What Is Visible: A Novel (12 page)

Laura often insisted on this charade; Julia had witnessed it several times herself. “But she isn’t actually trying to fool anyone. She knows―”

“But such acts serve as a grave exacerbation of her affectations. I can only imagine what enduring damage a pair of big blue eyes might do her character.”

Julia stood up, her hands on her belly. “So her character is more important than her happiness?”

Chev slid off the desk and faced his wife. “I must make decisions for the good of the entire Institution and all my charges. If I allow Laura the artificial eyes, all the blind girls will be begging for them. A riot of vainglorious children popping their marbles in and out while their teachers crawl beneath beds and tables chasing these ridiculous apparatus. No, I will not have it, so you and Miss Wight might as well tell her and get it over with.”

Sarah uncurled her fist so she could write, but Laura almost immediately interrupted her teacher. “She says the pain is fine,” Sarah told them, “and that she’ll pay.”

Laura had made quite a tidy sum recently from sales of her crocheted doilies, called antimacassars, used to protect furniture from being stained by the Macassar oil men were now using to slick back their hair. But Julia knew it wouldn’t make a difference if Laura paid or not; the emperor’s mind was made up.

“I’ll just tell her that you say no, that it’s simply not possible,” Sarah said, and Laura’s hand shrunk away. Before Sarah could stop her, Laura went down, kneeling in supplication, her upended hoopskirt a bone-limned half-moon behind her. Julia stood her ground and Sarah stood beside her. They were two strong women and a weeping child to confront him.

Chev stepped forward and addressed Sarah. “Miss Wight, while it is commendable that you are keeping company with Mrs. Howe during her lonely and apparently unbearable confinement, please remember that your allegiance must always be sincerely pledged to your employer, and not to my wife, who has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the running of the Institution.”

Julia forced herself, just for a second, to meet his eyes, which were large and beautiful and shining and completely resolute, before she swept out of the room.

He didn’t speak to her for a week after that, dinners suffered in silence followed by his reading the papers. He knew that this punishment caused her the greatest agony, to be abandoned by his company. It was not an unusual practice for him, but rarely had it lasted this long. And to think she was enduring this treatment on account of Laura, of all people! After the first two evenings, she gave up on any attempts at conversation, met as they were by grunts. And then Friday and Saturday nights he stayed over in town at Sumner’s, not even sending word where he was, though of course she knew. When he returned on Sunday afternoon, she resolved to regain his favor, if for no other reason than that she had no one to talk to besides Sarah and Jeannette, who was even duller than Sarah. Chev came in sweaty from riding, and she followed his scent, most beloved by her, into his bedroom. She wished that she could have gone riding with him, but her condition prevented strenuous exercise. She doubted she would even be capable of mounting a horse this far along. He did not acknowledge that she had entered the room, and she watched him strip down out of his riding clothes. His hair shone almost black with dampness, curling in tendrils around his neck; he needed it trimmed, a task she was sometimes allowed and that she performed with pleasure. She stared at the dark, matted V of his bare chest, her favorite place to nuzzle in all the world. How well she remembered the first time she had seen him naked that night in the swaying bow of their room aboard the ship. No great sculpture―not Michelangelo’s
David
in Florence or the Discus Thrower in the British Museum―had ever moved her so well or so quickly. Now he turned away from her, standing in front of the armoire in only his breeches and riding boots. She tiptoed up behind him and rested her head against his back―she only came up to his shoulders―and slowly slid her hands down his abdomen and toward his waistband, feeling the tightening sinew beneath her fingers. She was acutely aware of her belly rounded against him, but she brought with it all of her warmth, her femaleness, and yes, in this instance, her humility.

He turned so suddenly that he had to grab her shoulders to right her. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I thought…I thought you might want me,” she said.

“When you are this far gone?” he said, releasing her and stepping back. “You would endanger your child for a moment’s wantonness? You are long out of season.”

