The House Girl (18 page)

L
INA LET HERSELF INTO THE
house and called into the dark for Oscar, but only silence came back. She moved through the still air of the entryway, turned the switch on a table lamp, checked the mail, then started up the stairs, her steps muffled by the red padded runner. The earlier exchange with Dan, his casual dismissal and her readiness to accept it, had fueled a restlessness in her, a frustrated spark. In her head, she replayed the scene with Dan again and again. Why hadn’t she told him more about Josephine Bell? Why hadn’t she stayed to argue her case?

She walked the dim hallway to her room and paused, then ran down the stairs again to the second floor. An idea was beginning to form and it seemed as much a response to Dan’s dismissal as it was to Oscar’s invitation to talk about Grace. Paralysis had gripped her both times, both times had left her feeling vulnerable and irritated, with herself and with them. What was she so afraid of? It seemed she should be able to shoulder her way through Dan’s condescension, Oscar’s mysterious new candor. Push them open, take what she needed.

The idea took shape, and she wanted to execute it quickly, before Oscar came home, before she lost her nerve. Lina stopped in front of the closed studio door. She knocked once, twice, though she knew her father wasn’t there. Tonight she would look at Oscar’s pictures of Grace, without him standing beside her. She would examine them carefully, take her time. Perhaps without the pressure of her father’s expectations, the pictures would make sense to her.

The whole house creaked and moaned in the way it did at night, mysterious settlings, the banging on and off of instruments meant to keep them warm and watered. The hallway felt cold and stark, lit only by a bare bulb hanging overhead. For the first time, Lina noticed the unpainted skirting board, the rough doorframe, the paint-speckled floor, the various to-be-done details left from the studio renovation that she knew Oscar would never finish. And his sloppiness struck her suddenly as a larger failing: look at how little care he took with all that he had.

Lina opened the door. The room was messier but emptier than it had been last week. Much of the wall space was now clear—most of the big pieces must have already been moved to the gallery. As Lina wandered through the studio, she uncovered a blank canvas, and then another; a pile of sketches on the table showed only Duke, captured in three-legged motion. There seemed nothing left of the Grace pictures and Lina looked around her with a sinking disappointment, that she hadn’t before realized the opportunity—what those pictures might tell her, what they might mean—and now it had passed.

At the far end of the table rested a tall pile of books Lina hadn’t seen before in the studio. She picked one off the top:
Women in Love
by D. H. Lawrence, the cover showing two female silhouettes, like featureless heads in a cameo brooch. Lina had read the novel once in college, though she didn’t recognize this cover as one from her or Oscar’s bookshelves. Where had it come from? A bite of curiosity displaced her disappointment and she opened the book. On the first page, in a neat feminine script, Lina’s mother’s name was written:
Grace Janney Sparrow,
along with their Park Slope address and home phone number. Scraps of paper sprouted from the top of the book and Lina opened to the first of them. In the same handwriting, her mother’s, Lina read in the margin of the page:
Why does Gudrun love? What does Gudrun need?

Lina traced her fingers over the depression the pen had made in the paper. Her pulse in her throat, she turned to the next marked page. In a blank space where the chapter had ended, Grace had written:

Lina read the words, and then again, and a third time. And then she pulled out a stool. She did not wonder why these artifacts were here, tonight, in Oscar’s studio, or why she had never seen them before even though she knew every inch of this house, every corner and closet, the contents of every drawer and cubby. She felt only a pure urge of possession, that she must touch the papers and books, place her hands where her mother’s hands had once been. Lina brought the book to her face and inhaled, breathing in its smell of mildew and dust, the deep underlying odors of age and decay.

For the next 1.7 hours, she worked her way through the stack, turning to each bookmarked page, reading the notes her mother had made.

This is what she found:

June 7, gallery; June 19, show at Lize’s; June 28, L’s party; July 4, whose birthday is this?!; July 13, meet Porter; July 26, doctor 10:45; July 31, hot hot hot; August 7, Porter at 7:00
.

I am so sorry. Love, G
.

My dearest darling O
I love you you you, only you
.

O more than anyone deserves it. He does of course he does
.

…

Listen to the pigeons, they chatter and gossip and spit.
Can’t work, can’t think, can’t breathe
.

…
Is it so much to ask for? Is it so much? O does not understand, he cannot. Always something appendaged to me, always this noise, or this fear of noise. Be cautious, quiet, still. What if I want to scream too? What if my hands feel too heavy to lift even the slightest weight, a paintbrush or a baby?

…
She is the loveliest thing I have ever seen
.

Joy, my favorite person my favorite name—Sister’s cousin
Porter, my anti-O—Cousin, brother, twin
Lark, a beauty—Cousin thrice removed
Tisha, too much like me—Niece’s nephew’s daughter

And a series of rough sketches of a baby, only a few months old, indistinct in the way small infants are, but Lina recognized them as herself and her breath caught. Below each, Grace had written simply:

Daughter. Daughter. Daughter. Daughter
.

On the last page, no sketch, only the words:

Nothing is as I see it. What do I see?

Oscar,
If you want to keep the fucking frogs, keep them in the plastic tub not MY tub. I do not like their fucking sliminess
.

The second:

19 weeks, so I am told. My belly is getting big.
O happier than I’ve ever seen him, perhaps this is enough
.

