But gold doesn’t often sit on the surface. It must be wrenched from its stone cradle through misery of one kind or another, bent, broken, detonated. Once acquired, keeping it has a cost. I thought once more of Peter the Great. How did it end for him? Was he wretched at the loss of his son? Did he find that being great was a bitter road, followed by an unendurable destination?
I got up from my bed and peered at the drawing of a Chinese sleeve dancer that could have come from a vase or a scroll. They say the Chinese drown their daughters, sell them into slavery, abandon them to mountains. I didn’t believe it. I had never seen a Chinese woman, not in a kitchen, not on the railroad. The sleeve dancer had a beautiful coil of hair on her head, decorated with a pagoda of tiny bells, and a small smile on her rosebud lips. I imagined the Chinese revered their women, protected them; otherwise they would be sent to America instead of the men, less workers than work itself, a club to be swung until worn to nothing.
How was Lill faring in her days of unending toil? Oh, if she had only been born Chinese, she too would be sitting with a sable brush in hand, drawing black ink poetry onto lotus paper. I wondered if Lill had opened my present. Was she at this moment writing verse or a letter to me? It had been long since I’d heard from her.
Mother knocked on my door. “Are you ailing, Mr. Ned?”
I leapt back to the protection of the quilt and shouted from my bed. “Stay away! I am trying to sleep in.”
She unlocked the door in spite of my protests. She was in flushed high humor. “Sleeping in’s for toffs. Get yurrself up; we have Christmas porridge today and toddies to keep you warm. She grinned and chirruped. “If you sleep through your free day, you won’t even know you had it.”
Christmas porridge was everyday porridge with some hair-raising alcoholic beverage in it, the same that gave the toddies their punch. The men were, at half past eight in the morning, pickled in alcohol-induced high humor, which in turn effected outbreaks of wrestling, bursts of scatological japery, and much more loud slurred drinking. Yet, even with the song and laughter, the sight of those lonely men, drinking to forget that they had no one else but other lonely boarding men to celebrate Christmas with, was sad. Especially as I was one myself.
I tried to feign felicity, but after I was pinned to the floor by a trolley operator in an unsolicited grappling match, I pulled on my boots and went out.
The Boola Inn down the street was quiet, the Yale students having all gone home to warm houses, roast turkeys, and lavish gifts. I threw a snowball at the neat siding, then skidded along the sidewalk, pretending I was skating, with my beautiful Lill in scarlet hanging on my arm. After a bit, my head cleared enough to notice my stomach growling. I was terribly hungry, but the shops were closed. I doubted Mother was in any shape to lay food on the table. I’d left her spinning like a top to a raucous chorus of “See you at the bottom o’ the barrel tonight,” her hair having escaped its bun so the line between youth and age was visible in the gray and brown hair. Still, I was about to turn back and search her kitchen for bread when I saw Phaegin. She was gazing into a shop window at a display of rings and bracelets atop a cotton snowbank. I counseled myself to walk on, but my hunger was for more than food. I crossed the street. “Hello. Remember me?”
She jumped, then grinned. “Don’t cowboys celebrate Christmas?”
I shrugged. “Looks like the same way you do.”
“All cheapjack and woe.” She laughed and stuck out her hand, shaking mine with a great deal of vigor. “I thought you’d gone back to Indian country. What’ve you been doing?”
“Working. Seven days a week.”
She grinned. “Bastards.” She chuckled at my shocked face, then linked her arm with mine. “I say we liven up a corked day. What do you want to do?”
My stomach pinched. “Eat.”
Phaegin towed me along. “Don’t tell me you’re still looking for dinner! All this time without a bite? What can I expect? Not a buffalo or a rattlesnake for you to chew on in the whole state of Connecticut.”
Phaegin took me to a hole-in-the-wall tavern in the basement of one of the tenement houses. Planks set up on carpenter’s horses served as a bar and tables. A drunken group of elderly men sang Christmas carols in a thick brogue. Phaegin spoke to a fat man in the back, and he came out with a steaming plate of kedgeree. I tucked into the rice and fish, my upper lip sweating with the spice. Phaegin whistled.
