Defy the Dark

Tessa Gratton This Was Ophelia

In the darkness, I go mad.

It isn’t the heartrending, barefoot madness allowed to my sex, where I wander with bedraggled hair and dying flowers, wailing riddles of loss. My madness is the fierce melancholy of longing. It causes me to sigh through dinner parties and embroider hidden words onto bedclothes intended for part of my dowry. Mother offers excuses when I gaze out the window wishing to run past the horizon instead of making entertaining conversation; and when I don’t demur over tea but laugh at Colonel Chapman’s opinion, Daddy explains that my brother has always encouraged me too much.

But the sun sets. I strike a match and by candlelight don a tight suit of my brother’s. My breasts are easy to bind and I’ve little in the way of hips, as is best for the high-waisted fashions of New York. The vest cuts a lovely line under my black jacket, and pressed slacks I’ve only had to mend once fall perfectly hemmed to the shine of my borrowed shoes. I’ve stuffed them with cut-up stockings. Atop it all is a hat to hide my curls, though they’re short, anyway, to better show off choker necklaces and feathered headbands popular on women these days. And I wear gloves, of course, always gloves to disguise the delicate state of my fingers.

I sneak into Daddy’s library for a pocketful of cigars and five dollars from the hollow Book of Days. Plenty of cash for a single night’s escapades.

In the clubs nobody suspects who I am, because I’m tall enough, handsome enough, and my smoke is more expensive than theirs. I say that I’m a Polonius, let them guess I’m Lars or some visiting cousin. “Call me O,” I say.

“As in Osric?” asks a young man with a scarlet tie.

“As in Oliver?” guesses another with a swirl of his brandy.

I bare my teeth at them around my slim black cigar. Slowly, I pull it from my mouth and let smoke trickle through my teeth. “As in . . .” I lean toward them. “Ohhh . . .” I moan in a low voice.

They laugh and swoon, and from then on at Club Rose I’m called “Oh,” or “Oh, oh, oh!” or sometimes they buy me a drink and suggest other words the initial could represent.

I go once a week when I’m feeling mad, at midnight, to carouse with young gentlemen eager to ignore their home lives or futures or responsibilities, to dance with finely dressed but more common women and listen to the latest Rose. I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to arrive in a dress with my curls slicked to my cheeks and red on my lips. But one of these dandies from uptown might someday be my husband, and wouldn’t that crimp the engagement negotiations?

It’s late autumn, one in the morning. I’ve been here for nearly two hours, because it is oh-so-much easier to escape as winter approaches and the sun sets earlier, when the cold wind from Canada blows into the city, chasing upright citizens inside to fires and family. I can tuck my hat lower, wear a heavier jacket, and no one wonders why I hide my face while I wait at the cabstand two blocks from my family’s townhome.

I sit swiveling on a bar stool, my back to the liquor in order to watch Rose sing a song about steamy first kisses. A young man all in black, from his tie to his gloves, slides next to me and orders a bourbon and ice. He leans his elbows onto the bar, shoulder near mine, and opens a black-lacquered cigarette case. “Light?” he asks, and I lazily oblige without taking my eyes from Rose.

Her dress is the deep color of raw emeralds, with black fringe swaying as she twists her hips. I’m thinking how good she’d look with a tie around her neck when my neighbor asks, “What’s her name?”

I give him a poisonous glance. “Rose.”

He’s beautiful, though, and instead of curling my mouth I’m caught in a stare. All that black makes his skin glow in a ghostly fashion and his wavy hair falls over his forehead without wax to make it shine or slick back. Worst of all, I know him. Halden King, the son of our glorious mayor who died only five months ago.

“I’ve not been here this semester,” he says quietly, “and the last singer was Rose, only with darker skin and smaller tits.”

I take a drag to hide my blush. “They’re always Rose,” I say too harshly. The Roses are my favorite thing about this place, why I picked it over the myriad other downtown nightclubs. The patrons understand some kind of anonymity.

