Ophelia's Fan

by Christine Balint

  Mr. Elliston was uncommonly kind to me that evening. He bowed and kissed my hand, leading me to the seat in the greenroom known as Garrick’s Chair for the great actor who had once worked there. He brought water and enquired after my health. He offered smelling salts which he said would help clear my head. I must confess I could smell nothing at all, and my voice sounded as deep and rasping as Mrs. Brunton’s.

  “You have quite a remarkable resonance this evening, Miss Smithson,” Mr. Elliston said. “I believe you will be quite audible.” This, from Mr. Elliston, was high praise indeed, and I was pleased something good had come of my fever.

  Either the smelling salts or the fever itself gave me great ease of mind so that I did not mind adjusting my gown or my hair in front of the other actors. Behind my own reflection I saw their eyes wide with admiration. I turned one way and then the other to examine the folds at the back, I whisked some unrequired eyebrows from my forehead, I adjusted a curl on each side of my temples with an index finger. The gown rustled as I walked, it flowed behind me like a bridal train. In the glass I noted my upright carriage and my straight step.

  As I entered the stage, I heard cheering and plaudits. On that night it did not matter what I did, the audience was mine. The crowd cried when I mimed sadness, they laughed when I lifted my arms with joy. In the greenroom, Mr. Elliston was in a great state of excitement. He begged me to speak to the audience at the close of the evening. I no longer remember what I said, but I was showered in rose petals like a bride.

  AFTER MY BENEFIT concert in Birmingham, Mr. Elliston gave me a week to recover my strength. I slept almost all the time, waking only to eat the cook’s chicken broth. And while I slept, it was as though I still performed on the stage. I could smell the oil from the lamps and hear its faint sizzling sound. I could see faces in the audience smiling, throwing roses, weeping. I could feel the boards under my feet, and I fancy my hands made gestures while I slept.

  On the final morning before my return to the stage, I was woken by sunlight warming my chin. I smelled chicken broth and saw a white teapot and a letter on the table. I sat and looked around the room. Someone had put my clothes away, and my scripts were in a neat pile. Several vases of fresh flowers decorated the room. I drew the curtains completely and looked down into Birmingham. I felt strong once more. That morning the maid found me sitting at the table reading the letter. I had bathed and dressed and tied my hair into a bun.

  The letter was from London, and it informed me that, on the commendation of a Mr. Henry Johnston from the Scottish Roscius, I had been accepted into the company of Drury Lane commencing the following season, January 1818. I told myself that from heaven my father had seen me perform in Birmingham and he was pleased with what he saw. I would return to Dublin to tell my mother the news.

  Ennis: 1806

  HARRIET’S EYELIDS, in the morning, were glued down. She wondered if this was what it meant to be dead. She straightened out her back and lay flat. Her eyelids were smooth as marble, she knew that. She wondered whether perhaps someone had come during the night and transformed her into a statue. She would be a beautiful statue. Harriet imagined being laid stiffly on top of a carriage, tied down with rope, and carried all the way to Paris. She hoped someone would open her eyes when she arrived.

  “Harriet?” Bridie’s voice shrieked. “Harriet, child, why are you lying there like a dishrag?” Deflated, Harriet curled into a shape as close to that of a cat as she could manage and opened her mouth. The same thing that had glued her eyelids had also glued something in her throat. Harriet could not speak. An itch began in her toes and worked its way through her belly and then into her lungs. Her whole body began to shake with the cough that expelled a large green lump onto her pillow. The force of the cough shook the walls and unstuck her eyelids. Her large gray eyes began to drip something sticky.

  Bridie’s hand was cold lead on her forehead. Even for the few seconds she held it there, it weighed Harriet down so that she longed to push the woman away. But her body was too limp to move. Although Bridie did not sing loudly, Harriet could make out the words.

  How dear to me the hour when daylight dies,

  And sunbeams melt along the silent sea,

  For then sweet dreams of other days arise,

  And memory breathes her vesper sigh to thee.