“It’s not wanton,” she said. “I just thought…It’s out of love that I―”

“The things you would do for
love
are nearly as strange as the things you would not do for it.”

And still she stood before him, her breath rising, willing him to want her, even out of season, but he strode past her toward the armoire.

“I must dress for dinner,” he said. “Sumner and I are meeting up with Longo.”

“But you spent the last two nights―”

“What do you want to hear? You should be happy for me that God in his mercy has granted me one person who is always aligned with my wishes. Would that it were my wife, but we both know it is sadly otherwise.”

“He is always in season,” she murmured, though even as she uttered the words, she was not quite sure of their meaning.

“What did you say?”

“Less than nothing.” And with that she left him and crossed the hall to her room, where she buried herself in the satin pillows and wept until she came down with hiccups that lasted for hours, depriving her of her solitary dinner. Finally she slept, with both hands folded between her legs as if in prayer for her helpless and thwarted desire.

Julia had fashioned for herself a nest at the top of the stairs on the landing leading to the attic. Just enough room for a child’s desk, which she’d carried herself up six flights from the schoolroom in the dead of night, stealthy as a robber in her own home. But no one caught her that night, and so far no one had discovered her hiding place. It was here and only here that she could devote herself wholly and completely to her writing and the readings. And it was here that she could ride out her melancholia, sometimes weeks or months afflicted. “The old black dog,” she called her doldrums. She had met the dog long before her marriage; however, she had been capable of calling him to heel then, and now he ran amok, unleashed. He howled loudest when she was in rowing season with Chev or when she was pregnant, though the joy at the birth of her children released her in an instant. She felt grateful that she wasn’t doom-laden after childbirth, as she knew some women to be. She couldn’t suffer through these spells in her own bedroom, as she desperately wanted to do, because being abed attracted Chev’s attention and scorn. And if she stayed downstairs 
at her desk
 in her room or even in the library, she was sure to be nagged by one of the children or Cook or one of the housemaids asking her direction on some household matter: Should we have powder biscuits or plain tonight? Would she like the blankets washed completely after Florence’s accident or just the spot attended to? Would madam be requiring the seamstress next week or would she be going to town for her fitting?

The only time she cared about attending to these ridiculous and myriad details was when she was planning a party or when someone she liked or needed was coming for tea, such as Reverend Parker (or Teddy, as she called him in private), with whom she could discuss the Greeks, so different from the usual stuffed-shirt churchman. Except for her darling sisters, away in New York, Julia hadn’t much use for the female sex, preferring the company of learned men with whom she could wage battle through debate, banter, or if all else failed, the batted eyelashes or the demure hand on theirs. She was known as a flirt as much as a wit, both of which her husband despised. One would think he’d been tricked into marrying a belle instead of a cook and nursemaid.

Also matched as a running battle was her willingness to hand the children over to their nursemaids more often than he thought healthy. It was true: Chev was the dotingest of fathers, and while she loved her babies with all the considerable power of her heart, they did little enough for her brain, to the point where she felt it had nearly atrophied during each of her three pregnancies. Between that and the sickness (which only a man could have described as “morning”) from which she now, in her sixth month, had only begun to have respite, she would be over the moon not to bear another child. How she wished, how she had argued, for the kind of companionate arrangement that Harriet Beecher Stowe was rumored to have worked out with her husband: alternating years devoted to her work and the sharing of her bedroom. And yet here Chev berated her for the loss of affection even when she was weaning and raged against the publication of each bouquet of verse, small and delicate though they were. And as great as his seemingly endless compassion and genuine fondness for his enfeebled pupils was, he was indifferent to his wife’s isolation from the gay society to which she had been accustomed since birth. Not only did he keep the divine nightingale caged in the Institution, far from Boston’s social whirl (it could never rival New York, but Beacon Hill was a glittering beacon indeed compared to the mundanities, and even indignities, of life among the blind), but half the great house was left unlit to save on expenses because the children had no use for light! At least that helped Julia creep about in the shadows, hiding her from those who would dog her with inanities.

