What Is Visible: A Novel

by Kimberly Elkins

  Yet still she was bewildered that her husband stayed away from her bed for so long. How they could have comforted each other, if he had only allowed it. On the night she returned from Washington, where her tour had been a modest success, she greeted him with a genuine smile when he entered her bedroom. He came to stand behind her dressing table, but he didn’t lay a finger on her, only watched her in the mirror.

  “Has something happened?” she asked, suddenly afraid.

  “There will be no more children,” he said and left her before she could speak. But she couldn’t have spoken anyway. There would be no argument. But then why didn’t he push to divorce her now, now that Sammy was gone? Perhaps he had found some way, something, someone to keep him happy enough to bear his present situation, though Julia refused to torture herself over the possibilities. She accepted that that part of her life―that part of her heart, which she now realized had been much larger than she’d imagined—was forever closed. She was forty-two.

  For her next reading tour, she bought a white lace cap. She would never again appear in public without the cap covering the waves of her still-bright red hair, which had always been her greatest vanity, a true rosso being the highest effort of nature.

  Chapter 27

  Laura, 1863

  The house still vibrates with sorrow. I wrote a poem about Sammy, how he liked to juggle oranges and how plump his fingers were, and when I gave it to Julia, she hugged me hard against her, and I felt the rush of tears on my neck. Strange to be holding Julia, patting her gently, stroking her soft hair. At Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, where I expect I will be buried also someday in the Howes’ plot, I felt the crowding of souls around me, behind and before, and I didn’t know if it was the living or the dead. It was not my first death, but it was my first funeral, and though it was horribly sad, I found myself in some way oddly pleased by it, in belonging with this group of people all weeping at the edge of the grave. And yet although there was a minister and a service, the ceremony made me feel estranged from my Lord. How could he justify taking a child? These wartime days are full of death, but that I understand as the pitted road of history. Of course, none of my family or close acquaintances, save Cook’s son, are doing the fighting, though Doctor and Julia work with wartime committees in Washington. Would it have been better if Sammy had been maimed by fever and lived on as I do? I dare not ask his parents this question for fear of their answers.

  Sammy is not gone a year when I am felled by news from home: Mary has died of the same fever. Mary with her tangled hair, tickling me until I gasped; Mary who covered my face in kisses and would not let me die that winter in Hanover. Nine years old then, chubby-cheeked and snaggle-toothed, brilliant as a flame, she danced around the bed, trying anything to lift my spirits. Mary, who lay with me and petted me as much as I petted her. Mary, now twenty-three and about to be married. I was going to be in the wedding party in the spring—my first wedding—wearing my gayest dress and a straw bonnet pinned with nosegays to match the bride’s bouquet. But now the dress turns black, the flowers wilt into a veil. I go down on my knees to Doctor asking can I go for the funeral, but he says it is impossible; I could not make it in time.

  Doctor has not been the same this whole year, and I have spoken with him only a few times—Jeannette says he will not even talk to Julia—but today he clasps me boldly to his chest, and for a second, I forget about Mary, feeling only his warmth, and then I feel terribly guilty.

  “Want to be with your family in mourning?” he asks.

  I don’t know. My mother’s letter did not ask for me to come; doubtless she and Papa think I would be more a hindrance than a help at such a time, so I do not go. My relationship with God has taken another onerous blow, and I don’t know if we will survive it. He is obviously not who I thought He was. He has burdened me with great tribulations by the very circumstances of my life, and I have endured, but why did He take one so dear, so innocent? I realize that this is the way most people feel after such a heavy loss, and yet I take it personally nonetheless. I think I have probably been a great deal more intimate with Him than most others manage, because He has imposed upon me this isolation which posits Him as my only true companion. Now I talk, I rail, I shout, I make all my noises, even in the dining room, but I hear nothing from the heavens. Jeannette keeps pushing me down in my chair and finally puts her hand across my mouth. I bite the soft back sides of her fingers. God has turned me again into an animal.

  Though we rarely have Exhibition Days, no matter what Doctor promised, we still have Visiting Days. So I sit myself down in the drawing room, in the black crepe dress I have worn since winter, and await the curious. First up, I have a young girl who sorely tries my patience. She has come alone, not in a group like most of the schoolchildren. I give her my hand and she digs into my palm with block letters, the only way those not versed in finger spelling can attempt to communicate with me, and slowly spells out “Laura.” I pat her hand in acknowledgment but then she writes my name over and over. We still get a fair load on Visiting Days, so I know a line is forming behind her, but I can’t get her off me. She holds on almost desperately, scrawling my name across my knuckles when I finally close my fist. I have no choice but to wave for Jeannette to come and help me, but when Jeannette tries to pull her away, she grabs my skirts, circling my knees, and I can feel the sobs shaking her thin shoulders. Where on earth is her mother? I feel great pity for her, and yes, a certain pride that she seems so devoted to me, or at least to the idea of me, but there is nothing to be done about it. I pat her head as Jeannette lifts her off and am rewarded with a fine mess of curls. That at least is something.