The third:

Lydia
Laura
Aurelia
Zephyr?
Caterina
*Carolina

The last, a scrap torn from a longer document, the final sentence incomplete:

I cannot bear to leave her. I cannot bear to stay. I am—

Lina heard a sound, the grating of the lock downstairs, the front door closing and her father’s footsteps in the entry, the dull weight of him moving through the living room, into the kitchen. She rose from the stool. She did not want Oscar to find her here; it seemed a trespass. She should not be reading these notes, they had not been marked for her. Quickly she replaced the loose pages into the sketchbook, reordered the books on the table, and left the studio. The noise from downstairs stopped, and Lina tiptoed silently to her room. Inside, she leaned against the door and it seemed she held a bowl of water on her head and must move carefully, breathe slowly, or the bowl would dislodge and come crashing to the floor.
Nothing is as I see it. What do I see?

J
osephine started on dinner, the pork sausages she’d finished making last week, ready for Mister when he quit the fields. Mister would come inside but the rest would squat to eat among the tobacco plants, the food barely past their mouths before they’d take up picking again.

The sausages frying on the griddle, a pan of hoecake baking in the coals.
Tonight
. An image of Louis came to her, the sound of his voice gravelly and deep as a man’s but shot through with high notes, little squeaks that had made her giggle, and he had smiled too, powerless to stop them. How many days had passed since that day? How had he changed? And how had she? Would he still look at her as he did then, with a shy wonder?

Josephine pulled the last two ears of summer corn from the basket under the table and they felt small and light in her hands.

Right now Nathan labored in the fields, sweat running off him, his hands chapped and cut from the thick tobacco stalks. It was hours still until Josephine might steal down to the cabins to speak with him about the undertaker and his daughter.

Josephine husked the corn, pulling the green leaves down to reveal the pearly kernels hidden there, some starting to wrinkle and pull into themselves now, so long after picking. Steam rose from the pot and she dropped in the ears with a splash and a hiss of water hitting the coals. At that instant, a memory descended upon her, a memory of an ear of corn in an apron pocket.

Josephine closed her eyes.

It had been high summer when she ran before, an August night sticky and close, a full moon casting the road and the fields in bright relief. She had left without shoes, but had thought to pack some oatcake stolen from the pantry, and an ear of corn, so abundant at that time of year, Missus would never notice just one gone. An ear of corn in an apron pocket.

She had taken the main road toward town, ignorant of the regular patrols that searched that way for runaways. Somehow she had passed unseen, scrambling down the bramble-filled bank only once, when dust thrown by a fast-approaching horse appeared in the distance and she thought surely no good could come of a man in a hurry. The white man rode past her in a fury of hooves and flying dirt, pebbles and earth showering over her as she crouched in the bushes. She had dusted off and continued walking, sure now that she must be close, close to somewhere.

But the road continued, bordered on both sides by undulating fields of corn, wheat, some tobacco too, only the
chirrup
of night crickets to remind her that other living things existed in this desolate plain. Josephine would have walked all the way to the center of town, or surely been set upon by patrollers, but she heard a voice.

“You, girl, over here.” It was a boy’s voice, almost feminine in its high-pitched notes, but hoarse as though talking was something to which he had grown unaccustomed. She turned her head, narrowed her eyes and saw, standing in the field alone, a boy no older than herself. He stood shirtless, straight-backed and rigid, his neck in a wooden yoke, his hands fixed in holes to the side, one at each ear. Just above his knees a second yoke held his legs, and this board was wide such that the boy could not walk or sit, only stand or fall in that one place amid the tall green corn. Heat and sun had weathered him harshly, his hair was matted thick with dirt, traces of salt marked his skin white where the sweat had run and dried. His hands hung like alien things, the fingers bloated, the skin purple and blistered.

“Come here, girl. Scratch my back, would ya please. It itches like the devil. Please.” Josephine looked around her, thinking there must be someone keeping watch, but she saw no one, only the corn stalks, and a bat flapping black against the silver sky.

She did as he asked, as best she could; she ran a finger down the flayed flesh of his back, hardly a ribbon of skin left, and it seemed to soothe him. Her finger came back sticky with his blood and she wiped it against her skirt. He let out a sigh.

“You done a good deed for a dying boy,” he said and laughed. “You can sleep easy now, rest a your days. You’re heaven bound.” He grinned at her, his mouth a graveyard of dark space and gray stone.

“What’d you do?” Josephine whispered.

“Nothing. Not a thing. I ain’t done a thing since I been born,” the boy said, and laughed again, loud and raucous until it ended in a flurry of coughs, his throat straining against the yoke as his head pitched forward with the force of them. “You best get moving along,” he said finally, and he glanced at her stomach, full and round beneath the apron. “Patrollers come by. I seen them two, three times already tonight. They don’t pay me no mind but they’d chase you down, oh they would indeed.”

“I don’t know where to go,” Josephine said. This realization was sudden in her, the boy’s blood sticky on her hand, his suffering absolute. The field was open, exposed, and the moon bore down like a face watching from above. Fear swept over her, drying her mouth, weakening her legs where before they had been steady.

“Go to the undertaker’s. The undertaker and his daughter. You can make it there ’fore morning. Take the right fork in the road, you’ll see his wagons. There’s help to be found there. But you better run, run, run! Run!
Run!
” And the boy started screaming, his voice emptying into the fields and the road and beyond.

Josephine left the boy behind but the sound of his voice stayed with her, echoing beside her for miles. As she walked, she whispered to the boy, soothing him as he stood condemned in the cornfield, and soothing too the child within her. A girl, she believed it to be, and she felt strong twists and turns within her belly, rounded pokes of small elbows and knees as she walked on. She continued in her whispering, patting her belly with her right hand to keep the time of her steps and to assure the child that soon they would reach the undertaker’s barn, just as the boy had told them. Help could be found there; soon they would be safe. The moon above revealed her, the misshapen curves of her shadow falling long on the road. There is nothing to fear, she whispered to the boy in the cornfield and to the baby inside her, but her voice shook in its whispering.