by Clare Beams
Grass after all, probably.
* * *
*
The time had come to hold their experiment up to the light, Samuel announced in a meeting at the end of the first month. By light he meant the eyes of Thoreson, the educational champion of order and discipline he and Hawkins had discussed. It transpired that Samuel and Thoreson had lately been corresponding.
“Why?” Caroline asked.
“He wrote to me first,” Samuel said. “He expressed an interest in seeing our project for himself.”
“Papa, doesn’t that seem an unnecessary risk? He’ll see what we’re doing here as a direct challenge to his own work, won’t he? And we know he has a propensity for essay writing.”
“If it’s a challenge, a competition,” David said, “we’ll win.”
And so, one gray and drizzling Thursday, Thoreson arrived. Mrs. Sanders showed him to the study, a young man in a smart coat, with sand-colored hair and a square jaw. “We’re so pleased to have you,” Samuel said. He shook Thoreson’s hand. “It will be an honor to show our project to a fellow educator, a fellow thinker.”
“The honor is mine,” Thoreson said with a smile. He was probably no older than David. He looked like a person who liked right angles and who would enjoy making rooms of people quieter. “I still remember reading your essays in school.” Long ago, he wanted Samuel to understand.
Samuel clicked his tongue modestly. “These are our other teachers, David Moore and my daughter, Caroline Hood.”
Thoreson pressed Caroline’s hand and smiled at her without seeing her, as people tended to do. With David there was a strong gripping on both sides. David said, “Mr. Thoreson, we hear a great deal these days about your own schools.”
“Yes, we just opened our sixth, in Boston. So I know this early phase you’re in very well. Astonishing how different it all is in practice than in planning, isn’t it?”
“As in so many areas of life,” Samuel said.
“I’m fascinated by the particulars here. Teaching these girls Greek, and mathematics, and scientific inquiry. I do admire your ambition.”
Exactly what Caroline had known he would say—what she’d known the whole world would say—and perhaps because she was so ready to hear it, she surprised herself by speaking before her father did. “Mr. Thoreson, you teach both girls and boys, is that correct?”
“That’s right. Almost equal numbers, at least in the earlier grades.”
“Have you found that there’s any difference in aptitude?”
He squinted consideringly. Perhaps he really had never thought about it before.
“No, you’re quite right—there isn’t a marked one, anyway, Miss Hood. Though we aren’t teaching much Greek at present.” He chuckled. “We’re more—if you’ve read anything about our schools, you’ll know—we’re more interested in teaching the kind of self-control our girls and boys will need when they’re women and men, as good, productive members of society.”
“Oh, certainly,” Samuel said. “But it is an open question, what good and productive members of society most need. Now if you’ll come with me, the girls will be almost ready.” He walked from the room.
Visibly, Thoreson wanted to answer, but he would have had to answer to Samuel’s moving back. He followed.
Samuel settled Thoreson on the visitors’ couch, with Caroline and David to either side. Caroline watched him take in the circle of desks and the girls seated at them, who were eyeing the visitor curiously. She glanced at Eliza—innocent looking in light blue and braids—and felt a little twinge of senseless fear. Please don’t, she thought, not today, without even knowing what she would have liked to prohibit.
“Girls, we have a guest, as you can see,” Samuel said from the front of the room. “This is Mr. Thoreson. He is interested in our daily work. Let’s show it to him, shall we?”
Greek had not been first on the agenda. It was first on the agenda now. The girls opened their Homer and read in turns, Samuel correcting their pronunciation. They wrote in response to brief prompts and read their responses aloud. The room felt charged with their desire to perform well, and they did, though Abigail used an incorrect declension. It would have looked worse if no one had done that, Caroline told herself—less real. And this was real, their high voices making those weighty sounds. Caroline could have sung.
Instead of fearing Thoreson would write about this, she began to hope he would. She looked at David, his forward tilt on the sofa, his eyes on the girls except for quick assessing glances at Thoreson’s immobile face.
Next Samuel asked the girls to put their Greek books away and take out their copies of The Pilgrim’s Progress. “You all began part two yesterday evening,” Samuel said. “What are your impressions thus far?”
“Is it really going to be the same story all over again, all the same exact stops, just with Christian’s wife and their children instead of Christian this time?” asked Livia. The other girls laughed. “It’s just we’ve already read all that.”
Thoreson narrowed his eyes. Caroline wondered what would have happened to a girl in a Thoreson school who said such a thing. Chains in the corner, maybe. An underground chamber in the center of the classroom springing open, the offender fed to the dark mouth of impudence.
“If you’ll allow me, Miss Bunting,” Samuel said, “I’ll answer your question with another. Is it the same journey if different people are on it? Girls, do you believe that Christian, alone, experienced this journey in the same way as will his wife and their children?”
“Well, no,” said Felicity.
“And why not? Think, please. Imagine yourself as Christian, walking down the road. Then imagine yourself as his wife. How do you see your surroundings in each case? In each case, how do you feel?”
He waited for their girls to imagine themselves men, then imagine themselves women.
