by Lori Baker
Get out! Hey! Get out of there, you, Johnny Twomey! We gentlemen must talk in private, eh? Gather your bits and get out. Where? How should I know where? All of London is at your disposal! But see you are back before seven if you want your pay! cries Girard; there is a sudden, frantic stirring at the far table, and a small man, about fifty years old, dressed in a smeared smock and apron, pushes past, softly muttering—whether apologies or imprecations, I don’t know; nor does anybody else; so let it go, let it go. It is my grandfather’s illfated assistant, Johnny Twomey, who will be fired for incompetence before the end of the month. On the table he has vacated lie a dozen dead birds he was in the process of skinning, along with the tools of his grisly trade: scissors, knives, nippers, needles and thread, cotton wool, a jar of arsenical soap—and several more of those paper cones, idly awaiting their occupants.
He is bad, very bad, says Felix Girard, carefully picking up, and then lovingly rubbing, between his thick forefinger and thumb, a delicate skin with feathers of deep cobalt blue, which he then turns, exposing a large bald patch, like a scorched tract in a forest, which Twomey has left on one side. Careless. It is ruined! I have hired him as a favor to my friend Petrook, but … he shrugs mournfully … What more can I do? He ruins too much. Some can learn, some cannot, is it not so, Dr. Owen?
Harry Owen in his tweeds gapes slightly, hung now on my grandfather’s hook. Some persons have more potential than others …
Ah! You are an idealist at heart, I see, doctor! You would like to say to me that poor learning is often the fruit of poor teaching, and that the pupil’s failure is the teacher’s fault, but you fear to offend! Anyone can learn, eh? It is a good thing, this idealism, it does you credit. But I, well—
He sighs, shrugs. Great eloquence of shoulders.
I am an idealist no longer.
Then pushing aside the table’s contents, he plunges beneath it, broad back exposed, like an island, like the hump of a seal, and emerges with a large book bound in black leather, which he spread-eagles on the tabletop, contemplates, with eyes moist, red rimmed, while fingering the blazing thicket of his beard.
Yes. This is the one.
Looking up sharply.
Where is Dell’oro? Is he still not here? Leopoldo Dell’oro! Come out, shrinking violet, come out! It is time, and past time, to show yourself!
• • •
Honestly I expect no result from this. My father has interred himself in some secret space, he is lost, I can hear him rummaging, rummaging; no one will extract him; but my grandfather knows him better than I, for here he is; he has emerged; evidently he was nearby all the time; sheepishly now he insinuates himself into the room, still overdressed, hot, disheveled, sleepy. Tugging still at cuffs and collar. Nervous twitching.
• • •
Very well. Now we shall begin.
• • •
They gather around the table where lies my grandfather’s map book, opened to the sapphire Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea, there where the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the Leeward Islands, and the Windward Islands sweep, like the snap of a serpent’s tail, from the southernmost tip of Florida to the north coast of Venezuela.
Gentlemen, my grandfather says, she is here.
Gently he lays his great thumb on the green protruding bulb of the Yucatan.
Let me explain. As reported by my colleague Lord Willoughby in the Proceedings of 1840, which I for you now quote, “The fossil remains of an ancient cetacean, measuring thirty feet long, were found here imbedded in a sheltered plateau approximately three miles inland from Punta Yalkubul; but could not be excavated due to difficulties of approach and terrain and resistance from the native peoples.” There, gentlemen, she lies; and so she shall continue, unless we go, and dig her out.
Beatific smile then, rapture of the beard, so incongruous, he radiating joy, drooling with it practically, this big, rough man, my grandfather.
I propose we shall go in October. Harry Ellis of Montagu House has agreed to fund us. Hugh, what do you say?
Blackstone narrows his expressionless yellow eyes, cocks his head, says, It could be done.
From Hugh Blackstone, it is an endorsement. And you, Dr. Owen?
Some dithering now. Willoughby’s reports are still unconfirmed …
So you do not believe our colleague Lord Willoughby? His word is not enough for you?
Wicked provocative gleam of eye from Girard, the angelical banished, now the devil behind the beard.
