This summer, they had set out on exploration which was quite daring for native New Yorkers and for people born in Brooklyn. They hardly go anywhere, except around, and nearby, and where they know people. In peacetime, in the lower brackets, they go to certain places along the Jersey shore which shall be nameless, like Asbury Park. Or they go to the New York mountains, or into Connecticut, or to Cape Cod. Upper brackets, New Hampshire, Vermont, Cape Cod, too, but Truro or the Wellfleets, not Provincetown any more, so much. Then of course there’s Fire Island.

But they had a whole month’s vacation this summer, and decided to do something different with it. They couldn’t afford to go to Europe, or they would have done that. South America, no. But there was always Canada, and, talking around, they were torn between the Gaspé, where it was French, and Nova Scotia, where she had remote and elderly cousins who spent summers in a house built by a shipping great-grandfather.

She was not, but he was. But she was born in New York City, three generations of her family had lived in Manhattan, in traditional old apartment houses, first around St. Nicholas Avenue—that was in her grandparents’ time, it was all right up there, then. Later, midtown. She herself was a child of Greenwich Village, the soft asphalt of memory under her roller skates, went to school on Horatio Street, grew up to go to revels at Webster Hall.

He came from Brooklyn, said the longest journey was the one over the bridge to Manhattan, so that you lived there, he meant. On that journey you lost a lot of things, including a way of talking, old acquaintances, memories. Then, if you were doing all right, you grew warm again toward certain aspects of Brooklyn, and had friends over there, but different ones, and you even thought you would like to live in a remodeled house along the Heights, so as to look over at New York.

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They married after he got out of the army, and lived first in an apartment near Stuyvesant Square. It had tall, grand rooms, and odd small rooms, to study in. He taught, she worked for the Public Library, which she loved like a brother, because if you grow up poor in New York, you love all Andrew Carnegies, all kind librarians and Story Hour ladies. This apartment was up four long flights of vertiginous stairs, each one balanced differently from the flight below, and with a different droop, and shaky banisters. Your heart was in your mouth half the time, and if you forgot the bread or the artichokes, it was hell.

So they moved, but they had become New Yorkers who loved big, handsome rooms, and accepted irregularity of plumbing. They wanted drawing-rooms, French windows leading to a backyard that might become a garden later, and they were perfectly willing to have the icebox under the stove, and the bathroom out in the hall. I mention this to show they loved the look of where they lived. They were not austere, not too political, they liked beauty and pleasure and reminders of joy. He had brought home some good engravings from Paris, they were framed on the vast, accepting walls. She knew painters, and bought paintings, as she said, on purpose.

Whenever they went anywhere, they liked to bring something back, to remind them. They hadn’t been many places together yet, and they knew it got harder, with children. They had been married nearly four years, and were anxious for children, didn’t want to put off having them any longer.

So, as a reward for her getting pregnant at a slightly awkward time—there is never a time for getting pregnant that suits everybody, you know that, it just can’t be—they decided, she was only a month or two along, they would travel somewhere. Next summer Europe, baby and all, if he could get exchange teaching to do, or a fellowship, which looked very likely.

Afterward, she wondered if it was that which gave her a slightly queasy feeling about their summer, as though perpetually crossing the Bay of Fundy. Just a faint distaste and qualm. She had never been to Nova Scotia before, and then again, she had never been pregnant before. So it was hard to tell.

Anyway, they planned to drive to Canada along the New England coast, take the St. John-Digby ferry, and then come home via the Halifax-to-Boston boat, if they could get a reservation. Which they did. Ahead of time. And then, when they got to Halifax, their reservation had gone to somebody else. Or so the man said. Or something. They couldn’t get their car aboard for two days, and that took endless standing around the dock, waiting for a cancellation. He wondered if he was being called persistent, the way they are, pushing, elbowing out of turn, not gentlemanly, really, but by then he was good and sore, and hardly cared what the man thought. He got a reservation, finally, and had an idea it was somebody else’s turn to be annoyed. Maybe there was nothing personal about it, after all.

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As early as Northern Maine, they began to get a feeling of the dangers of foreign travel. They bought chocolate bars wherever they came on them, and put their favorite reading books right on the seat beside them, in case they had to wait anywhere.

