by Cat Winters
“Please—this is important.” He turned back to me and softened his voice to a whisper. “I’m going to tell you something I don’t usually share with anyone.”
“No! I don’t want to become your confidante.” I backed away. “I just want you to return my mind to the way it was.”
“Listen—”
“No.”
“Olivia”—he came to me and took hold of my arm—“my sister has a cancerous tumor the size of a goose egg in her bosom.”
My jaw dropped with a gasp of shock.
“It’s rare in girls her age,” he continued, his eyes moistening, “but it’s there. She needs surgery. There’s a specialist in San Francisco. His fees . . . they won’t be cheap.”
“What? No.” I wrenched his fingers off my arm. “You’re lying. That’s a cruel story to tell a person just to get your way.”
“You can see the world the way it truly is, so be honest”— he straightened the bottom of his vest with a sharp tug of the black fabric—“do I look like someone who’s lying about his sister’s health?”
His eyes drew me toward them with a pull that tipped me forward onto my toes. I waved my hands to steady myself, and a second later, like a swift gust of wind, Genevieve Reverie emerged by his side in a white nightgown, her blond head slumped against his arm, her face thin and peaked. The rest of the theater rushed away into a vacuum, and all I saw was the two of them—Genevieve, ill, exhausted, supported by Henri.
I blinked, and she was gone. Her tousled-haired brother stood alone.
“For heaven’s sake, Mr. Reverie,” called the woman on the stage. “I’ve had enough of your dillydallying . . .”
“My father looked like the monster in Bram Stoker’s novel,” I told Henri. “Have you read Dracula?”
“Isn’t that about a human vampire?”
“Yes, and that’s exactly how you made him appear in his office. His skin lacked blood, and his teeth were the fangs of a ferocious animal. I’m witnessing other things as well— disturbing sights—so tell me, please, for the love of God, what in the world did you do to my head?”
“Mr. Reverie,” bellowed the organist in a bone-rattling voice that consumed the entire theater, “throw that girl out of here this minute, or I’m asking Mr. Gillingham to cancel your performance. I know of two highly talented juggling brothers who would love nothing more than to take over your booking tonight.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming.”
He backed away from me, and a topsy-turvy feeling seized me again. My eyes insisted on seeing his hair as more ruffled than before, his dark clothing as frayed and worn. He suffered from fatigue. Distress.
“I’d very much like to discuss this matter with you more, Olivia,” he said.
“I don’t want to discuss this matter.” I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. “I want you to change me back. All is well!”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t? All is well!”
“Not now.”
I shoved my hands against my temples and swallowed down my anger so the right words would come. “Do you want to know how you truly look, Monsieur Reverie?”
He stopped in his tracks.
“You look like a shifty showman who doesn’t really know what he’s doing,” I said. “And I’m willing to bet the remaining shreds of my sanity that Reverie isn’t even your real last name.”
He frowned and jogged back to the stage—back to his rehearsal with the glowering substitute organist who shook her head as if he were a misbehaving spaniel—and he seemed to ignore my words.
Before he reached the front row, however, he peeked over his shoulder.
He gave me my answer, in an accent that wasn’t French in the slightest.
“You’re right, Olivia. It’s Rhodes. My name is Henry—with a y, not an i—Rhodes. But as I’m sure you’ve seen with your own eyes, I am not just a shifty showman.”
is dual names pulsed in my head all the way home.
Henri Reverie. Henry Rhodes. Henri Reverie. Henry Rhodes.
And then cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer. Tumor, tumor, tumor, tumor. Genevieve.
I quickened my pace and managed to find my way back to my house, despite the blurred and rippling sidewalks and the flashes of blue eyes from Henry’s theater handbills, watching me from shop windows. Always watching me.
I tripped over the threshold of our front door, and Gerda raised her head from dusting Father’s antique denture collection in the parlor.
“What are you doing home from school, Miss Mead?”
