The Celestials (17 page)

My reasons for coming here in the first place and staying as long as I have seem to be drawing to an end and I imagine I will be home before too long. You will be nearly the first I arrange to see upon my arrival. Until then, I am Your Julia.

Charlie read the letter several times in the failing light, following her words with his finger, still dirty from his day's work. The mosquitoes took pity on him. The cicadas loudened, as if to make thought a blessed impossibility. He told himself that the silence the factory noise had become to her also included Sampson, and not himself. He believed her memory of the view from the north hill to be a fond one. He felt sure that her desire to listen to the birds was a wish that included his presence. He tried to disregard her continued refusal to explain why she had departed and could now return. He tried to ignore the pain that the “nearly” at the letter's close caused him, its implications spread out like broad hands leaning heavily on his chest.

Sampson buttoned his vest, repocketed his watch, and shrugged his jacket onto his shoulders. He wished, briefly,
that he had a glass in which to check his figure, but satisfied himself with brisk tugs at his waistcoat and coat sleeves.

His telegram to Julia the previous week had been concise and plainspoken. He had not wanted to upset his wife unduly, but neither had he wanted to evade the gravity of the situation.
Thankful is passed. The services are held until your return. CS
.

The degree of his self-protection had kept him from acknowledging the largest of his own fears: that even this news would not be enough to bring his wife back and that without her he would not be able to surmount the monumental sadness incited by his sister's death. If he had been capable of utter self-honesty and a different literary style, he would have written a letter, not a telegram, and in the letter he would have said, “Without you, I am a man alone at the bottom of a vast mountain, my face lifted to the sheer expanse above me. Without you, I am this man for time eternal.” But he wrote none of these thoughts, and it was only because Julia had known him for so long and so well that she was able to hold that telegram in her shaking fingers and know the sadness that the words contained.

He had lost so many of his siblings that he had spent his adult life always expecting to lose more. So this news, she understood, was being greeted not with surprise but with the more devastating sadness of the arrival of what one already believes to be one's fate. She telegrammed back:
I arrive 31st, 4:15. My heart breaks for you
.

Later, he would berate her for all she had not told him, in that telegram and in her letters from her months away,
but even knowing all that she had omitted, he would reread that telegram and feel as cared for as he had when he first received it. Indeed, he was carrying it in his jacket pocket as he strode toward the depot, and he moved his fingers over it the way a child might a pocketful of marbles.

It had, against all likelihood, been Ida who told Charlie about the time and date of Mrs. Sampson's return, though she was not clear about why she had done such a thing. They were just beginning their private Thursday lesson, which had become over the last six months both her justification for extending her stay in North Adams and her favorite event of the week. With Julia gone, Charlie had found himself without a teacher. He was too tortured by her absence to care at all about filling it, but Fannie Burlingame took it upon herself to suggest to Ida that she offer her teaching services. Fannie herself had become very close to one of the other Celestials, and she felt that setting town tongues wagging any more than they already were was to be avoided when possible. The idea was to demonstrate how much these boys deserved to be accepted, not how much danger there was in doing so. But, Fannie had thought, if tongues were to wag, then better they wag about Ida Wilburn, an outsider, than about Julia Sampson.

Ida enjoyed these lessons so much that after a few months of them, she invited Charlie to dinner at the Widow Allen's. The dinner table had been excruciating, the widow chattering on, caught between thrill and alarm at having a
Chinaman
at her table. But Charlie had handled the hysteria as if tending to a panicked chicken, and then, after dinner, when
the widow retired to the living room with her after-dinner sherry (purely medicinal), he offered to help Ida with the dishes. She stood at the dry sink regarding him. “Well,” she said. “Knock me over with a feather.”

He looked at her blankly.

She smiled and handed him a wet plate. “Just means I'm surprised, is all,” she said. “Which doesn't happen very often,” she added.

“Why not?” he asked, placing the well-dried plate in the rack and reaching for the next one.

She shrugged. “I'm just usually the one with the most common sense in the room,” she said. “Hard to be surprised when you're the practical one.”

“That is sad,” he said simply.

She stopped washing for a moment and looked at her hands beneath the dirty water in the basin. It
was
sad, she thought.

“I am surprised all the time,” he said.

She looked at him and thought,
That's sad too
. They had given each other small smiles and finished the dishes listening to the sounds of evening birds.

So when, at the start of the lesson that July day, Ida had, with some hurt, taken note of Charlie's distracted mind, she had inquired after his health, and he had assured her that he was fine. The whole conversation might've ended there, had he not then looked at her, the expressions of decision making crisscrossing his countenance. He was expecting, he finally offered, news of a friend who had been away a long while.

She knew of whom he spoke, and it should've made her nothing but grim, but instead of desolation or woe, she felt flattered and moved that he had taken her into his confidence. Her instinct was to give something in return, and so she offered what she felt he would most like. Fannie Burlingame had shared the information with her on their way to lessons: Mrs. Sampson would be arriving that afternoon on the 4:15 from Troy.

His face, filled with gratitude and surprise, was an image that would never fade from the bank of her mind. Years later, dying, her children around her, she would conjure that face. She had made him happy, she would remember.

If Sampson had not been so delayed, he might have seen Charlie making his own way to the depot. As it was, Charlie had the time to slip behind the station unobserved by anyone save Ida, who had followed him at her own safe distance. He stood in the copse of elms and birches on the hill, his dark-blue-clad figure dappled in shade. Ida stood a stone's throw from the corner of Chestnut Street and took her concealment behind the farthest outbuilding of the freight station.

