Harriet Doerr (20 page)

She talked to Thomas Ransom in his study, where his first wife’s portrait, painted in pastels, had been restored to its place on the wall facing his desk. Edie sat under the green-eyed young face, her unfaltering blue glance on her employer. Each tried to make the parting easy. It was clear, however, that they were dividing between them, top to bottom, a frail, towering structure of nineteen accumulated years, which was the time it had taken to turn five children, with their interminable questions, unfounded terrors, and destructive impulses, into mature adults who could vote, follow maps, make omelets, and reach an accord of sorts with life and death.

Thinking back over the intervening years, Thomas Ransom remembered Edie’s cousin in Texas and inquired, only to find that Texas had been a disappointment, as had America itself. The cousin had returned to England twelve years ago.

“Would you like that?” he asked Edie. “To go back to England?”

She had grown used to California, she said. She had no one in Atherleigh. So in the end, prompted by the look in his first wife’s eyes, Thomas Ransom offered Edie a cottage and a pension, to be hers for the rest of her life.

Edie’s beach cottage was two blocks back from the sea and very small. On one wall she hung a few of the children’s drawings, including the earthquake aftermath. Opposite them, by itself, she hung the framed photograph of Lady Alice and Lady Anne, fair and well-seated astride their ponies. Edie had become the repository of pets. The long-lived fish swam languidly in one corner of her sitting room, the last of the canaries molted in another.

Each Ransom child came to her house once for tea, pulling in to the curb next to a mailbox marked Edith Fisk.

“Edie, you live so far away!”

On their first Christmas apart, the children sent five cards, the next year four, then two for several years, then one, or sometimes none.

During the first September of Edie’s retirement, England declared war on Germany. She knitted socks for the British troops, and on one occasion four years after she left it, returned briefly to the Ransom house. This was when the twins were killed in Europe a month apart, at the age of twenty-four, one in a fighter plane over the Baltic, the other in a bomber over the Rhine. Two months later Thomas Ransom asked Edie to dispose of their things, and she came back for a week to her old, now anonymous, room.

She was unprepared for the mass of articles to be dealt with. The older children had cleared away childhood possessions at the time of their marriages. But here were all the books the twins had ever read, from Dr. Dolittle to Hemingway, and all their entertainments, from a Ouija board to skis and kites. Years of their civilian trousers, coats, and shoes crowded the closets.

Edie first wrapped and packed the bulky objects, then folded into cartons the heaps of clothing, much of which she knew. A week was barely time enough to sort it all and reach decisions. Then, suddenly, as though it had been a matter of minutes, the boxes were packed and at the door. Edie marked each one with black crayon. Boys Club, she printed, Children’s Hospital, Red Cross, Veterans.

That afternoon she stood for a moment with Thomas Ransom on the porch, the silent house behind them. The November air was cold and fresh, the sky cloudless.

“Lovely day,” said Edie.

Thomas Ransom nodded, admiring the climate while his life thinned out.

 

 

If the three surviving children had written Edie during the years that followed, this is what she would have learned.

At thirty-five, James, instead of having become an electrical engineer or a master mechanic, was a junior partner in his father’s law firm. Twice divorced and about to take a new wife, he had apparently learned nothing from Thomas Ransom, not even how to marry happily once. Each marriage had produced two children, four intended cures that failed. James’s practice involved foreign corporations, and he was often abroad. He moved from executive offices to boardrooms and back, and made no attempt to diagnose his discontent. On vacations at home, he dismantled and reassembled heaters and fans and wired every room of his house for sound.

Whenever he visited England, he tried, and failed, to find time to send Edie a card.

Eliza had been carried off from her research library by an archaeologist ten years older and three inches shorter than she. He took her first to Guatemala, then to Mexico, where they lived in a series of jungle huts in Chiapas and Yucatán. It was hard to find native help, and the clothes Eliza washed often hung drying for days on the teeming underbrush. Her damp books, on shelves and still in boxes, began to mildew. She cooked food wrapped in leaves over a charcoal fire. On special days, like her birthday and Christmas, Eliza would stand under the thatch of her doorway and stare northwest through the rain and vegetation in the direction of the house where she was born and had first tasted tea.

Edie was still living in the house when Jenny, through a letter from her last stepmother, Cissy, met the Englishman she would marry. Thin as a pencil and pale as parchment, he had entered the local university as an exchange fellow. Jenny was immediately moved to take care of him, sew on his missing buttons, comb his sandy hair. His English speech enchanted her.

“Tell about boating at Henley,” she urged him. “Tell about climbing the Trossachs. Explain cricket.” And while he described these things as fully as his inherent reserve would allow, the inflections of another voice fell across his. Jenny heard “fahncy dahnces.” She heard “poor souls.”

“Have you ever been to Atherleigh in Devon?” she asked him.

“That’s Hatherleigh,” he said.

If Jenny had written Edie, she would have said, “I love Massachusetts, I love my house, I can make scones, come and see us.”

 

 

On a spring afternoon in 1948, Thomas Ransom called his children together in the same study where the aunts had read Cissy’s letter of lament and recommendation. The tree his wife planted thirty years ago towered in green leaf outside the window.

The children had gathered from the outposts of the world—James from Paris, Eliza from the Mayan tropics, Jenny from snowed-in Boston. When he summoned them, they had assumed a crisis involving their father. Now they sat uneasily under the portrait of their mother, a girl years younger than themselves. Thomas Ransom offered them tea and sherry. He looked through the window at the tree.

At last he presented his news. “Edie is dying,” he said. “She is in the hospital with cancer,” as if cancer were a friend Edie had always longed to share a room with.

 

 

They visited her on a shining April morning, much like the one when they first met. With their first gray hairs and new lines at their eyes, they waited a moment on the hospital steps.

James took charge. “We’ll go in one by one,” he said.

So, as if they had rehearsed together, one after another they stood alone outside the door that had a sign, No Visitors, stood there while patients prepared for surgery or carts of half-eaten lunches were wheeled past, stood and collected their childhood until a nurse noticed and said, “Go in. She wants to see you.” Then each one pushed the door open, went to the high narrow bed, and said, “Edie.”

She may not have known they were there. She had started to be a skeleton. Her skull was pulling her eyes in. Once they had spoken her name, there was nothing more to say. Before leaving, they touched the familiar, unrecognizable hand of shoelaces and hair ribbons and knew it, for the first time, disengaged.

After their separate visits, they assembled again on the hospital steps. It was now they remembered Lady Alice and Lady Anne.

“Where was that castle?” Eliza asked.

“In Kent,” said Jenny.

All at one time, they imagined the girls in their tower after tea. Below them, swans pulled lengthening reflections across the smooth surface of the lake. Lady Alice sat at her rosewood desk, Lady Anne at hers. They were still seven and eight years old. They wrote on thick paper with mother-of-pearl pens dipped into ivory inkwells.

“Dear Edie,” wrote Lady Alice.

“Dear Edie,” wrote Lady Anne.

“I am sorry to hear you are ill,” they both wrote.

Then, as if they were performing an exercise in penmanship, they copied “I am sorry” over and over in flowing script until they reached the bottom of the page. When there was no more room, they signed one letter “Alice” and the other letter “Anne.”

In the midst of all this, Edie died.

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