I had stood and even taken a few steps, but Sayuri wanted me walking. The process was not going to be as simple as me jumping out of bed and lurching down the hall. She brought in a special chair that allowed my legs to dangle while she crouched in front of me, pedaling my legs in circles. She, or Marianne Engel, would press her hands against my soles to mimic the resistance of the ground, and I was to push back against them. Sounds simple; wasn’t.
At the end of each session, Sayuri would make me stand for as many seconds as I could. It was never very long, but she’d yell “Fight! Fight! Fight!” to encourage me. When I could take it no more, I was placed back in bed and we’d review the day’s progress.
Sometimes Marianne Engel would hold my hand and I’d have trouble concentrating on what Sayuri was saying.
Marianne Engel arrived in clothes so dusty I was surprised they’d let her in. She must have sneaked past the nurses’ station, although I don’t know how that was entirely possible, as she was dragging her two hampers. When she squatted to start unloading them, I saw a little cloud of dust cough out of the crook of her knee.
“I’ve been thinking about the story of Francesco and Graziana,” I blurted, remembering that I had never updated Marianne Engel about the improvement to the idealistic aspects of my personality. “It’s romantic.”
She laughed at me while pulling bottles of Scotch out of the cold hamper. “These are for Dr. Edwards, Mizumoto san, and the nurses. I’d prefer that you don’t lie to me, but maybe you’ll like tonight’s story better.”
I noticed the dried blood clinging around the edges of her battered fingernails as she took food from the coolers. Fish ’n’ chips, bangers ’n’ mash. Prime rib with pudgy Yorkshire puddings. Finger sandwiches: ham and egg, cheese and vegetables. Scones with strawberry jam. Kaiser buns. Garlic and onion bagels. Herb cream cheese. German butter cheese, Swiss, Gouda, smoked Gruyиre, and Emmenthal. Fresh cucumber salad with yogurt sauce in a delightful little bowl adorned with images of Hдnsel and Gretel. Chunky red potatoes, quartered to show their white interiors; chubby green stems of asparagus, sweating butter; a plump eggplant’s fecund belly pregnant with stuffing. There were fat mutton slices piled up in an obscene monument to arterial sclerosis. A lonely pile of sauerkraut that seemed to have been added at the last moment only because someone had thought there weren’t enough vegetables. Roasted eggs, even though who the hell eats roasted eggs? Then, an abrupt culinary turn towards the Russian states: varenyky (pirogies, in layman’s terms), cavorting with candy-blackened circles of onions, and holubtsi (cabbage rolls, fat with rice) in tangy tomato sauce.
Marianne Engel popped an egg whole into her mouth, as if she hadn’t eaten in days, and devoured it in a manner that was almost bestial. How could someone this hungry not have sampled the meal while preparing it? When she had tamed the worst of her hunger, she announced, “The story of Vicky Wennington has great storms, vigilant love, and saltwater death!”
I settled in, anxious to hear it, and took another bite of the holubtsi.
X.
In London society, nothing was more important than a revered family name, and Victoria D’Arbanville was born with one of the oldest and most respected. Her childhood was a series of lessons for her improvement: she was taught to speak French, Italian, German, Latin, and a smattering of Russian; she could discuss Darwin’s theories without overtly suggesting any relationship between men and monkeys; and she could sing the best of Monteverdi, though she preferred Cavalli. Her parents didn’t really care what music she liked; they only cared that she marry a gentleman, because this is what Victorian ladies did.
Victoria never doubted that she would do just that, until the day that she met Tom Wennington. Not a Thomas, this man was every inch a Tom. They were attending the same formal dinner, with Tom-in an ill-fitting suit-accompanying a city friend. After the meal, the men retreated to a drawing room where the main topics were Parliament and the Bible. Tom didn’t have much to say about those things although, if pressed, he could have offered his opinions about dirt. He was a farmer, through and through, as his forefathers had been.
Tom was a rougher sort of man than Victoria generally knew but there was no denying the delight she felt each time she ran into him, accidentally on purpose, during the following weeks. And for his part, Tom extended his stay in London a month longer than he had originally intended; he put up with the parties, the teas, and the operas just on the chance that he might see Victoria. Eventually Tom’s friend, well-heeled and generous though he was, began to run out of suits to loan him. Tom, knowing full well that his fields weren’t likely to plant themselves, had a decision to make-go home alone or screw his courage to the sticking place. Which was, by the way, a phrase that Victoria had taught him.
The D’Arbanvilles were horrified when they first guessed their daughter’s interest in this, this, this-farmer! But by then, it was already far too late. Victoria had not only been quoting Lady Macbeth, but channeling her efficiency (if not her criminal intent) in planning. When it quickly became apparent that Tom didn’t understand the language of flowers, Victoria arranged a private tour of London’s foremost factory producing steam-driven barn machinery.
Tom had been navigating the foreign world that was London only because he was besotted with Victoria, but it never left his mind that she knew nothing of his life. With this tour, she showed him that she was willing to learn about agriculture. Her questions to the plant manager demonstrated that she had done a good deal of research on the equipment before she ever set foot in the factory, and
When Tom proposed, she knew that her days in the drawing room were over. Yes, she answered immediately, not playing any game of hesitation. She was finished as Victoria, and ready to start her new life as his beloved Vicky.
Her parents’ objections weakened considerably when they learned the vast acreage of Tom’s land, and the couple married in a ceremony that was too grand for Tom’s liking. Vicky moved into the large Wennington farmhouse, which overlooked their fields on one side and the North Sea on the other. It was a rather strange location for the house, but Tom’s great-grandmother had insisted on a view of “the very spot where the earth ends and falls into the sea.”
Vicky would admonish Tom when he forgot to shave, and Tom would tease Vicky that her heels were too high for a farmer’s wife, but she secretly thrilled at the rugged angles of his stubbled jaw and he loved the way her city boots made her hips sway. The smell of his sweat could bring her skin to gooseflesh, and the hint of her perfume could make him wipe the back of his neck with his well-stained handkerchief. In London, her body had been a muted thing, but on their farm, Vicky was plugged directly into the elements of the earth. She would stoke the fire to heat giant kettles for Tom’s evening bath. She squeezed the bellows, smiling, sweating, and imagining how he would feel under her touch. It was during these evening baths that Vicky loved her hands for the first time in her life. She forgot her childhood piano lessons as she scrubbed the dirt from her husband’s body.
At harvest time, Vicky conceived. She grew fat over the winter and gave birth in the spring. Vicky called the boy Alexander; Tom called him Al. The country air was even sweeter than before.
On their cliff they would stand in the mornings, baby in arms, watching the fishermen come and go. They had done this often through their marriage, and things did not change over the baby’s first summer. Tom would close his eyes and imagine that it was he who was on the water. When he was younger, he had flirted with the idea of enlisting in the Royal Navy, but had abandoned the notion when his father died and left him the farm.
Still, Tom had a small boat that he took out on Sundays. On one such day in early November, much like any other, he asked Vicky to come with him. The crops had recently been harvested and they had the time to take a day for themselves. She told him that she was feeling under the weather and wanted to stay with the baby. “But go,” she said. “Enjoy yourself.”
From the cliff Vicky, with Alexander in her arms, watched as Tom steered the boat out of the harbor and into the ocean, becoming smaller and smaller until he disappeared. She pulled her coat tighter and tucked the baby’s blanket under his chin. There was a chill wind coming; she felt it in her bones as she hurried back to the
