Sister Noon

by Karen Joy Fowler

  Lizzie stood. “I think I’ll go say hello to Mr. Putnam.”

  Invading Mr. Putnam’s library was not her usual routine, and she saw it noted, but it was unimpeachable, so she wasn’t stopped. He was reading the paper. Some men grew more corpulent as they aged. Mr. Putnam was the sort who shrank. Folds of skin lay across his neck as a result of his slow disappearance.

  The curtains were closed here, so it was much darker than the conservatory. Mr. Putnam read by the light of a small bright lamp. Lizzie’s father used to do the same. Lizzie’s mother had said he kept the curtains closed to fool himself into thinking it was late enough in the day for a drink. A glass of port sat on a mahogany table, close to Mr. Putnam’s right hand.

  He stood up politely. “Why, Lizzie,” he said. “What a pleasant surprise. But you look tired.”

  Lizzie was tired. She sank into a seat across from him. He returned to his chair. The room smelled strongly of books, a smell she loved above all things, and the usual male odors of liquor and old cigars. The same as in her father’s study. Many months after her father’s death, Lizzie had moved into her mother’s bedroom. She changed the rugs, the curtains, the position of the bed (her mother was a great believer in Dr. Crittenton’s analysis of magnetic fields and healthful westward orientation during sleep). It was hard at first, but the room was large, with good light, and now it was hers.

  In contrast, she’d entered her father’s study only once since his death, when she met there with the family’s solicitor, Mr. Griswold, and heard the terms of her father’s will. There’d been an ashtray on the table with some parings of her father’s fingernails in it. Lizzie supposed they’d been thrown out by now, but not by her.

  Her heart quickened. She picked up a tasseled cushion, held it in her arms across her chest, against that beating. “Mr. Putnam,” she said. She had trouble going on. She started again. “Mr. Putnam.”

  “Did you wish to see me about something particular?”

  In the glow of the lamp Mr. Putnam’s face took on a yellowish alarm. Lizzie knew him well. He didn’t mind talking to women if he could stick to rehearsed compliments. He fancied himself good at these; he imagined women enjoyed them. An old-fashioned gallant.

  But a genuine conversation was sure to tax him. It was unkind to force one on him. She waited while he took a sip from his drink, then spoke quietly. “Some time ago you said that someone had told you the sorts of foods Mrs. Pleasant served at her table. I was wondering who that someone was.”

  Mr. Putnam’s expression intensified into one of trapped horror. Lizzie, who’d merely hoped to set her mind at rest, was surprised. This was a bad result; she shouldn’t have come.

  Paradoxically, it had a calming effect on her. His reaction was so extreme; it was as if he had taken her anxiousness away and added it to his. She was able to set the pillow back, breathe more evenly. “I was wondering if it was my father,” she said. There. She’d thought it, she’d said it. No way to unmake this moment.

  He responded with a fit of coughing. Lizzie fetched him water, but he’d already gulped his port, which made him sputter all the more. She waited through this, making small noises of concern and sympathy, the same she would make to a nervous horse. Really, she thought, she had her answer. If this answer hadn’t raised other questions she would have taken pity on him and excused herself. He kept sneaking looks at her, hoping she had done so.

  But when he finally responded, his voice was nothing but kind. “What brings these questions, my dear?”

  Why lie? The Putnams were her parents’ oldest friends; she’d known them all her life. “I’ve been told I have a sister. A half sister. Actually, I think I’m being blackmailed. Please don’t tell Mrs. Putnam. She’d be so distressed.”

  As was he, of course. “Oh, my dear!”

  “So you can see I really must know the truth. Sparing me won’t spare me now.”

  Mr. Putnam stared at the empty glass in his hands. He poured himself another two fingers. “May I get you something?” he asked.

  “No,” said Lizzie. Eventually she would have to rejoin the women. Nothing would rouse their suspicions faster than liquor on her breath. Best to see this straight through straight.

  “You must never tell Mrs. Putnam I’ve said a word.” Mr. Putnam shook his head morosely. “I can’t tell you how I wish you didn’t know. Mind you, I don’t believe that part about a sister. I never did. I told your father so.

