Chapter 16 The Ledger and the Letters #2
Clara, You have never once in your life described yourself as happy without immediately correcting it to something more defensible, so I take your plainness here as a genuine measure of the situation.
I am very glad. I have been worried about you in the way I worry about things I cannot manage — distantly, persistently, and with a specific quality of helplessness that I find extremely inconvenient.
The man sounds like exactly the man you need.
I say this as someone who has known you for twenty-six years and who is aware that what you need is not a man who is easy but a man who is real.
Easy men bore you within the month. You are not a woman for easy men.
You are a woman for someone who will argue with you until midnight and mean it, and from everything you have described, this appears to be what you have found.
Nora sounds extraordinary. I would like to meet her.
I would also like to see these mountains, which you have described four times across two letters with a specificity that suggests they have gotten thoroughly into you.
Come home when you can. No — do not come home.
Stay there and be happy and write me the rest of the story.
Your Margaret P.S. You have not answered the question of the string. I remain curious.
Clara read the letter twice. She folded it back into its envelope and set it on the table and looked at the fire and felt the particular warmth of being known from a distance — of having a person who understood the translation from what you said to what you meant, who had been doing that translation for twenty-six years and did it easily and without error.
She would write back tomorrow. She would tell Margaret about the hill and about what had happened on the hill, because Margaret deserved to know, and because telling Margaret was the way Clara processed things that were too large for her own interior monologue.
She would tell her about Christmas Eve and the journal and the thing he had written in the back of it. She would tell her about the string.
"Good news?" Elias said, not looking up from his records.
"My sister," Clara said. "She's glad I'm happy."
"Are you?" he said. Now he looked up.
She looked at him across the table. At the fire-lit face, the specific face that she looked for in rooms and across hillsides and through kitchen windows. "Yes," she said. "I've told you."
"I like to hear it," he said.
"You'll hear it as many times as you like," she said, and went back to the letter, and the fire burned and the house was quiet and she thought: this is the life. On an ordinary Tuesday evening, a letter from Boston and a fire and a man who likes to hear that she is happy. This is the actual life.
* * *
The second letter in the packet was from Pastor Elmore's wife, who was not from Pinecrest but from Denver and had heard about the marriage through her husband's correspondence with Reverend Hobart and had written to welcome Clara to the community of Colorado frontier wives, which she described as a community of extraordinary women who had chosen an extraordinary life and who looked after one another.
She enclosed a recipe for a particular kind of winter stew that she said was better than anything else when the cold was serious.
Clara copied it into the household recipe book she had started in December.
The third was from Clara's former headmistress in Boston, a woman of seventy who had hired her at twenty-two and followed her career with the proprietary interest of someone who considered herself partly responsible for it.
She congratulated Clara on the marriage with the warmth of someone who meant it and expressed the hope that Colorado would prove worthy of her.
Clara thought Colorado was doing its best.
The fourth letter she set aside without opening because the handwriting on the envelope was Edward Hartwell's, and she had nothing to say to Edward Hartwell and he had nothing to say to her that she needed to hear. She put it in the stove on Thursday morning.
She told Elias about it that evening, because she had decided when they married that she would tell him things like this — not to require a response from him but because the concealing of them seemed, in a marriage built on the principle of honesty, like a small but real failure of the principle.
He listened. Then he said: "You burned it."
"Yes," she said.
"Good," he said. He said it the way he said things that were simply his opinion and did not require elaboration. Then he went back to his Bible and she went back to Middlemarch and the matter was settled.
* * *
She thought, in the weeks after Christmas, about what it meant to have someone to tell things to.
She had told things to Margaret all her life, and Margaret had received them well, but the geography of that — the distance, the letter, the necessary delay — had always meant that the things she told were already processed by the time she told them.
She had been her own primary interlocutor for twenty-six years.
She had developed, necessarily, a very robust interior life and a high capacity for her own company, both of which had served her well and which she did not regret.
But there was a different quality to telling someone who was in the same room.
Elias was not a voluble person. She had been clear-eyed about this from the first letter, and the reality had confirmed the expectation.
He was not a man who narrated his day or processed his feelings aloud or needed the kind of ongoing verbal exchange that some people required.
He was a man of few words and deep habits, and the few words, when they came, were the right ones.
But he listened.
This was what she had not known to look for, before she came: not the telling but the listening.
The quality of being received. She told him things and he received them with the full attention — really received them, not the social form of listening that was the preparation of a response, but the genuine form, the form that meant when she had finished speaking he had actually heard what she said and would carry it.
She told him about a student one evening — the tired boy, the one whose father worked him too hard, who had fallen asleep at the slate board two days running and whom she did not know how to help without overstepping the boundary between school and home. Elias listened until she finished.
Then he said: "Tom Kirby."
She looked at him.
"The father," he said. "I know him. He's not a bad man. He's a man in over his head with the spring planting late and too much acreage and not enough help." He paused. "I can speak to him. Man to man. About the boy."
"Would he receive it?" she asked.
"He'll receive it from me," Elias said. "We put up fence together last fall. He trusts me."
Clara looked at this — at the specific, practical, sufficient solution to the problem she had been turning for two weeks — and felt, with the warmth of something landing exactly right, what it meant to have someone in your corner who moved differently than you did through the world and therefore saw things you didn't see and had access you didn't have.
"Yes," she said. "Please."
He spoke to Tom Kirby the following week. The boy started sleeping through his school day within the month. Clara never asked exactly what was said.