Читать книгу America's First Female Serial Killer - Mary Kay McBrayer - Страница 16

CHAPTER 5

Every season a different color or pattern grew insufferable to Auntie, and she claimed her tastes changed based on what her friends liked best. When the deacon’s wife found pinks too saccharine, Auntie weeded them from her house, or when the mayor’s daughter decided white was too simple and plain, that it reminded her of the bleakness of a winter sun, nothing could keep its starkness, and the remodeling was added to Jane’s chore list. Jane liked such projects because even though Auntie took total credit for the ideas in front of her club, it was truly Jane’s handiwork, her frugality spun into decadence that they complimented, when they noticed. Jane liked the recognition, even if it was only Auntie who knew to whom it belonged, and she liked even better that she knew the reason Auntie craved such drastic change so often: she was sick—Auntie gave herself a to-do list because if she still had unfinished plans, she could not die. Jane knew this because she did Auntie’s laundry. Jane liked being the only one with this knowledge. She liked that she could see the way Auntie’s mind worked, and that she was so nervous. She liked that she alone could help Auntie, and that Auntie could no longer force her to do anything at all. Of course, Jane followed through her every command, but she smiled to herself at the knowledge that if she decided not to obey, she could simply do as she pleased.

After she hosted the women’s group on the first Sunday in August, Auntie announced to Jane that the draperies had to go—they were too simple, the pattern too loose and unwieldy, the colors too flashy for good women to abide—and Jane planned a trip to the textile store the following morning. After clearing the breakfast dishes to soak tepid in the kitchen sink, she walked downtown, and because she knew the clerk so well by these years of redecorating, Jane walked straight in without ringing the bell. She looked up after latching the door behind her and saw not her friend but a man instead—and not a man like Oramel, with his intelligently concave cheeks and graceful long fingers, but a man with a broad, suntanned face and upturned nose and wide palms. He laughed when he saw her expression and said in a lilt she had not heard since the Boston Female Asylum, “I guess you were expecting Katy, not me!” He stood and said, “You must be Jane Toppan. Katy told me to expect you this week, said you always ordered new upholstery at the beginning of the seasons but she didn’t know what you’d want—oh, where are my manners. I’m Tom Higgins. I’m just filling in for Katy till she stops feeling ill. I normally keep stock of the inventory, but I’m doing both. She had her doubts that I could, but I insisted. She needed rest. She’s a good girl, but every pregnant woman needs more rest than not. She told me what you looked like, but I didn’t expect…well, anyway, Miss Jane, how are you this morning?”

“I’m fine, thank you—”

“Oh, Lord,” he said, sitting, propping his chin in one broad palm, and lifting his eyebrows all in one caricatured motion.

“Sir?”

“Please. Just talk forever.”

Jane laughed suddenly. No one talked like this to her, without purpose, without instructions, just to entertain and flatter her, and it surprised her. She was normally the one to unspool talk to fill the space when ladies wanted to be entertained. She had not ever been the one worth entertaining.

“What?”

“Just talk to me.”

“What, just…what about?”

“What have you done today? What will you do today? What do you find most interesting about the world?”

Her eyebrows went up and she blinked several times before she laughed in embarrassment.

“It’s like music,” Tom said. “Laugh at me some more.”

And she did, but she did not mean to. “What should I say? I fixed up breakfast for the Toppans this morning, and then I cleared it when they finished, and then I walked up here to order this fabric for Mrs. Toppan.”

“You are not Mrs. Toppan?”

“No—”

“Praise Jesus.”

“I’m their servant, Mr. Higgins.”

“Oh, no. Tom, Tom. Call me by me given name. Go on! Go on!”

“What, you want to know the details about cleaning house?”

“Yes, yes, the details about the cleaning.”

So she told him in exaggerated detail every plan she had for the afternoon and through tea until dinners.

“And then you’ll come back here,” Tom said, “after dinner. To see me. And to pick up your order, of course.”

Jane’s brow furrowed and she deflected, “Well, no sir.”

“Only to retrieve your order, miss, I meant no disrespect.”

“It’s a large order,” she said, pulling a note from her sleeve. She noticed that he watched her too closely, observing as though infatuated like a child. Jane unfolded the paper on the counter between them and he watched her rough hands though he said nothing. “You may not be able to prepare it for this evening.”

