The House of Velvet and Glass (27 page)

Quincey busied himself over the table, balanced on his heels. He dipped the long needle into a glob of brownish stuff nestled in tissue paper inside the box, rolling it until a perfect bead of opium clung to the needle’s end. He balanced the needle on its stand so that he could present the remaining bamboo pipe to Sibyl. She took it, gingerly. How bad was it, really? The Captain had tried it in China, years ago. Made it sound boring, actually.
Not worth going to war over
, he’d said, with characteristic dismissal. She glanced at Dovie, watching as the flower of pure bliss blossomed on the girl’s face.

“I don’t know what to do,” Sibyl said, as much to herself as to Dovie.

“Quincey’ll show you,” the girl whispered. Her hand danced, slowly, tracing the contours of unseen shapes. Sibyl watched its movement, entranced.

Quincey waited, fingertips balancing the needle, eyes downcast. The moment had come.

Visions, Dovie said. She had tried so many times. When she was at Mrs. Dee’s the spirit world always seemed to be hovering just out of her reach, barely visible, almost near enough to touch. The pull of a window into that world was tantalizing, seductive.

A long dormant part of Sibyl finally stirred, as though the curious girl she had been was finally able to crack open the lid of the box in which Sibyl had locked her. Her hands holding the pipe at an awkward angle, Sibyl leaned forward, elbows on her knees. Quincey grunted, indicating through a series of gestures that she was to recline on the chaise.

“Oh,” Sibyl said, abashed.

She prized off her shoes and settled back, stiff and awkward, propped on her elbow. Her corset bit into the flesh of her hip, and she shifted against the discomfort. Quincey nodded, not looking at her, then beckoned for her to lean forward. Sibyl did so, rolling the top of the pipe bowl nearer the lamp. She held the silver mouth of the pipe nearer to her own, without touching.

Quincey hissed in irritation and smacked his index and middle fingers in a V shape against his mouth. Sibyl pressed the silver hole to her lips, feeling the metal grow warm under the pressure of her mouth, and leaned the ceramic bowl nearer the flame. Concentrating, Quincey brought the tip of the needle to the bowl. Sibyl inhaled through her open mouth.

The brown bead at the end of the needle vaporized in an instant of whitish light, and Sibyl’s mouth flooded with a curious numbing that tingled on her tongue, lips, cheeks, throat. She squinted, pushing the pipe away. Quincey laughed, his mouth a horrible grin of gums speckled with teeth. Sibyl coughed, and a wisp of smoke escaped through her teeth. Startled, she fell against the worn velvet of the chaise, feeling it prickle against the skin of her cheek.

Sibyl lay motionless, the pipe held loose in her hands, feeling her heart beating, aware of the movement of her blood. Nervous, she supposed she was nervous, and so she told herself to concentrate on the croon of the gramophone, and breathe.

Come to me, my melancholy baaaabyyyy. . . .

In. Out.

In. Out.

There.

She was fine.

There was nothing to worry about.

Except . . .

The velvet. The purple velvet on the chaise, it was distracting. Sibyl nestled into it, feeling its prickle on her chin, her nose, her eyelashes. It was softer, more perfect than any other velvet. It brushed against the corner of her mouth, and she opened her eyes, trying to focus on the texture. That close up her vision was blurry, and after a minute of intense staring at each individual tuft of velvet in its fullest detail, she surrendered, letting her eyes drift closed.

She brought a hand up, and it moved as though dragging through a dish of molasses, before coming to rest on the velvet next to her face. Her grip around the pipe loosened, and she felt it lifted lightly away, by Quincey she supposed, but she was too absorbed in the velvet to care.

Somewhere, far away, she heard laughter. She wondered where it could be coming from. Who was laughing? Was
she
laughing? Sibyl thought about her mouth and found it closed and smiling. No. It wasn’t her.

With some effort Sibyl opened her eyes, drawing her eyelids back like the curtains in her father’s drawing room. She was gazing into the fire. Why had she never noticed all the different colors in a fire before? The yellows and reds and oranges and blues and whites and . . . there it was, the laughing again.

Her gaze swiveled from the dancing fire behind the grate down to the carpet, to the low table where Quincey was at work, scooping ash out of the pipe bowl with the little coffee spoon. He didn’t seem to be laughing. In fact, he seemed unaware of anyone. He was absorbed in his task, a hand brushing the lid of the inlaid box with the intimacy of a lover. Her eyes slid past him, moving up the violet silk chaise opposite her, where Dovie lay stretched on her back.

