Winter Sisters

by Robin Oliveira

  “Is he home yet?”

  Jakob turned. His mother was playing with the edge of her embroidered sheet. Her speech was slurred, which meant that her last drink had not been that long ago.

  If she was surprised to see her son sneaking around in her chambers, she didn’t say so.

  “Did you have a nice rest?” Jakob said, setting the glass and decanter back down on a marble table near the door.

  “He’s still out, isn’t he?”

  “I think he’s at the district.”

  “Or so he says.” The alcohol on her breath emanated from her like a fog.

  Jakob had no wish to speculate on where his father went in the evenings. He and his mother often took dinner alone together: more recently, she in various and increasing states of inebriation, he attempting to manage the situation. “Would you like to rest some more before dinner?”

  “Why would I want to rest?”

  As usual, she ignored his subtle allusion to her drinking. He never said anything overt. How this state of affairs had come to be, he couldn’t say. It was understood, however, that no one was to say anything direct about it at all, ever. Not even his father, who more than once, in disdainful abeyance of the tacit agreement, had inferred that his wife’s increasing inability to hold her sherry was an egregious failure of character, especially since he was more than capable of managing his liquor of choice, which was Scotch. Fine Scotch, too, that took more than a few dollars to buy, but to Gerritt that mattered little. He was a wealthy man, and the money he spent on his own intoxication made no inroads into the family fortune. Scotch and sherry were delivered by the wagonful to 411 State Street.

  “You don’t have to give parties, Mother,” Jakob said. “If you hate them so much.”

  “Oh, but I do. Mary Pruyn was here and everyone else. It was exhausting.” Everyone else was all the other leading citizens of Albany, who had all attended Viola’s afternoon tea: the Langdons, Lansings, Parkers, Cornings, Richardsons, Vanderpoels, Ten Eycks, and Schuylers. “It’s like running a circus, trying to find something to talk about that they hadn’t already discussed the day before, at a party I hadn’t been invited to. But do not fear. I am well. I am always well.” She fluttered to full consciousness, discarding the sulking mask she’d worn not a moment before, and by this dismissal demanded that he once again collude in the lie of her well-being. It always puzzled Jakob that his mother appeared more at ease when she was befuddled by drink than when she was fully sober, with the exception of the other morning at the cemetery, where for some reason, the imposing Mary Stipp seemed to have set his mother at ease.

  He took leave of her without comment, surreptitiously spiriting away the decanter and glass. Downstairs, he stowed them in the butler’s pantry. In the kitchen, he instructed a maid to prepare a pot of strong tea and a glass of milk whipped with egg and dusted with nutmeg, a concoction into which he planned to stir acetylsalicylic acid. He had recently discovered this cure while overhearing some of his friends decry their sorrows after a hard night of drinking. Jakob hovered at the door as the maid prepared the tea tray, wondering how much she or any of the maids knew. But even if they knew anything, they would never say. Maids had their own conspiracy of silence, if only to keep their jobs.

  Upstairs he stirred the medicine into the eggnog before setting the tray on the bed and gently touching his mother’s shoulder to wake her, for she had once again nodded off.

  She drank the nog without comment and without evident embarrassment, then poured herself some tea, her hands unsteady but her aim true. Jakob had brought two teacups, and they sat together, steam rising from their cups, avoiding saying anything that would upset the facade of her well-being. This entailed more vigilance on Jakob’s part, but this kind of caution suited him. Sometimes, on his mother’s good days, he could forget the spiral into which she had fallen. The change had happened suddenly. One day, she had been temperate, and the next she had fallen into excess and there had stayed. At first Jakob had found himself unable to navigate the uncertain shoals of the mother he adored falling to pieces. The puzzle of why remained unanswered. It was more than her innate shyness. And in a house where no one acknowledged a problem, addressing it was out of the question.

  He poured them both more tea. He had not come to his mother only to abscond with the sherry. Elizabeth had enchanted him. It had taken him only a moment to realize that the young woman crying on the street was the same stunning young woman he had met at the cemetery.

  “Mother,” he said. “Do you think we could extend that invitation to the Stipp family for dinner? The one you mentioned at the cemetery?”

  “I was planning to. I admire Mary Stipp a great deal. I’d like to get to know her. But why are you asking?” She was edging back into sobriety, into the mother he knew before she had become the mother he did not.

  “I met Elizabeth on the street just now. I find her charming.”

  “Do you?”

  His father’s distinctive, heavy tread sounded on the stairs, and Viola hurriedly rearranged her face from its private to its public mask, the one she used with everyone but Jakob.

  “I have to dress for dinner. Send in my maid, won’t you?” she said, looking at Jakob with the last bit of her true self that he would see that night.

  When his father’s bedchamber door slammed shut, Jakob left his mother smoothing the front of her bed jacket, showing little embarrassment at having been disarranged in front of him, but wanting to be put together in front of her maid.

  The appearance of happiness in the face of great unhappiness had become her vocation.

  —

  At dinner that night, Gerritt wanted to know how Jakob had gotten on with that foreman up at the capitol and all his shilly-shallying. Had Jakob wrangled him into some kind of submission? Jakob assured him repeatedly that he had. When Gerritt’s queries dwindled into a satisfied silence, augmented by his third tumbler of Scotch, Jakob reminded his father of the invitation.

