She did not know what to make of him.
From her perch on the piano bench in the sitting room of her brother Joseph's house in Waynesburg, New York, she watched him out of the corner of her eye. He stood in the foyer stooped over to prevent his head from grazing the ceiling, a hand-knit navy scarf obscuring his mouth. The hair spiking out his nose had iced over. He huffed beneath the scarf, stamping his boots and brushing snow from his mittened hands and gazing down at her sideways across the horsehair couch and chairs and spindly walnut table. His eyes were soft and brown and over-sized, like a cow's.
"Rose," her brother said.
She shut the lid on the console piano she'd insisted on taking with her from her childhood home despite her father's opposition. (They had spoiled her, everyone said so; it explained everything.) Inhaling a breath of dignity she did not feel she rose from the bench. Her hand flew to her throat to caress her mother's broach. With her index finger she traced the raised filigree profile embedded there, longing to pop it open and retrieve the tiny hank of golden hair nestled within. To tickle the wishbone of her cheek with it as her mother once had. It was all she had left.
"Rose," her brother repeated, and she retrieved the wayward hand, clasping them both together in front of her, assuming the posture of the good girl she had always strived but not always succeeded to be.
"This is Victor Trambeaux," said Joseph, sweeping his arm through the air like the maitre d' at the French restaurant in Albany Allen had whisked her away to that long afternoon of their courtship. Before her father had gotten wind of their plans. She should have married him on the spot, right there at City Hall as he had begged. God would have understood, she was almost sure. They could have married for real in the Church after Allen converted. He would do anything for her, even that.
Victor Trambeaux yanked off his scarf and matching cap, bowed his head, and stared at the floor. She had never seen such large feet. Around them the silence screamed. To muzzle it, she stepped forward, extended her hand, and opened her rosebud mouth, the feature that had inspired her name. To her surprise, her mother's voice, calm and certain and with only a trace of her parents' brogue, spoke. "My pleasure," she said.
His hand enveloped hers with a not unpleasant pressure as his eyes continued to examine the oddity of his feet. Joseph beamed.
His wife, Marta, tottered out of the kitchen grasping a tarnished silver tray of coffee and her specialty pinwheel cookies filled with raisins and dates. "Welcome to you Victor Trambeaux," she said, placing the tray on the table, her hands buzzing through the air, engorged dueling hummingbirds. "Come set a while and have a sweet."
Rose lay in bed watching the flame from the milk carriage inch its way along the dark street outside her window, ricochet off the dormered ceiling. She had taken to awakening hours before dawn, unable to fall back asleep, consumed with a litany of regrets. She wiggled in the narrow feather bed until she had sufficiently cocooned herself in the quilt Marta had sent her for her sixteenth birthday. The quilt she had slept in blissfully every night back in Braeburn. Before mother died and her brother Raymond took over the farm and her father decided to make a full-time job of destroying her future.
After a while, the shadows on the wall coalesced into a moving picture show of her life. She could see a shivering image of her mother bending over the egg house in her baggy woolen coat, corkscrews of hair springing off her forehead as she stood over the wood stove stirring a pot of cornmeal mush, churning butter between her muslin-gowned knees. Sitting at the fire of an evening rocking and knitting, head cocked to catch every note of her only daughter's etudes. She could see herself, bent over her desk at the schoolhouse, dipping her pen into the inkwell, scratching out sums. Standing to recite Longfellow and Emerson and Dickenson and even a Shakespeare sonnet.
Her longtime teacher, Miss Williams' vigorous nodding the best applause she would ever receive. Miss Williams, who strolled with her across the schoolyard during recess day in and day out, painting faraway worlds with the brush of her tongue, worlds where women marched in the streets to get the vote, cured disease, wrote novels, and argued the law.
Tantalizing, secular, evil worlds.
