The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  “See what?” Caroline said. She wanted to underscore for herself too that there was nothing substantive here, so far.

  Samuel raised his eyebrows, the way he had her whole life when she was being difficult. He had always maintained his right to be taken aback by her.

  Though they would open in two months, the school at this point existed solely in the plans that spun through the air of any room Samuel and David simultaneously occupied. There was much to do, and more, maybe, to avoid doing. Samuel had taught as a young man, at a secondary school in Boston, and had come away with a host of aversions: to lectures, drills, the McGuffey Reader, and the striking of students. “Hours spent in dim rows, copying out dusty verses, smother the intellect in its womb,” he told David, as they paced the carpet in his study.

  David had not spent many such hours. His only formal instruction had taken place in a one-room schoolhouse on an Ohio farmer’s back field; at the same age at which Samuel had gone to Harvard, David had gone to war. Still, he knew what he thought about the point Samuel was making, as about most things. “What does regurgitation have to do with the mind?” he said.

  David’s mind, Samuel had long ago proclaimed, was as fine as any he’d ever encountered. This was especially impressive given that David had been almost entirely self-taught. David told Caroline once that his Ohio schoolmaster, in between getting sums wrong on the blackboard, took away the books David used to secrete in his desk, so that his earliest impression of school was of a place where it was unsafe to be caught reading.

  “Nothing at all. We’ll free them from all of that,” Samuel said, with the relish of talking to someone who agreed with him, David in particular.

  David had been with them almost exactly a year, though it felt both longer and shorter. He’d arrived at haying time, come to the front door and knocked in his strange, somber clothes, black and clumsy-sewn. Caroline later realized he’d fashioned himself after the author plates in the Birch Hill men’s books. At first she’d believed he was peddling something, and her “May I help you?” on opening the door was not too kind. Only when he’d given her his letter for her father—at work in his study, not to be disturbed—had she gathered that he was one of Samuel’s would-be acolytes, whose arrival had tapered and tapered through her childhood. David hadn’t known Samuel had a daughter. “Well, he doesn’t write much about me,” Caroline had said, smiling at the lock of David’s brown hair that lifted in a pocket of wind like a rogue antenna.

  Thinking the smile was for him, David returned it, carving lines in his face beside his bold, bony nose. “Tell him he should,” he said. “Surely at least a paragraph somewhere.” His eyes gleamed at her as if she were his own discovery. Then he’d held the letter out to her, the backs of his hands sunburned, and told her Samuel might send word to the Ashwell Inn if he chose.

  Caroline, pressing the wax seal while she watched him go, had considered not giving the letter to her father, though she wasn’t sure why—only that the paper had the feel, in her hands, of change. It might not have mattered. A man doesn’t travel from Ohio to Massachusetts only to leave again without speaking to the one he’s come to see. Yet she did think still that David, with his mix of arrogances and wounds, might not have returned—might have boarded a train homeward and cast himself back into the life he’d left, and she might never have seen him again.

  When she’d handed the letter to her father that night, he’d groaned. “These poor boys. These poor, poor letters,” he said, as if they still flooded in. He broke the seal and began to read.

  “Oh,” he said. With that sound, the change flew into the open. Caroline had been watching that change since, trying to understand what it might be carrying for her, trying to decide on the exact shade of its feathers.

  She was coming to suspect that its shade too might be a red so bright and so unexpected, so unlike the colors of her life, that it held a violence.

  “At what age will our instruction begin?” she asked her father and David now, for many of these practicalities remained vague. She was sitting by the window in her usual chair, out of their lines of sight. They turned toward her. She wondered if they’d remembered until then that she was there.

  “Fourteen, I think,” David said, and Samuel nodded. “It’s such a critical age, fourteen, fifteen. The entry to adulthood. A time when proper steering can work to great effect.”

  Samuel tapped his mouth thoughtfully. “I like that. The entry, the steering. Let’s put it just that way. We’ll have a brief essay in The Examiner this month,” he explained to Caroline, as she was readying her question, “to announce our aims.”

