To My Grandson’s Wife

The rain had gone through in the night. At seven on Saturday morning the sun came into the sewing room low from the east and lay across the oak table, the nine lead ducks and a plain white envelope with blue ink on it.

Nell sat on the stool in one of Win’s shirts and looked at the envelope without touching it.

Dorothea Quimby had been waiting in her car under the streetlamp when they got home from Barlow’s the night before. She had come up the step with the leather case and handed the envelope over on the black and white tiles. “My instructions say after the meeting,” she had said. “It’s after. I don’t know what’s in it and I’d rather not be told.” She had refused soup and gone.

Nell had meant to read it then. She had meant to say a number of things. She had been up since three, though, and she had sat down on the second-floor stairs to unlace her boots and gone to sleep against the banister. Win had woken her and asked which room. She had said his.

She heard him on the narrow flight now. He came in with the blue mug and set it on the clear corner of the oak, and stood back.

“Black, one level spoon,” he said. “Do you want me here for it, or downstairs?”

“Here. Sit on the bed. I’m going to read it out. She was your grandmother before she was anything to me.”

He sat. He had on an old grey T-shirt, and his hair was standing up at the back. The ring was on his hand.

She slit the flap with her pencil. Inside were two sheets of thin blue paper, written on one side in a slanting fountain-pen hand that had not shaken at all.

“My dear,” she read. “I don’t know your name, which is a nuisance at my age. Dorothea will have made you wait for this. She was told to.

“You will have heard that I tied my shares to a wedding, and you may think me a romantic old fool. I am not one. In 1960 Lathrop & Sons owed my father eleven months’ wages. He was Amos Gilley, the loftsman, and he would have worked another eleven sooner than ask for them. So I asked. I walked into the office with his time book and told the owner’s son I would have a lawyer by Friday.

“Thomas kept the books. He sat me down and showed me there was no money to pay my father and none to be sued for either. Eleven days later he proposed to me. He said a wedding was cheaper than a lawsuit, and that a wife could look at the ledger whenever she liked. I said I would take him if my father was paid first out of whatever came in. He was paid, to the last week, by the spring of 1962. I checked the book every Friday.”

Nell stopped. She had to. Win had his elbows on his knees and was staring at the page in her hand.

“Did you know that?”

“No. I knew she brought Amos his dinner. I thought it was a story about a dinner pail.”

“It’s a story about a time book.” She found her place. “We had fifty-one years. I could not tell you the day it stopped being a settlement. I only know that I would pay those eleven months twice over to have him back for one.

“That is why there is not a word about love in the clause. I had none on my wedding day, and I will not set my grandson a test I would have failed myself.

“Winslow can price anything and ask for nothing. He has the first from me, and I am afraid he has the second from me as well. A man cannot stay married without asking. If a wife is reading this, somebody made him ask, and I expect it was you. Thank you. Go on making him.

“The lead whales on the table in my sewing room were my father’s. They are yours. They are not the house’s and they are not Winslow’s to lend. Use them.

“Honor Gilley Lathrop.”

She laid the sheets down on the oak and flattened them with her palm. Outside a gull was complaining over the Fore River.

“She married on a bargain,” Nell said. “She had terms. Paid first out of whatever came in. That’s my fourth, Win, sixty-seven years early.”

“She checked the book every Friday.” His voice was rough. “She used to go through the yard’s payables on Fridays, in the library, until she was eighty-six. I thought it was habit. I never asked her what it was a habit of.”

“You never asked.”

“No. She’s said so, in writing.” He took his glasses off and put them on again. “Dorothea told me in January that my grandfather took eleven days, and that it wasn’t her story to tell. I let that go by as well.”

Nell picked up the nearest duck and turned it over. A.G. It sat in her hand as it had on her first night in this room, when he had told her the table was hers for the year.

“These aren’t for the year,” she said.

“No. I’d no right to put a term on them. They were never mine.”

“I left them here on the twenty-first of May because I wouldn’t take what wasn’t mine. She’d already settled it.” She set the duck back in the row and squared it. Her eyes had filled, and she let them. “I’d have liked her.”

“She’d have asked what you do before she asked where you came from. Then she’d have asked what you charge.”

Nell laughed and wiped her face on his shirt cuff. She drank some of the coffee. It was right, and it steadied her.

“I’ve got something to tell you that isn’t in a letter,” she said. “In March you looked at my drawing on this table and started to tell me who buys pilot boats. You said you’d keep it till I asked. I never asked.”

“I’d have said Bath. The Kennebec pilots have run the same boat since the nineties.”

