Woman 99

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Woman 99 Page 32

by Greer Macallister


  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Even in the comfort of my luxurious bed, I slept fitfully, tense with worry, and I rose with the sun. Celia and Phoebe slept on. The morning stretched out in front of me, hours upon hours of tense waiting, and I doubted I could bear it. I donned a silk day dress of robin’s-egg blue, took several of Nora’s folded bills, and set out on the first errand I could think of. I owed Matilda a new dress.

  Walking would be easier on the way there than the way back, but I was not inclined to use our carriage, which would involve explaining myself. Instead, I burst out the front door, thrilled to breathe the cool October air, to move under my own power in a direction no one had told me to go. Under heavy gray skies, I moved lightly, buoyed by a sense of purpose. I craved action even if the act was, in the grand scheme, minor.

  I’d never seen the inside of City of Paris, but I knew Mrs. Gibson often shopped for our dry goods there. I thought Matilda would rather have something beautiful for everyday instead of something sumptuous but impractical. Besides, a ready-made dress would arrive at our house by the afternoon, while waiting for the dressmaker would take time. I was not in the mood to wait on the future.

  I picked out their best, a jewel-toned plum dress with charming white flowers scattered all over and a smart ring of white piping on each cuff. It was lovely and flattering but not too fine for regular wear and would look just as well with an apron as without. The salesman was initially confused when I proffered cash instead of putting it on the house account. With repeated explanations, he got the gist. Once that was squared away, I strolled the aisles, not ready to go home if news wasn’t waiting there for me.

  The uphill walk home was easier than it would have been two months prior, and I again felt wonder at the strength my body had gained in the daily hikes at Goldengrove. The asylum had changed me in countless ways, not all of them good, but the strength I could give thanks for unreservedly.

  Even with the distraction I’d crafted for myself, I reentered the house somewhat breathlessly, my eyes landing immediately on the mail tray in the entryway. It was empty. When I went upstairs, so was my bed, Phoebe and Celia having vacated it. My heart began to race. Had something happened in my absence? Had I been a fool to leave, even for a short time?

  Despite my rush, I didn’t dare open the door of my father’s office without knocking. Thank goodness, he bade me come in. When I did, I saw straight away that Celia and Phoebe were seated across from him, and my pulse came under control. Celia was wearing her coral dress from the asylum, at which I raised my eyebrows. Phoebe wore a muted plaid of grays and greens. Her eyes were watchful.

  “Is there news? Did it come?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” my father rushed to tell me. “We were discussing what might happen either way.”

  I’d thought my task urgent this morning, but now it felt frivolous. I’d been out shopping, like the pampered Charlotte of old, while others held important conversations. Made decisions. And I’d been left out.

  I asked, “And what might happen either way?”

  Celia said, “I must go. Tonight.”

  “You should stay,” I said. My father and I had discussed that this was a likely outcome, but still, I didn’t relish hearing it. “You’re welcome. You know that.”

  “With you, I’m welcome,” she said. “Not with everyone.”

  “And where will you go?”

  My father interrupted, “Charlotte, I’m sorry, you can’t know that. Her safety is paramount. The best, the safest way is for no one but me to know where she’s been sent and for no one but her to know her true identity.”

  Then I saw my sister’s guilty face—high color in her cheeks, her gaze sliding away from mine—and I knew there was more to it.

  “And Phoebe?” I asked. “Does Phoebe get to know where she’s sent?”

  “I will if I go with her,” my sister said.

  The familiar anger of the asylum welled within me. My fists clenched of their own accord, and I longed to swing them. No. Instead, I sat, hard, on the edge of my father’s desk. “Go? How could you go? I just brought you back.”

  “I did not ask you to,” said Phoebe.

  My wounded gasp, loud and sharp, almost feral, startled us both.

  She hastened to add, “I’m glad you did. You risked everything. No one else would have done that for me. I owe you a debt.”

