The Stargazer's Sister

by Carrie Brown

  He pries apart her fingers. He has brought her one of the late-hatched ducklings, brown-feathered and leggy.

  Lina turns her face aside, but she feels the creature’s heart beating in her hands, and the weeping that follows finally is good.

  —

  THE AFTERNOON OF THE FUNERAL for Margaretta, Lina goes to the stable. It has been years since she has added anything to her childhood collection of pebbles and feathers, acorns and chestnuts. She unfolds the cloth in which they are wrapped and puts the items into her apron.

  She has not changed yet from her good dress. She wears the brooch with the locket of Margaretta’s hair given to her by Margaretta’s weeping mother.

  The bantams and guineas follow Lina down through the orchard to the river. She knows they imagine that her bulging apron holds grain, and she feels sorry that she has nothing for them. She is comforted by their company, their foolish air of busy industry.

  She stands on the riverbank. Beside her, the feathers of the bantams ruffle in the wind. Surely a storm will come before long, perhaps even snow. The hens cluck and complain at her feet. She stares at the scene before her: the dark brown water rippling by, the yellow stubble of the field on the far shore, the gray sky. Her father had helped the others carry Margaretta from her house feetfirst, so that she should not look back with longing but will be free to go joyfully to heaven.

  At the cemetery, Lina had seen that the family had been persuaded to have a bell installed. Afterward, Lina’s father had complained. Such customs, he said—imagining that a dead person might revive in her coffin and pull the string to ring a bell mounted on the grave, thereby alerting the night watchman to unearth the coffin—are nothing but a way to part a grieving family from its money.

  Yet surely some sort of passage awaits Margaretta, Lina thinks. Then, for the first time, she realizes that it is only faith that sustains the notion of Margaretta’s soul ascending toward God. The migration to heaven cannot be understood except as a mystery that neither science nor any man can explain.

  She misses William terribly. The thought of him causes an actual pain in her stomach. Sometimes it is difficult for her to stand upright, her belly hurts her so much. She wishes he could be with her now. He is not troubled by the idea of a God he cannot understand. She knows from his letters that he is able to hold the two ideas—the unfathomable God, a fathomable universe—without compromise to his faith.

  She knows, too, that ancient Egyptian kings were buried in tombs stocked with possessions for the afterlife, canisters of honey and mountains of gold coins. She does not believe that Margaretta will wake in her coffin, that her little white finger around which they had tied the string will twitch, that the bell on her grave will tinkle in the empty cemetery over which the fall leaves tumble and darkness now descends. At the cemetery she had listened to the priest and murmured the words of the prayers, but she had not felt closer through them either to Margaretta or to God. Still, she wants to make a gesture, to send Margaretta with something from her.

  Hilda is in the courtyard, calling in the hens. They have settled at Lina’s feet like loyal dogs, but they stir now uneasily. They are used to being brought in at night, and they sense rain approaching with the dark.

  Lina steps closer to the water and shakes her apron, emptying its contents into the river. The stones and chestnuts tumble at once into the current moving at her feet, but the feathers are picked up by the wind and carried a distance over the water before she loses sight of them.

  If God sees everything, she thinks, then perhaps he sees Lina make this offering. She feels that with Margaretta goes the last of her happiness. How will she bear the life before her?

  She knows from maps that the river at her feet travels toward other rivers—the Aller, the Weser—and from there to the North Sea. She has William to thank for helping her to understand their place in the world, how small it is, how…accidental. When he had first shown Lina a map of the world, she had not believed it to be a true representation.

  “But how came we to be here?” she had asked him. “Why not there”—pointing with her finger at one place and then another—“or there? What determines it?”

  “Nothing determines it,” William had said. “It is just God’s design.”

  She looks up now. The first stars are out. Some shine with a steady light. Others are smaller and fainter. She is comforted by their presence, understanding that they are the same stars William sees. As far away as he is in England, he and she are overarched by the same sky. It feels beyond her to memorize the positions of all the stars, though she recognizes many constellations, but she knows from William’s letters that others have done so. William has a star atlas, she knows, a copious record of the universe. He has sent her carefully drawn copies of a few of its pages so she may look for the constellations, and so that they may watch for them together.

  No one has heard from Jacob since the night the three brothers left home. Lina is glad. Her mother cries and cries over him, but Lina hopes he will never come back.

  As soon as the occupation ended, Alexander, who had struggled in England working as a tutor, returned to Hanover for a position in the court orchestra, but William was given a job as music master to the militia under the Earl of Darlington, and he wanted to stay in England. He writes that he performs as an organist, as well as on the violin and oboe and harpsichord. At one concert, he tells them, he accompanied the Duke of York, brother of King George III, who played the violoncello. One advantage of being a stranger in a strange land is that he has few diversions, William writes, and he composes new music at a great rate, seven symphonies so far. As he rides across the countryside to give concerts or to meet with his music pupils, he studies the night sky, and his mind is occupied by many cosmological quandaries and questions. He makes lists of his questions for Lina and their father: What is the size of the Milky Way and how is it to be measured? How far from the earth is the nearest star? Of what material is the sun composed? If there is life on the moon—and he believes there is—what sorts of creatures are they, and how do they organize themselves?

