The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  A friend of Samuel’s had mailed him three reproductions of photographs from the aftermath of Antietam. He had gasped when he opened the envelope and retreated with it, watery eyed, to his study, calling to her that this was a thing she must not see. She’d crept to his desk after he slept that night and found them in the main drawer. There in her father’s chair, she’d studied the heaped, intimate bodies: the casually bent knees, the flung arms, the hair on a stomach, the open mouth, the strange defenseless repose of so many ruined men.

  “It’s one of teaching’s best gifts, isn’t it?” David said to her now. He had moved his hand to his own kneecap. “Your students know nothing yet about unpleasantness. You get to borrow their ignorance while they borrow your knowledge.”

  “Oh, but of course they know unpleasantness,” Caroline said.

  He laughed. “Look at them!” David waved at Livia and Meg, traipsing along with interlooped arms. For some reason, Meg had draped a shawl over her head, and Livia was batting at it.

  “You think being unhappy has some particular choreography?”

  He looked at Caroline more closely. “Fair enough,” he said. He rose, then. “Girls! Time!”

  They gathered, each bearing her stone. Felicity’s and Julia’s were both large enough to require two hands to carry. “I don’t know if this is right,” Felicity said, inspecting hers doubtfully. “I thought I could see layers, but maybe it’s just the lines where the dirt hit.”

  “My hem—I soiled it,” Julia said. She put down the stone to pull and brush at the fabric.

  “Pity,” said Abigail, the only one kind enough to look.

  Julia drew out her workbag from a pocket. “I have just the perfect bit of lace to cover the mark.”

  “You carry that with you all the time?” Livia said. “In case of an urgent sewing matter?”

  “Only a few things, so I’m prepared,” Julia said, with dignity, still rummaging. “It was here. I know it was. Have any of you seen it?”

  “Are you saying one of us took it?” Meg said.

  “Well,” said Julia, sniffing.

  This didn’t seem impossible to Caroline. They were all living so close together. One of them could easily have noted and pilfered a beautiful bit of lace from her neighbor’s desk in between Latin exercises. Which of them had that covetousness? It would have less to do with what a girl already had than with the intensity of her desire: maybe Livia, with those limber dramatic fingers, or Meg, with her longing to make herself a little lighter and more graceful than she was, or fearless Felicity, or even Eliza, though Caroline couldn’t quite imagine her wanting such an uncomplicated thing.

  “Really, Julia,” Abigail said pacifyingly. “You know we wouldn’t. You’ve just misplaced it.”

  “I’m offended,” said Livia. She looked around to judge her effect. Then, “Where’s Eliza?” she asked.

  They searched one another’s faces as if one of them might be hiding her.

  “Miss Bell!” David called.

  No one had seen her since he’d released them. David called her name again, then said he was sure she’d be along and tried to continue with the lesson, but no one was listening. He set them free to search for her. By this time Caroline could see the tightness at the corners of his eyes.

  She was trying to stop her own mind from going to waterlogged places, high places, crushed places, places where traveling men with wagons might have spied a girl a bit far from her friends. She walked off. As soon as she was out of the girls’ sight, she ran for the high ground, the main hill and its surveyor’s view.

  So Caroline saw her before anyone else. From a distance Eliza on the grass looked like a piece of discarded clothing, a summer-white wrap thrown off in the warmth or blown from a clothesline. “There!” Caroline shouted. Everyone turned toward the sound of her shout, then followed her pointing finger.

  Three or four of the girls reached Eliza first, but only Julia closed in to touch her, shake her shoulder, and call her name; the others hung back, gripping one another’s hands. Caroline swallowed the bitterness rising in her throat—still, up close, that cloth-limp look of her—and went down on her knees at Eliza’s side. David too. Eliza’s hair had fallen over her face; Caroline brushed it away. Was this how her mother had looked when she’d fallen?

  “Miss Bell,” she said, and patted Eliza’s cheek while David felt her pulse. He met Caroline’s gaze and nodded, his face relaxing. Caroline felt her shoulders loosen.

  Just then Eliza opened her eyes.

  “What happened, Miss Bell?” Caroline said. She softened her voice. “Eliza?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  David helped her sit up; pale, she hung on his sleeve.

  “I was walking. Then…” A pause, in which Caroline felt some next sentence hang. “Then I must have fallen,” Eliza finished. Whatever she’d almost said, she’d decided to keep it for herself.

  David helped her up. He peered into her face. Had he heard the unsaid thing too? He glanced around the circle of tense waiting faces and put on a smile, which he directed at Eliza. “Please be more careful, all right?” he said.

  “I will.”

  “Let’s return to our discussion,” David said, but only Livia still had her stone. She opened her fist to show the white hollow it had made in her palm. “I forgot I was holding it,” she said, as an apology for not having the decency to lose it in the face of the disaster.

  David gave up and dismissed them. He and Caroline began to walk toward the barn.

  “Poor thing,” David said.

