by George Hagen
Dr. Chapel, now known as the Doctor with the Singing Wife, found that his fame had spread as far as the neighborhood of Belgravia. Harris Gantry's wife drove up one morning in her gray Berliet limousine. The Chapel children climbed about the wondrous machine, Margaret admiring her reflection in the car's shiny brass fittings while Arthur bounced on the red leather upholstery.
One man from Doorfontein who arrived with an ear infection was quite upset when he heard that Lizzy was too busy teaching to attend his treatment by the doctor. “I must insist on meeting the singing nurse!” he cried and refused to leave until Dr. Chapel took him into the house to hear his wife coaching one of her young pianists. The man was sated only when Lizzy sang “Twinkle, Twinkle” with the two-fingered accompaniment of her pupil.
AUDREY'S SON
HER LETTERS ARRIVED MONTHS, SOMETIMES YEARS AFTER THEY were sent, as if the winds mixed them up, sending some round Cape Horn while others came direct. A few were lost. Tom wrote back to Audrey but suspected that his replies followed a similarly confused route. It took years to establish the events of her internment.
Lizzy was curious about Audrey's effect on her husband; Tom always read her letters aloud, as if to show that he had nothing to hide. This assured Lizzy that Audrey was not a rival, but she observed Tom's bitterness, or perhaps it was disappointment, whenever they discussed Audrey and sensed that he was still at the mercy of his feelings.
Dear Tom and Lizzy,
I hope I may include Lizzy in this letter; I am sure it was she who sent me the charming picture of your children. A photograph permits one such a blessed illusion of intimacy. I regret I shall never know them as children, so please forgive the following interpretations: Margaret strikes me as responsible and eager to grow up. Iris, standing beside M. with her heels raised, appears to be trying to eclipse her sister, while Charity seems more concerned with the position of her brother in her father's lap. Lizzy, you are quite beautiful, and I imagine that Tom never says so, though he believes it in his heart. It always takes Tom an eternity to express in words what is very obvious on his face.
I have no pictures of my son, Jonah. He remains the blessing left to me after my attack. His birth, here in Newgate, was quick and sweet and came shortly after my trial. I might have lost my mind without my dear little boy. He marked time for me, learning to walk, to speak, and to comfort me. He broke the tedium of these walls, the minutes, hours, days, and months.
Several women in Newgate have children that they raised in their cells. It is not as bad as it seems—they would be in orphanages if they were not with their mothers. The problem comes when they reach the age of eight, for then they must leave the prison. The authorities don't want them to be influenced beyond that age by the so-called criminals in here.
Jonah left me five years ago. He is now in Elsie's care. She took him to Australia with her husband and children. I try to imagine the sunsets he sees, instead of the dim half-light through my barred cell window.
It is best for him, I remind myself. Yet I hear from Elsie that he is an angry child. He has been arrested for theft. I'm sure he is angry with me. Oh, Tom, do your children as good a turn as you can. Nothing upsets me more than the thought that I've placed such a troubled soul into the world's care.
I am a wardswoman now. Though I am entitled to a bed instead of a rope mat, I can't say that sleeping is any easier. My hip always aches in damp weather, and my walk will always be clumsy. I teach reading to my wards; the Bible is our only text. While I am not very good at explaining the actions of a brutal and vengeful God, I assure them that to read and write will be of great use in the outside world.
My love to you all,
Audrey
“The poor woman!” Lizzy remarked after Tom finished reading. Tom didn't reply. He sat in his chair with his fingers pressed together, his eyes fixed on the window. The children were leapfrogging across the lawn.
“You must miss her,” Lizzy said provocatively.
“Not really.”
“But what a hard life she leads. You must pity her at least?”
Tom nodded. “I regret that she suffers.” He paused, then added, “At least she doesn't suffer from anything I have done.”
As he rose from his seat and stepped to the window to cheer on his children, Lizzy pondered his last words. “How did she let you down, dearest?”
