The More I Owe You

by Michael Sledge

  It was during these sleepless yet blissfully oxygenated nights, soaring along on the magic carpet of cortisone, that she began to view her memories of Nova Scotia in a different light, to observe them with a writer’s eye. Elizabeth realized that she was in fact revisiting old material she’d first worked on twenty-five years earlier, in boarding school. It had not been evident during these last weeks how the vivid images of Great Village and the intense, frightening thoughts of her mother might be used in the service of writing. Poetry had never been the appropriate form for dealing with that period in her life, for representing the experience of a child passed among relatives while her mother was in and out of mental institutions. That was not the sort of poet Elizabeth was. One should not abuse poetry in order to confess one’s sorrows—nor one’s crimes, for that matter.

  But now Elizabeth did think back to the handful of times she’d attempted to explore the subject in stories, and to the extensive notes she’d made for a novel set in Nova Scotia during the early part of the century. Tucked in a drawer somewhere ever since. Though she was hardly a fiction writer, this small collection of stories was one of the first serious projects she’d attempted as a teenager, aware even at the time that she didn’t yet possess the power or skill to get it right. She’d done what she could, and then she’d put the stories away.

  Truthfully, she’d hated her mother’s visits to Great Village. When Gertrude had come home from the sanatorium for a holiday, or had been in between different hospitals, or when the family had summoned her, hoping to discover their daughter and sister cured and ready to return to them for good, the visits had been without fail disruptive. Or much worse. The young woman was simply not well. Then, after her mother left, Elizabeth would long for her to return. As she’d told Lota, Gertrude was lost in grief and failed to recover her balance in the years following her husband’s death. Elizabeth knew this from fragments of overheard conversations and much more that she’d absorbed.

  When Gertrude came home, the household held its collective breath. Elizabeth’s grandmother and aunts treated the mute and nervous young woman like some ethereal, delicately beautiful moth that had alighted at the windowpane. Her mother’s visits were strained, and in the end it seemed everyone was relieved when she left, though gloom settled on the house for weeks afterward. During the summers in Nova Scotia, thousands of big, horrible brown moths beat against the windows and fluttered around Elizabeth’s reading lamp at night, and sometimes she still dreamed that the moths were engulfing her and she couldn’t breathe. She woke from these dreams with a shout.

  There were two sounds, and they were linked: the sound of Nate’s hammer and, once, the sound of her mother’s scream. Her mother had made this sound, Elizabeth now remembered, on her last visit to Great Village before she’d been sent away for good. Elizabeth had not seen her mother again. On that visit, Elizabeth’s grandmother and aunts had urged Gertrude to finally leave her black mourning clothes. It’s been five years, they’d said. It’s time.

  Elizabeth had no memory of her father, no real sense of his presence in her infancy or how much or little he’d loved Gertrude. His sole legacy was this husk of a woman who stood before a mirror, a woman so thin you could crack her in your fist, whose white claw of a hand gripped the sumptuous purple fabric in which she was newly swathed.

  The dress was almost done. The dressmaker knelt on the floor working at the hem, her mouth full of pins; she looked like a big insect with dangerous spiny mandibles. Elizabeth sat in her aunt’s lap as Gammie and her mother’s other sisters fawned over the dress. Gertrude grew more and more agitated, and then she screamed. The scream frightened the child and she ran out of the room, out of the house, finding refuge at the blacksmith’s. The hammering and beautiful ringing sounds blocked out the scream. Perhaps it had not been a real scream. Gertrude may have been crying out in surprise or confusion over the clothes, or even in pleasure at the rich fabric. Yet the cry gained force and volume in the child’s ear until it became a scream so loud she wanted to press her head to the anvil and fill it with ringing.

  Later, the scream was over, and Gertrude giggled among her sisters, eating ice cream on the front porch. Elizabeth did not stay with them but instead helped her grandmother in the kitchen. Tears fell from Gammie’s face into the potato mash. When Elizabeth asked if she was crying, she said no.

