San Miguel

by Boyle, T. C.

  Her mother coughed gently into one fist. “We’ve been talking, your father and I,” she said—and here she shot a look at Edith’s stepfather, who wouldn’t acknowledge her, wouldn’t even turn his head—“and we’ve agreed that you’ll be staying on here, in boarding school, for the academic year.”

  It took a moment to register the words, and then suddenly it was as if the sun had broken through the fog and struck the room with light, meteoric, blinding. She was there on the edge of the carpet, feeling as if she were at the very beginning of a recital, every head turned to her and the conductor holding his baton at the ready. She didn’t know what to say.

  “Miss Everton’s Young Ladies’ Seminary,” her mother went on, “where Rebecca Thompson’s daughters attend classes. Carrie Abbott speaks highly of it. And the curriculum should suit you perfectly: French, German, Music and Art.” Her mother was smiling her beautiful smile, full-lipped, her teeth shining and perfectly proportioned, and for just that moment she looked as she had before the disease claimed her, vibrant, young, sure of herself. “I’ve already spoken with Miss Everton. You’re to begin September fourteenth.”

  Her stepfather had nothing to say to this. In the next moment he stood abruptly, strode to the closet for his hat and stalked out the door, slamming it behind him. It was the cost he objected to, she was sure of it, as if nothing mattered but dollars and dollars alone. She didn’t care. She was soaring—“Oh, Mother,” she said, “Mother.” And then, just for a moment, she came crashing down again—this would mean separation, a two-days’ journey between them, and she’d never before been separated from her mother in her life.

  “Of course, we’ll wait till you’re settled before we leave for Santa Barbara, and we’ll see you for Christmas. And write. We’ll write every day.”

  * * *

  It was a kind of miracle. After all she’d been put through on the island and in Mrs. Sanders’ class, where she’d never really belonged—they were hayseeds, rubes, and Santa Barbara wasn’t a city at all—now, finally, she felt she’d come home. And felt she’d earned it too. If she’d never been on San Miguel, never seen a sheep or a pig or suffered the grinding boredom of those anemic days and bloodless nights with no one to talk to and nowhere to go, she couldn’t have appreciated Miss Everton’s school the way she did. To the other girls it might have been usual, more of the same, a ritual society had contrived to prepare them for the next stage of life, which was to marry and marry money, but Edith saw things differently—this was her opportunity, her escape from the ordinary, from ranches and dust and a dying mother and a stepfather who could think of nothing but himself. And though she was an outsider at first—most of the girls had matriculated together through the elementary grades and formed their coteries and alliances—she quickly found her place. By the end of the first term she was earning A’s and B’s across the board and she was easily the best ballerina—and singer too—in the freshman class. Her French—the language of dance—was still limited (Chère Maman, J’espère que vous allez bien) and her German was weaker yet, but she was improving through sheer repetition and Miss Everton herself singled out her performance as Portia in the school’s co-production of The Merchant of Venice with St. Basil’s Academy as the best of the year.

  So it went through that fall and the following spring, home for the summer and on into the next term, and if she worried about her mother—and she did—it was at a remove. Each night, just after lights out, her mother’s face would float free of her consciousness to hover there in the dark over the bed, and she would say a prayer and close her eyes and the next thing she knew it was morning, girls rustling in the hallway, her roommate softly snoring in the bed beside hers and the smell of bacon and toast and scrambled eggs infusing the air. Then there was the onward rush of school, another day, another night, and no thought but for the moment. When she was home, when she could see her mother struggling to stand upright, her limbs wasted and the lines of suffering lashing her face, she could think of nothing else.

  Then, on a rainy afternoon just before Christmas break, everything changed all over again. She was in the middle of her piano lesson with Mr. Sokolowski, who had a habit of beating out the time with the flat of his hand on the bench beside you in a slow steady drop that went counter to everything you were feeling (it was Chopin’s Nocturne no. 2 in E-flat Major, the tempo so dragged down and reduced she might have been sleepwalking), when Miss Everton herself appeared in the doorway. Mr. Sokolowski looked up, his lips parted in irritation. She stopped playing, though his hand went on beating through the next two measures. Miss Everton—she was her mother’s age, or no, older, dressed all in tutorial gray and with her hair pinned up so severely her scalp was blanched at the hairline—was simply standing there, looking lost. Was there something in her hand—a slip of folded-over paper? There was. And before she could say a word Edith knew what it meant. “Is she—?” she said.

