The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen

by Katherine Howe

  “It’s Ed’s fault, for waking us up like that,” Beattie says soothingly. “You’re just overtired.”

  She gives my arm a squeeze and then returns to the tub where Lottie’s waiting.

  I nod.

  I can’t tell her that I was already awake, before Ed. Long before Ed.

  Lottie gives me the briefest of glances, and then looks away while rubbing the water off Beattie.

  “Well,” I say to the room. “I’ll just go downstairs, then.”

  I hurry to the door to the front stair, avoiding catching either of their eyes,

  “Tell Mother I’ll be down in a trice,” Beatrice calls after me.

  On the landing outside our bedroom I smell cooking bacon and beans, and strong coffee, and my stomach rumbles. I start down the curving staircase, my hand tracing the banister. This house is much more comfortable than my aunt’s, though she finds our neighborhood remote and unfashionable. Her house is drafty. I spent every night in her spare room shivering under the quilt with the torn square.

  As I descend the stairs, the smells of food intensify, changing in a just perceptible way. There’s a sharpness to the smell, and it makes my mouth water.

  What could Lottie have done to the beans? I wonder. It smells so good that I’m regretting my plan to sneak away to see Herschel and miss my chance at breakfast. I am planning to buy something in the street on the way, hot corn or something like that.

  Downstairs I hear voices in conversation from what sounds like the drawing room, animated voices so loud that I wonder if Papa’s in there having another argument with some of the Canal Corporation men, like I caught him having last week.

  They mean to do it, I’d heard my father shout. Don’t you see? They can still ruin everything.

  The other man had said something I didn’t understand. They were both on the committee for the Grand Aquatic Display to be held when the canal finally opened, the party that we went to last night. A whole flotilla wending all the way from Buffalo to the Hudson, and down to New-York, over a period of weeks, and when we heard word that they were only a few days away, the city leapt to preparations. Papa and all his business associates readied to receive them amidst fireworks and music and martial displays, all the newspapers there and Governor Clinton pouring water from Lake Erie into New-York Harbor, along with water from the Ganges, and the Nile, and the Amazon, and the Mississippi, and all the greatest waterways in the world, though Ed had wondered aloud how they really knew that’s where all the water was coming from, after all, doesn’t all water look the same?

  I hesitate on the stair, straining my ears. The voices grow louder, but somehow not more distinct. I can’t tell what they’re saying. Usually Papa is downtown by now. He hasn’t breakfasted with us in weeks. Always rushing off to planning meetings, being picked up outside the town house by different carriages. Strangers rapping at the door and asking for him.

  The morning light is streaming into the first floor hallway, pouring like rays of heaven through the transom window over the front door, glinting off the hall-stand mirror. I squint against it, and descend another step. Usually the morning light is soft, orange and muted, since more buildings have gone up on this block. But today the light is harsh and white.

  I bring my hand up to shade my eyes, peering into the glare.

  The whiteness is so bright it’s almost a haze. It fills the hall, lightening the dove-gray walls and swallowing the floorboards.

  I descend another couple of steps, and the light glows so bright that I can’t see where I’m stepping. My feet hunt about for each stair tread, and I grope for the banister, but I can’t find it. My hand plunges into space, grasping nothing.

  Finally my foot lands hard on the floor, and the carpet runner is missing, and my foot makes an unfamiliar sound in the front hallway. Voices are all around me. Their murmurs rise and fall, like music, or like the crowds of people outside the African Grove Theater on Bleecker, a clamor of voices and sounds and smells and everyone talking at once, but somehow never to one another. I can’t make any of them out, and none of them seem to be talking to me, but they buzz around to my ears like bees, close enough that I struggle to bat them away.

  “Papa?” I call out.

  The brightness of the morning sun is making my eyes ache.

  “Order up!” someone shouts close to my ear, making me jump.

  “What?” I say, looking left and right.

  I can’t see anyone. I’m alone, but somehow I’m surrounded by people and smells and I can hear a bell jangling, but I can’t tell if it’s the bell Mother uses to summon us for meals or if it’s something different.

