My Peculiar Family

by Les Rosenthal

  The house was New England through and through, three stories worth of gingerbread and shingles, bay windows and even a widow’s walk. Most of the people I knew from Arizona would have loved it. I shuddered when I stared at that grand staircase leading to the wraparound porch.

  The door was dark and solid. Four inches of heavy oak, well-seasoned and designed to withstand the worst weather that New England could offer. There were three separate locks on the door, each with its own key. Two of those were new. I couldn’t imagine anyone who would come up to the house and seriously consider daring to rob it, but then again, not everyone had the same dark recollections of what had occurred there in the past.

  The interior of the house was the same as always.

  I stood in the foyer and closed my eyes, taking in the scent of lavender and potpourri that had always permeated my childhood home. For as long as I had lived, that pervasive scent had been associated with my mother as strongly as the scent of pipe tobacco had been a direct connection to my father.

  I walked through room after room of the house, examining leather chairs and shelves filled with knick-knacks, and books enough to start a library. Each room had a thousand memories. There, in that corner was where we put up the Christmas tree every year, not because it was a joyous family affair but because it was expected of us. I genuinely believe that. My father went through the motions so that when people came to visit they could see his perfect family, his lovely wife and his well-behaved daughter. I was often seen and seldom heard, which was exactly as my father wanted it.

  I went into my father’s study. The vast desk where he had always sat during the daylight hours—on those occasions when he did not go to his office—still overwhelmed the room. On that first day I spent easily half of my time opening every window in the house to wipe away the stench of my parents and my memories of them.

  On the second day, I confess I drank much more than I should have. There was a bottle of brandy in my father’s study. It had sat in the same spot for as long as I could remember and if he ever drank from it he did so when I was not present. I emptied the bottle though the course of the day. I have never much cared for brandy or for drinking, but I was willing to make exceptions if it helped exorcise the demons of my past.

  I drank. I cried. I remembered my mother and her endless tiny cruelties. I remembered my father, who only ever noticed me when other men took note of my appearance. I was not a toy he liked to play with, but I was a toy he guarded jealously just the same.

  On the third day home I moved slowly through the bowels of the house. The structure had withstood well over a century of existence and walking through the basement, and the old larder, and the root cellar I could understand why. The foundation was solid. The ground was level and well-tended and the vast furnace that kept the place warm was old but well-tended. My mother had always been an expert at making sure what was hers behaved properly.

  The only other thing I found of interest was a rat trap complete with the mummified remains of a very large rodent. I left it where I found it, not quite ready to remove the ancient carcass.

  I had one visitor that day. My Cousin Stephen came to pay his respects. He managed to assess each and every item in the house as thoroughly as a letch might study the caliber of women at a party. Though he was civil enough I knew he wasn't there to see me so much as to see what he could get from me.

  The answer was nothing.

  Three days more I spent wandering the halls of my ancestral home, a ghost that lived within the walls; not haunting but rather haunted. There were so many memories, a hundred slights and a thousand disappointments. I slept in my old bedroom and nothing there had changed. I doubt my mother ever entered the room or paid it the least attention.

  Finally, after more than a week, I ventured up into the attic. Attics are strange affairs. They are too cold in winter, too hot in summer and seldom have anything of worth that resides within them. They are the addled brains of old houses, storing memories in the form of dust-coated cradles and mirrors and long-abandoned suitcases.

  When I was a child the attic of the house had been one of my few refuges until my mother forbade me the luxury of escaping there. It was too tiring for her to call after me and have to wait until I extracted myself from whatever box of memories I had found to examine.

  I walked up the creaking stairs to the attic and unlocked the door without hesitation, curious about what might have been added in the twenty odd years since last I had entered the room.

  Certain memories remained in the same, familiar locations. An old mirror propped against one wall still caught the sun as it came through the window. I have never known if the placement was deliberate but it certainly added light to the room. A seamstress’s mannequin, still sporting a half-sewn dress that had been there since before I was born, the fabric sun-bleached and long since ruined. A collection of old chairs stacked against one wall, and three steamer trunks that I knew from experience were filled with buttons, old letters and seventeen books written in a language I did not know.

  Stacked carelessly in front of these old, familiar companions were newer boxes, some filled with bills that had been paid, others containing still more items that my mother no longer wanted to see. Four large boxes contained most of my father’s wardrobe, a collection of suits my mother was either too attached to, or too petty to offer to charity. I promised myself that I would rectify that decision, just as I would offer all of her clothes to Goodwill or anyone else who wanted to come and collect them.

  The less I had to remember my parents, the happier I would be.

  There was one box nearly buried in the corner that I did not recognize. I looked at it for a long while because of where it was placed.

  The box was old, I could see that easily enough. The markings on the sides of the thing were faded to obscurity and a layer of dust and cobwebs sealed it in place. Written on the top of the box was the simple legend: My Family.

  What puzzled me about it was that it had obviously been there for a very long time and despite my many childhood excursions to the attic I had never run across it before.

  I should have, you see. I had combed through every receptacle in that long room a dozen times over at least. I could have gone to each of those forlorn steamer trunks and told you without so much as a glance what was in them. They had been my treasure troves as a youngster.

