Ivory Apples

by Lisa Goldstein

  “Not all of it. I went to other places around the world and talked to the muses there. In fact, that’s one of the things I’d like to ask you about. You found your muse around here, right? So you probably know where Talia ended up. I wonder if you can take me there.”

  I wondered that too. I’d become an expert at lying, and I’d noticed that both Ms. Burden and Ned would pause an almost imperceptible amount before coming out with a lie, that they needed that time to make something up. As far as I could tell Craig had told the truth throughout, but I still wasn’t completely sure of him. And I didn’t want to introduce him to Maeve, who was still so fragile, who hadn’t yet recovered from her illness.

  He saw my hesitation. “Or, well, you can tell me your story. Why were you in Kate’s house?”

  “It’s my house!” I said.

  “All right. So how did it come into her possession?”

  I liked the way he talked, his use of words and phrases like “dalliance” and “wherever their fancy takes them.” That wasn’t reason enough to take him to Maeve’s grove, though. But I could tell him what had happened, the way I’d told it to Maeve, and see if he had any ideas.

  “All right,” I said. “Have you ever read Ivory Apples?”

  It took hours to tell our stories in full. Meanwhile people came and went, and in the background we heard plates clattering, and steam hissing from the coffee machine. The proprietor came by a few times and flapped his dishrag at us, as if he wanted to sweep us away along with the crumbs and napkins, but we ignored him.

  I had to start my account with Adela Madden, since he had never heard of her or her book. That surprised me: for one thing, he’d mentioned an ivory apple in his story, and for another, I’d always associated the book and the muses together.

  Oh, and he had gotten rich by writing a rock song, of all things, something called “Grasshopper, Fly Away.” I’d heard it on the radio in what seemed like a bygone era, a time before Piper and Ms. Burden.

  He looked horrified by the things Ms. Burden had done, which was gratifying. We exchanged email addresses and promised to write if we discovered anything. I was feeling more and more discouraged, though. If even he, with all his knowledge of the muses, hadn’t managed to find Ms. Burden, I didn’t see how I could.

  I repeated his story to Maeve, telling her about Talia and Claudia, about the captured muses. In response she gave me Hesiod’s Theogony, but she had nothing to add, no advice to share.

  I saw why she’d suggested the book right away. “And one day they taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon,” it says about the muses. And later Hesiod says that they “breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime,” which was as good a description of their coming as anything. Aside from that, though, it didn’t seem very helpful.

  I realized something after I finished it. I had never felt that recognition with Maeve that I’d had with Craig, had never sensed the muse within her. But she was just my aunt, someone I’d known all my life, and there was already a bond between us.

  Craig emailed me a few weeks later. “I’ve read Ivory Apples and gone on the website, as you suggested. Have you looked through the archives? Someone posted a story that uses the phrase ‘ivory apple.’”

  I clicked on his link. “How common do you think the words ‘ivory apple’ are?” someone with the name of Dr. Spottiswood had written, eight years ago. I’d never seen this post; I’d never gone back that far in the archives. “Because it’s mentioned in this story I read, ‘The Woman and the Apple.’ The story isn’t online, but the book it’s from, Folktales from All Over, is old enough that it should be in the public domain. So here it is:

  “A woman once let her dog out at night and stopped to look up into her apple tree. An apple of the purest white, like ivory or alabaster, shone down from the topmost branch. Immediately she felt a great longing for it, a longing that drove all other thoughts out of her mind.

  “She brought out her ladder and laid it against the lowest branches, then stepped out onto the tree itself. But she had only gone a little ways when her breath started to come faster and the branches seemed to sway beneath her, and she had to return to the ground. She tried several more times, but always when she rose above a certain height she grew faint and dizzy and had to stop.

  “She climbed at night, because the apple seemed brighter then. Sometimes it dazzled her, shining out against the darkness, and sometimes its light seemed weaker, but her desire for it remained unchanged.

  “She thought about it constantly, as she milked her goats and churned her butter and harvested her fruits and vegetables. She felt she would never be happy unless she had it, that she would sicken and die for lack of it.

  “She no longer talked to her dog, or threw sticks for him, or took him on long walks. His fur grew matted and he became thinner, and he followed her with his tail down, knowing that there was something wrong with her but not what it was.

  “A man who lived in her village, a cobbler, began to court her but she turned him away, having no interest in anything but her apple—for she had already begun to think of it as hers. Finally the man said, in frustration, ‘What would it take to win your hand? I will do anything for you, anything at all.’

  “At that she brightened and said, ‘Will you pluck an apple for me?’

  “‘Of course,’ the man said.

  “So that night the man climbed the ladder set against the tree trunk and then stepped out onto the branches. At first they were thick beneath him and he went quickly; then they began to thin, to bend under his weight. Still he continued climbing, higher and higher, and when he looked up he saw only more boughs and more, and the leaves and apples they bore.

  “Finally he caught a glimmer of white ahead of him. He clung tightly to a branch and looked down, wanting to tell the woman what he had seen, but she had dwindled to the size of a cat, and his fear at how high he had climbed stopped the words in his throat.

