The Sister Read online

  A story came to me about a girl and her two older brothers. ‘Every year,’ I began in my head, ‘they grew in stature and reputation.’ The author and the philosopher, I whispered to myself. ‘Both were clever and kind,’ I continued in my head, ‘and both fond and protective of their younger sister.’ But I rejected that for so much pabulum; instead came this: ‘As their beards grew longer from their chins so the hair retreated from their heads, leaving them exposed to the elements like two half-domes of Yosemite.’ It was wicked but it warmed me like medicine; like the truth, harsh and real.

  The brooch had come with a card containing, in my father’s own hand, a quotation from Lady Godey’s Book:

  Hair is at once the most delicate and lasting of our materials, and survives us, like love. It is so light, so gentle, so escaping from the idea of death, that with a lock of hair … may almost say, ‘I have a piece of thee here …’

  I ran to my room and spewed up into the sprigged, ladylike chamber pot. When I’d recovered I began a tale about a young woman who is given her dead mother’s brooch as a keepsake. Instead of being grateful, however, the creature is possessed by some malign force so that she begins using it as a weapon against all those who counsel her to be good. She aims for the neck and so does a deal of damage especially among her frailer relatives … . But a picture of my Mother cold and alone in her new grave intruded and I flung my pen away and screwed up the card I’d been writing upon.

  *

  Some weeks later I rode out towards the coast around Beverley Farms. I made my stumbly way onto one of the narrow lanes. It gradually dwindled until it disappeared altogether and there was only the cliff path and the bay before me. As I walked William’s words sounded in my head: ’’You walk like a goose! Like a girl!’’ I thought of Katharine in britches: she would never get tangled up in her own skirts, never trip over her own feet like some dumb cluck. But on I went. Once past the last of the houses I stopped above a deserted cove where I swung my arm round clockwise three times as I’d seen William and Rob do while playing baseball, then let fly the brooch. It rode a wave like some tiny, whiskery mollusc before it turned, winked its gold clasp in the sun, and sank from sight. I thought, it has pierced the sea; yet the sea will barely know of it. After that I felt chilled to the bone, limp and womanish, as if the throw had unwound me.

  It was after that that I saw the For Sale sign swinging to and fro in the wind, its painted letters faded, the chain upon which it swung crooked and rusted. The property had obviously been on the market for some time. It overlooked the ocean separated by a sloping overgrown field and a barbed-wire fence. I considered the money my mother had left me. I could buy it, I thought: I could buy it! And so, after a deal of negotiation overseen by William, I did: nearly an acre and a half plot of land on that Point of Rocks. And a mere two miles up the coast past Prides Crossing … and Katharine.

  I paid $4000 for the land with rights to the pier and a common beach just to the south and west. It looked out past several little bay-bound islands towards the open sea. My property, mine. After the signing of the deeds I stood out on ‘my’ pier thinking I am well and have been well since my Mother’s death everyone says so and I will continue to be well … and Katharine will be close by …

  The snake-oil words dripped inside my head trickling down my arms and legs until I was coated in wellness. I saw myself hovering kestrel-like above the house and its grounds, my own establishment to which others would come for refuge. The trouble with hovering, however, is that when the magic fails and the sun sets and it’s too dark to see where you’re going and the person who has abandoned you has disappeared under the waves – you drop down from the sky with an almighty thump. You are not a kestrel, you are a calamity. But I am getting ahead of myself.

  There was honest work to be done, a cottage to be built on the rocky earth. My dear Katharine arrived at Quincy Street with her books of photographs. ‘‘There you are, Alice.’’ We sat together on my bed on the tree-of-life quilt – which I’d made years before at The Bee, spending countless hours poking my needle up and down until my youth was largely spent – with the raw materials spread around us.

  ‘‘What are all these?’’ I asked.

  ‘‘Houses … churches … cottages: all built by women.’’ Katharine turned the pages of her photograph album. She pointed to a church with a ‘rotunda’ at one end: Italian, I presumed. Katharine laughed. ‘‘Almost as far from Italy as we are from it. That particular church was built in the North of England by Sarah Losh. She sent her workmen over so they could see how it was done. The stone carvings are unique.’’

