“Our own Dr. Early leaves a bowl of corn mush every night by his back door, but I guess that hadn’t been enough for her lately. We’re thinkin’ maybe a new litter is on its way.”
He laughed and his face re-drew itself into wrinkles while his companion nodded with all solemnity.
“Don’t forget the show tonight,” Hugo called out as the two men walked away. That was when I saw Liddy walking down the sidewalk with a small lilac parasol I’d not seen before and holding the arm of a very upright man who bent his head to hear what she was saying.
Hugo saw them, too. “That’ll be Liddy’s correspondent, I’ll wager,” he said, and he was right. When Liddy noticed us, she came over and introduced the man as Dr. Martin Early—the same man who fed the raccoons mush every night.
“Honored,” Dr. Early said, shaking hands with Hugo. He spoke without a trace of the local accent and was a handsome man, with a fine full head of chestnut hair and long sideburns. I noticed his ears were very large but he kept his hair long, partially covering them.
“Caught your show when you were docked in Cincinnati last month,” he told Hugo. “Fine show, decidedly fine; I was sorry indeed when it ended. Afterwards I told Miss Liddy here that I could have sat there entertained for three more hours at least.”
He wore a striped tie and a crisp white vest with a watch chain showing. His boots were made of the best leather, and his hat was so white that it seemed to emit its own light.
“Cast has changed since then, I’m told,” Dr. Early went on. “I was sorry to hear about your sister.”
Hugo bowed his head, acknowledging the loss. I looked at the black handkerchief he still wore in his jacket pocket. He had but one that I knew of, and he washed it out every night and folded it into a triangle for his pocket again every morning.
There was a short silence. Then I asked the doctor how he kept his hat so white.
Liddy laughed and reached over to squeeze my forearm affectionately.
“This is my friend May Bedloe. I’ve told you about her: our very own costume designer. She is very curious about anything to do with clothing.”
“Ah, tricks of the trade. Well, I’ll tell you: repeated sulfuring. That’s what does it.”
His dark eyes crinkled when he spoke, and whenever he looked at Liddy, her cheeks flushed pink with pleasure. He began to make himself agreeable to me, asking about the costumes and expressing his interest in seeing them that night.
“I’m bringing the mayor and his wife,” he told us. “The mayor’s wife in particular is very fond of the theater, and she drags the poor man to Cincinnati as often as the new moon. I say ‘poor man’ only because he gets very sick on the water, you know, although they’ve recently purchased a new carriage and the roads this time of year are not as muddy as their reputation. Of course, the mayor is happiest when the theater comes to him, like today. Will you stop at my house for tea? It’s only a step.”
Liddy looked very happy when Hugo said he’d be delighted. I thought about my letter to Mrs. Howard in my dress pocket, but it could wait. I was curious to see the sort of house this man kept. He seemed unusually cosmopolitan and spoke like a politician I’d once heard in Philadelphia, with a well-pitched voice that seemed to listen to itself and give out information at the same time. He dressed as though he lived in Philadelphia, too, with his white vest and his white hat. He had a city man’s flare for finery without ostentation. And yet the town he lived in was barely settled. I wondered why he chose to live here.
We put the town square behind us and crossed over a stream with a narrow bridge, barely wide enough for a cart. The doctor’s house was made of logs, very neat and well made, with blue curtains in the windows, and it stood by itself on a little rise above a cleared field. Inside, Dr. Early took Liddy’s parasol and my shawl and put them on a high-backed chair against the wall. The main room was large but somewhat dim, having only two windows in front and one in back. It served as his office, his kitchen, and his study, Dr. Early explained. He had built the cabin himself, though he admitted having help with the roof, and he’d had the floorboards shipped in from Cincinnati. The room was crowded with tables full of specimens—preserved reptiles and insects under glass—as well as an array of lancets and a nested stack of bleeding bowls. Some tools hung by nails on the wall, both for healing and for cooking. A closed door led to his bedroom, I guessed, and that was the extent of his home.
