The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  Or Hawkins. Caroline avoided the streets surrounding his practice, but still she’d seen a man’s familiar broad back once and had to hurry two blocks to shake off the fear, even after the man had turned his head and proved not to be Hawkins after all. She had names for him too—usurper, trespasser, wolf, thief, thief. She was disappointed in herself after, for having run like that instead of turning to call Hawkins, had he turned out in fact to be Hawkins, by his rightful names. She had thought she’d become surer of her own voice.

  Today, spying this woman’s yellow hair from a distance made Caroline’s breath come fast at the prospect of all she might tell her. The imposter’s gold braids were coiled in a knot, and her shoulders rounded like Sophia’s.

  Then the imposter turned. Somehow she was not an imposter, but the woman herself.

  “Sophia!” Caroline cried, without thinking.

  “Oh!” Sophia said. She moved toward Caroline. She clasped her hands as if they’d been dear to each other.

  “What are you doing here?” Caroline asked her.

  “We came to get an endorsement,” Sophia said. “From a judge here, quite a public figure, if you’ll excuse my saying it. He and David have been writing back and forth. David would have been happy to see you, I’m sure, but he’s already gone on without me, for a meeting with some potential donors in Hartford. I’m taking the train later today to meet him.”

  “Endorsement?” Caroline said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry—I thought you’d have heard. David’s running for the Ohio legislature,” Sophia said proudly. “As a first step into public life. It was my idea. It’s going well. It never does to count on these things ahead of time, but”—she waved a hand—“through God’s grace. We’re very thankful to Him, both of us. David’s been coming to church with me again, you know. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me.”

  All the imposter Sophias had filled Caroline with imagined confessions, apologies, many genuine wishes of happiness. I have harmed you in these ways, and I am sorry. But in those scenarios David had been languishing in a dark Ohio bedroom, and Sophia had been out of her mind with worry and frustration that nobody could tell what was wrong with him, and they could not forgive each other.

  Sophia in the flesh did not look worried. “How are you?” Sophia said. She looked at Caroline with new attention.

  Some reckoning it seemed had happened all on its own, without Caroline. David had come home and told Sophia some things and not, Caroline was sure, others, but the mess of him had communicated enough to Sophia for her to understand, and out of that mess Sophia had managed to build a new life for the two of them. Sophia didn’t need to hear most of the things Caroline had been planning to tell her. Caroline would be saying them only for herself.

  Open the fingers, Caroline told herself, open them.

  “I’m quite well,” Caroline said.

  Sophia glanced down at the letter in her hand. “For your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope he’s well too,” Sophia said savagely.

  “Well enough. Does he know about David’s run?”

  “David wrote to him about it, I think.”

  “Ah. He didn’t mention.”

  “Well,” Sophia told her, “I was going to say we’d be grateful for his support, but I don’t think we would, not really.”

  “No.” Caroline smiled.

  “I’m glad it’s done. For all of us, you too,” Sophia said. “I’m glad you’re here and not there anymore.”

  “So am I,” Caroline said. She caught Sophia’s hand. “I told myself that if I ever saw you again I’d tell you how I admire you, for seeing it all first.”

  “Oh, admire,” Sophia said, and wrinkled her nose. “You did see it too.”

  “But you acted. You were braver and better. I am sorry I was not.” She looked into Sophia’s eyes. This part she could say after all. “I am so very sorry.”

  Sophia pressed her hands. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Please tell David I was happy to hear the news.”

  “Take care.” Sophia surprised Caroline by embracing her. “Find the best way of taking care,” she said, and then she pulled away and walked out the door.

  David before a crowd, behind a lectern, speaking. He did speak well, of course. Caroline wondered whether he was standing straighter these days, whether Sophia had noticed his hollowed-out sagging and prodded at his back until he looked more like himself again.

  Caroline put her letter in the mail. It was like all the letters she sent to her father: she wrote perhaps three for every one she actually sent. In deciding which to post she judged them by the quantity of their revelation of her real self: true things but not the truest. She was willing to show her father her hands, her arms, the back of her head, but never her face. I miss you, and Remember that afternoon when we reenacted the picnic scene from Pickwick? and Please remind Mrs. S you aren’t to have too much salt. She didn’t send the letters that said that she loved him but thought she might never forgive him; that she still felt the weight of all he had ruined; that despite a newness here that made her giddy, she still seemed to be pulling that weight forward with her through her new life.

  He always wrote her back. She tried not to imagine the airless, silent hours from which he sent these letters. Mrs. S seems to have taken your injunctions to heart; I find there is no taste I can recall to reassure myself that I have, in fact, already had dinner. When, my dearest, are you coming home?

  She was not.

  * * *

  *

  Caroline wondered if all the Trilling Heart girls were finding that, like her, they were mostly all right when not in rooms alone. Rooms without other people in them sometimes seemed to Caroline to hold too many thoughts of Hawkins and his hands. Though thoughts was the wrong word, really: too many relivings of him, of those hands, and then the stoniness would creep over her again in a way that felt like dying.

