Song of the Shank

Traveling Underground (1866)

“Light is the exception.”

SHE COMES OUT OF THE HOUSE AND SEES FRESH SHAPES IN the grass, a geometrical warning she does not understand. Blades mashed down under a foot, half-digested clots of earth where shoe heels have bitten in, mutilated worms spiking up through regurgitated blackness — piecemeal configurations, suggesting a man’s shoe, two, large, like Tom’s but not Tom’s since Tom never wears shoes in the country. A clear track, left foot and right, running the circumference of the house, evidence that someone has been spying through the windows, trespassing at the doors. Had she been back in the city, the idea would already have occurred to her that the journalists were to blame, those men of paper determined in their unstoppable quest to unearth the long lost — three years? four? — “Blind Tom”—Half Man, Half Amazing—to reproduce the person, return him to public consumption, his name new again, a photograph (ideally) to go along with it, the shutter snapping (a thousand words). She has grown accustomed to such intrusion, knows how to navigate around pointed questions and accusations. (Ignore the bell. Deny any insistent knock on the door and that voice on the other side, tongue and fist filled with demands. Speak calmly through the wood, polite but brief. Use any excuse to thwart their facts and assumptions. No matter what, don’t open the door.) Yet no one has called upon them their entire summer here in the country, those many months up until now, summer’s end. This can only mean that the journalists have changed their strategy, resorted to underhanded tactics and methods, sly games, snooping and spying, hoping to catch Tom (her) out in the open, guard down, unaware, a thought that eases her worry some until it strikes her that no newspaperman has ever come here before in all the years — four? five? — that they’ve had this summer home. Alarm breaks the surface of her body, astonished late afternoon skin, all the muscles waking up. Where is Tom? Someone has stolen him, taken him away from her at last. She calls out to him. Tom! Her voice trails off. She stands there, all eyes, peering into the distance, the limb-laced edge of the afternoon, seeing nothing except Nature, untamed land without visible limits. The sky arches cleanly overhead, day pouring out in brightness across the lawn, this glittering world, glareless comfort in the sole circle of shade formed by her straw hat. Tom! She turns left, right, her neck at all angles. The house pleasantly still behind her, tall (two stories and an attic) and white, long and wide, a structure that seems neither exalted nor neglected, cheerful disregard, its sun-beaten doll’s house gable and clear-cut timber boards long in need of a thick coat of wash, the veranda sunken forward like an open jaw, the stairs a stripped and worn tongue. Nevertheless, a (summer) home. To hold her and Tom. It stands isolate in a clearing surrounded by hundreds of acres of woods. Taken altogether it promises plenty, luxury without pretense, prominence without arrogance, privacy and isolation. Inviting. Homey. Lace curtains blowing in at the windows, white tears draining back into a face. The trees accept the invitation. Take two steps forward, light sparkling on every leaf. The nearest a dozen yards, a distance she knows by heart. Deep green with elusive shadings. Green holding her gaze. Green masking possible intruders (thieves). She must move, have a look around. No way out of it. Takes up a stout branch and holds it in front of her in defense, uselessly fierce. Even with her makeshift weapon she doubts her own capacities. Look at her tiny hands, her small frame, the heavy upholstery of her dress. But the light changes, seems to bend to the will of her instincts, lessening in intensity. (Swears she hears it buzz and snap.) She starts out through the grass — Tom keeps the lawn low and neat, never permitting the grass to rise higher than the ankles — her feet unexpectedly alert and flexible across the soft ground under her stabbing heels, no earthly sense of body. Winded and dizzy, she finds herself right in the middle of the oval turnaround between the house and the long macadam road that divides the lawn. Charming really, her effort, she thinks. In her search just now had she even ventured as far as the straggly bushes, let alone into the woods? It is later than she realized, darkness slowly advancing through the trees, red light hemorrhaging out, a gentle radiance reddening her hair and hands. Still enough illumination for a more thorough search. No timepiece on her person — her heavy silver watch left behind on the bedroom bureau — but she’s certain that it’s already well past Tom’s customary hour of return, sundown, when Tom grows hurried and fearful, quick to make it indoors, as if he knows that the encroaching dark seeks to swallow him up, dark skin, dark eyes.

Had she missed the signs earlier? What has she done the entire day other than get some shut-eye? (A catalog of absent hours.) Imagine a woman of a mere twenty-five years sleeping the day away. (She is the oldest twenty-five-year-old in the world.) After Tom quit the house, she spent the morning putting away the breakfast dishes, gathering up this and that, packing luggage, orbiting through a single constellation of activities — labor sets its own schedule and pace — only to return to her room and seat herself on the bed, shod feet planted against the floor, palms folded over knees, watching the minute lines of green veins flowing along the back of her hands, Eliza contemplating what else she might do about the estate, lost in meditation so that she would not have to think about returning to the city, a longing and a fear. She dreaded telling Tom that this would be their last week in the country but knowing from experience that she must tell him, slow and somber, letting the words take, upon his return to the house for lunch; only fair that she give him a full week to digest the news, vent his feelings — in whatever shape and form — and yield.

It takes considerable focus for her to summon up sufficient will and guilt to start out on a second search. Where should she begin? A thousand acres or more. Why not examine the adjoining structures — a toolshed, outhouse, and smokehouse lingering like afterthoughts behind the house, and a barn that looks exactly like the house, only in miniature, like some architect’s model, early draft. She comes around the barn — the horse breathing behind the stall in hay-filled darkness, like a nervous actor waiting to take the stage — dress hem swaying against her ankles, only to realize that she has lost her straw hat. A brief survey pinpoints it a good distance away, nesting in a ten-foot-high branch. She starts for it — how will she reach that high? — when she feels a hand suddenly on her shoulder, Tom’s warm hand — Miss Eliza? — turning her back toward the house, erasing (marking?) her body, her skin unnaturally pale despite a summer of steady exposure, his the darkest of browns. (His skin has a deeper appetite for light than most.) He has been having his fun with her, playing possum — he moves from tree to tree — his lips quivering with excitement, smiling white teeth popping out of pink mouth. Tom easy to spot really, rising well over six feet, his bulky torso looming insect-like, out of proportion to his head, arms, and legs — what the three years’ absence from the stage has given him: weight; each month brings five pounds here, another five pounds there, symmetrical growth; somewhere the remembered slim figure of a boy now locked inside this seventeen-year-old (her estimation) portly body of a man — his clothes shoddy after hours of roughing it in the country — an agent of Nature — his white shirt green- and brown-smeared with bark and leaf stains.

He turns her fingers palm up like a palmist reading her hand. Pulls and leads her back to the front door of the house, bypassing the back entrance. Because his eyes are lidded over, all the energy in his face is in mouth and jaw. (Eyes are globes that map the feelings of the face.) He grasps the door handle as if it is a butterfly — delicately, barely touching it with his fingers — pushes the door open, and with a great show of strength turns to carry her inside, lifting her high above the ground, overestimating, throwing her face momentarily into his black cap of kinky hair. She hooks both arms around his thick neck, ringed with sweat, for the ride. Her body against his, she can feel his heart beating rapidly beneath his damp shirt. In fact, he’s exhausted, struggling for breath. Something vulnerable about his features, a child’s earnestness in his unknowing blind face, which gives to his obesity the suggestion of exposure rather than strength, more unaware flesh available for ambush. He takes time to wipe the bottom of his feet against the hemp doormat, one foot after the other, again and again, Eliza stilled in air. They flutter in. He almost drops her when he is setting her down. In the act of balancing she detects a faint scent in the room, the smell of tobacco. Someone has been in the house. Might still be in the house. She latches the door while Tom, sensing nothing, dizzy with the scent of pollen on his hands, grass on his feet, whistling — always a tune buried under his breath — hurries over to the piano — his feet slide like dry leaves over the carpeted floor — which squats like a large black toad in the sitting room. He takes a seat on the bench, removes his hankie from his back pocket, and cleans his face. Returns the hankie and brings his hands to the keyboard, his long fingers fanning out in excitement. Begins playing, his routine, discipline of pleasure. She sets off to inspect potential hiding places, twenty rooms of ample size, upper and lower, sets off, charged by fear she doesn’t dare feel. How quietly she goes above the music rising up from downstairs; she feels lighthearted, competent, in a situation she knows she can handle. Could be a burglar sneaking through some unsuspecting person’s house, increasingly confident and safe, her pendular breathing causing her to believe that she is only moments behind the intruder, just short of reckoning. A feeling quickly dispelled. Expecting everything, finding nothing. Looking through glass, she scans the jagged red-lit landscape impressed upon her mind with the sudden violence of a dream, all those yellows greens and browns separate parts of something, no longer the stable signs of summer sanctuary but disjointed hostile eruptions. She feels even more the need to leave the country at the earliest opportunity, tomorrow or the next day at the latest. Hard to imagine putting off their return to the city. Something real ahead.

Downstairs again, satisfied with her search — check the latches, front and back — safe and sound for now, she settles down on the settee, Tom twenty feet away from her at the piano, his face directed at the ceiling with the height-bound music, his hands chasing one another squirrel-like over the keyboard, Eliza turning speculations about the unknown intruder, mind spinning down to concentrate on her own slowing pulse, buried sense, the music relegated to the edge of awareness as she sits face to face with the fact of herself in this red-bright room filled with handsome well-crafted furniture and plump well-stitched upholstery, light making the objects look incongruous and absurd, lurching in and out of focus like this countryside that lurches in and out of her (their) life with the seasons. She wants to get back to the city, to her (their) apartment. A strong drive to part with this place for good, sever all seasonal ties. Easier now for her to entertain the thought of year-round residence in the city. Everything in between their apartment and this house a mistake. Torn (her) from the city each summer, they holiday here because there is little risk of entanglement, danger from others, the house far beyond the usual hunting grounds. Not that she is not trying to keep them hidden, keep Tom underground.

The facts trip her up. (What she does not say is clearest.) Forced to admit, the city is ideal for her, but not for Tom. Would she dare live here in the country? A city girl her entire life, she’s not sure she’s cut out for the countryside. All that harmony and light. Greenness pulling through the leaves. And flowers blooming out in the heavy humidity of the air, growing things too colorful to look at but nevertheless created beautiful for the delight of man. Scents and nectars and fruits that act as attractive guides for insects. She cannot get her mind around the idea of Nature, Barmecidal feast. Too much to take in. The promised primal power and purity of the elements — fresh air to clear the head, space for the body, rest and reclamation — rarefied to a degree that eludes her senses. There is nothing she desires to map, mount, or measure. So who she is in the country is unclear. Tom’s safety is not reason enough to stay. End of story.

Or is it? The morality is ever changing. (At cross-purposes with herself.) She gets caught in all the choices. What’s bound to happen? What might happen? What should happen? The questions cast long shadows that do not disappear.

She watches as if from a watery distance, a red-tinted vista, dusk besetting the edges of body and piano, profile opening, redefining the boundaries between ivory and skin, muscle and wood. Tom is signaling her, white and black flags moving under his brown fingers, as if he can sense her rigid unresponsiveness — is she holding her breath? — and is determined to break her out of it. This bounteous act, premature calls floating around her. She casts out — what precedes what — to meet them, drawing to herself many points of sound, many others lost, breath held to slow down the reeling in, that which is brought back heard singly (as should be?). What a pleasant feeling to find (sense) her person in an upright position, rebodied, flesh again in a distinct sort of way, no longer just a sleeping form, but a working one, thinking, planning, and organizing, fields clearing in her mind. The sound growing there says too much. She feels it — pinching the keys — in her mouth, teeth, tongue, and gums. She wants to curtail it. Can’t. Her mood rising with each minute. Uplifted. All this music he gives only to her. She’s no expert, but he seems to play better than ever, no part of the force lost, his three-year hiatus from the stage hurting him none. He could step back under the spotlight tomorrow and simply pick up where he left off and then some, his past performance mere dress rehearsal for his prime. All that music still, “Blind Tom” preserved. Words prepared, she wants to tell him right then that they will be leaving tomorrow, but the music chases the idea of departure from her head for the moment. (After dinner, tell him after dinner.)

The splintered edges of a voice. Is Tom singing? No. Speaking her name — Miss Eliza — clearly and cleanly in a way pleasant to hear, the play of a smile around his mouth.

Yes, Tom?

Lait, please.

She gets up from the settee to honor his request, walks down the long tunnel of hall to the kitchen filled with the odor of meat — blood congealed in the cracks and the lined spaces where the floor joins — music following her. Pulls the pantry open (hinges creaking) and enters the cool sound-muffled dark. Bends at the waist and lets her hands search through black air for the bottle of milk kept curdle-free in a bucket of water.

In the light, she fills a slender cylindrical glass to the high rim and makes her return — music drawing her back — steady hand, careful of tilts and spills. But Tom, planted on his bench, fingers skipping like grasshoppers across the keys, doesn’t seem to notice her standing there right next to him. She nudges his shoulder with the glass, and his right hand springs up to seize it while the left continues to pattern chords, arpeggios, bass lines. He throws his head back and takes a deep draft, throat working, until the glass is empty. Pivots his face ninety degrees in her direction and holds the glass — face, neck, Adam’s apple — out toward her at the end of his fully extended arm. Miss Eliza, he says. Lait, please. She knows where this is headed, her feet fated to flux between kitchen and tongue. (Been there.) Might as well bring the whole bottle and preempt any need for orbiting.

So why doesn’t she? He takes more time with the second glass, drinking and blowing melodies into the liquid at the same time. Drains the third — see, you should have brought the bottle, or made a fuss — then bites the rim in place between his teeth, the glass attached to his face like a transparent beak, both hands free to roam over the keyboard. Tom drinking milk, making an event of it.

Milk seeping from the corners of his mouth, Tom sits quietly on the bench — buttocks seesawing over the narrow mahogany edge — facing her (twenty feet — more — away), practicing gestures on his pliant face, each expression holding the burden of a moment — what is he pondering? feeling? — and not for the first time the thought occurs to her that his face is not unattractive, the skin smooth and unblemished, the hidden eyes protruding against the lids to give them a pleasant bell shape, the ears large and relaxed at the sides of his head, close and tight, the nose spread wide and clinging, a bat hanging upside down in sleep. All in all, a look of still calm that he can never fully eradicate from his face.

He’s forgotten all about the piano — the music sleeps between his fingers, which are joined together and resting atop his paunch — and is ready for something else. His arms moving in circles now, hands trawling through the air, like someone swimming. What is it that he wants? She pushes her thoughts (speculations) into his body and face. He wants her to choose a song for him to play. (Yes, that’s it.) She calls out a selection—Waltz in A-flat—but he continues to gesture. She shouts out more guesses, the two of them partnered once again in this dance of communication. He won’t simply come out with it. A game for him, having fun at her expense. Lured (roped) in, she’ll just have to play along, abet him. What choice does she have? Looking at these arms and hands moving even quicker now in strange uneven arcs, frantic, annoyed.

Perhaps what he wants involves some act where words can’t go. She relinquishes her place on the settee, rising up to meet what? And answers with a dance that moves her feet forward, two steps, three, which succeeds (at last) in eliciting a change in Tom. He hears her move away from the couch, hands waving her on. (Advance.) She stays put, and he begins a hauling motion, as if she is attached to an invisible rope. And when she still doesn’t move he leaps up from the bench and charges, face forward, body behind, Eliza startled (confess), not knowing what will happen, knowing nothing ever. Comes and takes her by the hand (left), palm up, and starts to lead her back — now she understands: he wants her to sing while he plays, though she can barely carry a tune — to the bench, where he begins to wedge her down before the piano, bending her fingers back, stretching the seams of her palms, testing the durability of the hem that is her wrist. She sits and he settles into his space right beside her, close enough for her to feel the heat come off him. Sings. (What tongue, mouth, and throat don’t know.)

Sometime later, she salts, cuts, plucks, soaks, scrubs, rinses, chops, grinds, dices, pounds, oil sizzling in the skillet, pots bubbling and boiling, her mind working over tomorrow’s departure, while Tom stands listening at her side (touching distance), swaying slightly — his body can’t keep still — mouth watering, strings of drool webbing his chest, a sticky obstruction between now and tomorrow.

She readies her knife while he hovers over the cutting stand, poking and playing with the dead thing, exhibiting the straightforward curiosity of some innocent — a puppy or toddler — unburdened by any evident capacity for prejudice or appraisal. Her hand claims the handle, blade venturing out to discover the difference between air and flesh. The pleasant rhythm, slice and clack, of the knife, hitting the butcher’s board, traveling from gullet to gut.

When she is done, Tom seizes the knife and begins running it back and forth over the butcher’s board, sharpening silence, his mouth moving, some song just beyond the ear. A short time later he rinses the knife in the sink, strokes it dry, and puts it quietly away in the cutlery drawer. Circles back to the sink to wash his hands and face, water and skin splashed and slapped. Dries himself firmly with a clean towel. She spreads a fresh cloth over the table and sets two places, and they take seats, he on one side and she on the other. He is quite capable of serving himself, his fingers drawn to steam, and already his plate is full, spongy biscuits pushed to the edge, like shipwreck survivors overcrowded into a single emergency craft. Tom bent over his plate, lips quivering — is he saying grace? a new activity for him if so — the same angle he assumes at the piano, one hand rising to his mouth.

Eliza enjoys watching him eat, the physical manifestation of a fact. But she can’t take in much, too much room in her stomach for remorse.

The darkness that comes on them is startling (her momentary blindness, her fear) and complete. She lights the lamps, releasing the smell of kerosene. Tom floats against thin white curtains hanging straight in still air, the shadows concealing, revealing nothing of his color, his or hers.

His skin is ready. He holds his arms closely to his chest as if determined to guard this limited (torso) part of his nakedness — flabby mounds not unlike (almost) a woman’s breasts, belly button in layers of abdomen suggesting the bird’s-eye view of a volcano — and wobbles toward the tub. Hauls his legs up one after the other over the high porcelain side and joins her neck deep in high islands of foam. It’s the only way she can get him to bathe, the two of them together—He never has taken much to water, Sharpe said—two huddled forms stationed at either end of the tub, face to face, an archipelago of suds between them. Two bodies peeling away, layer by layer, soap the substance that obscures when it is smeared across cheek and brow, nose and chin, before running white fingers over muscle, bone, soft places, hard places — knows them all — making it hard to tell which leg or elbow, one outside, one inside, belongs where, to whom. She reaches to slow down his wild hurried hands. Rebuffed, cut short, they go moving like dark fish through the water, swimming to another world.

She grows considerate. Guides him back, hands that work as hard returning as running away. Stroking her face. Down-stroking her shoulders. Drawing warmth across her breasts until he takes tight hold of her silent back. She lets his touch linger, feeling the power of his fingers, this body embracing her reminding her that she is not alone. He reaches up and fists a hank of her hair, letting the strands sieve through his splayed fingers. Hairs pushing against each other, flickering back and forth, a mass of flowers set afire under his water-warm touch.

