The Dress Lodger Page 11

  “It’s barely past five,” Whilky says gruffly. “Did the pottery drop into the river?”

  “They sent us home early today,” Gustine replies, not wanting to go into it. “Owner’s birthday.”

  She takes the baby over to the hearth and climbs half inside to get warm. Someone had been roasting herring and a scorched bit of the tail cleaves to the grate. With the poker, Gustine pries it off, blows on it, and pops it into her mouth. It is so wonderfully hot in the fireplace. She closes her eyes and chews, savouring the feeling of her skin about to peel off. This is all that matters; heat and quiet and her own dear babe in her arms. She kisses the lobster pink cheeks above two faint shadows that would be dimples if only for a little more baby fat.

  Gustine takes a deep sniff and loosens the tuck of blanket from under the child’s chin. God forbid Pink should change you—what a rashy red mess your bum must be. She unwinds the layers of blanket to get down to the feedbag diaper she washes out every night and leaves to dry stiff before the fireplace. She has shown Pink a hundred times how to fold the diaper and pin it in place, but the girl is hopeless—

  “Pink!” Gustine yells, though the little girl is sitting in the corner not three feet from her. “What is on this baby?”

  Gustine has unraveled the child from its blanket bundle and holds it out in front of her. Her child, hers, is dressed in some sort of costume she’s never laid eyes on before: a long, trailing gown of white Irish linen, smocked along the collar, drawstringed along the cuffs and hem, pulled together and tasseled like a chaise roll pillow. How on earth did this garment come to be on her child?

  Pink, realizing all is lost, wishes she might squeeze beneath the coal bin and disappear into the floor. Mike, now wide awake, leaps from her father’s shoulder and pads over to the hearth to sniff Gustine’s scratchy new white baby.

  “Pink?” Gustine demands.

  “The charity lady put it on,” she says softly. “After she give me a blanket.”

  “Charity lady?” Her father looks up from his newspaper. “What on God’s bloody earth are you talking about?”

  “I have to go outside now,” Pink says, running for the door.

  “No you don’t.” Whilky leaps up and hurls his bulk in front of the only way out. “Not until you tell me what brainless, unforgivable thing you’ve gone and done now.”

  Pink’s small pink nose starts to tremble and she can feel her thick white tail bristle a warning. What would Mike do? She turns to the white ferret whose ten razor nails rest gently on the baby’s white linen gown. Tell the truth he seems to shine with purity and light. It’s the ferret’s Code of Honor. Pink stills her quivering chin and speaks haltingly to Gustine.

  “I let in a lady who was worried about Fos and then she saw the baby and got worried about that. She said the dress was for her cousin’s baby christening but that this baby needed it worse. She is sending a doctor tonight to make Fos stop glowing in the dark.”

  A doctor? Oh God, groans Gustine, I hope she hasn’t gone and ruined everything. What is the point of searching out the one perfect person if a foolish little girl is just going to come along and undo all her hard work? And look at this getup! Her child might as well be lying in a watered silk bassinet, choked with tulle and cosseted by fairy godmothers. I work two jobs, fumes Gustine. I need no one’s charity.

  “I knew I should never’ve left,” Whilky roars from his place before the door. “Did I not say even unto my own pet: Mike, you, a ferret, I would trust not to open the door for the minions of the Government, but who is it I’ve left at home today? My addled daughter Pink, who would, without a second thought, betray her Da and all his property. Oh, why have the gods cursed me?”

  “I’m sorry,” says Pink almost inaudibly.

  “You’re a sorry little git is what you are!” yells Whilky, working himself up into a proper frothing rage. Before she can duck, he gives her a hard slap to the head with the rolled-up newspaper. Tears swim before Pink’s eyes and she wishes now more than ever that she could read, to know which news was responsible for knocking her to the ground.

  “Don’t cry, Pink,” Gustine says, as the girl scampers behind the coal bin and curls herself into a ball. “It’s not a catastrophe.”

  “No doctor is setting foot inside this house,” Whilky says with finality. “The only creature worse upon the planet than a charity lady is a doctor, and I won’t have one poking and prodding and dispensing in this establishment.”

