What Is Visible: A Novel (29 page)

M
rs. Bond, you have a visitor.”

“I am not dressed, madam. You can see that.”

“Don’t you want to know who―?”

“I am not dressed, madam.”

“The visitor is not…”

“I am not ready today for any person.”

Dr. Tergesen’s boots clomp down the hallway. The surf foams onto Kaanapali beach, fizzing at my toes like ginger beer, the sun so bright I shut my eyes and wait for it to warm me, the roar so loud it drowns out everything. A hand in mine, pulling me back from the water. Not the doctor’s, not Edward’s. I know this hand.

“We are so honored to have Miss Bridgman here at McLean today. Could you write that to her please?” Tergesen says, motioning. “Aren’t you happy to see your friend, Mrs. Bond?” He doesn’t wait for me to respond. “Of course, we often host distinguished visitors because we host the most distinguished patients. Breeding breeds breeding, I always say.”

“And madness breeds madness.” I do not translate any of this for Laura, though she is knocking at my hand, eager as always to talk. I wrap myself as tightly in my shawl as I am able.

Laura looks old, like a widow, like a useless spider stranded without a web. I suppose she is forty now. Do I look that old? There are few mirrors here, so the insults are minimal, but of course I have never been vain. Laura has always been far more concerned with appearance than I am—or many women for that matter—an irony I doubt is lost on her. She is dressed impeccably, as always, even adorned with a bustle, which makes it difficult to sit. I am lucky; all I have to wear is my dressing gown and bed coat, no more steel cages or padded bottoms. But look here: a spot on her bodice. She would be so embarrassed in front of Tergesen and the nurses if she knew. Most days at Perkins she has no visitors now that she is no longer a
cause célèbre
, but today she has gotten dressed up and made this journey from South Boston to Charlestown, over fifteen miles. She does not have someone looking after her who cares. She won’t know, her caretakers surmise, and it’s true that it is hardly noticeable. Should I scrub it off or tell her and suffer through directing her in removing it? I don’t have the energy. She doesn’t know—why make trouble visible? They don’t care what she thinks, her pride, her fastidiousness, her frustration that she must constantly ask, “Am I clean?” Like a baby, though a baby won’t aggravate the life out of you for forty years.

Laura perches on the edge of the visiting chair and waves in the doctor’s direction. He sits in the other chair, unaware that he has been dismissed.

“How is Dr. Howe?” I might as well get this over with. “Boy died?”

“Years ago.”

Well, some child has died lately, I am certain. Probably hundreds. Thousands. Heaven overrun with tiny feet.

“Julia? More children?”

“No. More poems.”

Julia did come to see me, jabbering about her suffragist work. I laughed in her face. Why would she talk to me in here about the rights of women? Laura is still scratching away. Sumner, ah yes, the big bumblegoat, I remember him, sniffing around Howe like a dog. Senator Sumner, caned, I recall, on the Senate floor. Almost to death. So tall to reach almost to death.

“Sumner married,” Laura is saying. “Six months annulled.”

She probably doesn’t know what
annulled
means, just parroting the news. Like when she thought she and the Irish were having a baby, and then the girl ran off. I could not bring myself to tell her that her life, as she saw it, was impossible.

“What was her name?”

“Who?” she asks, and I say, not to hurt her, “Your love.”

“Kate.”

“Come back?”

“I think so.”

It is not Laura’s way to be evasive; she is as direct as heartbreak. I’d wager she’s still feeling up all the ladies in search of her lost sweetheart, even though the wanton took her for every hard-earned penny.

“And the daughter?”

“Sometimes.”

“From deck, I watched dolphins and whales,” I tell her. “How do they get enough air to stay alive when they go back under?”

She does not answer this, but begins telling me a dream she had about my dead children, how they flew into her arms. I can only stare at her, glad that she can’t see my fear, my pity. Is it pity? With her, all other emotions are layered over that sentiment, which is not the same as compassion. This Dr. Tergesen never escorts my family, not even my frail Abigail, but today he lends his arm and time to my esteemed visitor. Laura shrinks away from him; no, she wouldn’t like him; she never did most men, except the one she loved overmuch. If she could see Tergesen’s dirty white coat and greasy muttonchops, she would like him even less. And the way he stares at her through the ends of his round spectacles roosting on that veiny nose, with no pity
or
compassion, just a gaping, endless maw of medical curiosity. Dr. Howe could be like that, which Laura would have known if she’d ever seen his eyes, the way he looked at her sometimes. I wish I’d told her, tried to make her understand the truths invested in that cool gaze, but I’m sure she wouldn’t have believed me, possibly even hated me for it. That obsession might’ve come untethered sooner, more mercifully, but it would have broken her heart. Why did God choose me to hold these secrets from her? Heaven knows He has given me enough of my own.

She is still writing, endlessly marching on my palm, when I get up and go to my desk, leaving her to inscribe the air with her gossip and complaints. I pull out the letter I’ve been laboring over in the last weeks, certain that it is time.

