And so the opportunity to be friends with Constance Philippa was lost, never to be proffered again.
And there was many an exchange with Octavia, who pressed little treats upon her, in secret—candies, sweet cherries, toast generously spread with marmalade; and who liked nothing better than to give her instructions in sewing, or needlepoint, or crocheting, or cross-stitching; or to fuss with her hair, or her clothing; or to read to her from the Bible, or The Child’s Home Companion, or The Child’s Jesus: dear sweet indefatigable Octavia, who also appeared to be hurt by Deirdre’s murmured responses, as if mistaking timid gratitude for sullen indifference. Deirdre mumbled “Thank you,” her eyes downcast in shyness; and her sister flinched as if she had mumbled, “Leave me be! I hate you.”
How very strange it was, and exhausting, to be forever mis- understood . . . !
(Octavia, at least, did not turn from her in anger and revulsion: it seemed rather that the good-hearted young lady grimly redoubled her efforts with her new sister, even as she met with evident failure at every turn.)
Since Deirdre was particularly susceptible to uncontrolled outbursts of tears in her bedchamber, when out of the presence of the larger family, Samantha was forever drawing away from her, in helpless perplexity, or in weariness. “Oh dear, why are you crying now?” she might ask. “Have I said something bad? Did I upset you? Dear Deirdre, please do leave off crying—you will give yourself a headache—you will give me a headache!” But the mood was upon her, the great dark cloud of despair was upon her, and she could almost hear the spirit-voices calling to her at such times—calling, teasing, tormenting, cajoling: Deirdre, Deirdre, come to us, you are ours. To her credit, Samantha tried to approach her afresh every morn, as if nothing were gravely amiss, and the agonized tears of the previous night were already forgotten. She did her hair for her, with a touching awkwardness; she helped her dress; helped her with the lacing on her shoes. If Deirdre sniffled, she did not sigh with exasperation (as perhaps she might have liked—she was a very young girl herself at this time), but gamely offered her a handkerchief.
As the days and weeks and months passed, shading into years, Deirdre instructed herself in the wisdom—nay, the pleasure—of befriending Samantha: of becoming a true sister to her as, perhaps, she could not, in regard to Constance Philippa, Octavia, and Malvinia. She recognized the slender child’s estimable qualities; rejoiced in her intelligence, and even her precocity; was certainly grateful for her help with schoolwork (Deirdre found mathematics an especial challenge, and even spelling, which she had loved in the old days, was sometimes a problem: for the letters of old, familiar words perversely scrambled themselves in her head); she even believed, contrary to general family opinion, that Samantha’s narrow green eyes, and pale freckled skin, and snubbed nose, were attractive features—prophetic, perhaps, of mature beauty.
And yet, despite these admirable convictions, she could not force herself to like Samantha.
Your heart, dear Deirdre, a spirit one day whispered in her ear, your heart!—how bitter it is, and how wise!
A PAINFUL EPISODE occurred in her thirteenth year, which she was to remember all her life; and to recall, most poignantly, many years later, whilst watching her elder sister in the role of Lady Anne, in Richard III.
For she hated Malvinia—beautiful Malvinia.
She hated Malvinia, and adored her; and oft wished her dead; yet wished—ah, how desperately!—to be her. To swallow her up, to sink inside her, to stare at the world through those amused blue eyes!
“Dear Malvinia,” she whispered against her pillow, “how can you be so cruel? So lovely, and so cruel!”
At the very start of their acquaintanceship Malvinia had tried to befriend her, less persistently, perhaps, than Octavia; but with far more energy and charm. Hugging her, kissing her, fussing with her hair, pressing little gifts upon her—a sandalwood fan that was almost new, a cachet of rosemary she had sewn herself. For it had seemed to Malvinia something of a lark, to have a new sister, so suddenly.
And then, met with Deirdre’s silence, and the reproach of her pale clammy skin, and tearful eyes, she had naturally lost interest. “What a drear little wretch it is!” she whispered to the others, scarce caring if Deirdre o’erheard.
