The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen

by Katherine Howe

  “Dash it all, Annatje!” my father shouts. “You heard your mother! Get your things together!”

  “We’re going to Aunt Mehitable’s,” Mother reiterates, her voice artificially calm.

  “Yes, Mother,” I say.

  I crane my neck over her shoulder, to see if I can glimpse the note. The young man holding the knife sees me looking, and hides the blade behind his back. My father catches up the note and stuffs it into his pocket before looking with lowered brows out the window.

  “Don’t forget the dress we picked for you to wear for the festivities,” Mother reminds me. “And your slippers. Tell Beattie. The newspapers will be there.”

  “All right.” I hesitate.

  Should I invent an excuse to leave? But what lie can I spin that would persuade her to let me go?

  My eyes shift between her and Papa and the panic-faced corporation men. Papa turns his back to me, fingertips rubbing over his forehead, and one of the men whispers in my father’s ear.

  I can slip out. Lottie’s already left, and Winston won’t say anything. If I pretend I’m going right to my room, they’ll stay in the study hatching their schemes, and I can get away to see Herschel. Just for a minute. If I’ve lived this day before, as I’m increasingly certain I have, then I have to find a way for him to give me the cameo.

  I ache for it.

  For the cameo, and for how he stares at me beneath his studied brows, and for what he says when he slides it on my finger. His eyes look soft, when he stares at me. Like Wes’s eyes, I think in passing.

  I arrange my features into a semblance of filial piety. Mother glares at me. She knows me too well.

  “I’ll tell Beatrice,” I say, keeping all excitement out of my voice. “We’ll be ready.”

  “Good girl.” Mother dismisses me and then shuts the door in my face.

  The conversation recommences the moment the door is shut.

  I slip back to my bedroom and find Beattie digging through the pile of dresses and underthings that she left on the bed. An open trunk has been dragged over next to it, and the trunk vomits stockings over its edge and onto the floor.

  “There you are!” Beattie breathes. “Did Mother tell you?” Her eyes shine bright with impish excitement.

  “That we’re going to Aunt Mehitable’s? Yes,” I say, darting from shelf to mantel to dressing table, grabbing the odd item to toss into the trunk so it will look like I’ve packed to anyone curious.

  “Did she tell you why?” Beattie singsongs, dancing by with a scarf wrapped around her head.

  “I saw. Papa got a note.”

  “We’re all going to be killed!” Ed chirps from the doorway between our rooms. His arms are full of sweaters and he’s beaming at me from behind them. “We have to flee. Papa said.”

  “What?” I freeze, my hand wrapped around a spool of thread from Herschel’s shop. It’s a pale dove gray. I like the color so much that I keep the spool on my dressing table, where I can see it every day. No one knows why. I won’t let Beattie touch it.

  “It’s true,” Beatrice says, stuffing the scarf into the trunk. “I heard Mother and them talking about it, before she made me come pack.”

  “Is Papa still in his study?” Ed interrupts, cramming the sweaters into the trunk and then flopping on his back on our bed. “I want to ask if I should bring my speller.”

  “Killed? Are you sure?” I repeat.

  They wouldn’t have let Beattie see the note, certainly.

  “Mother thinks it’s a ruse,” Beattie says in her eminently reasonable way.

  “A ruse for what?”

  “To scare Papa.” She shrugs.

  A missing glove is hunted up and then Beattie lays the pair atop the sweaters with care.

  “But why would anyone want to scare Papa?” I ask.

  “How should I know?” Beattie says. Which is a good point.

  I frown, thinking.

  “You should pack,” my sister says mildly. “Mother said we’re leaving in half an hour.”

  “Yes,” I say, staring off into space.

  My siblings watch me, waiting for me to leap to attention and start hurling dresses into the trunk like I’m expected to.

  “I . . . ,” I start to say, and then trail off.

  What are Luddites? Could they really mean to kill us?

