He washes the dishes. They will be used again in several hours, when their guests—the retired Mrs. Dryden, the lazing newlyweds, and the old man Parcel—wander from their cabins. Now they are curled in their blankets or loading coal into the fire, trying to squeeze a little more warmth from the stove and a little more sleep from the morning.
“Did you want to see the museum now?” says John. “If you have a moment. I know you’re busy.”
“I am busy,” says Rosie. She doesn’t want to think about it. “I’ll have a look. The museum is a very important part of what we’re here to do.”
With his slow gait, he leads her there. He touches the back of his neck often and lets his head hang. From behind he looks like a lump. Already his armpits are deeply stained. She wonders how he does his laundry. There are whole days they don’t see each other, though so few live or stay here. He never talks about himself.
They pass under what is, at first glance, an unremarkable tree. Brown bark, green leaves, standard. Rosie doesn’t know about trees beyond a few species. Poplar. Oak. Redwood. Sequoia. Pine. Willow. She could not, with any confidence, assign those names to any actual existing trees. She might know a willow. This one is like a willow, but with a thinner trunk, and fewer branches, though tightly packed. They are not as long as a willow’s would be. They do droop in a certain way—they seem to weep. The green teardrop leaves flutter on the breeze. The breeze stops. With a sudden rustling they snap to one angle. As John passes, the tree reaches for him and follows. Or it seems.
Rosie asks, “Has this tree always been here?”
He stops and slowly turns. “It has.”
All the tree’s branches are still, quiet, strained for reaching. Its trunk bends very slightly toward him. A single leaf comes loose and falls on him, sticking to his face, just next to his mouth’s corner.
Rosie walks beneath the tree. It does not reach for her.
They come to the museum cabin, once the prisoners’ playhouse. He opens the door with such hesitance that she worries what he’s done.
“It’s wonderful,” she says.
At the entrance the ground is empty but for signs of shoes: skid marks from old leather; mud crescents from heels; scuffs. As if just the day before several dozen people had been trudging, walking, pacing, running through. Rosie wonders how many were made by John himself. How many were intentional? Whose shoes did he wear while he did it?
The walls are covered with paintings and a sequence of cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse. No artists are credited beyond their signatures, if they left them, because so few can be identified. Here a portrait of a grave little girl with hair too thin. Here a watercolor of several bright, exotic birds perched together on a tree. Here a painting of a broke-down cabin of the sort this one used to be, the lines precisely accurate, the colors pointedly wrong, even ill.
The stage is where they found it. Empty, not counting the long shadow Rosie casts from the doorway, which mounts the stage and climbs the far wall. Before the stage, there are fifteen rows of chairs and stools, some improvised, some poorly repaired, some only moderately degraded by the passage of time. Several out and out broken—collapsed, legs splintered or half-gone, lopsided on the ground. On each seat, a token: a cup, a spoon, a shoe, a bracelet, several gold fillings, a toothbrush, a rubber spider, an empty can of corn, a pair of dice, shoelaces, tin jewelry, a sheriff’s star, a dog bowl, a crushed hat, a knife, yarn, needles, twine, wire, crayon, comb, candle, card, cufflink, joy buzzer, jacks, pill bottle, pencil nub, underwear, watch face, thimble, pocket change, cigarette stub, half a belt, a pie tin, buttons, a shirt collar, a zipper, nylons, tongue depressor, false teeth. They all seem on the verge of a terrible collective rattle.
“Do you really love it?” John walks along the left wall, pretending to examine the paintings, the seating. He almost trips.
“It’s depressing as hell,” says Rosie. “But wonderful.”
“It’s supposed to feel bad, you know.”
“I’m not an idiot, John.”
