The Violet Hour: A Novel (12 page)

“Whatcha doing there, Cass?” he asked her, as she swung herself back and forth in the doorframe, feeling the exhilaration of the almost-fall and the neat competence of her fingers at the catch. He was wearing his glasses and making some sort of calculation. He hadn’t even looked up when he spoke.

“Nothing,” she told him, pulling herself upright, suddenly embarrassed. Her father was the fun one, but he was also serious about his work. Through his glasses, he went
into
it, which meant that he could sometimes be very far away even when he was sitting right in front of her. She was not sure how she was supposed to behave in the presence of such professionalism.

After a moment, he set down his pencil and looked up at her, giving her a wink so quick it might not even have happened. “Well, what were you doing before you started doing nothing?”

He repeated her word jauntily, which seemed to give her permission to keep being a kid. She swung herself forward and back again, trying to decide what to tell him. “Making people,” she finally said, thinking of what he did down the hall.

“Oh, yeah, what kind of people?”

She couldn’t explain it. Who could explain the weird little dolls she had created with her mother’s remnants and half a jar of dried beans? She ran upstairs and collected them so that she could show them to him instead. She’d made four, a series of wiggly bean bag people each topped off with a small but heavy head from a sack of Howie’s marbles. They were held together with thread and different combinations of patterned fabrics leftover from aprons, handkerchiefs, and
curtains. When she laid them out on her father’s desk, their arms and legs flopped wide.

Howard picked up the pink plaid-and-paisley one and gently turned it over in his hand, rubbing its belly with the tip of his thumb. “You made these by yourself?” he asked.

“Yep. I mean, yes.”

“Yep’s fine by me. Just don’t tell your mother. She’d have our heads.” He made a motion with his finger at the doll’s bunched-up fabric neck. “Did you have a kit or instructions or anything like that?”

“No, I told you. I just made them.”

“You’re telling me the idea just came into your head and off you went?”

“I guess so.” His questions were all exactly the same and yet somehow each one was more difficult to answer than the last. “I don’t
know,
” she wailed.

Then her father did something very strange. He saluted her and placed the bean person in his shirt pocket, where it hung forward like someone knocked unconscious by a villain in Nancy Drew. “Can I keep this one?” he asked. His eyes looked watery.

“I have boy colors, too,” she said, hastily holding up a boring blue-and-gray striped doll.

He patted his pocket and placed his other hand on top of her head. “This is the one I want. Come on. Let’s go find your brother and sister and see about getting some ice cream.”

Elated, she left her dolls lying there on his blotter, and followed him up the stairs to the hallway, where she waited for him to gather everyone else. At Howie’s request, they took the hearse, and because Howie and Mary had been squabbling over crayons, Eunice sat between them in the back, which meant that Cassandra got to ride up front with her dad. He put on his hat before he got in, and lit up a cigarette at the first stoplight. As he drove he tapped the ash out the window as though making a trail to follow back home.

At the ice cream parlor, Cassandra ordered a double chocolate malt and her father danced the doll along the marble countertop. “You see
what my little girl did?” he said to the owner, a shiny-headed man with whom he’d always been friendly. “She made this. With her own hands. You know what kind of kid does a thing like that? An
artist
.” He slapped his hand down on the counter as though it were a catapult, making the bean doll jump. “That’s what kind! My little girl’s a born artist.” He kicked the doll’s leg out then clicked its heels in the air like Gene Kelly. The bald man laughed and congratulated them all, giving her an extra cherry. She sucked at the red-striped straw and twirled it between her fingers. It was like a propeller, she thought, thinking like an artist. She could save the straw and cut it open when she got home. Everything made so much sense now that her father had said it. Even her mother was smiling and putting a warm hand on her back, her mother who had never once suggested she could be anything of her own devising. Teacher or nurse, she’d always said—never artist. For all Cassandra knew, artists lived on the street.

