Running her fingers over the spines of books on the bottom shelf, she pulled out a volume of medium size with a dark blue cover. Then she straightened, seized her well-worn dictionary, and carried both books back to her chair. Unceremoniously, she turned the dial and clicked off the radio just in the middle of a crescendo.
“What is it?” I asked in mounting excitement.
“Give me a minute.” As she began flipping through the blue book, she said, “Read me that poem aloud.”
I did so—and then a second time, when she asked me to. With the first book open in her lap, she turned pages in the dictionary.
I rushed to the arm of her chair.
“Aldebaran,” she announced, and stared at me as if thinking.
I thought I’d heard that word before, but I had no idea what it meant. It sounded like a name from Arabian Nights.
“It’s a star,” she said. “A giant red star.”
I drew a breath. “He said that! R —— kept saying ‘the red star’ over and over!”
“It’s from an Arabic name, Al Dabaran.” She showed me the dictionary. “It means ‘The Follower.’ Aldebaran is in the constellation Taurus—the Bull!”
Now she laid the other book on top, and I saw the starry outline of a bull, with lines drawn to assist the viewer’s imagination. Grandmother pointed at the bull’s red eye. “There it is,” she said. “People say the red star is the eye of the bull. It ‘follows’ these other stars in the constellation as they all move across the sky. The others are the Pleiades—also known as the Seven Sisters.”
I looked back to my notebook.
Find twice the number Taurus follows with his eye
Sisters dancing in the water and the sky
I gazed at Grandmother in amazed admiration. She had to be right. It fit perfectly.
Now she pushed past me, set the books on the table, and went back to hunting in the bookcase.
“But ‘dancing in the water and the sky’?” I asked. “What—?”
“The whole poem is a mirror! It’s all about mirrors. That’s why every line is written forward, then backward. The Pleiades are in the heavens—the sky—but their reflections ‘dance’ on the water below—the sea or a pool.”
Dropping a third book on the table, she peered over my shoulder at the poem. “Five, six, seven!” she said. “Aha!”
“What are you doing?”
“Counting the lines. Seven lines in the poem. Seven Pleiades. Seven Sisters.” The new, very thick tome she’d brought out was a dictionary of classical mythology. I glimpsed entries for “Nestor” and “Polyphemus” as she riffled the pages forward and backward, homing in on “Pleiades.”
We read about them, daughters of Atlas and Pleione, set in the sky as stars. “Atlas held up the sky in his hands,” Grandmother said. “Pleione was the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, who was the queen of the sea and mother of three thousand Oceanids—so the girls in one sense are children of sky and water. It’s the mirroring again. Quite a poem, that one!”
I remembered how our mermaid’s two sides and two tails were mirrors of each other.
Grandmother gnawed her lip. “Lots of mirrors—lots of division into two. There’s an upper garden and a lower—two halves. There are four smaller arches, two on the left and two on the right. Those angels inside the screaming mouth point at each other, one with the left hand and one with the right, like when you point at yourself in a mirror. There are two equal but opposite compartments in the leaning house.”
I paced around the room, unable to sit still, yearning to run to the sacred woods by lamplight and search for more clues. I tried to remember numbers and things I’d counted in the garden. Of course, there were the numbers on the risers of the stairway in the leaning house. I’d have to copy them into my notebook tomorrow.
Grandmother heated milk for me at bedtime, seeing that I was far too keyed up to sleep. I drank it, cleaned my teeth, and crawled into bed—but I lay awake for what seemed hours. It was hot in my room, another part of summer that I loved—hot nights, when the bedclothes clung until you kicked them off, and you lay there sizzling in the blackness like bacon in a skillet. My mother said I was “moon-touched” to relish heat the way I did, but that’s simply the way I’ve always been. But that night, with my head too full of ideas, the damp stickiness of my pajamas began to bother even me.
The poem rolled endlessly through my mind, chased by the inscriptions and the statues themselves—the women with their pitchers, winking their sly stone eyes at me . . . the sleeping woman, who seemed to dream fitfully, nearing a moment of wakefulness when she would sit up on the stone slab, frightening the birds . . . the mermaid, raising her face to breathe the salt breeze off the sea in which she could never swim. And did the tortoise slowly crawl in the moonlight, once around the entire garden and back into place by the first pink glimmer of dawn? And did the dragon gnash its teeth, and did the dogs snap and lunge? Did the sea serpent swim through the bushes? Did the terrible angel shake his keys and chain? And under the light of Aldebaran and the Pleiades, did the vanished statue return, perhaps as a ghost, and stand again on her pedestal? By daylight, only those beautiful feet in sandals remained. The garden’s secret might be lost forever with her, into whatever far place she’d been carried by thieves.
Listening to the night chorus in our own back garden, I tried to sleep, sizzling in my fry-pan of a bed. At some point, I did.
* * * *
To my intense frustration, Grandmother had changed her mind about the urgency of returning at once to the woods; instead, she insisted that we go shopping after breakfast. “We can’t just disappear every day,” she said. “Not unless you want search parties up there looking for us. Besides, we need supplies, and we should catch up on the news.”