  “There is going to come a time when a doctor shall be admitted into this house,” says Gustine hotly. “One is coming soon to cure this baby.”

  “The only thing coming for that baby is the undertaker,” bellows Whilky.

  “You take that back!” Gustine shouts, setting aside the baby and charging her red-faced landlord. The woman who sells fish to the poor Irish and the man of exposed toes edge about the long table and make quickly for the steps up to their room. Pink looks up from behind the coal bin and screams.

  “The doctor is coming for Fos! Nobody even cares about Fos!”

  Gustine pauses and in that instant the dress hits her like cold water thrown over an angry dog. She struggles, but Eye stands behind her, tugging the blue fabric down over her shoulders, forcing her clenched fists into the tight armseyes, and making fast the hooks. The blanket Gustine wore wrapped around her naked body drops to the ground and covers her bare feet like a puddle of mud.

  “This dress belongs to me,” Whilky says, poking her in the chest once with the rolled-up newspaper. “You will find yourself evicted from it if I ever catch you bringing a doctor into this house.”

  Gustine shakes off Eye’s cold-padded fingers and crosses back to the hearth where she set down the baby. It is crying, almost noiselessly, its tiny mouth opened into an O. Pink sinks back down behind the coal bin.

  “The doctor was coming for Fos,” she says. “Nobody even cares about Fos.”

  There are three times in an evening when a prosperous man wants a woman: after a hard day at the office, when he’s sated on responsibility; after five courses in a restaurant, when he is glutted on food; and after a fine night at the theatre, when he’s drunk on entertainment. It’s a fact that rich men tend to be awfully sullen and morose after hours behind a desk, going about the business of sex as if taking inventory: two breasts—squeeze, squeeze; two lips—mash, mash; one quim—poke, poke, poke. After an evening at the theatre, they are, on the other hand, too excitable and daring, ready to drape a girl in scarves or dress her up like the beardless hero in a melodrama before they bend her over and demand her bare white bottom. Gustine most definitely prefers the after-dinner men. Then a prosperous man is more inclined to treat her like a fine cigar or a mellow glass of sherry, the final intoxicant to complement his champagne and oysters and custard and quail. She’s found he’s too full to thrash about much, and too gassy to take himself too seriously. Gustine does her best business outside the Bridge Inn when the plates from the restaurant are being cleared and a guest steps outside for a breath of fresh air. Then a man might catch a glimpse of her in the gaslight and elect to take his after-dinner drink upstairs. And if he chooses to share it with a charming young lady, well, whose business is that?

  Gustine has wandered up Sunderland Street and across High ten times now, back and forth along the same two sides of the block (though you might not call it a block—Garden Street peters out into the old Quaker burial ground and none of the other lanes cut through). The limestone hotel is bright with four stories of paned windows and a fat gas lamp smiling over the front door. Men and women go in and out below it, some climbing the grand staircase up to their rooms, some turning left to take a table in the fancy dining room, which shimmers with chandeliers and mirrors and buffed silver platters. Gustine pauses before the street-level bay window to watch the patrons of the Bridge Inn. The women, far more than the men, impress her; she takes careful notice of how they hold their backs straight and erect when tucked into tall caned chairs, how they keep the
ir elbows lower than the table lip when lifting a scant forkful of roe to their mouths. She observes how they tilt their heads, so that their ringlets might brush a blushing cheek, and how they murmur with their lips barely open, as if everything they had to say were the most precious secret. The room is alive with maize and rose de parnasse and Cossack green silk, bare shoulders and sleeves even wider and more bouffant than Gustine’s. Hair is worn tight to the head, except where it has been erected with ribbons and feathers in elaborate topknots or curled into tiers at the temple. Fashion might be slow to reach Sunderland, but when it arrives, it arrives with a vengeance. Every middle-class daughter with a few coins in her purse flings away last autumn’s French capote roquet and runs after this spring’s Tuscan grass bonnet. Gustine can tell her spectacular blue dress is already going out of style. She’ll have to get Eye to take the tulle puffs off the skirt and tack them onto the sleeves.

