by Rich Horton
“Really,” Dora said.
“I could put in a word.”
“Thanks, I—thanks. That means a lot to me.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“I don’t know, though. GreenHex by any other name, and all. And if you’ll remember, our last editing gig didn’t turn out so well for either of us.”
“Things change, Dory. Gotta change with them. That’s what life does.” She raised cupped hands against the breeze, lit up, dragged. Wisps of gray smoke trailed back out of her mouth as Dora stared in disbelief.
“It adapts.”
She left her card behind. And the memory of that cigarette, flaring to life by the light of the clear blue flame that danced from the tip of her tongue.
The Memory Book
Maureen McHugh
Laura Anne presented herself at the door of her new employer on Monday morning, while London was still awash in mist. From the bottom of the steps, her younger brother Peter, who had escorted her, waited until the maid opened the door and said, “Oh. I shall fetch Mrs. Finch.” He lifted one hand in a kind of half-wave—he was really a tiresome boy—and then skipped off.
Mrs. Finch was a short, buxom woman, with her hair pulled severely back. Her Monday morning washing dress, Laura Anne noted, was plain and damp in places. And unflattering. Not because the cut was so obviously from a few years before, since that was to be expected, but because even when new it would likely not to have been flattering. Mama was not nearly so favored by nature in her figure as Mrs. Finch and yet she was ever so much smarter. Laura Anne knew that even in her mourning (black Bombazine from Black Peter Robinson’s on Regent Street and cut in the latest Continental manner which served admirably to accentuate her tiny waist) she far outshone dowdy Mrs. Finch. Mrs. Finch flicked her eye up and down Laura Anne and apparently knew so as well.
The dining room, where Laura Anne had been engaged to be the Finch’s governess was as she remembered it. Mrs. Finch sat at a cunning little desk and Laura Anne stood demurely. “You are very young, and without a character,” Mrs. Finch said. Laura Anne did not feel this was quite fair. She had a character, that is, a character reference, from her pastor, but of course she could not have one from a former employer because she had never been employed, and would not now if it were not for the death of her dear Papa. “But given your circumstance, we felt it a Christian service to give you this opportunity,” Mrs. Finch continued.
Mrs. Finch had the children called for introductions. The nurse brought them down, dressed in their best. Henry, five, looked sleepy. Elizabeth, seven, hid her face in the nurse’s skirts and would not look at Laura Anne. The nurse, a tall, awkward woman with a hatchet of a chin and narrow eyes, had obviously been crying. Now that the children were old enough for a governess, she would be leaving. “Nurse will show you the arrangements,” Mrs. Finch said.
From down the stairs, Laura Anne caught the whiff of boiling laundry. At least as governess she would be spared the ordeal of laundry day.
The second floor had three bedrooms. The nurse, the children, and Laura Anne trooped past the bedrooms on the floor and then climbed the narrow stairs to the third floor. At the top of the house were the nursery and the nurse’s room, the latter stripped bare now, only a lone carpet valise sitting in the middle of the floor. The nursery was whitewashed, and had a high fireguard in front of the fire, bars on the windows, and a table in the center, covered in a bright red and white oil cloth so it could be washed down. On one wall was an eye of God, watching them all. They no sooner got to the nursery then the nurse dropped to her knees and hugged both children. The little girl, Elizabeth, immediately began to cry, a high, keening, “eh-ehh-ehh,” that put Laura Anne’s teeth on edge. William was set off by his sister and sobbed, too. Elizabeth was going to need correction, Laura Anne thought.
Laura Anne didn’t quite know what to do with herself, faced with this extraordinary performance. The nurse sobbed out something about how the children liked their tea, and some other generalities about their preferences. By the bye, she kissed them both, called them her ducklings, her angels, her own dear loves. Then she stood up and said, “This is your new governess, Miss Huntley. Be lambs and be good for her and remember your prayers.” She went to her room and got her valise.
Elizabeth let out a high screech and ran after her, throwing herself against the woman’s skirts in a most theatrical manner. William, of course, copied. There was more sobbing.
