The Quick-Change Artist: Stories

Syrup and Feather

Syrup and Feather JULIA RESIGNED HER teaching job in February because she was getting married. She needed time to make her gown and trousseau for the April wedding. Embroidering daisies on fingertip towels, she had never been so happy or so alone, her future a bright blank stretch of security. She sewed all day in her rented room in Glen Allen, having taught school for less than two years. She liked teaching but didn’t love it. She did enjoy being sixty miles away from her home in Toano, over in James City County, where her widowed mother ran a small inn. In , it was expected that young female teachers in rural Virginia would marry and leave, even in the middle of a term. Julia’s fiancé, a doctor from Tennessee, lived in Richmond. They had met when he visited relatives in Toano. They became engaged at Christmastime, and when she returned to school in the New Year, her students, all different ages, clus-  tered around the diamond ring on her hand. She let them try it on. She’d never heard anybody talk about the kind of joy she felt in these sewing days, the only sounds the birds’ calls and the whisper of thread through cloth. She fell into reverie, winding ribbon around her fingers as if it were a daughter’s hair. She wrote to Edgar, her fiancé, but she did not really want to see him in those weeks leading up to the wedding. Richmond was only nine miles away, but she told him not to come, she was busy. She wrote instead, describing the lace she was stitching onto pillowcases and the tiny imitation pearls on her veil. They were married in Richmond at the home of a prominent surgeon, Edgar’s mentor. There was no money for a honeymoon. Immediately after the wedding and after seeing Julia’s mother off to Toano on the train, they went to the house that Edgar had found for them. The house was terrifying to Julia. Edgar had bought it by paying the back taxes. It was a crumbling mansion in a forgotten part of Richmond, vacant since the death of its former occupant, a Mrs. Mabry, twenty years earlier. Plates were still laid out on a cobwebbed table—fine porcelain plates, yellowed from well water and crazed with cracks. Somehow the house had escaped vandals, except for thefts of most of its furniture and one mantel. A railroad switching yard adjoined the property. Day and night, trains emitted grinding, teethrattling clashes. Julia hated the noise and the fact that the house had no indoor plumbing. She had never had that luxury before, and now that she was married, she had thought— but she didn’t say that. “We won’t be here long, I promise you,” Edgar said. He gazed at the fence that was their only protection from the Syrup and Feather  switching yard. “Anybody could climb over that. Maybe I’ve done a stupid thing. Look, I’ll put my revolver here, on the mantel. If you need it, use it.” He had an affinity for railways, having worked as a telegraph operator for the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad while he saved money for medical school. He grew up poor, as she had. He couldn’t afford medical school until he was over thirty, and now there were debts to be paid. Edgar hired a carpenter and a painter, and there was a woman, Dessie, to help Julia. Dessie said she had known old Mrs. Mabry, who lived in the house for so long. Dessie explained the plates in the dining room. “After her funeral, I washed these plates myself,” she said. “When she didn’t have no family to take them away, I just put them back on the table.” “Y  has the most brilliant medical mind I’ve ever encountered,” the head surgeon told Julia, at a lavish dinner in the best part of town. The house had fine furniture but little of it, for the host, like Edgar, was a young doctor just starting out. The elegant rooms were cold. Julia was cold, though her dress was more modest than those of the other wives, whose shoulders were bare. “Your husband has developed new techniques for the eye and ear,” the surgeon went on. “He’ll get offers to move to other cities. I want to keep...