  Gerritt raised an eyebrow. “That violinist?”

  Jakob nodded, grimacing a little at Elizabeth being referred to as “that violinist.”

  “Splendid. She’s quite the beauty. You certainly have an eye. When shall we have them?”

  In the wake of this surprisingly hearty reception, it was decided to invite the entire family for several days hence, on Monday night.

  Chapter Twelve

  A mile or so southeast of the capitol building lay the part of the city known as the Pastures, a low-lying grid of streets adjacent to the Greenbush Ferry Landing and north of Norman’s Kill, an area that housed icehouses and foundries and a hundred squat row houses on a floodplain. One of these houses stood at 153 Green Street. Nothing about the whitewashed clapboard or its gaily curtained windows gave anything away, except perhaps the meticulous way that its owner, James Harley, kept two garden boxes partly obscuring the cellar windows that sat at street level. He swore they kept the seasonal floodwaters out. At the earliest chance in the spring months, he planted the boxes with herbs and tomatoes that he then wrapped with chicken wire to discourage theft.

  The burly man mostly kept to himself. His brutish bearing—a thick chest and muscled arms—belied a retiring manner, and his round face, while weathered, lately exuded a nervousness that invited sympathy. It was said that he was admiringly reliable in his job as overseer for Gerritt Van der Veer. He was reported to attend Our Mother of Mercy Catholic Church on Sunday mornings. He unfailingly tipped his bowler hat to ladies on the street, even when it was raining. And while he was also known to take a pint in the evenings, he was not considered a dedicated tippler, so he was held up as a model of rectitude to the more dissolute husbands of the street, who protested at the injustice of being compared to a man without a wife and children to spoil his day.

  The single odd thing that people noted—but only in passing—was that lately in the nighttime Harley burned candles
in his basement windows. The warm glow from the candlelight formed a halo around the garden boxes, attracting attention while obscuring any ability to peer around them to see what he was up to. Foiled in their curiosity, the neighbors decided that if a man wanted to do a bit of fiddling in his basement of an evening, who was anyone to question him? Most likely, he was building furniture. He did that on the side, or so someone had once said.

  Harley, however, was not building furniture. He had found a much better use for his basement, which had until very recently served as his root cellar.

  He had turned the dark hole into a home.

  Emma and Claire O’Donnell didn’t think of the basement that way, nor did they know Harley’s name. He had never introduced himself, even as he brought them food and water, emptied out the privy he had built for them in one corner, and sometimes brushed their hair, taking care with the tangles, and apologizing for the long gaps of time between grooming sessions, even though Emma and Claire brushed one another’s hair all the time. He had to work during the day, he explained. That prevented him from showing his complete devotion, though they should be assured that he thought of them all the time. He was as big a man as they had ever seen, with arms the size of stovepipes and shoulders as wide as the Hudson. He wore a mustache, not a beard, and his head had no hair at all. They could hear him upstairs when he came home from work dragging a tub across the floor, then the sound of water sloshing, and afterward, the splash when he tossed it in the street gutter. Then, he came down the stairs in clean, pressed clothes, smelling of soap and carrying a tray of bread and butter and meats.

  They were allowed the run of the basement. He didn’t want them to be uncomfortable, he said. They were to make themselves at home on the couch he had fashioned of wood with his own hands, pillowed with a mattress folded in half and covered with a pink-and-brown length of calico he scolded them for not straightening after they wrinkled it. In the far corner, he had laid another mattress on the floor, under a pile of eiderdown and sheets he boiled once a week as he clucked, Nothing but the best for my girls.

  But the stone walls of the basement, packed with loose dirt in the uneven crevices, exuded a foul odor of sewage that, no matter how many times they took spit baths by the warmth of the coal stove, had settled in the sisters’ hair and under their nail beds. They were left alone most of the time, long, painful stretches during which Emma recovered. Day and night, through the narrow slits of window high above them, they could hear the whistles of day boats plying the Hudson and locomotives sounding their horns, the clackety clack of passing trains so near that sometimes it felt as if they could touch them. At night those plaintive sounds rolled unfettered through the empty streets, the rush of following air sounding hollow, the way that frightening things always had before. Now what frightened them was the damped hush of must and earth.

  “We must be near the river,” Emma said, for the hundredth time. They were lying on the bed together, their arms encircling one another, Emma’s nose nestled in Claire’s long hair. “Father works near the river. He is looking for us, Claire. He’ll find us.” Emma had long ago lost track of time. Innumerable days had passed since the blizzard. Time is nothing, she often whispered to Claire. Time is nothing; We aren’t here; This isn’t happening. But time was everything, Emma thought. It was always the same minute over and over, the same cage with no key, the same dark night, the same eternal present.

  Early on, the first time, the Other Man had said that if Emma didn’t cooperate, he would hurt Claire. And that if she cooperated, he wouldn’t. And he had kept that promise. But she didn’t know if he would keep it up. She was grateful when the Man took Claire away, up the stairs while the Other Man made himself busy with her.

