Justina wiped the dust from it with her handkerchief, which turned as gray and furry as a mouse.
“Please,” she said, as politely as Miss Gray had taught us, because one should always be polite, even to dead alligators, “show us Mouse.”
“Not Cleopatra again!” said Emma. We were sitting around Justina, who sat on the floor in front of the mirror. “You know, I don’t think she’s beautiful at all. I don’t know what Mark Anthony saw in her.”
“Please show us America,” said Justina. “And nowadays, not in historical times.” We were no longer looking at the obelisks of Egypt, but at a group of teepees, with Indians sitting around doing what Indians did, we supposed, when they weren’t scalping settlers. We had all learned in school that Indians collected scalps like Rose’s mother collected Minton figurines.
“Thank you,” said Justina. “But here in Ashton.” We saw a city, with buildings three or four stories high and crowds in the streets, milling around the trolleys and their teams of horses. “That’s New York,” said Melody, and we remembered that she had lived there, once—when her mother was still alive. Then ships in a harbor, their sails raised against the sky, and then Emma’s mother, staring into a mirror, so that we started back, almost expecting to see ourselves reflected behind her. She spread Dr. Bronner’s Youth Cream over her cheeks and what they call the décolletage, and then slapped herself to raise the circulation. She leaned toward the mirror and touched the skin under her eyes, anxiously.
Emma turned red. “Parents are so stupid.”
“Yes, thank you,” said Justina patiently, “but we really want to see Mouse. No, that’s—what’s Miss Gray doing with Zelia?” They were walking in the Balfours’ garden, their heads bent together, talking as though they were planning—what?
And there, finally, was Mouse.
We saw at once why Mouse had been missing our lessons with Miss Gray: she was tied up. There was a rope tied around one of her ankles, with a knot as large as the ankle itself.
“It looks like—the dungeons of the Inquisition,” said Justina.
“It looks like the old slave house at the Caldwell plantation,” said Melody. It had burned during the war, and other than the slave house, only the front steps of the plantation, which were made of stone, remained to mark where it had been.
“It’s a good thing we can’t smell through the mirror,” said Emma. “I bet it stinks.”
In the mirror, Mouse was waving her hands as though conducting a church choir. And as she waved, visions rose in the air around her. Trees grew, taller and paler than we had ever seen. Melody later told us they were paper birches—she had found a picture in a library book. Mouse was sitting on what seemed to be moss, but there was a low mist covering her knees like a blanket, and we could only see the ground as the mist shifted and swirled. The birches around her glowed in the light of—was it the sun, as pale as the moon, that shone through the gray clouds? The forest seemed to go on in every direction, and it was wet—leaves dripped, and Mouse’s eyelashes were beaded with waterdrops. Then a pale woman stepped out from one of the birches—from behind it or within it, we could not tell, and all the pale women stepped out, and they moved in something that was not a dance, but a pattern, and the hems of their dresses, which were made of the thinnest, most translucent bark, made the mist swirl up in strange patterns. Up it went, like smoke, and suddenly the vision was gone. Mouse sat, curled in a corner, with the rope around her ankle.
“I don’t think she learned that from Miss Gray,” said Emma.
“What are we going to do?” asked Rose. “We have to do something.” And we knew that we had to do something, because we felt in the pits of our stomachs what Rose was feeling: a sick despair.
“Rescue her,” said Melody. She looked around at the rest of us, and suddenly we realized that we were going to do exactly that, because Melody was the practical one, and if she had suggested it, then it could be done.
“How?” asked Rose. “We don’t even know where she is.”
“On our branches,” said Justina. “Mirror, show us—slowly, show us the roof. Now the street. Look, it’s one of the drying sheds by the old tobacco factory. All we need to do is follow the railroad tracks.”
“How can we fly on our branches?” asked Emma. “We’ll be seen.”