After Rosie and John part ways, he sees the new guest, the Japanese gentleman, approaching in a hired car. John goes to meet the car, which stops halfway down the central road dividing the hotel grounds. It’s slowed by the thick layer of mud that coats each tire. The gentleman climbs out, hopping several feet clear of the car so as to avoid the displaced muck. He’s dressed in white top to bottom. John reaches to shake. As their hands touch, they share a gaze into each other’s eyes. One of John’s knees goes crooked, corrects itself. They hold hands too long. There is perhaps a jolt of recognition. The gentleman points to the trunk and John retrieves the luggage, sinking ankle-deep in the moat of mud surrounding the car. There are many bags. The Japanese gentleman pays the driver through the window. Once John has burdened himself like a mule he leads the gentleman away, making polite conversation Rosie can’t quite hear from this distance. The gentleman does not offer to help with his bags.
She goes to her cabin. She goes to do the books, to find out how long they have left if things keep up this way.
Start at the beginning. Take the money her husband left. Reduce it by the cost of her journey, the paltry expense of the land, and the more serious cost of reconstruction. Subtract the cost of her multilingual peacetime library. Subtract her living expenses. Subtract the salaries of two employees. Subtract the cost of feeding the guests and providing them with certain niceties—complimentary chocolates, fresh towels, unlimited coal for the stoves. Subtract what she sends home to her mother to keep body and soul together. To be safe, assume two hundred dollars a year will unexpectedly catch fire and their ashes will blow away on the wind. Remember the tendency of things to become more expensive over time, and very rarely less. Add her government war widow checks. Repeat the annual deductions until the sum is zero. Three years is all they have. Two if she can bring herself to hire a real cook.
When the money runs out she’ll still have the land, the cabins. She cannot imagine where John and Matthew would go—even John is strangely childish, dependent. They need a mother. If it comes to that she can sell the books to buy time and buy food. Some of the Jewish paintings in John’s museum might be quite valuable. She could try to get a job in town.
She’s been working in bed, cross-legged, the books spread out before her. Her mud-caked shoes are looking lonesome on the floor. She falls asleep sitting up, her back against the headboard.
When she wakes it’s nearly time to practice languages. She corrects her hair. She slides into her mud-caked shoes. The sun is high and the air a little warm. Warm enough. She goes to the library. The newlyweds are in the southeast corner, hidden behind as many shelves as they can put between them and the entrance. The young husband reads an English book to his pretty wife because it sounds exotic. His pronunciation is a molasses amalgam of British and southern American. He reads her The Big Sleep. It gradually becomes clear they’re reading for the bad language, the punches, the booze, the guns, the sexual provocation—the only English words they really understand. Mrs. Dryden is asleep in a chair in the large, open reading area, a French history of the first great war fallen to the floor from her hand, open, pages down, pages bent. Rosie lifts the book, closes it, and puts it on the end table beside the old woman’s chair, marking it where it fell open. It’s unlikely that Mrs. Dryden has made it to this chapter on the war’s origins. She is a very slow reader, except in Spanish, where she takes perverse pleasure in rattling off words through a tommy gun mouth, explosively trilling her R’s, spitting consonants, rendering the lot incoherent. Not a language in her mouth: an attack.
Rosie sits down with a French dictionary and an early edition of Les Miserables. She feels the sleep coming on again. She blames Mrs. Dryden.
John’s arrival is announced by his shadow on the carpet—it blots out the sunlight that comes through the library door. He’s brought the Japanese gentleman with him.
“Mrs. Cum
mings,” says John.
She smiles up at him, and then the gentleman, a beautiful man.
“This is Mr. Wakahisa Masumi, our newest guest.”
“You can call me Masumi.” He tips his hat very slightly without really lifting it from his head. “I was excited to learn that you encourage your guests to learn as many languages as possible.” He glances in the direction of the invisible, tittering newlyweds. Allows himself a brief smile.
“What languages do you speak, Mr. Masumi?” says Rosie.
“Ah, this is not quite right. In Japanese names the surname is first. I would be Mr. Wakahisa. I invite you to use my first name. Just Masumi.” He goes to a bookshelf loaded with American novels. “I have English, Japanese, French, und ein bisschen Deutsch.”