"Teacher's pet," Allen teased after finally gathering the courage to speak to her at all he later confessed. Walking home from school that day three years ago when she'd glanced up and caught her breath, taking him in for perhaps the first time ever, this childhood friend and neighbor, closer to her own age than any of her older brothers. They'd grown up together playing hide and seek in the silos, sledding and skating and swimming in the frigid hole where the river turned its back on its source for good. Once, when she was nine, he had pulled her out of the ice just in time, taken her back to his house and let her steam dry by the fire to avoid her father's wrath for venturing where forbidden. She hadn't thought a thing about it. Still, here he stood beside her, a half foot taller, his jaw grown square and prickly with a light beard, his green eyes merry, full lips curled in a smile.
The stain of a blush crept across her pale cheeks. She bowed her head.
And now the lights on the wall shifted again, months ahead, to find Allen and Rose scurrying along the river hand in hand, a picnic basket swinging in the light May breeze, scrambling down on the flat, mossy rocks to lay out the blanket and the lunch his mother had packed them. A bundle of cold chicken and a jar of pickled beets. Potato salad and a thermos of lemonade and half an apple pie he had smuggled from the pantry. They chewed in silence, watching the water foaming over the dove gray rocks as if they had never seen so fascinating a sight. Until Allen vaulted to his feet, plucked a bouquet of violets from the loamy shore, knelt down, and offered it to Rose, lifting her hand to his mouth and pressing his lips against its sinewy back.
She gasped at the unexpected jolt of pleasure. There were violets everywhere.
He laughed. Then he lifted her face to his and kissed her hard on the lips. Later she could not even estimate how much time passed before she came to her senses.
Would Victor ever kiss her, she wondered, pressing her cheek into the flannel pillowslip. They were to be married, Joseph said, he had asked for her hand, although he had not asked her. A point she had tried raising with her brother.
"He is a good man," Joseph said. "A simple man, a country man. Honest as the day is long."
"A Catholic man you mean," she said. She could not seem to help herself. It was Miss Williams speaking through her this time. She seemed, these days, but a mouthpiece for other people's voices.
"You need a husband, Rose," said Joseph, in his gentle salesman voice, the voice that cajoled local farmers to buy more cradles and plows than anyone in the county.
"I could teach," she said. "I have a high school diploma. I wouldn't have to depend on you and Marta."
"It's not the money, Rose," he said, patting the flap of hair that ill-concealed his prematurely bald scalp. He sighed, as if he knew his next words would pain him. "You're high strung," he said, "always were, just like Mama said." She turned her back on him then, wrapped her arms around her rib cage and squeezed hard.
"Rose," Joseph said, not unkindly. He was her favorite, only seven years older. Back in Braeburn when they were young, he had dragged her around on her sled; taught her to ride their old mare, Lucy. His hand touched down lightly on her shoulder; then sprang away as if singed. "You need a man to take care of you, anchor you," he said. "You need a family, children, someone to love."
She gulped back the words that came rushing up her throat, her own words this time: I had someone to love.
"I don't love him, Joseph," she said.
He did not appear to have heard her. "You will be a great mother," he said. "You can have the children Marta and I never could. You will bring us all the joy that's been missing in our lives." She reached under her pillow and drew out the letter she'd taken to keeping there, her father's words disguised in her brother Raymond's scratchy script. Daddy had never learned to write but he knew how to dictate. She ran her fingers over the single white page embellished with a raised silver MCB, mother's stationary. Still too dark outside to read but she had memorized the contents:
She stuffed the letter back under the pillow, marveling at the ease with which her father mixed word of Raymond's new enterprise with frozen bodies, dead babies, and shattered dreams. She reached out and pressed her palm against the cold window, kept it there long after her teeth began to chatter, as if coaxing the icy dawn down the tunnel of her wrist, her forearm, her shoulder, her breast, into her heart.
