Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders (18 page)

I ask Ruthie if she remembers what she thought of this house when we were kids. You thought it was a woman with a big skirt, I say. And when you told me that, I thought of the woman as Wee-ette, who squatted like a nesting bird, all hovering and vigilant. But you were afraid of her. You had bad dreams.

I did? Ruthie says.

My mother looks at me too, like the next thing I say might either condemn her or let her off the hook. But for what crime?

You were afraid that the house would stand up and walk away and leave us here.

I see it in my head the way she described it back then, two women and two little girls with nothing to protect us, the half circle of our pale backs turned to the cold.

That’s childish, my mother says.

And I was just a child, Ruthie says.

I put both of my hands flat on the table. This is the middle of the story, I tell them. There’s a new ending.

Ruthie looks at my mother. Tell Tilton the truth, she says.

What truth? my mother says.

Mrs. Devlin and her daughter.

What about them?

No one wants to get a TV repaired anymore. No one has record players and mixers rewired. Where do you get the stuff, anyway? Do you even give the poems to anyone to read?

I look at my mother and at Ruthie and then at my mother again, who can’t even meet my eyes. I know that it’s all been a lie. I know it the way I know a certain birdcall on a certain morning belongs to a certain bird before I even look out the window and see it on the limb, eyeing me with a wet dark eye.

My mother says, Hush, Ruthie. Why are you like this?

Honest? Ruthie says. Why am I honest?

I look at my mother and I ask the same question that Ruthie did. Where do you get the stuff, anyway?

My mother takes in a big breath and then lets it out. Goodwill, she says.

I say, Do you even give the poems to anyone to read?

Mrs. Gottleib, my mother says. She loves your poems. They sometimes make her cry.

Gottleib? I say.

She nods, chastened.

You’ve been lying to me, I say.

Things have to change, Ruthie says to my mother. It’s already started. Do you hear me?

Oh, I’m well aware, my mother says. Very well aware.

If they keep talking, I don’t know it because my whole body is pounding inside, like I have a million hearts and all of them are set to burst.

E
xcept I was wrong. Eppitt had looked for me. Why had I never looked for him? Maybe I didn’t want to find out he was dead or had gone mad from the war.

Sometimes I ate a late lunch after work down the street from the library in a dim restaurant. I ordered the same thing every time: pimento cheese sandwich and onion soup, always served too hot. I read while I waited for it to cool. But one gray spring day in 1935, it was simply too dark to read, and the lamps on the tables were gone.

“What happened to the oil lamps?” I asked the waiter.

“Not for the lunch crowd. Only for dinner now.”

Since I couldn’t read, I looked around. I wasn’t used to looking around. A tall, angular man at the end of the bar, the only other customer, called to the waiter. “Hiram,” he said, “can I have a saltshaker?”

This customer was leaning over a bowl of soup. I could make out only the back of his white shirt, thin and airy, see-through, really, revealing the outline of his undershirt. The
shirt itself was pinned down between his shoulder blades by a pair of suspenders and puffed around his shoulders.

When Hiram gave him the saltshaker, the man looked at me, and I quickly fumbled for my book and pretended to read. I glanced up to check if he was still looking at me, and he was, the saltshaker in his hand, frozen. I looked down again but heard his approaching footsteps and soon felt his presence, standing over me.

“I don’t need any salt,” I said.

He hadn’t realized he was still holding the shaker. He put it on my table and said, “No, no, it’s not that. I know you.”

“Yes, the library.” This happened sometimes. Libraries attract crazies—is it the books, the ideas within them, the airy space, the quiet, the free public space enabling one to get out of the weather? It wasn’t unusual to find loons wandering the stacks, which was partly why it felt like home.

“Harriet,” he said.

“Miss Wolf,” I corrected, thinking he was being forward.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. I assumed he was trying to pay a library fine to me directly in the restaurant.

“No, sir,” I said. “Only within the library during library hours. I can’t handle fines anyway. That’s Miss Price’s job.”

But then he held out his hand and there was a loosely wound circle of thread. It was taped at one spot and the tape had writing on it. “E. C. and H. W. 1913. Marriage.”

“Miss Price?” he said. “No. I came over here because you’re my wife.”

The deathy dream was over. I woke up. Let it be a lesson, my Wolf Women. Just because you’re living in a deathy dream doesn’t mean you can’t wake up from it. Eppitt still existed in the world. He came back to me.

I stood up. The napkin in my lap dropped to my shoes. I stared at his face and then reached up and held it in my hands. I needed to feel him to know he was real. His eyes were beautiful—blue and sweet. His skin was soft, freshly shaven. His lips were puffed, his nose slightly crooked. Still thin, he’d grown into his overly dramatic face and his long limbs.