“Almost four then,” says Rosie. “Congratulations, Masumi, you’ve nearly found peace.”
“Have I, then?”
“If we all knew four foreign languages there no longer would be wars. You’ve got two and a half.”
He smiles again, this time with a dark hint of irony Rosie isn’t in on. She thinks how rude it is to make faces like that—faces that make people feel too acutely their own ignorance. His eyes are sharp and bright. He stands before her with his hands folded behind his back like a proud schoolboy. She can’t begin to guess his age. It’s hard for her with Japanese. Japanese are hard for her.
John is teetering nervously on his heels.
“Will you be willing to teach us some of your language while you are here?” asks Rosie.
“Which one?” says Masumi.
“All of them! But especially Japanese.”
“It would be an honor to help you find your peace, Mrs. Cummings. Will I meet Mr. Cummings as well?”
John says, “He’s dead.”
They spend two hours together, their seats huddled in a small triangle, Masumi instructing them in the basics of Japanese pronunciation. He uses strange words as examples: murder, devil, ghost, destruction, wrath, victim, loneliness, tears. They must be important words in Japan, words frequently used in day-to-day conversation. John is unusually quiet. He doesn’t make one joke. Masumi leaves without explanation. John soon follows.
Afterward Rosie falls asleep again in the library. When she wakes, Mrs. Dryden is still out cold. The newlyweds have left. Matthew is back from school—he rides his bike past her as she leaves the library. Then it’s dinner. John cooked. Everyone eats together; the ideal time to practice languages. She wants to practice languages with them. They want to speak the words they already know. It’s typical. Matthew looks sullen. She asks him, in French, how school is treating him. He stares at her blankly; he doesn’t understand. Not so good, then. She will harangue his uncle later. The boy needs to practice his language. He doesn’t speak enough.
Three more years of this. Two if she can find a proper cook.
COMPETITION AMONG SAVAGES
Claire comes to school early. She comes to see the boys fight for her.
Peter sits at the back of the class every year. He always has and she suspects he always will. Strategically speaking, his harelip would be less noticeable were he to sit in the front row where only the teacher and the student to his right could see it. But Peter hasn’t thought it through, or maybe he thought it through very thoroughly and realized he would still feel he was on display up at the front. So he sits in the back, and while he may get more stares in this way he can at least know he’s done nothing to invite them. Claire would hate to look the way he does. She’s always been pretty, just as her mother was always pretty, and they have discussed—in hushed, secret tones, when nobody could possibly hear their prideful confessions—the horror and the tragedy of life as an Ugly Person. “Everyone is beautiful inside,” said her mother, “but most people don’t take the time or the trouble to find out. I would hate to be the sort of person you had to know to love.” No one ever needed to know Claire’s mother to love her.
Matthew sits beside Peter and every morning he brings him a treat. Sometimes a cookie, sometimes a pastry, sometimes a chocolate from the factory. He also looks at Peter often, pointedly, as if to say, “I don’t mind your disfigurement at all.” By way of these two strategies he’s forced Peter to treat him as a friend. The harelipped boy does not have the luxury of casually refusing kindness, no matter how contrived. His cheeks burn at every gift and he glares when little Matthew gazes, but there’s nothing he can do about it. They are rapidly becoming best chums by the sheer force of Matthew’s will. He passes notes in class—poorly scrawled, half-literate French, as Peter has shown her later. He has come to the harelipped boy’s defense in one fight already, though he was neither needed nor wanted. He’s drawn them together, on the same page, at arm’s length, but smiling. The harelip did not translate to the stick figure. You could tell he was Peter because he was a little taller.
It’s a strange way to woo a girl if that’s what Matthew means by it. He has yet to speak to her except through the effects of his actions on Peter. Holding eye contact with Claire as he links his arm with the other boy’s, glancing to see if she’s glancing while Peter eats his treat. Smiling like a proud pup when he thinks he’s done good. There is always the pause as he removes the latest pastry or cookie from his bag—Peter now watching, expectant—where he seems to consider giving it to her instead. She wouldn’t accept it. She couldn’t.
