Little Fugue

by Robert Anderson

He looked and saw that she was quoting from a little gold gallery note to the right of the framed Botticelli. He took a step closer and squinted. The figure in the drawing was not Autumn at all, as he had thought. It was Ariadne, daughter of Minos, who provided Theseus with the length of thread that led him out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. He repaid her by abandoning her on the isle of Naxos, where Aphrodite promised her an immortal lover to replace the mortal one she had lost.

  “No, my love,” Ted said, “it’s Ariadne’s clew.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Ariadne. She was a navigator.”

  “A navigator?”

  “Someone who discovers and steers a course?”

  “Yes, I know. But what is she doing nearly naked?”

  Ted thought about it. “I don’t know.”

  8.

  Sylvia

  She went into the nursery. She had in mind that she might smother her father within the folds of the dark Asian quilt with the jackstraw tendrils and the malignant plums, patterned against the lighter fabric like big, black hail. This was something very much like what her father had been doing to her for more than two decades now, drowning her in his saturninity, bombarding her with the chill pellets of his nil legacy. She grabbed the quilt by the hem. She skinned the bed alive. The pillows were weightless cloud lozenges, tumbling to the floor. She sniffed the comforter for evidence of matrimony. She wanted to kill her dead father; she did not want to offend him. There was no residual odor of man and wife. There was, though, the stench of baby shit coming from the crib.

  Wait, didn’t her children, at least, count for something? Weren’t they a wedge, a barrier between her and the property rights of her father? Didn’t they serve to bury her dead?

  Bee King Otto obviously had his children, Sylvia and her brother, out of a sense of social and biological obligation. Sylvia screwed up with the Band-Aids. The second time on purpose. Both times, she managed to convince Ted that it was what he had wanted all along. She loved her children, but for Sylvia love, in all its manifestations, had always been a mistake. A crashing, near-fatal accident. Familial, marital, and, yes, maternal love. It was the same breathless anticlimax in the loss of innocence as it was in the delivery of innocence. Her difficulties with marriage and her letdown with motherhood had only deepened her obsession with her father. She had come to sort of believe in the doctrine of original sin that rendered love, foremost, a curse.

  Mighty, me in dust distressed.

  She went to the bassinet, dragging along her quilted train. Light from the window filtered into the children’s bedding. They lie there ruffled and muzzled in the covers, turning together to the wall. The sly choreography of dreams. One of them had dirtied its diaper in its sleep. The scene was so exact and heartrending, and it was made real by the prevalence of rot. Like lovemaking in a way. Love is only made real by its finitude. If no one died, neither would they love.

  That triggered a Grecian lightbulb. A memory of Myrrha. Sylvia saw stars and the checkerboard map of a banquet cloth, which reminded her that, what with the new poems, she had been feasting on despair for months.

  She squeezed at the babies’ bottoms. Her little girl was the offender. Concurrent feedings would not synchronize their bowels, as she had long hoped.

  Wait a minute.

  She went into the front room and dialed the radio until she heard choral music, languid and liturgical. She let the volume swell. If the children could sleep through the thunder of their father and their grandfather’s abandonment . . .

  She crossed to the marbletop. She took up her pen. She copied down the words Time/Eternal/Arterial underground railroad straight from the cave wall of her mind. She closed her notebook around her pen. The words were loose cairns. She would come back their way, maybe more than once, before dawn. She lifted her dress and hooked her thumb into the elastic of her white panties. She flayed them to the hardwood. They lay there like a coquettishly dropped handkerchief. She stepped onto the marble-topped table. She curtsied until she felt the chill of her father’s cranium between her thighs.

  She recognized the choral work now. She used to sing it herself, interred in the choir at Smith for a semester. The text was written by a medieval Franciscan. Originally, it was meant to be recited at the rite of the Feast of the Seven Dolors. Pergolesi set it to music. The piece was called Stabat Mater. “The Mother Is Standing.”

  9.