“Of course you would.” She shook her head at him. “Ursula gave me a name in New Bedford. Harry Soule, the president of the pilots. They saw the Petrel on trials. I rang him Monday, and on Wednesday he drove up with two of his men and their engineer. They walked through her on the cradle. Then Dad took them down the launch-way and stood them where the water is. Harry Soule didn’t say anything for five minutes.”

“And then?”

“And then he asked what she cost. I didn’t quote him by the hour. I gave him a price for the boat, bid Dad’s way, with his fifteen on the labour and the wire counted. Two million two hundred thousand dollars. He shook on it on the slip. The contract came Thursday, and the deposit cleared yesterday morning, while I was sitting behind a truck in Wiscasset.” She could not keep the grin down. “Hull 212 is sold. She goes to Bath in October.”

He was on his feet. He stopped a yard from her, and she saw him hold on to whatever he had been about to do.

“May I say I’m proud of you? I know I had no part in her.”

“You ground the tabs off two of her bottom plates before Pauline took them away. Say it.”

“I’m proud of you. I’m not surprised, and I’m proud.”

“There’s more. They asked what she was called. I didn’t name the last one I drew.” She touched the edge of the oak. “She’s the Odette.”

“Your mother.”

“And my middle name, so nobody can ever leave me off her.” She looked up at him. “Which brings me to it. I’m keeping my name. It’s on a building and it’s on a boat now. And I’m keeping my yard. Friday to Sunday I’m in Skerry Harbor, the same as it says. I’m not giving that up for anybody’s eleven rooms.”

“I haven’t asked you to.”

“I know you haven’t. I’m telling you so there’s nothing folded over.” She got off the stool. Standing, she came to his collarbone, and she had to tip her head back, and she did. She had carried this up an aisle and down again and slept on it. It did not need arranging.

“I love you,” Nell said. “I’m not leaving in January.”

He did not move. She watched it reach him. His face opened, slowly, the way the harbor did when the ice went out.

“Say something, Win.”

“I can’t find a figure for it.”

“Good. Don’t look for one.”

He put his hands on either side of her face, with his fingertips under her jaw, and rested his forehead on hers. He was shaking a little. She had told him once that she liked it, and she still did.

“I love you,” he said. “I said it at a bench, with a file in your hand, and I’d say it there again.”

“I heard you. It took me eleven days. I’m told that’s about right for this house.”

She turned out of his hands before she could lose the thread, and pulled the cardboard tube from under the table. Dorothea had rolled the vellum back into it herself at the staging.

“Where’s yours?”

“In my desk across the landing. In a folder with your name on the tab.”

“Get it.”

He was back in less than a minute. She laid the two sheets side by side on the oak, under the east window, and weighted the corners with Amos Gilley’s ducks. Her copy had the black line through term two and N.O.T. beside it, with the twenty-seventh of March. His was clean. It had been rolled carefully and handled a good deal.

“You’ve read this more than I have,” she said.

“Most nights in June.”

She took the drafting pen from behind her ear and a triangle from the rack. On his copy she ruled term two through, to match, and initialled it. Then she laid the edge of the triangle under the first line on her own.

One. One year on paper, counted from the wedding day. Then a quiet divorce.

“This one takes both of us,” she said. “I’ll rule. You hold the triangle.”

He held it. His hand was steadier than it had been on the staging. She drew the line through, end to end, and then through the same words on his sheet. She wrote N.O.T. and the date in each margin and gave him the pen.

He wrote W.E.L. under hers, twice, small and upright.

Nell looked at the two sets of letters, one above the other.

“Not well,” she read. “Faye’s going to be unbearable.”

“We could reverse the order.”

“Well not? That’s worse.”

He laughed, the low one she had first heard in this room. Then he capped the pen and laid it down, and turned to face her, and she saw him stop and gather himself.

“I asked you badly in January. I had percentages in it, and a price. I’d like to ask you properly.” He took a breath. “Nell. Will you stay married to me? There’s no year on it and no date at the bottom. I can’t offer you anything you’d take, so I’m only asking.”

“Yes.”

“That was quick.”

“I’ve had it ready since the launch-way. You owed me that word for three weeks and I’m not making you wait for it.” She put her hand flat on his chest. “Yes, Win. Now ask me the other thing. I can see you wanting to.”

“Will you come to bed? It’s twenty past seven on a Saturday and I’ve never once seen you in daylight.”

“Yours or mine?”

“Whichever you say.”

“Yours. It’s the only bed in two counties you fit in.”

She led him across the six feet of worn carpet by the hand.

