verything seemed to revolve around food for Miriam. Her family was always busy, always working. When Charlotte was studying with Augustine, Professor Rowe was conducting experiments, writing his journals, or psychoanalyzing patients. When Charlotte was home, she was either studying with her father or sitting. This left Miriam with little role in the family. More and more, Augustine conducted all sittings, leaving Miriam in the background as an observer and hostess, if that. She had no responsibilities but the running of the household. Between meals, there was little to occupy her body or mind. Meals were the only time they all gathered together, Miriam, her husband, and their daughter. Sometimes Charles would be self-absorbed and occupied with some train of thought. Other times, he would become ebullient, and they would discuss philosophy, religion, and science. Miriam, in her old way, would interject beliefs and opinions culled from her experience and imagination. These were the best times.
Miriam began spending more time in the kitchen, preparing for these meals. She canned fruits and vegetables, made jams and sauces, baked breads and pastries. The magical bubbling of yeast, the mixing of fats and oils, the transformation of a salt into a solution, all of the chemical properties of cooking appealed to her. This was an alchemy that yielded results: flour and milk and sugar and oil became cakes. Her natural creativity was let loose, and each meal was an experiment. Some failed miserably, and Charlotte pouted and picked at her plate. Professor Rowe, stoically, ate whatever was placed in front of him. Occassional meals were wildly successful, lifting food above its normal element to aesthetic heights.
As her husband worked away at volumes of his lore of the soul, Miriam began her own journal of the palate. This cookery book was more than a collection of recipes. It was a philosophy of food, a treatise on the metaphors of eating. It was founded in a deep belief that while the body was physical and, by extension, eating was a physical act, both body and food were inhabited by a spiritual power. In the body, this spiritual power was the soul. Food, which came from living creatures (both plant and animal) carried the residual power of the lower forms of life, which fed the soul. Each plant or animal had its own spiritual quality, and the cooking and mixing of food was a process of manipulating the psychical powers of the organic elements in such a way as to best align the vibrations of a soul’s psychic elements to an ethereal plane. In short, the correct foods, prepared in the proper way, brought man closer to God.
Our natural palate, Miriam propounded, would instruct us in this spiritual journey. Throughout history, man has not been content to merely eat. Man has brought the basic elements of fire and water and salt to his foods. Man chooses foods with care, combines them in complex ways, and manipulates them into unrecognizable creations. This behavior, occurring only in man, is not biologically necessary. Therefore, Miriam reasoned, it was not of the corporeal but of the spiritual.
An entire chapter of Miriam’s cookery book was dedicated to the study of ice cream. This delicacy was a culinary anomaly, and so it must have significant meaning. While most preparations of foods used heat, bringing to bear the mystic element of fire, ice cream used water (ice) and salt, generating cold, which processed and combined. The palate clearly showed that this unique process was superior in the preparation of milk. Why was milk unique among foods in its ultimate preparation? Milk was neither plant nor flesh, and the natural food of the newborn. It had, then, a unique spiritual place, fitting it to this unique preparation.
Miriam recommended improving the soul with ice cream as often as once a day, if feasible.
The family was sitting in the parlor eating ice cream when someone knocked at the door. They no longer had servants in this new, western life, so Miriam arose and went to the door.
The woman standing on the doorstep was young, perhaps nineteen. She held her hands together in front of her waist.
“Yes?” asked Miriam.
“Is Professor Charles Rowe at home?” inquired the woman.
“He is indisposed,” Miriam answered. “If you wish to see him professionally, I can arrange an appointment.”
“My business,” said the woman, “is private. And urgent.”
Miriam raised her eyebrows. “I am afraid that you will need to come back at another time. Can I take a message?”
“I must insist,” said the woman, wrinkling her brow.
“What private business could you possibly have with my husband?”
The worried look on the woman’s face grew deeper. “I must talk to him. He is here, isn’t he?”
“He is here,” said Miriam. “But he cannot see you.”
The woman looked at her hands and at the ground and then back at Miriam.
“This is unpleasant,” the woman said.
“Yes,” Miriam agreed, with frustration. She attempted to close the door, but the woman blocked it with her foot.
“I’ve come a long way,” said the woman. “Just let me see him.”
“What,” repeated Miriam, “is your business?”
“Mrs. Rowe,” said the woman, “I am sorry to have to tell you this, but your husband has sorely deceived us both.”
“I don’t know what you can possibly mean.”
“I,” said the woman, “am Mrs. Winifred Rowe, your husband’s other wife.”
