What I Didn't See (3 page)

"You are human, but not me?” Mama Strong said. Mama Strong had never touched Norah. But her voice coiled like a spring; she made Norah flinch. Norah felt her own piss on her thighs.

"Maybe so,” Mama Strong said. “Maybe I'll send you somewhere else then. Say you want that. Ask me for it. Say it and I'll do it."

Norah held her breath. In that instant, her brain produced the two missing reasons. “I am a liar,” she said. She heard her own desperation. “I am a bad person."

There was a silence, and then Norah heard Chloe saying she wanted to go home. Chloe clapped her hands over her mouth. Her talking continued, only now no one could make out the words. Her head nodded like a bobblehead dog on a dashboard.

Mama Strong turned to Chloe. Norah got sent to the TAP, but not to Mama Strong's someplace else.

After that, Mama Strong never again seemed as interested in Norah. Chloe hadn't learned yet to hold still, but Mama Strong was up to the challenge. When Norah was seventeen, the gift she got was Chloe.

One day, Mama Strong stopped Norah on her way to breakfast. “Follow me,” she said, and led Norah to the chain-link fence. She unlocked the gate and swung it open. “You can go now.” She counted out fifty dollars. “You can take this and go. Or you can stay until your mother and father come for you. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. You go now, you get only as far as you get with fifty dollars."

Norah began to shake. This, she thought, was the worst thing done to her yet. She took a step toward the gate, took another. She didn't look at Mama Strong. She saw that the open gate was a trick, which made her shaking stop. She was not fooled. Norah would never be allowed to walk out. She took a third step and a fourth. “You don't belong here,” Mama Strong said with contempt, as if there'd been a test and Norah had flunked it. Norah didn't know if this was because she'd been too compliant or not compliant enough.

And then Norah was outside and Mama Strong was closing and locking the gate behind her.

Norah walked in the sunlight down a paved road dotted with potholes and the smashed skins of frogs. The road curved between weeds taller than Norah's head, bushes with bright orange flowers. Occasionally a car went by, driven very fast.

Norah kept going. She passed stucco homes, some small stores. She saw cigarettes and muumuus for sale, large avocados, bunches of small bananas, liquor bottles filled with dish soap, posters for British ale. She thought about buying something to eat, but it seemed too hard, would require her to talk. She was afraid to stop walking. It was very hot on the road in the sun. A pack of small dogs followed her briefly and then ran back to wherever they'd come from.

She reached the ocean and walked into the water. The salt stung the rashes on her legs, the sores on her arms, and then it stopped stinging. The sand was brown, the water blue and warm. She'd forgotten about the fifty dollars though she was still holding them in her hand, now soaked and salty.

There were tourists everywhere on the beach, swimming, lying in the sun with daiquiris and ice-cream sandwiches and salted oranges. She wanted to tell them that, not four miles away, children were being starved and terrified. She couldn't remember enough about people to know if they'd care. Probably no one would believe her. Probably they already knew.

She waded in to shore and walked farther. It was so hot, her clothes dried quickly. She came to a river and an open-air market. A young man with a scar on his cheek approached her. She recognized him. On two occasions, he'd put her in restraint. Her heart began to knock against her lungs. The air around her went black.

"Happy birthday,” he said.

He came swimming back into focus, wearing a bright plaid shirt, smiling so his lip rose like a curtain over his teeth. He stepped toward her; she stepped away. “Your birthday, yes?” he said. “Eighteen?” He bought her some bananas, but she didn't take them.

A woman behind her was selling beaded bracelets, peanuts, and puppies. She waved Norah over. “True,” she said to Norah. “At eighteen, they have to let you go. The law says.” She tied a bracelet onto Norah's wrist. How skinny Norah's arm looked in it. “A present for your birthday,” the woman said. “How long were you there?"

Instead of answering, Norah asked for directions to the Pelican Bar. She bought a T-shirt, a skirt, and a cola. She drank the cola, dressed in the new clothes and threw away the old. She bought a ticket on a boat—ten dollars it cost her to go, ten more to come back. There were tourists, but no one sat anywhere near her.

