Her stepfather had nothing to say to this. In the next moment he stood abruptly, strode to the closet for his hat and stalked out the door, slamming it behind him. It was the cost he objected to, she was sure of it, as if nothing mattered but dollars and dollars alone. She didn’t care. She was soaring—“Oh, Mother,” she said, “Mother.” And then, just for a moment, she came crashing down again — this would mean separation, a two-days’ journey between them, and she’d never before been separated from her mother in her life.
“Of course, we’ll wait till you’re settled before we leave for Santa Barbara, and we’ll see you for Christmas. And write. We’ll write every day.”
* * *
It was a kind of miracle. After all she’d been put through on the island and in Mrs. Sanders’ class, where she’d never really belonged — they were hayseeds, rubes, and Santa Barbara wasn’t a city at all — now, finally, she felt she’d come home. And felt she’d earned it too. If she’d never been on San Miguel, never seen a sheep or a pig or suffered the grinding boredom of those anemic days and bloodless nights with no one to talk to and nowhere to go, she couldn’t have appreciated Miss Everton’s school the way she did. To the other girls it might have been usual, more of the same, a ritual society had contrived to prepare them for the next stage of life, which was to marry and marry money, but Edith saw things differently — this was her opportunity, her escape from the ordinary, from ranches and dust and a dying mother and a stepfather who could think of nothing but himself. And though she was an outsider at first — most of the girls had matriculated together through the elementary grades and formed their coteries and alliances — she quickly found her place. By the end of the first term she was earning A’s and B’s across the board and she was easily the best ballerina — and singer too — in the freshman class. Her French — the language of dance — was still limited (Chère Maman, J’espère que vous allez bien) and her German was weaker yet, but she was improving through sheer repetition and Miss Everton herself singled out her performance as Portia in the school’s co-production of The Merchant of Venice with St. Basil’s Academy as the best of the year.
So it went through that fall and the following spring, home for the summer and on into the next term, and if she worried about her mother — and she did — it was at a remove. Each night, just after lights out, her mother’s face would float free of her consciousness to hover there in the dark over the bed, and she would say a prayer and close her eyes and the next thing she knew it was morning, girls rustling in the hallway, her roommate softly snoring in the bed beside hers and the smell of bacon and toast and scrambled eggs infusing the air. Then there was the onward rush of school, another day, another night, and no thought but for the moment. When she was home, when she could see her mother struggling to stand upright, her limbs wasted and the lines of suffering lashing her face, she could think of nothing else.
Then, on a rainy afternoon just before Christmas break, everything changed all over again. She was in the middle of her piano lesson with Mr. Sokolowski, who had a habit of beating out the time with the flat of his hand on the bench beside you in a slow steady drop that went counter to everything you were feeling (it was Chopin’s Nocturne no. 2 in E-flat Major, the tempo so dragged down and reduced she might have been sleepwalking), when Miss Everton herself appeared in the doorway. Mr. Sokolowski looked up, his lips parted in irritation. She stopped playing, though his hand went on beating through the next two measures. Miss Everton — she was her mother’s age, or no, older, dressed all in tutorial gray and with her hair pinned up so severely her scalp was blanched at the hairline — was simply standing there, looking lost. Was there something in her hand — a slip of folded-over paper? There was. And before she could say a word Edith knew what it meant. “Is she—?” she said.
“Your mother’s ill, that’s all the telegram says. You’re to return at once.”
* * *
She was two days on the boat, the seas savage in the face of the storm that chased them down the coast, and everyone around her was sick at stomach. The smell was awful — like being trapped in a zoo — and she couldn’t go out on deck because it was raining the whole time. She’d never been seasick — she had her sea legs, that was what Captain Curner had told her, praising her — but as the hours went on and the smell concentrated itself till she felt she couldn’t breathe, she began to feel worse and worse. In the head — filthy, sour, a discolored mop reeking in the corner and somebody pounding desperately at the door — she went down on her knees and hung over the toilet till there was nothing left inside her. The boat rocked and groaned as if it would come apart. Her legs felt weak. When finally she made her way back to her berth she lay there volitionless, unable to change into her nightdress, unable to read or sleep or think of anything but what lay ahead.
Her mother was ill, that was all she knew. But her mother had been ill a long while — she’d lost weight and color and she’d hemorrhaged more times than anyone could count — and yet she’d always recovered because she was strong, the strongest woman alive. Maybe that was what this was: a false alarm. Maybe it was just another hemorrhage, bad enough, yes, but the sort of attack her mother had survived before. That was what she wanted to believe and she fought down the voice inside her that told her she was fooling herself because why else would they have pulled her out of school and wired the money for her passage if the moment of crisis hadn’t come? And then the grimmer thought: What if she was too late? What if her mother was already dead — or dying, dying right at that moment?
By the morning of the second day her throat was raw. She was thirstier than she’d ever been in her life, but every time she took a swallow of water it came right back up. The woman in the berth across from her took pity on her and gave her a handful of soda crackers to soothe her stomach. She broke them into fragments and tried chewing them one at a time, but they turned to paste in her mouth and she couldn’t seem to get them down. At one point someone said they were passing San Miguel. She never even lifted her head.
There was no one at the pier to meet her — she would have thought Ida would come, Ida at least, and the fact that she wasn’t there or her stepfather either filled her with dread. She stood alone on the pier in the rain, feeling light-headed, the other passengers streaming past her, the smell of the sea so overpowering it made her stomach clench all over again. There were people everywhere, faces looming up out of the mob, their eyes seizing on her as if to take possession of her and know her in her grief and fear and need before staring right through her, and she didn’t recognize any of them. Adolph — where was Adolph? Anybody? Finally, the umbrella clutched in one hand and the suitcase in the other, she set out to walk the eight blocks home.
It was a struggle, the streets a mess, the gutters alive with refuse, cigar stubs, paper bags, leaves, branches, horse droppings. Carriages lurched by, but no one thought to offer her a ride. The rain plunged straight down. She pushed through it, hurrying, breathless, going as fast as she could, her shoes soaked, her feet cold, the hem of her dress — the one she’d been wearing when Miss Everton escorted her to the boat and unchanged now through two days and a night — sodden with filth. Her hair was coming loose, her hat poking awkwardly at the ribs of the umbrella. All she could think was what her mother would say, how angry she’d be. You change that dress right this minute, young lady, and here, give me the brush, your hair’s a disgrace.