  He has begun an astronomical observation journal. He is studying not only English but also Italian and Latin and Greek. Often he muses on the question of immortality. He writes: My feeble understanding is not capable of pushing so far into the secrets of the Almighty….I think it better to remain content with my ignorance till it pleases the Creator of all things to call me to Himself and to draw away the thick curtain which now hangs before our eyes.

  By the time she reaches the courtyard at the top of the orchard with her empty apron, the sky is dark, but Lina does not remember ever seeing the Milky Way so dense and swarming with light. It is as if a great congress takes place there.

  She knows from William that they see with the naked eye only a fraction of what surrounds them. For a moment she suffers the physical sense of unsteadiness that sometimes results when she tries to make her mind calculate the extent of the universe. She gazes at the sky, its twinkling mansions.

  Where is Margaretta’s soul now? Perhaps it has already passed beyond the farthest star and through the gates of mystery into heaven.

  FIVE

  Mystery

  In May of Lina’s seventeenth year, the Herschel family is invited to attend the wedding of a neighbor’s daughter. After the vows in the church, a fete and a ball are held in the church hall. The tables are laid with exotic fare, partridge and peacocks, loaves of white bread, honey cakes called Lebkuchen, dates and sugar candies, pints of the white Feldliner wine. Her mother is furious, Lina knows, at what the feast suggests about their neighbors’ wealth. She keeps her fingers tight around Lina’s arm the whole time, as if she needs to lean upon her. When people stop to inquire politely about her health, Lina’s mother droops and simpers, affecting a limp, her hand over her heart.

  Lina watches people quickly move away from them, glancing at her scarred face. She knows what they think: ugly little thing. And attached to that awful moth
er. Poor child.

  Outside in the street, a group of boys sing the old forbidden song.

  What has she got? What can she do?

  There are wedding gifts of swaddling, cradles, bathing bowls. Lina, leaving her mother in a chair, wanders the hall inspecting the tables. She thinks of the old blind man Margaretta had imagined, the quiet house Lina would share with him one day, their fine possessions.

  “This is the great mystery,” the priest said at the church. “Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house. Your children will be like olive shoots around your table.”

  —

  LATER THAT NIGHT, her father sits by the fire at home, slumped in his chair. He has suffered a long morose spell lately. He has only one or two music pupils remaining now. Sometimes still the music master comes with scores to transcribe, but since her father’s seizure two years before, it is more difficult for him to write by hand. Like Lina, her father’s greatest pleasure is William’s letters. These have become long treatises William now organizes and titles by topic: Musical, Moral, Historical, Metaphysical, Characteristic. Sometimes his letters are filled with mechanical diagrams and musical notations for pieces he is composing.

  Alexander has taken lodgings elsewhere in Hanover, and he rarely visits; Lina knows that their mother’s unpleasantness keeps him away. Sophia has married and occasionally brings her little boy, but they never stay long. Lina sees that the child is afraid of his grandfather, the white spittle at the corners of the old man’s mouth, his trembling hands, his long face, which seems to approach the boy as though he will swallow him whole, though Lina knows it is only love that gives her father’s expression such intensity, such terrible fondness.

  The boy squirms in Isaac’s lap, throwing fearful glances at his mother, finally breaking into tears and wailing his complaint.

  —

  THAT NIGHT AFTER THE WEDDING, Lina sits at her father’s feet before the fire. He has asked her to read aloud some of William’s recent letters, just to hear them again, and she has complied. Now, as she folds the letters and puts them away in the box where they are stored, there is silence in the room.

  Her mother and Hilda have gone to bed, her mother complaining of indigestion from the rich fare at the wedding. Dietrich and Leonard, too, are asleep.

  From the shadows behind her, her father speaks at last.

  “Oh, my dear,” he says. “You are neither handsome nor rich. What is to be done? What is to be done?”

  Lina looks up from the box and into the fire.

  She knows exactly how she appears to others. She knows her illness stunted her growth, as well as marking her face. She is barely five feet tall, and she can hardly expect to grow any taller now. The pockmarks on her skin are less pronounced than they once were, but anyone might recognize her by running fingertips over the pitted skin of her cheeks and forehead. Her mother has declared that with her narrow hips and flat bosom and sticks for legs, it would kill her to bear a child, even if she were one day to wed and conceive.

  Lina knows that the wedding and its celebration that day have made her father worry. She thinks again of Margaretta’s romantic fantasies about the blind old man, his gnarled hand gentle upon Lina’s head.

  “Well, what hope for me then?” She tries to make her voice light to distract her father. “After all, perhaps I will attract the kindly blind grandfather Margaretta always prophesied for me.”

  “I believe it is your only hope,” her father replies. “It is my fondest wish that even if you are advanced in life, an old man might take you for your excellent conversation and your sweet voice.”

  A familiar pain crosses her head behind her eyes at her father’s words. The ghost of the fever, she has come to think of it. Perhaps it will always be with her.

  What is to be said now? She blinks at the fire.

  She thinks for a moment of the vanished Jacob, of how much pleasure her pain would give him now.

