by Mary Volmer
If I’m not mistaken, Mrs. Hardrow came close to a smile, then righted herself, and me, with one word. “Enough! We do not lay hands on one another in this house.”
Miss Rose called. Violet simpered triumphantly back to the parlor. Mrs. Hardrow held my gaze. “Do you understand, Madelyn?”
A servant, sweeping nearby, swallowed a giggle; my hands made f ists.
“Madelyn?” said Hardrow.
I mumbled some response, and Hardrow sent me outside to “acquaint myself with the grounds,” which if meant as a punishment, felt an honest relief.
The sun was bright; the air tart. A pair of pompous, blue-breasted turkeys (peacocks, Mrs. French had called them) were strutting back and forth in front of the carriage house. Beyond the carriage house, I found a hen yard and a stable, busy with voices. I turned the other way, toward the gardens overlooking the river. Wind jostled the trees down the bluff. A skiff, small as a child’s toy from this distance, drifted downstream, and though perhaps the urge was there, the sight of that tiny vessel alone on the wide river arrested immediate thoughts of flight. Where would I go? Even if Mr. Dryfus would have me back, no way my pride would allow me to face Mama. I wandered instead into the gardens.
There were two gardens. Three if you counted the kitchen garden in the clearing beyond the carriage house. Four if you counted the conservatory. The two I mean were the maze of trimmed shrubbery beyond the gravel drive, and the rose garden in a raised clearing at the center. A garden within a garden. I’d never seen anything like it. I wandered through trellised archways of climbing vines, past hip-high walls of trimmed shrubs out of which, at intervals, f igures grew—a perfect sphere, tiered saucers like stacked plates on a stalk, an elephant. A dancing bear and a dancing woman stood across from each other where the path opened to the rose garden.
I looked again. A thin trail of blue smoke wafted from the bear’s mouth. “Hello?” I said. The frantic rustling I heard turned my stomach. I’d thought I was alone, but when I stepped around I saw the redhead, Alby, from the kitchen, sitting on a ledge of rock, blushing as if caught doing her business.
“You’re smoking,” I said.
“Am not.”
But she was. The pocket of her pinafore was smoking. A small yellow flame leaped from the fabric. Alby sprang from the bench, bringing forth a whole dictionary of curse words, and revealing the culprit, a cob pipe she’d hidden in her pocket at my approach, now snapped in two. After she got done with her little f ire dance, she faced me like a boy, feet wide apart, hands on hips, head cocked to a challenge.
“You rat on me, I’ll pound you,” she said.
She wasn’t fooling me. I could smell fear beneath that bravado as sure as I smelled smoke.
“Not gonna rat,” I said, grinning at her in spite of myself.
“You laugh, I’ll pound you too. Hear me?”
I heard, but once I started laughing, the urge twisted into an impotent fury—directed at Violet or Mama or myself, hard to say, but for a full minute I raged around that clearing with a branch I’d picked up, thrashing shrubs as though they had faces until I had no breath left in me. Felt a little better for it.
Alby watched all this, eyes wide at f irst, and when it was clear the f it had blown over, stepped closer.
“Look at you,” she said. “You missing someone somewhere, ain’t you? Huh? Someone missing you? Mama? Daddy? First time in service, I reckon.”
I’d turned away from her, still breathing hard, but she came around to meet my eyes. “Hey.” There was a gap between her front teeth. The freckles bridging her broad, flat nose were the same color as her eyes.
Not a servant, I almost said, but this left open the question of what I was, and I still wasn’t sure. “Mama’s dead,” I said instead, the quaver in my voice lending validity. “Cholera. After the war. Lots of folks died. I never knew my daddy,” which was true.
“Yeah. Well.” She kicked at the gravel, and the little brown birds scratching through the shrubs jostled and settled. “I woulda given you mine if you’d asked for ’em.” She made space for me on the rock ledge under the bear and examined the charred hole in her pinafore. “Sumbitch owned my mamma, God rest her, but never owned me, and I ran off and left him to his stumps and sermonizing, and I’ll run from here too if’n old Nettle don’t leave off me. And Hardrow.”
