CHAPTER 15
OSKAR WAS ELATED and confident. He convinced me that it was a sign—if one believed in such things; of course, we did not—that all was as it should be. After all, I was a young married woman; producing a child was what I was meant to do.
In a matter of minutes, it seemed, I changed from my mother’s daughter, who might make any messes she pleased, because it wasn’t really her job to keep order, to my own child’s mother, who didn’t want her baby born into any more disorder and chance than its own coming would create.
That night I roamed the house, straightening and scouring. I scrubbed the kitchen table with salt, wiped the soot from behind the stove in the parlor, and repaired a rent in a sofa cushion. I took my Aladdin lamp upstairs and surveyed the schoolroom. Oskar had never made shelves—the wood hadn’t been to his liking, or Mr. Crawley had needed it for some other purpose; he’d been vague enough about the reason to make me understand that, in truth, the job no longer interested him once he’d found a more exciting pursuit. The trunk around which the children and I staggered forward with letters and numbers formed a sort of island, surrounded by a sea of dried creatures and weeds, along with various shells, sticks and stones, egg cases, teeth, and bones, which we’d gradually removed from the crates where I’d stored them, so that we could examine one thing or another. The idea that Mrs. Crawley thought this ought to be cleared away wholesale disheartened me. Had we just been biding time while we waited for Nature to organize her agenda? Unable to face such a thought, I turned away.
Our bedroom was equally untidy, the blankets recklessly cast aside as Oskar had left them when he’d risen from bed for his dinner. As I reached to pull them up, I saw that the sheets were no longer the creamy white they’d been when my mother folded and placed them in the trunk, but pale brown. There were stiff circles where Oskar’s spilled seed had dried, rusty swipes of blood, even patches of actual mud. How had I allowed this?
I yanked the sheets from the bed. On them I piled every towel and handkerchief we owned, and every item of clothing we’d worn in this place. Hardly an inch was fit to touch human skin.
I pushed it all down the stairs in a filthy mass.
For over an hour, partially clothed in one of the remnants of my former life—a dress I’d dragged here, not realizing it would be too fine to remove from the protection of my trunk—I spread a mixture of soda crystals and water on all of our cuffs and collars and the worst of the stains on the sheets and napkins. It seemed crucial to return everything to the state in which it had been before we’d left Milwaukee.
The next morning, even though it wasn’t the usual day, Mrs. Crawley agreed to wash her family’s clothes as well, so as to make heating the copper worthwhile. She and Mary and Jane and I went to the cellar, where we plunged shirts, trousers, petticoats, skirts, and linens of all descriptions into fiercely boiling water, while the steam curled our hair around our faces.
“It’s to be expected,” Mrs. Crawley said approvingly. “You’re readying the nest.”
I was as much irritated as reassured by the idea that I might be acting under the influence of some universal feminine instinct.
“That’s enough, my girl!” Mrs. Crawley barked.
I snapped to, but it was Mary she was addressing. The girl was vigorously grating soap over the writhing clothes. A dark gray scum had gathered at the top of the copper.
“You’ll scrape your fingers and get blood on the sheets if you’re not careful,” her mother said. “That’s plenty of soap, anyway.”
Jane had the safer job of dropping bluing into a tub of cold water. The globes of heavy color sank and stretched into jellyfish and then dissipated into wisps of indigo smoke before they disappeared into the clear water. “See? It’s invisible, but you know it’s there,” she said. “Just like electricity. Mr. Swann says that everything and everybody’s got electricity inside ’em. Did you know I had electricity in me, Ma? Mr. Swann says electricity is one of the invisible powers of nature. It’s all over the place, even in the air.”
Her last sentence made electricity sound less like the mysterious and beautiful bluing and more like the particles of dirt roiling around the copper.
“Mr. Swann has a great many ideas, doesn’t he?” Mrs. Crawley said, handing me one end of a dripping sheet to wring.
“Oskar’s designing some experiments involving electrical waves,” I explained.
“Experiments? I didn’t realize that Mr. Swann was a scientist.” She began to twist the sheet.
“Well, anyone can be a scientist, don’t you think?” I recoiled as icy water ran up my forearm. “I mean, it’s just a matter of considering what’s known and determining how to pursue what’s not, isn’t it?” But the words that Oskar had spoken so robustly sounded hollow when I delivered them. “He’s going to build a machine,” I tried, struggling to keep my grip on the sheet that Mrs. Crawley was fiercely twisting. “He’s going to send messages from the parlor to the lighthouse using the electric waves in the air.”
