Specimen Days

She looked at it uncertainly, as if she could not quite discern its nature. Lucas found he couldn’t speak, not as himself or as the book. He was the bowl and his hands. He was only that.

Presently she said, “Oh, Lucas.”

Still he couldn’t speak. He was a bowl and a pair of hands offering a bowl.

“You mustn’t,” she said.

He answered, “Please.” It was what he had to say.

“How have you come by this?”

“I bought it. For you. I was paid today.”

It was not as he’d expected. He had imagined her glad and grateful.

She bent toward him. She said, “It’s sweet of you. But you must return it.”

“I can’t,” he said.

“Did you pay for it? Truly?”

She suspected he’d stolen it, then. He could think of nothing to tell her but the truth.

“I bought it from a man on Broadway,” he said. “He was selling them from a tray.” It seemed better to have bought it from a man with a tray. It seemed truth enough.

“My dear. You can’t afford this.”

He trembled, filled with rage and confusion and blind, desperate hope. Somehow he’d made himself poorer by bringing her a gift.

“Please,” he said again.

“You’re the sweetest boy in the world. You truly are. And tomorrow you must return it to the man on Broadway and get your money back.”

“I can’t,” he said.

“Would you like me to go with you?”

“What is a man anyhow? What am I? And what are you?”

“Please, Lucas. I’m touched, I truly am. But I can’t accept it.”

“The man is gone.”

“He’ll return tomorrow.”

“No. This was his last bowl. He said he was going away.”

“Oh, poor boy.”

How could he tell her, what could he say, here in the dark of the hallway (where the goat’s skull still grinned), holding out to her the only treasure he could find, a treasure she didn’t want?

He said, “The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel.”

“Hush. Hush, now. You’ll disturb the neighbors.”

He hadn’t meant to speak so loudly. He didn’t mean to speak again, more loudly still.

“The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly.”

“Stop. Please. Come inside, you mustn’t rant like this in the hallway.”

“The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck. The nine months’ gone is in the parturition chamber, her faintness and pains are advancing.”

Catherine paused. She looked at him with a new recognition.

“What did you say?”

He didn’t know. She had never before seemed to hear him when he spoke as the book.

“Lucas, please repeat what you just said.”

“I’ve forgotten.”

“You spoke of a spinning-girl. You spoke of a bride, and … a prostitute. And a woman about to give birth.”

“It was the book.”

“But why did you say it?”

“The words come through me. I never know.”

She leaned closer, gazing into his face as if words were written there, faint but discernible, difficult to read.

She said, “You really don’t know, do you? Oh, Lucas. I fear for you.”

“No. Please. You mustn’t fear for me. You must fear for yourself.”

“You have some gift,” she said softly. “You have some terrible gift, do you know that?”

He thought for a moment that she meant the bowl. It was in fact a terrible gift. It should have cost nothing, but he’d paid for it with money meant for food. And what use did Catherine have for a bowl like this? Lucas stood with his blood racketing and his hands outstretched. He was the boy who had bought the bowl, and he was the boy who had sold it. Would that boy, the other, be now returning to his own family with food? Lucas could be only this, the one who had bought it. He could only stand before Catherine with a terrible gift in his hands.

Gently (he thought he had never known such gentleness) she took the bowl from him. She held it in her own hand.

“What are we to do with you?” she said. “How will your mother and father live?”

He said, “This hour I tell you things in confidence, things I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.”

“Hush, hush.”

“The dead sing to us through machinery. They are with us still.”

“Stop. Speak as yourself.”

“Simon wants to marry you in the land of the dead. He wants you there with him.”

Sadly, she shook her head. “Listen to me,” she said. “It’s wonderful of you to want to buy me a gift like this. You are a sweet, generous boy. I’m going to keep the bowl safe tonight, and tomorrow I am going to sell it and give you the money. Please, don’t be offended.”

“You must not trust your sewing machine. You must not listen if it sings to you.”

“Shh. If we make such a racket every night, we’ll be thrown out.”

