EverythingMyMotherTaughtMe

by Hoffman, Alice;

  I often helped Julia as she went about her chores, and so I was there at the end of the summer when she found the book. We had gone to gather eggs. She was set to make a birthday cake for young Rowan. He was turning nine, and he was her darling. It was to be a chocolate cake. She had showed me the recipe, and the ingredients included two bars of pricey chocolate, a cup of cocoa, and four large eggs. It was September by then, and soon I would go with the other children every day on the rowboat to Loblolly Cove to attend school in Rockport. I had never been to school before and looked forward to it. I had quickly come to love this place, and I loved Julia as well, for she treated me with kindness. Once or twice I had made a mistake in front of her. I broke a piece of crockery in the kitchen, and I suppose I closed my eyes tightly, as if I expected to be slapped. Instead she merely said, “I always disliked that cup. Now I’ll have a good excuse to buy another when I get to town.” I thought that she and my father would have enjoyed each other’s company, for Julia collected shells and kept them in glass jars in the kitchen.

  On the day she found their precious book, the weather was perfect and the world was golden, even the masses of seaweed on the rocks. Julia opened the first page; then she sat down in the straw and said, “Oh.” She gave a soft sob, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at her face. We brought the book back to the house, where she stored it in a bureau beneath the lace tablecloths they never used. She was older than my mother, and quiet, like me. She was pretty, but you had to search for her beauty, which was hidden in her kind eyes. When we reached the kitchen, she sat down at the table and I sat across from her. I suppose it wasn’t just their love for each other but their hatred for her that wounded her so.

  “What shall I do?” she asked.

  I wasn’t certain what she meant or why she would want my advice. Perhaps she didn’t want an answer, for she was asking someone who was mute by choice and therefore clearly had nothing to say. Or perhaps she valued my judgment. She took my hand in hers and said, “I’m as sorry for your troubles as I am for mine.”

  I helped Julia make the birthday cake that afternoon. She was deep in thought, and she scalded herself. Of course I didn’t speak as we did the baking, but I think she knew that whatever happened next, I was on her side.

  My mother was in a panic that night. She came into our cottage after she’d been to the barn and quickly grabbed my arm. Of course she blamed me. “Did you steal my book?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Answer me!” she demanded.

  I didn’t intend to start speaking now just to please her. I looked into her blue eyes. She’d been so young when I was born that some people thought we were sisters. I was certain that I didn’t resemble her in the least.

  “Maybe you’re lying and maybe you’re not,” my mother said. “All the same, there will be no school for you. That’s what you get for getting in my business.” She looked pleased with herself. “And it’s what you deserve.”

  Right then I decided to help Julia be rid of her.

  On the first day of school my mother went on the rowboat, along with Rowan Ballard. After November 1, the older children would stay in town all week in a boardinghouse and only come home on Fridays because the weather was too unpredictable to row back and forth each day. I, of course, was left behind while my mother took my place on the boat, saying she had shopping to do in town, although it was more likely she and Rowan were looking for a rented room where they could be alone and satisfy each other. That was the kind of thing they’d written to each other. Sometimes my mother wrote in French, a language she didn’t know. Je t’aime, she often wrote in the book. I learned later on that she had asked Charlotte Fuller to help her memorize some phrases, for Mrs. Fuller had been raised in Quebec.

  I sat in the kitchen with the other women that day: Mrs. Ford, who was formidable but competent and caring, and Charlotte Fuller, whose baby was in a cradle, along with Julia, who grew quieter all the time. They were canning blueberry jam for great quantities of the berries grew wild, and the kitchen was steaming. They had all taken off their dresses and worked in their slips, which made everyone giddy. I was encouraged to take off my dress as well, so I would be cooler as the huge pots of jam cooked. I did so but was immediately embarrassed by how dingy my slip was. Out of politeness, the women said nothing about it.

  “Have you never been able to speak, dear?” Mrs. Ford asked.

  Julia put down a pad and pen in front of me. I looked at her, and she nodded to encourage me.

  Not since my father died, I wrote.

  “Why, she has beautiful handwriting!” Charlotte Fuller said.

  “She’s good at many things,” Julia said matter-of-factly. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me.

  I would imagine my mother had a grand time in Rockport. Instead of rowing back and forth in the morning and then again in the afternoon, she and Mr. Ballard stayed away all day. She had to rush dinner, which was flounder and boiled potatoes, done to no one’s liking. It was after she cleared the plates that it all began.

  “You look well fed even though the dinner was dreadful,” Julia Ballard said in a small, serious voice. “I’m sure you didn’t go hungry today being with Nora.”

  You could have heard a pin drop when she said it. Everyone knew what she meant. We sat at a long wooden table, and we ate with the families, but having overheard, my mother didn’t return to take her seat. She stayed in the kitchen, waiting to see what would happen next.

  “Is it your business whether or not I’m well fed?” Rowan said in a low growl.