  Gustine glances over her shoulder to where her stooped old shadow waits on the other side of High Street. She hates the feel of Eye’s cold monkey fingers on her flesh, resents the backwardness of this animal locking her into her bright blue cage each night. She would have killed Whilky back at Mill Street if Eye had not stepped in, but Eye knows that the dress’s very blueness numbs her, making her feel like she’s moving underwater. God damn her. Why does she need this shadow? Gustine does not care that the Eye has seen her stretched to tearing around a thick stump of prick and done nothing about it, nor is she embarrassed that the old woman has witnessed many a slobbering, biting mouth upon her breasts. What she is deeply humiliated by—if humiliation can surpass that feeling of mortified exposure a girl suffers being watched night after night dressing and undressing, crouching over a chamber pot, or forcing a bit of sponge up between her legs—is that Eye still does not trust her. In her two years of dress lodging, she has never once given Whilky a reason to doubt her, never withheld money or gotten drunk or even, when requested to strip, laid the dress more than arm’s length from the bed. And yet Eye watches her with an expression so suspicious and malevolent, so certain she will misstep, that she almost makes Gustine want to do it. She has no idea what the Eye would do to her if she did try to make off with the dress, and only the fear of leaving her precious baby an orphan prevents her from finding out.

  One or two men dine alone, Gustine sees, turning back to the hotel; traveling businessmen who have braved the Quarantine. She spies the most likely candidate sitting near the window: a pale, balding man pushing a last bite of brandy-poached pears against his reluctant lips. Here is a man who guards against his own appetites, Gustine thinks, watching the top lip grudgingly give way and a thick tongue thrust out for the dessert. He has a furtive restlessness about him, and when he’s stopped shooting glances at other men’s wives and takes a second to look down onto the street, Gustine makes sure she steps out of the shadows into the hotel’s bright circle of gaslight. He starts a bit when he sees her and she holds his gaze boldly for a count of ten. Any dining-alone businessman who mistakes the count of ten, Gustine thinks, is a businessman not worth the trouble.

  Sure enough, the syrupy pears are pushed aside, the check is autographed, and the pale, balding man disappears from the dining room. Gustine determines to walk to the end of the block and back and see if he is waiting on the front step when she returns. If not, she’ll move on to the Red Lion Inn, where the men are poorer but their appetites more dependable. For every step Gustine takes, the Eye on the other side of the street takes one, too—far enough behind her not to be immediately noticed, but close enough to set Gustine’s teeth on edge. They turn at the dark intersection of Sunderland Street and Charles, a crossroads Gustine has never much liked, for it seems to contain all the contradictions of the town. Turn west onto Charles and the road broadens, coursing straight into tidy, well-lit Bishopwearmouth; turn east on Charles and it almost immediately dead-ends into forgotten courtyards and impossibly dark lanes leading nowhere. Old Quakers fester in the Friends Burial Ground and Methodists moulder on Number’s Garth, where John Wesley opened his first church in Sunderland a century ago. Gustine pivots and walks back toward the beckoning Bridge Inn. Please be there, she thinks. It’s cold and I would like to sit by a nice warm fire.

  He is there. She sees him standing in a long black fur-lapelled redingote looking the wrong way up High Street for her. His bald head is covered with a tall Neopolitan top hat, just a bit too tight from the way it’s perched, and he holds a feckless batonlike walking stick. Gustine smoothes her blue skirt, sets her head atilt after the fashion of the young ladies inside, and steps around the corner.

  “Good evening,” she says pleasantly, stopping in front of the Bridge Inn’s marble steps.

  The man jumps at the sound of her voice behind him. She catches a glimpse of bony eczematous hands before they thrust themselves into a pair of white gloves. Oh no, thinks Gustine.

  “Hallo,” says the man, with a faint Midland accent.

  “Are you a stranger in town?” she asks, dipping her chin slightly to make her curls bob.

  He nods and glances nervously over his shoulder.

  “It’s difficult on a man to be away from home.” Gustine smiles sympathetically, feeling the chill wind stir her skirts and probe for her chapped naked legs. “But Sunderland is a very friendly town.”

