New Wave Fabulists

by Bradford Morrow

  There was already a line. I recognized a couple of dealers, a few regulars who smiled or nodded at me. St. Bruno’s is a late-nineteenth-century neo-Gothic building, designed in the late Arts and Crafts style by Halbert Liston; half-timbered beams, local dove gray field-stone, slate shingles on the roof. The rummage sale was not in the church, of course, but the adjoining parish house. It had whitewashed walls rather than stone, the same half-timbered upper story, etched with arabesques of dying clematis and sere Virginia creeper. In the door was a diamond-shaped window through which a worried elderly woman peered out every few minutes.

  “Eight o’clock!” someone called good-naturedly from the front of the line. Bobby Day, the graying hippie who owned a used bookstore in Camden. “Time to go!”

  From inside, the elderly woman gave one last look at the crowd, then nodded. The door opened; there was a surge forward, laughter and excited murmurs, someone crying, “Marge, look out! Here they come!” Then I was inside.

  Long tables of linens and clothing were at the front of the hall, surrounded by women with hands already full of flannel sheets and crewelwork. I scanned these quickly, then glanced at the furniture. Nice stuff—a Morris chair and old oak settle, some wicker, a flax wheel. Episcopalians always have good rummage sales, better quality than Our Lady of the Harbor or those off-brand churches straggling down toward Warren.

  But the Lonely House was already crammed with my own nice stuff, besides which it would be difficult to get anything back to the island. So I made my way to the rear of the hall, where Bobby Day was going through boxes of books on the floor. We exchanged hellos, Bobby smiling but not taking his eyes from the books; in deference to him I continued on to the back corner. An old man wearing a canvas apron with a faded silhouette of St. Bruno on it stood over a table covered with odds and ends.

  “This is whatever didn’t belong anywhere else,” he said. He waved a hand at a hodgepodge of beer steins, Tupperware, mismatched silver, shoeboxes overflowing with candles, buttons, mason jar lids. “Everything’s a dollar.”

  I doubted there was anything there worth fifty cents, but I just nodded and moved slowly down the length of the table. A chipped Poppy Trails bowl and a bunch of ugly glass ashtrays. Worn Beanie Babies with the tags clipped off. A game of Twister. As I looked, a heavyset woman barreled up behind me. She had a rigidly unsmiling face and an overflowing canvas bag—I caught glints of brass and pewter, the telltale dull green glaze of a nice Teco pottery vase. A dealer. She avoided my gaze, her hand snaking out to grab something I’d missed, a tarnished silver flash hidden behind a stack of plastic Easter baskets.

  I tried not to grimace. I hated dealers and their greedy bottom-feeder mentality. By this afternoon she’d have polished the flask and stuck a seventy-five-dollar price tag on it. I moved quickly to the end of the table. I could see her watching me whenever my hand hovered above something; once I moved on she’d grab whatever I’d been examining, give it a cursory glance before elbowing up beside me once more. After a few minutes I turned away, was just starting to leave when my gaze fell upon a swirl of violet and orange tucked within a Pyrex dish.

  “Not sure what that is,” the old man said as I pried it from the bowl. Beside me the dealer watched avidly. “Lady’s scarf, I guess.”

  It was a lumpy packet a bit larger than my hand, made up of a paisley scarf that had been folded over several times to form a thick square, then wrapped and tightly knotted around a rectangular object. The cloth was frayed, but it felt like fine wool. There was probably enough of it to make a nice pillow cover. Whatever was inside felt compact but also slightly flexible; it had a familiar heft as I weighed it in my palm.

  An oversized pack of cards. I glanced up to see the dealer watching me with undisguised impatience.

  “I’ll take this,” I said, and handed the old man a dollar. “Thanks.”

  A flicker of disappointment across the dealer’s face. I smiled at her, enjoying my mean little moment of triumph, and left.

  Outside the parish hall a stream of people were headed for the parking lot, carrying lamps and pillows and overflowing plastic bags. The church bell tolled eight-thirty. Blakie would just be getting up. I killed a few more minutes by wandering around the church grounds, past a well-kept herb garden and stands of yellow chrysanthemums. Behind a neatly trimmed hedge of boxwood I discovered a statue of St. Bruno himself, standing watch over a granite bench. Here I sat with my paisley-wrapped treasure, and set about trying to undo the knot.

