The Underground River Page 5

  I tried to sit up straighter in the upholstered chair, but the back was designed for leisure. I looked behind her at the scenes of milkmaids on the wallpaper, which were not accurate depictions: their dresses were too formal and their hair ribbons ridiculous. Her arguments were like the wallpaper, idealized and untrue, and if she broke off for two seconds altogether I would be able to reply to each of her statements; but like the steam train she would not so much as pause, and I felt myself losing the argument without even beginning my case.

  “I don’t want any change,” I said.

  Mrs. Howard didn’t appear to hear me. “. . . a life spent until now in the wings, if I might borrow a metaphor from your world. But now you’ll be able to step out and develop your own interests. Why, I almost envy you this turn at a new life . . .”

  What new life was she envisioning? I grew up on a farm near a town so small it did not even have a regular coach stop. Everyone made their own clothes. A sound made me turn my head: Comfort was opening the pocket doors. She wore the same white gown as yesterday and a mint-colored shawl. The bandage over her forehead was gone. Mrs. Howard was still talking about this new life of mine, and for a moment I thought Comfort would interrupt—Oh, no, no, May will stay with me of course!—but she was looking at Mrs. Howard, not me, and her face was soft and compliant, like clay waiting to be made into something. She stepped into the room and, with a trick she learned from an actor in New York, pulled herself up to find another half inch of height.

  Mrs. Howard didn’t take a breath, didn’t break off her monologue, even as she turned to address Comfort. She still would give me no room to argue.

  “I’ve been telling May all about our little scheme, dear,” she said. “And you have no cause to worry. I can tell that she sees it all clearly, how good it will be for you and for our cause, and how she will have a chance now to be on her own. You have always struck me,” she said, turning back to look at me, “as quite independent in spirit.”

  • • •

  I fared no better with Comfort when I could get her alone. Mrs. Howard asked her to show me the “lovely garden” now that it had stopped raining. “Meanwhile I’ll tell Mr. Salter to get the horses ready,” she said with the air of conferring a great favor, “and he can drive May back.” I saw that I would not be offered a room in her house, nor even an invitation to supper.

  The back garden was not lovely, it being only April and muddy from all the rain, and it smelled like rotting leaves. As we walked among the clipped hedges and the lemon trees standing in pots, I began protesting strongly against Mrs. Howard’s proposal.

  “There is nothing in it for me. Mrs. Howard said so herself. You expect me to go home?”

  Comfort said no, of course not, I didn’t have to go home if I didn’t want to. “But don’t you see how this is better than traipsing about from city to city,” she asked, “holding a six-week engagement here, a month engagement there? I can’t be an actress in my old age.”

  “You’re only thirty!”

  “Twenty-nine. But, Frog, think of all those short old ladies. Who wants to play those parts?”

  “You’ve never been interested in slavery,” I said. What I should have said was: You’ve never been interested in anything except yourself.

  “Flora can be very persuasive,” she told me.

  She was staring at the back of Mrs. Howard’s house, which from here looked magnificent: the stones fit so precisely, they seemed like lines carved into one giant rock that rose wholly formed from the earth. However, it was not Mrs. Howard and her house I was thinking of as I stood there but rather Comfort’s late husband, Jasper Sinclair. When he came to our little town, he stood out dramatically by his finely cut clothes and his brushed hat and the gold watch fob that he checked constantly, as if even in the middle of rural Ohio he had firm appointments he couldn’t be late for. I didn’t think Comfort was in love with him, but while he lived I believed she was happy. Maybe love was not something she looked for in a companion. Or maybe she was just being practical. Being practical was in both of our natures. Our mothers were sisters, after all. As we stood there, Mrs. Howard’s face appeared in an upstairs window like a full white moon with a puff of hair. Did she know we could see her? She stood there for a long time.

  “Flora has beautiful taste. She tries to preserve the original look of the house,” Comfort said. “She restored the old farmer’s harpsichord, although no one can play it. And she has real marmalade imported from England.”

  “Why keep a musical instrument that no one can play?” The idea was absurd to me.

