During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

by Joan Chase

  “Momma.” Aunt Libby pointed toward the vanishing tails. “You scared them.”

  “Ain’t nothing. Come for apples. You could see them on any morning, if you’d get out of bed before noon. Makes them sick, though. Tipsy. But they always come back for more. Like some fool man.” She choked a declarative roar from the car. She felt relieved, released, we could tell—getting away from us.

  Aunt Libby turned back to Celia, who smoked her cigarette with a fervent concentration. “Try to get it out, dear,” she told Celia. “Cry.” Then Aunt Libby released a long rumble of her own discomfort.

  “Mother.” Celia spoke for the first time, her nerves threatening.

  “I can’t help it. I should eat something.”

  “Then do.” Celia got up and went toward the stairs. “And see if you can find Daddy, before he does something stupid.”

  But we just sat on at the table. For hours. Aunt Libby drank milk, which we warmed for her. “I don’t know how much she can stand,” she said.

  There were things we could tell, wanted to tell. We closed our mouths and watched Aunt Libby clutching her stomach, which we imagined tight and cramping like her desiccated mouth. We could tell about Celia, but we had promised. With Aunt Libby we stared toward the highway, expecting Uncle Dan.

  “It’s just like him to disappear like this and worry me to death. Up to God-only-knows-what.” She told us that Uncle Dan always had had a fresh streak in him: the night she met him he’d told her she would end up married to him. “Keep on hoping,” she’d said. A little dandy, not a hair taller than she was, clowning for attention all the time. A party drinker too. But of course he’d given that up for her; one way and another he’d had his way, wormed himself into her affections. “Well, I’ll walk on over to Rachel’s.” She put on her sweater. We stared after her as she went, slender with the last light absorbing her into its quiet grasp, walking through the orchard where the deer had stood.

  Aunt Libby hadn’t been gone long when what Uncle Dan called the nightly excitement began. First we thought we heard Celia talking on the upstairs phone. So when we heard the car on the gravel, we ran to the parlor window in time to see her opening the door and slipping in as the car barely paused to scoop her up and continued the circle of the drive, speeding toward the highway. We could tell from Phillip’s face that he’d heard what had happened. They didn’t greet or even look at each other. In the silence they left behind, we felt the trees and early stars and land pitch together. Only the brick house stood firm against it, stretching away up over us, cold and empty as though it had felt each desertion, slow death and failure that had occurred and, like someone with a stern character, had been made stronger yet numb from having suffered them. “Celia’s gone,” we imagined Gram saying, “and she ain’t never coming back.” Seeing Phillip made us feel for the first time that something had really changed, feel it more than Uncle Dan’s coming home in the middle of the afternoon. Like selfish and evil stepsisters, spurned and embittered, we wanted Phillip for ourselves, lusted after his newly blemished self. Now we could tell Aunt Libby—about Corley, Jimmy, the others too whom Celia still met, sneaking and lying herself, while pretending to be so blameless and true. And now broken-hearted. False herself, she played men for fools. While we, constantly nagged by an old biddy, protected ourselves for nothing, against nothing. Although it was early, we locked all the doors that were never locked and went up to our attic room.

  But there was someone else on the drive. This time it was Jimmy, lurching toward the house on foot, muttering, “I’ll kill him. Fucking son-of-a-bitch. Kill him.” The lights from the dairy across the road glinted on the rifle he was carrying, the bottle he drank from. “Celia,” he yelled. Then, “Celia,” wavering to aim the gun toward the house as if he didn’t know whom or what he was going to shoot. We didn’t call down. He stumbled around and we could hear him crying and muttering her name and then we heard him farther away again, his voice trailing back to us from the lane leading toward the woods. Sometime later we woke up. Because we heard someone with a key scratching on the side door, trying to unlock it. Uncle Dan was talking then in the front hall. In the dark we edged, half sliding down the banister so the stairs wouldn’t creak, to the landing on the second floor. Down below, through the railing, we saw Uncle Dan’s bald spot under the globe and his elbows stabbing out as he made a strange girl comfortable, helping her remove her sweater, fixing a cushion for her back. Sure as anything, we knew it was Louanne Price. On her face were the inescapable purple shadows of despair and poor judgment. We couldn’t see her stomach.

