Little Woman in Blue Read online

  “Not really children any more, except for Rose. Una and Julian are grown.” Mother picked up the blue socks with red and white trim she was knitting.

  “I suppose I should call on them,” May said.

  A few days later, May picked huckleberries from the hill behind their houses, and she brought over a pie. The parlor looked finer than it had when the Alcotts had lived there, with velvet drapes and shiny wallpaper. A marble mantelpiece had been put over the hearth. Busts of Roman gods stood on the piano.

  As Mrs. Hawthorne poured tea from a silver pot, she said, “Una will be sorry to have missed you, but she’s resting, poor dear. She never quite recovered from a fever she got in Rome. We want to add a room where she’ll get more sun, but Mr. Wetherbee left without a day’s notice when war was declared, leaving Mr. Hawthorne’s tower room unfinished. I know it’s necessary to save the Union, but my husband needs a peaceful place to work.”

  May looked up as Julian entered. His jacket and slim pants were as dark as his thick hair. He was tall with wide shoulders, though the way his jacket fell suggested they were soft, not necessarily from laziness, but because he was young enough for his muscles not to have yet hardened. She put out her hand, which he took in his. Its pulse cast a heat.

  After some conversation, while Julian finished a quarter of the pie, they stepped outside. May looked back at the house. Ivy grew toward the gables and a room, without shingles or shutters by the windows, that rose above the roof.

  “My father hopes that being a floor above everyone else will inspire him,” Julian said.

  “I wish I had a tower.”

  “And be cut off from your admirers?”

  “I wouldn’t miss people asking why I was painting when I might be helping my dear mother.” She shook her head, hoping he wouldn’t see her flush from his tossed-off compliment. “Concord must seem dull after Europe.”

  “My father believes that since no one can understand him, he might as well live in exile. But he was afraid his children would forget we’re Americans.”

  “Did you get to Paris? How I envy you seeing all that art!”

  “Masterpieces get tiring after one or two. Except for those my mother tried to rush us by. That Venus statue. Quite right she shouldn’t bother with clothes.”

  “All that art was wasted on you.”

  “I suppose it was.” He rested his blue-brown eyes on hers. “Europe had nothing like what I find right here.”

  “I want to see the Louvre for myself.” She tried to make her voice prim.

  “Why don’t you?”

  She was relieved that he didn’t guess that she was not someone who’d be sent on the Grand Tour to become cultured and meet eligible expatriates. She said, “How can I paint when I’ve seen prints borrowed from the Emersons but not a real brushstroke from Michelangelo’s hand? No one expects Louisa to write without having read great books.”

  “Surely you’re not serious about art.”

  “I hope you don’t say that because I’m a woman.”

  “I don’t believe a single painting in the Louvre was made by one.”

  Turning her face to mask her irritation, she started across the meadow between their houses. He seemed to see this as an invitation, and he walked beside her. When she stumbled over a stone, he threw an arm around her waist, then didn’t let go. She tried to step away, but he squeezed tighter, so she had to separate herself with some force.

  “Did you learn to take such liberties on the continent?” she asked.

  “No, I thought of them all myself.”

  She stepped away and headed home, telling herself that she didn’t want a frivolous suitor.

  That fall she began teaching penmanship, composition, and elementary French at Mr. Sanborn’s school. She drew gods, goddesses, cherubs, and horses on her bedroom walls and up the sides of windows, and she gave private drawing lessons to two girls. On Wednesday evenings, she joined ladies to roll bandages torn from old muslin or scrape linen tablecloths with a pine shingle, collecting lint to send south to dress wounds. Sometimes she borrowed a horse from the Emersons, who were grateful that she kept Dolly and Grace exercised. She paid calls on veterans, who mostly wanted to talk about almost anything except what they’d seen.

