Marianne Wiggins - The Shadow Catcher

Clara had enrolled in the Academy in September of the year following the Curtises’ departure. Amelia still sent letters but any thought of Ellen and her strange brood and stranger fate had long ago sailed from Clara’s sphere of attention until Amelia prompted her to sign a family Christmas card early in December. Write something to Eva, darling. Something heartfelt. She’s out in Washington Territory. Unmarried.

Clara had drawn a picture of a snowman.

Beneath, she’d written,

HO peful

HO mespun

HO liday.

Draw a heart around it, Amelia urged. Something cheerful.

Clara had drawn a sun above the figure.

Which would, she knew, never really offer solace to a snowman.

As for their own solace in the approaching Christmas season — yet again, in hindsight, Clara should have seen the signs. In past Christmases the fir tree had been brought inside in mid-December, decked with stars and ornaments her father had painted. In previous years, every night in the two weeks before Christmas another gift for Hercules and Clara had appeared, ornately wrapped, beneath the tree. But at the beginning of this year, in the week of the Epiphany last January, Clara’s father had brought home a massive glass jeroboam he had found in the alley behind the Italians’ grocery shop. Christmas jar , he had announced. And what had seemed a strike against the overstated lavishments of the baby Jesus’ birthday was, in hindsight, the first hint of straitened circumstances in the household. Amelia had continued giving music lessons, increasing them in number, by demand, from six or eight per week to six or eight per day, but Clara’s father had sold neither a commission for a portrait nor a civic mural nor a private painting for at least a year, or more. Not that she had noticed. Why would she have noticed? The family never talked of money and he was always buoyant in his work, disappearing upstairs to the attic room with the northern-facing dormers every morning when the light was right. But she should have noticed. She should have noticed, she later thought, his new preoccupation with what he called the current popular obsession with the latest fraud. The “art” form of photography. She should have noticed the small stain of rancor when he called it outright cheating. A hoodwinking travesty. Stand in front of a machine and have your “portrait” rendered, he’d disclaimed. Frame it, hang it in your sitting room, in your bastions of industry, chimpanzees could execute the skill required, click . That click required as much skill and artistry as a canvas painted by a monkey.

So her family had collected pennies. Dimes and nickels, too, though mostly pennies, and the jar had slowly filled. It had been exciting, really, watching the mass of coins rise slowly. Hercules would run home, breathless, with a found coin from the street, and he had gone knocking at the Polish widower’s next door, asking to perform odd jobs so he would have some small change to contribute. At least four dollars in the jar had been earned by Hercules, himself, and he’d sat staring through the green glass, sometimes, pointing to a dime, a nickel, saying, “That one’s mine.” It had seemed to make him proud so Clara hadn’t stopped to question the reason for the jar. It was the Christmas jar and it had sat on the floor in the dining room the whole year and in the second week in December all four of them, like eager children, had emptied it across the Persian rug and counted up the coins. They had found thirty four dollars — thirty four and change — it had seemed a vast amount, and Clara could remember feeling her face flush and noticing how happy they all were. Deducting the cost of the Christmas tree (two dollars) they would receive, each, eight dollars for their Christmas shopping — one gift, each, determined by drawn lots. Clara had stared at the four folded strips of paper hoping her mother or her father — not Hercules — would draw her name. Hercules drew first. Then gave a cheer. “I drew myself!”

“Is that what would make you happy, Hercules?” Amelia had asked.

Yes .

Not really in the spirit of Christmas, though, is it? Clara had objected.

He drew another lot and drew his father’s name, and it fell to Clara to chaperone her brother with his money.

They had meant to go, they had meant to take the trolley into town that very week to give themselves time for shopping in the large emporiums, but Clara had had long days of term examinations, and then the week before Christmas day, the only week they had to stroll and look along the major commercial avenue of St. Paul, it had begun to snow. It had begun to snow one afternoon and then it snowed all night. By the evening of the second day the trolley lines were overcome and transportation in the streets outside had come to a full stop. Clara’s father built a fire in the front room fireplace and Amelia organized a picnic on a blanket by the fire for their supper. They popped corn and toasted squares of cake, and as the night crept in Amelia raised a hand and told them, Listen , and they all grew quiet. The fire snapped and hissed and distorted what she wanted them to hear, so she drew them to the front door and opened it. There was snow up to their knees on the front porch. Nothing moved except the lines and dots of drifting flakes.

Sometimes I dream for it to snow, Amelia said. I will it.

She drew a finger to her lips to signal quiet, Hear it?

Clara strained to hear a sound through all the silence. Hear what, mother?

The acoustics . The whole world’s a concert hall.

“Play us something, darling,” Clara’s father had said, leading her back inside to her piano. He had left the front door open and Clara lingered at the edge of night as the notes rose from her mother’s fingers and floated out across the city, an accompanying phenomenon to nature’s own.

The snow was followed by a day of freezing cold, the sky a blank slate like a block of sullied ice which pressed into one’s lungs and froze people in their tracks as they tried to shovel. Sitting in the downstairs while her mother played that evening, Clara thought she’d heard it, finally, that bafflement of snow, silent, calm and soothing, as if the house were cupped in mittens.

The next day, the eve of Christmas Eve, the sun had risen strong and stunning, drawing people from their homes where they’d been stranded, avid to start digging out, eager to be witness to the beauty that the storm had wrought. Once he’d cleared a pathway to the street, Clara’s father rounded up the sleds and, laughing and delighted by the unexpected balmy turn the weather had taken, the four of them joined others in their neighborhood in a motley parade toward the open land on Finland Hill.

“I brought my money with me,” Hercules had confided to her.

“Why did you do that?”

“Two days left to Christmas. There’s a chance that we’ll find some place open.”

And, indeed, they had. A funny little shop on a corner five blocks from their street, where, for whatever reason, none of them had gone before. A lot of work had gone into its presentation on that morning, the sidewalk had been cleared, a banner hung, and it was evident the owner didn’t want to lose another day of business in this Christmas week. Fronted by a brick skirt from which a story-high glass window rose, the storefront beckoned with a display of lacquer boxes, silks and rice paper scrolls of the kind generally associated with the China trade, but there were also moroccan leather books and inlaid marble chessboards on the shelves inside.

“I’m going in,” Hercules announced.

“We can do it on the way back,” Clara reasoned.

“You need to find a present, too,” he argued.