Tom shrugged. “I asked her to marry me, and she wisely refused. I was impulsive and unreliable. I was my father.” He turned back to the children so that Lizzy couldn't see his emotion. “She has an insight into me that makes me ashamed,” he said. “A man has the right to forget the bad things he has done. He has the right to change.”
Lizzy nodded. “I'm sure she has forgiven you, darling.” She joined him at the window. “It would probably do you good to forgive her.”
Tom sighed, keeping his eyes fixed on the children.
ARTHUR
WHEN THE SMALLPOX EPIDEMIC OF 1904 BROKE OUT, TOM was commissioned by the Gantrytown Board of Health to administer inoculations. People arrived by the dozens to receive them, and many became regular patients. His practice had never been busier. On the days when Lizzy was with her pupils, Tom enlisted the help of his children. It was an alarming process. The doctor used a sharp trident to perforate the skin in three places on the patient's arm—a triangle of three spots of blood. Through a glass tube he would then blow lymph onto each piercing. The patients would return in a week so that Tom could examine the scars and satisfy himself that the inoculation had “taken.”
Many patients fainted during the process, so he needed someone to distract the nervous ones. Margaret, however, proved to be rather insensitive. She entertained one woman by telling her the story of a little boy who had blown off his hand while playing with a detonator he'd found hidden in a weapons cache left over from the war. At mention of the amputation, the woman's eyes rolled up and Tom banished his oldest daughter from the surgery.
Iris was next. She told limericks to the patients. Her favorite owed a debt to “You Are Old, Father William”:
You are bold, Dame Matilda, the young girl said,
With a body as big as a beadle.
Please hold still and don't scream
While I poke through your spleen,
With the very sharp tip of this needle!
Dismayed that Iris had inherited William Bedlam's penchant for verse, Tom replaced her with Charity, who made a point of telling each patient that the pain he or she was feeling was beneficial.
When she recognized a nun from St. Ruth's Collegiate School for Girls, Charity said, “It's painful, but it's nothing compared with the eternal fires of hell, don't you think, Sister?”
Arthur, however, had a calming effect on the patients. “I've got three thithterth,” he would explain. “How many thithterth have you got?” Between his endearing lisp and a genuine need to know something about each person, he became the favorite.
At five, he was less demanding and more eager to please his sisters, obliging them by performing in their games dressed up as a baby, a poodle, Jesus, and the Sleeping Beauty. He quickly grew weary of lying in a straw manger so that Charity could be Mary, but Iris could persuade him to do almost anything, so entranced was he by her cleverness and fertile imagination. She would take him for a walk around the garden, pretending to be a duchess to his duke, then abruptly change the game. “Oh, bother, Baby!” she would exclaim. “I've got a smudge on my knee, and it's all your fault!”
Arthur would oblige her with a reply. “Goo goo!”
“Just for that,” Iris continued, “I'm going to turn you into a piglet!” She removed his clothes, drew a circle on the ground around him, and muttered an incantation. Then she led him next door to sell him to the neighbors' children as a piglet.
The Horvath boys had no imagination. This was obvious to Iris because they had never given their parrot a name or taught it anything interesting to say. It was no wonder that it imitated the Indian fruit vendors—the bird
was utterly neglected. So it required considerable effort to convince them to accept Arthur as a piglet.
“He's a little boy,” they cried, “not a piglet.”
“Piglets are pink, are they not?” replied Iris.
“Yes, but—”
“They squeal and run on four legs, do they not?”
“Well, yes—”
Iris set Arthur down and cried, “Run, piglet, run!”
Arthur tore across the lawn on all fours, screaming at the top of his lungs until his entire body was a brilliant pink. The Horvath children conceded that he was a very convincing pig and rewarded Iris with one of their mother's toffee apples in exchange for Arthur.
Lizzy had to fetch him at dinnertime. “Honestly, Arthur,” she said after finding her son in the Horvaths' washtub, where he had been nestled in a bed of hay “you shouldn't let Iris sell you to the neighbors.”
“But I was a piglet. I couldn't talk.”
“Nonsense! You have a voice, you have words.”