The young woman’s stockinged toes were massaging themselves together, and Sibyl heard the joints crack. There it was—the laughing again. It was coming from Dovie. Sibyl’s eyes ventured up the girl’s form, blurry as Sibyl’s vision slipped in and out of focus, Dovie’s saucer eyes and short blond hair swimming together. The green saucers were fixed on her, the red bow mouth was laughing. Dovie rolled onto her side, her pipe laid on the table, and in her hands she toyed with the blue crystal ball.

“It’s so pretty,” she said, and the words reached Sibyl as though spoken from under water.

“Yes.” The word formed in her mouth, heavy and moist, like speaking through a mouthful of raspberries. “So pretty.”

They lay silent for a time, gazing at each other, motionless except for Dovie’s soft fingering of the scrying glass. In the distance, a world away, the grandfather clock began to chime. A part of Sibyl’s mind attuned from habit to count the number, but the chiming reverberated, each
bong
overlapping with several others, the sound vibrations moving in the wrong direction, so that Sibyl was at a loss to determine the time.

The light remained a steady glow of candle and lamplight, separated from the day. The gramophone had wound down, and she heard someone moving in the room, winding it, shuffling through records. The scene in the firelight swam before her eyes, and so she closed them, swallowing down a sour bubble of nausea. Closing her eyes was no better; the chaise moved beneath her as though floating atop a gentle swell.

“Sibyl,” said a voice close to her ear. “Are you nodding off ?”

“Hmmm?” she mustered enough will to answer.

The chaise bobbed on a passing wave, and Sibyl dug her fingers into the velvet to keep from falling off.

“Can you open your eyes?” the voice, Dovie’s, asked, her breath stirring the fine down along Sibyl’s ear.

Another wave rolled in, lifting the chaise and settling it down, and the nausea turned in her stomach. She was afraid she would slide off. A crush of panic burst in her chest, and she gasped. A hand settled on her cheek, and the sweet voice said, “Don’t frown so. Nothing’s wrong. Open your eyes.”

Sibyl obeyed.

“There,” the girl said, smiling. “You’ll feel better if you don’t nod off the first time. Have a little something to eat.”

“Eat?” Sibyl echoed.

“Trust me,” Dovie urged, withdrawing with trailing fingers from Sibyl’s chaise and melting back onto her own.

Sibyl eyed the cake with suspicion. She sank her teeth into a corner of it, sugar melting over her tongue, her molars sticking together as she forced the morsel down. There. She had eaten some of it.

“All of it,” Dovie insisted. “I promise, you’ll feel scads better.”

Her lip curling, Sibyl forced herself to finish it, one nibble at a time, rabbitish.

Sibyl settled back on the chaise, waiting for the wavelike motion to resume. She was surprised to discover that Dovie was right—the chaise now felt sturdy and safe, and the nausea had passed. She closed her eyes, finding her unease replaced with a pervasive sense of warmth, tingling from her scalp all along her neck, her shoulders, down her legs and into her toes. Sibyl stretched her arms overhead, bending like a cat, reveling in the feeling, letting it wash through her.

“You’ve . . .” Sibyl paused. “Do you do this a lot?”

“Hmmmm?” Dovie asked. “Oh, well. You know.”

She hesitated.

“Sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” Sibyl whispered, lidded eyes on the ceiling, with its dark carved molding. She traced her gaze along the curlicues and shapes, letting her attention wander.

“It’s useful,” the girl said. “For my art.”

The word hung there between them for a time as Sibyl turned it over in her mind. A euphemism? Though she had been brought to that salon to recite “Kubla Khan,” hadn’t she? Sibyl was prepared to let it slide past, let it be carried away as if it hadn’t been spoken, when Dovie continued.

“I’m an actress.”

Sibyl laughed out loud, pressing her hands to her middle, bringing her knees up, rolling on her back like she used to do when she was a girl. Tears rolled down the corners of her eyes, and her laughter intensified, dissolving into a fit of hiccups. Even the laughter felt delicious, roiling through her body, crinkling her eyes. Her cheeks began to hurt.

After a time she became aware of a deep silence emanating from the opposite chaise.

“Oh!” Sibyl exclaimed, collecting herself. “Excuse me. I can’t . . . I can’t think what came over me.”