  “Oh, Frog, wouldn’t it be nice to settle down at last? Zoals het klokje thuis tikt, tikt het nergens,” she said in Dutch. The clock ticks at home as it ticks nowhere else. She had always been good with languages, and she resorted to Dutch—which she used to speak with her stepfather—when she was feeling sentimental.

  “Come dine with us tomorrow,” she said, starting back toward the house, “when Flora has time to order something nice.”

  That sounded like a promise concocted for later only to get rid of me now, and I felt my blood swell beneath my skin. I was like a child being sent away and not knowing why. When Comfort opened the door, I told her there was no reason for me to go back inside, that I would meet Mrs. Howard out in front.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” She kissed me hurriedly, as though relieved our tête-à-tête was over. This plan was better for her, and that was the beginning and end to it.

  After she left, I waited for a minute or two by the back door. Then I pushed it open again slowly. Like everything else in Mrs. Howard’s house, the hinges were well maintained, useful, and silent.

  I walked quietly on the thick carpeting toward the front of the house, and if the two maids I passed—one carrying an armful of folded linen—thought it was odd of me to wander the house alone, they were too well trained to show it. They nodded and averted their eyes. They had work to do. So did I. I wanted to know more. I followed the sound of Mrs. Howard’s incessant buzz back to the parlor, where the pocket doors were partially open. Standing in the hall with my good ear trained toward the room, I heard her say, “She is quite comfortable with the idea. I’m sure of it.”

  Someone closed a door somewhere and I missed what Comfort said in reply, but Mrs. Howard answered in her booming voice, “Believe me, my dear, I’m a good judge of character.”

  “But what will she do? She can’t make a living by herself.”

  “That’s why I’m sending her back to your people.”

  What people, I wondered? There was only Comfort’s mother, my aunt Ann, a sour recluse who ate a boiled egg for breakfast and a coddled egg for supper, skipping dinner in order to save money.

  “She’s stood behind you all these years,” Mrs. Howard went on, “in your shadow. It’s not healthy for her or for you to let her live off you this way! I’ve provided a nice, clean break for both of you.”

  For the second time that day I thought of the slave boy I’d seen on the Moselle standing behind his mistress’s chair, and my face grew warm. I’m not a servant, I thought angrily. I haven’t been staying in her shadow all this time. I could make a living on my own.

  “She’s younger than her years,” Comfort said.

  “Well, more’s the shame and pity,” Mrs. Howard replied. “That’s her mother’s fault for spoiling her, and yours, too. But now is her chance to grow up. Ah, the horses are here. Do you see her on the drive?”

  I was in no mood for more creeping, so I went out by the front door and closed it loudly behind me, not caring if they knew I’d heard them talking. But Mrs. Howard, perhaps used to her servants opening and closing the doors all day, came out moments later saying she hoped I hadn’t been waiting there long.

  “I’m not Comfort’s servant,” I told her.

  But even then Mrs. Howard didn’t blush. She had her agenda and was following it doggedly. She handed me Elizabeth Nedel’s umbrella.

  “Of course not, no
. Not a servant. A helper! You have been so helpful to her all these years. And now good-bye, my dear,” she said, opening the carriage door for me. The wind picked up and blew against her but she didn’t alter her stance. She was a block of wood like her manservant, Donaldson. “We’ll see you tomorrow. We dine early, six o’clock.”

  • • •

  After supper that night I brought the plaid dress Mrs. Nedel had given me into the parlor, hoping that ripping the cloth seams apart to remake it would help me recover some sense of myself. In the course of one afternoon I’d been flattened and reshaped into something else altogether, a construct of Mrs. Howard’s: Comfort’s hapless cousin, her servant, a seamstress with no life of her own. Elizabeth sat in the armchair beside me, toying with a bit of fancy embroidery.

  As I unraveled the stitches I replayed Mrs. Howard’s speech in my mind. I didn’t want to go back home. I didn’t want to live with Aunt Ann. When I came to a stronger line of stitching, I borrowed a thick needle from Elizabeth in order to pick out the thread. Underneath each sleeve was a gusset I would have to recut, and then I would need to smooth out the pleats. After a while my work made the memory of Mrs. Howard’s mosquito-like voice recede a little. There were theaters in Cincinnati; perhaps I could find work in one of them.

