I keep waiting for him to move closer to her, put his arm around her, idly play with her hair the way men do in paperback romances. But it never happens. In fact, he seems so intent on our discussion of physics and mathematics that he hardly notices anything else. Matters of the heart seem mysterious to me. I am nearly twenty-one years old and still a virgin. Sometimes I wonder if I should have stayed at Our Lady of the Harbor and joined the Little Sisters of Saint Camillus. Joining a religious order has never been very far from my thoughts. Often, I perceive it as the only right and natural course. It is always Fairfax who convinces me that I should wait a little longer before deciding.
Later, alone in my room, I fall asleep thinking of Tony, his face animated in the glow of the stars and the red moon, the smell of cocoa on his breath, like a little boy. And as hour moves into hour, the nightmare comes again.
This time, the order of the dream events is subtly different from before. I huddle in the black chapel on the deck of the pitching ship. But now one wall of the chapel is a chain-link fence like the one on the orphanage playground. Beyond it stands a man, familiar somehow, clinging to the fence. I can’t see his face, but I think it is Tony, bearded, hunched in a sailor’s peacoat.
“Electra!” he cries. And he chants the words. “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind.” Suddenly, I remember such a man from my childhood. It’s not Tony. Not Tony at all.
Coming from his lips and not mine, the words have no effect. The wind laughs at him, howls at him. A bargain is a bargain. And something else, something new. Almost of age. Almost mine now. And it grabs me and spins me around till I scream.
I fancy I can hear the echo of that scream as I awaken. My window stands open, drifting slowly back and forth on its hinges. Under my nightgown, rivulets of sweat run down my ribs. That man. All these years he has lain buried in the clutter of other events, other people. How could I have forgotten about him?
Someone flings open the door. “Electra!” Tony stumbles into the pale rectangle of the doorway. “Jesus …” The word comes out of him in a long whisper. “Jesus!”
The horror in his voice makes me look around. Nothing is where it used to be. Pictures have been blown off the walls. Books and papers are strewn everywhere. My bed is upended and lies, frame and mattresses separate, on the floor behind me. My bedclothes stretch in a twisted rope from one corner of the room to the other. Feathers from my pillow fall through the air in lazy eddies.
“What’s going on?” Fairfax appears behind Tony, hastily tying the belt of her robe.
I hear urgent footsteps on the stairway and Roddy’s voice. “Put that thing away, Lavinia! You’ll kill us all.” Someone flips the light on. Lavinia lurches into the room, breathless, waving a dusty pistol, and Roddy grabs it from her. Then everyone stands in shocked silence, staring at the wreck of my room.
Fairfax is the first to move. She runs to the window, sticks her head out, looks up and down the backyard. “I don’t see anybody,” she says. “We must have scared him away” She turns and helps me to my feet.
My head is still spinning from the dream. “It was nobody,” I say. “Just the wind. The wind did it.” I watch the color leach out of Fairfax’s cheeks, and I start to shake. My teeth chatter. It is cold in the room. Without speaking, Fairfax untwists my blanket and drapes it around my shoulders. I feel her trembling; her hands are moist and chilly.
Tony, dressed in pajamas with tiny, faded fleur-de-lis all over them, scrubs his knuckles across his hair. “The wind? How could the wind do this? It’s not even blowing.”
Fairfax snaps at him. “Can’t you see she’s half asleep and scared out of her wits? Of course it wasn’t the wind. It was something else.”
But Lavinia picks her way across the room and shuts the window. With great authority she says, “Well, it’s possible. We do get freak winds up here on the hill sometimes. They used to call this street Loma de Viento, you know, before they decided everything in the neighborhood should have a literary name. So silly.”
My scalp prickles again, just as it did when I saw the words in the curb. “Loma de Viento. What does that mean?” I ask in a voice thin and quavery.
Roddy snorts. “It was a bad day indeed when they discontinued the Latin requirement.” He emphasizes his words with the barrel of the pistol.
