Whistling for the Elephants

by Sandi Toksvig

  After the A&P we would go and fill up the car at Jacobson’s Garage on the corner of Palmer and Lindhurst. It was really a Mobil station and it had a huge stopwatch in the window. When Mother drove the Pontiac over the rubber tube in the driveway the clock would start ticking and Gabriel had thirty seconds to get out, wipe the windscreen and start filling her up or we got a prize. Gabriel worked full-time at Jacobson’s since he got out of the draft. Sometimes he was in the office when we came but mostly he was under some car. Other times he would be welding and the sparks would shower round him like he was covered in fireworks. Mother would get out and lean against the car while he twirled the petrol cap off.

  ‘Fill you up, Mrs Kane?’

  Then she would need the bathroom and Gabriel would show her where it was round back. He would wait for her for ages round there while I stayed in the car. After that Mother would be tired. One time she was so tired she let me drive her home. The car was automatic. Sitting on an old fruit box, I found it no problem to drive.

  That summer, Charles was allowed to go sailing in Greece with a friend’s family, so Father let me buy a bike. He was busy commuting and Mother was, I don’t know, in bed, et cetera. Anyway I know I went to Milo’s Toy Store on my own. I spent ages deciding but in the end I chose a blue chopper bike with a long white banana seat. It was trendy but not too girly. Milo came out on the sidewalk with me to watch me take the first ride. As I came out a red pick-up truck was going by. The sun was shining on the windscreen and I couldn’t see the driver real well. Old white writing stood out on the passenger door: Burroughs Zoo. The back of the truck was empty but wisps of hay and straw blew about against the sides. A woman was driving with one hand on the wheel and one out the window holding the edge of the roof. I could see one side of her face but when she turned the corner there must have been a trick of the light. It was as if the rest of her head melted away. As if one side of her face didn’t exist at all. Milo shook his head.

  ‘Goddamn freak.’ I didn’t think he was talking to me. ‘You have fun now,’ he said and went back into his labyrinth of Slinkys, footballs and bikes. I loved that bike. I felt so grown-up as I rode it away from the store. I felt confident that it would impress potential new friends. It didn’t. What it did was make me the Marco Polo of our neighbourhood.

  Cherry Blossom Gardens was off Amherst Avenue. The old railway track ran along Amherst between the avenue and the river. Where the road left the last houses and curved away toward the Expressway the railway track took off over the river into the woods. Once there must have been a bridge there but now the tracks hung silent, unprotected and naked across the river. They hadn’t been used in years. Not since the mills had moved south to the cheap labour in Georgia. I rode my bike down to the crossing most days. Sometimes I would ride along the side of the track, pretending I was following the line south to freedom. Sometimes my bike was a horse called Rusty and we lived on the trail eating baked beans and wearing bandannas. Different games, different people. Never me on my own. Always exploring.

  One late afternoon I had been playing a particularly complex game in which I was an ambulance, the ambulance driver, the doctor and the patient when I came to a halt by the tracks. It had been hot all day and the river looked inviting. I was too scared to swim but I put my bike down under a tree and stepped out on to the shiny track. It hung over the water but the metal was still hot. Even through my sandals. I took my time. I found if I was careful and balanced with my arms I could make my way slowly across the river. The water was calm below me and before I knew it I was into the woods over the other side. That was when I saw the Burroughs House.

  I guess it was beginning to fall down in those days. The world hadn’t yet gone history-crazy, running around preserving everything more than ten years old in aspic. The theme-parkization of the world hadn’t started yet. No one knew about the past as a money spinner. The waterfront was so overgrown that I hadn’t seen the building from the other side. It was breathtaking. I was ten. I didn’t know about architecture but I knew that I had found a palace. What I didn’t know was that it was an exotic Venetian palazzo, an Italian Renaissance villa. To me, what stood before me was a Sleeping Beauty draped in ivy and long grass. A princess’s place. They’ve made it into a museum now and not surprising. It was incredible. Two hundred feet of terrace in green and white variegated marble ran along the whole of the back of the building. Thirteen steps, the width of the terrace, ran up to the enclosure of terracotta balustrades. Between the terrace and the main house lay what was left of a formal Italianate garden. The careful squares of grass had long since spread, tentacles of green capturing the attention of the tiled walkways. A group of rather Bacchanalian men with horns held up a long-rusted fountain. A statue of a fat man stood above them in the middle of a half-shell, his weight sitting heavily on his left buttock as he looked over his shoulder in a slightly camp manner.

