The Butterfly Cabinet Read Free Page A

Julia. Gabriel and Morris remind me of Edward’s maternal grandfather, or at least of what I know of him: bluff, red-faced, matter-of-fact chaps, hands-on, curious, practical. Freddie and George, too young, too early to say, though Freddie shows signs of Morris’s temper when his teeth are coming through—as if firing his rattle against the wall will make them come any sooner or easier. They are none of them alike, my children: dark, fair, red haired; gray eyed, blue eyed, brown; tall, heavy framed, fine. I seenothing of myself in any of them. They have come through me from Edward, from his ancestors and mine, but they seem little to do with me. And that is especially true of Charlotte, my sixth, my only girl. What can I say about her?
    She had a gesture that was all Edward’s: a way of tilting her head when she was listening carefully, a strange fully-grown tic that seemed entirely at odds with her small frame. It did not seem copied: it appeared that she had inherited it, as surely as those serious gray eyes, those blond curls that had been his too as an infant. And she was wise, like a child, as they say here, that had been before, would be again.
    She could never take an object by its handle. When she was given a cup she immediately wrapped her fingers around the bowl. She was contrary to the bone and entirely comfortable in her own skin. She had no interest in mounting a horse but would have fed carrots to my gray, Caesar, the whole day long. And she did not like the sea. It was loud, she said, a monster. She was plagued with dreams. Once, she woke up crying and I went to her and said, “It has gone away now. Go back to sleep,” and she said, “That is why I am crying.” She dreamed she could fly, she said. She had sprouted strong white feathered wings on her shoulder blades—she could feel them—and she was soaring high up in the blue looking down on the house and the strand, wheeling through the air, turning and gliding, being borne up on the warm currents that rise off Inishowen and Binevenagh, and she did not want to come down.
    Why so many children? Too indelicate a question for anyone to ask, but it was on their minds, I am sure of it. I saw the looks they gave me in church each time my condition became apparent. Why not lock the door against Edward? Surely I had provided him with heirs enough. Surely my duty was done. How can I describe the way I am with him, when we are alone together? It has something to do with touch, and something to do with ache, and something to do with living, and something to do with freedom,and something to do with loss, and something to do with a return to oneself, and something to do with fear, and something to do with relief, and with color, startling color, and with harmony, and with rhythm, and with abandon. A thrumming of parts, a butterflying, a dancing. And at the end of it, often, there is a child. It is a price to pay.
    I loved Charlotte—that could not be helped—but she was a difficult child to like. She was willful, disobedient; nothing particular in that, but her misbehavior had a quality that I could not fathom. She was so unlike the boys. Their mischief was impulsive, uncalculated, soon ended by a punishment that befitted it. I insisted on breakfasting with the children several times a week, a peculiarity that my defenders chose to view as dutiful and my detractors held up as an example of tyrannical control. On one such occasion I caught Harry emptying his morning porridge into his napkin. He loathed the taste, complained it was like swallowing warm frogspawn. I had him sit at the table at every meal for two days without a morsel on his plate. He ate his porridge on the third day, and every day thereafter. I caught Morris unpicking the wallpaper in the dining room, trying to set fire to it with a lucifer, the room adrift with black floating ash, an experiment, he said, to discover if a wall would burn. I held his hands on the hot-water pipes until he cried, and