  When the hall clock chimed eight o’clock, Elizabeth went over to the piano, turned the wick up on the lamp, and began to look through some sheet music. A minute or two later Mrs. Nedel came into the room, and Elizabeth sat down on the piano bench to play a mazurka, although she played it very badly, missing notes and running up the beat in a way I found almost unbearable.

  “Bother!” she said in disgust, breaking off suddenly. “I’ve forgotten this one entirely.”

  “Dearest, your language,” Mrs. Nedel reproved her mildly. “Anyway it sounds very nice.” She was sitting on the upright chair that Elizabeth had abandoned, examining Elizabeth’s embroidery. After a moment she pulled the needle out from where it was docked and began adding a few stitches. I wondered how much of the cover had actually been stitched by her. Maybe all of it.

  “Do you play the piano?” Mrs. Nedel asked me. When I said I did, she prevailed on me to play a tune. I’d learned to play as a child, and as an adult I sometimes filled in at the theaters where Comfort worked if the regular player was ill; consequently I became very good at sight-reading. In the middle of playing the mazurka, the parlor door swung open and Mr. Nedel poked his face in.

  “Knew that couldn’t be our Lambie,” Mr. Nedel said, stepping in. That was their nickname for Elizabeth. “Not enough mistakes.” He carried in a newspaper and sat down on one end of the sofa. “Continue,” he said, so I did.

  When I finished, Mr. Nedel thanked me “for the pleasure of the piece.” He was a slight man, slimmer than Mrs. Nedel, and his eyes and nose and mouth were very neatly arranged in perfect symmetry on his wide face, although rather bunched into the middle of it. He wore a well-cut dark jacket that made me think again of his name, Nedel: with his long fingers, he would have been well suited to tailoring. However, whiskey inspection no doubt paid better.

  As I took up the plaid dress again, Mr. Nedel asked if I had been able to form any plans for my future—although I could stay here as long as I wanted to, he told me with a smile, if I would play the piano for them every night. But when I said I might try to find work in a theater downtown, his eyes seemed to move closer together and he frowned.

  “I thought you had a friend—or a sister? Someone you were traveling with?”

  “My cousin. She’s staying with Mrs. Flora Howard.”

  “Ah, yes, the abolitionist,” Mr. Nedel said. “I met the husband once years ago; he made a small fortune in paper. Wonder what he’d think of where that money was going to now. Well, you know,” he said in a louder voice, as though I had just stated some opinion, “these abolitionists just cannot be discouraged. Some of them actually try to steal slaves away—a man’s own property! Around here they’re hung for that. We don’t take to thieves kindly. In my opinion, hanging’s too easy. Well, I’m old-fashioned that way.”

  I began pulling out the stitches around the gusset, close work that took some attention.

  “And while I do not condone slavery,” Mr. Nedel went on, “I do say let those creatures stay as they are and let our commerce continue with the evils and the advantages fixed as such. Everyone knows that if we were to abolish slavery the whole of the southern economy would collapse, and then where would we be?”

  I said, working the edge of my scissors under the thread to loosen it, “Of course, you use slaves yourself.”

  Mr. Nedel puffed out a breath of air. “We have never owned slaves! Ohio is a free state.”

  “Well, I meant Minnie.”

  The gusset was proving hard to unstitch with scissors. I reached for Elizabeth’s thick needle again, and as I did so I saw that Mr. Nedel was looking at me with a fixed expression that might be called outrage. His face was very red. Mrs. Nedel and Elizabeth, with much paler complexions, were both looking anxiously from his face to mine.

  I said, “I’m sorry, am I mistaken?”

  Mr. Nedel rose from the couch. “That is a family matter . . . What a family does . . . our own private exchanges . . . Are you an abolitionist, too, then?” He glared at me.