  Does the note say when?

  I shake myself awake and smile at Beattie.

  “Annie?” she asks, looking curiously at my face. “Are you quite well?”

  “But of course I am,” I say. “I’m just going to have a quick word with Winston. I’ll be right back.”

  “With Winston?” My sister looks confused.

  “Can I come?” pipes my brother from the bed.

  He’s been expressly forbidden from bothering Winston, as for a period of three months he trailed on the poor man’s heels every hour of the day, until one Sunday Ed announced he was going to go live in Seneca and be one of Winston’s children instead. Mother put a stop to it then. He’s been banned from below stairs without Beattie or me to watch him.

  “No,” I say. “You have to stay here and help Beatrice. Here, you can be in charge of making sure my evening dress is packed. The one with the puffed sleeves and the velvet flounce.”

  “Me?” Ed lifts his head. He likes being put in charge of things.

  “Yes,” I say. “Beattie will show you which one. It’s in the wardrobe. Don’t forget, it needs the right drawers and stockings, too. So it’s important you pay close attention. I’ll just run and ask Winston something, and I’ll be right back. You won’t even miss me.”

  “All right,” my sister says uncertainly.

  Ed has already leapt to his feet and climbed into the wardrobe, his two feet sticking out behind him as he roots through the clothes inside.

  “I found one shoe already!” he cries in triumph, voice muffled by layers of cotton and wool.

  Beattie raises a hand as if she were going to stop me, but I shake my head once, firm.

  With a look of silent commiseration at my sister, I vanish out the door of our bedroom as quietly as I can go.

  CHAPTER 6

  I ease open the front door. And I wait.

  I can still hear muffled arguing coming from Papa’s study upstairs, and in the instant when the argument boils into shouting, I slip through unobserved and click the front door closed behind me.

  The fog has finally burned away, and I take a long inhale, surveying up and down First Street. Crisp autumn sun blinks down onto the Bowery, and a lone seagull wheels by overhead, riding the salty harbor air with a cry.

  I look to where I left Wes waiting for me on the stoop, and see that he’s gone.

  “Dash it,” I say under my breath.

  Why didn’t he wait for me? I said I was coming right back! Now I’ll have to walk the Bowery by myself. I don’t have much time. They’ll be missing me any minute.

  Looking left and right, knowing neighbor women are observing me from behind panes of glass, I hurry away from our town house. I can make the walk in a quarter hour, if I’m not held up. Fifteen minutes to Herschel’s store, and fifteen back. I can just make it.

  I round the corner to the Bowery and hunch my shoulders up, avoiding eye contact with the various men lounging in the coffeehouses and beer halls. I feel very small, sometimes, when I walk on the avenue. Some of the buildings are six stories tall, with everyone packed together jaw to jaw, people crammed into every cellar and windowless back room and under the eaves and spilling out into the street. Papa says the governor thinks one day the entire island will be filled. I wonder where all the people will go, when that happens. Already there’re so many people here that listening at any open window will reveal six other conversations.

  I squeeze my naked ring finger between the opposite finger and thumb as
I walk, not meeting anyone’s eye.

  The last time that I lived this day, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know what Herschel was going to say to me. I wonder if I can keep my secret, when he tells me this time. But in a way, I knew it already the first time, too. I feel a twinge of misgiving, having flirted with Wes on my stoop on the very day Herschel gives me the cameo. But I resolve that if Wes were as good as all that, he wouldn’t have abandoned me. I don’t care if I never see him again.

  Maybe.

  I’ve only been alone with Herschel a handful of times. And even then, we’re never really alone. No one is ever alone, in the city. Sometimes down by the waterfront, flecks of cotton from all the unloaded bales drift through the air like snow, dotting Herschel’s eyelashes and making him sneeze. Between the shipyards and forests of masts with their nets of rigging, sailors straddling the spars and looking down with envy at our idleness, where the children swim on hot days, we lose ourselves in the crowd of other people our age and younger, screaming and laughing and splashing water. He first took my hand on one of those summer afternoons, and no one saw. But I felt it, when he squeezed my hand, and it thrilled me to the roots of my hair.