  “Mother?” I try this time, wondering if she’s serving breakfast in the drawing room for some reason. Perhaps she has guests? But she wouldn’t entertain at breakfast. And she would have made sure Beattie and I dressed up.

  A whiff of air brushes past my cheeks, and I spin where I’m standing, but all I see is the outline of the front hallway filled with pure white light.

  I move nearer to the drawing room, reaching a hand forward to where the sliding door should be, but my hand keeps going forward in space, deeper into a void, not meeting anything.

  “Keep it moving, keep it moving! Whatchou want, huh?” someone barks on my left.

  My eyes wide with terror, I spin again, hunting for the speaker.

  “Who said that?” I raise my voice. “I can hear you!”

  Nobody answers me, but still I hear the voices, talking amongst themselves, little snippets of conversation that I can almost understand, but not quite.

  Another whiff of air brushes past my other cheek, and I close my eyes, feeling whatever it is pass through me as though it were a summer breeze.

  “What is this?” I ask myself. “What is this?”

  When I open my eyes again, I’m standing in the middle of the drawing room, but it’s not the drawing room. It’s overlit with glaring white lights that hum overhead. Most confusingly of all, it’s packed to the gills with total strangers.

  They’re gathered around small tables I’ve never seen before. All Mother’s carefully chosen fixtures are gone, the horsehair sofas and the occasional chairs and the hulking marble mantelpiece with the gilt-framed mirror. Or rather, there’s a mirror where the gilt-framed one used to be, but it’s spotted and chipped, and someone has written on it, what looks like a long list, with words that don’t make any sense to me. Like Latin, but not Latin.

  Calzone. Pepperoni. Mortadella.

  The oil chandelier is gone, and instead it’s as though the whole ceiling were lit from within by white light that flickers, but not the way a candle flickers. The smell of food is mouthwatering.

  But who are all these people?

  I stare at them, and none of them pay any attention to me. They’re all different ages, dressed in the most bizarre way. Some of them look like they aren’t even dressed at all. Girls in camisoles lean over tables, their bodies loose, their hair flowing down their backs. They’re with boys, most of them, and they’re all eating with their hands. It’s like a kind of savory pie, only without a crust. They all act like it’s completely normal that they’re there, eating breakfast in my mother’s drawing room.

  Panicking, I grip my skirts in my fists.

  Where did these people come from? Who said they could be in our house?

  “Who ARE YOU?” I scream.

  Nobody answers me!

  “Tell me who you ARE!” I bellow, rushing up to one of the tables.

  There’s a girl sitting there, one of the ones who’s left the house in her nightdress as far as I can tell, and she’s bending forward and laughing, and I can see all the way down her bodice. She’s completely unlaced, and if Mother knew this prostitute was in her drawing room, I don’t know what she’d do. She’d call Papa, and she’d call Winston, and if they didn’t come she’d beat the girl b
loody with a fireplace poker herself.

  “You can’t be here!” I shout in her ear.

  The girl just keeps laughing and talking, chewing with her mouth open.

  I put my hands on the table between them, leaning into their conversation. The boy is just as bad. He reeks like a French waterfront whore, and his hair is so short it looks like he’s been lately shaved for lice. Neither of them takes the slightest notice of me.

  “Get out of my HOUSE!” I scream at the top of my lungs, and I take hold of the table where they’re sitting, grab it with both my hands and make ready to hurl it away, crashing it across the room in a righteous fury.

  “Annatje?” someone says softly.

  I look up, my eyes crazed with violence.

  Mother is standing by the sliding door of the drawing room, her hand resting on the burled walnut that she chose for the wainscoting. She is giving me a curious look.

  Panting, I look down at my hands, and find that they are resting on the card table that Mother left out from Papa’s whist game last week. No one has been in the drawing room since then. There’s a round stain where one of the corporation men left his sherry glass without a coaster. It looks dried and gray in the morning light.

  “Is everything all right?” she asks me lightly.

  I release the edge of the card table and smooth my hands down the front of my day dress.

