by Donna Tartt
Dear Mr. Dial (it began.)
I am a young lady of your acquaintance who has admired you in secret for some time. I am so crazy about you I can hardly get to sleep. I know that I am very young, and there is Mrs. Dial, too, but perhaps we can arrange a meeting some evening out behind Dial Chevrolet. I have prayed over this letter, and the Lord has told me that Love is the answer. I will write again soon. Please do not show this letter to any body. p.s. I think you might know who this is. Love, your secret Valentine!
At the bottom Harriet had pasted a tiny picture of Annabel Arnold that she’d cut out of the newspaper next to an enormous, jaundiced head of Mr. Dial she’d found in the Yellow Pages—his pop-eyes goggling with enthusiasm and his head aburst in a corona of cartoon stars above which a jangle of frantic black letters screamed:
WHERE QUALITY COMES FIRST!
LOW DOWN PAYMENT!
Looking at these letters now gave Harriet the idea of actually sending Mr. Dial a threatening note, in misspelled baby printing, purporting to be from Curtis Ratliff. But this, she decided, tapping her pencil against her teeth, would be unfair to Curtis. She wished Curtis no harm, especially after his attack on Mr. Dial.
She turned the page, and on a fresh sheet of orange paper, wrote:
Goals for Summer
Harriet Cleve Dufresnes
Restlessly, she stared at this. Like the woodcutter’s child at the beginning of a fairy tale, a mysterious longing had possessed her, a desire to travel far and do great things; and though she could not say exactly what it was she wanted to do, she knew that it was something grand and gloomy and extremely difficult.
She turned back several pages, to the list of people she admired: a preponderance of generals, soldiers, explorers, men of action all. Joan of Arc had led armies when she was hardly older than Harriet. Yet, for Christmas last year, Harriet’s father had given Harriet an insulting board game for girls called What Shall I Be? It was a particularly flimsy game, meant to offer career guidance but no matter how well you played, it offered only four possible futures: teacher, ballerina, mother, or nurse.
The possible, as it was presented in her Health textbook (a mathematical progression of dating, “career,” marriage, and motherhood), did not interest Harriet. Of all the heroes on her list, the greatest of them all was Sherlock Holmes, and he wasn’t even a real person. Then there was Harry Houdini. He was a master of the impossible; more importantly, for Harriet, he was a master of escape. No prison in the world could hold him: he escaped from straitjackets, from locked trunks dropped in fast rivers and from coffins buried six feet underground.
And how had he done it? He wasn’t afraid. Saint Joan had galloped out with the angels on her side but Houdini had mastered fear on his own. No divine aid for him; he’d taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark. Handcuffed in a locked trunk in the bottom of a river, he squandered not a heartbeat on being afraid, never buckled to the terror of the chains and the dark and the icy water; if he became lightheaded, for even a moment, if he fumbled at the breathless labor before him—somersaulting along the river-bed, head over heels—he would never come up from the water alive.
A training program. This was Houdini’s secret. He’d immersed himself in daily tubs of ice, swum immense distances underwater, practiced holding his breath until he could hold it for three minutes. And while the tubs of ice were impossible, the swimming and the breath-holding—this she could do.
She heard her mother and sister coming in the front door, her sister’s plaintive voice, unintelligible. Quickly she hid the notebook and ran downstairs.
————
“Don’t say Hate, honey,” said Charlotte absent-mindedly to Allison. The three of them were sitting around the dining-room table in their Sunday dresses, eating the chicken that Ida had left for their lunch.
Allison, with her hair falling in her face, sat staring at her plate, chewing a slice of lemon from her iced tea. Though she’d sawed apart her food energetically enough, and shoved it back and forth across her plate, and piled it up in unappetizing heaps (a habit of hers that drove Edie crazy), she’d eaten very little of it.
“I don’t see why Allison can’t say Hate, Mother,” said Harriet. “Hate is a perfectly good word.”
“It’s not polite.”
“It says Hate in the Bible. The Lord hateth this and the Lord hateth that. It says it practically on every page.”
“Well, don’t you say it.”
