Chapter Nineteen #4
Over the summer, Pelham had seemed to appreciate Julia’s sunnier nature, but among his friends, he acted every bit as disillusioned.
God was dead. Truth was dead. Faith and hope were for saps.
The only permissible joy was in hedonistic rebellion.
The only honest, courageous approach to life was to face its essential darkness, to look straight into the abyss.
Julia shared their disillusionment to some extent, but she could not bear to think as they did.
In October, they went to a party with Mina and Gardiner.
Julia remembered walking in and hearing the strains of some dark, melancholic jazz recording.
She was standing with Mina and some others, who were discussing a new novel by a British author, which Julia had read and hated.
She found it relentlessly dark, lacking in any redemptive message. Naturally, they all loved it.
Julia felt eyes on her and turned to see that Mina was watching her, a little half smile on her face.
Say something, her eyes were saying. Say something so I can pounce.
Not all visitors to the studio were unwelcome. Bess came every week, bringing with her the youthful air of the classroom, along with tidings from and stories about her students, and when Pauline was in town visiting her family, she stopped by with a crate full of gifts from Boston.
Julia’s aunt had put several books in it, including the latest in her new juvenile fiction series.
(“I thought perhaps you would like some light reading,” Anna’s note said.
How well she had always known her!) Father sent a box of Easter candy, and Mother added some spring frocks from her dressmaker, who, with inerrant taste, had continued outfitting the fashion-agnostic Julia all these years.
Since her own terrible visit to Haven Point two summers ago, Julia had seen little of her sister-in-law, but Pauline was in the pink of health now.
William had seemed a touch less domineering at Christmas, too.
Julia had a hope—a tiny hope, granted—that he had learned that his wife blossomed under kinder treatment.
Louisa occasionally sent letters from Boston, but they were short and oddly formal.
In all their years of friendship, Louisa had never held a grudge against Julia.
It seemed Julia had gone beyond the pale, something she had not thought was possible.
Though Louisa’s coldness pierced Julia’s armor, for the most part, she continued to push aside any thought of what came before this accident, and what awaited her.
That said, she threw herself into the rehabilitation of her ankle with a vengeance. The doctor from Walter Reed had done a thorough examination and assigned a physiotherapist named Miss Quinn, whom he considered one of the best he had worked with during the war.
Though only thirty, Miss Quinn had all the command of a field general. Julia told her as much more than once, but she submitted to all of the treatments and did every exercise to the best of her ability.
The worst was the “circumductor,” a pivoting iron brace attached to a wheel that dragged on the turn, forcing her to use all the muscles and ligaments around her ankle.
Though Julia asked Miss Quinn where she had managed to procure this medieval torture device, she did as she was bid and received so much praise for her tenacity, she was sure she was disguising her low spirits, and that nobody had guessed that part of her still felt lodged under that seat, waiting to be crushed by the weight of everything.
Not everybody was fooled, it seemed. One day, a month after she had moved to the studio, Michael came out to visit.
“It’s very fine weather. I’m taking you for a drive.”
“I am tired.”
“So? You’ll be a passenger. You don’t have to do anything but … passenge. You need it.”
“Why?”
“Novelty. You needn’t see people, but you must see something besides these four walls.”
“I’ve sat outside!” Julia objected.
“Forgive me. I did not count the back of my parents’ house. Five walls.”
“And a fence.”
“Congratulations. Now get up.”
She grumbled, but she got her cloak and the cane to which she had graduated and hobbled beside him through the side garden gate to his roadster.
He took her around the speedway in East Potomac Park, and she did find that there was something brightening about being outside, away from her place of convalescence.
After that, Michael took her out almost every day.
They drove out the old Conduit Road toward Great Falls, around the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, and through Rock Creek and Meridian Parks.
Julia appreciated everyone who had helped her and every kind gesture, but she had learned over these months how much easier some people made it to accept their help.
Michael was the easiest. He was like Louisa in his utter lack of self-consciousness.
Mina left a residue behind, but Michael always left the air cleaner after he visited.
With him, she sensed no anxiety or unspoken needs or expectations.
And like Louisa, while Michael saw Julia quite clearly, he did not subject her to endless analysis.
His cajoling her into taking a drive with him was so typical.
He discerned what she needed, and issued his demand with his usual cheer and directness, and without judgment.
Michael would marry someday, and Julia knew he would be a wonderful husband and father, and she wanted that for him.
At least in theory she did. When she once again saw his name and Genevieve Carter’s linked in the social news, it gave her a terrible pang.
She knew no wife would allow them to be as close as they had been.
She resolved to enjoy what time with him she had left.
One Saturday in late March, Julia sat on a comfortable cushion in the bow of a canoe, while Michael paddled her upriver.
“I feel like I’m in a gondola in Venice,” she said, then laughed as Michael began whistling “O Sole Mio.”
Years ago, when Julia was Michael’s partner for a Washington Canoe Club mixed event, he mentioned that when he was young, he and his friends had camped out on an island off the Maryland shore a little farther up the Potomac.
“Our own Liberty Island,” he called it.
She had always wanted to see it, so after a thorough interrogation by Julia’s doctor, Michael obtained permission to take her out.
She was cleared neither for paddling nor for disembarking and tramping about, but on this marvelously crisp spring afternoon, reminiscent of the Maine coast in midsummer, it was a treat just to have Michael navigate her around the perimeter.
“What did you name it again?” she asked.
“Whoop Whoop,” Michael said with a groan. “I don’t know what it’s called now, but needless to say, that didn’t stick.”
When they returned home, Margaret was in the back garden, pruning shears in hand and an old straw hat on her head. She stood up and waved, then peeled off her garden gloves and beckoned them over, eager to hear about the adventure.
“I’m glad Julia saw your little island, Michael,” she said, after they told her about the excursion. “She’s responsible for it, in a way.”
“How so?” he asked.
“I’d actually forgotten this until you mentioned the plans, but it was Julia’s mother who persuaded me to let you camp out on the river. She said I was being silly.”
“She did?” Julia asked, barely able to keep her jaw from dropping.
“I wasn’t usually a nervous Nellie with Michael, because his brothers had broken me in.” Margaret shrugged. “It’s just that none of them had ever proposed such a daring scheme.”
Later, when Julia was alone in the studio, she had a strange feeling that something inside her had been out of alignment, like an off-track drawer scraping against its runners, and had suddenly slid back into place.
“It was hardly bondage,” Louisa had said of Liberty Island that night, when Julia had railed against her mother for “hiding her away.” “It was permission. Encouragement, even.”
Louisa had looked so confused, as if she were speaking to a stranger. Looking back at the person she was just three short months ago, Julia was not sure she recognized her either.