Chapter 8
Olivia left Boston with one trunk and her mother's Bible. Nobody came to the station.
She had not expected anyone. Gerald had shaken her hand in the hall that morning and said she must write.
Cora had kissed the air beside her cheek and said how brave.
Bridget had cried in the kitchen and been told to stop.
That was the whole of it. Twenty-eight years in a city, and it let her go the way one lets go of a cab.
She did not mind. She told herself she did not mind. By the time the train had cleared the yards and was running out through Brookline, she found it was true.
The farms went by first. Tidy New England farms with stone walls and the last of the apples on the trees. Then the hills of the western counties, the long gray afternoon of New York, Ohio in the dark. She slept sitting up, with her hand on the Bible in her lap. She woke to Indiana, and slept again.
Somewhere past Chicago, the fields stopped having edges.
She had read about the plains. Reading was not the same.
The land went out flat in every direction until it met the sky, and there was nothing on it but wind.
The wind had teeth. She could see it in the way the grass lay down.
Now and then a house went by, a small dark square with smoke coming out of it.
She thought of the people inside, and of how far it was to the next one.
Something in her chest went tight, and then let go.
A home is a home, she told herself. The distance to the next one is no business of the person inside.
On the third day there was a line along the western sky that she took for cloud.
By noon it had not moved. She understood then that it was not cloud.
It was rock. It stood up out of the plain like a wall with the top broken off.
Through the afternoon the train crawled toward it.
It grew and grew until it filled the whole window.
Blue at the foot. White to the shoulders.
She could not see the top of it without putting her cheek against the glass.
Mountains, she thought. Well. He did say mountains.
She had not known what the word meant until then.
* * *
The last train was small, and it climbed.
It went up through a gorge with the river on one side.
The rock on the other side was so close that she could have touched it from the window.
Snow lay in every shadow. The trees were dark, narrow, and pointed, nothing like the broad maples of the Common.
They grew straight out of the stone, as if they had been planted there in a fit of stubbornness.
Twice the train stopped for no reason she could see. Twice it went on. Once, far below, she saw a wagon on a road no wider than a ribbon, with a man walking beside it. Then she understood the size of what she was looking at.
She sat with her hands folded in her lap and her back straight, because that was how she had sat for ten years. Her heart was going in a way she did not approve of.
In her reticule was a photograph of him.
He had sent it with the third letter, apologizing for it.
It was four years old, taken before his wife's death.
He did not think he looked much like it now.
It showed a tall, spare man in a dark coat, unsmiling, with his hair brushed back.
His hands hung at his sides, as if a camera left him no use for them.
It was a face she had studied a great deal. She had told herself that this was sensible, so that she would know him on the platform. That was true, as far as it went.
Then the gorge opened out. There was a town stacked up the side of it like plates in a rack, and the train was slowing. She had no more time to be sensible in.
He was on the platform.
She knew him at once, and not from the photograph.
The photograph had not shown how tired he was.
He stood a little apart from the three or four men waiting for the mail, with his hat in his hand and a folded rug over his arm.
Behind him the town went up the mountain in steps, roof over roof, with smoke standing straight up from every chimney in the still cold.
He was looking at the train the way a man looks at a door he has knocked on. Not sure it will open.
Then he saw her at the window. His face stayed exactly as it was. But he came forward.
"Miss Baker."
"Dr. Aldridge."
He handed her down. His hand was cold and steady. It let go of hers the moment her boots were on the boards. Up close, his eyes were gray, and the gray at his temples was more than the photograph had shown.
"You've had a long journey. I have the wagon at the end of the platform.
This is for your knees. The cold up here is not like the cold in Boston.
It is dry, and it gets in without your noticing.
" He put the rug over her arm. "Your trunk will come up behind us.
I have arranged with Mrs. Bowen, the reverend's wife, for you to lodge with her until...
until things are settled. She is expecting you.
She is very kind. I should also say that she is very loud. "
He was speaking to her exactly the way he had written to her. Precisely. Completely. Each item in its order, with nothing left out and nothing added. It was not cold, she thought. It was a man reading aloud from a list he had made in advance, because he did not trust himself without one.
