Why Ida thought they could just pick up and drive two thousand miles was more than a mystery. It had been three years since Ellie had bought a dress or a hat. Her Holeproof Hosiery was on its second life as material for Neva’s homemade rag dolls. And now there was Aldine. And all because of Ansel’s crazy rose-colored nostalgia for his childhood playacting and singing. Charlotte had seen the advertisement when she’d been cleaning the girl’s room, and they’d read it together. Culturally inclined. Forward-looking. And now here she was, a Scottish Kewpie doll, eating their food and taking her long baths and sitting up front beside Ansel in the Ford when she went in for Christmas shopping, laughing and casting her spell. Clare was smitten of course, and Neva, too. Charlotte wasn’t, though. Charlotte understood the girl’s ways as if they were her own, which in many ways they were. But why she’d read that filthy poem out loud was one more of life’s dark mysteries because, really, it was as if Lottie knew all along what it was and was having her fun rolling the powder keg into the middle of the room, and Ansel—well, he was a man too sure of his self-possession. During his Othello play, she’d watched his eyes following Georgia Waterman around the stage and then when she’d brought it up (knowing she shouldn’t and vowing she wouldn’t and then finally she did) he’d laughed and said, well of course he watched her, she was Desdemona, the wife Othello no longer trusted, but it was all a role, he knew the difference between a play and real life, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and, besides all that, he said, he’d never been a wandering man.
Which, truly, she couldn’t rebut.
Still, he hadn’t sent the Scottish girl back, as he’d said he would, and as he should have done.
Bringing up Georgia Waterman had been a mistake; she’d seen that clearly. And she’d told herself not to bring up Aldine, either, but of course she had. Ansel was working all the time—strip-listing, working on the machinery, trying to keep the cows standing—but now on Sundays instead of reading he was bringing out his dulcimer, which had seemed a relief after Venus and Adonis, but he was singing foolish songs and goading Aldine to do the same, one song after another after another and then, as what Neva called “the grand finale,” all of them singing that frightful “Bryan O’Linn” that everyone thought such a lark, especially the part about no clothes that they wore, so finally one Sunday night when they were alone in their room, she could contain herself no longer and said quietly, “Funny how so many of the songs turn out to be duets.”
“Not ‘Bryan O’Linn,’” Ansel said, and she heard cheer come into his voice just from the thought of it. “Besides, they wouldn’t be duets if anyone else would pipe up.”
“You know I can’t sing,” Ellie said.
He said that she had a perfectly nice voice, but she had no intention of trying the songs Aldine performed, with their vibrating consonants and flutey vowels. It was chilling how easily Ansel adopted the girl’s tongue, pronouncing the words just as she sang them when he joined her on the chorus.
“It’s like I’m not even in the room, Ansel,” she said, and at once he wrapped his arms around her and told her that it was only because she was tired that she was thinking such things, a theory that only made her feel more prickly still, and she’d lain there stiff and awake until she could roll away from him and face the wall.
Ellie put the letter away. For Thanksgiving, she would tell Clare to go out for something, squirrel or rabbit. And if he didn’t shoot something, he’d have to kill Goosey, one of their last layers. But that wasn’t all. There was something else to be done for Christmas, and she would do it.
27
Upon awakening Christmas morning, Aldine took in the sharp chill of her room and cast her eye on the austere gray sky beyond her window. She lay warm in her bed and thought that if ever in time eternal there would be a more cheerless Christmas morning than this one, she hoped not to see it. She used the chamber pot, then cracked her door to listen a bit—she heard movement downstairs, the clank of pans, but no voices—but it was too cold for anything, so she grabbed her book from her satchel and returned to the snug nest of her bed. There were two books in the satchel: Cyr’s Dramatic First Reader, which she’d brought home to help Neva memorize her parts for the Winter Entertainment, and—the one she had now in hand—the school’s red cloth Riverside Shakespeare, which she’d smuggled home for her own diversion.
Aldine had made a bookmark, cut from white paperboard and idly decorated with a teeming and ever-densening thicket of penciled flowers, some with a letter written on each petal to form words (Seizeth, for example, and Breatheth). She always marked her place indirectly—cunningly, even—in Act IV of King Henry VIII, the last play in the volume and within easy proximity of Venus and Adonis. Aldine liked this deception; it seemed to enrich the pleasure of the venture. But, this morning, no sooner had she found the portion of the poem she most liked (Even so she kissed his brow, his cheek, his chin, / And where she ends she doth anew begin) than she heard the scamper of footsteps on the stairs.
“Miss McKenna! Miss McKenna!” Neva called, and Aldine barely had time to shove the book beneath the quilts before the girl flung open the door and burst into her room. “Sausage!” Neva exclaimed. Really the girl was almost screaming. And (it must have floated in with the girl) Aldine caught the most marvelous scent of cooking meat. “Marmalade, too!” Neva sang out. “And strawberry jelly and oranges and, oh, just . . . everything!” She’d taken Aldine’s hand and had begun to tug. “Mama says it was Santa but I don’t think it was, do you?”
Aldine, pivoting, swung her legs to the edge of the bed, but her movement beneath the twisted covers pushed the hiding Shakespeare suddenly forward: the volume fell to the floor with a violent ka-thump.
For a moment they both stared at the immense volume lying there splayed open; then Neva said, “Oh, you! You fell asleep reading, didn’t you?” She bent to the floor and folded the book neatly closed. “I do that all the time!”
“I do as well,” Aldine said in the calmest manner she could manage, but the demeaning aspect of fooling a guileless eight-year-old did not escape her. She rose and set the book back into her satchel.
“What about this?” Neva said.
She’d picked up the bookmarker decorated with teeming flowers and petals spelling Breatheth and Seizeth.