“All right, then,” Allison burst out. “I detest Mrs. Biggs.” Mrs. Biggs was Allison’s Sunday school teacher.
Charlotte, through her tranquilized fog, was mildly surprised. Allison was usually such a timid, gentle girl. Such crazy talk about hating people was more the kind of thing you expected from Harriet.
“Now, Allison,” she said. “Mrs. Biggs is a sweet old thing. And she’s a friend of your aunt Adelaide’s.”
Allison—raking her fork listlessly through her disordered plate—said: “I still hate her.”
“That’s no good reason to hate somebody, honey, just because they wouldn’t pray in Sunday school for a dead cat.”
“Why not? She made us pray that Sissy and Annabel Arnold would win the twirling contest.”
Harriet said: “Mr. Dial made us pray for that, too. It’s because their father is a deacon.”
Carefully, Allison balanced the slice of lemon on the edge of her plate. “I hope they drop one of those fire batons,” she said. “I hope the place burns down.”
“Listen, girls,” said Charlotte vaguely, in the silence that followed. Her mind—never fully engaged with the business of the cat and the church and the twirling competition—had already drifted on to something else. “Have yall been down to the Health Center yet to get your typhoid shots?”
When neither child answered, she said: “Now, I want you to be sure and remember to go down and do that first thing Monday morning. And a tetanus shot, too. Swimming in cow ponds and running around barefoot all summer long …”
She trailed off, pleasantly, then resumed eating. Harriet and Allison were silent. Neither of them had ever swum in a cow pond in her life. Their mother was thinking of her own childhood and muddling it up with the present—something she did more and more frequently these days—and neither of the girls knew quite how to respond when this happened.
————
Still in her daisy-patterned Sunday dress, which she’d had on since the morning, Harriet padded downstairs in the dark, her white ankle socks gray-soled with dirt. It was nine-thirty at night, and both her mother and Allison had been in bed for half an hour.
Allison’s somnolence—unlike her mother’s—was natural and not narcotic. She was happiest when she was asleep, with her head beneath her pillow; she longed for her bed all day, and flung herself into it as soon as it was decently dark. But Edie, who seldom slept more than six hours a night, was annoyed by all the lounging around in bed that went on at Harriet’s house. Charlotte had been on some kind of tranquilizers since Robin died, and there was no talking to her about it, but Allison was a different matter. Hypothesizing mononucleosis or encephalitis she had several times forced Allison to go to the doctor for blood tests, which came back negative. “She’s a growing teenager,” the doctor told Edie. “Teenagers need a lot of rest.”
“But sixteen hours!” said Edie, exasperated. She was well aware that the doctor didn’t believe her. She also suspected—correctly—that he was the one prescribing whatever dope that kept Charlotte so groggy all the time.
“Don’t matter if it’s seventeen,” said Dr. Breedlove, sitting with one white-coated haunch on his littered desk and regarding Edie with a fishy, clinical stare. “That gal wants to sleep, you let her do it.”
“But how can you stand to stay asleep so much?” Harriet had once asked her sister curiously.
Allison shrugged.
“Isn’t it boring?”
“I only get bored when I’m awak
e.”
Harriet knew how that went. Her own boredoms were so numbing that sometimes she was sick and woozy with them, like she’d been chloroformed. Now, however, she was excited by the prospect of the solitary hours ahead, and in the living room made not for the gun cabinet but for her father’s desk.
There were lots of interesting things in her father’s desk drawer (gold coins, birth certificates, things she wasn’t supposed to fool with). After rummaging through some photographs and boxes of canceled checks she finally found what she was looking for: a black-plastic stopwatch—giveaway from a finance company—with a red digital display.
She sat down on the sofa, and gulped down a deep breath as she clicked the watch. Houdini had trained himself to hold his breath for minutes at a time: a trick that made many of his greatest tricks possible. Now she would see how long she could hold her own breath without passing out.
Ten. Twenty seconds. Thirty. She became conscious of the blood thumping hard and harder in her temples.
Thirty-five. Forty. Harriet’s eyes watered, her heartbeat throbbed in her eyeballs. At forty-five, a spasm fluttered in her lungs and she was forced to pinch her nose shut and clamp a hand over her mouth.
Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Her eyes were streaming, she couldn’t sit still, she got up and paced in a tiny frantic circle by the sofa, fanning with her free hand at the air and her eyes skittering desperately from object to object—desk, door, Sunday shoes pigeontoed on the dove-gray carpet—as the room jumped with her thunderous heartbeat and the wall of newspapers chattered as if in the pre-trembling of an earthquake.
Sixty seconds. Sixty-five. The rose-pink stripes in the draperies had darkened to a bloody color and the light from the lamp unravelled in long, iridescent tentacles which ebbed and flowed with the wash of some invisible tide, before they, too, began to darken, blackening around the pulsating edges though the centers still burned white and somewhere she heard a wasp buzzing, somewhere near her ear though maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was coming from somewhere inside her; the room was whirling and suddenly she couldn’t pinch her nose shut any longer, her hand was trembling and wouldn’t do what she told it to and with a long, agonized rasp, she fell backward on the sofa in a shower of sparks, clicking the stopwatch with her thumb.
For a long time she lay there, panting, as the phosphorescent fairy lights drifted gently from the ceiling.
A glass hammer pounded, with crystalline pings, at the base of her skull. Her thoughts spooled up and unwound in complex ormolu tracery which floated in delicate patterns around her head.
When the sparks slowed, and she was finally able to sit up—dizzy, grasping the back of the sofa—she looked at the stopwatch. One minute and sixteen seconds.
This was a long time, longer than she’d expected on the first try, but Harriet felt very queer. Her eyes ached and it was as if the whole ingredients of her head were jostled and crunched together, so that hearing was mixed up with sight and sight with taste and her thoughts were jumbled up with all this like a jigsaw puzzle so she couldn’t tell which piece went where.
She tried to stand up. It was like trying to stand up in a canoe. She sat down again. Echoes, black bells.
Well: nobody had said it was going to be easy. If it was easy, learning to hold your breath for three minutes, then everybody in the world would be doing it and not just Houdini.
She sat still for some minutes, breathing deeply as they had taught her in swimming class, and when she felt slightly more herself she took another deep breath and clicked the watch.
This time, she was determined not to look at the numbers as they ticked by, but to concentrate on something else. Looking at the numbers made it worse.
As her discomfort increased, and her heart pounded louder, sparkling needle-pricks pattered quickly over her scalp in icy waves, like raindrops. Her eyes burned. She closed them. Against the throbbing red darkness rained a spectacular drizzle of cinders. A black trunk bound with chains clattered across the loose stones of a riverbed, swept by the current, thump thump, thump thump—something heavy and soft, a body inside—and her hand flew up to pinch her nose as if against a bad smell but still the suitcase rolled along, over the mossy stones, and an orchestra was playing somewhere, in a gilded theatre ablaze with chandeliers, and Harriet heard Edie’s clear soprano, soaring high above the violins: “Many brave hearts lie asleep in the deep. Sailor, beware: sailor, take care.”
No, it wasn’t Edie, it was a tenor: a tenor with black brilliantined hair and a gloved hand pressed to his tuxedo front, his powdered face chalk-white in the footlights, his eyes and lips darkened like an actor in a silent movie. He stood in front of the fringed velvet curtains as slowly they parted—amid a ripple of applause—to reveal, center stage, an enormous block of ice with a hunched figure frozen in the middle.
A gasp. The flustered orchestra, which was composed mostly of penguins, struck up the tempo. The gallery was filled with jostling polar bears, several of whom wore Santa Claus hats. They had come in late and were having a disagreement over the seating. In their midst sat Mrs. Godfrey, glassy-eyed, who sat eating ice cream from a harlequin-patterned dish.
Suddenly, the lights dimmed. The tenor bowed and stepped into the wings. One of the polar bears craned over the balcony and—throwing his Santa hat high in the air—roared: “Three cheers for Captain Scott!”
