I wanted to believe him, but I’d met enough empty promises in my life to know one when I heard it. I left without speaking again.
Safely cocooned in my room, wrapped in the pink-and-gold bedspread that still smelled of nutmeg and sandalwood, I removed the coin from its tiny pocket in my skirt and studied the silver-eyed queen. She had a mischievous, run-away-with-me sort of smile, and for a moment I felt my heart swoop like something taking flight, tasted cedar and salt in my mouth—
I crossed to my dresser and tucked her into a hole in the lining of my jewelry box; I was too old to carry around such fanciful trinkets, anyway.
In March 1908 I was thirteen, which is such an intensely awkward and self-absorbed age that I remember almost nothing about that year except that I grew four inches and Wilda made me start wearing a terrible wire contraption over my breasts. My father was on a steamer heading to the South Pole, and all his letters smelled of ice and bird shit; Mr. Locke was hosting a greasy group of Texas oilmen in the east wing of Locke House and had ordered me to stay out of their way; I was just about as lonely and wretched as any thirteen-year-old has ever been, which is very lonely and wretched indeed.
My only company was Wilda. She had grown infinitely more fond of me over the years, now that I was a “proper young lady,” but her fondness only meant that she smiled too often—a creaking, cobwebbed expression that looked as if it had been stored in a musty trunk for decades—and sometimes suggested we read aloud from Pilgrim’s Progress as a treat. It was almost lonelier than having no company at all.
But then something happened that meant I was never truly alone again.
I was copying a stack of ledger books for Mr. Locke, hunched over the desk in my father’s study. There was a writing desk in my own room, but I mostly used his instead—it wasn’t like he was home often enough to object. I liked the stillness of the room, too, and the way the smell of him lingered in the air like dust motes: sea salt and spices and strange stars.
And I especially liked that it had the best view of the drive, which meant I could watch Samuel Zappia’s cart come swaying toward the house. He hardly ever left me story papers anymore—the habit had faded between us, like pen pals whose letters get shorter each month—but he always waved. Today I watched his breath rise in a white plume above the cart, saw his head tilt up to the study window. Was that a flash of white teeth?
His red cart had just disappeared toward the kitchen and I was considering and dismissing ways I could contrive to walk casually by in the next half hour, when Miss Wilda rapped her knuckles on the study door. She informed me, in tones of deepest suspicion, that young Mr. Zappia would like to speak to me.
“Oh.” I made a stab at nonchalance. “Whatever for?”
Wilda stalked behind me like a black woolen shadow as I went down to meet him. Samuel was waiting beside his ponies, muttering into their velveteen ears. “Miss Scaller,” he greeted me.
I noticed he’d been spared the misfortunes of most adolescent boys; instead of sprouting several extra elbows and galumphing around like a newborn giraffe, Samuel had grown lither, denser. More handsome.
“Samuel.” I used my most grown-up voice, as if I had never once chased him across the lawn howling for his surrender or fed him magic potions made of pine needles and lake water.
He gave me a weighing sort of look. I tried not to think about my lumpy wool dress, which Wilda especially liked, or the irrepressible way my hair frizzed out of its pins. Wilda gave a threatening cough, like a mummy clearing its throat of grave dust.
Samuel rummaged in the cart for a covered basket. “For you.” His face was perfectly neutral, but a faint crimp at the corner of his mouth might have been the beginnings of a smile. His eyes had a familiar, eager gleam; it was the same look he’d had when he was retelling the plot of a dime novel and was about to get to the really good part where the hero swoops in to save the kidnapped kid at just the right moment. “Take it.”
At this point, you’re thinking this story isn’t really about Doors, but about those more private, altogether more miraculous doors that can open between two hearts. Perhaps it is in the end—I happen to believe every story is a love story if you catch it at the right moment, slantwise in the light of dusk—but it wasn’t then.
It wasn’t Samuel who became my dearest friend in the world; it was the animal snuffling and milling its stubby legs in the basket he handed me.
From my rare and Wilda-chaperoned trips into Shelburne, I knew the Zappias lived crammed in an apartment above the grocery in town, in the sort of sprawling, raucous nest that made Mr. Locke whuffle through his mustache and complain about those people. The store was guarded by an enormous, heavy-jawed dog named Bella.