  “Your mother’s ill, that’s all the telegram says. You’re to return at once.”

  * * *

  She was two days on the boat, the seas savage in the face of the storm that chased them down the coast, and everyone around her was sick at stomach. The smell was awful—like being trapped in a zoo—and she couldn’t go out on deck because it was raining the whole time. She’d never been seasick—she had her sea legs, that was what Captain Curner had told her, praising her—but as the hours went on and the smell concentrated itself till she felt she couldn’t breathe, she began to feel worse and worse. In the head—filthy, sour, a discolored mop reeking in the corner and somebody pounding desperately at the door—she went down on her knees and hung over the toilet till there was nothing left inside her. The boat rocked and groaned as if it would come apart. Her legs felt weak. When finally she made her way back to her berth she lay there volitionless, unable to change into her nightdress, unable to read or sleep or think of anything but what lay ahead.

  Her mother was ill, that was all she knew. But her mother had been ill a long while—she’d lost weight and color and she’d hemorrhaged more times than anyone could count—and yet she’d always recovered because she was strong, the strongest woman alive. Maybe that was what this was: a false alarm. Maybe it was just another hemorrhage, bad enough, yes, but the sort of attack her mother had survived before. That was what she wanted to believe and she fought down the voice inside her that told her she was fooling herself because why else would they have pulled her out of school and wired the money for her passage if the moment of crisis hadn’t come? And then the grimmer thought: What if she was too late? What if her mother was already dead—or dying, dying right at that moment?

  By the morning of the second day her throat was raw. She was thirstier than she’d ever been in her life, but every time she took a swallow of water it came right back up. The woman in the berth across from her took pity on her and gave her a handful of soda crackers to soothe her stomach. She broke them into fragments and tried chewing them one at a time, but they turned to paste in her mouth and she couldn’t seem to get them down. At one point someone said they were passing San Miguel. She never even lifted her head.

  There was no one at the pier to meet her—she would have thought Ida would come, Ida at least, and the fact that she wasn’t there or her stepfather either filled her with dread. She stood alone on the pier in the rain, feeling light-headed, the other passengers streaming past her, the smell of the sea so overpowering it made her stomach clench all over again. There were people everywhere, faces looming up out of the mob, their eyes seizing on her as if to take possession of her and know her in her grief and fear and need before staring right through her, and she didn’t recognize any of them. Adolph—where was Adolph? Anybody? Finally, the umbrella clutched in one hand and the suitcase in the other, she set out to walk the eight blocks home.

  It was a struggle, the streets a mess, the gutters alive with refuse, cigar stubs, paper bags, leaves, branches, horse droppings. Carriages
lurched by, but no one thought to offer her a ride. The rain plunged straight down. She pushed through it, hurrying, breathless, going as fast as she could, her shoes soaked, her feet cold, the hem of her dress—the one she’d been wearing when Miss Everton escorted her to the boat and unchanged now through two days and a night—sodden with filth. Her hair was coming loose, her hat poking awkwardly at the ribs of the umbrella. All she could think was what her mother would say, how angry she’d be. You change that dress right this minute, young lady, and here, give me the brush, your hair’s a disgrace.

  Up the walk to the house, a single lamp burning in the front window, water cascading over the eaves, then the door, the umbrella, the suitcase dropping from her hand. “Hello!” she called. “Is anyone home? Mother? Ida?” The cat—Marbles—was perched on the footstool before the fire and he shot her a glance, startled, before springing to the floor and vanishing in the shadows beneath the chair. She saw that the fire had burned down. There was a half-filled teacup on the low table beside the chair and a book lying open there, facedown, the sort of thing her mother would never tolerate, You’re ruining that book, Edith. Think of the spine. Think of the cost. “Hello?” she called again, moving across the floor to the stairway.