  In the evening sun the building seemed to be made entirely of gold. A cream edifice with every inch of every corner picked out in gleaming terracotta brick. It was an architectural fantasy. At once beautiful and barmy. It was part-Italian, part-French Renaissance, part—baroque, part-art deco, part-madness. An American whirlwind tour of Europe in one building. A kind of ‘If this is the east wing I must be in Paris’ building.

  Above my head an outside staircase rose to a sixty-foot-high square tower encased in coloured glass and topped by brilliant red barrel tiles. Four Muses swathed in flowing robes kept guard on each corner, watched over by a selection of cat and parrot gargoyles. The coloured glass was repeated in all the Moorish windows of the second floor and all along the western façade. The centre section of the house, overlooking the gardens, had seven pairs of french doors glazed in a rainbow of rich colour. Handmade bricks in shiny yellow, blue, green and ivory finishes flung diamond patterns across the walls. Everything which could have been filigreed or ornamented was. There was absolutely nothing plain about any of it. I followed the building round to the front and found the door ajar. With the idiocy of youth and made bold by loneliness, I entered.

  The door opened straight on to an immense two-and-a-half-story roofed courtyard. I was inside the tower. The central room rose to a coffered, cypress-wood ceiling which framed the inner skylight of coloured glass. I could just see ornamental paintings of mythological figures and signs of the zodiac which covered each octagonal section of the ceiling. From the centre, a huge chandelier hung down on a great iron chain, its loops of crystal suspended like a Folies Bergères headdress. Spectrums of light rained down on the black-and-white-tiled floor. A room of rainbows. On one wall hung the most enormous oil painting in a golden frame.

  It was a busy picture, painted in what seemed like the gardens of the house, but the house itself looked quite different. It was square and plain. Not the fancy edifice I had just come into. In the middle of the painting stood a large man holding aloft a golden birdcage containing a single golden bird. He was immensely tall, with the chest of a sea elephant, the chin of a prize fighter and an Atlantic Ocean of wavy black hair. No clothing could adequately encompass him. His what used to be called ‘rude health’ burst from every button of his dark suit and his brilliantly coloured waistcoat. Nature’s only flaw in him, her little aside, seemed to be terrible eyesight. He squinted at the world from behind small round spectacles. Perhaps because he couldn’t quite see everything that was happening, he stood laughing as a giraffe, twelve lions, three tigers, two leopards, a polar bear, assorted antelope and a sea lion ran riot around him, chased by exhausted assistants of various ethnic origins. A hyena was stalking a peacock on the lawn while a polar bear with a collar, muzzle and chain was standing on its hind legs trying to reach a quivering black man up a tree in what looked like a red dress.

  In the corner of the picture sat a young woman in a wheelchair. Her body was withered by some illness. She was very small and her tiny frame lay twisted in the large mahogany-and-cane chair. She had no lines on her face so I guessed she was young, but
her hair was thin like an old lady’s. Only her eyes still suggested youth. She looked like she was having fun. She was dressed for the jazz age — a beaded flapper frock in pearl grey and a small matching grey feather in her hair — but didn’t look like she was ever going to be part of it. She was never going to get up and boogie, that was for sure. The wheelchair woman was smiling at the man with the birdcage. A man in command of his world and all that was in it. A small brass plaque was fixed to the bottom of the painting. I read it out loud:

  ‘Phoebe and John Burroughs Junior. 1925.’ Phoebe. His wife? The woman in the wheelchair. Feeble Phoebe…

  ‘We shall have a Chinese Garden of Intelligence.’ I jumped as a voice spoke behind me. I thought for a second it came from the picture. ‘A Great Menagerie. Like King George at Windsor or the Duke of Bedford. Tropical princes shall come and bring us barbaric offerings of tigers, leopards and creatures no man has ever seen before. We shall have such a collection that the Emperor of Abyssinia will hear of it and wish to come.’

