Letters to Dead Authors, #4

Dear Charlotte,

I have seized my Eve, my “’v’”!

It was at the library that I spied her. No, that is incorrect: I heard her, gasping her way through a simple sentence at the desk. When I plunged staring out of the stacks she was just turning to go, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. She was small, with a high, bulbous forehead that gave her something of a duck’s philosophical air, though with her black eyebrows pinched she did not have his kindly looks. Her dress was soiled and ill-fitting.

I gave the librarian, that bitch, a gay wave and went after her.

She mumbled and jinked down Common Place Road, heading into the wind, so that her dirty pink bonnet filled like a gassy gut, and into an ugly little house with rotting gingerbread trim and grass in the guttering. A porch roof sagging one way and its floor the other. I noted a broken sapling in the yard. Someone had bent and twisted it so that the very fibers of the wood had separated. Some unhappiness there. You will think me cruel, but I was glad: It is easier to prise loose from life those children whose roots are already torn and scorched, as I should know.

I pushed open the gate, stuck my foot through a rotten porch step into dust and startled spiders, wrenched it out again, and went up. I did not knock, but went right to the window and put my face to the glass, hoping, I confess, to complete the picture of squalor. Well, I did, but was rudely interrupted. Something—someone—was clinging to my back, and beating at me, and sobbing, and slobbering all over me. She probably thought I was from the WCTU.¹⁴ When I had flung the woman off, for she was slight and far from strong, and deduced that it was the girl’s mother (for she had the same peculiarly small and widely spaced teeth), I attempted to press upon her my handkerchief, whereupon the child herself burst through the door and fastened herself onto my back. Apparently this sort of behavior runs in the family; no doubt their ancestors flung themselves on the backs of antelope and nibbled them to death.

However, when I passed my handkerchief to the humid female already described, I had contrived to fold a Gold Certificate note into it. She spread the hankie—brought it toward her nose—lowered her wet lashes—crossed her eyes at the admirable George Washington advancing undaunted toward the double torpedoes of her nose—froze. She hastily extracted the bill, folding it one-handed with great deftness and tucking it into her bodice—and blew her nose.

Meanwhile the daughter, red in tooth and claw, clung to me like a wolverine, raving. Raving circumspectly, for she still avoided the interdicted vowel. Mother and daughter were alike, I perceived, in possessing a talent for calculation during moments of seeming abandon. I felt no indignation at this thespianism, only admiration and pleased anticipation, for I perceived that whatever the daughter felt, the mother was not at all indifferent to the persuasions of the pocket.

I do not wish you to think that I am so improvident or so desperate as to purchase all my students! But this one was worth, I thought, some inducement.

Seizing the girl’s hands, I distastefully unhitched her from my collar and placed her in front of me. She soon stopped struggling; I am not frail, despite a cough I cannot shake, and that odd distemper of my heart that makes it leap and flounder late at night. “Your mother has something to say to you,” I said. I took in her leaky nose and glaring eye and recoiled. (Even scrubbed, sluiced, and deloused she is no cinnamon bun but it is probably this extreme unlovableness, rare in a child, that warms me to her. A negative charisma has a power of its own.)

Mrs. Finster (although, forgive me, I doubt she was ever married) touched her bodice, hesitated, spoke. “Eve, be polite to the lady. You’re to—” There was a question in her eyes.

“To come with me,” I said heartily, and not without malice, “to be a student—a scholarship student,” I added with a glance at the mother, then recoiled when she simpered back, “of the necromantic arts. Make haste and gather up your things. You will have room for a small bundle of keepsakes. Pack no clothing or shoes; you will be issued a uniform.”

Of course she could not say “yes,” dear friend. Yes contains an e.

So “No,” said Eve, soon to be Finster (we go by last names here).

Nonetheless, we went.

Yours very sincerely,

H_admistr_ss Sybil Joines

p.s. The cost of this exploit: 20 green American dollars, and cheap at the price.