I closed the door and inhaled a deep breath. “I have a headache.” I parked my lunch pail on the marble-topped hall table. My book bag slid off my shoulder to the floor.
“Ja? A headache?” Gerda lowered the duster. “I left a note with the Acklens. It said that you would go with their boy to the party tonight. Should I not have done that?”
“Oh.” I slumped against the wall. “Percy. How the blue blazes did I forget about him?” I massaged the aching bridge of my nose between my thumb and middle finger. “He’s going to think I’m an absolute loon.”
“Shall I send another note?”
“No. Thank you. I need some sort of reward for surviving this day.” I pushed myself off the wall and headed for the staircase.
“Oh, Miss Mead—I almost forgot, your mother’s birthday envelope arrived. I put it on your bed.”
“Oh? Thank you.” My stomach sank. “I suppose I had better go see what extraordinary adventures she’s undertaken this year.”
I clambered up to my room with the same withered-hot-air-balloon sensation I’d experienced when Henry pulled me down from the theater’s ceiling.
Halfway across the bedroom floor, my feet stopped. There wasn’t an envelope waiting for me on my pink bedspread. It was a ticket, a pale brown one with curved edges and the words ONE-WAY PASSAGE TO NEW YORK CITY written across the center in block letters. My skin warmed, and my ears buzzed. I rubbed my eyes and willed away the delusion, for that’s what it had to have been.
I lowered my hands. The ticket disappeared, and a plain white envelope came into view, return address New York City. I picked it up and ripped it open.
October 10, 1900
My Dear, Darling Daughter,
Can you really be seventeen years old, my funny little lamb? You’re more woman than girl now, which makes your poor mama feel like an ancient crone. My heavens, I was only three months younger than you are now when I became your mother. I hope and pray you don’t follow my same path to early motherhood. Don’t rush into relationships with boys, even if they are as handsome as a certain young dental apprentice who wooed me off the stage eighteen years ago. You know as well as I do about the heartbreak that can result when two fools hurry to play grown-up.
On a much happier note, I’m giddy with excitement to announce I’m now established in New York City, playing Titania in a little theater production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful.” Oh, you should see my costume, my lamb—gold and purple silk, and a heaping crown of flowers upon my red curls.
I’m settled in an apartment near Barnard College, and I think of you every time I see those smart young women walking around with books tucked under their arms. I remember you trying to read your little collection of fairy tales to me when you were just four years old and how much I marveled at your intelligence. Does your father allow you to be bright? Or does he still insist young ladies ought to be silent idiots?
Oh, my darling, I would love to see what you look like as a grown-up young lady. As usual, I’m slipping a little bit of money into the envelope as a birthday present. If you’d care to come east and visit your wicked old mama, I would open my door to you with outstretched arms and hug away all the hurt I’ve caused you. I don’t believe I did you any good when you were a wee little thing, and I still strongly feel our separation was the best for all of us. However, I certainly know a thing or two about being a young woman, and I could take better care
of you now than I did back then. I would even let you take a tour of Barnard, and perhaps I’d allow you to watch that delicious play Sapho, if the moralists don’t shut it down again.
Happy birthday, my Olivia.
Your Loving Mother
A ten-dollar bill fluttered down to my lap.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream must have been paying Mother well—or else she had found herself another wealthy suitor with a fat billfold. I crouched down on the floorboards and slid out one of Father’s bright yellow cigar boxes from the dusty depths beneath my bed. Inside I kept my collection of Mother’s birthday and Christmas gifts, delivered in little envelopes throughout the years, minus a few missing dollars and coins that had paid for books and hair ribbons.
I counted the cash, including my newest contribution.
“Holy mackerel, Mother,” I said, followed by a long sigh.
One hundred twenty-three dollars now waited for me inside that old cigar box.
One hundred twenty-three.
I re-counted the stockpile and sat back on my heels, wondering how much tuition would cost at faraway Barnard College, where young women walked around with books tucked under their arms, as if in a marvelous dream.
rannie stopped by for a rushed after-school visit.
