Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders

by Julianna Baggott

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Eppitt told me he wasn’t a war hero, but had he not served at all? Burlesque? Mobsters? We could be anyone here. Eppitt was someone else. I said, “I’ve done some dancing myself, you know.”

  “The boards? You? Really?”

  “Of course!”

  “Maybe you could put on a little demonstration later.”

  I spotted Eppitt across the lawn, looking around, maybe for me. “Okay,” I said, and I winked, puckered my lips, and unbuttoned the top button of my high-collared dress.

  Eppitt bounded over.

  Isley said, “I had no idea about her, kid! No idea.”

  “Where did you go?” Eppitt asked me, with jangled alarm. “I couldn’t find you.”

  “Eppitt doesn’t like people leaving him,” Isley said. “Tell her you’ve forgiven me for all that old business. Tell me all’s forgiven.”

  Eppitt reared a little. He put his hands in his pockets. “Well, sure!” he said. “Of course all’s forgiven, Isley. What are you talking about? Our time in the war?”

  “Oh, that!” Isley sighed wearily. “Are you still singing that old song, Clapp? She knows. I told her,” he said. “Here, take a gas mask.” He shoved it at Eppitt with such force that he had to take it. “You might need it. You never know!” He walked back to the crowd at the coals.

  Eppitt was holding the gas mask gently with both hands like it was a kitten. I was dizzy. He was blurred.

  “Tell me the truth,” I whispered.

  “What truth?”

  “Pick one,” I said.

  “Will you love me no matter what?”

  “Of course.”

  He looked over at Harlow, who was tripping over coals, and then veered quickly and landed on his rump in the grass. His face, a deep purple, pursed, and then broke into a howl.

  “I wasn’t in the war. Isley bribed someone to fail me on the physical. I might have failed anyway. He got me working burlesques. Security. One time he left me on a rum run and I got in trouble with the law. I did some jail time. He got me the hiding job afterward because I took the fall for him.”

  I understood jail, in my way. “Mobsters? Is that who needs things hidden?”

  “Mobsters and some regular folks.” He put his hands on my hips and then worked them up my waist. “But all that is okay here. We can live on the edges of things. No one cares what people on the edges do.”

  “I feel like a killer,” I said.

  He laughed. “Who’d you kill?”

  “My mother.”

  He looked at me. “Tell me, Harriet, are you sure about that?”

  “She was a shut-in and then I arrived and we went out. She died of contagion because of me. And then I was in the crazy house. Sheppard Pratt.”

  “You didn’t kill your mother, Harriet. Not at all. You brought her to life. Don’t you see that?”

  I hadn’t before.

  He went on. “And around here, an asylum stint is something you could brag about. Jesus, did you know Zelda Fitzgerald has done time at Pratt? Isley had Scott and Zelda out for a lawn party. They fought over a game of croquet.”

  The edges. That’s where we were. The girl looking for the Mistol Drops must have found the fiends. She was smoking something with them beyond the coals, along with the midget in the Stetson and one of the Communists. I could smell the sweet smoke.

  “Let’s dance,” Eppitt said.

  Inside the house, the dancers were frenetic. Beryl was swooped up by some man, and when she landed, one of her breasts popped up enough to show a nipple. She stuffed it back in, and left with a toady little man whose Adam’s apple was more prominent than his chin. Eppitt and I tried a few steps but were unpracticed. Our hands slipped away from each other, and Eppitt was swarmed by a group of shimmy girls. When I spun and turned toward him again, his nose was crooked, his brow too dark. It wasn’t Eppitt at all.

  The stranger smiled at me. “Hello there,” he said.

  “Harriet!” Eppitt was calling me. I turned, but I couldn’t find his voice. “Harriet! Here!”

  Then I saw him behind the piano. I pushed through the dancers. When I reached him, I was breathless. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, feeling sick.

  “Upstairs!” he shouted.

  I climbed the stairs to a dark landing with four closed doors. A light shone underneath one so I knocked.

  “Taken!” a man shouted.

  I knocked on the next door. “Isley! Isley Wesler!” It was an old woman’s voice. “I hear you! I can hear everything!” I remembered my wrap. I’d last seen it on Isley’s arm as he headed upstairs to talk to his mother.