The maid came up the stairs, the front of her dress soaked. “Miss Huntley,” she said.
“Yes?” Laura Anne said.
“The mistress sent me up special to say that the carrying on up here won’t do and to get the little ’uns under control.” The maid delivered this without rancor and turned and clumped down the stairs again.
The nurse heard and soothed the children, quieting them. She sat them at the table, and got them scrap pieces of paper and crayons. “William is a right proper artist,” she told Laura Anne mournfully.
“I’m a right proper artist, too, aren’t I?” Elizabeth said.
“You’ve got a nice eye, and that’s an ornament on a young lady,” the nurse said.
She had a common way of speaking that Elizabeth adopted easily; proof, Laura Ann reflected that it was good that she was leaving. After more sighs, the nurse and her valise clumped down the stairs.
Laura Anne sat down and watched the children color for awhile. William was drawing a house, she thought. Or a square face. It was very difficult to determine. Elizabeth explained she was drawing an angel. Laura Anne was grateful that Elizabeth had told her because she was not sure she would have known otherwise.
Elizabeth handed her drawing to Laura Anne who pronounced it “very nice.”
“What do we do now?” Elizabeth asked.
Laura Anne had no idea.
By the time Peter met Laura Anne to walk her home, she had a horrible headache. She had determined that the thing to do was to teach the children the capitals of Europe but William had proven impossible. Elizabeth was not much better, but at least she managed Paris and Madrid. Then Laura Anne had read to them from the Bible while they fidgeted and William whined. Finally, she had taken them for a walk which wore her out much more than it wore them out. She was certain she had a natural way with children, but these children were heathenish little creatures who had obviously been spoiled by that awful nurse.
She waited for Peter to ask how her day had been. Peter walked along the other side of the sidewalk, now and again giving her a sidelong glance.
“How was school today?” she asked, to prompt him to ask about her day, but he just said, “Fine,” and sulked along like usual.
At home she went to her room and got down her regular scrapbooks, not the special one, just the ones anyone could see. Everyone knew she was quite mad about scrapbooks. She dug around until she found a scrap sheet of butterfly fairies, little sweet cherub faces with wings like stained glass. She cut out a fairy—it didn’t look like Elizabeth at all, the hair was the wrong color, black and curly, and centered it on the page. Underneath she wrote, “My first day of teaching.” She needed a quote, and Tennyson was always good. She found a quote about Knowledge in the book of quotations, and copied it out:
Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
Against her beauty? May she mix
With men and prosper! Who shall fix
Her pillars? Let her work prevail.”
Her sister, Jane, was twelve and the youngest, and shared a room with her and of course it was at this moment that Jane chose to come in and sit on her bed. “We’re having a cold joint tonight.”
Laura Anne said without looking up, “We always have a cold dinner on Monday.” Because it was laundry day of course, and their mother and Sarah, the maid, were too busy to cook.
“What are the people like?” Jane asked.
“What people?” Laura Anne said. She got out her paste pot and carefully applied paste to the back of the butterfly fairy.
“The people you work for? Are they above our station? Are they rich?”
“Of course they are above our station. They have a governess.”
Jane sighed. “Is their house beautiful? Do they have a couch and four?”
“No,” Laura Anne said. “They are a bit vulgar, I think. And they don’t have a couch and four. They have a terrace house, like us.”
“Like our house?”
“Bigger. Five bedrooms. Jane, go downstairs and help our mother. I’m busy.”
“You’re just doing your scrapbook.”
Without looking up, Laura Anne said, “You know what will happen if you don’t do as I say.”
Jane got still a moment, and then got up and quietly went out. It was not good to cross Laura Anne. Laura Anne listened until she was sure Jane had gone downstairs and then she pulled out her own, her special scrapbook, her memory book. She stroked the deeply embossed, rich red leather cover. It was her favorite scrapbook and she kept it hidden so no one could ever look at it. It fell open to a page she had done a few months ago. It was a tracing of a photograph of her father on tracing paper—she had stolen the photograph from her parent’s room. It had been taken years ago, long before she’d been born, but it was the only photograph of him they had had, at least until he had taken sick and died. (Then her mother had had a photographer in to take a photograph of him, deceased, but seated in the drawing room, one hand on a book, looking a little stiff and with one side of his face still droopy but if one didn’t think about it, it could almost be as if he had fallen asleep there.)
