Sister Noon

by Karen Joy Fowler

  Lizzie hated saying no to anyone about anything. Saying no, however you disguised it, was a confession of your own limitations. Not only was it unhelpful, it was galling. She reached out and touched Jenny’s arm. “I have some discretion. Since she really has no one. We’ll find a bed somehow. Would you like to stay with us, Jenny?”

  Jenny made no response. Her eyes were still lowered; she had one knuckle firmly hooked behind her front teeth, and her spare hand wrapped around the cloth of Mrs. Pleasant’s skirt. When Mrs. Pleasant was ready to leave, Jenny’s fingers would have to be pried apart.

  “That’s lovely, then,” said Mrs. Pleasant. “Now I know she’ll have the best of care.”

  “We might even find a family to take her. Be better if she had a bit of sparkle. Don’t put your fingers in your mouth, dear,” Lizzie said. She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a silver bell. “This is how we call Matron,” she told Jenny. She rang the bell twice. “We have two Jennys already, but they are both much older than you. So we must call you Little Jenny. Shall we do that?”

  The bell sounded very loud. Jenny’s fingers twisted inside Mrs. Pleasant’s skirt. Mrs. Pleasant knelt. She pulled a violet-hemmed handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped Jenny’s mouth with it. She had the face of a grandmother. “Listen,” she said. “You must be brave now. Remember that I’m your friend. I’ll send you a present soon so you’ll see I don’t forget you, either.” Mrs. Pleasant said these things quietly, intimately. It was not for the matron to hear, but she arrived just in time to do so.

  “I hope your present is something that can be shared,” the matron told Jenny as she took her away. “If you have things the others don’t, you can’t expect them not to mind.”

  The matron was a fifty-year-old woman named Nell Harris. She had come to the Home as a charity case; she had stayed on as an employee. She had soft-cooked features and a shifting seascape for a body. Her bosom lay on the swell of her stomach, rising and falling dramatically with her breath. Her most defining characteristic was that no one had ever made a good first impression on her.

  She took Jenny down to the kitchen and offered her a large slice of wholesome bread. “Mrs. Pleasant gave me cake,” Jenny told her. The kitchen counters were piled with dishes, half clean, half not. Two girls in aprons were washing; another was drying. That one smiled at Jenny and flicked her dishrag. The air was wet and warm and smelled of pork grease.

  “And that’s all it takes to make you think she’s nice as pie. She gave you away pretty fast, didn’t she?” Nell said.

  TWO

  Lizzie Hayes went back upstairs to the cupola. Out the window was an unbroken view of sand dunes, loosely strewn with scrub, chaparral, and bunches of beach grass. A storm was coming. Far to the west, the clouds were black and piled solidly against one another like rocks in a cairn.

  Straight beneath Lizzie the prow of Mrs. Pleasant’s bonnet cut through the wind toward her carriage. Her purple wrap was around her shoulders and the ends of her bonnet ribbons whipped about her head. Mrs. Pleasant walked away quickly, like someone who had someplace to go.

  The foghorn blew in the distance. Gulls streamed inland, shrieking, and the wind spun the ghosts of sand castles into the air. Lizzie returned to her box of donated books. Suddenly, unjustly, she found herself resenting them. What did such donations do but make more work for the staff? Nothing arrived in good shape; everything needed to be sorted and cleaned and mended.

  She blew the dust off The Good Child’s Picture Book. The author had the improbable name of Mrs. Lovechild. Lizzie opened to a woodcut of two girls picnicking together in an English garden. One of them had dark hair, the other light. They wore sun hats, which circled their heads like the auras of medieval saints, but tied in bows on the side. The flowers were as large as the girls’ faces.

  Lizzie brought the picture closer. The book had an odd smell, like fermented fruit. The title page had been torn out, but a handwritten message on the flyleaf remained. “To my darlingest Mitzy,” it read. “On the occasion of her fourth birthday. Hope you feel better soon! Your Uncle Beau.” The book was probably filled with infectious germs.

  Lizzie Hayes was an easy person to underestimate. Slow to act, she often appeared indecisive, but once she’d fixed on a course, it was fixed. She was hard to dissuade and hard to intimidate.

