Christina Kline - A Piece of the World

The paper is still damp. In bold strokes Andy reduced the house to a white box with two gables facing the sea. The fields are green and yellow, with bristly blades of grass poking up here and there. Near-black firs, a purple swipe of mountains, watery clouds. Though the watercolor has been done quickly—there’s movement in the brushstrokes, as if the wind is blowing through—it’s clear this boy knows what he’s doing. The windows are mere suggestions, but you have the peculiar sense that you can see inside. The house seems rooted in the earth.

“It’s just a sketch,” Andy says, coming up beside me. “I’ll keep working at it.”

“Looks like a nice place to live,” I say. The house is snug and cozy, a fairy-tale version of the one Al and I actually live in, the only hint of its decay in smudges of blue and brown.

Andy laughs. “You tell me.” Running two fingers over the paper, he says, “Such stark lines. There’s something about this place … You’ve lived here a long time?”

I nod.

“I sense that. That it’s a place filled with stories. I’ll bet I could paint it for a hundred years and never get tired of it.”

“Oh, you’d get tired of it,” Al says.

We all laugh.

Andy claps his hands together. “Hey, guess what? Today is my birthday.”

“Is it really?” Betsy asks. “You didn’t tell me.”

He puts his arm around her and tugs her toward him. “Didn’t I? I feel like you know everything about me already.”

“Not yet,” she says.

“What’s your age?” I ask him.

“Twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two! Betsy’s only seventeen.”

“A mature seventeen,” Betsy blurts, color rising to her cheeks.

Andy seems amused. “Well, I’ve never cared much about age. Or maturity.”

“How are you going to celebrate?” I ask.

He raises an eyebrow at Betsy. “I’d say I’m celebrating right now.”

BETSY DOESN’T SHOW up again until several weeks later, when she bursts into the kitchen and practically dances across the floor. “Christina, we are engaged,” she says breathlessly, clasping my hand.

“Engaged?!”

She nods. “Can you believe it?”

You’re so young, I start to say; it’s too quick, you hardly know each other …

Then I think of my own life. All the years, all the waiting that led to nothing. I saw how the two of them were together. The spark between them. I feel like you know everything about me already. “Of course I can,” I say.

Ten months later, a postcard arrives. Betsy and Andy are married. When they return to Maine for the summer, I hand Betsy a wedding gift: two pillowcases I made and embroidered with flowers. It took me four days to make the French knots for the daisies and the tiny buttonhole-stitch leaves; my hands, stiff and gnarled, don’t work the way they used to.

Betsy looks closely at the embroidery and holds the pillowcases to her chest. “I will treasure these. They’re perfect.”

I give her a smile. They’re not perfect. The lines are uneven, the flower petals spiky and overlarge; the cotton is marked faintly with the residue of ripped stitches.

Betsy has always been kind.

She shows me photographs from their upstate New York wedding ceremony: Andy in a tuxedo, Betsy in white with gardenias in her hair, both beaming with joy. After their five-day honeymoon, she tells me, she’d assumed they would drive to Canada for the wedding of a close friend, but Andy said he had to get back to work. “He’d told me before we were married that was how it would be,” she says. “But I didn’t quite believe it until that moment.”

“So did you go by yourself?”

She shakes her head. “I stayed with him. This is what I signed up for. The work is everything.”

OUT THE KITCHEN window I see Andy trudging up the field toward the house, hitching one leg forward, dragging the other, his gait uneven. Strange that I didn’t notice that before. Here he is at the door in paint-flecked boots, a white cotton shirt rolled to the elbow, a sketch pad under his arm. He knocks, two firm raps, and pulls open the screen. “Betsy has some errands to do. Is it okay if I hang around?”

I try to act nonchalant, but my heart is racing. I can’t remember the last time I was alone with a man other than Al. “Suit yourself.”

He steps inside.

He’s taller and handsomer than I remember, with sandy brown hair and piercing blue eyes. There’s something equine about the way he tosses his head and shifts his feet. A pulsating thrum.

In the Shell Room he runs his hand along the mantelpiece, brushing off the dust. Picks up Mother’s cracked white teapot and turns it around. Cups my grandmother’s chambered nautilus in his hand and leafs through the filmy pages of her old black bible. No one has opened my poor drowned uncle Alvaro’s sea chest in decades; it screeches when he lifts the lid. Andy picks up a shell-framed portrait of Abraham Lincoln, looks at it closely, sets it down. “You can feel the past in this house,” he says. “The layers of generations. It reminds me of The House of the Seven Gables . ‘So much of mankind’s varied experience had passed there that the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart.’”

The lines are familiar. I remember reading that novel in school, a long time ago. “We’re actually related to Nathaniel Hawthorne,” I tell him.

“Interesting. Ah yes—Hathorn.” Going to the window, he gestures toward the field. “I saw the tombstones in the graveyard down there. Hawthorne lived in Maine for a while, I believe?”

“I don’t know about that,” I admit. “Our ancestors came from Massachusetts. Nearly two hundred years ago. Three men, in the middle of winter.”

“Where in Massachusetts?”

“Salem.”

“Why’d they come up?”

“My grandmother said they were trying to escape the taint of association with their relative John Hathorne. He was chief justice of the witch trials. When they got to Maine they dropped the ‘e’ at the end of the name.”

“To obscure the connection?”

I shrug. “Presumably.”

“I’m remembering this now,” he says. “Nathaniel Hawthorne left Salem too, and also changed the spelling of the name. But a lot of his stories are reworkings of his own family history. Your family history, I suppose. Moral allegories about people determined to root out wickedness in others while denying it in themselves.”

“Actually,” I tell him, “there’s a legend that as one of the condemned witches stood at the scaffold, waiting for the noose, she uttered a curse: ‘May God take revenge on the family of John Hathorne.’”

“So your family is cursed!” he says with delight.

“Maybe. Who knows? My grandmother used to say that those Hathorn men brought the witches with them from Salem. She kept the door open between the kitchen and the shed for the witches to come and go.”

Looking around the Shell Room, he says, “What do you think? Is it true?”

“I’ve never seen any,” I tell him. “But I keep the door open too.”

OVER THE YEARS, certain stories in the history of a family take hold. They’re passed from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely from the implausible.

Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.

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