The Promise (19 page)

Just a few hours ago, I had wiped his tears. He had touched my wrist as though he no longer resented my presence. Apparently, a five-year-old’s memory was fleeting.

Andre lifted a corner of his sandwich and studied the ham. A drop of juice landed on his pants.

‘Please, if you would, spread out your dish towel and eat over it,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘To spare your clothes.’

‘So Miss Nan won’t holler at me for making a mess?’

‘Yes and because it’s good manners.’

‘Look up there,’ Oscar said, getting his towel out from under his foot. ‘Pelicans. And that schooner way over there. See it? It could be the kind that sails from Cuba. Andre. What do you think it’s carrying?’

Andre frowned at his sandwich, then at me. He put his sandwich down on the blanket and wiped his hands on his pants, leaving dark streaks.

‘That schooner,’ Oscar said. His voice was tight. ‘What comes from Cuba, Andre?’

‘Bananas,’ he said, the word flat.

‘And if it comes from Brazil?’

‘Coffee beans.’

‘Mexico?’

‘Lemons.’

‘England?’

‘Kings and queens!’ His heart was in the game now and the tension eased. Oscar asked about Spain and Andre answered, ‘Christopher Columbus,’ the rhythmic pattern of it telling me that they had played this many times before. His eyes on the ships, Oscar peeled a boiled egg, turning it, the small pieces of brown eggshell falling onto the blanket. The breeze ruffled his hair and did the same to mine. A few loose strands caught at my mouth. I brushed them away. The man who had been collecting shells was farther up the beach. There were only the three of us, Andre nibbling now on his sandwich as he guessed the cargo on the ships.

I had grown up in a household of three. A second child, an infant boy, had died when I was four. ‘My Catherine,’ my father called me. ‘My little pianist.’ He came from a family with tin ears and off-tune voices but had been determined to marry my mother, he once told me, the moment he heard her play the piano at a social. My mother was eighteen and had just had her debut. My father was older by eleven years and his career as an engineer was well established. ‘His proposal was the only one that came with the promise of a piano,’ my mother was fond of saying when I was young. My earliest memories were of her in the parlor at the piano, her fingers skimming the keyboard; and of my father at his drawing board in the study, hunched over sheets of paper, a pencil in his hand.

I begged my mother to allow me to sit with her as she played. ‘For twenty minutes,’ she’d say. ‘If you’re quiet.’ She wore her hair in ringlets then and always had a brooch pinned at the collar. I watched her hands, the scent of her lavender water enveloping me. Before either of us knew it, she was guiding my fingers on the keyboard and showing me how to read music.

By the time I was eight, I played simple renditions of Chopin’s and Mozart’s concertos. This pleased my mother but it staggered my father. ‘A child prodigy,’ he’d say. His confidence that I could master complex techniques made me believe that I could, too. ‘Just as I do with my bridges,’ he once told me, the part in his graying hair as precise as the creases in his trousers. ‘The first design that I did on my own was simple, the span a mere eighty-two feet. It was during the war, General Sherman was massing troops in Tennessee, in what would be called Shiloh, and we needed that bridge. It had to bear the weight of wagons and cannons. I had designed others but this time I was the only engineer. I put myself to the task; the Ohioans were counting on me.’

I thought his bridges were beautiful with their patterns of triangular framework and high cross bracing. My mother, too, was proud of his work and kept newspaper articles on his accomplishments pressed between the pages of her journal. ‘Your father is an important man,’ she told me. When I was small, he was gone for days on end supervising the building of his bridges, and if his absences made her unhappy, I didn’t notice. I had the piano and my mother’s lessons.

I loved the feel of the keys beneath my fingertips. I heard music in the jangling bells worn by the horses hitched to the delivery wagons that traveled our back alley. It was in the hiss of the hot iron as our maid pressed my father’s shirts. At school, I memorized poems, hearing harmony and tone more than the words. Long columns of arithmetic were musical notes, each one influencing the next. When I turned ten, my father believed I needed more than what my mother could teach me. He arranged for the pianist with the orchestra in Cincinnati to come to our home on Monday afternoons as my tutor. My mother argued against it. ‘She’s my pupil,’ she told my father. ‘I know her strengths and her weaknesses. This Mr Brand, he knows nothing about her.’

‘She has a gift, it needs to be fostered,’ my father said.

‘And I can’t do that?’

