Stand up straight, old man, he said to himself. Enough is enough is enough already.
And he would turn from where he stood and go back inside to lie down on the day bed and look at his dry spotted hands until he had chased himself inside-out. He looked through the window and curtains and was back to watching as the sun—the sun with all the patience and fortitude of the mountain and woods—the sun doing its work of turning the shadows of the lampposts up on their ends, of holding those shadows there, and then of gently laying the shadows out long again opposite. And dusk brought the vesper bells and the approaching click of his wife’s heels on the walk, the heavy creak of her basket filled with dinner greens and fruit, the old man’s heart chanting that the trouble’s no trouble, the trouble’s no trouble, the trouble’s no trouble . . .
And over dinner and wine he listened as she chatted cards and told how, in the market, the monkey stole a ball from a boy, and how last week she read a pirate story to the organ grinder, and how she could swear the monkey was weeping when the parrot in the story is captured by mutineers and is made to give evidence against his captain.
In the living room, late into the night, the old silversmith and his wife would sit and listen to the radio. Sometimes they’d remember the past for each other—their marriage trees as saplings, their trip to Spain—but mostly they just remained quiet together in the room, the man absently paging through a book of paintings, a book of flowers, a book of children’s stories, and the woman’s knitting halted on her lap as she stared at the dark empty windows, the soprano on the radio rising onto her toes, her piano slowly falling to the floor—and coming to rest—like a leaf.
You know who’d have liked that song? he asked her.
The needles in her hands began to tick together up and down again, and she looked over at his finger running along the edge of a page, and when she raised her eyes to his, he winked. She dropped a stitch and pulled out lengths of yarn from the skein tumbling on the floor.
After the next song—a waltz that had been popular when they were courting—she said that that wasn’t so bad, either, was it?
Incredible, said the man. He hummed and closed the book on his lap and watched as she knit. He laid aside the book. Know what I’d most like to be in my next life?
What’s that?
A musician, he said, and learn to play like that.
I’ll see what I can do, she told him.
He sat down. He had been sitting all along, but he sat down even more, as though forcing air from his body to touch bottom with something. He sat heavy in his old bones and looked at her. He had been looking at her all along, all his life he had been looking, but he looked even more—and she was a wolf with knitting in her lap, then she was a little girl frail and lost in gray hair and old lady clothes, her knuckles swollen, and then, again, what was she, old man? Who was she besides the only one you’d ever love in this life of clattersome spoons and singing crows? A smile floated to his face all by itself, he could feel it rising in his cheeks and eyes, this brightening, and he found a laugh starting deep out of him, and soon he was laughing in that big easy way some men have, men of the moment who can shake off their troubles and let out that three-cheers-to-the-fiddle-player laugh, which rattles bottles against barroom mirrors.
When she started to say something, he rose to his feet and took her hand and led her out to the porch, where they stood together and watched the night, the black trees, the moon, the stars so close you could stir them with a finger, the rustle of an animal in the leaves under the porch. And they closed up the house and went to bed, it being late, but the man had a tickle in his throat and couldn’t sleep in the quiet and began coughing. He got up and went to the kitchen for seltzer water and lemon. In the silvery moondark he sat at the kitchen table and cleaned his teeth with a toothpick.
That morning—the sunlight streaming into the house through the curtains, the birds outside singing—when she went to the room with the day bed, she carried a tray with their coffee and juice and muffins to him and found that, during the night, the old man had died.
There was consolation in the busy details of the wake and funeral, in the playing of host to friends and family, in the attending to train schedules and sleeping arrangements. An odd, quiet solace also crept into the old woman’s answering of sympathy cards and her writing of money orders to the churchyard and stone carver and undertaker, that cologne of his carrying the memory of every death in town. And at every other corner someone waited to keep her distracted with lunch in the market, with idle whiffs of gossip, with invitations to dinner. It struck her that everyone—in a fit of pity—conspired to let her never be alone.
She had her bridge ladies, her museum committee, her Friday reading to the blind, the organ grinder with his cream-clotted eyes, his little-man monkey over his shoulder, the old woman sometimes wondering if the man was even listening. It seemed he showed interest only when she stopped or digressed from the story they were reading.
What’s wrong? he’d ask. Why’d you stop?
Or, Excuse me, he’d say, but it says that for real?
Or, Keep going, please!
She would smile over to the monkey—the animal crouched so attentive in his little mustard-colored suit—and back to the page she’d return, clear her throat, the old widow picking up from where she’d broken off. The man wanted only ghost stories, of late. And the more avenging the justice, the more haunted the conscience, the better. And the monkey would snort at each turn of events, at each squeaking door and midnight romp he would somersault in his seat, and a dull guilt would tie up the old woman’s neck, as if her reading held within it something mildly illicit. With the bright morning and the chirping birds, the stories of grave robbers or shipwrecks seemed to her like brandy at breakfast.
But to see the monkey squirm in his seat, to have him begin to clap as she reached lunchtime, to have him pulling his hair as the ghosts all marched onto the waves to their foggy ships, that was fine for her. And as the monkey chortled and squeaked, the organ grinder opened his onion-white eyes. Bravo! he said. Bravo!
