She Walks in Beauty (47 page)

On Wednesday we woke to a suffocating mist. The carters materialized out of it, as if they were ghouls bent on some morbid task. They handed Aunt a letter and then tromped up the stairs to their work.

Aunt opened the letter and gave a gasp. “But … but … he can’t be right!”

“Let me see it.” I took the letter from her hand and began to read the cramped but meticulously written estimate. Apparently, Aunt had only asked him to sell several things. The dining room set, Father and Mother’s bedrooms, and Father’s books. “We’re going to have to give him more than just these.”

“Then what will we have left?”

“We don’t have to have anything left. We can no longer stay here. The less we have when we leave, the better.”

“But—”

“Why didn’t you put my bedroom on the list?” I would have no need of it where I was going. I turned the letter over and quickly began to annotate it with additions. I added Mama’s jewels and my carpets. The china and all of the silverware. The Turkish carpets in the parlor and the chandeliers. “I’m adding the piano.”

“You can’t!”

“What are we going to do with it? There’s no one here to hear it played.”

“There might be. Once we’ve come out of deep mourning.”

I shook my head. “Once we’ve come out of mourning, I will journey to Boston and you will move to the sea.”

“No. Please. I cannot have a parlor without a piano.”

I clenched my jaw against thoughts that were too profane to share. Instead, I went upstairs to find the men. They were in Mama’s room, disassembling her bed. “I have made some additions to your list. You may have to fetch another cart.”

One of the men nodded toward a young boy. The lad left the room at a run and I soon heard him patter down the stairs. The others continued with their work, carrying the pieces of the bedroom set down the stairs. Taking frames from the wall. Once removed, the pictures left odd dark patches of wallpaper to mark their going. The ghosts of what once had been. And along the floorboards, balls of dust had been exposed where they had taken refuge under the chest of drawers and the wardrobe. I had not been as good a maid as I had thought.

The last man paused as he bent to pick up a painting. “Were it nice, miss? Living like this?”

Had it been? “Yes.” Yes, it was.

He nodded. Hefted the painting. “Shame, miss. But there’s nothing lasts forever.”

It was only as the carters left for the auction house with most of our possessions that I thought to consider my book. I found Aunt in the parlor. “Where’s my Byron?”

“Your what?” Aunt looked up from the chair she was sitting in. The only one left us. The floors had been bared of rugs. The silk curtains pulled down from the windows. She sat there in the bright light, motes of dust dancing in a lone sunbeam. The Pomeranians were lying at her feet.

“Mother’s Byron. Where is it?”

“Her Byron?”

“Her book! The red one. With the morocco leather cover.”

“I don’t know.” Aunt had not yet looked at me. She was gazing about the room in bewilderment.

“Where is it!”

The loudness of my voice must have broken through her thoughts. She flinched. Finally, she looked up at me. “The book? The Byron?”

“Yes.”

“The one in Brother’s library? It had been signed. By the author—”

“The
poet
.” I spoke the words between my teeth.

“The auctioneer said such things have great value.”

“You sold it?”

“There was so little in this house of worth.”

“You sold it?” How could she have? She had no right!

Aunt blinked. “
I
haven’t sold it. The auctioneer will sell it.”

“You sold Mother’s Byron?!”

“Your father left us hardly anything at all. If only we had managed to find the recipe for
Dr. Carter’s
. . .”

“But that book wasn’t Father’s. It was Mother’s! It was the only thing I had left from her.”

A look of puzzlement crossed her face. “But … what about the jewels?”

“I sold them. For you. For us. I didn’t think you would begrudge me one small book.”

“Then I’m . . .” She turned to look at me. “I’m sorry. A girl should always have something left of her mother’s. I didn’t know.” There was something very much like regret in her eyes.

I stood there for a moment, thinking of all the things I wanted to say to her, but instead I went upstairs to survey what was left of my room. There was no use mourning Byron.

It was too late for true love.

43

ONCE I TURNED the calendar’s page to September, once we had changed from full mourning to half mourning, we took a train to Boston and then the boat train to Fall River. It was time for Aunt to find her cottage. The train continued on down to Newport, but Fall River was as far as she would go.

“Wouldn’t you like something farther south? Along the Atlantic?” Somewhere like Newport?

“I
would
like something farther south. In Middletown. I just don’t want to take a boat to get there. I’ve a great fear of boats that has only increased with age.” From the train station in Fall River she hired a carriage to take us down to Middletown, over the stone bridge from Tiverton. We spent that night in an inn and the next morning with an agent. He had located a small but comfortable house for her with a view of the water.

“Yes.” She began nodding as soon as she stepped inside. “I can see myself here.”

I could too.

“Only … you were right.” She had turned toward me. “We ought to have sold the hallstand. It won’t fit in here.”

After promising to secure the house for her, the agent returned us to the inn. Aunt had not planned to settle on a house so easily, so we had no plans for the rest of the day. And so I asked for something I had always longed for. “Could we go to Newport? We wouldn’t have to stay for long.”