  ‘‘You have seen it?’’

  ‘‘I took the photograph.’’

  She flipped two pages further on. ‘‘Those are workers’ cottages designed by Harriet Martineau: different of course, but equally radical in their way. So you see, Alice, if you put your mind to it you can …’’.

  ‘‘But they were Englishwomen,’’ I pointed out, as if that somehow made them of another species and beyond me.

  ‘‘True,’’ admitted Katharine, ‘‘but you are an American.’’ Clearly the greater pedigree.

  So to work. She’d also brought a blank sketchbook, graph paper, ruler, compass and sharpened pencils. I did not know where to begin but practical Katharine, teacher Katharine, began by asking: How many stories would I need, two or three? How many rooms facing which way? Did I prefer a modern design or a more conservative one? Did I value light over warmth … a view of the sea from the major rooms?

  She produced a compendium of architectural styles, such as the ‘Stick’ house on Cape May with its pitched roofs, weird staring dormers and shadowy arcaded piazza overhung by a low brooding roof-brow. ‘‘Can’t you imagine it on a bleak winter’s day inhabited by ghosts and goblins …?’’ Oh I could, I could. I turned the page to a monstrous edifice resembling a tightly corseted lady with flaring hoop and bulging bustle. But the most hilarious of all was a house from Wellsville, NY with more fringes and tassels and lambrequins than an interior decorator’s lampshade. The designs went on: Richardsonian Romanesque, French Mansard, Queen Anne, Italian Villa, Carpenter’s Gothic, Eastlake … fussy scrollwork, ornate weathervanes, widows’ walks, turrets, keystones, cornices, finials, dentils, consoles, pedestals, pediments … . until I could bear to look no more. I took up one of the needle-sharp pencils and drew the simplest, most blocklike house imaginable: cleancut porch posts, simple lattice railings, plain horizontal moldings and chimneys.

  ‘‘I want a seaside cottage,’’ I declared, ‘‘not a giant lampshade.’’

  By the end of a week we had a design of two stories; roomy enough for all the boys and their families plus Aunt Kate, Katharine herself, and Father of course: eight rooms in all with their elevations and wide-awake windows to let in as much light as possible. But then I thought: Where will we stand to watch the sea and the islands, where swing on warm summer evenings? Katharine guided me in adding broad porches with low balustrades running in two directions off a central pavilion, the walls straight with no roof slope visible.

  ‘‘It’s very reserved, Alice,’’ she said wrily. ‘‘Precisely,’’ I replied. But in the end I gave way to fancy, adding a few twiddly cutout patterns connecting the porch supports and again under the eaves.

  It took a year to be built and was still not quite finished, but I was determined to move in that spring of ‘82. And so I did. And a month later I was able to stand out on the very porch I’d sketched leaning on a balustrade looking down on my future garden. The smell of bayberries, a rowboat waiting at the pier, even a horse and carriage for taking Father into town.

  Look, I thought, look what I have made: oh, not a house of fiction or philosophical theories but a real house made of wood and stone and plaster and tiles and pipes connecting and pumping like a vibrant thing with windows that look out reflecting the living bundling sea and sky. My own design, my own. Mother, you will be proud of me.

  *

  Henry
, having stopped off on his way back to England, was sidling towards me in his aesthetic toggery, with his growing paunch and ‘alabaster brow’ – oh, stuff that – dear balding pate. As he approached, I felt an urge to place my hands upon that naked patch of skull: to warm it, protect it. I saw him, twelve years old again being shouted at by William: ‘I only play with boys who curse and swear!’ Which had left him pushed aside, a boy who did not curse and swear but who always hung back: seeing, watching, applauding, envying, desiring, pitying, making up stories inside a head covered in a boy’s own sweet lank hair. But he was all grown up now, and famous, and did not need my protection. We locked forearms sliding them gradually forward forcing me up onto my toes, Henry surveying the house over my shoulder: ‘‘I suppose you call it Carpenter’s Gothick, with a ‘k’?’’

  ‘‘Henry,’’ I replied, ‘‘I call it my own design.’’

