“Babylon, sure, sure,” John said. He’d begun to wonder at the soundness of his plan. Drinking alone was hardly that bad. And the stripling was drinking more than John wanted to spare. He was considering on how to get Able off the boat, when Able grabbed the water bucket, his cheeks bulging. Eyes frantic.
“Christ and all his fucking cronies!”
“Sorry, sorry,” Able said, over this bucket of his own vomit.
“Get up! You’re needing the air. Me too. Fuck, what a reek!” He grabbed Able under the armpits and after some stumbling and falling, got him up the ladderway and onto the deck. He went back for the bucket and hurled the stinking contents into the canal. It was later afternoon now. The wind and sleet had stopped; it was warm enough. “You need to be walking. It’ll clear your head some. And try being quiet, will you? Enough babbling about fucking devils and minions.”
Able nodded dreamily. John used his sleeve to wipe the vomit off Able’s chin. It was a gentle gesture, but then he supposed he should take some responsibility for Able’s tottering condition.
He decided against leading him along the towpath, though that would have been easiest. He’d had enough of a lark getting the boy sheeted, and even John wasn’t heartless enough to allow Able to be spied by gossiping bible lovers and reap humiliation. Nor did John wish to be harped upon for Able’s state. And so he took Able in the opposite direction, over a frozen, rutted field, grasses aright as flat-nails. In the near distance was a small wood. Beyond, under a reddening sky, were the jagged outlines of Rochester’s warehouses and factories.
Able sagged against John, mumbling incoherently, and it took all of John’s wiry strength to keep him upright. The boy was not stuttering, though. Still not stuttering. Of a sudden he scrabbled at John’s arm and shouted, “Willing!” then veered away, staggering in the ruts.
John cursed and ran after him. Caught hold of his flapping coat. Hauled him up from where he’d fallen. Able’s face was bluish and sheened with sweat. His breath puffed out in clouds.
“Here, take it slow. We’ll get to those trees, then rest, then walk on back. You’ll sleep it off. Hell, you can sleep aboard the boat. Doubt anyone will miss you wherever you’re fucking holed up. And I could use the company, I suppose. We’ll get you on your feet tomorrow.” John affected the sort of heartiness he had heard Erastus use to cajole drunken acquaintances, but his teeth were clenched in worry and annoyance. Able’s feet dragged heavy. His head flopped on his scrawny neck and his little black hat fell off and sat in the midst of the field like a hunched crow.
Then Able stared at John with rolled-up eyes as blank and white as a statuary’s.
John slapped him. Once and then again, much harder. Able’s tongue slid out of his mouth and he puddled to the ground. They were but twenty yards from the shelter of the woods. Cursing and pleading, John dragged Able to the base of a giant oak and propped him against the gnarled trunk. “Fuck. Fuck. You’ll be right now. You’ll be right. Just take a breather. Take a rest. Guess it were a lot for you. Next time we’ll take her slow, all right?”
Able retched out curdled whisky onto his vest. He moaned and his arms flopped up as if worked by some disinterested puppeteer.
“Guess your belly ain’t full. Should have seen to that, before the whisky. I’ve heard drink doesn’t go down well for some if they ain’t recently dined.”
Able sobbed. Tears fat as grapeshot slid out of his eyes, which had unrolled enough for John to see they were a green-brown. “I—I th-thought you were a g-good man. B-But it w-were a cruel t-trick.”
“A trick? Then I’d be damn well laughing. But I ain’t, am I?” John said, though he was smiling a bit to hear Able speak, and with a stutter, which meant he must be sobering. Able then stuttered out something about Willing being cruel as well. Stuttered out that he would never, not ever forgive him—though whether he meant Willing wasn’t clear. And then Able convulsed. And then he died.
… So you, see, Leah-Lou, how mischief can go awry and cause damnation, and so I tell again, cease it all afore you and your sisters are trailed by the ever-lasting dead for true.
CHAPTER 28.
“It was a cruel trick of your father’s, making the boy drink like that. Drink can destroy a body as everyone knows.”
“One can die in many fashions,” my patient said, her voice half-raised in question as if I might disagree to this most obvious statement.
