by Cat Winters
I pulled a sheet of writing paper out of my rolltop desk, dipped the nib of my pen into a pot of velvety dark ink, and wrote a response to his letter with my neatest display of penmanship.
To Judge Acklen:
You state that women were made for domestic duties alone. Have you ever stopped to observe the responsibilities involved with domestic duties?
What better person to understand the administration of a country than an individual who spends her days mediating quarrels, balancing household budgets, organizing and executing three complex meals, and ensuring all rooms, appliances, deliveries, clothing, guests, family members, and pets are tended to and functioning the way they ought to be? I do not know of any other job in the world that so closely resembles the presidency itself.
Moreover, females are raised to become rational, industrious, fair, and compassionate human beings. Males are taught to sow their wild oats and run free while they’re able. Which gender is truly the most prepared to make decisions about the management of a country? Do you want a responsible individual or a rambunctious one choosing the fate of our government?
You insinuate that women’s minds are easily muddled, yet you entrust us with the rearing of your children, America’s future. Mothers are our first teachers. Mothers are the voices of reason who instill the nation’s values in our youth. Mothers are the ones who raise the politicians for whom they are not allowed to vote. Why would you let an easily muddled creature take on such important duties? Why not hire men to bring up your sons and daughters?
I can already hear you arguing that women’s bodies were designed for childrearing, but that is not true, sir. Our bodies may have been built for birthing children and nourishing them during their first meals, but it is our minds that are doing the largest share of the work. On a daily basis, we women prove that our brains are sharp and quick, yet you are too blind to see our intelligence.
Furthermore, you have no need to fear that we would forgo our domestic duties if we were to become voting citizens, for we have been trained all our lives to balance a multitude of tasks. We do not let our homes fall into ruin simply because we have been given one more item to accomplish. Worry more about the males who have only one job and no household chores. Their minds are more likely to stray than ours.
Do you call your own mother “undereducated” and “ignorant,” Judge Acklen? Was her mind in too much of a muddle to keep your childhood household intact? Was she so easily confused that she was unable to raise a boy who would one day become a judge? I think not. Your mother was undoubtedly a quick-witted, accountable individual who would probably make a far better president than the pampered male you gentlemen vote into office this Tuesday.
I dipped my pen into the inkwell, caught my breath, and read my incendiary words, debating whether the phrasing was too obvious. I tried to imagine what would happen if the writer were identified and made public. Father would likely shove our entire life savings into Henri Reverie’s pockets to ensure my mind was altered beyond recognition. There might indeed be a trip to an asylum. I’d even heard rumors of surgeons removing wombs from the bodies of rebellious wives and daughters.
Unthinkable.
But maybe . . . if I was careful . . . just maybe the right anonymous signature would disguise me.
I tested out various examples in my head.
– An Angry Woman
– An Irate Female
– Your Long-Suffering Mothers, Wives, and Daughters
– A Highly Educated Woman
– A Girl Who Refuses to Be Silent
No. Too emotional for the tastes of stubborn men. I pictured Father shaking his head and calling the letter writer hysterical.
I tapped the nib of my pen against the well to dispose of stray drops of ink, sampled ideas for two more minutes, and then wrote the wisest, most reasonable approach.
– A Responsible Woman
dreamt about the hypnosis.
The procedure again occurred in Father’s downtown office, this time back in his operatory, at night. The stark wooden room glowed in the light of a bare bulb that reflected off the spittoon and the neat row of dental tools lined on a small oval table. Leather straps clamped my head and wrists to the operatory chair—an uncomfortable piece of furniture padded in worn mauve velvet and braced by four metal feet sculpted like the paws of a beast, as if the chair would one day spring to life and devour some poor, troublesome patient.
Father, his hands still bloody from a leeching, polished the sharp tip of his drill with a white cloth. Behind him in the shadows stood Henri Reverie in his dark suit and a black magician’s hat that appeared to be a taller, more ominous version of his real-life hat, but his luminous blue eyes were the only parts of him I could truly see. Oh, Lord—those bright and haunting blue eyes.
