Lisa Mannetti ~Excerpt from novella, DEATHWATCH

--Last night I heard the deathwatch

ticking in the wall--

Oliver Goldsmith

Deathwatch

I was 20 when I first came to Hyde Park, New York and fell in love with the child who was both woman and ghost. And God help me, it was my infatuation--or obsession--if your prefer, that spawned both her strange shadow life as my bride and--later, much later--her death.

It was December and the Hudson River was frozen. I hailed from the Carolinas, and after a bleak train ride north, my first, my strongest memory of the region was that solid white mass like a road, of wind blowing and the sight of tight-lipped red faced men hauling blocks of ice on sledges, the horses straining for purchase on the slippery surface.

Their shouts were muffled by the heavy quietfall of snow, even the sound of the train whistling as it left the depot was deadened, and standing on the wooden platform, the chill of the boards penetrating my thin-soled shoes, I thought, I have come to a lonely place. White and cold and deathly still.

Andrew Saunders sent his hired man to meet me. He spotted me right off: I was the only fool not swathed to the eyebrows in heavy wool.

"Mr. Granville," he raised an eyebrow, but there was no question in his tone of voice. He put out a thick gloved hand. "Gabriel Wickstrom," he said, "the doctor asked me to fetch you."

"I suppose you are an angel--rescuing me in this bitter cold."

He grunted. "You'll get used to it. Carriage is this way." He'd taken the smaller of my two bags, and I followed him down a rickety flight of stairs; his shoulders were covered with a small drift of wet melting snow, and I wondered if he'd waited a long time for me, if perhaps the cold made him so businesslike and terse.

He heaved the bag into the floorspace of a winter-converted two wheel buggy. "There's a footwarmer--if the coals haven't gone out," he advised when I climbed in. He handed me a furry lap robe and I snuggled under it. Gabriel plied the whip lightly, and the horse picked up its pace jogging through the snowy streets.

"Heard the doc got you cheap, because you were sent down, is that so?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, vaguely aware there was a something like a glint of humor in his eye. My parents had sent me to the University of Virginia, but I'd been expelled for drinking. "Yes, they gave me the boot, all right. There's a chance they may re-admit me next fall."

"You'll stay sober enough, likely. The doctor had my Missus--Ruth she's called--clear out every drop in the house. Or as good as. The stuff's locked up tighter than a virgin's cooze in a great big cabinet down cellar. She has the keys."

I nodded.

"A man needs a drink now and then," he said, his dark eyes staring ahead through the swirling snow. "You see me if you get to feeling that way."

"I suppose the doctor will be asked to give an account of me at year's end before the university will take me back." I held my hands up. "I'm good at what I do, you know.

I like surgery. Even if I'm only the children's tutor, it was luck that found me this place. At least I'll be around a doctor, I can read his textbooks, keep up with things--"

"Tutor?"

"Yes, for the girls, Abby and Eleanor."

"I think he has more in mind than that--"

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing. Except he only wrote to medical colleges...." Gabriel tucked his chin deep inside his collar. "You know they're twins?"

"Yes. And according to what Dr. Saunders said, they've fallen behind in their studies, other girls going on twelve speak French and have at least a smattering of Latin—”

He made a sound like a snort.

"What's so funny?"

"Fallen behind. That sounds like they've had any education at all--but he never could keep a teacher more than a month or two at most."

I looked around thinking the place was isolated, but there were good-sized towns. Poughkeepsie was actually a small city, there would be several schools to choose from.

He seemed to read my thoughts. "Never been to school, none hereabouts would have em."

"What! Why not? Two girls couldn't possibly get up to that much mischief."

"Give the other kids the willies--the teachers too. Then the boys and girls go to making fun, and Abby and Eleanor cry--well you can't blame em for that." He turned to me, and it was just that moment that the gaslights were going on here and there--like yellow beacons with haloes in the snow. "You don't know, do you?"

I shook my head.

"Abby and Ellie, they was born stuck together. Siamese Twins, the doctor calls em. Like those oriental freaks they sport in a circus."

