Faces turned toward her, all angry eyes and theatrically clamped lips. Not sharks, more like clams, of the very mad kind. They were demonstrating. Oh Christ, she thought. He’d taunted them. That would be Nick, yelling something to identify himself as anti–revolution rocker. And in a Gandhiesque method they’d learned in some peacekeeper training session, these kids were silently making a pearl of the grain of sand. Her car.
From deep inside the crowd she could hear a thread of belligerence. “… and I tell you what, the dream is going to wake up. I know so many people in the energy business, great people, they want to do things for this country but you know what? They can’t. People! We need leaders!” Tinny applause roared up. The radio.
“Oh shit,” Willa said aloud. He had it cranked up to max, finally getting the fix he’d been craving all day. She reached in her purse for keys but of course she’d left the car unlocked, engine running, windows down.
“… and I’m going to tell you something, we’re going to make this dream wake up for us, not the criminals and illegals that are taking over America right now …”
Willa started pushing herself between uncooperative shoulders. “I’m sorry, this isn’t … look, I can’t stand that guy,” she tried explaining to the flinty-faced kids, who weren’t yielding. Reaching and groping between bodies made her queasy, but with some effort she found the door handle. Flung it open, burrowed her way into the car, and slammed herself in.
Immediately the seat belt warning started to ding. Nick sat with eyes closed in a coma of satisfaction. The monstrous man wouldn’t even turn and look at her, while his hero railed on. “You know something? We don’t want them. Disgusting! We’re not going to take the crap of the world anymore, we are getting this country back!”
Willa buckled up before the ding-ding-ding dispersed the last of her marbles. Her hands shook so hard it took a few tries to jab the right knob and turn off the radio.
“Jesus Christ, Nick. Holy shit!” She punched the toggle that rolled up all the windows, and without really thinking about it, the one that locked all the doors. “Jesus,” she said again. “What the hell were you thinking? What did you say to those kids?”
His eyes opened but he said nothing, looking straight ahead.
“Great. I can’t even leave you for ten goddamned minutes without a babysitter?”
He still didn’t face her, but finally spoke. “Nothing. Swear to God, I said nothing. They just came running over here.”
She divined his misery, suddenly. Terror, regret, embarrassment: emotions that visited Nick so rarely she hardly recognized them, but his watery eyes would not meet hers and his hands clung together childishly in his lap. He would have had no idea his radio had been audible to the other end of the parking lot. Maybe he’d been too stubborn to turn it off, but more likely he never realized it was the problem. Or the weird demonstration had paralyzed him with fear. Or he just couldn’t find the right button.
The offensive seemed to be regrouping but hadn’t reached a new consensus. Quite a few bodies still jammed against the windshield, presenting as crumpled fabric, flattened flesh, a notable navel piercing, and many disembodied hands. A couple of grotesquely squashed faces. This revolution meant business.
Willa stared out through her glass bubble, dumb as a goldfish. Here was her inheritance, the job of protecting this poor old man, with exhausting labors and every dime her family could scrape together. She was trapped with her strange companion.
6
Strange Companions
Polly was disappointed in the president. “He looked so humble.” She chewed as she spoke. The long wait for supper had brought her near to self-declared extinction.
“Humility is a virtue, dear.”
“Not in a president, Mother. He looked as if he’d rather be riding his horse or reading a book than being a leader of men. And his eyes didn’t match.”
“Cut your chop from the bone with the knife, do not gnaw it,” Aurelia directed. “You make the impression of being a hungry animal.”
“I am a hungry animal,” Polly said, sawing away with her knife, and Thatcher thought: Dear girl, she is. Of the same world, as Mrs. Treat put it. With the dogs, if not yet the spiders.
