The Hawkman

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  From the nuggets of glass that had once aspired to masquerade as gemstone, to swaths of windows he converted to mirrors by smearing one side with silver paint, he welded the world’s first suit of mirrors, an armor that freed its wearer from carrying weapons. He put it on and resumed his search, not for simple objects, baubles or ball bearings, or any substance that might be manipulated into an illusion to dazzle or frighten, but for that dullest material of all, the human kind. He went to the closest city, where younger boys were known to scour through garbage in search of their destinies, and planted himself among the warehouses. Soon enough he was approached by other scavenging boys who had a familiar tale to tell him. They led him to the man amid his stores, the sweat and anguish of the impoverished transformed into precious menageries of all sorts of ornaments: colored glass and cameos, wooden spools and Christmas wrapping, shards of tin and rocks meant to be gold or jade.

  As the boy approached the man, he needed to do no more than raise his arms and catch the light as it reflected off the buffed surfaces. The man might have attacked the boy, but all he saw was himself in the mirrored armor and so was unable to move—against himself, against the boy, against all the boys he had so blithely trifled with. The boys appeared from behind the mirrored knight and attacked the man, tearing off his clothes so he would have to watch the length and duration of his shame. The boys sorted through his wardrobe to extract its riches while the man was forced to study the horrific patterns and textures of his bareness. Then they each recovered the pile of goods that had been taken from them as the mirrored knight refused the man in all his efforts to avoid his cowering likeness. It was a gratifying conclusion to the humiliation that had badly stung the first scavenger, who had now grown into a heroic man and found it more satisfying than the discovery of his own treasure.

  Often it was difficult to separate her mother’s stories from the meter the railroad tracks and train cars exacted, as Helen saved her most hypnotic sagas for the long journey they undertook once Eva’s father had left them—for the war, her mother reminded her. Her reminders were constant at first, but then they subsided as the journey slowed, as if calcifying, being made into a permanent condition. For if Miss Williams were ever pressed for when this journey began, the time she spent on trains and in train stations, coaches and carriages, and waiting in boarding houses, she would be unable to account for either a date or length. As far as she could place it, everything began with the word “confidence,” and progressed into other vocabulary, most of which Eva could not pronounce: the names of laws, diseases, and methods for assuaging both, if not the outright banishing of their effects. Eva and her mother were trying to outrun them, sepsis and coppers, and an unlawful termination of some kind. They were going to have to run a very long way to avoid the disgruntled customers of her father’s investment house—into the territories, where everything would be different, from the land they would walk on to the sun over their heads.

  On the train was when the robustness of her mother’s skin must have declined, as they were always inside a train car, or a room where the air was too close, or holed up in a station where the exhaust of men’s cigars, women’s perfumes, and the unrelenting distress of fidgety children steamed up the walls. Weak and fallow, her mother’s skin turned, like the pages of a book that has been abandoned. Not pages from storybooks or the slick and shiny magazine print from which her mother occasionally made tales based on the illustrations—Eva instead pictured the lined and divided charts her father kept in a folder, without proper binding, where he was incessantly recording names and numbers. The yellowed pages fell out and he crammed them back in again, without regard for any order they might have had. But Eva was forbidden to touch them, so delicate was the writing there. Her mother was suffering just as the pages might have, as her usual warmth and glow were dispatched in favor of an off-blankness—something curdling under her surface, as if burnt or newly fragile.

  “Now ‘confidence’ could mean many things,” her mother said at the start of their journey, as if to explain why it had begun. “It might be a quality that is important for men to have. Or a feeling you have about someone or something. Or if someone tells you a secret, that person takes you into his confidence, because that person knows he can trust you not to tell and spoil it.”

  “Why does one word get to say three things?” Eva asked.

  “I don’t know,” her mother conceded. Helen fell silent then, as though she considered supplying an answer, but knew the search would be too taxing.

