ESMERALDA’S STOCKING
LISA MANNETTI
“That straw pallet is a gift from heaven.”—Victor Hugo
“So, you have the gift of prophecy?”—Victor Hugo
West Chester, New York: Summer 1961
An end-of-August day and the wind picked up—nothing unusual she told herself; nothing she hadn’t felt nearly every late summer she could remember. The humidity dropped, the sky went from the faded, washed-out gray of her daughter’s favorite shorty pajamas to the sharp, clear blue of the Mediterranean. Nothing she hadn’t seen before—a routine weather pattern—not unlike the round of her weekdays these last five years: coffee and a cigarette, making breakfast and later, lunch for Robin and, like today, folding clean clothes while she napped in her room on the second floor. Still, she felt a subtle shift—as small, perhaps, as a rill of soil sliding down the slight mound of an anthill—and the breeze prickled along her skin and she felt the tiny hairs on her arms stand up. But it was nothing. Nothing. Old memories of the anticipatory feelings that came when school was about to start, shopping for # 2 yellow Ticonderoga pencils and new Buster Brown shoes, and crisp September air, and Robin was about to start kindergarten. That was it. She glanced out the sunroom window, and saw the wind toss the dark green leaves of the old maple, heard their whispering interplay; watched the rush of moving shadows on the lawn. It was nothing after all, and surely the dream she’d awakened from that morning—the dream about her father’s death on Christmas Eve 1950—meant nothing. Just another long-ago memory from the time before Robin came into the world. All life was change, Paulette knew; she’d been a nurse back before her daughter was born and seen the death angel by her father’s bed, by a hundred patients’ beds, and a dream or a memory, even a painful one, was no harbinger—the changes ahead, she was sure, did not hold anything ominous, did not cradle another death.
*
With the wind-driven damp sheets flapping against the skin of her arms and legs, clothespins moving steadily from flowered apron pocket to fingers, to her clamped lips and back to hands, to the rope stretched across the back yard, she was pegging laundry and thinking simultaneously that she loved the smell of line-dried linens and that at dinner the night before, Luc had begun to talk about purchasing a gas dryer this coming winter.
Robin was in the wading pool, playing amid an assortment of floating pink plastic cups and saucers, and using the kitchen strainer to make “summer tea” from the grass clippings—enough to make pretend tea for half of China, Paulette smiled to herself—that Robin had managed to import from the lawn.
“You have to ask Mommy.”
Paulette looked up. On the other side of the hedge that separated their properties, she could vaguely see Alma Briggs, hands pushed inside the greenery to move it aside, talking to Robin.
“Miss Alma has invited me over for lemonade and cookies,” Robin said, turning.
“Well….”
“Pleeease…”
“Rob—”
“Please, oh please? Mrs. Myrtle made ginger snaps—”
“Honestly. It’s no trouble at all, Paulette—Myrtle is bringing Mother downstairs and we thought it’d be nicer to sit out here in the shade. You come too, if you’d like.”
“Use the towel and dry off, Robin. Then go on upstairs and put on your sandals and sundress…”
“Are you coming, too, Mommy?”
“Not today, honey—maybe another time.” She smiled. “Thanks anyhow, Alma—give my best to Myrtle and Mrs. Briggs, and don’t let Robin eat more than two cookies.”
“Three—”
“Robin—”
“Daddy says the French love to bargain—it’s in our blood.” Robin ran careening past her onto the driveway leading to the back porch, and Paulette shook her head and smiled. “Don’t forget to put on your underwear, young lady, and hang that wet bathing suit on the side of the tub.”
*
Paulette liked the Briggs family—and they adored Robin—but somehow today she didn’t feel like sitting on the painted white metal glider that left waffle marks on her thighs—even when she wore slacks or a skirt—and making small talk with her elderly neighbors.
