The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

  She raised her eyes now to the woman staring back at her from the bathroom mirror, looking like her grandmother, Kitty Milton.

  There was something she was supposed to remember. Something she was not meant to forget.

  Three

  IT TOOK NEARLY TWO weeks to get back home, though Ogden had booked the first free berth. They had delayed the funeral, waiting for his return. The great stone church packed with old New York ranged pew after pew, united in its sorrow, singing the hymns Kitty’s mother had chosen, to console. There was the Christian soldier, the lamb meek and mild, and the quick afflicted. There were the rows of mourners, the hats, the wool of the hats giving off the steam from the May rain they’d all come in from. Damp. Warm.

  Ogden sat beside Kitty, staring straight ahead of him, seeing nothing. Moss and Joan had been kept at home, and Neddy—whom he carried on his shoulders, whom he played tag with in the park, the little boy who slapped at his hand and ran away laughing, crying out I got you—lay there in the oaken coffin in front where Ogden and the ushers had set him down.

  How?

  The boat had docked very late the night before last, and it was past midnight when Ogden had let himself in. He made his way quietly down the long hall of the apartment toward their bedroom, past the two lamps glowing on the lowboy, and pushed open the door. It was pitch-dark inside, where usually there was a small night-light in case the children needed to wake them, and he put his hand out, feeling his way toward the bed, inching forward blindly and stumbling against it, nearly falling. Carefully, he laid his hand down where he imagined her arm to be to wake her. But there was nothing, no one there. The bedspread was on the pillow. He snapped on the light. She was not in their room, the bed made up, tucked tight. He wandered back through the empty darkened apartment, library, living room, dining room with its enormous table—where was she? And wandering into the kitchen he saw a light on in the back hall, in one of the maid’s rooms. And that’s where he found her, curled tight, her hands in front of her face as if she were hiding in sleep.

  “Kitty,” he whispered, his hand on her shoulder. “Kitty.” He pried her hands softly apart.

  She opened her eyes and stared at him above her.

  “It’s Ogden.” His voice broke. “It’s me.”

  “Ogden?” she asked. And that was all she said.

  So the single word that had tolled in his head all the way across the ocean, all the way here, never sounded; he couldn’t ask her how.

  Time and quiet, everyone counseled, would help. Best not to mention it. Best not to dwell on it, his mother had said. It was a terrible accident. It must have been hot. Windows were open all the time. And time would heal. Some things were better off left unsaid. Though the truth was, he couldn’t bring himself to say his boy’s name. If he said the word Neddy, his heart might fall out of his mouth.

  He reached for her hand, and she let him take it, treading and retreading back and forth in her head as she had every day, returning to the room and to that last moment when Neddy was still there, still standing on the window seat with Bear in his arms, when she might have crossed the ten feet between them and snatched him back from death, instead of standing frozen in the doorway while he fell beyond help, her mind refusing the picture of him falling in his bathrobe and slippers out there—out there?—and still alive. Those were the moments she couldn’t bear. When he was still alive. Had he cried for her? She hoped his mind had shut down on itself, she hoped the brain closed its own curtains.

  Ogden’s hand tightened on hers. They were to stand again. The minister raised his hand in blessing. They stood.

  Frozen, she had stood there in the doorway after he fell. Surely the empty spot where Neddy had been was wrong. Surely what she was seeing wasn’t right, surely someone would stop him, someone would catch him, someone would come, bring him back to her, close the window, and—

  “Mummy?”

  Moss was sitting on the window seat, staring at her.

  At last, she had moved. Crossed the ten feet of carpet to snatch Moss, wrap him in her arms, turning from the window to the bed, where she sank down, her heart beating again. The world beating again, beating in her body with its no, no, no, and Moss’s face buried against her chest, clinging to her neck as Kitty wrapped her arms around him and closed her eyes, rocking. And she would not let go. She would never let him go.

