by Lori Baker
Maybe it is the strange doubledness of her, the sense that she is simultaneously here, by the fire, and there, on board the Emerald Isle, that prevents me from speaking.
She has become an uncanny thing. A thing of two faces, and none.
And me? How many faces have I got?
• • •
My mother. Saying, Leo, I’m bored. Leo, can’t you make it stop staring at me?
While outside the window there is wind, hail. Hip, somewhere. Inside, the fire. The smell of Harry Owen’s cigar. The scratch of my father’s pencil.
But these things are temporary, illusory, a scrim through which may be discerned the shadow of her other life, the place where she really lives, the place she’d really rather be.
She doesn’t live here with us anymore. Even I know that.
She is a ghost.
She inhabits insubstantiality, makes ghosts of us all. My father is not real, the warmth of his body where I press against his back is an illusion, the curling hairs at the back of his neck are an illusion, the pencil he sketches with, the paper he sketches on, none of this is real; nor is Harry Owen, tapping his cigar and saying, enigmatically, Onychia platyptera, strange words that my father recognizes, nodding—not real.
Nor am I.
• • •
This is the effect of my mother’s presence, which is really an absence.
• • •
Harry, she says from her seat by the fire, stop talking about those stinky fish of yours, and tell me about London. Have you seen my Papa’s friend, Mr. Petrook? It is a very long time since I have seen Mr. Petrook. He never writes—he never sends. Has he forgotten about me, do you think?
The stranger’s whiskers stiffen into a fleeting expression of distaste, quickly and scrupulously hidden.
I haven’t seen Arthur in some time. He’s been traveling, I believe. You know how it is with Petrook. Always off after something or other.
Yes, says my mother. It’s true. He was always off after something or other, wasn’t he? Just like my Papa.
She falls silent, stares unhappily into the hearth. It’s like she’s been reminded, suddenly, of something she wanted to forget.
She reminded herself.
Harry Owen says, Ommastrephes sagittatus.
My mother grows translucent by the fire. Her fine, small hands, slender arms, white neck, diminutive bare feet, all these, already pale, grow paler, as if, in the moment of remembering what she could not forget, some further percentage of her has disappeared.
Is disappearing, while I watch.
They don’t notice. Neither one notices. My father draws. Harry Owen produces papers from inside his leather satchel. Bound and then unbound, lengthwise and crosswise.
• • •
She is lit from within. Staccato of firelight falling not on but through her. Glass in the crucible at 2,500 degrees. Her substance is elsewhere. On the deck of the Emerald Isle she turns away from Whitby. Finally she faces the sea.
Does he hear from my Papa, do you think? Does my Papa write to Mr. Petrook, and not to me?
This makes them look. They don’t want to, but now she’s left them no choice.
My father says, gently, No, Tildy, he doesn’t write.
He is a kind man. He doesn’t say, Felix Girard will never write to anybody, ever again. Even though that is what he thinks.
Deep unease of Harry Owen. Nervous tamping of tobacco. Shuffling of papers.
I think I will write to Mr. Petrook myself, says my mother, and find out.
My father says, in a mild tone, As you wish.
All the time his pencil is moving.
• • •
How can he not know that my mother is disappearing?
Bit by bit. Another piece missing. She is at sea already.
It is my fault, perhaps. I don’t tell him, even though I should. I press slightly against my father’s back.
• • •
She says, Mr. Petrook will tell me where my Papa is.
It is possible she may be smiling. In the glare of the firelight it is hard to tell.
She says, Mr. Petrook will not hold back the truth.
My father, still mild, continuing to draw. Nobody is holding back the truth, And then to Harry Owen: We can go out to the Scaur when it clears. There are some interesting shale formations I’d like to show you …
Harry Owen, stiffly formal, with great rigidity of whiskers: I’d be very interested to see those. I’ve read Young on the Whitby shales, of course, but I’ve never had the chance to examine them myself.