Two washed bodies, light and clean — she dries Tom then herself, using the same towel made from Georgia cotton — smelling of lavender soap and talcum powder. He dresses her, she him, her form preserved under the wide heavy folds of her nightgown, Tom exotic in his white sleeping caftan and peaked nightcap like something out of an Oriental tale, Arabian Nights.

Back in the parlor she takes a seat on the settee, and he kneels at her feet, rests his head on the altar of her lap. Lets her (needs her to) massage his scalp, harvesting the naps, black buds blooming open. Unexpectedly, he pulls himself up midtouch — short season — and ambles off to the piano, where he sits on the bench, hands positioned above the keys. And he stays that way, still, withdrawn, music withheld, leaving her to measure the distance between them. It’s as if he knows that something is up. (NO, she hasn’t told him.) She feels a deep sense of gnawing discomfort but refuses to let it take hold. NO use trying to draw him in. He’ll find his way to bed. In fact, she should allow him to savor this hour, his final night here. She rises — heavy filled skin — and snuffs the lamps.

I’m going to bed now, Tom.

As might be expected.

With no light to guide her, she starts her ascent up the imposing mahogany staircase — a body wound through space — reaching out for the inclined railing to steady and direct her. Pain sets off in her hand. She realizes that she has actually grabbed the blade-like finial, which is carved in the form of a fiery torch (Sharpe’s idea), with pointed top and sharp spiraling edges, rather than the customary polished globe. Soon finds herself sitting upright on the bed, its circular shape (Sharpe, ever the iconoclast) — a beached sea creature trapped inside the pink and blue and gray squares and diamonds of the crocheted bedspread — so familiar to her bottom and the soles of her feet, yet she feels like an exile in an unknown space, her fears scrawled into words on the unmade sheets. Lets her head fall back into the pillows, her turn to be quiet.

She awakens the next morning in a semi-trance-like state. Shudders loose. Scrambles out of bed. If she slept at all last night she does not remember doing so. (What actual and what the engine of dreaming?) Opens one drawer after another, moves into the closet and dresses for the day ahead. Finds Tom downstairs — he is always up at the first fluttering of color in the sky — seated at the kitchen table, an empty plate before him, utensils set, fully clothed, a napkin tucked into his collar.

Miss Eliza. Sleep well?

Yes, Tom. Thanks for asking.

And how are you today, Miss Eliza?

Fine, Tom.

I am fine today too. The smile on his face is meant for her. No trace of last night’s glumness. (Forgotten? Denied?) The old Tom in full effect. How faithfully he assists her. Pumps bucket after bucket of water from the well out back — the motions come naturally, the trajectory of handle and shoulder — and hauls them to the door. Grinds her coffee. Beats eggs in a bowl, his hands circling faster and faster, while she slices some strips of salt pork and sets them popping in the hot lard-lathered skillet.

The discarded bread crumbs, the empty coffeepot, the quiet sink, the cups, plates, and utensils cleaned and put away — only now does he pick up on it (again), the smell of moving, uprooting, as present and pervasive as the odor of their long-finished and satisfying breakfast. Tom seated across from her, fingers locked on the table, head bowed, like someone saying grace. It’s not easy for her, his silent pleas cutting through defenses. The best recourse is just to get on with it, Eliza dumbfounded once again at how poorly she has understood his feelings.

In the parlor, he calls himself to order. Fits his bell-shaped bowler hat onto his head, a pristine object she hasn’t seen all summer, since their arrival here. Picks up his portmanteau — when had he readied it? — in one hand and his malacca cane with the gold knob, a gift from a former stage manager, in the other, his actions weighing everything with a solemn expectancy. She ties her bonnet in place and pulls the door open, but he remains standing, wavering slightly, rocked shut. She takes him by the arm and leads him out.

An hour later at the rental stable, Tom begins to unload their luggage in neat even stacks directly behind the buckboard, quicker than she can count, a tumultuous rush, nothing she can do to stop him; her admonitions go unheeded. Must be that he insists on believing they’ve already arrived at the train station, the first leg of their journey complete. Stands waiting, leaning on his walking cane, the horse one place he another, as if each, Tom and horse, understands the other is off-limits, the rules and restrictions reestablished. She steps down from the driver’s platform and situates herself midpoint — equal distance — between Tom and the horse, throwing in for show a few demure adjustments of her bonnet to offset the way her hands move into confident position before her waist. The owner smiling politely in the doorway less than fifty feet away, tallying up Eliza’s transgressions and calculating their severity and trying to decide what chastisement or punishment is warranted before finally seeing fit to leave his post and amble over to her. She settles her account with a one-pound sack of sugar, a luxury she’s sure the owner’s never seen by the look on his face. (More where that came from — despite a summer of ounces weighed and measured — all those unused sacks she must lug back to their apartment in the city.)

He places the sack on the running board, then looks at Eliza, looks at their muscled-over luggage, looks at Tom, back at Eliza. You must be after the early train? he asks.

Yes, the early.

And could do with means of transport. He palms his neck and rubs it. Well, miss, it grieves me to inform you that I can’t carry you. He pinches some rheumy annoyance from its lodging place between the corner of his eye and the bridge of his nose then takes a fresh look at Eliza to find out how much damage his report has caused.

She can’t say a word in response.

I’m constricted. You see, my boy is out sick, leaving me shorthanded for the day as is. And I am beholden here, to my livelihood. No getting away. He nods at the road fifty paces off. Try the first able body that comes along. Already he is bending over and grabbing one slender leg, anxious to see what the stallion has dragged in with its hooves. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he unhitches the animal from the buckboard and man and beast disappear behind the closed door of the stable. (The last snort of the nameless horse.)

So be it. She feels cheap and stupid, feelings in no way lessened by her knowing that the owner is of that variety of white man who believes she and Tom hardly deserve his professional courtesy. But he is willing to extend it anyway, clear evidence of his patient and generous nature, his time and words bordering on abundant acts of chivalry where Eliza and Tom are concerned. (Lucky them.) Whatever her true feelings, a proper lady would, at the least, openly thank him while privately counting her blessings and expressing gratitude to the forces that govern the universe. She stands, studying the sound and quality of the air. Small creatures clicking in her ear, the clatter of the leaves, a crow caught in a hot gust of wind somewhere above. She’s reminded how close the South is. How recent the war. (Time comes flying back. What has changed? What will change? What can change?)

The road encroaches upon her like a tightening band, squeezing into view a single solitary figure who strolls along it, shoes thumping in the dirt. Eliza watches the shape with almost scornful incredulity, fearing that she has given physical form to some mad hope filling her heart, and wont perhaps to admit that the stable owner’s predictions (promises?) might be fulfilled so quickly. Notions and motives that seem reasonable enough until she sees a head spin in her direction, a quick look of recognition before looking away, and only then does she believe that the figure is real, Eliza witnessing this brown face catching sight even as it is caught, catching then confirming her presence and Tom’s with additional discreet glances. The Negro seems wary, content to carry on. So why is it that she can’t call out to him, can’t lift her tongue to the roof of her mouth and press a single word out, or at least signal him over?

Sees him curve off the road and begin to make his way toward them, brisk and definite. What strikes her is how the Negro takes the initiative. NO way she could have expected that. Surely, he has caught wind of her situation and looks to gain some improper price. And she will have to pay it. She shuts her eyes tight for a second to prepare herself. Finds him standing with his eyes open in apparent expectation only feet away from her. He’s an imposing man, several inches taller than Tom and twice Tom in years and almost double his weight, but there’s nothing slack about him. Statuesque, chiseled. And perfectly groomed — shirt ironed, collar starched, sideburns trimmed — like somebody for Sunday service but in a manner that seems natural, unobtrusive, as if he had done little more than slip into a fresh set of skin.

Day, ma’m. He lifts his derby then lets it settle back onto the shelf of his forehead, a certain pause in his gestures and a smile poised on his face, deliberate contrivances meant to give her ample time to return the greeting. But her voice is still trapped somewhere inside her body. I can tote them bags for you, he says. His eyes are white and quiet, staring at her. The derby softens his appearance and makes his head look like an egg lodged inside a bowl.

She looks between Tom and the other Negro in a kind of agony. Her faltering now, at this moment, can’t be a good thing.

Lend a hand, Tom says.

The Negro looks at Tom then back at her. What time’s your train, ma’m?

How can such a quiet voice come from so large a man? Perhaps he is dropping it so as not to be discourteous. She tells him the scheduled departure time.

The luggage, Tom says. He makes a pseudogeometric move with his walking stick, part circle and part directive. If the Negro feels insulted he refuses to show it. Only picks up the lightest suitcase and closes the fingers of Tom’s stick-free hand around the handle, performing this apportioning of labor with such diligence and ease that Tom makes an impatient sound — breathes deep once — but does not resist. Then in an acrobatic display, he takes up every piece of the remaining luggage, muscled out in both fists, wedged between his elbows and his rib cage, and — the largest trunk, heavy even when empty — mashed up against his chest and stomach. Leaves not a single bag for her to carry. (She’s paying after all.)

The Negro handles the luggage with assurance — moving matter — like one used to it, although it takes all of his focus to walk in a straight line, trying hard not to display any strain. She can’t remember the last time she’s seen a Negro in this county, certainly not since the days when she and Sharpe and Tom first came here together to spend their summers. Little clouds of dust rise from their shoes, reaching a maximum height three or four feet above the road, slow and lingering dust, hanging in air. Easily another two miles to the train station, and Eliza becomes aware of curious sounds spilling out from the Negro’s body — wheezes and belches, grunts and snaps. Soon — a quarter mile — he is panting furiously, his arms, legs, and back wearying down, giving way to exhaustion. The remainder of the trek is one of constant upset, Eliza fearing at every step that the Negro will lose his balance.

They have come a good piece, and the three of them show signs of it. She can hardly stand, quick to collapse on the settle right outside the door that leads into the ticket office. Tom finds the settle with his cane and takes a seat beside her, still clutching the single bag the Negro had assigned him, arm crooked at his side to keep the bag from touching the floor. The Negro lets all the bags he is carrying fall into the dirt three paces short of the porch. Leans against a vertical post to catch his breath, so tall that he has to lower his head to avoid touching the wood roof under which he shelters from the sun. In all this not a word has been spoken among the three of them. Three people walking and sitting and standing while abiding by a hard bright silence that she did not find disconcerting. (It would hardly have been fitting for her to strike up any conversation with the Negro. Knows well how to play her part.)

He looks at Eliza from under his hat — Ma’m, just giving my arms a rest — before he starts loading the luggage onto a handcart. Takes the last bag from Tom — tugs once twice before Tom relinquishes it — and stacks it neatly on top of the others. Stands there under the roof, head hanging like a horse’s above her and Tom, his face glistening with sweat of the earned type, like a polished badge proudly announcing its achievement. He wants to be paid.

Of course, the Negro will prefer banknotes to sugar. (Common sense.) Thinking such, she removes the three lowest denominations of bills from the drawstring purse she keeps on her person (dress pocket) and holds them up to him.

He throws her a hard disapproving look. No’m, he says. You ain’t got to pay me.

Hearing confounds sense. Had she understood every word, Eliza asking herself although she knows that she has, knowing bringing change. All of this is quite different from the way she has been conceiving it. He simply wants to help her (them). She continues to sit, staring up at him with an amazed and incredulous question. Why?

I’ll tote them on for you.

Sir, Eliza says, I must not detain you any longer. What she says, although she would be happy enough to accept his offer, even let him do it all again, right down to his clumsy performance at the end (luggage dropped in dirt), a mishap that she is willing to forgive, seeing that in these three or four or five seconds they have established something noteworthy between them, formed an alliance to make the best of the worst.

Ma’m, you ain’t got to worry bout that. I’ll just tote them then—

Sir, she says, I must decline. You’ve gone out of your way, her refusal almost lost between whines of gratitude. Let us manage henceforth.

His eyes dart at Tom, as if to read the meaning of what she is saying. As you see fit, ma’m. Beneath his hat he looks disappointed. I should take my leave. He seems reluctant to move. Safe passage. He lifts his hat and tilts his head.

I bid you a very good day, Tom says.

Eliza watches the Negro disappear around the corner of the station, and she continues to watch, not knowing where he has gone any more than she knows where he came from, and debating whether anyone had ever bestowed upon her a greater act of charity. She gets up from the settle, leaves Tom — The tickets, Tom, I’m off for the tickets — and walks with brisk purpose inside the station to the ticket booth, where she sucks in the dense air of the room and coughs a wave of gagging unstoppable coughs (heaves). Greets a small naked face crossed by three black iron bars. A face with too narrow a forehead; the eyes seem to be starting out of the sockets. The face sees only the one standing before him requesting two tickets, but this face does not question her purchase, bestowing the tickets on her with a courtly motion.

She returns to find Tom standing up, on the verge of panic, his cane waving about in the air like a confused insect feeler. She touches his arm and they sit down together on the settle and wait for the train. Plenty of time to kill. More than an hour. The journey here by foot had seemed slow, their own dust getting ahead of them, but it had not been, only seemed that way because (perhaps) of moving through country without another soul around.

The train is just a sound at first. Then it comes all at once, punctual to the minute, great iron wheels and rods slowing beneath the tossing ringing bell, black smoke flaring out of the stack and steam wailing through the whistle, the station full of cloud and noise, Tom moving beside her, his mouth urgent and wide.

The conductor is standing on the steps of the dining car, directly behind the engine, a heavy-built man with a red strong-boned face, bodied like someone better suited to hard labor, laying tracks rather than riding on them. For a brief moment, more a gesture than an act, he glances from his perch toward Eliza, travels on to Tom and sees all there is to see of him, then directs his gaze elsewhere, a dismissal. Steps down hurriedly to the platform and starts a slow walk down the length of the station, but there is nothing to supervise, conduct, since she and Tom are the only boarding passengers.

All aboard!

Never acknowledges her. Never collects their tickets. His dismissal multiplied by heads framed in windows, faces pressed to glass, peering out in judgment. Determined not to let the insult inside her, Eliza takes the time (seconds) to study everything that is grotesque about the conductor, irritated by her powerlessness to force the issue. She gets up easy, like she has no weight to herself, and touches Tom in such a way as to let him know she is not going far and she will not be long. Makes her way over to the handcart and takes down the first item of luggage from the mound, aware that the conductor has already reached the end of the station and started the walk back. Seeing too something else that beggars belief, the Negro emerging from around the station corner, a black mass of speed, moving determinedly with head forward and a fixed from-under stare like a charging bull’s. This entity that shoulders right past the conductor, who, startled, understanding, stops dead still for a moment, looking at the Negro, the Negro continuing on, coming straight for her.

Ma’m. He lifts his hat, and before she can react he takes (snatches?) the bag from her hand, gets another bag and a third, then climbs onto the first passenger car and deposits them into the carrying space, loading and reloading two bags at a time, working with a kind of furious patience, a calmness and authority that surprise Eliza after his deferential antics earlier on. The conductor assumes his perch and hangs there in frozen immobility, his gaze calmly following the Negro, the conductor looking (trying to) more unconcerned than perturbed. (Just for a moment, she catches the fire of anger in his eyes.)

All aboard!

After he loads the heavy trunk, the Negro sees to it that she and Tom assume a berth on the train — moving single file down the narrow aisle, the Negro, Tom, Eliza — one (his decision) all the way at the rear of the car, meaning that they must pass row after row of their fellow passengers — the car half full — proper ladies and gentlemen who are nevertheless shocked and alarmed at this occurrence, drawing back in disgust and (even more) willing to express their feelings through faint cries of protest and indignation and (probably) derision and scorn. Tom takes the inside seat, near the window, passing his malacca cane off to Eliza for safekeeping. Eliza relieved that at least this much is settled. Duty fulfilled, the Negro stands poised in the aisle, waiting quietly — loud breath, silent sweat — looking down at them, eyes bright, as if the lifting and carrying and conducting had been a form of play. She takes it that he is waiting for her to discharge him.

Sir, I’m both sorry and thankful, she says.

Much obliged, ma’m.

Please allow me to compensate you something for your time and effort.

No, ma’m.

Are you certain?

Yes’m.

Iron scrape and drag, the train begins its sluggish pull out of the station.

Well, I best be leaving. The Negro bows slightly and lifts his hat. Ma’m. He shifts his attention to Tom. Mister. Tom neither moves nor speaks. The Negro stands, watching and waiting, the great iron wheels slowly rotating in hope of greater momentum, and succeeding somewhat, a beat or two. Mister. Momentarily he leans all the way over her and touches Tom’s shoulder. Tom turns his unseeing face at the contact. Only then does she notice that the Negro is staring at Tom with a marveling smile. Now she gets it. One poor son of Ham helping out another. Kindness, generosity — it was more than that with the Negro. It was Race and blood, shared suffering and circumstance. But wait — watching him watch — is that the true sum of it? She feels privy to an even greater, deeper, emotion. Apart from anything else, what — she sees in his gaze — can only be described as admiration and devotion, sentiments fully evident — unmistakable — from something in his manner and posture that had nothing to do with strength or height or poise or clothes or their cut and fit.

You can help us again, Tom says.

Much obliged. The Negro tilts his head-hat. Safe passage. Turns and starts down the aisle, swinging his shoulders lazily as he walks, unconcerned about what they think and at the same time very much concerned that they get a good look so as to recognize and remember this man, this Negro, moved by his own words, his own thoughts, made significant and present in the world because he has accomplished something of value for none other than the one and only Blind Tom.

It makes Eliza smile to herself as she watches.

And then he is gone, out there in the steam and smoke. She eases back and relaxes in her seat. Glances at Tom beside her, almost indistinct in bright light blaring through the window, a smile on his face, enjoying the movement of the train as it follows the curve of a hill, leaving the edges of the town to their left, scattered farms and homesteads hugging hurtling earth. A gradual thickening of brown and green until soon nothing but vegetation is visible through the windows (left right). The thought that they are finally leaving the country for the city becomes irresistible.

Mile after mile the other passengers maintain an illusion of civility and pay her and Tom no mind. Only shifting corner-eyed glances. Tensely hissed whispers. Words drifting between words. Diction strikingly precise. A general sense of touchiness all around. She has the greatest desire to start a discussion with these people. To confront them. (Something of the defiant Negro rubbing off on her.) So why doesn’t she?

The conductor enters the coach at the far end with a smile-commissioned face, squat and out of proportion to the visible rest of him under his short-brimmed cap. Starts his way down the narrow aisle, cumbersome and bulky, dodging knees and elbows, exchanging greetings (automatic discourse) and collecting tickets with a supplicating nod of his gray cap. At the appropriate time, Eliza holds her tickets up, and, shoe-leather hands, the conductor makes as if to take them, actually lowers and targets his brim, only to move on to the passengers seated in the row behind. A crude deliberate formula in his treatment.

