Remembering the Bones

by Frances Itani

  After the funeral, I returned home and thought of our baby being smothered a second time by the weight of dirt heaped upon his tiny coffin. I couldn’t bear the image. I walked into the living room, picked up the tree of life that had belonged to my grandfather and threw it against the ‘wall. It shattered, the glass leaves strewn, the slender branches hanging from threads of frayed silk. That night, Harry and I clung to each other in our bed and wept.

  There has never been such grief.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I received no help from God. There was no one to rail against. If there had been someone to blame, I’d have demanded an explanation, if only to loosen the tightness around my heart.

  I knew that Phil had loved the baby and was grieving too, but the adage of her generation was: Set your jaw, grit your teeth, take one day at a time. This is what life hands you and you have to bear up. None of this would have helped. She sensed this, and held her tongue. When I saw her, it was all I could do to keep from pulling her grief on top of my own.

  I knew, too, that many soldiers had not come back from the war, that other women were mourning husbands and fathers, brothers and sons. Their grief was not connected to mine. I pushed the sorrow deep inside and tried to bury it.

  Grand Dan began to come to town. She arranged for someone to drive her—Trick, or someone from a neighbouring farm. She appeared at my door, came in and sat in the kitchen or living room, doing needlework or reading, or playing softly with Case. I never knew which days she would arrive. We did not have to talk about the baby; his name was always there, between us. It was her presence that mattered. Her quiet, soothing presence. When Harry came home from work, he drove her back to the country. This went on for weeks.

  I threw my energies into raising Case.

  Case was not a joiner, and I was glad she had her cousin, Kathleen, to play with. As she grew older, she refused group activities except for Sunday School, which she liked because the teacher took the class on nature hikes and told stories while they walked. Case loved to read, loved language and tried it every which way. She’d been born with theatre in her blood, and she dictated dialogue for me to write down when she was three and four and five. After that, she printed the lines on her own. I was sorry Miss Grinfeld had retired and moved away, because she’d have liked my daughter. But the one-room school was closed and, anyway, we lived in town. By then I was old enough to understand that I had loved Miss Grinfeld when I was a child.

  Case invented plays and held “dress reversals.” Her stage successes were her “bictories.” She made sets from tarpaper and tin outside, and dragged branches into the house to create a forest inside. She hung old drapes over chair-backs and popped her head through, experimenting with voice. If I turned on the radio while she was inventing, she told me, “Music subtracts me, Momma, when I’m trying to concentrate.” One day, I heard her creating a dialogue for babies in heaven. I stood in the middle of the room and could not move. She stopped what she was doing and said, “Momma, did baby Matt’s bones stay connected when he was buried in the grave? Did they go up to the sky when he went to heaven? Did they?”

  I turned my back and walked to the table and sat there and cried without sound. She climbed to my lap and wiped my cheeks with her small palms. She climbed down again and went back to her play.

  The more she became involved in theatrical games, the more I helped. I tried to create costumes—I was good at making flawless tinfoil tiaras—but anything I sewed on the new machine was a disaster. Phil and Grand Dan came to the rescue. Much later, when Case was in her teens, she began to talk about “the imaginative beyond.” I looked at her strangely. I helped her to learn parts for school plays, and we sat on kitchen chairs facing each other and read corresponding roles. Her explorations into imagination made mine seem impoverished. But I understood her spirit. It was the underground connection between us.

  Every once in a while, I walked to the tobacco store to peruse the lineup of current magazines. I cashed the family allowance and occasionally allotted a tiny portion for news of Lilibet and her growing family. When he grew out of rompers, Charles wore button-up coats over short pants and bare legs. The Queen wore comfortable frocks when she looked out for her bonny son—though I wondered how much unseen help was hidden in the background. She also wore a diamond brooch with her frocks, sometimes pearls, which I never wore when I was caring for Case, even though Harry presented me with a double strand for Christmas—dubbed “Lizzie’s pearls” because they were similar in design to the ones in the photos.

