Treason

by Sallie Bingham

  “They loved it. The meals and the days we had together. The best fun of their lives.”

  David clasps his hands. They are trembling. “You let them know exactly what was happening. That was why Keith couldn’t stand the idea of living with you, without me. He thought it would be more of the same.”

  “So that is what you two have been discussing.”

  “I answered his questions, Ann. I couldn’t very well avoid them.”

  “You could have told me, at least.”

  “I didn’t want to upset you,” he says.

  “I won’t accept that. I won’t accept your version of the truth, or your kindness. You’ve taken Keith for vengeance, and now you want to take the others for the same reason—to break me. It has nothing to do with the children or their welfare. It has to do with your rage. You’ve seen me growing stronger since you moved out, since you stopped living on me, and now you want to punish me for that, to break me by taking my children.”

  “Be quiet, Ann. They’ll hear you.”

  In the silence I hear Tom’s voice drumming outside the window. “You can’t have them,” I say. I am suddenly so tired my eyelids ache.

  “We’ll see about that.” He makes a bracket with his hands, enclosing the case. “My lawyer will be in touch with yours next week. You made your choice, Ann. You made it a long time ago, whether you knew it or not.”

  Watching him, I feel a vacuum opening in front of me. David’s self-assurance will win the case before he even needs to make use of his evidence. I see myself sniveling in the dock, a bad mother, a self-confessed adulteress.

  I tell David, “I’m going to fight you on this one. I’m going to fight you, and you are not going to win.”

  He disappears into the living room.

  I rush into the kitchen, bang through the cabinets, open the refrigerator. I stand there staring, remembering when it was crowded with food, remembering its little light at two in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. Surely the pleasures of touching and kissing cannot lead to this catastrophe. We were hardly innocent, yet our lust for each other had a kind of innocence—the way my babies once grabbed my breast.

  The children are not my life, but they are my ties to the world, the channels through which my energy runs. Without them, I will lose the part of myself that functions socially. Otherwise, I’ll lapse into the isolation of my childhood. Then, there was always an escape hatch—growing up. This time there will be no escape.

  I spot four bottles of champagne in the fridge and announce in a forced, girlish tone, “We are going to drink this champagne!” I expect to hear a protest, my children doubting, David doubling himself up to repress his irritation, but the kitchen is large and empty, as empty as it will be tomorrow when we are all gone.

  The glasses have already been removed, but there is still a stack of paper cups by the sink. I pile the cups on the tray, arrange the bottles, and find a corkscrew in the muddled drawer of leftovers. Then I lift the unwieldy tray and make for the front door. David looks up at me with astonishment from his post in the parlor.

  “Where are you going with that?”

  “I am going to offer our friends some champagne.”

  “That’s very foolish,” he hisses as I pass.

  I open the front door with one hand and step out. Tom is on the steps. I edge my way around him. A bottle slides and threatens to fall; I stop and right it. There are rows of faces before me—no one I now recognize. I’m blinkered, staring at my tray. I carry it to the back of the tent where Mrs. Porter has set up her stand selling coffee and doughnuts. She peers at me through her blue-framed glasses. I set the tray down on the trampled grass.

  The Fields are sitting in the very last row. Saul turns hastily to catch a glimpse of me, then jerks his head back around. I see Flora’s heels in her old sandals, crusty and small. Edwin is wearing sneakers with holes. The children’s feet perch like birds on the chair rungs.

  I begin to unwrap the foil on the top of the first bottle of champagne.

  Suddenly Edwin rises and climbs across his children’s knees. He comes toward me, his face averted. He crouches beside me, “You don’t use a corkscrew for champagne.”

  “Let me handle this myself,” I say.

  “No. Let me help you,” he says for the first time and last time.

  I watch him fumble with the foil. He is working very slowly and methodically, making his task more complicated. I remember his hands on the chainsaw, his hands setting the logs for the fire, his hands on my thighs. He lays aside the foil and begins to uncoil the harness of wires underneath. “Will it pop?” he asks.

