The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “Hello,” I say.

  He looks at me. He’s dirty, not like playing-in-the-dirt dirty, but really filthy. There are tear tracks on his cheeks, although he is an older boy, maybe fourteen. His eyes linger on the swollen place over my cheekbone.

  “I tripped,” I say, bringing up the lie easily, the one I had had ready for school, the one I always had ready, although hardly anyone ever asked.

  His expression changes from mild curiosity to contempt.

  “Liar,” he says.

  The doors slam as the monks get in.

  “Where are we going?” I ask the boy as the van pulls away.

  “Shut up.” He shoots a glance at the monks in the front, but they haven’t heard over the engine noise.

  The van bounces over a bump, turns right; I slide across the metal floor.

  “Get off,” the other boy says, kicking me. I scramble back to my place, brace my hands on the floor of the van to keep my place when we take the next turn. There aren’t any windows back here, so I can’t see out, but after a while we are pulling up a long hill and then leveling out and finally coming to a stop.

  One of the monks opens the rear doors, and the boy goes through them. I follow and stand blinking in the sunlight for a moment, wiping my hands against my thighs to get the black from the van floor off them.

  We’re beside a large gray building. There’s an unfamiliar smell in the air; I wrinkle my nose. The other boy is already crossing the swath of gravel, and I start to follow, but a monk stops me.

  “This way.” Putting a hand on my shoulder, steering me toward a little door beyond some bushes.

  We climb some stairs, turn and turn, and then we are in front of a closed door. The monk raises his hand and knocks, then opens the door and pushes me in.

  The man behind the desk looks up.

  “I got Bedrick,” says the monk behind me. “I put him on stalls.”

  “Good,” says the man behind the desk.

  That means nothing to me—stalls—although later I will feel a reflex nausea hearing the word.

  “I’m not Bedrick,” I say. “I think this is a mistake.”

  The man looks at me. He is a monk too, but some kind of fancy one: while the others’ robes were dusty, these brown folds fall clean and new, like velvet, and he wears a silver cross.

  “No mistake.” He looks up at the monk behind me. “Thank you, Timothy.” The door shuts. He takes a book from a drawer in his desk, opens it to a page. “Leo.”

  “Yes.” I realize then that Bedrick must have been the other boy.

  “I’m Prior Charles. This is St. William’s School. We have rules here. First among them is that boys don’t speak unless spoken to. Is that understood?” I nod. “Prayers three times a day, finish the food on your plate, give an honest day’s work to the Lord.” He gives me a closer look. “And it should go without saying that there is no fighting.”

  “I wasn’t fighting,” I say, my cheek throbbing. When he scowls, I add, “You were speaking to me.”

  “Impertinence is a habit you’ll unlearn.” He notes something down in the book. “You’re from Waite, correct? Any experience with animals?”

  “I had a dog once.” Before Clyde.

  He closes the book, rings a bell. A minute later, the door opens behind me. I turn and see a boy standing there; he’s huge, with a soft face like a pudding.

  “Gregory,” says the prior. “This is Leo. Get him outfitted. He’ll start in milking.”

  “Come on.” Gregory puts a hand on my shoulder, but I shrug it off and turn back to the prior.

  “Why am I here?”

  Prior Charles leans forward, his hands together on his desk. “You’re here to make something of yourself,” he says.

  Gregory takes my shoulder again firmly and steers me out, pushes me ahead of him down the hall to the foot of some narrow stairs and prods me up them.

  “You’ll want to take these stairs,” he says. “And you can’t use the big front door ever; use the little one on the side to go in and out.” We come to a landing and go down a long corridor. He turns a doorknob, pushes a door open. “Here’s where you’ll sleep.”

  It’s a big room with damp-looking cots spaced in two rows.

  “Bring anything with you?” he says. I shake my head. “That’s good. They’d only take it anyway.” I don’t ask who they are. “There’s the bathroom,” he says, pointing to a door down the hall. “Piss before bedtime even if you think you don’t have to, because you can’t get up during the night.” He takes me down the stairs again, and then outside. I have to run a little to catch up.

