Sister Noon (6 page)

She lost control of the children. The older boys abandoned their partners and dashed off to look for green trousers. Mrs. Lake was unable to stop them. She used her energies to keep the little ones huddled together. This was not hard; many of them were frightened. Others, especially Minna Graham, were clearly envious. Minna was one of those children who liked to turn attention to herself whenever possible. She did so on this occasion by fainting.

Minna’s head hit the pavement with a crack they could all hear. Blood seeped into her hair, and Mrs. Lake found a large lump on the scalp. The lump was as soft as a cooked carrot and gave slightly when poked. Minna was too dizzy to walk. Mrs. Lake, who was planning on confronting Minna with her failure to watch over Jenny, instead saw her carried from the castle to the cable car on the back of the black knight’s horse, the crowd cheering as she passed. “She actually waved to everyone,” Mrs. Lake told Lizzie and Nell, “as if she were Queen of the May.”

All in all, the children were judged to be overexcited, and when Mrs. Lake collected them again, she brought them straight back. As a result, she couldn’t know about the tilting.

She gave Lizzie and Nell an aggrieved report, blowing her nose into her handkerchief frequently but silently. She then went home to rest. Nell stayed with Lizzie a few moments more, to give her own version of events, events to which she was not a witness. Nell had no time for knights; it amazed her that anyone did. And she had three particular points to make. The first was that Mrs. Lake was the kind of woman who lived a life of high drama in which
nothing ever actually happened. The second was that
Ivanhoe
was likely to overexcite, even when it wasn’t combined with unnecessary outings. It was a swoony sort of book, and she wondered at Mrs. Lake for encouraging the children to read it. The third was that it was time to know more about Jenny Ijub. Where had she come from? Had they put themselves and the other children in danger by taking her in? Someone needed to go to Mammy Pleasant and ask some hard questions.

Lizzie guessed that Nell was right on all counts.

Ivanhoe:
Swoony indeed—why, Lizzie had only to think in the most glancing way about the licentiousness of Norman nobles to feel a flush coming up her neck and into her cheeks. How many nights she’d drifted to sleep imagining herself struggling futilely, imprisoned for love by the swarthy, ardent Bois-Gilbert!

Mrs. Lake: Mrs. Lake was a neat, pretty, red-haired woman of thirty and could still carry on about knights and steeds and beheaded queens (how that woman loved the Stuarts!) without looking the fool, but her day was coming. Since Lizzie secretly shared all of Mrs. Lake’s shortcomings, she was quick to find Mrs. Lake silly and sentimental. It was a form of protective coloration. Nell’s veins ran with a heavier ore.

Questions about Jenny: The staff was busy and Lizzie was the only member of the board at hand, so these were bound to fall to her. She fixed her hair with combs, fixed her hat with pins, fixed her face in a smile, and walked to Octavia Street. By the time she reached the Bells’ front porch, she had worked herself into such a state over occult rituals and blood sacrifices she could hardly knock on the door.

L
izzie was not the sort to retreat, not when she’d made up her mind to call, and especially not with the elderly gardener watching her. He stood staring, scary in his very ordinariness, armed with a shining set of pruning shears and the thorny stems of a dozen dead roses. Lizzie picked up her skirts and climbed the steps to the front doors. These were of carved cherry wood, inset with a high pane of beveled glass. The knocker was a roaring lion with a ring in his mouth.

A white girl, very pretty and dressed in a green uniform, answered Lizzie’s knock, took her hat and gloves, and showed her into a white-and-gold drawing room. She was told to sit, but went instead to examine a set of statues of women, white marble on black onyx bases. They held
various poses of resignation and supplication. They were women who wanted something they would not get. And they were quite naked. There was a slight shadow of dust in the marble crevices. Lizzie could imagine a housemaid too embarrassed to clean more thoroughly. Lizzie herself did not much like them. She didn’t mind the lack of clothing; she knew about art. She was no prig. But a lady shouldn’t need to beg.

A gold-and-white woman entered the room. She wore pearls in her ears and gold on her wrists. Her hair was brown with a little meander of gold; her eyes were like trout ponds. A complicated fragile white dress gathered and spilled over her. She seemed about Lizzie’s own age, though much more beautiful. “I’m Mrs. Bell,” she said. Lizzie had expected Mrs. Bell to be younger.

“Miss Hayes. Of the Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society Home.”

“I suppose Mr. Bell has made contributions.” Her tone was distant and uninterested.

Lizzie had no recollection of this, and since she kept the books, she should know. But it would be an awkward thing to contradict.