  “Want a Coke or something while we wait?” Uncle Dan asked.

  She closed her eyes. “No, thank you.”

  They seemed to know already that Celia had gone out with Phillip.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said, and went into the kitchen. Below us Louanne’s face rested so deeply she looked like a child in a dreamless sleep. When Uncle Dan returned she didn’t open her eyes and he sat at the other end of the sofa, drinking calmly, his mouth holding the warming liquid; he could have been almost contented. Once he looked up toward where we were in the dark. Then at Louanne. “It won’t be long, I guess,” he assured her.

  The leaves outside the landing window began to rustle without a perceptible rise in the wind, without force, just marking the later hour, the shifting balance, cooler air coming in. Everything seemed more peaceful as we waited.

  We heard another car on the drive. We didn’t move to look —leaving everything to Celia, the way we always had. She came in with Phillip, holding his hand; solemn and spent-looking, they seemed about to announce some momentous decision to their grave and startled audience. Until Celia saw Louanne. Then she stepped away from Phillip, while Louanne rubbed her eyes with her fists like a newly awakened child. Uncle Dan watched everything, a curious onlooker, relatively unconnected with a complicated affair. Phillip looked as before, stern and hopeless. He left abruptly, telling Celia that he would call her tomorrow, saying something about not being railroaded. Louanne began to shed the tears of a child. And softhearted Celia, devoted to dogs and small children, all needful things, a nurse in wartime, a camp follower for ravaged men, took Louanne in her arms and told her everything would be all right. “He still cares for you. He told me so tonight,” she murmured in ballad-like cadence. Celia’s clear voice rose out of the column of her throat in unfaltering renunciation of whatever was trivial and low. Only her skin, blanched white as a substratum of exposed bone, showed the strain of her feelings.

  “But he seems to hate me,” Louanne got out. “He was so angry when I told. I just had to tell somebody, you know. I was so afraid that he might try to kill me, like that girl in the movies. And he says he won’t ever marry me.”

  “Of course he will.” Celia stroked her hair. “He has to.” She had learned some things from Aunt Libby. She was still comforting Louanne when Aunt Libby came in. With one glance she knew everything—“it” written all over Louanne, while we were thinking that if that was how “it” made you look, then who would ever want it. Uncle Dan gazed straight up at us then and said, “You might as well get in on the act.” So we went down. Jimmy had wandered back into the yard and we could hear him muttering and cursing. Uncle Dan said some people had the damnedest notions of being useful; then he said he might as well take Louanne on home, and when they left, Celia gave her a final hug and promised to call her the next day. Louanne was slumped into a tiny little nobody of shame and grief, a lesson to all. We could sense Aunt Libby thinking that, after she’d shut the door behind them. But Celia said nothing and went straight upstairs; from her room we soon heard the wail of a saxophone.

  Aunt Rachel came in then and we went with them to Aunt Libby’s bedroom, where the two sisters flopped on the bed to talk. Aunt Rachel lay across the bed that had been hers for so long before she had married Tom Buck and moved to the other side of the farm. Now Aunt Libby was saying that Dan had been right after all. Celia would have to live her own
life. Sometimes it took a real shock to make you see things.

  And Aunt Rachel said, “There isn’t any shock greater than a baby coming.”

  “Celia still sees the other guys,” we broke in, at last saying it out loud, telling on her. “Not only Phillip! Corley, Jimmy and Roger.” Aunt Libby gave us a scorching look.

  “And I’d like to know why she wouldn’t,” Aunt Rachel said. “A young girl like that tying herself down. That’s the silliest thing I ever heard of.” Aunt Rachel had been married herself for a short miserable spell at eighteen. That was when she’d had Rossie. She asked then, “You ever noticed how that water stain on the ceiling looks like a big tit?” Changing the subject, something droll like that popping out of her like a surprise butter rum drop. She reached over and tickled Aunt Libby under the arms. “Smile, you old sourpuss.”

  “You’re as bad as Dan,” Aunt Libby said, twisting around, and then she did laugh. “Only one thing on your mind.”