“No, we won’t,” said Justina. She looked at us, waiting for us to understand, and one by one, as though candles were being lit in a dark room, we knew. “Rose, how long has it been since your mother asked where you spend your afternoons? How long has it been since anyone asked any of us, even Melody? Why has Coralie started doing her afternoon chores? And when Emma burned one of her braids, when we were making butterscotch on the Bunsen burner and Miss Gray came in suddenly and startled us, did anyone notice?” No one had. “I don’t think anyone has seen what we’ve been doing, all summer. We’ve become like Miss Gray’s cats, invisible until you’re about to sit on them. I think we could fly through Brickleford on market day and no one would notice.”
So we flew through the streets of Ashton, as high as the roofs of the houses, seeing them from the air for the first time. Ashton seemed smaller, from up there, and each of us thought the same thing—I will leave here one day. Only Emma was sorry to think so.
We landed by the shed that the mirror had shown us. One by one, we dismounted from our branches. Justina—we had not known she could be such a good leader—opened the door. It did look like a dungeon of the Inquisition, and smelled just as Emma had expected—the smell of death and rotting meat. Mouse was sitting in her corner, with her arms around her knees and her head down, crying. She did not look up when we opened the door.
“Mouse,” said Rose. “We’ve come to rescue you.” It sounded, we realized, both brave and silly.
Mouse looked up. We had never seen her face so dirty. Each tear seemed to have left behind a streak of dirt. “Why?” she asked.
“Because—” said Emma. “Because you’re one of us, now.”
We could not untie the knot. It was too large, too tight: the rope must once have been wet and shrunk.
“There’s a knife, next to the bowl,” said Mouse. “I can’t reach it from here, the rope won’t let me—I tried and tried.”
The smell of rotting meat came from that bowl, and it was covered with flies. When Justina had finished cutting the rope from Mouse’s ankle—the rest of us were standing as close as we could to the boarded-up window, where the crookedness of the boards let in chinks of light—she said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
The door banged open. “What do you brats think you’re doing here?” It was a man, who brought with him a stench worse than rotting meat—the stench of whiskey.
“The drunkard father,” whispered Emma. We all stood still, too frightened to move, and from Mouse came a mouse-like whimper.
“You little bitch,” he said. “I know you. You’re Judge Beaufort’s daughter. You know how many times your father’s put me in that prison of his? You goddamned Beauforts, sneering down your noses at anyone who isn’t as high and all goddamn mighty as you are. Wait until he sees what I’m going to do with you—I’ll whip you like a nigger, until your backside is as raw as—as raw meat.”
Emma shrieked, a strangled sort of shriek, and dropped her branch.
“You’re not a man but a toad,” said Justina.
He stared at her, as though she had suddenly appeared in front of his eyes. “What—”
“No, not a man at all,” said Rose. “You’re a toad, a nasty toad with skin like leather, and you eat flies.”
“You don’t live here,” said Melody. “You live in the swamp by the Picketts’ house, where the water is dark and still.”
Somewhere, in some other country, where we were still Justina, Rose, Melody, and Emma, instead of witches, we thought, but we haven’t learned transformations yet.
“That’s right,” said Emma. “Go home, toad. Go back to the swamp where you belong. You don’t belong here.”
>
“Sophie,” he said, looking at Mouse. “I’m your father, Sophie.” He looked at her as though, for once, asking for something, asking with fear in his eyes.
“You know you are, Papa,” she said. “You know you’re a toad. I’ve tried to love you, but you haven’t changed. You’ll always be a toad in your heart.”
“Go home, toad,” said Justina. “We don’t want you here anymore.”
“Yes, go back to your swamp,” said Melody. “And I hope Jim Pickett catches you one day, and Mrs. Pickett puts you into her supper pot. The Picketts like toad. They say it tastes like chicken.”
Mouse’s father, the drunkard, hopped out through the door and away, we assumed in the direction of the swamp. We let out a sigh, together, as though we had been holding our breaths all that time.
We made Mouse a bed in the cottage, on the green sofa. Emma said, “Callie won’t let me have any more food. Since the revival came, she says she’s found religion, and she’s got jewels waiting for her in heaven that are more beautiful than earthly trinkets. She’s given me back my rings and necklaces.” So Rose stole some bread and jam from the cupboard when Hannah wasn’t looking, and Mouse ate bread with jam until she was full. Melody gave her a dress, because the rest of us were too big, although Melody didn’t have many dresses of her own. Emma brought soap and water so Mouse could wash her face, and combed her hair. Properly combed, it was as fine and flyaway as milkweed. Before we went home to our suppers, Melody read to her from The Poetical Works of Keats, which Emma had taken out of the library for her, while the rest of us curled up on the sofa in tired silence.
