The Edge Of The World Part 2

Perceiving the irony of having traveled thousands of miles only to do what I might have done in a more elevated way in Milwaukee, I quietly swallowed my gristle.

Oskar's mood, however, continued to be expansive. He waved a hand at the golden and green flanks that rose so abruptly to the east. "There's no one in those mountains?"

Mrs. Crawley nodded her approval. "You've read the Service booklet, I see."

"Lighthouse Service don't know everything," Archie Johnston said. His sister gave him a stern look.

"There's that crazy Yale fellow," Mr. Crawley put in, trying to lift the conversation again. "Lives in a hollowed-out tree."

"Do you enjoy living up here, Mrs. Crawley?" I was fl.u.s.tered by what had turned out to be my employment interview, but this was the sort of polite question I'd been taught so well to ask that I didn't need to think about the words.

"It's a decent post," she said, lifting her chin. "A good deal of work about the place, and no Chinese servant to do it, I can tell you that. With the animals, the children, the men, and the boiler, someone or something's always demanding to be fed."

"Euphemia's been keeping lights with me for over a dozen years," Mr. Crawley said. "She knows the job well as I do."

"Two for the price of one," Mrs. Crawley said dryly.

By now the sun had grown weary of us and turned a cold shoulder on our gathering. The children, who'd bolted their food, had already slipped away, and the boys brought a banjo and a guitar out onto the front steps and began to pick some old tunes. I thought I might join them with my violin.

Mrs. Crawley stood and began to reach around the table, stacking the dirty plates on top of her own. "Mrs. Swann and I will clean this mess up," she said, reminding me that I wasn't among the children here.

In the dark scullery, Mrs. Crawley instructed me not unkindly but firmly, and I found myself nodding, eager to please. I must not waste water; I must not chip china (or the inspector would dock Oskar's wages); soda crystals didn't grow on trees.

"Even if they did," I said, "there are no trees."

My mother would have laughed at this, but Mrs. Crawley did not. When we'd finished, however, she invited me into her parlor to see her "collection." Did everyone here have a such a thing?

"Our father was a whaler," Mrs. Crawley explained, stroking with one finger half a set of wooden teeth displayed on a length of red satin. "Archie and I grew up at a station up the coast. It was a treacherous stretch. Well, so many of 'em are. And the storms! You'll see," she said ominously, moving from the teeth to a swollen book that had obviously been soaked through, its pages printed in an alphabet I didn't recognize. There was a length of black fringe from a lady's shawl or a table covering; a knife with a wooden handle; a string of blue beads; a whole brown earthenware jug; shards of gla.s.s in every color; a basket of the sort a housewife might carry over her arm to go to market; a dented cigar tin and a coconut sh.e.l.l. "Sometimes we didn't even see the ship go down, but Archie and I would walk the beach with my mother, and we'd find things. You'd be surprised at what makes its way back to sh.o.r.e. There's not so much of it nowadays," she added wistfully, "now that we've got so many lighthouses."

As Mrs. Crawley touched her precious items with a smile as shy and proud as her daughters', I thought of my mother, pressing a fold of our drapes to her cheek as she shut them against the early darkness of a northern winter evening. She was proud to have good velvet, not, as she would say, the stiff stuff they sold over on Clybourn. I understood that the draperies' rich blue conjured for her the well-appointed rooms of her own childhood, with their gilt-legged tables and ceramic shepherdesses, rooms so faraway and foreign that when she told me stories about them, they sounded as magical and impossible as a fairy tale.

"Ma! We're ready!" One of the children-I couldn't yet tell their voices apart-had opened the front door and was shouting into the parlor.

They'd piled driftwood winched up from the beach, along with staves from broken barrels and any other combustible stuff they could gather, and the men must have gone down for the new barrels, for they stood nearby. Mrs. Crawley brought out rugs and invited me to sit beside her as Mr. Crawley lit the heap, and Mr. Johnston, to my surprise, delighted the children by pretending that he had no notion how to open the barrels. Finally, though, the lids were off, and the children, reaching inside to pull out whatever their hands grasped, behaved as though it were Christmas morning. Their "gifts" were mostly things like nails and canned produce. They squealed over fruit-pineapples, blueberries, blackberries, plums, and applesauce-groaned at peas and carrots, and were indifferent to green corn.

"This is excellent," Mrs. Crawley said, pa.s.sing a can of roast veal and gravy for my inspection. "These cans are about the greatest invention of mankind, although they're the d.i.c.kens to open."

I made a little pyramid of oysters and beef stew, remembering my mother's disappointment-"But it tastes so gray!"-when she'd sampled some canned good my father had brought home as a novelty.

