The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  “You’d hate it too.”

  Her face heated.

  David bent, picked something from the grass beside the pavement, and straightened again with his hand extended toward her. “From a trilling heart female, I think.”

  She took it from him. Not much like the feathers in her dream—in the palm of her glove it made a bedraggled, loose light-brown C—but a haze of red did somehow cling to that brown. “How would you describe that color?” she asked David.

  “Oh, reddish-brownish.”

  Well, yes. She brushed the feather away lest the haze somehow cling to her too, but he bent and lifted it again.

  “You’ll keep it?” she said.

  “To show the students, I thought.”

  She couldn’t think how to explain the small recoiling she felt at the idea of the feather inside his pocket, inside some drawer in their house.

  They were crossing the heart of Ashwell now, with its rows of quiet, matronly houses. Two fashionable girls, younger than Caroline, strolled down the other side of the street. Caroline didn’t want to watch David to see if he looked at them. She pointed to the grand white house a little ahead. “That’s where my parents lived when they first married, did you know? It had been my mother’s family home.”

  David ran his eyes up the pillars.

  “There was some money, and my father met her before his writing had earned much, so their marrying caused a stir.”

  “What was she like, your mother?”

  Caroline should have known better than to talk about her mother. Stiffly, she said, “She died when I was six. I only have a few memories.” Her mother standing far away, raising her hands to her mouth in a growing wind (a storm must have been brewing) and shouting for Caroline to come in. Her mother in the kitchen, handing her father a plate.

  “Your father speaks very beautifully about her.”

  “Yes, though of course my father could speak beautifully about a washtub.”

  The white house was a house for a perfect girl. When she was a child, Caroline decided that her mother must have been one, who had grown into a perfect woman. And then one day a handsome man came by on his horse. (The handsome man bore no real resemblance to Samuel in her mind.) The man had just moved to town, so he stopped and stared at Anna, because she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and then asked her where he might find the library. Anna pointed in the right direction, but the man decided the library could wait.

  “She must have been very young when she died,” David said.

  There was an old woman out on the porch of the house opposite, beginning to stare and straighten up in her rocking chair. Caroline started them walking again, then said, “Twenty-six. She’d had the fits for years—since she was just a girl—but no one thought them dangerous. It was a very great shock.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I don’t mean for me. I mean, it must have been, but I don’t remember.” Her one fragment of a memory from that day held no real feeling: sitting on her bed, Mrs. Wilmer’s fingers stroking her hair, while downstairs her father made shrieking sounds. The loss itself had always been something seen through fogged glass. Into that absence had crept a vivid imagining, a presence of a different kind. She could not stop anticipating how her inheritance from this unknown mother might arrive. Perhaps with a jerk of the fingers, as if pulled by twine. Or in the chest, a new thump, a foreign heart. In the legs, a sudden refusal to bear the body’s accustomed weight. In the head, a hot white limitlessness.

  Caroline was almost surely too old now for such a beginning, as she was for other beginnings. Still, when she rehearsed the possibilities, she was unsure if she was picturing her mother’s body or her own.

  “Your mother,” David said, “she was Pearson’s Louisa Blake?” Caroline had the feeling he was forcing himself to ask as if he had the right to instead of whispering.

  “People say so. I’ve never thought Louisa seems like a creature who could breathe anywhere outside of imagination. You’ve read The Darkening Glass?” Even naming the book set off a thrill of disobedience. “Don’t tell my father.”

  David nodded. “As a boy, before I’d read your father’s essays, and I read it again before coming here. It seemed wise to know everything I could, if I was to meet him, really meet him.”

  “Well, what did you think of it?” she asked.

  “Apart from the absurdity of Abner Blake?”

  “Yes, apart from that.”

  He seemed to consider. “It’s curious. You always feel that you’re straining to make out the characters’ faces in the depths of dark rooms. But Louisa—I don’t know. Pearson must have been in love with her, your mother, don’t you think?” Looking ahead again and not at Caroline.

  “My father says they all were, a little.” As she said this, Caroline suddenly heard its deflection. She had of course wondered before about her mother and Pearson, but then there were so many things she had wondered about her mother. “I can’t remember Pearson himself at all, so I can’t tell you firsthand. But I’m not sure it’s exactly a lover’s eye that’s trained on Louisa. She’s barely there at all. Just a sort of shimmery vapor that sometimes coalesces long enough to say ‘Oh sir’ or ‘Oh thank you so much,’ and then disperses again.”

  “Ah, you know the book well!” David said.

  He met her eyes again and smiled, and there it was: a secret they would keep from Samuel, for only themselves.

  They’d reached Jeffers’s door, where Mr. Jeffers himself waved them in. He was a potbellied man with a splendid, healthy mustache who had made Caroline’s parents’ marriage bed and seemed to feel this made them familiar. The desks and chairs were grouped at the front of the store for inspection before they would be loaded on the cart and brought to the house.

  “You try it,” David said to Caroline. “We need a lady’s opinion. The students will be ladies, after all.”

