The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  Calvin’s room is lit only by a banked fire. A greyness stirs near the window. It is man-sized but not a man: a form in slow flux. Leah starts back and stumbles on the rug. Whispers, “Calvin?”

  No reply. Only creaking. Only a susurration that is not a human breathing, not a fire dying.

  She is about to rush for Alfie, when the movement takes on sense: the velveteen drapery. It billows in front of the window, which is open, a young physician having advised that Calvin breathe outside air. Ridiculous advice in New York, but Calvin agreed it worth the try.

  Leah hurries to close the sash. Calvin jolts awake. He is propped up so that his lungs can drain. The bucket on the floor shows little blood. His breathing is less hoarse than usual.

  “Mrs. Brown!”

  “Yes, I am arrived. I am here, Calvin.”

  “Ah, you must be so pleased to see our Lizzie again. I’ve missed her these years. But you, you I miss every moment you are gone.”

  “And I miss you.” She has missed him, the helpful young man ever at her side. She turns up the gas valve, brightening the room, then busies herself with the plumping of pillows, the emptying of the ashcan. The young physician also prescribed medicinal cigars and Calvin smokes three daily. It makes more work for Leah, but she does not complain.

  She drops in a wing chair and lets escape a small sob.

  “Why the tears, my heart?”

  “I have not, not appreciated you. Nor Lizzie. I am a wretch of a mother. A terrible wife.”

  Calvin chuckles. “And what sort of a husband am I, then, who is bedridden and needs such cosseting … but look!” He throws back the bedclothes.

  “Calvin!”

  “Leah. We’re married. It’s not improper.” He swings his thin legs onto the floor. Walks five steps to the window. Five steps back. “This is the second time today I’ve walked so. I am regrouping. My strength is returning. Those cigars are working like the a magic charm.”

  “But this cannot do. Come back to bed. Here. Allow me …” She reaches out and Calvin pulls her into his arms. She cries his name. He cries out hers in answer, then attempts to kiss her, and on the lips.

  She pushes him away to arm’s length. “Calvin! You are too weak for such, such things and it would drain you further. And … I thought, surmised, that this marriage was only to protect me, my name, that is.”

  “Leah, you know I adore you!”

  Leah becomes all briskness. Takes his thin hand and leads him back to bed, ignoring his spleeny looks. All this effort has cost him and he hacks blood into the bucket. She pats his back and bids him good-night and turns down the gas lights.

  “One kiss?” he beseeches, fingers to his lips. “Only one, honour bright.”

  “You need think of your recovery. Only that.”

  He coughs into a handkerchief. “Bully, then, it’s not like it would kill you.”

  Leah treads wearily down the hall. If Calvin recovers he will certainly force his husbandly rights. She thinks of Bowman Fish and his coffin-lid weight. She kept Bowman at bay for some time before he became forceful, though he was always contrite and sorrowing in the aftermath.

  In her private room she undresses layer by layer until she is down to her chemise and pantalettes. She cannot abide being fully naked and barely tolerates her weekly bath. She recalls the Corinthian Hall investigations when she and Maggie were stripped and stood before strangers. She hid her terror and humiliation then for Maggie’s sake alone.

  She burrows under the quilts and wonders how other women endure sexual congress. Perhaps they become blasé and study the ceiling rose. Oh, she has heard there is some comfort, even pleasure, in such physical closeness. But there is precious little comfort in dying in childbirth, or in putting child after child in the grave. She must remind Maggie and Katie of this. Lizzie as well.

  I will make a far better widow than a wife, she thinks before sleep takes her.

  CHAPTER 24.

  “Where have you been?” my patient asked this day. She had just stirred awake.

  “Where? Why, right here, duck, I’ve been here forever. You were elsewhere, mind, dreaming on about some other place.”

  “I don’t dream.”

  “Don’t dream? That’s chalk and nonsense. Everyone dreams. And you were tossing about like a skiff at sea, duck, and amutter besides. If that is not evidence of dreaming, my name isn’t Alvah June Mellon.”

  “Fine to that, but I only see fragments. My dreams don’t unfold like a story, not even a muddled one. They’re alike fragments, or a tableau, though they do move a jot … thus perhaps more alike a cosmorama, a fancy one that shifts when you view it through a keyhole.”