Sometime later — the next station, the one after that — a soldier boards their car, brass buttons bright against the dark blue cloth of his tunic, varicolored medals splayed across his chest, mapping for the world the war he has returned from (that has returned him). The field saber holstered in its scabbard alongside him an awkward appendage, a rudder steering him this way and that down the aisle. And the hat he’s wearing, the biggest she’s ever seen, looming large on his small head, some powerful ocean-crossing ship bouncing on the peaked waves of his ears. (Does she even see his face?) Taken by glory, another passenger relinquishes a seat at coach front so that the soldier need not suffer the slight indignity of sitting in the rear where Eliza and Tom sit. (Does the soldier thank him?) Before he has comfortably put himself between the cushions — saber removed — even before the train has pulled out of the station, the conductor enters the car and speaks to the soldier with a catch in his voice and a smile hung on the end of his words. Takes his ticket. Nods his thanks and good wishes. Then he brings himself before Eliza and asks for her tickets with triumphant malice, his eyes lit sharply with exactly what he thinks about her. She produces them and he accepts them, satisfied with having the power to diminish and delay, even if he must capitulate and perform his job.

He slides away down the glistening aisle. They are speeding through space, tracks catapulting them toward the low sun, the city, toward home. Her bones jerking and shaking. She feels no more solid than the disparate streams of smoke swimming past the window, kicking their skinny black legs, bringing (now) the smell of fire with them.

Traveling north through a continual cascade of trees, moving between dialects and regions, a rise rich in territorial overtones. Unclear to her the national claims, where (before the war) what federation begins or ends, no line of demarcation, no sharp defining difference — they cross the river — separating one state from another, between there and here, only this river curving them into a view (window) of a halo of motion on the horizon, then, an hour later, sun sinking into the dark waist and a flaming flower rising up, the glass glistening with its fuzzy light, the city’s brooding skyline, growing across the distance with each closing mile, waving its petals of roofs and towers, domes and belfries, factories surmounted by smokestacks and churches surmounted by the cross.

The conductor jams his body in the door to keep it open, wind rushing in and something inside the coach emptying out, all speech and sound snatched free into the world. Eliza actually feels her insides suck; drowning in the air. But the conductor only stands there smiling (back) at them, features distorted under the rushing wind. After a gradual easing off of speed, they pull into the iron-vaulted shed of Grand Central Depot, a structure as big as a cathedral and possessing many of the same Gothic affectations.

The entire production of leaving the train, walking through the station, and passing out of its wide portals takes only a few minutes. Panic and anger and the beginnings of elation all in an instant. The point is to hide right out in the open, put up a front of normalcy and routine. Nothing out of the ordinary here. No crossing of boundaries that should not be crossed. But suspicion permeates every syllable and glance. They think he is dead. “Blind Tom,” the eighth wonder of the world, the Negro Music Box, for her eyes only. His three-year absence from the stage having produced tenfold theories about his death. Strung up during the draft riots. Frozen in Alaska. Drowned in a Pennsylvania flood. Consumed by fire in a London hotel. Caught under the wheels of a railcar in Canada. The victim of a soldier’s bullet in Birmingham. Felled by his own heart in Paris. Felled by his own hand in Berlin.

Tom gives her hand a little tug, meaning, Let’s move a little faster, Miss Eliza. Distracted by their return to the city, she only now notices his distress. A timid destitution has closed over him, a folding in on self (collapsible flesh), which forces him to walk in a slouch, Tom conscious of being watched. Wisps of panic begin to flicker through her brain.

Eliza is already searching for a taxi among the many lined up one after another curbside, horses parked head to behind, their drivers outfitted in ragged and ill-fitting frock coats and stovepipe hats, attending to their carriages cheerfully, dancing around the wet slap of dung hitting hard ground. If only their good mood could work in her favor. The first just looks at her in a dull unresponsive way, her request left stinging in her throat. The next waggles his head from side to side. It gets worse after that — shouts and curses, faces turning away, glares that promise pain. She approaches the final driver in the queue, thinking that this may be the occasion when they will have to walk home. But why give him a chance to refuse? But the driver only smiles back at her delightedly from his perch as if he has never seen anything funnier. She calls out to Tom. Tom passes her his cane then heaves his considerable bulk into the cab next to her, leaving the porter to attend to their luggage. The taxi does just hold it all.

They ride out into the strange wonders of the city, trundling across dry bridges and wet streets rivering up out of twelve canals, a city stitched together by water. Houses and buildings pushing against each other like contentious waves. The glow and hum of the gaslights clinging silt-like to their frames. Their windows crawling with lurid light. Shadows of people moving behind them as if performing (for her). The factories and mills burning even at this hour. The shops still open for business, many hundreds of objects arranged so as to arouse desire. People tumbling out from restaurants and saloons or leaning against the crossed telegraph poles from which black bodies had hung during the draft riots. The entire city welcoming her back. How happy she is that they are safely hidden within the hooded cab. They took something away from Tom, and he’ll never get it back.

As they drive deeper into the city, it seems to her that hundreds and thousands of facts crowd into memory. The reek of feces and urine, lime and kerosene. The air stinging her skin with some invisible but definite spray. This crisscrossing of the senses too much and achingly familiar. The tiniest details recognizable. (Seeing them now?) Before long she can feel her whole body revive. Strange how altered the city seems after a summer away. Unreal. The wagon moving faster than warranted, bouncing them into the unmistakable dimensions of Broadway, a wide well-lit boulevard running like a river of whiteness from one end of the city to the other. (The boundaries stay clear.)

Tom’s ears perk up. They have only to take the next corner, follow this last street, empty and mute and dark (dim lamps stationed far apart), which presses in on them like the walls of a narrowing tunnel. Tom relishing (smiles, grins) these bumps and declensions. Under inspection, the corners and lanes scramble to order, form a neat row of identical nondescript five-story residences reflecting the crude elemental law of symmetry, which has directed much of the layout of the city. She tells the driver where to stop. The facade pleases the observer (the broader view) because it looks so gray in keeping with its actual age, but sturdy, able to withstand. The brick — she wants to believe she has memorized each one — honeycombed with bullet holes. Every window is open, except theirs — a sultry night despite the time of year.

The driver will take the luggage into the vestibule and no farther.

Tom gets out of the cab unassisted and, golden-headed cane in hand, hops shifts and hobbles along the sidewalk up to the building entrance, his hat flying away from his head, Eliza behind him struggling to keep up, walking deeper into the darkness, away from the gaslights. They walk through the heavy door, pull moonlight in, and start the five-flight climb, Tom wheezing fitfully from the effort of lifting his ample bulk, voices from the street following them up, loud, night-singers, and frenzied laughter and shouts, mixed with the erratic barking of neighborhood dogs.

She rattles keys at their door. The one that should won’t turn the lock. Tom clings to the banister, alert and listening.

I’ll need to go fetch Mr. Hub.

Tom makes a slow sound of assent. As might be expected.

Forcing himself to immobility, remaining at the banister while she descends five floors — six? — to the basement in search of Mr. Hub. The Hubs inhabit the smallest dwelling in the building, the sort of place you see all at once upon entering. (And she has, once or twice over the years.) They have a bell and a knocker at their door. She tries both. For quite a long time nothing happens. Mr. Hub is someone who usually rushes to answer a bell. She knocks and rings again. That sensation that has to do with a shut door. Mr. Hub answers, a ripple of surprise passing over his face, that shapeless lump jammed into the angle of opening, little circles where the eyes should be as if thumbs have gouged in. (How he always looks or only the pallor of the late hour on his cheeks?) He smiles, nods — Mrs. Bethune — trying to hide his discomfort. Hovers anxiously in the doorway, looking leaner than usual, perhaps because of the bedclothes. Eliza used to seeing him in denim overalls, a rag fraying away in his hand.

Now his wife, a gaunt woman with stern pale features, is standing behind him, holding her dressing gown at the collar, flanked by their children. Eliza cannot recall a single instance when she has heard the woman speak, even in greeting or to chastise one of her offspring.

I’m sorry to draw you from your bed. She tells him succinctly about the key and asks him to look into the matter.

Yes, Mrs. Bethune. Of course.

They hasten along, Mr. Hub rising before her with a three-foot candle, which he carries like a sword at his side. He is low and stout but lunges his body up the stairs with long strides as if someone is pushing him from behind.

A most peculiar thing, she says, the key.

It ain’t the key, Mr. Hub says. A lock can shrink and swell. Like most things.

She sees the logic of that.

Mr. Hub reaches the landing where Tom is standing against the banister. He barely acknowledges, a peep, a nod. Puts his whole body before the door, hands working, and the door springs open. There. He lights the candle, stops at the threshold of their inviolate privacy before passing off the candle to her.

That tallow’s still got some life. The wife will be wanting it back.

She looks at him dubiously. This small matter. Burning wax. Will the morn be soon enough?

Certainly, missus. Make as much use as you need.

She informs Mr. Hub about their luggage waiting down in the vestibule. Okay squeezes out of his eyes faster than his mouth. He holds out a new key to her. You’ll be needing this, he says.

She takes the shiny new key, wondering how it confirms or contradicts his theory of contraction and expansion.

He starts back down the stairs, Tom still, waiting. Only when Mr. Hub’s footsteps have died away does he move, half-stumbles half-dances into the apartment. Continues on, the fingers of one hand touching the wall, a map to orient him, the carpet muting the sound of his and her feet.

They gain the sitting room. Using the candle, she lights a lamp and steps to the center of the chamber, surprised to find that the entire space has been dramatically transformed into a cube of dazzling white. In their absence someone — Mr. Hub? — had entered the apartment and liberally coated the walls in several layers of fresh wash. The room seems otherwise undisturbed, furniture and lamps collecting dust and spiderwebs. Tom’s piano is the dominating object, black and shining (had Mr. Hub polished it?), rising like some rocky formation — a butte or cliff — out of the carpeted floor. Overall, the room produces (the long view) a strange impression, spacious (airy) but subdued, because of the limited light, the shadows, black vectors. The first thing she’ll have to do is to open all the windows, for the apartment has not been allowed to breathe for months now.

We have returned, she thinks. Feels her body subsiding to the calm thrill at being home.

Tom gives her a sudden and delighted embrace, squeezing her to his steeping softness, her body crushed against his. The back of his jacket is wet with sweat, and his body reeks of coal and exhaustion. He speaks into her neck.

Lait, please.

A clean form in her line of sight: Tom seated on the piano stool, arms crossed at his waist, clutching the corners of his body (elbows), guarding his borders, trying to remember where he is. He is in a bad fix, dejected, has been for days, since their return. Has seen reason to do little more than position his slack pounds on the stool, head bowed, the piano blankly waiting for him. No music has broken from his fingers for hours, having long since moved away from the morning’s mazurkas, inventions, and variations. The only sound that of her struggling to remain upright on the thickly upholstered settee, along whose velvety seat she has been sliding all afternoon. All of the furniture feels wet — the room filled with the pungent smell of salt, scales, and sand — as if deep in the insides of something living. Sitting with her feet in water hour after hour, that dark expanse of carpeted floor beneath her, she could not have gauged with any accuracy the duration of the silence. (What is it she wants to say?) Sunlight expanding and contracting with passing clouds, creating the feeling that the room is a great bellows, opening and closing around them. The whole while her own quiet voice carrying across this fluidity of space, nothing to answer to, its sound coming back at her again and again, never failing to make her feel useless and alone, at fault, as if they have both failed. A gradual falling away of words until no words at all. This is just how he is, mute and inaccessible, he looks flat and unreal, like a silhouette cut from paper, the resident shadow flickering in and out of vision, lips folded, biting something back, and she must suffer the effort of watching him. She smiles to comfort him, an instinctive but utterly useless response. Strange how she still slips up even after so many years. Of course, he can’t see the smile, can’t even guess at her expression, since all he knows is confined within the reach of his fingers. Other acts of kindness surface in her mind but she knows better than to try. (Her claim on honesty.) Only Time will put everything to rights.

He shifts his bulk on the stool, and she bobs slow passage across the room, trawling past the piano’s oblong front to windows that cut the sky into four sparkling pieces. Where sea and boats can be had. Why this feeling of out of placeness? She lifts one window as high as it will go and props her elbows on the sill, upper body on the other side, head lowered. What is it that she hopes to see? Edgemere perhaps, but the dazzling light hides the island from view although she knows it is out there only a few miles away. Is Edgemere where Tom belongs? Would he find life on the island with other black people more suitable? The urge to take him there sometimes comes over her. (Admit it.) However, the world below her window (the city) is absolute in both its certainties and its dangers.

She thinks of her life with Tom as necessary, pressed on her. Not that her situation is all bad since there is the music to console and comfort her. (When he plays.) And when she gets her fill of his company, when she needs to put some distance between herself and Tom, she can put her head outside like this. She compels her aching chest to hold in lungfuls of pure ocean air and lose them quietly, breath rattling along her ribs. Her unbound hair drops, thick, flying, far short of the street five stories below. Empty distance. Nothing touching. Nothing close. (Is that what this is about, things falling short?) Perhaps it is best that way. Birds dive close to the water, too close, catch the currents, carried under. (This detail strikes her as excessive, pure invention.) The boats — white triangles, tiny pillars of black smoke — going backward now, like retracted thoughts, half-told secrets.

She remembers it this way, how she came to on the settee, faint moonlight floating in the air, unsure what had awakened her, unwilling to believe that she had actually dosed off. In truth she could not tell, having lost track of time, a terrible lightness to her body. Deprived of sleep over the past crush of days, maintaining a pitch of vigilance at the windows for hours at a time, mornings/nights curling around her like smoke, taking in shouts screams gunshots hurled obscenities sobbing pleads hurried prayers spit-laced laughter rollicking applause invading her apartment from the streets below. Heard urgencies that sounded completely different, depending on whether her eyes were open or closed. Which brought pictures upon entering the brain, her attempt to map the featureless surround, for what she could actually see — flickers of fire shooting upward — was limited since her apartment offered no view of the street, only the usual, the sea.

The more she watched the sea, the more it proved it could hold: a dozen crashing colors, schools of Negroes gone fish — fleeing the city was not a thought that had crossed her mind; her husband was out there — in the dhows that made their livelihood possible (fishing, ferrying, the transportation of cargo), in other small crafts, or with nothing but their bodies, a kind of oceanic monster of faces and limbs, sails and oars, tossed around in the rough exhaustive currents. Lights shining far across the water from the island of Edgemere — how else could it be seen? — were uncertain and distant. She supposed the island was within reach, even for those with only their bodies to carry them. In reach but far away. Some would not make make it, would drown. If only these Negroes had some Moses who could part the water. If only — not to put too fine a point on it — they could walk on water.

Had she already put an end to any form of hoping? How many days had it been since Tom had left the apartment in the company of Sharpe and the manager? Close to a week? Even as chaos was breaking loose in the city neither her husband nor the manager had considered canceling the concert. Days of waiting and wondering — Sharpe? — spreading in her head, on the verge of shattering it. Sleep was compensatory. Stripping her of consciousness.

What had she missed sliding in and out of sleep? The room sounded soft and hollow. The world seemed to have quieted down outside her windows. Was it over? That question in her mind, she shifted her gaze to the shadow cast by moonlight striking a lamp shade when she sensed a new kind of darkness, different from the darkness she had been experiencing until that moment, bleeding into the edgy air, beginning to burrow into her consciousness. She sat up and looked around. At first she thought she was hearing the outside, a resumption of the chaos, the violence. Then in the illuminated darkness she could make out a form curled up under the piano. She went over for a closer look and found Tom wedged in the cave of space formed by the piano’s spindly legs and heavy chassis, knees tucked to his chin. She gave herself time for two deep breaths. She had not heard him enter the apartment. Back without a sound. (She had fallen asleep.) How had he found his way back? How had he gotten in? No key of his own that she was aware of. Sharpe’s key? And what about the others? Where were they?

When she spoke his name, he shuddered, stirring up the dust floating in the darkness. He raised his head in her direction, his face in the shape of a snarl.

She took in the brutal aspect of his person. She dared not strike a lamp. Only this light to prove that he was actually there. He was still outfitted in recital dress. One jacket sleeve had been almost completely ripped away. The front of his shirt had a large black stain shaped like a butterfly. And his pants legs looked as if they had been singed, one cuff nothing more than straggly ash. His head and face had been spared, except for missing hat and one ear that was aglow with dried blood.

You found your way home.

Tom remained perfectly still.

Where are they? Sharpe? Your manager? Thinking, Tom has the answers.

He let out a breath she didn’t know he was holding.

Dawn came, a tiny crack separating one world from the next. A new day began to take shape. An unbroken covering of white clouds — clouds few enough to count — hung in the sky, clear and precise, textured as never before. From somewhere smoke funneling black and back on the wind. A single gull lent its monotonous cries to the scene.

The sun angled high and struck the surface of the piano, day giving her her first clear view of Tom, throwing too much light on his form. The boy holding himself, clutching the sum of his life. Then his arm lifted, a long shadow cutting across the emptiness and venturing out toward her—Miss Eliza (did he actually say it, or is she only remembering?) — and she stepped back, out of reach, a body reaction. He opened his mouth and the sound escaping it was all Negroes in one mouth.

No, Tom. They’ll hear. It’s not safe.

Trying to quiet that sound twisting through her head. (What the human mouth can bring into being.) After a time, it weakened and finally gave out altogether, only a few clumps of noise that still hummed in his body. In the stairwell outside, someone was passing by, speaking in a loud voice. She couldn’t catch the words. She had to wait, too soon to try Tom again. So for a while he stayed put and she stayed, only three feet — maybe four — separating them, Tom hanging in her eyes, an intrusive speck that couldn’t be blinked out.

Miss Eliza, he said, almost as if he realized she was waiting for him to speak, give her a full report.

She tried her questions again.

That sound tolling a response. Enough with the questions for now. Is it that she sensed more than the tongue could say? Coated his mutters and groans with emotion, hearing them as her own?

The piano seemed to assume Tom’s shape, the flesh hiding underneath it, covering it. So it was, he believed that she couldn’t see him nestled inside the hard black excess of his containment. Tom (indeed) in a place far removed from the bounds of her consciousness. She felt both pity and frustration for this boy, hiding, with or without her, innocent of outcome. Could not recall a single instance of being alone with him, always a trio with her husband or the manager, a quartet with her husband and the manager. How to breach the divide? Sharpe had given Tom much patience and correct words. He spoke to Tom in a quiet voice that he made stern when he had to, and tolerated her awkwardness around the boy.

