Sarah
The house was named Green Hill. When Israel wrote, inviting me to stay
with his family in the countryside of Philadelphia, I’d imagined an airy,
white-frame house with a big veranda and shutters the color of pine. It was
a shock to arrive at the end of spring and find a small castle made entirely
of stone. Green Hill was a megalithic arrangement of pale gray rocks,
arched windows, balconies, and turrets. Gazing up at it for the first time, I
felt like a proper exile.
Israel’s late wife Rebecca had at least made the inside of the house soft.
She’d filled it with hooked rugs and floral pillows, with simple Shaker
furniture and wall clocks from which little birds popped out all day and
coo-cooed the hour. It was a very odd place, but I came to like living inside
a quarry. I liked the way the stone façade glistened in the rain and silvered
over when the moon was full. I liked how the children’s voices echoed in
slow spirals through the rooms and how the air stayed dim and cool in the
heat of the day. Mostly, I liked how impenetrable it felt.
I took up residence in a garret room on the third floor, following months
of correspondence with Israel and endless skirmishes with Mother. My
tactic had been to convince her the whole thing was God’s idea. She was a
devout woman. If anything could trump her social obsessions, it was piety,
but when I told her about the Inner Voice, she was horrified. In her mind,
I’d gone the way of the lunatic female saints who’d gotten themselves
boiled in oil and burned at the stake. When I finally confessed I meant to
live under the roof of the man I’d written those scandalous, unsent letters to,
she broke out in symptoms, cold sores to chest pain. The chest pains were
real enough, as evidenced by her drawn, perspiring face, and I worried my
intentions might literally kill her.
“If there’s a shred of decency in you, you will not run off to live in the
house of a Quaker widower,” she’d shouted during our final clash.
We were in her bedchamber at the time, and I stood with my back to the
window, looking at her face streaked with anger.
“. . . Israel’s unmarried sister lives there, too,” I told her for the tenth
time. “. . . I’m simply renting a room. I’ll help with the children, I’m to be
in charge of the girls’ lessons . . . It’s all very respectable. Think of me as a
tutor.”
“A tutor.” She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead as if
warding off some heavenly debris. “This would kill your father, if he
weren’t already dead.”
“. . . Don’t bring Father into this. He would want me to be happy.”
“I cannot—I will not bless this!”
“. . . Then I’ll go without your blessing.” I was dazed at my boldness.
She drew back in the chair, and I knew I’d stung her. She glared at me
with taut, blistering eyes. “Then go! But keep this sordid business of
hearing voices to yourself. You’re going north for your health, do you
understand?”
“. . . And what exactly is my affliction?”
She looked toward the window and seemed to survey a piece of the
saffron sky. Her silence went on for so long, I wondered if I’d been
dismissed. “Coughing,” she said. “We fear you have consumption.”
That was the pact I made. Mother would tolerate my sojourn and refrain
from severing me from the family, and I would pretend my lungs were
threatened with consumption.
During the three months I’d been at Green Hill, I’d often felt dislocated
and homesick. I missed Nina, and Handful was always at the edges of my
mind. To my surprise, I missed Charleston, certainly not its slavery or its
social castes, but the wash of light on the harbor, the salt brining the air,
Birds of Paradise in the gardens with their orange heads raised, summer
winds flapping the hurricane shutters on the piazzas. When I closed my
eyes, I heard the bells on St Philip’s and sniffed the choking sweetness of
the privet hedge that fell over the city.
Mercifully, the days here had been busy. They were filled with eight
forlorn children ranging from five years all the way to sixteen and the
domestic chores I undertook for Israel’s sister, Catherine. Even in my most
severe Presbyterian moments, I’d been no match for her. She was a wellmeaning woman afflicted with an incurable primness. Despite her
spectacles, she had weak, watery eyes that couldn’t see enough to thread a
needle or measure flour. I didn’t know how they’d managed before me. The
girls’ dresses were unevenly hemmed and we were as apt to get salt in the
sponge cake as sugar.
There were long, weekly rides to the Arch Street Meetinghouse in town,
where I was now a Quaker probationer, having endured the interrogation
from the Council of Elders about my convictions. I had only to wait now for
their decision and be on my best behavior.
Every evening, to Catherine’s immense displeasure, Israel and I walked
down the hill to the little pond to feed the ducks. Decked in green iridescent
feathers and fancy black hoods, they were the most un-Quaker of ducks.
Catherine had once compared their plumage to my dresses. “Do all
Southern ladies adorn themselves in this ostentatious manner?” she’d asked.
If the woman only knew. I’d left the most grandiose of my wardrobe behind.
I’d given Nina a number of silk frocks adorned with everything from
feathers to fur; a lavish lace headdress; an imported van-dyked cap; a shawl
of flounced tulle; a lapis brooch; strands of pearls; a fan inlaid with tiny
mirrors.
