Seven Loves

by Valerie Trueblood

  They heard about these things, scraps of them, at the dinner table. The padlocked schools, the empty sidewalks. The word out not to gather for funerals. Epidemic. Their mother almost falling out a third-floor window as she shouted at a milk wagon, which clopped on around the corner. Their grandmother’s whispered wish, on her last day, for a tea their mother could not buy for her because the flu had closed the stores.

  All the while in her draped bassinet, in furious rosy health, the new baby kicked and screamed. That was Carrie. Her baby screams filled Boston. Boston took its shape for May from the word boss, from her mother’s talk of mill workers and longshoremen. Boston: shouts, cruel orders, indifference, death. And she could see the little stupidly waving fists of her sister, who didn’t know to be quiet in the bassinet while her grandmother was dying. I would have been quiet, May thought. I would have known.

  And of course their mother’s life had always been finding out, and putting down on paper for others to know, whatever happened that was unjust, cruel, and terrible. May knew that.

  Sometimes after dinner their mother would read aloud from an article she was writing, or from a book she was reading herself. Her hero was Kropotkin. Despite her boredom, May listened to the part about animals helping each other. “Charity . . . is a trick,” her mother would read, with a proud smile at May, just as she would pause and give May a special look in the suspense that followed “The king . . . sent . . . for his messenger.” Kropotkin, May said to herself, feeling a vague satisfaction. Like catkin, or Nutkin from her book. She was seven. She formed a picture of the man with this name: a small man, black button eyes, a boy, really. As her mother’s hero, Kropotkin would have a burning wish, and it would not be anything her sister Carrie would wish for, but her mother’s wish and her own, for happiness. But happiness for everyone. The strange, thrilling, mournful longing that belonged to her mother and now to her, that no one suffer. A bodily feeling both restless and sleepy in May as she listened—as sickish as hanging in midair in a dream trying to stay up once you had jumped off a cliff and were flying.

  Once her mother read them a story from a magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. It was a very old issue, more than twenty-five years old, she said, smoothing the wrinkled pages, and it had no cover. “The sweet Kropotkin,” she said before she began, smiling at May alone.

  But this thing was so awful May could not believe anyone sweet had written it down. It was about torture. May still could barely read, although Mrs. Olafsson was finding ways to teach her. Torture she felt as a torch. But it was really a punishment inflicted on boys hardly any older than Carrie, who was ten—at this Carrie shuddered dramatically under the afghan by the fire and covered her ears—peasant boys who were expelled from their houses so the younger children could have food. The door was shut. What were they to do, these boys Carrie’s age? They set off alone to join the army. Of course, once in the army—they were boys, after all—they broke some small rule. Then—could this be? could it be? but it must have been so long ago . . . but it wasn’t, her mother said—they were dragged, dripping blood, past a thousand men in two lines, each man bringing down his stick on the back, the legs of the boy, while a doctor stood by—here their mother cast a despairing look at their father—to lift the wrist and stop the drumming sticks just before the boy’s pulse came to a stop. No one dared to hold back, lest he be pulled out of the ranks and sent down the line himself.

  May sat frozen on the ottoman.

  “That’s why she can’t read, Anna.” It was her father’s voice on the landing, hours later. “She’s afraid to read. She hears these things, they come from you. She’ll never forget a thing like that.”

  Under the covers May slid down her bed to the footboard. A thousand men. And the boy from Carrie’s class with the bubble hanging out of his nose—they were spanking him in the hall, two teachers. Two.

  A thousand men.

  She’ll never forget a thing like that.

  For a while after that their mother was in mild disgrace. Though she still sang to them at bedtime, their father took over in the evenings with the Bible. It was time for that: a sensible Protestantism must be called in. They were getting older. Whatever their mother thought about it, they must carry out of childhood with them the knowledge of Joseph being handed up onto the camels of the Midianites, and Moses in the bulrushes, and Ruth in the fields of corn.

  In the ninth grade, May decided that Carrie could do as she liked, but she herself would go to college and major in one of the sciences. Probably chemistry.

