The Giver of Stars

9

Many medical men now recognize that numerous nervous and other diseases are associated with the lack of physiological relief for natural or stimulated sex feelings in women.

Dr Marie Stopes, Married Love

According to the local midwives, there was a reason most babies came in summer, and that was because there wasn’t a whole heap to do in Baileyville once the light had gone. The picture house tended to get its movies some months after they had been and gone elsewhere. Even when they came Mr Rand, who ran it, loved his liquor, to the extent that you could never be sure that you’d see the end of the show before a reel crumpled and burned on screen, victim to one of his impromptu naps, prompting jeers and disappointment across the audience. Harvest festival and hog-slaughter had slid past and it was too early for Thanksgiving, which left a long month with nothing but darkening skies, the increasing smell of wood smoke in the air, and the encroaching cold to look forward to.

And yet. It was apparent to anybody who took notice of such things (and Baileyville’s residents made whole careers out of taking notice) that this fall an inordinate number of local men seemed oddly cheerful. They raced home as soon as they could and whistled their way through their days bug-eyed with sleep deprivation but shorn of their usual short tempers. Jim Forrester, who drove for the Mathews lumber yard, was barely seen at the honky-tonks, where he usually spent his non-working hours. Sam Torrance and his wife had taken to walking around holding hands and smiling at each other. And Michael Murphy, whose mouth had been welded into a thin line of dissatisfaction for most of his thirty-odd years, had been seen singing – actually singing – to his wife on his porch.

These were not developments that the elders of the town felt able to complain about, exactly, but certainly added, they confided to each other with a vague feeling of discombobulation, to a sense that things were shifting in a way they were at a loss to understand.

The inhabitants of the Packhorse Library were not quite as perplexed. The little blue book – which had proven more popular and more useful than any number of bestsellers, and required almost constant repair – was dispatched and returned week after week, under piles of magazines, with quick, grateful smiles, accompanied by whispered murmurings of My Joshua never even heard of such a thing, but he sure does seem to like it! And No baby this springtime for us. I cannot tell you the relief. A honeymooner’s blush would accompany many of these confidences, or a distinct twinkle in the eye. Only one woman returned it stony-faced, with the admonition that she had never seen the devil’s work cast into print before. But even then Sophia noted that there were several pages where the corners had been carefully turned to keep their place.

Margery would slide the little book back into its home in the wooden chest where they kept cleaning materials, blister liniment and spare stirrup leathers, and a day or two later the word would be passed to another remote cabin, and the query would be made, tentatively, to another librarian: ‘Um … before you go, my cousin over at Chalk Hollow says you have a book that covers matters of … a certain delicacy …’ and it would find itself on its way again.

‘What are you girls doing?’

Izzy and Beth sprang back from the corner as Margery walked in, kicking mud from the heels of her boots in a way that would infuriate Sophia later. Beth was quite helpless with laughter, and Izzy’s cheeks glowed pink. Alice was at the desk, entering her books into the ledger and pretending to ignore them.

‘Are you girls looking at what I think you’re looking at?’

Beth held up the book. ‘Is this true? That “female animals may actually die if denied sexual union”?’ Beth was open-mouthed. ‘Because I’m not hanging off no man and I don’t look like I’m fit to drop, do I?’

‘But what do you die of?’ said Izzy, aghast.

‘Maybe your hole closes up and then you can’t breathe properly. Like one of them dolphins.’

‘Beth!’ exclaimed Izzy.

‘If that’s where you’re breathing out of, Beth Pinker, then lack of sexual congress isn’t the thing we need to be worrying about,’ said Margery. ‘Anyway, you girls shouldn’t be reading about that. You’re not even married.’

‘Nor are you, and you’ve read it twice.’

Margery pulled a face. The girl had a point.

‘Jeez, what are the “natural completions of a woman’s sex-functions”?’ Beth started to giggle again. ‘Oh, my, look here, this says that women who don’t get satisfaction may suffer an actual nervous breakdown. Can you believe that? But if they do get satisfaction, “every organ in their bodies is influenced and stimulated to play its part, while their spirits, after soaring in the dizzy heights of rapture, are wafted to oblivion’.

‘My organs are meant to be wafting?’ said Izzy.

