by Paula Guran
“As milk,” said Emma. “I wish I had milk. Callie’s gingerbread is always dry.”
“For goodness sake,” said Rose. “Can’t you think of anything other than food?”
“As the moon, shining over the sullied streets of London,” said Melody, in the voice she used to recite poetry in school.
“What do you know about London?” said Emma. “Make it the streets of Ashton.”
“I don’t think they’re particularly sullied,” said Rose.
“Not in front of your house, Miss Rose,” said Melody, in another voice altogether. Rose kicked her.
“As the paper on which a lover has written his letter,” said Justina. Serenity Sage was sailing down the Tiber.
“If he’s written the letter, it’s not going to be white,” said Emma. “Obviously.”
And then we were silent, because no one said “obviously” to a Balfour, although Justina had not noticed. The Mask was about to take off his mask.
“I don’t understand,” said Melody, in yet another voice, which made even Justina look up. “Lessons in witchcraft,” she read, “with Miss Emily Gray. Reasonable rates. And it’s right here in Ashton.”
“Do you think it’s serious?” asked Emma. “Do you think she’s teaching real witchcraft? Not just the fake stuff, like Magical Seymour at the market in Brickleford, who pulls Indian-head pennies out of your ears?”
“You’re getting crumbs everywhere,” said Rose, who was suddenly and inexplicably feeling critical. “Why shouldn’t it be real? You can’t put false advertising in a newspaper. My father told me that.”
And suddenly we all knew, except Justina, who was realizing the Cardinal’s treachery, that we were no longer reporters. We were witches.
“Where did you say she lived?” asked Melody. We were walking down Elm Street, in a part of town that Melody did not know as well as the rest of us.
“There,” said Emma. We didn’t understand how Emma managed to know everything, at least about Ashton. Although her mother was a whirlpool of gossip: everything there was to know in Ashton made its way inevitably to her. She had more servants than the rest of us: Mrs. Spraight, the housekeeper, as well as the negro servants, Callie, who cooked, and Henry, who was both gardener and groom. Rose’s mother made do with a negro housekeeper, Hannah, and Justine, who lived with her grandmother, old Mrs. Balfour, had only Zelia, a French mulatto who didn’t sleep in but came during the day to help out. And Melody—well, Melody was Hannah’s niece, and she had no servants at all. She lived with her aunt and her cousin Coralie, who taught at the negro school, across the train tracks. We didn’t know how she felt about this—we often didn’t know what Melody felt, and when we asked, she didn’t always answer.
“Don’t you think it’s unfair that you have to go to that negro school, with only a dusty yard to play in? Don’t you think you should be able to go to the Ashton Lady’s Academy, with us? Don’t you think—” And her face would shut, like a curtain. So we didn’t often ask.
“The brick house, with the roses growing on it,” said Emma. “It used to be the Randolph house. She was a witch too, Mrs. Randolph, at least that’s what I heard. She died, or her daughter died, or somebody, and afterward all the roses turned as red as blood.”
“They’re pink,” said Melody.
“Well, maybe they’ve faded. I mean, this was a long time ago, right?” Rose looked at the house. The white trim had been freshly painted, and at each window there were lace curtains. “Are we going in, or not?”
“It looks perfectly respectable,” said Emma. “Not at all like a witch’s house.”
“How do you know what a witch’s house looks like?” asked Melody.
“Everyone knows what a witch’s house looks like,” said Rose. “I think you’re all scared. That’s why you’re not going in.”
At that, we all walked up the path and to the front door, although Justina had forgotten where we were and had to be pulled. Justina often forgot where we were, or that the rest of us were there at all. Rose raised her hand to the knocker, which was shaped like a frog—the first sign we had seen that a witch might, indeed, be within—waited for a moment, then knocked.
“Good afternoon,” said a woman in a gray dress, with white hair. She looked like your grandmother, the one who baked you gingerbread and knitted socks. Or like a schoolteacher, as proper as a handkerchief. Behind her stood a ghost.
That summer, we each had a secret that we were keeping from the others.
