by Mary Volmer
“Madelyn.”
I nearly pissed myself. She spoke! And she knew my name. But, no, the voice had come from behind me. I turned to f ind his silhouette, black against the sun.
“William,” I said, stupidly.
8
William sent me back to Reliance ahead of him, but I remember nothing more until the path opened and the town appeared, lamplit, glowering above me. “I’ll take care of this,” he had said, easing the great bulk of the camera on his back to the ground. Was there tension on his face? Grief ? Any sign he knew her? I don’t remember. I remember thinking, Good. William will take care of this, having little idea at the time what this meant. “Don’t say anything,” he’d said, so gently. “Do you understand, Maddy? I’ll inform the constable. Don’t say anything to anyone. Can do you that, and be a good girl?”
Not until I stood barefoot by the pier did the charm deep in my pocket and the image of the dead girl with her blue staring eye and her body laced in milkweed come back as shivers all through me, and I began to run. Past the dock and the last of the market vendors, gathering their carts; past the Patch, up Main Street to Union, and the only word on my lips was “Mama!”
Hanley, not Mama, grabbed hold of me in the print-shop alleyway.
“Hey, easy! Easy, Maddy. Goddammit.”
“Let go, Hanley!”
“Are you okay?”
The question briefly crippled me with gratitude. He glanced over his shoulder. The kitchen lamp stamped a square of light in the yard. “He’s not happy. Did you get lost? Say you got lost, and be sorry. Be sorry as you can, and maybe you can stay.”
We found Mama in the kitchen, standing against the wall near the larder, hands white around a broom, like some kind of cornered haunt. My heart nearly kicked a hole through my ribs. The sight of her so pale and motionless must have spooked Hanley too, because he took his hat in hand but found nothing to say to her. Any words in my mouth dried up, for no sooner did she see me, than she seemed to look through me; I felt this numb remove settle over my shoulders the way sleep does. Whatever urgency ran me up that hill vanished. I turned away and walked past her, straight down the hall to Mr. Dryfus’s study, hardly caring what he’d say. He was sitting behind his desk, face grim, meerschaum pipe poised like a gavel.
“Leave us, Hanley,” he said.
Even if I’d tried, I don’t think I could have heeded Hanley’s advice to be sorry. I didn’t feel sorry. Didn’t feel much of anything, hardly noticed my torn skirts, my skinned knees, my bloody feet. I’d lost my bonnet, too, but in the stuffy air of the study, a kind of giddy belligerence overwhelmed what remained of my reason.
“Your sister has been worried,” he said.
I mumbled a response.
“What? What did you say?”
“I said, ‘I doubt it.’ Sir.”
“Young lady. The constable has been searching for you, and the deputies.”
“I don’t care.”
“She’s not herself, Mr. Dryfus. Lyman.”
Mama. It was Mama in the hallway. She took one step toward me through the door, just one step, and then, as if restrained by some invisible wall between us, came no closer. “She’s not been herself.”
What did I want of her? To rush and hold me? To slap me again? To cry?
Too much. I always wanted too much.
Hanley returned, this time with Clara. All three watched Mama as if poised to catch an infant falling from the ceiling. I don’t think I meant to say it, but I was so appalled by the frightened uncertainty in her face, and by my own rising anger, that the word slipped from my mouth almost without thinking.
“Mama,” I said. Then louder, punctuating the word like prayer, like a curse. “Mama, Mama, Mama.”
Then my breath caught, for the color had gone out of her. She stood staring at a spot on the floor, her hand to her belly, breathing slow as if she would be sick. I thought I would be sick. This is not my fault! I wanted to tell her, if only to convince myself. We would have been exposed sooner or later, right? We would go. I want to go. We should go away now, Mama.
She f illed her lungs and looked at me, and I felt a relief so strong my legs were strings.
“Mr. Dryfus. I got something to say,” she said, still looking at me. “Mr. Dryfus, you going to be a daddy.”