  There was the sound of footsteps, of a door flung open, and then Ida was there at the head of the stairs. “Edith, is that you?”

  * * *

  They tried to spare her, Ida clinging to her in the stairwell, her stepfather emerging from the upper bedroom with his arms folded and his eyes gone distant, and the man beside him too, the doctor, the doctor with his black bag and his spectacles shining and the dead dumb unflinching look on his face warning her not to go in there, not yet, not until they had a chance to prepare things, but she wouldn’t have it, wouldn’t listen, and she broke away from Ida and rushed up the stairs knowing only this: that her mother was already dead, dead and gone and extinguished, and that she’d never hear her voice again, never hear the coughing in the night or the soft calming lilt of her words as she read aloud before the fire or recited a poem she’d learned as a girl. Her stepfather tried to block her way, but she fought free of him, careening down the hall to fling herself through the open door and into the room that was lit by the lamp at the bedside and yet was dark all the same with its layers of contending shadow and the blood that wasn’t red, not red, not red anymore, but as black as the place where what was left of her mother—the shell, the empty shell—would go to rest.

  Double Eagle

  Alone in her room in the dark, she listened to the shuffling and whispering from the room next door, the room where her mother lay dead. The smallest sounds: a patter of feet, the sudden startled whine of the wardrobe’s hinges, the sigh of a drawer pulled open and the soft discreet thump of its closing. Ida was in there, taking charge. She could hear her stepfather—a heavier tread, but soft, soft, the muted beat of a mallet wrapped in gauze—pacing the hallway, creaking up and down the stairs, his voice cast low. Then nothing. Stasis. Silence. Rain. And here it came again: the buzz of whispered griefs, concerns, question and response, a door opening and closing, the solitary rhythm of Ida’s feet on the bedroom carpet. She tried not to think about what those sounds intimated, but she couldn’t help herself: Ida was cleaning up, putting things to rights. And what did that mean? That meant preparing the body for the undertaker. For the ground.

  But wasn’t that a daughter’s task? Shouldn’t she be there beside Ida, shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, hip to hip, stripping the bloody sheets, stripping the corpse, washing the crusted black blood from her own mother’s lips? Ida had said no. Ida wouldn’t hear of it. Ida had wrapped her in her arms and led her away from the disordered bed and the effigy of her mother—and the blood, the blood that was everywhere, even on the bedstead, the floor, the wall—and gently pulled the door shut behind her.

  Her mother was dead. That was the fact. And the worst thing, worse even than the loss of her, was that she hadn’t got to see her before the Lord took her away, and though she tried to imagine her mother in repose, in a better place where there was no coughing, no blood, where there were no sleepless nights spent sweating in a thin gown and spitting mucus into a cup, tried to picture the field of lilies, the wisps of cloud, Jesus radiant on His throne, she could find no relief. If the Lord was so merciful why had He let her die without her own daughter there at her side? Why had He let her die when that daughter was so close, when she was standing confused on the pier in the rain or struggling up the street with the gutters clogged and her heart pounding and no one to offer her a ride?

  It had been so close, a matter of minutes, mere minutes. If the boat had only been swifter, if there hadn’t been a storm, if the telegram had come a day earlier, just a day, she would have been there to take her mother in her arms, no matter the blood or her coughing or frailty, to bless her and hold her and receive her blessing in return. Instead, she came home to a corpse. And worse: she didn’t shed a tear or beat herself like Heathcliff in his grief over Catherine, but just stood there frozen because she couldn’t accept that this was her mother, this dead inert thing in its frieze of blood. It’s the shock of it, Ida had said. Now come away from there, come, and Ida led her out the door and down the hall to bed, this bed, her own bed, where when the whisperings finally stopped and the house settled into silence, she fell away into a black and fathomless sleep.