Rose’s secret was that she wanted to fly. She had books hidden under her bed, books on birds and balloons and gliders, on everything that flew. She read every story that she could find about flight—Icarus, and the Island of Laputa, and the stories of Mr. Verne. There was no reason to keep this a secret—the rest of us would not have particularly cared, although Melody might have said that if God intended us to fly, he would have given us wings. Her aunt had said that to a passing preacher, who had told the negro people to rise up, rise up, as equal children of God. And Justina might have looked even more absent than usual, with the words “away, away” singing through her head. But Rose would have been miserable if she had told: it was the only secret she had, and it gave her days, and especially nights, when she was exploring the surface of the moon, meaning. And what if her mother found out? Elizabeth Caldwell’s lips would thin into an elegant line, and Rose would see in her eyes the distance between their house with its peeling paint, beneath a locust tree that scattered its seedpods over the lawn each spring, and the house where her mother had grown up, in Boston. She would see the distance between herself and the girl who had grown up in that house, in lace dresses, playing the piano or embroidering on silk, a girl who had never been rude or disobedient. Who had never, so far as Rose knew, wanted to climb the Himalayas, or to fly.
Justina’s secret was that her grandmother, the respectable Mrs. Balfour who, when she appeared in the Balfour pew at the Episcopal Church, resembled an ageing Queen Victoria, was going mad. Two nights ago, she had emptied the contents of her chamberpot over the mahogany suite in the parlor, spreading them over the antimacassars, over the Aubusson carpet. Justina had washed everything herself, so Zelia would not find out. And Zelia had apparently not found out, although the smell— She still had a bruise where her grandmother had gripped her arm and whispered, “Do you see the Devil, with his hooves like a goat’s and his tongue like a lizard’s? I can.” “Away, away” the words sang through her head, and she imagined herself as Serenity Sage, at the mercy of the Cardinal, but with a curved dagger she had stolen from the Caliph hidden in her garter. Then she would be away, away indeed, sailing across the Mediterranean, with the wind blowing her hair like a golden flag.
Emma’s secret was that her mother had locked the pantry. Adeline Beaufort had been a Balfour—Emma was Justina’s second or third cousin—and no daughter of hers was going to be fat. For two weeks now she had been bribing Callie, with rings, hair ribbons, even the garnet necklace that her father had given her as a birthday present. That morning, she had traded a pair of earrings for gingerbread. Callie was terrified of Mrs. Beaufort. “Lordy, Emma, don’t tempt me again! She’ll have me whipped, like in the old slave days,” she had whispered. But she could not resist fine things, even if she had to keep them under a floorboard, as Emma could not resist her hunger. They were trapped, like a couple of magpies, fearful and desiring.
Melody’s secret was that she wanted to go to college. There was a negro college in Atlanta that admitted women, the preacher had told her. So they could be teachers, for the betterment of the negro race. Because white teachers went to college, and why should only negro children be taught by high school graduates—if that? And Melody wanted to better the negro race. Sometimes she wondered if she should be with us at all, instead of with the other girls in her school—perhaps, as her aunt often said, she should stick with her own. But her own filled her with a sense of both loyalty and despair. Why couldn’t those girls look beyond Ashton, beyond the
boys they would one day marry, and the families they would work for? And there was a streak of pragmatism in this, as in many of her actions, because the rest of us checked books out of the library for her, more books than even we read. She had never been told that colored folk could not enter the library, but colored folk never did, and what if she was told to leave? Then she would know she was not welcome, which was worse than suspecting she would not be. So every morning, after her chores were done and before school, when other girls were still ironing their dresses and curling their hair, she went to the houses of the wealthy negro families, of the Jeffersons, who traded tobacco and were, if the truth be told, the wealthiest family in Ashton, and the Beauforts, whose daughters were, as everyone knew, Emma’s fourth or fifth cousins, and cleaned. She put the money she earned, wrapped in an old set of her aunt’s drawers, in a hole at the back of her closet. For college.
The ghost was, of course, a girl, and we all knew her, except Justina. She lived near the railroad tracks, by the abandoned tobacco factory that not even the Jeffersons used anymore, with her father. He was a drunkard. We did not know her name, but we could identify her without it. She was the ghost, the white girl, the albino: white hair, white face, and thin white hands sticking out from the sleeves of a dress that was too short, that she must have outgrown several years ago. Only her eyes, beneath her white eyebrows, had color, and those were a startling blue. Her feet were bare, and dirty.