Her talk calmed me some. She was fourteen, maybe older, but small like me. Probably she could pass for white if she wanted, and it was my impression she knew a great deal about the world. She glanced sideways at me; I looked away.
“I want you to know I didn’t mean nothing by what I said in the kitchen, about you not having looks enough to be a servant. You don’t and that’s the truth, not an outright meanness.” I was willing to concede this. “Who done it to you anyway?” she said.
“Nobody done it to me.”
“Mightn’t be a curse.”
“Nobody done it,” I said. “And I don’t believe in curses. Or spirits.”
She shrugged as if to say I could believe what I wanted at my own risk. “My daddy, he might call a face like yours a blessed misfortune. Know what that is?” I didn’t. “It’s when the bad things, accidents and such, things you’d best avoid if you could, turn out alright in the end. Good, even. Might be the confoundingest type of grace, but grace just the same. You think of Job suffering so that he could get back tenfold what he lost. Or Mary Magdalene. If she ain’t been a whore, might never ’a’ met the lord our savior Jesus Christ by the well, am I right? That’s blessed misfortune.
“I think, maybe”—she looked close at me and I let her—“maybe a mark like yours is worth something. Money, I’m saying. Cash. Ever heard of Dog Woman? Born furry head to toe. I paid my penny, waited near an hour to see her in Saint Louis. All she got to do is sit there all day and let people look.”
A fate worse than death to me, but I didn’t say this.
“But now I look at you awhile though, you ain’t nearly so beastly as I thought, not nearly so much as Dog Woman. Where’s it travel?”
“Head to . . .” I pointed to my thigh.
“Even so,” she said.
I was very nearly flattered by this, but had no desire to stay on this vein. “Run where?” I asked. “I mean, if you was going to run, where would you go?”
“Easy. West.” She turned her face to the sun. “Arizona. Maybe California,” saying the word with such relish I couldn’t help remember the flavor of John’s letters home to Dot. Mango. Pineapple. Banana. In my imagination, the whole of California was edible. My stomach growled. Alby stood.
“Lordy,” she stuck a f inger through the burn hole in her pocket. “Nettle and Hardrow both going to skin me. I better get back.”
I didn’t want to go back. Didn’t want her to go either, already felt for her an outcast’s kinship—not the same as trust, mind you. “Alby?” I said and nodded to the third floor of the manor, thinking talk of haunts might hold her. “Why’d the spirits tell him to build a town here?”
“I don’t know. Something about how the rivers join up here. Meeting-up place of bodies and souls, or some such. Have to ask Nettle.”
She took a long look at my carpet bag. “You coming? Come on.”
After Mrs. Drabney of the Wayward Home departed, Miss Rose took to bed with a headache. Violet retreated to her room, Mrs. French to her studies. I ate two helpings of fatback for supper in the kitchen with Alby while Mrs. Nettle sifted weevils from a measure of oats and a hugely fat cat purred under the table. Next door, in the servants’ hall, we could hear companionable laughter. Word had spread that I’d slugged Violet and there was no use trying to deny it.
“Probably deserved it,” Alby said. “Vile Violet. Goes around acting like royalty when, from what I hear, Miss Rose found her rotting in the tombs for thieving and promised to make her an actress.”
“Thieving?” I
asked.
“Miss Rose, now, she was something on the stage,” said Nettle. In the mud-yellow lamplight, she hadn’t noticed the hole in Alby’s pinafore. At least she hadn’t said anything, and I could tell she was not the kind of woman to miss a chance to criticize.
“Not that I ever saw her,” said Nettle. “Me? Now I am not the kind of woman to patronize a theater.” I looked at Alby, not sure what kind of woman was supposed to patronize a theater. “But my brother, he saw her at the Park in New York the week before Lincoln . . .” She let the sentence fall. I heard voices and footsteps up the little staircase to the basement’s outer door. Servants jostled into the courtyard toward the carriage house.
“Anyway, I reckon the stage was what come between them, old master and Miss Rose.”
“Thought it was a young man, what got between them,” said Alby.