Miss Alma—a blue rinse lady—was in her mid to late seventies Paulette guessed, and she was a sharp-as-a-tack former school teacher who hadn’t missed a day of classes in something like forty years. Myrtle Briggs was married to Alma’s brother Howard and they sported identical shades of white hair—when they sat together, they reminded Paulette of dandelion fluff. She’d never gotten straight whether Howie or Alma was the eldest, but really, all three—brother and sister and sister-in-law—seemed like budding youths compared to the sparse-haired matriarchal Mrs. Hannah Briggs. She was sharp-as-a-tack, too, and she’d been born just over 100 years ago, she always said proudly and, as Robin recited enthusiastically, “Mrs. Briggs had been ‘just five years old at the time, and remembered when Abraham Lincoln was shot.’”
*
Some three-quarters of an hour later, Paulette walked around the block to retrieve Robin from the Briggs’s yard. She pushed open the wooden privacy gate and saw the three old women sitting on the double glider, gently pushing against the slightly elevated iron “floor” making it rock. Robin was curled up, her head against Mrs. Hannah Briggs’s arm and sitting opposite Myrtle and Alma. The remains of the lemonade—glasses, peels, an empty cookie plate, and four crumpled dainty napkins sat on a small white wrought iron table near the fancy glider. Myrtle and Alma were fanning themselves and, as they pumped to rock the seats, Paulette could see they wore their stockings rolled to just below the knee—1920s style—and they both wore dated summer shoes—thin “tie” heels made from soft, perforated, pink leather like the loose weaving Robin used when she made nylon loop potholders at the village’s free summer program day camp across the street in the park. Hannah appeared to be reading the newspaper aloud to Robin. Robin could read after a fashion—books like One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish or The Cat in the Hat because she’d memorized them, and here and there she could pick out a word and she was beginning to read, but the newspaper was beyond her skills.
“Say thank you, Robbie, and let’s be on our way.” Paulette smiled broadly—hoping to forestall conversation—and all three heads swiveled in her direction. Even Mrs. Briggs turned her cataract-whited empty eyes toward Paulette.
“But she was just getting to the good part,” Robin crumped.
“Now, please, sweetie. Daddy will be home soon and we have to get the picnic basket packed.”
“For the beach?” Her eyes went as wide as the sand dollars that occasionally washed up on the shore. The Oakland beach was free after 5 p.m. and you could stay till dusk, but usually she and Luc didn’t let Robbie do more than wade—there were no lifeguards on duty in the evening.
“Yep.” More smiles.
“Bye, Miss Alma! Bye, Mrs. Myrtle and thank you for the delicious cookies. Bye Mrs. Briggs—” She flew to Paulette and grabbed her hand. “Bye-bye, and thank you again!”
“Such a nice, polite little girl—and so intelligent, too.” Paulette heard one of them say, the others assenting. All three of them had wavery voices, but she thought it had been Mrs. Briggs—the blind old woman—who’d spoken in praise of her daughter.
*
Paulette was packing the last of the picnic basket and she sent Robin upstairs to dig through the bottom of the closet and retrieve Luc’s beach sneakers (the only place he wore that kind of casual footwear). She lowered the green canvas awnings on the west side of the house, and began to open windows on the north and east side to begin to let the cooling late afternoon air circulate. The wind had died down, it was hot again. She heard Robin drop the sneakers on the floor by Luc’s side of the bed, and then heard her clomping down the front stairs. The basket was done and she poured herself a cup of coffee, then sat at the kitchen table. She heard the wooden front door bang open, then closed; Robin came bounding into the kitchen bearing The Daily Item.
“Read me the newspaper, Mommy! Read me the paper!”
Paulette folded it in half and read: “Mayor Thomas Iasillo—”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s the mayor of our town.”
“Yeah. Okay, read about something else.”
“Village to install parking meters on Main Street—”
“Isn’t there anything at all about Indians?” Robin said.
“Indians?”
“When Mrs. Briggs reads me the paper, she reads all about crossing the country in a covered wagon. And cooking over campfires. And the time her sister nearly got scalped by a red Indian in the Nebraska territory. And lots more about homesteading—”
“She does?”
