The nature of fragile th.., p.4
The Nature of Fragile Things, page 4
I use the water closet and then venture down the staircase. Martin, bent over a writing tablet, sits on a sofa edge. Newspaper pages are strewn over the top of a little table between the sofa and armchair. The nib on the writing pen is making delicate scratching sounds as he works. He is wearing a dark blue suit this morning and his hair is neatly coiffed and his face shaven.
He looks up when I enter the room.
“Hello,” he says, in a quiet but congenial tone.
“Good morning. You are up early.”
“I’ve never been one to sleep past sunrise.”
I notice he already has a cup of coffee. “I’ll have to rise a little earlier, then, so I’ll have a kettle on for you.” I had seen the drip pot on the back burner of the range the evening before. My landlady at the tenement had a drip pot like that. I’ve only ever made coffee once, when she was ill and she asked if I would make a pot for her. She’d told me how to pour the hot water from her kettle onto the ground coffee beans in the top of the pot, and I watched as the filtered beverage dripped down through fine mesh into the pot below. She said I could have a sip for my trouble. I didn’t hate it, but I wondered why anyone would prefer it over tea.
I sit down in the armchair by the fireplace that Martin sat in the night before. He doesn’t ask if I slept well.
I glance down at the tablet and newspaper but can’t read either one upside down. “Are those working papers? For your job?”
“Yes. I’m heading out tomorrow.”
“And how long are you usually gone when you go, if I might ask?”
“It depends,” he says, casually, easily. “Sometimes two days, sometimes three or four. Occasionally a week.”
“I see.”
Several seconds of silence pass between us.
“You take the train when you travel?” I ask.
“I’ve purchased an automobile. I keep it garaged south of the pier when I’m not out on the road. I don’t bring it into the city.”
“An automobile?” I make no effort to cloak my surprise. I know no one who owns an automobile. Not a soul. Will he take me on a ride sometime if I ask him? Isn’t that what people with autos do on lovely Sunday afternoons? I wait for Martin to notice my amazement, but he says nothing.
A few minutes slide by with the only sounds in the room being those of the ticking of a wall clock and the faint scraping of the nib of his pen.
“May I ask you a question about Kat?” I say.
“What about her?”
“Did she stop speaking straightaway after her mother died? I’m only asking because you are leaving tomorrow and she’ll be alone with me and I want to understand better how to care for her. I don’t want to do the wrong thing while you’re away.”
Martin caps the pen and sets it down on the table. I fear I’ve said too much, and all while he’d been trying to work. But when he opens his mouth to answer, his tone is calm.
“Candace was quite ill before she died,” he says. “The more her condition declined, the quieter Kat became, and she’d been a quiet child to begin with.”
“She must have loved her mother very much.” I watch Martin carefully to see if he will react in a way that will clue me in to his own level of grief. His beautiful face is unreadable.
“Yes.”
“And Candace’s parents? Were they of help to you with Kat during this terrible time?”
“No.”
He says the word effortlessly, as though it doesn’t pain him to say it. As though he’d not been surprised his in-laws hadn’t helped him and Kat walk that hard road since surely they were traveling it as well. “Whyever not?”
“We were not on friendly terms.”
“Why is that?”
He studies me for a moment, as though he is now watching me carefully, gauging how much he will tell me about the intricacies of his first marriage. “They’d planned for Candace to marry someone of substantial means—someone like them—and instead she married me. That was a disappointment to them.”
“But . . . but even so, surely they cared about their granddaughter?”
“Kat has never been an exceptionally sociable creature. Even before she stopped talking, she was a sober child who kept to herself. Her grandparents, the few times they saw her, found that behavior bizarre.”
“Are you saying they don’t have affection for their own grandchild?”
“Didn’t.”
“Didn’t?”
“Candace’s mother died of pneumonia last year. And I hear her father is not well.”
Poor Kat. Poor Martin. Poor dead Candace. My heart strangely aches for all three of them. How wounded Martin must be inside, and how hard it must be for him to pretend he isn’t.
As if he can read my thoughts, Martin gathers up the papers and the tablet and places them in a leather satchel resting at his feet. He closes it in a gesture that seems to bring the gavel down on the conversation. “Why don’t you rouse Kat and we’ll have breakfast?” He rises from the sofa with his satchel in hand and I follow him out of the room. He heads for the library next to the room we have just left. As I pass by the open door, I see him open a drawer in the doctor’s old desk and flip through some papers. He glances up, sees me, and waits for me to continue on up the stairs.
When I open Kat’s door, she is sitting on her bed, already dressed in a too-tight, too-short dress of pale pink and holding the broken doll against her chest. Her cinnamon-brown hair is a tangled mess from sleep, but her eyes—so very like Martin’s—are bright pools of topaz with not a hint of slumber clinging to them. Has she been awake for a while? Was she able to hear the conversation taking place directly below her on the first floor? It is impossible to tell from the blank expression on the child’s face.
I reach for the hairbrush that I placed atop the bureau last night, and then I sit down beside Kat on her bed. “Did you sleep all right in your new room, love?”
She looks at me, her eyes communicating an answer that I can’t decipher.