  As a child she’d been passive and biddable. “So dependable. Quite beyond her years,” her mother had said on those frequent occasions when Lizzie did as she’d been told. But just beneath this tractable surface lay romance and rebellion. She loved to read, engaging books with such intensity that her parents had allowed only the dullest of them, and then curtailed the time she spent with those. Her mother was quick to spot the symptoms of overstimulation, and Lizzie had spent many hours lying in bed, sentenced to absolute inactivity until she could be calm again.

  It was an ill-conceived punishment. With everything but her imagination forbidden to her, Lizzie’s reveries grew ever more fevered. She could lie without moving for hours in the semblance of obedience, and all the while an unacceptable cascade of pirates, prophets, and Indians pounded through her mind.

  She was not trusted with fairy tales until she was sixteen years old; they were so full of murder and mayhem. She was not trusted with poetry at all, not since, at the age of six, she had wept bitterly while listening to Sir Walter Scott’s “Proud Maisie.” She had made it only as far as the second stanza.

  “Tell me, thou bonny bird,

  When shall I marry me?”

  “When six braw gentlemen

  Kirkward shall carry ye.”

  Sermons could have the same effect. When the Reverend Paul Clarkson came to luncheon, her mother was forced, over a nice lobster bisque, to suggest a little less exaltation on Sundays. “For a woman, religion should be a steadying thing,” she’d suggested, and the reverend, who had just burned his mouth on his soup and was taking great gulps of cold water medicinally, had not disagreed.

  In adolescence, Lizzie had been prone to the type of satisfying melancholia that expresses itself in diets and music. “I’m not raising any saints,” her mother had said one morning when Lizzie was irritating her by fasting. She stood at the doorway to Lizzie’s bedroom, carrying a breakfast of steak and peas, and then stayed to watch each bite. In our modern age, she informed Lizzie, extravagant holiness is ill mannered as well as ill advised. “The world is as the world is,” she was fond of saying. “And just as God made it. You’re ungrateful to Him when you wish it otherwise.”

  Lizzie’s mother knew that she hated peas. Lizzie ate them all silently, offered them to God, one by one, as a form of fleshly mortification.

  As she’d aged Lizzie’s inner and outer aspects grew increasingly ill matched. Her breathless, romantic imagination, charming in a young woman, and delightful in a beautiful young woman, was entirely ridiculous in someone short, fat, and well past her middle age. Lizzie was sharp enough to know this, and since there was no way to keep the outer woman private, she generally kept the inner woman so.

  The outer woman: Often when she’d misbehaved, her mother would march her to the dressing room mirror to look at herself. “That’s what a bad girl looks like!” her mother would say, her own sagging eyes floating behind the bad girl’s head, as if the mere sight of Lizzie’s face was a punishment. (As a consequence, Lizzie didn’t like mirrors much. When she was finally allowed to read the story of Snow White, she’d instantly understood that the mirror was the real villain of the piece. “Why, I couldn’t possibly choose between two such beautiful women,” is what the mirror would have said if it hadn’t been bent on blood.)

  “You have only the beauty of youth,” her father had told her when her refusal to marry his good friend, Dr. Beecher, had made him angry enough to be honest. “I’m not a fussy man,” Paul Burbank had said on the occasion of her second proposal. “You won’t be expecting romance,” Christopher Ludlow had said on the occasion of her third.

  Lizzie remember
ed these things partly because they’d hurt, but mainly because for most of her life her appearance had been so rarely commented on.

  The inner woman: And yet, as far back as Lizzie could remember, she had suffered from a kind of self-importance that expressed itself as the conviction that every move she made was watched. This made a certain sense among ladies out in society, where the mere whisper of eccentricity could cost a reputation, and among the religious, since God was interested, exacting, and everywhere. Lizzie was both out and devout.

  Even so, her conviction was pronounced. Add to society and God that special circumstance familiar to every passionate reader: An unseen narrator hovered somewhere behind Lizzie, marking her every move.

  And then add the fact that for most of her life Lizzie had been haunted by a photograph of an angel in a christening gown. Her mother had made the picture frame herself, an intricate, heartbroken oval of ribbon roses and wax lilies encircling the likeness of Lizzie’s brother, Edward. Lizzie was five years old when Edward was born. He’d lived less than three weeks and died, sinless, of inanition. Lizzie hardly remembered him alive.

