On the Rocks: A Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mystery (5 page)

Hole in the Wall

W
HEN
Edith reached the North Head Bank, she turned in, hoping for a long chat with Mr. Enderby. He was a safe bet for news. Men claimed never to gossip, but Edith knew better. People always trusted bankers, and Mr. Enderby was a good listener. Edith considered him almost a friend. She was often in the bank transferring money or arranging for bills to be paid in the States. She handled all of their personal business, and by now Mr. Enderby knew what that was about as well as she did.

Edith waited while Mr. Enderby counted the fistful of change Janey Dawson had stretched her full height to deposit in a small pile on his side of the teller’s cage.

“My,” Mr. Enderby nodded approval, “you carried this a long way and kept it very safe. I’m proud of you.” His glance at Edith shared his amusement. “The coins are still warm from her hand,” he paused to fill out the deposit slip, “and a bit sticky as well.”

Mr. Enderby’s smile was a special treat. He was a genial man. Janey was radiant in return, and after a slight curtsy and “Thank you” and “Good day, Miss Lewis,” to which Edith replied in kind, Janey opened the clasp of the little patent leather purse she carried draped on her arm and tucked the deposit slip inside. The purse, it seemed, was for paper, not coins. Then Janey ran out the door, forgetting all about manners and matters of finance, to join Jocko Winslow, just passing by with his black-and-white puppy.

“Eric and Mary Dawson have got themselves a fine young one there,” Mr. Enderby observed after his own “Good day, Miss Lewis.”

“Indeed they do. And well they might. Eric Dawson seems to be a fine young man himself.”

“That’s certain, he is. Got himself an education and keeps up with the world. He loves the island, but he would do well anywhere and so will his daughter,” Mr. Enderby concluded his observations and turned back to Edith. “I understand you had occasion to make his acquaintance yesterday.”

With no one else in the bank, Mr. Enderby was clearly prepared to spend whatever time necessary to hear the whole of Edith’s version of the previous afternoon. She began with Eric Dawson and moved backwards, then forwards again to bring him to the point where she could ask what more he had heard in North Head.

Mr. Enderby cleared his throat. He approached every opportunity to impart knowledge with a gravity Edith relished. He reminded her of her father, an investment banker as familiar with a three-piece suit and watch fob as Mr. Enderby. Edith long ago learned to be patient with the need for authority and understood the terms of exchange. She had given Mr. Enderby her story. He would take the time he needed for his.

“I understand you saw someone in a red shirt,” Mr. Enderby observed now, leaning against the polished wooden shelf at the rear of the cage, his left hand cushioning his back. His right hand reached forward to straighten the knot in his tie. He was waiting for Edith to answer.

“Only his back,” Edith nodded.

“Yes,” Mr. Enderby glanced down. His right hand brushed the front of his jacket. “Can you be certain it was a him?” Mr. Enderby’s words came slowly, each one distinct. He returned his attention to Edith’s face, his eyes echoing his inquiry.

Edith paused. “I saw only a back. And an arm. The right arm shot out in the air.” She made the gesture herself, bringing her arm quickly up from her side. Her hand passed in an arc across her midsection before flinging itself straight out, fingers extended. She looked at her hand and took a moment to feel the way her body had arranged itself, then she sought Mr. Enderby’s reaction.

Behind his rimless glasses, Mr. Enderby’s gray eyes were squinted slightly and seemed a little out of focus. He was seeing Edith and the figure on the cliff at the same time, Edith guessed. She was working on that inner vision herself, trying to attach gender to the shirt. It was difficult. The distance had been so great. Had there been a hat? She couldn’t tell. Did the person wear pants? She thought so, dark pants, perhaps. She could not say for sure.

It was as though her memory was playing tricks. She could surround that red shirt with a variety of costumes. All of them seemed possible. Her eyes must have been so attracted by the red they saw nothing else. And it happened so fast. When the man went over the cliff, she saw nothing else until he landed. No, that wasn’t true. She could distinctly remember shouting to Eric Dawson and waving to catch his attention. So fast it all happened, yet hours seemed to pass between the moment the man went off the cliff and the second he landed on the rocks below. She remembered his body slowing and seeming briefly to drift. Surely an illusion.

