These nuances made him feel better, so that he could contemplate what mattered, the film itself.
When the car ferry arrived and I drove down the gangplank, I felt almost at once the sensation of being an outsider. This distance—a kind of disaffirmation of any sense of belonging here—I had experienced before, of course, but never quite so profoundly. I reminded myself that there was no reason that the landing, and the oak and maple trees, and the street that disappeared up toward the island center, should look foreign, reminded myself that I had just visited my mother and Gabriel not two months ago in their cottage, which was three minutes from here, that I had lived, on and off, on Shelter Island for most of my lifetime—but I wasn’t able to shake the apprehension.
I drove to the new inn where I had made a reservation. I had registered using Grace as a surname. No one knew me at the place, as it was on the opposite end of the island—somewhere I never ventured, near the public beach. When I settled in my room, I took it out of my bag, and openedit again, the note I’d received that brought me here. It was typed out and unsigned. There was no return address on the envelope. There was nothing about the white paper on which it was written that would allow me to know the identity of its author; and this was, of course, intentional: no Geiger letterhead, no National Council of Churches, nothing. There wasn’t even, in the way the few sentences were composed, a rhetoric that would give me any insight into the writer’s slant on the situation, or what he or she hoped to gain from it.
“Your brother is about to make a mistake. You might want to observe the proceedings. Scrub Farm, middle next week, it begins. Sorry!”
I hadn’t told anyone about this, though I’d been sorely tempted at least to telephone—of all people—my mother. She and Segredo had gained my trust when we met, and had even been in touch on the telephone, just talking, not even so much catching up, but talking about events, the world, the government, sweeping impersonal things that would help us to get our bearings again. But I didn’t tell her about this; I imagined there was some chance she and Segredo wouldn’t want to know. They might think, Grace is back in our lives and look what she brings, problems, maybe we were better off before. I didn’t want them to think that way.
The last exclamatory word in the letter does carry a rhetorical weight, but what kind of weight, and in what way it leans, I cannot say. Sorry for me, for Berg, sorry for whom? And does it really mean, sorry, or is there a quiet snicker behind it, like, “Sorry, but richly deserved”? What is more, the word “mistake” is particularly unloaded—so light a term it is, within the context of this anonymous missive, that its rhetorical innocence seems false, and hints to me that the author of this thing wants me to know that the mistake is a grave one.
Like a fool, I have come; I didn’t see what option there was. Later, I will go out there. Not in the car, though. Myown anonymity, it occurs to me, might have certain value, but in what regard I couldn’t yet say.
Five families used to own the better part of Shelter Island, or at least that was how Berg remembered it, when he was growing up: the Nichollses, the Havens, the Tuthills, the Derings, and the Sylvesters, who had originally owned it all, having had it bestowed upon them by the crown. The island was Republican, as are most islands. In the summers the population would swell to twenty-four hundred souls between the natives, summer people, and the visitors. Islands are like that. A few people do their best to make money during the season, and then are left to survive as best they can through the winter. Berg invented a family that had seen better days. Once an island family, they were now treated as if they were a summer family. Once the toast of the island, once one of the great, glorious, landowning families, the Muellers—as he called them—were quite reduced now. Gone to seed were the terraced gardens, toppled was the fine statuary that once stood here and there, placed by some imported English landscape artist to heighten the effect of this lily pond, or that octagon. The trees on the Mueller estate were overgrown with vines, some of them missing large branches from the storms, some of them dying from diseases or age. The manor—not much of a manor really, just a clapboard farmhouse—was charming, if in a shambles. And the Muellers themselves were charming, if overly devoted to their livestock, the blind goat, the lame mule, the old horse, and the several dogs. The Muellers were caught in their own time-warp, because the stretch of water—narrow though it was—that separated them from the mainland also separated them from the social velocities at which those on the land excelled. Islands are washed by waves, and their clocks tick as irregularly as waves. The sun shows a longer day on an island, comingup as it does right out of the water, and then setting in the water too—no mountains or buildings to keep you in shadow.
So …
The camera focuses on a hand. The hand is holding a black fountain pen over a sheet of clean white paper. It is a girl’s hand, we suspect, and the pen appears unwieldy, overlarge, awkward in its grasp. There is the suggestion, we suppose, of the black pen being homologous with a black phallus, held so quiveringly in the neophyte’s grasp. We note it, the hint, and move on just at the same time the image does, not assigning too much importance to it—the hint—as the hand now puts the nib to paper.