I looked up apologetically. “I was so hungry, and this is excellent. I told my hostess dinner last night was the best meal I’d had. I think I’d have to hedge with this one.”
Phaegin lit her cigar off the lamp. “Hostess? Are you courting?”
“Boss’s wife.” I told her about Professor and Mrs. Quillan and the strange evening. “I feel sorry for her,” I confided.
Phaegin nodded. “Ah, yeah, the poor woman. Eating all them fine foods, living in that turrible state of shine and loveliness. She don’t even get the thrill of figuring how she’s gonna make it through tomorrow.”
I eyed Phaegin and her soft curves. “You don’t eat enough?”
She puffed the cigar. “For now, but I’d like to be a truly fat woman, and not potato fat neither.” She looked at the cigar. “And this, while it’s the best job I ever had, don’t pay pork chops.”
I nodded and finished off the kedgeree. “Still, he didn’t even get her a Christmas present.”
“For pity sake. Every day is Christmas for a woman like that.” Phaegin blew smoke rings in the air. “Nine. I can do fifteen. Want to see?”
“Nine of them gave me the idea.”
She extended the cigar to me. “You try.”
“I’m not a smoker. My lungs are bad.”
“Then you should smoke for your health. Kills the smut in your chest.”
I took the cigar from her and took a small puff and coughed. I handed it back and took a drink. “I don’t care for it.”
Phaegin took it. “Of course you don’t. You have to work at it. Pleasure is nasty until you’ve earned it.”
I scoffed. “Pleasure is immediate.”
She gave me a pained look. “Nah, comes with practice.”
“What about cake? No one practices liking cake.”
“Does a newborn babe want cake? No. A baby only wants milk. He has to learn to eat, and doesn’t like it, I’ll tell you.”
I knew nothing about babies, so I would have to take her word for it. “Milk’s a pleasure, then.”
“No. A baby doesn’t even want to be born, much less nurse. Wants to stay where it is. Doesn’t want breathing, doesn’t want smell or taste: no milk, no cake, no cigars.” She took a long drag on the cigar and handed it to me. She motioned to take another drag. I pulled on the cigar, coughed again, my head spinning. Phaegin looked critically at the cigar, stubbed it out, and wrapped it in her handkerchief for later.
“Come on, let’s have a go with Christmas. Can you sing?”
In the corner of the tavern, a stick-thin man began sawing a fiddle like mad while another fellow beat a drum to another’s guitar strumming. We stood with the trio of musicians amid a crowd of enthusiastic revelers to sing “Silent Night,” “O Tannen-baum,” “A Midnight Clear,” and a host of carols I had never heard of. Nog was passed around, and more men and some women came through the door and joined us in the circle. The songs left Christmas and we sang “Danny Boy” and “Loch Lomond.” More nog and the songs shifted into downright bawdy, “The Petticoat Left Behind” and Mother’s “Bottom of the Barrel,” while the rowdy congregation laughed and shouted more than they sang. I lost track of time as well as any sense of inadequacy after downing my third nog. By the fourth, I was reeling.
Phaegin showed me a few dance steps, characterized as far as I could see by haphazard and energetic stomping. I stomped away to the laughter of the others. No sylphen ballerina ever provided more pleasure to its audience than I did that night. Phaegin finally took pity on me and led me from the floor to a chair. “I don’t know if you are tru
ly so bad at dancin’ or if it’s the drink, but you’ll hurt yourself if you keep on.”
From my seat I watched the revelers, feeling warm and happy. Phaegin waved every time she came around the circle, stepping quick with her skirt in her hands. She switched it back and forth, laughing with her head back.
The trouble was, being part of the circle of dancers was great fun, but watching them was giving me vertigo. My head spun faster and I had trouble focusing. The crowd blurred into color and noise and disappeared into another place entirely. I wiped my forehead and stared at my feet.
The last time I’d danced was at Avelina’s wedding, and the thought of her and Tilfert, their big leathery hands clasped as they waltzed, rose against my alcohol-weakened defenses and toppled them. I sat staring at the wrinkled leather of my boots, trying to stave off tears and loneliness and the mean teeth of guilt.