  We go around the back of the building, to another large building about a hundred yards away. Inside, the air is steamy and bleachy, and there is a racket of machines. We pass open doors: a large room filled with tubs, others filled with noisy equipment. Boys are swarming purposefully everywhere. Gregory stops in front of a half door, the top half open showing shelves and shelves of soft-cornered beige bundles. He puts his head into the opening.

  “New boy,” he calls.

  The top half of a monk appears in the space, sizes me up without speaking, turns away. He comes back in a minute and passes over a bundle and a pair of shoes. Gregory takes them and goes down the hall to another door, opens it and beckons to me. I follow him into a tiled room, humid like the rest of the building. He twists a tap on the wall, and a spray of water sputters from a showerhead in the corner.

  “Hurry up,” Gregory says. “Chapel in twenty minutes.”

  I strip down and get under the water, scrub myself using a hard bumpy lump of soap I take from a recess in the wall. It doesn’t lather well. I am embarrassed to have Gregory watching, but he pays no attention, unwrapping the bundle to reveal a pile of folded clothing. I turn my back to him to rinse off.

  “You’re what, nine?” he says.

  “Eleven.” He hands me a flannel from the pile and takes it back from me when I have dried off. Then he hands me underwear, undershirt, shirt, trousers, and a pair of thick socks. He tosses the wet flannel into a bin as I dress.

  “You’re lucky. Milking’s easy.” He yanks my collar right side out and does up the top button for me, mashing his thumb hard against my neck as he does; then with two fingers he tugs the trouser waistband away from my stomach. “A little big but they’ll do. We used to have suspenders, but too many boys got clever. Come on,” he says as a bell tolls from somewhere outside.

  “Gregory,” I pant, stumbling after him in the new shoes, which are too big too. “How long have you been here?”

  “Seven years.”

  Seven years. He must be joking, or lying. But why would he lie about that?

  “Why did you come here?”

  Gregory wheels around, anger distorting his pudding face.

  “Never, ever ask anyone that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I stammer.

  “Come on,” he says, and I stumble after him again, toward the building with the tolling bell swinging back and forth in its tower, and the boys streaming in through the doors below.

  * * *

  NOW YOU’RE WAKING up, you’re feeling refreshed, like you’ve had a nice long sleep.

  When I blink my eyes open, it does feel like waking from a dream.

  “How do you feel?” says Dr. Jellicoe.

  “Okay.” The shiny bowl isn’t empty anymore. There’s so much in there now, a hive of boys, the dirty floor of a van, a kitchen table, the long vibration of a tolling bell. Weren’t there other people too? “I don’t remember everything, though.”

  “We’re just getting started,” he says.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  Clare

  IT’S ON NOW, I CAN talk? It’s recording?

  We’ve tested it three times. Go ahead. Start at the beginning.

  * * *

  I WAS BORN the youngest of eleven, the only girl, and when I emerged into the light of day I was quite unmistakably dead.

  The omens hadn�
�t been good from the start. My mother was no longer young. She’d given birth every other year for two decades, losing three in infancy along the way, and then five barren years had followed my brother Michel. She quite reasonably thought the whole business was done; she was looking forward to grandchildren. Then in one terrible year, war took the two eldest boys and influenza snatched away two of the others. She’d given birth to ten children and had only three left. When she learned I was on the way she wept: another baby meant another opening of her bruised heart, a new opportunity for loss.

  She didn’t weep long, though. She was both devout and determined, believing in God’s will be done, but also in God helps those who help themselves. She dried her tears and took herself to the church, made a scrupulous confession, and then wheedled the priest into blessing me where I lay bean-sized in her womb, as a sort of advance baptism to capture my prenatal soul. Then she went home and told my father.

  “This time, we’ll call in the doctor,” he said.

