The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  Years passed and Caroline had watched while the Ashwell girls were claimed, one by one, by their brothers’ friends, their fathers’ younger business associates, sometimes distant cousins. And the spring they were fifteen, Caroline and Mary’s games, which always paused for the winter since they never had much to say to each other indoors, somehow never resumed. When they were seventeen, Mary wed a farmer’s son. Caroline called on her, that first year of her marriage. Mary had come to the door of the ancient farmhouse where she now lived with her husband and his family and led Caroline back into a cabbagey-smelling dark, a sitting room in which every wall sloped and curved, suggesting the inside of a loose fist. She adjusted her skirts to sit, and Caroline could see the rounding of her stomach.

  “A very hot summer,” said Mary.

  Caroline made a noise of agreement. A boy of perhaps eight ran through the room, pounding his feet as if in rage—one of Mary’s nephews? A small brother-in-law?

  “At the end of working the men are drenched,” Mary continued.

  Caroline wanted to ask her what it felt like, that swelling, that growth out of herself, unnatural looking as something that could kill her. “And you, are you well?” she said.

  “Well enough.”

  The baby, a girl, hadn’t killed her. Caroline sometimes saw this girl out in the fields now with the other neighbor children. She was eleven or twelve, tall and towheaded, not much like Mary. There were three boys now too, and the youngest did have something of his mother in the set of his eyes.

  Samuel had always said that the tending of the souls of children was the highest moral calling there was. Caroline had expected that someday a means would appear of joining all of his instruction to the things that usually came for women, and that this union, in its particular shape, would turn out to be what she wanted. She would read and think and roam and mother, all at once. The world would give her a way of rounding out and filling in and firmly rooting.

  And she was firmly rooted now, she supposed. She just hadn’t expected the rooting to happen where she’d always been. If her mother had been alive, maybe she would have helped Caroline to see what different thing she ought to have done, at what crucial point along the way.

  Caroline stopped beneath the tree on the front lawn and leaned against the trunk. There was one place where it fit her back exactly. In the quiet, she found herself listening for the trilling hearts’ call, the invader’s flourish. Listening that way all the time was exhausting in a way that felt familiar—stilling, tensing, attending—because she’d always known that another possible future might come for her instead. Her mother’s epilepsy had begun in adolescence. Caroline should have felt calmer on crossing the threshold of each new year after her own adolescence was done, but waiting for something that didn’t come made true calm impossible. There was no clear end to the wait, no clear beginning of safety—no official word that here, this year, this month, this moment, just here, was the line that separated her from any chance that what had happened to her mother would happen to her next. No one knew enough about what had killed her mother to know that for certain. Sometimes she even felt that it would be better to be sick, because then at last she could stop asking if she would be.

  No call now, but there, in the tree a little ways across the lawn, a grouping of birds, six of them, seven, their red flattened a little by the dusk light. One stabbed at the branch beside it, stabbed again, then tore most of a leaf from its stem and rose with it into the air. Caroline suppressed an urge to pursue, to leap and try to reclaim that leaf and reaffix it to the branch. These holes in the regular order—she wanted the birds to stop leaving such marks of themselves.

  Through the lighted windows of the farmhouse she could see David and Hawkins and her father, seated at the table. They looked like a painting. Wise Men in Conversation. David tilted back a little in his chair and stretched out his feet, offering up the plane of his body.

  Caroline wished that someone had taught her how to know if such an offering, after all this time, was for her.

  * * *

  *

  To Caroline’s relief, Hawkins left after a week. Samuel and David set about assembling the list of the girls who would come to the Trilling Heart School. The list was not long. This, Samuel explained, was the way they wanted it at first. “From seeds, bountiful gardens, with care in the selection and sowing,” he said, though it seemed to Caroline that they had not selected from a very broad array. Samuel exchanged several letters with each girl’s parents (mostly fathers, a few mothers) to assure himself of fruitfulness.

  * * *

  —

  The girls were:

  Miss Rebecca Johns, daughter of the Boston banker who handled the income from Samuel’s essays.

  Miss Felicity Ridell, whose parents had read the essay in The Examiner and felt that their daughter had something of a historical mind.

  Miss Tabitha Seward, daughter of a newspaperman in Larchmont who believed in being part of the vanguard where possible.

  Miss Julia Altman, whose mother had long admired Samuel’s ideas and could wish no better for her daughter than to learn to live according to them.

  Miss Livia Bunting, possessed of too many energies, and too varied, for her current school to handle.

  Miss Abigail Smith, at the wedding of whose parents a passage from Samuel’s essay “On Love: Plenitude and Patience” had been read aloud.

  Miss Margaret Sawyer, whose father played cards with Mr. Howard Phelps, former Birch Hill resident, and who feared the school she attended now was making her silly.

  “Their parents would make marvelous students, anyway,” Caroline said.

