Harriet Doerr (19 page)

Later on, when their father emerged from mourning, Edie was the mast they clung to in a squall of stepmothers.

Within a period of twelve years Thomas Ransom, grasping at the outer fringe of happiness, brought three wives in close succession to the matrimonial bed he first shared with the children’s now sainted mother. He chose women he believed were like her, and it was true that all three, Trish, Irene, and Cissy, were small-boned and energetic. But they were brown-eyed and, on the whole, not musical.

The first to come was Trish, nineteen years old and porcelain-skinned. Before her arrival Thomas Ransom asked the children not to come knocking at his bedroom door day and night, as they had in the past. Once she was there, other things changed. The children heard him humming at his desk in the study. They noticed that he often left in midmorning, instead of at eight, for the office where he practiced law.

Eliza asked questions at early-morning tea. “Why are they always in their room, with the door locked?”

And Jenny said, “Yes. Even before dinner.”

“Don’t you know anything?” said James.

Edie poured more pale tea. “Hold your cups properly. Don’t spill,” she told them, and the lost
h
floated into the steam rising from the pot.

 

 

Trish, at nineteen, was neither mother nor sister to the children. Given their priorities of blood and birth and previous residence, they inevitably outdistanced her. They knew to the oldest steamer trunk and the latest cookie the contents of the attic and larder. They walked oblivious across rugs stained with their spilled ink. The hall banister shone with the years of their sliding. Long ago they had enlisted the cook and the gardener as allies. Three of them remembered their mother. The other two thought they did.

Trish said good morning at noon and drove off with friends. Later she paused to say good night in a rustle of taffeta on Thomas Ransom’s arm as they left for a dinner or a dance.

James made computations. “She’s nine years older than I am,” he said, “and eighteen years younger than Father.”

“He keeps staring at her,” said Eliza.

“And kissing her hand,” said Jenny.

Edie opened a door on a sliver of her past. “I knew a girl once with curly red hair like that, in Atherleigh.”

“What was her name?” James asked, as if for solid evidence.

Edie bit off her darning thread. She looked backward with her inward eye. Finally she said, “Lily Stiles. The day I went into service in Dorset, Lily went to work at the Rose and Plough.”

“The Rose and Plough,” repeated Eliza. “What’s that?”

“It’s a pub,” said Edie, and she explained what a public house was. Immediately, this establishment, with its gleaming bar and its game of darts, was elevated in the children’s minds to the mysterious realm of Lady Alice and Lady Anne and set in place a stone’s throw from their castle.

At home, Trish’s encounters with her husband’s children were brief. In passing, she waved to them all and patted the twins on their dark heads. She saw more of the three eldest on those Saturday afternoons when she took them, along with Edie, to the movies.

Together they sat in the close, expectant dark of the Rivoli Theater, watched the shimmering curtains part, shivered to the organist’s opening chords, and, at the appearance of an image on the screen, cast off their everyday lives to be periled, rescued, rejected, and adored. They sat spellbound through the film and when the words “The End” came on, rose depleted and blinking from their seats to face the hot sidewalk and full sun outside.

Trish selected the pictures, and though they occasionally included Fairbanks films and ones that starred the Gishes, these were not her favorites. She detested comedies. To avoid Harold Lloyd, they saw Rudolph Valentino in
The Sheik.
Rather than endure Buster Keaton, they went to
Camille,
starring Alla Nazimova.

“I should speak to your father,” Edie would say later on at home. But she never did. Instead, she only remarked at bedtime, “It’s a nice change, going to the pictures.”

Trish left at the end of two years, during which the children, according to individual predispositions, grew taller and developed the hands and feet and faces they would always keep. They learned more about words and numbers, they began to like oysters, they swam the Australian crawl. They survived crises. These included scarlet fever, which the twins contracted and recovered from, and James’s near electrocution as a result of his tinkering with wires and sockets.

Eliza and Jenny, exposed to chicken pox on the same day, ran simultaneous fevers and began to scratch. Edie brought ice and invented games. She cleared the table between their beds and knotted a handkerchief into arms and legs and a smooth, round head. She made it face each invalid and bow.