  Conscious of my surroundings, keenly aware of the others present now that my initial shock had ebbed, I said, “I keep no ledgers. I don’t expect to be repaid. But I also don’t expect you to vanish—to lose you—when I’ve only just found you again.”

  “It isn’t decided,” Phoebe said. “We were discussing possibilities.”

  My father rose from his chair. “Perhaps we should let you two speak privately.”

  At his words, Celia rose too, and I put out my hand to stop her. “No, please, stay. I want to know what’s been decided and what hasn’t. Please.”

  Celia looked to my father. He said, “Regardless of what Charles says, whether there’s a deal or no deal between our families, Celia leaves tonight. The wheels are already in motion.”

  “Will there be a way to get a message to her?” I asked. To Celia, I said, “I could write to you, tell you what happens.”

  “No. I am done knowing.” Her eye was sharp and fierce; I did not doubt her for a moment.

  “Wear a dress of mine, at least,” I said. “Take the sateen with the blue floral. It’ll look well on you. You deserve a fresh start.”

  “I’m not sure what I deserve.”

  “I’m sure,” I said simply. “You saved me.”

  “You saved me. We’re square.” There was a faint smile on her face, a wry one, that made me unspeakably glad she was no longer within the walls of Goldengrove. Whatever good or ill I had done with my time in the asylum, however things turned out in the future, I had done this one good deed. An innocent woman who deserved to be free was free.

  I turned to Phoebe then, my heart aching at the thought of losing her too. I fought down my anger by remembering the love that had driven me to rescue her. It was that love that made me want her by my side. I needed her to hear that.

  “Don’t go,” I said.

  Quietly, meeting my gaze and holding it, she said, “I’m not sure I can stay.”

  Before I could form the words to reply, a light rap of knuckles on the door startled us all. Father’s head swiveled, as did Phoebe’s and mine. Celia sat up in her seat with a jolt, her twitch of fear almost a convulsion. She was right. She needed to be somewhere no one knew her if she was ever to feel safe again.

  “Come in,” my father called.

  Matilda darted in with a small white envelope, which she handed to my father without a word.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She bobbed her head with her usual broad smile. At first, I thought she was telling us it was good news, but the envelope was still sealed, so she couldn’t know. But we all would soon. Everything was in that precious rectangle, so vital, so small.

  Once Matilda was gone, my father looked at each of us gravely, his worried face showing every year of his age. His eyes lingered on mine; I thought for a moment he might offer me the envelope to open. Instead, he methodically slid a letter opener under the flap, withdrew the letter, and read it, his face stoic.

  The other three of us waited. Phoebe reached out for my hand. I gave it to her.

  At last, he said, “Yes.”

  “Yes?” yelped Celia.

  And then he smiled. “Yes. Yes to the whole arrangement, with every stipulation.”

  I put my hand out for the letter so I could read it for myself, but instead, he dropped it and the envelope on his desk and reached out his arms for us all. Then we were laughing and crying, holding each other, sighing, celebrating.

  Once we had settled into a quieter state, wiping away tears, I said somberly to my father, “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” he said to me just as seriously. “Al
l of you.”

  My family’s debt to the Sidwells would be forgiven and without yoking me forever to George Sidwell in exchange. I let myself feel a brief pang of sympathy for my mother, who would be furious her plans had come to naught, but it was a drop of rain let fall among the currents of the Bay. I would not let her grief slow my happiness.

  “This means,” said my father, “we never speak of the conditions at Goldengrove. We never speak of what George did. The Sidwells are taking steps to punish him, and they are taking steps to improve the asylum, but we must leave it in their hands. Not a word to the papers, not a word to anyone. I must know you girls understand.”

  It didn’t feel like perfect justice, but it felt better than our family losing its livelihood, and it felt better than being sold off into matrimonial captivity. And if Celia, who had the most stake in seeing her almost-murderer suffer, was happy with the outcome, I had to accept it.

  Celia nodded. I nodded.

  Phoebe said, “Will they release the women who are not mad? The ones who don’t deserve what they got?”