We sat on cane chairs and watched as he built up the fire and boiled water for tea. While we were waiting, he set out a large white bowl of dewberries sprinkled with sugar and urged us to eat, all the while talking about his doctoring practice, new cures he was trying with French brandy and angelica root. He made me think of a friendly dog that fancies himself a scholar.
Hugo seemed to think it an interesting place, for he got up from his chair while the doctor bustled about and began going from table to table, looking a long time at every specimen with his hands clasped behind his back.
“It’s a great treat to meet with another learned man,” he said. “It’s rare that I have the pleasure.” I found myself feeling a little jealous at that. “Another learned man”! I had gone to high school for a year, and I knew for a fact that Hugo had only gone up to the eighth grade before he left to work at his father’s theater.
When the tea was brewed, Dr. Early cleared off a jumble of jars and capped bottles from a lacquered tray table, then he set down the tea things and the last of a pound cake, which he had made himself the night before.
“Ate most of it for breakfast, I’m afraid,” he told us.
“Delicious,” Hugo said, taking a bite. He winked at Liddy when the doctor’s back was turned. “A man of varied talents.”
“I don’t need much sleep,” Dr. Early said, wiping four teacups with a cloth and then filling them up. The cups were very pretty, red and green with a clover and honeysuckle pattern. “Five hours at most. And I need something to occupy myself with out here all alone.”
He looked at Liddy and for some reason she blushed. “Besides your pets,” she reminded him. “The Shakentales.”
I looked around as if I might see them. Instead my eye caught the red marble eye of a small stuffed muskrat standing upright by the back door. Was the doctor a taxidermist as well? I found I didn’t like him as much as the others seemed to, though I didn’t know why, exactly. Something about his easy manner, deliberately not boasting, only underscored how accomplished he was. This was on purpose, I felt.
“So you’re traveling on the alligator’s eye, are you?” he said. “How are you finding it?”
“What’s the alligator’s eye?” Liddy asked.
“Why that’s what they call the Ohio around here. The state of Kentucky is shaped like an alligator’s head, don’t you know, and they say that boats along this part of the Ohio River are going down the alligator’s eye.”
“We’re in Indiana,” I pointed out. “Not Kentucky.”
Dr. Early laughed. “Only marginally,” he said.
Hugo smiled at me. “May likes to be precise.”
“A very good trait. I only meant that there’s not so much difference as you might think. I come from Louisville originally and studied medicine at Jefferson College in Philadelphia. Those two cities, though hundreds of miles apart, were not so unalike, I found. New York, however, is a different beast altogether. Well, all great cities. New York, Vienna, London.”
“I spent a great deal of my life in London myself,” Hugo told him.
“Only three years,” I said.
Hugo frowned slightly. “You mean when I managed the Covent Garden Theatre. That is true. But”—turning back to Dr. Early—“I went back and forth between London and the provinces with my parents before that. My parents were from London.”
“I see what you mean about being precise. It’s good to keep us on our toes,” Dr. Early said to me with a wink.
I resolved to say nothing more. I was beginning to feel grumpy and wished I hadn’t come.
I had a letter to post and I still wanted to give out a pair of free tickets to the grocer. The tea was rich and fresh-tasting, and the dewberries were just exactly, perfectly ripe. I don’t know why I was feeling peevish. Perhaps it was the closed heat of the room. As if he could read my thoughts, Dr. Early stood up and opened the back door, then crossed the room to open the front door.
“Main thing I thought about when designing this cabin was that there’d be two ways of getting out in case of fire.”
“Very smart, very smart,” Hugo said.
“But I wish I’d laid in more windows.” Dr. Early smiled at me showing sharp, white, even teeth. “It gets a mite warm, don’t you think, Miss May?”
An accommodating man, but I did not like him.
It was Liddy who spied the piano against the far wall wedged between two low tables, one serving as a bookcase and the other with stacks of plates and teacups and saucers, all of them with the same clover and honeysuckle pattern.
