I remembered the oscillating electric fan in a nearby closet and placed it near my bed. I set it on high and pointed it in my direction. After pouring myself another glass of ice water, I went to bed with the book. Soon the fan had cooled me down, and I began to feel sleepy. I had no idea that in my hand was a key. A key that would take me back in time again, back to Seven Sisters, back to Calpurnia and Muncie. As I closed my eyes, I felt myself drifting to a different time and place. I did not feel afraid. Perhaps I should have.

Chapter 8

My face shone strangely in the mirror, like a disembodied head, floating in the amber light of my bedroom. I hated the coiled hair piled upon my head. I looked like Medusa, the disgusting Gorgon doomed to life without love; my braids like forbidding snakes, keeping everyone away. This is what Mother wanted. I stuck my tongue out at myself, screwing up my face in an ugly look, in a defiant protest against the universe. Of course, I was not defying Mother. I’d never defy her. She was the one who had insisted on this debutante charade.

“Calpurnia, every young lady sits for a painting at your age. You’ll thank me someday. Why, you’re in the rose of your youth, and you’re so lovely.” Mother had cradled my chin lovingly, speaking softly down to me as I sat pouting on the edge of my lace-covered bed.

Compared to my mother, I felt like an old spinster, although I was sixteen—well, almost sixteen. Mother was petite with delicate hands that she kept folded in her lap when she reclined. She had smooth, dark blond hair, lively brown eyes and a tiny mouth that wore a permanent smile, without an excess show of even, white teeth. Even now, with her swollen belly and red cheeks, Mother was the picture of feminine perfection. My figure, on the other hand, maintained its childlike shape, straight like a hickory branch with no curve at all.

Downstairs, waiting impatiently in the ladies’ parlor, was the insipid Reginald Ball, aspiring artist and some sort of distant cousin on my father’s side. Except for his limited enthusiasm for art, he was a bore with vacuous eyes who never wondered about anything beyond the arrival of the next plate of sweets. Still, I felt a tinge of sympathy for the rotund Mr. Ball. He would always be what he was now—the bumbling son of an elegant gentleman who made no secret of his disappointment in his progeny. At least Reginald Ball had given up his feeble attempts at courting me; now we observed an easy quiet during our sketching sessions. I was quite the better artist than he but was too much of my mother’s daughter to tell him so.

In the beginning, before I met him, I had secretly hoped that I would like him, maybe even love him. But that was not to be. “Strange,” I told Muncie later, “artists typically have an overabundance of joie de vivre. They’re searchers of the beauty in the world around them, full of artistic curiosity.” I suspected that Mr. Ball’s sole interest in art was merely to make a living. Had he been full of turmoil or offered even a single controversial thought, I could have overlooked his swelling stomach, round face and piggish black eyes. Reginald Ball had truly been an intellectual and romantic disappointment.