“This is how my sister Frahnces likes to dahnce the fahncy dahnces,” Edie said, and the knotted handkerchief waltzed and two-stepped back and forth across the table.

Mesmerized by each other, the twins made few demands. A mechanical walking bear occupied them for weeks, a wind-up train for months. They shared a rocking horse and crashed slowly into one another on tricycles.

James, at eleven, sat in headphones by the hour in front of a crystal radio set. Sometimes he invited Edie to scratch a chip of rock with wire and hear a human voice advance and recede in the distance.

“Where’s he talking from?” Edie would ask, and James said, “Oak Bluff. Ten miles away.”

Together they marveled.

The two aunts, after one of their frequent visits, tried to squeeze the children into categories. James is the experimenter, they agreed. Jenny, the romantic. The twins, at five, too young to pigeonhole. Eliza was the bookish one.

A single-minded child, she read while walking to school, in the car on mountain curves, on the train in tunnels, on her back on the beach at noon, in theaters under dimming lights, between the sheets by flashlight. Eliza saw all the world through thick lenses adjusted for fine print. On Saturdays, she would often desert her invited friend and choose to read by herself instead.

At these times Edie would approach the bewildered visitor. Would she like to feed the canaries? Climb into the tree house?

“We’ll make tiaras,” she told one abandoned guest and, taking Jenny along, led the way to the orange grove.

“We’re brides,” announced Jenny a few minutes later, and she and Eliza’s friend, balancing circles of flowers on their heads, stalked in a barefoot procession of two through the trees.

That afternoon, Jenny, as though she had never seen it before, inquired about Edie’s ring. “Are you engaged?”

“I was once,” said Edie, and went on to expose another slit of her past. “To Alfred Trotter.”

“Was he killed at Wipers?”

Edie shook her head. “The war came later. He worked for his father at the Rose and Plough.”

In a field beyond the grove, Jenny saw a plough, ploughing roses.

“Why didn’t you get married?”

Edie looked at her watch and said it was five o’clock. She brushed off her skirt and got to her feet. “I wasn’t the only girl in Atherleigh.”

Jenny, peering into the past, caught a glimpse of Lily Stiles behind the bar at the Rose and Plough.

 

 

After Trish left, two more years went by before the children’s father brought home his third wife. This was Irene, come to transplant herself in Ransom ground. Behind her she trailed a wake of friends, men with beards and women in batik scarves, who sat about the porch with big hats between them and the sun. In a circle of wicker chairs, they discussed Cubism, Freud, Proust, and Schoenberg’s twelve-tone row. They passed perfumed candies to the children.

Irene changed all the lampshades in the house from white paper to red silk, threw a Persian prayer rug over the piano, and gave the children incense sticks for Christmas. She recited poems translated from the Sanskrit and wore saris to the grocery store. In spite of efforts on both sides, Irene remained an envoy from a foreign land.

One autumn day, not long before the end of her tenure as Thomas Ransom’s wife, she took Edie and all five children to a fortune-teller at the county fair. A pale-eyed, wasted man sold them tickets outside Madame Zelma’s tent and pointed to the curtained entrance. Crowding into the stale air of the interior, they gradually made out the fortune-teller’s veiled head and jeweled neck behind two lighted candelabra on a desk.

“Have a seat,” said Madame.

All found places on a bench or on hassocks, and rose, one by one, to approach the palmist as she beckoned them to a chair facing her.

Madame Zelma, starting with the eldest, pointed to Edie.

“I see children,” said the fortune-teller. She concentrated in silence for a moment. “You will cross the ocean. I see a handsome man.”

Us, thought Jenny. Alfred Trotter.

Madame Zelma, having wound Edie’s life backward from present to past, summoned Irene.

“I see a musical instrument,” said Madame, as if she knew of Irene’s guitar and the chords in minor keys that were its repertory. “Your flower is the poppy. Your fruit, the pear.” The fortune-teller leaned closer to Irene’s hand. “Expect a change of residence soon.”

