He followed the sound from the bedroom to the stairs and descended. It was louder on the first floor, seeming to rise from the boards rather than out-of-doors. When he reached the basement door, it abruptly cut off.
It so happened that the basement door at the top of the worn stone steps, along with the front and kitchen doors, had not been stripped of its iron and thus functioned as intended. Additionally—and Lyman hadn’t thought this odd in the daylight, but now wasn’t so sure—the door was fitted with a crossbar, which, as there was no direct entrance from outside to the basement, seemed unnecessary.
He undid the bar, opened the door, held the lamp high. Nothing but shadow—the light failed to reach the floor below. Neither glimmer of light nor sounding of fiddle note wafted from the darkness.
The flame of the lamp leaned and flickered. Air brushed the hairs of his short beard: a breeze on his face. Something moved toward him at fast speed he realized, something large, its mass pushing the air ahead of it. Even now it noiselessly rushed up the stairs at him.
Lyman slammed the door, shot the bar through its cleat, threw his weight against the wood—steeled himself for the impact against the other side.
None came. After a long moment he looked at his lamp. The flame stood straight as a soldier.
He took a deep breath. Upon returning to his room it didn’t take him long to convince himself he had imagined everything, that the only music had been the cotton of a dream clinging to his sleepy skull. He tossed another log on the fire and lay back on the mattress, listening as the usual players outside again took up their instruments and played him off to sleep.
•••
In winter or rain, Lyman was told, meals were served indoors with every member sitting cheek by jowl; but because the morning was warm and dry, breakfast was like a picnic on July Fourth, served under an elm in the Consulate’s yard on battered tables with old linens and mismatched chairs. Hungry as he was, Lyman hesitated as he approached the band of men already established at the motley furnishings, gossiping as they awaited the meal’s arrival. Their trousers were striped, their waistcoats checked, and their frock coats the best offered by the shops of Providence or New London; but Lyman observed here and there the worn sleeves and frayed hems of good clothes put to hard use, and most of all he noted the sweat stains on every man’s cravat. Each fellow had removed and set nearby his hat—or, in some cases, used his to fan away the flies—all of which were specimens of the wide-brimmed style of the countryman rather than the tall, narrow-ledged trend of the metropolitan. Their faces, whether voluble or unforthcoming as they chatted, had none of the craggy dourness one expects of men accustomed to toil but instead bespoke of softer and more gracile origins, suggesting childhoods spent in fine homes rather than in fields and of lessons learned in heated schoolrooms rather than in frigid barns or henhouses.
Just then Grosvenor noticed him and, after a series of introductions which pelted Lyman like the drops of a rain shower, each name too fast and insubstantial to catch, he was warmly invited to sit; when Lyman explained why he had missed supper, Grosvenor scolded himself for not checking on him before nightfall.
“Your exhaustion is completely understandable,” said Grosvenor. “The travel, then a full day’s work just so you could sit down and make a fire. Anyone would have done the same.”
A stream of women, their side curls bouncing, poured out of the kitchen door carrying platters of grits and butter and bread and jam and bacon and boiled eggs, spreading them among the tables before joining the seated men. When the most beautiful of the cooks plopped down next to Lyman, he struggled whether to rise—she being a lady and he a gentleman, and yet their experiment demanded tradition be overturned—and instead invoked a half-crouched position that seemed more apt for the outhouse than the breakfast table. She laughed.
“This is the immediate dilemma, Mr. Lyman,” she said. “Which customs to keep and which to throw away as regressive? I can see neither benefit nor detriment to your standing while I sit—at least from my perspective.”
“Into the trough with it then,” said Lyman, attempting to recover some measure of poise, “but what about the lady folk preparing the meals and the men working the fields? Isn’t that division of labor among the chief problems we seek to revolutionize?”
“Agreed. But we each bring to Bonaventure the skills learned in the old mode—you have your carpentry, for example. Unfortunately, most men today are so poorly schooled that they can contribute little but the simplest brute labor, whereas we women can knit, cook, weed, and slop the pigs in equal proficiency. If the men dining alongside us right now were to do the cooking, we’d all starve by Monday. The key to reform is to teach our sons and daughters to bake and darn and sow and reap equally, regardless of sex.”
Lyman nodded. “I should like to raise such sons and daughters with you,” he said, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
But she laughed again and offered her hand. “Introductions first, if you please, Mr. Lyman. I’m Minerva.”
Her full name, it turned out, was Minerva Katherine Grosvenor, the only child of the commune’s founders. Raised by such a pair of reformers she was perhaps more evangelical than the parents; but through some mysterious distillation of rearing had none of the seriousness of the zealot and all the good humor of a missionary among hopeless cannibals. Their cause, she understood, was Sisyphean from onset and therefore no excuse for pessimism and temper. She was, in no particular order, an obsessive reader of The Dial, fond of strolling the countryside over sitting in a sewing
