The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  They piled their apples into the sling Caroline had made out of her skirt and walked off across the grass together. Caroline took an unthinking step after them, so she could try again, do better than those storybook words. Who greatly loved her. The apples knocked together like knees. She had no other kind of words, really, to offer.

  The house lay so still. She felt full of so much motion. She wanted David to emerge, stride toward her, grab her wrists, spill the apples on the ground.

  * * *

  *

  The next day they were reading act 3, scene 2 of Midsummer, Livia as Helena rending their hearts—just Caroline and the girls; her father and David were busy planning their own lessons—and sweet, open Abigail cried, “I just feel so awful for her.”

  “You do?” Eliza said.

  “She’s so in love with Demetrius, and he can’t stop talking about how much he loves Hermia.”

  “I’d rather be Helena than Hermia,” Eliza said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Of course it all hurts her. But pain is…I think pain can be so important. I think it can have such value.”

  Eliza’s voice swooped with inflection. She was performing this, and the performance itself, the golden weight of their attention, was in all likelihood her motive. Unsurprising enough. Yet in substance it was an alarming thing for her to say and to make them all think about: the value of pain. Caroline tried to speak lightly. “It depends on the type of pain, Miss Bell, don’t you think? I’m not sure the stubbing of one’s toe is good for much.”

  The girls didn’t seem to have heard. “What kind of value, Eliza?” Julia asked.

  “Of the two of them, who’s more interesting? Never mind Demetrius—which one do you think Shakespeare loves more?” Eliza held out her hands, as if she were showing them herself.

  Caroline imagined Thoreson on the visitors’ couch, watching with eyebrows raised. Was this also a part of your vision, I wonder?

  It was not. It was not a part of hers.

  * * *

  *

  Caroline sat at her desk in the fading afternoon light to write a letter to Miss Marsh’s, Eliza’s old school. A letter of inquiry after Eliza’s health; perhaps they might know how to help her. She phrased her question tactfully, delicate words for a delicate girl, though she didn’t think that was quite what Eliza was. Might you know, might you be able to share, might there be anything…The vagueness was polite and let her feel that she was not doing anything so very dramatic in writing this letter, but it was also useful—a wide-open invitation, a prompting that might summon anything at all. She walked into town and sent the letter off.

  At their teachers’ meeting that evening, Caroline’s father told her, “Your work with Midsummer has a nice pace to it, Caroline.”

  “Yes,” David said. And then, “I’ve been wanting to ask both of your opinions—do you think that Abigail is making progress? I still question her grasp of the fundamentals.”

  “The place that had her before did let her down,” Samuel said, “but she’s rallying.”

  So here they were, in the first conversation they’d all had since the fainting episode, bestowing a lukewarm compliment on the lady teacher, worrying about Abigail’s arithmetic. Caroline had thought they would try this—it was why she’d written and sent the letter to Miss Marsh’s on her own.

  “Shouldn’t we talk about Eliza?” Caroline said.

  Samuel sighed. “We could try.”

  “It must have been very frightening for her,” David said.

  “Though people do faint,” said Samuel. “She seems quite recovered now. And academically, she’s above reproach.”

  “Academically,” Caroline said.

  “Caroline, I just don’t feel I understand her well enough yet to know how to proceed. She’s a somewhat complicated case, isn’t she? We will watch carefully and do our best to determine the right course of action.” Samuel lifted his shoulders helplessly. “The foreignness of the fifteen-year-old girl! Sophia might have more luck, when she arrives, being a bit closer to that world than the rest of us.”

  “Sophia?” Caroline said.

  A silence.

  David watched the floor. He looked cornered, younger than she’d ever seen him.

  “You haven’t spoken to Caroline about Sophia, David?”

  David knew when the corner was too tight.

  “Sophia,” he said, and raised his eyes to Caroline’s, “is my wife.”

  7.

  MRS. DAVID MOORE

  “I often find that at night I feel freer,” she told him.

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 144)

  Sophia would be radiant: a winsome sliver of light put by God in Ohio, now moved by God to Trilling Heart, expressly to illuminate David’s life. She would be straight out of every book and song—she would come dripping words and notes, leaving pools of them in her wake, little puddles of grace for others to wander into. She would shape air into loveliness with her hands and arms. Her face would be blinding. David’s, turned toward it, would look sun-dazzled.

  Sophia was due to arrive the following week and begin teaching fine arts classes, it having been long decided that she should come only once the school had been established, so as to miss any early discombobulation. (So as not to turn the music discordant, mar the shapes, dim the light.) October was soon enough for the girls to begin their arts study.

  “Why didn’t you tell us you had a wife?” Felicity screeched during David’s lesson, while Caroline sat still at the back of the room, wondering if she herself had spoken without her own permission.

  No, because if it had been her voice, it wouldn’t have held laughter.

  “It was unnecessary. I am not the subject of our studies,” David said. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his arms.

  Livia said, “You kept it from us.”

  “She must be very beautiful,” said Eliza, no laughter in her voice either.

