Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders

by Julianna Baggott

  The judge raps her hammer, rolls her eyes at the defendant, and tells some woman on the verge of tears how stupid she is. I say to the judge, “You exist in a big box, all furry with dust.”

  I close my eyes and from the nearby ball field come the sounds of batting practice. Years ago, the bats hit the balls with satisfying cracks. Now their pings are hollow. Aluminum bats. I know that much even though I know nothing about baseball, really. My mother had gaping blank spots in her understanding of simple things. It was like being raised by an immigrant. Her understanding of history was spotty. She was missing basic geography—Nebraska?—and yet could talk about extinct animals that had lived in African jungles. She didn’t know any of the books I was taught in school, but she’d memorized entire poems by Yeats.

  If I’d had a father during those years, I might not have noticed my mother’s gappy grasp of the world. He could have filled in, provided a counterbalance. Maybe if I’d met my father, even briefly, everything would make sense. I was nothing like Harriet and so it stood to reason that I was exactly like my father. (A theory confirmed after I had Ruthie.) It was like growing up in a house without mirrors. Or no, not exactly. My mother provided a mirror of sorts, but when I looked into it, I never saw myself.

  I pick up a plastic SMTWTFS pill container that Ruthie bought for me on one of her many trips to the drugstore. S, M, and T are closed but empty. And so I figure it’s Wednesday. For some reason the row of hollow spaces reminds me of lined-up election booths, or no, something else: confessionals. How odd that election booths and confessionals are so similar.

  Harriet told me her own mother had been Irish Catholic—an O’Keeffe from Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin. Harriet didn’t miss going to church, but she said she missed the confessional, the way the close walls made her feel safe. And she liked telling the priest what she’d done wrong, although, she told me later, as a child, she lied about her sins. She never felt it was really any of the priest’s business. “I believe in God,” my mother told me. “The God in here.” And she tapped her bony sternum.

  We never belonged to a parish. But Harriet did take me to confession once while we were on vacation in Wildwood, New Jersey. It was strange to take a vacation in the first place, regardless of the confession. This was before my mother became a shut-in, but she had never liked going out anyway, much less so far away. A trip to Wildwood entailed hiring a car and taking a ferry.

  It turned out to be a plodding, bitter, stormy weekend in October. My mother and I walked the beach, our chins stiffly tucked to our chests, braving a tenacious wind and pelting rain. I’d never seen the ocean. Like the sky, it was gray. My mother tried to explain what it was like in summer, with women in bathing costumes, men selling bags of peanuts, the warm sun pinking people’s skin, the bright awnings of the boardwalk, the amusement rides, the hawkers in bow ties. I tried to imagine my mother having spent time there when she was younger. She claimed to have had happy family vacations, but she sounded more wounded than nostalgic. I liked the sand, the ocean, its unpredictability. It was angry about something, I was sure of it, and I appreciated its honesty.

  We stayed in our rental a few blocks from the beach most of the time, and my mother cooked for us over a small gas burner. Oceanfront places were available too, but Harriet said that she didn’t like the sound of the ocean—like it was clawing at her. If she sounded wounded and it was cold and she didn’t like the ocean, why had we come at all? My mother never said.

  On our last day we walked past a bar, and my mother clutched my hand. “My God,” she whispered. “Look.”

  In the window, there was the head of a lion. A real lion. Stuffed.

  “Who would do such a thing?” my mother said.

  “Hunters, I guess,” I said.

  My mother shuddered and then couldn’t stop shaking. I felt the tremor in her grip. She walked quickly. I asked where we were going because it seemed we’d walked a long way. She didn’t answer.

  Eventually she stopped in front of a church. Inside, confession was under way. It was midweek, an afternoon, busy. There were maybe three confessionals—six little curtains, for priests and sinners alike. People were waiting their turn in the pews. Before Harriet stepped inside, she let me peer into the confessional—just a small dark closet with a seat and a screen, little holes of light.

  She told me to sit in the nearby pews and pray. “I won’t be long.” After she walked in, she let me shut the curtain, a velvety thing that went scritch.

