by John Klima
Maybe that was coincidence, but I don’t think so, since Danny was there again as soon as I decided to go back to school in the fall.
It’s raining like hell, and we’re dangling our legs off one of the tracks of a burned-out Panzer tank. You think it’s going to be over this year? I ask him.
How should I know? Danny says. You going to pass your classes this year?
The truth is, I don’t know. I’ve got one extra year to play with age-wise, and by the time another year has gone by, I’m going to know every word in the English language. I’ll be invincible. Is that worth deliberately failing another year of school? I’m inclined to think it might be.
I don’t know, Danny says. How much longer do you think you can ride this grieving-for-your-brother horse?
Shithead, I say. I’m not grieving for you anymore. You won’t leave me alone long enough.
What are you talking about? I left you alone all summer.
And now you’re back.
You’re not answering my question.
I still don’t answer him. After a while he shakes his head. Your heart won’t heal, he says.
It was such a strange thing for my wiseass brother to say that I walked around for days thinking about it. Then the days stretched into weeks, and I was treading water in school, unable to concentrate on anything—even learning new words—because something about Danny’s words was like a fishhook in my brain. Ambivalence was everywhere: I was passing school but barely, the Reds turned Majdanek into a brand-new concentration camp for Polish resistance fighters, Miriam had come to life but only because she was dating a boy my parents didn’t like. Her dreaminess had somehow hardened into rebellion while none of us were looking.
I went to school long enough to finish an algebra test and keep my head above water, then lit out and just walked around the neighborhood. I walked down across Broadway, underneath the elevated tracks. Briefly I thought about stealing a car even though I had no idea how—or that maybe I could just get on the train, switch to another train, get on a bus at Penn Station and disappear. Except I didn’t have any money. It was January. I was about to turn fourteen. Winter rain was dripping through the elevated tracks.
Something made me turn and walk east on Broadway. A train thundered by overhead, and as I looked up through the slatted trackbed to follow its passage, I saw a sign. FUGACCI AND SONS, TAILORS. Each of the initial letters, even the A, was bigger than the others, and red while the others were black. An acrostic: FAST.
Then came one of those moments where everything that has been a mystery makes sense, and as it does you condemn yourself for an idiot because you didn’t figure it out before. For so long I should have known, but at last I put it all together.
Yoo-hoo will help. You have weird hang-ups. Yesterday Howard went home.
Your heart won’t heal.
YHWH.
All along, he’d been saying God. God. God. God.
Some kind of animal sound came out of me, drowned out by the train passing overhead. “Ah, Danny,” I sobbed. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
I felt something break, physically break, inside me, and I leaned against one of the I beams holding up the elevated tracks and wept for my brother. That was why I had dreamed, why he had spoken to me, why—God’s will being God’s will—he had died in the vortex of ocean water near the Straits of Gibraltar. There is no greater pain than complete acceptance of a truth you wish was a lie. I fought it, but that’s not a fight you can win.
New Yorkers being New Yorkers, people left me alone, and I felt it all leaking away, the resentment and obsession and the paralyzing sense of impotent witness drowned beneath the iron and the rivets and the indifference of the train. It ended right there in the rain, this grief-stricken rebellion against my patrimony. Because that’s what it was, what I can call it after fifty years of bending back.
I went back to school, but not that day. Instead I went home, and found my mother listening to Walter Winchell on the radio. Winchell was talking about the liberation of Auschwitz.
Seven months later, it was all over. My eligibility for the spelling bee ran out in June, with an invasion of Japan looming. Then came Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and ticker-tape parades, and the counting of the dead. My older sisters Ruth and Deborah went to college like they were supposed to, Ruth to Michigan and Deborah following Eva to Barnard. I never talked to Danny again. But when a kid named John McKinney from Des Moines, Iowa, won the spelling bee the next summer, that jubilant post-war summer of 1946, I felt like the winning word was a last word from my brother, and I made a little room for belief.
