(The children, the children, what is to become of the children?)
Again and again, Mason and Alice keep telling themselves—after each setback—that they will try harder, that they will not give up.
This day, however—this shining afternoon—for some reason, exhaustion perhaps, they are not fighting, and Alice is sitting by Mason’s side, holding his arm with both hands like a young bride, and they are watching their two young daughters roll down the hill like logs, clasping each other’s hands like acrobats as they laugh and shout and roll down the steep green manicured lawn: to the bottom, back up to the top; to the bottom, back up to the top. It feels, in the peace and happiness of the moment, as if Alice and Mason in their chronic unhappiness have somehow—perhaps through the miracle of endurance, or even luck; surely not through any ingenuity—pierced some thin but resistant membrane that has heretofore separated them from such happiness.
The sun is warm upon their skin.
The girls are lying midslope, heads on each other’s shoulders, warm wind ruffling their beautiful hair. The oldest is sketching in her journal a portrait not of the dome of Monticello—ignoring it much as Mason had, so long ago—but instead of the slave quarters, which lie behind them.
The five-year-old watches her big sister with both raptness and pleasure—in the younger sister’s eyes, the eight-year-old can do no wrong. The eight-year-old takes after her mother and is a great artist with the knack for reproducing things exactly as they are. The light on the old red bricks of the quarters (brick that was baked on the premises, the slaves gathering the raw red earth in buckets and then shaping it into the bricks that would later imprison them, so that in that strange manner it was somehow as if the earth itself, upon which they lived, in whose gardens they grubbed and hoed, and at whose red hillsides they now clawed, was imprisoning them; as if their imprisonment were being rendered by the movement of their own two hands, each of them, if not by their hearts’ or minds’ will)—is striking the bricks in yellowish slants, and the two colors, the yellow sunlight and the red bricks, ignite each other so that the whole structure is glowing, with both colors thus accentuated.
The old lilacs that shroud the slave quarters are drooping purple and sugar-scented over those glowing red bricks, and tourists are walking back and forth in low murmuring conversations. Mason and Alice’s daughters continue to lie in the center of the lawn, one sketching earnestly, the other admiring her. Mason and Alice are sitting farther up the hill, halfway between the slave quarters and the girls, looking down upon the girls, and Mason has to wonder if the oldest is sketching them, too.
Is it of note to mention again that their marriage after twenty years has foundered; that the river of not just love but even simple care and compassion has run all but dry, and that too many days now they stumble as if blind through their lives with confusion and lack of resolve or commitment—they, who were once so strong?
It doesn’t matter. This day, this one day with the girls, their precious masters, lying together farther down the hill, shoulder to shoulder, their hair tousled by the wind, Mason and Alice seem to be drawn along, for once—or for the first time in a long time—all of them drawn along, parents and children alike, as if on some idyllic, gliding sleigh. As if the world has been created for their pleasure, so that they might participate in its many sharp beauties; and as if, though in the not-too-distant past they have gotten lost or sidetracked from that mission, they have now wandered back onto the path and been found again.
As if the simple sight of their oldest daughter sketching in her journal—as if constructing some master plan for something—is enough to bring them back into the world, and back onto the path of love.
Doesn’t anyone, everyone, after twenty years of sameness, encounter such crises? Aren’t we all extraordinarily frail and in the end remarkably unimpressive, creatures too often of boring repetition and habit rather than bold imagination?
Who will rescue us, if not ourselves? Who will emancipate us, if not ourselves?
There is no one among us, Mason thinks, who does not dream of that wild elk. There is no one who is not, in some part, to some degree, both the animal itself—torn between wanting to slip off down farther into the dark wilderness, and back up into the clean lawns and orchards of the tame, the possessed, the cared-for—and yet also the viewer rather than the elk—the watcher who waits and watches and hungers for that elk.
Eyes staring, right at dusk, for movement right at the edge of the great woods.
Waiting, right at dusk, for that lift of heart, upon first seeing the great beast take its first step from out of the impenetrable, magnificent wilderness.
3
The tour guide stands before their group in the first great room to the north of the Rotunda and stares unseeing through the gathered and waiting throng separated from her by a velvet rope.
She stands poised like a diver perched at the top of a high platform, arms raised aloft in a flamelike taper, unblinking. She appears to be in her mid-fifties, still high-cheekboned, her hair still red-tinged, cut neat and short. Her eyes seem to glitter