  “He went on. The gleam of the apple grew stronger, and once again he wanted to call down to the woman, but this time when he looked at her she was the size of an ant. He hurried ahead, certain that he would reach his goal soon.

  “As he climbed a suspicion grew within him, and when he saw the apple just above him his suspicion turned into a certainty. He looked down, and this time he could not see the woman at all. Still, he knew he had to tell her what he had discovered, and so he shouted, ‘It isn’t an apple!’

  “And very faintly, her voice came back. ‘What is it, then?’

  “‘It’s the moon!’

  “And her voice came back to him: ‘Then pluck me the moon.’

  “And so the man reached up and took hold of the moon. It felt cool and smooth to his touch, and it was very heavy. But although he tugged at it with all his might he could not pull it free.

  “Then a face appeared on the moon, two wide eyes and an open mouth. ‘Are you certain you want to take me from the night sky?’ she asked.

  “‘Yes,’ the man said.

  “‘Then on your head be it,’ she said. She came away from the branch so suddenly that the man lost his balance and tumbled downward. Down and down he fell, still holding the moon, the branches whipping him as he went. Finally a branch caught him and he lay still.

  “The moon, you know, has her friends, or some say her children. They come to her from all over, and she hosts their nightly revels. They dance and sing, they laugh and play games, they celebrate her presence in their own way. And because she is changeable, because she moves from one shape to another and never stays still, they are changeable as well. They come and go as they please, and they believe in nothing.

  “These friends heard the moon cry out, and they climbed the tree to where the man lay. They took the moon from his hands and tried to return it to the sky. But they laughed as they worked, and one of them began a game where they tossed her back and forth. Another had stopped to look at th
e night sky without the moon, to marvel at the garden of stars like white roses, and when they tossed the moon to him she slipped through his fingers and fell to earth.

  “The woman saw the moon fall, and she reached out her hands to catch her. Then the woman felt something hit her, and she dropped senseless to the ground.

  “As the sun rose the next day the man woke and found himself held within the branches of the tree. He did not remember anything of the night before, but he felt a strange loss in his hands, a lightness, as if he had once held something very precious.

  “The man climbed slowly to the ground, feeling aches in every part of his body. He saw the woman lying there and he remembered that she was something to do with him, but he could not remember why. He worked gently to rouse her, and finally she opened her eyes and looked at him.

  “He asked her who she was, but she only babbled nonsense. He put her to bed in the house and stayed with her for several days, but although he spoke patiently to her she would only ever answer him in gibberish. Sometimes he thought that he could understand her, or almost understand her, that if he could just listen in the right way her words would make sense.

  “At nights he felt drawn to go outside, and several times he found himself looking up at the star-filled sky, with no memory of waking up or leaving the house. Once he saw the round moon hanging like a ripe fruit, and he thought to himself, Ah, so they’ve put her back. But he didn’t know why he had thought that, and he shook his head at his foolishness. From then on, though, he understood that the moon had something to do with him, and he found himself going out more on the nights when she was full.

  “The people of the village still needed new shoes, and wanted their old shoes mended, and the man began to remember his house and his shop. The woman’s neighbors told him about some distant cousins of hers in the next village, and he left her with them and returned home.

  “He had not escaped the moon’s influence, though. He found himself singing and dancing more, and he composed songs for the village’s festivals and celebrations, and for their more somber occasions. His neighbors grew fonder of him, and from that time on he never had to buy his own beer.

  “The dog enjoyed his company as well. He had followed the man to his house and had grown fatter under his care, and at night he slept curled up at the foot of the man’s bed. Sometimes the man would dance under the full moon, and sometimes the dog would dance with him.

  “And the moon’s friends? She rarely grew angry, but she could not forget how they had tossed her like a ball and then let her fall to the ground. They were playing at their games when they heard the moon’s voice, coming from above them:

  “‘Sound the tocsin, toll the bell,

  Down and down the children fell.’

  “They looked around and found themselves on earth, on stony ground. They saw that she had exiled them, and that they would stay where she had sent them until she pardoned them.

  “In time they came to live on mountaintops, where they are closer to her and can see her more clearly. They look up at her on dark nights, and they sigh for their old friendship. But they know that she is changeable, and they hope that someday she will reverse her decree and take them back.”

  I took a breath and read the story again. Of course the muses hadn’t been friends of the moon, and they hadn’t dropped her to earth like a basketball, I knew that much. But there was something there, something I could almost understand, the way the man in the story had almost understood the woman. It wasn’t my story, but it rhymed with mine.

  I left the computer and went to find Maeve. “Where did you get the name Ivory Apples?” I asked.

  She had that foxy look again. “Is one of the letter-writers asking that question?”

  “No, just me. The thing is, there’s this folktale with an ivory apple in it, and I’m wondering if you read it.”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “The apple turns out to be the moon, in the story. So does that have anything to do with your apple, the Watchmaker’s apple?”

  “Oh, I can’t remember—it was all so long ago. I wrote most of the book by moonlight, I remember that much.”

  She didn’t want to discuss it, I saw. I remembered that someone had used the pseudonym “Watchmaker” on the website, and that she had seemed disturbed when I told her about it.