  “Lucky you,” Aunt Rachel said, and gave her the sideways slanted look from her tilted green eyes which made us think of jade pagodas and gold-threaded cloth.

  “I’ll have to put that bottle away where he can’t find it.” Aunt Libby didn’t seem worried now but only resigned. “Maybe I worry so much about her because she was sick for so long and I got into the habit.” Long ago Celia had had asthma and had nearly died more than once.

  “It’s that new baby I’m worrying about,” Aunt Rachel said. Uncle Dan agreed with her as he came into the room that was full of females.

  “You look awfully pleased with yourself,” Aunt Libby said while he stood in the doorway, her arms propping up her head while she eyed him from the bed. But it was as though through her elongated, half-closed almond eyes she was openly envying him something he had that she didn’t, only usually she didn’t think about it. Then she got up and started to take off her clothes. Aunt Rachel said, “Well, excuse me!” Anyway, she ought to be going on home and Uncle Dan said he didn’t know why— certainly Libby didn’t mind who stayed. He said that he for one was glad he didn’t have to leave the house for a strip show and Aunt Libby said she hadn’t ever asked anybody to watch. Which made Uncle Dan call back from the hall that he was hardly able to take his eyes off her for even a second. And we saw a little private smile float in her eyes before she slipped her gown over her head.

  Aunt Rachel walked off alone into the darkness toward home. She refused any company, saying that nobody was ever going to catch her on her own land. She would probably run just for fun, the way she let her horse stretch out over the fields night and day. There was always that something in Aunt Rachel that we felt drove and bedeviled her. We let her go. Aunt Libby was saying to Uncle Dan when we passed their room, “Sometimes I want him horsewhipped and then I feel there probably wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Poor fool.”

  Phillip didn’t marry Louanne. Nothing could make him do it. Celia gave him back his ring and wouldn’t see him or talk on the phone, and one day when he stepped out in front of her downtown, she let him have it right there. He got a flash flood of her temper—the temper, Uncle Dan said, that was not so much the fault of red hair as of all the extra attention that went with it. Anyway, her tirade shocked Phillip and soon after that he left the college and then the state. He kept staunchly to his word and never married Louanne, though he never failed to send her money for the baby, no matter where he was, Alaska or Europe. Gram said right there was the sum difference between a father and a mother.

  “The son-of-a-bitch,” Uncle Dan always called him after that, with something like admiration along with just plain amazement in his voice. Phillip wrote Celia once but she tore up the letter without looking at it and we never heard directly from him again. She said she didn’t think she’d ever really known him, could scarcely remember what he’d looked like.

  From the first Celia considered herself kind of a godmother to Louanne’s baby. Aunt Libby taught her to knit, skillfully managing the gauge, and Celia knitted a pair of booties and then other garments in delicate pastels, attempting more complicated patterns as she got better.

  Once in a while she still shut herself into her room with the mournful jazz she’d loved, but more often she sat with the rest of us, her fingers flying faster and faster with the needles and her tongue loosened, trying to catch up on everything she had missed, as if she’d come out of a daze or dementia. Even stories we told her of times she’d been with us fascinated her, because she didn’t clearly remember. She questioned Gram too, patient with Gram’s rambling and disjointed tales, got excited over old recipes, and watched Gram cook as though she might imitate the same rapid-fire style. She even got Gram to talk a little about the time when Aunt Grace lay dying.

  Aunt Libby still fretted over Celia, a set habit, focusing now on her health, for rather quickly the bloom of Celia’s face and figure was gone. She looked wilted by her misfortune. Aunt Libby hid her cigarettes but Celia accepted the intrusion as love-inspired, and just bought some more. Celia had developed a persistent allergy to pollens and grasses and her blue eyes seemed to have lost a portion of sight, were streaked with irritated vessels that accentuated the paleness of her skin, the prominence of her thin nose. It didn’t help her sneezing that she smoked so continually. Aunt Libby coaxed her to eat.

  Jimmy began to come around the house again. To us Celia was almost like another aunt, her life settling into a foreseeable pattern; she could have been the one having a baby with the father thousands of miles away. She seemed to allow Jimmy to take her out because he wanted to so much, doing it for him rather than for herself.

