A Piece of the World(48)

“Help me, Christina,” he gasps, reaching out a hand. “I can’t get up.” His muscles constrict and spasm; his legs are so painful, he says, that he can barely move them. When I finally get him into the house, he lies on the floor of the kitchen and kneads his calves, trying to dull the pain.

Al goes to fetch Dr. Heald. After examining Papa, he announces that it must be arthritis, and there’s not much he can do.

With Mother in and out of bed and Papa increasingly infirm, the duties of the household fall even more heavily on my brothers and me. We have no choice, or the whole farm will slide into entropy—animals unfed, the cows needing milking, tasks doubled for the next day. To get it all done I have to dim my brain, turn it down by notches like the flat-turn knob on a gas lantern, leaving only a nub of flame.

AS SUMMER TURNS to fall, envelopes with two-cent stamps postmarked Boston begin to arrive for me at the post office again. Ramona’s “small family wedding,” she reports, has grown, predictably, into a more lavish affair. Her dress will be modern, despite her mother’s objections—a white satin V-neck with a skirt just below the knee, a wide satin belt, and a bridal cap veil (not, God forbid, her grandmother’s, with its crumbling yellowed lace). “If suffragettes can picket the White House, I can express my emancipation from long skirts and old veils,” Ramona declares. She will carry a bouquet of irises like the bride on the cover of Hearst’s magazine.

The invitation—on thick cream card stock, hand-painted with pastel flowers—arrives in an oversized cream envelope. I stand in the road and read the words etched in florid black script:

Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Carle

Respectfully request the honor of your presence

At the marriage ceremony of their daughter

Ramona Jane

And Harland Woodbury . . .

Equally respectfully, on notebook paper, I decline to attend. My brothers are busy with the harvest and I must prepare for the holidays, but we all send our best wishes to the happy couple. (And later a silverplate tea service marked down on sale at a home goods shop in Thomaston.)

After the wedding, held in early November, I receive a honeymoon postcard postmarked Newport—“Such magnificent houses! All the ladies here wear furs”—and, a few weeks later, a note describing the sunny apartment in a new brick building that the newlyweds are renting in Boston. “You must come and visit in early spring. I know Al will be busy with the planting, so bring dear Sam,” Ramona writes. “He needs an adventure, and so do you. It’s neither haying nor holiday season, so no excuses. A few weeks only! Nothing will be disrupted.”

The idea of traveling to Boston under such vastly different circumstances than the one I envisioned sends me to bed with a headache for the afternoon.

“YOU KNOW WE can’t possibly go,” I tell Sam when he confronts me with the letter, which I foolishly left open on the dining room table.

“Why not?”

“The distance . . . my infirmity—”

“Nonsense,” Sam says. “I’ve never been anywhere. Nor have you. We’re going.”

Looking at tall, handsome Sam, with his strong jaw and aquiline nose and piercing gray eyes, I think of all those seafaring Samuels he was named after, setting off to explore the world. Sam is twenty years old. Ramona is right—he needs an adventure. “You go,” I urge him.

“Not without you.”

“But—Al can’t manage the farm on his own.”

“He’s not on his own. Fred is here. And Papa will help.”

I give him a skeptical look. Papa hasn’t been much help for a while now.

“Al will be fine. I’m not taking no for an answer.”

So it is that early on a March morning in 1918, despite my trepidation, Al drives us through the fog to Thomaston, where Sam and I will catch a train bound for North Union Station in Boston. The staircases and ticket lines, narrow hallways and train platforms are a bewildering obstacle course for both of us, made even more difficult by my tight new shoes. Sam carries both suitcases and an overcoat and still manages to keep a firm arm under mine, steadying me as we slowly make our way toward the gate. When we finally get to our railway car, we collapse onto the red leather seats.

A few minutes after we’ve left the station, Sam asks, “Got anything to eat?”

I had packed a few dry biscuits in my bag, but when I pull them out, they crumble in my hand. Just as I’m thinking we might have to wait until Boston, the conductor, a red-faced man with a bristly mustache, happens along to collect our tickets. Sam fumbles through his jacket for them. “Let me guess,” the conductor says. “First time on a train?”

I nod.

“Thought so.” He leans over the seat. “Lavatories are in the next car . . .” He points a meaty finger toward the right. “And the dining room is four cars down. You can get a hot meal or a cup of tea. Or whiskey, if you prefer,” he says, chuckling. His breath is briny, like lobster.

“Thank you,” I say. But after he moves along, I tell Sam, “I don’t think we should. We need to budget.” We’ve brought $80 for the entire visit; the round-trip fare has already eaten up $5.58 each. But I’m also reluctant to make a spectacle of myself, jerking back and forth.

“What we need to do is eat,” Sam says.

“You go and bring me something small.”