In the end, it is Joaquin who saves me. Unknown to my mother, he too has spent the afternoon pacing the city streets, settling his nerves. He is about to take a woman away from her husband and to help her end her baby’s life. He was dumped into foster care at four years old but he still has the distinct feeling that his father would not be behind him in this. For the first time in his life, he purchases admission into one of the city’s premier museums—the Museum of Science and Industry—and wanders from exhibit to exhibit, looking at fossils, learning about coal mining and the human heart. It is six o’clock when he starts toward the exit and takes a wrong turn. He finds himself drawn toward an otherworldly rose light at the end of a dark hall, and he takes one last glance at the direction he was supposed to be heading in before starting down this hallway. When he comes near enough to understand what he is seeing, he stops, but he has no choice now but to come closer.
He moves slowly down the line of windows, beginning with the embryo, minute and curled and lovely, suspended in glowing fluid like a tiny snail. At six weeks, three days the child’s body is identifiable, the head bowed as though in prayer. At eight weeks, six days the fingers are exquisite, a pianist’s dream, and at nine weeks, five days the child is light and airy, a pixie suspended in a silky web like a hammock swinging from the placenta. At fourteen weeks the child is swathed in the amnion, hands curved as though to catch rain, and at twenty-one weeks she has a posture of anticipation with her hands wrung near her face. At twenty-three weeks she is unquestionably wearing an expression of anguished fear, but at twenty-six weeks her face is softened, calm, accepting. As though, in that last moment, it dawned on her that she was not alone.
Stricken, he stands there as others come up behind him. He wonders if he will ever wear that face—that look of peace. It is something he wants for himself, but even more so for my mother, and for me. He cannot imagine any of us having a chance at this if he and my mother do what they are planning to do. He backs away from the exhibit and starts toward the exit, and when he reaches the street, he turns toward home, bypassing the station. There will be a time when my mother hates him for failing to meet her, for vanishing, even after he writes her a letter telling her what happened, what changed his mind. Much later, she will realize that what she loved most was the dream they had together, and what he loved most was her.
But right now, my mother is sitting on the train station floor, chilled and alone. When she understands that no one is coming, she trades in her ticket and takes an evening train back to the suburbs. She makes it home in time to crush the note she had left on the kitchen table and to make my father’s eight o’clock dinner. My father has been washing windows in the evenings for extra money, and he tells her of a near-accident, how he’d nearly fallen ten stories. My mother sees a deep mottled bruise on his right hand and imagines him reaching out with a ferocity she has never seen, clinging desperately to something solid. She picks up the injured hand and holds it to her forehead. His obvious surprise at her affection sears her heart; she wonders how much she has withheld, in her own desperate effort to hold on to something. For the first time it occurs to her that he too might be starving. She washes the dishes. She lingers in the kitchen as he showers, holding her hand to her belly as night falls. She comes to bed when he calls for her.
—
All of this, my mother tells me as we work in her steeply terraced garden behind the house in Tennessee. We are transplanting irises, and it is over the exposed rhizomes thick and bulbous as ginger that I have told her that I am thinking of leaving my husband and son. My son, the bully, the little terrorist who at seventeen has asphyxiated my home and my marriage with the mindless rage that his psychiatrist says puts him at risk for suicide; my husband, spineless, who caters to my son’s every whim and to his own whims as well, always at my own expense. As we separate the bulbs and clip their leaves, I talk on, asking my mother why I should go on living like this, afraid of my own child, backed into corners, so lost in their demands that my words are flying away from me like dandelions’ skeletons scattered in the wind. I can’t write anymore; there aren’t poems left in me at the end of the day. I want her to know how to get the words back. My voice gets louder as I demand a solution—from her, from anyone. Then she tells me this story, and when it’s over, there is a long pause. I am stunned. I am waiting for the lesson. She has always finished her stories with a lesson, a simple “Now do you see?” But she has gone silent, and I watch her as she bends over the irises, cleaning them one at a time and laying them out to dry before we can move them to new soil. Over the course of her story we have dug out and separated dozens of them. She has become a gardener, my mother; she has found another gift deep within herself. This garden is almost mythical with its wild roses and tiger lilies and fiery lantanas growing in mad spirals. The neighbors have expressed mild disapproval of the disorder here. No doubt the irises will end up scattered where the eye would never expect the bright glow of blue. I decide that if my mother is going to refuse me her advice, she will have to at least answer me when I speak. Shakily I say, “Well? Where are we putting all of these?” But she only takes off her gloves and smiles faintly at me before walking up the stone pathway back to the house. I am left with the irises, the long line of them, each of them meant for some space I can’t yet imagine.
Geetha Iyer
The Mongerji Letters
SINCE THE COLLAPSE OF one of the last dynasties of the Common Era and the subsequent end of the era itself, historians have searched for descendants of the Mongerji family, as well as descendants of the scribes who, under their employ, collected samplings of flora and fauna from around the world. The only evidence discovered thus far are the letters that follow. They are from Mr. Mongerji, his wife, Kavita, and two of the three Mongerji children, all addressed to a Mr. Chappalwala, thought to have been the last of the Mongerjis’ scribes. Archivists continue to seek Mr. Chappalwala’s side of the correspondence.