For days after, my mother’s smile was set in place. My parents’ conversations became increasingly polite and distant. My father spent more time at his drawing board, and my mother criticized all the hours I spent practicing. ‘Your needlework is suffering,’ she’d say. ‘And so too is your china painting.’ As my father’s reputation soared, his trips lengthened in duration. My mother found even more women’s clubs to join, attending lectures about literature, art, and music. When my father was home, he consulted with Mr Brand, my tutor, about my progress. A few months after my fourteenth birthday, my father arranged for me to spend the summer boarding with Mr Brand’s family in Cincinnati. ‘Catherine will have lessons every day,’ he said to my mother, the two of them in the parlor. I listened through a closed door. ‘Hours of lessons,’ he said. ‘Just think of the progress she’ll make.’

‘And not summer at Lake Erie?’ my mother said. ‘But it’s what we always do. The picnics, the games of badminton, croquet. Albert, please. You can’t ask Catherine to forgo her summer.’

I was thrilled about going to Cincinnati. ‘Only for this year,’ I told my mother before I boarded the train. ‘Just for Father.’ She went alone to our Lake Erie cottage, my father’s work keeping him busy during the warmer months. At the Brands’ home, a small two-story house on Mount Adams with a view of the Ohio River, I lived in a world of music, the tempo of that household so different from the well-mannered routine of my home. ‘You’re rushing,’ Mr Brand would shout to me from wherever he was in the house as I practiced in the narrow parlor. He was a thin man, and although I understood he was close to my father’s age, he moved like a boy, quick and agile. ‘It’s music, not a gallop,’ he’d say. He’d be in the parlor by then, pounding on his chest. ‘Reach into your heart, Catherine. Feel it there, hear it there. You can. I know you can.’

I reached for it all, working hard, the days flying by. The Cincinnati Orchestra practiced during the summers for the upcoming season and on Wednesday afternoons, Mr Brand allowed me to attend those practices. I sat off to the side, observing, enthralled by the passion of each musician and marveling at the conductor’s ability to control those passions, blending each instrument into a unified symphony. At dinnertime, some of the musicians showed up on Mr Brand’s doorstep. Mrs Brand, a robust, red-cheeked woman who spoke with a German accent, was known for her cheerful willingness to set extra places at the dining-room table. ‘This is why God did not give us children,’ she told me. ‘He wants me to feed musicians.’ She served meats of the cheapest cuts but no one seemed to mind. Meals lasted for hours. The men spoke of Prague and Vienna as though they had studied there. They talked about the brilliance of Liszt and the tragedy of Beethoven’s deafness, preventing him from hearing his own compositions. ‘Do not forget the Vienna Damen Orchestra,’ Mrs Brand said from time to time, winking at me. ‘Times are changing. Soon you men will have women in your orchestra.’

I listened to it all, my heart flooded with the desire to be a musician. It was then that I realized I cared little about marriage or about motherhood. Such a life would be stilted and dull. Six years later, when I finished my studies at Oberlin College and joined the ensemble in Philadelphia, I was alive with the excitement of performing. Music, I believed, would carry me for the rest of my life. It was my fulfillment.

‘Catherine?’ Oscar said. He held out the peeled egg in his callused palm. The game he and Andre had played about the ships and their cargo had drawn to an end, and Andre had wandered off. He was a handful of yards in front of us, squatting with his hands on his knees as he studied something in the sand. I thanked Oscar and told him no. I had had plenty. He shrugged as if he had expected me to refuse his offer. He bit the egg in half, then ate the rest.

The last two evenings Oscar had worked late in the barn, returning to the house long after I’d gone to bed. Both nights, I held myself still while he undressed in the dark. I waited, not moving, as he parted the mosquito netting, and the feather bed gave way under his weight. My back to him, he did not touch me. He was not going to risk another scene of hysterics.

The silence between us was unbearable. A few dances and a trip to the cemetery were not enough. I needed to apologize for what had happened at the Central Hotel.

Oscar lit a cigarette, then flicked the match into the sand and leaned back on both elbows with his legs stretched out before him, one bare ankle on top of the other. Propped on his elbows, he looked off to where he had staked the horses in the shade of the sand hills.

I was overwrought, I imagined saying. The trip, the wedding, and a new city.