  It is savage enough that He comes in the night to steal our children, and yet the nation has now given the dark emperor permission to mount the carnage at Bull Run and Shiloh, the battlefields littered with the corpses of our finest specimens, North and South. Is the emancipation of the Negro really worth all that dying when we’ve faced the horrors of Antietam, the bloodiest day of the war, over two thousand Union soldiers dead? And not even a clear winner, though General Lee did finally withdraw to Virginia. I don’t care what the Constitution and the abolitionists say; we are not, by any stretch of the imagination, all created equal—in God’s eyes or in man’s—and so we must strive to be happy within the respective cells in which our Maker has confined us. I believe I could teach the slaves a thing or two about making do, though it’s true that I am not beaten. The tragedy is that I might enjoy it. I remember Julia’s shock that I had no interest in crusading for the rights of oppressed women and slaves. I feel a simultaneous affinity and disgust for both, which I do not nurture, but which is nevertheless inscribed in my nature. They all assume on my part a huge and general compassion by virtue of my condition, but I refuse to be anything but myself, whatever that is.

  At last Doctor’s carriage takes me out to Wayland, where Sarah, just back from the islands, is settling with Mr. Bond. I begged to meet her at the pier, but Jeannette convinced me that she would be very tired after a journey of three months with three children. She is right, so I bide my time one week—that is all I can wait!―and now I’ve traveled the fifteen winding miles to see her, my darling Wightie, after a dozen long years.

  She opens the carriage door, and I restrain myself from falling into her arms. She has been weak, she wrote, since the birth of the last child, so I must be as careful with her as she has always been with me. Finest china, my porcelain Wightie. The children paw at my skirts, and so I stop to pet and peck them all, none very tall for their age. The boy’s face rings of Sarah’s—the straight, thin nose, the slight dimple in the chin—and all their hair is fine and slightly wavy like hers. Like Mr. Bond’s. She says they are all blonde.

  I finally loose the children and kiss my darling over and over, but her face seems to have shrunken. I trace the pouches of flesh beneath her eyes and the sunken wells beneath her cheekbones. How much older she feels than forty. Perhaps she is thinking the same of my thirty-three
, though I doubt it because I know my skin is still wonderfully soft and smooth. She leads me to a chair by the hearth and pulls up close beside me.

  “A present,” she says and puts something round my neck. It seems to be a necklace of flowers, but they are long dried. “Lei,” she writes. “Island custom.” I try to imagine her running along the surf, the circlet blooming between her slight breasts. It is a shock to me how much I have missed her, the touch of her, just knowing she is close by. She fills my hand with notes on the voyage; the girl was sick the whole way. The children miss the island, as does her husband, but she is delirious to be home. Mr. Bond has taken a position as the head of the new Hawaiian Islands Commission in Cambridge and is happy with it. Still, I am glad he is not here.

  She did not get my letter about Mary, so I break the tale to her, and she lets me weep against her bony chest, the way she always did. Sammy she knows about. The difference is that she met my Mary, those long weeks she stayed to watch over me in Hanover before she left, when I had turned my heart against her.

  “God finished,” I tell her, and she is quick to ask my meaning. “No talk, no listen.” He is farther away than the moon, less bright than the stars, more dangerous than the sun, and now I know that was always His nature. For myself, I forgave His cruelties, but now that He has loosed His fateful lightning on my family, I cannot forgive. It is a two-way street with God; not only must He forgive me, but I must also forgive Him.

  Sarah is shocked, the most shocked she’s ever been with me. “God loves,” she says. “Rest is life.”

  “Then why pray?”

  “For your soul,” she says, “and the souls of others.”

  “Senseless. Wouldn’t have to pray for Mary’s soul if He hadn’t killed her. Don’t you think I’ve gone easy on God?” I ask her, and she is angry.

  “Not only your life hard,” she writes, almost scratching my palm. Her nails are ragged. The old Sarah kept her nails neatly filed and was possessed of boundless sympathy; I suppose that becoming a wife and a mother has left her less for me. “Everybody’s hard.”

  Not everybody! Piffle. Until Sammy died, Julia’s life was a perfect dream. And all the belles who visit me—they have no idea of suffering.

  “Jesus suffered,” she says. “For you.”

  “Then who do I suffer for?” Of course, she can’t answer that one.

  “How is Julia?”

  “Still crying.”

  “Doctor?”

  “Worse than time of John Brown.”

  “I have a Secret Six,” she tells me: three babies lived, three babies died. “Under the volcano.” She recites the names of her dead children, Katherine, Augustine, and Clinton, and I write back the names of her living ones: Abigail, Thomas, and Laura. At least my namesake didn’t die. People love to name their children after me. I find that flattering but strange, given my condition. I remember the death of one of her children, but I never knew about the others. One of fever at six months, she says; the next boy lived an hour; the last girl the fever at two, a full little person lost.

  “If she lived, maybe like you.” She asks me: Could she have lived through that or was it better that she died? “The live ones escape me like eels.”

  What does she mean? They are here, clambering around my chair, annoying the vinegar out of me. She says that her dead children are buried pineapples, and then she tries to tell me about an island priestess walking into a volcano.

