What Is Visible: A Novel (27 page)

“My face,” she says. “Check my face.”

I am mystified, but I do as she asks, all around that heart-shaped, familiar face, right up to the delicate ears. I find nothing out of the ordinary and tell her so.

“Sure?” she asks and begs me to check one more time.

Maybe she believes she’s been bitten by insects. She must have been bitten often in the islands, but here it is not yet even mosquito season. I pat her hand and assure her that all is well.

After a few moments, she calms down and lets me hold her again. I complain to her about the Unitarians. I know, of course, that she is one herself, but she is also my friend, so I feel the subject can be broached. They do not believe in even trying to touch God, and the services seem to be as much about man as about the Creator. Philanthropists, humanists, ralliers for all causes, abolitionism being the latest and now the bloodiest. And yet these do-gooders do not give the Good Book its full due.

“Don’t believe all Bible’s words?” I ask.

“Acts over words,” she tells me.

For me, this makes no sense: the words must be engraved upon the heart before the actions are spent. Doctor hung his reputation upon his presumption that I would know God instinctively and not need instruction or even the Bible. I did have a sense of God, but how could I know of Jesus and the Holy Spirit? I was a child—how could he have left me in darkness, foraging alone for so long? How much I needed the poetry of the Psalms, the common sense of Proverbs, the miracles of the New Testament, even the horrors of Revelation to keep me anchored on the path! Jesus’ resurrection became real to me as my fingers traced his fate—and therefore my own—and the warmth of His embrace cannot be equaled by any man, not even Doctor, not even Sarah,
not even Kate
. Doctor has told the world I’ve failed him miserably by hying to the heart of religion, but he is interested only in the head, where his beloved bumps reside. That he should put phrenology above Christianity cuts me to the marrow. Over and over, my dear mother has asked why I remain a Unitarian if I do not find true solace in its doctrines, and I have told her that Doctor is the one who gave me my religion, and I’ve clung to it out of loyalty. But now that Mary has died, it seems possible that I should make my catechism match my heart. Mary was a Baptist, my whole family are Baptists, and a hot blood flows through their veins that never touches the formal vessels of Unitarianism.

“I think I’ll change,” I tell Sarah.

“Into what?”

“Baptist. I want to be baptized.”

She waits. “Yes,” she says. “You are a born Baptist.”

Of course, we’re not born anything but children of God, and yet I get her meaning. “So you think it’s good?” I would like to have her stamp of approval before I take my case before Doctor.

“Laura under water,” she says. That is true; it will be a full immersion, unlike the dainty sprinklings of the Unitarians. I deserve―no, I actually desire―the dunking. I have never been fully underwater. At the beach my attendants have always kept me close to the shore. Once a wave lashed as high as my waist, and I was salted and sanded between the legs, but that was it.

“Doctor,” she writes and then she’s shaking, and I realize she is laughing merely at the thought of his response. She laughs so hard she falls into my arms, and within moments, the shudders turn to weeping, and she is staining my bodice, her heart thudding like a horse’s after a canter. I wanted water, I got water. How did Sarah ever endure my hysterics as a child? I find I am not fit to comfortably endure hers. Suddenly she stops and leaves the room without a word. What change was wrought across the sea in my dear Wightie, what baptism of fire?

Ten minutes and she is back, her hand cold and wet. She has soaked her face apparently, and she does seem present once again.

“The letter?” she asks.

I’ve been so disciplined at waiting today, though I wanted nothing more than to throw it at her straight out of the carriage. I am grateful she understands my anxiety and anticipation. I wonder does she ever feel replaced in my heart by Kate, but she does not seem jealous, only wary.

“That is all?”

Sarah nods.

“Sure?” I ask again. I am reeling. She is not coming to see me, nor will she let the girl take me to her. And Laura! She doesn’t even say if she will send her back to me.
Taste…in
remembrance?
What rot! Sarah does not add salt to the wound, but only holds me. How quickly she and I change places, again and again, a boundless circle of womanly feeling.

