Eve.
Hilde stood by the window and looked out over the garden, down toward the
dock behind the little red boat-house. The motorboat had not yet been brought out for
the summer, but the old rowboat was tied up to the dock. She must remember to bail
the water out of it after last night’s heavy downpour.
As she was looking out over the little bay, she remembered the time when as a
little girl of six she had climbed up into the rowboat and rowed out into the bay alone.
She had fallen overboard and it was all she could do to struggle ashore. Drenched to
the skin, she had pushed her way through the thicket hedge. As she stood in the
garden looking up at the house, her mother had come running toward her. The boat
and both oars were left afloat in the bay. She still dreamed about the boat sometimes,
drifting on its own, abandoned. It had been an embarrassing experience.
The garden was neither especially luxuriant nor particularly well kept. But it
was large and it was Hilde’s. A weather-beaten apple tree and a few practically barren
fruit bushes had just about survived the severe winter storms. The old glider stood on
the lawn between granite rocks and thicket. It looked so forlorn in the sharp morning
light. Even more so because the cushions had been taken in. Mom had probably
hurried out late last night and rescued them from the rain.
There were birch trees—bj0rketreer—all around the large garden, sheltering it
partly, at least, from the worst squalls. It was because of those trees that the house had
been renamed Bjerkely over a hundred years ago.
Hilde’s great-grandfather had built the house some years before the turn of the
century. He had been a captain on one of the last tall sailing ships. There were a lot of
people who continued to call it the captain’s house.
That morning the garden still showed signs of the heavy rain that had suddenly
started late last evening. Hilde had been awakened several times by bursts of thunder.
But today there was not a cloud in the sky.
Everything is so fresh after a summer storm like that. It had been hot and dry for
several weeks and the tips of the leaves on the birch trees had started to turn yellow.
Now it was as if the whole world had been newly washed. It seemed as if even her
childhood had been washed away with the storm.
“Indeed, there is pain when spring buds burst...” Wasn’t there a Swedish poet
who had said something like that? Or was she Finnish?
Hilde stood in front of the heavy brass mirror hanging on the wall above
Grandmother’s old dresser.
Was she pretty? She wasn’t ugly, anyway. Maybe she was kind of in-between ...
She had long, fair hair. Hilde had always wished her hair could be either a bit
fairer or a bit darker. This in-between color was so mousy. On the positive side, there
were these soft curls. Lots of her friends struggled to get their hair to curl just a little
bit, but Hilde’s hair had always been naturally curly. Another positive feature, she
thought, were her deep green eyes. “Are they really green?” her aunts and uncles used
to say as they bent over to look at her.
Hilde considered whether the image she was studying was that of a girl or that
of a young woman. She decided it was neither. The body might be quite womanly, but
the face reminded her of an unripe apple.
There was something about this old mirror that always made Hilde think of her
father. It had once hung down in the “studio.” The studio, over the boathouse, was her
father’s combined library, writer’s workshop, and retreat. Albert, as Hilde called him
when he was home, had always wanted to write something significant. Once he had
tried to write a novel, but he never finished it. From time to time he had had a few