The Light of the World, page 32
“But why did you go down there without telling us that first time?” Eva asked. If only the four of them had gone down together, there was a good chance that nothing bad would have happened to any of them. The shadow would have been faced with three believers and a guardian to keep them safe. It seemed the perfect outcome, in retrospect.
Theo sighed, his shoulders slumping forward so that his sweater slipped off one shoulder. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was looking at the truth, Eva. I saw it and I knew it was true—and then I knew no more.” He let out a world-weary chuckle. “I guess that’s what I get for trying to do everything on my own, though… possessed.”
“Something like that,” Liv said from the computer table. “But hey, you made it out okay.”
Eva glanced over at Liv and she felt a smile tug at the corners of her lips. Liv was smiling to herself, her blonde hair spilling over her shoulders. She was tapping her pen against her notepad and very pointedly not looking at them. It was cute, to see Liv so at ease again. She belonged here, in this dusty room surrounded by books. This was where she could do the most good. Eva wasn’t sure if she wanted to stay working at Mr. Bertelli’s grocery store forever, but it was enough for the time being. She could spend her time with Liv, and Al, and help Theo out with his projects.
“I am truly sorry that I hurt your shoulder, Eva,” Theo continued, resting his fingers gently on her knee for a moment to draw her attention back to him. “It wasn’t exactly my finest moment.”
She didn’t know how to respond to that because somehow, “I’m sorry you got possessed by a centuries-old demon” didn’t seem like the appropriate response. Eva bit the inside of her cheek and forced herself to smile pleasantly at Theo. “You got your answer, though.”
“I did,” he agreed.
They stared at each other for a long time before Theo straightened and leaned over to the table. He picked up a sheaf of papers and passed them over to Eva. “This is all that I found on your grandmother, Eva.”
She flipped the pages over. They were covered in Theo’s slanted handwriting, detailing everything that they’d found—a loose outline of the time that Mary had known Wren, right down to notes from the old cold case file that detailed the ineffective police search for Catherine Monroe after she’d disappeared. “Why didn’t you show me this before?” Eva asked.
“Because I wanted to save it, you know?” Theo ran a tired hand over his face. “I know it was stupid, but I was convinced that there was something more to this than bad memories. My grandmother had a friend who used to tell us stories as a child. She helped a girl hide and the girl disappeared before her eyes. She always told me that was proof enough of the light of the world.” He glanced toward Liv and then shrugged. “I figured that there had to be more to it.”
“Once upon a time, there might have been,” Eva agreed. “Thank you… for this.” She wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it.
“Liv’s told me that she wants to write a book based on your grandmother’s journals and some of the documents she found in the Talbot collection,” Theo said tentatively. “I’d understand if you didn’t want me to help her with it—”
Eva shook her head violently. The thought hadn’t even occurred to her. She knew that Theo wouldn’t go back down there, and she was pretty sure that Liv had told him exactly what he needed to know and nothing more than that. It would be enough, she reasoned, to simply keep him away from the place.
A few nights ago, Liv had told Eva that there was very little left down in the room beneath the city. The seal had been restored and when she’d made her way back there again, she had found nothing other than darkness. It was, Liv had explained, as it should be. There was nothing for a normal human down there, just rock and mud and memory. The people who would venture down there now would only be those who knew, and even then, Liv had pointed out, they’d never be able to touch the seal.
A wish was a wish, it seemed.
“I want you to help,” she said quietly. Her fingers curled around the papers and she smiled brightly at Theo. “This can, I think, legitimize some of your own work.”
He inclined his head, and Eva knew that it wasn’t the light of the world, but it was close enough. This was the story of a young girl who’d fallen in love, and how her love had gone missing. “I suppose that it might be worth a second try.”
Eva nodded, smiling warmly.
“And what about you?” Theo asked. “Are you going to go back to Bertelli’s and leave us now?”
“Nah, I don’t think you’ll be rid of me just yet. I want to help too.” Eva glanced over at Liv, who’d set her pad down and was leaning over the back of her chair, her chin resting on her palm, a fond smile playing at her lips. All she wanted to do was tell a story that had been told a thousand times before. This time it would be different, though, the cycle had been broken and the players cast anew.
“Next we’ll get you back to school.”
Eva shifted, uncomfortable that her secret perusal of college websites had been so easily detected. Theo smiled knowingly. “Maybe,” she said.
Theo held out his hand and Eva shook it. There was something final about that moment, as Al called out to them from the front, a question about a book that only Theo would know the answer to. He let Eva’s hand drop and stood up on his unsteady feet. Eva watched him go from the room, grumbling about how Al would never amount to anything if he didn’t learn the trade.
The papers in Eva’s hands were like a weight that kept her steady on the chair. She stared at them. He’d found all of this, all this research he hadn’t mentioned until now. “Are you okay with him helping you?” she asked Liv. “And with me helping, too?”
