Reliance, Illinois

by Mary Volmer

  Beyond thinking a rubber thimble a daft idea, I didn’t give the contents of the box or Mrs. Smith’s reaction much thought at all. I was going to visit William. Mama, well, Mama could wait. Of course, I had no idea, as I hurried away from the dress shop, the state in which I would f ind him.

  Streaks of sunlight broke the slate sky into pieces and lit the hat brims of ladies strolling the shops; old men, gossiping by the post off ice, tipped their wrinkled faces to it. He walked around like he was looking for something, Mrs. Smith had said. Or someone? Someone, maybe me? Or Mama, I conceded, but buried the thought, and rushed down the alley to William’s studio only to crash headlong into a young lady hurrying away.

  We sat stunned on the ground across from each other. Sketchbook pages, obscured in the alley gloom, littered the ground between us; I did not at f irst recognize her for Mr. Stockwell’s oldest daughter, Georgiana, until she jumped up to gather the pages.

  “Wasn’t my fault,” I said, but watching her I felt bad. I had not seen her since the night at the Stockwell house and so couldn’t say why I thought her changed. Her face thinner, maybe? Or maybe it was her hands, which were shaking. “I’m sorry, Georgiana. Are they ruined? They’re not ruined, are they?”

  The sun slipped behind a cloud. The darkness deepened.

  “It’s closed,” she said, hugging the sketchbook close, giving no indication she knew me. “The photo shop. I looked and—it’s closed.” Then she ran from the alley.

  A buggy clattered down Union Street. A dog barked, and another answered one block over. Somewhere a man called out. “The other way, Jack!” But the alley was still and silent. I climbed the staircase and found the studio door was closed; not unusual, especially when William was at work in the darkroom, but . . .

  I put my ear to the door, heard nothing at f irst. Then a scuff ing, fast and rhythmic.

  The latch was open. I pushed through. The scuff ing stopped. It was dark and cold. The ceiling shades were drawn. The f ire was out. The stove door lolled open. When my eyes adjusted, I could see the flower stand languishing on its side upon the stage.

  And there facing the stage, his breath a vanishing fog, sat William in the rocking chair, arrested in a frightening stillness.

  “William?” He wore the white jacket with many pockets, but his boots crouched on either side of the chair. His blouse lay rumpled upon the stage, his trousers were draped over the camera to my right.

  I ventured closer. “William?” This time his head jerked. He stank of spirits. “William, what are you doing?”

  “Oh. Oh, it’s you. Of course it’s you, my apparition,” he said, but did not turn to look at me. “Do you know what day it is?”

  “William?”

  “Do you?”

  “Thursday, I think.”

  “Thursday,” William scoffed, shook his head. “Thursday.”

  “I’m going for Clara.” I took an indecisive step for the door.

  “Madelyn, don’t!” I hesitated. His face was stubbled and drawn. His eyes had no light in them. Had Georgiana Stockwell seen him in this state? “This will pass,” he said. “The day will pass. If you would just hand me my trousers?”

  “I’m going to go get Clara.”

  “Then I shall get them myself.” He stood and wavered closer, his thin torso writhing with black hair, his cock so shriveled and vulnerable. If he expected to startle me, he was disappointed. I’d seen my share of cocks through the hole in the backroom wall in Susanville, and really, what impressed me then was never the size and shape of that changeable appendage so much as the fearful pride men took in it. No, it wasn’t his nakedness—not only his nakedness—but his closeness that made my breath catch. I studied the yellowed crust of his toenails, the veins coursing blue over raised, white tendons.

  “Madelyn?”

  Footsteps on the stairwell. Then a jangle of voices breached the space between us. I ran to the door and called: “The shop is closed!”

  “What are you doing up there?” It was big Nora, her little friend Angela in tow.

  “Be nice, Nora. Remember, she’s slow,” said Angela.

  “He is ill today. He can’t . . .”

  They looked past me, for William, dressed but barefoot and untucked, now braced himself in the doorway. I hoped they couldn’t smell him from where they stood.

  “Ladies. Very sorry to disappoint you. Malaria, you know. Maddy has sent for the doctor.”

