Tinderbox
Page 28
The coffee is made, which Caro knows her mother must have done. She takes the cup her mother hands her, and for a confused moment, it is as though the year she and Talis and Adam and Omar and now Chicky have lived here dissolves and it is her mother’s kitchen again.
She inhales the coffee. “Do you miss the house?”
“Not really. Not that I didn’t love living here. I had wonderful years here, but it’s not as though I want to be back in those years now. I feel very lucky to have been able to move on.”
Myra puts the pan of corn bread in the oven. She takes the sausages she brought out of the refrigerator and begins dicing them into cubes. “And I love my new apartment, the sun rising over the reservoir, the lights reflecting on the water at night.”
“Sounds like you’re burning the candle at both ends.”
“I’ve been working hard on finishing my project—the last stage, I think, of my teleology of love.” Myra raises her voice on the word “teleology,” as though mocking herself.
“And?”
“Oh, it’s too early in the morning…”
“I’m interested. Truly.” Caro sips her coffee, enjoying the moments before Chicky will wake up, before she will turn to washing the turkey and cutting the vegetables. The kitchen is filling with the sweet and savory smells of the corn bread baking and the sausage pieces now cooking in the cast-iron pan. Her mother smiles, her way of saying, Caro has learned, that although she takes her work seriously, she doesn’t expect anyone else to do the same.
“It’s life its very self,” Myra says. “I hope that doesn’t sound too corny. And, of course, I’m only using myself as a case study. After the breast, or the longing for the missing breast, and words and mastery of the body and romance and children and then—again, for me—my patients and my garden and my piano and my feeble attempts at something spiritual, something transcendent, it has come round to being able to love life its very self.”
Caro nods. The words are her mother’s, the ideas ones she could not have found syllables for herself, but the sentences feel so inevitable, they seem almost to be coming from her own head, like a reverse déjà vu—a glimpse of a state of mind she will reach one day herself.
“The greatest art, the apex of love, I’ve come to think, is to be able to love life its very self.” Her mother cracks two eggs into the bowl where she will mix the stuffing. A froth forms as she whisks together the yolks and whites. “I see it in my mind as one word: Lifeitsveryself.”
Only now does Caro recall that corn-bread-and-sausage stuffing is her father’s favorite. Her throat catches as she is filled with gratitude, gratitude at her mother’s generosity. Gratitude that she’d not had to build herself entirely from scratch as her mother had. To have grown up in Rome, not on parched sand.
41
After dinner, Caro and Myra do the dishes while Rachida plays chess with Omar. Larry, done with his mock groaning that he ate enough to slay three cardiac patients, lies on the floor flying Chicky on his knees while Adam shows Talis portions of Fitzcarraldo, which he has discovered Talis has never seen.
Myra takes the sink, washing the oversized platters that were once hers and that she left for Caro and Adam. Caro dries the platters with the tea towels her mother gave them as a housewarming present.
“You did a lovely job, darling,” Myra says. “With the dinner.”
“It’s very strange to be stepping into your shoes.” Caro looks at her mother’s face.
“It’s your turn. And I would never have been able to manage here, with the garden and the stairs, once I got really old. With my new apartment, I can see myself able to live there until the end of my days. I’ll be one of those women with a caregiver, a nanny for old ladies, wheeling them to the park for air.”
“I’ll wheel you.”
“Hopefully we’ve got a while before we’re there.”
To Caro, her mother seems lighter since the fire, since leaving the house, as though the luminous air of her new home, the sky over the park, the sun on the reservoir, has penetrated her skin. Her mother has become happily unencumbered while she has become happily encumbered.
Myra gives Caro the last platter to dry. She scrubs the sink and dries her hands on the apron wrapped around her. For the first time, Caro notices the age spots on the backs of her mother’s hands, patches of skin where the pigment is failing—the inevitability of the day when she will touch her mother’s hands and they will be cold.
She sets the platter on the counter and wraps her arms around her mother’s slender torso. She rests her cheek on her mother’s breastbone. Over the last year, she has seen crow’s-feet emanating from her own eyes, a heaviness under her chin, the telltale signs of her own body’s slippage, her own decay.
Through their breathing, beyond it, Caro can hear her mother murmuring something like there, there, or perhaps it is that phrase, lifeitsveryself, murmured over and over like an incantation. She sees herself burying her mother—Adam and Rachida and Omar and Talis and Chicky with her at the graveside, each of them throwing a handful of dirt against the mahogany coffin. Then twenty-five more years until it will be herself lowered into the earth. And who will be standing there to kiss her forehead, to bid her farewell? It is hard to imagine Adam or Talis outlasting her. Omar, yes, sad, of course, but not filled with grief. It will be Chicky who will be grief-stricken. Chicky, tall and graceful, her hair dark and sleek, her long lashes rimmed with tears, her slender arms, one of them still marked by fire.
The spring after a forest fire, Talis has told her, is always gorgeous. Lush from the nutrients unlocked by the burn, the razed land fills with a riot of wildflowers. Larkspurs, poppies, and hyacinths thriving on the nitrate remains. Sweet peas, lupines, and paintbrushes. Berries and grasses. Vines of wild cucumbers, bulbs of pink onions. A tempest of crimson, lavender, and gold. A feast for hummingbirds, woodpeckers, and deer.