“I thought it was a man,” was all Edith could affirm. “There seemed to be some sort of scuffle beforehand. I heard a shout.”

Mr. Enderby took a step forward and placed both hands on the counter, then leaned against them. “Constable Daggett drove off for Seal Cove about half an hour ago. Said he wanted to talk to Sabra Jane Briggs. She’s the only person anyone remembered seeing in a red shirt yesterday.” Mr. Enderby pushed back to rock on his heels, then leaned forward again to add punctuation, “And Little John Winslow saw her standing outside the bakery talking to that man not more than two hours before he died.”

When Edith left the bank with twenty brand-new Canadian dollars in her purse, she headed straight for Newton’s Bakery, though in the usual course of events she would have stopped by Rose Cottage first for a cup of tea. The rest of Mr. Enderby’s story had included the full roster of Mr. Brown sightings from the day before, but none of them were as urgent as the one connecting Sabra Jane to the man in the pin stripes and wing-tipped shoes. That morning the women at Whale Cove puzzled over the man’s attire as much as Constable Daggett had. Willa even suggested that if Edith hadn’t been there, the man’s death would have been presumed a suicide or a tourist’s mistake. Now it seemed Edith was also to be responsible for the accusations beginning to swirl around Sabra Jane Briggs. Edith wanted to know more about Sabra Jane’s encounter with this Mr. John T. Brown outside the bakery. And fast.

T
HE
trouble was, Edith thought, stirring fresh milk into her tea, the flowers on the teal green wallpaper at Rose Cottage her only company for the moment, no one in the bakery saw Sabra Jane Briggs talking with Mr. Brown. Both Emma Parker and Jesse Martin remembered Sabra Jane in the red shirt. She had purchased two loaves of St. John’s bread. And they remembered Mr. Brown. He purchased three biscuits. They recalled seeing several other people as well, Little John Winslow among them, but no two together and no one at all in the company of Mr. Brown.

“He was alone,” Emma Parker’s nod was decisive, her gray curls bounced once.

“He didn’t seem a bit nervous or anything. Not like he was thinking of dying,” Jesse Martin interrupted. “And then there were the three biscuits. Whatever happened to them? I heard they weren’t in his room at The Swallowtail.”

“Not nervous,” Emma Parker agreed. “But he wasn’t friendly, either. Sort of pinched he was around the eyes and nose,” she pursed her mouth and squinched her eyes, trying to catch his look. “I can’t say as I liked him. Jesse neither.”

“Well, I didn’t dislike him exactly. I didn’t know the man,” Jesse Martin demurred, her blue eyes widening. “But I didn’t like him, that’s true. He seemed not quite nice, if you know what I mean. All tight and sort of beaky,” she opened and closed the fingers on her right hand, pulling them toward and away from her face, trying in another way to convey his expression. “And maybe a bit mean-spirited.” Her voice was thoughtful. “It didn’t bother him a whit to break off some scone and stand there nibbling, then choose the biscuits. Not a may I, not a thank you, not a nothing.”

“I’d have called him persnickety if he were a woman,” Emma Parker giggled. Emma Parker never giggled. “But he was no woman. Not that one,” her voice returned to its usual deadpan. “He had a leer about him. I don’t mean he liked women. I didn’t get the feeling he did. Just that he had nastiness in his eyes.”

E
DITH
sipped her tea, investigated the roses on the wallpaper, and thought about the men they knew. Not one of them was mean-spirited, nor did they wear pin-striped suits or wing-tipped shoes. They didn’t know many men on Grand Manan except for the village doctor, who was learned and sympathetic and helpful, especially to Willa during those painful periods when from some undiagnosed malady she could not write and had to keep her hand in a splint. Among Edith’s colleagues at J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency that continued to consume at least six to eight months of every one of her years, even the most competitive men were generally pleasant to work with, mannerly and well intentioned. The men they counted among their friends—Alfred Knopf, Bruce Barton, Sam McClure, John Phillips, Edith began parading them through in a mental review—were without exception honest and accessible. They met her approval. Some, a few, Edith considered actually wise.