Semaphore.
God is mysterious that way.
* * *
S•M•A•R•A•G•D•I•N•E
sma·rag·dine sme-'rag-den, 'sma-reg-'din
adjective
1: of or pertaining to emeralds
2: emerald green in color
* * *
The Smaragdine Knot
MARLY YOUMANS
Infinity, when all things it beheld In Nothing, and of Nothing all did build, Upon what Base was fixt the Lath, wherein He turn’d this Globe, and riggalld it so trim?
…
Who Lac’de and Fillitted the earth so fine, With Rivers like green Ribbons Smaragdine? Who made the Sea’s its Selvedge, and its locks Like a Quilt Ball within a Silver Box?
—EDWARD TAYLOR, from God’s Determinations
I’ M A CHILD of the Puritans, though my forebears would cast me from the golden rows of the Elect, as surely as the Angel barred Adam and Eve from the garden. But I take an interest in the “sad” colors, the hymnodies that scared the wolves, the hunkered children—as numb in their cloaks as stumps by a frozen church. Foremost of my kin who crossed a sea of mermaids to the New World was a certain minister, scholar, and poet. Centuries after his death, the leather-bound book wherein he had buried his poems was unearthed in the Yale Library. Championed by the Anglophile banker-poet, T. S. Eliot, his sermons and poems are still read.
What hasn’t been known is that he kept a history of his forays into other realms. He was an adept of Puritan meditation techniques meant to restore the bridge between mortals and God. A session began with an elaborate calling-up of tangible place—the drawing room of Hell with its gilt-framed mirrors, the sogged landscape of straw outside his door, a countinghouse where a clerk tallied the gold coins called angels. The more solid the imagining, the greater the chance that drops from the fount of God could fly past the stars until a seeker found himself in a waterfall of Spirit. Following prescribed steps, he might commune with men, God, or angels, his soul aroused, and be floated toward new resolution by streams of love and desire and that cataract, joy.
He used no magic; being in strong communion with the next world, what was shadow to other Puritan divines eventually became living presence to him. Neighbors spied lights streaking through the house, and one Goodman Brewster testified that he had glimpsed an angel, eyed like a peacock, at the minister’s deathbed—the visitor stirring the fire on the hearth with bright hands.
The journal was inscribed with the title, The Smaragdine Knot. In childhood, I was enraptured by the mystical, fierce, and passionate accounts. A year back, I felt a blow to my sense of family because of this book.
“I’d like to borrow the Knot,” I told my great-uncle Samuel, a long-retired professor of Renaissance history. He has been steward of the book so long that we’ve forgotten when it passed from great-great-great-great-aunt Tabitha.
“Gone,” he groaned, slapping the arms of his chair with both hands.
“What do you mean—where?”
“I don’t know, Simon. Your uncle Saffin borrowed it. Your niece Amy peeped into the thing and left it on the playroom floor. Ann had a go at it, leaving the book on the porch, to be plucked up by my brother.”
“So what happened?”
Great-uncle Samuel shook his head. “Chauncy was feckless from the cradle. The mallow! The downright squash! Who knows?
A major family treasure, and he ‘can’t recall.’ You can shake the old dodderer and hear the seeds rattle. I’d like to boot him in the backside.” He crooked a finger and scratched at the dottle in his pipe.
“You’ll get burned.”
“No chance.” When Sam leaned to inspect his handiwork in the light from the window, his rumpled white hair blazed in an aureole. “I’m as tough as cuticle.”
He rapped the pipe on the arm of his chair until crumbs sprang from the bowl. My aunts try to sweep Sam’s messes and trim the whiskers fountaining from his ears. I say, “Don’t bother—wait till he’s dead,” but they don’t listen to nephews.
“What can we do?”
“Do? Just don’t tell the Neddie club, or there’ll be a hell’s own tithe to pay.”
“Is there such a thing?”
