Connie lifted her head and gazed across the vaulted reading room. She thought back to Deliverance’s probate list, a telescoping lens through which Connie could peer back in time and look into the living room of a distant woman. Here she held in her hands a daily log of the entire second half of another woman’s life, and Connie felt like she knew her even less. Prudence’s cold practicality, her obstinate refusal to reveal her feelings, no matter how culturally proscribed, created in Connie a whistling void of incomprehension. She wanted to throw the journal across the room, to bunch its fragile pages up in her hands and rip them into shreds, to shake Prudence out of her reserve. But Prudence sat removed from her frustration, insulated by a two-hundred-year-long wall.
A drop fell from somewhere, smudging the dandelion sketch in the margin of Connie’s notes. She wiped her arm across her eyes and pushed the antique book away.
Marblehead, Massachusetts
July 4
1991
“
F
RANKLY
, I
AM A LITTLE SURPRISED THAT HE WOULD CALL YOU,”
said Grace. Her voice sounded mild, but Connie perceived a perturbed undercurrent in her choice of words.
“He was just really curious to find out what I learned from Prudence’s journal,” Connie assured her. “He knew that I had an appointment at the Athenaeum yesterday. And he knew that it was vital that I find a mention of the recipe book, or else I wouldn’t know where to look next.”
“How did he take it when you told him?” Grace asked, carefully. Grace always sounded careful when she crocheted. Connie wondered what form was emerging from Grace’s rapidly moving crochet hook while they talked. She pictured her mother seated in her living room, phone receiver tucked into her shoulder, lap overlaid with a spreading, rainbow-colored confection of yarn, collecting in a heap around her feet.
Connie brushed her fingertip down the spiderwebbed surface of the entryway mirror and sighed. “To be honest, he sounded pretty upset.”
In fact,
angry
might have been a more fitting word than
upset
. Manning Chilton telephoned her that morning as Connie sat, sipping coffee over her copy of the
Local Gazette and Mail
(headlines: “Fireworks Planned for Nine O’Clock”; “Model Sailboat Regatta Boasts Record Number of Participants”; “Rotary Club Meeting Postponed”). When Connie told Chilton that she found no explicit mention of the physick book in Prudence’s journal, and had learned nothing apart from the fact that Prudence was a fairly grim woman who made her living as a midwife, he demanded to know what her next step would be. Connie, baffled enough by her advisor’s telephoning her at home, on a holiday no less, had been caught unprepared for the question.
“Upset how?” asked Grace.
Connie hedged. “I think he’s just excited, you know. It’s such an intriguing source, and he really wants to see me do well….” Which is a nicer way of putting what he really said, which was
What in God’s name have you been doing wasting your and my time like this
, and
Frankly I had expected much more of you
. Connie shuddered, remembering the conversation.
“Upset
how
, Connie,” Grace pressed.
Connie sighed again, cursing inwardly for having always wished for Grace to express interest in her work. “He sort of…screamed at me,” she admitted, hastening to add “but it totally wasn’t a big deal,” at the same moment that Grace cried, “Oh, Connie!” and threw down her crochet hook in irritation.
“It wasn’t, Mom,” Connie insisted.
You had better put your mind to find ing it
, Chilton had said.
Else I will seriously doubt your commitment to the study of history, and will not be able to guarantee your scholarship support in the coming year.
Her stomach contracted at the memory, but she told herself that he was only trying to keep her motivated—strong-arming though his techniques may have been. Grace only exhaled through her nostrils, blowing her hot breath over the telephone receiver and into Connie’s ear.
“He just really wants me to find the book. But right now I have no way of knowing what Prudence Bartlett did with it, and so he’s upset. I just should’ve been more prepared.” Connie walked into the dining room, stretching the telephone cord out behind her until it stopped her just short of the crockery shelf. She had spent part of the previous week finally rinsing the heavy layer of dust off each of the dishes, and they now glowed in the dim corner of the room. Connie picked up a mug, examined it—British, nineteenth century, with a hairline crack—and replaced it on the shelf.
“He’s got a point, anyway,” she continued. “I’ve got no clue what to do next. Prudence didn’t leave a probate record, and she didn’t mention it in her journal. If I can’t figure out where the book went next, I’ll have to rethink the whole project.”
“Hmmmm,” said Grace, with barely perceptible disapproval. “Why do you think he’s so invested?”
“All advisors are invested in their students’ success,” said Connie, conscious as she did so that she sounded unconvincing. Like a brochure.