Edie and the children listened.

And so the fortunes went, the three eldest children’s full of prizes and professions, talents and awards, happy marriages, big families, silver mines, and fame.

By the time Madame Zelma reached the twins, she had little left to predict. “Long lives,” was all she told them. But what more could anyone divine from the trackless palms of seven-year-olds?

By the time Cissy, the next wife, came, James’s voice had changed and his sisters had bobbed their hair. The twins had joined in painting an oversized panorama titled “After the Earthquake.” Edie hung it on her wall.

Cissy, the children’s last stepmother, traveled all the way from England, like Edie. Introduced by the aunts through a letter, Thomas Ransom met her in London, rode with her in Hyde Park, drove with her to Windsor for the day, then took her boating on the upper reaches of the Thames. They were married in a registry, she for the third time, he for the fourth, and spent their honeymoon on the Isle of Skye in a long, gray drizzle.

“I can hardly wait for California,” said Cissy.

Once there, she lay about in the sun until she blistered. “Darling, bring my parasol, bring my gloves,” she entreated whichever child was near.

“Are the hills always this brown?” she asked, splashing rose water on her throat. “Has that stream dried up for good?”

Cissy climbed mountain paths looking for wildflowers and came back with toyon and sage. Twice a week on her horse, Sweet William, she rode trails into the countryside, flushing up rattlesnakes instead of grouse.

On national holidays that celebrated American separation from Britain, Cissy felt some way historically at fault. On the day before Thanksgiving, she strung cranberries silently at Edie’s side. On the Fourth of July they sat together holding sparklers six thousand miles from the counties where their roots, still green, were sunk in English soil.

During the dry season of the year, from April to December, the children sometimes watched Cissy as she stood at a corner of the terrace, her head turning from east to west, her eyes searching the implacable blue sky. But for what? An English bird? The smell of fog?

By now the children were half grown or more, and old enough to recognize utter misery.

“Cissy didn’t know what to expect,” they told each other.

“She’s homesick for the Sussex Downs,” said Edie, releasing the h into space.

“Are you homesick too, for Atherleigh?” asked Eliza.

“I am not.”

“You knew what to expect,” said Jenny.

Edie said, “Almost.”

The children discussed with her the final departure of each stepmother.

“Well, she’s gone,” said James, who was usually called to help carry out bags. “Maybe we’ll have some peace.”

After Cissy left, he made calculations. “Between the three of them, they had six husbands,” he told the others.

“And Father’s had four wives,” said one of the twins. “Six husbands and four wives make ten,” said the other.

“Ten what?” said James.

“Poor souls,” said Edie.

At last the children were as tall as they would ever be. The aunts could no longer say, “How are they ever to grow up?” For here they were, reasonably bright and reasonably healthy, survivors of a world war and a great depression, durable relics of their mother’s premature and irreversible defection and their father’s abrupt marriages.

They had got through it all—the removal of tonsils, the straightening of teeth, the first night at camp, the first dance, the goodbyes waved from the rear platforms of trains that, like boats crossing the Styx, carried them away to college. This is not to say they were the same children they would have been if their mother had lived. They were not among the few who can suffer anything, loss or gain, without effect. But no one could point to a Ransom child’s smile or frown or sleeping, habits and reasonably comment, “No mother.”

Edie stayed in the Ransom house until the twins left for college. By now, Eliza and Jenny were married, James married, divorced, and remarried. Edie went to all the graduations and weddings.

On these occasions the children hurried across playing fields and lawns to reach and embrace her.

“Edie!” they said. “You came!” They introduced their fellow graduates and the persons they had married. “This is Edie. Edie, this is Bill, Terry, Peter, Joan,” and they were carried off in whirlwinds of friends.

As the Ransom house emptied of family, it began to expand. The bedrooms grew larger, the hall banister longer, the porch too wide for the wicker chairs. Edie took leave of the place for want of children in 1938. She was sixty years old.