"Thank you," she said. "I should like to meet the child first, if I may. Before Mrs. Bowen."
Something went across his face. It was gone before she could name it.
"Yes," he said. "She is waiting. She has been waiting since six this morning. I could not persuade her otherwise."
* * *
The house was on the upper street, and the child was at the door.
She stood on the porch in a brown dress that had been let down at the hem.
Her hair was scrubbed back so hard that it pulled at her temples, and her hands were clasped in front of her.
She was smaller than Olivia had pictured.
The hair was not smaller. It was every bit as red as the letters had said, red as a struck match. It made her small pale face look paler.
Olivia got down from the wagon before the doctor could come around to help her.
She went up the steps without hurrying. When she reached the porch, she stopped a yard from the child. Then, because ten years of sickrooms had taught her that nobody likes to be loomed over, she bent her knees and came down to the girl's height.
"Antonia," she said. "I'm Olivia. I've come a very long way to meet you."
The child studied her.
Her eyes were gray-green. They did not do what Olivia had expected, which was drop. They went over her face slowly, piece by piece, the way a doctor's might. Then they went to the doctor, standing in the yard with the rug still over his arm. Then they came back.
"You should know first," Antonia said, "that folks here call me a jinx."
Her voice was hoarse and careful. She said it as if she were handing over a paper that had to be signed before anything else could happen.
Olivia considered it.
"Do they," she said. "Well. I've just come from Boston.
Boston is full of grown people who believe worse nonsense than that, in better hats.
I'm afraid it doesn't impress me much." She stood up and brushed down her skirt.
Then she held out her hand. "Shall we go in?
I've been sitting for five days, and I should very much like to see a kitchen. "
The child let the hand hang there. She considered it. Then she glanced past Olivia at the doctor, as if for permission.
Olivia turned. She caught a look on the doctor's face that she had not seen in the photograph, or on the platform. It was there for one unguarded moment, at the corner of his mouth. It was very like a smile.
Then it was gone. He was saying that the stove was lit, and did she take her coffee with milk.
* * *
They ate supper in the kitchen, the three of them, at a table meant for two.
It was a good supper. He had cooked it himself, badly.
She said nothing about that, because it was the first meal anyone had cooked for her in ten years.
There was bacon, potatoes, bread from the mercantile, and coffee with milk.
The stove ticked. The lamp hissed. Outside, the wind came down off the mountain and tried the window.
Nobody spoke.
She had thought there would be talk. There had been so much in the letters.
But the letters had been written by two people alone in two rooms, a thousand miles apart.
Now they were at one table, and neither of them could find the way back.
He asked whether the journey had been tolerable.
She said it had. She asked whether the practice was busy.
He said it was. The child ate with her eyes on her plate, and kept them there.
"Do you like potatoes, Antonia?" Olivia asked.
The child nodded once, without looking up.
"Good. I can do a great deal with a potato."
Olivia listened to the silence. She was good at silences.
This one was not unfriendly. It was not the silence of people who wished her elsewhere. It was the silence of people who had each been alone so long that they had lost the knack of company. They were sitting very still, in case they did it wrong.
Two of them, she thought. Not one.
When the plates were cleared, he walked her down to the Bowens' with a lantern, along a street so steep it had steps in it.
Mrs. Bowen was all that he had said. She talked from the door to the parlor without drawing breath.
She put Olivia on a settle by the fire with a quilt over her.
The man had sense enough to send for quality, at least, she said, and went to bed.
Olivia lay awake.
The settle was short. The quilt smelled of camphor. Somewhere in the house a baby cried and was hushed. She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. Then she did what she always did at the end of a day. She reckoned it.
A cold attic in Boston, she had traded for a colder house on a mountain.
A brother who did not see her, for a husband who read from a list. A city of four hundred thousand, for a camp of eleven hundred. And every one of the eleven hundred, if the letters were true, would cross the street to avoid the child she had come to mother.
Then there was the child. A small grave girl with a matchstick head, who handed over the worst word about herself at the door like a ticket.
Two locked hearts, Olivia thought. That is what I have traded for.
She turned on her side and pulled the camphor quilt to her chin.
Well, she thought. I have had ten years' practice with locks.
And she slept.