“Yes, she does,” Robin said seriously. “I thought we got the same newspaper, but the one that the Briggs get is completely different. How can that be, Mom? Theirs says Daily Item, too. Are you sure there’s nothing—maybe in the back—about Pawnee Indians or Hereford cows on the trail, or the time the Carson baby was gored by a bull?”
Paulette understood at once. Mrs. Briggs was blind of course, and she was telling Robin stories from her youth—but pretending to read the paper aloud. Now that Paulette thought about it, Alma had mentioned at some point she’d first taught in a one room school house out west, so maybe the stories were true.
“You know honey, Mrs. Briggs is a lot older than Mommy. You know that don’t you?”
“Sure!”
“How do you know?” Paulette wasn’t sure Robin—smart as she was—really had any concept of age beyond the fact that all adults seemed grown-up and old.
“Her skin when you kiss her cheek is like leather. Yours is much softer. When will your skin be like leather, Mommy?”
“Not for a long time, I hope.” Paulette was trying not to laugh, and she went on patiently. “The thing is, Robin, sometimes when people are very old they lose certain faculties—parts of themselves.”
“Like what?”
“Well, like Mrs. Briggs. She’s lost her sight. She can’t see. We call that being blind, Robin. Mrs. Briggs is blind.” Paulette sped on. “Mrs. Briggs is a wonderful woman, and she’s entertaining you by telling you stories—but they’re stories from history—not what’s in the daily newspaper. Do you understand?”
Robin shrugged. “Okay, if you say so. But she told me today I was wearing a very pretty yellow sundress…so I guess she’s not too blind.”
“I guess not, honey.” Paulette decided that Mrs. Briggs was even sharper than she seemed—the old lady had clearly heard Alma or Myrtle remark on the dress and stored up that nugget of information. Like fortune tellers—like the Provençal gypsies her own mother had told Paulette about—doing cold readings, she thought. No, none of it mattered, she told herself. The summer lemonade parties, the homemade candied apples for Halloween, hot cocoa and peppermint sticks for Robin after sledding in the winter. They all doted on her. All the Briggs family, she told herself, were good neighbors.
West Chester, New York: Autumn 1961
“Mommy!! What am I going to be this year?” Truth be told, Robin was such a small kid that Paulette guessed she probably hadn’t outgrown last year’s pumpkin costume. At the most, she thought, she’d have to spring for a new pair of orange tights at Woolworth’s.
“Pumpkin? It’s a great costume—” Which it was—Paulette’s mother, Estelle, had made it and she had a creative gift when it came to sewing.
“Sister Mary Frances says we have to be a saint,” Robin said in going-on-six fashion: part announcement, part whine.
“Let me talk to Mama Estelle,” Paulette said. “She’ll think of something.” God, she thought, I hope it’s not an Infant of Prague outfit, it’ll cost a fortune with all that satin and Robin won’t want to wear it when she goes trick-or-treating at night—not when the rest of the neighborhood is dressed as witches, skeletons and the ever-popular white-sheeted ghost. There’s no bragging rights or scare factor when you’re dressed like baby Jesus or the Blessed Mother. She’s so tiny she doesn’t even need half a sheet; I can cut eyes out from a pillowcase, if necessary, Paulette decided, and call it done.
But Paulette’s mother surprised them all and even Paulette was excited when she brought home the jingling toy tambourine with the fluttering ribbons and the green flounced skirt and gypsy headscarf for Robin’s Halloween.
*
Naturally, Paulette didn’t own any necklaces made from coins—gold or otherwise—but she thought Robin would do very nicely with some beads and a two or three bangle bracelets. There were no zippers and the costume’s bodice-blouse tied in the back and she was helping Robin get ready for the morning kindergarten session.
“But Mommy, what will Sister say? I’m supposed to be a saint—”
“You tell Sister Mary Frances that you’re Saint Sara the Gypsy, who gave alms to the poor in France.”
“Was she a real saint?”
“Absolutely. You just have to leave the tambourine at home for now—and, instead, take this basket.”
“What’s in there?” Robin asked looking under the cloth napkin. “Is that alms?”