  Life was meant to be more than work. While May still had misgivings about Julian, she couldn’t refuse his invitation to gather chestnuts at a neighbor’s farm one Saturday. Afterward, they sat close in the hay wagon and by the bonfire under starlight. On Thursday evenings that winter, May set out bowls of popcorn and homemade root beer and invited neighbors for games of whist, euchre, or Generals, which was currently more popular than Authors. She teamed up with Julian and slipped off her pumps, tapping his toes or feeling his boot on her ankles, not just to win at cards, but because cheating held its own pleasures. They played charades and danced the polka, while Ellen Emerson played the piano. One night, when the moon was full, everyone left to skate on the river. May and Julian ducked behind trees, where his warm lips softened against hers. Something shifted like ocean waves above and below her belly. May thought her sisters would be horrified, for Anna had confided that she’d kissed John only after they were betrothed. But the old rules were changing. News from battlefields made May loath to spurn any chance to feel the strength of her own body.

  That spring, May watched Julian drill on Lexington Road. There was nothing like a musket on a shoulder to make a lad look older, though she hoped he wouldn’t go off to war. There was grief enough at home. One day, when it was warm enough to go out without a shawl, Mother asked her to bring a basket of Father’s apples and some of her tincture of spearmint to Mr. Thoreau, with instructions to take it cold with cream and sugar.

  In his parlor, May looked at a stack of books, a vase of hyacinths, a music box, a cane bed, and blood-stained cloths. His aunt tucked a Bible under her elbow, leaned toward the man whose eyes looked big in his gaunt face, and said, “Have you made your peace with God?”

  “I didn’t know we ever quarreled,” Mr. Thoreau replied.

  May told him about the return of bluebirds, robins, spiders, violets, and fiddleheads, for he could only see bluebottle flies at the window. He talked about the water lilies that opened on Concord River in July, and she told him the ice had broken there. She’d heard phoebes, meadowlarks, and peepers, and she had seen boys crouch to catch tadpoles near the skunk cabbage and pussy willows.

  Later in April, the beaks of starlings turned yellow. In May, church bells rang forty-four times, one for every year of Mr. Thoreau’s life. Louisa hiked in from Boston, clutching andromeda, which hadn’t yet bloomed into bell-shaped flowers, but whose deep green leaves were fragrant, like the pine boughs piled before the altar. Schools had been closed for the day, and children had picked violets now spread on his casket. Louisa and May sat by their parents in front of crowded pews.

  “He hated churches,” Louisa whispered.

  “Mr. Emerson said he didn’t want to mourn alone. When people die, little goes the way they hoped.” May watched Louisa press her lips together, supposing she was angry about more than the church. May was sorry she’d ever thought Mr. Thoreau was too old and short for her sister, or that he wore his trousers too low.

  After the service, May walked between Julian and Louisa in a procession to the cemetery, which included philosophers, writers, editors, and hundreds of children whose necks smelled of soap.

  “Mr. Thoreau showed me how to catch pickerel and chub with blades of grass when I was a boy. We twisted the grass into loops,” Julian said.

  “He must have liked you,” May said.

  “He put up with anyone who was willing to follow him around the woods and not bother him with talking.”

  “He told me how the water lilies near Egg Rock open all at once, with the first touch of sunlight.” May squeezed Louisa’s hand. “Sometime we should go there at dawn.”

  “When did he say that?” Louisa asked.

  “The last time I saw him. Not long ago.�
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  Louisa didn’t reply. When they reached the gravesite in Sleepy Hollow, she stood still and silent. Louisa didn’t cry until they were home and May told her about bringing him apples and spearmint. Then Louisa yelled, too. “You take what you don’t even want!”

  May explained that she’d been doing Mother a favor, reminding Louisa that she hadn’t been around. This didn’t seem to matter. Louisa hardly spoke to her before she returned to Boston, though when she came back in July, she acted as if she’d never raised her voice. Her forehead smoothed as she told May she was writing about a woman in doomed love with a woodsman philosopher. May thought such writing was a peculiar way to mourn, and she couldn’t imagine such a book selling, even if Louisa came up with a better title than Moods. She didn’t say this, but, grateful that she seemed happier, invited her to swim with her and Julian.

  “Is it proper for you to traipse about with him?” Louisa asked.