  Robert

  The year 1963 was abominable for civilization all around. The mavericks died along with the established icons, and over time history has melded them into the same aggregation. This is one year in which death played favorites. My favorites. Robert Frost and Tristan Tzara died. C. S. Lewis and Jean Cocteau. Georges Braque and Edith Piaf. William Carlos Williams and Clifford Odets. W.E.B. Du Bois and Pope John XXIII. John Kennedy and the maidenhead of American innocence. I muse about the seating arrangements in Elysium being allotted by the date of death and I am content that Sylvia is perched with the immortals; in the company of a pope, a president, a father of cubism, a father of surrealism, a father of the civil rights movement, and a Mater Dolorosa. But putting her in with this aggregation seems a bit of a prosaic stretch. JFK, for instance, was a gentleman who lived in a world where comparatively few could summon up the meaning of the word napalm, long hair on a man was a religious affectation, and gravitaters toward bebop alone smoked pot. He influenced the decade greatly in and by his conspicuously abrupt exit from its main stage. His “New Frontier” sales pitch, his aristocratic offhand attitude, especially under fire, and his expansive sense of “cool,” continued to resonate in ways that he never would have imagined throughout the decade that he sired out of air by dying tragically in its formative stages and thus scarring the communal psyche of my generation beyond repair, and perversely preparing us for all of the irrationalities that were yet to come.

  I was in high school in 1963. I attended the Trinity School, two blocks east and twenty-four blocks south of this rooftop that I’m standing on. That was also the year of the great Black Leotard Controversy at Trinity. Every Catholic girl in town wanted to be Tanaquil LeClercq. She had been Balanchine’s prima ballerina at the New York City Ballet and also his wedded wife, until she was paralyzed by the sudden onset of polio one night after a curtain call. She wasn’t of the faith and yet the Vatican was deluged by handwritten petitions calling for her beatification, many of them in Crayola. “Tanny,” as the little girls who hadn’t met her never failed to call her, had been marooned in a wheelchair for life, but she would dance on pointe through the golden gate of a better world. The girls wore their Danskins to bed and wore them also to school despite the strict dress-code regulations. Father Manning, our headmaster, turned an indulgently blind eye to the proliferation of dark leotards beneath the flannel skirts as long as he could. One day Sister Maria Pia Stella Luisa, who was so high-handed that the other nuns called her “the Dowager,” asked the father outright if he were running an accredited prep school or “some kind of hootchie-chootchie academy.” Manning issued an immediate edict against the black tights.

  At three in the afternoon, we would crowd into the Corona Candy and Fountain Service on Ninety-fourth and Amsterdam. It was a cramped storefront with a hand-painted rainbow placard above the door. Liquor stores, saloons, and movie houses alone had grandstand neons in those days. Little gentlemen that we were, with our closely pared, side-parted hair, our blue insigniaed jackets with the matching ties, and our cruciform tie clasps and cuff links, we would allow the girls to occupy the six counter stools, split across the top like muffins, and the three blond-wood tables. We lingered against the wall, calling each other “my man,” lighting up and thereby causing Mr. van Devanter—a little Belgian who always wore a V-neck T-shirt with talcumed gray chest hairs protruding—to point his spatula and invoke the idle threat of lung cancer. He said that it would be cheaper to go out to the curb and suck on an exhaust pipe. We probably would have tried it, had we thought of it first. We had sniffed gasoli
ne-soaked rags, witnessed colors that did not organically exist upon earth, and puked all over each other. We had lived to laugh about it. The terse wounded ones in the movies smoked. We knew that smoking was sexual years before we were certain of the logistics of sex. The sexually deprived tended to smoke heavily. Van Devanter probably had a heifer of a wife upstairs—no one bothered to inquire. But Manning and Father Buchanan puffed compulsively. Manning would give the altar boy the high sign before the offertory. The kid would sneak back to the sacristy and leave one burning for him. The father would wander casually offstage during the hymn.

  Mr. van Devanter had a corroded radio, bespattered with paint and grill grease, dangling from a strand of wire above the griddle.

  “Scandal in the UK,” the radio said. “Honeybear Ivanov admits under interrogation that Brit actress Christine Keeler questioned Lord Profumo, on his behalf, about an exchange of nuclear warheads with West Germany. Queen returning from New Zealand . . .”

