The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  Samuel grabbed her by the shoulders. “You must.”

  Those stirring limbs were the shape of Caroline’s oldest fears. She could not get air.

  Samuel also gasped. “Stop it, Miss Bell!”

  “She can’t help it. Look at her,” said Sophia.

  A spasm, another spasm. Lessening now.

  Eliza’s hands calmed. She began to cry.

  Sophia pushed close, gathered her in, making shh sounds and smoothing.

  “This is cruel, Miss Bell,” said Samuel.

  The motion of Sophia’s hands pushed the drapery of the sheet aside, baring Eliza’s arm up past the elbow, showing them all a vivid mottling of red on the skin, tucked into the crook of her elbow and extending both up and down. Like a dappling of thumbprints, as if someone had seized her over and over.

  “Look,” someone whispered.

  “Look,” someone else.

  Look at the red, red, red.

  Everyone was very quiet then, except for Eliza, still crying, still with that rippling moving through her, a shiver, a pause, a shiver, a pause, a rhythm like breath.

  * * *

  *

  They sent to Ashwell for Dr. Burgess. He came and examined Eliza. “No immediate crisis, anyway,” he told them after, in Samuel’s study. “It seems to have passed. No physical trouble that I can find, other than the rash, which could be anything really.” He was a weak-chinned man who’d spent decades stitching up his patients’ mowing wounds and delivering their babies. Here he was out of his depth.

  They put Eliza to bed and stationed Mrs. Sanders to watch while she slept.

  When Caroline went to talk to her father that night, he was writing and didn’t hear her enter. She wondered how his own words could transfix him even now. “Papa,” she said sharply.

  “One moment.”

  She stood there—she actually stood there—and waited. Furious with herself, her own biddability, she ran her eyes over the rows of books, the rich reds and browns and greens of their spines. She looked down at her feet on the Turkey carpet. She remembered when her whole foot had fit inside a single swirl of its pattern, and she would leap around the room from one to the next in a dance she had felt sure the carpet’s weaver had mapped out for her. Her foot was large enough to hide the swirl now.

  The Moores had retired for the night. Caroline listened to the quality of the silence above her head. They would be talking about Eliza, surely. What would each be saying?

  “All right,” her father said, setting his pen down. “What is it, Caroline?”

  “You must know.”

  He pushed his fingers back behind his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “Such a frightening moment.”

  “More than a moment. All the moments. We need to send her home, Papa. I know it’s my fault she’s here, I know it will cause trouble—”

  “That isn’t what matters now,” Samuel said. “You’re right, of course.”

  She felt such relief at his reasonableness and his forgiveness. Eliza was ill, that was all, and they would send her back to the people whose job it was to take care of her. They would all recover; the school would survive; there was no need for them to take Eliza’s collapse as their own failure.

  She sat down opposite her father. “Did Mama have many fits in a row?” she asked. She wasn’t sure she could stand to watch another.

  Samuel started. “But Caroline, this isn’t like what happened with your mother.”

  “What do you mean? Didn’t she fall down and shudder?”

  “Whatever we’re dealing with here, it’s not that. Miss Bell never lost consciousness, for one thing. And your mother never had any—any skin ailments.”

  So that was what they would be calling those fearsome splotches.

  “It was different with Mama? What was it like?” Her father had never agreed before to talk about this.

  Samuel sighed. “Often it began with a suspicion. She’d sense one was coming. Though not always.”

  Caroline imagined that, waiting for a vast hand to paw her clumsily, pin her to the ground.

  “There was one morning I recall when she told me she thought she’d best stay home that day. Would I mind staying with her.”

  Would you mind? As if politely requesting that he close a window or repair a rotted shingle. What kind of a woman could give fear such a dainty voice? Though perhaps Anna had been too accustomed to her sickness to be afraid, and of course she hadn’t known it could kill her, and perhaps Samuel wasn’t remembering exactly how she’d phrased her request or couldn’t bear to say the words as she’d actually said them. “Did you stay?” Caroline asked him.

  “Of course! I would have given up anything to be there.”

  “Of course.”

  “It wasn’t painful, she told me. Just a strange sensation. Something like electricity.”

  More internal than the vast hand, then. The first time it might have felt like the arrival of some impressive new power, sudden grace or speed. Had it left its mark on Anna in other ways, this unusualness? This being a person whom strange sensations visited? She had known, as people rarely have to know, what she could sustain. The knowledge might change the way a person walked and spoke and wore her own face.

  Samuel played with the page of the book he’d been writing in, flipping it first one way and then the other. His fingertip whispered against the paper. “Sometimes there wasn’t any warning.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t always tell you. Not wanting to worry you, in case she was wrong.”

  Samuel shook his head. “When she suspected, she always told me.”

