The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen

by Katherine Howe

  I slow to a walk, my hands pressed to my ribs against the painful stitch that’s digging into them. My breath comes in short gasps. The fog rolls nearer.

  I stop walking.

  There’s no one on the street. I’m alone, completely enclosed in a veil of fog. I strain my ears, listing for the telltale calls of pineapple sellers, children scavenging the trash heaps for bits of rope and broken nails, peddlers’ carts creaking past, black fortune-tellers selling numbers for policy, whores hustling the men coming out of coffeehouses.

  There’s nothing.

  I rub deeper into my rib cage, frowning.

  I’m surrounded by dead silence.

  “Well,” I say aloud to myself. “If that don’t beat all.”

  I wait for what feels like a long time for the fog to lift. These fogs happen sometimes, though usually not this far uptown, and usually not this far from the wharves. This is oyster-selling fog. Ocean fog.

  The stitch in my side finally subsides, and I smooth my pigtails back into place and wipe the sweat from under my eyes. Lottie will kill me, with the sweat stains I’m leaving on this dress. I bend down to inspect the damage to the hem, and find it not too bad. A roll and a few stitches, and it’ll be too short for me, but Beattie can wear it. It’s too small for me anyway, and we’ve let it out twice already.

  I start walking again, with some care, as the fog is so thick I’m having trouble telling what direction I’m going. But I know the way to Herschel’s store as well as my way to Hudson Square, or to the ferry landing, or the Battery. I know it as well as I know the path from our room to Ed’s, or from the kitchen door to the privy. I’ll find him.

  I keep walking.

  My feet carry me for a long time. I’m not sure how long, as the fog stays heavy, but I feel myself begin to get tired. And the corn hasn’t held me hardly at all. I want dinner. I want Herschel to give his uncle some kind of excuse so that we can slip off a few blocks away and find a beer hall that serves cured ham. Course, Herschel can’t eat ham. Well, Herschel will have to go despite himself. Ham is what I’m hungry for. Or bacon! I should’ve stopped for some bacon before leaving. I don’t know why I was in such a rush, only . . .

  My ruminations on dinner are interrupted by the thinning of the fog, ever so slightly. I peer ahead, trying to make out where I am. I should be at Chatham Square by now. Or past it, even. Well past. I could have walked all the way to the water, by mistake, though you can generally hear the rigging and the seagulls and the ships creaking, between all the hubbub of the wharves and stalls and junk shops.

  I can almost recognize where I am. I hurry forward, into the thinning patch that is opening before me.

  It’s the stoop of a town house, that much I know. There’s no one about on the street. The block is deserted and silent. I squint, trying to make out more details of the house. I walk faster, picking my skirts up in my fists, then dashing up to the stoop to stare at the building’s face.

  It’s my house.

  “But how did I . . .” I trail off.

  I spin about where I’m standing, but there’s no one there, and just outside the periphery of the front stoop, the fog is just as thick.

  I scratch in my curls.

  “I got turned around,” I explain to myself. “In the fog, I got turned around someways.”

  I stand on the stoop for a long minute, chewing my lip. The truth is, I’m feeling awfully tired. It was a long night, after all. All that Madeira. Perhaps it would be wiser to go inside and rest. Perhaps I should look for the cameo in my room, and rest, and collect my thoughts, and perhaps I can bribe Winston to carry a message to Herschel, to meet me at a theater we’ve gone to before, where we can sit in a corner and kiss and no one cares. Winston carries messages for me sometimes. Winston excels at never letting on, when he sees things. Willful blindness is almost as good as trust.

  I mount the steps to the house and try the door.

  It’s locked. I don’t have my key, of course, but someone’s always home.

  I rap on the door with my fist first, and when that doesn’t work, I take hold of the brass knocker and give it a good loud knock knock knock.

  I wait, listening for the telltale shuffle of Lottie’s feet on the stairs.

  There’s no answer.

  I try again. Knock. Knock. Knock.

