by Lori Baker
She doesn’t understand why they’ve left her alone. They’ve left her, all of them. Left her with her secret, trying, all alone, to decide what to do.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to like my father. He is, as William Cloverdale would have it, foreign to me. Unaccountable. Lost in more ways than one. While Clotilde, who will run away, washing her hands of me completely, feels close.
Despite everything, we have a lot in common, she and I. Not that I like to admit it.
Like me, for instance, she, too, has a map of the place where her father disappeared. She found it among the odds and ends of her “inheritance,” in a box also containing the preserved head of a lowland gorilla and a specimen tray labeled “miscellaneous pupae.” The map itself was carelessly folded and stuck in between the lid of the tray and the pupae themselves, which, true to their label, were rolled about loose, slightly seedy, peeling, like the fossilized stubs of partially smoked cigars. The map was Felix Girard’s own map, bearing the stains of Bury Place and home—it even smelled like home, when she first unfolded it, a rich mélange of preserving fluid, gazpacho, Beaujolais, and chocolate. It is marked by Felix Girard’s soup, by his tea, by his pencil. There, on the map with which he planned his trip, is Punta Yalkubul, a green, ape’s-brow bulge at the northernmost prominence of the Yucatán. And there, to the north, in the blue void of the Gulf of Mexico, marked in pencil in her Papa’s beloved hand: Isla Desterrada.
• • •
My mother discovered this map by accident. She was not, initially, interested in the map at all, but rather exclusively in the pupae. She had even some notion that she would try to identify and label the pupae, as a completion of and testament to the work of her dear Papa. She thought she would feel close to him that way. The map, at first, she set aside and ignored. She surrounded herself instead with books belonging to her Papa, containing pictures of pupae, and tried her hand at identification. The pupae, though, proved unpromising. She realized she did not even know where they were from. Were they European pupae? North American? South American? Central Asian? From New Guinea? Malaya? Mongolia? Toronto? Clotilde did not know, could not begin to know. Instead of making her feel closer to her Papa, the pupae made her feel farther away. There was nothing, in them, of her Papa. Clearly he had found them uninteresting himself, or else he would have labeled them. He did label very many things, but not these. Already distracted, she could not concentrate. Then one afternoon, she opened the map. She opened it listlessly, without any conviction. That is when she noticed it—written in, in her father’s hand.
Isla Desterrada. 22′49″ N, 89′70″ W.
She noticed, and then she quietly put the map away. She put it away without thinking. She also immediately lost what little interest remained for her in the pupae as well. She thought she would never look at them again, and the map, if she thought of it at all, was included in that.
It would take her a while to digest the implications. She even, for a time, forgot about the map, as if she had never seen it. She put it and the pupae back in the box with the gorilla’s head and took the whole thing out, into the shed, and left it in my father’s studio. Dropped it on the floor and walked away.
Then one day she suddenly thought:
He knew.
A huge realization.
And then:
He planned it.
An even huger.
And worse yet:
He knew, and he left me alone regardless.
No, that can’t be right. It’s impossible.
• • •
She went back out to the shed, into the box with the pupae and the gorilla’s head, and retrieved the map, and looked at it again. Saw that it was, indeed, as she thought.
• • •
No wonder my mother is preoccupied during the long nights when my father and Thomas Argument, too, leave her alone.
There is, of course, a positive side to her discovery.
My Papa is alive!
That is what she begins to think, at first hesitantly, then with greater and greater conviction. Over time, as her discovery chafes at her—as she grows pale, and distant, and lies awake at night, watching the reflections of the river crawling up the wall—it becomes all she thinks. She succeeds, almost, in forgetting the other implications.
My Papa left me. He did not care.
Now, when she is alone, she brings out the map, and studies it, and runs her fingers over the pencil marks. If she shuts her eyes she can feel them. That is how hard her Papa bore down, when he marked Isla Desterrada on his map.
Even then, I think, she was already packing her suitcase. Mentally, at least.
Emotionally speaking, she had packed it already.
How many times, growing up, was she filled with despair at the sight of her Papa caressing a map? Now she does exactly as he did. Except no one sees her. There is no one to despair. There is no one to beg her to stay. No one will want to come with her. She is alone. That is what she thinks.
There is a freedom involved in no one caring. Also, in not caring oneself. There is a detachment in it, a knot unraveled, a detail set free from context. That is what my mother has learned. Not caring makes the limbs lighter. She caresses the map without worries. I doubt she thinks twice about Leopold. Thomas Argument, with all his toys and gifts, is not even on her horizon. It is her Papa that she thinks of.
He is alive! I must find him!
• • •
It is interesting, is it not, how we always think most about the one who has gone away and left us? And least about the one who has remained behind?
• • •
She imagines herself on the water, navigating by the stars.
• • •
She has forgotten other aspects of the journey. Such as the heat. The stink. The poisonous vapors. And the getting lost.
(But that, after all, was just part of the plan—Felix Girard’s plan.)
• • •
Mary! Go out to the shed and fetch me my bags! The small one, with the buckle! And the big one, with the strap! Go on! Why are you lolling, you lazy creature! I’ve asked you to fetch me my bags—and my trunk—bring my trunk too, while you’re at it, you lazy, creeping, good-for-nothing—!