  I turned but couldn’t see anyone. Then, amongst the great drapes which covered the walls, something moved. A giant insect woman. All in brown. Its wings closed about itself. It spoke to me.

  ‘No one, not even in Egypt, China, India or Rome, will be able to boast of such exotica.’

  The huge bug shimmered toward me. She was maybe in her late thirties but when you’re a kid everyone just looks old. She was probably as old as Mother, just less set in aspic. She wore brown corduroy pants, a brown turtleneck and a vast brown cardigan. Her face was plain and thin and looked severe with her matching brown hair pulled back from her face into a brown rubber band, but she smiled at me and I smiled back. There was nothing about her which suggested ‘friend’, but I didn’t think to run. She stood and looked at the painting for a moment.

  ‘Were they here? The animals?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘The SS Uritania from Europe and then Amherst’s finest railway. They had to walk from the station. Couldn’t get the giraffe in a cab.’ It sounded like a joke but she said it seriously so I didn’t laugh. The brown woman reached her hand out to the picture for a second. ‘Poor Phoebe.’

  Then she sort of fluttered off I followed her into the next room. The room beyond, with the french windows overlooking the terrace, was entirely white. Well, ex— white. Ghost white. The carpets, the curtains, the walls and all the furniture had once been polar. Now they had a grey sheen of cobwebs. Despite the dust, I could see the river flowing purple through the rose-colored glass of the windows. A real moth fluttered from the grey curtains and made me jump. The insect woman nodded at it. What did I know, maybe they were family.

  ‘They say the first primitive moths fluttered over giant dinosaurs a hundred and forty million years ago. Imagine that. The butterflies came much later. Forty million years. Really they are the new kids on the block. The moth is beautiful. Here, look.’ From inside her folds of brown clothing she removed a large black-rimmed magnifying glass, which she held up to the moth near my head. ‘Look. See how it has a tiny kind of hook-and-bristle thing linking its fore and hind wings? It can fly better than an airplane. Land more accurately than a helicopter. Of course some female moths can’t fly at all.’ She put down the magnifying glass and looked at me.

  ‘Did you know that there are more species of beetle than any other type of insect?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Butterflies and moths are unique. Almost every part of their body from their wings to their feet is covered by thousands of delicate scales. That’s what gives them colour and pattern, but we don’t see them. Do you like insects?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t like spiders.’

  ‘A spider could catch this moth. Some spiders can make a smell like a female moth and attract the male.’ She nodded at me confidentially. ‘Attraction is all about chemicals.’

  ‘Whose house is this?’ I asked.

  ‘It is mine.’ She gently touched a cobweb which glistened against the tinted glass. ‘My father built it for my mother. John, big John. It was the house of love. He wanted to marry her before they even met.’ The house of love stood silent as the woman sighed.

  After a moment she pointed to the spider’s work. ‘See this web? See how it is shaped like the sun and its rays? Spiders always spin them in the morning to remind people of their divine ancestor. It was Grandmother Spider who brought the sun.’ Behind her the tinted glass made ripples of palest crimson, aubergine, blue, yellow and green on the river. ‘Do you think spiders feel?’ she asked. I had never thought about it. I was sure my family had never thought about it. We were English.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you know why people hate spiders? Because they aren’t cute. I like trapdoor spiders. They live in the ground and make silk-lined tubes. Sometimes they have silk trapdoors and they can shoot out from them to capture passing insects. I put one in alcohol once.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A trapdoor spider. They twitch awhile if you put them in alcohol but after that you can keep them for ever. She had babies on her back. I took them off with tweezers and put her in alcohol. After a while I thought she was dead so I dropped the babies in. The babies floated down in the jar and as they passed their mother, the spider reached out her legs, folded her babies beneath her and clasped them to her till she died. I think it was a reflex. I figure she would have seized anything floating near. Of course it wouldn’t have happened if I had used chloroform instead of alcohol. That kills them stone dead.’ The insect woman clutched herself smaller. ‘Then I thought about it. The spider’s web is very complicated. If they can do that, why can’t they love their kids as well? You don’t know what’s in the mind of a spider, do you?’