Bella, Samuel explained, had recently produced a litter of burnished bronze puppies. The other Zappia children were busy selling most of them to tourists gullible enough to believe they were a rare African breed of lion-hunting dog, but Samuel had kept one. “The best one. I saved for you. See how he looks at you?” It was true: the puppy in my basket had stopped its squirming to stare up at me with damp, blue-sheened eyes, as if awaiting divine instruction.
I couldn’t have known then what that puppy would become to me, but perhaps some part of me suspected, because my nose was prickling in that dangerous, you-are-about-to-cry way when I looked up at Samuel.
I opened my mouth, but Wilda made her rattly throat sound again. “I think not, boy,” she declared. “You will take that animal right back where it came from.”
Samuel didn’t frown, but the smile-crimp at the corner of his mouth flattened out. Wilda snatched the basket from my clutching hands—the puppy toppled and rolled, legs paddling in midair—and thrust it back to Samuel. “Miss Scaller thanks you for your generosity, I’m sure.” And she steered me back inside and lectured me for several eons about germs, the inappropriateness of large dogs for ladies, and the perils of accepting favors from men of low standing.
My appeal to Mr. Locke after dinner was unsuccessful. “Some flea-bitten thing you took pity on, I suppose?”
“No, sir. You know Bella, the Zappias’ dog? She had a litter, and—”
“A half-breed, then. Those never turn out well, January, and I won’t have some mongrel chewing on the taxidermy.” He waggled his fork at me. “But I’ll tell you what—one of my associates raises very fine dachshunds down in Massachusetts. Perhaps if you apply yourself in your lessons I could be persuaded to reward you with an early Christmas present.” He gave me an indulgent smile, winking beneath Wilda’s pursed lips, and I tried to smile back.
I returned to my ledger copying after dinner feeling sullen and strangely rubbed raw, as if there were invisible chains chafing against my skin. The numbers blurred and prismed as tears pooled in my eyes and I had a sudden, useless desire for my long-lost pocket diary. For that day in the field when I’d written a story and made it come true.
My pen slunk to the margins of the ledger book. I ignored the voice in my head that said it was absurd, hopeless, several steps beyond fanciful—that reminded me words on a page aren’t magic spells—and wrote: Once upon a time there was a good girl who met a bad dog, and they became the very best of friends.
There was no silent reshaping of the world this time. There was only a faint sighing, as if the entire room had exhaled. The south window rattled weakly in its frame. A sick sort of exhaustion stole over my limbs, a heaviness, as if each of my bones had been stolen and replaced with lead, and the pen dropped from my hand. I blinked blurring eyes, my breath half-held.
But nothing happened; no puppy materialized. I returned to my copy work.
The following morning I woke abruptly, much earlier than any sane young woman would voluntarily wake up. An insistent plink-plinking rang through my room. Wilda snuffled in her sleep, brows crimping in instinctual disapproval.
I dove for my window in a fumbling mess of nightgown and sheets. Standing on the frosted lawn below, wrapped in the pearly predawn mist, his upturned face cri
nkled in that almost-smile, was Samuel. One hand held the reins of his gray pony, who was making furtive passes at the lawn, and the other held the round-bottomed basket.
I was out the door and down the back stairs before I’d had time for anything so mundane as conscious thought. Sentences like Wilda will flay you or My God, you’re in your nightgown arrived only after I’d flung open the side door and rushed out to meet him.
Samuel looked down at my bare feet, freezing in the frost, then at my desperate, eager face. He held out the basket for the second time. I scooped out the chilly, sleepy ball of puppy and held him to my chest, where he rooted toward the warmth beneath my arm.
“Thank you, Samuel,” I whispered, which I know now was an utterly insufficient response. But Samuel seemed content. He bowed his head in a chivalrous, Old-World-ish gesture like a knight accepting his lady’s favor, mounted his drooling pony, and disappeared across the misted grounds.
