The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  “Please, Papa,” Caroline said quietly. She was trying to remind him of how Eliza would be fastening every word he said to a wall in her mind from which none of it could ever be dislodged.

  “What, Caroline?” Samuel said. “It’s all true. Do you know, once I sat next to Miles at supper, and he spent the whole time telling me what the future of civilization would be like. He said in a few generations’ time we would all be in communion with both the living and the dead. That, he thought, would become the measure of a spiritual life.”

  “We must have a very spiritual life, then—we’re communing with the dead right now,” Caroline said. She couldn’t bear this.

  “He mooned around this place like he’d never heard of working,” Hawkins said.

  “You’re lying,” Eliza whispered.

  “We aren’t,” Samuel said. “He used to take morning swims in the stream, though it was so shallow he could barely get himself all the way in. He called them his ‘ablutions.’ He proposed we speak only in ancient languages to one another, in the interest of purity.”

  “Remember when a tree fell on the barn, and the roof needed fixing?” Hawkins said. “He disappeared for three days and walked back just as we were finishing.”

  “He’d come across some rune in his readings and he would sing it while he walked because he said—”

  “Stop,” Eliza said. “Oh, stop, please. I see what you want me to, about him. My father was a silly boy. That’s what you mean to tell me.”

  “Miss Bell,” said Samuel, “we have no desire whatever to be cruel. But since you came here you’ve seemed to be questing after some connection with your father, and it’s clear the obsession has grown to unhealthy dimensions. Best for you to know the truth about him. Sometimes the ideas we have about the people in our lives aren’t helpful to us.”

  Is that true of the people in your own life, sir? was what Caroline expected Eliza to say next.

  Instead she said, “All right. I understand.”

  “You understand?” said Samuel.

  “Miss Bell?” Caroline said.

  Eliza looked at her then. Caroline wanted to tell her that she didn’t need to understand this, that such an understanding was more than what she needed to ask of herself; or even lie and say that she could remember Miles after all and what they were saying wasn’t true, he’d been nothing like they were telling her. But she was thinking of her mother, of all she’d never seen about Anna, and that stopped her for a moment, and in that moment Eliza looked away again. Something collapsed in her face. “I do. I do understand,” she said. “Might I have my treatment now?”

  Hawkins raised his eyebrows. “You’re ready?”

  “I’m ready,” Eliza said. “If this treatment might make me better, I’m ready. I can’t stand to feel like this anymore.”

  Like what? Caroline wanted to ask her. Like yourself?

  Eliza lay back, and Hawkins wafted the sheet down over her, her body just like all the others’ bodies, nothing so mysterious or powerful about her at all. She was only a girl.

  “That’s very good, Miss Bell. You will feel much better soon,” Hawkins said.

  16.

  PAROXYSM

  “Only you can save me, though it costs us both,” she told him.

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 403)

  Alone in her bedroom that evening, Caroline lay down and then realized she’d forgotten to put out the light. She rose again to do it, and the world swung away from her like a loose door pushed open.

  She lost some time then—she wasn’t sure how much. When she awoke she was lying with her cheek to the floorboard, goose bumps stippling her arms. Cold down there, on the floor. Had her body made a sound, falling? No one had come to check on the thump, if there had been a thump.

  The lamp on her desk still gave off its domestic glow. She crawled across the floor to reach it—staying low enough that she couldn’t fall again—and snuffed the flame, then crawled back and hoisted herself into bed.

  By the time Caroline came downstairs in the morning, Sophia was already gone: Mr. Sanders had driven her into town before daybreak to hire a coach to Boston, where she would board her Ohio-bound train. The house without Sophia in it felt so much closer to dead. Caroline could not believe her own bereftness.

  Samuel clasped David’s shoulder at the bottom of the stairs, when he came down alone. “It will be all right in the end,” he said.

  “Will it?”

  From the dining room, Caroline could see how hollowed out David’s face looked.

  “She will come to understand. Once we’ve properly gotten our feet under us, once this course has a chance to take effect. When you can write and tell her of recoveries, she’ll be back, mark my words. Nothing like results to win them.” There was a forced cheer in Samuel’s voice, as if he were jesting about a customary lovers’ spat, the middle act of some comic play in which the shrewish wife is at her temporary pinnacle of unreason.

  The explanation David gave Hawkins, when he emerged from his room, was that Sophia’s mother was ill and she’d been called home.

  Over breakfast, Hawkins said, “We should try to get them all in again today.”

  “Again?” Caroline said. She couldn’t catch her breath.

  “It’s important to provide the release several times in quick succession at first. In some cases a cumulative effect is beneficial.”

  Samuel had work to do in his study, David had writing to finish in his room, and so neither would attend. After all, no need to learn an identical lesson twice.

  “And you, Caroline?” Hawkins said.

  “I’ll go with you.” If no one were presiding, Hawkins might whittle the girls away like dry wood.

