“Ever?” Brodelle put in. Emil was just thirty, but he liked to think of himself as a man of experience — he tended to lord it above the others when Frank was absent, and she could hardly blame him. There wasn’t much for him out here in the country, apart from a trip to the tavern or a solemn horseback ride along the dusty roads. He had a ready wit and a range of learning rare among draftsmen, who tended to be narrowly focused and — well, to her mind at any rate — dull. There was a moment of silence. When he was sure he had everyone’s attention, he went on. “Aren’t you afraid that comment just might possibly be construed as an implied criticism of our hostess”—and here he smiled at her—“who’s done such a heroic job in the kitchen ever since the last — not a whit lamented—chef de cuisine left us?”
The boy ducked his head. When he glanced up at her, he was blushing. “I didn’t mean — I was only—”
And it was all right. Everyone laughed. Except Carleton, of course, who remained in character, hovering against the wall like a revenant in his white jacket.
“Yes,” she said, laughing still, “I know what you mean. Our new cook is such a paragon”—she was conscious of using Carleton’s term, wondering vaguely if it would please him—“I’m afraid we can all look forward to putting on weight up here at Taliesin.” She raised her glass. “Compliments to the chef!” she said, and everyone, even Alvin, whose profession seemed to have made him dubious about all things oral, lifted a glass in homage. She felt expansive, contented. “Well,” she said, setting down the empty glass, “is anyone ready for dessert?”
She took a long walk next morning, then settled into work. Despite the heat — it must have been ninety by half-past ten — she found she was able to see the book afresh and resolve some of the problems that had dogged her the day before. She read over the completed pages, making small emendations— and they truly were good, the prose sharper and clearer than anything she’d been able to extract from Ellen Key, whose language had a tendency to bog down in a Swedish morass of misplaced modifiers and parenthetical phrases. She was in another place altogether, moving forward with a subtle refinement of Key’s ideas on the evolution of love and the way men often desire a woman before they know her while women are too often obligated to develop sexual desire after the fact, thinking of Frank, Frank and her, and how she’d been the one to reveal herself first, a rainy autumn day, the children in school and Edwin at the office and she in her robe and nothing under it — when she became aware that someone else was in the room with her.
There was a smell of some caustic solution — muriatic acid? gasoline? — and when she looked up she saw Carleton bent over the fireplace with a bucket and scrub brush. He was wearing a blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of heavy trousers, far too heavy for this heat. His back was to her. She watched him go down on one knee, the brush working rhythmically over the upper surface of the stone where the soot stains reached almost to the ceiling like long grasping fingers, but was it wise to use a flammable solution? Even if it would have evaporated, whatever it was, by the time fall came around and the fireplace was in use again? She wanted to say something, wanted to interfere, but she didn’t. Let him show some initiative. Certainly Mrs. Swenson, the housekeeper who’d preceded him, wouldn’t have dreamed of scrubbing the fireplace — or anything else, for that matter, except at distant intervals and then only under compulsion. Just the night before, as Diana was gathering up her things to leave, she’d taken Mamah aside and told her how lucky she was. “These Negroes of yours are just too good to be true. I’m envious. I am. If I could only get Alvin to loosen his purse strings I’d march right over here and steal them away.”
For a long moment she simply sat there, watching him. There was something intrinsically fascinating about the Negro’s movements — he was so fluid and athletic — and he wasn’t so much dancing, she realized, as conducting, as if the brush were his baton and the stone of the fireplace his orchestra. But that was a foolish thought, the stone an orchestra. What was she thinking? She had work to do. She turned back to the page before her (For many men, too many men, sexual attraction precedes any notion of love, and this too often leads to. .), but the rhythmic swish of the wire brush distracted her and before long she was staring out the window. He truly was a good worker, she thought, glancing up at him again. She watched his shoulders dip and rise, the brush sweeping to and fro like a hypnotist’s watch, thinking she’d been too harsh on him that first day, too judgmental, too quick to take offense. . but then she saw the rage in his face all over again, the way he’d snapped at his wife, and thought how wrong it was, how inadmissible, how primitive.
He needed education, that was all. There were cultural differences at work here, just as there were in Japan and even Germany, but still, beneath it all, the attitudes were the same. Male attitudes. Archaic. Barbaric. Suddenly she felt herself go out to him — she could help, she could, not simply him but Gertrude too. Her eyes fell on the low table before her, and there, amidst a scatter of books and notepaper, was one of her presentation copies of The Woman Movement, still in its wrapper.170 She took it up on an impulse and rose to her feet. He was an intelligent man, she was sure of it, the sort of man who would welcome the gift of knowledge, thank her a thousand times over, because now, for the first time, he would see the other side of the coin, the woman’s side, see how his wife felt and should be made to feel.
The only problem was that she didn’t know what to call him, not under the circumstances — Julian was too familiar and Carleton too formal. She saw the muscles clench in his shoulders as the sound of her footsteps drew closer, noticed the briefest hesitation before both arms swung back into motion, and then she was standing over him, the reek of the gasoline fumes in her face, clearing her throat. “Excuse me,” she said, “Mr. Carleton, Julian.”
He turned at the sound of his name, a slow rotation of his head, the hair there cut short so that it clung to his skin in dark whorls like some extraneous growth wheeling out across the expanse of his skull, but he remained in his crouch, one knee braced against the coping, the brush arrested. And here were his eyes coming into play, dark eyes, so dark she could scarcely distinguish iris from pupil. He stared up at her, his eyes fixed, his features immobile.
She held the book in both hands as if it were a missal, her fingers playingover the wrapper. “I just wanted to say,” she began, “what a splendid job you and your wife are doing. I’m very pleased. Very pleased indeed. And I’ll be sure to tell Mr. Wright.” She hesitated. His eyes were dead, his lips pressed tight. “I’m sure he’ll be — well, he’ll be pleased too. I’m sure.”
If the moment was awkward it was made even more so by the fact that he was kneeling, as if he were bowing to her in subjugation, as if he were a slave in the old South — a darkie — and she the overseer’s wife. Mrs. Legree, Mrs. Mamah Borthwick Legree, her whipping boy at her beck and call. He didn’t smile, he didn’t nod, didn’t utter a word. He didn’t even seem to be breathing.