Encore! Encore!
And she whiled away the afternoon with lunch and coffee and the sweet organ music in the market, the crabs and roasting seeds and fruit stalls, and the same water-cool shade of the trees, the same benches where she sat and met the usual passersby. And closer to evening, the old woman sat out on the porch with her wine and chocolate, the sun sinking behind the trees, the branches in strong tangled shadow. It was autumn but the light was warm and she waited for night to fall as birds flew home to their nests. She carried sunflower seeds out of habit, but she hardly ever watched for her Romeo and his soft return anymore, which she had once seen in her mind so clearly, a smudge of black against the horizon, his raucous flying home so fully imagined that it seemed to her already accomplished. The roll of his wings, the fanned spread of his tail, the silky hiss of his feathers, the tick of his feet upon the wood porch.
Hello, little bird, she said to a grackle in the shrub, the bird tipping its head and looking to the seeds she held out to him in her hand.
She told him to take some, her voice looping high and low, the bird squeaking out a rusty gate of a song, flitting to a branch in a tree, slightly higher than before. The old woman stood and came forward again with her hand out. When she was close enough to see how his eye shone yellow, how his black feathers glossed purple, she watched him whet his beak on the branch and flutter to a tree near the street and turn on his perch and watch her again, the bird saying to follow him.
She was on the sidewalk and past the post office and fire station and market, her bird before her in the tree just distant, past houses and smells of dinner, past the cemetery and church. Tree by tree she followed until they were far beyond even the railway station, and suddenly the little grackle was gone.
The sky darkened left to right over the town, the moon also was starting to rise nearly full, bright and clear and pale enough to cast shadows. And into the gutte
r the old woman pitched the seeds in her hand. Beyond the closed market stalls, she could see the glow of lights against the museum façade. Every light in the palace of the museum must have been on—whole place alive with light—but not a soul stood on the steps at the entrance as she approached, no guard or coat-check with his arm draped over the ancient lion in the foyer. Music, yes, and the muddled drone of voices and glassware from the ballroom, like some empty and haunted ship, the old woman feeling invisible as she turned at the suits of armor down the long side hall, draped ceiling to floor with royal tapestries, the music and voices fading behind her, only the occasional burst of girls’ laughter flying after her.
At the end of the hall the huge double doors with porthole windows stood dark, and when she pushed the doors all their heaviness swung easily and silently aside and opened onto her favorite of all rooms in the museum. The doors closed behind her and she let her eyes adjust to the dim light. All was quiet and still, that tinwork of blood she could hear in her ears. And slow and gradual, the sponged clouds came clear on the high-domed ceiling, and once more she was in the company of the twelve-month gulls and blue kestrels that flew suspended on strings above her, and the huge albatross wandering there along its wires above her.
She walked beneath them—the big wheeling birds under clouds—moved to the wall of bright cases, each holding a bird as posed and half-real as a painting of a bird under glass. A diorama of passenger pigeons, each of them staring with glass-bead eyes at the room, their eggs speckled like stones. And next to the pigeons, as remote as the rest, the bourbon crested starling sat on a branch, holding a plastic cricket in his beak, accounts telling how this bird could be batted down with a yardstick, poor creatures so trusting and tame and delicious. And the old woman came to the great auk and could practically hear him call his own name, his feathers soft as velvet, his tiny swimming wings spread, the old woman’s hand next to the glass as if he might be frightened away at any moment. She passed a collection of finches, the birds so delicate and alert that she had to remind herself that they were hollow inside. The spectacled cormorant, the Chatman Island rail, the wood pigeon, the society parakeet, all of these birds sitting stuffed and staged and dead to the world.
And at the end of the room, at the window, the old woman caught herself reflected in the glass and reached up and turned the metal lock on the sash and lifted open the window, the weights in the walls banging, the night dark outside, the air cool, the sounds again of a party, the streetlamp of a moon above. And what was so wrong with admitting it, admitting that she would love to fly home right now like a bird? That she would have given anything to go dark through the black air, instead of having to walk past the tuxedoed thick-wits splashing in the fountain, the bare-shouldered women giggling as they held the men’s empty shoes in their arms. That insolent look of the night guard back on duty, his feet up on the desk, that look enough to crush her, enough to make her feel small and lonely, lonely for her life when it was as yet undiminished, when it was still there in front of them, when life was not these vanishing wings behind her.
She walked home cold under the moon—which had two blue rings around it, meaning frost before morning—and she was home again, her red wine where she had left it on the porch, next to the chocolate and fruit. She took everything inside and sat in her chair and hugged herself with a heavy shawl until her teeth unclenched from the cold. She stared at the room, the fireplace, the radio, the rug, her husband’s empty chair, her basket of tangled yarn. And she didn’t know, in the end, how to sit without hope, how to sit without wishing for his return, for her Romeo to open his beak and place a necklace in her palm, for this old gone bird to return to her, for him to bring back all the many voices she had grown so lonesome for.