Mrs. Bell was already sweeping Lizzie back toward the door. “Perhaps we could do a mite more. I’m not the one to ask. I’m not the one to know when we have money and when we don’t.”

“I didn’t come to ask for money. I’m here about a child.”

“I love children,” said Mrs. Bell. “Mr. Bell and me have our six. The oldest grown. I think Fred might be in San Jose. Or maybe Mexico. Somewhere south.”

“This is a girl. She’s only been with us a few weeks. Her mother passed away.”

“I hardly knew my mother.” Mrs. Bell’s voice retained its formal-tea tone. “I had two older brothers who both died right after birth. When I was three months old my mother stripped me to the skin and set me on a windowsill in a thunderstorm. My father found me and he gave me to another family to raise.”

“I’m very sorry,” Lizzie responded uneasily.

“A three-month baby left soaking in the rain.” Still, Mrs. Bell’s composure was perfect; she might have been discussing the new fashion in women’s sleeves or expressing hopes for a mild winter. “A pretty little thing, too, with a head of silky hair. Before it was even born, she hated it. Wouldn’t nurse it. I refuse to think on her much. What might I do for your motherless girl?”

“Mrs. Pleasant brought her to us. Actually, it was Mrs. Pleasant I was hoping to see.”

Mrs. Bell’s poise proved as diaphanous as her dress. It slipped from her face like smoke. Lizzie watched this happen, and then looked away, since clearly it was something she shouldn’t have seen. “Don’t do that,” said Mrs. Bell. “Just go. I won’t say you been here. I won’t say anything.” There was the sound of brisk footsteps in the corridor. “See how fast she walks?” Mrs. Bell whispered. “She comes on you in a moment.”

Mrs. Pleasant entered the room. “Teresa,” she said. She spoke as quickly as she moved. “You’ve met Miss Hayes, then. I’m delighted. She’s a woman of good works.” She didn’t look delighted. She didn’t look surprised. Her face was gracious, but this could have been an illusion created
by age, by the texture of her skin, like a crumpled handkerchief. Her hair was white about her face, but still, even now, when she was in her seventies, mostly black. She’d gathered it into a knot with bits curled tightly around her temples. Her eyes were sharp; they seemed to take much in while giving nothing away.

“Really?” said Mrs. Bell. “Now, she didn’t say. I’m rather a creature of ideals, myself.”

“Would you take a cup of tea?”

Lizzie did not want to stay long enough to drink a cup of tea. She didn’t wish to make a social call. She didn’t wish to conduct her business in front of the peculiar Mrs. Bell. She couldn’t think of a courteous way to send Mrs. Bell from her own drawing room. “Tea would be lovely,” she said. “Aren’t you kind.”

She took a seat on the couch. Mrs. Pleasant vanished. Mrs. Bell sat beside her, sliding her hand into Lizzie’s, giving it the ghost of a squeeze. Her hand was cold, limp, corpselike. Lizzie could feel her own warmth draining out of her. Yet courtesy prevented her from withdrawing.

“Don’t eat or drink nothing,” Mrs. Bell warned Lizzie. Her tone suggested they were old friends now, co-conspirators. There was an odd footstep in the hall. “I’m not talking to you, Miss Viola.” Mrs. Bell’s voice grew louder. “You just run along,” and a girl, dark-eyed and unnaturally pale, of perhaps sixteen or seventeen years, passed slowly by the doorway. She walked with some difficulty, her left foot twisted inward. “Not everything in this house is your business.” Mrs. Bell turned back to Lizzie. “Viola is queen of the keyhole.” She did not lower her voice, though Lizzie was sitting right there beside her.

Something exploded in Lizzie’s peripheral vision. She turned to look out an arched window and saw a burst of silver light, as if a fairy were coming into the room. The fairy spun over the sill, darted into the corners and up to the vaulted ceiling, where it hung for a moment like a star. Then it dropped again, touched the roses, the statues, Teresa Bell’s brown hair. Everything it touched remained under a silvery film, as if seen by moonshine and through ruffled water. The sight filled Lizzie with dread.

The first time Lizzie had seen such colors, she’d thought a Christmas angel was visiting. She’d cried, it was that beautiful. Later she imagined it was Baby Edward giving her the silver taste of his unhappiness, angry not to be the one alive when everybody would have preferred him.

She heard a noise deep in her own throat without understanding that she had made it. She hardly noticed Mrs. Bell’s hand sliding away, Mrs. Bell herself leaving the room.