In the weeks that followed, she continued to hang around the downstairs office, making new dolls: out of cotton swabs and her mother’s torn stockings, out of carefully scissored brown paper bags. Finally, one day at the very end of the summer, it was somehow arranged that she would watch her father put the final cosmetic touches on an old woman’s body while her mother took Howie and Mary to buy new shoes for school. Cassandra could hardly speak, she was so twitchy with competing feelings—first excitement, then terror, then determination to suppress her terror. This was important, she told herself. This was a secret most kids her age wouldn’t know. She was beginning to sense the limits of her knowledge already—the paper-bag doll failing to stand on its own, the stocking doll lacking features on its face—and here was a chance, in her very own house, to know something that would set her apart. Was she an artist or not? Was she a big girl or not? On the eve of fourth grade, the time had come to prove it. At breakfast that morning she considered telling Howie, whose ears turned such a satisfying red when he got jealous, but ultimately decided against it. It felt better to keep this challenge to herself.

Cassandra read in her room until the appointed hour, hearing the sounds of whining in the hallway, followed by a door slam as her mother and siblings headed out, and still more whining—muffled now—from the driveway below. The car drove off and she read on, digesting none of the words as she waited. Lost, she went back to the beginning of the paragraph and started afresh, only to be interrupted by her father, whose knock on the wall outside her open door was so soft she never would have heard it had she actually been reading her book. His face was solemn, but bright, as though he couldn’t be seen smiling, but wanted her to know just how happy he felt. “Well,” he said, and waved her over with his strong, reliable hand. She closed her book and followed him down the two flights of stairs.

In the embalming room, he slipped enormous adult-size latex gloves over her hands and knotted them tight at her wrists to keep them from falling off. She wiggled her fingers underneath, feeling the talc clot against her skin. The deceased was a Mrs. Ida Hanover, whose ancient puffy face was about to receive the last brush of color that it would ever know. Her heart racing, Cassandra stepped onto the little stool her father had set up and prepared to do as she was told. She looked down. Ida was clad in a silk frock of royal blue.

“Her dress is pretty,” Cassandra said, trying to be casual, as though she assessed burial clothes every day.

“It is,” Howard said, snapping on his own properly sized gloves. “Her daughter chose it because it brought out her eyes. Silly, right?” He gestured at her closed lids. “But you can’t argue with people.” He looked at her with swift concern. “Ready?”

“Yes,” she said, not because she was, but because she wanted to be.

“Then we’re off.” He dipped his latex-covered fingertips into a tub of cream and transferred half the volume to his other hand, then set about massaging the cream into Mrs. Hanover’s cheeks and along the bridge of her nose, up to her eyelids and forehead and down again along the jawline to her chin.

“Always make sure the skin is nice and soft,” he said. “Never do any makeup without moisturizing first.”

He moved his fingertips in tiny circles across her skin, sometimes adding pressure from the thumbs. As his fingers worked their way down, the skin he left behind seemed brighter, warmer even, as though considering coming back to life. Cassandra watched closely, but Mrs. Hanover never moved—not even when Howard dipped his finger in the vat of cream again and returned with a final dollop that he smoothed one-handed into the top, bottom, and insides of her lips.

Next, he held out three vials of skin-toned liquid and asked Cassandra which one looked the most like Mrs. Hanover. He pointed to a color photograph he’d pinned to a small bulletin board. “Always choose a shade that’s subtle. Never dramatic.” In the picture, Mrs. Hanover was standing in her blue dress with her hands clasped in front of her next to a low stone wall in the country. The collar that now lay flat against her chest lifted slightly in an invisible wind and her skin was pale but pinkish, her features clearly, in that moment, alive. Cassandra looked back at the liquids and strained to see the differences among them.
Always subtle, never dramatic
. She decided finally on the palest of the three shades. Howard agreed and set about dabbing a small amount across Mrs. Hanover’s face, more heavily in the darkened spots on her nose and upper right cheek, before dusting her amply with powder. He then applied a light blue eye shadow and two faint streaks of powdered rouge across her cheeks, pretending to doff Cassandra’s nose with the brush when he was done. The muddy smell of makeup and the thousands of powder particles now shimmering in the air near her nose tickled her throat, making her feel for a moment as though she couldn’t breathe. She turned away and sneezed into her latex-covered hands, and when she turned back, her father was holding out a handful of uncapped lipsticks and asking her once again to choose.

