What He's Poised to Do

She looked at me with feigned confusion—I learned that look from you, and also to dismiss it, and for that I am grateful—and we set off down the road leading to the cottage. Rustic life in all its glory was arrayed for us as if Mrs. Pritchard, or some other benevolent angel, had retained a troupe: there was an old woman waiting for the last of her pigs to ford a small stream and set off for home; there was a younger woman sitting beneath a tree and finishing with the needlework on a large tablecloth; there was a sunburned girl who was running from a sunburned boy toward a large tree that sat center-meadow, a god of the place.

While Lily went ahead with the suitcases, I stopped to inspect a leaf I saw at the side of the road. It reminded me, to be frank, of you: it was not a particularly spectacular specimen, and yet it was more spectacular than anything I could have imagined. The edge had browned slightly, and with it the vein skeleton. A corner had been eaten away by a beetle or one of the other divinely low creatures that flourished in this part of the country. It was a shabby thing that still communicated an indisputable beauty. “Lily,” I called, but my voice was faint from wonder, and she did not hear me. I gripped that leaf by its petiole and took it with me, telling myself that this piece of evidence of the majesty of the everyday would be a great help when Lily and I reached our destination, dropped our bags, and settled into the narrow but sturdy bed that had been described to us in our correspondence with Mrs. Pritchard. I could place it on a table and watch it while the world turned upside down. Nature would steady us both.

I worried that Lily was so far up the path that she would reach the cottage before me, so I hurried to arrive before her. You know how fast I can run when I try. Still, this was done at great sacrifice to village life, or rather to my enjoyment of village life: to have any chance of arriving at the house before Lily, I had to rush through the characteristic scenes that were in abundance all around me, and as a result I have only the blurriest recollection of them. I do know that I saw a number of beautifully picturesque arrangements of flowers in neat little window boxes in front of neat little houses. I saw a woman spinning with a distaff in an enclosed porch. I saw a priest sitting sociably beside a young woman whose face was flushed a deep pink from what I can only assume was a sudden appreciation of the Lord’s word.

My heart ached as I passed by these simple villagers, these simple tiles of benignity in the mosaic of the village, for I knew that it wanted little more than to settle among them and explore the common lines of fellowship and companionship. There would be time for that after the house, and Mrs. Pritchard’s narrow but sturdy bed. Lily was ecstatic to be in the country. I had sensed it even before she herself had sensed it. Like you, she had spent most of her life in the city. Like you, she had been raised among its smokestacks and alleyways and fire escapes, and its adulterations were knit into her bones. On the train, Lily told me that one of her earliest memories involved playing hopscotch as a child, and confessed that as she grew older the numbers on the board came to represent a different sort of progress. I drew out from her a clearer sense of her meaning. She told me that she assigned a number to different levels of excitement. “Are you excited today?” I asked. She held up one hand, I assumed to give me a measure of her feelings. As was her habit, she did not offer a full account; she was generally embarrassed by the passions she felt. But her five fingers were stiffly raised. I verified her excitement by the traditional means, holding up three fewer, just before the conductor arrived to punch our ticket. When he departed, she drew me out as well, to the same end.

I will tell you a story that would embarrass a different sort of woman. The night before Lily and I left the city, I opened the window of my apartment and let her put her head out. Her hair was long and black and difficult to manage, in the fashion then popular in the city. I took my business with her then, just like that, with her head out of the window. “When we get to the country,” I remember saying to her, “we will do this again, near a country window, and the air that you breathe will be new air. A little death, a little rebirth: Is this not what you want?” I cannot describe the expression she wore as she listened to me, mainly because I could not see her face, which was outside the window. The next day, on the train, her face was once again concealed from me. This time it was beneath a blanket I had draped over my lap. The conductor’s curiosity did not recommend him.