“A young man on the stage. An actor,” she said, shooing the cat and throwing the contents of the sifter into the f ire. “Carried off her heart, then carried her away when she was not much older than you. When he died, only the stage was left to her. Old master wouldn’t hear her name aloud.” She damped the coals, spread her heavy hands down her apron. “Never again spoke it.”
“Why?”
Nettle, looking at me as if I were daft, picked up the bread bowl.
“Why? Couldn’t conscience a daughter on the stage, that’s why. Though, you ask me . . . You ask me, he’s to blame as much as anyone. Everyone’s born to their own lot, and you ask me, it’s a base cruelty to educate a girl beyond her station and sex, if you don’t expect her to act on it. Now, course, Old Man can’t say anything either way. But you ask me . . .” She leaned in.
“Mrs. Nettle.”
It was Mrs. Hardrow in the darkened doorway; a gust of air accompanied the voice and damped coals seethed red. Nettle raised her wattle chin.
“To bed, Madelyn,” said Hardrow. “You too, Alby.”
Alby slipped out to the carriage house between the two women now sizing each other up like duelists, and I think that’s when it hit me—not my brain, which knew, but my gut—how out of place and out of sorts I was.
Nurse Lipman would not be happy to see me. The memory of the old man’s turtlehead and the sound of the wind moaning through the eaves of the cupola punctured Hardrow’s silent assurance against the existence of haunts. Not even pride offered comfort. As the women had words, I stood f idgeting, close to tears in the hallway, yearning as I never supposed I would for my cot in the little attic room in the print shop. Nettle, agitated, brushed by me down the hall, but Mrs. Hardrow, turning and f inding me still there, paused. She lit her candle, and leaning close, blew out the lamp above my head. “Come along, then,” she said.
One by one she blew out each lamp on our way up the stairs. By the time we pushed through the service door to the third-floor landing, her little flame was the only light beyond starlight through the cupola. She handed me the candle, put her strong hand softly on my shoulder, pointed me the way, and bade me good night.
16
I’d found Nurse Lipman splayed across the bed we were to share, leaving me only slivers of mattress, which together might have been enough to curl into. Her breathing wasn’t right. I knew she was awake but lay down with my carpetbag by the closet without saying anything, because even if I’d been up for a tussle, I could tell she was more than my match. I must have slept because I woke to her toe in my side. “If Hardrow asks, you wanted to sleep on the floor,” she’d said. Now in the sickroom, with equal force: “Tell him who you are.”
“Madelyn.”
“Louder.”
A gray f ilm fogged the old man’s eyes; his pale bald head was a patchwork of green, purple, and blue, and the whole room stank of waste and mold. Why the windows were still shuttered and the curtains drawn, I didn’t know. The only light was a flickering oil lamp that cast unsettling shadows across the walls and over the portraits staring down.
“I’m Madelyn Branch, Mr. Werner. Maddy. Nice to meet you?”
He reached with one bony hand. I jerked back. Nurse Lipman laughed and something between a grimace and smile scarred Old Man’s face. He craned his neck and opened his toothless mouth. “Wiaaa!” A mournful moan, and again. “Wiaaa!”
“Now, now, Mr. Werner,” said Nurse Lipman and gave his cock, making a tent of the sheet, a fond little tap. Then with the broad, flat heel of her hand, she pressed his head back into the pillow and in the space of f ive minutes heaved him on his side, cleaned him front and back, changed the soiled square of material, and laid his dangling bones down again, as if to illustrate how little my assistance would be needed.
I didn’t need convincing. I had passed a long, vexing morning in the library with Violet, who, I discovered, also took lessons with Mrs. French. Violet, who could recite in French and German and who, until Miss Rose called her away to sing, sat at the table smirking at my every mistake. Meat pie with gravy for lunch had brightened my spirits considerably, but I had no desire to spend the afternoon cooped up in the sickroom.
Old Man groaned again.
“What’s he saying?” I asked, watching her. Nettle was sure Lipman must have stuttered as child, or been what she called “compromised.” I suppose this was meant to explain how Lipman at twenty-nine (that is, still young enough to marry, barely) could be content alone with Old Man every day, with little to no diversion beyond Sunday service and choir every Tuesday at the Lutheran church.
