I told her about the science of graphology—the analysis of handwriting—and the book I had read in which I’d learned the letter S was difficult to interpret. “There’s too little expression in it, I guess,” I said. “But how could that be? Doesn’t it seem the most expressive of all?” It was a viper coiled to strike. It was sex. It was lazy wisps of smoke that you let lift from your lips.
Sessily. Sessalee. Sissly.
• • •
I THOUGHT OF CLOVER often in the few days after her visit, and after the carnival tore down and packed back up. I guess I worried about her. The way those tea leaves followed that dark curvy line seemed ominous somehow.
“Ice skates,” Emmaline suggested, as we sat at the table having tea of our own, discussing the performers who’d passed through. She ran her finger in the air, twisting her wrists around the curves of the letter. “You skate an S when you’re skating your figure eights.” She dropped her hand to the table with a thump. She gasped. “Clover will fall through the ice, to drown.”
Eulalie said, “I think all the trouble’s with that uncle Stanley of hers. Ssssstanley’s going to sssstab her with his sssstiletto.” She winked and smiled, and she studied her own tea leaves, which were too scattered to read.
As it turned out, it was a premonition I was having those days, but one that had nothing to do with Clover herself. I was rapt with her tattoos—she’d been a flesh-and-blood glimpse of Cecily’s fate had she stayed with Doxie’s dad.
And when the carnival left, Doxie arrived.
• • •
AT FIRST I DIDN’T recognize the child. Why would I? Not only had she grown since winter, not only did she now walk on her own two legs, but she was far from home, on forbidden land. I had resigned myself, absolutely and completely, to never being allowed to see her again. So when I did see her, there before me on my very own farm, she wasn’t there. This was someone else’s child, most certainly.
A woman all in black, and shrouded like a beekeeper, a dark, heavy veil hanging low from the brim of her hat, helped the girl down from the phaeton. They were alone but for the driver, a lanky lad from Bonnevilla who could be relied upon to slither out of his basement room whenever there was need for a cabbie or pallbearer or drinking chum.
In the back of the phaeton were steamer trunks, portmanteaus, hatboxes. This woman and her girl were refugees of the carnival, I figured. I wondered what sort of horrors might be hidden beneath the veil.
I’d been in the garden in my pajamas and robe, my pockets full of the stunted carrots I’d pulled, their leaves gnawed to twigs by rabbits. The two came toward me, the woman slightly bent so she could hang on to Doxie’s hand, to help keep the little girl upright as she stumbled around the clods of dirt.
When the girl finally looked up at me with Cecily’s eyes, I knew she was mine. The shock of seeing Doxie passed in an instant, and it was as if I’d been expecting her all summer long. I ran to her, and I swept her up and into my arms. She giggled and shrieked as I lifted her above my head. I tossed her in the air, up at the spot of sun. “More,” she said, slapping at my wrists. More.
The woman in black lifted the veil up and aside with the whole of her arm, like parting a drape from in front of her. This was Pearl, of course, caught in those cobwebs, and I worried about her. I worried about myself. If she’d gone possessed again, I couldn’t bear it. Though I no longer received letters from Cecily, or any word of any kind, Cecily was there with me always, whether she spoke or not. And I’d grown comfortable with the quiet.
“Pearl?” I said, hesitant.
She struggled with her hatpin as she resituated her veil. At the pin’s head was a hornet of topaz. “I fear that I’ve . . . well, I think . . . I think I’ve left Billy,” she said.
• • •
AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, we all scrambled to entertain Doxie, looking for everything and anything that might pass for a toy. We let her upend the saltshaker and hammer the sugar cubes with the back of a spoon. We allowed her to tear a plum apart.
She sat on my lap and I ran my fingers through the tiny, fine curls of her hair. I didn’t fret or dread. I didn’t plot. I wanted only to be there with Doxie, letting every minute linger. I touched my fingertip to her ear, learning the slope of it. I put my fingers to her neck, gauging where best to tickle. She flinched, then laughed, then tried to tickle me back in revenge, her fingers sticky with plum, her face comically intent on my torture.