  Harriet imagined a Bridie who was not Bridie the maid. The Bridie Harriet saw with her eyes closed had a plump face above a heavy satin gown with a ruby teardrop like blood on a golden chain around her neck. Her lips were not tight and stern. The Bridie that Harriet saw with her eyelids glued down was pale and stared wistfully out of large windows.

  “Who do you love, Bridie?” Harriet meant to ask. But the words got lost somewhere in the quietness of her room.

  Harriet had heard about love. It was one of the things Molly whispered about. Before Molly’s father died, whenever Molly was feeling bold she used to stare Harriet in the eye and say, “I love my mother and my father and Jacob who helps father with the cows.”

  Molly said that because she loved Jacob, and because her mother and her father also loved Jacob, one day she and Jacob would get married. This meant that everyone from the town would come and have a feast at their house and play music. Harriet could be one of her bridesmaids, and this meant that Harriet would also be allowed to wear a pretty dress. Afterward, Molly would have to leave her mother and father to live with Jacob.

  “Who are you going to marry, Harriet?”

  “No one.”

  “But you have to marry someone.”

  “Why?”

  “You can’t live by yourself.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll have no one to look after.” Harriet thought of Bridie clearing away Father Barrett’s dirty dishes splattered with gravy and cough. She remembered Bridie finding Father Barrett’s jacket in the library on cold mornings and wiping his shoes before he came in the front door. She recalled Bridie pulling silver coiled hairs out of the brush in Father Barrett’s room when she thought Harriet was not there, and muttering to herself about how she ought to give the hair back to cover Father Barrett’s balding head.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Harriet said.

  But Harriet was fascinated by the idea of love. She and Molly crept around the cowshed trying to spot Jacob. The first time they passed him, he lifted his cap, nodded gruffly, and said, “Hello, Miss Molly.” Molly beamed and Harriet felt a greater understanding. It was the way he had savored her name in his mouth, his politeness, the angle of the cap in his right hand, that showed how much he loved Molly. But as Harriet and Molly walked past the cowshed again, arms hooked together, they spotted Jacob coming out the other side and he said nothing. Molly did not want to talk about love anymore so they went to climb the apple tree.

  Bridie scrubbed at Harriet’s face with a rough cloth. She picked crumbly dry grains from around Harriet’s eyes with jagged fingernails that caught in her skin. Harriet wondered whether she was dead after all and Bridie was preparing her to be a beautiful corpse. Once Bridie had finished with her face, Harriet let her eyelids droop again and felt warm stickiness from somewhere inside her head ooze outward. Bridie unbuttoned the nightdress and rubbed a coarse sponge over Harriet’s body, pummeling the skin until she ached all over. After she had been still for a few minutes, her skin tingled and then burned. Harriet thought she mustn’t be dead after all.

  During the night Harriet met the ghost of Aunt Ellen who snarled with black teeth and clutched her wrists until they ached. “Come with me, child, and we shall steal!” Harriet knew that she had to follow. They wound their way through the cellars of Ennis. “A penny for the child!” Aunt Ellen shouted to strangers. When Harriet wept from loneliness, people showered her with coins.

  “It’s bed for you, from now on, Miss Harriet,” Bridie told her, tugging at the sheets that tied Harriet so tightly into bed that she could not imagine ever moving again.

  “No more climbing into cold dark places with Miss Molly
.”

  Harriet could hear logs being dragged from the corridor and arranged in the fireplace. She smelled hot smoke and heard crackling. The tiny woodsprites were being burned from the wood, she could tell from the popping sounds. While her eyes were glued down, it was difficult to know where the fire was coming from. There was heat drying out her skin and making her cough, drying her out from the inside. Harriet could only hope that someone was containing the fire to make sure it did not creep out from the fireplace and climb her bedclothes.

  Harriet drifted in the colors inside her head. She knew time passed from the sound of logs being thrown into the fireplace. Sometimes there was whispering. Sometimes there were cold hands on her forehead making her shiver and try to wriggle deeper under the bedclothes. Only Harriet was not strong enough to move under Bridie’s bed-linen knot. The most frightening thing was the cold water. It was sponged into her hair, and it dripped into the crevices of her closed eyes. It trickled down her face and collected on her neck, making her feel as though she were drowning. It gave her icy dreams.

