Kate has never come, and I have almost accepted that she probably never will. At last I forced myself to stop sending letters by Laura since they hadn’t been answered in several years, perhaps not even read. Laura finally learned to write decently, at least, and I brought myself to ask her if her mother were dead. “No,” she said, “but might as well be.” She is a young woman of stolid and sorrowful temperament. When I asked how she lives, if she’d married, she wrote, “You don’t want to know.” The mystery is far worse than the truth, I think, but that’s easy to say when one is not slapped in the face with it. I have certainly done all that I could over the years, and I am sure my Kate has done the best she could under the circumstances, whatever they might have been. I pray that the three of them―Kate, our daughter, and hers―listen to the music box together, the three songs, one for each, over and over, and think of me fondly. I do not complain, but instead thank God for giving me the opportunity, however strange and slant, to fulfill the circle of womanhood. Where would I have been without all those hopes and dreams and memories? Between those and my chatter with the Lord, I am never truly alone. Or so I say.
I am sitting in the front parlor, my chair pulled as close to the fire as caution allows, when there is a tumult, many footsteps, everything shifting. I am up in an instant, hurrying toward the hall, when Jeannette bars my way with one solid arm. “Doctor,” is all she writes, and I slide against the wall to the floor.
He is not dead, thank Jesus; he rests in what they say is a coma. The doctors come and go, and tell us that it is something in his brain, a tumor. I think Doctor would make a joke of it himself, the ultimate phrenological display: the biggest bump of all. I reach into the thick masses of his hair and locate each bump on his skull. Ah, there it is: the well-developed veneration bump right at the top between firmness and benevolence, evidencing the faculties of his divine creative spirit and his quest for the sublime. I round the twin bumps of ideality at his temples that denote the disposition toward perfection, toward beauty and refinement in all things, and then notch the bulge of individuality between his eyebrows that sets them so far apart and him so far apart from lesser men. And the prodigious affection bump situated on the upper back of his head, of which I have had my share of its benefits, though far from all. He told the world, told my family, that I was a failed experiment, but still I love him and forgive him all his trespasses as he has surely forgiven mine.
It has been two days now, and he does not speak or open his eyes. Julia is being very kind; she lets me sit with the girls by his bedside, though I am of little help, and they don’t leave me alone with him because if he did open his eyes or speak, I would miss the moment. I restrain myself from touching him constantly. I know I must share him with his family, but it still cuts deeply to admit that they have greater claim on him than I do. My namesake sits beside me and we hold hands, rarely talking. The room is warm and time passes strangely, as if in a dream.
On the third day, I am in the dining hall eating what I can of lunch when Julia flies in and takes my hand without a word. Together we climb the three flights to Doctor’s room, and she pushes me toward his bed. His forehead is ribboned with sweat, his hands freezing. I trace the lips that I have touched a thousand times, but have never met with mine. I know that Julia is watching, but I can’t stop myself, I lean in to kiss those lips, for the first and last time.
“Eph-phatha,” I write across the width of Doctor’s forehead. “Be opened.” Over and over, and yet his spirit remains closed. One last time I reach for his hand, which has held my whole life’s conversation, but I can think of nothing to write.
Chapter 34
Chev, 1876
Hands on me, so many hands on me, and voices fluttering in and out. Years have passed—no, decades—since I have been so quiet. It is all right because I am tired, so tired. Julia’s hands, worried and sweet, the only hands that traveled the true north and south, east and west of my body. My girls’, panicked and damp, pulling at my covers. And the one I refused to see, now I will never know the child’s face, half-mine. Sammy does not yet touch me, but he will and without end. He waits, as does my Charlie, just beyond my reach, but soon to be mine.
And then the most familiar fingers, writing in my palm, and then across my forehead, words I cannot follow. Her fingers are enough; I do not need to know their meaning. I have always known their meaning, their endless font of desire, tapping, tapping, always there.
