“Your pride will be the end of you,” Mother often says. Perhaps she’s right.
I tuck the parcel into my waistband and struggle to my knees. Bunching my skirt beneath me to buffer my skin from the ground, I drag myself toward the side of the road, moving gingerly to avoid putting pressure on my ankle. I squint toward a clump of birches about a dozen feet away, looking for a stick to use as a cane. After pulling myself to my feet, I stagger to the cluster of trees, picking my way over rocks and ruts, and feel around with my hands. Here. Too short, but it’ll do. Limping back to the road, I lean heavily on the stick, grimacing through the pain.
An hour ago I couldn’t wait to leave Gertrude’s house, but now going back there is my only option. I hobble slowly down the road. When I see her front porch, I breathe a sigh of relief. I pull myself up the three front steps, leaving a sludgy trail, and pause in front of the door. The lights are off. I pound on the door with the side of my closed fist. No answer. I rap hard on the window beside the door with my knuckles.
From deep inside the house I hear footsteps. Through the window I see the glow of a lamp. Then Gertrude’s frightened voice on the other side of the door: “Who’s there?”
“It’s me. Christina.”
The door opens and I lurch inside.
“Mercy!” Gertrude flaps her arms like a bird trying to land on a rock. “What happened?”
“I fell on the road. I think my ankle may be broken.”
“Oh dear. You are covered in mud,” she says with dismay.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry to bother you.” Hot tears spring to my eyes, tears of relief and exhaustion and bitterness—that I can’t walk right, that I am back at this house, that, damn her, Gertrude may be right: Walton will never marry me, I will be stuck in this place for the rest of my life, sewing with this wretched woman. I turn my face so she doesn’t see the tears streaking through the grime.
Gertrude sighs and shakes her head. “Stay right there. Let me find a cloth so you don’t ruin the rug.”
“I BROKE MY ankle coming back from Gertrude Gibbons’s house,” I write to Walton. “It was foolish. I never should have been alone on that road in the dark.”
“I am glad to hear you’re on the mend, and dearly hope you’ll be more prudent in the future,” he writes back. “Yours faithfully—.”
I scan the letter several times, trying to hear his voice between the lines. But the words are stiff and formal. No matter how often I read them, they sound like an admonition.
I’M APPREHENSIVE ABOUT seeing Walton for the first time after the long winter apart, but he gives me a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek. “I have a present for you,” he says, drawing a large shell from the inside pocket of his seersucker jacket and placing it on the table in front of us. “I thought you might add it to your collection.”
The shell is shiny and garishly colored—orange red, with bulky knobs on top that get smaller toward the edges.
I pick it up. It’s as smooth and heavy as a glass paperweight. “Oh. Where did you find this?”
“I bought it. In a specialty shop in Cambridge.” He smiles. “From Hawaii, I believe. It’s called a cameo shell. At least that’s what the card on the shelf said. It’ll look nice in the Shell Room, don’t you think?”
I nod. “Sure.”
He touches my arm. “You don’t like it.”
“No, it’s—interesting.” But I’m disappointed that he doesn’t know me well enough to understand that this gaudy bauble from a specialty shop doesn’t belong in the Shell Room, filled with discoveries from expeditions. I wish he’d lied and told me he found it on a beach.
I set the cameo shell on the mantelpiece in the Shell Room, but it looks out of place, like an artificial flower in a garden. After a few weeks, I put it in a drawer.
AS THE SUMMER of 1916 progresses, Walton acts exactly as he always has: solicitous, courtly, quick with a smile and an ironic aside. But I am acutely aware that like a slip of paper in the wind, something in his nature eludes my grasp. Even when I ask direct questions, he is evasive, offering only vague generalities about his life in Boston, his family, his plans for the future.
One early July morning Walton and I are making our way through the high grass to Hathorn Point to harvest mussels for dinner when I notice that he’s not saying much. He seems uncomfortable, fiddling with his sleeve as he walks.
“What is it? Walton, tell me.”
“It’s just . . .” He shakes his head as if dislodging a thought. “My parents. Thinking they know what’s best for me.”
I know his parents live in Malden, near the Carles. As far as I’m aware they’ve never come up for a visit. “Did you get a letter?”
He bends down, swipes an errant stick from the grass, and snaps it in half with a small, sharp movement. “Yes. A long, tedious letter. Saying it’s time for me to grow up, to take a job in Boston in the summers and stop frittering away my time up here with the Carles.” He snaps the stick halves in half again before flinging all the tiny pieces onto the ground.
“Is this about . . . me?”
He shoves his hands in his pockets. His grievance has taken on a theatrical air, as if exaggerated for my benefit. “It’s not personal,” he says brusquely. “They claim to be concerned about my future. They don’t want me to limit myself.”
My heart skitters ahead of my words. “What—what do they mean by that?”
“It’s absurd,” he says. “Keeping up appearances. Harvard, all that. The right job. The right wife.”
“Meaning . . .” I ask in as neutral a tone as I can muster.
He shrugs. “Oh, who knows. They want me to marry someone”—he lifts forked fingers to convey that he’s quoting—“‘educated’ and ‘from a good family.’ Which means, naturally, a family they’ve heard of. A Boston family, preferably. A family that will bolster their social standing. Because that’s the important thing.”
I find myself shrinking into silence. Of course Walton’s parents don’t want their Harvard-educated son marrying a girl who didn’t even go to secondary school.
“You’re upset,” Walton says, patting my arm. “But you shouldn’t be. This isn’t about you. They don’t really know about you.”
This shocks me into words. “You’ve never mentioned me?”
“Of course I’ve mentioned you,” he says quickly. “I just don’t think they realize quite what . . . quite how much you mean to me.”
“Do they know that we are . . .” The word sweethearts springs to mind, but I’m afraid it will sound cloying, presumptuous.
He shrugs. “I try not to talk to my parents about much of anything.”
“So they don’t know that we’ve been . . . seeing each other for four years?”