—I must go tell the rest of the family, she mutters.
—That’s been taken care of. Days ago, Mary says.
A friend of her father, Henry Guillemard, has been to see the relatives on her father’s side. Mary sent word to him the day they learned of the massacre. There has been no word from the Kingsleys. The Bailey side of the family live down in Liverpool. They have sent cards, expressing their concern.
—Your brother said he would leave school.
—No one should do anything yet.
—My Charles is being quite the little man.
—Yes.
—Where are they? Where is the family?
Mary has no answer for this. The Kingsley haughtiness toward her mother has been a source of rage for her father for years. She helps her mother back to the bed.
—A family pulls together at such a time, Mary. Don’t it?
—Some families, Mary cannot help saying.
Mrs. Barrett comes to the entrance of the room and asks for the morning off, to go be with her own family. Her son is ill with a fever, and there is worry. The truth is, she fears the proximity of misfortune, fears that it is like contagion, and might spread. Mary dismisses her, and spends the day in her mother’s bedchambers. Her mother is too restless and frightened to lie down. She sits at the edge of the bed, moving with that small, involuntary rocking motion, still wringing her hands. Now and then she murmurs:
—What will become of us?
Mary tries to calm her, but the question has entered her mind as well. There is no will or testament, as far as she or her mother know, and she has no understanding of the law as it relates to this. She has read enough to know that, until Charley reaches his majority, all of them are hopelessly at the mercy of the law courts, if the family will do nothing.
Charley returns from school, accompanied by Guillemard, who has again spoken with the Kingsley side of the family, the uncles and aunts. He’s gloomy. Charley is sullen. Charley sits in the big wing chair in the parlor, looking too small for it, even being big for his age, and bites the cuticles of his nails.
—What are they thinking? Mary asks Guillemard.
—They simply wish to wait until some certainty…
Guillemard stops himself. He’s a very large, round man, with a shiny, bald pate and great side whiskers and a beard. His bulk always looks as if it is about to burst out of the clothes he wears, and about his clothes he’s quite fastidious. He is a physician, like their father. Now he retrieves a small handkerchief from his coat pocket, takes off his glasses, and begins to wipe the lenses. He sniffles, and says nothing.
—They’re bloody sorry, says Charley. They wish there was something they could do. They’re sure we’ll hear any day now. The bloody, sodding bastards.
—Language, young man, Guillemard says.
—Do you know what ’appens to us if there is no will? Mary asks him.
—You will be taken care of, Henry Guillemard says. I’ll see to it, young lady.
—Where will we go?
Charley stirs in his chair suddenly. He draws in air, and attempts to contain himself, and then with a gesture that seems almost dismissive, mutters:
—You sound exactly like her. They don’t want anything to do with us because of her.
—I will pretend you did not speak, she tells him.
—Charles, Guillemard says. There’s a good chap.
Charley rises and makes his way upstairs to their mother’s room. Mary excuses herself and follows. Here, the only sound is the small, animal whimper of the woman lying in the bed. But then she stirs, and says:
—Mary, they ’ave to be told.
—Dr. Guillemard already went ’round to see them, Mother. They know. They have known for a week.
—I should make ready.
—You needn’t bother, Charley says. They’re not coming.
—Of course they are.
—With Father gone, they don’t have to do anything at all. And so they won’t.
—Charley, Mary says.
—I look a mess, their mother says.
—Did you hear me? Charley says. They’re not coming. No one is coming.
—There must be someone we can send for, says Mary. Some way of finding out for certain.
—You’re still on about that?
—It’s the truth, Charley. We don’t know anything for certain until word comes.
—Oh bugger this. I’m going out.
—Where are you going? their mother says.
—I’m going out.
They let him go. Mary goes down and invites Guillemard to stay for tea. He demurs, evidently understanding from the exhaustion in her voice that she’s not up to company—even family company. When he’s gone, she makes the tea, and then drinks it alone, in her mother’s room. Her mother hasn’t moved from her position on the bed. Mary sits at her side and pats her hip, an automatic motion that neither of them quite feels. Her mother drifts into a fitful sleep. Mary watches this, then goes to the window and looks out at the garden.
She works in the house, and feeds the gamecocks. It is so humid outside that she’s soaked in the five minutes it takes to scatter the seed on the bare ground. In the house again, she stands in the doorway of her father’s library, and begins to experience the pain of his loss. It’s nearly insupportable. Upstairs, her mother is awake, and has begun to whimper again.
—Mother, she says. We don’t know for certain.
—I can’t stand it, Mary.
—No, nor I.
That afternoon, Charley comes home and locks himself in his room. He wants nothing to eat, nothing to do with anyone. He remains there all night and into the morning. Mrs. Barrett arrives in the forenoon, but won’t stay until something is certain. There is no sense working days for which she will not be paid. Mary sends her off, and then returns to her mother’s room, where she reads to her, and tries to soothe her. Her mother likes Dickens, and so Mary reads from The Old Curiosity Shop. It occurs to her that they are learning to be accustomed to the idea that her father is never going to come home again. Yet they have done nothing toward accepting that. She’s begun to believe that they will never know any more than they do at present; there will never be any final word, and no remains, no sign, forever.
