When the babies were five days old, Addison had returned. He had stood looking into their bassinet with a puzzled expression and then at Annabel where she lay, rank with sweat, her hair matted. She’d been refusing to bathe because the doctor said warm water would encourage milk production, and she was determined for hers to dry up.
“Cool water, then,” the day nurse said. “To soothe your parts.”
Annabel had told her she would rather die than take a cold bath. “Your business is with the babies, not with me,” she said. “Leave me be.”
She had matched Addison’s silence, and the next day he left again.
“Only a touch of the melancholies,” the day nurse said. “I’ve seen it before. You’ll be yourself again soon.”
Yourself.
A memory from the murk of her first years. Moonlight bluing the nursery curtains; her father beside her, holding her. No one ever held her. The warmth of another body was intoxicating. Instinctively, she had clutched the silk front of his robe and felt him trembling. There the memory ended.
Age seven. She was standing in the pantry in the house in Murray Hill with her dress lifted while the cook’s son, a boy of about eleven, crouched in front of her. A jagged cry from the doorway and a great, flapping rushing-in. Bosomy, bustled, black-skirted Nanny overfilled the small space like a crow jammed in a house for sparrows. The cook’s boy yelped at being trampled. Nanny gave only that one cry, then nothing but agitated nose-breathing as she dragged Annabel upstairs and locked her in a closet.
Dark in there, but with a keyhole view across the hallway to the nursery, her yellow quilt on the bed and a doll abandoned facedown on the floor. “Was I bad?” she had asked Nanny through the door.
“You know you were,” Nanny said. “You are the worst kind of girl. You ought to be more than ashamed.”
What lay beyond shame? Annabel wondered, crouching among dustpans and tins of furniture polish. If what she had done was so abominable, why was it permissible for her father, the god of the household, vastly more powerful than even her mother or Nanny, to touch the part of her that the cook’s son had offered her a piece of lemon candy only to look at, the part that Nanny called her cabbage? This is our secret, her father said about his visits, and Mother must not know because she would be jealous of how much he loved Annabel and how much Annabel loved him and how they were warm together.
The day she showed her cabbage to the cook’s boy, her mother beat her on her bare legs and backside and called her wicked, wicked, wicked.
The first doctor prescribed daily baths in cold water, a vegetarian diet.
Nanny refused to answer any questions about the nature of wickedness. “That sort of talk will only encourage you.”
Although, once, when Annabel had asked if boys’ cabbages were bad, too, Nanny had burst out with, “Stupid child, boys don’t have cabbages. They have carrots.”
Wickedness, it seemed, had to do with vegetables.
Uneasily, guiltily, for reasons she could not have begun to explain, Annabel began, during unsupervised moments in the nursery or the bath, to touch her cabbage. The sensation dulled her mind in a pleasant way, built to an absorbing comfort, even had the power to drive off unwelcome thoughts: the skinned lamb, for example, that she had seen in the kitchen with its tongue hanging out or her mother calling her wicked. It even muffled thoughts of her father. Her father said he was trying to do something nice. That his visits filled her with dread must mean there was something wrong with her. She would try to be better.
Age nine. She woke to a gust of cold air, morning light, her yellow quilt being snatched away. Her mother stood over her, clutching the quilt like a matador’s cape. Too late, Annabel realized her hands had, in her sleep, migrated under her nightgown. Wicked, said her mother, rearing over her like an ax about to drop. The next night Nanny bound Annabel’s wrists, and she slept with her fingers interlaced as though in prayer.
“Your mother is a good woman,” her father told her, patting the cords on her wrists but not untying them. “But she doesn’t understand how we want to be warm together.”
“Am I wicked?” Annabel asked.
“We’re all a little wicked,” said her father.
The second doctor was old and houndish, with pouchy eyes and speckled skin and long earlobes. With tongs he extracted a solitary leech from a glass jar. He nudged her legs apart.
A ringing pressed in her ears. An obscuring white light swirled in like a snowstorm, was rent apart by a bright jolt of smelling salts. The doctor went out to speak to her mother, leaving the door open.