The House Girl (5 page)

“I didn’t realize you were … ready. I mean, emotionally ready to do this,” Lina said.

A tension appeared in Oscar’s face, and he crossed his arms against his chest. “It’s not like I just woke up one day and—
bam
—everything’s okay. For so long I didn’t want to think about her at all. But then, I don’t know, the past couple years have been different. I wanted to go back, to when she was young, and remember her. I loved your mother very much. I wasn’t a perfect husband, I know that, but, Jesus, I loved her.”

Lina watched Duke, and her own memories ticked by: a curtain of dark hair, the tuneless song, pepper and sugar.

“And look at you—you’re an adult!” Oscar spoke nervously into the silence. “And I’m practically an old man.” Here he grinned. “I wanted to … explain some things. Tell the truth. I’m better at showing than talking, you know that. These are for you, Carolina. I want to
show
you some things about your mother. Stuff we’ve never talked about. It’s time you knew.”

Lina looked again at the
Enough
portrait, her mother’s elongated face—like an El Greco, she thought, one of those rapturous, wraithlike ghosts. Wasn’t this what she had always asked of Oscar?
Tell me,
she would say.
Tell me about my mother
. But now she felt only an urgency to leave the room. Oscar had caught her unprepared. The reckless girl who had flung that pot across the room was long gone, replaced by a Lina who did not like surprises or this sinking sensation of weakness and instability, like standing on sand as the tide pulled away. She needed time to consider Oscar’s pictures, to analyze and think through her reaction. And sleep. She needed sleep.

“Carolina, have I upset you?” Oscar asked, his voice tight. “Why don’t we talk more tomorrow. You look exhausted.”

Oscar’s tone, and the way he was standing now, his shoulders slightly rounded, his stomach slack, provoked Lina’s old concern. And of course—Natalie needed a show. In recent weeks the publicity had been mounting, all tied to the mysterious subject matter of Oscar’s new work: Why all the secrecy? What had Oscar Sparrow done now? Interviews with journalists, a spread in
Artforum,
all of it clever and enigmatic, Oscar deflecting questions with a bemused grin. It had pained Natalie at first, or so she said, but even she had to admit that, as a PR strategy, it worked. But now Oscar was reaching a critical point. An opening date for the show hadn’t been confirmed yet and if they waited too long, Natalie had warned, people would lose interest.

Lina steadied her breath. “I’m not upset,” she said, smiling as Oscar’s eyes played across her face. “The pictures are fantastic. I’m so glad you finally want to talk about Mom.” She did not want to lie to him, but she didn’t know how to explain the thudding in her chest. “It’s just … been a long day. I’ll take a closer look tomorrow, but I’m glad you’re painting her.”

Oscar’s shoulders relaxed, the muscles of his jaw gave way to a wide, relieved smile. He let out a whoop and swooped in to hug her. “Hallelujah. Okay then. I’m ready. I’ll call Natalie tomorrow.

“And listen—” He pushed her out of the hug, hands on her shoulders. “I mean it, I want us to talk more about your mother.”

“Sure. We’ll talk more.”

“Tomorrow.”

“I’m pretty busy at work.”

“Okay, the next day. Whenever you can.”

Lina nodded. “Good night, Dad.”

“Good night, Carolina.” She leaned forward to accept his kiss, the scratchy brush of his beard against her cheek, and then she turned and moved toward the door of the studio. Her vision was focused to a fine, narrow point. A wedge of darkness loomed behind the half-cracked door, the glass knob smudged with half a thumbprint of blue paint. Lina reached out and pulled it open. Duke rushed past her, a blur of orange and white, and bounded up the stairs, his tail twitching.

Lina started up to her bedroom, past a series of photographs that hung above the steps. There were eight in total, taken on Lina’s birthday from ages four to eleven. In each one she was standing in the same position, her arms at her sides, the camera aimed straight-on, her torso filling the frame. On her head perched a series of homemade birthday hats: ribbons and bows, a large plastic 8, peacock feathers, balloons.

Lina knew the photos by heart: smiling in years five and seven; serious in nine, ten, and eleven; crying in four; eyes closed and mouth open in eight. Every year it had been Oscar baking her birthday cake, inviting her friends, making her hat, positioning her against the wall, the same spot, the same anticipation, every year when she was a child. Every year, her father on the other side of the lens, clicking the shutter open and closed, freezing the moment in time.

