
<#FROWN:K01\>
Geno called B&B taxi, which took him to the Barrington campus along Route 9 in a rusty blue '84 Chevy. This road had been nothing but a slice of macadam through a cornfield when Geno arrived in Barrington seventeen years ago, but for him it was ruined now. Neon signs had arrived a decade ago, advertising a pizza shop and a bowling alley. Gas stations went up quickly, followed by an A&P, a Super Drug, and a Miracle Mart.
Soon after their wedding, Geno and Susan had moved into a redbrick apartment building two blocks off campus on a leafy elm-shaded street. First the elms died, then a Pizza Hut opened up across the street, and the traffic worsened. Frustrated, they began hunting for a farmhouse outside of town.
Geno loved the remoter parts of Vermont, places where one could imagine the twentieth century had barely begun. The farmhouse he and Susan found, with a long view of Mount Isaac, was perfect. Sitting in an Adirondack chair on the front lawn, one could believe the year was 1911.
The main thing about Vermont, for Geno, was that it wasn't New Jersey. His home state embodied the worst aspects of this catastrophic century. At one time its small towns were full of gingerbreaded wood-frame houses, redbrick Federals, neoclassical granite banks, and shimmering limestone court-houses. These had given way to 'developments' of split-level eyesores with aluminum siding and screened-in patios.
Geno had grown up in the standard prefab with a two-car garage beneath a master bedroom. His father put a basketball hoop over the garage doors when he was eight, making his son instantly popular in the neighborhood. A gang of boys filled the driveway every afternoon in summer, and a running pick-up game continued until Geno's father, who sold wall-to-wall carpeting for a building supply company in Meadow Pond, arrived home at five-thirty sharp for supper.
Mr. Genovese always came home frazzled, and he gulped a double Manhattan to calm his nerves. Mrs. Genovese made sure the boys abandoned the hoop just before her husband's black Buick nosed into the driveway.
An only child, Geno was raised to believe the universe revolved around him, although he'd been conscious of his father's business troubles from an early age. Mr. Genovese began in sales after the war, working first in automotive supplies. He moved, briefly, to a feed supply store. His cousin, Nick Giacometti, hired him at the building supply company in 1957, and Mr. Genovese gravitated to industrial carpeting. He wore a suit to work every day with a starched shirt and a flowery tie, and it meant a great deal to him that he had a 'white collar' job. It upset him that business was never very good.
Mr. Genovese wanted Geno to pursue a career in sales, but his son's academic bent scratched that idea. The scholarship to Dartmouth sealed Geno's fate. From then on, he was never not in school, as student or teacher. And never in New Jersey.
The disturbing thing was that Barrington had come to resemble his hometown more than ever, with condos and tracts of prefab houses spreading like cancer cells on the town's periphery. The village green, with its churches and banks and nineteenth-century storefronts, was - thank God - preserved by tourism. Kitsch had its up side, too. But Geno hadn't quite noticed, until now, how terrifyingly ugly the place was becoming.
The college remained pristine, but its unreality hit Geno hard as the taxi passed through its stone gates. What was he doing here anyway? He must call his father-in-law soon about that loan. If only he could buy, say, twenty thousand dollars of penny stocks in gold mining companies in Peru, his future would be assured. If his calculations were correct, in five years that stock would appreciate tenfold, and he could quit his teaching job, move to the Caribbean, and write poetry till the world turned cold.
Geno walked into Milton House with a heavy heart, trying not to breathe in the smell of institutional floorwax. The corridor was dark.
"Hi, Geno," a voice cried, rather pleasantly.
Geno startled, turning to face Agnes Wild.
"Did I frighten you?"
"You always frighten me."
"I'm glad I ran into you," she said.
"Ditto."
"Really?"
"You really fucked me this time, Agnes."
Agnes looked at him. "You think I put Lizzie up to this, don't you?" She seemed hurt.
"I do."
"Well, I didn't. I had nothing to do with it."
Geno stared at her, uncertain.
"I'd tell you if I did. You know that. Nothing is gained by going behind people's backs."
Geno sighed. She was probably telling the truth. Indeed, he often told Susan that Agnes was too unimaginative to lie. "I assumed you were pissed off about that Virginia Woolf thing."
"I thought that I was more interested in Woolf than you were."
"You are."
"So it was natural that I should want to supervise Lizzie."
"It was." He looked down like a small boy. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions."
"I accept your apology. But you've got a lot of work to do with Lizzie Nash."
"And the Committee on Human Relations."
"I don't know what's going to happen there."
"You're the chairperson!"
"The materials you presented are ...well ...hard to digest. We're not legal experts, you know. I don't think we're looking at a legal situation in any case. But there's a point of morality here."
"Ah ...morality. Yes."
Geno went into his office, closed the door, and drew the blinds. He sat back in his desk chair, his feet on the desk, and closed his eyes, feeling a sharp throb in each temple. His head was killing him now. It seemed that his life - his teaching life, his writing life, his family life - had hit its nadir. It was difficult to imagine how he could regain his wife's trust or find a way to relate to the boys that felt solid and real. The idea of divorce appalled him. A marriage was a mystical unit, consecrated by human and divine love. And he was determined to act responsibly and well - and to earn the union he desired - even if it meant uprooting, moving to a new country, burning his house to the ground to begin again, with bricks and mortar. The time had come, he decided, to rebuild.
A knock came to the door, and he shuddered. Not Lizzie Nash, he hoped. Or Agnes.
"Hello?" he called weakly.
"Excuse me?" said Chap Baloo, pushing the door wide. "That you, old boy?"
"Nobody here but us chickens."
Baloo made himself comfortable in the chair by the book-case. "I had a call from Botner this morning," Baloo said. "They apparently don't have a decision on your case. Not yet."
"Fuck them," Geno said.
Baloo shifted uncomfortably, twisting his mouth to one side unconsciously. "That's not a good attitude, Geno," he said.
"Frankly, I don't care anymore."
Baloo said, "I don't mean to frighten you, but they could suspend you for a term. Maybe dock your salary."
"Can they fire me?"
"You've got tenure, but I reckon anything's possible." His Southern accent seemed to thicken. "It's a dark mood this country's in."
"I didn't do anything wrong."
Baloo took a pipe from his jacket pocket, though he didn't intend to light it. Pipes were conversation props for him - a residue of Southern gentility. "I'm sorry if this seems to be ruining your summer," he said.
"My summer is fine."
"I saw Susan at the post office just a while ago. She looked awful."
"She's had a bad year," Geno said. "And I guess I haven't made life easy for her."
"Women," said Baloo. "You know the old saying, 'Can't live with them, can't live without them.'" With this, he winked and left, closing the door behind him.
On the way home in the taxi, Geno thought about Baloo's silly old saw. He'd heard it many times, and it typified a familiar male way of regarding women as a kind of foreign country. As an only child, he hadn't really known a woman close up until quite late in adolescence, unless you counted his mother. Susan was the first woman he'd lived with intimately, and he recalled the strangeness of their first months together. Everything about her intrigued him: her smells, her daily habits, the way she stood in front of the mirror and looked into her own eyes. He could never look into his own eyes so intensely.
Susan was bending over a row of flowers when he arrived. She wore a big straw sombrero and jeans, and even though she must have heard the taxi grinding over the pebbles as it climbed the driveway, she didn't look around.
Geno paid the driver and walked to where she was clawing up weeds, and he stood quietly behind her. "We could use some rain, huh?" he said, at last.
She continued with her claw, piling the granular leaves of dandelions in a clump beside her.
"I guess you're not talking, is that it?"
Susan sighed, rocking back on her thighs. Then she started crying. She put her head in her gloved hands, and her shoulders shook.
He knelt beside her. It was so hard to think of anything to say to someone so obviously in pain. What was worse, he felt responsible for that pain.
"I'm sorry, Susie," he said.
She rose slowly, wiping her eyes on a flannel shirtsleeve.
"I guess I'm out of control these days." He was looking at the ground as he talked. "Sometimes I wish we could just get out of here, you know. Start again somewhere else. I might quit teaching."
"You're broke," she said, laughing through the tears now - like sun tearing through a scrim of rain.
"So what?"
"Like hippies, huh?"
He became excited now as a green floating image - an island - appeared in his mind. He closed his eyes to see it more clearly. It was the Dominican Republic, he was sure.
"We could house-sit in Maine," Susan said.
"Maine?"
"Help on a lobster boat or something."
"How about the Dominican Republic? Maine is too cold," he said. "The D.R. is perfect - never too cold or hot."
Susan studied his face like a math problem, saying nothing.
Geno said, "I'm serious."
"I know you are," she said.
Geno came close to her now, wiping the wetness from her eyes with his thumbs. Then he didn't kiss her exactly. He just stood with his lips pressed to hers, slowly breathing her in - the smell of dirt and sweat, tears and sun. She was earth and air, he thought. She was fire and water.
"I love you," he said. "I like you. And I never hate you."
"I'm glad you never hate me," she said.
She put her head on his shoulder, and he let his fingers cup her gourdlike head, feeling her skull beneath the scalp. And he knew he loved her, loved her.
Chapter 21
Charles had spent five days in the mountains with Yellow Moon, a mud-spattered woman in her midtwenties. She was from Arkansas, with an accent thick as kudzu, though she had most recently lived in Boulder. Her name made sense if you looked at her without preconceptions: the whites of her eyes were indeed yellow, while her head was moonlike; even her scalp - visible beneath her bleached-out hair - glowed with a yellowy tint.
She and Charles pitched a tent in the north field adjacent to Geno and Susan's house, and it was established that they could either use the kitchen to cook for themselves or, if they preferred, eat with the family.
"I'm certainly a cook," Yellow Moon volunteered on the first night, her words like mismatched beads on a string. "I do a rice and beans dish much like the Caribbeans."
Geno wondered how was it possible that Charles, who was so intelligent, could have stuck himself with such a woman.
"The Cubans eat rice and beans, don't they?" Susan asked.
<#FROWN:K02\>
"Not really. It's more like seeing things as they are. Kind of like the old acid days."
"Well, it gets you rolling in the morning." She stood up abruptly with her purse under her elbow. "Call me," she said, and went out.
Frank felt a little gust and thought, I will. He paid for breakfast and went outside where a parking lot full of cars rested, seemed to await their mission. Wonderful when day had not begun, when only the breakfast waitresses and airline crews were conspicuously there and ready for the rest of the world if it ever woke up. Frank looked off to the silhouettes of the city and the mountains beyond. Odd hours always took him back to the days of weirdness, to the exhilaration of being out of step. He went on contemplating the way the world was reabsorbing him and his friends, terrified people coming to resemble their parents, their dogs, their country, their seatmates, after a pretty good spell of resembling only themselves. This, thought Frank, lacks tragic dimension almost as certainly as podiatry does. But it holds me in a certain ache to imagine I'm actually as much a businessman as my father.
But Frank was apprehensive about going to work. He was, after all, across the hall from Lucy. That hadn't changed. And he was disquieted about seeing her this morning. Despite twenty years of trying to reduce sex to the same status as the handshake, its reduction was unreliable and it frequently had an unwelcome larger significance. Lovemaking still seemed to test the emotional assumptions that led up to it, and in Frank's case he somehow found out that he was never going to be in love with Lucy. It was important to act on this perception before her nose seemed to grow or her mouth to hang open vacantly, her vocabulary to shrink or her feet to slap awkwardly on the linoleum. He was going to have to drum up some drippy conversation about friendship, a deadening policy statement that would reduce everything to awkwardness.
He needn't have worried. She was in the hallway when he arrived. She wrinkled her face at the sight of him, shook her head and disappeared into her office. He went into his own without greeting Eileen, his secretary. He tore down the Eskimo poster with disgust and, briefly, hated himself. A new set of tickets and itinerary lay on his desk. He opened the itinerary. It said, "Hell." Nothing else.
He picked up his phone.
"Eileen."
"Yes, Mr. Copenhaver."
"Good morning."
"Good morning."
"My mind was elsewhere."
"Don't worry about it."
"Thank you. Now, can you get me Lucy across the hall."
The phone rang only once.
"Lucy, Frank."
"Yes."
"Is there something wrong?"
"Is there something wrong..." she said. He knew now, of course, that there was.
"I thought we'd had a nice evening."
"We had, to a point."
"And at what point did you think it went downhill?"
"At the point you called me Gracie."
"I did that, did I?"
"About seven times."
"Sorry."
"I suppose it's not your fault, Frank. But I'm not your old wife."
"Of course not."
He hung the phone up and leaned on his hands. He could have said, "No, you're not my old wife. You're my wife's old friend. Some friend!"
For some reason, he called June up at the dealership. They had to page her on the lot. By the time she came to the phone, he had forgotten why it had seemed so necessary to call her. Nevertheless, he told her what had happened. She listened quietly. He explained as discreetly as he could that he had said one or two inappropriate things during a spell of delightful lovemaking and it had ruined everything. June said,"I can't get into it. When they're doing their job, they can call me John Brown for all I care." Frank thanked her anyway and hung up, then thanked her to himself for this burst of redneck health.
He went down to Lucy's office and sat under the waterfall while Lucy watched him and waited for him to say something.
"Are you still angry?" he said finally.
"No. I never was angry."
"I don't want to lay this on you, but if you weren't angry, you were hurt."
"Then I was angry, but I'm not angry now."
Some hours ago, he thought, she was chewing sheets and going "Oof, oof, oof!" while, evidently, I was going, "Oh, Gracie, oh, Gracie!" Quite a picture. Oh, dear.
Then she smiled and said, "This time, I'm not sending you anywhere." The air had apparently cleared. Frank left her office, thinking, What a nice person.
Frank straightened up his desk and went back out through the reception area. "I'm going to the ranch," he said.
"Can you be reached there?" asked Eileen.
"No, but I'll be back."
Frank drove north out of town, cutting through the subdivisions that lay around the old town center. Frank had a reluctant affection for these suburbs, with their repetitious shapes and lawns and basketball hoops and garages. He appreciated their regularity.
The road wound up through dryland farms of oats and malting barley, golden blankets in the middle of sagebrush country, toward the tall brown of snowy mountains. The city had almost disappeared behind him, yet from the front gate of the home place he could still make it out. A bright serration against the hills.
Frank stopped right in front of the house where his family once lived, a substantial farmhouse with a low, deep porch across the entire front, white with blue shutters and a blue shingled roof. The house sat on a fieldstone cellar with deep-set airyway windows at regular intervals beneath the porch. The house was locked up. In front, the tall hollyhocks his grandmother had taken such care of stood up boldly through the quack grass and competed along the border of the porch with the ocher shafts of henbane. The junipers hadn't been trimmed and streaks of brown penetrated their dark green masses. It was a fine old house that gave Frank the creeps.
He drove slowly past it toward the barn and outbuildings, looking for Boyd Jarrell, his hired man. He had already seen Jarrell's truck from the house, and when he crossed the cattle guard into the equipment compound, he watched Jarrell walk past the granary without looking up at Frank's car. He saw that Jarrell would be in a foul mood, and felt a slight sinking in his stomach. Boyd liked Mike but didn't like Frank. Mike came out here and played rancher with Boyd, building fence on the weekends or irrigating, and in general dignifying Boyd's job by doing an incompetent imitation of it. Frank could never understand why this would ingratiate Mike to Boyd, but he guessed it was a form of tribute.
Frank parked the car and walked toward the granary. Jarrell now crossed the compound going the other way, carrying an irrigating shovel and a length of tow chain over his shoulder.
"Boyd," Frank called, and Jarrell stopped, paused and looked over at Frank. "Have you got a minute?"
"I might."
Frank walked over to him.
"I spoke to Lowry Equipment on Friday," said Frank, "and the loader's fixed on the tractor. So, that's ready to go whenever you need it."
"If that's all it was."
"That's right. But I assume it's okay."
Jarrell looked away and smiled. Frank let it fall silent for a minute.
"I've got a buyer to look at our calves on Monday."
"I hope he can find them."
Frank looked at Jarrell. Jarrell had him by fifty pounds and ten years. But he had put down his mark.
"He'll find them," Frank said. "You'll take him to them. Or you'll get out."
Frank turned to go to his car.
"Fuck you, Copenhaver," he heard Jarrell say, like a concussion or a huge sneeze, and Frank kept walking. He heard Jarrell walk up behind him, and in a moment Frank's hat was slapped off his head. He bent to pick it up, then kept going to his car. Jarrell laughed and went to his truck, parked alongside the barn.
Frank stopped, then turned. He went back to where Jarrell stood. "Why did you do that, Boyd?"
"Because I don't like people telling me what to do."
"Well, Boyd, you should have thought of that."
"Thought of that when, you goddamn sonofabitch? When I let you tell me what to do?"
"When you came to work for us, Boyd. You knew what the deal was. I told you what the deal was. And I might have been the guy to give you your last chance." Jarrell crossed his arms and smiled at a faraway place. "I wouldn't hesitate to fire you right now except for the thought you might go back and beat up your wife like you did last time." Jarrell swung his gaze from the cloudy faraway and stared hard and flat into Frank's face. If it happens it happens, Frank thought. I couldn't live with myself if I shut up now. "Don't look at me, it was in the papers. And you know what? I had the same thought everybody else did: what kind of guy puts a hundred-ten-pound woman in the Deaconess Hospital? What kind of man is that? Good luck on your next job, Boyd."
Frank turned and began to walk toward his car. He hadn't gone many steps before he heard Jarrell behind him again. He kept walking and the steps ceased. He got in his car and drove out of the drive, past the unlucky house, and tried to picture the exact spot where Jarrell stood when he left.
When he got back to the office, he called Mrs. Jarrell and explained that he had had to let Boyd go, that Boyd was a fine man and a fine worker but that the time had come for each of them to get on with their lives in a different way. He had had to tell people before that it was time to get on with their lives. He said this in a conciliatory voice that sounded, after a bit, like that of a radio announcer or an advertisement for a commercial halfway house for disturbed youths. Mrs. Jarrell at least let him finish, then called him every foul name he had ever heard, including a few he was unsure of, like "spastic morphodite." Frank squinted in pain through this barrage and said that, nevertheless, he wished them all the luck in the world. His voice was a croak.
"Eat shit," said Mrs. Jarrell. "I hope you have a stroke."
Pause for thought. Some direct suggestions from Mrs. Jarrell. The same day Hell was suggested as a travel destination -and by a lover of the previous night! He went to see his brother Mike.
Mike was an orthodontist, and Frank had to wait until almost noon in his office, with bucktoothed preteens, reading kids' magazines before Mike had him in. They sat in the dental lab and talked, fat Mike still in his pale green smock, his round red face revealing the constant optimism that came of doing some one small thing in the world, namely pushing young teeth back and keeping them there. Frank looked around at the instruments, at the remarkable order.
"Mike," said Frank, "the ranch is making me crazy."
"You always tell me this when irrigation starts."
"I fired that cocksucker Jarrell."
"I wish you hadn't done that. He's a hard worker."
"I went out there today and he was in one of his cowboy snits."
"You shouldn't have gone out there. You know this happens when irrigation water runs. Everybody becomes an animal."
"I have to go out there. I had the tractor fixed for the filthy shit. He busted it, bent the bucket and blew the hydraulics. But he can't talk to anyone so I got it fixed. I tell him this and it just seems to make him madder.
<#FROWN:K03\>
There she is. No dancing brothers are in this place, nor any breathless girls waiting for the white bulb to be exchanged for the blue. This is an adult party - what goes on goes on in bright light. The illegal liquor is not secret and the secrets are not forbidden. Pay a dollar or two when you enter and what you say is smarter, funnier, than it would be in your own kitchen. Your wit surfaces over and over like the rush of foam to the rim. The laughter is like pealing bells that don't need a hand to pull on the rope; it just goes on and on until you are weak with it. You can drink the safe gin if you like, or stick to beer, but you don't need either because a touch on the knee, accidental or on purpose, alerts the blood like a shot of pre-Pro bourbon or two fingers pinching your nipple. Your spirit lifts to the ceiling where it floats for a bit looking down with pleasure on the dressed-up nakedness below. You know something wicked is going on in a room with a closed door. But there is enough dazzle and mischief here, where partners cling or exchange at the urging of a heartbreaking vocal.
Dorcas is satisfied, content. Two arms clasp her and she is able to rest her cheek on her own shoulder while her wrists cross behind his neck. It's good they don't need much space to dance in because there isn't any. The room is packed. Men groan their satisfaction; women hum anticipation. The music bends, falls to its knees to embrace them all, encourage them all to live a little, why don't you? since this is the it you've been looking for.
Her partner does not whisper in Dorcas' ear. His promises are already clear in the chin he presses into her hair, the fingertips that stay. She stretches up to encircle his neck. He bends to help her do it. They agree on everything above the waist and below: muscle, tendon, bone joint and marrow cooperate. And if the dancers hesitate, have a moment of doubt, the music will solve and dissolve any question.
Dorcas is happy. Happier than she has ever been anytime. No white strands grow in her partner's mustache. He is up and coming. Hawk-eyed, tireless and a little cruel. He has never given her a present or even thought about it. Sometimes he is where he says he will be; sometimes not. Other women want him - badly - and he has been selective. What they want and the prize it is his to give is his savvy self. What could a pair of silk stockings be compared to him? No contest. Dorcas is lucky. Knows it. And is as happy as she has ever been anytime.
<*_>three-dots<*/>
"He's coming for me. I know he is because I know how flat his eyes went when I told him not to. And how they raced afterward. I didn't say it nicely, although I meant to. I practiced the points; in front of the mirror I went through them one by one: the sneaking around, and his wife and all. I never said anything about our ages or Acton. Nothing about Acton. But he argued with me so I said, Leave me alone. Just leave me alone. Get away from me. You bring me another bottle of cologne I'll drink it and die you don't leave me alone.
"He said, You can't die from cologne.
"I said, You know what I mean.
"He said, You want me to leave my wife?
"I said, No! I want you to leave me. I don't want you inside me. I don't want you beside me. I hate this room. I don't want to be here and don't come looking for me.
"He said, Why?
"I said, Because. Because. Because.
"He said, Because what?
"I said, Because you make me sick.
"Sick? I make you sick?
"Sick of myself and sick of you.
"I didn't mean that part ... about being sick. He didn't. Make me sick, I mean. What I wanted to let him know was that I had this chance to have Acton and I wanted it and I wanted girlfriends to talk to about it. About where we went and what he did. About things. About stuff. What good are secrets if you can't talk to anybody about them? I sort of hinted about Joe and me to Felice and she laughed before she stared at me and then frowned.
"I couldn't tell him all that because I had practiced the other points and got mixed up.
"But he's coming for me. I know it. He's been looking for me all over. Maybe tomorrow he'll find me. Maybe tonight. Way out here; all the way out here.
"When we got off the streetcar, me and Acton and Felice, I thought he was there in the doorway next to the candy store, but it wasn't him. Not yet. I think I see him everywhere. I know he's looking and now I know he's coming.
"He didn't even care what I looked like. I could be anything, do anything - and it pleased him. Something about that made me mad. I don't know.
"Acton, now, he tells me when he doesn't like the way I fix my hair. Then I do it how he likes it. I never wear glasses when he is with me and I changed my laugh for him to one he likes better. I think he does. I know he didn't like it before. And I play with my food now. Joe liked for me to eat it all up and want more. Acton gives me a quiet look when I ask for seconds. He worries about me that way. Joe never did. Joe didn't care what kind of woman I was. He should have. I cared. I wanted to have a personality and with Acton I'm getting one. I have a look now. What pencil-thin eyebrows do for my face is a dream. All my bracelets are just below my elbow. Sometimes I knot my stockings below, not above, my knees. Three straps are across my instep and at home I have shoes with leather cut out to look like lace.
"He is coming for me. Maybe tonight. Maybe here.
"If he does he will look and see how close me and Acton dance. How I rest my head on my arm holding on to him. The hem of my skirt drapes down in back and taps the calves of my legs while we rock back and forth, then side to side. The whole front of us touches. Nothing can get between us we are so close. Lots of girls here want to be doing this with him. I can see them when I open my eyes to look past his neck. I rub my thumbnail over his nape so the girls will know I know they want him. He doesn't like it and turns his head to make me stop touching his neck that way. I stop.
"Joe wouldn't care. I could rub anywhere on him. He let me draw lipstick pictures in places he had to have a mirror to see."
Anything that happens after this party breaks up is nothing. Everything is now. It's like war. Everyone is handsome, shining just thinking about other people's blood. As though the red wash flying from veins not theirs is facial makeup patented for its glow. Inspiriting. Glamorous. Afterward there will be some chatter and recapitulation of what went on; nothing though like the action itself and the beat that pumps the heart. In war or at a party everyone is wily, intriguing; goals are set and altered; alliances rearranged. Partners and rivals devastated; new pairings triumphant. The knockout possibilities knock Dorcas out because here - with grown-ups and as in war - people play for keeps.
"He's coming for me. And when he does he will see I'm not his anymore. I'm Acton's and it's Acton I want to please. He expects it. With Joe I pleased myself because he encouraged me to. With Joe I worked the stick of the world, the power in my hand."
<*_>three-dots<*/>
Oh, the room - the music - the people leaning in doorways. Silhouettes kiss behind curtains; playful fingers examine and caress. This is the place where things pop. This is the market where gesture is all: a tongue's lightning lick; a thumbnail grazing the split cheeks of a purple plum. Any thrownaway lover in wet unlaced shoes and a buttoned-up sweater under his coat is a foreigner here. This is not the place for old men; this is the place for romance.
"He's here. Oh, look. God. He's crying. Am I falling? Why am I falling? Acton is holding me up but I am falling anyway. Heads are turning to look where I am falling. It's dark and now it's light. I am lying on a bed. Somebody is wiping sweat from my forehead, but I am cold, so cold. I see mouths moving; they are all saying something to me I can't hear. Way out there at the foot of the bed I see Acton. Blood is on his coat jacket and he is dabbing at it with a white handkerchief. Now a woman takes the coat from his shoulders. He is annoyed by the blood. It's my blood, I guess, and it has stained through his jacket to his shirt. The hostess is shouting. Her party is ruined. Acton looks angry; the woman brings his jacket back and it is not clean the way it was before and the way he likes it.
"I can hear them now.
"'Who? Who did this?'
"I'm tired. Sleepy. I ought to be wide awake because something important is happening.
"'Who did this, girl? Who did this to you?'
"They want me to say his name. Say it in public at last.
"Acton has taken his shirt off. People are blocking the doorway; some stretch behind them to get a better look. The record playing is over. Somebody they have been waiting for is playing the piano. A woman is singing too. The music is faint but I know the words by heart.
"Felice leans close. Her hand holding mine is too tight. I try to say with my mouth to come nearer. Her eyes are bigger than the light fixture on the ceiling. She asks me was it him.
"They need me to say his name so they can go after him. Take away his sample case with Rochelle and Bernadine and Faye inside. I know his name but Mama won't tell. The world rocked from a stick beneath my hand, Felice. There in that room with the ice sign in the window.
"Felice puts her ear on my lips and I scream it to her. I think I am screaming it. I think I am.
"People are leaving.
"Now it's clear. Through the doorway I see the table. On it is a brown wooden bowl, flat, low like a tray, full of spilling with oranges. I want to sleep, but it is clear now. So clear the dark bowl the pile of oranges. Just oranges. Bright. Listen. I don't know who is that woman singing but I know the words by heart."
Sweetheart. That's what the weather was called. Sweetheart weather, the prettiest day of the year. And that's when it started. On a day so pure and steady trees preened. Standing in the middle of a concrete slab, scared for their lives, they preened. Silly, yes, but it was that kind of day. I could see Lenox widening itself, and men coming out of their shops to look at it, to stand with their hands under their aprons or stuck in their back pockets and just look around at a street that spread itself wider to hold the day.
<#FROWN:K04\>
At last I applied for the commission of ensign (deck volunteer general) and became a 'ninety-day wonder' after training for that period of time aboard the U.S.S. Prairie State, moored in the Hudson the upper west bank of Manhattan.
And then my fate took a curious turn. Instead of being sent to sea, I was assigned to Vice Admiral Clarke's staff at 90 Church Street, where I found myself a kind of personal secretary to the old man, running errands, writing letters, accompanying him on social occasions and even handling some of the delicate problems of his rather difficult children. It was no fault of mine that he became so dependent on me that he opposed my transfer to more active duty, and Amanda, delighted to have me home, argued strongly that it was a quite sufficient contribution to the war effort to guard from distracting botherations the high officer who was responsible for the safety of our whole eastern sea frontier. But as I had always concentrated on looking the part of a man of courage, it now surely behooved me not to look the part of his opposite, and I suspected that few of my friends appreciated the stranglehold that my chief had on my naval career and deemed me the willing and complaisant captive of his personal needs. And so I found myself in the position of having actually to throw away the shield that a kind fate seemed to be interposing between me and my old nemesis!
The call for more officers on sea duty was now so urgent that Admiral Clarke was obliged to endorse my application for assignment to the amphibious fleet. I had decided that I might do better on a ship such as an LST, where one had only, so to speak, to follow the leader in a line of transports, than on an attacking destroyer, where any moment of panic might paralyze the brain and endanger the vessel. What I had not counted on was the favoritism of my admiral, who followed my career from his desk in Church Street (as a naval officer he could not resent my desertion) and was instrumental in my being made captain of a landing ship tanks.
Well, it started off well enough. I had nine officers and a hundred men under me, and being reasonable in my expectations of them and polite and friendly in my dealings, I soon found myself popular. We crossed the Atlantic to take part in the invasion of Normandy and had the good luck to unload our troops on one of the less guarded sectors of the beaches. After returning to the Solent three days later and dropping the hook exactly in our assigned position, I wondered whether the murky god of my adolescence had not been appeased at last.
Alas, he was only waiting for a more opportune moment. Some weeks later, ordered to London to take on Canadian troops, we passed at night through the Straits of Dover within range for some hours of the German shore batteries. They opened up on the convoy, and despite the British jamming of their radar, they managed to hit the merchant vessel directly ahead of us.
Now I learned what hell is. My crew, of course, were at their battle stations, and I at mine on the bridge with the officer of the deck, the executive officer, the chief quartermaster and a signalman. The night was black but lit with the flare of gunfire and the blazing wreck of the merchant ship, which we now had to pass and leave astern. I was suddenly absolutely convinced that we were going to be struck. The shell would land directly on the bridge itself. There was no doubt in my mind; it was the simplest and grimmest of facts. I opened my mouth to suggest some kind of evasive maneuver to the exec, whose figure I could just make out in the darkness, but no sound emerged. And then I knew that the horror choking me was simply unbearable. Anything, even death was preferable.
Suddenly I was walking aft. I was leaving the bridge. Leaving my battle station without even transferring the 'conn' to the exec! I think I meant to jump off the ship. At least I can recall leaning over the side on the stern, vaguely aware of the staring white faces of the gun crew of the three-inch fifty close beside me, and peering into the hissing foam of our wake. Did I hope to be picked up by a lifeboat of survivors from the wreck astern? Was I deterred by the apprehension of being sucked into our screws and cut to bits? I am not sure.
All I know is that I remained there, a miserable shivering wretch, until the firing ceased and I returned to the bridge. I mumbled something about an attack of the 'trots.' Nobody said anything.
So there it was. Nemesis. The final blow had fallen at last. Yet in the next days nothing happened. I was treated in the wardroom with the same good manners, and I began to wonder whether it was my imagination that these now veiled an unspoken scorn. I knew that the episode must have been discussed by every man on that vessel. But only in the eyes of the exec, a strange saturnine fellow in whom I fancied I could detect a resemblance to Andy Ritter, did I really believe I could make out a glimmer of contempt, and I suspected him of having felt that for me all along.
At last I realized something about LSTs. The ship's company does not depend on the guts and skill of the commanding officer to anything like the degree it does on vessels of attack. These big naval marine trucks perform their semi-automatic tasks under the orders of a group or flotilla commander, who is apt to be a competent and almost certainly courageous regular navy officer. The skipper of the individual unit is important to his crew largely because of his power to make their lives uncomfortable. If they have the good fortune to have drawn a reasonably easygoing and pleasant captain, how much does it matter if he has a yellow streak? The vessel, anyway, is rarely under direct attack.
So my defection was overlooked if not forgotten. I even dared to draw a breath of something like relief at the idea that the worst was now over. When we returned to the States, after some months of uneventful Channel ferrying, for an overhaul in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I was generous in granting liberty to the crew and entertained the officers on several occasions at night clubs.
I was still afraid, however, that one of the officers might tell Amanda of the horrid incident. The exec had left us to take command of another LST, and I did not believe that any of the friendly junior officers would do so vile a thing consciously, but we drank a good deal at our parties, and I could not be sure what distorted joke might emerge from the lips of a young and intoxicated ensign. I decided at last it would be safer to give her my own version of what had happened.
She listened closely and without interrupting. She did not seem surprised. But also did she not minimize it.
"It could have been a good deal worse," was her first comment. "If the ship had been hit while you were away from the bridge, I suppose you might have been in some sort of official trouble. Anyhow, you're due now for shore duty. And with any luck the war should be over before you go back to sea."
