Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

Still, after all their meetings, Ned knows little of this solitary wanderer other than what Clara has conveyed to him. Lines quoted from Max’s letters or repeated after a visit: from these, Ned’s constructed a version of Max’s life which resembles, he imagines, the unknown lives of Erasmus and Copernicus, his old companions. Or the life he could have led himself, if he’d had the strength and the desire. Instead he’s stayed here, preserving animals and sheltering strangers, because this has been his nature. As it’s been Clara’s nature to build a private life for herself behind the shield of Max’s absent presence.

You might meet him up here, he adds. It would be wonderful to see you. This letter, he sees, will be of the ordinary kind; most often they dwell on the family they now have in common. Only rarely will he mention the past to Clara, describing some long-ago incident — but when he does, she responds attentively, without pressing him. The odd result is that he hides far less from her than he hid from Nora.

He bites the top of his pen and adds, of his only sister and Clara’s eldest daughter: I have never really understood what either of them were thinking. As he does, Elizabeth, chilled by the wind off the lake, moves more briskly toward the cottage.

At her own house, she thinks, everyone will be stirring. There each day resembles a week, the relentless rest periods chopping the days into miniature days — awake, asleep, awake, asleep — which pass in one sense with horrible swiftness (how can a person get anything done, always dressing or undressing, eating or sleeping, preparing to eat or sleep?) and, in another, with a devastating slowness. Each of her nine guest rooms forms the center of someone’s life, her boarders caged behind the doors in their attitudes of loneliness and anxiety, boredom or melancholy or occasional elation. Logan wears his pajamas constantly, alone or under his oversized jacket and pants: the better, he declares, to nap or rise without missing a minute. With the time he saves, he means to write an epic poem celebrating his father’s role in the Civil War. Farther down the hall Tillie lies flat, thinking optimistically of the children she’ll have, the home she’ll make, the man who’ll find her when she recovers and for whose sake she’s drenched herself in expensive wrinkle cream. On either side of her Niles and Celine, inseparable over the summer but now estranged, listen tensely for each other’s footsteps but instead hear Meg, across from them — Meg, who speaks excellent French, but spends too much time in the bathroom she shares with Julie and Corinne. Below them Ezra reads illicitly: a long account of the Irish problem, which exactly as Dr. Davis warned has upset him. This, he thinks, closing the book, is why we’re forbidden to read during rest hours. But who could rest with the noise upstairs, the footsteps tapping across the hall and the water running?

Martin, Elizabeth thinks, approaching the door of her sister’s house. Let Martin be sleeping through these hours, dreaming of Daisietta. How she hopes he is still asleep.

Inside the cottage — too many bodies, too much noise; she loves everyone here, but the bustle still stuns her — she tries to respond with proper enthusiasm to her family’s greetings. Her three tall, fleshy nieces, and the two nephews who tower even over Michael: a race of giants, amazing to her. One is musical, two are wickedly funny, all are as smart as their grandparents. She likes best the youngest, nine-year-old Eudora, the one grandchild Nora didn’t live to see but whose expressions nonetheless often remind Elizabeth sharply of her dead friend.

“Look at my drawings,” Eudora says, tugging at Elizabeth’s hand. A blue bird, a yellow bird, three of the dogs curled up together, the front porch of the inn. “This is the best,” she says, pushing forward her latest work: Dido asleep, one paw sheltering her gray nose.

“Very nice,” says Elizabeth. She spends a few minutes examining Eudora’s efforts and then admires her nephews’ carved duck decoys and a dress her older niece is making. Finally her sister says, “Don’t torment your aunt,” and pulls Elizabeth into the kitchen.

“Don’t these look good?” Gillian says proudly. “Would you like to take one back?”

On the counter are two more of the meat pies Elizabeth saw at Ned’s, along with loaves of bread and trays of roasted squash and onions. “They smell delicious,” Elizabeth says. “But everything’s all planned for supper back at the house.”

“Such a surprise,” Gillian says, with affectionate mockery. Elizabeth returns her smile, thinking what a pair she and her sister are. Both of them so competent, such excellent cooks and household managers. When they were young, they’d thought themselves so different from each other.

“How did Ned seem to you?” Gillian asks.

“All right. A bit frail, the way he has been lately. And his hands are certainly no better.”

For a few minutes they discuss their aging relative thoughtfully. Although they’ve grown apart some over the years, they still have in common Ned, the details of keeping house for so many people, the children. And of course Michael. One of the children, Elizabeth knows, will already have skipped to the shed behind the cottage, where Michael runs the business that used to be Ned’s. Michael will be setting down his draw-shave now, lifting his bulky body from the wooden stool, and moving calmly toward the kitchen. That noise at the back door is him, kicking the snow from his boots. One more thump and here he is. He clasps Elizabeth’s hand and touches his massive cheek to hers.

“I just wanted to say hello,” she says. If she could reach through his skin, she might find Nora inside. “And to see how the children are.”

“In excellent shape,” Michael says, stepping back to look over at his brood. “As you see.” While a black and white cat with pearl-gray eyes twines among everyone’s legs, he adds, “Won’t you stay for supper?”

“I can’t,” Elizabeth says. “It’s three-thirty, I need to hurry back.”

The rigid schedule at the boardinghouse, Elizabeth’s inflexible, invariable duties there, have never made an impression on Michael. What his mother did, he once said — not in the least meaning to be insulting — had been the practice of healing. Whereas what Elizabeth does is, in his eyes, no more than keeping house. How difficult can it be?

He has no idea, Elizabeth thinks, amazed again at what she’d once felt for him. He is nothing like Andrew, who, whatever his quirks, has always understood her devotion to the house and its constantly changing population. Andrew will be rising now, she thinks: stretching after his afternoon nap, ready to resume his duties. And in fact he’s doing almost exactly what she envisions.

Two miles away, in the pleasant room at the back of their house, Andrew slips on a shirt, which he leaves unbuttoned, ignores the socks Elizabeth laid out for him, and then steps outside through the French doors and begins his afternoon exercises. Twenty deep knee bends, his arms straight out and his hamstrings burning. Windmills, touching right hand to left toe, left hand to right, straightening vigorously in between with a great whooshing exhalation. Sit-ups, jumping jacks, several minutes with the jump rope; he’s breathing hard, his lungs strong and elastic and a healthy sweat, a useful sweat pouring down his temples — oh, the air is gorgeous today, the fragrance is like burying his face in a bed of balsam needles. Counting ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR, he thinks of all the afternoons he’s exercised in this handsome setting. And of the invisible line, a few feet to his right, that separates the bit of ground before his French doors from that in front of the doors to the nurse’s room.