“And then? What did he do after? Did he send for more workers from England?”
“Ah…no, no need…he always had Mexican workers too, a large contingent of them…but they’re not all buried here. I believe they’re in El Triunfo. Uncle Howard would know better.”
A rather exclusive spot, then, though Noemí supposed it was for the best. The families of local crew members probably wanted to visit their loved ones, to leave flowers on their graves, which would have been impossible in this place, isolated from the town.
They walked onward until Noemí paused before a marble statue of a woman standing on a pedestal, flower wreaths in her hair. She flanked the doorway to a mausoleum with a pedimented doorway, her right hand pointing at its entrance. The name Doyle was carved in capital letters above this doorway along with a phrase in Latin: Et Verbum caro factum est.
“Who’s this?”
“The statue is supposed to be the likeness of my great aunt Agnes, who died during the epidemic. And here, the Doyles are all buried here: my great aunt, my grandfather and grandmother, my cousins,” he said, trailing off, dipping into an uncomfortable silence.
The silence, not only of the cemetery but of the whole house, unnerved Noemí. She was used to the rumble of the tram and the automobiles, the sound of canaries chirping in the inner courtyard by the gleeful fountain, the barking of the dogs and the melodies pouring from the radio as the cook hummed by the stove.
“It’s so quiet here,” she said and shook her head. “I don’t like it.”
“What do you like?” he asked, curious.
“Mesoamerican artifacts, zapote ice cream, Pedro Infante’s movies, music, dancing, and driving,” she said, counting a finger as she listed each item. She also liked to banter, but she was certain he could figure that out on his own.
“I’m afraid I can’t be much help with that. What kind of car do you drive?”
“The prettiest Buick you’ve ever seen. A convertible, of course.”
“Of course?”
“It’s more fun driving without the hood on. It makes your hair look movie-star perfect. Also, it gives you ideas, you think better,” she said, running a hand through her wavy hair jokingly. Noemí’s father said she cared too much about her looks and parties to take school seriously, as if a woman could not do two things at once.
“What kind of ideas?”
“Ideas for my thesis, when I get to it,” she said. “Ideas about what to do on the weekend, anything really. I do my best thinking when I’m in motion.”
Francis had been looking at her, but now he lowered his eyes. “You’re very different from your cousin,” he told her.
“Are you also going to tell me I lean toward a ‘darker’ type, both my hair and coloration?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t mean physically.”
“Then?”
“I think you’re charming.” A panicked look contorted his face. “Not that your cousin lacks charm. You are charming in a special way,” he said quickly.
If you’d seen Catalina before, she thought. If he’d seen her in the city with a pretty velvet dress, going from one side of the room to the other, that gentle smile on her lips and her eyes full of stars. But here, in that musty room, with those eyes dimmed and whatever sickness had taken hold of her body…but then, perhaps it wasn’t that bad. Perhaps before the illness Catalina still smiled her sweet smile and took her husband by the hand, guiding him outside to count the stars.
“You say that because you haven’t met my mother,” Noemí replied lightly, not wishing to voice her thoughts on Catalina. “She is the most charming woman on Earth. In her presence I feel rather tacky and unremarkable.”
He nodded. “I know what that is like. Virgil is the family’s heir, the shining promise of the Doyles.”
“You envy him?” she asked.
Francis was very thin; his face was that of a plaster saint haunted by his impending martyrdom. The dark circles under his eyes, almost like bruises against that pale skin, made her suspect a hidden ailment. Virgil Doyle on the other hand had been carved from marble: he exuded strength where Francis irradiated weakness, and Virgil’s features—the eyebrows, the cheekbones, the full mouth—were bolder, entirely more attractive.
She could not judge Francis ill if he wished for that same vitality.
“I don’t envy him his ease with words or his looks or his position, I envy his ability to go places. The farthest I’ve ever been is El Triunfo. That’s it. He’s traveled a bit. Not for long, he’s always quick to return, but it’s a respite.”
There was no bitterness in Francis’s words, only a tired sort of resignation as he continued speaking. “When my father was still alive he’d take me to town and I’d stare at the train station. I’d try to sneak in to look at the sign with the departure times.”
Noemí adjusted her rebozo, trying to find warmth in its folds, but the cemetery was terribly damp and chilly; she could almost swear the temperature had dropped a couple of degrees the more they’d pressed into it. She shivered, and he noticed.
“I’m so stupid,” Francis said, removing his sweater. “Here, have this.”
“It’s fine. Really, I couldn’t let you freeze for my sake. Maybe if we start walking back I’ll be better.”
“Well, fine, but please, wear it. I swear I won’t be cold.”
She put on the sweater and wrapped the rebozo around her head. She thought he might pick up the pace since she was now walking in his sweater, but he didn’t rush back home. He was probably used to the mist, the shady chill of the trees.
“Yesterday you asked about the silver items in the house. You were right, they came from our mine,” he told her.
“It’s been closed for a long time, hasn’t it?”