  The light was fading but we sat there on the floor, trying to imagine the silent spinning spider with the potentially rich inner life harbouring a riot of emotions. Had I known what it meant I think I would have felt almost philosophical. Until a single word cut through the silence.

  ‘Cunt.’

  Even in the richness of the English language there are not many words which can have so immediate an effect. I had never heard it before and it had much the same impact on me then that it might still have in the middle of a BBC wildlife documentary. Cunt. It is a splendidly satisfying, sharp sound. The least onomatopoeic word in the world. I looked through the doors to the tower room.

  High up on a balcony I could just see someone standing. The last rays of the sun were behind them, spilling down from the tower windows. I couldn’t see if it was a man or a woman. Certainly it was a person. A tall person with what appeared to be a parrot on their right shoulder. My storyteller folded up like a moth and scuttled away.

  I ran. Out of the house, back through the gardens, across the tracks over the river and on to my bike. I was frightened but all the way home I couldn’t stop thinking about spiders. Even steeped in alcohol I couldn’t imagine my mother reaching out to haul me in.

  Chapter Three

  Donna Marie Dapolito lived next door but one at Cherry Blossom Gardens. Although she was twelve, and two years older than me, I wanted her to be my friend. I thought if we became pals she could tell me if I still had cooties from sipping her cream soda. After my visit to the Burroughs House I held off exploring for a while. Most afternoons I would just drift up and down on my bike past Donna Marie’s house. Mother and Father might be beautiful people with perfect manners but the Dapolitos — that was a family. They had the untidiest house in the street but it also looked like the most fun. There was the best part of a 59 Oldsmobile, several abandoned bikes and most of an old bathroom on the front lawn. Round back they had a trampoline. It was the noisiest house on the block. Boy, could the Dapolitos yell. Aunt Bonnie yelled and her kids, Donna Marie and Eddie Jr, yelled. The noise was as much part of the neighbourhood rhythm as the banging of the halyards across the water. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t used to noise. Not just because Father’s voice
never rose above a soft breath and Mother rarely got up, but because it wasn’t welcome in our house. Everything, every footstep, was taken quietly, carefully and with much planning, preferably by map.

  Three of the houses in our dead end had their own floating docks with gangways from the backyard down to the harbour edge. There was ours, the Dapolitos’, and Sweetheart’s, who lived between us. The Dapolitos’ dock ran way out into the harbour. Uncle Eddie was in salvage. He wasn’t a yeller. He left that to the family while he worked the waters of the harbour all day on his flat-bottomed boat with a large crane. When he wasn’t pulling things up from the bottom of the river and the sea he was helping rich people move their yachts. Uncle Eddie knew every inch of the seabed. He’d either dragged it or fished it. Other than recycling from the deep, fishing was Uncle Eddie’s life. He was a big man. Everything about him was big; he was maybe six foot four and as wide as an ox. Every year he won the ‘Biggest Hands in the County’ competition at the Harbour Island Carnival. Eddie Jr said his dad could catch a shark by just scooping it out of the water with his bare hands.

  Aunt Bonnie was the thinnest woman still actually breathing in the United States. She was thin because she never ate anything. She just sat on the back stoop drinking Budweiser straight from the can and watching over her kids. The Dapolitos didn’t have much money but whatever her kids wanted they got. She was always there for them. Never asleep when they got home. I guessed it was because she spent so much time on her family that Aunt Bonnie didn’t really ‘make the most of herself’. She always wore trousers (pants) and I think she even cut her own jet-black hair. Maybe she had been pretty once. Now she just looked kind of used up. If she were a Dixie cup you would take a new one. Of course they weren’t my real aunt and uncle but that was what they said I should call them.