The girl-of-all-work, cap askew, grumbling, makes her way reluctantly out into the yard and then more reluctantly still into the shed, where my mother’s salt-stained luggage resides among the swaying disease of stacked crates shipped from London and other “parts (and ports) unknown.” Mary loathes the collected goods and chattels of Felix Girard, Gives me the willies it does, that stuff, all kind of dead things rotting, a great rotting dead bird I found in one o’ ’em boxes once, and a seal’s flipper in another—that’s right—just the flipper—it had fingernails an’ all just like we do—appallin’ I tell you!—and I thought, well, what’s next—the hind end of a giraffe?—a camel’s pizzle?! And pah! What a stink! But she goes into the shed; what choice has she got? If she needs her job (and she does), she must go. And there she will find, in addition to my mother’s small bag with the buckle, large bag with the strap, and water-warped old trunk, the grinning stone head of a Persian div—Staring straight at me it was, right out of the box, sticking out its tongue, very familiar and all, as if it knew me!
Maybe it does know you, Mary, her sister Susan will say; Yeah, and maybe I ought to quit that job, Mary will say, and that house full of evil things; and someday she will; but not today. Instead, with much grunting and groaning and panting, she will drag the trunk and the two bags upstairs, while my mother sits on the sofa, dreaming over her Papa’s map: Idling her day away as usual, and me like a dog, around and around and up and down them stairs with milady’s boxes and bundles and bags …
All right, you silly girl, you can leave them.
The bags drop at the center of the parlor rug.
Does madam wish to pack her things?
No—sharply this time—I said to leave them.
The girl, grumbling under her breath a
bout the obscenely out-thrust tongue of the div—evil things in this house, evil things!—disappears back down the corkscrew stairs into the kitchen.
Of course my mother will not pack directly. She isn’t ready yet. There is much that she will need—so much that she can hardly think of it all. Clothes. Shoes. Maps. A ship. Advisers. Money.
A very great deal of money.
She contemplates her suitcases.
It will take time. For the moment, it is just a dream. She has accomplished the easiest part of the dream, summoning the bags, then sliding them underneath the bed, where my father will not see them. There they will wait, like a promise. Sometimes a promise can be enough. My mother is aware of those bags, hyper-aware. There is not a moment that she spends on or in or around the bed that she is not conscious of the bags beneath it, waiting, patiently, until she is ready. Sometimes she wants to laugh, thinking about them; but she does not laugh.
Instead she grows very silent. She goes to Lars Kiersta’s in Flowergate and has a dress made. It is the first of what she will need. My father curses when he receives the bill, thinking the worst. So little imagination! Because of my father’s negative response, my mother has the next bill sent to Thomas Argument. He will pay for the next dress—With pleasure. And for the boots as well. His Vesuvius is making him rich. He can buy enough dresses to pack my mother’s entire trunk. He will also buy, before my mother is done, corsets, camisoles, petticoats, cotton hose, and a dozen nice cambric handkerchiefs, all of which my mother will fold carefully, reverently even, into her suitcases. Thomas Argument has no idea why Clotilde wants so many clothes; he has less imagination even than my father. Women want new clothes, therefore she shall have them. It may occur to him, once or twice, to wonder why he never sees her wearing what he has bought; he supposes he has forgotten which ones he paid for, and which her dear Papa bought her in Paris, back before the disappearance (he assumes Leopold hasn’t bought her any, which is very nearly true); but he never goes so far as to imagine those suitcases hidden beneath the bed.
Nor could he imagine that she has obtained the schedule for the steam packet Emerald Isle (departing the pier, Wednesdays to London, Mondays to Stockton; John Barritt, agent), which she has also folded up, and keeps among her underthings, along with her Papa’s map, in her trunk.
• • •
She is such a delicate creature. Incapable of planning.
• • •
It is true she hasn’t purchased her ticket yet.
She is waiting.
She already has a few coins tied up in one of those cambric handkerchiefs, and each week she will stealthily extract a single coin more from my father’s pay packet and hide it within that tight cambric knot.
So she is a thief, too, in her own way, and with her own justification.
My Papa is alive!
But he must be in trouble, or else he would return to me. I have to find him. I have to help my dear beloved Papa.
• • •
It is not very likely that my mother will succeed. She knows, herself, how unlikely it is. Yet she manages to continue the dream, hiding it in a particular space in her mind, where it is safe. In this space, the dream can be real to her, and also not real, and both at the same time. She does not, must not, look too closely. It is in the background, in the periphery. She sees it out the corners of her eyes. It is a bright flash of color, a flash like the flash of a wing.
Look directly and it is gone.
She needs the dream very much. Therefore she slips, each week, another coin into the cambric handkerchief, and continues forward, straight ahead, looking neither left nor right.
• • •
It would be so easy for my father to stop her.
• • •
It will take her a long time to save that money. And in the meantime, there are obstacles that she will face. She will be slowed immeasurably by one inconvenience, then another. There will be many opportunities for Leopold to intervene. But he will not intervene.
The trouble is that he has no imagination.
