Prudence (2 page)

“Oh, dear.”

“Anyway. It’s bad enough that the paper is a week old before it gets here. I don’t want it to age any more before I finish it.”

“Frankie will bring a new batch with him. I asked him to in my telegram.”

“Ernest and the others are meeting him?”

“They were supposed to. But now . . .” But now Ernest and David and some of the other boys Frankie had gotten to know over the years might get sucked into the search, and the welcome party would be a bust. And if they did meet the train, who knows what trouble they might get into on the way home? Maybe they would go to the Wigwam. Or someplace else. And then, with the boat being used in the search, how would they cross the river?

Emma brushed past Jonathan, her muslin skirt with the little plaits of straw—they made such a pleasing sound when she walked up the heart-pine steps or deftly set the table in the dining room—brushing against Jonathan’s chair and his outstretched and tap-
tapping foot, which dangled in midair over his crossed leg. The parlor, with the fireplace and few stuffed chairs and the couch against the far wall, wasn’t all that big. One did need to brush past others sometimes when in such small spaces (this wasn’t the Mackinaw Hotel, after all), but she’d done it on purpose, had wanted to show Jonathan that she was taking matters into her own hands, that she was going to make sure that everything was perfect. She wouldn’t leave anything to chance, escaped prisoner or no. And what was one escaped German sailor? He wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t a killer. He probably had to watch gauges on his U-boat. He was a clerk in uniform sitting at his desk under the sea. Anyway, she hadn’t exactly meant to flounce past Jonathan. She wasn’t twenty-three anymore. She was forty-one. An old lady.

Jonathan didn’t want to help with the search, and that was embarrassing. When everyone was out helping each other, you certainly didn’t want your husband sitting at home reading the paper. She would go herself, except that someone had to make sure the Pines was up and running properly. Not just properly, but grandly. And it would just add to their shame for her to put on her khakis and garden boots and one of Jonathan’s flannels and walk through the brush with the Indians and the loggers. Jonathan would certainly not let her hear the end of it. But more than that, she had hoped he would show more excitement, more joy, at the prospect of Frankie coming back to the Pines one last time before he joined the Air Force, if only for two weeks. So far the only thing Jonathan seemed to feel was annoyance. He was annoyed (or “put out,” as he said the night before) by the hubbub, by the expense (did they really need a bushel of lemons?), by the general activity and disruption. All he wanted to do was read his papers and books on politics and genetics and have a scotch before bed.

He’d always been mildly annoyed by Frankie, this was true. Emma’s face was stuck in a frown as she walked the short hallway
toward the kitchen, where the girls were preparing the food. Jonathan was not an effusive man, not given to big hugs or romantic gestures or anything of the sort. He was embarrassed by the drama of affection. Embarrassed by affection itself. Or so it seemed. He had always been uncomfortable when Frankie wanted to sit on his lap. Almost as uncomfortable as when he had to fulfill his marital duties. Though thankfully such negotiations were far behind them now, receding in the turn of years. Frankie’s nature, his personality, seemed to disappoint Jonathan somehow. His delicate nature. Anemia. Hormones. Whatever it was. Jonathan had consulted colleagues and had put Frankie on a regimen of cold showers and raw liver. And when Frankie protested (the water was cold, the liver was disgusting), Jonathan shook his head and threw his hands up in the air as though in defeat—though it was Frankie, not Jonathan, who had been defeated. It was Frankie who cried. It was Frankie who had failed. Jonathan had emerged from these ordeals unscathed and unmoved, convinced there was something, somehow, wrong with Frankie. Something beyond fixing. There were more tortures in store. Frankie was forced to join the Boy Scouts. He was sent to camp in Michigan. But these weren’t opportunities as much as humiliations. He came home, each and every time, with new stories for Emma; stories about his misery and discomfort. Frankie had never been manly. Nothing was going to change that. Under his new Princeton muscles, his shoulders were still as narrow as his hips. His wrists looked, even to Emma, painfully thin. But Jonathan was hardly a strapping man himself. Frankie was built just like his father. Not that the father could see it, or would ever admit it. Oh, no! Ask him and he’d remind you that he boxed for Princeton and had competed in the pentathlon in the 1928 Olympics. Ask him and he’d remind you of the marches he’d undertaken in the Great War. He was full of stories about his own exploits, if you got him going, but he was hardly a big, bruising man, and so his criticism of Frankie rang hollow and
all it did was hurt the boy. And so what if Frankie wasn’t robust? He was joining the Air Force and was going to England to fight the Germans. He was a brave boy. He didn’t have to go but you should see him when he started talking about oppression and aggression and how democracies have to fight the strong to protect the weak. When he got to talking about this at his eating club (Emma imagined) his cheeks went red and he pounded his fist on the table and stood with his shoulders square. Oh, how he
sang
when he talked of justice! When he erupted into those proud speeches at home he looked fiercely at Jonathan, who couldn’t even meet Frankie’s gaze because he knew, Emma knew, they all knew: Frankie was talking about Jonathan. He was a brave boy. So what if he wasn’t a big, strapping man?