She did not think her back had ever been as straight as it was now, flush against the couch in Joseph's sitting room, Victor still as a corpse at her side. The clock on the mantel boomed in the stillness as she watched the frail second-hand crawl across its moon face. Mother Mary help me, she prayed in her head, over and over, and still, Victor sat clenching and unclenching his swarthy hands. He was nearly her age, Joseph claimed, but looked at least a decade older. As an only child he had been deferred from the draft to run the family farm after his father died last year.
"Joseph said you had something to ask me," she blurted at last, unable to bear it any longer.
He cleared his throat. He rose and bent over and tried to kneel but his large limbs knocked into the coffee table, spilling the cream. Flustered he stood, bulging toe catching an already unstable table leg and upturning it on its side. His feet slipped out from under him, his elbows flapping in the air akimbo, and he landed on his bottom with a thud that rattled the china on its rack.
"Mercy," she said, darting to his side and kneeling down.
"I'm so sorry," he said. "You must think I'm some kind of fool, it's just that I'm so nervous, you're so lovely, I…"
"Shhhh," she said. She had never heard him string so many words together. His voice was deep, with a bit of a French accent evoking the comforting scent of Miss William's lavender perfume, the moments when she'd inexplicably launch into that exotic language. Rose had always wanted to study French but her after-school farm chores prevented it. Maybe Victor could teach her.
He stared up at her then, straight into her eyes for the first time with a look so lost and pleading she could have cried. For no reason at all her mind drifted back to the French restaurant that day. They'd sat among smartly dressed city folks at a candlelit table set with linen napkins and heavy silver. As if born to the good life, Allen ordered bowls of fragrant onion soup topped with melted cheese followed by goblets of chocolate mousse. In a corner by the multi-paned window, a man played an instrument she had never seen before, a cello, carved from exquisite varnished wood, its back curved like a woman's. She was done with that fairy tale.
She looked down on Victor. He was not Allen. She did not love him. But he was a simple man, a country man, a good man. Thy will be done, she whispered in her head, addressing the God of her childhood, the God to whom, prior to Allen, she had pledged her devotion. The God who had seen her through her brother's deaths, her mother's loss, her father's tirades. The God she'd nearly forsaken for the elusive pleasures of this world.
For the first time in months, the picture she carried of Allen in her head—the one his father had taken at his graduation, sitting on a chair wearing a suit and tie with his hair slicked back and his eyes boring into you—began to fade.
Marta scurried in, breathless and wringing her hands. "What on earth," she said, taking in the scene on the floor.
A sound whistled in Rose's throat, a sound she didn't at first recognize, a sound she hadn't heard herself make in an awfully long time.
To her astonishment, Victor threw back his head and laughed, too.
They married in the middle of May, at Saint Andrews in Waynesburg, Victor's cousin Maurice and Marta standing up for them. Her father came up for the wedding but Raymond could not leave the farm and her three other brothers had died of scarlet fever one by one, year after year, even though mother always spoke of them as if they still lived (sometimes even set places for them at supper) along with her stillborn sister, June.
Some neighbors of Joseph's attended along with Victor's mother, Claudette, who had moved into a little house down the road on their property in Lauraville (to make room for the newlyweds), her sister Andrea, her daughters and their husbands and children, and Victor's Godparents who lived several miles from the Trambeaux farm. Victor's paternal aunts and uncles still lived outside Montreal and could not make the journey.
Rose dragged her eyes away from the violets dotting the jade grass outside the church window and took her father's arm. He walked her down the aisle in excruciating slow motion, rheumatism locking up his knees at every other step. He kissed her cheek as he handed her over to Victor. She searched his face in vain for the approval she expected to find there before he turned abruptly away, rubbing his palms together in front of him as he hobbled back to the pew, glad to be done with her. She might have been back in school the way she repeated the vows Father LaCroix recited. She kissed Victor as instructed. She did not meet his eyes.