“Why?” Hal takes the tumbler that Tio—the barkeeper—offers.

“They’re here for the pleasure of money and art—names don’t matter.”

“I wish that were true.” He downs half his drink, and the ice clinks hard against the glass.

Leaning nearer to him, I say, “I’ll call you anything you want tonight.”

He studies me, eyes lingering on my mouth as I smile around my cigar. So long I feel a jerk of panic that he sees through my disguise. “Sir,” he murmurs, close enough I notice the strangely spicy smell of his dark cigarette. “You already know who I am.”

“True.” My heart pounds and I can’t decide if I want him flirting with me because he knows what I am or because he doesn’t. “I’m O.”

“Oh,” Hal King says, shaping his mouth around it. He pops his tongue so a ring of smoke escapes.

I laugh, forgetting to modulate my voice, but Hal doesn’t seem to notice how girlish it is. As Rose and the piano pick up, I stand and weave my way toward the dance floor. A girl named Patrice holds out her hand and I catch it. I spin her into the crowd and we leap into the fast fox-trot. She grins and I mirror it, teasingly keeping our hips apart.

Every time I glance toward the bar, Hal is watching me.

At song’s end, I kiss Patrice at the corner of her mouth, and Hal is there, standing beside the parquet dance floor with a tumbler in each hand. “Join me,” he says, and I do, throwing my arm around his shoulders. His free hand snakes around my waist and blood rushes my ears.

I’ve never been so lost in laughing and alcohol and hot, delicious conversation! Hal and I take over a table, and he tells me stories about his late father, about his mother and uncle who married her a mere month past the elder Mr. King’s death. Hal laments into his drink, and I moan and cry protest at the right moments, leaning in to cuss a wild streak about his obviously treacherous uncle. I whisper to him that my father’s said everyone expects Hal’s uncle to run in the next year’s election, and with Mrs. King’s support he’ll get in. Hissing, Hal slumps back into the booth. I gasp at his disheveled beauty and tell him I choose to come here because here I can be whoever I wish, not the person my parents expect.

“We can do anything here, Hal,” I say, and he immediately looks at my mouth.

“Brother,” he murmurs, “you make me believe it.”

I can’t breathe, but Tio yells out last call. Like Cinderella I leap up. “I’ve got to go!”

Hal catches my wrist. “Come back tomorrow.”

Two nights in a row is a thing I’ve never done. It’s too likely Daddy will notice I’m gone, too dangerous to think a cab driver would remember me.

But I say, “Tomorrow.”

Our second night together is more lavish and desperate than the first. Hal arranges a private booth and our own bottle of sixteen-year-old whiskey. Between her sets, Rose joins us, purring lyrics into my ear to make me blush because Hal loves it so. “It makes you seem like a sixteen-year-old virgin,” he says, caressing one long, bare finger down my jaw. “Do you even have a beard yet, O?”

I want to press my face to his and whisper my secret. “You’ve not so much beard yourself, my prince,” I say.

He barks a laugh. “King,” he corrects.

“But your father was the king, so. My prince.”

Rose interrupts, “You’re both such pups!” and she kisses us full on the mouths, one after the other.

As she kisses Hal, his knee presses into mine under the table. It thrills me into knocking my tumbler too hard against the wood as I suddenly set it down.

When Rose leaves for her next song, I slide along the round booth and say to Hal, whose eyes are bright and lips swollen, “Let’s get out of here.”

“And go where?” He shoots the last of his whiskey.

I only smile and hand him his soft black gloves.

Outside it’s filthy dark and a wet, cold wind cuts under my collar. I dash across the street, loving how easy it is to run with no skirt to fight, no delicate slippers that will ruin in rain. Hal comes after, ducking with me between an old boardinghouse and a shut-down corner pub. The damp street cobbles glint like strings of black pearls in the moonlight. There’s a slim public garden tucked on the other side of the block, which I discovered last month when I stumbled out of a cab that dropped me off in the wrong place.

