Chapter Three #3
Robert Seaborne looked out from behind his paper and chuckled. “As regrettable as the circumstances are, they have provided my wife with an excuse, and a noble one, at that, to skip events she had no desire to attend.”
“Well, I will miss being with you, darling,” Margaret said, filling Julia’s coffee cup.
“A very pretty piece of perjury, my dear.” Robert smiled at Margaret affectionately.
At first glance, Robert and Margaret Seaborne looked oddly matched.
Margaret, in a plain green dress, dark hair falling from a braided coil, still looked like the professional artist she had been.
Robert, silver-haired and distinguished, looked as if he had never met an artist in his life.
They were obviously smitten with each other, though.
Julia’s and Michael’s families got together every few years, but it was almost always in summertime, either on Haven Point or at the house the Seabornes owned on Gibson Island in Maryland.
Julia had not been to their home in Washington for many years and had forgotten how perfectly it reflected Margaret’s earthy charm.
It was spacious, but not overly grand, with an eclectic collection of art and a hodgepodge of furniture that somehow harmonized.
When Margaret led her to a little sitting room at the back of the house, Julia noticed framed prints of two Liberty Island illustrations on the wall.
“Louisa and I love these!” Julia smiled at them fondly.
“Mr. Carruthers” showed Lucy, the character loosely based on Julia, standing on a bluff in too-large fishing boots and waders. She was wagging her finger at a harbor seal, basking on the ledge below, haughtily impervious to her scolding.
Though many Liberty Island stories sprang from Anna’s capacious imagination, Julia and her friends actually had known a seal on Liberty Island, old and rotund, with silvery gray fur and white whiskers.
Julia had named him Mr. Carruthers, after Father’s banker, to whom he bore a striking resemblance.
The other illustration was of the four girls lying on their backs under the night sky, heads together, so they formed a plus sign. Lucy was pointing at a star.
“They’re my favorites,” Margaret said.
“I know Anna got you to come out of retirement to work on Liberty Island. How did she convince you? By my math, you had four little boys when the first book was published.”
“Well, as you know, the stories were serialized first, then bound and sold as a novel. All Anna had to do was send me the manuscript, along with the magazine containing the first installation. I was so indignant by the poor job their illustrator did, I dashed off a letter instantly, telling her I would take the commission.”
“What made them so awful?” Julia asked, intrigued. She had seen the serialized versions, but other than noting that the book’s illustrations were far better, she had not paid much attention.
“The girls might have been plucked from some sentimental Victorian tale. Rosy cheeks, tidy pinafores, big ribbons in neatly combed hair. In every picture, they appeared either frightened or contrite. Although always with perfect posture.”
Julia laughed. “Inaccurate, to the extent Liberty Island was drawn from reality. We ran around like savages and slumped like old miners. Did Robert mind your taking the job?”
“He was not terribly pleased that I accepted without even consulting him.” Margaret smiled ruefully. “But I told him I owed it to your grandmother’s memory to do the story justice.”
Julia sighed. “I wish I had known my grandmother.”
“I wish you had, too. Winifred Newbold was so intelligent and creative, and so very kind. Though I was far younger, she had no idea of the usual stratifications. I took terrible advantage and followed her around like a puppy.”
Eventually, the conversation turned to Julia’s plans for after college.
“I’ll probably teach,” Julia said. She had discovered no other grand ambition, and it was not difficult for Barnard graduates to get teaching jobs.
Besides, Julia not only loved children but felt she understood them.
Though most of Julia’s teachers had tried to tamp down her imagination and exuberance, she had as models the rare few who actually appreciated these qualities and knew how to channel them.
“Will you return to Boston?”
Julia raised an eyebrow, and Margaret smiled.
Julia knew Margaret could not say much, lest she find herself crosswise of Julia’s parents.
Father, at least, expected Julia to return home after graduation.
Why would she ever live anywhere else? However, like Anna, who helped Julia navigate to Barnard without ever explicitly acknowledging that the goal was to get Julia out of Boston, Margaret likely understood that if Julia returned to her hometown, the powerful undertow of Boston society would pull her inexorably into its current.
“Would you like to stay in New York?”
Julia paused, thinking. “I love a lot about it. The energy, how much there is to do. And I’ve met such interesting people.”
She told Margaret about all the smart young thinkers she had met through Mina. (However tiresome Mina’s theatrics and attention-seeking could be, she had been generous in taking Julia to gatherings and making introductions.)
She described some of their adventures in Greenwich Village, where all the young artists and writers seemed to be moving.
Julia was enchanted by the neighborhood, with its shabby brownstones, and the way the predictable grid system vanished as soon as one entered the district.
It was as if the streets themselves had rebelled, dodging and weaving until planners threw up their hands and left them to their anarchic ways.
“All that said, as a student, I always have Morningside Heights to return to. The thought of a cramped apartment on a busy, treeless street fills me with dread. I want to want to live there, but I confess I don’t.”
“I felt the same, actually. Washington wound up being a good compromise, a busy city that felt more expansive somehow. It’s the height restrictions and broad avenues, I think.”
