2/5
KNOCK.
Louiza opened her eyes.
A tree.
Louiza closed her eyes.
A knock.
Open again, a tree. A tree inside, a single pine tree standing inside a house. Above, a ceiling painted white, planks crisscrossed by whitewashed beams. One cobweb, another. A long thread of dust bobbing in the breath of the room, although it could have been just another cobweb, abandoned.
Louiza turned her head.
The back of a sofa. Soft, smelling of dust and sun. A yellow cushion embraced by passionflowers, faded, all faded.
A knock.
She turned towards the sound. A wood fire, fresh, three logs propped up like Guy Fawkes. The tree, a smell of pine.
A third knock, not the fire. Louiza sat up.
She was in a dining room — at least, there was a round table covered by a lace cloth, half a dozen willow library chairs, an open folder, sheets of paper, a pencil. Next to the table in a bay window shielded by lace curtains, a piano, a small piano. More lace on the piano, and resting on the lace a vase. Flowers. The sofa, the sofa she was sitting on, had yellow cushions. Passionflowers. The fire. Above the fire, a mantle. Marble. A pair of crystal candlesticks, old. Two plaster busts, small. On the wall above, a portrait. A man, a man from long ago, looking down on her. Not unkind.
She had no idea where she was. She had no idea why there was a pine tree inside the house. She knew something was missing.
“Lou! Lou, honey!” Three knocks. Outside. There must be a door.
Louiza stood. The heat of the fire nudged her back in the direction of the knock. She walked towards the sound, out of the dining room and into the hall. She turned the doorknob.
A man.
“Lou! Honey! Were you sleeping?”
The smile, the mouth. A map of ridges and valleys climbing up to a tree line of spiked black hair. The man pushed his way past Louiza, a paper bag of groceries in each arm. Louiza turned towards him and followed down the hall.
“Hey, Lou! Front door! It’s freezing!”
Louiza turned back and shut the door. There was a window — nine panes of glass on the front door — frosted. Beyond, a veranda, snow, trees covered with snow.
Louiza had no idea where she was. She had never seen the man before.
Something was missing.
Through the vague light of the hall, through a door at the far end, Louiza saw the man set the two bags down on a table. The man disappeared. A tap opened, the sound of water in a tea kettle, the pop of a flame. The man reappeared, turned towards Louiza, smiling, blowing on his hands, slipping his arms out of his parka.
“Colder than a Siberian nun!” The man hung the parka on a wooden peg in the hallway. Something dripped onto the floor. “Hey, Lou!” The man was wearing a T-shirt, a white T-shirt. He took Louiza by the shoulders — not roughly but not with delicacy either — and drew her head into his chest.
Louiza had never seen this man. But with her cheek turned against his chest, she could see the figure tattooed into his bicep. It was a figure she recognized — the long s of the integral sign. The formula for the logarithmic constant of e to the power of x.
∫ ex
Mathematics. Maths. Maths she knew.
“How about a cuppa your good ol’ English tea?” The man let her go. He walked down the hall and disappeared to the side across from the dining room. She heard the sound of a zipper, water splashing, a soft moan.
American.
This was not the cottage. This was not Rome. She had no idea where this was.
There was a pine tree inside the house. Something was missing.
Louiza reached up to the wooden peg and took down the dripping parka. She slipped her arms into the sleeves and zipped it shut. She turned the handle of the door. She walked out onto the veranda, yellow boards through the snow, a gable. She breathed. Her eyes opened. Cold climbed from her bare feet to her knees, rung by rung. The Gables. She took another breath.
There had been a plane. There had been a car, a ride through a city, up a river. A pine forest, a mountain, a yellow house, The Gables.
Vince — the man was Vince. American. A soldier. He taught at a place called West Point; he taught soldiers. He taught soldiers maths, he taught soldiers mathematics. He drank beer at a bar down by the river. He brought groceries and beer home in paper sacks and made tuna salad for lunch and steak for dinner. And at night he drank beer and then he came upstairs and slept with her.
Vince. Was Vince her husband?
Something was missing.
And in the morning, Vince cooked oatmeal and left a folder of maths problems on the dining room table. Just like at the cottage.
But she wasn’t at the cottage. She was with Vince, who taught maths to soldiers, who brought her problems and took back the answers and drank beer. She was in America.
Something was missing. She had to go back. She stepped off the verandah into the snow.
“Good morning, Louiza.”
Another man, larger than Vince. In a large parka. Much larger. And under the hood, a red beard. This man she had seen before. This man she remembered.
“Lou, honey!” Louiza turned. It was Vince, out in the cold with his T-shirt. “Where you goin’? I didn’t see her go out,” he explained to the man with the red beard. “Lou, what you doin’ out here in the snow without no shoes?”
Louiza looked down at her feet, snow melting in the heat between her toes.
“Come, come inside, Louiza.” The large man took her arm, took her by her arm in her parka and gently turned her around. His voice was deep; she knew this voice. Louiza’s feet made little angels in the snow.
Louiza was sitting at the dining room table by the papers. Vince was on one side, the red-bearded man on the other. MacPhearson — that was another name, his name. She had met him at the Orchard with her mother and father. MacPhearson. She had seen him before. There was steam. There was tea. No parkas. Her feet were dry and warm in long, gray socks. MacPhearson was speaking.
“Louiza,” MacPhearson said. “How long is it that you’ve been with us?”
With us? With whom? She was in America, now she remembered, somewhere up the Hudson — that was the name of the river. How long had she been with the Hudson? With America?
“Little over two months,” Vince said. “Christmas last week.”
“Thank you, Vince,” the man with the red beard said. Louiza remembered. MacPhearson didn’t like Vince. But Vince couldn’t afford to get angry.
“You remember the cottage, Louiza?” MacPhearson said.
Christmas.
“You did very good work for us back there,” MacPhearson said. “Very good work.”
The pine tree indoors. Christmas.
“But the last two months,” MacPhearson said.
“I’ve been bringing the problems to her,” Vince said. “I’ve been bringing the answers back.”
“But the answers haven’t made sense, unfortunately.” MacPhearson took a sip of his tea. “Cookie?”
The answers. The problems.
“Please,” Louiza said, “I should like to go home.”
“Lou, honey,” Vince said, “you are home.”
“Discretion,” MacPhearson said to Louiza. “Do you know the meaning of the word?”
“Secrecy,” Vince added. MacPhearson held up a hand full of red-haired knuckles and warning. Vince stopped.