  The house has a dead sound, as though it were completely empty, not only of people, but of furniture, and all hint of life.

  “Hello?” I shout up to the windows. “Ed?”

  My brother’s room looks over the street, since my parents are less concerned with the modesty of an eight-year-old boy than with their potentially wayward daughters. If he’s upstairs playing or at his lessons, he should certainly hear me.

  “Ed! I’m locked out!” I scream at the top of my lungs.

  The house makes no reply.

  Muttering, I hurry down the front steps and around the side alley, through the gate to the kitchen garden in back. I exhale a long sigh of relief when I spy Winston chopping wood next to the chicken coop. Mother likes to keep chickens because it reminds her of when she was a girl, in Connecticut. But it’d be cheaper just to buy them.

  “Winston?” I call out.

  Winston doesn’t hear me. He lifts the ax overhead with an air of barely restrained rage that even I can see, and seeing anything about him is difficult, as the fog is thicker back here. He brings it down with a grunt, and the log splits. Winston’s saving up money to buy his wife, who labors as a housemaid for a man at my father’s bank. She costs ninety dollars. So far he’s saved seventy-one.

  He hoists it out of the stump underneath, and lifts it overhead again, and brings it down with a thwack. Over and over and over and over and over again. Like Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill. The woodpile never seems to get smaller. The chopped pile never seems to get larger. The chopping of wood will never end for a man of all work with an indentured baby daughter and an enslaved wife.

  “Winston?” I try again.

  I edge nearer, and see that it’s not the fog that’s making Winston hard to see. Winston is hard to see because Winston almost doesn’t seem to be fully there. He lifts the ax overhead, and I can see through the ax head to the fence beyond. He brings it down, and the curve of Winston’s back blends in with the chicken coop beyond. My eyes widen.

  As I watch, Winston seems to fade, like a newspaper bleached and curling in the sun. He keeps lifting and chopping, lifting and chopping, but with each blow he gets less visible, until even the sound of his chopping drifts away. Presently Winston retreats to the barest outline of himself, as if drawn in watery ink, and then on a passing breeze he blows away.

  I stand for a long time in the kitchen garden, staring at the spot where he used to be.

  I’m alone.

  The vegetables are all gone. The fat gourds and pumpkins that we usually have in October are gone, the garden bricked over and desolate, interrupted only by the rustle of dead leaves.

  I wrap my arms around myself, hugging tightly. The wind picks up, blowing my skirts against my legs and my curls into my mouth.

  Slowly I turn and walk back down the alley to the front of the house.

  As I round the corner onto the street, I spy a dark figure at the front door. He’s young and slight, and I can’t see his face, but he’s holding a knife.

  “Hey!” I shout. “What are you doing?”

  The figure turns to stare at me with a start, stabs the knife into the wood of the door so hard it sticks, and flees down the stairs.

  “Wait!” I yell, running after him. “Wait! Who are you? What do you want?”

  Whoever he is vanishes into the dense wall of fog just beyond the circle made by the front stoop of my house. I’m on the point of following him, but I’m loath to step into the fogbank again. What if I get lost?

  What if I can’t
find my way out?

  I stare at the carved wooden door of our house. The knife jutting out from the door pins in place a folded paper fastened closed with a red smear of sealing wax. I mount the stairs to rip the offending paper off the door and observe that the seal in the wax is shaped like an old-fashioned spindle.

  It’s the note. The one we found on the door last week.

  The same note.

  Papa wouldn’t let anyone see it when it came.

  He crumpled it in his hand and cried, “Eleanor!” in a way that I had never heard him address my mother before. And more importantly, she’d come. They’d spoken not more than five minutes and then Mother had emerged from the drawing room, handed a folded paper to Winston to carry to Hudson Square and said to me brightly, “Well! Better pack.”

  This is the note that sent us running to my aunt’s house.

  It’s not the day after the Aquatic Celebration.

  It’s the week before.