She had slept in his room most nights that spring and never looked at it. It had a bay window over the Promenade, with the river beyond the rooftops and no curtains drawn. There was a shelf of company reports, and a wide bed that he had made at half past six, because he could not leave one unmade. The sun had not reached this side of the house. The light in the room was clear and even, and there was nowhere in it to hide.

He reached for his glasses and stopped.

“I’m keeping them on for a while,” he said. “I’ve had you by lamplight, and in the dark under a roof. I’d like to see what I’m doing.”

“Then look.”

He undid the buttons of his own shirt on her, one at a time, without asking leave for any of them, and pushed it off her shoulders. He stood looking at her. He looked at the freckles across her collarbones that the coveralls never let the sun find twice. He looked at her breasts, and at the pale band on her wrist where her glove ended, and at the scar. She stood still for it. It was easier than it had been in May.

“You’re brown to the elbows and nowhere else,” he said.

“I work indoors. You’re not brown anywhere.”

“I work in an office and get seasick. Take this off me.”

She pulled the T-shirt over his head. She took her time with the rest. When they lay down the sheets were cool, and the bed was so wide that she stretched her arms out both ways and touched nothing.

“Nobody has to breathe in turns,” she said.

“I miss the rafter.”

“You do not.”

He kissed her, and went on kissing her, as if there were no boat due anywhere. His mouth moved down her throat and across her breasts and along her ribs, and he stopped wherever she caught her breath, and stayed. She ran her hands over his shoulders and into his hair. Neither of them hurried. It was the first time there had been no line on a page waiting at the end of it.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Under the eaves, when I said I’d stopped counting and you didn’t answer. What was in your head?”

He raised it from her hip. “That I’d have given everything my father left me to say it back. And that I was already working out what a wire would cost. Both at once. I’ve never been so ashamed in a bed.”

“I had three words in my mouth that night. I gave them to your knuckles instead.”

“I felt something. I thought it was only a kiss.”

“It wasn’t only anything.” She pulled him up to her. “And in February, at my door, when I stood with my hand on the knob?”

“I counted to three.”

“So did I. On the other side of it, after I’d shut it. I was furious with myself. Counting’s your habit.”

“You may have it. I’m trying to give it up.”

She took his glasses off then, and reached to set them on the shelf, and he let her. His hand went over her stomach and down, and he watched her face, close, with his dark eyes a little unfocused. She did not tell him where this time. He knew. She said his name and held on to his wrist, and it came through her in a long slow wave that left her with her face pressed into his neck.

“Now you,” she said, when she could. “Tell me what you want. In words.”

“You, under me, where I can see you. And your eyes open.”

“Then come here.”

He came into her slowly, in that clear light, and they both kept still for a moment. She could see every line of his face. She saw the small scar on his jaw from a razor in January and the grey mark the face shield had worn into his forehead. She saw what was in his eyes, and he did not try to cover it.

“I love you,” he said. “I want it said while I’m looking at you.”

“I love you. Don’t stop looking.”

They moved together, unhurried. It built as the tide came up the launch-way, a little at a time and without a sound, until there was no ground left under either of them. His hand found hers on the pillow. The two bronze bands met. She heard him say her name, and her own voice answering, and she held his eyes the whole way, and neither of them looked away at the end.

Afterwards he lay with his head on her breast and she lay with her fingers in his hair. A square of sun had found the far wall.

“I didn’t count anything,” he said.

“I know. I was watching.”

His telephone buzzed on the shelf. He reached for it, squinted and held it at arm’s length. Then he gave it to her.

It was from Toby Keegan. Baptiste signed 8:10 at my desk. Four boats. Don’t either of you come in.

“Seventy-six million dollars,” Win said to the ceiling. “And he’s given us the day off.”

“He’s given you the day off. I’m on hull 2 Monday at six, at a hundred and eighty-five an hour. Term five.”

“Five stands.”

“They all stand, three to seven. The note stays frozen till the twenty-ninth of January and not a day longer. No gifts. My rate, my floor, my name in the corner. Monday to Thursday here, Friday to Sunday there.” She turned his face up with one finger. “And seven.”

“I’d like seven underlined on my copy. I’ve only got it underlined on yours.”

“I’ll do it before breakfast.”

“Next Friday,” he said. “May I come up with you?”

“You’d better. The tabs don’t stop.” She looked at the ring on her hand, in the daylight, and at his. “And there’s a round of bronze on a windowsill that’s had no customer since January. It’s got one now. Dad’s been waiting six months to pick up his punches.”
***