  “It isn’t Isley,” I said through the door.

  “Come in! Come in!” the old woman shouted.

  I closed my eyes. Walls spinning. I grabbed the knob, to steady myself, and then turned it and opened the door. The room was dimly lit, the bed high. There was the smell of old bed linens and something else familiar. The old woman lay in the bed. Her partially closed eyes were wet, the lids tight and small, as if it were the lids that kept her from being able to see. Her eyeballs shifted, exposing milky sky.

  “My name is Harriet Clapp.”

  “Are you after my son?”

  “No, I’m married.”

  “Keep your purse strings tight. Take care of your own. Or you’ll end up destitute. Men die, Harriet Clapp. Men die. Men leave. Men are untrustworthy. But money. Money is tried-and-true. Do you have children?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” Her eyes seemed to stare through me. The woman wasn’t blind so much as I was invisible. “Pray for daughters, Harriet Clapp. Boys are worthless. My Isley is a menace. I’d strike him if I had a good chance.” She clapped her hands violently and one of the walls fluttered. I could now see birdcages strung from the ceiling—Isley’s doves. I smelled the bird shit, and again the familiar smell: newspapers. They lined the cages.

  “I’m going to go,” I said.

  “Go, then. Leave!”

  I backed out of the room and shut the door lightly. I went to the bathroom at the end of the hall. It was large, with a claw-foot tub. On the wall opposite the mirror, an enormous sword was mounted. Beneath it hung a photograph of a soldier—undoubtedly a Wesler, with his pale porky face and skinny legs—holding the decapitated head of a native by the hair, quite proudly. Sitting heavily on the seat, I peed. While washing my hands, I saw the sword and the framed photograph behind me in the warped mirror. I was too tired to go on. I sat in the tub, just to rest, and then lay down in it.

  Eppitt found me asleep in the tub, picked me up, and carried me downstairs, where the dancers jerked wildly, like things made of wire. They bared their teeth and shook epileptically. I remembered the children at the Maryland School who were prone to fits.

  “Our angels!” I said to Eppitt. “Look!”

  “Hush now.” He took me into the open air and sat in a wooden chair with me on his lap.

  Isley sat down beside us on the ground like some fallen queen, his gown frumped around him. “Don’t you want to stay all night?” he asked.

  “It’s almost morning,” Eppitt said.

  “I want to stay and stay,” I said.

  “Cole Porter didn’t come! Neither did Luigi Pirandello. Aren’t we three characters in search of an author? And Halliburton, that fellow crossing the Alps on an elephant like Hannibal. He didn’t show. Perhaps he isn’t back yet. I heard he had troubles with customs. And I didn’t invite the Duke of Gloucester and his fiancée. There was a garden party at Bowhill, I hear. My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail!”

  “It’s a great party without them.” Eppitt sighed.

  “It’s like our wedding party,” I said. “We never had one.”

  “I don’t even know your bride.” Isley’s lids were fat, his eyes bloodshot. “Are you from Sparrows Point like Eppitt? Before the industrial wreckage and poverty, it was a beautiful marshland. Named after those swarming sparrows. Beautif
ul! Imagine air muscled by thousands of beating wings!” He gazed at Eppitt. “Just when you’ve written me off completely, I go and say something worthwhile!”

  “It was named after Thomas Sparrow,” I said. I’d read too much. “Not birds.”

  Isley ignored me. “What I wouldn’t give to be on the roof of the RCA building. They’ve got Japanese trees up there, a Tudor arch, a cobbled Spanish patio with a wellhead transported from Granada. And lemon trees, Eppitt!”

  “It was a great party, Isley! Everyone will be talking about it.”

  “Really?” Isley asked, but then he quickly pouted. “Still, what I wouldn’t give just to be in that horrible taxi dance hall on Fourteenth!”

  “How could you leave your mother?” I said to Isley, thinking of my own. I stuffed my fingers through the opening between two buttons on Eppitt’s shirt—like he was Napoleon and I was Napoleon’s hand.

  “Abercrombie & Fitch is selling riding breeches of cavalry twill!” Isley was wistful. “And all summer Tripler’s had a hat of coconut fiber being worn by people throughout the Bahamas. And I’m only ever here.”

