Marie lay there across Ruth’s knees, sniffing the grass and the lake, paying no attention to the rest of the concert. If she moved just a little more each day, eventually or even soon enough she would be walking. She could learn to talk, too, first by willing herself to squeak, next by squeaking almost words, then actual words, and finally whole sentences. “Ruth, I’m going outside now”—imagine the girl’s surprise.
Just then Ruth stirred at what turned out to be the last notes of the last piece, and there seemed to emanate from her a new vibration that reminded Marie of the girl’s small rebellion earlier today. As she let out a series of furious, sharp sounds with her two palms, Marie was sure the music had held something new and significant for Ruth, too.
The family bustled back to the station. Ruth followed closely behind her father, as if she wanted to ask him something. Marie stared at his heels lifting and falling to the pavement again. On the train Ruth sat once again between Helen and John, but she paid no attention to them, not even when John teased her for it. “All aboard,” was called, a whistle blew, but the train didn’t yet move, and in that tense, hushed moment, Ruth suddenly blurted out, “Papa? I would like to play the violin.”
Everyone laughed. The railway carriage jerked foward.
“Oh, you would?” said Papa.
“She never wanted one before today,” said John.
“Violins are expensive,” Mama warned. “And we already have a piano.”
“I know,” Ruth murmured.
The train clacked. Marie wanted to bury her head in Ruth’s shoulder. It was true that the girl sometimes asked for things she didn’t want very much or forgot about a day or even an hour later—so how could Ruth convince them?
Papa said, “Of course you all know the story about Ikey and the carriage.”
It was a very old joke—older than automobiles—and a family favorite. Even Marie, who had been with the family only since Christmas, already knew it. Evidently Ruth’s grandfather, the orphan, used to tell it.
It was a funny story about what could happen when people got carried away by their wishes.
“One fine Sunday morning a very silly family was walking to church,” said Papa, “because the wheel of their carriage was broken and they couldn’t afford to have it repaired. It was a long way to church, and the road was muddy, so they began talking about how grand it would be to have a new carriage.
“‘I can see us riding in it now,’ said the mother. ‘It will be such a beautiful, shiny carriage.’”
Mama, Helen, and John were already laughing to hear Papa speak in falsetto. Normally a quiet man, he could tell a good story when he wanted to.
“‘We’ll get to church in no time,’ said the father. ‘We’ll glide along like the wind.’
“‘And everyone in town will see me riding right up in front,’ said the little girl.
“‘Me, too,’ said her little brother, Ikey. ‘I’ll be riding in front, too!’
“‘No, Ikey, there won’t be enough room next to Father,’ the girl scolded.
“So Father said, ‘Ikey, be a good boy and ride in back with Mother.’
“‘I don’t want to!’ cried Ikey.
“‘You have to,’ said his sister.”
Even Ruth was laughing now, and Papa himself chuckled in anticipation of the punch line.
“Then Ikey started jumping up and down in the mud, hollering, ‘No! No! I don’t like it in back! I want to ride in front—in front!’
“And the little boy was making such a fuss that finally his father shouted, ‘Ikey, get right out of the carriage!’”
4.
Winkie sighed. Undulating telephone wires had given way to darkness and the occasional play of headlights across the car’s beige ceiling full of tiny holes. He saw himself as Marie, hoping and surviving, growing up, as it were, and he knew not only how long she’d have to wait for what she longed for, but how it all ended—here in the back of a white sedan, driving in circles.
Once upon a time, Marie could change nothing, not in Ruth’s life, not in her own, just as Winkie could change nothing of his own story. There was Ruth the girl, and there were her parents, and before them her parents’ parents, et cetera. Later there would be Ruth the mother, and her own children. These were all facts. Even now, Winkie wanted to rebel against them, refuse them, yet they continued reeling out before the tired eyes of his memory.
It could be said that the whole of the bear’s life as a toy formed one long incantation that produced, at last, the miracle of his coming to life. Winkie half hoped to understand that incantation through recollection, maybe even to reproduce its magic and thus regain his freedom.
