Cold Union
Karen Halvorsen Schreck
Goodlove, Illinois 1864
In the bay window overlooking the frozen lawn, the spider spins her silk. I watch her from the window seat, the letter in my hands. Jointed legs gesticulating, she draws lustrous gossamer from her abdomen. Like my husband, she is an engineer, inventing, calculating, executing no matter the cost, a Sisyphus, for all intents and purposes, even as the end of life draws near. She attaches the thread to a kind of guyline, which, thanks to her ingenuity and perseverance, stretches on a neat diagonal across the casement. Tensile in its strength, the web is her best defense and her best offense. It has mostly survived Nora’s distracted dusting. At its intricate center, a fly, seduced from some crevice or cranny by a brief burst of fickle Spring, hangs, bound and paralyzed with venom, awaiting the spider’s appetite.
But there is more—the web is nursery too. At the outermost ring, in the topmost corner of the window frame, a pearly gray pouch, plump with nascent spiderlings, holds fast, as it holds my gaze.
Yesterday I made my way outside to question our chief gardener about this houseguest and her babies. Given the harsh and relentless winter, Alessandro has had to postpone his bed preparations; he has turned his attention to the reparation of a stone wall. At my approach and subsequent interrogation, he looked up from his crouch, rubbing frost from his full mustache. After a moment’s thought, struggling to contain his bemusement, he relayed in halting English and rapid Sicilian, and with the most expressive of hand gestures, that the spiderlings should hatch in two to three weeks, if they survive this ungodly cold. If the mother does not eat them alive, as spiders sometimes do—here, Alessandro pinched an imaginary newborn between his fingertips and pretended to pop it into his mouth—she will be dead before her offspring grow into adulthood. “Morto,” Alessandro said, and, although this is a word I know the meaning of all too well, he mimed strangling himself, a terrible grimace on his face. Then again, there is another possibility. (Here, Alessandro gave an extravagant shrug.) The mother may be dead by the time her children are hatched.
“May she be so lucky,” was my reply. Alessandro regarded me, ruddy brow furrowed, and asked, “Why?” Meaning, “Why do you of all people, Ice Queen, care about such a little thing as a spider?”
“E interessante,” I answered. “Un nuove mondo.” We understand each other, Alessandro and I. For both of us, this great swatch of land, owned by my husband, and the budding town, which already bears his name, is indeed a whole new world. Displaced decades ago from our respective original countries to this vast America, Alessandro and I have been, in the last year, through no choice of our own, uprooted yet again. Perhaps it is not so great a distance from the North Eastern United States to the Middle West. Perhaps the only ocean we crossed on our recent journey was that of prairie grass. But, for me, at least, the shock of this most recent change is only a little less great than the shock of my first migration. From the lost look I often glimpse in Alessandro’s tired eyes, I assume the same is true of him.
Alessandro shrugged in half-hearted agreement with me. Yes, he supposed another whole new world is interesting. But—rough and dirty hands raised in perplexity—“Il ragno?” She holds interest, too? “Perché?” It’s not the spider, per se, I tried to explain. It’s the spider as mother, and her babies, soon to be hatched. They are the only other mother and babies I know now, in this new place. Thus, they interest me.
Alessandro laughed at this, and I laughed, too, lightly, as at a silly joke. But when I turned from him into the bitter wind, I drew the fur collar of my coat close to my throat, and my smile faded. There is nothing laughable about the webs in which the spider and I live. In fact, if she survives into the near future, I may one day, in an act of mercy, raise a hand to her habitat and strike her down, spare her any further suffering. For now, though, I leave her to her work. She has provided me with my only distraction in this last month, her frenetic movements initially a mirror to my thoughts, and then, as the passing of time revealed a repetition of pattern both beautiful and soothing, a kind of anesthesia. Soon after the New Year, when I took up residence here, I found I could no longer read; words blurred on the page or sentences in their sinuous meaning revolved in endless circles, devouring their own snaky tails. Take mending in hand, or the embroidery hoop, and the garment or sampler would blossom with rose-red drops, born of my pricked fingertips. Clean or cook, I would break things or burn them. Pray, and the words rose not upward, but fell like stones from my mouth. In the end, I found myself at this window, watching for changes in sky, land, and web, waiting for a letter that never came.