  When this feeling came, she tried instead to remember the afternoon with David, the way she had taken then what she wanted. Except in reliving it she changed him into the person she’d thought he had been.

  She wondered how the girls were managing, so much younger than she was, with so much less to steady them. She wondered and worried about the dreams they were having, while sleeping and while awake, and what their feelings about these dreams were, whom they blamed. She wondered what it would be like for them when they married and another man touched the places Hawkins had touched. He had shown them all something they would always know now about the violability of their own boundaries.

  Caroline worried most of all for Eliza, who had been so eager to exceed the boundaries of herself even before she came to Trilling Heart.

  So it was to Eliza that Caroline wrote, just one letter, the week before the term would begin at Miss Marsh’s. She wanted to write much more than she did. She wanted to say that she hoped Eliza was finding ways to get out of her house sometimes, and that she had a good lamp beside her bed, and that she still had her father’s painting to look at. That Caroline had come to believe some mysteries were beyond solving but a person could still live with them, around them, inside them. She wanted to tell Eliza that she’d be teaching at her old school—imagining a correspondence in which Eliza would write her back with her opinions of the teachers, and Caroline would reply with her own, and eventually they would come to really know each other, and this might make some difference.

  In the end, all Caroline actually wrote was that she thought of Eliza often and wondered how her health was. How was she spending her time?

  Astoundingly, a letter came back. I was pleased to hear from you, Eliza wrote. I find I am reading and sleeping a great deal. My fond regards.

  Caroline made herself keep this letter, this call from a ship sinking far off in the distance. She put it in her desk drawer, atop her plain paper,
where she would see it, not daily, but often, lest she ever begin to forget about costs.

  * * *

  *

  There were trilling hearts even in Boston by summer’s end. Instead of leaving they seemed to be expanding their territory. The first time Caroline saw one stalking the roofline of a building on a busy street, she stopped, and the man two paces back bumped into her. The bird didn’t look in her direction, and why should it? The meaning between them ran only in one direction. Caroline was doing her best to live in other directions herself.

  The Boston Daily Advertiser ran a story on them, several pages in. “Scientists Investigate Bird Species’ New Range.” The words of the article held no indication of awe. The birds had done something new for reasons that existed somewhere and wouldn’t stay unknown indefinitely.

  She imagined what the scientists would think if the birds began their exaggerated nest building here. Great, wild, sculptural, ensnaring thickets in the crow’s nests of the great ships in the harbor, on the broad and somehow horselike back of Faneuil Hall, on Harvard Green, in the doorway of the statehouse, so that the men trying to come and go would find their way blocked. Everywhere this great city of men made to bear the shapes of girls and women.

  Here we are. Look. Look.

  When Caroline first saw the newspaper headline, her breath stopped, because she misread range as rage.

  * * *

  *

  Early September, a sweltering second-floor classroom in Miss Marsh’s school. Caroline perched against the edge of the blackboard and waited to meet her students.

  She had dressed herself with care that morning, lining up the shoulder seams of her good dress exactly with the tendons of her neck. Smoothing her hair, patting her cheeks, she’d been pleased with her eyes’ steadiness in the glass. She looked like a person who belonged to herself.

  She’d felt like such a person since the first time she’d bled, after David. A red streak, a question answered: her body was only hers.

  Inside her body in this classroom now, though, there was fear with Caroline, fear inside her nose and mouth and chest. She kept clearing her throat to try to dislodge it. She would be all right once the girls were there in front of her and she could see that none of them had Livia’s face, or Rebecca’s, or Abigail’s. Not one of them Eliza’s, or Caroline’s own.

  The door creaked open. A girl came into the room and sat down. Caroline registered her brown hair, her blue dress, and her serious face, without meeting her gaze.

  Two girls came, then, and a group of three. Another girl, and another. Caroline knew there would be nineteen in total, but she had the feeling that perhaps they would just keep coming forever until they stuffed the room.

  Almost exactly two months later the Great Boston Fire would begin, one evening after the students and teachers had all retired to their rooms for the night. For a few minutes it would seem as if Miss Marsh’s would be in its path and would be impossible to save. As it would turn out, the wind would shift, and the fire brigade would arrive, and their hoses would work well enough to stop the flames from quite reaching their door. But in that brief, tense, infinite time, Caroline would flee from room to room, rounding up the girls, coughing on smoke and panic, sending them all out to stand with Miss Sterne in the street. An orange glow would fall through the windows, bathing floors and walls and faces like a sunrise, and she would think of the nest she hadn’t burned. She would feel so afraid of somehow missing a girl. One of them might be in an unexpected room where she’d fallen asleep, and no one would notice her absence until too late. Caroline would remember then this first morning she met them, when they seemed a crowd to her, with many interchangeable faces. She would feel like she was remembering a different person’s life.

  Now Caroline turned her desk chair toward the blackboard, sat, and flipped through the pages of her lesson plan, so that she might look busy to the girls. She’d be teaching the plan on Shakespeare’s sonnets from her first lesson at Trilling Heart. In bringing it into this room she saw she’d tried to smuggle in an artifact from another time.

