by Joshua Corey
The children who have gone ahead no longer need us,
weaned from earthly things as from
the mother’s breast. But we who need
these secrets—for from sadness
springs our progress—can we be without them?
Is the story false that grief for Linos
first dared music to pierce our drought,
so that, in shocked space, the outline of youth, almost godlike
suddenly forever departed, that void vibration
that now ravishes us, comforts us, and helps.
To live in the kingdom of elegy. The present tense only an aftermath, thin consolation for the thickness of past. The decisive moments that go unglimpsed. I can show you the before, I can live the after. The event is plural and passes without recognition, passes unsurpassed. To fix it is the work of the fictional. The characters pursue the event in vain. When did she become my mother? Why did I fall in love? When did I resign my hopes?
Linos the singer, murdered with his own lyre.
She drops off her bag at the Hotel Verdi and goes straight to the address on the Via dei Piccardi, not bothering to ring the bell for number 3. She knows the apartment is empty, or let to another. But she presses the buzzer for 5, again and again, until a hoarse woman’s voice answers: Si?
My name is Elsa Freeman. I believe that you know my mother.
Su madre?
Si, Signora.
I don’t know. Suspiciously.
She knew your son as well. His name is Bernardo.
A long pause, and then the buzzer.
The apartment is spacious but dark, Signora Bruno herself a long black feather with faded cheeks done up a morbid shade of rouge. I have called my son, the Signora makes it plain to her through signs and gestures and particles of English. He will be here soon. Do have some tea, or some coffee.
Grazie. I mean, no grazie. I’m fine.
You look like her, the Signora announces, falsely.
Bernardo. He is old enough to be Ruth’s father. He makes a courtly, embarrassed little bow and speaks rapidly in Italian to his mother, without taking his eyes off of Ruth. She shrugs. He offers Ruth his arm and says in nearly accentless English, Let us talk somewhere else. Your first time in Trieste? We will go to the San Marco, it is not very far.
The streets are narrow. Old World, she thinks, Old World. What is there in me that responds to these streets. Is it M, in my blood, speaking.
I wanted to meet you, she says when they are seated at a table in the buzzing Vienna-style café. Around her mostly middle-aged men and older with espresso cups and glasses of wine, talking and gesticulating. She hears snatches of languages that don’t sound quite Italian. My mother wrote me about you.
She was a great lady, Bernardo says. Very brave. Very strong.
Is it true, Ruth asks, pausing, not sure she wants to hear the answer. Is it true that… you were her friend?
For a little while, yes.
You knew about her husband?
Bernardo is embarrassed again. He coughs and sips some water. Yes. But she was not, we were not involved in the way that you think.
It’s none of my business if you were.
Yes. But I want, I think she would have wanted you to understand her. She was lonely, but proud. She wanted to meet the end alone. I was a kind of weakness, an indulgence of hers. You must forgive her.
Must I?
What she says is: I never understood her. I have tried. But I don’t know why she left.
Why.
She told me once she wasn’t searching for anything. I’m not looking for love, she said, or for answers, or for anything. I’m not looking for a cure for the cancer. I want to be alone for a while. Because once I’m dead, I won’t be alone any more. I won’t belong to me.
She said that?
Yes, it’s a peculiar phrase, isn’t it. She said it a few times so I’d remember it. “Once I’m dead, I won’t belong to me”
To whom does she belong, then?
Bernardo lowers his eyes. I could not say. I only knew her for a little while.
She must have trusted you.
I don’t know. Perhaps.
And… when she died?
There, I am afraid, I was like you. I didn’t know until it had already happened. I hadn’t seen her for a few days. I became worried. Then the concierge told me about the letter.
What letter?
The… the note I suppose you would call it. So that the concierge would know whom to call. Me. And then, the police. I thought it was best to let the authorities notify you. Nothing she’d said to me made me think I was, how to put this, authorized to contact you. She was afraid of the confusion it might cause.
But I knew all about you, Ruth says. She holds up the packet of letters. She wrote to me about you.
A gravely pleased look is his reply.
She is still writing to me, Ruth murmurs.
I have an appointment, she adds. A last appointment. I have to go to the castle, Miramare.
Why do you want to go there?
Because that’s where it happened. Where it ended.
I don’t understand.
Didn’t she tell you? In the letter she left for you? Where she went to end it?
