As I walked the city of New York, not knowing now where to go, I cursed it silently, and my eyes felt like the judgment of angels, as if they could light my way in the gathering dark.
I still did not know where to go or what to do.
My family had been the borders of my world before then, and with them gone, the world had revealed itself to me.
The trees were the wrong trees; the buildings, the wrong buildings; the people, the wrong people. The reek of the streets, of the horse manure, the garbage, the spilled beer, and the drunken piss, it all seemed to say to me, Your mother is dead, your father is dead, your brothers are dead, and no one can help you.
And so I cursed these things. I cursed these wrong trees; the carriages; the low, sooty buildings; the high ones. It was warmer here, the ground not quite frozen, but cold all the same—I cursed that as well. The mud under my feet. I cursed the fine clothes and the poor, the buggies, the trains, the men, the women, the beggars, the horses, and the birds, all of it—I wished it all to burn, to become a fire that would lay waste to the city, for me to turn from ember to inferno under the breath of whatever it was that would listen to my prayer and answer it. And while I’d not cried once for the entire journey, I began to as I began my curses. I wept continuously, though I did not sob or shake.
§
By nightfall I remained more ash than ember. My face burned from where the tears had glazed my face and I had brushed them away. I sank against a stone wall. Nothing had answered my prayers, again. And so, having cursed everything that came near me, I cursed myself.
I was dazed from hunger—I’d never eaten away from home in my entire life. I looked at the window of a tavern full of people laughing and drinking, and saw no clear way to feed myself, no way to join them. I remember I was afraid that it was their house and they would not let me in.
The confidence that came with cursing the people in the street left me, and they frightened me now. They seemed to me like a swarm, indistinct from one another, foreign and of a piece with one another in a way I would never be. And while I was unsure how they fed themselves, what they would eat and drink, they were not unsure at all and this terrified me. I watched for signs of how it was done, in a furious despair. Not for wanting to die, but to live.
Girl, said a voice behind me, and I turned.
Are you lost? he asked.
I shook my head. This, at least, was true.
You look quite cold, more than half froze, he said. He smiled faintly, and a whisper of charm came through the air.
He was pale, somber, very tall. He had dark hair and whiskers, the whiskers a bit frozen from his breath and the wind, and he looked as if even speaking to me grieved him.
Come join me inside, he said, and indicated the saloon. Let me buy you a bit of something and get you out of the cold.
I went in. He bought me soup and a bit of beer, and I knew I might live.
§
Do you need a position? he asked.
I supposed I did.
He needed someone for help with the washing and the cooking, he said. His wife had just died. Was I handy? For it looked like I was. He was a new widower.
I was no good for it, but I nodded all the same, for I wanted at least another meal and a bed. I hoped desperation might make me better at chores.
Can you not speak? he asked, for thus far I’d said nothing.
I decided I could not and nodded yes. It would be easier this way.
Well, okay then, he said.
It was a very short charade we managed. His house that night was cold and clean, the farm large, familiar and unfamiliar both. My parents had never used hired men and women so I was unused to them and greeted them warily with a wave. He showed me to a small room off the kitchen he said was to be mine. When I came back through the kitchen and found him asleep by his bottle, a little whiskey was still in the glass.
I was still cold, and though I had come into the kitchen to be close to the fire, I thought to try this—he had said it warmed one, but had not offered it to me. The taste burned, but the warmth was there and ran through me, consoling.
I sipped again.
I roused him, for he should be in his bed, it seemed to me, and helped him up the stairs.
§
By the end of the next day, it was quite clear I was as bad as I ever had been at the cooking and the wash. He was nice enough, but as I cleaned the table and took his plate, he made a face.
I had found him asleep at the table again. He’d stayed late, drinking by the kitchen fire. I woke him to go to bed, and as I did, he looked at me and I saw his eyes.
I slowly understood; I was close to a lesson, one I had long understood would come. I could tell what he wanted from me.
I’d had to break the ice on the East River to wash clothes that froze before they dried. His eyes reminded me of that ice. I wondered if it would be worse than that and decided perhaps it was not.
I guided him to his room. I laid him out on his bed, helping him off with his clothes, pausing before also draping mine. I stood cold, naked, at the edge of this moment. I told myself I could still leave, though I knew I could not, and climbed into the bed on top of him.
He did the rest. There was pain that surprised me, and I was so cold, it burned as he entered me, the heat of him, but this also its own strange pleasure. I pulled his quilt up around me like a cape, pushing it against my face so he could not see me cry, my eyes starting at the shock of it. Soon there was only the terrible cold around us in the room and the new warmth of him, and beneath that, a surprise: the beat of his heart, strange to me, there in the veins.
It wasn’t his heart there, though, pushing in me.
He was tough and hard all over except here, with a wiry fur to his chest and belly. A tremor came over him like fear and his head rolled back, eyes shut. He was not a pretty man. Was he falling asleep? He was very drunk. I hoped he was. I reached down and put my hand along his beard, touched his lip to check. He pulled back.