  Harriet was becoming accustomed to the vivid hues of the world underneath her eyelids. She knew morning by the deep orange light and by the heaviness of the smoke from the freshly revived fire. It was in the morning that her eyes oozed the most. Harriet imagined fat worms wriggling out of her head. When she lifted her fingers to her face, she felt throbbing hotness and bulging skin. Warm salty liquid should be poured into her mouth to bring her voice back, someone said. Harriet doubted that this would work. She knew that her voice preferred cocoa sweetness and warm milk. But since her voice had not yet returned, she was unable to explain.

  She knew lunchtime by the paler yellow light and the quickness of Bridie’s step. By lunchtime, Bridie had many important things to do before evening. Sometimes Harriet would be given treacle at lunchtime, and the sticky sweetness would make her see rainbows. By lunchtime the fire was quieter and did not need as much wood. Harriet’s favorite colors were those of evening. These were the coolest and the easiest to look at. They did not hurt her eyes or make them ooze water. The dusty blue of evening made her feel cool and strong. In the world beneath her eyelids she could drift in a cool lake. Sometimes Harriet even saw the grayness of the ocean.

  On the day the whispering stopped, it was time for Harriet to open her eyes. When Bridie came into the room, she pulled back her bed-linen knot and told Harriet her fever was subsiding. “I’m going to clean your face, Miss Harriet. Then I want you to try to open your eyes.”

  Harriet nodded because her voice had still not returned. She felt wetness and coarse grains making her face sting. She smelled something that made her feel as though she were floating above clouds. Fat fingers tugged at her eyelashes. Harriet pushed them away with her own hands and heard someone sniff. She pressed her eyelids and pushed them gently up toward her forehead. Slowly, her eyelids began to peel away from her eyeballs. Harriet took a deep breath. The world was blurred and creamy. The hues of her room were pale. Bridie revealed her teeth, and for the first time Harriet noticed that one of them was missing. She turned away.

  “There, now. Can you see?”

  Now that Harriet was allowed to sit up, she felt liquid quivering deep in her chest whenever she breathed. She was pleased to see that her coughs were green and yellow and that they made Bridie wince as though she had swallowed something bitter. Harriet liked coughing because it made her feel as though she was digging deep inside herself to find her voice again. The first lunchtime after Harriet could see again, Bridie brought her thick liquid the color of her coughs. Harriet pushed it away.

  “ ’Tis broth!”

  Harriet shook her head. She knew there was quite enough thick greenness inside her without adding more. Bridie pointed her nose to the ceiling and left the room. Harriet felt a hole growing in her belly.

  She heard thumping and voices coming from downstairs. Bridie was arguing with a man who had a strong bass voice. The walls shook as something heavy moved up the stairs. Harriet curled her legs underneath her and hoped the heavy object would not come to her room. The door flew open and hit the wall with a thump. The Man Who Was Her Father took up almost the whole doorway. His gray eyes were almost round, and his thick eyebrows seemed to be climbing his forehead. His two coarse hands clutched a small red apple as though it were a baby bird.

  “What have they done to you, Harriet?” His voice was quiet, and Harriet had already opened her mouth to answer when she remembered that she had not yet found her voice. He placed a forefinger on her forehead and stood over her.

  “Your mother will sit with you a while,” he said. Harriet looked behind him and saw the Woman Who Was Her Mother. There were lines on her face, and Harriet thought she cradled a child that looked old enough to walk. The Man Who Was Her Father turned, took something from the Woman Who Was Her Mother, and left the room.

  Dublin: 1817

  I ARRIVED AT MY MOTHER’S lodgings by coach; my limbs felt heavy, and I did not want to leave the carriage. The driver had begun to remove my small case when Mrs. Cooney stepped outside and informed us that my mother had moved unexpectedly two days previously. Her face was stern as she said this. I thanked her, and we continued on through Dublin toward Kilmainham Jail which was the area in which my mother now lived. The streets became grayer and dirtier as we progressed, and I wondered why it was that my mother had moved such a great distance. We arrived at a greengrocer’s, and the driver stopped. He offered to carry my case, but I preferred to make my own way. The shop was dark but I could make out withering lettuces stacked like so many skulls, and the air was thick with something rotting. A man missing many of his teeth nodded at me.