I push through the creaky gate into layers of fallen leaves. A satyr fountain stands silent on the small lawn, spilling no water from its pursed mouth.

“O, this is gorgeous,” Hal says in a hushed tone. “It’s like the whole city vanished outside.”

Emboldened by the moon, the full, madness-approving moon, I grab his hand and turn him under my arm into a waltz. It’s no easy feat from my shorter stature, but he smiles and falls into the woman’s steps, hand firm on my shoulder.

We dance around the satyr, to the music of the wind and the rhythm of the blood in my ears.

“O,” he whispers as we slow.

I put my hands on his face and kiss him. At first it’s only a hard press of lips, his cold nose shocking beside mine. Then Hal grabs the lapels of my jacket. He drags me onto my toes and opens his mouth under mine.

It is more than a kiss. I spill out of myself, and the garden spins in dizzy circles. I strip my gloves off and dig my fingers into his hair. As he kisses me, I can feel the muscles of his jaw stretch and contract beneath my thumbs.

A moan grows out of my throat as he runs his mouth down my neck, and his hands sink to my hips. One finger flips aside my jacket and hooks around the belt on my hips.

I tear away.

The violent shove trips me and I land on the cold, frosty grass, panting. I’m a girl! I cover my burning mouth. One more inch and he’d know it, too. Shaking, I stare up at him. Against the moon, Hal is a dark ghost.

“O?” he whispers, crouching before me.

“Hal.” I reach out and touch his bottom lip with a bare finger. My gloves are discarded somewhere like so many dead leaves.

“You’ve never been kissed before,” he guesses, his voice low and full of something I don’t understand.

I snatch back my hand. “Was it so bad?”

But Hal smiles. “No, kitten, it made me feel like I’d never been kissed before, either.”

My fingers hover over my own mouth, and as he watches me the garden opens up. I can see the entire galaxy of stars, of lives and loves, of families and cities and graveyards, of forests and foreign mountains, the oceans and plains.

And here is Halden King in the center of it all. My center.

No one but my brother notices the shift in my daylight melancholy. Instead of merely being distracted, I’m afflicted by smiles at inappropriate moments, prone to fewer snide observations, and given to sighing happily when Daddy plays a new ragtime record after supper Sunday night. The music is so delightful, my memories of Hal so consuming, I pull Lars to his feet to dance with me. My serious brother manages to enjoy himself, afterward chasing me to my bedroom. He follows me inside and bars the door with his body.

“Phe, what has gotten into you?”

I flit about, unclipping my hair and smiling over my shoulder, wishing I could tell him. Instead I say, “Life, brother! My life is wonderful.”

He narrows his eyes, but I see the very moment he decides he’d rather have me happy even if I keep the reason for it a secret. The understanding lifts his eyebrows just a tick. My brother shakes his head, sits on my bed with his legs stretched out over the quilt, and asks me to read to him from whatever novel I’ve lately been enjoying most. It’s a love story, of course, filled with passionate declarations and racing to stop boats from leaving the docks and tragic betrayal.

Lars falls asleep against the headboard before I’m through a single chapter.

Hours later, Hal escorts me home at the end of our third night. After drinking and dancing, after secret kisses in the satyr’s garden. We avoid main thoroughfares, though at this time of morning no one’s in our way but fellows as eager for shadows as we are—or the police.

I’m sober and cold by the time we’re a block from my family’s townhome, but my insides feel clean and light while my hand is in his. I walk as if my feet lift off the ground of their own accord and catch myself smiling too widely. When I pull Hal against a building, he smiles, too. The first hint of purple in the east reflects in his eyes. “I’m going back to school tomorrow.”

In Ohio, I think. Wittenberg University, where his mother’s father endowed several scholarships for farmers’ sons as he himself had once been. “So far.”

“You must be going to university soon. Apply to Wittenberg.”

