New Wave Fabulists

by Bradford Morrow

  I felt a flash of dread, that now of all times would be when she started to lose it, to drift away from me and Katherine. But no. She turned to Katherine and said, “Where did we put those files? When I was going through the letters from after the war. Do you remember?”

  “Your room, I think. Do you want me to get them?”

  “No, no …” Blakie waved me off as she stood and walked, keeping her balance by touching chair, countertop, wall on the way to her study.

  Katherine looked after her, then at the innocuous shred of paper, then at me. “What is it?” She touched one unraveling corner of the scarf. “Where did you get them?”

  “At the rummage sale. They were wrapped up in that, I didn’t know what they were till I got outside and opened it.”

  “Pig in a poke.” Katherine winked at me. She still had her silvery hair done every Thursday, in the whipped-up spray-stiffened bouffant of her Dallas socialite days—not at the beauty parlor at the retirement center, either, but the most expensive salon in Camden. She had her nails done too, even though her hands were too twisted by arthritis to wear the bijoux rings she’d always favored, square-cut diamonds and aquamarines and the emerald my mother had given her when they first met. “I’m surprised you bought a pig in a poke, Ivy Bee.”

  “Yeah. I’m surprised too.”

  “Here we are.” My mother listed back into the room, settling with a thump in her chair. “Now we can see.”

  She jabbed her finger at the table, where the scrap of paper fluttered like an injured moth, then handed me an envelope. “Open that, please, Ivy dear. My hands are so clumsy now.”

  It was a white letter-sized envelope, unsealed, tipsy typed address.

  Miss Blakie Tun,

  The Lonely House,

  Aranbega Island, Maine

  Before zip codes, even, one faded blue four-cent stamp in one corner. The other corner with the typed return address: W. B. Fox, Sand Hill Road, T. Harbor, Maine.

  “Look at it!” commanded Blakie.

  Obediently I withdrew the letter, unfolded it, and scanned the handwritten lines, front and back, until I reached the end. Blue ink, mouse-tail flourish on the final e. Very Fondly Yours, Burdie.

  “I think it’s the same writing.” I scrutinized the penmanship, while trying not to actually absorb its content. Which seemed dull in any case, something about a dog, and snow, and someone’s car getting stuck, and Be glad when summer’s here, at least we can visit again.

  Least. I picked up the scrap of paper to compare the two words.

  “You know, they are the same,” I said. There was something else, too. I brought the letter to my face and sniffed it. “And you know what else? I can smell it. It smells like pipe tobacco. The scarf smells like it, too.”

  “Borkum Riff.” My mother made a face. “Awful sweet stuff, I couldn’t stand it. So.”

  She looked at me, gray eyes narrowed, not sly but thoughtful. “We were good friends, you know. Burdie. Very lovable man.”

  Katherine nodded. “Fragile.”

  “Fragile. He would have made a frail old man, wouldn’t he?” She glanced at Katherine—two strong old ladies—then at me. “I remember how much you liked his books. I’m sorry now we didn’t write to each other more, I could have given you his letters, Ivy. He always came to visit us, once or twice a year. In the summer.”

  “But not after the boy died,” said Katherine.

  My mother shook her head. “No, not after Wally died. Poor Burdie.”

  “Poor Wally,” suggested Katherine.

  It was why Fox had never completed the last book of the quintet. His son had been killed in the Korean War. I knew that; it was one of the only really interesting, if tragic, facts about Walter Burden Fox. There had been one full-length biography, written in the 1970s, when his work achieved a minor cult status boosted by the success of Tolkien and Mervyn Peake, a brief vogue in those days for series books in uniform paperback editions. The Alexandria Quartet, Children of Violence, A Dance to the Music of Time. Five Windows One Door had never achieved that kind of popularity, of course, despite the affection for it held by figures like Anaïs Nin, Timothy Leary, and Virgil Thomson, themselves eclipsed now by brighter, younger lights.

  Fox died in 1956. I hadn’t been born yet. I could never have met him.