There was no news to speak of in the village, and the resounding lack thereof was music to our ears. The soldiers had indeed gone back to the barracks. Depending on which shop we entered and who was speaking and listening, Major P ——’s men had either been a rude, noisy, disrespectful lot, or they had been bright and cheerful gentlemen, and if they were representative of the young generation, there was hope for our country’s future. All in all, life was returning to its drowsy summer pace. There was still talk of the enemy fugitive, but he had to share time now with digressions into fishing and the weather and the ripening grapes.
We saw Mr. L ——, a retired sea captain, standing on the flat roof of the police office and looking through binoculars. But he was looking up toward the orchards and the mountains, not out to sea. The baker told us that Mr. L —— had taken it upon himself to keep watch for the fugitive since we couldn’t depend on the Army. He spent mornings up on the cliffs and afternoons on the roofs of the dockhouse or the police station.
Grandmother had some letters of her own to mail—one was to my papa, and she’d let me write a greeting in a margin—so we stopped in at the post office. To my relief, Mr. V —— looked much better, and he called me by name again. He asked Grandmother all about her garden and said he’d been hearing wonderful things from those who’d seen it. Grandmother said he ought to come by for tea.
The postmaster thanked her. “But I’ve also heard,” he added, “that it’s difficult to catch you at home these days.”
“Have you heard that?” Grandmother exchanged a longish glance with him. “Well, we’re making the most of summer. I’ll have plenty of time to warm my old bones by the stove when the young one’s gone.”
Mr. V —— with his long, droopy face, gave me a mournful look. “I’ll go out of business!”
“No,” I told him. “I’ll write Grandmother a lot.”
“I’m counting on you,” he said.
When Grandmother had received her change and put it away, she gazed meaningfully at the boarded-up window. “You should have let the major’s men replace that glass for you.”
The postmaster laughed, several explosive barks.
Grandmother smiled back, and we left. I didn’t understand what was funny or why no mention was made of how the window had gotten broken. But I’d reached the age at which I realized grown-ups didn’t talk about everything they might, and I wanted to be grown up.
Because of the war, some things such as coffee, salt, sugar, and flour were rationed, and Grandmother had to surrender little gray tickets for them. But produce from local gardens and orchards was plentiful, as were eggs and chicken and anything from the sea.
Grandmother clearly wanted to make our presence felt in as many places as possible. Instead of buying most items at B ——’s Grocery as we might have done, we shopped all up and down the street, purchasing a fish here, a bag of beans there. It was quite infuriating for me, with my theories and questions about the sacred grove burning holes in my mind. I couldn’t help thinking Grandmother was being a bit obstinate in chatting to the very last word with Mrs. Z —— and Mrs. K —— and Mr. B ——. Precious hours slipped by. It was past mid-morning when we made our last stop—at the grinder’s dim little shed, where Grandmother got her kitchen knives and her scissors sharpened. We had stopped in at her house to get them and the brush knife. The shed smelled of oil, and a spider had built a web in one corner of the cloudy window.
“Rain coming,” said the grinder, repeating a prediction we’d heard at least five times since leaving the house. “Won’t have to water that garden for a while, Mrs. T ——.” He looked like a huge insect in his goggles, hunched in the half-dark over the spinning white wheel. It had a pedal like Mama’s sewing machine, and I admired how the bright sparks flew from the knives’ blades.
Grandmother inquired after the grinder’s son, who was also away in the war.
He shook his bald head wearily and tested the cleaver’s edge. “He don’t write; he don’t come home. He’s not like your boy.”
“Yours is a good boy too,” Grandmother said. “I remember him on that bicycle. Always polite, and a hard worker.”
“Long time ago,” said the grinder. He put Grandmother’s money into a cash register with a missing handle and a broken glass pane, its drawer always open.
We came out into the sunlight and the sound of the flapping flag on the post office, and we stopped in our tracks. With a sinking in my stomach, I held my breath and stared.
Major P ——’s staff car cruised toward us down the main street, the sun on its windshield making a blinding glare. Behind it, I counted three Army trucks with canvas sides—troop carriers.
“Why are they back?” I asked.
Grandmother said nothing but slowly lowered her shopping basket to the ground and straightened again, watching with a grim face.
Bicycles braked; people hurried out of the trucks’ way; shoppers poured from stores to line the sidewalks. I saw the barber gazing out of his window, and beside him a man with a lathered face, half-shaved. Three policemen emerged from the police office as the staff car stopped there against the curb. On the roof above them, Mr. L —— put down his binoculars and stared.
The driver opened the car’s back door and Major P —— climbed out and gazed around with an enormously self-important air. Taking a deep breath of the morning breeze, he placed his hat over his shiny hair, adjusted its angle, and turned to the policemen, who saluted him.
I heard them say “Good morning, sir,” and then I was sure the major said, “Now we’ll get somewhere, just when I’d called it off. They took their time, but my request went through after all.”
I felt Grandmother’s hand on my shoulder. Her gaze was fixed on the troop carriers.
From the two rear trucks, men and dogs jumped to the ground. Barking, whining, the dogs strained at their leashes and stuck their noses in all directions, taking in the thousand scents of our village’s main street.