J
osephine stepped through the back door into the kitchen and placed the basket, half full with berries, on the table. She felt Mister’s slap still in the bones of her face, echoing down her spine, but she saw no mark when she checked in the glass above the washstand. She fixed herself with a stare: her eyes of shifting color, a shadow of blue here, green there, hazel and brown and gray, the colors fractured together and split. “Tonight,” she whispered. The kitchen seemed larger with the word alive in the air, the stone floor pushing downward, the roof lifting toward the open sky.

She climbed the steps to Missus’ room and clapped her hands before the closed bedroom door. “Missus Lu,” Josephine called. “Got to get you up and dressed. Dr. Vickers coming today, coming from town.”

For months Mister hadn’t wanted to fetch a doctor. “He’ll just rob us blind,” Mister had said last October, after the first fit came, Missus Lu stiff and crooked on her bedroom floor. Josephine had never seen such a thing before. Papa Bo’s trances at the pulpit had never gripped him with such demon force. Lottie sometimes fell to the floor with her praying, but her body stayed natural in its shape.

Mister said to Josephine, “Your Missus just having a bad spell. We’ll wait on it.”

But the spells went on and on, through the short days of winter, frost on the grass, and then snow on Christmas, the coldest Josephine could remember, the wash freezing stiff on the line, Josephine holding the flat-out dresses and pants close as a dancing partner as she brought them into the house to thaw. The willow branches froze too, touching the crackling ice of the river in a solid crystal sweep. Lottie said the cold made the spirits irritable and prone to mischief, and she saw Missus’ troubles as play wreaked upon her by the babies and not-yet-babies Missus had lost. Sometimes a fit lashed long and hard, and Missus would sleep for hours afterward, a sleep so still and silent that Josephine would fear she had passed on and hold a mirror to her face to check for breath. But some mornings Missus woke up just right, speaking in her singsong voice of flowers that needed picking, mending that needed doing, where was that pillowcase I asked you to launder, the corncake I wanted for tea.

It was the New Year when Missus started to forget the names of common things. Bread, fetch me that bread, she had called to Josephine on that first day of the year 1852, and pointed a finger at her wrap warming there before the fire. Other mistakes followed, thick as fleas. Apple, she said, instead of comb. Door for fire, rag for spoon, milk for chair. Josephine tried to interpret Missus’ requests, find a pattern in her new language, but none seemed to fit.

Snow melted, the red mud of spring came, and with it planting time. Mister was out of the house most days, working alongside his men. Missus shook her head at the shame of it, but they all knew there weren’t enough to work the farm. With Hap dead and Louis sold off for money to buy seed, only Otis was young and strong enough to pull the plow, keep the pace from morning till night. Lottie and Winton and Therese worked slow with warped fingers and crooked backs. Papa Bo would have sold all three, bought just one more with the money and worked him dawn till midnight, but Mister didn’t think that way. He never looked to change things, just struggled along with what he had. Missus called it a weakness, said it was something she hadn’t seen coming until they were married and living already under the crumbling roof at Bell Creek.

Finally last week, the day so hot, Mister came back from the fields for his dinner, and he found Missus on the floor, Josephine there holding her head to keep it from knocking against the floor or a table leg. He saw how her body jerked, the eyes nothing but empty white. After the fit ended, after she had slept, Missus insisted on Dr. Vickers, down in Claremont, thirty miles south at least. Josephine remembered, it seemed a long time ago, Missus Lu’s strong views on curtain colors, the names of her chickens, the way that Josephine wore her hair, a particular painting that must never be hung in the hall, only in the front parlor. “Dr. Vickers knew my daddy. He’s the only one I’ll consent to examine me,” she had said, a rare brief return of that stubborn insistence about small things.

Always at the mention of Missus’ daddy, Mister’s mouth would set tight, his voice go low and strained. But on that day he had only nodded. “Tell Otis. Dr. Vickers in Claremont, and ride fast.”

Now Josephine called again at the closed bedroom door: “Missus Lu, today’s the day for Dr. Vickers coming. This morning, Missus.”

No sound from inside, no call or creak of steps on the floor. Josephine opened the door and surveyed the unmade bed, the closed windows. A sticky smell of sleep hung in the air. But no Missus.

Josephine heard knocks from the room at the end of the hall, something heavy dragging—the easel, must be.