  In the white schoolhouse, Elizabeth learned that a sound makes a wave, and that waves of sound continue circling the globe for eternity, even after they are no longer audible. Forty years later, Elizabeth could hear in her mother’s scream exactly what had terrified her as a child: the grief and loneliness, her mother’s recognition of how distantly she’d drifted from those to whom she was most attached in the world, the understanding that she could not find her way back to them. Beyond the grief and loss, Elizabeth now heard a secondary note. It was a kind of assertion, more like a battle cry than one of despair. As if Gertrude were defending the last territory that remained her own.

  THEY WERE STILL waiting for the completion of the second stove on the evening Elizabeth began to write the story. She began quite late, wide awake long after Lota had gone to bed, her whirring thoughts fueled by the cortisone. Shrouded in sweaters and blankets, she typed by the light of a kerosene lamp. She wrote for hours and did not tire. An injection of cortisone, two cc’s of adrenaline, a whiff of norisodrine sulphate, and a blast of gin and tonic to ignite the fuse.

  The single drink was enough. She did not crave more. She did not want to upset the chemical balance.

  Elizabeth wrote on the typewriter with unusual confidence and speed. The piece came to her in a form that felt complete, instinctively right, though the form was not a conventional one for prose; it lay somewhere between story and poem. The writing of poetry was such an exacting labor that it could take years to bring one poem to an acceptable state; she might work for months on a single line. Yet with this piece she did not second-guess her choices.

  She wrote all night, something she had not done probably since Vassar. Midmorning, Elizabeth finally stood and left the typewriter. Discarding sweaters as she went, she walked up the streambed to the pool. She heard Lota shouting in the distance, amid various sounds of construction. Elizabeth had not abandoned the work; she was immersing herself in it more deeply. Incognizant of her surroundings, she paced beside the pool, hitting the palm of one hand with the fingers of the other, as if keeping time with her racing thoughts. She worked through the story in her mind once more. The ideas rushed upon her so rapidly, the galaxy of associations and details and memories made so many spontaneous connections, that she felt they were pressing against the physical confines of her skull. All the details sprang clear: the houses and citizens of Great Village, Nate and his smithy, her mother’s hand. The story began with the sound, one sound that opened up into another sound, the sound of her mother’s cry in counterpoint to the sound of the blacksmith’s hammer. It was the balance between those two that had eluded her before and that now provided the frame. Elizabeth laughed out loud. It could be that yes, just perhaps, she was a genius.

  On her way down to the house, she tripped over a shovel that had been left on the ground. The shovel flung wet concrete onto her jeans. She bent to wipe it off and was nearly overcome by a wave of lightheadedness. The effects of the cortisone were beginning to flag. Elizabeth went to her room to rest and did not wake up for many hours.

  LOTA WAS ENTERING the room with a tray. Sammy the toucan perched on its lip, chortling as he did when he was pleased. Elizabeth found that she lay fully dressed on top of the bedclothes, though a blanket had been tucked around her. The light in the room was dim; she’d slept until evening. When she sat up, she smelled coffee and toast. Looking to the window once more, she realized she had slept long past evening and into the following day.

  Lota put a hand to Elizabeth’s forehead as if she were testing for fever. Her attention was so intent and encompassing, it was like being taken physically into her arms. You could not
encounter Lota without acknowledging the physical force of her. Lota swept over you.

  “Are you rested, my poet?”

  “I’m famished,” Elizabeth said, reaching for the toast.

  Sammy cocked his head and fixed his electric blue eyes upon her breakfast. He was exceedingly handsome, with glossy black plumage and a sulfur bib and an enormous, waxy green and yellow bill he wielded as dexterously as Lota did a machete. For a creature with no real face, he had a remarkable range of expressions. The first time he’d plunged into a bath, Elizabeth had discovered that beneath the black feathers, his skin was the same deep blueberry blue as his feet. On the first birthday she’d spent in Brazil, still bedridden from that dreadful cashew poisoning, the Polish zoo couple down the hill had given her Sammy as a present. That day, she’d received two gifts: a toucan and a ring. The ring was tight on her swollen finger. It had remained for several days on the bedside table before she’d kept it on. The engraving was a simple date: 20/12/51. The day Lota had asked her to stay.