“Are you all right, Miss Hayes?” Mrs. Pleasant asked. Her voice moved at the wrong speed and was pitched in the wrong key.

“I must get home,” Lizzie said. She took a great, unladylike gulp of air, pressed her hands into her temples to try to block the pain before it arrived. “Please. I don’t believe I can walk so far. If I might have the loan of your buggy…”

“Your head aches?”

“Not yet.” The blood was beginning to beat in her ears. She curled into her own lap, the corset cutting upward into the bottom of her breasts. “But I must go home.”

There was no answer. She was alone in the room again, with the silent, pleading, naked silvery statues. She
tried to rise, but her legs shook beneath her. She heard a clock sounding the hour with a slow, sobering tune. She heard a tapping in the hall, footsteps entering the room, each louder than the previous and all of them too loud.

“I’ve made you something. Drink it up, but slow. You’ll feel better.”

Lizzie raised her head. Mrs. Pleasant stood before her, and behind Mrs. Pleasant, Mrs. Bell. Mrs. Bell’s eyes flashed like silver coins.

Mrs. Pleasant guided her fingers around a china cup in which Lizzie smelled a foul sort of tea. Bay leaves, wet moss, blackberries, and rum. She allowed Mrs. Pleasant to lift her hand, tip the cup into her mouth. She was sluggish from apprehension, too limp to resist. The drink was bitter enough to sting, dribbling down her throat in a thin stream, leaving behind a runnel of heat. She drank more. With every sip, she felt the impending headache recede, the warmth spreading until it reached even her frozen fingers.

“There,” said Mrs. Pleasant. “See how that helps.” This might have been a question. It might have been a command. Followed by a command. “Keep drinking.”

As she emptied the cup, Lizzie felt as if she were waking, finally, from a long dream. The dream was her whole life until now. The silver light leached from the room. The tables and flowers flattened into ordinariness and further, better even, to detachment.

Sometime after Lizzie finished her tea, Mrs. Pleasant asked if she was happy with her life. She should have said yes. She rarely felt unhappy. Daily association with the downtrodden kept her keenly aware of her advantages. She knew the pleasure of doing good. She knew moments of
great joy, often in church during the high notes of particular hymns. She would open her mouth to sing them, and her heart would leap with her voice up to where the sunlight filtered through the colored glass, igniting the motes of dust above her head. So many pleasures. The sight of red tulips. The little buzz of life in the grass. A letter with her name and foreign stamps. The smell of rain. The taste of pomegranate jelly. Reading novels in the afternoon, with no corset and her shoes off and her feet on a chair.

And at the moment of the question, she was feeling nothing at all. It had seemed to Lizzie that as the room returned to normal around her, she herself shrank away like Alice in Wonderland in the “Drink Me” episode. Her concerns, her alarms, became tiny and laughable. She remembered how lovely it was to be small and cared for. She remembered a fever from many years before, not a high fever, just high enough to be exhilarating. She remembered Effie sitting on the edge of the bed and feeding her sips of a salty broth with one of her mother’s special apostle spoons.

And yet she answered that she was not. In direct contradiction, she then went on at length about the gratifications of her work. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. Somehow she mentioned that her mother had once said she played the piano as if she had hooves instead of hands. She felt no distress over this, and yet her eyes filled with tears. She pulled her handkerchief from her bodice and wiped her nose. The handkerchief was hot, and stiff with soap.

“My mother left me naked out in the pouring rain,” Mrs. Bell said. Lizzie had already managed to forget this.

“My mother was sold off.” Mrs. Pleasant sat with her arms crossed and her hands showing. Her fingernails were like white pearls against her dark skin. “The overseer was frightened of her eyes. He couldn’t bear the way she looked at him. He sickened and died soon after.”

Lizzie felt outdone. She was tempted to say something of her father—there were things she could say! But one look at Mrs. Pleasant made her see that she would not win this, either.

And she didn’t really mind being bested. She was finding, to her surprise, that she was quite relaxed in the company of notorious women. Teresa Bell was said to have been a prostitute. Mary Ellen Pleasant was rumored to sell babies to Chinamen. Lizzie felt that she could say anything; how could mere words lower her here? “I’ve never been in love,” someone said, and most likely it was Lizzie herself, although she very much hoped not. She put her handkerchief away, tucked it to the side of her breast and felt her heart beat as she did so. Her pulse was rapid and skimmed over the surface of her skin, delicate as a bird’s. She could hear it, washing through her ears, loud and then soft and then loud again. She was so involved in these observations that she forgot the unseemly topic of love had been raised.