  “Father works near the river. He is looking for us, Claire. He’ll find us. He loves us and he’ll find us,” Emma said, keeping up the running prattle, though she no longer expected Claire to answer. Little Claire, only seven years old, wiser than she, had stopped talking long ago, having learned better than Emma that silence gave you power when nothing else did. Claire spent most of her time staring at the walls with the fixed, stunned expression that had lately hollowed her cheeks and eyes, worrying Emma, who had done all she could to protect her.

  There were two men. The Man who lived upstairs and took care of them, and the Other Man, the one who found them and brought them here and came sometimes after dinner. Before the Other Man came downstairs to see Emma, the Man would whisper a scolding, Be good, a flat warning, Don’t look, and a brief caress, my little ones. Then he would take Claire away and the Other Man would come down. But he came only sometimes. They always had to be ready, just in case. It was the waiting that was awful. The anticipation.

  Emma would turn her face away, press one ear into the ground, cover the other with one hand, and transform now into before, here into not here, happening into not happening. In the darkness, she would remember the pattern of the walls and the bedspread and the way the lettering on the stove looked, but it was both Claire and Elizabeth who comforted her during. Emma would first think of Claire, safe upstairs, knowing nothing of what was happening, and Emma would then be free to imagine that she was listening to Elizabeth play her violin. Elizabeth had always been able to change how Emma felt just by pulling a bow across a string.

  Now Emma tucked the edge of a blue sweater over her little sister’s shoulders and said, “They never come in the day, Claire. Remember? You can sleep if you want. I’ll keep watch, and wake you when they do.” Claire blinked once, twice, then shut her eyes, having learned, it seemed, that if she followed orders, there would be less pain for both of them. Emma marveled at her sister’s ability to drop away and wondered why Claire still trusted her. She shouldn’t. Emma didn’t even trust herself. The Man had said that her parents had given up on them. That they didn’t care. That Claire and Emma should learn to love him instead, because wasn’t he taking good care of them?

  She hated him.

  Emma began to gulp air, but she fought the rising wave of panic.

  Lately, her life was measured solely by her ability to keep Claire safe, a safety that two months ago she had never dreamed she would be responsible for. She suppressed the urge to cry now, an urge that required constant vigilance or it would unleash itself and get her into trouble. Instead, she chewed the edges of her tongue, working the tongue against her teeth. Somehow it soothed her, the hint of pain, the scraping of the flesh, the small bubbles of noise that she alone could hear.

  Once, the Other Man had seemed their savior.

  On their way home from school that day the blizzard ended, Claire had sunk to her neck in one of the deep drifts. Despite Emma’s frantic efforts, Claire kept sinking, and Emma began to wail for help. That was when the Other Man veered toward them in his bright cherry sleigh—as bright as the maraschino cherries at Huyler’s ice cream shop—and leaped from the bench. Within moments, he dug Claire out. And before Emma could thank him, he dusted them both off and lifted them into his sleigh, tucked them on the seat next to him under a thick carriage blanket, and slipped a warmed brick between them. Stunned and hungry, they accepted his ministrations, though now Emma remembered entertaining a vague sense that she ought to ask to be taken straight home. But she couldn’t think. The cold was a monster, scaring her into silence. And the snow was so deep that they hadn’t been able to move. And then he had taken their stiffened hands into his thick leather gloves, his scarf sparkling with snow, and said things like, “I’ll help you. I’ll take care of you.” And, “Trust me.” But now he said it just to taunt her. He liked her terror. Observed it with glee. Savored it.

  Emma thought that by now her pain would have coalesced, become one large throbbing ache, but every muscle drew attention to itself, every space between bone and sinew vibrated with ache. The cold of the blizzard still lingered in her body and in the basement stones. Until a few days ago, the walls had wept with snowmelt and her bones had felt as if they
would shatter from the cold, despite the smothering piles of eiderdown the Man supplied. Even the coal stove, which the Other Man stoked during his nighttime visits, could not battle the damp. He shoveled the coal into the stove as he said, I am so sorry.

  After, mad with worry, Emma would ask Claire, What did the Man do with you upstairs?

  Claire would say, He made me a new dress. Do you like it? Or, he combed my hair and carried me around on his shoulders. Or, He fed me porridge. He says I’m special.

  “O’Donnell?” the Other Man had said when he first asked their names, rolling the vowels on his tongue, his eyes lighting up a little as he knelt before them in the sleigh. “Well, well. That’s quite the Irish name. Emma and Claire? Lovely. Perfect for you. Such pretty, pretty things you are.”

  Now Emma wished she had never told him who they were, because their names were too precious a thing to have given to him. It was as if she had given the Other Man a key, for he used her name like a bludgeon: You will do this, Emma. You will. She hated his voice. It was so cold, and it sounded like the far edge of pain.

  Emma wanted to sleep, because when she slept she could forget, but she had promised Claire, so she pinched the bruises on her arms to stay awake. Outside, past the obscuring window boxes, footsteps sounded on the sidewalk, bursts of laughter and happy chatter falling away as the passersby tripped onward, oblivious.

  One more sound out of you, he’d said that first night, and Claire won’t live.