  My blood thuds in my ears. I slowly mount the steps of our town house and reach my hand forward to pluck the note from the knife.

  But before my hand can touch the paper, something strange happens.

  The door begins to melt.

  It looks like the door is sculpted of mud, and a sudden hard rain has come up. The door dribbles down itself under my hand, the knocker and the handle and the carving sliding down the surface of it and pulling apart while I watch. In moments our heavy wooden front door is gone, and the note and knife vanished with it. The slurry runs into crevices in the brick, pouring down the steps and oozing around my feet. Speechless, I take a step backward and nearly topple off the top step. I catch myself by grabbing on to a cheap metal railing that wasn’t there before.

  Behind our door is a glass one that I’ve never seen. It has a metal handle, and I can see through it into what had been our entryway, but I don’t recognize anything inside. Our wood floor has been replaced with some kind of odd-looking tile, and our curving stair is gone. Next to the glass door stands a row of little brass cubbies with names written on them. And to the right, jutting out where our front gated garden used to be, is a wall of glass, lit with that glaring white light I saw in our drawing room before, with the same little tables and stained mirror. Behind the tables I can see a long counter, with racks of pies covered in cheese. But all the people are gone.

  “This isn’t happening,” I explain to myself, and I’m pleasantly surprised by how reasonable I sound.

  I turn around, keeping perfectly calm, and proceed down the steps with my head held high.

  When I reach the walkway, I break into a dead run and flee into the fog. I run and I run and I run and I run, not caring where I’m going, not turning corners or looking, seeing nothing, until my chest is bursting and my stitch is back and I have to stop, leaning over, my hands on my knees, panting like a dog in summer.

  The fog parts, and when I look up, I find myself back in front of our house again.

  I roll my head back on my shoulders and laugh aloud.

  “All right!” I scream at the top of my lungs. Screaming feels really good. I never get to scream. And none of this is really happening anyway, so why not?

  “ALL RIGHT!” I bellow, and my voice echoes deadly off the face of my home. “I give up! Are you happy now?”

  I don’t know who I’m talking to. Myself, I suppose.

  Chuckling with relief, I walk over and plop down on the stoop.

  Obviously, one of two things is happening. One, I’ve gotten yellow fever and I am at this very moment lying-in in my aunt’s house, out of my head with delirium. This is a distinct possibility, as yellow fever rips through Herschel’s tenement in the Sixth Ward every summer. It’s a wonder I didn’t get it sooner, frankly. I probably danced too much at the Aquatic Display, and certainly drank too much, and the fever took over and I collapsed. In which case, this will all be over soon, because I will either recover, or I’ll be dead.

  The other possibility is that I’ve gone mad.

  I’m less persuaded by this possibility. People don’t go mad all at once, do they? Isn’t madness more of a gradual kind of thing? Maybe you wake up one morning not quite yourself, and the next morning you’re even less yourself, and then before you know it you’re not yourself at all. I’ve seen mad people, of course. They take them in at the almshouse, which is why most sane paupers would sooner live with eleven strangers in a wet cellar. They turn up in the street, too, roaming about, muttering to themselves, getting beaten with a walking stick when they steal a bread crust from a coffeehouse table in the open street.

  Of course, if a body goes mad, perhaps one doesn’t know it? Perhaps it’s the persuasion of sanity that truly marks a madwoman. I muse on this idea for a long while, my fingers knitted over my knees, leaning back against the step and gazing up into the blank white sky.

  If I am mad, in a sense, it could be fun. My parents will still have to care for me. They’d never cast me out, certainly not while Papa has his political designs. I won’t be responsible for myself at all. I can do or say whatever I like. I can go see Herschel and not have to pretend I’m not!

  At the thought of Herschel, though, my face darkens.

  He’d never want to be with a madwoman. Who would?

  Herschel’s not allowed to be with me, anyway. His family won’t allow it. They don’t marry outside their schul.

  I look down at my hands, at my naked finger where my cameo ought to be.