Pearl had changed from her black traveling dress in a back room and now stepped into the kitchen in a long bright yellow robe aswirl with pink paisley. She was dressed much like the actor from India who’d ridden down the midway atop an elephant. She even wore beaded carpet slippers that curled up at the toes.
While we entertained Doxie, Pearl opened and closed cupboard doors and put on a kettle for tea. Emmaline and Hester, who would normally object to anyone rummaging through their kitchen, paid no notice. The Old Sisters Egan became more animated than I’d ever seen them, as they clowned and mugged for Doxie and spoke in squeaky voices. Hester knotted and twisted a hankie into the shape of a baby in a cradle. She held each end of the little hammock and rocked it.
“How long will you be staying?” I asked, though I dreaded the answer.
“Only a day or two, if you don’t mind having us underfoot a little,” Pearl said. She examined the patched-up china teapot that had fallen from the cabinet the day my balloon hit the house. Hester had pieced the delicate thing back together sloppily, for Emmaline, with cement and plaster, and it looked to be forever bursting at the seams. “I’ve booked passage for Paris.”
They’d only just arrived and already they were leaving. I held Doxie closer. “Then you need to go back the way you came,” I said, with an edge of irritation. “Unless you’re taking the long way around the world.” But then I smiled, hoping she wouldn’t sense my impatience. I would have to eke out to her every ounce of pity she sought, so she’d become addicted to my sympathy, so she’d escape Wakefield again and again, and bring Doxie to me, over and over. Pearl, so susceptible to spirits, would easily fall under the Emerald Cathedral’s spell.
Pearl returned to the cupboards until Eulalie, unsettled by all the squeaking of hinges, stood to get the tin of tea from the spice cabinet. “Let me,” she said, taking the teapot and nodding toward the table.
But Pearl wouldn’t sit. She walked from the kitchen to the front of the house, to look out the window and up the road. Hester was begging to hold Doxie, so I handed her over, and I went to Pearl’s side. “Are you worried Wakefield will find you?” I said.
“No,” she said, but she continued to look out, as if expecting a late guest. “He’s the one sending me off.” Wakefield, Pearl explained, had arranged for her to see a doctor in Paris.
• • •
THAT EVENING I salvaged a broken-down bassinet from the Emerald Cathedral, prying it loose from where it’d been roped and nailed on. We put Doxie to bed on the screened-in porch, where there were some cool late-summer breezes that smelled of autumn must. We sat in the wicker swing and rocking chairs and watched the angel sleep.
Eulalie brought out our evening’s cups of brandied plums, and we ate them with teaspoons as Pearl told the story of her escape.
“He wants me to conceive a child on the night of our wedding,” Pearl said. She spooned a sodden plum into her glass of red wine. “On the first night of the new century. And he wants a son. Only a son.”
“There are methods,” he’d told Pearl. He’d consulted with scientists and witches alike. He’d studied folklore and medicine. “We’re on the precipice of discovering all there is to know about everything,” he’d said.
He’d already begun her on a diet of potato peels and red clover blossoms and alfalfa grass, horseradish, and dandelion leaves. Alkaline, he’d explained. She lay awake in her bed every night, worrying, some tonic undrunk on the nightstand besi
de her. She cried for her little girl that could never be. She began to feel herself going mad from it. Wakefield had spoken of having her womb curetted, a word she hadn’t known. One of the maids, who’d worked for a time in an asylum, told Pearl it meant a scraping of her insides.
Then one afternoon Wakefield’s twin sister, Billie, took Pearl to Brandeis for a private showing of the milliner’s new wares. Billie and Pearl drank champagne on a sofa of white, and they would nod, gasp, cluck their tongues at the dramatic hats and compliment the shopgirls who modeled them. The girls would lean in to show off every hat’s every frill—the glass grapes with leaves of calfskin, the stuffed doves with sapphire eyes, the blue beetles with stone backs pinned to silk ribbons, the feathers, the flowers, the gems.
And in between all the polite fuss, Billie offered rescue. “I’ll help you get away,” she said in a whisper, leaning her own head forward, the brim of her hat hiding her face.
Not yet trusting Billie, Pearl said, “I have nowhere to be.”