  “I’ve never been one for entertainments nor—”

  “And dreams don’t mean anything. Interpreting them is alike pulling hankies from the air, like an illusionist does.” She plucked at her bed jacket, her little hands looking very pale against the fabric’s deep bishop’s blue. “I muttered? About what?”

  I smoothed out my cover-all. I was pleased with its design of stars and rays. “You muttered about Elisha. And thus you may as well tell me more about him, and this grand romance you shared.”

  THE BEGINNING OF MAY and Maggie has just returned from her short spirit-rapping tour to Philadelphia with Mother. She is determined, despite Leah’s dark looks, to spend her every available moment with Elisha before his early June departure for the Arctic, and before her own mid-May departure to Washington with Katie. It is a tour she would love to cancel, but cannot, apparently, not without bringing disgrace upon them all, or so Leah has asserted. Leah. Thank Christ, Maggie thinks, that at least here in New York Leah is too preoccupied with Lizzie and Calvin and her clients to make much fuss over Maggie and Elisha’s many outings.

  On this balmy afternoon Elisha escorts Maggie to New York’s Lyceum of Natural History, where he is set to lecture and raise last-minute funds for his expedition supplies. The Advance, Elisha has informed Maggie, must be stocked with several years’ worth of foodstuffs and sundries in the off-chance she becomes trapped in the polar ice.

  “Which is nothing, nothing alike to this,” Elisha explains as he shows her the enfilades of saw-cut bergs, the walls of glacial ice and the wooden shores painted with birds. “And, ah, behold, my pet, the aurora borealis!”

  Maggie looks up at the dangling bits of coloured glass. “How pretty they are!”

  “Pretty? They are tawdry, a far-fetched illusion, an artifice. The sublimity of the Arctic can only be painted with words. I have informed the manager of this, but that cretin hardly cares.”

  “He should attend you,” Maggie says gravely, and wonders how she could have misjudged his tone. She vows to do better, to attend every shift in his voice, every nuance of his expressions.

  “Yes, he should. Ah, Tuttie, the Arctic is such a clean, white place, even when assaulted with endless dark. The dawn when it comes is a purpled blue, alike a bruise or, no, alike a raven’s wing in angled light.”

  “Bishop’s blue,” Maggie offers, and thinks: Not blue, not purple, but both at once. A lovely shade. I’ll have a dress made forthwith.

  “Bishops have no place in the arctic, pet,” he says wryly. “It is a queer, immutable world. Deathless and yet the landscape of death itself.” Elisha shakes his head. “I do so despise this vulgar business of raising funds. I’d rather raise the dead as you do … I jest. But little wonder my mother—that is, my parents—begged off attending my lecture.” He faces her. “Did you know I’m being called a celebrity?”

  “A what?”

  “A celebrity, as if I were something to celebrate, a party of a man, if you will. Something to enjoy and then forget the next day. It is an insult, nothing less.”

  Maggie frowns, shocked, though she can think of worse things to be called. Has been called worse things aplenty. “I do believe I’m becoming one of them … of those celebrities too.”

  “Dreadful enough in a man, pet. Anywise, it’s hardly the same, your celebrity an
d mine. Mine is chanced to become something greater.” He gives an intricate wave to Morton, who is busy pointing out the lime-lights to Maggie’s mother. Morton nods, then ushers Mother out the back door, as if to show her something more delightful beyond.

  Elisha cups Maggie’s elbow. “Have you told your family? Of our plans? Have you told that tigress of a sister?”

  “Should I? That is, should I now? Calvin is so sick, it might seem selfish.”

  Elisha nods. “Selfish, yes. You’re correct. To be wholly quit of your profession, timing is of paramount import. I will tell you when to cease. When you return from Washington perhaps. Yes, that will be your last tour before you are stashed away for tutoring. How different you will be when I return. As will I.”

  Maggie, gusted with faintness, puts her hand on a glacial wall. She half expects to feel a coldness, so real does it look, feels instead the sticky wetness of fresh paint. “Why is that bird by himself?” she asks of a sudden. The bird is glossy-black in the well-lit hall and is shaped like a large, fat urn. It has white patches about its eyes and a witless look.