This rather startling revelation gained the woman access to the house. Miriam was certain that the woman was mistaken. Her husband could not possibly be Professor Charles Rowe. Either the man had given her a false name, which was likely considering his obvious lack of moral character, or he had coincidentally had the same name.
She lead the woman into the house, intending to clear up, for certain, that Professor Rowe was not, by any means, the man this woman had married.
As they walked into the room, Winifred stared at Charles Rowe.
“Charlie,” she said. She went up to him. “Charlie.”
He stared at her, blinking, holding an ice cream spoon in his hand.
“Yes? Er. I’m sorry. Have we met?”
“Charlie. It’s me. Don’t pretend you don’t know me.”
Charles Rowe looked up at his wife.
“Who is this young woman?”
“She claims, Charles,” said Miriam Rowe, “to be your wife.”
The young woman fainted to the floor.
They seated Winifred in a lounge and administered a wet towel for her forehead. Charles brought brandy and forced a small amount into her mouth. Charlotte watched with interest as the woman coughed delicately and sat up.
“Charlie,” she said, “Charlie.”
“Lie quietly, rest yourself,” Charles Rowe said. “This is quite interesting,” he told his wife. “Young woman,” he said, “you insist that you know me?”
“Know you? How can you deny it?”
“I think we had better hear your story,” said Charles Rowe.
“Certainly,” said Miriam, with her eyebrows raised.
The woman closed her eyes and lay quietly for a moment. When she opened them, she looked at Miriam Rowe. “Your husband is denying me, but you must believe me,” she said.
“Well, as he said, let’s hear your story.”
This is the story that Winifred Rowe told:
On May 23, 1915, near midnight, a man—Charlie—walked into my father’s inn. But maybe that’s not really the start. You see, nearly two weeks earlier, I had gone to see this woman, this woman who is supposed to be a witch. Honestly, I would never normally go to see a witch. She didn’t look like a witch. She didn’t look mystical at all. In fact, she was the exact opposite. She looked like a little doll, porcelain and harmless. Her red-brown hair bounced each time she moved her head. Big green eyes, not heavily lashed but wide and lined so that they seemed wider, a pug nose, and freckles didn’t help her look any more mysterious. This woman, this witch, looked clearly Irish, and none is less mystical than the Irish. She had an almost constantly puzzled expression, and the look in her eyes was that of a dog, trying desperately to grasp the meaning of what was going on around him. This woman seemed sub-normal, but I comforted myself that perhaps it was the woman’s lack of mental proficiency that gave her a supernatural understanding, opening her to something mystical.
You see, I was in an unhappy situation at the inn. I lived there with my father. I had nine sisters, each older than me. One by one, they had been married off and left the inn. They all lived nearby, in farms or towns, but it was just me and my father at the inn. I had my own suitors, if you will call them that, but they were all coarse men, they did not know anything of love. They were sorely unsuitable as husbands, not the kind of man that you can respect. They were all the same, simple, rough working men, not the type of man to inspire the glow of passion.
I knew that there was love in the world. I had read books, and I knew that there were others out there who understood these feelings of the heart. They wrote of love and passion. I wanted to be swept away by an undeniable, impossible, dreamlike feeling. I needed to be wholly a woman.
The men who courted me were more than disappointing. There was nothing under their rough exterior but a drive for sex. Excuse my language, if I am blunt, I have learned to be blunt, but it is the truth! These men worked in nearby mines, and their life was a hard one, full of physical labor. They did not read, or write. Instead, they drank at the inn’s bar and made crude jokes at my expense, or the other barmaids. I worked as a barmaid in my father’s establishment, and the atmosphere of men was smothering to me. These were the types of men my sisters had married, and they all had normal, working lives. My sisters took coarse behavior in stride, as the folly of men, but I could not. I had to believe that there was something higher and better for me.
One man, Nick Parker, had been persistent in his attentions toward me. After hours, he would approach me, and speak to me kindly, throwing off his hard language and rough manner. He was, though, essentially a rough man, and he knew nothing of true, pure love.
In any case, my frustrations had increased, and in desperation, I had gone to this rumored witch for advice and help. The witch’s name was Patricia Marley. She opened the door to me pleasantly, seated me in a small parlor, and offered me lemonade. Her attitude was detached and far-off, in a dazed and dreamy kind of way. People called her a gypsy and a witch, but I had begun to doubt the woman’s abilities, either natural or preternatural.
“Stay away from her,” my father had told me. “That gypsy in her worn-out clothes. She cavorts with the devil. She’ll curse you, just like she cursed old man Mason last winter, when he shot that no-good dog of hers. It was always on his property, always interfering with his sheep. She didn’t care none for that, though, because once he shot that dog, his fate was sealed.”