I smile bitterly. My brother goes next year, but me? “My father would never.”

Hal kisses me softly. “I’ll have to come home more often, then.”

What are you doing? I want to cry—and I don’t know if my desperate question should be addressed to him or to myself. Hal is the heir to an estate that might as well be a kingdom and that comes with responsibilities like marriage. How can he speak as though he and I have any future?

A tiny voice reminds me that he could marry me, but the thought pricks my eyes with tears. I don’t want to be his dress-wearing, child-bearing hostess-wife. I want this! Suits and dark gardens, wild kisses that I can choose, that I can initiate. This mad power.

“Don’t cry, O.” Hal brushes my eyelashes.

If only I could explain the different ways men look at me when they believe I’m one of them.

Instead I say, “I’ve never felt this way. Don’t go.” I put force into my voice. I square my shoulders. I am strong.

“God,” he breathes. “If anybody found us now, like this”—his fingers slide behind my ears—“they’d murder us.”

I kiss him, jerk him against me. Into his ear, I order him, “Write to me, Hal King. Tell me everything there is to know about the man I’m in love with.”

My head tingles with my own boldness, my sudden declaration.

“It’s been a whole life in three nights,” he says, putting his arms around me. I fold my own arms over my breasts, trapping them between us, hiding my truth.

It’s mid-November, two weeks since my Hal has been back at school, when Mrs. Shay brings the post into the sitting room at teatime. She hands Daddy several letters, Mother her Parisian fashion magazine, and Lars two letters: one with the scrawling hand of his friend Markham, and the other smaller and blue. The address reads Mr. Polonius, the Younger. With a curious frown, he doesn’t wait for the silver opener but slides his finger under the flap instead. It’s one sheet, folded in half, and from the settee beside him I can’t see enough to recognize the writing.

But Lars’s frown only becomes more pronounced, so much so that Mother asks, “Whatever is the matter, dear?”

“‘Doubt thou the stars are fire; doubt that the sun doth move; doubt truth to be a liar; but never doubt I love,’” my brother reads. “It’s a love letter.”

“Oh, God!” I snatch for it, but Lars tucks it against his chest.

“Ophelia?” Daddy stands up to tower over me.

I bite my bottom lip. “It’s for me.”

Mother sips her tea, lifting the china slowly and setting it back with just as much care. We all wait for her, though I suspect I’m the only one whose heart is melting down into her stomach. She says, “Who is it from, Lars?”

“There are only initials. H and K.”

My hand trembles as I hold it out, palm up. I’ll not beg.

“Wait.” Daddy gently touches my hair. “Darling, we want your happiness. Tell us this boy is a suitor, tell us who and perhaps we’ll let you write back.”

The fire crackles behind me, the only sound but for my dying, rushing blood.

“H and K,” Mother says. Her gaze scours me, appraising me as she would the wardrobe of her best friend and rival, Mrs. Tealy.

Lars unfolds the letter again, reads silently over it. “If he wrote it himself, he’s educated. A poet, but no poor artist. ‘Thine evermore, whilst this machine is to him, H.K.’ That machine his body?” My brother pouts his mouth as he ponders the mystery of poetry, never his forte.

“Oh, please,” I say, flapping my hand. “It’s meant for me, not all my family!”

“Why would he send it to Lars?” Daddy asks.

My voice is too shrill. “Perhaps because he thought my brother could be trusted to secretly pass love notes between us.”

Hurt jerks Lars’s brow low, but I can’t stand it any longer. “Hal King. It’s from Hal King,” I say, balling my fists into my dress. I’m done for. Doomed. I shut my eyes and wish for the full moonlight to transform my face and body, for the sun to set forever.

But silence reigns in our cozy sitting room. I peel my eyes open and look at my family: Lars is surprised but still hurt, Daddy wears a slowly dawning expression of glee, and Mother is pensive, as if she’s never seen me before.

I use their distraction to take the letter from Lars’s limp fingers and flee to my bedroom.