  If I’m reliving the day the note was stabbed to our door, then it’s the same day Herschel gives me the ring. Perhaps that’s where my cameo is. Perhaps he hasn’t given it to me yet. But how can he give it to me, if I’m trapped here?

  How will anyone ever find me, in all this fog? If nobody ever finds me, what will happen then?

  I shiver, huddling within myself and pulling my arms to my chest behind my updrawn legs. I sink my head down, resting my forehead on my knees.

  I have to think.

  I have to figure this out.

  A long time passes, I don’t know how long, before I hear a young male voice say, “Hey! Hi!”

  I look up, my eyes dazzled with hope. I’ve been found!

  “Herschel?” I say, my voice catching in my throat. My heart thuds twice in quick succession.

  The fog has thinned just beyond the stoop where I’m sitting, and I can barely make out the figure of a boy slouching toward me. There’s something familiar about him, but I can’t see his face.

  “Huh?” the boy says.

  He pauses inside the thickest edge of fog, and I can tell by his movements that he’s looking around to see who I’m talking to. I stare hard at him, trying to see him clearly. But it’s not who I thought it was.

  “Oh!” I exclaim, my heart sinking. I withdraw behind my knees for protection. If he puts his hands on me, there’s nowhere for me to go. I can’t run. There’s no one to help.

  “Hey, no. I’m sorry,” the boy rushes to say. I can admit that he sounds friendly. Jolly, even. And not in a sporting way. “I’m Wes,” he goes on. “From the other night. Remember?”

  “Wes,” I say slowly.

  He acts like we’ve known each other before. By now he’s moved out of the fog and I can see him clearly. And it’s true, there’s something warm and familiar about him. Tall, much taller than Herschel. Taller even than Papa. Sandy-colored, with freckles. But he’s in ill-fitting short pants, which is puzzling considering his age, and no waistcoat. He’d look like a beggar, in such clothes, if he weren’t so clean. He’s cleaner than me, even. The skin of his face is scrubbed and pink, beardless, and his hair stands up in a mop like Herschel’s. I like it better than the oiled-down look that so many men affect. He’s not even wearing a hat.

  “Yeah. Um. I was here with that other guy? Filming the séance. Last week?” He looks into my eyes, hunting for recognition. He seems like he
really wants me to remember. But surely I would remember, meeting this strange boy. Film is not a verb, first off. And I certainly haven’t been to a “séance,” whatever that is. But it’s hard to resist his certainty that we’re already friends. I feel the pull of him and find myself wanting to remember. Unless of course, and this is a distinct possibility, this boy does not exist at all. In fact, there is quite a decent chance that this boy is a figment of my imagination, who I have conjured out of the mist because I am lonely, and that he’s familiar because he’s just a part of my mind. If that’s true, which it almost certainly is, then it’s doubly rude to send him away. Not only rude, but foolish, since who knows if I’d be able to conjure up anyone else?

  “The séance,” I repeat as though I know what he’s talking about. Then I make my best show of remembering. “Oh yes! I remember. Of course.”

  He looks worried. The figment of my imagination is sensitive.

  “Are you okay?” the boy asks.

  “Okay?” I echo. What does that mean? Am I . . . what? “I was just waiting,” I correct him.

  “I was actually hoping I’d see you again,” he says, moving nearer.

  The figment of my imagination is also charming. I smile prettily at him. Silly figment.

  “You were?” I say.

  “Definitely,” Wes insists with what I imagine he thinks is great authority. “In fact, it was absolutely imperative that I find you. Did you know that?”

  “Aw,” I say, lowering my lashes to let him know that I’m on to his tricks. “You’re teasing me. You’re not really here.”

  “Sure I am.” He looks hurt.

  As if to prove a point he comes over and sits on the stoop, his knees drawn up next to mine. His shoes are odd. I’m trying to figure out what makes them so odd when he interrupts me by digging his elbow into my ribs.