Between, Georgia (15 page)

“I tried to warn them,” I said, shaking my head.

Henry laughed. He had a great laugh, throaty and low. He’d gotten it from his mama, along with the faint edges of his Cajun slur. “Got your key?”

I nodded, and we went up the stairs. A sign on the front door said WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE AND BUTTERFLY MUSEUM. It listed the hours and instructed visitors to buy tickets at the Dollhouse Store next door. I unlocked it and we went inside, locking up behind us.

A staircase led up to a landing overlooking the entryway. It was roped off, and the upstairs entry was bolted from the inside when Mama and Genny weren’t there working. “We need to go around to the back stairs,” I said.

On one side of the staircase, a sign that said BUTTERFLIES

pointed patrons to a doorway on the left. On the other side, a DOLLS sign pointed right.

“Let’s play tourist,” said Henry. “Pick a path.”

“Dolls,” I said immediately.

“Then I’ll go butterflies. Meet you at the back.” He headed left. The downstairs rooms were built in a big circle, connected by wide arching doorways. Along Henry’s path were all of Bernese’s terrariums, filled with caterpillars and cocoons, and above each hung a plaque with information about the species and pinned adult specimens that Bernese had chloroformed and mounted herself. There were no live adults. When butterflies emerged, Bernese released them into the gardens on the square.

The Baptist Ladies’ Gardening Club kept butterfly-attracting flowers blooming in the square’s beds all through spring and summer.

In the first room off the foyer, I heard Henry greeting Uncle Lou. Caterpillars are essentially eating machines that spend every moment changing food into frass, and Lou had the charming job of cleaning up after them.

I obediently followed the arrow on the DOLLS sign. It led me into a large open room that was devoted to my mother. Some of her earliest dolls were on display, including the remains of her first salt-dough doll. Most of the face had crumbled away, but the basic shape of the head and the red silk body were still intact. On the right-hand wall, mounted plaques told an abbreviated version of Mama’s life story and explained Usher’s syndrome. The plaques were interspersed with pictures of Mama and Genny at different ages, mostly working on dolls.

On the left wall, a single long frame housed the picture and every written page of the article that had appeared in
Life
magazine when my mother was in her early twenties. That was the article that had helped Bernese and Isaac land the contract with Cordova Toys. In the picture, my mother stood next to Genny, who looked shyly away, but my mother stared boldly into the camera, her gaze direct and level. Genny’s hair was pinned up in a bun, but my mother’s hung in a long, loose braid over one shoulder.

Mama was a few pounds thinner than Genny, in the face especially. Her cheekbones and jawline looked sharper, and I could see the Seminole in her. Her eyes were shaped like half-moons that had been tipped over to stand on their points. The shape of her eyes made it seem as if she was smiling, but her wide mouth remained closed and solemn. Beside her, Genny looked like a car-bon copy, paler, prettier, and blurry around the edges.

The caption read “The dying eyes of the artist look into the camera, unafraid.” Bernese wrote that crap, and they used it.

I hated this room. Nothing in it was actually about my mother.

It was all about Bernese, a celebration of her chutzpah and marketing savvy. It was a shrine to exploitation, and the thing that got to me about it every time was that when I looked at the dolls themselves, I could see that my mother was better than this. She was too good an artist to need to use her blindness as a hook, but Bernese had done it anyway. I had always wondered what Bernese took away from Mama by marketing her this way, if she had un-dermined Mama’s self-assurance or her belief that her vision, while it lasted, had had both clarity and distance.

I walked on into the next room. Here, the mounted plaques walked visitors through the process of casting porcelain, and some of my mother’s original molds were on display. But the room was dominated by a huge glass case in the center. Inside were the originals of my mother’s last series. The animal dolls.

Cordova had scaled their versions down, but the originals were all about twenty inches tall, lions and mice alike.

They were posed on and around a miniature carousel, a work of art itself, hand-carved and -painted to look like the old wooden carousels my mother remembered from the carnivals of her childhood. If you put a dime in the slot beside the case, the horses would go up and down and it would spin and play a tinny, thin version of “The Carousel Waltz.”