But most hurtful was Chev’s complete lack of sympathy for the fears that held her captive with each confinement―would she die giving birth this time, as her mother had of puerperal fever when she was five, and as nearly half of all women seemed to, especially the poor? He was a doctor, for God’s sake, and yet he would not stay in attendance at her bedside during labor until the last possible moment, the moment when he could wrench
his
child from her womb and behold the glory, which he seemed to believe he had achieved without her help, as if she were the mere vessel for his lineage. Oh, how Chev loved his children, even with two out of the three girls, a fact that would have appalled many men. And yes, yes, and yes, she had to admit that he loved her too, because no man could possibly be capable of greater ardor or attention to his marital duties when he was allowed. And yes again, despite herself, she was captive too to that ancient bond, though her husband didn’t believe how much she adored him physically. But was it worth all the trouble? She was constantly torn, and so the fabric of their marriage. She didn’t know how other women did it, gave in and stayed pregnant and half-brained until forty, with the nippers pulling at their filthy skirts.

Only here, in her aerie—which had for her become as enchanted as a fairy tower, though it lacked any natural light and she fought the good fight with the wasps who’d built their nests in the eaves, the spiders and dust mites that crept across her couplets by the light of her one purloined candle—did she find peace and solace from her lot. How she longed for the bright yellow-curtained room of her girlhood. Often she stopped, pen in midair, and imagined what her life would have been had she chosen one of her many New York beaux, those planets around her fiery sun, but the dream would vanish into the ether when she remembered when she’d first beheld Samuel Gridley Howe, riding in on his black stallion straight out of a fairy tale the day Sumner had brought her to the Institution to meet Laura. There were no eyes like that in Gotham, none she’d ever seen, that sharp and fathomless blue that had held her attention from the first moment, and still did, when she allowed herself to really look at him, which was not often because of the power he held over her, even now at forty-five to her tender twenty-eight. Those eyes, which never left hers as he panted above her, still open even at the moment of release. Ah, tarnation, she did not climb these steps to think about her husband! Swedenborg was calling to her, and Hegel, her dear ones, who kept their hold on her higher faculties even while Dr. Howe maintained his grasp on her lower ones.

The next weekend, when she’d assumed Chev would again be spending his nights in town, he showed up well past the dinner hour with Sumner.

Julia was flustered. “You could have sent word ahead,” she told her husband, as he and Sumner draped their jackets over the dining room chairs.

“Ah, but Charlie here got it in his head that he had to see you, it had been too long,” Chev said, and Sumner made an elaborate bow and kissed her hand.

“But I would have had Cook fix a proper service and I would have dressed―”

“Diva Julia looks as lovely as ever,” Sumner said.

He knew how she hated that nickname; after all, he was the one who’d given it to her during her courtship. And she knew she did not look her best―she was wearing a simple sprigged muslin festooned with the drying stains of baby spit-up.

“The children are already in bed,” she told them. “I hope Cook is still about so she can―”

“But my darling,” Chev said as he took his seat at the head of the table, “surely you can whip up a small repast for two starving gentlemen.”

Julia felt her cheeks flaming. He knew good and well she didn’t cook; as a matter of fact, he regularly abused her for that and for other domestic failings. Have mercy, she’d grown up without a mother to school her in the proper management of a household and the disciplining of the help. Of course, she also had no interest in learning to eviscerate a duck or a piglet, to stew tortoises and hares, to labor for hours over making sure the tea cakes were frosted just so.

“A simple hasty pudding would be fine,” Sumner said and actually winked at her. “I do remember you pulling off an almost creditable blancmange years ago, so you must have some magic.”

“And should I rouse Laura to entertain you, Charlie?” Julia knew how the two detested each other. “It must be ages since you’ve seen her.”

“The always titillating paradox that she can be seen and yet cannot see,” Sumner said. “It never grows old. So thank you, but I think for this evening, you can leave the Eighth Wonder be.”