Before she knew what was happening, something wet streamed down Tom’s face, one long spill. On closer inspection she saw water puddling at the concave of his shut eyelids, a drop slowly separating from the lash and speeding to the floor. A discovery: the blind can actually cry. (How had she escaped noticing this among the blind children at the Asylum those many years ago?) Might it be that the images she needed, the unsayable truths — where is Sharpe, where is my husband? — were trapped inside the salty liquid, dripping to the floor, lost forever?

With her eyes closed, she saw Sharpe, the manager, and Tom leaving the apartment, their coats cut generously to accommodate them, three attitudes of self-assurance. Stacks of programs — under whose arm? in whose hand? — still smelling of the printer’s ink. Everything connected with their departure remarkably fresh and distinct to her.

Time wound around her. All right, then, she thought: here I am with Tom. Backed up on all fours under the piano, like some animal in hibernation. Still for hours at a time but for fevered motion that quaked through his shoulders and teeth. Now bent over, a praying Mohammedan, driving his face into the floor. Crawling on his bloody knees to one corner, and crawling back to his cave. Or twisting and turning like a troubled dreamer, the backs of his hands shining with bruises. Whole days of this, Eliza hovering in clear orbit above him, afraid to sleep, for without constant attention her floating body would be carried off to another world. Tethered directly overhead while the boy’s torso swelled and his limbs cramped, while his skin grew gray, his body giving off waves of stench, a sour orange-yellow smell, and the air in the room (she felt) thinning out little by little.

Then she heard something snag, and the boy let loose with a flood of urine. She watched, poured into a strange heaviness. Only the sound of Tom’s heart fluttering around inside the empty birdcage of his chest. Then nothing. Not a twitch or twinge. Bereft of sound, of movement, he seemed so far away. She knew he was dying.

She had to move her body, begin working toward some goal. She went over and touched him. (Touch is the body’s sense.) He was cold to her hand. She lifted his forearm and it flopped back to the floor. She shook it vigorously once or twice like a dog with a branch between its teeth, but even then he didn’t stir. Nothing. But she was sure she felt a current just under the skin. A stuttered beat. Which could only mean that she had to do more. Kneel now into that puddle of urine and get wet, her petticoats gathering in the warm scent of his shadow, her knees squishing, her ear pressed close to his chest — she bent so easily — a thorough examination. (How else?) In an instant, he began to warm, as if something of her was seeping into his skin. Her hands bearing down on his back. And this body that had been holding its shape unfolded, extended into the room. The heavy down-directed sun seemed to aid her, pressed his mouth open, the black inside punctuated with teeth, a heavy expression of breathing and hunger.

Before long, the first sip of water, the first nibble of bread, the first bite of an apple. Then utterances, words or parts of words, language springing back. Food and liquid reviving his tongue. Why was she so entirely agreeable to the task? And why did he accept her comfort so easily, trust in her voice and her touch?

With his damp nose nudged deep into the crook of her elbow, she began to run through ways she might gain more, what she might resurrect, bring forth from the blood, stink, and sorrow. He was and was not like what she was. (A young Negro of the male sex. A musician. A southerner.) Before anything else, she had to draw him out from under the piano. But he wanted her to sit beside him on the floor, his insistent hands stretching up to her own, and when she was there, he pressed her and touched her as if she had just returned after a long absence. He wouldn’t tolerate any separation. (This body holding her.) Came upon her like a shadow, forever hovering around, getting in her way. Whenever she was seated on the settee, he settled near her on the floor, trying to get comfortable, with his head propped against her knees. The need, attention, filled her with a strange elation.

His hands came flickering up through the light, like dark moths, as if they would tell her something. They didn’t.

She told him, If I could have a word.

Put one question after the next to him. He told her nothing. But she had better say the words while she could. No intention to speak them ever again. (Too hard with words.) Truth to tell, weren’t the questions a form of avoidance? What she had been moving along to in her mind was this: What will I do with the boy? But she was too balled up with comforting him — mothering? — to think past this moment. (The future sensed beneath the present.) What would come later she could think about later. The last thing she wanted to do was think, acknowledge the sum of what was, Sharpe, her marriage. Could she have changed the outcome had she accompanied them to the concert?

Separate from Tom, the piano looked like something foreign, something that didn’t belong, a sea creature washed up onto a beach. She remembered herself. Thought about the trapped bones of her own body. In the months to come, she would have plenty of time to weigh both her suffering and her hatred, for wishing damnation upon the sea. (There to remind her, the city’s sins resurfacing in the water, never under for long.) Right here, right now, she was content, taken with the strangely tangible impression that something had come to an end. She could feel it in her face. Knew that she and Tom were either at the start or finish of a life. Eliza and Tom, new to each other.

Tom sits at the piano in postsupper stupor amid long shadows in the gathering dusk, tugging at his belt, trying to wrestle his waist in place, a body slumping at the edges, slowly losing the pattern of its own dimensions.

The windows glitter with faint fluorescent shapes, lines of fading sunlight shimmering on the walls like the red strings of a guitar. The piano holds the sunset’s color. She hears light drumming on the keys now, like shells rattling in a boiling pot. Thousands of tiny tinkling hollow echoes. The boats seem to move in time to the music, at the mercy of the rise and fall of Tom’s hands. They continue their forward advance, moving farther and farther away until they are about to fade from view, an ever-widening wake, but they will never arrive, reach their destination, caught, under Tom’s control. Must slumber a new course. That sonata he is playing, each controlling finger made to lift alone. She listens with inward breath to the way he pushes deeper into the keys, so many notes overlapping in this room, so that no note ever sounds alone.

For a long time she goes on listening. He will play the entire night. (Let him, as long as Mr. Hub brings her no complaints from the neighbors.) Watching him, she feels as if the flow of Time is slowing down little by little. She strikes a match, igniting wet wicks, the lamps humming, coating the room with their expected flush.

Toward the end of one afternoon a week later, Mr. Hub comes for the return of his tallow candle. The missus sends me. How had she forgotten, even with his almost daily appearances at her door? The bell pulls and she opens it to find two fresh bottles of goat’s milk sitting outside the door, like mushrooms that have sprouted up through the floorboards. In his darned coat and scuffed shoes, and bearing about him a smell of lye and ammonia, Mr. Hub runs errands, sees that her deliveries are sent, and receives her mail, what little there is, from the postmaster. He has a real talent for the execution of such practical duties, never complains and will consent to any request without argument, grateful for the small fees he receives, these supplements to his meager caretaker’s salary. Standing in her doorway with a happy face, the gay animated expression of someone with fascinating things to relate, although he never reports matters of consequence. She listens with keen indifference, in no hurry to deepen her relationship with him. In fact, she senses a kind of uncertainty in him. Exactly what she can’t say, but it comes every now and then in his words or actions. She might ask him something (I don’t believe I thanked you for touching up) and a single breath will intervene before he answers (I’m not deserving), just the slightest hesitation, but in that split-second interval she senses a kind of shadow of menace or distrust.

So kind of you to do it while we were away, sparing us the inconvenience.

It wasn’t up to me, Mr. Hub says, no change in expression. A man was in your apartment.

She heard him. Had she heard him?

I was making my rounds. And I saw that the door was open. Just a pinch. You could have missed it. He was sitting on the couch like the most natural thing in the world. Gave me the scare of my life.

She waits for him to speak, waits to hear his words.

I supposed him an apparition or God knows what. But he was nothing as terrible as that. Just a colored. All dandyed up. Imagine.

She tries to.

Never thought I would set eyes on another one. Here, at least. Not in this city.

Already she is flipping through a mental index of her past acquaintances, remembered and forgotten. Could he—a colored—be someone from her past life, from the Asylum?

He didn’t bother to hide. Just sitting there, like the most natural thing in the world.

She wonders what kind of man this is who would brave the dangers of the city alone. What did he want?

Mr. Hub draws his lips slightly to one side. Your guess is as good as mine. But you can bet money, he would have robbed you blind had I not chased him away. I keep my hammer on my person. He shows it to her then returns it to his coat pocket.

Did he say anything?

Just some gibberish, trying to talk his way free. He asked for you.

For me?

He asked your whereabouts. I’m sure he took your name from the bell. He knows his alphabet, that’s for sure.

And nothing else?

He tried to hand me something, but I didn’t let the wool slip. Mr. Hub shows his hammer. Yes, he was a slick one.

What was it?

I barely looked. I figure, why stand for more lies? Given an ear, he might claim your relation. The king of England. God knows what.

The same intruder, she thinks. From the country. What can she do besides listen? A foreign body had entered their home, their space. What if anything left behind? What if anything changed?

A lot of courage that one. Mr. Hub shakes his head in disbelief, a rush of wind streaming between his teeth. You have to admit. To come here. He deserves a medal. Or maybe he’s just plain stupid, or simple. Touched.

She hears herself utter some reply.

Would you believe, there was a second one out front waiting for him? The driver. Not dressed up like the first, but I didn’t get such a good look.

Eliza has no words.

Sorry to upset you, ma’m. I had hoped to save you the trouble of worrying over it. Nothing is missing?

No.

He had mud on his feet. I thought to take every precaution. So the lock was changed, Mr. Hub says, as if this were all logically consistent. One of those gestures perhaps offered in the sure expectation that she would take comfort in it.

After mutual good wishes, Mr. Hub strides away, leaving her with the weight of words, her ears retaining their living sound. Two men, colored, her name in the mouth of one, the thing offered, mud on the feet: she had heard it all, and now comes the realization: Mr. Hub had talked his way around her question. She still doesn’t know what prompted him to paint her apartment.

Each thing accounted for — checks again — but Mr. Hub has unsettled what she thought was settled, shaken her belief in anonymity, that there’s no one in the city with a passing thought for her. The building big enough that no neighbor is near and all acquaintances are vague. Eliza a familiar face in the hallway or on the stairwell or on the street (those rare occasions), passing under a street sign, already gone, a woman without name or connections, or a woman who was only a name. Mrs. Bethune. Apartment 5B. Where the piano music comes from. As far as she knows, they assume that she is the pianist. Whatever their assumptions, she is uneasily conscious of her neighbors. More so now. (Yes, on Monday — think about it — there was someone leaning in the shadows, watching.) Who has she seen this week other than Mr. Hub? And how many of her neighbors have caught a glimpse of Tom in the past three years? Before the violence, every resident in the building knew Tom; half of them were Negro and for that reason took pride in the proximity; but who among the present neighbors — white, all of them white — can place him here, in apartment 5B?

When Sharpe was here, working with Tom and the manager, the neighbors found any excuse to knock on her door — I thought the young master might like some custard — some with punctilious regularity. Pulling the bell, but not without a certain guilty sense of invading someone’s privacy — blurting out explanations and regrets, even as others were less polite, ventured to make forcible entry. She would screen the visitors when she could—

Tom, this is little Sally from the second floor.

Some little girl lifting herself out of memory, wearing a short dress of white satin, a black-buckled pink belt around her waist.

Hello, Mr. Tom.

Hello, girl. Hello, Sally. Tom took the girl’s hand. She’s a nigger, he said.

— but Tom was often quick to answer the bell before she or Sharpe or the manager could refuse or turn away the caller, resolved to present “Blind Tom” to one and all.

I am Blind Tom, one of the greatest humans to walk the earth.

Syllables paced out one breath at a time.

Nice of you to visit, Tom said. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.

Names circling names.

This was all they wanted to know about their neighbors. Indeed, Mr. and Mrs. Bethune maintained close relations with only one other family in the building, the McCunes, Dr. and Mrs., who were further along in years than Sharpe and Eliza, but not significantly so, and whose offspring, boy and girl, were deeply attentive to Tom. They’re niggers, Tom said. Once a week, the older couple would extend a supper invitation to the younger — never the other way around — so that the Bethunes became a regular presence in their home, a sumptuously furnished apartment (third floor, 3A), the chairs and couches tattered and antique, proud of period detail, the walls hung with tapestry and bedecked with a great number of spirited modern paintings, landscapes and seascapes, in frames of rich golden arabesque set against walls papered in an expanse of white flowers. The McCunes themselves smacked of careful cultivation, presentation pieces with their own form and meaning. Their tastes ran to art, theater, geography (places traveled, destinations to come), and politics—

I won’t support a losing cause. Sharpe passed the decanter of wine across the table to the Doctor.

I take that to mean you are perfectly comfortable supporting the winner?

Hardly.

At least you have no doubts about who will win.

I have no doubts.

The children ran through the room, set forth in their own wonder.

How can I? They will destroy the South just so they can rebuild it in their own image.

The causes are deeper.

I’m not saying they aren’t.

So why then do you aid the rebels?

Sharpe stretched his body, easing into an answer. Look, Doctor, I’m still a Southerner. A man can’t simply cut off his family. He sat back in his chair, arms spread wide in a request for pardon. I won’t leap to their defense, but why not throw a few bills at the battle-scarred and the war widows?

The Doctor poured the last of the wine into Sharpe’s glass. Does it matter what the boy thinks?

Obviously you’re saying it should.

The Doctor continued to look at him, shoulders curved forward, head hanging over the table.

A benefit concert or two. Is that taking advantage? Besides, do you know how much money we’ve given the Abos over the years? More money than I can count.

Ah.

Not openly, of course. Under the table.

That’s unfortunate. You will never get the recognition. The boy will—

Doctor, I stopped wondering long ago about what people think of my doing this or that.

Useful hours for both men, even when they disagreed. These visits revealed a side of the Doctor that Eliza had not been privy to during the many years she had known and worked with him at the Eternally Benevolent Asylum for Ill-Fated Offspring of the Sable Race, something beyond what was contained in the structure of his medical duties. (And it was her own duties in the charitable wings and halls of the establishment that by either providence or happenstance she would come into contact with Sharpe — and Tom.) Though he insisted on a limited schedule, working no more than four hours a day, four days a week, so that his private practice and research should not suffer, he was charged by his work, bright with it, padding through the wards in his white coat, the legs of his binaural stethoscope clamped around his neck. There was a practicality about his body, a man built to a purpose — the total opposite of Sharpe, the tallest man she has ever seen, even today, all angles, juxtaposition, jagged elbows jutting out, forward-pointing hatchet-like knees, and square blocky forehead and temple, aspects of person defying the uniformity of line that is supposed to define a body — moving with tireless fluidity along beds lined up like boats in a dockyard, attending to as many as 160 children at a given time. (A massive four-story building of fine recent construction, the Asylum could accommodate up to 200 orphaned children, providing them with the luxury of modern facilities — indoor toilets, sinks, and baths, gaslights — that only the city’s wealthy had access to.) But he sought to do more than heal and see to the good health of the Negro children under his care. He was determined — the greater goal — to refine their artistic and intellectual tastes through regular attendance at museums, concerts, and dramaturgical stagings. (He took all 160 children to a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at his own expense.) We should endeavor to expose the most unfortunate of the Race to the better class of general culture. It was clear from the atmosphere he projected that he was no ordinary person. Mrs. Shotwell and Mrs. Murray hoped that the Doctor, in his professionalism, the way he spoke and handled himself, would serve as a masculine exemplar who could illuminate the orphans’ own conditions and inspire them (the boys) to aim high and achieve.

Doctor, should we hire a music teacher? Mrs. Shotwell asked. Do you believe the reports that music can reform a bad disposition?

Eliza could not help feeling a certain strange joy whenever she had assisted the Doctor, frantically eager to carry wash pan, thread, scissors, knife, to boil the surgical instruments, prepare the opium paste, or stanch bleeding. As house matron she had earned nine dollars a month, a decent wage, but the work was exhausting even if fulfilling, the hours immense. She saw to the stocks and supplies and took daily inventory, the large brass storeroom keys kept on a five-pound iron ring; she tallied up donations, engaged the domestics, and supervised all of the other employees to ensure that they weren’t making light of their duties. Her work with Dr. McCune made up for certain agreed-upon reductions of self, for the Doctor, in his ministrations, showed an emotion deep enough to confirm her own power—They need me, irreplaceable me—a fact that made it easy for her to bend to her other labors with a quiet mind. She had spent so much time with him — month after month, one year after the next — she felt his duties had become part of her. No exaggeration to say that it was she who drummed up patients.

Once a week, she left the Asylum and went in search of fresh orphans, venturing away from their Midtown locale to explore the narrow twisting streets of the Black Town, the city’s most densely populated district, where surfaces (sidewalks, roofs, shutters, corners, walls) pressed together in unexpected ways, noisily in place, life here chambered inside a ramshackle accumulation of tenements leaning over the sidewalks, as if bent against a winter wind. Eliza advancing softly with a sense of mysterious invitation, feeling the uneasy force of all those lives hived within, families (four or more) jammed up against each other inside a single room, unable to confine respective kin to respective corner, assorted limbs jutting out of slanted windows and crooked doorways, Eliza dizzy with forms all about her. Clusters of Negro men toting pyramids of firewood and Negro women dangling strings of fowl, and men and women and children alike in slow drift with satchels of sweat strapped to their backs, or water pots or baskets (fruit, herbs) positioned on their heads. Faces staring accusations at her, bitter in an undirected way. She would stare right back — hopeful tension — pushing against refuse and waste thick and abstract at her feet, and ask the simple questions that brought such satisfying replies from the two or three or four that she extended invitations to, willing to give themselves up to her then and there. Candidates collected, she would then taxi on to the Municipal Almshouse and spend hours cycling through a maze of warrens where monstrous forms — albinos, pinheads, she-hes, worm-like legless and armless torsos stationed on wooden carts, pig-child hybrids with snouts and curly tails, deer-children (fauns? satyrs?) with horns and hooves, mermaids swimming in their own urine, Cyclops, Blemmyae, three- and four-eyed Nisicathae and Nisitae, a boy with an underdeveloped twin hanging out of his abdomen, as if the hidden head was only momentarily absent, mischievously peeking into the keyhole of his stomach, a girl with a second canine-toothed and lizard-tongued mouth chewing its way out of her left jaw, and rarer creatures shackled and chained — huddled in dim light against the smell of sawdust, some folded monk-like in cloaks and hoods, others completely nude. Eliza careful to appear curious and concerned, a desperate devotion undercutting her probing looks, her riddle-solving, translating texts of skin and eyes.