  “Himself? No. That is the female of the species. A Great Auk.” Elisha explains how, on his first expedition to the Arctic, he and two companions found her on the barrows, how the bird cocked her head as if trying to recognize their faces, then waddle-climbed up the hummock, her stubby wings used as a propellant. Elisha’s companion shot the bird and she slid down to where her green-hued egg was sitting on open ground.

  “We were delighted at the time. We had bagged, you see, what was certainly the last Great Auk in existence. The captain and I decided to have her stuffed for the ship’s library.”

  Elisha strokes his jaw. “I told the stage painter to put her there because I admit it nagged at me, the shooting of that beast. Though, why so greatly? Why at all? Consider my little brother. He was the last of William Kane, never the like to be seen again. Every death is the same and yet unique and comes to all without favour. Thus what could it possibly signify, the death of one dumb animal on an Arctic plain?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know these things at all, Lish,” Maggie says softly, desperately. “And that’s why, why I need tell you the how of it all.” She looks to where her feet might be if they were not encircled by layers of skirting and petticoats.

  “Ah, God. Stay alike that, my love,” Elisha says, his voice catching queerly. “I see an image of you. You are looking down, your countenance pensive just as now. But your body erect, yes, also just as now, as if you are determined for something. You are dressed as an enchantress, as Circe. A white sheath but no … corset. Your hair is loose. An ambrotype. I must have one made. Only glass could do such an image justice.” He trails off into his own imaginings. Maggie makes bold and reaches for his hand. She slides her fingers between his. His fingers tremble, then tighten. She would give her soul, or some portion of it, to remain fixed with him on this stage, amid these painted shores and bergs, beneath these sparkling bits of cut glass. She makes to speak again. To tell. To make things plain and honest between them.

  “You’re so wondrously mysterious, Tuttie, promise you will always stay so,” Elisha says, at which Maggie blinks and finds herself as mute and witless as any Great Auk.

  Three nights later Maggie sits in the audience with Katie and their mother. Katie wears her favourite gown of cream and fawn, Maggie a new-sewn gown of bishop’s blue. Mother, at Maggie’s insistence, wears a brown silk gown instead of her usual fit-out of brown woollens, and a band of faux flowers instead of her usual fussy lappet cap. Leah has not come, to Maggie’s relief. A new doctor is examining Calvin, and as his wife she is apparently required.

  I am in love, Maggie decides. She must be. The feeling—giddy and sapped and anxious—is alike that described in the novels she reads. And how can she not be in love with Elisha Kent Kane, given his station, his handsome countenance, his erudition, his renown and reputation, even his “celebrity,” as he so mockingly called it?

  Elisha takes the stage to polite applause. He invites the audience to play “detective” and discover, as he had on his first expedition, the remains of Sir John Franklin’s encampment, the abandoned sledges and heaps of discarded food tins. And then, the stone-heaped graves of three members of Franklin’s party. Elisha asks why no written record was found, no brave notes as is usual when all is lost. The audience confers.

  “The Open Polar Sea, dear listeners!” Elisha exclaims. “The evidence for its existence is overwhelming: The warming currents as one travels upwards. The birds that have been seen to migrate north. The perpetual rays of summer that could not allow for an icy cap on our world. No, no, good people, at the top of our world are warm shores bounded by vivid trees and strange grasses. Food is abundant there—fishes the colour of the auroras, sea-hogs that can feed a man for months, and creatures unnamed and strange beyond telling with jellied limbs and a multitude of eyes to see during the six months of utter dark. Sir Franklin and his men are there! Surviving in that undiscovered realm. Awaiting, nay, praying for rescue. I have volunteered to lead the next Grinnell expedition. And I give you my heart’s vow that I will not rest until Sir Franklin is found, until we, the Americans, succeed in this noble search.”

  The audience claps. Some listeners huzzah. Many reach for their pocketbooks.

  After the lecture, after the applause, Maggie, Katie and their mother wend through the milling audience towards Elisha. He is still onstage, tight-grouped now by admirers. Closer and Maggie realizes these “admirers” have the proprietary air of close kin. She steadies her breath. His family has come after all. The older man, upright as a post and all distinction, is no doubt Judge Kane, Elisha’s father. The youngish man, who looks a better-fed version of Elisha, must be his brother Tom-the-lawyer. And the woman? She is taller than any of the men, her beauty astounding though she must be past sixty. Her features are delicate and pale, as if cut for a cameo. Her hair a vivid gold, her slender figure arrayed in forest green. Maggie finds it hard to believe she has borne seven children, of which Elisha is the youngest.

