During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

by Joan Chase

  It was dark and the people were leaving. We saw it was still snowing when the cars turned on their lights and drove away. Neil sat on at the table, his head now resting on his arms. Through the long double room, into the dining room, we could see the baskets of flowers the women had brought from the grave. Aunt Elinor said it would have been a waste to leave them in the cold and she could arrange them to look like regular bouquets. We didn’t go near them.

  Anne tried on Aunt Elinor’s black coat with the ermine collar and cuffs. The collar was slightly raised so that it surrounded her face. She paraded into the kitchen, where the aunts took one look at her and broke into tears. How it suits her, they said, and told her how glamorous she would be, grown up. “Like your mother,” Aunt May said. “Only the coloring’s different.”

  “And that mop!” Aunt Rachel said. Anne’s hair was dark red and uncut, hanging far down her back. “Something’s going to have to be done about that.” Aunt Rachel moved her fingers to snip like a scissors.

  But Anne, giddy because they found her beautiful, said, “I’ll never cut it. I’ll let it grow and grow, until somebody will have to walk behind me to carry it. And you can leave me your coat when you die,” she said to Aunt Elinor. Whereupon everything was completely quiet, until Aunt Libby opened the door to set out the garbage and a sweep of air danced the snow in at the door so that it seemed we might be snowbound for days.

  Then Neil lifted up his head and looked around at all of us. Only Gram was missing. “I guess I know when I’m licked. Though if you don’t believe I’ve tried, then, God knows, you never will. Hell, I never could make enough money to impress any of you and I couldn’t keep my wife at home—even to die. Wasn’t any competition for you at all.” He stood up then and went to the window, his back turned to us, and continued. “Then she took away the one thing I did think was mine. Ours. The house. And probably she thought to give my children away with it. There never was any way to make you or her think I was man enough to handle you or what belonged to you.” He turned and nodded his head toward Anne but spoke to the women. “And now this fool girl thinks she’s a princess. Expects God knows what. Nothing else anyone will ever try to do for her will ever mean anything, never be enough. She’ll always be dreaming about this place and this time, looking backward. Could be all of us should have gone on and died right along with Grace. Might be none of us will ever be quite alive again.” We had never heard Neil speak like that, long and serious, not hiding his meaning. We sat as though forbidden to move, while Neil took up the whiskey bottle and, walking over to the sink, stood and poured all of it down the drain. We heard it gurgle going down. He set the empty bottle down with a shrug, then smiled, half amused, and said mostly to himself, “Too bad reform’s not that easy,” his eyes on the bottle.

  Gram came in the doorway, her fists raised, yelling first at us: “You kids go on.” But she couldn’t stop herself, never could. “Don’t you talk sorry, you bastard. Not around here. It don’t matter what them doctors say they know. I know. I seen you. Heard.” Gram’s face was purple. But she was raging into a void, like when Grandad used to walk out on her, because Neil had exited, holding his hands in mockery around his ears, saying to the rest of us, “Here’s to female solidarity. May it last forever.” When Gram had wound down, she allowed Aunt Elinor to lead her to a chair. We were all quiet, but we scarcely heard Neil’s car going through the snow. So many times he had left, furious and outcast, then was back again: a pattern that reminded us of Aunt Grace, as though it was something they had forged together.

  He didn’t come back that night, and the next morning on his bed, still made up, was a heap of clothing and other things—Aunt Grace’s belongings: the fur coat, the silver-linked belt made by Indians in Arizona, her wedding band and a watch, the music box that played “In Springtime.” Aunt Libby lifted the lid and it ground feebly, statically, dragging. Inside the box was the confetti-like litter of a sheet of paper torn up. Aunt Libby knew what it was right off. “Makes you want to kill him,” she said. “Always the last word.”

  “Not this time,” Gram said, and left for town. She called in the loan she had made to Grace and Neil for the down payment on their house. That house was far off in Illinois—to us it seemed as insubstantial as the torn-up sheet of paper.

  “I wonder if we’ll ever see him again,” Aunt Rachel said when Gram got home.