The wedding party and guests retired to Joseph's house where Marta had a cold lunch of boiled ham, stewed tomatoes, deviled eggs, and homemade rolls waiting. Victor's mother provided the wedding cake, a three-layer affair with boiled frosting decorated with miniature daisies that matched Rose's bouquet and the flecks of gold in her eyes. She plucked at the bunched up waist of Marta's wedding dress that no amount of altering could force to conform to the longer, leaner contours of Rose's frame. At last she slid a knife into the cake's creamy folds, praying for God to spare her from asking too much of this life, from the devil's food greed flowing at the center of her own dark nature.
Children raced through the house and out into the yard and after a while they rolled up the carpet and cranked up the Victrola Joseph had bought Marta for Christmas and danced to "You Made Me Love You" and "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag." To her astonishment, Victor proved a handy dancer, spinning and twirling her round the floor with a light assurance that belied his gawky body and enormous feet. Rose followed him tirelessly, hoping to stave off the inevitable reality of their wedding night until Marta ended the festivities with a piercing whistle that halted the revelers in their tracks.
"Time to throw the bouquet, Rose," she said.
Returning from the hen house with a basketful of gritty eggs, Rose paused a moment on the steps leading up the back doorway, a sudden dizziness washing over her. The chickens were hers. She could milk a cow, of course, but she had a way with chickens and now, mistress of her own coop, could even raise the axe and chop off a head when the time came. Pinning a neck to a pine stump. Reciting a Hail Mary slowly and surely, even as the beheaded fowl hopped about seconds more, controlled from afar by its phantom brain. Mother would be proud.
After a while she threw back her head and drank in the soft late August breeze that carried with it a whiff of Lake Champlain. A scent she had already come to identify with summer after two years but miles from its banks. A smell that recalled Victor, surprising her with an overnight visit there for her birthday in June, the honeymoon they'd never had.
They'd stayed in the vacant home of his dead father's cousin twice removed, away on a trip to Albany to visit his son. They bathed in the frigid water, helplessly swatting the black flies suckling their tender flesh. Later, after dinner, itchy and sunburned, they lounged in Adirondack chairs in the muggy air over a pitcher of cold tea and a bowl of wild strawberries. Watching sailboats cut through the chop gleaming like frosted iron beneath a wanton sun that refused to set. Rose trying once again to prod Victor into remembering the language of his birth, the language his mother insisted he renounce, the language his parents spoke only to each other, a secret bedroom language he had not been privy to.
"Parlez-vous Francais," he said, tickling her bare feet resting against his knees. "That is it. I don't even know what it means."
Lazy as children, giddy with unfamiliar idleness (Victor had talked his godfather into the morning's milking in an unprecedented fashion), they tumbled into bed at last. And Rose, all tangled up in the midnight light, had opened to her husband in a way that had not happened before or since. The baby she knew she was carrying had been conceived that night.
In the kitchen, she set the eggs on the edge of the sink and lifted a tea towel from the bread rising on the counter. She had just floured her hands to knead it when the doorbell rang. "For heaven's sake," she said, aloud, wiping her hands on her apron before heading for the door, futilely attempting to stuff tendrils of hair back into the net she used to rein her wayward tresses in. She was not dressed for visitors, whoever could be calling in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, she fretted?
She did not know what to make of him.
He stood on the threshold taller than ever, but with wider shoulders and a heavier jaw; eyes still merry despite the dark brows that had, in consternation, stitched themselves together all of a piece across his forehead, eyes that matched his uniform.
"I am back," Allen said.
Back, she repeated in her head. I didn't know you'd gone.
Her thoughts chugged away from her. It wasn't until her eyes fell below his waist that she noticed the cane he carried in his left hand, biting into the slatted wood and drawing her attention to the peg leg jutting out the hem of his pants. It wasn't until she saw that false limb that it dawned on her what he meant, where he was back from.