  “What mischief could he get up to, at his age? It was a fleecing, wolves to a lamb. He was a good man, Lizzie, or there’d have been no point. Your mother was already dead. A man—a man is different from a woman. He installed the child in the country, down south where you used to camp summers.”

  Down by the big trees. Lizzie remembered trunks like houses, a stream that dried by July, pine needles covering the ground so your feet sank when you walked. High, windy cliffs over foam. This all arrived in a moment, a flood of smells and sounds.

  “There was a weathervane,” she said sadly. “Carved like a flock of flying ducks. It clacked when the wind blew. Every year my father let me repaint it. I used to love doing that.” She was so astonished she could feel nothing else besides.

  “He made one condition. It was as much to protect you, Lizzie, as himself. The mother was a grasping, mendacious woman, not at all fit to raise a child, and he saw she would only increase her demands once she’d made a start. So he said he’d refuse all support if she ever contacted him again. He swore if she came even once to see the girl, he would cast them both off. After his death, we were forced to do that. Is she the one blackmailing you? She can’t prove any of it. You pay her nothing.”

  “It’s not the mother. Do you know where she is now?”

  “I don’t know anything about her. Which is as much as I wish to know.”

  “How does Mrs. Pleasant figure in?”

  “Mrs. Pleasant helped arrange a nursemaid for the child. Is she the one blackmailing you?”

  “No.”

  “But she’s in back of it. Got to be. Who else? That child is not your sister, Lizzie, and no one says she is, excepting a couple of women who were born telling lies. Don’t you pay a single cent. Mrs. Pleasant knew your father a long time, since the first days when she cooked at Case and Heiser and he supplied the meat. She made it her business to know the up-and-comers, and she found the way to work him.”

  “Your mother was a saint. How she suffered!” Mrs. Putnam stood in the doorway. Lizzie didn’t know whether she had just arrived or had been standing outside for a while, hearing every word.

  She shut the door and came into the room with her wide plum skirt sweeping the floor like a furious pendulum. Lizzie had never seen such a set of high red blotches on her cheeks. “When poor Harriet came all the way back from the grave to warn you! When I learnt that Mrs. Pleasant was making her afterlife a misery as well as her life!”

  “Your father was a good man, Lizzie,” Mr. Putnam repeated. He looked appealingly at his wife for confirmation, for forgiveness. “Lizzie already knew,” he told her. “She came asking.”

  The color went down in Mrs. Putnam’s face. She shifted with visible effort into briskness and efficiency. “You’re a good man,” she said. “Better than I ever deserved, and don’t I know it. But you talk too much. This hasn’t a thing to do with Lizzie, and it would hurt her mother horribly. I thank God she’s dead! The past must bury the past.

  “Now.” She gave Lizzie a quick nod. “We’re all done in here. Mrs. Mullin is waiting in the conservatory, wondering what we’ve all got up to, and you know what a gossip she is. You just pinch some color into your cheeks and come sit with us, Lizzie, as if nothing has happened. Let poor Mr. Putnam finish his port in peace. Look how you’ve upset him, but I entirely forgive you and none of this need ever be referred to again.”

  Mrs. Mullin’s suspicions were indeed roused. They expressed themselves as a series of questions as to how Lizzie had found Mr. Putnam. Fortunately they were easily answer
ed. To every delicate probe, Lizzie responded that Mr. Putnam had seemed in good spirits.

  Meanwhile she tried to organize her own thoughts and feelings into clear, useful sequentiality. These are the things she thought and in this order:

  First, it was a shame she didn’t care more for Jenny. She preferred a girl like Maud, someone kind and thoughtful, someone lively, someone you could talk to who’d talk right back. Why couldn’t it be Maud? Jenny seemed more Baby Edward’s sister than Lizzie’s, tight-lipped and disapproving.

  And if Jenny really were her sister, wouldn’t Lizzie instinctively feel something more for her? Mr. Putnam was quite right to point out that even if her father believed her to be his, she might still very well not be. Novels, even the history books, were littered with women who lied about such things. And for each one caught out, there must be a dozen never doubted.

