The Unseen World (35 page)

“Me neither,” said Ada. It was true. She missed having one at Liston's: she hoped that Liston would put one up soon.

Through a picture window at one end of the room, Ada could see that the snow was picking up speed. The snowflakes themselves were getting fatter—David's favorite.
This is very satisfying snow, Ada
, he would have said.
This is real snow
. She closed her eyes, briefly, against her memories of all the times he woke her up, or brought her to the window, upon first snowfall. Was it snowing in Quincy, too? Would any kind nurse know to point him toward the window?

Miss Holmes returned with a tray. On it was a teapot and cups, a little cardboard box of cookies, and an envelope that rested against the thumb of her right hand. On the front of it Ada could make out
Miss Anna Holmes
, and the address of the public library.

“So,” said Miss Holmes. “This is good timing, Ada. Guess what arrived yesterday,” she said.

She put the tray down and held up the envelope. She had opened it already, and Ada saw on her face that she had been uncertain about how, and when, to present its contents.

“I was going to give it to you Monday,” said Miss Holmes. “But here you are.”

She poured three cups of tea, and brought one of them to Ada, along with the envelope.

“Now,” said Miss Holmes. “Before you open it. I want to warn you that it's strange.”

Inside the envelope was a letter.

December 5th, 1985

Dear Miss Holmes
,

I hope the enclosed information will be helpful to you. It took me some time and a trip to our city hall, but I did find records of a Canady family near Olathe, although there are no living members here today
.

There were two men born in Olathe named Harold Canady. The first was born on February 13, 1892. He was married on May 1, 1912, to Greta Burns, also born in Olathe in 1892. Their first child, Susan Canady, was born on July 15, 1913, but died in 1929 at the age of 15 (no mention of cause of death). Harold Canady was a minister at the Second Presbyterian Church here. He died in Olathe in 1968, and his wife Greta died in 1974, also in Olathe
.

Their second child, Harold Canady, Jr., was born on January 2, 1918. I could find no death record for him in Olathe
.

However—and this is purely anecdotal—I mentioned the interesting task you've given me to a colleague here at the library, and she knew the Canady family. In fact, she went to the church where Harold Canady, Sr., used to preach. And she told me that after attending college, Harold Jr. went on to work for the Civil Service in Washington, D.C., and wasn't seen nor heard from again—that is, until the town received word of his death. She believes it was a car accident. This would have been sometime between 1947 and 1952, she thinks. It was just after the war, anyway. You might do well to look in the
Washington Times Herald
or the
Post.

She remembers this, my colleague here, because she recalls Reverend Canady praying about it at church. Terrible thing to lose two children
.

I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if I can be of further assistance
.

Sincerely
,

Fred Coburn

Olathe Public Library

1920s–1930s

Kansas

“
W
hat's wrong, Susan?” said Harold Canady, trying to be brave, though truly he didn't want to know. He was ten years old. He was standing in a sort of shed, a hastily constructed little room with the sharp shadowy smell of rust. He was shivering: it was early March, and very cold. The year was 1929.

His sister, Susan Canady, was crying. She was wearing her winter coat, which this year was too small for her. She was sitting on the dirt floor and leaning against a wall, despite the splinters she was sure to pick up from the rough unfinished wood. Her head was on her arms, which were folded over her knees. And she was weeping: Harold had heard her from outside. That's how he'd known to come in. This shed was where they came, the two of them, to sort things out, and sometimes to avoid their father. Susan was his favorite person: she was five years older than he was, raucously funny when she wanted to be, pretty in a round unstartling way. She had only two dresses (her father thought that more would encourage vanity) but she took very good care of them, sewed well, arranged her hair in flattering mysterious styles.

“Tell me what's wrong,” said Harold again. He was on shaky territory. He tried to guess. Not their father: there had been no incident with him, not that Harold knew about. He would have heard it. Their house was small, and he was always in it (something Susan
sometimes pointed out when she was feeling unkind—“Go outside, Harold, for once in your life,” she instructed him).

