Over the years she had developed a technique for dealing with those occasions when reality threatened to encroach: she would find a corner where she could sit quietly and visualize herself as a siren-lizard, many of which swarmed through the trees around the school. Trees burgeoned, sap flowed from some deep and mysterious source below, life trickled out into every twig, enlivening the entire organism, but the sirens did not know or care. They merely fluttered from branch to branch, flashing their scaled wings in the sun like rainbow mirrors, dependent upon the tree but unconnected to it. Whenever the scrutator came to talk about her soul, Genevieve visualized her soul as a small, invisible siren-lizard, without any dangerous thoughts or emotions, flitting through the tree of life while it waited to be taken away into paradise. She was, so to speak, required to flash her wings, but she was determined to stay unconnected for several reasons, not least of which involved what Mrs. Blessingham called her “talent.”
Genevieve could accept her talent as she did her nose: an annoyance, at best, a grief at worst. Sometimes when it did not manifest itself for some time, she hoped desperately that she had lost it or it had left her, though hope was in vain, for the talent always returned. As it did shortly after her conversation with Carlotta and Glorieta, when Mrs. Blessingham invited Genevieve into her office.
“Genevieve, I hate to trouble you, but I am concerned about the marriage plans being made for Carlotta and Glorieta.”
Genevieve felt a deep pang, as though a large bell had rung inside her. She stared at the wall, everything else becoming misty and indistinct. She thought of Willum as she had seen him last at an evening soiree, sitting with Glorieta on the terrace. His eyes—which she had scarcely noticed at the time but now remembered fully—had been full of desire and pain, fear and resolution. She saw shadows shifting, like the library machines on fast forward, shadows of Glorieta, of Willum, of an older man or men, Willum’s father or family perhaps, a shadow of another woman, a young woman whose face she could not see.
Her eyes gradually cleared, focused, and she saw Mrs. Blessingham sitting at her desk, calmly waiting. “Mrs. Blessingham,” she murmured, “There will be tragedy connected to Willum. He dreads something that will happen, as if he is determined to do some terrible and irrevocable act. I fear ruin will come … to someone close to him.”
“I’ve had bad feelings about the whole thing. You’re sure?” Genevieve gave her a reproachful look. “Oh, ma’am, I can’t say that. I can only tell what comes to me in these . . .”
“These certainties.”
“This one is not clear enough to be a certainty. Most times whatever this is,” she touched her head, flipping her fingers away to show how ephemeral it all was, “this thing in my brain doesn’t explain what it is showing me. Most of the time I think it is off somewhere else, letting me see only scraps.”
This had been one of the times when she saw bits of scenery, heard bits of conversations, recollected things she had read or overheard or seen that had made no impression at the time. The sound that came with these smatterings was like surf or storm, the undifferentiated noise of hard rain or the crackling of fire, and from this meaningless mosaic an impression emerged, a feeling, a picture, sometimes a voice. Only long practice kept her quiet and passive as this occurred and passed, leaving a sodden exhaustion behind, like a deep drift of autumn leaves wet by rain, icy and clinging, herself buried in them, naked and cold.
“Describe it to me,” commanded Mrs. Blessingham, though in a gentler voice.
Genevieve sighed. “1 feel that someone dies. I see a body, a young woman. I don’t know whether it’s Carlotta or Glorieta or someone else, but whatever is happening is connected to them. I know Willum is in it, for I see his face. I hear his voice and a baby crying. I smell blood.”
Whenever people came into her certainties, she could only identify those she already knew. Others were indistinct, almost like manikins, stand-ins for real people. She saw someone doing something without being able to see why it was done, or by whom. Sometimes she would see people she did not recognize at all, but this time she knew it was Willum, that same Willum she had recently seen with Glorieta on the terrace, his face full of fear and longing.