“Here.” I press the envelope into her hand. “Give to Edward.”

“But he visits…”

“Please, one thing for Wightie.”

She nods and I tell her I am tired. I climb into bed, and she tries to kiss me until I push her away. I don’t mean to push her hard, but she stumbles back against the visiting chair and almost falls. Tergesen helps her up and she is shaking. She doesn’t understand that I am trying to protect her.

The doctor leads Laura out, but at the door she turns back and lifts her shade, and one dazzlingly bright blue eye winks at me.

O
ne dollar,” Doctor writes. “Sorry.”

That is Papa’s inheritance to me, his eldest daughter. No remittance to pay for my continued care at Perkins or so that I might have clothes and shoes once a year. I knew he had not loved me as a father should, and in some ways I even understood that sentiment―or lack of it―but I did not know he cared nothing for my health and well-being. To Addison, he gave the house and land, with the stipulation that he and his unpleasant wife, Hattie, allow Mother to live there, in a single small room, and feed her. I am also allowed to visit and will presumably be fed if I do. There was no time to get me to Hanover for the funeral, and I must admit, I am grateful I didn’t have to go. Thank God I have had another father since the age of seven, though he of course has also failed me in many ways. And apparently, I him. It is no wonder that I bear so little fondness for men.

“Must go away?” I ask him, holding my breath against the answer, a drum without sound beating in my head. That moment twenty-five years ago when he told me that I had to go home floods back in nauseating specificity. But today, his fingers feel different, a little shaky, but not thrumming with the hard edge of nerves and force that had accompanied my former heartbreak.

“Course not,” he says, and I release my breath, so dizzy I grip the arm of the chair with my other hand.

“But no money,” I remind him.

“You have some.”

“No.”

“From needlework,” he writes. He would assume, correctly, that I have earned hundreds of dollars over the years, but of course, he doesn’t know where it’s all gone and I cannot tell him.

“Gone.”

“Where?”

He is angry. I don’t blame him. “Gifts. Family.”

He twiddles his fingers, and I know he is calculating, disbelieving.

“You don’t watch me,” I say. “For years.” My only strategy is to thrust the responsibility back onto his shoulders with a pound of guilt. And it’s true, I could have bought a thousand spinning tops and he would have been none the wiser.

“Not good” is all he can come up with.

“I go?”

“We find a way.”

I almost leap from my seat and into his arms, the way I used to. He is my dear Doctor again, looking out for his little Laura. Instead, I bring his hand to my lips and kiss it, only once. He accepts.

On the way out of his office, I am so weak with relief that I hold on to the shelves lining the walls for support, and my fingers come upon a tiny foot. I know this foot! It is mine. Doctor has kept a Laura doll this whole time, over thirty years since they were first made. I reach for it carefully, aware that he is watching me, and take her from the shelf. Her gown is covered in dust, but that is all right. He has kept her, seeing her every day, for over three decades. I make sure her eyeshade is still secure—the green must be so faded now—and begin to comb through her hair. It is stiff and brittle, but at least not salted with gray, the way I know mine is. There is a sudden snap, and I am holding her head in one hand and her body in the other. I have taken off my own head. I turn toward Doctor’s desk, holding out the head, and he takes it. I set the body gently back on the shelf, and I feel him behind me. He strokes my hair, and I allow my head to touch his shoulder, just for a moment. We stand and all is quiet and still and perfect, the way it has always been, the way it has never been. I pull the door shut behind me.

True to his word, Doctor lets me stay. I have no idea where the money comes from to support me. I do not ask, and he does not say. And anyway, Doctor does not fare well these days, which I suppose is to be expected for one over seventy. He rarely even rides his horses anymore. All sources tell me that he and Julia still look like the prime specimens they have always been, though Julia’s fabled auburn locks are now tricked out with gray. Julia Romana’s husband, Mr. Anagnos, the scholar Doctor brought from Greece, is helping with the affairs of the Institution and Doctor is obviously grooming him for the chief post. To think he was vibrant enough just a few years ago to return to Greece during the Cretan insurrection to distribute supplies. I do not see him often―“tired,” Julia says, “so tired”—and when I do, his touch holds but a tenth of its former vigor. His mind does not appear to lack for clarity, though. He raged against the annexation of Santo Domingo last year, and though I never thought I’d see the day, he and Sumner fell plumb out over the subject. Doctor even abused his dearest friend in print. So hot was the issue that Doctor rallied and set off with Julia to the island to work at politicking.

But while he was away the year, Sumner took ill and died, and the news brought Doctor hurtling back. He is still deeply anguished, Julia tells me, berating himself for his row with his beloved. That is what Julia calls him, and goes as far as saying that her husband should never have married her, but Charles Sumner instead. Though I never liked the man, I think this probably would have been the happier union. Like me and Kate, if we had not been separated.