  My father folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope. “I believe so. Charles gave me every reason to hope that they want to make the asylum a better place. They did not realize the conditions there had degenerated so badly.”

  “That’s what he said. And you believed him?” said Phoebe.

  “I have no choice.”

  “We always have choices,” my sister said.

  I heard the anger burning in her, the same anger that Goldengrove had stoked in me. I could still feel it simmering in my blood. We had to find something to do with it, or it would burn us up.

  My father said, “Give them time. That’s what I want—no, need—from you. Give them time to fix things.”

  The look on my sister’s face was still combative, and I wondered if she truly meant to comply. She watched my father as he turned his back and moved toward his safe. I watched the knot in her jaw, her crossed arms, the fast pulse at her throat. Our father bent to place Charles Sidwell’s note in the safe with Celia’s statement and her ruined nightdress. I heard Celia take a long, shallow breath beside me. No one spoke.

  After he’d closed the safe, my father extended his hands to Celia and broke the silence. “Seven o’clock tonight,” he said. “You’ll be ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But will you be all right?” I asked her, overcome with concern. “Are you sure?”

  She said, “No one is ever sure,” and then we embraced, because I was going to lose her, regardless of what we might or might not say to one another. Leaving was her only path to happiness. That was power and peace for her. So many reasons to leave and not a single one to stay.

  Celia’s fate was decided, and I was glad of it, but all else was uncertainty now. The certainty I had felt at our front door had waned. I had accomplished my goal of delivering my sister home. We had been, as I’d hoped, more or less welcomed.

  But I could no longer avoid the question of what lay beyond our return.

  * * *

  Celia refused to let us bid her farewell. The three of us spent our afternoon in my bedroom, watching her try on my dresses and Phoebe’s, choosing the three we thought suited her best. Phoebe insisted that Celia take her best valise, its rich brown leather tooled with delicate patterns. Inwardly, I hoped the gift meant that Phoebe herself planned no travel. But I truly had no idea what was in my sister’s mind, and that scared me. I buried my concern in preparations for Celia’s departure, fussing over her, entertaining her with slight stories, working hard to make the mood seem easy.

  When the time came for her to meet my father downstairs, Celia kissed me softly on the cheek, whispered something in Phoebe’s ear, and walked out my bedroom door silently. She closed it behind her so we would not follow.

  I turned to Phoebe. “What did she say?”

  The air crackled between us. “If she wanted you to know, I think she would have said it to us both.”

  We could not put it off anymore. We could not pretend there was nothing to say.

  “Phoebe,” I said, trying again to remember my love and forget my anger. “I’m glad you didn’t go with her.”

  “I’m not sure it was the right choice.”

  I chose my words carefully. “You don’t feel you can stay here?”

  “I don’t. Do you?”

  Considering it, I fell onto my bed and patted the coverlet beside me. “I don’t know what to do, honestly. You’re right. It doesn’t feel like home here.”

  “Picture yourself happy,” said Phoebe, climbing up on the bed, laying her head on the far pillow. “What do you see?”

  The wedding with Henry that I’d imagined in the asylum—the sun-warmed grass, my hand in his, the secret smile under my veil—sprang immediately to mind. But that was not possible, not anymore. Still, I didn’t want any lies between Phoebe and me. “It’s not a place.”

  “Henry?” she said.

  I nodded. “Give me time to mourn the loss. But you, I want to know what you see. Exactly as you said. Picture yourself happy.”

  A shadow crossed her face. I guessed her mind, as she had guessed mine. “Goldengrove?”

  “I miss it,” she said. “Well, parts of it.”

  And then we talked, whispering for hours, as we used to. She told me what it was like for her there. The words came pouring out of her. How at first it all felt like a bad dream, a nightmare she might wake up from, a strange tale she could recount to me in the light of morning. How much it hurt to acknowledge all her pain was real. How it felt to find herself swept away from the awfulness of the water cure into the odd isolation of pouring drinks for the superintendent; how kind he’d been to her, deferential and attentive; how her mind had soared with glad inspiration when he had asked her to make a canvas of his wall; the oddly soothing imprisonment, brief as it was, in the Tranquility Chair. How jarred she was when I materialized out of the rows in the vineyard, how stunned, how unsure she was that leaving the asylum behind was the wisest choice, even as she placed her grateful hand in mine.

