Dedication
For Daniel Legault, my lightning bolt for
twenty-five years and counting
I
The MIRACLE
The Vision
Mary Mabel’s decision to kill herself wasn’t taken lightly. She’d considered it off and on ever since she was ten. That’s when she and her papa, Brewster McTavish, had arrived on the doorstep of the Bentwhistle Academy for Young Ladies, a Gothic flurry of turrets, parapets, corbelled chimneys, gargoyles, dormers and widow’s walks, more apt for the housing of bats than the delinquent daughters of the idle rich.
The Academy sat on a four-acre field in the west end of London, Ontario, a colonial outpost in the Dominion of Canada. Unlike the real London, London, Ontario, was a reconstituted barracks town of retired farmers, accountants, and insurance salesmen, who fancied the place a city. At eighty thousand souls, it was certainly large enough and moneyed enough, with its army of stone churches, steel bridges, and broad tree-lined streets of ample yards, each with a solid brick home sporting a Union Jack. It had its own fairgrounds, too, and a hockey rink, men’s club, and a train station — even its own east-end underbelly of unpaved, potholed roads and clapboard houses. What it lacked was imagination; Londoners were a practical, thrifty lot who said their prayers, and saw the Devil’s work in anything that threatened the predictable.
Construction of the Bentwhistle Academy had begun in 1910 under the supervision of the town’s greatest financier and leading citizen, Horatio Algernon Bentwhistle V. Horatio had conceived the Academy not only as a monument to his family’s name, but as a hobby for his only child, Miss Horatia Alice, who’d become increasingly difficult since her return from school. Now, twenty-odd years later, Headmistress Miss Bentwhistle had halted improvements to the Academy in the wake of the Great Depression and her father’s untimely death. This had left the moat half-dug, its clay basin filled with leaves and stagnant runoff. School brochures conjured “a magical lagoon, ideal for the contemplation of Lord Tennyson, Longfellow, and Sir Walter Scott”; a breeding ground for mosquitoes was more like it.
Mary Mabel had had a bad feeling about the Academy from the moment she and her papa were shown their quarters, a basement dungeon below the Great Hall comprised of two windowless, low-ceilinged rooms with cement floors, an icebox, and a stove. Her papa had been hired to do odd jobs for room and board, as he’d done for the past five years in towns throughout Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. She was to work in the laundry and kitchen, in exchange for which she could attend classes with the young ladies.
Her schoolmates were a nightmare, especially Clara Brimley, ringleader of the ruling clique. They’d taunt her for being poor (“What’s your real name? Penny Less?”), for having lost her mama (“Where did you lose her? In a whorehouse?”), and, above all, for being plain (“Here comes Miss Potato Head”). At night, Mary Mabel would stare into the small mirror in her bathroom, praying for her mama to appear to tell her she wasn’t as ugly as all the girls said.
It’s true I have big eyes and a mop of curls, she thought, but my “auntie” in Indiana said my mole is a beauty mark, and my features are something I’ll grow into, whatever that means.
Mary Mabel refused to let anyone see she was unhappy. When the young ladies taunted her about her mama, her papa, or her looks, she didn’t cry like they wanted. Instead, she spat in their soup and blew her nose on the inside of their pillow cases.
“Devil child.” That’s what Miss Bentwhistle called her the time she pitched a ladle of vegetable slop at Clara. The headmistress was of the opinion that a week spent scrubbing the Academy’s toilets with an old hairbrush and lye powder would settle her down.
“Serves you right.” Clara smirked. “You’re a nobody’s brat. I trust you’ve learned your lesson.”
“Take care,” Mary Mabel replied, “or I’ll stuff your face in the toilet bowl where it belongs.”
Clara snitched. Mary Mabel got a second week, and her papa warned her that if she caused any more mischief, Miss Bentwhistle would send them packing. “Well,” Mary Mabel said, “if that’s a promise, I’d better get cracking.” He chased her down the hall and round the boiler, cursing her lip till an overhead pipe laid him out cold.
Mary Mabel would’ve gotten into greater trouble, if it hadn’t been for play-acting. She started with puppets. One night, she drew a face on a finger and stuck it through the toe of a dead sock. Production standards soon improved, thanks to decorated thimble-heads costumed with a wardrobe of worn hankies. Alone in her room, she’d entertain herself with epics, switching characters with the flick of a thumb. It reminded her of when she was eight, living with “Auntie” Irene, a mortician’s wife who directed theatricals for the Milwaukee Little Theater Guild.
At fourteen, fancying herself a grown-up, she set the puppets aside and acted the tales herself, performing the roles of Jo March, Little Nell, Dora, and, one memorable night, smothering herself on the sofa as Othello and Desdemona both. Inspiration came from her library. She collected it in the middle of the night. Families fleeing the bailiff would take off after dark with whatever would fit in a borrowed wagon; leftovers were strewn everywhere. Mary Mabel would sneak out to front lawns and pick books like fishermen pick worms, then stack them in her closet on jerry-built shelves of boards and cement blocks that wobbled up to the ceiling.
These books were her best friends, her only friends, if truth be known. To enter their worlds was to encounter possibilities wondrous and magical, certainly more so than any she could picture in the here and now. Her papa disapproved. “Get your head out of the clouds,” the beanpole lectured. “Life only gets worse. Accept your lot, or you’ll end your days weeping over your ironing board.”
His words went in one ear and out the other, though he was right about life getting worse. As she approached the age of seventeen, Mary Mabel thought about suicide daily. Not in the wild, hysterical way some of the girls did over boys or examinations, but with a calm, quiet resolve. She no longer wondered whether to do it, but rather when and how.
Rat poison was her first idea. It was easy to come by, as the Academy had a large supply to keep down fall infestations. Still, she shuddered at the fate of the mice and squirrels that died in the walls and smelled for weeks. Next, she thought of hanging herself from the clock tower, like a character out of Victor Hugo; but, however romantic, she hated the idea of letting the world look up her skirts. Leaping in front of a train like her heroine Anna Karenina, or shooting herself with a pistol like Hedda Gabler, were also out of the question; she was determined to die in one piece.
Mary Mabel weighed and discarded options until the week following her birthday. That night, out of the blue, she woke up to find her mama in glowing white robes, floating at the foot of the bed. She’d prayed for a visitation for as long as she could remember, but her mama had never come, and she’d almost given up hope. Her mama’s arrival now meant the visitation must be about something important: her entry into womanhood, perhaps?
“Meet me tomorrow at noon on Riverside Bridge,” her mama said, “and we’ll be together forever.”
Mary Mabel reached out to hold her, but the moment she did, her mama disappeared. What a peculiar dream, Mary Mabel thought. Yet the meaning was clear, and for the first time in ages she felt at peace. She knew when to die. And where. And how. The plan made such sense. Sunday was her one day of the week without chores; she wouldn’t be missed for hours. Riverside Bridge was perfect, too, out of the way, private and beautiful. And the height of it and the rocks beneath — it was a death that couldn’t be botched.
She got up. On the way to brush her teeth, she almost tripped over her papa, snoring on the floor of what passed for their living room, legs splayed out, back upright against the couch. Brewster tended to slide off when he passed out. As usual, his bottle was secure beside