In the attic room, mama stripped my clothes and bathed my bramble cuts; a single candle flicked our shadows against the wall. Hanley had gone home to his sister’s house. William had returned with the constable and left again with Mr. Dryfus. The house was silent and cold. I wrapped Mama’s arms around me but felt in her hipbone, her collarbone, her chin on my shoulder, the great distance between us and pulled away again.
“Maddy?” she said.
“You did it,” I said. “Gone and made yourself indispensable.”
“Maddy, please.”
“Don’t call me Maddy. Dot called me Maddy. You call me Madelyn.”
“Madelyn, please.”
“Please?” But something in her voice, something that had been there for weeks, poked me now as revelation. I turned to face her. “Mama, whose is it?”
“I tried to tell you before.”
“You tried.”
“I did, Maddy, but you’ve been so moody, so quiet, I was afraid . . .”
“Whose is it? Mama—”
“John’s,” she whispered.
That shut me up. Dot’s boy? Dot’s boy, John? The breath went out of me. Of course it was! Of course, I must have known, but most of us have a talent for seeing no more than we wish to see.
“He came upon me, Maddy.”
“No more, I reckon, than any of the others came upon you.”
The blue vein on her temple pulsed; I could see desperation rising with her anger and relented. “You tried . . .”
“Everything,” she said.
“Ergot?”
“Everything. Tried and tried. It held on.” She smoothed my hair. “I thought maybe it’d loose itself, but—” She paused. “Maddy. You won’t run away?” Outside a dog barked, then stillness. “You won’t leave me, will you?”
Hate, that simple, stubbed toe of an emotion, which colors everything an explicable black and white, would have been so much easier than love. I loved her. Certainly not in the grateful, dependent manner I imagined girls were meant to love their mamas, but grudgingly, irrationally. For a moment, I found myself suspended between love and hate, or swinging between those poles so quickly I couldn’t tell the difference, and I was overcome by a glorious, though brief, indifference. I didn’t think about the dead young woman in the river, or William, or the baby, or the dumbstruck expression on Mr. Dryfus’s face when Mama told him. And in the clarifying absence of these thoughts, I knew:
Mama had not fallen in love with any letters. Her acceptance of Mr. Dryfus’s proposal had had nothing to do with love or its promise. It had not been a hopeful or even an impulsive act, merely a desperate one. He had been, I realized, the f irst Matrimonial Times man to offer.
“Maddy?” Mama said.
But I had sunk heavy and warm into my own body. Had I the words to express what I felt then, I would not have had the will. You won’t leave me, will you? You won’t leave me? The question stank up my head, stank up the room, stank up my heart, soured the light squeezing from the moon, and left other questions piling in its place.
Where did she think I could go without her? And what right did she have to need me?
9
A dead woman in the river. Mama pregnant. I’d had shock enough for one week, surely. Yet, one more revelation waited when Hanley, bursting with excitement, joined Mama, Clara, and me in the kitchen the next morning.
“Her arms, they were so tangled in tree roots they had to cut her out,” he said. “Not even the vultures could get at her.”
I pushed my plate awa
y. Mama, toying with her cup, f ixed her eyes on me. We’d circled all morning but said nothing to each other, and the silence was a clock ticking between my ears. The way her hand hovered above her belly. That watchful tension in her face. A baby. Why didn’t she tell me?
“Adam thinks the Papists did it.” Hanley eyed my plate. He’d already wolfed down the portion Clara gave him. “But she was a Papist.”
“Did what?” I asked.
“Killed her.”
I choked on the small bite in my mouth. Mama looked up. Hanley, pleased to gain our full attention, grinned.
“I thought you knew. Her throat was cut. Ear to ear.” He drew a f inger with a certain relish across his neck, before his eyes strayed back to my plate. “You going to eat that?”
It was evening before William returned from the courthouse with Mr. Dryfus, and the next morning before I could steal away to the photography shop. In the night, rain had come, the air tart with cold even as the potbellied stove in the shop chuffed comfortably. From behind the black felt curtain of the darkroom, I could see movement.
“Closed!” he called, and when he emerged, blinking into the light, his face beneath his beard was ghostly pale. He wiped his hands on his trousers. His shirt was open at the collar, his feet bare. River mud flaked from his boots, discarded to my right. I took an involuntary step away from them.
