The Illness Lesson

by Clare Beams

  From within, it could probably go anywhere. One chamber to another. The bird might weave its way along a path from the body of one girl to the next, from Abigail to Tabitha, Eliza to Livia, Meg to Julia, Rebecca to Felicity to Caroline herself. Caroline was so sure of this impossible thing. Of course she knew that the real girls were all outside the nest—some in their beds upstairs in the farmhouse, some circling the parlor, she herself standing in these woods—but somehow they were also here in the nest, because she was seeing them, mounded and joined and made to be still.

  She had known the birds were taking little bits of things from all of them. Now she saw that had been only the visible tip of their ambitious thievery. What the birds wanted were the girls. The girls, whole. What other shape could an infinite hunger take? What shape other than their own?

  That one red bird, Caroline seemed to feel it making its way toward her in the nest. She felt it navigating the net of their bodies and shaking that net with its weight, causing a tremor in one body that passed to every body, bound as they were. A percussion, a repercussion, from each thing that happened, from every traveling point of red.

  Caroline closed in on the place where the bird had led her. The birds on the outside of the nest flapped and fluttered farther away and perched again on its surface to watch her. Up close the nest seemed so quiet, though inside she knew it must be boiling with birds.

  She could reach the lowest opening by stretching. She prodded, releasing that smell again, even more potent—feathers and rich, varied rot—and from within the nest an unseen bird pecked at her skin, not hard, but still it startled her and she whipped her hand free, tearing the weave of the nest. A piece fell. She bent to lift it. Caught in it was a scrap of paper.

  She pulled the scrap loose, yellowed and crisp.

  told you in my last letter

  Livia’s large, looping hand.

  From the next hole Caroline pulled a shred of fabric she recognized from the new gown, deep blue silk, that Rebecca had brought back with her from her time away at Christmas.

  She moved to the other holes she could reach. She brought forth, from the next: half a ripped page of a book on the natural sciences. A pen nib pocked with marks of teeth. Felicity’s missing earring—a suspended crystal dewdrop.

  From the next, a little to the left: a tangle of light brown hair. A silver locket, tarnished, nothing at all left inside. A scrap of black lace from the hem of a shawl she’d seen on Eliza’s shoulders. Three words in Julia’s cramped hand: greed cannot whose. A scrap from her own day dress.

  More pieces of fabric too: white, black, brown, burgundy, blue. Silk and linen, cotton and velvet. Meg’s green paisley from Christmas. Some swatches coming apart between her fingers, some fresh.

  As she collected—some of the bits requiring untangling, some only resting on the floors of their caves—the birds inside sometimes poked and picked at her hand, not gently but not painfully, broody as nesting hens.

  Another new hole and a small ceramic dog the size of a fingertip she’d once seen on someone’s desk—she could not now recall whose. A large piece of what seemed to be a fingernail, a thick dull-white parenthesis. A bit of rag soaked in what looked like brown-red blood.

  When she reached into the next hole and brought out a tooth, brown encrusted at its base, she cried out, then dropped it as she’d dropped the rest.

  The birds outside the nest, the ones she could see, rustled a little at the noise she made.

  Who knew what else there was just beyond her reach—the whole structure studded with parts of them. Finding each object, she felt as if the girl inside the nest were pushing it out toward her. The way a person in a cell might push a message under the door.

  Here I am. Here is proof that I am here.

  The way Caroline herself might push one, might hope for someone to find it.

  *

  ON THE TRILLING HEART SCHOOL

  by Caroline Hood

  Lately my father, Samuel Hood, undertook—and I and others along with him—a grand educational experiment, the establishment of the Trilling Heart School for Girls. My purpose in writing this brief essay is to declare that experiment finished. I feel that only in so writing can I ensure its final conclusion.

  My father sought to demonstrate with our school the truth and importance of certain principles. While I am certain of nothing, I believe our failure lies not in those principles themselves but in the discrepancy between them and the world in which we live. There and in a ruthlessness that awoke in those of us who had charge of the school, defending ourselves past the point of defense. My father set out to show that women have as great a capacity as men to learn anything that might be learned, and in this I feel he did prove himself correct. The girls of Trilling Heart, our girls, did all that boys might do.

  Yet our girls were not boys. The world does not consider them boys, and in the end we could not either. We both knew and did not know who they were. Were we nobler than the rest of the world, which does not know them at all? I think, though I am no longer sure, that we were. But it did seem that in the divide between our knowing and our not knowing—between the girls’ minds and their bodies; between the sense we tried to give them of their possibilities and the actual state of those possibilities—a strange suffering flourished. In our approach to this suffering, we were less interested in preventing further pain than in preventing the world’s discovery of that pain.

  For that offense, I am sorry. I find I cannot quite be sorry about the whole of Trilling Heart itself, though I know that it is right for the school now to close. We were, I think, making girls for a world that does not exist. That cost them.