“Why don’t you sing us something?” Dr. Early asked when Liddy exclaimed over the beauty of the instrument.
Liddy blushed again. “Well, if May would accompany me . . .”
The piano was indeed a beautiful upright, constructed of caramel-colored wood with round globes and leafy vines carved into the legs. However, I guessed that way out here with no musician to care for it, it must be hopelessly out of tune. Again, as though reading my mind, Dr. Early said, “I tune the contraption myself. Hope it’s not terribly off.”
For some reason I did hope it was terribly off, but when I tried a few notes with my index finger they sounded just fine. Was there nothing this man could not do? I thumbed through a stack of music on the piano lid. And here I can say that, although I was not aware that I was looking for anything in particular, at this moment I found it. Intermixed with the musical scores were printed broadsides, and as I read the first one a warm flood of uneasy recognition came over me, followed by disgust.
FIFTY DOLLARS REWARD! Ranaway on the 27th of May, my Black Woman named Emily. Seventeen years of age, well grown, black color, has a whining voice. She took with her one dark calico and one blue and white dress; a red corded gingham bonnet; a white striped shawl and slippers. I will pay the above reward if taken near the Ohio River on the Kentucky side, or SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLARS if taken in the North and delivered to me.
Certain words had been circled: “seventeen years,” “gingham bonnet,” “seventy-five dollars.”
Dr. Early was a slave hunter. This must be where he got his money for his specimens and china teacups, certainly not from his angelica root remedies or by bleeding a shopkeeper or two. I took a long breath and an acrid odor filled my nose, something false and unnatural, perhaps from all of his jars and bottles. It could be that the odor had been in the room the whole time but I was only just noticing it. I looked out the small back window to the scrubby woods beyond Dr. Early’s cleared field. He probably would have his own path down to the Ohio River. He would go down there late at night to watch, and he would stay until morning. He already admitted that he didn’t need much sleep. Maybe he had a special hidden place, like a deer stand, where he watched for anyone crossing over from Kentucky.
“Look at this,” I said, handing the broadside to Liddy.
Liddy’s fingers around the sheet of paper seemed as small as a child’s, and she took a long time reading it. She did not look up but a faint blush of color rose in her neck. Dr. Early came over to see what she had. She took the next broadside from my hands and gave the first one to Hugo. She did not meet my eye, nor anyone else’s.
100 DOLLARS REWARD
For my negro fellow STEPHEN who RANAWAY on the 17th September last. He is between twenty-five and thirty years of age, is about six feet high, copper-colored, with a high forehead. He can read but I do not think he can write. Has some use of tools, and was purchased as a rough carpenter. The above reward will be paid for said boy if apprehended out of the State, and eighty dollars if caught within the State and confined to jail so I that I can get him. I will also pay for the capture of any white thief who offered assistance to him, and will mete out my own justice to that unhappy rogue.
I passed along a few other broadsides, and after reading three or four Liddy looked up at the doctor as though she were trying to see him more clearly, or perhaps she just wanted to see him the way she had seen him ten minutes before.
“Well,” Hugo said in a broad English accent. “I mean to say. Of course, I can’t opine . . .”
“Yes, yes, quite right, it’s a local issue,” the doctor said. He was still smiling, but there was a sharp look in his eyes. “Something your lot worked out a long time ago”—I guessed by “your lot” he meant the English—“and I wish we had, too. It’s tiresome really. But it’s the law, and what can you do? Can’t break the law, you know.” He turned to Liddy. “Now, my dear, I feel for these poor souls just as much as you do, which is why I originally offered my services.”
He began to speak at length about the difference between conditions in the North and in the South and how slavery was deplorable but that the law was the law. Moreover, in his case he was raising money for the sole purpose of helping anyone who was ill, rich or poor. And he was very good to Negroes, he went on: some white men captured them in a most humiliating and painful way, but he himself never carried a whip, and it was better by far that he found them and not someone else . . .
