For Melanie
• One •
I was thirteen the year everything changed with a single knock at the door.
It was a strong door, sturdy oak, the kind designed to keep the worst of the world’s elements outside while keeping safe the occupants on the inside. My mother was making the rounds of the neighborhood, as she often did on weekdays, preferring the use of her own feet to the carriage, while my father was no doubt at his club, regaling his friends with stories concerning the progress of the latest novel he was writing; born into great wealth, my father could afford to treat his career with leisure.
I don’t know where the servants were when that knock came. For surely it should have been one of their jobs to answer it. But as I sat on the floor of the back parlor, in front of the fire, my long skirts all about me on the carpet with the drawings I was working on spread out along the perimeters of those skirts, the knock came again, more insistent this time. I thought to ignore it—the self-portrait I was working on, showing my long dark hair off to best advantage, was really coming along too nicely to be disturbed! It was probably just one of my mother’s friends. Or perhaps it was one of the beggars who occasionally found their way to our front steps, quickly made short shrift of by Cook providing food we no longer wanted at the back. But then the thought occurred to me: what if it was something—however improbable—important?
With reluctance, I set down my charcoal pencil. Brushing off my skirts to straighten them as I rose, I made my way to the source of the knocking, opening the door just in time to see the caller turning away.
The caller’s back to me, from behind I made out the tall figure of a woman, so painfully thin as to make me want to feed her, her long gray dress bearing the stains of the elements we usually tried to keep out. Her hair, also glimpsed only from behind, was a naggingly familiar thick hank of gold that no amount of living hard could tarnish, nor could it be kept completely under control by the pins that sought to bind it up in a twist; the tendrils would escape, wisping their way onto the air. Both hands were gloveless despite the frigid day, and in one she carried a threadbare carpetbag.
“Can I help you?” I asked, catching her attention before she started away.
She turned slowly. At first, her eyes were downcast, but as she moved them upward to meet mine, there came a shock of recognition as I took in the familiar bright blue of her eyes and knew where I had seen that hair before. It was the same place I had seen that porcelain skin, although, I must confess, I had never seen it quite like this: with soot smudges on it. It was as though she had been cleaning out fireplaces herself and hadn’t a looking glass to consult before leaving her home.
I couldn’t prevent a gasp from escaping my body. “Mother?” I said, reaching a hand out to her. “What has happened to you?”
. . . . .
Of course, as it turned out, it wasn’t my mother who had come knocking on the door. Does not a child recognize her own mother?
“Is Aliese Sexton at home?” she asked, speaking in an accent reflective of her lower class attire, naming my mother and ignoring my gasp and what I’d said.
“No, she is not,” I said.
“I hope you won’t mind, then,” she said, slithering around me and into the entryway without so much as a by-your-leave, “if I wait inside.”
Shutting the door behind her—it felt good to shut out the cold—I turned just in time to catch sight of the surprise and surprising visitor taking in our vestibule. She nodded as her eyes swept across the soaring height of the ceiling, as though approving it, nodding a second time at the pink marble floor, a third time at the ornate hat rack with its mirrored back and bench seat.
I started to offer to take her cloak, as I would that of any visitor arriving in the winter—or as my parents or the servants would—but then I stopped myself short. Of course, she hadn’t a cloak.
“Would you like to leave that here?” I said, indicating the carpetbag she still clutched and pointing at the bench.
“If it’s all the same to you,” she said coolly, “I prefer to keep it close to my person.”
“Of course,” I said, trying to smile, trying to appear natural, trying to behave as I thought the adults I knew might behave in similar circumstances … as if there ever could be similar circumstances. “I don’t think Mother will be much longer,” I said. With a hand I gestured toward the front parlor. My drawing things, which I was missing now with that longing you have for safe objects when the world has turned confusing, were in the back parlor, but I couldn’t bring her there. That cozy room was for family, while the front parlor was for more formal visitors and was surely where my parents or the servants would have shown this woman. “Perhaps you would like to wait in here?”
She followed the direction of my hand, seating herself on one of the white silk sofas, her back ramrod straight, hands tightly clasped in her lap, her carpetbag so close to her legs it touched against the ankle of one of her worn boots. She did not change her position even when I called a servant to bring tea and the tray arrived, the servant barely containing her shock at the appearance of my guest. For my part, it surprised me that the woman did not take any refreshment, since I would have thought she would have accepted a cup, if only to hold something warm in her hands, which I could see now were chapped and raw.
I sat with my own teacup and saucer balanced in my lap, my legs delicately crossed at the ankle beneath my skirts, and it occurred to me for the first time: I didn’t even know her name! And yet how do you ask that of someone after you have invited them into your home and after you have offered them tea and a comfy seat in the front parlor? Do you say, “Oh, by the way, and what are you called and who might you be?” Just as odd, when I stopped to think about it, she hadn’t asked my name at the appropriate juncture either, and so that time had passed.
