During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

by Joan Chase

  “Oh, girls, look.” Aunt Elinor tried to rouse us to another wonder—we were always behind her. “Noodles.” We gathered with her to watch and give tribute.

  “Pasta,” Mrs. Chaccio corrected. Her bulk jiggled with the flash of her knife. She sliced with a machine’s precision.

  “Oh, of course. Did you ever!” Aunt Elinor said meaningfully, meaning for us to note the merits of skill and self-reliance, of service to others. We watched the mound pile high. Then Mrs. Chaccio spread the yellow ribbons of dough over the tabletop and Aunt Elinor asked how long they might last. Mrs. Chaccio said she thought about a meal. Again we had the sense that Aunt Elinor was asking questions and pointing out things primarily to teach us—that Mrs. Chaccio was unwittingly a subject.

  Then, with “Come and see us,” and exclamations of how delightful it had been, Aunt Elinor decided to leave and swept us out to the lawn and onto our horses and we, glad enough to escape, left at a fast clip, waving grandly behind to the woman and the now seven or eight children and grown girls who came out and waved back. The chickens in the yard scattered and one of the dogs followed us down the road, barking and growling.

  Katie, on Queenie, fell behind and we drew up to wait for her. When we were all circled around Aunt Elinor, she gave us the clear, deliberate look we knew. It told us that she intended to be very serious, that although she could carry any role and enjoy any situation, there were always the lessons underneath to be learned, ramifications to seemingly simple occurrences. We took a deep breath because we wanted only to get away from there.

  “Do you girls realize that that woman is not much older than I am?” We certainly couldn’t believe it. “And she is nearly dead from fatigue. From childbearing. Eighteen, twenty—what does it matter? It’s ridiculous! But no one will ever lift a finger to help her, not while she is carrying out the dictates of the Roman Pope. Many Catholics are fine people, don’t misunderstand me. But misguided. And her husband? What does he care, worked to death himself, the church always after something. That woman, my dears, is a slave. This may be the twentieth century, but she is in bondage. To her husband, the church, her children. Never forget her.”

  We knew we never would. Always and forever we would remember Mrs. Chaccio, old before she had been ripe, with dozens of children, heaps of noodles, chickens underfoot, and on her neck the heavy feet of her husband and the Pope. Neither would we forget what we had seen when we looked back at the barking dogs. Several of the older girls were running in the yard, prancing like high-strung horses, while Mrs. Chaccio laughed and thumbed her nose. We blushed to ourselves, glad that Aunt Elinor was far ahead and wouldn’t have to know.

  At dinner Aunt Elinor recreated the afternoon, complete with noodles. Gram muttered, “Humph.” She’d made as many for threshers. Her noodles, it was clear, were quite different from Mrs. Chaccio’s, prepared in freedom and far from Rome. They were the pinnacle of Gram’s surviving skill at homemaking. We had only to imagine them, served in fatty streams of milk gravy along with chicken, double fried in the country way, to beg her to make some. Which ordinarily she refused ever to do again— “I’m done with that.” But now we knew she’d have some noodles drying by midmorning someday soon, the report of Mrs. Chaccio’s skill activating an old pride. And we’d swallow our fears, follow after her to see her snatch the hen she wanted and wring its neck with one formidable twist, the life of the tough old bird no concern of hers.

  Grandad didn’t look up from eating. He and Uncle Dan were very little in our lives that summer, both doing what Uncle Dan called “laying low.” Now that we were too busy to play in the barn, with Aunt Elinor filling every hour, Grandad was left to himself. We had nearly forgotten he was there. Perhaps he was often gone, to town or to auctions. What we had noticed, but only to recall later, was that he had to stop to get his breath when he came up the seven steps to the porch, and that sometimes his face bruised purple at something Gram said, though with a glance at Aunt Grace, he’d usually turn on his heel and go away, his anger unspoken. But this night he was there at the table, silent, although he knew the Chaccio family well enough, the men helping him at haying time or with the threshing.

  Toward the end of the meal Aunt Elinor excused herself for a moment and came back to the table with a small foil-wrapped packet of cheese. She opened it and the pie-shaped wedge exposed then was uneven and spongy on the surface, riddled with a greenish-blue substance.