  “Of course, Mother,” I say with some difficulty.

  “I thought I heard you shout, just now.”

  I level my eyes at my mother’s face and smile prettily at her.

  “Shout?” I echo, as mildly as I can.

  “Yes. I thought I heard you raise your voice, a moment ago.”

  It’s not like Mother to press the issue. Usually we maintain a tacit agreement that we will each pretend I do what I’m supposed to do, virtually all of the time. It’s easier on both of us.

  “I’m so sorry, Mother,” I say. “Perhaps you heard someone out in the street? A peddler? They’re getting louder and louder, aren’t they?”

  She watches me for a long moment.

  “Indeed they are,” she says after a time.

  We stare at each other across the length of the drawing room, each wondering who is going to call me on my bluff.

  At length she says, “Well. Beatrice is down. We’re about to eat.”

  “All right,” I say.

  She’s on the point of leaving, when she gives me a last long look and says, “Are you quite sure you’re all right, Annie?”

  Her unaccustomed use of my preferred name takes me aback, and I have to lean on the card table.

  “I . . . I think so,” I say.

  What I want to do is run to her, and have her hold me and tell me that I’m just having a bad dream within a bad dream. I want her to tell me that it’s probably on account of my having too much Madeira, which I shouldn’t have accepted from Mrs. Dudley at the corporation dinner, and it serves me right for indulging too much, and it’s just this sort of thing that’s made her consider joining the Temperance Society. I want to tell her that my cameo’s missing, and beg her to help me find it, and I want to tell her that it was Herschel who gave it to me, and why.

  “I think . . . perhaps, there’s something the matter with my head,” I finish.

  I bring my hand to my temple.

  “Hmmph,” my mother sniffs, and her dismissal fills me with relief, as it is exactly what she would do, if we were really having this conversation. “In any case, there’s coffee on the breakfast table.”

  She whisks away down the hall, and I can hear the rustling of her skirts as she goes.

  I lean myself ever so slightly to the left, so that I can see farther down the hall and confirm that she’s really gone.

  And then I grab up my skirts and run for the front door.

  CHAPTER 4

  Herschel,” I breathe as I blunder down the front steps of our town house and flop into the street. A carriage rattles by, and I throw myself out of its way. The horse, a bay mare with a grizzled muzzle, rolls its eye at me as it trots past.

  I round the corner from First to the Bowery, into the morning crowds of the avenue. The traces of last night’s revels have vanished, which is odd—I’d expected wet bunting and a stench of spoiled beer. Well, the stench of beer is there, but it usually is. Beer and urine and the salty smell of seawater, even though we’re well inland from the waterfront. At least we’re far enough in that it doesn’t stink of fish.

  Men stroll by in twos and threes, some women, too, and in front of the butcher shop a puppy steals a ham trotter and endures the abuse of a pigeon for his trouble. The day is cool and windless, and the sky is an unbroken palette of white.

  “Hot corn!” a yellowish mulatta waif hollers to the men bustling by. “Hot corn, piping hot! Fresh out of the boiling pot!”

  She’s carrying a huge covered basket that smells enticingly of boiled maize ears. A few sporting bloods pause to notice her as she strolls by. One gentleman in tight lacing and a tall hat lets his eye roam down her body in a frank, appreciative leer.

  She stops, returning his look with just as much frankness.

  “Hot corn, sir?” she asks him. She reaches into the basket, finds an ear browned in its husk, and holds it out to him.

  “How much?” he asks, leaning nearer.

  A knot of other men passes by, remarks on the exchange, and laughs. The tight-laced man straightens, red-faced, and lifts his hat to the passing men. Their laughter becomes an uproar.

  The hot corn girl looks annoyed. They’re going to cost her her business. After all, she’s really selling two things. Already the tight-laced man is moving away as if they weren’t in the midst of a negotiation.

  “Here, I’ll buy it,” I say to her. I’m hungry anyway.

  The men all think this is a marvelous turn of events, and hoot and applaud like they’re at a disreputable theater. A bright-colored woman in plaid happens by, an actress or someone pretending to be one, and joins in the merriment. One of the men puts his arm about her waist, and leans in to hear the price she whispers in his ear. It’ll be more than the hot corn, I can tell.