  Dead, he’d been inescapable. His picture hung first in the nursery and later in her bedroom. “To watch over you,” Lizzie’s mother had said. It was the sort of misunderstanding Lizzie and her mother were likely to have. Eventually Lizzie knew the difference between watching someone and watching over someone. Eventually she understood that her mother had intended this as a comfort. But by the time she’d made the distinction, Edward was a pale, palpable, disapproving presence who could be neither banished nor appeased.

  Nell Harris appeared, startling Lizzie with her large pudding face rising over the top edge of the book. “She’s in the kitchen, having a bite now,” Nell said. “I’m afraid she looks to be a fussy eater. So I’m to squeeze a bed in for her somewhere?” Everything about her tone and posture expressed reproach. We have a waiting list, she might as well have said. We have no beds. We have no money. We have standards. Deciding who we take in is not your job.

  “She’s a friendless child,” said Lizzie. “With a father somewhere. And unless I miss my guess, a wealthy father. Out of wedlock, of course. But quite, quite wealthy. Mrs. Pleasant wouldn’t bother, otherwise.”

  “So you don’t think that the child might be colored?” Nell asked.

  The idea had been so far from Lizzie’s thoughts as to shock her now. She responded slowly. “There’s nothing of the colored in her face.”

  “You can’t go by that. Mammy Pleasant herself fooled a lot of people for a long time, if the stories are true. Though I never credited them myself. You saw, she’s black as a Mussulman. But if this child comes out of the Home, if she’s adopted somewhere, no one is going to question her. They’ll just take her as white. It will be as if we’ve said so.”

  Lizzie set the book down and wiped her hands on her apron while she thought this through. Lizzie Hayes believed it was better to be white than colored, believed it so absolutely that this was not the part she thought about. But within these confines, she was a well-intentioned woman. She genuinely didn’t care what or who Jenny was. Lizzie wanted to be an influence for good in the world. If she could take in a motherless colored girl and turn her out white and adopted, she would count it a good day’s work.

  Still, many of their most generous donors would no doubt feel differently. The Ladies’ Relief Home had no savings, no margin for error. Even a small drop in donations could mean ruin. Wasn’t Lizzie’s first obligation to protect the wards already there? Could she set them all at risk for the sake of one child?

  The next book was a Robinson Crusoe someone had evidently dropped in the bathtub. Lizzie picked it up and tried to flatten the crusty cover with her hand. What she admired most about Crusoe was his calm sequentiality. He found himself in an overwhelming situation and survived simply by dealing with each task in its turn. The mere sight of the book was clarifying.

  These are the things Lizzie thought, and in this order:

  Today’s task was to take care of Jenny. Possible repercussions were not today’s task.

  Besides, she had often noticed that charity made misers of donor and recipient both. She had always sworn that it wouldn’t work this way on her.

  Plus, she genuinely thought it likely Jenny had a wealthy father. What might such a man not do in gratitude for the preservation of his daughter? Lizzie was in charge of the Ladies’ Relief Home finances, and in her professional opinion the financial risk was easily outweighed by the possible benefit.

  And then Mrs. Pleasant was no one to trifle with. Lizzie would do nothing wrong to please her, but if she did the right thing and it pleased Mrs. Pleasant as well, wasn’t that a bit of luck?

  And who would not be moved by little Jenny’s situation?

  “You’re not to say this to anyone else,” Lizzie told Nell. “Once you’ve said it, it won’t be unsaid, no matter how untrue. And it is untrue. Mrs. Pleasant cares about money. She doesn’t care about the colored. You mark me, she’ll be back within the month with a wealthy father in tow.” Her voice began friendly, but sharpened as she spoke.

  “What kind of a name is Ijub?” Nell Harris asked, and since Lizzie didn’t know the answer, she said nothing, but she said it to good effect. It shut Nell up entirely.

  Two weeks later a box arrived for Jenny. Lizzie Hayes was there to open it. It contained a doll, wrapped in tissue, and a note. “I have noticed that many young girls are more interested in their needlework if they have a friend to sew for,” Mrs. Pleasant wrote. “This is a doll that needs just such a friend.” Her penmanship was as twisty as wrought iron. The note was signed “Mrs. Mary E. Pleasant.”

