A Lesser Light, page 11
The boy appeared to blush at this, but rather than demure, he took a cautious step toward Theodulf. “In Paris, who did you see perform it?”
Even this vaguest reference sent Theodulf dithering. He joined his fingertips one hand against the other, nodded to himself, and said, “She actually became a dear friend. I might have married her, if not for the great distance between us and the importance of my work here.”
“What was her name, this pianiste?”
“Paul,” he said.
“A rather strange name for a woman.”
“Paulette, actually. Paul was my pet name for her.” He reached for his watch, flipped its lid in his pocket, and removed his hand all in one motion. “Paulette Gouttière. Perhaps you’ve heard of her?”
“My pedagogue back home is named Paul.”
“Virginia, yes?”
The boy seemed almost to sidle toward Theodulf. Certainly, his expression was less guarded. Even rakish. Could Theodulf dare hope?
“Yes. Richmond.”
Theodulf sighed. But how he wished to speak!
It was the boy who spoke more. “You all have arranged some very peculiar weather for me.”
Theodulf, hoping to quell the gale rising in himself, looked outside again. “This is exceptional even by our inconstant standards. I hope your uncle has raised the weather flags. I’m sure he has. I have it on good authority he’s a fine and decent man, and a learned one at that.” Theodulf wanted to ingratiate himself to this boy, but it was also a moment of unguarded truth, and those facts together seemed to unlock the smile now animating the boy’s beautiful, painted face.
“I don’t know one finer,” he said.
“Your outfit,” Theodulf said, looking for an excuse to size him up and down. “It’s quite decorous. If that’s the word. And quite like a disguise. I know I ought not say this, but I rather like a good disguise.”
“Doctor Brandt, well, it was his idea. He’s charming in many ways, not least in his merrymaking.”
“What a delightful word! Merrymaking. It makes me want to dance!”
“You don’t strike me as the dancing sort,” the boy said.
This stung, and Theodulf felt himself losing hold, something he could not do. Instead of sulking, he bore up. “How about we catch the next trolley down to Bill Lanigan’s pub? I’ll show you a jig!”
“I prefer a waltz.”
Did he really just speak those words? Theodulf allowed he did, the gunsel! “You’ve at least two hours before your uncle’s ceremony is finished—”
His own fantasia was interrupted by an enormous crash against the door. Both he and the boy jumped at the sound, scurrying back from the glass. Outside, what appeared to be a ship’s moonsail flapped against the glass.
“Mon dieu,” Theodulf whispered, as much to himself as to the boy. “What is that?”
“I believe, sir, it’s an awning unmoored.”
“An awning?” Theodulf said, stepping toward the door and risking another look up. “I guess we’re now prisoners of this lobby.”
“I know another way out,” the boy said, and before Theodulf could speak, he disappeared into a passageway beyond the elevator.
Paralyzed, beggared, heartsick, Theodulf listened to the storm wail behind him.
Seiches
April 22, 1910
If you stood on certain seashores long enough, and with unwavering eyes, you’d see the moon pulling the water. The tides. When the moon’s orbit is most distant, the attending tide is called Apogean. When it’s closest, Perigean. The varieties between are many and many named, but they all speak to a force subtle and beguiling.
Lake Superior is not blessed by tides. Not like the oceans and seas. But she’s sometimes made to spill, and not just from her famous gales. She has seiches—is there a more beautiful word?—that come unannounced and gently and stir her sweet waters.
I once stood near the mouth of the Burnt Wood River and watched the water roll out under the moonlight. I tried to imagine a tidal force at work, but knew better—desire and longing are not lost on me!—and reconciled that hollowed shore against my wishes. What I learned is that sometimes, even oftentimes, it is better to imagine than to know.
* * *
ALL NIGHT she’d watched the sky instead of sleeping. There from the headland, in the shadows of the lighthouse, she tried to possess her thoughts. But they flitted like shooting stars—between her own melancholy and something else she couldn’t name or even see, only ever catching its metaphysical ripple. To quiet her mind, she thought of the girl instead.