The boat dropped her, along with the others, twenty feet or so out on the sandbar, so that she walked the last bit through waist-high water. She was encircled by the straight, clean line of the horizon, the whole world spinning around her, flat as a plate. The water was a brilliant, sun-dazzled blue in every direction. She twirled slowly, her hands floating, her mind flying until it was her turn on the makeshift ladder of planks and branches and her grip on the wood suddenly anchored her. She climbed into the restaurant in her dripping dress.

She bought a postcard for Chloe. “On your eighteenth birthday, come here,” she wrote, “and eat a fish right off the line. I'm sorry about everything. I'm a bad person."

She ordered a fish for herself, but couldn't finish it. She sat for hours, feeling the floor of the bar rocking beneath her, climbing down the ladder into the water and up again to dry in the warm air. She never wanted to leave this place that was the best place in the world, even more beautiful than she'd imagined. She fell asleep on the restaurant bench and didn't wake up until the last boat was going to shore and someone shook her arm to make sure she was on it.

When Norah returned to shore, she saw Mama Strong seated in an outdoor bar at the edge of the market on the end of the dock. The sun was setting and dark coming on. Mama Strong was drinking something that could have been water or could have been whiskey. The glass was colored blue, so there was no way to be sure. She saw Norah getting off the boat. There was no way back that didn't take Norah toward her.

"You have so much money, you're a tourist?” Mama Strong asked. “Next time you want to eat, the money is gone. What then?"

Two men were playing the drums behind her. One of them began to sing. Norah recognized the tune—something old that her mother had liked—but not the words.

"Do you think I'm afraid to go hungry?” Norah said.

"So. We made you tougher. Better than you were. But not tough enough. Not what we're looking for. You go be whatever you want now. Have whatever you want. We don't care."

What did Norah want to be? Clean. Not hungry. Not hurting. What did she want to have? She wanted to sleep in the dark. Already there was one bright star in the sky over the ocean.

What else? She couldn't think of a thing. Mama Strong had said Norah would have to change, but Norah felt that she'd vanished instead. She didn't know who she was anymore. She didn't know anything at all. She fingered the beaded bracelet on her wrist. “When I run out of money,” she said, “I'll ask someone to help me. And someone will. Maybe not the first person I ask. But someone.” Maybe it was true.

"Very pretty.” Mama Strong looked into her blue glass, swirled whatever was left in it, tipped it down her throat. “You're wrong about humans, you know,” she said. Her tone was conversational. “Humans do everything we did. Humans do more."

Two men came up behind Norah. She whirled, sure that they were here for her, sure that she'd be taken, maybe back, maybe to Mama Strong's more horrible someplace else. But the men walked right past her, toward the drummers. They walked right past her and as they walked, they began to sing. Maybe they were human and maybe not.

"Very pretty world,” said Mama Strong.

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One:

I have that within which passeth show ... ?

On November 25, 1864, Edwin Booth gave a benefit performance of
Julius Caesar
. One night only, in the Winter Garden Theater in New York City, all profits to fund the raising of a statue of Shakespeare in Central Park. Edwin played the role of Brutus; his older brother, Junius, was Cassius; his younger, John Wilkes, was Mark Antony. The best seats went for as much as five dollars, and their mother and sister Asia were in the audience, flushed with pride.

Act 2, scene 1. Brutus' orchard. Fire engines could be heard outside the theater, and four firemen came into the lobby. The audience began to buzz and shift in their seats. Brutus stepped forward into the footlights. “Everything is all right,” he told them. “Please stay as you are."

The play continued.

People used to say that Edwin owned the East Coast, Junius the West, and John Wilkes the South, but on this occasion, the applause was mostly for John. Asia overheard a Southerner in the audience.
Our
Booth is like a young god, the man said.

From the newspaper the next morning, they learned that the fires near the theater had been set by Southern rebels. Had they been in California, Junius said, the arsonists would have been strung up without a trial. He was for that. Edwin was for the Union. He told them that a few days earlier, he'd voted for the first time. He'd voted for Lincoln's reelection. John dissolved in rage. Edwin would see Lincoln become a king, John shouted, and have no one to blame but himself. Their mother intervened. No more talk of politics.

