Thirty-three Swoons

by Martha Cooley

  “Was she affectionate with you?”

  “We didn’t go around saying warm things to each other, if that’s what you mean. Nobody did that in our household. Now and then Sarah would say ‘you’re a sugar’—that’s how she expressed affection. And sometimes Eve would make sugar jokes, call me Cammie Cane or something like that.”

  “So she was a talker. But did she talk with you?”

  Eve in her room, her door closed. How many hours had I spent waiting for her to emerge, wondering what was causing her to closet herself? “Not about her feelings, if that’s what you’re getting at,” I said. “Sometimes she’d say things to me about Dan, but that wasn’t really talking. More like ranting.”

  Dan had joined the American Communist Party in the early 1930s, remaining in it until Eve was a teenager. He’d dragged her to political meetings and rallies, though he’d never managed to make it to most of her school events. His daughter’s life had taken place on the periphery of his, a blurry, irrelevant outlier.

  “Dan had a temper, right?”

  “Yes. He and Eve argued a lot. She gave him a run for his money, too—told him his politics were outmoded and he was screwing up his relationships with everyone in the family. Not that it helped. He wasn’t ever going to be a decent father.”

  “Why’d she name me after him, then? To give me some kind of link to a father, even though I never had one?”

  I shook my head. “I think she was using the name as a kind of promise to herself.”

  She frowned. “A promise?”

  “To give you a completely different experience from the one she’d had with Dan.” My answer wasn’t convincing, but I had no other. “Your grandfather lived entirely in his head. Which made him completely selfish.”

  “Like Jordan?”

  I wasn’t expecting the question, the name. “Jordan lived in his head, too. But he knew how to dance. And he liked flowers.”

  Danny contemplated this. “Neither of them should’ve become a father,” she stated. “And Mom shouldn’t have been a mother.”

  We were off-map now, on uncharted terrain. “I’d give that a yes,” I replied slowly.

  “But you sure as hell covered for her!” she snapped. “And so did Sam! Until I went off to college and you both finally realized I couldn’t be tricked any longer. Remember that time at your apartment?”

  I KNEW what she was referring to.

  One weekend, home from college, she’d come to my place for dinner. That evening she’d spoken about her mother in a new way, with a depth of frustration and hurt she’d never before expressed. And she’d accused me of playing along with Eve. She hadn’t wanted to hear my responses—to her they were just excuses. The day after our dinner, I’d called Sam, who’d reported getting a similar earful from Danny.

  “Sam and I talked that weekend, too,” she went on, as if I’d just aired my thoughts. “We spoke about all the time I used to spend with the two of you when I was a kid. You and Sam got together when I was four, and from that point on, I was over at your place constantly. Tell me, did you and he both want me around?” She hesitated. “Because I’m sure I was with you a lot more than you’d banked on. I’ve always wanted to ask you about that. But I’ve been afraid the answer would make me even angrier at Mom.”

  Closing my eyes for a moment, I pictured Eve at Sam’s wedding party, champagne glass in hand, questioning me about Sam, making me question myself.

  “Having you with us was what Sam and I both wanted,” I said, trying to keep my tone steady. I wanted urgently to reroute the conversation. “You know, my biggest concern now is your state of mind. You look and sound so much better than you did even a few weeks ago. But back to this trip of ours—tell me what you want from it, Danny.”

  “My father.”

  “And your mother?”

  Flexing the fingers of her right hand, Danny gave one of her rings a nervous twirl. “Sam said the same thing to me. That coming here is at least as much about her as about my father, whoever he is . . .”

  I nodded. “Neither Sam nor I think you’ll discover much here. In any case, what do you want to do tomorrow?”

  “I’d like to see the landscape architecture department at Cornell, and have a look around the campus.” She’d begun cooling down. “I’d also like to stop in at a local nursery where Mom worked.”

  I threw her a questioning glance.

  “I found the place on the Web,” she went on. “It’s not far from here. I want to talk with the owner. Maybe he knew Mom, or knows someone else who did.”