For the eighty-seventh time the car turned left, tires squealing. Winkie tugged idly at the handcuffs, letting the rough plastic cut into his paw. He didn’t want to remember his life with fondness; he didn’t want to love only in retrospect. Yet he did love Ruth, even now. It was yet another thing he couldn’t change.
5.
Outside Ruth’s window, the huge cottonwood tree creaked and rustled.
“You command the situation if you understand that mortal existence is a state of self-deception and not the truth of being,” Ruth read out, laboring over the bigger words. At breakfast she’d announced she was going to read Science and Health every day from now on. Marie was annoyed at such an obvious attempt to win the parents’ favor, but she had to admit it might help the girl get a violin after all. “Mentally contradict every complaint … master fear through divine Mind. …”
Marie’s own mind made her glass pupils go cloudy with boredom. In the middle of the night she had decided to rename herself Mouth. Every time Ruth said, “Marie,” the bear yelled, Mouth, in her mind, to blot out the name of that poor bear that couldn’t answer. “… master the propensities …” Mouth, Mouth, Mouth, she thought now, trying to feel what it would be like for her stitched mouth to actually make that sound. For a second she could almost believe it had, but in fact she was already getting bored with the game. “Choke these errors in their early stages … destroy error. …”
Marie herself was beginning to feel choked and destroyed. These teachings were like the wallpaper of this house, and all at once Marie seemed to glimpse in that ornate pattern a monstrous face, livid and forbidding, with Mama’s mousy hair and Papa’s sad, deep-set eyes—the Father-Mother God—
Fortunately Ruth put the book aside just then and the image dissipated. “Just a little each day,” Ruth said, much to the bear’s relief. Then she picked up Marie and began whispering plans for playing in an orchestra when she grew up and the many marvelous experiences she would have. Her breath tickled Marie’s ear almost the way the music had. It worked the bear into a fever of anticipation, not only for Ruth’s future but for her own. “But it’s no use pestering him about it,” the girl suddenly warned, meaning her father. “You’d better just sit here quietly,” she added, putting Marie down again. It didn’t calm the bear one bit. Ruth went out to play, while Marie listened for every word and movement in the house. The concert had made her large ears even more sensitive; she found that she could hear a lot, if she concentrated. Water sloshing from the icebox tray as John carried it to the sink. The stray words of a practitioner who had come to see Mama about her headaches—“mental malpractice … mental contagion … mental miasma …”
That night when Papa arrived home from work, Marie doubted Ruth would be able to restrain herself from bringing up her big wish. She didn’t right away, but in the middle of dinner, the girl blurted out, “Papa, may I have a violin?”
Upstairs, Marie winced. The leaves of the cottonwood were dark as velvet in the window.
“We’ll see,” said Papa slowly.
Marie had heard this reply from him before. Maybe this time it really did mean he would think about it—Marie couldn’t tell. Her anticipation only grew. It seemed her own fate and her own desires were toying with her, too, refusing to answer.
Tines clicking on plates.
/> “If I had a violin,” Ruth said, in a dreamy way, “I’d play Beethoven, Mozart, and also Haydn.”
“Ah, mm-hmm,” said Papa.
His tone remained the same, but Ruth couldn’t seem to stop herself. “I’ll play with the Chicago Symphony, and I’ll sit with all the other violins, and—”
“Sure, Ikey,” said her brother, and everyone laughed.
Marie felt the usual outrage, but when Ruth came upstairs after dinner, she didn’t seem at all upset. In fact, she was unusually serene. The bear watched her carefully as she took out crayons and began drawing a violin. Marie wanted to know how Ruth went about wishing. If someone wished in a particular way, or with a particular intensity, would she get what she wanted?
