The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  Rebecca could take Samuel’s writing hand. Caroline watched Mr. Johns stare in confusion at his daughter, so whole seeming—he hadn’t yet seen her dramatic slumping, and her rash was hiding under her sleeves. Perhaps he wouldn’t ever see, if Rebecca could take the writing hand, which had always persevered and could give her relentlessness.

  For Abigail: Samuel’s imperturbability. The way no one but Caroline could spy when something had rattled him; the way his words and movements came at their own pace always, not the pace the rattlers would set. Soon, when Abigail’s mother squeezed her shoulders and cried, Abigail would not flush so crimson. Whatever she felt, she would be able to decide what she wanted to show of it.

  Meg could take Samuel’s grace, the lightness of his step when his thinking was going so well he had to pace with it. The impassive like-faced parents who came to collect her would see her new way of walking and know that she had moved beyond them, the way people, most people, hope their children will.

  Julia could have his laughter. That sense of the joy of living that so rarely deserted him. Julia’s mother, all boniness and flaring nostrils, had scented and stomped out all threats but also all joy in Julia’s life. Now Samuel could give her his.

  Livia needed Samuel’s kindness. Caroline wanted her up on a stage somewhere, her white-gold hair its own light, accusing them all—but she also wanted Livia to look on some deserving faces with the kind of love that had always come easily to Samuel.

  For Felicity: the set and sureness of Samuel’s shoulders, to bolster further that courage she’d always had. A spine that stayed straight, so that Felicity’s smallness would hereafter be a screen behind which she could set all the terms.

  That left only Eliza, and for Eliza Caroline had trouble thinking what would be enough.

  Before Eliza left, Caroline went to see her in her bedroom. Everything she had brought with her had been packed back into her trunk. She sat on the mattress. Caroline sat too.

  “I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry,” Caroline said. “I’m so sorry that I didn’t understand in time about him. You are…much too good for what happened to you.” Her voice trembled a little. “But he’s gone now, back to Boston. It’s over.”

  Eliza looked at her curiously. “Hawkins, you mean?”

  “Who else?”

  “When you said him I thought at first you meant your father. And of course they aren’t the same, are they?”

  “No, of course,” Caroline said, pleased that they could agree on at least this much.

  “Your father’s worse, I think,” Eliza said.

  Caroline stared at her. “Worse than Hawkins? How can you say that? You don’t really believe what’s in The Darkening Glass, do you?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Eliza said sharply. “I mean that after all of this, after everything, he still thinks he sees more than everyone else. He still believes, however it went wrong, it can’t really have been his fault. He’ll write about it. You’ll see, he will.”

  Was this true? Caroline didn’t know. It might be. It had been true of nearly everything else that had ever happened to her father.

  “I came here wanting so much to find something I never had,” Eliza said, her eyes welling. “I don’t know what, but I’ve always missed it. Somehow I thought it might be here. And he let me believe that. He let all of us.”

  “If it matters,” Caroline said, “I do think he believed it himself.”

  Eliza considered. “I suppose so.”

  In the end, as Eliza’s stepfather carried her to the coach, since she still felt too weak to walk down the stairs, Caroline decided Eliza should have Samuel’s anger. That rage he had treated as an unwanted, unnamed, unacknowledged child—at all those who’d wronged him and every current he’d fed that had somehow passed on without carrying him where he expected to go. Eliza had anger already, but Caroline looked at her quiet, pale face, before the closing of the carriage door hid it, and wished her more, a mountaintop of rage on which she could be distant and safe.

  After they had all left, Caroline understood that perhaps these pieces she wanted to give the girls were pieces not just of Samuel but of herself too. That perhaps they belonged to her just as fully. She thought about which of them she would choose to take with her, into the life that would come next.

  * * *

  *

  The next morning, Caroline would leave for Boston. Mr. Sanders would drive her.

  In the middle of that last night she took her lantern and went again to the nest in the woods.

  She’d decided that before she left she should set the massive nest shape on fire, so that she could turn it into a dream that had passed. This was something she could do with her brand-new strong body, which was not going to teeter into death at any moment and which was whole enough to carry and unleash a destructive force. The image of the nest would continue to haunt her, but after this it would be only an image, only a haunting. And only for her. She’d had no desire to tell anybody else about it—not David or Hawkins, before they left, and not her father. It didn’t belong to them.

  Not the girls either, because it did.

  She walked in the lantern’s circle of light through the dark and to the nest. Then she stood, looking.

  How easily it would catch. Two more steps, the lifting of the lantern’s glass case, the touching of the flame to the parts of the underside she could reach. The whole haystack of it would burn and, with it, all the stolen scraps she hadn’t found. If there were birds in there, well, birds had wings.

  This act was the same one she’d feared Eliza would take, that night in the woods with the stick and the fire, and there was no reason to assume the fire Caroline would set would stop with just the nest. It might devour that and then just keep devouring: tree after tree, until no trees stood. That wasn’t what she wanted, but if it happened she was prepared to consider it necessary.