“Yes.”
“It looks like bread.”
“It is bread. But for today, it’s alms for the poor.”
“I don’t think Sister will like it—” Robin shook her head.
“Are you kidding? With half the class dressed like the Blessed Mother, and the other half dressed like Saint Joseph, she’ll love it.” Actually, Paulette thought the other kids’ mothers were pretty canny—their offspring already had costumes for the Nativity play on tap in December. She went on: “Sister will be thrilled. Variety. It’s the spice of life, kiddo.”
“If you say so.” She shrugged. “But tonight—”
“Tonight, yes, you can carry the tambourine.”
*
“Robin, that necklace’s only to borrow—not for keeps—and you have to be very careful. I really mean it.”
“Mrs. Briggs wanted me to wear it—she said I’d be the perfect Esmeralda.”
The mistake, Paulette thought, was her own. She’d suggested that on the way home from King Street Elementary School Robin stop and show the Briggs beldames her Saint Sara costume. “For tonight,” Robin had chirped, “I have a real tambourine and I get to be a real gypsy.” Immediately Alma—or maybe it was Myrtle—consulted with Mother Briggs and Paulette heard rummaging upstairs (presumably in a dresser drawer) and then the old lady glided down the straight staircase on her moving chair, carrying the necklace in her crabbed white claw of a hand.
Paulette had no idea if it the gaudy green gem was real or “paste”—as De Maupassant famously called costume jewelry—but that didn’t matter. “I’m not kidding. It goes back as soon as you’re done trick-or-treating.”
Like all kids—and not a few adults—in the metropolitan area, Robin was addicted to Channel 9 WOR-TV’s Million Dollar Movie—which opened with Tara’s theme and ran one film almost continuously for a week at a time. Robin could recite the come-on: “If you missed any part of this movie or would like to see it again, the next showing begins immediately.” Just how much of The Hunchback of Notre Dame Robin understood was doubtful—though when Paulette caught her tossing the satin bolsters over the stair railing and made it very clear that Robin was stopping that at once, and furthermore, would also not be filling the big soup kettle with water she planned to pretend was molten lead and throwing that over the balustrade, and when she continued snatching up and heaving sofa cushions, Paulette threatened to spank her bottom, and Robin yelled “Sanctuary!”—it was obvious she got the whole Quasimodo-Charles Laughton character. And though she’d never been spanked, Robin obeyed more or less: Paulette watched her running up and down the stairs bent-over—a pillow stuffed behind her shoulders inside one of Luc’s sweaters—with her fingers simultaneously pushing her nose up and pulling her right eye down…watched as Robin lay back on the landing kicking her legs and feet and shouting, “Guillaume…Gabrielle…Big Ma-a—Rie!”
Paulette’s concession to the American version of the holiday was to serve a hot dog and sauerkraut and mulled cider dinner—which, Robin in her excitement, scarcely touched; neither did Luc, who was to stay home and hand out goodies to the neighborhood, because he didn’t like cabbage or cider—with or without rum—or frankfurters. They were nothing, he swore, like the delicious saucissons Provençal. Paulette scraped plates while Robin sped into her costume.
“First stop to see the Misses Briggs,” Robin declared. “I want to show them my costume.” She banged the tambourine against her palm.
“No. Last stop, Robin, to share some of your treats—and, to return the necklace.”
*
“Why Howie… Myrtle… look at this: Esmeralda, the gypsy girl, has come trick-or- treating right here in our neighborhood.”
“And I’m French too,” Robin put in helpfully.
“Adorable. Come in, dear—and you, too Paulette. Mother will want to see this!”
The treat table had been set up in the wide foyer—a plate with huge caramel apples and small orange draw-string bags. Howard and Myrtle helped Robin, as Paulette moved through the tied-back green velvet curtains toward the living room. “Only one of each, Robbie,” she called over her shoulder.