  That box had obviously been there at least as long, had been lost in even more dust and the markings of a neglected room, and yet I had never once noticed it before and never touched the contents.

  I went to the box and pulled it over to the steamers, stacking it on top of them so that I could investigate my newly discovered treasure.

  Curiosity is an old friend and despite my mother’s best attempts to crush it, remains one of my strongest traits.

  I had to know what was in the box. It could have been nothing but a collection of old recipes and I would have been just as eager to examine it.

  Inside there were carefully sorted images: Pictures, paintings and daguerreotypes that had seen their best days many years and decades into the last century, some even earlier.

  Looking at the dour faces, I could see the similarities in certain features, the set of the mouth, the angle of the jaw line, the shape of the nose…a dozen different aspects of those faces that all spoke of familiarity. They were beyond familiar. They were familial.

  These were the faces of my bloodline, my family.

  I knew none of them.

  Looking at the assorted images I thought about my mother, my father, my cousin Stephen and his obnoxious parents. How had they come to be what they were? How could they have come from the same blood that ran through my veins?

  I was struck at that moment with a desire to know more about my heritage. If I could never learn more from my parents, I could learn what had made them so cold and distant. Perhaps I could understand the origin of my species.

  I took the box with me, down from my former playhou
se to the place where I had always been forbidden to go. My father’s office was now mine, and it would suit me well as I investigated the origins of my peculiar family…

  My Peculiar Family

  Miss Elizabeth’s Poison

  The story of

  Gussie, the Apothecary

  Stacey Longo

  The murders, I fear, were ultimately my fault. I just didn’t believe she really had it in her.

  I’ve never misjudged anyone so horrendously.

  Let me explain. My name is Gussie Gilchrist, and I work for my father in the local apothecary shop here in Fall River. My job is to sweep the floors and dust the glass globes filled with colored water that shimmer in the front window. I polish our wooden counters, clean the windows that are always propped open during this hot, steamy August, and shoo out the wayward insects that find their way in to buzz among our scented soaps and imported chocolates. However, these are not my only tasks. Father and I share a secret. He is now practically blind, and it is I who mixes the potions, crushes the herbs with mortar and pestle in the back room, and fills the orders. If any of his customers knew it was a mere girl mixing their tonics and salves, he’d be ruined. So I act the part of shopkeeper’s assistant, wiping down the cigar case and making sure the match dispenser is filled. When a customer comes in with an ailment, Father calls out to me to make sure the measuring glasses and pill-rolling machine are cleaned and ready, and I hurry off to the back room to prepare the medicine.

  I am a quick study. At seventeen, I already know which plants and mineral salts are best for which ailments. We use a mixture of sodium phosphate and citric acid to cure constipation, and heroin mixed with cherry syrup to sedate coughs. For a bad cold, ten grains of opium do the trick, and nothing restores health and vitality like a dose of French tonic wine. We carry effervescent salts for headaches and seasickness, and when our customers are wracked with pain for which the only end will be death, that’s when we dispense the morphine. My potions are second to none. But ’tis the scared women, who come in right before closing, when father has already retired for the evening, leaving me to clean up, that are my best customers.

  I can recognize them right away. They duck into our doorway with wide eyes and trembling shoulders, like they’re ready to jump out of their own skin. They’re all frightened, desperate, and ready to try anything. It’s my job to assess the situation and decide if they’re really capable of executing the solution they’ve sought me out to find.

  The ones who have found themselves in a family way are the easiest to figure out. Most of them are unmarried, the victim of a cruel attack, perverse family member, or even just the simple promise of true love and a marriage proposal that never came. These ladies cry on my shoulder, afraid to tell their parents or pastor of their terrible woe, but so scared and fraught, they’re willing to spill all to me, a stranger. Perhaps because I’m a woman, they think I’ll understand. I can’t imagine the stark hopelessness and terror some of these poor girls felt when they were taken against their will, oftentimes by men they trusted. When their cheeks are ruddy and they can no longer speak for sobbing, this is when I decide if they truly need my help.

  For most of these ladies, I hand them a potion concocted of bitter melon, nutmeg, and wild carrot to induce miscarriage. Father taught me this potion only once, after a young girl of twelve found herself in an awful way after being assaulted by a stranger, but I have a memory for such things. Yet once in a while, a young woman will show up, newly married and simply afraid of motherhood, and I refuse to help such twits. When this type of girl shows up, asking for assistance simply because she’s worried that she won’t be a suitable mother, I prepare a mixture of lime and coconut juice, and when it does nothing but give them mild gas, I assure them that it is merely God’s will that she have the baby after all. So you see, I am not blind to the power I hold. I need to choose the women I help wisely.

  This is especially true of the ladies that come in for darker purposes. Some wish to escape an unhappy marriage; others simply want to end their own miserable existences. These are the gray women, slinking in shrouded in dark coats, chin down, uneasily determined to end a life. I have to study these ladies closely, listen to their tales, wipe away their tears, and decide if I can, in fact, provide them with the end result they seek. Some of these women have husbands who beat them mercilessly for the most ridiculous of imagined slights—Prudence Cooper, for instance, showed me her permanently disfigured hands, each finger broken after her husband caught her penning a thank-you note to her sister for sending over a basket of berries.