S
herman’s March to the Sea was almost complete, and the destruction looked to be finished by year’s-end. Having traveled to the South many times to raise money for blind education, Chev had a soft spot for the state of Georgia, and so his gladness at the Union’s progress was tempered by a weakness for magnolia trees and the lilting cadences of Southern women. And Lincoln had been reelected, at which he cried foul. Lincoln was a good man, had been a leader of strength and integrity, but he had proven far too lenient in his veto of the Wade-Davis Bill, which required the electoral majority in each Confederate state to swear past and future loyalty to the Union. What could the Union expect if not promised at least that allegiance? Of course, the South believed that a gentleman’s loyalty could never be legislated. Chev was wary of what would ultimately come about under the guidance of the lawyer from Illinois.

But at least the nation had Julia’s song, however that should help to raise the spirits of the republic. Yes, he understood that the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was indeed a hum-worthy tune, but it didn’t seem to merit all the attention it had so quickly accrued. And he still couldn’t believe she’d had the gall to set it to the melody of “John Brown’s Body.” That was a sword to pierce his side, and it was his own wife who had thrust it in and turned it. The song was indeed a fitting accompaniment to their married life at present: she had trampled on the vineyards where his grapes of wrath were stored.

The week after the reelection, Laura came to the doorway of his office and asked him to take a walk with her. He told her that he didn’t have time, but she insisted that it was very important.

“Come in!” he commanded, annoyed that he had to stand in the entrance of his own office to converse, but she shook her head vehemently.

“Parker’s brain,” she said.

Oh, Lord, the news had spread quickly through the Institution. Recently, his close friend and minister Theodore Parker’s brain had arrived from Florence, where he’d died of tuberculosis. Apparently, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with whom Parker had been staying, had had the brain preserved and left instructions on her death that it be sent to Chev, whom she’d thought might like to keep this gorgeous and much beloved specimen. He had been frankly taken aback by the generous gift. Yes, he’d examined many brains, but he hadn’t felt particularly keen to
own
one, especially one of his friends’. But obviously he couldn’t get rid of it; Parker’s congregation in Boston had over seven thousand members and Julia had loved him dearly. So here it was, prominently displayed in a glass case atop a marble pedestal in the corner of the room, the sunlight dappling the glistening congeries.

“Afraid will knock over brain,” Laura said. Well, that would be a fine mess. He certainly didn’t want that, so he relented and walked out with her. She still had a bit of pull on his reins, though he’d never admit it, not to her, and least of all to Julia. Laura was in an ambling mood as they strolled arm in arm toward the docks, but Chev got right to it and asked whatever was so urgent that she should call him away from his letters for the Sanitary Commission. The military hospitals were counting forthwith on the report.

She rambled a bit about her sister Mary’s death, and that he didn’t want to hear.

“Still think of Sammy?” she asked.

“What a ridiculous question,” he told her. She made one more try to bind them with overgeneral ties of grief, and he cut her dead. His boy was the one subject that still could not be broached, though it had been over a year. Chev felt as if he were strangling every time he heard his son’s name, and he didn’t have faith that this knot of sorrow would ever go away. He was also positive, at the rate it was going, that he and Julia would have no more children. Queen Victoria had recently ushered in the age of anesthesia for childbirth, having taken to chloroform with her last birth, so what was left for Julia to be afraid of? If Chev were a woman, he’d have birthed a dozen by now.

“Addison fighting for rebs,” Laura said. Jeannette had told Chev this bit of news, and it
was
shocking. Laura’s brother had grown up in New Hampshire, gone to medical school at Dartmouth, and yet had changed his stripes just because he happened to marry a belle from Savannah? More proof that there was something terribly amiss with the whole family. What a story that boy’s bumps must tell.

“Awful,” he told her. “But don’t pray for rebs.”

“No. Finished
Uncle Tom
. Now I understand.”

“You’ll speak out?”

She nodded emphatically.

