The Celestials (24 page)

Her heart was a gyroscope of determination and fear. She warned him to take his time before responding, to understand what it would mean for him to refuse them this. “Do you really want to stand before your wife of twenty-four years and tell her that despite all the obvious difficulties there is something inside of you that cannot allow the two of us to have and enjoy the one thing that has been missing from our otherwise healthy and blessed life?”

Sampson swayed on his stiff legs as if she had knocked him from side to side. She had conceived this child with another man. A Chinaman. He looked up quickly, regaining some of his familiar fortitude, and said, “Obvious difficulties? You are being either disingenuous or ignorant or both.”

She went on as though he had said nothing. “I have always understood you to have sympathized with my grief and to have shared it as if it were your own. Was I so mistaken in my understandings?”

Sampson held on to the back of the nearest chair. Whatever familiar strength he had mustered was gone. How had his life come to this point? For what was he being punished?

“I want to do this for you,” he said, his voice like nothing either of them had previously heard. “But I cannot see how.” Despite everything, he wished to cross the room and take her hand in his, but if she were to refuse him, as he feared she would, he knew he could not stand it. Instead, he sank to the floor, his back against the chair leg, his knees pulled up.

She had not seen him like this since he was a young man. Her heart was a bird searching for a way out of a windowless room. She set Alice back into the bassinet and made her way to him. She knelt, her skirt covering his feet, and took his hands in hers. He had been betrayed, yet her touch made him dizzy with gratitude.

“If you knew,” she whispered slowly, “would that be enough? Could you then go on?”

His head was a small spinning part, unclear of the larger machine's functions.

“If you had the knowledge, could you then deny it and continue with this life we thought we would not have the chance to inhabit?”

She wondered if he could do this, but she felt herself to be in a deep pit, and this the rope lowered to her from above. And so she placed her hands on his chest and leaned in to him. “Could you do that for me?” she asked, laying an emphasis on her final two words.

In the days since Charlie's encounter with Julia at Sunday lessons, he had spent what little spare time he had making his daughter a pair of shoes. Traditional stitch-soled, black cloth shoes. For the necessary materials, he deconstructed a pair of his own cloth shoes, the ones his mother had made for him, that he had worn on the ship to California, that he still wore at his workbench in the factory. He worked at night, by lamp, in a narrow field up the hill from the factory. He carried the required tools in a shoulder sack, a glass jar filled with tea, and a low stool upon which to sit. To his
curious fellow Celestials, he explained that he was going to find a place of more quiet and calm to study his Bible. It was not an explanation that did anything to endear him to his charges, but it was an explanation that they regarded as true.

He used the palm of his hand to measure the white cotton soles. Between the soles and the black cotton uppers, he stitched a small ribbon of bright blue taken from the hem of one of his tunics. The sewing took longer than he expected, his missing thumb making him awkward with needle and thread, but he was happy to be working on a project such as this and felt no impatience with the time it was taking.

When he was done, he placed one of the shoes on his open palm and looked at it this way and that. He turned it over and saw his own patterns of wear on its sole. He slipped three fingers into the shoe and felt the depressions and dips of his own stride. Yes, he thought in his small circle of light, his daughter would walk in these shoes.

One of Lucy Robinson's first tasks was to arrange a meeting between Charlie Sing and Mrs. Sampson. This was on a Friday in the middle of a workday.

Lucy's hands, busy folding Alice's tiny necessities, stilled at her employer's request, but her expression remained unreadable. After a moment, she said, “The best time might be after the factory is down for the evening.”

Later, Julia would chastise herself for making this request of Lucy so quickly. She would determine that if she
had really cared for the girl, she would not have given her access to a matter so private. But at the time, Julia had very few wagons coursing about her mind except those containing her own needs, and so she experienced only thankfulness at having two heads rather than one to apply to the task at hand.

And Lucy's was a particularly efficient head. It was as if she had been asked to orchestrate the discreet and delicate every day of her young life. The Widow Allen's carriage barn, she informed Julia, had not been used in years and lay at the outermost edge of the widow's vast property in the dip of a high hill. One could approach it from field rather than road. She had somehow managed to get word to Charlie while calling just the right attention to herself by stopping in to Sampson's office to say that she was there to deliver a primer to the foreman for one of the new boys and she had thought Mr. Sampson might like to hear that his wife and child were passing a lovely, undisturbed morning.

Sampson had not asked for such reports, but was pleased enough at both the message and the messenger that he made no further inquiries.

She did indeed pass a primer to Charlie, in such a way that he was sure to see the small corner of Julia's stationery revealing itself from the leaves of the book. She attempted to quiet his alarm with a kind smile.

It seemed to her, as she returned to the Wilson House, that she was not of this world but gliding through it, touching its living inhabitants here and there, leaving warmth in her wake. It was a pleasure to think about herself in this
unfamiliar way for a while, and it was the first time she had felt her alien nature as blessing rather than burden, and she resolved to speak to Alfred about staying in North Adams, at least for the time being.

Fannie Burlingame waited for a time when she knew there was no danger of finding Sampson at home to call on Julia. It was an awkward conversation for both women, but Fannie soldiered on, sure in her belief that often the most virtuous ends require the most difficult means.

Politely perched in two stiff chairs in the front room, the women faced each other, Alice in her basket on the floor between them making her infant sounds.

“I am not,” Fannie reassured for the second time, “suggesting that any relationship at all is something of which to disapprove.”