  “It isn’t fair, for one word to say so much,” Eva decided, “and for other words to say nothing.”

  “What words?” Helen asked.

  “The words some men give,” Eva said, “so when Daddy says, ‘His word ain’t worth a plug nickel.’” Eva was proud of herself for having answered so efficiently and in the voice and dialect of her father. “Sometimes he says, ‘His word ain’t worth the paper it’s printed on,’ and ‘Anybody worth their two cents knows that guy’s bogus, he’s for doing a sucker’s business.’”

  “Ah-ha,” her mother said, and to Eva she seemed to draw more heavily on her next breath, out of a sense of fatigue and surrender. “I think your father was speaking of what men in his business call ‘terms of art.’” Helen tried to speak lightly, though Eva detected a rougher strain entering her mother’s voice, along with an odd restoration of color to her cheeks and neck.

  “What is ‘term of art’?” Eva persisted.

  “It is how business is conducted,” her mother said. “Certainly your father did not wish for you to repeat any of this, not if you intend on becoming a proper young woman.”

  “Will Daddy come to meet us if I am proper?”

  “If he can find a way, he will. But he has so much to do and it is all so far away,” Helen said, and then her mother hesitated. Eva sensed it in how her mother’s breathing quickened, as if willing herself not to talk when she must have had too much to say. But before Eva could form her next question, Helen said gravely, “Your father has a duty to his country, and he is going to perform his service.”

  Eva did not have a perfect grip on what “service” and “duty” meant but had already been instructed her father could accomplish these tasks only across the ocean, on an island whose name she could not sort out. It took too much expended breath in the middle of the word, after a balancing act of the tongue she had yet to perfect; when she tried, only the final syllable made it past her lips. She wanted to ask her mother to say the name again; if she heard it enough, she might say it without the embarrassment. Yet her mother appeared so diminished in posture, suddenly vacant and pale where seconds earlier she was irritated and flushed. Eva dared not to force her mother into another configuration of tone, standing, and breath.

  Helen swayed as the passengers surrounding them on the benches were forced to adapt to the bursts and hesitations of the locomotive. Eva took her mother’s hand, cold as if becoming bloodless, but Eva was relieved it was able to squeeze hers back. Her mother’s hand would rest in Eva’s lap as they fell asleep in their clothes, as they did every night of their journey, amid the dreams and mutterings of other passengers. At daylight, they rose to take their turn in one of the water closets, as they would every morning; they would change undergarments and wash the previous day’s shifts and drawers as best they could. Helen was frequently restored in the morning; with an appetite she’d greet other passengers, the porters, and engineers. She’d make appointments with other women to read or play cards, and to the porters she’d pass in the narrow passageways, she’d invite them to smell the special perfume she had mixed in an atomizer. Helen said it was nothing more than rubbing alcohol brightened with citrus oils, though it smelled taut and fortifying, how the out-of-doors would be in the territory after their stifling city existence.

  For a spray to their cheeks, the porters would agree to carry word of her services throughout the train: hair styling or freshening. Helen
had been forced to part with her most important equipment, what she used to give her husband new identities: razors and moustache brushes, the barbering scissors and curling tongs. The beads and ribbons for ladies’ hair were also left behind in the mad preparations they made; there was an urgency Eva did not quite understand, having to do with her father’s shipping out to his regiment. But Helen could improvise so long as she had paper bags or newsprint, and her last bottle of Macassar oil. She had to stretch it, though, with her spit that she dabbed into the palm of her hand. This she reserved for the wealthier ladies, those in their private passenger compartments.