  Those who had resisted yesterday were mostly calmer today. They understood what to do without being told, so almost nothing needed to be said, and that helped—some of the words involved were themselves so incensing. They lay back obediently. Hawkins set to work with only brief instructions to each, and no explanations.

  Today tears gathered only in the corners of Abigail’s eyes. “Will we need to do this many more times?” she asked when Hawkins had finished.

  “Not many, no—not if you continue to make progress as I expect,” Hawkins told her.

  He folded the sheet and handed it to Caroline as if she were his nurse. She took it and the world leaned again, and she tilted forward, fell—she kept her eyes open but could not stop herself from falling to her knees. She was scrambling up again when Hawkins turned to her.

  “I stumbled,” she said, clutching the bedpost for balance. Abigail was watching her absently, as if half asleep.

  “Miss Hood, a word outside, please,” Hawkins said.

  Caroline went into the dim hall, heart pounding: caught caught caught caught. She faced him.

  “Tell me, Caroline, how long has this been going on?” Hawkins said sternly.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She made herself as tall as she could. This wasn’t anyone else’s but hers, to do with what she would, and she wouldn’t be made to feel she’d failed to confess a sin. What could he do, if she insisted it was nothing? If she used her very best teacher-voice to say so?

  “I assume you’ve been keeping this from Samuel. He would have mentioned if he considered his daughter to be among our patients.” Hawkins shook his head. “You know I’ll have to tell him.”

  Ah, there it was—there was what he could do.

  “Dr. Hawkins, I would ask you, please, as a friend”—the word almost gagged her—“not to do that.”

  “I must. He’s my friend too, Caroline—my old friend, one of my oldest. It wouldn’t be right to keep such a thing from him. You know it wouldn’t. And you can’t go on like this.”

  “But you don’t understand—I think it might kill him. Tr
uly, having to worry about me in this way, he couldn’t withstand it.” Her voice broke, but she would not, would not, cry in front of Hawkins.

  Hawkins sighed.

  She breathed, breathed, breathed while she waited.

  “One thought,” Hawkins said finally. “If we started you down the right path, and if I felt that you were improving, I might feel better about keeping the situation between us.”

  Caroline still had the clammy weight of the sheet draped over her arm. The right path. Between her and Hawkins she wanted nothing except space. She didn’t want him anywhere near her. Hawkins was suggesting that he see now beneath her dress, as she’d always suspected him of wanting to do, and at the recognition of this she flinched, a full-body flinch, as if something had pricked her spine and the hurt traveled in every direction at once.

  But her father’s face, when Hawkins told him: the way it would crumple as all of his worst moments returned to him. As he remembered Anna falling, and kicking at the air, and losing herself, and failing to return, one day, from a walk he had let her take alone. The way Caroline would feel, watching his face, knowing she’d made it look that way.

  Here again was the pattern Hawkins had used with Rebecca and with Eliza too: the father brought in at the critical moment to make the daughter tractable. Caroline could see well enough what he was doing, but seeing didn’t help her.

  And Hawkins had said that she couldn’t go on like this, and she thought that might be true. Caroline of course wanted to be whole and well. The books, the doctors, made a long line in front of her and each of them said that yes, this was the way to wholeness and wellness. At the back, so far distant she could barely see, Hawkins and David and her father, just as sure as the rest and only part of this pack of sureness. Her father who—if all of this were the way they thought—would never have to carry the weight of what was wrong with her. All together they were loud. They all wanted her to listen to them, as they always had.

  What did Caroline know?

  Hawkins was watching her face.

  “When?” she said.

  * * *

  *

  Caroline waited in her bedroom. At least she knew what was coming and could loosen her corset and take off her drawers ahead of time, so she wouldn’t need to fumble beneath her skirts with Hawkins in the room. She positioned herself on the bed, positioned the sheet over her. Soft and a little damp-feeling against her legs. She would lie like stone in the shape of a woman: like the statue on a sarcophagus. She would be in all respects stony. Not a word would she say to Hawkins, not the whole time. She would in fact pretend he was not Hawkins but only a physician, the anonymous physician all the books referred to. And she herself only the anonymous patient. First the physician should instruct the patient to…

  There was her ceiling above, the same as ever. It seemed impossible that the familiar water stains and ripples would look down on something like this without intervening on her behalf.

  But then what would this be, after all? Only a treatment for her body, which had been disobedient, which would now be taught to obey. Every one of their girls had survived this, and the fine society girl too, and so many others. Things had been happening to Caroline’s body that she didn’t understand—this would be one more thing. Maybe this thing would do what was promised and fix the others.

  She pulled in air.

  Hawkins knocked. He entered.

  “All right, Caroline,” he said.

  She said nothing. She did not look at him. She looked at the ceiling.

  He seemed then to understand her sarcophagus terms and came to the bed without speaking again. The sheet clung to her legs as he slid his arm beneath it.