My darling Wightie passed last year, having never set foot out of McLean Asylum again, and I still miss her dreadfully, though she didn’t seem to know me at the end. She had told her husband that he could no longer visit, but the hospital let him just the same, as if she had no say. I am not sure I can blame them, but for whose comfort was it? Mr. Bond has become a real friend to me, and he and two of their children, now grown, come to visit more than most. He always takes pains to assure me how dear I was to his wife: “She never stopped speaking of you.” I am proud that I left as much of a scar on my teacher’s heart as she did on mine. The lei she brought me from the islands is strung across my bedpost, and first thing when I wake every morning, I finger the dried flowers and think on her. I know she is now as lucid as Saint Peter himself and watches over me as carefully as she did in life. I remember when I was young, wishing that I had a cameo of Doctor’s face to wear at my neck and to sleep with on my pillow, but now that the years have shown me other kinds of love, it is Sarah’s face I would keep pinned at my neck, and Kate’s face I would press to mine in the night.

My Laura has not come to me the last two years. She had been visiting annually on my birthday, though it was usually me giving the presents. Sadly, I am certain that her absence is because I told her I have no more money to give her. The last time she brought with her a curly-haired child, a dumpling of a girl, who would not sit still on my lap, even after I gave her a Laura doll, the very last thing I had to offer. She kept jumping off and being put back by her mother. I knew that she was probably afraid of me, repulsed even, though of course it hurts to think it. Maybe Laura did not want to come again either to see my face. I can feel that it has become hollow-cheeked, my bones even birdier than before, and that my skin, which I had prided on its softness, feels now a bit like my boots. I have long given up my bright green shade—by the age of forty, even I knew its gaiety no longer became my station—and replaced it with darkly opaque spectacles, which do seem a bit of a joke. The glass eyes I’d pined for are forever out of reach, now that I have no money of my own.

Kate has never come, and I have almost accepted that she probably never will. At last I forced myself to stop sending letters by Laura since they hadn’t been answered in several years, perhaps not even read. Laura finally learned to write decently, at least, and I brought myself to ask her if her mother were dead. “No,” she said, “but might as well be.” She is a young woman of stolid and sorrowful temperament. When I asked how she lives, if she’d married, she wrote, “You don’t want to know.” The mystery is far worse than the truth, I think, but that’s easy to say when one is not slapped in the face with it. I have certainly done all that I could over the years, and I am sure my Kate has done the best she could under the circumstances, whatever they might have been. I pray that the three of them―Kate, our daughter, and hers―listen to the music box together, the three songs, one for each, over and over, and think of me fondly. I do not complain, but instead thank God for giving me the opportunity, however strange and slant, to fulfill the circle of womanhood. Where would I have been without all those hopes and dreams and memories? Between those and my chatter with the Lord, I am never truly alone. Or so I say.

I am sitting in the front parlor, my chair pulled as close to the fire as caution allows, when there is a tumult, many footsteps, everything shifting. I am up in an instant, hurrying toward the hall, when Jeannette bars my way with one solid arm. “Doctor,” is all she writes, and I slide against the wall to the floor.

He is not dead, thank Jesus; he rests in what they say is a coma. The doctors come and go, and tell us that it is something in his brain, a tumor. I think Doctor would make a joke of it himself, the ultimate phrenological display: the biggest bump of all. I reach into the thick masses of his hair and locate each bump on his skull. Ah, there it is: the well-developed veneration bump right at the top between firmness and benevolence, evidencing the faculties of his divine creative spirit and his quest for the sublime. I round the twin bumps of ideality at his temples that denote the disposition toward perfection, toward beauty and refinement in all things, and then notch the bulge of individuality between his eyebrows that sets them so far apart and him so far apart from lesser men. And the prodigious affection bump situated on the upper back of his head, of which I have had my share of its benefits, though far from all. He told the world, told my family, that I was a failed experiment, but still I love him and forgive him all his trespasses as he has surely forgiven mine.

It has been two days now, and he does not speak or open his eyes. Julia is being very kind; she lets me sit with the girls by his bedside, though I am of little help, and they don’t leave me alone with him because if he did open his eyes or speak, I would miss the moment. I restrain myself from touching him constantly. I know I must share him with his family, but it still cuts deeply to admit that they have greater claim on him than I do. My namesake sits beside me and we hold hands, rarely talking. The room is warm and time passes strangely, as if in a dream.

On the third day, I am in the dining hall eating what I can of lunch when Julia flies in and takes my hand without a word. Together we climb the three flights to Doctor’s room, and she pushes me toward his bed. His forehead is ribboned with sweat, his hands freezing. I trace the lips that I have touched a thousand times, but have never met with mine. I know that Julia is watching, but I can’t stop myself, I lean in to kiss those lips, for the first and last time.

“Eph-phatha,” I write across the width of Doctor’s forehead. “Be opened.” Over and over, and yet his spirit remains closed. One last time I reach for his hand, which has held my whole life’s conversation, but I can think of nothing to write.