He is frightened of my mother: of her beauty, of her mockery, of her unhappiness. He won’t look at her. My father won’t either. They’re both afraid. They’re hiding, one behind his paper and pencil, the other behind his whiskers.
Me, too, I am also afraid. But I do look.
She sees me looking. Doesn’t like it.
Carlotta, she says, why aren’t you in bed?
• • •
Away from the fire I feel how cold the house has become. Clatter of hail on the red-tiled roof.
My mother’s voice follows me up. The Scaur? That awful, ugly place? Oh, Leo, must you really? Poor Doctor Owen …
While Harry Owen says: But you don’t understand, my dear. I want to go! After we’ve reviewed the specifications for the new models, of course …
Oh, of course!
• • •
Jingle of harness, later, informs me that he has departed.
My mother, on the stairs: He’s checking up on you. Spying.
• • •
To this, my father says nothing. What can he say?
• • •
I wonder does she know what he’s doing out in that shed instead of making the glass ocean that he’s promised Harry Owen. Does she know about the things he’s taken, Thomas Argument’s gifts to her which have gone, or those other objects, my father’s carefully wrapped, tenderly cosseted secrets? Does she feel, without being able to identify it, the sense of herself diminishing? Of something being taken away, somewhere beneath her notice? Is that why she’s decided to leave us? So as to make the choice herself, which parts of her will stay, and which will go?
• • •
I am surprised I haven’t noticed this before, my mother’s doubledness, the way the light falls through her. Through the shadow that both is and is not her. She is like an image in a kaleidoscope, bright and scintillating fragments coming together, falling apart, beauties and monstrosities forming and reforming, combining, breaking, fleeting away.
• • •
I don’t think she knows. I think she’s a secret to herself. As are we all.
• • •
In the morning, early, Harry Owen returns, bringing with him harness jingle and whip of wind bearing stinging bites of cold rain, dry rattling dead leaves that pry like fingers along the jointures in the stone floor, heavy scent of sea stink and brine. Various pieces of gear enter with him as well: heavy oilskin boots, thick coats, gloves, collector’s bags, pick and hammer for each, coils of rope, all paid for by the benefactor, she who by her own account has been, by my father’s work, taken. As one might be taken by an illness. Swept up in a gale. Except this thing is a good thing. There is talk of boats, expeditions, all paid; this frightens me, the ocean is no comfort, a scaled and horned and scornful thing in my imagination now, slithering at the foot of the cliffs, murmuring low and constantly of distances long, black, impossible to imagine.
Harry Owen says, We shall go out together in the spring. There is a great deal of money.
Spring: this, too, is difficult to imagine, with the Whitby winter pressed so hard upon us.
My mother stands helpless before the influx, golden braid slack on her shoulder, mug of tea pressed between cold hands.
I’m not coming with you. I won’t come, Leo.
This being evident regardless. She is undressed but for a moth’s wing of nightgown, shivering by the fire. And anyway, they have not
asked her.
But nor does she ask him, to remain.
Instead she and I remain together, in the cold and empty house, while they head off to the Scaur, to examine the shales.
I have a new unease with her, it is like being left behind with a stranger who both is and is not my mother. Doppelgänger. Simulacrum. She: present and absent both at once; I: wishing only to be absent, free of the Birdcage and its accumulation of secrets, dead bodies, its low, uneven ceilings and canted walls and doors jammed shut, the sooty sparking closeness of the fire.
This is easy. She will not object.
• • •
But once free and out in the street I find myself overwhelmed by the conviction or fear that she has gone already, ceased to exist, perhaps, absent the gaze of my formative eye, as if it is I who create and uncreate her; I want to run back and check, then, just to make sure she hasn’t left us, to make sure she still exists, but I remember Hip, She’s golden, ain’t she, your Ma? She’s golden, that furtive, half-shy grin, and there is a click, something changes, it’s like the closing of a door I won’t let myself go back and open, no matter what.