  For a while I thought I’d have to just rip the damn thing apart, or wait till I got to Blakie’s to cut it open. The cloth was knotted so tightly I couldn’t undo it, and the paisley had gotten wet at some point then shrunk—it was like trying to pick at dried plaster, or Sheetrock.

  But gradually I managed to tease one corner of the scarf free, tugging it gently until, after a good ten minutes, I was able to undo the wrappings. A faint odor wafted up, the vanilla-tinged scent of pipe tobacco. There was a greasy feel to the frayed cloth, sweat, or maybe someone had dropped it on the damp grass. I opened it carefully, smoothing its folds till I could finally see what was tucked inside.

  It was a large deck of cards, bound with a rubber band. The rubber band fell to bits when I tried to remove it, and something fluttered onto the bench. I picked it up: a scrap of paper with a few words scrawled in pencil.

  The least trumps

  I frowned. The Greater Trumps, those were the picture cards that made up the Major Arcana in a tarot deck—the Chariot, the Magician, the Empress, the Hierophant. Eight or nine years ago I had a girlfriend with enough New Age tarots to channel the entire Order of the Golden Dawn. Marxist tarots, lesbian tarots, African, Zen, and Mormon tarots; Tarots of the Angels, of Wise Mammals, poisonous snakes and smiling madonni; Aleister Crowley’s tarot, and Shirley Maclaine’s; the dread Feminist Tarot of the Cats. There were twenty-two Major Arcana cards, and the lesser trumps were analogous to the fifty-two cards in an ordinary deck, with an additional four representing knights.

  But the least trumps? The phrase stabbed at my memory, but I couldn’t place it. I stared at the scrap of paper with its rushed scribble, put it aside, and examined the deck.

  The cards were thick, with the slightly furry feel of old pasteboard. Each was printed with an identical and intricate design of spoked wheels, like old-fashioned gears with interlocking teeth. The inks were primitive, too-bright primary colors, red and yellow and blue faded now to periwinkle and pale rose, a dusty gold like smudged pollen. I guessed they dated to the early or mid-nineteenth century. The images had the look of old children’s picture books from that era, at once vivid and muted, slightly sinister, as though the illustrators were making a point of not revealing their true meaning to the casual viewer. I grinned, thinking of how I’d wrested them from the clutches of an antiques dealer, then turned them over.

  The cards were all blank. I shook my head, fanning them out on the bench before me. A few of the cards had their corners neatly clipped, but others looked as though they had been bitten off in tiny crescent-shaped wedges. I squinted at one, trying to determine if someone had peeled off a printed image. The surface was rough, flecked with bits of darker gray and black, or white, but it didn’t seem to have ever had anything affixed to it. There was no trace of glue or spirit gum that I could see, no jots of ink or colored paper.

  A mistake then. The deck had obviously been discarded by the printer. Not even a dealer would have been able to get more than a couple of bucks for it.

  Too bad. I gathered the cards into a stack, started wrapping the scarf around them when I noticed that one card was thicker than the rest. I pulled it out; not a single card after all, but two that had become stuck together. I set the rest of the deck aside, safe within the paisley shroud, then gingerly slid my thumbnail between the stuck cards. It was like prizing apart sheets of mica—I could feel where the pasteboard held fast toward the center, but if I pulled at it too hard or too quickly the cards would tear.

&n
bsp; But very slowly, I felt the cards separate. Maybe the warmth of my touch helped, or the sudden exposure to air and moisture. For whatever reason, the cards suddenly slid apart so that I held one in each hand.

  “Oh.”

  I cried aloud, they were that wonderful. Two tiny, brilliantly inked tableaux like medieval tapestries, or paintings by Brueghel glimpsed through a rosace window. One card was awhirl with minute figures, men and women but also animals, dogs dancing on their hind legs, long-necked cranes and crabs that lifted clacking claws to a sky filled with pennoned airships, exploding suns, a man being carried on a litter and a lash-fringed eye like a greater sun gazing down upon them all. The other card showed only the figure of a naked man, kneeling so that he faced the viewer, but with head bowed so that you saw only his broad back, a curve of neck like a quarter-moon, a sheaf of dark hair spilling to the ground before him. The man’s skin was painted in gold leaf; the ground he knelt upon was the dreamy green of old bottle glass, the sky behind him crocus yellow, with a tinge upon the horizon like the first flush of sun, or the protruding tip of a finger. As I stared at them I felt my heart begin to beat, too fast too hard but not with fear this time, not this time.

