The Cure for Dreaming(10)
“But—”
“You’re lucky Percy Acklen’s father didn’t see you standing out there on his courthouse steps, or that distinguished young man never would have taken an interest in you.”
“I—”
“Was he hypnotized into falling in love with you?”
“No!”
“Well, then, if you spoil this unexpected bit of luck you’ve been handed this evening, I will keep to my word about ending your education and sending you away.”
“But—”
“No. You are done talking for the day.” He shoved a finger in my face. “I lost Mr. Underhill as a patient because of you. He was supposed to be leeched tomorrow afternoon, but he demanded to know how he could trust me with his mouth when I can’t even control my own daughter. He called me an embarrassment to the men of Portland, and he uninvited me from the election-night ball of the Oregon Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women.”
“What? That’s ridicu—”
“You will go to your room, change into your nightclothes, and turn down your lamps without reading or writing a single word. You will go to sleep while contemplating your poor decision and figure out how you can compensate for your ills tomorrow. You need to prove you won’t embarrass me if I let you go to that party with Judge Acklen’s son.” He lowered his finger and steadied his breath. A bulging blue vein pulsated in his forehead, and for a moment I feared it would burst and kill him right there in front of me.
“Go!” he shouted.
I scrambled up the stairs with thumps and bangs and skids, failing to sound like a “rational, respectable, dignified young woman.” I sealed myself inside my bedroom—my cherry-blossom-pink Elysium of lace and literature and freshly dusted china dolls in long satin dresses. Father had already lit my frosted gas lamps, so there was no need for me to fumble in the dark for a match.
I grabbed the little steel hook from the top of my chest of drawers and undid the dozen black buttons running down my ankle boots. “Unfair,” I muttered under my breath as I worked to free my cramped feet. “So unfair. I’d like to see him silenced for a change and sent off to a monastery. How would he like that?”
My stocking-covered feet broke loose from their leather prisons, and I stretched out my toes across the cold floorboards.
From my bedside table, the Count’s dark blue castle on the brown cloth cover of Dracula beckoned: Read me, read me. Only thirty more pages to go before Mina will be saved from Dracula’s bloodthirsty curse.
I slid my arms out of my coat and caught the reflection of my movements in the standing oval mirror by my window. A tired girl with a plain face and a distinct lack of fire in her pale brown eyes peered back at me from the glass. Stray strands of hair the color of wet river sludge had fallen out of my topknot and stuck to my cheeks after my ride through the city and the scramble through the rain with Percy. I brushed the hairs aside with the back of my hand and heaved a sigh that made my shoulders rise and sink.
The only other evidence of mischief on my body, the only sign my seventeenth birthday wasn’t quite as proper as it should have been, was a dusty pair of footprints on my dress, right above my stomach and thighs.
y the time I had dressed for school and was heading downstairs the next morning, the house smelled like poached eggs, black coffee, and a touch of rosemary from the Macassar oil Father used for slicking down his hair. He was already seated at the breakfast table, below his favorite photograph: an appetite-souring image of a pair of bone dentures, with six of the bottom teeth missing.
“You’re in the newspaper, Olivia,” he said from behind a sheet of newsprint.
My stomach tightened. “I am? Why?”
Before he could answer, Gerda, the Swedish girl we hired to help with the cooking and cleaning, blew through our swinging kitchen door with the silver coffeepot. She smiled when she saw me, her butter-blond hair and crisp white apron cheery contrasts to our moth-brown walls and dim lighting. “Oh, good morning, Miss Mead,” she said in her lovely Swedish lilt.
“Gerda”—Father rustled the newspaper down to the table—“return to the kitchen, please.”
Gerda and I exchanged a look.
“Gerda,” said Father in a warning tone, “a private family matter needs to be discussed.”
“Yes, sir.” Gerda nodded and disappeared through the door, which flapped shut behind her as if it were swatting her away on her posterior.
I clenched my fists and prepared for the worst.
Father slid the paper across the table. “This is why you’re in the newspaper.”
My lips parted at the startling image on the front page of the Oregonian: an illustrated picture of me, lying supine in my hypnotized state. As Kate, Frannie, and Percy had all told me, I was propped between two chairs, supported beneath my neck and ankles, and my body looked as rigid as the Steel Bridge crossing the Willamette River. A sketched version of Henri Reverie stood on top of me with his arms stretched out to his sides, as if he were balancing on a tightrope instead of a girl.
Below the picture was a caption:
Young hypnotist Henri Reverie stands atop mesmerized Olivia Mead, daughter of Portland dentist Walter W. Mead.
“I’m so sorry.” I scooted the newspaper back across the table and sank into my chair. “Kate volunteered me to go on the stage with that hypnotist, but I didn’t even want to do it. I had no idea Mr. Reverie was standing on top of me after he put me in my trance.”