Eyebrows raised slightly, he looks at her, in mild shock of inquiry. She takes the envelope from her purse.
This was the first letter. Or the last letter, take your pick. Look.
The canceled stamp: a gray formal crenellation like the rook of a chess set. The address in a steady, legible cursive hand with U S A in block letters underneath it like a signature.
How do I get there? To Miramare?
You had better not, Signora.
It’s the only reason I’m here.
He looks at her with his puzzled, kind, infinitely tired eyes, and shrugs in a way that reminds her ineffably of her grandfather. So nu?
Then you had better take a taxi. No. I have a better idea. There is a boat you can take. You will have a splendid view.
All right. Signor Bruno… Bernardo. Can you just tell me… The last time you saw her… She struggles to formulate a question that makes sense. He puts his warm, dry hand on top of her own.
The last time I saw her, he said, was here. At this very table. She sat where you are sitting now. She did not look ill, not at all. She did not wish to.
What did you talk about?
He shrugs, lifts his other hand, spreads the fingers.
She said she was going on a journey. Before going into the hospital. I thought perhaps she meant she was going to try and find her husband. I thought she was going to go north.
How did she look?
Bellisima.
But in her mind she saw that head, hairless, that body, reduced to air and bone, in a hospital bed, in a universe of plastic and taupe. Sleeping. Tiny sleeping bird with its head under its wing.
She had only to close her eyes.
Ah, my poor signora, Bernardo says. You have had a hard journey, I think.
It is almost over, she says, rising.
She sits in the bow of the motor launch that carries her, from the Grand Canale out into the harbor on a wide arc, watching the castle swing into view. Miramare, mirror of the sea. In her mind’s eye the woman in gray is a mirror behind the mirror, the great glass prow of the castle where the Empress of Mexico once stood, trapped in her husband’s dreams of the sea, of the name of action. In our mind’s eye turning to discover Lamb, coiled in a Biedermeier armchair, hat leveled, pistol easy in his hand. The contract is about to be fulfilled. Hurry, Ruth says silently to the boatman, to the swell of land, the forest of Miramare beginning to crowd itself around them. To her own heart. Hurry, and at last.
The mistral is blowing, it renders everything dusty and spectral, the banners on the castle’s peaks whip and thrum in the wind, the ground itself seems to vibrate. It’s an ordinary Tuesday in the off season. There’s a man on the promontory, the great doors behind him, coat blowing beh
ind him, black gloves on his hands, black hat pulled low, no sign of any suitcase. The boat pulls around, she watches him, too far, she can’t see his face. The castle grounds are silent when she alights in the sheltered lagoon from which Maximilian and Charlotte used to sail, little pleasure cruises in the evening, she imagines, on a wooden boat with silent splendid servants, as alone as royalty can be, going out just far enough to look back on the castle and on their lives. The heavy wind shakes the layered branches of the oaks and firs. She wraps her coat around her and steps onto the shore.
In the castle foyer there are sober tapestries, a parquet floor. Ruth holds her entrance ticket in front of her. Looking around at the high ceilings, she passes into the private quarters of Maximiliano, the frigate-rooms, feeling herself as she is meant to at sea. Where is he? Stepping to the porthole window that looks out on the promontory where he was standing like a figurehead, almost crucified by the wind. He is gone. But he is here. She climbs the great stairs toward Charlotte’s rooms, frozen and disintimate, past the somber portraits of dead empires. That is Franz Joseph, she tells herself, and that is Franz Ferdinand, and that is Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Emperor of Mexico for three years and seventy days, and this is the house that he built on the edge of his empire of tolerance, that for a while held together so many nations and tribes, that agreed for a bit to forget their grievances against each other, a peaceable kingdom, almost pastoral, that could not go on finally refusing the brute invitations of history. Where is she buried, really buried, not the anonymous plot in New Jersey they shipped the box to, where I stood with Ben and the baby and a few cousins, is she buried here, in this city, I never saw the body, I can never know her death, or what I am, till I meet her. Having climbed to the top, to Charlotte’s bedroom, where the mad Empress might have sat in that uncomfortable chair by the window with a bit of sewing or simply staring, out to sea, while doctors looked after her, while a servant looked up into her face, where a cousin might have come to visit to read to her from the Bible in French, the language of her youth.