‘Beth Pinker, will you just shut up for five minutes?’ Alice slammed her book down on the desk. ‘Some of us are actually trying to work here.’

There was a brief silence. The women exchanged sideways looks.

‘I’m just joking with you.’

‘Well, some of us don’t want to hear your horrible jokes. Can you just cut it out? It’s not funny.’

Beth frowned at Alice. She picked casually at a piece of cotton on her breeches. ‘I’m so sorry, Miss Alice. I hate that I might have caused you distress,’ she said, solemnly. A sly smile spread across her face. ‘You’re not … you’re not having a nervous breakdown, are you?’

Margery, who had lightning-quick reaction times, managed to get between them just before Alice’s fist made contact. She raised her palms, pushing them apart, and gestured Beth towards the door. ‘Beth, why don’t you check those horses have fresh water? Izzy, put that book back in the trunk and come and sweep up this mess. Miss Sophia gets back from her aunt’s tomorrow and you know what she’ll have to say about it all.’

She looked at Alice, who had sat down again and was now staring with intense concentration at the ledger, her whole demeanour warning Margery not to say another thing. She would be there long after the rest of them had gone home, as she was every working night. And Margery knew she wasn’t reading a word.

Alice waited until Margery and the others had left, raising her head to mutter goodbye. She knew they would talk about her when they were gone but she didn’t care. Bennett wouldn’t miss her: he would be out with friends. Mr Van Cleve would be late at the mine, as he was most nights, and Annie would be tutting about three dinners gone dry and shrivelled in the bottom of the range.

Despite the companionship of the other women, she felt so lonely she could weep with the weight of it. She spent most of her time alone in the mountains and some days she talked more to her horse than any other living being. Where once it had offered her a welcome sense of freedom, now the vast expanses seemed only to emphasize her sense of isolation. She would turn up her collar against the cold, wedge her fingers into her gloves, with miles of flinted track in front of her and only the ache in her muscles to distract her. Sometimes she felt as if her face was set in stone, apart from when she finally stopped to deliver her books. When Jim Horner’s girls ran to her for hugs it was all she could do not to hold tight to them and let out an involuntary silent sob. She had never thought of herself as someone who needed physical contact, but night after night, yards away from Bennett’s sleeping body, she felt herself slowly turning to marble.

‘Still here, huh?’

She jumped.

Fred Guisler had put his head around the door. ‘Just came to bring a new coffee pot. Marge said the old one had sprung a leak.’

Alice wiped at her eyes and gave him a bright smile. ‘Oh, yes! Go right ahead.’

He hesitated on the threshold. ‘Am I … disturbing something?’

‘Not at all!’ Her voice was forced, too cheery.

‘I won’t be a minute.’ He walked over to the side, replacing the metal coffee pot and checking the tin for supplies. He kept the women in coffee every week without so much as mentioning it, and brought in logs to keep the fire burning so that they could get warm between rounds. ‘Frederick Guisler,’ Beth would announce every morning, smacking her lips at her first cup, ‘is a veritable saint.’

‘Brought you all some apples too, thought you could take a couple each to work. You’ll be getting hungrier now the days are colder.’ He pulled a bag from inside his overcoat and put them on the side. He was still wearing his work clothes, his boots hemmed by a layer of mud around the sole. Sometimes she would hear him outside as she arrived, talking to his young horses with a yip! And a ‘C’mon, now, smartypants, you can do better than that,’ as if they were just as much his friends as the women in the cabin, or standing, arms crossed, beside some fancy horse-owner from Lexington, sucking his teeth as they discussed conformation and price. ‘These here are Rome Beauties. They ripen a little later than the rest.’ He shoved his hands into his pockets. ‘I always like … to have something to look forward to.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’

‘It’s nothing. You girls work hard … and don’t always get the credit you deserve.’

She thought he would leave then, but he hesitated in front of the desk, chewing the side of his lip. She lowered her book and waited.

‘Alice? Are you … all right?’ He spoke the words as if this was a question he had already rolled over in his head twenty, thirty times. ‘It’s just, well, I hope you don’t mind me mentioning, but you … you seem – well, you seem so much less happy than you did. I mean, when you first came.’

She felt her cheeks colour. She wanted to say I’m fine but her mouth had dried and nothing would come.

