The Invention of Wings: A Novel (19 page)

Any flicker of gladness I might’ve hoped for from my family about my engagement, any retribution I might’ve feared for accepting the proposal without permission, was swallowed by Father’s trial. Mother’s reaction to my announcement was simply, “Well done, Sarah,” as if reviewing one of my embroidery samplers. Father did not respond at all.

Throughout the winter, he sequestered in the library day and night with Thomas, Frederick, and Mr. Daniel Huger, a lawyer friend of Father’s who was known for legally eviscerating his opponents. My hearing was almost preternatural, cultivated by years of unsanctioned listening, and I caught scraps of conversation while sitting at the card table in the main passage, pretending to read.

John, you’ve received no money, no favors. You are accused of nothing that rises to the level of high crimes.

Isn’t a charge of incompetence bad enough? They accuse me of being biased! The streets and the papers are full of it. I’m ruined, regardless.

Father, you have friends in the legislative chamber!

Don’t be a fool, Thomas, what I have are enemies. Scheming bastards from the upcountry, seeking the bench for themselves.

They cannot possibly get a two-thirds majority.

Make meat of them, Daniel, do you hear me? Feed them to the dogs.

When the trial was heard that spring in the House of Representatives in Columbia, Mr. Huger assailed Father’s enemies with a vengeance, laying bare their political conniving with such force Father was acquitted in a single day, but the vote was ominously close, and he returned to Charleston, vindicated, but dirtied.

At fifty-nine, Father was suddenly a very old man. His face had turned haggard and his clothes baggy as if he’d wilted inside them. A tremor appeared in his right hand.

As the months passed, Burke paid courting calls to me weekly in the withdrawing room, where we were allowed unchaperoned visits. He filled these rendezvous with the same fever and excess we’d shared in the camellia grove, and I complied, drawing lines the best I could. I counted it God’s miracle we weren’t discovered, though I’m sure our invisibility was not due to God, but to the family’s distraction. Father continued to shuffle and shrivel and tuck his hand in his pocket to hide its shake. He turned into a recluse of a man. And I, I turned into a Jezebel of a woman.

M
auma couldn’t sleep. She was up fussing round the cellar room like usual. She didn’t know the meaning of the words
quiet as a mouse.
I was laying in the straw bed we’d always slept in, wondering what was on her mind this time. I’d stopped sleeping on the floor outside Sarah’s room a long time back, just decided it on my own, and nobody said a word about it, not even missus. During those years, her meanness was hit and miss.

Mauma dragged the chair over to the high-up window so she could crane her neck and see a piece of sky beyond the wall. I watched how she sat there and studied it.

Most of her waking nights, she would light the lamp and sew her story quilt. She’d been working on those quilt squares bits at a time for more than two years. “If there a fire and I ain’t here, that’s what you get,” she’d say. “You save the squares cause they pieces of me same like the meat on my bones.”

I pestered her all the time wanting to see the squares she’d finished, but she held firm. Mauma loved a good surprise. She wanted to unveil her quilt like they did marble statues. She had put her history on a quilt like the Fon people, and she meant to show it all at once, not piecemeal.

The day before, she’d told me, “You wait. I’m ’bout ready to roll down the frame and start quilting it all together.”

She kept the squares locked in a wood trunk she’d dragged from the storeroom in the basement. The trunk had a bad, musty smell to it. Inside we’d found mold, dead moth-eggs, and a little key. She cleaned the trunk with linseed oil, then locked the squares inside, wrapped in muslin. I guessed she locked our freedom money in there too, cause right after that the bills disappeared from the gunny sack.

Last time I’d counted, she’d saved up four hundred dollars even.

Laying in bed now, I did the numbering in my head—we needed six hundred fifty more dollars to buy the both of us.

I broke the quiet. “Is this how you gonna be all night—sit in the dark and stare up at a hole in the wall?”

“It’s something to do. Go on back to sleep.”

Go back to sleep—that was a lot of useless.

“Where do you keep the key to the chest?”

“Is that how
you
gon be? Lay there figurin’ how to peek at my quilt? The key hid on the back of nowhere.”