Catalina had said something about that; it was why Noemí’s father had not been keen on the match. Virgil seemed to him a stranger, maybe a fortune hunter. Noemí suspected he’d let Catalina marry him because he felt guilty about driving away her previous suitor: Catalina had loved him truly.
“It happened during the Revolution. That’s when a host of things happened, one thing led to another and operations ceased. The year Virgil was born, 1915, that was the absolute end of it. The mines were flooded.”
“Then he is thirty-five,” she said. “And you are much younger.”
“Ten years younger,” Francis said with a nod. “A bit of an age gap, but he was the one friend I had growing up.”
“But you must have gone to school eventually.”
“We were schooled at High Place.”
Noemí tried to think of the house filled with the noise of children’s laughter, children playing hide and seek, children with a spinning top or a ball between their hands. But she couldn’t. The house would have not allowed such a thing. The house would have demanded they spring from it fully grown.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said, when they were rounding the coach house and High Place was visible, the curtain of mist having parted. “Why the insistence on silence at the dining table?”
“My great uncle Howard, he’s very old, very delicate, and very sensitive to noises. And the sound travels easily in the house.”
“Is his room upstairs? He can’t possibly hear people talking in the dining room.”
“Noises carry,” Francis said, his face serious, his eyes fixed on the old house. “Anyway, it’s his house and he sets the rules.”
“And you never bend them.”
He glanced down at her, looking a little perplexed, as if it had not occurred to him until now that this was a possibility. She was certain he’d never drunk too much, stayed out far too late, nor blurted the wrong opinion in his family’s company.
“No,” he said, once again with that resigned note in his voice.
When they walked into the kitchen,
she took off the sweater and handed it back to him. There was one maid now, the slightly younger maid, sitting by the stove. She did not look at them, too occupied with her chores to spare them a single glance.
“No, you should keep it,” Francis said, ever polite. “It’s rather warm.”
“I can’t be stealing your clothes.”
“I have other sweaters,” he said.
“Thanks.”
He smiled at her. Florence walked into the room, again decked in a dark navy dress, her face severe, glancing at Francis and then at Noemí, as if they were small children and she was trying to determine whether they had scarfed down a forbidden box of sweets. “If you’ll come with me for your lunch,” she said.
This time it was the three of them at the table; the old man did not materialize and neither did Virgil. The lunch was conducted quickly, and after the dishes were cleared Noemí went back to her room. They brought up a tray with her dinner, so she supposed the dining room had been just for the first night and the lunch was also an anomaly. With her tray they also brought her an oil lamp, which she set by the bedside. She tried to read the copy of Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, which she’d brought with her, but kept getting distracted. Noises did carry, she thought, as she focused on the creaking of floorboards.
In a corner of her room there was a bit of mold upon the wallpaper that caught her eye. She thought of those green wallpapers so beloved by the Victorians that contained arsenic. The so-called Paris and Scheele greens. And wasn’t there something in a book she’d read once about how microscopic fungi could act upon the dyes in the paper and form arsine gas, sickening the people in the room?
She was certain she’d heard about how these most civilized Victorians had been killing themselves in this way, the fungi chomping on the paste in the wall, causing unseen chemical reactions. She couldn’t remember the name of the fungus that had been the culprit—Latin names danced at the tip of her tongue, brevicaule—but she thought she had the facts right. Her grandfather had been a chemist and her father’s business was the production of pigments and dyes, so she knew to mix zinc sulfide and barium sulfate if you wanted to make lithopone and a myriad of other bits of information.
Well, the wallpaper was not green. Not even close to green; it was a muted pink, the color of faded roses, with ugly yellow medallions running across it. Medallions or circles; when you looked at it closely you might think they were wreaths. She might have preferred the green wallpaper. This was hideous, and when she closed her eyes, the yellow circles danced behind her eyelids, flickers of color against black.
5
Catalina sat by the window again that morning. She seemed remote, like the last time Noemí had seen her. Noemí thought of a drawing of Ophelia that used to hang in their house. Ophelia dragged by the current, glimpsed through a wall of reeds. This was Catalina that morning. Yet it was good to see her, to sit together and update her cousin on the people and things in Mexico City. She detailed an exhibit she had been to three weeks prior, knowing Catalina would be interested in such things, and then imitated a couple of friends of theirs with such accuracy a smile formed on her cousin’s lips, and Catalina laughed.
“You are so good when you do impressions. Tell me, are you still bent on those theater classes?” Catalina asked.
“No. I have been thinking about anthropology. A master’s degree. Doesn’t that sound interesting?”
“Always with a new idea, Noemí. Always a new pursuit.”
She’d heard such a refrain often. She supposed that her family was right to view her university studies skeptically, seeing as she’d changed her mind already thrice about where her interests lay, but she knew rather fiercely that she wanted to do something special with her life. She hadn’t found what exactly that would be, although anthropology appeared to her more promising than previous explorations.
Anyway, when Catalina spoke, Noemí didn’t mind, because her words never sounded like her parents’ reproaches. Catalina was a creature of sighs and phrases as delicate as lace. Catalina was a dreamer and therefore believed in Noemí’s dreams.
