“Just stop. Please, stop.” She flung a bit of toothpaste against the mirror.
“I—”
“Stop! Goddammit, do you hear me?” she snapped. “You sound like a human grenade.”
We didn’t speak of it ever again. Soon, I went to boarding school. She went to France. One of us was looking to grow up quicker; the other was looking to stay young.
I stopped writing after that. I feigned outrage at my mother, yet I was secretly relieved. I knew, deep down, that I had no talent. It was the same way guests at weddings secretly knew the couple would be divorced within a year. I was incapable of writing anything non-autobiographical. No matter what I tried, the protagonist ended up being a tall brunette who secretly longed to be outside her own skin. Even when the main character was short and blonde, she was actually tall and brunette. I had read Nabokov and I had read Milton and I marveled at their ability to create characters that bore no resemblance to their own selves whatsoever. Were they geniuses in a world of losers? Or were there glimmers of themselves in even their most outlandish fictional creations? My father used to say that all protagonists were versions of the author who wrote them—even if it meant the author had to acknowledge a side of himself that he did not know existed. It just required courage.
My lack of literary talent was more a tragedy than a disappointment. The real problem was this: my father was in the grave, and I could do nothing to write him out of it. I had no sweeping statements to make about loss, or life, or their inextricable link. His death was not beautiful, and I couldn’t pretend it was. At the same time I knew that, untreated by art, his death would go unacknowledged. It would be flat, useless, real, and forgotten. And if there was anything I disliked, it was waste. I began to dislike every author who ever lived. Hemingway, Keats, Pinter, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tolstoy. Rumi, Euripides, Roth, Poe, García Márquez. Homer too, because The Odyssey was so long, and so good. These were writers who could take life’s biggest disasters and turn them into something beautiful and universal. They could repurpose abandonment and morph it into an enduring form of connection.
More than anything, I began to resent women writers. Burney, Austen, Browning, Shelley, Eliot, Woolf. Brontë, Brontë, and Brontë. I began to resent Emily, Anne, and Charlotte—my old friends—with a terrifying passion. They were not only talented; they were brave, a trait I admired more than anything but couldn’t seem to possess. The world that raised these women hadn’t allowed them to write, yet they had spun fiery novels in spite of all the odds. Meanwhile, I was failing with the odds tipped in my favor. Here I was, living out Virginia Woolf’s wildest feminist fantasy. I was in a room of my own. The world was no longer saying, Write? What’s the good of your writing? but was instead saying, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. And yet I couldn’t produce anything of value. Now that I could say anything I wanted, I had nothing to contribute. I was unable to take advantage of the intellectual emancipation for which my own ancestors had struggled so fearlessly. I had taken the freedom Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë and Mary Wollstonecraft had sent me, and thrown it right back at them.
For that, I knew I would never be forgiven.
I met Blanche Howard of the British National Bank on a cold Saturday in November, in a grimy café that looked like something bombed out of the Second World War. Blanche (pronounced Blahnche) introduced herself and we had a polite conversation about England’s cloud cover. Did I know that we were in for a dire winter? Her face was as pale as a shark’s belly.
We sat down, and Blanche placed an old, faded shoebox on the table in front of us. The corners were sealed shut with orange packing tape. I stared at the box and the box stared back at me. My heart began to pound and I thought for a moment that it might come ripping out of my chest. Could this be my inheritance? No—surely not.
Blanche ordered coffee. She had the translucent look of a middle-school boy.
“Forgive me for asking,” she said abruptly. “But did your father know he was going to die?”
I said, “I don’t think anyone plans on dying like that.”
“No, of course not,” she said without a blink of remorse. Her voice was brittle and high-pitched, just as it had been on the phone. It was what baby plants would sound like if they could talk.
“I ask because he came to England only a month before he died,” she said. “He visited Oxford, and then he visited our bank. He explained that he wanted us to deliver his estate directly to you, but only once you were here, at Oxford. He handwrote his will. Did you know that? It was almost impossible to decipher. Would you like to see it?”
“Not really.”
“I have a copy with me.”
Before I could protest, she reached into her purse and pulled out a sheet of laminated paper, which she held up for my inspection. I took it from her. Yes, yes, it was Dad’s illegible handwriting. His f’s looked like lazy treble clefs; his lowercase a’s were topless. Every bit of blank space on the page had been used and abused. The whole thing looked like a splat of black spaghetti. I caught my name here and there, but it was impossible to string together complete sentences. I glanced at Blanche.
She took a breath, then let it out. “You see my problem.”
“I see your problem.”
“I’m not sure whether he was trying to write poetry, or a will,” she said. “Perhaps they were the same to him? He gave us very few concrete statements. What we have managed to glean—and mind you, this required a not uncomplicated effort—is that if anything were to happen to him, he wanted you to receive this inheritance, but only if you were studying at Old College. How did he know that you would be at Oxford? And why, Samantha, did he suspect he would not be alive to give this to you himself?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t decide if it was a necessary question, or just personal interest at this point. I hadn’t the faintest idea why Dad assumed I would study at Oxford. I also didn’t know he visited it before he died.