Rudolph Ruzicka and Earl Brewster at the very least aspired toward wisdom, Edith smiled to herself. Twenty years ago, during their early studio days on Washington Square, Rudolph and Earl had been among Willa and Edith’s closest friends. Both were artists, Rudolph an engraver, Earl a painter. And, oh, such energy, Edith grinned at her tea cup. After a full day at
McClure’s
, where Willa and Edith both worked as editors, they would come home to argue half the night with Rudolph and Earl. Long, meandering arguments. And silly, since all of them fundamentally agreed, but the talk itself was exciting.

“Creative genius be damned,” Rudolph would declare, his voice firm. Rudolph was a quiet, gentle man, but passionate about his art. Later Willa would ask that he illustrate
My Antonia
, but these long evenings were early in their friendship. “Craftsmanship, that’s what counts. Craftsmanship and honest sympathy with the subject. Not genius, not schools, not
art
-ificiality,” Rudolph would pause after the first syllable to make his meaning clear. “Craft and sympathy. Those make the artist.” Earl or Willa and sometimes Edith would respond. Then for hours upon hours they would dissect individual artists and their works, Burne-Jones, Chase, Sloan, one of the upstarts like Matisse, or examine writers like Hawthorne, Howells, James, and the young radicals hanging around Dreiser.

Back then Willa felt increasingly desperate for time to practice her own craft, but she also had a great deal to contribute to their conversations. Edith sometimes caught echoes from Willa’s early commentary in the Lincoln newspapers where she labeled Oscar Wilde the leader of insincerity and his “epigrammatic school” of aesthetics dangerous in its assumption that society could improve upon nature.

During those long argumentative evenings, Willa’s voice would remain steady but her words were urgent. “If the choice were only between aesthetics and genius, I’d have to choose genius every time. Genuine genius,” her hands moving as though they were conducting a choir building toward crescendo, “untrained, elemental, primitive, sensuous, amoral, perhaps. But genius. Genius as full of the joy of life as the old barbarians. Genius like Whitman’s, whose reckless rhapsodies in
Song of Myself
,” she’d smile at the superfluity of alliteration, “might very well have been written by a joyous elephant who just happened to break into song.”

Edith distinctly remembered Rudolph’s laughter and her own giddy vision of an enormous gray beast in crushed hat, flowing scarf, and rumpled suit cavorting among fields of flowers and rising on powerful hind legs only to toss his head and trumpet glad-hearted lyrics to the open blue sky.

“No Barnum and Bailey for a gay blade like Whitman, eh?” Rudolph’s laughter had filled the room then and again when Willa opened fire on writers who fell victim to America’s appetite for stars.

“Of course it happens elsewhere. It happened to Wilde and even to Whitman,” Willa contended. “George Sand, too, a little, but probably not until she became George,” Willa smiled at the aside, then let her voice rise, “and they let it happen, all of them, like Faust.”

“And what about Marguerite,” Rudolph began to tease but Willa ignored him. She had been through too many discussions comparing the aspirations of women artists to their relative worth as muses for men to get sidetracked by false issues like Faust’s Marguerite.

“Well, audiences do demand that artists be bigger and better than life, but the artists don’t have to deliver,” Rudolph admonished with a sharp intake of breath.

No one responded until Willa leaned forward, “Audiences demand sentimentality from women artists,” her right index finger tapped hard against the surface of the table, “but the best don’t give in. George Sand never did, George Eliot either. The two Georges,” she mused, “and Sappho, the greatest of women writers,” then added her own teaser, “but somehow men seem to find it harder to resist fame than women do the sentimentality men complain so much about.”

“Sympathy’s okay, not sentiment,” Rudolph insisted.

They all nodded. Edith remembered how straight the lines of their mouths had been fixed at that moment.