“For heaven’s sake, watch where you point that thing,” says Lavinia. She turns to me. “Loosely translated, it means Windy Hill, my dear.”
In a daze, I watch them put my bed back together. Everyone agrees the question of how it happened is better left for the morning. When Tony and the Desmonds have gone back to their own rooms, Fairfax takes me by the shoulders. “It was the dream, wasn’t it?”
I nod.
“Have you ever thought … you know, there are people who can move things with their minds. I don’t even know what they call it. Psycho-something.” She leans toward me. There are fine lines of tension in her forehead. “Electra, I’m afraid for you. You’ve got to do something about this. Talk to somebody. Please.”
I struggle to keep my balance on the wire between laughter and tears. “Who can I talk to? Just tell me. Who knows how to stop the wind?”
“I’m trying to tell you it’s not the wind! It’s something inside you.”
“And I’m trying to tell you it is the wind. Crazy as it sounds, it is the wind.”
She lets go of my shoulders and heaves a sigh, one I have heard often before, the one that says, all right for now, but this isn’t settled yet. “The least you can do is let me stay with you,” she says. “I don’t think you should be alone tonight.”
So we climb into bed together, as we often did when we were little girls. With my head next to hers, I float on the surface of exhausted sleep, thinking about our address. Loma de Viento. 713 Windy Hill. The rational part of me assures the irrational part that it’s just a coincidence, that predetermination is an outmoded notion, that nothing from my dark, unknown past has manipulated me into moving to a part of town where there are “freak winds.”
These thoughts lead to others, about the man in my dream. I know where the words of the nightmare response came from now. I can almost relive the incident, moment by moment. It is a foggy day on the orphanage playground. I am six years old. I see a man on the other side of the chain-link fence. He is hunched into a big, dark coat. He has a lovely, wild beard and a fisherman’s cap with a bill on it. I wander toward him, fascinated. He looks so flat and unreal in the fog. He calls my name. His breath is strong and sour. His voice is strange—husky and broken and wet. He is crying. He whispers the words. “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind!” Then he half runs, half stumbles, away into the mist.
Now the dream has brought to mind other forgotten incidents, other times when I have noticed a strange man in a dark coat and a fisherman’s cap. Six, seven, a dozen times perhaps. Interspersed throughout my life. The same old seaman watching me, almost always from a distance.
When I wake up the next morning, Fairfax has already slipped away. I hear her practicing the cello in her room down the hall, making a lot of mistakes. She replays the same passages again and again, loudly and impatiently. The day is clear and still, and the sun pours through my window while I pick up rumpled papers, rehang pictures, and replace my battered belongings in their usual cluttered order. There is no permanent damage. Everything looks just as it did before—perhaps a little less dusty.
At breakfast, I dutifully chew and swallow, chew and swallow, and assure everyone that everything is all right. Roddy embarks on a detailed story about the big storm of ’58, which uprooted trees, snapped power lines, and left half the houses on Loma de Viento without roofs. Not number 713, he assures us, smiling and stabbing at the yolk of his fried egg. There’s not another house in Las Piedras as well built as number 713.
That afternoon, we gather for tea in Roddy’s study,
my favorite of all the rooms. Its walls look as if they are made of books. A single leaded-glass window and a stone fireplace peek out from among the gold titles and leather bindings. A threadbare Oriental carpet, mostly red, covers the floor. We mill about among the overstuffed chairs, sipping Earl Grey and Lapsang Souchong. Roddy munches gingersnaps and lectures Fairfax on the origins of her name. Nobody says anything about the wind.
“Such a happy quirk of fate,” he says. “The name Fairfax comes from the Old English fyrfeax, meaning ‘fire-haired.”’
A little smile drifts across her face, for the first time today. Fate, of course, had nothing to do with her name, not in the usual way, at least. At Our Lady of the Harbor, Sister Jude, the mother superior, had the duty of naming foundlings. When she was not at prayers or locked away in her office, she spent her time poring over copies of Beowulf or the tales of Alfred the king. At vespers, we used to whisper jokes about her. “Sister Jude speaks Old English like a native. Pass it on.” “Grendel is Sister Jude’s boyfriend. Pass it on.”