Back at the Asylum, she saw to it that the new arrivals were thoroughly washed and comfortably dressed, each child’s hair combed free of lice, each body put to bed under folds of fresh linen in the Inspection Ward, awaiting Dr. McCune’s examination. The admissions were naturally reluctant to undergo examination, poking and prodding, but before Dr. McCune all their defenses vanished. They gave in with trustful surrender, the ready-made quality about the way he spoke. Disrobe, please. Including shoes and undergarments. Miss Viel here will take care of your belongings. At times she found herself speaking the diagnosis even before he had. The cleared would be taken immediately to the appropriate ward housing their peers, Whole Orphans or Half Orphans, and the wing therein specific to their sex — the wards could amalgamate during meals, boys on one side of the dining hall, girls on the other — where they would be ghosts for several days, invisible, suffering at arm’s length a brief trial of discretionary exclusion before they were accepted into the fold. The eye-sick were afforded the opportunity of surgery to remove the diseased orbs. (One darkness defining another. Now the eyes of Israel were dim for age, so that he could not see.) To aid in healing and lessen the chances of inflammation, Dr. McCune would apply a thick paste made from crushed peanuts and water—peanut butter he called it — over the empty eye sockets, two six-inch-high brown mounds that would remain in place for up to a week. Eliza was there to fan flies away and pluck ants and cockroaches from the paste. To wet fever with cold compresses and diminish pain with warm opium. Once the paste was removed, Dr. McCune had to judge that no part of the infection had escaped to another region of the body, before the patient could be assigned his/her own bed in the Eye Ward. Dr. McCune put a high practical value on his work at the Asylum, believing that it aided and enhanced his research and his private practice in the homes of the city’s wealthy Negroes and in his own home, those packs of proper Negroes who made daily pilgrimages to his apartment (3A) in their well-cut clothes, depending on his dogged efforts to keep them in top form.

Was it this blood commitment, the bond and obligation of Race, that laid the unspoken rule that the Bethunes would only enter his home as friends, never as patients — had he offered? had she or Sharpe? — however much the Bethunes were in perfect accord with his moral and professional life? Bound up with the Asylum, the circumstances of that life first established between Eliza and the Doctor passed on to Sharpe. Tracing back, she recognizes now that it was through her that the two men met and that she had a hand in the friendship they forged, unaware that in serving as this instrument of connection she was sealing the fate of each and forever linking her and Tom. (True, but one should beware of such judgments.) Not that the pattern is completely clear to her, the where what why and when, the x that preceded y and z, only that she is at the center of the likeliest sequence of events. Sharpe is gone now, forever, no coming back, but she distinctly recalls the morning, a few days after Tom’s benefit recital, when Sharpe called at the Asylum, his face smooth and smiling — yes — and without a word took her hand where it rested at her side and shook it gratefully. His uncalendared appearance — a new intake of feeling — the moment she pinpoints as the start of their enthusiastic days together. Sitting over tea in the matron’s office, he expressed his hope that they should again entertain the children at some point in the not too distant future. He had no sooner finished his cup than he rose to leave. Their stay in the city would be short; there were places to be. Something in his tone of voice, a glimmer beneath the words—We welcome another opportunity—in his posture and manner and excitement — partly observed, remembered, partly dreamed — occasioned in her a feeling that his linen-dressed body was a conspiratorial screen designed to mask the true intentions of his visit. He seemed to want to talk to her. (The screen too easy to see through.) A hope belief powerful enough to pluck up her courage to ask him, the caller—Mr. Bethune he was to her then — if one afternoon he might desire to leave the side of Tom and the manager for a few hours and accompany her for a walk about town so that he might embrace the good weather and see—Allow me to show you; was that it? — if not visit — yes, that was it — a few of the city’s most impressive sights, just the thing he might need to feel fortified and refreshed before carrying on with the many duties — the boy needed to be outfitted for the approaching concert season less than a month away — and blur of appointments awaiting him. Of course, for her to extend such an offer was to overstep the boundaries of acceptable behavior, action made even more brash and bold given the many speculations and rumors circulating in the journals at the time concerning the reasons why Sharpe’s father, General Bethune, several months earlier, had removed Tom’s longstanding manager and replaced him with a new one, Warhurst, and given that the General’s scheduled visit to the city in a few weeks as a stop on his national tour (Save the South!) to raise funds and supporters for the Confederacy was the talk of the town. (The stories always seemed to be accompanied by that now familiar photo of the General, posed behind the seated pianist, one hand in paternal rest upon the boy’s shoulders, the boy’s fingers — those cherished objects — fitted together in two fists of knuckles inside his lap.) For his part, Mr. Bethune readily accepted. In view of the (his) circumstances, he suggested the sooner the better. Why not tomorrow? Why not.

They rendezvoused on an unusually fine day, one of those summer afternoons that commanded the populace out of their homes. Wherever one looked, people were pouring out of open doors. On the street, everything was rushing and physical, a light gaiety in the air. Men touching theirs hats in mute greeting, women tilting their faces forward to smile. At her suggestion, they began walking toward Central Park, the nearest lawn only a few blocks away. What better way to impress him on their first outing than with the city’s most impressive location? (He was a foreigner after all, a Southerner.)

Once they reached the park, they started down the wide central lane, which wound five miles from one end to the other. The park was only a few years old at that point; Seneca Village, the northernmost section of Black Town, had been razed and the park constructed in its place as part of a municipal beautification project. But the Negroes had never completely relinquished their hold, sanctioning the park as their communal site. This day dozens of celebrants strolled about, a flash of unrestrained smiles and theatrical bodies done up in lavish and gaudy costumes, a hundred colors and cloths heating the holiday — John Canoe? Pinkster? Emancipation (state) Day? some Union victory? — air. Again and again Eliza and Mr. Bethune met by whistles, drums, gyrating hips and feet. Some of the celebrants made a fearsome impression with mock guns and swords, more comic the paltry contingents of horsemen with their sorrow-worn almost-dancing steeds. Then too something neither noble nor humorous about the knot of boys huddled into guards, ribbons of tree-circling summer-maiden girls, or the deputation of deer-skinned and eagle-feathered elders seated in ceremonial poses like some rare delegation of the most venerated and powerful Red Indian chiefs. All told, the holidaymakers, whether in couples or family groups, produced a kind of pressure of presence of which everyone was a part, an insider’s air of intimate entitlement that caused them to cast exclusionary looks at Eliza and Mr. Bethune. What’s your business here? Eliza and her guest did not allow themselves to be put out in the slightest by sucked teeth and jeers. Still, since the park had been seized by the Negroes, she wondered if she ought to have made other arrangements. Through her work at the Asylum, she had come to know a less-traveled section of the park, just down this path. Far away, not easy to see, but well worth the effort of getting there.

Eliza and Mr. Bethune continued on, enjoying the walk and the view, letting the features gather. Things had been arranged to be gazed on. Endless brilliances planned, tidied up, and straightened out to the last square corner. She drew his attention to one sight after another. Slim rippling trees with heavy bunches of flowers. Sparkling lagoons. Gardens with birdbaths, fountains, and paved watercourses. A three-mile-long central lawn. Gazebos with mosque-like domes. A marble pavilion stretching almost four city blocks. A paved path, climbing in four or five levels to a shelf of pale crags. A hilltop edged with a castle, a modern structure trying to create an element of medieval intrigue, add something old to the new. This place returning to them a sense of their own motion through it, their limbs growing progressively warmer from the movement. He seemed interested in what he saw, awed even at times — was he really, or is she supplying this impression years after the fact? — but had nothing to say, at least about this. Words were bound to come. (Of course, he must take the lead, draw her into conversation, Eliza showing restraint, holding true tongue back, determined — however difficult — to move within the parameters of convention lest she give him the wrong introductory impression.) What would it take?

They walked another mile or two before he responded to her with something more than a barely perceivable nod of the head. He asked her about the orphanage. Getting on all right there?

Yes.

I take it you enjoy your position?

As much as one might.

It’s not too much for you? It would be for me.

It’s too much.

So why do it? he asked. Why work there? His question was so quiet she had to watch his lips to understand. He did not wait for an answer but carried on talking. It’s too much to bear, but you stay on because of what you can produce in the children.

She explained that the best children — those clever enough — would take up positions of indenture, mostly on farms in the city’s (four) outer boroughs, where skin prejudice held less sway. What better way for independence than through entry to a trade.

He nodded slightly, approvingly.

They walked over the narrow spine of a bridge. The sun shone so warm that Mr. Bethune chose to remove his hat and carry it beside him. It seemed to her of particular significance that he showed an interest in her life. Her life at the Asylum against his life abroad: the South, Britain, the Continent. Her years (twenty) against his (thirty-five, her estimation). Her innocence against his experience.

A figure shot from the brush two yards ahead and stopped dead center in the path observing them. Jolted, they stopped too, registering the danger. A cur, mangy, unwashed, cut and bitten, obscene. Showing worth, it opened its mouth, flashing yellow teeth, only to sit back on its hind legs, exposing two egg-red testicles, this display of maleness portending that a violent attack might be the least of their concerns. Indeed, the animal began trembling from tongue to toe as if fully anticipating what was to come next. The muscles went still. The frame shuddered. A lengthy turd began squeezing out the rump. Eliza turned her body 180 degrees away from the sight. Only when she heard the animal lope off, panting, a sure indication that it was done, did she turn around. They stepped around the small steaming volcano, at once cautious and oblivious — cancel height, stench, texture, color — and resumed their walk.

Mr. Bethune looked unashamedly at her and uttered something, Eliza numbed by guilt, helpless to compel an order to the rush of sounds. Took another sentence or two for her to realize that he — his sharp bright eyes restlessly on the lookout — was now talking about his vocation. The forthcoming season would carry them east for the first time. Prague and Belgrade, Kraków and Bucharest, Oulu and Ekaterinburg, Turku and Split, Tirana and Trieste, Skopje and Saint Petersburg, Ljubljana and Riga, Tartar and Tallinn, Helsinki and Kiev, Warsaw and Pristina, Gdańsk, Tbilisi, Dubrovnik, Heart, Bukhara, Sarajevo, Uzbeki, Kirgisi, and Sofia. Places on the edge of imagination. (Last year, a Mediterranean circuit — Bastia, calvi, Cagliari, Alassio, Sartène, and Sassari — streaks of color — pastel-colored stone houses, whitewashed stone buildings, blackened stone forts — dancing on waves.)

This sudden leap to a new topic — where had they left off? — was its own explanation, for she recognized with shamed certainty his effort to allay her embarrassment. How noble, his at-the-ready responsiveness to her feelings gaining him favor in her eyes. Such luck, she said. Excitement. To be sped from town to town, city to city, adventure to adventure. (The concerts in fashionable metropolises, before fashionable audiences, including the private commissions and gatherings for city burghers; Russian czars and nobility; landed earls, ladies, and dukes; and the Continent’s kings, princes, and queens.) And the music, night after night.

He maintained his gaze on the path before them, but his face grew active with thought, trying out one idea after another, only for him to nod his head in affirmation, giving up all hope of constructing a reply.

Will you give me a full report? I need to see something of life.

He smiled. Perhaps you will get your request sooner than you imagine. You might find us as your neighbors.

Eliza made a soft incredulous noise, tagging the idea with melodramatic amazement. You don’t expect me to believe that could actually happen?

It could. He went on to explain. Since home was now in the heart of the war zone, the family — his father, mother, sisters — had already left the main estate for another property. But what was the difference really? Commerce and culture have already vanished in the South — his sentiments not exactly in those words but something like them.

You plan to resettle?

Yes, we do. Tom, myself, and Warhurst, the manager.

Was he implying some divide within the Bethune family?

My father has his own direction.

She felt embarrassed for bringing forth this secret. Here she was leading him to places he would not have ventured to on his own. How had she gotten so ahead of herself?

But perhaps this is not about my father, he said, taking any accusation out of his voice. All of the traveling can make you feel something different.

She did not understand.

There are other things.

When she glanced at him, she found that his face was transformed. Was he about to take her in confidence? If so, she would be careful not to accuse, to judge.

He expressed that yesterday at the orphanage she had picked up perfectly on his desperation. How satisfied he was to abandon his affairs for a few hours, to detach himself from Tom and Warhurst, to get clear of promoters and agents and schedules and journalists and reports and wires, and join her.

I understand something of what you’re going through, she said. It was a lie put out there to bait him. Where had she found the strength to act this way? And how so quickly, so spontaneously? Would it cost her in the end?

Yes, you would understand, he said, given the responsibilities and directions of your work.

Already you know me so well. Her eyes slanted upward toward him in that accepted female way considered both coy and inviting. Go further. Try more.

He smiled. Are you telling me that I’m wrong?

No, I cannot call you wrong. Indeed, in my position at the Asylum, there might be the chance occasion when I experience feelings identical to yours.

But you make it seem wonderful, your work.

Do I?

Yes. That and more.

Nothing is special about my condition. This is simply where life has found me.

I would put it down to more than that. Your affairs are positive and important but fraught with worry and complication, as is any career completely devoted to either maintaining or uplifting a weaker party.

Ah, so she had not lied. What luck. They seemed in a way to belong to the same thing, a brotherhood/sisterhood of sorts. So, is that what it is with Blind Tom?

Thomas. We call him Thomas.

Thomas. Of course. Tom. Of course.

Tom is constant wonder. And trouble too, much of the time. But wonder. Charm. Magic. To be there in his presence each and every day and witness it firsthand. Those gifts. Blind Tom. Come and get your miracle. To see that. It’s everything else that turns you inside out. Spectacular disasters. Mundane upsets.

He took some time to explain.

Earlier that day, he had suffered through a “brunch” with the boy’s publisher. A game of extraction, he called it. The numbers never add up the way they should. One would think that Tom’s fame would be reflected in thousands of sales of his songs. But we seem to sell fewer and fewer songs each year, even as the list of publications gets longer and longer. Can you imagine the bother of trying to keep that in order, under your thumb? In fact, you don’t press for payment. You feel rather happy to be cheated. A strange trade-off.

From what I’m hearing, much of the daily business goes through your hands.

Yes.

So what does Warhurst do? What is he around for?

Sharpe said, He takes care of the performance. I take care of Tom — said, staring straight in her eyes as though expecting a response since the distinction was perfectly clear.

She did not know what to say in return.

Then his eyes brightened as if charged by her confusion. (He’d gotten that much from her.) You will hold this against me, he said. He turned his face away. I look after my family’s most profitable investment.

How solicitous and civilized those words sounded despite their meaning. Until then she had never thought of him as a slave owner.

But what am I really telling you that is news? It’s rather simple. I look after Tom.

She could not make herself utter the words burning inside her mind. It is wrong, an evil.

Then again I’m being unfair. They own him. My father, my mother, my sisters. Where am I in any of it? I was born into this wound.

She was surprised at the intensity of his dismissal, dislike.

At least that’s what I tell myself. Of course, I can reel off another half dozen ways of looking at it, all equally valid.

Did he expect her to supply those ways?

Perhaps I’m just a coward. A useless one at that.

She saw the way he tightened his lips, the way words fell from his mouth.

There is an even worse possibility. Perhaps I have the nature for it.

Grudgingly, she took in this admission, trying to determine to what extent it mattered, how it would shape whatever it was that was developing between them. She wondered if he thought his confession somehow legitimized everything. Wondered, too, if he felt entitled to her empathy, automatically expected her to forgive him his shortcomings because he was smart, rich, powerful. She asked, Where are his parents?

He is alone.

Wanted to ask him what exactly had happened to the boy’s parents, but she did not. What was the point of thinking about it all if the most it did was raise ugly fact or speculation? She was already considering the least hurtful way of untangling herself from the topic, not because he had won her over — too soon to say — only that what he had already said was a beginning.

The first appearance of water halted their conversation. They had reached the man-dug and — filled lake at the park’s center and now decided they’d walked enough. (The spot she originally had in mind was still some way off.) They sat down beside each other on the grassy ground at the very edge of the water, verges churned by the feet of animals, paw impressions — trails with no beginning or end — set and hardened in evidence. (Hopefully no droppings or urine.) A good mile in circumference, the lake glistened like a gigantic silver coin, sun lying on the water in manifold glittering, water trembling soft impossible light, composed silence, no sound but for furtive cracks (trees) and urgent scurrying (animals), the smell of fish strong, leaping out at them — all told, a scene marked by expectation. Nature making itself powerfully felt.

Now a dhow was on the lake, its triangular sail slanting forward like an oversized shark tooth cutting through water. She was disappointed — why? — to see a second then a third sleek brown-white form on the lake. Watched the sharp sails drifting by and thought how fragile they were, not in the least knowing if this were true.

Some yards off, an animal came to the water to drink.

I expect to be anywhere but here when my father arrives, another state, another country, circling the rings of Jupiter — anywhere other than here when he starts making a fool of himself with his war talk. One should know how to behave in another’s house.

So there was a rift. Was she ahead of herself again? Pardon my mentioning him, she said. Of course, his reputation is so often put before us. The entire city is awaiting his arrival.

You are innocent of any wrong. I would be suspicious if you had said nothing. He dropped his head and stared at the ground with an expression of immense satisfaction. She was only now noticing the strangeness of it, how awkward he looked sitting there, his collarbones jutting out like mountain peaks. For as long as I can remember, my father has sought secession, separation. Five years ago, before anyone was talking war, talking seriously about the possibility, he raised the first regiment in our state out of his own pocket.

So you’ve heard much more than we have.

Yes, and for far longer.

The lake was bringing a change, making them lower their voices with the feeling its sight and presence stirred in them.

Had he wanted, he could have formed an army before I was born. Does that sound so impossible?

She watched a smile pull his mouth up at one end, a derisive look.

Well, it isn’t. My fellow countrymen suffer the pathology of ignorance. How easy it is to pull the wool over their eyes. All it takes is some savior or devil cleverly done up as a man of the people, an otherwise average man of learning and consequence who has been unjustly wronged and has no choice other than to fight for self, family, and country. If such a man told them the pope was an Israelite, they would believe it.

She didn’t know what to say. Could only imagine how hard it must be for him. Although she could not recall ever having seen his name or image in print — he remained ghost, operated from behind the curtain — the name Bethune surely fitted him like trouble, given his father’s celebrity and notoriety.

The hand (troubled) in closest proximity had found his hat, one finger flick flick flicking at the brim, as if testing if the hat were alive or dead. She wanted to reach out and touch it, to lift it off the grass and position it in place, then draw her hands away and let it settle onto the shelf of his forehead.

Where will you go? she asked.

Good question. Better near or far? What do you recommend?

She thought about it for a while, pretended to.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so eager to run. After all, his stay will be short, three days. That’s really not so long, is it? I might simply hide away, go underground. This city is vast.

She smiled. Well, if you do you can gain some practice in being my neighbor.

Yes I could.

They sat looking out at the lake, lost between sentences. Yet another vessel had taken to the water, a gondola, its driver aiming and sinking the long skinny oar, gliding gradually forward to join the other vessels, the lone canoe and compounded dhows. Almost as if the five vessels were competing, three totally distinct forms pitted against one another.

She wondered, where was the boy Thomas, Tom, in all of this? From what she had gathered Sharpe saw the boy as an entity that existed only in relation to the family. What did the boy pianist think about it all? What does Tom think about it all? Does he know his value, worth?

Will the boy come with you or stay behind with your father?

He comes. No two ways about it. He has come so to rely on me.

Ah, so that was it. Sharpe weighed down with dependence. Another life. (Was that it?) He was in charge of Tom’s life.