  Maggie readies a demure smile, adjusts her gloves. Decides she is glad to meet his parents at last. They are always out of town when she asks to meet them, or moving house, or indisposed.

  Mrs. Kane sweeps something minute from Elisha’s collar, then swivels her lovely neck an almost imperceptible degree. She might not be seeing Maggie at all.

  Maggie whispers to Mother and Katie, and the three move forward as one. Just then Morton appears. “Miss Fox, I’ll be honoured to see you home.”

  Maggie looks in dismay at Elisha. He is nodding to his mother. His face has a strange, tight expression. Embarrassment? Surely not. He darts Maggie a pleading glance. She understands then. Understands completely. His expression is not embarrassment but that of a little boy about to cry. Volcanoes. Wars. Fevers. Foreign heat. The endless Arctic ice and dark. He fears none of these. Fears only his mother. Yearns for her. Resents her. A suffocating quilt of emotion, perhaps alike what Maggie feels for Leah.

  She lets Morton shepherd them away, ignoring her mother’s queries, Katie’s disgruntlement, her own frustration, and all because the pity has allowed a revelation: Maggie loves Elisha with all her heart. Loves him, not his “celebrity” and station and all that. And I will love him, she decides, for everlasting more.

  “BUT DID HE HAVE IT MADE? The ambrotype?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  I knitted a line or two. “I’ve heard said your sort can hold a picture, an image, and then scry what happened to the person, or some such. That is superstition, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you have it still, the ambrotype?”

  “It met a bad end. Then again, it was made of glass. Why?”

  “No reason. Such images are pleasant to have, is all.”

  “Has anyone taken an image of you, Mrs. Mellon?”

  “No,” I said. This was not entirely untrue. The image I had—a tin-type clasped in a velveteen case—was n
ot of me alone, but of me and my son. He was fifteen at the time. We looked out all stoic and grim (as does everyone in such images, to be frank), but we had been laughing the moment before.

  “I am sorry for that,” my patient said, and in such a way that she might have heard me screaming at Mr. Mellon as he threw the tin-type on the hearth, where the flames blackened and bent it, and erased it of any image. Not even a silhouette remained.

  “It ain’t natural,” Mr. Mellon had sneered, “for a woman to love her son more than her husband and sit with the milk-sop for images, alike they are a married set.”

  I took up the cover-all, my needles. “If I were the gambling sort, I would bet that your Elisha was prone to ludicrous jealousies—for anything or anyone. I would bet that he wanted your attention and regard only for himself.”

  “Well, yes. He wished to plant his flag, as it were, on my person. But I can’t say I was devoid of the green demons either. This I learned when in Washington in the mid of May of’53, not long before Elisha was set to sail for the Arctic, where he hoped to rescue Franklin and set his flag on the shores of that chimera, the Open Polar Sea.”

  “MAG! GET ON BACK! Lish was just playing. Really! You’ll catch your death out there.”

  Maggie ignores Katie’s frantic calling, hastens up the street, round a corner, through a small square; hastens far from Mrs. Sullivan’s Washington boarding house.

  By the time Maggie spies the small shopping arcade her house-shoes are sopping from the puddles left from the recent rain, her face sopping with ongoing tears. The arcade is an austere place with no fountain, no potted plants and only a few customers at this hour of late morning. She passes a small daguerreotypist’s studio. It is a beswagged, cramped space, stacked with false backdrops—Italian castles, flowered fields, shaded rivers. An advertisement in the windoe touts the Gabriella pose, whatever that may be. A clerk arranges the props, books and chairs and pens, his movements a portrait in boredom. Before they left for Washington, Maggie and Katie had, on a whim, visited a New York studio similar to this one. Katie wore a capped-sleeve dress of white muslin, Maggie a gown of bottle-green that showed charcoal in the finished image. The effect was a chiaroscuro: Katie-the-light and Maggie-the-dark. And their expressions differed also. Maggie was looking off to the left with her held-back smile, as if she had spied something amusing out of the corner of her eye. Katie was looking directly at the camera. A rimming of kohl enhanced the translucence of her eyes. She had her hand on Maggie’s shoulder, as if to bring her to attention, or to keep her there.