“He was stubborn, and foolish, to boot,” I said. “But he only wanted to do good. What kind of man would he have been if he had grown older? Would he have gained any prudence?”
“Brother Able?”
“Yes, of whom else would I be speaking?”
“I’ve not a glimmer.”
“Well, what happened next? Your father didn’t leave the poor boy there, did he? Without proper rites or burial?”
“You have to wait to know. Wait. Wait. As I did. And where is my medicine? Mrs. Mellon?”
EARLY JUNE, and it is Maggie’s final visit to the studio of the painter Joseph Fagnani. She must leave the New York brownstone this very afternoon for Crooksville, eighteen miles east of Philadelphia, and there wait Elisha’s return while undergoing her own metamorphosis—though into what, exactly, is hazed, mysterious. Her tutor will be a Miss Turner, an old family friend of Elisha’s. Leah has thrown up her hands. “Your fate and reputation are yours to toss in the midden heap, if you like,” Leah said. “I merely hope you do not toss ours away at the same instance.” Katie is more supportive and has vowed to visit if she can slip away from her busy schedule of sittings and dinners and outings with clients.
Maggie takes her customary place by Fangani’s window. Elisha wishes her to be just as when he first beheld her—caught in a nimbus, framed by a window’s arch, dressed in white. He has confessed that he fell utterly in love at that instance. Would he have felt the same if she had been chewing at her oysters? Wearing her old brown sateen? Maggie can’t but wonder.
“But then, shouldn’t I be reading a book, Lish? One about German verbs?”
“Tuttie. Attend. I said I wish you ‘to be’ as I first saw you.”
“Ah, to be. To be?”
“To be the essence of you. The appearance is of secondary import. That’s why this photography science with its tiresome emphasis on exactitude has not a chance of surviving against a good painter and his kindly workings of the brush.”
Fagnani agrees. He paints Maggie stroke by leisurely stroke—meanwhile she must be as a living statue, a tableau of her own self. A wistful expression is not easy to hold for hours, but she must. Such is how Elisha remembers first seeing her. How can she quibble that no one looks so when they are studying German? That likely her brow was furrowed. That likely she squinted in the light and her expression hung between exasperated and bored.
The finished portrait shows a girl’s face from her sloping shoulders up. A high white collar circles her thin white neck. Her face is delicate, her hair in flaps over her ears, as if to keep out harsh words. Her eyes are wistful and dark as Indian ink.
“So ethereal,” Elisha murmurs, “as if a wind might lift you aloft.”
Maggie is proud of her small waist. But ethereal? That is Katie’s attribute. Maggie looks at the portrait again. Recognizes herself and yet does not. No matter what Elisha says of photographic science, the daguerreotype of her and Katie is still her favourite image. She recognizes herself completely in it. Is the daguerreotype still with Katie? It must be.
“It is exact!” Elisha says, and kisses the painted surface. “Know that if I become weakened or despondent during my journey I shall only need gaze upon you here in the palm of my hand and then utter your name: Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. I promise you, this portrait shall never leave my keeping, in all the years that I am gone.”
Years?
“Ich warte. Ich wartete. Ich werde warten,” Maggie chants. “Does that suffice?” It has been over a month now since Elisha’s ship the Advance set sail out of New York harbour to fanfare g
alore. July is underway and the torpid heat only aggravates Maggie’s already spleeny mood.
“It is satisfactory,” Miss Turner answers. She is the eldest daughter of the Turner house and, as Elisha warned, she is ugly as all-sin, her face like a cellar potato. She seems to know quite a bit about quite a lot, however, and thus Maggie has resigned herself to Miss Turner’s constant company. Has resigned herself to the Turner home as well. And why not? A prettier country dwelling cannot be imagined. There is a fence of white pickets, a bower of honeysuckle and roses, and the clarion chimes of the village church clock with which to mark every solitary hour.
In late July a letter finally arrives from Elisha from a place called Upernavik.
Dear Tuttie,
I think of you under the shade of some drooping chestnut, startling the birds, your play fellows, with dreamy tokens from the spirit world. Imagine me there by your side, and that I am answering all your questions … Cherish this letter! You may not hear from me again for a year. And promise me, swear it, that you will never sleep again within the house of your Tigress of a sister …
“I promise, Lish,” Maggie says. “I’d rather swallow coal than live with Leah again.”