  “That it is,” says the man, rooted to the Bridge Inn steps.

  Is he ever going to invite me up? she wonders wearily. It’s too cold to stand here all night. The man above her on the steps wrings his hands nervously, flicking the walking baton dangerously close to her eye.

  “If you’d like,” she says, backing up a step, “I could come upstairs and tell you about some of our more interesting sights.”

  “Oh no!” he yelps. “I just came out. I couldn’t go back in.”

  Gustine sighs. One of those. If business weren’t so bad, she would just walk away and abandon the man to his own flaky right hand for the night. But with the Quarantine, and no soldiers about to help out, she can’t be too choosy. She takes a deep breath and gives it one last try.

  “We might walk about, then,” she offers. “I’ve got an hour before I’ve got to be home.”

  That option seems to spur the gentleman. He gives a curt nod and jerks down the steps, falling into place beside her. As she starts up well-lit High Street, he plunges down ill-lit Sunderland, and Gustine has to jog a few steps to catch up.

  For a block they walk in silence. The man in the redingote takes long loping steps and Gustine trots alongside him. He has a long-jawed, skeletal face, with two reddened eczema ridges under his eyes like war paint. He also has a spoiled-milk nervous smell about him which Gustine recognizes as desire. When they get to the intersection of Charles, Gustine once more tries to lead them west, toward populated Bishopwearmouth, but the gentleman turns east, taking them deeper into darkness. Over her shoulder, Gustine sees that the Eye is turning the corner behind them. She makes another stab at conversation.

  “What line of business are you in?” she asks, slipping her hand under his arm. She does not do it to be coy, but to protect her naked skin from the icy wind blowing up from the river. It really does look like snow.

  “Plumbing,” he says, and turns down Garden Street, toward the dark heart of the Quaker cemetery. The reflective white sky above provides the only light, and by it she can make out the evenly spaced iron pikes of the cemetery wall straight ahead. The putrid smell of old bones rushes out to meet them and Gustine instinctively pulls back.

  “Here’s fine,” the man says, pushing her into a sagging doorway. She has time only to see the Eye over his left shoulder, stern as one of the Dissenter ghosts rising up from the grave, before his heavy black redingote is thrown over her face. The coat smells of tobacco and sweat and greasy animal fur. Her own trapped breath condenses inside the wool and drips down upon her cheek.

  Well, it’s not a roaring fire at the Bridge Inn, thinks Gustine while the man thrusts a flaky finger up her and digs about as i
f fishing a ring from a sink pipe. But at least it’s warm.

  * * *

  Girl and shadow. Dress and Eye. They walk south on Villiers Street and east on Coronation; they walk north on Sans (past the cheap theatre where the first boys are lining up for tickets to Les Chats Savants, held over by popular demand), then east on High. Some nights, Gustine feels like she’s caught the hem of her dress on a nail and that as she walks her skirt is slowly unraveling behind her, leaving a thin blue trail along the ground to mark where she’s been. Sometimes when she lets her mind wander, she feels the thread drag along the gutters, snagging dead rats and bottles, chicken feathers and broken furniture. She feels the tangled thread grow heavier and heavier, tugging her back, making her strain to drag it, until at last she spins and sees that its very weight has become the Eye, a shadow called into being out of cumulate garbage much as the first woman was fashioned by God out of clay. There is no escape, Gustine thinks on nights like these. We will walk the streets forever, the Eye and I.

  Girl and shadow, Dress and Eye. She’s been walking for hours and has had no luck. And it is so cold tonight. She remembers last winter when her dress was newer and brighter, then almost nightly she was invited up to well-appointed hotel rooms where dinner was spread out in front of cheery coal fires. Her precious baby was conceived in one of those rooms, she is convinced, on a night when her stomach was full and her back was warm and she’d taken a sip of the champagne these men constantly force on her, as if getting her tipsy will make her somehow more willing than she already is. But this winter promises to be something else altogether. The hotels are half-full and the barracks are locked; the middle classes are afraid of contagion and the poor men are broke. What hope does she have now for an hour in a hotel? She must count herself fortunate to be half-suffocated beneath a plumber’s redingote.