A lamp burned in the fish house. Occasionally she’d see his shadow pass the window, and when it did, she’d move her gaze to the firmament. It shone enormously over the calm lake. The moon making its slow arc across the night. The comet in some other part of its orbit. The lighthouse beacon keeping tempo to the impossible song of the nighttide. All of it reflecting on the water and again in her lonesome eyes.
In those few moments she gathered her thoughts, they inevitably found her father’s ghost. She might have prayed to him—to give her strength, to grant her the power of forgiveness, for peace—but then she’d consider the girl, an orphan if all this was true, and reckon that even praying to someone as good as he was pointless. The realization came with a nudge, and she’d glance once more at the fish house window. Then his silhouette would pass, and to the heavens she’d turn again.
Round and round.
Now it was an hour before dawn. She could tell from where the moon hung. And the notion she’d been dreaming up since the small hours rose over her like the sun soon would. She followed her intuition down the path, past the boathouse and dock, and scampering across the rocky, crescent-shaped beach. Fifteen minutes it took, and by the time she reached his dock, he stood upon it, smoking a pipe, almost as if he’d been expecting her company. In the starlight, she could see his tired eyes. Like a pair of moons they shone, and she knew it was as much for a look at them as his niece’s loss that she’d come.
“A strange time for a visitor,” he said, his voice only a whisper, but carrying like the beacon that just then passed over them.
“I’ve been thinking about your niece. About both of you.”
“I’m in a fix.”
“How’s that?”
“For one, I’m Silje’s only family.”
“I wondered.”
“And I don’t know what to do about her folks. Where to report it. What will happen to my niece.” He took a puff from his pipe. “I asked your husband for practical advice, and he only suggested I pray.”
Her response came as fast as one of those shooting stars: “Don’t rely on Mr. Sauer for practical advice. Or any advice, in fact.”
Mats regarded her through his pipe smoke. Through the lessening night. He puffed three times. “That’s your husband you speak unwell of.”
Again, like another shooting star: “I forget sometimes.”
Now Mats looked behind him and turned a fish box on its side and sat and crossed his right leg over his left knee and leaned on his elbow.
“There’s a man in Gunflint you should go see. Curtis Mayfair is his name. He’s a magistrate.”
“I know Mr. Mayfair.”
“Then I don’t have to tell you he’s an honorable man. If you went up to Duluth to report the fate of Silje’s parents, and to put to rest her place in the world with you, I expect you’d encounter no end to the bureaucracy.”
The glowing tip of his pipe brought a flash to his eyes. “The larger question is just what in damnation I’m supposed to do with her.”
“Why, she adores you. That much is plain to see.”
“Little doubt of that. But raising a child? Me?”
“Who else would do it?”
He nodded, then looked over Willa’s shoulder. “Speak of the devil.”
Willa turned, and there was the girl, listing on the dock, her nightshirt threadbare and catching starlight. When Willa turned again, back to Mats, he already stood and was emptying his pipe bowl.
“Thank you for the counsel, Mrs. Sauer.” He closed the distance between himself and his niece and scooped her sleepwalking form into his arms. Her head fell onto his shoulder. “I’d wish you a good evening, but I think the night is done.”
He walked past Willa then, and there seemed to trail him a wake not only of his sweet-smelling tobacco but his niece’s misshapen and half-awake dreams. Willa felt them as a chill in the air.
* * *
DISASSEMBLED, arrayed on the black silk, scintillating in the lamplight: the ninety-nine pieces of the Hamilton railroad watch. Pins and wheels and jewels and pinions and springs. All night he worked, taking it apart, fueled by a deranged resolve, employing every tool. Now he trained the loupe on one of the springs, tried to imagine it moving time, despaired. Hours of this, broken only by the winding of the lighthouse clockworks.