The studio was at the front of the house, four long steps from the door of Missus’ room, with windows that looked west to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the low mounds sloping soft as though drawn with a crumbling crayon. Josephine didn’t know what the studio had been in brother Henry’s time, but Missus Lu and Mister had envisioned it a nursery and painted the walls a pale blue with a border of yellow daisies at the top. The furniture that once had filled the room—an unpainted pine crib, a hanging mobile made of pressed tin and scraps of ribbon, a carved wooden horse that rocked on curved supports—had been burned years ago, Mister adding the pieces one by one to a bonfire out back. Since then, Missus Lu called it her artistic studio, where she pursued creative endeavors, painting and sketching mostly, some sewing and needlepoint. The walls were still blue, but the paint had dripped in long pale streaks down the plaster, and the daisies had bled to thumbprints of color.

Josephine knocked once and entered. Missus Lu’s back was to the door, one arm raised and motionless before a canvas propped on the rough easel Mister had made from old fencing post. She wore a white cotton nightdress that hung too big on her now, the ruffled edge hiding her ankles, the fabric falling loose from her thin shoulders. Missus must have tried to do up her own hair because it hung in a messy topknot, stray dark locks cascading loose onto her shoulders and down her back.

A rough table with hewn timber legs was pushed against the east wall, its top piled with scraps of canvas and homemade paper, birch bark, jam jars and old brushes, pots of powdered color that Missus would buy every season from the peddler whether she needed them or not.

Missus Lu’s canvases leaned against the north wall and hung by nails above: a half-finished still life of apples and pears beside a wooden bowl, the watercolors bleeding one into the next; a shapeless peony from the garden sketched in pencil; a self-portrait, Missus’ brown eyes too large for her face, her mouth slanted open in a half-smile; small landscapes with the horizon cut short or the perspective tilted in such a way that they provoked in Josephine a mild nausea whenever she glanced at them hanging there on the wall.

In the far corner were piled Josephine’s pictures. She painted scenes from the farm. Winton and Lottie standing beside their cabin, Louis in the fields, Hap playing the fiddle, Missus Lu and Mister side by side in their rockers on the porch, all painted on scraps of canvas or sketched on paper, or on wide lily leaves that Josephine would collect from the creek in summer, dry in the sun, flatten under the cutting block. Missus let Josephine paint some days, others not. On those other days, Josephine would fan Missus’ face, or read to her from the Bible. Sometimes Josephine would sketch a form where Missus found herself unsure, the charcoal in Josephine’s hand moving quickly, the apple or hillside or vase finished with confidence, and Missus would step to the picture again. As Missus labored at the canvas, Josephine would resume her fanning, her reading, but inside a restlessness would take hold, and a flush of herself, the joy in what her hands could do.

“Missus?” said Josephine. She inhaled the tang of turpentine mixed with the perfumed powder Missus used in the summer months to hide her own smell.

Missus Lu did not turn around as Josephine entered the room but spoke toward the canvas: “Your Mister. Your Mister knows God watches him, as I do. He knows what evil comes from licentious ways.”

Josephine had grown accustomed to Missus’ wandering mind. Topics started off and then abandoned midsentence. Stories from her childhood told as though she lived still with her sisters and brother in the big house in Mississippi, and the little dog that ate only catfish and peaches, it still nipped at her skirts. Always Josephine would nod, whether Missus’ words were foolish or wise, wicked or kind.

Josephine nodded now. “Yes, Missus,” she murmured.

Missus resumed sketching with the charcoal she held in her right hand, short quick lines, a form taking shape as Josephine watched. A child, a sleeping child, a lock of hair curled on its forehead, its lips slightly parted, and then another beside it, its twin.

“He stopped all that, years ago,” Missus continued. “God saved him from himself, yes. There are so many worries that plague him now. He is a good man, like his father Papa Bo before him.”

A good man. Papa Bo had carried with him always a cedar walking stick tipped in silver, dented and dark from dragging behind him along the ground. He’d use it for poking at things, tapping out the rhythm of his sermons, drawing figures in the dust and, once his legs gave way, banging on the floor beside his chair when he believed household attention to be improperly diverted elsewhere. Sometimes he used it on the field hands, though never at the house, except once on Mister that Josephine had seen. It was the sound that alerted her, and Mister crying out. The crack of wood against the hard places of his shoulder and upper arm and Mister’s sharp grunt, an unsurprised sound that held in it a futility and an assent.