“Do you take it I would astonish? Does the daylight astonish? Or the early redstart twittering through the woods?”

“Go home now. Come to me tomorrow, after work.”

“I cannot leave you. I will not.”

She put her hand on his head. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Be careful until then.”

“It’s you who must be careful.”

She seemed not to hear or understand. With a rueful smile she opened the door and went back inside.

Lucas remained for a while before the door, like a dog waiting to be let in. Then, because he could not bear being like a dog, he went away. He passed the tiny woman, who said, “No mischief, then?” He told her there had been no mischief. But there had been mischief, hadn’t there? There was the bowl and what the bowl had cost. There were other crimes.

He made his way home, because he had money now (he had some left), and his mother and father must eat. He bought a sausage from the butcher and a potato from an old woman on the street.

The apartment was as always. His mother slept behind her door. His father sat at table, because it was time to do so. He put his lips to the machine, breathed Simon’s ghost song into his lungs.

“Hello,” Lucas said. His voice was strange in the quiet room, like a bean rattling in a jar.

“Hello,” his father said. Had his voice changed slightly, from his chest being filled with Simon? It might have. Lucas could not be sure. Was his father turning into a machine, with Simon inside him?

Lucas cooked the sausage and the potato. He gave some to his father, took some in to his mother, who slept fitfully but slept. He decided it was best not to disturb her. He left the food on the bedside table, for when she awoke and wanted it.

After his father had finished, Lucas said, “Father, it’s time for bed.”

His father nodded, breathed, nodded again. He rose. He took the machine with him.

Lucas left his father in the doorway to the bedroom. His mother murmured within. His father said, “She cannot stop dreaming.”

“She sleeps. It’s what’s best for her.”

“She doesn’t sleep. She only dreams.”

“Hush. Go to sleep now. Good night, Father.”

His father went into the dark. The machine’s little feet scraped on the floorboards after him.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,

And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

Lucas read his passage. He put out the light and went to sleep.

He dreamed he was in a room, an enormous room and clangorous. It was the works but not the works. It was full of silvery dusk like the works but empty of all save the noise, a deafening sound, not like what the machines produced, not quite that sound, though it resembled it. Lucas understood that the machines were gone but would return soon, as cattle return to a barn. He was to wait here. He was to see them home. He looked up—something told him to look up—and saw that the ceiling was covered in stars. There were the Great Horse, the Hunter, the Pleiades. He knew then that the stars were machinery, too. There was nowhere to go that was not the world, that was not the room. The stars moved mechanically, and something was descending, a dark shape from high in the night sky …

He turned and looked into a face. Its eyes were black pools. Its skin was stretched taut over its skull. It said, “My boy, my boy.”

His mother’s face was pressed to his. He was dreaming of his mother. He struggled to speak, but couldn’t speak.

The face said again, “My poor boy, what they done to ye.”

He was awake. His mother crouched beside his bed, with her face to his face. He felt her breath on his lips.

“I’m all right, Mother,” he said. “Nothing’s been done to me.”

She held the music box, cradled close. She said, “Poor child.”

“You’re dreaming,” Lucas told her.

“My poor, poor boys. One and then another and another.”

“Let me take you back to bed.”

“It’s greed that done it. Greed and weakness.”

“Come. Come back to bed.”

He rose and took her arm. She yielded, or did not resist. He led her out of the bedroom and through the parlor, where the faces watched. Her feet shuffled on the floor. He took her into the other bedroom. His father wheezed and gagged in his sleep.

Lucas helped his mother into bed, pulled the blanket up. Her hair was spread over the pillow. In the fan of dark hair her face was impossibly small, no bigger than his fist.

She said, “I should be dead with him.”

Lucas thought—he could not help thinking—of the bowl he’d bought. There were nineteen cents now, to keep them until Friday next. There wouldn’t be food for the week.

He said, “You’re safe. I’m here.”

“Oh, safe. If anyone were safe.”

“You must sleep now.”