There’s never any doubt I’ll be given permission to write back. He’s too rich to ignore. My only requirement to my parents is that the letters be private. Anything they might’ve felt about propriety was ditched in favor of dreaming that their daughter might marry into the powerful King family. It isn’t that we aren’t well-off enough, for Daddy’s father and grandfather both garnered huge wealth shipping along the first railroad out West, and our name has been a part of New York’s rosters for nearly two hundred years. But even at that, Poloniuses are always second-in-command. A mayor’s right hand or the clerk to the state’s governor. Kings don’t marry subordinates no matter how rich or well bred.

Until now, is the promise whispering in my parents’ dreams.

I write to Hal. Oh, do I write to him. I tell him everything there is to know about me, only edited to keep out details such as that the specific moment I realized I preferred Tennyson and the sharp wit of Mark Twain came when I happened to be embroidering. I write about my own dreams: traveling and studying, dancing in Paris and climbing the Pyramids in Egypt, that I’d even like to learn to read the ancient pictographs. Wouldn’t it be lovely, H, to write these letters in complicated hieroglyphics? Perhaps we will make our own language, my prince.

He writes back with poetry: long, complicated poems about the nature of life and what comes after death, on mankind and fear and what makes us into cowards or brave men. I repeat them to myself over and again, until I can recite them from memory. I write, What will we do, my prince? How will we live and love? And Hal King replies, We love beyond all things, beyond material considerations.

Beyond our bodies and our sex? I ask.

I love you for your poetry, and for your mouth and your eyes. All these human bodies come with mouths and eyes. But few men I have known, no, nor women, neither, have had in them such poetry as you.

For my mouth and eyes, for my poetry.

And as weeks pass, I slowly begin to share some lines of our poetry with Lars, for he delights in puzzles and rambling philosophy. He knows I forgive him, though I can’t quite say it in case he decides to pay too much attention to me when the sun sets.

For yes, I still go out. I put on my suit and shiny shoes, button up that tight vest, and knot the slim blue tie at my throat. I walk alone through the streets with a cigar, stopping sometimes at a club, but mostly roaming the darkness, my coat pulled to my chin, hat low. Ice and snow make barricades, but they are no more fierce than the barricades tightening around me as every night passes. As it grows nearer to Christmas, when I know Hal will come home, and what will happen when I see him again?

On December 13th, Daddy comes in to dinner with a letter in hand. The green wax seal is broken, and he waves it triumphantly. “I have heard from Charles King. He and his wife, Gertrude, will be joining us for the solstice night dinner to discuss the possible engagement between our daughter and their son.”

My skin bursts into a rage of tingling, and my hands are frozen in my lap. I blink quickly, as if to make up for being unable to move the rest of my body, as Mother exclaims, “Wondrous!” in a rare show of enthusiasm.

Lars leans over to me, touching my elbow. “Phe? Aren’t you happy?”

“Oh, yes,” I whisper. In my evening dress I am soft and drooping, unable to stop the inevitable.

The night of my downfall, I take care as I put on the gown Mother commissioned in a whirlwind of fittings. The low ribbon waist suits my hipless body, and the overdress is beaded in a white-on-white floral pattern. White makes my skin shine and my dark eyes bright. I mold every curl precisely and put dark pink paint on my lips. In my mirror, I am unusually beautiful, but sad. Through my eastern-facing window, I see the half-moon rise behind the city, though the sun hasn’t yet set.

Lars arrives to escort me into the formal dining room, tall and straight in a suit like I should be wearing. “Ophelia,” he says, pausing just before we enter. He smiles his vague but reassuring smile. “Halden is come with his parents.”

Horror makes my skin feel as though it’s peeling away. I try to put my hands on my face, as if I could hide the femininity with only my fingers. But Lars catches my wrists gently, folding them together. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m not—not prepared to see him! Why didn’t I know?”

“Mother said he even surprised his parents by racing home early.”