Of course, Warhurst could assume primary responsibility. He would, gladly. But I can’t fathom the rightness or wrongness of such an arrangement.

She worried; if the boy was so delicate, who was looking after him at that very moment? Your concern is perfectly understandable, with such a special case.

Another animal had come to drink. A bird had taken to the sky, branch vibrating. And what were the vessels doing now, moving into some sort of authoritative formation?

She said, His blindness, that’s always been the great cause of debate. As I remember from the reports, he was without sight at birth. She tried to make it sound more like an assumption than a question. Whichever, she saw nervousness on his face — she was asking him to uncover a secret; no, another source of discomfort — and something else she was not sure of.

That lie has served the interests of publicity. In fact, he was born with sight, and he had sight when my family purchased him. He quit his fussing (energy, trouble) over the hat. He was the cause of it.

It was not what she expected to hear. If he hoped to shock her, he had succeeded. How so?

He gave her a report.

We were not planters. We had no fields to plant, no crops to harvest. In fact, we kept in minimal communication with planters and farmers, did not buy from them or barter or trade or hold or engage in any significant transactions with them that I am aware of. So, at Hundred Gates by age three or four when a servant—slave, she thought, slave—should assume the responsibility of labor, Tom should have settled into a quotidian life involving random chores about the estate or a more active assignment in town at my father’s office or his press. But when he achieved that age (four? five?) — he was less than a year old when my family acquired him, a babe of six or seven months — he still had not gained the ordinary abilities, talking and walking. (Speech, she thought. Does that include all speech? All movement?) In fact, he showed no signs that he understood the purpose of either. He could not follow instructions. But my parents decided to keep him on rather than abandon him, having little either to lose or to gain by his presence — his absence would have devastated his family, mother, father, siblings (sisters); Ah, so he has had a family, she thought — since our commerce did not depend on free labor. He was given each day to use as he pleased. Let me tell you how he spent his time. Sharpe measured what he was saying, as if trying to remember whether anything had been left out. He passed most of each day sitting out in the open, under the sky, with his face upturned at the sun, and with his eyes fully open. He screamed, kicked, and punched if you tried to pull him away, into the shade. He crawled after the sun as its position shifted in the sky. Then in the evening, when there was no more sun to be had — the moon did not seem to interest him — he would sit before the hearth all the while passing his hand rapidly before his face.

And this is how he went blind? She could ask.

We believe it was the cause of origin. Greater damage came. He began forking his fingers into his sockets.

My God, Eliza said.

That’s not all. He began digging into the sockets with sticks and stones and anything else he could find.

That was worse, hearing it, seeing it. And nobody stopped him? she asked. (She had the right.) No one stopped him. Why did no one stop him?

I would have, had I been there. And my father would have, my mother. Would have. Anyone there. Would have. None of them. None of us. We are not cruel people, whatever their faults or our vices. But Tom largely saw after himself, as I understand it. I was not there. To stop him.

Where were you? She could ask this.

Even then I was circling the globe, pursuing stories for my father’s journal, doing my part to see that it remained a vital publication, among the best in our country — the South, he meant, his country — if not the best. She heard his explanation as best she could, her mind pushing out, exploring, formulating, but he kept speaking, speaking before she had a chance to locate her words — a few brief illuminated thoughts — without giving her an opening to surge forth in response, overtake.

You must understand, the family doctor determined all of this many days after the fact, weeks even. For quite some time the mutilation went on daily without our notice. Then one evening the boy’s mother came crying into the parlor before my father, carrying him in her arms, the boy, carrying the boy, and the boy trying to fight his way free, and the father trying to keep him still. Fresh blood covered his face, so much of it that they could not locate the source. All thought he had only then injured himself. Dr. Hollister, our doctor, was sent for. The eyes could not be saved.

She took this to mean that the sockets were empty — in fact, as she discovered several months later, the orbs were (are) very much present, intact, although useless. How it all might have gone otherwise if this Dr. Hollister possessed talent equaling Dr. McCune’s. More often than not in his examinations, Dr. McCune found that the orbs — afflicted, damaged — could be saved, and he made every effort to achieve such preservation, the question of whether or not vision could be restored in whole or part notwithstanding, for he knew — she knew too — that the presence of orbs makes all the difference to the structure of the face, rounding it out rather than flattening it, and thereby maintaining a deep inner structure, those few ounces providing (proving) by their mass and weight an addition amid the loss, a measure of hope, however false.

Dr. Hollister speculated that the boy had acted out of curiosity, a curiosity brought on by mental incapacitations, or vice versa. Whichever the first.

Eliza lifted her hand so that she could feel the breath inhaled and exhaled by her nostrils. If only she possessed the ability to breathe out of every pore.

And given the severity of these injuries, the Doctor estimated that the mutilation had been going on for quite some time, for days, or weeks, months even. Right under our noses. Tom had outwitted all of us.

The lake crawled in the direction of the drinking animal.

We were able to draw much after the fact, although little good it did us. One sister—his? — had observed the poking, while another sister—his? — had chanced upon the prodding. The parents too had noticed some minor cuts and scrapes, which they chalked up to normal roughhousing and mischief. Innocence cannot be expected to save innocence.

Word-done, Sharpe returned to toying with his hat’s stiff brim. They sat lost between sentences, Eliza trying to follow the features of Sharpe’s face, bushes cooing and whispering behind her. What was clear, he had not seen it for himself. What was lacking: music. Music had to figure in there somewhere. (Stories await the telling.) Where was music? She could ask him. The mother, no, mistress, that was the word; the mistress, Mrs. Bethune, had been a music instructor, information she had gleaned some time ago from reading a racy exposé about the family. (True, not true.) Of the many stories she could construct, the easiest has Tom drawn to the piano after the world goes black. Who can stand vacancies? Tom gives himself up to Music. (How close is this to the official account? She tries to remember.) The world for him now no wider or taller than a piano. What it takes to get through the dark succession of constricting years. The story she invents, imagines. As good as any. Why not simply ask? She could ask. But the questions would have to take different form.

She adjusted her legs — numb, sleeping — to be sure that they were still functioning. Her knee brushed against his shin — no memory of the feel of his skin — but they were both quick to recover.

Dr. Hollister has him on a regular schedule.

He’s still not done talking. She will have to say something.

But if there’s no hope—

Tom seems to derive pleasure from the visits. Is that why we carry on with it? And the Doctor. Is that why he carries on with it?

Your Dr. Hollister sounds like a thorough and exhaustive type.

Yes, he is.

He puts me in mind of someone. I wonder if he has ever crossed paths with Dr. McCune. Here she was again, wading out of her depth.

He keeps active company with the living and the dead. Sharpe released the hat. Healing would be their sole affiliation?

Yes. He is another eye man. Perhaps he could examine the boy. The words took a long time coming from her mouth. A voice her own but outside her, speaking something that she was only thinking. She was still watching the distant shore, certain that Sharpe was watching her. Her offer not so surprising really. For — understanding everything — she felt an unspecified sense of duty — sight slowly fading from memory, images dissolving one by one, like wafers in water — although she didn’t know the boy and she hardly knew Sharpe. (Was just getting to know.)

What good would it do?

None. But what harm? The doctors one and the other will have much to talk about.

Who is he?

Eyes, hands, she gave up water — the lake is still there unchanged — and trained her attention on him. A colored man of distinction that I work under at the Asylum.

He turned, leaving water, looking at her — what we do to resolve blur and disbelief — so she could see her words reshape his face. How she had phrased it—work under—was that it or instead the meaning of what phrased?

Said (asked), A Negro doctor? A nigger doctor. And shook his head as if to empty it of her suggestion. Imagine how that would fly with the family.

They needn’t know.

They wouldn’t know.

A difference. A quiet disdain in the way he stared back. He was taking her offer as an insult. She knew that he wanted to rise and walk away, but he had the grace to continue sitting quietly (keeping quiet). Easier in fact if he showed his anger, but it is as though he thinks her unworthy of even that. For whatever reason, his stifled passion doesn’t sit well with her, doesn’t settle on her stomach but rises. (Jesus.) For a brief irrational moment, she wishes she could (rise) walk away from him. Need grants him power without his trying, deserving it. The color of his statement has moved something in her long forgotten. The weight felt.

How would this play out in the South — give hate a proper home — that land decimated by the plague of slavery, all those black skins caught, actively trying either to run away or to stay put? She’s never been there, but even here in the city she has witnessed certain Negroes, decent people, with money in their hands and pockets and purses and minds, has seen the way these dignified types, of unquestionable repute, shirts buttoned to the throat, shoes polished and glistening like fish, will drop their heads in the presence of a white person, or cross to the other side of the street to avoid direct contact, staying away (this corner, that street, those wards), or give up a place in line and let the white person behind move ahead, use the side entrance/exit to circumvent unnecessary attention, thank the clerk who cheats them out of a few coins, that mortuary stiffness and fear, which make them smile peace at their disappointments, smile and forget everything else.

Over the lake, the wind rises — a commotion rising in the water, a current — and catches a bird by surprise, shaking it, tossing it. Somehow its song gets out.

You only want to help, Sharpe said.

A bee tried to pull nectar from a flower, petals swaying, drunk.

That was horrible of me. I’m sorry.

You think so? I wouldn’t accuse you of any disrespect. Those words. The offers that come pouring in, all the time, from every corner. He looked at her in a way that softened his eyes.

She recognized at once what he was putting forward, no denying the source of the tongue — the South, a Southerner — that made it. What had she done to earn the dramatic reappraisal? Nothing really. No, he was showing her another dimension of self. This is me too. Generous. Ready. No closing off. Now, in the strain of the moment, she feels as if she has been found out in a weakness beyond remedy. He has opened up the chance for her to make amends, to win back his attention, make a full return. What to do? She needs help understanding exactly where it is she can’t go. Eliza, matron of the Asylum, as used to throwing things away — baby, bathwater — as she is to salvaging.

But in this short time I’ve gained enough of you to understand that you place trust in the expense, he said, his tone gently teasing.

Those words. She felt grateful that his bluntness gave her no space for self-pity, gave her nothing to hide behind. But she said nothing, knowing that she would sound stilted. Looked and discovered that he was at the hat again. Actually had picked it up and fitted it on his head and remained there hunched forward, rocking with some indecision — the doubt of shoulders — near to panic. He seemed to be looking beyond her to some private trouble of his own. And he was including her in his worry. She could speak now.

I shouldn’t be volunteering his services. He keeps his own calendar.

Kindly arrange it if you can. He rises to his feet, uprooted, making ready to go. She comes up too, light with relief, their past dispute put out to sea (so to speak), oared along until it falls over, out of view. (Water and its ways.) They reach the (closest) park exit without having said a word. So much in so short a time. Enticed by what she barely understands. Tom — the words used on his behalf — lurking vaguely in her mind in the days to come. What was so terrible about the world that he stopped himself from seeing it?

Sharpe signals a taxi in the queue. Look at the hour.

Time well spent.

Indeed. Horse harness hooves arriving. So you’ll let me know?

She has to tilt her head to look at his face. The sun has shifted position, shining from behind him, right into her eyes. Yes.

Edgemere. A mile or two out in the ocean — waves lengthen and shorten, the lull and pull of distance, water that finds a way — nothing beyond it, horizon’s fuzzy edge. Sister isles — Hart’s, Hunt’s, Tipping Point, Nanatucka, Fool’s Favorite, Shoisfine, Wanstaten, and others whose names she can’t recall, words hard to pronounce even if she could, that fuse with the tongue — certain but hard to make out, a bump here, a lump there, positioned with the proximity of knuckles on the hand. Or is it that vision has grown so weary it cannot hold anything more? Sea caught in glass. Framed. (What’s kept in, what’s kept out.) The window she stands by a clean rectangle of light overlooking shimmering blue, lines of white waves sliding along surface in rhythm, like a stitch traveling to its proper place in patchworked cloth. Appearing and disappearing. Weaving a bright thread of constancy through their lives. Even as the island shrinks daily. Dwindles. Something eternal at work. Something forever undone. Gaps where the water can’t come together, can’t rise high enough to submerge that row of hard buttons, black islands knotted into position. Her unfastened blouse exposing a triangular channel of hot skin as she stands on display, propped at the window, mounted on land, bust flaps waving against five-storied sky. This sea ruthless, empty of witnesses. Years since she’s seen a dhow on the waters. (So she believes.) The lateen sails. Can she even remember what one looks like?

The notes lower to a comfortable audibility, reviving the light, that stub of redness reaching through the glass, sea burned by setting sun. Eliza hears the song breaking in his hands. Two-fisted snatching at the keys, rebel green thumb ripping up roots from earth. Elbows sliding along horizontal, a straight track from left to right, right to left, the arms agile, the fingers quick. Skipping from short rows of black to long rows of white. Pulling air to the bottom of himself before letting it go. Mouth opening and closing, counting so that nothing is left out, inhaling and exhaling his little triumphs. Bench sagging some — yes — but bearing the full weight of his efforts. The shape appropriate to what comes out of him. That sound. (Making.) Arms, hands, fingers sensing the weight of water. An invitation. Anything you want. Anyplace you want to go. The sea closer by every step on land. But silence marks a stopping point. The pleasure in looking ruined. Horizon gone. Vanished. Edgemere where the world ends, every time.

The island demands contemplation. Extra. More. A bright world lost at sea. Each day, year after year, the surface strikes Eliza as new and she is refreshed by it. Could it be that ocean flows from isle, from this rocky flipped-over bowl spilling out flow, wet nourishment for all the world? Should it flip in reverse, hollow side up, the world will run dry, drained water pooled at inexhaustible island bottom. How big, how deep. Edgemere a world deeper and ampler than anything here on the mainland. City and anti-city, island and anti-island, place and anti-place, water and its negation. Once again she wonders (in her best moments, on the verge of logic, a humming coming from the corners of consciousness) if she and Tom should venture there. Across the watery wilderness. A clean start. (Get clean of him.) Escape on (in) her mind — she observes from a distance, images more so than words playing across a black screen at the front of her skull — if not on her tongue. Thinks the action, sees it even. Edgemere the city’s great unknown, dark space of silent speculation set between her and any magical possibility of relocation. Eliza thinking about flight again as she used to in the concert days, Sharpe off freely roaming the world with Tom and Warhurst—tour means gone, see you later, my heart, my love—and she left alone, here, with herself, feeling like an outsider in her (their) own apartment. (Room and its evident lack.)

As the one who had stayed put, stayed at home, excluded from the joys and sadnesses abroad, whatever they were, only fair that she somehow be part, one of the sojourning band (birds of a feather) from a distance, so that the word overseas could appear in her vocabulary as it did in Sharpe’s. Rumor the method of passage, the Blind Tom Exhibition surfacing out of anything anyone had to tell from flat paper. Not that those distant reports ever satisfied her for long. Words slipping away, a sentence breaking, at a dead end, and Eliza feeling short-changed, starting to taste extinction, words working against her. To come out seeming solid even if empty, she found it necessary to console herself with communications put down in a clear hand — the store of fine blue-colored lavender-scented paper Sharpe had brought her from Provence, the gold stylus with the silver nib he had brought her from Marathon, the marble well filled with deep blue ink he had brought her from the Adriatic—

Dearest Husband,

What shall I do with Monte Cristo? I’ve abridged my reading of it until it resembles someone suffering from typhus. The first part — until the Count becomes rich — is very interesting and well written, but the second, with few exceptions, is unbearable since Monte Cristo performs and speaks inflated nonsense. But on the whole the novel is quite effective. Please send your recommendations.

— blue ink staining her fingers whenever the need arose (whatever the time of day), when she thought it would do the most good, transport her. Fingers, wrists, eyes, back straining to yield justification. Counted on, his missives told her little, a short blocky paragraph or two that it behooved him to say and that provided nothing useful, that left her dispirited — counted out — even if she was grateful for any little crumb, not having voyaged herself.

Until the day Sharpe would come bounding through the door, bright as an actor onstage, still enjoying his free range of the world. He, Warhurst, Tom each in a suspicious state of freshness, despite months of travel. Sharpe would pull her forcefully into his chest and kiss her, her body pressed so tightly to his that she would have difficulty breathing. Would hold her at arm’s distance — Eliza (always) conscious of their difference in height — look her over, but her eyes would stay firm, looking dead at him, for to trust him implicitly would have been a mistake. (The tour was never finished. Years coming and going.)

And so Sharpe would start putting down on the table the first of many gifts. Sugar and spice. (Curry, cardamom, cinnamon.) Coffee from Arabia. (Plentiful in Paris.) And he would be talking, as if she had been waiting there weeks months in suspense for him to bring back a report from his travels. In the parlor — she sees it now — he sits down, stretches his legs out, long narrow boots crossed at the ankles, laughs. He seems content, at home with himself. He is. The liberties he takes, allows his person. She looks up, looks down, looks at him and looks away. Warhurst a far better study in avoidance, fixed in place beside Tom at the piano, down-turned eyes, hair combed into obedience. Coachman brings in the first of the luggage, a trunk as tall as short as he is and too heavy for him to lift. Why he drags it behind him like a corpse. He gives off the edible smell of fresh-turned dirt.

Missus. He smiles, gone in the teeth. Bows, the top hat spilling forward like a toppled tower.

Offering to assist the midget, Warhurst leaves when the midget leaves. With only Tom there, Eliza takes the opportunity to ask Sharpe why he has been away for so long, and walks right past him without waiting for an answer.

Alone in the bedroom she takes a few moments to collect herself before she returns, returns only to find Sharpe gone.

Testing Tom, she touches him on the shoulder. Who knows if he misses her in the least. Nothing from him. Not a handshake or hello.

How about a hug, Tom?

Any reason he should press his thin arm against hers? Chomping at the bit, ready to sit on the bench. Any reason she should stop him? Doesn’t. Already he is in position. Already his face is glassed over with music.

Coachman, Warhurst, and Sharpe come in with the last of the luggage. (Who actually says it?) Sharpe needs to go out again. After all the traveling (ships), he has to take his legs for a walk.

A turn or two in the park, a lazy float in a gondola along the canals. Eliza wrapped in a layer of self-consciousness, refusing to let herself be carried away from any impulse of happiness. She doesn’t let his name pass her lips. No words in fact. Just nods her head yes or no without further elaboration. Means to have no intimate talk. Must keep her pride and not cross certain lines. For his part, Sharpe refrains from pressing her. Doesn’t ask “How’ve you been?” or “How have you kept busy?”—concerns best left alone. A wound he understands he must smile through.

Hambone Hambone where you been?

Around the world and back again

Presents her with more gifts from abroad — ivory combs, ebony bangles, pearl necklaces, mahogany bracelets — but neither his words nor his hands touch her, Eliza determined not to let herself slide into nostalgia and forget the real man in front of her. But nothing really goes away. Every return is just that. Feeling much more than she was able to feel while he was away. What she can do with her back facing him: tear up, spill over, wipe her face with the new lace handkerchief just given her. What she can do afterward: for the first time look directly into his face. Quick to look away, but he’s seen her, though, in that one brief moment, has seen her face change. Starts moving with all the confidence of a man who has triumphed, her resistance not an issue.