Polly’s forecast for today had been partly correct: President Grant attended the school dedication and did shake Thatcher’s hand, but in a hallway after the ceremony, witnessed only by Professor Cutler and a few fellow teachers. The public events barely outlasted the Reverend Pittinger’s opening prayer, in which he blessed all things in Vineland, then on the earth, and was moving to the outer planets when a rain shower blew out of the elms and scattered the attendees from the lawn. The interruption was gratefully received. Afterward Thatcher was allowed to show the president his classroom (an opened door, a reflective nod) but to Polly’s distress, finished the day with his veil of mystery intact.
“What on earth do you mean, his eyes didn’t match?” asked Rose, gazing at the candle flames in their silver sconce while idly touching her throat. Her fingertips drew Thatcher’s eyes to her collarbone. A wide ribbon outlined the low, square cut of her bodice and the rise of her breasts, and if men were not meant to stare at such, he wondered why women trimmed themselves out like advertising circulars.
“One of his eyes drooped. You saw, didn’t you, Thatcher? He looked so sad.”
Rose seemed suddenly startled into the present. “As you would, if you’d seen as many men dead under your command.” She looked to Thatcher for agreement.
He hated speaking of the war. He’d managed to slip his father’s noose and move with a regiment into Boston as a runner first, then as a medical assistant. The doctor who taught him to stanch wounds and bandage amputations took Thatcher into his home, put him to work, and eventually sponsored his education. War had wrecked the Union but worked the opposite for Thatcher, improving his life immeasurably. Leaving him with a moral debt no man could pay.
“I still think Professor Hook-Hand should have let Thatcher sit on the stage with him and Captain Landis. Even if no one but old Pittinger was allowed to speak.”
Rose set down her fork. “Polly. A lady does not form opinions on the deficiencies of her elders. Especially not in the case of a missing hand.”
A short laugh escaped Thatcher, pulling all the blue eyes his way. “I’m sorry. You’ve made him sound like a sensation novel.”
“The case of the missing hand!” Polly cried.
“I’m sure I don’t understand what you mean,” said Aurelia.
“He means detective stories!” Polly clarified, unfortunately.
“Don’t worry, Mother. Polly is not reading Wilkie Collins or Edgar Poe,” Rose promised, widening her eyes at Thatcher. Mr. Collins and Mr. Poe had been passing by stealth all summer between Polly’s bedside and her sister’s, concealed in stacks of folded petticoats with the maid Gracie as accomplice and fellow reader. One of the two scoundrels was lodged in the parlor at this moment, Thatcher happened to know, on the settee, hidden under a wad of Polly’s haphazard embroidery.
Thatcher relished his wife’s small seditions, trusting that any distance from her mother would bring Rose closer to him by degrees. He assumed it was normal in a new marriage to feel one has joined forces with a stranger. Especially one so young. At barely past twenty, Rose was ten years his junior, though he’d watched her claim a poise beyond her years. Tonight he marveled at the bravery of her calm disposition. For weeks there had been a baby, an animate secret stirring between her divine flesh and his own, and then this morning abruptly, no baby. With a few tears hastily dismissed, she’d gathered up the bedclothes and declared this to be Thatcher’s day. Exquisitely encased in her smart red day dress, Rose took his arm and went to the dedication, moving him to prideful anguish when she lowered her lashes and curtsied to the president. No mere teacher deserved this grace at his side.
Autumn darkness had already blinded the dining room windows, an effect that dispirited him, no matter how many autumns he lived or how
predictably the light receded. Surely this year he might leave his birthright of sadness behind. He was a man, a husband and head of a household if not yet a father, comfortably marooned with his own family in the candelabra’s glow. Smooth planes of female features reflected the centered light, each face an orbiting moon. The cook had served the chops before the soup at Thatcher’s request, astonishing the women as if this were a clever invention and not simple good sense, with the soup not yet made when they arrived home, and Polly loudly perishing.
And now here came Mrs. Brindle, intent as a midwife at delivery, cradling the soup terrine that she set down at Thatcher’s right hand. He ladled the soup into four bowls while the cook scurried to whisk away the chop plates. Thatcher had no image of the mother who’d died after his birth, and now his attempts to conjure her could invoke only Mrs. Brindle, a woman in motion. She circled the table stacking plates with their scattered bones and gristle, the effort of service coloring her stout cheeks. Her apron ruffle dusted the floor around her brogues.
