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I remember that it was a Saturday afternoon in early November, only a week following Miss Channing’s dinner with Mr. Reed and his family. I was sitting on a bench at the edge of the coastal bluff. On the beach below I could see several people strolling about or lounging under large striped umbrellas. There was no one in the water, of course, the season for swimming having passed by then. But far out to sea, I could make out the white sail of a fifteen-footer as it skirted along the shoreline. Watching it drift by, I yearned to be on it, to be cutting across an illimitable blue vastness.
Sarah was wearing a long blue skirt and red blouse when she came up to me that morning, and she’d wrapped a flowered scarf over her shoulders, the knot tied loosely at her throat. Her hair was long and extraordinarily dark, and had a continually frazzled and unruly look to it, as if she’d just been taken by the heels, turned upside down, and shaken violently, her hair left in tangled disarray.
Still, for all that, she was quite a lovely girl, the same age I was, and I often found my attention drawn to her as she swept past my room or bounded up the stairs, but most particularly when I found her lounging on the porch swing, her arms at her sides, her eyes half-closed and languid, as if lost in a dream of surrender.
In those days, of course, the classes were more rigidly divided than they have since become, and so I knew that whatever my feelings for Sarah might be, they would always have to be carefully guarded. For unlike the other deadly sins, lust is sometimes joined to love, and such a prospect would no doubt have met with stern disapproval from my mother. And so, up until that day, I’d allowed myself only those hidden thoughts and secret glances that were within my sphere, thinking of Sarah at night, but by day returning her to the status of a servant girl.
“And hello to you, sir,” she said as she approached me, the Irish lilt now striking me as somewhat thrilling and exotic.
I nodded. “Hi, Sarah.”
She smiled brightly, but seemed unsure of what to do next. “Well, should I sit with you, then?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said casually, as if the nearness of her body meant no more to me than that of the lamppost a block away.
She sat down and looked out over the water. I did the same, careful to conceal the fact that all I could think of was her skin, the color of milk, her hair black as coal, the mysteries of her body infinitely enticing.
As to her history, I knew only the broad details. But from the bits and pieces of conversation I’d overheard as I roamed the house on Myrtle Street, I’d learned of her mother’s early death in Limerick and had some picture of the bleak coastal village she’d grown up in after that. She’d had three brothers, two killed in the Great War, one an aimless drifter who’d disappeared into the dreary slums of East London. As to her father, he’d died of tuberculosis five years before, leaving her with only enough money to book passage to America. I’d heard my father speak grimly of that passage, the horrors of the steerage, the way the men had leered at her in the dank quarters of the ship’s belly, the stale bread and dried beef that alone had sustained her until she’d finally disembarked at the Port of Boston.
After that Sarah had fallen upon the mercy of the Irish Immigrant Aid Society, who’d fed, clothed, and given her shelter until she’d landed a job as a serving girl in a great Boston house. It was there she’d met my father three years later, told him how much she longed for village life again, particularly if the village happened to be located near the sea. By all accounts she had spoken to my father with great earnestness, and my father, never one to remain deaf to such heartfelt solicitations, had first cleared it with her employer, then offered her a place in our house at Chatham, one she’d taken without a moment’s further thought and performed dutifully ever since.
But as I looked at her that morning nearly two years later, she seemed not altogether pleased with her earlier decision. There was a melancholy wistfulness in her eyes, a deep dissatisfaction.
“Something’s bothering you,” I said bluntly, my own intense restlessness now spilling over into a general sense of radical impatience.
Her eyes shot over to me, as if I’d accused her of stealing the silverware. “Now, why do you say that?” she asked in a sharp, defensive tone.
I gave her a knowing look.
She turned her head away, touched her cheek. “I’ve nothing to complain about. I’ll not be thought of as a whiner.”
I was too consumed with my own complaint to feel much tenderness toward Sarah’s, so I said nothing more.
This seemed to jar her. “Well I want you to know that I don’t at all regret coming to Chatham. Not at all, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t ever want your father to think I wasn’t grateful for what he’s done for me. It’s just that I didn’t come to America to be a serving girl. I’m after more than that. I want to better myself, to break away from the cleaning and cooking. To
I could see it in her face, a vast, billowing need to leap beyond the mundane and unglamorous life she otherwise seemed destined for, and which, since reading Mr. Channing’s book, I had also begun to feel far more powerfully than I ever had before. Watching her agitation, the restlessness that swept over her, I suddenly felt absolutely in league with her, the two of us castaways on a narrow strip of land whose strictures and limitations both appalled and threatened to destroy us. I saw my father as grimly standing in our way, reading his ancient books, mouthing their stony maxims. In my mind I heard his steady drone:
“Maybe you should just take off, Sarah,” I told her. “Just take the train to Boston and disappear.”
Even as I said it, I saw myself doing it. It would be a moment of wild flight, the real world dissolving behind me, all its gray walls crumbling, the sky a vast expanse before me, my life almost as limitless as the unbounded universe.
“You should do whatever you have to, Sarah,” I continued boldly. Then, as if to demonstrate my zeal, I said, “If I can help you in any way, let me know.”
Her response came as a question that utterly surprised me. For it had nothing to do with flight, with night trains to Boston, or disappearing into the multitude. Instead, she studied me intently, then said, “Do you remember Miss Channing? The lady that came to the house at the end of summer, the one that’s teaching art?”
“I’m in her class.”
