In overlapping bursts, the crying built to a furious peak.
Better not to move from the window than risk the visions that bubbled up, smelling of brimstone, when she went near the twins. She should not go in the kitchen where there were knives. She should not venture near down pillows or basins of water. She should not hold the babies in her arms because she might bring them up to this window and drop them from it. Wicked, came her mother’s voice. Wicked, wicked, wicked.
During one of her stints at boarding school, the morning after an ice storm, she had taken cautious gliding steps off her dormitory’s porch and into a blinding, brittle, splintery world. Each maple in the school’s central green was locked in its own close-fitting glass case, toothed with icicles. When the babies cried, she became like those trees: first rooted, then frozen. Their wails seemed as remote and unanswerable as the cries of birds circling their ice-filled nests.
Addison had been on the Josephina when they were born. Annabel had begun labor on September 4, three weeks early, and the twins were finally expelled more than a day later, an eternity later, before dawn on the sixth, the first day of the Battle of the Marne. No names had occurred to her, and she had waved a hand in acquiescence when the midwife suggested Marian and the doctor offered James, to be called Jamie.
For Annabel, the horror of the birth had merged with the horror of the war, now that she knew what it was to scream, to bleed. The birth had become the new trouble to which her mind returned when she let her guard down. The basin of red water reappeared, the doctor’s knives and forceps and sewing needles. She saw again the purple infants smeared with blood and something like custard, as small as puppies, and she was revisited by her first horror at the sight of them, her fleeting, addled belief that the doctor was holding her organs in his hands, that she had been eviscerated. The midwife had told her the birth would be a trial, but, afterward, joy would overwhelm her. Either the woman had been lying, or, more likely, Annabel was an unnatural mother.
When the babies were five days old, Addison had returned. He had stood looking into their bassinet with a puzzled expression and then at Annabel where she lay, rank with sweat, her hair matted. She’d been refusing to bathe because the doctor said warm water would encourage milk production, and she was determined for hers to dry up.
“Cool water, then,” the day nurse said. “To soothe your parts.”
Annabel had told her she would rather die than take a cold bath. “Your business is with the babies, not with me,” she said. “Leave me be.”
She had matched Addison’s silence, and the next day he left again.
“Only a touch of the melancholies,” the day nurse said. “I’ve seen it before. You’ll be yourself again soon.”
Yourself.
A memory from the murk of her first years. Moonlight bluing the nursery curtains; her father beside her, holding her. No one ever held her. The warmth of another body was intoxicating. Instinctively, she had clutched the silk front of his robe and felt him trembling. There the memory ended.
Age seven. She was standing in the pantry in the house in Murray Hill with her dress lifted while the cook’s son, a boy of about eleven, crouched in front of her. A jagged cry from the doorway and a great, flapping rushing-in. Bosomy, bustled, black-skirted Nanny overfilled the small space like a crow jammed in a house for sparrows. The cook’s boy yelped at being trampled. Nanny gave only that one cry, then nothing but agitated nose-breathing as she dragged Annabel upstairs and locked her in a closet.
Dark in there, but with a keyhole view across the hallway to the nursery, her yellow quilt on the bed and a doll abandoned facedown on the floor. “Was I bad?” she had asked Nanny through the door.
“You know you were,” Nanny said. “You are the worst kind of girl. You ought to be more than ashamed.”
What lay beyond shame? Annabel wondered, crouching among dustpans and tins of furniture polish. If what she had done was so abominable, why was it permissible for her father, the god of the household, vastly more powerful than even her mother or Nanny, to touch the part of her that the cook’s son had offered her a piece of lemon candy only to look at, the part that Nanny called her cabbage? This is our secret, her father said about his visits, and Mother must not know because she would be jealous of how much he loved Annabel and how much Annabel loved him and how they were warm together.
The day she showed her cabbage to the cook’s boy, her mother beat her on her bare legs and backside and called her wicked, wicked, wicked.
The first doctor prescribed daily baths in cold water, a vegetarian diet.
Nanny refused to answer any questions about the nature of wickedness. “That sort of talk will only encourage you.”
Although, once, when Annabel had asked if boys’ cabbages were bad, too, Nanny had burst out with, “Stupid child, boys don’t have cabbages. They have carrots.”
Wickedness, it seemed, had to do with vegetables.
Uneasily, guiltily, for reasons she could not have begun to explain, Annabel began, during unsupervised moments in the nursery or the bath, to touch her cabbage. The sensation dulled her mind in a pleasant way, built to an absorbing comfort, even had the power to drive off unwelcome thoughts: the skinned lamb, for example, that she had seen in the kitchen with its tongue hanging out or her mother calling her wicked. It even muffled thoughts of her father. Her father said he was trying to do something nice. That his visits filled her with dread must mean there was something wrong with her. She would try to be better.
Age nine. She woke to a gust of cold air, morning light, her yellow quilt being snatched away. Her mother stood over her, clutching the quilt like a matador’s cape. Too late, Annabel realized her hands had, in her sleep, migrated under her nightgown. Wicked, said her mother, rearing over her like an ax about to drop. The next night Nanny bound Annabel’s wrists, and she slept with her fingers interlaced as though in prayer.