  “We better,” Gram said. “There’s a thing or two here that belongs to him.” She looked at Anne and Katie. “I already had too many kids,” she said, then smiled thinly, almost an apology.

  “Of course he’ll come back,” Aunt Elinor reassured us. And then she said, “You know he’s no worse than the rest of us. We shut our eyes and tell ourselves we’re wonderful. That we’re better than everybody else, different. When we’ve had endless fighting and envy and fear. When some plain honest forgiveness would be truly wonderful.” Although her colors—eyes, hair and complexion—were no more vivid than in all her earlier passions, her words were new, fruits of the Spirit, and they unnerved Aunt Libby so that for some reason she threatened Aunt Rachel: “If you ever start in on that religion, I’ll move to California and never see you again. A person might as well have died.” It was possible; already Aunt May, having lost husband, father and sister within two years, had begun to study Science with Aunt Elinor. They stayed off together, apart from the rest of us, to read and talk late into the night. Aunt Libby feared that she’d end up with only Gram left.

  Later that morning, Gram divided up Aunt Grace’s possessions—she said it was her right, not Neil’s, since she had paid for most of them. And where was he? Typical! Aunt Elinor whispered to Anne and Katie that she’d see they got something from their mother.

  The snow had stopped falling and the day was clearing. The apple trees were rimed in white. The sisters had followed Gram into the parlor and the door was shut. Left alone, we lay on the rugs amidst the gardens of paradise. In front of the window in the dining room were the flowers, gleaming against the light— rigid and priggish in their hothouse satisfaction. We got up and went in where they were. We could smell death, its victory and boast. Scarcely meaning to, but doing it, Katie knocked against one basket and it tipped over, reclining as stiffly as it had stood. We reached in and pulled out a long-stemmed carnation. Anne stuck it into her hair and it suddenly had an urgent beauty, translucent against her red hair. We took all the arrangements apart then. Over Katie’s head we draped a circlet of white chrysanthemums and wound a ribbon sash around her waist. When we were all decorated, we filled vases with bunches of flowers and placed them around the rooms, on sills and tables where the snowlight glazed them. Some we put into water glasses. The house looked beautiful again. Anne took one piece of ribbon and tied it like a beauty queen’s banner while we sang, “A pretty girl is like a melody.”

  We didn’t see Gram come in. She slapped Anne’s hot, still-laughing face, then she clawed the bow from her chest. She slapped out at a vase of flowers and the water sprang up and stained the wallpaper dark. Anne stood with her head bent.

  “Can’t you never do right?” Gram asked her. Then to Aunt Elinor, who had come in with her sisters, she said, “It’s your doings. Them girls don’t a bit know how to act anymore.” But when she passed her on the way to the stairs, her mood suddenly shifted and she said, “You done the best you could, I reckon,” the closest she ever came to admitting that, and went away.

  We heard her bath running. A half hour later she came back dressed and powdered, two dots of rouge plopped on her face. Her daughters looked up, amazed to the end at her ways. But Gram said, nice as could be, “All’s any of us can do is keep going, though there ain’t no sense to it. I’m going to the picture show.” She searched her purse and came up with nickels for ice cream —in the dead of winter. She touched Anne’s hair, leaving. “You go on outside and play. Try to forget. You’ll feel better.”

  The minute we were out the door, Anne was running, the snow spraying up around her, hightaili
ng it toward the ravine. We followed, at first a little reluctant, wondering how we would ever find the way home. Anne went straight to the big tree which stood at the entrance to the deeper woods. The sun had come out and the light in the silence struck like cymbals as it appeared and disappeared among clouds. The vine ropes that hung down from the nearby trees were more noticeable than ever, more enticing with no leaves hiding them, and we ran and caught them, taking long swings to land in the soft snow. We romped and screeched and got so heated we unbuttoned our coats.

  Anne was staring at the big oak. Then she took off her coat and looped and tied one of the vines around her waist. She began to climb up the steps Rossie had nailed to reach the first branch. We thought she would jump from there but instead she went higher, her feet sliding and scrambling, clinging with her body to the rough snow-layered branches.