  I wonder still what we ought to have been doing instead. Perhaps the answer is just what we were doing, except that we should have made it clearer—to everyone—that the girls themselves mattered more to us than our or anyone’s ideas about them.

  To the families of our girls, I offer my deepest regret. To our girls themselves too.

  And also, always, if they will accept it, my love.

  * * *

  *

  Caroline sent Mr. Sanders into town to post the essay to the editor of The Examiner, a Mr. Nathaniel Lewis, enclosed and sealed inside a much briefer letter. Word of the start of our school appeared in your pages. I thought it only fitting that word of our end appear there as well.

  Caroline watched Mr. Sanders walk away with it. Past the woods, which hid the nest, though she could see it clearly in her mind. She would until she died, she knew. She had written the essay because she needed to name its shape in some useful way.

  Then she went to her father’s study to tell him what she had done.

  They sat there. The two Hoods, alone, as they had mostly been.

  What did Caroline mean? Just what she had said.

  “They won’t publish it,” Samuel told Caroline. His eyes were open so wide the gaze looked painful, turned on her, as if on too fierce a brightness. “Nathaniel wouldn’t do that, something so damaging to me.”

  “I think he will. It’s a story, isn’t it?”

  “A story. Is that what you saw yourself doing? Writing a story?”

  “After living it.”

  “Explain yourself, please,” he said. His willfully level voice made her so angry.

  “That was always how we began, wasn’t it, when I did something displeasing? But I’m grown now, Papa, and I’ve been explaining and explaining myself, and if you haven’t heard me, that no longer seems to me to be my concern.”

  Samuel leaned back. “There was always,” he said softly, “such a viciousness in you.”

  Caroline held her face still.

  “I never knew where it came from.”

  “I never did either.”

  “Your mother would have been so—”

  “Oh yes. My mother the angel. My
mother the white light. Did you know Hawkins told me about her?”

  She watched his face absorb this without changing. “What about her?” he said, as if there were nothing Caroline could say that could trouble him. For as well as she knew his voice, even she wouldn’t have been able to hear the lie there this time.

  “The truth of what happened between her and Miles Pearson.”

  “If he did, then he told you nothing more than what many people have always—”

  “And he told me you knew.”

  “Knew?” Samuel said, just as carefully, but she could sense that care beginning to slip beyond him.

  “Papa.”

  His expression changed, sagged toward grief. “You don’t have any idea how unbearable this is, how impossible—there are things it would only hurt you to know.”

  Now was the dangerous moment, when he was only asking her to save them both by withdrawing her question, by not making him answer after all.

  “Let them then,” she said.

  She could see, ever so briefly, her father’s disbelief that she would do this to them. She allowed no mercy to cross her own face. I am doing this, and you must also. I am demanding this of us.

  Samuel’s mouth set and hardened. “I came upon the two of them once in the hayloft. Walking by in broad daylight, I heard…something. So I went in.”

  His vision would have adjusted slowly from the brightness outside. Pigeons cooing in the rafters. The smell of all that hay the Birch Hill men had gathered to try to feed their animals into health. And above, a tangle of dim, dusty shapes. She saw and heard and smelled all of it as if she had been there.

  That was her real mother, up there in the hay. No wonder Caroline had never quite been able to get to her before now.

  “They didn’t hear me, and I left. I don’t think Anna ever knew I knew. I never spoke of it to her.”

  “How could you stand it, not saying anything?” The restraint this would take—to carry on after, sitting down for tea, saying good morning, sharing a bed, kissing a cheek—seemed to her miraculous.

  Samuel’s voice shook. “She was so young. So beautiful. The great unexpected gift of my life. I put myself in mind of the vastness of human imperfection. I thought eventually her own conscience would come to show her the wrongness of what she’d done, and she would come to me herself and beg me to forgive her.”

  “Would you have?” Caroline asked.

  “Of course.”

  He didn’t know he was lying. Just as he didn’t know that few men could have denied themselves the expression of such a rage.

  “Later, after they’d all left—I almost managed to convince myself I’d dreamed it.”

  “Yes,” said Caroline. She could understand that feeling.

  “And then when I found her there—”

  “What do you mean? When you found her where?”

  He stopped. She watched him close his teeth on his lower lip.

  New panic came over Caroline, the sense of drifting down and down in deep water. “You always said she died of a fit, out for a walk.”

  “She did. I just didn’t tell you…the particulars. I couldn’t. She said she was going walking. After, I went into the barn for something, and there she was, broken at my feet. She must have been up in the hayloft, and the fit took her at the top, and she stumbled off the edge.”

  Her father looked at Caroline austerely now.

  “And I know how that sounds, Caroline. You may trust that I’ve considered it from every angle, as much as anyone could. I knew her, and I knew her mind. It was a fit.”

  You may trust.

  Caroline peered at him, weighing. How deep did the lie go? If Anna hadn’t been on a walk, if she’d been up in the hayloft, where had he been?