  Jenny had shown up at the Brown Ark, and on Lizzie’s day there, too, so Mrs. Pleasant must have arranged it all. But did this make it more or less likely that Jenny was her sister? Lizzie tried to remember whether she’d been specifically asked for, the way Mrs. Pleasant’s baskets of food were specifically directed to her. She wasn’t sure, but clearly there were schemes within schemes.

  And yet Mrs. Pleasant had asked nothing from her beyond Jenny’s place at the Ark. She’d left Jenny off and that had been that.

  Did it even matter whether Jenny was Lizzie’s sister? Her father’s acknowledgment certainly attested to the possibility. He had behaved in such a way as to make it possible. Everything else was mere chance. Surely, one’s moral responsibilities were not determined by chance. As Mrs. Hallis said, there were immediate consequences to behavior and there were remote ones. Why distinguish between the two?

  What moral responsibilities? Lizzie’s behavior was not at fault here. Jenny was well cared for at the Ark, where everyone was more than kind to her. She had the prettiest dresses of any ward there. She had piano lessons. She had food and a bed and good friends. Any obligations Lizzie might or might not have were thoroughly discharged.

  And what kind of a name was Ijub?

  And all the while, Lizzie kept up a polite discourse on the weather and Blythe’s children and Mr. Putnam’s high spirits. It was a bravura performance, supported by Mrs. Putnam, who kept the conversation easy and prompted Lizzie if she ever seemed about to forget her lines.

  Outside, two men and a woman strolled by. They’d come up the hill, were laughing and panting, loosening their scarves, unbuttoning their coats. No such thing in San Francisco as going out for a little walk.

  The woman wore a soft hat with a black veil folded back. She had a yellow rose pinned to it, not a rosebud, but a full round bloom. It gave Lizzie a start. She actually jerked in response.

  “Are you cold, Lizzie?” Mrs. Mullin asked, but Lizzie couldn’t answer, because she had just realized that her father must have attended Mrs. Pleasant’s Geneva Cottage red-invitation, men-only parties. What else would make her mother such a saint?

  Maybe her father was a good man. Mr. Putnam said so, and he would know. Maybe they really had been forced to set Jenny aside, if Jenny’s mother was so thoroughly bad. Mr. Putnam had said this, too, though he’d also claimed to know nothing about Jenny’s mother. Mr. Finney had said the same thing once and followed it with the same retraction.

  In any case, Lizzie had always thought her father a good man. But he was most certainly, most incontrovertibly, a man with a terrible temper.

  “What’s wrong?” Mrs. Mullin asked.

  “She gets those dreadful headaches,” Mrs. Putnam said. “Lizzie, I expect you’d better lie down.”

  But Lizzie had already risen. “I must go,” she said. She tried to think of a reason to offer, gave it up. She left the house without her gloves. Blythe had to run after her.

  Everywhere Lizzie looked, the color yellow sprang at her. There was so much of it. Sunshine on windows. Buttons on coats. The golden wattles dripping with their fabulous golden spikes of blossoms. It would be a terrible thing to be a young girl dead and missing the springtime.

  Lizzie went home and drew the curtains in every room but her father’s study, which she didn’t enter. A letter from the Brown Ark had been delivered in her absence. She opened it and read:

  My dear Lizzie,

  I hope this finds you well. My own health is excellent although I’m aware of those wishing otherwise. The vultures gather, but I’ll disappoint them as long as I can. I won’t tell you their names. Last night’s soup had a peculiar taste, but I make nothing of this, I put it down to carelessness in the kitchen. I remember when the food here was always done to a turn. I had a new pair of knitted slippers, but someone seems to have taken them. I won’t tell you who or this letter might not be sent.

  The dog has disappeared and no one will tell me why. I’m reminded of the day my dear friend Millicent Peterson died. We were told she fell from her horse, but her dog vanished the same hour. Dogs do find ways to tell us things, don’t you know? If they’re let. I remember how that terrier used to bark at everyone. I always knew when someone was coming through the yard.

