The Dress Lodger (43 page)

“You have been so kind to me!” Audrey jumps up impulsively and throws her arms around the retreating Gustine. Against the suddenness of the gesture, Gustine raises her hands to ward her off, and as she does so her package falls to the ground.

“You’ve dropped your parcel.” Audrey exclaims, swooping to retrieve it. “What is this?”

“Nothing.” Gustine reaches for it.

“No, wait! That is my father’s jacket. I sewed it myself. See here, the yellow stitching.” Audrey forgets her manners and swiftly unties the packet of clothes. “These are my father’s trousers. This is his shirt,” she says, inventorying the contaminated items. From his shirt pocket, where it was hidden to protect it from thieves, Audrey draws out her father’ s gold watch and chain. She lifts it to her ear and listens as its hollow ticking fills the room. “Were you planning to leave with them?” she asks accusatorily.

“They are not safe,” Gustine stammers. “Please, miss, just throw them in the fire.”

“Throw out all that I have left of my father?” Audrey asks incredulously, burying her face in the sleeve of his jacket.

With a heavy heart, Gustine backs out of the parlour, leaving the girl to inhale her certain fate. It is what Gustine wanted, was it not?

Left all alone, Audrey rests her wet cheek against poor dear Papa’s abandoned clothes, too numbed by grief to feel anything, let alone the tickling itch of a solitary louse that leaves the warmth of her father’s pant leg for the new world of the daughter’s collar. Slowly, the bold explorer makes its way up her neck, along the slope of her ear, across her tundra of skull, coming to rest in the golden wilderness of her disheveled braid. Too numbed by grief, it’s not surprising Audrey doesn’t think of a silly saying we have around Sunderland, one taken as gospel by those who believe that when rooks feed in the street, a storm is at hand, or that the glass works, if not shut down once every seven years, will generate a salamander. If Gustine had been here, she could have told her what it is they say around Sunderland. Lice on a clean person spells a death. If you believe in old wives’ tales.

Are you giddy or anxious, madame? Do your fingers ache? Is there a burning pain in the pit of your stomach? Do you greatly thirst?”

The Eye stops before a bedraggled top-hatted impresario who, having set up outside the Theatre Royale to capitalize on the growing mistrust of crowds (not realizing fear had taken such hold that all events had been canceled), calls out to any passerby.

“What you need is a fine flannel cholera belt! Wrap it around your waist thuswise, to keep those vital parts warm, and cholera morbus will be stopped like the Frenchies at Waterloo. Or wait! If it’s not a belt you want, try these potent little packets.”

The impresario holds out two raggedly sewn calico squares that when clapped together produce a prodigious cloud of dust.

“Chloride of lime, madame,” he announces solemnly. “Touch ‘em to everything: papers, doorknobs, money. Hold one in your hand when you shake ‘hello.’ Guaranteed to kill the cholera morbus on contact.”

The Eye reaches out for the packets and the cholera belt.

“Yes, the belt and the chloride will help, madame, but to be absolutely certain, you wouldn’t want to leave without purchasing a bottle of cholera drops. Put them in your tea, madame, put them in a glass of water. To tell you the truth, madame”—he leans and speaks in sotto voce, as if at this hour any but the frogs might hear—”I’ve found they work best stirred into a bumper of brandy.”

The Eye reaches out and takes the brown bottle of drops.

“I have candies, too, madame. And girdles lined with zinc. Pitch plasters for the back of your neck, guaranteed to be one hundred percent effective. Doctors use nothing else on their own mothers.”

Eye ties the wide flannel cholera belt around her thick waist and shoves the chloride of lime squares into her pockets. She uncorks the brown bottle and shakes a few bitter drops onto her tongue. Awful.

“That comes to eleven shillings four pence, madame. Surely a bargain to maintain good health. Wait! Where are you going, madame? Come back— you can’t take that without paying—”

But the Eye has left him payment in full, little does the impresario know. And all the remedies in the world won’t make change for the cold blue currency with which she’s paid.

Oh! Marrow, Oh! Marrow, Oh! What dost thou think?

The truth is that the Eye does feel rather giddy and anxious. There is a burning pain at the pit of her stomach and she does greatly thirst. It is awful to feel this way right at the dawn of understanding what has eluded her all these many years. It is especially awful because in the course of her wandering tonight, she has been as close to happy as she’s ever been.

