The Witness
Clifford Browder
From her bedroom's front window Carrie watched as the ladies came and went. Some came at dusk, and others by daylight in thick veils, going down under the stoop to the basement. Through all kinds of weather, dodging black puddles of rain, lashed by the wind, or even on wintry mornings when she awoke to coconut snow, and drainspouts jutted icicles, the ladies came and went. For months Carrie watched, and watched the neighbors watch; they looked from behind closed curtains. "Madame Restell," she whispered as she brushed her stringy hair, wishing it were dark like her mother's. "Madame Restell..." The name had a sound of mystery.
They lived in a four-story red-brick house on Greenwich Street at the corner of Liberty. Her parents had furnished it with thick carpets, a mahogany table in the parlor with claw feet and a white marble top, and gilt-framed portraits on the walls--"Of ancestors," her mother explained with a smile.
Carrie's mother was a female physician: she treated ladies for ailments. "I'll have my office in the basement," she had announced the day they moved in. "We're going to help oodles of ladies. We're going to make tons of money." The office was done up to dazzle, with anatomy charts on the walls, and models of the human body like dolls without their clothes on. "Both sexes," said her mother, "with detachable parts--from Paris!" Then Carrie's stepfather, taking pen and paper, had raked up from his mind the fanciest words he could think of--efficacious, infallible, regulator--and set them down with a flourish. When they put the words in the papers, ladies flocked. Her mother received them in the basement; her stepfather mixed the medicines.
When the ladies started coming, the neighbors had turned frosty, wouldn't speak to her parents in the street. And once when Carrie, peering over the fence on a woodpile, asked the girl next door to play with her, the girl's mother had snatched her away. So Carrie played alone with a wax doll in blue gauze whose eyes opened and shut.
Carrie's stepfather was tall and handsome with a cane that clicked on the pavement. He gave her lessons in reading and spelling. After each lesson, when he scooped her up and hugged her, she nosed into his clean starched shirt, clung to him, grazed his scented chin.
Carrie's mother towered in fountains of silk, her dark eyes flashing, and pealed a bell-like laugh. She wore bold tartan shawls, fiery brooches, and hard gold pins that glittered. Some of her dresses talked, some were silent. One green silk dress crinkled like money and gave off whiffs of perfume. When her mother kissed her, Carrie felt locked in a fragrant garden of jeweled insects, black roses with thorns.
Her mother loved her in fits. For two weeks she greeted her with a "Hello, pet" in the hallway or at best a blown kiss. But in the third week she announced, "You're my lucky penny, my creampuff," and nibbled her with kisses. An outing always followed: to Vauxhall Garden, where she rode the merry-go-round, or to Barnum's Museum to see the fat girls, an armless man who wrote with his toes, and a boa constrictor that gulped live chickens whole. Then they went to the stores on Catherine Street and came back laughing with lace for Carrie, or pink kid gloves, or a new chinchilla hat. Then for two weeks her mother ignored her, though if she moaned in her bed at night, her stepfather came and read to her.
Every day Carrie's parents conferred in the back parlor behind closed sliding doors; she wasn't supposed to hear. So she talked with Cook, who sat damp and tangy in the kitchen among spinach scraps, potato peels, and carrot ends, and had a mole with a hair in it, or with Irish Annie, hot-tempered with a firecracker laugh. Annie warmed her bed at night, roused her in the morning, and all day scrubbed, waxed, polished, but in odd moments sang her Irish songs and told her stories.
But the ladies still came and went while the neighbors frowned, scowled. One evening, muffled as from the depths of a pond, a scream broke. Later as Carrie looked from her window, a veiled woman lurched up to the street, leaned on the fence, staggered off. Carrie had never been to the basement since the ladies started coming; her mother forbade it. In her mother's office she remembered a doorway in back with a red curtain. She feared her mother's anger, the scald of her voice, but she thought about the curtain. Behind it something happened.
One day when her parents were out, she tiptoed down to the office, peered in. Dim light sloping from a window lit a shelf of jars with labels: ERGOT, SNAKEROOT, BLACK HELLEBORE. She saw a picture on the wall of a fish that looked like a baby, and in back, the red curtain. Her heart beat. Suddenly she rushed to the curtain, snatched it back: a small room, bare; a blanket, a smell of soap. Closing the curtain, she went to her mother's desk, opened drawers: glinty things. When she touched one, pain ripped her finger. She sprang back, knocked the shelf. A jar fell to the floor and smashed. A black powder spilled out whose smell stung her nostrils. Footsteps on the stairs; she froze. Annie burst in:
"Girral, what have you done? Get back to your room--fast!"
She raced upstairs, flopped on the bed in a sweat, sucked blood from her finger. Would Annie tell? Her mother, turning ice and fire all at once, would do something--she didn't know what. Annie entered, grabbed her tight by the wrist:
"Lucky for you I cleaned it all up. Don't niver go down again to that basement! Do you hear, Miss Snoop, do you?" She pinched her. "Do you?"
Carrie nodded, Annie left. Her arm ached, but she knew now that Annie wouldn't snitch.
