A White Room (8 page)

First she’d help me into one of my dreary mourning dresses, cinching my corset, pulling my skirt closed over the layers of petticoats, and assisting with high-collar buttons. She’d also help me with my long hair, which I wore in a pompadour with curls, twists, and tucks atop my head. Then I’d have her open all the doors downstairs to let the light out of the rooms. She’d clear away the dishes and lower them to the basement using the dumbwaiter. Next she would empty, clean, and refill the jug and basin in the bath chamber. She’d then go to the dungeon to wash the dishes and remove the ashes from the coal-burning stove.

“The dungeon” was my nickname for the basement. I’d thought it up as a way to tease myself, but it turned out to be quite accurate. It was murky and the walls bled with leaks. It felt as if despair had been banished to that space. One insignificant window hovered at the top of the wall opposite the stairs. Below the window was a large wash basin for cleaning dishes. We had to lug the water down to the basement from a well outside. We stored dishes and food in some cupboards with glass doors. I stored fresh food and baked goods in a pierced-tin closet to keep bugs away. The extra buffet and icebox sat against another wall. People in Labellum actually had iceboxes that they filled with large chunks of ice from the Mississippi during the winter and stored in such a way that the ice lasted through much of summer. The stove and oven sat next to the stairs. We did much of the work on a large wood table in the middle of the room and a small dough box with an unfinished wood top for chopping.

While Mrs. Schwab worked on the dishes, I would dust off the tablecloth and fold it. Then I would sweep, moving from the dining room to the parlor and other commonly used areas while ignoring the glares coming from the knickknacks. In the parlor’s main seating area around the fireplace, I swept each day around and under a green sofa with clawlike feet. The seat of the sofa curved up into the arms, which rounded over and under, making the entire piece look like a menacing leer, the white tassels of a large doily throw its teeth. Next, I’d move toward an adjacent blue love seat that had two chair backs but a fused seat, like conjoined twins connected at the hip.

Mismatched wooden chairs were placed sporadically around the room, and I had to move them all around every time I swept. I’d move one and then turn and another would confront me, and then another, and another. One with ghostly hands drifting up, like smoke, one with two green bug-eyed pads on the back, and one with three overlapped leaves for a seat. Another had thick layered waves that resembled muscles I’d seen in books but not those of a human—some other creature. The muscles of a chair?

I would polish everything, and I mean everything, even the doorknobs. I’d clean the lamps’ black residue from the walls, and I’d clean John’s ashtrays. He smoked cigarettes—never cigars like my father. Even when others smoked cigars, he favored cigarettes, but he mostly smoked when he worked and never at the table.

About the time I would reach the end of the hall, Mrs. Schwab would rise from the basement and trudge up the stairs, open the doors on the second floor, put our chamber in order, flip the mattress, and make the bed. She also polished fixtures, dusted, and cleaned out the chamber pot. Then she’d dump John’s shaving water and wipe down the wash basin in our room. Finally, she’d refill the jug so we could wash our hands and faces throughout the day and before bed. Mrs. Schwab did these chores daily and dusted the empty rooms once a week. On the days she wasn’t with me, I would do those chores alone. Those were the worst hours for me, alone with those empty rooms and the people who weren’t in them.

Other chores depended on the day. On Mondays, when Mrs. Schwab returned from our chamber, we would both go to the basement for laundry. Boil, wring, scrub, wring, soak, wring, and hang. The process took all of Monday and usually some of Tuesday. When we’d finished more than we could carry, we’d gather the wet linens and take them outside to hang. Whenever we rose up from beneath the ground holding baskets of wet clothes, I imagined us as captives released after years of undeserved confinement to a cell. Of course, when we went back, I couldn’t help but imagine that our captors had immediately accused us of some other crime for which we were being forced back underground. I wasn’t used to laundering, and afterward my arms and hands would ache from the scrubbing, so much some days that they’d quiver all through dinner and I feared I might drop the pitcher of water on John.

Tuesdays we ironed, starched, and mended. We would also start baking food to last the entire week, which meant we had to plan all meals in advance. We finished baking on Wednesdays. Then we’d beat the rugs and scrub the floors. Every time we scrubbed, I wondered, who scuffed all these floors? Doing the floors drained me of energy, but I enjoyed the freedom from the basement.

Thursdays, John would bathe at 5:30 a.m., before work, and I would bathe after he left. I had to lug buckets of water from the well down into the basement to heat on the range and then haul them back up to the tub. Of course, I would fill the tub with only an inch or so of warm water, and then we used a sponge to draw the warm liquid over our bodies. Whenever I bathed, I wondered what it would look like if the raven-footed tub could really take flight and if it could, whether or not it would do so with me still in it? My hair was so long that it took all day to dry by the fire, so I washed it very rarely, using perfumed soaps made from animal fat and lemons. Afterward, I cleaned the tub and brushed my teeth with a horsehair toothbrush and bicarbonate of soda. I would have liked to save our bathing day for when Mrs. Schwab could assist with the water, but I needed her too much for the other chores, and there just wasn’t enough time on those days for bathing.

I dreaded Thursdays when I had to face the house alone. I would spend at least an hour fiddling with self-cinching and skirt-clasping tools as I tried to dress myself, but usually I still couldn’t do it quite right. Worse, when I prepared breakfast and cleaned the dishes in the basement, there were constant noises above and around me, as if something lurked there. I told myself that what I heard in the basement had to be a scurrying mouse or another critter, but I couldn’t speculate what the thumping and clacking from above could be unless it was the furniture moving around of its own accord—scuffing the floors, no doubt.

