Missus waited at the foot of the attic steps with her cane, huffing from climbing the stairs, big as she was. I lurked behind her. I was trembling with nerves.
Mauma came down the ladder, shivering, telling this cockamamie story I’d come up with. Missus said, “I did not think you were as naturally dumb as the rest, Charlotte, but you have proved me wrong. To fall asleep on the roof! You could have rolled off onto the street. The roof! You must know such a place is completely off-limits.”
She raised her cane and brought it down cross the back of mauma’s head. “See yourself to your room, and tomorrow morning after devotions, you are to sew the rosettes back on my new dress. Your sloppiness with the needle has only worsened.”
“Yessum,” mauma said, hurrying to the stairs, waving me in front of her. If missus noticed how mauma didn’t have her cane or her limp, she didn’t say so.
When we reached the cellar, mauma shut the door and threw the lock. I was winded, but mauma’s breath was steady. She rubbed the back of her head. She set her jaw. She said, “I is a ’markable woman, and you is a ’markable girl, and we ain’t never gon bow and scrape to that woman.”
Sarah
The idea of a new sibling didn’t strike me as happy news. Shut away in my room, I absorbed it with grim resignation. When pregnant, Mother’s mood became even fouler, and who among us would welcome that? My real dismay came when I took paper and pen and worked out the arithmetic: Mother had spent ten of the last twenty years pregnant. For pity sake!
Soon to be twelve, I was on the cusp of maidenhood, and I wanted to marry—truly, I did—but such numbers petrified me. Coming, as they did, so soon after my books being taken away, quite soured me on the female life.
Since Father’s dressing-down, I hadn’t left the four walls of my room except for meals, Madame Ruffin’s class three mornings a week, and church on Sunday. Handful kept me company, asking questions to which she didn’t care to know the answer, asking only to animate me. She watched me make feeble attempts at embroidery and write stories about a girl abandoned to an island in the manner of Robinson Crusoe. Mother ordered me to snap from my inwardness and misery, and I did try, but my despair only grew.
Mother summoned our physician, Dr. Geddings, who after much probing decided I suffered from severe melancholy. I listened at the door as he told Mother he’d never witnessed a case in someone so young, that this kind of lunacy occurred in women after childbirth or at the withdrawal of a woman’s menses. He declared me a high-strung, temperamental girl with predilections to hysteria, as evidenced by my speech.
Shortly after Christmas, I passed Thomas’ door and glimpsed his trunk open on the floor. I couldn’t bear his leaving, but it was worse knowing he was going off to New Haven to pursue a dream I myself had, but would never realize. Consumed with envy for his dazzling future, I fled to my room where I sobbed out my grief. It gushed from me in black waves, and as it did, my despondency seemed to reach its extremity, its farther limit, passing over into what I can only now call an anguished hope.
All things pass in the end, even the worst melancholy. I opened my dresser and pulled out the lava box that held my button. My eyes glazed at the sight of it, and this time I felt my spirit rise up to meet my will. I would not give up. I would err on the side of audacity. That was what I’d always done.
My audacious erring occurred at Thomas’ farewell party, which took place in the second-floor withdrawing room on Twelfth Night. During the past week, I’d caught Father smiling at me across the dining table, and I’d interpreted his Christmas gift—a print of Apollo and the Muses—as an offering of love and the end of his censure. Tonight, he conversed with Thomas, Frederick, and John, who was home from Yale, all of them in black woolen topcoats and striped vests of various colors, Father’s flaxen. Seated with Mary at the Pembroke table, I watched them and wished to know what they debated. Anna and Eliza, who’d been allowed at the festivities, sat on the rug before the fire screen, clutching their Christmas dolls, while Ben pitted his new wooden soldiers in battle, shouting “Charge!” every few seconds.