Specimen Days Read online

He must need the machine. Lucas must hurry and bring it back.

  When he went into the hallway to retrieve it, it was gone. Breathing machine and music box had vanished entirely.

  He stood for a moment, confused. Had he dreamed of putting them there? He searched up and down the hall, wondering if they were only farther away. Perhaps he had gotten up during the night and moved them, somnambulistically. No. They were nowhere. He thought briefly that the mechanisms were more alive than he’d imagined, that they walked. Would they have found their way back into his parents’ bedroom? Would the music box be sitting at his mother’s side, singing a song she couldn’t bear to hear?

  He summoned himself. He was agitated, but he was not insane. Someone had taken the machine and the music box, as people did. Nothing of any value could be left unattended. He had thought they’d be all right for those nocturnal hours, but someone had carried them off. Someone would be trying to sell them, as the boy had sold the china bowl.

  Lucas returned to the parlor. What could he say to his father that his father would understand? He could think of nothing, and so he said nothing. He left his father and mother in their bedroom together. He hoped that when he returned from work, they might be restored to themselves.

  Here it was, then: his own machine. He stood before it in the enormous room. Dan and Will and Tom were at theirs, tending them as they ever did, with the steady dispassionate attention of farmers.

  Lucas whispered, “You were unworthy, you must admit it. You were untrue. I’m sorry you’re dead, but you can’t have Catherine with you. You must stop singing to Mother about your sorrows.”

  The machine sang on. Its song didn’t vary. Lucas still couldn’t decipher the words, but he knew they were all about love and longing. Simon wanted more than he should rightfully have. Why would he be different dead than he was alive?

  Lucas loaded a plate and fed it in. The machine took the plate as it always did. It made the impressions, four across, six down. As Lucas carried the first of the day’s plates to Dan, he wondered if his machine spoke to the others at night, when the men were gone and the machines lived here alone. He could imagine it easily enough, the machines murmuring in the darkened rooms, singing the songs of their men, praising their men, dreaming of them, singing each to the others, He is mine, he is my only love, how I long for the day when he allows me to have him completely. Lucas thought he should warn Dan, he should warn Tom and Will. But how could he tell them?

  Dan was bent over his machine. He said, “Good morning, Lucas,” without looking up.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  Lucas lingered after he had dropped the plate in Dan’s bin. Dan was the biggest man in cutting and stamping. He was massive and stooped. He carried his immense round shoulders like burdens; upon his shoulders, partly buried in them, his head looked out with drowned blue eyes. Lucas knew nothing of his life but could imagine it. He would have a wife and children. He would have a parlor with a bedroom on one side and a bedroom on the other.

  Dan turned from his machine. He said, “Something wrong?”

  “No, sir.”

  Dan took a kerchief from his pocket, wiped the sweat from the gleaming red dome of his brow.

  He was missing the first and second fingers of his right hand. Lucas hadn’t noticed it before.

  Lucas said, “Please, sir. What happened to your fingers?”

  Dan lowered the kerchief and looked at his hand as if he expected to see something surprising there.

  “Lost ’em,” he said.

  “How did you lose them?”

  “Accident.”

  “Was it here? At the works?”

  Dan paused. He seemed to wonder whether or not to reveal a secret.

  “Sawmill,” he said.

  “You worked in a sawmill, before you came here?”

  “That’s right.”

  Dan wiped his brow again and returned to his work. Idling so, talking, wasn’t permitted. Lucas returned to his own machine and loaded another plate.

  A different machine had eaten Dan’s fingers. That machine, one that split logs, contained a fragment of Dan’s ghost, though the rest of Dan lived on. Would this new machine know of that? Could it hear that other machine, singing from far away in a sawmill, happy to have had Dan’s fingers but lamenting the loss of the rest of him, wishing the new machine better luck?

  Catherine must be sewing now. Lucas couldn’t think how a sewing machine might take her. It would be an arm with a needle, ratcheting. It might prick her, it could do that, but it couldn’t harm her truly.

  There must be other machines at her work, though, machines that could maim. He struggled to picture it. He could imagine presses and rollers through which the garments must be passed. Did she go near those machines during her day? She might. He couldn’t know. She might be asked to take bodices and shirts to be sent through a larger apparatus. It would be big as a carriage, he thought; white, not black; it would have a mouth through which the freshly made shirts and dresses were fed, to be smoothed and folded. It would exhale torrents of steam.

  Finally, the whistle blew. Lucas waited for Jack Walsh to pass and say, “All right, then.” He shut down his machine. He hurried away. He ran up Rivington, keeping to the street, dodging the carts and carriages.

  A river of girls and women was already streaming out of the Mannahatta Company when he got there, and they showed no signs of having seen a calamity that day. He searched for Catherine among the crowd. He saw any number who might have been her. They were so alike, in their blue dresses. As more and more of them passed by, in twos and threes, talking low, stretching their spines and flexing their fingers, he finally made bold enough to ask one of them, and then another, if she had seen Catherine Fitzhugh. Neither of them knew who she was. There were hundreds of girls in the sewing room; Catherine would be known only to the few who worked near her. From a distance Lucas saw Emily Hoefstaedler walking among the many, plump and serene, laughing lewdly with another girl, but he didn’t speak to her. He would never speak to her about anything, certainly not about Catherine. He asked another girl and another. Several smiled and shrugged, several scowled, and one, a young dark-haired girl, said, “Won’t I do instead?” and was pulled away, laughing, by her friends.