Julia nodded, refraining from saying that she wouldn't think that's what her dear cousin would be suggesting, given her own relationship with her own Celestial.

Fannie stood, suddenly impatient. “Please, Julia,” she said. “You are married. To my cousin.” She broke off as if dismayed at having to make things even this overt. “You cannot have
relations
with one of these boys.”

Julia reddened, but said nothing.

“You cannot have a
child
fathered by one of them.” Fannie looked at Alice. “Really, Julia. What were you thinking?” she asked.

And maybe because Fannie was unable to keep the scolding schoolmistress out of her voice, maybe because
Julia knew that if she was to weather the war, she must weather battles such as these one by one, over and over, she stood, gathered baby Alice to her chest like a shield, and told her cousin that she didn't know what Fannie thought she knew, but she found this visit insulting and beneath them both. Fannie's thoughts belonged to no one but herself, as did Julia's, and to share them was perhaps unwise for both of them.

The Widow Allen's husband had run a livery service but had been neither a horseman nor a businessman and the company had been an outright failure. The carriage barn held the vestiges of his defeat. Dry and cracked collars, hames, and harnesses hung haphazard from the tongues and shaves of coaches and surreys all inappropriately extravagant for such a business in such a town. Mr. Allen had suffered from delusions of his own grandeur, and the purchases he had made to stock his company had reflected these fantasies. His large team had pulled a carriage he had ordered from England that was said to be modeled on the one in which the king himself rode. There it stood, large and oafish as a dull child kept back in school, against the carriage house's far wall. Its paint was chipped; its leather thoroughbraces, trunk, and driver's boot as cracked as a creek bed during a drought. The steel spreader bar was dull and rusty, and the hand-painted eagle on the door a ghost image.

Charlie felt as if, within an already foreign world, he had turned a corner into something even more unknown. He wanted to run.

He had arrived early, positioning himself in a back corner where, between the boards of two walls, he had clear view over several approaches to the barn.

His ears pulsed with the strain of listening. Would he be able to tell Julia's footfall from another's? Just how much had she told this Lucy Robinson, and to whom else was she speaking? Because she had handed him nothing but silence in his further attempts to speak with her, it had not occurred to him that she might be sharing something different with others. He swallowed, coughed dryly, and swallowed again.

One jacket pocket held the portrait he had never presented, the other held the small shoes. His slim fingers returned to his tie and collar like an insect feeling its way. What kind of image would he cast in her eyes? From their first embrace in late spring 1872 to her departure for Florida in January, he had been unable to imagine what she saw when he stood before her. Once, when he had been feeling particularly cared for, he had asked. It had been evening, an early November chill in the air. They were in the spot they liked best, in the shadow of Balance Rock, the large blanket she had brought with them tucked tightly under their chins. They were both growing cold, but neither of them wanted to move to get fully dressed.

He tucked his nose beneath the blanket and inhaled.

“What are you doing?” she said, smiling.

“Smell you,” he said.

She didn't know if he meant that was what he was doing or what she should do. Both made her blush.

He told her that when he saw her, he saw as well a memory that always gave him pleasure: his father swinging on the big gate to the far field at the end of another long workday. The sun had been low, his father's exhaustion clear, but as the fence made its big arc, his father balanced on one foot on the lowest rung, Charlie had also seen the happy boy beneath the tired man.

Her eyes had filled with tears of pleasure; she had placed a hand against his broad cheek, and he had felt enough out of harm's way to ask, what about her? What did she see?

She hesitated, and somewhere his heart told him to leave this particular line of inquiry where it was. He had spent his life in this country in continuous states of wariness about the answers to various forms of that question. And perhaps because of that, he continued to push at a place that if he had been honest, he knew would give way.

He flipped the blanket away, revealing his naked chest to the air and to her. Her face filled with anxiety. He asked her again to tell him what she saw.

She told him not to be silly and tried to cover him. Again, his heart gave him its warnings, and again he ignored it.

“I need to know,” he said.

He wanted to know what she saw
of
him so that he could know what she saw
in
him. And in her hesitancy he had his answer, but he had spent the ensuing months convincing himself that it was within his power to change it. What other option did he have? Could the ability to be a chameleon, a trait so strong in him, really be equally strong in her?

She approached the barn from the far field, picking her way with small steps through the tall grass. It was the gait that came over her when she was nervous. And she wore the expression he had seen whenever he had asked something new or unfamiliar of her. The time he had pushed her on the swing they had discovered in a clearing miles away from any houses, hanging from a branch of a sturdy chestnut. The time he had made her close her eyes and taste his brew of ginger and chrysanthemum. On such occasions, her face was adorned with a mix of caution and optimism and it had filled his heart to tipping.

The baby swayed in its basket against her hip. When she neared the barn, she paused, rolled her shoulders back, and took on the look of a Temperance Society representative, and whatever hopes he had for this meeting jumped away like the grasshoppers escaping her footfall.

Lucy and Ida were being impatient with each other, and Alfred regarded them from his chair by the window the way you might watch two dogs threatening to disagree.

Even the few days Lucy had spent in the Sampsons' Wilson House rooms had been enough to make the tenement apartment smaller and more inadequate. She couldn't help but note the grime on the sills, the mold above the stove, the stains in the basin. The smell of vinegar did nothing to eliminate the lingering odors of the previous lives lived in these rooms.

And this particular Friday, she had the added affront of Mrs. Sampson sallying forth to a secret adventure. No
matter that Lucy's role in arranging the adventure had brought her pleasure. Now all she saw was a life extraordinarily different from her own.