  “Weren’t we taught to go where we please? Besides, we usually go with Ellen and Edith, or Julian’s sisters, after convincing their mother that the farmer boys keep to the side of the pond by the railroad.”

  “So I’m to be chaperone.”

  “That’s not why I ask. Some cool water will do you a world of good.”

  On the next hot afternoon, May, Louisa, and Julian walked through shadows cast by high branches that arched from one side of the dirt road to the other. Orange day lilies grew by cornfields.

  “Julian gets up early every morning to practice marching with the Concord Auxiliary.” May hoped to impress Louisa.

  “Lexington Road could be the closest I’ll get to the front,” Julian said. “My mother says I’m too young to go to war, though plenty of fellows my age are signing up.”

  “Our father is writing letters begging for a place in the army. He admits sixty-one is rather elderly to be a soldier, but he reminds them he’s a vegetarian and teetotaler and couldn’t be in finer health,” May said.

  “He wants to show the South whose side God is on,” Louisa said. “I wish I could fight, too. All women can do is roll bandages and make jam for hospital raffles. Julian, I hope you do enlist.”

  “You look good in blue. But you mustn’t break your mother’s heart,” May said.

  “People say your father is on the southern side.” Louisa looked at Julian.

  “He’s not, but he thinks southerners have good manners, which he finds lacking around here.”

  “He should hardly comment on etiquette when he walks the long way through the woods into town, rather than pass our yard and risk conversation with our father,” Louisa said.

  “My father never quite recovered from a long poem yours brought over to recite.”

  “Louisa admires your father’s novels.” May changed the subject. “What is he writing now?”

  “No one knows. When he worked as a consul in Europe, he kept saying how he needed solitude and silence to write. Now that he has it, he mostly paces.”

  “What I’d give to travel and find dastardly dukes and corrupt ladies-in-waiting for my tales,” Louisa said.

  “I’m not much of a reader, but I’m looking forward to your novel if it’s as immoral as May says it is,” Julian said.

  “May, what did you tell him?”

  “Only that it’s hard to please editors in a city where some ladies put books by men and women on different shelves to avoid a hint of scandal.”

  They reached Walden Pond, which reflected the pointed tops of spruce trees and rounded silhouettes of maples. Red-winged black birds and yellow warblers sipped water by blueberry bushes. May and Louisa took sheets from their baskets and wound them around a few birches to make a space where they could change into flannel tunics and pantaloons. Louisa unpinned her chestnut-colored hair and let it fall to her waist, reminding May how she’d grown up thinking Louisa was the most beautiful sister. This role seemed bequeathed to May as her sisters brushed her light hair, casting such a spell of confidence that by the time she began to depend more upon mirrors than her sisters’ touches, and saw that her looks were ordinary, her belief in her own allure didn’t dim with the recognition that her nose was too long to be classical, her eyes, neither gray nor green, were too small, and she was starting to tower over her friends.

  When she and Louisa stepped away from the cloth-wound trees, Julian was already swimming. Louisa dragged in a yellow rowboat that belonged to the Emersons, who welcomed borrowers. She slung her legs over the side and took the oars. May waded until the water reached her waist, then plunged in and swam toward Julian. Her soaked tunic was heavy, but her swift strokes and kicks kept her buoyant. Flannel pressed against her legs, a pleasurable sensation, as was noticing Julian’s eyes on her arms as they arced over the pond’s surface.

  He swam toward her. His wet hair and eyelashes were black. He pressed his wide hands on her shoulders and pushed her down. Water filled her eyes and mouth. She felt the ache of a shriek caught in her throat, then burst back into the air. She shook her hair off her face, laughed, caught Julian’s waist in her hands, and pulled him under. Her mouth trailed over his neck, which was slick, though prickly under his chin.

  He grabbed her foot and slid his hand up her calf. As his palm reached her thigh, her legs opened. She twisted around, raised her arms over the surface, and swam toward the rowboat. Julian grabbed her foot again. She kicked it away, so that her bathing costume billowed. She reached the boat before him. Louisa gave her a hand as she tried to scramble in.

