During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

by Joan Chase

  “It’s easy for them—sing and dance all day.” Gram took no notice of Mr. Weiner’s misfortune, assimilating only what concerned her.

  Mr. Weiner sat in the living room and looked out the window to the meadow which had once been Grandad’s cornfield. He sighed. It emerged from deep inside him and made us feel sorry for him. Already Gram was opening the deed to her land. She began to talk business: the location of the farm relative to the growth spurt the town was making, the time she would need to complete the move. All for a moment wavered, at pause and balance; then Mr. Weiner put on his glasses and picked up the deed. The meadow flowers, in bright yellows, pinks, shades of lavender and ivory, levitated over the grass.

  After he had gone, Aunt Libby wondered aloud if he had big-city connections. Maybe he was in the Mafia.

  “Botheration,” Gram snorted, “he ain’t Eye-talian. He’s a Jew.”

  “I know that. But there’s something fishy.”

  “There ain’t. No more than him pulling some of his Jew tricks. Trying to.” Later we heard her humming “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” her first song in years.

  “You seemed to like him well enough,” Aunt Libby teased Gram. “Walking on his arm. He is kind of nice, though. A gentleman. Liked the girls.”

  And we liked him. Better and better. Sometimes when he came he brought us things from New York—boxes of special candy, a nicely framed photograph of the house. And even after the shopping center was under construction and we were almost ready to move away, we still heard from him. He invited us to come and visit his home, which, though not as lovely as ours, he said, was on Long Island Sound, and he had a yacht we could sail on. But there was a distance between us that was more than miles now. Without our house and land we had been diminished, stripped of pride and reputation. Once we left the farm we knew we would never see him again.

  The last time he came was when the papers were signed. Gram lifted aside the lace cloth on the dining room table and Mr. Weiner handed her a magazine to protect the finish. Her fingers were stiff and there was a discernible tremor over the close work of signing her name on the several documents. When she had finished, the room became quiet, as though even the impassive furniture held its breath, disavowed the transfer.

  Gram had her own personal copy of the blueprints for the commercial development of the land, the proposed positions of the IGA, Woolworth’s, the bowling alley. “This here’s going to be Krauss Drive,” she said, proud-sounding, glad to at last have something more enduring than flesh and blood to share her name. Her unblinking eyes, varnished by her glasses, weren’t seeing anything but the future, which was taking off like the printed road before her.

  “If only I had the money,” Aunt Rachel said, after the limousine had taken Mr. Weiner away. It went without sound or disturbance, like a figment, as if in the preceding transaction our land had evaporated and become mere value. Gram snorted to hear Aunt Rachel. Castles in the air—the notion that any of them would ever have money. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

  Gram thought of Aunt Elinor. “You call her, Libby. Right now. About that set of furniture she wants. And while you’re at it, you can tell her she’s not the only one that can turn a dime.” She turned to Aunt Rachel, who had said she would have wanted the place and would have bought it and wouldn’t ever have sold it. “If you had the money! Pooh. You’d do the same as me. What did we ever have around here but dying and fighting? Work and craziness?” Off she went to ready herself for the evening, calling back to the rest of us that we were nothing but a pack of dreamy fools. “Wish I could see that old man’s face. Reckon we’d see who’s the horse dealer now.”

  When she came down she went to the kitchen, put on her apron, took the skillet from the oven and turned the gas flame sky high under it. Started for the refrigerator. Then she stopped and looked at us watching her, willowy dips of sunlight fluttering over the table. Maybe we depressed her then, because she hung up her apron and turned off the fire. “I’m going over yonder,” she said, and soon we heard her car start up to take her the half block to the restaurant on the other side of the hedge. Aunt Libby called Uncle Dan at the market and told him to bring home something to eat. She didn’t care what. She laughed, listening to him. He was probably lamenting once again, how cruel a fate that in a household of women he had to plan the meals and do the shopping too. Sometimes he’d ask her if she wanted him to eat for her as well.

  We were talking about the shopping center, how funny it was going to look to see a big old brick house poking up in the middle like a sore thumb. Aunt Libby was off the phone by then and she looked peculiar and said she didn’t think that was the plan. She figured they were going to knock it down.

  After that we sat quietly, imagining the walls around us buckling, the plaster crumbling, all of us diving out the doors and windows to get away. We could see Gram’s Pontiac steering for her turn. She drove with the authority of her right to drive on the future Krauss Drive. She parked and drew herself slowly out of the car. At the edge of the parking lot, facing the house, she leaned forward and with two fingers grasping the end of her nose, blew it and expertly flicked the residue into the weeds of the ditch. Then with her pocketbook shelved on her mound of stomach, bespeaking the female condition of multiple childbearing, her pace toward the restaurant for her evening meal unhurried, her expression mild and vaguely pleasant, she proceeded with the assurance of someone who had earned everything she had gotten.