“No, miss. For you we will have it ready this evening. What is it?” he looked at the paper and murmured the order aloud. As he picked up the slender pencil in his ham hand to take the order, he asked, “Miss Jane. Do you tire of waiting on the Toppans?” She stared at the top of his sun-bleached head, the thick curls pulling up from their combed-in place. Then he was looking straight at her.

“No,” she said, smiling, flustered. “I’m very grateful. They’re a generous English family.”

Tom looked incredulous and grinned, “I’ve never met a generous English family before.” He looked back down, and as he smudged out his errors on the form, he said, “America’s not for serving, miss. It’s for freedom. And I’d want to murder them all if I was you.”

Jane watched him figure in silence until she grew embarrassed for him. On a newfound courageous recklessness, she walked to the hinge in the countertop and lifted, passed underneath, and came to stand over his shoulder. “May I help?” she asked, and inhaled the air he occupied. It smelled of his sweat. He turned to look at her and smiled and held the pencil out to her. Jane was careful not to touch his hand when she took it. He pushed back from the desk and watched as she filled out the form in only a few minutes, hinging as slightly as she could at the waist. She was conscious of him behind her, watching her as she wrote, and she tried to be still, to concentrate, but as is always the case when one is being watched by someone worth watching, her mind wandered, and it took her much longer than it should have to complete the arithmetic. Tom said when she finished, as she crossed to the customer side of the counter, “You really don’t tire of coming here to make her new things all the time?”

She lowered the counter behind her without smiling. “The textile store is one of my favorite errands.”

Tom stopped smiling. “Why is that?”

Jane’s voice was too high, too casual to be believed. “Whatever fabric she’s replacing becomes my next Sunday dress.”

“So you get to wear what she’s bored with.”

“I get to wear what she hates.” Her eyes flashed a little at him, and Tom was delighted. “Are you certain the order will be ready this evening?”

“It’ll be prepared before sundown,” he said, and he stood.

“Thank you, sir,” she said with a small head nod. She turned to go, and some confidence possessed her and she said, “I’ll see you this evening.” Jane looked over her shoulder with her face too blank and too intense.

Tom nodded, his bravado vanished.

Elizabeth leaned in the kitchen doorway as Jane rolled up her dress sleeves and asked what took her so long. Jane explained that Katy had been sick, that the man filling in needed her help to make the order.

“A man?” Elizabeth frowned, and the wrinkles Jane so enjoyed chewed through her face. “That’s a woman’s job.”

“It’s temporary, Miss Elizabeth. I think he’ll eventually be more efficient. He said they would have the order ready by this evening. He normally works in the factory. Maybe they’re trying out a new tactic like all the other companies, having the one company do all of the steps to cut out the middle people,” Jane said, smiling.

“Oh, who can keep up with business tactics? Honestly, who has the patience for that kind of talk? Filling orders normally takes days. He probably just wants to see you again. Why else would he rush the order?”

Jane said nothing. She could not tell whether denying the plausibility or leaning into the joke sounded more guilty.

“Don’t you think?” Elizabeth examined her nail beds. “Do you want to see him again, anyway? How does it work among…I mean…How would he go about courting you, Jennie, if he wanted to?”

Jane dipped the washrag into that morning’s grease and wiped out the skillet. She cracked a grin across her face and said, “Miss Elizabeth, you know that my contract lasted till I turned eighteen. There’s nothing else after that.”

Flustered, Elizabeth said, “You know you don’t have to call me miss. I don’t know why mother insists on that. It’s so ridiculous. We’re sisters, after all.”

Jane held the silence intentionally too long, as if to say, It has been made very clear to me that we are not, and she almost did say it aloud, but Elizabeth interrupted her thought.

“Well. Do you like him? What is he like? How did he talk? Was he kind?”

“There’s nothing much to tell,” Jane said, turning her attention to the finer china. “He’s a nice man who did a fine job.”

“How nice was he? Was he tall? Tell me, Jennie. Distract me. I haven’t heard from Oramel in days. Let me be happy through you.”

“Yes, he was tall. I’m sure Mr. Brigham would like to see you at home, madam.”

“Oh! I love that,” she said, ignoring the last half of what Jane said. “What else?”

“He’s Irish.”