  And there were his hands. She’d been right about the place they touched and tried to move.

  If she kept her eyes on the ceiling, she found, Hawkins was entirely out of her line of vision. She didn’t have to see anything about him.

  His hands’ motions were causing a sort of jittering in her legs that seemed to have nothing to do with her. A mechanical effect from a mechanical cause. Caroline herself was nowhere in what was happening, and so this was nothing like her dreams, where her whole self swelled. She felt only an unpleasant friction, easy enough to hold at a distance. When she lay as still as she could, everything under the sheet seemed not to be hers. It all seemed to belong to the patient.

  She glanced down once and found that Hawkins’s eyes were on her face, where she’d caught them so often before. She looked back at the ceiling. She would not think of reciting Latin in a white dress with Hawkins watching from his chair. She would not think of him across the parlor watching her. Watching her flee from the birds. Those were thoughts of Hawkins, and this was not Hawkins but the physician, giving the patient a treatment, dealing in bodies.

  With her eyes on the ceiling she waited through the movements of her legs—the patient’s legs. They were moving beneath the sheet and Caroline could wait out the moving. Waiting she was good at.

  “All right. All right. That will do for now,” Hawkins said.

  He wiped his hand as he had done after each of the others.

  He left. Caroline lay quiet. She was still stony. She was afraid of what would happen in the first moment she moved again, of what she would feel.

  At last she sat up. She whisked the sheet away, wanting to be free of it.

  And there she was, uncovered, herself as always. Nothing he’d done had left a mark on her. She thought of all the unmarked girls around her, in their rooms.

  The walls seemed to blur a little, her fingers seemed to tingle, but maybe that was only the last gasp of the blurring and tingling, the last breath of them on her before they left forever.

  * * *

  *

  Next there were hours for Caroline to last through. She reminded herself that she was waiting now for a cure to take effect. Each feeling that visited her the rest of the day might be the start of becoming well, becoming a person clean and empty with newness.

  The feelings themselves mattered almost not at all.

  She walked into town so as not to be in the house. How did her legs feel on this walk? She could not have said with any certainty. She tried to breathe in the cold air deeply and feel only new.

  At the post office she found a letter from Miss Sterne waiting for her.

  Oh, I was so very sorry to read the news your last letter brought. Despite the challenges she posed, I quite liked Miss Bell; I felt for her. I do so wish there were some strategy I implemented that I could tell had an effect—I would gladly share it with you now—but no, our episode persisted and then passed for no discernible reason, something like the way weather does.

  I will be thinking of all of you.

  Unexpectedly Caroline’s eyes welled at the thought of Miss Sterne sewing capably in a quiet room and thinking of her. It felt as if Miss Sterne had reached out and found her, the real her, and gripped her hand.

  * * *

  *

  At supper Samuel passed Hawkins the plate of salted beef.

  “How are the treatments progressing?” he asked.

  “Quite well, I think,” Hawkins said. “We’re starting to make some real strides forward. Wouldn’t you say, Caroline?”

  She was not going to look at him, not ever again. She would remain stone where Hawkins was concerned. “I suppose so,” she said.

  “So you think they’re beginning to recover?” Samuel said.

  Hawkins sipped his wine. “I do. I think we’re beginning to see real changes. I feel very pleased with how it’s all going. We all should.”

  He raised his glass, and Samuel and David raised theirs in return. Caroline remembered herself and raised hers too.

  17.

  BODIES

  His yearning for her was pure as the breath of the very soul—pure and stainless as she herself.


  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 407)

  The third morning of treatments, Julia had a fit as Mrs. Sanders was distributing the breakfast trays. She fell off her desk chair and struck at the air with her hands and feet while the others, alerted by Tabitha’s scream, flew to her—the girls from their rooms, the teachers and Hawkins from downstairs, everyone running. The girls encircled her where she lay on the floor. Samuel stood in the doorway, looking as if he wanted to close his eyes.

  “Please stand back,” Hawkins said. They made way for him, and he lowered himself beside Julia and plunged his hand into her flailings to find the pulse at her neck. He kept his fingers pressed there until she was still, then stood up again. “Let her lie there for a moment. Then someone can help her onto her bed.”

  “Why is this happening?” said Caroline. “Why is this still happening?”

  She had allowed the treatment to happen. Here, in this room—and all the other rooms, her own too—she had allowed it.

  “What has it all been for?” she shouted.

  “Miss Hood, surely you weren’t expecting instant results,” Hawkins said.

  “You yourself said the results would be instant.”

  “Ah, I said they can be. One possible course—a rare one, I ought to have explained. In most cases it’s several cycles at least before we begin to see real change. We may find that it takes months.”

  “Months,” said Eliza, from the floor near Julia’s head, her hand woven into Julia’s hair; Julia’s eyes flicked to her. They looked like a classical portrait of dying sisters. Caroline had been a failure of a guard. She dug her nails into her palms.