“Are you unwell?” she asked from our front porch, where long shadows yawned across the scuffed red boards and the scraggly potted plants.
“I had a bad headache.”
“I worried the hypnosis made you sick—or that your father sent you away.” She hugged me against her chest. “You scared me to death with all that talk about asylums.”
“I’m all right.” I patted her on the back and let her squeeze me until my collarbones hurt. “In fact, I’m going to go to a party at Sadie Eiderling’s house tonight. Can you believe it?”
She stiffened. “I beg your pardon?”
“Percy’s taking me.”
She dropped her arms and pulled away.
“Don’t worry, I’m going to be quite careful of his”—I tipped my face forward and lowered my voice —“grabby hands.”
“It’s not a joke, Livie.”
“He didn’t grab you, did he?”
“No!” She blushed so hard, she went practically mauve. “No, I’ve just heard rumors . . .” She backed away. “I’ve got to go help Papa at the store. Please be extremely careful with Percy—and your father.”
“Frannie?”
“Good-bye, Livie.”
She scrambled down the porch steps, and for a moment I thought I glimpsed a white handprint on the back of her blue skirt, below her swinging brown braid.
A shudder and a blink, and the print was gone.
FATHER CAME HOME FROM WORK AROUND FIVE THIRTY that evening. I hid in my bedroom and pinned up my hair for the Eiderlings’ party.
“Are you getting ready, Olivia?” he called up to me.
“Yes,” I yelled through my closed door. “Gerda is boiling a ham for your dinner, and then she’ll help me dress. I can’t come down right now.”
“Don’t take too long. Young men don’t like to be kept waiting.”
“I won’t.”
I fussed with my hairpins in front of my mirror, my hands slippery and my mind squalling with fears about the visions. I kept expecting my mirror and my hairbrush to transform into nightmarish abominations—hissing creatures with snouts and needle-sharp teeth that would squeeze around my torso and take a bite.
My hair suffered from all that worrying. Most girls of Sadie Eiderling’s caliber were wearing their long locks puffed high on their heads in enormous pompadours, like the fashionable girls in Charles Dana Gibson’s drawings. On occasion, Frannie and I would try styling our hair in that manner, but our pompadours always turned out lopsided or collapsed like deflated soufflés—which was precisely the problem at the moment. My pinned-up mess of dark hair sagged as if I had just sprinted through the rain with Percy again. I hated it. Every strand.
“All is well!” I said, and I dropped my hands to my sides and growled.
All is well? Balderdash! Bull dung!
Even worse words entered my head, but they shall not be repeated.
I shoved more hairpins into my topknot, and my eyes drifted to a conjoined pair of silver picture frames that sat on top of my chest of drawers. In the rightmost frame sat a photograph of Mother, just sixteen years old, posed in a brocade Renaissance mourning costume in front of a backdrop of painted vines. A black veil draped over her thick ringlets, which looked brown instead of their natural red in the sepia image. I remembered her explaining to me that she had been playing Olivia, my namesake, in a traveling production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and that’s how she met Father. Her pretty face—rosebud lips, arched brows, almond-shaped eyes, long lashes—seemed nothing like mine, save for perhaps the round tip of her nose. She looked like the type of person who never lacked confidence about anything.
The accompanying photograph of my eighteen-year-old father, however—my father, Mead the Mad—was the spitting image of me, aside from his short hair and mustache, of course.
Good Lord. I was more like him than her.
Good Lord. What if I resembled him in behavior, too?
I snapped the frames closed, pinching a finger in my haste.
A minute later, Gerda joined me and helped button me up in an eggplant-purple gown I’d worn to the wedding of one of Father’s cousins down in Salem.
“You look lovely this evening, Miss Mead.”
“Thank you, Gerda.” I straightened the satin poufs sliding off my shoulders. “I personally think I look like a giant purple bauble someone might hang on a Christmas tree.”
She laughed. “No, no, no, you look like an elegant young lady. Your young man—”
“He’s not quite my young man.”
