Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders (12 page)

Ruthie pours wine into two juice glasses. We sip. The wine is not sweet, but it takes up more space in my mouth than a normal drink. I swish it because it seems like it could clean a mouth. The dogs have plopped onto the linoleum.

How’s Hailey? I ask. I’ve never told my mother, but I think of Hailey a lot. I think, What does she look like now? What does she love?

She’s good, Ruthie says. I think. I see her in August. She lives with her dad, you know.

In Tucson, I say. I want to meet her.

One day, Ruthie says, but she says it like a wish, not a promise.

I have to get the television back to Mrs. Devlin. I fixed it for her.

Who gets TVs repaired anymore? Everyone just goes out and gets a new one.

A lot of people get things repaired, I tell her. Toaster ovens, hand beaters, mixers, and record players. I swirl my wine, take another sip, and it’s not as good as cough syrup. I tell her, Eleanor brings them home. I fix them and get paid by my clients.

You ever see these clients?

I never see people, really. You know that, what with my weakened immune system.

Do you really think you have a weakened immune system? I mean, do you get sick a lot?

No, but it’s because we take a lot of precautions.

Right, Ruthie says. Eleanor. She’s staunch about precautions.

I tell Ruthie that we have to watch out for vultures, that they could come looking for the seventh book at any moment.

Ruthie sits at the kitchen table, leans forward with her wine cupped in her hands, and says, while squinting, Do you think she really did write it? Did she write it and burn it like Eleanor says?

Don’t ever tell anyone that. You know not to. This is one of the pacts. It’s a pact between me and Eleanor and you.

She shakes her head. I haven’t told anyone, but only because I don’t buy it, Ruthie says. I think she did write it, and I think it’s in this house and it’s worth millions.

It’s important to keep our pacts, I tell Ruthie.

Like the one where Eleanor told us never to go looking for our father? I already broke it.

You know where he is? But you haven’t gone to get him?

Ruthie shakes her head.

Why not?

The question isn’t why not. It’s why.

George! Lordy, Lordy, I say. Where does he live?

In Pennsylvania. Mushroom country. Just over the line—if he didn’t move, that is. I could take you.

Ruthie grabs the bottle of wine and pours herself another glass. I sip my same one. She leans forward. Have you ever been in love? she asks.

I shake my head and shrug. I’ve loved people from a distance, I tell Ruthie. It’s easier.

That’s called a crush, Ruthie says. Do you have a crush on someone?

I deny it, but then there’s warmth in my chest and my face feels sweaty. And I say that I kind of like the Eldermans’ youngest son.

Across the street? Benny Elderman?

He lost his job.

Someone once hired him?

Stop it.

Sorry. I’m glad you kind of like Benny Elderman. I remember him being a little pretentious as a kid.

He wore fedoras.

He did! I remember that now. See, but Benny Elderman could pull off a fedora at nine years old. He had that mojo.

He jogs now.

That’s great.

Have you been in love twice, once with each husband?

I don’t know. I’ve either been in love a dozen times or never. I can’t tell.

You’re strange.

And so are you.

N
o one is ever suspicious of a happy childhood—though everyone should be. But then, what writer would admit to one? My publisher got wind of a rumor once that mentioned some institutionalization. He actually wanted to use the information to bolster sales. An unstable writer holds some cachet. I apologized to him. “Sorry, but alas, my life has been quite dull.” As for those fellow inmates and guards who could have uttered the truth, God bless them: they didn’t. Once upon a time, privacy was valued. For goodness’ sake, a disabled president of the United States could ask that the press not photograph him in a wheelchair or being transferred to his car or generally in a weakened state, and the press would oblige. Those were the days.

The sum portrait I rendered of my childhood was the four years I spent with my mother in this house—this very house!—extended. It’s what I talked about with readers, as well as with Eleanor and the girls. Who can blame me? These were the years I wanted to remember.

Plus Eppitt. Always Eppitt.

But he couldn’t exist in this portrait. It wasn’t possible. For the purposes of a pristine youth, I fixed on my mother. When I think of her now, I know the feel of her skin, the arrangement of her small bright teeth, the smell of her hair. Our love for each other was condensed, therefore more richly palpable. We were each other’s figments made real.

In the months after the discovery that my father had stolen me from her, alive after all—and a girl genius to boot—the power shifted. If my father mentioned something that he’d read in the morning paper—the Great War was broiling overseas—my mother could say, “That sounds a bit off. Are you sure you read that correctly, or is it possible you’ve made some mistake?”

My mother swelled with confidence. When she refused to allow me to go off to school—“She’s had enough time away from us, don’t you think?”—my father conceded immediately.

She broke from her hermit’s existence and strolled with me on her arm around town. She pointed out hemlock, spruces, finches, and goldenrod. She allowed me to study whatever I wanted. I collected butterflies, toads, moles, various insects in boxes and glass jars with perforated lids. I examined them for hours on end.

In summers, the sunporch became a biologist’s study. The walls were covered with corkboards for my notations. At the start of the winters, I moved everything to my bedroom.