“Do ye think sleeping is safe?”

“Shh. Just be quiet.”

He sat with her. He couldn’t tell if it was better to stroke her hand or refrain from stroking her hand. He rocked slightly, to calm himself. There was nothing so frightful as this. There was nothing, had been nothing, as terrible as sitting on his parents’ mattress, wondering if he should or should not touch his mother’s hand.

He knew he had to take the music box away. But what of Simon’s other point of ingress, their father’s breathing machine? Father needed the machine. Or did he?

Lucas didn’t know if the machine was crucial to his father or merely helpful. He hadn’t been told. It was possible, it was not impossible, that the breathing apparatus, which had been given as a gift, was in fact a bane. Could it be sucking his father’s life away, when it pretended to help him? Did any machine seem to want the good of its people?

Lucas stood, went as quietly as he could to his father’s side of the bed, and took up the machine. Its iron pole was cool to his touch. It was full of its song, as steady and unmistakable as the mice inside the walls. Gingerly, as he would take up a mouse by its tail, he carried the machine through the parlor and put it in the hallway. Was that far enough away? He hoped it was. In the twilight of the hall the machine was as indistinct as the goat’s skull. Its bladder, the size and shape of a turnip, was gray but subtly luminous. Its tube and mouthpiece dangled.

He would leave it there overnight. He would bring it back in the morning, when he’d seen how his father fared without.

He went into the parlor for the music box. He took it and put it in the hallway, beside his father’s machine, then returned to the parlor and locked the door. He checked to make sure it was fast.

When sleep found him again, it brought its dreams, though he recalled upon awakening only that they had involved children and a needle and a woman who stood far away, calling out across a river.

In the morning his father had not yet risen. Lucas went to his parents’ bedroom and cautiously opened the door. They were quieter than usual. His mother murmured over her dreams, but his father, who was ordinarily given to deep snorts and coughings, was silent.

He must need the machine. Lucas must hurry and bring it back.

When he went into the hallway to retrieve it, it was gone. Breathing machine and music box had vanished entirely.

He stood for a moment, confused. Had he dreamed of putting them there? He searched up and down the hall, wondering if they were only farther away. Perhaps he had gotten up during the night and moved them, somnambulistically. No. They were nowhere. He thought briefly that the mechanisms were more alive than he’d imagined, that they walked. Would they have found their way back into his parents’ bedroom? Would the music box be sitting at his mother’s side, singing a song she couldn’t bear to hear?

He summoned himself. He was agitated, but he was not insane. Someone had taken the machine and the music box, as people did. Nothing of any value could be left unattended. He had thought they’d be all right for those nocturnal hours, but someone had carried them off. Someone would be trying to sell them, as the boy had sold the china bowl.

Lucas returned to the parlor. What could he say to his father that his father would understand? He could think of nothing, and so he said nothing. He left his father and mother in their bedroom together. He hoped that when he returned from work, they might be restored to themselves.

Here it was, then: his own machine. He stood before it in the enormous room. Dan and Will and Tom were at theirs, tending them as they ever did, with the steady dispassionate attention of farmers.

Lucas whispered, “You were unworthy, you must admit it. You were untrue. I’m sorry you’re dead, but you can’t have Catherine with you. You must stop singing to Mother about your sorrows.”

The machine sang on. Its song didn’t vary. Lucas still couldn’t decipher the words, but he knew they were all about love and longing. Simon wanted more than he should rightfully have. Why would he be different dead than he was alive?

Lucas loaded a plate and fed it in. The machine took the plate as it always did. It made the impressions, four across, six down. As Lucas carried the first of the day’s plates to Dan, he wondered if his machine spoke to the others at night, when the men were gone and the machines lived here alone. He could imagine it easily enough, the machines murmuring in the darkened rooms, singing the songs of their men, praising their men, dreaming of them, singing each to the others, He is mine, he is my only love, how I long for the day when he allows me to have him completely. Lucas thought he should warn Dan, he should warn Tom and Will. But how could he tell them?