Hallelujah. Julia was right; he should have raised the book as soon as it was published. But before he could congratulate himself, Laura wrote, “But John Brown still wrong.”

This was what she’d dragged him out to talk about? “Enough. What is urgent?”

She noodled in his hand and lifted her face toward the sky as if she were examining the cumulus clouds forming on the horizon. It was going to rain soon, and Chev was losing patience. He pecked hard at her palm with his middle finger.

Finally she turned toward him. “Have row with God.”

As he’d predicted, this was the fruit of her taking in the Bible before she was ready. Chev had long ago washed his hands of this wreck; he couldn’t be held responsible for the damage done by her overweening appetite for religion. She, and the proselytizers who had hounded her, must bear the grave consequences.

“You argue with Him?” she asked.

“No,” he told her, which she surely knew was a lie, since he argued with practically everyone.

“Unitarians don’t talk to God enough.”

The girl—the girl he had made, no less—was going to preach to him? He took her by the shoulders and he wanted to shake her, but he didn’t. “What is wrong with you?” Of course, the truest answer was “almost everything,” but then they both knew that.

“Change to Baptist,” she wrote.

He dropped her hand and moved away. She had the power to rock him still. How could it have come to this? All his work invested for her to dunk her head in a stream and come up a wet and wild Calvinist. He saw the distress on her face deepen as she stepped forward tentatively over the cobblestones, reaching into the air in front of her. She snagged the billowing sleeve of a passing lady, but Chev did not help her. Instead, he walked a few yards away and watched. She wheeled around slowly with both arms outstretched like antennae. She looked like an imbecile, one of the idiots Miss Dix swooned over. She was an idiot, as far as he was concerned. People strolling by gave a wide berth to the crazy, spinning woman on the walkway. He read the panic in her face; she knew she was too far away from the Institution to find her way back. She was asking herself: Could she depend safely on a stranger to escort her? How could he just leave me? Doctor has never left me. She was gasping for air, trying not to cry. She made her sound for him, softly at first, then as a full-throated howl:
“OCKA! OCKA!”
She was counting on his being embarrassed enough to come back for her. After all, most people recognized Laura Bridgman, and wouldn’t that make a fine tabloid headline? She let loose again, louder still:
“OCKA!”
Oh, for pity’s sake, he couldn’t bring himself to leave her, though he’d like to teach her a lesson about who she could actually depend on. Not a Baptist God, that’s for certain. And so his hand covered her mouth, the other clamped hard on her arm, and he jerked her around in the direction of the Institution.

When they were safe inside the door, she doubled over, panting, and almost fell. Theatricals worthy of Charlotte Cushman. He caught her, but not gently, and jabbed into the sweating valley of her palm: “You are a disappointment to God and to me. Do what you will. I am done with you.” He expected her to collapse, to kneel, to beg, but now she stood up straight. Ah, but she reached for his hand to ask forgiveness.

Her fingers trembled but still she wrote, “My God and I not done with you.”

Chev had never been more grateful that Laura couldn’t see his face because his jaw had actually dropped. Who
was
this woman? He took the steps two at a time to his office and slammed the door, pressing himself into the wood as if to fuse it with his backbone. He was shaking, and he didn’t know if it was with anger or something else. He prayed for strength, the strength to truly be done with her. He could not let these wretched women rule him, or God help him.

Would that he could go to Sumner’s comfortable, old flat in the Back Bay, but his man was now ensconced in the capital, having returned to the Senate, and giving his florid and ill-received speeches as heartily as ever. He still had some troubles with his spine from Brooks’s beating, but not enough to stop him from courting. Yes,
courting
! Dear Charlie had finally been bitten, and the teeth belonged to one Mrs. Alice Mason Hooper, a socially connected war widow. Chev had yet to meet her, but he couldn’t quite imagine the shape, caliber, and qualities of a woman who could genuinely inspire his friend’s affections. He’d always pushed for marriage, and yet here his own was currently an exquisite pain, while Sumner seemed poised on the very lip of happiness. How strangely the tides and times change for every man.