“God help me.”

He frowns. “Don’t do anything you don’t wish to do. Only be true to yourself.”

“Oh, Lars,” I say, overwhelmed by the injustice in his words. There is no choice now.

Together we go in, and there he is. Hal King in a suit blacker than night, but a moon-silver tie hangs from his neck, tacked down with a pink-ruby pin. His mouth betrays his discomfort, and I can only imagine how strange it is for him—to have written to a son but be suddenly thrust upon a daughter. His chin lifts as we enter, as all the men stand from the table for me.

Mrs. King swirls around the table to catch my hands in hers, which are covered by long, silky white gloves up past her elbows. “My dear, we are so thrilled to have found such a beautiful cure to our son’s melancholy.”

I force a smile, but I see behind her that Hal glances back and forth between Lars and me, and his face falls by increments into a glower.

His uncle Charles is wide, with a sash of scarlet striping him from shoulder to hip. He says to Daddy, “Yes, yes, what an occasion!”

Hal bows coldly over one of my hands when his mother offers it. I refrain from speaking, hoping my horror will be taken for propriety, for shyness.

We sit, all seven of us, and it is easy to remain silent as the men, but for Hal, converse on the state of the city, and Mrs. King and Mother trade hair care secrets. Lars attempts to engage Hal twice, but my prince puts him off with quiet, convoluted answers that border on rudeness. I catch him watching me, but when I lift my chin he shakes his head, refusing to truly see.

And how can I blame him?

He came here expecting the agony of flirting with me, while longing for my brother. Instead, his is the agony of confusion, of not belonging. I recognize the madness hiding in his eyes, for it is a disease I know intimately.

Once near the end of the meal I say to him, “My father has excellent cigars, and I know you enjoy such things.” As if I want to hint at our secret, as if I want him to understand.

He stares at me and sips his wine—his only glass, which he has nursed the last hour.

Daddy, who has somehow moved his chair nearer to Charles King’s, says, “We’ll retire to the study to taste them, straight from my cousin’s in South Carolina. And I’ve some lovely brandy to match.”

Hal’s eyes are on Lars as my brother folds his napkin to stand. Lars dislikes smoking, but he puts his long hand onto Hal’s shoulder with a polite smile, leading my prince out. Hal’s face is tight, and I can guess he’s panicking.

I am, too. I didn’t mean to suggest they leave us.

Mother and Mrs. King lean back in their seats, glad to have the men gone, and I slouch, wanting to put my head on the table, to sigh out all my sorrow. “May I go outside, Mother?” I ask, interrupting her as she begins to discuss her longing for the springtime with its allowance for outrageous hats.

She waves her hand, and Mrs. King smiles with sympathy. “Poor dear, you must be overwhelmed. I know how strange my Hal can be, but he never lies, not with his poetry. He loves you.”

I nearly choke on my thanks.

Our garden is small and trapped between high stone walls. The hedges are trimmed and evergreen yew, with two iron benches facing each other across a centerpiece of brown rosebushes. There is a birdbath carved of marble, and the water is frozen at the edges. I come out here every morning to break the ice until it’s too thick, so the cardinals can drink.

I arrive, and Hal is already there. His hands grip the birdbath and he hunches over it. I think, We both fled to the garden. To the nighttime. Looking up, I spot the half-moon between the roof of our house and the neighbors’. Its light shines purely in a cloudless sky.

Taking a long breath, I cross the frosted, dead grass in my thin slippers. They soak through, and I shiver from the freezing wind on my ankles. I’ve come out in a wool wrap, but this dress—this dress!

“Hal,” I say in my low voice, and he spins around.

“O.”

He peers through the darkness, but I know the moon is on my face. The face he knows, but painted like a woman’s. My lips must be as dark as cherries. “What is going on?” he hisses.

Ignoring my cold toes and the layers of skirt around my calves, I stride forward. I grab his lapels in my fists and I drag myself up to kiss him before he can protest.