Until today. So yes, distraction the spider has provided me. But she has also given me the answer to a question I have harbored for over a quarter of a century now, a question I have carried since the birth of my daughter, a question reiterated at the birth of my twin sons. What is it that links a mother and her child—or, if not all mothers and all children, then what is that links me to mine? When Juniper was born—this was nearly twenty-one years ago, in Marblehead—I heard the snip of scissors as the doctor cut the cord. But I knew before my daughter was laid, warm and clean, swaddled and sleeping in my arms, that we were as bound together as we had ever been. With Douglas and Hollis, two years later, it was the same. My ties to these three may be invisible, but they are no less strong than the spider’s strands, no less sensitive to shifts and movements—which in my case means the triumphs and tragedies of my children’s lives. They are out in the world, fully grown now, yet moments exist when I believe they may as well be thriving within me, somersaulting and spinning in my womb. Their presence is that imminent, immanent, intimate, although they are miles, half a country, a world away. Even death will not separate us. Though I pass through the veil and dwell in eternity, they will be with me always, and I with them.
Or so I assumed until a month ago when my concentration unraveled, as did the connection I felt to my children—or I should say the connections I felt to my two sons. I still sense my daughter, who, at her father’s insistence, spends this winter in Italy with her vague and stodgy Aunt Miriam. (It is warm and beautiful there—Alessandro confirms this—nearly as warm as the Martinique of my childhood, also the original home of the Empress Josephine. Like Josephine, I was told as a child by a fortuneteller that I would be a queen. Look where that got us both.) Juniper is having a fine time, I know, though her correspondence has been minimal. Too fine a time, her failing father and unmindful Miriam would say, if they were made aware, for in fact there is little punitive about my wayward daughter’s experience of this other country. If her father wished her to suffer, he should have sent her to Siberia to live with the Decembrists. Though even there, knowing Juniper . . .
Where was I? Where am I? Ah, yes. Thanks to the spider, I now visualize motherhood as a thrice-spoked web constructed of strong and lustrous threads, spun upon childbirth, expanding and contracting with the passing of time and distance, from me to my daughter and my twin sons. No one has ever known the workings of my gossamer—even Juniper, Douglas, and Hollis have been unaware of its existence, although often surprised by the knowledge it affords me, which they have laughingly called my “intuition.” Particularly my husband, a man haunted in his old age by laudanum-induced nightmares, has no idea about my experience of motherhood. Had I ever tried to explain, he would have laughed. I can almost hear his laughter now, cold and brief, bark rife with bite. My husband is the Ice King; it makes sense there is no warmth to his laughter. He insisted our children be named for plants that thrive in the most bitter of climates, and, although I protested this, he sealed the deal (as he has been wont to do throughout his life, no matter the repercussions) by signing their birth certificates while I was yet in recovery from their delivery into this world. Now in those increasingly rare moments when the Ice King’s drugged haze clears—before pain again overtakes him, and his desire for oblivion reasserts itself—he continues to rule his kingdom as he always has, with a brutal iron fist. He disremembers his drug-induced dreams, the better to view the world and its workings as he always has: through the pragmatic lens of an aggressive realist. His are the eyes of a man who came from money, and who, at an early age, perhaps from birth, put away childish things—visions, poetry, magic, miracles—and capitalized on his origins to assume world-renowned wealth and power. As far as I know, my husband has only ever said what if when he already knows the answer and wants to prove a point. His careful calculations and methodical preparations have served him well. He would see the spider’s web as a product and tool of labor, nothing more. Was I to share my perspective on it—a perspective rooted in my gut and flowering from my heart—he would roll his eyes at my “fey imaginings and foolish fantasies.” He would order me to turn my head from the clouds and set my feet on the earth. Man of action that my husband is, he would demand that I “do something worthwhile with my time”—if I confided my secret self to him, which I long ago learned never to do.
