I wouldn’t do that to her. I’ve done enough already.
• • •
In the brightness of the day I can see there’s a hieroglyph outside my window, though I cannot read it: two halves of something brilliant that has been broken, and a gesture that says, Carlotta, it’s time to go.
II.
THE BIRDCAGE
It is hard to get in; harder yet to get out.
These are first two things my mother, orphaned now, cast ashore, learns about her new home in Whitby, on Bridge Street, above the River Esk. The house is called the Birdcage. Here it perches, above the river, here with my mother in it, the Birdcage, the narrow, whitewashed, pentagonal house where my parents begin their life together; the house with its two cramped, winding staircases, one designated for up, the other for down, since only with difficulty may two persons pass through either at once; with its thick stone walls and stubborn, low-jambed doors, none of which opens the first time—none willing—all must be pushed, pushed hard, with the shoulder, or, in my mother’s case, because she is slight, pushed with the whole of the body. They must be pushed twice, at least, those doors, if they are to yield; and when they yield at last they do it grudgingly, the wood grating against the uneven flagstone floor up to the final sticking point beyond which it will not move at all, the point at which even my mother, small as she is, must turn sideways in order to slip through, whether into the next room or out into the raw cobblestoned outdoors.
Hard to get in, harder yet to get out.
Like everything else in the house, the doors are swollen with the damp. Rusty of hinge. Disinclined. The house shudders above the river as if it would prefer to rise up and run; but, held fast, it receives, reluctantly, through its foundation, through its floors, its walls, its windows, the rush and suck of the tumbling Esk as it carries toward the sea a malodorous cargo of grease and gut, fin and bone, pulp and tar, bitumen and slag, night soil and glue: the runoff of the blubber works, the fishing fleet, the boatyard, the knacker’s yard, the jet works, the privies, the mines. My mother, in the house above the river, is puzzled, perhaps, after so many months at sea, to find that, though cast ashore, she still hears water rushing beneath her all the time; still smells it; still feels the damp of it everywhere, permeating everything, the furniture and food and clothes and bedding, the sheet music that she so seldom touches now, even herself, her skin, her hair, all rich and damp with the unwelcome oily scent of the river, the scent both of life and of death, which no amount of washing will ever remove. Through leaded windows that cry out upon rusty hinges of their own she observes when she so chooses, and also sometimes when she does not, the edge of the harbor, one arm of the breakwater, the cold North Sea beyond. These are dangerous objects—shards of glass upon which she may cut herself if she is not careful.
• • •
And my Papa?
• • •
Very often my mother turns her back upon the sea. She dislikes it in all its moods, its grey wintry indifference, its boiling infuriated white and green, its bright icy dissimulating blue. She cannot help but sense, no matter what is on the surface, the dark that lies beneath.
My Papa . . .
She cannot think about him. She cannot think about anything else. She cannot think.
His things, of course, are all around her—those, at least, that Petrook, ever calculating his profit and his loss, knew he could not sell. They are her inheritance and her dowry, shipped north from London in a series of packing crates and bundles, crowding now each of the five corners of each of the three rooms of the Birdcage, and rendering more precarious by their presence the screw-tight turning of the two staircases, both down and up. These are her old friends, her playmates, the splayed and grinning confidantes of her girlhood—the elephant’s skull, the stuffed orang-utan, the snakeskins and skeletons, the gaily patterned venomous cone shells, the butterflies and moths askew on their pins, her father’s prized Morpho telemachus, his Attacus atlas, his box of rotting silkworm pupae, the jar containing a mysterious object labeled “Mermaid’s hand,” the heads and arms, the broken-off chins and noses and fingers of stone idols neglected and fallen—even a single large crate containing nothing but the skins of birds Girard had been interrupted in the process of preserving, shedding now their feathers of crimson and violet and indigo, their delicate beaks shattered, packed in obvious haste, without care. Her father’s hummingbirds arrived in a cage, all dead but one. The single survivor, emerald green above, ruby red beneath, batters itself all along the crooked ceilings, buzzes like a trapped fly in the casements, never resting. Hovering in place it drinks sugar water from a glass that my mother has set out for it, then darts away up the stairs, or tangles itself among the last, dying filaments, cold nipped, of Felix Girard’s remaining orchids, or dodges between the rotting, rolled-up Turkish carpets leaning in the corners; or zooming downstairs makes Mary, the girl-of-all-work, scream aloud when its wing (moving so fast that it does not seem to move at all), grazes her cheek or her hair. For days at a time the hummingbird disappears completely, until some slight motion—a vibration among the white lace of a curtain, perhaps—reveals it; and then it is gone again, until next time.