  Caroline sat. David looked at the places where the lines of her body hit the lines of the chair.

  “It’s comfortable,” she said, though really she couldn’t tell, intent as she was on holding herself still under his gaze, which hit her like a focused point of light, traveling.

  “Is the back at the right angle?” he said. He reached out to touch her between the slats.

  The delivery, Jeffers said, would take place the next morning. He was certain they’d be able to get all seven onto the cart at once.

  “Seven,” Caroline said, while Jeffers was in the back. There was something about hearing the number separated from the names. “Not very many.”

  “There will be more later, as soon as people see what we’re doing,” David told her.

  A wet gray tissue of cloud had descended by the time they left Jeffers’s. Everyone in the streets now scurried. With satisfaction, Caroline imagined the state of the girls they’d seen on their way in: they’d look melted, ribbons, curls, and ruffles all pasted to their skin.

  When they’d almost reached the end of the street, a voice called from behind. “Miss Hood! Miss Hood, a moment! Please!”

  Caroline turned to find a group of three people coming toward them: a prosperous-looking middle-aged couple and a girl of fifteen or sixteen. The girl had been the one calling out her name. Caroline didn’t recognize any of them.

  “Hello,” Caroline said, and put a question in the word.

  “I’m sorry. The man at the store said it was you who’d just left, and I had to meet you. I hope you don’t find me very forward.” The girl had dark hair, a large mouth, and skin that was almost translucent. Her gray dress gave away its expensiveness in the way it gloved her.

  “Eliza, please,” the richly wrapped woman behind her said, grimacing at the sky and dragging a little on the arm of the man, who was thickset and luxuriant-bearded and crisp-edged in his top hat. Somehow none of the three of them seemed very
wet.

  “Excuse my mother. She doesn’t like weather,” the girl said. “I’m Eliza Pearson Bell.”

  She put weight on that name in the middle, and through her shock Caroline thought that someone should tell her not to be so obvious. But when she saw the way Eliza was watching, she realized that the middle name was not habitual, was just for Caroline, because Eliza wanted to see how it would land. Caroline tamped all reaction down beneath her own expression. She had never met Pearson’s widow and daughter, who’d been only a baby when he’d died. She’d thought they lived in New York now. They were like figments made real and polished, this vivid girl and her decorative mother. She must have summoned them somehow by saying The Darkening Glass aloud.

  “This is my mother, Adelaide Pearson Bell, and my stepfather, Matthew Bell.”

  The man tipped his hat; the woman pursed her mouth in their direction.

  “A pleasure to meet you,” Caroline said. “And this is Mr. David Moore.”

  From between buildings, a flurry of trilling hearts rose into the sky, and Caroline started at the sudden fragmenting and animation, like pieces of a still painting that had decided to move.

  Eliza turned to watch them. “Aren’t they beautiful!” she said.

  Caroline smiled. Beautiful. Why did everyone seem to think that?

  “Really, I can’t get used to them. We were on a sort of New England expedition anyway, because Papa had some business, and once we heard about the trilling hearts, of course we had to come out here and see.” Eliza’s speech and gestures might have belonged to someone ten years older; she seemed a small, perfect, unnerving copy of an adult woman. “We took a tour.”

  “You practically gave the tour,” her stepfather said. His voice turned out to be high and froggy.

  “I shared a few things I happened to know.” Eliza waved a hand. “I thought everyone might be interested.”

  “They were,” said her stepfather.

  Caroline imagined Eliza raising her arms and a cloud of birds swirling up, conducted.

  “But of course now none of that will be the highlight of our trip. You will be. I just can’t believe I’m meeting you in the flesh.”

  “Please, Eliza,” her mother said again. It might have been the word flesh that set her off this time.

  “Yes, sweetheart, we should be going,” Bell added.

  As if they hadn’t spoken, Eliza continued. “Miss Hood, may I ask, is it true that you’re opening a girls’ school?”

  “It is.”

  Eliza clasped her hands. “And I need a new school, don’t I, Mama? I’ve been at Miss Marsh’s, but it’s only pretty prattling—you know, music, needlework.”

  Pearson’s daughter, at their school? Even Pearson’s book wasn’t allowed in their house. This sleek and canny offspring—her face, her skin, her eyes, her words, would all be painful to Samuel anywhere, and unbearable inside his grand new project. Caroline thought about telling Eliza that they planned only pretty prattling too, but just by looking at Caroline the girl would have been able to tell it was a lie.

  “I’m not sure…,” Caroline said.

  “Isn’t there room? I can make myself very small, I promise.” In her composed face, Eliza’s eyes were startling in their hunger.

  At home sat Samuel, wrapped warm in blankets and sureness, thinking of his school for girls. He was imagining the girls themselves as a kind of beautiful clay: dense, rich, formless, and waiting for him. He was not thinking about failing, despite Caroline’s efforts to remind him, despite the risks of that possibility for her too, the way it would bury both their lives. Had he ever considered her life, really? How its form, her form, was only ever the form he had given her? She the first piece of clay.