“I’m more afraid the second time,” Eliza said. “Threats are different when you’re a man, I think, since you yourself are more of a threat too. It’s all more even.”
“Just so,” Samuel said. “How then might we anticipate that will affect the experience of this journey?”
“It might be slower,” Julia said. “Because they’ll be afraid and reluctant to go on. And because everything will take longer too for them to get by.”
“Oh, slower,” Livia said, and groaned, and they all laughed again—Thoreson took in a breath, stirred on the couch—but it was all right, Samuel laughed with them.
“But not necessarily duller, Miss Bunting—fear not!” he said. “Suspense in large part has to do with the scale of obstacles—the relative scale—and not with pace. There will be quite enough to command your interest, I assure you. What else, girls? What other differences might you expect?”
“It might be sadder this time,” Abigail said quietly.
“Interesting. Why?”
“Well, they’re weaker. And Christian barely made it to the Celestial City. So it’s not a certain thing they’ll get there, is it?” she said.
Once the lesson was over, in the study, Thoreson barely let the others get through the door before he started talking. “Impressive,” he said. “Thus far their progress with the Greek is clearly passable, and you’ve certainly got them thinking.”
“I certainly hope so,” said Samuel.
“I wonder what you make of what that round-faced girl said, though. About Christian’s family. How some of them may suffer.” Thoreson waited. He seemed to feel he’d said enough to be clear.
“Was she wrong?” Samuel said.
“But she wasn’t speaking only of the characters. You can see that, surely.”
“No, she wasn’t.”
“Do you consider it right, to make young women think about such things? Weakness, and the difficulties of their lot? The future tragedies that may befall them?”
> “I would argue that it is always right to think,” Samuel said.
“What good will it do them to dwell on it?” Thoreson said, disconcerted at finding his unanswerable point answered—as if he’d tried to make one of his beloved right angles and discovered the edges would not quite meet. That square jaw hung slightly. “What will it accomplish? Many of the hardships that will confront them are not avoidable. They are inevitable.”
Samuel nodded. “Some might be changed, perhaps, if they know about them ahead of time. Others not.”
“Giving them that kind of knowledge—encouraging that kind of contemplation—seems to me cruel.”
“I don’t think so. It’s in such contemplation that we foster the enlargement of the soul,” Samuel said.
“Oh, souls, souls. We need to worry about the world, not souls. Show me a soul.”
“Didn’t we?” Caroline said.
Samuel bid Thoreson farewell and shook his hand at the front door, though he came out onto the stoop to see him off. Caroline and David walked him to the carriage. Four trilling hearts cut across the sky, and Thoreson stopped to watch them. “They are real then,” he said.
They were, they were real; perhaps they were the same kind of real as their girls and what their girls were doing. Perhaps, after all, everything was linking together in the way Samuel had designed.
David lingered next to Caroline by the carriage door, after it had closed behind Thoreson. “We rattled him,” he whispered, leaning in. Caroline could feel his breath on her neck. She turned toward him and laughed. She looked at her father across the grass as he waved at the carriage, pulling away now, carrying Thoreson and their triumph, like a fellow passenger unwelcome beside him.
6.
A FAINTING
That instant broke upon him in a vast wave.
—MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 120)
The feeling of having won was a lingering sweetness perched far back on Caroline’s tongue where she was accustomed to tasting dread. They were doing what they’d planned, sweeping even Pearson’s daughter up. All of them together were doing it, and David seemed on the point, the very point, of telling Caroline what this meant to him, their togetherness, hers and his, in accomplishing such a thing. Any day now, any moment that felt to him like the right one—it didn’t matter which, for here Caroline would be, ready, here where she had always been. She sensed a newness in the air of the house, in its taste, and now even, she thought, in the shape of her own features in the mirror, their somehow lighter set.
The books came, then, souring.
One day Meg had The Darkening Glass, that thick black volume Caroline would have known anywhere, tucked between wholesome schoolbooks; the next, Livia had it on her desk, like the black mark of a spreading plague. Natural, Caroline tried to tell herself—not worth worrying over—until she saw Abigail and Felicity too with it.
“New reading?” she asked.
“My doing, Miss Hood,” Eliza said. “I had a few sent for the girls who were interested. Some of them hadn’t read it. You don’t mind, do you?”
She presented to Caroline her adult smile, her calm, inscrutable face.
“It’s so beautiful,” Felicity said. She pressed her palm to the cover.
Samuel wasn’t present; Caroline would have liked to see his expression. Those black covers made phrases stir greasily in her memory. If it had been a different bad book, she’d have told Felicity she was smart enough to know better. But as things stood, what could she say in front of Pearson’s daughter? She wasn’t going to become David’s Ohio schoolmaster, prohibiter of reading, especially this reading. She wouldn’t prize a poor fatherless girl’s remembrance from her fingers. She knew so well what that clutch felt like.
“Only remember it’s a work of fiction,” she told them. “It might be easy to forget, given where we all are, but it’s a product of imagination.” She looked not at Eliza but at the others. What her father wrote of mine was his own invention, nothing more.
