The Knife Thrower by Steven Millhauser Read Free Book Online

different kind and tended to undermine the case she was attempting to make. We noted with concern the existence of the group of “searchers,” the ritual of the blackened paper, the secret meeting in the woods, the rigorous vow; we wondered, if the girls were innocent, what it was they vowed not to reveal. It was at this time that we began to wake in the night and to ask ourselves how we had failed our daughters. Now reports first began to circulate of bands of girls roaming the night, crossing back yards, moving in the dark; and we began to hear rumors of strange cries, of painted breasts, of wild dances under the summer moon.
THE DEATH OF LAVINIA HALL
    The daughters of our town, many of whom we suspected of being secret members of the sisterhood, now began to seem moody, restless, and irritable. They refused to speak to us, shut themselves in their rooms, demanded that we leave them alone. These moody silences we took as proof of their membership; we hovered, we spied, we breathed down their necks. It was in this tense and oppressive atmosphere that on June 12, ten days after the confession of Emily Gehring, fourteen-year-old Lavinia Hall climbed the two flights of stairs to the guest room in her parents’ attic and there, lying down on a puffy comforter sewn by her grandmother, swallowed twenty of her father’s sleeping pills. She left no note, but we knew that Lavinia Hall had been named by Emily Gehring as a member of the sisterhood and a participant in their erotic rites. Later it was learned from her parents that the Gehring confession had devastated Lavinia, a quiet, scholarly girl who practiced Czerny exercises and Mozart sonatas on the piano two hours every day after school, kept a diary, and stayed up late at night reading fantasy trilogies with twisting vines on the covers. After Emily Gehring’s confession, Lavinia had refused to answer any questions about the sisterhood and had begun to act strangely, shutting herself up in her room for hours at a time and moving around the house restlessly at night. One night at two in the morning her parents heard footsteps in the attic above their bedroom. They climbed the creaking wooden stairs and found Lavinia sitting in her pale-blue pajamas on the moon-striped floor in front of her old dollhouse, which had been moved into the attic at the end of the sixth grade and still contained eight roomfuls of miniature furniture.Lavinia sat with her arms hugging her raised knees. Her feet were bare. She was strangely still. Her mother remembered one detail: the long forearm, revealed by the pulled-back pajama sleeve. In the dollhouse three little dolls, thick with dust, sat stiffly in the moonlit living room: the child on the cobwebbed couch, the mother on the rocker, the father on the armchair with tiny lace doilies. The parents blamed themselves for not recognizing the seriousness of their daughter’s condition, and they condemned the sisterhood as a band of murderers.
THE SECOND CONFESSION OF EMILY GEHRING
    Scarcely had we begun to suffer the news of the death of Lavinia Hall when Emily Gehring released to the
Town Reporter
a second confession, which angered us and filled us with confusion. For in it she repudiated her earlier confession and, siding with Mary Warren against herself, accused herself of having fabricated the first confession in a spirit of revenge for her expulsion from the sisterhood. Emily Gehring now confessed that on the night of May 14 she had been led into the woods by Mary Warren and two other girls, as she had truthfully reported on June 2, but that “nothing at all” had happened there. Of her initiation she said only that it “consisted of silence”; for the next two weeks she had met nightly with small groups of the sisterhood, during which “not a single word” was uttered by anyone and “nothing at all” took place. On May 30 she was expelled from the sisterhood for violating her vow: she had spoken of the secret society to her friend