The Changeling

by Joy Williams

  The children said that once a teenage girl had killed herself for love of Thomas. Thomas had been in divinity school at Harvard. After the incident he switched to law. Religion had become too confused with the ethical morality to be of interest to him. Then some other scandal occurred and he dropped that profession as well.

  Pearl saw him in an Episcopal skirt, his clipped nails flashing among the little picture wafers, his fingers pressing them down upon lopped tongues. A wicked angel, sexless and a little violent, his eyes burning beneath his bushy brows.

  The girl who killed herself had a peculiar name. It was like a name chosen off a perfume bottle, something the girl had chosen herself. Pearl imagined her sitting zipped and trembling in a pew, looking into those smoking eyes of the young interning priest. She imagined the dead girl imagining him before she died, sticking her head in her mother’s oven, imagining Thomas doing it to her, doing it with his eyes perhaps, the girl possessed by a florid and exquisite confusion so complete that she could, in fact, ignore the fact that her own shining hair, which she envisioned roped around his fist, was fluffed against bubbles of blackened cheese on the black interior of her mother’s Garland.

  The unheard cry escapes. She died a virgin. Thomas did it anally perhaps. Perhaps he did do it with his eyes. She was confused after all, a flashy piece at fourteen, holding herself together with thin arms. But Thomas had probably done nothing. He was just a handsome man, rich, and at Harvard. He had rich skin. He spoke in gleaming rhythms of bewildering metaphor. He spoke about the highest, unhuman ambitions of man.

  She gained access to him by speaking of her brother. The child had sugar. He was sickly. He was miserable, picked his nose and ate it, couldn’t say certain words at all, words like “love” and “orange,” just couldn’t say them.

  Some things are not essential, Thomas said, denying this nymph, this girl with the carefree name, the joy she craved.

  There were two or three Thomases really. The one she saw, the one he was, and the one he would become. She read too much. She’d lie about on Saturdays with her girl friends, reading aloud from their parents’ paperbacks . . . “Her mouth accepted his turgid organ” . . . they’d read and sweat. “. . . he draped her across the ottoman. He entered her . . .” She didn’t think it through. She thought she’d be able to hear his comments when he received news of her death. Well, perhaps she did. He made none. He really wasn’t nice, although he did take her little brother to the island with him several weekends in a row after the funeral. He took a child sick in spirit and made him well. He suffered little children in the biblical sense. The boy grew up a success.

  After Thomas left the university, he began going out with very beautiful women. He’d take them to Newport or Saratoga or even Porto Ercole, but in the end he’d bring them to the island, where they’d poach lobsters for him and listen to him talk in ontological dialects. They were so impressed with the quality of his mind. Really how could one think and speak at the same time . . . Amazing when you thought about it. The flow of those . . . words. The tumefaction of . . . thought. It must have been both exciting and degrading to be with him. Of course, he made enemies. It became too tedious for him to treat his affairs as though they were real. He broke a woman’s arm while dancing. He was even married once for four days to a socialite who threw the I Ching. She simply vanished, taking nothing, even leaving her sticks behind. Another woman who knew him well was a novelist. She used Thomas as a figure in her most repellant book. Physically he did not read the same, and it was considered that the perversions practiced were substitutions for those which actually took place.

  He was a well-known mystery. He was often sighted in several night clubs at once, or simultaneously walking down Fifth Avenue with an actress or two and having lunch at the Cloister on Sea Island with a seven-foot artist who made hair pictures.

  Then he retired. He came to the island where he had spent summers as a child. He restored the house that had been let go. He found that he had a talent for children.

  Why was Thomas the way he was about children? He had been doing this for seven, fourteen, twenty-one years now. Hitler’s father raised bees. It’s in all the histories. But what is to be made of that? Raising bees. Thomas’s father was a judge. He had no hobbies, although he did have an extraordinary collection of compasses. He had two sons and, late in life, a daughter. His wife painted plates and took codeine.

