Valley of the Moon. Melanie Gideon

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      “Joseph, five minutes and then back upstairs to your schoolwork,” said my mother. “Did you finish your sums?”

      “Yes,” I lied.

      “No,” said Madeline, the governess, who had appeared in the doorway and was holding out her hand to me. How long had she been standing there?

      I groaned and slid off the stool.

      “Don’t you want to go to university one day?” asked Madeline.

      I should have been in school already. That my mother had convinced my father to allow my sister’s governess to give me lessons at home was a miracle. My father consistently reminded me this would come to an end and I would soon be sent away to a proper school.

      If only he knew what really happened at 22 Willoughby Square once he left the house every morning. My mother sailed us out of the sea of oligarchy and into the safe harbor of egalitarianism. We became a community of equals. Titles evaporated. Young Master, Little Miss, Cook, Girl, Mistress, Governess. Poof, gone. Polly, Madeline, even Charlotte, the lowliest kitchen maid, called my mother Imogene.

      As a result my education was broad. I was taught not only how to multiply and divide, to read and recite, but how to blacken a stove, how to get candle wax out of a tablecloth, and how to build a fence. Some of the lessons I disliked more than others. Egg gathering, for instance: the chickens terrified me. They’d run after me, pecking at my feet.

      “I hate the chickens,” I said to my mother. “Why do you make me go out there?”

      “How else will you learn what you love to do?” she said. “You don’t have to like everything, but you must try.”

      What my mother loved was greengage plums.

      The most sublime-tasting plum in the world, she always said, but the tree had a fickle temperament and was notoriously difficult to grow. She had a small orchard in the back of our garden. I had never tasted one of her greengage plums, or if I had I couldn’t remember. The last time her trees had fruited, I was a baby. Every July I’d ask if this was the year the plums would come.

      “You must be patient,” she told me. “Everything good takes time.”

      I was a greedy boy. I stamped my foot. I wanted a plum now.

      “How to wait,” she said, looking down at me with pity. “It’s the hardest thing to learn.”

      I was always waiting for my mother to come home. Most afternoons she left the house to attend one meeting or another. She was devoted to many causes. Education. Women’s rights. Land reform and the struggles of the working class. She made signs. She marched in the streets. Once she even went to jail with a group of her fellow suffragettes. Much aggrieved, my father went to retrieve her, paying the exorbitant two-pound bail to set her free. When they walked in the door, my mother looked shy and triumphant. My father was enraged.

      “You’ve made me a laughingstock in front of my friends,” he spat at her.

      “They are not your friends,” she said, taking off her gloves.

      “You have forgotten your place.”

      “And you have forgotten where you came from.”

      “That is exactly the point!” he bellowed.

      They slept in different bedrooms that night and every night thereafter. My father had done everything he could to erase his history and pull the ladder he’d climbed up behind him. He forbade my mother to join any more organizations. She agreed, and instead began holding meetings at the house while he was at work. In her mind, everybody deserved a better life and it was her responsibility as a woman of means to help them achieve it. Unmarried women with children, spinsters, laundresses, jakesmen, beggars, and drunks all traipsed through our doorway and were led into the parlor to discuss their futures.

      When I was eight, my mother left. She told me she was going on a painting trip to Provence. She’d been unable to bring herself to tell me the truth: my father was admitting her to an institution. He did it without her consent. He needed only two signatures to have her committed, his and his lawyer’s. Her diagnosis: unstable due to overwork and the inability to handle domestic responsibilities. She was gone for four months.

      She returned fifteen pounds lighter and the color of curdled cream. She used the same light, cheery voice she always had with me, but I wasn’t fooled. There was no joy in it anymore. She spoke as if she were standing on the roof of a building in which somebody had forgotten to build the stairs. She’d fight to sustain eye contact when we spoke, but as soon as we stopped our conversation, her gaze would fall to the floor.

      It was Charlotte, the kitchen maid, who finally took pity on me and told me the truth. “Painting, my arse. She got locked up by your father. Sent away to the loony bin.”

      I didn’t believe her, but the governess corroborated the story. Polly, the cook, too.

      “Don’t tell her you know,” said Polly.

      “But what do I do?”

      “Treat her exactly the way you’ve always treated her,” she said.

      “But—she’s different,” I whined. I wanted my real mother back. The playful, optimistic, bread-making, injustice-fighting, eye-glinting woman who called everybody by their first names no matter what their stations.

      “She’ll come back,” said Polly. “You just have to be patient. Sit with her. That’s all you have to do.”

      It was easy to sit with my mother. She rarely left the house anymore. Most days, after breakfast and a bath, she retired to the parlor.

      “I’ve taken up some lovely new pursuits,” she said. No longer did she work in the kitchen alongside Polly and Charlotte. Instead she sat on the chaise and embroidered, the curtains drawn, the lamp lit, her head bent studiously over her work.

      “Shall I read to you?” I asked.

      “No, thank you. I prefer the silence.”

      “Shall I open the curtains? It’s a beautiful day.”

      “I don’t think so. The light is too bright for me.”

      “Then I’ll just sit here with you.”

      “Wonderful,” she murmured.

      I lived on that “wonderful.” A crumb, but I swallowed it down, pretending it was a four-course meal.

      She would come back. Polly said she would. I just had to be patient.

      Over the next year she stopped leaving the house altogether. Twilights were especially difficult. Once my mother was a sunflower, her petals spread open to the sky. Now, one by one, her seeds fell out of their pod.

      It СКАЧАТЬ