Suddenly, Laura speaks—I know it is her—softly at first, and then so loud that her voice fills the room. Not the noise she made for my name. This is Laura speaking, and the voice is different from the one I’d imagined all these years, husky and grave instead of high and light, the most beautiful and solemn sound I have ever heard. “You are mine,” she says. “I have always been yours.” Now she is laughing, the sweetest laugh, echoing until I hush her with a kiss. We have finally closed the breach. I can hear the mute speak and be heard by the deaf. I knew this day would come.
I am beginning another life, separating myself limb from limb, thought from thought. In another life, Laura and I―
Chapter 35
Julia, 1876–1877
Julia wreathed her husband’s bedstead in her white bridal veil. He hadn’t been well for months, but the end had come so suddenly that she was numb with disbelief. Yes, he had been seventy-five, but she had always expected him to outlive her by sheer force of personality. How he must have argued with the Lord when he was called home, and heaven help the angels. His hair and beard had grown bushy and wild―he hadn’t let her at him for over a year―so now she trimmed them for the laying-in, careful as always to keep his hair long enough to hide his enormous ears, which he’d always been shy about. She didn’t touch the waxy skin or the frozen lips, the stiff limbs in his best suit. Only the hair seemed still alive, that beautiful, thick mane gone gray long ago, and she combed her fingers through the strands, parting and reparting it, fingering his cowlick, grabbing it in greedy handfuls until she realized she’d been sitting there for hours, his hair clutched in her fists.
Chev was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge beside Sammy, with a plot waiting for Julia on the other side of her son. At the funeral, it was Laura who wailed the loudest, that horrible, unearthly keening as if echoing straight up from hell. She threw herself on his coffin just before it was lowered into the hole, pressing her face into the boughs of white roses, and if Julia hadn’t grabbed her, she might have gone down with it. She pulled Laura to her feet, and they all saw the blood streaming down her face from the wounds of the thorns, and yet Julia took the girl in her arms anyway―she still thought of her as a girl, though she was nearly fifty―and Laura’s blood spotted Julia’s black veil. How she longed to feel the embraces instead of her children, who stood close by, but they were more reserved in their mourning.
At the memorial service later in Boston Music Hall, she read not one of her own poems, but John Greenleaf Whittier’s tribute to her husband, “The Hero.” Hundreds had turned out, from strangers to the friends they had left who had not preceded Chev. Thank God Sumner had died first; he would have been as helpless as Laura in his grief. The students of Perkins sang hymns and Chev’s successor, Michael Anagnos, spoke at length of Dr. Howe’s accomplishments. Julia still hadn’t recovered from Anagnos’s marriage to Julia Romana. The truth was she’d thought the girl lovely but ultimately unmarriageable, cursed as she was with a nervous and melancholic temperament far worse than either of her parents.
At home, Julia did nothing. She was now relieved of all demands and edicts from Chev, and yet she felt no urge to pick up either book or pen. And lately her vision had been going, and at night she could barely read even with the help of a lamp. In her worst moments, she imagined that this was the Lord’s punishment for her repulsion for the blind, the children who surrounded her, and for her unkind thoughts―and sometimes actions―toward Laura, the epitome of the damaged and helpless among them. The only thing left to attend to was the r
eading of the will, which Chev’s lawyer would bring in a couple of days.
In the last weeks before her husband’s death, she had, at his request, had her double bed carried into his chamber and placed beside his, close enough that they could both stretch out their arms and hold hands until he fell asleep, and his hand released hers. Three nights before he died, she had been in her room at her desk preparing for a lecture, this one on ethical polarities in nature, when she heard him call out for her to rub his feet. It was late, half one, and she was almost finished, so she told one of the servants to attend to him. When she finally came to bed, he was asleep. The next day, when he was taken out for his walk, he went into convulsions and collapsed, never to open those blue eyes again. She knew that it wouldn’t have made a difference if she had gone to comfort him in the night, and yet she kept hearing him call her name, over and over, his voice raspy with irritation. She had not gone to him because she was still so angry over what he had told her the week before.