The old ladies, Paula saw, had decorated the mantel with bright red and gold, and flaming orange leaves—gathered in the park, no doubt. Small pumpkins sat along the wooden edge; two round black-amethyst vases spilled a profusion of bittersweet and ivy from either end; and tiny glassed-in votive candles twinkled here and there. This was not the sort of house, Paulette thought, where one found store-bought dangling cardboard skeletons or gaudy papier-mâché witches. Very Victorian. More turn-of-the-century than mid-century. But maybe which century was the real question, she mused.
“The fireplace looks lovely,” Paulette said honestly. “Feels good, too” she added, rubbing her hands. There was a heavy pot—something whitish bubbled and frothed inside—hanging above the grate; it was the first time Paulette had noticed that this fireplace had an iron swing hook—the sort one associated with colonial times, colonial cooking—in this part of the country at least. Paulette had never seen one in any of the World War I era houses in the neighborhood—
“Month has an R in it…care for a bowl of oyster stew?” The old lady, propped in a rocking chair, nodded toward the flames. “’Course in my day, mind you, it was more likely we ate prairie oysters—hah!” She laughed. “Still, a body gets used to things, and I was used to an iron swing-arm inside a fireplace—so was ’most every homesteader in my time—and Howard, he rigged up this one for me,” Hannah said. “Food tastes better, somehow, when it’s cooked over a wood fire.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You might at that—being French and all,” she said. ’Course, the colonials hereabouts didn’t have much use for the French, and by the time I was born in 1860, nobody had any use for the Indians—even if those wars helped us Americans eventually throw off the Brits. Freedom is a great thing.” She paused. “But they herded all the Indians into territories and onto reservations. Ever tell you about the time I saw my own sister scalped?”
“Yes. Or maybe Alma told me—”
“Hid behind a rock on the trail, but they found me. Know why they didn’t take my tresses, Missus?”
Paulette shook her head slowly.
“Can’t guess? Your ma told me how after nursing school you wanted to go out west and work with the Indians—said you felt sorry for them. That was very unusual. But she wouldn’t let you go.” Hannah wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Well, you met Luc and had Robin, so you’re better off, girlie. But, can’t you guess why they let me go?”
“No… ” Paulette said again.
“Sure, you can—you being part gypsy and all—like your ma told me.” The old woman turned her white, blind eyes on Paulette and the younger woman would have sworn she was being stared at with the intensity of a searchlight. “And old squaw-woman—a seeress—stopped ’em,” she said. “Told those braves to let me be ‘cause I had a gift—”
“A gift? I don’t understand?”
“Same as yours.” The old woman’s hand suddenly shot out and clamped down on Paulette’s wrist. She found herself wincing at the woman’s surprising strength and thinking crazily that Robin was right—Hannah’s skin was like leather—like stiff, tanned hide. “Same as your girl’s—though sometimes it skips a generation.”
“What gift?” Paulette wrenched her arm free
“The gift of seein’” the old woman said, tapping alongside her right eye. “The gift of knowin,’ the gift of prophecy.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do,” Hannah Briggs said, nodding, then sitting back and winding her knobby hands over the down-curved arms of the rocker. “Of course you know. You saw the angel of death when your father passed,” she said. “And you saw your father beckon that angel—crooked his finger calling her, didn’t he? And what did he whisper? ‘Come closer…’ wasn’t that it, Missus?”
“Robin—” she began.
“Robin knows that story,” said Mrs. Briggs.
“She doesn’t—”
The old woman shrugged. “Well maybe she overheard it, and maybe she just knows certain things. Like I did. Things other girls her age haven’t a notion in the world of. Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Anyhow, here’s a story for you, Missus—though if you let yourself, I wouldn’t even have to tell it. You’d know it. Same as that angel by your father’s death bed—you’d see it.” The rocker creaked once, twice, and then the old woman began to speak in a half-whispered, papery voice.
*
Paulette had stood there by the fire, arms folded across her chest, and tried very hard not to listen to what Mrs. Briggs told her; she convinced herself she’d actually been successful at blocking out that avid, nearly feverish voice. When they came in just after 8 p.m., Luc was nodding over a Life magazine in the wing chair. She’d let Robin eat one candy bar, untied the gypsy costume and just sent her daughter upstairs to get into her pajamas and brush her teeth, when she discovered the shiny green gem in the bottom of Robin’s paper spook-ridden trick-or-treat bag.