“How did he lose it?” Polly pressed. “Thatcher! The professor’s hand.”
“We have never discussed that in a school meeting.” Today for the ceremony Cutler had worn a hand carved of wood, realistically painted down to the nails, less functional but more decorous than the hook. Thatcher could not help wondering where such things were made and procured. Thanks to a war waged largely by gangrene, the need had burgeoned. “I believe it was a shooting accident when he lived in the West.”
“People are always shooting one another out in the West. It isn’t fair.”
He tasted the soup, leek and potato, very good. “That we don’t have our share of shootings in Vineland?”
“Well, I don’t suppose we need them really. But it would be interesting.”
“I don’t think Professor Cutler was injured in a duel. I’ve heard it was a hunting accident, probably self-inflicted.” Thatcher envisioned himself and his employer back-to-back with pistols on Landis Avenue, pacing off: may the best man win. He saw no other way to gain control of his curriculum and teach truth instead of mythology. The impending presidential visit had only given the principal further excuse for his tyrannies.
“Do you think our Mr. Nailbourne has a gun, now he’s living in the West?”
“Mr. Nailbourne is not ours,” Rose said. “The house is ours. He only used it.”
“Without Scylla and Charybdis to guard him, he might need one,” Thatcher said.
“I have decided it speaks well of the man,” Aurelia declared, “that he gave them Biblical names. If only the beasts could absorb the lesson of it.”
Thatcher and Rose exchanged another glance, but said nothing. Aurelia might take to bed if she knew her daughters had strayed past Edgar Allan Poe into the swamps of the pagan Homer. Or that Polly had borrowed The Odyssey from her brother-in-law.
“Only I have tried to find the reference and cannot. Do you recall the chapter and verse, Rose? Of the parable of Scylla and Charybdis?”
“I believe it’s one of the Psalms, Mother,” Rose said, her spoon tracking a faultless path from china bowl to rosebud lips. Thatcher felt unnerved watching his wife lie so easily. Even prettily.
“I saw Mrs. Tillotson today at the dedication,” Polly said. “In a regular old dress. I thought I might get to see one of the bloomer costumes she and Mrs. Merton Stevens wore at the Dress Reform Convention.”
“Polly dear, you are slurping. Our soup spoons sail away from us like ships going out to sea.”
Thatcher knew he bore deficits from a childhood without mothering, but he felt Rose and Polly suffered from too much of it. Aurelia was incapable of understatement in any endeavor: her cap had lace ornaments dangling from its lace. The floral fabric of her dress could have been a seed advertisement: Every one shall germinate!
“How can you possibly know about that, Polly?” Rose asked.
“About what?” Aurelia asked.
“It’s nothing important, Mother. Women wearing trousers,” Rose said.
“It is important! The Dress Reform Convention had a whole column in the Weekly. ‘Mrs. Tillotson in her doeskin pants led the grand march to perdition!’” Polly recited triumphantly. “I’m allowed to read Captain Landis’s newspaper, Rose. Aren’t I, Mother? You can’t say I’m not. He is king of us all and Mother writes him letters.”
“Not a king,” Rose said.
“But Captain Landis did look handsome today, did he not? In his velvet waistcoat?”
“Mother, behave, you’re besotted,” Rose scolded. “He has a wife, you know.”
Aurelia’s hand rested on her crinkled throat. “The poor thing.”
Thatcher gathered from the gesture that Mrs. Landis was ill. Though the poor thing might have caught her husband with the cook, for all he knew. This captain had grasping hands: not only was he Vineland’s mayor and sole land agent but also its postmaster, acting police chief, hotelier, owner of many businesses, and autocratic editor of the Weekly. His governance had a habit of elevating his own enterprises and ruining competitors.