  And she told me their names again, every woman she had met who had been wrongly committed. She remembered them all. I knew that she wanted to find a way to save them, and we talked about what we might do, but she told me about the others too for the first time. Those who hadn’t been wrongly committed at all. Those who were exactly where they should have been.

  Many of the inmates, my sister told me in a subdued, serious voice, were unsuited for the world. Too fragile, too mutable, too sad, too something. They seemed to genuinely benefit from the isolation of the asylum. Those were the ones, she said, it was hardest to forget. And she wondered which of these groups she belonged to: the ones who needed to be out of the asylum, or those who needed to be in.

  I did not know what to do with that.

  In the far hours of the night, we fell asleep, still in our day dresses, wrapped in a spare quilt atop the coverlet. My fatigue finally overcame my uneasiness. When I woke in the morning, I realized we had not answered the overwhelming question—what would become of us, together or apart?—but my sister gripped my left hand firmly in hers, holding tight to me even as she slumbered. And that was some kind of answer.

  * * *

  Three days passed, each one longer than the one before it. As awful as our time in Goldengrove had been, there were aspects of it I missed. I missed the camaraderie of the other women who were my wardmates. I missed the sense of accomplishment from making soap, from turning an assigned set of tasks into a tangible, physical result. I missed Nora’s quick wit, Damaris’s beaming face, Martha’s rare, bright smile.

  An image of the matron in the Tranquility Chair sprang to mind, her sharp fingers flexing, struggling against the inescapable restraints; I wondered how long it had taken someone to find and free her. I was not grateful to her for the observation that a sense of purpose helped many women. I would have rather found it out without her. I wondered what the superintendent was doi
ng now, whether his struggle with gin had been resolved, and if so, who emerged the victor. I wondered if Damaris had ended up back at home, whether her stepbrother was still under the family roof, whether they would find themselves irresistibly drawn into lust again. Jubilee had picked up her career as a slattern with no obvious interruption, back into her bunk with barely a step missed. As much as we’d changed inside the asylum, when thrust back into the circumstances that had driven us mad in the first place, would any of that change last?

  But here, at last, here there was Phoebe.

  On the second day, I was shocked to find her working on an excellent needlepoint, picking out multicolored threads against a pearly white ground, patiently inserting and withdrawing the needle over and over again. She must have been desperate to do the things denied to her in the asylum, whether she had ever liked them or not. She didn’t paint, and I didn’t ask her why. In good time, if she wanted me to know, she would tell me. Still, every time she and I were in separate rooms, I hoped somehow that there would be paints and brushes in hers.

  My conversations with my father tended to be brief, generally over meals, mostly exchanging pleasantries. I understood why he wouldn’t want to speak candidly in front of our mother, but even when I saw him alone, he was warm but distant. We did not discuss the future. Once, I steeled myself to address him directly in his office, but as I approached the door, Phoebe emerged, an envelope in her hand. She saw me catch sight of her, and I turned back, headed toward my room, cheeks flushed.

  I longed to know who she was corresponding with, if that was what was happening, but I didn’t ask. During our long talk after Celia’s departure, she’d asked me to give her time to think about where she wanted to live and who she wanted to be. I did not want to jeopardize our fragile peace with a prying question. I had to admit too that I feared her answer.

  And each of the three days we waited at home, I crossed paths with my mother, and we did not speak a single word to each other. She sat silently at the dinner table, poking with obvious discomfort at her fricassee, and skipping teatime entirely. When we happened upon each other unexpectedly in the hall outside the parlor, my mother started a little and looked at me as if I were a stranger. In a way, I realized, I was.

 

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