“Then I’ll take those five minutes.”
The older woman did not seem happy, but she left. Noemí approached her cousin. The younger woman had not glanced at her; she was oddly still.
“Catalina? It’s me, Noemí.”
She placed a hand gently on her cousin’s shoulder, and only then did Catalina look at Noemí. She smiled slowly.
“Noemí, you’ve come.”
She stood in front of Catalina nodding. “Yes. Father has sent me to check up on you. How are you feeling? What’s wrong?”
“I feel awful. I had a fever, Noemí. I’m sick with tuberculosis, but I’m feeling better.”
“You wrote a letter to us, do you remember? You said odd things in it.”
“I don’t quite remember everything I wrote,” Catalina said. “I had such a high temperature.”
Catalina was five years older than Noemí. Not a great age gap, but enough that when they were children, Catalina had taken on a motherly role. Noemí remembered many an afternoon spent with Catalina making crafts, cutting dresses for paper dolls, going to the movies, listening to her spin fairy tales. It felt strange to see her like this, listless, dependent on others when they had all once depended on her. She did not like it at all.
“It made my father awfully nervous,” Noemí said.
“I’m so sorry, darling. I shouldn’t have written. You probably had many things to do in the city. Your friends, your classes, and now you are here because I scribbled nonsense on a piece of paper.”
“Don’t worry about it. I wanted to come and see you. We haven’t seen each other in ages. I had thought you would have come visit us by now, to be frank.”
“Yes,” Catalina said. “Yes, I thought so too. But it’s impossible to get out of this house.”
Catalina was pensive. Her eyes, hazel pools of stagnant water, grew duller, and her mouth opened, as if she were getting ready to speak, except she did not. She drew her breath in instead, held it there, then turned her head and coughed.
“Catalina?”
“Time for your medicine,” Florence said, marching into the room, a glass bottle and a spoon in hand. “Come now.”
Catalina obediently had a spoon of the medication, then Florence helped her into bed, pulling the covers up to her chin.
“Let’s go,” Florence said. “She needs her rest. You can talk tomorrow.”
Catalina nodded. Florence walked Noemí back to her room, giving her a brief sketch of the house—the kitchen was in that direction, the library in this other one—and told her they’d fetch her for dinner at seven. Noemí unpacked, placed her clothes in the armoire, and went to the bathroom to freshen up. There was an ancient bathtub there, a bathroom cabinet, and traces of mold on the ceiling. Many tiles around the tub were cracked, but fresh towels had been set atop a three-legged stool, and the robe hanging from a hook looked clean.
She tested the light switch on the wall, but the light fixture in the bathroom did not work. In her room, Noemí could not locate a single lamp with a light bulb, though there was one electrical outlet. She supposed Florence had not been joking about relying on candles and oil lamps.
She opened her purse and riffled through it until she found her cigarettes. A tiny cup decorated with half-naked cupids on the night table served as an impromptu ashtray. After taking a couple of puffs, she wandered to the window, lest Florence complain about the stench. But the window would not budge.
She stood, looking outside at the mist.
3
Florence came back for her promptly at seven with an oil lamp in her hand to light the way. They went down the stairs to a dining room weighed down by a monstrous chandelier, much like the one in the hallway entrance, which remained unlit. There was a table big enough for a dozen people, with the appropriate tablecloth of white damask. Candelabra had been set on it. The long, white, tapered candles reminded Noemí of church.
The walls were lined with china cabinets crammed with lace, porcelain, and most of all with silver. Cups and plates bearing the proud initial of their owners—the triumphant, stylized D of the Doyles—serving trays and empty vases, which might have once gleamed under the glow of the candles and now looked tarnished and dull.
Florence pointed to a chair, and Noemí sat down. Francis was already seated across from her and Florence took her place at his side. A gray-haired maid walked in and placed bowls filled with a watery soup in front of them. Florence and Francis began to eat.
“Will no one else be joining us?” she asked.
“Your cousin is asleep. Uncle Howard and Cousin Virgil may come down, perhaps later,” Florence said.
Noemí arranged a napkin on her lap. She had soup, but only a little. She was not used to eating at this hour. Nights were no time for heavy meals; at home they had pastries and coffee with milk. She wondered how she’d fare with a different schedule. À l’anglaise, like their French teacher used to say. La panure à l’anglaise, repeat after me. Would they have four o’clock tea, or was it five o’clock?
The plates were taken away in silence, and in silence there came the main dish, chicken in an unappealing creamy white sauce with mushrooms. The wine they’d poured her was very dark and sweet. She didn’t like it.
Noemí pushed the mushrooms around her plate with her fork while trying to see what lay in the gloomy cabinets across from her.
“It’s mostly silver objects in here, isn’t it?” she said. “Did all of these come from your mine?”
Francis nodded. “Yes, back in the day.”
“Why did it close?”
“There were strikes and then—” Francis began to say, but his mother immediately raised her head and stared at Noemí.
“We do not talk during dinner.”
“Not even to say ‘pass the salt’?” Noemí asked lightly, twirling her fork.
“I can see you think yourself terribly amusing. We do not talk during dinner. That is the way it is. We appreciate the silence in this house.”
“Come, Florence, surely we can make a bit of conversation. For the sake of our guest,” said a man in a dark suit as he walked into the room, leaning on Virgil.
Old would have been an inaccurate word to describe him. He was ancient, his face gouged with wrinkles, a few sparse hairs stubbornly attached to his skull. He was very pale too, like an underground creature. A slug, perhaps. His veins contrasted with his pallor, thin, spidery lines of purple and blue.
Noemí watched him shuffle toward the head of the table and sit down. Virgil sat too, by his father’s right, his chair at such an angle that he remained half enveloped in shadows.