She spied him from the window and answered the door warily, her hands clutching the wood. From around the sides of her seeped the scent of lemons, of gingerbread and camphor. Feminine odors that Robert Morgan had forgotten existed in the world.
“You’ve recovered.” Her voice rang as flat as his raps on the door. Robert Morgan produced from his pocket an apple— a gnarled piece of fruit, but an offering all the same.
Tabitha received it warily, tucking it in the depths of her apron. “Do you have a specific reason for calling?”
Robert Morgan could feel the heat radiating out of the house and sensed that she was impatient to be rid of him. He listed on his cracked boot heels like a ship about to sink, then brought an arm forward to steady himself. Slowly, the world settled back into some semblance of order, the porch boards still warped, the chimney still aslant, but all the pieces more or less fitted together. It was probably, Robert Morgan decided, as close as he would ever again come to being arranged. Tabitha folded her arms and waited. “I have come,” he stammered, “with a proposal.”
They were married on Michaelmas, the ceremony witnessed by Widow Dunfry and Ebert Pickerton. They celebrated Christmas with a goose and chestnut stuffing. The brother drank too much cider and wheeled about on the wooden leg he would never get used to. The father slumbered over his dish, and Robert retired early to the corner of the parlor he had transformed into a makeshift laboratory. No one sang.
Three things amazed Robert Morgan about his new life. The first was that no one asked him about his past. The people of Aberdeen just seemed to regard him as Tabitha Dyerson’s new husband, and a prior existence neither occurred nor mattered to them. The second thing that needled him was that even though he was a doctor, he had yet to heal one single patient in the town. His remedies either failed, or the people dumped his powders in their chicken feed. They unwound his bandages and replaced them with Tabitha’s poultices made from crushed wolfsbane and pig’s urine.
The final source of wonder, of course, was his wife. Impervious to the wild whip of a New England winter, moon-skinned under the covers when he took her at night, circumspect in all matters relating to herself. With her father, she was patient, forgiving; with her brother, resolved; and with Robert Morgan, she was serene.
“Tell me what your earliest memory is,” he demanded one night after lovemaking. The air outside was so cold, the stars appeared to be shivering.
Tabitha loosed one of her arms from the sheets and brushed a piece of hair away from her eyes. When she spoke, her breath escaped in a visible wisp. “Gathering herbs,” she said. “An iron pot bubbling on the fire. The odor of wet leaves.” She half closed her eyes and smiled but offered no elaboration.
“What is your favorite food?” Robert Morgan asked. They’d been married only a short time, but she already knew that he liked venison stew with nutmeg and juniper berries, that he preferred whiskey to ale, soda bread to brown, while he could only guess at her tastes. It bothered him a little, this advantage she had over him.
Tabitha stretched one of her long arms toward him, and he grew excited at the thought of her touch, but she merely re- arranged the blankets closer around her chin. “I eat the same as you, husband,” she whispered. “We are one flesh now. Please, let’s sleep.”
On his better days, Robert Morgan indulged her behavior, told himself he was lucky to have wed an obedient and untroublesome woman. On his bad days, he skulked in the parlor, cursing her witch blood.
By June, Tabitha’s belly was drum-tight under her altered skirts, the baby riding so high that Robert Morgan was certain it must be a girl. Tabitha merely murmured over his predictions. She dreamed whole afternoons away, wrapped in the floral quilt her grandmother had begun. Sometimes, Robert Morgan found her replacing the batting, mending the quilt’s weak seams, shoring them up for the generations.
He moved them into town, and when people called at the new house, it was Robert who greeted them, ushering them into the parlor’s laboratory, asking them to breathe against the discerning disk of his stethoscope. On the shelf above his head, he had jars of tablets ordered from Boston, powders from New York. He had a canister of ether and a paper cone to administer it. When Tabitha’s father died, Robert Morgan turned his room into an examining office and then built a whole separate cottage in the back for his practice. He quit accepting eggs and skeins of yarn for payment, demanding a deposit of silver up front. It took only the turning away and subsequent death of one young mother, spotted with fever, for the town to learn that death is an impatient master. Even the poorer households acquired clocks and began putting pennies in the bank for the hours the doctor charged.