Take Felix, for instance. Now,
he
was a big man, a big man with huge hands, hands that could close a steel trap spring without effort. He could work all day bucking firewood and then sit down to dinner without a sigh or a limp. He was a fighting man, too. It was the first thing that Jonathan had asked him when Emma hired him as a caretaker. “Where were you during the Great War?” Felix had nodded slowly in that dumb way of his and said, “In it.” “Oh, really, quite right,” said Jonathan. “Far back, I imagine?” Felix shook his head. “No. Far front. Ypres.” And then he held up two fingers. And Jonathan hadn’t pushed any more. It was Jonathan who had been far back in the lines, tending to the wounded, and then not until 1917. That was all Felix had to say about the Great War. He didn’t talk much, but he told Frankie stories about the old days of battles between the tribes and the coming of the white man and he showed Frankie animal tracks and brought him things from the woods and even gave him the gift of some bells sewn to leather cuffs, which Frankie explained were spirit bells that had belonged to a medicine man. No wonder Frankie was drawn to him. Every boy should have an Indian to play with. What a childhood!

Emma was still lost in these thoughts when she pushed open the kitchen door. The girls were seated around the table. There were four of them, all Indian, three under the age of twenty. Two were shelling peas they’d picked in the kitchen garden. The other two were peeling potatoes. Emma wished she had more regular work for them. Not that they were very good workers. They tended to dawdle and gossip. If Emma didn’t stand over them and direct them they’d talk the day away, giggling at some shared joke in the language Emma would never understand. But they seemed like nice enough girls. And the time they spent at boarding school wasn’t entirely wasted. They could sew and mend, cook simple things, and even, if the situation called for it, write. Not that she’d have them keep the books or anything like that! They were Ojibwe girls, round-faced, dark, with kissing-thick lips. Their hair was straight and shiny and black. And they had slow, big, almond-shaped, heavy-lashed eyes. When they laughed in Emma’s presence she was always shocked by how white their teeth were and a little disturbed by the darting of their quick pink tongues. They were quick, too, with their hands. Whether picking peas or peeling potatoes, their hands were good at their work—smooth and efficient, the muscles bunching and jumping under the skin of their plump forearms. Their arms were nothing like Emma’s, which, she had to admit, suffered in comparison—stringy, pale, with veins coursing dully beneath the skin. It strained her wrists to use the hoe too long or to lift a boiling pot off the stove, things they did with ease. Even the one named Mary. She was the oldest of the four and had a clubfoot and a humpback. The only ugly one, the Quasimodo of the group. The word “ugly” was itself ugly but there was no other word, really, that would do. Mary worked hard though and didn’t gossip much with the other girls. Jonathan had diagnosed her with lupus. Emma felt pity for her. She had barely any English and she lived with her family way out in the bush in a wigwam, like a real Indian. Emma had never been out to Mary’s family’s camp but it
was easy enough to imagine. Dirt floors. Dogs everywhere. Filth and hopelessness and lack of comfort. Not that Mary could expect any real comfort, much less love, in the future. Life for the poor girl would probably remain much the same. She would go through it alone, that was certain.

If only the girls understood the joy of cleanliness. That and the iron. They never understood either. Never understood how truly wonderful and comforting a nicely starched napkin was, or cool ironed sheets, so welcoming when you slid under them after a day of hard work. But the girls were pleasant and punctual, even though they had to walk from the village to the dock on the far side of the river, a two-mile hike on trails along the lake. And, say what you will, Mary made the walk with them, humping along on her bad leg like a peasant in some story. If the boat wasn’t available they always found a way to get across, and even rowed themselves or paddled, if someone had left a canoe down by the shore. Which, come to think of it, was probably what the German prisoner had done. He’d probably just slipped away in a canoe and was halfway to Mexico. Jonathan was usually right about these things. The sailor was long gone and it was time and energy wasted trudging through the brush all day when there were more important things to do. For instance, she must remember to tell Felix to clean the dead fish from the beach. The stink, which had started the day before, was getting steadily worse.