They did not like to be out of each other’s sight. If he was going somewhere to see about tickets, she went with him, and if he was going to be long, she sat in the car and read. The same with him. Once she got her hair washed in a small hotel, because already the amenities of civilization were thinning out, and he sat right in the lobby, reading and waiting and listening to the jocund conversation of small-town travelers.

“How things going?”

The sharp answer seemed to be, “Straight ahead.”

In Maine, there were a few nice old towns, with great, grand houses, bays and harbors, widows’ walks to see them from, and cemeteries everywhere. The dead had the best of everything, hilltops, views, leisure. In life, not so.

Towns thinned out to farms that all seemed to belong to old people. They sat in their doorways, in the chill sunset.

“Maine would make a lovely old folks’ home,” she said. “You could be independent a long time. A little farm would keep you busy enough, a few chickens, an apple tree, neighbors—”

“You wouldn’t like it,” he said firmly. She was more apt than he to get a little sentimental, in summer, and think some day they must live in the country. For himself, he wanted to own something in the city, real stones, bricks, a piece of Manhattan or Brooklyn Heights, then you’d own something, then you’d be somewhere. And if you could do that, you could afford plenty of country and seashore, all you wanted, summers.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said, and felt prematurely old, because she suddenly remembered being pregnant, which was the start of generations to come, and she would be of a generation left behind, one of these days.

Often it was hours between towns, now, and when they crossed the border into Canada, they got long drinks of water, as though they were about to cross a desert.

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In New Brunswick, the tea began to be good, and they had the first one of those meals they soon found to be inevitable—fried meat or fish, French-fried potatoes, pie, and tea. Wax beans the only vegetable, not counting potatoes, which apparently grew French-fried, and the rare, pale slice of tomato.

She exclaimed with pleasure, finally, over tomatoes.

“Love-apples,” she said. “When I was little, we hardly got to eat tomatoes. They were dangerous, like bananas.”

“We went in for healthy vegetables, vegetables,” he said. “Except for the junk we ate outside the house. I like fried food.”

They stayed overnight in St. John, red brick houses, three stories high, on steep streets that all ended in views of water. Across, in Digby, they began to drive through Nova Scotia.

“The Evangeline country,” she read from a travel folder, while he drove through what she called five-story-high trees. After a while, they were made uneasy by the deserted vast expanses of forest, the roaring dark rivers that bared their stones. There was sky everywhere, vast, naked and blue, or else covered with slow-moving, repetitious clouds.

They stayed at bare cabins or boarding houses, and looked forward to the few days of visiting her comfortable cousins. A terrible loneliness began to envelop them. Nova Scotia was densely unpopulated. Villages were half a dozen mute houses, then mile after mile of woodland. There were all kinds of birds, bright finches and great, unwieldy crows, in quantity.

“As big as vultures,” she said, mournfully. “I wish we’d get somewhere.”

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In her cousins’ village, there was English civilization, the tiny, tidy social life of Cranford. People had each other to tea, elderly ladies wore white hats and white gloves, and declined a second sandwich, and spoke of pleasure. “With me, painting is merely an avocation,” said the plump, redfaced lady. “Not a vocation.” She laughed, and they looked at her water colors of hackmatack trees and small fishing boats.

The dozen or so families, like her cousins, were descendants of vanished mill owners and managers, describing themselves as gentlefolk. They told her local history, which was complex, and had to do partly with the American Revolution, when nearly half of Harvard College moved to Nova Scotia, loyalists, and so on.

There were others in the village, rural characters in thick-soled boots, women often wearing men’s old tweed jackets, the children pale, thin, small, looking as though they lived on wax beans, French-fried potatoes, and tea.

Her cousins told her nobody poor ever had the doctor, but instead ate pills, and took colored infusions, and made herb teas for each other. Hearing some talk of sterilizing infants’ bottles and so on, the old one who worked for her cousins said it was foolish, and she ought to know, hadn’t she had twelve and raised six?

She began to feel queasy, and the landscape seemed darker and more menacing. She began almost to hate the great, encroaching evergreens, and the impervious sky. Although there were sudden vistas of slanting green fields, a bright blue inlet, brilliant sun on amber-colored water, a yoke of oxen, all together, in one place, and a miniature fishing village. It felt a hundred years ago, and she entertained dreads and humors.