  “Are you crazy?” we called up to her. “You come down. We’ll tell.”

  “Shut up,” Anne snarled down at us. Her teeth were scoured white against her kinky red hair.

  “You might fall.”

  “Never do.”

  We didn’t say anything more but watched Anne going higher than we went even in summer, showers of snow falling down on us. Her feet slipped but then got their grip and pushed higher.

  At last she stopped. She grinned at us. “Katie be quiet. I have the rope. I’m coming down now. Bombs away!” She had the scared happy look she had when she took the jumps off the haymow. She pushed off then, swinging far out from the tree, her lurch sending down an enormous fall of snow. Out of that silent storm we heard the crack when the vine snapped, and then Anne’s plunging scream, which was cut off as if it too struck the ground. After that it was still again and the snow stopped falling.

  Gram said it was the snow that saved Anne, that she might otherwise have ended up dead or wishing she was. She came back to consciousness the next morning and recognized Neil right away. He had come over from Illinois, where they’d finally located him the night before. Everybody had been afraid, the way he’d carried on, mourning at last, almost crazed with grief and begging forgiveness. Pale and tremulous, he didn’t seem like the same man.

  We went to visit Anne in the hospital. They had cut off her hair and a tiny part of her head was shaved because of the stitches. Her exposed neck seemed too long, livid and dotted as with a rash. We couldn’t say anything, for they had warned us and made us promise we wouldn’t make fun of her.

  Gram pronounced the haircut overdue and quite all right with her. She smoothed the bangs. “It looks real neat. Modern too.”

  Anne lay glaring toward the window. We talked of other things as best we could. She had lost the ring Aunt Elinor had given her—Gram said that was typical, that Anne never could keep hold of anything. Anne said one thing about her hair, determined and final: “I don’t care.”

  Aunt Rachel wondered if anyone had thought to save some of the hair so Anne could make a hairpiece for when she was older. But Gram said it wouldn’t do any good anyway, since her hair was getting darker every year and it wouldn’t ever match up. We thought there was something different about Anne altogether, something that would never match up. It had to do with the way she didn’t talk or laugh, and nothing Katie did could make her hit her. Neil didn’t seem like himself either, bringing Anne a glass of water and adjusting the shade so the light wouldn’t glare in her eyes. Even with the view covered up, she kept staring that way. As soon as Anne was well enough, Neil said, he would be taking his girls home to Illinois. Until then he and Katie were staying at a nearby motel.

  Neil offered to drive them out to the farm before they left, but Anne said she was still having headaches and wanted to get the trip over with. We went to the hospital the night before they were leaving, to say goodbye. Gram was going over to Kingfield to play bingo, so she was in a rush and we couldn’t stay long. Everybody kissed the girls and told them it would soon be summer and they would be back before they knew it. After the women left, we stayed behind a minute. We leaned over to kiss Anne. The smell of the hospital was between us. We looked outside to see the woods, but it was dark and we saw only ourselves and lights in the glass. The hospital bed made everything confused.

  It seemed Anne would never speak to us again. “We hate to see you go,” we wanted to tell her. “We won’t ever forget.” But we couldn’t, not with her face terrible like that and her arm tied up in a sling. We heard a horn blowing over and over from outside. Knew it was Gram, so anxious to leave that she forgot all about the people in the hospital who were sick. Then it seemed almost that Anne would smile. We said, “Goodbye; see you next summer,” and hurried out the door.

  Partway down the hall, we heard Anne call out, “I can still climb the farthest of anybody.”

  “I’d already had too damn many brats,” Gram would continue to say, right to our faces, a little wicked pleasure on hers from making the remark. She had let Neil take Anne and Katie away and that seemed cruel. But she reversed herself about the loan on the house. Just said Neil could have it for the girls—after all, she wasn’t the meanest person in the world. Reminded of Grace’s will, she said, “She didn’t know what she was doing. They have to live somewheres.”