There were boxes and boxes of a sort of cracker they called pilot bread, bottles of vinegar, jars of mola.s.ses and pickles, sacks of green coffee, onions and potatoes and dried apples. At the bottom of the barrels, too heavy for the children to fish out, were sacks of rice, flour, sugar, beans, and cornmeal, and salted cod, wrapped in waxed paper. There were newspapers, too-several months' worth of old news-and then the men pulled out a large wooden box.

"There's for your school," Mrs. Crawley said cryptically.

They set the box on one end and opened its wooden flaps. It became a bookcase with four shelves, each tightly packed with volumes.

"We get a new one of these every time the tender comes," Mr. Crawley said, running his oil-stained finger along the spines. "It's our library."

It was fully, almost densely dark now, and I had to stand close to catch the t.i.tles of the books in the glow of the fire. Whoever had collected them must have a.s.sumed that lighthouse keepers were partial to accounts of men on water, for the t.i.tles-A Christmas at Sea, Memoir of Commodore David Porter, The Battle of Mobile Bay, a translation of The French Lighthouse Service-leaned heavily that way. While I studied the shelves, Mrs. Crawley organized the new supplies according to which house or shed they ought to be stored in.

"Ready for the wagon," she said at last, but the children had stolen away.

"Mary! Edward! Nicholas! Jane!" Her voice thundered over the morro, and she peered sharply in the direction of the ocean, although, as nothing was there but black air and, far below, black water, it seemed an unlikely place for the children to be.

They did seem somehow to emerge from that place, however. We heard them running up the dirt path from the lighthouse, and they came panting into the firelight. Something swinging around the little girl's neck glinted silver, pink, and blue.

"Janie," Mrs. Crawley admonished. She looked quickly around as she pulled the girl to her. "How many times must I tell you?"

I stepped toward them for a closer look. The necklace was made of sh.e.l.ls or bits of sh.e.l.l, like nothing I'd ever seen. "What is it?"

Deftly, Mrs. Crawley pulled the loop over her child's head. "It's not for her."

Jane let out a shriek to wake the dead, but Mrs. Crawley ignored it. She marched with the necklace into the darkness at the edge of the mountain and flung it in a wide arc, releasing it over the ocean.

"It was mine." The girl was crying softly but heartbreakingly. "It was my turn."

I stepped uncertainly toward the girl, wanting to soothe her but worried that I might interfere. Archie Johnston reached her first. He squatted beside her and opened his arms to offer her comfort.

CHAPTER 4.

WHEN THE BONFIRE had been doused and Oskar and I came into our own rooms, I went directly for my writing paper and pen. I didn't know when I might have a chance to send letters, but I longed to talk with the people I'd left, if only in my head. I elevated our situation in a letter to Lucy, describing the vista as being what Mr. Edmund Burke would call sublime, exciting terror and admiration in equal measure, although I felt far more terror than admiration that night. And I wasn't sure what was more disquieting, the emptiness in all directions or the people who shared my isolation.

The closed windows dampened the crash of the waves far below us, but the sounds of life at the top of the rock remained distinct. There were footsteps on the path; someone heading toward the light, then someone coming back. Archie Johnston, that must be. Yes, I could hear him climbing the steps to his front door and coughing as he pa.s.sed through his sitting room to his kitchen. On the opposite side, the children's feet pounded up the stairs to their bedrooms; doors slammed exuberantly.

I let Oskar show himself around our house. The noises he made as he galloped through the place, opening the cupboards and windows to peer in and out, were similar to the children's banging.

"Jesus! What's this mess?" he shouted down.

"It belongs to the children. I . . . they'll . . . we'll get rid of it."

"Looks like they dragged half the beach up there," he said, seating himself beside me at last.

"Their mother has a collection, too. It's awful! Some poor sailor's teeth!"

He'd put his hand in my lap and was beginning to stroke my thigh, but I stopped his fingers and held his hand firmly between my own. "Up here, I feel so . . . exposed."

"What do you mean?"

"Everyone can hear us. Mr. Johnston. Listen." The cough came again from the apartment next door. "The Crawleys. G.o.d."

"Oh, G.o.d!" He laughed. "I'm not worried about Him. But I agree that Mrs. Crawley is a different matter. She's daunting, isn't she? And the way she enlisted you to teach her children. I wouldn't like to cross her."

"You were on her side! Telling her what a wonderful teacher I would be!"

"You would!"

"I suppose I must try."

"Well, what else are you to do?"

"There's a good deal of work about this place," I mimicked, "and no Chinese servant to do it."

But he was right. Who was I here? Not Trudy Schroeder, pampered daughter, lively friend, bright student, all but affianced to steady Ernst Dettweiler. Here I would be a disappointment because I didn't know how to make b.u.t.ter.

