February, 1861
Four months after we buried Child and three after Hannah and I had been married, I got a summons from my mother.
I’d taken off my wedding ring before I even left my rooms.
The house, I saw on my approach, was the most brightly lit one of all the street. It directly abutted the edge of the Charles, save a roadway that circled the city due east, and across from this roadway a narrow worn path to the lowermost banks of the river itself. You could see from on top of that bank, looking down, how the house watched itself in the tarn of the water.
As a boy I’d thrown stones at the not-house down there, wanting to see what it did to the real one. When the house in the water would waver and swirl, I would pivot around to catch sight of my own, certain that the turmoil of the one in the reflection would amount to falling shingles, shattered windows, warping woodwork. My parents, safe but indisposed as the house came down around our heads. I would flee by a boat among cholera cases, disguised by coughing in my sleeve. I had never had a brother or sister—had you guessed? I reckon I am wretched with it.
Now my father stood before me, tyrannically already chewing his dinner. “Villum—pfah,” he said, “you’re late.”
“Backlogged tickets, don’t you know.”
“That Sveeney woman’s brooch?” he said.
“Mrs. Sweeney. Yes.” I sniffed. “Always has the little dog.”
Entering the dining room, my mother sat there, facing me, while Paterfamilias encircled the table to sit once again at the head, near the kitchen. My mother looked better since last I had seen her: her face had blood in it; her nails had been clipped. And yet there was something unnatural about her, a brutal, scoured quality playing at health, like a prison inmate who’d been freshly deloused.
A place had not been set for me. I was not hungry anyway. The meal was some old-world concoction of father’s: chicken stewed with bits of greens.
“I take it that Hannah is poorly again.” She dabbed at her lips with her napkin and smiled. “Your father and I—well we assumed . . .” She looked at my father, my father at her. “At any rate,” she forged ahead, “I hope it isn’t something grave.”
“Hannah’s very tired tonight. She was greatly embarrassed,” I said, “not to be here. But I said you must save your strength. Your body is your instrument.”
“A so-called medium, is she? Some very pretty ones, I hear. My Willy is engaged with one, I tell the ladies down the way and they are impressed, oh enormously, Willy. And do you know what else they say?”
“No, mother,” I said. “What else?”
“They say that they are cheats and frauds. Common swindlers, every one! The fairer the cheaper and falser, they say, and yet I am quick to your Hannah’s defence. And they say to me, Abby, is she pretty? And I to them, Of course she is. And they to me, Well pretty how? And I to them, Well I’m not sure! And they to me, Oh sigh. Young love! And I to them, Surpasses words. Now tell me, Willy,” mother said. “Which one among us is the fraud?”
I sat for a moment, digesting her words. And then I couldn’t help it, I exploded into laughter. Unsure what to do with my hands for some reason, I pointed at my mother, laughing, and pointed at my father, too. As my laughter subsided, I poured out some wine and swirled it around in my glass grandiosely.
“People, mother dear, are false. And you will just have to get used to it, won’t you?”
“You are a clever boy,” she said. “You have always been so clever.”
Sternly, she had ceased to eat while father continued to scavenge his plate.
“We have had discussions, Willy. We have had discrepancies. And the girl that you’re courting not coming to dinner is frankly the least of . . .”
“What kind of discrepancies, mother?” I said.
“Whatever it is that you’re up to,” she said, “your father and I will not take part. In fact we feel it best to say . . .”
She seemed to be having trouble speaking. I looked at her setting: her fingers were shaking.
“We feel it best to tell you, Willy, that we will be forced to rescind your allowance. But do not bother to explain. We two will have no part in that.”
Do not bother to explain. Now there was a bit of outrageous presumption. Well if I had once had the least inclination, I surely did not have one now. An all-in-or-nothing-ness came over me—a Monte feeling, dangerous. I was also, I realized too late, very angry, the rage of an only and maltreated son, and before I could cotton to what I was doing my wine glass shattered in my hand. A bright, popping sound filled the small dining room and the wine pattered down, with some blood, on the table. When I looked at my palm I was taken aback to see a shard embedded there.
My father stopped chewing, rose up from his seat, leaned over the plates and hit me, hard. He’d hit me in the mouth, back-handed, with plenty of wind-up from his seat and I lurched to the side with the force of the blow, dropping my fork in the process. It clattered.
