The Butterfly Cabinet Read Online Free Page A

her lovely Julia showed signs of developing eczema. It is not serious, but when the light catches the side of her face, little raised sores are sometimes visible just under the skin that occasionally become infected. When she came to us, I recommended American syrup of bloodroot, advised her to pull her hair forward to hide the marks, but she said a doctor friend had prescribed exposure to the sun in order to energize the skin. I commented that she had no eczema on her chest and that she ought, at least, to cover that. She gave me that peculiar look of hers, said, “Harriet, you were born a century too late,” and flounced off to walk in the garden.
    I hurt her hand once in a wardrobe door. We were children at the time, nine and five: she was standing beside me, prattling as usual, and I closed the door with her hand in it. A blue line appeared, running below the knuckle on her little finger to the edge of her hand. The finger turned white beside the pink of theothers: it looked quite dead. When I looked at her face, her mouth was open wide, soundless.
    “Ssshhh,” I said, “it will be all right. Ssshhh, Julia, do not cry.”
    Her face grew redder and redder, and still there was no sound. The silence was terrifying.
    “Ssshhh, Julia,” I said, even though she wasn’t making any noise, “I will fix it. I will make it better. I will get some water.”
    Then came the cry, one long, loud howl. Good God, one would have thought she was being mauled by wild animals.
    I was still trying to soothe her when Father came into the room, his first words “What have you done to her, Harriet?”
    “Nothing,” I said. “It was an accident. She put her hand in the door.”
    He was looking at Julia’s hand, then scrutinizing my face. “You could have taken her finger off, Harriet, do you understand? You could have really hurt her.”
    “I did not see her put her finger in. I did not know it was there.”
    He picked Julia up, carried her to the basin, called Lily to bring water. He sat on the end of my bed with her on his knee, pouring cold water on her hand, massaging color back into it, speaking softly to her, rocking her gently. I do not think either of them noticed me leave.
    I have been photographed since, my first day here. I was made to sit in front of an oval-shaped board with my name and admission date chalked upon it. Afterward, the warder commanded me to cross my hands on my breast, palms in, she said, thumbs pointing up. I looked at her blankly, momentarily unable to translate the instructions into actions. “Like a bird’s wings,” she explained, not unkindly. They were on the lookout, it seems, for any identifying marks. A square mirror hung on a chain on the wall behind me and cast my image in profile. It was an odd gesture to be asked to make, to sit, with hands butterflied, left under right. I wonder what Julia would make of that portrait.
    Julia insisted on capturing the entire household, caused havoc carting that three-legged wooden beast of a camera about from the kitchen to the stables. She was preparing to exhibit, she declared, and she wanted the pulse of an Irish house, the servants and the farm workers, all human life. There was sudden mayhem when an itinerant tailor arrived in the stable yard and all had to be dismantled and taken outdoors so he too could be captured au naturel. If she had been able to mesmerize the dogs I believe she would have photographed them as well. I saw those images later: Peig, the housekeeper, her face like a skull, looking out from the paper with her deep-set eyes, a century of misery creased on her brow; the tailor, tousle headed and wide eyed, in fear of his life but immobilized by the glass eye that held him; and Maddie. Maddie with her pale face and straight brows, a hair escaping from her cap, a shadow under her mouth. She looks morose, as ever, and severely young. She stands in her white apron and cuffs, with one hand closed over the other, and her look says that she