“. . . I’ll wear it once, if it makes you happy. But only once.”
Gradually her breath grew elongated and whispery, the sound of ribbons fluttering, and I heard her mutter, “Ma Ma.”
All week, Becky greeted me with a searching look at the collar of my dress. I’d hoped she would forget the episode with the locket, but my wearing it seemed to have built to an implausible height in her mind. Seeing I was without it, she would slump in disappointment.
Was it silly of me to feel wary? Wound inside the locket was a tendril of hair, Becky’s, I supposed, but the vaporous color of it must’ve conjured memories of her mother. If seeing the necklace on me brought her some fleeting consolation, surely it harmed nothing.
I wore the locket to the girls’ tutoring session on Thursday. The boys met in the classroom each morning with a male tutor who came from the city, while I instructed the two girls there in the afternoons. Israel had built a single strip of desktops and attached it to the wall, as well as a long bench. He’d installed a slate board, shelves for books, and a teacher’s table that smelled of cedar. That morning I wore my emerald dress, which had seen precious little wear considering how like the ducks’ feathers it was. The neckline contoured to my collar bones, where the gold locket nestled in the gully between them.
When Becky spied it, she rose on her toes, her body swelled with delight, the tiny features on her face levitating for a moment. For the next hour, she rewarded me by raising her hand whenever I asked a question, whether she knew the answer or not.
I had free rein over their curriculum, and I was determined my old adversary, Madame Ruffin, and her “education for the gentle female mind” would get nowhere near it. I meant to teach the girls geography, world history, philosophy, and math. They would read the humanities, and when I was done, know Latin better than their brothers.
I wasn’t against them learning natural history, however, and after a particularly grueling lesson on longitudes and latitudes, I opened John James Audubon’s Birds of America, a massive brown leather folio, weighing at least as much as Becky. Turning to the ruffed grouse, which was common in the woods nearby, I said, “Who can mimic its call?”
There we were, a flock of ruffed grouses at the open window, trilling and whistling, when Catherine entered the classroom and demanded to know what sort of lesson I was conducting. She’d heard our chirping as she gathered the last cucumbers in the garden. “That was quite a bit of disturbance,” she said, the vegetable basket swinging on her arm, sifting crumbs of soil onto her ash-colored dress. Becky, ever alert to her aunt’s annoyance, spoke before I could push out my words. “We were calling the ruffed grouse.”
“Were you? I see.” She looked at me. “It seemed unduly loud. Perhaps more quietly next time.”
I smiled at her and she cocked her head and stepped closer, so close her dress hem brushed mine. Her eyes magnified behind the thickset lens of her glasses as she concentrated on the locket at my throat.
“What is the meaning of this?” she said.
“. . . The meaning of what?”
“Take it off!”
Becky wedged herself between us. “Auntie. Auntie.”
Catherine ignored her. “Your intentions have been more than clear to me, Sarah, but I had not thought you would be so bold as to wear Rebecca’s locket!”
“. . . Rebecca? . . . You mean, it belonged to . . .” My voice deserted me, my words adhering like barnacles at the back of my throat.
“Israel’s wife,” she said, finishing my sentence.
“Auntie?” Becky’s upturned face, drowning in the waves of our gray-green skirts, made her look like a castaway. “I gave it to her.”