He becomes aware, for example, that money is missing. It takes time, but he notices a stricture in the domestic budget, greater than that caused by his own waste of material and time at William Cloverdale’s glasshouse. He notices, and quickly forms certain assumptions about what it is that Clotilde is doing with the money. Not long afterward he finds, because he looks for them, already assuming their existence, the suitcases underneath the bed, and this discovery bolsters his confidence in the assumptions he has already made.
• • •
He is too much of a gentleman to look inside the suitcases. He recoils from this—out of respect? Discretion? Fear? So he does not find the map on which Felix Girard has marked Isla Desterrada: 22′49″ N, 89′70″ W. Nor does he find the schedule for the steamer Emerald Isle. Left to his own devices, he cannot imagine these things. He imagines only the usual things, all of them distasteful, many of them involving his rival, Thomas Argument.
• • •
Missing money. Suitcases brought out of storage. And there are other things, other signs. For a period my mother’s spirits seem to rise. She sends Mary out to the shed to search for her old sheet music, and when, despite the menacing div, it has been found, she sits, for the first time in a very long time, at her little spinet. It is hopelessly warped now and out of tune, this dear instrument bought for her by her Papa; but Clotilde persists in playing, and she does not complain of its poor sound. She plays as if oblivious, simply for the pleasure of touching the instrument that she has not touched in so many months.
My father thinks (because he cannot imagine the dream that has lifted her spirits, the fragile dream that balances, precariously, in a place inside her that is hidden from him), She is leaving me for Thomas Argument. Therefore she is happy.
So little imagination! And so wrongsighted.
Even Thomas Argument knows better than to imagine this. Especially Thomas Argument. He is busy with his magic lantern—too dazzled by his own special effects to be planning any radical moves with my mother. Though he still comes to visit at the Birdcage, of course; and he still brings gifts—except now, he brings corsets instead of music boxes.
• • •
My poor mother. I feel sorry for her sometimes. So much looked at, gazed upon, devoured, even, by them both, yet so little seen. Transformed by them, always, into something other than herself. Her happiness, such as it is, so fragile. She is about to face the first, and greatest, obstacle to her dream.
• • •
Mary! she cries, you’re hurting me! Don’t tie my corset so tight, you terrible creature!
La! Blame me? It’s not my fault, is it, that madam’s got so fat—?
Shut up, you horrible, lazy, impudent girl! Leave it! Get away!
• • •
This is the beginning: my mother clinging to the bedpost, her gold curls loose and in disarray around her shoulders, Mary tugging bravely at the corset laces. She can tug no further. La! It’s not my fault, is it, that madam’s got so fat?
How unhappy it makes my mother, this remark of Mary’s. She frowns, not with anger, but with a misery so profound that it frightens the servant, who runs quickly away.
• • •
Mary, help me move the mirror out of the closet.
It is the afternoon of the same day. My father, as usual, is not home.
Really, madam? Incredulously. Mr. Argument’s big mirror? Are you certain?
• • •
It is the one gift of Thomas Argument’s that my mother has banished: a large mirror in a gilt rococo frame on a cherrywood stand—the only full-length mirror she has ever owned.
Yes, you little fool, of course I’m certain. Why would I say I wanted it if I didn’t?
Of course, madam. I’m sorry, madam.
It takes both of them, huffing and puffing mightily, to dislodge the mirror from the back of the closet where, together, they’d jammed it a year ago, wedging
it between a stuffed anteater with great hooked foreclaws posed on a tree stump, and a lacquered incidental table inset with ebony, belonging to Marie-Louise Girard. Back then, a year ago, my mother couldn’t bear the sight of the mirror; now she regards it coolly, evenly, like an enemy she means to face down.
It’s very dusty, madam.
That’s all right. Now get out.
Yes, madam.
The door shuts behind Mary’s bustling and bowing skirts; my mother, left alone, stands quite still, at an oblique angle to the mirror, its unruffled silver depths outside her line of vision, which rests, instead, on the bed with its white, nubbled bedspread. Beneath the bed, like stones beneath the sea, lie her trunk and her travel cases, but she can see these no more than she can see her own reflection.
She waits a moment, during which the only sounds are the chiming of the clock, downstairs in the parlor, and, farther away, muffled, here, on the third floor, the hollow, echoing boom of the river, whose vibration carries up through the bones of the house into the soles of my mother’s feet.
Quickly, then, she begins to undress, removing, first, the petite leather boots bought for her by her Papa in Paris; then, unpinning it from the bodice, the navy blue skirt, which falls around her feet; then the bodice itself, low necked, with tight, short sleeves, is unhooked and cast aside; then the petticoats—there are four—the long one with the flounce—the short white one—the petticoat bodice, with its buttons, embroideries and frills—then the ornamental petticoat, expensively laced; then she rolls her black stockings down and off, kicking them aside; then the white cotton camisole, tightly fitted at the waist; then the corset, which she unhooks from the front before reaching around behind to loosen the laces; and then at last, the heavy white chemise, which she slips up and off over her head, her arms tangling in it for a moment before, bending forward sharply at the waist in a gesture of impatience, she casts it, too, onto the floor.