by Amber Sparks
But when he returned home, there was Oliver in the parlor, making careful notes about some new artifact from the Dark Ages. And there was Cedric in the court, playing tennis with Pru in his whites from thirty years ago. And Set knew then, as he had since he’d returned from the Arctic, that whatever was wrong with him, his missing piece, his hollow—it anchored him at home as surely as if he’d never left at all. If he was going to find his body anywhere in the afterlife, he supposed he would find it here. He felt the family’s pull as though caught between powerful magnets—suspended, spinning between, a little polestar.
Photograph: Inge Agnew, circa 1916. Hair a pale cloud, pinned down here and there but escaping to blur the edges. Wide, high cheekbones. Lips pale, skin pale, close-up face obscuring any background.
Their cook had a son who lived in the village. He came to the manor sometimes to see his mother, when the little village school was dismissed (and how Inge wished she were one of those students, streaming out of the one-room schoolhouse with tidy notebooks and freed-prisoner faces). And that meant seeing Inge, too—Inge who eagerly drilled him on all the town gossip and who had kissed whom and what had they learned in school. Sometimes he had good stories and sometimes he furrowed his brow and told her, in his funny accent, that he was worried about Inge and his mother. See, your father’s gone papish, he’d say, and Inge didn’t even know what that meant, but worried, too, in a nameless sort of way—was this the cause of the glares she got on the rare occasions when she rode her bicycle into the village? She knew the tenants had slowly moved off the land when she was small, and that her father fought with and evicted the rest. She remembered some of the ugly scenes. She knew, also, that the people in the village spoke differently, dressed differently. Inge wore her sisters’ old dresses, chiffon and lace. Though they were out of fashion and moth-eaten, they were still nicer than the drab woolen frocks the village women wore. But she couldn’t imagine these differences were dangerous.
Since the cook’s boy was her only friend, it stood to reason his would be the first body she knew. In the moldy smell of hay and the damp cold of the barn, she kissed him with reckless abandon, asked him to push into her like the footman used to do to the housemaids back when they had a footman and housemaids. I’ll marry you, he said after, his young freckled face between her breasts. She was sixteen but already bursting into something older; soft, warm fat over coltish limbs and long muscles.
She laughed. Don’t be silly, she said. I’ll never marry. Why should I?
His face darkened to red, streaked with white, and he started to get up. She pulled him back, hands on his shoulders, and this time her want was a little red star, was a fire in her belly, and he couldn’t help but be flamed. She felt something lovely and then, the star, it burst, and she smiled like a Valkyrie as he said, nervous and coltish now, I have to go, turned tail, and she breathed and breathed in the barn-stained air on that flattened patch of hay. And she learned that sex was a weapon she could wield, even and especially as a woman. It seemed a useful thing to know.
The last Arctic film proved, finally, a commercial and critical success for Cedric. He was hailed an innovative new storyteller, the best working in this new nonfiction film medium. With close-ups, panoramic shots, reverse angles, and tilts—he immersed the viewer in a wholly new way. He planned to follow up his success with a new film shot in Alaska—but the War made that impossible and curtailed, rather painfully, his wanderlust. He took a job in Hollywood as a studio director—one he made very clear was a temporary position—with Polytone Pictures. Polytone was second-rate, but still impressively large, with two stages and an underwater tank for filming.
Cedric was tasked with directing a picture about two friends who become obsessed with—what else—Arctic exploration. It was supposed to be a comedy. Set received frequent, dyspeptic letters from Cedric that winter.
My god, he wrote, the things that pass for humor with these dreadful picture people.
You wouldn’t believe, he wrote, the depths I’ve sunken to.
My dear boy, he wrote, I have become the Mack Sennett of remote places. I may as well put my native ladies in bathing costumes and hire a ragtime band.
When Cedric came home for a visit, Set asked if there might be a place for him at the studio. I’ll do anything, Ced, he said. I need to get off the Island. Off this coast.