  Samuel saw this question in her face, the way he’d always seen so much of what she wanted to hide from him, when he cared enough to look for it. “If you could actually wonder such a thing, I was with George Crammer, from The Continental Review, in my study that whole morning. George died five years ago, but he gave a statement at the time. The examiner was perfectly satisfied.” He inhaled, fixed her with a bitter stare. “Of course, he was not a daughter.”

  “No,” Caroline said. There was relief in learning she had to revise only so far.

  Still, the revising dizzied her. Her mother might have made a choice not just to leave wife and mother behind but to leave her whole self. It had not been her body directly that killed her. Maybe her body’s demands, but not her body.

  “How, how could you not have told me, Papa?” Caroline said.

  “Telling you would only have caused you pain.”

  “Pain? Don’t you understand? The fit didn’t kill her, then, if it even was a fit,” Caroline said. She was choking.

  “What does it matter? She’s dead—what does it matter how?”

  “What does it matter? Do you know I’ve lived my whole life fearing I’d get sick like her, and die of it?”

  Samuel breathed in, deeply. He closed his eyes. “Well, who isn’t afraid?” he said.

  From within her body, with its head-swimming, its tingling, Caroline watched him—her body that, it turned out, had all along been as survivable as anyone else’s. She need never have read particular meaning in its signs, even now need not assume they pointed anywhere. With a survivable body, a person could do anything she wanted.

  Caroline raised her body out of the chair. She moved to her father’s desk, she lifted the glass globe, she threw it through the window, so she would always know the sound of all that she could do.

  19.

  PROVISIONING

  Some part of him had always understood that so must this season end.

  —MILES PEARSON, THE DARKENING GLASS (P. 431)

  A carriage removed Hawkins to Boston. He would see more patients there soon; he would not concern himself much with those he’d seen here. If he spoke after of Trilling Heart, Caroline knew it would be for titillation. Caroline managed not to speak to him again before he left. It turned out this was simple. When he walked into a room, she walked out of it. He wasn’t going to chase her.

  She’d been wondering how much he knew about what he did to the girls and women he treated. Perhaps he’d worked not to know very much, like her father or David, like all the men who’d written all those medical books, who’d implemented this treatment of a territory from whose borders they averted their eyes. Though she would always suspect some animal part of Hawkins of understanding more, and relishing.

  David and Caroline spent a week avoiding each other, a dance of abandoned spaces and broken glances. Then he took a train back to Ohio. The morning he left she looked at her face in the glass, still and solemn, and thought of the first morning David had come to live in the farmhouse, before the school had opened, how his closeness had seemed a taunting, a yanking at her tethers to a self that would always be the same and that would never see the consummation of anything. The consummation, when it came, had also made her feel tethered to herself. But to a self she suddenly understood, suddenly trusted.

  She was sure this must have been the pull for Anna too, toward Miles. One’s self could be felt most easily in its desires and in its sufferings. Anna had been trying to choose.

  But Miles must have disappointed Anna in the end—he had left, after all—much as David had disappointed Caroline. David, who had turned out to be so much less than she’d imagined. What they’d done together had left a mark on him, a sort of wincing in his back, and though she’d been trying not to look directly at him in the days before he left, even in the periphery she noted the new, tentative way he held his shoulders. Sophia would see it as soon as he came off the train.

  * * *

  *

  Caroline’s essay had not appeared yet but would, Mr. Nathaniel Lewis had written, in next month’s Examine
r. Caroline met her father in hallways, pressed his hand, dropped it. Practiced dropping it.

  By the time the essay actually appeared, she knew, she would be gone.

  * * *

  *

  The girls’ parents hurried to them and hurried them away as they might have during a plague—they understood that this was one, even if they didn’t quite understand its nature. No one had told the parents much. Samuel knew that the essay was coming and that it would be better if the girls had left by the time it came, and so he had written a brief letter stating that there would be a recess of indeterminate length, outlining with as little sensation as possible the nature of the girls’ ailment and disclosing that a treatment had been started, but it had been decided the course would best be pursued by each family individually. Those were the phrases Samuel used, had been started, had been decided. There was authority in this anonymous starting, deciding force, and for now the parents seemed jumpy and daughter-consumed enough not to press beyond a few vague threats of future demands for answers. Later, after the essay, after the news spread, Caroline thought there would be letters, and perhaps lawyers, but now the parents only clutched at their girls and bundled them away.

  Upon each daughter, Caroline wished she could bestow a different part of her father for the girl to take with her. This would be fitting: a last giving of gifts, of specialnesses, which despite everything she still knew that he had. The trouble perhaps was that he had too much of them.

  She imagined Samuel diminishing behind his closed study door as she wished these parts off him.

  Tabitha, she thought, Tabitha who could never think of anything to say, should take Samuel’s voice. That sureness he’d used in lectures once, and then in teaching Caroline, and then the others. Through the glass of her parents’ carriage Caroline saw Tabitha wave, her fingers scratching at the glass, and she thought, Be sure. Think of things to say and say them.