Ship Fever (16 page)

“And Bianca?”

“He loved to tell stories about her adventures.”

“Hawaii, you mean? Alaska? The climbing stuff?”

“All that.” All the things I hadn't done. Harry wouldn't tell me if my father's pleasure in Bianca's adventures outweighed his pride in my accomplishments. Instead, he told me other stories about my father's friends.

They brought food, some of them—not one of them had a wife left, all their wives had died or abandoned them, but they cooked clumsy meals and brought them to my father. They planted a chaise in the front lawn and on sunny days guided my father out there for some air. They drove him to the doctor. They talked to the nurse. They brought Scotch and wine and sat on the end of my father's bed, refreshing their drinks and telling bawdy anecdotes from their shared youth. Harry said they made my father laugh.

These stories give me such a pain. Because women had come and gone from our father's life with some frequency before his second marriage, and because he never seemed to miss any of them any more than he missed us, Bianca and I had labored
under the impression that he had no emotional life. And yet this turned out to be untrue. Our father had an emotional life, although it was not one we could recognize. It was centered, while he waited for his wife, on his dogs and on this group of men.

Now, when I see these men in the village, they are quite cool to me. They judge me harshly, and rightly so, for not sharing my father's last days. But everyone else treats me as if nothing has happened. In the high school there are still a few teachers left from the time when Bianca and I were students: Mrs. Komnetz, who teaches English; Mr. Baker, who teaches biology. And of course there are plenty of other people in town who remember me and Bianca as girls. When I first moved back here, and even more when I first got my job, I wondered all the time what these people thought of me. They remember me and Bianca, but they remember us as if we were different people.

“You were such bright girls,” Mrs. Komnetz says. “So spunky, so talented. We all knew you had a future. What is your sister doing these days?”

“Painting,” I say, although Bianca is not painting but only living with a painter. But everyone accepts this, as if we are only doing what they expected. They're a little surprised to find me back here, but happily surprised, pleased. They have no knowledge of anything Bianca and I did after we left this town, and what they remember of our girlhood here is sanitized and wrapped in a shroud of nostalgia. No one mentions the times we were suspended from school, the endless notes sent home to our father, the policemen showing up at our house at night after certain acts of vandalism that pointed unfailingly to us. In their revision of our history, we are local girls who made good. They act as if they're grateful that I came back, and they are so tactful they never ask if I mind the cut in salary or if I miss being called “Professor” or “Doctor” instead of plain “Ms. Marburg.”

Of our visit to our father before his death, they remember that we came and cooked and cleaned; they forget that we left. Of the funeral, what they seem to remember is two young women struck speechless by loss. No one knows that we slept on that hill; no one wonders, or not out loud, why we were never seen with our father's widow. If they remember anything strange about that time, they tend to blame it on her. She was not a local woman.

Instead of talking about those things, they tell me stories about our grandfather and our great-aunts as if they were still alive. “You look like Agnes,” they say to me, or “Did you know you have Leo's nose?” They've forgiven or forgotten everything, especially now that I live with Harry and his white dog.

This dog and I share a secret: our pasts are lost to everyone but us. I remember who I was as a girl, but everyone seems to have entered into a conspiracy to deny that that girl was me, as they deny their knowledge of what I did while my father was dying. As for the dog—who knows what the dog remembers? People treat him like Harry's dog: ancient, arthritic, harmless. I think he remembers each of my father's last days.

Since my arrival, this dog has attached himself to me. He sleeps on the floor beside me, within reach of my dangling arm. When I'm absent he pulls my dirty clothes from the hamper and gathers them patiently into a heap, on which he turns and turns and turns before flopping down. At night, when I sit grading my students' exams in the room that Harry has turned into my study, the dog lies groaning and scratching the floor as he dreams his way through our past. If I wake him up too suddenly, he jerks stiffly to his feet and then barks at the portrait of Suky, which turned up at a flea market in Ithaca after I thought it was lost forever. If dogs could talk, I believe this one could list each moment where I failed.

What am I to make of all this? I've tried to describe much of it in my letters to Bianca—always leaving out the most important part, which is that I've shared our deepest secret with Harry. Bianca suspects this, I believe; she didn't reply the first two times I wrote. But a month ago, after I wrote describing Couperin's involvement in our father's last days, and the recovery of our father's dog, she wrote back to me.

“Why are you telling me these things?” she wrote. “I bet you don't remember Couperin any better than I do. But I'm glad you have Dad's dog and that he's all right. Are you happy with this Harry? Please tell me you're not with him because of that dog.”