“And you, what have you been up to? Don’t think I haven’t noticed you hardly write. Have you been pretending you live on a windswept moor, like in Wuthering Heights?” Noemí asked. Catalina had worn out the pages of that book.
“No. It’s the house. The house takes most of my time,” Catalina said, extending a hand and touching the velvet draperies.
“Were you planning on renovating it? I wouldn’t blame you if you razed it and built it anew. It’s rather ghastly, isn’t it? And chilly too.”
“Damp. There’s a dampness to it.”
“I was too busy freezing to death last night to mind the dampness.”
“The darkness and the damp. It’s always damp and dark and so very cold.”
As Catalina spoke, the smile on her lips died. Her eyes, which had been distant, suddenly fell on Noemí with the sharpness of a blade. She clutched Noemí’s hands and leaned forward, speaking low.
“I need you to do a favor for me, but you can’t tell anyone about it. You must promise you won’t tell. Promise?”
“I promise.”
“There’s a woman in town. Her name is Marta Duval. She made a batch of medicine for me, but I’ve run out of it. You must go to her and get more. Do you understand?”
“Yes, of course. What kind of medicine is it?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you do it. Will you? Please say you will and tell no one about it.”
“Yes, if you want me to.”
Catalina nodded. She was clutching Noemí’s hands so tightly that her nails were digging into the soft flesh of her wrists.
“Catalina, I’ll speak to—”
“Shush. They can hear you,” Catalina said and went quiet, her eyes bright as polished stones.
“Who can hear me?” Noemí asked slowly, as her cousin’s eyes fixed on her, unblinking.
Catalina slowly leaned closer to her, whispering in her ear. “It’s in the walls,” she said.
“What is?” Noemí asked, and the question was a reflex, for she found it hard to think what to ask with her cousin’s blank eyes upon her, eyes that did not seem to see; it was like staring into a sleepwalker’s face.
“The walls speak to me. They tell me secrets. Don’t listen to them, press your hands against your ears, Noemí. There are ghosts. They’re real. You’ll see them eventually.”
Abruptly Catalina released her cousin and stood up, gripping the curtain with her right hand and staring out the window. Noemí wanted to ask her to explain herself, but Florence walked in then.
“Dr. Cummins has arrived. He needs to examine Catalina and will meet you in the sitting room later,” the woman said.
“I don’t mind staying,” Noemí replied.
“But he’ll mind,” Florence told her with a definite finality. Noemí could have pressed the point, but she elected to leave rather than get into an argument. She knew when to back down, and she could sense that insisting now would result in a hostile refusal. They might even send her packing if she made a fuss. She was a guest, but she knew herself to be an inconvenient one.
The sitting room, in the daytime, once she peeled the curtains aside, seemed much less welcoming than at night. For one it was chilly, the fire that had warmed the room turned to ashes, and with daylight streaming through the windows every imperfection was laid bare more strikingly. The faded velour settees appeared a sickly green, almost bilious, and there were many cracks running down the enamel tiles decorating the fireplace. A little oil painting, showing a mushroom from different angles, had been attacked, ironically, by mold: tiny black spots marred its colors and defaced the image. Her cousin was right about the dampness.
Noemí rubbed her wrists, looking at the place where Catalina had dug her nails against
her skin, and waited for the doctor to come downstairs. He took his time, and when he walked into the sitting room, he was not alone. Virgil accompanied him. She sat on one of the green settees, and the doctor took the other one, setting his black leather bag at his side. Virgil remained standing.
“I am Arthur Cummins,” the doctor said. “You must be Miss Noemí Taboada.”
The doctor dressed in clothes of a good cut, but which were a decade or two out of fashion. It felt like everyone who visited High Place had been stuck in time, but then she imagined in such a small town there would be little need to update one’s wardrobe. Virgil’s clothing, however, seemed fashionable. Either he had bought himself a new wardrobe the last time he’d been in Mexico City or he considered himself exceptional and his clothes worthy of more expense. Perhaps it was his wife’s money that allowed a certain lavishness.
“Yes. Thank you for taking the time to speak to me,” Noemí said.
“It’s my pleasure. Now, Virgil says you have a few questions for me.”
“I do. They tell me my cousin has tuberculosis.”
Before she could continue, the doctor was nodding and speaking. “She does. It’s nothing to be concerned about. She’s been receiving streptomycin to help her get over it, but the ‘rest’ cure still holds true. Plenty of sleep, plenty of relaxation, and a good diet are the true solution to this malady.”
The doctor took off his glasses and took out a handkerchief, proceeding to clean the lenses as he spoke. “An ice bag on the head or an alcohol rub, that’s really what all this is about. It will pass. Soon she’ll be right as rain. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
The doctor stuffed the glasses in the breast pocket of his jacket, no doubt intending to leave the conversation at that, but it was Noemí’s turn to interrupt him.
“No, I won’t excuse you yet. Catalina is very odd. When I was a little girl, I remember my aunt Brigida had tuberculosis and she did not act like Catalina at all.”
“Every patient is different.”
Mexican Gothic Page 5
