by Dawn Tripp
At night, he vaults himself over the hedgerow into the stone house gardens. He crouches in the new mulch, opens a pouch full of slugs and drops them under the leaves. He wades through thick colonies of spiderwort, hyacinth, Italian bugloss, false dragonheads, and meadow rue. He keeps a wreath of sea muck wrapped around his withered neck to knock out the smell. He uncorks a small bottle of lime and trails it through the beds. He waters it thick and close to the base of each stem, and he watches the lime disappear into the soil. By morning, it will have bored to the root. Within several days, the blooms will sag, and the leaves will turn the color of weak tea. As Ben pulls his wheelbarrow full of sea muck up the knoll, he will hear someone yelling at the gardener.
“The dragonheads!” The voice is female and shrill. “What has happened to the dragonheads?”
He listens to the sullen and ashamed reply of the gardener who explains that it is not only the dragonheads. It is the English roses and the spiderwort as well. They will all have to be uprooted and replaced.
Ben sits out on his doorstone and watches the trucks from the nursery pull in. He watches the unloading of new plants, new flowers. There is more yelling, and the children drag in from the beach. Their nurse herds them into the outdoor shower, bathing knickers peeled off, and they are screaming, running out bare-assed through the yard. Ben stares up at the slate roof of that tremendous house. He dreams of hopping over it. Catching the first wave of wind, and then the second. Higher this time. The flush of the wings fills his ears. They push upward—the old man and the feathers—working current to current. He aches to stand on the solid upper ground of the clouds above his head. His shoulders strain. A great whoosh, and his feet skim the highest chimney. The voices of the children chase him, screeching, high-pitched, they rope his feet and the shrillness of the sound melts the wings. The wind drops out from under him. He plummets. Icarus dreams.
CHAPTER 2
Elizabeth
She knows that her mind has grown sloped, that everything passing into it rolls on a slight downhill, cannot find grip, and is lost.
Und die Angst, daß ich nichts sagen könnte, weil alles unsagbar ist.
the fear of everything unsayable
Her granddaughter brings her the German like food, her pale granddaughter Eve, who has grown brittle. She sits in the untrimmed light across the room from the isinglass stove, the flames stripe her face like blue lace, and she reads aloud to Elizabeth from a book of Rilke’s poetry, she reads the words at first in German, the syllables tumbling from her mouth like small discreet stones she circles back to distill into English. She leaves out sentences, whole paragraphs in translation. She torques the meaning through her.
ich lerne sehen. Ja, ich fange an.
But the woman. The woman had completely fallen into herself. She sat up, erschrak, frightened, pulled out of herself, zu schnell, violently, so that her face was left in her two hands.
On the floor of the isinglass stove, the nut coals cluster in an uneven mass of terrain. Their edges glow orange as they eat themselves away. The deafness has thickened like a wax in Elizabeth’s ears, but here, in this quiet room where there are no other sounds to distract her, she hears enough to sense the widening gap between the solidity of the language and the dissolution of her mind. Her granddaughter, the pale one reading, floats in undigested pieces near her. She reads of Eurydice, a woman who is already root,
Wer?
fern aber, far away, far away,
groping, she is, dark before the shining exit-gates, already walking back, moors, cliffs, the Owenglen at dusk, the castle and the blackthorn trees tumbling, all of it will tumble into yellow water. She will unravel to heather. She will press the ocean through her, its crossing through the eye of a needle, and her body will rise up again, young and unscathed. Innisfree. Elizabeth wonders what it means. Has been asking herself always, What does it all mean? Innisfree.
Sie schlief die Welt. A girl who slept the world. An Irish girl who slept in me. Who ate the cliffs of Moher and the mounds of Donegal. She slept in the blood-stricken light of Galway Bay.