I let it be, and my mind drifted off to Sarah.

I didn’t care for this Mr. Williams. The only thing he’d ever said to me was, “Remove yourself hastily.” I’d been building a fire in the drawing room so the man could get himself warm, and that’s what he had to say,
Remove yourself hastily.

I couldn’t see Sarah married to him any more than I could see myself married to Goodis. He still trailed after me, wanting you know what. Mauma said, tell him, go jump in the lake.

Yesterday, Sarah had asked, “When I marry, would you come with me to live?”

“Leave mauma?”

Real quick, she’d said, “Oh, you don’t have to … I just thought … Well, I’ll miss you.”

Even though we didn’t have that much to say to each other anymore, I hated to think about us parting. “I reckon I’ll miss you, too,” I told her.

Cross the room, mauma said, “How old you reckon I is?” She never did know her age for sure, didn’t have a record. “Seems I had you when I’m ’bout the same old as you now, and you nineteen. What that make me?”

I counted it in my head. “You’re thirty-eight.”

“That ain’t too old,” she said.

We stayed like that a while, mauma staring at the window, mulling over her age, and me laying in the bed wide awake now, when she cried out, “Look, Handful! Look a here!” She leapt to her feet, bouncing on her knees. “There go ’nother one!”

I bolted from the bed.

“The stars,” she said. “They falling just like they done for your granny-mauma. Come on. Hurry.”

We yanked on our shoes and sack coats, snatched up an old quilt, and were out the door, mauma tearing cross the work yard, me two steps behind.

We spread the quilt on the ground out in the open behind the spirit tree and lay down on top of it. When I looked up, the night opened and the stars poured down.

Each time a star streaked by, mauma laughed low in her throat.

When the stars stopped falling and the sky went still, I saw her hands rub the little mound of her belly.

And I knew then what it was she wasn’t too old for.

S
arah, you should sit down. Please.”

That was how Thomas began. He gestured toward the two chairs beside the window that overlooked the piazza, but it was I alone who sat.

It was half past noon, and here was my brother, the
au courant
of Charleston barristers, interrupting his lawyering to speak with me in the privacy of my room. His face was pale with what I took to be dread.

Naturally, my mind went to Father. One could scarcely look at him these days without worrying about him, this thin, hollowed-out man with the uncertain gait and erratic hand. Despite that, there’d been some improvement lately, enough that he’d returned to his duties on the bench.

Just the week before, I’d come upon Father laboring along the main passage with his cane. It had conjured up an old Sunday School image from our catechism of Lazarus hobbling from the tomb with his shroud cleaving to his ankles. Father’s left hand was shaking as if waving to a passerby, and before he saw me, he grabbed it violently, trying to subdue it. Noticing me, he said, “Oh, Sarah. God is ruthless to the aged.” I walked with him to the back door, moving with a corresponding slowness that only called attention to his feebleness.

“So tell me, when will you marry?” It was the only question anyone ever asked me now, but coming from Father, it brought me to a standstill. I’d been promised to Burke since last February, and not once had Father even mentioned it. I hadn’t blamed him for missing the engagement party, which Thomas and Sally had graciously hosted—he’d been bedridden then—but there’d been so many months of silence since.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Burke is waiting on his father to assign the business over to him. He wants to be in the proper position.”

“Does he?” His tone was sardonic, and I made no attempt to answer.

It was difficult now to remember those times when Father had let me plunder his books and basked in my speeches. There’d been a kind of invisible cord running between us then, and I tried to think exactly when it’d been broken. The day he forbade me books? Thomas’ farewell party, when he hurled his vicious words?
You shame yourself. You shame us all. Where did you get the notion that you could study the law?

“I remind you, Sarah, there is no divorce law in our state,” he was saying. “Once you are married, the contract is indissoluble. You are aware of this?”

“Yes, Father, I know.”

He nodded with what seemed like bleak acceptance.

That was where my mind alighted in those final moments before Thomas delivered his news, upon Father and my last encounter with him, upon his frailty.

