Pulling latex gloves from his hands and shoving them into his pockets, he walks across the room toward them both. “Hello,” he says.
“Hi,” says Ivy, her voice carefully nonchalant again. “This is Philip Okada,” she tells Jane. “He’s visiting for the gala. Philip, this is Kiran’s friend Janie.”
“Nice to meet you,” says Philip, speaking with what sounds like an English accent.
“You too,” says Jane, glancing at the gloves dangling from his coat pocket.
“Forgive me,” he says. “I’m something of a germophobe and I often wear them. How do you know Kiran?”
“She went to college in my hometown.”
“Ah.” He smiles a polite smile, his face creasing into lines that make Jane think he must be at least thirty. Thirty-five? Even older? When do old people get laugh lines?
“How do you know the Thrash family?” asks Jane, deciding to be nosy.
“The New York party scene,” says Philip, his expression pleasantly bland.
“I see,” says Jane, wondering what that means, exactly, and how a germophobe manages a crowded party “scene.” Is there more here than meets the eye?
“Well,” he says, “see you later, no doubt.” He bends down to give Jasper a vigorous rub behind the ears. Then he descends the stairs, sliding his hand along the metal railing.
“You’d think a germophobe would avoid dogs and railings,” says Jane.
Ivy’s face is expressionless. “Take whatever you need,” she says, turning away. “Our attic is your attic.”
Definitely more here than meets the eye.
*
In the end, Jane borrows a rotary saw, a small lathe, a tarp, some beautiful birch rods, a can of stain, a can of varnish, and a worktable that’s a good height for her sewing machine. The workshop contains a thousand other things she could use, but she’s already embarrassed enough by her riches, especially when she needs to take two trips to get them downstairs.
While Jane is balancing her first armload, Ivy’s phone makes a noise like one of the horns in Lord of the Rings. “Sorry,” she says, glancing at it. “That’s Cook. You’ll be okay? Leave the worktable. Someone’ll bring it to you later.”
“Okay,” Jane says, “thanks,” wondering when she’ll see Ivy again, but too shy to ask.
Jasper follows Jane back and forth from the attics to her rooms, stumping along cheerfully behind her, waiting patiently at the base of the attic steps each time. “I like you, Jasper,” says Jane.
Her suitcase and crates arrived while she was gone. Dinner is hours away and the storm is still raging on the other side of the glass. At her morning room windows, Jasper beside her, Jane gazes out at the drenched world. She supposes it’s an appropriate day, an appropriate setting, to consider the making of umbrellas.
It wasn’t the colors that had first drawn Jane to umbrellas, it wasn’t the mechanics.
It was Aunt Magnolia.
On rainy days, when Jane was a child and Aunt Magnolia was away on a deep-sea photography trip, Jane would build an umbrella fort on the campus green and hide inside. The sound of rain thudding against a taut piece of fabric stretched above her was like being underwater. Jane could crawl into her umbrella fort and imagine herself where Aunt Magnolia was.
The elderly neighbors, who cared for Jane when Aunt Magnolia was gone, were warm and attentive and kind, but they were old, and Jane was generally left to play alone. Aunt Magnolia had given her an old scuba helmet to wear inside her umbrella fort, so that her own breathing sounded strange. Sometimes, depending on the weather, a chorus of tiny frogs joined the other noises. Jane would lie on her back in the wet grass, breathing through the nozzle, listening, pretending the umbrellas were giant jellyfish.
And once when she was in high school, when Aunt Magnolia had been taking pictures in the oceans of New Zealand for what felt like an eon and Jane had been staying in the apartment alone, she’d found herself in art class building an umbrella sculpture. Her art teacher had opened a closet full of miscellaneous junk and told everyone to go scrounging and make something. The closet had contained birch rods, various wires and metal fixings, and a huge piece of dark fabric spread across with fireflies. It had been raining that day, water coursing down the art room windows. It wasn’t really what the art teacher had meant by “art,” but it had somehow found Jane, this lopsided, water-absorbent thing with an open canopy like a real umbrella. It had been a mess, really. Made of lucky discoveries and countless mistakes. But tears stung her eyes when she looked at it.
Who can say how we choose our loves? After that first attempt, she’d rifled through the coat closet, snatched up the two bedraggled umbrellas she’d found, then applied herself to taking them apart.
Their tension came from branches that reached away from a central trunk and from each other—as far from each other, in fact, as they could get. The reaching away was what held the domed canopy taut and stretched in place. Why had Jane loved this, that the reaching away held it together? Who knows. But she had, and she’d taken apart every umbrella she could find, and experimented with waterproofing, and built rickety frames Aunt Magnolia would stumble over, or find piled in corners. She became particular about small variations in color and shape. She worked on them a little bit every day back then, almost compulsively.
“There is nothing wrong with impractical loves,” Aunt Magnolia had responded whenever Jane had apologized for spending so much time on them.
And then college had started up and she’d had no time for anything, except schoolwork that had felt like a hill of sliding rock.
“Janie-love,” Aunt Magnolia would say sometimes. “When did you last work on an umbrella?”
Jane’s grades had been passing when Aunt Magnolia had been around to help, but her aunt had had a lot of travel that fall and Jane found herself failing biology. And then Aunt Magnolia had died. Jane had dropped out of school. And umbrellas were all she could face, almost as if one perfect umbrella might make Aunt Magnolia come back.
Jane sits on the striped sofa in her morning room, holding her stomach. Jasper comes and leans against her legs.
Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh set out to sea once in an umbrella, Jane remembers. During a flood, to save Piglet.
Maybe, she thinks to herself, she should take her umbrellas down to the water, turn them upside down like boats, and send them off on the waves, carrying nothing. Maybe if they carried away all the nothing, she’d be left with something.
“Ocean pollution, hm?” Aunt Magnolia would say to that. “That’s your big solution, is it?” Or, “All right, allow yourself a good wallow, then get up from that sofa, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and do something useful.”
All right, fine, Aunt Magnolia, Jane thinks. For you, I’m getting up. With a great breath, she pushes herself to her feet and surveys the morning room.
She lays the tarp down to protect the middle of the shag carpet, where she plans to do the most heavy-duty work, then begins pulling umbrellas out of her crates and opening them. There isn’t room for them all, so she stacks some unopened on the floor and leans some in corners while Jasper watches appreciatively. She’s brought every one. She has no other place to store them; Jane brought everything she owns to this house. She has thirty-seven completed umbrellas. Some of them aren’t even so bad. They transform the room into an odd landscape of colorful, spiky hills.