  Eva witnessed her mother mixing a spate of oil in this manner as she posed as Helen’s assistant. Eva was told not only to remain silent, but not betray any relations between herself and Helen, lest they appear as itinerants, permanently on board the train without a legitimate destination. Helen was to be a lady stylist, headed west where the ingredients for her potions were plentiful; a lady stylist with an apprentice, trusted by the authorities to educate and train a young ward of the state. A lady stylist was a woman certified for respect, to be treated with fairness. So Eva handed her mother strips of paper that would be wound around hair for a crimp or a curl, and was careful to address her mother as Mrs. Conover-Williams, for stating one’s pedigree in such a public way was assurance that such a pedigree existed in the first place. Her mother did not speak to her during these charades unless to call her “Miss” or “Missy,” or click her heels to summon Eva to a task.

  For the wealthy ladies, Mrs. Conover-Williams demonstrated how they might collect their own hair to weave hairpieces. It was Eva’s most important task to demonstrate how to best maintain one’s hairbrush, so that it would not aggravate the scalp, or further damage the hair it collected. This involved removing the hair from the thistles, teeth, or tines in an assiduous manner so that the mass of tangles and knots could be used for the hairpieces, and then sprinkling a flowery concoction over the brush to rejuvenate it. The liquid might have been nothing more than the spray her mother graced the porters with, but Mrs. Conover-Williams promised, after previewing its scent for her lady customers, that it would strengthen and resolve the bite and pull of the brush as though the implement were a living creature. And it would do so “just enough to preserve the gentleness needed for gentle ladies.” Eva tried using the same nonchalance and melody her mother employed when using this line, though remembering the words and when they should be said was too much for Eva at times. When she recalled their timing and content, it was all she could do to recite them, without her mother’s proper, but casual, authority.

  “And these women do not want rodents in their hair,” Helen said sternly, since in the trade hairpieces women made for themselves were called “rats.” “Our clientele are not French royalty,” Helen reminded her, “and this is not an Imperial realm. Yet.”

  Lifting the balls of hair from the brush felt like morbid work to Eva. She might as well have been removing souls from bodies, for the amount of time it took, and the care she had to apply to it. Her mother would sometimes admonish her in front of the customers that no one should hear a snap when the hair was separated from the brush; nor should they detect a raking noise, almost like an ascending musical scale, when detaching hair from a comb. It was a wonder to watch her mother do these things, the flare and power in Helen’s fingers, as though she were attending plants, beseeching them into a delicate growth. As she stitched and knitted up these impromptu hairpieces, she carried on conversations with these women, always fretful on some issue. They were very worried someone should find out something or think in some way that they were being taught a skill they should have mastered long ago; that they were paying for a service they shouldn’t have to pay for; that they should appear too well coiffed upon disembarking from the train, disproving that train travel is the burden that it is; or that they might come off as haggard, neglectful of their grooming upon arrival. Mrs. Conover-Williams pledged to provide them with a look from the golden mean, and never to spill their secrets.

  The poorer women had no such reservations about hiring the stylist and her apprentice, and tipped Mrs. Conover-Williams more graciously. Helen did not use her spit-and-oil treatment on them. She plaited their hair and twisted their locks, securing these alterations with her own hairpins, and returned the following day to the benches where her poorer clients had been seated by the railroad. For these ladies she released their tresses to pile them atop their heads so they would appear as Charles Dana Gibson’s girls did. On these occasions Eva was encouraged to hold a small mirror to the woman’s face as proof of her mother’s handiwork. They used their fingers to smudge out the dirt the train had compiled on their faces and declared their reflection to be nowhere as beautiful as the girl apprentice displaying it to them.

  The coins her mother earned were secreted into pockets Helen had sewn into her corset. When her mother coughed, or “had difficulty seeking air,” as she put it, Eva imagined the coins cutting past Helen’s skin, into her ribs as they ploughed through to her lungs and heart. Her mother would drown in money, because they never had enough, or they had too much. “The poor are so often denied the luxury of a quick death,” her mother said once, though Miss Williams could not precisely place when Helen had made that statement. On the train, time was compressed into three states: morning, afternoon, and night. But there were no days or dates on the calendar, only the roiling present. As the coins accumulated in Helen’s corset, her mother found difficulty in making any movement, as though muscle and bone were hardening under the force of so much pressure.