"Are they...." the question died on my lips, because I had a hundred questions. Where was the jointure? Were they expected to live? Could they walk?

"There ma's dead," he said abruptly. "Dr. Saunders, maybe he went a little crazy. Grief does strange things to a man. I know. Mrs. Ruth and me, the way we see it, his idea-- it's like Solomon's notion, taking a child and splitting it in two--"

"He means to separate them?"

"He hired you. A surgeon, like you said," he leaned out. "Good with your hands," he finished, then spit over the side. "Ho, Bessie," he soothed, reining the horse. "No more palaver now, we're here."

The house, a large rambling mass as tall and white as an iceberg, loomed out at me across a long spread of snow covered lawn, and I felt my stomach clench. My hands, under the warm blanket, twitched, and I was suddenly cold.

"Fly Abby, let's fly!"

Gabriel Wickstrom and I had entered a dimly lit large slate-floored hallway, stamping our feet free of snow; above our heads in what I guessed was the twin of the space we were standing in, I head the clattering sound of metal wheels rolling on wooden planks, the high pitched squeal of giggling glee.

"Fly, Fly!"

"It's the girls," Gabriel said, his eyes flicking up toward the white plastered ceiling. There was a soft bumping noise; the hollow echoing ratchet of the wheels turning round and round like a cheap carnival ride. "A kind of jerry rigged contraption," he said. "A toy sheep. I made it myself--children got to run, best they can--"

The sound of two doors opening cut him off. From the upper one, came a woman's sharp voice, telling the girls to leave off their play and go down to meet their new teacher. From the lower one--a large paneled mahogany slab that led to what looked like the library--a tall stiff man in a black cutaway coat emerged, clearing his throat. Dr. Saunders had a pair of gray eyes he kept averted from mine. When he shook my hand and introduced himself, I caught the sharp musk of sherry on his breath.

"Ah, my daughters." He turned abruptly.

At the far end of the dreary entryway, I saw a small gated niche I'd overlooked. From its rising throat I heard the scree of hemp ropes, the drop-and-settle-drop-and-settle of a wooden platform moving through metal channels.

"Elevator," Gabriel hissed, scuttling quickly to throw back the gate and seize a pair of ropes. "Harder to manage from above with the weight," he said, peering up inside the darkened recess. "Got, em Ruth," he called. Whatever she said was lost in the thump-slide of the cage moving down the shaft.

The platform bumped to floor level. Gabriel wound, then knotted the ropes around a heavy cleat set into the wall. He opened the metal door of the cage.

And I had my first glimpse of the twins.

They stood, smiling, their arms locked around each other's waists. They looked for all the world like any two young girls sharing a moment of sweet embrace. Except, my eyes had grown used to the dim gas light, and now I picked out the startling details: the single-bodiced frock with its lumps and swatches of fabric that could not be sewn smooth, the drift of green velvet skirt below as wide as the cloth for a pasha's table.

Slowly, they began limp-walking toward me like children hobbling in a three-legged race at a summer picnic. But there was no giggling at the awkwardness, no shrieks of laughter. They moved slowly, somberly, and I understood at once--the old pictures from my medical texts flashing up at me--the jointure was at the hip.

Dinner was a nightmare. Andrew Saunders got drunk; I was not even offered a sip. In between courses in the drafty dining room the girls stared at me--harder, I'm sure, than any one might ever have had nerve enough to stare at them. Ruth and Gabriel served--they were obviously unused to company; they twittered and fussed, never doing anything that was to the doctor's satisfaction.

"The roast's cold. Where's the souffle I ordered."

Ruth, a tall woman, stood by the side board, wringing a pair of outsized hands, her eyes nervously darting over the room.

"Sorry, Doctor. You were so long with the first course, I wasn't sure of the timing. It's the wind tonight, blowing right through the windows of the pantry--"

He grunted, standing over the beef, the carving knife and fork trembling in his hands. He had just used his fingers to tweeze a large slab of meat onto the serving platter. No one commented. I looked away.