“Sure. Bunch of Neddie scholars.” Decades ago Sam had decided that calling him Neddie would lift the curse of excess gravity from our ancestor.
“You could record the bits you remember.”
“Wouldn’t have Ned’s way of lathing a phrase. ‘Baroque wilderness’: that’s what the critics call his style.”
“I’ll bet you know some by heart—”
“Not a bad idea. But it’ll crop up in some half-witted place. Ann will dredge it from a hamper, Saffin will find it wedged in a golf bag—or perhaps Chauncy will prove thief.”
“Is that possible?”
“Hasn’t got either the brains or the snap. I’d respect him more if he’d hightailed it to Timbuktu after flogging the book at the pawn shop.”
“They wouldn’t know what to make of it. Weird name, smaragdine.”
Great-uncle Samuel was hacking at his pipe with a pickle fork, and I recalled that my aunt Bideth had been on a wild hunt for just such an essential item, the handle chased with flowers.
“From the Greek, a highly respectable polysyllabic. Smaragdines are in Burton, Scott, Thackeray—scads of others. Everybody likes an emerald. I’m fond of a seventeenth-century description: ‘an excellent fresh green, far passing any leaf.’”
“So it’s an emerald knot.”
“That fool, Chauncy!” Sam jabbed vigorously with the pickle fork.
“Why? Why an emerald knot, I mean.”
“Linked to God’s promises and the tribe of Judah. And Bacon talks about the Tabula Smaragdina, the emerald tablet of Hermes Trismegistus. Alchemical revelation by a learned Rosy Crucian and all that.”
“Yeats. Madame Blavatsky,” I offered. The names marked the outer limits of my feeble knowledge about the Rosy Cross, acquired in college.
Samuel shot me a glance I took to be cautiously approving. “At least I have one relation who hasn’t been claimed by the powers of ignorance.”
I nodded; then, recalling that he detested nodders above all species of the male kind, massaged the nape of my neck to suggest that I had merely been stretching a few crabbed vertebrae.
“Stupid to have research and no book,” he continued. “I hadn’t wanted to risk making a xerox. Now eight-year-old Andrew says he could’ve photographed and stored copies of the whole she-bang. Precocious brat.” Sam rummaged in his rolltop desk and dragged out a folder. He went right to the page he wanted. “Here. Wycliffe gave a line in The Revelation of St. John as ‘The reynbowe was in the cumpas of the seete, lijk the siyt of smaragdyn.’ Slightly screwed up—translated from the Latin, but the Vulgate had poorly rendered the line from Greek.”
“An emerald rainbow around the throne of God,” I said, guessing.
“Torsell says if a viper sees a smaragdine, her eyes melt: her eyes, mind you. Medievals thought birds put emeralds in nests as amulets. Listen to this: “beare the stone Smaragdus with the Griphon against Serpents.” Great-uncle Samuel shrugged. “I’ve found a few screwball sources that refer to a smaragdine mirror. This fellow Bailey claims that it’s the chief toy of angels.”
I caught myself in a nod and jerked upright. “Do you remember the title meditation—the one about the knot?”
“I could tell you,” he said. “If I felt like it. If, say, somebody fixed me a whiskey, nice and neat.”
“You ought to drink beer, like the Puritans,” I said.
“That was mostly funerals. They didn’t mind the odd drunken tumble into a grave.”
I fetched the whiskey, and when Great-uncle Samuel sloshed it back with a will, I poured him another and sat down to take notes. He was to show me a good deal of favor that afternoon, and, in doing so, allowed The Smaragdine Knot to overshadow my life in ways that I am only now beginning to penetrate.
The minister began his meditation late in the evening, after the children were in bed. It was cold, bitterly cold. He huddled on a stool by the hearth with a bed rug over his nightclothes. As he grew warmer, he attempted to look past the fire, though it was now well kindled and flickering with a lovely persimmon color.