Charley comes out of his room and walks down the stairs, into the kitchen. She hurries down to catch him before he can leave, as she is sure he will.
—You look dreadful, he says to her. Why don’t you brush your hair at least.
—Charley, what if we never learn anything about it at all?
—Why are you asking me? I don’t know anything.
—I’m sorry, she says.
—Why don’t you take care of it, Mary. You’re the one who’s always taking charge of everything. Why don’t you find out?
—Why are you angry with me, Charley?
He hesitates, puts one hand to his head, then lets down and begins to cry.
—I don’t mean it. I don’t. I’m so scared.
She moves to embrace him, but he steps back. It is as if she meant to strike him.
—Don’t do that, he says.
—I only wanted to comfort you.
—Well, I don’t want it from you. I want my father.
—There must be someone in the family who’ll help us.
—They hate her, he says, and so do I.
She slaps him, a blow that sends him reeling across the room. He falls against the stove and stands there, holding the side of his face. When he takes his hand down, she sees the red welt, the print of her hand.
—Don’t you ever say such a thing again in my presence, she tells him.
—It’s the bloody truth. We’ve had it spelled out for us.
—Tell me, she says. Which of them would say such a thing?
—All of them!
She can’t speak for a moment. He straightens, brushes the sleeves of his shirt, looking down.
—If you want to know. Guillemard said. They’re so so
rry. Nothing they can do, nothing. Nothing. Didn’t you listen to him?
—We’ll go along then, Mary says. Without them.
—We’re going to end up in bloody Newgate, in the workhouse.
He leaves her there, and returns to his room. She makes soup and takes it upstairs to her mother, who is not willing to eat or do much of anything for herself, now. Everything is in this awful hiatus, this static province, the country of waiting: for the knock on the door, the arrival of the wire, the messenger, the one who will carry to them the official, dreaded word. But nothing comes. The nights pass, the days, one after another. Mary begins to fear for her mother’s sanity. She can’t get her to eat, or take any sustenance. Mrs. Barrett comes calling every day, and every day she turns and makes her way back down the street. Mary keeps the house. No one else comes. There is no mail to speak of. There are not even any further newspaper accounts of the disaster at Little Big Horn.
One afternoon, Mary gets Charley to stay with Mother, and makes her way alone down Highgate Street to the corner, and on, to where Cousin Rose lives with her family. It is a miserably hot day, without a breath of air stirring anywhere, and the sun glares on every surface. Her cousin’s house is shut tight, curtains drawn against the heat. Rose receives her, looking beyond her for a companion, and then leading her, doubtfully, into the dim side parlor, where there are chairs ranged along the wall as if for a party. Rose is three years older, and steeped in the proprieties. Her face is elongated and sallow, and because she’s nearsighted she has a perpetual squinting expression.
—There’s news? she says.
—Nothing, Mary tells her.
Rose’s mother enters the room. Gray, small-eyed, stout, dressed in frills and silks, a scarf draped over her shoulders, and tied at her neck to hide a goiter.
—Well, and don’t you look the young lady, so grown up and straight, she says.
—This is not the bleedin’ time for that sort of silliness, says Mary.
Rose’s mother gasps, and then gathers herself.
—Miss Mary Henrietta Kingsley, you will please watch your tongue. And you will conduct yourself according to your station and age, young lady.
Rose says:
—It’s been so long since any of us have seen you, Mary. Do you never go out?
—’ere I am, she says.
—I want what I said understood, says Rose’s mother.
—Understood, Mary says.
—Everyone wonders about you, says Rose, as if the annoyance of the interruption is a burden that can be borne with patience and diligence. You haven’t been to a single gathering this year. And you missed my birthday celebration.
—I wonder if I could speak to Uncle.
—He’s in America, actually, says Rose’s mother. It was a dreadful fright for us hearing the news about your father and that American general.
—Father is in a place called Chicago, Rose says. I believe it’s hundreds of miles away from any savages.
—Yes, it is. I know where it is.
—And there’s no news? Rose’s mother says.
Mary stands.
—Good afternoon.
—That’s all? What did you want here? Why did you come?
—I wanted to see something for myself.
—Oh, and what was that?
—That would be the reason I don’t come to anything anymore. Good day.
4
NEWS ARRIVES that afternoon, finally, in the form of another letter from her father in which he explains, quite blithely, that he and Dunraven, by providence, were spared the massacre at Little Big Horn, having failed to reach the expedition at all. Bad weather kept them away; it saved their lives.
—Bad weather, Charley says. Weather.
Their mother seems unready or afraid to allow herself the belief that her husband is not slaughtered thousands of miles away. But her appetite, the next morning, is slightly better; she eats the egg that Mary brings her. And something of her humor has returned: she makes a dry little joke about Mrs. Barrett being willing to return to the once-cursed house of Kingsley.