I did not at all like her implication that the episode was apt to be repeated. "But even if I should go back to sea," I protested, "there's no reason to assume I'd have another attack of nerves. I have a funny gut feeling that this was the kind of thing that always was going to happen to me, but now it's happened, it may not come again."
"But why risk it? You're home, my darling, and you're safe, thank God. I'm sure Admiral Clarke will be tickled pink to have you back in your old slot. And he won't let you go again, either. Oh, Ally, don't tempt fate! You've done your bit. Let well enough alone."
But I felt trivialized. There was a distinct discomfort in her minimization of a lifetime's trial. If my ancient inner enemy had been merely something that could be kept at bay by a silly staff job in Church Street, what did the long agony of my resistance amount to?
"I wonder whether I shan't apply for an LST command in the Pacific," I said moodily. "The war there may go on for years."
"You might stop to consider what you owe me and the baby," she said in a sharper tone. But then her expression suddenly changed, and she struck a deeper note. She even stretched out her arms to me. "Oh, my dearest, do you think I don't know?"
"Know what?" I did not rush to her arms. Every part of me was throbbing with alarm.
"Know everything, of course. How could I not, loving you as I do? Don't you see, that's got to be the answer? Oh, my poor suffering sweet, if you could only relax and love and let yourself be loved, how easily things would work themselves out! All your bad dreams would fade away, and you and I would be afraid of nothing in the world."
So there it was, Jonathan. A woman's answer to everything. Open the floodgates and let the damned-up sentiment come thundering out to obliterate all the ugly-bugly things in the big bad universe. And she may have been right, too. That's the sorry part. She may have been offering me my last clear chance. And I, like the ass I was doomed to be, or had doomed myself to be, had to turn away from her appeal. Perhaps I felt that otherwise I should be giving up my soul or my ego or even, silly as it sounds, my manhood. When all she was asking was that I give up the foolish little comedy that I had been making of my life! The absurd little piece that I had been desperately trying to turn into a noble tragedy! But lives that won't bow to a hurricane can bend to a gust of wind. Maybe what I couldn't bear was being called "my poor suffering sweet."
Anyway, I mixed her a cocktail and we changed the subject. That night we made love. The next day brought the news of the bombing of Hiroshima, and we knew that I should not have to go to sea again. I remember my gall in reminding myself, as a way of putting the whole matter behind me, of Gibbon's statement that the courage of a soldier is the cheapest and most common quality of human nature.
3
Alistair and I sat in silence for a minute in my office after he had finished. The room was darkening in the winter twilight. I switched on my desk lamp.
"But you and Amanda had another ten years of happy marriage life after that, did you not?"
"Oh, yes." He spoke in a tone of faint weariness. "She was never a nag. She didn't return to the subject. As you know, we had another daughter." He smiled wryly. "Born nine months after that discussion. We went on as before. Ours was what you might call a temperate union. Only, of course, because I made it that way. She would have been pleased with something a good deal hotter. But she was always a good sport."
"Until now?"
"Well, who could blame her for leaving me now? Hadn't she offered me a way out? Hadn't she given me fair warning?"
<#FROWN:K05\>
But the milliseconds distinguished the good from the merely adequate. Time enough for a spin or a half turn, a dip - and there should still be a moment left to smile before hands touched and moved apart again. "They called it 'off-timing' in our parents' day," Clayton had explained at the fraternity dance, "because the Lindy three-step is imposed on a four-four rhythm."
Terry reached out for her again, his body buoyed by the exultant wash of strings, tethered by the beat. Transmutation. He swung her into his arms, and they moved without break into a slow song: saxophones and a hundred strings, blue-cool eunuchs harmonizing It feels so good. She had forgotten how it felt to be touched and found desirable, to want with a will not one's own.
A man and a woman relieved of the weight of speech watched light slide from the windshield, the outside air offering no resistance, the car easing forward with barely a tremor. Earlier this evening, seduction had been verbal - words teased, provoked. Now, immersed in the familiar world of his scent, talk was no longer an issue.
He draped an arm over her shoulder as they walked toward his house, and her arm slipped around his waist. Then his tiny grunt of satisfaction, the key in the lock, the dark vestibule, hands slipping under her blouse, his lips. Her exposed skin chilled, the unexpected heat from his palms. She gasped as he sucked her tongue into him.
Down the hallway she held his hand like a lost waif, neither of them daring to speak. The bedroom door creaked, one dim lamp gave light enough to see that the sheets were blue, a bachelor's detail, marine-blue, a waiting ocean. When he touched her again their bodies merged into one long, yearning curve, and the sea rose up to meet them.
Thirteen
She stirred at the aroma of coffee, the comforting cluck of percolation. It smells so brown, she thought, stretching, then snapped awake as she remembered where she was, the deep blue sheets and (she slowly opened her eyes) the peach-and-white-striped wallpaper. She jumped out of bed, headed for the shower, then decided against it. Instead, she splashed water on her face, rubbed along her teeth with a finger full of Crest, and scooted into her clothes. A quick pick through her Afro, and she walked into the kitchen.
"Up already? And here I was planning to spoil you: breakfast in bed with all the trimmings, down to the rose." Arrayed on the tray were plate and napkin, a glass of orange juice, two pats of butter on a saucer, and a rose the color of coral in a crystal vase. Terry was at the sink pouring milk into a creamer, freshly showered and drenched in some exotic scent, clad in one of those white terry-cloth robes Virginia had seen only in the movies.
"Breakfast is served." He held out her chair and she felt warmth radiating from him as he pushed her gently up to the table, then the moisture of his lips on the back of her neck. "My Lord, I've found an angel," he whispered, and slid into the chair to her right.
She had rarely felt less angelic, unwashed and unflossed, with her rumpled blouse and her hair full of lint. If there was anyone who looked beatific it was this gorgeous man calmly sprinkling pepper over his scrambled eggs.
He looked up, smiling. "I've been thinking, princess. There's got to be more schools around here that have room for a Puppet Lady. You should try to get another gig as soon as this one's finished."
"I do have another 'gig,'" she replied.
"You do? Why didn't you tell me?"
"You never asked."
" Liar."
"Okay. You asked, but I didn't know you well enough yet. I still don't know you well enough - "
"Oh, no," he said, and they both laughed.
"But I'll tell you anyway," she continued. "I'm doing a month at the high school in Oberlin."
He frowned slightly. "Oberlin? Where's that?"
"Fifty miles from here, silly! Near Elyria." Then, to smooth over his ignorance: "It's tiny place. Six thousand people, two or three thousand college students."
"Oh, yeah - that radical hippy college, right? Lots of rich cultural-type families from New York send their kids there."
"Not just rich kids - smart kids. And I don't know what you mean by radical, unless you call being the first college to admit blacks and women radical."
"Whoa, whoa!" He lifted his hands, waving his napkin in mock surrender. "Look, I was out of line. More coffee?"
She nodded.
"Anyway, I shouldn't talk about things I don't know firsthand. Which I'll soon remedy. But I do know I like the idea of you being in the neighborhood." He deposited another kiss, this time on her forehead, and suddenly Virginia felt panic. The prospect of last night repeated over and over during the next month and more - to lean across a dinner table to kiss and exchange stories from the past, all the little intimacies of new lovers - the thought both enraptured and terrified her.
"But I won't be in the neighborhood," she stammered. "Not really."
He looked at her with amusement. Then he tried to convince her to stay at his house for the day - "a lazy Sunday" was how he put it - but Virginia needed breathing space.
"I can't," she said. "I've promised to visit an aunt this afternoon whom I haven't seen since I was nine."
"You won't spend all day with her, will you? Tonight - "
"Listen, Terry, I've got class preparations. I also have to plan my opening sessions for Oberlin. That starts up first thing the week after next, and it's a totally different bag."
"We can plan them together."
She smiled, and leaned over to kiss his chin. "Oh no we can't. If I stay, we'd get zero done, that's for certain."
"Well, lady, since you're calling the shots ... will you call me?" He leaned back, studying her expression. "You know" - she saw him swallow hard - "I'm in this for the distance. I mean it."
No. 118 Furnace. Ruts and crabgrass, acrid air, the horizon smeared with the lurid sediment of pollution. Hugging herself against the chill, Virginia trudged across the street, up the sunken steps, onto the sagging porch. The door of the small house opened, and she was swallowed in that massive bosom, spongy and instantly comforting, redolent with the mingled disclosures of sweet cologne, mothballs and wool warmed on the skin. Then she was bustled in, her coat peeled off and in a flurry of exclamations and questions - "My, my, what a sight for sore eyes you are! Tea or coffee? Water's on, sit down; I'll be with you in a minute" - she found herself alone in the room.
She sat down on the sofa, pale gold brocade kept immaculate by a plastic slipcover that clung to the backs of her thighs; she scooted forward, finally settling for a ladylike perch on the edge of the cushion. The coffee table, maple-veneered and from another decade, carried several month's worth of Ebony and Jet magazines; the pale green wall-to-wall carpet had probably been extolled by the salesclerk as 'sea mist' or 'mint frost' but here, with daylight filtering weakly through heavy yellow drapes, it exuded the melancholia of hospital waiting rooms.
She had the feeling she'd come back to something, like a sleepwalker. The modest yearning this room represented, this acceptance of one's vulnerability toward the exigencies of life - she had denied it and now, through a stroke of good luck or bad, the Arts Council had accepted her application for artist-in-residence and she had reason to return, back to the sulfurous skies and camphorated rooms where she first drew breath. Running and getting nowhere, round and round and faster and faster like Sambo until everything melted down to the antimacassars and hidden peppermints and tasseled pillows, the white leather-bound Bible on a doily and the table in the corner with its phalanx of yellowed family photographs framed and propped up under oval mats. ...
"My, my, will you look at that. The spittin' image."
Aunt Carrie stood in the doorway to the kitchen, teacups in one hand and a plate of cookies in the other. She shook her head slowly as she clucked her tongue. "Same eyes, same long neck and that way of holding yourself like someone attached a string to the top of your head and pulled it tight. Ernest must be proud enough to bust." She set the dishes down.
Virginia smiled. And Grandma Evans said her eyes were like Belle's.
Aunt Carrie was wearing a navy blue straight skirt and matching V-neck sweater stretched so tightly across the prow of her bosom that two ghostly circles of white shone through where her brassiere strained against the weave. It was an unusual outfit for a woman at home; Virginia had expected a muumuu or one of those loose shirtwaist dresses and a dun-colored cardigan with the sleeves pushed midway to elbow and two buttons buttoned at the top - instead, this attempt at sophistication. The effect was startling: from the wrappings of a legal secretary rose a vaguely gourd-shaped, jowled face whose pendulous lower lip revealed a crescent of deep pink mucous membrane whenever she smiled - as she did now, showing a row of uneven and widely spaced teeth. Her large eyes drooped slightly at the corners and seemed constantly on the point of tearing, giving her the appearance of a chocolate-brown beagle.
Virginia realized she had been staring; quickly, she reached for the teapot. Why, she looks just like I thought she would. I remembered her all along.
"Here, let me pour," she offered. "What do you take in yours, Aunt Carrie?"
"The same as you, dear. I don't take much to tea usually - never had occasion to, I guess."
"Oh, I'm sorry! I would have drunk coffee as well."
Aunt Carrie chuckled. "You must have learned that in the university."
"Learned what?"
"Having tea in the middle of the day. Anyway, I ain't so old I can't pick up a new habit. It's good to see you, sugar. Mrs. Evans said you was here, said you was bound to call."
"Aunt Carrie, I want to apologize for not getting in touch with you. I've been so busy..."
"Don't go apologizing to me. I'm not one for apologies, makes me blush. You young people got all that life ahead of you, it's no wonder you're busy. We may talk a lot about you not coming round to see us often as we'd like, but we know how it is."
She took a thin white handkerchief from her waistband and dabbed at her eyelids. There was a pink rose embroidered in one corner. "I remember baby-sitting you and your brother, how you liked to draw. You drew up every piece of paper you could get your hands on. Your dad had to lock his desk." She wrapped he hanky around her right index finger, pulled it straight, then started in again with the left index finger.
"May I ask you something, Aunt Carrie? I don't know if it means anything, really."
"What, dear?"
"Well, you mentioned the old station the other day, and then I dreamed that night - I mean, I had a dream about it - not a very pleasant dream, I'm afraid. But you were in it, and me, and my mother. I don't know if you can help me or not. I've always wondered why we had to move to Arizona in such a hurry. I don't remember anyone being too happy about it."
"Your father got a good job offer - "
"I know. But there has to be something else." She stared at the old woman's hands twisting the handkerchief; sometimes the rose could be seen among the coiled ends of the cotton, a delicate blemish. "One day, not long after Claudia was born, I overheard my parents arguing.
<#FROWN:K06\>
Sometimes even now I think I see him in the street or standing in a window or bent over a book in a coffee shop. And in that instant, before I understand that it's someone else, my lungs tighten and I lose my breath.
I met him eight years ago. I was a graduate student then at Columbia University. It was hot that summer and my nights were often sleepless. I lay awake in my two-room apartment on West 109th Street listening to the city's noises. I would read, write, and smoke into the morning, but on some nights when the heat made me too listless to work, I watched the neighbors from my bed. Through my barred window, across the narrow airshaft, I looked into the apartment opposite mine and saw the two men who lived there wander from one room to another, half dressed in the sultry weather. On a day in July, not long before I met Mr. Morning, one of the men came naked to the window. It was dusk and he stood there for a long time, his body lit from behind by a yellow lamp. I hid in the darkness of my bedroom and he never knew I was there. That was two months after Stephen left me, and I thought of him incessantly, stirring in the humid sheets, never comfortable, never relieved.
During the day, I looked for work. In June I had done research for a medical historian. Five days a week I sat in the reading room at the Academy of Medicine on East 103rd Street, filling up index cards with information about great diseases - bubonic plague, leprosy, influenza, syphilis, tuberculosis - as well as more obscure afflictions that I remember now only because of their names - yaws, milk leg, greensickness, ragsorter's disease, housemaid's knee, and dandy fever. Dr. Rosenberg, an octogenarian who spoke and moved very slowly, paid me six dollars an hour to fill up those index cards, and although I never understood what he did with them, I never asked him, fearing that an explanation might take hours. The job ended when my employer went to Italy. I had always been poor as a student, but Dr. Rosenberg's vacation made me desperate. I hadn't paid the July rent, and I had no money for August. Every day, I went to the bulletin board in Philosophy Hall where jobs were posted, but by the time I called, they had always been taken. Nevertheless, that was how I found Mr. Morning. A small handwritten notice announced the position: "Wanted. Research assistant for project already under way. Student of literature preferred. Herbert B. Morning." A phone number appeared under the name, and I called immediately. Before I could properly introduce myself, a man with a beautiful voice gave me an address on Amsterdam Avenue and told me to come over as soon as possible.
It was hazy that day, but the sun glared and I blinked in the light as I walked through the door of Mr. Morning's tenement building. The elevator was broken, and I remember sweating while I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. I can still see his intent face in the doorway. He was a very pale man with a large, handsome nose. He breathed loudly as he opened the door and let me into a tiny, stifling room that smelled of a cat. The walls were lined with stuffed bookshelves, and more books were piled in leaning towers all over the room. There were tall stacks of newspapers and magazines as well, and beneath a window whose blinds had been tightly shut was a heap of old clothes or rags. A massive wooden desk stood in the center of the room, and on it were perhaps a dozen boxes of various sizes. Close to the desk was a narrow bed, its rumpled sheets strewn with more books. Mr. Morning seated himself behind the desk, and I sat down in an old folding chair across from him. A narrow ray of light that had escaped through a broken blind fell to the floor between us, and when I looked at it, I saw a haze of dust.
I smoked, contributing to the room's blur, and looked at the skin of his neck; it was moon white. He told me he was happy I had come and then fell silent. Without any apparent reserve, he looked at me, taking in my whole body with his gaze. I don't know if his scrutiny was lecherous or merely curious, but I felt assaulted and turned away from him, and then when he asked me my name, I lied. I did it quickly, without hesitation, inventing a new patronym: Davidsen. I became Iris Davidsen. It was a defensive act, a way of protecting myself from some amorphous danger, but later that false name haunted me; it seemed to move me elsewhere, shifting me off course and strangely altering my whole world for a time. When I think back on it now, I imagine that lie as the beginning of the story, as a kind of door to my uneasiness. Everything else I told him was true - about my parents and sisters in Minnesota, about my studies in nineteenth-century English literature, my past research jobs, even my telephone number. As I talked, he smiled at me, and I thought to myself, It's an intimate smile, as if he has known me for years.
He told me that he was a writer, that he wrote for magazines to earn money. "I write about everything for every taste," he said. "I've written for Field and Stream, House and Garden, True Confessions, True Detective, Reader's Digest. I've written stories, one spy novel, poems, essays, reviews - I even did an art catalog once." He grinned and waved an arm. " 'Stanley Rubin's rhythmical canvases reveal a debt to Mannerism - Pontormo in particular. The long, undulating shapes hint at ... ' " He laughed. "And I rarely publish under the same name."
"Don't you stand behind what you write?"
"I am behind everything I write, Miss Davidsen, usually sitting, sometimes standing. In the eighteenth century, it was common to stand and write - at an escritoire. Thomas Wolfe wrote standing."
"That's not exactly what I meant."
"No, of course it isn't. But you see, Herbert B. Morning couldn't possibly write for True Confessions, but Fern Luce can. It's as simple as that."
"You enjoy hiding behind masks?"
"I revel in it. It gives my life a certain color and danger."
"Isn't danger overstating it a bit?"
"I don't think so. Nothing is beyond me as long as I adopt the correct name for each project. It isn't arbitrary. It requires a gift, a genius, if I may say so myself, for hitting on the alias that will unleash the right man or woman for the job. Dewitt L. Parker wrote that art catalog, for example, and Martin Blane did the spy novel. But there are risks, too. Even the most careful planning can go awry. It's impossible to know for sure who's concealed under the pseudonym I choose."
"I see," I said. "In that case, I should probably ask you who you are now."
"You have the privilege, dear lady, of addressing Herbert B. Morning himself, unencumbered by any other personalities."
"And what does Mr. Morning need a research assistant for?"
"For a kind of biography," he said. "For a project about life's paraphernalia, isits bits and pieces, treasures and refuse. I need someone like you to respond freely to the objects in question. I need an ear and an eye, a scribe and a voice, a Friday for every day of the week, someone who is sharp, sensitive. You see, I'm in the process of prying open the very essence of the inanimate world. You might say that it's an anthropology of the present.
I asked him to be more specific about the job.
"It began three years ago when she died." He paused as if thinking. "A girl - a young woman. I knew her, but not very well. Anyway, after she died, I found myself in possession of a number of her things, just common everyday things. I had them in the apartment, this and that, out and about, objects that were lost, abandoned, speechless, but not dead. That was the crux of it. They weren't dead, not in the usual way we think of objects as lifeless. They seemed charged with a kind of power. At times I almost felt them move with it, and then after several weeks, I noticed that they seemed to lose that vivacity, seemed to retreat into their thingness. So I boxed them."
"You boxed them?" I said.
"I boxed them to keep them untouched by the here and the now. I feel sure that those things carry her imprint - the mark of a warm, living body on the world. And even though I've tried to keep them safe, they're turning cold. I can tell. It's been too long, so my work is urgent. I have to act quickly. I'll pay you sixty dollars per object."
"Per object?" I was sweating in the chair and adjusted my position, pulling my skirt down under my legs, which felt strangely cool to the touch.
"I'll explain everything," he said. He took a small tape recorder from a drawer in his desk and pushed it toward me. "Listen to this first. It will tell you most of what you want to know. While you listen, I'll leave the room." He stood up from his chair and walked to a door. A large yellow cat appeared from behind a box and followed him. "Press play," he commanded, and vanished.
When I reached for the machine, I noticed two words scrawled on a legal pad near it: "woman's hand." The words seemed important, and I remember them as if they were the passwords to an underground life. When I turned on the tape, a woman's voice whispered, "This belonged to the deceased. It is a white sheet for a single bed ... " What followed was a painstaking description of the sheet. It included every tiny discoloration and stain, the texture of the aged cotton, and even the tag from which the words had disappeared in repeated washings. It lasted for perhaps ten minutes; the entire speech was delivered in that peculiar half-voice. The description itself was tedious and yet I listened with anticipation, imagining that the words would soon reveal something other than the sheet. They didn't. When the tape ended, I looked over to the door behind which Mr. Morning had hidden and saw that it was now ajar and half of his face was pressed through the opening. He was lit from behind, and I couldn't see his features clearly, but the pale hair on his head was shining, and again I heard him breathe with difficulty as he walked toward me. He reached out for my hand. Without thinking, I withdrew it.
"You want descriptions of that girl's things, is that it?" I could hear the tightness and formality in my voice. "I don't understand what a recorded description has to do with your project as a whole or why the woman on the tape was whispering."
"The whisper is essential, because the full human voice is too idiosyncratic, too marked with its own history. I'm looking for anonymity so the purity of the object won't be blocked from coming through, from displaying itself in its nakedness. A whisper has no character."
The project seemed odd to the point of madness, but I was drawn to it. Chance had given me this small adventure and I was pleased. I also felt that beneath their eccentricity, Mr. Morning's ideas had a weird kind of logic. His comments about whispering, for example, made sense.
"Why don't you write out the descriptions?" I said. "Then there will be no voice at all to interfere with the anonymity you want." I watched his face closely.
<#FROWN:K07\>Naanabozho, the first born manidoo, who had become a trickster spirit, was much too eager to hunt and kill what he could find, even the first little birds in their nests. Like a domestic animal he brought what he had killed to show to his mother. She told him never to kill little birds again. Naanabozho did not listen, and he did not stop killing little spirits on the earth. He was a trickster child.
Stone, the last born manidoo, seldom moved from his place on the earth. The birds, flowers, and animals came with his birth. Naanabozho and his other brother were together most of the time, but not with their brother Stone. At night the brothers shared their adventures with Stone because he could not travel.
Naanabozho was bothered that his travels and adventures were limited by his mother to the time it would take him to return to his brother Stone, so he asked his other brother if he could kill Stone.
Naanabozho listened for a time, but his brother was silent. He never answered the question. So, the first born manidoo child on the earth decided to listen to himself and planned to kill his brother Stone. This would be the first and most terrible crime on the earth, the death of the first born stone.
The trickster borrowed an axe from his grandmother and used it to kill his brother Stone but the axe broke in two places. Stone was hard and could not be killed with an axe. Then Naanabozho asked his brother Stone how to kill him.
"I will do whatever you tell me to do to kill you."
"Build a fire," said the manidoo trickster Stone. "Put me in the fire and when my body is red hot then throw cold water on me and watch what will happen to me."
Naanabozho built a huge fire. He threw more wood on the fire as his brother stone instructed him to do from the very heart of the fire, and then the trickster waited until his brother was red hot in the coals.
"Are you hot enough, is it time now?"
"No, not yet," said Stone.
"Wait, wait, more fire, is it time now?"
"Yes, it is the time," said Stone.
"Here comes the cold water then," said Naanabozho as he poured the water on his brother Stone. Stone was red hot and cracked in several places when the cold water touched him, and then he broke into thousands and thousands of pieces and flew in the four directions of the earth. At first it seemed that one of the first manidoo children had died on the earth, that the first stone had come to a wild death in a fire.
Naanabozho believed that he had killed Stone. The distance he could travel would never be limited by his brother. He could travel great distances at night and not bother to return to his brother, but Stone had outwitted his brother the trickster, the one who liked to kill.
Stone had broken into several families and covered the earth in the four directions. Stone families lived everywhere, in the mountains, on the rivers, in the meadows, in the desert. No matter where that trickster traveled he would not be far from his brother and the families of the stone. One break of the stone became a bear in the cities. Stone is in a medicine pouch. Stone is in the mirror.
Stone created the world of nature and the wanaki cards, and taught the tribes how to meditate. He created three sets of seven cards with pictures of animals, birds, insects, and the picture of his brother the trickster on one card in each set.
Naanabozho heard that his picture was on the cards so he buried two of the sets. He was tired and bored so one set of the cards survived. The third set of wanaki cards has been used to teach the tribes to remember stories and to meditate. The players create their own cards, but the seven must picture the bear, beaver, squirrel, crow, flea, praying mantis, and the trickster.
The player arises at dawn, turns one of the seven cards, meditates on the picture, and imagines he has become the animal, bird, or insect on the card for the day. Then stories are told about the picture and the plural pronoun we is used to be sure nature is not separated from humans and the wanaki game.
Stone created a meditation that would never leave him out. He taught that on each day a card is selected the player walks on a familiar trail and gathers fallen leaves, flowers, feathers, and other natural things of the season. Then he meditates on these things and places them in a room or on a table according to where they were found on the trail.
When animals, birds, insects, and living things are seen on the trail a stone is placed to remember the place. In this way, stone is always present where life would be in the wanaki game.
The game goes on for seven days, a new picture and identity at dawn. The last card in the game is the picture of the trickster. The last card leaves the choice of identities to the player, an imaginative picture for the last day of the game. Many players become eagles, and cranes, some become beavers and other water animals, and others become beautiful birds on the last card of the wanaki game.
Stone created a game that remembers him in stories. To end the game his brother would have to end the world, and he would never do that because he would be too bored and lonesome. Stone became a bear in his own trickster meditation. The wanaki game is his war with loneliness and with human separations from the natural world.
BEARS
March 1979
Turn the first card at dawn.
Bears in the wanaki circle, bears in the east.
The bears are with me now on this first turn of the cards. The stones are broken into bears and land in the east. We are the bears of chance, bears turned over on the mountain wind, turned over on the cards. We are bears on that slow burn at dawn, down from the wild treelines to our tribal agonies in the cities.
We are bears in the rain this morning, the picture of the bear and the bear in the mirror. We are more than a word, more than a word beast, we are remembered in stories. We return to the heart in stories, a return to nature in the pictures of the wanaki cards. We are bears on the rise in the cities this morning. The wordies held our name in isolation, even caged us on the page. We are bears not cold separations in the wilderness of dead voices.
We are together at dawn. No other bears are on the same trail around the lake. The caged eagle and the crows hear our stories, but the wordies would think we were strange at this hour, talking out loud to the crows in plural pronouns. Not many wordies would see me as the bear, and that is how bears have survived the hunters and the tourists. They might wonder who is with me, but few would see the real me in our stories.
Someone hears us with the crows at the cage, a fresh wordy in loose clothes, and he reeks of perfume and laundry soap. Even the crows move back, out of his poison scent. How can we remember who the wordies are when they smell the same, as if they came from the same box of soap. Their animals are lost, and no one can hear the stories in their blood.
The laundry boy follows us to the bench near the wisteria. His mouth moves with dead voices. How can he be so young and so dead? How could he kill all the animals and birds in his heart? How can he go on? He has no stories to remember because he asks us about our stories. He must be a trickster who played so hard he killed the animals in his own heart.
Laundry must think we are separated, he must think he understands our loneliness at this hour, but he is so easy to distract with the obvious in the natural world. Had he taken the scent of magnolia we might have heard his voice.
We crisscrossed the street and he was sure to follow that morning, so we turn to the right and circle around, but he continued on our trail. The mongrels were roused by the bear and shied by our shadows. The laundry boy lurched at the words and the mongrels barked him down to the animals in his heart. Too bad, he turned to the darkness not the treeline, and the mongrels sensed that he holds back the light in his own stories. The wordies close their books at the first bark and lose their way without a sentence.
Laundry believes he discovers people on the street, as if he landed as some pioneer of tribal stories, but he got lost in his own wilderness of words. How could he hear our stories? He never had his own stories to remember.
Laundry sees the darkness behind his eyes and waits to discover the last words that might hold back his death. How does he go on without stories? He comes so clean to the cage and dies over words in a dream.
We are seen as circus bears under a clear umbrella. We can jump rope to the crack of a whip and ride a small motorcycle in a tight circle on the sawdust. We are bears with an audience, bears in the word, and we are alone at night in a chemical civilization.
Some wordies laugh at us from their windows on the block. Children reach out at a great distance in their dreams to touch our nose, to hide in our maw, and pull our thick hair high around their thin necks in winter.
There, at that clean pink house with the wild shutters, a thin woman leans over the fence as we pass. We were invited to touch her high breasts, the breasts steam in the cold rain. She was silent and never moved. Would she be worried that we were bears?
Laundry cursed the mongrels, and we were alone under the umbrella. We were alone with our pronouns and stories, and there were distances even in our pictures. We might have been a mourning dove, or an otter on the great river. We are bears this morning, and later the cards might turn us into birds at dawn. We could be cockroaches, and we are tricksters in the end. The cards protect us from the dead voices of the wordies.
Broken windows on a truck.
Beer cans and chicken cartons at the bus stop. Cigarettes buried in the concrete.
Printed flowers on a wet scarf distract us from the trees and flowers behind the building. There, spread like a sacred shield over the wire near the storm sewer, the wet red flowers and leaves on the scarf seem more real than the trumpet vines that decorated the center of the cedar trees across the barrier.
The cedars were moist and gentle in the rain, but the cotton flowers bound a culture that made more sense in the cities. So, we were circus bears with a bright silk scarf. First we smelled it, our nostrils flared over the neck perfume of a hesitant blonde, a teacher at the public school. She left a scent of beer and beans, garlic, chalk, and she takes her place in our memories.
We heard more than stories of trees and flowers, so we hounded the material world on the block. We brushed a fence woven with bamboo, pounded a rock garden, and touched an iron bird over a mailbox, and we laid our paws on houses, window frames, fences, and golden doors.
<#FROWN:K08\>They were often in harmony, even if for different reasons. You're feeling better, he asked. The Cavaliere had not married a monkey. The carriage rolled on. It began to rain. London expired behind them. The Cavaliere's entourage was wending its way back to his passions - ruling passions. The Cavaliere went on with Candide and valet to El Dorado, Catherine stared down at her own book, the maid's chin dropped to her breast, the panting horses tried to pull ahead of the whip, the servants in the rear coach giggled and tippled, Catherine continued to labor for breath, and soon London was only a road.
2
They had been married, and childless, for sixteen years.
If the Cavaliere, who like so many obsessive collectors was a natural bachelor, married the only child of a wealthy Pembrokeshire squire to finance the political career he embarked on after ten time-serving years in military regalia, it was not a good reason. The House of Commons, four years representing a borough in Sussex in which he never set foot, turned out to offer no more scope for his distinctive talents than the army. A better reason: it had brought him money to buy pictures. He also had something richer than money. Yielding to the necessity of marrying - somewhat against my inclination, he was to tell another impecunious younger son, his nephew, many years later - he had found what he called lasting comfort. On the day of their marriage Catherine locked a bracelet on her wrist containing some of his hair. She loved him abjectly but without self-pity. He developed the improbable but just reputation for being an uxorious husband. Time evaporated, money is always needed, comforts found where they were not expected, and excitement dug up in barren ground.
He can't know what we know about him. For us he is a piece of the past, austerely outlined in powdered wig and long elegant coat and buckled shoes, beaky profile cocked intelligently, looking, observing, firm in his detachment. Does he seem cold? He is simply managing, managing brilliantly. He is absorbed, entertained by what he sees - he has an important, if not front-rank, diplomatic posting abroad - and he keeps himself busy. His is the hyperactivity of the heroic depressive. He ferried himself past one vortex of melancholy after another by means of an astonishing spread of enthusiasms.
He is interested in everything. And he lives in a place that for sheer volume of curiosities - historical, natural, social - could hardly be surpassed. It was bigger than Rome, it was the wealthiest as well as the most populous city on the Italian peninsula and, after Paris, the second largest city on the European continent, it was the capital of natural disaster and it has the most indecorous, plebeian monarch, the best ices, the merriest loafers, the most vapid torpor, and, among the younger aristocrats, the largest number of future Jacobins. Its incomparable bay was home to freakish fish as well as the usual bounty. It had streets paved with blocks of lava, and, some miles away, the gruesomely intact remains, recently rediscovered, of two dead cities. Its opera house, the biggest in Italy, provided a continual ravishment of castrati, another local product of international renown. Its handsome, highly sexed aristocracy gathered in one another's mansions at nightly card parties, misleadingly called conversazioni, which often did not break up until dawn. On the streets life piled up, extruded, overflowed. Certain court celebrations included the building in front of the royal palace of an artificial mountain festooned with meat, game, cakes, and fruit, whose dismantling by the ravenous mob, unleashed by a salvo of cannon, was applauded by the overfed from balconies. During the great famine of the spring of 1764, people went off to the baker's with long knives inside their shirts for the killing and maiming needed to get a small ration of bread.
The Cavaliere arrived to take up his post in November of that year. The expiatory processions of women with crowns of thorns and crosses on their backs had passed and the pillaging mobs disbanded. The grandees and foreign diplomats had retrieved the silver that they had hidden in convents. The court, which had fled north sixteen miles to the colossal, grimly horizontal residence at Caserta. was back in the city's royal palace. The air intoxicated with smells of the sea and coffee and honeysuckle and excrement, animal and human, instead of corpses rotting by the hundreds on the streets. The thirty thousand dead in the plague that followed the famine were buried, too. In the Hospital of the Incurables, the thousands dying of epidemic illness no longer starved to death first, at the rate of sixty or seventy a day. Foreign supplies of corn had brought back the acceptable level of destitution. The poor were again cavorting with tambourines and full-throated songs, but many had kept the long knives inside their shirts which they'd worn to scout for bread and now murdered each other more often for the ordinary, civil reasons. And the emaciated peasants who had converged on the city in the spring were lingering, breeding. Once again the cuccagna would be built, savagely dismantled, devoured. The Cavaliere presented his credentials to the thirteen-year-old King and the regents, rented a spacious three-story mansion commanding a heart-stopping view of the bay and Capri and the quiescent volcano for, in local money, one hundred fifty pounds a year, and began organizing as much employment as possible for his quickened energies.
Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle - it is one of the reasons that people of means move abroad. Where those stunned by the horror of the famine and the brutality and incompetence of the government's response saw unending inertia, lethargy, a hardened lava of ignorance, the Cavaliere saw a flow. The expatriate's dancing city is often the local reformer's or revolutionary's immobilized one, ill-governed, committed to injustice. Different distance, different cities. The Cavaliere had never been as active, as stimulated, as alive mentally. As pleasurably detached. In the churches, in the narrow, steep streets, at the court - so many performances here. Among the bay's eccentric marine life, he noted with delight (no rivalry between art and nature for this intrepid connoisseur) one fish with tiny feet, an evolutionary overachiever who nevertheless hadn't made it out of the water. The sun beat down relentlessly. He trod steaming, spongy ground that was hot beneath his shoes. And bony ground loaded with rifts of treasure.
The obligations of social life of which so many dutifully complain, the maintenance of a great household with some fifty servants, including several musicians, keep his expenses rising. His envoy's salary was hardly adequate for the lavish entertainments required to impose himself on the imagination of people who counted, a necessary part of his job; for the expectations of the painters on whom he bestows patronage; for the price of antiquities and pictures for which he must compete with a host of rival collectors. Of course he is eventually going to sell the best of what he buys - and he does. A gratifying symmetry, that collecting most things requires money but then the things collected themselves turn into more money. Though money was the faintly disreputable, necessary byproduct of his passion, collecting was still a virile occupation: not merely recognizing but bestowing value on things, by including them in one's collection. It stemmed from a lordly sense of himself that Catherine - indeed, all but a very few women - could not have.
His reputation as a connoisseur and man of learning, his affability, the favor he came to enjoy at court, unmatched by any other of the envoys, and made the Cavaliere the city's leading foreign resident. It was to Catherine's credit that she was no courtier, that she was revolted by the antics of the King, a youth of stupefying coarseness, and by his snobbish, fertile, intelligent wife, who wielded most of the power. As it did him credit that he was able to amuse the King. There was no reason for Catherine to accompany him to the food-slinging banquets at the royal palace to which he was convened three or four times a week. He was never bored when with her; but he was also happy to be alone, out for whole days on the bay in his boat harpooning fish, when his head went quiet in the sun, or gazing at, reviewing, itemizing his treasures in his cool study or the storeroom, or looking through the new books on ichthyology or electricity or ancient history that he had ordered from London. One never could know enough, see enough. Much longing there. A feeling he was spared in his marriage, a wholly successful marriage - one in which all needs were satisfied that had been given permission to arise. There was no frustration, at least on his part, therefore no longing, no desire to be together as much as possible.
High-minded where he was cynical, ailing while he was robust, tender when he forgot to be, correct as her table settings for sixty - the amiable, not too plain, harpsichord-playing heiress he had married seemed to him pure wife, as far as he could imagine such a being. He relished the fact that everyone thought her admirable. Conscientiously dependent rather than weak, she was not lacking in self-confidence. Religion animated her; her dismay at his impiety sometimes made her seem commanding. Besides his own person and career, music was the principal interest they had in common. When Leopold Mozart and his prodigy son had visited the city two years ago Catherine had becomingly trembled as she sat down to play for them, and then performed as superbly as ever. At the weekly concerts given in the British envoy's mansion, to which all of local society aspired to be invited, the very people who most loudly talked and ate through every opera during the season fell silent. Catherine tamed them. The Cavaliere was an accomplished cellist and violinist - he had taken lessons from the great Giardini in London when he was twenty - but she was the better musician, he freely allowed. He liked having reasons to admire her. Even more than wanting to be admired, he liked admiring.
Though his imagination was reasonably lascivious, his blood, so he thought, was temperate. In that time men with his privileges were usually corpulent by their third or fourth decade. But the Cavaliere had not lost a jot of his young man's appetite for physical exertion. He worried about Catherine's delicate, unexercised constitution, to the point of sometimes being made uneasy by the ardor with which she welcomed his punctual embraces. There was little sexual between them. He didn't regret not taking a mistress, though - whatever others might make of the oddity. Occasionally, opportunity plumped itself down beside him; the heat rose; and he found himself reaching from moist palm to layered clothes, unhooking, untying, fingering, pushing. But the venture would leave him with no desire to continue; he was drawn to other kinds of acquisition, of possession. That Catherine took no more than a benevolent interest in his collections was just as well, perhaps. It is natural for lovers of music to enjoy collaborating, playing together. Most unnatural to be a co-collector. One wants to possess (and be possessed) alone.
It is my nature to collect, he once told his wife.
"Picture-mad," a friend from his youth called him - one person's nature being another's idea of madness; of immoderate desire.
As a child he collected coins, the automata, then musical instruments. Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself - it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting. By his early twenties the Cavaliere had already formed and been forced to sell, in order to pay debts, several small collections of paintings.
Upon arriving as envoy he started collecting anew. Within an hour on horseback, Pompeii and Herculaneum were being dug up, stripped, picked over; but everything the ignorant diggers unearthed was supposed to go straight to the storerooms in the nearby royal palace at Portici.
<#FROWN:K09\>
She kept staring at him.
How could I have lived under the same roof and not known what was transpiring in that room all these years. Forever transpiring! Wait a minute, come closer, Harlan. I wont bite you, you fool. Let me look at you. Kneel down.
Harlan knelt down. She touched his dark face and straight black hair.
The face does not tell all, does it? The face is a liar, and your face has lied to me. No, you do not look like one of them.
One of who, Harlan could not control his anger.
Like the children of Sodom, she muttered. Degenerate, abandoned by God and man. The kingdom of forever damned.
I am going to stay the night, Mrs. Vane, Harlan said, whether you will it or not. I will stay to see you are all right. You will have to allow it for your own good.
I have no good, I have nothing. The photographs have sealed off everything from me, past present future, kingdom come, all gone up in one cataclysm. Had there been a hundred stacked corpses in there it would have been a less gruesome sight.
Her color began to return. She worked the rings on her two hands frantically.
Will you make me some strong coffee, she said in a voice more like that of a great star.
Do you think coffee is right after your medicine? Harlan wondered.
When I tell you what it is I want, it is what I want, and it is of course right. So march!
Harlan was gone so long that when he came back she had fallen asleep in his chair. She stirred and opened her eyes. She stared at the cup of hot coffee.
Ah well, ah well, she said and received the cup. I feel I have come back from the deepest part of the infernal kingdom. I walked down to hell and here I am sitting drinking coffee prepared by one of the participants in hell rites.
Olga Petrovna raised her coffee cup.
She tasted the brew.
Yes, its perfect. You have many talents, all hidden of course from a woman who was only his spouse. How fortunate he was in having solicited your assistance for so long.
Harlan sat down in a small chair nearby. To his shame he burst into tears and sobbed.
All the tears of the seven seas will not wash away what you are, were, and probably will go on being as you leave these premises.
Harlan wept on. She threw him a huge ornately embroidered linen handkerchief and he dried his eyes.
Abner Blossom was so engulfed in the writing of his new opera, a kind of postlude he later called it to The Kinkajou, that he had perhaps failed to take into account the magnitude of the scandal of Cyril Vane's funeral, and the successive scandals like intermittent explosions in a firecracker factory which came after the disgrace of the funeral.
The maenad of course of all of the tumult and the shouting was Olga Petrovna herself. Everybody said she had gone mad, but the fact was if that were so then she had always been mad, but had not had the right script by which her madness could be so completely expressed. Yet in a deeper sense the photographs and the photographic suite itself long sealed to her inquiring eye and nervous fingers had altered her faculties, disordered her senses, and unleashed in her an energy, a shameless bravado, as she went flinging to the winds of any restraint.
Other aging screen stars remembered perhaps Alla Nazimovas estimate of Olga Petrovna. Nazimova, the great Russian actress, once said when Olga had paid her a visit in her dressing room: Always remember, my dear, that it is the firm hand on the reins and not the untamed fury of the steed that wins the day.
Olga Petrovna might have remembered the great Nazimovas words the day she flung all reason and restraint to the winds, but had she placed herself under continuous restraint there would have been no explosions of scandal and obloquy. Cyril Vane would probably have sunk into even greater oblivion than he had achieved before his death.
Scandal is the breath of fame in the United States of America. No one can be perfectly famous unless he has fallen into the glue pot. The press lives on lies, and where truth impedes its progress, truth is easily changed to headlines. The press had had lean years, and the scandal arising from the death of the old photographer-novelist brought the corpse of journalism briefly back to life.
Usually as Abner took his breakfast in his bed, Ezekiel seated himself in a chair that almost impinged on the bed itself, for Abners deafness required proximity when one spoke to him, and Ezekiel relished booming out the latest newspaper instalments of infamy and vilification. All was of course disseminated by the servant in the interest of decency, decorum and the fitness of what one can impart.
But there was a sudden vigorous insistent ringing of the front doorbell. Ezekiel and his master exchanged worried glances.
Best to answer it, Abner finally said, and rose out of the layers of bedclothes, fastened the cord of his pajama bottoms, and threw on a faded Chinese dressing gown.
He could barely make out a long sequence of whisperings, clearing of the throat, grumbling and then nervous guffaws.
A flustered but still regal Ezekiel entered the bedroom.
Count Alexander Ilitch, Sir.
Abner gave Ezekiel a look of disbelief and irritation.
What shall I tell him?
What have you told him? Abner almost shouted.
That you are occupied.
Good, Abner seated himself in the little alcove next to the bedroom. "Tell him then I will see him.
Count Alexander Ilitch had passed his best years. His face which had once been superlatively handsome was now careworn and flaccid. His hair on the other hand had retained much of the color and luxuriance of his youth and gave him from a distance a look of a man in his prime.
Count Ilitch always carried a small cane which helped him keep his balance. He had a gunshot wound in his left leg sustained during a duel he had fought near the Volga River, at least according to his own story.
This is an unexpected pleasure, Abner took the Counts hand and pressed it briefly.
I am intruding, dear Mr. Blossom," the Count apologized.
Abner bowed faintly.
May we speak in private? the visitor stared at Ezekiel.
We are in private, Count, Abner Blossom assured Ilitch.
Count Ilitch nodded, placed his cane carefully almost lovingly by the side of his chair.
Ezekiel picked the cane up despite a motion of displeasure from Count Ilitch and placed the cane just out of reach of the visitor.
I will be brief and to the point, Count Ilitch spoke now with considerable effort. It was perhaps this effort which brought the blood to his countenance, and all at once cleared his features of the look of age. Abner Blossoms mouth opened in a kind of surprise, for Count Ilitch all at once appeared as a relatively young and extremely fetching person. His great mass of yellow hair suddenly came loose and fell indolently about his ears.
But before I begin, Count Ilitch entreated, all the while trying to brush back his unruly shock of hair, would it be possible for your young servant to fetch us a footstool by chance? He pointed to his injured leg.
Ezekiel brought forth a footstool with an ornate American Indian design and placed the Counts rather dainty feet accurately and securely on the stool.
Thank you, oh thank you, the Count cried and grasped Ezekiels hand tightly in gratitude.
Abner now resembled in his mien more than ever that of a presiding judge.
Mr. Blossom, you must not write the opera, the Count all at once blurted out.
There was no immediate response from Abner, but Ezekiel paused at the door with an air of surprise, even shock at the sudden utterance of Count Ilitch. Then he hurried out.
Must not! Cannot! the Count repeated.
From the Counts voice now Abner recalled that his visitor had once sung in a charming male alto and had given recitals to other titled Russians living in exile.
Ezekiel returned bearing a tray with two large glasses filled with wine.
Count Ilitchs powerful right hand shook as he accepted the refreshment and he had finally to hold the glass with both hands as he thirstily sipped the wine.
Lovely bouquet, the Count sipped again and again appreciatively. Little drops of sweat appeared on his brow and his right cheek. But allow me to return to our problem, dear Mr. Blossom. An opera based on her husbands life - I refer of course to Madame Olga Petrovna. It would come at the worst possible time for her - Remember, dear Mr. Blossom, may I call you Abner in remembrance of your kindness to me in times past when I was honored by being invited to your sumptuous banquets here at the Enrique ....
Abner Blossom raised his own glass in gracious condescension.
Thank you, Count Ilitch whispered. Remember, then, dear Abner, he spluttered a bit and sipped more wine, and raised his nearly empty glass to Ezekiel who immediately filled it to the brim. Remember, then, my gracious host, that I knew Olga Petrovna in our native land, in long ages past. She was then known as Vassila. Yes, Vassila, Count Ilitchs eyes were a bit moist. We were the dearest of friends. That is why, dear Abner, I have dared to come here today because I am her friend and compatriot although I was much younger than Vassila of course in our Russian days. I have dared to come, then, partly because of knowing her so long ago and partly because I used to be your honored guest at your banquets.
Count Ilitch now sighed heavily as he used to do when as a male alto he entertained his friends with singing arias from Tchasikowskys lesser-known operas.
She has sent me to you as her interlocutor! For some reason now Count Ilitch rose, but then remembering his wounded calf muscle he sat abruptly down.
Vassila, pardon me, I mean Olga Petrovna begs you on bended knee, Count Ilitch concluded his request, and almost feverishly finished his second glass of wine, again filled to overflowing by the attentive Ezekiel.
Gazing over at his employer, for a moment Ezekiel thought that Abner had fallen asleep for his employer had his eyes closed tightly to the added discomfiture of Count Ilitch.
"We once spent an entire long evening together on the Volga," Count Ilitch spoke so low at that moment that Abner Blossom could not possibly have heard him, and had kept in any case his eyes tightly closed.
"I greatly appreciate your taking time from your own pressing affairs to come here, Count Ilitch, all on behalf of our dear friend Olga Petrovna, or as you called her of yore, Vassila .... But see here -" Abner now opened both his eyes widely - "I cannot even acknowledge I have heard such a request on your part or hers."
"Cannot?" Count Ilitch asked in an amazed theatrical tone, and again Abner Blossom imagined he could hear the Count's male alto voice in recital.
"Cannot, will not, never shall countenance such a request, even when it comes from so prepossessing, so winsome, so elegant and manly a gentleman as yourself, Count Ilitch. I have always admired you. I have always wanted to be of service to you now and in the future. But I cannot help you because in the first place there is no such opera in progress."
"No such opera," Count Ilitch asked hopefully.
"None whatsoever. Certainly, dear Count, none based on the life of - you did call her Vassila I believe. No such opera based on Vassila's life or that of her dead and departed spouse exists!"
<#FROWN:K10\>
Oriental fabrics being fashionable in Europe ever since Napoleon's Egyptian foray, permitted glimpses in the warm candlelight of her plump shoulders' ivory skin and of the powdered embonpoint the dcolletage of her high-waisted gown of well-set silks revealed. He bent low, placing his beaver hat, with its own fashionable iridescence, between his boots, his Philadelphia boots, of a thinner black leather than his Lancaster boots, their tops cut diagonally in the hussar style.
"You disclaim, to elicit flattery," his new companion gaily accused him. "You have lost your mountain manners, if ever you had them."
"My dear mother is a woman of some graces, who loved the old poets as well as the Bible, and my father a man of sufficient means to send me to college, though he missed my strong back on his farm. He began on the road to prosperity as the sack-handler in a frontier trading post; in his youth in County Donegal, his own father had deserted him, and when the dust of our Revolution settled he quit his dependency on his dead mother's brother, and sailed." Lest this self-description which he impulsively confided seem boastful, he added, "But the simple Christian virtues remain my standard of success, and when my second term in the Assembly ended three years ago last June, I with great pleasure surrendered all political ambition."
Mary Jenkins loyally protested, "Yet the Judge Franklin case has kept you in the public eye, and there is talk," she explained to her sister, giving their guest the dignity of the third person, "of the Federalists putting up Mr. Buchanan for the national Congress in next year's election. And just the other day he and Mr. Jenkins and James Hopkins were appointed to form a committee to advise our Congressman on the question of slavery in Missouri."
Buchanan hastened to disclaim, "Lancaster is a small city, Miss Hubley, and a few dogs must bark on many street corners."
"I assume you will advise to vote against extending slavery; I think it wicked, wicked, the way those planters want to spread their devilish institution over all of God's terrain!"
Such fire of opinion, the tongue and heart outracing reason, attracted Buchanan, and alarmed him. "We do so advise, Miss Hubley, though in terms less fervently couched than your own. Myself, since the Constitution undeniably sanctions slavery, I see no recourse but accommodation with it pro tempore. A geographical compromise, such as rumor suggests Senator Clay will soon propose, to maintain the balance of power within the Senate, would, I am convinced, allay the sectional competition that has heavily contributed to the present panic of selling and suing. For unless the spirit of compromise and mediation prevail, this young nation may divide in three, New England pulling one way and the South the other, and the states of middling disposition shall be left as ports without a nation to supply their commerce. Disunited, our fair States may become each as trivial as Bavarian princedoms!"
Grace said, theatrically addressing her sister, "Oh, I do adore men, the sensible way they put one thing against another. Myself, Mr. Buchanan, I cannot calmly think on the fate of those poor enslaved darkies, the manner in which not only the men in the fields are abused but the colored ladies also - I cannot, it is a weakness of my nature, I cannot contemplate such wrongs without my heart rising up and yearning to smite those monstrous slavedrivers into the Hades that will be their everlasting abode!"
Buchanan tut-tutted, "Come now, the peculiar institution presents more sides than that. You speak as a soldier's daughter, Miss Hubley, but here in peaceable Pennsylvania we take a less absolute view. The slavedrivers, for one, are themselves driven, by circumstances they did not create. Chattel slavery, though I, too, deplore its abuses, is as old as warfare, and to be preferred to massacre. In some societies, such as that of ancient Greece, the contract between master and slave allowed the latter considerable advantages, and our Southern brethren maintain that without the institution's paternal guidance the negro would perish of his natural sloth and inability. At present, our friends in the South see their share of the national fortune dwindling; much of the urgency would be removed from the territorial question, it is my belief, if new territories - to the south of the South, so to speak - were to be mercifully removed" - he made a nimble snatching gesture, startling both members of his little audience - "from the crumbling dominions of the moribund Spanish crown. Cuba, Texas, Chihuahua, California - all begging to be plucked."
He settled back, pleasantly conscious of the breast-fluttering impression his masculine aggressiveness had made. Now he directed his attention, with a characteristic twist of his head, specifically toward Mrs. Jenkins, who had remained standing, held upright by the strands of hostessly duty. "But I mustn't tarry, delightful though tarrying be," he said. "Inform Mr. Jenkins, if you will, that the Columbia Bridge Company matter took some hopeful turns under my prodding, and if he wishes to be apprised of their nature, and of the distance I estimate we have left to travel, he will find me in my chambers tomorrow all day."
"I will indeed inform him," the excellent wife agreed. "But please, Mr. Buchanan, you shame me by not letting me offer you a beverage, and then a spot of supper. My sister and I were to sit down to a simple meal - salt-pork roast, fried potatoes, dried succotash, and peach-and-raisin pie. It would brighten our dull fare if you could join us, and would keep you out of the taverns for an evening."
"People exaggerate my tavern attendance, even in my unattached days," Buchanan said, in mock rebuke, and with a jerk of his head rested his vision on Miss Hubley's alabaster upper chest, bare of any locket or sign of affection pledged. His attachment to Ann nagged at him awkwardly; he should be speeding from this house and presenting at the Colemans' door live evidence of his safe return from Philadelphia.
"Oh, do stay with us," Grace Hubley chimed. "It would be a kindness even after you are gone, for sisters continually need something to gossip about."
Between folded wings of peacock-shimmery Persian silk, the woman's powdered skin glowed in his imperfect vision, which needed for focus constant small adjustments of his head. "I would be honored to serve as helpless fodder for your sororal interchange," he pronounced, "but there can be no question of imposing my presence for the length of a meal. I will, Mrs. Jenkins," he announced, relaxing into conviviality, "upon your kind urging have tea to keep Miss Hubley company, and a thimbleful of port to keep company with the tea."
When Mrs. Jenkins, to arrange these new provisions, left the room, its glittering glow seemed to intensify; the purring blaze in the fireplace - its mantel in the form of a Grecian temple carved with fluted pillars and classic entablature of which the frieze was decorated with acanthus garlands in bas-relief - added its flickers and flares to the eddying web of candlelight. Cocking her head in unconscious imitation of Buchanan's own, Miss Hubley said prettily, since he had referred to his attached state, "I have heard the most wonderful things concerning Miss Coleman. She is as original as she is beautiful, and her family of an unchallenged prominence."
"The Colemans are seldom challenged, it is true," he said, permitting himself the manner if not the substance of irony in such a serious connection. "Even at the age of seventy-one, the Judge keeps a good grip on his interests, and his grown sons greatly extend his influence."
"Mary tells me all Lancaster thinks you are a knight errant to brave the Coleman castle and carry away the languishing princess." When this apparition laughed, the shadowed space between her breasts changed shape. Her voice formed cushions in the air, into which Buchanan sank gratefully after days of nasal legal prating in an oppressive metropolis.
"She would not languish long, were this particular knight to take a fatal lance."
Grace Hubley thoughtfully pursed her plump, self-pleasing lips. "It makes a woman unsteady, perhaps, to have too many attractions; it prevents in her mind the resigned contentment of a concluded bargain." Here she spoke, less mischievously than usual, from experience, absorbed and foreshadowed: we are told Grace Hubley was a young woman of three negative romances, not including the part she played in the Buchanan-Coleman episode. Thrice engaged to be married, misfortune and a fickleness of temperament ordained her ultimately to spinsterhood.
Buchanan, too, may have suffered from a surfeit of attractiveness. A decade later, he excited the Washington journalist Anne Royall to gush, in the third volume of her Black Book (1828-29), No description that the most talented writer could give, can convey an idea of Mr. Buchanan; he is quite a young man (and a <{_>batchelorbachelor<{/>, ladies) with a stout handsome person; his face is large and fair, his eyes, a soft blue, one of which he often shuts, and has a habit of turning his head to one side. He had been his mother's first son and, with the death of his older sister, Mary, in the year he was born, her eldest child. Five sisters followed, four of them surviving to form playmates and an audience. His capacity for basking in female approval was essentially bottomless, and Ann Coleman's good opinion had to it a certain bottom, reinforced by her family. Grace Hubley, in turn, we are told, possessed a beauty and vivaciousness of disposition that made her the pet adorable of her acquaintance. Her feathery banter was to his vanity, we might conceive, as a deep barrel of sifted flour is to a man's forearm. He stirred her, he took her tinge. The shadows the Colemans cast in his head were dispersed by the light of this social conversation very adroitly guided by the keen objective mind of Miss Hubley. Golden minutes fled by on winged feet. As the embrace of the November evening tightened around them, and the windows of the tall sitting room with its fine provincial furniture gave back only tremulous amber reflections of the lights burning within, and Mary Jenkins absented herself to supervise details of the impending meal, possibly the conversation between these two strangers, the pet adorable and the favorite son, whose ages flanked the turning point of thirty, deepened in intimacy and dared probe the innermost source of consolation and anxiety harbored by Americans of the early nineteenth century, the strenuous maintenance of which so remarkably consumed and yet also supplied their energy - the Christian faith. Struck by her repeated righteous rejection of black slavery in all its forms, indeed scandalized by her airy, quick-tongued condemnation of an institution so extensively and venerably bound up in the nation's laws of property and means of production, he ventured," Miss Hubley, I envy you the clarity of your views. God's design, it is evident, presents no riddles to your vision."
"What riddles there are, Mr. Buchanan, I leave to the Lord to solve." By this hour her own sipping had moved from tea to a brandy cordial in a tulip-shaped glass, and certain rosy warmth and confident languor broadened her gestures, beneath the loosening exotic length of Persian shawl.
He inclined his stout handsome person forward from the delicate lyre-back chair with fluted legs, so that his vision won for its field slightly more of the radiant expanse of Miss Hubley's bosom. "May I ask - " He hesitated. "I ask in all respectfulness, with full solemnity - have you known, then, an inner experience of election, that supports this lovely certainty of yours?"
She adjusted her shawl, to achieve an inch more concealment, then relaxed into self-exposition, saying, "I would not express it in so political a phrase - but for as long as I can remember, I have sensibly felt the closeness of the Lord. He looks over me - He approves of me - He rebukes me - He enjoys me."
<#FROWN:K11\>
31
The night of the long knives.
Or one long knife - the guillotine.
If only I had known, as the heroes in mystery novels used to say.
When it was over, I was reminded of Elijah at the gangplank or myself in Beverly Hills in the bookshop buying my portable Melville and hearing that strange woman's prophecy of doom: "Don't go on that journey."
And my naive response, "He's never met anyone like me before. Maybe that will make the difference."
Yep. Sure. The difference being it took a bit more time to prepare the pig's head for the hammer, the razor at the throat, and the hanging on the tender-hook.
Lenin referred to dumbclucks like me as "useful idiots."
Which is to say the image of Chaplin - remember? - crossing a street as a lumber truck passes and drops a warning red flag off the load. Chaplin picks it up and runs after the truck, to warn them they've lost the flag. Instantly, a mob of Bolshevicks Bolsheviks rounds the corner behind him, unseen, as Chaplin stands waving the flag after the truck. Enter the cops. Who promptly seize Chaplin, trample the red flag, and beat the hell out of him before throwing him in the hoosegow. The mob, of course, escapes. So ...
There I am, in Dublin, with a red flag, waving it at John. Or there I am in the Place de la Concorde as the Bastille wagons park and I offer to help folks up the guillotine steps. Only when I reach the top do I realize where I am, panic, and come down in two pieces.
Such is the life of the innocent, or someone who kids himself he is innocent. As someone once said to me: "Let's not be too naive, shall we?"
I wish I had heard and followed that advice on that night in a Chinese restaurant somewhere in the fogs and rains of Dublin.
It was one of those nights when the prophet Elijah did not prevent me - nor did I prevent myself - from drinking too many drinks and spilling too many beans in front of Jake Vickers and his Parisian lady and three or four visitors from new York and Hollywood.
It was one of those nights when it seemed you can't do anything wrong. One of those nights when everything you say is brilliant, honed, sharpened to a razor edge of risibility, when every word you speak sends the house on a roar, when people hold their ribs with laughter, waiting for your next shot across their bows, and shoot you do, and laugh they do, until you are all bathed in a warm love of hilarity and are about to fall on the floor writhing with your own genius, your own incredible humor raised to its highest temperature.
I sat listening to my own tongue wag, aim, and fire, damn well pleased at my own comic genius. Everyone was looking at me and my alcohol-oiled tongue. Even John was breaking down at my wild excursions into amiable insult and caricature. I imagined I had saved up tidbits on everyone at the table, and like those handwriting experts we encounter on occasion in life who read more in our hairlines, eyebrows, ear twitchings, nostril flarings, and teeth barings than are written in our Horatio stars or inked on plain pad with pencil, guessed at the obvious. If we do not give ourselves away in our handwriting or clothes or the percentage of alcohol on our breaths, our breathing does us in or the merest nod or shake of the head as the handwriting expert sniffs our mouthwash, or our genius. So lining up my friends one after another, against the stockade wall, I fired fusillades of wit at their habits, poses, pretensions, lovers, artistic outputs, lapses in taste, failures to arrive on time, errors in observation, and on and on. Most of it, I would hope, gently done with no scars to bandage later. So I drilled holes in masks, poured sulphur in, and lit the fuse. The explosions left darkened faces but no lost digits. At one point Jake cried, "Someone stop him!"
Christ, I wish they had.
For my next victim was John himself.
I paused for breath. Everyone stilled in their explosive roars, watching me with bright fox eyes, urging me to get on with it. John's next. Fix him!
So there I was with my hero, my love, my great good fine wondrous friend, and there I was reaching out suddenly and taking his hands.
"Did you know, John, that I, too, am one of the world's great hypnotists?"
"Is that so, kid?" John laughed.
"Hey!" everyone cried.
"Yep," I said. "Hypnotist. World's greatest. Someone fill my glass."
Jake Vickers poured gin in my glass.
"Go it!" yelled everyone.
"Here goes," I said.
No, someone inside me whispered.
I seized John's wrists. "I am about to hypnotize you. Don't be afraid!"
"You don't scare me, kid," John said.
"I'm going to help you with a problem."
"What's that, kid?"
"Your problem is - " I searched his face, my intuitive mind. "Your problem is, ah."
It came from me. It burst out.
"I am not afraid of flying to London, John. I do not fear. It is you that fears. You're afraid."
"Of what, H.G.?"
"You are afraid of the D<*_>u-acute<*/>n Laoghaire ferry boat that travels over the Irish Sea at night in great waves and dark storms. You are afraid of that, John, and so you say I am afraid of flying, when it is you afraid of seas and boats and storms and long night travels. Yes, John?"
"If you say so, kid," John replied, smiling stonily.
"Do you want me to help you with your problem, John?"
"Help him, help him," said everyone.
"Consider yourself helped. Relax, John. Relax. Take it easy. Sleep, John, are you getting sleepy?" I murmured, I whispered, I announced.
"If you say so, kid," said John, his voice not so amused but half amused, his eyes watchful, his wrists tense under my holding.
"Someone hit him over the head," exclaimed Jake.
"No, no," laughed John. "Let him go. Go on, kid. Put me under."
"Are you under, John?"
"Halfway there, son."
"Go further, John. Repeat after me. It is not H.G. who fears flying."
"It is not H.G. who fears flying - "
"Repeat, it is I, John, who fear the damned black night sea and fog on the ferry from D<*_>u-acute<*/>n Laoghaire to Folkestone!"
"All that, kid, all that. Agreed."
"Are you under, John?"
"I'm sunk, kid."
"When you wake you will remember nothing, except you will no longer fear the sea and will give up flying, John."
"I will remember nothing." John closed his eyes, but I could see his eyeballs twitch behind the lids.
"And like Ahab, you will go to sea with me, two nights from now."
"Nothing like the sea," muttered John.
"At the count of ten you will waken, John, feeling fine, feeling fresh. One, two ... five, six ... ten. Awake!"
John popped his pingpong eyes wide and blinked around at us. "My God," he cried, "that was a good sleep. Where was I? What happened?"
"Cut it out, John!" said Jake.
"John, John," everyone roared. Someone punched me happily in the arm. Someone else rumpled my hair, the hair of the idiot savant.
John ordered drinks all around.
Slugging his back, he mused on the empty glass, and then eyed me, steadily.
"You know, kid, I been thinking - "
"What?"
"Mebbe - "
"Yes?"
"Mebbe I should go on that damned ferryboat with you, ah, two nights from now ... ?"
"John, John!" everyone roared.
"Cut it out," shouted Jake, falling back, splitting his face with laughs.
Cut it out.
My heart, too, while you're at it.
How the rest of the evening went or how it ended, I cannot recall. I seem to remember more drinks, and a sense of overwhelming power that came with everyone, I imagined, loving my outrageous jokes, my skill with words, my alacrity with responses. I was a ballet dancer, comically on balance on the high-wire. I could not fall off. I was a perfection and a delight. I was a Martian love, all beauteous bright.
As usual, John had no cash on him.
Jake Vickers paid the bill for the eight of us. On the way out, in the fog-filled rainy street, Jake cocked his head to one side, closed one eye, and fixed me with the other, snorting with mirth.
"You," he said, "are a maniac!"
That sound you hear is the long whistling slide of the guillotine blade rushing down through the night ...
Toward the nape of my neck.
The next day I wandered around without a head, but no one said. Until five that afternoon. When John unexpectedly came to my room at the Royal Hibernian Hotel.
I don't recall John's sitting down after he came in. He was dressed in a cap and light overcoat, and he paced around the room as we discussed some minor point to be revised before I sailed off for England, two days later.
In the middle of our Ahab/Whale discussion John paused and, almost as an afterthought, said, "Oh, yeah. You'll have to change your plans."
"What plans, John?"
"Oh, all that bullshit about your coming to England on the ferryboat. I need you quicker. Cancel your boat ticket and fly with me to London on Thursday night. It'll only take an hour. You'll love it."
"I can't do that," I said.
"Now, don't be difficult - "
"You don't understand, John. I'm scared to death of airplanes."
"You've told me that, kid, and it's time you got over it."
"Maybe sometime in the future, but, please forgive me, John, I can't fly with you."
"Sounds like you're yellow, kid."
"Yes! I admit it. You've always known that. It's nothing new. I am the damnedest shade of yellow you ever saw."
"Then get over it. Fly! You'll save a whole day at sea."