  Walker said that Thomas was always mysterious about things, even as a child. He had his secrets, and even then had the intellectual’s love for the irrational moment, the usurpation of natural law. Once, when he was nine or ten, he found a bicycle washed up on the rocks in that cleft mid-island where the sea beats upon the island’s heart. The bicycle was completely plated with oysters. He begged the judge to buy him a life-sized mannequin from one of the stores in the city. He threw it into the sea and dragged it up a few weeks later. The encrusted creation was in his room even today, the children said. The children said he had all sorts of peculiar stuff in his room from all periods of time and stages of man’s degradations and hopes. He had a clay statue of Osiris, the flayed God, the mutilated god of regeneration. And over his desk was an Ethiopian tapestry depicting a castration in battle. The enemy looked as though they were smoking cigars.

  Thomas was unreasonable with the children, impatient and demanding. He had a strong, unsympathetic face and a quick, eclectic mind. Thomas had a cruel streak. The children said they’d seen it. A pale line running from armpit to hip on one side and from armpit to fingertips on the other, quite visible, hot even, exposed when they didn’t please him. He was convinced, quite simply, that their minds were capable of anything. He saw each child as an exhilarating beast of transmutative delights which he could take great pleasure in. Year after year, he taught them. He had found his place in his own life. He spent the years observing and instructing these delightful, innocent, and dangerous creatures. He had no notion that they lied shamelessly to him in their every word and action, nor did it occur to him that they would, with the genius he unconsciously had always believed to be finite, refuse to go the way of the other children before them.

  He had taken over the island and its history as though it means nothing, as though the present never reshapes the past. He really did not believe in the children, that was it. He didn’t believe in them the way Pearl did. Pearl’s chin was in her hands. She straightened up. She wondered if she had been asleep. Her lip seemed wet. For some reason, Lincoln was discussing the history of the three-pronged fork. Thomas had slowed the boat in the harbor and voices drifted clearly to her. The day beat down upon them with its intimations of night.

  Once, even yesterday, she had thought Thomas was powerful, even perhaps, evil, but now she knew he was as helpless as she was, as they all were now on this day with its night coming. Night runs with its children, Sleep and Death, with its twins, the true dream and the false one.

  They pulled alongside the pier in Morgansport. As one barfly said to another: Life is a dirty glass or a very dirty glass. There was red seaweed, a dead crab floating belly-up. An entire page from a newspaper floated past, flat-out and completely readable. A laconic model with straight, blunt-cut hair was posing in a flowered gown. Pearl touched her own undernourished hair. That’s for me, she thought. That’s my style. The paper struggled around the boat and drifted off.

  Pearl opened her pocketbook and peered inside. There was a fifty dollar bill there. Perhaps she should get her hair done, like the girl floating in the water.

  The others were already making plans for returning. It was almost eleven. They would meet back at the pier at three. Pearl stood up uncertainly. She smoothed her dress.

  “Are you coming with me, Pearl?” Miriam asked.

  “Oh goodness,” Pearl said. “It’s too early in the day yet for me to make decisions.” She laughed as though she had been joking. But she followed the others off the boat and onto the dock, and trailed off after Miriam toward the center of town.

&nb
sp; It seemed so peculiar to her to be without the children. In the past, when she had ventured into town, some of them would always be with her. They would come into the liquor store where she ordered her wine and gin. The children selected the bottles with the prettiest labels.

  The town was small and busy. The people seemed sharply defined, as though they had great black borders around them. Pearl followed Miriam up and down the aisles of the grocery store, she followed Miriam into and out of bookstores and banks. She stood with Miriam in a long line at the post office. They used Pearl’s bag for the mail. Most of it was addressed to Miriam. Envelopes full of swatches of fabric, tearings of silk and lace. Ecru, velvet, denim. Each with its tale of simple betrayal and the tedium of love.