  “I’ve decided I don’t like being an apprentice,” Eva announced at the conclusion of one styling session; they had freshened the hair of five sisters bound for Chicago. The youngest, a year or two older than Eva, was blonde; the other four became darker in color as they aged, until the oldest, the chaperone, was a wan brunette, and she seemed bitter for having lost her youth in such a public fashion. She demanded to be attended to first, as the most senior member of the family, and referred to Eva as “you,” clapping her hands when she needed something: a glass of water, the mirror, powder for her neck; it was infernal, even in first class accommodations, she said. The woman’s dishpan hair had a sour odor of dross and chalk; the chalk was meant to conceal what came from the rest of her. “How long has this thing been your apprentice?” she asked as Eva tugged on her scalp, which she accused Eva of doing too enthusiastically. Helen had pins in her mouth and so merely smiled, as though engrossed in her task to the point of enforced silence.

  “But it’s just an act,” Eva’s mother said.

  “But why do we have to act it?” Eva asked.

  “Because it provides the proper illusion,” Helen said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we affirm their belief that there is an order in their world, and they are at the top of it,” Helen said. “That is what they are truly paying for, to be fussed over and complimented, when if they had any sense they could just as easily do this for themselves.”

  “Why don’t they do it themselves?” Eva asked, not because she did not understand, but because she sensed her mother’s strength flagging. If she could not keep her mother engaged in conversation, Helen would drift off, leaving Eva to her own devices. Eva could watch the other passengers or the landscape: dark, mostly, with neither people nor animals for her to study. At night the train accelerated with tremendous force; it became more difficult to walk or maintain one’s posture sitting on those benches, and yet the minutes while her mother nodded and muttered passed by stubbornly, as though they required a push, shove, and then some to lead them off the clock. Eva wondered if her parents truly loved her or if her mother would have preferred a different type of girl for a daughter—one who was older, more agile and adept at following orders.

  Eva knew she was not an orphan, but she had to consider whether this was how an orphan felt, and whether she was anywh
ere close, in her estimations. It was not a pleasurable feeling in any sense, but it held an attraction much like moths are attracted to flame. They navigate by finding light, Helen had told her, so it was no surprise that they would seek out fire when the moon was new and light was unavailable. But like any living creature, moths identify warmth and beauty first from a distance, and are unprepared when their source is revealed to be dangerous.

  “I will explain when you are older, although you are likely clever enough to sort it out for yourself, long before then,” Helen said.

  “Will you still tell me then, when I’m older? To make sure I’ve got it right?”

  “If need be, my dear,” Helen said. “You know, you are a dear. And you will be a fine young lady when you grow up. I just know it.”

  “How? How do you know that?” Eva asked, but it was too late; her mother had blinked. As the moment lagged and the train hastened its pace, Helen’s eyelids succumbed to the weight of the nightfall outside, and she was asleep.

  Through observation and error, Eva learned that her mother’s voice and body could better withstand the darkness if Eva could lure her into a story. This could be accomplished only by leading her mother into considering some pedestrian item: mirrors and feathers, bottles and coins. One feather was fine for a quill, but a collection of feathers only God could use, and the murmurations of starlings were God’s way of writing in the sky His messages to the world. The bottles the railroad porters hauled through the cabins were mere rubbish in their eyes. But to a smart boy, the neck of a bottle might be a telescope, and the glass bottom a magical lens. A young man she once knew used a bottle’s secret qualities to look over his enemies, and found the bully who had been menacing him was not so much of a giant. Because the lens could sort out fact from exaggeration and provide perspective as it set people and objects against the curvature of the earth, that bully became a compressed miniature of a man, who could barely tackle an upward slope. The tall men who were always so intimidating were squeezed to their rightful size through the lens, and the little people—the short, poor, or thin—were stretched into towers of courage and masculinity, Helen said.