  I fiddled with a songbook in one of the pews and popped the kneeler up and down for a few minutes and then my mother came out crying, her hand covering her mouth. “Come on,” she said to me. “Let’s go!”

  I kicked the kneeler and shoved the songbook back into place, and each made a gonging sound that echoed. My shoes were too loud. Everyone was looking. My mother grabbed me by the elbow, and off we went out in the gray afternoon.

  Years later I went back to Wildwood once, with George.

  He was raised in New Jersey—Trenton, to be exact. When we were first dating, I told him I’d vacationed at the shore once, off-​season. A few weekends later, he told me to pack a bag. It was summer. He was going to take me on an overnight. He drove us to Wildwood. We pulled up at a seaside hotel, oceanfront. He said, “A little better now, right?” I’d remembered the place as gray and battened down, rainy, bleak—filled with old people. But that weekend, I didn’t relate the change to off-season versus summer. I related it to George. With my mother, the world had been gray and battened down, but with George all of that would change.

  We got light sunburns, our skin pink and taut and salty, and we stayed in a single room with two beds. I turned on the faucet in the bathroom so he couldn’t hear me pee. I didn’t have sex with him, though he pressed. Falling in love at thirty, I was a late bloomer like my mother, who’d given birth to me in her late thirties. I was already an old maid who took care of my mother, as I had been doing since I was eleven, when my mother stopped going out. I was a housewife before I was even a teen.

  George was my last chance, as I saw it. My mother had had one last chance, right? But that man hadn’t stayed put. I didn’t want to have this in common with my mother. I wanted a husband, a true escape. When I lay in the hotel bed that weekend, I watched George sleep.

  Ping.

  Ping.

  The pinging of the aluminum bats has intruded again. I close my eyes once more and see the lion head in the barroom window. I remember—very clearly—that the lion was wearing a bow tie right above its severed neck, and a top hat pinned down its mane. But most shocking of all was its expression—not ferocious, not wild. It wore the wide-eyed and wistful gaze of the lovelorn.

  Ping.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Killers

  Harriet

  For three years, Eppitt and I lived carnally. We were reduced to bodies. For me, it was a good thing to be a body, to be set free from the cage of my skull. When I think of this time, I remember my electric skin. I was always chilled or flushed or tingling—like a limb that falls asleep and returns with the uncomfortable needling rush of blood.

  Food was saltier, sweeter, tangier.

  This was still during the Great Depression, and so most wants were unattainable, but Eppitt and I were insulated from the Great Depression because of Isley Wesler and his invalid mother, because of mobsters and their need to hide things. Isley had us eating foie gras, partridge eggs, and perfumed puddings. With Prohibition over, we drank what we wanted and lots of it. Isley preferred homemade booze. We drove into western Maryland to buy liquor from homemade stills that had popped up during Prohibition, but now lingered based on reputation and to dodge taxes. “Hillbillies,” Isley said, “with high-end hooch.” He had a connection in Portugal too, and imported cases of Madeira, as well as plum wine from Asia, which he made us drink from eyedroppers. We tilted back our heads and opened our mouths.

  There were more parties—loosed doves and dancing. Isley rode through one
naked on a white stallion. He married a sixteen-year-old named Mabel at one of the quickie chapels in Elkton, Maryland, the place where, one day, my Eleanor and George and the girls, still little, would see a plane hit by lightning, the accident that would pull that family apart. When I hear Eleanor tell that story to the girls all these years later, I think of wedding parties falling from the sky, all those brides and grooms that once packed Elkton’s little chapels, an industry.

  Eppitt and I were Isley and Mabel’s witnesses. While there, Eppitt asked me again if I wanted to make it official.

  “It already is,” I said, but my greater fear was that we were registered, in some way, as morons. Morons weren’t supposed to marry and surely weren’t supposed to marry other morons and procreate. I couldn’t say this aloud, but maybe he shared my concerns or maybe he wanted to believe—as I did—that the pact we had made was pure and true. It was the best part of our childhoods. Getting married for real meant that the pact didn’t matter, and perhaps that’s what we didn’t want to admit.

