The Vagabonds (26 page)

She said, “Hunky-dory, I’ll be there on time,” and readied herself for an outing, a trip to Congress Park. Alice washed her face and brushed her teeth and brushed her hair and selected her clothing with care. She tried on and rejected the black Ann Taylor and the brown Eileen Fisher and the black cashmere skirt and matching sweater with embroidered pockets and then told herself not to dither and chose the outfit from Talbots Joanna had sent her for Christmas: jaunty yet suitable, maroon, and something the lawyer would not yet have seen. Foundation, rouge, lipstick, mascara; she attended to it all. In this town they called her a lady and a lady she would be.

For the time it took Alice to finish her face her breathing stayed regular, easy, and she reflected with some satisfaction that she still could manage the niceties of makeup and the business of settling her last will and testament, her—
peculiar
word—affairs. She had never slept with Joseph Beakes, had not had an affair with him, but he remained courtly and attentive and to a degree flirtatious; it was a pleasant prospect to ready herself for a visit, to drive to his office and deal with her—
peculiar
word—estate.

So back down the stairs and from Grandmother’s house and over the hills she would go. There was money to leave for the children, the money she didn’t give George. There was money to leave Kerry Noble, who had scoliosis of the back and had been forced to take early retirement and could barely make ends meet. There were bequests for charities: Planned Parenthood and the Neighborhood Senior Citizens Project and the Good Old Days. There was money for that woman Betty Livingston who took such good care of her father and for three or four others she couldn’t at this moment name, but her lawyer had written them down. And it was a happy prospect, Alice reassured herself, a pleasant surprise she would have for the children—David and J-J and Claire da Loon—and she wondered, idly, if they would be surprised. She consulted her watch and the clock in the kitchen:
tok-tik.
The clocks agreed: 1:36.

Aaron died at ninety-two. She herself was a slip of a thing by comparison, younger than springtime and gayer than whatever it was the next line had rhymed with in that song from
South Pacific
—summer? laughter? Her father collapsed in the fullness of time and lasted to a ripe old age but she herself was not a candidate for a heart transplant, said Dr. Rosenthal when she had her appointment last week. You’re short of breath, a little, and we need to watch your blood sugar and maybe schedule an EKG and stress test, but you’re doing fine.

His expression belied this, however; his face was grave, not gay. He had ordered additional blood work and said we might consider angioplasty—not a bypass, not a full-fledged operation, nothing quite so radical—but this little balloon that can clear out your system; it’s a low-risk procedure and we might give it a try. The funny thing is, Alice told him, the single most important thing is something you can do nothing about: have old parents, have good genes. So she either would last for a very long time or die like her mother, and soon. Dr. Rosenthal inquired if she knew which particular variety of cancer her mother had contracted, and how long it took and how old she had been when she died. “Forty,” Alice said. Younger than springtime, a slip of a thing, and the truth was—though of course she did not tell this to the doctor—she couldn’t remember her mother at all. The sound of her voice, yes, but not what she
said
and not what Elizabeth smelled like or wore.

Therefore she tried to remember, and did, the way the house looked those long winters ago when she fashioned snow angels all by herself, using carrots and coal and potatoes for the snow-lady’s face. Eight years old is much too young to be a child without a mother and with a father who had turned sixty already and was about to retire and needed to be asked or else he would forget to shave. It was too young to live alone all day in this cottage she had filled with children, her children—David and J-J and Claire da Loon—and now was empty again. I have two daughters and a son except they live elsewhere today. I have three granddaughters also except they have flown south.

She slipped on her black fur-trimmed coat. She drew on her fur cap, her gloves. Then she let herself out of the kitchen and locked the house behind her and walked down the path in the Molly Maids’ tracks and went to the garage and pressed the clicker for the automatic door. It opened. The wind—on January 10, at one forty-five in the afternoon, in Saratoga Springs, New York, in the Eastern Time zone of the United States, on the continent of North America, and in the world and in the universe but not God’s palm, he’s not a mailman, girls—was raw. She stood for a minute in weak winter sunlight before settling into the car. Her ankles were swollen and sore. This house had been her mother’s house and she would tell Joe Beakes she wanted it to be her son’s if David was willing to keep it; she very much hoped he would. She would not, of course, insist. It does not behoove—strange word, peculiar word,
behoove
—a lady to insist.

