An Inconvenient Wife

by Megan Chance

  “Everyone must be quiet,” he said, keeping his gaze on Julia, who blushed beneath it. “It cannot work if you aren’t.”

  “Silent as the tomb,” Leonard said, putting a finger to his lips, and there were nervous giggles and a few hushes. When the room was quiet, Victor began.

  I had only ever been the victim of that gaze, and I watched with a kind of repulsed fascination as Victor took Julia’s thumbs in his fingers and began to speak in a quiet, singsong voice. “Look at me, Julia, and think only of going to sleep. How you long for it. How good it will feel to close your eyes. Your eyelids are growing heavy. Heavier. Your eyes are very tired.”

  Julia’s eyes began to redden.

  “Yes, that’s it. Your eyelids are flickering, your eyes are watering. Your vision is blurring. You want to close your eyes. Sleep is all you long for. Yes, close your eyes.”

  Her eyes were tearing now. When he said the final words, she closed her eyes in obvious relief. I had known that relief once, the first time he’d put me into a trance. Since then, I had never needed such a ceremony. My fingers curled about my wrist. There was a murmur from someone, quickly hushed. Victor did not take his gaze from Julia.

  “You will no longer feel anything. Your hands are motionless, you see nothing more. You are sleeping. Sleeping.” His voice trailed off in a whisper.

  “That was remarkable,” Leonard said.

  “Quiet, Len,” Alma ordered.

  Victor released Julia’s thumbs. They fell lax into her lap. “Now,” he said, “I am going to raise your arm. It will stay frozen in the air. No amount of strength will move it.”

  He raised Julia’s arm until it was outstretched, so the candlelight shimmered off the purple silk of her sleeve. The sinews in her arm were pronounced; her hand was rigid. Gently Victor tried to move it. It did not budge. He turned to Leonard. “Would you care to try?”

  Leonard swallowed and nodded. He came forward and pushed on Julia’s arm. “It’s solid as a bar,” he said in amazement.

  “You may use all your strength,” Victor told him.

  Leonard put both hands on Julia’s arm and tried to lower it. It did not waver. “My God,” he said.

  “Does one of you ladies have a pin?” Victor asked.

  “Yes. Yes, of course.” Alma reached into her chignon and pulled out a bejeweled hairpin that glittered citron and amethyst. She put it in Victor’s hand.

  “You may lower your arm now, Julia,” he said, and she did so. He took her hand and turned it palm up. “You will feel nothing,” he said, pressing the pointed end of the pin into the soft center of her palm, hard enough that it made an impression. She didn’t move.

  “What else can you make her do?” Leonard asked.

  Victor handed the pin to Alma, who stood staring as if it held some magic power. He sat back in his chair and said to Julia, “Rise and open your eyes.”

  Julia stood obediently.

  “Walk.”

  She walked, neatly avoiding the chair, crossing the room as if she could see everything within it. I began to feel strange, as if it were me Victor was putting through the paces.

  “You can’t go any farther,” he said, the tone of his voice never wavering. Low and smooth, with a rhythm that held us as spellbound as Julia. “On the table beside you is a glass of wine. You will drink it.”

  There was no table beside her, but Julia reached out. Her hand curled around an invisible glass. She raised it to her lips. Swallowed.

  “You’ve had your fill of it,” Victor said, and Julia put the glass down. “Now you will return to your chair and sit down. When I count to three, you will awaken. When you do, you will hear the sound of a violin coming from the beach.”

  Julia moved back to him. She sat down, calm and still, and Victor counted slowly. “One. Two. Three.”

  She blinked. She saw us watching her and flushed deeply.

  Leonard clapped his hands. “Bravo, Victor. That was truly remarkable.”

  But no one paid attention to him. We were all watching Julia as she tilted her head. “Do you hear that?” she asked, rising, going to the window. “Why, it sounds like someone is playing a violin on the beach.”

  Victor sat back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. He smiled smugly while the others oohed and aahed and crowded around him, and it was clear he enjoyed their adulation. I looked at Julia, who had turned from the window with a frown. Our gazes met, and I felt hollow and alone. I remembered a walk in the woods, a singing bird.