  Still, there was something about seeing the names. She would be teaching Shakespeare and Wordsworth to a Tabitha, an Abigail, a Rebecca, a Margaret—handing all of it to them as if it were theirs. She ran her fingers over that list in her father’s hand, those letters that spelled out girls.

  * * *

  *

  Not long after Hawkins’s departure, David moved out of his rooms in Ashwell and into the farmhouse. No one had thought to mention this to Caroline until the day before. “He’s going to live with us?” she asked her father. She took care to keep her voice steady.

  “It won’t make any sense for him to be traveling back and forth once the teaching begins,” Samuel said.

  On that first morning Caroline awoke with the feeling that the earth had shrugged its skin in the night. She’d never been free to seek out new places for herself; this seeming newness of her usual place gave her hopes of terrifying size. She herself didn’t seem at all new—her face in the mirror was the same, the just-darkening patches beneath her eyes like the fingerprints of a person who had pressed too hard, though no one but Caroline had ever pressed there.

  Across from David at the breakfast table, she stirred and stirred her tea. David, it turned out, didn’t drink it in the mornings. She raised her eyes and caught him looking at her, or perhaps his gaze was only tracing an arc from tabletop to window and her face happened to be in its path.

  That night, she had a dream in which she stood on the front stoop of the farmhouse wearing a dress made of red feathers. She stroked her fingers down her arms to feel the smoothness of the sleeves, feathers lying one over another as if still notched in place on the backs of birds. The cuffs at her wrists were scalloped because of the feathers’ points, and more shades of red than there were words for. She’d never worn anything so fine.

  But when she moved to touch the bodice to see if it was just as sleek, there was no bodice but her own warm skin. The dress was only sleeves.

  There she was, standing on the porch, only her arms clothed, waiting for someone. I don’t know who, she told herself. She slid her hands down the sleeves, down her warm stomach, down to where the hair lay smooth and silky. She stroked the way she’d stroked the feathers. I don’t know who
, staring out at the horizon. The lie was coated in sweet shame that spread and spread with the motions of her fingers. Her knees buckled.

  Caroline opened her eyes in the gray light of her own bedroom—her hands still in the dream, still working—and closed them again. She could tell from the house’s stillness that the others weren’t awake yet. She dressed, wrapped herself in her cloak, and went outside. She would find some of the birds and watch them until she had inoculated herself, taken all the mystery out of them, remembered that in spite of dreams and swells they were only tendon, meat, feather, flimsy bone. That they meant nothing at all for her. The grass was drenched enough to wet the tops of her shoes. All around her birds, waking up for their day, were calling.

  But she walked and walked and couldn’t find any trilling hearts. She roamed for ten minutes, began to feel ridiculous, and snuck back to the house and up the stairs with her hem soaked through. She crawled back into her bed and curled herself over to warm her feet. Only when she heard her father and then David going down the stairs did she rise and straighten her dress. She went down to meet them, pretending she too was just starting a day in which she would be too busy to watch the sky.

  3.

  MISS ELIZA PEARSON BELL

  How beauty can stir a man!

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 43)

  The week before the school would open, Caroline’s father caught a summer cold. She found him stumbling through the kitchen with a blanket clutched around his shoulders like a shawl. She seemed to be seeing a new, fine crack at the base of an enormous structure, so slight, and yet the structure’s own weight was already almost enough to topple it.

  “Back to bed with you now,” she told him.

  When she carried his tea up, he took it from her fretfully and sipped. “David and I were going to walk to Jeffers’s to sign for the desks for the students. The two of you will need to do it, I suppose.”

  “All right.”

  “You can discuss your first week’s lessons. You’re planning on a sonnet?”

  Caroline, it had been decided, would be teaching only English literature. David would take natural history and mathematics, Samuel would take classical languages, and the men would divide moral philosophy and history between the two of them. Though Caroline was meant to be a walking embodiment of the school’s aims, that didn’t mean her feminine fingers belonged in its meatier pies.

  “David may have some thoughts for you. And you might have to rein him in a bit, if you can do it gently. We must prevent his brilliance from being anything but an asset.” Samuel gave a moist cough and settled into his pillows like any old man. “Despite this little setback, it’s very good to feel that I’m beginning this most important work just now. That God has made it possible for me to serve Him in this way, at this late hour.”

  Caroline remembered one supper when she was about thirteen: snow coating the windows, Samuel reading aloud a review of his most recent book of essays and trying to laugh, trying to pretend the soup was too hot and that was why his eyes were tearing. Caroline had said, “It sounds as if the writer has misunderstood your argument,” and thought, I will never, ever be able to leave him. He wrote just as eloquently in the years after Birch Hill’s failure, but people began to read him differently. They wanted writers whose feet were more firmly planted and who had not been models for storybook villains. The shift broke his heart, she knew. Watching it broke hers.

