A-Splendid-Ruin(7)

I froze in shock. My mother, alive, her blond hair in a braid down her back, her nightgown unbuttoned at the throat as she preferred it. But almost in the same moment, I knew it was not her. “Aunt Florence.”

“Who are you?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.

“I’m May. Your niece.”

“My niece is dead.” My aunt frowned. “They told me she was dead.”

She was not awake. I recognized that blank stare. There had been a woman in the boardinghouse like this. Old Mrs. Welling disturbed the rest of us with her sleepwalking so often they’d had to lock her in her room. I spoke gently, “No, it’s my mother who died. Your sister, Charlotte.”

“May.” Aunt Florence spoke my name as if it were foreign. “Oh May, oh May! It can’t be. Why are you here? Oh, why have you come?”

“You invited me. You asked me to come.”

“No, no.” She shook her head, backing away. “No, you must go now. I told them not to. I told them.”

“I—I don’t understand. Told who?”

“You must go!” she shouted. “You don’t belong here!”

Now it was my turn to back away. She was asleep. She had no idea what she was saying. Still, the force of her rejection shook me.

But I had her letter of invitation. The paid train ticket. That was what mattered.

“Mother!” Goldie marched through the door in her dressing gown, impatient and exasperated. “Mother, what are you doing here?”

Aunt Florence’s hands dropped to her sides.

“I’m so sorry, May.” Goldie went to her mother. “Come now, back to bed with you.”

I said, “If she’s sleepwalking—”

“It’s nothing for you to worry about. I’ll take care of it.” Goldie tugged Aunt Florence to the door the way one might an ill-behaved child.

I followed them to the hallway, feeling helpless and stupid. “Do you need my help? Is there anything I can do?”

Goldie didn’t answer. She took her mother into the bedroom at the end of the hall, shutting the door firmly, and the house swallowed them in silence.





I’d forgotten to draw the curtains, and I woke to a blanket of bright fog outside the window obscuring all else, and the hauntingly disorienting sense that the world had slipped away and I was suspended, imprisoned in a vast nothingness.

Some of that feeling had to do with my aunt’s strange visit last night, but my dreams too had chased uncertainty and dread into the morning, though I could not remember what they’d been. Full of questions, certainly.

I listened for something to tell me that the household had thrown off sleep, but I heard nothing, not a maid, nor my aunt or uncle, nor, unsurprisingly, Goldie. Only, again, that spooky silence, accented now by the suffocating sequester of the fog. I wondered if I would make too much noise if I went to the bath. Should I dress? Should I go downstairs or wait for a maid to come? My questions only emphasized that, while I was not quite a guest, neither would I be a member of the family until I’d mastered these details of day-to-day living. Strange, wasn’t it, how such things were hardly worth thinking about until one did not know them?

I crept to the bath with its blue delft sink and tub and an embellished toilet that looked carved from marble. What a miracle, to turn a faucet and have water—hot water, too, no less. A bath in the boardinghouse had meant buckets of water heated on the stove, half grown cold before the tub was full. I might have spent all day luxuriating in this bathroom, had not the wallpaper been so intimidating. It was bright and garish, with animal faces peering from between jungle leaves. They seemed to be watching my every move, and I was glad to hurry out again.

I’d seen no sign that anyone was awake, and so I pulled my sketchbook in its leather case from my valise, along with the set of drawing pencils. The pencils had been an extravagance, and I still felt guilty when I used them. But Mama had insisted. “I don’t know where you got such talent. Not from me, certainly, and your father, well . . .” She’d become lost in a memory, then shaken it loose with a smile and a small laugh, and when I’d begged her to share it, had only said, “Just remember, my dear, not to judge so harshly. There are two sides to every story.”

It did no good to ask anything more; the promise my mother had made to my father, whatever it was, was as binding as her love for me. In the beginning, I’d buried my questions in imaginings about my father where I gave him a hundred excuses for being away. He was lost at sea. He’d been kidnapped. He was an explorer in the Arctic desperate to find his way home to us. As I grew older, those stories no longer satisfied; I became frustrated with everything I didn’t know, frustrated with our poverty, with the everyday evidence of our want. Our rooms where nothing belonged to us, not the furniture, not the rugs, not the cheap chromolithographs on the walls. Only a few things here and there: a commemorative candy jar from the Centennial Exposition, an empty perfume bottle that still held a lingering scent of something complex and fascinating—“French perfume,” Mama would say, waving it enticingly past my nose—a few books, our clothing, the drawings I made sometimes, when there was spare paper about, of fantasy lands where my father was held prisoner, though I didn’t tell my mother that’s what they were. The only time I had, her sorrow had made me sick with myself.