Julia nodded. “In New York, breezes have an artificial, almost menacing quality, as if the tall buildings compelled them to gather and charge down the streets.”
“Given all that, I wonder why you’d even consider living in New York?” Margaret said. It was so like her to get straight to the nub of things.
“I suppose it’s because people I admire…” Julia began, then hesitated.
“… cannot understand living anywhere else?” Margaret smiled. When Julia nodded, Margaret leaned forward. “It’s a good thing you’ve always gone your own way, then, isn’t it?”
The next day, while Louisa slept, Julia looked out the window of the parlor car as the train sped past factories and muddy fields, and reflected on the events of the past few days.
Julia had always sensed that her mother and aunt found it hard to speak of their own mother.
She understood why it was a painful subject.
Far too soon after she died, their father had married Clarissa, a perfectly dreadful woman.
Though she was glad to have learned more about Winifred Newbold, the conversation with Margaret left Julia feeling wistful. Disappointed, even.
A memory floated into her mind, from Mina’s visit to Haven Point the summer after their freshman year. It was during a terrible heat wave, when everyone who could do so had headed for the coast, like animals escaping a forest fire.
Julia had expected her friend to behave shockingly. Not that she minded—the prospect afforded her some perverse pleasure. Her greater concern was how Mina would react to Haven Point. Would she pick up a whiff of what she always called the “stale air of gentility”?
Julia also wondered what Mina would make of her friends Maudie and Ruthie.
Mina had lost touch with her own childhood friends.
She said she no longer had anything in common with them, “now that they’re setting up their little households.
” Meanwhile, Maudie was already engaged to John Franklin, her longtime boyfriend, and Ruthie was seeing the very eligible Vernon Scott.
Ruthie’s mother, like Julia’s, had married after her first debutante season, and Julia expected her friend to follow suit.
As it happened, while Mina did not dress or act in a conventional fashion, she behaved with relative propriety. She would never be particularly ingratiating, but she was perfectly pleasant to Julia’s family and friends.
She even managed to charm William and Father. Upon learning that Mina worked at The Current, William had sniffed and said, “Isn’t that a socialist rag?”
“Terribly!” Mina replied, eyes wide, as if it was only upon working there that she learned the magazine’s editorial stance. “But the place is so dreadfully chaotic, I suspect we have little to fear from the socialists!”
Julia had felt some anticipatory embarrassment about Fourwinds, their house on Haven Point, which she considered far too large, but Mina had nothing but compliments.
She was charmed by the stone foundation and gray shingles, the asymmetrical rooflines and differently shaped windows.
“It looks like it popped out of the ground and grew whichever way it liked!”
The one sticky moment came after Julia introduced Mina to Anna.
“Your aunt is fascinating,” Mina said. “She seems so different from your mother. Isn’t theirs the side of the family that came from Concord?”
“Yes. Anna was the scholar of the family, and Mother the athlete,” Julia had replied. She tried to keep the defensiveness out of her tone, though evidently without success.
“I don’t mean to insult your mother, Julia. She’s lovely!” Mina said. In truth, Mina had only put words to something Julia herself had noticed. Julia did not see in her mother a hint of the freethinking Concord spirit that Margaret had described in Julia’s grandmother.
It was hard for Julia not to feel robbed.
As much as she loved being around Mina’s irreverent, creative, forward-thinking friends, it felt like a club she could only visit on a guest card.
No previously undiscovered artistic or literary ability had announced itself during Julia’s years at Barnard, and she had neither the audacity nor genius for making oneself indispensable that had given Mina full membership.
Though Julia had not told Margaret as much, another reason she resisted staying in New York after graduation was her sense that she would never really belong.
Her connection to Concord might have been an asset, given the admiration that many modern thinkers had for their nineteenth-century counterparts in Concord.
Pelham Stewart (whom Julia still had not met!) had mentioned both Emerson and Thoreau in articles he wrote.
That, however, would have required Julia’s mother passing along that legacy.
Instead, Father spotted Mother on a tennis court, and reputedly fell in love on the spot.
They were married a few months later. By all appearances, Mother had molded herself to the tastes and wishes of Julia’s other grandmother, a typical wealthy and narrow-minded Boston matron.
Like those British aristocrats who had to close off wings of the ancestral home, Mother had sealed off her Concord roots. It was hard not to wonder what it might have been like if she had kept those doors open, allowed Julia to explore the old rooms.
Julia was so lost in thought, she was surprised when she heard Louisa’s voice.
“What are you fretting yourself about?” she asked sleepily.
Louisa’s loyalty to Julia’s family was so firm, Julia knew she would not understand all she had been pondering, so she stuck to one reflection.
“I was just thinking about my parents,” Julia said. “Father saw Mother on a tennis court and fell in love. It seems like so little to build a lifetime on.”
Louisa shrugged. “Mr. Sweeney down the street married his wife because she made good doughnuts. They were married fifty years.”
Julia laughed out loud. “What would I do without you, Louisa?”