  “Yes, it will pop.”

  He aims the bottle away from me and pulls the cork. It leaps out with a small explosion, the champagne foaming over his hand. We grin at each other, briefly. “An embarrassment of riches,” he says. Then he begins to fill a row of paper cups. I set them up one by one, and he tips the bottle, filling each cup halfway, twisting the neck of the bottle so that it will not drip as he passes it along to the next. How deft he is, what magic there is, even in the sight of his hands.

  “Start passing them,” he says, and I take a cup and pass it to Flora, over her shoulder. She flips her head around, glares at me, then glances at the cups. She has grown older, the lines in her face spreading across her forehead. “What’s this?” she asks in her familiar tone, grudgingly.

  “Champagne, or poison.”

  “Can I have some?” It is Saul, the intractable. I settle one cup in Flora’s fingers and hand Saul another. Flora snatches it from him. She holds the cups over her head out of reach.

  I give another cup to Frank, who takes it without a word. Then I go back to Edwin. He is about to open the second bottle. I hear the pop as I pass along the rows. Smiling, bowing, I am as cautious as a churchwarden passing the plate. I thrust the cups into their hands. I do not see anyone take a sip. It doesn’t matter. They’ve got their champagne.

  On my way back to Edwin, I see Saul snatch a cup from Flora’s hand. She whispers to him fiercely. He grasps the cup so tightly he crushes its edges. Champagne leaks down his hand; “I just wanted to try it,” he whines, and looks back at me—I am his excuse for naughtiness now.

  Now I hear Tom auctioning off the fire screen where the children hung their Christmas stockings. Bidding is sparse. Perhaps I’m distracting attention from Tom by handing out drinks. “This is to celebrate,” I say, raising a cup to Mary Cassaday.

  I hand over a cup to Helena from the last batch. She takes it with a grimace. “Ann,” she whispers across her staring neighbor, “you must be terribly upset. This is all so difficult. Can you have lunch next Tuesday?”

  “No more lunches,” I tell her with a smile to take the edge off. “No more feasting on my bones.”

  “Why, Ann, you know perfectly well—”

  I turn away. I will miss her. I will miss all of them.

  I hurry back to Edwin, who is still crouching on the matted grass, filling cups from the last bottle. “That’s it,” he says.

  “You take this cup.”

  He rubs the cheap paper. “A great idea, Ann,” he says in a flat tone.

  “Will you go on again now, the same way?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Taking women …”

  “Edwin,” Flora’s voice cracks over the children’s heads. She’s beckoning.

  “Goodbye,” he says, placing the untasted champagne in the center of the tray, then settling down next to Flora.

  Now Tom brings out the rocker. Frank raises his hand to bid, startling me. Flora, her face set dead ahead, seems unaware of what he is doing. Tom hesitates, then accepts his bid of fifteen dollars. I wonder where he will get the money to pay for it. Flora always wanted that rocker. I used to sit in it to sew beside the fire.

  Fred brings the rocker down the aisle and sets it at the end of the Fields’ row. It moves gently back and forth on the grass. The sight of the rocker beside them is more than I can bear. Now Fred comes
out of the house with the box of Christmas tree ornaments. “What am I bid for this box of balls and things? Some strings of lights. Nice. Nothing broken as far as I can see.”

  Saul’s hand shoots up.

  “No,” Flora hisses, batting at his hand across Edwin. The child whines, “I want that angel!” His hand is still up avoiding hers.

  “Make him stop!” Flora orders Edwin. She reaches in front of him to slap Saul’s hand, but Tom has already accepted the bid.

  “Sold for two dollars to the little fellow in the back.”

  I do not want my angel to hang at the top of their tree.

  I duck out of the tent, realizing as I bend over that my neck is stiff-to-cracking. I walk across the grass toward the covey of cars.

  Molly runs up behind me. “Where are you going?”

  “For a little drive.”

  “I want to come. It’s boring here.”

  “Life is boring, Molly. Boring or painful.”