  That night we sat watching TV (a police procedural, the only thing viewable on our feeble television) without speaking more than a few words. Not anger—that wasn’t the emotion rising like trapped water between us. More like a mounting wariness about what we might each feel as we tracked Eve the next day, and during the days to come.

  AWAKING AFTER a heavy slumber, I realized I hadn’t dreamed a thing. I closed my eyes, took a few long breaths, and waited: nothing. My dream-stage really had stayed dark all night, which surprised me.

  I took my time showering and dressing. Danny, who’d already gone out and returned, carried fresh fruit, coffee, and muffins to a picnic table adjacent to the motel’s parking lot, where we ate breakfast. The blue-skied Sunday was shaping up to be warm, but not overly so. Almost no cars materialized, and the backseats of those that did pass by were occupied by children being taken (I imagined) to Sunday school or the nearby state park.

  The morning’s tranquility felt like the atmosphere itself, smooth and transparent. Danny said she wanted to go to Bluebell Nursery before visiting the campus. I told her I’d like to see downtown Ithaca. Showing no disappointment, she offered to drop me off and meet me a few hours later for lunch.

  THUS I found myself wandering the Commons and the DeWitt Mall in the center of town, aimlessly window-shopping. A few stores were open. In a men’s emporium I picked up a bright blue bow tie for Stuart, and in a kids’ shop I found two Cornell T-shirts for Sam’s children.

  At eleven I entered a café, ordered an espresso, and eavesdropped on a conversation between a pair of earnest-sounding graduate students arguing the merits of George Bernard Shaw’s plays. They were sticking around campus for the summer, I gathered—earning money doing research for a professor who was writing a biography of Shaw.

  The students’ conversation reminded me of my own college years in New England, and of how much Stuart and I had enjoyed gossiping about actors, directors, and playwrights. We’d lived almost nothing but theater during those four years. Gradually we’d moved toward other interests, and into a closeness we hadn’t known and wouldn’t experience with anyone else. Ours was a love affair, we eventually realized—without sex but with all the other features: infatuation and letdown, fights and reconciliations. Over time, our talking tuned in to less intense frequencies; we learned to counterbalance with humor our usual tendency toward overseriousness. Our relationship settled onto its own terra firma—paydirt, as Stuart called it. The longed-for ground of reliable love.

  Danny had no one like Stuart in her life, no friend so cherished. She preferred traveling in a pack with a half-dozen other young women and men, all of whom enjoyed seeing films, playing pool, and drinking coffee and beer. I knew she’d received support from these friends after her mother’s death, yet I doubted she’d revealed to any of them—even those she’d known for a while—the discord in her relationship with Eve. Easier to let a benign version of the story prevail than to try explaining a messier truth.

  ARRIVING ON time at the restaurant we’d chosen as our meeting point, Danny handed me a baseball cap with BLUEBELL NURSERY printed on it.

  The nursery was a pleasant enough place, she reported over lunch, but the owner hadn’t known Eve. At his suggestion she’d dropped in on another greenhouse a few miles down the road. Its proprietor had been entertainingly informative about the landscape architecture department at Cornell, but was too young to have known either Eve or Bil
ly.

  We made a plan for the rest of our day. The first stop would be the university’s Arts Quad; Danny wanted to climb McGraw Tower and see its well-known chimes. Then we’d take a tour of one of the campus gardens and stop in at the landscape architecture department. Did I want, she asked, to go to Baker Laboratory and see if anyone in Lab Services knew something about Jordan’s gifts to the chemistry department? I declined, and she didn’t press the issue.

  THE CAMPUS was larger and lovelier than I’d imagined it would be. Crisscrossed by several gorges, it featured multiple quads, each of which abounded in old-growth trees and offered pretty walks.

  Our view of Cayuga Lake from the belfry of McGraw Tower was well worth the climb. Eve, I remembered, had spoken once about climbing the tower, then feeling dizzy as she gazed out over the campus and the dramatic countryside surrounding it. After descending the tower, we made our way to the Minns Garden. There Danny asked a student gardener about the landscape architecture department and was told its administrative offices were closed on weekends—which ruled out asking any questions about Eve’s student years.