“Hmmph,” she said, dropping what had essentially become a dry snake into the basket. “He might try shouting.”
When we went outside to hang the clothes, Mrs. Crawley told the girls they could go and play; they’d helped enough.
“I wanted to tell you privately,” she said when they’d run off, “that it’s good to prepare, but it’s better not to expect. You never know what might happen.”
“You mean like Baby Johnston,” I said.
She looked at me sharply.
“I read it in one of the logbooks. ‘Baby Johnston born and buried.’”
“Oh. Yes, that’s right.”
“And his wife?”
“Gone, too, I’m afraid,” she managed around a mouthful of pins.
“Poor Mr. Johnston. He practically threw me off the rock when I tried to look at the grave.”
“You’ll learn, Mrs. Swann, that privacy must be respected here.” She gave the sheet she was about to hang a violent shake to discourage wrinkles. “When you’re living this close to people, sometimes you have to look the other way. There’ll be times you’ll want them to look the other way, too.”
“He left birds on the catwalk again.” Mr. Johnston had crept silently up the path and was standing just behind us. I stiffened, worried that he’d heard our conversation. “And his mess was all over the place downstairs.”
I had a fleeting image of some marauding animal before Johnston passed some familiar-looking papers to Mrs. Crawley. I imagined with chagrin the boiler room looking like our front room or kitchen after Oskar had spent hours working on his plans, the pages he’d carelessly let fall from the table drifting like autumn leaves against the legs of the chairs.
“I’ll have Henry speak to him.”
“Oh, Henry knows,” Mr. Johnston muttered as he continued past. “Who do you think found the dead birds?”
“Dead birds? What can he mean?”
“I told you. They fly into the windows at night. Keeper’s supposed to check for birds on the catwalk before he goes off duty.” She handed me the sheaf of papers. “More about that invisible power, I daresay.”
? ? ?
We were finished by noon, and I was home in time to make lunch, but Oskar was late, as usual, and when he came in, he was preoccupied and shuffled through the piles of papers that he’d heaped on the kitchen table over the last few weeks. Having exhausted these, he went into the parlor and thumbed through the pages he’d spread across the sofa. I watched as he held Electric Waves by its spine and shook it.
“What are you looking for?” Yes, I was disingenuous. I was annoyed about the embarrassment he’d put me through.
“Some papers,” he said. “Some drawings. I had a sort of inspiration last night, but now I can’t find my notes.”
“You left them in the lighthouse.”
“Oh!” Relieved, he turned to the door, obviously intending to retrieve them from the tower.
“They aren’t there now. Mr. Johnston picked them up. He said they were a mess all over the boiler room. And that you didn’t clean up the birds. You left dead birds lying on the catwalk. You’re spending too much time on this electricity business. You’re not paying attention to what’s important, Oskar. The lighthouse is your job, your real work.”
“The lighthouse is hardly what I’d call real work.”
“Oskar, you must do it properly. It was embarrassing, listening to Mr. Johnston say those things in front of Mrs. Crawley.”
“Forgive me for embarrassing you in front of the All-Powerful Crawley. If you understood what it meant to have real work, you would know that occasionally it might come before a dead bird. Now, please, give me those papers.”
“Yes, of course, I’ll give them to you. But really, Oskar, you can’t let the light go out. That would be very serious.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not letting the light go out!” He’d followed me into the kitchen, and I looked beside the stove, where I believed I’d set the papers.
“Where are they?” His voice had a hard edge.
“I thought I’d left them here. Mr. Johnston gave them to Mrs. Crawley, and she gave them to me.” I went back into the parlor, where I hopelessly lifted the cushion of the armchair and peered beneath it. “Where could I have put them?”
“You must find them.”
“I understand. I’m looking.”
“No, you don’t understand. You must find them. They’re very important.”
“Oskar, you left them flying around the boiler room!”
“Where they’d be now, if that busybody hadn’t taken them! Idiot!”
“You can’t call him an idiot for picking up papers that you left behind.”
“He’s an idiot, and you are a stupid girl! What have you done with them?”
At that I stared at him and then ran from the door. I’d set the papers on the ground while I pinned the last of the clothes. I remembered it clearly now. I ran to the lines on which the shirts and trousers and underthings frolicked and the sheets billowed like sails. Of course, by this time the papers had blown away. Nothing light and loose could stay put on that mountain. I started back to the house to confess what I’d done, but when I came to the bottom of the stairs, I kept on down the path, my feet moving faster and faster, until I stepped off the edge and began to slide.
I took myself all the way down to the beach and walked fast, fast and north, where there was nothing to stop me.