Phaegin put her hand on my shoulder. “Ned, are you well?”
I shook my head. “Not at all.”
She sat down and took my hand. “What is it? I shouldn’t have let you drink that way.”
“It’s not the whiskey.” Her hand was small but strong. I turned it over and stared at her brown fingers. Avelina would approve. “Nothin’ wrong with the mark of work, Ned,” she’d told me. The memory seemed a sign, and so, with slurred address, I introduced Phaegin to Avelina and Tilfert. I told her everything about them, while keeping Lill to my heart’s counsel.
Phaegin listened carefully, nodded, leaned on her hand, elbow on the table, and listened some more. When I was done, I moaned, “How could they? It’s so wrong.”
Phaegin took a minute. “I wouldn’t say wrong, Ned. Avelina don’t sound like she was wrong at all. Neither one. Maybe it was more … a mistake.”
“A mistake?” I snorted. “That’s a pretty big mistake for either one of them to have made, and I believe they made it over and over again.”
“Not that. Not their mistake.”
I didn’t understand. “Whose?”
Phaegin looked upward, and I followed her gaze upward toward the offices on the second floor.
“Accountants?”
She slapped my arm. “Don’t be daft! God. God’s mistake.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Phaegin, Phaegin.”
She sat back. “Don’t go and tell me there are no mistakes, Ned Bayard. I’ve been to Barnum’s. I seen the little baby with legs like a fish. The man with only one arm. My auntie’s got a beard better than me da’s. You wanta tell me my brother’s brain wouldn’t be in better service to a squirrel than it is to him?” She sat forward. “I talked to a black man once. He talked like the poshest posh you ever met. Had a book under his arm ’e wrote ’imself. If God put a white man in a black man’s skin, why couldn’t he have put a lady in a feller?”
I nodded. Perhaps she was right.
Phaegin was very pleased with herself. “And that Tilfert, he was the only one smart enough to see it. Saw with piercin’ vision to what lay under all those layers to the pure heart beatin’ underneath, the fair lady Avelina truly was.”
She’d had me for a minute, but this was a bit much. I laughed. “Avelina mighta been a woman underneath it all, but she sure wasn’t a fair lady.” The thought of Avelina with a parasol tickled me, my sorrow broke, and I laughed until I almost fell off my chair.
I pulled myself together with yet another mug of drink and lurched away from the blurry chair to sweet Phaegin, toward whom I was feeling transcendentally warm. “Do you have a boyfriend, Phaegin? You must have them coming out of the woodwork.”
She stood up and put her hands on my chest. “Not a one, and that’s the way I’m keeping it, so no funny business. I’m an independent woman and ain’t about to mess it up sellin’ myself into marriage.”
I took her hand in mine. “I wanna dance with you. You’re the prettiest thing I’ve seen since Lill. And I haven’t felt happy, not really really happy, since way back before. Now she won’t even write to me, after all we’ve been through. But you’ve made me happy. So now I want to dance with you.”
“Ned, you are drunk as a dog.”
“Dogs drink?” As my knees sagged, she caught me around the waist.
“Come on, Neddy boy. You need to go home. Get outside, and the cold’ll wake you up.”
“You smell good.”
She laughed. “Sweatin’ like a dockworker and you think I smell good.”
“And you’re soft, and so pretty. Prettiest thing I’ve seen since Lill Martine.”
“Yea, yea, I heard that.”
She draped my coat around my shoulders, leaned me against the wall, and put her own coat on. Outside, the cold felt good. I rubbed my face.
“That’s right, wake yourself up there, Ned. Where are you staying, Mother Fenton’s?”
I nodded and gulped at the air. She took my arm and put it around her shoulders. I waved at the clear night stars. “Sky’s so pretty. This has turned into my best Christmas ever.”
“You are a miserable character then, aren’t you?”
I nodded. Tears came to my eyes. “I was sick my whole life, then my mother married a pickle barrel, and now it’s Christmas.”
“That is sad. Well, glad I could cheer you up.”