  So he was in her arms when the nurse came into the room. In her arms when the terrible men with the stretcher came. Still in her arms, nearly asleep, when she rose from the bed at last to meet her mother and father out in the hall.

  “Have you got Neddy?” Moss asked, turning his head to look at his grandparents.

  “Neddy,” his grandmother said, leaning over her grandson, “has fallen ill. He has gone to the hospital.”

  And Kitty dropped, sank to the floor before her father could grab her, like a bird, straight down, a bird shot from the sky, poor bird, before her father could catch her, with her son still clinging to her neck, fallen.

  “Where is Neddy, Mum?” Moss asked in the days that followed. “When is he coming back from the hospital?”

  Kitty couldn’t answer.

  “He’ll forget.” Her mother was gentle. “Children forget. It is best for him to forget. The truth is unspeakable.”

  “But Moss was there,” Kitty said. “He saw Neddy fall.”

  “Where is Neddy?” Moss asked every night.

  And on the third night, Kitty pulled him into her lap and was going to tell him, was going to say, You remember what happened, you remember, darling, don’t you? But his body was so small and so trusting against her, and so Neddy flew was what she’d said.

  “Neddy flew?” Moss looked at her.

  She nodded. “Neddy flew to heaven.”

  Moss rested against her, thinking. “With Bear?”

  Kitty gathered him closer. “Yes,” she whispered into his hair. “With Bear.”

  “Let us pray.” The minister had finished speaking.

  Our Father, the voices around them said, who art in heaven.

  And Kitty tried to do what she had not yet done. Tried to do, but failed. Under the surface of the others, here in the chapel, she tried again to imagine Neddy all the way down until the end. She was determined to think him all the way down, to carry him in her mind’s eye all the way to the ground. To carry him with her. So he was not alone when he died. But her mind, her tired mind, picked swiftly back from the sight her mind put there that she did not want to see. Instead, she imagined Johnny had caught him as he fell and brought him back to her, and she had taken Neddy in her arms and taken Moss by the hand and she had put her two boys to bed as she always did. She had kissed Neddy good night, she had tucked him in, she had straightened his covers, she had looked at him as he turned sleepily onto his side, his head on his hands. And then she had done the same with Moss and snapped off the light, closing the door on the two of them, her hatchlings, her boys in the big room, the city honking far below.

  “My dear,” Mrs. Withers said, and drew her into a powdery embrace.

  Kitty allowed herself to be pulled in, to be held, and to be put back. Mrs. Withers searched her face. “It will get better,” she whispered.

  Kitty nodded and smiled. How she hated them all.

  And Mrs. Withers turned to Ogden, standing beside Kitty in a receiving line as if it were their wedding, and Kitty stood and smiled and took the wishes for her, and understood that if she gave in to the tears in front of others, there would be no way back. Her father was right. There should be no waterworks. Better to construct a ladder inside, better to set each foot upon the wooden rungs to climb up and away from the empty, terrible hole. Better to cling to the ladder and pull oneself up, up, and away from the image that she couldn’t see, but couldn’t leave. Neddy on the ground between the legs of strangers, and all alone.

  In the days afterward, Ogden went back to the office and Kitty went to church, though there was nothing to pray for. There were no words
for what happened. She had found a tiny little church off Lexington Avenue, with a battered door and one single round window above it. She went to church to sit in the cave of stone, filled with voices of strangers. Murmurs coming through the air, bowling in the ceiling and sifting down with the speckled greens and blues, the deep dark red of the stained glass at the end of the nave. She sat in the hard wooden pew and waited for the hymns. And when the singing started, she could weep. She went to church to open her mouth and feel her heart again, constricted, struggling, banging against her throat, the tears there in the place of words, her voice struggling out in the vast air, stopped by grief. And the parishioners grew used to the tall woman coming in each morning, coming in from another part of the city. And let her be. So she sat alone, day after day, singing but not making a sound, her tears streaming down her cheeks, her throat, below the collar of her dress.