The clockworks! He checked his Longines, tried to place the hour on the morning, peeked out the window and saw the first inkling of light on the eastern horizon like it rose from the water itself. A man could believe it did if he lived here long enough. He wasn’t so far gone himself, but strange thoughts like these were already becoming regular. Instead of trusting himself, he took the spiral staircase up to the watch room. There he found the whole apparatus running exactly as it was supposed to. He checked his pocket watch again, as though much time had passed or been lost in the minute since he last looked at it. It had not.
Dear God, he thought.
Then he thought of the thing he’d been avoiding all night. The comet. He felt inside his coat for the letter he’d not yet mailed, that he’d go deliver as soon as he extinguished the lamp.
Rather than returning to the Hamilton, he climbed into the lantern room, then out onto the parapet. He chose the dark side of the lighthouse, let the starlight fall on him slowly, and, with each eclipse of the light, risked a glance heavenward. Nothing arced. No poisonous gases rained. No blaze of apocalyptic fire streaked across his view. No raving hosannas fell on his ears. And certainly he offered none himself. It was this last that riled him now. He was always waiting for the world to align. For the want of prayer to meet the moments his fear or his shame or his longing struck him most fiercely. Instead, he felt now like he almost always did: like what remained of the night’s darkness.
To the west, across the yard, a light on in his kitchen window. This brought him some satisfaction. On two counts now, maybe she wasn’t worthless after all.
* * *
Was he disappointed, a half hour later, that she did not greet him there? That instead of her pretty face, he found on the kitchen table a bowl of lukewarm oats covered with a folded tea towel and a cup of coffee with the saucer atop its rim? He stopped not to ponder whether he was, but only marched upstairs and opened the door to his bedroom.
“It’s past seven o’clock and here you are?” She sat on the edge of the cot, taking a pin out of her hair.
“Where else would I be?” she asked.
“My breakfast is cold. There’re dirty dishes in the sink. Your boots are covered with mud and sitting in the foyer like a pair of napping cats.”
“It must have been quite an inconvenience, to step around them.” She stood and pinned her hair back again.
“Must you be contrary?” He crossed the room and set his holdall on the floor beneath the window.
“Is your breakfast not sitting on the table? Is your cot not ready for you?”
“This morning’s not for sleeping away. Mine or yours or anyone else’s.”
She glared at him for a full ten seconds before he said, “You’ll need a shawl and bonnet.” When she did not move, he added, “You’ll need them now.”
She hurried past him and out of the room and before he could so much as loosen his necktie she returned, standing in the doorway with a sweater draped over one arm and her hat untied atop her head.
“I’ll be down to the dock in five minutes,” he said. “You can wait there.”
When she didn’t move, he retraced his steps to the door, and gently shut it in her face.
And when he opened it again a couple minutes later, she had not moved. “Where are we going that I should meet you on the dock?”
He wedged himself past her and turned around in the hallway. “A mail run. To Otter Bay.”
“And you can’t manage your correspondence without help from me? I suppose you have sacks and sacks of mail.”
He smoothed his mustache and sighed. “You’ll be making the run yourself sometimes, so you’ll need to see the place. And meet Herr Winkler and his wife, Clara. You’ll need to learn how to get the boat down the ways, and how to set the sail once it’s on the water.” Then he scratched his throat and sighed again, affected an air of slight condescension. “I can’t imagine that in all your training as a debutante, you’ve had many lessons in useful things. Certainly your performance thus far hasn’t indicated any.”
If he meant to sting her, he appeared to have failed. She only sneered at him and walked to the door of her own bedroom, where she spoke again. “You’re dull and overbearing.” Then she closed her door.
* * *
He waited ten minutes at the boathouse before he launched the boat and raised the mast. The westerly breeze would make going easy and returning less so. He supposed this was the way of things. Though his wife’s temper was more like relentlessly being in irons. A cold and bitter wind, too. Here she came now, fairly sauntering down the path, no bonnet atop her head, no shawl across her shoulders.