  This seemed to satisfy them—the disease afflicted so many men since the war—but their trust made me nervous in a way I couldn’t explain. I closed the door, helped him back into the chair. I covered him with the white jacket, lit the stove, and sat watching his eyes flutter, counting breaths until the church bells rang f ive. I was due back at the manor, but couldn’t leave him alone like this, could I? There was only one person I could think to help, and when I snuck into the print shop to f ind him, Hanley came without question.

  “How long he been like this?” he asked.

  I didn’t know. Long enough for Georgiana Stockwell to get an eyeful, I reckoned, but didn’t tell Hanley that. “He kept asking if I knew what day it was.”

  “What, you mean Thursday?”

  I shrugged.

  “We should get Clara,” he said.

  “No, Hanley.” I grabbed his sleeve, quickly let it go. “He said. He doesn’t want her to know. He said it will pass.”

  William lolled in the rocking chair, legs splayed, drool down his chin.

  “Scheisse,” Hanley said.

  “I have to get back,” I said. “Hanley?”

  “Okay.” Hanley, hulking and gentle, pulled the visor off his head and crouched next to William. “It’s okay. I’ll take care of him.”

  A confused upwelling of fear and warmth and gratitude stole my voice. I didn’t doubt him at all—quite the contrary—though that must have been what he thought.

  “Don’t worry, Maddy,” Hanley said. “Go.”

  19

  A week later in the kitchen, the cook, Mrs. Nettle, stood puffed up, hand on hips, mouth pursed.

  “What I tell you to fetch?” she asked Alby, cracking her on the thigh with a towel. “Don’t even remember, do you? And don’t think I can’t smell what you been up to.”

  Pies, tarts, and cakes for the night’s soiree lined the sideboard. The teapot screamed. I heaved it off the heat, scooped myself a bowl of stew simmering on the stovetop, then sat to my lunch, listening to the fluster of preparations, excited for the festivities, though I expected only to haunt the occasion from the second-floor balcony. I didn’t care, so much. Lessons had been short that morning. There would be music and good food, and the trample of feet above told me guests had begun to arrive.

  Nettle, cussing, turned back to the stove, and Alby scurried over. “What was it she wanted?” I told her. She slipped out past Susan, the chambermaid, who rushed in.

  “Miss Maddy,” said Susan. She was waif ish and tall with brown eyes too big for her skinny face; she was also the only one in the house to call me Miss, one of the reasons I liked her. The drawing-room bell rang in a line of bells.

  “Quick, Miss Maddy, leave that. Miss Rose is asking for you.”

  “Well, ain’t you just the fair-haired child,” said Nettle.

  I was not so optimistic; it was all I could do to swallow the bite in my mouth. Miss Rose had been nursing a headache when I’d returned the week before. Mrs. Hardrow had taken Mrs. Smith’s response from me and had asked nothing about my sister or the print shop—a relief, because I knew the technicalities I’d conceived to justify my def iance would not hold up under scrutiny. I was still, a week later, suffering a mild guilt and a not so mild fear of discovery, which eased when I found Miss Rose in the parlor.

  She perched on a settee, addressing a diminutive redheaded man in a white suit.

  “Of course
you may, but I fear he will be of no help to you on your book, Mr. Clemens. Mr. Bixby paid a visit a month—over a month ago?” Hardrow, in the corner, conf irmed this with a nod. “And if father did not know him, well . . .”

  William—combed, shaven, tucked into a gentleman’s vest—stood up from behind a high-backed armchair.

  “Ah, Madelyn,” said Miss Rose. “The Reverend’s wife has just sent her regrets, and Mr. Stark, here, suggested you might be willing to f ill her place at dinner tonight. Would that be agreeable to you?”

  William, the gentleman again, in a gray vest, his oiled hair gleaming. I could see no crazy in his eyes. “Maddy?” he said.

  I made some kind of aff irmative response.

  “Now,” said Miss Rose, “run upstairs and see that father is not indisposed.”

  •

  I managed to remain composed until I reached the gallery, then scampered up the servants’ staircase and slammed into the sickroom. Old Man snorted. Lipman jolted from a sweaty sleep. “Jesus and Joseph!” she said. “Better be a f ire!”