It all came clear that night in the snow, when she stood opposite the grieving mother, her own thick arms full of blue silk, faced with the mother’s armful of still blue child. In that snow-falling moment, when nothing sounded but the sob of east wind, there in that moment Eye realized that to guard something too well might be as bad as not guarding it well enough. Once when she was young, she followed the rat and thirty miners perished; then when she was old, she followed the dress and look what happened—the rat snuck in and stole away the baby. Like a little piece of horehound candy. What Eye realized as the dress sobbed herself sick and snow swaddled the cold body of the only child she’d ever held was that she was not born to be either a prisoner or someone else’s prison. She had failed the child, but she need not fail the mother. It was in her power to abandon her post. There are some holes better off not watched.

Oh! Marrow, Oh! Marrow, Oh! I’ve broken my bottle and spilt all my drink!

What would her life have been like if she’d never been set to watch a coal-mining shaft? She’s rarely wondered that, any more than she’s wondered what the world would look like seen through a matched set of eyes. And yet, if it was in her power to stop time in its coursing, she might pick a day, a day before any of this had ever happened, before she’d ever even seen a rat. She might pick a day when she was no older than Gustine’s tiny baby, and her eyes had not yet fallen on anything but her parents’ home and her mother’s firm pink breast. Everything was pleasantly out of focus back then, from the brick red blur of the low hearth to the marigold birse of her thatched roof, sifting inside with each hard rain. How much nicer life would have been had her eyes never sharpened the pickax features of her coal miner father or discovered the blancmange resignation in her mother’s face. If only her world had remained out of focus, what sort of myopic paradise could have been hers?

An old woman cannot stay a half-blind child, much as she might like. But as brokenhearted as she was when the dress held out her only child, the Eye couldn’t help feel the tiniest pang of envy. You will never see an ugly world, child. You will never know a rat.

I’ve lost all my shin splints among the great stones!

Eye doesn’t believe these remedies are helping much. Her stomach thuds against the tight flannel cholera belt and the little potent packets have done nothing more than make her hands itch. It is late, and she is very tired. The heavy head upon her shoulders throbs rhythmically in time to the echo of the colliers singing down by the water. The Eye’s trail of blue which began at the gray-blue dent in the snow where she left the sailor after she stole his tied-up packet (the dent from where if she had tracked the handprints and knee-prints would ultimately have led to a door a few streets away, where he pounded to be let in, someone had knocked him cold and robbed him, woe was him, taking his captain’s clothes) has led her at last to a place she recognizes, where deep indigo letters proclaim their own inescapable truth:
LABOUR
IN
VAIN
, reads the hand-painted sign swinging in the wind. John Robinson’s skull smiles benevolently down upon her; his working shovel is raised in salute. When she pushes open the door and steps inside, she sees that the place is empty, except for a group of four strangers, sitting as if waiting expressly for her. Three men and a woman—players, maybe, from the way they are dressed, all in elaborate costumes of blue, with curling blue feathers, blue gloves, blue boots. They will soon be off to London, then Exeter, Oxford, and Hull. They will catch a boat for America; play Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Peru. Before they retire their show, there won’t be a country in the world that has escaped their little tragedy.

Mr. Eliot opens his arms to include their friend the Eye. Come join us, he says. Let us buy you a drink. How good it feels to lay down your burden. To close your eyes and listen to the colliers sing.

Oh I Marrow, Oh! Marrow, Oh!

What dost thou think?

I’ve broken my bottle and spilt all my drink

I’ve lost all my shirt splints among the great stones… .

Draw me to the shaft, lad, it’s time to go home.

It is one of the strange properties of cholera morbus that when a patient is bled, the life force comes out in parallel streams: one thick, slow, and tenacious; the other swift and light. The phenomenon can be explained quite readily by medical science: acute dehydration causes the patient’s serum to separate out from his platelets, thus forming dual channels in the bloodstream; but to Gustine sitting at the old woman’s bedside, holding the cup while the doctor cuts, the Eye’s blood flows like a pact. We have given our lives to avenge my child, thinks the dress lodger. We will always be a pair. The girl and her shadow. The dress and the Eye.

“You should be in bed yourself,” Dr. Clanny says, as she catches die strange, double blood in her cup.

“I’m fine,” she assures him weakly. She had sent for the doctor after she discovered the old woman passed out, alone, at the Labour in Vain. John Robinson and she managed her back to Mill Street, where Pink had been left in charge, her Da off to Fawcett Street, she said, following up a mysterious tip. Gustine is feverish and queasy, really too sick to be out of bed, but Dr. Clanny is overworked and understaffed, so when she insisted, he reluctantly agreed.