  “That’s the mold,” she explained. “But it’s perfectly harmless.” We were aghast. She smeared some on a cracker, found it edible, in fact delicious. She nibbled appreciatively, wiping her fine thin-curve of mouth daintily, eating as she always did, in the refined way we thought they must eat in New York City, which just then seemed a million miles away.

  The summer before, Aunt Elinor had come home with other alluring specialties, yogurt and wheat germ. For a week or two we had traded in our sugar sandwiches for what she assured us were the far superior benefits of raw green peppers and sunflower seeds. Until Rossie got an upset stomach and Gram declared in no uncertain terms that Aunt Elinor could just pack up and leave for New York if things there suited her so much better. We were allowed to go back to our old ways of eating and while the rest of us ate Gram’s white-flour biscuits and mashed potatoes, Aunt Elinor ate what she called chef’s salad and cottage cheese. Even now that she had come to see that spiritual nourishment was the true bread, she continued to eat her health foods, as if she now preferred them. We wondered if she was afraid to be so alone. It never seemed so.

  “You’re missing out on so much,” she said to everyone at the table, spreading the cheese. She said it was just silly, the family aversion to cheese, just some old-fashioned nonsense, though Uncle Dan suggested she should allow the custom to persist, since as far as he could see it was the only thing Grandad and Gram had in common and they’d passed it on to their children, like a family trait. Though Aunt Elinor laughed at that, she continued to eat the blue cheese for us to see, in order that we might take heart, become braver, dare to begin anew.

  “Eleanor.” We could tell from the edge Gram put on pronouncing the name that for her it was still spelled the way Gram named her, before she went to the state of New York and had her name officially spelled E-l-i-n-o-r, and her middle name of Myrtle dropped entirely. “If you have to eat shit, do it out of my sight.”

  Aunt Elinor, her neck arched, poised high, looked at Gram, her mother. We could see by the swell of her bosom how it had shocked her. But she said then, matter-of-fact, “Mother, I don’t think it’s all that serious a thing,” and she went back to her cheese, flourishing her hands with their jeweled rings and sprinkling of freckles.

  Gram continued to dip her white bread into her coffee, making sucking noises. Louder than usual, it seemed. Uncle Dan took his plate to the sink and went to his attic room; he went in a hurry. Aunt Elinor was the only one who ever got the best of Gram like that, forcing her to hold her tongue, just as, when Aunt Elinor was a girl, she alone of the five children was selected to exchange the dollar’s worth of egg money for a weekly piano lesson, and was then further excused from evening dishes so she could practice. We often heard of this privilege when our mothers were impressing us with the good fortune that was ours, students at the piano from the age of six, in contrast with their musical deprivation. We could almost imagine the two dark-haired and thin older girls, May and Grace, in the rented bungalow on North Street, down with the Italians, scraping and stacking dishes by kerosene light, while in the background Elinor tripped light-fingered over the keys and spread through the house her resonant contralto.

  But Gram could get back, anytime she wanted to. She made more than her usual guzzling over her coffee when Aunt Elinor was around and spoke exactly as we figured her people had spoken on the old farm. It was as if she were reminding her daughter: an apple never rolls far from the tree.

  Grandad hadn’t said one word. But when he’d finished eating he stood up abruptly, his dish in one hand. With
the other he reached to pick up Aunt Elinor’s cheese, dropped it on the floor, and then mashed it with a hard wiping motion of his heel and tracked it across the linoleum to the sink and out the door toward the barn.

  Aunt Elinor had tears standing in her amber-brown eyes. Gram recovered her voice and went to the door, screaming out after the vanished figure, “Goddamned bastard. Swine.” She came back in with the scrub pail and told her daughters to shut up. There were four of them standing at the table, Libby, Elinor, Grace and Rachel, all of them furious, railing that it was no fit place to have their children, never had been, that he had ruined their whole lives.

  “Then why don’t you get the hell out?” their mother said as she slowly let herself down onto her bony knees beside the pail. “You know he can’t abide cheese. Never could.” Her arm, burdened with its slack quiver of hanging skin, moved the rag in what was still a strong motion, as though habit went beyond the endurance of flesh itself.