It was something with a boy, then, he guessed. There had been several recently, hanging around: he had seen Susan with them at school and once on the main road, too. But when he proposed this—“Is it a boy?” he asked, embarrassed—Susan only shook her head violently, overtaken by her own sobs, drowning in them.

It was not quite like seeing an adult cry—not quite—but it was almost as bad. For as long as he could remember, Susan had seemed untouchable, wise, well versed in everything Harold wished to know. She was, generally, composed, wry, knowing. She laughed loudly, her mouth open. She rarely cried. She protected him when it was important. She was popular at school and made him—if not
liked
—then tolerated, adopted as a sort of odd mascot. She rolled her eyes impeccably; she gestured with her hands in a way that fascinated Harold, who tried to imitate her until, one day, his father slapped his hands, told him he looked like a girl when he did that.

Harold looked around the shed. There were six empty cans of whitewash on a high-up shelf. There were twelve bags of Diamond chicken feed below them. There were twenty-four small wooden posts, the start of a set of chairs, on the floor. The pattern distracted him.

“I'm going to have a baby,” said Susan.

He didn't understand.

“I'm expecting,” said Susan. She still had her head against her arms. Her voice was muffled. “Don't you know what expecting is?”

Harold bristled, as he did whenever he felt his intelligence was underestimated. Of course he knew what
expecting
meant. What he didn't know, exactly, was how a person got a baby inside her. But he knew that it was not a thing that should happen to a girl of fifteen, an unmarried girl. He had heard whispers about other girls it had happened to in the past: the youngest parents of his friends, for example. People who got married at Susan's age.

“Aren't you going to say anything?” Susan asked, finally looking up. Her face was frightening: red and wretched, wet with tears. Her hair was matted into a sort of single mass, as if she had been sweating—though it was cold enough in the dim shed to make Harold shiver.

“Have you told Daddy?” said Harold.

“I'll never tell him,” said Susan, so quickly and viciously that Harold flinched. “He'll kill me. Do you understand? He'll actually kill me. You can't tell him, either.”

Their mother did not enter the conversation. She did what their father said. She rarely made eye contact with either of them: out of shame, Harold thought sometimes, for being unable to protect her children. She had turned off some switch inside herself long before Harold was born. He wondered sometimes what she had been like as a child.

“Promise,” said Susan, wild-eyed.

“I promise,” said Harold.

“Swear it,” said Susan.

“I swear it,” said Harold.

He wanted to ask her what she was going to do, but he had pressed his luck enough, he decided. He felt a vague sense of awe that Susan had told him as much as she had.

The next day was Sunday, and on Sundays they spent the whole day in church. Susan looked woozy and faint. Harold studied her: Was she bigger? Was her stomach bigger? He couldn't say. She had never been a small girl, and if she looked rounder now it wasn't enough to draw attention.

“Quit staring,” she hissed finally.

Their father, from the pulpit, spoke frightening words about damnation. For most of Harold's life, he had seemed like God: the decisiveness with which he cast behaviors and emotions into the categories of
good
and
evil
; the authority he bore naturally and gracefully, like a
mantel over his impressive shoulders; the knack he had for knowing when anyone was lying. He bragged about this final quality; he was proud of it. “I'm everywhere,” he said to his children. “I know everything.” And it was also what he said about God.

There was no library in their town. The nearest one was in Olathe, and sometimes when Mr. Macklin had to go there to visit a friend on a Saturday, he let Harold ride along beside him. He dropped Harold off at the Carnegie building on North Chestnut Street, which offered a surprisingly complete collection of both fiction and reference books. There, Harold spent long hours reading what he could find—including, at one point, the eleventh edition of the
Encyclopædia Brittanica
, from start to finish (except for Volume 12,
Gichtel–Harmonium
, which was missing, and therefore acquired added intrigue in Harold's mind; he felt certain that he was being deprived of the most important secrets of the whole endeavor).

