I watch him place a few more bricks and then I turn for the stairs and the light of day.
8
As August gives way to September, I continue to leave my door open, and occasionally Martin visits me at night. Sometimes I visit him. He never stays through until morning in my bed. I do in his, but he is always up before me and gone from the room when I awake. We never kiss; we never whisper sweet words to each other. We never give each other knowing looks across the breakfast table the following day.
I want to think Martin is finding comfort with me that is different from what he got at the brothels. I don’t think he visits them anymore. At least I no longer smell the cheap perfume on his skin. But he doesn’t have affection for me. I would know it if he did. He would kiss me if he did. And what little fondness I was starting to have for him is frozen in place now as I wait to see if he will begin to have any kind of likewise affection for me.
In late September Martin brings in the first bottles of his cousin Belinda’s hair tonic. The unlabeled black bottles are thesize of syrup containers, with white stoppers sealed with wax. I watch him the first time he sets them onto a little wooden shelf he placed inside the brick vault, which he keeps covered with a thick panel of solid wood. He positions the bottles like toy soldiers, like giant dominoes. By the time October arrives there are twelve bottles, the oldest ones on the far left of the shelf and the newer ones to the right.
I have only disobeyed him once. I reached inside the vault one day when he was home and the cover was off, noting that the temperature of the air seemed no different within the brick structure than outside it. I carefully lifted one bottle an inch or two off its straw bed. The glass was too black and the room too dark; I was only able to sense the heaviness of what was inside it. Whatever mixture was inside seemed dense with weight. I set the bottle back in place and went upstairs.
That same evening after supper I decided to speak to Martin about Kat’s schooling. Another six-year-old child who we sometimes see at the park is attending school and learning to read and write. I had asked that child’s mother about it and I learned that nearly all six-year-olds living in the state of California are enrolled in some kind of school.
“Do you think we should enroll her?” I asked Martin.
He did not seem to have an opinion. “I’ll leave you to do whatever you think is best,” he replied, sounding somewhat disinterested.
There is plenty of money, at least from what I can tell, and I asked him if I could check into the girls’ school that this other child went to. This he seemed to consider for a moment before deciding that, yes, I could inquire about it.
The interview at that school, two days after Martin left for hisroute, was not successful. Kat would not engage with the headmistress, did not answer any of her questions, made no attempt to show the woman what she already knew. The headmistress suggested rather quickly that Kat might be better off with a tutor at home.
“Some children have special requirements, and I think your daughter might be one,” the headmistress said. “I’ve seen children like this before who are withdrawn. She wouldn’t do well in a social environment like our academy.”
Kat and I returned home. I was angry and hurt and annoyed, but Kat seemed unaffected. Perhaps a tutor was going to be the best thing, but maybe not until she was older. Perhaps for now I could teach Kat her letters and sums, I was thinking.
When Martin returned from his latest stint on the road and bearing three black bottles of hair tonic, I told him about the interview at the girls’ school and what the woman had said.
“Do you think it would be all right if I taught her here at home for this first year until we can see better how she prefers to learn?” I asked him.
“Certainly,” Martin said with a confidence that surprised me and with no surprise at all at what the headmistress had said about Kat.
So this is how Kat and I spend the autumn mornings. We work on her letters and simple sums. We string colored beads in different patterns and study maps of other countries and look at books with illustrations of animals and gems and plants. Some days I get out Da’s book and I read off some of the words until we find one she likes and then she attempts to write it. Her favorite word thus far isluminescent. It has always been one of my favorites, too.
Kat, for all her oddities, was born to learn. Everything that I tell her she absorbs like a sponge, though she asks only a few questions now and then.
While I hunger to hear the child’s voice more than just once or twice a day—and I do hear it at least once or twice a day—I do believe Kat has grown fond of me, perhaps even loves me. When Martin is home Kat seems no different than when he is away. She has nothing to say to him and he doesn’t seem to mind that she doesn’t. Mrs. Lewis’s words haunt me a little then, but I imagine Martin feels he cannot change the way Kat is, and therefore what good does it do to worry about it?
The year comes to a close after a quiet Christmas. I make the house as festive as I can with my weekly allowance, bringing in armloads of evergreen branches and a little pine tree that Kat and I decorate with homemade ornaments and garlands. But despite the cheerful look of the house, Martin is his usual aloof self when Christmas Day actually arrives. I asked him a few weeks earlier if he wanted to exchange gifts and he simply replied, “No.” I also asked him if he had any objections to my picking out our gifts for Kat, and he didn’t. His only stipulation was not to give her too many; two or three were plenty. I complied.