  “We must forgive,” Aunt Elinor said. “None of us is perfect.” She wiped her tears then and smiled. We kept absolutely silent so they wouldn’t ask us to take sides or send us out, for what we knew about the family was disclosed to us by our being there to see it happen. We had to remain as inarticulate as the mantling walls, silent and watchful—outside the action. The five sisters had guarded their secrets from us, as though we were strangers, as if their loyalty was only to each other and their mother; if further divided, it would dissolve.

  Aunt Elinor revived and brought out a fresh package of cheese. She began to spread it on crackers, lining them up before her. “God is our father and our mother,” she said then. We heard Gram moving the rag in widening circles over the floor. Aunt Elinor offered us a cracker. Gram went out on the porch. The door slammed behind her. We heard the water slap against the packed dirt by the steps. With the tips of our tongues we tasted the blue cheese. Salt. Gram clanged the pail onto the shelf. Aunt Elinor beamed encouragement.

  Gram marched through the door and across the room without looking at us. Ready to go out, she had scrubbed the floor in her good dress. While she washed her hands, Aunt Rachel went over and brushed off the hemline. “Honestly, Momma. We could have done it.”

  “I figured you was too busy improving yourselves,” she said, and left the room.

  Aunt Grace had the cheese in her mouth. She sat there, full-mouthed, as if she couldn’t bring herself to move it either way. But then she ran to the sink and spit it out. Aunt Elinor looked patient, as one who had seen a wider world, one she constantly made visible to the rest of us—accepting the fact that a wider world might mean a weaker place in the old one. She left the table to go to Aunt Grace, who still bent over the sink. We waited. Later we would toss our crackers into the trash. Choosing between Aunt Elinor and Gram seemed to us as profound as a choice between good and evil, only we didn’t know which was which.

  How completely they forgot us. Gram left in her car and Aunt Elinor put her arm around Aunt Grace and led her out. “Who is My mother? our Lord asked. Whoever would follow after Me must forsake all that he has.” They were gone into the next room. Already Aunt Elinor had said that we might leave off the Aunt in addressing her: simply call her Elinor. She would consider it no disrespect, for it was our spiritual bonds that mattered, not our human. Yet we never did more than try to say it once or twice, “Elinor.” We didn’t want to say the bare name, to break the connection. It seemed we might be asked to give up everything.

  Aunt Rachel and Aunt Libby still sat at the table, Aunt Rachel eating more of the cheese. She had tried it before, rather liked it. Aunt Libby was looking disgusted, but not about the cheese—she didn’t even pretend to taste any. “It would be wonderful if you could believe it. But I just can’t understand how a person can turn their back on all the terrible things that happen and say they aren’t real. Most of what happens in this world isn’t real, then. I will not look at somebody who I can see is sick and say they’re well. It’s nothing but a damned lie.” She gathered up all the crackers and took them to the trash, as though she would thereby strip the world of humbug.

  “It appeals to me a little,” Aunt Rachel said. “You have to look deeper than that, Libby. It’s like that old thing about the chicken or the egg.” Her gaze was fixed with Oriental inscrutability upon the elusive figures shadows painted over the orchard grass.

  “God,” Aunt Libby said. “You ever start in on that”—she motioned with her raised fist toward the front room, from where we could hear Aunt Elinor’s strong voice—“I’ll leave town, I swear it. Hardly any family left, it seems to me. Most of the time I feel like I’m not even here—as if she sees through us, as though we’re all disembodied spirits floating around.” There were tears standing in her eyes. A breeze came in at the window, stirring the cloth on the table. When Aunt Elinor was home there were special touches like tablecloths and napkins, what Gram called “airs.”

  “It’s for Grace,” Aunt Rachel said, and put her hand on Libby’s arm. “Let’s just try. See what happens and maybe there will be a miracle and she’ll get well.”