Emma smiled down at the girls briskly.

“How is everything going? Will we have enough?”

“Yes, ma’am. Heap of peas. Potatoes, heaps.” The girls laughed as if the one who spoke had said something hilarious but it was hard to know what was so funny about talking like an idiot.

Betty, she was the one who spoke. Emma prided herself on knowing their names (Betty, Candida, Mary, and the young one, the prettiest one, Stella). Where on earth did their parents find these names? On the back of a box? One Indian from the village was named Ovid.
Ovid, of all things! And he’d probably never even heard of the
Metamorphoses
! Emma had read it twice. Once in secret while she was still at St. Mary’s since the nuns wouldn’t have allowed it in the classroom, and once again in the open, in a class at Mount Holyoke. She’d been stunned by the violence, the erotic passages, by the language and the raw riot of beauty. Girls like these—from a small logging village on a reservation, raised with hardship and parents who’d never been to school, much less read any poetry at all—wouldn’t know anything about the sublime.

“Will you remember to save the potato water? You know you will use that for the ironing? Right?”

“Yes, ma’am. Yes, we will,” said Stella. She looked down, and Emma was struck, as the girl averted her gaze, by how long her eyelashes were. Surely the village boys—whites, half-breeds, even full-bloods—would be lining up for her soon, if they weren’t in line already. Emma sighed. Such a pretty girl.

Frankie had been raised around these girls, and ones just like them (they did come and go) most of his life. The Washburns had purchased the Pines three years after he was born, and he’d spent part of every summer there until he’d gone away to Princeton. But even though he’d been raised among them, he seemed barely to notice them. He’d never stared after one of them as she set flowers on the tables in the front room or glanced over his book at the haunches of another when she swept out the ashes from the fireplace (it did get cold at night sometimes, especially in May). Several times Emma had caught Jonathan doing just that. His foot would jiggle faster. His paper would droop. And just as quickly it would rise again and he would look no more. It was natural for men to look. But Frankie was nobler than most men, and didn’t leer over the girls. Not like Ernie. Ernie was Frankie’s age and they had been friends for years. His family was from Rockford, not Oak Park. The family owned a quarry and had done well for itself, and they had purchased land just down the shore
from the Pines and built their own summer place, though Ernie stayed at the Pines more often than not. Probably because the Washburns were the only ones with a boat like the Chris-Craft. Ernie liked all the things that Frankie didn’t. He liked to fish and drive the boat fast and water-ski and take long hikes into the parcels of forest that hadn’t yet been clear-cut. When he came to the Pines he’d stare at the girls. When he was a teenager, he’d drop things and ask the girls to fetch them in order to stare down their blouses, though Emma had had the good sense to make them wear aprons, so there was nothing to see. Once she caught Ernie in one of the empty cabins with Betty. They were drinking whiskey he had brought and they had gotten carried away. Their laughter betrayed them. Frankie was there, too, and Billy. But they were sitting in the corner and had, as far as Emma could tell, taken only a few sips.

Frankie had been interested in more innocent pleasures. She didn’t mind that he liked spending time with Felix, even if he was Indian. It would give his youth more color, deeper tints, when he cast his gaze back over it as an adult. And Billy. The girls had such interesting names but the boys . . . Indian boys were all named Billy. They’d take out the canoe and paddle up the river. Or Frankie would help Billy with his chores around the Pines. They were quite close. Frankie had urged Billy to stay in school, at least to finish high school. And he had, the only Indian in his class to do so. The rest had left after the tenth grade. Frankie had asked Emma many times to send Billy books care of the village postmaster throughout the winter months—any and all she found that she thought he might like. Of course she did. Of course. She tried to send him useful books over the years, ones that provided perspective (which those people so desperately needed). Gibbon, of course. He was good for perspective and wit. And Frazer,
The Golden Bough
. And Virgil, Homer, and more ancients that Frankie had recommended but she hadn’t heard of. Something by Longus,
Daphnis and Chloe
. Another by Heliodorus,
The Aethiopica
. She sent, of her own choosing, Dickinson, Cather, and Shelley. They were romantic things, those collections, but couldn’t really, really do a young man harm.