Twig by twig, stone by stone, he built a scene in fancy until a garden spread before him, its sculpted boxwoods swooping into love-knots. He could see each leaf standing separately, burnished by the light. The walkways of slate were bedded on crushed limestone and crossed one another at right angles. Lovingly he traced the outline of the paths, touching the moss and the many clustered stems of a grove of filberts. Beyond the knot garden lay a regular apothecary’s shop of blooming herbs, hedged in by pickets. Past the last fence lay fields with grain yielding to the wind.
He paused, caught by the gold sprouting from the leaden ground. It was an alchemical change, the puckered seed soaking up water and bursting its withered coat. Easy as ribbon unreeling through fingers, the allegory flashed through his mind: the philosopher’s stone, distilling, transformation, the trying of ore, alloy and purification, the minting of angels—their gold faces radiant inside the stiff halo of the coin.
“Eden park,” he said aloud, though he was not sure what or where his meditation had built. Was it the earthly paradise or a plat in heaven, or even the garden of his friend Richard Baxter? He had never met the Englishman except in letters always out of date. A greeting from such a sender might arrive from one already dead! Just such a garden of love-knots and herbs and pickets, with a farm of barley and millet beyond, Baxter had once described.
“Richard?” He felt hesitant; had he spoiled the meditation by beginning without a sufficient purpose in his mind?
A fragrant breeze lifted a tendril of hair from his cheek.
The pollarded willow at the center of a knot of shrubbery abruptly burst forth with new branches, and to the clergyman’s surprise, sprang into blossom. In the midst of this froth of sun and hum of bees, a figure appeared. Glowing white, its beams began to fade as flowers dropped and stems started to bear fruit.
“What bough of wonders is this?” Tears moistened his eyes.
The angel—for so he appeared to be—stepped to the ground, and the radiance around the body resolved into wings. The willow also leafed out in feathers, its burgeoning foliage soft and wispy and utterly unlike the earthly trees Ned knew.
He, being of a poetical cast of mind, cried out, “Make me a golden trumpet on which to tootle thy praise!”
The light-minded angel laughed at these words, the trailing, willowlike branches of the wings trembling with enjoyment.
“You may keep your happy blasts to yourself, thank you kindly,” he said.
“I didn’t mean to summon—but here you are, a messenger of the Lord.” Ned marveled at his own fortune. Never had he, in sweet meditation, seen an angel—though once his little son had spied one, when the sky was bright yet checkered by clouds.
The angel nodded in agreement. “A messenger. Just so.”
Last petals from the tree twinkled to the moss, where they went on fluttering weakly as if they might gather themselves for a fresh flight.
Though the minister waited in anticipation, he received only a smile. “You have a message for me?”
The angel nodded again but offered nothing more than a cascade of merry laughter. Ned was su
rprised that no greeting of “Fear not!”—always the prelude to some fearful thing—appeared to be forthcoming. But surely it was enough to be in the presence of such a creature. A ring of the pale yellow butterflies called sulphurs fluttered around the floating hair before wobbling toward a patch of barley.
“And how shall I address you?”
“I shall call you Neddie,” the angel said; “you may call me…Astariel. That is one of my names, suitable for human use.”
“And a very pretty one.” The minister did not like the name Neddie. He was also unaccustomed to the paying of compliments and did so awkwardly, with a small, stiff bow.
“‘My Lord Astariel’ would be proper form.”
“Ah,” the minister said, growing uncomfortable.
“Perhaps you would like to worship me.” The angel smiled, the barest hint of slyness serving as a veil to his sunny features.
“Worship? Would you test me? It’s forbidden for mortals to worship powers such as thrones and principalities and archangels, cherubim, and seraphim.”
Astariel appeared nettled by these words; or, at least, the flakes of stars that fell from his snowy wings and set the nearest boxwoods on fire might have seemed to suggest it. He made as though to return to his bower in the willow tree.
“Do not leave! I beg you not to—”