We knew that we weren’t supposed to play with her, because she was poor, and probably an idiot. What else could that lack of coloring mean, but idiocy? There was an asylum in Charlotte—her father should be persuaded to put her there, for her own good. But he was a drunkard, and could even Reverend Hewes persuade a drunkard? He rarely let her out. Look at the girl—did he remember to feed her? She looked like she lived on air. Adeline Beaufort and Elizabeth Caldwell agreed: it would be for her own good. Really a mercy, for such a creature.
“Come inside, girls,” said Miss Gray. “But mind you wipe your feet. I won’t have dirt in the front hall.”
It was certainly respectable. The parlor looked like the Beauforts’, but even more filled with what Emma later told us were bibelots or objets d’art: china shepherdesses guarding their china sheep; cranberry-colored vases filled with pink roses and sprays of honeysuckle; and painted boxes, on one of which Justina, who had studied French history that year, recognized Marie Antoinette. And there were cats. We did not notice them, initially—they had a way of being inconspicuous, which Miss Gray later told us was their own magic, a cat magic. But we would blink, and there would be a cat, on the sofa where we were about to sit, or on the mantel where we had just looked. “How they keep from knocking down all those—music boxes and whatnots, I don’t know,” Emma said afterward. But we didn’t say anything then. We didn’t know what to say.
“Please sit down, girls.” We did so cautiously, trying to keep our knees away from the rickety tables, with their lace doilies and china dogs. Trying to remember that we were in a witch’s house. “I’ve made some lemonade, and Emma will be pleased to hear that I’ve baked walnut bars, and those cream horns she likes.” There was also an angel cake, like a white sponge, and a Devil’s Food cake covered with chocolate frosting, and a jellyroll with strawberry jelly, and meringues. We ate although Melody whispered that one should never, ever eat in a witch’s house. The ghost ate too, cutting her slice of angel cake into small pieces with the side of her fork and eating them slowly, one by one.
“Another slice, Melody, Justina, Rose?” We did not wonder how she knew our names. She was a witch. It would have been stranger, wouldn’t it, if she hadn’t known? We shook our heads, except for Emma, who ate the last of the jellyroll.
“Then it’s time to discuss your lessons. Please follow me into the laboratory.”
It must have been a kitchen, once, but now the kitchen table was covered with a collection of objects in neat rows and piles: scissors; a mouse in a cage; balls of string, the sort used in gardens to tie up tomatoes; a kitchen scale; feathers, blue and green and yellow; spectacles, most of them cracked; a crystal ball; seashells; the bones of a small alligator, held together with wire; candles of various lengths; butterfly wings; a plait of hair that Rose thought must have come from a horse—she liked horses, because on their backs she felt as though she were flying; some fountain pens; a nest with three speckled eggs; and silver spoons. At least, that’s what we remembered afterward, when we tried to make a list. We sat around the table on what must have once been kitchen chairs, with uncomfortable wooden backs, while Miss Gray stood and lectured to us, exactly like Miss Harris in Rhetoric and Elocution.
“Once,” said Miss Gray, “witchcraft was seen as a—well, a craft, to be taught by apprenticeship and practiced by intuition. Nowadays, we know that witchcraft is a science. Specific actions will yield specific results. Rose, please don’t slouch in your chair. Being a witch should not prevent you from behaving like a lady. Justina, your elbow has disarranged Mortimer, a South American alligator, or the remains thereof. A witch is always respectful, even to inanimate objects. Please pay attention. As I was saying, nowadays witchcraft is regarded as a science, as reliable, for an experienced practitioner, as predicting the weather. It is this science—not the hocus-pocus of those terrible women in Macbeth, who are more to be pitied than feared in their delusion—that I propose to teach you. We shall begin tomorrow. Please be prompt—I dislike tardiness.”
As we walked down the garden path, away from the Randolph house, Emma said to the ghost, “How did you know about the lessons?”
“My Papa was sleeping under the Observer,” she said. Her voice was a rusty whisper, as though she had almost forgotten how to use it.
