by Marge Piercy
26
She had not noticed they had lilacs in the yard until she woke one warm May morning to their heavy sexual fragrance. She discovered them in bloom near their common fence with the Schulmans. Cutting an armful, she brought them to mingle their perfumes with the smells of new wood and sawdust. Overhead an electric saw was already whining. With a dragging thump something heavy was being toted through the empty rooms up there. Monday Aaron Aardvark had begun. Tom had talked another renovation into waiting till fall with an inventive patter about how hot weather adversely affected high quality cabinetwork. Her insurance money had come through. The money that was to flow from Ross to the bank to pay off the mortgages on the other two buildings was reputed to be “in process,” whatever that meant.
Sheba lay on the kitchen table, washing her swollen belly where the glossy hair was thinning. She was a little cross and snapped at Ali when he tried to snuggle. Her belly was definitely in the way and her nipples, swollen. Daria had a birthing box all prepared in the darkest closet.
She was working out the minimal amounts of sugar or honey that made a rhubarb compote palatable, with and without orange juice, so she had four different combinations simmering. Her mind was partly engaged with variations (nutmeg; ginger; candied ginger; orange peel; cinnamon) and partly engaged with how to prove to Tracy, who had only been home once since the fire, that life in the new house could be tolerable.
The phone rang, forcing Daria to turn down the fire under her four variations. “Cesaro! It’s been a long time.”
“Yes.… Well, how are you doing, Daria?”
“I’m surprisingly fine. Ross had me burned out in Lexington, you know.”
“Now, Daria, he said you’d made wild accusations—”
“Did he also tell you I finally got most of the settlement I wanted because I hired a private investigator who found kerosene residues in the cement floor of the basement?”
“Why didn’t you call me when you had the fire? I was shocked to hear about it.”
“I called Gussie—”
“That’s who told me. Why didn’t you call me?”
“Cesaro, I haven’t had support from anyone in the family but Gussie. In many ways you’re closer to Ross than to me. Tony and I no longer even speak.”
“Please don’t be bitter. I’ve tried very hard to put pressure on Rusty to make a decent and just settlement. I truly have.… I have a few things to tell you.…” His voice deepened, trailed off.
“So what’s new?”
“Daria, Rusty was married last Saturday, to Gail.”
“My, my, he sure was in some kind of hurry.” She was annoyed, but not as hurt as Cesaro expected. The news brought back her anger with a grating rush. A door opened and a hot dry wind laden with grit and smoke blew in. “Big wedding?”
“Small., by their standards. In the rose garden at Hamilton. Only immediate friends and family. Perhaps eighty people. Ninety at the outside. They have a big old house—a white elephant in Greek Revival style. Then there are a couple of smaller houses. Gail and Ross are going to be living in one of them, near her kennels.”
“How many dogs attended the wedding?” She understood that Cesaro had gone.
He chuckled. “About twenty. I’m glad you’re taking this well.”
“I wish them each other.”
“Just before he flew down to the Dominican Republic, Daria, Rusty told me he still loves you. That the marriage had just become impossible. Your life-styles were incompatible.”
“He sure loves with a fiery passion. He tried to kill me, Cesaro, and if you don’t believe me, I’d be pleased to show you the detective’s report.”
Cesaro cleared his throat. “You’re not aware Rusty set detectives on you just before the divorce.”
“I am aware of it.”
“Oh? Anyhow, he dug up little to your detriment, I want you to know, except that you seem to be involved with a radical group of troublemakers who are trying to prey off property holders in Allston.”
“Having moved into the neighborhood and having experienced firsthand Ross’s use of fire as a personal and financial tool, I have a lot in common with that group—SON. Which I do not find a radical group, anyhow.”
“Daria, Rusty told me that the Boston Red Squad has a dossier on one of them, a common laborer Rusty said he’d seen with you—apparently you approached him about rebuilding the Lexington house after the fire?”
“He’s a very good carpenter,” Daria said smiling.