You don’t want to come to Los Angeles, said Cedric darkly. These people are infernally stupid. They think the Eskimo people eat something called Eskimo pie.
I don’t think people actually believe that, Set said, laughing. I think they just want to be part of a fashion.
Who needs fashion? Those natives have lived that way for hundreds of years.
Except for the guns, Set said. And the clothes. And the phonograph, and—
White men gave them those things, said Cedric, cutting him off curtly. It’s not part of their culture, no more than Eskimo pies.
You want them to go back to how things were? asked Set. He wasn’t asking in jest—he mostly believed in Cedric’s backward vision. He’d been trained up to it.
But of course it was a silly question, anyway. Cedric wanted everything to go back. He wanted his savages noble and his civilizations autocratic. He saw the modern world as a series of trivialities, increasing in insipidness, humanity an idiot scourge, etcetera, etcetera. Set had heard the endless refrain, countless times. The people were better and the world was profound. The vulgar saxophone had not yet been invented. There was art, and mystery and there were no crossword puzzles, no silk stockings, no fast women, no rouge pots, no jazz bands, and certainly, certainly there were no Eskimo pies.
You sound like an old man, Set said.
Laugh all you want, said Cedric. He preferred a world spinning slowly, a world where history was carved into heavy stone. This fleeting life, this fractured, spasmodic present—it was hardly being alive at all. One of multitudes, so much din to wade through. So little opportunity for greatness.
Pru had been certain that Cedric would rush to join up, that he would feel called to fight in some sort of outmoded patriotism. She had been absolutely sure of it. But when Set asked Cedric if he would volunteer, he spat. The War, he said, was a machine thing, an ugly new kind of fight. Chivalry won’t save them, he said grimly. Valor won’t save them. The whole damned world has gone mad.
Once, Inge’s favorite aunt came to Larne for a longish visit. Her husband had died and she wanted to be with her niece for a while, to be reminded of her eldest sister. Inge lived for her letters and now she basked in the diminutive but powerful presence of her aunt, and absorbed all the stories she could take in about her mother and her sisters and their cheerful childhood in Germany. Her favorite story was the one about the Gypsies: her aunt always began with how Inge’s maternal grandmother gave birth to three daughters while living in the little village of Ludwigshafen. It sounded like a sort of fairy tale. The eldest daughter took after her father and was very pretty; the second took after her mother and was plain, but strong and good; and the third (the aunt in question) was left wanting entirely, her sick body and solemn mood bearing the hallmarks of long childhood illness: thin, weak limbs, pockmarked face, pale, wan pallor; though she was also—perhaps in some cosmic compensation—quickest and smartest. And she would marry before the second, and the second would marry before the first, and the first would not marry until her mother was dead and her father had given her up as a spinster.
One sweltering summer day the girls heard their father, who was the village Polizeichef, complaining about a band of Gypsies who had set up camp just outside the village. He and his friends were sitting on the porch, drinking from steins of beer in their shirtsleeves, cold rags draped over their heads.
Well, you’re the Polizei, said Herr Baumann, the butcher. Why don’t you chase them out?
It’s too hot, the girls’ father said. Let them keep there until it’s cooler. It’s too hot to go running around after a bunch of Roma, he said, and all the ot
her men nodded and grunted in assent. The girls, listening through the window of the parlor, looked at one another. Gypsies! They would be dancing, singing, telling fortunes perhaps—maybe making spells! We have to go, said the eldest. Tonight, before they drive them out.
When their mother was asleep and their father had passed out in the big porch swing, the girls put on their pinafores and crept down the stairs to see the Gypsies. When they got to the Gypsy camp, they found it disappointingly small and quiet—no singing, no dancing, only a few women in brightly colored skirts cooking over a crackling fire. Four caravans, painted red and white, parked among the trees, and drying laundry was strung on lines between them. It didn’t look magical, or mysterious, or particularly wicked—but for the caravans it could have been their own backyard.