Maggie’s hands will come to her at dawn, wake her from the red chenille that has softened like warm earth around her in her sleep, Maggie will come, will come, arise and you must go, an hour after dawn, Maggie’s hands will come to wash her body with the sponge soaked overnight in chamomile, lavender, the wild blue flax children of the lower fields, their wind-skinned heads,
they will not hush, the leaves a flutter round me, the beech leaves old,
Elizabeth will ask Maggie’s hands if they have touched the burned man in the root cellar, if they have heard the wailing of the osprey mother at the fall of her nestlings into the mouths of herring gulls. She will ask the hands if they have seen the goatsuckers on the roof, if they have heard the rhythm of ghosts in a small chick’s foot stamped in the dirt.
Elizabeth’s skin has turned to parchment. It peels off in gray withered sheets, the stuff of egg skins. She will let only Maggie touch her. Maggie, whose hands are smooth and cool and run like a stream through her flesh,
they will not hush, a voice has told her, or is that her granddaughter reading to her now, aloud, dreams of a Dublin chimney sweep.
Elizabeth’s father told her once when they were still in Ireland that every madman who is free will hide himself in that same valley. Now she is older than he ever was. She has turned like ancient stones lying in the Carrowmore.
Arise and go now, arise and you must go.
Only Maggie, who brings the smell of earth and trees, who comes with the sun to rub pine oil into the ridged plains of Elizabeth’s back that has grown as crooked as an island hatched mad from the sea. Her shoulder blades poke through the skin in small bluffs, her spine has sunk into a glen, and she longs to hide herself in shade, wade with the fog across the midland moors the way she did when she was young. Maggie will come, raise her from the white sheets, counties of water where she has slept, early morning, every morning. A boat, she knows, is barely a scar on the ocean. A man, not even a sound. She has seen their butterfly arms. When Maggie comes, Elizabeth will ask after the scorched body in the root cellar, the tugging of the heart. She will ask while the curtains splash wild, full of sunlight and brine, sparrow wings, the early fragile light she loves. Maggie will lift the great warped orbs of her breasts to sponge the caves underneath. She will lift them gently, over the blue basin, and let the water run over them. She will hold their lobed weight in her hand as if they were the world.
Seltsam, die Wünsche nicht weiterzuwünschen. Seltsam, alles, was sich bezog, so lose im Raume flattern zu sehen.
Strange, to desire what one no longer desires.
Elizabeth knows that her granddaughter cheats her. That she steals words, whole phrases, in translation. She knows that she is cruel in what she chooses to leave out, what she chooses to speak, lines of chaos, death, a heart stone-ground, one who has never arrived.
Hilf mir.
Help me.
so gently slip into a life we never wanted and find that we are trapped as in a dream
without ever waking up, without ever,
Elizabeth sits in the rocking chair by the isinglass stove and imagines herself in flames. This chair has witnessed her through years. It has held the secrets she has kept, the lies she has told. The chair has seen everything. Its mahogany joints have settled to her weight. They cannot hold anyone else. They are worn, full, satiated with her life. They will die with her,
for there is no place we can remain,
nirgends,
holy londe Irlaunde; daunce wyt me,
Éire,
ar ais go—
She crawls after the Gaelic, her limbs dull, swollen finger joints that cannot hold the lost tongue, the one she knew as a child before she knew what language was. Once they had crossed that ocean, to live in the no-place of inland, grapes, the absence of cliffs and moors and fens, her mother would not speak it. Gealach. Sàile. Elizabeth does not remember what the words mean. Is
not sure they ever did mean. And it occurs to her for the first time in her life that the world might be godless. The trees, the river, the striving of hills that she has always assumed hid some spirit, some palpable otherness, it occurs to her now they might hold nothing but themselves. Even the sky, which to her has always seemed to bear the weight of angels, might be brief and irretrievably alone. This strikes her for the first time in the mid-lit room that is suddenly without contour and estranged, and this granddaughter, the cool one with less shape than wind, who is fractured, has always been, faithless, pale, this girl she has never quite learned, perhaps she saw the flatness of the world when she was young and her own mother lay down and let herself go into that simple, endless night. Perhaps the girl died to it then, years ago, and went on walking, her small and wheat-haired self. She left her face in her hands with that knowing and stumbled on, blind through the dark with her arms sheer and her mouth full of grief for the things she could not hold.
