The Two Nights

Two nights before the wedding I dreamed, which is not a thing I do.

I dreamed I was carrying a child along the corridor on the second floor. Not Mila, and not a child I knew. It was small enough to hold with one arm under its back, and it was asleep against my neck, and I was walking the corridor past the doors with the child getting heavier the way a real one does when it gives up and goes under. Then the child got cold. Not cooler. Cold, the way a thing gets in a room with the windows open in January. I kept walking, because there was a door at the far end and I had to get to it, and between one step and the next the child was so heavy that I had to use both arms, and I could not see the door anymore.

I woke standing up.

I was at the end of the east corridor in my nightgown, at my own door, with both arms bent the way they are bent when you are carrying something, and it took four or five seconds to make my hands let go of a thing that was not there. I went in and shut the door and put the bolt across and sat on the edge of the bed until the heat came back into my feet. Then I did the arithmetic. There was nothing to check and I checked it anyway. A dream is a dream. I turned the light on and read two pages of a schoolbook and went back to sleep.

The next day I made lists. One for Bea about Mila’s French, and one for the minister about the music, and by six o’clock I was so tired that I went up before Mila’s light was out.

That was the second night, and the dress had been in the room since the first.

I came up the back stairs at half past ten with a cup of tea and the dress over my arm, because I had taken it down to the kitchen to press the hem. My door was open about six inches and the light was on. I stood in the hall with the cup in my hand and listened, because that is what I do, and there was nothing to hear.

Then I went in.

The dress was on the floor. It had been worn. The bodice was creased across the front where a body had been inside it, and there was a smell in the shoulder of it, powder and sweat and something sweet underneath, and I stood there with the tea going cold and put my face into the fabric and did not want to.

It had also been cut. Somebody had taken the small scissors off my desk, the ones I used for paper, and opened the shoulder seam down to the elbow and cut across the top of the bodice three times, and not carefully.

The veil was on the bed. It was out of the box and out of the tissue, and the celluloid comb was bent where a hand had pulled at it, and the net was torn from the crown down to about where a waist would be, one long jagged tear that no sewing could make straight.

There was a glass on the floor with an inch of water in it and a print of a thumb in powder on the rim. The window was shut and latched from the inside. And on the rug by the wardrobe there was one slipper, blue, with a hard sole, and it was not mine.

You will want to know who came into my room. So did I.

I sat in the chair and listened to the house. At eleven the clock in the front hall struck, and at half past eleven somebody crossed the floor above me, which is the attic and has nothing in it. At a quarter to one a door at the far end of the corridor opened and shut, one door, once, and after that there was nothing until the furnace came on at four. By then I knew the sounds of that house the way you know the sounds of your own car, and that was not one of them, and in the spring I found out that the roofers had been in and out of the attic hatch since March and that Bea had not told me, because it was not my business, and I have never made that account balance, and I have tried.

I did not go after anybody that night. I picked the slipper up and put it on the table and sat down in the chair by the window with my coat over my knees and stayed awake until five, and then at six I carried everything down to the kitchen: the dress folded over my arm, the veil in its box, the glass, and the slipper.

Bea Truitt was at the stove with the kettle on. I put the things down on the table in a row, the way you lay out parts for a repair, and I did not say anything.

She came over and looked at them. She looked at the dress for a while, and then at the glass, and then she picked the slipper up and turned it over in her hand twice. Bea has one of those faces that keeps still, and I watched it not keep still.

“Nobody from the north wing should have been out today,” she said.

I asked her what was in the north wing.

She put the slipper down and stood with both hands on the back of a chair.

“You will have to ask him,” she said. “I have worked in this house thirty-one years and I have kept to my own side of it, and I am not going to be the one who tells you.”

I said he was in Buffalo until tonight.

“Then ask him tonight,” she said. “Or do not.”

I met Otto on the back stairs. He was going up, which he never did in the morning, and he stopped and looked at me and then went past me and sat down at the far end of the hall, facing the door at the end of the corridor, and he stayed there.

I went out through the back hall and up to the room by the linen closet, the one with the tray outside it in the morning, and I knocked, and Bernice Grady said, “Come.”

She was in the chair by the window with the bottle on the sill and a glass in her hand and her shoes off, and it was twenty past six in the morning. She looked at me the way a person looks at a clock.

I asked her who was in my room last night.

“Nobody was in your room,” she said.

I did not argue. I put the slipper on the table next to her.

Bernice looked at it and drank and looked at the window. Then she said, “She only wanted to see how it felt. She does not get—” and she stopped, and drank again, and set the glass down on the sill. That was the end of the sentence, and she did not finish it that morning or ever.

I asked her what she does not get.

“You ask him tonight,” she said. “He will tell you, and then you will wish he had not.”

I went down and sewed the dress.

I used white thread and the smallest needle I had and pulled the lamp up to the edge of the table. The shoulder seam took an hour. The three cuts across the bodice took another, and I closed them one at a time, and when I came to the last one I found that my hands were steady, which they always are when there is mending, and that is one of the few true things I know about myself.

The veil I could not fix. The tear went through the net from the comb down, and every stitch I put in pulled two more threads out, and at four in the morning I stopped and folded it and put it back in the box and put the lid on.

I finished the dress at twenty past five and held it up in front of the window with the needle still in my hand. The crack of the window was gray. The seam was white. It held.