  Well, perhaps Caroline should give him Eliza now. She was a girl, after all. Let him see what he could make of her. Let him see what it was like to try to make this particular girl into anything.

  “There would be room, I think,” Caroline said.

  David turned to her with a polite smile and lifted eyebrows.

  Caroline looked again to the Bells. “You’ll of course need to discuss it.”

  “Oh, Mama and Papa will let me do what I like.”

  “Hmm,” said Mrs. Bell.

  “Why don’t you talk it over and let us know? Though you’ll need to decide quickly, I’m afraid; we do open in a week,” Caroline told them.

  They parted—Eliza bestowing her hand and showing her white teeth. David and Caroline made their way around the corner.

  “Caroline, you saw so quickly,” David said. “You understood right away. It took me a moment.”

  “Understood what?”

  “What she could do for us, the word of mouth we’ll get from having her.”

  Caroline looked into the window of the fabric store they were passing—a bolt of plaid, a bolt of black, a bolt of green—because if she looked at David he might see why she’d really done what she’d done. “Nothing will come of it, I’m sure. Why would Miles Pearson’s daughter want to come to our school? She must have her pick of schools on two continents.”

  “Ours will be the best of any. Truly it will.” He brushed at his forehead in excitement. “This will make us.”

  “My father won’t see it that way.”

  “Your father wants this to succeed.”

  “Though he isn’t very well acquainted with success of this sort.”

  “Caroline,” he said sharply.

  She met David’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  All of this has happened before, she wanted to tell him—you just weren’t here the last time. You didn’t see the way it all went, in the end.

  “I think we’d all be wise to remember that it isn’t as easy to achieve a thing as to dream it up,” she said.

  “You think dreaming it up is easy?”

  “For my father? Easier than considering practicalities. The many different ways of failing.”

  “We won’t fail. And worrying about practicalities, all of that, it’s unmaking the dream—anyone can do that.”

  “Anyone can unmake this one,” she said. “We have seven students.”

  David was shaking his head. “I’m sure you have dreams. What are they, I wonder?”

  Smooth red sleeves; her own promising nakedness.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a glimpse.” David caught her gloved hand, then sighed and dropped it. He walked ahead. Behind him in the road, Caroline forgot her breath.

  4.

  SCHOOL BEGINS

  She was to other women as a swan to sparrows—silk to burlap—the finest marble to earth.

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 72)

  Trilling Heart’s first morning arrived. Caroline found her father and David in the barn that would be their classroom. She’d been having nightmares set in this room for the past week—in the worst, the students weren’t students at all but ratlike creatures that scurried beneath her skirts while she screamed. This morning she saw the space with fresh horror. Despite the whitewashing David had done, the window he’d cut into the far side, it was still unmistakably a barn; the new light only drew attention to the rough hew of the planks. A wood floor had been laid but not varnished. The ladder to the old hayloft had been removed, perhaps so no wayward girl could climb up there, but the hayloft itself remained. The whole place smelled of sawdust.

  Her father sat at the teacher’s desk, talking to David over the heads of the busts of Milton and Plato that he’d carried here from his study. Behind him stood two cases full of books. Those books had made dazzling shapes inside Samuel’s head, but that didn’t mean the girls would be able to see those shapes. What they’d see: a barn filled with paper and wood. Caroline wondered if she was ready to watch what the girls would do to her father.

  “Caroline!” Samuel said. He rose and
stepped out amongst the desks and chairs David and Caroline had approved. He still hadn’t quite recovered fully from his cold, and she thought he looked a little feverish. “Note the pattern of the desks, the circle. Whoever is giving the current lesson will take the teacher’s desk, part of the circle in its own right.”

  She hadn’t told her father about Eliza Pearson until the confirming note had arrived, in handwriting that cupped years of elegant education in the letters’ curves. Mama and Papa had indeed decided to let Eliza do as she liked, though that was not, this time, the way Eliza phrased things. Instead she wished to convey that she was beside herself with excitement, would do her best to be an asset to Trilling Heart, &c. When Caroline had carried the note to her father at his desk, he’d read it, then raised his eyes to her face. “Caroline, she makes it sound as if you’ve already agreed to this.”

  Her heart hammered. “I only told her there was room. She’d have heard so anyway.”

  Make of her what you will. Can you?

  “What can you have been thinking?” The color of his face had become complicated—too red in places and too white in others.

  David, sitting across the room: “Sir, I understand your reservations, but I do think she could be quite a good thing for us.”

  “It’s…problematic.”

  “Does it need to be? Having her here will create new visibility for what we’re undertaking.”

  Caroline and David looked at each other while they waited for her father to decide how he felt. They were united in this. Not for the same reasons, but still, the feeling of mutually assessing, of speaking with their eyes about what they saw—she hummed with it.

  Samuel cleared his throat. There was a catch in the sound. “Well. Well, I suppose we should consider ourselves privileged to be touched by at least the fingertips of fame,” he’d said, and David had smiled at her.

  Now David told Samuel, “The circle is ingenious. One body, neither head nor foot.”