  And then he saw her. She was near the end, with an older woman who had drawn her thin gray hair severely back and walked with her neck craned forward, as if her face were more eager to go forth than her body was.

  Lucas approached them. “Catherine,” he cried.

  “Hello, Lucas,” she said. She looked at him with exquisite patience.

  “Are you well?”

  “Quite well. And you?”

  How could he say what he was? He said, “Shall I pray? Shall I venerate and be ceremonious?”

  “Lucas, this is my friend Kate.”

  The older woman dipped her head.

  “Kate, this is Lucas. He is Simon’s brother.”

  Kate said, “I am sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Have you come to see me home?” Catherine asked.

  “Yes. Please.” He struggled not to snatch at her hand.

  “Kate, it seems I am escorted. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  The older woman dipped her head again. “Goodbye,” she said. Her face led her onward, and her body followed.

  Catherine placed her hands upon her hips. “Lucas, my dear,” she said.

  “You are well.”

  “As you can see.”

  “Will you let me walk with you?”

  “I have to sell the bowl.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In my reticule.”

  “Don’t sell the bowl. Keep it. Please.”

  “Come with me, if you like.”

  She walked on. He went beside her.

  How could he tell her? How could he make her see?

  He said, “Catherine, the machines are dangerous.”

  “They can be. That’s
why you must be careful.”

  “Even if you are careful.”

  “Well, being careful is the best we can do, isn’t it?”

  “You mustn’t go to work anymore.”

  “Where should I go, then, my darling?”

  “You could sew at home, couldn’t you? You could take in piecework.”

  “Do you know what that pays?”

  He didn’t know what anything paid except his own work, and he had learned that only by being paid. He walked on beside her. They passed together through Washington Square. He didn’t come often to the square. It lay beyond the limits of his realm; it wasn’t meant for a boy like him. Washington Square, like Broadway, was part of the city within the city, cupping its green and dappled quietude, ringed by the remoter fires—a place where men and women strolled in dresses and greatcoats, where a lame beggar played on a flute; where the leaves of the trees cut shapes out of the sky and an old woman sold ices from a wooden cart; where a child waved a scarlet pennant that snapped and rippled in countertime to the flute player, who in his turn produced a little point of ginger-colored beard as answer to the pennant. Lucas tried not to be distracted by the beauty of the square. He tried to remain himself.

  He asked Catherine, “Where are we going?”

  “To someone I know of.”

  He went with her through the square, to a shop on Eighth Street. It was a modest place, half below the street, called Gaya’s Emporium. Its window showed two hats floating on poles. One was pink satin, the other stiff black brocade. Under the hats were bracelets and earrings, arranged on a swatch of faded blue velvet, gleaming like brave little gestures of defeat.

  Catherine said, “Wait here.”

  “Can’t I come in with you?”

  “No. It’s best if I go in alone.”

  “Catherine?”

  “Yes?”

  “May I see the bowl again, first?”

  “Of course you may.”

  She opened her reticule and removed the bowl. It was bright in the evening light, almost unnaturally so. It might have been carved from pearl. Its line of strange symbols, its blue curls and circles, stood out boldly, like a language that insisted on its own cogency in a world that had lost the skill to decipher its message.

  “You mustn’t sell it.” Lucas was briefly host to an urge to snatch it away from her, to hold it to his breast. It seemed for a moment that if the bowl was lost something else would be lost as well, something he and Catherine needed and would not be offered again.

  She said, “Sell it is exactly what I must do. I won’t be long.”

  She went inside. Lucas waited. What else could he do? He stood before the shop window, watching the hats and jewelry live their silent lives.

  Presently, Catherine returned. She wearily mounted the stairs to the street. Lucas thought of his mother’s weariness. He wondered if she would improve, with the music box gone.

  Catherine said, “I could get fifty cents. It’s all she would give me.”

  She held out the coins to him. He wanted the money, he needed the money, but he couldn’t bring himself to take it. He stood dumb, with his hands at his sides.

  Catherine said, “It can’t be what you paid for it. It’s the best I could do.”

  He couldn’t move or speak.

  “Don’t reproach me,” she said. “Please. Take the money.”

  He stood helpless. His ears roared.

  “Lucas, you begin to try my patience,” she said. “It was difficult in there. I don’t like being treated as a thief.”

  So he had done that to her. He had forced her to demean herself. He imagined Gaya of the emporium. He thought she’d be skeletally thin, with skin the color of candle wax. He thought—he knew—she’d have taken the bowl and examined it greedily and disdainfully. She’d have named her price with the superior finality of those accustomed to dealing in stolen goods.

  He said, “The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel.” He could not be certain how loudly he’d spoken.