Well, let her freeze.
When she reached the dock and then the boat and Theodulf raised his hand to help her in, she ignored him, taking a seat on the forward thwart and turning her back. He answered the only way he knew how, by untying the line and pushing them off. Not more than twenty strong strokes on the oars and he was out beyond the palisade. He feathered the oars and raised the sail and watched it fill slowly with the faint breeze. He thought to tell her never to knot the sail to the gunwale, an unsafe practice, but her stalwart silence inspired the same in him, and they sailed on that way.
Rounding Big Rock, he rose to his feet and studied the depths on the port side of his boat. There at twelve fathoms lay the ghostly hull of the Lisbon. A swell of virtue surfaced in him, and again he thought to impart his wisdom, to show her this sunken wreck, to impress upon her the importance of his job and rank, but he sailed on in his morbid taciturnity instead.
He’d meant to hug the shore, but in the lee of the palisade his trailing breeze hardly puffed the jib, and so he rowed out until he found that companion wind again. With it at his back, they sailed a half hour down the shore. As he steered his boat to the town dock, Willa finally turned and said, “I expect we could have arrived fifteen minutes ago if you’d rowed instead of letting that whisper push us.”
Before he’d even tied the boat off, she was up and stretching on the dock, her hand shielding the sun from her eyes as she took in what lay before her. He looked himself. Up on the hillside he saw smoke and heard the saw from the whining mill. The enormous stacks of timber lay like a highway to the houses and churches. The fish houses and dockside businesses bustled this fine spring day, and it wasn’t more than a minute or two before Helmut Winkler appeared from the office of the Winkler Freight Depot at the mouth of the Otter River. He must have caught sight of Theodulf, for he walked half the length of the dock to greet them.
“Mr. Sauer,” he said, extending a hand toward Theodulf but keeping his eyes on Willa. “This must be your bride.”
Willa turned. “I have a name.”
“I’m pleased, Mrs. Sauer, to meet you.” Now he extended his hand to her.
“Willa,” she said, shaking his.
“Charmed,” Helmut said.
“It’s her first visit,” Theodulf interrupted. “I’ll take her around. Show her what’s what.”
To Willa, Helmut Winkler said, “Whatever else he shows you, know that you’re always welcome at my home, as well. I live just up past the Indian cemetery. You can’t miss it. Biggest house in town. I’m famous for my hospitality.”
“Famous, you say?” Willa said. “How come I’ve never heard of you?”
Now Helmut hitched his thumbs under his suspenders and pretended to be insulted. “You see, there’re families like the Sauers here”—he lifted his chin toward Theodulf—“who’re interested in making reputations. And there are families like mine, who’re interested in making fortunes.”
Theodulf puffed himself up. “The two things are not mutually exclusive.”
Helmut winked at Willa.
“You’re a fortune-making family? All this lumber, it belongs to you?” she asked.
Everyone knew the Winklers were lumber barons. But to see this inventory put their business into a vivid context. The yard went a quarter mile into the hills, and a quarter mile to the south. Two hundred and fifty acres of winter-cut white pine stacked to the rooflines of the houses in the platted part of town.
“Otter Bay isn’t even the tip of it. Our operation up on the Burnt Wood yielded twice as much as this. We’ve got mills over at the Sault and down in Ashland, too. You’d be hard-pressed to find a house in middle America that wasn’t built with our lumber.”
“And none of these boards would have a place to go if not for safe waters to get them there,” Theodulf said.
“True, true,” Helmut said. “Your lighthouse will save us on insurance, and for that we’re grateful.” He patted Theodulf on the shoulder as though he were but a schoolboy answering a trifling question. To Willa he said, “I mean it sincerely when I offer our hospitality. Now that the last of our children is off to college, my wife gets lonesome up here. The pleasure of your company would do her well.”
“But not you, sir?” Willa said.