"God," I moaned, falling back in my chair. "I don't mind being at sea all night The ferry leaves around ten p.m. It doesn't get across to the English port until three of four a.m., an ungodly hour. I won't sleep. I might even be seasick. Then I take the train to London, it gets in Victoria at seven thirty in the morning. By eight fifteen I'll be in my hotel. By eight forty-five I'll have had a quick breakfast and a shave. By nine thirty I'll be at your hotel ready to work. No time lost. I'd be busy on the white whale as soon as you - "
"Well, screw that, son. You're coming on the airplane with me."
"No, no."
"Yes, you are, you cowardly bastard. And if you don't - "
"What, what?"
"You'll have to stay in Dublin!"
"What?" I yelled.
"You won't get your vacation. No final weeks in London."
"After seven months?!"
"That's right! No vacation."
"You can't do that!"
"Yes, I can. And not only that, Lorry, our secretary, she won't get her vacation. She'll be trapped here with you."
"You can't do that to Lorry. She's worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for six months!"
"Her vacation's canceled unless you fly with me."
"Oh, no, John! John, no!"
"Unless you change color, kid. No more yellow."
I was on my feet.
"You'd really do that to her? Because of me?"
"That's the way it is."
"Well, the answer is no."
"What?"
"You heard me. Lorry goes to London. I go to London. And we go any damn way I please, as long as I don't interfere with our writing, my finishing, the script. I'll travel all night, and be on time at your room at Claridge's Friday morning. You can't fight that, argue that, I'll be there. I'm going on the ferry. You can't force me into flying on any goddamn plane."
"What?"
"That's it, John."
"Your final word?"
<#FROWN:K12\>
4
I didn't see him again for close to two years. Maria was the only person who knew where he was, and Sachs had made her promise not to tell. Most people would have broken that promise, I think, but Maria had given her word, and no matter how dangerous it was for her to keep it, she refused to open her mouth. I must have run into her half a dozen times in those two years, but even when we talked about Sachs, she never let on that she knew more about his disappearance than I did. Last summer, when I finally learned how much she had been holding back from me, I got so angry that I wanted to kill her. But that was my problem, not Maria's, and I had no right to vent my frustration on her. A promise is a promise, after all, and even though her silence wound up causing a lot of damage, I don't think she was wrong to do what she did. If anyone should have spoken up, it was Sachs. He was the one responsible for what happened, and it was his secret that Maria was protecting. But Sachs said nothing. For two whole years, he kept himself hidden and never said a word.
We knew that he was alive, but as the months passed and no message came from him, not even that was certain anymore. Only bits and pieces remained, a few ghostlike facts. We knew that he had left Vermont, that he had not driven his own car, and that for one horrible minute Fanny had seen him in Brooklyn. Beyond that, everything was conjecture. Since he hadn't called to announce he was coming, we assumed that he had something urgent to tell her, but whatever that thing was, they never got around to talking about it. He just showed up one night out of the blue ("all distraught and crazy in the eyes," as Fanny put it) and burst into the bedroom of their apartment. That led to the awful scene I mentioned earlier. If the room had been dark, it might have been less embarrassing for all of them, but several lights happened to be on, Fanny and Charles were naked on top of the covers, and Ben saw everything. It was clearly the last thing he expected to find. Before Fanny could say a word to him, he had already backed out of the room, stammering that he was sorry, that he hadn't known, that he hadn't meant to disturb her. She scrambled out of bed, but by the time she reached the front hall, the apartment door had banged shut and Sachs was racing down the stairs. She couldn't go outside with nothing on, so she rushed into the living room, opened the window, and called down to him in the street. Sachs stopped for a moment and waved up at her. "My blessings on you both!" he shouted. Then he blew her a kiss, turned in the other direction, and ran off into the night.
Fanny telephoned us immediately after that. She figured he might be on his way to our place next, but her hunch proved wrong. Iris and I sat up half the night waiting for him, but Sachs never appeared. From then on, there were no more signs of his whereabouts. Fanny called the house in Vermont repeatedly, but no one ever answered. That was our last hope, and as the days went by, it seemed less and less likely that Sachs would return there. Panic set in; a contagion of morbid thoughts spread among us. Not knowing what else to do, Fanny rented a car that first weekend and drove up to the house herself. As she reported to me on the phone after she arrived, the evidence was puzzling. The front door had been left unlocked, the car was sitting in its usual place in the yard, and Ben's work was laid out on the desk in the studio: finished manuscript pages stacked in one pile, pens scattered beside it, a half-written page still in the typewriter. In other words, it looked as though he were about to come back any minute. If he had been planning to leave for any length of time, she said, the house would have been closed. The pipes would have been drained, the electricity would have been turned off, the refrigerator would have been emptied. "And he would have taken his manuscript," I added. "Even if he had forgotten everything else, there's no way he would have left without that."
The situation refused to add up. No matter how thoroughly we analyzed it, we were always left with the same conundrum. On the one hand, Sachs's departure had been unexpected. On the other hand, he had left of his own free will. If not for that fleeting encounter with Fanny in New York, we might have suspected foul play, but Sachs had made it down to the city unharmed. A bit frazzled, perhaps, but essentially unharmed. And yet, if nothing had happened to him, why hadn't he returned to Vermont? Why had he left behind his car, his clothes, his work? Iris and I talked it out with Fanny again and again, going over one possibility after another, but we never reached a satisfactory conclusion. There were too many blanks, too many variables, too many things we didn't know. After a month of beating it into the ground, I suggested that Fanny go to the police and report Ben as missing. She resisted the idea, however. She had no claims on him anymore, she said, which meant that she had no right to interfere. After what had happened in the apartment, he was free to do what he liked, and it wasn't up to her to drag him back. Charles (whom we had met by then and who turned out to be quite well off) was willing to hire a private detective at his own expense. "Just so we know that Ben's all right," he said. "It's not a question of dragging him back, it's a question of knowing that he disappeared because he wanted to disappear." Iris and I both thought that Charles's plan was sensible, but Fanny wouldn't allow him to go ahead with it. "He gave us his blessings," she said. "That was the same thing as saying good-bye. I lived with him for twenty years, and I know how he thinks. He doesn't want us to look for him. I've already betrayed him once, and I'm not about to do it again. We have to leave him alone. He'll come back when he's ready to come back, and until then we have to wait. Believe me, it's the only thing to be done. We just have to sit tight and learn to live with it."
Months passed. Then it was a year, and then it was two years, and the enigma remained unsolved. By the time Sachs showed up in Vermont last August, I was long past thinking we would ever find an answer. Iris and Charles both believed that he was dead, but my hopelessness didn't stem from anything as specific as that. I never had a strong feeling about whether Sachs was alive or dead - no sudden intuitions, no bursts of extrasensory knowledge, no mystical experiences - but I was more or less convinced that I would never see him again. I say 'more or less' because I wasn't sure of anything. In the first months after he disappeared, I went through a number of violent and contradictory responses, but these emotions gradually burned themselves out, and in the end terms such as sadness or anger or grief no longer seemed to apply. I had lost contact with him, and his absence felt less and less like a personal matter. Every time I tried to think about him, my imagination failed me. It was as if Sachs had become a hole in the universe. He was no longer just my missing friend, he was a symptom of my ignorance about all things, an emblem of the unknowable itself. This probably sounds vague, but I can't do any better than that. Iris told me that I was turning into a Buddhist, and I suppose that describes my position as accurately as anything else. Fanny was a Christian, Iris said, because she never abandoned her faith in Sachs's eventual return; she and Charles were atheists; and I was a Zen acolyte, a believer in the power of nothing. In all the years she had known me, she said, it was the first time I hadn't expressed an opinion.
Life changed, life went on. We learned, as Fanny had begged us, to live with it. She and Charles were together now, and in spite of ourselves, Iris and I were forced to admit that he was a decent fellow. Mid to late forties, an architect, formerly married, the father of two boys, intelligent, desperately in love with Fanny, beyond reproach. Little by little, we managed to form a friendship with him, and a new reality took hold for all of us. Last spring, when Fanny mentioned that she wasn't planning to go to Vermont for the summer (she just couldn't, she said, and probably never would again), it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps Iris and I would like to use the house. She wanted to give it to us for nothing, but we insisted on paying some kind of rent, and so we worked out an arrangement that would at least cover her costs - a prorated share of the taxes, the maintenance, and so on. That was how I happened to be present when Sachs turned up last summer. He arrived without warning, chugging into the yard one night in a battered blue Chevy, spent the next couple of days here, and then vanished again. In between, he talked his head off. He talked so much, it almost scared me. But that was when I heard his story, and given how determined he was to tell it, I don't think he left anything out.
He went on working, he said. After Iris and I left with Sonia, he went on working for another three or four weeks. Our conversations about Leviathan had apparently been helpful, and he threw himself back into the manuscript that same morning, determined not to leave Vermont until he had finished a draft of the whole book. Everything seemed to go well. He made progress every day, and he felt happy with his monk's life, as happy as he had been in years. Then, early one evening in the middle of September, he decided to go out for a walk. The weather had turned by then, and the air was crisp, infused with the smells of fall. He put on his woolen hunting jacket and tramped up the hill beyond the house, heading north. He figured there was an hour of daylight left, which meant that he could walk for half an hour before he had to turn around and start back. Ordinarily, he would have spent that hour shooting baskets, but the change of seasons was in full swing now, and he wanted to have a look at what was happening in the woods: to see the red and yellow leaves, to watch the slant of the setting sun among the birches and maples, to wander in the glow of the pendant colors. So he set off on his little jaunt, with no more on his mind than what he was going to cook for dinner when he got home.
Once he entered the woods, however, he became distracted. Instead of looking at the leaves and migrating birds, he started thinking about his book. Passages he had written earlier that day came rushing back to him, and before he was conscious of what he was doing, he was already composing new sentences in his head, mapping out the work he wanted to do the next morning.
<#FROWN:K13\>
HAPPY HOUR
Bernadine was glad to get out of the house. Gloria prayed she wouldn't be bored to death. Savannah was hoping she'd meet somebody worth giving her phone number to, and Robin kept her fingers crossed that she wouldn't run into anybody she'd slept with.
They agreed to meet at Pendleton's around six-thirty. Robin offered to pick up Savannah when she found out her meeting would be over much earlier than expected. This gave her enough time to zip by Oasis to get a nail repaired and stop at home to change into something flashier.
More than anything, Robin wanted an excuse to see Savannah's apartment. Bernadine had bragged about Savannah's artworks and said she had very good taste. Robin wanted to see for herself. She knew her apartment didn't exactly look like it came out of Architectural Digest, but it was colorful. When Robin rang her bell, Savannah came to the door wearing a form-fitting orange dress with a wide white belt and orange sling-back sandals. Her hair was cut close on the sides, and skewered-looking curls stuck straight up on the top. It was different from anything Robin had ever seen on anybody down at Oasis. "Hi," Robin said. "I'm Robin."
"No shit," Savannah said, and gave her a hug. "Come on in," she said. "Have a seat. I'll be ready in ten seconds. As you can see," she said, walking down a hallway, "I haven't had a chance to unpack everything yet, so forgive the place."
"It looks to me like you've done a lot in two days," Robin yelled, and sat down on the couch. She ran her hands over the forest-green cushion. This wasn't cheap leather by any means, she thought. There were six mint-green and peach throw pillows strewn along the back. Stacks of boxes were pushed in corners, but there were sculptures sitting on at least four different pedestals, silk flowers on tables, ceramic vases such as Robin had never seen before: copper-colored; metallic green; blackish-silver; each a different shape, and some with blotches of color that made them look like a map of the world. The movers had obviously broken a few, because some were badly cracked, but Robin didn't want to say anything. Savannah already had pictures up on three walls. Robin didn't particularly care for this kind of art, because half of them didn't look like they were finished. The few she was able to make out - what they were supposed to be - didn't match anything in here.
"I'm ready," Savannah said, and came out of the bathroom.
"Your place is gorgeous," Robin said, standing up. "Is this a one or two bedroom?"
"One. It's not much to see, but come on back if you want to."
"I'm nosey," Robin said, and followed Savannah down the hall.
"This is me," Savannah said, waving her hand like the women on game shows who show contestants what they can win.
A queen-sized platform bed with four oversized stuffed pillows sat in the middle of the room. Behind it was a picture of a nude man and woman. Next to the fireplace was an ice-cream parlor table with a black and rose floral tablecloth; oak chairs with wrought-iron backs, and more unpacked crates and boxes stacked in a corner. One whole wall looked like the millinery section of a department store. At least twenty hats hung on hooks.
"So I guess you're into hats," Robin said.
"I am," Savannah said, and headed toward the living room.
"Well, you should've called. I would've been glad to help you unpack."
"Girl, this stuff was in storage, and everything was all mixed up. I'm having a hard enough time finding things myself, but thanks."
"Some people just have the knack of knowing how to put things together, and some don't. I think you missed your calling. You should've gone into interior decorating."
"Bernadine said your place was pretty nice too. So stop. I wish I could've brought my plants."
"Why couldn't you?"
"They wouldn't let me bring them across the state border. They worry about bugs. It broke my heart. But it's okay. I've got to get some. I can't stand being in here without live plants."
"Well, I've got about three, and they're on their last legs." Robin started rubbing her eyes, because they were itching all of a sudden, and the next thing she knew she was sneezing.
"You're allergic to cats, right?" Savannah asked.
"Yes. Lord," she said. "Where is the little sucker?"
"In the back," she said. "I'm ready."
As Savannah reached for her purse and keys, she looked at Robin, particularly her cleavage, which was extremely prominent in that white top. "You're looking pretty snazzy yourself. If I had legs as long as yours, I'd probably wear miniskirts too. How tall are you?"
"Almost five nine," Robin said, taking a handkerchief from her purse and wiping her eyes. "I wish I had some of your ass," she said, and sneezed again.
"Well, in that case, I'd like to borrow about sixteen ounces of your boobs."
"Then buy you some. How do you think I got these?"
They both laughed, and Robin sneezed again.
"Well, I know one thing. I won't have to worry about you wearing out your welcome."
"You got that right," Robin said. "Now get me the hell outta here."
"What kind of resort is this?" Savannah asked Robin. It seemed as if they had driven through Little Mexico to get here, and the place looked as though it could stand to be remodeled.
"Girl, I don't know. This is my first time here too."
They were standing in the entry, when a black man in his early thirties came over to greet them. He looked pleased and excited to see them. Robin pinched Savannah, as if to say, "He's all yours." Savannah pinched her back, as if to say, "I don't want him, either."
"Thanks for coming," he said. "Is this your first time here, ladies?"
They both shook their heads yes.
"Well, I'm Andre Williams, and me and a few of my partners have formed the Stock Exchange group. We're trying to get some exciting things happening in Phoenix, a place where professional sisters and brothers can network and get to know one another in an informal setting and, you know, dance a little, eat a little, and drink a little."
"Are all of you stockbrokers?" Robin asked.
"No, sister. We just wanted to come up with a catchy, sophisticated name. It's the one we all liked. Do you two ladies have a business card?"
Robin did, but Savannah didn't have hers yet; she hadn't anticipated needing one so soon. The moment this man said "network," Savannah cringed. She hated the whole notion. It was as if black folks couldn't get together and have a good time anymore unless they were in a position to do something for each other. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned fun? There was a little basket for the cards, and Robin tossed hers in. What were they going to do with them? Savannah wondered. "I'll bring mine next time," she said, and peeked around a partition into the adjoining room. There were fifteen or twenty people in it. What a helluva turnout, she thought. It was easy to see that Bernadine and Gloria weren't here yet, so she turned her attention to Robin, who had walked over by the windows, where a woman with long dreadlocks stood behind two tables. One was filled with books by and about black people, the other with various African crafts: silver and brass jewelry, kinte cloths, wooden and soapstone sculpture, handmade cards, T-shirts with Africa on front, as well as little bottles of fragrant oils. There were posters of Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Malcolm X, and Martin, as well as Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan.
Robin had her wallet out and two black bangles already on her wrists. Bernadine had told Savannah that the girl was a die-hard shopaholic and terrible at managing her money. Savannah smiled at the sister selling the merchandise, eyed one of the soapstone sculptures, but kept her distance. She hadn't come here to shop. Besides, she was now on something she'd never been on before: a budget.
"Come on, Robin," Savannah said, and headed for one of the forty or so empty tables. When they sat down, it felt as if they were on display, which Robin didn't seem to mind. She liked getting attention, and it showed. There were ten men sitting at the bar, a few of whom turned around and looked at them, and then turned back toward the bar.
"I thought this thing started at six," Robin said. "That's what Bernadine told me."
"This is your world, I'm just in it," Savanna said.
"I wonder where everybody is. Well, at least the music is good."
'Forever Your Girl' was playing. "I can't stand Paula Abdul," Savannah said. "She can't sing. Jodey Watley can't sing, and if you want to know the truth, Janet Jackson can't sing, either, I'm sick of all three of them." But, she thought, if somebody was to ask her to dance right now, she would. But nobody did.
A waitress came over and took their order. Robin ordered a glass of wine, and Savannah, a margarita. "That must be where you dance," Robin said, pointing to a wide doorway, and within a minute she had walked over to it, peered in, come back, and sat down. "Yep, they've got a DJ in there and everything. There's some tables in there too. And not a soul on the dance floor."
Savannah was staring out the window at the golf course when the waitress brought their drinks. "I'll buy this round," Robin said. "And let's get some of that food over there, girl. It's free, and I haven't eaten.
They weren't stingy with the food, Savannah was thinking as she filled her plate up with fresh fruit salad, tossed green salad, pasta salad, and buffalo wings. Normally, she never ate chicken in public because it always got stuck between her teeth, and plus, she forgot to put her dental floss in her purse. But hell, nobody worth worrying about was in here.
Robin made two trips to the food table and drank her wine in between plates. On the way here, she had told Savannah her life story, which didn't seem to start until she met Russell. She told Savannah all about him. And Michael. And how she wanted to have a baby before it was 'too late.' When she finally mentioned her job as an underwriter and all it entailed, particularly how she sometimes wrote proposals that brought in million-dollar accounts, it sounded to Savannah like the only time Robin used common sense was at work. "It looks good on paper," Robin said, "but I'm still not making any real money, and I'm seriously thinking about looking for another job, at a bigger company. The way things stand now, I'm living from paycheck to paycheck and can't even afford to help pay for a nurse for my daddy. That's pitiful," she said, as if she was talking to herself. "What the hell did I get a degree for?"
The place was starting to fill up, but there was still no sign of Gloria or Bernadine. Now on her second glass of wine, Robin went back to her favorite subject: Russell. She apologized for his philandering. "Could he help it if he was so fine that women flocked to him? If I'd been a little more patient and not pressured him, maybe he would've married me," she said. "But it's not over till it's over."
Savannah didn't say a word. She just sat there listening to the shit and wanted to slap Robin. Knock some sense into her. Savannah agreed with Bernadine: the woman was a little on the dizzy side when it came to men.
Savannah sipped at her second margarita, thinking: This woman is pitiful. Too hard up.
<#FROWN:K14\>
"At the moment, my true wad could not be farther from shooting. It is work getting the two of you together. I feel that any second I'm going to misstep in telling this. It's very stressful."
"Now listen," she said. "Harvey leaves, slamming the door, so the sign says CLOSED, and I, me, I am left, abandoned right in the middle of things by Harvey, and I'm standing there in the shop with the taciturn and very rich guy Forky, Forky Pigtail, who's holding the necklace that I made in his big knuckly fingers. He sits down on a step stool, he looks down at the necklace, looks up at me. What does he do?"
"He says, 'I really do have to see what it looks like on someone before I know whether it's something I want.' And you look down at your shirt with the green and black stars and you sort of pluck at it and smile and say, 'I'm sorry, I'm not wearing the clothes for that piece. It's really an evening piece, for a low-cut dress.' With your finger you trace the ideal curve of the neckline of the dress. And Fork says, 'Then unbutton your shirt.' Well, what can you do? You unbutton the top three buttons of your shirt. With each button, you feel the fabric shift slightly against your collarbone. Fork stands up, letting the necklace dangle from his left hand, and, to your astonishment, he begins unbuttoning the buttons of his fly. Because of course he's a button-fly kind of guy. He unbuttons three buttons. The two of you are still about ten feet apart. You fold your shirt down, trying to make it follow the line of the dress that you should be wearing to wear the necklace, but looking down at yourself you see that you really need to undo one more button, and you dart a glance at him - has he reached the same conclusion? Oh no, he has! He is shaking his head. He says, 'I think really you'll need to go down one more in order to wear your necklace.' So you unbutton one more button, and he responds by unbuttoning the last button of his fly. He doesn't do anything, he doesn't reach in, you almost couldn't tell that his fly was undone, if it weren't for the fact that you've just seen him undo it. Oh, he is a bold bastard! What is he up to? He takes the necklace in both his hands, by both ends, and he shakes it, indicating for you to walk toward him, which you do. When you are standing close to him, he says, 'I think it'll be easier if you turn around. Then I'll be able to see the clasp.' So you turn around, and you see this necklace, your own handiwork, descend very slowly in front of your face, and you feel the dangly elements just touch your skin and you try to hold your shirt so it doesn't get in the way, but instead of doing the clasp, he lowers the necklace further and lets it accommodate itself to your breasts, and you hear him say, thoughtfully, 'Hmm, no, I really think the shirt has to come off entirely before I can evaluate this necklace.The green and black stars clash with the stones.' So you unbutton the shirt completely and let it fall off your arms. You're wearing a black cotton undershirty thing, with very thin shoulder straps. Very gently he drags your piece of jewelry up again, against you, and then finally he fastens it, holding the ends away from your neck so that his hands hardly touch you. You look down at it. It's hard to tell, but you think it looks kind of beautiful. Your nipples are visible through the black material. He's silent behind you. You say, 'Don't you want to see it now?' But he says, ' Wait, let me just do something.' And you hear a slight scrape of the step stool against the floor, and you hear his shoes on the steps, and then you hear some rustling, and the a very soft rhythmic sound, the sound of the sleeve of his suit jacket making repeated contact with one side of the jacket itself, and, as the speed of the rhythm increases slightly, you hear every once in a while a little sort of plick or click, a wet little sound, and you know exactly what he's doing, and you hear his voice, with a bit of strain in it, say, 'I think I'm ready to see it now.' And you turn, and there he is, on the top step of this little stool, with his cock and both balls pulled out of his pants, and with each pull he makes on his cock you can see the skin pull up slightly on his balls. I mean is this guy for real? And you touch your shoulders with your hands, and you pull the straps of your black undershirt down, and you pull it down around your waist, so your breasts are right there, out, and now you take hold of your breasts, your frans, and you lift them, so that each of the two side stones of your necklace touches a nipple, and by moving your breasts back and forth, you move your nipples, which are hard, back and forth under the two cool dangly stones, and you see him stroking faster and faster, he's starting to get the about-to-come expression, and you smile at him and move a step closer, so your breasts and your silver necklace and your collarbone are ready for him, and then you look straight at him and you say, 'Well, what do you think? Do you like it? As you see, it's really an evening piece.' And the, stroking very fast, he bends his legs slightly and then straightens them and he goes 'Ooh!' and then he comes in a hot mess all over your art."
There was a pause. She said, "Does he buy the necklace or does he just take his fixed fork and go home?"
"I don't know. I assume he takes the paper towel that he'd wrapped his fork in and uses it to wipe you off and wipe off your necklace and then he buys it and gives it to you."
"That's good. He sounds like an honorable sort. A bit precipitate maybe. Um - would you excuse me for a second?"
"Sure."
"I just - my mouth's dry - I want to get some more - "
"Sure," he said.
There was a long pause. She returned.
"It's funny that you cast me as an arts-and-craftsy type," she said.
"Not aggressively arts-and-craftsy. Are you?"
"Well, no. I'm really not, I don't think. Do you have a ponytail?" she asked.
"No."
"Then do you have an old-world smell?"
"I don't think that would be the word for it."
"I wonder what your smell is."
"I've been told I smell like a Cont crayon," he said.
"Hm."
"Or I guess it was that I smelled like what a Cont crayon would smell like if it had a smell."
"Well, that's good to know," she said. "Of course I have no idea what you're talking about. But no, you know what your story reminded me of, when I was in the kitchen just now?"
"What?"
"I was in a museum in Rome with my mother, and we passed a statue that had all these discolorations on it, a nice statue of a woman, and my mother pointed to a sort of mottled area and she shook her head and said, 'You see? It's so realistic that men feel they have to ... ' She didn't explain. And I don't know now if she was serious or not. I was - I guess I was eighteen. I thought, oh, okay, in churches in Italy, men come on the statues of women."
"Yes," he said, "I think I do remember coming on that statue. It's all a blur, though. There were so many statues in those years."
"Do you, as they say, like to travel?" she asked.
"You mean get in a plane and fly somewhere for recreation? No. I've never been to Rome. I spend my vacation money in more important ways."
"Like this call."
"That's right. Now tell me, though, really, when your mother pointed out that statue, was it faintly arousing?"
"I don't think it really was," she said. "It was just interesting, an interesting sexual fact, like something in Ripley's. I'm not, by the way, to get back to your story for a second, I'm not wearing a black undershirt under my shirt."
"What are you wearing under your shirt?"
"A bra."
"What kind of bra?"
"A nothing bra. A normal, white bra bra."
"Oooo!"
"It's shrunk slightly in the wash but it was my last clean one."
"It's always impressive to me that bras have to be washed like other clothes. Does it clip on the front or on the back?"
"The back."
"Shouldn't it come off?"
"I don't think so," she said.
"Oh, I can hear in your voice the sound of you frowning and pulling in your chin to look down at them" Oh boy."
"Hah hah!"
"The idea of women looking down at their own breasts drives me nutso. They do it while they're walking. Some walk with their arms sort of hovering in front of their breasts, or awkwardly crossed in front of them, or they pretend to hold the strap of their pocketbook so their hands are bent in front of them, or they pretend to be adjusting their watch, or their bracelets, and the fact that even fully clothed the helpless obviousness of their breasts is embarrassing to them drives me absolutely nutso."
"They see you staring, with your eyes sproinging springing out of your skull, of course they're embarrassed."
"No, I'm very discreet. And this is only in certain moods, of course. Once I got into an wild state just standing at a bus stop. It was rush hour, and there were all these women driving to work, and they would drive by, and I would get this flash, this briefest of glimpses, of the wide shoulder strap of their safety belt crossing their breasts. That thick, densely woven material, pulling itself tight right between them. That's all I could see, hundreds of times, different colors of dresses, shirts, blouses, over and over, every bra size and Lycra-cotton balance imaginable, like frames of a movie. By the time the bus came, I was literally unsteady, I could barely get the fare in the machine. What's that noise?"
"Nothing. I was just changing the phone to the other ear."
"Oh," he said. "Did you see that thing about the Chinese kid who suffered an episode of spontaneous human combustion?"
"No."
"You really missed something. It was originally in one of the tabloids, I think, but I heard about it on the radio. You know about spontaneous combustion, right?"
"I'm familiar with the general concept."
"All right, well this kid apparently spontaneously human combusted, but the combustion was confined to his genitals. Boom! He was very uncomfortable. But see, I understand perfectly how that could happen. I fear for my own genitals sometimes. I get so fricking horny ... now there's another inadequate word ... so porny, so gorny, so yorny ... I get so yorny that I look down at my cock-and-balls unit, and it's like I could take the whole rigid assembly and start unscrewing it, around and around, and it would come off as one solid thing, like a cotterless crank on a bicycle, and I would hand it over to you to use as a dildo."
"Okay then, hand it over. Although I've never cottoned to dildos particularly. I used one once, to oblige someone, and I got a yeast infection. I think it was called a 'Mighty Mini Brute.' "
"That's a fair description of my ... crank."
<#FROWN:K15\>
The urge, she knew, was crazy - a lifetime, or much of one, had passed since she had last touched her mother's living hand. Yet the urge to go back, to escape the years, to be her mother's young child rather than the crabby grandmother of her dead daughter's children, was so sharp that tears came to her eyes. She flung the phone book off the bed and buried her face in the pillow. Hector Scott must not see what she was feeling - it was too crazy, and he'd think it was his fault.
The General did think it was his fault, and he was horrified. What had he done now? Things were getting impossible. He and Aurora were both so sensitized on the subject of sex that the most casual reference to it was likely to send them over the edge. He didn't really know a thing about Aurora's mother's affairs, and even if she had had a lot, so what? That was in New Haven, and a long time ago. Besides, Yale was in New Haven, and people who lived around colleges were always apt to be having affairs. Being at Yale was not like being at the Point. Now he had hurt Aurora's feelings, and they hadn't even had breakfast. If the slightest reference to sex was going to cause her to burst into in tears, he might as well move out - but where would he go to? He had no children - he and Evelyn had kept putting it off, and then Evelyn got too old. Teddy was the only one of Aurora's grandchildren who really liked him, but Teddy was at least half crazy and could barely manage his own life. It was a grim picture he faced, filled with nothing but old soldiers' homes, endless bridge games, and widows who probably wouldn't turn out to be half as interesting as Aurora. And even if they were half as interesting, he loved Aurora, not them. She'd get another boyfriend, she'd never come to visit, and he'd be alone. Perhaps he'd do better just to join the homeless, once he got off his crutches. The papers maintained that most of the homeless were Vietnam veterans, and he had to admit that a good many of the homeless he'd spotted in his drives around Houston looked as if they might be veterans. Well, he was a veteran himself - he could go back to his own and live in a tent in a park when Aurora threw him out.
The grimness of it all reduced the General to a state not far from tears. He had never supposed he would end up in a tent in a park - he had never been very good at erecting tents, for one thing. Most enlisted men could erect tents far more efficiently than he could. It might be that he'd have to pay one of the homeless enlisted men to set up his tent for him. That would be rather a sorry pass for a general to come to, but if that was the best he could do, then so be it.
Aurora felt the General fumbling for her hand and let him hold it, but she didn't immediately remove her face from the pillow. She enjoyed, for a few moments, the ridiculous fantasy that her mother was once more holding her in her arms, as her mother had often done during her childhood. It was a ridiculous fantasy, but at the same time it was deeply comforting, and Aurora clung to it as long as she could before reluctantly raising her face and resuming the taxing life of someone who had miserable grandchildren and a played-out lover.
Looking over at the played-out lover, she noticed that his Adam's apple was quivering, a sign that he was in distress. Hector's Adam's apple quivered only on those occasions when she had vexed him almost to tears. Now it seemed to have happened again, although, as she recalled, he was the one who had accused her and her mother of being loose, an accusation to which she had only made the mildest reply. What could have happened to hurt the man's feelings now?
"Hector, are you getting ready to cry, and if not, why is your Adam's apple behaving that way?" Aurora asked.
"Sorry," the General said. "I guess I just never thought I'd end up in a tent. Old age is full of surprises."
"Life is full of surprises." Aurora said. "They are apt to come at all ages, in my observation. I must say I was quite surprised to look over just now and see your Adam's apple bobbing like an apple in a barrel. What's the matter? All I was doing was looking up psychoanalysts in the phone book. Are you going to begrudge me even that mild pleasure?"
"No, no, you can have all the analysts you want," the General said. It was perfectly obvious that she had had her little fit and was now in a good humor, and yet the fact that she had surprised him in a low mood was as likely as not going to cast her back into a low mood, and this time she would blame him. Sometimes it was so hard to get through a morning, not to mention a day, with Aurora that on the whole he thought it might be easier to be homeless and live in a tent.
"I was just worrying about my tent," the General said, not quite able to detach himself from the grim vision he had just conjured up.
"What tent?" Aurora asked, surveying her nice sunny bedroom. "Have you been dreaming of the Battle of the Somme again? Does this look like a tent we're quarreling in?"
"No, it's a bed, but I've decided to go live in a tent in Herman Park when you finally throw me out," the General said. "For one thing, I won't last long in a tent, and a short end is about the best prospect I have to look forward to now."
Aurora saw to her amazement that the man was genuinely upset, and for no reason - when had she ever said anything about throwing him out?
"A tent in Herman Park would be a damn sight better than one of those stupid old soldiers' homes with no old soldiers in them," the General said, his Adam's apple still aquiver.
"Hector, I'm baffled," Aurora admitted. "You brought up my mother, and the thought of her undid me for a moment. I loved my mother very much and she died much too young. I think I have every right to be undone by her memory, but that's all that happened. I don't have the least desire to dispatch you to a tent in the park and I don't know how you can have conceived such a notion. This convinces me that we had better make an appointment with Dr. Bruckner quickly. You might be beginning to drift off your moorings or something."
The General was both relieved and annoyed: relieved that Aurora was no longer angry, annoyed that she kept slipping into nautical metaphors.
"Aurora, I'm a general, not an admiral," he reminded her, for at least the hundredth time. "Generals do not drift off their moorings. Generals aren't moored. Even admirals aren't moored. Boats are moored."
"Well, touchy, touchy," Aurora said. "Perhaps the word I was seeking was 'mired.' You can hardly deny that we're mired in a rather quarrelsome embrace."
"The hell we are," the General said. "This isn't an embrace. I remember our embraces. I wish I was dead. Then you could embrace anyone you could catch."
"I can anyway," Aurora informed him. "It's obviously not doing me much good, but I've always claimed the right to embrace people at will. That's where this conversation started, remember? You said I was loose, and my mother before me."