She heard the rumble of a train running through town, and then all was quiet again. She raised her palm to her mouth to taste the salt from the sunflower seeds, and she heard mice in the walls. Far away a dog barked. And she must have started to sleep in her chair, for she was awakened by scratching in the kitchen. She feared the mice had become rats, their clawing so persistent that she took the iron poker from the fireplace. She turned on the light, and the noise stopped. At the counter she checked that the flour and sugar jars were closed, and when she turned to leave, the scratching like tapping began again.
Then at the back door, his hand on the screen—she caught the little gray face in the bottom corner—the organ grinder’s monkey in his mustard-colored suit. She smiled and let him in. My, my, she said, what a nice surprise!
And the monkey climbed up on the counter and held out his hand to shake.
And what brings you here, you little rascal?
The monkey’s smile widened as he went across to the table and sat down, his tail coiled around the chair back. He crossed his legs like a gentleman, pretended to smoke a cigarette.
Well then, she said, may I offer something to eat?
She set the table and began putting out cheese and crackers and nuts, a tiny bowl of olives, some fruit and wine, and the monkey nibbled at a pretzel. He never took his eyes from her. And when she sat down, she offered him chocolate and began talking. It’s like a tea party, she said, telling him what amounted to a long pour of days and once-upon-a-time memories, the monkey listening rapt, like it was a story, her voice stopping only long enough to refill a glass or crack a nut for her little friend.
Then, in the distance, they heard the voice of the organ grinder up the street. Arch-ie! he called, his voice breaking and raw. Don’t do this, he yelled. Come home, please.
Neither the monkey nor the woman moved. They stared at each other, and the man passed the front of the house. Archie, please, he was saying, and neither the monkey nor the woman seemed to breathe, they held so still.
Bad Archie, said the man, you’re a bad, mean monkey.
And when the man’s voice had passed the door—Arch-ie! Arch-ie!—when they could hear only crickets in the trees, the old woman stood and looked out to see the organ grinder far up the street, the man calling, stumbling like a drunk in the gutter. The old woman turned to the monkey and smiled and watched him sleeve a butter knife, his thin brown hand taking up his glass by the stem and placing it back down in the ring of wine on the tablecloth.
Now, Archie, she said, and sat again. Where were we?
A Stand of Fables
I. Miss Oliana and Her Wish Come to Life
Once upon a time there lived a beautiful young schoolteacher in a fishing village by the sea and all the children adored her. She would enter the class like a source of light, smile her good morning, and begin their arithmetic. Hop-hop! she’d call to them if they dallied. And they rarely dallied.
In the afternoons, as the students scratched their tablets full of compositions, Miss Oliana would stand beside the windows and gaze out over the glittering bay and sea below. It was a grand view, wide with light, and she’d watch the clouds and the shadows of the clouds run in toward the land. She’d watch the fishermen row home, their boats riding deep with fish, and the gulls slow-wheeling overhead.
The years all passed like this, and Miss Oliana found herself teaching the children of her former students. Then she found herself teaching their children’s children. Yet never did she despair of these passing years, or the fact that she’d never married or had her own children.
No, if Miss Oliana felt any thorn of regret, it had something to do with those lengthening stares over the water during the quiet, sun-lanced afternoons. And as the children read their compositions from the front of the class, she would feel herself drift back beyond the bay to the hammered-looking sea, to the dull draw of the horizon and the spikes of sunlight.
And the children, so eager to please, would patiently wait for her response, which would be something quick, finally, something that could apply to any child or any essay. And Miss Oliana would scold herself for neglecting these children. She would sit up straight, redouble her attention, and hear not the words this time but the song beneath the
words, the small voice so like those before and those to come that they sounded eternal: all that had been being all that would be being all that was.
And she would weep.
And the child at the front of the class would stop, mid-sentence.
And Miss Oliana would touch her eyes, clear her throat, say, Continue, please. It’s lovely is all.
And they’d continue, for no one in the village could conceive of a thing contrary to her.
More years passed the same, and more men went to sea. Women cured endless piles of fish, and men drowned and washed ashore as their widows mourned the seasons, which beat relentless and rocking as waves. Storms brought down buildings. Long wars ravaged the inland. Kings gave way to presidents, horses to trucks, boats to planes, letters to telephones, and still nothing changed in the village. The next generations all passed under the watchful eye of the village schoolteacher, Miss Oliana.
As she grew ever more ancient, she also grew more restless for the horizon of which she never tired. She had never heard of so long a life as her own and wondered if something was preventing her passing. In her darker moments she actually suspected the reality of her life: a melody’s end is not its goal, but if a melody never finds its end, is it a melody? She worried and she wondered and through the fall and winter these moods persisted as she stared out on the afternoon sea, the children filling notebook after notebook behind her.
What she hoped would pass did not pass. If anything her restlessness grew stronger and more uncomfortable, until she could resist it no longer. She felt pulled almost bodily toward the thin draw of the horizon, and she began to rise each morning before dawn and swim into the bay.
The Architect of Flowers Page 11