He kept talking and talking and I wanted to stop my ears up. I was watching Hugo as intently as Dr. Early was watching Liddy, trying to gauge his reaction, but, like Liddy, Hugo was wearing almost no expression. I thought, not for the first time, how handy it was to be an actor and have all your physical expressions under control. I badly wanted to sit down, and when I did I felt the letter to Mrs. Howard bend awkwardly in my dress pocket. I’d forgotten about that. I took it out and held it, address side down, on my knee.
“I must mail this,” I said when at last Dr. Early paused. “I have to be going.”
I put the broadsides back on the piano lid, all except the one about the man Stephen, which I’d folded up and put in my pocket when no one was looking. I wanted to read the bit about the white thief again. Arrest and conviction—would Dr. Early do that to me if he caught me in the rowboat? Anxiety pricked my chest. Of course he would. There was a hundred dollars in it.
Outside, Liddy walked a little ahead of Hugo and me. We didn’t say a word as we made our way across Dr. Early’s field, nor as we walked over the wooden bridge and into town. As we approached the Shakentales’ tree, I saw that it was deserted. No one stood in the square, and all the window shutters in all the shops had been closed up against the sun.
“Why did you show me those notices?” Liddy asked me suddenly, angrily, stepping around the tree.
I was surprised. Was she angry at me? “I don’t know. I thought you would want to see them.”
“I don’t! I didn’t! It’s nothing to do with you or with me.”
I wasn’t sure if she really thought this was true or if she was trying to work her way toward believing it. Hugo glanced at her and then at me.
“Well, now, it’s a difficult issue,” he began carefully.
“Martin is not breaking the law,” Liddy interrupted. Her face was tight with anger.
“You think what he’s doing is honorable?” I asked.
“You heard what he said. If he doesn’t do it, someone else will—and someone with less compassion.”
We parted at the post office, and I watched Hugo and Liddy walk back to the boat without me. All at once I felt worn down by Mrs. Howard and everything associated with her. Liddy was my friend. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know why I was doing it. First I learned how to lie, and now here I was, breaking the law. I didn’t know what to think about any of it, but I posted the letter to Mrs. Howard just the same and hoped that she would forward me some money before she had me go out in the rowboat again.
That night I dreamed I was on the Floating Theatre
with Giulia. It was sinking, but we stood in the auditorium as though rooted to the floor. I knew I had to get her off the boat but I could not seem to leave the room. As I watched the wall descend and felt the floorboards slant beneath my feet, I reasoned to myself that the water would soon come in through the window and we could swim out that way.
• • •
For the next few days Liddy avoided me. Twice she got up and left the dining room just as I came in, one time with the chop on her plate only half eaten, and I realized that she was coming in early for her meals. There was no swimming in the mornings, and poor Celia sat with Leo and me on the riverbank looking dolefully out at the water. Leo offered to teach her how to reel in a fish but she wrinkled her nose, and so I gave her a piece of rough linen, a large needle, and some embroidery thread to amuse herself with.
Mrs. Niffen noticed our rift and made the best of the situation, as usual. Whenever I saw her she made sure to mention Liddy’s name and if possible to ask if I had seen her. To this I could only say no. After the third or fourth time she said slyly, “Well, you haven’t seen Liddy at all lately, have you! I’m beginning to wonder if you two have had a quarrel.” Of course I could tell by her manner that she knew all about it.
Alpha, beta, gamma. “No,” I told her.
She stretched her lips into the kind of smile that a child would draw, two broad lines connected at the edges, like a boat. For a moment she seemed all pointed nose and teeth, and except for her creamy-white hair she looked like a fox. “Thank heaven. You two are so close.”
My heart seemed to plunge a little lower in my chest when I heard that, since her manner clearly conveyed that she meant just the opposite. I hadn’t had many friends in my life, but I thought of Liddy as one of them. And, not having many friends, I also did not know the rules for arguing and making peace, if such rules existed. I wished they did.
The Underground River Page 23