  A few months after the final payments were arranged, Celia and Jimmy were married and moved away to Texas. Gram had bought her new house and everything was in an uproar with the tremendous job of moving out of the big house. It was early summer and Anne and Katie were back and they were helping too. We knew it was the last summer we would be together. Celia wrote from Texas that the whole world seemed brown. Then later that she was expecting a baby. If it was a girl she was going to name her Jennifer after her sister. Gram said she had never liked the name, that she thought of it as a mule’s name. She looked cross about the whole business. And Aunt Libby got the stomachache.

  We didn’t know what to think. As we went through the house, packing up, emptying boxes or drawers, we felt as though Celia should still be with us and it would surprise us to go in her room and find the phonograph all dust-coated. And the phone would ring for her sometimes—a guy who hadn’t heard that she had gotten married. We didn’t know what to do with all the things she’d left behind, so we threw most of them out. She wrote that she was sick all day long and the heat was unbearable. If she had a boy she would name him Kevin. That was a name we’d never heard of.

  Gram was impatient with the smallest details of the move, referred to it as “the whole pile of junk,” and vowed that she was glad the barn had burned down so she didn’t have anything else to worry about. She commanded a truck to be driven up alongside the house and had Aunt Libby and Uncle Dan pitch the entire contents of the attic out the window. At the beginning they dallied over some of the ribbon-tied love letters, some from Neil to Aunt Grace, others that Uncle Dan had written from California; they were amazed at this evidence of their youth. Meanwhile, Gram was tossing away anything that came to hand. She asked if anyone wanted the framed magazine print of the Indian brave which had always hung over the fireplace in her bedroom—she’d looked at it long enough, both of them seeing too much of what she wanted to forget. She paused a second and threw him out the window. The grubby muslin sampler Anne had struggled over went after it. When they couldn’t find anyone to take the walnut Queen Anne chairs from the dining room, Uncle Dan hauled them away and set them upright at the dump, to one side, where he said it looked as queer as if a bunch of ghosts were having a banquet.

  All that Gram said she cared about saving were her Persian rugs. They were now worth a lot more than what she’d paid for them. Besides, she thought they were bright and colorful, comfortable to stand on.

  “Although somewhat lumpy,” Uncle Dan reminded her. Because she
kept her important papers under them. He said he imagined that without her rugs she might never find anything, might crawl for hours or have to resort to a file cabinet. Gram said she viewed each rug as though it were the layout of the entire farm; she knew that she kept her will under the center, where the barn had been, the birth records where Grandad had experimented with soybeans in the south meadow—that way she could go straight to anything she wanted.

  Celia wrote from Texas: “Save me Aunt Elinor’s saddle blanket and the marble lighthouse lamp. The coconut from the downstairs hearth.” Had anyone found the Sunday school Bible they gave her in the fourth grade? But it was too late; everything had been sorted out and carried away.

  On the Sunday they called from the hospital, Uncle Dan was down at the church, singing in the choir, the only one of us who went regularly. Gram watched her services on television, told anyone who questioned her to shut up, that she’d gone to church longer than the rest of us had lived and now she figured God wouldn’t begrudge her some comfort and ease. We heard the evangelist fervently exhorting, “Heal! Heal!” when Aunt Libby went to the phone.

  Celia would make it. The doctor told her that the first thing, so she wouldn’t get hysterical. He asked if Celia had shown signs of serious depression before. Was there a history of that sort of thing in the family? Her husband was far too upset to give them the information they needed, and besides, it seemed that he didn’t know that much about her past, about the family. Aunt Libby asked if she should come right down to be with her. No, but Celia wanted to come home. Would she be able to get help there, in such a small town? “We can take her up to Cleveland,” Aunt Libby said. We’d gone to Cleveland for help before. Celia would have to remain under a doctor’s care for some time—the next time she might succeed. They hadn’t been able to save the baby. Aunt Libby asked how Celia had gotten the pills. She’d been saving them up, a few at a time, for quite a while.

  That night Uncle Dan shut himself in the parlor and played the trombone sonata he had practiced on and off over the years since his one year at the college. Usually he told us that each time he played he got worse, instead of better, which he thought about summed up life anyway. But this night he went in without a word. We heard him struggling away. After a while of listening to him, Aunt Libby said she couldn’t stand that noise another minute. It was just like crying. “He’s such a big baby, you know.” She frowned at us, tears clustered thick in her lashes, and she went in with him and closed the doors.