“Good night,” said Mouse, when we were leaving. “Good night, good night.” And because she was one of us now, we knew that she was happy.
The next day, Rose and Melody were punished for taking bread and jam without permission and for losing a perfectly good dress, which Hannah had just darned.
“The next lesson,” said Miss Gray, “is gaining your heart’s desire. For which you will need a potion that includes hearts. Today, I want you to go out and find hearts.”
“You don’t want us to kill squirrels, or something?” said Emma, incredulously.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Miss Gray. “Have you learned nothing at all this summer? The heart is the center, the essence, of a thing. It is what gives a stone gravity, a bird flight. Killing squirrels, indeed!” She looked at us with as much disgust as on the first day, when we had failed to see ourselves in the mirror. It was not fair—Emma had asked the question, and the scorn was addressed to us all. But when had Miss Gray ever been fair?
So out we went, looking for hearts.
This was what we put into our potions. Into Melody’s potion, she put all the plays of Shakespeare, with each mention of the word “heart” underlined in red, and each mention of the word “art” as well, even the art in “What art thou that usurp’st this time of night?”; The Poetical Works of Keats with each page cut into hearts; and a butterfly that she had found dead on her windowsill, a Red Admiral. With its wings outstretched, it looked like two hearts, one upside down. And we knew that Justina had been right: we were invisible that summer. Otherwise, Emma would have had to spend her pocket money on library fines. Emma put in the double yolk of an egg she had stolen from under the hens, which she insisted resembled a heart; chocolate bonbons that Callie had shaped into hearts; Cocoanut Kisses that we told her had nothing to do with hearts, but she said that she liked them; and hearts cut out of a Velvet Cake, all stolen from a Ladies’ Tea that her mother was giving for the Missionary Society. Rose put in a heart-shaped locket that her mother had given her; her mother’s rose perfume, which she said was the heart of the rose (the laboratory smelled of it for days); and water from the icebox that she had laboriously chipped into the shape of a heart. Mouse’s potion contained a strange collection of nuts and seeds: acorns; beechnuts, butternuts, and black walnuts; the seeds of milkweed and thistle; locust pods; the cones of hemlock and cypress; and red hips from the wild roses that grew by Slocumb’s Bluff. “Well,” she said, “Miss Gray did say that the heart is the center. You can’t get much more centery than seeds, can you?” Justina’s collection was the strangest of all: when Miss Gray asked for her ingredients, she handed Miss Gray a mask shaped like a heart on which she had sewn, so that it was completely covered, the feathers of crows. “The crows gave them to me,” she told us later, when we asked her where the feathers had come from, “once I explained what they were for. They seemed to know Miss Gray.”
“Nicely done,” said Miss Gray. “I think Justina’s spell will be the strongest, since she has been the most focused among you, although one can’t quite call this a potion, can one? But Emma’s and Melody’s potions will do quite well, and Mouse, I’ll help you with yours.”
“And mine?” asked Rose. If she had done something wrong, she wanted to know.
“Yours is complicated,” said Miss Gray. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Years later, Emma asked, “Rose, did you ever get your heart’s desire?” They were walking in the garden of the house where Emma lived with her husband, the senator. Above them, the maples trees were beginning to turn red and gold. Whenever the wind shook the maple branches, leaves blew down around them.
“That’s funny,” said Rose, reminding herself not to think of her deadline. This was Emma, whom she hadn’t seen in—how long? Her deadline could wait. “I don’t think we ever told each other what we wished for. I guess what happened afterward drove it out of our heads.”
“I suppose you wanted to fly,” said Emma. “I remember—you were obsessed with flying, then.”