  She imagined the slow lick of the fire’s first contact, then the wild orange rush, trilling hearts flying straight upward from it like great sparks.

  The undoing of the girl shapes.

  Caroline ran her eyes now over the nest that linked those shapes, the path made solid that any tremor would take to register there, and there, and there. She stood for a last moment looking at this nest that was itself the shape of receiving all the signals of the world.

  Birds again now. Several, then more, coming out of the nest, flying toward Caroline. The light, she understood—they were drawn to the lantern she held—but before she could put it down one had landed on her, on the soft inside bend of her elbow, as if on a branch. The clench of its feet through her sleeve was like strong, warm wire—but the bird’s body was so light, impossibly light, her arm wasn’t aware of holding any new weight at all. A second landed at her feet. Her skin shivered, her heart thrummed, but it didn’t seem they were trying to take anything from her. Others landed near the one on the ground. All of them faced the lantern. They didn’t seem very aware of Caroline herself. The one on her arm was straight from her dream of red sleeves except it moved, darting now in its reptilian way a little closer to the light, lifting now its wing. The birds on the ground shifted, hopped. Movements she couldn’t have dreamed for them, designs she couldn’t guess at—remote as the impulses that had built this nest, or as the ones that had produced, from Caroline’s own unreachable heart, the trembling and numbness and fainting—all of theirs.

  Animals within animals within animals within animals, stretching far too deep to see.

  Best, maybe, not to burn down things that you couldn’t see.

  Because everyone, she decided, should be allowed that dark. She looked again to the nest. Everyone should keep the space of a haunting.

  One day she might tell the girls about this nest after all. She imagined them returning here as women to find whatever remained: perhaps nothing, or perhaps a layer of debris just
a little thicker than the layer of pine needles and leaves elsewhere, littered, on inspection, with their own artifacts. Or perhaps the nest would last whole somehow and they would stand here to look at it. Just here, where they could face the shapes they’d had as girls.

  Caroline blew out the lantern and felt the small, small shift of the bird lifting off and leaving her.

  * * *

  *

  In the morning, Caroline knocked at her father’s study door a final time. “Come in,” he said. When she did he was reading, or pretending to. Behind him a board still covered the space of the windowpane she’d shattered.

  “Mr. Sanders is on his way now to drive me,” she said.

  “What are you going to do once you arrive?” He stood, her diminished father, and stepped toward her.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said.

  “Dearest, I still don’t understand what you’re doing, going there.”

  “I know,” she said.

  She moved in and put her arms around his neck. She breathed in the smell of her childhood, leather and paper; a childhood at last done no matter how she had loved it.

  “I’ll write once I’m settled,” she told him.

  Outside Mr. Sanders hefted her into the carriage and settled her case at the back. Not much in it. Most of what she had in her little room hadn’t seemed like proper material for a new life. “All right, Miss Hood?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He closed the door and clambered up in front, and they began to move. Slowly, then faster. Caroline did not let herself look out the windows for last glimpses of the landmarks of her life. She kept expecting a sudden snap as some band reached its limit and returned her. Then she expected her father on horseback, galloping abreast, leaning toward the glass to say, Back! Leaving was not a thing that was, in her experience, allowed.

  Yet she did seem to be doing it.

  She hadn’t been to Boston since she was fourteen, for the last of Samuel’s lectures. In Boston, he had been young and famous and built intricate ideas like gold machines with many whirring parts, he and all his friends—most of them sent to Harvard by their fathers to become ministers, but becoming in the end something else in spite of those fathers. Caroline was in a fine tradition, going there in spite of her own. She wondered if she’d recognize the city when she saw it.

  She closed her eyes, and eventually she slept. When she woke the hills were flatter, the trees shorter and scrubbier, the land being pulled tight like a stitch as they neared the sea. There were houses, and more houses. More, then more again. A steady hum began to build outside the carriage. Finally Caroline could see only slivers of sky between buildings, they stood so close together. Brick facades next to wood-painted, next to wood-painted, next to stone, every roof a slightly different height, reeling past the window, so she seemed to be watching the line of the horizon jump and then dip, jump and then dip again. People everywhere—in carriages, on the street, passing under awnings, standing in doorways, every one of them moving. Even the ones who were standing in place were moving, reaching into a pocket to check the time, swiveling a head, turning a face up into the snow that had started to fall. The breath and warmth of them and the steam of their horses and the smoke from their fires fogged the street. How was it possible there were so many people in the world?

  Caroline’s memories of those early lecture-trips here held the smells of the streets, ripe and sour, and stuffy rooms full of men and women in rows, and then the relief of coming home again to run across the grass and sprawl with books across her bed. To eat supper with her father and see him smile at her across the table. Home that quiet she’d craved until it had become all she had.

  The hum Caroline was hearing now was the sound of all these people’s moving bodies. They ferried all their terrors and joys like incidental luggage along with them, not hidden, not really, but not much looked at, since all the others were occupied in carrying their own. They were lovely and scurrying as ants. How beautiful, she thought, to be so busy going somewhere.