“That young man, then, will fall madly in love with you when he sees you dressed like this.”
“Hmm.” I chewed my bottom lip. “I’d feel a whole lot better knowing a person was falling in love with me because of me and not because of hypnosis or snug purple gowns.”
Gerda tittered again. “You’re so funny, Miss Mead. You’ll make him laugh, if nothing else. And when men laugh, they feel happy and in love.” She hooked the last button. “That’s what Mamma always says about Fader.”
A knock downstairs made my shoulders jerk.
Gerda and I locked eyes.
“He’s here,” I said in a whisper.
“Put your shoes on.” She scurried to my door. “I’ll tell them you’re almost ready.”
Before I could say a word, she was gone, her footsteps padding down the stairs.
Down below the boards of my bedroom, the front door opened with its usual squeak. I heard muffled male voices. My pulse pounded in my ears in the same swift rhythm as the clock on my wall.
“Oh, please look normal,” I whispered while facing my closed door. I folded my hands beneath my chin and scrunched my eyes closed. “Please, please, please don’t turn out to be a monster.”
“Olivia,” called Father. “Young Mr. Acklen has arrived.”
I opened my eyes, inhaled a deep breath, and dared to leave the safety of my room.
Below me, past the bottom of the staircase, Father and Percy chatted about the upcoming election—the impassioned battle between President McKinley and the Democratic anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryan. I only saw the back of Percy’s head, and his auburn hair looked just as handsome and impeccable as usual, with a sheen of pomade glistening in the lamplight. He wore his wool outer coat over a pair of narrow-striped trousers, with a finely knit crimson scarf hanging around his neck. His silk top hat dangled from his right fingers.
Time seemed to freeze for a fraction of a moment. Hope for Percy swelled in my heart. Anything was possible, and if I had my way, we would have remained like that—suspended, innocent, unencumbered by my strange sight—for the rest of the evening.
But then Father’s dark gaze—a bit too predatory for my
taste—flitted toward me. His voice rumbled through the hall. “Ah, Olivia is here.”
Percy turned around.
Normal. He was normal—well shaven and groomed and as beautiful as ever.
My legs gave way in relief, and I had to clutch the banister with both hands.
Percy stepped toward me, the ends of his scarf swaying with the lunge. “Are you all right, Olivia?”
“Yes.” I gripped the handrail and proceeded down the steps. “I’m sorry. I got dizzy for a moment.”
“Ladies and swooning,” said Father with a roll of his eyes. “They can’t help themselves, I’m afraid.”
“All is well.”
“The Eiderlings will have plenty to eat at their party,” said Percy, “so you won’t feel faint much longer.” He fetched my coat from the wall hook and spread it open for me to enter. “Are you well enough to go?”
“Yes, I’m fine.” I slid my bare arms inside the heavy sleeves, and a potent whiff of his cologne shot clear up to my sinuses.
Father beamed one of his hearty Santa Claus smiles and opened the door for the two of us. “Take good care of my girl, Mr. Acklen. I’ll expect her home by ten.” And don’t forget to propose to her, I thought I heard him add, but he grinned, and Percy grinned, and nobody said a word about marriage.
MANDOLIN’S HOOVES STOMPED ACROSS THE MUD-CAKED street leading north of my neighborhood, and the buggy rocked me in a rhythm that might have made me drowsy if my spine weren’t locked upright. Nerves thickened my tongue, and every conversation topic sounded jumbled and stupid in my head.
“How is your ear?” I asked when the silence grew too fierce.
“Better.” He glanced my way. “I was only teasing about you owing me more than just a book, you know.”
My cheeks warmed. “I know.”
“You looked so frightened when I said that to you at school. What did you think I would make you do?”
“I don’t know.” I fussed with a loose pin in my hair and tried to persuade myself Frannie was mistaken about him. The word grabber loitered in my mind like an unwanted guest.
Percy steered Mandolin west, onto Irving. “I read all of it.”