  We’ve walked at night, the few times we could both sneak away. Once we stole enough time to ride the Brooklyn ferry over the moonlit river, stars scattering in the waves before the prow of the boat as we pressed against the railing, the dotted lamps lining Manhattan’s wharves receding behind us, enclosing us in darkness. Herschel drew his thumb along my jaw and moved his fingers into my hair and then he kissed me, his young beard chafing my cheeks as he touched his lips to mine, first nervously, trembling, and then with hunger.

  I’m lost in a daydream of Herschel, the feel of his mouth on mine, the smell of his skin, and the prickling and trembling in my body when I think about him. I’m deaf to the catcalls from the men lounging on the Bowery.

  I cross Houston Street, pulse thudding in my throat. I’ll be there in seven minutes. I’ve counted. Seven minutes until I see him. Seven minutes until he gives me the cameo and tells me his plan.

  A rumbling noise approaches behind me in the street, and then a carriage thunders by of a like I’ve never seen. It veers so close I’m pushed aside by the breeze of its passing. Frightened, I scream, and thrust my knuckles into my mouth. The carriage is painted a vibrant butterfly yellow, and it spits like a chimney from under the chassis.

  And there’s no horse.

  “Did you see that?” I shout, reaching out and grabbing the first sleeve in the crowd, which proves to belong to a young mother, only a bit older than me, her face shaded by a fashionable bonnet with a bow under her chin, her hands on the shoulders of a small boy.

  “See what?” she cries, looking around with alarm.

  “I thought I saw . . .” I trail off.

  But I’ve lost sight of it, between the landaus and wagons, pulled by snorting horses, driven by harassed-looking boys.

  The young matron gives me a wary look and steers her boy away in the crowd.

  I carry on. Only now I’m unable to daydream. My feet bring me downtown, and under my feet, I feel an unfamiliar rumbling, as though a sleeping giant were turning over with a snore. A cadre of young men in plaid suits plays at cards at a table in the open doors of a beer hall, and though I should know better, I call to them, “What can that rumbling be? Can you hear it?”

  They exchange glances among themselves, laughing, and one of them says, “I’ll give you a rumbling.”

  I shake my head, hurrying farther, looking down at the bricked sidewalk as I pick my way between daubs of mud and excrement. In one stretch the bricks have been oddly replaced with what look like narrow iron bars, as if it were the door to a dungeon. No one else notices anything amiss. I edge around it, peering down, and am met with a blast of hot air, like the furnace of hell, and a screeching and groaning such as I’ve never heard. Lights flicker by, and the rumbling passes again, and I fall backward in confusion, my hands pressed to either side of my head.

  “What is that?” I scream.

  A few passersby hesitate, deciding whether to offer me help, or if they should summon whatever man has appointed himself guardian of the ward to usher me off the streets, or into a wagon to be hauled off to the House of Refuge.

  A German family loiters on the periphery, watching me, and presently the man approaches me with caution at the apparent urging of his wife. He has a friendly face, and his tall hat is new and brushed.

  “Miss?” he says, his accented voice low so as not to attract attention. “Is there someone I can help you to be finding?”

  I’m confused by this offer. Herschel, I think, but I must only be a few blocks away, and it is only his face that I crave.

  “N-n-n-o,” I stammer, backing away. “Thank you, no.”

  “You are sure?” the young wife calls.

  Without answering her, I turn on my heel and run.

  I haven’t gone twenty steps before the rumbling returns, and I stop short, gasping, watching in openmouthed horror as the tenement next to me begins, slowly, inexorably, to shake. A wave surges up the building as across the surface of the sea, from its foundations, up to the windows, to the pitched roof.