Our earlier thought that the hand was a young girl’s is confirmed, and this makes us feel at once satisfied. The words that begin to appear are written in large, rounded forms, and we are sure that the person writing is a child. Although the calligraphy is plain, schoolish, and legible, that the hand is shaking (what is she nervous about? we cannot help but ask ourselves) causes the words to be imperfectly shaped here and there. As the words are revealed, the innocent, fluty voice of the girl hovers over the text with us, and narrates her thoughts as they materialize on the page. No music. The quality of the sound is dry. There was a condenser on the mike in the room where the child-actress read for the sound track. Black and white, a tight shot filling the screen, deep tones of lush gray that almost have in them the quality of old nitrate film stock.
The voice tells us, “I am a sinner, and this is my calendar of days, my confession. This is my almanac,” and the theater fades to momentary black.
We can hear the ocean rocking against the shore and the image dissolves into gray waves fanning across sand.
“The ocean is a vast eye,” the voice continues, “which has witnessed many things, being an eye that never closes, night nor day.”
Then the screen image jump-cuts to a gypsy woman withone glass eye. “Nasturia was one who knew how to read the lines of a person’s palms. My parents brought me, early on in my life, to her, hoping against hope that she could identify the reason for my problems. I had been very ill, and our family had moved to this place on doctor’s orders, in the hope of restoring my health. But for all the natural beauty and calm of island life, I was still subject to fits and sinful hallucinations. Desperate about my uncouth nightmares, and my fantasies, which were evident to my parents by the way I moved as I slept, fitfully, moaning and heaving, bathed in the salty water of my own flesh, my parents, frustrated by the failures conventional wisdom and medicine had shown in my case, brought me to Nasturia.”
The palmist, in whose own facial wrinkles we are able to read a long, hard life of quackery and falsehoods, smiles a knowing smile. Obscured if not hidden beneath her heavy makeup, we can discern, is a person who possesses both a melancholic understanding of what a bitch life is and a failure to have, herself, warded off its nastiest demon: the demon of growing old ignorant.
She studies the child’s hand with admirable concentration. She frowns, as we might expect. Then she looks up to the parents, who stand, worried expressions on their faces, behind their daughter, and darkly mutters, “This bodes evil.”
The mother leans forward and tells the palm reader to elaborate.
“How do you feel, honey?” the palmist asks the girl.
Grady answers, most reserved, “Fine.”
“You want to go on?”
Grady says, “Yes.”
Dra
wing the hand closer to her dark eye, the palmist reads, “An absent Mount of Jupiter suggests degrading proclivities, the Mount of Venus being rather excessive indicates coquetry and frivolity beyond measure. The Line of the Head reads of a lack of steadiness of mind, I am afraid. None of which is, as you can see, good. However,there is more. Her Line of Life, while being neither normal nor short, is formed of a double J—you see? you see these fishhooks here?”
The father asks, somewhat unimpressed with the palmist’s confidence in her craft, about the meaning of the fishhooks.
The palmist smoothly ignores his hostility. “These lines tell of one who shall enjoy success in war.”
And she smiles knowingly at the girl, and the girl is seen to smile back at the old hag, her face flooded with innocence.
The parents aren’t pleased with the reading.
The palmist stresses, “I can only read what fate has traced there in the flesh, I cannot shape the girl’s fate myself,” and as she pauses for a moment the camera tightens in on her face, slowly, so that we are close enough to imagine her breath on our cheeks when she says, “One thing I can tell you is this. If she were my daughter I know I’d keep a close watch on her.”
The scene was hokey to just the degree Berg wanted it to be hokey, and yet eloquent enough, he believed, so that it achieved precisely the mix of tones he was looking for. Fair enough. It was under way. He’d got his filmic conflict going. The music was to be understated, and that would be a plus, keep it from getting too arty.
When he had first sketched out this opening, he was aware that his audience, now three-four minutes into the action, would be getting restless, maybe begin shifting in their seats, wondering when they were going to be delivered what they’d come looking for, whether it be simple action, or skin trade materials. The palmist could, of course, request to be left alone with the girl, usher the parents to a waiting room, and summon her two twisted sons to the chamber to perform, perhaps, some sort of ritualistic act with the girl to cleanse her of the curse that her palms declared was upon her. The sort of tribal ambience, the narcotized luxuriance of a classic like Behind the Green Doormight be effected had he invented a scene like that.
But, Berg reminded himself, classic or not, Almanacwasn’t to become some piece of pulp porn trash nor a cruddy mail-order tape; it was a family portrait, a Film with a capital “F,” and he disciplined himself to stick to the—well, if not facts, as such, at least the testimony his memory wished to preserve on its celluloid canvas.