She couldn't say how he ended up seated at their kitchen table, how she came to brew coffee and set out plates of gingerbread from yesterday's supper. She could not remember speaking but there he sat, Allen, her childhood friend, her alternate future, broken like a toy. He was talking incessantly, how he'd shipped out soon after she left with a half dozen boys they'd known. How it gave him a sense of purpose after he'd lost his. (She should not allow him to talk of this, she knew she should not, but still, she could not speak. Her tongue as paralyzed as the day she watched her mother bleed to death in a vain attempt to pass her final son from her collapsed womb.) He spoke of how they died, the other boys they'd known, blown to bits they could not gather up enough of to bury. How lucky he'd been.
His voice cracked wide open on that last part and he bit into his fist. She had never seen him cry, not even when his older brother cut off the tip of his ear lobe that time trying to give him a haircut in the barn.
She handed him a tea towel. Her palm made little circles across his back.
What with both her brothers too old and Victor deferred, the war had seemed a distant, foreign unlikely affair in the papers and the few moving pictures she'd seen, grainy and dreadful; exotic and vaguely romantic. The weight of her own naiveté and self-centeredness descended on her. She sunk into the chair beside him.
"And your wife?" she asked.
He mopped his face with the towel. "My wife?"
"You were engaged to a cousin in Albany, my father wrote me…"
He shook his head. "What in the world?" he said. "I shipped out not long after you left, Rose. I couldn't think of what else to do when you wouldn't answer my letters. I was going to be drafted anyway and I figured I might just as well. Why didn't you answer my letters?"
"Letters?" she repeated, her stunned mind roaming for the proper word to describe the situation in which she now found herself. Recalling the story Miss Williams had read them about a poor young woman who had nothing to give her husband at Christmas. She sold her beautiful hair to buy him a chain for his watch; meanwhile he sold his watch to buy combs for her hair. Irony, Miss Williams called it. Rose thought about the letters her brother obviously had intercepted, the letter her father had written to carry his lie. Irony. She had not heard that word before or since but felt certain she would remember it until the day she died.
"Rose," Allen sputtered, taking her hand. "Are you happy?"
For the first time since he'd arrived she thought of Victor. He would be cutting hay, still, the field gleaming and braided with it, the sun a lucky penny in the sky. He and the hands he'd hired for harvest would be in for dinner directly and she hadn't even put on the potatoes.
"Victor is a good man," she began, reciting Allen's lines, the script she had agreed to.
"Rose," he said. "I could still take you with me. I know you still love me. I know you didn't choose this."
"Allen, don't," she said, rising.
He caught her wrist. "We don't have to live in this world," he said. "Jesus, Rose, it's not even real. We can sail across the ocean and start all over. There are other worlds. Places where none of this would matter one bit. I've seen them."
For a long moment, her thoughts jumped the ship of his words, cruised out the front door across the atlas Ms. Williams had spread out on the wall in the schoolhouse that had imprinted itself in Rose's brain. With what determination had she stabbed straight pins into that map at eleven years old: Paris and London and Rome.
"I'm married, Allen," she whispered, hand subconsciously slipping into her apron pocket to caress her still flat abdomen.
He pushed up out of the chair, lips clamped shut, the little muscle at the side of his jaw flexing.
She followed him to the door.
On the threshold he turned and met her eyes. "It was supposed to be me," he said. "I wish it had been me." She watched him hurry out to the waiting carriage and driver she had not noticed before, moving too fast for his damaged limb, staggering. She shut the door behind her.
In the kitchen she stoked up the stove, peeled the potatoes, pumped water into the pot, set them to boil, and cut the left over pot roast into long strips. Stirring the gravy his parting words echoed in her head and for the first time she realized they might have a different meaning. She thought he meant it was supposed to be me that married you but now in a sweaty confusion erupting in her solar plexus she realized he might be talking about the shells that took the others instead of him.
The heat of the stove, the smell of the gray meat, Allen's hollow eyes, a world larger and more indiscriminate than she could ever have imagined, ambushed her. Covering her mouth, she made it to the sink just in time.