The General recalled that he had said something like that. He said it not long before he decided to go live in a tent. Now he couldn't remember why the subject had come up in the first place. They had been talking about Vienna or something and then the quarrel started.
"Well, I suppose I popped off." he admitted. "Did she have affairs or didn't she? Let's get this settled."
"She loved the gardener," Aurora said. "Before he arrived I certainly hope she had a few affairs. What's a girl to do?"
"What do you mean, what's a girl to do?" the General asked. "She was married. Why can't a girl who's married sleep with her husband?"
Aurora was remembering a conversation she had had with her mother once - it was after a concert in Boston. They were walking across the Commons and it was snowing. She could not remember the program, but it seemed to her Brahms had been on it. Her mother confessed to a considerable weakness for Brahms. The evening snow was beautiful, falling on the Commons; the air was wintry and clean. Her mother, Amelia, had evidently been somewhat more stirred by the music than Aurora - just about to marry her beau Rudyard - had realized. Out of the blue her mother made a startling statement.
"I ought to tell you that your father has abandoned my bed," her mother said. "The truth is he abandoned it eleven years ago."
Aurora did not immediately comprehend.
"Why?" she asked. "Isn't it a comfortable bed?"
Her mother who rarely looked happy but even more rarely looked sad - who made it a point of principle never to look sad, in fact - pursed her lips for a moment and gave her daughter a look that was unmistakably sad.
"It's not the bed he finds uncomfortable," she said. "It's the woman in it. It's me he doesn't like."
Aurora did not remember how the conversation ended, though now she wished she could. As soon as she got her memory project really cranked up she meant to go through her vast collection of old engagement books and concert programs and pin down the concert. If she could recover the program, she might be able to recall the end of the conversation. The two things she was sure of were that her mother had used the word "abandoned," and that she had mentioned eleven years.
"My father didn't sleep with her for eleven years, or possibly longer," Aurora said. "My mother lived for six years after she told me that - so it was probably more like seventeen years that he didn't sleep with her. What do you think of that, General?"
"If you're thinking it's some kind of record, forget it," the General said. "I went more than twenty years without sleeping with Evelyn."
"But did you dislike her?" Aurora asked.
"No, not particularly," the General said. "She was a little chirpy, but I didn't exactly dislike her."
"Then what happened?" Aurora asked.
"I really have no idea," the General said. "We just lost the habit, somehow. There came a time when I don't think it would have occurred to either one of us to go near the other sexually. Otherwise we got along pretty well."
"Goodness," Aurora said. "I believe I'll have to think this over, Hector. If nothing else it explains why you were so enthusiastic when we were first getting to know one another. At the time I was quite swept away by your enthusiasm."
"Swept away, my ass," the General said. "It took me a good five years to seduce you. Or to convince you to seduce me, whichever it was that finally happened."
"I remember it as me being swept away," Aurora said. "If you didn't sleep with your wife for more than twenty years, then it's no wonder. I hope we can discuss this matter with Dr. Bruckner at our first session, if that's what you call them. I find it intensely interesting, particularly in light of what I've just been remembering about my mother. I want to hear more about it."
"We just stopped sleeping together, there isn't any more to hear," the General said.
<#FROWN:K16\>
Twice a week in every week of summer except the last in July and the first in August, their mother shut the front door, the white, eight-panel door that served as backdrop for every Easter, First Holy Communion, Confirmation, and graduation photo in the family album, and with the flimsy screen leaning against her shoulder turned the key in the black lock, gripped the curve of the elaborate wrought-iron handle that had been sculpted to resemble a black vine curled into a question mark, and in what seemed a brief but accurate imitation of a desperate housebreaker, wrung the door on its hinges until, well satisfied, she turned, slipped away from the screen as if she were throwing a cloak from her shoulders, and said, "Let's go."
Down the steps the three children went before her (the screen door behind them easing itself closed with what sounded like three short, sorrowful expirations of breath), the two girls in summer dresses and white sandals, the boy in long khaki pants and a thin white shirt, button-down collar and short sleeves. She herself wore a cotton shirtwaist and short white gloves and heels that clicked against the concrete of the driveway and the sidewalk and sent word across the damp morning lawns that the Daileys (Lucy and the three children) were once again on their way to the city.
The neighborhood at this hour was still and fresh and full of birdsong and the children marked the ten shady blocks to the bus with three landmarks. The first was the ragged hedge of the Lynches' corner lot where lived, in a dirty house made ramshackle by four separate, slapdash additions, ten children, three grandparents, a mother, a father, and a bachelor uncle who was responsible, no doubt, for the shattered brown bottle that lay on the edge of the driveway. The second was a slate path that intersected a neat green lawn, each piece of slate the exact smooth color, either lavendel or gray or pale yellow, of a Necco candy wafer. Third was the steel eight-foot fence at the edge of the paved playground of the school they had all attended until June and would attend again in September, although it appeared to them as they passed it now as something forlorn and defeated, something that the wind might take away - something that could rumble with footsteps and shriek with bells and hold them in its belly for six hours each day only in the wildest, the most terrible, the most unimaginable (and, indeed, not one of the three even imagined it as they passed) of dreams.
At the bus stop, the tall white sign with its odd, flat, perforated pole drew them like magnets. They touched it, towing the pebbles at its base. They jumped up to slap its face. They held it in one hand and leaned out into the road looking for the first glint of sun against the white crown and wide black windshield of the bus that would take them to the avenue.
Their mother smoked a cigarette on the sidewalk behind them, as she did on each of these mornings, her pocketbook hung in the crook of her arm, the white gloves she would pull on as soon as the bus appeared squeezed together in her free hand. The sun at nine-fifteen had already begun to push its heat through the soles of her stockings and beneath the fabric-covered cardboard of her belt. She touched the silver metal of its buckle, breathed in to gain a moment's space between fabric and flesh. Across the street a deli and a bar and a podiatrist's office shared a squat brick building that was shaded by trees. Beyond it a steeple rose - the gray steeple of the Presbyterian church - into a sky that was blue and cloudless. Swinging from the bus-stop sign, the children failed to imagine for their mother, just as they had failed to imagine for the building where they went to school, any other life but the still and predictable one she presented on those mornings, although even as she dropped her cigarette to her side and stepped on the butt with her first step toward them (it was a woman's subtle, sneaky way of finishing a smoke) she was aware of the stunned hopelessness with which she moved. Of time draining itself from the scene in a slow leak.
Briefly terrified, the younger girl took her mother's hand as the bus wheezed toward the curb.
Even the swift, gritty breeze that rushed through the slices of open window seemed at this hour to be losing the freshness of morning - some cool air clung to it, but in patches and tatters, as if the coming heat of the afternoon had already begun to wear through.
The children squinted their eyes against it and shook back their hair. Watching the houses go by, they were grateful that theirs was not one of them to be left, after each stop, in the expelled gray exhaust, and as the bus moved past the cemetery they felt - all unconsciously - the eternal disappointment of the people whose markers lay so near the road. Who saw (because they imagined the dead to be at eye level with the ground, the grass pulled like a blanket up to their noses) the walking living through the black stakes of the iron fence and the filtered refuse of what seemed many summers - ice-cream wrappers, soda cans, cigarette butts, and yellowed athletic socks - that had gathered at its base.
Where the cemetery ended, the stonecutter's yard began, a jumble of unmarked and broken tombstones that parodied the order of the real graves and seemed in its chaos to indicate a backlog of orders, a hectic rate of demand. (Their father's joke, no matter how many times they drove this way: "People are dying to get in there.") Then, at the entrance to the yard, a showroom - it looked for all the world like a car showroom - that displayed behind its tall plate glass huge marble monuments and elaborate crypts and the slithering reflected body of their bus, their own white faces at three windows.
They passed another church, a synagogue, and then a last ramshackle yard where chickens pecked at the dirt in speckled sunlight and what the children understood to be a contraption in which wine was made (although they couldn't say how they knew this) hulked among the vines and the shadows, through which they also glimpsed, passing by, a toothless Italian man named (and they could not say how they knew this, either) Mr. Hootchie-Koo, as he shuffled through the dirt in baggy pants and bedroom slippers.
Now the large suburban trees fell away. There was another church and then on both sides of the road a wide expanse of shadeless parking lot, the backs of stores, traffic. Their mother raised her hand to pull the cord that rang the buzzer and then waited in the aisle for them to go before her toward the front, hand over hand like experienced seamen between the silver edges of the seats. Their first sight as they touched the ground was always the identical Chinese couple in the narrow laundromat, looking up through the glass door from their eternal pile of white and pale blue laundry.
As they stood on the corner the bus they had just deserted, suddenly grown taller and louder and far more dangerous, passed before their noses, spilling its heat on their thin shoes.
When the light changed they crossed. Here the sidewalk was wider, twice as wide as it was where they lived, and they began to catch a whiff, a sense, of their destination, the way some sailors, hundreds of miles out, are said to catch the first scent of land. There was a bar - a saloon was how the children thought of it - with a stuccoed front and a single mysterious brown window, a rounded doorway like the entrance to a cave that breathed a sharp and darkly shining breath upon them, a destillation of night and starlight and Scotch. Two black men passed by. In a dark and narrow candy store that smelled exotically of newsprint and bubble gum they were each allowed to choose one comic book from the wooden rack and their mother gathered these in her gloved hand, placed them, a copy of the Daily News, and a pack of butterscotch Life Savers on the narrow shelf beside the register, and paid with a single bill.
Outside, she redistributed the comics and placed a piece of candy on each tongue, fortifying the children, or so it seemed, for the next half of their journey. She herded them into the shaded entry of a clothing store, another cave formed by two deep windows that paralleled each other and contained, it seemed, a single example of every item sold by the store, most of which was worn by pale mannequins with painted hair and chipped fingers or mere pieces of mannequins: head, torso, foot. The store was closed at this hour and the aisles were lined with piles of thin gray cardboard boxes that sank into one another and overflowed with navy-blue socks or white underpants as if these items had somehow multiplied themselves throughout the night.
When the bus appeared it was as if from the next storefront and they ran across the wide sidewalk to meet it, their mother pausing behind them to step on another cigarette. She offered the driver the four slim transfers while the children picked their way down the aisles. There was not the luxury of empty seats there had been on the first bus and so they squeezed together three to a narrow seat, their mother standing in the aisle beside them, her dress, her substantial thigh and belly underneath blue-and-white cotton, blocking them shielding them, all unaware, from the drunks and the gamblers and the various tardy (and so clearly dissipated) businessmen who rode this bus though never the first because this was the one that both passed the racetrack and crossed the city line.
All unaware, noses in their comics, her three children leaned together in what might have been her shadow, had the light been right, but was in reality merely the length that the warmth of her body and the odor of her talc extended.
At the subway, the very breath of their destination rose to meet them in the constant underground breeze that began to whip the girls' dresses as soon as they descended the first of the long set of dirty stairs. ('No spitting' a sign above their heads read, proving to them that they were entering an exotic and dangerous realm where people might, at any given moment, begin spitting.) The long corridors echoed with their mother's footsteps and roared distantly with the comings and goings of the trains. There were ads along the walls, not as large or as high as billboards but somehow just as compelling, and if it had not been for their mother's sudden haste, for she had begun rushing as soon as they left the bus, they would have lingered to read them more carefully, to study their bold messages and larger-than-life faces and garish cartoons, to absorb more fully what appeared to them to be a vivid, still-life bazaar.
And then bars, prison bars, a wall of bars, and, even more fantastically, a wall of revolving doors all made of black iron bars. Their mother passed another bill through the tiny half-moon aperture in what otherwise seemed a solid box lit green from within and received, in reply to her shouted "Four, please," a sliding handful of tokens and coins.
They were each given their own, given only the time it took to cross the dim expanse from token booth to turnstile to feel between their fingers the three opened spaces in the center of the embossed coin (a tactile memory that would return to them years later when they drew their first peace symbols) before they slipped it into the eternity of the machine and pressed with hands or waist or heart the single wooden paddle that clicked, gave way, and admitted them.
<#FROWN:K17\>
10
"YOU HAVE an Academy ring," the woman at the stall opposite said to Browne. She was dark and slim, wearing sneakers and jeans. Her booth advertised a patented star-finder for the northern hemisphere.
Browne turned the class ring on his finger.
"Yes. Class of sixty-eight."
It was opening day at the Maritime Exposition at the 42nd Regiment Armory in New York. The crowds were sparse. All day he had been sitting beside a screen on which he himself appeared, extolling the virtues of Altan boats. He was heartily tired of hearing himself.
"My ex-husband graduated from the Academy. His name is Charlie Bloodworth. Ever run into him?"
"Never," Browne said.
"He's at Green Cove Springs now. That's where they make the old ships into razor blades."
"So I've heard," Browne said.
"We lived in Atsugi," she said. "Guam, too."
Looming above them were the hulls of two Altan stock boats. One was the Highlander Forty-five, which from his own experience Browne knew was badly made. The second was the Altan Forty, which he regarded highly. Before sailing south, Browne had actually made a tape on which he praised the Highlander Forty-five. He did not play it. Instead he played his pitch for the Altan Forty. stand-up sign beside the Forty proclaimed it to be the stock version of the boat Matty Hylan would sail around the world. There was a picture of Hylan on the stand-up.
"I like your tape," the slim dark woman said. She was deeply suntanned. "I'm really hung over."
In the stuffy, humming air of the armor, he could not be sure he had heard her correctly.
"Too bad," he said politely.
"Know any cures?"
"No," he said. "I don't drink much."
The woman laughed.
"How about watching my booth?" she asked.
Browne agreed and she walked away, still laughing.
As the afternoon wore on, the crowds became even smaller. The woman did not return to her star-finder booth. Browne had brought along a volume of naval history. That afternoon, he read about Trafalgar, Nelson and Collingwood advancing in separate columns toward the Franco-Spanish fleet, breaking the line.
At some point, he decided to get up and take an aspirin. Well over an hour had passed since the woman at the stall opposite had disappeared. Browne set out in pursuit of a drinking fountain.
Searching for water, he passed through the wing in which the powerboats were displayed. It was much more crowded than the sailing section. There were overweight matrons in yachting caps and couples with matching tattoos. There were cabin cruisers and sleek cigarette boats with gleaming fins. Model interiors blazed with chrome and tiger-striped upholstery. Browne walked through it all feeling light-headed. When he came to the beige curtain that divided the displays from the storage and receiving section, he slipped past it into the gloom.
The storage area was a wilderness of crates and cardboard boxes piled to the forty-foot ceiling. Beyond the crates, on a buffed concrete floor, stood two armored personnel carriers of the New York National Guard. Near them was a drinking fountain.
On his way to the fountain, Browne heard something like a sensual moan from the area behind the crates. Looking more closely, he saw the balding head of a middle-aged man above one rank of boxes. Extending from the boxes along the floor was a woman's foot with a tanned ankle and sneaker. Between one thing and another, Browne formed the impression that a sexual act was taking place. Drinking from the fountain, downing his aspirin, he felt angry and revolted. He avoided the area on his way back.
The woman from the star-finder booth returned fifteen minutes after Browne got back to his own booth. She seemed pleased with herself and he thought somehow it must have been she he had seen sporting among the stacked boxes. The exposition could be a wild scene, the top of the year for certain people. Browne had heard stories about the casual sex but he had never seen any evidence of it before.
A little before six o'clock, Pat Fay, the designer whom Browne had pressed into service at the Staten Island yard, came up and looked at the stand-up ad for the Altan Forty that had Matty Hylan's picture on it.
"You might as well take it down," Fay said.
"Why?" Browne asked. He could see that the designer had been drinking.
Fay handed him a copy of the New York Post, open to page three. The headline over a three-column story inquired, "Where's Matty?"
There was a metal chair handy at a table piled with Altan brochures, so he sat down to read the story. Its substance was that in the face of bankruptcy and mounting scandal, Matty Hylan, bon vivant and captain of commerce, had vanished.
"They might have that race," Fay said. "Matty won't be in it."
"What I'm wondering," Browne said, "is what does this mean to us?"
Fay shrugged and walked away.
Browne stayed seated at the table for a while, trying to ponder the results of Hylan's disappearance. All at once the idea came to him of volunteering to enter the race on his own. If he could not sail the boat Hylan was having made in Finland, he might sail the stock model on the floor in front of him. He was sure it was a good boat. He felt a surge of confidence in his own abilities as a sailor. Immediately he began composing, with a pencil on a sheet of lined yellow paper, a letter to Harry Thorne.
He had finished the letter and pocketed it when he saw the woman who sold star-finders still lounging before her stall. She sat on the ledge of industrial carpeting at the corner of the booth with one leg folded under her. Browne thought she was watching him suggestively.
"Matty's gone," she said. "How about that guy?"
"Off for more congenial climes," Browne said.
"I guess he won't be sailing."
"Too bad," said Browne. He began to gather up his papers. There were very few show-goers about. "It was a good boat."
"If I was Matty," the woman said, "I would have disappeared during the race. I'd vanish at sea."
"Guess he couldn't wait," Browne said.
The dark woman looked at him with a kind of affectionate insolence. He thought she must be on something.
"Or I'd give them something to bellyache about. I'd not sail around the world but say I did. Hole up in Saint Barts and let the other guys sail and cross the finish line first."
"I don't think that's possible anymore," Browne said.
"Matty could do it," the woman said.
Browne told her good evening and went home.
11
NO WORD awaited Strickland in Helsinki. Hylan was not booked into any of the major hotels. Since it was the weekend, he called Joyce Manning at home to leave a message on her machine. No reply was forthcoming. On Sunday, he arranged a meet with a local cinematographer and a sound man. They met a few blocks from Strickland's hotel, in a place called O'Malley's. As an earnest of their seriousness, everyone ordered soda water.
The Finns were called Holger and Pentii. They had recently worked on location in Florida for a Finnish-language TV thriller; they read Variety and were conversant with the picture business. Strickland explained his needs to them; he was charming and hesitant and they were patient with his stammer. Once satisfied with his assistants' bona fides, he became more composed. Everyone relaxed and called out to the Irish girl behind the bar for Harp lager. Her name was Maeve and Holger said she worked for the Marxist-Leninist wing of the IRA.
They spent the rest of the evening talking movies. Pentii was a Russ Meyer fan and his favorite among the master's oeuvre was Faster Pussycat. For Holger, who seemed the more thoughtful of the two, it would always be Heaven's Gate. When they broke up, Strickland told them to meet him in Sariola the next evening. He would drive himself there in the morning for some preliminary conversations with the boatyard management.
After breakfast the following day, Strickland telephoned the yard in Sariola. The man with whom he spoke was very polite but cautious to the point of evasion. It was all very odd. Around mid-morning, he piled his gear into a rented Saab and took off down the autobajn for Sariola.
The town lay deep in scented oak forests along the Gulf of Finland. It was an old place, with a Swedish cathedral, cobbled squares and rambling wooden houses that suggested Chekhovian Russia. The air was clean and dry and the skies overhead as blue as June in California. The dark woods around the town were losing their winter silence but a surprising cold lurked in the groves and shadows.
At his new pastel plastic hotel, Strickland changed into clothes which he hoped seafaring types might find congenial: Topsiders, khaki slacks and a bulky naval sweater. Then he shouldered his camera case and set off on foot for the boatyard. Before he had gone a mile, he was light-headed with the sun and the smell of warm evergreen, his eyes dazzled, his nose and forehead reddening.
At the sign of Lipitsa Ltd., he followed a dirt road off the highway. Bird calls of a mystical complexity seemed to announce his passage. He walked out into the seaside meadow in which the Lipitsa yard stood to find three men waiting for him. Behind them a freshly laminated boat with a sexy curved transom and a shark-fin keel lay up on blocks. Beside it stood a graying, flaxen-haired man with the build of an oak stump and eyes the color of wild grapes.
"I'm Strickland," Strickland told him. "I've come to film."
"Lipitsa," the man said softly. He seemed to hesitate for a moment before extending his hand.
"Is that the boat?" Strickland asked. They looked at the shiny creature in its perch.
Lipitsa nodded.
"I've been trying to find Mr. Hylan," Strickland explained. "He doesn't seem to be available."
The old man's eyes twinkled over his high cheekbones, alight with boreal suspicion.
"I was hoping to ask you about that, sir. Can you come inside?"
Lipitsa's offices were on the second floor of a converted farmhouse, a solemn exercise in wood whose silent varnished spaces held a churchly resonance. There was an oak desk, some ancient photographs that appeared to represent the age of sail, and a long line of model boats in token of the ones he had designed. Strickland took a chair and faced the old man across the stern surface of his desk.
"Tell me what you want to do," Lipitsa said.
Strickland explained that a documentary film had been commissioned by the Hylan Corporation and that he was there to shoot it.
"Do I understand you to mean," old Lipitsa asked him, "that you have been paid?"
"I've been paid a retainer. And I've been given expenses."
"And you have no idea where our Mr. Hylan has gone?"
"Absolutely none," Strickland said. "I didn't know he was missing."
"You saw him when, please?"
Strickland began but had to start over.
"I ... I've never seen him. Now that you mention it."
"Ho," old Lipitsa said gravely. They looked at each other in silence for a moment. "I'm ahead of you," said the Finn. "I saw him in London two months ago. But you have been paid and I have not. So there you are ahead of me."
"What," Strickland asked him, "do you think is going on?"
"Don't think me impolite," Lipitsa said. "But I'm very curious and you are coming from over there. What do you think?"
"Quite honestly," Strickland said, "I have no idea what to think."
Old Lipitsa passed him a copy of the Financial Times. There was a story on the front page which reported growing concern as to the whereabouts of the youthful tycoon in question. The story contained, as rumor, a report that a number of grand juries in the United States had also expressed interest.
<#FROWN:K18\>
Francesca heard the out-of-tune pickup go by. She lay there in bed, having slept naked for the first time as far back as she could remember. She could imagine Kincaid, hair blowing in the wind curling through the truck window, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a Camel.
She listened as the sound of his wheels faded toward Roseman Bridge. And she began to roll words over in her mind from the Yeats poem: "I went out to the hazel wood, because a fire was in my head ..." Her rendering of it fell somewhere between that of teacher and supplicant.
He parked the truck well back from the bridge so it wouldn't interfere with his compositions. From the small space behind the seat, he took a knee-high pair of rubber boots, sitting on the running board to unlace his leather ones and pull on the others. One knapsack with straps over both shoulders, tripod slung over his left shoulder by its leather strap, the other knapsack in his right hand, he worked his way down the steep bank toward the stream.
The trick would be to put the bridge at an angle for some compositional tension, get a little of the stream at the same time, and miss the graffiti on the walls near the entrance. The telephone wires in the background were a problem, too, but that could be handled through careful framing.
He took out the Nikon loaded with Koda-chrome and screwed it onto the heavy tripod. The camera had the 24-millimeter lens on it, and he replaced that with his favorite 105-millimeter. Gray light in the east now, and he began to experiment with his composition. Move tripod two feet left, readjust legs sticking in muddy ground by the stream. He kept the camera strap wound over his left wrist, a practice he always followed when working around water. He'd seen too many cameras go into the water when tripods tipped over.
Red color coming up, sky brightening. Lower camera six inches, adjust tripod legs. Still not there. A foot more to the left. Adjust legs again. Level camera on tripod head. Set lens to f/8. Estimate depth of field, maximize it via hyperfocal technique. Screw in cable release on shutter button. Sun 40 percent above the horizon, old paint on the bridge turning a warm red, just what he wanted.
Light meter out of left breast pocket. Check it at f/8. One-second exposure, but the Kodachrome would hold well for that extreme. Look through the viewfinder. Fine-tune leveling of camera. He pushed the plunger of the shutter release and waited for a second to pass.
Just as he fired the shutter, something caught his eye. He looked through the viewfinder again. "What the hell is hanging by the entrance to the bridge?" he muttered. "A piece of paper. Wasn't there yesterday."
Tripod steady. Run up the bank with sun coming fast behind him. Paper neatly tacked to bridge. Pull it off, put tack and paper in vest pocket. Back toward the bank, down it, behind the camera. Sun 60 percent up.
Breathing hard from the sprint. Shoot again. Repeat twice for duplicates. No wind, grass still. Shoot three at two seconds and three at one-half second for insurance.
Click lens to f/16 setting. Repeat entire process. Carry tripod and camera to the middle of the stream. Get set up, silt from footsteps moving away behind. Shoot entire sequence again. New roll of Kodachrome. Switch lenses. Lock on the 24-millimeter, jam the 105 into a pocket. Move closer to the bridge, wading upstream. Adjust, level, light check, fire three, and bracket shots for insurance.
Flip the camera to vertical, recompose. Shoot again. Same sequence, methodical. There never was anything clumsy about his movements. All were practiced, all had a reason, the contingencies were covered, efficiently and professionally.
Up the bank, through the bridge, running with the equipment, racing the sun. Now the tough one. Grab second camera with faster film, sling both cameras around neck, climb tree behind bridge. Scrape arm on bark- "Dammit!" - keep climbing. High up now, looking down on the bridge at an angle with the stream catching sunlight.
Use spot meter to isolate bridge roof, then shady side of bridge. Take reading off water. Set camera for compromise. Shoot nine shots, bracketing, camera resting on vest wedged into tree crotch. Switch cameras. Faster film. Shoot a dozen more shots.
Down the tree. Down the bank. Set up tripod, reload Kodachrome, shoot composition similar to the first series only from the opposite side of the stream. Pull third camera out of bag. The old SP, rangefinder camera. Black-and-white work now. Light on bridge changing second by second.
After twenty intense minutes of the kind understood only by soldiers, surgeons, and photographers, Robert Kincaid swung his knapsacks into the truck and headed back down the road he had come along before. It was fifteen minutes to Hogback Bridge northwest of town, and he might just get some shots there if he hurried.
Dust flying, Camel lit, truck bouncing, past the white frame house facing north, past Richard Johnson's mailbox. No sign of her. What did you expect? She's married, doing okay. You're doing okay. Who needs those kinds of complications? Nice evening, nice supper, nice woman. Leave it at that. God, she's lovely, though, and there's something about her. Something. I have trouble taking my eyes away from her.
Francesca was in the barn doing chores when he barreled past her place. Noise from the live-stock cloaked any sound from the road. And Robert Kincaid headed for Hogback Bridge, racing the years, chasing the light.
Things went well at the second bridge. It sat in a valley and still had mist rising around it when he arrived. The 300-millimeter lens gave him a big sun in the upper-left part of his frame, with the rest taking in the winding white rock road toward the bridge and the bridge itself.
Then into his viewfinder came a farmer driving a team of light brown Belgians pulling a wagon along the white road. One of the last of the old-style boys. Kincaid thought, grinning. He knew when the good ones came by and could already see what the final print would look like as he worked. On the vertical shots he left some light sky where a title could go.
When he folded up his tripod at eight thirty-five, he felt good. The morning's work had some keepers. Bucolic, conservative stuff, but nice and solid. The one with the farmer and horses might even be a cover shot; that's why he had left the space at the top of the frame, room for type, for a logo. Editors liked that kind of thoughtful craftsmanship. That's why Robert Kincaid got assignments.
He had shot all or part of seven rolls of film, emptied the three cameras, and reached into the lower-left pocket of his vest to get the other four. "Damn!" The thumbtack pricked his index finger. He had forgotten about dropping it in the pocket when he'd removed the piece of paper from Roseman Bridge. In fact, he had forgotten about the piece of paper. He fished it out, opened it, and read: "If you'd like supper again when 'white moths are on the wing,' come by tonight after you're finished. Anytime is fine."
He couldn't help smiling a little, imagining Francesca Johnson with her note and thumbtack driving through the darkness to the bridge. In five minutes he was back in town. While the Texaco man filled the tank and checked the oil ("Down half a quart"), Kincaid used the pay telephone at the station. The thin phone book was grimy from being thumbed by filling station hands. There were two listings under 'R. Johnson,' but one had a town address.
He dialed the rural number and waited. Francesca was feeding the dog on the back porch when the phone rang in the kitchen. She caught it at the front of the second ring: "Johnson's."
"Hi, this is Robert Kincaid."
Her insides jumped again, just as they had yesterday. A little stab of something that started in her chest and plunged to her stomach.
"Got your note. W. B. Yeats as a messenger and all that. I accept the invitation, but it might be late. The weather's pretty good, so I'm planning on shooting the - let's see, what's it called?- the Cedar Bridge ... this evening. It could be after nine before I'm finished. Then I'll want to clean up a bit. So I might not be there until nine-thirty or ten. Is that all right?"
No, it wasn't all right. She didn't want to wait that long, but she only said. "Oh, sure. Get your work done; that's what's important. I'll fix something that'll be easy to warm up when you get here."
Then he added, "If you want to come along while I'm shooting, that's fine. It won't bother me. I could stop by for you about five-thirty."
Francesca's mind worked the problem. She wanted to go with him. But what if someone saw her? What could she say to Richard if he found out?
Cedar Bridge sat fifty yards upstream from and parallel to the new road and its concrete bridge. She wouldn't be too noticeable. Or would she? In less than two seconds, she decided. "Yes, I'd like that. But I'll drive my pickup and meet you there. What time?"
"About six. I'll see you then. Okay? 'Bye."
He spent the rest of the day at the local newspaper office looking through old editions. It was a pretty town, with a nice courthouse square, and he sat there on a bench in the shade at lunch with a small sack of fruit and some bread, along with a Coke from a cafe across the street.
When he had walked in the cafe and asked for a Coke to take out, it was a little after noon. Like an old Wild West saloon when the regional gun-fighter appeared, the busy conversation had stopped for a moment while they all looked him over. He hated that, felt self-conscious; but it was the standard procedure in small towns. Someone new! Someone different! Who is he? What's he doing here?
"Somebody said he's a photographer. Said they saw him out by Hogback Bridge this morning with all sorts of cameras."
"Sign on his truck says he's from Washington, out west."
"Been over to the newspaper office all morning. Jim says he's looking through the papers for information on the covered bridges."
"Yeah, young Fischer at the Texaco said he stopped in yesterday and asked directions to all the covered bridges."
"What's he wanna know about them for, anyway?"
"And why in the world would anybody wanna take pictures of 'em? They're just all fallin' down in bad shape."
"Sure does have long hair. Looks like one of them Beatle fellows, or what is it they been callin' some of them other people? Hippies, ain't that it?" That brought laughter in the back booth and to the table next to it.
Kincaid got his Coke and left, the eyes still on him as he went out the door. Maybe he'd made a mistake in inviting Francesca, for her sake, not his. If someone saw her at Cedar Bridge, word would hit the cafe next morning at breakfast, relayed by young Fischer at the Texaco station after taking a handoff from the passerby. Probably quicker than that.
He'd learned never to underestimate the tele-communicative flash of trivial news in small towns. Two million children could be dying of hunger in the Sudan, and that wouldn't cause a bump in consciousness,. But Richard Johnson's wife seen with a long-haired stranger - now that was news! News to be passed around, news to be chewed on, news that created a vague carnal lapping in the minds of those who heard it, the only such ripple they'd feel that year.
He finished his lunch and walked over to the public phone on the parking of the courthouse.
<#FROWN:K19\>
Carmody had lashed a walk from the flying bridge to the scow's rail instead of using the fishing boat's regular walkway lower down. A plank was all it was, not quite a foot wide, no ropes or railings. Billy raised his head from the stretcher enough to get a look. He groaned and cursed. Greer, carrying the lead end, agreed. "Maybe we better think about this ..."
"Psht now, Emil," Carmody called. "Haul your old load right on across. Nothin' to it, nothin' at all."
A loud laugh snorted from the blonde at his side. "How would you know? You haven't hauled your old load acrost it, I noticed." It was a laugh that should have been derisive, but there was no derision in it. It was as sunny and good-natured as her face. Ike judged her to be about fifty, perhaps older - not anywhere near as old as Carmody's seventy-so, but a good decade or two the senior of Alice. Yet there was something about her that was still quite childlike. She had a lopsided tomboy grin that she held wide open in spite of chapped lips and missing teeth, and there was a bratty twinkle in her blue eyes. A twinkle at lot like Carmody's. Their complexions were nearly identical - a wind-buffed and sun-polished pink. They had the same corn-colored eyebrows, the same pug nose. When Ike saw them side by side, grinning at the spectacle of Billy the Squid being carried precariously across the narrow plank, he wondered if they might not be close kin, perhaps even big brother and little sister. That would explain the hip-to-hip familiarity.
"Welcome aboard, laddybucks," Carmody said as they stepped down from the plank. "Stow your kips and secure your wounded. And step lively about if; I'm yearnin' to haul anchor and catch this tide and I really mean yearnin'."
The blonde winked. "What the old donkey really means," she confided, "is we got to hightail out of here before the owner of that powerboat by the pumps yonder comes down and sees the hole we bashed in his bulkhead while we was gassing up. And we have two posses on our tail."
Carmody looked hurt. "He should not've parked the flouncy piece o' fluff so close to the pumps, the stupid gob."
"Close? I wouldn't call that so close. a container barge big as a goddamn football field steamed in between that sailboat and those pumps this morning, didn't ding a thing."
"I was seriously undermanned," Carmody protested.
