Her body could not sustain a life, Jagr had always told her. It was too weak; her feminine organs had been irreparably altered. He shouldknow: he was the doctor to whom her mother brought Opal for the procedure. She recalled how when he’d finished, he’d helped her sit and patted her shoulder like one might pat a horse, with consolation for being the weaker beast.
And even without that procedure, her husband had explained, she couldn’t have handled a baby, not physically, not mentally, not with herunusual condition.It’s best for you, he’d say because he was always claiming to understand her body more than she did herself. He told her stories of Ida McKinley, the former president’s wife, for whom pregnancy brought on headaches, convulsions, confusion, a brink from which even medicines could not retrieve her.
As Opal lay next to her husband at night, thirty, then forty, then fifty days after her last bleeding, she believed she might burst into a billion molecules. She’d written to Madame de Fleur in France, and two weeks later she’d heard back. She hid the letter among the canned vegetables in the cellar so Jagr wouldn’t find it, and each time he left to see a patient, she took secret pleasure in reading and rereading the woman’s words.
Dear Opal,
The mystics say the wise men followed a comet, not a star, to Bethlehem, to that miraculous baby conceived by spirit. I am no mystic; I am a medium, a listener. It’s clear now—from that voice you heard—you are a listener, too. Remember when I told you that you had it in you, this gift? That last night I saw you? By the river?
You asked me if I believe you. I do. You asked me what to do. I cannot tell you. In France they understand people like us. I know a man here with a Spirit Machine. When he connects the machine to a spiritist, a ghost becomes, in a way, incarnate. The Spirit Machine could tell us—you—more about this baby’s origin. It may provide some comfort to know what you’re saving, or who.
—Madame de Fleur
The owl outside Opal’s window had hooted a melancholy tune:Who? Who? Who?Who was Opal to think such thoughts? She listened for that voice again. Already, she began to feel unfamiliar to herself. It scared her to want something this much.
Opal imagined wiping excrement from a bare bottom or holding a crying child to her breast like a farm beast. She’d helped Jagr birth foals and piglets; a mare had recently died; a neighbor, too. She knew there’d be pain. And risk. Jagr had declared her sterile, and yet now she was pregnant. She didn’t have to be a seer to know how her own life would unfold if she stayed, what Jagr would force her to do with her baby.
A buzzer sounded from the foreman’s platform, the release signal for a break, and the workers on the factory floor set down their materials. The foreman held a megaphone to his lips. “Earthshine Girls,” his voice boomed. “Return to your stations. We’ll be taking our break later than usual.” His voice sounded different, stern but less insulting. A collective groan from the floor, but then two men appeared from behind the foreman, and Opal understood the delay. The owner had finally arrived.
Opal recognized Charles Tuttle from his picture in the paper. He was the kind of man who could be handsome if one squinted. He dressed smartly in a suit and vest. His features were strong but mixed up and slightly out of place: his eyes set too close together, his nose a bit too dramatically sloped.
Behind him stood a pole of a man with a camera strung around his neck. Opal bent down to obscure her face when he raised his camera and snapped the photograph. When she stood back up, the smoke from his flash hung in the air. It wasn’t until the men walked down the stairwell that Opal saw the woman standing on the platform above, appearing to have materialized where flash smoke disappeared.
The woman wasn’t beautiful so much as she commanded the very idea of beauty: manicured hands, rouged lips, brows that had been plucked and shaped into perfect arches. Her hair was parted in themiddle, pulled back on the sides by two barrettes. She wore a walking suit with two rows of buttons that reminded Opal of a soldier’s jacket. Her skin was smooth, new, though not new. She wasn’t young, so much as she was not old. Like Opal herself.
Bertie Tuttle.
Opal recognized her from the papers, too.
Dixie Ellison had reported that Tuttle’s first wife died unexpectedly from influenza. But, then, just as quickly, Tuttle wed again, the daughter of an heiress. His mourning suit molted into a matrimonial costume. His first marriage was born of love, his second of aspiration.
Two years ago, when Albert Bremen, Bertie’s father, passed away, he bequeathed Earthshine Soaps to his son-in-law. To Bertie, his only child and namesake, he left a sizable trust, accessible to her only after she bore an heir.
Dixie Ellison had declared Bertie awife of fortune and convenience. And, yet, Dixie’s column had described Bertie as barren. If Bertie’s field was barren, Opal’s was fertile, tilled, planted. She traced the arc of her stomach bracing against her maternity corset. Her belly was firm where it had once been soft; she could not help but touch it.
Bertie Tuttle descended the stairs slowly. Opal heard the padding of her boots on metal. When she finally came to stand on the factory floor, all the girls halted their work and gave her audience.
Even the factory dog greeted her. Nobody knew where Sudsy came from, only that he begged for scraps in the lunchroom. He was a cross between a Saint Bernard and something mangy, and someone had tied a small brandy barrel around his neck. Bertie bent to pet him. Even in bending she demonstrated good posture, her shoulders a perfect square. One of the girls apologetically pulled the dog by the collar.
“Oh, he’s all right. I like an eager fellow,” Bertie said, straightening, and everyone laughed.
“Hurry along, Mrs. Tuttle,” her husband hollered from where he stood across the room, showing the newsman the soap-stamping machine that pressed the Earthshine mark onto each soap cake.
Bertie straightened and smoothed her skirt, then she scanned the girls standing on the factory floor. Their work slowed but did not stop completely. She let her eyes fall on Opal, then she tilted her head as though to ask:Do I recognize you?She walked to Opal’s station and stood directly in front of her. “What a beautiful necklace,” she said. “I’ve never seen a stone like that.”
“Moonstone,” said Opal.
She looked as though she might reach out to touch it, but then she stopped herself. “Striking. It catches the light. Like an opal,” Bertie said.
There it was, her name in plain sight, like a box had been unlatched and a forbidden object tumbled out. Opal’s knees felt weak for a moment, all water and no bone.
Madame de Fleur had explained the ancient Greeks named moonstone Aphroselene, after Aphrodite and Selene, the goddesses of love and the moon. She said the stone had the power to draw two people together under the correct celestial conditions. She said this as she fastened the jewelry around Opal’s neck, a gift.
“Like the moon,” Opal said to Bertie.
“Perhaps my great-grandfather should have named the soap Moonshine and bragged of its intoxicating quality,” Bertie said, and here she reached out her finger and touched the stone.
After all that would happen—all that people accused her of—it would be this moment Opal held in her memory long after, Bertie Tuttle standing like a gasp of air on the factory floor, her finger delicately pressing the moonstone like it was a button on one of the factory machines. In the moments right before her death, Opal would think of the way Bertie’s eyes connected with hers and how she saw in them something she recognized: a woman stuffed inside another woman, a human nesting doll.