I paused to look at the animals. Bernese the literalist could never see it, but I knew the animal dolls had all been modeled on the people in my mother’s life, people from Between. Mama had done herself as a brown bear, standing with Genny, a sweet-faced panda. Genny had dressed both of them in steel-gray silk. Trude was a duck, the Marchants were deer, and I could see Crabtrees in the thin-faced red foxes. One little fox girl stood by her pony, and from beneath her cherry-red skirts, brown bear paws peeped out, a quiet love letter from my mother to me.

Bernese was there. Mama had cast her as, of all things, a moth, her insect eyes bugged wide and long, fierce porcelain antennae coming out of the top of her head. Genny had made the moth a short, stiff body, too fat for flight, and bound it tightly in a dress of black bombazine. A gray cloak suggested the wings, and Mama had gotten around trying to sculpt and cast moth feet by putting her in buttoned boots. Lou sat on the horse beside her as a ginger-colored mousie. Isaac, a long-headed, elegant grasshopper, stood on Bernese’s other side.

I had always questioned this choice of totem. Though Bernese loved moths and butterflies, she seemed far too carnivorous to be properly represented by an insect. But the moth, sitting stiffly on its carousel pony, was undeniably Bernese. And if Mama had still been sighted when Fisher was born, I was certain that her doll would have been a caterpillar. I could imagine that perfectly, a pale green caterpillar with a short, sturdy body and an earnest face.

“What animal would I be?” said Henry, reading my mind. He had not spent much time learning about the life cycle of butterflies; he’d come all the way around through the back room to meet up with me here.

“I don’t know,” I said. All the Crabtrees were foxes, but that didn’t seem right for him. A lynx, maybe, dappled deep brown and gold.

We left the carousel and went into the large room at the back of the house. This was the place where the two halves of the museum collided. On the far wall, we would find a locked door with a STAFF ONLY sign. It opened onto the back stairs, and I had a key.

But we couldn’t see the door because of the huge blue velveteen box that practically filled the room from side to side and was only six inches lower than the ceiling. It was made out of a frame of PVC pipe, jointed and squared off, and thick velveteen drapes hung from the pipes all the way to the floor. It had a dense blue velveteen roof as well; it was probably safe to develop photos in there.

Facing us was a pipe-and-drape hallway that led back into the box. The entrance glowed faintly purple with black light. “Want to?” said Henry.

“Not even a little bit.”

“Come on. I haven’t been back there in years.” As he smiled, I could see the wickedness that lived somewhere under his tailored clothes emerging, daring me, like a young man who wants to take a girl into the fun house at the county fair.

“It creeps me out.”

He grinned at me. “One minute. You wimp. Come on. If we go, you can put off choosing a head.” He grabbed my hand and tugged me along, toward the mouth of the pipe-and-drape tunnel. I allowed myself to be drawn in.

The tunnel doglegged almost immediately, so the opening and its friendly rectangle of sunlight disappeared. Glowing footprints on the floor and a string of tiny black-light bulbs strung along the wall led us to the entrance into the box. I’d seen Bernese’s mas-terwork hundreds of times, but I found myself clutching Henry’s hand tighter anyway.

At first glance, it seemed innocuous enough; a large display case held a fully decorated dollhouse surrounded on both sides by a miniature forest. It seemed perfectly ordinary except for the lighting. The black lights made the furniture gleam oddly, and the white portions of the papered walls and the sheets on the beds glowed with purple phosphorescence.

A family of cheap plastic dolls lived in this midnight world, mass-market reproductions of some of my mother’s work. A mommy stood by the stove in the kitchen, the black lights emptying her smile and eyes of anything human. The daddy had fallen over, and he lay stiff and silent in the yard, his white golf sweater spotted with flecks of black like a Dalmatian’s coat. Two identical boy dolls were sitting quietly on identical rocking horses in the third-floor playroom. A freckled baby lay in its crib, alone in the nursery on the second floor. And in the living room, a spotty little girl with my face sat stiff and wary on a rocking chair.

As our eyes adjusted, we began to sense an undulating movement within the house, within the woods surrounding it. Something shifted, caught at the corner of my eye, and I saw one of them in the nursery, pale green and glowing sickly in the light. It pulled itself along the back edge of the baby’s crib. Then I saw another, rearing up to bump its black-tipped head twice against the little girl’s shoes. Its sticky leg-buds attached to her calf and it began to climb her, half disappearing as it went questing under her skirts.