"You was foolishly overconfident is what you was. Good morning, boys. I'm Willimina Hardesty-" She held out a big pink hand, rough as a reef. "I'm known as Wild Willimina from Waco, but you boys may call me Willi. I'm hired on as chief software officer for this ritzy high-tech tub."
"Haw!" It was Carmody's turn to snort. "Software officer. What do you think, Ike? Would I hire a software officer? Especially a software office names Hard-assy, gnheh-heh-heh ..."
Ike shook the hand and introduced her to his three friends. Archie flushed. Greer kissed her knuckles and said something in French. Billy just grunted into the metal case he had padded with towels for a pillow. Archie started to explain about Mr. Bellisarius' supine condition, but the woman said, oh, they knew all about it - that the gang's daring and spectacular escape on the runaway railcar had been the talk in all the bars hours before Isaak phoned.
"Right!" Carmody added. "All about it. Now put him down and cast us off, we'll swap yarns later." He frowned at the two big net bags Archie was carrying. "What in the hell's all this?"
"One's wine," Archie shrugged.
"I can see that," Carmody said. "A reasonable cargo. but what about the other bag?"
"Books," Archie answered.
"I can bloody see they're books, Culligan. what did you do, enroll in one of those self-improvement courses?"
"They're the Squid's books, Mr Carmody. You know I don't read. Mr Bellisarius made us check them out of the Juneau Community College Library. They're scientific books."
"That's what took you so damn long? Lord love a duck. Well, stash the whole shitteree somewhere out from underfoot if you please ... because, lads and lady, we are about to foam straightaway home. Nels! Flip us free forward - I'm firing this ritzy bitch up!"
They foamed all right, but not straightaway home. To Isaak's surprise, as soon as they were out of sight of Juneau Carmody wheeled the metal prow left, south, back down the Inland Passage exactly the way he'd just come. "Evasive action, to confuse the pursuers," he called from the flying bridge by way of explanation. Then he instructed the woman to key them in a course around Admiralty Island and north up Chatham Strait, which would loop them back to almost the exact spot where they began their so-called evasive action. When Ike mentioned this the old man confided that what he really wanted to do was scope the other side of Admiralty for bears on the beach, maybe pick one off with his new tranque rifle. A half hour later Ike overheard him tell Greer what he really wanted to do was "give this Texas Tootsie a look at An-goon. Three years she's been up here and says she ain't yet seen an authentic Indian village." And a day later, creeping up the strait on auto at no-wake speed, everybody heard him tell the Texas Tootsie herself that what he had in mind was long-lining for some of the legendary sea sturgeon that were supposed to prole the mud off Hoonah. That's when Ike finally figured it out - that what the old dunk actually wanted to do was take just as long as he could getting home.
This was all right with Ike. He had never been in too much of a hurry to deal with Alice in any event, and he had bad feelings about her prodigal son's ambitious return. This was pleasant, cruising leisurely along the calm channel in a deck chair like a tourist on a ten-day special, sipping wine and playing spit in the ocean and scoping the shorelines. Sometimes they put away the cards and trolled off the fantail with spinning rigs and flashers ... they were cruising that slow. Carmody kept the choice catches to eat - the occasional native coho, the rare sockeye with his neon meat - and tossed the hatchies back. Or sold them over the side to the little pirate processors that winked codes from every cove and cranny.
They cruised and played poker and yarned, and Carmody sang. In the evenings, amid the dirty dishes in the galley, he crooned old love songs, like a young swain serenading his lady. Tin Pan Alley tunes, and sixties stuff, even New Age ballads. But as the nights darkened and the bottles emptied, he always got back to the Old World Traditional, and, at last, to his theme song: 'O, the prickle-eye bush ...' It was so ever-present it began to seem to Ike that it had been in his head from the moment he was startled from his peaceful slumber by the cat in Kuinak.
Naturally, at first, Ike had tried to get back into that slumberous peace. It should have been easy enough; the crew was certainly in a slumberous mode. Especially Greer. The chemical uplift Greer had been hoping to find in Billy the Squid's briefcase would not be complete until they rendezvoused with the other half of the stimulant's formula in Kuinak. So Isaak's customarily jacked-up partner spent most of his time below decks in a narrow bunk, zeed out. Archie Culligan was no scoot-head, but he was exhausted by his sojourn in Beulahland; he could usually be found slumped against the water heater in the galley, snoring away. The industrious young Nels Culligan tried to remain at least upright, propped against the rail of the flying bridge, stifling yawns while he awaited orders from the captain. But the captain was no ball of fire himself. Never, in the decade they had worked together, had Ike seen the old fisherman so kicked back and languid.
The cushy new boat was part of it; the software in the Loranav pilot was especially programmed for these coasts, user-easy and voice-activated and in constant contact with sea and sky satellites. A ten-year-old with a coastal chart and a mouse could have commanded the course - "Juneau to Kuinak at fifteen knots" - then gone back to watching his Slitman goggles. It was a superb vessel, built when they were still building boats for high-end diversifishing. It had probably been priced originally at a mil-and-a-half or more, back before the Trident leak. Carmody had picked it up for a fraction of that.
But it was more than the new cruising vessel. The old Cornishman had also picked himself up the perfect cruising companion. Wild Willi from Waco might not have been as cushy and modern as the new boat, but she was just as user-easy. It wasn't hard to understand why Carmody had been dawdling along. This was a long-deserved vacation for the old dunker, with a new playmate. Everybody on board enjoyed her company, except for Billy Bellisarius, who was still brooding too deeply about his recent run-in with Greener to have enjoyed anybody. In the days since Juneau they had found Willi to be a good worker and capable sailor, plus she offered them a whole new library wing of dirty stories and ribald sayings - a southern wing. The trip had been a lot of fun, a lot of drinking and laughing and gambling and eating.
Especially eating. It looked to Ike like Carmody had picked out his ritzy new boat as much on the basis of its galley as on its computer-sensor channel-charting fish-finding features. Maybe more. The old fisherman spent a lot more time around the kitchen dials than the computer dials.
"Fish are best eaten absolutely fresh," Carmody maintained. "I love fresh fish, by God, right in the galley. All these years busting my butt hauling the bastards in? Don't seem like I remember getting to eat one really truly fresh fish supper. I truly feel I have been deprived, by God I do!"
The size of the man's stomach bespoke otherwise; he had an absolutely enormous midsection, round and pink and wrinkle-free as his shaved ball of a head, and as hard. Carmody's girth was the result of a lifetime of hard labor and good appetite, laced liberally with drink and dance whenever possible. The belly he had produced was the accomplishment of nearly three-quarters of a century's dedicated effort; he was famous for it and proud of it. He used it like a sumo wrestler uses his kee, or center. It was his workbench, his fulcrum on the booms, his block and tackle on the ropes. Now, as they hummed along, he had it bellied up against the round cedar table that occupied the center of the galley, leaning on it while he chopped a ten-pound halibut into steaks.
"A fish don't really object to being caught and consumed," Carmdoy was explaining, "long as it happens fresh."
The fish was truly fresh, the glimmer of life had not yet completely left the animal's freakish eyes, and the body was still quivering there on the table, though big slabs of him were already hissing in butter and chopped parsley in the wavepan.
"Fish understand the fishy facks of life. They get et. It's their destiny from the get-go, from the least to the largest, to get et. What a fish objects to is being wasted. 'If you need me, catch me; if you don't, let me be.' Back in the days we really needed whale oil you never heard any whales complaining, did ye? They knew they was greasing the wheels of progress. They didn't commence complaining about it until they found out their oil had become obsolete, progress-wise, and all we wanted them for was food for cats. That's when they organized Greenpeace.
<#FROWN:K20\>
Rebecca's Theory
I trust water. I know my limitations in water. And I don't press beyond them. My name is Clarissa; I'm twenty-five. Lately, I swim a lot. Swimming toughens the vital organs: lungs and heart. A swallow of air measures every stroke. When I'm underwater, I can't see or hear clearly and can't smell anything. I'm humble. I'm forgiving with others and myself. Maybe I'd have been better off living somewhere like Cuzco, in Peru, when it was the capital of the Inca. Water streamed down from the Andes and flowed in ditches throughout the city. When hot, I'd have knelt under a fountain. A vicu<*_>n-tilde<*/>a would have sipped at a trough near my feet. More often, I think of another place, Atlantis. That is my favorite myth. The island was rich and no doubt lush. But I imagine its splendor after an earthquake sank it.
My grandmother was afraid of the water. She never swam. Her name was Rebecca Lyon, always known to us as Nanny. She was my father's mother and the only grandparent I ever met. I know little about my mother's past. She tells me that she lost both her parents during the Second World War. She is British and her name is Julia.
My father, David, was brought up in Hidden Gorge, a small town in upstate New York. His father ran a nine-hundred-square-foot grocery store called The Lyon Den Mart. The family lived on top. In 1952, my grandfather died of a heart attack. A few months later, Nanny gave my father and his sister enough money to build a supermarket in Puerto Rico. At the time, the island had only small grocery stores, or colmados. Nadia, my father's sister, moved to Puerto Rico shortly after my father did. Today they have several stores on the island and throughout the Caribbean: in Saint John, Saint Thomas, Saint Croix, Tortola and Venezuela. They named the supermarkets Isla.
As our father puts it, my brother, my sister and I are "pampered." We've been given some money. Sometimes we justify our good fortune by feeling guilty. The guilt lets us pretend we're noble. Our father is sometimes noble. A friend of his once said, "Your dad is one of the few honest people left on earth." He appears to find a goodness in almost every man he meets. But he's not always sociable. He likes small islands where there are few people. Maybe that's his way of pretending he has only himself to answer to.
I look like my father. I'm tall and my skin is more olive than white. Like him, I have a high forehead and a dimple on my left cheek when I smile. He tells me I also have his poise. I keep my chin high; I'm never clumsy.
I grew up in a small suburb of Puerto Rico called Santa Mar<*_>i-acute<*/>a. Our house had white gates, or rejas, Spanish ceramic roof tiles, white plaster walls and a cupola with a horse weather vane. I was born in 1955 and stayed an only child for four years.
Nanny kept me company. She visited me every week. She drove in from Santurce, where she lived with her housekeeper. Nanny would bounce me high on her knee. She taught me gin rummy. She'd slap down cards. She'd say, I win, over and over. The day I won, she accused me of cheating.
In September 1959, Cora was born. She doesn't look like me. She has blue eyes, like our father's. Otherwise, she looks like our mother. She has her round face and fair skin. She is small-boned.
Michael came a year after Cora. As a baby he had straight blond hair. When it turned dark brown, I remember thinking he looked a lot like my brother. He grew to be six feet. But he doesn't seem big. His legs, his neck, his fingers are all slender and almost graceful.
Nanny's attentions turned to Cora and Michael. So I started to lie. I told my sister and brother stories of what I'd done before they were born. I told them I rode an albino horse in the rain; I cantered for hours. I told them I took a helicopter to a volcano top in Sicily; the volcano had just erupted. I told them stories of what I'd just read as if they were true. I read a lot. My mother had given me reading lessons every morning since I was three. I taught Cora and Michael how to read. I wanted them to look up to me. Nanny taught them how to play cards.
When I was six, my father found me a piano teacher. He was a short man with a red mustache. He used to carry a stack of old music sheets under his arm. He made me copy the music by hand. He used to tell me, "You're the kind of student who can't become too polished. You'll lose your gut feeling for the music." We had a Pianola. When I wasn't playing, my mother pedaled it. We'd all sing to 'Caravan,' 'Stella by Starlight,' 'Making Whoopee.' But the Pianola was eight keys short. My teacher never complained. He said I practiced a lot and that was all he could ask for.
I liked the certainty of notes. They were less ambiguous than words. When I made a mistake, I knew it right away. The fewer mistakes I made, the more Nanny cooed. She began taking me on her lap again. I played with her under me. She made Cora and Michael stand next to me and listen. Nanny said I was a natural musician; I was meant to be a famous pianist. But I never thought of myself as gifted.
The year Nanny turned ninety, she came to visit for a few days. I was eight. My mother took us to the supermarket. Nanny frightened me: she began ranting about tomatoes and lettuces tumbling out of the bins. She said there were rats in the aisles poking their snouts at her toes. My mother had no desire to listen to her. So she drove her to my father's office. She told him to take her home. Then my mother picked up our housekeeper, Rosa, and drove us all to the Japanese gardens, almost an hour away.
The gardens were in a hotel off a San Juan beach. The hotel was always busy with businessmen and tourists. Cubans and Europeans gambled in the casino. They sauntered on the garden paths. Cora and I watched them as if to learn from their motions. My mother called certain women the 'gentry.' They were pearl-skinned and had black hair. Descendants, my mother said, of the conquistadores. One or two such women lived in Santa Mar<*_>i-acute<*/>a. My mother knew them but thought they were too proud.
We entered the garden from the north on a path of stones laid in the grass. The path snaked up a hill. On top of the hill there was a pond with lily pads. A wooden gazebo with a bridge had been built in the middle of the pond. The gazebo was our sanctuary. We had picnics there. Then we threw bread crumbs to the garden birds. Pelicans balanced on one leg; peacocks dragged their tails in the grass; ducks stepped in and out of the pond. The pond streamed over the south side of the hill and turned into a waterfall. Cora, Michael and I used to roll down a dry part of the hill. At the bottom there was an abandoned art gallery, rotting under a mango tree. We used to play around the gallery.
Mom said to Rosa, "What a relief to escape that Rebecca." We were sitting in the gazebo. It was almost five, and we'd been at the gardens since noon.
Rosa was from Peru. She'd been with us since I was three. She'd learned English for Mom. But Michael, Cora and I liked to talk to her in Spanish. Her clothes smelled of garlic. Her skin smelled like pine. She had a flat nose and paper-thin ears. The whites of her eyes had yellow shades in them. She was showing Michael how to whistle with a blade of grass. I was bent over the pond, catching guppies in a paper cup. Cora sat Indian-style next to me. She wore a yellow dress she'd already soiled.
"Rosa, that woman keeps him up all night sometimes," Mom said and lit a cigarette. "She was a wild one. She had her men. Plenty, too. She loves to tell me all about them."
Rosa said, "Do<*_>n-tilde<*/>a Rebecca is a good woman. She doesn't know what she says."
"She knows exactly what she's saying. She told me I should stop trying to have children. Imagine! Now she's begun this raving. Don't underestimate her power, Rosa. That was my mistake. She's a mighty one."
Mom caught me listening and blew me a kiss. She wore her hair short and behind her ears. Her hair is blond-red and her eyes are green; the left one slopes down a little. When angry, she closes both eyes halfway.
She took off her hat and fanned herself with it. Even in the shade Mom felt the heat. She left to call Dad. When she returned, she said, "I told your father we'd be late. I packed sweaters in case it gets chilly."
Cora leaned forward to watch the guppies writhing in the cup. She said, "Do we have to wait until dark? After dark, God comes out."
I giggled. I didn't believe in God. My father made me go to Hebrew school. I skipped lessons. I never liked the quiet of synagogues, the small talk after the services. Passover or Yom Kippur was a chore to me. My mother is Catholic. She has, to all appearances, converted. Yet when frightened or nervous, she crosses herself.
"I have some juice and cookies," Mom said.
"Let's leave before it's dark,"Cora said.
"Have a go at more of those tadpoles."
"Do<*_>n-tilde<*/>a Julia," Rosa said, "Michael hasn't had his nap."
And Mom said, "He'll live."
Cora and I headed for the waterfall at the bottom of the hill. We splattered our ankles in the mango pulp and mud. We looked through a cracked window of the art gallery. I said, "Look at the shadows on the pedestals. Let's go in." We'd never been inside.
Cora didn't want to. I said I'd go in myself and she changed her mind. We crawled through a window. The glass was missing. There were two rooms. The back one had a dirty desk in it. I sat behind the desk and pretended to play Mozart.
"Look at me," I heard Cora shout.
In the other room, she'd climbed onto a pedestal. She was holding her hands up. She looked like a skinny cherub. I climbed onto a larger pedestal and thought there was no way a living thing could look like art.
Mom came to the window and watched us.
When we got home, she said, "You looked so quiet. Just like statues. I couldn't disturb you."
Standing on the pedestal made me feel composed. My mother would tell me she always sees me that way. She believes people like to assess our graces. I believe we ask people to judge us. Sometimes we even insist.
Michael fell asleep during dinner. Rosa carried him to his room. His room was blue, with white floors and a white ceiling. His bed was near the window. He could look out to the top of palm trees and the sky. I liked where his room was: above Mom and Dad's and between Cora's and mine. My room faced the backyard, the pool and the forest that belonged to the church. We had a flamboyan tree. When the tree was flowering, I didn't mind my view.
Nanny ate slowly. She toyed with the lacy collar of her yellow robe. Her face was long and smooth. Her eyes seemed to have clouds in them.
<#FROWN:K21\>
I am the Grand Inquisitor. My piercing Spanish eyes are wide with righteous indignation beneath my great black hood and cowl. I have the Jew in my grasp, but he refuses to recant. He assaults me with his spurious Hebrew logic. My mind storms at the sacrilege. I must restrain myself from wringing his neck like the chicken he resembles. Instead, I survey my armory of more persuasive implements and consider, with pleasure, which to use on this very special day: the tongs, the thumb screw, the rack, the fire. I sneeze.
This dungeon, my domain, is raw with winter. I can hear the wind rushing through the cracks between the enormous gray stones. Odors of mold and putrefaction are borne along like fish in the sea. Gusts find their way under my cassock, ripple my thighs like a horse's flanks. My arthritic fingers clutch Ecclesiastes to my chest, and I think that the Jew must suffer similar pangs without similar comfort. At least I am accustomed to this spiritual netherworld, while all he knows is his warm thatched cottage, homey with the moist heat and smell of his grandmother's soup. Not soon will he feast on beans and the blood of Christian children. Not soon will he escape the benevolent clutches of the Inquisition. I hold my lantern aloft to examine his fear, but when I sneeze again I drop it and the flame gutters and dies.
Despite the intense cold, I am sweating as I make my way down the darkened corridor. Is it the supernatural illumination that guides me through the pitch labyrinth beneath the castle which is burning me up from within or merely my hatred of the Jew? A fire out of control on a glacial slope, the extremes of temperature wrack and contort me to their whim. Tapping this bone this way and that bone that, they play upon my brittle spine like a musician. We undergo the same tortures, myself and the Jew, but it is a small price to pay for eternal salvation. Each howl of agony that drifts through the walls is bringing some lucky soul closer to God. I envy them. Then I feel it, an awesome winged presence in the corridor with me. A silent, dreadful, magnificent visitation. The Holy Ghost?
From somewhere in the midnight passage comes a voice. "Who are you?"
"Your faithful servant," I reply, and drop to genuflect.
"I see no servant of the God of the Cross," the angry voice intones. "I see only ... a Jew."
A Jew? "No, no, my Lord. Here," I tear at my hood, but where the black crest was is a knitted skullcap. "Here," I rip my shirt to reveal the crucifix ever upon my heart, but in place of the penitential hairshirt is a flannel nightgown, and beneath it a star of David.
What a dream, what a terrible, frightening dream! I am back in my Toledo four-poster bed, Spanish lace hanging from its carved mahogany peaks. My red-cassocked junior brothers surround me, praying. Their voices are sweet, and far away, beneath my chamber, I can make out the restful undertone of the prisoners' cries. My court physician is in attendance, bending over me, peering intently through his gold-rimmed spectacles, attaching a leech to suck the fevered blood from my still pulsing forehead. I try to speak, but I have been too exhausted by my recent ordeal. Even now it is not over, and there is something wrong about these people I think I know so well. They are engaged in a hushed consultation, so I only hear fragments.
"A judgment."
"Raving since he got home."
"... could have happened?"
Gradually their mellifluous Iberian accents become harsher, more guttural. Then their words themselves grow vague, then strange.
"On his way home from cheder."
"Church," I rasp to correct them.
"It was something the blacksmith's son said."
"The blackness. What the blackness said."
But they ignore me, so I scrutinize them. I catch a whiff of something fishy. My God, protect me, the court physician smells of herring! He is an imposter. I try to writhe from his insidious grip, but he and his aides hold me down. Sweat springs to my forehead, floods into my eyes, burns them with salt. I shut them against the pain and sight of the Jew.
It is not enough to banish the vision of treachery. Words come through, in Yiddish. Miraculously, I understand the infidel tongue. I reopen my eyes in wonder at their magic and in order to remember their faces on the day of retribution.
"Who was the last to see him?"
A man dressed as a schoolteacher answers, "The students all left together, but he ran ahead of the others. He often does."
"This wouldn't have happened if he were more friendly."
"So then Zevchik, the blacksmith's son, went up to him. There were words, then a fight."
"That Zevchik is a terror."
"Nonsense," a new voice declares. "When haven't young blacksmiths beat up young Jews? Zevchik is neither better nor worse than any Pole." This speaker's face is different from the others. It is less cared for but more caring. It is sensible, but it is also sensitive, and despite its lowly position on a straight-backed wooden chair in the corner it obviously commands a great deal of respect.
A mournful woman beside the chair sniffs, "He shouldn't fight." Her face is soft, madonnalike, haloed by a checkered handkerchief, but I will not allow myself to be seduced. It smells of soap and the other domestic chores of the faithless Jewish home.
The schoolteacher continues: "They were pulled apart, and he could hardly walk. Already he was crazy. So we brought him here, and he's been like this ever since."
The physician says: "I can find nothing drastically wrong with him. There are bruises but they're minor." He pulls the engorged slug off my forehead and drops it into a glass container, which he seals. "I don't usually advocate leeching, but in this case I thought there might be too much pressure on the brain. It will make him weak and light-headed, neither of which can hurt him more than his delirium."
Delirium, they say! Just because I can see through their pitiful masquerade they are desperate to convince me that I am mad. Endangered, yes, insane, never. I have fallen into the hands of Marranos, false converters, mockers of the sacrosanct baptismal ceremony. Pretending to be good Spaniards, they are merely cowards evading the snares of the Inquisition, secret Jews. I shall tear their disguises from them, strip them bare, flay them, burn them, and consecrate their ashes to the greater glory of Christ. "Jews!" I scream at them.
"Yes," the quiet man in the corner responds.
"Jews! Jews!" There is no worse insult.
"You are a Jew," he says.
"That's a filthy, degenerate lie. I was born to a sainted Christian woman, brought up in the household of the Lord, and have taken my place as the father of his earthly ministry ... I am Torquemada."
Most everyone in the room blanches and starts back in horror. They cannot help but accord the truly righteous a certain esteem. I can see the effect my name has on all of them - except the one in the corner. He seems saddened but not fazed. He says, "Then Torquemada is a Jew."
I spring up and at his neck. My fingers are ten wriggling snakes reaching to sink their fangs through the soft flesh.
He does not move to defend himself. It is the other Jews who subdue me and tie me to the bed.
"A dybbuk," the mystic utters.
"No, a delirium," the rationalist maintains.
"Who," the woman hovering by the man in the corner pleads, "can help?"
First it is the doctor's turn. Besides leeching me he forces me to drink a vile liquid that tastes like tree bark. I feel it knotting my stomach, coursing through, and purging me from within. My pillow is drenched with sweat, but I will not succumb. When he lays hands on me, intruding on my privacy, I must endure the offense. Wrapped as securely as a baby in swaddling clothes, I have only my words. "Do you not see the error of your ways, Jew? How dare you refuse to acknowledge the divinity of the one Lord above?"
As this is a matter for theology, the Rabbi steps in. He is an ugly, cantankerous old goat, a pious criminal. I can smell his beard and rank gabardine coat. I can smell the pungent reek of his faith, like rotting moss caught in a castle wind. "We are the ones who recognize the one Lord," he says. "It is you that divide him into three."
"The Trinity, most hallowed, most ineffable of mysteries. One in three, three in one. You cannot understand."
"Then how can we believe?"
"You claim to understand your Lord, Rabbi? A minor God he must certainly be."
The Rabbi steps warily about this bed that imprisons me, as if afraid that I might break loose. He explains, "No, we do not understand our Lord. His ways are beyond human comprehension. But we do know that he is One."
"As is mine," I tell him. "One in three, three in one. A mystery greater than yours. If there are two great mysteries, must not the greater be attributed to the greater God?"
The Rabbi tugs at his smelly beard, then replies, "Then why not one in five, five in one, one in a million, a million in one, the greater the mystery ...."
I have underestimated him. He has a point. Stalemate. I try another tack. "And the words of Christ on the cross?"
"Moses in the wilderness."
"Saint Paul."
"Elijah."
"Pope Innocent III."
"The Baal Shem Tov."
"We can banter religious authorities all night, Rabbi, but how can you deny the lay opinion of the citizens of the world? How can you deny their choice, which has given the community of Christ to be fruitful and multiply while you shrivel in this Polish backwater? How can you deny history?"
"Truth is not a matter of majority rule. How could we otherwise deny the words of the ancients as to the circulation of the blood, the roundness of the earth. A minority with truth on its side will always prevail, must always deny."
I am exasperated. I cannot contain myself. "Your minority is a rag-ridden, flea-bitten race of whorish, usurious, inbreeding Christ-killers and should be exterminated."
The Rabbi sighs, "No doubt if you have anything to say about it, we shall."
"Yes, I can see such a day, and not so long from now. It will be a splendid day, bathed in light and blood. There, on the white shore of the eternal kingdom, the good people shall be gathered. At sea, aboard a raft as large as an ark, the total remains of international Jewry are tied one to the other. The angels demand an end to the pestilence. I am proud to dip my torch to the scattered bundles of straw, which crackle and smoke until the oils of the wood and the sinews of the flesh catch fire. The flames mount. The last blasphemous prayers to a pagan God are drowned by the hosannas of the righteous Christian multitude as the final glorious auto-da-f sinks sizzling beneath the waves. Rid forever of the Jewish contagion, it shall be a day of universal thanksgiving and universal belief in the one true God."
They are mute, agape before the power of my vision. Again, it is only the quiet man in the corner who can summon the will to speak to me. He asks, calmly, "Are you a priest or a prophet?"
I could confound the doctor, refute the Rabbi, but this strange man's soft-spoken questions are beyond my ability to scorn. I can see the marks of my hands on his neck. I feel obligated to explain as best I can, and I do so with surprising modesty, in a voice almost like his.
<#FROWN:K22\>
MAUNDY
A FEW days before Easter, Maggie's father found a man in a sanitary lane, and took him home. All through Badminton, our housing estate, sandy, stony sanitary lanes ran between the houses on Edward Avenue and Henry Street and Elizabeth Crescent. They had been built so that the night-soil men, coming like ghosts after dark, could remove the black rubber buckets without being seen.
Our fathers returned home from the desert war in Egypt and Libya and began battling the bare veldt. Every weekend they wrestled the hard, red earth into gardens. Badminton was a new housing estate, built outside Johannesburg for returning soldiers. Its streets were named after English kings and queens, because we were English South Africans. The boxy new houses, with their corrugated-iron roofs, ran down a slope to a small stream and a copse of giant blue gums. Seven years after the war ended, soldiers who had gone to fight against Germans had turned into gardeners in uniform. My father worked in his Army boots. Gus Trupshaw wore a sailor's blue shirt. Nathan Swirsky put on his leather flying helmet when he took out his motorbike.
Our fathers looked up from their zinnias, mopped their brows, and said, "It's hotter down south than it was up north, make no mistake." They cursed the African heat. They cursed the stubborn shale that had to be broken up with picks, forked over, sieved, spread and sweetened with rich brown earth, delivered by Errol the topsoil man.
They cursed the burglars. My mother said that there were swarms of burglars hiding among the blue gum trees. They ran down the sanitary lanes at night and slipped into the houses like greased lightning. As I lay in bed at night, I saw the sanitary lanes teeming with burglars and night-soil men, coming and going. Nobody talked about the night-soil men. They came and went in our sleep, though in the morning we caught the scent of something we wished to forget.
Nobody talked about Maggie, either. She lived next door and took off all her clothes from time to time and ran around her house. And we all pretended not to notice. She was the fastest ten-year-old on the estate.
My mother was next door in a flash when she saw the man working in Maggie's garden. He wore old khaki shorts. His legs ended in stumps, inches below the shorts, and the stumps were tied up in sacking. He pulled himself everywhere in a red tin wagon, hauling himself along with strong arms. His muscles were huge. The legless man sat upon a paper bag that he had spread in the bottom of his wagon. It read "Buy Your Brand-New Zephyr at Dominion Motors."
"Hell's bells! What could I do? He just followed me home," said Maggie's father. "He tells me his name's Salisbury."
"I don't care if he's the King of Siam," my mother said to my father a little while later. "It's bad enough when that little girl tears about the place in the you-know-what, for all the world and his wife to stare. Now they have a cripple in their garden!"
My father was studying the annual report of the South African Sugar Association. "Figures for 1952 show exports up."
"Some of us cannot lose ourselves in sugar reports," my mother said, "Some of us have to look life in the eye."
"For heaven's sake, Monica," my father said. "The poor sod's lost his legs. I'm sure he doesn't like it any more than you do. But he's still human. Well, more or less."
Then Maggie appeared, running around the side of her house. "Speak of the devil!" my mother said. Maggie was skinny and very brown. Her bare legs flashing, round and round the house she ran. Her dog, a Doberman called Tamburlaine, ran after her, barking loudly.
"Martin," said my mother, "come away from the window. It only encourages her if you stare."
Maggie's father was chasing her with a blanket. He caught up, and threw it over her. Like a big gray butterfly net.
"You'd hardly think this was Easter," said my mother. "I don't know where to put my face."
Salisbury sat in his red wagon, doing some weeding. "What on earth do you think is going through his head?" my mother demanded. "That little girl might be less keen to parade in the altogether if she knew what was going through his head."
"I see that Henry's been planting out beardless irises," said my father. "The beardless iris loves a sunny spot and a good bit of wall."
"Heavens above, where will it all end?" my mother asked. "Our neighbors have a cripple in their garden. Easter is almost on us. There are burglars in the blue gums. Soon the streets will be full of servants. Did you know that they've taken to asking for Easter boxes? First Christmas boxes, now Easter boxes. I suppose they'll be asking for Michaelmas boxes next. Dressed to the nines, some of them. And worse for wear."
I went to bed that night and thought about the burglars down among the blue gums that grew thickly across the road from the big houses in Edward Avenue. All over Badminton our fathers, home from the war, slept with their Army-issue pistols in their sock drawers, ready at any moment to rush naked into the African night, blasting away. The burglars were said to creep up on the houses and cast fishing lines through the burglar bars to hook wallets and handbags from our bedrooms.
We all believed in the burglars. Everyone except for Ruthie Swirsky, the chemist's new wife. But she was English, from Wimbledon. Swirsky had travelled to Europe and brought her home with him. "Burglars with fishing rods," Ruthie Swirsky said to my father just after she moved to the estate. "I've never heard of anything so absurd. Pull the other one, Gordon."
"Pull the other what?" my mother wanted to know later.
"How would I know, Monica?" said my father. "Leg, I suppose."
"Whatever she had in mind, it wasn't a leg," said my mother.
"Whatever she had in mind, it wasn't a leg!" sang my friends Tony, Sally, and Eric, and I as we rolled down the steep, grassy banks in Tony's garden that Eastertime in Badminton.
FOR the rest of the holiday, nothing much seemed likely to happen. The days looming ahead were too hot somehow, even though we were well into autumn. Our fathers worked in their gardens tending to their petunias and phlox and chrysanthemums. They sprayed their rosebushes against black spot, moving in the thick clouds of lime sulfur like refugees from a gas attack in the trenches.
Ernest Langbein had fallen in love with Maggie. Ernest was an altar server at the church of the Resurrection in Cyrildene, and he told Eric that if only Maggie would stop taking off her clothes, their love might be possible. Maggie was not easy to get on with. When she had no clothes on, she wasn't really there. And when she was dressed she was inclined to make savage remarks. I met her in Swirsky's Pharmacy on Maundy Thursday. She wore a blue dress with thick black stockings. Her brown, pixie face was shaded by a big white panama hat, tied beneath her chin with thick elastic. I was wearing shorts. I'd never seen her look so covered up. She looked at my bare feet and said, "You have hammertoes, Martin." It seemed very unfair.
We were standing behind the wall of blue magnesia bottles which Swirsky built across his shop on festive occasions, like Christmas and Easter. We heard Ruthie Swirsky say to Mrs. Raubenheimer of the Jewish Old Age Home across the road, "I'm collecting Maundy money. It's an Easter custom we have in England. The Royal Mint makes its own money, and the Queen gives it to pensioners and suchlike. The deserving poor. In a special purse."
Mrs. Raubenheimer said that those who could afford it could afford it. Swirsky came around the magnesia wall and grinned at us. He crackled in his starched white coat. His mustache was full and yet feathery beneath his nose. Black feathers, it was. "Well, kiddies," he said. "Can I count on you? Pocket money is welcome for Ruthie's Maundy box. What Ruthie wants she usually gets." He rattled a black wooden collection box.
My mother said, "It's appalling. The Swirsky's aren't even Easter people. The Queen of England does not live on an estate infested with burglars. Have you seen the collection box Ruthie Swirsky's using? I happen to know that it belongs to St. John's Ambulance. She simply turned it around so you can't see the badge."