  Pearl could never understand why people who did not even know Miriam would want to send her the poor threads of their lives. They never saw the skirts, which were really more like wall tapestries, although they received long letters of advice and thanks. The skirt she was wearing now consisted of nine hundred histories. Miriam was like a saint dragging herself through the desert with the sins of the world hanging from her waist. Pearl supposed it was all a little crazy on Miriam’s part. She was even in possession of a bit of the headband of a woman who had died in climax. It had probably been posted by the lover. Pearl herself had never given Miriam anything for her skirts. Of course, Pearl did not consider that she had anything of her own. Pearl felt that she was renting space here in this life. And it belonged to her no more than to the person who would occupy it next.

  Pearl looked in shop windows at suntan lotions and rope bracelets. She looked into a fenced yard where a woman was weeding. She was going to make an effort, she really was.

  “Hello,” Pearl said.

  They went into a drugstore. Pearl bought candy for the children. She bought Miriam and herself ice-cream cones. She was beginning to feel a little better. She bit into her cone and laughed. The cold made her teeth ache.

  She looked at kites and bubble bath. She should get them for the children. They would like frivolous things like this. But something in her mind said it was hopeless, it was all hopeless.

  She wandered among the aisles. The store seemed overstocked in sanitary napkins. Several shelves of various brands were offered. Pearl found herself standing in front of the shelves in the attitude of one appraising fine jewelry. Lying among the boxes of Tampax was a package of Tarot cards with the picture of the Hanged Man on the cover. Pearl picked it up. She had seen these before. In her childhood . . . in the store of an old lady who ran a market in her home, who kept ducks in pens to be slaughtered. The Hanged Man. Well, he certainly looked peaceful, Pearl thought. She tried to receive intimations concerning her higher nature from the card but couldn’t manage to. Wasn’t this what was supposed to happen? One was supposed to receive intimations. He certainly looked peaceful, Pearl thought. But dead, she would imagine, although his eyes were open. Well, neither alive nor dead.

  “What do you think of this?” Pearl asked Miriam. She had placed the deck of cards back on the shelf where she had found it. She pointed them out to Miriam.

  “They don’t belong there,” a clerk said critically. “They belong in notions. I swear some people have to go out of their way to put something where it doesn’t belong.” The clerk’s face was addressing Miriam while it scolded Pearl. Both women looked at Pearl.

  The bottom of Pearl’s cone was leaking. She asked the girl behind the soda fountain if she could throw it away. “What is really needed is a drink,” she said to no one in particular. But to Miriam she said:

  “I think I must sit down for a bit. I’m not used to so much excitement.”

  Miriam said, “Yes, I have to be some place at one myself.”

  In the street again, they separated. Pearl hesitated in front of a store which seemed to deal exclusively in plates with asparagus and onions painted on them. A stocky woman in a tee shirt that said A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE stood beside her. Pearl wanted to ask her what it meant but the woman looked fierce and impatient so Pearl didn’t. If she inquired, the woman might say something unpleasant. She might call her a simple-witted twat or something.

  Pearl walked briskly away in search of a bar. Rattled, she took several turns that took her away from the town’s business area and back into cobblestoned, residential streets. She passed a row of lovely eighteenth-century houses. The doors stood open as though to invite adoration. A glimpse within showed glossy floors, linen love-seats, fresh flowers.

  “ . . . I said lime sherbet to go with the blueberries, not lemon sherbet for christ the fuck’s sakes,” said a voice from one of the houses. “I loathe lemon sherbet.”

  A brown Jaguar passed her on the street. It’s brake lights reddened. Lincoln pushed his head out.

  “Hello, Pearl,” he said. “Are you lost?” He laughed. His face was pink and damp. Shelly looked at Pearl and shook her head.

  “I was just looking for a bite to eat,” Pearl said.

  Shelly raised her brows.

  “Well, something to eat and drink,” Pearl said.