  “I am seeking Mrs. Smithson,” I told him. He pointed to a staircase around the back of the shop.

  The stairs themselves were dark and dusty. They wound around in an untidy spiral. The man left me and my case outside a door on the landing. I knocked.

  I almost did not recognize my mother when she stood in the doorway. Her hair was greasy and knotted and had been pulled back behind her ears. She wore an apron which was stained and threadbare. I noticed her stockings underneath were torn and her shoes scuffed. The room behind her was gloomy and airless.

  “Harriet!”

  “Hello, Mouse!” I kissed my younger sister’s pale face and saw that it was lined. She smiled.

  “You’re back,” she said, smiling as though I had handed her a gift.

  “We were not expecting you!” my mother sniffed. “Have you lost your position?”

  “I finished the summer season. I will be going to London in the new year.”

  “London? Where?”

  “Drury Lane.”

  “That is grand, Harriet, grand.” She stared at me in silence. “Your father would have been proud.” As she said this her tears began.

  Some moments later I saw her running her eyes up and down the fabric of my dress, and I was ashamed.

  “You were a success in Birmingham, then?” she sniffed.

  “I have enough to last until London. Where is Joseph?”

  “He is working at the theater.”

  “And you? I thought you had a position at the Crow.”

  “Mrs. West is here from London. I am not required. Were you—safe—in Birmingham?”

  I blushed. “Yes, Mama.”

  “We did not wish to disturb you on your father’s death.” After a pause she asked, “What has happened to your speech?”

  “I was taught elocution so I can perform in London. They say the English don’t like foreigners.”

  “London is a grand city. And a dangerous one. I cannot allow you there alone. We will come with you.” As she said this she looked at the purse in my lap. Slowly I stood. I untied my purse from my wrist and opened it. I handed my mother half my coins.

  “I will go by coach to Moore Street and fetch us some food,” I told her.

  I had to walk a long way before coming across a carriage. As we trundled toward the market it was difficu
lt to keep my eyes open. I dreamed I was returning to Ennis where I would visit Father Barrett’s chapel and say the rosary by his grave at Drumcliffe. I would visit the building of my father’s theater in Cooke’s Lane. I would find Molly, and we would talk for hours about the people of Ennis and all we did when we were children. I was awakened from my reverie by the words “All right, miss?” I handed him the fare and, clutching my skirts, stepped down to the street.

  I had never been to the market before. When I first worked at the Old Crow, my mother had been wary to spare me domestic duties so I could concentrate on learning my lines. This was nothing like Market Square in Ennis where I had played as a child. This market was like an untidy chorus, people shouting long discords while others punctuated with staccato cries. It was full of disheveled women with dull eyes; I fancied it was themselves they were selling. The men were large with calloused hands; they stared at my gown which was not one of my best, merely one in good repair. There were no well-dressed ladies here. This was a place visited by their maids, and the few to be seen this late in the day had their heads down and scurried quickly. Shopping was clearly a task to be completed in haste. I bought a large leg of lamb; the meat had a green sheen, and I hoped it was not bad. The man wrapped it, staring at me all the while so that I was most relieved when the transaction was over. It remained for me to find a few small muddy potatoes and some shriveled carrots; I was glad the meal would be well roasted before we ate it.

  After the Carmichael family had retired for the evening, they gave my mother permission to use the kitchen providing she left it as she had found it. My mother would leave the kitchen better than she had found it. Before she even started cooking she scrubbed the pots and pans and stoked the fire. A lifetime in the theater had accustomed us all to late meals, and so there was no hurry as I followed my mother’s instructions. Joseph’s eyes were wide when he appeared, slow from sleep with dark smudges around his eyes, in Mrs. Carmichael’s kitchen. My mother sent him to fetch Anne, and he returned with her in his arms.