Now, here at the window, as the spider wends her way to the fly, I am left only with one immediate decision. Will I show my husband this letter, come into my hands today? Not while he is insensate or hallucinating—there is no point in showing him anything then. Or if there were a point, it would only be a point of pretense: I could claim to have at least tried to communicate the news. But I am not one for pretense. So, should I then hover by his bedside, watching and waiting for that fleeting moment when he appears alert and aware? Should I then hold the letter before his ravaged gaze? When he reveals his inability to decipher its contents, should I turn the page toward my own eyes and read the news aloud, word for word? In a marriage that has been a kind of battleground, with husband perpetually the victor, should I deliver the final blow?
If our situations were reversed, that is what he would do. But am I cruel enough to follow the example he has set for me time and time again over the course of our cold union? If I pride myself on anything, I pride myself on this: I was raised in a warm climate by kind people. I have never returned to Martinique—he would not allow it, and, with the children under my wing, I could not defy him, un-nest or abandon them, fly away. But with his passing, whenever that should avail itself, for he is as tenacious in his death throes as in a business deal, as tenacious as the hardy Cladonia lichen which flourish along the rocks that flank Marblehead’s beaches throughout the year, and which the locals call British Soldiers because of the red berry-like caps which top the pale green stalks . . . so Douglas told me. Douglas, the naturalist, lover of plants and animals, Douglas who would never hurt a fly, who likely would try to rescue this fly from the spider’s web, Douglas, an unlikely and ill-equipped soldier, most at home among the ranks of the Cladonia—
So my thoughts circle, knot, and snarl. At the Ice King’s passing, perhaps I will board a ship and sail for the Lesser Antibes in the eastern Caribbean Sea. The mangroves will greet me in the bay of Fort-de-France. My parents are long dead, but my brother will welcome me back to our plantation. We will drink our rhum, although I will refuse any offer of ice—which exists in Martinique only because of my husband’s business, exported to my homeland so many years ago now, the ice upon which the Ice King has made and continues to make his fortune. I will drink my rum as everyone did when I was a child; I will drink it warm. I will walk among the orchids, morning glories, and ferns, the white gum and mahogany trees. Madiana, the Carib Indians called Martinique long ago. Land of Flowers. I will seek out my favorites, Hibiscus, Oleander, and Frangipani. I will seek out the blue butterfly for which I was named, thanks to the color of my eyes, the butterfly which my mother, an aspirant lepidopterist, once nurtured in our solarium along with other delicate winged creatures. I will speak French only, never English again. I will forget my life in these divided states. I will forget everything but my children. I will seek out the most respected Voodoo priestess, and with her help I will spirit Juniper away from wherever she happens be. I will lure her to the Land of Flowers, where she can be as wayward as she likes, released at last from puritanical judgement. My daughter and I will dwell in Martinique for the rest of our lushly warm, sugar-dusted, sweetly scented days.
The door creaks open behind me, and, with stuttering footfall, Nora enters the room. She draws near, hesitates. When I fail to invite her forward, she rounds the chair and sinks to her knees at my feet, the skirt of her gray dress billowing around her. She has been crying. Her pale green eyes—just the color of Cladonia stalks—are glassy with tears; her thick dark eyelashes clump together in wet spikes; her eyelids, typically as pale as the rest of her skin when she isn’t sunburned and peeling, are red and puffy. Her curly auburn hair sticks out in all directions—it looks as if she has been tearing at it—and now she twists her apron in her chapped hands.
Nora knows. As I have long suspected, she’s not above steaming open an envelope to learn a letter’s contents. She has gotten quite clever at this, today confirms. Other than the return address—a Union Forever Seal with bold blue star and red and white stripes, which intrigued her, I suppose—the envelope remains in unremarkable condition. There was no band of black, no laurel wreath. Still Nora must have opened it. But for her appearance, I might never have guessed she resealed the flap.