“He’s a dangerous person—”
“As for the common laborer, he’s skilled, and just how would you have described Pops? And do you remember the Boston Red Squad pestering Grandpa because he was such a dangerous anarchist and played bocce at the old anarchist picnics?”
“Daria, I know you’re not involved with this man, but you ought to be careful about your associations.”
“Cesaro, I would say the same to you, in spades. How involved are you with Ross’s machinations? Cut free of him. I won’t warn you again.”
Cesaro was silent for a moment. “What do you mean?”
“We both know what I mean.”
“Rusty has insurance with me, of course.”
“Cesaro, I know you’re not cut in in any obvious way, as opposed to Tony who’s in over his head. I don’t think you’ve owned anything with them since that perfectly legitimate condo near Chestnut Hill Reservoir. But clean up your act. I’m serious. I care about you. Don’t repeat this to Ross.”
“I won’t. I’m not sure exactly what you’re hinting at?”
“Just put distance between you and Ross in your business dealings. Marriage or no, Ross is going down. Don’t let him pull you with him.”
There was another silence. “You never used to take much interest in Rusty’s business.”
“That-all changed with the divorce, didn’t it? I let myself remain ignorant. I was wrong. That was close to immoral.”
“I don’t see what morality has to do with it.”
“If you don’t like immorality, try illegality. Cesaro, listen to me.”
“What could happen?”
It was her turn to remain silent. She shifted awkwardly in the kitchen chair looking longingly at her simmering rhubarb.
“I shall consider what you have said to me very carefully, Daria. And I would like to see that detective’s report. Send it on to me, please.”
The assistant attorney general, Bloomberg, assigned to work with SON on the arson case had authorized wiring Lou. The next afternoon Lou had a meeting scheduled with Chuck Petris to explain why he had not managed to set fire to Number 71 and when he would make his next attempt. He was to explain about the patrols and suggest a daytime fire.
Mac was running Lou, as he put it, borrowing his jargon from spy novels. Indeed, both Mac and Lou were acting in a thriller of their own devising. They met in prearranged public places. Lou insisted on seeing Mac daily, for he pinned his faith for a good deal on Mac: the Harvard man would save him. He confided his worries, his troubles, his feelings about his family to Mac.
A deep mutual contempt between Lou and Tom ruled their few interactions. Out loud at SON core meetings, Tom commiserated with Mac for having to deal in such a daily and intimate way with scum; but Daria observed that Mac was enjoying himself. He was putting together a history of what Lou knew about the real estate manipulations of the men he had worked for, prime material for Mac’s thesis. It was a symbiotic relationship that seemed equally fascinating to both men. Lou had his own college professor, as he called Mac (ignoring his status as graduate student and instructor) who was interested in his life, his ideas, his struggles. Lou was flattered. What did Mac want? Perhaps he was touching what he thought of as reality, brute reality, proving himself tougher and more streetwise than the working-class people in SON. Lou was Mac’s own first-rate informant.
Mac gave them all reports on Lou, daily weather reports, as he stood before them pushing his glasses back on his snub nose, pla
ying with a lock of his own moderately short, moderately curly brown hair, fingers wandering to the bowl of the pipe he was forbidden to smoke at SON meetings. Mac purported to admire what he called the technical brilliance of Lou’s arson. In his high-pitched nasal voice he declaimed, “Lou has on call inside his head plans of every building he’s ever worked on or burned—”
“What’s special about that?” Tom demanded. “Of course you remember your own work.”
“When I discuss with him any particular set, he has the uncanny ability to describe precisely how the rooms were laid out, the floor plan, the wall construction, the roofing material. He has total recall on how he arranged that fire. It’s a highly developed skill with a methodology he has mastered. He has the brains to apply himself to something better.” He looked straight at Tom. “The man doesn’t have to be a common electrician or carpenter. He could be an architect, an engineer, not something completely mindless.”
“Sure,” said Fay. “The way things are going he’ll end up a college professor, and we’ll have you running around the streets setting fires, you’re so gaga about him. So tomorrow’s the big day when he’s going to tape Petris?”