  Time would heal, she was told. Time will bear your sorrow away.

  Instead, there Neddy lay, a permanent grief, and it was she who was borne away, her sorrow worming through her brain, a slow unwinding body burrowing a tunnel into which she could stumble at any moment. A windy hole inside her, from which the view was pitiless and unfathomable.

  Ogden was no help. There was no help. She had left the window open. She had opened the window.

  Four

  LIKE VOICES HUMMING along a telegraph wire, Evie thought. That was how to teach the past. One could rest one’s hand upon it, feel the vibrato, one could close one’s eyes, lean low and listen hard. If one was paying attention, one could hear the voices underneath the past. And that was Time.

  She stopped at the corner of Waverly and University Place in New York City. Around her the university students streamed across, hurrying to classes in the squat buildings that framed Washington Square Park. In ballet flats and a sky blue sleeveless dress that set off her shock of silver hair, Professor Milton’s lean figure was a place on which to rest one’s eyes in the midst of all that motion. Queenly, her younger colleagues described her as when they thought she was out of hearing, and she knew it was as much to dismiss her as to signal their respect.

  A medievalist by training, the history of women’s lives her concentration, Professor Evelyn Milton had come out of the starting gate twenty-five years ago with The Anchoress: Foundational Trope of the Patriarchy from the Middle Ages to the Present, arguing that although the bedrock of every Western hierarchy rested upon a silent woman—seen quite literally in the case of the thirteenth-century anchoresses, the nuns walled into a cell at the side of an abbey to pray out the duration of their lives—that silence was the source of both the Church’s power and the nuns’. The anchoress was the power, the glory, and the victim all at once. It was the 1990s. Rereading a woman’s silence was all the rage. The book had won her prizes, a job, and eventually tenure, landing her at the foot of Manhattan in the Department of History at NYU.

  Nowadays, however, Evie heard the word trope and wanted to run for the hills. And furthermore, no matter how powerful an anchoress was in theory, in the end, there she was—still a woman who had buried herself in a stone room, alive.

  Metaphor, Evie thought as she stepped off the curb as the light changed, was for the young. Or, at any rate, for the younger than she.

  Evie pulled open the double-paned doors to the history department, passing out of the hot bright day into the cool of the marbled lobby, and shoved her dark glasses onto the top of her head, nodding on the way to the elevator to a pair of students whose names she couldn’t retrieve.

  The door slid shut and the elevator rose through the numbers on the brass board, flaring and extinguishing like momentary stars. She stood quite straight and watched them go, then dropped her eyes to the polished brass of the elevator door, realizing with a shock that the silver-haired woman reflected there was her.

  She kept forgetting. It was her.

  She crossed her arms at the reflection. Never mind, she thought as she stared back. It’s elegant. A fist in the air. No more pretending. She was over fifty, after all, married for twenty-five years, and with a teenage son. And, anyway, she had never banked on her body to get attention, even when she had had a body to speak of. Her husband, Paul, had wanted her and she had wanted him and that had been that.

  “You know, there’s a name for us,” her oldest friend, Honey Schermerhorn, had remarked last week.

  “Oh?” Evie said. “What’s that?”

  “The In-Betweens.”

  “In between what?”

  “Good question.” Honey considered. “Girls and hags?”

  “Oh, for god’s sake.”

  But that’s just it, she thought now. There was no good name for this spot. Evie, who had shot like an arrow from school into life, who had never wavered, who had seen clear right from the start where she wanted to get to, had lately found herself more and more in the brambles. Somehow, here she was, no longer certain where she was going. Or even if she wanted to get there.

  The jobs had been won, the beds made, the dishes washed, the children sprouted. The wheel had stopped, and now what? Where, for instance, was the story of a middle-aged orphan with the gray streak in her hair, the historian who had rustled thirteenth-century women’s lives out of fugitive pages, who believed more than most that there was no such thing as the certainty of a plot in the story of a life, in fact who taught this to students year in and year out, and yet who found herself lately longing, above all else, for just that? Longing, against reason, for some kind of clear direction, for the promise of a pattern. For the relief—she pulled against the shoulder strap of her satchel—the unbearable relief of an omniscient narrator.

