The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  That night when I made my evening prayers, I first asked a blessing for my father, then the usual request to Saint Anthony for humility. My knees on the cool wood as I waited. After a few minutes without any glow of response, I bent my head over my braided fingers again.

  Blessed Mary, I prayed. Grant me strength.

  She was the mother of God, but she’d been a woman first. And of the two, humility and strength, the latter seemed a far better bet.

  * * *

  BRADLEY WAS BORN on a spring morning, six months after my father’s death. Hugh was delighted. He’d been sure it would be a boy, and from the moment he learned I was with child he treated me like a delicate casing around an important jewel.

  My mother visited daily after the birth, giving me lessons in the simplest things, the diaper pinning and how to test the bathwater, how to trim the little fingernails. For the first month she kept two households, housecleaning and cooking for Hugh and me, then leaving in late afternoon, our supper warm on the stove. I hated to think of her eating alone—what a thing, for a woman who had borne eleven children!—but when Hugh’s tread came on the stairs she’d wrap her scarf around her head, issue last instructions, two minutes on the hot fire before serving, don’t forget to whip the cream for the tart, and be gone.

  “You’ve been such a help, Sophie,” said Hugh as my mother was slipping past him one evening. “I don’t know what might have happened without you.” He turned to me. “Maybe your mother should come live with us.”

  Qu’est-ce qu’il a dit? To me. She’d understood the sentiment of gratitude, but not the rest.

  I was struck dumb by his words. What did he mean, what might have happened? Did he think I was incapable of caring for our child? I remembered the terrible shame when he hadn’t offered my mother a home after my father had died. Now he wanted her, when it was of benefit to him? I felt then what I had not felt before: hatred.

  My mother touched my elbow, and I turned to her.

  “He thinks I should come to you during the weekdays,” I told her in French, keeping my tone bright. “He says I can help you to reopen the shop. We can sell the remaining books.”

  “What a nice idea,” she said, smiling at Hugh.

  “She can’t leave the garden,” I told Hugh. A frown on his face at the reminder of how we lived, without a yard or even a balcony. “It’s almost cherry season.” Hugh loved my mother’s cherry cakes; everyone did. I didn’t say anything more; Hugh needed to make the idea his own.

  “She can teach you how to make the cakes,” he said. “You’ll take Bradley there during the daytime, and be home before I return from work.”

  It was a gigantic reprieve, but with a sickening underside: cherry season was brief. But then there would be tender haricots. And then tomatoes, and eggplant for the ratatouille Hugh fancied. I couldn’t string harvests together forever, of course: winter would come. But I wouldn’t think about that until I had to.

  * * *

  THOSE NEXT FEW months are softly lit in my memory, the sun striping the wide-planked wooden floor of the bookshop, Bradley asleep in a basket while my mother taught me basic tasks. How to get out the yellow stains from under the arms of Hugh’s undershirts, how to handle a pie crust without toughening it, how to slit the belly of a fish and lift the bones out in one piece. If she was surprised at my eagerness to learn all that I’d spurned before, she didn’t mention it. She must have believed that motherhood had made me a woman at last.

  I had worried that it might be unbearably sad to be in the shop without my father, but we felt his presence in the silences there. Sometimes it seemed like he would step out of the back room, holding a book in his immaculate hands, reading out a bit, chou-fleur, listen to this. The man he’d been when I was a little girl, not the broken WPA laborer of his last years, the one who took his suspenders down with hands scarred and permanently discolored, bending over the kitchen sink to wash his face and neck before coming to the table.

  I managed to keep the arrangement in the bookshop going through a lovely summer. Meanwhile, I was a newly terrible wife, lying beside Hugh at night in a bed of secret loathing, wishing for his subtraction from my life. Somehow. Somehow.

  * * *

  SEPTEMBER BEGAN WITH rain, starting in the wee hours each morning and carrying on most of each day. Hugh decreed that Bradley and I would stay in the house, that even the short distance to the bookshop was too far to walk in the downpour. He carried a note to my mother, to let her know not to expect me.