September 7, —18
Young Mr. Chappalwala,
This once, I wish my family’s long correspondence with yours were more of a face-to-face transaction. Your letter telling of old Mr. Chappalwala’s passing has stricken us all. The Mrs. has not spoken more than ten words, and even the children are subdued. They feel their parents’ grief. I find it hard to write even now—to acknowledge receipt of goods delivered, to speak of our continued business.
But the polar bear you stuck in the inner envelope suggests you are keen to continue in the family trade. That first explosion of teeth and air bubbles as the creature snapped at my face—what flair! I learned to swim backward that day, you know? It took a week to bail out the living room and pour the Arctic Ocean back into the envelope.
Our three-year-old, thankfully, was in the nursery when I released your capture, and thus spared his first swim. Meanwhile, our middle child, so enthralled by what you’d done, put on a diving suit and plunged right into the water. She stayed there for hours at a time. We nearly wondered if we’d lost the girl, and it was not until the living room was almost dry that the Mrs., in an inspired frenzy, thought to search inside the granary vase in the corner. We tipped out the last of the ocean into the outstretched envelope and grabbed our daughter by the ankles as she tried to follow.
The Mrs. remains put out. After the first shock, she said to me, “I would dearly like to see that young man right now,” and I am not sure if she wanted to scold you for your exuberant capture or condole with you for your loss. She could not stop hugging our eldest boy, so perhaps it was the latter. He, you may know, will inherit the Mongerji collection and one day take over my correspondence with you. He did not like the bear—I believe it might have frightened him—but I think he will learn to appreciate your taste just as I learned to appreciate your father’s.
Yes, you may consider this letter a renewal of the contract between our families. The unrest in these parts, I assure you, is a trifle, and should not come in the way of our important work. I enclose the usual sum
of money. The clutch of purple bellflowers is a token from the Mrs. I believe they are from the collection, something your father must have sent us long ago. We keep him in our thoughts, and watch how you will follow him.
In anticipation,
Mr. Mongerji
June 5, —19
Mr. Chappalwala (Jr.),
Sir, my father requests that I write to you because he is engaged on urgent business in the city, and my mother is busy looking through the collection for important files. He says it will be good practice for me for the future, but I think by then we shall all have to go into hiding. I tried to explain this to my little sister and brother, but they are silly and won’t listen to me. Jayu said she would go hide right now, and snuck into the letter with the sleeping octopus. But I stopped her from taking my little brother in with her. I am not irresponsible.
You see, my tutor, Mr. Ali, says the people don’t trust us anymore, that they think we own what belongs to them. He says he hears murmurings from the village, and that we should all be prepared to flee. I don’t understand it, really. I asked my father why we couldn’t just give stuff away if others wanted it so badly—there are so many envelopes in our house that we wouldn’t even miss them. He gave me such a look. He said I might as well scatter my ancestors’ bones. As if I would do such a thing.
I have been patrolling the grounds with the night watchman, and I think I have another solution. In your next letter, can you send us a stampede? We could use it to frighten people off our grounds. Perhaps, then, my father will see I’m ready for his work—can you believe, he told me to copy from an old letter when writing to you? As if I didn’t know how to say “Dear Sir” and “Thank you” for myself.
Sincerely,
R. Mongerji (Jr.)
December 12, —19
Dear Mr. Chappalwala,
This brief note confirms our change of address. The move to the city has been trying. Our new house is a two-story apartment. A top-floor loft, to be fair, and much more than I could have hoped for in our rush to secure a new living arrangement after the riots. But it will be quite difficult to curate the Mongerji collection in such meager environs. I am in conversations with the city’s museum directors and the head of the opera house but, until then, most showings of the collection are quite humble affairs, pedestal displays of butterflies and ferns in the living room.
We are fortunate that the brass microscopes survived the move—the mayor was quite impressed with the diatom samplings you sent back from the Great Lakes this summer. It gives me an idea—when you trek the glacial sheets again this winter, would you look out for dark dimples against the blue ice? They are balls of moss collected around dust flecks—the locals call them glacier mice. I am told that entire herds of microscopic, eight-legged water bears lurk in that velvet warmth. It would make a fascinating presentation piece to the mayor. These days I find I need such friends more and more.
In expectance,
Mr. Mongerji
August 28, —22
Dear Mr. Chappalwala-ji,
My name is Abhimanyu Mongerji, but you can call me Abhi, like everyone else does. I am writing because Ammi said I must thank you for sending me the albino gray wolf cub for my seventh birthday. Daddy said it was not really meant to be a present—he wanted it for his work—but Ammi said it was only fair, because when Jayu-dhidhi and Rohan-bhaiya each turned seven, she got a fox cub and he got a baby camel with two humps.
Dhidhi’s fox cub letter is lost, and Bhaiya said he sold his camel to someone at his new school, even though I think someone actually stole it off him. I tried to share my wolf cub with them both, except Bhaiya doesn’t really like your letters anymore, and Dhidhi, well, she always complains that we should go to the cub’s world instead of bringing the cub to us, so they’re both no fun at all.