“Your mother is a good woman,” her father told her, patting the cords on her wrists but not untying them. “But she doesn’t understand how we want to be warm together.”
“Am I wicked?” Annabel asked.
“We’re all a little wicked,” said her father.
The second doctor was old and houndish, with pouchy eyes and speckled skin and long earlobes. With tongs he extracted a solitary leech from a glass jar. He nudged her legs apart.
A ringing pressed in her ears. An obscuring white light swirled in like a snowstorm, was rent apart by a bright jolt of smelling salts. The doctor went out to speak to her mother, leaving the door open.
Overexcitement, he said. Very serious…not cause for despair yet.
More cold baths and a Borax solution to be applied weekly. She was to be kept away from spices, bright colors, quick-tempoed music, anything lively or stimulating. Before bed, she was to be given a spoonful of syrup from an amber bottle that sent her into a bottomless sleep. Some mornings she thought she detected the faint smell of tobacco on her pillow, but she remembered nothing.
The day she woke, twelve years old, terrified in bloody sheets, her mother told her that she would not die but the blood would come every month as a reminder to be always on her guard against, yes, again, always: wickedness.
Around then, two other events: First, she noticed she had not smelled tobacco on her pillow for some time, and, second, she was sent away to school. The sunny chatter of the other girls, their books and bedtime prayers and homesickness and letters to their mothers, the cheerful dances they practiced with one another, their fussing over their hair and pinching of their cheeks for color—all of it made her feel like a small dark spider scuttling among their merry shoes. In a rush of fury, she understood she knew nothing of the world. She had been kept from it.
How to remedy her appalling ignorance?
Be attentive. Eavesdrop. Sift and strain for clues. Choose books at random from the library, stea
l more books from other girls, especially the forbidden ones they have kept hidden. Read Wuthering Heights and Treasure Island and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Moonstone. Read Dracula and have nightmares about the zoophagous madman in the asylum, Renfield, who feeds flies to spiders and spiders to birds and eats the birds and wishes to consume as many lives as possible. Steal The Awakening and dream about walking into the sea, though you have never been in any water but the bathtub. (Even at school, her baths are cold.) From these books, gradually piece together jumbled theories about how other notions of shame and wickedness exist besides your mother’s. Intuit that some women wish to be touched by men. (The girls sighed over certain books, lying back on their pillows. So romantic, they remarked, though not to Annabel, whom they found strange.) When she was sure everyone else was asleep, she returned to touching what she no longer thought of as her cabbage but as her thing, not greenly inert but alive and animal. The sensation became sharper, a piquant fishhook that snagged on her nerves as though on a net, pulling her along. She found a flickering and thrumming, a pulse and flash.
Once a week a young man came to the school to instruct the girls in piano. He leaned over Annabel while she sat on the bench and with his long fingers sounded low, tolling notes. He was almost as blond as she, with arched, surprised eyebrows and comb marks in his hair. She took his hand one day and put it on her dress, over her thing. The terror in his face baffled her.
In disgrace, she was sent to another, lesser school, but within a month she was called home because her mother was dead. Her father treated her with distant, bewildered politeness, seemed not to remember that once he had wanted to be warm with her. Nanny was gone, and, when she asked, her father said Annabel was too big for a nanny, wasn’t she? Annabel took a bath so hot she emerged looking cooked.
(Only later, overhearing gossip at the funeral, did she learn her mother had drunk a whole bottle of sleeping draught.)
A third school, the one with the maple trees, the ice storm. Her history teacher was older than the piano tutor and not afraid of her. He found reasons to summon her to his office. “Like a fish to water,” he said after he had relieved her of her virginity on a sagging sofa. “I could see it in you. I could see you would be this way.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s in your gaze. Didn’t you mean to seduce me?”
“I suppose so,” she said, though she had not quite known what she meant to do. She had simply returned his glances, allowed him to proceed, felt a dull, sawing pressure while both of them remained mostly clothed. Afterward, as she crossed the school green, the sadness that seemed to be the aftermath of any human contact settled on her, but the experience had not been unpleasant, and she returned to his office willingly when he next summoned her. He turned away and fumbled with himself beforehand, which he said had to do with avoiding a child. With practice, she could draw the flickering and thrumming from his ministrations, occasionally even the pulse and flash, though the sadness afterward remained.
“Let’s run away together,” he said, and she had gazed at him from the sofa, confused he would think there was anywhere they could go.
She was not expelled from that school but graduated at sixteen and returned to New York. As best she could, she adopted a life of outward respectability as spinster consort to her father, his companion to dinners and parties and on his travels. She tried to be good, to ward off her wicked need. But she could no sooner chase it away than she could chop off her own head and continue living. She found lovers. Their discretion varied.
“Maybe you should consider marrying,” her father said.
They both knew no one in New York would dream of marrying her, despite his wealth.
Lovemaking brought relief, yes, but also shame, rumors, scorn. She wished to be different, to be someone who did not go with men, who was not oppressed by blackness or possessed by wanting. But she failed. She failed in New York, she failed in London (“Perhaps an English husband,” her father had said), in Copenhagen (“Perhaps a Danish husband”) and Paris (“Perhaps?”) and Rome (no talk of an Italian husband). She failed on the Josephina. She had not thought she could possibly have a child, had been certain her womb was rotten with wickedness.