I looked at Grandmother in horror. I knew that hunters used dogs, that guards used them to track down escaped prisoners. When a man walked or ran across the earth, he left an invisible trail that the nose of a dog could follow days afterward, a trail as clear to it as the beam of a lighthouse. The scent of R —— would lead from the parachute straight to the grove of monsters and up the stairs of the leaning house. Mr. Girandole’s scent would be everywhere, too—as would ours, in an often-traveled line between the cottage and the woods.
Major P —— called out, “Good morning, Mrs. T ——!” Across the street, he waved a hand and tipped his hat to Grandmother.
Forcing a smile, she waved back and gave him a nod.
“What do we do?” I whispered.
For a long time she said nothing but only watched the men lining up and an officer giving them orders. To our further dismay, the major finished his words with the policemen and sauntered in our direction. I could see it in his face: he had time to be at leisure while his men went to work. I envisioned another toast coming, another excruciating chat with this man my grandfather would not have liked. And all the while, the soldiers and dogs would be climbing the mountain. The world was spinning. My heart pounded in my ears.
Grandmother whispered, “You’ll have to do this. It’s up to you now. Trust Girandole and help him however you can.”
It was the last thing she had a chance to say before the major was within earshot. As her words sank in, I heard her exchanging pleasantries with him. I thought I might be sick on the major’s gleaming boots.
“And how is the young soldier?” asked Major P ——, shaking my hand. His grip was hard, warm, and slightly damp, and he smelled of cologne. “Is he following orders well?”
“Commendably so,” said Grandmother. For the life of me, I didn’t know how she could sound so calm. “He has his orders right now, in fact.” She opened her pocketbook. “While he’s here, I’m taking full advantage of an extra pair of hands. This is our marketing day, Major.” She handed me two folded bills and counted out some coins.
“Oh, but I was hoping,” said the major, “that since fate has once more granted us a fortuitous meeting, I might thank you for the pleasant time the other day.”
“Well,” said Grandmother, glancing down at the shopping baskets.
“Please,” said the major. “I will be wounded if you do not accept. We can drive to your house, and you can put these things away. Then join me for lunch in the hotel restaurant. I recall that they serve a particularly good mackerel.”
No famous actress could have bested Grandmother. She actually appeared to blush as she averted her eyes, hesitating. It also struck me that she had an effect on people, as if she were a lantern in a dark room. People noticed her; what few strangers we met that summer in the village would take a step or two closer, perhaps without realizing it, to get a better look at her. The major might have focused his attentions on some woman thirty or forty years younger—there were many in the street around us. Probably, I thought, he would do just that before the day was over; but for now, he seemed to want Grandmother as a lunch companion.
“Very well, then,” said Grandmother. “I certainly can’t wound a defender of our country.”
“Splendid!”
“But I think,” Grandmother said, “we should let the ‘young soldier’ do his errands as planned. He is so often subjected to the gossip of old busybodies—I speak of my friends, Major, not you!”
The major laughed, displaying his teeth. “How about it, my good man? Aren’t you tempted by a ride in an Army car?”
Camouflage, I told myself. “Yes, sir. But I . . . I’m writing a book.” I don’t know why I blurted that, or what sort of excuse it was supposed to provide, but that’s what came out of my mouth.
“A book?” said the major. He pointed at me suddenly, remembering what I’d told him on the ferry. “You like to draw pictures! The artist is writing a book?”
“Well, and illustrating it,” I said weakly.
“I
would love to see this opus!”
“Thank you, sir. I’m . . . getting my ideas together.”
“And what is this book about?”
Behind the major, the men and dogs were moving out, following the street in different directions, working in teams. I guessed they would leave the village by separate paths and converge on the parachute. I had no time to waste.
“The sea . . . voyage,” I answered, grasping after words.
“Eh?”
“Sea voyages—and battles,” I added, expecting the major would like that.
“Ah. Well, then. I suppose we must leave the artist to his contemplation. The coast, they say, is inspiring to the creative mind. The painters and poets all want to move here, to villages just like this.”
“And you wonder, Major, why I’ve never moved away.” To me, Grandmother said, “Off with you!”
I needed no further prompting. Leaving the basket where it lay, I stuffed the money into my pocket and dashed along the street, away from our house. I would have to take an indirect route, but once I was outside the village, I could make straight for the grove; the dogs would not, so I should still arrive ahead of them. But it was risky: I’d never followed any path but the usual one to the garden. I hoped I could find it.
And once I got there—what then? The secret compartment would do us no good. The dogs would smell us inside, and we’d be trapped.
Trust Girandole, Grandmother had said. I could only hope he would know what to do.
* * * *
I raced along the street, weaving among people, sidewalk displays, vegetable carts, and parked bicycles. At the corner with Harbor Street, I turned away from the waterfront and headed up the steep hill. Already I was painfully aware of the day’s heat. My drenched shirt stuck to me, and light glared off the white houses, where bedding and laundry hung on steamy balconies. Flowers in window garden-boxes made dizzying splashes of color and filled the air with a lushness of scent. Old people eyed me with the general disapproval shown toward all things disruptive. No one should be running on such a day.
A Green and Ancient Light Page 14