  “You could get a real job,” Eppitt suggested.

  Isley straightened and turned his head, as if smelling something sharp. “Work doesn’t suit me. It’s why I can never quite get on with the Communists.”

  Then the girl in search of the Mistol Drops appeared, cupping something in her hands. She’d lost the ribbon wound around her hair. She opened her hands. “It’s dead!” she said, holding one of the doves.

  “No, it isn’t dead, dear!” Isley told her. “It’s sleeping.”

  “It’s dead,” she insisted.

  “If you go looking for tragedy, you’ll find it! Clapp knows that. He’s gotten married, for Christ’s sake. Beyond all reason!”

  Eppitt ignored him. He leaned toward the bird and then back toward me. “It’s dead, Isley.”

  And it was, limp and lifeless.

  “I’m sure it’s barely dead,” Isley said.

  “It’s dead dead,” the girl said.

  “Let’s have a burial! We could have a ritual ceremony. Are you a virgin?” he asked the girl.

  She looked up at him, wide-eyed.

  “Don’t worry. I don’t believe in sacrificing virgins!” Isley comforted the girl. “No, no, dear. That’s just a silly waste! You’ll find I’m quite civilized.”

  He walked off with the girl, away from the house, the fiends, out toward a distant stand of trees, his green dress billowing in a puff of wind like a rising balloon. I thought of his mother in the upstairs bedroom, shifting with the caged doves. “Men die. Men leave. Men are untrustworthy.” Doesn’t everyone leave at some point—or we’re the ones who get left behind? Isn’t that what life had taught me? “Pray for daughters.” It had never dawned on me to pray for anything, and I’d long since given up on the idea of having a child. But if I could be anyone, if this could be home, why not a family? Why not children?

  I was drunk and everything was churning. My life was different now. This was a new world, and whether it needed me or not, here I was in it. I gripped Eppitt’s shirt with my fists and held tight.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Wolpe’s Method of Systematic Desensitization

  Ruth

  I’m inside a Wawa waiting out a late-afternoon rain shower. Eleanor would call this dawdling. She’d have rushed out of the store by now, hunched over her purchases, and driven off in the driving rain. She pops into my mind constantly, forcing me to compare myself to her. It’s like living my own life and my mother’s at the same time.

  It’s been a few days since I promised Tilton I’d take her to George. She keeps asking if I’ve located him yet, whispering so that Eleanor can’t hear. I’m worried about Tilton. She’s agitated and restless but isn’t leaving the house—out of deference to Eleanor?

  Ron’s called a few times, left messages that I haven’t returned. He still wants to know if I’m coming to the wedding and the gala. He once said, “How about the rest of our lives? Are you in for that too?”

  But I need him to look up George’s whereabouts and I should touch base too. I can’t keep avoiding him.

  I call and he answers, “Yes?” He sounds harassed.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I thought it was Justin. I sent him for ice. Do hotels have ice machines anymore? Shit. He’s probably lost out there.” He shifts his tone quickly. “I’m glad you called back. It’s good to hear your voice.”

  I say that it’s good to hear his too, but I don’t know how I feel. “Do you have Internet access?”

  “You don’t?”

  “I’m living in 1974. I can’t even hope for dial-up.”

  “I’ve got the laptop running. What do you need?”

  “George Tarkington.”

  “Didn’t you promise yourself that you’d never have anything to do with him?”

  I walk past the antacids, tampon boxes. “Tilton needs this. And it will piss off my mother.”

  “Still devoted to pissing her off?”

  “It’s a lifelong vocation,” I say.

  It’s quiet as he searches, and then he says, “I thought you might lighten up on her so close to the end.”

  “Oh, right,” I say, remembering my lie. “I’m sorry about that. She isn’t dying. I told you that so you wouldn’t pop in.”

  “You lied to me?”

  “We’re all dying, technically.”

  “Damn it, Ruth! I told Susan Burchard.” Susan Burchard is a cofounder of the Harriet Wolf Society. “She’s been desperate to get in touch with you. Damn it!”