But Arthur liked the idea of slipping into a different skin. He enjoyed the drama, the surprise at the end when he became himself again, and especially, the fuss made by his mother.
Tom recognized his son's gentle spirit and even thought he had the makings of a doctor. He gave the boy an old stethoscope, complaining to Lizzy that Arthur should look more like a boy. His hair, a pale, lustrous ginger, fell to his shoulders. Lizzy couldn't bear to cut it. Also, he still carried around his clothespin family.
Lizzy advised her husband not to be too strict with his son, but Tom couldn't help it. He was casting Arthur in his own image with a wary eye to the alternatives—Audrey's wayward son and, of course, the Mansworths and Privots of the world. The mere utterance of his son's name was a constant reminder of his responsibility to the boy and his inability to reconcile Arthur Pigeon's death and Mansworth's acquittal with the relatively placid and happy life he now enjoyed.
FALLING IN LINE
TOM GAVE ARTHUR A SET OF LEADEN SOLDIERS FOR HIS SIXTH birthday. Smartly dressed in red tunics, and carrying muskets and satchels, they lay side by side in a box, preserved like sardines or cigars. Arthur stood them on the shelf by his bed, their dark metallic faces fixed at attention. But he continued to play with the clothespin family, whose cheery, warm features (painted and repainted with fresh smiles) remained his constant companions. He slept with them tucked under the covers. During Iris and Margaret's frequent arguments, Arthur preached conciliation to their wooden counterparts.
Margaret had taken a new interest in the boys at St. Peter's. On the way home from school, she would stop at the playing fields to watch the older boys at cricket. One player, Peter Carnahan, would leave the game to flirt with her for a few minutes. Iris was still young enough to consider boys an alien breed, and she took to spying on Margaret and Peter, fascinated by the preening glances and joking that served their courtship.
Each rendezvous lured Iris closer, until she believed that she understood the terms of the ritual. Then, one afternoon, she boldly sauntered across the field towards Peter, and curling a blond pigtail around her grubby finger, fixed the boy with a sultry glance. “Peter? I've made up a limerick, would you like to hear it?”
Margaret arrived in time to exclaim, “Iris! What are you doing? Go away!”
“There once was a boy named Dick, who was known for the size of his—”
“Oh, pay no attention to her, she's only thirteen,” Margaret interrupted quickly. “Iris, go home!”
This dismissal pierced Iris's pride; she stalked home in a fury, preparing her retribution for the dinner table.
“I'VE COMPOSED A NEW LIMERICK,” Iris announced. “Would you like to hear it, Papa?”
Tom regarded the spark in his daughter's eye. Those infernal limericks, he thought, recalling his father's rhymes again. “Not now, Iris,” he replied.
“I can play ‘The British Grenadiers’ far better than fat Julian,” interrupted Charity.
“Charity, you are not to speak of my pupils in such a disparaging way,” replied Lizzy.
“You're both interrupting,” said Iris. “Would you like to hear my limerick, Mama? It's about Margaret.”
“Of course, Iris,” replied Lizzy, before Tom could protest.
“But I don't want to hear it,” said Margaret.
“Why can't Ihave piano lessons?” Charity asked.
“I'd like piano lethonth too” murmured Arthur.
“Of course!” Charity sneered at her brother. “You always want what I have!”
“It's a wonderful idea, Charity,” said Lizzy. “Arthur, perhaps you could learn to play the violin instead of the piano.”
“It goes like this,” continued Iris:
There once was a girl who would greet,
Every boy that she passed on the street,
When they said to her, “Miss,
Would you give us a kiss,”
She'd say—
“That's enough!” cried Margaret.
“But I'm not finished,” said Iris. “She'd say thanks, but I've already—”
“It's nasty and rude, and absolutely false!” cried Margaret, tears bursting from her eyes. “Mama, Papa, how can you let her say such terrible things about me!”
Serenely, Iris replied, “But you don't know what I'm going to say.”
“I don't need to,” wept Margaret.
“I want to hear the end,” cried Charity, pounding the table.