“You’ve always been my favorite sister,” Thomas said. “You know that. In truth, you’ve been the favorite of all my siblings.”

He paused, stalling, gazing through the window across the piazza into the garden. I watched a drop of perspiration slide to his temple and cling in the net of wrinkles that was already forming. A strange resignation settled on me.
Whatever it is, it has already happened.

“… Please, I’m not as fragile as you might think. Tell me plainly.”

“You’re right. I will simply say it. I’m afraid Burke Williams has misrepresented himself to you. It has come to my attention that he has other female acquaintances.”

Without considering the hidden entendre, I said, “Surely, that’s not a crime.”

“Sarah, these acquaintances—they’re also his fiancées.”

I knew suddenly what he said was true. So many things made sense now. The delay in naming a marriage date. The incessant trips he made to visit family or conduct business. The curious fact that someone so full of looks and charm had settled on me.

My eyes filled. Thomas dug for his handkerchief and waited while I dabbed them dry.

“How did you learn of this?” I asked, composed, no doubt protected by the recoil of shock.

“Sally’s cousin Franny in Beaufort wrote to say she’d attended a soirée there and seen Burke openly courting a young woman. She didn’t approach him, of course, but she did discreetly question the young woman, who told her Burke had recently proposed.”

I looked down at my lap, trying to absorb what he’d said. “But why? Why would he do this? I don’t understand.”

Thomas sat and took my hands. “He’s one of those men who prey on young ladies. We hear of this kind of thing now. There’s a fast-set of young men acquiring fiancées in order to—” He paused. “To lure women into sexual liaisons. They assure the women that given the promise of wedlock, such compromises are acceptable.” He could barely look at me. “I trust he didn’t take advantage—”

“No,” I said. “He did not.”

Thomas exhaled with relief that embarrassed me in its extravagance.

“… You said fianc
ées.
Beside the acquaintance in Beaufort, there’s another?”

“Yes, I believe she lives in Savannah.”

“And how did you learn of
this
one? Not another cousin, I hope.”

He gave me a weak smile. “No, this one I heard of from Burke himself. I confronted him last evening. He admitted to both young ladies.”

“You confronted him? But why didn’t you let me—”

“I wanted to spare you the pain and disgrace. Both of our parents agreed you should be left out of it. There’s no reason for you to see him again. I’ve broken the engagement on your behalf.”

How could you?
He’d usurped any chance I had for personal retribution. In that moment, I felt more enraged by Thomas’ babyish protection than by Burke’s cruelty. I sprang to my feet and stood with my back to him, almost gagging on mouthfuls of jumbled, scathing words.

“I know how you must feel,” he said behind me. “But it’s better this way.”

He knew
nothing
of how I felt. I wanted to shout at him for uttering so arrogant a claim, but when I whirled about, I saw his eyes were filled with tears and I forced myself to speak with civility. “… I would like to be alone. Please.”

He stood. “There’s one more thing. You’ll need to withdraw from public for a brief time. Mother believes three weeks will be sufficient for the talk to die down. Then you can return to society.”

He left me by the window, engulfed with anger and mortification, and with nowhere to hurl it except at myself. How could I have fallen prey to such a lascivious person? Was I so besotted, so needy, so blind that I imagined he loved
me
? I could see myself in the glare of the window, the flushed, round face, Father’s long nose, the pale eyes, the mis-colored hair. I’d clipped a piece of that hair for him. He must have laughed at that.

I went to my desk and retrieved the letter with his proposal of marriage. I didn’t read it again, I tore it into as many pieces as I could manage. The tatters fell onto the desktop and the rug and the folds of my skirt.

It was the time of year when migrating crows wheeled across the sky, thunderous flocks that moved like a single veil, and I heard them, out there in the wild chirruping air. Turning to the window, I watched the birds fill the sky before disappearing, and when the air was still again, I watched the empty place where they had been.

S
arah was up in her room with her heart broke so bad, Binah said you could hear it jangle when she walked. Her brother, Thomas, hadn’t even got his hat on to leave before the whole house knew what happened. Mr. Williams had himself two more fiancées.
Now
who has to remove himself hastily?