Betty, to Sibyl’s occasional discomfort, was Sibyl’s exact age. She was plumper than Sibyl, healthy-looking, russet skinned with a smattering of freckles, as though her cheeks were spattered with cake batter. Her hair was dark red-brown, and frizzy, tied off her brow in a pouf. Sibyl thought her an ally in the house, and Betty provided one of the few sources of humor to be had within doors. If that humor was tinged with an unbecoming undercurrent of anger, Sibyl tried to overlook it.
“Betty!” she called from the doorway, and the hubbub of the kitchen ceased, with another of the occasional girls, a pale waif in a stained pinafore, actually freezing with her arms raised over a mixing bowl, as though caught in a game of tag.
“. . . by God, your ear’ll get boxed so hard you’ll be spitting blood!” Betty finished upbraiding the cowering girl at the coal stove. As soon as the rebuke left her mouth Betty noticed the abbreviated silence in the kitchen, and turned.
“Forgive my interrupting,” Sibyl ventured from the doorway.
“Out,” Betty commanded the unfortunate girl, indicating the garden door with a jerk of her head, and the girl ran off with a squeak. Betty wiped her floured hands on her apron and approached Sibyl, casting her eyes sidelong at the other underling.
“Don’t stand there gawking,” she snapped to the statue at the kitchen table, who unfroze and, with her head down, set batter mixing, eyes averted.
“Too much work, on the dough,” Betty remarked, her exasperation tinged with defensiveness. Sibyl gathered that Betty wished to be very clear where blame for the pie should go. “But don’t worry, we’ll get it fixed. You’ll want supper at seven thirty, then?”
“Mrs. Doherty tells me that Mister Harlan’s arrived,” Sibyl said, watching Betty for clues. News traveled quickly along the back stairs, and most of it found its way to the kitchen sooner rather than later.
“So he did,” Betty said, wiping her forehead with the back of a wrist and leaving a smudge of flour behind. She planted her hands on her hips and shook her head, and Sibyl thought she saw a soft look cross fleetingly over Betty’s face. “Couldn’t miss ’im.”
“I don’t suppose he indicated to you or Mrs. Doherty how long he plans to say,” Sibyl stated.
“I don’t s’pose he did,” Betty bristled. “But his trunk seemed to imply ’twas awhile he planned on. If he’s staying, I’ll be needing more for the grocer. I’ve got all the meals planned, but he throws the numbers off, don’t he.”
“What’ve you got on for tonight?” Sibyl asked.
“Roast chickens, sausage pie, cold cucumber salad, Madeira, and orange fluff for the pudding,” Betty listed. “Had to right stretch to make the pie.”
“That should do,” Sibyl reflected, avoiding looking at the greasy sausage pie in its deflated raw crust on the edge of the stove. “Mrs. Doherty didn’t mention anything at his arrival?”
“Nnnooo,” Betty said, drawing the word out. “But it weren’t quiet.”
“I gather not,” Sibyl said.
The two women looked at each other while the girl at the kitchen table stirred her batter with even more vigor.
“All right,” Sibyl decided. “Seven thirty, then. Have Mrs. Doherty ring the dressing bell, if you would. Not much more than half an hour, I don’t think.”
“Ma’am,” Betty said, with only a hint of irony, nodding her head. Then she turned to the open garden door and yelled, “You, idler! Back in here ’fore I drag you in myself !”
Sibyl withdrew, letting the kitchen door swing closed behind her, and hurried down the hallway, readying herself to face her father.
Interlude
East China Sea
Yangzi River Delta
June 8, 1868
Shallow waves slopped against the starboard side of the cutter, tossing up tongues of salt spray. Lannie thrust his hands into his armpits, squinting. Strange to be in such a low boat, within the water’s grasp. He could almost reach out and brush a hand over the ocean surface, stroke it like an animal. It looked like an animal, breathing, the surface glassy, or pebbled with wind. In his months at sea Lannie had grown accustomed to looking at the sky for coming weather, or the horizon for other sails, or for wind lines over the swells. He had stopped looking at the water’s surface. Now there it was, rolling up and under him, only an arm’s length away.