  “Absolutely not,” said my mother. “I will not have a man in the room.” Coming from a normally gentle and compliant person like my mother, her statement had the air of a royal fiat; my father did not argue. “We’ll use the midwife who brought Auguste.” My cousin. She added, “And you know it may not get that far.” For the reality was then that not all pregnancies became babies, just as not all children lived to grow up.

  Despite the odds, I grew under her mourning clothes; I provoked terrific heartburn and kicked her at night when she tried to sleep. She used to say I was more trouble to her than all the boys put together, before I ever drew a breath. Not that it looked like I was going to do anything of the sort, when after a prolonged labor I slipped into the world.

  “A girl,” said the midwife in an appropriately disappointed tone.

  “A girl?” cried my mother, sitting up despite her exhaustion. After ten sons! She hadn’t really dared to hope. She beckoned the midwife. “Bring her to me.”

  The midwife dried me off and flicked the bottoms of my feet. I lay pale, unmoving. Still, she was not overly worried—she had coaxed many an infant back from Limbo. She turned me over and scraped a rough towel up and down my back. She dealt my buttocks a firm slap. Nothing. She gave a tsk.

  “What’s wrong?” cried my mother.

  “Ne t’inquiète pas,” growled the midwife. She was a stubborn woman, proud of her skill; she would not, would not fail, would not lose the soul of even a girl child. While my increasingly anxious mother watched, she pinched the tender flesh between my white toes and blew with her own mouth into my nostrils.

  “What are you doing to her?” my mother demanded.

  They were alone in the room. There had been no progress for hours, and the sisters-in-law who had been in and out of the birthing room all day had thought it safe to leave temporarily, one going next door and the other downstairs, to feed their own families breakfast.

  My mother prayed silently, watching the midwife, who’d now turned her back, and tried to guess from the movements of her elbows what was happening with me. Never more than at that moment had my mother wished for her own mother, slumbering beneath the Canadian ground more than twenty years by then.

  “There’s no use,” said the midwife at long last, turning around. She brought the damp unmoving bundle of me over and laid me on my mother’s chest. My mother stared down at my pale dead face. “It’s probably best,” the midwife told her. “You’re far too old for a little one.”

  My father was drowsing just outside, in what would be called in modern homes a living room, and indeed it was the room we lived in. We gathered near the fireplace in winter and at the large table for schoolwork and meals. My father read there, and my mother did her sewing. Two of my brothers slept in that room at night. It was rarely empty, but that day my father was alone. The older boys were one in school and the other at work; Michel, the youngest, was with my father’s sister on the floor below, having breakfast. Uncles had kept my father company for a while, bluff and helpless, smoking and trading stories, watching the women pass in and out of the door. At dawn they had drifted away to their own breakfasts and their jobs, leaving my father to keep the vigil by himself. He knew his role well by this time: sit and wait, for the kitten cries and the opening door, and in the meantime accept food and cups of tea conjured by the various women of the family. He would no sooner have entered the birthing chamber than he would have run naked down the street.

  He came awake suddenly to the sound of my mother screaming, and though still half-asleep he understood immediately that it was not one of the expected noises of labor. He leapt to his feet, opened the door to the birthing room, and charged across the threshold. He stayed just long enough to see my mother keening over my body before he wheeled around and ran back out.

  He returned in a few moments with a glass of water. My mother, clutching my corpse and wailing, struck out at him when he approached the bed.

  “Attends,” he told her, fending her off with one arm, holding the water glass high in the other hand, out of her reach. “Ce n’est pas pour toi.”

  He dipped his forefinger and thumb into the glass, brought them to my forehead. Telling the story later, my mother always said that at that moment, it was as though a hand came over her mouth. She couldn’t make a sound as she watched him trace a wet cross on the tiny plain above my eyebrows. After my father took his dripping fingers away, there was utter silence in the room.

  Then she said I went a slow dark red, like a coal when you blow on it and awaken its heart of fire. My face gathered in a bunch, and I opened up my mouth and howled. Not the kitten mewl of a newborn, but a six-month-infant holler.