She looked for opportunities to run into neighbors and acquaintances (she had no real friends), to introduce me as her daughter, Harriet. “She was sickly,” she’d tell them. “We thought we’d lost her. But here she is! The Lord had mercy!”

I stood there, beaming. My mother, pink with sun, bloomed like a fat bud in a hothouse. She was so charged, so happy, so brimming, she gave off a radiant steam—it reminded me of the laundry. I’ll always associate steam with love.

Over these teen years, when most girls turn away from their mothers, I fell in love with mine. She took me into Baltimore, where we went to the movies, watching Fatty Arbuckle and Lillian Gish. On our birthdays, we lunched at the Swinging Lantern, a Chinese restaurant run by Mr. and Mrs. Ling. It had an indoor fishpond of bloated koi. We folded origami cranes, a new fad.

She took me to church, regularly. I’d been baptized at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children—we were morons, not heathens. But my mother made sure that I took First Holy Communion, wearing a veil with a headpiece of chilled flowers. I loved the incubated feeling of the confessional. I confessed rapturously to sins I’d never committed and prayed with my hands wrapped in rosary beads. I went through confirmation as well, choosing Saint Therese the Little Flower—as most girls did—for my namesake. Other girls loved her abject humility, scrubbing floors with tubercular fervor. I loved that she coughed blood into a hankie. I was still a bleeder too.

My mother told me about her
own
childhood in Dún Laoghaire, a port town outside Dublin. She talked about Killiney Hill, where you can see mountains, sea, and city. The Irish knew suffering, but she said it made their sense of joy keener. She loved me more for having lost me.

Although I was supremely happy, I was still lovesick. I missed Eppitt. I missed being my husband’s Wolf Woman. While my father slept in my parents’ bedroom alone, I slept beside my mother, pining sometimes for the steamy laundry, its washboards and wringers. I missed seeing Eppitt through the strung-up sheets and our time at home under the Duck Porch—Eppitt’s body pressed to mine.

But Brumus’s words stuck with me. “A boy like Eppitt Clapp”—there was no place for him in my new beautiful life. I was consumed by my mother’s love. If I asked to have Eppitt here
with us, would she say no? Would this cause a fissure between us? If she said yes, how could I love them both at the same time? Surely my heart would burst. I had my mother back. This had to be enough. I was her infant and I loved it. She combed my hair, wrung warm sponges over my back, and peeled my pears. My greatest fear was losing her again.

My desire to keep love—to hold on to it—grew stronger and manifested itself in a desire to keep track of the world. My mother doubled my subscriptions, gave me ivory-handled scissors that narrowed to the long pointed beak of a bird, and bought me a tub of paste with a wire brush connected to its lid. I began a ritual of sniffing the paste before I started. The newsprint smelled good too and blackened my fingertips, tacky with the glue that hardened beneath my nails.

As time passed, some of my clippings stated the obvious: the
Lusitania
sank in fifteen minutes; the Panama Canal was finished, although six thousand workers had died in the process; Ambrose Bierce went down to Chihuahua to see the Mexican Revolution and was never heard from again; Mary Richardson, the suffragette, slashed
The Rokeby Venus
in the National Gallery in London; Typhoid Mary was a new form of killer; someone invented the light switch.

But I was most fascinated by Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy who’d been on a hunting trip when his wife and two children were murdered by Belgium’s Force Publique during its exploitation of rubber in the Congo. An American named Verner traded Ota for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth and picked up an assortment of pygmies for exhibition at the Saint Louis World’s Fair. Ota later lived at the Bronx Zoo, posing with the patrons, and then in the zoo’s Monkey House as part of an evolution exhibit. Following public outcry over the injustice of a human zoo exhibit, Ota was released to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, even though he was in his twenties.

This terrified me—the idea that you could be sent back.

Eventually they sent him on to Lynchburg, Virginia, where they dressed him in ordinary clothes and capped his teeth, which had been filed to points in childhood. Anne Spencer—the poet who wrote in her poem about the diving-tank girl “Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adorning”—taught him to read and write. Then, in 1916—when I was sixteen—Ota Benga stole a shotgun and killed himself.

Was I Ota Benga in my family’s home, free to walk the grounds as a human exhibit, the Found Child? Was I doomed, as he was, to shoot myself in the heart?

By this point, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand had marked the beginning of the Great War. One of the seven would-be assassins struck a bomb against a lamppost to set its timing mechanism, and the owner of the car transporting the archduke and his wife thought the clang was a flat tire. A count who was riding with them said, “Bravo. Now we’ll have to stop.” But then the driver saw the black object hurtling at him and stepped on the gas. It was an open car. As the archduke covered his face, the bomb bounced off his arm, off the folded-down car top, and rolled into the crowd. The bomber swallowed his cyanide pill and jumped into the river. Long outdated, the pill only made him throw up. And due to a lack of rain, the river was only a few inches deep anyway. The other gunmen dispersed. Princip, the young, tubercular assassin, walked across the Appel Quay to Moritz Schiller’s delicatessen. The motorcade took a wrong turn and backed up five feet from Princip. He pulled a gun from his coat and fired.