She’d seen her mother apply lipstick in front of the bathroom mirror, and she’d seen the red paper rainbows in drugstores advertising the variety of choices, but she had never before seen so many shades of pink and red open to the air all at once. She wanted to sweep their luscious, extended tips across her cheek and have every color upon
her face at once. But this wasn’t playtime; it was business. And the business at hand was not her own face, but Mrs. Ida Hanover’s lips. What color were they? She looked back at the sunny photograph. “Your mother will want her to look like a lady,” Howard said. Cassandra agreed and thought hard before finally selecting a dull, sturdy pink that best matched the lips by the wall in the country.

Howard painted Mrs. Hanover’s mouth in six deft strokes, a short and two long for each lip, then stood back, capping the stick, so that Cassandra could admire the finished face. It looked, if not alive, then at least yearning for life. “This is what the families want,” Howard said, standing on the floor behind his daughter. “They want to see their loved ones one last time.”

She sucked in her breath. Her father was in the business of imitating life. Suddenly the room seemed incredibly small and bright, like the hospital elevator she’d ridden with him and her brother on the day when Mary was born. It had paused for several seconds before opening its doors and Cassandra had wondered in that time if they might have to live in there forever. The possibility of such a sudden and drastic change had made her feel as though her stomach were somehow being sucked out her back. Now, in her father’s workroom, the sensation returned. Only this time, it excited her. The things she was learning from her father today meant she would never again be the person she’d been before. She’d be smarter than her classmates, a person who knew great secrets. She placed a hand on his arm in gratitude.

“That’s a brave girl,” he said, removing her gloves. “Now,” he said, turning her to face him. “Don’t tell your mother.”

He held up a round hand-held mirror with little ripples circling the edge, as well as a fresh trio of lipsticks still in their cellophane. She had never seen anything she wanted more. He let her stay there while he moved Mrs. Hanover to another room, so she sat down on the stool and practiced her stroke, a short and two long on each lip as he’d shown her, covering her mouth with layers of China Rose, Scarlet, and Bardot Beige. How magical they were! Now she knew what
people meant when they said a shade really brought out someone’s lips. In the mirror, hers floated freely from her face, taking on a life of their own. They were practically old enough to be in high school, these lips—and she was only nine!

When she was done playing, she huddled the mirror and the three shades together on the counter for her father to hide, then took care to wash her hands and face thoroughly over the little aluminum sink. The talc from the gloves was initially stubborn between her fingers, and the lipstick left her mouth looking slightly blurred, but the water was cool, and the soap smelled piney and dark, like Christmas. When she was done, she crept back upstairs to her room, where she picked up her book once again. She reread the same paragraph in which she’d been mired that morning, but got no further before her mother came home.

“I hope you had a good morning,” Eunice said. She stood formally at the edge of the bed in one of her nicest dresses, a white flower pattern over a French blue background that was lighter but somehow more vivid than the blue on Mrs. Hanover downstairs.

Cassandra sat upright and pressed her lips together, in case any evidence remained. “Oh, yes. I learned a lot.”

Her mother’s eyebrows rose, with her chin following close behind—a look of expectation suggesting there was still more she ought to say.

“Thank you,” Cassandra said, hurriedly, hoping she’d guessed right.

Eunice smiled, and Cassandra relaxed. Her mother had a pretty smile, shiny and almost extravagant when compared with the severity of her resting expression. It colored her cheeks and rushed her face to life. “Well, you’re welcome,” she said. “If you’re good you might get to help your father again.”

She wasn’t so bad, Cassandra thought. She only wanted what was best; she just wanted it badly. Cassandra could see it in the way she held on to that shiny smile, tucking it up high into her cheeks, as though waiting for someone to take her picture. A picture of success.
Already in her young life, Cassandra had wanted many things she was still waiting for, so she knew something about impatience and how panicked it could make you feel. Maybe her mother was just a little bit panicked, too.