The next evening in a bar in farthest Brighton where they had arrived separately for a rendezvous in a dark booth, Lou boasted to Mac that he had managed to have an explicit conversation with Chuck Petris. “I got him to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. He was in a good mood for once. A shitload of money just came through for that North Cambridge development. Listen, man, he mentioned sums for the burning. He chattered about old jobs I did for him. He was talking my head off.”
Daria’s phone rang within half an hour of Mac’s getting home. Mac was in an unusually expansive mood to call her, for she was on the bottom of his private hierarchy of the SON core group. But tonight Mac was a proud papa excited by what his Lou had done.
The following morning Mac rushed to the attorney general’s office to listen to the tape. The assistant attorney general, Bloomberg, played what turned out to be strange burbling sounds, static and occasionally Lou sounding like a foghorn or the bellowing plaint of an ocean liner in distress. The other voices consisted of underwater moaning, the subaquean calls of whales.
“The FBI has expertise in taping from witnesses,” Mac announced that evening with a bitter grimace. “I don’t think those state bozos know how to do it right. Lou and I were keenly disappointed.”
Fay made her eyes big. “Unless he screwed up on purpose.”
Mac pulled his lower lip between his even white teeth and glared. “You think he’s two-timing us?”
“Spy versus spy,” Tom said with mock sympathy. “It’s dreadful how you can’t trust your own double agents these days.”
Lou balked at returning to have the same conversation with Petris a second time. “I got to tick off that Number Seventy-one soon,” he complained. “They won’t trust me anymore if I don’t get it done.”
The attorney general’s office claimed that Lou had used the recorder incorrectly; Lou claimed he had used it just the way they had set it up. Daria wondered if the case would peter out in a fizzle of ineffective technology.
In the cat care book Daria had purchased, it said that cats preferred privacy and darkness for giving birth, a closet, a drawer. Sheba commenced her labor on the kitchen counter between the Robot Coupe and the convection oven, in a large mixing bowl which she had prepared herself on the sly by tearing the morning’s Globe to shreds along with a couple of pages of Daria’s neatly typed manuscript. Sheba lay purring and occasionally giving guttural cries but the first kitten did not begin to appear till after forty minutes of second stage labor, while the three of them were trying to eat supper. That ended any formal meal. Daria ran for the birth box and set it up in the center of the kitchen. Sheba wanted attendants, clearly.
Mariela proudly called Tom, saying his number aloud, as Daria squatted over the birth box making sure the kitten was emerging properly, in this case with the paws extended, just fine. Black. Sheba sniffed with some puzzlement at the slimy wet thing and Daria was afraid she would not know what to do. Then Sheba began licking the membrane, nuzzling and licking to stimulate breathing. The second kitten came quickly, also black. As Sheba leaned to deal with the second, after eating the first placenta, Daria examined the first. Female. Daria remembered from childhood that if you did not sex them when the fur was still wet, it was harder later. The kitten seemed normal, intact, ready to nurse, with ears folded down and eyes closed but the small mouth parting to suck. The first two in their emergent state looked more like little hamsters than cats.
Number two was female, out head first. Sheba was behaving purposefully, severing the cord, eating the afterbirth, cleaning the kitten and herself. “Could that be all?” Daria asked aloud. Sheba lay down with the kittens and stared at everybody, crying out in what Daria could only think of as crowing, but she was still panting. Daria grew nervous, wondering if something was wrong. She feared a stillbirth blocking the canal, or an improper presentation. She was glad when Tom came and went running to hug him; but he had never seen kittens born and was more fascinated than helpful. Daria had her cat care book in the cookbook holder, had gathered the recommended cotton balls, sterilized squares of towel, surgical scissors et cet., but she was nervous. She finished her dinner standing over the box.
“Mariela, don’t,” Sandra María warned. “They’re too frail. You’ll upset Sheba. They’ll grow fast—be patient. Now you just look at them.”