  “Get in, get in,” Lincoln said. “We’ll drive to The Silent Woman. Tables set up beneath the trees. Piccolo music. Quiche appetizers. And an excellent bartender.”

  Pearl shrugged. She knew Lincoln just wanted to show off his car. She opened the rear door and slid across the seat.

  “Walker had a car like this,” she said.

  “No, that was a Mercedes. You’ve still got that, you know. It’s still garaged down there by the dock.”

  “I don’t know anything about cars. It smelled like this one.”

  Lincoln laughed. “I’ve had this for over a year and haven’t driven it more than half a dozen times. It costs me two thousand dollars every time I turn on the ignition.” He sounded delighted. Pearl said nothing. She slumped in the back seat, pretending she was the female wanted on the post office posters, captured now and being taken to a maximum-security prison.

  The car stopped before a small white house with a large and quite beautiful garden. A sign on the gate post said THE SILENT WOMAN. Pearl gazed out at it unhappily. Nevertheless, there was a man in shirt sleeves and a madras vest behind a table that held a great many bottles.

  “It’s a proper place, Pearl,” Shelly said. “You don’t want to go into a bar all by yourself. You’ve got to think about these things.”

  “Are you sure an invitation isn’t necessary there?” Pearl asked.

  “No, no.”

  Pearl got out of the car. “Well,” she said, “thank you.”

  The car moved creamily off.

  She did not want to go in right away. The bartender looked at her impassively and slowly inserted his little finger in his ear and pushed it about.

  Across the street was an abandoned church, metamorphosed into a community center. There was the sound of vacuum cleaners and the muted barks of dogs. A bulletin board banged into the shaggy grass announced a puppet show at noon. THE MAGIC PAPER BEASTS LIVE PUPPETS LIFE SIZED BRING YOUR OWN MUSIC BRING YOUR OWN SELVES. An elongated papier-mâché object was draped over the bulletin board. It was an angel-type creature with hectic cheeks and yellow yarn hair hanging down like donkey ears.

  Puppet shows had always been associated in Pearl’s mind with audiences of well-bred children and competent mothers who knew how to raise their children properly. She sighed, looking at the church. It was a simple Protestant structure. The stained-glass windows depicted mountains, trees and stars. She could imagine it inside. The pews latched, the carpeting a muddy brown, the abandoned pulpit, pine.

  Behind her, in the garden, a man’s voice said:

  “I have two kids by my third wife and you’ve never seen such pampered horrors. Bills, pills, anorexia nervosa. Number Three always believed in making a grand occasion out of everything. She’d give them a party on Mother’s Day. Now, Number Two never had kids. She was cuckoo, you know. She kept the wine and threw away the roses, as they say.”
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br />   Pearl could smell liquor on the air.

  “Another tequila sunrise,” the man’s voice said.

  Oh it was so gay and civilized, Pearl thought, in this summer resort, this last resort. So gay and civilized to drink on a summer’s day beneath the trees. To drink drinks that had names, that were your friends.

  Her fingertips felt icy. No, she must not drink. She must keep a sober witness. Had she so quickly forgotten the hellish convictions she had held?

  This is no kind of life, Pearl thought.

  She walked across the street to the church. Just within the open front door was a wooden baptismal font holding a silver bowl. The bowl was, strangely enough, filled with water. The church was empty except for a small child seated behind a card table.

  “You might as well come in free,” the child said. “I guess no one else will be arriving.”

  Pearl hesitated. The church was warm and smelled sweet as though small things had died between its walls. With what forms of resurrection had the faithful found comfort here? Gone now. The faithful were being faithful somewhere else. There was an electric hot plate at the back of the nave with a long extension cord plugging it into the wall.

  “You don’t want to perform just for me, do you?” Pearl asked. “Please don’t feel you have to do that.”

  “We don’t mind,” the child said. “You can sit down anywhere.”

  It seemed peculiar to Pearl to be speaking with a child not her own. Or rather, not her own, but of the family of children who . . .