“Shall we begin?” asked Father, and he leaned over me, reeking of blood and chloroform.
He pulled open my mouth with his thumb, which tasted like everyone else’s saliva, and his ears turned as pale and as pointed as the Count’s in Dracula. Bat ears made of human flesh is what they were—horrifying flaps sticking out from the sides of his pasty-gray head with its fierce and bulging red eyes. He pumped the drill’s foot pedal to make the needle spin.
I arched my back and froze against the chair, and that drill buzzed against one of my molars until bitter flecks of tooth sprayed across my tongue. My nerves throbbed with pain. I screamed bloody murder.
“Good heavens, Olivia!” called Father over the grinding and the shrieking. “Your entire head is rotten.” He stopped the drill and swiveled around to his little stand of tools. “Let’s remove some of those troublesome spots.”
“No!” I kicked my feet and tried to wrench my wrists free of the bindings. “Don’t take anything away!”
Father picked up a silver instrument, a hybrid of a key and a corkscrew, with a small metal claw at one end and an ivory handle on the other.
“Let me just get this dental key in there”—both his fanged face and the instrument rushed my way—“so we can break apart that problematic piece.”
“No!”
He gripped my tooth with the metal claw and cranked the ivory handle. Pressure mounted on the molar, growing, pushing, squeezing, CRACK!—the tooth split in two.
I howled in agony, but Father muffled my cries by digging beneath the crumbling tooth, stirring up blood and more pain, stretching my cheek and lips with cold metal. He then grabbed hold of the shattered molar with a pair of long forceps and yanked each piece straight out of my gum.
“This rotten, broken tooth is your dream of attending a university,” he said, and he displayed the decayed rubble on the palm of his hand. “Mr. Reverie, would you please be of assistance?”
“Oui, monsieur.” Henri whisked his hat off his head and held it out for Father, who tossed my tooth pieces inside with the sound of rustling gravel.
Father loomed back over me and went in for another molar. Over the high-pitched din of my screams and the thumps of my thrashings he called out, “This is your dream of voting.”
Yank, plunk. The second tooth landed in Henri’s hat.
He continued onward.
“This is your dream of working for a living.”
Yank, plunk.
“This is your dream of becoming ‘A Responsible Woman’ who publishes letters in newspapers.”
Yank, plunk.
“This is your dream of wearing trousers while bicycling.”
Yank, plunk.
The list went on and on, and my mouth grew emptier and emptier, until my wails weakened and my heartbeat slackened. My arms flopped over the armrests, my energy spent, and I witnessed Henri waving his gloved hand over the black silk hat with a graceful flick of his fingers.
“You see, Mademoiselle Mead?” He showed me the dark recesses of the hat’s interior. At the very bottom lay a mirror that reflected my toothless mouth with blood spilling down to my chin. “If you stay with your father, he’ll take it all away.”
>
I awoke with a gasp, my gums sore, but all my teeth, thankfully, intact.
ather’s fiendish visage did not return during breakfast, thank heavens. I munched my toast without ever stopping to speak—a good, quiet girl—and every few minutes Father beamed at me over his newspaper, quite pleased with my angry silence, which he clearly mistook for obedience.
He left for work, and I attempted to walk to school—I truly did. My toffee-brown book bag hung off my shoulder, and my lunch pail dangled from the crooks of my right fingers. I made it a full block north before I witnessed a peculiar sight.
Our neighbor Mrs. Stanton exited the front door of her narrow green house on the corner of Main, followed by her three little ducklings: a pair of twin girls in white bonnets and a toddler boy in a navy-blue sailor suit. She sold preserves to grocers in the city, and she and her children often emerged from their house with a wooden pull wagon stocked with jars of brightly colored jams and vegetables swimming in pickling vinegar.
Obviously, all of this wasn’t the peculiar part.