Liv stepped up behind her and laid her hand on her back. It felt warm, lingering just long enough to reassure Eva that she wasn’t pulling away.
“I’d like that,” Liv replied. Her fingers trailed up to rest on Eva’s good shoulder, squeezing gently, reassuringly. Eva reached up and took Liv’s hand in her own. There was a future in this, and she knew it. It was definite and she couldn’t wait.
“Book of the Week: Talbot’s Girls – Tales of the 1920s”
James Hariden – In a debut historical work, Olivia Currance takes readers on a journey back to a time that is very different from our own. While the 1920s are idolized in popular culture, it was a time of great disparity between the haves and the have-nots of New York. Ms. Currance’s book takes a critical look at the daily lives of the young women who came to live at the boarding house of one Mrs. Irene Talbot, a noted local suffragette. Through this very insightful window into the lives of these girls, Ms. Currance is able to string together a series of narratives that are eye-opening and page-turning.
I was able to sit down with Ms. Currance and discuss her book, as well as her motivations for writing it.
James Hariden: This is the sort of book that isn’t oftentimes written, Ms. Currance. Why did you decide to write about the girls who live at Mrs. Talbot’s home?
Olivia Currance: Precisely for that reason, James. There is so much focus on the young men of the 1920s that the women are lost in the shuffle after the 19th Amendment was passed, and they don’t come back fully into the historical narrative until World War II.
JH: But why Mrs. Talbot’s house? There are so many more like it in the city, some that are far more well-known than that.
OC: A friend of mine’s grandmother is actually one of the central characters of this story. When she died, she left behind a series of diaries that detailed her life. My friend came to the bookstore where I work and asked for our help to get to know her grandmother better. The Brooklyn Historical Society was able to lend us the Talbot Collection, from which much of the research for this book was drawn, and through that we were able to piece together the bare bones of a story about what had happened to my friend’s grandmother.
JH: So this all mostly started as a favor to a friend?
OC: Something like that, yeah. I hadn’t intended to go out and write a book that would be so well-received, if you catch my meaning.
JH: Still, though, it’s a wonderful insight into the lives of these young women. Can you tell us a little bit about the characters you’ve selected and why?
OC: Well, I had to include the story of my friend’s grandmother because, honestly, it’s one of the more interesting. She worked as a clerk for a lawyer in the city and was all of sixteen when she started. There’s Evelynn, who worked selling women’s hats and somehow was able to find herself designing them for all the baseball players’ wives of the day. Edith, who is probably my favorite, is the most fascinating. She was a teacher who also taught English to the Chinese men who’d come to work in the city during the evenings. She was fluent in three different dialects of Chinese and could write it quite well for a woman who’d never been to China and had no Chinese ancestry at all. She eventually took a train across the country to San Francisco and got a job working for some Chinese businessmen who were investing in the city.
JH: How hard was it to track down some of this information??
OC: (Laughing) Well, James, if I’m honest with you, not as hard as you’d think. Women are usually pretty good about keeping journals and diaries. The hardest part was tracking down the families of some of these girls—a large number of them never married and didn’t have children—to see if any papers or journals had been kept.
JH: Well, that’s good to know.
OC: Seriously. I was happily surprised.
JH: You focus a great deal on the story of these two girls, Catherine and Mary. Can you tell us a bit about them?
OC: They really did become the focus of the story, didn’t they?
JH: They did.
OC: Well, let’s see. Mary kept a diary, which made it very easy to find a narrative to string this whole collection of research together. I chose to focus on her at first because I had such fantastic primary source, and from there I branched out to the other girls mentioned in Mary’s diaries.
It’s serendipitous, I know, but Mary meets this girl with whom she shares this intense connection, Wren—Catherine—on a train. In this day and age you might call it love. The diaries span about a year and really delve into the burgeoning romance between them, only to end in heartbreak. Mary’s granddaughter wanted to know more about what had happened to Catherine because there was never any mention of her after that year in her grandmother’s papers. That was the catalyst for my writing the book. We spent months researching, trying to figure out who “Wren” was and finally discovered her identity.
JH: I’ll bet that was a kick.
OC: Oh, you have no idea.
JH: Are they the girls on the cover?
OC: Yes, I wanted to put them in the cover to give them a chance to be seen out in the world today—where no one will judge them for loving each other. It was a lot of hard work to find that photograph. It made sense.
JH: Well, your work has definitely paid off. The book is a fascinating read.
OC: Thank you.
Talbot’s Girls is available online and at most major bookstores throughout the city. It is recommended for all readers and carries no specific content warnings. 8/10.
About Ellen Simpson
Ellen graduated from the University of Vermont in 2010, majoring in political science with an emphasis on media and its effects on society. She is the co-creator and social media editor for the popular webseries, Carmilla, now in its second season. She currently resides in North Carolina but is a Vermonter at heart.
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