The Butterfly Cabinet (3 page)

She could never take an object by its handle. When she was given a cup she immediately wrapped her fingers around the bowl. She was contrary to the bone and entirely comfortable in her own skin. She had no interest in mounting a horse but would have fed carrots to my gray, Caesar, the whole day long. And she did not like the sea. It was loud, she said, a monster. She was plagued with dreams. Once, she woke up crying and I went to her and said, “It has gone away now. Go back to sleep,” and she said, “That is why I am crying.” She dreamed she could fly, she said. She had sprouted strong white feathered wings on her shoulder blades—she could feel them—and she was soaring high up in the blue looking down on the house and the strand, wheeling through the air, turning and gliding, being borne up on the warm currents that rise off Inishowen and Binevenagh, and she did not want to come down.

Why so many children? Too indelicate a question for anyone to ask, but it was on their minds, I am sure of it. I saw the looks they gave me in church each time my condition became apparent. Why not lock the door against Edward? Surely I had provided him with heirs enough. Surely my duty was done. How can I describe the way I am with him, when we are alone together? It has something to do with touch, and something to do with ache, and something to do with living, and something to do with freedom,
and something to do with loss, and something to do with a return to oneself, and something to do with fear, and something to do with relief, and with color, startling color, and with harmony, and with rhythm, and with abandon. A thrumming of parts, a butterflying, a dancing. And at the end of it, often, there is a child. It is a price to pay.

I loved Charlotte—that could not be helped—but she was a difficult child to like. She was willful, disobedient; nothing particular in that, but her misbehavior had a quality that I could not fathom. She was so unlike the boys. Their mischief was impulsive, uncalculated, soon ended by a punishment that befitted it. I insisted on breakfasting with the children several times a week, a peculiarity that my defenders chose to view as dutiful and my detractors held up as an example of tyrannical control. On one such occasion I caught Harry emptying his morning porridge into his napkin. He loathed the taste, complained it was like swallowing warm frogspawn. I had him sit at the table at every meal for two days without a morsel on his plate. He ate his porridge on the third day, and every day thereafter. I caught Morris unpicking the wallpaper in the dining room, trying to set fire to it with a lucifer, the room adrift with black floating ash, an experiment, he said, to discover if a wall would burn. I held his hands on the hot-water pipes until he cried, and never once did he venture near a flame again. But with Charlotte nothing was ever simple. She repeated the same offense time and again, and nothing I did appeared to have any impact. She was not unintelligent—precisely the opposite in fact—but she would not see the consequences of her actions, she would not be turned. She was entirely stubborn, would not bend her will to anyone, and in the matter of her toileting, I was utterly defeated. I have found myself, since she began to walk and talk, remembering moments I had forgotten from my own childhood with my sister, Julia—the sudden hatreds, the mind games, the jealousies. There have been times when I have felt
Charlotte to be my senior. She had something over me the way Julia always had.

There was nothing straightforward, direct with Charlotte. If she wanted more bread she would ask if everyone else had had enough; if she wanted to feed Caesar she would ask if he was likely to be hungry; if she wanted to draw with Julia she would ask if she was busy. Every question was leading somewhere, nothing to the point. She seemed to want to consider any given matter from every angle available, to examine the reverberations on the entire household. She knew what she wanted but she would not ask for it outright. No one else seemed troubled by this, indeed Julia found it charming, but her circumnavigation drove me to distraction. I often felt with Charlotte that an interpreter was needed: someone who could sift through the emotional entanglement of her language, translate to me a clear intention. Julia, on the other hand, appeared to understand her perfectly.

Charlotte loved Julia, and Julia loved her, and why would they not? Julia does not discipline the children, never speaks a cross word. She is in the privileged position of the indulgent aunt who can spoil them at will and then leave them since they are not her responsibility. It is not to her they come with stomach cramps in the night for having overindulged in ice cream, it is not at her they snap in the mornings for having been put to bed too late. Julia is softhearted. She would not outwardly cross me, not anymore, not since we exchanged words on the matter. She feels her position in my household keenly. But if she could find a way to soften a punishment, without appearing to go against me, she would do it. She has grown predictable, can be depended upon to bring bread and water to the children when I have said they are to have no supper, to slip in and read to them when they have been put to bed early for some misdemeanor. I have never acknowledged this subtle interference and she has never referred to it. And this, our unvoiced agreement, worked well enough for a time. I
feigned ignorance of her temperance, never sanctioned it, and her discretion was complete; she did nothing outwardly to flout my authority. That I came to rely on it was my mistake.