The girls were about to creep away, unseen, when one of the women—a very old lady, with hair tucked under a kerchief over dark, hard eyes—put her fingers in her mouth and whistled loudly. A group of men emerged from the caravans, and one of them grabbed the eldest daughter, twisting her arm behind her back. Bring her here, said the old woman. The eldest wanted to cry out, but she was known for being brave as well as beautiful, and so she said nothing. The second, even braver than her sister, and more stubborn, too, crossed her arms over her starched white pinafore and glared at the grinning men. If you’re going to eat our hearts, then get on with it, she said. We’re not afraid of you.
The youngest, though, thinking quickly, pretended to cry. Let us go, she sobbed. Don’t magick us, don’t eat our parts, please. We only wanted to have our fortunes told.
Ah, said the old woman. You should have come in the front way like good little children. You are in luck, for here is my daughter, Nadya, who can read your life in the lines of your hand. The young woman stirring the pot over the fire nodded shyly. Come closer, child, said the old woman to the youngest, but she flinched and hid behind the second, still pretending to sob. The youngest had a certain self-preservation that would allow her, alone of all her family, to escape marriage, childbearing, and two wars unharmed.
I want to hear my fortune, said the eldest, and she shrugged free of the Gypsy’s grip and held her hand out over the fire. What will happen to me?
The younger woman, Nadya, took the eldest’s hand in hers and turned it over to trace the creases in the palm. She hummed to herself as she did so, some ancient, sad song, full of trouble and pain. Her face, though young, was worn, her prettiness already rubbed away in the hard road life of the Roma. Finally she spoke, voice still a singsong of sorts. Your heart, she said, you will find over mountains and seas, and you two will meet but late, when you’ve nearly lost the thread of love. She put the eldest’s palm down, and smiled at her sweetly, and it wasn’t until the sisters were gone, long past the caravans and out of the camp, that she turned to the old woman. She will live a short life, bednaya devochka, she said. Poor little girl.
The Gypsy woman was right, of course, though who can say if she foretold or forced the course of events: Inge’s mother would refuse to marry and would, at thirty-three, join the German Freikorps as a nurse, following her beloved brother into the Boer War. Once there, she would watch her brother die at Elandslaagte, and nurse to health a handsome British soldier. And she would follow him back to Ireland—to her fortune, to her children, to her early grave.
When Inge’s aunt got to the end, she reached for Inge’s hand and told her, Never mind that last bit. I made that up, of course. To make myself feel better.
My father blames me, said Inge. He blames me for her loss.
No one, said her aunt, is responsible for the way they come into this world. But men often forget that. It doesn’t do to dwell on the past, she said, and she shook her head. It’s the women who usually have to remember that.
Curiosity #49: Partial mermaid’s skeleton, circa 1822. Discovered in the stomach of a shark caught off the coast of Iceland. Eyewitnesses gave hair color as brown, skin color as green, and sex as most likely female. The eyes, they reported, were blue as the sea.
When Oliver died, Desmond stayed locked in the parlor for weeks, making furious notes in the black notebook. Then he emerged, only to vanish down the drive, Set supposed for good. Set took to hovering in the parlor’s darkened doorway, watching the cold, barren fireplace as if Oliver would reappear there. He wasn’t sure whether he hoped for that or not. He wasn’t sure what the rules were, how you came back: how many tears shed or wishes made or memories drummed up after death.
Instead it was Desmond who came back, briefly. They sat on Pru’s porch in silence. Set had heard that Desmond also had the flu, and when he came out of a three-day fever dream to find Oliver dead, he loaded a pistol and stood in front of the cabinets for a long, long time. He put the pistol in his mouth and took it out, put it in and took it out, and finally placed it on the floor and walked away.
Set had supposed Cedric never much cared for Oliver, but he seemed utterly undone by his brother’s death. He took the train back from California, missing the funeral but not the opportunity to shout at them all: at Pru, at Desmond, at Constance—and especially at Set, incomprehensible madness about sacrifice and substitution. It should have been you, he told Set, and Set wept alone in his bedroom because it wasn’t. Death demands a sacrifice, Cedric told Set at the dinner table, and Pru slammed down her fist so hard the pot roast jumped. She glared, and Cedric got up and left, shouting all the while in Italian, in Latin, in some other language that Set didn’t know. Set stared at his potatoes, speared one with a shaking hand.
