“I think I shouldn’t have come,” she said.
“That’s my fault,” he said. “I’m sorry you feel that way. But you’ve done a lot of good.”
“No. I haven’t.”
“Don’t say that.” The wind was a whuffing sound, then a rising, swarming rush. He wondered if there was anything diagonal in the walls for lateral stress. He eased close to Aldine and bent near and still, as you would make yourself near and still with a spooked horse. She reached out and touched his shoe.
Ansel’s knees didn’t bend that easily and they were starting to ache. He sat down on the floor so that he could lean against the wall, but he laced his hands together so that he wouldn’t reach out to take her hand. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin peered from their frames with placid eyes.
Aldine took her hand back as if embarrassed. She said, “When Leenie and I were growing up, we had an aunt who wasn’t married. The story our da told us was she’d been in love with a Japanese man who didn’t come to fetch her until it was too late.”
“What do you mean too late?”
“I don’t even know! We always thought it was because she was too old. When you’re a child, people can seem old. We saw the man once, when he came to ask her. And then he went away again, and she went on living alone. Leenie and I, we were always planning to meet our Japanese man at the right time, and go off with him, and not be alone for years and years, wearing fascinators and trying to get other people’s children to like us.”
Ansel wasn’t sure what a fascinator was. “You’re still young,” he said. “You’ll be happy.”
“Like you and Ellie?” she asked.
He thought about that. Did he and Ellie seem happy? By some measures they were. As happy as anyone was at that stage of things. And now here he was beside Aldine, and she was curled up inside the old curtains and he felt an overpowering urge to caress her.
Ansel tried to look only at his hands or at the walls. The wind shook the building, seeping through the cracks.
“I’m so cold,” Aldine said, and he looked unwillingly at her eyes and mouth. Her smooth hair fell forward around her face and because she was still lying down, it was like seeing her when she first woke up in the morning, as if they were in bed together. Ansel stood up. He intended to do it quickly but found himself stiff and old feeling, as he often did lately. He said he would put more coal in the stove, but the bin was empty when he looked.
“I used what was inside already,” she said flatly. “I was going to tell you when I got home that we needed to fill up.”
With his wife, his daughters, or even Clare, he would have had the warmth of his body to offer. Even to imagine this with Aldine was to go dry-mouthed with desire, so he waited a moment before he said, “Another reason to leave now. Before it gets colder and darker.”
Aldine simply curled herself smaller inside the pile she’d made. She tried to remember the Venus poem. Something about kissing where there was no hiss of death. The wind was nothing if not a hiss of death, and if Ansel had copied down those words for her, if he had felt what she thought he felt that day in the barn, would he act on it now? From a distance adultery seemed so obviously wrong and resistible, and yet what she craved now was the man before her, with his large hard workman’s hands, his sturdy limbs, his quiet way of being. She loved him. If he were not married, he would be her Japanese man—that was the truth of it. And then she had a terrible thought: What if Aunt Sedgewick’s Japanese man had been married? When she met him the first time, or even perhaps later on? She had always assumed that poor Aunt Sedge made the wrong decision, that she was just too timid to seize her own chance at happiness.
“We have to get back,” Ansel said. “They’ll be worried.” He remained standing, and she remained on the floor. “Miss McKenna,” he said, and he reached his hand out to help her rise, willing himself to make this ordinary gesture, telling himself it would make their relations courtly and chaste. She put out her hand and the touch of it was something he tried not to let his blood race toward. As long as he said nothing, did nothing, the feeling would go away. Her hand was cold and small, and she tightened her grip on his hand without making an effort to stand.
“I’m afraid,” she said, the only words that expressed both how she felt and how she was allowed to feel. If he had moved his hand or his body closer, she would have met him eagerly, but he was just looking at her and his face was so grave, so sorrowful, that she only held on to his hand and waited.
He pulled her up, and she thought he would pull her into his arms. George Washington and the flag. The flag and Ben Franklin. Aldine’s own script on the chalkboard, the white words she had copied out, oil broil hoist coil.
“Pull that blanket you were using up around your head,” he said hoarsely. “Shut out some of the wind while we run for it.” She reached down to pick up a blue curtain panel and draped it over her head.
“Take my hand,” he said, “so you don’t get lost. I’ll lead you.”
She took it, but he didn’t move. She stepped forward and pressed her body against his, laying her face against his chest, her arms clutching him. When his arms caught her to him, something like a sob shook her, and she couldn’t tell if it came from relief or fear. He held her very tightly until it passed, and she felt a dark measureless want.
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Charlotte told Emmeline, and Emmeline told her father, who must have told the inspector, that Ansel Price nearly died driving to the school to fetch a teacher who was using school-owned coal to heat herself on a Saturday afternoon. “She was smoking, too,” Charlotte had added. The novel that Emmeline and her father found on the school floor early Monday morning was The Harvester, just as Charlotte said, and inside the front cover of the novel was Charlotte’s handwritten name.
Charlotte knew that her father would not have said that he nearly died, but that was how it had seemed to her and her mother during the five hours that they waited in the suffocating brown gloom of the house. They had peeled potatoes and cooked them in gritty water, and they had told Neva not to worry, but they had worried. Neva was too sick to stay alert during the strange dark afternoon, slipping into sleep until she coughed herself awake, then drifting off again.
Her father’s explanation, that he couldn’t get the truck to start, that they’d been sitting in the truck in the schoolyard most of the time, that darkness fell and then the wind stopped, at which time the engine turned over just fine, was logical enough, but Charlotte didn’t like the way Aldine slipped up the stairs wearing that old curtain over her head like the Virgin Mary or something, her face pale, her eyes red, not even bothering to say, “Sorry,” or to ask, “How are you?”
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