My see-through sister, Julia, pale faced, light haired, fine, nothing dark, nothing hidden, nothing deep. It was always made clear to us that she was the one to be educated; I was to be married. Neither of us questioned our father’s will. She went to Girton, not long after it opened, where she read the classics and came back full of talk about the equality of the sexes, and how there was no reason on God’s earth (she did not use the phrase in front of Father) why she should not be awarded a degree the same as her male counterparts. She was going to be an artist, had had two of her paintings accepted by the Royal Academy. I wanted to view them but was told they were “accepted but not hung,” which meant they were in line for a place. I never heard of them being exhibited, as I am sure I would have done, had they been.

Julia’s offer to stay at Oranmore and take care of the baby when it comes has shocked me. I had not thought she was interested in growing up. She has been the petted child for so long I had believed her incapable of taking responsibility for herself. Her brief sojourn as nurse to Mother and Father must have terrified her: I could see her relief when we invited her to live with us. I wonder how she will fare when the novelty of Oranmore has worn off, when she grows tired of playing at mistress of the house, when the tedium of those hours in the kitchen with Peig, managing the household, becomes apparent: the perennial dilemma between mutton and lamb; the controversial question of whose job it is to break the sugar or order the coal. She must be excited at the prospect of having free rein in the house without me in it, but I doubt that that will be enough to sustain her for very long. Her enthusiasm over new projects is generally short-lived.

She will not have much time for her newest interest. Aptly, she has decided to become a photographer, a thief of time and
light. She has no idea how ridiculous she looks. She insisted on photographing the family, of course, returned from a visit to London with her apparatus in tow, boxes and baskets of mysterious chemicals and bewildering equipment. Explained the whole process to Edward over dinner. How glass-plate negatives have revolutionized photography, made it possible for her to traipse about the countryside photographing out of doors. She might as well have been speaking Greek for all the sense she made to me. She planned to visit Dunluce Castle and the Giant’s Causeway, to capture them for posterity, she said. And people, too—she wanted every face in the house. Edward humored her. He had a soft spot for my dark-lashed half-suffragist sister.

“With every new preoccupation of Julia’s I thank God it was her sister I married,” he used to say.

I wonder if he still feels that way. She had me sit for her. She wanted me with my hair loose, in a silk dressing gown of hers, under the tulip tree in the garden. I came down in my Busvine, red and green herringbone, dressed for the hunt, my hair pinned tight under my riding hat. “Oh, Harriet!” she cried when she saw me. “If you must wear a hat, why not the hummingbird? Put it on, dearest, do. It would be perfection!”

I ignored her, took up position behind the green leather chair in the library. She has made her views on my jewel of a hat perfectly clear—a real hummingbird, ruby throated, quick eyed, every feather a surprise of beaten metal, green and silver and blue. It is mounted, as if still hovering above a head of wild columbine. I have never seen anything so lifelike. Edward brought it back from Paris. When I showed it to her first, expecting admiration, she said, “How exquisite, Harriet, did you stuff it yourself?” She will grant me no pleasure. I will not defend it, and I will not be guilted out of wearing it by Julia, but I will not wear it in her company.

She positioned herself to my right-hand side, asked me to look to my left. In the photograph, one can clearly see the dusty
old boar’s head on the wall behind me. She had the likeness hand-colored to her own instructions but the studio assistant made a poor job of it. My color is too high, and the shade of my costume a dull red. I look a fool in it, dressed for the hunt, leaning over the back of the library chair, the boar leering behind me. Julia made Edward a gift of it. She said every man should have a “revealing” portrait of his wife. Honestly, “revealing”! Buttoned up to my throat. How is it possible to make one look a fool in a photograph?