It could prove unfortunate to undertake such a venture without proper confirmation and corroboration.
Laughter at this from Girard, Blackstone meanwhile following, with his cool glance, a hummingbird’s trajectory along the perimeter of the wall; brilliant green, bumping and bobbing beneath the moldings. As for my father, Leo Dell’oro, he glances anxiously from one party to the next, antennas twirling; rubs, quickly, one wrist against the heel of the opposite hand. Rub himself raw he would; and did, when I was a child.
• • •
But that’s not yet. Not yet. I don’t exist as yet, not even as a gleam in my father’s eye. Maybe I’m the intimation of a gleam.
• • •
Dr. Owen, says Felix Girard, stifling his laughter, you are the soul of caution! It is you who will save us all from our doom. If Harry Ellis, and the museum, trust Lord Willoughby’s report, what more is there to think about? If they will pay, what else is it to us?
It should matter very much to us.
Ah.
Disappointment now, a frown among the russet fronds. Yet warmly he grasps Harry Owen’s elbow. Promise me at least to think about it, Dr. Owen. I would like to have you with us. It will be a very great thing for us, and a very good thing, I think, for you, too, if you would come. But now I think I hear my Tildy in the salon. We will talk more later.
He takes Hugh Blackstone by the arm then, and together they depart the room, whispering of the necessary preparations, while my father and Harry Owen linger behind.
He touches my father’s arm.
Have you decided to go, then?
Oh, yes. My father is quick about this, has no doubts, smiles his gentle smile. Yes, of course I shall go.
Where does it come from, this unexpected certainty?
Harry Owen releases him then, but my father remains behind among the orchids, which seem to float, like hallucinations, in this very hot room. Feverflowers: my grandfather’s pets. Gently he caresses the ice-green blossom, Angraecum funale—the corded ghost. It is smooth, soft, cool, lightly furred. Whose cheek is this I touch? Then a sudden stirring, a sibilant, soft rustle; Clotilde is in the doorway. Her skin is pale and cool as ivory; so pale, so cool; like one of Petrook’s sculptured goddesses.
This though is an illusion.
She laughs. Flesh and blood.
Papa says to tell you dinner is served, she says, and half lowers herself in a hideously ironic curtsey. Then she runs away, like a child, boots clattering noisily upon the floor. Leaving him gawping.
• • •
Delectable. Delectable. Oh mother mine.
• • •
They will speak no more this night about the journey that is to come (for it will come, despite certain reluctances, it approaches them already, slipping quickly toward them across the waves). Instead, in a hot, dark, dining room, as the dead look on, they raise and lower their spoons and listen as my grandfather speaks of journeys past. He is eloquent, and he has been everywhere: Bain Dzak, Cyprus, the Canary Islands, the Basque regions of Spain, Argentina, Baalbeck … he speaks of these with affectionate nostalgia, as another might speak of long-missing friends. Yet what a dismal company they make! My mother is not there; the procuress only, she does not eat the meal; or eats it elsewhere; somewhere; in another room; somewhere else, in the warren. So it is the four men. My father, gazing at the table-cloth, starting slightly each time anybody speaks to him—Hugh Blackstone, eating little, saying less, regarding them all with his cynical yellow eyes—Harry Owen, w
rapped up in his tweed, growing appalled as his glance explores the collector’s cases, finding here, stretched out in supplication, the black leathery hands of a gorilla or a chimpanzee, so like ours, yet so unlike; there, the famished, begging grins of cayman, alligator, crocodile.
• • •
What can it mean, this collecting of my grandfather’s, all of it, any of it? These creatures in their sullen, half-rotted profusion represent not the multiplication of knowledge but instead its opposite—the impossibility of knowing anything at all. Many things, dead; corpses, carapaces, shells; collected, catalogued, cut open once, then cut again—flayed—essence gone, destroyed in the cutting, if it ever was there at all.
• • •
They are no different, these four. Grist for the mill. As they know. Anxiously sipping their soup through clenched teeth. And him, too, the servant with the Asiatic features who stealthily slips in, lights the lights, departs again. Him especially.