  Her chemistry lab partner, Eugene, had a popular sister. Carrie was in the senior class with her, the beautiful Olga. Everyone knew who Olga was. She was not pretty enough to be on the homecoming court; her beauty was that of an adult woman, May thought, and so was her melancholy stare. Sometimes at school she went days barely speaking. Her tall brother coming along behind her was the same. May began, while Eugene was pouring from beakers, to notice the veins standing up in his forearms. When he rolled up his starched white shirtsleeve, the muscle rounded and clenched. What skin could be seen was oddly smooth, smoother and paler than her own.

  May knew his father owned a lumberyard; later she found out from Carrie that Eugene had worked there after school since the third grade. “Third grade!” her mother said. “When will we have a law?”

  Her father grinned. “Now you respect the law?”

  “Some laws we need, for now.”

  Eugene wanted to be a scientist. May was going to be a scientist herself, although that conflicted with her wish to be a writer, but in the period before she was famous in either field she might teach school, and if so she would teach chemistry.

  Eugene had inexpressive eyes the clear brown of tortoiseshell, pulled tight at the corners because his mother was Russian, said Carrie. He almost never smiled. In the cafeteria May saw Olga bow her head with its stark middle part and chew each mournful bite, surrounded by senior boys.

  Eugene had chosen May. They had to do the experiments in pairs, and the teacher had the boys choose. He would have offered the privilege to the girls, he was known for saying every year, if they could have managed it without a lot of silliness beforehand. The other boys were picking boys, until boys ran out and they groaned and began on the girls. There were many more girls; boys had begun dropping out of school to look for work. But Eugene, while there were still boys remaining, said, “May Harkness.”

  Gradually, Carrie was becoming kindly toward May, full of advice. “Smile at him. Smile whenever he looks at you.”

  “I can’t just smile all through chemistry.”

  Carrie was going to graduate, but she didn’t want to go to the academy of stenography or to nursing school, or drown herself in some charity; she would not have wanted to go to college even if there had been money for it. She wanted to play the piano, go to the pictures, and take the streetcar to Green Lake with her friends. She wanted to forget Hoover and Roosevelt and the economy and the poor, and begin a life of her own choosing.

  Boys sat on the glider surreptitiously playing with her curls, and laughed at anything she thought up to say, and even danced with her to records that weren’t for dancing, though she giggled instead of objecting when they pulled her up to waltz to “Downhearted Blues” or “Joe Hill” or “Years are coming, speed them onward, when the sword shall gather rust,” as May sat on the porch railing sourly watching.

  If Eugene said, “May, where’s the copper sulfate?” she felt a singing in her arms. She heard only her name. On the slate counter she traced the foreign shape of his eye with her finger. She was facing him and the big windows behind him, and if she looked long enough at the level where the dark counter stopped and the light began, a blur like a heat mirage would rise steadily for a certain distance with his silhouette in it, shimmering. The sight would give her the strange, not unpleasant sense of them all as bodies, skins filled with moving blood and chemicals and organs as unknown as the bog man just discovered in Europe. With heads on top, thinkin
g. Batteries, her father said; the brain was a battery. But the skin, containing and shielding all this, and at the same time feeling. Did Eugene see that? Did he look at her skin?

  When he told her his own name was really Yevgeny, and wrote it out with his fountain pen in the alphabet that was his as the brown eyes with their slant were his, she closed the paper in her chemistry book, drew a breath, and asked him about Kropotkin. He had never heard of Kropotkin. This made her wonder about her mother: was she right that this was a great Russian hero?

  Eugene’s father sat at a window looking down on a hundred workers, but his business was failing like all the others. Lately, it was said, a bottle of vodka kept him company; lately Eugene came to school with a sleepy frown, and sat with his hand over his eyes.

  May tried to get her mother alone so that she could bring up the subject of Eugene, steering her away from the matter of child labor. She wanted to mention his disturbing, hypnotizing face, his smooth skin—was this skin Russian? for his sister’s had the same transparency. Her mother knew all about Russians. She wanted to let her mother, in her eager way once you had her attention, begin to question her. She rarely let her mother do that now. She was ready to answer any question. She wouldn’t say Eugene didn’t know who Kropotkin was.