She went on. "I kept it covered with the silver dome, the wind has a way of going right through these old walls on a winter night." She began to go around the table with a bowl of new potatoes, holding the china at the shoulder level for each of us in turn.

I watched Abby and Ellie. They were seated on a raised bench like a piano stool. Ellie forked potatoes efficiently onto her plate; Abby was forced to used her left hand and she was not so dexterous. A buttered round skidded onto the polished surface.

Ruth retrieved it quickly, wiped the table with her apron hem, and covered the girl's embarrassment: "The souffle is still in the oven, Sir."

"Well see that it's served hot. What are you two staring at?" He flung his napkin down.

"Nothing," Ellie said.

Abby flicked her gaze toward her father. He was pre-occupied, pouring what must have been his sixth or seventh glass of wine. He drained it, poured another; then he lowered his grizzled head like some blind old ox foraging in its manger and began to eat.

"We don't see many people," Abby said quietly, looking into my eyes. Her hair--like her sister's--was sheened red and glossy in the lamplight. It was done in a puff of ringlets, and I spotted more of Ruth's handiwork.

"Some from the nursery window," Ellie added. "The butcher's boy. Abby has a crush on him," she giggled.

"Quiet. Mr. Granville doesn't want to hear your truck and nonsense," Abby said. "We heard you're a doctor, we're most anxious to have our surgery done," she said.

That remark, spoken in a very low voice, roused the doctor.

"Get out, get out the pair of you! Sneaking spies, always lurking about, listening, watching. I said out! Get out this minute."

Ellie turned white, but Abby whispered at me. "Excuse us. It's the drink you know. Ever since mother--"

"Ruth," he yelled, "get these vixens out of the dining room--"

She hurried in, helping them off the bench, lending her arm for support, then steering them toward the door. I heard it shut abruptly, and then through the adjoining wall, the rattle of the metal cage, the squeak-rub of the ropes being hoisted, the platform groaning its way toward the second floor.

"Poor things," I said.

"Yes. We're all of us poor things in this house. They say that God helps those who help themselves. But I've been crushed by my own life. First them, the damnable freak birth, the years of watching them grow twisted and maimed while idiots' children run like jackrabbits. And then my wife, the only human being I ever loved. She killed herself, you know."

In the silence that followed, the doctor fixed his gray eyes on me, and I saw they'd gone silver cloudy--not just with drink, but from bone-deep cynicism. The man was in pain. Half-startled, I pushed away from the table, Abby's words ringing in my mind: It's the drink. Ever since mother died, he drinks to shut us out, to shut himself down.

She was a month shy of twelve years old, and she had just taught me my first lesson.

"It's snowing," Abby's voice held a note that was one of joyous expectation. She clapped her hands. "It's the perfect gift!"

It was just past dawn on the morning of February 12. The girls stood, their backs to me, peering out the high, wide mullioned window of the nursery.

"Aren't you scared, Abby?" Ellie squeezed her sister's hand.

"No, and no! It's freedom, Ellie!" She started the first steps of a pirouette, pulling her sister with her. Her white nightdress fanned and rose in a circle.

I had risen early--with just as much anticipation--and now I rapped my knuckles against the wooden jamb of the open nursery door. They turned toward me, I saw the color rising in their young faces, and something turned inside me.

Abby's dark blue eyes were shining.

"It's the best gift, the best birthday present in the world," she said softly. "After the surgery, we'll be like other girls. We can dream their dreams, we'll be free to dream. We never could do that before, Mr. Granville."

From below, I caught the sharp scent of carbolic acid, the pungency of alcohol and ether. There was a faint clink of steel instruments being laid out in the office the doctor kept here at home, and I willed myself not to look at my hands.

"I'm scared, Abby," Ellie whispered, and I saw the muscles of her jaw tense. "What if we die?"

Abby shook her head, took her twin's right hand between both of hers. "Don't be." Her hands found their way to her sister's forehead, and she smoothed her hair and temples, looking for all the world like a mother comforting a child with the reassurance love brings. "Ellie, when we go down stairs, it's the last time we go as freaks--"

"You're not a freak, Abby. I love you."