  “Why doesn’t Sammy fly away, do you think?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Look at him. He’s still wild, even though he’s eyeing my bacon.”

  “He’s smart,” Lota said. “He knows that he wouldn’t be taken care of nearly so well anywhere else.”

  Elizabeth tossed a piece of mango purposely short so that Sammy had to lunge to catch it. His tail shot straight up, brandishing his red rump like a flag. She had to write something about him one of these days. Sammy cried out for a poem.

  “How’s the construction business?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Soon you’ll have two new bedrooms and a superbathroom with a sunken bathtub,” Lota said proudly. “I’ll put a window there, and as you soak you can look out at the mountain.”

  “And who will be looking in?”

  Lota slid her hand under the blanket and began to knead Elizabeth’s calf.

  “I had a Portuguese nanny when I was a child,” Elizabeth said. “I remembered that yesterday. It was in Worcester, while I was living with my father’s parents. It was only for a short time; then they replaced her with a very severe Swede. Probably the Portuguese one was too nice to me.”

  “That explains it,” Lota said.

  “Yes?”

  “She planted a seed in you. Uma semente. The seed grew into a plant, the plant produced a flower, the flower made a fruit.”

  Elizabeth laughed. “Is the fruit a cashew?”

  “No, coraçao, the fruit is Samambaia.”

  THE ELIXIR’S EFFECTS, Elizabeth discovered, were repeatable. The recipe had a nice ring to it: cortisone, adrenaline, norisodrine, gin. The chemicals swirled in her bloodstream; her fingers flew across the typewriter keys. She finished the piece around three in the morning. Short story, prose poem, or autobiographical sketch, she did not know exactly what to call it. Still, she knew she’d hit something dead-on.

  She had never felt much kindness toward Gertrude—not as a character in a story, not as one in life. She had occasionally found herself voicing, in conversation as well as in the privacy of her own thoughts, Poor thing. But she hadn’t felt the sentiment, not deeply. Most memories of her mother were overshadowed by impatience. Once or twice she’d imagined herself as Gertrude’s own mother, at her wits’ end, slapping the young woman and telling her to get on with living, not to be so self-indulgent. When someone’s grief was completely entangled with your own, it was impossible to feel true sympathy for her.

  The first attempts Elizabeth had made in adolescence to write about her mother, she understood now, had been her way of trying to silence the plaintive cries that used to break into her thoughts before she could push them back into the dark.

  Why did you leave me alone? Why couldn’t you love me enough to get well?

  Those stories failed, both as fiction and as exorcism. To act as a scientist objectively testing hypotheses could lead nowhere. The father died. The mother wandered down a path and became lost. The child was given up. She’d posed this case believing that the missing pieces of the story might be revealed and organized if only they were subjected to clinical examination. Elizabeth finally understood that the missing pieces—the private world of her parents, its intimacies and interdependencies, the quality of their life together—were irrecoverable. She would never know precisely what her mother had lost or why that loss had driven her mad. But she could imagine it. She knew that if she herself were to be separated from Lota, even after such a short time together, forced from safe harbor out into the storm, she, too, might wander too far down a dark path ever to find her way back. It was only now, twenty years after Gertrude’s death, that Elizabeth could reach out to her mother with compassion.

  12

  I used to be merely embarrassed at being American, Elizabeth exclaimed. Now I’m horrified.

  At last you are in exactly the same position we Brazilians have been in for some time! Rosinha said.

  So shy and nervous when she’d first come to Brazil, Lota thought proudly, and now look at her Cookie—at the head of the table, holding everyone’s attention: the queen bee!

