Mysterium

The dress was of some faintly iridescent, dark green material— bombazine twilled with silk, the lieutenant had said. It came with a complement of underclothing so baroque that she had needed an instruction manual, which the lieutenant also supplied: a tiny hardbound volume called Appearance, Its Perfection, for Women, by Mrs. Will. Once Evelyn had deciphered Mrs. Will’s peculiar spelling, sorted out a stay from a buttonhook, and understood that in this place a pin was called a pince, she managed all right.

She even liked, sort of, the way she looked in the dress. The effect was Victorian, of course. Prim. But it did interesting things for her figure. To be so thoroughly covered and at the same time so completely advertised—it was odd, and oddly interesting. In Boston and New York, the lieutenant said, all the finer women dressed like this.

But Two Rivers wasn’t Boston or New York; it hadn’t been even in the old days. And that was the problem. She had already been accused of taking favors from the Proctors who were lodged in her house. Eleanor Camby, the undertaker’s wife, had stood behind her in a ration line and whispered the word quisling over and over again. Evelyn didn’t know the word but understood immediately what it meant. Collaborator. Traitor.

To stand in a similar line wearing green bombazine and lace collars —no, not possible.

She could have just worn her old clothes when she went into the street, but Evelyn sensed that this was precisely what the lieutenant did not want. The purpose of the dress, or one of its purposes, was to make her different, to make her unique.

So when she wanted her water ration she begged a ride from one of the junior officers (Evelyn thought of them all as “baby Proctors”; their ranks were too complex to remember), in this case a young man named Malthus Feliks. Feliks drove her downtown in one of those boxy care that looked like antique Jeeps.

Feliks wasn’t talkative, but he was courteous to her—and that was refreshing. She had learned to expect contempt or at best indifference from the junior officers. They were trained that way, she supposed; too, they must be intimidated by the strangeness of Two Rivers. The town had become a terrifyingly strange place no matter which end of the glass you peered through. Today Feliks drove along the leaf-choked streets at a less than bone-bruising clip, and even smiled once (an acrid Proctor’s smile, but genuine) when she commented on the particular blue of the sky. Last night’s rain had cleared the air. October skies, Evelyn thought, were the bluest of all.

It was the dress, she thought, that made Feliks more courteous. If not the dress itself, then what it represented. His commanding officer’s imprimatur. A mark of possession, if not rank.

No, she scolded herself. No, don’t think about it that way. Even if Feliks does.

She was dismayed to discover that the water truck had been moved. Today it was parked in the lot behind JFK High School. Of all places. She considered telling Feliks to turn around, it wasn’t worth the risk of being seen—not here. But Feliks might tell the lieutenant, which would leave the wrong impression. And what, fundamentally, was she ashamed of? Nothing. She had nothing to hide.

Water was dispensed to ration card holders between the hours of noon and six; the truck had only just arrived. Feliks exchanged words with the militiamen lounging in the cab of the tanker. The Bureau de la Convenance Religieuse wasn’t a branch of the armed forces; Feliks didn’t officially outrank these men, but Evelyn had noticed the way the military deferred to the religious police. The powers of the Bureau were vague, hence enormous, the lieutenant had told her. It was easy, he said, perhaps too easy, all things considered, for a Censeur or a senior Proctor to make trouble for an enlisted man. So, naturally, the soldiers were wary of them.

A surly militiaman unlocked the spigot at the back of the truck. Evelyn took her camping thermos from the car. Feliks wouldn’t fill it for her and she knew better than to ask. It was her water, her chore. She stooped to fit the thermos under the steel faucet and swept her dress out of the way with one hand. The water gushed out and spattered her shoes. It looked clean but smelled faintly of oil. It always did.

She filled the thermos to the very top and capped it.

As she walked to the car she risked a glance back at the school— specifically, at the second-floor room where Dex taught history to his dwindling classes.

Was there a shadow there?

Was he watching her?

Had he seen the dress?

She turned away and walked with her head high. She didn’t care whether he had seen her. She told herself so. There was no reason anymore to care what Dex Graham thought.

∞