September, 1859
Boston from the start was this: a fleetness of shades without object or aim. So many I could scarcely count. For every being made of flesh, a double of shadow beside or behind him.
We had been there, my mother and I, for five months.
We lived on the wharf among fish and more fish. How the first place we saw on the boat coming in was also where we made our home. We had set up a stall, which was profitless, really.
It sold not fish by statuettes.
Drifts of soap behind our stall. Making squeaky our floors. In our shoes and our hair. Trails of it sliding from our skirts and leading the way to our door, in the evening.
Shaped like children, family pets. Like heads of state. Like former lovers.
Also, that first month ashore, a fine remembrance of my father. Standing spraddle-legged in boots. Fishhook hanging from his hand. By a narrowing thread from the top of his shoulder, the net of spring salmon that he’d never caught. His salt-stung eyes. His puckered face, a barge for albatross and gulls. Father shrinking in the rain, where mother had placed him, his visage. To melt.
Suds of him bubbling into the gutter.
With the weather still warm we extended the tenting. Slept on palettes in the back.
But poverty is seldom slow. It tends to happen just like that. Such was the case with my mother and I. With winter coming on, we starved.
Old potatoes. Blackened bread. Rusty well water perfumed with an onion.
Mother hardly seemed to mind. It was more than just pride. In my mother, a relish. A life of privation a life to be lived.
Could barely get out of my nightgown those days for fear of looking at my ribs.
Mother’s cameo necklace occurred to me often. Sole precious thing not of soap that we owned. Its mould of jet. Its silver backing. Its long romantic, linking chain.
Mother only took it off for fear of tarnish when she bathed. Her single monthly luxury, in a tub loaned to her by the fruit-seller’s son. The water she’d heat with the driftwood she found along the harbour’s filthy beach, some of it so sodden through she must burn other wood to dry wood to be burned. And then she would sit in her loan of a washtub, washcloth draped upon her eyes.
The necklace was the only thing.
I could filch it. Or filch it and hide it for later. Could claim it was stolen. Could tell her: a shame. Exchange it for money and money for food. Not sustenance but human food.
For we were humans after all. Not Maiers. Not bitches of Satan. But women.
At the end of the month, as she soaked in her bath, I stalked the necklace like a cat. It hung on a nail just in back of the tub.
With her long ropy arms hanging over the lip, my mother shifted, sighed, subsided.
Last time I had disobeyed her, Grace had flinched from my embrace. Grace had flinched, and I had swooned, the Widow Blackwell in my face, and everything from that point on was a long falling out of the life I once knew, and I would be foolish, colossally foolish, to slip that necklace off its nail.
Q
Had never once strayed from the wharf-side, our home. Had heard tell of Boston, but never once seen it. But now I was in it, I could not ignore it. Rousting me from every side.
Yes, had heard tell of Boston when we lived at Clayhead. Mostly from menfolk, who’d gone there with fish. How two men in Boston had twelve years been neighbours—waked and slept and ate twelve years—while only in the thirteenth year had come to discover, in fact, they were brothers. Beaten by the city into numbness of each other.
Now I saw how this could be.
Granite, puddingstone, and brick. Awnings striped and checked and solid. Ragged, evil-looking churches. Hotels as high as the heavens were low. Mansard friezes so lifelike they squirmed with change as you approached. And vendors, vendors everywhere. Of leather, tobacco, candy, nuts, men’s top hats and women’s scarves. Rows and bins of children’s toys, as finely wrought in wood and paint as the figures that we carved in soap.
The cameo necklace surprisingly heavy, tolling down between my breasts.
Bostonian at twelve o’clock. Boy a couple years my junior. Trousers and shirtsleeves, a charcoal grey vest. Face gaunted and red with cold.
Foot traffic broke and flowed around us.
“Has missus got the time?” said he.
“I haven’t got a watch,” said I.
“I beg your pardon.” Second stranger. Halting then veering around me, lips clenched.
“How can you tell by the moon, then?” said he. “Isn’t there some way to tell by the moon?”
“I’m sorry, but I must keep walking,” I said and whirled around to take my leave, and heard back behind me the questioning voice: “What’s the deviled problem, then? Aren’t I fit to know the time?”
Turned to watch the dead boy fade behind a veil of jostling bodies.
I stopped at the corner of Washington Street. Admiring the cuts, very clean, of the buildings. How bright and regular the lamps. When suddenly something, a clanging chimera with coal-smoke boiling from its base came tolling its onslaught in high, hollow rings, bristling with people that clung to its flanks or dangled from its rearward parts. Could not move from off the curb. People queuing up behind me. One block up the creature stopped, rejected about a dozen captives and when they had safely alighted moved on.
The ring of the thing in diminishing pitch.
A foreign pressure on my elbow. “Miss,” said a man’s voice, “I say, are you well?”
Harvest blond and fair-complexioned. Hatted, coated, gloved and caned. Handsome, I guess you would call him—yes, that. Near all of his person inclining toward mine.
“Are you ill?” the man said. “May I help you along?”
“Be at peace,” I told the man. Like my mother might say. “You are missed at God’s side.”
“I say, are you looking for something? Some business?”
“I’m sorry,” said I. “But I . . .”
“Thought what?”
A beat in which we watched each other.
“I’m looking for,” I searched, “a jeweller’s.”
“Washington Street is the ticket,” said he. He took my arm and started walking. “Not too far and not too close. Though I should say, your arm in mine and on such a fine night, in its infancy yet . . .”
“We must hurry,” said I.
“To the jeweller’s?” said he. “They’re open late all down this street.”
“But I must get back to my mother,” said I. “She’s very old and very weak.”
“An angel of mercy, are you, then? And what must be your sainted name? Which leads me to ask, now I think of it, miss—”
“—but really, sir, we must push on—”
“—Saint Cordelia, perhaps? Or Constance, yes? You strike me, somehow, as some manner of C. Up ahead is a place that I know,” said the man. “Many say they do good work. Grant me your hand for a kiss if you’re going.”
“I couldn’t,” said I.
And broke into a run. The young man grabbed my elbow hard.
He whispered at me: “Slattern bitch.” And then with a last violent squeeze let me go.
Running along the storefronts. Tripping. My chin scraping against the road. Rising again with a faint beard of blood. Faceplate of the locket cracked. A trickle of blood from the scrape on my chin getting smeared by the chain there, a greasy red fan.
I broke my eyes against the gloom. Squinting while running to make out the storefronts.
Mumler and Sons, I read, in script. Wasn’t that a German name. The printed pane began to shake as someone descended the stairs to receive me.
Did not bear much speculation, the big bearded man who came down to the door. Remains of something formal on: rolled shirtsleeves, a loose cravat, a vest of dusty, greenish-black. Wiping his hands with a towel in the foyer. Thick, dark eyebrows slightly arched.
“You’re open,” said I.
“No, miss. We are closed.”
“I was told you were open.”
“You were misinformed, sadly.”
“Still you answered. There you are.”
I was shocked at the sound of my own indignation.
“Which surprises you, does it?” said he, on a smirk. “As if I could ignore such ringing. The devil’s own summons you gave me, I’m sure, and yet there is some doubt I’d come?”
Why would this shrewd fat man not help me. How could he be so cold, so cruel. The night’s events, like staggered waves suspended at their crests from breaking. Fright after fright after fright. And I wept. So rarely if ever. Surprising myself. Tears streaming cold off the end of my chin.