In a few seasons, the underbrush grows thick again, a new tinderbox. Lightning strikes, flames dance through the fallen branches and nimble saplings, and then, again, yellow forget-me-nots, pink snapdragons, blue Canterbury bells.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to a number of sources for background information critical to this novel. For my understanding of the Jewish community in Iquitos, Peru, and the links with Moroccan Jewish communities, I drew heavily on Ariel Segal’s Jews of the Amazon: Self-Exile in Paradise and Susan Gilson Miller’s “Kippur on the Amazon: Jewish Emigration from Northern Morocco in the Late Nineteenth Century” in Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era, edited by Harvey E. Goldberg. Daniel J. Schroeter and Joseph Chetrit’s “The Transformation of the Jewish Community of Essaouira (Mogador) in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” also from Harvey E. Goldberg’s anthology, and Daniel J. Schroeter’s “Jewish Communities of Morocco: History and Identity” in Morocco: Jews and Art in a Muslim Land, edited by Vivian B. Mann, were invaluable sources on the history of the Jews of Essaouira. In the Mann anthology, Moshe Idel’s “The Kabbalah in Morocco: A Survey” and the photographs in the incorporated catalog helped me to understand the meanings and varieties of hamsas. Although we did not meet until the near completion of this novel, I am grateful as well to Jorge Abramovitz, president of the Sociedad de Beneficencia Israelita (Kehila de Iquitos), who generously allowed me to interview him and provided introductions to other members of the Iquitos Jewish community.
My interest in the politics and ecology of fire was ignited by both my experience rafting under the expert guidance of Gary Lane on the Salmon River in Idaho during the wildfires of 2000 and reading Richard Manning’s New York Times op-ed piece “The Politics of Fire” (August 24, 2000). My understanding of this topic and of the history of smoke jumpers in America was enriched by Stephen J. Pyne’s Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, Ashes to Wildflowers: A Promise of Renewal Springs from Destruction by Wayne P. Armstrong, and the websites of both the National Smokejumper Association and t
he McCall Smokejumpers.
Code of Honor: The Making of Three Great American Westerns by Michael F. Blake, The Western Genre: From Lordsburg to Big Whiskey by John Saunders, and The Searchers by Edward Buscombe were all important sources with respect to Westerns, and Herzog on Herzog, edited by Paul Cronin, provided invaluable material about the making of Fitzcarraldo. For helping to unlock the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, credit is due to Essential Frank Lloyd Wright by Caroline Knight and to Loving Frank by Nancy Horan.
I am indebted as well to the report of the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery on their pro bono Operation Restore, and to their member Dr. Antonio Mangubat for a phone interview regarding his work with tissue expansion in cases of scalp burns in pediatric patients. Other sources include Dr. Robert L. Sheridan’s article “Skin Substitutes in Burn Care” in the Karger Gazette no. 67 (August 2004) and Dr. Monique Aurora Tello’s article “Eyes Wide Open” in Yale Medicine 36, no. 4 (Summer 2002), an account of her treatment of a three-year-old burn victim in Guatemala City.
Thank you to Dan Cahill, Henry Dunow, Anne Edelstein, Claire Flavigny, Selin Gulcelik, Dan Piepenbring, Jane Pollock, Jill Smolowe, Meg Spinelli, and Lucy Stille for their generous feedback at various stages of this manuscript; to Rebecca Ascher, Jessie Byrnes, Mark Epstein, Jenny McPhee, Linda Morton, Shira Nayman, Susan Scheftel, Arlene Shechet, Ana Sousa, Nancy Star, and Barbara Weisberg for their help and sustenance; to the wonderful caregivers of my children—Mag Brown, Bernadine Roberts, and Glory Khan—who through the decades have given me the peace of mind necessary to focus on my work; to the amazing Montclair Writers Group for their sisterly support, wisdom, and humor; and to the Gornick family—Fred, Janet, Marian, and Vivian—whose narrative gifts raise the bar on what constitutes a story. Without my loyal agent, Geri Thoma, who has impeccable taste and believes in novels for grown-ups, and my fiercely independent and breathtakingly intelligent editor, Sarah Crichton, who knows when to reach out and when to say enough, this book would never have found its way into print. Finally, a bottomless thank-you to my husband, Ken, for gifting me the time to work on this novel, and to my sons, Zack and Damon, voracious readers and artists both, who teach me something new every day.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lisa Gornick is the author of the novel A Private Sorcery. Her stories and essays have appeared widely, including in The Agni Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and various psychoanalytic journals, and have received many awards. She has a B.S. from Princeton and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Yale, and is a graduate of the writing program at New York University and the psychoanalytic training program at Columbia. She lives with her family in New York and is completing a collection of linked stories.
Also by Lisa Gornick
A Private Sorcery
Sarah Crichton Books
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2013 by Lisa Gornick
All rights reserved
First edition, 2013
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013941742
ISBN: 978-0-374-27786-4
www.fsgbooks.com
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eISBN 9780374710255