Sister Noon (28 page)

“Now.” She gave Lizzie a quick nod. “We’re all done in here. Mrs. Mullin is waiting in the conservatory, wondering what we’ve all got up to, and you know what a gossip she is. You just pinch some color into your cheeks and come sit with us, Lizzie, as if nothing has happened. Let poor Mr. Putnam finish his port in peace. Look how you’ve upset him, but I entirely forgive you and none of this need ever be referred to again.”

Mrs. Mullin’s suspicions were indeed roused. They expressed themselves as a series of questions as to how Lizzie had found Mr. Putnam. Fortunately they were easily answered. To every delicate probe, Lizzie responded that Mr. Putnam had seemed in good spirits.

Meanwhile she tried to organize her own thoughts and feelings into clear, useful sequentiality. These are the things she thought and in this order:

First, it was a shame she didn’t care more for Jenny. She preferred a girl like Maud, someone kind and thoughtful, someone lively, someone you could talk to who’d talk right back. Why couldn’t it be Maud? Jenny seemed more Baby Edward’s sister than Lizzie’s, tight-lipped and disapproving.

And if Jenny really were her sister, wouldn’t Lizzie instinctively feel something more for her? Mr. Putnam was quite right to point out that even if her father believed her to be his, she might still very well not be. Novels, even the history books, were littered with women who lied about such things. And for each one caught out, there must be a dozen never doubted.

Jenny had shown up at the Brown Ark, and on Lizzie’s day there, too, so Mrs. Pleasant must have arranged it all. But did this make it more or less likely that Jenny was her sister? Lizzie tried to remember whether she’d been specifically asked for, the way Mrs. Pleasant’s baskets of food were specifically directed to her. She wasn’t sure, but clearly there were schemes within schemes.

And yet Mrs. Pleasant had asked nothing from her beyond Jenny’s place at the Ark. She’d left Jenny off and that had been that.

Did it even matter whether Jenny was Lizzie’s sister? Her father’s acknowledgment certainly attested to the possibility. He had behaved in such a way as to make it possible. Everything else was mere chance. Surely, one’s moral responsibilities were not determined by chance. As Mrs.
Hallis said, there were immediate consequences to behavior and there were remote ones. Why distinguish between the two?

What
moral responsibilities? Lizzie’s behavior was not at fault here. Jenny was well cared for at the Ark, where everyone was more than kind to her. She had the prettiest dresses of any ward there. She had piano lessons. She had food and a bed and good friends. Any obligations Lizzie might or might not have were thoroughly discharged.

And what kind of a name
was
Ijub?

And all the while, Lizzie kept up a polite discourse on the weather and Blythe’s children and Mr. Putnam’s high spirits. It was a bravura performance, supported by Mrs. Putnam, who kept the conversation easy and prompted Lizzie if she ever seemed about to forget her lines.

Outside, two men and a woman strolled by. They’d come up the hill, were laughing and panting, loosening their scarves, unbuttoning their coats. No such thing in San Francisco as going out for a little walk.

The woman wore a soft hat with a black veil folded back. She had a yellow rose pinned to it, not a rosebud, but a full round bloom. It gave Lizzie a start. She actually jerked in response.

“Are you cold, Lizzie?” Mrs. Mullin asked, but Lizzie couldn’t answer, because she had just realized that her father must have attended Mrs. Pleasant’s Geneva Cottage red-invitation, men-only parties. What else would make her mother such a saint?

Maybe her father was a good man. Mr. Putnam said so, and he would know. Maybe they really had been forced to set Jenny aside, if Jenny’s mother was so thoroughly bad.
Mr. Putnam had said this, too, though he’d also claimed to know nothing about Jenny’s mother. Mr. Finney had said the same thing once and followed it with the same retraction.

In any case, Lizzie had always thought her father a good man. But he was most certainly, most incontrovertibly, a man with a terrible temper.

“What’s wrong?” Mrs. Mullin asked.

“She gets those dreadful headaches,” Mrs. Putnam said. “Lizzie, I expect you’d better lie down.”

But Lizzie had already risen. “I must go,” she said. She tried to think of a reason to offer, gave it up. She left the house without her gloves. Blythe had to run after her.

Everywhere Lizzie looked, the color yellow sprang at her. There was so much of it. Sunshine on windows. Buttons on coats. The golden wattles dripping with their fabulous golden spikes of blossoms. It would be a terrible thing to be a young girl dead and missing the springtime.

Lizzie went home and drew the curtains in every room but her father’s study, which she didn’t enter. A letter from the Brown Ark had been delivered in her absence. She opened it and read:

with a postscript from Miss Stevens, serving as secretary:

At about four o’clock Lizzie heard the foghorn. When she looked outside around dinnertime, she couldn’t see across the street. It didn’t necessarily follow that no one could see in. She left the curtains drawn.