Now, let us clear the air: I am not a stupid girl. I realized the words I’d written in the ledger book were more than ink and cotton. They’d reached out into the world and twisted the shape of it in some invisible and unknowable way that brought Samuel to stand beneath my window. But there was a more rational explanation available to me—that Samuel had seen the longing in my face and decided to hell with that bitter old German woman—and I chose to believe that instead.
But still: when I got to my room and settled the brown ball of fur in a nest of pillows, the first thing I did was trawl through my desk drawer for a pen. I found my copy of The Jungle Book, flipped to the blank pages at the back, and wrote: She and her dog were inseparable from that day forward.
In the summer of 1909 I was almost fifteen and some of the selfish fog of adolescence was starting to dissipate. The second Anne of Green Gables book and the fifth Oz book were out that spring; a white, snub-nosed woman named Alice had just driven a motorcar across the entire country (a feat that Mr. Locke dubbed “utterly absurd”); there was some fuss about a coup or a revolution in the Ottoman Empire (“absolutely wasteful”); and my father had been in East Africa for months without so much as a postcard. He’d sent me a yellowed ivory carving of an elephant with the letters MOMBASA carved into its belly at Christmas, and a note saying he would be home by my birthday.
He wasn’t, of course. But Jane was.
It was early summer, when the leaves are still dewy and new and the sky looks freshly painted, and Bad and I were curled together in the gardens, rereading all the other Oz books to prepare for the new one. I’d already had my French and Latin lessons for the day, and finished all my sums and bookkeeping for Mr. Locke, and my afternoons were wonderfully free now that Wilda was gone.
I think Bad deserves most of the credit, really. If you could have manifested Wilda’s darkest nightmares into a physical being, it would have looked very much like a yellow-eyed puppy with overlarge paws, a surfeit of fine brown hairs, and no respect at all for nursemaids. She’d thrown a predictably impressive fit when she first found him in my bedroom, and dragged me up to Locke’s office still in my nightgown.
“Good God, woman, do stop shrieking, I haven’t had my coffee. Now, what’s all this? I thought I was perfectly clear last night.” Mr. Locke had fixed me with that look, ice-edged and moon-pale. “I won’t have it in the house.”
I felt my will shivering and warping, weakening under his gaze—but I thought of those words hidden in the back of Kipling: She and her dog were inseparable. I tightened my arms around Bad and met Mr. Locke’s eyes, my jaw set.
A second passed, and then another. Sweat prickled at the back of my neck, as if I were lifting some immensely heavy object, and then Mr. Locke laughed. “Keep it, if it matters so much to you.”
After that, Miss Wilda seemed to fade from our lives like newsprint left out in the sun. She simply couldn’t compete with Bad, who grew at an alarming pace. With me, he remained adoring and puppyish, sleeping flopped across my legs and cramming himself into my lap long past the time he could actually fit—but his attitude toward the rest of the human population was frankly dangerous. Within six months he’d successfully driven Wilda out of our room and exiled her to the serving staff’s quarters; by eight months he and I had most of the third floor to ourselves.
I last saw Wilda scurrying across the broad lawn, peering back at the third-floor window of my room with the hunted expression of a general fleeing a losing battlefield. I hugged Bad so hard he yelped, and we spent the afternoon splashing along the lakeshore, giddy with freedom.
Now, lying with my head against his sun-warmed ribs, I heard the crunch and putter of a car coming down the drive.
The drive of Locke House is a long, winding thing lined with stately oaks. The cab was just pulling away as Bad and I circled around the front of the house. A strange woman was striding toward the great red stone steps, head high.
My first thought was that an African queen had been trying to visit President Taft in D.C. but found herself misdirected and arrived at Locke House by mistake. It wasn’t that she was dressed especially grandly—a beige traveling coat with a neat row of black-shined buttons, a single leather valise, scandalously short hair—or that she looked particularly haughty. It was something in the unbending line of her shoulders, or the way she looked up at all the grandeur of Locke House without the slightest flicker of either admiration or intimidation.
She saw us and came to a halt before mounting the front steps, apparently waiting. We circled close, my hand on Bad’s collar in case he got one of his unfortunate impulses.
“You must be January.” Her accent was foreign and rhythmic. “Julian told me to look for a girl with wild hair and a mean dog.” She extended her hand and I shook it. Calluses knotted her palm like a topographical map of a foreign country.