  I should have claimed him. It could have made all the difference.

  After we made love, I would lay my head on his stomach and Eppitt would pretend to be my phrenologist. He ran his fingers along my skull’s ridges. “This is where you keep the girls’ laundry, where we met.” He’d rub the bump behind my ear and say, “This is where you’ve stored Mrs. Funk and Stump Cottage.” He’d rub my temples and say, “This is your genius. Locked away. You should let it out.”

  “To do what?” What good had being a girl genius done me? I had nothing to apply it to.

  “One day,” he said. “One day.”

  “And where are my memories of my mother?” I asked once.

  “Drilled into every bone,” he said because he knew it was true.

  “And where are you?”

  He was always found in the nape of my neck, that wee dip where the finest hairs wisped and fanned. He would kiss that spot and we would start again.

  I prayed for a daughter like Isley Wesler’s mother had told me to—probably because I wasn’t accustomed to maternal advice. I revered it without question. I prayed for a daughter so that I could have that mother-daughter relationship back again, here on earth. It was another part of our carnal life. I wanted to make a body with my own.

  This praying went on all three years. I didn’t tell Eppitt. I wondered if he knew that I’d been the one to save him from the operation, the snip-snip, performed on all of the other boys at the Maryland School. Did he know that I’d been spared the operations that the girls underwent? Or did he think I was sterile? I worried that Brumus had gotten him after all.

  And then, as I’d almost given up, the prayers worked. My period—so punctual and heavy—was late. It was still a hunch, not a fact. I was going to see a doctor before telling Eppitt, just to make sure.

  But then one summer night he came home from a hiding job with mud caking his thin-soled shoes and the hems of his pants. He poured himself a drink in the kitchen, slammed it down, and closed his eyes.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?” I asked.

  His eyes were glazed. He rubbed dirt from his hands. “I know more than I should,” he said. “My head’s too full now. What I hid, where I hid it. Years of it.”

  “You need a hot bath,” I said, even though it was a humid night. “Steam.” It had been prescribed for his lungs as a child. Maybe it would do him good again.

  I knew that he’d seen a dead body. I knew that he’d carried it through the woods somewhere. I knew this without his saying a word. I saw him in my mind’s eye, struggling with arms and legs, dead weight.

  I led him to the bathroom, started filling the tub. I took off his shoes, his shirt, and helped him with his pants. There was blood. Dried stiff, it had been hard to make out mixed with the dirt, but it had seeped through his pants and onto his skin, and once he was in the tub the water turned dark, tinged with red. Small churning rivulets twisted the way that blood does.

  He said, “If I’m not here one day and you need money, it’s there.” He pointed to the top panels of the bathroom door.

  “Stop talking like that,” I said. “Close your eyes.”

  “When I close them, I don’t like what’s there.”

  I wiped his face and scrubbed his head, his arms and legs. I drained the tub and refilled it. I wrung a washcloth over his back, the way my mother had with me. I sat on the tub’s edge and said, “We should have a baby.”

  “A baby?”

  “To replace what you see when you close your eyes.”

  “A baby,” he said. “That would be nice.”

  “But am I a little old to have a baby?” I asked, suddenly worried.

  “My mother had me in her forties.”

  “Oh, Cat!” I said, calling on the pet name I’d used for him under the Duck Porch. “After all those other babies, she was used to it!” I wasn’t ready to tell him that I thought I was pregnant—not till I was sure.

  He looked up at me and said, “You really want to have a baby? With me? Is that what you’re saying?”

  I nodded.

  He grabbed me around the waist and pulled me into the tub with him. The water sloshed up and over the lip. My clothes puffed and then clung to me. “A baby!” he said, and he kissed me. Then he laid his head back again. “A real live baby.”

  I put my head on his wet chest and wrapped the wet wing of my skirt over his legs. “Yes.”

  “I didn’t do it,” he whispered. “I was called in to hide it.”

  “I know,” I said. “Hush.”