  I see figures in the windows, moving about in shadow, but no one screams.

  No figures appear at windows to throw out babies to be caught, no sashes fly open to wave sheets crying for help. No one seems to notice when a brick falls, then another, then a lump of cornice splits off and plunges down to shatter at my feet, followed by a rain of crumbled masonry. The noise becomes deafening, filling my ears and vibrating my entrails. I lift my arms to shield my face as the building slowly, rumblingly dissolves into dust.

  No one else on the street seems to notice. They keep moving along in a tide of humanity, clutching their baskets and children as though nothing were amiss while I stand with arms over my head, my eyes saucers of disbelief.

  Where the building stood is only a thick cloud of brown dust, roiling on eddies of autumn air.

  “What’s the matter with you people?” I scream, my face red.

  This didn’t happen the last time I sneaked from the house to go see Herschel.

  A few people waiting at the street corner before picking their way between the wagons and vegetable stalls eye me with suspicion, but say nothing.

  Desperate, I run over to a curiously dressed young man, hatless, in what look like tight-fitting work pants and a collarless shirt. I grasp his arm and try to drag him to a stop.

  “That building just collapsed!” I scream in his ear. “Go get help!”

  He pretends not to hear me, and my fingers slide off his arm as he disappears into the crowd.

  “Someone, help! There’s people in there!” I shout, pointing at the giant dust cloud.

  My shouts cut short when the rumbling begins with renewed malice. I back away from the buildings, wanting to be far away, but I can’t step into the street else I’ll be trampled to death by the throng of horses and wagons and carriages. I once saw a little boy trampled, and his twisted limbs and dully flattened head haunted my nightmares for months.

  The rumbling thickens, intensifies, and I stand stock-still, tears streaming down my face. It’s coming from where the tenement stood. The brown dust cloud seems to be circulating, moving, breathing like an ephemeral nightmare animal. It grows and swells, thickening, stretching itself upward to the sky, growing denser and taller and squarer. The rumbling grows so loud that I scream, and my scream is noiseless, swallowed by the sound of the dust cloud. Inside the cloud, something comes ripping up out of the ground, bricks and rocks exploding in every direction as whatever it is comes rocketing toward the sky. I watch it rip skyward, my head falling backward as the thing stretches five, then ten, then fifteen, then twenty—it isn’t possible!—stories into the sky.

  When the rumbling subsides I’m left starin
g slack-jawed up at a fantastical edifice, all dressed in glass, stretching higher in the air than anything I’ve ever seen. It’s like a solid cliff face, as steep and forbidding as the cliffs along the Hudson River at Sneden’s Landing. Here and there the glass cliff has lights, illuminated inside, and I spy other figures, outlines of furniture, the moving shadows of people just like the ones in the tenement a moment before.

  No one notices.

  The crowds along the avenue jostle by as busy as ever, unconcerned, unmoved, oblivious. A girl strides by with a baby in a sling on her chest, bare-armed. Some young men in plaid pants sidle by, their eyes hidden with dark spectacles. Appalled, helpless, I stand rooted to my spot, turning around, staring. A horse trots by pulling a carriage with two people who look down at me curiously, the man in a high hat and the woman in a bonnet, and then another trots by on its heels with two more people, unhatted this time, bare-armed, dressed in short pants both of them, one of them holding an odd box to his face. I hear a clicking sound come from the box as the horse clops past.

  I’m dizzy. I put my hands on either side of my head and squint my eyes closed. But they fly open again when I hear a loud blare, or honk, and on a puff of air another landau sails by inches from me, long and black and polished and also, incredibly, without a horse.

  “Help!” I try to scream, but my mouth is too dry and no sound comes out. I lean over, afraid I’m going to be sick. No one stops; no one pays any attention to me.

  “Help,” I whisper to the ground, hands on my knees, gasping for breath as hot tears stream down my face and throat and neck. My nose bubbles.