By the time his son, Bertie, was five, Robert Morgan had hired a young man to keep his books and appointments. He had finished the cottage in back of the house and turned it into an office and an examining room. The recalcitrant brother moved back to the defunct farm. Tabitha had two more children after Bertie. With each successive pregnancy, she grew quieter and quieter, until she finally ceased to speak at all. The bouquets of herbs she was accustomed to fix to the rafters lost their shape, then their color, and finally relinquished their earthy scents, crumbling into twigs and dust. She stayed in her room, working at her quilt, adding pieces, making it bigger so that its ends draped off the bed and swept the dusty floor. Tabitha lay in the covers, wishing her arms had no bones.
Occasionally, Robert Morgan savaged the house looking for old Judith’s shadow book, the one Ebert Pickerton told him about on his first day in town. He ripped apart the larder, biting indiscriminately into pork pies and wedges of cheese. He knocked down the woodpile, upended Tabitha’s linen cupboard. He pried apart floorboards, thumbed page by page through the family Bible, then burned the whole thing. He ordered a new Bible from Boston, and when it arrived, it was bound in supple calfskin, its pages gilded, the cover embossed with his initials and his alone, in real gold. He penned the names of his children inside, flourishing the dips and curls of the letters, lining them up perfectly on the page, but he left Tabitha Dyerson the witch, the crone he’d tried to make a Morgan, off the family register.
At church, Robert Morgan’s lips moved, but it wasn’t the words of God he was uttering. Instead, he was silently cataloging his stores to himself:
carbolic powder, laudanum, aspirin, alcohol, ether
. In his experience, salvation came droplet-sized, issued from the pinched nose of a beaker, from tiny grains of granules measured and slid into an envelope. The prospect of heaven had been bottled and stoppered by him and his brethren. It was easily dispensed.
One morning, while shaving, he ran the razor over himself by feel, averting his gaze from the aging stranger in the glass, and when he turned back to his image, he found he’d nicked himself. A trickle of blood wormed its way down a crease on his face and cavorted along his jaw. He turned to Tabitha, but she was marooned in a melancholic swamp in the middle of their bed, her brow as smooth as an egg. She ignored him. Her hands were twisting and turning, knotting and looping. Under them, as if by magic, the outlines of nightshade, belladonna, and hemlock bloomed in silken leaves across the quilt. A mortal garden stitched for the immortal soul.
Robert Morgan thrust his jaw out toward his wife. “Help,” he demanded crossly, and received the press of Tabby’s little fingers, wrapped in a square of cast-off linen. As if by magic, the blood stopped, and Robert Morgan scowled. He wondered briefly how Tabitha did it, but the clock downstairs chimed, and he rushed to put on his hat. For him, knowledge was a plain thing, like a neatly labeled bottle, transparent and tucked on a shelf. It was not in his character to pick and follow the threads of an idea like a woman unraveling a skein of yarn. Besides, he was running late.
“Thank you,” he growled, and loped out of the room, his thoughts already on salvation, his belief that he was in charge of dying in the town of Aberdeen fully intact—an idea that would persist for the next hundred and fifty years until I came along and overturned the apple cart of history.
E
ven before I emerged from my mother’s womb in 1953, people began warning my mother that the infant she carried was going to be huge. “It’s bound to be a boy!” Reverend Pickerton boomed at her after church when she was only four months pregnant, laying his stout fingers on her stomach. The world, it seemed to her, had been transformed into pairs of groping hands.
“He’s already rough-and-tumble!” Reverend Pickerton chortled, patting my mother’s belly. As if in reply, I tilted and spun in her uterus. My mother was so enormous that Robert Morgan IV had checked her twice to make sure she wasn’t carrying twins.
“I just can’t believe it,” he said again and again, shaking his head. “A baby this big. It’s bound to be some kind of record.” When his own wife gave birth to a hefty boy a year and a half before (another Robert, called Bob Bob), her abdomen had been only the size of a melon. Nevertheless, Dr. Morgan heard only one heartbeat, one fetus growing in Lily. Unless, of course, he thought, the baby had somehow devoured its twin, winding itself into its sibling, a possibility the doctor didn’t present to my mother.