“My apparition?” William said, a question in his voice.
I’d picked up, without thinking, a picture book lying by the door and now stared at it, the mouthful of words I’d walked in with gone to mush.
“Flip through,” he said. “Faster.” I did and the stout little woman pictured spun a wobbly pirouette. “There’s a man who’s going to show me how he makes them in the city. It’s a flip book, a moving picture.”
I put the book down.
“What, Madelyn?”
“It wasn’t true about her throat being cut. I saw . . .”
William didn’t move, didn’t say anything.
“You know I saw her. I . . .” But for some reason, I held my tongue about the charm I’d found. I didn’t know why.
“Her throat was cut,” he said after a moment.
“It wasn’t.”
“I did it.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d heard. He pulled a glass plate from the camera, examined it as if he’d merely been explaining the workings of the emulsion process.
“You? You cut her?”
“Catholics consider suicide a mortal sin. They would not have buried her next to her brother. I knew she would have wanted—”
“So you cut her?”
“Madelyn!” His tone froze me. He held the glass plate in both hands as if he might crush or throw it. Instead, with great deliberateness, he placed it atop the camera, and his shoulders folded in upon themselves. “Her name was Aileen, Aileen, Aileen.”
“William?”
“I’m f ine.” He did not look f ine, but I said nothing, for he had come close, an arm’s length away, the taut, ready heat of him, overwhelming.
“I know it’s hard for you to understand. But what I did, it was—it was an act of kindness. A necessary kindness. I gave her family a truth they could live with. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“Murder, Madelyn. Random, senseless murder. Do you understand?”
I stared at his long bare toes, trying to separate the word murder from Madelyn.
“She killed herself. Madelyn?”
I looked up at him. “But why, William? And how do you know?”
“Shhh,” And the fact of him so warm, so close, left no room for questions.
“Look at me.” He tipped my chin. All fear and reason left me. “Don’t you see, Madelyn?” he whispered. “It’s better this way.”
Yes.
“You trust me, don’t you?”
Yes.
“This will pass. You will see. She will remain a beautiful mystery, our Lady of Shalott.”
And then he took my hand, not the clear but the stained one.
“I can depend on you? On your,” he paused, searching for the word, “discretion?” And didn’t I agree that we need never speak of this again, to anyone?
Then slowly, ever so slowly, he brought my hand—not my clear but my marked hand—to his lips, and kissed it.
I returned to the print shop. Linen snapped wet on the line. A chicken squawked at some indignity, and I knew I would keep William’s secret. I tugged a sheet from the line, balled it in my arms, pranced like a fool around the yard. Yes, I would keep his secret. I would keep his secret, and he would be grateful. And every time he looked at me, I would feel the touch of his lips upon my hand. An act of kindness. Yes. An act of kindness, even as the notion scratched like hens through the back of my mind. Did I suspect him then? Was I capable? Had he tried to kill himself ? His Mama? No matter. No matter, no matter, for hadn’t it been the darkness pressing the seams of his charm that most appealed to me?
For an hour the following day, a wailing procession disturbed the town’s discomf ited silence. I waited, listening hard to the talk, but no one, not even Hanley, suspected what William had done. It seemed everyone preferred to believe the girl’s death had been a murder, and lacking a suspect, blame was cast wherever blame was convenient. Mr. Stockwell’s Sin Society blamed suggestive artwork, novels, dancing, liquor. Liquor implicated the Germans, who blamed the Irish, who blamed the Negroes. I waited. The truth—as much as I knew of it—heavy on my shoulders. But William said nothing, so I said nothing. I held my tongue when shop windows in the German district were smashed, and later when three Irish boys were beaten bloody behind the warehouses. I said nothing when hooded men with rifles set f ire to Negro Town. I don’t know what else happened there—I suspect, now, far more than was ever reported—but by the time flames turned to ash, only a few shacks were left and no one seemed to remember, much less care, that a dead girl had been the cause. Mr. Dryfus squeezed only a few lines about her between a column on the Lady’s Auxiliary Luncheon and another about potato bugs ravaging farms east of the bluffs. This, too, weighed on me.