She was so angry at the thought that Robin had somehow wheedled Alma or Myrtle into parting with the necklace—or worse, filched it—Paulette was on the verge of dragging her from her low single bed. Instead, she steeled herself and picked up the phone.
*
“Yes, Paulette, this is Alma. What’s that you say? Robin still has Mother’s necklace? Well, Myrt gave it to her, of course—we both did. No, she didn’t whine or plead. Really. Oh, pshaw, let her keep it… What? No! It isn’t any heirloom… An emerald?” Alma laughed. “That’s no emerald, my dear. No, it’s—what Mother? Hang on Paulette. Just one second. Yes, it’s shiny all right, but Mother says it’s nothing but a semi-precious green sunstone. They mine ’em out Oregon way, she says…”
Paulette could picture Alma—tall and slim and still ramrod straight—standing by the black Bell telephone in the hallway, old Mrs. Briggs in her wooden rocker by the fire, and tiny white-haired Myrtle scurrying back and forth between the ancient woman and her elderly daughter, hovering over both of them. “I couldn’t possibly let her keep it, Alma,” she said. “It’s very kind of you not to make a fuss, but Robin knows better than that—”
“Better than what? That chain isn’t gold, Paulette—I’m surprised it’s not as green as the stone by now. I played with it sometimes when I was a girl after Mother gave it to me one birthday—what did you say Mother?” Pause. “She says it was for Christmas one year, not my birthday. And Myrtle says she wore it for over the holidays when first Howie courted her and—hang on Paulette. What’s that Mother? Yes, all right, I’ll tell her. Listen, Paulette, it’s not even a genuine antique. Not yet, anyhow. Mother got it when she was nine or ten. Says some old Plains squaw must’ve had a husband or an uncle or a brother who traded with one of Plateau Indians and the Plains squaw—hang on Paulette… She was what? Oh… Mother says the squaw was Pawnee or maybe Ponca and told her it would clarify her vision. She gave it to Mother in the winter around 1870—or thereabouts. Says none of us have daughters—or any children—for that matter, and to go ahead and let Robin keep it. Like Mother said, it’s just a green sunstone—not some emerald—but it’s still a nice little memento for Robin, for dressing up like Esmeralda, the gypsy.
“I appreciate that Alma, I really do. But we’ll be over in the morning to return it.”
*
Just before sunset on Wednesday evening, about four weeks after they returned Hannah Briggs’s green sunstone Indian necklace, Paulette was checking her recipe book for a dressing with marrons—chestnuts—to give the damn turkey some French flair, and Robin was nattering a series of kindergarten-gleaned facts about Abraham Lincoln and how because of him Thanksgiving was celebrated the fourth Thursday in November, when the phone rang.
“Bouchard residence, this is Robin.” Pause. “Mommy, it’s for you.” Robin held the receiver outstretched, and Paulette took it up.
“Paulette, this is Alma. I hate to disturb you—with the holiday practically on top of us, I know you must be getting things ready…but,” she hesitated, then cleared her throat. “But we think Mother died a little while ago in her sleep. And, well, I hate to ask—but, you being a nurse—Paulette, could you come over?”
“Certainly, Alma. I’ll be right there.”
“Robin?” she began.
“—Luc came home early; she won’t be here alone.”
Paulette put on her wool coat and a fringed scarf for the short walk around the block, thinking just before she rang the bell that, under duress the three remaining Briggses had reverted to behavior typical of their prior farming life out on the prairies: when illness or death came, you relied on your nearest neighbors for help, you didn’t automatically summon a town doctor, who might be—who most likely lived—an hour’s long, hard ride away.