Although I despised the basement, other areas of the house were just as disturbing. I constantly sensed a presence when I was alone, especially in the parlor. Whenever I would clean mirrors in there, I’d see a flash or a blur in the reflection. I’d spin around and search among the clusters of tables and chairs, the web of bric-a-brac that could easily conceal a tiny trickster. I’d eye the grouping in the left corner, the china cabinet on the wall with the curved sides and glass doors like eyes. Or I’d peer at the middle cluster with the game table and gangly treelike figurines, a lopsided vase practically dripping off the table. Or I’d study another cluster of seats surrounding the window-box garden. The cabinet for gardening supplies lingered nearby. Its appendages swirled, too. Could the inky sliver I’d see out of the corner of my eye have been one of those winding arms?

Thankfully, I didn’t lose all my sanity on Thursdays because, when I didn’t have wet hair, our driver and stable hand, Mr. Samuel Buck, would take me into town to make calls and weekly purchases. I ordered many things by catalog, even groceries, but I still had to visit the milkman, the egg man, the butcher, and a provisionary for apples, butter, potatoes, and the like. The first time I visited the little town, I expected to see long drooping trees and a jungle of foliage overwhelming chipped and worn buildings. To my surprise, Labellum actually appeared to be clean and kempt, with little white shops and bushy trees lined up in neat little rows. I could see grassy hills in the distance. The trees were mostly oak, the type with rounded tops. Little patches of forest were interspersed throughout the valley but cleared from the town center.

Labellum’s original inhabitants situated the town on a crisscrossed grid, with narrow alleys. The white buildings were square, with flat fronts and angled roofs. Almost every structure looked alike, with two windows on the upstairs floor and two more flanking a single door. I’d thought people avoided painting buildings white for fear that they’d show filth, but everything here looked cleaned and pressed. Perhaps this little town had discovered the secret to being rid of things like dirt.

Fridays were lonely, too, but I had to labor only on chores I hadn’t completed during the week. I had fewer chores than women in the past because factory production made it possible to buy ready-made clothing, and food preparation and storage was easier. My mother used to badger me to be grateful that I didn’t have to spin my own thread or grind coffee without a hand-cranked grinder—not that she’d ever ground coffee in her life. I usually had a lot of extra time on Fridays, so I set it aside to receive callers, but in such a small town, calls were infrequent. I’d spend much of Friday mending mindlessly, reading, or just dreaming of faraway places and occasionally jerking around to see if a noise behind me had in fact been made by a living creature skulking among the figurines.

Or I faced my correspondence:

Dear Emeline,

My darling child, your father would be so proud. Thanks to the Dorrs, your sisters and I are not living in the desperate conditions we feared. Now family, they have offered an extraordinary amount of kindness, resources, and connections that will allow us to prosper. Mrs. Dorr introduced several well-bred young ladies to your brother, and she is sure she knows a young man who will show an interest in Florence.

Emeline, your husband has given you and your family so much more than we could ever expect in our situation. He could have married a woman of much higher worth and standing, but he chose you. Do not risk disappointing him. We wouldn’t want to lose all that we have been blessed with again. Sometimes marriage can be difficult. You will not always be happy or comfortable, but you must always remember what your husband sacrificed for you.

With all the love in the heavens,

Your Mother

Unfortunately, I had little options for distraction. I never settled on any accomplishments. I didn’t paint or etch wood or play the pianoforte. I’d never found meaning in such things. I tried making crafts from seashells, but they never came out right, and my floral arrangements were deplorable. Thankfully, society considered reading an acceptable way for a woman to improve herself. Even if society did not approve of the literary subjects I chose.

I developed a talent for locating and consuming writing deemed unsuitable for a young lady, such as Dickens,
Wuthering Heights
, sensations like
The Woman in White,
by Wilkie Collins, and various science and medical texts. Although I found the house distasteful, the library brimmed with books I had never heard of, and John brought even more, many of them professional volumes I inquisitively thumbed through in his absence. When we first arrived, John had said he wouldn’t work Saturdays and Sundays, but he did. I spent those days bored and anxious. It didn’t take me long to go through all his books, but they were mostly about law, which I found a terrible read. Nothing made sense in law books. Still, there were some masculine finds—Henry David Thoreau’s
Walden
and
Civil Disobedience
, Thomas Carlyle’s
The French Revolution, A History,
and Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
.

When John did stay home, he would spend the day working in the library. I wish I could say his presence was a comfort to me, but it often made things worse, specifically because when he was home he insisted we close all the doors. Light still filled the rooms we were in, but there was something about traveling through dark halls and the knowledge that darkness hid behind every door.

Sundays we attended services. John had once mentioned committing Sundays to a leisure activity like cycling or tennis. I internally leapt at the idea, but he never brought it up again, always having too much work and not a moment to spare, not even to play a game or tell me something about himself. So I focused on improving myself, hopefully to his liking. Or I read.

The redundancy was dreadful. No task accomplished was really an accomplishment. I cleaned things that would just get dirty again. I baked things that we consumed. Nothing had lasting value; I had to redo everything, over and over. Perhaps I might have felt a sense of purpose if the drudgery had ended with a smile on his face, but every day began and concluded the same way. John would emerge from the library unaware that my cheer was in spite of my efforts, the tedium, and how depressed it all made me.

“How was your day?” I would ask.

“Hmm?” He would say, refusing to look away from his read.

“Did your day go well?”

He might stab a bit of food with his fork, hold it up to his mouth, and pause for a moment. “I like it.”

“John, I asked you how your day went?”

“What?” he would ask. “Oh—um—fine.”