  Adolescence, she reflected, pushing open the classroom door with a kind of savage glee, had nothing on this.

  The rows of students quieted and looked up.

  It was the second class of the summer semester, Introduction to Medieval History, and the unspoken rules of the game had not yet been determined. What Professor Milton might be looking for remained to be seen. She nodded at them and slid out her laptop, appearing stately, in possession of answers, and clearly unfazed by quiet. She pulled a small book out of her satchel, folded it in her arms, and looked at them.

  “If you worked at the World Trade Center, and you were told to go back to your desk in the second tower after the first tower had been hit, would you?”

  The class went utterly still.

  “What would you have done? It is the thing I ask myself over and over. Would you have gotten up from your desk and started walking down the stairs? That panicky feeling, what to do, what to do, meeting head-on with a supervisor saying go back to your desks, go back and wait for the firemen to come. That’s the procedure—” She paused. “Would you have kept walking? Or would you have turned around and gone back to your desk?”

  She looked at them.

  “If a Jew came to you in 1939 and asked to be hidden, would you?”

  She nodded at the students ranged in the first row. “Would you risk your life, your family’s life, to free someone enslaved?”

  They were all listening now.

  “If we can imagine the answers to those questions, then we are beginning the semester right.”

  She paused.

  “I’d have gone back to my desk,” she said quietly. “I’d have been the good one, the obedient one.”

  She looked at them. “Who are you? Each one of you?”

  They stared back at her. One boy looked down.

  Good, she thought, letting the words hang a few moments in the air. Then she put on her glasses and opened the book.

  “‘Long after the bricklayer vanished behind the wall he was building around me, I could hear the scraping of his trowel. He was careful. Devoted. And throughout the hours of my enclosure, I heard the setting down of bricks, one upon the next, the mortar slapped on and then smoothed, slapped and then smoothed, and even as I prayed, even as the light dimmed, then lessened, then vanished, the clay and the mortar grew in my mind’s e
ye. Grew to God.’”

  She paused and looked up. “This is the account of Marie, anchoress of Saint Leraux, written in 1341,” she said, and continued on.

  “‘And I could not keep myself from picturing the wall he built, the wall he built around me, as though I were standing on the outside and looking in. The bricks like notes—soldier, sailor, rowlock, and shiner—the wall would sound the song he made from clay and lime and water. And the beating heart at the center of his song, behind his wall, sang in silence with the bricks. My heart sang to God.’”

  She closed the book.

  “That,” remarked a boy sitting in the middle of the room, “is sick.”

  Male or female, it didn’t matter; there was always this student in every class, self-appointed provocateur who imagined himself fearless, unafraid to poke at the classroom orthodoxy to ask questions, to nudge aside the hand that was feeding them. Evie recognized it; she welcomed it. She had been that boy long ago, skeptical, insightful—and wanting to paint her name across the classroom sky.

  “Sick?” Evie took off her glasses and considered the boy. “As in excellent? Or as in horrible?”

  “Horrible.” He grimaced. “Why would anyone let themselves be bricked into a room at the side of a church for their whole life?”

  “Faith,” she replied firmly, “and power.”

  The skepticism in the room was palpable.

  “Let me ask you something.” Evie put down the reading. “What does a firsthand account like this make you want to do?”

  The same boy grinned. “Get her out of there.”

  “Go on,” Evie said. “How?”

  “Guns,” he answered. “Love. Or money.”

  “Or email,” another boy, emboldened, cracked. “If she had wireless.”

  The room laughed. Evie walked to the single window in the classroom and wound the lever, opening it. Then she turned around, still waiting, the students saw, for an answer.

  “How about writing her history?” Evie asked calmly. “How about history?”