“You’re up all night crying,” she said.
Pearl felt her skin grow hot, felt the sweat bead on her forehead, and she cursed her constant blushing and how her red cheeks always told all her secrets.
Billie would arrange for Pearl to go to Paris with Doxie to a special clinic. “What clinic?” Pearl said.
Billie said, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t exist.” Billie would have materials printed, papers and advertisements that promoted the fictional clinic’s expertise at selecting a baby’s sex. Wakefield would find it irresistible and arrange the travel himself. And Wakefield’s sister would send Pearl money, for as long as she needed it.
Billie spoke with her glass at her lips, her breath popping the bubbles of her champagne. “We’ll tell my brother it requires months of treatment. And you’ll tell him you’re taking Doxie so she can learn French as she learns English. And you’ll disappear into the city.”
Pearl asked, “Won’t he come looking for us?”
“Eventually,” she said. “But he won’t find you. And he’ll forget about you. He’s a broken man. He has no true capacity for love.”
“Why are you doing this?”
Billie leaned over, ducking the brim of her hat in and under the brim of Pearl’s, and she said simply, as the answer was obvious, “I want you both out of my house.” She then smiled, fluttered her eyelashes prettily, and turned her attention to the shopgirl bent before them to show off the silk lilies twisted into the hatband.
• • •
SO BEFORE PEARL left the country for good, with my girl, she found her way to the farm.
“We couldn’t leave without saying good-bye,” she said.
“I’m grateful,” I said, but I was heartbroken. Only months before I might have felt inclined to follow her to Paris, to be near Doxie always. But now I was home, and I was home to stay. I’d come to rely so much on Eulalie. And as the Old Sisters Egan got older, they needed the son they never had.
After Eulalie and the sisters went up to bed, leaving me alone with Pearl on the porch, I said, “Don’t go.”
“Oh, I won’t,” Pearl said. “I’m not tired. I can stay up all night talking to you. It’s so good to see you again. Can you believe how much we’ve been through?”
“I mean, don’t go to Paris,” I said.
“Oh,” Pearl said, worried, looking down to the floor. She reached to the curled toes of her slippers, to touch at their tips.
“You can hide here as easily as in Paris . . . even easier,” I said. “You can’t trust the Wakefields. She’ll tell Billy where you are, I know she will.”
Pearl met my eyes. “But you see, it’s all already settled, Ferret,” she said. “She bought me my own shop. I plan to pay her back, but . . . my own shop. In Paris.” It pleased her so much just to say it. “I can sell whatever I want.”
“Do you even know what it is you want to sell?” I said.
“It’ll be a shop for the new woman,” she said. “Dresses that fit. Cigarettes. Political magazines.”
“Sounds just awful,” I said, but I smiled, and I winked, as I said it.
“You’ll come visit us,” she said, which sounded even more awful somehow, and the words caught me by surprise. I felt my eyes tear up. In those words were all the miles of road and ocean between us. In that invitation to visit were all the visits we’d never have.
• • •
WHEN I WENT TO BED, I stared at the ceiling, two crickets in duet somewhere in the room. Every time I stood, my ear peeled toward the crickets’ chirp, hoping to cup the bugs in my palms to toss them from the window, they got quiet, dropping mum at the creak of the floor. Only when I was back under the sheet would they sing again.
Eulalie was awake too, but distracted by other insects. “June bugs in August,” she said. We could hear the soft thump of their hard shells on the window and the screen.
“What do we have to look forward to?” I said. It was a practical question—Eulalie was the expert on our crops and all the ways they might fail. June bugs in August sounded prophetic somehow. She knew the true villainy behind every summer song and flash of color. For her, the night quiet was always noisy with threat. As was a ladybug on a daisy petal. A robin perched on a fence post. The sight of any pretty thing could put a hitch in her step.
“‘What do we have to look forward to?’” she said. “What a cruel thing to say.”
“No, no, sweetie, no,” I said. “What does it mean, June bugs in August? What kind of damage will they do? That’s what I meant. What damage do we have to look forward to? To the crops.”