  Yet, in a funny way, he made me who I am—well, maybe not me exactly. But he certainly changed the way I thought about the world; made it seem at once unabashedly romantic and charged with a sense of imminence, as ripe with possibility as an autumn orchard is ripe with fruit. Julia and I were talking once about the 1960s—she was seven years older than me, and had lived through them as an adult, communes in Tennessee, drug dealing in Malibu, before she settled down in Rockland and opened her tattoo studio.

  She said, “You want to know what the sixties were about, Ivy? The sixties were about It could happen.”

  And that’s what Fox’s books were like. They gave me the sense that there was someone leaning over my shoulder, someone whispering It could happen.

  So I suppose you could say that Walter Burden Fox ruined the real world for me, when I didn’t find it as welcoming as the one inhabited by Mabel and Nola and the Sienno brothers. Could there ever have been a real city as marvelous as his imagined Newport? Who would ever choose to bear the weight of this world? Who would ever want to?

  Still, that was my weakness, not his. The only thing I could really fault him for was his failure to finish that last volume. But, under the circumstances, who could blame him for that?

  “So these are his cards? May I?” Katherine glanced at me. I nodded, and she picked up the deck tentatively, turned it over, and gave a little gasp. “Oh! They’re blank—”

  She looked embarrassed and I laughed. “Katherine! Now look what you’ve done!”

  “But were they like this when you got them?” She began turning the cards over, one by one, setting them out on the table as though playing an elaborate game of solitaire. “Look at this! They’re every single one of them blank. I’ve never seen such a thing.”

  “All used up,” said Blakie. She folded the scarf and pushed it to one side. “You should wash that, Ivy. Who knows where it’s been.”

  “Well, where has it been? Did he always go to church there? St. Bruno’s?”

  “I don’t remember.” Blakie’s face became a mask: as she had aged, Circe became the Sphinx. She was staring at the cards lying faceup on the table. Only of course there were no faces, just a grid of gray rectangles, some missing one or two corners or even three corners. My mother’s expression was watchful but wary; she glanced at me, then quickly looked away again. I thought of the two cards in my back pocket but said nothing. “His wife died young, he raised the boy alone. He wanted to be a writer too, you know. Probably they just ended up in someone’s barn.”

  “The cards, you mean,” Katherine said mildly. Blakie looked annoyed. “There. That’s all of them.”

  “How many are there?” I asked. Katherine began to count, but Blakie said, “Seventy-three.”

  “Seventy-three?” I shook my head. “What kind of deck uses seventy-three cards?”

  “Some are missing, then. There’s only seventy.” Katherine looked at Blakie. “Seventy-three? How do you know?”

  “I just remember, that’s all,” my mother said irritably. She pointed at me. “You should know. You read all his books.”

  “Well.” I shrugged and stared at the bland pattern on the dining table, then reached for a card. The top right corner was missing; but how would you know it was the top? “They were only mentioned once. As far as I recall, anyway. Just in passing. Why do you think the corners are cut off?”

  “To keep track of them.” Katherine began to collect them back into a pile. “That’s how card cheats work. Take off a little teeny bit, just enough so they can tell when they’re dealing ’em out. Which one’s an ace, which one’s a trey.”

  “But these are all the same,” I said. “There’s no p
oint to it.”

  Then I noticed Blakie was staring at me. Suddenly I began to feel paranoid, like when I was a teenager out getting high, walking back into the Lonely House and praying she wouldn’t notice how stoned I was. I felt like I’d been lying, although what had I done, besides stick two cards in my back pocket?

  But then maybe I was lying, when I said there was no point; maybe I was wrong. Maybe there was a point. If two of the cards had a meaning, maybe they all did; even if I had no clue what their meaning was. Even if nobody had a clue: they still might mean something.

  But what? It was like one of those horrible logic puzzles—you have one boat, three geese, one fox, an island: how do you get all the geese onto the island without the fox eating them? Seventy-three cards; seventy that Katherine had counted, the pair in my back pocket: where was the other one?

  I fought an almost irresistible urge to reveal the two picture cards I’d hidden. Instead I looked away from my mother, and saw that now Katherine was staring at me, too. It was a moment before I realized she was waiting for the last card, the one that was still in my hand. “Oh. Thanks—”

  I gave it to her, she put it on top of the stack, turned, and gave the stack to Blakie, who gave it to me. I looked down at the cards and felt that cold pressure starting to build inside my head, helium leaking into my brain, something that was going to make me float away, talk funny.