He knew, further, that he would have to discipline himself to coordinate his need for accuracy in some kind of measure with the market imperatives he knew Analise would have in mind: he wasn’t prepared to be irresponsible, given how much money it had by now become evident would have to be siphoned off the Trust to make the thing a reality. So, he gambled the scene that revealed how fate had doomed her was enough of a prelude, and decided not to spend the money and shooting time it would take to further develop and shade the background to Grady’s character. He would skip ahead some years and show her as a flowering adolescent, obsessed with her brother.
I felt unhurried as I biked over the first, then the second causeway, maybe because it felt so unusual to be traveling in this childhood mode again, slow and yet covert, and I was enjoying the sea air, and the skittering of the pebbles as the rocks ran fingers through them, foaming and chewing incessantly at the manmade span that led out toward the house.
Enjoying the sea air? I could have laughed if it had been less painful; such a pathetic figure I must have cut in the eyes of those two boys down on the shore, surf casting into the wind, who glanced back to see this woman cycling along toward Ram above them on the road. To them I must have seemed ninety, seemed ancient, with my Soho blacks fluttering into my body, my black ankle boots and blackstockings moving up and down against the pedals of the bicycle that I’d borrowed from the hotel. In the city, this was the absolute in feminine garb—at least downtown, where I had gone so often to meet Cutts at the aerie. But here, on this rather desolate road, on this island, at this time of evening, I must have looked like a witch, and a wicked and ridiculous one to boot. But rather than shout something derisive at me, they ignored me, turning back to the darkening water and casting again. I could have told them that fishing here on this side of the causeway was not going to avail them of any catch, not in this month, at this hour—Desmond, Berg, and I had tried to fish the bay from this concrete strait before on many occasions under similar conditions with no success. But I thought, let them learn for themselves. That’s what I was still doing, wasn’t it? Learning for myself. And besides, they hadn’t even laughed at me. Solipsism, is what it’s called, when a person is so far gone into the sorrows and joys of apperception that she believes everyone is looking, measuring, admiring, ridiculing her. Solipsism is when you think that one of the primary reasons the sun bothers to rise in the morning is to show you once more to the world for appraisal. Whatever streak of it I had running through my nerves and blood and heart I could damned well do without, but it was in me, like sap in the spring brush, sap out of the wound of a late-pruned maple branch.
So. Picture a witch but one without powers, one who wouldn’t know necessarily how to crack a mirror at the right moment, or wiggle her nose in order to make all the most inane complications that happen in a life disappear, and there was Grace, approaching her own house, ditching her borrowed bicycle in the scrub—plentiful yet out there, whence the name of the farm originally. The irony (are these things ironies, or sublime cruelties?) of me coming to a stop at just about the same place in the road that Segredo parked his car all those years ago, when he’d come to Erin, did not escape me—but I did not fight what had by thenbecome an inevitability, a purpose. To find out just what it was that Berg was doing. And to make up my mind who I was, how I could define myself in the midst of all these other ideas, and movements, all these decisions.
The grounds of Scrub Farm I knew better than my own body. Every tree, every stone, every rise in the grade. I was the most viable insurgent. And—for the solipsist I accused myself of being—the most self-deprecatory. Everyone, I am convinced, has experienced this moment in their lives, when they “snuck up” on someone. Common as grit in a hen’s gullet, would be how Web might say it.
The windows cast a yellow onto the holly and junipers, and the tiny berries on the ferethorn burned bright under what had become a convergence of sun afterglow and early moonlight. My old library window, the window that I had stood at so often as a girl, glowed with a butterscotch hue. There were a number of lights on in the house, upstairs and downstairs, though the carriage house was dark. I made my way down toward the far shore where the carriage house looked out toward Coecles head, and peeked in the windows to assure myself no one was inside, then used a key to let myself in the back door. The rooms smelled of (guess what) potpourri, ever so mild. The familiarity of the smell was, in this new context, heartwarming to me, and I could feel my pulse, which had risen as I’d ventured across that open space in the twilight, now return to a regular tempo.
I sat down. I didn’t know my way around Djuna’s rooms—indeed, even when I was living at Scrub Farm I had only been in the carriage house on a few occasions, once to bring Djuna her medicine, maybe once to help her carry plates of cookies she had made for a surprise party for my father on his fiftieth birthday. Of course, I didn’t turn on any lights, but as I sat on the floor in the foyer, my eyes adjusted to the darkness, and soon enough I got my bearings, rose, and walked toward the open staircase—still quite charmingly rickety—and went up to the second story. In Djuna’s bedroom the potpourri was positivelyheady. What was it about these women that would make them want to keep bowls of dead and decaying flowers in their houses? I found her telephone, which was on the bedside table. Without thinking about it I dialed the number for the farmhouse.
The Almanac Branch Page 23