  Danny then wanted me to accompany her to the wildflower garden. She seemed fidgety, her energy barely contained; I trailed after her like a reluctant child. By four-thirty I was ready to call it quits.

  She wasn’t, though, and it took some doing to persuade her we shouldn’t go to Baker Laboratory. We had a drive of at least four hours ahead of us, I argued. Did we really want to roll into Manhattan after midnight? Although she resisted, I won, and we returned to the motel. I checked us out while Danny loaded our bags, and we were back on Route 13 by five-thirty.

  IT WAS as we passed a LEAVING ITHACA sign that I realized our trip had given me nothing to visualize where my father was concerned: no chemistry labs, no sites where he’d spent time. That didn’t matter, I decided. I could imagine him at the top of McGraw Tower, listening to the chimes. He’d have liked that: a good stage (almost a theater in the round) and a breeze wafting through, transporting the air’s subtle scents along with the chimes’ music—all the aural and olfactory notes blending beautifully.

  Tired, I closed my eyes to shut out the jumble of impressions slipping by. I wanted to see only the insides of my own eyelids. For a little while there was nothing in my head, only darkness and the soft whir of the Volvo’s tires. Then, as if projected onto a screen, an image materialized: two hands—one male, one female—palm to palm.

  Jordan and Eve, I thought; only it wasn’t thinking but seeing. The two of them at the top of the tower, side by side. My father hadn’t come here—now I got it—to visit his alma mater, or to find out what the chemistry department had purchased with his donated dollars. He’d come because Eve had asked him to. Jordan had understood how unyielding the soil of feeling might be for her, how hard to cultivate. And this insight roused something long silent in him. He’d never stopped missing his first entanglement, with my mother; that ardor and anguish had set everything else in motion . . . And here was Eve, her niece, offering what must have looked to him like a second chance.

  I closed my eyes, pulled my baseball cap onto my face as if I were planning on sleeping, and wept soundlessly. To my relief, Danny was too involved with simultaneous tasks—driving and tuning in the local R&B station, which kept slipping in and out of static—to notice.

  INTERLUDE

  WHAT DOES the director of a stage performance hope to do more than anything else? Bring the audience under his spell. How does he accomplish this? By exercising a control at once delicate and ironclad over all the rhythms of the performance.

  But more! A director wants each member of the audience to insert himself into the drama. To cease sitting passively, to apprehend bodily as well as mentally what is happening. To feel it utterly.

  What then might be a director’s best legacy? Transported spectators. People who go home after an evening at the theater and say, I participated—it might as well have been me up there onstage!

  And how is this legacy actually conveyed, once the director himself is gone?

  By those who were there, and speak afterward about what it felt like to be thus unseated. Other people hear such testimonies, imagine that same magical experience, and want it for themselves. Demand it of the next generation of directors.

  Hence what death seems to have permanently annulled is perpetuated.

  SEVA LONGED for all this to happen. His ego desired it, of course—but so did his heart, which had been altered irrevocably (yanked open, really) by his early experiences in the provincial theater in Penza, where he’d grown up. Right away, then and there, he’d sensed what might be wrought on a stage.

  He’d found his calling. Which was also his mode of service, his means of connection. Yet his homeland’s leaders saw things differently.

  Nothing, I often whispered in his ear, should stop you from doing what you most wish to do! Pay no attention to the petty ringmasters of that larger circus, Russia, in which you find yourself. Ignore the censors, naysayers, rumor spreaders. Comply only with your art’s dictates.

  Needless to say, a double doesn’t always win such struggles for control.

  When death claimed and released Seva, it released me as well. And so began my wandering through the halls of many imaginations—until I encountered Camilla’s.

  AS SHE pulled her baseball cap off her face, I saw how far we’d yet to go. Certainly she’d been provoked by all the things that had taken place on her dream-stage. Nonetheless, those nocturnal dramas hadn’t really uncorked her heart; it remained stoppered.