I open my mouth, I invite him in, and for one brief eternity Hal kisses me back. He tastes me, and I moan into him, I pull at him. His hands find my waist, silk against my ribs, the soft shape of me under that gown, and I am free. I’m kissing him hard, because I choose to, like a man, but his hands are on my own body, pressing into my hips, without thick layers binding me into a false shape, without a boundary between us, hiding me, disguising what I am.

I don’t need my suit to be O, not when I’m kissing him.

The moment I realize it, Hal King tears away.

“Ophelia.” My name is like a curse when he says it.

“Hal. Oh, God, Hal.” I flicker my fingers in the cold air, wanting to bury them again in his jacket, in his hair. To touch him.

Laughing once, and then again, he covers his face. “You’re a girl.”

“A girl with a mouth, with eyes and—and poetry, Hal.”

He spins away in an antic dance. “You’ll throw my words back at me.”

“All men and women have those things, you said. What you love transcends sex.”

“God! I don’t want—I’m not—” Hal shakes his head.

I go to him, to prove what I’m saying. To show him I’m O. He loves me.

The wool wrap is heavy on my shoulders, and I imagine it a coat, I take shallow breaths as though my chest were bound. Grabbing his head in both hands, I say as fiercely as I can, “Everything I was those nights, I can be again. I am. The moon is up and all I need is my jacket and hat, Hal.”

He circles my wrists and pulls my hands away. For he is all man and stronger than me. “What of when the moon is down then? You’re my wife?”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to love you only at night.”

The words slap across my face. I am harsh in return. “It would be better if I were a boy and you couldn’t love me at all? Except in dark alleys and illegal dance clubs? This is best.” Now that we’re here, together, all my doubts and uncertainties and fears are gone—I know what I want.

Hal pulls at his unwaxed hair. “I can’t change my desires, or I’d have stopped kissing boys a long time ago, Ophelia.”

“But you did! You kissed me and you loved it.”

“Don’t fool yourself. You’re no girl. I don’t know what you are. Girls don’t do what you did. You’re neither.”

I want to be both, I think, but I can’t say that. Hal abruptly releases my wrists and storms past me into the house, taking my heart with him.

Empty and numb, I sink to the spiky, frozen grass and lie back, staring up at the moon. At the spotlight of my madness.

And I remember how, just this evening as the sun still burned in the sky and I painted this color onto my lips, the moon was up, too, and visible. It rose before sunset, paler and blending gently into the darkening blue, but still there. Still the moon.

In darkness and light, in the shadows between, I go mad.

I know who I want, but I also know who I am. I remember when Hal said to me if we were caught, we’d be murdered, and he didn’t care when I kissed him. If he meant it, if it was true, he would love me still, in any clothes, in any body. Because my mouth and eyes and soul are the same.

But we need time. I can’t go begging to him, for he broke off marriage talks. I can’t play the girl only and win him that way, but neither can I arrive at Club Rose, hoping to see him, in my brother’s suit.

All I can do is figure out how to live with this madness.

I never intended for anyone to think I died. Yet I stand, on an afternoon so gray with heavy clouds it’s neither day nor night, in front of my family’s town house where the memorial service for Miss Ophelia Polonius is beginning.

Ice slicks the pavement and I shiver into the long, fur-lined overcoat that I stole from Father’s closet three days ago before disappearing near the train station. It slipped my mind that the river rushes on the other side of the meadow, and that when I was a little girl our nanny took both Lars and me there one day. I spent that afternoon telling my brother stories about mermaids who leave their undersea homes to get feet and walk on their own, and then I begged for weeks to go back. Mother forbade it because of the homeless wanderers to be found near the trains.

It’s no wonder Lars thought of the river before the trains. And I did leave my favorite silk scarf in the meadow for them to find.