“I
am
,” Dovie said, her voice unusually tight.

Sibyl rolled to her side, cheek pressed to the velvet again, and cast a twinkling gaze on the younger woman. “But of
course
you are, dearest,” she said, grinning.

Dovie, green eyes cool, gazed on Sibyl for a long moment. Then she, too, burst out laughing. They both held their arms around their middles and guffawed. Their giggles finally subsided with two long sighs, and the two women quieted, half staring into the fire and half looking at each other. At some point in the past hour Quincey had withdrawn, leaving them alone. Hiccuping with residual laughter, Dovie leaned forward for a sip of tea.

“Oh, I know what you all think,” she said, answering an unspoken comment from Sibyl. “But I am. Really. I got started out in California. Musicales. Then I got a chance to join a traveling company. We went all through the Midwest. It went okay, but I was never made the lead. Just ingenues and understudies. My coming here really did start out that way.”

“What way?” Sibyl asked.

“Well,” Dovie said. “When you prepare for a role, it can be helpful to . . .” She paused, looking for the right words. She turned an idea over in her mind, and then continued. “To forget yourself. To delve into your mind and see what else is there.”

“What else is there,” Sibyl repeated, almost turning the repetition into a question, but not quite.

“Oh, Sibyl,” the girl exclaimed. “What tremendous visions you can have, once you get accustomed to it. Like Coleridge. Or that English fellow, who wrote the book, whatever his name was. I found it fueled my imagination like nothing else. They never made me . . . That is, I’d always been a credible mimic, but something was lacking when I tried to—”

She paused, frustrated, unable to articulate what she meant.

“With this, you don’t need to have any imagination of your own, I guess is what I mean. You just lie back, and images will come to you, things you never dreamed might be in your head. Once, I even saw a silver dragon form in the air right above me, fire coming out of its nose, and it bent around like a snake until its tail was in its mouth, then rolled itself in a circle whirling faster and faster, before it disappeared in a puff of smoke. After that I spent a whole day not really knowing who I was.”

Sibyl reflected on this idea.

“But that wouldn’t be real,” Sibyl mused. “Just dream stuff, is all you’d be liable to see. They must all be ideas that you picked up from somewhere else, stored away, and forgot about.”

“Course, it doesn’t hurt that it feels marvelous.” This last word Dovie let out with a groan and leaned back on her chaise with a delicious sigh. They sat for a time listening, under the ticktock of the clock and the winding-down gramophone, to the deep silence emanating from the other motionless forms in the room.

Sibyl knitted her fingers across her midsection and settled on her back, contemplating the ceiling. An actress. So that’s how Dovie Whistler paid her way at that awful boardinghouse. Well, she couldn’t be a very good one. Successful or not, if that’s how Dovie thought about herself, it would explain how changeable she seemed. Sibyl wondered if this worldly, yet oddly innocent, girl was the true Dovie Whistler. Was this the same person Harlan saw when he squired her around town, to artistic salons and who knew where else? This tiny blond westerner, who could stand amid the bustle of Chinatown in Boston on a spring afternoon and blend in completely. And in the hospital the night of Harlan’s misfortune, performing the role of the concerned sweetheart, all exclamations and facial expressions technically correct, without necessarily being natural. Which was the real Dovie Whistler? Perhaps there wasn’t one.

Sibyl supposed that everyone assumed different roles, depending on the circumstances. The version of herself that presided over the breakfast table with Lan Allston was Sibyl-as-dutiful-daughter, and different from Sibyl as Helen’s stand-in running the Beacon Street house, warily circling Mrs. Doherty or prodding Betty for gossip in the kitchen. Sibyl-as-sister looked different in Harlan’s wary and suspicious presence than she did consulting with Benton over Harlan’s future at college.

Sometimes, when she was alone, unobserved, Sibyl tried to disentangle her inherited notions about what she ought to be from what she truly wanted. Sometimes she found disentanglement impossible and wondered if she had any true self at all.

Sibyl squinted her eyes closed, tired of her busy mind.

“Dovie,” she brought herself to say. “Let me see the scrying glass for a minute.”

“How come?” Dovie asked, loath to give it up.

“Just want to play with it, I guess,” Sibyl said. “I’m bored of myself. Trapped inside my head.”

Dovie laughed, passing the box into Sibyl’s hands. “That can happen. Never know what you’re going to find in there, do you?”