Objects in the collection of.
• • •
Lacking only the ether, the scissors, the arsenical soap, and the pin.
• • •
There is one thing living, though. It is the sound of my mother’s voice. A trill of laughter, musical, soft, is coming from somewhere in that place, from some unseen room or unknown corridor (filled, no doubt, with other carcasses, other carpets, other artifacts). My mother, alivest thing in that cabinet of mummies, living and dead, is laughing.
Leo hears her. His eyes are round, startled, his spoon suspended in dense midair. What’s that look on his face? It’s not surprise; it’s something else. Something like surprise. Apprehension, that’s what it is. Apprehension, bordering on fear.
• • •
He knows already, of course. He already feels the trouble she will be. It’s there, in her voice, for he who has ears to hear it. Attraction and repulsion. He wants to run away, but he can’t. It’s too late already.
• • •
What can Harry Owen think, glancing up from his soup, seeing the fear on my father’s face? And then, too, seeing the cayman grinning at him from behind my father’s shoulder. Grinning confidentially, with something like a wink.
He hears her, too, of course, this Harry Owen. My father isn’t the only one with ears.
• • •
Dash! cries Felix Girard. Open another bottle of ’28!
Alcohol does help sometimes, it’s true.
• • •
They are waiting for her to appear again, Harry Owen and my father both. If the truth be told.
But she’s hidden herself. She, the desired one. She’s plaiting her long golden hair, tucking herself into bed with lizards and vultures looking on, so that in the end, when my father and Harry Owen can bear to wait no longer, it’s the bell suspended above Petrook’s shop door that bids them a cheerful good night, not she. Despite their hopes. The man himself is still sitting there, hunched like a spider over his desk, with a sallow cup of tea at his elbow, tepid, grassy liquid gleaming dully in the well of the saucer; when he sees them he pauses in his work for a moment, glances up with those dark, feral eyes, then quickly away. Not much of a leave-taking this. They two will part disappointed on the pavement, Leo Dell’oro, Harry Owen, two friends well met, one turning left, one right, into that stinking garbage tip of a city. The night air heavy, hot, black; thick with cinders. A red glow on the horizon, sulfurous stench. Analogy to hell artlessly implied. Thick guttural vibration, this is the life of the city, its arteries pumping, darkly, warmly, all the engines turning over, then turning again. The vital essence sparked. It is a place on the verge of the future. Upstairs, oblivious to all, my grandfather and his friend Hugh Blackstone will go on, and on, the exotic servant opening another bottle, then another. Behind that lighted window. There are so many lighted windows in this city, curtains drawn, a scrim descending, shutting out, shutting in; and so much is going on behind them, who knows what. Vertiginous thought. Best look away. These two are done anyway, for now.
Such an awkward parting. Perhaps I shall see you again. Perhaps. One toward Mayfair, the other, God knows.
• • •
Of course they will sail, in the end. Despite all doubts. They haven’t any choice, not really.
• • •
My father has decided already, on the strength of a certain blue glance. This is foreordained. The other will dither for a while, finally read Felix Girard’s Ghosts of Bain Dzak, find it brilliant, say he is sailing on the strength of it, when really prompted by boredom. Ambition. Rebellion. Because his father prefers him to pursue the clove trade, while he prefers not. Hence: dislike of hearth and home. Restlessness. Dissatisfaction. And something else he cannot name. Will not.
Such is her influence.
Like a planet, she draws her acolytes.
Not that she does it on purpose. Misunderstandings that might arise are never her fault. She’s innocence in a tower, guarded by dragons, plaiting her golden hair.
Of course she, too, will sail. This is her desire. Regardless who may disapprove: and many shall. But she’s willful, my mother, and fiercely attached to her father, the bear.
• • •
Papa will stay with Clotilde always. Papa will never go away again!