I have been thinking—were the albino cub’s mother and father also white? I have looked and looked inside the envelope, but I can’t find the parents anywhere, not even their footprints in the snow. Please could you tell me what happened to them?
Thank you,
Abhi
January 5, —23
Dear Mr. Chappalwala,
I imagine you have reached the Caribbean by now. Had I your talent for letters, I would share my winter with you—it hunkers in this city in a blanket of smog so thick I can barely see the streets from up high. Your long journey south through the western continents fills me with a strange dissatisfaction. I long for the old home, though I have tried hard these years to forget those days of warmth.
At any rate, I wanted to note that the release of your latest specimen caused quite a stir around the city. It moves me to critique your delivery in some detail. The instructions you placed within the outer envelope contained a couple of crucial errors. Surely, for example, you meant for us to “direct the mouth of the inner envelope away from the body” before lifting the flap?
I obtained the advised twenty-foot length of strong rope and went up to the roof with my children, as they had never seen such a specimen before. I opened the flap of the envelope and, before I knew what had happened, we were lofted into the upper branches of your bald cypress. We scrabbled for holdfasts among the slender branches while, below, the city swung like a concrete hammock. As I watched our rope slither off a lower tree branch into the fathoms of the cypress roots, I considered writing you a letter, explaining the importance of specificity. Because I should have tied that rope to my waist before venturing into your tree.
My daughter and my youngest, perhaps the world is still new to them for, instead of searching for a way down the cypress, they clambered farther up and out into it. They were in its limbs for hours, hooting to each other as my eldest and I sought our way down.
We were still fifteen feet off the ground when we reached the lowest rungs of the cypress. I will pause to acknowledge that the tree you selected is, indeed, a magnificent specimen. Its trunk is as fluted as a champagne glass, the bark silver whale hide. It must be the last of its size, and I am glad it is now under my care. But this did not strike me then. I looked down into the roil of the tree-beast’s roots, snaggled into those distinctive stalagmites, and wondered if we would pierce ourselves upon them as easily as dinosaurs once did when they tried to climb up such trees in the past.
My eldest was impatient to be done with this adventure—he almost dashed himself to the ground in his haste to get down. I am grateful he suffered no injury. He disappeared downstairs, returned moments later with a poker from the fireplace to help stab and shove and stuff the whole tree, knot by knot, back down into its envelope. As soon as I was able to hop down from my branch, I took over for him. The heights of the tree, as the trunk tapered, were easier to pack away. My younger children were eventually shaken out of the upper branches and back onto the roof—they stood blinking like hatchlings thrown from the nest, their fingers tarred with cypress sap.
My daughter said there were fern gardens in the upper branches jeweled with small insects—that we had to climb back up to see. She looked so adamant, just like her mother, that my youngest, poor boy, looking back and forth between his sister’s face and mine, started to cry. But I am not one to be swayed by tears or tantrums. It will not do to spoil these children more—they have lost so much already I hate to offer them any false sense that their lives as Mongerjis means what it once did. I continued to bend the cypress branches back into the envelope. By dawn, all that was left was to furl back the topmost twigs, the last pale leaf buds. I sealed the envelope with tape, filed it in the closet. I shall ask at the museum tomorrow if there is room somewhere to display a specimen so tall indoors.
You will find enclosed your payment, which you may note is smaller than it once was. I know your living is incumbent upon my support and, by way of apology, I remind you of our impoverished circumstances here. Take care to enclose better directions with your future dispatches, and to pick specimens easier to contain. This is, I fear, no longer a world for exhibitions of grandeur.
In humbled spirits,
Mr. Mongerji
P.S. Just now the Mrs. informs me, rather briskly, that she had to escort the local police up to the roof to show them we had dismantled the tree in its entirety. She did manage to persuade them that the letter was private property, but we shall soon have to merge the Mongerji collection with the city’s to ensure its continued survival.
September 2, —25
Dear Mr. Chappalwala-ji,
Ammi looked through my grade-four textbooks today and her eyebrows became all one line, she was that angry. She asked me if I knew what an axolotl was. Then she asked me if I knew what lots of other animals were, and I didn’t know any of their names, so she went to find Daddy and complained to him about my school and how I wasn’t learning anything important there. Now it’s decided that when I return from school Ammi will take me through the cabinets in the downstairs big closet, the ones with all the amphibians first, next the ones with all the extinct birds.
But Ammi shouldn’t worry, I think, because Jayu-dhidhi is already teaching me all sorts of things in secret about your letters. Today she showed me one that came from the last century, from your great-great-grandfather or something. Inside was a rotten fruit—something long and brown. I didn’t think it was special—I wanted to see more axolotls like Ammi had shown me before dinner—but then Dhidhi gave me a magnifying glass, and we both lay on our stomachs with our heads right over the fruit and she pulled apart its flesh to show that there was a small fly in there, smaller than an apple seed. Its body was the color of a peacock, and its eyes were the color of gold, and it was laying tiny eggs between the skin of the fruit and the flesh. The eggs were long and white, and under the magnifying glass they looked like tightly closed flower buds.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 Page 4