  She wondered if the idea for the essay had come to her father before or after the idea for the school. “Where would you like to steer these girls?” she asked, leaning a bit on the last word.

  “Toward the best of what’s in them already,” he said. “That’s what education should be, for boys and girls alike. A molding of what they already have.”

  “No difference, then.” She wasn’t sure if she was challenging him or if she only wanted him to explain it to her.

  “The sole difference is that we’ll have to show these girls there’s no difference.”

  A few days later, as they walked to the barn to assess their future classroom—the only space large and open enough for what Samuel imagined—Caroline asked David, “Did you ever guess you were coming here to open a school for girls?”

  “I could lie and say I did,” David said, watching Samuel, who had walked ahead. “But truthfully, I can say that the best parts of my life have mostly been things I couldn’t have imagined.”

  He’d never imagined her, she knew; she’d seen that on his face when she first opened the door to him. She half turned to him now to see if she could catch whether that was any part of what he’d meant—but they were in earshot of her father now.

  “We’ll have to replace that door,” Samuel said, gesturing broadly. “You see how the wood’s going. But most of it’s fine. Come in, both of you. Picture how it will be.”

  * * *

  *

  Hawkins arrived. His skin had thickened and reddened with too much good eating since his last visit, five or six years earlier. He brought luggage. He remembered where things were in the house, and when he wanted something—a book, a footstool, a piece of the bread Caroline had made—he went and got it without saying a thing to anyone, as if this were still his home. Caroline wished he hadn’t come. He looked at her too long, and her skin crawled with his eyes on it.

  Together, Hawkins, David, and Samuel went out to kill one of the trilling hearts, so it could be sent to an acquaintance of Hawkins’s at the Boston Society of Natural History. Twenty-five years ago, when the birds had first been seen, the society had no record of this species, but the men thought records might by now have improved. Hawkins was the one who shot the bird; he carried it back to the farmhouse by its feet, like something he intended to roast and consume, small though it was. “Now we’ll get some answers, if there are any to be had,” Hawkins said, standing over the bird while it sopped blood as red as its feathers onto the rags Caroline had laid out for it on the kitchen table. Caroline leaned in over the limp body. At this proximity it had a gamy smell, and two tiny mites swam across the glassine surface of its open eye. She felt relief at seeing it this way, its strange magic all fled. She straightened again.

  The answer, which returned quickly from Boston, was the one Caroline knew they’d wanted: there was still no record of the trilling hearts, though it seemed they were close relatives of a bird common in South America. No one had a convincing theory about where these birds had come from or why they should descend on two or three towns in Massachusetts, vanish for decades, then reappear. But there it was.

  The men were credited with having sent in the society’s first official specimen (any sent during the birds’ brief stay last time having been lost or mis
placed). In the ledgers, the birds became Aphelocoma rubinus; in the wider parlance, they remained trilling hearts.

  “Your mother named a species, Caroline,” Samuel remarked wonderingly.

  * * *

  *

  The essay about the school in The Examiner appeared and caused a modest stir. David read it aloud to all of them that evening by the fire.

  We have been lately reborn as a nation…

  The mothers of this nation, the daughters, deserve…will give in turn…

  Souls…souls…souls…

  They applauded. David flushed.

  Instead of letting the applause stand, Hawkins grunted, shifted. “Isn’t it something,” he said, “the way these birds are making people fall in love with Pearson again.”

  If they’d ever fallen out of love with him, Caroline hadn’t heard. Miles Pearson, the youngest of the Birch Hill men, had been in his early twenties during the grand experiment and had abandoned it first of all of them. In short order he’d written a titillating novel called The Darkening Glass, a tale of the supernatural, very famous—so famous that more people knew his name now than knew Samuel’s. He’d married, then died young, winning himself still more celebrity.