  “The garden must be nearly harvested now,” he said. “We’ll move her here when the rain stops.”

  It seemed it would never stop. Every day for a week, and then another week. I hated the rain that kept me from my mother, but I loved it too for putting off the day of reckoning. Would she agree to Hugh’s offer? He would be furious if she declined. But if she agreed—I hated to think of her coming under Hugh’s thumb. And no more garden! How would she bear that? Each day when I awoke to the drumming of rain, my heart sank, then rose, then sank again.

  At last a clear day dawned.

  “You’ll stay home today,” Hugh decreed, scraping butter across his breakfast toast. “It might yet rain.” He thought me such a mouse, so completely cowed, that he didn’t even look to see that I acquiesced; he delivered his mandate and got up from the table. “We’ll move your mother on Saturday.”

  Bradley cooed in his basket while I washed the breakfast dishes. I’d need to do the laundry. It had been impossible during the long rain to hang anything on the outside line to dry. The thought came to me: if it was weather fine enough for laundry, wasn’t it fine enough to walk to the bookshop? I could go and be back before Hugh ever came home; he’d never know. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

  I couldn’t go out in what I was wearing, though, a housedress with an apron on top. I left the dishes to dry on the drainboard, went into the bedroom, and opened the wardrobe. Everything needed to be laundered, except for two dresses: the first a long sky-blue satin sheath that I’d worn for my wedding and that I’d worn only once since, to an evening concert. The other was my second-best dress. My mother had made it for me out of one of her old ones, unpicking the old-fashioned dropped waist and taking out all the seams, and putting buttons down the front. The fabric was a plum stripe that she cleverly turned, the stripes meeting at the front placket to make chevrons; she’d added a belt and a little white collar. It suited me very well.

  I stood in the bedroom, looking out of the window at the shiny streets, fighting with myself. I wanted to go to the bookshop; I should do the laundry.

  I decided I would do both.

  I made a bundle of three of Hugh’s shirts, one of my stained everyday dresses, and a pair of his trousers, and pinned on a hat. I swept Bradley up and kissed him, laid him in the pram—we’re going to see Mummum—took an umbrella from the stand, and hung it from the pram handle. After a moment of consideration, I took Hugh’s long black oilcloth slicker from the peg and draped it beside the umbrella. Just in case.

  I wheeled the pram down the long drive feeling like a criminal, but once on the sidewalk I felt a flush of triumph. The laundry bundle rode nicely between the pram handles. I was so happy. I remember singing a little to Bradley as we went along. The sky was the weirdest hue, almost yellow. Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning. There isn’t any rhyme for a yellow sky. There should be.

  When I arrived, my mother kissed me and fussed over Bradley (Oh là là, he’s gotten so big in just two weeks), and made me a cup of tea. A shadow girl still stands there with my mother, watching her strong, age-spotted hand with the veins standing out on the back, tossing the leaves over the endlessly just-boiling water.

  She helped with the laundry; together we pinned it to the line in the yard. Then an hour in the garden, in the humid still air while she weeded the crops of leeks and squash and I pulled late tomatoes from the vines, holding Bradley on my hip, telling him the words for things in French and English. When i
t was time to open the shop, I went inside and turned the key in the front door, then sat in a chair and read a picture book to the baby, getting up to help the occasional customer find a book, or to ring up and wrap a purchase. My mother’s singing drifted in from the garden.

  The sky darkened around noon, and not long after that a light rain began, striking the glass of the bookshop windows with insistent little taps. I went out and helped my mother pull the laundry from the line; we rehung it on a cord that she stretched across the kitchen and wound around a cleat on the wall. Showing me: a good knot like this, et voilà. I have some cord you can use to make your own. She waved me away from the lunch dishes, saying There’s a seam coming apart in that blue shirt. Better get to it now, before it makes a hole. I got her mending basket out and began the repair, but the thread wouldn’t behave and the fabric kept bunching up. You’ve threaded the needle the wrong way, my mother said, drying her hands on her apron. She held the thread up, showed me the fibers standing away from it like tiny branches. It’s like pulling a tree through—one direction smooth and easy, the other direction disaster. She rethreaded the needle and handed it to me: comme ça.