  The Least Trumps. The term was used, just once, in the first chapter of the unfinished, final volume of Five Windows One Door. I remembered it suddenly, the way you recall something from early childhood, the smell of marigolds towering above your head, a blue plush dog with one glass eye, thin sunlight filtering through a crack in a frosted glass cold frame. My mouth filled with liquid and I tasted sour cherries, salt and musk, the first time my tongue probed a girl’s cunt. A warm breeze stirred my hair. I heard distant laughter, a booming bass note that resolved into the echo of a church clock tolling nine.

  Only when he was certain that Mabel had fallen fast asleep beside him would Tarquin remove the cards from their brocade pouch, her warm limbs tangled in the stained bedcovers where they emitted a smell of yeast and limewater, the surrounding room suffused with twilight so that when he held the cards before her mouth, one by one, he saw how her breath brought to life the figures painted upon each, as though she breathed upon a winter windowpane where frost-roses bloomed: Pavell Saved From Drowning, The Bangers, One Leaf Left, Hermalchio and Lachrymatory, Villainous Saltpetre, The Ground-Nut, The Widower: all the recusant figures of the Least Trumps quickening beneath Mabel’s sleeping face.

  Even now the words came to me by heart. Sometimes, when I couldn’t fall asleep, I would lie in bed and silently recite the books from memory, beginning with Volume One, The First Window: Love Plucking Rowanberries, with its description of Mabel’s deflowering that I found so tragic when I first read it. Only later in my twenties, when I read the books for the fifth or seventh time, did I realize the scene was a parody of the seduction scene in Rigoletto. In this way Walter Burden Fox’s books eased my passage into the world, as they did in many others. Falling in love with fey little Clytie Winton then weeping over her death; making my first forays into sex when I masturbated to the memory of Tarquin’s mad brother Elwell taking Mabel as she slept; realizing, as I read of Mabel’s great love affair with the silent film actress Nola Flynn, that there were words to describe what I did sometimes with my own friends, even if those words had a lavender must of the attic to them: tribadism, skylarking, sit Venus in the garden with Her Gate unlocked.

  My mother never explained any of this to me: sex, love, suffering, patience. Probably she assumed that her example alone was enough, and for another person it might well have been. But I never saw my mother unhappy, or frightened. My first attack came not long after Julia Sa’adah left me. Julia who inked my life Before and After; and while at the time I was contemptuous of anyone who suggested a link between the two events, breakup and crackup, I can see now that it was so. In Fox’s novels, love affairs sometimes ended badly, but for all the lessons his books held, they never readied me for the shock of being left.

  That was more than eleven years ago. I still felt the aftershocks, of course. I still dream about her: her black hair, so thick it was like oiled rope streaming through my fingers; her bronzy skin, its soft glaucous bloom like scuppernongs; the way her mouth tasted. Small mouth, smaller than my own, cigarettes and wintergreen, tea oil, coriander seed. The dream is different each time, though it always ends the same way, it ends the way it ended: Julia looking at me as she packs up her Rockland studio, arms bare so I can see my own apprentice work below her elbow, vine leaves, stylized knots. My name there, and hers, if you knew where to look. Her face sad but amused as she shakes her head. “You never happened, Ivy.”

  “How can you say that?” This part never changes either, though in my waking mind I say a thousand other things. “Six years, how can you fucking say that?”

  She just shakes her head. Her voice begins to break up, swallowed by the harsh buzz of a tattoo machine choking down; her image fragments, hair face eyes breasts tattoos spattering into bits of right, jabs of black and red. The tube is running out of ink. “That’s not what I mean. You just don’t get it, Ivy. You never happened. You. Never. Happened.”

  Then I wake and the panic’s full-blown, like waking into a room where a bomb’s exploded. Only there’s no bomb. What’s exploded is all inside my head.