That night, he had reached for her hand in the darkness and said he had something important to tell her. When she tried to get up to turn on the lamp, he pulled her back down. He was still so strong, no matter how he complained. Julia honestly believed this was just another one of his spells, when he would take to his bed and demand to be waited on hand and foot, preferably by his wife, who would then be forced to miss all of her suffragist meetings and lecture appointments.
“There were women,” he said, and she tried to wrest her hand away, but he held fast. This she had long suspected, but had never expected for him to confess. She thought of the weanings of her six children, how she had kept him away. Had there been one whore for each of her pregnancies?
“How many?” She craned her head toward him, but in the blackness she could see nothing of his face. Only his voice, steady and sharp as a dagger.
“The details don’t matter,” he said, and she wanted to leap out of the bed and force him to tell her, her nails on his face, her hands on his neck. But instead she lay still, her hand limp and wet in his.
“Then why are you telling me?”
“It is selfish,” he said quietly, “but I am selfish. One I deeply regret, a girl of low station when you were in Rome, who bore a child, my child.”
She thanked God she was lying down; otherwise, she might have fainted.
“And there was one I don’t regret, an affair of the heart long-standing, which only ended with her death ten years ago.”
“Did I know her?”
“Yes.”
She combed her memory as if for nits: sidelong glances, interrupted conversations, awkward meetings, but came up with nothing. At least it had not been Laura. She would never have recovered from that. She thought of the final letter she had written to Mr. Wallace; she had learned of his death before she could mail it, but she had saved it and read it again and again over the years, as she did the letters from him, even unto this day.
“My Diva Julia, I knew you’d understand because of your Mr. Wallace,” Chev said as if he were reading her thoughts, and abruptly let go of her hand.
She started to protest and then decided she would keep the truth to herself, that she had never actually been unfaithful, only desperately in love. Let her husband believe she was as sin-stained as he was.
Just the year before, Julia had declared in Woman’s Journal that suffragists were really typical Victorian women, who sought the comforts of home, but also the striving for freedom. She had asked “that the door of human right might open widely enough to allow us to pass through, bearing our babes, not leaving them, assisting our husbands, not forsaking them.”
Should she have forsaken him?
Two days later, the lawyer arrived and the family, along with Laura, gathered in the parlor for the reading of the last will and testament of Samuel Gridley Howe. He had left his estate to be divided evenly among his children; his papers to the Perkins Institution, under the guidance of Michael Anagnos; and a two-thousand-dollar bequest to Laura Bridgman. To his wife of over thirty years, he left nothing. Julia wrote the words into Laura’s palm even as the pain of it all nailed her to her seat. Was this his way of punishing her for her alleged affair, despite his many? Or was he simply giving her what she had always begged for, the right to earn money on her own from writing and lecturing? Passion-Flowers, over the years, had made close to three hundred dollars, the most successful of her poetry collections. She wasn’t afraid―her work and, if necessary, her children would support her―but if only he had told her the why of it, the wound would not feel so deep, the infliction so cruel. And she had waited for the revelation of a sum left to his bastard child, but the will mentioned nothing. She would not tell her children that they had a half-sibling somewhere out there in the world, probably poor and bereft, although at that moment how she longed to besmirch her husband’s memory, but even more, just to set the truth straight.
At a conference the following year of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, of which Julia was founder and president, she told the assembly, “In my youth, we thought that ‘superior’ women ought to have been born men. A blessed change is what we have witnessed.” Freed from the man who had bestrode her life like a colossus―the man she realized in the end that she had loved above all others―Julia Ward Howe was, at age fifty-eight, finally glad that she had been born a woman.