  They had come downtown on the streetcar and picked their way out onto the rocks of the bay, she and her mother and Carrie. Her hair was strung across her face; she could taste the strands of it, wet and salty. She ran both hands in under her scarf and held her neck and her cold jaw. Her mother had turned her red cheeks to the wind off the water.

  May was going to say something now, even though Carrie was right there two feet lower down on a rock with her magazine, sulking because she didn’t want to picnic on the rocks on this cold fall afternoon with their mother, who had thrown down the article she was writing and jumped up calling, “Carrie! May! It’s not raining! Let’s go down to the waterfront!” Carrie wanted to go to the pictures, as they usually did on Saturday. She didn’t follow the plots as May did, she sank down in the dark to wait for the man to bend the girl back for the kiss. The kiss. And it wasn’t a girl half the time but a pale, married-looking woman with black lips and awful drooping eyelids. Yet May too sat transfixed every time, long after the scene was over, in a rush of sweet fright because after the kissing, she knew, came the unseen undressing, when a man crushed a woman against him and their skins touched. This she had imagined in detail.

  The wind had the whole bay churning with little waves. Where she was sitting the spray made her socks cling and mottled the skin of her knees, which she rubbed to make the ugly pattern of veins go away. “Skin’s so different, on different people,” she finally began, casually. “But . . .” She hesitated. That might start her mother off on the subject of race prejudice.

  But her mother was gazing blankly at the water, her eyes full of tears.

  May stared at her. She found she could not say, as she once would have, “What’s the matter?” Why must her own heart freeze like this when her mother’s face had that look?

  “I’m sorry,” her mother said, wiping her eyes. “Oh, I’m only thinking, thinking of my mother.” She smiled apologetically.

  May clenched her gloves. The water slapped the rock; she shut her lips. The epidemic. Suffering. Death. She was tired of these things. Why wasn’t Carrie ever the one to ask their mother about the past, to sympathize? Her eye followed the bands of cloud upward. Water, cloud, mountain, cloud, sky. As she pretended to study the view a sort of curfew passed over it and the two long layers of cloud began to disperse. Out of the higher one came a watery disc, tinged with orange, the daytime moon.

  The moon. There it was, blurred, almost humble, making its still, shy survey of the earth. “‘Come up, thou red thing,’” her mother recited slowly. “‘Come up, and be called a moon.’”

  May threw her head back. She had to speak. But her mother slowly raised her arm in the plaid sleeve and held it out, whispering, “Look, girls.” Hardly any distance from them a young harbor seal, its speckled hide glowing with water, was clambering onto the rock.

  The seal sniffed in all directions, like a dog, before it saw them. Then for several minutes it balanced and looked, an expression of such pensiveness, such concentration in its dark eyes and black flared nose that May thought she would have to speak to it, call it, make it hers. Then it blinked, it seemed to listen, and sliding over onto its side, tail first like ribbon being turned, it sank into the water and was quickly gone.

  I got a mother done gone on

  Makes me feel like my time ain’t long

  Could this have been sung at her mother’s funeral?

  No. No, her father wouldn’t have had that. But May had heard it. It must have been one of her mother’s records. It must have been in the weeks when Carrie was submitting herself all day to records and picture albums and scraps of paper with their mother’s handwriting on them. The aftermath.

  It was mysterious to May that Carrie had this sickly grief in her that could not be wept out, that it was Carrie who was called to a fury of mourning that left her pretty script meandering and splotched on the black-bordered notes they were writing, and clogged her sinuses. It was mysterious, considering that May’s tears came sparsely and secretly at night—as mysterious as Carrie’s ability, after no more lessons than May had had, to play the piano, when she didn’t care about music as May did.

  Their father could not understand what had happened. For him, May thought, it had somehow not yet happened. In the middle of the night she would find herself foolishly terrified that he would find out.