The light in the garage stayed on for its allotted span and then the light went out. She closed her eyes an instant, breathing, steadying her breathing, and saw her mother when younger than springtime and slipping into and out of the doorway, her doorway, a slip of a thing with a man by her side, and the man by her side had a limp.

XV

1916

“A
beautiful night . . .”

“Oh!”

“I’m sorry. I startled you.”

She shook her head.

“Indeed, I took you by surprise . . .”

“But, Mr. . . .”

“Barclay. Peter Barclay.”

“Yes.”

“And now”—half-earnest, half-playful, he doffed his brown cap—“you yourself have the advantage.”

“Of?”

“Knowledge, Madame. Miss? For I am not so fortunate.”

“Fortunate?”

“As to be in possession of
your
name, I mean.”

“Dancey. Elizabeth Dancey.”

“Miss Dancey. Elizabeth Dancey. A pleasure.”

“Mr. Barclay.” Minding her manners, she gave him her hand. He pressed and politely released it. “Have you traveled here before?”

“No, never,” said Barclay. “I hope to return.”

“It
is,
yes, a beautiful evening,” she said. “The stars are out.”

“The constellations. That one is Orion the Hunter,” he guessed. He did not know, as did the girl, that Orion rose only in winter and would not adorn this night’s sky. “I watched you while singing.”

“Oh?”

“While I was performing. You said you did desire air, but unless I am mistaken you remained within earshot to listen . . .”

“I did.”

“And did you approve what you heard?”

Consciously, she changed the subject. “Do you entertain company often?”

“Only when asked. Or inspired.”

“It seems they ask you often.” Above his cap the full moon rose; his strange form grew familiar and the sound of frogs resumed.

“I was, Miss Dancey, unrehearsed. I missed a whole chorus of ‘Barbry Allen.’”

Elizabeth smiled. “But what you sang was sweetly sung.”

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“By that time I could no longer see you,” he ventured, “and I lost the heart for it.”

“Mr. Barclay, you flatter me.”

“No.”

She turned from him. He followed. But now the maiden raised her hand, as though wavering, uncertain, and he judged the time had not yet come for physical proximity. Instead she asked his purpose here, and Barclay strove to speak. To begin with, he dilated on his long association with his employer Firestone, though emphasizing their companionship and not the relation itself—rendering his own role the more central by omission (neglecting to mention, for instance, the fact of employment and who reported to whom). Instead he found himself describing their shared previous adventures in the wilderness or sparsely settled regions by comparison with which this farmland seemed a town, a metropolis abuzz and teeming with the enticements of romance (here he looked at her significantly, but she did not flinch). Next he discoursed on the wanderings of the companionable members of that famed quartet Thomas Edison, John Burroughs, Harvey Firestone and the absent Henry Ford, whom somehow Peter Barclay rendered on this occasion supernumerary since
he
himself made up a fourth, suggesting (albeit implicitly and not, because she might have questioned it, by explicit utterance) that the mogul’s absence went by the others unremarked because of
his
compensatory presence who stood by her side in the dark.

In truth he had attended often enough to conversation of the Vagabonds so in this maiden’s hearing he could replicate it readily, embroidering on theme and subject as though their endeavors were his. The girl might perhaps have found him persuasive without such borrowed finery, but time was short, the chance at arm’s length only, and he judged it better to better his station in life.

Therefore Barclay arrogated to himself the character of Firestone. He spoke of their shared purposes, the cares of business, of capitalistic venture and the heavy weight of duty, the dozens—nay, hundreds and thousands!—of workingmen dependent for prosperity on Tom Edison’s inventiveness, that spark first struck in Menlo Park or what the Sage of Slabsides—so we refer to old Burroughs, he said—has called the future’s landscape and the contours of its face. In time to come our factories, assembly plants and turbines and highways crowded with commerce will be not so much remarked upon as commonplace, and the automobile itself will prove not the exception but rule.
Et in Arcadia ego,
he said.