  He smiled a crack. ‘‘I do admire your piazzas.’’

  I released myself. ‘‘I call them plain old porches.’’

  He sighed, ‘‘I suppose I cannot get it right today.’’

  Yet he was pleased, I could see: my snappish reply told him what he needed to know: that I was vastly improved, was in fact better than I’d been for a long while. We continued to circle the house clambering over piles of timber and slates, pipes and gutterings. When we’d come full tour Henry said, ‘‘This might certainly be called pleasure under difficulties.’’ It was a remark I’d heard before; but where? when? I recalled a long-ago drive from Paris to Boulogne-sur-Mer … a dusty road full of potholes that had seemed to go on forever; and Henry … was he eight? ten? calling it ‘pleasure under difficulties’ … and me feeling poached like an egg, in love. My brother, that is to say, had a way of putting his finger on the exact perfect description; for living in the unfinished cottage was, as it had been during that drive from Paris, precisely a situation of pleasure under difficulties.

  ‘‘Or is it perhaps,’’ he now began refining his position, ‘‘pleasure because of difficulties?’’ ‘‘You may be right,’’ I admitted, ignoring the implied if gentle ‘dig’. But what did I care so long as I continued to be well? The air brushed at me but did not hurt. I was tough as a toddler. My limbs were not aware of themselves. That is what it meant to be well, I realized. You walk and run and skip, and feel nothing but a puppyish tiredness. Wellness is next to numbness. Long live numbness.

  Later that day I watched as Henry, dressed in his English tweeds in spite of the warm weather, leant upon one of the new porch railings. He in his turn was observing the builders who were stripped to the waist. Hot work digging new drains. He continued to watch them on their lunch break: one sprawled full length leaning on an elbow, the other two sitting up. ‘‘Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe,’’ he remarked dabbing at his forehead with his handkerchief. He’d recently seen Manet’s ‘scandalous’ painting in Paris, whereas I’d only seen cartoons of it in the papers; but I knew, as everyone did, that Manet had dared to depict two dressed gentlemen and a nude female. But was that what Henry saw? Or did his own version perhaps feature two naked lolling workmen and a single modestly attired author; or – even more titillatingly – two modestly lolling workmen and a single naked author? I put the disturbing possibility out of my mind but it would not stay put. Henry and I may have thought with the same mind, even shared the same soul – whatever that was – but I guess we had our particular tastes: his, for instance, unaccountably, for raw steak.

  But there was Henry turning to me, smiling, pleased to report on the workers’ progress. They had finished their dejeuner and were connecting the pipework; soon it could be covered up, a garden planted. I thought of writing a story about manly love; after all, hadn’t the poet Whitman unashamedly sung the praises of the male body? But then I remembered William (who almost certainly had not read him) calling him disgraceful, or possibly disgusting … No, I would not write about such a man. His confusion (attraction – temptation – retreat: always retreat) would joggle my mind until I became ill again. In any case, hadn’t I been warned off writing stories? Not that it mattered. Who said it’s the writing down that counts? So long as the stories wind on and on, I thought, I know I am alive; and even if no one else knows it, even if my words are poor and I am forced to write in disappearing ink, in the hand of a ghost, I hereby declare: I am a writer. Do you hear me?

  Just then Katharine burst from the house, the new screendoor screeching on its hinges before banging to behind her.

  Henry straightened, taking in the small cataclysm of what was about to happen: ‘‘You are leaving?’’ he said, giving voice to the obvious. ‘‘I’m afraid so,’’ said Katharine. It was one of those moments which Henry might have called ‘prodigious’, when it appears that nothing is happening yet everything is. Three people stand about in a kind of temporary suspension. We do nothing because once one of us ‘acts’ something will be destroyed forever. We are, just as we are, complete, and equal in our tension. It is Katharine of course who breaks up our balanced configuration. And once she goes, I thought – for it was too late to stop her with her battered-looking haversack already hitched onto one shoulder so that neither Henry nor anyone else could help her – everything will change; and Henry and I will be left like twins again with no room for her.