  People didn’t speak like this in front of Mr. Ford, the first lighthouse keeper, and everyone was stunned.

  “You’re my husband, aren’t you?” Julia dared to say. “If I shouldn’t care, who should?”

  She said it in a way that made me feel like crying. It was a simple question, with no recriminations. Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Fuller lowered their eyes and turned pale. We were all in close quarters, in the dining room and on the island. An argument could mean many things to many people and affect us all.

  Rowan stood up so quickly his chair clattered onto the floor. He threw down his napkin, not liking to be chastised in front of the other keepers. “If you don’t know what would satisfy me, then you’re far stupider than I would have ever imagined.”

  After that, Julia slipped into a kind of melancholy, or so the other wives said. She had taken to her bed, insisting that she was ill, but the other women believed she was worried about the state of her marriage. After all, Rowan was a handsome man and my mother was young and a widow. When I took some tea and biscuits up to her room, I saw there were bruises on Julia’s face and arms.

  “What would you do?” Julia asked me.

  I took the pad and pen from her night table. I was glad she’d asked for my advice.

  I wouldn’t let them do this to me, I wrote.

  September was a glorious month, and I was glad for the weekend, when the children were not in school and I could explore the island with them. The sky was a dome of stars at night, brilliant and bright. The wind was a living thing. There was so much to discover. We found a cave where we often played, piling up treasures: rocks and sea glass and dried flowers. All the while, I was thinking things over. My mother and Rowan Ballard had become bolder all the time. He came to the cottage nearly every night now, and I took to sleeping in the barn, which would suit me fine until the cold came on. Once, when I was late in leaving, carrying my quilt, I met him on the path. He grabbed my arms and looked at me. It was that studying look I’d seen when men looked at my mother. I was turning thirteen that month, and I suppose he noticed I was almost a woman. I resembled my mother more than I would have wished. His own thoughts must have frightened him. Ballard was quick to take his hands off me. He’d held me too close, so close I thought I might faint. My fear of him made my face flush.

  “Don’t you ever say a word,” he said to me. He called me a brat and a little whore, which I thought was amusing, c
onsidering who he was sleeping with. He told me I had better behave or he’d take care of me. The next morning I slipped Julia a note.

  I think you should escape.

  By the end of the month I’d thought things over long enough. Every once in a while Julia came to breakfast with her lip split. No one said a thing, not even Mr. Ford. They thought what went on in a marriage was between husband and wife, but the men had all but stopped talking to Rowan Ballard. On my birthday, Julia gave me a pair of socks she’d knitted and we went out to pick the last of the raspberries. I brought a pad of paper along. My idea was simple. She would leave a note and disappear, and no one would search for her because they would all believe she had taken her own life. Mr. Ballard and my mother would be blamed for her suicide and lose their jobs as their punishment.

  “She would have to do away with herself in order to have a life of her own.”

  “And how do I disappear?”

  I would row her to shore, then row myself back; then I’d leave the note in place. We could do it in November, when Billy Goat was at the boardinghouse in town. She insisted she would not leave without him, and so I would warn him that she would come for him before she ran away.

  We thought it over, sitting among the raspberry bushes.

  “Rowan wasn’t always like this,” she told me.

  I guessed that he probably had been, but she hadn’t wanted to see.

  “But he’s like this now,” she finally said, and then I knew she would go ahead with the plan. She feared the man who crept into her bed early in the morning, when he was done with my mother. She would have to do away with herself in order to have a life of her own.

  I began to go out on the rowboat with Mr. Fuller, the second lighthouse keeper, whenever he went fishing so that I could practice rowing. After a while he said I was good at it. The currents were wicked, but I learned to stay away from the north side of the island. When the children came home for the weekend, I took Billy Goat aside and wrote a note. Someone may appear when you least expect her. You’ll be told she’s dead, but she’ll be alive and outside your window. He gave me a look, then nodded. He was nine but sharp. “I’ll wait for her,” he said.

  On November 1, there was a storm. On November 2, it was Mr. Ford’s birthday and there was a celebration with Julia’s special chocolate cake and ice cream made from the goats’ milk flavored with nutmeg. Mrs. Ford played the piano, and the Fullers danced and so did my mother and Rowan Ballard, right there in front of everyone.

  “What do you think of them?” Mr. Ford asked me. He wasn’t in the habit of addressing children, but I happened to be sitting next to him, and perhaps I wasn’t a child anymore. I took a pad and pen, then handed him my message.

  They should be ashamed.

  The third of November was clear, and the sea was as calm as glass, deep-black glass that liked to take a life or two. My father had told me the best shells could be found at such times, when the water was still. I met Julia after dark and helped her scatter her belongings on the rocks, high up enough so they wouldn’t be washed away. Her nightgown and shoes and the combs she wore in her hair. She took nothing with her, only a black dress that was kept in the back of her closet that her husband wouldn’t miss and a pair of Mrs. Ford’s old boots. We got into the rowboat and headed toward shore in the dark, not to the harbor but to a little beach nearby. Julia’s face looked pinched at first, she had lately been badly beaten, but she soon relaxed, and her hair, always pinned up, fell loose and was swept back by the breeze. She began to look like someone else—perhaps the person she’d once been. When we got to the beach, she handed me her suicide letter.

