gloried in it. She wasn’t racing against anyone or getting into trouble, she was just running and looking at things. She ran fast enough so that she could feel her heavy blond hair stream out behind her, subside across her back, stream out again. She passed one house after another.
At the far end of town, there was a pleasant large house where some ladies lived, though they never talked to her, nor she to them. She remembered how, one day, she came to a halt in front of this house and one of the ladies, a tall beauty, was standing on the porch, wearing an elegant white embroidered gown with a snowy eyelet skirt. Margaret stared at her, and the lady smiled. Margaret thought that she had never seen anything as beautiful as that dress in her life, which at the time seemed rather long. When the lady wafted back into the house, Margaret turned and pelted home, where she found her mother in the back parlor, sewing. As soon as Margaret entered the room, out of breath, she saw that her mother was sewing a copy of the dress she had seen on the beautiful lady. She exclaimed, “I saw that! I saw that dress today!” Then she went up and touched the eyelet. Her mother, Lavinia, didn’t reprimand her, but finished the seam she was sewing, and broke the thread between her teeth. Then she said, “Perhaps you did. But don’t tell your father.” It was years before Margaret realized that the pleasant house at the far end of town was a brothel, and that, from time to time, her mother sewed for the ladies, to make a little extra money. In Margaret’s mind, these dresses were always white. When she was older, though, and recalled this, Lavinia said that it hadn’t happened, it couldn’t have happened; Margaret must have read it in a book.
What had happened, what Margaret should have remembered, was that her brother Lawrence, who would have been thirteen then, had left the house with her one day and taken her to a public hanging. No one had stopped him, because Lavinia was giving birth—to Elizabeth—and her father, famous all over town as Dr. Mayfield (Margaret thought of him as “Dr. Mayfield,” too, he was that imposing), was attending the birth. Lily, the housekeeper, was occupied with Beatrice, who was two. It was said that Lawrence and Margaret left the house and were gone for hours before anyone noticed. But no one suspected that Lawrence, a studious boy, would have taken her to the hanging. Ben, yes—Ben was rowdy and adventuresome, though two years younger than Lawrence. The whole episode was a family legend, and part of the legend was that Margaret didn’t remember a thing about it. “Margaret looks on the bright side,” said Lavinia. “As well she should.” From time to time, though, Margaret had a ghostly recollection of this bit or that bit—of her hand reaching up into Lawrence’s hand, or of him handing her a bit of a crab apple, or of her bonnet hanging over her eyes so that she couldn’t see anything except her feet. He might have sat her on his shoulders—he sometimes did that when she was very young. Nevertheless, it was a fugitive memory, however dramatic.
Margaret remembered other things that she would have preferred to forget. She remembered that when Ben was thirteen he went with some cronies down to the railyards. They found a blasting cap, which one of the fellows attached to the end of a short length of iron rod that they had also found. Employing this rod, they rubbed the blasting cap against some brickwork to see what might happen. When it exploded, the rod flew out of the boy’s hand and entered Ben’s skull above the ear. He was killed instantly. None of the other boys was hurt, and they carried the body home as best they could. Dr. Mayfield met them at the door, and this was the first news they had of the death of Ben.
That winter, Lawrence contracted measles, which led to an inflammation of the brain. The source of the original infection was what Lavinia had always feared, a child who was brought to see Dr. Mayfield. Elizabeth, Beatrice, and Margaret succumbed as well. But they were fairly young, and Lawrence was almost sixteen at the time. They lived and he did not.
And then, one evening about six months after the death of Lawrence, for reasons of