Snowflakes fell, wavering down like emissaries of winter.
She heard the tap tap of Mr. Tuck’s little hammer, persistent, as if nothing had changed.
EIGHT Tin Reindeer
“YOU WANT TO WATCH out for him,” Ellen said, kneading dough.
The wind moaned and whistled, carrying the snow in twirling columns and forming drifts on the veranda. Flora opened the firebox to insert a stick of wood, and the dance of flame made a liveliness in the wintery light. Maud sat at a small table in the corner, her pencil scratching, muttering breathily over her algebra.
Flora closed the firebox door and resumed her seat by the window. She was turning a collar for Mr. Sprague.
“I see him looking at you, Flora.”
Maud raised her eyes at Ellen’s insistent warning, but Flora held the collar closer to her face, tugging at the stitches with a curved ripper.
“Who?” said Maud.
“That Mr. Jasper Tuck. I don’t trust that one.”
Ellen was kneading dough at the long, central table. Press. Turn. Fold. Emphasizing her words. “You’re a rare beauty, Flora. It will get you into trouble.”
It, Flora thought. Not me, but it.
She knew how Mr. Tuck looked at her. It was nothing more than the way most men looked at her. Women, too.
“Flora?”
“What?”
“Are you listening to me?” Ellen laid the shaped dough into a bread pan and sprinkled it with cornmeal. “Girls like you end up…well. Do you know what men want from the likes of you?”
Maud turned on her chair. “Don’t say ‘the likes of you,’ Ellen. You make it sound as if Flora was a low woman. We know, you know. We are modern girls.”
Ellen’s mouth hardened. Maud, her pet, seldom offered opinions. “I was only thinking,” she said, chastened. “Of that poor woman who was murdered.”
“Oh, that. Ellen, what could you expect? She was living with him. She had taken a room in a tiny house with an unmarried man. Flora is not like that. She is not stupid.”
—
It seemed the world was lost. There were no houses, no people, no horses or trains or towns. Only the whiteness, a muted roar, and flakes that came endlessly from nowhere, from nothing, unbidden, mysterious and persistent, piling on the porch railing, obscuring the trees.
Cold seeped through cracks in the plaster walls; snow found its way under loose windows, lay on sills and did not melt in unheated rooms. No mail arrived, the phone did not ring. Josephine could not track the progression of the sun.
So it must have been for Simeon in storms at sea.
She stayed downstairs only long enough to forbid Maud from going to school. She spoke to Ellen, knowing that her orders lacked conviction, and that if she asked Ellen to make apple pie, the cook might make lemon and no one would care. She sensed Ellen’s pity, was made to feel like an invalid as Ellen cajoled her with tea, rusks, puddings.
Josephine continued to worry over Sailor, forgetting that he had survived the perils of shipboard life. She stood in the back door wrapped in a housecoat, arms around her waist, watching as he went into the snow and hunched to relieve himself and trotted back obediently at her call. He followed her upstairs, wet, dripping. She sat in her bedroom, her housecoat dark with melting snow.
She bent forward, moaned into her cupped hands, rocked.
His letters.
My dear Josephine, I sit in the presence of monkeys. They have white faces and shriek with bared teeth.
My dear Josephine, it is late at night on a calm sea and the monotony cannot be described. I miss you, my dearest.
My darling, I miss you. Have you purchased the croquet set and bid Mr. Dougan flatten the yard?
She had been like a child, believing expectations would always be realized. Her imagined future was the engine of her self. Always, upon his return, she had been borne by his enthusiasms. Always, when he was gone, his energy remained, a source never entirely tapped. Enough to see her through.
She crawled into bed with Simeon’s letters, his dog at her side.
Pity, sympathy, warmth, caring. She felt it, tepid water lapping at her shores. She stared, wide-eyed, dry-eyed, at what it had been to be loved.
—
By midday, snow skirled faster past the windows and the howl in the branches of the trees grew louder. Ellen, reading the newspaper, clucked her tongue. The boarders had all walked to work this morning, even Mrs. Beaman, vanishing into the thickly falling snow.
“Thank the Lord your mother kept you home,” Ellen remarked to Maud, lowering the newspaper at a gust that shook the house.
Maud had seemed relieved when Josephine told her to stay home—whether or not school is cancelled—but Flora thought that if she were in Maud’s place, she would have protested, determined to hand in her homework, not wanting to miss a single moment of learning.
Learning.
It was the same as freedom, for at the workhouse schooling had been the only time that she and Enid were without fear. Neither Matron nor her henchwomen stood along the walls of the classroom—as they did in the lunchroom, in the welting room, in the yard. Matron must have assumed that the young teacher would discipline them as she did—boxing ears, smashing heads into walls—but he did not. Every girl or woman or child in his classroom was eager to sound out words, listen to stories, hear about kings and queens and the shape of the world that spread beyond the workhouse walls.
Flora noticed that Ellen was fascinated by a newspaper column far removed from cooking, murder, or Ellen’s own prospects. It was called About Women, reprinted from the American papers. Today Ellen read out loud about a Miss Letta L. Burlingame, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had been licensed to practise law; of women granted patents, in New York State; and of women university students.
“The name of the first woman graduate of Columbia is Miss Mary Parsons