Why slip into bedclothes only to slip out of them? (The force of routine.) Is it that a gown seals Hope in—Stay. He will stay—just like those silk lamp shades (overdressed paramours) that bowl as much light as they release? He bends to take off socks and shoes, while recounting the story of Tom and Morphy. (Who knew that Tom could play chess?) It sounds so good and perfect when he tells it, smooth and ideal.

She settles between white sheets and quilts. Does not stir, afraid of what she might set loose. When he closes in, she evades him by fingering the ruffled collar of her gown. His mouth stuffed still with Tom and Morphy. The small senseless words she can offer in reply, not at hand (lack) the full range she needs to speak to him. (Who knew that Morphy could play the piano?) He bends his reaches around her and she orders herself to wait. If he is the ladder to pleasure, she should not climb. She takes his tongue, putting an end to denial. Holding herself before he enters her with a tenderness she could not expect. Fitting in, his I love yous, trying to fill the hole created by absence, distance, separation. Shaking the two of them, some of the sweat on her body his and some of the sweat on his body hers, the best part of marriage, warming up a foot of air above and beneath them, fucking when what they need is sleep, arms and legs moving through it, since what divides her from him will never close.

For weeks after she bears him, unbears him. Two minds to leave, one to stay. His being here a time of plenty that she knows will end. A month or two. Squirrel-like, hoarding away words and pictures behind her eyes before she feels him from behind placing the softest line of kisses down her back, a wet trail over her spine. And out the door again. Gone.

Each key has its say. Notes rising in three dimensions around and about her. Reflections rattling against glass where moon bends through. The hours swaying above water. Edgemere rocks as never before, drawing closer to shore. The air, the light, the sounds different.

She draws back her gaze, looking away from so much water, satisfied to let the disrupting tumult of Tom’s notes throw her head clear, free her from wandering in that space between memory and Mr. Hub’s report about the two intruders. A man here. A Negro. Something at the edge of all this. Layers/levels of sound sliding together like stacked plates. Tom, spine arched, face tilted up at her, muddy with feeling. Sweat popping from his pores as if from some inner struggle he is going through, organs caught in the open. Reddish sediment collecting around the legs of the piano. Rising. Not a speck of kindness in his face for her.

Seeing the grievance in his face, thoughts that would have shamed her on other days come with surprising ease. Get clean of Tom — why not? Edgemere looming, expectant, glistening beneath a layer of moonlight — correct this disharmony of fate, a black possibility that gushes into bright night sky. (Night can find color.) Hasn’t she already done enough? Keeping him safe, protecting him from the city, keeping him nourished and clean, shutting herself up like this, watching hands for three years. (How long?) Is this what she deserves? Is this what she’ll do, watch hands for the rest of her life? Hands cooking cleaning playing praying fanning patting slapping rubbing or caressing her whole life. Tom her inheritance, with her perpetually in this city, this apartment. Consider other avenues, compromises that might be struck. Deliver him to Edgemere where he can be with his own kind. Letting herself think it for the first time. Afraid of being discovered in her feelings. But he can’t survive another upset — she’s sure — another relocation. Besides, he has earned the right to stay. Something to be said for dying quietly, for disappearing, a victory of a kind that has earned Tom the right to be here, in the city, for as long as the hours, the days permit. Them here until she can tell herself different.

She does not think of Tom as having desires other than those demanded by the way they live. How might Tom describe himself? (Occurs to her to wonder.) Is she promising something not hers to keep? They live reasonably well — she gets something half-right at least — their life neither complicated nor tragic. But what does Tom want? Narrow choices seem natural. Certain patterns of thought so simple and one-sided they become irresistible. You imagine you are Tom and ascribe your own thoughts to him. What does Tom think about her? How does he feel? (Wishes known and unknown. Where the heart is. Hidden beneath ribs curving around stomach and chest.) Clearly much affection but something else too, as if he is holding her up to something. She worries that she comes out lacking in his estimation.

The melody winds down. Sparser range. Softer scales. She tries to speak. Voice catches and the song ends. She knows exactly what Tom has in mind. (Why does a body want to be entered or embraced?) Getting him to bed will be torture. No point in insisting. She sneaks away from the chords, leaving Tom where he sits, in the shimmering distance behind her, his gold-headed cane hissing at her from its place in the corner when she passes.

She wakes some mornings, mouth gummy, eyes filmed over with sleep, legs feeling weary and leaden, a drug-like sluggishness throughout her body, and expects to find Sharpe in the parlor. But only in death is he completely available to her — as he was not in life — moving (contained) in a certain part of her mind. Eliza free to forget or to remember, thinking about him sometimes merely for the purpose of distraction, a buzz or dim ache that seems to carry toward the past.

What exactly has kept her from feeling more about her loss? (What plunges in the heart and is gone.) Her anger to help this thing (longing, grief) along. The passage of time putting an edge on her remorse, making her sense of independence, freedom, sharper. His broken appearances, migratory passings to and fro, rehearsals preparing her for the final sending off. So once she decided he was gone for good — three months? four? — she packed up his entire wardrobe, along with Warhurst’s — ten crates filled — and had Mr. Hub transport them to the Municipal Almshouse and the city’s other poorhouses and hospitals. She allowed Dr. Hollister to rummage through piles of souvenirs and mementos that had collected over the years and decide as he saw fit what should be put up for auction and what should be saved for posterity, these few items stored away in a single trunk that History will (might) want to know about the “Blind Tom Exhibition.”

Loaves of bread line the counter like closed coffins. Heavy pitchers filled with water and milk rising like mausoleums from the table. Basins covered over with big towels. Five ripe apples on a clean plate. Twelve porgies fried on a platter, mouths open, awed by air. She examines the blade of the knife and at that exact moment Tom enters the kitchen.

Miss Eliza, he says. Might I suggest we — then the words go wrong in midsentence.

He talks nonstop for more than an hour, words flying from his mouth like directionless bats, a mishmash of centerless verbiage, bottomless sound taking over her skin. Recitations from his stage days—Half Man, Half Amazing—voices within voices, a second, low and calm, that rises and separates itself from the main, then a higher third. Entire passages of one oration, snatches of another, the words lilting, sentences curling up and breaking off at the ends. Mouthed so rapidly at times that the words lose all sense.

What’s driving him into language? What is it exactly that comes back to find a tongue?

He stops as suddenly as he started and stands quietly before her, expecting her to say something — ah, she knows what he is thinking: she must be impressed, she must be astonished — his hands open in front of him as if he wants to be ready to catch her first words should she decide to speak, but she is feeling vague inside, not knowing what to say and wondering whether she has any moisture left in her mouth for framing it.

He takes her hand in his — the right palm, wet and greasy with fish — and leads her to the piano. (Not the objects themselves but the way to arrive at them.) Sits down, fingers flexing and finding themselves. (Idle hands, the devil’s playthings.) His notes are so thrilling, and his execution so perfect and so startling as to amuse every listener. The piano itself seems gifted, and sends forth in reverberation, praises, as it were, to Blind Tom. Blind Tom is the Temple wherein music dwells.

He jerks her sideways with his always-perfect timing. Pulls her into his chest, close enough for his hammering heart to break her resistance. Pieces their forms back together in a harsh rhythm. A dance. (What he wants.) Tom free and light, enjoying his own movements.

And that’s only the beginning. He spends the next day, sunup to sundown, running frantically about the apartment, throwing his legs out with aggressive confidence, his arms in the air, providing the gravity needed for country to gutter out of him in two flowing streams of sweat. And the day after that, he pursues her from one chamber to the next.

Run, Miss Eliza. I got you, Miss Eliza. These are some fast legs, Miss Eliza. Speeding along like an afternoon breeze. Room emptying into room. And Tom on her heels. How remarkable it is to be able to do that. Whether he catches her or whether she wins.

So it is. Back to his old self. All of his previous (summer) vigor regained. Joyful. Small chuckles converted into big laughs. Ridiculously happy. A long string of fabulous happenings. Eliza at first unable to appreciate the value of these new pleasures — the laughter has a cruel strain of its own — but with what predictability she eventually gives in.

Tom is quick to notice her change.

Time for our bath.

No better time to.

He stands quietly before her while she undresses him. Holds her hand in a tight grasp during the short walk to the tub, open and waiting and poised to pounce on four lion’s-paw feet balanced against the floor. The whole of him bending into the tub once the water is ready. They hunker down like two passengers setting out on a long journey, two soaking in the soft sounds of liquid prosperity, little concern for where they are headed.

From somewhere indistinct the moon begins to shine, red light thick and slow-moving on the water like wax. In a rapid sinking action Tom disappears beneath the surface, some time before he comes up again — she starts to count — choking and spitting.

They are digging a canal in Egypt, he says, water still in his mouth, shining against his teeth.

Here is the soap. Her breasts give in to the buoyancy of water, two pointed canoes riding the surface.

Two pounds of powder

Two pounds of soap

If you ain’t ready

Holla billy goat

Billy goat!

Seems to spill out of him, uncontrolled, the soap sliding over his body with a kind of furious impatience.

My mouth is closed, my ears are open, he says.

The cloth, she says.

He commandeers the cloth and proceeds to rinse the soap from his body. After a long thoughtful pause, he puts all his fingers deep into her hair and holds her head then leans forward in order to deliver his instructions, doing his best to be gentle, reassuring, his fingers moving with a bargaining touch that indicates that this natural familiarity will take nothing from her.

They stamp upon the mat to get rid of excess water. She whitens his entire body with lemon-scented talcum powder that Sharpe once brought back from Spain. Tom in her world again and she in his. Calm, helplessly so. How does it all become so familiar?

Perfectly content in the skin he calls home, Tom lives inside his body like a turtle, his world limited to the extremities of his skin. He can never escape his own head through the distractions the world offers sighted people. Perhaps he suffers from some mental deficiencies, Sharpe said. Still, I wonder how much of his mental state can be attributed to my father’s neglect. Because of Tom’s genius my father was reluctant to apply the correcting hand. But he gains much more in compensation, fortunate that his lack of sight, lack of mind does not permit him to know that he is of the despised Negro race, a former slave. Hellfire, Sharpe said. Maybe he even thinks he’s a white man.

For a time she is able to forget everything as she looks at the watery light, this sensation that the building has unmoored itself from the earth and set sail, Eliza captain at her window station, rocking between lower and higher joys of journey. Still, after days, after weeks, why is she not able to get completely used to this thing in Tom, in herself?

Tom gives a whole clear utterance, holding neither promise nor blame.

In the ashen noontime Dr. Hollister enters the parlor, dressed too heavily for the weather in an outer coat hanging over a fine woolen jacket and creased black trousers, his legs stocky, like sawed-off trunks, his feet shod in half-shoes half-boots that rise above his ankles. His white shirt seems to supply a soft light of its own, and Eliza wonders who has pressed and ironed it, since the Doctor as far as she knows travels without servants. Indeed, he is well dressed but needs some touches to be added, matters that fall under the purview of a good servant.

She hears his words but she feels nothing for the Doctor. Always this pretense once a month that he is only dropping in to visit on his way up to Saratoga Springs, where he keeps a stable of racing horses, his supposed reason for venturing here, even during the off-season. She allows that she is glad to see him. He brings her a bundle of two or three books. Lets himself express natural affection for Tom, certain in his touch that Tom can understand him.

How long was it after Sharpe’s disappearance (death) that he turned up one day, unexpected? She heard the knock, put one eye to the cold glass of the peephole, and discovered Dr. Hollister put before vision. Half a mind not to open the door since the Doctor was General Bethune’s man, and she had no way of gauging his intentions. But to deny him, she risked his return.

He walked in that first time, mouth tight, eyes cold, took her hand and kissed it, barely greeting her before he made his way across the room to Tom. The emotion brought on at the sight of Tom occupied his face for a full minute or more. He began the examination, but Tom’s skin was selfish, hugging to his frame, making it necessary for Dr. Hollister to use certain instruments again and again.

Dr. Hollister looked at her then looked past her, which she thought boded ill for Tom. He treated Tom with substances contained inside a dozen or more small glass-stoppered bottles. Tom moaned with the relief at these ministrations. He drank green liquid from a tiny urn, draining the vial. Slowly color began to come back to his skin. At the end of it all Dr. Hollister prepared Tom a bath with salt from Saratoga Springs.

Is the comfort the same, what the good doctor offers Tom and what she offers? Her arms and his, her bath and his?

Dr. Hollister pats Tom on the head. Don’t I know what you hate by this time? he says.

His leather bag is open just enough to allow her a glimpse of a caliper, pincers up. Why is it that he chooses to perform his examination, take measurements, in front of her? Why does she watch?

He furiously registers his findings—“data” he calls it, part of Tom’s ongoing “medical history”—in a vellum ledger, after writing his notes, then writing them again on cleaner paper in a cleaner hand, careful strokes, more beautiful lettering, not a single smudge.

He continues to eat well, beyond what he needs?

Eliza throws up her hands. He always has.

Well, do what you can to regulate him.

I will make much effort. How is his water?

Dr. Hollister takes a seat on the settee, the fingers of both hands laced on his head. Looking like a hot mess, overcoat still in place, blanketing his body. Sweat outlining his cleanly barbered hairline. The moisture has decreased some, but fortunately there’s still a valuable surplus. The orbs have not deformed any and are effectively preserved inside the chambers.

So there’s still a chance for sight?

Very much so.

Dr. Hollister’s diagnosis — Tom’s pickled eyes biding time — was opposite that of Dr. McCune’s. He can detect some light, Dr. McCune said. But expect no improvement in his condition. The orbs will slowly putrefy. However the experts differed, upon first meeting she impressed Dr. Hollister with her interest in and understanding of the facts and details of ophthalmology, all she had gleaned from Dr. McCune in their rounds at the Asylum.

Continue to keep the orbs moist.

I should by all means. His seriousness imposes a silence on her, on Tom, and she senses that if anything important is to get said it will have to be said quickly. Someone was here.

Dr. Hollister ceases to move, sits rigid for a few moments, as though making any motion at all might be of unintended and dangerous consequence. She sees the way age has set into his skin, a map crumpled and creased, folded too often, overhandled. When?

I’m not sure.

You’re not sure?

I received a report.

The Doctor does not appear startled, as if in the common ease of these surroundings nothing can put danger in the front of his mind. And when was this report received?

It takes her a bit of calculating to arrive at an approximate date.

Yes, the Doctor says. I see. So then you were actually away?

We were away. Foremost in her thoughts facts she decides to withhold: A Negro. Two.

Yes, the Doctor says. Yes. Who could it have been? He cracks for her benefit a small understanding smile. Why shouldn’t he? At this late time the watching eye and listening ear know better than to expect any upheaval that would end up leaving things radically different from the way they are. Well, send word if you have to.

Certainly, Doctor.

I should say my good-bye. He gets to his feet, puts away his instruments, shuts his bag, touches Tom, bows his farewell. Remember his appetite.

Certainly, Doctor. Certainly.

A door open and shut, and already the strong smell of damask roses is taking over the apartment. Each breath brings with it a smell of flowers. The smell lifts the corners of Eliza’s mouth.

Tom moves the vase one inch to the right in obvious irritation. That inch won’t do so he moves it another.

She sits down on the settee, trying to conceal her uneasiness, hands clasped together in front of her.

Tom tries the vase an inch or two more, in one direction or the other. And she searches his face for something she didn’t know was lost until then.

We can place them elsewhere, Tom.

You, Miss Eliza, you keep them there. This is my piano.

Wasn’t that nice of Mr. Hub? Mr. Hub was only trying to be nice. The roses. And fish, too.

I’m Blind Tom, he says. I’m one of the greatest men to walk the earth. Nostrils flared, he goes about in the shadowed cool sniffing the room, from corner to corner, length to length. Dressed by his own hands today, a finely tailored suit, the wale in his pants close together as if stitched by miniature fingers.

He removes his jacket, revealing the harness of his suspenders. Folds the jacket across the settee at the end opposite her and resumes his walk, moving quickly and lightly about the room, with his hands wrapped around the shoulder-looped straps of his suspenders, navigational tools directing him this way and that.

Tom—

I have dominion over my life.

Tom, if you will—

Now he begins to parrot every word that comes from her mouth, having an easy time of it, an exact reproduction of all the nuances of diction and tone of voice. Strange to hear yourself coming out of another person’s mouth, that person of the opposite sex, and a full-blooded Negro.

She gives up trying to engage and distract him. Later he will be all softness and apology, but she’ll make him pay. All she can do for now to maintain a fruitless distance, sound cutting the air in half. Rose petals shudder with the piano’s vibrations. Move like little knives in the air, trying to cut free.

Vexed, Tom measuring her wants against his, showing and giving her a sampling of his worst, but not the worst he is capable of, the store of inflictions he directed at the manager Warhurst. Tom readily accepted Sharpe’s authority but was every bit the disobedient child with Warhurst. A terrible irony since the manager, unbeknownst to Sharpe, indulged Tom in ways that would never have met with Sharpe’s approval, honoring every demand, only for Tom to repay this gluttonous generosity with resistance and outright refusal — in the end the reasons for Tom’s recalcitrance are unclear, stemming from more than the mere consequence of age, Tom’s youth — until Sharpe, shouting, shoving, stepped in to exercise the restraining hand.

He thinks you’re a nigger, Sharpe said.

A nigger? Warhurst said. He has Coachman for that.

You work like a nigger. And you worry like a nigger.

I do my job.

Yes, you do your job, but you take everything for a sign.

She wakes up feeling tired and at fault. Feet aching as if she had spent the night walking sleep. Tom had done the walking. Roving about the apartment all night. (What she heard.) Why the sudden restlessness?

He drinks his milk after it cools to the right temperature. Replaces the stagnant fluid in the vase with fresh water. Despite the dominant scent the roses are already wilting, becoming less noticeable, like a flag receding in size and color with distance. The vase (glass) seems to be decreasing in size too. Losing to the piano’s black shine, hard-set radiance.

The piano is growing, subtracting the world around them. A little more each day. She fears that it will soon take over the parlor. Dead center in the room now, so that you can’t help but see it, have to walk around it to get from one side of the room to the other. The furniture redefined, going miniature, one object crowded up against the next, some actually forced out into the hall.

Little by little. The universe constricting in front of her eyes.

Tom is seated on the bench with his legs spread wide apart, the expansive globe of his belly propped on black wood, hands serving a supportive role at his sides, some upset nesting in the hollows of his abdomen. He sits that way for a time, a pattern of dying light stretching across the ceiling.

An owl night, he announces. Sitting on a tree.