I didn’t put much stock in my father. This woman had acquired a reputation for witchcraft, that was for sure. There were all kinds of rumors that flew around about her. Not that I believed in that sort of thing. If I had believed in it, I never would have gone, and that’s a fact, since if it’s true then it’s the work of the devil, as my father said. The truth is, I went.
I would hardly need to tell you about it at all, except that it was so strange. I went to the woman and asked to have my fortune read.
“Pay me first,” she said, “because you don’t need to see the future to know that nine of ten people would like to cheat me.”
“And the tenth?” I asked, taking some coins out of my purse.
“The tenth will be offended at what I tell them, and not want to pay.”
I laughed. “Well, I’m none of the ten and happy to pay you.”
She sat me at a table and asked me, “What do you want to know? The past or the future?”
“The future, of course,” I said, since I already knew the past.
She took out a funny deck of cards and asked me to cut them, which I did. She lay them out on the table.
She said: “My dear, you are looking for love. You’re looking for something better than can be got in this town. If you stay here, you will be an old maid.”
“What?” I said. “I can’t leave my father, and all of my family is here. Where would I go?”
“You would go to the city. You would go to the east.”
“I can’t!”
“Then you will be an old maid.”
“What about Nick Parker?” I asked. “I could marry Nick Parker tomorrow.”
The woman shook her head. “No, you couldn’t.”
This was very upsetting to me, and I could hardly contain myself. I vowed that I would marry Nick Parker and settle down to a normal life like my sisters. I left convinced that I should never have gone to the woman in the first place.
The next evening, though, as I was just getting set to look around for Nick in the bar, a group of miners came in. They were all full of sad news. There had been a cave-in at the mines, and six miners were killed. Nick Parker was among them. So, what the witch had said was true, I couldn’t marry Nick that day, nor any day.
The witch was right. I could not marry any man from the town. I could not stand either possible fate, though: leaving the home of my family or growing old alone.
Finding myself with no recourse, I went back to the witch.
“What can I do?” I asked. “There has to be a way.”
“I can help you,” she said, “for the right price.”
“Anything,” I told her. “Whatever I have.” I didn’t have a lot of money, but the inn did well. I had enough.
“Since there is no husband here for you, and you don’t want to leave, I will call you a husband.”
“Call him?”
“Yes. I must work in private. Go now. Wait patiently. Within a fortnight, a stranger will come to stay at the inn who will be your husband.”
I spent a week and a half waiting patiently, rushing to see each person who entered the inn. There were always travelers coming to stay, and though I talked to each at length, and was as friendly as could be, none of them were my future husband.
Then, one night, nearing midnight, as I said, Charlie came to the inn. He was so polished and elegant, though of course he was quite tired and worn out with traveling that night.
Here, Charles Rowe interrupted.
“Was I at all disoriented? Confused?”
“No, just tired. You said you’d had a long journey.”
“Where did I say I was from?”
“Well, you didn’t say.”
“Did I tell you anything about myself?”
“No, not really. We didn’t talk about you, or me, in the sense of things that had happened to us.”
“What did we talk about?”
“Why—love.”
We talked about love, and you opened my eyes to a greater and greater world. Our love is a metaphysical love, a communion of the spirit. Our love, itself, is a higher power. The physical act of love is a ritual that elevates us beyond this life. It is the only truly important thing that we ever do. We were married the following day, consummating our love. I continued working as a barmaid so that Charlie could devote himself to writing. He was writing a book of poetry that unlocked all of the secrets of love. Poetry is the only true way to explore love with words. We lived a life of passion, where our actions were ruled only by our intuitive understanding of the body’s higher purpose in service to the soul.
We lived happily, in total union. Then, one day, the witch came to see me at my work. I had not seen her for quite a while. She was visibly pregnant.
“That man,” she said, “is not any husband that I called for you. I cheated you out of your money, you little fool. And now, look what he’s done to me and left me to fend for myself in this condition.”
“You’re lying,” I told her. “He showed up, just as you said he would.”
“Of course he did,” she said, “of course if you were looking for a husband among each and every man who walked into your father’s inn in a fortnight, you would find one.”
We argued, and when I got home, I confronted Charlie. We had always been happy, and we had proven in our happiness his theories of love. I told him the whole story of the witch, and he—you—denied ever having bedded her. But that night, you just disappeared.
I’ve searched for you for so long. I’ve come so far. How can you deny me? Is it just as you denied her? After all of the talk of higher being, of being closer to God… Is it a lie? It can’t be a lie. How can you deny me like this?
