The porch in front of the house leaned precipitously, and the steps were crooked. When Maci walked from one side to the other, she worried it might pitch her headlong over the cliff and onto the rocks below. Standing carefully on the porch, she listened to the noise of the sea and the noise of her father hammering in the shed, which came together to give her a creeping sense of doom. When she covered her ears with her hands, she could hear the beating of her anxious heart, which she sometimes imagined to be the quick footsteps of voracious madness, hurrying to claim her. Her mother and father had gone insane. Rob had rushed to join a regiment of Zouaves with an alacrity and fearlessness that spoke of a weakness of sanity if not an absolute absence thereof. Maci expected to be the next to lose her mind. At least it would happen here, where no one would notice and she would stand out less in company than in Boston, where her family’s shame would be completed with the departure of her faculties. Would she eat beans exclusively? By July, they’d eaten themselves out of beans, but Maci had a basket of cranberries in the kitchen, and she had noticed a previously unappreciated beauty in the small forms, nestled together in a mound, very pretty in the morning sun that poured through the drafty window. Would these cranberries dominate her fancy? Or would she build something impossible, perhaps a flying machine to sail over the cliff and into Block Island Sound? A gin that separates emotions in a confused mood? A cloud buster?
Maci walked gingerly down the steps, then went around the house and down the hill to the rotting dock that jutted out into the pond. She got in a little boat and took up the oars. “Poppy!” she called out towards the shed. “I’m going out!” There came a pause in the hammering, but no answer. She began to row out towards the neighbor’s house, where she would beg flour. She had plans for her lovely cranberries.
A few days later Maci gnawed on one of her flat, greasy cranberry biscuits as she read a letter from her brother.
Our route from Roanoke Island to Norfolk took us through Croatan Sound and the North River, to the Elizabeth River by way of the Great Dismal Swamp. Tugs pulled us in little boats through the swamp canal — I was put in mind of you traveling hither and thither on the pond behind the Hotel de Trufant — did you write that it is called Potter’s? It was new and strange and silent in there. You ought to see such a forest of cypresses, with their gnarled roots peeking above the water, and whisks and festoons of Spanish moss clinging to the branches. There are curious holes in the roots — they look like round open mouths. I swear I heard one call my name. Sister, ought I to fear for my sanity? It was no ghost that spoke, the root did not declare itself old Uncle Philip with his listening-horn and his green teeth. Cotton-gum and sweet-bay, a curious juniper and holly, huddles of bamboo-cane: you will see that I sketched them for you. I have hidden Uncle Phil somewhere in the drawing — can you find him? Such odd birds in this place! We are all equally strangers here and no one can tell me their names. When we passed a Negro standing mysteriously by the shore I asked him the name of a small, bright thing that darted back and forth over our heads. He said, “That’s a Jesus-bird!” Not, I am certain, the proper name for the thing.
You must go back to Boston and Aunt A.
Rob ended all his letters, Cato-like, with that admonition. There was money in the envelope, two months of his second lieutenant’s salary, and there was a thick sheaf of illustrations. There were the straight columns of the cypresses, and hidden Uncle Phil, betrayed by his horn, which stuck out from a stand of bamboo. There was the Jesus-bird and the mysterious Negro; there was a boatful of Zouaves entering a patch of mist. She thought for a moment that her brother had included a sketch of himself — there was a picture of a boy with his same heavy brows and square chin — until she saw the caption written along his neck. Pvt. G. W. Vanderbilt — he is the Commodore’s son, and insists on his privatehood! He had a wide thick neck, not at all like the piece of licorice her brother balanced his head upon. Looking up from the drawings, Maci saw a blue phaeton coming up the road with its top thrown open to the warm July sun. A woman in a yellow dress was at the reins. When the carriage came near, Maci could see that she was pregnant.
“Girl,” the woman said, occasioning Maci’s instant and intense dislike, “go and fetch your master.”
Maci wrote to her brother that night, huddled at a desk wedged between her bed and the open window. A breeze lifted her hair and threatened to put out her candle.
My dear Zu-Zu,
We have got a new guest here at the Hotel Fou-Fou. Her name is Miss Arabella Suter. She rode up this morning in a pretty phaeton, and she might have been out taking a pleasure-ride if she hadn’t traveled hundreds of miles to find our sweet mad Poppy. She is unmarried but quite pregnant — six months if a day. This is not a scandal because what fills her womb is not a flesh-and-blood baby but the living principle of Poppy’s machine. I think she has got a bladder beneath her shirt, or else she is fleeing dishonor. The former is most likely. An “accidental” poke with a needle will deflate her, and then we will send her back to Philadelphia. I wonder if she is a Quaker. She does not dress like one. She is as colorful as a Jesus-bird. I shall call her the Apostle of Shame, or the Swollen Apostle. Already I detest her, but I think she will save me from becoming the Apostle of Boredom.
I will not go back to Boston but I remain your loving,
Sister.
As she wrote, Maci could hear her father and Miss Suter laughing in the front room of the cottage. He had welcomed the woman literally with open arms when Maci led her into the workshop.
“Here you are at last!” he had said, rushing to embrace her. Maci had never seen him be so familiar with any lady before, except herself and her mother. Strange that such things could still give her a shock, a wrenching feeling all along her spine, even after the many months she’d been witness to her father’s madness. “Maci,” he said, “here is that wonderful lady I spoke of!”
“Yes, Poppy,” Maci said, though he had not spoken of her before. Maci left the shed, keeping her eyes away from the glass and copper lineaments of the Infant, and went back outside to stare over the cliff. On that clear day, she could see all the way to Block Island. She undid her hair and let it blow in the wind, thinking how she must look dramatic and wild, the very picture of an incipient madwoman. She closed her eyes and wondered if it was obvious to a person when her reason departed. With no one sane to tell her she was on the decline, would she know when her madness came down upon her?
After she’d finished the letter to Rob, she got under her quilt and stared at her brother’s sketches. They covered the whole wall opposite the foot of her bed, and now they were creeping across the wall to her left. She got out of bed to put the candle on the floor, to better light them. Back under the quilt, she studied the pictures. They were a history of Rob’s time with Company A of the Ninth New York Volunteers. On the far left was an ink sketch of the regiment drilling in the Central Park — Rob had colored their coats with blue ink; their pantaloons and fezzes were red. Maci had nightmares about those red hats. When she was small, her father had told her stories of a monster who wore such a hat, who colored it with the blood of his victims. In those dreams, her brother was turned from her gentle companion into a man who sopped up the blood of his enemies with his cap, then wrung it into his mouth.
She’d posted the last picture, the sketch of Private Vanderbilt, about three feet from the corner. She rearranged herself in her bed, moving her head down where her feet usually rested. Now she could look out the window at the stars shining above the dark sea, and when she turned her head Private Vanderbilt was just in front of her. For a while she looked into his eyes, wondering that the son of such a man as crude, rich Cornelius Vanderbilt would not buy himself a captaincy, at least. Her sleepy eyes fell to his thick neck; she imagined how her two hands would not fit around it. She closed her eyes but his image hovered behind her lids. Then she opened her eyes again, and kept looking at him until her candle blew out.