But she’d already begun to cry. We lay flat on our backs. She put her hand to her face, and the bed shook with her sobbing. I got up on one elbow and held my fingers to her cheek. “Eulalie,” I said.
She sat up to swing her legs over the side of the bed and rummaged through the nightstand drawer for a handkerchief. “They lay eggs in the meadow,” she said. “When they hatch, they’re worms that live in the sod. Then we cut the sod to put in the cornfield. And the grubs get in the roots.”
“Is that anything to cry over?” I said, hoping to make light. I walked my fingers up the back of her nightgown, ladder-stepping the knots of her spine. “Worms in the roots?”
I sat on the edge of the bed next to her and took her hand in mine. She put her head on my shoulder. She said, “She’s quite a little girl, isn’t she?”
I nodded my head against hers. We could see the black shadows of the June bugs creeping along the screen. “What do we do about them?” I said. “The worms?”
“We turn the neighbor’s hogs loose in the field to eat them up,” she said.
I said, “I have so much to learn,” and Eulalie laughed.
We lay back down, Eulalie in my arms. She put her hand at my cheek. “We’ve got skipjacks in the strawberry patch,” she said.
“I like the sound of that,” I said.
“Well, you shouldn’t,” she said. “Their eggs hatch worms too.” I’d seen the beetles bouncing around the strawberry leaves. Eulalie explained to me the notches in their skeletons and spines. The bugs, when on their backs, could right themselves with a click.
“They’re cute,” I said. “I like how they pop up and around like acrobats.”
She moved her hand to cover my mouth. “Sh,” she said. “You make me tired.”
• • •
I WOKE TO the noise of Pearl’s shoes on the living room floor downstairs, as she paced back and forth before sunrise.
She’d already dressed for the day in her traveling suit of mohair, and she wore her veil again.
“What’s wrong, Pearl?” I said, sashing my robe closed around my pajamas.
It seemed my every word anymore brought a girl to tears. With the question, Pearl began to whimper, and her shoulders to bob. I went to her and pushed her veil away from
her face. I put my arm around her as she cried, and I led her to the kitchen table. I put on some water to boil. “You’re leaving already,” I said, standing at the stove, staring down at the kettle.
“Yes,” she said.
“I thought I might have the day with Doxie,” I said.
“Ferret,” she said. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”
“What more could there be?” I said, weary.
“I can’t take Doxie with me,” she said. I held my breath. Her words had been broken by her weeping. Had I heard her right? I was afraid if I asked her to say it again, she’d take it all back. “I love her with all my heart, but I’m no one’s mother. I’m no one’s wife. I never wanted to marry. I got lost in all of this. And now I can start over. I can be who I wanted to be. I can be who I am.”
I sat at the table and took Pearl’s hands in mine. I knew I must move slowly, but it was all I could do to keep from running to the porch, to where Doxie slept, and snatch her up before Pearl changed her mind. But when I felt Pearl squeeze my hands, when I looked at her wet cheeks, at her chin quivering, I knew she’d already let Doxie out of her life. Doxie was mine. I sat up straighter in my chair. I gripped Pearl’s hand tight, and nodded, with my chin lifted. I took on all the stern and certain gestures I imagined a good father would have.
When the water in the kettle began to bubble, Pearl stood from the table to attend to it. She wiped her face with her sleeve, and she went about brewing our tea. “I’m not sure if I should tell you what I want to tell you,” she said.
“You should,” I said. “You should tell me.”
She stood still, her back to me, steam leaving the room through the window open an inch. “Cecily sent me here,” she said.
I welcomed it now, this ghost story. Pearl was on her way to Paris. It wouldn’t hurt to indulge ourselves for a minute or two, for old time’s sake. “You can tell me,” I said.
Pearl told me that she and Mrs. Margaret had continued to secretly visit clairvoyants. Pearl would go down the hill and into town, hidden in veils and massive hats. Most often all the psychics’ hullaballoo amounted to nothing—even the charlatans saw their tricks fizzle, with cogs skipping gears, lightbulbs flickering to black in their presence. Now that the room with the swans was unlocked, Cecily’s ghost refused to haunt.
The Swan Gondola Page 41