Charles Rowe frowned and paced the floor. “It’s incredible,” he said. “It’s just incredible.”
“Well, what have you to say to it?” asked Miriam.
“I can’t ask you—either of you—to believe me. I’m sure this young woman is sincere. As you know, my absence is mysterious to me, and I’ve told you what I know of it. I can’t say that while, in my mind, I remember one truth, in my body, I was behaving in some completely inexplicable manner. I can’t deny this young lady’s story, but I cannot accept responsibility for it.”
“Responsibility!” said Winifred. “Responsibility! You took on my responsibility when you married me. You took on responsibility when you fathered our child.”
“You have a child?”
“Charlene. After her father.”
Charlotte’s eyes opened wide. Charlotte’s head fell backward, and she let out a low moan.
“She’s going into a trance,” said Miriam.
“Not more of this witchcraft!” said Winifred.
“Quiet, quiet,” said Miriam.
Charlotte’s head shot up. Her voice came, deep, strong, and masculine. “I must explain. This is difficult for your human minds to understand.” A rapping noise was heard that seemed to fill the air around them. “Silence!” said Charlotte, and the noise stopped. “The power is strong, the time is limited. Your husband,” she turned to Winifred, “is not a being of body, but a visitor from another plane. Do not blame this man, whose form was imitated. This being is an embodiment of the abstract, not a full human, but only a construction of the mind, a being of only love, whose only thought was love, whose only essence was love. Feeding on your desires, she brought him to being, and in her wrath she unstrung his fabric. I cannot explain, you have not words. Here. You must return to your home and your child. As kind hosts, these people will give you money. Tell your loved ones that your husband is dead. It is as much truth as they will understand. Have naught to do with this witch. She meddles where she does not belong. Time is short. I have not time. We all have no time. There is no time. No time.”
Charlotte collapsed on her chair.
“There,” said Charles Rowe. “I knew there must be an explanation.”
Miriam was hovering over her daughter, feeling her temples and her wrists.
“But it’s impossible,” said Winifred. “It’s nonsense.”
“Nonetheless, you must know,” said Miriam, “that spirit messages through my daughter are never false.”
After a good deal of discussion, Winifred Rowe was sent home with a gift of money and the belief that whatever else, her husband was dead to her.
I hate that girl, Charlotte, that child, that liar. She is completely foreign to me. She has been overcome, replaced, changed, maneuvered, reconciled, expunged, revamped, completed, and discoursed out of existence. I have no fond memories of that person who I was. I can see now that these were the last vestiges of the child that was before she looked into the mirror, that selfish, angry, insecure, and human child. She was a fake, a fraud. She recognized one of her own quite easily, though. She recognized in the visitor a kindred spirit. All the woman really wanted was money, and all that Charlotte did was speed up the negotiations.
Perhaps she did. I know, Charles Rowe was a libidinous man. I have seen his sins with women. In him, I never recognized the fake, the fraud who takes advantage of fear and desire for financial gain. He was, though, a fake and a fraud for other reasons. He wanted something so badly. I don’t think he ever knew what it was. Do you trust the stranger who comes to your house with a plausible tale? Do you trust the man you see every day, the father? Do you trust the images you see in the mirror?
I saw in the mirror an image of blood.
Nanette was in the middle of the field. She was full of child, round and bursting, round and huge. The boy on the farm had made her that way, in the natural course of all things. He had stopped coming when she started to get large. He had disappeared from his father’s farm, gone off to pursue some other life in some other place. His leaving was a quiet change in Nanette’s life, as his presence had been. Her growing stomach and swelling breasts, she took in stride. She had some rudimentary realization that what was happening was not disease, not death. The changes, she absorbed into her existence.
The pain, however, when it came, took her by surprise. The water came rushing down her leg and spread out against the ground, and she fell to the earth. She yowled, letting out a screeching, animal noise. She pounded the ground with her fist. The dogs came to her when they heard her cries. They gathered around her, sniffing and licking her hands. There was nothing they could do.
Then, a man nearby with a cart and an ox heard the noise.
He came over to the field and saw an unwashed and abandoned young girl, in the midst of labor and surrounded by wild dogs. The dogs growled at him and snapped when he approached, but they were driven off by a stick.
He took the girl to his cart and drove her to his home.
This man was a doctor. He knew what to do in labor and successfully brought the girl through the pangs of birth. She gave birth to a baby girl, and by a coincidence, the mother being unable to speak, the doctor named the child Nanette.
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