Laura Anne had traced it very carefully and drawn many curlicues around it, and as she was quite good at curlicues she fancied it had turned out very well, perhaps her best drawing ever. She remembered how angry she was when she drew it and how her anger had come out in the ink, careful curlicues of anger, all around him. Then she had stuck a sewing needle, over, under, over, through the head of the drawing.
Now she did not like to think about it.
She flipped to a new page now and chose a butterfly fairy that had fair hair and blue eyes like Elizabeth. She pasted it down and put an old piece of flannel over it in case the pages stuck together although she was very careful with her paste and that almost never happened. Then she closed the scrapbook, her red memory book, and was about to hide it back up in the top of the wardrobe, making a note as she did so that Jane was getting tall enough she might see it. Laura Anne thought she would have to find a new hiding place soon. Then she had a bolt of inspiration and took it down and opened it up. She inked out the little butterfly fairy’s eyes so that they were two black pits. She admired the effect for a moment. Underneath it she wrote “Elizabeth Finch” and the date. Then she closed it and hid it.
Mrs. Finch had a brother who was four years younger than she, although he was still an ancient twenty-two. Laura Anne met him coming down from the nursery one evening as he arrived for dinner. He was handing his umbrella and hat to the maid. The Finches appeared to entertain unfashionably early, serving dinner at five as if they were someone’s grandparents. At Laura Anne’s, when Papa was alive they had never eaten before six, and when they entertained, it was usually seven o’clock when dinner was served. Now, it was true, things were at sixes and sevens. Mama had let things slip terribly since Papa died, and often took to her bed, leaving the house in a state of total disarray.
“Good afternoon, Miss Huntley,” Mrs. Finch said. “This is my brother, Anson Risewell. Anson, Miss Huntley is the new governess.”
Anson Risewell nodded gracious, and murmured his pleasure.
Mrs. Finch asked, “How does William do?”
Laura Anne lied. “I think he is taking to geography most admirably, ma’am.”
“And how is Elizabeth this day?”
Laura Anne looked serious and troubled. “It is difficult, of course. She loses so many days to her headaches that it is often one step forward and two steps back.”
“We have recently started her on Dr. J Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne when she has an attack,” Mrs. Finch explained to her brother. “There has been a tremendous improvement.”
Laura Anne thought so, as well. When dosed, little Elizabeth was placid, her pupils so large they turned her blue eyes dark. It was not the result that Laura Anne had anticipated, but the butterfly fairy image had not really looked very much like Elizabeth.
Anson Risewell pursed his lips. A difficult trial for you, Louise,” he said to his sister. He had very fair hair and very dark brown eyes. It was, Laura Anne thought, a striking combination. And he had a wonderful, ticklish looking blond moustache, a very dashing thing. His sister was drawn very much of the same cloth, but what looked fleshy and common on her gave him an athletic robustness that Laura Anne found quite attractive.
As Laura Anne was collecting her rainwear, she overheard Anson Risewell say, “So things are working out?”
“Certainly until William goes to school,” Mrs. Finch said.
“Of course,” Anson Risewell replied.
Mrs. Finch sighed, “I can’t be expected to take care of them without a nurse, what do I know about children?”
Laura Anne rather agreed.
“But when William goes to school, I think I will teach Elizabeth myself.”
Anson Risewell nodded. “Excellent,” he said. “Miss Huntley seems quite charming but,” and here he leaned a little closer to Mrs. Finch to say quietly, “She seems very young.”
Laura Anne was furious, and her brother Peter was late, which left her standing on the street waiting. He rounded the corner, running and panting. She slapped him. “How dare you keep me standing here like some common woman,” she snapped.
Startled, he burst into tears. “But the omnibus kept stopping and stopping! I ran the whole last six blocks!”