Set, Pru said. He loves you. He loves us. He’s trying his best to be brave, that’s all.
But Set didn’t think that was all. Something happened that shook him, shattered him, and he didn’t suppose it was brave, though perhaps there was a kind of love behind it. One afternoon, just before Cedric was to leave for Hollywood again, Set was in the pool, swimming slow laps and missing Oliver. He felt a hand on his neck, his head pushed down into the blue. He knew not to breathe in the water, but panicked as the hand stayed steady, kept him firmly submerged. He held his breath and tried to shake off the hand and saw the edges of his vision start to blacken and smear. Help, he thought, and the hand stopped taking life and gave it, pulled him up by his hair, dragged him off to the side of the pool and draped him there, coughing and sputtering and swearing. It was Cedric.
You were drowning, he said firmly, insistently, and his eyes were dark, his suit sopping wet.
Set stared. He clung to Cedric’s suit coat, even now, couldn’t pry his own hands from his older brother’s arm. He gasped and flopped and coughed and clung.
You were drowning, said Cedric, but I didn’t let you drown. I didn’t. You should remember that.
Set leaned over and threw up his lunch in response.
He wanted to tell Pru what had happened, but he didn’t quite dare. Pru was hardly herself, anyhow. She pounded the piano and tore up her latest manuscript. Her hair went white overnight. She threw her long shadow over Set after that. When she wasn’t there, she asked Constance to leave her city apartment and stay with Set, who at sixteen was humiliated.
Set wanted out. His home felt like a mausoleum now. Cedric was in Hollywood making his pictures, Pru was locked in her grief, and Constance chafed at her forced return. And Oliver was clearly not coming back, in spirit form or any other. Set ambushed Pru in her bedroom, where she sat grimly pinning up her long white hair. I want to go to school, he said. Pru shook her head fiercely, scattering hairpins across the vanity. No, she said. You have good tutors, she said. It’s not safe for you to leave us. We don’t know what might happen. She tucked a pin expertly into the corner of her mouth and twisted a section of hair back and under.
You’re all bloody mad, you know. He stopped, shrank back. He’d never spoken that way to Pru before.
Pru plucked the pin from her mouth and shoved it into the last unruly wisp. She turned to him. Insolence won’t help. You’ll do as you’re told, and no more talk about it. And she
pushed him out and shut the door. Set thought he could hear her crying softly through the oak, though he told himself he had surely imagined it.
Once the War was over, Pru had promised her own sort of familial truce. Set had high hopes, but what it amounted to was this: Pru took her youngest son to London to visit her relations, and this was even worse than the house on Long Island. Pru, her mother, and grandmother seemed to be the only people left, and the three of them in the vast house in Kensington put him in mind of Macbeth’s witches. They dressed in black and spoke in whispers, and lived in a house that was nothing short of Gothic, all winding turrets and blood-colored wallpaper and old furnishings covered in sheets. They seemed to live mainly in two or three rooms, floating about the darkened house like restless spirits. His old, old great-grandmother boxed his ears with astonishing force when he put his elbows on the table at dinner. Set lay awake at night, terrified to sleep, sure they were casting uncharitable spells to fill his underwear with snails or turn his blankets to adders. Despite his misgivings, he wrote to Cedric in Los Angeles but received no reply, and became convinced the witches were burning his mail. He missed his brothers like lost limbs and the hollow inside him was growing; it hurt, he ached with it. He clung, still, was lost without them, was immensely relieved when Cedric wrote back, begrudgingly allowing him to come to California. Cedric was lonely past bearing, alone among the infidels. Perhaps, then, it was for Cedric’s sake that Pru relented at last.
And so Set finally fled: he left London and the witches and the damp and the cold and traveled to sunny Hollywood, to make and sell dreams.