  “This will either go wrong or right,” she said. “But I’m grateful to you no matter what happens next.”

  She embraced me and I shed some tears, for she had been my only friend in the world. I rowed back against a rising wind, but I did well. I think my father would have been proud of me. I sneaked into the house. I left the letter on the dining room table. Let Rowan Ballard and my mother try to explain themselves now. Let them pay for their thoughts and deeds. Before I left I took the black book from its hiding place in the bureau, as Julia and I had planned. We didn’t want it falling into the wrong hands.

  In the morning there was mayhem. The keepers combed the island in search of Julia and discovered her belongings at the shore. With no body in sight, Mr. Ford went for the police. Rowan Ballard had a funny look on his face, as if his dearest wish had been granted, but he didn’t want to show what he felt. My mother, on the other hand, couldn’t hide her emotions. On a day such as this, when a woman’s life was at stake, she had a smile on her face. She suggested she make breakfast, but no one took her up on her offer. The police brought more bad news. Young Rowan had been so upset he had run away from the boardinghouse after he’d been told his mother was dead.

  At last the letter was read aloud by the officer, and Julia’s words were chilling to hear. She had been beaten daily and could no longer endure such violence from her husband. Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Fuller exchanged a glance that made it clear they were not surprised. It was quiet after that and no one spoke much; they simply went about their business in a silent, puzzled manner. Everyone avoided Rowan and my mother. They were guilty of something; that much was certain. Two days later Rowan went into town to post about Julia’s death in the local newspaper. He went to the boardinghouse, but there had been no sign of young Rowan, and I suppose that wasn’t his main concern. He had brought my mother with him without even bothering to ask for permission from Mr. Ford. He took out a marriage license, and he and my mother became man and wife. You should have seen the grin on her face when they got back to the island.

  My mother moved into the big house, right into Julia’s room, and the other two wives were none too happy about it. She didn’t have to take orders from them anymore; she made that clear. She told them they could make their own tea and wash their own sheets. As for me, I was to stay in the cottage and take over most of her housekeeping duties. I was now the one in charge of the piles of laundry. I thought of my father as I worked; he had wanted more for me. He was the one who had encouraged me to go to school, but my mother had said a classroom was a waste of time. I began to think all hope was lost, until Travis Fuller, the second keeper, came back from running his errands in town with a letter for me.

  “I guess you have a friend somewhere,” he said cheerfully.

  I went to sit by the shore so I could have my privacy. I’d recognized the handwriting from the recipes she’d written out for my mother. Now I knew there was still someone in the world who cared for me.

  The very next week a reporter from the Boston Daily Globe came to visit. He’d seen the post about Julia’s death and was now at work on a story. What would make a woman do such a thing, and why would her son be in such despair he would run off? When questioned about why he’d married again so soon, Rowan said a few words about how he’d had to go on despite the loss of his wife. He hoped his son would return to him, and if that should happen, the boy would need a mother. Mr. Ford and Mr. Fuller had forbidden their wives to discuss Julia’s disappearance, but Mrs. Fuller did manage to say that the first Mrs. Ballard was a very unhappy person and that God would surely take pity on her soul.

  The reporter found me by the niece’s grave. I had piled on so many white stones that the cairn gleamed in the sunlight. Some people were remembered and some were not, and sitting there I remembered my father. The reporter was a young man, but he wore a suit and was rather serious. His boots slipped on the seaweed as he came over the rocks. He introduced himself as Benjamin Hart, a name I thought was a good omen.

  “Up at the lighthouse, they told me you don’t speak. But they say you spent a good deal of time with Julia. What do you think happened to cause her to take her life?”

  This was part of the plan. To place blame for her sorrow on those who had caused it. I went for the black book, which I’d hidden in the children’s cave, and brought it back to him. He read a f
ew pages, then looked at me.

  “Do you think this is why she did away with herself?”

  I shrugged.

  “Or is someone else to blame?” I could almost see him thinking. He often wrote about crime and clearly saw the worst in people. “Perhaps your mother and Mr. Ballard saw to the deed themselves, wanting us to think Mrs. Ballard took her own life.”

  In that moment, I realized Mr. Hart had come here because he believed a murder had occurred. The black book could serve as proof. I felt a small thrill at the power I held, but if I didn’t let him know the truth, I’d be no better than they. As it turned out, I took after my father in more ways than I had imagined. I couldn’t be responsible for sending my mother to jail. My father wouldn’t have wished me to do so, and it wouldn’t harm Julia if people knew what had happened.