  As if brought down by the Truth, Aunt Libby said nothing to that. They looked at us. “I think we should forget ourselves and have one mind among us.” Aunt Rachel addressed us and Aunt Libby. Although two years younger, Aunt Rachel seemed now the older, wiser one. “After all, I don’t see that things turn out so well for most people. Live and die for nothing.” We felt at one in a yearning to believe, to transcend the material and false, to perceive the reality of Spirit. Just then over the stove, the opaline salt and pepper shakers, their tin lids marred and bent, appeared to be invested momentarily with an underlying quality, a luminous spirit, as the flood of sun went down.

  In the fall, Aunt Grace heard of new treatment centers that might offer some slight hope. She seemed stronger after the summer of religious enlightenment, had more energy, and she accepted Gram’s determination that she should try any and every thing. Aunt Elinor concurred. It was a last effort. She would travel with Aunt Grace whenever she could; we watched her usher Aunt Grace, who looked thin and stylish wearing the new fur coat Gram had bought her, into the interior of the prop plane, Aunt Elinor’s shoulders squared over her sturdy frame. The size which most of the family carried in a gangling bony height was in Aunt Elinor condensed into a powerful firm fleshiness. She had become more quiet and concentrated in her spiritual quest with the passing months. Always now in speaking to us of Aunt Grace she assumed an intense, solemn tone. But there was a hint of withdrawal too, as if our concern, though loving, contained a fearfulness and worldliness which might be traitorous to the requirements of absolute faith. It could even jeopardize the cure. We felt her drawing away from us, but in the interests of our common struggle we tried to be brave, swallowed our hurt.

  It was during that winter that Grandad died. No one expected him to die; Aunt Elinor hadn’t even known he needed help or she would certainly have tried to give it. He had heart failure in the downstairs bathroom, a tiny little room made from a back hall, with a curtain in front of a toilet and sink. He had been home alone and when Rossie found him he’d been dead for hours. It was terrible for Rossie. We were all comforting him, trying to help him overcome the shock, the embarrassment of crying so hard. We were waiting for the police to come to help.

  Gram exploded: “God almighty. Them cows’ll be dead or worse,” and she flew straight to the barn as if there she expected to meet a real disaster. But there weren’t any cows; Grandad had sold off the last of them. Why had he done that? Perhaps he got sick of spilling perfectly good milk down the drain or feeding it to hogs. “Maybe he knew something was coming.” Gram said that. We looked at her, surprised, as if for the first time we realized she might know things about him, more than she’d let on.

  After Grandad was gone we didn’t notice much that was different. We had to buy milk. There were fewer fights, but that had been true since Aunt Grace got sick. Uncle Dan sat down in the living room more often in the evenings and eventuall
y the furniture in the attic sitting room was distributed around the house. Sometimes we’d wake up around dawn and think we heard Grandad going off to milk. But we didn’t get up, so we must have known it was some other sound we heard. Or was some memory the house kept. And there were times when the wild doves seemed to moan “Sucky, sucky,” as though Grandad were tramping through the hollow, gathering his cows.

  Another summer came and Aunt Grace still lived. She was very thin, with some form of bandage under her dress at the throat. And she carried her left arm in a muslin sling. Her eyes, dark and prominent, were too much for us—she had seen what had burned its own image into her gaze. The first and the last. We held her in great awe. And it was as though her presence and our devotion to her had united us at last in a perfect oneness, we four girls thinking, feeling and moving in a dimension that felt like the exact representation of a greater mind. We had bad dreams, cried out at night. But during the day we guarded every thought about her.

  If we met Aunt Grace as she went about the farm on her long solitary walks, we—still dancing and running, coming out of the flowing, dazzling pleasures of the brook, the embrace of vines and roots, the sting of grasses—would fall into silence. Then talk awhile, but carefully, self-consciously, answering her few questions, her smiles with our smiles. At the edge of our awareness we glimpsed the white wrapping at her throat, breathed carefully so we wouldn’t smell the abscess underneath. There in the dust-silted track by the barn, ankle-deep, we buried our bare toes, sprayed geyser figures into the air to fall away. While we talked with her, it seemed that our hearts burned within us, as if we were with someone who had come to love the world, inexpressibly yet without entitlement. We made some excuse and ran away. Left her alone to concentrate her entire being toward making manifest the sufficient love of God.