The Bowl with Gold Seams. Ellen Prentiss Campbell

a ceramic art form. The Gallery’s estimate of the bowl’s value shocked me so much that I hid it away deep in the cabinet. Really, I should have put it in my safe deposit box. Someday it could supplement my pension. Or I might leave it to Clear Spring, bequest from a dead hand, no questions, no explanations possible.

      I placed the bowl on the mantle, broke the seal on the Suntory and had my drink.

      Upstairs I pulled the cord in the hallway ceiling for the attic ladder. I brought down a cardboard carton and opened it. The smell of dry paper and paste reminded me of grade school, of the Bedford library on a summer’s day. Like a good historian, I made neat chronological stacks of papers across my bedroom floor: recital programs, my yearbook, letters, V-Mail, newspaper clippings. A folded piece of rice paper, black ink bleeding through the translucent page. A heavy envelope from the War Department.

      Primary sources connect us directly to the past, I teach my students.

      Neal’s photograph watched me from the bureau. Young, not much older than my boys at school. His expression was serious, his jaw set and square.

      The phone rang.

      “How was dinner?” Ted asked.

      “Fine.”

      “Are you okay?”

      “More or less.”

      “Less, it sounds like,” he said. “Come back.”

      “I’m leaving early in the morning.”

      “Where are you going? I thought you had to be at school.”

      “To the Springs. With Charlotte Bledsoe.”

      “So she was one of the children?”

      “Yes.”

      “Wow. What are the odds? Amazing.”

      “Yes.”

      “You sound strange. I miss you,” he said.

      “I miss you, too.”

      But it wasn’t Ted I missed. I carried Neal’s photo to my bedside table; black and white, but I saw the wheat color of his hair and the green flecks in his brown eyes. His lips were closed but I remembered how soft and warm they were, and the space between his two top teeth.

      The half-remembered lament from the tenth century Japanese poet Murasaki Shikibu floated into my mind. Why did you disappear into the sky?

      I held the picture, looking into Neal’s eyes, as though the lifetime I had lived since he died, the lifetime of years between us was dissolving. Lying awake, I listened to the hours chime and stared into the shining darkness of the past.

      Chapter One

      Neal and I married almost straight out of high school. The war accelerated things and determined the timing, but we’d been heading there ever since we met in 1932, in the first grade at the Common School in Bedford. We claimed each other like kin and as friends long before we were sweethearts.

      The Common School sat in the heart of town, across the street from the cemetery, surrounded by churches and homes, along a long alley between the Courthouse and the Jail. My father walked me to school the first morning, from the Jail where we lived: a hulking, Victorian structure that combined house and prison. To me it was just home, spacious and comfortable, with leaded stained glass in the transom above the broad front door, oak floors and wainscoting, a front parlor and a dining room, a big kitchen and a neat pantry. There were two bedrooms upstairs, his and my smaller one in the turret. Just as a New England farm house may be linked to the barn, our house connected directly to the cell block through a thick metal vault door. Every evening, my father changed out of his uniform and bathed, as though washing away the soil of the job before cooking our dinner. We lived our family life behind the triple locked steel door, separate from the cells. At Christmas, he would bring me with him into the cell block, delivering the holiday meal, cards, and gifts. Occasionally, my father took a young inmate, a raw farm boy who’d gotten into trouble, under his wing. He’d tutor him in the kitchen. I sat beside my father, absorbing the reading lesson, learning that people could do bad things without being bad people.

      ***

      “Why can’t I stay home? I know how to read,” I asked the first day of school, standing at the edge of the school yard, hanging onto his warm hand. He’d braided my hair. I had on a scratchy starched dress instead of soft, well-worn overalls.

      “There’s more to learn,” he said. “Thee will have a fine day. School is thy job now, Hazel.” The building was tall and imposing, with a mansard roof above the second floor. I hesitated at the edge of the school yard, trying to hide behind my burly father, peering out at the milling children on the sloped yard in front of the school. Boys gathered acorns from the huge oak tree, a Peace Oak planted at the school at the end of World War I. They threw the acorns at each other. Girls squealed and ran back and forth along the fence line. It didn’t look like fun to me.

      The bell rang and suddenly the children formed two lines, girls and boys, in front of the separate entrances. My father pushed me toward the end of the girls’ line, prying my fingers loose.

      “Is she scared?” said a boy, a latecomer, strolling up to us instead of joining the line.

      He was so skinny, the knobs of his elbows looked sharp. Scuffed shoes stuck out beneath his pants’ frayed cuffs. He reminded me of the wooden clogging puppet I’d seen at the County Fair. The stiff whirls in his wheat-colored hair stuck up in random tufts, the way fields looked just after being mowed, before the grain is bundled into tidy bales. He was smiling, a broad, open grin. He was missing a front tooth. I had a missing tooth in exactly the same spot!

      “Look,” I said, scrunching up my lip, pointing at the gap.

      “We’re twins! I’m Neal Shaw, I’m six and I’m going to first grade. Who are you?” He spoke fast, the words tumbling out.

      I looked up at my father.

      “Introduce yourself,” he said.

      “I’m Hazel Miller. I’m seven. Going to first grade, too.”

      “Why she’s so old?” he asked my father.

      “My father was teaching me,” I said. “Now I have to go to school.”

      And then the teacher was calling from the porch, “Girls and boys, girls and boys, hurry along please.”

      Neal shot across the yard to the tail end of the boy’s line. My father kissed the top of my head and tapped my back, pushing me toward the school like a marble into a chute.

      Once inside, I passed through the girls cloak room. It smelled of rainy days and a long summer’s emptiness. I followed the girls into the hallway and discovered we were with the boys again. The Common School had segregated entrances by sex; a remnant from an earlier time, but inside everything was coeducational. All of the children were white. The few Negro children in town went to a separate school near the rooming houses where black chauffeurs and maids stayed while their employers vacationed at the Springs Hotel down the road.

      The older, bigger children were racing up the stairs. Drowning in the hubbub, I stood stock still.

      “Hi, Hazel,” said the boy from outside, coming up beside me. “First grade is over there.” I followed him, like a duckling imprinted on the first moving creature she sees. He became my friend, my beacon.

      Neal and I were twins, in some ways. He too was an only child, and a half-orphan like me. But his father drank and would run the family hardware store into the ground before we graduated high school. Neal never knew what happened to his mother; he wasn’t even sure if she had died or simply disappeared. I knew everything about my mother. Her name—Helen—began with an H, like mine. My birthday, June 30, 1925, was the day she died. Every year after cake and candles at home, my father and I took a Mason jar of violets to her grave in the Dunning’s Creek Friends Meeting cemetery. Her high school graduation picture and wedding portrait stood on our mantelpiece, beside her clock.