  I am astonished, not only that she is telling me so much, so oddly, but that she seems more than willing, even eager, to offend me. And then she writes more, signing so erratically that I cannot follow her. This is not the Sarah I know; the years and the islands have changed her. I hold her and pat her, and for the first time since I have known her, we have switched places, and I am the comforter. It feels good, but suddenly, she grows rigid in my arms, as if she just realized where she was, and pulls completely away.

  “All right?” I ask.

  “Of course,” she tells me, and then apologizes. “Headache,” she says. “A spell.”

  I remember her spells; obviously they have gotten far worse over the years. I force myself to let go the topic of religion, and then we are chatting like old times. She puts in my hands the engraved maps Mr. Bond has bought the children to mark the battle territories. A Prussian, Mr. Prang, made the first one after the assault on Fort Sumter, and furnishes the maps with colored pencils―blue for the Confederacy, red for the Union―so that the advances and retreats can be tracked as soon as reported by telegraph in the newspaper. He has sold over forty thousand, though I personally have no interest in tracking the war. Her girl brings a plate of afternoon biscuits, but I can’t force more than a nibble or two. I have long given up on trying to taste—what was God playing at?―and there are certainly no occasions to tempt or encourage me. Perhaps it was all a waking dream, a willed delusion, part of the brief, glorious rapture that marked my only union with another human being.

  Sarah and I have so much to catch up on that we go on for over two hours, until both our fingers are sore. When it is time to leave, she says she’ll pray for me, and I tell her that I’d pray for her too if I were still able. We say our good-byes lightly, and I promise to come again soon. She sends her love to my family and to Doctor and Julia.

  All the long ride back in the carriage, I bounce between two terrible thoughts: my Sarah has changed and my God has changed. Where will I be without their constancy? And no one seems to care that Julia Pastrana, “the World’s Ugliest Woman,” has also passed from the world that titled her so, and I wonder if the Lord will, in the end, find beautiful that which He hath wrought.

  Chapter 28

  Laura, 1863

  Visiting Day again, and I parry a bit with a Methodist minister, keeping my untoward thoughts about his employer to myself, and then we are down to the end of the line. The chapped hand of a young girl. It’s been a month, but I remember this one, the one who would not let me go. I feel a moment’s gratitude that trouble though she was, she has not flagged in her devotion. Once again, all she writes is my name over and over, until I think that she herself is perhaps in some way enfeebled. But then she places in my other palm a small, hard object, rough and flaky on the outside. I trace the irregular, lumpy circle, and pieces of the skin come off in my fingers. I hold it carefully, feeling the strange contours. A fruit or vegetable. Suddenly, I know it, and almost drop it in my surprise: garlic. The girl has given me a bulb of garlic. I close my fist upon it and time stops. Finally, I reach for her, that halo of curls―red, I’m guessing―and she rests her head in my lap, allowing me to coil and uncoil the ringlets. Laura. She has been writing her name! My Laura, after all these barren years. She raises her head and presses an envelope into my hand. I am confused; she knows I can’t read it, and she is not able to communicate with me. Wait. This is a letter from― I can’t bear to say her name, even in my head, lest all the hope gathers into the storm that has raged so long in me.

  The girl rises and I let go of her hair. I pull her to me and kiss her cheek, and she kisses mine in return. I should have known her at once. Poor darling. She pats the letter on my lap, and I nod, though there is no one here that I trust enough to read it to me. Where is her mother? Does the letter contain bitter news? A meeting? Why couldn’t her mother come herself? And then I remember: I am also her mother.

  At last I let her go, my shade soaked clean through with tears. The day has come at last, though it will take some figuring to discover what wonders or sorrows might lie ahead after all these years. Ten years. I know I must take the letter to Sarah. She is the only one I can trust with the greatest secret of my life.

  Two months after my last visit I return to Wayland. I have agitated Doctor for a month, since the day I got the letter, but he has had excuses about the carriage, my health, the weather. I think he doesn’t want me to spend time with Wightie; after all, he is the one who tore us apart in the first place. Julia had gone to see her once and wanted to take me with h
er, but Doctor claimed that I was in a temper that day, which I was not. I am a bit afraid that Wightie will be talking of eels and volcanoes again, but when I arrive, she seems her old self. I bring each of the children a purse I have crocheted, but I can’t tell if they like them or not. Perhaps they throw them in the dirt. Sarah natters on about seeing her mother and sister after all these years, but I can’t concentrate. The truth is I don’t really try. I can’t stop for one minute thinking about the letter, pressed into the bosom of my dress, the letter that will open—or perhaps close—my world again.

  Finally, I can’t take the waiting any longer, and I pull it from its hiding place and hand it to her without explanation. “Read me,” is all I say. She’s taking a long time to begin, and I believe she is reading it first to herself, perhaps gauging what, if at all, to tell me. I am furious. “Read!” I rap hard, and when another moment passes, I grab her arms and shake them.

  “Calm,” she writes. “Who gave you this?”

  “Just read,” I beg her. My head and heart are exploding.

  “My beloved Laura,” she begins, but my palm is so drenched with sweat that she has to dry it with her handkerchief before she can continue.