Galore - Michael Crummey [139]
Abel Devine was having difficulty thinking of the creature on the stage as his blood, though he’d been told as much. She was wearing tight strings of pearls at her neck and wrists, the delicate line of the collarbone bare below the clasp. Applause drowned out the first lines of the song completely and when the noise finally settled the hair rose on the back of Abel’s neck. The voice seemed too extravagant to come from the figure on stage and he looked behind periodically, thinking it was some sort of elaborate ventriloquism. The audience roared whenever Esther drifted into those impossible ranges and no one heard her falter the first time, though Abel saw her flinch as if she’d been stung under the bell of her skirt. Something in her face turned inward before the smile reasserted itself. Adelina Sellers glanced up at the stage and Esther waved her on impatiently. A hush fell in the hall as the Nightingale’s voice rose and broke like glass. The flesh of Esther’s neck flushed red and she asked for water and carried on a little while before she collapsed on the stage.
It was all anyone spoke of for days afterwards, the shock of Esther’s otherworldly voice failing her and the indecent outfit she wore before the entire community and the secrecy that surrounded her arrival. She’d been locked in a room at the new hospital before the performance to keep her away from liquor, people said, she’d fallen down drunk on the stage. The union had paid for her travel from Europe and she’d been booked to perform in half a dozen other F.P.U. districts, but Coaker canceled the tour after her collapse. Everyone expected she would sneak off the shore the way she’d arrived. But two weeks later Esther Newman took up residence in the shambles of Selina’s House.
The old hospital had the feel of a place evacuated during an emergency. The air smelled of formaldehyde and disinfectant and chloroform and rot. The margins of each room cluttered with the detritus of thirty years of frontier medicine, outdated equipment, empty glass bottles and stacks of paper, the shards of ten thousand teeth trapped along the baseboards. Esther made a bed for herself in the main room upstairs where an insistent leak had stained a medieval map on the ceiling, the misshapen outline of the continents drawn where Mr. Gallery had once come through the plaster in his ghostly boots.
She never appeared outside the house but she was drunk, the black extravagance of her hair in fits, her childlike face puffy and discolored. She was supplied her liquor by Des Toucher or someone of the like and no one doubted how she paid for it. When she went out she wore as much of her wardrobe as she could layer, one outfit on top of another, ball gowns and skirts and blouses and sweaters and elegant robes, a tangle of jewelry about her neck. She bought a goat from Val Woundy and kept it in the parlor, taking it for walks on a leash or harnessing it to a wooden truckley and riding through the streets. Bride once or twice contrived to bring her granddaughter to church on Sunday mornings and they walked arm in arm to their pew, the younger woman unsteady on her feet, her eyes licked out and her head chiming like a steeple bell.
Hardly a soul darkened her door through the winter though her antics occupied everyone’s idle time. They felt their good will had been abused and a merciless accounting was underway. There was talk that her storied career in Europe was a sham, that she performed