  Lizzie unwrapped the doll. Her head was made of china, her hair was paint. She had a sweet, pouting face. She wore a necklace with a tiny coin, and a work apron over her dress. She fell out of Lizzie’s hand and her head broke into several curved pieces. On one piece Lizzie could see a little heart-shaped mouth.

  Mary Ellen Pleasant was a voodoo queen and Lizzie Hayes was an Episcopalian. They had had a very cordial exchange. There was no reason for Mrs. Pleasant to be angry. Except that Lizzie hadn’t removed her work apron. Such a small thing, a careless thing, an oversight, honestly, when the big thing, Jenny’s care, had all gone exactly as Mrs. Pleasant wished. Lizzie told herself that Mrs. Pleasant would not send a doll to curse her, and reminded herself that she couldn’t be cursed by a doll even if Mrs. Pleasant had.

  In fact, Lizzie had parts of this right. Mrs. Pleasant was angry about the apron, but the doll was just a bit of a joke, a bit of misdirection. There was no need to curse Lizzie with a doll. Not when she’d been given Jenny Ijub.

  No one ever mentioned the doll to Jenny. It would have been pointlessly cruel, since she was already broken.

  THREE

  The Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society Home occupied a lot on the corner of Geary and Franklin. There wasn’t a tree on the property, just scrub and sand, so storms hit hard. The Home was familiarly called the Brown Ark. Though blocks from the ocean, it had a shipwrecked, random air, like something the tides had left. In this respect, it matched the fortunes of most of its residents. During the year of 1890, the Ark housed a total of two hundred thirty-nine women and children, many only on a temporary, emergency basis.

  The motif of randomness was carried up from the basement, with its kitchen, laundry, and schoolrooms, all the way to the bell-tower cupola. The furnishings had been donated, and represented the worst taste of several decades. The parlor, into which Mrs. Pleasant had not been asked, contained a clock face painted with clouds and trapped under a bell jar, a handmade mantelpiece decoration of gangrenous velvet, pinned into tufts with brass studs, and an old set of stuffed chairs that crouched before the fireplace like large, balding cats. The effect was little offset by the posting of embroidered quotations intended to uplift and edify. “He who loves a friend is too rich to know what poverty and misery are.” And “Some flowers give out no odor until c
rushed.” And “The true perfection of mankind lies not in what man has, but in what man is.”

  The last had been gleaned from the deplorable Oscar Wilde. In 1882, Wilde made a visit to the city and was absolutely undone by the vulgarity of it. He said so in public lectures addressed to the badly dressed perpetrators themselves. “Too, too utter,” he said, though they all felt this described him far better than them. His observation on the parlor wall of the Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society Home was unattributed.

  The Bell place was only a few blocks away, on the corner of Octavia and Bush. It was known throughout San Francisco as the House of Mystery, although there was a second House of Mystery, out on the beach at Land’s End, owned by the Alexander Russells. Mrs. Russell, despite her increasingly vehement denials, was widely believed to be the center of an Oriental cult whose disciples all called her Mother. Soon there would be a third House of Mystery, the Winchester house, but that would be down by San Jose.

  The Bell House of Mystery was the occasional home of Thomas Bell, his reclusive wife, Teresa, an indeterminate but large number of children, servants, and Mrs. Mary Ellen Pleasant. Mrs. Pleasant was the housekeeper, although everyone knew she was too rich and too old and too famous to be a servant. This was part of the mystery. In the 1890 census she listed her occupation as “capitalist.”

  Mr. Bell had another house on Bush Street where he sometimes stayed. Mrs. Bell had a house in Oakland. Mrs. Pleasant had a house called Geneva Cottage on the San Jose Road, and properties on Washington Street and in Berkeley and Oakland. She was currently thinking of buying a large country ranch in the Valley of the Moon.

  The Octavia place was a thirty-room mansion shadowed by blue gum trees. It had a red mansard roof, a southern mood. The interior was stuffed with hidden passageways, spiral staircases, statuary, and gold-veined mirrors. Rock-crystal chandeliers dripped from the ceilings. Every Saturday, even in winter, cut roses were arranged in vases with ferns and peacock feathers. The rooms smelled faintly of old bouquets. Mrs. Pleasant had chosen the decorations, many of which were imported from Italy. She had a fondness for vaulted ceilings and also for the gilt cupids that were so liked by everyone.