Dan was bent over his machine. He said, “Good morning, Lucas,” without looking up.

“Good morning, sir.”

Lucas lingered after he had dropped the plate in Dan’s bin. Dan was the biggest man in cutting and stamping. He was massive and stooped. He carried his immense round shoulders like burdens; upon his shoulders, partly buried in them, his head looked out with drowned blue eyes. Lucas knew nothing of his life but could imagine it. He would have a wife and children. He would have a parlor with a bedroom on one side and a bedroom on the other.

Dan turned from his machine. He said, “Something wrong?”

“No, sir.”

Dan took a kerchief from his pocket, wiped the sweat from the gleaming red dome of his brow.

He was missing the first and second fingers of his right hand. Lucas hadn’t noticed it before.

Lucas said, “Please, sir. What happened to your fingers?”

Dan lowered the kerchief and looked at his hand as if he expected to see something surprising there.

“Lost ’em,” he said.

“How did you lose them?”

“Accident.”

“Was it here? At the works?”

Dan paused. He seemed to wonder whether or not to reveal a secret.

“Sawmill,” he said.

“You worked in a sawmill, before you came here?”

“That’s right.”

Dan wiped his brow again and returned to his work. Idling so, talking, wasn’t permitted. Lucas returned to his own machine and loaded another plate.

A different machine had eaten Dan’s fingers. That machine, one that split logs, contained a fragment of Dan’s ghost, though the rest of Dan lived on. Would this new machine know of that? Could it hear that other machine, singing from far away in a sawmill, happy to have had Dan’s fingers but lamenting the loss of the rest of him, wishing the new machine better luck?

Catherine must be sewing now. Lucas couldn’t think how a sewing machine might take her. It would be an arm with a needle, ratcheting. It might prick her, it could do that, but it couldn’t harm her truly.

There must be other machines at her work, though, machines that could maim. He struggled to picture it. He could imagine presses and rollers through which the garments must be passed. Did she go near those machines during her day? She might. He couldn’t know. She might be asked to take bodices and shirts to be sent through a larger apparatus. It would be big as a carriage, he thought; white, not black; it would have a mouth through which the freshly made shirts and dresses were fed, to be smoothed and folded. It would exhale torrents of steam.

Finally, the whistle blew. Lucas waited for Jack Walsh to pass and say, “All right, then.” He shut down his machine. He hurried away. He ran up Rivington, keeping to the street, dodging the carts and carriages.

A river of girls and women was already streaming out of the Mannahatta Company when he got there, and they showed no signs of having seen a calamity that day. He searched for Catherine among the crowd. He saw any number who might have been her. They were so alike, in their blue dresses. As more and more of them passed by, in twos and threes, talking low, stretching their spines and flexing their fingers, he finally made bold enough to ask one of them, and then another, if she had seen Catherine Fitzhugh. Neither of them knew who she was. There were hundreds of girls in the sewing room; Catherine would be known only to the few who worked near her. From a distance Lucas saw Emily Hoefstaedler walking among the many, plump and serene, laughing lewdly with another girl, but he didn’t speak to her. He would never speak to her about anything, certainly not about Catherine. He asked another girl and another. Several smiled and shrugged, several scowled, and one, a young dark-haired girl, said, “Won’t I do instead?” and was pulled away, laughing, by her friends.

And then he saw her. She was near the end, with an older woman who had drawn her thin gray hair severely back and walked with her neck craned forward, as if her face were more eager to go forth than her body was.

Lucas approached them. “Catherine,” he cried.

“Hello, Lucas,” she said. She looked at him with exquisite patience.

“Are you well?”

“Quite well. And you?”

How could he say what he was? He said, “Shall I pray? Shall I venerate and be ceremonious?”

“Lucas, this is my friend Kate.”

The older woman dipped her head.

“Kate, this is Lucas. He is Simon’s brother.”

Kate said, “I am sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Have you come to see me home?” Catherine asked.

“Yes. Please.” He struggled not to snatch at her hand.