  20.

  CLASSROOM

  Her sweet face would always be so luminous in his memory he could not believe he would never see it again in life.

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 442)

  Miss Gloria Sterne was not as Caroline had imagined her. Instead of pincushion-stout, she was broad and tall, and younger than expected. Daunting, a gray iron ship of a woman.

  “I must say, I was surprised to receive your inquiry,” Miss Sterne said.

  “Oh?” said Caroline, taking her seat. The room swam for a moment. She closed her eyes forcefully. These feelings still came to her, not often, not rarely, but she’d stopped fearing they made up a narrative. Now she considered them telegrams from some sender who had ceased to exist.

  “Yes. I appreciated our correspondence, of course—but I read about Trilling Heart, back before it opened. In your father’s essay in The Examiner. Forgive me, but I’d imagined you might consider yourself above our sort of school?”

  Miss Sterne read widely then, for a sewing instructor—though why should a sewing instructor not? “I didn’t write that essay,” Caroline said.

  The one she had written had also appeared, as promised, in The Examiner, two weeks after she’d arrived in Boston. It had made people talk about Samuel—subsequent essays had appeared, in The Examiner and elsewhere—but Caroline’s name hadn’t even been on it. “By the daughter of Samuel Hood,” the author line had read. Seeing those words, she’d felt as if she’d stood up in a crowd of people, knees shaking, blood pounding, to scream with anger, and discovered as the scream left her mouth that she was separated from all of them by a veil, and that they could hear her, yes, but they still couldn’t see her.

  One of the essays that had followed her own was by Thoreson. “A Strange Final Chapter.” Its tone had been gently, condescendingly bemused; its stance had been that Samuel and his every idea were relics; and its final paragraph announced the founding of Thoreson’s next school. That school, she’d heard, had filled almost instantly.

  Samuel had written Caroline a letter that arrived two days after her essay appeared. I forgive you, dearest, it read, though she hadn’t asked for forgiveness.

  If Miss Sterne had read Caroline’s essay, she wasn’t saying. “That isn’t an answer,” she said, smiling.

  “I imagine I did see things that way once.”

  “And now?” Miss Sterne asked.

  Caroline took in a breath, let it out in the close, hot air of Miss Sterne’s sitting room. In Boston in the summer, everywhere was hot, and the buildings seemed on the verge of melting, the roads of sliding down the hills like sweat. Something in Caroline also sliding, too massive to stay fixed. Her mind had been too full of her need to get away for her to make specific plans before arriving. For months now she’d been paying her room and board out of her earnings from tutoring the ten-year-old daughter of a solicitor, and the girl was cheerful about working her simple sums and reading aloud, but their sessions left an unused vastness within Caroline. She needed to find somewhere to put it. She had remembered how Miss Sterne’s note of sympathy had touched her like the touch of a hand and wondered if this might be a place.

  “Now,” Caroline said, “I think we must find productive ways of living in the world as it is. Living in it and meanwhile changing it in the ways that are available to us, small ways at first, that might if we’re fortunate add up to something larger. I’d like to help my students to find those ways.”

  She had been hoping for months that the girls of Trilling Heart were finding ways of their own, teaching themselves to carve out and modify as needed the spaces the world presented to them. She thought on the whole they probably were. For most of them, the months of Trilling Heart, the faintings and the red rashes that had crept across their bodies, were probably like the strangeness of a dream in the moments j
ust after waking, when there was a choice: clutch closer, look, wonder, or open the fingers.

  Every night before she slept, Caroline pictured each face. Open, open, she told them.

  Skin healed. Fainters awoke again.

  “Do you know,” Miss Sterne said, leaning back in her chair, “my father idolized yours. He knew him only on paper, of course—he was a shopkeeper, didn’t move in the same circles, but still your father made quite an impression. If everyone could listen to this man, my father used to tell me, the world would have no problems at all.”

  “I spent my life listening to my father. That has not been my experience,” Caroline said.

  Miss Sterne stared at her. Then she let out a creaky startling laugh. “Well,” she said, “Sarah Truman is always complaining that she has too much work to do. She might not mind giving up the literature sections, if you’d like to teach them. I’ll have to talk to Miss Marsh, of course, but—you’ll excuse my saying so—it’s likely she’ll listen to me. The pay won’t be much, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t need much,” Caroline said. In this context it was true.

  * * *

  *

  On the Tuesday after her appointment with Miss Sterne, Caroline thought she saw Sophia at the post office, where she’d come to mail a letter to her father. Impossible, of course. She’d had these sightings often since coming to Boston—she would think she saw Livia or Tabitha or Rebecca. Samuel in a corner-of-the-eye glimpse of someone’s gray beard, and she’d feel sure he’d come to spy on her and gather ammunition for the writing of some letter so powerful it could make her come home once and for all. Or David, in the set of a stranger’s shoulders or chin, and a heat would rise in her, still. Though she knew so well now the word that named him best: coward. She thought if she did see him again she might even say it.