  “The man weighed over two hundred pounds. There was so much of him.”

  “A baby only weighs six or seven or so,” I told him.

  MOBSTERS

  Eppitt arriving home covered in dirt and blood was a warning that we should have heeded. The next week, he didn’t arrive home at all one night. I was at the window when one of Isley Wesler’s cars pulled up. It was nearly midnight. A young redhead with bulky shoulders ran to the old house and eventually knocked on our door. I pulled it open.

  “Where is he?” I asked. “What’s gone wrong?”

  “Mr. Isley Wesler’s got a message.” The kid rubbed his right hand with his left, like he’d recently punched something and was trying to work out the ache.

  “Who are you? Where’s Eppitt?”

  “I’m Gerald.”

  “Okay, Gerald,” I said. “Get on with it.”

  “He’s in the hospital. Problems with some ribs and his jaw. He’s looked better. Mr. Wesler says he can’t stay in the hospital. He’s going to get him out and send him away. For his protection and yours.”

  “What happened?”

  “Mr. Wesler’s waiting in the car. He says you need to pack up everything. You got five minutes. I’ll drive you out. Eppitt will show up when he can.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Mr. Wesler’s setting you up. Don’t worry. But once you’re there, you can’t try to reach him or Eppitt. It’d be too dangerous. For everybody.”

  “Five minutes?”

  “Only four minutes now.”

  I looked around the apartment, panicked. Eppitt’s alive, I reminded myself. Jaw, some ribs—how bad could that be?

  “I’ll meet you by the car,” he said, and shut the door.

  I grabbed my old suitcase. I lifted clumps of clothes, hangers and all, off the rods in the closet and folded them up. I packed the photograph of us taken the night that I attended my first Isley Wesler party.

  Eppitt had held on to our marriage pact from 1913, but I wanted it now. I had tucked that pact and the one with my mother into the bed frame, as had been my habit in Norris Cottage. I got down on my knees and felt along the metal until I found one and then the other. I slipped both into the pocket of the suitcase’s silky lining.

  I ran to the bathroom and looked at the top of the door. The car horn sounded in the street.

  “I’m coming,” I muttered. “I’m coming.”


  I knocked on the two top panels. One gave a hollow conk, the other a heavy thunk. I pulled a chair to the bathroom door, ran my hand along its top, and felt a ridge. I pressed my hand along the ridge, and a ring for a handle popped up—the kind that Eppitt made for his homemade drawers. I hooked it with my finger and pulled out a box. I shoved it in the suitcase, which I buckled quickly and then hefted from the bed. I grabbed my pocketbook.

  The horn blared again.

  Isley was sitting in the backseat, drunk and propped up by his coat, which gaped around his collar. His tie was loose, shoved off to one side. Glassy-eyed, he stared straight ahead. I slid in beside him.

  “Have you seen Eppitt?” I asked. “Is he okay?”

  “It went wrong.” He slapped his own cheek, hard, as if trying to sober up.

  “Mr. Wesler,” Gerald said from the driver’s seat, “you want I should drop you off somewhere, or are you going all the way out?”

  “Igor’s,” he grunted. Gerald started to drive.

  I grabbed Isley’s arm. “What’s happening? Tell me.”

  Isley looked out the window. “Monies and whatnot went missing. These things belonged to people of influence. These people got very angry.” He scratched his forehead; his nails were trimmed expertly. He started to cry, but then he coughed, gripping the legs of his pants. I thought he might get sick, but then he straightened. “They turned on Eppitt. He was the only one who knew the hiding place.”

  “Eppitt wouldn’t steal from mobsters.”

  “Don’t say that word.” He glared at me. “Listen, they didn’t think he stole it, just that maybe he sold the information to some other interested parties.”

  “He didn’t sell the secret hiding place.”

  “Really? You know where he goes and what he does?”

  “I know him, and he wouldn’t,” I said.

  We drove in silence until Gerald said, “We’re here, Mr. Wesler.” He parked in front of a modest house in an elegant section of Baltimore.