  More than once in her adult life when she was told, “So-and-so had pneumonia, but she just kept on,” May heard a voice inside her rasp, Why didn’t she die? She did not like to hear about the pneumonias people carried around with them like troublesome cats. “Oh, she fought it off. Of course she did.” Women, mostly, hardy women, with their high-dose-this and their long-term-that, and their refusal to merely die. As if a person could ever have cooperated, in one weekend of rushed shocked dying, sitting up in bed among the newspapers while a tide from nowhere washed into her lungs.

  “Bring me—” This would be a whisper; their mother would raise a burning finger and point straight up, meaning they must bring a book from the top shelf in the study. “Quick! Bring me—Gorky. My Childhood. And bring—oh, just that one. My Gorky in the blue wrapper.” But when they came back she would not be able to hold the book, or she would have gone to sleep.

  Or May read to her and she slept, breathing open-mouthed in runny strands of sound with no rhythm. “‘Look how beautiful it is!’ Grandmother would exclaim, as she went from one side of the boat to the other. . . . ‘Why are you crying?’ ‘Because I’m so happy, dear, and so old!’ . . . After a pinch of snuff she would begin her wonderful stories about good robbers, saints, and all kinds of wild animals and evil spirits.”

  Her father’s lips had turned the gray of cement under his mustache. “Anna,” he kept whispering. He had the chair forward on one leg and its trembling under his weight made the floorboards quake. In the morning the fever was less but her cheeks had fallen in like thin pie dough. Now the mentholatum he had rubbed on her chest and put to melt in a saucer under the lamp covered the infected smell that came out of her open mouth. His partner, Dr. Thorp, came up the stairs and took a turn tapping and listening. “Rales,” he said to her father. May did not ask what that meant. She didn’t look up from the page to ask about anything. She sat with her dead legs curled under her, reading on and on.

  For two whole days while her mother’s eyeballs twitched back and forth under the oily lids, May read the awful childhood of Gorky. Again and again, in her memory of this time, the blindly good, snuff-dipping grandmother would receive her savage beatings—she who had made the wounded starling a wing, and taught it to speak! As vividly as if they had been her own, May recalled, all her life, Gorky’s fingers picking out the hairpins embedded in the old woman’s scalp.
>
  They meant nothing by it, May knew, people with their stories of walking pneumonia.

  Sometimes it seemed to her that those stories, with their almosts—indeed all stories that ended well, and in fact the present in which people heard them with satisfaction—were a movie, full of optimism but somehow pitiless. It was another kind of story altogether that was real, from long ago, and the long ago itself where the truth of the drowning death in bed was known to everyone.

  Idiots! You idiots! But she got over it. So many of her friends were younger than she. They didn’t know; for them it was easy, forgivable, to say, “But wait a minute, when did antibiotics come in?”

  There! in her father’s Pathology: the lung, outside and in. Like the limp raw breast of a chicken when you peeled it off the bone. May put one hand down firmly on the book and began to tear out pages one by one, neatly, going on some way past Pneumonia before she was finished, and she threw the pages down—she, who was so superstitious about a book she didn’t write her name in a new one at school when she was told to. Her father came upon the scraps on the floor. She heard his slippers stop. He picked them up without a word and closed them back into the chapter on the lung.

  The decision was that May would cook, and Carrie, the neat one, would clean. But a week after the funeral it was Carrie who put on an apron and baked a sheet cake, flat and dark as the doormat, for May on her fourteenth birthday, and stuck the candles in it. At the table May unwrapped Testament of Youth, which she had heard her mother ordering on the telephone, and an envelope from Carrie containing a puff of cotton.

  “Open it,” Carrie commanded.

  “I will,” May said. “I will, I promise. After the cake.” She knew what was in the cotton. She knew Carrie had bought her the locket they had seen in the mercantile, hanging on a velvet card. She knew what was in the locket. In the wastebasket of their mother’s study she had found the photograph, where Carrie had thrown it after she cut into it with the scissors. The women in rows, and a hole above the NO WAR sign where Carrie had cut out their mother’s face to fit the locket.