The other men in the cutter murmured, restless, fingers running through the money in their pockets. They’d endured a long journey, longer than planned, and the mood on board the Yankee clipper Morpheo had passed from excitement, to tedium, to festering discontent. The passage south was bitter; full on two weeks of foul winds thwarting them, as if forgotten ocean gods, enraged by their presence, stirred up a vile brew of wind and ice to blow the little clipper all the way back to Salem, forbidding them the other side of the world.
Around him the chattering of the others swelled, tension growing in their shifting bodies. Lannie shook himself, alert to the change. He couldn’t tell what imperceptible signal meant that the land was approaching. He strained his eyes through the gathering dusk, senses creeping forward. Only blackening mist, and the pull and slop of oars moving them across the surface of the water.
Then, he felt something—a change. The air pulled away from the cool breath of the ocean animal beneath him. Against his face Lannie felt a wave of pressure as the cutter entered the fetid air pouring off the land. He reached up to loosen the buttons on his coat.
In the distance, a line of glittering lights, haloed in mist. The warm mass of air carried shreds of sound: a shout, clattering cart wheels, the faint wail of music. As they neared the shoreline, oars dropping into the water and rising, Lannie’s nostrils quivered with the subtle land flavors: familiar wharf smells first, of salt water, rotting fish, seaweed. Then, stranger things: cooking food, something burning, rich animal smells, the cloying scent of flowers. He squinted, peering ahead.
The dots of light resolved into rows of paper lanterns, suspended in the windows of buildings made of bamboo and daubed mud. These modest dwellings hung over the water on stilts; behind them rose hulking forms that slowly revealed themselves to be new stone office buildings; and Lannie understood that he was looking not at some crowded village, but at a bustling modern city. Before his shock could register, it was there.
Shanghai.
The cutter bumped its way alongside the dock, making a hollow sound as it nudged against the wharf, and a flurry of activity broke out as men sprang ashore to secure the lines. The other sailors in the cutter jostled together, assembling on the dock amid whoops and hollers. The sailors’ voices mingled with the cries of the street vendors and wharf noise, and Lannie quailed at stepping out of the boat, into a world of which he knew nothing.
“Let’s not forget Greenie,” a gruff voice admonished, and hands dug into his flesh, hoisting him up, his feet scrambling for purchase on the gunwale, onto the safety of dry land.
Greenie, for greenhorn, was a name he tried to bear with good humor. A sandy boy, with a fine long nose and eyes the color of water, Lannie at seventeen felt confident in his chosen profession. Cocky, almost. He didn’t mind the close quarters. He loved the gentle creak of the ship, loved its motion, and the music of snoring sailors abandoned to sleep. At sea he delivered himself into Providence’s hands more freely than he ever had back in the brick house on Chestnut Street. At home, Providence always seemed to stalk behind him in the hallways, following him to bed, waiting to pass judgment on his innermost thoughts. On the water, Providence was master; Lannie was answerable only for his actions, and not for the state of his soul.
Even the discomforts of life at sea didn’t trouble him. He never cared much about food, always eating absently, whether roast squab at his father’s dining table or boiled salt pork out of the galley. He enjoyed the rigor of the watches, the technical precision of the rigging, the clarity of knowing what duty required, and what it did not. While the other men went distracted in their craving for female flesh, Lannie held himself aloof wit
h stern self-assurances of his innate gentlemanliness and piety.
Perhaps that was his mother’s voice, stressing piety. Gentlemanliness, at any rate.
He stood on the long wharf off of the Bund, testing his legs, his hands thrust in his pockets. Around him throngs of people pressed, ragged children clawing for money, ageless women with rotted teeth. Multicolored lanterns cast flickering light, and Lannie absorbed the clamor, basking in the mingled fear and excitement that he had craved when signing on as part of the clipper’s crew. The mysterious land of his father’s stories was not some wild fairyland in a storybook, but was here.
“Day breaks on Marblehead,” Lannie muttered, grinning to himself.