CHAPTER 3
Eve
Somewhere early in her life, she dreamed this moment, displaced from context. She held the threads like flax and spun it out in currents so it would crystallize, years ahead of her, in this room, the library, her own shadow stretched exhausted on the floor, the shapeless mass of her grandmother, the gentle ash-white head, and the fragile confusion of languages mixing in her mouth as she reads aloud.
She has seen all of this, in watercolors, in oil, in the dried neglected flowers around the Montmartre graves. She tasted it in the small wet bits of softened bread that Madeline pulled out from the warmth below the crust and placed on her tongue. She has seen each one of them in this moment: Elizabeth sleeping herself down to mahogany, Maggie wrapped around a burnt man in her root cellar, Patrick shuffling through papers upstairs, her father locked in his study, and the boathouse hovering like a small raft past the lower meadow at the bottom of the hill, with a man who pulls her slowly as he reads.
Seltsam, she struggles for the meaning of the word, seltsam, strange, her life, each of their lives, an ongoing conversation between freezing and thaw, a continual and senseless wrestle out of aloneness.
She has glimpsed this, unpacked it out of the leak in her heart. She has seen it in the surf walking with her father on Horseneck as he stooped to gather the skates’ eggs and the jingle shells. She has witnessed it in the hunger of waves; unlikely combinations of wind and current and swell; how they smash into one another; each one changed, mass, speed, direction altered by the impact even as the wave itself continues on.
Seltsam, strange, the taste of something other, some brief sense of how disparate lives might meet and gather into a web that has meaning, dimension, shape. The gathering itself, she knows, is accidental and unseen, the way a storm gathers in an outer reach of water, in an unwitnessed space.
And that is how I have cherished you—deep inside the mirror where you put yourself away die schöne Täuschung,
the sweet deception of every woman who smiles as she puts her jewelry on and combs her hair …
She has seen all of this, perhaps many times, perhaps that day of sandflat and Jake’s voice soaked with the rain in her ear. And then again, in the white room in Paris, the window flung open onto the heat of St.-Germain.
She reads aloud from the poem that Madeline read to her and broke off reading midway through because she could not get her throat around the word—nachklang—Eve reads it out loud—nachklang—the echo that Orpheus’s footsteps made through that endless corridor that would lead him back to light, the lyre grafted like a slip of roses in his arms, and the woman behind him, Eurydice, the shadow woman following, wrapped so deep inside herself she could not feel, so filled with her own vast death.
Her grandmother has begun to shrink into the chair, and Eve wants to wake her, she wants to stop reading and wake her, she wants to tell her of the boathouse floating at the bottom of the hill, how it glows, the orange light he reads by, his face washed in that light and bent over the pages he will turn, she will watch him turn, gently, she will imagine his face in her hands. Will he sense her touching him? Her fingers map his face like wind.
Wild orchid light, cow paths twisting off the juniper lane into dark pastures, hayfields, wrecked stone walls that scythe through honeysuckle, ivy, grape, and one meadow in the middle of it all, where she stood once, a child in the sunlight.
She has seen this moment many times, this almost verging of her life into something more than thread. For the first time, perhaps, when she was young and half-submerged in the blue tub on the second floor of the town house, water spilling from her mother’s long hands into her hair.
It is like wheat, her mother said, culling through the tangle. A sun-bleached August hay. She had combed the hair straight, cut it for the first time, and Eve as a child heard only the sound of the scissor blades seeking one another, that craving after edge close to her ear.
She remembers it now, stumbling over the German, her own voice hollow. She remembers how her mother’s hands moved across her scalp in search of a horizon. The fingers desperate—the child could feel it even then—how the blade nicked, just there, skin, neck, wheat, and she cried, the child Eve, she could not stop crying when she saw those ends of her hair cut loose and floating in the bath like yellow grass that had been pulled.
If you can bear to, stay dead with the dead,
if I can bear to,
Her mother’s hands had smelled of rose water, and as the child floated in the blue tub, it was then that she first began to sense the geography of silence, the danger of walking too close to the heart. She understood, closing her eyes, that her life would be a wandering through a dead sky, and yet perhaps she might have sensed him even then, migrating slowly toward her through that night.