At some point, I would have to un-trim my bonnet. I would have to go
through the formal divestment, getting rid of all my lovely things and
resorting to gray dresses and bare bonnets, which would make me appear
plainer than I already was. Catherine had already presented several of these
mousy outfits to me as “encouragement,” as if the sight of them encouraged
anything but aversion. Fortunately, the un-trimming ritual wasn’t required
until my probation ended, and I had no intention of hurrying it.
When Israel and I visited the pond, we tossed crusts of bread on the
water and watched the ducks paddle after them. There was a weathered
rowboat turned upside down in the cattails on the far side, but we never
ventured into it. We sat instead on a bench he’d built himself and conversed
about the children, politics, God, and inevitably, the Quaker faith. He spoke
a great deal about his wife, who’d been gone a year and a half. She could’ve
been canonized, his Rebecca. Once, after speaking of her, his voice choked
and he held my hand as we lingered silently in the deepening violet light.
In September, before summer left us, I was fathoms deep on the mattress in
my room when the sound of crying broke into my slumber and I came
swimming up from a dark blue sleep. The window was hinged open, and for
a moment I heard nothing but the crickets in their percussion. Then it came
again, a kind of whimpering.
I cracked the door to find Becky, Israel’s six-year-old, swallowed in an
oversized white gown, blubbering and rubbing her eyes. She not only had
her mother’s name, but her wilted, flaxen hair, and yet in some ways the
child reminded me of myself. She had brows and lashes so light they were
barely visible, giving her the same whitewashed look I wore. More than
that, she chewed and mumbled her words, for which her siblings teased her
unmercifully. Overhearing one of her brothers call her Mealy Mouth, I’d
given him a talking-to. He avoided me nowadays, but Becky had followed
me about ever since like a bear cub.
She rushed at me now, throwing herself into my arms.
“. . . My goodness, what’s all this?”
“I dreamed about Ma Ma. She was in a box in the ground.”
“. . . Oh, Sweet One, no. Your mother is with God and his angels.”
“But I saw her in the box. I saw her.” Her cries landed in wet bursts
against my gown.
I cupped the back of her head, and when her tears stopped, I said,
“Come on . . . I’ll take you back to your room.”
Pulling away, she darted past me to my bed and pulled the comforter to
her chin. “I want to sleep with you.”
I climbed in beside her, an unaccountable solace washing over me as
she edged close, nuzzling my shoulder. Her head smelled like the sweet
marjoram leaves Catherine sewed into their pillows. As her hand fell across
my chest, I noticed a chain dangling from her clamped fist.
“. . . What’s this in your hand?”
“I sleep with it,” she said. “But when I do, I dream of her.”
She unfurled her fingers to reveal a round, gold-plated locket. The front
was engraved with a spray of flowers, daffodils tied with a bow, and below
them, a name. Rebecca.
“That’s my name,” she said.
“. . . And the locket, is it yours, too?”
“Yes.” Her fingers curled back over it.
I’d never seen a trace of jewelry on Catherine or on Becky’s older sister,
but in Charleston lockets were as common on little girls as hair barrettes.
“I don’t want it anymore,” she said. “I want you to wear it.”
“. . . Me? Oh, Becky, I couldn’t wear your locket.”
“Why?” She raised up, her eyes clouding over again.
“Because . . . it’s yours. It has your name on it, not mine.”
“But you can wear it for now. Just for now.”
She gave me a look of such pleading, I took it from her. “. . . I’ll keep it
for you.”
“You’ll wear it?”
“. . . I’ll wear it once, if it makes you happy. But only once.”
Gradually her breath grew elongated and whispery, the sound of ribbons
fluttering, and I heard her mutter, “Ma Ma.”
All week, Becky greeted me with a searching look at the collar of my dress.
I’d hoped she would forget the episode with the locket, but my wearing it
seemed to have built to an implausible height in her mind. Seeing I was
without it, she would slump in disappointment.
Was it silly of me to feel wary? Wound inside the locket was a tendril of
hair, Becky’s, I supposed, but the vaporous color of it must’ve conjured
memories of her mother. If seeing the necklace on me brought her some
fleeting consolation, surely it harmed nothing.
I wore the locket to the girls’ tutoring session on Thursday. The boys
met in the classroom each morning with a male tutor who came from the
city, while I instructed the two girls there in the afternoons. Israel had built
a single strip of desktops and attached it to the wall, as well as a long bench.
He’d installed a slate board, shelves for books, and a teacher’s table that
smelled of cedar. That morning I wore my emerald dress, which had seen
precious little wear considering how like the ducks’ feathers it was. The
neckline contoured to my collar bones, where the gold locket nestled in the
gully between them.
When Becky spied it, she rose on her toes, her body swelled with
delight, the tiny features on her face levitating for a moment. For the next
hour, she rewarded me by raising her hand whenever I asked a question,
whether she knew the answer or not.
I had free rein over their curriculum, and I was determined my old
adversary, Madame Ruffin, and her “education for the gentle female mind”
would get nowhere near it. I meant to teach the girls geography, world
history, philosophy, and math. They would read the humanities, and when I
was done, know Latin better than their brothers.