“Harriet,” he said.

And that was the moment when I gasped, a delayed reaction. But it wasn’t just a gasp: it was a wild ragged breath. My heart was stunned awake. “Eppitt. Eppitt. Eppitt.”

He reached his hands around my waist and lifted me off the ground and held me aloft. He kissed me on the mouth, there in the middle of the restaurant. My mouth on his mouth. Tears slipped down my cheeks quickly, and he wiped them with his thumbs. “Harriet. Harriet. Harriet.”

“I want my mother to see you, here at last.”

“I’d like to meet her,” he said.

Of course it was too late for that.

Hiram, who’d been watching behind the bar, called to the dishwasher, the cook. “You got to see this!”

They emerged from the back, drying their hands on their aprons.

“My wife!” Eppitt shouted to them.

“You just found your wife?” Hiram said.

“I lost her and now she’s found!” Eppitt cried.

We sat at the bar and drank with the three men. We told them how, between two billowing sheets, we’d made a vow. We didn’t mention that we were morons.

“How’d you get separated?” Hiram asked.

“The war?” asked the dishwasher, who was missing most of his hand.

Eppitt and I looked at each other and nodded. How else to explain what had happened? This felt close enough.

“War,” I said. “Yes, we were separated by war.”

Eppitt didn’t take me to Mrs. Oblatt’s boarding house, with its women, its shrill water pipes, and its pissy stink. We walked instead a few blocks through the cold to his apartment, our arms locked. His place was small, just a room with a kitchen attached, but it had its own bathroom, a luxury. The paint was old and peeling. There were no curtains, no soft touches. But I didn’t care. I was his wife.

Eppitt lay me down on his bed. I was older now. A woman in her midthirties was ancient then. To everyone else, I was unmarriable. An old maid. I was a librarian who stalked the stacks. A biddy.

“Remember the Wolf Woman?” I said. “I clipped the story of her. She was alone and they shot her.”

“I remember,” he said.

“I’ve been alone for a long time.”

“It’s good that you didn’t get shot.”

We undressed slowly. We now had time. We weren’t two children hiding behind sheets, exposed by a gust of wind, or kids hiding under porch boards.

Eppitt had a wide row of knuckles and long fingers. He unbuttoned my sweater and my blouse—a row of fake pearls. My own breasts surprised me, my fluted waist, my full hips. Where did this body come from? It had been hidden beneath slips and cotton and wool. It was like Eppitt had unearthed me. The mummy unwrapped, alive again.

And I’d never seen a man’s brightly lit body before. Eppitt wasn’t a boy who had to stay in the steam. With slatted ribs, his upper body broadened from his taut muscular stomach to thick shoulders. He had moles, here and there, which made his body seem like it had been partially thought out by a cartographer.

As kids we’d stayed fully dressed when pressed together, and I’d seen only anatomical drawings of male bodies in medical texts. I had just a vague image of what might be stiffened, but I’d imagined it incorrectly. I was surprised by its firm bounce, the rubber give of skin and toughness, and the perfect fit of it, shuttled in on his hips between my legs.

Our lovemaking was quiet and urgent. The women at Mrs. Oblatt’s complained that men were grunting beasts, but Eppitt was beautiful and sweet and mine. My husband. At last.

After it was over, we lay there. I was ruptured. Again, there was blood. Eppitt remembered this about me too.

“The Bleeder of Stump Cottage,” he said. He got towels and I bunched them between my legs and we lay down again.

“It’s our wedding night,” I whispered.

He nuzzled my neck. “Been a long time coming.”

We could see the moon when we tilted our heads just so on the bed.

“What does my husband do for a living?” I asked.

“Your husband is a businessman who has a business partner. You’ll have to meet your husband’s business partner. He throws parties for all of his clients and constituents and allies.”

“Is my husband a war hero?”

“Not really, not a hero. No.” He turned to me. “And my wife…”

“Is a librarian.” This wasn’t exactly true. I was an assistant in the library, but it was close enough.

“My wife, the librarian—where has she been all these years?”

“Pining,” I said. “Alone, lost, and pining.”

“And now my wife is happy and found and not alone ever again.”

“Do you still combine words?” I asked him.

“Sometimes,” he said. And then he shouted, “Oh, how I love my wovely life!”

To get married officially seemed a betrayal, as if we would be saying that our marriage bound by string wasn’t real. But still, the next morning, after I’d fried eggs and while we ate them in bed, Eppitt said, “Do you want to get the license?”

“No, I don’t think I do.”

“Somewhere down the line someone might ask for it.”

“Do people really ask for marriage licenses?”

“I’ve never told someone I was married before so I’ve never had to prove it.”