It was very true, I felt the same myself. I felt all three of us were sleepwalking over a cliff in some strange dream. All the same, I helped them onto the elevator, lowering the platform, steadying the ropes until Gabriel took over from below. Then I walked slowly down the wide stairway, and met the doctor in his office.

He'd wheeled the dining room table in to accommodate their bulk; but two separate iron beds lay pushed against the far wall of the room. It took the three of us--Gabriel, the doctor and myself--to lift the girls onto the sheet-covered makeshift operating table. Overhead, a bright lamp threw its harsh glare on the girls’ pale, upturned faces. Abby put her hand out, and I took it, clumsily patting her shoulder at the same time. Dr. Saunders frowned at me.

"Pull yourself together, Granville. They're my children, after all."

I nodded. Gabriel was looking very white, he kept licking his lips, and I knew he was nearly desperate for a cigarette or a drink--or both. "You don't have to watch the actual surgery," I said, "just hand us what we need, when we need it."

"Right." He nodded, I turned to look at the instruments one last time, the descriptions I'd pored and sweated over the last month rolling through my head. I began to focus, to breathe a little deeper and easier.

"Ready?"

"Yes," I slipped a white gauze mask over my mouth and nose, and used a sterilized ice pick to open the first can of ether. It made a little plock--the sound of air rushing in--then hissed when I opened a second vent. I saturated a thick wad of cloth and pressed it gently against Abby's mouth and nose.

"Just breathe normally."

"We're twins," she giggled, rolling her eyes toward my own white swath of mask.

Saunders had upended the open can, and was likewise giving Ellie anesthesia.

"Fly, Abby, let's fly," she whispered just before her head swiveled bonelessly sideways and she lost consciousness.

I saw Gabriel make the sign of the cross.

It was as brilliant a surgery as any I'd seen before--or since. Saunders was in high glee. He'd guessed that the jointure was not profound, and when he opened them up and saw with his own eyes that the pelvic bones were like the bottoms of two tea-cups end to end with a small lumpy bridge between them, he whooped.

"Piece of cake," he said.

They did share one loop of intestine, but we cut and tied it quickly. There were no annoying tiny vessels presenting as bleeders--when I took off a clamp after he sutured, the stitches held.

Gabriel winced and squinched his eyes at the sound of the bone saw; for me it was a miracle. For the first time the girls were separate, two beings unlocked from the grotesquerie of their birth.

"Christ," I whispered under my breath.

"You see," Saunders said, "now they're older, they've got their growth, we can reshape the bone--both of them will walk normally. I've waited all these years for this day, Granville. I've heard of doctors in Europe doing this to younger children--almost always one of them ends up with a crippling malformation--they can't predict the growth pattern of the bones."

"Someday, I suppose," I said.

"Yes, in fifty or a hundred years if they can re- configure the microscope, otherwise a man's just going in and groping blind." He paused. "You close Abby, I'll do Eleanor," he said, and I found myself sneaking looks and watching to see how he tucked and stretched the skin.

"Mind the scar."

I could see his grin behind the mask; he went on, "I believe our Abby's going to be a vain girl--and well she should--with a face like hers."

It was the first time I thought about the twins that way, and I saw it was not just a father's love, he was right. They had dark blue eyes, fine spun reddish hair. Their mouths were cherub's pouts. They were pretty.

"We're pioneers," I said. This was slow, careful work, but not more difficult than what a good seamstress could do.

"There've not been more than a handful of successful separations. Course, it's not like they were buried one inside the other's chest, like some I've seen. Or those cases where the children lie head to head--like human pinwheels."

I twitched at the words, the needle caught in the girl's scant flesh. Abby moaned in her sleep.

"Give her just a touch more ether," Saunders said casually--one colleague to another--and I marveled at this second miracle: if the girls were separate, he and I, by virtue of our work were joined.