It was lucky that Mr. Locke stepped out the front door at that moment, heading for his newly shined Buick Model 10, because my mouth had fallen open and seemed unlikely to close itself again. Mr. Locke made it halfway down the stairs before he saw us. “January, how many times have I told you to leash that deranged animal—who in the name of God is this?” His thoughts on courtesy evidently did not apply to strange colored women who materialized on his doorstep.
“I am Miss Jane Irimu. Mr. Julian Scaller has commissioned me to be a companion to his daughter, paid from his own funds at a rate of five dollars a week. He indicated that you might be generous enough to supply room and board. I believe this letter explains my situation clearly.” She extended a stained and ratty envelope to Mr. Locke. He ripped it open and read with an expression of deepest suspicion. A few exclamations escaped him: “His daughter’s welfare, is it?” and “He has employed—?”
He snapped the letter shut. “You expect me to believe that Julian shipped a nursemaid halfway across the world for his daughter? Who is nearly grown, I might add?”
Miss Irimu’s face lay in a series of wind-smooth planes, nearly architectural in their perfection, which seemed unlikely ever to be disturbed by the mobility of either smile or scowl. “I was in an unfortunate situation. As I believe the letter explains.”
“A bit of charity work, is it? Julian always was too softhearted for his own good.” Mr. Locke slapped his driving gloves against his palm and huffed at us. “Very well, Miss Whatsit. Far be it from me to step between a father and his daughter. I’ll be damned if I’m filling up one of my good guest rooms, though—show her up to your room, January. She can take Wilda’s old bed.” And he strode off, shaking his head.
The silence that followed his departure was shy and slinking, as if it wanted to be awkward but didn’t quite dare beneath Miss Irimu’s steady eye.
“Uh.” I swallowed. “This is Bad. Sindbad, I mean.” I’d wanted to name him after a great explorer, but none of them seemed to fit. Dr. Livingstone and Mr. Stanley were obvious choices (Mr. Locke so admired them he even had Stanley’s own revolver on display in his office, a narrow-nosed Enfield that he cleaned and oiled on a weekly basis), but they made me think of
that shriveled African arm in its glass case. Magellan was too long, Drake too boring, Columbus too bumbling; in the end I’d named him after the only explorer who rendered the world stranger and more wondrous with each voyage.
Jane was watching him warily. “Don’t worry, he doesn’t bite,” I assured her. Well, he didn’t bite often, and the way I saw it the people he bit were probably secretly untrustworthy and had it coming to them. Mr. Locke did not find this argument compelling.
“Miss Irimu—” I began.
“Jane will suffice.”
“Miss Jane. Could I see my father’s letter?”
She considered me with clinical coolness, like a scientist evaluating a new species of fungus. “No.”
“Then could you tell me, uh, why he hired you? Please.”
“Julian cares very deeply for you. He does not wish you to be alone.” Several nasty things leapt to my lips, including Well, that’s news to me, but I kept them locked behind my teeth. Jane was still watching me with that fungus-identification expression. She added, “Your father also wishes you to be kept safe. I will ensure that you are.”
I surveyed the gentle green lawns of Locke’s estate and the placid grayness of Lake Champlain. “Uh-huh.”
I was trying to think of a polite way to say My father’s gone mad, and you should probably leave, when Bad stretched toward her, sniffing with an appraising, to-bite-or-not-to-bite expression. He considered briefly, then bucked his head against her hand in a shameless request for ear scratches.
Dogs, of course, are infinitely better judges of character than people. “Uh. Welcome to Locke House, Miss Jane. I hope you like it here.”
She bowed her head. “I’m sure I shall.”
But for the first several weeks Jane spent at Locke House, she gave no sign of liking it—or me—very much at all.
She spent her days in near-silence, prowling from room to room like something caged. She regarded me with stony resignation and occasionally picked up one of my discarded copies of The Strand Mystery Magazine or The Cavalier: Weekly Stories of Daring Adventure! with a dubious expression. She reminded me of one of those Greek heroes doomed to some endless task, like drinking from a disappearing river or rolling a stone up a mountain.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January Page 4