The phone rang. Daria did not think to move and neither did Sandra María, both deep in empathy with the laboring cat. Tom picked it up. “It’s Robin.”
“Robin?” Daria swung around. “My daughter?” When she took the phone from Tom and spoke, “Robin? Hello. Are you all right?” she heard her voice issuing differently, as if she had a special mother’s voice. Perhaps she was merely nervous.
“You didn’t even call me about that fire.”
“Robin, after the way we parted last, I wasn’t about to call you for anything. I was very hurt.”
“Well, you can laugh at me now, because it’s my turn to be hurt!”
Melodrama was unlike Robin. To Daria’s alarm, her stoical daughter began to sob into the phone. “Robin, what is it? What’s happened?” When Robin didn’t answer she continued, “Do you want to come over here?”
“I don’t even know where here is. I called home and I got a recording with this number. Then Uncle Cesaro told me you’d had a fire at home.”
“Why don’t you come over?” She gave instructions. “Sheba, the cat, is having her kittens tonight.”
“Sheba the cat?” Robin sounded blank. “Oh, Tracy’s cat.”
“Actually I think she’s more mine now. If she isn’t Mariela’s.”
“Who’s Mariela?”
“Just come over, Robin. Thing’s are quite different here.”
“Mother? I’m sorry.” Robin hung up.
It occurred to her that she had just received one of the only apologies Robin had ever made since reaching puberty. Robin had seemed to feel that growing up meant that she never had to say she was sorry, never had to accept blame for anything and that never again would she admit any occurrence was her responsibility. If other people got hurt, that was their fault: that had been her attitude since fourteen.
What was wrong? She would find out soon. Yet she was smiling as she turned back to the corner holding the birth box. Her glance fell on Ali, forgotten, crouching on top of the refrigerator with eyes round and orange as wheels of cheddar cheese. He looked frightened. She realized no one had fed him for hours. She scraped some of the abundant leftovers from supper onto a saucer and handed it up to him. He gobbled all gratefully, still on the refrigerator. To the room in general she announced, “Well, that was my long estranged daughter, Robin, who’s on her way over here. Finally.”
Tom caught her gaze. “Now I meet this one.”
“Or now I meet this one,” Daria said. “I haven’t seen Robin since
Christmas.”
“Another’s coming.” Sandra María announced. “That’s a good mama, come on and bear down.” She was gently rubbing Sheba’s belly. Sheba was braced against the side of the box. Something wet and slick was beginning to protrude. But it was not black: it was orange with faint tabby bars.
“Well, look at that,” Daria said as she examined the newest kitten. “Now how did that one happen? It’s a boy, Mrs. Sheba, it’s a boy, but whose boy is it?”
“They could have recessive genes for tabby,” Sandra María suggested. “If black is dominant.”
“I like a scientific answer,” Daria said. “I was thinking more about Fox, Annette’s cat. Mariela, did you let Fox in?”
“Noooooo,” Mariela said. “He came in himself. Through the back door. He opened it.”
“I’ll bet,” Daria said. “Do you think we’re done?”
Very, very gently Sandra María rubbed Sheba’s belly. “Not so, I think. We have more to come.”
“Imagine if we had children like that: four to six at a time, and at four months they’re ready to hit the road,” Daria said slyly.
Mariela’s eyes got very large. “Would I have to leave? Would I go away to college like Tracy?”
“Have we sent kitties out to work?” Sandra María asked, stroking Mariela’s black curls. “So the missing daughter comes home?”
“I hate to say this, but you have to be careful. Say nothing about SON. She’s her daddy’s girl, and she keeps his secrets rather than mine.”
“What do you think is wrong?” Tom was making coffee for everybody. “Sylvia’s problem? Which does by the way seem certain.”
“I doubt that. Not Robin.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You don’t like to admit your daughters have sex lives. Neither will I, when the time comes.”
“Tracy certainly does. But while I’m sure Robin’s been to bed with a couple of her male friends, she finds sex gross, as she told me once. She doesn’t like anyone quite that close to her. It’s too threatening, too messy.”