Saunders had left me to go dose himself with the first drink he'd taken in a week; so I sat alone waiting in the cool of the darkened room, keeping vigil while the girls slept off the anesthesia. There wasn't much to do; I checked their pulses often, watched the color slowly returning to their waxy faces. Twice Abby moaned lightly, and Eleanor's hands twitched in a dry rasp against the coverlet, startling me briefly while I brooded on the peculiar life I'd led during the past month.

I'd expected to do a sort of penance to make up for being expelled--had, in fact, exiled myself to a low status job in a place that was far from home and friends. But I hadn't been prepared for the sheer isolation that made me feel I was living in a sort of ghost house--a microcosmic Brigadoon--that appeared or vanished at will.

The doctor had no patients--or none that I ever saw. Each morning as we were finishing breakfast and the hall clock chimed nine, he consulted his pocket watch, replaced it in his black wool vest, then clumped down the hallway to his office. I don't know what he did there. Occasionally he left the house, his medical bag in hand and said he was going out on a house call. But there were none of the flurried knocks in the middle of the night, anxious voices asking for care, or medicines; no sickly wailing babies soothed by worried mothers--none of the constant activity I associated with a doctor's busy practice.

Apart from delivery boys, there were no visitors either. The first week, I assumed the heavy brooding weather kept the doctor's friends from dropping by. But by the end of the month, no one had come. When I looked out the window at the frozen landscape, the fantastically whittled drifts and blowing snow, I felt as if the rest of the world outside the house had suddenly come to a stop.

That was outside; inside I felt something that was equally stifling. Routines are often soothing, they allow life to mesh neatly. But in Saunders's house, they were like the strong silky threads of a spider web--nearly invisible, but capable of holding a man mute, fast.

Mornings, I tried to teach Abby and Ellie the rudiments. They were bright enough; but their deformity got in the way. They sat on a bench (like those in any country schoolroom) but forced to use one hand, their papers flew from the desktop.

"Stuart," one or the other would announce, after I'd set them to writing compositions or doing a raft of sums. I'd look up from Saunders's grimy anatomy book, and meet two pairs of eyes.

It was easier for me to get up and retrieve the yellow lined paper than it was for them. I thought I'd solved the problem by fixing the pages down with small balls of wax. But there would be a brief silence followed by the tapping sound of pencils bouncing on the floor, and once, a gasp when Abby upset a jar of ink over both of them.

We tried oral lessons and reading aloud. I took to using a blackboard.

"Now, repeat after me," I'd say, hearing Ruth's scrape outside the door, or the doctor's cough.

They wouldn't though. They only peered up at me, small wry smiles on their faces. Sometimes one or the other asked a question:

"Were you ever in love?"

"Do you like us?"

I ignored these questions, but the sound of my own voice droning geography lessons and Latin verbs made me feel like I was living in a vacuum. I guessed the school work bored them--they made so many slow halting trips to the bathroom--and of course, if one went to squat over the double seated box of a ‘toilet’ Gabriel had built, her twin had no choice but to sit dangling her legs over the other chamber pot concealed in the cabinet.

In the evenings I sat in the library poring over surgical literature and looking at sketches and drawings and reading the doctor's notes. Overhead, I'd hear the sound of the wheels of their toy sheep turning hollowly against the floor boards. Saunders had forbidden them to cry out while I studied, and their unnatural silence made it all the eerier. And that thin noise began to haunt my sleep and invade the quiet time with my books. My head would jerk up from my work at the sound of the metal wheels ratcheting along, the small bump when the stuffed animal tipped against the windowseat which had been covered in a strip of old carpeting. Stifled giggles, whispers. Then at eight o'clock, Ruth would ready them for bed. The sameness of it all grated on me, and from downstairs I could have set my watch by the little sounds from the nursery. Ruth drawing the drapes and bringing the girls cups of chocolate, the spoons clinking against the china. The final trip to the bathroom, and then my name called lightly on the chill air of the house.

"Stuart...we're ready."

At the sound, the doctor, half drunk, would pop like a jack in the box out of his office, his face red, his collar hanging like a tiny flag, and eye me up and down.

"They're calling you, Granville. Go on up, why else am I paying you?" And he would reel away toward the cellar--or if he was too unsteady, bellow for Gabriel to fetch him another bottle.