  When Caroline looked back, she saw the other girls drawing nearer to Eliza. Closing and closing like a tightening knot.

  * * *

  *

  That evening, Caroline knocked on the door of Eliza and Felicity’s room. She’d seen Felicity downstairs in the parlor and thought she might catch Eliza inside, alone.

  “Come in,” Eliza called.

  This room had belonged to Hawkins and his wife in the Birch Hill days. Caroline had a faint recollection of a dim place she’d avoided, Mrs. Hawkins often stewing over a table in the far corner. It was very different now. The girls had all decorated their areas with amazing speed, building little nests against homesickness, and the farmhouse bedrooms were bedecked with drawings and nosegays like the ones on Felicity’s side. Eliza’s was simple in comparison: just a rose-colored swath of fabric draped about the curtain, a bright blue quilt on her bed, that horrible trilling heart feather still on the headboard, and a stack of books atop a slim folding table that she must have brought with her in the depths of that trunk. Also a single picture frame that Caroline hadn’t noticed before, with a painting of green hills at sunset—amateurish, the lines convincing but every color slightly false.

  Eliza sat on the bed reading. The pink had returned to her cheeks. She’d opened the window, and soft, summerlike air blew in.

  “Hello. My, it’s nice in here,” Caroline said.

  “Thank you.”

  Something about this peaceful room made Caroline feel indecent about her intentions in coming, as if she were about to uncover some concealed, unpleasant part of Eliza’s body—a mangled toe, a raised furred birthmark. She searched for something easy to talk about. She pointed to the painting. “Did you do that?”

  “Oh no,” Eliza said, “I’m not a painter. My father did it. I’ve been thinking it might be of here.”

  Caroline sat down in Eliza’s desk chair. She squinted at the painting. Its hills might have been theirs, or anyone’s. She made a noncommittal noise.

  “It’s one of the only things of his I have.”

  “Really?”

  “My mother threw most everything away after he died.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. She was trying to find her own way of handling things, I’m sure.” Caroline knew it wouldn’t have helped if there had
been more, anyway. There was a drawer in her father’s bedroom that held a folded lace ribbon, a volume of Browning, a crumbling flower with the look of old skin, and a bottle of scent that had long dried into a gum on the glass. Caroline visited this drawer sometimes when her father was busy somewhere—not as much now as when she was younger—and found the items had always shifted slightly from the positions she’d remembered, as if they stirred while the drawer was closed. But when she touched them, she felt no life beating. From the neck of the scent bottle she could catch only the smell of dust.

  “My mother has trouble believing in things that aren’t right in front of her,” Eliza said. “You know, when I came home on my very first school break, she’d turned my bedroom into another sitting room. She had to bring my bed back down from the attic so I had a place to sleep.” She laughed, saw Caroline’s face. “No, it was funny—she’d clearly just forgotten to consider I would still sometimes need a bed there. She went into the hall to whisper for someone to fetch it, as if I might not have noticed yet.”

  Caroline tried a laugh too.

  Eliza was watching her almost timidly. “Can I ask—Miss Hood, what do you remember about him, my father?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid.” Caroline thought she remembered once being lifted onto the shoulders of a tall man with dark hair, having to bend low over his head so as not to knock her own head on the ceiling, but it didn’t seem like enough of a thing to say.

  “Nothing at all? Really, nothing?”

  “I was so young. Only four, five when he left.”

  “You were older than that when he died,” Eliza said.

  “Miss Bell, I’m not keeping anything from you,” Caroline said. “Truly. We were not…in touch with him, after. I do wish I had something I might tell you.”

  “Ah. Well. What about your mother?”

  That surprised Caroline. She felt herself pull back from the bed. “What about her?”

  “I’ve just always wondered, from the book, you know, what she was like.”

  “I remember very little about her either,” Caroline said.

  Eliza hugged her knees. “I think I would give anything to go back, just for a day, and meet him. Do you ever wish that? I find it so hard, not being able to remember.”

  The trouble with Eliza was that she had a perfect, tragic right to say all that she was saying and had paid dearly for that right—yet Caroline mistrusted her motives in saying it. She could not quite believe Eliza was only voicing her own heartache, could not overcome her suspicions that Eliza had other surreptitious motives. She knew to the core of her that Eliza said little that was not intended to create some certain effect. She wished she knew what that effect was. She seemed almost to feel Eliza’s fingers pushing and pushing at her own flesh, looking for the place that would give, like a soft spot on a piece of fruit.

  “I do, yes, of course. I know just what you mean.” Caroline folded her hands in her lap. “Though actually I wanted to discuss something else.”

  Eliza sat back again, and her face composed itself. “Yes?”

  “Today, when you fainted. Can I ask, what do you think happened?”

  Eliza shrugged. Caroline had moved them from the ground she wished to occupy. “I’m not really sure.”

  “Well, I don’t think there’s any reason to worry.” Caroline was trying to get the words right, but a sense of echoing distracted her: someone must have said just this to her mother once. Don’t worry—but…“I only hoped we might try to understand it a little better. Has that sort of thing happened to you before?”