I wasn’t against them learning natural history, however, and after a
particularly grueling lesson on longitudes and latitudes, I opened John
James Audubon’s Birds of America, a massive brown leather folio,
weighing at least as much as Becky. Turning to the ruffed grouse, which
was common in the woods nearby, I said, “Who can mimic its call?”
There we were, a flock of ruffed grouses at the open window, trilling
and whistling, when Catherine entered the classroom and demanded to
know what sort of lesson I was conducting. She’d heard our chirping as she
gathered the last cucumbers in the garden. “That was quite a bit of
disturbance,” she said, the vegetable basket swinging on her arm, sifting
crumbs of soil onto her ash-colored dress. Becky, ever alert to her aunt’s
annoyance, spoke before I could push out my words. “We were calling the
ruffed grouse.”
“Were you? I see.” She looked at me. “It seemed unduly loud. Perhaps
more quietly next time.”
I smiled at her and she cocked her head and stepped closer, so close her
dress hem brushed mine. Her eyes magnified behind the thickset lens of her
glasses as she concentrated on the locket at my throat.
“What is the meaning of this?” she said.
“. . . The meaning of what?”
“Take it off!”
Becky wedged herself between us. “Auntie. Auntie.”
Catherine ignored her. “Your intentions have been more than clear to
me, Sarah, but I had not thought you would be so bold as to wear Rebecca’s
locket!”
“. . . Rebecca? . . . You mean, it belonged to . . .” My voice deserted me,
my words adhering like barnacles at the back of my throat.
“Israel’s wife,” she said, finishing my sentence.
“Auntie?” Becky’s upturned face, drowning in the waves of our graygreen skirts, made her look like a castaway. “I gave it to her.”
“You did what? Well, I don’t care who gave it to her, she shouldn’t have
taken it.” She thrust out her palm, shoving it inches from my chin. I could
hear air rasping in and out of her nostrils.
“. . . . . . But I didn’t . . . know.”
“Give me the locket, please.”
“No,” Becky cried, sinking onto the rug.
I stepped back, unclasping the necklace, and placed it in Catherine’s
hand. As I bent to scoop Becky from the floor, her aunt pulled the child
gently by her arm and maneuvered both girls from the room.
I walked calmly, slowly out the door and down the escarpment toward the
pond. Before stepping into the thicket of trees, I looked back at the house.
The light was still citrus and bright, but Israel would be home soon, and
Catherine would be waiting for him with the locket.
Cloaked in the cedars, I pressed one hand to my stomach and one to my
mouth and stood there several seconds, as if squeezing myself together.
Then I straightened and followed the path to the water.
I heard the pond before I saw it—the frogs deep in their hum, the violin
whir of insects. On impulse, I walked along the edge until I reached the
rowboat. Sunk in the mud, it took all my strength to flip it over. I lifted out
the oar and inspected the bottom for holes and rotted wood. Seeing none, I
gathered up my skirt, climbed in, and paddled to the middle of the pond, an
untouchable place, far from everything. I tried to think what I would say to
him, worried my voice would slink off again and leave me.
I remained there a long while, lapping on the surface. Vapor curled on
the water, dragonflies pricked the air, and I thought it all beautiful. I hoped
Israel wouldn’t send me away. I hoped the Inner Voice would not show up
now, saying, Go south.
“Sarah!”
I jerked, causing the boat to tilt, and reached for the sides to steady it.
“What are you doing?” Israel called. He stood on the bank in his knee
britches with the glinting buckles, hatless. He shaded his eyes and motioned
me in with his hand.
I pulled the paddle through the water, banging the wood against the hull
and made an inept, zigzag path to shore.
We sat on the bench while I did my best to explain that I’d thought the
locket belonged to his daughter Rebecca, not his wife Rebecca. I told him
about the evening Becky brought it to me, and while my voice clenched and
spluttered, it didn’t fail me altogether.
“. . . I would never try to take your wife’s place.”
“No,” he said. “No one could.”
“. . . I doubt Catherine would believe me, though . . . She’s very angry.”
“She’s protective, that’s all. Our mother died young and Catherine took
care of me. She never married, and Rebecca, the children, and I were her
only family. Your presence, I’m afraid, has flustered her. I don’t think she
really understands why I asked you here.”
“. . . I don’t think I understand it either, Israel . . . Why am I here?”
“You told me yourself—God told you to leave and come north.”
“. . . But he didn’t say, ‘Go to Philadelphia, go to Israel’s house.’”
He placed his hand on my arm, squeezing a little. “Do you remember
the last words my Rebecca said to you on the ship? She said, ‘If you come
north again, you must stay with us.’ I think she brought you here. For me,
for the children. I think God brought you here.”
I looked away from him toward the pond blotched with pollen and silt,
the water bronzing in the shrinking light. When I looked back, he pulled me
to him and held me against his chest, and I felt it was me he held, not his
Rebecca.