“Stop it!” cried Margaret.
“She'd say thanks, but I've already kissed— Ow!”
Margaret had seized Iris's hair, and her sister fell backwards onto the floor.
“Margaret, that's enough!” shouted Tom.
Iris knew the advantage of a rapt audience; even as Margaret was dragging her across the dining room floor, she repeated the limerick, ending it with “She'd say thanks but I've already kissed Pete!”
At this, Margaret slapped Iris across the face, which stunned her sister into silence. Margaret, now trembling with shame, slowly knelt before her mother, head bent in an attempt at contrition. “Oh, Mama, I'm so, so sorry!”
In the silence, Iris seized the opportunity to sweeten her vengeance. “I've another limerick about Margaret that's even better: There once was a tart named Meg—”
Before she could continue, Tom took his second daughter to the consulting room, where her mouth was filled with water and surgical soap, a smell Iris would associate with punishment long into her adult life. It did nothing for the sharpness of her tongue, but it did cement the antipathy she felt for Margaret.
After the children were put to bed that evening, there lingered a fog of bitterness in the Chapel house. The strong characters of the children, fostered and encouraged, were getting out of hand.
“Have we failed them?” Lizzy whispered in bed.
Tom sighed. “Margaret should be encouraged to enjoy her youth,” he said. “She's in too much of a hurry to become a woman.”
“I was as bad as she was at this age—vain, selfish, hated my father.” Lizzy glanced at Tom. “Boys are, at least, a distraction from such feelings.”
“But it's our duty to protect her from the things she doesn't understand. She's not ready for them,” Tom declared, meaning that he wasn't ready for Margaret to be ready for boys. “As for Iris, her tongue is guaranteed to make her more enemies than friends. And Charity needs her own pastime.”
Lizzy agreed with him, but she voiced one further concern: “We must encourage them to respect one another, even when they differ,” she said. “I fear that when we are gone, they might become estranged.” She paused. “Nothing would be worse than that.”
THUS MOTIVATED BY a desire to steer their children into happier relations with friends and family, Tom and Lizzy formed a plan. At the breakfast table it was announced that each day Margaret and Iris were to walk home from school together. This would tighten the bond between the girls and repel the advances of Peter Carnahan.
Upon hearing this, M
argaret assumed the grief of a martyr. She sat staring at her lap, hands folded. It was a wrenching experience for her parents to see this normally effusive creature so stifled.
Iris was forbidden to mock her sisters at the dinner table, her incendiary limericks were banned, and her access to Lewis Carroll, Hilaire Belloc, and Guy Wetmore Carryl was reduced.
“From now on, you will read the Bible only,” said Tom.
“My dear,” warned Lizzy, “the Old Testament is full of the most wretched behavior. Couldn't we give her the collected work of Shakespeare?”
“Shakespeare it is,” Tom replied. He was tempted to ban King Lear too but decided the likelihood of his second daughter taking to that play was quite slim.
Iris punished her parents by vowing to reply to them in the way that Echo had been doomed to repeat the words of her lover, Narcissus.
“You understand why we must do this, my love,” said Lizzy.
“Love!” echoed her daughter.
“It's for your own good,” added Tom.
“Good?” Iris huffed, burying herself beneath the couch cushions.
As for Charity, she would begin piano lessons with her mother. This granted her the distinction of having a precious hour alone with Lizzy every week.
WHEN LIZZY CHAPEL held the annual Yuletide recital for her pupils, the parents patiently endured even the most ham-fisted performer because they looked forward to the teacher's concluding performance. Lizzy's playing, in spite of her misgivings, was as popular as her singing. This Christmas, however, she chose not to overshadow her daughter, so everyone learned instead how far an acorn might fall from the tree. When Charity struck that keyboard, she proved that a girl with a tin ear could throttle anyone's holiday spirit. Tone-deaf and insensitive to tempo, dynamics, and melody, Charity drove away her audience with one consoling notion: if Mrs. Chapel could give birth to a musical failure, anybody else was as likely to produce a prodigy.