Pretty Julia with her kitten’s teeth. And she is pretty, when her face is at rest, which is infrequent now. She is slight and pale, was the type of child that adults patted on the head, the type of woman men wish to protect, I believe. Her nose is a little wide, however, and her mouth somewhat too expressive, and her head, I always think, seems a little too big for her body. We are nothing alike: me, with my dark features and long limbs, a jawbone too strong for a woman’s, large hands; one would never take us for sisters. Mother was beside herself when her lovely Julia showed signs of developing eczema. It is not serious, but when the light catches the side of her face, little raised sores are sometimes visible just under the skin that occasionally become infected. When she came to us, I recommended American syrup of bloodroot, advised her to pull her hair forward to hide the marks, but she said a doctor friend had prescribed exposure to the sun in order to energize the skin. I commented that she had no eczema on her chest and that she ought, at least, to cover that. She gave me that peculiar look of hers, said, “Harriet, you were born a century too late,” and flounced off to walk in the garden.

I hurt her hand once in a wardrobe door. We were children at the time, nine and five: she was standing beside me, prattling as usual, and I closed the door with her hand in it. A blue line appeared, running below the knuckle on her little finger to the edge of her hand. The finger turned white beside the pink of the
others: it looked quite dead. When I looked at her face, her mouth was open wide, soundless.

“Ssshhh,” I said, “it will be all right. Ssshhh, Julia, do not cry.”

Her face grew redder and redder, and still there was no sound. The silence was terrifying.

“Ssshhh, Julia,” I said, even though she wasn’t making any noise, “I will fix it. I will make it better. I will get some water.”

Then came the cry, one long, loud howl. Good God, one would have thought she was being mauled by wild animals.

I was still trying to soothe her when Father came into the room, his first words “What have you done to her, Harriet?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It was an accident. She put her hand in the door.”

He was looking at Julia’s hand, then scrutinizing my face. “You could have taken her finger off, Harriet, do you understand? You could have really hurt her.”

“I did not see her put her finger in. I did not know it was there.”

He picked Julia up, carried her to the basin, called Lily to bring water. He sat on the end of my bed with her on his knee, pouring cold water on her hand, massaging color back into it, speaking softly to her, rocking her gently. I do not think either of them noticed me leave.

I have been photographed since, my first day here. I was made to sit in front of an oval-shaped board with my name and admission date chalked upon it. Afterward, the warder commanded me to cross my hands on my breast, palms in, she said, thumbs pointing up. I looked at her blankly, momentarily unable to translate the instructions into actions. “Like a bird’s wings,” she explained, not unkindly. They were on the lookout, it seems, for any identifying marks. A square mirror hung on a chain on the wall behind me and cast my image in profile. It was an odd gesture to be asked to make, to sit, with hands butterflied, left under right. I wonder what Julia would make of that portrait.

Julia insisted on capturing the entire household, caused havoc carting that three-legged wooden beast of a camera about from the kitchen to the stables. She was preparing to exhibit, she declared, and she wanted the pulse of an Irish house, the servants and the farm workers, all human life. There was sudden mayhem when an itinerant tailor arrived in the stable yard and all had to be dismantled and taken outdoors so he too could be captured au naturel. If she had been able to mesmerize the dogs I believe she would have photographed them as well. I saw those images later: Peig, the housekeeper, her face like a skull, looking out from the paper with her deep-set eyes, a century of misery creased on her brow; the tailor, tousle headed and wide eyed, in fear of his life but immobilized by the glass eye that held him; and Maddie. Maddie with her pale face and straight brows, a hair escaping from her cap, a shadow under her mouth. She looks morose, as ever, and severely young. She stands in her white apron and cuffs, with one hand closed over the other, and her look says that she does not know why she has been asked to do this, why she has been summoned and made to stand in such a way, but that it is not an ordeal, and for that reason, she will do it. She is a strange girl, hardworking, it is true, but unfathomable. I look at those pale eyes of hers and I cannot tell whether or not she is speaking the truth.