  Charles grinned with an impish smile and stared unblinking into the camera. When he was amused, he cried out in delight, or so it was reported. Anne arrived, and sat up in her pram with blonde hair and raspberry-tinted lips that appeared to be lipsticked on the glossy pages. I wondered if Lilibet understood that she was blessed. In family photos, Philip stood to one side, slightly aloof. There was always a corgi, on leash or off, depending.

  And there was the Queen—Majesty, Mother of two—into whose hems hidden weights were sewn to defeat any gust of wind that came along and tried to lift her skirt. She carried handbags that slipped up over her arm so she’d be free to shake hands. Not unlike the women of Wilna Creek, she wore gloves out of doors. Every woman in town—this included Ally and me—had gloves in a top drawer, a black pair and a white. We wore gloves to the A&P to shop for groceries, which, from the bottom of a ravine, is hard to believe.

  Our fathers were dead, and Lilibet was Queen. In every one of those magazines, she had a smile on her face. If not a smile, a square-shouldered look into the far-off future, as if what we were all facing was bright and promising indeed. What she was facing was the birth of more children and a shrinking pink map. The Empire on which the sun never set was changing quickly. But give credit where credit is due. Lilibet had a job and she held her head high. Lilibet led with her chin.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Thousands of new people were arriving in our country, and Wilna Creek had begun to stretch its boundaries. In the stores, in the library, everywhere I went, I heard conversations about “the influx of DPs.” Case’s classmates had names like Bep and Wilhelmina and Rom. From all sides, women were told to get back into their homes after the war, and stay there. I was home, making every penny stretch. Ally was home, drawing and painting at one end of her kitchen. She had a bursting portfolio labelled “WHITE” in her hall closet, but still had not displayed a single piece of art. She and I had a child-swap arrangement, which suited us both. I volunteered at the school and the town library. Every second Sunday, both families drove to the country to have Sunday supper with Phil and Grand Dan. Before Case was born, Harry had bought a second-hand Hudson, and I had learned to drive.

  What astonishes me now is that every hour was filled to overflowing and yet, looking back at that intense period, all the days seem like one day. I wondered more than once if I had become frantic about filling them up. I read to Case and acted out roles and helped her build theatre sets and volunteered and washed and ironed and painted walls and gardened and put up preserves and gave birthday parties and made radish roses and fancy sandwiches—checkerboards, wagon wheels, pinwheels—stuck a gherkin in the centre and added a crabapple for garnish. Ally and I visited back and forth and looked after our children and went to see our mother and grandmother and hosted Christmas and Thanksgiving celebrations, ensuring that if Aunt Fred was visiting she was served only white meat and Phil only dark. Ally and I did our own housework and hated it. And throughout all of this time, each event flew down like a separate pattern threading itself through a bolt of cloth. Each moment hummed with energy, shifted and settled until assured its own space and shape. And then, some unseen hand darted a needle into the entire long bolt and drew it together so that all of the patterns merged and no single image could be unravelled or pried off.

  But sometimes I manage to slip a finger of memory inside a fold of those years and expose a seam. One day at the library, I was asked to arrange magazines in the R
eading Corner. I flipped through them as I worked, and a magazine fell open to its back pages. I cast my eye over a list of ads under the heading “Men Wanted.” Two lines in bold print, placed by “small New York company,” invited applicants to submit samples of work for part-time employment as an illustrator for health and biology pamphlets and texts. The work could be done by correspondence.