“When will I see you again, Phaegin, prettiest thing since—”
“Lill, I know, whoever.” We stopped in front of Fenton’s. I was sufficiently chilled to stand upright on my own. She gazed at me a minute before saying, “I have a week before I get busy again. I work at the cigar shop off the green. You want to go dancing, real dancing, we could go after work.”
“Am I your boyfriend?”
She laughed. “Your ears ain’t so sharp, are they? We can have some fun, but that’s it. Bet you won’t feel so good tomorrow, though.”
She reached up and kissed me on the cheek, then patted her pockets and handed me two cigars. “Merry Christmas, Ned.”
I was terribly touched at the gift. “Thank you, Phaegin.” I patted my pockets. I pulled out the tiny turtle fossil. “This is for you.”
She peered at it. “A rock.” Slipped it into her pocket. “Why, thank you, Ned.”
She knocked on the door. Mother answered, a rag tied around her head so that she looked like a corpulent pirate. She groaned, looking at me. “Between you, me, and the rest, this’ll be a sorry house in the mornin’.”
CHAPTER 17
Dear Ned,
I have had the child. So tiny no one thought she would live. I was not well myself. Had baby Lucy died, I would have followed. But she, though tiny, was strong and gave me courage to continue.
I expect great things of my beautiful girl, that she will excel where I have not.
Love, Lill
At dawn, Mother poured some vile concoction down my throat, waddled on to the next room, and dosed that occupant. “No sense in getting fired on top of being sick as dogs!” she squawked to the house. “This will teach you men to drink your days away. Work hard at your jobs, find yourselves a good woman, have at least five children to look after ye in your declining years, and never pick up the bottle again.”
The brew she dosed us with did no good at all. Judging by the reeling green reaction of myself and the rest of the boarders, she may have done it just to get us out the door in fear of a second go.
It does not rain but pour. As I escaped Mother’s, I noticed a letter on the foyer table addressed in Lill’s hand. Walking to the lab, I read it.
A baby. Though I had known it was coming, I felt a chill travel down my neck and down my back. I tried to imagine my bright Lill, distended and pale, an infant sucking at her breast, but could not. It didn’t seem possible that she had a real child with hunger, weight, and a name. I entertained the evil wish the child had died. Lill, untethered, would have come to me. Certainly, I’d soon have means to provide her the life she deserved. Clouding my cruel fantasy was the knowledge that Lill, instead, was now doubly anchored to Osterlund.
I got to the lab and
closed the door against the blinding light on the snow, put my head on the table, and waited for my organs to calm.
Quillan, emerging from his office, recoiled as though I were a snake. “Are you sick?” He put his sleeve to his face. “The flu is going around again.”
I waved off the idea. “A little to drink yesterday.”
He scowled and dropped his arm. “I do not expect a day off to result in two days off, Edward.”
I sat up straight and tried to compose myself. “No, sir. And how is Mrs. Quillan?”
“She will be herself soon. Over the years she has bounced back from these episodes of hers ever more quickly. I am hopeful she will outgrow them altogether. They’re a damned nuisance.”
He was so irritated, I hesitated to ask him about the correspondence about my mother, so I worked through the hours, miserably.
The day was torture, and not only because of my head and stomach. The quiet of the lab had shifted from the muffled hallow of science and thought to out-and-out gloom: the clock ticking dutifully, dust of the long dead sifting through the impotent light of winter. Quillan, in his office, moved like a shade behind frosted windows, while I longed painfully for my mother’s hand, wishing to pour out my heart to her. Though she had abandoned me, I yet believed in her love. I could not bear otherwise.
I stood to query Quillan for her address again, but the professor shouted and growled from inside his office, and I slumped back down.
The draw of my pen was thin. The paper was thin. I suddenly thought of Avelina looking at a drawing I’d done of an axle tree. “It’s a beaut likeness, Ned. But why draw it when you kin look at the real thing?”
Why indeed? I put my head in my hands. Had my scientific spirit been exterminated in one night of merriment? Not exterminated, overshadowed. I was horribly lonely.
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