"If you're going to divide the world into those who are and those who are not Easter people." said my father, "you may as well go and join the government. They do it all the time."
"I have no intention," said my mother, "of joining the government."
All the kids gave to Ruthie Swirsky's Maundy-money box. We collected empty soft-drink bottles and got back a penny deposit down at the Greek Tea Room. Swirsky shook the box until our pennies rattled. "Give till it hurts," he said. "Baby needs new booties."
A deputation arrived at the pharmacy. Gus Trupshaw had been elected to speak for the estate. He wore his demob suit and brown Army boots with well-polished toes. He said that everyone objected to the idea of Ruthie's giving away money to the servants. What would they expect next Easter? It might be difficult for an English person to understand. But the cleaners, cooks, and gardenersof Badminton got board and lodging and wages. "They might be poor," Gus Trupshaw explained, "but they're not deserving."
"Are you telling me I may not give my Maundy money to whomsoever I choose?" Ruthie asked, her face white beneath her red hair, "This is outrageous."
"This isn't Wimbledon." said Gus Trupshaw. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."
Swirsky leaned over to us and whispered. "When you're next in Rome, I can recommend the Trevi fountain. But watch out for pickpockets."
Ruthie Swirsky tapped the black collection box with her finger after Gus Trupshaw left. She told Swirsky she was so mad she could spit. She asked him to find Errol the topsoil man. "Tell him I have a job for his wheelbarrow."
Later, it was my mother who spotted Errol wheeling his barrow into the yard next door. "There appears to be some movement at the neighbors'. I think I'll go and lie down," she said.
Errol stopped beside Salisbury with his wheelbarrow. He laid the paper bag from Dominion Motors on the floor of the barrow and lifted Salisbury out of his wagon. Then he set off up Henry Street, wheeling Salisbury, with my friend Sally, her brother Tony, Eric, and me tagging along behind them.
We heard the iron wheels scattering gravel in Henry Street.
"Where are we goings?" Salisbury asked Errol in a deep, growling voice.
"Boss Swirsky's place. Sit still and don't make any trouble." Errol maneuvered the barrow right up to the front door of Swirsky's Pharmacy. Papas, the owner of the Greek Tea Room, and Mr. Benjamin, the Rug Doctor, came out of their shops to stare. A couple of ladies from the Jewish Old Age Home also stopped to watch. Ruthie Swirsky came out of the pharmacy. Nathan was next to her. There was sun on his mustache, and it looked as if it had been dipped in oil. Swirsky carried the collection box. He held it carefully, as if it were a baby, and his face when he looked at Ruthie was soft and loving. A crowd of cleaners, cooks, and gardeners gathered across the road. They looked angry.
"I hear you're a poor man, Salisbury," said Ruthie. "So I've decided to help you."
"Yes, Madam," said Salisbury.
"I hope you're not going to leave him there all day, Mrs. Swirsky," said Mrs. Raubenheimer.
<#FROWN:K23\>
"Trash like the other trash. Pissako or some other bluffer."
"Who is this Pissako?"
Out of somewhere materialized Reuben Kazarsky, who said, "That's what he calls Picasso."
"What's the difference? They're all fakers," Max Flederbush said. "My wife, may she rest in peace, was the expert, not me."
Kazarsky winked at me and smiled. He had been my friend even back in Poland. He had written a half-dozen Yiddish comedies, but they had all failed. He had published a collection of vignettes, but the critics had torn it to shreds and he had stopped writing. He had come to America in 1939 and later had married a widow 20 years older than he. The widow died and Kazarsky inherited her money. He hung around rich people. He dyed his hair and dressed in corduroy jackets and hand-painted ties. He declared his love to every woman from 15 to 75. Kazarsky was in his 60s, but he looked no more than 50. He let his hair grow long and wore side whiskers. His black eyes reflected the mockery and abnegation of one who has broken with everything and everybody. In the cafeteria on the Lower East Side, he excelled at mimicking writers, rabbis and party leaders. He boasted of his talents as a sponger. Reuben Kazarsky suffered from hypochondria and because he was by nature a sexual philanthropist, he had convinced himself that he was impotent. We were friends, but he had never introduced me to his benefactors. It seemed that Max Flederbush had insisted that Reuben bring us together. He now complained to me:
"Where do you hide yourself? I've asked Reuben again and again to get us together, but according to him, you were always in Europe, in Israel or who knows where. All of a sudden, it comes out that you're in Miami Beach. I'm in such a state that I can't be alone for a minute. The moment I'm alone, I'm overcome by a gloom that's worse than madness. This fine apartment you see here turns suddenly into a funeral parlor. Sometimes I think that the real heroes aren't those who get medals in wartime but the bachelors who live out their years alone."
"Do you have a bathroom in this palace?" I asked.
"More than one, more than two, more than three," Max answered. He took my arm and led me to a bathroom that bedazzled me by its size and elegance. The lid of the toilet seat was transparent, set with semiprecious stones and a two-dollar bill implanted within it. Facing the mirror hung a picture of a little boy urinating in an arc while a little girl looked on admiringly. When I lifted the toilet-seat lid, music began to play. After a while, I stepped out onto the balcony that looked directly out to sea. The rays of the setting sun scampered over the waves. Gulls still hunted for fish. Far off in the distance, on the edge of the horizon, a ship swayed. On the beach, I spotted some animal that from my vantage point, 16 floors high, appeared like a calf or a huge dog. But it couldn't be a dog and what would a calf be doing in Miami Beach? Suddenly, the shape straightened up and turned out to be a woman in a long bathrobe digging for clams in the sand.
After a while, Kazarsky joined me on the balcony. He said, "That's Miami. It wasn't he but his wife who chased after all these trinkets. She was the businesslady and the boss at home. On the other hand, he isn't quite the idle dreamer he pretends to be. He has an uncanny knack for making money. They dealt in everything - buildings, lots stocks, diamonds, and eventually she got involved in art, too. When he said buy, she bought; and when he said sell, she sold. When she showed him a painting, he'd glance at it, spit and say, "It's junk, they'll snatch it out of your hands. Buy!" Whatever they touched turned to money. They flew to Israel, established Yeshivas and donated prizes toward all kinds of endeavors - cultural, religious. Naturally, they wrote it all off in taxes. Their daughter, that pampered brat, was half-crazy. Any complex you can find in Freud, Jung and Adler, she had it. She was born in a DP camp in Germany. Her parents wanted her to marry a chief rabbi or an Israeli prime minister. But she fell in love with a gentile, an archaeology professor with a wife and five children. His wife wouldn't divorce him and she had to be bought off with a quarter-million-dollar settlement and a fantastic alimony besides. Four weeks after the wedding, the professor left to dig for a new Peking man. heHedrank like a fish. It was he who was drunk, not the truck driver. Come, you'll soon see something!"
Kazarsky opened the door to the living room and it was filled with people. In one day, Max Flederbush had managed to arrange a party. Not all the guests could fit into the large living room. Kazarsky and Max Flederbush led me from room to room and the party was going on all over. Within minutes, maybe 200 people had gathered, mostly women. It was a fashion show of jewelry, dresses, pants, caftans, hairdos, shoes, bags, make-up, as well as men's jackets, shirts and ties. Spotlights illuminated every painting. Waiters served drinks. Black and white maids offered trays of hors d'oeuvres.
In all this commotion, I could scarcely hear what was being said to me. The compliments started, the handshakes and the kisses. A stout lady seized me around and pressed me to her enormous bosom. She shouted into my ear, "I read you! I come from the towns you describe. My grandfather came here from Ishishok. He was a wagon driver there and here in America, he went into the freight business. If my parents wanted to say something I wouldn't understand, they spoke Yiddish, and that's how I learned a little of the language."
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My face was smeared with lipstick. Even as I stood there, trying to wipe it off, I received all kinds of proposals. A cantor offered to set one of my stories to music. A musician demanded I adapt an opera libretto from one of my novels. A president of an adult-education program invited me to speak a year hence at his synagogue. I would be given a plaque. A young man with hair down to his shoulders asked that I recommend a publisher, or at least an agent, to him. He declared, "I must create. This is a physical need with me."
One minute all the rooms were full, the next - all the guests were gone, leaving only Reuben Kazarsky and myself. Just as quickly and efficiently, the help cleaned up the leftover food and half-drunk cocktails, dumped all the ashtrays and replaced all the chairs in their rightful places. I had never before witnessed such perfection. Out of somewhere, Max Flederbush dug out a white tie with gold polka dots and put it on.
He said, "Time for dinner."
"I ate so much I haven't the least appetite," I said.
"You must have dinner with us, I reserved a table at the best restaurant in Miami."
After a while, the three of us, Max Flederbush, Reuben Kazarsky and I, got into the Cadillac and the same chauffeur drove us. Night had fallen and I no longer saw nor tried to determine where I was being taken. We drove for only a few minutes and pulled up in front of a hotel resplendent with lights and uniformed attendants. One opened the car door ceremoniously, a second fawningly opened the glass front door. The lobby of this hotel wasn't merely supercolossal but supersupercolossal - complete to light effects, tropical plants in huge planters, vases, sculptures, a parrot in a cage. We were escorted into a nearly dark hall and greeted by a headwaiter who was expecting us and led us to our reserved table. He bowed and scraped, seemingly overcome with joy that we had arrived safely. Soon, another individual came up. Both men wore tuxedos, patent-leather shoes, bow ties and ruffled shirts. They looked to me like twins. They spoke with foreign accents that I suspected weren't genuine. A lengthy discussion evolved concerning our choice of foods and drinks. When the two heard I was a vegetarian, they looked at each other in chagrin, but only for a second. Soon they assured me they would serve me the best dish a vegetarian had ever tasted. One took our orders and the other wrote them down. Max Flederbush announced in his broken English that he really wasn't hungry, but if something tempting could be dredged up for him, he was prepared to give it a try. He interjected Yiddish expressions, but the two waiters apparently understood him. He gave precise instructions on how to roast his fish and prepare his vegetables. He specified spices and seasonings. Reuben Kazarsky ordered a steak and what I was to get, which in plain English was a fruit salad with cottage cheese.
When the two men finally left, Max Flederbush said, "There were times if you would have told me I'd be sitting in such a place eating such food, I would have considered it a joke. I had one fantasy - one time before I died to get enough dry bread to fill me. Suddenly, I'm a rich man, alas, and people dance attendance on me. Well, but flesh and blood isn't fated to enjoy any rest. The angels in heaven are jealous, Satan is the accuser and the Almighty is easily convinced. He nurses a longtime resentment against us Jews. He still can't forgive the fact that our great-great-grandfathers worshiped the golden calf. Let's have our picture taken."
A man with a camera materialized. "Smile!" he ordered us.
Max Flederbush tried to smile. One eye laughed, the other cried. Reuben Kazarsky began to twinkle. I didn't even make the effort. The photographer said he was going to develop the film and that he'd be back in three quarters of an hour.
Max Flederbush asked, "What was I talking about, eh? Yes. I live in apparent luxury, but a woe upon this luxury. As rich and as elegant as the house is, it's also a Gehenna. I'll tell you something; in a certain sense, it's worse here than in the camps. There, at least, we all hoped. A hundred times a day we comforted ourselves with the fact that the Hitler madness couldn't go on for long. When we heard the sound of an airplane, we thought the invasion had started. We were all young then and our whole lives were before us. Rarely did anyone commit suicide. Here, hundreds of people sit, waiting for death. A week doesn't go by that someone doesn't give up the ghost. They're all rich. The men have accumulated fortunes, turned worlds upside down, maybe swindled to get there. Now they don't know what to do with their money. They're all on diets. There is no one to dress for. Outside of the financial page in the newspaper, they read nothing. As soon as they finish their breakfasts, they start playing cards. Can you play cards forever? They have to, or die from boredom. When they get tired of playing, they start slandering one another. Bitter feuds are waged. Today they elect a president, the next day they try to impeach him. If he decides to move a chair in the lobby, a revolution breaks out. There is one touch of consolation for them - the mail. An hour before the postman is due, the lobby is crowded. They stand with their keys in hand, waiting like for the Messiah. If the postman is late, a hubbub erupts. If one opens his mailbox and it's empty, he starts to grope and burrow inside, trying to create something out of thin air.
<#FROWN:K24\>
He heard the rabbi strike a match and it flared momentarily, casting shadows of candles and chairs amid the empty chairs in the room.
"Look now in the mirror."
"I'm looking."
"What do you see?"
"Nothing."
"Look with your eyes."
A silver candelabrum, first with three, then five, then seven burning bony candlesticks, appeared like ghostly hands with flaming fingertips in the oval mirror. The heat of it hit Albert in the face and for a moment he was stunned.
But recalling the games of his childhood, he thought, who's kidding who? It's one of those illusion things I remember from when I was a kid. In that case I'm getting the hell out of here. I can stand maybe mystery but not magic tricks or dealing with a rabbinical magician.
The candelabrum had vanished, although not its light, and he now saw the rabbi's somber face in the glass, his gaze addressing him. Albert glanced quickly around to see of anyone was standing at his shoulder, but nobody was. Where the rabbi was hiding at the moment the teacher did not know; but in the lit glass appeared his old man's lined and shrunken face, his sad eyes, compelling, inquisitive, weary, perhaps even frightened, as though they had seen more than they had cared to but were still looking.
What's this, slides or home movies? Albert sought some source of projection but saw no ray of light from wall or ceiling, nor object or image that might be reflected by the mirror.
The rabbi's eyes glowed like sun-filled clouds. A moon rose in the blue sky. The teacher dared not move, afraid to discover he was unable to. He then beheld a shining crown on the rabbi's head.
It had appeared at first like a braided mother-of-pearl turban, then had luminously become - like an intricate star in the night sky - a silver crown, constructed of bars, triangles, half-moons and crescents, spires, turrets, trees, points of spears; as though a wild storm had swept them up from the earth and flung them together in its vortex, twisted into a single glowing interlocked sculpture, a forest of disparate objects.
The sight in the ghostly mirror, a crown of rare beauty - very impressive, Albert thought - lasted no longer than five short seconds, then the reflecting glass by degrees turned dark and empty.
The shades were up. The single bulb in a frosted lily fixture on the ceiling shone harshly in the room. It was night.
The old rabbi sat, exhausted, on the broken sofa.
"So you saw it?"
"I saw something."
"You believe what you saw - the crown?"
"I believe I saw. Anyway, I'll take it."
The rabbi gazed at him blankly.
"I mean I agree to have the crown made," Albert said, having to clear his throat.
"Which size?"
"Which size was the one I saw?"
"Both sizes. This is the same design for both sizes, but there is more silver and also more blessings for the $986 size."
"But didn't you say that the design for my father's crown, because of the special nature of his illness, would have a different style, plus some special blessings?"
The rabbi nodded. "This comes also in two sizes - the $401 and $986."
The teacher hesitated a split second. "Make it the big one," he said decisively.
He had his wallet in his hand and counted out fifteen new bills - nine one hundreds, four twenties, a five, and a single - adding to $986.
Putting on his glasses, the rabbi hastily counted the money, snapping with thumb and forefinger each crisp bill as though to be sure none had stuck together. He folded the stiff paper and thrust the wad into his pants pocket.
"Could I have a receipt?"
"I would like to give you a receipt," said Rabbi Lifschitz earnestly, "but for the crowns there are no receipts. Some things are not a business."
"If money is exchanged, why not?"
"God will not allow. My father did not give receipts and also my grandfather."
"How can I prove I paid you if something goes wrong?"
"You have my word, nothing will go wrong."
"Yes, but suppose something unforeseen did," Albert insisted, "would you return the cash?"
"Here is your cash," said the rabbi, handing the teacher the packet of folded bills.
"Never mind," said Albert hastily. "Could you tell me when the crown will be ready?"
"Tomorrow night before Shabbes, the latest."
"So soon?"
"Your father is dying."
"That's right, but the crown looks like a pretty intricate piece of work to put together out of all those odd pieces."
"We will hurry."
"I wouldn't want you to rush the job in any way that would - let's say - prejudice the potency of the crown, or for that matter, in any way impair the quality of it as I saw it in the mirror - or however I saw it."
Down came the rabbi's eyelid, quickly raised without a sign of self-consciousness. "Mr. Gans, all my crowns are first-class jobs. About this you got nothing to worry about."
They then shook hands. Albert, still assailed by doubts, stepped into the corridor. He felt he did not, in essence, trust the rabbi; and suspected that Rabbi Lifschitz knew it and did not, in essence, trust him.
Rifkele, panting like a cow for a bull, let him out the front door, perfectly.
In the subway, Albert figured he would call it an investment in experience and see what came of it. Education costs money, but how else can you get it? He pictured the crown, as he had seen it, established on the rabbi's head, and then seemed to remember that as he had stared at the man's shifty face in the mirror the thickened lid of his right eye had slowly dropped into a full wink. Did he recall this in truth, or was he seeing in his mind's eye and transposing into the past something that had happened just before he left the house? What does he mean by his wink? - not only is he a fake but he kids you? Uneasy once more, the teacher clearly remembered, when he was staring into the rabbi's fish eyes in the glass, after which they had lit in visionary light, that he had fought a hunger to sleep; and the next thing there's the sight of the old boy, as though on the television screen, wearing this high-hat magic crown.
Albert, rising, cried, "Hypnosis! The bastard magician hypnotized me! He never did produce a silver crown, it's out of my imagination - I've been suckered!"
He was outraged by the knavery, hypocrisy, fat nerve of Rabbi Jonas Lifschitz. The concept of a curative crown, if he had ever for a moment believed in it, crumbled in his brain and all he could think of were 986 blackbirds flying in the sky. As three curious passengers watched, Albert bolted out of the car at the next stop, rushed up the stairs, hurried across the street, then cooled his impatient heels for twenty-two minutes till the next train clattered into the station, and he rode back to the stop near the rabbi's house. Though he banged with both fists on the door, kicked at it, 'rang' the useless bell until his thumb was blistered, the boxlike wooden house, including dilapidated synagogue store, was dark, monumentally starkly still, like a gigantic, slightly tilted tombstone in a vast graveyard; and in the end unable to arouse a soul, the teacher, long past midnight, had to head home.
He awoke next morning cursing the rabbi and his own stupidity for having got involved with a faith healer. This is what happens when a man - even for a minute - surrenders his true beliefs. There are less punishing ways to help the dying. Albert considered calling the cops but had no receipt and did not want to appear that much a fool. He was tempted, for the first time in six years of teaching, to phone in sick; then take a cab to the rabbi's house and demand the return of his cash. The thought agitated him. On the other hand, suppose Rabbi Lifschitz was seriously at work assembling the crown with his helper; on which, let's say, after he had bought the silver and paid the retired jeweler for his work, he made, let's say, a hundred bucks clear profit - not so very much; and there really was a silver crown, and the rabbi sincerely and religiously believed it would reverse the course of his father's illness? Although nervously disturbed by his suspicions, Albert felt he had better not get the police into the act too soon, because the crown wasn't promised - didn't the old gent say - until before the Sabbath, which gave him till sunset tonight.
If he produces the thing by then, I have no case against him even if it's a piece of junk. So I better wait. But what a dope I was to order the $986 job instead of the $401. On that decision alone I lost $585.
After a distracted day's work Albert taxied to the rabbi's house and tried to rouse him, even hallooing at the blank windows facing the street; but either nobody was home or they were both hiding, the rabbi under the broken sofa, Rifkele trying to shove her bulk under a bathtub. Albert decided to wait them out. Soon the old boy would have to leave the house to step into the shul on Friday night. He would speak to him, warn him to come clean. But the sun set; dusk settled on the earth; and though the autumn stars and a sliver of moon gleamed in the sky, the house was dark, shades drawn; and no Rabbi Lifschitz emerged. Lights had gone on in the little shul, candles were lit. It occurred to Albert, with chagrin, that the rabbi might be already worshipping; he might all this time have been in the synagogue.
The teacher entered the long, brightly lit store. On yellow folding chairs scattered around the room sat a dozen men holding worn prayer books, praying. The Rabbi A. Marcus, a middle-aged man with a high voice and a short reddish beard, was dovening at the Ark, his back to the congregation.
As Albert entered and embarrassedly searched from face to face, the congregants stared at him. The old rabbi was not among them. Disappointed, the teacher withdrew.
A man sitting by the door touched his sleeve.
"Stay awhile and read with us."
"Excuse me, I'd like to but I'm looking for a friend."
"Look," said the man, "maybe you'll find him."
Albert waited across the street under a chestnut tree losing its leaves. He waited patiently - till tomorrow if he had to.
Shortly after nine the lights went out in the synagogue and the last of the worshippers left for home. The red-bearded rabbi then emerged with his key in his hand to lock the store door.
"Excuse me, rabbi," said Albert, approaching. "Are you acquainted with Rabbi Jonas Lifschitz, who lives upstairs with his daughter Rifkele - if she is his daughter?"
"He used to come here," said the rabbi with a small smile, "but since he retired he prefers a big synagogue on Mosholu Parkway, a palace."
"Will he be home soon, do you think?"
"Maybe in an hour. It's Shabbat, he must walk."
"Do you - ah - happen to know anything about his work on silver crowns?"
"What kind of silver crowns?"
"To assist the sick, the dying?"
"No," said the rabbi, locking the shul door, pocketing the key, and hurrying away.
The teacher, eating his heart, waited under the chestnut tree till past midnight, all the while urging himself to give up and go home, but unable to unstick the glue of his frustration and rage. Then shortly before 1 A.M. he saw some shadows moving and two people drifting up the shadow-encrusted street. One was the old rabbi, in a new caftan and snappy black Homburg, walking tiredly. Rifkele, in sexy yellow mini, exposing to above the big-bone knees her legs like poles, walked lightly behind him, stopping to strike her ears with her hands.
<#FROWN:K25\>
JOHANNA KAPLAN
Sickness
In books, radiators hum and sing; in my house, the radiator howls and yelps as if a baby were locked up in it, an angry baby who, though he cries and cries, still does not bring his mother running. Not that she isn't longing to. But there is an older neighbor around or an aunt maybe, and her philosophy is: He's crying? So he'll cry! And the baby in the radiator - how can he know all this? So he sends up a last, raging yowl and I am woken up.
Here, in the brief, early whitish light, the march of neighbors has already begun. For even though it is barely morning of my first day home from school, the news of a sick child has shuttled through the building like steam through the pipes, and my mother's voice rises from the kitchen in bitterness.
"What's a doctor? He sits and sits studying long enough so that finally in one place his bathrobe wears out."
It is not a question now of tissues and aspirins, of swollen glands or a throat that won't swallow. This time it is serious: Lichtblau, the limping Golem with MD on his license plate, has made a housecall. Dragging one heavy foot behind the other, he has announced measles and a high fever, and in a stingy mumble as dull as the one that sends black years to the Irish kids on his new Buick in the street, he has even mentioned the possibility of hospital. But this doesn't worry me because what's a hospital? One, nurses: quick-stepping, white-clad girls whose heads are all blond and faces shiksa-silly. And two, doctors: bald, heavy men, sad-eyed and Jewish, who walk slowly on dragging legs, their bodies wrapped up in old maroon bathrobes, shamefully all worn away in one spot.
What would I do in a place like that? Where would I keep my glass of sweet, lukewarm tea that sits, whenever I am sick, like lightened liquid honey on a folding chair by my bed? Where would I put all my books? Where would I get my neighbor stories? As I lie back against the pillow, my room flies up before me like an airy, pastel balloon. From the window, slats of sunlight sift in, off-spinning ballerina twins to the clumsy elephant slats of the fire escape: the sun is playing a game of potsy on the linoleum. Hopping each time to a different cone of color, the sun has zoned my floor so that it's a country counter of homemade, fruit-flavored ice creams, or else great clean pails of paint from which I can choose new, sweet, custardy colors and order the painter to paint my room.
Outside, other children's feet thump off to school. Some are shouting: they just got to the corner, shoelaces dragging, and now, for spite, the light is changing. And some are crying: people with bad work habits, maybe they forgot their consent slips or their gym suits, and because it's too late now to go back, the crying buttons them into their stormcoats even tighter and their whole bodies knead with what's coming. But I am inside, I am home, and sickness is all pleasure.
"Some tremendous achievement," my mother says, and from the kitchen her voice in anger and sourness closes in on itself till it's black, black as the telephone, a mother jungle - steamy from her tears and sour from her breath. If she listened to me, she'd be completely different, even wear nail polish, but if that's what I'm looking for, she says, what I better do is go out and get myself another mother. As it is, though, the one I have plucks pinfeathers out of a chicken, and because her fingers get clumsy and impatient instead of elegant and neat, the knife point nips them so they bleed a thin, crooked trail that maps out spongy yellow Chickenland: a bridge across the legs, a mountain pass to the wings, and all the way back through to the interior where the tiny stomach and liver lie hiding together, breathing like brothers.
"Some tremendous achievement," she tells Birdie. "To sit and sit and study and study and nowhere in the whole process is there a head that comes into it or a brain that's involved. In medical school the big expense is in bathrobes."
Birdie is puffy-brown and stuffed, the awful splendor of a Florida suntan. Her voice too is bleached - thin and hard from the sun and sandy from cigarettes. With aqua earrings, an orange dress and two orange-painted big toes that pop out from aqua open-toe shoes, Birdie is herself a sunstroke.
"Let's face it, Manya," she tells my mother. "You'll never get satisfaction. A Jewish doctor is a Jewish prince."
A Jewish prince! Joseph Nasi, Joseph the prince ...
The chamber was thick with incense and plush with silken pillows. In the distance a droning voice was chanting the name of Allah, summoning the faithful to prayer. But within the richly adorned room not even a palm frond dared stir, for in the center, seated upon the largest and most sumptuous silken pillow of them all, was the Sultan himself, brocade pantaloons loose about his legs and a gleaming scimitar at his waist. Behind him stood his fierce, mustachioed guards, before him veiled and scented dancing girls. All awaited his pleasure and command. Beneath the imperial turban, however, the Sultan's heavy brow was clouded and his darkened visage bespoke distress. Besides all this, he was very ugly, had a fat, puffy face as if mosquitoes couldn't keep away from him. With a soft rustle of silks, a graceful, veiled maiden appeared before him, bearing a silver tray of sweetmeats. But barely raising one languid hand, the Sultan sent her away. On hot days, sweetmeats probably made him a little nauseous. A richly garbed courtier bowed low before him.
"Sire," he said, "an emissary just arrived from the mighty King of Spain urgently begs that Your Majesty receive him." But bidding him rise, the Sultan merely looked away, saying, "I shall receive no one." A thin, hurrying Vizier flung himself at the Sultan's feet crying, "If it please Your Majesty, a messenger stands at the palace gates with a plea of grave import from Your Majesty's heroic general now engaged with the Infidel in battle far afield." The beetle-browed Sultan sighed.
Suddenly a great clatter was heard from without and finally even the fat, sitting Sultan started getting a little curious.
"What occasions this disturbance?" he demanded of his court.
"It is nothing, Your Majesty," replied a saber-bristling guardsman. "Nothing His Highness need concern himself over. It is merely a Jew."
"A Jew?" cried the Sultan, hastily rising from his cushions as color flooded his features. His eyes were popping, too, and probably by this time there was even a vein twitching somewhere. "A Jew? What Jew?"
"Merely a Jewish doctor who calls himself Joseph."
"Joseph!" The Sultan cried out with great emotion. "All praises to Allah Who has sent him to me this day. Bring Joseph to my presence immediately."
Hustled in between two armor-laden guardsmen was a slight, bearded man of modest dress and bearing and proud, intelligent eyes.
"Sire," he said, stepping forward, carefully lowering his eyes, but not bowing his head or bending his knee, for there was only One to Whom Joseph bowed. A not every other minute either because he certainly wasn't Catholic.
"O Joseph," the Sultan called out in great agitation. "What news do you bring me? What of my son, what of my ships, and what of the terrible apparition of my nightly slumbers?"
"For your son, O great Sire, I have prepared a special salve and now the lad's eye is as bright as ever it was."
"Selim," the Sultan breathed. That was his son's name in Turkish.
"Of your ships, Your Majesty. Though one was lost in a storm at sea, the cargo of all the fleet has been rescued in a foreign port by a friend and member of my faith, one Mannaseh ben Levi. Further, he has sent a message to me with the news of a worm, Your Majesty, who through his own cunning can spin silk. He offers to send to your court as many of such creatures as Your Majesty desires in the shipment with the lost cargo."
"Allah be praised!"
"Of the apparition. It was a warning to Your Majesty of the storm at sea which distressed your ships. Now that the cargo is safe, the dreaded apparition will trouble you no longer."
"O Joseph, physician to my body, my soul, and my coffers. How shall I reward you? What is it that you wish?"
"For myself, Sire, there is nothing I desire. But for my people, I ask that they may always live in peace within your walls, free to pursue their daily lives and to worship, harming no one, according to our age-old laws and beliefs."
"Granted, Joseph. Most swiftly and easily granted. But what of yourself? What do you ask for your own person?"
"Only that which is granted for my people."
"Then, Joseph, if you will not ask, I must bestow unrequested. And I, His Imperial Majesty the Sultan, name you, Joseph, a Prince of my Domain. No longer are you merely Joseph the Jewish doctor. Henceforward you are to be known as Joseph the Prince! Let cymbals sound and gongs strike!" Right in my ear: it is Birdie's Atlantic City charm bracelet sounding and gonging on the Formica table.
"Uh-tuh-tuh and look who's here!" she says, smiling at me, her lipsticked lips wide and bright as a sideways orange Popsicle.
Uh-tuh-tuh and look who's here. Yellow kindergarten clowns hop all over my pajamas and red spots climb through my flesh. That's who's here.
"Ketzeleh," says Birdie. "Are you hungry? Do you want some bread and peanut butter?" But I'm not sure what I want; my head is spinning off in a deadman's float all by itself and is strange to the rest of me -luggy limbs and scratchy skin.
"Oh, Manya," Birdie calls to my mother. "Watch how your daughter spreads the peanut butter. I love the way she does it - so perfect and so exact you'd think the knife is a paintbrush. Look how she sits there with that peanut butter like an artist."
"Some artist," my mother says. "She has no hands, she's just like me. She couldn't even tie up a goose, my father used to say about me, and that's what it is - no hands."
In the back of the siddur, in the Song of Songs, it says: What shall we do for our little sister, for she has no breasts? But there is nothing in it about no hands.
"Look how she makes it smooth and how she goes over and over it. By the time she's through, it's a shame to eat it."
But my mother doesn't even bother to turn around because in her opinion peanut butter and nail polish are the exact same thing: both of them made up inside the head of Howdy Doody.
Birdie has nothing against peanut butter, though. Why should she? She chews gum, plays Mah-Jongg, goes to bungalow colonies and eats Chinese food. Altogether she would be a cow but for one thing - cows get the best boys and end up with the best husbands. And this is Birdie's story: she didn't. So far did she miss in this one way that even though she has been divorced for years, she still cries to my mother in the kitchen that when she wakes up in the morning she feels that there is no taste in her, and sometimes when she stands with her shopping cart in the aisle at Daitch's, everything starts to get cold, sour, and far away. Her one son, Salem, is eighteen and goes to pharmacy school in Philadelphia: by a coincidence, an accident, the city where his father lives.
<#FROWN:K26\>
RADON
BY EDWARD FALCO
In the summer of '88, when my older sister turned 16 and started dating a 34-year-old Amway salesman, my father discovered we had unacceptable levels of radon trapped in our house. That was ten years ago, though it doesn't feel like it. It was a presidential election summer, and in addition to Howard, Julie's new boyfriend, my mother was upset about George Bush's campaign tactics, which she called Nazi-like and un-American. My father was worried that Michael Dukakis might win the election and ruin the economy, and he was also upset because his favorite TV preachers were all in trouble - Oral Roberts said God was going to kill him unless he raised four million dollars soon, Jim Bakker was being revealed as a bisexual, and Jimmy Swaggart had been caught with a prostitute - but most of all my father was going crazy about radon, which he was convinced would give us all cancer, soon. And everyone was worried about AIDS, which I heard one newscaster describe as a plague that could eventually wipe out half the world's population.
Luckily, no one was worried much about me. I was 15, on the baseball, football and basketball teams, an average student, and my two best friends, whom I hung out with constantly, were Mary Dao and Allan Freizman. Mary - a year younger than us and a grade ahead of us - was the smartest girl in the district, and Allan was another all-around athlete, like me. One night that summer my parents were in the living room arguing. They had started out discussing politics and eventually got around, as usual, to radon and Julie's boyfriend. My father wanted to spend four thousand dollars to seal up and ventilate the basement, and my mother wanted him to do something about Howard. "Honey," my father said. "Breathing the radon trapped in this house is equivalent of smoking sixteen packs of cigarettes a day." "Honey," my mother answered. "Your 16-year-old daughter is sleeping with an Amway salesman." Upstairs, in my room, I was searching my closet for a dark jacket. Mary, Allan, and I were meeting at McDonald's. We were casing a house we planned on robbing.