ERGOT, SNAKEROOT, BLACK HELLEBORE...pointed things...a fish that looked like a baby. Her mother hurt ladies, but they wanted to be hurt. Why? She saw her mother's eyes, biting and black, then heard her mother's voice downstairs. Her mouth went dry.
"We're going to become a hospital, pet. We're going to help ladies in trouble. We're going to make mountains of money!"
Ladies came and stayed two, three, four to a room; pans clattered, doors creaked. Carrie's mother glided from room to room, brisk, buoyant, poised, while Annie fetched trays from the kitchen. Her mother told Carrie to keep to the kitchen or her room, or play outside. But ladies in ruffled nightgowns smiled at Carrie, and one beckoned to her, kissed her, and said, "God bless your mother, dear; she's saved my reputation." Others kept their doors shut and sobbed. If a gentleman called on a lady, Carrie's mother talked with him a moment in the parlor, waving a plump bare forearm, then led him up to the room; later she smiled him out. At night there were whispers, padding feet; in the morning, vomit smells, a reek of vinegar and urine.
Once it had been in the basement; now it was all around her: stinging powders, pointed things, the fish that looked like a baby. "Babies come from Heaven," Cook had told her once, but her stepfather, learning this, had scoffed: "Babies come from mothers and fathers; forget about Heaven and God!" Carrie remembered pots from certain rooms that only her mother emptied; she felt sick.
"You're going to day school, pet. You'll learn all kinds of things, make oodles of friends."
The master, Mr. Knight, had whistly breath and snowstorm dandruff. When irked, he slammed down his ruler on his desk: "Order is Heaven's first law, and order I'll have in my school!"
Carrie learned bits of French, did sums, and with a quill pen over and over again copied out models for writing: Beauty decays, Death is inevitable, Cheerfulness pleases. She had a white porcelain slate that other girls itched to borrow. By lending it out, she did indeed make friends, but couldn't invite them home. So in the backyard every afternoon she rolled her hoop round and round on the skimpy grass, then looked into a shallow pond deep, saw another Carrie in another yard with vines, flowers, trees.
"Outrageous!" said her mother.
A word had been painted on the stoop. Before Carrie could see it, Annie rushed out with suds to scrub it off.
A week later the word reappeared. Before Annie could wash it off, Carrie saw it: MURDERESS. Carrie felt a fist in her stomach.
"A lie!" exclaimed her stepfather. "Your mother is a very brave lady, far in advance of her time."
The next morning, shouts erupted in the street. Carrie's parents double-locked the doors, shuttered the windows, sent Annie to stay with Cook in the kitchen. In the back parlor, well away from windows on the street, they explained to Carrie how bad people had said bad things about her mother and called a meeting in front of their house.
"No matter, pet, the police will protect us."
Outside, Carrie heard murmurs, speeches, yells: "Butcher!" "Fiend!" "Haul her out!"
Rocks banged the shutters, glass broke. Carrie's mother sat stock still, staring straight before her with a hint of a twist of a smile; her stepfather paced up and down. At cries of "Kill the monster!" Carrie burst into sobs, screamed; her mother hugged her tight. In the street, police whistles shrilled; scuffles. Clasped against her mother's pounding heart, eyes shut, Carrie whispered:
"Paris is the capital of France. Two times eight is sixteen. George Washington the father of his country..." She saw nothing, heard only the chant of her voice.
Time passed; her mother's grip had loosened. Carrie opened her eyes: not a shout, not a sound from the street. Pale and speechless, her stepfather sat slumped down in a chair. Her mother, calm, smiled:
"The police have done their duty."
Because her mother killed things in ladies--tiny babies that looked like fish--people hated her. Her mother's deed was all through the house, the hate was all around it. Her mother was stronger than the hate; no plea from Carrie would stop her, no threat from anyone. Carrie must live with her fears, and with the hate.
All winter she dreamed of ice: clean spikes of it frosting her brain, cool crystals through her eyes, her snow-stuffed innards sealed, her blood numbed, in a thick transparent mountain.
Spring came. One morning there appeared in front of the house a shiny dark high-wheeled carried drawn by four quick-stepping horses with a coachman in livery, watched by every eye on the block. At the sight of it gleaming in the neighbors' hate, a tingle danced through her veins. The carriage, her mother told her, was theirs: "If you're good in school, pet, I'll take you for a ride on Saturday." Then, escorted by her stepfather, Carrie's mother stood up straight like a queen and strode out toward the carriage. Carrie watched in awe, and when her mother's dress of rippling blue satin with a froth of lace brushed her in the hall, it was so beautiful she wanted to drown in it.
Tables of Content
Seventeen (Fall 2003)
Sixteen (Spring 2003)
Fifteen (Fall 2002) Fourteen (Spring 2002)
Thirteen
(Fall 2001) Twelve (Spring 2001)
Eleven (Fall 2000)
Ten (Spring 2000)
Nine (Fall 1999) Eight (Spring 1999)
Seven, (Fall 1998) Six, (Spring 1998)
Five (Fall 1997) Four (Winter/Spring 1997)
Three (Summer/Fall 1996) Two (Winter 1996)