No, here was the strange thing that caused me to stop walking and gawk at the woman with my arms hanging by my sides: On this particular morning, Mrs. Stanton was a ghost.
The trees she passed, the white picket fence bordering her house—they were all visible through her skin and clothing and her tea-stain-colored hair, which looked as translucent as the layers of an onion. She was a cobweb woman. Barely there. Almost gone.
A nothing person.
“I FOUND THIS LYING ON THE SIDEWALK OUTSIDE THE building,” I said to the statuesque receptionist manning the front desk of the Oregonian’s nine-story headquarters on Sixth and Alder.
The female employee, sporting half-lens spectacles and a thick black tie, sat with her posture so impeccably straight, I felt the need to stretch my neck a little higher. Rows of lady workers in tailored dress suits typed behind her in a commotion of clicking keys and high-pitched dings that signified the ends of typewritten lines.
I inhaled a long breath of inky air and handed the woman an unstamped envelope, addressed Letters to the Editor Department. “Someone must have dropped it,” I said. “I thought I should bring it in.” My fingers pulsed with nervous energy.
The woman took my envelope and studied the address through her half-moon lenses. Her hair was puffed so high and her sharp chin held with such confidence that I could have sworn I shrank six inches just from standing in front of her.
She lifted her face and offered a thin smile. “I’ll deliver it to the correct department. Thank you for bringing it in.”
A gleam in her eye told me she knew the handwriting on the envelope belonged to a seventeen-year-old girl with shaking hands, so I turned and left the building.
NOT ONCE IN MY LIFE HAD I PLAYED HOOKY FROM SCHOOL before that frosty-cold autumn morning. Not once. The temptation to be truant had never even occurred to me.
Yet instead of hurrying off to school, I found myself standing in front of the arched brick entrance of the Metropolitan Theater. A haunted sort of feeling squirmed around in my gut, but still I walked inside, my feet motivated by a will of their own.
The empty lobby felt like a hollowed-out husk compared to the hot and buzzing scene from Halloween night. My footsteps clapped across the black-and-white tiles, and the echoing, gilded ceiling above seemed a thousand feet high. I stopped and caught my breath, worried I’d get caught trespassing. I probably shouldn’t have even liked theaters so much—not after their allure had spirited my mother away one snowy December night when I was just four years old. When she told us she couldn’t breathe in our house anymore.
The pipe organ started up in the auditorium, and my heart leapt into my throat. Beyond the open doorway, someone played “Evening Prayer” from Hansel and Gretel, the spellbinding melody Genevieve Reverie had performed when Henri invited me to float up to the theater’s catwalks and bask in the warm electric lights. Whoever was attempting to play the song lacked Genevieve’s passion and talent, but even the school-recital stiffness of the performance allowed the notes to melt inside my bones and ease my troubled soul.
With silent footfalls, I stole into the auditorium.
The music proved to be the work of a bottom-heavy lady organist with pumpkin-orange hair. She sat in front of the dark wood-and-copper pipe organ, all alone on the stage, her eyes fixed on the sheet music in front of her as if she were just learning the song that very moment. I hunkered down in a red velvet chair in the back row and listened to that mesmerizing melody that reminded me so of Halloween night. My eyelids drooped with each passing refrain. I remembered all the rows of lights hanging above the stage, beckoning me to them, and my cheeks and neck warmed.
Henri Reverie’s pacifying voice rose to my ears: “And that’s when I leap off the young lady’s torso.”
I opened my eyes with a start. There he was, on the stage, strolling over to the organist with three pages of notes in his hands, dressed in his midnight-black trousers and vest, without the coat.
Henri Reverie.
He pointed to one of his papers. “If you finish the song early, I recommend transitioning into ‘Sleep, Little Rosebud.’”
The pumpkin-haired organist, who for some reason wasn’t Henri’s sister, withdrew her fingers from the keys and rotated toward the hypnotist. “Do you really stand on top of these ladies, young man?”