Saunders had conceived the idea that I should be the one to read them a bedtime story, so I would tuck a book under my arm and go up to that room, the fire sunk down to a pale strip of orange light on the hearth, the shadowy faces of the girls lying on their bed, propped with pillows. What Saunders never knew was that my book was window-dressing. When I climbed the stairs each night, it was the girls who spun the tales; Ruth banished, their voices a dark whisper.

"Mother is here again, you know," Ellie said. I'd been there just a little more than a week. Outside, the January snow spat against the windows, closing us all in.

"Her name is Regina," Abby added. "Regina Cahill--before she became Saunders--"

"She comes in our dreams."

I was sitting on a low red leather hassock alongside the bed, my hands limp between my upraised knees. The girls peered down at me and suddenly I felt absurdly small.

"Do you have the same dream?" I asked.

"Not at all," Ellie shook her head. "It's better that way, don't you think?" She paused, picking at the coverlet. "She likes you--she wants the surgery soon--"

"Ssh," Abby punched her sister lightly. "She killed herself--and now we know why. I dreamed it." Her blue eyes were very bright. Then she closed them as if she'd gone back inside her dream and was searching for the details.

"After we were born, Father didn't want her. No he didn't," she said. Her voice was sad, mournful. "Mother understood--he was afraid there'd be more babies like us or worse--"

I jumped. This was nothing a twelve year old--a completely sheltered twelve year old could know, I thought.

"It was a long time, years and years, and her heart was full, but there was no one to love."

Her voice had the sound of a recitation, and it unnerved me. I stared at her, and for a second she seemed so much older than the ringleted child lying on the pillow, her ballerina doll with dripping, flesh-pink cloth legs cuddled in her arm.

"It was one of our teachers," Ellie put in, excitedly. "John Price--he was older than you--nearer our Mama's age. Almost thirty five. He was good looking--but not as handsome as you--"

"He found out," Abby said, her eyes remote, hazy as a sleepwalker's in the dim lamplight.

"Andrew," I breathed. "He killed her...."

"No. She was quick with John's child," Ellie said. "It was a terrible time, a time of confusion. Part of her singing to the sleeping child within, most of her terrified, knowing the doctor's eye was sharp. She meant to go away to have it, and to keep it safe. She told herself knowing it lived--somewhere--would be enough."

Abby clutched the doll more tightly, her voice tinged with the same unearthly tone. "A drug in the tea...he knew, you see. He noticed she'd stopped taking wine with dinner. Mother felt his arms around her, lifting her while she slept heavy-headed as an opium eater. She felt him carrying her bulk down and down and into the office. One light glowed.

" ‘No Regina,’ he whispered, ‘No more monsters.’ And then Mother felt the hard metal of the curette inserting itself like a cold snake between her legs. It was gone, he cut the baby out, limb by limb and bit by bit."

"Dear god," I said. Was this the source of the man's desperation?

Abby went on, her whispery voice overriding mine. "He sent John away. After that there were only lady teachers. He said he forgave Mother's infidelity, and yet, there it was between them. Always. It was in his eyes, and he wouldn't touch her. He drank more and more. He went to one of those low women, someone in an alley. She was drunk, too, when he put it up her, banging her against some broken down alley fence. He taunted Mother with it, ‘I had a whore’ he shrieked." Abby paused, and I saw her tongue creep out to lick her lips.

"Mother found him in bed with the last governess. The girl was wearing one of her own soft blue satin gowns, ripped down the center, the halves lying like jagged wings against the white sheets. She knew she'd never shut out the hideous picture: Andrew's mouth fastened on the girl's ruby tipped breast, his fingers plunged between her naked white legs, her hands burrowing against his back, her voice a low scream.

" ‘Am I to have nothing,’ Mother hissed. ‘Nothing and no one?’ Her stomach was in a knot, her mind whirling. The girl sat up, clutching the sheet to her breasts--but not before Mother saw the sheen of the moisture on her full thighs and the bold light in her eyes.