  Marriage mystified Caroline in its attending certainties about the actions and intentions of someone else. She had spent more time with her father’s habits and words than with her own (he had more of them), and still she sensed hidden, quiet rooms she’d never entered, with heavy curtains pulled. But the contract itself, the formal decision to live all the days of the rest of your life with a person, might make it impossible to believe any thought could be kept from you on every one of those days. So her father could say, She always told me; David could say, I was showing her; Sophia could say, He misses things about people. Caroline knew less of the country of marriage than she knew of ancient Greece or Shakespearean England, yet it did seem to her that Sophia didn’t see things quite the way David wanted, and David from time to time did trot out a small, surprising observation about the subtext of a remark or the expression on someone’s face. And her mother could not have told her father everything.

  “She understood it was better for me if I knew it was coming. She never would have kept it from me willingly,” Samuel continued. His voice caught. Caroline wanted to go and comfort him, kiss the top of his head, but the words seemed slightly wrong.

  “I wonder if making it better for you was always the first thing she considered,” she said.

  Her father’s face sharpened. “Suffering isn’t a winner-take-all game, Caroline.”

  “Thank you for the lesson. Tell me what it was like.”

  “You want me to describe the fits for you? How they looked and sounded, and how I felt, watching that, nothing at all I could do?”

  Yes, she was about to say, when he went on.

  “Dearest, you can’t ask that of me.”

  He had always been so ample with what he did want to say: tidbits of Anna’s preferences, habits, sayings. Tiny pieces of her surface. Caroline had taken each of these shards into her open palm to try to assemble later if it turned out there were enough, not wanting to ask for more when he worked so hard to seem happy, and when she’d always known this work was for her benefit.

  “The last time, did she know?” Caroline asked.

  “No. That last time was…unforeseen. You were sleeping, and I was reading. Your mother had gone for a walk.”

  Her mother
dying while out on a walk was one of the facts Caroline had been given long ago to hold in her hand. Now it felt strange there, improbably angled. Caroline took many walks, but Anna, wife and mother, must have had enough to do without solitary wandering. “But where was she going?”

  “These questions!” Samuel barked. “Where does anybody walk to? I don’t know. I wasn’t able to ask her after, was I?”

  They watched each other.

  “It’s upsetting to remember it,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She was. Still, where? Nowhere, maybe. Anna had just liked walking. She’d liked walking right up until she died walking, that was all. Or away from the fullness of her life. From Samuel telling her about his latest essay, or talking too loud to someone in the study, another of those conversations that unfolded as parallel performances. Away from Caroline’s yells, laughter, and tantrums, her small clutching fingers. Birch Hill that had lately rotted on the vine. Anna liked to get as free as she could, and one day the escape had become more permanent than she had planned on.

  Her father’s expression gentled. “I know it must have been…terrible for you to watch that today, Caroline. Please trust me, though, that this is quite different from your mother’s illness. Miss Bell has, I think, only allowed some suggestion to take hold of her.”

  “You think she shuddered like that on purpose? What about her skin?” Picturing even as she said it the way it might have happened: Eliza, at night, or beneath her desk, or as she walked from one place to another, thumbing up inside her own sleeves and bearing down.

  “I don’t pretend I understand it. But you heard Dr. Burgess—this doesn’t seem to be some straightforward physical malady.”

  “I don’t see—”

  He held up a hand. “In any case I do think you’re right. It’s best, now that things have reached such a pitch, to send her home. Tomorrow morning I’ll have David and Mrs. Sanders bring her into town and arrange it, and telegraph to tell them she’s coming.”

  “Won’t they blame us?”

  “They may. But an ill girl—it isn’t so unusual. Everyone knows one. And anyway, I don’t care for the trajectory here. We’ll have to face it. We’ve faced worse.”

  “We have.”

  He smiled in a tired way.

  Upstairs the hall was still, but as Caroline walked toward her bedroom Sophia emerged from hers, still dressed—she must have been waiting inside for sounds. Her eyes and cheeks were puffy.

  “Any news?” she whispered.

  “We’ll send her home tomorrow.”

  Sophia nodded. She glanced sideways at Caroline’s face, seeming to gauge something. “You know what it looked like?”

  Like my mother.

  “Like what happened in the camp meeting once,” Sophia said, “when God came to a girl and pitched her over, and moved her.”

  Caroline looked at her. “You think—”

  “I didn’t say that, did I?” Sophia said quickly. “I just said what it looked like.” The Moores must have had a tense discussion about this already. “I’ll tell David, about tomorrow.”

  Inside her bedroom, Caroline found that the skin of her inner arms itched. Her sleeves were too tight to push up and see, and when she unbuttoned her dress, she held her breath in the moment before the cloth came away. But there was her skin, same as ever. She took in a breath, blew it out. She’d been letting her panic run with her—the skin markings weren’t even the part of this visitation that was familiar, that she had long practice fearing. She raked her fingernails gently over the place until the itch left.

  10.

  CARRIAGE

  Like a tempest in the distance, trepidation amassed and brewed.

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 288)

  In the morning, Eliza, informed of the plan, informed them she did not want to leave.

  “I’m feeling much better,” she said.

  That was excellent, the very most welcome news, but did not change the necessity of sending her home, as she herself must see. And once recovered she might come back again.