It wasn’t to be tender then, I saw. He chose that moment to sit up and made to kiss me. I pushed him back down and held his arms in place until we were done. The kissing I could not bear.
The kissing would be worse than the ice.
Afterward, when he was done, he threw back his blankets and swore. Eh. I’ve ruined you, have I? he said, for there was blood on him and on me. He went to his basin and washed himself before telling me to do the same.
Men always said it that way—I’ve ruined you. I couldn’t explain, but, no, I did not feel ruined. I wasn’t sure what I felt at first, besides being shocked by the blood—I felt like I’d slain something else, though the blood was mine.
He let me stay the night in his bed, which was warmer than the room off the kitchen. It was a strange vigil, for he snored so loudly I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I felt my body warm.
I could feel how easy it would be to stay, and it was almost tempting, for being easy. I, with only ash for my trousseau, the new girl for the widower. I think he felt this also. But that was not what I wanted. It wasn’t why I’d come all this way.
What I felt, by morning, was how it was as if I were someone new. Or, perhaps, more: There was someone I had become, and she had made this decision by way of introduction.
You should leave, this new girl I was said to me. Before he wakes.
I slunk from the bed and stood again in the cold. As I dressed myself in that dim kitchen light, I felt the opposite of ruined. I felt strong again, ready to try to cross the ocean again.
I was sore, that was all. And so this felt like a triumph over death, as if I had been dealt a murderous blow and lived.
§
There was still one member of my family left to bury.
I paused on the hill above his farm, having found graves much like the ones my mother and I had made, though these were made with stones well carved.
He was like me, then, also the last of his family left among the living.
The name I
took was from a smaller stone, farther back, older. She had died three years before these new ones, at the age of three. Her last name was different from the rest. She could have been a sister’s child. I said it aloud in the air, a whisper.
Lilliet Berne.
I suppose I knew even then what Verdi later told me about the great tragedies, those great families who’d caught the attention of the gods for their hubris and were struck down, known to us now as the subjects of operas. My family was not, to my knowledge, a great family, but they were dearly good—any greatness they had was in their goodness. But I sensed even then, before I knew the word, the hubris was mine. And the gods did not kill for hubris—for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn.
It is only to be for a little while, I told myself, for however long it would take me to get to my aunt. I would go back to my old name then. This one would keep me safe as I traveled. In its disguise, I could hide all my sins, like this one.
Instead, it would be this name I would return to, the name I chose that day, this name that would stay with me when almost nothing else had.
My hubris was hidden from me, as it always is, until it is too late, and it began with this stolen name. I believed I could hide from my Maker and start again. My hubris, then, something I’ve not yet been punished for, the real punishment still ahead of me.
§
There is a novel all French schoolchildren are made to read in the new Republic of France, written to outline the nation’s history. I would read it to teach myself both the language and country while at the Conservatoire in Paris. Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants is the story of two orphaned brothers who travel the entire country in search of their uncle, helped at each turn by the good people of France. When the brothers leave home there is a description of the sky. Pas une étoile au ciel. In my clumsy translations I mistook étoile for toil, star for work. By a work of the sky, I thought it meant. By a work of the sky, the orphans left. Not a star in the sky, as the orphans left, was what the phrase meant in that sentence. But still I thought, This I understand. Orphans made for stories.
If I was making for you a book for children, the page opposite this one would be an engraving of the girl as she stands on a street in New York, with a girl’s map of the world, in which she imagines she can go back the distance her mother traveled from Lucerne in Switzerland to Minnesota and find her kin there. A dotted line would connect the two places, drawn by the author. For the final X, the cemetery near the farm in Brooklyn, where she takes the name of a girl, Lilliet Berne, 1860–1863, dead at age three, which she gives the next time anyone asks it of her.
With a dead girl’s name, Death would go looking somewhere else, I was sure. No funeral, no prayers said for her, no stone to mark her rest except this name, the heaviness of it on my tongue each time I say the name all these years, until now, when it has nearly worn away.
Her book closes there and this other one opens. In the first picture, she is standing on the back of a horse, waving to a crowd.
I will try and name, by the end of this, the country this tells the story of.
Five
I WENT BACK TO the river and wandered the shipyards.
I had the memory of a story from my father of stowaways, people who managed to hide on a boat and cross the sea, but I couldn’t figure out how one went about it. The boats all seemed forbidding, silent, impermeable, and the looks the men gave me warned me to stay back. These men were not the kind I’d known before. The way they looked at me, like I was a lamb. I would soon know how lucky I’d been with my widower.
I found a tent pitched near the water, and it glowed and shook with the noise of singing and horses, gunfire and laughter. As I approached, a flap opened, and a dejected-looking woman stumped out.
It was the strangest thing I’d found, perhaps, in all of my short life, this noisy tent near the water, and I waited to see how I could go in. I walked closer. It did not seem open to the public—there was no audience.