" ‘Get out, Regina,’Andrew said. ‘Women who make monsters are not wanted here.’

"The girl tittered, and Mother fled.

"It would only get worse, she told herself. She was a prisoner here; condemned to a loveless life, forced to watch him flaunt his lust for others. He would not let her love anyone--even him. Mother knew there were drugs in the locked medicine cabinet, she didn't care if was quick or slow or easy or painful. She latched the outer door of the office and went in; then she broke the glass pane on the closet door with her fist and took the first thing that came to her hand. Inside the small brown vial there was a white powder, sparkling crystals. She spilled it into her palm and she began to eat." Abby stopped.

"She's here right now," Ellie said. "She comes to us at night. Can't you smell her?" She wrinkled her nose, sniffing.

I caught a faint perfume: Parma violets. My eyes were dragged to the bedclothes, I knew Ruth scented the cupboards with lavender--

"Violets," Ellie whispered. "The first scent of spring."

The air seemed suddenly drenched with warm rain, earth-

"When we're separated, they'll make our new clothes from hers," Abby said. I saw she was livelier, more alert. "She likes you Stuart, the set of your shoulders, the way your eyes light. You don't smile enough--ah, but when you do."

I felt something brush my cheek--soft as fingertips trailing beloved flesh.

Ellie cocked her head. "She wants the surgery, sends him dreams to hurry. Ruth has been watering his wine, more and more. His hands will be steady, keep on with your work. She watches you."

I gave a small gasp, thinking back to times when I'd felt someone's keen stare while I turned the thin leaves of Saunders's heavy texts. Once the candle had gone out, and I'd heard the rustling sound of silk as if someone hurried from the room, wide skirts fluttering against the door jamb-

"You're her second chance, we're her salvation."

"Kiss us goodnight, Stuart," Abby said, and I leaned across the bed kissing each of their foreheads in turn. Abby's small arm went round my neck. She clung to me.

"Soon, Stuart," she whispered against my ear. I nodded thinking she meant the surgery.

"But only one of us can be chosen," Eleanor sad sadly. "Only one can survive...."

"Hush," I soothed, putting out the lamp. I left the nursery, the rational part of my mind saying it was nothing more than the fancies of two crippled girls, an imaginary game got up between them. Compensation it was called. Lonely, motherless, they invented her again. And lonely and friendless, isolated, I'd let them bewitch me with their half-truths and wishful thinking.

After that night, I made Ruth stay during the story hour. I didn't want to listen to or encourage their strange fantasies; but Abby and Ellie had no interest in my stories. I read tale after tale in Scheherezade--but I read to a pair of slack-faced dolls, their blank eyes upturned and fixed stonily on the white nursery ceiling. The only sound--apart from my thick voice--was the small steady pricking of Ruth's needle--altering Regina's old gowns--in anticipation of their surgery.

"What is there to do or see hereabouts?" I asked the doctor one evening just before dinner. The month was dragging on. I felt the walls closing in, the silence was oppressive. It was just past five o'clock, he stood with his back to me looking past the library window at dead darkness. I sat in my usual place, a drift of papers and books under my nose, my eyes bleary from the dim light.

"Nothing," he said. He inhaled a small brown cigar, and I saw its glowing tip wink in the reflection of the glass.

"I don't pay you to sightsee or carouse. I pay you to teach my daughters and bone up on surgical techniques."

"Am I your paid prisoner?" I said.

He stared back at me, his eyes hard. "What is there to do?" he mocked. "And don't bother asking Ruth or Gabriel, they won't answer."

He left abruptly, but not before he'd pulled another weighty volume--A Textbook of Pathology--from the shelves and slammed it on the flat of the mahogany desk.

I was no slave I told myself; it was only a question of waiting till he fogged out some night, snoring on a couch or in his bed. So, twice I ventured out in search of company, taking the doctor's carriage. The first time I drove north toward Rhinebeck; just inside the town limits I saw a white elephant of a place called the Beekman Arms Hotel. Eagerly, I hitched the horse and sprinted up the brick walkway.

