• • •
My father will have won, very abruptly, the battle of Vesuvius, without even knowing how. Won’t even know that he’s won it, actually. He’ll go on competing with himself for a long time. He’s not a man of the world, he’s the antithesis of that. He won’t even notice, or if he notices won’t understand, the other battle taking place right under his nose—the one between my mother and me.
• • •
She’s a very determined opponent. I am, after all, a huge obstacle to her dream. Nobody goes to Isla Desterrada with a big belly. Even my mother knows that. And although Dr. Holtby has told her it is already too late for him to intervene—even if he would—and he wouldn’t—my mother, fierce in time of war, is certain she can still get rid of me herself.
The too-tight corset is only the beginning. If she cannot squeeze me out, she will find another way. She is willing to damage herself in the process: thus the ugly red welts from the whalebone, the purpling bruise on her stomach from the rigid wooden busk. These marks bother my mother very little—the pain not at all, the ugliness, the marring of her beauty, hardly. Where has her beauty gotten her, after all? And then, nobody is looking. Nobody will see. Only Mary sees, and Mary is nobody. What’s more, Mary does not want to see, wills herself, practically, to see nothing. She is nobody seeing nothing. Morning after morning she will tighten my mother’s corset in silence, pulling as hard and as tight as she can for one reason only, to preserve her job. She doesn’t comment on the bruises, but looks away, biting her lip. What would Mary say, if she could? Does she disapprove, as she pulls tight the laces of my mother’s corset, choking me, squeezing me—choking and squeezing my mother? Does she sympathize? And if so, with whom? With me? Or with my mother?
She has seen Thomas Argument’s cruel smile. She knows that my father is never home. Mary is a woman, too, with a woman’s ambivalence, a woman’s understanding. She pulls the laces tight, grunting and straining as my mother clings to the bedpost.
• • •
My mother does other things, too, of course—things that are just between the two of us, between her and me.
There are, for example, the long and strenuous walks that we take together, she and I, throughout Whitby, into the market, up and down the Harbour Road, down the East Cliff, past the dockyards, even out onto the Scaur; yes, up and down the Scaur we walk, over that black, humped and twisted spine of rock that she hated even as a child, back when Felix Girard brought her here, during the exhumation of the Whitby Beast. We are exhaled upon, the two of us, by the cold, wet, antediluvian breath of the sea. Licked by the tongue of it. Then we return, soaked, exhausted, shivering, and Mary puts us to bed, with scoldings and cups of tea.
Madam must not strain herself—Madam will get ill—
Mary pours the cups of tea but my mother will not drink them; will not stay under the clean sheets and white, nubbled bedspread, kicks these off, will not, for that matter, even stay in the bed, but must get up immediately.
I’m fine, Mary—really fine—
Mary says nothing to this, there is a collusion between them, the wordless collusion of mistress and servant, the terms of which are that Mary will object, but only to a certain degree; will take care of my mother, but only to a certain degree; after which the objections cease, Mary bites her lip, and my mother is let to do whatever she pleases.
It is, after all, none of Mary’s business.
The matter is strictly between my mother and myself.
In our mutual struggle I am, thus far, mostly silent, but rooted. I have gotten hold of my mother, have anchored myself, have sunk my fibrous tethers deep into the deepest of her warm, soft, secret places. There I cling tenaciously, making her blood my blood, her oxygen my oxygen, her food my food, replicating, artfully, ceaselessly, the intertwining filaments, the spiraling that reads: CGD’O.LD’O.CGD’O.LD’O. I never rest from this, my life’s work; I will continue infinitely: CGD’O.LD’O . . .