*
Upstairs, alone in the old woman’s darkened bedroom, she found more signs of last-century-homesteaders’ customs and rituals: Evidently Alma and Myrtle had worried that rigor mortis might set Hannah’s jaw agape and, in a time and place where there was no embalming, the undertaker might have to break the ancient bones to close up her mouth for the viewing in her casket. The sisters-in law had torn an old white sheet or timeworn pillowcase into strips, knotted the bandages on top of her head to bind the age-shrunken mandible firmly shut.
Paulette understood, but she also knew tying up the old woman’s jaw was completely unnecessary; she turned on the bedside lamp and began to unwind the cloth. Then, all at once, beneath her schooled fingers she felt the faint, thready beat of Hannah’s pulse. My god, she thought, they were wrong—she’s alive. She unwrapped the bandages quickly, then began rubbing the old woman’s hands and patting her cheeks. Her eyes fluttered open and she whispered, “Ah. Thank you, Missus—that’s ever so much better…” Paulette fluffed the pillow behind the frail shoulders so Mrs. Briggs could sit higher and breathe a bit more easily, announced she’d be right back, and then went to tell Miss Alma and Howard and Mrs. Myrtle that Hannah was alive and Paulette would stay with her for a while. In turn, they each took Paulette’s hands, told her how grateful they were for her help.
“It won’t be long,” Paulette said, turning to climb the stairs again. “I can nurse her through the end…”
*
“Gif-f-f-t-s-s-s,” the old woman hissed softly. Her eyes, white and filmy beneath the half-closed lids, were crescent moons lying sideways, twinned in heavy mist. She nodded slowly. “Gifts,” she said again. The sound of that weak voice was, to Paulette’s ears, both hideously plump—fulsome—and sibilant. “Legacies… and gifts… all of them traps.” Hannah’s mouth—the grayish lips now drawn inward and sickle-thin—trembled as she exhaled; Paulette, sitting next to the iron bed, her palms lightly riding Hannah’s bony fingers, felt that low cool breath on her own hands and she shivered.
Suddenly she was back in memory on the day of the dismissed premonition last summer. Time folded in on itself …and then it was Halloween night. Mrs. Briggs, her mouth slippery and wet with milky oyster stew, was telling Paulette hideous things—things Paulette had stubbornly blocked from her conscious thoughts till now:
“Of course you know about this gift—hah! Goddamn curse I call it—you have it, too, and so does Robin. Oh, that knowing,” Mrs. Briggs had said. “Terrible…. But what could anyone do? Anyone, even an adult—much less a child—living in a sod hut or a weather-beaten cabin on those endlessly empty, sky-crushed plains…. Nobody in my world could’ve done a single thing. Still, I saw it. Six months, maybe a year before it happened. Saw the actor fellow—that Booth—creep into Ford’s theater, put the gun to the back of Lincoln’s head and pull the trigger,” she said. “That sound in my skull—deafening. I never stopped hearing it.” She shook her head slowly. “Same thing when I was twenty—already married to my Robert and living back east out Connecticut way. Yes. I was older and closer the second time. But not close enough to the rail station in Washington, D.C. to be able to stop Garfield’s assassination….There’s no worse feeling than that sense of being completely helpless.” Hannah turned her head toward the flames and Paulette had seen the firelight glinting here and there on her scalp through her thin white hair. “Ask Alma—she knows what it is to carry the burden of knowing, to heft the worse burden of being powerless. Her time of knowing first came when she was fourteen, maybe fifteen—she felt it black and bristling for five long years. But she couldn’t stop it either. Buffalo, New York. The Pan-American exhibit...and McKinley was felled in 1901. You never get over it. Never. Time doesn’t heal those deaths, Missus.”
Paulette said nothing.
“Every gift carries an obligation—to be gracious, kind, grateful. Always a dilemma, Missus, minor though it be.” Her hands curved, clenching the arms of the worn rocking chair. “But these dark gifts are traps.” The fire gave off a loud, sharp crack! and Paulette heard the embers shift and tumble. “You wouldn’t think just knowing a thing can wound you—that seeing the future can pierce your mind and crumble your soul….but it’s so.”