The next morning, after reading from Science and Health, Ruth took Marie with her down to the basement, intent on something. The bear had never been down there before. The light was dim. Holding up the ceiling were two medium-size tree trunks, bark and all, as if the house were sprouting from them like branches and leaves. Ruth set Marie down on the worktable and went to rummage in a dark, fertile corner. She returned with an old cigar box, two paint stirrers, a hammer, and some other things. Immediately she set to work gluing the cigar box shut, then nailing the end of one of the paint stirrers to the box. The object now had a body and a neck. Marie wanted to cheer, but in fact Ruth needed no encouragement. “Good,” the girl said to herself. She’d hit the nails in crookedly, bending them over, but she didn’t seem to mind these imperfections. Usually such things bothered her a lot. Marie continued watching her carefully. Four thumbtacks at either end, long rubber bands hooked around the thumbtacks—and the project was done. Ruth plucked one of the rubber bands and it made a dull noise of a certain pitch.
Marie’s ears tingled. The object that had taken shape before her eyes was better than a real violin. Cobbled from scraps, square instead of curved, it was only the idea of a violin; that is, the essence of a desire. Ruth strummed the rubber bands and to Marie’s delight they made a series of twangs bearing almost no relation to music.
“Listen, Marie!” she said, and taking the violin by its neck, she pushed its square body awkwardly under her chin and with her other hand raised a second paint stirrer high. She paused theatrically, and then in one masterful-looking stroke drew the stirrer down across the rubber bands.
The makeshift strings pulled, twanged loosely, and the wood of the homemade bow scraped against the box.
Again! thought Marie. Again!
Ruth tried once more, with equal force. The assuredness of her strokes, the disappointing sounds it made—they sent an electrical thrill right between Marie’s eyes. Skggh! Twoog! Fshp!
But then Ruth put her creation down, frowning, the spell broken. She wasn’t crying, but she was obviously disappointed. Marie didn’t understand. Had Ruth expected the violin to work?
Ruth frowned again, though now it was a crooked frown. She placed the violin under her chin and began playing again, but moving the stirrer very lightly this time so that it barely made a sound, and bobbing up and down, smiling wanly as if in ecstasy. She was making fun of her own creation. This saddened Marie a little, but soon Ruth began to twirl, pretending to play, her eyes closed. She was humming the tune now, and it was no longer a joke, after all.
“What is that?” said Helen with disdain.
In anticipation of dinner, Ruth had taken the cigar box up to her room.
“Nothing,” she said, placing her handiwork on her dresser and Marie beside it.
Helen put her book down and came over to the dresser wearing a malicious smile. “Is that what you’ve been doing all day?”
“No,” said Ruth sullenly.
Helen plucked at one of the rubber bands. “John!” she called out, running to get her brother. “Look what Ruth made—a vio-lin!”
“So what?” John called back. Today he was above it all, too old to be bothered with his sisters’ affairs.
So many forces at work in this house, Marie thought, and sometimes they worked to Ruth’s advantage. Helen returned, smirking “Vio-lin,” but without John to witness the teasing she quickly gave up. She flopped down on her bed and resumed reading Wuthering Heights.
Ruth sat on her own bed to read Science and Health. “… for Mind can impart purity instead of impurity,” she murmured, “strength instead of weakness …” Marie didn’t understand how Ruth could submit to it just now. Her own head was still spinning from the music of the basement, but she had to agree the book was an unassailable way to ignore Helen. After a little while the bear heard Mama’s step on the stairs. She appeared in the doorway.
“I need one of you girls to set the table. I shouldn’t have to ask you every time.”
It was Helen’s turn, so Helen said, “Look what Ruth was doing in the basement today.”
Marie was afraid Ruth might get in trouble—for using the hammer, perhaps, or the glue. She watched Mama pick up the homemade object.
“It’s my violin,” said Ruth, shrugging, yet the tone of her voice was like opening both her palms in supplication.
“Ah,” said Mama in her distant, inscrutable way. “I can see you worked very hard on it.” But at least Ruth didn’t seem to be in trouble. Mama went out and Helen followed.
Ruth continued reading until their footsteps receded down the stairs. Now that the girl was alone, the bear stared ahead more intently, hoping that Ruth would play with her violin some more. Marie wanted to see her make those wild virtuoso strokes again.
“No, Marie, you can’t have my violin,” Ruth said suddenly. “You’re only a bear. Bears can’t play the violin!”