"Will you like your work?" I asked.

"It'll be easy enough." He imitated Mr. Crawley's slightly nasal tones. "Sc.r.a.pe the rust, clean the lenses, keep the rollers and the air compressor running at the proper speed. Paint and polish. Check the boiler. Reset the pendulum every six hours, so the foghorn sounds on schedule. It's only maintaining machinery," he concluded. "I could do it in my sleep."

"If you don't like it, maybe we could go back. Maybe not to Milwaukee, but to Chicago or Cincinnati. Somewhere not at the edge of the earth."

"Go back? No! This place is exactly as I'd hoped it would be." He rose from the sofa and began to range about as he spoke, testing the slide of the windows, studying the pattern of the wallpaper. "I'll be able to do some real work here. When we go back, it'll be in triumph."

"Work on your electric engine, you mean?"

Oskar was among those who thought that electricity might be an efficient alternative to steam power. He'd built a small electric engine in Milwaukee and attached it to a canoe, which attracted a good deal of attention on the river. The problem, as he'd explained it to me, was how to make such a machine large enough to move a craft as heavy as a ship. When we'd learned that we'd be going to a lighthouse, he'd hoped it would provide a useful place for experiments in this line, but halfway here he'd stopped talking about such plans. I was pleased to hear them revived, although to me such work seemed impracticable in this setting. It was far more isolated than we'd imagined.

"You know, I don't believe that interests me anymore," he said. "So many others are already beavering away at electric engines. I'm going to do something new here. Something no one else has got hold of yet."

"That's wonderful, Oskar. What is it?"

He shrugged. "I'm not sure yet, but something will present itself. For a curious person, the world is full of opportunities." He threw open the large parlor window with a bang and leaned out of it, drawing the air loudly into his lungs. "Don't you think this place is inspiring?"

"No," I admitted, wrapping my shawl tightly around my shoulders. The temperature seemed to have dropped twenty degrees since the afternoon. "It frightens me. I don't think people are meant to be here."

"What's to be afraid of?"

"Everything! The wind that's trying to blow us off, the rocks that are waiting to spear us! If we were to step off this mountain one night, how would anyone even know what had happened to us? Being here, it's like we've disappeared."

At last, he turned and focused his disconcertingly bright blue eyes on me. "But don't you see? It's not we who've disappeared. It's they. We've got rid of all those people who would tell us what to do, who to be. Except," he added slyly, "for Mrs. Crawley. Now, if she were to step off this mountain . . ."

"Oskar!" But he'd made me laugh, and I was grateful for it.

"And now, Mrs. Swann," he said, extending his hand, "if it would please you to accompany me to our own bed in our own house, we'll do whatever we like."

It may have been our own bed in our own house, but when I awoke later in the night, it was nevertheless an unfamiliar place, full of unfamiliar shadows and, aside from the sheets that smelled comfortingly of home, strange odors. Oskar had opened the bedroom window, and in the dark, the ocean seemed to rise to me. I could smell it, its greenish, half-growing, half-decaying scent laced with salt and an unwashed animal stink. Or perhaps the smell was coming from the children's collection. I got up and closed the door to the second bedroom and our door and the window as well.

Except for the bed, our room was empty, so different from the fullness of my parents' house. I thought of the vanity in my mother's room at home-no, not at home, this was home now-where she'd brushed my hair not so very long ago and eons ago in preparation for my wedding. I thought of the silver-backed brush and mirror engraved with the swooping initials of the mother my own mother had left behind in Hamburg, a set surrendered to a dusty p.a.w.nshop in San Francisco.

I sniffed. The smell had been coming not from the open window nor from the next room but from Oskar. The sea had marked him with its briny green odor and its underlying scent of rot.

CHAPTER 5.

IT HAD BEEN only a casual comment at an everyday meal, a small thing, that had caused my life to change course. But any sailor knows that an alteration of a few degrees, uncorrected, is enough to put a ship on a wildly different trajectory.

The meal that night had also been fish, carp boiled in wine, a dish recently popular with the members of the Milwaukee Women's Club. It had been prepared with more care than the ling cod.

"You see, girls," my mother said, measuring herbs she'd dried the previous summer and dropping them into the pot of simmering, sweet-smelling liquid, "you must pay as much attention to the poaching broth as you do to the sauce."

Gustina, our hired girl, nodded, but my attention had wandered to the window where the sky was alive with snow. It was two weeks before Christmas, 1897.

"All right, Trudy," my mother said, misinterpreting my distraction. "I know you have your essay to finish. And I've got letters to answer. Gustina can watch over this. Don't forget the potatoes," she called over her shoulder as she accompanied me to the parlor.