Now, in the old woman’s narrow bedroom on this Thanksgiving eve, there were the sudden sounds of three desperate, pained breaths, and Paulette was startled from her unsettling reverie. This time, she did not see the death angel, but the old pioneer woman, Hannah Briggs, born in 1860, age 101, was gone.
West Chester, New York: December 1961
First snowfall of the season: the fat, drifting flakes huge and desultory—and destined to melt quickly in the southern New York climate. Caroling and the Nativity play. Mama Estelle made Robin’s angel costume and tinsel crown. In the rushed weeks preceding Christmas, Paulette—shopping, decorating the house, baking cookies and wrapping gifts—had no time to think about Hannah: a dying woman maundering about visions and portents and death.
It was, she thought, perhaps the last year that Robin might believe in Saint Nicholas—every kindergartener with older siblings was on fire to spread the joyfully desolate tidings: There is no Santa! Your parents buy the gifts!
Luc was a practical man, and Paulette bought her daughter a sampling of useful presents: a cozy flannel nightgown sprinkled with tiny blue sheep; a red wool beret and matching mittens; The Cat in the Hat Comes Back; Bartholomew and the Oobleck; Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose. On impulse in Macy’s, she picked up a pair of beginner’s ice skates with leather straps Robin could fasten over her brown rubber boots. Paulette was most excited though, at the thought of seeing her daughter’s face when she tore the wrapping paper from a most impractical gift: A blond, pony-tailed Barbie clad in a black and white striped bathing suit, black high heels, minute pearl earrings, and tiny white sunglasses. She splurged on a second outfit; Estelle, as thrifty as Luc, began to seek out material and patterns for doll clothes to expand Barbie’s wardrobe beyond pedestrian beach wear—to the cocktail hour and the cruise line. Paulette, oohing and aahing over the teeny red chiffon dinner dress, the pleated tennis outfit, and ski togs Estelle had sewn, could hardly wait.
*
Christmas morning and all cheer had fled. Instead, a brief moment of surprised delight turned almost instantly to harrowing sobs and tears; the Barbie doll still lay untouched in its bright Mattel box, still wrapped in gold ribbon and white paper with stars.
Robin, sitting cross-legged by the fireplace, had gleefully—at first—pulled out nuts, oranges, hard candy and a plastic blow-up bubble kit. She rocked the red felt stocking back and forth, then squeezed, searching for further tell-tale lumps.
“Any coal?” Luc teased.
Robin pushed her small hand all the way inside down to the toe, yanked, and then upended the stocking to shake out the prize. What clattered on to the rug shocked Paulette, but she knew instinctively, Robbie hadn’t stolen it and no one had put it there: Gleaming in the tree plights, lay the green sunstone Indian necklace.
“It’s Mrs. Briggs’ emerald,” Robin began to say, catching it up in her hand and closing her fingers around it.
Then all at once she moaned, her eyes rolled up, and she swayed toward the carpet.
“Catch her, Luc!”
“Are you all right? What happened? What happened, Robin? What’s wrong?”
Paulette could not console her daughter; she picked Robin up and carried her to bed.
“Tell me, Robbie. Tell me what’s wrong—please!”
“Life magazine,” she cried. “All the pictures. There’s blood on a pink skirt, and a little boy saluting, and oh, Mommy, they’ve killed him, they’ve shot our president. Soon—next year or the year after, a man with a gun is going to shoot that boy’s daddy dead.” She covered her face with her hands. “Texas. President Kennedy,” she wept.
“Ssh, ssh…ssh, now, honey, it will be okay.”
But of course, Paulette knew it wouldn’t be all right.
No, not any more right than the necklace that held an emerald for the gypsy girl named for a green gem; bright gleam winking in the light when she danced on the worn stone steps of Notre Dame before all of Paris: beggars and poets and nobles. Sad green-gemmed girl touched the hearts of a hunchback, an archbishop, and the king himself. Fell in love with shining Phoebus, captain of the guards, god of the sun—
Sun…
Sunstone. In its brilliant blinding glare, you could see things clearly.
Perhaps, too clearly.