“We haven’t found anything really nice to take home, have we?” she said, and began to look at hooked rugs. She bought one or two, for presents, and bought wool to take home to knitters, and some lengths of good tweed, so they could have country jackets alike. He bought some flannel for a suit.

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In almost the last day of their visit, her cousins took them to visit an impressive hunting lodge in the deep forest. Surrounded by darkness, the lodge was built on a steep bank of a river, there was a steady noise the water made. Their host said there was a bear in the vicinity, he knew by two signs, the bear’s works on the path, and another place the bear had been sick on blueberries.

“The charms of nature,” she thought.

She heard a story that made her feel slow and cold and far from all she held dear, except for Saul, who was there (they would die together in these woods, a stone would crush them, a river would drown them, a bear would embrace them).

Her host told the story, while she observed remainders of dead animals. Antlers. A cluster of wasps’ nests. His gun rested on upturned deer hoves. Snakeskins.

A man had come there, many years ago, a peddler with a pack. Gradually he got a horse and wagon, then built the only store. Also he began to buy a little woodland. He was a solitary man, without family. His store had been burnt down five times. The last time he was nearly cleaned out, because his warehouse was full of new stock. He let the poor buy on credit, and nobody ever left the store without stealing something—it was a ritual. He knew that, and was pretty sure who set the fires, but he went on working all hours, and now owned miles of forest, which he just kept. Nobody could prevent that.

“An Armenian,” her host explained, and she felt the strangest shock of relaxation. She knew why, and hated it more that he was only a poor Armenian trader, trying to emulate Bruce and his spider. “Try, try again, poor old Bruce Canatangian, or whatever your name is,” she thought. “Anglo-Saxons love fair play.” But it had come near.

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On the last day, they drove to a nearby town, with the cousins, who wanted to see about some upholstery that had been in process all summer.

“He has some fine old furniture,” they said, for she had still not found what she wanted to take home.

The town was of such ugliness as to be almost memorable, how could a town with a harbor, and trees, be so depressing? The cousins admired the residential section, but other streets were raw and frontierlike, and the courthouse was Grecian in front, with Doric columns, but drab shingled back and sides. The stores along the main street were named Voegler’s, Wigglesworth’s, Armand’s, and at last they came to a two-story barn, full of old furniture.

The upholsterer who conferred with the cousins bought and sold antiques, did cabinet work, trucking, and a few other things. He was a fat, small-eyed beetle of a man in striped overalls. The reason he had good antiques was that he also helped out the undertaker, and so got into front parlors not usually open to him. He remembered what he saw in time of bereavement—English highboys, French chairs, fine china, crystal goblets. When the time came, he bought up.

She admired one sofa. It was small, carved with palmetto leaves along the rising curve of arm and back, beautiful red mahogany from the Bahamas, not yet upholstered, which was an advantage, if it would only fit in the back of the car. It was a hundred and fifty years old. The daughter of a family he knew, so did the cousins, had brought it in a year or two ago, to get it upholstered because she was going to be married. Before he got around to it, her man went into the asylum. There ever since. Hopeless case, they said.

“How terrible,” said the cousins, in pity.

“Lucky to get out of it, the way I see it,” he replied. “She’d have had him on her hands. Now she wants to sell the sofa.”

“How much is it?” she asked.

“Two hundred dollars,” he said.

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It was a lot, but they wanted it. While they talked it over, and measured, and looked at other things, the upholsterer touched a French empire table, also mahogany. It was far more elegant than anything else there, polished by centuries, with brass, carried from long-ago Paris to be the one fine thing in the wilderness community.

“It is beautiful,” he agreed. “Jew come in here the other day, offered me a hundred and fifty for it.” He laughed. “Figured if the Jew offered me that, it was worth twice as much to me. Wouldn’t sell.”

“I wonder if the sofa will fit in the car,” she said, rather abruptly, and walked downstairs, as if to take more measurements. The stairs were uneven, and she clung to the rough wooden rail and longed for Stuyvesant Square.

Her cousin had introduced them by name, for, they always explained gently, business was not so commercial here as at home. The antiques man had seemed indifferent.

She could not know whether he had done it intentionally and told herself she cared less, and be damned to his sofa. But it seemed to her when she glanced back to see if Saul and the cousins were almost ready to leave, the fat little man stood smiling, glinting with the pleasure of the word he had used.

The town stood in Acadia, the land of Evangeline. This was the forest primeval.

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