  “I want to come with you anyhow.”

  “Better not,” I say, to myself.

  “Why better not?” I do not answer. “Tom is beginning to auction what’s left.”

  She is pleading, and I’m sorry for her. I cannot bear to see her face fall. “All right, you can come,” I say.

  She scurries along beside me. As we walk to the car, I hear far-off thunder. I remember the big summer storms rolling up the valley from the river, churning the air ahead.

  “Daddy says he’ll buy me a bed with four posts when I come to live with him,” Molly says, running to keep up.

  “You’re not going to live with him, my pet.”

  She doesn’t respond, avoiding trouble. She runs ahead of me, ferreting through the cars, shouting when she spots our station wagon. She is sitting very straight in the front seat when I arrive.

  “Where are we going?” she asks, bouncing as though we are heading out for a picnic.

  I fasten my seatbelt and twist the key in the ignition. “We’re going for a drive. Put on your seatbelt. You must do exactly as I say.”

  She stares at me. I have never spoken so firmly.

  I turn the car onto the highway and pick up speed. The highway is deserted. I press the accelerator down to the floor, and the battered car leaps. Along the road, the trees have turned color, blazing, then fading to dusty reds and browns. There are For Sale signs in another of the old fields. Our own pasture has been sold to a developer; he will put up twenty little boxes.

  “Where are we going?” Molly asks again. “You’re driving terribly fast.”

  I slow down and wonder if David has noted my carelessness on his yellow pad: unsafe at any speed.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to wreck us,” and I feel her relax beside me, reassured as always because of my confidence.

  We turn onto the humped tree-hung side road. She looks out the window and says nothing. She knows where we are going. Over the bump which used to make her giggle when she was tiny, strapped in her car seat and bouncing high. The car hangs suspended in the air for a moment and comes down with a wrenching thud. “Daddy says it’s bad for the springs,” she remarks. She is smiling, my partner in crime.

  Fuck Daddy. Fuck all daddies, and their wives.

  I drive through the Fields’ gate, past the shed where Edwin keeps his car. The door is open. I slide the car inside to evade the neighbor’s notice. “You stay here in the car with the door closed,” I tell Molly and reach across her to roll up the window. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Never mind. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  I would like to lock her in, but I relent when I see her peaked face; she is frightened enough already. “You stay here,” I repeat with the full weight of my new authority. She sits very still to impress me, as though welded to her seat.

  I slam the door and walk around to the front of the car. Edwin’s power mower is standing in the corner next to his gardening tools. Everything he touched bears his mark: the smoothly worn handles are circled with bands of invisible fingerprints. I see the red gasoline can and approach it cautiously, leaning down to lift it by the handle. I sigh with mixed relief. It is nearly full.

  Molly is watching me through the car window. I wave at her, then hoist the can and walk out of the shed.

  I start down the path toward the house. A little smoke is climbing out of the chimney from Edwin’s early-morning fire, left banked against their return. How fragile the house looks, how defenseless and pretty with its green shutters and dormer windows. It is like an illustration in a children’s book, a house of rabbits—all Edwin’s handiwork. There’s the terrace he laid himself next to the front door, the flower bed he dug for Flora, the window boxes he hammered together so that she could have her petunias. They are thriving still, falling over the edges of the boxes in long white and purple sprays.

  I walk around the north side of the house where I am out of sight of the road. The handle of the gasoline can is cutting into my fingers. I set it down on the grass and unscrew the top, then realize I have no matches.

  Leaving the gasoline can, I slide open the porch door and step inside. There’s the familiar chaos and smell of burnt bacon. Tennis rackets and children’s boots are heaped on the floor. I hear the tap dripping on plates in the kitchen sink. The table is covered with the remains of their breakfast, chairs pushed back as though they all rushed out on impulse in the midst of toast and tea. Flora’s heart-shaped silver tea strainer is winking in the sun.

  I know she keeps her matches in the drawer next to the stove. I take the box.