“Addison Graves,” she said to her father after she was certain of her pregnancy.
“Who?”
“The captain. The ship captain.”
On the night she met Addison, her father had gone to the smoking room after dinner, entrusting Annabel to the ladies’ parlor, which was easily escaped. She had stood at the Josephina’s stern, studying the black water, the silver clouds of bubbles welling up from the propellers. Fear had coursed through her, binding her hands to the railing. She imagined the rush of wind, the shock of the cold, the huge, slicing blades, the retreating lights of the ship.
Would she have time to watch the ship disappear over the horizon? Would she be left alone at the center of a starry black sphere, to have as her last sight infinite quiet points of light? Nothing could be lonelier. Or, she thought, more truthful. In her experience, proximity to other humans did not actually diminish solitude. She imagined herself drifting down, down, settling on the ocean floor. One final cold bath to extinguish what burned.
The wind cut through her dress. She could never predict when her willpower would give way, but on that night wickedness saved her, pulled her away from the ship’s wake and drew her to Addison’s cabin instead. At dinner, he had seen her for what she was. She’d felt the force of his recognition like a slap.
* * *
—
Perhaps, the day nurse suggested, if she held her babies, she would be reminded how beautiful they were. She was lucky to have two healthy children when some lost their babies at birth, poor souls. “God made women to be mothers,” the nurse said.
“If you have any sense, if you love your God, you will keep them away from me,” Annabel said, and the nurse, frightened, had taken the babies and gone, shutting the bedroom door behind her.
Against her doctor’s advice, she had placed ads for wet nurses in the newspapers before the twins were born and hired the first two women who applied. They both claimed to be married. Neither offered an explanation of how her breasts had come to be full of expendable milk, and Annabel did not ask. “In my opinion the practice is not far from prostitution,” the doctor had said. “Often they place their own babies under the most appalling conditions so they may sell their milk. They are not likely to be good women.” But goodness did not interest Annabel.
When she had left Addison’s cabin and returned to her own at dawn, her father had been sitting awake in his room beside an empty tumbler and full ashtray, still in his tie and tails, waiting, the communicating door left open. “Annabel,” he said. He looked old and tired, resigned. “What should I have done differently for you?”
“You should have let me sleep,” she said, and shut the door.
New York City
October 1914
One month later
Lloyd Feiffer in mourning was outwardly no different from Lloyd Feiffer in the bloom of happiness. His coat and hat were impeccable. His collar was the ideal of whiteness and stiffness, his tie knot without flaw. He walked at a clip.
But, for a month, the Lloyd Feiffer enacting Lloyd Feiffer’s life and habits had been no more than an animated carapace, a hollow effigy. Inside was a shadow, a twist of smoke, a dark spirit peering out as he perused manifests and negotiated coal prices and lunched on crab Newburg and screwed his mistress. What was there before, the jovial but ruthless man, full of scornful intelligence and restless energy, seemed to have drifted away with his son Leander’s last breath.
Diphtheria. Age six.
Matilda had still not emerged from her bedroom (separated from Lloyd’s by their dressing rooms and a shared sitting room) and had eaten almost nothing. The surviving boys—Henry, Clifford, Robert—
were kept out of the way by their nanny, and Lloyd didn’t know if they spent their time in morose sniffling or if they hollered and brawled. He had never been interested in his children’s daily affairs, and he would not have anticipated that, upon losing one, such pain would rise, black and primitive as oil, from his particular bedrock.
Henry, who was twelve, had come to him in his study one night and politely asked to be sent away to school. Lloyd had demurred, saying his mother needed him close.
“But she doesn’t even want to see me,” Henry had said. “She never answers when I knock.”
“Women,” Lloyd had said, “resort to theater when they wish to demonstrate the depth and superiority of their emotions. Indulgence will only prolong the spectacle. She’ll emerge when she perceives no advantage to continuing.”
The boy had gone away, stung and downcast. In the small hours, tired of lying awake, Lloyd had thrown off his blankets and gone striding through the intervening rooms and into Matilda’s bedroom intending to scold her for her torpor, to command her to rouse herself. But Tildy, in her bed, had wordlessly lifted her arms before he could speak, and he had fallen into them and wept onto her chest. This was the first time he had cried for Leander except for the day the boy died, when he had curled forward to submerge his face in his bath and wailed into the water. Nor had he embraced Tildy since…he could not remember. She smoothed his hair while he cried, and he cried until he slept.
In the morning, he left her room without a word. But the next night he returned to her, and the warmth of her thawed him. The night after that he had pushed up her nightgown and made love to her.
Since then, a week had passed, the days and nights taking on an inverted quality. The dark spirit ruled in the day, and at night his wife’s body exorcised it. What Tildy thought about his visits he didn’t know, but on this morning, as he left the house, she had been sitting at the breakfast table with the boys, wan and silent but upright, among the living.
Great Circle: A Novel Page 3