I will not hold her actions against her—not today. I do not have the fortitude. And I remind myself, as I watch her sobbing, that Nora was all but raised with my boys. She played with them, bickered with them. They taught her to read and write. She taught them to swim and manage a boat. They taught her matters of etiquette (though since their departure a year and a half ago, she has reverted to her Irish ways). She taught them the movements of tide and undertow. With her fisherman father’s help, she guided them through the setting and retrieval of lobster traps, helped them build a fire on the beach near our Marblehead estate, and then boiled their catch right there, ordering tender Douglas to ignore the rattling of claws against the inside of the tin pot. Nora loved my boys. They loved her. And she and Hollis—well, they loved each other a little too much, given their respective stations in life. (My husband would have put an end to it all, had he known. He would have put her out on the street.) So now Nora weeps. Her tears fill me with an envy so bitter it rises in my throat as bile. For my eyes are as dry as the lobster claws they abandoned to the gulls on Marblehead’s shore, having devoured the sweet meat inside.
“Oh, Ma’am,” Nora wails. “How can you bear it? I—”
“We will bear it,” I say to my utter astonishment, disbelieving the words even as I utter them with absolute conviction. But I do not want to hear what Nora can or cannot do. “We must.” My marriage has left me changed; never has this been clearer to me than in this moment. Stoicism has become second nature to me.
“You’re a hard one!” Nora’s hands fly to her hair, and the curls heave and twist as her fingers clench and release. Then, like swift, hungry birds, her hands dart free and snatch the letter. She scans it, tears streaming, mouth working. Surely the words blur, read as if underwater. But somehow, Nora manages to read them aloud.
“Dear Sir and Madam, With great sorrow I write to tell you of the deaths of your sons, Douglas Goodlove and Hollis Goodlove, at the battle of Meridian, Mississippi, on the 14th of February, this year of our Lord, 1864. As commanding officer of their unit, I am able to attest to their great acts of heroism during this most successful campaign for our Union Army—”
Nora falters, choking on the words. But I know the letter’s contents. “Fallen in glory . . . Devoted to the cause . . . Your loss serves the greater good.” Having endured the sentiment previously, I am loath to do so again. I seize the letter from Nora and press it to my chest. She seems not to notice; her hands remain in midair, her streaming eyes focused on what is no longer there. “It’s nearly April. This must have been sent some time ago,” she cries.
When my concentration failed, and my ties to my boys were severed, I don’t say. Nora gapes at me. “Why did they wait so long to let us know?”
“’Us?’” This I say do say, and sharply. To her credit, Nora’s flush deepens. I take pity on her. I nod at the envelope, still on the window seat where I cast it. She scrubs her fists into her eyes, and then, vision cleared, peers at the address, the postage mark. “Four weeks ago!” she cries. “So much time lost, not knowing!”
In my heart, I knew. “They never should have volunteered,” Nora blathers on. “They should have hidden themselves away.”
This we can agree on. At first news of the war, I wanted to ship Douglas and Hollis off to my brother, or, failing that, send them to Italy with Juniper and Miriam. But I didn’t have a chance. My needs, wishes, and opinions have always been secondary, in the public arena and the private. My boys enlisted at my husband’s first urging, which was prompted by his political aspirations. The Ice King does not give a fig about slavery or the Union. The South may be temporarily cut off from Northern export, but they will always need cooling, and he knows that soon enough they will come crawling, begging for his wares. He forced my boys to enlist, because he only, always, wants his name associated with still more power and success. Government office, at the highest level. This is my husband’s ultimate desire. This is why my boys died.
From Nora’s grief, I can guess that Hollis, ever the romantic, must have promised a swift return upon the war’s end. Where she was, he would go. He would marry her, make an honest woman of her. He would shed his military uniform for a business suit; she would cast off her servant’s uniform for the latest fashion. They would become the Prince and Princess of the Kingdom of Ice, and because Douglas’s desires have always lain elsewhere in the natural world, among virgin forests and pastoral fields, atop gilded mountains and undulating dunes, Hollis would, upon the reigning king’s demise, inherit the throne.
Nora pounds a fist against the window seat, and the torn envelope jumps on the cushion. “Damn them,” she cries. “Damn him, damn you. Damn you all.”