“I don’t think Mother will be much longer,” I said again, striving for a bright tone, while inside I was hoping my father would arrive first. My father, even if he had been drinking with his friends, would still be better equipped than Mother to deal with whatever …this was.
“I can wait,” the woman said. “I have waited for a very long time.”
And so that is what we did: waited, waited, waited in silence as the ornamental clock above the fireplace ticked away the seconds and minutes, eventually striking a new hour.
We both started at the sound of the front door opening, followed by heels tapping on the pink marble floor. I knew from the quality of the tapping that I had not been granted my wish; it was not my father’s step.
“Lucy?” I heard my mother’s voice call out, and I could picture her removing her gloves, followed by her wrap and finally the pins from her hat, which she would toss blithely at the rack, laughing if she missed the hook. I heard that laugh. “Where are you?” I heard her call to me. “I have missed you.” I could hear her step growing closer to the doorway, and I rose from my seat thinking to go to her, to warn her somehow first—although warn her of what exactly, I couldn’t say—but her energetic glide was too quick for me and as she blew into the room, the woman who had been seated across from me rose as well.
I stood between them looking from one to the other: the one who was dressed and coiffed in a way that showed she had every advantage in the world—my beautiful, gorgeous mother—and her mirror image, but dressed and coiffed far differently. I can say with near certainty that I am the only child in the world who can claim she was there the first time her mother met her twin.
My mother fainted dead away.
• Two •
My father was considered to be an exceedingly handsome man, having grown more so as he aged. I shared his coal black hair, although his curls were short while my mass stre
tched down to nearly my bottom when I let it, and I shared his dark eyes. Twelve years my mother’s senior, he had met her when she was in her seventeenth year. I had not, of course, been there to witness their first memorable meeting. But I had heard stories.
Both of my mother’s parents had died during my early years: my grandfather to a disease when I was an infant, my grandmother to a different disease when I was just three. I had no memory of the former, rendering him no more to me than a stern face in a portrait, but I had a few memories of the latter: long afternoons when Mother had me accompany her as she visited her own mother in her illness; my grandmother, even though sentenced to her bed, finding entertainments or trinkets with which to occupy me while she and Mother chatted away.
As for my father’s parents, they lived out in the country and only came into the city when there was absolutely no other choice. In truth, I found them to be rather stultifying people and far preferred to have them there than here. Besides, when they were with us, they had little to say of interest about the past, a subject that interested me greatly, save to say that my father had been an intelligent boy.
As if anyone had ever doubted that.
Since Mother was an only child, this state of affairs left only my father’s older sister, my aunt Martha, as a source of family lore. Aunt Martha, seven years my father’s senior, had never married and was as tall as her brother, which meant very. The graying black hair she wore coiled around her head like a nimbus made her appear just a smidgen taller; I suspect my father found this annoying. She had the lean look of someone born of far less affluent parents, and I often wondered how she could stand to live with those parents in the country, but then would remember that perhaps this was why she so often visited with us.
“The day we chanced upon your mother strolling with her mother in the park,” Aunt Martha would say, recalling my parents’ first meeting, “was a truly great day in my life. I had despaired of Frederick ever finding a woman to marry. Lest you think that no one would have him, on the contrary. From the moment he was out of britches, one female after another set her cap at him. And yet he was quite the choosy fellow. Any woman who became his wife had to be perfect. She had to be one of a kind.”
“And when he met Mother,” I would say eagerly, “she was that woman!”
“Yes,” Aunt Martha would agree. “Aliese was that woman. She was like a diamond pulled from one of those mines in southern Africa: the golden color of her hair, the cut of her figure, the clarity of everything she said.”
“And my father fell in love with her that very first day and told Grandmother he would make Mother his wife!”
“A month later they were married. It was astounding how quickly they planned it.”
“And my father put a ring on Mother’s finger.”
“Yes, the symbol of unity, in this case made of cobalt blue and diamond, fashioned into the shape of forget-me-nots.”
“Which Mother lets me wear sometimes.”
It was true. Mother gave me freedoms I couldn’t imagine any of the other mothers I’d ever met giving their own children. But then, Mother wasn’t like any other mother.
Whereas every other mother I’d ever encountered was eager to pass her children off to the nearest nanny, Mother looked forward to our time alone. Indeed, on sunny days, or beastly ones—Mother hated in-between days—Mother would send Nanny, when I was still young enough to have one, to help elsewhere in the house, taking my care upon herself.
Once we were alone, Mother would help me with my drawing. Better still, she would invite me to help her spin stories of things that had never happened but might be. Mother loved stories as much as my father did, but whereas all his stories found their way into and out of his pen, hers came straight from her mind to mine, twining together before I sent the stories back to hers. Best of all, Mother would encourage me to act out the stories we created together.