Roddy turns to me with animation. “You’ve an interesting name, too,” he says.
“What—Thorpe?” I don’t know anything about my surname except that Sister Jude chose it, probably on one of her less energetic days. I have always imagined her closing her eyes and pointing, by accident, to the name Thorpe in an open phone book.
“Well … Thorpe’s interesting, but only vaguely. Comes from thearf, meaning ‘need’ or ‘distress.”’
How appropriate for an infant found in the dark on an orphanage stair, with nothing between her skin and the fog but a sailor’s tattered peacoat. Maybe I have sold Sister Jude short all these years.
“No, I was thinking more along the lines of Electra,” says Roddy. “Now there’s a truly fascinating name, don’t you agree? I would guess it figures somehow in your family history.”
I take a long swallow of hot tea. It seems to go down my throat in an irregular lump. The Desmonds don’t know yet about my background or Fairfax’s. I wish I could tell Roddy that I am named after my maternal grandmother or a special friend of the family. But the truth is I am only called Electra because that is the name the nuns found scribbled on a bit of soiled canvas in the pocket of my coat-blanket.
“There’s not much of a history in my family,” I reply, hoping Roddy will become discouraged and move on to some other subject.
But his eyes are bright, and he will not swerve. “Outside the obvious places, the myths and Freud’s books and such, I’ve only come across the name once before. Quite a story. There was an old ship, the Electra, used to sail up and down the coast around San Francisco. She was an antique—a barkentine, built to carry cargo, I suppose, but they’d redone her for passengers. Sort of a tourist attraction. She was a lovely sight heading through the Golden Gate. Quite pretty. Doesn’t matter if she was old. A lot of old things are pretty.” He winks at Lavinia.
Suddenly, the tea is swirling around inside me. It’s too hot in the study. I glance toward the window. Maybe I can open it.
Roddy puffs at his pipe. Clouds of sweet-smelling smoke billow in the sunlight. “Quite an amazing story. She got caught in a terrible storm out near the Farallons and actually went to the bottom. November it was. Must be twenty years ago. Let’s see. I believe it was the year Sartre declined the Nobel.” He studies the ceiling as he works a mental sum. “So it’s actually twenty-one years ago now.”
He shakes his head. “They should never have had a ship like that out so late in the season. That’s what everybody said. Could have been a real disaster, but against all odds, against incredible odds, I might even say, the captain got the passengers and crew into lifeboats and saved them all. All but one, that is. A newborn baby, who was lost in the panic somehow. Quite a heroic story. You can imagine what a field day the newspapers had.”
A ship with my name, sunk the month I was born, the only fatality a newborn baby. Just a string of coincidences. That’s all. A string of coincidences. I repeat the words, but they are empty.
I don’t feel very well. My cup slips from my hand. I hear it break as it hits the edge of the table, a distant sound, like the tinkle of wind chimes.
I wobble across the room and unlatch the window. Before I can even push it open, a brutal gust of wind tears it from my hands and flings it outward. The window smashes against the rock wall of the house. Terror roars down my spine in an icy wave.
The carpet has turned into a roiling ocean. I see the ship, masts splintered, sails hanging in rags, wind driving the rain in horizontal sheets. Rain. The air seems full of it. From this wall of black water, Sister Jude emerges, holding out something rectangular and white. But the wind steals my breath, whirls me around like a leaf, and whatever it is she offers me, I can’t seem to reach it.
“The window’s broken!” Fairfax cries.
Dimly I sense that someone has a strong grip on my arm. I think it is Tony. Or is it the wind? Or is it both of them?
Then the world degenerates into noise. The wind howls. A bargain is a bargain! Part and parcel! Beneath that, there is an undercurrent of thuds and crashes, paper tearing and fluttering, the further shattering of glass, and Fairfax screaming my name over and over again.