Far off, deeply felt, Landschaft, cities, towers, bridges, unsuspected turns,
She looks up from the book in her lap to her grandmother—the creased and tissue skin, coursed dry riverbeds that hook in slow and aching bends down through her cheeks.
Eve sets the book on the table by the gooseneck lamp, walks over and kneels next to the mahogany chair. She picks up her grandmother’s hand. The fingers have stiffened into tough roots, the blueness around the joints, the light swelling of the veins. Eve turns the hand open. She can see the unused dreams inside the palm. She folds the fingers closed again and touches the hollow brown rims around Elizabeth’s eyes. They have grown deep the way earth grows deep after a long rain. She touches the soft translucent skin of each lid, and in the touch, she can see Jake at the bottom of the hill, she can see the orange light inside the boathouse, his shadow flung around him on the wall. She can see the long fingers of the marsh spinning down across the river, the starkness of the docks and the boats slung between the piles. She turns toward the sandflat, and she can see him there, the way he was, wading with her in his arms.
She draws her grandmother from the chair, takes the nickel-plated lamp with the milk-glass shade, and leads her upstairs. Halfway down the hall, Elizabeth trips.
“Maggie,” she calls out.
“Shhh,” Eve says.
“Maggie.” Her grandmother grips her arm. “They rise in the valley, they are like fog in that valley, the one where the mad fathers go. I can see them all. They go differently, you know. We will all go differently. I don’t know if I believe that we can let go in sleep. I don’t know if I believe. You think the door will be an easy one until you get right up to it, and you find that it is so much heavier than you could have dreamed, there are stones you left unturned, roads unwalked, there is so much, it heaps like a mountain at that door, it eats like a dog at your heels, all the things behind you that you did not do. You cannot go gently then. Clutching at the grass that you have missed, you cannot go, Maggie, you cannot go.”
“Hush,” Eve says, and she turns her grandmother slowly down into the sheets. She draws the red chenille blanket close up to Elizabeth’s chin, and she sits beside the bed. On the night table is a Dundee marmalade jar stuffed full of dri
ed clover, laurel, and wildflowers.
“You know, Maggie,” says Elizabeth, “I did not see it coming like this. It was not until I reached that small flat-paneled door. I found it waiting for me there.”
Later that night Eve lies in bed next to Patrick and she struggles to hold the corners of her life in her arms. What she finds is the semblance of a life. She thinks about Maggie and her garden. Maggie can coax beauty out of nothing the way Elizabeth can pull God out of the rain. Even her father, Charles, with his flailing dreams of poetry, even Patrick and his blueprint drawings of the town—each one of them holds some power to alter however small a world, but she is drift, as inconstant as winter light.
She tries to feel the weight of her body on the sheet. She runs her hand down her neck between her breasts into the flat plain of her belly, tight-lipped between her hipbones and her ribs. She feels for the leak in her heart. The space has grown open and so ash, she cannot locate even an edge of the tear.
She remembers the nights she would lie, just this same way, awake and alone in the smaller bedroom down the hall with her mother’s voice creeping out of the handfuls of food Eve had left for her in piles on the floor—the jellied eyes of halibut glistening on the windowsill.
—I grew up in a place where blood had a sound,
Eucalyptus scrub, spine grass, walkabout. A dry heat that leaves the aftertaste of metal in the mouth. No beginning. No end. An implacable middle.
We would watch the tribes pass on their way to the Kimberley ritual grounds. In the morning, it was the same sky, the same desert. But the space was somehow different from their having passed through.
Eve wakes in the dead of night to her husband snoring. She lies still with the lull of him next to her, her body cold and unfilled, as the sound grows vast inside her. She holds her breath counting to ten in German, then in French. The solace of numbers, as the sound of him runs foreign in her blood. She lies there, half-listening, half-misplaced in a grid of language until he rolls off his back onto his side and into silence.