  The Darkening Glass was the only forbidden book in the Hood household. Samuel refused to speak about it. Birch Hill was already dead when The Darkening Glass was published, but he could not forgive the novel for making that death final, or for its other crimes. Its heroine, a perfect golden glittering paragon named Louisa Blake, had been based, it was said, on Caroline’s mother, Anna. The villain, Abner Blake, was based on Samuel, but Pearson had made him Louisa’s uncle instead of her husband. Abner keeps Louisa locked away through various dark machinations; a young man named Hammond arrives and ushers in a season of attempted liberation; trilling hearts flap madly through significant scenes; nothing ends well. When she’d read the book—at sixteen, a copy she’d at last purloined in town, too desperate for what it might contain to resist any longer—Caroline had found little of her father in the sinuous Abner except a tendency toward speeches. Louisa, childless, unmarried, and slippery with virtue, had slid right through her fingers, though she’d tried so hard to clutch and hold. And then at the end of the novel Louisa had died. That part at least had felt familiar, even if Louisa’s manner of dying—undone by either ghosts or Abner’s potions, the question of which left unresolved—was more dramatic and tormented than Anna’s, in the midst of an epileptic fit.

  Now Samuel asked Hawkins, “Are they?” as if it made no difference to him.

  “The bookstore in Ashwell has two shelves of only Pearson.” Hawkins coddled his paunch like a lapdog. “People are giving Darkening Glass tours.”

  Caroline had seen the new crowds thronging Ashwell when she walked to the post office to send and receive her father’s letters. So that was what the strangers were doing, tromping through fields to find the birds, pulling copies of the novel from their pockets to read relevant passages aloud to each other in the sunshine.

  “What can there possibly be for them to see?” Samuel said.

  “It depends which eyes are doing the looking, Sam,” Hawkins told him, tapping a finger, for some reason, to his temple.

  “If people are talking, they may talk about the school too,” David said. “That can’t hurt.”

  Samuel lifted his newspaper and was silent for a moment. Then he lowered it again. “Those tours ought to come this way. They ought to see themselves right to the front door and meet us. Don’t you think, Caroline? If they’re lucky, I might bestow a hair from my head, a fingernail clipping or two, for burning in their midnight rituals.”

  Caroline felt as if she were watching a poor tortured bear try to jig. She smiled. “Why give them away? We should sell them. Profit from what’s ours.”

  “Very clever,” said Hawkins, and there were his eyes again.

  * * *

  *

  Hawkins, some of the other Birch Hill men, and several of her father’s newer correspondents had gathered at the farmhouse once, when Caroline was about ten—five years after Birch Hill had ended, almost five after her mother had died. She’d gone down in a new white dress like a nervous little bride to recite the opening of the Aeneid, which she’d been studying with her father, before supper. Caroline stood in the center of the circle of dark-suited men. “Caroline would like to demonstrate what we’ve been working on,” her father said. She’d neatened the folds of her dress, pinned her arms tight to her sides, and stood up straight, because, she imagined (she cringed to remember it now), this was the way Dido or Viola or Penelope or her mother would have stood. “Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam, fato profugus…” The white dress and the words fit themselves to her skin. When she was done, she knew the men would applaud thunderously, and then they would come closer to touch her arms, her hair. So like Anna, they would say.

  But when she stopped after thirty lines, their applause was merely polite. “Very nice,” said one of them. The others made encouraging noises. Caroline had twisted her hair up, hours earlier, and tucked in a blossom from their dogwood tree. Had her fingers actually crept to remove it or had they only wanted to? She couldn’t remember.

  “All right, Caroline. You may go back upstairs,” her father said, in a kind way but with something like embarrassment in his face. Why? She knew she’d done well.

  From there, she could still hear. “What a little creation, Sam!” somebody said. It might have been Hawkins; she wasn’t sure.

  “Someday her husband can refresh his schoolboy Latin at the breakfast table.”