A shouted discussion was under way as several of his shipmates, already three sheets to the wind, debated which of the needs of men several weeks at sea should be met first, and in what quarter. The old walled city, or the International Settlement? The French concession? But who wants those bony white Shanghailanders, when the land of a thousand flowers is just along the creek?
After a time the group started to move, a decision not having been made exactly, but motion seeming the order of the night. Lannie had gone barely a block before he stumbled as the ground seemed to undulate under his feet.
“Drunk already, Greenlet! Haven’t we taught you to hold your liquor better’n that?” bellowed the sailor next to him, a grizzled fellow named Tom, who was missing three teeth from a wide hole on the side of his jaw. Early in the voyage he’d claimed to Lannie that they’d been lost when he caught a musket ball in his teeth, but the bosun’s mate informed him later that they’d been pulled by the barber for common rot.
“No!” Lannie protested, looking with confusion at his feet. He lurched, catching himself, without meaning to, on Tom’s shoulder.
“You’ll be needing those land legs again.” Tom smiled with roguish certainty. “We’ve only little time ashore, then it’s back for home and six weeks of salt pork stew for us, by God. And those fancy long three girls won’t have yis, if they think you can’t handle yourself.”
Lannie tried to smile, glancing sideways at his shipmate. Tom’s horrible mouth was smiling, but his eyes were harsh in the fragile evening light.
“Right,” said Lannie, shrugging his shoulders in a way that he hoped seemed careless, but which, he thought too late, could be construed as haughty. Tom watched him, eyes narrowing. Lannie squirmed under the scrutiny, aware that the verdict on him was out.
He smiled again, more fully this time, looking for a way to reassure Tom of his gameness.
“What’s a long three girl?” he asked finally, already fairly certain that he knew the answer.
Tom tossed his head back, guffawing, and clapped Lannie on the shoulder. Lannie felt the tense moment pass as Tom said, wiping his nose on the back of his wrist, “Something tells me you’ll be figuring that out soon enough.”
Chapter Three
The Back Bay
Boston, Massachusetts
April 15, 1915
The front hall of number 138½ Beacon Street, the Back Bay, was a more modern version of the hall that Sibyl had just left at Mrs. Dee’s, though darkened by deeper shadows. The town house, a four-story brown creature with a fat bay window bellying out under an elm tree, possessed a facade obscured by twining fingers of ivy, which cast the hall in gloom. In the summertime the ivy leaves spread dark green over every surface of the house; in the autumn they flushed bloodred, and in the winter the leaves shriveled and blew away, leaving dried husks of vines snaking over the house’s face like ossified veins. Springtime, the ivy burst to waxy life, tinting the shade inside the house with pale green.
The house was built by Sibyl’s father, after his own design, in 1888, and presented as a wedding present to Helen upon their return from a honeymoon tour of Europe. Sibyl’s mother had thrown herself into decorating their new house in the height of modern style, and Lan Allston, not usually an indulgent man, acquiesced to almost every desire of his new, and much younger, bride. As such, the interior of the house reflected in its purest form the incoherence of Helen’s taste.
The hall stand coiled up the entryway wall, a monument to American aestheticism, but still serving its essential Victorian function by bristling with umbrellas and forgotten hats. A silver tray was cluttered with visiting cards, most of them dropped off by drivers as their owners idled outside at the curb. Lan never received anymore. Sibyl glanced at her reflection in the hall stand mirror, her face cast in green pallor from the ivy over the windows.
To the rear of the grand staircase, which wound its vinelike way up to the canopy of the upper floors, glowed Helen’s finest achievement: the La Farge window. She had always made a point of touring visitors past this organizing feature at the far end of the hall to admire its woodland scene of a babbling brook overhung with trailing wisteria, made of nubby layers of stained glass.
“The La Farge,” Helen had called it, always leaving off “window,” though Sibyl as a girl found the scene unsettling. There was something off-putting about a scene like that, moving water captured so cunningly in shattered and reassembled glass. Like a live bug caught in amber.