W
ake up.” Maud’s face floated white as paste in the dark, and behind it Melody’s face, and behind that, Coral’s. When Jenny sat up she saw that Ella May and Tilly were also there. The whole Good Manners Club. Maud’s voice was a hiss. “Come with us.”

They made Jenny go first up the stairs. “Shhh!” Melody told her once, although she was already making as little noise as an Indian. They went up one flight and then another, until they were in the tower room.

“You’re not afraid to be here, are you?” Maud asked.

Outside, the fog was so thick that no lights shone through. “No,” said Jenny, with a sense of being trapped. She knew there was no right answer to that question. Maud excelled at questions without right answers.

“You need to toughen up,” Maud said. “When you’re adopted, you’ll probably sleep by yourself. You can’t be such a baby about it. None of the rest of us mind the dark.”

Jenny thought she didn’t mind the dark, either. What she minded was being shut up. But even that was all right, because she knew the door didn’t lock. She needed only to wait as long as she could, letting the other girls go back to their beds, and then go out again. She could go anywhere she liked, out to the barn with the dog and the mule, or into the downstairs parlor to sleep. Or out to the street. She often went for walks when she couldn’t sleep. As long as you were wherever you were expected when morning came, no one knew. Jenny took a seat on the settee that smelled of dead horses. The door shut with a click.

The room was cold and stank of dust and the bitter Chinese tea Miss Hayes drank. Jenny’s breath was coming as fast as if she’d run up the stairs.

She didn’t hear the girls, but they would wait for her. She couldn’t leave yet. She must stay still as long as she possibly could. The silence pressed against her ears until it turned her pulse into a metronome.

Jenny put her hands on her knees and played scales over them. Two minutes, she told herself. An egg cooking. She kept her hands arched and tried to keep her fingering even. Give every note the same time to breathe. Instead she found herself playing faster and faster, lost track of when the egg was done.

She rose and picked her way through the clutter of charitable donations. There was a stuffed squirrel with its tail raised, and a hat rack with dangerous points on which she scratched her arm. There was a broken music stand,
and a large cracked vase for umbrellas. Jenny reached the door and turned the knob.

It spun like a pinwheel. She panicked. She grabbed the doorknob tightly, pulled with both hands. The knob rattled in its socket, could be wiggled this way and that like her loose tooth.

Maud must have known it was broken, or arranged for it to be broken. Generally the boys stayed out of things between the girls, but Duffy Phelps would do anything Maud wanted, and Mrs. Lake said he was a wizard with a hammer, could fix anything. The thought that the boys might have known what Maud had planned was a special humiliation for Jenny.

By now she was gasping for air and unable to speak. No one would hear her, anyway. She stumbled back to the settee and flung herself onto it. Her face was already hot with tears, and now she began to weep with her mouth open, making faces that stretched her cheeks. Whenever she took a breath there was a noise like barking. She wiped her nose on the hem of her nightgown, because she had nothing else, and then fell asleep.

She awoke cold as well as terrified. She found a woman’s dress, velvet with the hem kicked out, smelling of mothballs. She pulled its skirt over her as she lay on the settee. The pulse in her ears was deafening and yet she was convinced that something hungry was in the room with her. There’d been a rustle, the tick-tock of claws, only her heart was too loud for her to hear this.

She rose. Whatever was hungry retreated with a scrabble, but it would be back when it saw what a little girl she
was. She was exactly what something hungry would want. Jenny had to get out. She crept to the nearest window.

Outside, the world was gone. There were no stars, no scrub, no sand, no city. Nothing above and nothing below. A vast and milky ocean rolled against the glass.

T
he next afternoon Lizzie heard the front door chime. She was expecting no one. Before she could reach the door, it chimed again. When she opened it, she found Miss Viola Bell standing on the doorstep. She refused to come in. She was wearing a coat of blue wool, pinned at the throat with a large, garish brooch. Inside the coat she looked small and cold. “Do you know what’s happened?” she said. “Do you care?”

The fog from the night before had dissipated, but the air was clingy and carried the echoey sounds of horses and wheels. The bit of yard in front of Lizzie’s house was trellised. Few blossoms; it still looked wintry, but there was one branch of jasmine, and some sleepy bees.

“How nice to see you, Miss Bell,” Lizzie said. “Please come inside. What are you talking of?”

Viola shifted on her crutch and her sheet music fell. Lizzie stooped and retrieved it. “The Mockingbird’s Song” was the top sheet, “a piece for Teacher and Student.” “I’m talking of Jenny. Who was found this morning, standing on the ledge outside the cupola window. She’d been there all night, in her thin little nightdress, with nothing but yards and yards of air beneath her and the cold, hard ground. If she’d fallen!”