—I’ll loan you the book when I’ve finished, V says. We can talk about it.
Laura says, I’ve slowed it down so much I can take a deep breath between notes.
James says, “Sunflower Slow Drag”?
—When we get back, I’ll play it while you two talk. But don’t come stand over me to appreciate it.
V AND JAMES SIT HALFWAY ACROSS THE LOBBY while Laura plays the piano. She leans forward so that her hair hides her face and plays notes that sound like wind chimes on a nearly still day.
James says, I keep struggling to remember Ellen, but the pictures in my mind are so vague I think I’m making them up.
Thief of Lives1877
THE CROSSING WAS PERFECT, BEAUTIFUL AND CALM AND dragging so slow that everyone except V complained. At the dinner table, passengers kept saying, You get what you pay for. Cheap tickets mean saving on coal by creeping across the ocean at a walking pace. But V traveled in a mood happy to foot-drag. She had never seen the North Atlantic so blue and glassy. The ship’s library held quite a few good books, and every day she sat on deck and read and breathed long and slow, counting three Mississippi both in and out.
If she allowed her thoughts to move beyond the present moment, toward her destination, she clenched in the diaphragm and her breath pinched short. Her homeopathologist in London had recommended Aconitum napellus for vague fear and panic sweeping in strong waves, sleep disturbed by dreams of the dead. And Kali arsenicosum for the opposite, which V found confusing. Opposite of fear? Opposite of vague? Of strong? Of dead? One or the other potion was also supposed to help with fear of crowds and with sinus congestion, but the scrip didn’t clarify which one. She took both, and nothing happened, so she took opium in her wine.
A FEW MONTHS BEFORE HER VOYAGE toward America, she had traveled all the way across France to visit a doctor in Karlsruhe, where Winnie was now in school. She’d imagined Karlsruhe differently. Jeff had settled Winnie into school there, and he had given V the inaccurate impression that the Rhine flowed right through town and snow-covered mountains towered just to the south. As it turned out, the town’s main attraction was that it lay a day away from actual interesting places without being one itself. She found a room in a guesthouse with a partial view of a tall church steeple.
V had not written to Jeff in a while—months, in fact. Before long, a note came, forwarded from her London apartment: How are you and where are you?
In Karlsruhe Winnie was busy with school, so they mostly saw each other on Sundays, leaving V free to visit Doctor Richter three times a week. He was a few years younger than V and had become renowned for his ability to diagnose mystery illnesses. One of her doctors in London had said her poor health was no mystery—when she felt so washed over with panic and terror that she couldn’t breathe, she was having a heart attack. Richter, though, began seeing her with no preconceptions. He checked her reflexes with a rubber hammer and looked into her eyes and listened to her internal sounds. With various large and small calipers, he measured every dimension of her head. But mostly he was awfully interested in her personal life and emotions and history. They talked for an hour or so each visit.
He asked, When was the bottom? The worst?
—Impossible to say.
—Try, please.
She told Richter that most people would probably say it was when she and the children lived fugitive on the road like escaped convicts. But the truth was, the shape of her life wasn’t a deep U or a sharp V that you went down into and came up out of. It was a saw blade, jagged and dangerous from end to end.
Doctor Richter had a big upholstered chair in his consulting room, and V sank into it very comfortably. His voice was quiet and even, so soothing that most days she dozed off for a few seconds as they talked. The children interested him—the dead ones and the live ones equally.
V told him she had always tried not to define Maggie as a Davis and Winnie as a Howell, but that’s how it was—a correspondence of personalities. V loved Maggie, but at heart she was smart, chilly, serious, mercantile, single-minded. Maggie and Jeff were always very close, so much alike. Winnie, though, was a Howell—smart, funny, emotional, impulsive, open-minded. She and V were alike in most ways, except that Winnie loved everything about boarding school—the girls, the teachers, the classes, the dormitory and dining hall. V, on the other hand, couldn’t name one redeeming moment of her months at Madame X’s.
She told Richter about Samuel and Joe, their very different personalities. She guessed Samuel would have been a Howell had he lived. After Joe was born, she fell into a deep depression because he looked like a Davis, and as if that hadn’t been bad enough, Jeff wanted to name him after his brother Joseph, who had been cruel to V from the time she was seventeen until middle age. They argued and Jeff would not relent about the name. All V could do was pray little Joe would not share all the Davis traits and might outgrow looking like one, though whether her prayers were answered remained unclear at the time he fell off the balcony.
Jeffy was the most Howell of all, probably too much so. Nothing interested him more than jokes and having a good time. If he couldn’t find trouble to get into, he created some. He was still finding his way in life after trying out a number of schools and colleges. Billy, though, had a personality totally his own, and Jefferson thought he would be their great success, except he died at ten of diphtheria. Those