  My mother said it was the Holy Ghost who called me back into the world through my father’s fingers, and I believed it for a time. But now I’m not sure; it might have just been the cold of the water, or the ridges on my father’s fingertips against my tender new skin. It could have been the rush of air that entered the room with my father, or the power of a mother’s prayer, or simple coincidence. In any case, I hollered and I lived. I had a proper christening a few months later. Which means that in the end, I’d been baptized three times: once in the womb, a second time by my father, and finally officially, in the church. My soul was pinned firmly in the care of the Lord.

  * * *

  WE LIVED THEN in Woonsocket, in one of those shaky three-family houses that fill New England. We were a solid block of French on the street, and all family in our building: my father’s sister below, my mother’s brother above. My father’s brothers occupied two levels of the house next door. It was years before I knew that it amused others how we described that—we lived on top of my aunt, my uncle lived on top of us. Two houses next door to each other we called side by each. Not all the families in the neighborhood were French; there were scatterings of Italians and Irish in Woonsocket, even some Jews. But each group kept mostly to its own kind; that was the way things were then. The school I went to was taught by nuns, in both French and English.

  We moved out of Woonsocket when I was eight. We didn’t go very far—just a few miles down to Providence, to live above my father’s new bookshop—but it might as well have been to a different country. Providence was much busier than Woonsocket, and it had no French community. In Woonsocket, all the shopkeepers spoke French and my brothers ran in and out of all the houses on our block as if they lived in them. In Providence, we knew none of our neighbors, and not a soul spoke French. My mother, who knew very little English, was marooned. She had to take one of us, usually me, with her to do the shopping. Such embarrassment I felt, seeing the scorn on the grocer’s face as my mother plucked at my sleeve qu’est-ce qu’il a dit? I hate remembering how impatient I was with her.

  I don’t think I was really sad to leave Woonsocket; a child never understands what is being lost. I liked the new house. I had a little back bedroom on the very top floor. More like an alcove or a closet, just an extra bit of space barely big enough for a bed shoved under a dor
mer. I had to be careful not to sit up quickly or I’d bang my head. But through the deep-set, wavy-paned window I could see across to downtown Providence, the collection of clapboard buildings fringing the black water of the river, and the spire of the Protestant church on Westminster Street.

  Our new church was around the corner from the bookshop. It was an imposing building with a big carved wooden door and velvet curtains on the confessionals—so grand, so full of strangers, that I was surprised at how bravely my mother entered it. But as she said, Catholic is Catholic—whether French, Irish, Portuguese, or Italian—and at Mass, the Latin served everyone.

  The new shop, at the foot of College Hill, would be a real bookstore. There hadn’t been much walk-in custom in Woonsocket, the locals there too newly trickled into this country to waste money on books, and most of my father’s income had depended on the rare books he bought and sold, pictureless volumes that looked very dull to me. Now we’d carry all sorts of books. Brown-wrapped parcels arrived every day, our new inventory. My brothers were conscripted to build shelves to hold them, and the first days in the shop were filled with the noise of sawing and hammering. Then the sanding began, generating clouds of sawdust that floated everywhere. Turning over in my bed at night, I could feel particles carving gruff messages on my skin, and when I combed out my hair, bits of wood showered my blouse. I was glad when the boys were done with that part of it and moved on to applying the dark-brown stain.

  Meanwhile, my mother was setting up the living quarters, which meant lots of hot water to clean every surface. Stoking the fire in the kitchen, calling for my brothers to help her lift the huge pot, calling to me to help her scrub. I think we got up dirt that had been in those floors for fifty years. There was no school for me for a week while we cleaned the shop and the apartment and unpacked everything.

  My father catalogued books long into the night; he wanted to open for business as soon as possible. On the third or fourth day after the move I woke up in the middle of the night, sat up and banged my forehead on the dormer, then slid out of bed and crept downstairs to find my father sitting at the front counter with a stack of ivory cards.