Harry is kind. Harry helps me understand. But I'm not in love with him, and Bianca knows it. She writes that yes, she finds it odd that our father's widow has vanished from our lives without a trace. And yes, she thinks of our old life sometimes, and of our father and his last days, and of the talk we did or didn't have with Suky. But she doesn't think about these things often, she says. Not very often at all. In her new life, in her new country, she never speaks about our past.

Do I believe her? Sometimes; sometimes not. Often I wonder if she hasn't told Oscar all I've told Harry and more; if she doesn't lie tangled in sheets at night, talking the darkness away. But all the rest of Bianca's letter was about her daily life. Oscar paints her nude, she writes. In their house on a cliff in Costa Rica, both their old lives left behind, he poses her on white sheets strewn with flowers and then works furiously on a gigantic canvas. It's steamy, she says. Impossibly sexy. The things he says, the things he does; she has never had such wonderful sex, she has never been so in love. Around them are orchids, iguanas, bananas and parrots, howler monkeys and coatimundis and frogs the size of salad plates.

At night, she writes, they make love outside, in the jungle, in the rain.
The here and now, the moment,
she says. This, when for years she chided me for leaving our history behind. I can hear her voice in my study, as clear as an equation.
Why dwell on the past?

[
I.
]

January 27, 1847

Skibbereen, County Cork

Dear Lauchlin:

Does this find you well, my friend? For myself I am well enough in body but sick at heart: small excuse for not writing sooner. All has been confusion since our arrival. I have been traveling from county to county with two Quaker relief workers, an American philanthropist, a journalist from London, and various local authorities. Matters are worse than I expected.

At Arranmore, in County Donegal, the streets swarm with famished men begging for work on the roads. At Louisburgh, in County Mayo, the local newspaper reports between ten and twenty deaths a day, and I myself saw bodies lying unburied, for want of anyone to dig a grave. In a hut that had been quiet for many days we found on the mud floor four frozen corpses, partly eaten by rats. That same day, a dispensary doctor told me he'd seen a woman drag from her hovel the corpse of her naked daughter. She tried to cover the body with stones.

Does this give you some idea? Here at Skibbereen, I saw in one cabin a man, his wife, and two of their children, all emaciated beyond belief, sitting around a tiny fire and
mourning a young child dead in her cradle, for whom they had no way to provide a coffin. In some places, men have constructed coffins with movable bottoms, in which the dead may be conveyed to the churchyard and there unceremoniously dropped. Those lucky enough to be buried at all have no mourners, often no more than a handful of straw for a shroud.

I see no hope of this situation changing; the British Government continue their benighted policies and say they've spent vast sums. Yet we hear reports that the people, having eaten their seed potatoes and cattle and horses, are reduced to eating frogs and foxes and the leaves and bark of trees. Dysentery rages among those who eat the unground Indian corn passed out so grudgingly by the Relief Commission. To the complaints of Parliament, that the land lies unworked and that the lazy Irish refuse to fend for themselves, I would only ask that they visit here and see with their own eyes the terrible apathy brought on by starvation and despair. Or let them hear the horrifying silence lying over this land. We travel for miles and never hear a pig's squeal, a dog's bark, a chicken's cluck, or a crow's caw.

As you might imagine, I've been writing articles, the first of which I am sending to the
Mercury
by this same post. The American with whom I travel has also undertaken to arrange publication of some of these in the New York papers. Anything to counteract the London papers, which are enough to drive one mad. Yesterday I read a column stating that the cause of the “potato murrain” is a sort of dropsy. Others contend that the rot arises from static electricity generated in the air by the puffs of smoke from locomotives, or from miasmas rising from blind volcanoes in the interior of the earth. Always the potatoes; not a word about the ships that sail daily for England with Ireland's produce, which might have been used to feed the starving.

I wonder what you would make of all this? You are busy, I imagine. But I know you are keeping an eye on Susannah, as promised. Do try to visit when you can, and keep her in good spirits; I expect she is lonely but I cannot
be both here and there and I know you will help her understand this. With luck I will leave here in April, but it is possible I may go to London and do what I can to influence matters there. There will be a vast emigration this spring, for which you should prepare yourselves. Forgive my haste and this scattered letter.

Dr. Lauchlin Grant paused, after reading most of this letter out loud to Susannah Rowley. They were in the Rowleys' handsome house on Palace Street, in the city of Quebec, behind a door carved with a pair of As intertwined with an S. Susannah's husband, Arthur Adam Rowley, had built the house and arranged for the decoration of that door. So confident was he of his place in the world that he signed everything, even his newspaper articles, solely with those initials.