So the months passed, and the years, and one afternoon something remarkable happened: the sisters were seated about a round oakwood table in an airy downstairs room of Kiddemaster Hall, receiving instructions from Grandmother Kiddemaster in the painstaking art of china-painting, and Malvinia suddenly wanted one of Deirdre’s finest camel’s-hair brushes, because her own was ruined—and Deirdre bent more resolutely over the tiny Limoges cup she was decorating, as if not hearing Malvinia, and Malvinia uttered her request again, in a pettish, unreasonable voice, and Deirdre still pretended not to hear, and Grandmother Kiddemaster told Malvinia to hush, and Octavia offered Malvinia her brush, but Malvinia knocked it away, and reached across the table for Deirdre’s, and, when Deirdre drew back, startl’d, said loudly: “You! What do you own! It isn’t your brush and it isn’t your china cup and it isn’t your place, here with us!”—and Deirdre rose from the table and hurried away, and ran to hide in the rear of the house, in the servants’ quarters, behind a staircase: and Malvinia hurried after her, unerringly seeking her out, with a breathless laugh, and a half-angry sob, and, pulling her roughly around, and embracing her, burrowed her face against Deirdre’s neck, and kissed her wildly, and murmured: “Oh, Deirdre, do forgive me! I don’t know what devils force their way into me, and gallop along my veins—I don’t know why I say the things I say—to you and to the others—but particularly to you! Allow me to make amends, oh, do allow me, Deirdre, don’t turn away from me—we might share the same bedchamber—Octavia can move out—Octavia can share Samantha’s room—we might share the same bedchamber, and become loving sisters—it isn’t too late—you are growing up now—and I would try to be good—for I am good, truly, in my heart—oh Deirdre, poor wronged sister, do forgive me—”
It was the moment long awaited, the moment Deirdre had not dared to dream of: beauteous Malvinia with her burnished dark hair, and her pearline skin, and the fragrance of her slender young body: Malvinia who was everyone’s delight, even with the very Devil sparkling in her eyes: now pleading with her despised sister, not only for forgiveness, but for love. Deirdre feebly returned her caresses, and made an effort to press her cool, moist cheek alongside Malvinia’s warm—nay, burning—cheek, and would have blurted out in gasps and sobs her forgiveness, and her love, and, indeed, her worship—had not, at that tremulous instant, a spirit intervened: pinching poor Malvinia sharply on the vulnerable flesh of her upper arm, just beneath her puffed starched sleeve, and crying, in a falsetto voice that was a malicious parody of Deirdre’s own: “What! I! Share the same bedchamber with you! Never! Not a bit of it! Nay, not a whit of it! I! You! Never!”
THIRTY-NINE
That prankish voice doubtless belonged to Zachariah, one of the less civil contact spirits who besieged young Deirdre, when she was in a weakened or fluctuating state of mind: tho’ at that time, at the age of thirteen, she did not grasp the astonishing nature of the assailant, let alone his specific identity. She knew—yet could hardly plead!—that the pinch, and the vicious words, were not her own.
Zachariah, whom Deirdre came to fear. And Mrs. Dodd, whom she most trusted. And Father Darien, with his stern yet kindly voice. And little Bianca, a child of four, who had died of meningitis in 1867. And, upon occasion, Mrs. Bonner herself.
And Captain Burlingame—the Raging Captain, as poor Deirdre called him—who appeared to her always in nighttime dreams, shouting and admonishing and threatening: with a compelling authenticity the other spirits, oft no more than mere wraiths, could not possess.
Less differentiated, however, and far less human, was a veritable galaxy of noisy spirits, a Babel of protesting, demanding, wheedling, cajoling, furious voices, such as commonly undermine the well-being of the untrained medium, and cast int
o confusion any household unfortunate enough to contain her. (It was spirits of this ilk, one must assume, that so upset the family of D. D. Home, and played the more diabolical of the tricks ascribed to the Fox sisters; indeed, this species of spirit no doubt interrupted Deirdre’s piano playing, jealous of the genuine musical ability of another spirit. Raps and crashes and extinguished lights—all manner of noisome “hauntings”—are characteristic of the lower levels of Spirit World, as I am given to understand.)
Deirdre, however, knew nothing of this—she knew nothing at all.
So innocent was she that she thought, at first, with a small amazed smile: Ah! I shall be less lonely.
Much later she was to think, pressing the palms of her chill hands cruelly hard against her eyes: Shall I never be free . . . ?
But such wisdom, alas, lay far in the future: and we have to do, at the present time, albeit in a summary manner, with the Deirdre of fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen years of age: the embittered and lonely orphan who would, out of her heart’s pride, and her great yearning anguish, never consent to see herself, in secret, as a sister.