  The girls would wait, two to a muffin stool, for space to clear in the restroom so that they could change out of their school clothes. They would take their black tights from their purses and hold them up to the light. The material, thus illuminated, was knit with secret pearls. They passed the fabric meditatively through their pink and freckled hands.

  “You boys are so hormonal,” they would say when they caught us looking. “Why don’t you all grow up?”

  We had thought that biological urges constituted unmistakable proof of maturity.

  “South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem is reported to have been deposed and assassinated . . .”

  Manning’s hands began to tremble. He developed what might have been a tic douloureux. He would embarrass the faith by spazzing out in the middle of Mass like a Holy Roller. He began to forget our names. He baptized a corpse in euphonious Latin. “Hophead” was our verdict. Priests, for all their dogma and conventionality, were our poets, astrological and baffling. They knew wizardly litanies that had actually saved lives. Priests were the ones brought in at the moment of death to petition that the Holy Father allow life to continue upon a higher plateau. Still, everyone we knew observed off-hours. Everyone kicked back, had a drink, or a smoke, or a piece of ass. We had been in the rectory. Manning had an elaborate brass tea set, but no television. I never saw so much as a chess set or a checkerboard. He had nothing on the bookshelf aside from prayer volumes, Reinhold Niebuhr, and works by that suspected Thorazine addict Bishop Fulton John Sheen. The headmaster’s nocturnal activities became a source of great speculation. Who did he think that he was fooling, anyway? God?

  We trailed Manning, one evening, to 129th Street. Harlem was way out of his jurisdiction. The storefront and nonaffiliated Emancipated New Canaanites, the Mount Calvary Mercenaries, and the Greater Antioch Unto Others were said to be middle-aged street gangs in cheaply made suits. We had heard that they could be quite inquisitional when someone of an opposing faith breached their territory. We anticipated the satisfaction of seeing our spiritual leader getting himself stomped. Manning went into a tenement, stepping over some hulking Negroes who most likely lounged there on the porch day and night in defiance of the tradition of gainful employment and socioeconomic advancement. They had a certain bodily splendor that we knew we could never in our dreams aspire to. They had their own chronic irony. They had the freedom of their directionlessness. We envied and hated them. Before opening the door, Manning made sure to tuck his valise under his arm, thus freeing his hand to reach up and cant his black miter. The Negroes stood up only after he was in the vestibule with his back turned. They respected the cassock and the collar, they seemed to be saying, but not what the dark clothes contained.

  Manning came out in a moment, too soon, too alert to have fixed, or to have had his ashes hauled—that was our pseudonym for getting laid, borrowed from earlier generations who may have known the origin of the expression, which we never learned. The fellas stood as he stepped down off the porch, nodding and tipping that inverted handbag of a hat. They genuflected, hitching their trousers, grabbing their dicks, holding the pose. They cracked up. Manning headed back toward the el.

  Otis Cross, a Negro kid who charmed us with accounts of uptown stabbings and rigor-mortis-afflicted drug fatalities—“He’d been dead so long that when we tossed him off the roof, he chipped up like a soda cracker”—appeared in our classes without fanfare. In Sister Thomas Aquinas’s Italian class—Aquinas was an accomplished linguist and folk guitarist who subtly germinated our consciousnesses with the commiserative politics of “Guantanamera,” “Mas Que Nada,” and the Notturno from La Dolce Vita—he rolled his rrr inflections so flawlessly that she could not control herself from tracing Otis’s ancestry back to Hannibal’s rapine of Campania. He fibbed that he had an uncle named Hannibal, smiling indulgently down on the sister from the towering eminence of his unbreachable racial pride. She was made so merry by this disclosure that she got her guitar out of the cupboard and played a melancholy an-dante campaniano from some Giuliani concerto for the rest of the period. For the recessional at the bell, she deftly switched into “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Otis could also handle any logarithmic challenge that Sister Teresa di Dio could hurl at him, and he actually got away with intimating to Sister Maria del Popolo that Iago’s codpiece was perhaps too tight. He went around on the sly with Tammy Schaffer. No one said anything.