  Why had he always hated her so?

  Lina knows there will be no gentle grandfather. She imagines instead an old man with a beak of a nose and a full purse, his breath like spoiled meat, who one day will take her to his home and rap her fingers if she burns his dinner.

  She would rather die.

  “Perhaps if he is wise enough to recognize my excellent conversation,” she says finally, though she knows she cannot disguise the bitterness she feels, “he will not be so bad.”

  Her father’s hand falls to her shoulder.

  “Of course, of course,” he says. She can hear from his tone that he is repentant, that he regrets having spoken to her in such a way, betraying his fear. “You are a fountain of excellent qualities, my dear.

  “Oh, how unjust it all is,” he cries suddenly, “that the best of daughters should be denied a mortal happiness! It is a tragedy!”

  He strikes his thigh with his fist.

  Lina knows her father loves her. She has not wanted to be alone tonight. The wedding made her sad as well. But now she has had enough. She cannot bear any more of this, wants no more of his dramatics. She begins to rise from the floor.

  Again he is immediately regretful.

  “Child, child. Do not mind me,” he says. “I am only a foolish old man. You are beloved to me, my only comfort. You will find happiness, I am sure of it.”

  He takes her hand and kisses it.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “I intend a different sort of life for myself, anyway.”

  “Of course,” he says. But he is not listening. He does not ask her about this life she imagines, and she is trapped in the life she has, she knows. She is trapped at her mother’s side, condemned to listen to her complaints. She is trapped by the walls of the courtyard and the orchard that ends at the river, trapped by the duties of sweeping and washing and cooking and sewing. All possibility in her life began with her sex, perhaps, and ended with the fever that came to her one night and left her scarred and stunted.

  She has seen no fondness between her parents. She knows, though, for she has seen it between Margaretta’s parents—Margaretta’s father’s hands on his wife’s waist or cupping her bottom when they thought no one was looking—that sometimes there is love between husbands and their wives, that there is love between a blushing girl and boy who dance the Ländler, their arms intertwined, the girl’s face upturned toward the boy’s, smiling.

  But that is not to be her life.

  Hers is not a face to turn toward anyone.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING she is awakened at dawn by the sound of her mother’s screams and by Hilda’s wailing. She comes to the top of the stairs in her nightdress and looks down. Her mother and Hilda are cringing against the bottom steps in each other’s arms.

  “I can’t touch him,” her mother says. “I can’t. It’s disgusting, disgusting!”

  The fire is cold.

  Lina wavers in her stockings on the landing, a shawl around her shoulders, her hair wild.

  Her father is dead in his chair, his hands curled on his lap like bird claws and his eyes and mouth open.

  —

  THE GULF THAT OPENS at Lina’s feet with her father’s death lasts for five years, time that later in her memory is characterized by nothing, an empty plain almost without event, or at least events so trivial as to mystify her with their strange permanence in her mind: Dietrich being lifted to a table and playing a solo on his Adempken at a concert, a beautiful lady putting a gold coin in his pocket and complimenting his technique on the violin; the two months she spends lodging with a sempstress, where she learns to sew household linens and is given too little to eat; the cold floor of the garrison church where she goes alone sometimes to kneel and bow her head and ask for something, anything to relieve the barren days stretching before her. She remembers word for word a passage from one of William’s letters, and which she often rereads: There are two kinds of happiness or contentment for which we mortals are adapted; the first we experience in thinking and the other in feeling. Let a man
once know what sort of being he is; how great the Being which brought him into existence, how utterly transitory is everything in the material world, and let him realize this without passion in a quiet philosophical temper, and I maintain then that he is happy; as happy indeed as it is possible for him to be. She reads this letter so frequently that eventually the paper tears where she had folded it. At night she sits outside on the bench and looks up at the sky, at the familiar constellations. She thinks about the Being who created this life for her. She knows that it is, as William said, transitory. But she does not know where she might find a “quiet philosophical temper” with which to bear it, while it is still hers to live.

  One day, her mother raises a hand to strike her. She has done so before, but this time, something in Lina’s face must arrest her, for she drops her hand. They stare at each other, but it is her mother who turns away finally. Lina will make that moment last, make her mother look at her lifted hand. Yet the incident occasions no sense of triumph in Lina. It is that moment, in fact—the stark presence of her mother’s fear, along with her chronic anger and lack of affection—that prompts Lina at last to write to William, to plead for his help, to beg for his rescue.

  Dearest Lina. I am making plans, William writes to her after receiving her desperate letter. I have not forgotten you.

  Finally a letter to Lina and their mother containing William’s proposal arrives. He will return to Hanover in August and plans to take Lina back to England with him, where he is now installed as concertmaster and organist at the Octagon Chapel in Bath. He knows Lina’s voice is a fine one, he writes, and he needs a singer he can train and keep with him all the time. The performers on whom he depends now are itinerant, their services too expensive.

  He will compensate their mother for the loss of Lina.

  “He will never have you sing,” her mother says, folding the letter and tucking it away in her gown, as if to deny Lina the pleasure of reading his words again. “Not with your face.”