The Invention of Wings(87)
She looked confused. “You’re not leaving as planned?”
“No, I would like to stay a while. Only a while.”
I told myself it was because I wanted to grieve in private. Really, was that so implausible?
Mrs. Todd was the wife of a struggling law clerk and she clasped my hand. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you wish.”
I wrote a solicitous letter to Mother, explaining the unexplainable: Father had died and I wasn’t coming home straight away. I need to grieve alone.
Mother’s letter in response arrived in September. Her small, tight scrawl was thick with fury and ink. My behavior was shameful, selfish, cruel. “How could you abandon me in my darkest hour?” she wrote.
I burned her letter in the fireplace, but her words left contusions of guilt. There was truth in what she’d written. I was selfish. I’d abandoned my mother. Nina, as well. I anguished over it, but I didn’t pack my trunk.
I spent my days as a malingerer. I slept whenever I was tired, often in the middle of the day. Mrs. Todd gave up on my presence at appointed meals and reserved my food in the kitchen. I would take it to my room at odd hours, then wash my own dishes. There were few books to read, but I wrote in a little journal I’d bought, mostly about Father’s last days, and I practiced my scripture verses with a set of Bible flash cards. I walked up and down the streets beneath the sycamores as they turned blonde, then bronze, venturing further and further each day—to Washington Square, Philosophical Hall, Old St. Mary’s, and once, quite by accident, The Man Full of Trouble Tavern where I heard shouting and crockery breaking.
One Sunday when the air was crisp and razor-cut with light, I walked ankle-deep in fallen leaves all the way to Arch Street, where I came upon a Quaker meetinghouse of such size I paused to stare. In Charleston, we had one teeny Friends House, something of a dilapidation, to which, it was said, no one came but two cantankerous old men. As I stood there, people began to stream from the central door, the women and girls clad in dismal, excoriated dresses that made us Presbyterians seem almost flamboyant. Even the children wore drab coats and grave little faces. I observed them against the red bricks, the steeple-less roof, the plain shuttered windows, and I felt repelled. I’d heard they sat in silence, waiting for someone to utter his most inward intimacies with God out loud for everyone to hear. It sounded terrifying to me.
Notwithstanding the Quakers, those days were very much like the moments I’d floated in the ocean at Long Branch beneath the white flag. A vitality inhabited those weeks, almost like a second heart beating in my chest. I’d found I could manage quite well on my own. Had it not been for Father’s death, I might have been happy.
When November arrived, however, I knew I couldn’t remain any longer. Winter was coming. The sea would become treacherous. I packed my trunk.
The ship was a cutter, which gave me hope of reaching Charleston in ten days. I’d booked first-class passage, but my stateroom was dark and cramped with nothing but a wallmere closet and a two-foot berth. As often as possible, I hazarded above deck to feel the cold, bracing winds, huddling with the other passengers on the lee side.
On the third morning, I woke near dawn and dressed quickly, not bothering to braid my hair. The stale, suffocating room felt like a sepulcher, and I surfaced above deck with my carrot hair flying, expecting to be alone, yet there was another already at the rail. Pulling up the hood of my cloak, I sought a spot away from him.
A tiny, white ball of moon was still in the sky, clinging to the last bit of night. Below it a thin line of blue light ran the length of the horizon. I watched it grow.
“How are thee?” a man’s voice said, using the formal Quaker greeting I’d often heard in Philadelphia.
As I turned to him, strands of my hair slipped from the hood and whipped wildly about my face. “. . . I’m fine, sir.”