She might, if he guessed her favorite flavor.
Peter wipes his mouth, having finished a slice of chocolate cake. He licks his bottom lip. “Do you always have to watch me eat it?” he says. “It makes me feel all faggoty.”
Matthew smiles, says, “I’m sorry.” This is roughly one fifth of his French vocabulary. He collects the chocolate-smeared wax paper from Peter’s desk, folds it into quarters, drops it into a paper bag, puts this paper bag inside his own bag. He unloads his school books, stacking them one by one on the desk. They look undisturbed—unused, even. Like many of the students here, Matthew has a job that keeps him busy after school, but Claire can’t imagine what would keep him from trying even a smidgen. He should learn the language, at least.
“Hey,” says Peter, glancing at Claire. “You know what we should do?”
“What?” says Matthew, in English. It’s not clear if he’s responding or merely asking what Peter means. What is sometimes his way of begging to hear it all again in English, a request the other students could sometimes honor but rarely choose to.
“We should arm-wrestle,” says Peter. “Then we could finally know who is stronger.”
They already know who’s stronger. They’ve known it from the beginning, when Peter knocked Matthew off his bike. They’ve known it in the weeks since school began, for instance when Peter hoisted a bigger rock over his head in the rock-hoisting contest, and they knew it when Peter lifted Matthew and carried him on his back, and they knew it when Peter won their friendly boxing match by bloodying Matthew’s friendly little nose, which took on a slight, permanent slant in the healing, its tip hooked just a little upward. Still, Peter scoots his desk up next to Matthew’s, swivels so they’re almost facing, and pulls Matthew’s desk the rest of the way, their desks kissing. Claire pictures the boys themselves kissing and the thought is not disagreeable. Peter offers his hand, curled to half fist, elbow resting on his desk. Matthew looks to Claire for help. She’d rather see them fight.
Matthew takes Peter’s hand. They each grip the opposite edges of their desks with their free hands, the sort of rule-breaking that suggests seriousness in much starker terms than mere passionless rule-following. Their pencil necks are already tensing in preparation, veins standing out like tripwires. Peter counts down from three. They push. They make grunts of frustration. Little Matthew is immediately at a disadvantage, pushed down several inches, but he holds it steady there a moment, cheeks going all red. Children filter into the room, some minding the competition in the back, others sensibly ignoring the
rivalry, which will find another iteration tomorrow, and another the next day.
Claire opens her grammar and pretends to consult it. Insofar as Matthew has a chance in these contests, it’s because he doesn’t understand the goal is victory with dignity—without the skin inflaming, without the pores drooling, without depraved breathing, without losing one’s cool. How he strained to lift that rock. How he flailed when Peter boxed him, at one point actually shoving a finger—by accident, she hoped—two knuckles deep in the other boy’s nose, coming back with snot and blood. Now Matthew twists at the wrist, pulls the desk to stay steady, plants his feet wide. Does everything short of stand up and jump. Claire twists her hair around her finger and lets the coil hang.
Peter pushes Matthew’s hand another increment. The strain is only visible in his neck. He doesn’t huff or puff. He doesn’t sweat. Doesn’t crimson. Doesn’t need to. He looks like he’s waiting for something.
Matthew’s hand is pressed lower, his arm nearly touching the desk, the hand itself hovering several inches past the little square of plywood. He groans, pulls his head in the opposite direction, drips, shuffles his feet, leaning with his whole body. All the other children have sat down in their seats. Most have pretended to forget the arm-wrestling entirely, perhaps because they are embarrassed for the combatants. Claire is deeply embarrassed. This is for her. Her gut’s electric. The harelipped boy seems to leer. He always seems to leer. It may be real now, though—the corner of his mouth genuinely raised, the glinting teeth set hard.
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