“Sounds close to a word,” I said.
Lipman shook her head. “Just a sound he makes. He’s been, well, agitated.”
A knock turned our heads. The landing door opened to a shock of light and air and my stomach did a flip. Miss Rose’s dark silhouette f illed the doorway. She’d been abed all morning with a headache but was dressed f ine now, her skirts too wide for the threshold, her hair an elaborate pattern of braids and curls. She stood, handkerchief to her nose, as if waiting for the stink to leave or some cue to enter. I could not take my eyes from her.
“How is he today, Nurse Lipman?”
Old Man’s neck craned again, toward the light or Miss Rose’s voice; I couldn’t tell. His mouth opened to nothing but a wheezing breath.
“Fine. Fine as ever, Miss. I was just about to fetch his lunch.”
Miss Rose entered, easing through the doorway, then stood over the bed staring at Old Man, the handkerchief obscuring her expression and muffling her voice, which, when she spoke again, sounded oddly wooden. “Bonjour, Papa,” she said, and bending with great care, holding her head still as if to hold a crown in place, kissed him on the cheek.
She didn’t appear to notice me until Lipman, with a jerk of her head, motioned me out of the room.
“You are not to worry my father with news of any kind. Do you understand?”
I stepped back into the room. Miss Rose looked at me in the darkness.
“No romance or maritime stories.” As if she suspected I knew a great many by heart. “He was a merchant marine in his early manhood; his memories of the life he led then—before my mother died—they must still haunt him. If there are spirits in this room,” she glanced about. “If there are spirits, they are given life by regret.”
She handed me the odd book of verse I’d struggled with two days before. “This will do for reading. Keep it with you. Read it over f irst so that when you read aloud, the words do not resist your tongue. ‘Of bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing . . .’” Her smile fading with her voice as her eyes came to rest on her father.
“Right. Well. I’ll just fetch his lunch then.” Lipman left. Miss Rose remained silent. The book felt heavy in my hands, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Stay? I wanted to slip away, but by and by Miss Rose spoke again.
“Why is it?” she asked—me or the old man; I wasn’t sure. “Why is it that one must always be reminded of one’s own mortality?” She looked at me.
“There will be a record of my father, in Mr. Dryfus’s book?” I said I guessed so. “How much of a record? How many words, how many pages for a life such as his?”
I hadn’t read any of Mr. Dryfus’s book. “Two pages, I guess.”
“And what, I wonder, will be written of me?”
I didn’t recognize the question to be rhetorical. “Depends,” I said.
“Oh? On what?”
“On who writes it, I guess.”
I thanked my stars for the knock on the door, because from the look her face, I was afraid I’d said something truly daft.
Lipman set Old Man’s mush on the bedside table. Miss Rose, turning with care, left us—she seemed relieved to do so—and I had no more contact with her for three days, until after morning lessons and lunch, a servant came to fetch me.
It had become clear by this time that I was to be more Mrs. French’s than Miss Rose’s project, and thus far I had proven neither an apt nor an eager student. That’s not true. I was eager, but hated to be wrong, especially in front of Violet. Even after Violet left me alone with Mrs. French, as she did each day an hour before lunch to practice her scales and attend Miss Rose, frustration all but overwhelmed me.
Really, I wasn’t at all sure Mrs. French knew how to teach. There was not a McGuffey Reader in the house, for one thing, and we spent a great deal less time spelling, drawing, learning sums, and reciting than I expected. Whatever my struggles at the Susanville School, I had been adept at parroting facts that the teacher, Mr. Lynd, had written on the board to memorize. Mrs. French had the terrible habit of responding to my answers with questions and of posing questions that did not seem to have answers—at least not answers she saw f it to give me.
On the second day, for example, after Violet left, we read aloud a story in which a man, who’d been compelled to leave a cave of shadows he’d called home, returned to share all the diff icult and wonderful discoveries he’d made beyond, only to f ind that no one believed him. They called him crazy. I found it a very strange story indeed, not just in the way it was told (two men talking), but also in what happened. Mrs. French did not seem inclined to offer clarity.