  Just once, prior to Sophia’s arrival, Caroline tried to talk to David about her. “She’s an artist?” she asked him, while her father was finding a book upstairs. She saw now of course that it was Sophia that David had failed to tell her about, that day with the sheets, and all the days before that and after, the many days on which he’d said many things to her and none of them wife. Or it might be that he hadn’t failed—that he’d only decided there was no particular reason he should have to tell Caroline anything.

  He was wrong about that.

  David got up to tend the fire. “She enjoys the arts,” he said stiffly.

  Sophia, perhaps, was such an artwork herself that no one expected her to learn, produce, practice. She’d breathe on the girls’ art and it would bloom.

  “You know her from your town back home?”

  “There’s nothing there that can fairly be called a town. But yes, Sophia is from the next farm over from my father’s.”

  He prodded the coals with his head tipped low. Caroline resented the coziness of the scene—watching David from the settee, across an otherwise empty room, while he added kindling. She hoped a stray spark might ignite his curls and singe them a little. She wouldn’t mind hearing him yell.

  “You grew up together, then, the two of you.” Something like what might have happened with her and William, if she’d let him keep pulling that summer day. If William had been brilliant, and she herself less burdened, more beautiful.

  “After a fashion, though Sophia’s younger than I am.”

  Nothing else seemed to be forthcoming—certainly no apology. He might feel he had nothing to apologize for. Perhaps, after all, he was right. What did Caroline know about the ways men and women usually were together?

  “David,” she said, meaning to ask if it had all been only friendliness for him, if she’d invented every hesitation and almost-said word. W
hy not ask now?

  David raised his face. He looked at her as if they were strangers passing on the street and she’d pinned his toes beneath her heel.

  “Must we discuss this forever?” he said. If she kept making him talk, Caroline understood, he would look for ways never to talk to her again. And he could find them. She had no real claim on him, no ground in which to stake one, nothing that could hold. Losing more was always possible.

  She excused herself and went to bed, where she lay in the same darkness that had covered her at twenty-four, eighteen, twelve, eight, the walls and ceiling of her room like a box that fit her, neat as a dead thing, inside.

  * * *

  *

  Caroline wanted to talk to her father. She needed some way of tricking help out of him without having to tell him why she needed it. She chose a moment when she knew he’d be in his study to go and get a book there, nodded to him, fetched it, then stopped at the door, turning back as if she’d only just remembered something—the dance around her shame giving her such shame. “Papa, I wondered, do you have any thoughts on disappointment? Just generally? For one of the girls—she’s having some trouble, and I’d like to help her. Great, very great disappointment, the kind that feels unbearable.”

  “Of course not actually unbearable,” Samuel said, smiling at her above his book.

  “I don’t see how that helps,” Caroline said. She’d come close to Samuel’s desk now, though she’d meant to stay at the door like an alighting insect on the brink of detaching. “Telling her that the thing that seems so huge to her ought to seem small. How does that help? It doesn’t make her stronger.”

  “No,” Samuel said, closing his book now and giving her his whole gaze. “I’m sorry, dearest. I do think it might be a useful reminder, though—to help her adjust her vision. To help her see that the trial can’t be so great.” He wasn’t asking who the girl was. She’d known he wouldn’t force a more specific lie from her. He did not pry, had always believed in their right to keep things from each other.

  “If it is, though,” Caroline said. “If it seems so to her.”

  Samuel considered. “Then she might be asked to think of the very partial view she has—we all have. To remember and trust in the wisdom of the Father, who sees the whole.”

  “Thank you,” Caroline said. She closed on the sentence and carried it from the room.

  But she found that the longer she held the idea, the flimsier it grew as a comfort. She had never really needed reminding that she saw only part of things.

  Later that week, coming back from a walk, Caroline spied Eliza walking on her own. Wandering and grieving over the existence of David’s wife, perhaps—and Caroline’s steps quickened. She thought of what to tell her. I know it’s hard when a silly little dream comes to nothing. But you always knew that’s all it was, didn’t you? You didn’t actually think…? She loved the prospect of saying these sentences, being a person high enough above to say them, and she chased this excitement across the grass toward Eliza.

  Except Eliza, she saw now, was not wandering but circling. Her body always turned toward the house as she moved, as if pulled that way.

  “What are you looking at?”

  Eliza stopped. “Nothing.”

  “It did seem you were looking at something.”

  “Oh, well. It’s a mysterious house, don’t you think?”

  “Is it?” Caroline said. “You’ve seen all of it, I imagine, except maybe the cellar.”

  “What’s down there?” Eliza said.

  “Cellar things. Some preserves, and old broken furniture. Tools we never use. What’s this about, Miss Bell?”

  “I just want to know everything about this place.” Eliza’s fingers played at the fringe of her shawl as if weaving.

  Uneasily Caroline watched her go. What she was doing now did look more like romantic wandering—but before, that had been a sleuthing circle. Their house had no secrets to yield, but the house in The Darkening Glass did, a whole secret room that was the site of Louisa’s torments at Abner’s hands. Worrisome, the possibility that Eliza had been looking for it, as if the things and people in that book were real and findable.