“I think today we should buy some new bedcovers for you in a color that you like. Do you have a favorite color?”
The girl looks down at her lap. I wonder if her gaze is drawn to the hazy pink hue of her dress.
“Pink, maybe?” I say.
She nods, and it is almost like hearing her voice.
“I love that color, too. Would you like one braid or two?”
Kat slowly holds up two fingers.
“Two it is, then. Can you turn a bit toward your pillow, love?” She obeys and I put the brush to her head and begin to gently loosen the tangles. “My best friend growing up had hair this color. So very pretty.”
To fill the silence as I attend to Kat, I ramble on about how my mother used to braid my own hair too tightly and how my midnight blue hair ribbons had been my favorite.
“There,” I say when the plaits are done. “You look very pretty. And we’re getting some new clothes for you today. Won’t that be a treat? You’re getting so tall. You’ve outgrown all your dresses.”
Kat looks down at her too-small dress and then raises her head to look at me again. The child looks troubled, as if the thought of parting with the constricting dress she’s wearing is too painful a notion to consider. Perhaps Candace bought the dress for Kat before her illness sent her to her bed for good. Surely she had. Of course she had.
“You like this dress, don’t you?” I say in a more empathetic tone. Kat says nothing. “It’s very pretty. I can make some clothes for your dolly with the material from this dress if you like.” I point to the doll Kat clutches. “I can make a frock for her just like this one. My gram taught me how to sew. I can make her some pantalets to go with it. Would you like that?”
Kat gives her assent in one slight nod. I want to pull her into my arms.
Instead I tell her she can help me make breakfast. We make her bed quickly and then head downstairs.
It takes me a bit of time to familiarize myself with such a well-equipped kitchen. The meal last night I did nothing to prepare, and Martin wanted to leave the plates to soak overnight, so everything about its appointments is foreign to me. It takes me several tries to light the stove, and then I’m opening cabinets right and left to find a skillet. Martin had boxes of staples delivered, so there are eggs and sausage, but there is no bread to make toast. And no yeast or lard or vinegar. I shall have to make a list. As I find my way around, I decide we will eat at the butler’s table in the kitchen rather than in the formal dining room, and I give Kat the table settings to place at our seats. I am nearly pinching myself again at my fortune, strange as it is, as the room begins to take on the scents of cured meat and fried eggs. It’s been such a long time since I’ve been in a warm, happy kitchen making a meal that is setting my mouth to water. At the tenement there was only the hunk of bread in the morning, the watery soup at the factory cafeteria at noon, and at night, the cold sausages shared among the other young immigrant women I roomed with. There was no table and no conversations around the meal, except for when there was an occasional pilfered bottle of whisky to pass from one to another to another.
After breakfast, we take Kat to a children’s clothing store in the heart of Union Square, where Kat submits to trying on several ready-to-wear dresses in different colors and styles, some for every day and a few for special occasions, the clerk says, like a party or for churchgoing. I ask Martin if he and Kat attend church.
“No. But if you wish to go and take Kat with you, I’ve no objections. There are plenty of Catholic churches here.”
“I’m from the North, remember? I’m . . . Protestant.” I say this with a light laugh, a bit surprised he’s forgotten that. I mentioned it in my letter to him.
Martins shrugs. “There are plenty of the other kind, too.” He turns to the salesclerk and points to the Sunday-best dress Kat has on. “We’ll take this one as well.”
It’s odd to me that he doesn’t care if I decide to take Kat to an Anglican service, if I can find one, but empowering, too. He trusts me with her.
Next we step inside a dressmaker’s, where I am measured and fitted for three new shirtwaists and undergarments.
We take a streetcar to the Palace Hotel on the corner of Market and Montgomery to have lunch in one of its lovely dining rooms. The multistoried palatial building has an open center entrance that until recently buggies could drive into to unload their passengers. The open court is overlooked by all seven stories and framed with white-columned balconies and decorated with exotic plants, statuary, and fountains. The American Dining Room, with its linen-topped tables and golden high ceilings, has just begun to serve the midday meal when we arrive. We lunch on consommé, duckling croquettes, and endive salad, with glazed peach tarts for dessert. It is the finest meal I’ve ever eaten and it’s a challenge to pretend it is merely an ordinary lunch on a busy day.
After our meal we make our way to the Emporium to outfit Kat’s new room with proper toys and décor for a little girl.
On the ten-minute walk to the Emporium—a multilevel department store that carries everything—I see more of the city’s bustling retail area. I take note of a shoe repair shop, a milliner, a stationer’s, a grocer, a bakery, and a hair salon.
The outside of the immense Emporium is as large as many of the buildings I’d grown used to seeing in New York, taking up nearly a whole city block on Market Street. We take an elevator to the fourth level and walk past displays of sporting goods and bicycles to the children’s toy section. The display cases are laden with dolls and doll carriages, miniature tea sets, train sets, boxes of colored wax crayons, and paints. There are dollhouses and little wooden barns with carved farm animals and books and puzzles and looms and jointed stuffed bears and armies of toy soldiers.
