CHARLOTTE AND HER FATHER

 

 

THERE ARE SOME STORIES that do not work toward cataclysm but open in the midst of it. Whether that story begins with a discarded wife locked in an attic or a mother kept in a room with yellowed walls, the story opens at a precipice. This is how some stories—from the initial word—are all about descent.

Charlotte was born and raised in a house behind which lay a graveyard for the patients her father could not save. As a result, her life revolved around The End and was therefore cloaked in mourning, a heavy, evolving sadness that materialized in unexpected ways.

For years she coped with what her father called her illness of the head. Medicine was his practice, and because he had treated several other girls, he thought he knew the best methods for making her well. The most successful had been to place a girl in a room and shut the door and go away.

One day her father informed her he was to be gone for several weeks. He pulled her covers up to her chin and kissed the places where her bangs met her brows. Before he left the room, he turned around and requested that she smile. She obliged him, but when his back was to her, the smile faded quickly. She thought this: which is more dangerous—a door, through which one can only imagine what lies beyond, or a window, which exposes its possibility like a baited lure?

Because women have a history of being tended to like a sculpture made of already cracked and failing glass, they also have a history of defying. As soon as the house was empty of him, Charlotte wrapped herself in coats and left to walk the city. There she came upon the town’s Language Museum, a building saturated in books, those mysterious devices that allowed one to exit the world in which one’s body moved and enter a plurality of others.

For the fortnight he was gone, she removed books from the Language Museum for no cost at all, only the promise that she would return them. And by the time her father returned, she had realized the antidote to her strife—that the way to quell her illness was not through carefully curated passivity, but through rigorous thought.

When her father returned a day early, on the eve of her twelfth birthday, and, in the hopes of surprising her, swung open the door to her room without knocking, what he witnessed was a sight for which he was unprepared. There was his daughter—his offspring and his patient, both; his charge and his work—eagerly consuming the conduit for that risky enterprise known as contemplation.

The next morning, her father made a deal with the Manager of the Language Museum, that he would donate copies of his most rare texts if the Manager promised not to lend his daughter any more books. And when next she snuck away and pulled open the grand doors of the Language Museum, the Manager shook his head and pushed her back and locked her out.

Now her desolation took new shape, for she knew what would quell it, but was forbidden access to the corrective. Now her sadness meant walking into swift rivers with the aim of not walking out, going barefoot into woods hoping never to be found. Now her sadness meant screaming the opening lines to her favorite books while she hung naked from trees in the yard.

The morning he came to tell her he would place her in the Home for the Harmed, he put his ear to the door and heard laughter. And as he twisted the knob, his stomach sank. For he felt and then saw that she was gone, the window dressing moving in the breeze. The laughing was coming from the sound machine—she must have recorded herself.

Years later, he would find her books at the Language Museum, though he would never know the words were hers, for they bore men’s names. And—reading with a physician’s eye—he would think these narratives were those of a sick man. The books contained the stories of women who were abandoned—in an attic while her husband fell in love with an orphaned governess below, or in a room with bars, the acrid, amber wallpaper teasing her. He would think the work powerful but failed because it contained such aggression. Yet he found himself irresistibly drawn, compelled, in fact, to reading such dim and lurid tales. It was on these evenings, after reading the stories he could not know were born under his roof, that he would draw closed the drapes, synch the sound machine, and drain a glass of liquor, listening to the fractured record of his little girl’s laugh.