  “My mother isn’t dying. This is good news.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just…She was thinking that maybe before Eleanor dies, she’d give an indication. You know—”

  “Eleanor isn’t ever going to give an indication.” Our mother made us promise to never talk about the book’s demise, page by burnt page. Can I break a pact that was based on a possible lie? I scratch my forehead with the edge of the phone. The pact with Tilton is the one that matters. Wound string, labeled and kept all these years—it sits in the zippered pouch inside my pocketbook.

  “You know what I think?” Ron says. “Tilton knows. She’s a savant, isn’t she?”

  “Just look up George Tarkington. Oxford, Pennsylvania.” I stare at the bank of fogged freezer doors and remember this winter party scene in one of Harriet’s later books: the party has spilled onto the lawn because it’s started to snow. Daisy watches from an upstairs window that’s laced with ice. If only the Harriet Wolf Society would throw parties like the ones in my grandmother’s books. Dance halls, boating parties, drunken picnics, gins in hand, Daisy weeping in a tub, Commies in the kitchen, men climbing trees in tuxedos—that would be worthwhile.

  “Oh, look at him,” Ron says of my father. “He’s still in real estate and very toothy.”

  “Real estate agents are supposed to smile broadly. It’s a prerequisite.” I dig a pencil from the linty innards of my purse. Ron tells me the address and phone number, and I write them on the back of my Wawa receipt. “Thanks.”

  “Wait,” he says. “How are you really doing?”

  “My mother keeps intruding on my thoughts.”

  “Trapped thinking,” Ron says. “You’ve got to break it.” And he reminds me about his first wife’s struggle with OCD. “Have you ever heard her say ‘Stop,’ aloud, but kind of to herself?”

  “No,” I say.

  “She used to all the time. Sometimes people around her would just stop, thinking she was talking to them. It’s Wolpe’s theory, fruit of the 1950s. I know what you’re thinking—a real apex in psychological research, right?” This is not what I am thinking. “You say ‘Stop,’ take a deep breath, exhale, and divert your attention.”

  “Did it work?”

  “She opted for high doses of medication.”

  “I’m thinking of Hailey too.”

  “Hailey,” he says. “Well, Hailey.” Ron has
never tried to be Hailey’s father, which is good. He’s always known, too, in ways I couldn’t even fully appreciate, that my relationship with Hailey would define me as a person, for better or for worse. He’s been a parent longer and understands the depth of those waters. “Are you okay?”

  “Just kind of out of my head, but fine.”

  “I was using Wolpe’s theory a few days ago whenever I thought of you. But I don’t want to stop.”

  Teenagers have bounded in from the rain, loud and wet. “Do you think we got married casually?” I ask. “Were we cavalier?”

  “Cocky, yes.”

  “If we get divorced, will we have a casual divorce?”

  “No such thing,” he says. “I need to know what the rest of my life is going to look like. Don’t you?”

  “I need to help Tilton.”

  “Justin and I can still visit. We’d like to, but not if you’re going to fake someone else’s death.”

  “Don’t.”

  I stare down at George’s address and number. I won’t call first. I’ll pop in. Did he give us warning before he deserted our family?

  I hear Ron’s voice slightly distant from the phone. “The conquered hero returns! No ice?” I hear the thrum of Justin’s voice in the background. “No ice,” Ron says to me.

  “No ice.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The Heart of a Mongrel King

  Tilton

  I have two hearts, Wee-ette, and you know why. Both of them are beating inside of me, still. One is the heart of a mongrel king that I ate from a museum display with you right beside me, and one is my own original heart. But now that they’re both within me, there’s no difference. I know what you’re thinking: that heart I ate was a pruned and leathery thing that’s long since moved through my digestive tract. But you’re wrong. It’s always been with me. It was supposed to make my father appear. It failed. Hearts always eventually fail us. (Take my mother’s heart, for example—attacked. And yours, which stopped.) I wish I had more hearts—like one for my mother; one for my father; one heart just for you, Wee-ette; and another for Ruthie. And one for Benny Elderman? Maybe. And one for Hailey, even though I’ve never met her. My two hearts must do a lot of work: missing my father; missing you, Wee-ette. One wants to be with Ruthie out in the world and one wants to stay here and take care of my mother.