When I talked to my mother about the assassinations (an obsession of mine), I wanted to discuss the ending. I feared that one was coming. “It could have been avoided,” I said. “The whole thing. But they died—the archduke and his wife.”

“I know,” my mother said.

The archduke didn’t usually let his wife ride in the car with him because she wasn’t real royalty like he was. But it was their anniversary. He was shot in the throat, and she in the stomach.

Sometimes I imagined that my father was the archduke. Now, in my teen years, I could still barely look at him. I shrank when he walked into a room. He worked late and began to allow office hours on Saturdays and Sundays. He was no longer needed at home to tend to his ailing wife. But when he did appear, he still seemed to expect hoopla, as if he were in a parade. He’d tour around the house in a grand motorcade of his own defensive pride.

I wanted to shoot him.

Some nights I heard them argue. My father suggested marriage. “She’s of age.”

“She’s a genius. She could go on to study.”

“Do you really think she’d fit in?”

“She can stay here, then.”

“One day, she’ll have to go somewhere!” There was a sharp nasal ring to his voice. I had no desire to be someone’s wife. I was Eppitt’s wife. I didn’t want to go to college, genius or not. I didn’t want to leave my mother, and also, Eppitt would find me one day. For now, I’d stay by my mother’s side.

My mother would counter, calmly, “Will she have to go somewhere one day? Is that a fact? Are you sure, darling? Perhaps we should leave these familial decisions up to me. I may be better suited to make them.”

Despite a small cough that had been developing, my mother was a great force, as mighty as a steamship. She was an entire fleet.

My father was a weakened enemy—like Archduke Ferdinand, a cocky fop, an easy target in his tall hat and open-air motorcar. Lying in bed, I dreamed of shooting him outside Moritz Schiller’s. I’d hold my hand out, gun-shaped, and my hands would shake—the archduke was always too close to his wife. I’d put my pretend gun back into my pretend coat.

As soon as I closed my eyes, my skull lit up like a bright globe. The theater in my brain ran the reel of all that I’d left. Part of me forever belonged at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children, not here. Eppitt, Funk, Brumus, the Owl, the Good Wheel, Gillup, Oonagh…This life that I was in now was undeserved, unearned. Others weren’t so lucky. I escaped by dumb luck. Sometimes I ran while lying in bed, my legs scissoring away from the past, but when I was most anxious, I lay completely still. I didn’t dare bleed into my pillow for four years, not a single drop.

I’ve set out to tell everything—without interruption of the fubbery from my absurd mind. Still, I don’t want to revisit what happens next. I don’t want to bear it to the surface. I’ve lived with this weighty stone all these years, and the burden is its own comfort.

Just now, I walked to the bedroom window and saw Tilton and Ruthie outside after a heavy rain, wearing slickers and rain boots. Ruthie had turned her bicycle upside down and was rotating the pedals like she was working a machine. Tilton was washing worms in a cup. Two clear plastic kiddie-sized umbrellas, abandoned in the yard, swayed like big airy teacups in the breeze.

Eleanor bustled out, a jacket over her head although it wasn’t raining anymore. “Out of the rain!” she cried. “Do you want to catch your death?”

Ruthie said, “Maybe I do!”

And Tilton started crying. “We’re helping worms!”

Eleanor shouted some more, hustling the girls into the house, protecting them from…what? Imaginary rain? Worms?

I’m guilty of worse, Eleanor. In the name of protecting you from the world’s unwieldy workings, I protected you from the truth.

Here’s one that I couldn’t utter, even now: my mother’s death.

When our newly hired nursemaid, Lila, told my father that my mother had gotten worse, he punched the lowboy, nicking it with his ring, and then called Dr. Brumus.

Eppitt had once shown me how to drop a bead of water into a nick in wood, cover it with a washcloth, and pass over it with an iron, borrowed from the girls’ sewing room. The wood swelled to fill the dent. That’s what I was doing when Brumus found me.

“Harriet,” he said. “My God, I barely recognize you.” He looked at me the way he’d once looked at the Owl and the Good Wheel. Despite a narrow frame, I now had breasts and hips. Lila had gone home. I didn’t know where my father was. Suddenly it was just the two of us again—Brumus and me.

“I’m eighteen now,” I said.

“I see that,” he said.

I went back to ironing. The iron steamed the cool air. It was early autumn. “How’s my mother?”

He explained Spanish flu but I already knew about the early deaths related to it, the suspected points of origin, the effects on the war efforts. Some schools had closed. Movie theaters were aired out between shows. Hotels had been transformed into hospitals to handle the
overflow. Weddings and funerals had to be small, private affairs. A woman wanted a marching band to play at her husband’s funeral; they had to play on the parlor lawn. A clairvoyant was arrested for holding a séance, a pool hall owner for having too many people at a card game. Bankers wore masks behind their grillwork. Department stores weren’t allowed to hold sales that would create a storm of business.

Brumus touched my arm lightly—as lightly as he may have once fondled the Good Wheel’s bitten leg. “She might make it. Some do.”

“Can’t you do anything?”