  “There’s no violin,” I said softly to her, and her expression cleared. She nodded and went again into the dining room, to where her glass of wine—a real one this time—waited. She took a long swallow.

  I heard Leonard ask, “Can you do that to anyone?” and Victor’s assured assent, and then a chorus of “Oh, I’d like to try” and “Put me to sleep, Victor” and “No, no, it’s my turn now.” I turned away from it all, bedeviled in a way I couldn’t explain. I went out the screened door and onto the porch that looked over the darkness that was the sea. The moon was slight. I could see the crests of waves, dimly white and ghostly, floating, disconnected. From somewhere came the scent of roses.

  That night, as we walked from the carriage house around to the porch, Victor caught my arm, stopping me before I climbed the stairs. “You seem quiet tonight,” he said.

  “I’m a bit tired.”

  “You’ve said nothing about dinner.”

  Sadie had lit a lamp that beckoned from the window. It cast Victor’s face in shadow, but I could see the avidity of his stare, how hungry he was for praise. I said, “You were quite a success. I think they all love you.”

  “Yes,” he said with satisfaction. “Did you hear how they all begged for it? Two minutes before they had called it mesmerism.”

  “They couldn’t know the difference,” I said dully.

  “I had to show them it was a true science. They didn’t believe.”

  “Now they do.”

  “Yes, now they do,” he said. I felt his excitement. We went up the stairs, and he pressed me against the wall near the door and kissed me. “They’ll know now,” he murmured into my mouth, and my sense of disconnectedness fled. I felt again the passion I always felt for him, the longing so intense it took away doubt as he lifted my skirts and plunged his hands beneath them, holding me in place, taking me there on the porch while the sea rushed onto the beach beyond.

  Chapter 22

  Victor became a luminary in Newport. He was invited to the Reading Room, the exclusive men’s club that William had spent most of three years trying to join before they accepted him last summer. Women could not get past the first step onto the large piazza without encountering a clubman, so I only heard about how Victor entertained them, how he made Gerald Fister attempt to light his cigar with a stem of mint from a julep, and how even Cornelius Vanderbilt had clapped him on the back and asked him to attend one of their parties. When we went to the Casino to listen to the orchestra, he was surrounded by those who wanted to be turned into trained monkeys, and every supper we went to ended with a display of hypnotism. Even Millicent had taken her turn on the chair, exclaiming when she woke over how loud the military band on the porch was—where had it come from?

  Victor had told me in the past how hypnosis was not successful on everyone, and to others only to a certain degree. I noticed how carefully he chose—Julia, whom he had hypnotized before; Leonard, who wanted it so badly he would no doubt pretend even if Victor could not take him into a trance; Gerald, who accepted with alacrity anything that made Alma happy. But never me. Victor never put me into a trance before a crowd.

  It was mid-July already. The sky was clear blue and cloudless, and the mornings came humid and hot, so we woke often before dawn, bathed in sweat, to open the windows, and we kept them open far into the night. Even the water felt warm when we swam.

  We began to live for the night, for the suppers we went to and the ones that we increasingly hosted together. William had not
visited Seaward for the last two weeks. He would come on the fourteenth to spend a week, but he was busier than ever. He sent his love, along with the invitations to our ball for me to address, and hoped that Victor was not monopolizing my time.

  Victor threw himself into the entertainments, and these scenes played anxiously about my mind. I did not like the game hypnotism had become; it made too little of my own experience. I did not like seeing how easy it was for Victor to make a fool of someone. I began to wonder about the control he had over my mind. Though I was uneasy and fretful, my passion for him had not abated. If anything, it had grown, so my fingers itched for him constantly; I grew less discreet. Occasions like the one on the porch grew more frequent—once on the beach, along the seawall; once in the carriage house, while David was outside washing down the landau; once midday in the little rose bedroom that had been mine, with his papers crumpling beneath me and Sadie moving around downstairs. I searched for ways to bind him to me, because my own doubts plagued me. I did not like my feeling that the Victor I knew was changing into one of the tricksters he claimed to despise. I wanted his hypnotism play to stop, and I told myself it was because I feared for him: I knew how soon people’s affections could turn, how the newest entertainment passed so rapidly into the next. How much longer before hypnotism bored them the way phrenology had? But the truth was that I didn’t like the intrusion of my own reason; every time he put someone in a trance, I was reminded of the control he must have over me.