  * * *

  The funeral service was held in the parlor the following afternoon. Her mother lay rigid in the coffin, her eyelids drawn down as if she were asleep and the faintest smile painted on her lips by the mortician. The mortician stood at the back of the room, two small boys in black at his side. They held black silk top hats in their hands and studied the floor. The minister was a stranger—her mother wasn’t a churchgoer and she supposed her stepfather must have contracted with the mortician to bring the man along. There were no mourners but for her, her stepfather, Adolph and Ida. Tapered white candles and vases of cut flowers—Ida’s doing—gave the room the feeling of a chapel, and the minister, with his sweep of silver hair and crisp clerical collar, stood grave and erect before the coffin. The service was brief—the usual comfortless words, the words she’d heard twice before in her life when friends of her mother had died in San Francisco and they’d gone to services in a great lofty cathedral with a hundred mourners and a choir singing and incense streaming from polished censers—and then they were out on the street, in a light rain, following the mortician’s hearse to the cemetery on the hill overlooking the ocean.

  There were more words, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, black umbrellas, black horses, the seabirds rotating overhead and crying out their indifference. Her stepfather took the shovel from the grave digger and threw the first symbolic spattering of dirt on the coffin. Ida, in a dress that had once belonged to Edith’s mother, hung her head and sobbed, and Edith watched her stepfather put an arm around her shoulder to steady her. Edith herself, though she was stricken to the core and would recollect every detail of that day for the rest of her life as if they’d been seared into her brain with a hot iron, didn’t break down and cry. Anyone could cry. Anyone could rage to the heavens and tear out her hair. But she was an actress—or she became one that day—and she held herself apart so that she could see and feel and hear and take all the credit away from the kind of God who would do this to her, her face ironed sober and her shoulders slumped under the weight of her unassailable grief. There was a funeral supper, but she didn’t taste it. And, finally, there was bed, but she didn’t sleep.

  The next day sheared away like the face of a cliff crashing into the ocean and then there was another day and another. Her stepfather put a wreath on the door, but it wasn’t a Christmas wreath and when Christmas Day came there was no celebration, no exchange of gifts or singing of carols or even a special dinner. Ida put something on the table and sat with them and they ate in silence. In the days that followed, Edith locked herself up in her room though the
weather was soft and inviting, clear days giving way to star-filled nights, the trees in perpetual leaf and the flowers along the front walk waving bright orange banners as if to deny the toll every living thing has to pay, and then it was New Year’s, a bitter time, the bitterest, the two-year anniversary of their move to the island. It was that move that had killed her mother, she was sure of it. If only they’d stayed in San Francisco—or here, even here—everything would have been different. Did she blame her stepfather? Did she watch him chewing his meat, chewing with his mouth open and one hand clenching his knife and the other his whiskey (he was drowning his sorrow, that was what he claimed) and accuse him in her heart? She did. Yes. Resoundingly.

  She didn’t like to talk to him, didn’t like to talk to anyone, not even Ida, not the way she was grieving, but when New Year’s had passed and the new term at Miss Everton’s was about to commence, she came to him where he was sitting by the fire, a book open in his lap and the glass on the table at his side, and handed him the printed schedule for the Santa Rosa. “I thought tomorrow morning’s boat would be best,” she said. “Classes start Monday and this way I’d have Sunday to settle in at the dormitory. We could wire ahead to Miss Everton to have someone meet me at the pier—and I don’t have much with me, so I can walk to the boat if you like and save the expense of a carriage . . .”

  Patches of peeling skin traced the margin of his side whiskers, yellow-edged flakes that dusted his shoulders and clung minutely to his mustache. He’d worn a beard on the island for at least part of the time—too much trouble to shave, he’d said, though her mother had hated it—and the beard had hidden the flaws of his skin. She looked at him now in the lamplight and saw the pits and eruptions run rampant there, his whole face aflame as if all his sorrow had bled out of him and settled in the pores of his face, and she felt a wave of affection for him: he was grieving, grieving every bit as much as she was herself. He looked up from the book. His eyes shifted to her, gray eyes, eyes the color of smoke drifting over open water. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” he said.