  “He won’t need to refresh. She’ll talk to him in nothing but Latin. Their children will speak it when they emerge from the womb.”

  Her father laughed along with them. “Let’s go in to supper, shall we?” he said. Nothing else. She remembered that.

  * * *

  *

  Samuel and David and Hawkins, clustered around the desk in the study to talk and talk; Caroline on the sofa, sun slicing through the curtains to lie on the carpet in big wasteful stripes. Filling her with that restlessness she knew as well as she knew any person—that sense that a gift was being given, and the moment for its use was passing, had passed.

  “Would anyone like a walk?” she said.

  But Hawkins was declaiming. “Thoreson of course holds that in education it’s discipline that matters most. I was reading an essay of his the other day.” All these men had this ability to seize on every essay, never letting one slip by, vigilant as housewives guarding their flour and sugar from pests. “Educating, he says, really should be disciplining, in every sense of the word. Teaching order, order in the mind.”

  “I read that too,” Samuel said. Swat, swat, essay read, stores safe.

  Hawkins sat back and eyed Samuel. “You don’t agree?”

  “Oh, order matters, of course. But the notion that it can be externally established—stamped down on pupils, each of them receiving it in exactly the same way, as if they’re all just the same shape…” Samuel hissed air between his teeth, wincing a little at poor Thoreson’s error. “And the precedence it’s given. He seems to feel the only measurement of successful education is how quiet and unobtrusive the whole enterprise can be made.”

  “To what would you give precedence?” Hawkins said.

  “To the truest, deepest self.”

  Hawkins sneered. “The deepest selves of these girls.”

  “They do have them,” Samuel said. “We must encourage them to think and question and find God in themselves, where He lives, after all. In educating women, we can make a great leap forward, because the next generation will be handed to them, in large measure, to raise—to shape as they see fit.”

  This dreaming was a fever Caroline had decided not to catch, and yet to her fury, her forearms rippled now with goose bumps.

  “We
ll, yes, I knew you thought all of that,” Hawkins said. “But in light of these new advances—Thoreson’s new school is getting quite good results, it seems—”

  “Good results,” David said, smiling. “As in farming. Carpentry.”

  Hawkins regarded David impassively. You are an upstart and new to your place here, and some of us have been here a long time. It was a look that Caroline had sometimes wanted to give David too, among other looks.

  “All right, so what will it be like in practice, then? This finding of true selves?” Hawkins said, turning back to Samuel. “Will you talk to them about their souls all the time?”

  “Their souls are the aim, not the material. The bulk of the instruction will consist of reading and conversation about what we have read, as it would if the students were boys. Literature, moral reasoning, and scientific inquiry.”

  “And mathematics,” David said.

  “Yes,” said Samuel. He had a way of forgetting mathematics, which David would be teaching and which had never been Samuel’s strongest suit: too many rules in what one did with numbers.

  “Though they aren’t boys,” Caroline said. No matter how many times she said this she was never quite sure he’d heard.

  “The soul does not have a sex,” Samuel said. “That’s what we’re going to show the world.”

  While Caroline walked that evening, she thought about the sexless soul. The idea had its own chill, like the air tucked into the shade beneath the trees now, foretaste of fall. She had no way, really, of evaluating its general truth. She knew only that her life had a sex.

  She’d always understood it would, of course. Her father might have instructed her as he would have a son, but she’d known she was not one. Only she had never quite felt like a daughter either. Mary Sutton, from a farm a bit down the road—with whom Caroline had played and mapped these hills when they were small, running through imagined fairy glens, bedecking themselves in moss, and plaiting their hair with grasses and flowers—had been a daughter, able to roam only until her mother called her to come and help prepare the food, hem the trouser leg, sweep the kitchen. In Caroline’s house there was no mother, and Mrs. Wilmer, the housekeeper, did most of these things; she taught them to Caroline only if Caroline happened to be by. The girls her father sent her to visit in Ashwell, they too were daughters, with their crossed ankles and their tiny smiles.