  I thought Victor must sense my uncertainty, but he said nothing, though I often found him staring at me as if he could see into my thoughts.

  Early one afternoon, two days before William was due to arrive, Millie came to call bearing rolls of wallpaper and swatches of fabric and chunks of marble. I welcomed her with a smile, but those things only reminded me of the pile of invitations on my desk, ready to be sent out, and of the huge mausoleum that I would be returning to, of William’s expectations.

  She knew this, of course. Perhaps it was part of the reason she’d come. As she laid a chunk of pink Italian marble next to one of sparkling marbleized granite, she gave me a sideways glance and said, “I wouldn’t have brought them all this way, but I do need help choosing, and I thought since you’ve so recently been through this yourself . . . Oh, and Lucy, wouldn’t this pink look lovely in your new foyer?”

  “William has already decided on something,” I said.

  “Oh? What is that?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  She gave me an odd look, and then her glance went beyond me to where Victor was idly glancing through rolls of wallpaper. “You didn’t help him choose?” she asked me.

  “William has his own ideas for the house,” I said. “My opinion hardly matters.”

  “Really?” Millie stepped away from the marble samples. “But you went to Goupil’s so often this spring.”

  I had to turn away as a burst of bitterness came upon me. “He didn’t like my choices. He particularly disliked the Gérôme.”

  “Oh? Well, you knew he would. He did say landscapes, Lucy.”

  I saw Victor’s shoulders tense. I wondered what he thought Millie was saying, why it mattered to him. When I looked back to Millicent, I saw she had followed my glance, and her own expression was assessing, faintly worried.

  “In any case, Charles says he drove by your new house the other day, and it looks nearly complete.”

  I thought of the walls looming against the sunset, the dark stone, William’s enthusiasm, and I nodded, fingering a swatch of multicolored tapestry. “I’ve invitations to send out for the opening. William wants a grand ball.”

  “How wonderful. Alma Fister was saying the other day that jewels would make such an elegant supper theme. Can you imagine? A pearl supper or an emerald one. Which would you choose?”

  I felt the dull start of a headache. “William’s planned something already. I have no idea what it will be.”

  “William?”

  “He’s much more dedicated to the house than Lucy is,” Victor said. His interjection was so out of turn that both Millie and I went silent.

  “It’s true, you know, Millie,” I said. “Victor is only saying what we already know. I prefer the Row.”

  “I know that was so once. But I’d thought—”

  “I’d rather be here at Newport.”

  “Perhaps you won’t feel that way once the house is finished.”

  “I cannot imagine.”

  “Lucy,” she said. She bent close, as if she did not want Victor to hear. “You should at least feign interest. No one will understand why you care nothing for it. And William has been so good to build it for you.”

  I stepped away from her. “He’s built it for himself, Millie.”

  She frowned. “But I thought—” She glanced again at Victor. “You said your doctor had worked miracles.”

  I worked to keep from looking at Victor. “He’s quite brilliant.”

  “Yes.” She said the word slowly, as if by lingering she could make herself believe it.

  Victor straightened from the rolls of wallpaper and came over to us. “You seem skeptical, Millie,” he said.

  Millicent fingered the small gold dragonfly at her collar. “You must forgive me if I speak bluntly. It’s just that I’ve known Lucy for so very long, and these last years have been so difficult for her. There have been so many doctors, and none has effected a cure. I’m happy that she feels so much better, but it seems so closely tied to you, Victor, that it gives one pause.”

  He smiled his charming smile. “I’m simply Lucy’s guest for the summer. It also happens that I’m a doctor, so I’m available to help her should she require it.”