  We stripped Old Man’s shirt, wiped gruel from his face and chest, and as Lipman hiked her skirts and climbed onto the bed to brace her sore back against the headboard, we could hear Miss Rose’s laughter, controlled as a song, wafting up the spiral stairs.

  “I’m meant to go to dinner,” I said. “Tonight. At the dining table.” And at this clarif ication found the thrill polluted by a stronger surge of anxiety.

  “Well. La.”—Lipman grabbed Old Man under the armpits and heaved him upright—“Di. Da! Pot.” She pointed at the chamber pot, then hopped down. Miss Rose, knocking twice, swung wide the door as I slid the pot beneath the bed.

  I felt a twinge of guilt treating the turtlehead (I’d begun to think of him as my turtlehead) this way, like a living, shitting sack of potatoes. I felt for him trapped there on that bed, in this room, inside himself, but Lipman got her knickers in a twist if I ever said anything about it. “Nothing poor about him. Poor is starving on the street, not living to be old as God and pampered like I pamper him.”

  You pamper a baby you do more than clean and feed it, I thought. You hug it, kiss it. Love it. Of course, it’s easy to do with babies, which are little and cute, even if they’re ugly. Not even Miss Rose visited Old Man every day or stayed long. She’d sit stiff and quiet as a skeptic in church, looking like she had something meaningful to say, but never saying a word. No wonder Old Man raged sometimes. He was love-starved. I did my best to be gentle. I even hung rosemary sprigs from the garden on the bedposts as I had for Dot the winter she nursed Mama back from scarlet fever, then nearly died of it herself. But it did little for the stink.

  Drawn by the light, Old Man’s head craned toward the door. I brushed a hair from his forehead and pulled Miss Rose’s chair into place by the bedside. William and Mr. Clemens remained outside until Lipman, never fond of company, shoved past them to fetch the linen.

  “Mr. Werner, sir,” said Mr. Clemens, coming in, hat in hand. “Sam Clemens here.”

  “Don’t have to yell,” I snapped at him. People were always doing the same with me.

  “Madelyn,” said Miss Rose. William smiled.

  “I see his lips moving sometimes when I read to him, is what I mean. I reckon he can hear okay, even if he can’t say so.”

  Clemens’s tempered voice thickened into a drawl. “You said. Well, you said I’d be back to the river one day.” Clemens clutched his pipe, but this and his unruly mustache made him look like a boy trying to dress as a man. “You were right. I hoped. I hoped to speak about what it was like, back in the early days.”

  Old Man’s mouth opened, closed, opened again like a beached f ish.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Clemens,” said Miss Rose. “You knew him on the river?”

  “Everyone knew him. Knew of him at least. Your father was the f irst man to send packet boats north of Natchez.”

  Clemens was doing the other thing I hated, talking as if Old Man was already dead and gone, but I kept my mouth shut, my eyes on William.

  “Swore a vision from heaven revealed to him a town, no Shaker city, but a metropolis rising out of the bluffs. Imagined the levee churning with steamboats and goods heading all ways of the compass. He was still talking that way when I met him—in ’57? ’58? Listening to him, you could almost believe the age wasn’t dying out from under us.”

  “He didn’t count on the war, I guess,” said William.

  “Or the panic,” said Miss Rose.

  “Or the railroad,” said Clemens.

  The war, the railroad, the panic. It was odd to hear talk of a time before these things, like hearing of a time before the moon and the sun and the stars.

  “Not every visionary is a prophet, Mr. Clemens,” said Miss Rose. “This country’s full of visionaries believing themselves prophets and demanding of others a great deal of misplaced faith.”

  “He was right about Chicago,” said Clemens.

  Miss Rose offered to show Clemens her father’s river journals. William stayed behind. We were alone. William and I—and Old Man, who moaned, “Wiaa!” his eyes milky white, searching.

  William’s expression changed. “What is that?” he asked.

  “What’s what? Oh, just a sound he makes. Nurse says it’s nothing. You think he’s saying something?”

  “No.” William sat, elbows to knees, chin to hands in Miss Rose’s chair. “I don’t know. God, look at him.”

  I looked at William.

  “He must be near a hundred years old. He seemed about that old to me when I was a boy.”