A girl. A servant. A Catholic. A nobody, like me. No sooner dead than forgotten. Except maybe by her blind old father and an aunt, who were Catholic and poor and nobodies, too. I thought maybe I should say something to them—maybe give them the charm I’d found. I did neither. I wore the charm, instead, hidden under my blouse. I tried to remember if I’d recognized the dead woman from the cigar box of naked ladies in William’s room, but I couldn’t remember her face beyond that staring eye, and when I looked again, the cigar box was gone. Twice I dragged Hanley with me to visit the white painted cross marking her grave in the Catholic cemetery. But what could I do? Nothing.
Then William closed his shop for the winter, and there was nothing I could do about that either. Some kind of business in Saint Louis, he said, but couldn’t tell me when or if he’d be back. He said little to me after the kiss. I reasoned he had no choice but to ignore me. Otherwise what would Mama think? He left Clara a pie, left me only his secret—more, at least, than he left Mama.
I hadn’t heard the last of him, or the dead girl, Aileen, of course. Dot used to say the dead don’t always shuffle off into heaven or hell. Sometimes they hang around to make use or nuisance of themselves. And Aileen did haunt me. Does, I should say. For months her image, tangled in roots in the river, one blue staring eye, visited my dreams. And she would haunt me in a more substantive manner a year later when William f inally returned and I left the print shop for Miss Rose’s house.
Even now, more than thirty years later, when I close my eyes and feel the weight of the charm on my chest, there she is again in the river, clear as a photograph.
At the print shop at the time, however, two more pressing excitements all but overwhelmed the death and William’s departure. The f irst, of course, was the
baby. The second was an unexpected invitation to dine, in the New Year, at Oak Hollow, Melborn Stockwell’s house on Millionaire’s Row.
PART ii
1875
10
Oak Hollow, a stern, federal-style house of yellow Roman brick, stood like a gatekeeper on the corner of Tenth and Hazel, beyond the courthouse. Here shop fronts and terraced homes, still decked in wreaths and holly, gave way to the grand houses of Millionaire’s Row, each secure behind its own moat of grass and garden.
Really, it was only seven blocks from the print shop. We’d walked. But as my eyes tracked from paving stones to columned porch to blue-painted door, the distance seemed much farther. I could feel how tense Mama was beside me, how nervous and proud to be invited into that house wearing a new gown. There had been little enough money for cloth after Dryfus paid for the ribbons I’d ruined at the market, but even without gloves, pelisse, or corset, it was the most exquisite garment Mama had ever sewn. Puffed sleeves fell to a low, lacy neckline. Beneath the blue muslin, lilac flounces gave life to her every movement and hopefulness to the smiles she’d tried on all afternoon in the attic mirror. She piled her dark hair atop her head in curls that framed her face, and though I didn’t say so, I thought her as beautiful as I’d ever seen her.
You’d never have guessed she was carrying. She wanted to keep it that way for a while, at least, and Mr. Dryfus? Well, he’d become ever more obliging.
I was wearing Mama’s Sunday dress, too large in the bosom, which hardly mattered. My inclusion in the night’s events, from what I could tell, demanded no f inery. I was there to keep company the resident invalid, Mr. Stockwell’s youngest, a girl about my age whose name I didn’t know or had forgotten. Dinner. Mr. Dryfus had promised me dinner, and while the smell of roasted meat wafting out of the Stockwell’s front door could not have pleased him, I was nearly giddy for a taste.
No other guests were arriving. I thought maybe we were the f irst, but when the housekeeper, a squinting, thin-lipped woman, showed us into the sitting room, a collection of jackets already hung. The floorboards moaned overhead and men’s laughter rumbled in the room adjacent. Were we late? Mr. Dryfus was never late, and I could tell from the way he gripped his cane that the possibility troubled him. The housekeeper taking our jackets looked twice at Mama. “Would you like a wrap?” she asked.