No one believes it is in the cosmic order for the Eye to die—the other lodgers can just as easily imagine a comet sweeping away the house or die ghost of Napoleon dropping in for a plate of eels. They keep a respectful distance, huddled around the fire downstairs, trading rumours that after the third telling will pass into fact. Did you know the Eye was born not of a woman, but had been secretly manufactured in a laboratory? No, no, the

Eye was the chance child of poor old King George in his madness and an asylum inmate. The Eye worked for Scotland Yard; the Eye had been fed arsenic because “she saw too much.” There are as many theories as ashes, yet all agree on one thing: that dress lodger—she is somehow responsible. Why else would the girl everyone knew abhorred the old woman volunteer her own pallet for a bed? Why, for hours, feed her ginger and calomel with a spoon? Why risk death herself to hold the old woman’s hand through the bone-breaking tetanus spasms if not out of murderous guilt? Downstairs, by the fire, the respectful fear that for years had been the Eye’s alone is slowly transferring over to the dress lodger.

I never knew you loved him too.

Gustine strokes the old woman’s matted hair. Her heaves have abated and the singultus that sometimes replaces vomiting set in. It is horrible to witness the unconscious hiccuping, like obscene drunken giggles, racking the old woman’s body. Earlier, her leg muscles contracted compulsively, but now the spasms have worked up to the muscles around her mouth, drawing her jawbone so relentlessly up and down that she who never spoke in life in death appears a chatterbox.

How did he do it? Gustine wonders. How was it possible an infant’s touch could quicken the thready mass of sinew and bone in the old woman’s chest, recall to life an organ so long still no one could remember the last time it stirred (though, it might interest Gustine to know, it was when she herself was born, a little girl small and vulnerable, herself kept from the Eye by her own mother, a worthless drunk of a whore who made everyone miserable until she mercifully died). This rebirth of her heart was as close to motherhood as the Eye was destined to come. Would that it had not been such a long gestation.

“I am losing her pulse,” announces Dr. Clanny. “Let’s inject her with three ss. of tobacco. Maybe it will stimulate her.”

Gustine sets down her cup and hands the doctor his syringe. “If this doesn’t work,” he says, “we’ll try an enema of oil of turpentine. If the body needs to purge, by God, we’ll help it purge.”

Unobserved by doctor or dress lodger, one member of the household remains upstairs, keeping to the shadows, trying not to get in the way. Nothing is as it should be, thinks Pink, watching her Da’s dress lodger drip tears over the creature she was never supposed to touch. Gustine has the old woman’s hands between her own, chafing them like she used to when her baby’s were cold. Everything is upside down since the cholera came to town, what with frogs inside the house and bodies disappearing, enemies weeping over each other, and Da not even celebrating Mike’s big night. She looks over at the Crown Prince, wearily sniffing the Eye’s clenched, dark blue toes, and wonders if he feels as lonely and left out as she.

“Here she goes again,” says Dr. Clanny, removing the syringe.

Gustine is helping the doctor hold Eye’s punching arms and straw-stiff kicking legs through another attack when unnoticed, Pink scoops up her father’s pet and creeps downstairs, past the gossiping lodgers with their theories of Eye’s generation, over to her Da’s stool where Mike’s shining silver regalia lies forgotten. A Crown Prince should have a crown, she thinks, and neither politics nor newspapers should come before such a triumph. Pink stretches the strap of India rubber under the ferret’s chin and affixes the crown in place. There. At least / haven’t forgotten you.

Wrapping Miss Audrey’s charity blanket around her shoulders like a shawl, Pink quietly lets herself and His Majesty out the door. Dawn is breaking, filling last night’s churned snow with rosy light, rousing the gulls from their perches over the lintel. There is only one person in all the world who can make her feel better, Pink thinks, but walking west with the tin-crowned ferret in her arms, she fears her single solace might be in jeopardy. Ever since her Da swept in last night, to deposit Mike and call out the other lodgers, shouting triumphantly about Fawcett Street, how he’d be damned if God didn’t love the poor man after all, she’s been troubled in her mind. She would much rather her Da have no business on a street so near to her own heart, for if there’s a way for him to destroy whatever happiness she could expect there, she knows he’s sure to find it.