  “Well.” I wrapped the cards in the paisley scarf. It still smelled faintly of pipe tobacco, but now there was another scent too, my mother’s Chanel No. 5. I stuck the cards in my bag, turned back to the dining table. “What should we do now?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” said my mother, and gave me the smile of an octogenarian tiger. “Ivy? You decide.”

  Julia’s father was Egyptian, a Coptic diplomat from Cairo. Her mother was an artist manqué from a wealthy Boston family that had a building at Harvard named for it. Her father, Narouz, had been married and divorced four times; Julia had a much younger half brother and several half sisters. The brother died in a terrorist attack in Egypt in the early nineties, a year or so before she left me. After her mother’s death from cancer the same year, Julia refused to have anything else to do with Narouz or his extended family. A few months later, she refused to have anything to do with me as well.

  Julia claimed that Five Windows One Door could be read as a secret text of ancient Coptic magic, that there were meanings encoded within the characters’ ceaseless and often unrequited love affairs, that the titles of Nola Flynn’s silent movies corresponded to oracular texts in the collections of the Hermitage and the Institut Français d’Archeologie Orientale in Cairo, that the scene in which Tarquin sodomizes his twin is in fact a description of a ritual to leave a man impotent and protect a woman from sexual advances. I asked her how such a book could possibly be conceived and written by a middle-aged communicant at St. Bruno’s in Maine, in the middle of the twentieth century.

  Julia just shrugged. “That’s why it works. Nobody knows. Look at Lorca.”

  “Lorca?” I shook my head, trying not to laugh. “What, was he in Maine, too?”

  “No. But he worked in the twentieth century.”

  That was almost the last thing Julia Sa’adah ever said to me. This is another century. Nothing works anymore.

  I caught an earlier ferry back than I’d planned. Katherine was tired; I had taken her and my mother to lunch at the small café they favored, but it was more crowded than usual, with a busload of blue-haired leaf-peepers from Newburyport who all ordered the specials so that the kitchen ran out and we had to eat BLTs.

  “I just hate that.” Blakie glowered at the table next to us, four women the same age as she was, scrying the bill as though it were tea leaves. “Look at them, trying to figure out the tip! Fifteen percent, darling,” she said loudly. “Double the tax and add one.”

  The women looked up. “Oh, thank you!” one said. “Isn’t it pretty here?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Blakie. “I’m blind.”

  The woman looked shocked. “Oh, hush, you,” scolded Katherine. “She is not,” but the women were already scurrying to leave.

  I drove them back to their tidy modern retirement cottage, the made-for-TV version of the Lonely House.

  “I’ll see you next week,” I said, after helping them inside. Katherine kissed me and made a beeline for the bathroom. My mother sat on the couch, waiting to catch her breath. She had congestive heart disease, payback for all those years of smoking Kents and eating heavily marbled steaks.

  “You could stay here if you wanted,” she said, and for almost the first time I heard a plaintive note in her voice. “The couch folds out.”

  I smiled and hugged her. “You know, I might do that. I think Sue wants a break from me. For a little while.”

  For a moment I thought she was going to say something. Her mouth pursed and her gray eyes once again had that watchful look. But she only nodded, patting my hand with her strong cold one, then kissed my cheek, a quick furtive gesture like she might be caught.

  “Be careful, Ivy Bee,” she said. “Goodbye.”

  On the ferry I sat on deck. The boat took no cars, and there were only a few other passengers. I had the stern to myself, a bench sheltered by the engine house from spray and chill wind. The afternoon had turned cool and gray. There was a bruised line of clouds upon the horizon, violet and slate blue; it made the islands look stark as a Rockwell Kent woodblock, the pointed firs like arrowheads.

  It was a time of day, a time of year, I loved; one of the only times when things still seemed possible to me. Something about the slant of the late year’s light, the sharp line between shadows and stones, as though if you slid your hand in there you’d find something unexpected.

  It made me want to work.