  Eliza said, “I’ll tell everyone.”

  A question, a quite natural question, was: Tell them what?

  “That I’m ill. That I fell ill here.”

  Of course she might say as she liked, as ever. And of course people fell ill in all kinds of places, and was it really true, really, that she’d never been ill before, elsewhere?

  “You can’t make me leave,” she said, and clutched the arms of the chair she was sitting in (they’d told her after breakfast, wanting her fed at least).

  It seemed, though, that they could. In the end David had to carry her to the carriage, where her possessions and Mrs. Sanders were already stowed, Mrs. Sanders having packed everything expeditiously during breakfast. Eliza would not walk, though she did not kick or scream either. She lay like a rolled carpet in David’s arms. Participating in this farewell in which the leave-taker seemed already absent felt like acting a scene with the key player missing. Caroline stood with the blood thrumming in her throat while they drove away.

  Samuel waited until the carriage was almost out of sight, then turned to the girls. “We are all concerned about Miss Bell, but she goes now to attend to the duty of getting well again. While she does, we’ll all be thinking of her.”

  The girls were quiet and unsettled looking. Sophia gazed out over the grounds, searching for God, maybe. There was a feeling in the air like a death had happened.

  “Our other duty, meanwhile, lies in the classroom,” Samuel finished, and sent them inside to ready themselves for a lesson in thirty minutes’ time.

  But the lesson never began, because it took only twenty minutes for the carriage to drive back, for David to leap out and yell, “I think she’s breathing,” for them all to see Eliza with her eyes closed and head lolling, huddled on Mrs. Sanders’s lap like a child.

  * * *

  *

  David fetched Dr. Burgess again, who administered smelling salts and some sort of draught and left once more. The teachers sent the girls to their rooms and met in Samuel’s study.

  “I thought she was dying,” David said. “I thought she was going to die right there in front of me.” He was looking at his hands as if newly understanding all they could not do. Sophia covered them with hers.

  “What happened?” Samuel said.

  “We started, and she told us she thought she needed to stay, that it wouldn’t be good for her, leaving. I thought it was just more of what she’d been saying all morning. I thought she was only…you know.”

  “Lying,” Caroline said.

  “Then she started saying she felt light-headed. She couldn’t breathe. She started gasping, and she turned red, and then she slumped over.”

  Sophia gasped too, as if somehow, even though she’d seen Eliza there in the carriage herself, the conclusion of the story were a surprise.

  Samuel was tapping his second and third fingers in alternation on his desktop, making them sound the wood like tiny marching feet, the way he did sometimes when stuck on a thorny bit of phrasing. “Well. In light of this, we may need to reconsider our approach. Clearly just now Miss Bell is in no condition to be moved.”

  “Her parents will need to come then,” Caroline said. “Collect her, decide how best to take her home.”

  “My concern there,” said Samuel slowly, “is that she’s taken it into her head that leaving makes her worse. Sometimes a belief like that—believing it may make it true, I fear. Her condition may worsen no matter how the moving is accomplished.”

  “What are you saying?” Caroline asked.

  “What do we do?” Sophia said.

  “Let’s think. Let’s think about this carefully. Dr. Burgess still finds no physical source of Miss Bell’s distress. It would seem to follow that the source—i
t would seem clear to me—must somehow lie in her ideas.”

  “Then if we could fix the ideas—” David said.

  “Yes, I think so,” Samuel said. “I think if we can do that, if we can find whatever mistaken view is troubling her, she might improve.”

  They were sitting in the same room where for all of Caroline’s life she’d been taught to see her problems clearly, to name them while her father listened and adjusted her naming—to find them, after, smaller. But this—no one knew the name for this.

  “Papa, we can’t. You know we can’t keep her,” Caroline said.

  Samuel sighed. “In removing her we put her at risk. Do you want to try that again? Given the result? I think, I truly do think, there’s something in her thoughts or in her soul that’s made her sick. And I think with care and attention we might be able to figure out how to make her well.”

  “How?” Sophia said. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Of course I don’t have all of the answers just yet, Sophia. But we can search for them—we will—as no one else can.” Samuel looked at Caroline again. “If we did get her home somehow, her family doctor, what do you think he’d do with her? He’d lock her up in her bedroom. Give her draughts upon draughts that would do nothing to reach this trouble where it lives. Miss Bell wouldn’t see the sun for a year.”

  “That’s true,” David said, and his voice held a kind of awe. “That is what would happen.”

  “In good conscience I don’t think we can let it,” Samuel said. “We’ll write to Hawkins and seek his advice.”

  “Hawkins?” Caroline said.

  “Hawkins has been an active physician for thirty years.”

  “Why do we need one, if you’re so certain the trouble isn’t physical?”

  “Its manifestations of course are, and Hawkins is a different breed than whomever Miss Bell’s parents would employ, with a wide and varied practice, and a deep and current and active reading in the professional literature. Hawkins will be able to tell us what it would be best to do next.”