  “Victor specializes in nervous disorders,” I said. “He won’t say it, but I know you’re already aware that Victor is more than my guest. He’s the doctor I’ve been seeing—the one I told you about—and he’s been most kind to stay here with me this summer.” As I spoke, I touched Victor’s arm.

  Millie’s gaze went to my hand. “Your doctor,” she said softly. The doubt did not leave her expression as she looked at Victor. “You must truly be a genius, then. No other doctor has been able to help her.”

  “No other doctor has bothered to understand her,” Victor said. “None of the others have been trained in neurology.”

  “Neurology?”

  “The study of the mind.”

  “Ah. You’re an alienist, then?”

  “I’m a scientist,” Victor said. “Unlike most alienists, I’m not concerned with asylum problems but with the true understanding of the brain and nervous system.”

  Millicent did not look enlightened. She seemed impatient, even angry. She said, “Would you mind, Victor, if I had a word with Lucy alone?”

  “Certainly not,” he said, but he was slow to leave.

  Millicent waited until he was gone, then drew me to a corner of the room, next to a potted fern, as far from the doorway as we could be.

  “I know what you say, Lucy, but there’s something more here,” she whispered urgently. “It’s only a matter of time until everyone else sees it too.”

  I frowned. “What are you talking about? He’s my guest for the summer. It’s not at all unusual. Look at Leonard Ames—he spent all of last summer with Alma. No one questioned it.”

  She shook her head. “This is not the same as Leonard Ames with Alma Fister. Victor is no charming, harmless bachelor, Lucy, and you are too attached to him. You’ve hosted dinners together; he hovers around you as if he can’t bear to leave you alone, and you’re no better. You watch him constantly. People have noticed.”

  “You’re being ridiculous, Millie.” I backed away from her, loosing her hand.

  “I’m not, and you know it,” she said. “I remember when you were a child, Lucy. You’ve always been so passionate about everything. Too much so. Once you found something to engage you, you grew too involved. Nothing else mattered. I see it happening with him. You must send him away before everyon
e else sees it. They’ll destroy you, Lucy. You’ve already caught their attention. You’ve changed, and they’ll blame him when they see—don’t you understand?”

  “He’s my doctor, Millie. Nothing more,” I insisted—a little too desperately, I thought, and she noticed that too.

  “Perhaps not yet,” she said thoughtfully. “But I know you, Lucy, and I see what’s happening, if it hasn’t happened already. Send him away. Please. Don’t ruin yourself or William.”

  “But I’m so much better.”

  “There are other doctors. It’s unhealthy the way he controls you. It’s as if he has you under his spell.”

  Her words shook me: They mirrored my own thoughts. “That’s absurd,” I said, though I heard my lack of conviction.

  “I’ve seen what kind of power he holds,” she said. “I’ve seen what he does.”

  “That’s simply medicine.”

  “No it’s not.” Millicent grabbed my arm again, pushing me into the fern so its fronds brushed my shoulder. “Give him up.”

  The very thought made me ill. “I won’t. I’ve found my life again. He’s shown it to me. I’m happy for the first time in years.”

  “Happiness is not the most important thing. If we all did as we pleased, where would the world be?”

  “I’m done caring about the world. It’s time I started caring for myself.”

  “And it’s you who will pay the price when this turns into what I suspect it will,” Millicent said. “Or perhaps I’m too late. Perhaps he’s already your—”

  “My what?”

  Her face hardened. “Don’t be a fool, Lucy. You’re my friend, I don’t want to see you hurt.”

  “I won’t be hurt,” I said.

  She stepped back and sighed. “Lucy, I have heard you say such things a hundred times before. What has it ever brought you but grief?”

  I felt cold. “This is not the same thing as painting or poetry.”

  “No,” she said. “But I remember William’s courtship, if you don’t. You expected him to create happiness for you, and as a result you’ve been miserable for the last four years. Look at yourself, Lucy—you’ve never been able to find satisfaction in the things that were possible. You’re always reaching for something that isn’t there. Don’t doom yourself to unhappiness again.”