  “A bomb has gone off during Sunday services at Birmingham, Alabama’s, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Nineteen parishioners are reported injured. Four schoolgirls are dead . . .”

  Upon the roof of the Trinity gymnasium was an outdoor basketball court, an asphalt Arcadia. Players from all over the city lined up for a game, verifying their Catholicism for the playground attendants and swearing that they had an abiding interest in studying for the priesthood once their “balling” days were over. Everyone called the court “Olympus.” One day, Tommy Rowse went high for a rebound. Otis, a runt for all of the impact he’d had on our world, accidentally upended him from underneath. Though diminutive, Otis was so good at rebounding that we called him the Postman. Tommy was another who claimed that he wanted to be a priest. He said that they were the ones who got away with everything in life. Their vows of poverty brought them all that money could never buy. He wanted to use the ordination as a cover for dope shooting and sexual adventure. He wanted, he said, to screw spade women with his pants carpeting his ankles in Harlem hallways, sucking on his postcoital cigarette, even in the act—smoking was sex and sex was death, and what grown-ups didn’t understand was that we had to smoke to signify that we would a hundred times rather die than live out their conscriptive lives. Ordinary life seemed to us to be so regimented that death held the first, last, and best hope of freedom. In the meantime of the shorttime, we meant to have fun. Tommy had said what he said about screwing spade women right in front of Otis. Otis hadn’t said anything back.

  Lying there on his back after taking that hard fall from the rim, Tommy couldn’t contain his rabbity little smile. The smile was the only giveaway that he was not unconscious. We tickled the crap out him, but he held out somehow, showing yogic control of his visceral muscles. We played snake-charming air flutes over his body. Joey Martell stamped the tread imprint of his left Converse All Star into Tommy’s chest. We tested out the Saint Nick’s Arena witticism that we would hear every Friday fight night on the television. “G’home if ya wanna lie down, yer bum, yer,” we said, cracking up, taking turns double-dutching rightward and leftward over his outstretched body. We lifted the hem of his sweatshirt and saw the incipient column of black belly hair that none of us had noticed before. Then Paul Pellingier reached and pinched Tommy hard, the white skin reddening into an angry, bee-stung blotch. We saw the continent of darker denim spreading out from the crotch of his corduroys. Otis had been laughing with us a moment before. He was the first to turn and run. The rest of us followed, but in the opposite direction.

  We made it down the stairs and across to the park before w
e caught up to our wits and reasoned communally that none of us was to blame. We had all seen what had happened. Paul Pellingier said, “What if it was one of us?” But that was just it. It had been one of us and Otis was no longer, or rather never had been, one of us. We had all seen him viciously undercut Tommy while he was helpless in the air. We would have to tell what we had seen. The playground monitor might be returning from the john any second. The first thing that he would do would be to call the police.

  We ran back and gauged Tommy’s wrist and heart for the rumor of a pulse. The silence of his body insisted that he was serious about this death thing. Made bold by our capacity as eyewitnesses of the exceedingly rare event of death, we turned him over. There wasn’t much blood at all. The tiniest chip of his skull was missing. It looked like something that could be handled on a walk-in at the clinic. Some other kid found the missing piece among the pebbles. Fuzz on one side and bright bone on the other. We flipped Tommy back the way that he had fallen. He lay there smiling up at us. The hired playground hand came back from his bathroom break. He looked at us, standing there in an open circle, hemming, hawing, and shuffling our sneakered feet in place with the body lying in the blanket of our shadows. He nodded, proceeded down the ramp of the stairs, and kept on going. A couple of us went off to get Father Manning. He came with that special black kit that we had seen him set off for Saint Luke’s Hospital with.

  “Poetess Sylvia Plath, wife of award-winning poet Ted Hughes, was found dead this morning in her London flat . . .”

  Tommy’s family didn’t want any kids at the funeral. Some of our parents attended, and they remarked on how sublime and how grown-up he appeared in his upraised catafalque. “He was like a little king,” my mom said. In those days, the Requiem Mass for expired children would sometimes reprise the ceremony of the festival of Candlemas, the holy rite of the presentation of the infant Christ at the Temple. At the end of the service, all of the congregation’s tallows were blown out, row by row.