Her favorite thing to act out, and mine, was something we gigglingly referred to as “The Wedding Game.”
Mother would place her own wedding veil upon my head and give me her special wedding slippers to wear, although my feet swam in them. Then she would lend me her wedding ring, so that I might feel a complete bride. To finish the picture, she would run from the room, gliding downstairs to steal flowers from one of the vases. Heaven forbid that a bride should have nothing to carry. What would she do with her hands?
After humming a march as I processed across the nursery, Mother would lead me to her room, where she would stand me in front of her full-length looking glass so that our side-by-side reflections, so very different from each other, gazed back at us.
Her blue eyes meeting my dark ones, she would say, always using the exact same words, “Your hair may be a dark cloud, but no matter what the weather, on your wedding day the sun and stars will shine.”
And then we would dissolve into yet more laughter as we collapsed upon the bed she shared with my father, giggling at the silliness of it all.
• Three •
My father arrived home, entering the front parlor just as Mother was swimming back up to consciousness. If Mother had fainted in any of the number of ways that women usually faint, my father would have asked me what had happened to precipitate the event. But these were not normal circumstances. There was nothing usual going on here.
He need only glance from me, bending over Mother on her right, to the caller bending over her on the left. One look at the caller’s face, turning up to meet his at the sound of his tread, was all he needed to know immediately that these were very extraordinary circumstances indeed.
“Go upstairs,” he ordered me.
“But I—”
“Now, Lucy!”
I rose to my feet with as much dignity as I could muster. I could not believe I was being sent away. It was as though I were a mere child! Had I no right to know what was going to happen next? I lived here too, after all.
Still feeling the imperative to move with dignity, I forced myself to glide from the room and to the foot of the long curving staircase. My parents had lately tried to impress upon me the importance of gliding.
“A lady always glides,” Mother would say, prompted by my father to see to my deportment. “It should appear at all times as though a lady is floating across the floor. Only common women do something as vulgar as walk—or, worse still, stride.” She would of course tell me these things while wearing a good-natured smile upon her face, as was her habit, leading me to wonder how much stock she herself invested in such rules.
I had noticed one thing about the caller, in the few brief steps I witnessed her take: She didn’t glide. She walked. She strode.
And I had noticed something else, in the few brief moments when the caller and I had been bending over Mother’s prone form on the floor, before my father’s entrance: Transferring my gaze from one to the other repeatedly, I saw that I had not been mistaken in my earlier impression. The two women did indeed bear the exact same face. If the caller had more to eat, and cleaner clothes, she would be the image of Mother.
At the bottom of the stairs, I placed my booted foot on the first step, charging up them so that the adults below would be sure to hear the racket I was creating. What they could not know was that when I gained the top landing, I sat, removed my boots, and then crept back down the stairs on cat’s feet, stopping on the sixth step from the bottom so that I was close enough to hear but not close enough to be seen. It was a trick I had learned over the years, something I did when there was a party going on or when I thought my parents or other adults might be discussing something interesting.
I quietly seated myself on that sixth step just in time to hear my father saying, with all his authority, “Could you please tell me what your name is and what business brings you here?”
“My name’s Helen Smythe,” I heard the caller say, in a proud tone suggesting she was trying to force a dignity into her speech. “I came to meet my sister.” She paused. “My twin.”
It was odd.
These were the most words I’d heard her speak in the space of a minute since first setting eyes on her. And it was odd too because, once removed from the visual confrontation of seeing her face side by side with Mother’s, it was as though she had come from a different world. Her voice was so coarse, when compared with my memory of Mother’s lovely one, using a base contraction that Mother would never use—My name’s Helen Smythe—as though she could have been one of the servants helping Cook work in the kitchen.
I wondered if my father would question this Helen Smythe’s authenticity. He had long been fascinated with the story of Edward Rulloff, a thief, lawyer, doctor, murderer, and professional impostor who earlier in the century had been executed in New York, over in America.
My father was fascinated by the very idea of impostors, by the idea of people being something very different from that which they appeared to be, although I suspect his fascination did not extend to having one try to deceive him. Would he accuse Helen Smythe of being an impostor?
But no.
My father might have been given to arguing with his learned friends over the most trivial pieces of historical fact, but even he could not deny the truth his own eyes were seeing, the truth Helen Smythe had spoken.
Her face was her proof.
Now that he knew her name, he left off wondering about the precise nature of her visit, proceeding to:
“I must say, this is a fantastical thing … I cannot imagine … how did you come … you must tell me …” It was almost painful to hear my well-spoken father lose the sure-footedness of his speaking so, to stutter as though he could not put a complete thought together.
Apparently, Helen Smythe had mercy on him at this point, perhaps on Mother too, for she began with no preamble to tell her tale.
“My parents”—here she paused and I could imagine her looking meaningfully at Mother as she corrected to—“our parents were not really our parents.”
The Twin's Daughter Page 1