She raised her lovely eyes to his, and Barclay averred it was Latin he spoke, and how we might fashion
e pluribus unum,
the plural conjoined into one. This represented, as she could not know, the sum and substance of his knowledge of the tongue of Catullus and Virgil, but it sufficed to establish his
bona fides,
his standing as
Magister Ludi
or master of the game. We love America, he continued, we honor its rough history and wish to retain it through purchase; we shall collect the relics—worldly yet sacred—of its diminishing, vanishing past. I predict a time when Ford’s acquisitive extravagance will seem mere prudent husbandry (again he studied the girl’s face; again she did not frown); when all of us are worms and dust the pleasures of this present moment will have been preserved.

“Worms and dust?”

“I speak of the future,” he said.

Prettily, she shuddered.

“You know, perhaps, the poem?”

“Which?”

“A couplet I might say to you, a pleasing thought of a fellow called Marvell?”

Fetchingly, she shook her head. She was enjoying this flirtation, this unaccustomed badinage in the deep dark. “Do say it, then.”

He did. Firestone quoted it often, and Barclay knew the verse:

Had we but world enough and time

This coyness, mistress, were no crime . . .

“And next,” he said, “there are lines I misremember, but another thought worth quoting . . .”

“Which?”

The grave’s a fine and private place

But none, I think, do there embrace!

This last surprised her, seemingly; she raised her white hand to her throat. She gazed at him steadily, keen-eyed. And though he might well have persisted with rhyme, some part of her expression warned him that he must move beyond words. There is a point where language proper proves counterproductive of natural ease; to continue down the primrose path of dalliance was to move from the verbal to physical realm, yet to proceed with care.

Again Elizabeth withdrew, in silence absolute. Again her suitor followed till the gleam of the lanterns was swallowed by distance, and the din of chat behind them grew inseparable from night-noise, a buzzing of insects and bustle of wind in the trees. She was, it must be recollected, barely more than half his age; he himself was nearing thirty and she but sweet sixteen. Yet she knew as he did not the path, and what Peter Barclay saw was the girl’s retreating form, the shapely paleness of her back disguised by bush and branch. Here was quarry worth pursuing, albeit skittish and alert.

Therefore he blundered forward, arms outstretched. The snapped twig and the slippery leaf gave him but momentary pause, so sharp was his ambition to be by the maiden’s side. He was formulating a new phrase about “Time’s winged chariot,” and how it was a Model T, not drawn by horses nowadays, and how he hoped she’d ride with him to have the pleasure of it soon, the speed and power both. Made brave by applejack and rhetoric, he forayed after “Phyllis” (call her shepherdess or country wench, call her Audrey or the unplucked rose, it mattered not to Barclay in his rutting forward rush) until the city slicker—though he’d boasted of his sojourn in the wilderness, his habit of adventure—was in short order lost. She was skipping lightly down the hill, or so he guessed, or seemed to see; but in his haste to join with her he turned his foot athwart a log and felt the ankle twist.

“Christ,” Barclay cried, and this proved his first utterance of uninflected authenticity. “
Damn!
”

“Sir?” Of a sudden the girl reappeared, though how she heard his cry and came so fast he could not comprehend. “Did you say something?”

“No!” Sitting, he rubbed at his ankle in pain.

“Is it broken, do you think?”

He shook his head.

“Turned? Sprained?”

Above him, she was a vision of innocence, and Barclay cursed his own profanity. “I’m sorry.”

“Can you walk?”

“If you would help me to my feet . . .”

She did so, bending down and taking his arm and pulling him upright with what he recognized to be a farm girl’s practiced strength; that hand of hers could milk a cow or wring a chicken’s neck. Gingerly, he tried his weight; the ankle throbbed but held.

“I’m sorry,” Barclay said again; his fair rescuer said, “Hush.”

“You must think me a great fool.”

“No.”

“Clumsy, then.”

“A little, yes.”

“Is there a place I might lie down?”