  Now this plan for the school was allowing her father his visions again. There were worse needs. His visions had goodness, shine.

  Yet the noise of his tea sipping, which she would have known anywhere, made her shoulders want to creep up around her ears.

  “We’ll change these girls,” he said, “and send them off to change others—turn them inward, then turn them outward again. It’s the way the world changes.” Delicious words in the mouth, change the world.

  “We can’t quite know what they’ll see when they turn inward, though, can we?” she said.

  “Grace, of course.”

  Caroline pulled the blanket up to tuck it more snugly around him. “I’ve been giving some thought to the name,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be simpler to call it the Birch Hill School?”

  Samuel’s eyes sharpened and focused on her face. She would plunge ahead wholeheartedly with this school, she would never speak another word against it, if he would just make himself say it now: simpler, yes, of course, to make the school’s status as Samuel Hood’s repeated, doomed experiment clear to everyone.

  He put on a smile. “I’m surprised at you, Caroline,” he said. “I would think you’d want your mother to have the naming of it.” His fingers worried at the blanket. “My dear, let’s give her this.”

  * * *

  *

  When Caroline told David her father was ill, his face tensed. “He’s all right? Should we send for the doctor?”

  “It’s only a cold. He’ll be well in a few days, I’m sure.”

  Out in the lane, David tore a branch off a tree, stripped it of leaves, and swished it through the grass beside the road as they walked.

  “What are you going to do with them, the first day?” she asked. She was remembering red sleeves, but she knew he would never have been able to tell from her face or her voice.

  “I’ll begin with a nature walk.”

  “Really.”

  “We’ll visit the fields, with the students instructed to collect samples that are of interest to them. My scheme is for them to keep journals of observation for analyzing and responding to what they collect. I know your father also intends journal keeping, but the two projects will be separate, and different, I think, in character.”

  Samuel’s kind of journal was a record of self-inspection as a means to moral improvement. He’d kept one for thirty years, its volumes spanning a prominent shelf in his study, which dipped a little with their weight; Caroline had kept her own as part of her education at his hands. For years he read it weekly and left guidance in the margins: When you feel impatient in this way, try to recall the everlasting patience of your truest Friend, which lasted through death itself. The words always gave her the sense that he’d written them for her but also with some theoretical broader audience in mind. At fourteen Caroline recorded a dream about running in a hot field with their neighbors’ son, William, a year older than she was. Her dress had caught on a stick and torn, and William took it between his hands and tore it further. Her father called her into his study after that week’s reading and told her, without meeting her eyes, that he’d decided she was now capable of monitoring her own thoughts and feelings on the page.

  Later that summer, Caroline had kissed William but run away when he took her hand and tried to tug her into the woods between their houses. She wouldn’t be kissed again until, at twenty-four, motivated mostly by curiosity, she let Emmet Baker, her father’s middle-aged bookkeeper, press his lips to hers in the back garden while Samuel was out walking. Had she known the dearth that lay ahead on that summer day, William’s mouth sweet against hers, she might not have run. William and Emmet were both married now: William to his second cousin from Lattemore; Emmet to a wealthy Ashwell widow.

  Caroline did not keep journals anymore, because she didn’t like to set words down on the page where she’d have to look at them.

  “You surprise me,” she told David.

  “In what respect?”

  Your voice, your face, your step surprises me; in every way, you are to me a continual surprise.

  “A nature walk,” she said.

  “A study of the way God lives and clothes Himself.” He swooped the stick through the air. “Of the life the grandest ideas find in the smallest things.”

  “You think these girls will grasp that?”

  “I’ll teach them to,” David said. He’d stopped walking, so Caroline turned back to face him. “I
t can be taught. As your father taught me, long before I ever came here. I was fifteen, coming out of the shop in town, and a man in a suit tossed The Inner Pendulum down right in the middle of the street before getting back on his horse. To travel lighter, maybe. My own literary angel.”

  A book-jettisoning angel who hadn’t considered her father’s words worth their weight. Caroline smiled.

  “You wouldn’t understand what it was like, coming across his thinking for the first time. I didn’t sleep till I’d finished. It was a defense of so many things I’d always instinctively felt were true.”

  “What things?” Caroline asked. He was right—she didn’t know what it would be like to meet her father this way.

  “Well, that moral truth belongs to all of us, if we practice the right kind of seeing. That’s how we find God, not in dancing and screaming before some man on a stage who’s thundering about hellfire.” Walking faster now, David tossed his stick to the ground.

  Caroline pulled abreast. She said carefully, “My father hasn’t written much about hellfire.”

  “My family went to the camp meetings, that’s all. They lived for them. I’m sure they do still.”

  Caroline saw in her mind a foam of writhing people, David standing apart, the only one not moving. “I’ve never been to anything like that,” she said.