“Things must have changed since I was in college.” Grace sighed as Connie started to correct her by saying “graduate school,” and Grace amended, “Of course, my darling, graduate school. Is it
really
that important?”
Connie inhaled sharply.
“I know,” said Grace, before Connie’s snap could finish taking shape. Connie squelched a sigh and decided to change tack.
“Are you doing anything for the Fourth?” she asked, toying with one of the dead plants still hanging in the dining room. Her mother released a peal of merry laughter.
“Not hot dogs and fireworks, if that’s what you’re asking. The co-op is running a bake sale and carnival to raise money. Any surplus will go to our subcommittee on the ozone layer. I’ll be reading auras.” Connie said nothing but thought,
And what color is my aura right this minute, Grace?
“You know, it might help if you think about this book in a different way,” Grace said, filling Connie’s silence.
“Oh?” Connie asked.
“Perhaps this woman—Prudence—didn’t think of the book like a recipe book per se. She might’ve used different language to describe it. She’s a hundred years after her grandmother, after all. Sometimes people see things differently from their mothers.” Connie could hear the smile in her mother’s voice and grinned in spite of herself. “And how are you celebrating the holiday?” Grace asked.
“Liz is coming up for the weekend. We’ll make dinner and watch fireworks with Sa—with this guy I know. Go to the beach. Dodge my advisor’s calls. The usual.” Connie turned a blackened jar that stood atop one of the chests in the dining room, digging a dark circle into the layer of dust surrounding it.
“At last, the boy appears,” Grace remarked. “I can’t know his name yet?”
She waited while Connie smiled into the silence.
“Oh, all right. Well, that sounds like fun,” Grace said, brightly. “But I must run.” She paused. “And, Connie,” she said, sifting through her words, “I’m not sure what to tell you about your Chilton situation.”
“What do you mean? All advisors get on their students’ cases. I gave Thomas fits last semester. It’s the same thing,” said Connie, shrugging.
“I don’t mean anything. Just tread lightly, my darling, that’s all.”
Connie threaded her fingers through the telephone cord and said, “I will, Mom. Don’t worry.” And just as she hung up she almost thought she heard Grace say
blue
.
C
ONNIE SAT AT
G
RANNA’S
C
HIPPENDALE DESK, ONE FOOT FOLDED UNDER
her, paging yet again through her notes on Prudence’s journal. She had read through the entire document and found no mention of Deliverance Dane, nor any indication of what might have happened to the book. Her frustration with Prudence deepened. Day after day after day of gardening, cooking, and delivering babies. Of course if it was frustrating to read, it
must have been vastly more frustrating to live. Not that such a realization did anything to assuage Connie’s aggravation. Prudence was a staid, practical, even harsh woman—a woman living up to her name.
As Connie worked, Arlo stretched out on his belly in the entryway, nose pressed against the crack under the front door, fur blending in with the color of the Ipswich pine boards. Presently his tail began to swish, and growls of excitement escaped from the corners of his mouth. His ears crawled up to the top of his head. Connie turned over another page in her notes, her molars stealing an unconscious gnaw on the inside of her cheek.
“Hey there, Captain Grody!” called a woman’s sudden voice from the front door, and Connie, shaken out of her reverie, turned around from her desk to find Arlo, tail and hind legs a blur of pleasure, borne into the arms of Liz Dowers.
“Liz!” she exclaimed, rising from the desk in surprise. “I didn’t even hear your car! Hi!”
“Today is a holiday, you know,” Liz chided, hugging Connie with her unoccupied arm. “You’re not supposed to be working.”
“Tell that to Chilton,” Connie groaned. “He even called this morning expressly to tell me what a total disappointment I am, and how I am completely wasting his time.”
“Professor Chilton,” Liz announced with solemnity, “is a bastard.” Connie opened her mouth to respond, but Liz held up her hand to stave off disagreement. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. He works you too hard. I’ve watched it for years. Now come on. There’s groceries in the car.”
Connie smiled at her friend. “Not too many groceries, I hope. Remember, there’s no fridge.”
“And that,” said Liz, “is why I also brought ice.”
“S
O
,” L
IZ BEGAN, PLACING FORKS ALONGSIDE NAPKINS ON THE DINING
table, “fill me in. How’s everything coming?”
“I’m not sure where to start,” Connie called from inside the kitchen.
“Do you want the story of the vanished book-slash-dissertation topic, complete with pissed-off advisor? Or do you want the details on the boy so that you can grill him properly when he gets here?”
“Um, both, I guess, but I was actually asking about selling the house.”