Despite her natural fear of such malignant, mischievous spirits as Zachariah, and the nameless imps and naughty cherubs who attended him, Deirdre responded with some affection, and not a little gratitude, to the solicitude of Mrs. Dodd, a gentlewoman of indeterminate age—now extremely elderly, now of hearty middle age, a contemporary of Washington’s, and, indeed, a frequenter of the fashionable salon held by Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton in the days of Hamilton’s power and glory; and then again, with what logic Deirdre could not comprehend, and hardly dared to challenge, a contemporary—and a young one—of Ulysses S. Grant, the “most unfairly maligned of Presidents,” in her opinion.
Mrs. Dodd was in any case a presence admirably maternal, not unlike, in fact, Mrs. Zinn, yet freed of that good woman’s ceaseless—and painfully obvious—campaign to love her adopted daughter as if she were her own. (A forced issue young Deirdre, with her sometimes cruel perspicacity, comprehended from the very first.) Deirdre did not mind Mrs. Dodd’s frequent admonishments, and greatly enjoyed her “o’erruling” of Mrs. Zinn’s remarks, tho’ she would have preferred her own mother, after all, but Mrs. Bonner returned from Spirit World mysteriously altered as to her robustness, and her ability to negotiate consecutive thought; and was rarely accessible to Deirdre when she most wanted her. (How very odd it was, Deirdre tormented herself in thinking, that Mr. Bonner did not appear to her, neither as an ectoplasmic shape, nor as a voice. Indeed, this good-hearted man was never to appear throughout the years of Deirdre’s active mediumship—having simply been swallowed up, one must sadly conclude, by the farthest reaches of the Void.)
Father Darien was the spirit of a martyred Jesuit, hideously tortured by Iroquois Indians in the Seneca Lake region of upstate New York, a very long time ago, in the 1600’s; his nationality being French, he naturally spoke English with a marked accent which Deirdre found, at times, difficult to interpret.
And there was little Bianca—headstrong and mischievous at times, yet of a sweet and yielding and, indeed, sisterly nature at other times, in response to Deirdre’s unarticulated need. She could not delude herself, as other girls did, that hugging a mere doll, a silly inert wooden doll, was any true comfort when one was in tears, or felt that the world was truly a wretched place: and so little Bianca, tho’ a ghost child, and the least substantial of all the wraiths, oft wriggled into Deirdre’s embrace, and loved nothing better than to burrow there, and cuddle, and fall asleep to a humm’d lullaby of Deirdre’s: Sleep, Baby, sleep . . . thy Father watches the sheep. . . .
Unfortunately, in Deirdre’s own sleep, the strident Captain Burlingame sometimes appeared, causing the poor child to awaken in sheer terror, her heart knocking in her breast, and her unseeing eyes opened so wide, Samantha, despite her sound good sense, was led to believe that something did crouch in one of the shadowy corners of the bedchamber: and the two girls were almost equally affrightened.
“What does he want of me!” Deirdre wept, striking her small fists against the cotton comforter. “Oh, why does he plague me!”
And the trembling Samantha could only reiterate, in a voice that hardly convinced, for all its equanimity: “There is no he, Deirdre, but only a dream-fragment—only a vapor of mere thought—mere fancy—in your imagination, don’t you see? Come, come now, do stop crying, you know full well that no one—and nothing—can hurt you, in Father’s house.”
BUT THERE WERE other dreams. Equally fanciful, perhaps: yet very close to Deirdre’s heart. Dreams that were not nighttime vapors, but dominated her thoughts even at midday, when, seated at the dining room table with the Zinns (for, alas, the ungrateful child coldly thought of them thus, chiding herself, over the years, if she lapsed into other, warmer usage), she was obliged to partake of their common, lively conversation; or when, in that cozy hour following the evening meal, and the family gathered in the parlor, she was obliged to take up her sewing in their presence, or sing to Mrs. Zinn’s or Malvinia’s cheery playing, or, with lamentable clumsiness, participate in a silly parlor game.