  When I read my friends’ letters, Elizabeth said, what’s happening in the States sounds completely absurd. Is that what you feel here? Such absurdity you think it must be a joke? I can hardly believe this terrible business with William Carlos Williams, thrown out of his post at the Library of Congress because someone, no one even knows who, called him a communist. The country is obsessed with communism, just rabid. Remember, Rosinha, when we went to Robert Frost’s reading at the American embassy, how the ambassador was so rude and stupid? He sat next to Frost’s daughter with an unlit cigar clamped in his mouth. Frost may be a malicious old bore, but the ambassador could not have been more disrespectful. All he could talk about was who was or wasn’t a Red.

  Americans have less respect for poets than we Brazilians, I think, piped in Marietta. Lota was shocked. Without the husband around, her sister turned back into a human being. Once again, she actually had opinions.

  Yes, didn’t you know? Elizabeth said. We’re quite dangerous elements. If it weren’t so terrifying, I’d have to laugh. As if a poet had any real power in the first place.

  At last, Lota had to interrupt. She raised her voice to call down to the other end of the table. You’ll never be a great poet if you think like that.

  Well, I do think like that, Elizabeth called back.

  Lota laughed. Her Cookie did not think like that in the least.

  Last week, Elizabeth had confessed that all her life, the approach of the American holiday Thanksgiving had made her miserable; she had no real family with whom to share it, no real home. And yet this year she had begun to hope she might host a Thanksgiving dinner at Samambaia. She would invite all the members of her Brazilian family. Did Lota approve?

  Lota gave her a squeeze and a kiss. Anything my Cookie wants, my Cookie gets.

  Elizabeth hand-painted beautiful invitations and sent them to Mary, to Carlos and his wife Leticia, to Lota’s adopted son Kylso and his family, and to Rosinha, Elizabeth’s favorite among Lota’s friends. She pressed Lota to deliver one of the invitations personally to Marietta. This is an occasion when we put our differences aside, she said, and Lota could not refuse. Even though she had instead handed the invitation to Marietta’s maid and told her not to disturb the mistress, she was extremely touched by Elizabeth’s gesture and was pleased, now, that Marietta had come. Fortunately, without her loudmouth husband.

  The evenings had grown warm enough that they were able to set up a long table outdoors. Early in the day, the two of them had walked through the woods, stealing a private moment to hold hands outside and collect orchids and fallen branches ornamented with lichen, which they had fashioned into the table’s centerpiece. Lota had thrown a rope over a branch and hoisted a chandelier overhead; hanging from the tree above the table, it was now alight with flickering candles. Lota beamed at her dear Elizabeth at the far end. The dinn
er had been a lovely idea. The courses themselves were impeccable, simply superb; Cookie was as much a genius in the kitchen as she was on the page. She’d improvised some Brazilian variations on the meal’s traditions: jabuticaba jam in place of cranberry sauce; cassava meal in the stuffing.

  Only when they began talking politics did the evening threaten to become disagreeable. Lota could see that Carlos was growing offended by some of Elizabeth’s remarks about America. He frowned at his plate as he repeatedly aligned his knife and fork across its top. Besides, politics was not a subject to discuss in English. You couldn’t trust English. It did not fully declare itself, unlike Portuguese. It pretended dispassion while hiding its true intent.

  Finally, Carlos broke in. You speak so lightly about these things that I suspect you do not grasp their larger significance.

  Carlos, Elizabeth said with a laugh, I have the right to criticize my own country.

  And a blindness, perhaps, to what gives you that right? he said with some force. Communism would hardly allow you that right. Not all of us at this table share the rights you take for granted.

  I’m hardly blind to that. But you can’t be an apologist for every American stupidity. If the same thing happened here, you’d be the first to attack it. You’re as critical of extreme nationalism as I am.

  Yet nationalism forms only in opposition to a threat. Such as communism.

  Or to an imagined threat. Or even to a manufactured threat.

  Lota couldn’t stand it when Elizabeth picked a fight with Carlos. Carlos is very brave, she said. You should not attack him. For instance, the list he published in his newspaper last week of the policemen in Rio receiving payoffs could put him in real danger. But he believes it is right.

  I’m hardly attacking him, Elizabeth said. You know I respect Carlos highly.