Chapter 36
Laura, 1883–1887
Another Irish from Tewksbury! And they’ve stuck her in my cottage, almost as if they know I have an affinity for such. But not this one, alas, even if I could bring my heart to heel once and for all about Kate, which I doubt will ever happen. It’s not a beneficent God giving me a second chance at passion, because this girl is only fifteen and practically spits nails. I do know from Kate how much life in an almshouse can crooken a soul, even if it does not break it, but this one has come out fighting like a cock.
“Be patient with her,” Anagnos says. “Annie is an orphan,” he tells me. “Her brother died in the almshouse, and to boot she has only partial sight.” That’s why she’s gained a bed here; apparently she pleaded her case to Frank Sanborn, head of the State Board of Charities and a close friend of Doctor’s, when he visited Tewksbury. She must be pretty. I tried to touch her hair and face, but she actually smacked my hand away. No one has ever done that! I asked Jeannette, “Does she know who I am?” And Jeannette said, “Yes, indeed.” I tried again when she was sleeping, or I thought she was sleeping, just to get a feel for her hair, to see if all Irish hair is a dense forest like Kate’s, but I’d barely snared a lock when she grabbed my hand. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to touch that head, a fact that is nettling me much more than I’d like. It is my job to teach her the manual alphabet, and for that she eagerly allows my hand in hers. She is the quickest learner I have ever encountered. Within days, we are conversing as nimbly as I do with Jeannette or any of the older blinds, though her manners are still bad. She is boorish, impatient, and never greets me when she comes into the cottage.
“Lived here all your life?” she asks, and I tell her all but the first seven years.
“Like prison or home?”
What cheek. Of course Perkins is my home.
“Have family?”
I tell her they are far away, and she says at least they’re alive. Well, some of them.
Annie confides that at Tewksbury, she was placed in the ward with all the pregnant women, and she learned “everything” from them: of trysts in closets, perversions in alleys, children abandoned on doorsteps, or worse, disposed of. I’m not shocked, but I hadn’t truly understood the dark underbelly of the world Kate had come from; now I feel that I am at last gaining entrance into her circumstances, the plot that framed our short romance. It strikes me, hard as a slap, that she could have abandoned our child, but she did not.
Apparently, the deadhouse was still on the grounds of the almshouse, and Annie had seen more dead bodies than she could count, including her own little brother, Jimmie.
“Sister Mary died also,” I tell her, and we exchange details about our siblings. I show her the Emily Dickinson poems I have memorized; she has not heard of her, of course, as Miss Dickinson has never published a single book. As I have jousted with mortality, the poems and their obsessions now resonate with a deep and forlorn ferocity, which they didn’t hold for me before, and Annie is taken with them right away. It is these particular verses that provide the most comfort to us both:
This is the Hour of Lead―
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow―
First―Chill―then Stupor―then the letting go―
Annie has grown on me—and apparently I on her—because now she lets me stroke her hair, which is not as curly as Kate’s, but is still a delight. She allows us but a minute of such intimacies, however. The girl can’t brook much tenderness, as if she were afraid it might make her weak. It’s just as well; I don’t think I could stand a misadventure at my age. Only once has she come to me for genuine physical comfort. About six months after she’d arrived, she pushed her way into my bed in the middle of the night. “Scared,” she spelled, quivering against me. She’d had a nightmare about the Horribles, the deformed men who hobbled to the dining hall at Tewksbury to eat alone like animals. Every day at the blast of a whistle, she watched with the others the procession of the burned, the legless, some with faces hideously distorted by tumors or goiters. Annie knew she should feel sorry for them, but still they terrified her. I approve of her moral sense, but at the same time, I wonder how objectionable she finds me. She can see well enough to be disgusted when I remove my glasses to wash my face and clean out my eyes over our little basin in the corner. She has probably even seen the raised scars on my arms and legs, those tiny, jagged relics of my passions, when I change from dressing gown to day gown. I’ve waited for her to ask, but she hasn’t. It has been a long time since I have had anyone to really talk with, and this girl, I know, can handle truths that those twice her age cannot. If I’d had more of my senses—even one—I think I might have been more of the tiger, like Annie.
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