  Later, when I was alone, I asked Piper if he’d ever heard the phrase. Sure, he said.

  Really? I asked. Where?

  Just now. When you read that story.

  I gave up talking to him and skimmed through Ivory Apples instead. In the book, the apple had been ivory or a muted white. It was owned by the Watchmaker, and it stood on a shelf behind the counter. Several of the characters wanted to buy it, but the Watchmaker always told them it wasn’t for sale. Some of them begged to be allowed to touch it, but he refused them even that. They would come into the store whenever they passed his shop and look at it, and they would resent him for teasing them with it and yet refusing to sell it to them.

  CHAPTER 18

  AND THEN, amazingly, Ned came through. A few weeks after I met Craig, Ned stopped me in downtown and told me he’d run into Ms. Burden, and that she’d given him her new address. Of course he wanted a reward, but this time I was happy to give it to him.

  I got in my car and drove toward the address. I thought of my sisters, alone with her for all this time, and I wondered what new miseries she had conjured up. I felt jittery, sick to my stomach, my hands sweaty on the steering wheel.

  I found myself in a part of Eugene I’d never seen before, block after block of warehouses, some of them empty. I grew more and more apprehensive as I went on, as the numbers counted down: 319, 317, 315. And then I saw it—313.

  She couldn’t possibly live there, I thought. It was one of the abandoned buildings, with painted-over windows, some of them broken, and graffiti on the walls. A sign at the top said “For Lease,” the words striped white with pigeon shit.

  I parked the car and got out. There was a massive gate at the front but it was locked, and so was a smaller door within it.

  I went around the warehouse and found an open window with a steel grate pulled more than halfway down. I squeezed myself through the gap and stood in the building, looking around.

  I was in a huge echoing space, with light and dust lancing through a few small high windows. A patchwork of windows painted white lined one wall, some new, some broken or faded to gray. A stairway hugged another wall and stopped halfway up, its last step poised out over the air. Steel shelves and broken machinery littered the corners.

  I’d slept in places a lot like this when I’d been on the streets, and I sniffed for the old familiar odors, shit and spoiled food and unwashed bodies. But I could smell only damp wood, gone rotten from the rain.

  Were people avoiding this place? I would have been grateful to have found it, somewhere to get out of the rain, or most of it. But no one had ever mentioned it to me, not even to warn me away.

  I set off into the building, skirting the light from the windows. The echoes of my footsteps seemed weirdly loud, as though the walls were amplifying them. I went more carefully and the echoes diminished.

  A light appeared up ahead, illuminating a scene like a stage play. I came closer and saw my sisters eating at our dining table. They weren’t talking and laughing and bickering as usual, though. Instead Amaranth was staring off into the distance, scowling, and Semiramis looked afraid. Only Beatriz seemed aware of her surroundings, but her attention came and went, like a light flickering on and off.

  Everything seemed blurred, as though I was seeing through gauze. Was I crying? I blinked, but the haze didn’t go away.

  Then I heard Philip’s voice, and saw him sitting at the head of the table. And Jane was there too, saying something to Philip over the heads of my sisters.

  I don’t know how long I stood there watching them. They finished dinner, and then Jane and Philip urged my two youngest sisters to bed. They protest
ed, and my parents joked with them, and finally they were allowed to stay up for another hour.

  I felt a yearning that threatened to swallow me whole. I knew my parents were dead, of course I knew that, and that we weren’t at home but in a warehouse. It didn’t seem to matter. All I could think was that I had found them, that we could be a family again.

  I started toward the light, my arms already opening to hold them. Piper pushed hard at my ribs. Get out! he said. Move!

  Loud footsteps sounded, and I saw Ms. Burden coming toward me across the warehouse floor. I stood taller, trying to look unafraid. A hundred questions passed through my mind. Why were my sisters here, in this abandoned warehouse? Or were these illusions, the way Philip and Jane had to be? I knew that my parents were dead, so was it possible that my sisters . . .

  Ms. Burden started talking before I could think what to ask her. “I don’t want them, not really,” she said. “Just tell me where Adela Madden lives, and I’ll give them back.”

  She muttered something I couldn’t hear, though I thought I caught the word “bell.” The haze around them thickened and grew, until it became the size of a room, a cloud.

  I tried to back away and found that I couldn’t. Instead the cloud came closer, or I moved toward it. One step more and I would join it.

  Piper danced within me, his knees and feet and elbows striking a painful percussion against my ribcage. Once she has you she’ll never let you go, he said.

  “Ivy!” Philip said, from somewhere inside the cloud. “Why didn’t you come down for dinner? Come and join us!”

  I took another step toward them. There would be someone else to make all the decisions now, someone who understood things the way an adult did. I could stop working so hard. I could rest, finally.

  The mist parted, and I saw the Oregon Zoo in Portland, a place we’d visited once with Philip. My family was at the elephant exhibit, looking enthralled.

  They continued on, down a path past the other animals. The path led them away from the zoo, into a dark, thick forest. They looked around uneasily. Someone leapt at them from between the trees, and then two more people, five, ten. Witches shrouded in black, shadowy terrors from a child’s nightmare. My sisters screamed.