Elizabeth was shocked. She tried to dodge the obvious contention, but she swallowed, and she said instead, “Oh. How do you know that?”

“He talks like my pa did.”

Regaining her footing, she said, “Do you like that about him?”

“I don’t know him. I don’t have anything to like or dislike about him.”

The sounds of water sloshing over dishes were the only noises in the room for a moment.

“Well. If you like him—and I think you might, even if you don’t yet—if you like him, don’t wear that same dress when you go back.”

“It’s my work dress, madam.”

“I know,” she said. “If you change clothes, he’ll notice. You’ll be wearing nice clothes. You won’t be there for work. Or, not only for work necessarily. If you decide that you like him. But, you know, what’s the harm? You have little enough free time. You may as well enjoy it. Mother has company this afternoon, so if you come back late—not that you would, but if you wanted to stay longer to…find out if you might like him—well, she probably wouldn’t notice she’ll be so tired.”

Jane cut her eyes at Elizabeth.

Elizabeth’s shoulders went up to her ruffled neck. She smiled conspiringly. “What’s his name?”

“Peter,” Jane lied.

Elizabeth nodded, her bun secured as tightly as it had been when Jane wound it on her head that morning. “Mother said she and her guests will take tea in the parlor as soon as they arrive,” she said when she heard footsteps, and on cue, Jane snatched up the teapot from its hook and was filling it with water when Auntie entered.

Jane busied herself during the day, but her mind wandered. Normally the rote chores kept her thoughts from wandering, but this was different from the gossip that normally spiraled through her mind: whether she got the rumor from someone else or invented it on her own, the regular thoughts were of people other than herself, the drama of other lives. Today, she turned her attention inward. Of whether she should go to the store at all, and if she did, what she would say to Tom when she saw him again, the second time in a single day, of what she would say to Auntie if she was caught leaving the house after dusk, even if on her errands, of what she would wear when she inevitably did arrive. She followed Elizabeth’s advice: she changed into the only nice dress she had besides those for Sunday. She’d pieced it together from orange curtain panels she found in the maids’ quarters, and even though the bodice was of a more faded color than the skirt—the only reason those curtains had been discarded in the first place—she liked the fit of it. The velvet hugged unlike the regular cotton. The sleeves draped such that her arms looked thin and unmuscled, like the arms of a lady, and the skirts looked more voluminous because of the fabric’s pile. And because it was mottled, Auntie never let her wear it outside the house. The dark covered flaws in coloration though, she thought at twilight when, after she cleared the dinner dishes, she fastened herself into the dress and walked downtown.

Her pace changed every block. At one she nearly ran, and the other she walked so slowly she may as well have detoured. Her mind stopped when she barely tapped the bell outside the textile shop. Tom opened the door almost immediately. He stood aside for her to enter.

“Is this your new Sunday dress?” he asked before he even said hello. “It’s gorgeous.”

The way he pronounced gorgeous, she thought, gar-jiss, gar-jiss, was like her family had said it. It came back to her, and the room looked changed in the fading light when she walked in. Tom walked around her behind the counter, and he made no effort to conceal his observation of her as she followed him. “They’re finishing the order now,” he said, and as he did so, with no further preamble he added, “I was thinking on your name. Toppan isn’t really your surname, is it? The family who indentured you had you take it, ah?”

Jane’s lips parted in shock.

“Oh! I didn’t mean to offend you. I was just thinking on it while you were gone. I was thinking on you and almost nothing else all day. I should be ashamed the way I let you distract me when you aren’t even here, but I’m not. They made you take it, though, when they brought you home, right? Is your first name Jane actually, or did they change that, too?”

Jane waited while the silence extended between them. She thought that he would backpedal over the tension that he created, but he did not, he just stared into her with his stark green eyes, waiting for her to answer. “Honora Kelley,” she said back, and it was as if something in his soul unfolded, like his eyes had a new depth of recognition, although he did not know her. His placid expression no longer meant nothing. He said with his eyes, you are also Irish. They took it away from you. You want it back, but you don’t know how to get it—you didn’t even know that you wanted it till now, and now you’ve told me, too.

With her mouth ajar, Jane’s belly grew warm and nauseated. Tom said finally, “Beautiful.”

She said nothing.