I was only running away from Ophelia, but my family believes I killed myself out of distress at my ruined engagement. Over a broken heart. I shouldn’t have come back here, should have lost myself in the streets and clubs as I’d intended, or used Daddy’s money for a ticket to California. Yet here I am, clutching my coat, hat low, eyes down as everyone my family has ever known walks slowly up the worn marble steps.

Seeing them grieve will undo me. I’ll never be able to watch Lars stand stiff and pale, surrounded by flowers. They aren’t at church because of my suicide. Ophelia has been rendered unholy.

The thought does make me smile, but only a little bit.

Just before I turn away, promising myself that I’ll write to Lars as soon as I’m settled someplace, I see Hal.

The top hat suits him not at all, but the long coat swings around his ankles like a cape. All that black is muted and severe in the gray light, and his lips are pressed into a line. He sweeps through the crowd and inside, and I go after.

Everyone parts for him, and my prince’s path is unobstructed until he reaches the sitting room. It is draped in the darkest violet and black cloths, the windows shut and lit by candles. A portrait of me as a fifteen-year-old girl rests on an easel beside a spray of hothouse lilies.

It’s Lars who blocks his way.

“Devil take your soul,” my brother cries. My stolid brother—cheeks flushed and fists clenched. “You cannot be here, Halden King.”

“What is this?” Hal grasps Lars’s shoulder, to push him back.

“It’s for you that she’s here—or rather that she isn’t here, you animal.”

Mother calls from the back of the room, “Part them!”

My hands are on my face, and I hit the door frame for backing away so fast.

Hal releases Lars, palms up, “You can’t keep me from this.”

“You denied her in life, so how could you have her in death?”

Oh, my brother. Tears blur the scene and I am awhirl with sorrow. I should reveal myself here, now, and they will all be well.

But I would be trapped again, stripped and put back in my dress and feathers, caged and prettied up for the feast. I dig my fingers into my mouth to keep myself from speaking.

My whole family stands as a wall against Hal, and all the crowd of mourners pushes nearer to hear. Hal touches Lars’s face, and my brother flinches away. But Hal says, his voice raw and ugly, “I loved Ophelia.”

I don’t know if it’s because I’m weak or because I’m strong, but I push forward through the crowd. “Stop!” I say, throwing off my hat and stripping the heavy coat from my shoulders. Beneath it is my suit, my tight vest and pressed pants, my jacket and tie. I am a slim young gentleman with the face of a dead girl.

“O.” Hal rushes at me faster than Lars or Daddy or Mother, none of whom know me thus.

Whispers break out, and at least one feminine shriek, as Hal throws his arms around me and kisses me in front of them all.

We are the most incredible scandal to ever blaze through the city, they say.

I won’t marry him, though I love him. So Hal takes me away to Paris with his inheritance and we rent a flat, the two of us friends from school we say, in the City of Light to experience the best life has to offer.

My family never contacts me until Lars shows up in the summer, hat in hand on the steps of our building. When I greet him in my favorite new suit, which is pin-striped and the vest curves against me smoothly without my bindings, Lars squares his jaw and says, “What should I call you?”

“I’ll always be your sister,” I say, grasping his hand and dragging him inside to supper with us. He’s uncomfortable, but trying, hunting desperately for a way to understand this puzzle. That night, Hal goes out to the theater, where a friend of ours is singing, and Lars and I sit sipping brandy on the iron balcony. From there we can see the top lights of the Eiffel Tower, and all the hazy stars behind.

“This is dangerous, Phe,” he says, quite drunk so that his cheeks are blotchy.

I’ve loosened my tie and slouch with my head against the low back of the chair. “Lars, anything else would be wrong.”

“If you would marry him, you could come home.”

I purse my lips.

“Halden told me he asks you every day.”

“To be a wife would lock me into one thing, and I don’t know what I am, yet.”

Lars reaches across the little space between us and takes my hand. He flicks a finger over the topaz cuff link Hal gave me for my birthday last month. “You’re mad, is what you are,” he whispers.

I open my mouth and laugh at the sky.