The coffee arrived but Blanche didn’t drink any. She just held the cup in both hands and blew on it.
“Well?” she pressed.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He always used to say that Old College was the last place where you could still read the writing on the walls.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have no idea.”
Blanche let out a breath. “Your father was a secretive man, I gather.”
“He made a career out of it.”
She took an exaggeratedly petite sip from her cup. I put down my father’s will and adjusted my scarf around my neck, like a noose. I recalled many conversations he and I had had about college. Once, we had been sitting in his den, one of us eating cottage cheese and the other drinking whiskey, when he fixed me with his watery stare, told me to sit down (I was already sitting), and explained that traditional English schooling was the last beacon of hope in a world undone by soft American institutions. A brain only reaches its true potential through conflict, he said, the same way courage only finds its wings through necessity. He would have loathed the boarding school my mother had chosen for me. Blanston Academy only produced fragile, sensitive powder puffs like—I feared—me.
I turned back to Blanche. “It was the only school he ever did mention to me. I guess it was always at the back of my mind.”
“Did he ever attend Oxford?”
“He didn’t go to college.”
“But he must have at least been familiar with the colleges.”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
She took a notepad out of her purse, along with a plastic bag half filled with small chocolates.
“Do you see the signature at the bottom of the page?” she said. “Yes, that’s right—there. Your father had a witness present when he signed his will, as he ought to have done. It was a Miss”—she reached for her glasses and peered down at her notes—“a Ms. Rebecca Smith. Your . . . ?”
I frowned. “Former math tutor.”
“Ah,” she said.
“Former math tutor.”
She scribbled something on her notepad. Rebecca Smith was a name I hadn’t heard in years, and I didn’t welcome it. That name brought me back to an old and smelly place.
Blanche seemed to be waiting for an explanation, so I said, “Rebecca came on Wednesdays and Sundays.”
“I see,” she said. “Rebecca Smith is no longer at the address your father lists, nor does any Rebecca Smith ever seem to have lived there. Do you know where Rebecca Smith is at the moment?”
“She’s dead.”
Blanche raised her eyebrows. “How dead?”
“Pretty dead.”
She frowned. “I’m sorry.” She waited a respectable moment of silence before asking: “Is it difficult for you to talk about her?”
I let my silence speak for itself. My father simply adored Rebecca.
Blanche carefully selected a chocolate from the bag in front of her. Her thumb and forefinger looked like escargot snatchers—the small, pewter kind that came in fancy restaurants. She offered me one but I shook my head. She popped one like Advil.
“In case you’re wondering, this is what he left you,” she said, pointing at the shoebox.
I swallowed. “Yes, I wondered.”
“Before you open it, I’d like to ask you something else.”
“Go for it.”
“If you read the will carefully—or at all—you’ll notice that your father went to great, repetitive lengths to make sure that the contents of this box would remain private, and that it would be delivered to you in person. He didn’t want you to stumble upon it, do you see? At the very end, he scribbled one final note—look here—a footnote he seemed to have penned in a great hurry.”
I followed her gaze to the will. She was right. There was a slanted scribble on the right-hand side of the page. It looked like an addition an editor might make upon discovering a missing sentence.
“I can’t make it out,” I said.
“I believe it says, ‘And keep it all away from John.’ ” Blanche looked up. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“John Booker?” I asked.
Her eyes brightened. “You know him? Who is he?”
“He used to teach at Cambridge. Now, he runs the Brontë Museum, at the Brontës’ old home.”
“I will assume that he and your father did not get on well.”
“Take you me for a sponge?”
“Pardon?”
“That’s what Dad always used to say when Sir John came up in conversation.”
She paused. “I see.”
“He liked to call him a ‘huge hill of flesh.’ ”
Blanche blinked, then pushed her glasses to the edge of her nose. She wrote down something that was probably unnecessary.
“Did he ever try to contact you after your father’s death?” she asked.
“Sir John? Many times.”
“And?”
“I ignored him.”
Blanche’s eyes widened and didn’t go back to normal. I looked away, feeling strangely ashamed. Then, without another word, Blanche put a palm on the shoebox and slowly slid it across the table. I thought I saw a note of relief cross her face. The problem was now mine, not hers.
I was silent for a long time. I must have looked as agitated as I felt, because she sounded almost sympathetic when she said: “Why don’t you take a deep breath? This is only a box.”
“That’s what Pandora thought.”
“You look like you might be expecting a body.”
“Maybe. My dad spent his life resuscitating the dead.”
“Are you quite all right? You look ill.”
“I’m fine. This is just mourning sickness.”
She frowned. “You’re expecting a child?”
“I meant actual mourning sickness. You know, like getting sick from mourning?”
Blanche pursed her lips and for a moment she looked like a squid. I imagined what it would be like to come home to her every night, to boiled potatoes, three green beans, and a piece of cod, all arranged in an isosceles triangle on her plate. I envied her, in a way. This was her day job. She would return home and think nothing more about any of this. I took a deep breath and then let it out.