  She wished for some way of making Eliza declare truthfully her reasons for coming here. She suspected those reasons of poison, of creeping rot—tainting the water, eating the foundations, ruining the belowground substance of all their lives in some place none of them could quite see, perhaps not even Eliza herself.

  Though for Caroline’s own part, it turned out that what she’d been building here needed no undoing to fall down, having never had any soundness.

  * * *

  *

  October 25, a Saturday, was sunny but cooler. David, Caroline, and Samuel assembled on the lawn of the farmhouse to meet Sophia’s carriage as it drew to a stop. Caroline adjusted the collar of her dress, readying herself to withstand the music, light, and loveliness that would break over her. She wanted the memory of having stayed on her feet.

  The driver handed down an inexplicably ordinary girl. A traveling companion, Caroline thought—this broad cream face, with its frame of yellow hair, had been provided to stitch Sophia safely to reality during her journey.

  “Here I am!” the girl cried, and ran forward into David’s arms, which opened for her.

  Then the girl leaned back, still gripping him around the neck, and looked around. “So it is real, then,” she said. “Mama and Reverend North said I’d get here and find it was all made up, and my husband pacing and talking to some dolls he’d set up for students.” An eager spreading of her thick red lips—everything about her so milk-fed.

  This girl was David’s wife?

  “Some common geese dyed scarlet, for the birds.”

  “Reverend North?” Caroline said, before she’d even said hello, disoriented enough that she couldn’t tell what questions needed answering.

  “Our minister back home. Very learned. You’ve never told them about Reverend North?” Sophia said to David.

  Somehow Caroline suspected that this Reverend North would not have met her father’s standards for learned. Where had her father gone? Hanging back behind her, lips a little open as if preparing to speak, but saying nothing—it seemed Samuel didn’t know what to do with Sophia as she was turning out to be either. The girls stared from a distance. Tabitha peeked at Sophia through the windows of the farmhouse; a group stole glances at her from the garden across the lawn. They all wanted to try to read what she would mean to them.

  “He knows more than anybody. Except maybe this one,” Sophia said, and nudged David with her elbow. “Reverend North can quote a Bible verse for anything. He had one for me, just before I left. What was it? Something about a journey, a good journey.”

  Samuel, sensing his opening, stepped forward. “ ‘Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, for the workman is worthy of his meat.’ ”

  Sophia frowned. “That wasn’t it. I’d know it if I heard it.”

  Samuel’s smile stayed on his face. “Well. An effort. Welcome, Mrs. Moore. I’m Samuel Hood. We’re so pleased you’re joining us, and grateful to you for sharing your husband with us all this time.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” Sophia said crisply. Caroline wondered if David had gone on at too great a length about Samuel when he’d written to her—if his letters had read too much like love letters to someone else. “You too,” she said, turning a warmer face on Caroline, stepping forward to take her hands.

  David had written, perhaps, of Caroline’s library, her tea making. Such a fool Caroline had been.

  “A pleasure to meet you,” Caroline said, brittle as a schoolmarm. Sophia, to look at her, might almost have been a student. Caroline hadn’t imagined that younger could mean this face still smooth at all its creases, no years at all gathered in the corners of the eyes.<
br />
  They began to make the necessary noises about how Sophia must be tired after her journey. They dispersed. Samuel returned to his study, to read in preparation for his upcoming classes, he said. David led Sophia off to their room, where he would lay her down on their bed and wrap himself around her, this earthy girl without any special light, and taste her skin.

  It might be the only line that mattered in life: between those who thought about things and those who did them.

  The girls were chattering again. Their interest had ebbed for now.

  Caroline went to walk until her mind was quiet enough for her to do something else.

  * * *

  *

  Sophia at the breakfast table the next morning, looking out the window at all the green: “How far do we have to go to get to services Sundays?”

  “We attend in Ashwell, when we do attend,” Samuel said.

  “When you do?”

  “Well, Sophia—it is all right if I call you Sophia, I hope?—the distance is a bit of a deterrent.” As was Samuel’s inability to listen in peace to what he called the pompous half-musings of the slow-speaking reverend. “We go periodically, when circumstances allow. The rest of the time we hold a small worship meeting ourselves, right here, Sunday mornings.”

  “No church,” Sophia said.

  “Sophia,” David whispered, and touched her wrist.

  Only the four of them still sat in the dining room; the girls had finished and gone back upstairs, but the teachers had lingered at Samuel’s suggestion, so he and Caroline could get to know Sophia. They were getting to know her now.

  “You don’t pray?”

  Samuel extended his arms. “Of course we do. We pray wherever and whenever the Spirit moves us.” He wanted to continue, Caroline could tell, but Sophia was neither his student nor his child, so he wasn’t sure what voice to use. She herself knew the rest. She remembered hearing it on a snowy Christmas Eve in childhood as they bumped over ice heaves in their warm carriage: We’re quite as well able to know God as any member of an official clergy, Caroline. We need no ordination. Our ordination is our awakening to the world, and to the divine, and to our own role in relation to both. Pressed against her father’s solid shoulder, she’d felt as if they were the only two citizens of a wise country. She’d wanted to live nowhere else. They hadn’t returned to church for two years, after.