We hired another coach to take us south, and soon we were on our way. The Newport we drove into was not the fabled Newport of my dreams. The haunt of the very rich and the scandalously famous. The town was composed of small houses and, out of season, seemed bereft of people. Wind battered the carriage as we rode through the streets.

“Would you like to see the ocean?”

I nodded. It was here my mother had lived. In one of these houses she had been raised. To be in her town and miss her ocean? I leaned toward the window, pressed my forehead against the pane. “I think I see it.”

Aunt laughed. “No. You cannot see it from here. It hides behind the dunes.” She thumped on the roof with her parasol and then shouted a command. “To the beach! Second Beach.”

The carriage made a wide, sweeping turn, and then drove out from town.

“But—”

“Second Beach was her favorite.”

After a while, the carriage left off rumbling and rolled into an extended sort of glide. The horses’ hooves stopped their clopping and seemed to have disappeared entirely. And then, the carriage stopped. Aunt inclined her head toward the door.

I hesitated. “Do you want to come?”

“No. I’ll stay here.”

The coachman helped me out and my feet touched not packed dirt, not cobblestone, nor asphalt. They touched sand. How curious! I raised my skirt with one hand and walked away from the carriage toward the hills of sand before me. Each step I took seemed to lose itself. It was more work walking on sand than I had ever imagined. But finally, after a few false starts and a near tumble, I made it to the top of one of those hills. And there, before me, twinkling in the sun, was the ocean.

Miles and miles of it.

Some of it was shadowed under clouded skies, but other expanses of it sparkled like the most brilliant of sapphires.

With a hand on my hat I ventured off the hills and down onto an expanse of flat sand. It tilted right down into the ocean. And farther on, by the looks of it. I walked along, parallel to the waves, not willing to wet my boots. But as I walked I noticed a singular bird hopping along before me. Long of beak and slender of legs, it skipped to the point where waves lapped up on the sand. It was uncanny how it knew exactly how far to go. It never got its feet wet either.

Following that bird, I walked along rather farther than I meant to.

When I turned around, it was to find the wind in my face. I tightened my hold on my hat, but my arm soon tired. So I took it off and clamped it beneath my arm. The wind worked its fingers through my hair, loosening my coiffure and teasing tendrils that wrapped around my neck whenever I turned to look out at the ocean. It brought to my nose scents I didn’t recognize. Salty, briny odors. Smells scoured and bare.

I followed my footsteps back to where I had come off the sand hills. Took one last look at the ocean and then returned to the carriage.

Aunt greeted me with a frown. “I thought you might have gotten swallowed by a whale.”

I smiled.

“Well?”

I sighed as the carriage pulled away. “I don’t know how she ever left it.”

“She didn’t. Not truly. In fact, she almost came back.”

“She did?”

“It was shortly after they had married. Life in a town along the shore doesn’t prepare anyone for the city.”

I didn’t imagine that it could.

“And Brother’s hours were unpredictable at best. He could never be depended upon to be home, you see.”

Of course he couldn’t. He’d been a physician, after all.

“And then she learned that he had discovered The Bowery. That he had bought some of those old buildings. The ruckus she raised!

The tears she cried! She questioned the state of his very soul. And she ended up sending him straight back from where he had just come.”

“And what happened?”

“I waited until he had gone, until she had quieted, and then I told her how it was. I explained to her what kind of life she could expect. As the wife of a man with growing wealth.”

“And she stayed?” How could she have? When she had known such things?

“She got restless now and then. She would fling open those windows in her bedroom once in a while and I could tell by the look on her face that she wasn’t smelling the garbage or seeing the soot.”

“But she did stay.”

“She did. And eventually there were no more scenes.”

“Because she loved him.” And she had decided to partake in all the pleasures that money could buy.

She shook her head. “Because she loved
you
. She had discovered that you were to be born.”

So she had stayed. And she had given up the ocean for me.

“And he … stayed? With Mama?”

“Yes. He never did take up with another woman. Because I showed her how to keep him. Did I tell you she achieved a sixteeninch waist? Brother was right: She was the most beautiful woman in the city.”

Two days after our return to New York City, I rolled off my pallet and worked at removing the crape trimmings from my best gown. I sewed on a pair of lawn cuffs and a collar in their stead. Afterward, I took a piece of dry toast and some tea for breakfast. Then I took my hat from its box, plucked the black feathers from it, and set it on top of my head.

I was going out.

I was a bit late and so I hurried down the street, impervious to man or beast. I had nearly twenty blocks to go. At the end, I even ran a little, in a very ladylike way. But I made it. I reached the sidewalk in front of Sherry’s restaurant. And I fit myself into the crowds that pressed around the place. It was Lizzie’s wedding day, and I did not want to miss it. Not even if my only glimpse of her were from the edge of a crowd.