But it was dead winter, and apart from a few tight-lipped locals, there was no one to share an ale or a joke with. I was a stranger, I was not stopping there, so the men talked around me in low voices and I felt walled off by their quick glances, by the way they turned back to their own cliques. I drank a brandy by the taproom fireplace; northerners were narrow and suspicious, I thought. This wouldn't happen in the south. I stood up to go, paid my bill. I was going out the door when I caught the sound of the barkeep's quiet voice: "Lives in the house with the freaks. Teaches ’em."

"You can teach a two-headed cow to dance," another voice answered, "but that don't make it any prettier to look at."

I went out, wincing at the sound of soft, brittle laughter behind me. Earlier, the barkeep had asked me if I needed a room; I'd said no more than I lived nearby, that I was a tutor living with a doctor named Saunders. Stupid. I should have known better than to mention his name within 20 miles of the place.

The second time, I drove south toward Poughkeepsie determined to break the silent spell-like atmosphere of the house.

I cannot say what sent me back--before I'd gone even two or three miles--unless it was the sight of the Roosevelt's house--lit to the roofline, with a vast array of carriages entering, jockeying for spaces. There was obviously some huge party going on. I could see the dark silhouettes of figures moving up wide porch steps toward the doors. From across the frozen fields, I heard the distant sound of an orchestra, the violins clear and sweet.

Perhaps it was the thought of all those welcomed guests, people who knew one another as friends and lovers--and the contrast of my own loneliness. I lost heart, turned the horse around and returned feeling more gloomy than when I'd left.

Now, I sat, watching the twins return to consciousness in the doctor's office. I felt a change coming. Certainly during the surgery, Saunders had been a different man--talkative, friendly. Perhaps the twins' deformity had been the thing that weighed all of them down, and their freedom would release him, too. With the thought, Saunders stepped lightly across the threshold, a bottle and two glasses in hand.

"It was good work, and good work calls for a celebration," he said, pouring. "Drink up, Stuart."

It was the first time he ever called me Stuart, and the wine was champagne--another first for me. I liked the giddy way it frothed inside the glass he handed me.

"Smooth," I said.

"As silk," he answered, and we both laughed, though I wasn't sure why. He called for more champagne, and poured a round for Gabriel and Ruth, whose wide anxious eyes informed me they'd never seen the doctor in such a good humor.

We were both drunk and well into the fourth bottle when Ellie came to, her voice cutting like a scalpel through my champagne glaze.

"Pain," she screamed. "It hurts, it hurts, oh it hurts!" She struggled like a beached fish, and I saw the spasms take her. It was the after-effects of the ether, she began to gag.

"Christ! She's vomiting, she'll drown!" If she aspirates it, she'll die for sure, I thought, panic invading me. I banged the wine glass down, ignoring the sound of it shattering, and raced to her bedside. I rolled her to one side, thumped her back, then thrust my fingers deep inside her mouth to snatch at the slimy clots of vomitus, scraping my skin against her teeth--

Only one of us can survive

Her hollow words jumped in my mind. "No," I shouted. "No! C'mon, Ellie, breathe, breathe!"

A greenish drool poured slowly from between her lips, there was no time to worry about a basin, I held her head and shoulders as best I could. Her stomach heaved--a welcome sight--and then she was merely sick, retching weakly over the side of the bed.

"Abby," she moaned. Her voice was a sob. I soothed her. Her sister was still asleep, Saunders had gone directly to her bed and was standing by.

Abby was blinking now, her hands swam around her head, but she showed no signs of throwing up. "Where am I?" she muttered a second before she opened her eyes. "Where's Ellie?"

"Lost," Ellie said, and at the time I thought she was still disoriented from the anesthesia or from her near crisis. I didn't know it was the true beginning of the change I'd half sensed earlier, or that it was the antithesis--a rotting corpse--to the vibrant new life I'd imagined.

"I'm lost," Ellie mewled again.

Then they both faded out, drifting into the regular rhythms of deep, undrugged sleep.

DEATHWATCH is 34,000 words

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