The Invention of Wings (31 page)

How does one know the voice is God’s? I believed the voice bidding me to go north belonged to him, though perhaps what I really heard that day was my own impulse to freedom. Perhaps it was my own voice. Does it matter?

T
he 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 well-meaning 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.”