  She held out her hand to my brother. ‘‘Please do not take my timing as in any way significant: it’s just that I must get back to my sister Louisa, she’s not well.’’

  Thus rubbing in the snub of her departure on the very day of his arrival.

  By now the workmen had resumed digging, filling in the drainage ditches with new compost and topsoil. As I watched, a butterfly landed on my breast. I went still as glass, forced my heart to calm so as not to disturb the delicate creature with its noticeable rise and fall. Then, for no apparent reason, something shifted in me causing that same organ to contract, turning pebbly and hard. Perhaps it was Katharine’s rudeness to Henry, not to mention her walking out on me. Not that either of those could excuse my disgraceful act: how the creature’s dusky wings smeared like powdered ink across my white dress.

  Seven

  My brother watches over me. I am The Spirit of the Dead. ‘‘Henry,’’ I whispered, ‘‘I have been hearing strange creakings and groanings during the night. Have we a ghost already?’’ Ever a willing entertainer of immaterial things, he did not however think it likely on this occasion: how would it have divined the new house prior to taking up residency? ‘‘No,’’ he concluded, ‘‘it is only your house’s growing pains.’’ Witty Henry. Still, I thought, pains of any sort could be worrisome. I pushed myself further up in bed:

  ‘‘Where is everyone?’’

  ‘‘Katharine, you remember …’’

  ‘‘Yes, Henry: gone. What of the others?’’

  ‘‘Aunt Kate is down in the diningroom with Father. They’re weighing the War and its legacy: Are such catastrophic bellicosities necessary for regeneration to take place? Was or was not Ben Franklin a true radical? Meanwhile Rob’s little girl is attempting to dig up the new drainage ditches … and I believe Mary is down the hallway packing up.’’

  ‘‘Packing up …?’’

  ‘‘Indeed, I heard the clicking of her valise …’’.

  ‘‘But why, Henry?’’

  ‘‘Why?’’

  ‘‘Why, I was fast losing patience, is she packing up?’’

  ‘‘Ah, that’s because our brother, having been sent a sermon by our father on the subject of commitment and family devotion, arrived late last night from London to take Mary and the children home.’’ He paused; then: ‘‘Do you wish to see him … shall I bring him up?’’ The idea of seeing Rob made my chest hurt. He has messed up his marriage, I thought, shaking my head.

  ‘‘No … tell him I am too ill … but do send him my love.’’

  Henry nodded. We might have stopped there but I carried on:

  ‘‘What is wrong with their marriage, Henry?’’

  He wagged his head. ‘�
��I am hardly one to pronounce on that subject.’’ Yet imagine it he could, brilliantly, vividly: Rob’s disturbed state of mind after our mother’s death, the claustrophobia of their small Milwaukee dwelling, their childrens’ scraps, Mary waiting for him to do something, but what is he to do …? ‘‘He has shooting pains in his kidneys sending spasms up his spine … his digestion is sour and he hasn’t emptied his bowels in weeks.’’ On he went narrating Rob’s situation until I began to feel his growing desperation, almost as if I were Rob: wanting to get away, become unattached again, feel the desire to drink, to forget. Without the burden of a family, I might become well again …?

  He continued with his remembrancing of Rob: his reluctant service in the War and its attendant guilt … his memories of Kitty, who haunts him still, whom perhaps he should have married in spite of her illness, who was to say …? He rose from his chair and stood at the window. ‘‘Ah, Kitty,’’ he sighed, as if the subject of our cousin was all too much for him; then he returned to his chair and made a girdle with his fingers over his stomach. ‘‘Yes,’’ he was coming to a beautifully rounded out summation of Rob’s motivation: ‘‘And so the resolution, the intention forms that he cannot stay a minute longer. Where he will go he has no idea, Egypt perhaps, but that he must go is certain or he will do something he will later regret.’’

  I observed my brother. He has been telling me a story about Rob, I surmised, in order to deflect attention from himself. A story about our brother Robertson and the causes of his ‘weaknesses’. He has no experience of marriage, yet he feels how it makes Rob feel, and so we believe him, and we listen. Everyone listens to Henry, that is his gift. But is it true?