At such times Deirdre affixed her eyes to Mr. Zinn’s face, as he sat, on most evenings, in repose in his chair, reading, or scribbling notes to himself, or staring into the fire (for Mrs. Zinn so sternly insisted, that he remain with his family in the evening, and not repair to his workshop after dinner, as he sorely wished to do, that the good man acquiesced, and came to believe that his “parlor hours” were not only sacrosanct in terms of his paternal love, but positively helpful in terms of his preparation for the next morning’s work). At such times the silent, brooding, pallid Deirdre stared as if mesmerized at her adoptive father’s face, and would hardly have noticed, or been alarmed, if the rest of the parlor and its inhabitants had faded into mere vapor, and off the earth entirely. Mrs. Zinn’s and Octavia’s occasional reading of the Bible—the Psalms, and the stirring Gospels, and the three Epistles of John above all—had the power to engage her interest, but only sporadically; and the rest of the time her mind simply drifted, whilst her gray eyes remained fixed to Mr. Zinn’s face, in an attitude of pettish reproach.
O Father I dreamt that my sisters stood over my bed as I slept and tho’ I was asleep I saw them clearly and heard their cruel whisperings and gigglings oh and Father Malvinia drew out of her bodice a tiny silver scissors like the scissors in Mother’s sewing basket but much, much brighter and sharper—O Father please hear me out oh please do not turn away do not merely smile do not lean to kiss my forehead as you kiss the others—I am not one of them—I am not one of you—O Father please hear me out—please hear how Malvinia your favorite leaned over my bed and snipped at my breast and I cried for her to stop and she paid no heed I was awake yet unable to move even my smallest fingers and toes even my eyelids Father Dearest do not deny me I begged for her to stop but she pierced my flesh she lifted the skin away she touched my heart O O O O Father—
FORTY
On that fateful day in September, of Deirdre’s seventeenth year, the sisters betook themselves to the gazebo above the river, in order to await Mrs. Zinn’s somewhat delayed departure for home: the numerous guests having at last driven off, with many a vociferous and prolonged farewell, and reiterated expostulations of gratitude, for the extreme hospitality and courtesy of Judge and Mrs. Kiddemaster. The future—ah, how happily!—being opaque, to the normal of vision, no one could have foreseen the double—nay, triple—sorrow that would, most ironically, become attached, in the hearts and minds of the Zinns and Kiddemasters, to this particular autumn day. The abduction and disappearance of young Deirdre; the bitter aftermath of Constance Philippa’s engagement to the Baron Adolf von Mainz; and, thirdly, a minor issue at best, yet no less abrasive to the honest pride of the Zinns and Kiddemasters, the inexplicable disinclination of the esteemed gentlemen of the American Philosophical Society, to affirm John Quincy Zinn’s nomination to membership—and after “the tiresome old fools had ate and guzzle
d so much!”—in the words of the elderly Judge.
Such disappointments, however, lay in the future: and at the present time, the young ladies, having retired to the charming gazebo, took up with varying industry their sewing, and sighed with an admixture of pleasure, relief, and simple bodily weariness; for the lawn party had been a magnificent event, and it had been somewhat fatiguing, for young ladies of delicate constitution.
Deirdre, whose head fairly rang with voices, and whose heart was beating most dangerously, found that she had taken up—without knowing it—the crocheting she had elected to do, to replace a scandalously soiled antimacassar on the parlor settee. (“Scandalously soiled,” in Malvinia’s irrepressible judgment: that sprightly young lady having declared it thus, after a Sabbath in which both Baron von Mainz and Mr. Lucius Rumford had come calling upon their respective sweethearts. Both sisters blushed crimson, upon hearing their suitors mocked by Malvinia, and tho’ Mrs. Zinn insisted angrily that Malvinia proffer her apologies, at once, it did seem to be the case that the lace antimacassar was irrevocably soiled—with hair pomade of a greasy texture, and a saturnine complexion: and Deirdre, as much to subvert a quarrel, as to be of genuine aid, volunteered to crochet another at once.)
There had been, initially, much resistance in Deirdre’s heart—as, it may be, there was in all our female hearts, at one time—to the creation of such commonplace household appurtenances; but as the years solemnly passed, the willful girl had come round to seeing that it might be salubrious indeed, for her to absorb herself in such mechanical manual activity, as a means of guiding, or even suppressing, unfruitful and wayward nervous energies. So too did the other Zinn girls occupy themselves: Constance Philippa laboring over a pink smock for an infant cousin; Octavia working at a patchwork panda; Malvinia addressing herself, tho’ without an excessive quantity of concentration, to a needlepoint pillowcase exemplifying the Bloodsmoor River Valley, superimposed upon which was to be, in golden thread, an American bald eagle with spears in his talons; and Samantha decorating a white linen towel with orange cross-stitching, for her sister’s wedding.