  “My dear, she’s from New York . . .” Mrs. Nedel’s voice was very weak. I saw that I had trespassed and I tried to apologize.

  “I didn’t mean she was your slave. You don’t pay her, but you feed her dinner, which I’m sure is very nice.”

  “Now you insult me with sarcasm?” Mr. Nedel snapped.

  “I am never sarcastic.”

  “Enough,” said Mr. Nedel. He pulled open the parlor door and left the room abruptly, leaving his newspaper still open on the couch.

  All the lamp flames wavered with the sudden opening and closing of the door, and when they settled I saw that Elizabeth was studying a page of sheet music with unusual attention. I could still feel Mr. Nedel’s angry presence, which seemed to pull air from each corner of the room. For a long while no one spoke, and I wished—not for the first time—that I could say what was expected instead of what I thought. At last the half hour struck and Mrs. Nedel quickly said good night and left, with Elizabeth following her. Molly, the domestic, came in to extinguish all the lamps except the one nearest me, and I wanted to speak to her, but her face looked like a tightly closed door. After she left, the darkened room felt larger and my place in it very small.

  Mr. Nedel’s newspaper still lay on the couch. In it I found notices for a few theaters, one on Columbia Street and one on Third Avenue and Vine. No doubt I could find a room to rent nearby, but I would be sorry to leave here. I had already grown used to Mrs. Nedel and Elizabeth, and even to the smell of ham in my hair.

  4

  Cincinnati’s Columbia Theatre stood pat in the middle of Columbia Street, a large white building designed in a classical Greek style with a tobacconist shop renting out the first floor. Although yesterday’s rain had moved off, a mineral smell remained in the air. As I made my way across the street I tried to stay away from the snuffling pigs running loose and making every effort to bump up against me. I thought to myself how surprised Comfort would be when I told her that I’d found my own job. Younger than my years! That’s what she called me. My chest still burned when I thought of it.

  Yesterday I missed my sewing box most, but today I missed all the costumes I’d sewn over the years, all those gowns and bodices and capes I’d so carefully rolled and folded into Comfort’s green costume trunk—now sunk. Most actors’ costumes are terrible, some of them even pinned instead of hemmed, and with no sense of what is historically accurate. However, I’d had a book to guide me: Walter Daugherty’s Dress Through the Ages, given to me by a retired mistress of the wardrobe, an Englishwoman, whom I met in New York. It had drawings of everything from a Swiss soldier’s uniform to Italian dresses in the fifteenth century. Even if the play reviews were bad, the reviewers
always mentioned Comfort’s strong voice and her beautiful wardrobe. I believe that an accurate costume greatly adds to the effect of a role. But how could I demonstrate my abilities?

  There was quite a bit of loose garbage outside the theater, since no one came to collect house scraps: they were just thrown by the bucketful into the streets for the pigs. But the theater’s stone steps were newly washed and smelled of lye, and in the lobby a workman was cleaning the wallpaper with pipe clay and water. When I asked him where I might find the manager, he pushed his chin in the direction of the stage without stopping his work.

  I pulled open the heavy door that led to the seats. The house was dark and smelled like damp wool, and up on the stage two actors faced each other, rehearsing a scene. After a few moments I spied the manager sitting in the third row, so small that at first I mistook him for a child. He had a plank of wood balanced on his lap with an inkwell and paper on top.

  “Mr. Kreuger?”

  He turned his head, sneezed, and then sneezed again. He had a fearsomely unruly red beard, perhaps to convince others that he had in fact reached adulthood. After sneezing a third time he called to the actors to take a break and blew his nose loudly. “Hay fever,” he explained.

  I was standing in the aisle. “I’m looking for work,” I told him. “I’m a seamstress. I worked in the Park Theatre for many years in New York, and in other theatres, too. My last job was at the Third Street Theatre in Pittsburgh.”

  Mr. Kreuger looked me over. “Actors see to their own costumes here,” he said. This was common practice, even in New York. We were slow to catch up to the advances in England, where wardrobe mistresses oversaw the whole show and everyone in it. That was something I would very much like to do, but of course I couldn’t afford the passage to England.