The Saturday following his sister's announcement, he sought out Mr. Macklin, who, by chance, was heading into town, and when he got to the library he went directly to the reference section, and selected from it Volume 22, and searched it for
Pregnancy
, glancing over his shoulder repeatedly and guiltily. But it yielded no results. Volume 3, however, contained within it an entry on
Birth
, which Harold quickly skimmed for useful details, anything helpful he could bring back to Susan, like a Labrador with a stick. The best-case scenario, he imagined, would be if he could find her a solution that might make the pregnancy go away: just disappear, sort of. Unmanifest itself, just as it had manifested itself, mysteriously, darkly, a curse that had befallen his sister. It did not seem to him that a child could be inside her: this was too much of an abstraction, to Harold. He couldn't imagine it. In fact, it made him envious: he didn't like the thought of Susan loving anything more than him.

The encyclopedia, unfortunately, was not helpful. Mainly, it discussed the legal aspects of childbirth within the context of British
jurisprudence. Unhelpful, Harold decided. Volume 23 was slightly more helpful, for within it was
Reproduction
(a word that Harold knew was vaguely connected to the situation Susan had found herself in, though he could not remember how he had learned this). There were one or two things he thought might be useful, and he wrote down notes on a little scrap of paper he had gotten from the librarian, in a code he had invented for himself several years before. He would bring it to Susan, and explain to her what he'd learned. But it wasn't much: in general the language was so technical, so scientific, that he could not connect it to his sister Susan, who was vivid, pained, human. All week she had been wandering to school and back like a ghost. Their father had slapped her the night before, hard, for not listening: but Harold knew that she had only been distracted, not intentionally disobedient.

“Harold,” his mother had murmured—his father's name was Harold, too—but that was all she said.

Susan did not put a hand to her face. She did not alter her expression. Instead, there was an odd, forbidding calm about her, as if she had suddenly made up her mind about something.

He rode home with Mr. Macklin, who was a kind and entirely silent person and the owner of one of the few automobiles in their little town, which made him impressive. He had reached the rank of commander in the U.S. Navy during the First World War, thus lending him an authority that surpassed the authority of anyone else in the town. He also attended the church over which Harold's father presided, which was the only reason Harold was allowed to go with him when he was invited. In their small town, Harold was recognized as intelligent—someone who might be going places. This recognition meant, in his father's mind, that Harold had sinned. He was too proud, he told Harold often. Not humble enough. But he respected Mr. Macklin (and also, perhaps, Mr. Macklin's donations to the church), so when Harold was invited along, he was allowed to go.

“Just make sure you're not a nuisance,” said his father, each time Mr. Macklin picked him up. Therefore, on their drives together, Harold did not speak, but instead wondered what Mr. Macklin thought about in all that silence. He wondered whether Mr. Macklin—whether any member of the congregation—had an idea of the dual nature of his father, the Reverend Canady: the darkness of him that emerged at home, at night, or sometimes in the late afternoon. Could Mr. Macklin, could anyone in the pews on Sundays, imagine the sheer searing terror of being chased by an adult? Had they been chased by their fathers? Had they been beaten? Yes, Harold told himself; yes, this was a part of childhood. He had heard his friends at school talking about it resignedly, almost bragging about beatings they had gotten. Yet he felt—he knew—that what he received was different. And so he never joined in.

When they returned, he thanked Mr. Macklin politely, descended from the vehicle, and walked toward the house. He felt in his pocket for the scrap of paper. Because it was in code, he would have to read it to Susan; he looked forward to it. It would make him feel needed, important. Perhaps she would thank him.

But he knew something was wrong as soon as he entered the house. It was 6:00 in the afternoon, and his mother was out, and his father was home, sitting at the table, looking dangerous.

Harold's first instinct was to retreat to his bedroom, but he had caught the gaze of his father, and there was no leaving without words. His father measured him.