“Here, I don’t want this,” said Emma, handing her the last cream horn, somewhat crumbled, which she had been keeping in her pocket.
None of us realized until afterward that Miss Gray had never told us what time to come.
“The first lesson,” said Miss Gray, “is to see yourselves.”
We were looking into mirrors, old mirrors speckled at the edges, in tarnished gold frames—Justina’s had a crack across her forehead, and Emma stared into a shaving-glass. Justina thought, “I look like her. My mother looked like her. They say my mother died of influenza, but perhaps she died at the asylum in Charlotte, chained to her bed, clawing at her hair and crying because of the lizards. Perhaps all the Balfours go mad, from marrying each other. Is that why Father left?” Because to the best of her knowledge, her father was in Italy, perhaps in Rome, where Serenity glared out through the bars of her prison, so far beneath the cathedral that no daylight crept between the stones, at the Inquisitor and his men, monks all, but with pistols at their sides. Justina looked into her eyes, large and dark, for signs of madness.
Rose scowled, which did not improve her appearance. What would she have looked like, if she had taken after the Winslows rather than her father? She imagined her mother and her aunt Catherine, who had never married. How daunting it must have been, taking for a moment her father’s perspective, to marry that austere delicacy, which could only have come from the City of Winter. In Boston, her mother had told her, it snowed all winter long. Rose imagined it as a city of perpetual silence, where the snow muffled all sounds except for the tinkling of bells, sleigh bells and the bells of churches built from blocks of ice. Within the houses, also built of ice, sat ladies and gentlemen, calm, serene, with noses like icicles, conversing politely—probably about the weather. And none of them were as polite or precise as her mother or her aunt Catherine, the daughters of the Snow Queen. When they drove in their sleigh, drawn by a yak, they wore capes of egret feathers. If she were more like them, more like a Snow Princess, instead of—sunburnt and ungainly—would she, Rose wondered, love me then?
Emma imagined herself getting fatter and fatter, her face stretching until she could no longer see herself in the shaving glass. If she suddenly burst, what would happen? She would ooze over Ashton like molasse
s, covering the streets. Her father would call the men who were harvesting tobacco, call them from the fields to gather her in buckets and then tubs. They would give her to the women, who would spread her over buttered bread, and the children would eat her for breakfast. She shook her head, trying to clear away the horrifying image.
Melody thought, “Lord, let me never wish for whiter skin, or a skinnier nose, or eyes like Emma’s, as blue as the summer sky, no matter what.”
We did not know what the ghost thought, but as she stared into her mirror, she shook her head, and we understood. Who can look into a mirror without shaking her head? Except Miss Gray.
“No, no, girls,” said Miss Gray. “All of the sciences require exact observation, particularly witchcraft. You must learn to see, not what you expect to see, but what is actually there. Now look again.”
It was Melody who saw first. Of course she had been practicing: Melody always practiced. It was hot even for July—the flowers in all the gardens of Ashton were drooping, except for the flowers in Miss Gray’s garden. But in the laboratory it was cool. We were drinking lemonade. We were heartily sick of looking into mirrors.
“Come, girls,” said Miss Gray. “I would like you to see what Melody has accomplished.” We looked into Melody’s mirror: butterflies. Butterflies everywhere, all the colors of sunrise, Swallowtails and Sulfurs, Harvesters and Leafwings, Fritillaries, Emperors, and Blues, like pieces of silk that were suddenly wings—silk from evening gowns that Emma’s mother might have worn, or Rose’s. “O latest born and loveliest visions far of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy! Butterflies are symbols of the soul,” said Miss Gray. “And also of poetry. You, Melody, are a poet.”
“That’s stupid,” said Melody.
“But nevertheless true,” said Miss Gray.
“It’s like—a garden, or a park,” said Emma, when she too saw. And we could also see it, a lawn beneath maple trees whose leaves were beginning to turn red and gold. They were spaced at regular intervals along a gravel path, and both lawn and path were covered with leaves that had already fallen. The lawn sloped down to a pond whose surface reflected the branches above. Beside the path stood a bench, whose seat was also covered with leaves. On either side of the bench were stone urns, with lichen growing over them, and further along the path we could see the statue of a woman, partially nude. She was dressed in a stone scarf and bits of moss.