“Oui,” said Henri, nodding. “But I believe in equality, and I stand on gentlemen, too, depending on what I feel the audience would prefer to see. Haven’t you ever heard of the great Herbert L. Flint?”
“No.”
Henri stepped back. “You haven’t?”
“Do you honestly think I’ve heard of every two-bit stage performer?” asked the organist.
“But he is not ‘a two-bit performer.’ He’s a well-known and respected mesmerist. We adapted his use of the human plank for our show, and I always open with it. It is my most popular feat.”
“And none of these stepped-upon volunteers ever complains?”
Henri shook his head. “None so far.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Well”—he lowered his papers and rubbed his smooth chin—“I never force anyone to come on the stage, madame. The volunteers join me up here because they want to, even if they initially demur. I think they want—need—to be seen. To be noticed.”
The organist scowled. “And having a hypnotist stand on their torsos, while they’re sleeping like pacified infants, is preferable to remaining shrinking violets?”
Henri shrugged. “As I said, they never complain, and the audiences adore viewing them up here. You should hear the applause. Americans gobble up magic and visual oddities, such as viewing a man standing upon a near-floating woman.”
“It is scandalous. You may as well be in New York City, debasing yourself in Sapho, that rrribald”—she rolled the r in ribald with dramatic flair—“theatrical production I keep reading about in the newspaper. The one about the strumpet and her lovers.”
“As I was saying . . .” He pointed to his notes again. “This is where you transition into ‘Sleep, Little Rosebud.’”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“Start with an adagio tempo. The notes should be delicate at first.”
“Youth these days will be the death of morality.” The organist flipped through her sheet music to find the right selection. After a cough and an outward thrust of her chest, she blundered her way through a musical number that would have sounded quite pretty if it were being played by anyone else.
Henri wandered across the stage with his hands in his pockets, wincing and hunching his shoulders as the off-key notes assaulted his ears. His gaze turned to the (almost) empty auditorium, so I ducked my head down farther and inhaled a noseful of dust.
Before I could control myself, a sneeze exploded from my nostrils.
“Who’s there?” asked Henri, which made the organist stop playing.
I froze at first, but
then I felt like a fool crouching down on the dirty floor that way, my feet stuck in something sticky and my nose itching with the threat of another sneeze. I stood up and let myself be seen.
Henri squinted up at me. “Miss Mead?”
“Yes. It’s me—I mean, it is I, to be grammatically—”
“Stay right there. Don’t go anywhere.” He leapt off the end of the stage and landed on his feet with a thump—a startling maneuver that made me think of illustrations of lions chasing down gazelles.
I turned and lunged for the door.
“No! I need to speak to you.” I heard him bounding up the aisle behind me. “Don’t go. For your own safety, don’t go. I’ve been worried sick about you.”
At those unexpected words, I stopped.
“Please . . .” He skidded to a halt a few feet away from me and held out his arms to catch his balance. “Please tell me— you have got to tell me—what terrified you so badly when you saw your father yesterday.”
I bit my lip and hesitated.
“Please”—he braced his hands on his hips and regained his breathing—“tell me. I swear to God, you can trust me, Miss Mead.”
“My name is Olivia. I have no intention of calling you anything as respectful as Mr. Reverie, so please stop this ‘Miss’ business.”
“What I do on that stage, Olivia”—for some reason his accent suddenly sounded more American, less French—“all that showy stuff, it’s just to earn money. I want to help people with hypnosis, not hurt them. I want to cure people of their addictions and fears and—and—”
“And dreams,” I finished for him.
“No, not dreams.” He swallowed and stepped closer. “Why did you react to your father the way you did? How did he look after the hypnosis?”
“Are you done flirting, young man?” called the pumpkin-haired organist from the stage. “I’m not being paid to watch you fraternize with girls.”
“One moment, please, madame.”
“I have a good mind to tell Mr. Gillingham you’re wasting the theater’s money—”