  The clock on the wall said she should begin. She turned to face them.

  In rows—no circle here—they watched her. In this quiet room.

  The hayloft where Caroline’s mother had sat on the last day of her life would have been quiet too, and sunny, sweet smelling. The most peaceful place on earth. Sitting in the hay, her mother had been safe, but her body was made of text. Her substance was only all the words that men had written and said about her. Motionless, she was linear, slight, transparent as a series of sentences.

  Only when Anna stood and moved did she take on flesh.

  Caroline rose behind her desk, pushing her chair out so it scraped across the floor, and the girls shifted forward in their seats.

  Her mother had neared the hayloft’s edge, next. Each step made her more real and more solid. Her skin was ordinary skin. Her cheeks were ordinary cheeks. She curved and wept in all the ordinary ways.

  Caroline stepped out from behind the desk and moved forward, to the edge that divided the space that was hers from the space that was the students’. The lip of the hayloft must also have seemed a meeting point of spaces. The hayloft was Miles’s, and the floorless space in front of Anna belonged to Samuel. Or the other way around. Or maybe the space behind her—that solid floor and pillowing hay—belonged to Miles and Samuel both, and the floorlessness in front of her, that was hers.

  It might be she took no step, no conscious step; that she’d meant only to walk to that line and show herself what the choices were, and there—something unexpected and toppling. A fit, just as Samuel had always said. Except Caroline was almost sure not, seeing now her mother’s flesh and the way it knew from years of practice which way to fall. If something beyond her own choosing had happened to her, it must have been something less expected. On the line between the floor and nothing, thinking of Miles’s hands, his lips, the feel of his face in her palms, she could have heard the squawk of a bird, Samuel calling for her, Caroline’s own child-voice, crying out from deep in dreams. Anna opened her mouth to call something back and the weight of whatever she was about to say had changed her balance there on the edge of the world.

  Caroline took another step forward, over the line. Her mouth filled with red feathers. Through them, she found she could still speak.

  Acknowledgments

  This novel’s events and world are invented but do have real-life debts. Some books that were especially helpful in anchoring and directing my imaginings: Record of a School, by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody; Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857–1925, by Susan Goodman; Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, by John Matteson; The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, by Megan Marshall; The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, by Rachel P. Maines; Mass Hysteria in Schools: A Worldwide History Since 1566, by Robert E. Bartholomew and Bob Rickard. Caroline’s teaching of Shakespeare is informed by Helen Vendler’s analysis in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, because my own understanding is informed by that analysis in ways I can’t escape. Louisa May Alcott’s Transcendental Wild Oats sowed some of the seeds of Birch Hill, and had I not read her Little Women countless times in childhood, I’m quite sure this novel wouldn’t exist at all.

  Working with the team that has brought The Illness Lesson into the world has been a gift beyond my wildest dreams. Lee Boudreaux saw this novel for its real self so clearly from the very first—the kind of seeing that is a rare, rare gift—and made it immeasurably better, and I am so very grateful, for this brilliance and for her passionate devotion to her books. She is extraordinary, and being edited by her has felt like a fairy tale. My bottomless thanks also to everyone at Doubleday, especially Cara Reilly, Michael Goldsmith, and Emily Mahon, who made me the most beautiful jacket I’ve ever seen;
and in the UK, to the wonderful Harriet Moore, and to Lizzy Goudsmit and the whole amazing Transworld team. Thank you also to Michelle Kingdom, for the use of her glorious embroidery art on the jacket.

  My faith that my agent, Michelle Brower, is the very best there is, in every way, just grows and grows. I am the luckiest.

  Writing any book is a long road, but this one felt especially long—maybe in part because I had two babies along the way—and communities of all kinds sustained it, and me, through the years. In a life-changing stroke of luck, the National Endowment for the Arts funded a stretch of time in which I finished a first draft. The feedback I received on portions of the book at the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences was invaluable, and the chance to be part of those communities even more so. I am so grateful to all of these organizations, and to Lookout Books, especially Emily Smith and Beth Staples, who published my first book, the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, moved mountains for it and for me, and will always be part of my literary family. Many thanks also to the Pittsburgh Writers’ Collective, where I did much of the work of revising The Illness Lesson, and to its members—Jonathan Auxier, Mary Auxier, Katie Booth, Danielle Chiotti, Becky Cole, John Fried, Maggie Jones, Geeta Kothari, Irina Reyn—whose wisdom and generous advice have meant a great deal to me. My life is so much better since we all banded together to make ourselves a creative home.

  Then there are the brilliant writer-women without whose guidance on early drafts this book and I would have been lost. Michelle Adelman jumped in and read the whole thing at a crucial juncture and helped me steer it right. Keri Bertino, among her many talents, has such an innate sense of the heart of a story, and she helped me to understand where I was and wasn’t being true enough to this one. Ruth Galm, I really don’t know how you do it, but you always know where the magic is, often before I do. I will never be able to thank any of you enough—for the particular help you’ve given me with this particular book and for your fellowship as writers and mothers in this world.