  Out through the kitchen where we made fruitcake three Novembers running, Edwin giving us each a boiled dime to drop into the big bowl of batter: we were all his children then.

  Out through the porch. I stumble on Frank’s knapsack bulging with books.

  Down the steps to the gasoline can, shining red in the sun. Tipping the can, I sprinkle the geraniums growing along the house. Their fleshy leaves do not absorb the gasoline; it spatters, staining the paint. The acrid smell overwhelms the citrusy scent of the geraniums blooming in the sun.

  I tip the can up again and soak the leaves and the grass. Cool air touches my cheek like a set of fingers, and I look up the hill and see the bright trees behind the children’s swing. It is a beautiful day.

  I strike a match against the strip of sand paper, throw it into the geraniums, and jump back. With a gush, a big flame flares up. Molly sounds the car horn.

  Stepping back, I watch the flame consume a tuft of dried grass leaning against the side of the house. Edwin, trimming with his shears, missed that one. I watch the flame leap up the wall, the paint wrinkling. Another flame, spurting up a separate stalk, follows the first one onto the wall.

  Molly sounds the horn, two short and one long. I watch the first flame feeling for a foothold a little higher up the wall. It finds a blister and lays hold. The second flame is quick behind it. The grass near my feet is crackling, and a pungent smoke rises. The first flame climbs the wall, reaching for the open kitchen window. I see Flora’s gingham curtains suddenly sucked in. The flame touches the white window frame and turns it brown.

  The second flame fans out further down the wall, and the paint crackles and sears. The first flame is mounting the window frame, edging it like a vine.

  A scorching, darkening stain is spreading across the north wall of the house, board by board, above the kitchen window.

  Molly sounds the horn.

  The top of the window frame pops and cracks. The second flame, spreading, reaches up. The first and second flames join together. Together, they race for the roof line.

  My God, it is burning. The house is burning.

  Treason

  A Play

  Time passes and pisses on us all.

  —WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

  CHARACTERS

  EZRA POUND

  midsixties to late seventies

  DOROTHY (Shakespear) POUND
<
br />   his wife of thirty years, English, midfifties to sixties

  OLGA RUDGE

  his mistress of twenty years, ten years younger, American, raised in England, light accent, midforties to fifties

  SGT. PAUL WHITESIDE

  US Army, African American, thirty-five

  DR. OVERHOLSER

  Chief Psychiatrist at St. Elizabeths, fifties

  SHERI MARTINELLI

  a painter, early twenties

  MARCELLA SPANN

  a teacher, late twenties

  JOHN KASPER

  New Jersey–based anti-integrationist, white supremacist, thirties

  MARY RUDGE

  Olga and Ezra’s daughter, brought up in the Tyrol, light Swiss-German accent, early twenties to midthirties

  ELDER LIGHTFOOT SOLOMON MICHAUX

  African American evangelist, minister of the Radio Church of God

  TIME: The action of the play takes place between 1941 and 1965, in Italy, the Tyrol, and Washington, DC.

  Act I

  SCENE 1

  Setting: At home in Rapallo and broadcasts from Rome. November/December 1941

  (As the audience enters, we see documentary footage of Mussolini’s Italy and the Allied invasion. As the stage fades to black, we begin to hear static from a radio trying to tune in a shortwave station. Out of the darkness we hear three voices.)

  DOROTHY

  You and I, Olga.

  OLGA

  Yes—you and I, Dorothy, sitting here in the dark, to save electricity.

  EZRA’S VOICE

  (Radio broadcast)

  Ezra Pound speaking …

  (Dissipates into static)

  OLGA

  Over the static …

  DOROTHY

  Even over our static.

  OLGA (Flaring)

  Our static!

  (Radio static becomes louder, then suddenly a spotlight on EZRA, at a broadcast studio in Rome. He is flamboyantly dressed in cape, sombrero, flowing cravat, ruffled shirt. Incongruously, he wears heavy old hiking boots, mud-caked, that are clearly too big for him.)