• • •
She is a child, sitting on his lap, poring with him through books containing exotic colored plates of faraway places. He has just completed his own book, Felix Girard’s Ghosts of Bain Dzak, after years holed up in the attic in his father-in-law’s house with his fossils spread out around him on two long, scar-topped, spindle-legged tables. All day and all night he spent there, in those two cramped, inconvenient rooms, writing; my mother as a baby crawled among his loose and discarded papers on the floor, as a tot leaned on his shoulder while he wrote, contaminated his inkwell with spiderwebs, whirled like a dervish through all his accumulated research until she finally collapsed, exhausted from her games; then he read aloud to her from his work. She was too young to understand much, but what of it? It is the voice that matters, and all these years later she still recalls the sound of it, her father’s voice, intoning: In the distant steppe, the camels stride … Wherever she was, curled up at his feet on the floor, or against the wall among the piles of discarded papers, dropping into sleep with his words in her ears, the simple line, In the distant steppe, the camels stride … , like an invocation, heavy with the fragrance of the unknown. In the distant steppe … the camels. My mother is in her father’s arms. She is asleep, and sleeping, dreams of the things he has seen, of which he has written and then read aloud to her, of the bazaars of Khuree, of swift, small horses and of courageous horsemen whose boots curl up at the toes, of fantastical sandstone buttes weirdly shaped by fierce desert winds, of the skeletons of dragons he has carved single-handedly out of the stone; dreams, until it seems as if she has seen these things herself, has been there with him, with her father, the bear.
• • •
But then it all is over, the book is finished, the manuscript wrapped up in plain paper, and mailed to London. He begins to think, once again, of travel.
• • •
Papa will not go away. Papa will stay with his Clotilde always. One babyish hand on his cheek, the other buried in the luxuriant ginger beard. Papa will never go away again. Attempting to extract, in the unguarded moment, a promise she can use against him later. You know I’d like that, Tildy. Better than anything else in the world. To be always and ever with my Tildy! And reaching into one of his pockets, he pulls out a sweet he’s hidden there especially for her.
• • •
But never does he promise. Felix Girard will not make a promise to Clotilde unless he intends to keep it.
• • •
And he does travel: bravely, selfishly, mercilessly, relentlessly—once he has finished his book, he travels. First, briefly, to Spain; then southward, staying longer, down into the Canary Islands, and on to Morocco. Then another trip, to Greece, is extended into Malta, and t
hen on to Tunisia. In between, the stops home, to Paris, and more gifts. An egg from which she is allowed to raise a wild dove that perches on the curtain rods and shits on Madame Girard’s curtains before escaping out the open window. Then a pair of spice finches in a gilt cage—she’ll spend hours watching these, with their brilliant red beaks, pert black eyes, brown-speckled breasts. Their movements are like clockwork, their songs like high notes plucked upon taut wires. She feeds them bits of apple and orange, trains them to perch on the heel of her hand, to let her spread out, with her small fingers, their small fragile wings. She is enamored; but in a few weeks the spice finches are forgotten, and Felix Girard is leaving once again. He is departing for Sfax; his cases are packed, they are in the entry hall. Papa does not love me! If he loved me he would take me with him to Sfax—
Ah, Tildy! Sfax is no place for a little girl. It’s a hot, rough, nasty place. They eat goats’ eyes for dinner in Sfax. Would you like to eat goats’ eyes, Tildy? Of course not. Nor anybody else’s eyes neither. You shall come with me when you are older, to someplace better than Sfax.
But he does not tell her when, or where; my mother is not fooled, she grabs hold of his beard, pulls fiercely, all the while screaming, Papa does not love his Clotilde! He does not love her at all!
• • •
My grandmother, Marie-Louise Girard, has her own ways of coping with this. She floats off, with a resigned air, among the bright blooms in her father’s conservatory. This is the world she came from, the world she will return to. There, surrounded by the yellow and white winter orchids, with a watering can in her hand, she hums quietly to herself, Mmmm… .
• • •
She has surrendered my mother to Felix Girard long since. Clotilde’s first word, pronounced a month after her father returned from Mongolia, was Up, by which she meant to say that she refused to lie for one minute longer in her bassinette. Her second word, after Marie-Louise picked her up out of the bassinette, petted her back, and pressed her affectionately to her breast, was Papa!