But even Arthur Adam could not control the weather, and his sitting-room, with its windows still sealed against the Quebec winter, was overheated on this unexpectedly warm day. It was April already; winter had delayed the mail even longer than usual. The letter increased Lauchlin's discomfort, and he removed his jacket as he finished reading.

He had not read the lines about watching over Susannah, because they would have infuriated her. Nor had he read the part about the corpses devoured by rats. Now, as he draped his jacket on the chair, he spoke two lines that did not exist:
Please ask Susannah to forgive me for writing so infrequently to her. She is in my mind always, but I cannot bear to subject her to all I've seen.

Susannah made no response, but Lauchlin felt the sweet, easy mood in which she'd welcomed him disappear. Annie Taggert, the Rowleys' parlormaid, set the tea-tray down on the claw-footed table by the fireplace, and still Susannah said nothing more than, “Thank you.” Only after Annie's departure did she
turn to Lauchlin to ask, “Do you suppose Annie heard you reading that?”

“Annie?” Lauchlin said. “How could she?”

Susannah shrugged. “She hovers, you know. She stands outside and pretends to dust that cabinet in the hall. She's been with Arthur Adam a long time—I'm still new to her, and she doesn't entirely trust me.”

“With…me, you mean?” His face grew so hot that he moved toward the sealed window. “Can't we get this
open?
” he said, pushing irritably at the latch. At night he dreamed of women he'd glimpsed during the day, and in his dreams their garments fell away, revealing milky skin. But his dreams were no one's business.

“With anyone, I suppose. She thinks my manners are appalling. She thinks I'll say something that will prove I'm not a lady.”

That was all she meant, then. He leaned his forehead against the window, but the glass was hardly cool. Then he said, “I'm sorry about the letter—I shouldn't have read it to you.”

“Why not?” she said. “How else would I know what's going on? Maybe he's on his way home already.”

As she paced the room, the sun cast the folds of her blue gown into deep shadow and struck silver highlights on her breast and shoulders and back. These glimmers were her only jewels, other than her wedding and engagement rings—although not born a Quaker, she'd been raised by her Quaker aunt and uncle after her parents' deaths, and she still dressed simply. And yet, Lauchlin thought, part of her seemed to miss the glitter of her childhood. When he'd entered this sitting-room earlier, he'd found her kneeling before the tea-table, turning over the contents of her mother's jewel box. The sight of that mahogany box, with its chased silver hinges and rose velvet lining, had frozen his greeting in his mouth. When they were very young, and had lived next door to each other, Susannah's mother had sometimes let them play with the box on rainy days. The string of pearls
Susannah held, and the hatpins—one tipped with cloisonné flowers, the second with an onyx knob—were as familiar to him as his own mother's earrings and brooches.

“Do you want to put it on?” he'd asked, bending over to touch the necklace.

As he did so he'd remembered her, at age seven or eight, parading around her mother's dim dressing room while the rain streamed down the windows. Her parents had gone out and the nursemaid who was supposed to be watching them had fallen asleep. Susannah had stuck the hatpins in her pinafore and, because neither she nor Lauchlin could open the clasp, draped the necklace over one shoulder and around the heads of the pins. She'd smiled broadly and tilted her chin, imitating her mother. Later she'd been given some modest jewelry of her own: a ring with a small ruby, which Lauchlin had watched her unwrap at her tenth birthday party; a dainty gold bracelet. And he had chosen, with his mother's help, a pretty enameled hair-clasp for a Christmas present. Where had those things gone?

“I don't like to wear them,” she said, dropping the strand back in the box. “But they're so pretty to look at…remember these?” She held up a dangling pair of coral earrings.

“Of course I do,” he said. “Surely you could wear those? They're very plain.” Her earlobes were just visible below the wings of her dark hair, which was parted in the center and drawn up in a simple knot. The coral drops would look lovely against her hair and skin, he thought.

She shook her head, but did not object when he crouched across from her and peered into the box. “Your mother dressed so beautifully,” he said. “And that whole house looked like her, somehow—those violet drapes, remember those? I used to think she must have picked them to match her eyes.”

“She might have,” Susannah said. Her own eyes were closer to gray than violet, and were set unusually far apart. They'd made her look oddly adult when she was a girl. Now they made
her look girlish. “I wish I could picture her more clearly. Do you ever have times when you can see all the things around your mother, her clothes and jewelry and furniture—but you can't see her face?”

“Sometimes,” he said.