I don't really know which one of us started the whole robbing thing, but that summer was the beginning and end of it. No one in the world would have ever suspected us. No one did. We must have robbed a dozen houses, all told. In the beginning it was a game. There's not a lot to do on Long Island, so we'd walk around, through the developments. Pretty much, we'd wind up in people's yards, where we'd sit and talk and drink beer and smoke grass when we could get it, and we'd keep an eye on the people through their windows. One night Allan brought binoculars, hoping to catch a peek of someone getting undressed. We didn't. It turned out to be an old lady's house where we wound up. We had a couple of joints with us and Allan wanted to go hunting for a better yard, but Mary just wanted to get stoned. So we compromised. We'd get stoned where we were and then go looking for a better yard.
Mary's skin looked like it was always deeply tanned, and she had big eyes and black hair slicked straight back (she claimed she'd rather die than wear bangs) and pulled into two little pony tails that made her look pixieish, along with being so frail. But God, was she smart. She spoke Vietnamese, French, and English, all fluently; and she always had a book in her pocket. Half the time, Allan and I didn't know what she was talking about, and she knew we didn't know and went on anyway. It impressed us, and I think she liked impressing us. Allan and I admired the hell out of Mary, and we were both trying to get her to take off her clothes.
That night in the old lady's yard, Mary was explaining our philosophies to us. "Rick," she said, sitting cross-legged under a tree, slightly above me. She toked on a joint, held the grass in, and then spoke as she exhaled, her voice high and thin. "You're a materialist," she said, pointing at me, the joint between her fingers. "You don't care about what you can't see or feel - or maybe use. But if you can't see it or feel it, man - you don't give a shit about it."
"You mean," I said, "that's like because I'm always saying how I want a hot red Ferrari Testarossa and a big house on the ocean."
Allan took the joint from Mary. He said, "You been watching too much Miami Vice, man."
I must have been stoned, because I remember rolling on the ground laughing at that.
"What about me," he asked Mary. "What am I?"
"You, man - you're a grade A, number one, no-holds-barred nihilist."
"A what-ist?"
"A nihilist. That means you don't believe in shit. Nothing. Nada." Mary picked up the binoculars and looked at the moon.
Allan thought for a moment, then said: "How do you say that again, what I am?"
"A nihilist."
"And what about you," I asked her. "What are you?"
"Me?" She handed Allan the binoculars and took back the joint. "I'm an existentialist."
We both stared at her.
"That's like a nihilist who's into self-delusion. Sort of."
Allan checked out the house with the binoculars. "Hey," he said. "Look at this."
And that's when it started. Allan had seen the old woman take some money out of a bowl and put it in her handbag. A few minutes later, a car pulled up the driveway and a man took her away. I don't remember who said what first, or if anybody even said anything - but we must have all been thinking the same thing, because a few minutes later we kicked in a basement window, climbed up a flight of stairs, and ran out the back door with the money. Later, Mary said it was the most exciting thing she had ever done. The money came to a little over 80 dollars, which we split evenly. That was a couple of months earlier.
The place we were casing - Allan spotted it driving home with his dad. Allan's father's an ex-cop who owns a topless bar on Jericho Turnpike. Or he did then anyway. Now I hear he's retired in Florida. Allan always said he didn't hate his old man because it would take too much energy. He said his father was a stupid drunk who didn't care about anything but screwing the dancers who worked for him. His mother he didn't know. She had left when he was a child. Allan told us that she had moved to Alaska and married a Husky. He said he couldn't blame her for wanting to move up in life.
The house he spotted was only a few blocks from his own. An ambulance had just driven away and a police car was parked at the curb. Allan's dad stopped to talk to the cop, the way he always did, and Allan overheard that the man who lived there was old and three-quarters dead, and kept a loaded gun in every room. At the mention of the guns, Allan said he slunk down in his seat and acted bored while trying to hear every word. The old man used to be important - something about something in World War Two, but Allan didn't get the details. Now he refused to live in a home or with his children. The whole thing was too good to pass up. Guns were easy money in the city: We knew a pawn shop that bought them no questions asked. All we had to do was sit in the old guy's yard and wait for him to leave the house.
I couldn't find the dark jacket I was looking for, so I settled for denim. In the living room, Julie had joined the argument. From the top of the stairs, I could see my father sitting back in his Lazy Boy like a reluctant judge, while my mother stood on one side of the chair and my sister on the other.
"I won't have this!" my mother said, slapping the arm of the chair. "I want you," she said to Julie, "to bring him here tonight. And I want you," she said to my father, "to tell him we'll have him put in jail if this doesn't stop right now." She looked at Julie. "I won't have this," she repeated.
Julie talked to Dad as if they were the only two people in the room. "This is nobody's business but mine," she said calmly. "I'm grown up now. I'll make my own decisions and I don't need any help from anyone."
My father had lain back and crossed his arms over his eyes, as if bracing himself for a crash.
"Dad," Julie said. "Look at me."
He lowered his arms. Julie's hair was bright red and shaved at the temples, short over the top, and long in the back, where it was dyed blond. She wore a gigantic crucifix dangling from her right ear, and a "Jesus is My Friend" T-shirt that was too small on her: it left a few inches of her stomach bare and her breasts struggling for freedom. Her pants, she had slashed with a razor from top to bottom, so from where I stood I could see she was wearing red panties.
My father said, "I realize you're grown up now, Julie -"
My mother sighed.
"But," he continued, "Your mother has a point -"
Julie groaned.
"Why don't we compromise," he said. "Bring him over, just so that we can meet him."
"I don't want to meet him!" my mother screamed. "I want you to shoot the son-of-a-bitch!"
"See!" Julie yelled.
My father jumped up, excited. "You know!" he shouted, quieting them both. "We didn't always used to argue like this, did we?"
I thought to myself: this was extreme, granted, but, actually, yeah - they always argue like that.
"Did we?" my father insisted.
"What?" Julie said.
"What? Radon - that's what!"
My mother covered her face, and Julie turned her back to him. They both sighed.
"Go ahead!" he screamed. "Treat me like I'm mad! I'm telling you, this poison we're breathing is half our problem."
For a moment, everyone was frozen: my mother with her face covered; my sister looking at the wall; my father glaring at both of them. Then his shoulders drooped forward, and he left the room with tears brimming in his eyes. He went out into the yard.
My sister went to her room. As she passed me, she said: "What are your staring at, jerk-off?"
My mother looked up. When she saw me, her face brightened. I've always had that effect on her, even now. She says I'm the best thing in her life. "Rick, honey," she said. "Come here,"
"I'm meeting Mary," I said, on my way down the stairs. My mother loved Mary. When she came to visit, they'd often sit and talk for hours while I wandered in and out, pretending to be interested. My mother never questioned what I was doing, as long as I was doing it with Mary.
By the front door, she put her arm around my shoulder. "Five minutes for your Mom," she said, "I need to talk to somebody sane around here."
We sat down on the front steps, under the dim yellow light. Behind us, the bug-zapper was working overtime: I can still hear the pop and sizzle of bugs getting fried. "Really, Mom," I said. "I've got to go in a minute."
"Did you witness all that?" she asked. "The whole pathetic scene?"
With me, my mother was always dramatic like that - like I'm this pure thing besmirched by a dirty world. "Maybe Dad's got a point about the radon," I said. "Do you know what it is - radon?"
"Yes", she said. "It's wishful thinking."
<#FROWN:K27\>
The second thing happened that same week. I was in town late in the afternoon waiting for Dud and Stack to finish some business of theirs, when I looked up and saw my loony brother Bucky across the street. He was standing on the courthouse lawn next to where the steps came down to the sidewalk, holding his hand out, palm up, to one of two men who weren't looking at him. What the men were looking at was a good-sized wooden box on the ground. I could see that Bucky, with his head jerking back and forth, was saying something to the men, or trying to. After a minute I saw one of the men and then the other one reach in their pockets and come out with what had to be coins and put them in Bucky's outstretched hand. After Bucky had the coins settled in his own pocket he leaned down and, almost like he was a magician or something, yanked the top off the box. Both men kind of jumped. They stood staring down into the box, till pretty soon I could tell that one of them was trying to ask Bucky questions. I knew what kind of answers he was getting, the kind that made him give it up after a minute of two. Then all of a sudden Bucky leaned and shut the top down quick. I saw why. A man coming down the walk was just barely a step away from a free look in the box.
I know I stood there for a half hour watching Bucky take in the customers, wondering what it was in the box and what kind of coins he was getting for a look at it. As bad as I wanted to know, I was too ashamed of Bucky to go and see. At least I was till the customers quit coming and I saw the square had about cleared out because it was after quitting time. I crossed the street and climbed up to where Bucky stood by the box. His shirt was even more ragged and dirtier than it was the last time I saw him. He rolled his eyes at me and kind of smiled. "What's in there?" I said.
He held his hand out.
"Your own brother?" I said. "I ain't got any money anyhow."
Bucky blinked and his head jerked. "O-okay." He leaned down and opened the box. I jumped, myself. It was the biggest dang cottonmouth I ever saw in my life. It was as big around as a man's arm and something between black and mud-colored and had a head that looked like it would do for a woodcutter's wedge. "How'd you catch that thing?"
"In m-m-my fish box."
I looked at the ugly thing a minute more. "How much you get for a look?"
His mouth worked, then said, "Du-dime."
"How much you made?"
He patted a bulge on the hip of his overalls. Then he reached in the pocket and took out a handful of coins, some of them quarters, that didn't leave that bulge on his hip much smaller than before. "Damn!" I said. "You going to get rich."
Just then Dud and Stack pulled up to the curb in Dud's old car and sat staring up at Bucky's box. They had to come up for a look, too, which they made Bucky give them for free, and they asked about the same questions I had asked. The thing different was that Dud wanted to know how much Bucky had made in all, and he wouldn't let him alone till Bucky got down and laid all those coins out on the walk to be counted. It came to six dollars and eighty cents, though I reckoned he hadn't made it all in one day.
"Goddamn," Dud said. "It's money in snakes ain't it? You better go catch some more. Start you a snake zoo."
It was that word zoo that got things started. On the way home Stack, after being quiet till we crossed the bridge, said, "What if we started up a zoo? I don't mean just snakes, I mean all kind of wild critters. Maybe we could catch that bear, even. Else her cub. Maybe a bobcat too. And a deer. And sho'ly such as coons and foxes."
"That'd be something, wouldn't it?" I said from the back seat. I was excited. Dud didn't say anything for a minute, just staring at the road in front of him. I knew how Dud liked to be the one to think of a thing and I was beginning to be afraid he was going to say it was a dumb idea. Then I saw him nod. "Ain't one zoo in this whole county," he said. "People likes to look at wild animals. Like that cottonmouth. We could sho catch a bunch of them."
"Rattlers too," I said, leaning over the back of the front seat now. "I killed one down in the hollow Sunday. Could of caught him. And copperheads too."
"We need more than just snakes," Stack said. "That bear's what we really need. And a bobcat."
"Snakes is a good starter, though," Dud said. "Look at Bucky. With one dang snake."
That was how it started off and kept right on after we got in the house and settled down at the supper table. After I watched Coop for a minute or two I was reassured. He didn't say anything at first but I could see him listening, like he was getting interested in spite of himself. Daddy didn't say anything at first either, just went on shoveling the food in, and I was getting uneasy for fear he was going to come in against us. But that was before he got it clear that Bucky was making real money off that snake.
"And he could of got a quarter easy as a dime," Stack said. "He had a bunch of them; folks'd pay more than that. Specially if snakes was just one part of it all."
"We could put a sign up on the road," I said. "Mosses Zoo."
That was the right thing to say because, I could tell, Daddy liked the idea of having his name up there on the road. I watched his jaw slow down and for a space there he didn't take another bite. When his jaw finally stopped all the way he said, "I'm kind of leaning to the notion it just might work. I even knowed a man made money charging to look at his nervous goats. Folks is like that."
Caress and Mabel both looked at him with their mouths open and then at each other. It was easy to see they hated the whole idea, but it didn't matter about them. What did matter was what I could see in Mama's face, in the way her shut lips made a tight straight line. Then they came open. "Where you mean to keep these snakes? In the house?"
"Make a cage for them, o'course," Stack said. "A good tight one."
"What about the bear? And the wildcat?"
"Cages too," Stack said. "Make a log pen for the bear, though."
"I hate a snake," Mabel said, screwing up her face. "What if they get out?"
"They'll come right for you," Stack said.
"When you going to build all these pens?" Mama said to him. "And you with a good job, for a change. You going to quit?"
"I can find the time," Stack said, cutting his eyes away. But I could tell that was what he was aiming to do.
Mama shook her head and drew a long breath. Then she looked up, like up to heaven. "I seen a lot of foolishness in my time, but not nothing like this before. And tobacco to set and corn to plant." She looked down again, looked at Daddy who didn't look back. In fast he had the expression of a man doing some hard thinking. Mama said, "I ain't having one wild animal anywhere close to this house. Put them off in the woods. I ain't going to get caught like poor Mrs. Noah on the ark."
Considering all the work we knew we'd have to do, and Mama so strong against it besides, it's a real wonder the whole business didn't just blow on over. After a couple of days when nobody did anything but talk about it and I saw Mama getting more comfortable-looking all the time, I was afraid it was done for. After all there wasn't a one of us who was much for hard work except Coop, and he didn't get in on the talk like I wished he would. How we did finally get started was another accident, kind of, with Bucky the reason for it this time too. We had stopped by and told him to catch some more snakes for us, but we had about forgot it. Then, on Friday afternoon, he came puffing out of the woods with a box bigger than the other one. It had five grandaddy cottonmouths in it, all knotted up together like big old mud-colored ropes, the ugliest sight you ever saw. He said he had found a whole nest of them where we could catch all we wanted. So we had to do something with those snakes.
Stack started right in that evening after supper. He found enough wire on some banged-up chicken crates, and boards off the old falling-down shed out back. He worked by a lantern on till midnight, with Dud and Coop and I finally falling in to help him. It turned out big enough for a man to walk around in and looked so nice that when Daddy saw it in the morning, with the snakes crawling around in there, he got caught up too.
For the next couple of days, with all the banging and sawing and cussing, that was the noisiest place in the county. We pretty soon ran out of boards and wire and nails and stuff, and Daddy had to go to town and buy everything except for some slab boards he scrounged off Mr. Cutchins at the saw mill. It took more money than Daddy had, but Stack was right there with his last week's paycheck.
By Sunday afternoon we had four big cages finished. With all the odd-shaped slabs on them the last three didn't look as good as the snake cage, but they looked strong. Daddy said they'd hold anything up to the size of a bloodhound, so we could get started catching coons and foxes and such. But what about the bear? I said. Stack had several steel traps big enough for one and we were planning on setting them out that evening down along the creek. What if we caught the bear tonight? Daddy thought for a minute, rolling his lips in and out. "Th'ow ropes around her. Tie her all up and drag her up here. Put her in the mules' stall."
"Ain't got no ceiling," I said."A bear can climb."
"Make one. We got some more slabs. Anyhow we ain't caught her yet."
I had some more questions - Like how would you ever get her out of there? - but I let them go for the time being.
Daddy was always quick to get enthusiastic about a new project to make money, but usually he got over it in a couple of days. Not this time. Every once in a while, when he should have been out in the field with his mules and plow, I'd see him standing there admiring those cages and those cotton-mouth snakes that, for all the moving they did, might just as well have been dead. By the time he got through he'd be standing up straighter than was natural for him, and he'd walk away with a kind of step that made me think of that big old red rooster we had. Pretty soon I could tell what was going on in his head.
<#FROWN:K28\>
Green Grow the Grasses O
D. R. MacDonald
A suspicion had come down that Kenneth Munro was using dope in the house he rented above the road. "Harboring drugs" was the way Millie Patterson put it.
"I don't think he's that kind," Fiona Cameron said, in whose parlor Mr. Munro was being discussed. She had seen him coming and going, a thirtyish man with dark gray hair nearly to his shoulders. It was the only extravagant thing about him, how the wind would gust it across his eyes. He had left St. Aubin as a tot and returned suddenly now for reasons unclear.
"Drinking's one thing," Millie said. "But this."
"This what?" Fiona said. She was curious about him too, but in a different way. And Kenneth Munro, after all, was not just any outsider. His family was long gone but still remembered.
After some coaxing, Lloyd David, Millie's son, described how Munro's kitchen had been full of the smell the day he'd dropped by to cut the high wild grass out front. "There's no other smell like it," he said.
This expertise got him a hot glance from his mother. Millie missed no opportunity to point up the evils of drugs.
"But Millie," Fiona said, "a smell in his kitchen is hardly criminal."
"Fiona dear, you have no idea." Millie, a nurse for twenty-six years, recalled with horror a young man the Mounties brought into the emergency ward last winter: "In that weather, crawling down the highway in his undershorts, barking like a dog." Lloyd David chuckled, then caught himself. "He was that cold," Millie went on, "he was blue." She paused. "Marijuana." But the word came out of her mouth erotically rounded somehow, lush and foreign.
"But we hardly know Kenneth Munro," Fiona said. She knew he often stood shirtless on his little front porch late in the morning, stretching his limbs. He'd just got up, it was plain to see. He was brown from the sun, though he'd brought the brown with him. Fiona could not imagine him crawling along a highway or barking either. What she could imagine she was not likely to admit. She was from the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides but had lived in Cape Breton all her married life, nearly twenty years. Her eyes were an unusual pale green, peppered with colors you couldn't pin down, and they looked merry even when she was not. no, Millie would not easily let go of this matter. Kenneth Munro. And drugs. They had come to Cape Breton like everywhere else, and of course people saw on TV what drugs out there in the world could do. Marijuana? Just a hair's breadth from heroin, in Millie's eyes, whereas alcohol was as familiar as the weather. hadn't there been a nasty murder over in Sydney where two kids on drags stabbed an old man for his money? That shook everyone, murder being rare among Cape Bretoners, despite a reputation for lesser violence. Fiona glance out the front window: she hadn't seen Munro all day. His bedroom window was flung high and the curtains, green as June grass, whipped in the wind.
"He's got a telescope in the backyard," Lloyd David said.
"What's he up to?" Millie said.
"Well, that's the point." Fiona took a sip of tea. It was cool. "We can't say."
"He seems like a nice fella." Harald, Fiona's husband, had come in from haying and stood stout and perspiring in his overalls. "Fiona's right," he said from the doorway. "Yesterday he was asking me about the bobolinks."
"About the what?" Millie said.
"Birds, Ma. Tweet tweet?"
She glared at her son: she hated his Oakland Raiders T-shirt with the insolent pirate face on the front.
"Well," Fiona said. "He's just over the road. We'll have to find out about him. Harald, won't we?"
"You be the detective, girl."
At a table by the west window of the Sealladh Na Mara Restaurant Kenneth Munro took in the postcard view. Whatever he saw he measured against the descriptions his father had given him years ago. He could see a good portion of goose Cove and the mountain behind it whose profile darkened the water this time of the afternoon, calming the bay. Terns squabbled on a sandy bar. The waitress, whom he fancied and who, he felt, was ready for a move, came up behind him, her slender figure reflected in the glass. In her unflattering uniform- a bland aqua, the hem too long- she seemed all the more pretty. She'd worn her find brown hair unfashionably long down her back when he had seen her walking along the road, but now it was clasped in a bun.
"Ginny, suppose I was to take you to dinner some night soon? In Sydney?"
"Oh, I don't know. You're older than I am, by more than a bit." Ginny had graduated from McGill this summer and was back home, pondering her future. She loved the country she'd grown up but knew she would work in a big city before long.
"I can't deny it," Munro said. "I'm up in years. I expect your parents wouldn't approve."
"No. No, they wouldn't much. And they've always known just about everything I've done around here." She looked over at two elderly women picking daintily at their lobster salads. "There's no need they should keep on knowing."
"I'll get you home early," he said. "Early as you like."
"I suppose we could. I'm thinking we might." She went off to another table and stood with her back to him. Munro drank from his water glass, running the ice around his tongue, and smiled comfortably at the immobile brilliance of the bay, its surface inked in shadow.
That was the kind of light he imagined in his special afternoon, an ambience like that.
They ate in a steakhouse too open and noisy, but after a bottle of wine they talked freely in raised voices, discovering that they might be distantly related through a great-grandmother, and that brought them a few inches closer. Munro told her about his carpentry work in San Francisco, cabinetmaking and remodeling, and how he liked working for gays because they paid him well and were particular. Ginny told him about Montreal and how she always tried to speak French there because she got to know the people. She asked him why he was living alone over there in St. Aubin with hay and woods all around him.
"Only for awhile," Munro said. He took a photograph out of his coat and laid it on the white tablecloth, moving his face closer to hers. "That man there is my father, Ginny. The women I don't know."
"I'd say they like him, eh?"
"Something more than that going on. Look at his face."
"Is he your age there, your dad?"
"About."
"I like your gray hair. It's a bit long. His looks black."
"And very proud of it he was. Vain, even."
"He's dead?"
"He is." Munro tapped the photo. "But not here. Here, he is very much alive." He touched her hand. "Would you come with me to a field like that? Would you be one of those women, for an afternoon?"
Ginny laughed. He looked so serious in the smoldering light of the candle jar. But the people in the photograph, the man and the two women, seemed happy, and she felt quite good herself after three glasses of wine.
"You mean like a picnic?" she said.
On the way back to Rooster Hill Munro pulled off the highway near South Gut so they could take in the bay. Along the mountain ridge the lost sun threw long red embers. In the evening water below them, still as a pond, lay the blackened timbers of an old wharf.
"My father had a picture of that," Munro said. "From back in the twenties when he was a kid. There was a schooner tied up to it. Looked like another century. Here, you want a hit of this?"
He proferred what she thought was a cigarette. She stared at it.
"Am I shocking you?" Munro said.
"I've run across it, and I don't shock easy as all that."
He was afraid he'd blown it with her, but he was in a hurry, and for him puffs of grass were part of almost any pleasure.
"You are a woman," he said.
"At home here, I am still a girl."
"Well, then." He made to stub out the joint but she grabbed his wrist and took it from him, drawing a long hit.
"God help us if the Mounties come by," she said through the smoke. "And you with relatives here."
"Never met any. One afternoon of my own is all I want. With the sun out, and a warm wind coming up the field. And women like those in the photo, at their ease. That's what I came for- to take that back with me."
"Ah, Ginny, you'll be more than that."
They kissed in the car as it idled by her mailbox, once quickly like friends, then again with a long deep taste of something further. After Ginny got out, she kissed the window on the passenger side. The fierce twilight made her reckless. Through the rosy smudge on the glass, Munro watched her walk up the hill to her house, twirling her bag.
Fiona parted the parlor curtains: Kenneth Munro's car was turning slowly up his driveway, its broad taillights reminding her, in the foggy dark, of a spaceship. Wee men would be coming out of it, heading for the scattered houses of St. Aubin. Feasgar math, she'd say, I've been waiting. Fuirich beagan. Certain feelings had no shape in English, and sometimes she whispered them to herself. Harald was not a speaker above the odd phrase, but Gaelic came to her now and then like old voices. Traighean. The sands of Harris, the long shell-sand beaches that even on a dour day opened up white like a stroke of sun, still warm to your bare feet after the wind went cold and the clouds glowered over the gusting sea. Those strange and lovely summers, so distant now- brief, with emotions wild as the weather, days whose light stretched long into evening and you went to bed in a blue dusk.
"Harald," she said, "Is it time for a call on Mr. Munro?" But Harald, pink from haying, had dozed off in his chair. A rerun of Love Boat undulated across the television, the signals bouncing badly off the mountain tonight. Fiona loathed the program. When she turned off the set, Harald woke. He kissed her on the cheek, then wandered upstairs seeking his bed.
So why not go up to Munro's? Yet when she thought of him opening the door, her breath caught. Of course she could phone him first, but that was not the same thing, was it?
Fiona had shared a life with Harald for a long time, here in the country. She'd left Harris for a small farm in Nova Scotia because she loved the man who asked her away, the seaman she'd met in Stornoway where she worked in a woolen shop. Love. An gaol. Yes, she had no reservations about that word, and all it carried, never had. She loved his company, even when he was dull ( and wasn't she the dull one too sometimes, shut into herself, beaten down by a mood?). The two of them together had always seemed enough, and although they liked other people, they never longed for them. Small delights could suffice, if you were close in that way you couldn't explain to anyone else: it was the robin who nested every summer in the lilac bush at the front door, huddled in the delicate branches as they came and went, always aware of her, pleased that she didn't flee, and the families of deer they watched from the big window at the foot of their bed, grazing elegantly one moment and exploding into motion the next, and every day the Great Bras D'Eau, the different suns on its surface, the water shaded and etched by tides, stilled by winter, the crush of drift ice, and the long mountain in autumn, swept with the brilliance of leaves.
<#FROWN:K29\>
Stephen Peters
Babuji
It began, he thought, auspiciously enough. In the plane as they flew over the Indian subcontinent from Bangkok, Richard sat in a window seat watching a pale thundercloud rise level with and a mile off from the airplane. Far below through the mists of the cloud were the starry lights of a city, and as the plane wheeled toward the thunderhead, branches of lightning flashed and filled it from top to bottom like arteries and veins shot through with blue illuminate. The cloud twisted on its axis, larger still, flexed its billows, heaved its hoary chest, wagged an old man's beard at Richard, then its body filled again with the jagged lines of blue light, jolted up straighter, more powerful even that before. He watched for the ten minutes or so it took to approach and then pass the cloud. "What a sight!" he told the Arab man sitting next to him. "Sensational," he said over and over again. The man leaned across Richard to stare out the window and rested his thick paw on Richard's thigh for balance, an alarming, embarrassing feeling that Richard wanted over with. "What a way to start," he said matter of factly and turned away from the window, hoping the man would get off him. "What a sight that was." In half an hour they were on the ground in Bombay. It was three in the morning and pitch black.
The ride from the airport in the dark looked almost like any ride in a taxi from any airport, except that many of the trucks and cabs drove with their lights off, some even on the wrong side of the road, and except that indistinct shapes like giraffes or camels seemed always about to race out in front of the taxi from the shadows. Time to sleep when the creature images start, he thought. It was nothing more than the whimsy of fatigue. He let himself sink back into the vinyl of the passenger's seat and half closed his eyes. They came wide open again and he cringed and sat up straight as his driver, a fat, bald man in his fifties, Richard's own age, started to pass a darkened truck but then seemed happy to simply run parallel to it. "From which country do you come?" the cheerful driver asked.
Richard glanced from the back of the driver's head to the truck they had not completed passing. He felt an empty, cold space in his gut. A pair of headlights approached in the windshield but the driver seemed unconcerned. Richard would have complained at home in Minneapolis or even in New York. Here, though, he would never quite be sure what to do. "I'm from the United States," he said. He noticed that written in English on the side of the truck with no headlights were the words 'Caution! Highly Inflammable Gases!'"That's a rolling Molotov cocktail," he told the driver.
"A very good country, the USA," said the man. "I have many friends USA. Change money?"
But at that instant the oncoming headlights reached them, the talkative driver couldn't decide which way to turn, and the three vehicles tangled themselves into a rolling, spinning collision of screeching tires, breaking glass, shredded blades of slashing aluminum, and fire. Richard was not burnt. His body shot over the driver's seat and through the windshield, landing like a heap of dirty laundry in the dust and rocks at the side of the road. His neck and back were broken, and a long laceration starting at his hairline and staggering across his face and neck, ending in his lower torso, made him look as if someone had turned him half-way inside out. His mouth filled with commingling dust and blood, and for an instant, only for that instant, he felt the sharp air move across the open wound of his face. He smiled as a herd of giraffes, racing monkeys under foot, galloped away across the black wasteland.
After that he stood above his own body wondering what was meant to happen next. "There are no giraffes in India," he said aloud. The burning wreck blocked half the road, and vehicles coming to and leaving the airport picked their ways through this island of fire. Richard watched impassively as the sleepy, morbidly curious passengers stared through smokey windows and continued on. He poked the body at his feet, his own body, with the toe of his tasseled loafers. "No response," he said aloud. "I'm here."
Who would know what to do in that circumstance? His suitcase and shoulder bag sat neatly next to the road, as if waiting for him like a pair of shoes set next to the bed in the morning. He picked them up, found his way past the burning wreck, and began walking into his darkness. No cabs would stop while within sight of the fire, so he had to walk three miles before he caught a ride to his hotel.
Strangely, though, nothing happened immediately after that. He imagined while riding in the second taxi, that, since he was conscious and apparently dead, he would be delivered to some vaguely angelic keeper of souls, escorted through a heavenly customs gate. Instead he arrived at the very hotel he had previously made reservations in. The hotel was a famous one facing the waterfront, all plush and brass and glass and the Sikh doorman sported an elaborate white uniform and a huge red turban. Many of Richard's 'clients' at home - ne'er do wells and welfare mothers, people for whom he no longer felt real compassion - lived in a trailer park that would have fit neatly into that lobby.
The young man at the desk wore a neat blue suit and efficiently checked Richard in and saw to it that Richard's bags were carried to his room. He had a full mustache and a curl of his wavy black hair fell onto his forehead.
"So things just go on," Richard whispered. "Nothing happens. How stupid."
"I beg your pardon, sir?" the clerk asked. When Richard only stared at him, he said. "We don't tip here, sir. There will be a ten percent service charge added to your bill when you leave."
Richard tipped the bell hop when he got to the room anyway. "There will be more when I leave if you take good care of me," he said. The man understood, and Richard felt clever and cocky. Because he kept his budget tight, he could afford only two nights in this place, but he would have good service from the little man while he stayed. How much would he have to tip after just two nights in a place that allowed no tipping? he wondered. It couldn't be much, and anyhow how much was too much in his new state, such as it was?
But something seemed odd, different in how he handled the money. Was it in his elbows? His fingertips? He'd found it difficult to judge where his pockets were when reaching to find the tip for the man. His arms were numb.
Watching his movements carefully, judging with his eye now instead of by feel, he threw the curtains open wide and looked out over not the harbor but a poor side street below. The sun, just coming up, caught the angles and pastels of a building that was either being torn down brick by brick or going up the same way. He couldn't tell, but he thought of a cubist painting as he stood watching the sharp blades of light stab across the surface of yellow bricks. "Tangy," he said aloud and, struck by the oddness of the sensation, tasted the sight on his tongue. "Good grief." A woman in an orange sari squatted next to a cooking fire inside the painting's walls. Did she live there? What difference did it make? He wanted to deny the odd sensations creeping over him.
Apparently you live and you die and nothing changes, he told himself. He had always figured he had done his part for the world, "more than the world probably deserves," he had liked to tell the drab young woman in the desk next to his at the office. "After the final words are written and signed, we are all only really responsible for who and what we are, not for the who and what of other lives. We are, after all, alone." He liked saying that and he said it rather cynically because it shocked and offended her. She was passionate about the social welfare work they did. "The poor will always be with us," he likes adding for good measure. "So no unemployment for us."
After retreating into sleep for a few hours, he rose and shaved. His face was numb. He might have nicked himself and felt nothing. He took a long hot shower. He turned the shower on full blast and stuck his face close up to the nozzle but felt no pain, only a dull pressure, on his face. Then, after drying off, he stopped to examine himself in the mirror for changes. He was a slight man, neither tall nor short, with kinky gray hair increasingly thin in a patch on the back of his head. His features were good, not especially strong, but rather aquiline and, under the weathered grayness of age, his skin still radiated the pink associated with Sunday school and sunlight. He could be positively boyish with a drink in his hand at office social gatherings, and women often wanted to take him home and care for him. His drab young colleague had done just that a time or two, but he felt she'd become dependent and so cut her off. He saw no change in his reflection, no sign of the previous night's trauma except maybe a sourness at the back of the throat that might have still been fatigue. "I see a sourness?"
Still wondering about the jumble of vision and taste, he ventured out onto the street, searching for the tangy building he could see from his room. The same woman in the orange sari squatted next to the same fire stirring the coals. A man, presumably her husband, reclined on a nearby stack of bricks smoking a foul smelling Indian cigarette that looked like a marijuana joint. A second woman sifted dirt through a box with a screen bottom. For one brief moment the air stank of urine and tobacco, sight and smell united.
Apparently there would be no sign today, good or bad, that might explain his condition. He had expected for the world to change the moment he looked again at reality, but that didn't seem to be happening. True, there were these other, odd sensation, the numbness, the sight/taste confusion, but nothing like that was unexpected when you were jet lagged and people had told him India would assault his senses in unexpected ways. He took each step mindful of the sensation the pavement cause his heel, his shin, his knee as he walked through the heat and the crowds of tourists and vendors. He noted the time and date on his wristwatch. Things were almost the same as always. People spoke to him. He was not invisible. His elbows and fingertips had not returned to normal. In fact, his arms from shoulder to fingertips hung loose and unfeeling from his torso, but he could still use them. As if to prove this to himself, he bought a handful of peanuts from a grizzled old-timer stooping under a palm tree on the curb, and he held the peanuts in his hand. They did not fall through his skin; he did not drop them. He had not turned into Casper the Ghost, walking through walls. What could he do but continue with his plans, even when he had no real plans? The peanuts tasted? - rectangular.
He had slept most of the day away, spent one of his 2,500 rupee nights dreaming of giraffe herds cantering aimlessly over an endless savanna.