Had she not been wearing the crimson scarf that Charlie had given her the previous Christmas—each Sunday school teacher had received one from him—Alfred probably would have missed her as he took the ridge shortcut to Tim Crawley's place on the south end of town. As it was, he did not miss her, and so he too was crouching on the hill above the depot when the 4:15 made its shrill call, when it
eased into the station, coming to a slow and gasping stop at the passenger platform. And all four attendees—Sampson, Charlie, Ida, and Alfred—had a clear view of Mrs. Julia Sampson descending the train's two steps, an infant child in her arms.

Chapter Nine

The infant girl was a sensible and sober thing, making not a sound from depot to Wilson House. Her hair was of darkest black, and her eyes were the shape of almonds and the color of rosewood. She regarded her mother from her bassinet until her heavy eyelids grew heavier, rising and dipping in that sleepy way until they remained closed, her tiny chest rising and falling like a panting puppy's. One arm was cocked to her turned head and the other stretched straight in the manner of a fencer poised to parry.

On the other side of the closed bedroom door, Julia's husband waited. It sounded as if he were moving furniture. Beyond her bedroom wall was the emptiness of her sister-in-law's room. It would make a good nursery, Julia thought before she could stop herself.

Years ago, she had read in
Godey's Lady's Book
that motherhood was the most striking and beautiful aspect of the
female character. Only motherhood could provide the fulfillment of a woman's physiological and moral destiny.

Her husband would want an explanation. Charlie would want an explanation. By now, she was sure, word was moving through town like river water. The whole town would want an explanation. She felt as if any story she offered could not be the entire tale. Who knew how this baby had found her? Who knew why she had kept the infant to herself for so long? Who knew what fear kept one from doing? Who knew why this time her hope had been addressed?

It had been a Sunday in October, their first time lying together, and it strangely pleased her to think of God on His day of rest having seen them hiking up to Balance Rock, and heard their quiet voices, breathless with their exertion. When they arrived at the top, Charlie took Julia's hand, and they stood there in fear and astonishment, wondering how it could be that their hearts reached after this particular other. They prayed for guidance. Julia thought,
I shall be better for knowing him
. Charlie saw an image of the two of them reading side by side in a room, one of her hands on his, the other turning the pages of history. They were still touching.

“Do people come this way?” he asked quietly.

“Often,” she said, and he dropped her hand to reach for her face. She did the same. Their noses, when they finally kissed, nestled above each other's upper lip. They inhaled.

From that day forward, seeing Charlie in her mind's eye meant seeing them both from above, as if watching a couple of whom she had no understanding or knowledge.
And that day in late October 1872 when she had found her tired self in the embrace of that kind, careful Celestial, both of them bathed in the shadow of the impossibly balanced stone, and his body found its way inside hers, she was undone. Because no matter the regard in which she knew her husband held her, in his eyes were sadness and disappointment. Though he sought to convince her that the desire for children was more strongly held by her than by him, what was a farmer or businessman without an heir? In her Celestial's eyes there was nothing but astonished pleasure. “Let's keep our eyes open,” she said, shocking herself, and they did. Her eyes watered with the strain of it. It felt to her as if God had reached down, taken her between finger and thumb, and placed her on top of that precarious rock, where He set her to spinning with a gentle push.

He kept their mouths close and spoke, his lips moving against hers like the sign language of tiny animals. “You are the most mysterious thing,” he said, and she thought he was right. They were mysteries to themselves.

She had lost so many babies that the moment this girl arrived Julia had been steeled for her departure. She had read too much of the consolation literature surrounding grief and the mourning of the death of children. She was tired of its emphasis on the joyous afterlife. Although she would always be a believer, and never felt calmer than in the face of something she recognized as God's grace, those lost babies had caused her to believe that a woman's highest duty was in fact to suffer and be still. She had learned in her bones the useful lesson of doing without.

It had seemed to her that Life had stood before her telling her that she must learn to like him in the form in which she found him before he could offer himself to her in any other aspect. And then had come Charlie and it was as if he had taken her by the chin and tilted her head up and then down, allowing her to view the world above and below her own small one. And if life with Charlie had been the teetering, the arrival of her baby girl had been the push over the edge. But after falling, she had bobbed softly back up, as if floating on deeply salted water. Life was neither what it had been nor what she had thought it could be. There was no way of knowing what would happen next. What she would tell Sampson when she joined him in the other room was what she felt: that it was quite something to have won the privilege of going on.

Long after the Sampsons quit the depot, Ida stood watching Charlie on his hillside perch. She had planned to follow him, to discuss the extraordinary sight they had both seen, but the longer he stood there, the more his body, leaning against the slightest of maples, told her that the sight of Julia with babe in arms had in some way undone him. Her feelings for him were so well intentioned that she began to believe it did him an injustice to watch him unseen in this way, and so she sent him good wishes in her mind and turned quickly to go the long way round to Lucy and Alfred's, where she was expected for supper and where she would not reveal what she had witnessed.

*

In 1881, no fewer than eleven bills would be submitted calling for Chinese exclusion. Senator John Miller would exhort Washington to “secure the American Anglo Saxon civilization without contamination or adulteration.”

This would be about the sanctity of the American home, about protecting it from a race that cared nothing for marriage or family. George Frisbie Hoar, the senator from Massachusetts, would lead the argument in defense of the Chinese. He would be considered by his opponents a doddering fool, mocked for not facing up to the realities of the present and the dangers of introducing the alien to the pure.