  Catherine faltered. She said, “You’ve never repeated yourself before.”

  How could she know that? Had she been listening to him, all this time, when he spoke as the book? If so, she’d given no sign.

  He couldn’t control himself. He said, “The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly.”

  Catherine blinked. Her eyes were bright.

  She asked, “What did Simon tell you?”

  What had Simon told him? Nothing. Simon sang the old songs, teased Lucas for being small, went to Emily’s room in secret.

  Lucas said, “The nine months’ gone is in the parturition chamber.”

  Catherine dropped the money at Lucas’s feet. One of the coins rolled and stopped against the toe of his boot.

  “Pick it up and take it home,” she said. “I have no more patience for you.”

  He said, “The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck.”

  Catherine began to weep. It took her like a spasm. She stood one moment erect, with a single tear meandering down her cheek, and the next moment her face sagged, and the tears came coursing out. She put her face into her hands.

  He couldn’t think what to do or say. He put his fingers gently on her shoulder. She shrugged him away.

  “Leave me alone, Lucas,” she sobbed. “Please, just leave me alone.”

  He couldn’t leave her weeping on Eighth Street, with people passing by. He said, “Come with me. You must sit down.”

  To his surprise, she obeyed. She had lost herself to weeping. She had become someone who wept and walked with him as he led her back to Washington Square, where the child’s pennant snapped against the sky and the flute player hopped nimbly from foot to foot.

  He found a bench and sat on it. She sat beside him. Timidly, he put his arm over her shaking shoulders. She didn’t seem to mind.

  He said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I don’t know what I said.”

  Her weeping diminished. She raised her head. Her face was red and haggard. He had never seen her so.

  “Would you like to know something?” she said. “Would you?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  “I’m going to have a baby.”

  Again he paused in confusion over something that was true but could not be true. She hadn’t married.

  He said, “I see,” because it seemed what he ought to say.

  “They won’t keep me at work. I’ll be too big to hide it in a month or so.”

  “How could you get too big to go to work?”

  “You don’t know anything, you’re a child. Why am I talking to you?”

  She made as if to rise but sank down again on the bench. Lucas said, “I want you to talk to me. I’ll try to understand.”

  She went away again, into her weeping. Lucas put his arm again across her shoulders, which shook violently. The people who passed looked at them and then looked politely away, to help deliver Lucas and Catherine from their own shamefulness. The people who passed were intricately made, with gold buckles and little clocks on chains. Lucas and Catherine were made of cruder stuff. If they lingered on the bench, a policeman would come and send them along.

  At length Catherine was able to say, “I’ve spoken to no one of this. It isn’t fair, saying it to you.”

  “It is fair,” he said. “You could never be anything but fair.”

  She gathered herself. She wasn’t through crying, but her aspect changed. Something new took hold of her, a rage with grief caught up in it.

  She said, “All right, then. I’m going to teach you something.”

  “Please.”

  Her voice when she spoke was like a wire, thin but strong.

  She said, “I told your brother he must marry me. I don’t know if the child is his. It probably isn’t. But Simon was willing. Would you like to know something else?”

  “Yes,” Lucas said.

  “I suspect.
He had his accident because he was unhappy. He may have been so distracted by the thought of our wedding that he allowed it to happen. Think of it. He’d been in the works for years. He knew better than to let his sleeve get caught.”

  Lucas said, “Simon loved you.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “Yes,” Lucas said, though Simon had never said the words. How could he help loving her? Not everything needed to be said in words.

  Catherine said, “I’m a whore, Lucas. I tried to force myself on your brother.”

  “Simon loved you,” he said again. He couldn’t think of anything else.

  Catherine said, “I’m going to have the baby. It’s what I can do for poor Simon.”

  Lucas could not think of an answer. How could she do anything but have the baby?

  She said at length, “I told him he’d taken advantage, I told him he must make it right. I told him he’d come to love me, in time. So there you are. I’m a whore and a liar and I’m going to give birth to your brother’s bastard. You mustn’t come to see me anymore. You mustn’t buy me things with the money you need for food.”

  Her face took on a new form. It grew older; its flesh sagged. She became a statue of herself, an effigy. She was not who she’d been. She was going somewhere.

  Lucas said, “I can help you.”

  She stood with grave finality. She was formal now.

  “No one can help me,” she said.

  She walked resolutely eastward, toward home. Lucas went alongside her.

  “You are in danger,” he said.

  “I’m in the same danger as every woman who draggles her shawl, neither more nor less.”

  “Don’t go to work anymore. Please.”

  “Soon enough I won’t be going to work anymore. That will happen regardless.”

  “No. Tomorrow. Don’t go tomorrow, you’re in danger.”

  “I’ll need every penny I can get, won’t I?”

  “The dead search for us through machinery. When we stand at a machine, we make ourselves known to the dead.”

  “Your precious book.”

  “It isn’t the book. It’s true.”

  He confused himself. The book was true. What he was trying to tell her was differently true.

  She walked on. Her new face, reddened and ravaged, cut through the air. She might have been the carved woman at the prow of a ship.