  The shop was nearly empty, for a long while no one with us but a student type who stood in the depleted art history section in the back of the store, thumbing through the colored plates in the heavy volumes there. After him there was a young woman in fashionable clothing who must have been caught outside without an umbrella and just pushed through the nearest shop door. She made several circuits of the store, her dismay obvious every time she came to the front and saw that the rain hadn’t stopped. When she finally left, she didn’t pull the door fully closed behind her and the wind slammed it right back open, blowing in a fat, cold slash of rain. My mother got up quickly to shut it.

  I knotted the thread and snipped the end, slid the needle into the pincushion. I held up my work to examine it, but the light was too poor to see well. When had it gotten so dark?

  “I should go,” I said, bundling the shirt into a ball and standing up. I needed to get Bradley home and dry and changed, get the laundry dry somehow, erase all evidence that I’d gone out, before Hugh came home.

  “You should stay for supper,” said my mother as I came back down from the kitchen with the damp laundry in my arms. She was looking out at the rain, which had intensified, the sound of it enveloping the house. “Hugh will know to find you here.” She turned to me. “I worry about you.”

  I almost told her then. I’ve started to hate him. I don’t know if this is how it’s supposed to be. I parted my lips to speak, but just at that moment Bradley awoke crying from his nap.

  “It’s the wind rattling the windows.” I took him up and jiggled him against my shoulder. “He’s frightened.” He cried more loudly.

  My mother took him from me. “Pauvr’enfant,” she said into his squalling, contorted face. She clasped him against her and turned at the waist, swung him around with her body, back and forth, and he calmed down.

  “You used to love this,” she told me. She transferred him, beginning to wail again, into my arms. “Hold him like this, against your chest,” she instructed. “One hand here”—she placed my hand behind his warm head—“one here.” On his bottom. “And round and round.”

  I turned in a slow circle with the warm solid mass of my infant pressed against me in my arms, and he soothed again almost immediately and gave that little hiccup he used to give after a crying spell.

  I had forgotten that hiccup until just now.

  The moment for confession was past. I was newly shamed by my mother’s competence. How good she was at everything! Nearly sixty and arthritis starting in her hands, she’d take my tortured needlework from me and replace my mess of awkward stitches with a perfect seam. I couldn’t even comfort my own baby without guidance. Hugh was right: I was a sham wife, a sham mother.

  I swallowed the words I had been about to say; I tucked Bradley into his pram and took the slicker from the handle and put it on. My mother raised her eyebrows.

  “It’s raining too hard,” she said, watching me roll up the coat sleeves and work the toggles down the front. “Think of the baby.”

  “He won’t melt,” I said, and kissed her good-bye—at least I have that—and went out into the late-afternoon downpour in that old oilcloth coat with the bundle of laundry crammed against my side beneath it, Bradley in the pram with the hood stretched over him and buttoned down, and the umbrella opened over us both.

  The street was empty; no one else was stupid enough to be out in such weather. The rain was coming down in a pelting sheet. Despite the pram hood and the umbrella, within half a block Bradley and I were very wet. I walked faster, and as if in response, the wind came up harder. It blew sideways, backward, forward. One moment I was struggling against it, as if against the powerful breath of a giant; the next I was practically running along as it pushed me from behind, each step carrying me a great distance. I turned the pram with effort, crossed the street leaning into the wind. It blew us across the road, then died down just long enough for me to stand, then blew again, skittering us backward. It was like an enormous cat batting us with its paws.

  Suddenly a button on the pram hood popped off, and then another. The hood whirled around crazily for a few seconds, held by one last stubborn button, and then broke free and went sailing off down the street. The wind blew a drop of rain right into one of Bradley’s eyes. He screwed up his face, and I scooped him out of the pram. He must have been howling, although I couldn’t hear it over the wind. He was already soaked through. The pram, unhanded, bucked in place a couple of times before being blown onto its side and scraping across the sidewalk and bouncing off a wall. I felt a pang of fear—it had been expensive, Hugh would be terribly angry—but the wind came up harder as if to say, I’ll show you what to fear.