She re-reads the letter. She is, yes, sitting on a garden chair under a chestnut tree. She cannot imagine, however, what a “dreamy token” might be. And she certainly cannot imagine Elisha by her side with Miss Turner grousing on. “Do you understand, Miss Fox, that the genitive attribute may be seen as merely another nominal phrase in the genitive case, which may hang off another nominal phrase?”
“Well, yes.”
“Excellent. Now form a sentence with two variant conjugations of wait.”
Maggie considers. “Ich warte auf meinen freund. Sie wartete und wartete.”
Miss Turner frowns. “You pronounce German as might a frog. It is not a language of croaks. It trips along thus: Übung macht den Meister, aber geduld macht gute. Hear the difference, Miss Fox.”
Maggie manages a studious smile. Wonders where it was that Miss Turner heard a frog speak any language, never mind German. Wonders if the language has a word for this sense of suspension, of dread and boredom mingling. German contains words for all manner of rarified sensations and phenomena—torschlusspanik, schadenfreude, weltschmerz, doppelganger—which is why she wished to study the language; that, and Elisha’s confessing that he knew nothing of German and wished her to be ahead of him in something other than beauty and spirit trances.
She looks up into the chestnut leaves. Hopes to see a flit of yellow. Elisha bought her a canary before he left, but it escaped as soon as Maggie opened the cage door. How does Leah manage to keep her birds contained? She has never lost a one.
“Miss Fox, repeat if you please: Glücklich was die heimat, wo die kinder das lachen ringe. Please now, I do not have the patience of a saint.”
“The patience of a saint? A saint?” Maggie looks over the fence to the public road, her hand at her throat. The road is empty. No stunted, limping figure approaching. No laden silhouette.
“You act so strangely, Miss Fox. You are a perplexing student. Terribly so. Attend—we must work now on the accusativus cum infinitivo.”
Once the lesson is thank-godfully over Maggie collapses in her bed. Her quiet little room has floral wallpaper, quaint bric-a-brac, a chamber set of china blue and, really, if she has to stay here all autumn and winter she might drown herself in the rose-covered privy in the yard. What was she thinking? Why-ever had she agreed to this? She is safest in city spaces amid the soothing clamour, the endless entertainments, the surround of supporters. What is to stop a mob from finding her out here, as it did in Troy those years ago? And then there is Miss Potato Face and her patience-of-a-saint comment, which made Maggie think of the nasty peddler. Though, really, the peddler has been limping into her mind unbidden all too often ever since Washington. Ever since that limping old lady guided her back to Sullivan’s boarding house, then tap-tapped her hoary fingernail on her green glass eye.
Maggie punches at the decorative pillow on her bed. Written on it in florid embroidery are the words: Least Said Soonst Mended.
Why-ever did I do that to the old peddler? Maggie wonders. For after she and Katie pelted the peddler with apples, Maggie grabbed his cap that had fallen in the ruts. And why-ever did he follow them? For there he was, limping behind at some distance, across the little bridge, then into the foreyard of the saltbox house. Surely he noticed how isolated the house was, how desperately plain it was. How there was not a neighbour in sight.
The girls who were Maggie and Katie heard him banging the door. They ran above-stairs as he shouted, “Give me back my cap, you hellions! Give it! I’s got the patience of a saint. I can wait till the Resurrection.”
Maggie and Katie lifted the sash. Their dark braids dangled as they leaned out the window.
“Oh, take it! And git!” Maggie yelled, and hurled the cap down. She hadn’t meant for it to land in the pig trough.
The peddler picked it up between two fingers. “Damn you. It’s ruined, ain’t it? Ruined! Where’s your ma, you two? Where’s your pa? Or were you whelped by wolves? Don’t matter. I’m gonna tell them about them apples you chucked at me. I will, damn me if I don’t!”
“Mag, we can’t let him tell,” Katie said. “Ma warned that if we got up to any more silly mischief she won’t take us to the Rochester fair. Remember? We ain’t gonna see Amy, then. We ain’t gonna get roasted peanuts or ice-creams.”
“We’ll go. We’ll get there. Shhh. I’m considering.”