Once I had seen those two, they began appearing all over, coming into focus as they moved. In the black lights, they bore no resemblance to the busy little bugs that Fisher loved. Here, their segmented bodies oozed through the woods and crept around the furniture, their black heads seeking a path. In the playroom, behind the silent boys, a long cocoon stretched from the ceiling to the floor, attached by webbing at both ends. Through the paper-thin casing, I could almost see the thing inside twitch and spin as it morphed.

The family glowed pale and still in their polka-dotted clothing, and the caterpillars crept all around them and over them, endlessly shitting. The furniture was spotted, too; Lou was behind on his cleaning. The scale, the size of the caterpillars as they skulked past these children and their vacant, grinning parents, made the whole scene monstrous. The worms lurked and loitered in the night landscape, eventually cocooning and then fighting their way free to mate and die in the glass box.

On the roof I could see three of the adult moths. One perched, unmoving, the pale eyespots on its yellow-green wings glowing fiercely like purpled eyes, its long hind-wing tails quivering. The other two were attached end to end, and as I watched, they flailed into motion and bounced together off the back of the house. I couldn’t blame them. They were on a schedule. Luna moths emerge with no digestive systems, so they mate and die in a matter of days. Bernese did not release all the adult lunas. They’d lay their eggs inside paper bags Bernese had hidden behind the woods, and the caterpillars would come out and cocoon and morph, cycling endlessly in the constant nocturnal springtime she’d created for them.

“What a freak show,” Henry said. I had almost forgotten he was there. As I stared into the box, he’d been reduced to a warmth and pressure on my hand, grounding me. I turned away from the dollhouse to look at him. The whites of his eyes and his teeth glowed iridescent. He was still staring at the luna moths’ dollhouse terrarium, fascinated. “Bernese really has no idea?”

“Nope,” I said. “It seems obvious to her, like basic math. She enjoys raising moths and butterflies, she’s built her life on dollhouses, so obviously, she ought to be able to put them together somehow.”

Henry stared into the case for another moment and then shuddered and averted his eyes as well. “Maybe. But this is not the way.”

“You know who else likes it? You won’t believe this.”

“Who?”

“Jonno,” I said. “He loves this thing. Thinks it’s ‘kicky.’ ”

Henry let go of my hand, squinting at me from behind his glasses. “Kicky?”

“That’s what he says.”

“Okay,” said Henry. “I guess I can see that about him.” Then he was silent, looking at me too long, too intensely.

“What?” I said.

“Are you going to go through with it?” he asked. “Divorce him?”

“Yes,” I said. “Why does everyone keep asking me that? I have a lawyer. I have a court date. Even Jonno acts like this is some silly whim I’m going to get tired of sooner or later.”

“It doesn’t seem believable that you could get a divorce and be done with Jonno. Not that one naturally follows the other, but that’s the idea of the divorce, isn’t it? To be done with him.”

“Why is my divorce so fictional? Yours was real enough.”

“Not to me,” he said. “I didn’t believe in it until months after it was over.”

We carefully held each other’s gaze so as not to look back at the dollhouse. One of the moths fanned or flew, a slight flutter of movement in my peripheral vision. I kept my eyes on Henry. “I believe in it,” I said.

His teeth flashed in the black lights. “You never met her, did you,” he said.

“Your wife?” I shook my head. I’d seen her once, though, when she and Henry had visited Between briefly to settle some business of his mother’s. She was exceptionally pretty, with yards of black hair that fell in perfect rumpled waves down her back. But she also had something beyond beauty. Charisma, maybe, or an excess of style. She moved as if she were covered in tiny, invisible bells and her walk was designed to make them trill. Seeing her made me interested in knowing him better, because I was being tugged along in the wake of something equally charismatic.

Henry knew what it was like, this thing with Jonno and me.

Now I said to him, “I’m sick of not being believed. The only person who believes me is Bernese, and she’s probably pretending so she can lecture me about the sanctity of marriage. But I’m deadly, earnestly, seriously done with him.”