“May-I-read-the-Week-ly-Mo-ther!” Polly demanded again, giving each syllable equal weight as if banging on a door.
“Only the social and advertising pages. The agricultural reports if you must, but not the accidents and crimes. Those are damaging for a child of your age.”
“And not the other one at all,” Rose said. “Not The Independent. That man is very unfair to Captain Landis.”
Aurelia looked around herself, momentarily overcome by revelation. “Vineland does not need a second newspaper! Can you see any reason for it, Thatcher? It causes confusion about everything, and encourages shadows of doubt.”
“Some would consider that a reason,” Thatcher said.
“But he is deliberately breaking the peace! And he is a foreigner.”
“Is there no such thing as a peace that deserves to be broken?”
Soup spoons clicked quietly against bone china. From whom he expected an answer to his question, Thatcher wondered. The overfed dogs asleep on his shoes? He’d met the editor of the rival newspaper at a school meeting. Carruth was his name. He’d come not as a journalist but a citizen, he said, to speak up for Italian and freedmen’s children in his neighborhood who could not attend school because of long work days. Their families had been lured to Vineland by promises from Landis—fields of milk and honey, land for almost nothing—and found themselves indentured to the man. Professor Cutler was irate at the charge. Landis had hired him to revolutionize Vineland’s schools in the freethinking mold and this he had done, he said, by opening the doors to all races. Carruth shot back: There are many ways to close a door.
Thatcher was impressed enough to pick up Carruth’s newspaper and get his eyes opened. The Independent exposed the extent of Landis’s control, and its insidious underbelly. That despite his temperance laws, for example, Landis kept a private bar in his hotel because money could be made and more land sold by getting visitors inebriated.
“Did you try the Turkish Balm on your hair, dear?” Aurelia asked Rose.
“I did, some days ago. If you need to ask, it may not have done much good. It smelt terribly of tar but the package said it contains nothing injurious. Oh, and I spoke with the dressmaker yesterday. Polly, you’re to go in for a fitting this week after school. You’ll have two new day dresses.”
“I don’t need new day dresses,” Polly said. “The old ones are working all right.”
“There’s the girl,” Thatcher said.
“Thatcher, don’t be a drudge. You will be earning three hundred dollars a year.”
“Divided by more than three hundred days, it isn’t a lot of dresses. Let alone beef and molasses.”
“But you see, Thatcher,” Aurelia spoke up, “at the end of one year there will be another, and so another three hundred dollars!” His mother-in-law laid down her spoon, exhausted from her foray into mathematics.
Let us pray, he added silently. The principal contracted his te
achers for only one school year at a time. It was one of his so-called innovations, to make his staff stay or leave depending on how they took to his Plan of Modern Education. Thatcher so far wasn’t taking. Cutler gave tedious lectures about shaping young minds, but would never grant Thatcher leave to take his subjects out of the classroom for a look at the living world. The request so provoked his employer that Thatcher would have dropped it, but he found himself haunted by Mrs. Treat’s question: If trained to nature from an early age, could a mind be freed from its vendetta against the world’s creatures? Cutler viewed field study as truant and unscholarly. Had ridiculed Thatcher’s proposal in front of other teachers.
“I’ve been waiting for Mother to bring this up,” Rose said suddenly, “but she hasn’t. With the strain of moving we have overlooked Polly’s coming of age.” She turned to her mother significantly.
Aurelia looked troubled. “Did we? How do you mean?”
“I mean it is past time for Polly to think about corsets and bustles. I spoke of it with the dressmaker.”
Thatcher met Polly’s eyes, seeing a drowning look there, knowing he could not save her. The women of his family would become one with the earth’s creatures only by pressing the bones of whales against their rib cages until breathless.
“It’s an exciting time, dear,” Rose said briskly. “You mustn’t dread it. You will enjoy society. We aren’t speaking of young men yet, only you have to become known. I’ll take you with me to lectures and meetings.”
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