The pocket door to the front parlor was closed, and Sibyl’s hand hovered above its lacquered surface, twin peacocks furling inlaid tails below her fingertips. There was no telling what sort of mood she might find waiting in the drawing room. Lan Allston wore many discrete faces, and Sibyl suspected that she had only ever seen a handful of them. The one usually reserved for her, a pleasant but closed face, masking general if detached approval, she knew to be different from the one allotted to her brother. Several of Lan’s faces, she knew, had vanished years ago under the surface of the Atlantic ocean.
In silence she slid the pocket door aside and slipped into the front parlor, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. The room was done in varying shades of blue, with dark woods and lacquer. Helen’s fetish for the art nouveau dominated, with tree boughs and curling birds echoed in the patterns on the Chinese rug and in the objets clustered, almost tastefully, on occasional tables. The bay window held benches upholstered in heavy yellow silk, which Sibyl, when small and hungry for sensation, loved to stroke. Velvet curtains blotted out the streetlights. Most of the houses along Beacon had long since run electrical wires to wall sconces and chandeliers; it was a simple process, not even that expensive, but Lan kept the house lit with orange gas flame. He was loath to spend the money, she knew, but she also detected her mother’s preferences haunting Lan’s choice.
“Electric light does nothing for the complexion,” Helen insisted in her mind, as usual delivering instructions. “Women look so well in softer light.”
Sibyl turned to the parlor fireplace, its mantel carved and froglike in shape. Above the fireplace was Helen, or rather a life-size effigy of Helen, caught in swirls of paint by Cecilia Beaux shortly after her marriage. The paint-Helen stood frozen, eyes illuminated by globules of white, her hair up in curls at the back of her head, white collarbones exposed, circlet of pearls at her throat. Helen clearly wished to appear “artistic” when she posed. Sibyl could imagine a naïve Helen in the artist’s studio, anxious to seem worldly, yet uninformed how to do so. The effect was of a young woman unsure of herself, an awkward slipper peeking out from under her gown, one arm folded at her waist, eyes wide, lips about to speak.
As a child, Sibyl liked to sprawl on the carpet before the fireplace, gazing up at the painting like a miniature supplicant. She was supposed to keep away from the front parlor—no children in the good rooms was the rule—so her hours communing with her mother’s likeness were stolen from time during which she was assumed to be sleeping, or working on lessons. Neither Harlan nor Eulah were drawn to the parlor the way Sibyl was; or at least, she had never caught them there on her expeditions to the front of the house. Eulah had no need for a substitute; she could command the attentions of the actual Helen. Harlan, in contrast, spent his energies avoiding close observation. It was difficult, being the son. r />
Sibyl gazed up at the portrait, her mother looking as surprised and tentative as always. Lately, Sibyl had felt the curious sensation of passing her mother in time. She was now older by some five years than the paint-Helen was. A strange dual awareness situated Sibyl, in the painting’s presence, as at once lady of the house, and yet also a small girl, trespassing in a room that was forbidden to her. She always felt the mingled thrill and guilt of getting away with something when she entered the front parlor. Even if she was doing so to receive.
Light from the tulip sconces on either end of the mantel gleamed on the painting’s varnish, illuminating it with lifelike warmth. Sibyl could almost feel sorry for Helen as a girl. Her ambition, her curiosity, her fear: everything that Sibyl had known Helen to be could be read in her youthful face. Everything but what was to come, of course. Sibyl’s eyes wandered to the soft white hand pressing into the paint-Helen’s waist, thumb folded into her belly. The same hand, thirty-odd years older, that had reached out for her from unfathomable nothingness. Sibyl’s breath caught in her throat, and she reached her own hand forward, stopping short of caressing the image of the hand that she had longed to touch.
Ashamed, Sibyl pulled herself out of her reverie, realizing that she was dawdling. Castigating herself in silence, she stepped with authority to the pocket doors of the rear drawing room, allowing her footfalls to be audible on the floor. Sibyl hesitated, pressing her palm to the lacquered door, patterned with twin images of whales entwined with tentacled sea monsters. She inhaled, filling her lungs as much as her corseting would allow, and slid open the doors.