  “Fine,” the corn-selling girl says, ignoring them. I fish a penny out of my skirt pocket and press it into her palm. She hands over the ear.

  As I take it, I look at her. She’s shorter than me, about Beattie’s size, but I can see that she’s older than Beattie. Maybe older than me, but not by much. Her cheekbones are so sharp I can see them clearly through her skin, and her eyebrows and hair are wiry.

  “Thanks,” I say to her with a nod.

  “Hmmph,” the girl grunts, uninterested in my charity. She turns away, and resumes her cry of “Hot corn! Piping hot! Hot corn!”

  I peel the husk back and take a bite, wandering south on Bowery. It won’t take long for me to reach Herschel’s uncle’s schmatte shop. I have money for thread. The corn is rich and sweet, and I chew contentedly, pausing every so often to spit corn gristle into the sewer along the center of the avenue. I’m starting to feel better. It must have been the Madeira, honestly. I didn’t realize I’d had so much. Mrs. Dudley kept refilling my glass over and over, teasing me about when I’d get married, and tickling me to make me tell her about my beaux, and I was so afraid I’d say something to give myself away about Herschel that I kept reaching for my wineglass so I wouldn’t have to talk. And then it was time to dash for the dais, and . . .

  I pause, looking at the overlapping posters pasted up on the brick wall of a haberdasher. Ads for theatrical productions, sheet music, lumber, cigars, rum, molasses, rewards for slaves run away, a notice for a political meeting. I take another big bite of my corn and chew, wiping my lips with the back of my hand as I look closer.

  STOP THE MARCH OF TIME, it reads. Underneath the heading there’s a rough engraving of a barge in flames. Then there’s a t
ime listed for a meeting, and the signature of the notice reads UNITED BROTHERHOOD OF LUDD—

  The rest is torn off.

  I frown.

  “And how are you today, my dear?” whispers a voice in my ear.

  I turn and spy a man with a huge round belly straining at the buttons of his waistcoat and spindle legs, his mustache growing into the hair on his cheeks. He’s looking at my chest. All the blood vessels in his potato-nose have burst long ago.

  With a sigh of disgust I throw my corncob into the street and start to walk downtown.

  “Hey,” the man says, trotting after me. “I’m askin’ you a question.”

  I hunch up my shoulders to make my chest smaller, and walk faster.

  “Hey! Girlie!” He’s catching up. I can hear his breath huffing through his hideous nose.

  “Leave me alone!” I shout, and a few heads turn from passersby noticing, and then deciding not to intervene.

  “Look here,” he says, reaching for my elbow, but before he can get his hands on me I break into a dead run.

  “Hey!” he hollers. “Why’d you walk so slow, if you didn’t wanna talk to me?”

  A few people scatter in the street, opening a path before me in surprise. A dog barks and nips at my heel, tearing away a mouthful of lace from my underskirts.

  My arms pump, my breath coming hard and fast in my chest, and even though the cool autumn air whistles through the cross streets, mixing air from the river into the city miasma, a sheen of sweat beads on my forehead as I run, skirting rickety stairwells and wives out marketing and bands of frock-coated bloods lounging in the doors of victualing houses with oyster shells heaped at their feet.

  Herschel, I think, my eyes smarting with tears. Herschel, I have to see you.

  I run faster and faster, and the Bowery blurs around me, faces and horses and barrels and baskets and hanging hunks of meat for sale and theater marquees all smearing into an indistinct mass as I fly past.

  I gasp for breath in the rhythm of his name, Her on the inhale, schel on the exhale, and as I run the pale morning sky descends slowly, transforming by degrees into a fog rolling up the streets. I almost trip over a rut in the cross street, my skirt ripping on the heel of my slipper when I catch myself, but I keep running. The fog coils thicker, so thick I can feel it against my face. Before long the path by the shopfronts is completely swallowed with mist, and the sounds of the street life have deadened.