“What about your family? Would you want them to come to a wedding?”

“No,” he said, his jaw stiffening as he chewed his eggs. “Some are alive. Some dead. I don’t go back.”

“What about your sister Meg?”

He shook his head. She was gone. “Would your family want a wedding?” he asked.

I wiped my mouth with a napkin. “My mother died,” I said.

“I thought you said—”

“I
do
want her to see you,” I said. “And she does, in her way. She’s still with me.”

His eyes turned moist. “I remember her grabbing you and hugging you on the lawn. I was as jealous as I’ve ever been.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, remembering the abruptness, the sudden abandonment.

“What? You couldn’t stay on. You had to go and be happy.”

“I loved my mother so much.”

“What about your father?”

“I have no reason to talk to him. He sends some money to Mrs. Oblatt for rent. I wouldn’t mind if he got a note one day from her saying I was gone. I wouldn’t mind if she never told him and kept the money for herself.”

“I hated your father,” Eppitt said.

“You knew him enough to hate him?”

He stood up and walked to a window. “I got out at fifteen, but it was hard for a while. Eventually, the new cotton mills needed workers and they weren’t picky. Then I moved to the docks. I got up some money, enough so I felt proud of myself, like I could take care of us. I got on a bus and then hired a taxi to your parents’ house. It wasn’t too hard to track your father down. I stood outside and looked at the windows. Then your father walked out and was
getting into his car, a Model T. I walked up to him and stated my intentions, that I was in love with you and wanted to marry you.”

I try to imagine Eppitt at fifteen, my father by the old black town car. Somewhere behind one of the windows, I was probably dreaming of Eppitt. “What did my father say?”

“He asked me who I was and how I knew you, and I said, ‘From school.’ And he said, ‘That place? It’s hardly a school. Leave her alone. Her mother and I don’t want any trouble. She’s happy, for once. Let her be happy.’” Eppitt’s back was to me, and I couldn’t read his expression. “I followed you and your mother around—now and then. You were happy. I left you alone. It was the least I could do.”

“You saw me with my mother?”

“On outings, on walks, going to the pictures. I saw the way you linked arms and talked like crazy.”

“She was beautiful, wasn’t she?”

“You were beautiful together,” he said. “But it wasn’t good for me to watch you like that. It was a sin, I think. But I couldn’t stop until I met Isley Wesler, and my life changed. He got me better work. I had money and I knew you were getting older, marrying age. So I came back to that house at seventeen. I gave a note to the housekeeper.”

“My mother’s nurse?”

“I don’t know. I just handed it to her and said, ‘Give this to Harriet, will you?’ And she looked at me with her face blank and white. She said, “Oh, no. Harriet’s gone, son.” Eppitt started coughing and I worried again about his weak lungs, but then he started speaking again, his voice quiet and small. “The look in her eyes made me think that you were really gone. Dead. I looked
up then and saw the notice on the door, the warning of Spanish flu, and I assumed that’s how you’d fallen.”

“It was my mother who died,” I said. “I was hers for four years, but I couldn’t stay after she died, so I made my own way,” I said, avoiding any mention of my institutionalization. “All these years, you never got married?”

“I was already married to you.”

“Even after you thought I was dead?”

“I never really could accept that. What about you? You never got married either.”

“Me? No,” I said. “So where have you been all these years?”

Eppitt said that when Isley found him he’d been carting bananas on the docks for Antonio Lanasa. I’d heard of Lanasa from my clippings. He shipped bananas in from Jamaica. There’d been an incident, a bombing of the house of a competitor, DiGiorgio, that was referenced in a lot of the articles. Two sticks of dynamite had gone off in an empty room—the DiGiorgios’ three parrots flew off, untouched. Lanasa’s partner, a Jamaican named Goffe, was put on trial but went free. Eppitt explained how the bananas came in on steamships, and then down a conveyor belt from the hulls. They put the stems on their backs and they hauled more than a hundred pounds of them at a time. And they fought on the docks too—ugly stuff: knives, cleavers. But he felt he was lucky to have the work. Then one payday he went to a pool hall. Isley was there, wearing a full-length coonskin coat. He weighed about 120 pounds, but had full cheeks and a buttery ring of fat around his middle, which Eppitt read as well fed and no heavy lifting. Isley asked him what he was hiding. Eppitt told him that he wasn’t hiding anything. Isley said that that was the kind of thing someone who was hiding something might say.

“I kept a lot to myself,” Eppitt told me. “But Isley said he had work for someone secretive and smart, so I became a professional hider.”

I thought of the origami cranes I’d hidden under my mattress, flocks of them, all for Eppitt. I was a hider too, but I didn’t know what a professional hider did.