They looked down into the foreyard. The peddler was still here. “An apology ain’t enough now. It ain’t! I want you two to have a hiding. I’ll cut the switch myself!”
A tear dripped down Katie’s nose. “Why don’t he just git?”
Maggie gnawed at a fingernail. They did not have much time. Their mother was at a neighbour’s birthing. Their father was at the village forge. He was always home before full-dark.
The peddler limped back and forth under their window. They had given him back his cap. He should be accustomed to taunting. To things hurled. Such was the way of the world for one such as he.
Maggie ran down to the cellar. Returned with an arsenal of turnips and potatoes and apples. “Look, Kat, it’s like we’re in one of them besieged castles.”
“Oh, are we like them princesses, then?”
“That’s it! And he’s the evil sorcerer. If we can get him gone, everything’ll change.”
“Lovely clothes. Pretty rings.”
Down below in the foreyard the peddler dodged their turnips and apples, hopping about in a queer fashion that nearly made the girls laugh. He yelled again: “You’ll die alone and ranting, you hoyden bitches!”
Just then Maggie found the rock amongst the potatoes. Mother must have collected it to add to her “curiousity” rocks bordering her herb garden. It was the shape of a man’s fist and bore the imprint of a fantastical whorled shell that was not, Maggie understood, of this place or time.
Maggie took careful aim.
“Mag, you got him!” Katie whispered, thunderstruck.
The peddler yowled and hopped, and pressed a hand to his bloodied face. Maggie feared she had taken out his eye, that the law would now be coming for her. A rhyme rang in her head: Lock her in the cellar with only turnips for food. Put her on a chain gang building schools. She gave a quick and horrified laugh.
“I’ll up and die now, see if I don’t! And you’ll swing for it, you two.”
“I didn’t mean to!” Maggie called down.
“Me neither!” Katie added.
The peddler staunched his bloodied forehead with his sleeve. His eye was intact, Maggie saw with vast relief.
“I think yous killed me!” he yelled, then limped out of the foreyard, out of their dull and ordinary lives.
Katie sniffled. “Leastaways, he’ll never come on back again.”
Maggie jumps at the knock on her door. It is only Miss Turner, asking if Magg
ie requires anything. Her tone is apologetic. She reminds Maggie somewhat of Machteld, Amy Post’s maid, who so wanted Maggie’s and Katie’s friendship. Would it have killed Maggie to give it?
“I’m just sterling,” Maggie calls. “Should we have tea in the garden?” Miss Turner replies that would be gut, and also nice.
Maggie presses her face to the pillow. Katie, Kat, Katherina. Maggie misses her even more than she misses Elisha. Hell, then, is not a fiery well crammed with sinners. Hell is a black, cold place, barren of anyone. For what fire and torment can compare to the self left alone?
Over the next year Maggie, as Elisha warned, does not receive any news of the expedition. Nor does anyone. The Advance is beyond civilization’s beck and call, though Dr. Kane is surely quite safe, and surely having quite an adventure—such is what the expedition’s sponsor, Mr. Henry Grinnell, writes to assure her.
The months spin by and though Maggie tries hard to be a good student of Miss Turner’s, a good guest, the lights of New York beckon her on, as if she were a small-brained insect. The Turners object to Maggie’s toing and froing, but they cannot deny her right to visit her family. Maggie feels badly for going against Elisha’s wishes, yes, but at least she keeps the promise she made Elisha to never sleep again within Leah’s house. Not that Maggie has a need to stay with Leah now. Mother and Katie have moved into an apartment on 10th Street and she stays with them whenever she is in New York.
I want to be my own Mistress, too! Katie wrote to Maggie when she first moved to Tenth Street. So much that I could scream. And Leah is such a bossy-bird. “Don’t drink that, my dearest dear! Another glass? Don’t talk so loud!” Well, you know how she can go on. When I called her a battle-axe she said she’d battle-axe my cabinet of spirits. “But everybody wants spirits with their spirits,” I said. Wasn’t that a clever quip? And then I reminded Leah that she was the one who wanted me to have a spirit cabinet. She turned near purple at that—because of course she meant one of those people-sized cabinets for our séances, the ones she gets from that Pettifew.
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