Connie appeared holding a steaming colander between two oven mitts, and dumped pasta into a waiting bowl on the table. “Oh.
That.
”
“You haven’t done anything, have you,” said Liz, crossing her arms.
“Not true,” Connie countered, pulling off the oven mitts. “I have put in a telephone.”
Liz leaned over to adjust the oil lamp on the table, its orange flame flaring up and casting her narrow features in relief, then tamping down into a warmer glow. Outside, the sky was still the pale blue-gray of twilight, but the interior of the house was already cloaked in darkness. “If I have to find another roommate for the fall, you need to tell me,” said Liz seriously.
“Liz!” exclaimed Connie. “Of course not! It’s only July.”
“I know, but I’m just saying,” Liz muttered, not looking at Connie.
“Don’t be silly. Anyway, now that I have no probate record for Prudence Bartlett to tell me where the book went, I will no longer be distracted by all this productive dissertation research. I can finally devote my days to cleaning and fixing and selling, dropping out of grad school, running off to join the Foreign Legion….”
“And the guy?” asked Liz, ignoring Connie’s sarcasm.
Connie tucked her lower lip under her front teeth, and then broke into a smile. “He said they set off the fireworks from the causeway. He’s going to drop by later and walk us over to a spot he knows.”
“‘A spot he knows,” echoed Liz, waving her fingers on either side of her head as Connie, laughing, threw an oven mitt at her friend.
The two young women huddled at the end of the long dining table in the small pool of light cast by the oil lamp, swirling pasta on their forks. Liz supplied Connie with anecdotes from her summer Latin students (“One of them had this gigantic cellular phone that he kept on his desk! What kind of high schooler has a cellular phone anyway? Aren’t those just for bankers?”), and
embroidered her account with stories of her dilatory summertime life in Cambridge.
Connie watched Liz talk, enjoying the sound of a voice other than her own filling the house’s dour rooms. When circulating in the Marblehead world—buying groceries, visiting archives, picking up a coffee—she engaged in brushes of conversation, her solitude briefly rubbing up against the presence of other people before retreating again to the isolated cavern of Granna’s house. Sometimes she would look down to discover Arlo in her lap, his brown gaze reminding her that she had not spoken in several hours.
A soft rap sounded at the door, and Liz broke off her story of a particularly awful date from the previous week to look up, bright-eyed, and whisper, “Aren’t you going to get it?”
Connie grinned and tossed her napkin onto the table. “Coming!” she called.
On the threshold of the door, the yard behind him a black tangle of shadows and vines, stood Sam, a six-pack of beer in one hand and a heavy-duty flashlight in the other. “Good evening, madam,” he said, with mock solemnity, executing a stiff half-bow with the flashlight beam shining up under his chin. “Your local Sherpa has arrived.”
Connie noticed that Sam was sporting an
ANARCHY IN THE UK
T-shirt, presumably in honor of Independence Day, and giggled in spite of herself. “Sam Hartley,” she announced, gesturing into the dining room, “I would like you to meet Liz Dowers. Liz, this is Sam Hartley.”
“A pleasure,” said Sam, gesturing with his hand, as if doffing a tricorn hat.
Liz appeared behind Connie in the doorway with a blanket folded over her arm. “Mr. Hartley, I presume,” she said, executing a delicate curtsy, holding the picnic blanket out to one side, as if sweeping up a heavy brocade train.
“Shouldn’t we be going?” Connie asked. “The fireworks are at nine, right?” Connie noticed Liz cast her eye quickly over Sam, mouthing “nice” at Connie when Sam was distracted with the flashlight, and then assuming an angelic posture when Sam looked up again.
Their three silhouettes set off through the night, followed by Arlo’s eyes glittering through the leaves in the sitting room window.
T
HE LAST SPARKLING TENDRILS RAINED DOWN ON THE INNERMOST CURVE
of Marblehead harbor, and a few air horns blew their approval from sailboats moored on the water, their wails mingling with the echo of the explosions overhead and the collective sigh of townsfolk clustered on blankets in parks and on rooftops. The red flares ringing the harborside began to sputter, adding to the cloud of smoke drifting over the causeway after the last fireworks winked into nothingness. Connie heard claps and whistles from the park around her, and for the first time she felt a warm affection for the community where she was accustomed to loitering on the periphery. She enjoyed the anonymity of sitting hidden by the darkness, just one pair of eyes among many, dazzled by the lights overhead. She released a contented sigh and smiled over at her friends, both leaning back on their elbows, necks craned to face the sky.