“He does,” she said, depositing the offending jar on the desk and then wrinkling her nose as she arranged the still-damp rags on one side of the bottom shelf, from which she had already removed the counting frames. “He recites them louder than anyone else and can even apply them. He has almost mastered long division too.”
“Then he can be a clerk in a counting house or perhaps a wealthy banker when he grows up,” he said. “He will not need the soul of an artist. He probably does not possess one anyway. There—his future has been settled. I enjoyed your stories today.”
“You were listening,” she said in a mildly accusatory tone. “You were supposed to be concentrating upon teaching your art lesson.”
“Your pupils,” he said, “are going to realize when they grow up that they have been horribly tricked. They will have all these marvelous stories rolling around in their heads, only to discover that they are not fiction after all but that driest-of-all realities—history. And geography. And even arithmetic. You get your characters, both human and animal, into the most alarming predicaments from which you can extricate them only with a manipulation of numbers and the help of your pupils. They do not even realize they are learning. You are a sly, devious creature, Anna.”
“Have you noticed,” she asked, straightening the counting frames to her liking before closing the cupboard doors and turning toward him, “that at church when the clergyman is giving his sermon everyone’s eyes glaze over and many people even nod off to sleep? But if he suddenly decides to illustrate a point with a little story, everyone perks up and listens. We were made to tell and listen to stories, Joel. It is how knowledge was passed from person to person and generation to generation before there was the written word, and even afterward, when most people had no access to manuscripts or books and could not read them even if they did. Why do we now feel that storytelling should be confined to fiction and fantasy? Can we enjoy only what has no basis in fact?”
He smiled fondly at her as she stood looking at him, her hands clasped at her waist. “One of my many secret dreams is to be a writer,” he said. “Have I ever told you that? To write truth dressed up in fiction. It is said one ought to write about what one knows. I could invent endless stories about what I know.”
Secret dreams! It was a familiar, evocative phrase. They had often played the game as they grew up—What is your most secret dream? Usually it was that their parents would suddenly appear to claim them and whisk them off to the happily-ever-after of a family life. Often when they were very young they would add that they would then discover themselves to be a prince or princess and their home a castle.
“Stories about growing up as an orphan in an orphanage?” Anna said, smiling back at him. “About not knowing who you are? About dreaming of your missing heritage? Of your unknown parents? Of what might have been? And of what still might be if only . . . ? Well, if only.”
He shifted his position slightly and moved the paint jar so that he would not accidentally tip it.
“Yes, about all that,” he said. “But it would not be all wistful sadness. For though we do not know who we were born as or who our parents or their families were or are, and though we do not know exactly why we were placed here and never afterward claimed, we do know that we are. I am not my parents or my lost heritage. I am myself. I am an artist who ekes out a reasonably decent living painting portraits and volunteers his time and expertise as a teacher at the orphanage where he grew up. I am a hundred or a thousand other things too, either despite my background or because of it. I want to write stories about it all, Anna, about characters finding themselves without the hindrance of family lineage and expectations. Without the hindrance of . . . love.”
Anna gazed at him in silence for a few moments, the soreness of what felt very like tears in her throat. Joel was a solidly built man, somewhat above average in height, with dark hair cut short—because he did not want to fulfill the stereotypical image of the flamboyant artist with flowing locks, he always explained whenever he had it cut—and a round, pleasant face with a slightly cleft chin, sensitive mouth when it was relaxed, and dark eyes that could blaze with intensity and darken even further when he felt passionately about something. He was good-looking and good-natured and talented and intelligent and extremely dear to her, and because she had known him most of her life, she knew too about his woundedness, though any casual acquaintance would not have suspected it.
It was a woundedness shared in one way or another by all orphans.
“There are institutions far worse than this one, Joel,” Anna said, “and probably not many that are better. We have not grown up without love. Most of us love one another. I love you.”
His grin was back. “Yet on a certain memorable occasion you refused to marry me,” he said. “You broke my heart.”
She clucked her tongue. “You were not really serious,” she said. “And even if you were, you know we do not love each other that way. We grew up together as friends, almost as brother and sister.”
He smiled ruefully at her. “Do you never dream of leaving here, Anna?”
“Yes and no,” she said. “Yes, I dream of going out there into the world to find out what lies beyond these walls and the confines of Bath. And no, I do not want to leave what is familiar to me, the only home I have known since infancy and the only family I can remember. I feel safe here and needed, even loved. Besides, my . . . benefactor agreed to continue supporting me only as long as I remain here. I— Well, I suppose I am a coward, paralyzed by the terror of destitution and the unknown. It is as though, having been abandoned once, I really cannot bear the thought of now abandoning the one thing that has been left me, this orphanage and the people who live here.”