“Just because father said you were the favorite, don’t think it was true,” Laura Anne hissed at him.
He blanched and was silent all the way home.
She began to watch for Anson Risewell. He did not come over often, of course. A gentleman like himself certainly had much more interesting things to do than eat dinner with his dull sister and her dull husband (a drab little man who Laura Anne rarely saw, although she sometimes heard him come upstairs and vanish into his study on the second floor.)
Near the end of the summer, the air thickened and the Finches decided the only escape was a holiday to Brighton. It was decided that this would be good for Elizabeth, as well. They booked three rooms at the Royal Albion Hotel—not as exclusive as the Grand Hotel, but on the King’s Road overlooking the promenade and very respectable. Laura Anne was to accompany them and share a room with the two children. Anson would meet them there as well.
The preparations for a week away were immense. William was over-excited, prone to running around the nursery screeching, and Elizabeth developed a headache so severe she could keep no food down, nor could she swallow Dr. J Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne. Laura Anne cleaned up after her, since the maid was overwhelmed with airing and sorting and packing. It was a perfectly dreadful week, and not even the season. The Finches never seemed to quite manage to do things the right way. Laura Anne had quickly realized that she had been hired as a sort of pretension, and that they were not people of means sufficient to hire a governess. Which was why all the business about her not having a character and them hiring her out of Christian charity was claptrap. They had hired her because her inexperience made her cheap. And now they were going to Brighton when the only people there would day trippers and desperate sorts.
But Laura Anne had never been to Brighton. And it would be a chance to see more of Anson.
The train trip was a horror. Elizabeth was still sick and William would not settle and be quiet, no matter what Laura Anne did. Mr. Finch sat in the corner, parked behind his newspapers and invisible. Mrs. Finch said, “Miss Huntley, please control William!” several times. It was all Laura Anne could do to keep from bursting out that he was a horrid and spoiled child w
hen she got him and whose fault was that?
But when Mrs. Finch rebuked Laura Anne the third time, Anson Risewell said, “Oh Louise, you know how boys are.”
Mrs. Finch said sharply, “I certainly do not.”
“I was just as difficult,” Anson Risewell said. “William, come here.” Anson lifted the boy on his lap and pointed out the window. “You see, we’re outside of London now. You’ve never been outside of London, have you?”
The boy stared out the window, thoughtful. “Where are we?” he asked. “Are we in Madrid?”
Everyone laughed.
“What makes you think that?” Anson asked.
“Madrid is the capital of Spain,” William said, as if this explained everything.
“Yes,” Anson said. “Very smart! Did Miss Huntley teach you that?”
To Laura Anne’s astonishment, William went on to list a half dozen European capitals, Athens, Greece; Rome, Italy; Vienna and Budapest, Austria-Hungary; Berne, Switzerland; and triumphantly, London. He was an obstinate little thing usually, unable to remember anything she taught him. But now Anson beamed at her. “Capital, little man!” he said, but she knew it was really a compliment to her and her heart lifted.
They made the transit from the train station to the hotel in a flurry of luggage and porters.
The air smelled of sea and everything was so clean after the soot and fog of London. Even Elizabeth seemed revived although she said that the sun hurt her eyes. The hotel rooms were clean, bright and airy, and as it was not the season, they had been able to get them overlooking the ocean. The ocean was entrancing. Anson declared they should go down to the promenade immediately.
“We are all in need of a rest after the journey,” Mrs. Finch said.
To Laura Anne’s surprise, Mr. Finch said, “Louise, we have come all this way, it seems foolish not to take a turn on the promenade.”
Elizabeth began to cry. “My head hurts,” she whimpered.
Laura Anne could feel Anson’s eyes upon her and the child. She felt a rush of fury. Now she would be forced to sit in this room with two children while everyone else enjoyed Brighton. But she smiled and sat down and gathered Elizabeth to her, pretending to be unaware of the observers to her performance. “It’s all right,” she said. “You and I will stay here and you can rest your little head and breath the clean air. I’m sure that by the end of the week you’ll be right as rain.”