By midsummer, her wrists and ankles sloshed with fluids. Her knees were so puffy, it was painful to bend them. Her breasts were two cones. She was ravenous all the time, eating the strangest things in spite of herself—jelly and raisins on rye bread, anchovy and mustard sandwiches, lime-flavored gelatin with bits of ham and sweet potato floating in it. Her thighs expanded, turning gummy and pale. Her fingers plumped into sausages. My sister, Serena Jane, was two years old and no longer liked to sit on her lap. Her tiny fists prodded my mother’s legs, searching for the old, slender ones. “Bad bump.” It was Serena Jane’s opinion that I was consuming my mother and would eventually fill her all the way up.
My mother sighed and slid Serena Jane back onto the floor. Of all the trials of motherhood, she’d been the most unprepared for the critical scrutiny of a toddler. Serena Jane screamed when my mother read her the wrong story at night. She combed her fingers over my mother’s face, outlining every crease and fold. She inspected the cheese sandwiches my mother made her at lunch with the offended air of a restaurant critic, whining if the crusts were still on. My mother could only imagine her daughter’s reaction to a bald, squalling infant. She ran her palm over Serena Jane’s butterfly hair and tried not to care when my sister yanked her head away. My mother sighed again.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I had a bump with you, too. I was round before you came out.” But they both knew she was lying. This time was different. Something really was eating her from the inside out.
Dr. Morgan found the lump in my mother’s breast in the eighth month of her pregnancy, four weeks before she was due to deliver. It rolled under his palm like a hard-boiled quail’s egg. My mother cried out from the pressure.
“How long?” he asked, pushing his glasses up on his nose, as if they would make the elements of the situation clearer.
My mother bowed her head. Her neck wattled. “About three months.”
“This size the whole time?”
My mother shook her head. “It’s gotten bigger.” Bob Morgan sighed, and that single exhalation told my mother everything she needed to know. She splayed her knees on the examining table and contemplated the reproduction going on inside her body—copies of copies of copies, a garbled message being passed around her organs. An unbreakable code.
She refused offers of a ride home. She wobbled down Bob Morgan’s porch steps, her knees as flexible as rubber bands, and waved to Maureen and little Bob Bob, who were cavorting in the sprinklers by the side of the house. Bees weighted with nectar hung in the hedges. Bob Bob, his buttocks swaddled in a diaper, scooted over to my mother and hugged her around her calves, throwing her off balance.
“No, darling,” Maureen scolded him gently, detaching his fingers from my mother’s puffy legs and flashing a weary smile at her full-mooned face. “I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes roving the mountainous curves of my mother’s body. “He’s completely uncontrollable. He just wants what he wants. I can’t keep up.”
My mother looked down toward her feet, toward Bob Bob, but her monstrous belly, her mutinous breasts, blocked her view. She felt the child’s wormy fingers trying to creep in between her own, and she opened her hand wider.
“It’s okay,” she told Maureen, moving her palm up to her belly. “You don’t have to explain.” After all, she’d just learned that even something microscopic could have an unstoppable will.
When her labor began, my mother was brushing Serena Jane’s baby-floss hair. Serena Jane was beautiful, my mother knew, a miracle of physical arrangement—perfect eyes, perfect pearls of teeth framed with a cupid mouth.
The girl should be in pictures
, my father used to chortle, hoisting Serena Jane up as if to display her to an adoring crowd. It pleased him no end to have produced a commodity like my sister. He took almost as much delight in the starched baby ruffles, the rose-patterned, crocheted toddler clothing, as my mother did. He was an ordinary citizen, a small-town barber, but he had produced a princess, a queen. And soon, to go with the little monarch, there would be a prince.
“Put her down,” my mother scolded. “I’m not done.” In her hands, a limp length of pink ribbon drooped like a tired tongue. My father deposited Serena Jane back on the bureau top, where she stood with eyes fixed, limbs poised, as if waiting to receive a benediction. My mother anointed Serena Jane’s hair with a double-looped bow. Her fingers looked as if they were wrapping a present they couldn’t wait to give away. “There!” she said, sunbeams in her voice. She turned Serena Jane to the mirror, angling her small body from side to side. “Who looks pretty?”
Serena Jane merely blinked. She knew she was pretty. She accepted it as her due. In the summer heat, at birthday parties or picnics, when other little girls’ clothes were sticky and smeared with cake, hers remained buttoned and pristine, crisp as sails on an arctic lake.