  I opened my coat, the laundry falling out, and tucked Bradley underneath the oilcloth, clasping him with one arm across my body. I was still holding the umbrella with the other. I turned and turned, trying to give my back to the wind, which was coming from all directions.

  We were six blocks or so from home. Six blocks! No distance at all—and yet it had already taken so much effort to get this far. More than halfway there, so it made no sense to turn back. In Woonsocket, I could have knocked at any door to be taken in, but I didn’t know anyone on this street. Nonetheless, I struggled toward the row of houses. As I did one of them gave a great tearing sound, audible even over the shrieking of the wind, and then astonishingly, its third story ripped free from its second, lifting right off, scattering debris in a rain all around me and leaving a decapitated structure where the gable-roofed house had been. It was unbelievable, like something from a bad dream, and I stood there amazed as the pieces of wood flew around us. Then I came to my senses, lowered the umbrella, and held it close like a shield over Bradley’s head, retreating back to the gutter. Where was I going, though? Where could we find refuge?

  The church! It was huge and heavy and made of stone. It wasn’t far—two blocks away, on one of the streets that ran uphill off Wickenden. I turned in that direction and the umbrella belled out, nearly carrying me off my feet; its wooden spokes splintered and I opened my hand, fed it to the wind.

  The air was now dark with suspended grit, and filled with dancing, hurtling objects. I remember a man’s hat, a flowerpot, what seemed like a million pieces of glass. I struggled forward, head down, coat closed over Bradley, both arms over my chest to hold him there. A chunk of something caught the side of my head, taking my hat with it. My hair blew around my face, plastering wet tails over my eyes. I scraped them away with one hand, fitting my chin over Bradley’s little head under the coat. I don’t know if he was crying then. I couldn’t hear anything; I couldn’t see very much. By memory and instinct I moved toward the corner where I could turn uphill toward the church.

  When the water came rising, it was like nothing I could have imagined. Feet and swirling feet of water, rushing up around my ankles, aro
und my calves. As if pouring out of the earth itself, as if the earth was making it. It was to my knees in no more than a minute and still it rose, dirty and cold and filled with unidentifiable shapes that knocked against my legs. The air smelled of salt; I could taste it in my mouth. I looked up and saw through the rain that the corner was just a few feet away.

  The wind came up even higher then, shockingly fierce and insistent, as though something knew I was trying to get to safety and was trying to prevent it. The wind blew into my nostrils, into my open mouth, forced itself down my throat. I snorted and breathed, snorted and breathed, shallow sips of air. I don’t remember having any coherent thoughts; I wasn’t thinking of anything except getting to the church that lay somewhere beyond the dense wall of rain. Solid and safe, its carved wooden door a gate to Heaven. Heaven being a place without wind, without water, without this terrible noise in my ears. I was almost swimming now in the rushing flood; I held Bradley higher on my chest to keep his head above the surface. I turned the corner. The church was now only half a block away. I might have been crooning to Bradley, some panicked attempt to comfort him, something like It’ll be all right, Mama has you, Mama has you. I don’t know if I spoke in French, or English, or a mixture.

  At last my foot, shuffling forward, struck the bottom step that led up from the sidewalk to the church gate. These were the same steps I had mounted so many times, going to Confession, to catechism, to Mass. The gate would be just beyond the steps, the church door just a dozen yards more.

  When I reached the top step I was for a brief, brilliant moment out of the water, and at that instant, as if forfeiting the battle, the wind dropped. I staggered through the open gate. Then had to stop: a tree had fallen across the path inside the iron fencing and lay wedged there against the metal. I would have to climb over it somehow. I looked at the tree, reckoning the best, shortest way over it. There—where two branches were spaced widely apart. I could clamber onto the trunk and drop down to the other side.