Kat is drinking in the sight of all those shelves, I can see that, but she makes no move to walk toward any of them. Martin just waits for her to do so. I reach for her hand and lead her to a doll carriage upholstered in robin’s-egg blue fabric, with chrome and rubber wheels and a collapsible hood trimmed in wide white lace.
“How about if we try out this carriage with your own dolly,” I say, convincing Kat to lay down the doll with the cracked cheek inside the satin-lined bed of the miniature buggy. A glimmer of a smile tugs at Kat’s lips.
“I’ll find a clerk to help us,” Martin says, and off he goes to find an employee to tally Kat’s choices.
I help Kat select a second doll so that her first one can have a friend, and some dresses for them and one of the doll-sized tea sets. We choose wooden beads with string and the wax crayons and a tablet of paper, and sets of children’s picture books and three jigsaw puzzles meant for older children, but which Kat is clearly interested in.
“She likes figuring them out,” Martin says of these, after he returns to us. “She’s good at those. You’ll see.”
Our last stop is a grocer’s, where I am able to get the things for the kitchen that Martin did not think to buy. Martin arranges for all our purchases to be delivered to the house. The day has been a stretch of satisfying hours so foreign it is almost as if I am watching another person’s day unfold. We leave the grocer’s and walk to the cable-car stop.
“Kat is tired,” Martin says, as the cable car clacks to a stop and people start getting off and on. “And all those deliveries are coming. You need to be there to receive them. Here you go.” He lifts Kat onto the open car and then holds out his arm so that I can board. I turn to face him once I’m standing on the car’s polished floorboards. Martin’s arm is outstretched; he is handing me the key to the house. Our house. I encircle my gloved hand around it.
“I’ve got details to see to before I leave tomorrow. I’ll be home later,” he says.
I nod, draw Kat toward me, and take a seat on one of the benches. The car clangs as it grasps the cable deep in the slot, and we begin to move forward and up. Martin turns from us and walks away. I watch him until he is gone from view.
Back at the house, Kat and I explore all the cupboards and closets, discovering a great many things the doctor and his family decided to leave behind. The china cabinet still holds a good supply of dishes and glassware, and the linens closet is half-full. I imagine the doctor’s wife had to choose just her most favorite items to take, perhaps only those things that had been given to them as wedding gifts. I wonder if Candace was given beautiful linens and dishes when she married Martin, and if she was, where are they? Did Martin abandon everything that was theirs when she died? Did he sell them to pay for the move from Los Angeles to San Francisco? I wonder how long it will be before I can ask him a personal question like that.
In the boys’ room I take off the toy soldier bed linens as we await the delivery of the new pink bedcover and linens we purchased at the Emporium.
“Do you want that extra bed in here?” I ask Kat, who is silently watching me. Kat looks at the second bed and then back at me. She slowly shakes her head.
“That’s what I would do, too. You’ll have more room for your new doll carriage in here if we dismantle it and take it upstairs. Shall we?”
With minimal help from Kat, I drag the frame, the posts, and finally the mattress upstairs to the empty maid’s room and lean them up against one of walls. We head back downstairs, and I make tea for us—sugar tea for Kat like my gram used to make—and we sip our drinks as we await the first of the deliveries and also Martin’s return.
The groceries arrive first, then the Emporium goods, and then the undergarments and corsets and hosiery from the ladies’ clothing store. The new clothes for Kat arrive last.
Dusk begins to fall and I am anxious for Martin’s return. I set about turning on the electric lights in the house, and then the gas fireplace in the sitting room, as the day’s warmth is leaving the house. As we wait, Kat and I sit by the fire and work on one of the puzzles she chose—a tableau of sketched butterflies of every shape and color. When darkness falls completely and Martin is still not home, I light the stove and place pork cutlets that I rubbed with butter and dried sage into a roasting pan alongside potatoes and carrots so that supper will be ready when he finally returns.
But he is still gone when the food is ready, and Kat is yawning. I fix her a plate, which she eats, and then I take her upstairs and draw her a warm bath, all the while expecting to hear Martin’s footfalls on the stairs. But I don’t. After her bath, I tuck Kat into bed.
I kiss her good night and close her door nearly all the way, but not quite, despite what Martin said the previous night.
Back downstairs I don’t know what else to do but sit in the dining room with our now-cold meal and wait.
When Martin finally arrives home, it is after nine o’clock and I have fallen asleep at the dining room table, slouched in my chair with my chin at my chest. I awaken to his touch on my arm as he says my name. I startle, nearly knocking over a goblet of water. Martin catches it. Relief mixed with anger races about inside me as Martin sits down in front of his cold supper.
“Where were you?” I say. “I was worried.”
“I told you,” he answers calmly. “I had details to take care of.”
“But . . . you were gone so long.”
“There were a lot of details.”
He doesn’t sound angry or defensive or even conciliatory. I can’t name the tone with which Martin is answering me.
“I was concerned. I didn’t know . . . I didn’t . . .” My voice drops away as the right words don’t come.
“Did you need something while I was out? Did all the deliveries arrive? Was anything amiss?”
“No. Everything is fine. Everything arrived. I put it all away. I made supper. I fed Kat and I put her to bed. And I waited for you.”