• • •
Hey, Red! Over here! Walk my way, why don’cha?
• • •
I am used to it by now, early, the cold out in the street. Even the market is not yet thriving, the Emerald Isle, down below in the harbor, drowsing on her tether, is unaware as yet of having a role in our small drama; all is cold, silent, still. I look for Hip but I cannot find him, not in any of the usual places or even the unusual, not around the market stalls or the Punch and Judy in Grope Street or the burned-out house at the top of the hill or the stables in Highgate; Whitby is empty of him; he has gone off, perhaps, to please his master, fetch and carry, or some other impossibility. And so I idle about, observing for a while the steaming breath of ponies, then peering in shopwindows at goods I will never have sufficient funds to buy.
• • •
Ain’t you cold, girlie? Want to warm yerself, don’cha?
• • •
This the hawker of chestnuts, gloved hands splayed over hot brazier.
There is none of this in the new world; it is an altogether warmer place, though I don’t know yet that this is in my future, cannot possibly imagine the skitter of lizards around my skirts, or the ancient black sickle of the man-o’-war bird, drifting aloft on high, blue currents of air, or even my raven companion, she who enters at the screen door and tells me it is time to go; all this is yet to come; what I have now is my forehead pressed painfully against cold plate glass, fog of my own breath blinding me like angel’s wings, and the bubble of foreboding lodged beneath my sternum. I can neither belch it up nor swallow: feel myself choking. Drowning in it.
• • •
Ain’chew cold, girlie? Wants to warm y’self?
• • •
In the end it becomes too bitter, I have to return home. All the way across the bridge I imagine the empty house, the vacancy where my mother used to be, this is pain and pleasure both and so compelling that I do not linger as I would, usually, to look at the dark, indistinct things looming beneath the surface of the Esk, too turbulent ever to freeze, but hurry instead in dread and anticipation, undignified as ever on my long legs, imagining the abandoned spinet, the empty chair, the vacant mirror, she gone, self and shadow both. Yet when I arrive she is as always in the parlor before the fire, and though I look for it her transparency is no longer evident, she has disguised it, pulled close her veils, except there is a slight blurring around the edges of her, a softness, which may be smoke or the frost on my eyelashes or something else—I don’t know what. I was so convinced she would be gone I can’t believe she is there, it takes me a moment to realize it, and then I am either disappointed or relieved, it is unclear which. In this way I am a mystery to myself.
My father and the stranger, Harry Owen, are there as well, beaten back off the cliffs early by the cold. Nobody but the stranger looks up when I enter: I am not invisible to him as yet. Immediately he asks if he can measure me.
This peculiar request brings no reaction from my parents, my father intent on his newly collected rocks, my mother staring broodingly into the fire, as if she has lost something and thinks she might find it there, so, shrugging off my coat, I accede.
He measures me gently, with a piece of string. The circumference of my skull first; then the lengths of my arms, in separate measures: wrist to elbow; elbow to shoulder. Then my legs: ankle to knee, knee to hip. Measures each of my feet. My hands, each of my fingers. He is so clinical it is impossible to find anything improper in his touch, which is light and dry, like paper, though, too, I can feel his warmth, his tweediness, can smell his cinnamon and tobacco, can hear, even, the intimate, measured ticking of his pocket watch almost as if it is his heart tucked away safely beneath his waistcoat. Carefully he makes note of all my measures. He can rebuild me now, if he wants. Replication is possible.
He says, Remarkable!
This is because I am a giantess, not out of any other type of longing, or desire, or admiration.
Those belong to my mother, all of them, always. She is not sharing with me.
Indeed, it seems she will not allow me even this, for as if his remark has alerted her to my presence she emerges suddenly from her reverie, blinks, sees me, and says, Carlotta, run to the bake house and buy me a loaf.
And so I am out again, into the cold.