They all settle slowly into the old patterns, though Mary finds that she has moments when she cannot believe her father to be alive. The experience is like a premonition. During the period of terrible waiting, she was plagued by the fact that if her father was indeed dead, she had gone on for days—the days it took for his letter to arrive, and the days it took for the news of the massacre to arrive—in the belief that he was alive in his part of the world. It had never occurred to her that if something were to happen to him, there would be this lag of time before she would know it. The thought is perfectly obvious, of course, but now it carries the weight of experience; it troubles her in the nights, along with everything else that troubles her.
One rainy morning a week later, sitting across from Charley, she alludes to it.
—I’m wondering what Father is going through at this minute. This instant.
—You’re strange.
She watches him eat.
—You’re as gloomy as Mother, he says.
Mary goes upstairs to check on her. Still asleep. Back in her own room, she changes her dress, her undergarments. The day stretches before her.
In the glass, she looks upon her gangly, long body and is strangely heartsick. A resignation comes over her like a spell of nausea. She wishes her father would come home, and in the same instant experiences a flutter of unease at the thought of a change, any change. How odd, to be in the middle of a state of perpetual alarm and worry, inexpressible anguish, and the sense of being caught in a trap, and still to abhor any alteration of it.
She feels altered inside, and the length of time opens out in front of her like a desert. She experiences an overpowering restlessness. Aftershock. She understands, without the words to express it, quite. The concentrated perception that comes with crisis, and remains when the crisis is past.
On the door frame, she has made several marks, keeping track of her growth over the last year. It’s appalling—more than two inches. She sometimes imagines that she can feel it happening, the extremities elongating, the ends of the fingers stretching. She cannot quite place in memory when it was that she began to fear madness. She remembers a phrase from King Lear—the one work of Shakespeare that she has read over and over. The phrase troubles her, and still she repeats it, like a prayer:
Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet Heaven!
Keep me in temper. I would not be mad!
The makings of imagination, of fancy—plays, poems, songs, tales, and novels—contain ambushes, matters to haunt her in the blackness. She confines her reading now entirely to the sciences—mathematics, biology, social customs, physics, and chemistry. The world of facts. Especially the facts of chemistry. She wades through all her father’s books on the subject: solids, liquids, gases, compounds. In the dark of the sleepless nights, she can repeat to herself the names of elements, the theories of Robert Hooke, the law of extension and compression of elastic bodies; Huygens and the undulatory theory of light; Fahrenheit, Ampère, and Robert Boyle. She can recite studies of Volta on the properties of heat and gases, and the work of Evangelista Torricelli and his principles of hydromechanics. And of course Isaac Newton. There are no emotions attached to these things, and so there is a solace in them, in knowing them. A protection. She doesn’t fully understand much of what she reads—so much of it is foundational—but she has developed the faith that reading other things will teach her, that she can come back to what she doesn’t understand, and see it with new eyes. This faith never disappoints her. And there is nothing of the girl in it, none of the weakness she has learned is expected of her, even by other girls, like Rose and the other cousins, who are so much concerned with their appearance.
They are readers of romances, gothic tales, stories of supernatural transformations and horrors, and their talk about it all is freighted with a kind of zeal, as if the whole aspect of darkness were something delicious and alluring. Yet she
wonders if they are visited by ghosts and terrors in sleep, and she has entertained a desire to ask them. Nothing in their chatter or their behavior has ever left the slightest opening for the discussion of anything serious. She has wanted to say to them, Are you frightened of losing your mind? Do you have dreams that you are being ravished by wild animals? Are you not afraid to put these books down and face back into the world, or to examine the reasons they stimulate your senses so?
SIX
1
LILY SAW THE FAMILIAR HOUSES, trees, and lawns of her street with mingled excitement and unease. She gave Tyler the directions, and he followed them, driving slow. The sun had broken through an opening in the cloud cover, and there was a wide band of stippled shade on the road surface. Reflected leaves rode up the smooth, shiny hood of the car. She remembered watching the same kind of reflection in the polished hood of her father’s Ford when they came down this road. How long ago? She had been a little girl. It felt like earlier today. She thought of remarking on this to Tyler, since he was probably nervous, too. “It’s gonna be a good time,” she said to him.
He reached over and touched her knee. The mist had lifted, burned off by the sun. It would be a hot day. Everything had a washed, fresh look. The grass sparkled with beaded water, as if each blade contained pieces of the flaming sun itself. The shade was blue, the green of the leaves a darker, richer green. The tree branches were wet and black.
They came out of the canopy of leaves and approached the house.
Doris had grown neglectful about the lawn in stages—she still kept the flower bed that stretched across the length of the porch, but the bushes were badly in need of trimming, and the driveway had been narrowed by the thick growth. A trash can lay on its side by the woodpile, which had collapsed at one end. Sunflowers stood up out of the fallow garden in the yard.
Doris came out on the porch to greet them, wearing a halter and dark shorts and sandals. She had let her hair down; it framed her face. She looked healthy, pink-cheeked and well fed. Her lined face glowed in the light.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 15