The next night the Winter Garden Theater saw the debut of
Hamlet
with Edwin in the title role. The play ran for two weeks, three, eight, ten, until Edwin felt the exhaustion of playing the same part, night after night. He begged for a change, but the play was still selling out. This run, which would last one hundred nights, was the making of Edwin's name. Ever after, he would be America's Hamlet. It was more than a calling, almost a cult. Edwin referred to this as “my terrible success."

It was a shame Shakespeare couldn't see him, the critics wrote, he was so exactly what Hamlet ought to be, so exactly what Shakespeare had envisioned. One morning his little daughter, Edwina, was offered an omelet. “That's my daddy,” she said.

There came a night when, deadened from the long run, Edwin began to miss his cues. He had the curtain brought down, retired to his dressing room to gather himself. “O God! O God!” he said to himself. “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable/ Seem to me all the uses of this world."

When the ghost appeared, Edwin was not surprised. He'd been born with a caul, which meant protection, but also the ability to see spirits. Almost a year earlier, his beloved young wife had died of tuberculosis. She'd been in Boston, he in New York. He was Hamlet then, too, a week's worth of performances and often drunk when onstage. “Fatigued,” one of the critics said, but others were not so kind.

The night she died, he'd felt her kiss him. “I am half frozen,” she'd said. He'd stopped drinking and begun to spend his money on s?ances instead.

Initially he'd gotten good value; his wife sent many messages of love and encouragement. Her words were general, though, impersonal, and lately he'd been having doubts. He'd begun to host s?ances himself, with no professional medium in attendance. A friend described one such evening. He was seized, this friend said, by a powerful electricity and his hands began to shake faster and harder than mortal man could move. He was given pen and paper, which he soon covered in ink. But when he came back to his senses, he'd written no words, only scrawl. It had all been Edwin, he decided then, doing what Edwin did best. Night after night on the stage, Edwin made people believe.

The ghost visiting Edwin now was about the height of a tall woman or else a short man. It wore a helmet, but unlike the ghost in Hamlet, its visor was lowered so its face could not be seen. Its armor was torn and insubstantial, half chain mail, half cobweb. It stood wrapped in a blue-green light, shaking its arms. There was an icy wind. A sound like the dragging of chains. Edwin knew who it was. His father's acting had always been the full-throated sort.

"Why are you here?” Edwin asked.

"Why are you here?” his father's ghost asked back. His tone reverberated with ghostly disappointment. It was a tone Edwin knew well. “You have an audience in their seats. The papers will put it down to drink.” More arm shaking, more dragging of chains.

Edwin pulled himself together and returned to the stage.

Two:

The serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown.

Drink and the theater ran heavy in Edwin's blood. His father, Junius Brutus Booth, was famous for both. Born in England, Junius had come to America in 1821 on a ship named
The Two Brothers
. He brought with him his mistress and child. He left a wife and child behind.

Junius Brutus Booth leased a property in northern Baltimore, a remote acreage of farmland and forest. When he wasn't touring, he and his family lived in isolation in a small cabin. He refused to own slaves, forbid his family to eat meat or fish, or to kill any animal. When he inadvertently injured a copperhead with the plow, he brought it home, kept it on the hearth in a box padded with a blanket until it recovered.

Edwin's earliest memory was of returning to the farm after dark on the back of a horse. As they passed through the forest toward home, his night terror grew. There were branches that grabbed for him, the screaming of owls. The horses came to a halt. His father dismounted, swung Edwin down and across the fence. “Your foot is on your native heath, boy,” his father said, and Edwin never forgot the overwhelming sense of belonging, of safety, of home that washed through him.

He was not his father's favorite child nor his mother's, either. The favorite was Henry, until he died, and then it was John Wilkes. Four of the Booth children passed before adulthood. They were all older than Edwin or would have been had they lived. These deaths drove their father into an intermittent raving madness. In later years, Junius Booth was much admired for his King Lear.