You wanted that, didn’t you. To reach and out and touch her, as she was touched by others. M. You wanted to touch it, as she wanted to touch it, history in the form of two bodies, meeting.
Every second, the narrow gate.
And there, before the balcony, backlit, black figure, the man. Lamb. Her deputy, her author, her undertaker. He shines as a vampire shines, invisibly, unmirrored.
The case is closed. You shouldn’t have come.
I had to come.
You had to come. The deadliness of repetition. He has been repeating her, all along.
Does he have a gun? Is that how he plans to finish the job? Bullet fired seven decades ago, from the grave of Europe, aimed forever at my heart?
His suitcase nowhere to be seen.
She’s here, isn’t she, Mr. Lamb?
Your mother is dead.
But she is here. She was M.
M.
The wind catches in the windows, rattles it, builds up to an unearthly revenant whine that makes them both wince. Ruth puts her hands to her ears.
What’s in a name? She called me Elsa. I called her M—. But we didn’t answer to those names.
Lamb holds the gun level, pointing it at her heart. He gestures with it.
Let’s walk.
Out into the storm, though the sky is bewilderingly blue and clear, not a cloud to be seen being chased by the mistral up from the south, chopping the sea behind them. Into the woods, the thick forest of the park surrounding Miramare, like Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, seeking cover for the dark deed of their story. He walks behind her, she steps carefully, watching her feet. Is this what it was like? Is this where I come from? Istvan called it the death march, but that’s not quite right. It’s only death if you stop. Keep moving.
Mr. Lamb, she calls behind her, though he can’t possibly hear in this wind. Lamb. This doesn’t make sense. You work for me.
I work for you, he agreed. She could feel it between her shoulder blades: the eye of the gun.
This isn’t my story, she says, or thinks. This is my end.
This is the end.
Every story ends in death. But my story began with it.
She stops, flinches. The air in the wood is still though she can hear the treetops tearing with it high above them. No birds. Twigs roll under her feet like marbles. She puts out her arms to steady herself.
It’s the story I wanted. To feel that I had one. That there was something behind her, beneath her, a human being. If my mother died, the human being could live. I could meet her.
She turns around and says to no one, to her, to M:
I had to love you. You gave me no choice. You were the world. And I mean that literally, you had taken the world inside you, I could see it and taste it, in the lines of your face, the voice so low, your bitterness, the snap of your rage, your blame. I bore it all, I was stronger than you knew, stronger than you. I had to survive you, what you couldn’t even do, survive grandma and all the wars, survive Germany, survive Paris. And now I’ve done it, I can call you by your right name. I can see you so clearly. I see me in your face, and I see your own face, and none of it is alien, none of it is not mine, not ours. M, a letter, a character, in writing. It’s so beautiful to know you. It’s so beautiful to cry for you, now that you’ve gone.
The woman in white, the wind peeling her, carrying her clothing away.
Bless me and let me go.
On my knees in the dirt of Mitteleuropa, where I began, to see her. In tears, smiling at the woman who lived.
A crow’s cry, a black report, under the wind. Winged. To take flight.
The castle is behind her and the man she made, stumbling blind and alone through the trees, empty-handed. No camera follows him, no awkward suitcase, no body commas the ground. No grave comes near. The air in the airplane cabin is dried-out and decontextualized. Focusing on the back of the seat in front of her, a luminous white face eyes closed in concentration. The faces of her loved ones are blooming there: the daughter who needs her. The husband who waits for her. The light whole and clear in her face, all the faces, retreating and returning, mother in daughter in mother in in. She opens the new book, the blank book, the book of home, its wings, her eyes write her face, a woman, renamed, writing a letter, to the middle, at last.
Joshua Corey is the author of four books of poetry: The Barons (Omnidawn Publishing, 2014), Severance Songs (Tupelo Press, 2011), Fourier Series (Spineless Books, 2005), and Selah (Barrow Street Press, 2003). He lives in Evanston, Illinois with his wife and daughter and is an associate professor of English at Lake Forest College. This is his first novel.
www.Joshua-Corey.com
@joshcorey on Twitter
www.facebook.com/beautifulsoulnovel
Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy
Copyright ©2014 Joshua Corey
ISBN:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data for Print Edition:
Corey, Joshua.
Beautiful Soul : an American Elegy / Joshua Corey.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-923389-58-1
I. Title.
PS3603.O7343B43 2014
813’.6--dc23
2013047381