Then there were six ghosts. The two that were sisters were punished, locked in a room. The air was bad, and one died, the other almost did. And one of the remaining ghosts found the dead girl and her half-dead sister. She touched the blue cheeks of the dead girl, and she felt only cold. Something old rose in her, some small courage. She stole one moment with the phone, spoke words, clumsy, ugly, perhaps, but those words breathed life back into the girls, brought liberty in the form of flashing red and blue lights.
IN THE END, AFTER THE LONG TRIAL, the men who’d imprisoned them were imprisoned themselves. The girls went to San Francisco, where they chose to stay, where, slowly, they went out into the streets. They saw the green of the water, the gold of the sky, and they learned what it meant to be girls again. I imagine them there, together, walking in some garden, their hair gleaming under the sun. I imagine them happy.
And it is a happy ending, perhaps, in the way that myths and fairy tales have happy endings; only if one forgets the bloody, dark middles, the fifty dismembered girls in the vat, the parents who sent their children into the woods with only a crust of bread. I like to think it’s a happy ending, though it is the middle that haunts me.
L. DeBard and Aliette
HE IS AT FIRST A DISTANT WAVE, THE WAKEWEDGE of a loon as it surfaces. The day is cold and gray as a stone. In the mid-distance the swimmer splits into parts, smoothly angled arms and a matte black head. Twenty feet from the dock he dips below the water and comes up a moment later at the ladder, blowing like a whale.
She sees him step onto the dock: the pronounced ribs heaving, the puckered nipples, the moustache limp with seawater. She feels herself flush, and, trembling, smiles.
It is March 1918, and hundreds of dead jellyfish litter the beach. The morning newspapers include a story, buried under the accounts of battles at the Western Front, about a mysterious illness striking down hale soldiers in Kansas.
The swimmer lifts his towel to gain time, wondering about the strange, expectant trio that watches him. The man in the clump is fat and bald, his chin deeply lined from mouth to jowl. His shave is close, his clothes expensive. A brunette stands beside him, the wind chucking her silk collar under her chin: the fat man’s young wife, the swimmer thinks, mistakenly.
Before them sits a girl in a wheelchair. The swimmer’s glance brushes over her and veers away when he sees her wizened child’s face, the diluted blonde of her hair, her eyes sunken in the sickly white complexion. A nothing, he thinks. That he looks past her is not his fault. He doesn’t know. And so, instead of the lightning strike and fluttering heart that should attend the moment of their meeting, the swimmer feels only the cold whip of the wind and the shame of his old suit, holey and stretched out, worn on the dark days when he needs nostalgia and old glory to bring him to the water.
THE SWIMMER IS A FAMOUS MAN. He is an Olympian: gold medalist in the 1908 London Olympics in the 100-meter freestyle, anchor on the 4×200 relay. Triple gold in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics: 100-meter freestyle, 100-meter backstroke, anchor again on the 4×200. He was on the American Swim Association’s champion water polo team from 1898 through 1911. He is, quite simply, The World’s Best Swimmer.
His name is L. DeBard, though this was not always his name. He was Lodovico DeBartolo, but was taken from Rome at the age of six and transplanted to New York, where the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Chinese couldn’t pronounce Lodovico. He reworked his last name when he discovered in himself literary agility and a love of Shakespeare.
He is a swimmer, but he is other things, too. A forty-three-year-old with a mighty set of pectorals, one chipped front tooth, and a rakish smile; a rumored Bolshevik; a poet, filler of notebooks, absinthe-drinker, cavorter of the literary type. He knows a number of whores by name, though in the wider world he is thought to be a bit queer, his friendships a mite too close with the city’s more effeminate novelists and poets. He has been alone in the company of Tad Perkins, C.T. Dane, Arnold Effingham. Something is suspect about a man-poet, anyway, and many of his critics ask one another, pursing their lips lewdly, why he is not in France, fighting for the Allies. The reason is that his flat feet make him unfit for battle.
And today, he is one last thing: starving. Poets and swimmers are the last to be fed in these final few months of the Great War.
The fat man steps forward. “L. DeBard?” he says. L. wraps the towel under the straps of his suit. “Yes,” he says, at last.
The girl in the wheelchair speaks. “We have a proposition for you,” she says. Her voice reminds the swimmer of river rock: gravelly, smooth.
THE GIRL’S NAME IS ALIETTE HUBER. She is sixteen, and she is a schoolgirl, or was before her illness. She won her school’s honors for French, Composition, Rhetoric, and Recitation for three years in a row. She can read a poem once and recite it perfectly from memory years later. Before the polio, she was a fine horsewoman, a beautiful archer, the lightest dancer of any of the girls at the children’s balls society had delighted in staging in the heady days before the war. Her mother died when she was three, and her father is distantly doting.
She knows L. from his book of poetry, which she read when she was recuperating from her illness. She feels she knows him so intimately that now, freezing on the dock, she is startled and near tears: she has just realized that, to him, she is a stranger.
AND SO, ALIETTE DOES SOMETHING DRASTIC: she unveils her legs. They are small, wrinkled sticks, nearly useless. She wears a Scottish wool blanket over her lap, sinfully thick. L. thinks of his thin sheet and the dirty greatcoat he sleeps under, and envies her the blanket. Her skirt is short and her stockings silk. L. doesn’t gasp when he sees her legs, her kneecaps like dinner rolls skewered with willow switches. He just looks up at Aliette’s face, and suddenly sees that her lips are set in a perfect heart, purple with cold.
After that, the swim lessons are easily arranged. When they leave — the brunette pushing the wheelchair over the boards of the docks, her trim hips swishing — their departure thrums in L.’s heels. The wind picks up even more and the waves make impatient sounds on the dock. L. dresses. His last nickel rolls from the pocket of his jacket as he slides it over his yellowed shirt. The coin flashes in the water and glints, falling.
ALIETTE LIES IN HER WHITE starched sheets in her bedroom on Park Avenue, and listens to the Red Cross trucks grinding gears in the street below. She puts the thin book of poetry under the sheets when she hears footsteps coming down the hall to her door. But the book slides from her stomach and between her almost useless legs, and she gasps with sudden pleasure.
Her nurse, the brunette from the dock, enters with a glass of buttermilk. Rosalind is only a few years older than Aliette, but looks as hearty and innocent as Little Bo Peep, corn-fed, pink with indolence. Aliette tries not to hate her as she stands there, cross-armed, until Aliette drains the glass. The nurse’s lipstick has smeared slightly beyond the boundaries of her lips. From the front hall, Mr. Huber’s trilling whistle resounds, then the butler says, “Good afternoon, sir,” and the door closes, and Aliette’s father returns to Wall Street. The girl hands the glass back to Rosalind, who smiles a bit too hard.
“Do you need a trip to the water closet, Miss?” the nurse asks.
Aliette tells her no, she is reading, and that would be all. When the nurse’s footsteps have faded, the girl retrieves the book of poetry from under the covers where it had nestled so pleasingly. Ambivalence, the title says. By L. DeBard.