“Thank you,” I said. My voice cracked. “You’ve been kind. I’ll open this now.”
To my surprise, when I lifted the box, it was light as a coin. Was it empty? I used my keys to tear through the tape. It sounded like I was ripping into flesh. There was only one item inside: an old, tattered red bookmark. It had silver sequins and a small, glittery string coming out of the bottom. On it were the words Much Madness Is Divinest Sense, right underneath an unflattering picture of Emily Dickinson, who looked as though she had just accidentally stapled herself and was trying to appear cheery anyway. It was a relic of my childhood that I had not seen in years.
Blanche peered over the table, and her thin lips turned into a frown. “What does it mean?”
I said, “Oh, hell.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“His-and-hers bookmarks.”
She said, “Sorry?”
“Twins. He had the other.”
“I don’t understand.”
It grew difficult to speak. “Dad used to mark important passages in books I hadn’t read, then hide the books around the house for me as small surprises. I would find the book and his bookmark inside and know that it was a present from him.”
Blanche seemed alarmed, like I had announced an air raid. Her breath was coming quickly. “Your father went to all this effort to leave you a bookmark?”
I glanced at the old shoebox. I felt a painful constriction in my chest. My voice came out soft, and low. “I think he knew no one else would understand it.”
“Do you understand it?”
“Oh, hell.”
I felt ill. Really—very ill. Someone seemed to have punched a hole through my torso all of a sudden, and the rest of my body was flapping around the gap.
“Are you sure he didn’t leave me any money?” I said, looking up. “Like, cash money?”
“Quite certain,” said Blanche. “He was very much in debt. And—that is—he seems to have lost quite a bit in the divorce.”
“Yes, my mother is comfortable,” I said. “Did he, by chance, leave me any books? Agnes Grey, perhaps?”
“As I said—just the box.”
“Nothing else?”
Here, Blanche looked apologetic. “Even if he did own something else, I’m afraid your legal claim to it would be questionable, since nothing else was ever referenced in his will. This box—this bookmark—is all you have from him. I’m sorry, Samantha.”
I moved the bookmark between my fingers, watching Emily Dickinson go in and out of focus. I considered going to the newspapers and revealing the truth—that the Brontë estate had actually been manufactured in China—but I thought better of it. Reporters would only think I was hiding something.
Blanche said, “You look terrible. What is it?”
“Do you mind if I leave?”
“Pardon?”
“I mean, are we done here?”
“You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I’ll just go. Thank you for your time.” I gave Blanche the will and packed my things. When I stood up, I crashed into the chair behind me.
“Sorry about my manners,” I said. “I was raised in America. By wolves. And my father.”
“Samantha—”
I collided with a man in a top hat and then escaped the café into a world where everything was the color of cardboard.
Christmas Day, 2006. It was snowing. The tree was decorated with homemade ornaments, once edible and now stale. My mother had stormed out of the house exactly ten days ago, almost to the hour. The damage she had inflicted upon the kitchen door was still visible. Her exit was dramatic. I remembered her high, strained voice; I remember the echoes of myself sobbing hysterically, saying desperate and lonely things that I didn’t care to think of anymore. M
om hugged me so tight that it hurt, and then she was gone.
My father tried to explain their separation to me, but I already knew what had gone wrong. My father married my mother when she was a very young person—a very young person who would probably not have married him had she known him better. She did not understand that Tristan Whipple came with booze, books, Brontës, and weeks of unexplained absence when he mysteriously fled to England. She did not know on her wedding day that her husband would leave her. Not physically, of course. I think he just forgot she was in the house sometimes.
As I said, it was Christmas Day, 2006. My father had invited a guest over and it was not my mother. It was Rebecca Smith, my new tutor, fresh off the boat from England. She did not like traveling by airplane because it frightened her. This struck me as strange, because she was a teacher of math and used the word literally three times in a sentence. She thought that everything in life—homework, emotions, bath temperatures—could be solved with an algorithm. She once explained a bad relationship to me through a graph. The y-axis was intensity of emotion; the x-axis was time spent away from each other. She was brilliant, Dad had to explain.
He had known Rebecca for many years. They had met in England, when Dad was a young man. She was fifteen years his senior. Somehow, he had convinced her to become my overqualified algebra tutor. She was a visiting professor at Harvard and surely did not need part-time work, but my father must have been very persuasive, because for the next year and a half, she came over on Wednesdays and Sundays to teach me how to think of life as a giant graph. She was lovely, accomplished, and amusing, and my father liked lovely, accomplished, and amusing people. Rebecca enjoyed my father because they both liked cabbage and they agreed that true civilization had ended after the Peloponnesian War. Literally.
I remembered when we first met.
“My name is Rebecca,” she told me. Her voice was glossy.
I asked, “Like the book?”
“Like the name.”
“Do you know the book Rebecca?”
The Madwoman Upstairs Page 6