  “He’s never liked Esther, you see,” Prudence said, wincing at the memory. “Thinks she’s uppity because she married a banker. It was my fault; I know he doesn’t want me to have contact with her, but those strawberries were the best I’d ever tasted. Plus, she’s my sister. I couldn’t just—I had to—and this?” She held up her bent claws, healed in a mishmash of angles, and set her shoulders back. “I can’t take it anymore. How can anyone live like this?”

  If I think they really do have it in them, the capacity for murder, and the man whose life they’re hoping to end seems to truly deserve it, I might wrap up a neat bottle of prussic acid in simple brown paper, tie it tight with twine, and send them off to their dark deed. Of these women, of which I’ve helped no more than ten, none has been suspected of murder. And why would they be? On the rare occasion that the local constable stops by to ask if Mrs. Cooper or Mrs. Bell might have come in, inquiring about poison to rid oneself of mice, my father confidently assures them that this never happened.

  When Miss Elizabeth came in that night, shaking out her black umbrella and wiping her boots neatly on the doormat, I was surprised. Her father is notoriously tight with his pennies, and we rarely see his daughters in here to look over our boxed candy or fancy bottles of perfume. I recognized her, of course, from church. How many times had I seen her drab figure, her ashy blonde curls with tendrils of wiry gray sneaking through, and thought there, but for the grace of God . . .? No, I did not envy Miss Elizabeth, for under her demeanor, her proud jaw and thin lips, was always an air of strain: she was wound up tighter than piano wire, and every sharp movement and short reply she gave made one think she would snap at any moment under the tension of her life. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that she’d found her way to me, to seek out a potion to ease her burden. But you see, I never thought she had it in her.

  I stood for a moment, broom in hand, staring at her as she brushed the droplets off of her overcoat. She lifted her head up and walked directly towards me, with purpose.

  “We’re closed,” I offered weakly, but she shook her head, and came close enough to make me uncomfortable.

  “I’m not here for a bottle of nerve tonic,” she said, then smiled tightly. “I need a special sort of medicine this evening, and I’m told you’re the only one who might be able to supply such a thing.” I blinked. Heard from whom? Perhaps I should concern myself more with what gossips were saying on the street.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” I replied, more confident than I felt. Was it Prudence Cooper who betrayed my secret? I should never have trusted that nervous little mouse. I should slip a little something into her nerve tonic . . . though, now that her husband William had met his maker, she rarely had need of our wares. I reluctantly met Miss Elizabeth’s eyes and shook my head slightly. “What was it you were looking for?”

  “Oh, calm down, Gussie. You’re shaking like a frightened child. I need something special, that’s all. A bit of an unusual request. Surely you can help me?”

  “What did you have in mind?” I asked, leaning my broom against the counter by the soap display. I had to proceed cautiously, in case Miss Elizabeth was trying to trap me. I wouldn’t put it past her to try and earn a few pennies as a police informant if the opportunity arose.

  “A bottle of prussic acid, if you would.” My eyes grew wide, but she held up a gloved hand before I could protest. “Just to
clean a sealskin cloak. That’s all,” she said, and her tight smile returned. I didn’t trust that smile. I didn’t trust the black look in her eyes, or the squint to her cheeks that made her face look constricted. No, something wasn’t right here at all.

  “I don’t know that we have that in stock,” I said, hoping she would accept my lie and leave. “Father doesn’t like to keep much of that around, in case of robbery. It can be quite toxic, you know.” I looked at her again, and the shadow in her eyes told me that she did know how toxic the acid she was requesting was; knew well, indeed, for what she was asking. “What matter of stain are you trying to get out? Perhaps we have some sort of oil or polish that could help.”

  “I’ve scrubbed it with a bit of ash and water, to no avail,” she replied. “Really, I’ve tried everything. My girl Maggie soaked it for a whole day, but the spot just won’t come out. Surely you have something,” she added. “I’m afraid the cloak in question isn’t wearing well, and it’s also starting to look shabby. I was told that prussic acid would refresh it quite nicely. Nothing else will do, you understand.”

  Oh, I understood. If she needed the prussic acid to clean a sealskin cloak, one of the finest furs on the market that could hold up to the worst weather New England had to offer with nary a bald patch, then I was a monkey’s uncle. No, her intent with the poison was for a darker purpose, I was sure. But who? She was unmarried, and had no prospects for a beau that I’d heard; her sister Emma was considered the attractive one in the family, and even she had not stepped out with a gentleman for a good number of years. Was Miss Elizabeth jealous of her older sister’s beauty? Yet the two seemed close . . . perhaps it was her father, who had made a fortune buying and selling textile mills, yet had not seen it fit to upgrade his house with indoor plumbing or an icebox. Or maybe her stepmother, Abby Gray, was the intended target. Though Miss Elizabeth had never publicly spoken ill against the woman who had married Mister Andrew when Miss Elizabeth was but five, I had noticed that Miss Elizabeth and Miss Emma often sat a bit apart from Mister Andrew and Mrs. Abby at Sunday services.