  I copied out the ad, put the information in my purse, and had a sense of expanding possibilities. Didn’t I hold the shape of body parts in my head? Didn’t I have a man’s name? I drafted a letter and signed it George Witley. I drew a set of lungs with an inset of popcorn-shaped alveoli. I included larynx, trachea, tongue, nasal and oral cavities. With dotted lines, I showed the position of blood vessels and a shadow of the heart, including the aorta and the superior vena cava. I labelled the diagram “The Respiratory System” and folded the drawing and placed it in an envelope with the letter. I carried the envelope around in my purse. Case became ill the same week, and I sponged her at night to keep down the fever. She was delirious; her lungs were congested. She was diagnosed with pneumonia, and I was terrified. Grand Dan came in from the country to stay, and sponged her, and made onion plasters and took turns sitting at the bedside with Harry and me. Harry took time off from work because he was afraid not to be present. We stumbled along the hall at night and spelled each other off. The doctor advised us to care for Case at home but we were told to watch her carefully. We could not look each other in the eye because of our fear. When Case began to recover and was able to sit up, Harry went back to work and Grand Dan returned home. Case and I looked out her bedroom window and created roles for a theatre of clouds. Two lambs reared up on their hind feet and bleated. A lion trapped a mouse under its paw. A cumulus blew its stack and became a volcano. A cloth doll exploded, its stuffing scattered over the heavens. A barn roof burned. A dog chewed at cellar steps. The drawing in my purse was forgotten and never mailed. Anyway, it was Ally who was the artist in the family.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Although the damage to Harry’s left leg did not permit him to stand for hours, he had steady hands and quickly learned about escape mechanisms and mainsprings, hairsprings and balance ‘wheels. It helped that he had long, slender fingers. He ‘wore magnified lenses ‘while seated at his jeweller’s table and sometimes a loupe, ‘which pushed a telltale depression into his skin. He began to design necklaces and brooches, and Mr. Ring assured him that he had a talent for both.

  Harry loved Case and me, I was certain of that, but there were times ‘when he pulled into himself. When this first happened, he pulled so far back I saw darkness that left no room for anyone.

  At the table, Case, ‘who ‘was lingering too long over her food, asked a question about his childhood. “Were you allowed to leave food on your plate when you were a little boy, Daddy?” Harry appeared to be bewildered by the question, and didn’t answer. He did not speak again during the rest of the meal. Later, after I’d put Case to bed and tucked her in, he turned away from me. What was he living through? The early years had left their mark.

  Another time, we were visiting Phil and Grand Dan when a summer storm blew up. Harry did not like storms and I wondered how he had survived at sea during the war. He hated thunder and lightning and I believe this also had something to do with his childhood—the cruelty on the farm, being sent alone to sleep in a cold and cheerless shed.

  Phil could hear the storm, far off, but she was listening to Mario Lanza. She had discovered him when she and Grand Dan had gone to see The Great Caruso at the Belle, and she was telling Case about him while they listened to the one precious recording she owned of Lanza’s songs. She loved to do her sewing to his voice and, most times we visited, he was singing in the background.

  Grand Dan called us to the window to see the curtain of rain that blocked the sky as a wall of storm approached. Spectacular bolts of lightning were shooting down to earth. Harry waited until the storm was immediately overhead and then, with rain pounding the roof, he went halfway up the stairs and sat on a step in the dark while thunder threatened to crack open the house. It was the kind of storm that could provoke desperate fear or giddy elation. The power went out. Phil lit a kerosene lamp and sat Case on her lap and began to tell her the story of Caruso’s life as lived through Mario Lanza.

  I went to sit by Harry on the stairs. He could not believe how much I enjoyed watching trees whip back and forth in wind gone wild. Indeed, as children, Ally and I had often stood in the enclosed veranda watching for the quick line of flames that ran along wires strung between poles up the lane. Glass insulators burst and fell to the ground and, after each storm, we went outside to search for their rounded caps. We brought them to Grand Dan, who wired them to the side of her chicken coop and filled them with water. The yellow fluffballs that were baby chicks ran to them and dipped their tiny beaks, and drank.

  At the end of the storm, Harry came down off the stairs and no one seemed to think his behaviour worthy of mention or remark. Grand Dan, however, brought him to the parlour later and talked to him. From the kitchen I could hear her murmur something about the war.

  Harry never tried to explain his behaviour. Nor did he offer to drive me to the place to which he’d been sent as a Home Child, so that he could point out the farm from the road. He must have known where it was. A three-day walk would not have been so far, measured in a boy’s steps. The farm would probably be considered close—now that most families, including ours, owned a car and took Sunday drives in the country. But I never learned the name of the abusive family or the place Harry had been sent to live. Both had been banished from his conscious mind.

