One afternoon he had come indoors and suggested a nap, but then, when they were lying down, he said, “Maybe you would tell me one of your stories.”
She told him how their family had gone on holiday to the Isle of Skye because their father was to play music there, and while their mother was in the village shopping, their father took them down to the firth to look around. The tide was low, which meant you could see the hairy underparts of the sea and the wreckage that people threw away but never really got rid of: a rusted iron chain with links the size of her own head, a safe, the gears of an old clock. Aldine loved the outing, she said, but her sister said it all smelled of death, and she kept complaining that the salt water would spoil her shoes. She wanted to be off to the shops, but that was when Aldine found the little egg case sticking to a rock.
Aldine gave out a small pleasant laugh that wrapped around Ansel like a flannel blanket. His eyes had fallen closed and he kept them so.
“I said, ‘Come see! I found a mermaid’s purse!’ but Leenie thought I’d found some ugly old pocketbook that I was pretending was a mermaid’s.”
She fell silent and after a few moments, he opened his eyes.
“Thought I’d bored you to death,” she said. “You came in to nap after all.”
But he liked all the stories of her childhood, which she lingered over and made seem magical as fairy tales, so he coaxed her on. She told him how their father strode over to the rock, peered down, and began carrying on as if Aldine had found a giant pearl. “It was a shark’s egg,” she said, and because Ansel had never seen one she told him what it looked like: a flat hourglass ridged like a fingernail but translucent enough to reveal the tiny creature in its embryonic water. It was so small and helpless, Aldine said, as delicate as a human baby in the womb and yet there it was lying outside, stuck to a rock, with nobody to watch over it, amidst all the broken things people had thrown away.
“Then what?” he asked.
“Nothing. We went back to the town. We couldn’t help it at all, my father said.”
She fell silent again.
“I wanted to take it with me and put it in a jar so nothing would hurt it but Father wouldn’t allow it. Said we shouldn’t deny the living thing its sliver’s chance to live.” A moment passed and then Aldine said, “I never saw another one. I always looked after that, when I was near a firth.”
Ansel listened with his eyes closed.
“A photograph would’ve been splendid,” she said. “But we hadn’t a camera.”
Ansel said nothing.
“I don’t have a photograph of you, you know.”
“You don’t need one. I’m here. I’ll always be here.”
He’d turned in the bed then so that she could snug close to his back, and soon they had fallen to sleep.
It was later that night that the wind started blowing again and what he thought had receded roared up in his head and ran its sharp fingers along his lungs, leaving behind a hardness that made him catch his breath, his whole chest percolating with what felt like chunks of swallowed fire, and it was the day after that, when he thought Charlotte’s wedding had occurred without him, that he felt inside the darkened mailbox and found the letter that said they were still waiting for him.
He burned it so Aldine wouldn’t know.
92
Leenie Cooper had been holding Henrietta by the kitchen sink, staring up at the whiteness of the mountain peaks and trying to decide if she should hang the diapers out on the clothesline first, while Henrietta toddled around in the wet but not frozen grass, or if she should nurse Henrietta and put her down for her nap and then hang out the diapers, which would use up precious minutes of the free-handed nap period but would save her the trouble of dressing Henrietta in a bunch of clothes she didn’t like at just the time of day when she was likely to scream her foolish little head off about it.
Leenie turned away from these thoughts when she heard mail plop through the front door a full two hours before the usual time. She said to Henrietta, “Let’s go read the mail then, shall we?”
She had been offended—outraged, really—when her three deeply felt letters to Aldine about this new stage of her life (including a darling picture of Henrietta in her pink bonnet) had not produced a reply of any sort, so when she looked down and saw the faint but legible Kansas postmark on the blue envelope lying there on the sunlit stripes of wood, she might have had a begrudging moment, but she did not. She thought at once, and glowingly, of Aldine.
She stared at the envelope, trying to make sense of it—it was a stranger’s name in the return address, not Aldine’s, and someone had scrawled sorry—was addressed wrong!—D. Friggati across the front of it. Mrs. Friggati was the next-door neighbor who hated Mormons. The letter was postmarked November 7, and today was December 4, which meant the Friggatis had held on to a piece of their mail for nearly a month! Why anyone would keep a misdelivered letter so long was a topic she intended to raise no matter how forbearing Will thought they should be. She whisked Henrietta to the sofa with a little cry, intending to hold her in one arm while she ripped open the envelope, but Leenie’s sitting down made Henrietta drop into the nursing position, where she screamed and squirmed with thwarted rage the whole time that Leenie read:
Dear Mrs. Cooper,
You don’t know me but I’m a good friend of your sister Aldine. I met her when we were both working at the Emporia Kansas Harvey House. A man came here today looking for her, and I think he is the reason for her getting let go. She is expecting. That’s why she hasn’t answered your letters.
Right now she is living with a nice woman named Odekirk on Neosho Street. I thought you should know.
Cordially,
Glynis S. Walsh
Leenie read the letter three times, then did the routine unfastening and shirt arranging to nurse to quiet Henrietta’s wild crying. She must think a minute, calm Henrietta down, then bundle her up and walk to the corner and catch a bus to William’s office. He would know what to do, surely.
93
The second time someone came to the Price house, it was a whole family in a blue car. A man was sitting at the steering wheel and when he pulled to a stop, a woman in a turquoise coat stepped carefully out into the gusty wind. She bore a covered dish and from the way she was holding it, swathed in a checkered towel, the food was still hot. She was vaguely familiar, middle-aged and slightly plump, her hair tied with a white chiffon scarf that the wind picked at. She’d put on lipstick, too. Three children sat in the backseat, and Aldine, from her usual watching place, saw to her horror that the one at the window looking out was Emmeline Josephson. That was why the woman’s face looked familiar.
Aldine drew back from the window and stood still when the woman knocked and called, “Ellie? Ansel?” A pause, then, “Anybody home?”