treated to the spectacle of people in all their plainness. Like children, they rate human pettiness, cruelty, and longing in the extreme, which, if you’re idly curious about human nature, makes for interesting study. Besides which, it is no one’s business whom she killed or did not kill.
“Why don’t you set them right?”
Already Clara has forgotten who’s speaking, whom she’s speaking to. Her head is full of other times and, faintly, other voices. Once a sneering suitor, complaining to the aunts, called her otherworldly. Ridiculous, of course, since where else would she be but here in the world, waiting, in the cage of her own body?
Clara dabs at the nest with her finger to assure herself that it’s real. “I have no wish to be right.” She plucks a bit of down from the straw bowl and presses it, wiry-soft, to her cheek.
She catches sight of a grinning eye and one corner of the girl’s mouth before the door clicks shut: “They say a lot of things about me, too.”
Before the Widow Bray took to detaining him five days out of seven, this was a routine well established. Clara hardly remembers when it began. When they first settled in New York, it was difficult to speak, to dodge the anger—hers, hard as a bitter blade—reawakened by gossips in Philadelphia.
But Father’s a deal more patient than most. He’s like an old tree, and they value each other, so they staged a truce, even in the face of hardship.
Their conversations now sound the same. “Won’t you take your health outside?” “I won’t today, thank you.” Murmurs of appreciation for the buttery touch of twilight on the east wall or the corner carpet where the feral cat sleeps. Polite protestations about the weather or the sensationalism of certain journalists bent on running stories about boys falling into vats of molasses where they’re promptly licked to death by hogs. This talk is diverting without cost, and less dishonest than their forays into progressive or political subjects—Universalist doctrine, temperance reform. Father would rather enjoy these at ease over a pipe with his companions. She would rather avoid significance altogether, since the one significant thing she might say or ask would destroy their fragile peace with a stroke.
After Will came between them, they learned to be together but separate, to sit and read or sketch or be lost in thought, and to this day her gratitude knows no bounds. Not a bold man, Father has devoted his life to sheltering her, and she, too, shelters him.
Clara won’t admit it to Maggie, but she does prefer the drapes open. She can occupy herself at the window for hours. To starved senses, the back garden is better than a magic-lantern show: oak leaves languid and falling, glossy crows heavy on branches, bats wheeling and snapping at dusk. She can almost recall what it feels like to be out among them where the Genesee winds blow hard.
The natural world she loves above all else goes on working its endless circles, full of phantoms and scurrying small things that keep out of sight to survive, as she does. Larger things, too: the gray fox leaping over an ice crust, the “devil cat”—at least in legend—with its woman’s shriek. Their house borders the edge of the city, and these and more are all alive in her head.
When they first came to the States, to Philadelphia, they learned quickly that it wasn’t far enough from London. The relative wilds of western New York, on the other hand, might be another universe. Whatever healing she’s managed to do she did here, in the gardens, on woodland paths, in the meadows around Rochester.
When Will’s voice did not go from her head and couldn’t be unraveled from the wild world he knew so well, that world began to seem for the first time unwelcoming, and she unworthy. It’s ever what it was, beautiful and shining and full of wonder, but the more she dishonors it, denying what it will have from all who care—curiosity and the body’s cooperative engagement—the more unworthy she becomes, and the more conscious of failure. Sometimes she feels she is nothing now but consciousness, unmoving in her chair, tracking the ever-changing light, the astonishing clouds flying past, the fat fly that circled and circled inside the shade of her reading lamp, knocking like a drunken fool at her thoughts. She forgets she has a body, and when she remembers, grief rests like lead on her chest, in which her heart still beats in its old frame, stubborn as rain. Sometimes she traces her lips absently with her fingertips, marveling at their softness, like the inside of a lamb’s ear, and is struck by the great waste she’s made of an earthly life. But apologize?
Before this room swallowed her whole, she did her best to make do in the world, on ships and trains, in drawing rooms and corsets, lecture halls and tearooms, but the conversations there failed to rouse her, and she felt that she was sleeping through them, dreaming in their midst. Even the best exceptions, the moments that stood out, could never match the joy she had felt in a single furtive afternoon with Will or lying on a hill of heather alone with a dog circling her feet. It isn’t right to hold them, everyone, by his light or against the bee-loud quiet of a grove of trees twisted and heavy with fruit. But she never understood why not. She neglected no vows. She’s taken none.
There’s something about Maggie Fox that teases and troubles her. She can’t reel back the way she can with others, whose faint concern, even tenderness—vulgar curiosity certainly—are of no use to her. Clara doesn’t require friendship. She’s a grateful recluse and believes that many others feel this way but without courage to act on it. Half the women she knew in London suffered “sick headaches” on command, usually when faced with intolerable social tasks, and those with the prerogative of wealth relinquished their children to the household.
But this Maggie Fox has wares for barter, though Clara is too skeptical and sensible to believe. It’s a lovely hoax, of course. The continuity of life. It has the farmers whispering across their fields from Newark to Rochester and the ladies in their drawing rooms too. Clara reaches out for the bird’s nest. It might be mine, for all I know.
Maggie Fox, unexceptional farm girl, has pinned her to a board, recalled her to the human race, enslaved her anew with longing.
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