  I had no customers lined up that week. Idly I ran my right hand along the top of my left leg, worn denim and beneath it muscle, skin. I hadn’t worked on myself for a while. That was one of the first things I learned when I was apprenticed to Julia: a novice tattoo artist practices on herself. If you’re right-handed, you do your left arm, your left leg; just like a good artist makes her own needles, steel flux and solder, jig and needles, the smell of hot tinning fluid on the tip of the solder gun. That way people can see your work. They know they can trust you.

  The last thing I’d done was a scroll of oak leaves and eyes, fanning out above my left knee. My upper thigh was still taut white skin. I was thin and rangy like my mother had been, too fair to ever have tanned. I flexed my hand, imagining the weight of the machine, its pulse a throbbing heart. As I stared at the ferry’s wake, I could see the lights of Rockland Harbor glimmer then disappear into the growing dusk. When I stuck my head out to peer toward the bow, I saw Aranbega rising from the Atlantic, black firs and granite cliffs buffed to pink by the failing sun.

  I stood, keeping my balance as I gently pulled the two cards from my back pocket. I glanced at both, then put one into my wallet, behind my driver’s license; sat and examined the other, turning so that the wall of the engine house kept it safe from spray. It was the card that showed only the figure of a kneeling man. A deceptively simple form, a few fluid lines indicating torso, shoulders, offertory stance—that crescent of bare neck, his hands half hidden by his long hair.

  Why did I know it was a man? I’m not sure. The breadth of his shoulders, maybe; some underlying sense that any woman in such a position would be inviting disaster. This figure seemed neither resigned nor abdicating responsibility. He seemed to be waiting.

  It was amazing, how the interplay of black and white and a few drops of gold leaf could conjure up an entire world. Like Pamela Colman Smith’s designs for the Waite tarot—the High Priestess; the King of Wands—or a figure that Julia had shown me once. It was from a facsimile edition of a portfolio of Coptic texts on papyrus, now in the British Library. There were all kinds of spells—

  For I am having a clash with a headless dog, seize him when he comes. Grasp this pebble wit
h both your hands, flee eastward to your right, while you journey on up.

  A stinging ant: In this way, while it is still fresh, burn it, grind it with vinegar, put it with incense. Put it on eyes that have discharge. They will get better.

  The figure was part of a spell to obtain a good singing voice. Julia translated the text for me as she had the others:

  Yea, yea, for I adjure you in the name of the seven letters that are tattooed on the chest of the father, namely AAAAAAA, EEEEEEE, EEEEEEE, IIIIIII, OOOOOOO, UUUUUUU, OOOOOOO. Obey my mouth, before it passes and another one comes in its place! Offering: wild frankincense, wild mastic, cassia.

  The Coptic figure that accompanied the text had a name: DAVITHEA RACHOCHI ADONIEL. It looked nothing like the figure on the card in front of me; it was like something you’d see scratched on the wall of a cave.

  Yet it had a name. And I would never know the name of this card.

  But I would use it, I decided. The least trumps. Beneath me the ferry’s engine shifted down, its dull steady groan deepening as we drew near Aranbega’s shore. I slid the card into the Lorca book I’d brought, stuffed it into my bag, and waited to dock.

  I’d left my old GMC pickup where I always did, parked behind the Island General Store. I went inside and bought a sourdough baguette and a bottle of Tokaji. I’d gotten a taste for the wine from Julia; now the store ordered it especially for me, though some of the well-heeled summer people bought it as well.

  “Working tonight?” said Mary, the store’s owner.

  “Yup.”

  Outside it was full dusk. I drove across the island on the rugged gravel road that bisected it into north and south, village and wild places. To get to Green Pond you drive off the main road, following a rutted lane that soon devolves into what resembles a washed-out streambed. Soon this rudimentary road ends, at the entrance to a large grove of hundred-and-fifty-year-old pines. I parked here and walked the rest of the way, a quarter mile beneath high branches that stir restlessly, making a sound like the sea even on windless days. The pines give way to birches, ferns growing knee-high in a spinney of trees like bones. Another hundred feet and you reach the edge of Green Pond, before you the Lonely House rising on its gray islet, a dream of safety. Usually this was when the last vestiges of fear would leave me, blown away by the cool wind off the lake and the sight of my childhood home, my wooden dory pulled up onto the shore a few feet from where I stood.