Rose laughed. “I thought I was so good at keeping it secret!” She stopped and looked out over the lawn, where the shadows of the trees were lengthening. Soon, it would be time to dress for dinner. She worried, again, about her gray merino. Would it do for Rose’s party? “No,” she said, “I wished that my mother would love me. You remember what she was like, even at the end. What a strange thing to admit, after all these years.”
“I wished that I could eat all I wanted and never get fat.” Emma absentmindedly pulled a maple leaf from her hair, which was bobbed in the current fashion.
“Well, you got your wish, at least. There’s no one in Washington as elegant as Mrs. Balfour.” Rose looked at Emma, from her expensively waved hair to her expensively shod feet, in the new heels. “How do you like being a senator’s wife?”
Emma let the leaf fall from her fingers. “Has the interview started already?” Rose laughed again, uncomfortably. Nothing is as uncomfortable, her editor had told her, as the truth. Emma continued, and to Rose her voice sounded bitter, almost accusatory, “So did she ever tell you that she loved you?”
How much easier it was, to answer questions instead of asking them. To pretend, for one afternoon, that she was here only as Emma’s guest. “No, she never told me. But she did love me, I think, in her own way. It took me a long time to understand that. It wasn’t a way I could have understood, as a child.”
“Understanding—that’s not much of a spell.”
Emma sat on a bench beside the ornamental pond, where ornamental fish, red and gold, were darting beneath the fallen leaves. After a moment, Rose sat beside her. She looked at the patterns made by lichen on the ornamental urns, then at the statue of Melpomene, whose name on the pedestal was almost obscured by moss. She did not know how to respond.
“Have you heard from Melody?” asked Emma.
“Not since last spring,” said Rose, grateful that Emma had broken the silence. “I don’t think she’ll ever come back. It’s easier in Paris. She says, you know, there are no signs on the bathrooms. But I’ve brought you a copy of her latest. It’s still in my suitcase. I meant to unpack it, but I must be losing my memory. You’ll like it—one of the poems is about being a witch. I think that’s what she asked for, to be a poet. It’s still hard to imagine: Melody, the studious, the obedient one, in Paris cafés with artists and musicians, and
girls who dance in beads! Drinking and—did you know? Smoking!”
Emma picked up a piece of gravel and tossed it into the pond, where it splashed like a fish. The sound was almost startling in the still afternoon. “It broke up the group, didn’t it? When she left for college. I miss her.”
Rose stared up at the leaves overhead, red and gold against the sky. “I think it was broken before that.”
“We all paid a price, didn’t we?” asked Emma. “Do you remember the advertisement? Reasonable rates. She never charged us, but I think we all paid a price. You—all those years taking care of your mother while she had cancer, when you could have been, I don’t know, going to college, getting married, having a life of your own. Melody—she’ll never come home. If she did, she wouldn’t be a poet, just another colored woman who has to sit at the back of the theater. And me—”
Emma picked up another piece of gravel, then placed it on the bench beside her. “I can’t gain weight, you know. No matter what. I’ve tried. Such a silly problem, but—I don’t think James and I will ever have children.”
“Oh, Emma!” said Rose. “I’m so sorry.” What did her article matter? Emma had been her best friend, so long ago.
“Well, that’s the way of the world,” said Emma, her voice still bitter. Then suddenly, surprisingly, because this was Emma after all, she wiped her eyes, carefully so as not to smudge her mascara. “You gain and you lose, with every choice you make. That’s the way it’s always been. But you—” She turned to Rose and smiled, and suddenly she was the old Emma again. “All those years giving sponge baths and making invalid trays, when you barely stepped off the front porch, and now a reporter! Do you remember when we were reporters? Just before we were witches.”
“I don’t know if the society pages count,” said Rose. “Although I suppose everyone has to start somewhere. If only we had stayed reporters! But come to think of it—I really am losing my memory—I have news for you. I’ve heard of Justina! A friend of mine, a real reporter, who was in Argentina covering the revolution—they’re having another one this year—wrote me about an American woman who had married one of the revolutionaries, a man they call—why do revolutionaries always have these sorts of names?—The Mask. They call her La Serenidad, and there’s a song about her that they play on the radio. He wrote it down for me, but I don’t know Spanish.”
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