“Oh yes,” Eliza said.
And perhaps it would be fine. The girls might simply wade through all Pearson’s words and come out clean on the other side. They were receiving something here, after all. If she wanted proof of that, she’d had it in Thoreson’s slack mouth.
Before long, though, a certain resistance crept into Samuel’s lessons, in small enough ways that at first Caroline couldn’t be sure. Her father was still brilliant, and the lessons still went where he wanted them to go, but now Caroline could sometimes feel a moment of drag on the line before he began to pull the girls with him.
“What do you all think of Mercy’s behavior here?” Samuel asked.
“What aspect of her behavior in particular?” said Julia.
“Well, her words, I suppose.”
“What about her words, sir?” said Meg.
Caroline found her father afterward. “They seemed a bit reluctant today.”
“Reluctance is the natural province of the student,” Samuel said. “We do not blame the sky for being blue.”
On a chill Wednesday afternoon, six of the girls, in cloaks and shawls, circled on the grass under the birch by the front step. The Darkening Glass lay open on each lap. Caroline spied them from her bedroom window, went down the stairs, out the back door, and around the house. She wasn’t creeping up on them—she was going for a walk. They would see her when they saw her.
In the meantime, she could hear Abigail’s voice, reading. “ ‘Night approached quickly, but not as quickly as the answering night within.’ ” Caroline drew nearer. Half of them looked down at their pages, dutiful as if this were a classroom. Livia fidgeted, Tabitha stared up into the leaves—Caroline had yet to see Tabitha attend to any reading, or really any sustained task, without several promptings—and Eliza reclined on one elbow, watching Abigail, whose face, tipped to the words, seemed to glow in the sunlight reflecting off the page. “ ‘A fear, nay, a terror for her grew in him.’ ” Eliza’s eyes on Caroline now.
“Hello,” Eliza said.
Abigail stopped, startled.
“Aren’t you all a picture of industry.”
Had Abigail volunteered, or had Eliza called on her?
“How are you finding your reading?”
“Wonderful,” Tabitha said.
“It’s the best book I’ve ever read,” Rebecca added. Rebecca who had now read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Bible.
Eliza smiled. “They’re so kind to me.”
A chorus of protests.
Caroline wondered what the lines sounded like to Eliza, read aloud by these other girls—if she were only making use of every voice available to her, in the hopes that one of them, reading, might happen at last to catch a cadence her bones knew. If she meant to fill her world with the speaking of her father’s words, strike and strike herself with them until she could feel their marks. Had she managed it yet?
“I should have said this before, but if any of you have—questions about anything you find—I’ll do my best to answer them,” Caroline said.
She felt the offer limping from her. They had chosen already. That was why this circle frightened her; she had not formed it, nor had any of the teachers.
The girls looked, every one of them, to Eliza.
“Thank you very much, Miss Hood,” Eliza said.
* * *
*
The weather warmed again in the second week of October. The leaves flared, filling the air with the spectacle and earthy scent of their dying, but the ground was still soft and alive underfoot, and the sun ripened in a hot blue sky. David moved his lessons back outdoors.
“But I’m tired, Mr. Moore!” the girls would cry, each time he announced they were going out. “Couldn’t we just talk in here today?” Performing their exhaustion, going limp, draping themselves o
ver their desks and chairs. Their love for him was connected to their bodies in ways most of them didn’t yet understand.
“We could not,” David told them briskly, and clapped his hands, so up and out they went.
Sometimes Caroline came along on these lessons. As he scaled the hills, David would remove his jacket and roll up his sleeves to show broad forearms, sun-browned against the white of his shirt, a color as rich as promising soil. He had still shown no signs yet of reopening his failed attempt to talk to her, about whatever it was.
He sent the girls one morning to find stones that showed sedimentary layering. He wandered amongst them answering questions, then sprawled on the grass beside Caroline and said, “I give this weather my permission to continue.”
His hand was inches from the edge of her skirt. She could feel that edge as if it were an extension of her skin.
“The kind of day that makes it hard to believe in unpleasant things,” she said.
“Unpleasant things do happen on days like this.”
Caroline stole a glance at his face, which was turned away from her, toward the sky. It had been a stupid thing for her to say. David, of course, had been in the war and would have seen men kill each other in picnic-bright sunshine. The war had been so separate from her own life that she just had trouble remembering. Samuel had been impassioned on the slavery question, if the writing of thunderous essays were proof of passion, though what else he should have done, being too old to fight, she wasn’t sure. They’d been too far north to see active soldiers or damage or even many uniforms, and so the only obvious change the war made in their lives was giving them the new ceremony of reading the day’s papers solemnly aloud in the evenings by the fire. If the news they read was true—the dead in numbers so large her mind couldn’t grasp them concretely; all the chains fallen from all the necks—she wondered how she and Samuel could still be sitting there on the same faded patch of comfortable carpet, in their habitual chairs. How not even the books on their shelves were disarranged.