Mary’s storm

July 1928

Along the brick streets of the suburban town the green elms lean out their big branches.  From the sleeping porch she can hear a vacuum cleaner starting up with a whine.  Through the screens she sees the bobbing figure of a maid next door.  The vans from the laundry come with their bundles in white sheets with their names stenciled in blue.  The carpenter drives slowly with his load of glass, his truck idling at an intersection, undecided.  The sky a landscape with great towering clouds.  Across the street, visible from the study window, a girl squats at the grass at the edge of her yard watching a worm in the gutter.  It has been cut in half and the halves are writhing around and touching blindly.  She has chased away the bird but now she wonders if she had done the wrong thing…

It also puzzles the girl that you throw away good interesting glass bottles rather than save them after they have been emptied.

Summer and the heat grows, falling from the sky and rising from the earth at once.  The lawns give off a hot fog and the sky turns pale and painfully bright, although the sun is lost behind the haze.  A dog lies helpless in the shade, his fur glossy and full of dust.  The maid is listening to the radio, very loud as she goes through the house, and now it begins to crackle with distant lightning.  The air shifts, grows thoughtful.  The birds fall silent.  The sky clears of its haze and now there are thunderheads, gray on the horizon.  They will be here in an hour.

She watches the girl from the window.  The girl has given up on the worm, which is dead.  She goes in for lunch and emerges again looking sleepy and with a paunch in her dress.  Her shoes are white but scuffed at the toe and her socks keep sliding into the heels, and now as she sits reading on her lawn she pulls at them without changing her expression.  Her dress falls into her lap and reveals her underpants and she absently puts the dress back where it belongs.  She is reading something without pictures, so she must be eight or nine.  She is content to sit still, in the shade of the elm.  The shadow moves across the lawn and she follows it, hefting herself up with two hands and moving along the grass two feet at a time.  With the first rumble of thunder she looks up as though into a distant photograph.  She is far away.  The worm and the bird and the morning’s fight over oatmeal…she remembers nothing.  Her eyes climb to the window where Mary is sitting, watching, but pass over without catching.  There is a glare on the glass or possibly she is used to seeing Mary by now, or she is seeing something else entirely.

The thunder comes again, a deep bass with a musical echo.  The maid has turned off the radio.

It is the stillness that Mary envies, and that she remembers in herself.  When Mary stands the air is already cooling.  Now the first rush of wind from the front turns the leaves over and sends the season’s first few dry leaves scuttling points-down across the sidewalk.  She ducks her head to clear the lintel and steps onto the front porch.  The swing is shifting.  She steps into the empty street and crosses.  “You’d better get inside,” she says, her hands on the pickets of the fence.  “It’s going to storm.”

“I know it,” the girl says.  The wind is blowing her bangs and with a sullen but obedient air she stands.  “You’re married to Mr. Howe.”

“We’re not married.”

The girl considers this and has the solution: “You’re his girlfriend.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

The girl is well-mannered and says, as she has heard her parents say, “You have my best wishes, then.”

“What are you reading?”  Mary is conscious of the storm behind her and of the gathering charges in the atmosphere.  She is carrying a lightning rod on her head and it is not really safe to be outside.  But she can stand it for another minute.

The girl shows her.  It is The Moonstone.  “It’s a boys’ book I guess.”  Seen up close the girl is already almost pretty.  Her dark hair falls in a curl to her shoulders, unfashionably.  Her lips are full, cherry red and her skin very pale.  She will be a certain kind of beauty and Mary feels a bright sudden connection between them.

“That’s all right,” Mary says.

The girl is shy, all at once, perhaps feeling their connection too, and now Mary wants to go.  She says goodbye and crosses the street again.  She avoids the study for a few minutes and goes around pulling in the windows and setting the latches.  The storm is visible over the lake.  When she returns to the study the girl’s yard is empty and the windows of her house are white and blank with the drawn shades.  When the storm arrives Mary watches it avidly.  She is a devotee.  More than anything she wants to see a tornado.  There is dashing rain, rushing down the gutters.  In this electrical storm she feels the short hairs on the back of her shaved neck rising.  It is as though something is being drawn up from between her feet; she feels the air take on a shape in Edward’s green study.  It is ghostly and strange and she extends her arm to feel the charged air surging past.  She cannot really tell if this is imaginary, but she thinks not.  A flash fills the room as a bolt strikes the street outside, mere yards from where she had been a few minutes ago, strikes and seems to pulse three times, a very bright jagged shape is unmistakably there, repeated exactly three times, craggy and strange.  With it comes a sharp percussive slap of thunder, very loud.  This is the closest Mary has ever seen lightning and it shocks and pleases her to see it up close, rather as though she had seen the end of the rainbow.  It seems to climb up out of the ground and meet a bolt on its way down from the sky, as though the hazy heat that had been rising for hours from the lawns has been concentrated into this blue flame.

The storm is moving fast and when the next bolt lands it is already many blocks away, and the thunder shakes the window in the ordinary fashion, so it trembles.  After a few more minutes the sun comes out again.  The lawns are very green and the trees are glistening.  The birds resume their singing.  The maid next door opens the windows and the radio comes back on, playing something soft.  The shades come up next door.  The girl comes outside and makes her way through the gate, lifting the latch and turning her body self-consciously, perhaps knowing Mary is watching.  In her scuffed shoes she crosses the sidewalk and the parking strip.  On tiptoe she peers into the gutter, her eyebrows arched.  Nothing there.  Mary feels a wash of love for the girl and when Edward comes home she leans into him.  He is surprised and carefully puts his hat on the trunk and returns the embrace.

Edward for his part knew the precariousness of his situation.  For the first few weeks he had told himself it was a temporary fling.  But her beauty did him in.  It was not the sort of beauty that is readily put away, and if you are in a particular frame of mind you stand no chance at all.  You are left with two options: you can choose to pursue it and if you catch it you can succumb forever and gratefully.  Or you can redescribe yourself as someone not quite of the top shelf.  This means the beauty is not for you, which allows you to enjoy it without the terrible pain of wanting it for yourself and, later, of getting it and trying to keep it.

The flower market is a ten-minute ride down the 42 car line.  The streetcars are of various vintages, some very old with entirely open sides as though you are riding on a raft, and others enclosed, with porcelain teardrop handles and wicker seats and blond, varnished oak floors.  Others are in between with maroon sides and gilt lettering and beat-up wooden seats that have been carved by a generation of penknives.  You want a modern car in bad weather and in good weather you didn’t care so much.  Either way you want a seat by the window so you can stick your tusk out.

In July, she takes Edward to the flower market on a Saturday.  It is a kind of paradise.  The stalls go up one side of the brick square and down the other.  On the other sides there are vegetables for sale but neither of them cook; the flowers are what bring her.  Edward moves peaceably by her side, encased in a brown suit and blue tie.  His neck fills the collar to overflowing, but it is still mostly muscle.  They are buying flowers for Jerry Fitzsimmons, who is coming to dinner that night, and who has never noticed or mentioned flowers in Edward’s hearing; still, it is the thing to do.  In fact, they are simply spending time in the open air in the summer on a Saturday because for Edward – for Edward it is a matter of life and death that he make this girl happy.  He has no use for flower markets or flowers, but if Mary were to leave he would die.

This is what he thinks as he walks.  If this girl leaves me, I will die.

Her beauty is not difficult to describe, he thinks, but it is difficult to convey the impression of it.