Marie was startled and annoyed. She didn’t want to play the violin, did she? That was what Ruth wanted. And Marie had wanted it for her.
“Silly bear!” said Ruth. She came and picked up Marie and began shaking her up and down, making her eyes click open and shut. “Silly bear! Silly bear!”
It was sort of like their headache game, but worse, because Marie doubted there would be a calm, healing part. She wished for a return to the more placid, careful Ruth. The girl kept saying, “Silly!” over and over, shaking Marie up and down and side to side, making her big lifeless head wobble on its weak cloth neck. “Vio-lin,” Ruth said disdainfully, exactly as Helen had said it. “I want a vio-lin!” she made Marie say, while she also made the bear dance sideways in weird loops. “Vio-lin!” The awkward pirouettes were a harsh parody of the high-wire movements Marie had performed in her concert vision, and it was as if wanting itself—wanting anything—were only a weird, ridiculous, painful dance. Between flickers of her eyes, Marie glimpsed an entranced hatred in Ruth’s face. She kept repeating “Stupid bear!” and “Vio-lin!” and making Marie dance like an idiot in the air. The bear tried to summon her will to move, to tumble out of Ruth’s grasp once more. Everything started going dark around the edges. Then the feeling pushed a step further and Marie began almost to enjoy her neck flopping sharply back and forth, the way her eyes seemed about to crack with the jerking open and shut. “Harder!” she wanted to cry. “More!”
But just as suddenly it stopped, like a storm that never was, and Ruth was calmly setting Marie down on the pillow of the bed, smoothing out the bear’s black velvet skirt. Ruth’s face had a busy, pinched look of concentration, like Mama when she was carefully sewing a seam shut. Marie could only stare, dark and dizzy from the shaking, trying to pierce that mesmerized intention. Ruth kept smoothing and smoothing the velvet, saying nothing, seeming to think nothing at all.
“Ruth,” said Papa. Marie started. Ruth turned around quickly, embarrassed.
Marie’s vision was still cloudy around the edges. Just now it was hard to believe there was anyone else in the world besides herself and Ruth. But here was this man, standing in the frame of the doorway, very tall and thin, looking as worried and sad as usual. The sight was even stranger because Papa never came up to the girls’ room; it wasn’t his realm.
He nodded toward the dresser. “Is th
at the violin you made today?”
“Yes,” said Ruth uneasily.
Was he angry or just curious? Because of what Ruth had just done to her, Marie actually hoped the girl was about to be punished. She ticked off in her mind again all the rules Ruth might have broken today. But the girl couldn’t have looked more innocent. Her side of the room was, as usual, perfectly neat, in contrast to Helen’s, and despite rummaging in the basement she’d managed to keep her white dress and white socks perfectly clean.
Papa picked up the homemade instrument. “That’s quite a violin,” he said wryly.
So intensely did Marie hate the object at this moment that she took pleasure in his little joke.
“And you’ve been reading Science and Health?” said Papa, nodding toward the little volume that lay on Ruth’s bed.
“Uh-huh,” the girl answered.
“That’s a very grown-up book for a nine-year-old to be reading.”
“I know …”
Marie was hoping he might disapprove, but he began examining the violin again.
“It doesn’t really play,” Ruth admitted. Maybe she thought that showing she knew the truth might win her points, for surely she was in trouble. Then she joked, “Marie helped me make it.”
“Oh, well, that’s why it doesn’t work,” Papa said, laughing.
Marie thought she might burst into yellow flames of fury and frustration. That would get their attention. For she already understood, by Papa’s tone, what he was about to say next—she could see how everything was suddenly turning around and how Ruth was going to get her way after all.
Papa knit his brow. “I think, Ruth,” he said, tapping the thin wood of the cigar box lid, “we will get you a real violin.”
It appeared to the miserable bear that undeserved candy was falling down from the ceiling in colorful waves. Ruth seemed to dare not move or speak, and Marie watched a moment as this bounty fell and fell on the girl and her father.
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