• • •
Outside I feel lighter, relieved of a burden. It was not just the heat from the fire, or the tightly packed, tensile warmth of my grandfather’s creatures pressed close around us, threatening to spring.
It was, is, something else altogether.
• • •
Weight of secrets, drawing us downward. Stones in our pockets. That is what I think, passing again, at my mother’s bidding, above the murmurous river.
• • •
In the night it snows. The stranger returns to his room at the Bird in Hand; but in the morning it clears, and so he returns, early, before it is light.
They will attempt their expedition again.
My mother says:
Take Carlotta with you.
I am both too surprised and too delighted to respond to this unexpected largesse; but then my father says, No, she can’t go out. It’s too icy.
My mother scowls and turns away. But really there is nowhere else for her to turn; there is only this one place, these people; so she turns back.
My Papa used to take me with him on all his adventures, she says.
But nonetheless: It’s dangerous. She could fall.
So I am left behind again. My mother and I watch, together, from the parlor window, as my father and Harry Owen emerge, heavy with gear, onto Bridge Street. It is a white morning, bright with ice, Harry Owen and my father black figures upon it, dark, moving hieroglyphs upon a stark field of white crosshatched with shadows.
The ice is bright from within, like hot glass emerging from my father’s furnace. Yet this light is confusing, because it has no clear source. I watch as my father and Harry Owen cross the bridge, grow distant. My mother says, yawning, It’s too early. I’m going back to bed. The moth’s wing of her gown brushes against me. She is a stranger again in the strange cold light, the ice light. Her face is altered. She isn’t really here. She has already boarded the Emerald Isle, awaits, impatiently, the moment of casting off.
She says, Find yourself something to do.
Then she goes up, round the spiral. I do not follow. I am left alone in the parlor, with the ticking of the clock, the soft hiss and spark of embers in the grate.
Recalling the bitterness of the day before, I decide I will not go out. I will find myself something to do.
This is easy, in the Birdcage. The general deterioration, the softening of order, the laxity—the boxes half unpacked, overspilling with Felix Girard’s creatures, the papers scattered everywhere, the books, the journals, the crumb-laden plates, the discarded
clothes, on the dining table, on the chairs, on the floor—there is opportunity in this. There is a box I’ve had my eye on. Inside it I find a collection of sea fans, their brittle labyrinthine branches separated and preserved between thin sheets of crumbling paper on which someone (my grandfather?) has written:
Gorgonians. Holoxonia.
They release, as they emerge, a shower of sand, broken fragments of fragile coralline limbs, scent of brine, of rot, of sea. I spread them carefully on the floor. They form a delicate two-dimensional forest, a fading peacock’s tail of pink and red, violet, yellow, orange. Some are very tall; all are very flat, rigid, skeletal; the hard, dry bones of something once vibrant and alive. Gently I trace a path with my finger along their tangling, interwoven copse, then walk it in my mind: a path along a seafloor dense with shrouded things, hidden detours, forbidden turnings, movements sensed rather than seen; scuttle of claws, flash of fierce, cold eyes …
• • •
I am awakened, abruptly, by the slamming of a door: tumult, footsteps on the stairs, a man’s unfamiliar voice roaring, Are you ready, Tildy? Then: Oh, hello. Who are you?
He stands and stares at me, long-legged gangling thing that I am, sprawled out half-asleep on the floor: a yellow-haired man, young, leonine, with a large, proud mustache, ruddy, ripe, almost womanly lips, camel overcoat bearing the raw, snowy scent of outdoors, long, pale, womanly hands. On his left pinkie he wears a gold ring set with a tawny flashing stone.
My mother says, Oh, that’s just Carlotta.
She has come downstairs in her traveling suit, the short, sharp jacket of grey velvet lined with red, the trim, gunmetal-grey skirt, the petite black boots, the soft, narrow, calfskin gloves, which she adjusts over her slender hands; her hair is bound up tight beneath a blue hat trimmed with a trailing black feather.
