CHAPTER 4
WHEN THE BONFIRE had been doused and Oskar and I came into our own rooms, I went directly for my writing paper and pen. I didn’t know when I might have a chance to send letters, but I longed to talk with the people I’d left, if only in my head. I elevated our situation in a letter to Lucy, describing the vista as being what Mr. Edmund Burke would call sublime, exciting terror and admiration in equal measure, although I felt far more terror than admiration that night. And I wasn’t sure what was more disquieting, the emptiness in all directions or the people who shared my isolation.
The closed windows dampened the crash of the waves far below us, but the sounds of life at the top of the rock remained distinct. There were footsteps on the path; someone heading toward the light, then someone coming back. Archie Johnston, that must be. Yes, I could hear him climbing the steps to his front door and coughing as he passed through his sitting room to his kitchen. On the opposite side, the children’s feet pounded up the stairs to their bedrooms; doors slammed exuberantly.
I let Oskar show himself around our house. The noises he made as he galloped through the place, opening the cupboards and windows to peer in and out, were similar to the children’s banging.
“Jesus! What’s this mess?” he shouted down.
“It belongs to the children. I . . . they’ll . . . we’ll get rid of it.”
“Looks like they dragged half the beach up there,” he said, seating himself beside me at last.
“Their mother has a collection, too. It’s awful! Some poor sailor’s teeth!”
He’d put his hand in my lap and was beginning to stroke my thigh, but I stopped his fingers and held his hand firmly between my own. “Up here, I feel so . . . exposed.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone can hear us. Mr. Johnston. Listen.” The cough came again from the apartment next door. “The Crawleys. God.”
“Oh, God!” He laughed. “I’m not worried about Him. But I agree that Mrs. Crawley is a different matter. She’s daunting, isn’t she? And the way she enlisted you to teach her children. I wouldn’t like to cross her.”
“You were on her side! Telling her what a wonderful teacher I would be!”
“You would!”
“I suppose I must try.”
“Well, what else are you to do?”
“There’s a good deal of work about this place,” I mimicked, “and no Chinese servant to do it.”
But he was right. Who was I here? Not Trudy Schroeder, pampered daughter, lively friend, bright student, all but affianced to steady Ernst Dettweiler. Here I would be a disappointment because I didn’t know how to make butter.
“Will you like your work?” I asked.
“It’ll be easy enough.” He imitated Mr. Crawley’s slightly nasal tones. “Scrape the rust, clean the lenses, keep the rollers and the air compressor running at the proper speed. Paint and polish. Check the boiler. Reset the pendulum every six hours, so the foghorn sounds on schedule. It’s only maintaining machinery,” he concluded. “I could do it in my sleep.”
“If you don’t like it, maybe we could go back. Maybe not to Milwaukee, but to Chicago or Cincinnati. Somewhere not at the edge of the earth.”
“Go back? No! This place is exactly as I’d hoped it would be.” He rose from the sofa and began to range about as he spoke, testing the slide of the windows, studying the pattern of the wallpaper. “I’ll be able to do some real work here. When we go back, it’ll be in triumph.”
“Work on your electric engine, you mean?”
Oskar was among those who thought that electricity might be an efficient alternative to steam power. He’d built a small electric engine in Milwaukee and attached it to a canoe, which attracted a good deal of attention on the river. The problem, as he’d explained it to me, was how to make such a machine large enough to move a craft as heavy as a ship. When we’d learned that we’d be going to a lighthouse, he’d hoped it would provide a useful place for experiments in this line, but halfway here he’d stopped talking about such plans. I was pleased to hear them revived, although to me such work seemed impracticable in this setting. It was far more isolated than we’d imagined.
“You know, I don’t believe that interests me anymore,” he said. “So many others are already beavering away at electric engines. I’m going to do something new here. Something no one else has got hold of yet.”
“That’s wonderful, Oskar. What is it?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure yet, but something will present itself. For a curious person, the world is full of opportunities.” He threw open the large parlor window with a bang and leaned out of it, drawing the air loudly into his lungs. “Don’t you think this place is inspiring?”
“No,” I admitted, wrapping my shawl tightly around my shoulders. The temperature seemed to have dropped twenty degrees since the afternoon. “It frightens me. I don’t think people are meant to be here.”
“What’s to be afraid of?”
“Everything! The wind that’s trying to blow us off, the rocks that are waiting to spear us! If we were to step off this mountain one night, how would anyone even know what had happened to us? Being here, it’s like we’ve disappeared.”
At last, he turned and focused his disconcertingly bright blue eyes on me. “But don’t you see? It’s not we who’ve disappeared. It’s they. We’ve got rid of all those people who would tell us what to do, who to be. Except,” he added slyly, “for Mrs. Crawley. Now, if she were to step off this mountain . . .”
“Oskar!” But he’d made me laugh, and I was grateful for it.
“And now, Mrs. Swann,” he said, extending his hand, “if it would please you to accompany me to our own bed in our own house, we’ll do whatever we like.”
? ? ?
It may have been our own bed in our own house, but when I awoke later in the night, it was nevertheless an unfamiliar place, full of unfamiliar shadows and, aside from the sheets that smelled comfortingly of home, strange odors. Oskar had opened the bedroom window, and in the dark, the ocean seemed to rise to me. I could smell it, its greenish, half-growing, half-decaying scent laced with salt and an unwashed animal stink. Or perhaps the smell was coming from the children’s collection. I got up and closed the door to the second bedroom and our door and the window as well.
Except for the bed, our room was empty, so different from the fullness of my parents’ house. I thought of the vanity in my mother’s room at home—no, not at home, this was home now—where she’d brushed my hair not so very long ago and eons ago in preparation for my wedding. I thought of the silver-backed brush and mirror engraved with the swooping initials of the mother my own mother had left behind in Hamburg, a set surrendered to a dusty pawnshop in San Francisco.
I sniffed. The smell had been coming not from the open window nor from the next room but from Oskar. The sea had marked him with its briny green odor and its underlying scent of rot.