Then he'd risen hastily, turned his back on her and the mahogany box, and produced the letter that seemed, suddenly, to have soured the afternoon. All because he couldn't bear to think of the year when Susannah's parents had died within a week of each other, and his own mother's life had been extinguished like a lamp within a room he was not permitted to enter. Afterwards he and Susannah had been separated. She'd gone to her aunt and uncle's house, in the suburb of St. Roch; he'd been shipped off to cousins in Montreal. Throughout those years, and then through his medical training and his postgraduate studies in Paris, he hadn't seen her.

On his return to the city of Quebec two years ago, he had rediscovered her: grown and married to Arthur Adam Rowley. How had this happened? But the answer was obvious. She was intelligent and beautiful; Arthur Adam was tall and wealthy and clever. And although she had no more dowry than her mother's jewel-box, her upbringing set her apart from many of the more frivolous young women in the city. Her seriousness fitted well with Arthur Adam's ambitions. Already he'd made a name for himself as a journalist, despite the fact that he had no need to earn a living. He liked to make crusades in print, and to outrage his peers by taking up the causes dear to Susannah's adoptive family. Older men predicted for him a career in politics.

Lauchlin had grown fond of him, despite twinges of envy. All that energy and enthusiasm, his warm hospitality and vibrant conversation—no, it was impossible that Lauchlin should resist him. And their growing friendship had meant he could see Susannah easily. He could knock on the initialed door, as he had today, and be sure of a welcome. Just now, though, he felt
confused. Was it the information contained in the letter that had upset her? Or the fact that the letter had not been written to her?

“His news made me miserable,” Lauchlin said: both stating a fact and searching for the source of Susannah's unhappiness. “It's unbearable, what's going on over there. And me here, doing nothing—I should
be
there.” He pressed his forehead against the glass, as if he could push through it to the air.

“It's not as though Arthur Adam is actually
doing
anything,” Susannah said. “He's watching. He's writing. That's what he does. Why does he write in such detail to you, and not to me?”

“He's writing articles that move people,” he said, evading her question. “Move them to send clothes, money, food—that's hardly nothing.”

“Anyone could do as much…oh, I don't mean that, I know what he's doing, how important it is—but I
miss
him. All the time.” She continued to pace, swishing her skirts against the heavy furniture. “Does he think I wouldn't be interested? Why can't
I
be there?”

“It's no place for a woman.”

She spoke as if she hadn't heard him. “Stuck here, sorting old clothes and running bazaars…and feeling you watching me all the time. He asked you, didn't he? To keep an eye on me.”

“Only the way a friend would ask another friend—to ease his mind, you know. And perhaps to make sure we each have some company in his absence.”

“That's how you see yourself? As company?”

Was she mocking him? The room was stifling. He had taken great pains, he thought, not to let her know the depth of his feelings for her. He had been friendly but no more than that; well-mannered, discreet. Although it was true he fussed over his clothes when coming to see her. Now he sneaked a glance at the oval mirror hanging from a cord on the wall. Bushy red hair as
neat as a pair of brushes could make it in this weather; a flush spreading from his cheekbones across his freckled, blocky nose. His new shirt was handsome enough, but for all it had cost it still bunched at the collar as if made for a smaller, daintier man. He sat and extracted a fat, prickly cushion from under his elbow. Then he flushed more darkly as he caught Susannah's gaze.

“Vain boy,” she said. She settled herself in a low chair and poured the tea.

“I am
not.
” But even as he protested he found himself oddly comforted by her tone, which brought back the bickering of their childhood. Once, in the garden behind his family's house, they had argued for hours over a passage in a book.

She shrugged, spilling tea into her saucer. “I was only teasing.” Then she let out a small, exasperated sigh. “But here I am. And here you are. Both of us wanting to be over there. I wish you'd stuck with your work at the hospital.”

“But the director wouldn't let me
do
anything…bleed, bleed, bleed; that's all he does, and all he wanted me to do.” He reached for more sugar. “You know that.”

They'd argued before about Lauchlin's unwillingness to continue working at the immigrant hospital supported by Susannah's aunt and uncle. “You're as prejudiced as your father,” Susannah had said. In Findlay Grant's eyes, the cholera that had killed his wife in 1832 had come from the Irish immigrants, and since then he'd never had a kind word for anyone or anything Irish. But Lauchlin's defection had nothing to do with his father, only with the limits his own research placed on his time. He studied the nature and uses of alkaloids, those active principles isolated from plants. A substance as useful as atropine or quinine might reveal itself to him, if he were diligent. He'd thought Susannah understood the importance of this. She'd seemed to agree when he explained, after his second hospital visit, how he wasn't really needed there, and how the work disrupted his research.