  Despite the polio honeymoon that began our marriage, despite the frightening memories and the darkness that surfaced, despite the loss of our son, there came an evening when love for Harry stamped its indelible image for all time. Case was reciting one of her own creations at the table while I was preparing supper, and I was half-listening. Harry usually walked home from the jewellery store but because it was raining, Mr. Ring had offered him a drive. When the car pulled up, I glanced through the white sheers at the window, just as Harry was getting out of the passenger seat. He stood beside the car and opened the rear door and reached in. I saw his lips move as he spoke to Mr. Ring. He rounded the hood and I registered the familiar limp, at the same time noticing that he held something in his right hand. He leaned into the rain, and then straightened. His fingers were wrapped around the stems of a bouquet of yellow roses. He glanced down at the ground and I saw determination and purpose on his face.

  I was witnessing an act of love.

  Harry had brought flowers to me on other occasions, and he would do so again, but it is this memory that has stayed with me. In one brief moment, all darkness was dispelled.

  In the image, there is motion. Harry is rounding the car, preoccupied. He is bearing a gift. The memory would not be the same if I had not looked out at that precise moment. Harry’s intent, the courtship ritual, his trim and limping body—these are the details I witnessed. He was returning home after a day’s work. His wife and daughter were inside. He was related to two people he could call family. His hands were bearing roses.

  I loved him when I married him, but this day I loved him for all time.

  Easy as pie.

  Who said pie was easy? Phil’s pie crust was as heavy as lead, and mine wasn’t much better. It was Grand Dan who knew the secret of pie crust.

  But knowing the depth of my love at that moment was easy. As pie.

  RIBS

  TWENTY-NINE

  Can I be seen from above? What day is it? Has the Queen’s Lunch come and gone? If so, Lilibet has already greeted her guests. Case told me that the ninety-nine names were chosen by ballot so that selection would be fair, so that all parts of the kingdom would be represented.

  Lilibet’s kingdom. Well, it must be something, having a kingdom.

  Case was the first to find out about the celebration, and looked up the information on her
computer. How she manages to locate things in that machine is a mystery to me. I’ve been in her apartment when she sits in front of the monitor and laughs into the screen as if it will respond. “Ha Ha Ha.” It makes me wonder about the future of civilization. She wants me to get a computer of my own so that we can communicate by e-mail, but that is preposterous. Why would I do that when we live in the same town? Case, slipping in the last word as always, said, “You’ll change your mind, you’ll see. If you don’t, you’ll be left behind. You ought to buy a cellphone, too. You might need it someday.”

  Cassandra, blessed ‘with the gift of prophecy and never believed. Well, she was right. I’m sorry I didn’t buy a cellphone. And for sure I’m not going anywhere. I’m stuck here with painful breaks in my bones, and ribs that have begun to fuse. True ribs, false ribs, floating ribs, peculiar ribs, elastic arches of ribs. When I looked inside Gray’s I saw a great half-hoop of ribs welcoming the turn of a page.

  After he sold the jewellery store and retired—he had bought the business when Mr. Ring died—Harry fractured ribs three summers in a row by falling through rotting canvas seats of lawn chairs he’d neglected to fix. He was good at repairing miniature things, but not items that were bulky or large. We were living up the hill by then. A stack of canvas chairs had been left behind by the previous owners and were leaning into the garage wall. As the canvas rotted, so did Harry fall through. I heard the sickening, telltale snap at the instant of the spill from the sling seat, just before he rolled to the ground. He planned to replace the canvas with wooden slats in all of the chairs, but didn’t get around to doing the repairs. After being treated for the first fracture, he refused to return to hospital to be X-rayed. He already knew the diagnosis, he said.

  He had a stubborn streak, and so did I. Every summer, I looked to the sky, rolled my eyes and gave a nod to Grandfather Danforth’s third principle while Harry lay on the ground, unwilling to either learn or change his behaviour. Turning down my offer of assistance, he managed to pick himself up and go inside. To counteract the pain, understood to be an ordinary tribulation of summer, he borrowed a stretched and loose girdle from my dresser drawer, stepped into it and pulled it up over his chest. He told me he was strapping his ribs. The girdle was one of those old flesh-coloured items we women had to wear when we lived in the dark ages and were not meant to breathe. I had no use for it, but had not thrown it away. After Harry’s first fracture, I kept it for the dog days of summer.