He studied her face for a moment and then he walked slowly across to the shelves to the left of the front door. He scanned them, a nod of satisfaction escaping him when he found what he was looking for. He pulled a book from the shelf and brought it to her. ‘She’s a bit of a misfit, but I like the fire in her words. When I felt low, a few years back, I found some of these were … helpful.’ He took a scrap of paper, marking the page he had sought, and handed it to her. ‘I mean, you may not like them. Poetry is kind of a personal thing. I just thought …’ He kicked at a loose nail on the floor. Then finally he looked up at her. ‘Anyways. I’ll leave you to it.’ Then, as if compelled, he added, ‘Mrs Van Cleve.’

She didn’t know what to say. He walked to the door, raising a hand in awkward salute. His clothes were scented with wood smoke.

‘Mr Guisler? … Fred?’

‘Yes?’

She stood paralysed, consumed with the sudden need to confide in another human being. To tell him of the nights that she felt something was being hollowed out at the very core of her, that nothing that had happened to her in her life up to now had left her feeling so leaden of heart, so lost, as if she had made a mistake that there was simply no coming back from. She wanted to tell him she feared the days she didn’t work like she feared a fever, because outside the hills and the horses and the books, she often felt she had nothing at all.

‘Thank you.’ She swallowed. ‘For the apples, I mean.’

His response came a half-second too late. ‘My pleasure.’

The door closed quietly behind him and she heard his footsteps heading up the path towards his house. He stopped halfway up and she found herself sitting very still, waiting for what, she wasn’t even sure, and then the footsteps continued, fading into nothing.

She looked down at the little book of poetry and opened it.

The Giver of Stars by Amy Lowell

Hold your soul open for my welcoming.

Let the quiet of your spirit bathe me

With its clear and rippled coolness,

That, loose-limbed and weary, I find rest,

Outstretched upon your peace, as on a bed of ivory.

She stared at the words, her heart thumping in her ears, her skin prickling as they shaped and re-formed themselves in her imagination. She thought suddenly of Beth’s astonished voice: Is it true that some female animals will die if denied sexual union?

Alice sat for a long time, gazing at the page in front of her. She wasn’t sure how long she stayed like that. She thought about Garrett Bligh, his hand reaching blindly for his wife’s, the way their eyes locked in mutual understanding even in his final days. Finally she stood up and walked to the wooden trunk. Glancing behind her, as if even then someone might see what she was doing, she rummaged through it until she pulled out the little blue book. She sat down at the desk and, opening it, began to read.

It was almost 9.45 p.m. by the time she returned home. The Ford was outside and Mr Van Cleve was in his room, pulling open his drawers and ramming them shut with so much force that she could hear him from the hall. She closed the front door behind her and walked quietly upstairs, her mind humming, her fingers trailing lightly on the banister. She reached the bathroom, closed and bolted the door, allowed her clothes to fall around her ankles and used a washcloth to wipe away the day’s grime so that her skin was once again soft and sweet-smelling. Then she walked back into her room and reached into her trunk for her silk nightdress. The peach-coloured fabric collapsed, soft and fluid, across her skin.

Bennett wasn’t on the daybed. She saw only the broad back of him on their bed, lying, as he so often did, on his left side away from her. He had lost his summer tan and his skin was pale in the half-light, the outline of his muscles moving gently as he shifted. Bennett, she thought. Bennett, who had once kissed the inside of her wrist and told her she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Who had promised a world in whispers. Who had told her he adored every last bit of her. She lifted the coverlet and climbed into the warm space inside, barely making a sound.

Bennett didn’t stir, but his long, easy breaths told her he was deeply asleep.

Let the flickering flame of your soul play all about me

That into my limbs may come the keenness of fire …

She moved close, so close that she could feel her breath on his warm skin. She inhaled the scent of him, the soap mixed with something primal that even his military attempts at cleanliness couldn’t erase. She reached out, hesitated just a moment, and then placed her arm over his body, finding his fingers and entwining them with her own. She waited, and felt his hand close around hers, and she let her cheek rest against his back, closing her eyes the better to absorb the rise and fall of his breath.

‘Bennett,’ she whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’ Even as she was not entirely sure what she was sorry for.