The day grew dark. I watched as more and more women left. I knew I would have to leave soon, to work, and yet I waited.
I noticed a man paying attention to me. He came and stood right in front of me finally, tried to press a piece of paper into my hand, saying something to me and gesturing at the tent door, but he hadn’t tried to introduce himself so I ignored him. And after my episode with the farmer, I feared strange men but also myself, a little.
Fine, he said finally, exasperated. Be that way if you must. If we can’t get Muhammad to the mountain, we will bring the mountain to Muhammad.
I remembered my mother would say this when I was stubborn. I looked down at the paper, where it lay on the ground, and read it dully.
Female Equestrienne Rider Needed—Audition Today!
Skill with Firearms and Singing Important! Get Ready to See Paris!
He went into the tent, to my surprise.
The flap flew open again, and this time standing there was a small group looking at me.
A light glowed high above the others, separated from them, and moved steadily toward me. As I watched, it twinkled, broke into limbs of a kind, so that it seemed for a brief moment a dancing figure of fire, something small and capable of lighting, say, a cigar. It danced, moving as if it could beckon me somewhere. Then I saw it was coming for me.
It was a tiny oil lamp, set high up into the curly wig of a strange, enormous, and terrifyingly beautiful woman. A few more lamps lit the back of her head, so that she was curtained in light. Thick red curls rose for several feet above her face. She was accompanied by a giant looking at me over the top of her hair, his face shadowed by the light and by what I first thought was another man, but was instead a woman dressed in pants walking with a soldier’s powerful stride. I looked away, thinking they’d be on their way, but then looked back when from behind them suddenly appeared the man who’d tried to force the paper into my hand. This one! he said. See? Am I right?
They came to a stop in front of me.
Well, he didn’t lie, the woman of fire said to the others, before turning to me and saying, My dear, my name is Flambeau. She gave a curtsy, and the warmth of her fire reached my cheeks and eyelashes. My colleagues and I, it seems to me, have been searching for a girl just such as you.
I stared at her as if she hadn’t spoken at all and then opened my mouth to say, What is it you think I am? and a strange whispery noise came from my throat instead.
I looked around at them and tried again. The sound was ghostly. It terrified me.
My audience looked on, curious and concerned. Cat got your tongue? she said.
The voice was gone, as gone as if it had slunk away in the night and left this in its place.
How do you be? the giant asked. He bowed deeply.
Here, my dear, whisper in my ear, Flambeau said, and so I did.
What do you think I am? I asked, whispering.
What do we think she is? Flambeau said, repeating my question with a slight smile.
Whatever she is, she’s the last one we’ll speak to before going home, said the gentlemanly woman. She shifted her legs and then, like my father used to, cracked her knuckles with a swift flex of her clasped hands, and I had a pang of remembering him.
The giant met my eyes, asking, Did you just arrive here?
I nodded yes.
Flambeau smiled and asked, How’s your aim with a rifle? Are you a good shot? Can you ride a horse?
I again nodded yes to both.
Then you are the one we seek, Flambeau said. The fine lady there is Priscilla of the Cajun Maidens, and this is Ernesto the Giant. We are colleagues together in a traveling show. We are seeking a Pioneer Girl to join us for our European tour, and you, as you look to be a raccoon in boots in that coat, fit the bill. Will you audition for us?
I pulled the coat closer about me, unsure of how to display my offense at these people who, it seemed, could help me.
Priscilla explained the show was leaving in a few days, as soon as the weather
turned, for a tour of Italy, Spain, and France, where there was to be a very important performance in Paris. Auditions had turned up too many women trying to get to Paris for the wrong reasons. All were transparently bad with horses, terrified of guns, and unable to sing.
There’s plenty of whores in Paris, Priscilla said. And some of them are a damn good shot. We don’t need to bring any more of those.
Ernesto cast his eyes down, caught my eye, and winked. I can’t believe there’s whores that’s bad with horses, he said, and laughed.
At this, Priscilla rolled her eyes, and Flambeau coughed, laughing.
I only smiled as if I understood, which I would, soon enough.
The circus tent shook with the terrible winds coming in off the sea near the shipyards, as if it were undergoing a violent transformation. I felt the same. I wanted desperately to leave with them. Ernesto gave a courtly, exaggerated bow, as did Priscilla, and they gestured toward the tent in unison, as if we were already performing in a show together. I stepped between them, and we walked to the door.
If she can’t speak, she can’t sing, can she? Ernesto asked Flambeau and Priscilla over the top of my head, as if he thought I couldn’t hear him. I don’t think himself will go for it, he said. He’ll want one that sings. If only she could sing.
And with that, he flung back the tent flap.
The lights from Flambeau’s hair threw sharp shadows against the roof of the tent as we entered. She took my arm and walked me to a very exasperated older man leading a roan gelding that also seemed quite tired. The man rubbed his forehead as he chewed the end of a cigar and gave me a long look.
The Queen of the Night Page 5