  “You knew him as a boy?”

  “He brought me things. To please my mother.” He paused. “Everyone loved my mother.”

  He so rarely spoke of his mother, I was afraid he’d say no more. To be honest, it strained my mind to imagine him a boy, with a mama. Much less a daddy. In the photo shop, I’d told him about Landis Wilcox, my father—as much as I knew without giving Mama up—but this had inspired only a sneering retort that made me drop the subject for good. “So you’re a bastard,” he’d said. “Just like me.”

  “She was beautiful?” I asked watching him.

  “No,” he said. “Not beautiful. Alluring, I would say, like Miss Rose, except not so conscious of the fact. And talented. That’s one of her paintings there.” He pointed to the portrait over Old Man’s bed—a red-faced graybeard, with Miss Rose’s nose over a broad chin. “That’s him. How I remember him.

  “Maddy,” he said after a pause. “You’re okay here, with him. You’re not miserable?”

  “Oh no, William!” But his face had become serious and dark and my guts tightened.

  “Maddy,” he said. “About last week—”

  “Dearest William!” It was Violet in the doorway. William shut his mouth. “Won’t you take a turn in the garden?” she said.

  Dearest William? A turn in the garden? I scowled at Violet.

  “Join us, Maddy?” said William.

  “Oh, she must stay here with Old Master,” she said as Lipman labored through the door with fresh linen.

  “Go on, then.” Lipman heaved her basket to the foot of the bed. “No, now, don’t think a thing of me up here night and day while you . . .” She waved her hand and included in the gesture all I might do outside that room. I could have kissed her sweaty head, though I knew I’d hear about her sacrif ice for the next three days. “Off with you!” she said.

  20

  To be honest, I’d come to enjoy reading aloud to my turtlehead; it made no difference to him how often I stopped and reread for meaning or for the f ine sound of a line. The Metamorphoses reminded me of the Old Testament, which I preferred to the New because it was full of bizarre occurrences. Floods, parting seas, and men living in the bellies of whales didn’t seem all that different in scale from races of men growing out of serpents’ teeth or peo
ple transforming into trees or birds or cows. It reminded me, too, of newspaper stories Hanley and I read that summer—about scandals and murders and wars and young people dying horribly for love. Once in the Times, I read about a girl (rich) and boy (poor) who ran away to swallow arsenic and die (horribly, of course) in each other’s arms. And, well, there was no doubt in my mind, no doubt at all, that Thisbe would eat arsenic for Pyramus.

  I wanted to tell William this, to reassure him. I didn’t need him to explain last week. It was enough that he thought an explanation necessary. In the glow of his presence, all aspects of my life at the manor brightened considerably. I wanted to tell him about Alby and Mrs. Nettle and Hardrow, and Miss Rose’s gowns, about my lessons with Mrs. French . . .

  But not, of course, with Violet listening. She hooked one arm under his elbow, steering him toward the gardens and would have left me behind if William hadn’t offered me his other arm. I could feel bone and muscle through his jacket. No more booze. He smelled of shoe leather and Macassar oil and spoke with great and worried affection about Clara, who would not give up cooking, though her lungs were not healthy and her shakes worse. “Rebecca does what she can, but with the baby, she’s running herself ragged,” he said.

  The complex tangle of longing and guilt I felt at this was bearable because he was talking to me alone when he said these things.

  “Hanley sure misses you,” he said after a pause.

  “Hanley?” said Violet breaking in. “That great big ugly devil. What do you think? He asked me to dance at the gala!”

  “Hanley? Asked you?” I asked. Hanley went to the gala? A peacock strolling with regal sloth unfurled the blue eyes of its preposterous tail.

  “And?” said William.

  “Well, I told him no, of course.” Violet brushed her curls behind her ear as if brushing Hanley aside.

  William should say something, I thought, especially after Hanley cared for him. I should have said something, but kept quiet. William excused himself to sit on the grass by Mr. Clemens, who lounged, pipe in hand, in a lawn chair in the clearing between the manor and the kitchen garden, overlooking the river. Miss Rose had settled beneath her parasol on the stone bench next to him. There was a cold breeze, clouds to the south.