He released her hand and, for a second, her heart stilled, but he shifted his weight, turning so that he was facing her, his eyes just visible and open. He gazed down at her, her eyes great sad pools, begging him to love her, and perhaps in that moment there was something in her expression that no sane man could refuse because with a sigh he placed an arm around her and allowed her to nestle into his chest. She placed her fingers lightly on his collarbone, her breath a little shallow now, her thoughts jumbling with desire and relief.

‘I want to make you happy,’ she murmured, so quietly that she wasn’t even sure he would hear her. ‘Really I do.’

She looked up. His eyes searched hers, and then he lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her. Alice closed her eyes and let him, feeling the deep easing of something that had been wound so tightly that she had felt she could barely breathe. He kissed her and stroked her hair with his broad palm, and she wanted to just stay in that moment for ever, where it was like they used to be. Bennett and Alice, a love story at its beginning.

The life and joy of tongues of flame,

And, going out from you, tightly strung and in tune,

I may rouse the blear-eyed world, and pour into it –

She felt desire build in her swiftly, its fuse lit by the poetry and the unfamiliar words of the little blue book, which conjured images that her imagination yearned to make flesh. She yielded her lips to his, let her breath quicken, felt a bolt of electricity when he let out a low groan of pleasure. His weight was on her now, his muscular legs between hers. She moved against him, her thoughts now lost, her whole body sparking with new nerve endings. Now, she thought, and even that thought was misted with urgent pleasure.

Now. At last. Yes.

‘What are you doing?’

It took her a moment to work out what he was saying.

‘What are you doing?’

She pulled her hand back. Looked down. ‘I – I was just touching you?’

‘There?’

‘I … thought you’d like it.’

He pulled back, dragging the cover over his groin, leaving her exposed. Some part of her was still flushed with need, and it made her bold. She lowered her voice and placed her hand on his cheek. ‘I read a book this evening, Bennett. It’s about what love can be between a man and his wife. It’s by a medical doctor. And it says that we should feel free to give each other pleasure in all sorts of –’

‘You’re reading what?’ Bennett pushed himself upright. ‘What is wrong with you?’

‘Bennett – it was about married people. It was designed to help couples to bring each other joy in the bedroom and … well, men apparently do love to be touched –’

‘Stop! Why can’t you just … be a lady?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘This touching and this reading of smut. What in hell is wrong with you, Alice? You – you make it impossible!’

Alice sprang back. ‘I make it impossible? Bennett, nothing has happened in almost a year! Nothing! And in our vows, we promised to love each other with our bodies, as in all ways! Those were vows we made before God! This book says it’s perfectly normal for a husband and wife to touch each other wherever they like! We’re married! That’s what it says!’

‘Shut up!’

She felt her eyes brim with tears. ‘Why are you being like this when all I am trying to do is make you happy? I just want you to love me! I’m your wife!’

‘Stop talking! Why do you have to talk like a prostitute?’

‘How do you know how a prostitute talks?’

‘Just shut up!’

He hurled the lamp from the bedside table so that it shattered on the floor. ‘Shut up! Do you hear me, Alice? Will you ever just stop talking?’

Alice sat frozen. From next door they heard the sound of Mr Van Cleve groaning his way out of bed, the springs shrieking a protest, and she dropped her face into her hands, braced for what would inevitably come next. Sure enough, a few short seconds later there was a loud rapping at their bedroom door.

‘What’s going on in there, Bennett? Bennett? What’s all the noise? Did you break something?’

‘Go away, Pa! Okay? Just leave me alone!’

Alice stared at her husband in shock. She waited for the sound of the fuse of Mr Van Cleve’s temper being lit again but – perhaps equally surprised by his son’s uncharacteristic response – there was only silence. Mr Van Cleve stood on the other side of the door for a moment, coughed twice, and then they heard him shuffle back to his room.

This time it was Alice who rose. She climbed off the bed, picking up the pieces of the lamp so that she didn’t tread on them in bare feet, and placed them carefully on the bedside table. Then, without looking at her husband, she straightened her nightdress, pulled on her bed-jacket, and made her way next door into the dressing room. Her face once again returned to stone as she lay down on the daybed. She pulled a blanket over herself and waited for morning, or for the silence from the next room to stop weighing like a dead thing on her chest, whichever would come first, or would deign to come at all.