He watched me a moment and then started eating, miserable bite after miserable bite.
The other time my father hit me, I had been a boy of twelve. That time, I’d discovered a live nest of wasps that hung in a corner of our porch and prodded the thing with a stick that I’d found, releasing the colony into our parlour. He’d hit me just inside the door, his face just beginning to swell from the stings. I hadn’t cried but stared at him, not quite comprehending the scope of my crime.
Now I think I understood. I took his wine from him and drank it.
Then I guided the now empty bowl of his glass to underneath my wounded hand. I plucked the glass shard from my palm, dropped it on the tabletop and squeezed my wrist a couple of times so that more of my blood pattered down in the glass. I set the glass before my father, filled up an eighth of the way with bright blood.
He rammed his chair back from his place. He ripped his napkin from his shirt.
“You have robbed us blind,” he said. “And now you make Dummköpfe of us.”
“You seem convinced of that,” I said.
“Convinced,” he said. His eyes fixed me. “Convinced?” he roared at me. “Convinced!”
He brandished the napkin as if he would throw it. And then my mother started crying, head upon her bony arms.
“Oh your little hand,” she cried. “Your tender little wounded hand! It has always been yours, ever since you were small!”
Father looked at her with brief trepidation and lowered the napkin from over his head. He let the fabric slowly down and he folded it into a food-stained rectangle, and when he had it up to snuff he put it at the centre of his plate and walked out.
Mother stopped sobbing and lifted her head. “The man hates both of us, you know.”
“He certainly despises me.”
“He found I’d been taking the laudanum again. And then he happened on the books. He knew I’d been protecting you before he’d even done the math. And that is why, Willy . . .” She began to break down. “That is why tonight . . .” She sobbed.
“Why you were the one who must say it,” I said. “The man had put you up to that.”
“Oh but I needed to say it!” she said. “I was—I was not well, you see. Neither of us were,” she said. “Both of us were wrong—insane!”
“Yes,” I said and reached across to pour another glass of wine, but by that point it made more sense to simply drink it from the bottle.
“And besides,” she continued, collecting herself. “Your father only wants what’s best. For him. For me. For all of us. Even, if you can believe it, for you.”
“Yes,” I repeated. “Of course. What is best.” I tasted the soil at the base of the bottle. “And yet I suppose that it goes without saying that I shall be out of a job come tomorrow?”
“I’m afraid that the room and the job—nonsense, Willy. You must surrender them to father. But you have other income, don’t you? And we will keep in touch, of course. Hannah, whenever you’re ready to bring her, is certainly welcome to—”
“—income?” I said. “What other income do you mean?”
“Why Willy,” said mother. “Photography, surely.”
And that’s when The Sadness came over her, too.
“I’ve never much cared for the hobby,” I said and reached for the bottle and canted it up, but I had drunk the last of it and I hammered it down on the table again.
“Oh, Willy.” Mother looked exhausted. “What is the use of your saying this, now?”
And then a door slammed, like the crack of a musket, somewhere deeper in the house. Mother jumped and listed left, grappling onto the table.
“Mother,” I said, coming over to her. “The man has made you ill again.”
I levered my arm under hers and she groaned, this time with a spike of pain and I saw that the arm I had meant to support was the one she’d broken on the ice of the pond.
“We must get you to bed at once.”
“No,” she managed. “You must go.”
“Don’t be absurd. I’ll go nowhere,” I said. “You will not make it on your own.”
“Willy, really, you must go. Your father does not want you here. He will be furious if he finds you,” she said, “just loitering here after such a bad scene.”
“Unequivocally, no,” I said to her. “I will not leave you here in pain. If he wishes me gone, he may tell me himself. If he wishes me gone—” we embarked up the stairs “—then father may come out and help you to bed.”
“You must not stay,” she whispered weakly.
All the fight was gone from her. So too her scoured, alarming freshness. Perspiration at her temples sharpened her face as it climbed in profile.
Her bedclothes were as fiercely made as the napkin my father had folded in anger and all about her tiny room—a room she did not share with father—was further evidence of him, his therapeutic interventions. Bureau clear of smeary glasses; table bare of bloody cloth; vanity rubbed bright as day; bottles of scent in neat rows underneath it. I disarranged his masterpiece and helped her in among the covers.