Still, as 1905 becomes 1906, it is the first turn of a year since Da died that I am not unhappy with the New Year’s prospects. I am grateful to have Kat to raise and love, and this fine house to live in, and I’m even content with my companion of a spouse. Martin has been hard to figure out, but he’s a gentleman who provides adequately and who has never laid a hard hand on me. And he lets me mother Kat however I want to. I’m certain now that what I thought from the very beginning is true. Martin has decided he is finished with love. Perhaps even finished with lovefor his daughter, as Mrs. Lewis first suggested. He is done with loving anyone. This is his one major flaw, that he let what happened crush his willingness to love other people again. I don’t know what guides his heart when it comes to his kindness toward his cousin Belinda. Perhaps it is duty or guilt. But it can’t be love.
What a pathetic creature he is, I tell myself when I toast the first day of the New Year alone. Martin is away on business even though it is a holiday and surely no one will want him to come calling. I pity him. I do. And I pity my sweet Kat, who will grow up without the love of a father if Martin lets his grief keep him to his ways. I shall love her doubly the rest of my life to make up for it.
I spend January and February learning to fully embrace this truth that Martin has no emotional attachment to Kat and me, and perhaps never will. As March rolls in with its hints of spring, I know I must resolve to be content without any promise of Martin ever changing. I begin to remind myself every day of all that I have: Kat, this house, food to eat, nice clothes, a safe and warm bed, books to read, a garden to keep, a fine kitchen to bake and cook in, a view of the sea within walking distance, warm fires in the hearth, porcelain teacups, fountain pens full of ink, and a spouse who does not beat me.
All of this is enough, I tell myself, over and over. When I compare what I used to have to what I have now, surely it is.
As our first wedding anniversary arrives with barely a moment of recognition on Martin’s part, I vow to wake up every morning—for the rest of my days—telling myself that what I have is enough. When Mam writes to me on the occasion of my first anniversary and asks how I am faring, I write back that I am as happy as I’veever been, because I am. We do not speak of the past. What is the point of it now?
March slides into April. Martin is away more than usual but I don’t care. Kat and I fill the days on our own, and I am pleased to see that she is now speaking whispered sentences to me—whole ones—off and on all day long. It’s as if she, too, has come to some kind of agreement with the hand she has been dealt and has reckoned me as an acceptable consolation for her other losses. She says things like “I don’t want eggs” and “I like the blue carousel horse” and “I need new books.” Martin is more phantom than anything else, and yet the house is calm and peaceful and warm.
It is mid-April now. Martin is away—as usual—and Kat and I begin this Tuesday afternoon with a trip to the library. Then we go for a long stroll down Market Street to have ice cream, and then to a butterfly house so that Kat can see the splendor of a chrysalis and its transformation from crawling worm to beautiful butterfly.
As we start for home in the late afternoon, I congratulate myself on how well I’ve settled in to my new perspective on my life. I’ve even begun to appreciate the singleness of my devotion to merely one person—Kat—instead of having to divide my affections between spouse and child as most mothers and wives have to do. As we walk down Mission Street to catch a streetcar, stunningly gowned women and smartly dressed men emerge from carriages to dine at the Palace Hotel prior to attending the opera tonight. Enrico Caruso is in town, as the posters declare, to sing the role of Don José inCarmen. Gaily dressed skaters readying for the masked carnival tonight at the pavilion are on the streets,too, boasting about which of them will win the thousand-dollar prize. The mood downtown is festive, alight with promise.
When we arrive home at dusk, Kat heads upstairs to her room and I decide to make a cup of tea before getting started on supper. Martin has been gone for two days and I expect he will be gone for two or three more. Maybe four. I have grown accustomed to knowing very little about his stints on the road or even about his occupation as a man who assesses risk for an insurance company. He has never talked about his work, never takes calls at the house related to his job. There has never been work-related mail delivered to the house because, as he finally told me months ago, he uses a post office box for that.
I am not expecting a caller when the front bell rings. As I go to answer it, I wonder if perhaps Libby is coming by for one of her charity visits, which she still grants me from time to time. But when I open the door, standing on the mat is a petite woman with strawberry blond hair and a decidedly rounded stomach. The woman has to be seven or eight months pregnant. She also seems out of breath and maybe even lost.