“Have your parents died?” he asked.

“My mother, when I was young, of consumption,” she said evenly, and then with a more buoyant tone, “My father surrendered us to the Boston Female Asylum when I was five, and then he tried to sew his eyelids shut.”

Tom didn’t laugh, and Jane could not remember anyone ever asking about her. She looked down, realizing that she had been missing this.

“He was sick,” Tom said softly.

Jane looked at him, hostile.

“I’m not being funny. You’d have to be sick to surrender a beautiful and smart little girl—and, who with you?”

“My sister Delia. I never saw her after I left.”

“I’d want to kill them all if I was you,” he said for the second time that day.

“No,” Jane said, resuming the jolly disposition that made her a favorite among all of the bourgeoisie. “I’m very grateful for their generosity. I don’t know what I did to make God favor me and be chosen by the Toppans.” She smiled. “And thank you for assuming I was a beautiful child.”

“You have skin like magnolia petals,” he said.

Her hair was unraveling from the walk and she suddenly felt embarrassed, the collar of her best dress suddenly constrictive. She realized she was sweating a little, her eyes watering from the cruel lie she had told about and to herself. Tom stood. He withdrew a clean handkerchief from his breast pocket. “It’s one of the good things about learning to be a gentleman,” he said. “I remember to carry a handkerchief but I don’t remember to use it. Tell me, where do you live?”

Jane moved the handkerchief over her face, recalling the gossip of signals that Elizabeth and her friends sent to men with them, of how lost those trivialities would be on Tom. She dabbed her forehead, her upper lip. “I have my own space. The whole top floor of the Toppan house.”

“You mean a hot attic apartment?”

She glared at him and held his handkerchief, unsure of what to do with it. “Why are you so interested in me, anyway? One second you’re charming, the next you’re belittling my means.”

Tom’s belly laugh burst the tension in the room. “When was the last time you got to talk to someone like that?”

“I do it in my head all day long. Just this afternoon I was going to—” Jane caught herself and looked down. Quieter, she said, “You shouldn’t indulge me so, sir.”

“You’re the most interesting woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

“That’s a lie,” she whipped back thoughtlessly.

“Never!” he said, placing a hand over his breastbone as if wounded.

Then she laughed, too, loud, and like she meant it—not the tinkling demure giggle from before—for the first time since she met him, and his eyes lit from within.

Jane swallowed and said suddenly, “Is there a washroom I can—please? Until my order—until Mrs. Toppan’s…please, where is your, um?”

Tom came around the counter and led her down the hall away from the entrance and stood again, too close for her to pass without her arm touching the buttons on his vest.

“It’s a very nice water closet,” he said, and she noticed his awkwardness. “I’ll…I’ll check on your order now.”

In the bathroom there was a lit candle on the sink by the basin. After she urinated, she tore a sheet from the Sears catalog on the hook by the stool. She read it. An advertisement for some white kid gloves she would never use or afford. She wiped, she stood, and she turned and pulled the string. There was no hip bath in the room, no foot bath, just a basin to which she turned. She splashed cold water on her face from the basin and rinsed her hands, but she did not notice that her mind was not racing as it should have been at the late hour, at being unsupervised, in private, with a man who was nearly a stranger, at what Auntie was thinking about her whereabouts and when she might send a neighbor out after her. She was calm. She was warm. When she opened the door, Tom stood just outside it, wringing his hands. Jane looked at him with confusion.

“It’s a nice water closet, isn’t it?” he repeated.

Jane tipped her head a little and gave a tiny laugh. “Yes…what? Do you want to see it?” she joked, stepping aside as he had done for her twice.

In two paces, Tom was in the bathroom with her, pressing her into the wall. His hands framed her face and his mouth was strong on hers. It took only a moment for Jane’s surprise to yield and for her own hands to run up his back as if she had been doing this her whole life, his breath heating her face, him lifting her heavy skirts and crinoline to feel her beneath them. Jane felt a rush of embarrassment at not having a cage crinoline as he must have expected, but then she realized he must not have expected it, or did not care she was without it. His mouth trailed under her jaw, and with a savage rip the tiny bone buttons at her collar scattered throughout the room. Before they had come to rest in their sprawl, with his face buried in her neck and chest, Tom pulled the pin from her hair and her braid unraveled, strands floating cloudlike and unmoored around them.