From my little writing table some portion of an hour later, I watched the lamplighter mount his ladder beside the post outside. There! Thick snow appeared in the sudden circle of light when his pole touched the wick. With the tip of my pen, I pulled spider legs of ink from the rich black blot that had dripped onto my copybook page just after Napoleon had set off for Moscow. I sighed. So far to go. Two more rays, and the spider became a sun. I tapped the pen with my index finger, and a miniature storm of dark droplets splattered the little general.

"Trudy," my mother said reproachfullly. She was seated at her own desk, covering pages with an irritating ease. "Don't make it so hard, liebchen. It's only a composition." She rose with a rustle of apricot silk. "I need to check on Gustina." On her way out of the room, she laid her hand on my shoulder. "You will finish before supper, yes?"

I sat up, sighed again, and pushed my fingers deep into my hair. Pins sprang from my coif, and I enjoyed the bit of drama and the little mess they made on her Turkish carpet. "Yes, yes, I'll try." I was too uncertain of myself and the source of my malaise to make any sort of stand; the best I could do was bend over the page in an exaggerated att.i.tude of application. She deftly collected the pins without comment, gathered my hair, and twisted it neatly, resettling it like a sweet roll on top of my head.

When I could no longer hear the whisper of silk, I rose and went to her desk and slipped the unfinished letter from under the blotter. It was to her sister in Hamburg.

Trudy has lost her pa.s.sion for her studies. It's not that she doesn't know her history and philosophy. The way she argues Kant with Felix! Papa would be pleased. They go until the candles gutter and the cloth is covered in nutsh.e.l.ls. It's like living among chattering squirrels. But when she must compose her thoughts on paper, the rattle of the coals in the stove, the pattern of the snowflakes dropping from the ashen sky, even such little nothings distract her. There, she frowns at me, offended by my own prodigious pen scratchings.

She practices her music but without conviction. To be sure, her talent is not so great as your Johann's-I don't expect ever to hear her etudes at the Pabst-but she used to play with profound expression. I would wish music to be a greater pleasure to her. What makes my heart weep most, however, is her poor, neglected drawing. Remember those droll cartoons? Pages of them! But she doesn't prize her skill and hurries through the exercises her master sets for her. All slapdash, as they say here. Such a waste!

Latin and Greek she claims are useless. Her translations come back covered in red. She proceeds tolerably with mathematics and biology but complains that they, too, can have no place in her life. She taunts me. How have I put to use my knowledge of chemistry, my studies with Professor Von Rhein? "Oh, that's right," she says. "You have instructed the laundress not to put too much bleach in the bedsheets and told Gustina to add more vinegar to the kartoffelsalat. That is what you've done with your fine education."

Be thankful you have only sons, Lilian. You cannot expect them to be like you. But a daughter, naturally so similar to her mother, can be a reproach in every way she is different. Of course, my liebchen is sorry when she is cruel. She throws her arms around my neck and cries. I know her hardness is only a fleeting expression of her own frustration; to absorb it is part of a mother's role.

The poor thing is infected with the notion that all of her education is "bourgeois trappings," as she puts it. "I must create my own destiny!" she insists. How foolish children are to believe themselves wise!

And now here she is, lying along her arm on the desk like a little girl. To have them little again, just for an hour or two now and then, what wouldn't we give for it? I must wind her up to finish this composition or she will be wretched.

In so many ways, this a.s.sessment stung, though I couldn't deny the truth of it. I had been hateful to her. Still, I couldn't agree that my frustration was a childish emotion I'd outgrow. For three years, I'd been exhilarated by the cla.s.ses Milwaukee College had offered me. The history, the science, the philosophy, all went far past what I'd learned in high school. Here, I'd believed, were complex but satisfying ways of making sense of events and nature and ideas. I'd felt I was being given a glimpse of the world beyond me and the tools I'd need to explore it further. But now that commencement approached, I'd begun to perceive graduation more as a finish than as a beginning. I'd ingested all the material I'd been fed, but I was a goose plumped for others' consumption. My parents, Ernst, President McAdams, Miss Dodson, and even Lucy seemed to have a definite vision of how my life should proceed.

"But the goose will not have it!" I said aloud. And sighed. The trouble was that the goose, being a goose, had no idea what she would have.

Still, failing history would hardly help me. In any case, I'd been brought up to finish what I'd started. I sat myself straight in my chair again, resolved to push Napoleon smartly on.

I was fully engrossed in my essay at last when the bell rang. Absently, I capped my pen, wiped my inky fingers, and thinking of the troops pursuing the elusive Russian army and drawn inexorably toward Moscow, I wandered into the hallway and opened the door.

"Ernst!"