  “Not that I know of.” A quick exhaled laugh.

  “All right. Would you tell me more about what you remember, from when it happened?”

  “Well, I was walking, looking for my stone for the lesson. The sun was very warm, and I remember a tiny snake slid out of my way—a black racer, maybe? Mr. Moore showed us the plates, but I always confuse them—and it startled me. When I looked up again I saw some trilling hearts in the taller grass. I thought I’d see if I could get closer without frightening them off.”

  “Why?”

  “Just to watch them. See what they did, what they looked like. It’s hard to get a real sense of them from a distance. So I got closer, quite close. And then—” Eliza stopped. “Miss Hood, do you ever feel just…overwhelmed—by things? It sounds silly. But the birds were so red. I know that’s how everybody describes them, but seeing that color still feels…”

  “Overpowering,” Caroline said.

  “Yes. It wasn’t just the birds—all of a sudden, everything seemed so bright. The green of the grass, and the blue of the sky. I could feel that color pressing down on me. As if it were all right up against my face. I couldn’t seem to breathe.” She breathed now, deeply. “And the next instant, Mr. Moore was standing over me. Or that’s how it felt.”

  Caroline wondered if David’s face had seemed part of all that thickening color, the gloss of his hair and beard, the deep brown well of his eyes, his lips’ red—whether Eliza had tried to breathe these too in. That she could also understand.

  Eliza said, “Has anything like that ever happened to you?” and Caroline felt caught, as if the girl had glimpsed recognition stirring.

  “No,” Caroline said shortly. Heat crept up her neck. She rose from Eliza’s chair.

  “I thought you might—”

  Caroline touched Eliza’s knee. “It sounds to me as if you just got too warm, on a warm day,” she said. Word for word the explanation her father had given, when Caroline had come with her heart in her throat to tell him about Eliza’s fainting that afternoon. She tucked Eliza’s chair neatly back under the desk before she left, so that Eliza wouldn’t suspect her of flight.

  * * *

  *

  Later in the week, Livia and Meg found Caroline in the orchard, where she was gathering the last of the apples from that one fruit-bearing tree. “Yes, girls?” she said.

  “We were passing by,” Meg said.

  “On your way to the market, you mean? The post?”

  Meg watched her stolidly. Through the screen of her curled hair and silk ribbons, it was possible to discern the heavy-jawed middle-aged woman she would be some not-too-distant day. Livia shot a glance at Meg and said, “No, we were just out walking, and we saw you and thought, if you have a minute—since you offered, there are some things we’ve been just dying to ask.”

  “You look fairly distant from your deathbeds to me,” Caroline said.

  Their foreheads creased.

  “Never mind. Help me with the fruit while we’re talking.”

  They moved to the branches and began to pick, Livia undiscriminating, Meg overcareful, spinning each apple on its stem to look for blemishes first. The sun through the leaves dappled their faces and made them both beautiful.

  “Eliza said she tried asking,” Livia said, “but she thought you might not want to tell her.”

  “Asking what?”

  “Oh, look!” said Livia.

  Caroline turned. A trilling heart paced the ground between the trees, its legs like clumsily animated twigs, the red clot of its body lurching. It was coming toward them, and Caroline’s arms tried to extend and make a separation between girls and bird. Foolish, and she stopped, instead reaching up for another apple and hoping it would seem this was all she’d been doing. “I’ve been expecting they might go south,” she said, “or somewhere, soon. When they came before they only stayed for a couple of months, I think.”

  The bird flew away. Meg set off running, stopped, bent to pluck something from the grass. “It’s dropped a feather! Like what happened with Eliza.”

  “It’s nothing like that. Let me see,” Livia told her.

  “I found it.”

  “I just want to look.”

  “Girls?” Caroline said. “What was it you wanted to ask me?”<
br />
  They turned back to her, Livia holding the feather now. “We wanted to hear more about Louisa,” she said.

  “Anna was my mother’s name.”

  “Well,” said Meg.

  “We wondered if you could tell us about her. What it was like, having her for a mother,” Livia said.

  “What is it like having your own mothers as mothers?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Not really. My mother was real, just like your mothers. Louisa is a character in a novel.”

  “Was she very beautiful?” Meg said. “I love that part in the book, about her face.”

  “There are many parts in the book about her face,” Caroline said.

  “How did you stand it when she died?”

  “Well, what would not standing it involve?” But she was being unfair, asking them to answer for every careless person who’d ever asked. She wasn’t even sure why their questions were bothering her; she had, after all, invited them to ask her things, and here they were, only asking. Though of course at Eliza’s behest. Caroline gathered herself. “I was far too small to really understand what was happening, which was in many ways a blessing. It was much harder, I think, for my father.”

  “Your father,” Livia said, pursing her mouth.

  “Yes, my father, her husband, who greatly loved her,” Caroline said sharply. “Girls, there isn’t much more I can say about this, I’m afraid. And I’m certain you both have other things to do.”