Having enough of the dark, she strikes a lamp, the smell of kerosene weighing down upon them. Tom’s mouth cannons open and before long his entire body is erupting into convulsions, retching up a stomach-warm lump stillborn inside an orange-yellow puddle.

Takes her some time to move, since she is in no great hurry to clean the floor. Fears that any movement will touch off his belly again. And even after she performs the task she takes the precaution of preparing a tablespoon of cod liver oil to help settle his stomach.

Heavy with the oil he sits for a time before joining her on the settee, stomach noisy. Twists his fingers into hers, her smooth pink hands and his smooth brown hands forming a single fist. His face stunned and drained, yellow flecks of vomit in the corners of his mouth. She has of necessity to clean his face too. Already pitched beyond her limit. (Isn’t it enough?)

Dr. Hollister arranges his gauges and instruments on top of the piano.

Here you are at last, Tom says.

Yes, I am here.

You came because of me.

I shall not pretend. I came because of you.

Dr. Hollister makes quick work of his examination. Records his findings.

Perhaps you can give him something for his belly, Eliza says. He suffered a bad stomach last week. Tom touches his abdomen in verification.

He has too much flesh, Dr. Hollister says. He’s gained more than ten pounds since my last visit. He looks at her, making sure she understands.

She does. For the good doctor how one looks is of first importance.

He mixes Tom a tonic with medicines drawn from several vials.

He closes his bag in less time than it takes to tell. He will require a daily constitutional. Facing her again while he talks.

Where will we walk? Where would they walk? Of course, Dr. Hollister can imagine (knows) only too well the life they live here.

He will do well to walk. And you would do well to give him relief from his person whenever possible. His continuance depends on these conditions.

What exactly does he mean by that?

Did you hear that, Tom? Dr. Hollister asks.

Good doctor.

Dr. Hollister takes the time to fasten every button on his overcoat. He grips the handle of his bag. Already she is wondering about his instructions.

Tom turns toward the Doctor. What kind of time is this to leave, to go home?

I’m all done here. You’ve made my stay light.

I have. I hope you’re not too tired. Tom gets up from the bench. You’re dropping with sleep.

Am I now? The Doctor touches Tom’s head.

Even your hand. I ask you, where’s the sense in your leaving?

You wish to delay my going? Dr. Hollister takes a seat on the bench with his bag at his feet. Who will look in on the horses?

Tom sits down beside him.

Yes. I see. I see.

It’s good you do. So we’ll sit for a time. My afternoon is totally dependent on you.

Is Dr. Hollister offering her an opportunity to escape as he had on that mad afternoon three years ago during the violence?

We can travel at nightfall, Dr. Hollister said, drawing himself up in his seat.

No, she said.

Do your best not to worry. I have agents here in the city who will see to our safe passage.

I’ve suffered a shock. I need to consider my options.

Her words temporarily shunted Dr. Hollister into a disbelieving silence. Yes, you’ve suffered a shock, he said. Now you must let it end.

No, she said.

Madame, if you entertain thoughts of a respite—

No I do not. But I do entertain other thoughts.

He gave her a woebegone look.

I will go out for a short time and you will remain here with Tom and see after him until I return.

I cannot honor that arrangement.

So Tom must accompany me.

Madame.

Doctor.

You don’t want to see what’s out there, he said.

I can quite believe it. But I will go all the same. She wouldn’t have him coming in her home telling her what’s dangerous and what’s safe.

Accepting that he had no voice in the matter, Dr. Hollister looked at Tom again and again, as if trying to read the saving solution in the boy’s expression.

She walked out into a maddeningly sunny afternoon, some underworld creature slinking into light, into air, after a long hibernation. Blinking off the shock of sudden glare. Then taking the light inside her, blazing from inside out like a dream. She walked awkwardly, her feet unreal, feeling exposed beneath a dress falling in stiff folds. Even with the sun scouring everything, drops of water were hanging from the trees, reminding her that it had indeed rained last night. Either that or the trees were sweating.

In any direction she looked she saw long ropes of smoke rising in gray-black rebellion against the sun. The sidewalks and streets paved in shards of glass — hop, skip, jump — like some sparkling but reckless carpet, her passage across it accentuating her amazement that the city was still in place, the houses and buildings standing. Telegraph wires had been cut. Along the shore lay scattered the rusting remains of rifles and cannons, tools and field equipment, canteens, shovels, picks, and axes. The ocean drowned in a frantic proliferation of debris — hats, blouses, scarves, shoes and boots, staves and paddles — along with bloated cow-like forms bobbing in the surf. Avenues clogged with streams of rioters spilling out from smashed-in doorways, with booty floating on their shoulders: cumbersome lengths of carpet, heavy iron bedsteads, finely crafted desks and tables, leather-topped stools and chairs, and porcelain basins and commodes. Hands pushed through broken windows burdened with bulging sacks that they quickly dropped to other hands raised greedily in wait at street level below. This was what she saw. This was what I saw.

Was she any more than they?

Perhaps why she hurried on, kept on her way, seeing nothing at all, unless it was the glass under her feet. Why break her eyes with all the sights? Why when she was already fully weighted with words of apology, words of guilt?

Is she any more than they?

Walking now, she wonders how long it has been. Too long. Stiff legs, crotchety arms, and rusty joints. (What she has lived to know.) Testing the waters. Indeed, motion brings the better. Footsteps with nothing physical in them. Just out and about. Seeing what can be gained from an aimless stroll, a brief separation from Tom.

The first leaves to change stop her. Now all the trees pop into bright color one after the next. Autumn in an instant. Leaves in free fall. Falling about her shoulders. The colors look elegant on her sleeves. And loose leaves carpeting the ground. (Which leaf belongs to which tree?) One color giving shape to another. Twirling on the sidewalk like scraps of another world dropped from the sky. And she stumbling forward, the world beautiful again. Remembering what this feels like.

Why has she left this pleasure until now? How easily she could have done this before, take her feet on casual stroll around the neighborhood. Take in some fresh air.

Evening arranges itself around the fallen leaves. And then the sky blooms. She watches the stars pop out, one by one. Now here is something she has forgotten, that you can see stars here in the city. There they are, like — looking at them closely — holes punched in dark cloth so light underneath bleeds through.

Of course she has already stayed out longer than she should have, but the harbor is just over there. All the big ships sailing to Britain and the Continent and the West Indies and Africa and South America and the Pacific. Just over there.

Something goes skimming by her in the air. Ship blowing its horn. Much has changed, much between her and Tom. So why is she scanning ahead in her mind to find an excuse for why she has stayed away so long? What is holding her in this world?

What if she returns home and finds Dr. Hollister no longer there? No, she will find him there — and Tom — giving her some last words of advice as useless as all the others he has given her.

Mr. Hub calls, Tom says. He calls when you are away.

When am I away? she says. I am never away, she says, except that one time — yesterday or the day before that, two, three days ago, four — when Dr. Hollister came. And she is thinking, could he really have missed me for those few hours when I stepped out?

He calls with thoughts of flowers and fish.

And where am I when this happens? Just where do you suppose?

Mr. Hub wishes to drive you to the country. Our house in the country. With flowers and fish.

He is slouched all the way forward on the bench, with his face turned sideways in flat repose against the strings, the piano’s cantilevered lid raised guillotine-like above him.

But where have I been?

So come here and sit and let’s figure it out.

Tom must be confused, thinking her gone, thinking that she has left the apartment when she has only been spending a few necessary moments elsewhere. (Could she have missed Mr. Hub’s call?) And why shouldn’t he have such thoughts? Hasn’t she been avoiding him? Indeed she has. As of late, she finds she can’t remain in the same room with him for more than a few minutes at a time. She sees only the outline of his body or his back hunched over food when she enters a room and just as quickly leaves it. Whenever he leans for her, she leans away, until with each passing day he becomes more and more remote, disappearing into the crevices of forgetting until he squeezes through again to remind her. Who would think that he should miss her so for a few unimportant hours taken on the fly?

Now Tom is standing firm in the middle of the room, hurting her in his way, all impatience to have her sit beside him on the bench and listen to a new song. She gives in to his excitment, not unbearably at first, pours herself into being another person since this is what he will accept as compromise, conscious to make no open display of her need for distance.

His an expression of the most steady attention. Smiles, the shine of teeth, strong urges to burrow into her whenever she is comfortably seated on cushions and pillows. He occupies the apartment completely, from the lines of the walls to the edges of the doors to the joints in the floors. Tom brimming in the doorways. Tom stationed on the chairs. Tom framed in the windows, venetian blinds sectioning both him and time into lit rectangular hours.

Turning on the movements of his face, the motion of his limbs, her life repeats itself every time Tom takes her by the hand and insists that she follow where he pulls her. Agitated breaths. Bumps and bruises. Sleight-of-hand reflections that go skimming over solid surfaces and disappear. Anything to keep him still.

Why not here at the piano, where one can enjoy the firm feel of wood while watching one’s image trembling in clear particular silence, a dark glaze of laminate? Where one may study the deep hollow with strings cast in tight suspension like a fisherman’s net. More than three years now since the correcting fingers of the tuner have paid a visit, but each key sounds the pitch it should. What keeps them in tune? Some memory of the tuner’s hands caught in the layered depths of shine? Or is the piano itself the tuner’s petrified shadow (soul), severed from the flesh where it rightfully belongs and (caught) forever here?

Slow heavy notes and stalled chords hold in the air somewhere above her head and hang bat-like from the ceiling, teaching her longing and loathing in equal measure.

Even the music has turned against her. (No, he has turned it against her.)

How ugly it makes her feel to be simply sitting here, doing nothing, day after day, like an anchor rusting in water. Easy to drift from one room to the next. Space before her, space to her left and right, space behind her. Her life a muddle in this way. Easy to turn a familiar corner only to lose your grasp on the known world and collide with another body coming into the room you are leaving and see your twin sitting on the floor trying to clear her head.

Is she any less alone with Tom? How meagerly she opens her heart to him. For his own good, she must set some boundaries, limit contact to mere glimpses of his grumpy silhouette. She feels angry, capable of causing pain. Just the other day, she was sullen and spoke too quickly at him, her tone harsh, thinking it might cause some change in his manner, ease his demands and contentions, bring an end to his finding her wherever she is. He seized her by the hand, as is his custom, and generated a deep pressure on her flesh. Began touching and pulling her, and when she resisted — No, Tom — took her neck in the crook of his heavy arm and tried to wrestle her out of herself, drag her down to the floor to sit with him. She shoved her palm in his face with something more than annoyance, something closer to hatred, and freed herself, rising up from the floor, gaining the settee and hastening to the other side of the room. Then he was on her again, his hands quick and warm. She pried them from her dress, one finger at a time.

She doesn’t want his ugly touches. So much else she doesn’t want anymore, some point of definition in the past from which she is receding, some point of embarkation in the future where she is or isn’t heading, Eliza glowing distinctly in her own lessening light, sparklingly aware of that world cut off from her. Never so alone.

Tired of always being cooped up with her thoughts, she opens a window and sticks her head out into the open. Takes in air that brings a welcome fragrance and taste into her nose and mouth. She’ll take it, this air, take it for what it’s worth, even if it gives her trouble. Undoes what’s done. Her hair shifting sideways from the full-on breeze blowing at her. She catches up the shiny-dart strands with both hands, wind so hard she can’t see a thing, can’t keep her eyes open, hair, eyes giving her trouble. Using both hands she scoops hair forward from the sides of her face, head tilted downward. Is it that she is leaning out the window, her untended hair hanging like rope? If she extends her tresses full length she can climb down them to the street.

Her mind furling, rolling on its own into some unchartable dark sanctum. Hair, eyes, mind — what are they telling her? She has taken her ease long enough. If she is to be any good to Tom, good to herself, she will have to step for a spell (again) beyond the confines of walls, no farther than the street below, into the air.

Taking up her shawl, she quits the apartment, her desperation no less deep for its suddenness. Color is noticeably absent. Only the same brown of barren trees and gray of empty sidewalks and streets. (Autumn over already?) Still, standing here is good. Under open sky. The day overcast. Secondhand light. Dusty and old.

Is she to trust her eyes? Since starting out, not another person has crossed her sight. Can it be that they’ve all gone away and left the city to her? Worse, some destruction has reached each and every one of them in their homes? She will continue on to the first canal.

Advancing at a quicker pace fails to ease the sourness of her suspicion. The thought of them all dead. Hardly a satisfying outcome even if a just one given what she has endured, changes enough for several lifetimes. (The body never forgets.) Just like that the world chooses to end but not before spoiling her with a short taste of normalcy. She is like anyone else: a satisfying taste creates expectations for more. Has she not already begun forecasting, making plans? (Before the weather changes, winter arrives, each day she will have her walk, two or three or four modest hours at a time. Stroll along the canals. Through the park. Take in the museums. Where’s the harm? What trouble can Tom come to while she is away?) So what is she to do now?

She reaches the fourth canal and still no sign of people. (Dogs yes. Cats yes. Birds yes. Squirrels and the lesser forms.) She senses the air standing out against the cloth of her shawl. What’s the point in venturing farther? Something futile. Something nostalgic. Something stupid. But she can neither stop nor turn around. In fact, the impulse to advance, push ahead all the way downtown, to the harbor, comes over her. When had she last seen the harbor, the beautiful waters and ships there?

Soon she crosses the sixth canal, takes a corner, and chances upon a fantastic sight: a Great Wall of backs, elbows, napes, formed along the boulevard less than a hundred paces ahead. A scene that overpowers her as much for its unexpectedness as for the total un-accompaniment of sound. Thousands of people standing in complete silence, straining calves and necks to see over the heads in front of them some display of public celebration. Has her grip on time become so lax that she has forgotten this holiday?

She has trouble making her way through the crush of bodies, four or five rows deep, but polite requests, dexterity, and force eventually gain her the front and access to an even more impressive spectacle, a slow river of color flowing southbound down the boulevard. Negro soldiers on parade. Black, brown, and yellow skin enlivened by blue uniforms, the best blues embellished with white gloves and white leggings. They step bravely, heads high, bodies stiff, displaying a dignity of purpose even when a sleeve is torn, a cap mended, a cuff tattered, or a collar worn away. Their regimental flags (colors) swaying wildly above although there is no wind that Eliza can feel, the previous breeze stilled. Some soldiers ride high on horses. Counted among the hooves that carry men those that pull along cannons mounted on wheels. And the men to a one are fully armed with muskets, bayonets in place, holstered pistols visible in the belts of a few. Altogether enough firepower to set ablaze acres of white skin.

Her ears awaken in an explosive instant at the sound of a rifle, the first bullet fired. Surely a volley will follow. But no body falls dead. No one runs for sanctuary. And she realizes that what at first struck her as the absence of sound was only its denial, a vain effort by that white wall of bodies to cut off any and all evidence of these Negro soldiers to the listening ear and the observing eye. Only now can she hear the thud of boots, the smacking of hooves and the creaking of wheels, the straining of leather, the swishing of cloth and clanking of metal, the clatter of drums and calls of bugles and shrill of flutes.

The last soldier reaches the end of the boulevard and slips from sight around the corner with his compatriots, and the crowd moves as one body in curious pursuit of the Negro soldiers when they should be fleeing in the opposite direction. She simply stands and looks into one face after another, trying to read the emotions stirring there, their faces radiant with panic. Charmed by the piper, the entire city tags along to its doom. Is she fated to perish along with them? For surely the soldiers are here to enact their revenge against the city.

With no loss of speed or obvious sign of tiring, the soldiers make the many miles back to the harbor, where the big metal ships that had carried them hulk like resting whales, their guns the size of houses. The soldiers march the half circle of the harbor then start to travel north again, along Broadway, passing one canal after the next until they reach the southernmost entrance to Central Park. They enter the park and continue on to the Great Lawn, and only cease to move when someone shouts a command. A second shouted command brings them at ease.

Now the city beholds the third astonishing sight of the day. Tents pitched across the Great Lawn. Dozens if not hundreds of them. Flapping in the breeze, they seem perfectly at home. Even their canopies were a familiar shade of seasonal green. Not hard to believe that these tents have sprouted up through the earth of their own accord.

Then the sense of unease. She feels it, but she can’t be alone in her feeling, glad that they are feeling it too. (She sees it on them, hears it inside them, even for those who can only manage a murmur.) But it also feels good for some reason she cannot fathom to be standing as part of the crowd, as if she is one of them still. She mingles her surprise with theirs — why not? — even as she recognizes with new intensity just how alone she is, just how far the world has left her behind.

Her arms shiver in the coolness of the evening. Bare limbs bearing their loss. She adjusts her shawl and continues up the street, shadows gathering behind her, planning ambush. All along the avenue the gas lamps come on one by one. No cause to worry.

How will Tom greet the news? An invading army of Negroes. Victorious in one war and readying for another.

So much around her is untried or different that it takes her almost a half block to realize that she has passed the building where she lives. Making hasty return, she finds a man sitting on the front steps, wrapped in his overcoat. A Negro. She decides in an instant to simply make her way around his person as quickly as she can.

He takes to his feet at the sight of her. Mrs. Bethune? Eliza Bethune?

Who are you looking for?

Madame, I believe you are the reason for my call.

She stands watching.

My presence must be a surprise. Tabbs Gross. The Negro holds his hand straight out. She reaches and takes it, and he shakes her hand with the minimum of movement and force, like a bird alighting on the thinnest of branches. Mrs. Bethune, I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. The Negro eases his features into a relaxed smile. He is tall and very correctly dressed. He is calm and dignified, a man who makes himself felt at once.

I don’t mean to excite you.

You haven’t. She rubs her hands up and down both arms under her shawl.

It pleases me to know that. I should make haste and explain.

You called once before? You were here back during the summer?

Well, I have expended considerable time and debt to find you.

She senses that he is pleased, he is delighted, he is glad, but he allows nothing of his feelings to appear on his face. Does he expect her to make apology for his troubles in locating her?

I’m sure you will find the purpose of my business most satisfactory to yourself.

Yes, Mr. Gross. I feel certain of that too. Kindly inform me.

Madame. You see, I’ve come for Tom. I’ve come to return him to his mother.

What could have prepared her for this response? Far easier to draw upon certain acceptable assumptions that might make quick work of explaining his presence here. A journalist. A soldier even.

You would have me believe that this mother is alive? He has no one, Sharpe said.

Yes, madame. Even as we speak she is resident on Edgemere, awaiting reunion with her son.

And she has been resident there for how long? Why is she not here instead of you? She can barely get her voice to work.

Madame, I fully understand your concern. You see—

She can see colors when the Negro speaks, this Tabbs Gross, colors, as if the seasons are moving in reverse and autumn is returning again. The circle ending where it began.

She takes two steps back and falls on the curb. Sits there looking up at the man, Tabbs Gross, afraid to talk, afraid of what might happen if her words hit air.