And so began another kind of honeymoon in France, the sort she will take until she is too old and frail to travel, the chance to slip away and see her life grow small on another coast and with it the impossible knots and complications. What seems unfixable can be fixed, if only by distance.
These days she keeps a suitcase packed beneath her bed and leaves the specifics to Norah.
There is no man waiting for her, here or there. There’s been no man for years, which has sharpened the effect of her letters and journals they’ve been sorting. These last several months have given her suddenly all the men at once. It will probably be good to get away from that for a time. She can feel the loose pieces rattling even when her mind is still.
The marmalade cat hears the knock before she does, bolting for the kitchen, her food bowls, and safety. Mary Frances stands, tucking the combs into her silvered hair, a smack of lipstick in the mirror by the door before she answers it.
It’s a man in his shirtsleeves with his suitcase, his face obscured by the long brim of his hat. There’s a familiar set to his shoulders, the peak of his chest, and the fine square hand he extends to stroke the marmalade cat, but Mary Frances does not know him. The marmalade cat pushes up to nuzzle the brace of quail he’s holding.
“I stopped in the village for directions,” he says. “When I mentioned your name, everyone had something they needed me to bring to you.”
She laughs. She knows the hunter who saves his quail for her, and from the pocket of the suitcase, her visitor takes a jar of olallieberry jam, a paper sack of dusty white salamis, a glassine envelope of powdered spice. She fixes on the folded birds, their bodies limpid, hung the way she’s told the hunter they do in France.
“How can I help you?” she asks, taking the quail.
He is from the library. He’s driven a van all the way across the country for the boxes, his suitcase full of her books rather than his clothes, her books for her to sign.
“If you don’t mind,” he says. “And then I can collect my parcels and be out of your way.”
“Oh, no,” she says. “You have to stay for dinner now. Who will help me eat these quail?”
“It’s not necessary, Ms. Fisher. I have a room waiting for me in town, and a long ride home.”
“And I don’t want to keep you working late. But still, it is a lot of quail.”
He seems to consider his options, his eyes warm and brown, his eyes not familiar, not the eyes she’s longing for, but still somehow related to this sifting through the past she has been doing. This man, now appeared, a kind of souvenir.
“I’d be honored,” he says.
She turns and leads the way inside.
Sea Change, Spring 1936
The train would be three days to Chicago, another to New York. The seats in her compartment were plush, the window wide, a berth the porter cranked down from the ceiling every night, a little johnnie in the corner with a curtain, a sink that unfolded from the wall. Each human concern fit neatly here, and twelve deep to a car, at least six cars of sleepers. It was like a tiny, efficient neighborhood, hurtling across the country.
The film of travel settled into her skin. The train rattled and swayed, loud and drafty, then blasted with heat so that her coat was always on and off her shoulders. The passengers talked endlessly about nothing, and when she went to the dining car, there was nothing she wanted to eat, and outside the window the red desert became the measureless bitter plains, the fields beaten back beneath the swollen sky, and then all was gray or darkness.
Mary Frances could hear a mother and child in the compartment next to hers, a toddler as given to words as he was to tears and thuds and crashes, and then his mother’s stroking voice. She couldn’t make out what was said; parenting remained something she spied on.
She swung over the edge of the berth and huddled in her nightgown, her bare feet dangling above the floor. During this interlude with Tim, whatever happened would be something discrete, a miniature life. She rolled her palms open in her lap and wished she had someplace to pray, someone to promise, but there was only herself. That hardly seemed like a promise she would keep.
Outside the window, the middle country raced by.
At breakfast in the dining car, she faced the mother from the berth next door, whispering to the boy as though they were alone. She bent to serve her son’s eggs, to pass the fork to his rosy mouth. There was no man traveling with them, and the woman wore no ring. Mary Frances thought of Anne, how frazzled and overwrought she would be traveling with Sean. The boy smacked his hands against the tabletop, sending spoons flying. His mother laughed, and the steward brought her more.
Mary Frances said, “Your son reminds me of my nephew.”
The woman smiled, brushing the crumbs from her lap. She spoke with such a thick accent it took Mary Frances a full moment to hear her words after she said them.
“Oh, Mum, he’s not mine. His parents are in New York a week already.”
“Oh,” Mary Frances said. “I just assumed.”
Now looking at the pair, she could chart no resemblance. But the woman beamed at the boy in a motherly fashion; she was patient, and she seemed to enjoy him.
“Have you always been his nurse?” she asked. It was too personal, but who was to say, on this train, what she should and should not do? It seemed, suddenly, important that she know.
“Since the morning he was born.”
The woman smiled at Mary Frances and turned her attention back to the boy, his fists now full of his breakfast and headed to the floor. Everything, Mary Frances thought, eventually came down. Both the nurse and the boy laughed about it.
Back in her compartment, the porter had yet to make up her berth, and so she crawled back inside, folded her hands beneath her head, and stared at the glossy capsule of the ceiling. She thought about how many lives it contained, just this single car, and how fast it was going, away from home.
* * *
At Penn Station, Tim was waiting on the platform.
He was lithe and elegant, dressed all in navy blue, a fine cashmere topcoat and herringbone muffler, his white hair waved back close against his head. He looked like a knife, like a hawk, a piece of dark blue open sky. Mary Frances took his gloved hand and tried to make her mouth work to speak. She could think of only the plainest things, hello, how nice to see you, how nice.
He broke her wrist back and brought it to his lips, a light, true kiss where her blood was pounding, and that was all.
He directed a porter to her trunks, her trunks to a cab, his hand steering her forward at the small of her back. They were nearly the same height. She could feel his breath on her temple, and with his hand, he was all through her, and there was nothing to say, nothing that could be heard over this.
The cab took them uptown, to the Warwick Hotel where he had reserved her a room. Watching his profile, the city racing past them, she realized he belonged here, amongst all this business and metal, noise and speed, or at least the man he was now belonged here. The thought plummeted through her. What else might she have to learn about him? What else might she have made up to suit herself in all this time they’d spent apart?
“Where is your mother?” she asked.
“She naps in the afternoons. Are you tired?”
It sounded like one thing made him think the other, and she shook her head, turning to the window. What if she was making a horrible mistake?
The taxi pulled to the curb, and Tim paid it, a fleet of doormen descending upon the car, her steamer and satchels full of books. She stood where she’d been escorted and watched her things stack up; why had she brought so much stuff? She needed the help of so many people.