“Kate, it seems I am escorted. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

The older woman dipped her head again. “Goodbye,” she said. Her face led her onward, and her body followed.

Catherine placed her hands upon her hips. “Lucas, my dear,” she said.

“You are well.”

“As you can see.”

“Will you let me walk with you?”

“I have to sell the bowl.”

“Where is it?”

“In my reticule.”

“Don’t sell the bowl. Keep it. Please.”

“Come with me, if you like.”

She walked on. He went beside her.

How could he tell her? How could he make her see?

He said, “Catherine, the machines are dangerous.”

“They can be. That’s why you must be careful.”

“Even if you are careful.”

“Well, being careful is the best we can do, isn’t it?”

“You mustn’t go to work anymore.”

“Where should I go, then, my darling?”

“You could sew at home, couldn’t you? You could take in piecework.”

“Do you know what that pays?”

He didn’t know what anything paid except his own work, and he had learned that only by being paid. He walked on beside her. They passed together through Washington Square. He didn’t come often to the square. It lay beyond the limits of his realm; it wasn’t meant for a boy like him. Washington Square, like Broadway, was part of the city within the city, cupping its green and dappled quietude, ringed by the remoter fires—a place where men and women strolled in dresses and greatcoats, where a lame beggar played on a flute; where the leaves of the trees cut shapes out of the sky and an old woman sold ices from a wooden cart; where a child waved a scarlet pennant that snapped and rippled in countertime to the flute player, who in his turn produced a little point of ginger-colored beard as answer to the pennant. Lucas tried not to be distracted by the beauty of the square. He tried to remain himself.

He asked Catherine, “Where are we going?”

“To someone I know of.”

He went with her through the square, to a shop on Eighth Street. It was a modest place, half below the street, called Gaya’s Emporium. Its window showed two hats floating on poles. One was pink satin, the other stiff black brocade. Under the hats were bracelets and earrings, arranged on a swatch of faded blue velvet, gleaming like brave little gestures of defeat.

Catherine said, “Wait here.”

“Can’t I come in with you?”

“No. It’s best if I go in alone.”

“Catherine?”

“Yes?”

“May I see the bowl again, first?”

“Of course you may.”

She opened her reticule and removed the bowl. It was bright in the evening light, almost unnaturally so. It might have been carved from pearl. Its line of strange symbols, its blue curls and circles, stood out boldly, like a language that insisted on its own cogency in a world that had lost the skill to decipher its message.

“You mustn’t sell it.” Lucas was briefly host to an urge to snatch it away from her, to hold it to his breast. It seemed for a moment that if the bowl was lost something else would be lost as well, something he and Catherine needed and would not be offered again.

She said, “Sell it is exactly what I must do. I won’t be long.”

She went inside. Lucas waited. What else could he do? He stood before the shop window, watching the hats and jewelry live their silent lives.

Presently, Catherine returned. She wearily mounted the stairs to the street. Lucas thought of his mother’s weariness. He wondered if she would improve, with the music box gone.

Catherine said, “I could get fifty cents. It’s all she would give me.”

She held out the coins to him. He wanted the money, he needed the money, but he couldn’t bring himself to take it. He stood dumb, with his hands at his sides.

Catherine said, “It can’t be what you paid for it. It’s the best I could do.”

He couldn’t move or speak.

“Don’t reproach me,” she said. “Please. Take the money.”

He stood helpless. His ears roared.

“Lucas, you begin to try my patience,” she said. “It was difficult in there. I don’t like being treated as a thief.”

So he had done that to her. He had forced her to demean herself. He imagined Gaya of the emporium. He thought she’d be skeletally thin, with skin the color of candle wax. He thought—he knew—she’d have taken the bowl and examined it greedily and disdainfully. She’d have named her price with the superior finality of those accustomed to dealing in stolen goods.

He said, “The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel.” He could not be certain how loudly he’d spoken.

Catherine faltered. She said, “You’ve never repeated yourself before.”