  Gram kept us off guard. We were afraid of her truths and then their reversal. One day she might deny that there was any earthly or heavenly rhyme or reason to anything. The next day she might announce, “I’m going down to see the old nigger.”

  “She’s no better than a witch,” Aunt Grace had said once.

  “I s’pose since you went to college you know everything,” Gram had said. She’d had her fortune told, her palm read, from time to time the tarot. It was a comfort and she wasn’t going to stop it. Not for a bunch of uppity know-it-alls. Gram sometimes seemed like the child of her daughters, the bad and willful one they couldn’t do a thing with but loved the best because of her charm and daring.

  When she went off to see the nigger woman, we sneaked away from the house over the back hill and waited in the lower field for Gram to come in her car. The disrespectful name was a part of the mystery we came to sense in those visits to Della’s mother—Della the woman who cleaned for Gram—was part of the great distance we traveled to get there and enter the unpainted shack which stood on stilts on the far border of our land. Gram said she didn’t take what the old woman told her as gospel, no more than she took anything. But fortunetelling fascinated her and relieved her some. After Aunt Grace died she recalled that the woman had warned her of heavy sorrowful times to come —had seen a woman, still young, with a dimple on her chin. That had to be Grace. Gram knew it right then, had cried even. We had seen her, coming out wiping her eyes.

  Della’s mother was so ancient-looking she might have been mother to the whole world, the burden of it wearing down her pigment to a milky-tea color and blinding her eyes. She was nearly bald except for random cotton bolls that sprouted. Her empty cheeks sucked themselves and we wondered if her clouded eyes even saw the light. We could stay with her only a moment. Just for a glimpse. It was too powerful a place to be; the fogging sweet-smelling smoke from the wood stove, ablaze even in summer, filled the cabin and presences beckoned through that haze, disturbing and suggestive, while the old woman, a worn quilt on her knees, sat expectantly.

  We waited outside on the sagging porch for Gram to have her reading. Bending around a lopsided icebox which held a nest of kittens, we took peeps at Della’s dark lanky boys, who hoed in the garden. They glanced at us shyly too; they knew who we were but we never spoke. The big boy, Jefferson, brought each of us a carrot, which was about an inch long and more golden than orange. We nodded thanks and chewed at it, though a bit of dirt still clung in the root hairs. The boys showed us a human grave where a trampled picket fence about a foot and a half high marked it out of the field and a picked flower waved in a jar.

  But Gram knew why she was there and stayed a good while. When she came out she was wiping her eyes, though she only answered, “Never mind,” when we asked her wh
at was the matter. She called back to Della, “I’ll have them drapes setting on the porch.” And Della put her hand up to shade her eyes and called to Gram, “You come on back anytime, Lil”; so there had been an exchange. Just then it seemed that Gram was closer to Della than she would ever be to us. We remembered the wood smoke’s lavender haze figured on summer heat while we still flicked flecks of carrot and dirt with our tongues. Afterwards we would wonder if Della’s mother had known all that was coming. And had Gram known too when she would eye us and say significantly although enigmatically, “Times change,” a calculation in her tone that frightened us.

  It was summer and Anne and Katie were back on the farm, so we were all together the night the barn burned. Waking by chance, or intuition, Uncle Dan looked out the window and saw it. Perhaps the flare seemed like dawn. The fire trucks came along soon and the racket had all of us awake, throwing on clothes and running down the drive. Gram was dressed completely, even to her stockings and garters, and carrying her pocketbook. We stood off on the weeds beside the orchard trees and watched the fire engine come speeding along the back way, the clinging men serious and intent, acting as if they didn’t know us. Everybody had to tell Rossie ten times to keep out of the way.

  An immense heat blasted from the barn so that we could feel it hot against our own bodies. Gram said, “I mind the day this barn was raised. There was a big party.” The firemen were hooking up the pumper and dragging hoses. Uncle Dan said they didn’t build things that well anymore. Gram agreed, said maybe they didn’t need to because progress meant that something a whole lot better would be coming along the next day.