  The remedy? Get her moving. Action, and some good props.

  Before long I knew where to send her: in search of a certain cardboard carton she’d been storing in her apartment building’s basement for two decades. The one she’d taken from her father’s house after his death.

  Change of scene, then. No more loft. This time, down to the cellar!

  SEVEN

  A BOX. No, a pair of boxes: I’m supposed to choose between them.

  One is large and long. It’s the box into which Jordan climbed, that time we sailed across the gray table, the coffin in which my mother lay naked and veiled, beautifully dead.

  Another box is much smaller and made of cardboard—a carton of books or papers, perhaps. It’s dusty; apparently it hasn’t been opened in years. The word “Russia” is scrawled across its top.

  I choose the large, long box. I want to join my parents, lie between them. As I lift the heavy lid and raise one of my legs, preparing to climb inside, a tall man in a black mask and cape approaches and stops me.

  No. Open that one, he says, pointing at the small box.

  I do as he commands. Closing the lid of the large box, I move to the other one and tear open its top. A fragrance, deep and mellifluous, fills the air.

  What could that be? I ask.

  It’s Danny’s perfume, he says. Your father made it for her. Time you told her about the letter, isn’t it?

  Letter? I ask. What letter?

  In the box, he says. Read it, then pass it along!

  He takes off his cape and flaps it a few times from side to side, like a matador. Then he wraps it around himself, goes up on his toes and into a rapid pirouette, and disappears, and I awake.

  DANNY DROVE and I, recovered, stared out the car window. We were proceeding east, toward Harriman. After a half hour or so, seeing me stir, Danny remarked blandly on our whereabouts. Then, without further ado, she reverted to her interrogatory mode. What did I remember about her mother’s departure for college? Had Eve been nervous?

  I pulled myself out of my slouch, trying to order my cottony thoughts. I was only eight, I responded, but Eve hadn’t seemed at all nervous. The parents of another freshman student had driven the two of them upstate. Eve had climbed into their station wagon with a suitcase full of new clothing.

  “Who bought her clothes for college?”

  “Jordan used to take the two of us on shopping expeditions every now and then. He had g
ood taste. And way more money than Dan.”

  Eve at eighteen had been taller than some boys her age, and quite capable of dressing up. When she did, she’d turned heads. During her high school years, Jordan had guided her sense of style.

  “Did Mom wear dresses?” asked Danny. “I’m having trouble imagining the teenaged Eve in a dress.”

  During her adolescence she’d favored tight bell-bottom jeans, but as an adult she’d taken to wearing skirts and dresses. She’d owned an especially noteworthy sleeveless shift in soft tan suede, with lacing up the sides and across the décolletage. Mostly, though, she’d liked pants: wide-legged, high-waisted ones that flattered her hips, or close-fitting pants that drew attention to her height and her shapely backside.

  “She did wear dresses,” I said. “Good-looking ones, too—not the usual hippie shit everyone was into back then.”

  “Mom in a caftan? I wouldn’t think so.”

  When I was in grade school, Jordan used to take Eve and me to his favorite women’s department store, Henri Bendel, where (he claimed) the salespeople really knew their perfume and their fabrics. He’d buy us each a dress. Nothing flashy, though I remember he urged Eve—then in her teens—to choose something fitted. Her physique was one he’d known how to flatter.

  JORDAN HAD encouraged Eve in her love for landscaping as well. At one point he made her an offer: he would pay for supplies and equipment if she’d serve as our building’s gardener.

  Eve took him up on this. She transformed the back garden (originally a weed-infested plot about a hundred feet deep) into a tranquil haven. Purple clematis wandered the slatted fence around the yard’s perimeter, and Eve coaxed a pair of ailing azaleas back to leafy greenness. She planted hosta, which spread into a rich, dense ground cover. A small Japanese maple flourished under her supervision. Her tulips, emerging each spring of her high school years around the bases of several trees in front as well as in back of the building, lent a particularly jaunty note to our block. Our neighbors were delighted.