There was a deafening commotion as blue-eyed Scott, his furs stiff with blubber grease and coated with ice, stepped onto the stage shaking the snow from his clothes and lifted a mittened hand to the audience. Behind him little Bowers—on skis—emitted a low, mystified whistle, squinting into the footlights and raising an arm to shield his sunburnt face. Dr. Wilson—hatless and gloveless, with ice crampons on his boots—hurried past him and onto the stage, leaving behind him a trail of snowy footprints which dissolved instantly into puddles under the stage lights. Ignoring the burst of applause, he ran a hand across the block of ice, made a notation or two in a leather-bound notebook. Then he snapped the notebook shut and the audience fell silent.
“Conditions critical, Captain,” he said, his breath coming out white. “Winds are blowing from the north-northwest and there seems to be a distinct difference of origin between the upper and lower portions of the berg, suggesting that it has accumulated layer by layer from seasonal snows.”
“Then, we shall have to commence the rescue immediately,” said Captain Scott. “Osman! Esh to,” he said impatiently to the sled dog which barked and jumped around him. “The ice axes, Lieutenant Bowers.”
Bowers seemed not at all surprised to discover that his ski poles had turned into a pair of axes in his mittened fists. He tossed one deftly across the stage to his captain, to a wild din of honks and roars and clapped flippers, and, shouldering off their snow-crumbled woolens, the two of them began to hack at the frozen block as the penguin orchestra struck up again and Dr. Wilson continued to provide interesting scientific commentary about the nature of the ice. A flurry of snow had begun to whirl gently from the proscenium. At the edge of the stage, the brilliantined tenor was assisting Ponting, the expedition’s photographer, in setting up his tripod.
“The poor chap,” said Captain Scott, between blows of the axe—he and Bowers were not making a great deal of headway—“is very near the end, one feels.”
“Hurry it up there, Captain.”
“Good cheer, lads,” roared a polar bear from the gallery.
“We are in the hands of God, and unless He intervenes we are lost,” said Dr. Wilson somberly. Sweat stood out in beads on his temples and the stage lights glinted in white discs across the lenses of his little old-fashioned glasses. “All hands join in saying the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed.”
Not everyone seemed to know the Lord’s Prayer. Some penguins sang Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do; others, flippers over hearts, recited the Pledge of Allegiance when over the stage—head first, lowered by the ankles from a corkscrewing chain—appeared the strait-jacketed, manacled form of a man
in evening dress. A hush fell over the audience as—twisting, thrashing, red in the face—he wriggled free of the strait-jacket and shouldered it over his head. With his teeth, he set to work on the manacles; in a moment or two they clattered to the planks and then—nimbly doubling up and freeing his feet—he swung from the chain suspended ten feet above the ground and landed, arm high, with a gymnast’s flourish, doffing a top hat which appeared from nowhere. A battery of pink doves flapped out and began to dip around the theatre, to the audience’s delight.
“I am afraid that conventional methods will not work here, gentlemen,” said this newcomer to the startled explorers, rolling up the sleeves of his evening coat and pausing, for an instant, to smile brilliantly for the explosive flash of the camera. “I nearly perished twice while attempting this very feat—once in the Cirkus Beketow in Copenhagen and once in the Apollo Theatre in Nuremberg.” From thin air, he produced a jeweled blowtorch, which shot a blue flame three feet long, and then produced a pistol which he fired into the air with a loud crack and a puff of smoke. “Assistants, please!”
Five Chinamen in scarlet robes and skullcaps, long black queues down their backs, ran out with fireaxes and hacksaws.
Houdini tossed the pistol into the audience—which, to the delight of the penguins, transformed into a thrashing salmon in mid-air before it landed amongst them—and grabbed from Captain Scott the pickaxe. With his left hand, he brandished it high in the air, while the blowtorch burned in his right. “May I remind the audience,” he shouted, “that the subject in question has been deprived of life-sustaining oxygen for four thousand six hundred sixty-five days, twelve hours, twenty-seven minutes, and thirty-nine seconds, and that a recovery attempt of this magnitude has never before been attempted on the North American stage.” He threw the pickaxe back to Captain Scott and, reaching up to stroke the orange cat perched on his shoulder, tossed his head at the penguin conductor. “Maestro, if you please.”