  I hope you’ll think it safe enough to visit when you return,

  Sincerely yours,

  Mrs. Wright

  with a postscript from Miss Stevens, serving as secretary:

  P.S. The dog is fine and Mrs. Wright petted it only yesterday. She is most unwell, as you can see, and I think it cruel that she must spend her declining days in this endless drama of poisonings and murder. Now she wishes me to add that she has instructed her bank manager to provide you with additional funds should you need them. She believes you’ve not come to see her because you’re on a European tour. It would be a kindness if, when next you speak, you thank her for the money. Otherwise she will worry at us endlessly, convinced she’s been robbed. I wonder if her impulses were so generous when she actually had funds, although it is tenderly done; I take nothing away from her genuine benevolence.

  At about four o’clock Lizzie heard the foghorn. When she looked outside around dinnertime, she couldn’t see across the street. It didn’t necessarily follow that no one could see in. She left the curtains drawn.

  TWO

  Wake up.” Maud’s face floated white as paste in the dark, and behind it Melody’s face, and behind that, Coral’s. When Jenny sat up she saw that Ella May and Tilly were also there. The whole Good Manners Club. Maud’s voice was a hiss. “Come with us.”

  They made Jenny go first up the stairs. “Shhh!” Melody told her once, although she was already making as little noise as an Indian. They went up one flight and then another, until they were in the tower room.

  “You’re not afraid to be here, are you?” Maud asked.

  Outside, the fog was so thick that no lights shone through. “No,” said Jenny, with a sense of being trapped. She knew there was no right answer to that question. Maud excelled at questions without right answers.

  “You need to toughen up,” Maud said. “When you’re adopted, you’ll probably sleep by yourself. You can’t be such a baby about it. None of the rest of us mind the dark.”

  Jenny thought she didn’t mind the dark, either. What she minded was being shut up. But even that was all right, because she knew the door didn’t lock. She needed only to wait as long as she could, letting the other girls go back to their beds, and then go out again. She could go anywhere she liked, out to the barn with the dog and the mule, or into the downstairs parlor to sleep. Or out to the street. She often went for walks when she couldn’t sleep. As long as you were wherever you were expected when morning came, no one knew. Jenny took a seat on the settee that smelled of dead horses. The door shut with a click.

  The room was cold and stank of dust and the bitter Chinese tea Miss Hayes drank. Jenny’s breath was coming as fast as if she’d run up the stairs.

  She didn’t hear the girls, but they would wait for her. She couldn’t leave yet. She must stay still as long as she possibly could. The silence pressed against h
er ears until it turned her pulse into a metronome.

  Jenny put her hands on her knees and played scales over them. Two minutes, she told herself. An egg cooking. She kept her hands arched and tried to keep her fingering even. Give every note the same time to breathe. Instead she found herself playing faster and faster, lost track of when the egg was done.

  She rose and picked her way through the clutter of charitable donations. There was a stuffed squirrel with its tail raised, and a hat rack with dangerous points on which she scratched her arm. There was a broken music stand, and a large cracked vase for umbrellas. Jenny reached the door and turned the knob.

  It spun like a pinwheel. She panicked. She grabbed the doorknob tightly, pulled with both hands. The knob rattled in its socket, could be wiggled this way and that like her loose tooth.

  Maud must have known it was broken, or arranged for it to be broken. Generally the boys stayed out of things between the girls, but Duffy Phelps would do anything Maud wanted, and Mrs. Lake said he was a wizard with a hammer, could fix anything. The thought that the boys might have known what Maud had planned was a special humiliation for Jenny.

  By now she was gasping for air and unable to speak. No one would hear her, anyway. She stumbled back to the settee and flung herself onto it. Her face was already hot with tears, and now she began to weep with her mouth open, making faces that stretched her cheeks. Whenever she took a breath there was a noise like barking. She wiped her nose on the hem of her nightgown, because she had nothing else, and then fell asleep.

  She awoke cold as well as terrified. She found a woman’s dress, velvet with the hem kicked out, smelling of mothballs. She pulled its skirt over her as she lay on the settee. The pulse in her ears was deafening and yet she was convinced that something hungry was in the room with her. There’d been a rustle, the tick-tock of claws, only her heart was too loud for her to hear this.

  She rose. Whatever was hungry retreated with a scrabble, but it would be back when it saw what a little girl she was. She was exactly what something hungry would want. Jenny had to get out. She crept to the nearest window.