Then the dream closes in around me, and nothing else seems real.
It’s a very long time before I can get the order of the words right. “My days shuttle past, windy life without hope, O remember I am a weaver …” Thousands of possibilities, none of them right, till finally one concatenation slips into the darkness like a key into a lock, and I wake up, gasping.
I am lying on my bed, a heavy wool blanket thrown over me. Fairfax dozes on the window seat, her head nodding forward. Tony sits beside me, reading a thick green book, Paranormal Psychological Phenomena. It has library reference numbers printed on the spine. There’s a purplish bruise beneath one of his eyes and a Band-Aid stuck in his hair.
“What happened to you?” I say.
He looks up, startled at first; then his dimples appear and his cheeks turn red. “Oh nothing,” he says. “Hey, Fairfax. She’s awake.”
Fairfax snaps upright, her eyes full of sleepy confusion. Through the window behind her, I can see that it’s dark outside. I hear the distant braying of the foghorn on Las Piedras Point. The house has a peculiar, muffled feeling about it, as if it’s wrapped in cotton.
“How long have I been asleep?” I ask.
“Hours,” says Fairfax. “Do you remember what happened?”
“No. It was noisy. I opened the window. I’ve been dreaming, haven’t I?”
“It was more than a dream,” says Tony. “The library’s a shambles. Roddy and Lavinia are still downstairs putting books away and sweeping up glass.”
I imagine Lavinia’s china teacups pounded to shards, the beautiful leather books lying bent and torn on the Oriental carpet, and kindly, whimsical old Roddy picking each one up and dusting it off like an injured child. What have they done to deserve this?
I sit up and test my feet against the floor. I feel as if I’ve been beaten with a board. “I’m going to the orphanage,” I say. “I’ve got to talk to Sister Jude.” But when I try to stand up, my knees buckle and I fall back onto the bed.
“Take it easy,” says Tony. “Here. You’ve been tossing and turning so much your pillow’s like a rock. Let me fluff it up for you.” He bats at the pillow clumsily, his worried gaze never leaving my face. “Fairfax told me all about this orphanage of yours. One thing’s for sure. It’s too far to go in the fog.”
Fairfax rises abruptly, hands clenched, thumbs inside her fists. “Electra, there’s a professor in the psychology department who’s interested in problems like yours. I think we should go see him. The orphanage can wait till tomorrow.”
I take a long breath. I remember how we used to argue about the difference between that which is incomprehensible and that which is impossible. I could never make her believe in the square roots of negative numbers, or in infinities, or even in the empty set. “E
ven nothing is something,” she would say. Perhaps the notion of wind as a conscious entity is just as difficult.
“I don’t need a psychologist, Fairfax. I need to see Sister Jude.”
“How the hell do you know?” She is trembling, and the veins in her neck stand out. “Do you realize that Tony almost got killed this afternoon shielding you from flying glass and books? And here you are, blabbering about going to see some half-witted nun who’s so far away from the real world that she probably doesn’t even care what year it is. You know, there are other people’s lives in danger here! It’s not just you anymore.” She almost screams the last sentence.
By the time she finishes, I am trembling, too, and working my fists around inside my pockets to keep from lashing out at her.
Tony touches my arm. “Look, Electra. I don’t know anything about parapsychology.” He gestures toward the thick green book with the library numbers. “I’m not sure I even believe in it. But I am a scholar. And I do know that when you’ve got a specific problem, the best way to start on a solution is to track down every lead you can find—even the wildest. Maybe Fairfax is right. Maybe this guy can help you figure out what’s going on. How will you ever know if you don’t go see him?”
Track down every lead, even the wildest. I almost smile at the irony of Tony’s words. I look out the window at the gray wall of fog. Somewhere beyond it, beating the waves into foam, whistling among the offshore rocks, the wind is waiting for me. The marrow of my bones is cold with eerie certainty that the wind means to kill anyone who tries to keep it from getting what it wants. There is no time left for pride.
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