You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [66]
After the wedding, they took her parents’ summer home in the town next to Plymouth, an old saltbox by the river, where her grandparents had lived all their lives. Just for a year, it was said, while Will finished his degree. No rent for them to pay, and he only needed to be in Cambridge twice a week. She can remember her dislike of the idea of living, however briefly, in that house, away from the city, in a place she’d spent months of her childhood, a house one branch or another of her family had lived in or owned for more than three centuries. The weight of the past felt so heavy there, it was hard to imagine a future. Will set his desk up in the parlor, next to the four-foot-high mahogany radio in whose bottom cabinets the old 78s of Beethoven and Mahler gathered their dust. Trying to read a book on the sofa in the afternoon, she had to work hard to forget the sight of her grandmother sitting in the chair opposite, napping through a summer rainstorm.
Before they were married they had talked about having children; they both wanted them. A bit of a strain, don’t you think? her mother said when she brought up the idea, their life together having just begun, no job for Will yet. But Will didn’t see any reason to wait. They were happy when she got pregnant. More than the wedding vows this meant permanence—a future they could predict.
“Beautiful morning,” Mrs. Johnson says, poking her head in the door. She has been the director of Plymouth Brewster all the years Elizabeth has been here. A gentle redheaded woman who sits with Elizabeth and discusses the books she is reading. “Don’t forget you’ve got a visitor this afternoon.”
Elizabeth smiles and Mrs. Johnson passes on and Elizabeth gazes again over the harbor. She sees people, tiny at this distance, heading out along the breakwater, leaning into the wind as they go. Yachts bob in the marina, their chrome masts ticking back and forth like the arms of metronomes. Sun glistens on the water. The scene is alive with motion.
Nearly four hundred years since our family arrived on this shore, Hester begins, her voice cleaner and more vibrant this morning.
“Here we go,” Elizabeth says, taking a seat in her chair, “sing your little song.” It’s better when she’s able to affect nonchalance. Signs of care are like flesh exposed to her companion’s arrows.
And what a beautiful season of suffering it has been. What principled wars. What tidy profit. And the machines, they are enough to take your breath away. And all the limbs and eyes and organs of the children bled and severed for progress. And the raped slaves and the heads of boy soldiers crushed like eggs. Why, the minister might even allow us a dance. Perhaps to celebrate you, Elizabeth, a flower grown from the seed of all this. What have you done to correct it? Do you suppose the divines would have liked your country club, Daddy coming down the back nine, dark hands fixing Mommy a cocktail? Jitterbug.
“Lousy historian,” Elizabeth mutters, trying to maintain the dismissive upper hand. “You’re confusing all sorts of things.” It’s been years since she’s had to argue like this. She has the energy, for now.
I’d forgotten, Hester says. You always believed books and their facts could save you. Haven’t done so well by them, have you?
Elizabeth laughs. “If I’d only known what a harsh woman you were.”
What? You would have refused my help?
“Is that what you gave me?”
And then the memory is there, the morning her contractions began: second day of the blizzard, 1978, the roads covered in ice and buried, the police saying no one was to drive, the hospital telling them they weren’t sure when they could send an ambulance. She lay upstairs in her grandparents’ old room, in the front of the house.
For hours she did her breathing as best she could, laboring there on the high bed, clutching Will’s hand. When the contractions got worse, her mother tended her,