Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

For a minute Nora was silent. “They’ll probably be back next summer,” she finally said. What else had she missed? “If Elizabeth’s health doesn’t improve.”

He turned to look at her. “Really?” The film of plaster on his face was beginning to crack as it dried. “Gillian will be back?”

Nora shook her head and left Michael to go back to his work, back to his longing and confusion and his sense that neither his mother nor his uncle had the slightest sense of who he was or what he wanted. How could they pretend to know anything, when they didn’t know the most important thing? In the woods, all through the closing weeks of summer, in a hollow lined with ferns and lycopodium, he and Gillian had secretly met when they were supposed to be separate and elsewhere.

Hands, tongues, bared flesh, lifted skirts and opened trousers: what he might have expected, except that he hadn’t known what to expect. On the days it rained, they stood and wrestled in place. They lay down when it was dry. They hardly spoke, they had no words for what was going on between them. Their parents had told them nothing. Michael had heard things from the guides, but hadn’t known whether to believe them. When Gillian put her hand inside his shirt and slipped her palm down his smooth white skin, the sky spun around his head and he saw every needle on every fir and hemlock. Why wouldn’t she write to him?

When the Vignes returned the following summer, Gillian and Michael picked up not as if they’d been out of touch for nine months, but as if they’d been talking every day. Michael ignored Clara and Elizabeth when the wagon pulled up, holding his arms out for Gillian. She leaned into them and let him lift her over the side, while her pale hair, twined low on her neck, fluttered in small strands around his face.

After that it was Michael and Gillian on the porch together, or hunting or riding — she was a splendid horsewoman, an excellent shot — or training Helen and Dido. He turned down guiding jobs to spend time with her, and Clara did nothing to keep them apart; he was hired help to her, Nora saw, who’d be left behind come September. This was so annoying that Nora, who might have told Michael not to get involved with a guest, said nothing. She waited for the flirtation to burn itself out and watched Elizabeth, alone on the porch, pretending to read but always watching the pair and seeming to wait for the same thing.

Meanwhile Ned continued to seek Clara’s company, although Nora, tired of the whole family, couldn’t tell whether it was Clara herself or the tales she told of Max’s exploits that so fascinated him.

“I do love him,” she heard Clara say one day, when she was sitting a few feet away from them on the porch. “Or I did — how can I know what I feel anymore, when we never see each other?”

Ned murmured something Nora couldn’t hear and then there was yet more talk about Max. Max in Venezuela, on the slopes of Mt. Fuji, crossing the ice fields of Alberta. Clara’s face, at first tight and drawn, softened as she supplied the details Ned asked for. Perhaps, Nora thought, Clara thought he was safe to confide in because he knew no one from her circle in New York. Yet her manner toward him seemed genuinely friendly, and when Nora asked Ned what he liked in Clara, he answered promptly.

“It’s a kind of courage,” he said. “The way she waits, and takes care of his life for him. I admire that.”

The mail, Nora saw, bound their friendship together. On mail days, Clara’s lap would be heaped with letters. When they were younger, she said, Max had sometimes let months go by without a word. But now — she lifted the envelopes and let them tumble back onto her skirt.

“I’ve always let the girls read them,” Clara told Ned. “But for myself — sometimes I’ve just skimmed them, to make sure he’s all right. It’s different now that you’re so interested in his travels.” She peered at the first three envelopes in the pile. “I wonder when he got to Japan.”

“I wish I got letters like that,” Ned said, as Nora wondered who from. Drawn into the conversation despite herself, she asked, “Do you write him back?”

“Once a week,” Clara replied. “I used to be a great letter writer myself. But it’s never enough. What could be?”

“My friend Copernicus,” Ned said — here Nora turned toward him in surprise: already he’d mentioned that name to Clara? — “said he used to write his sister all the time. She stayed home and looked after the family house, so he was free to travel. He said he was grateful for that.”

“Who wouldn’t be grateful?” Clara said acidly.

Later Ned would tell Clara a little more — but not the dream, never the dream. Which was not a dream, exactly; he was often partly conscious when this came to him. Under a brilliant sky, he and Copernicus moved through the north woods again, everything they would ever need packed tidily into the guide boat. Hunting rifles, fishing rods, line, lures, leaders, a net, a cast-iron frying pan and some slabs of bacon, blankets to toss on the balsam tips they gathered each night. Wool socks, a spare shirt. Two good knives, pipes and tobacco; Copernicus’s sketchbooks and painting supplies.

In Ned’s dream it never rained; the fish never stopped biting and the mosquitoes never bit. They never quarreled. They moved from lake to stream with the greatest of ease, never slogging through mud at the carries, never dropping the boat or the pack-baskets. Copernicus did not pull them, every week or so, toward any hamlet where he might find a girl. And Ned himself did not feel hurried, did not always sense that the six weeks they’d planned for their holiday were flying away. He had chosen the site for the Northview Inn because it was perfect, and not because their trip had ended here, near the spot where he’d spent his first Adirondack winters.

Once they’d set up camp by the lake, Copernicus set off for the nearest tavern, returning two days later only to say that he’d painted enough of these woods for now, it was time for him to head out West. Was Ned interested in joining him? To Ned’s own surprise, something inside him had balked at moving any farther. He’d stayed behind, not sure what kept him, while Copernicus — like Erasmus, like everyone else — went off exploring and never returned.

Of course he was drawn to Clara, Ned thought. Tied to a wanderer, rooted herself.

7

What does it mean that Ned didn’t acknowledge his sister’s birthday? Perhaps, Elizabeth thinks, in his oddly delicate way he was trying to spare her feelings. Or perhaps his reminder that she visit the cottage was itself an oblique acknowledgment. The day as a kind of pilgrimage, each site that Nora knew revisited? The cottage holds all of Nora’s descendants, every trace of her physical being. The rest, Elizabeth thinks, she carries inside herself.

As she drifts along the shore, what Ned notices from his third-floor window is the distracted sandpiper’s track she leaves in the snow. She moves toward the water’s edge and then away, back and forth as she’s always moved between her desire to embrace her family and her fear of being engulfed. Never easy with any of them except Nora, who wasn’t exactly Elizabeth’s family; nothing has ever been simple for her but her work. Ned thinks this not judgmentally but fondly, his feelings for her neither natural nor spontaneous. He loves her because she’s her mother’s daughter, and because she gave purpose and shape and even joy to the last decade of his sister’s life.

Back in his chair, his pen in hand, he continues his interrupted letter to Clara. Elizabeth came to see me, he writes. She looks well, and sends her love. I think she has no idea of how much she now behaves like Nora — all the habits and attitudes she picked up. He pauses, wondering if that last comment will wound Clara’s feelings. Then he continues, knowing how truly Clara understands her daughter. Even the way she speaks reminds me of Nora. She’d be glad to see her father, I think. Will he stop here on his way home from Alaska?