At once her head dropped to the pillow behind her.
I smoothed the hair back from her brow where it had begun to adhere in the dampness. The hair was lank; it crackled faintly. Her temples pulsed beneath my palm. Before too long her breathing levelled—rasping, really, in and out. Her tiny, reddened eyes had closed and I glimpsed the vein-work just under their lids.
I reached in my coat and took hold of the vial and began to unstopper the cork in the top. She continued to breath in and out, a susurrus.
“I do not think I should,” said mother. Her fevered eyes were watching me. “I do not think I will,” she said, struggling to sit up in bed as I rummaged.
“But mother, you must. You’re in pain,” I said levelly.
“My pain will pass in time,” she said.
“And now,” I said, “while it persists?”
“I will sit here very still. I will refrain to move a muscle. Really, you must go,” she said. “Your father’s bound to hear us talking.”
“Bugger what he hears or doesn’t. What if he heard you cry in pain?”
“Then he would come to me,” she said. “And he would stoop to smell my breath.”
“Lie back now,” I said. “Lie back.”
“I am lying back,” said mother.
“What I mean . . .” I said. “Relax. Where is your pitcher of water?” I said.
Mother shook her head at me and continued to shake it, fanning wrinkles in her pillow. I held the laudanum up, unstoppered. I imagined the scent of it reaching her, beckoning. She pressed her head back in the bed as if the vision might recede.
“Just a couple of drops,” I said, “to temper the worst of your pain,” and leaned down.
But she wrenched her head away from me, coughing then retching on air in her throat.
“Mother, dear,” I said. “Hold still.”
“You get that vial away from me.”
“The pain has made you quarrelsome, mother. Another spike will drive you mad.”
“I will call for him, Willy—your father!” she said.
“Kindly don’t do that,” I said.
One hand to her brow and the other her chin, I prized her mouth open as wide as I could. The sweet-sour rot of her was gone, supplanted by another scent, the reek, I recognized, of tea—strong tea, in the gums, without sugar or honey to blunt its bitter aftermath. Mincingly, I tipped the vial. A few drops spattered on her tongue. She moaned but the moan sounded wrong, sounded raw, without the flesh to give it roundness. Deep inside her open mouth I saw its inmost gizzards, flexing. She moaned in despair, snapped her mouth shut and swallowed.
And no sooner done than her head gave up struggling. A torpor settled in her eyes. The yellow witchcraft of the vial had dutifully begun its work.
“There,” I said. “Is that not fine?”
“I feel . . .” she said. “I feel . . .”
I stoppered the dosage of laudanum again and made to put it in my coat but then thought twice of doing that and placed it in her bedside drawer. When I looked up again, she was smiling at me. But her smile, like her moan of despair, was all wrong. Her lips were bunched above her teeth and then the lips opened and mother was laughing.
“Willy, I know. I know, you see. I know what you did,” she said. “I know what you did,” she said, and continued to say in between fits of laughter.
“Mother,” I said. “That is all in the past. Shoddy bookkeeping, I’m sure you remember.”
“No,” she said with glee, almost. “That is not why I am laughing. Wretched boy”—she gulped for air—“I know what you did to her.”
“Her?” I said.
“Yes, her,” said mother. “You wanted her, you wretched boy. You dirty, little, wretched beast. You wanted her, Willy, but she wouldn’t . . . oblige you. And so you held her pretty head.”
Reader, what was I to say? And what am I to say to you?
If saints preside in human form, the Spirit knows I am not one. But take now any bloody crime and lay it writhing at my feet, the death of my cousin that fine summer day—not only her death but her murder, mind you—that crime and that crime alone is one to which I’ll not concede. And barring outrage, shock or shame the only thing I felt was Sadness. Not only for Cora, whose doomed stroke and paddle traversed my mind without surcease but Sadness for my raving mother, foundering amidst her bed. For it was then I realized just how completely gone she was.
It was as if the selfsame tide that had taken my cousin two decades before had completed its sweep with the theft of my mother, moment to moment, gone and gone.
“Oh, mother. You know that I’m sorry, don’t you?”
“I know what you did,” she said. “I know what you did, you beast.”
But her voice sounded weaker, less sure by the moment. Smoothing her hair back, I leaned in above her.
“Of course you do,” I said. “I too. And now we know. The both of us.”