I understand in this moment why, since the news, I have been in the grips of a mood I once regarded as an anathema to myself, one which typified my husband’s character only, never mine. Cold. Rigid. Driven. Self- consumed. This is who I am now. I regard Nora as if from a great distance. “Go about your work,” I say. “If you want to keep your place in this house.” The only grief I can bear is my own. I will feed on it, as the spider now feeds on the fly.
Nora runs from the room, slamming the door so hard that a photograph of my children encased behind glass falls from the wall and shatters against the polished wood floor. There were stone floors throughout much of my childhood home in Martinique, which was also made of stone— indestructible in the face of hurricanes and cool against bare feet. It was called the Great House, but it was nowhere as grand as the estate in which I lived in Marblehead, or where I live now. In Martinique, slaves lived in dirt-floor huts; I suppose this is true in the Southern states as well. But my brother has written to say that one by one, he is freeing the people who have worked our plantation. A radical man, my brother. When I leave behind this terrible country and return to my island, perhaps I will become radical too. I will certainly be free—of everything but the loss of my sons. I will carry this loss with me, drag it across salty waters which will deepen with my tears. I will hold this loss to me and rock it to sleep in Martinique. I will nurse this loss. I will weave a web around it. I will watch it grow.
Methodical, instinctual in her drive, the spider begins to consume the fly. I can be as she is, as my husband was before the dropsy possessed him. I have become my own anathema. My intention now is to destroy what destroyed my sons. Meridian, Mississippi; the Confederacy; this war—these things are beyond my reach. But the Ice King is close at hand. The second kingdom he planned on building here, composed of this ostentatious house and the second, but by no means secondary, headquarters of Goodlove Ice, is still under construction. The plans include offices, naturally, and also guest suites, a golf course and sweeping hunting grounds, all of which he intended to utilize in the wooing of Chicago’s Big Three: Morris, Amour, and Swift. Any need for refrigeration, my husband once claimed, can be heightened by the smoke and mirrors of leather, velvet, colored glass, a day on the green, a good kill, a cooling swim, the best cigars and whiskey, marble urinals. He already proved this true in Massachusetts, where his reach extended down the eastern seaboard and into the Caribbean. Thanks to Chicago’s burgeoning railroad lines and system of rivers and canals, he intended to prove it again, once the meatpacking lords visited the rural retreat that he expected our sons to oversee. Our sons who are no more.
I’ve read the famous book, made notorious because it is advertised as “an autobiography.” Juniper gave it to me for my birthday last year, her blue eyes, just the shade of mine, shining with enthusiasm. As I unwrapped my hefty present, my daughter told me that within the pages I’d find a female character who openly expresses her desire for identity, meaning, and agency. “As you can imagine, Mama, her critics are legion. One even fretted that the most disturbing revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre.” Here Juniper shot me a wicked grin. “Oh, and there’s a secondary character, too, quite intriguing. In fact, the two of you share some things in common. No, I will not tell you who she is. No need. You will know.”
I am no Mrs. Rochester, no Bertha, as Juniper will soon see. I will not burn this house or any other down. I will not go up in flames. I, like Jane, will salvage a future.
I rise from the window seat and go to the door Nora so forcefully closed. I open it. One strand, lustrous to me but invisible to all others, still stretches to Italy. The other two, I drag behind me across the floor. I will wait by my husband’s bedside, alert as the spider, ready to pounce on my prey. I will show him the letter. I will read it aloud to him word for word. I will make him understand what his ceaseless, limitless ambition has wrought. I will be cruel as he is cruel, deliver the final blow, and fell him.
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Karen Halvorsen Schreck is the author of four novels, Broken Ground, Sing for Me, While He Was Away, and Dream Journal, and a book for children, Lucy’s Family Tree. Her short stories, interviews, and essays have appeared in various magazines and journals, including Consequence, Hypertext, The Rumpus, Belt, American Fiction, Literal Latté, and Image. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and an Illinois State Arts Council Grant, Karen received her doctorate in English and Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her website is Karenschreck.com.