  Julian clutched the rim of the rowboat and pulled it down. May let go of Louisa’s hand, slid back into the water, and helped Julian rock the boat. It tipped over. Louisa tumbled in. She flung up her arms to propel herself out of the water, sputtering and laughing. All three splashed and dunked each other until they were breathless. Then May and Louisa swam to shore, dragged the boat up the pebbly beach, and changed from their clinging clothes into dry dresses. They sat where moss and dried pine needles made the ground pale green and burnt orange. May spread her fingers to comb Louisa’s hair, watching Julian wade from the water. As he headed behind some pines to change into dry trousers and a shirt, she glimpsed his broad pale back.

  “He’s not a bad fellow,” Louisa said.

  “I prefer his company to that of the scholars who tell Father how our New England granite is more precious than emeralds from afar or farmers who can’t carry on a conversation.” May stopped talking as Julian emerged from the woods, pushing back his damp dark hair.

  “Do you want to row across the pond? I want to try out for the crew team, and I should practice,” he said.

  “He’s going to Harvard soon,” May reminded Louisa.

  “If I pass the examinations,” he said.

  “You should be grateful for the chance at college,” Louisa said.

  “You aren’t going to give me one of your suffragist talks, are you?” Julian started shoving out the boat. “Aren’t some colleges open to women?”

  “Not many. And all require money,” Louisa said.

  “Our cousin Lucy is going to medical school.” May shook her head as Julian beckoned. “I’ll stay and keep my sister company.”

  She saw Louisa’s mouth soften, as if touched that she’d choose to be with her. They looked at the pond, which was partly shadowed this late in the day, but some water still shimmered a jewel-like blue. A muskrat paddled to shore. A heron spread its wide wings.

  “I can’t see the use of art, when beauty is right here.” Louisa took a notebook from her basket and propped it on her knees.

  “But not everyone sees it. Artists try to point out the ordinary splendors.” May borrowed paper and a pencil to sketch the pond and hill where Mr. Thoreau had lived for two years, two months, and two days. She even drew the cabin. The world seemed to turn quiet while she moved her hand.

  Louisa glanced at her paper. “His little house is gone.”

  “Can’t you see it?” May squinted at the pines and hemlocks.

  “Across town, where it wa
s hauled to store grain.”

  “Look harder.”

  “I liked him.”

  “I know.” May touched her hand, then added a rowboat to the picture, showing the back of a man holding oars. The more she moved her pencil, the more shapes and hues she saw in the shadows. “A view like this seems like a message from the world. Drawing is my way to keep up my end of the conversation. I’ve missed it.”

  “Too busy with card games, I hear.”

  “Making tea and conversation, hanging the wash, and sorting the mail for bills. The lot of the unmarried daughter.”

  Louisa watched Julian rowing back and asked, “Are you smitten?”

  “He’ll be off to Harvard soon.” May thought of how Cambridge was a good afternoon’s hike from Concord and how Julian would surely meet more young ladies there. She said, “I want a beau who will take me to Europe, not tell me about it.”

  “You don’t still have that dream?”

  “My art would improve with Michelangelo and Raphael to teach me.”

  “Perhaps you should look for a living tutor. There must be some in Boston. Maybe we should find a place to room together.”

  “What?”

  “Do you still want to live with me?”

  “I don’t want to be the girl who’s left behind.”

  “And I wouldn’t want anyone to speak of my sister that way. You could take my place at the kindergarten, so I’d have more time for writing. But you should remember that Chapel Street is where immigrants come for help. These aren’t the little girls in fresh frocks or the boys with ringlets you see with governesses in the park.”

  “Did you forget I taught girls in an asylum? If I can calm girls who consider jumping off bridges, I can manage children’s tantrums. Lu, you won’t regret it. I can help fix up your wardrobe and cook us lovely suppers.”

  “I can’t have you fussing with clothes or clever dishes, banning drinking from jam jars. I like to put a few apples in the stove, then pick up my pen. If my writing is going well, I don’t want someone telling me to put out the lamp.”

  “You can write until morning. Something dazzling enough to make a fortune.”