“Magnolia,” Tom murmured into her ear. He spun her facing away from him and said then, “Honora.” As one palm flattened on the faded bodice of her dress and the other found its place between the separate legs of her drawers, her memory flashed back to the Boston Female Asylum, at telling stories on the stairs, at the children rapt at her voice.

Both groaned. His hand moved up over her breasts, under her chin, and then grabbed a fist of her hair and bent her forward over the sink. She gripped the edges of the table and felt him fumble away from her, then a stark white moment of anticipation as she stared into the rippling water in the basin before her as he angled himself and slid into her stinging and hot and thick. Jane muffled the sound of her pain until it passed and then she moved against him. He swore and muttered unintelligible exclamations, grasping for her thigh or shoulder and then seizing, shaking, and trembling behind her.

She released her grip and tried to calm her own breath. “Honora.” She cut her eyes back at him and he withdrew. The air was too much when it rushed in, and she inhaled sharply. “Ah,” he winced, and said, “You’re bleeding, my dear,” in a low whimsical tone. Tom moved her around to face him. He noticed that she leaned away from him, over the sink, backward. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“You didn’t,” she said, turning up the corners of her mouth. “I mean, I’m fine. That’s normal. Right?”

“No,” he said, “it’s not normal. I’ve hurt you.”

“It’s not normal to bleed the first time?”

“Oh, the first time, sure, but—” he stopped cold and his face fell. Honora watched him and he could not tell what she felt. “I had no idea. I would have been kinder had you told me. I never would have thought—”

“Why would you have assumed otherwise?”

“Look at you! You must have men waiting in queue! And to waste that time on something as rushed and someone as base as me, I’m sorry.”

“Oh,” she said, as though insulted but not willing to show its effects unless the offender was asking. She prepared herself to wait through another length of awkward pause but Tom kissed her again, and apologized for ripping the buttons on her collar as he gathered them from the floor. He put them in her hand, and in a moment she pinned closed the bodice of her dress, though Tom asked her to wait. She gave him a patronizing smile and continued dressing herself.

“You don’t need to spin this tale for me, sir,” Jane said as she twisted the cloud of her hair onto the crown of her head. “I misunderstood before, but I don’t anymore. I’ll make my way home as soon as I gather the order.”

“It’s not a tale!” he insisted.

“Of course. But you don’t have to entertain me this way anymore. I understand the situation now.”

“What situation? I’m not trying to trick you! I said you were the most interesting and beautiful woman I’ve ever met, and I meant it.”

Jane clucked her tongue in disbelief and said, “Oh really? What do you plan to do about it?”

Tom laughed aloud. “I love it when you confront me! First I’ll take you home—”

“No, you won’t. Auntie will see your carriage and I’ll have God knows what punishment to deal with on top of these window dressings.”

“Listen to me. I will. I’ll go around the back street and you can walk through the neighbors’ yard. First I’ll take you home, and then I plan to save for a ring and convince you to marry me.”

Because he did the first part of what he said, drove her home, talked idly of when he would come to court her and when he thought he would be able to ask formally, she believed the rest, too. After all, she had really nothing else to believe in. People in middle age believe young love weak because of its ignorance, but the first love is the strongest, and its simplicity forges its strength—it prevents the leaking in of any doubt. Young love is dangerous in its powers of devastation: without bad experience, one cannot judge to manage one’s expectations.

At the house, Jane climbed the stairs into her attic room and barely felt the cold as she slid her hands from their secondhand gloves to shift logs into the stove. She lit the stove with the candle from downstairs, and lit those in her room by the washstand. Jane removed her dress and hung it by the cracked-open window. She unlaced her corset and draped it over the drying rack. After washing her face and hands, she moved by her chamber pot and with chapped fingers removed his semen from her like honey over a dipper, and then rinsed herself there as well. The water turned pink. She fastened a rag to the open crotch of her drawers. The pearly buttons rolling from her pocket into her hand reminded her of Tom, his bulk on all fours, gathering them from the corners and dusty baseboards in the washroom, him kneeling as his thick fingers dropped them one by one into her sweaty palm. He paused there when she said, “Oh really? What do you plan to do about it?” grinning, saying, Marry you, and putting her last button in her hand.