  It was years before anyone figured out how it worked, this accretion of synaptic damage, neuronal misfirings, an overstimulated fight-or-flight response; the way one tiny event becomes trapped within a web of dendrites and interneurons and triggers a cascade of Cortisol and epinephrine, which in turn wakes the immense black spider that rushes out and seizes me so that I see and feel only horror, only dread, the entire world poisoned by its bite. There is no antidote—the whole disorder is really just an accumulation of symptoms, accelerated pulse rate, racing heartbeat, shallow breathing. There is no cure, only chemicals that lull the spider back to sleep. It may be that my repeated tattooing of my own skin has somehow oversensitized me, like bad acupuncture, caused an involuntary neurochemical reaction that only makes it worse.

  No one knows. And it’s not something Walter Burden Fox ever covered in his books.

  I stared at the illustrated cards in my hands. Fox had lived not far from here, in Tenants Harbor. My mother knew him years before I was born. He was much older than she was, but in those days—this was long before e-mail and cheap long-distance servers—writers and artists would travel a good distance for the company of their own kind, and certainly a lot further than from Tenants Harbor to Aranbega Island. It was the first time I can remember being really impressed by my mother, the way other people always assumed I must be. She had found me curled up in the hammock, reading Love Plucking Rowanberries.

  “You’re reading Burdie’s book.” She stooped to pick up my empty lemonade glass.

  I corrected her primly. “It’s by Walter Burden Fox.”

  “Oh, I know. Burdie, that’s what he liked to be called. His son was Walter too. Wally, they called him. I knew him.”

  Now, behind me, St. Bruno’s bell rang the quarter hour. Blakie would be up by now, waiting for my arrival. I carefully placed the two cards with their fellows inside the paisley scarf, put the bundle inside my bag, and headed for Penobscot Fields.

  Blakie and Katherine were sitting at their dining nook when I let myself in. Yesterday’s New York Times was spread across the table, and the remains of breakfast.

  “Well,” my mother asked, white brows raised above calm gray eyes as she looked at me. “Did you throw up?”

  “Oh, hush, you,” said Katherine.

  “Not this time.” I bent to kiss my mother, then turned to hug Katherine. “I went to the rummage sale at St. Bruno’s, that’s why I’m late.”

  “Oh, I meant to give them my clothes!” Katherine stood to get me coffee. “I brought over a few boxes of things, but I forgot the clothes. I have a whole bag, some nice Hermès scarves, too.”

  “You shouldn’t give those away.” Blakie patted the table, indicating where I should sit beside her. “That
consignment shop in Camden gives us good credit for them. I got this sweater there.” She touched her collar, dove gray knit, three pearl buttons. “It’s lamb’s wool. Bonwit Teller. They closed ages ago. Someone must have died.”

  “Oh hush,” said Katherine. She handed me a coffee mug. “Like we need credit for clothes.”

  “Look,” I said. “Speaking of scarves …”

  I pulled the paisley packet from the purse, clearing a space amidst the breakfast dishes. For a fraction of a second Blakie looked surprised, then she blinked, and along with Katherine leaned forward expectantly. As I undid the wrappings the slip of paper fell onto the table beside my mother’s hand. Her gnarled fingers scrabbled at the table, finally grabbed the scrap.

  “I can’t read this,” she said, adjusting her glasses as she stared and scowled. I set the stack of cards on the scarf, then slid them all across the table. I had withheld the two cards that retained their color; now I slipped them into my back jeans pocket, carefully, so they wouldn’t get damaged. The others lay in a neat pile before my mother.

  “‘The Least Trumps.’” I pointed at the slip of paper. “That’s what it says.”

  She looked at me sharply, then at the cards. “What do you mean? It’s a deck of cards.”

  “What’s written on the paper. It says, ‘The Least Trumps.’ I don’t know if you remember, but there’s a scene in one of Fox’s books, the first one? The Least Trumps is what he calls a set of tarot cards that one of the characters uses.” I edged over beside her, and pointed at the bit of paper she held between thumb and forefinger. “I was curious if you could read that. Since you knew him? I was wondering if you recognized it. If it was his handwriting.”

  “Burdie’s?” My mother shook her head, drew the paper to her face until it was just a few inches from her nose. It was the same pose she’d assumed when pretending to gaze at Wise Ant through a magnifying glass for LIFE magazine, only now it was my mother who looked puzzled, even disoriented. “Well, I don’t know. I don’t remember.”