The surf rushed forward, then fell back, over and over, a dull roar. The salt air prickled my skin. The sun crept closer to my side of the blanket. The heat was unrelenting. I poured more mineral water into our jars. The muscles in Oscar’s forearm flexed as he tapped his cigarette, the ashes falling into the sand beside him. I unfastened the top cloth-covered button on my high collar. Farther from us, Andre scooped sand with a seashell he had found, his shadow a dark patch beside him.

It was nothing you did, I imagined saying to Oscar. But that, of course, was not quite true.

His gaze on Andre, Oscar tapped the side of his foot against the blanket. His trousers had hitched up a few inches. The lower curve of his calf muscle tightened and released with each tap.

I’d like to start anew, I could say. That might be all that I needed to say. Or it might call for more, an explanation of something that couldn’t be explained.

I straightened my bent legs; they were numb. I tucked my skirt around them. Like Oscar, I crossed one ankle over the other. The breeze ruffled my hem. A few inches of my white silk stockings flashed just above my ankle-high shoes. Oscar drew on his cigarette and then blew out the smoke, glancing at my stockings, then away.

The breeze was hot, but it stirred the air. Out past the tide line, a fish leapt, a flashing arc of silver. I unfastened the second button on my collar, then the third. I pulled the sides of my collar apart so that the air reached the base of my throat. Nearby, the long sea grasses and daisies rustled as they bent and tangled.

‘Oscar,’ I said.

He looked at me, his eyebrows raised.

‘I … The other night …’

Oscar waited, saying nothing.

‘What happened. On Thursday.’

He laid his cigarette in the sand and turned toward me, his weight now on his left elbow.

‘I was—’

‘Catherine.’

I stopped. Oscar’s glance flickered toward my ankles, skimming over my stockings, and then he was looking at me, his green eyes taking me in, lingering at my throat, my mouth, and then my eyes.

I felt myself slipping. Oscar put his fingertips on the center of my lips as if to keep me from speaking. His touch light, he traced my upper lip, a few grains of sand on his fingers. I leaned toward him, inhaled his scent of tobacco, then salt and hay. He brushed back strands of my hair, his palm cupping my face.

He kissed me, his hand at the nape of my neck, and mine on the broad curve of his shoulder.

All at once, he pulled away, startling me, his hat tumbling off. He sprang up onto his feet, his gaze searching the beach, his face tight with worry. Andre. He was gone. A two-horse buggy clipped along the tide line. Andre, all that water. I tried to get up. I knocked over my canning jar, then Oscar’s, my feet tangled in my skirt. The buggy passed on, the wheels spinning, and there he was, a little boy digging near the edge of the surf.

Oscar turned to me. His smile was crooked with relief and in that moment, I saw the worries and the responsibilities of raising a child. Andre came first; I had to think of him. Not my mistakes, not my disappointments. Not the distraction of Oscar’s eyes, his touch, and my response that took me by surprise and now embarrassed me.

I stood, fumbling as I fastened my collar buttons, then straightened my hat and brushed sand from my skirt. I glanced at Oscar. His smile was gone, and I saw myself as he might, my posture straight, my clothes just so, my reserve back in place.

A muscle ticked near the corner of his mouth. ‘Likely it’s time to get on home,’ he said.

‘It’s been a long day.’

He nodded, then whistled for Andre, calling him in before going off to retrieve his hat, which was caught in a stand of sea grass farther down the beach. I put on my gloves and by the time Oscar returned, slapping his hat against his leg to shake off the sand, it was as if we were acquaintances who happened to be in the same place at the same time. I packed the picnic basket while he and Andre unrolled their stockings, put them on, and laced up their boots. Oscar helped me up onto the wagon but his touch on my waist was brief. He called to the horses and we lurched out of the soft sand of the hills.

CHAPTER TEN

The Yacht

Monday. Laundry day. Pots of water simmered on the stove. The kitchen walls glistened with moisture. Garments, underclothing, and bed linens soaked in tubs of hot soapy water. At the kitchen table, Nan raked Oscar’s and Andre’s shirts over the metal slats of the washboard. Perspiration beaded on her forehead and upper lip, and damp circles darkened her bodice. She’d pushed her sleeves up so that her knobby wrists showed. Her hands were red from the harsh laundry soap and nicked from the washboard. She scowled when she came across Andre’s pants that were stained from yesterday’s picnic and clicked her tongue as she held up one of my shirtwaists, the layers of lace apparently adding to the burden of her work. Laundry, I was given to understand without Nan saying a word, was an onerous task. When I asked what I might do to be of help, she looked at me as though I had spoken Greek.