  Sometimes Celia would go out gambling with Gram in the evenings. Then, one day, Gram said, “I’m thinking of taking me a little trip before I die,” which was partly a taunt to Aunt Libby, who never wanted to think it was possible for Gram to die, who said Gram would outlast the whole bunch of us. Gram took Celia along to Hawaii. They brought home a coconut and snapshots of the two of them wearing leis around their necks, with the other people on the tour, older men in flowered shirts and their wives, who watched the hula girls with careful smiles on their faces. Celia’s smile was much the same.

  Jimmy, pitifully missing her, not eating, almost as distraught as when she had been engaged to Phillip, took leave from his job and flew out to Los Angeles to meet her. And when they came back they were engaged. Kindhearted Celia, no longer beautiful, devoted to needy creatures, blew her nose continually; all the flowering tropical plants had been wretched for her condition. Again she suffered asthmatic attacks. Jimmy displayed the patience and devotion of a saint, qualities she said she expected would make for a fine father. Celia’s obsession with motherhood, which she got from Louanne’s pregnancy, remained her lone passion and she had questioned Gram almost nonstop about the rearing of children. Gram was reluctant and gruff, because she was done with that business, thought children pretty much raised themselves if you had plenty of them. Good riddance—one compensation for being old and ugly.

  Afterwards Gram referred to the trip as Celia’s wedding present. Uncle Dan said it was just like her to think up a wedding gift that left out the husband entirely, but then again he couldn’t think of a more appropriate introduction to the family. Jimmy was just grateful that Celia at last was his. He must have noticed, as we did, that she was not the same girl he had first loved; we talked of her bygone beauty and charm in legendary terms, as if it might have been something we made up. Their wedding was quiet, in front of the fireplace, beside the dried-up coconut, and right away they left for Beaumont, Texas, where Jimmy had been transferred by his company.

  After they drove away we went up to Celia’s room and lay on the bed, still in our good clothes. The call of the mourning doves across the fields went back and forth; we wondered whether we were the only ones to hear it. Jenny got up and turned on Celia’s phonograph. She dropped the needle and then all we heard was Dave Brubeck.

  PART TWO: GRANDAD

  FOR as long as we could remember
we had been together in the house which established the center of the known world. When we were younger we woke in the mornings while it was still dark. Grandad would be clumping out of his back room and down the hall to the bathroom, phantom-like in his long underwear. He wore it because he was a farmer, which was why he got up before first light to do the chores. In the two iron beds in the attic room there were the four of us—Celia and Jenny, who were sisters, Anne and Katie, sisters too, like our mothers, who were sisters. Sometimes we watched each other, knew differences. But most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal.

  Beyond the window glass the spruce trees were black and the sky ran silver around their silhouettes. The day smelled like clear water coming in through the open window which our mothers said must be raised at night for health and inspiration. Our mothers believed in nature, its curative and restorative power, trusted its beneficent guardianship. We were given fresh-squeezed juice with breakfast, two vegetables with every dinner, and were put to bed early. Other than that, we were left alone. They spoke among themselves in whispers, they who had their own mysteries, concerns; they left us to the tutelage of the wild and natural world. The doors of the house were always open to the drive, which turned at the lilac and rose hedges, and led to the barn at the head of the ravine and woods, the barn there like an outpost, mysterious and alluring.

  One thing was forbidden. Any fighting among ourselves was punished consistently and severely—no listening to “She did this,” or that. We were to protect each other, they seemed to say, for who else would? So we bit and scratched each other at night in bed under the covers, hiding the marks from our mothers.

  When we heard Grandad again, the stairs creaking, we slipped out of bed, snatching our jeans and cotton shirts off the floor, nothing more to dressing than that. We were mixed up as sisters, Jenny and Katie with dark skin and eyes and Anne and Celia redheads; but we were alike in other ways, tall for our ages with long legs and large hands, like our Grandad. Passing along through the second-floor hall we saw bad-tempered Rossie asleep in his bed. If we woke him, later in the day one or all of us would pay for it. We tiptoed by; Rossie’s head was a silky brown fluff on the pillow, snuggled like a little creature out of the woods. Katie thumbed her nose. Anne grabbed her as though she’d made a noise.