The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Copyright

  For Roger and Marisa

  The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission, is, of all the perquisites of love, the one which it values most highly.

  —Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

  Part One

  One

  “I GREW up on a farm.”

  I had said this so often in my life, trying to explain myself, that I barely heard it anymore. The images that came with it—the hydrangea tree in our front yard with its loose, faded blossoms; my sister Sylvie feeding a new lamb from a bottle; the brilliant maple leaves swirling down out of the October sky—meant everything to me; that I came from a beautiful, fertile place; that I was innocent rather than ignorant; ardent, not reckless … that I, like all things stamped “natural,” must be, essentially, good.

  I was explaining myself right then to Philippa Sayres, my professor of Comparative Literature at Sweetriver College, bastion of cultural and political enlightenment. The year was 1974. Philippa (Sweetriver was antihierarchical; faculty members were to be treated as senior colleagues and addressed as peers) had yanked me into her office after class to explain the mistake I’d made in calling Causabon (the aged pedant to whom Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch, is so grindingly yoked in marriage) dull.

  “No, no,” she said. Being so small physically and so quick mentally, she had the aspect of a hummingbird—one sensed that she kept still only by dint of great effort; in her case an effort of mind instead of wings. “He is not at all dull! He is, in fact, on a magnificent quest! ‘A Key to all Mythologies’ [the manuscript onto which Causabon’s head drops when he finally, mercifully, dies] would be invaluable if carried through. Here, let me show you a couple of essays.”

  I sat before her, nodding so seriously. My life had moved by means of study. If I hadn’t been a good student, I’d never have escaped from home. But here I was at Sweetriver, safely taking a note: Causabon—scholar/hero. When I looked up, I saw Philippa squinting at me, trying to puzzle me out. Where had I come from, where was I going?

  And I had that feeling she was seeing all that was wretched in me, so made the standard farm answer. And saw her blink in surprise.

  “On a farm? In, like, Iowa?”

  “No, Connecticut.”

  “The wilds of Connecticut?” she asked, looking intently, for some reason, at my hands. I was proud of my hands—they were slender and pale and seemed to speak of virtue. Someone had once told me they were perfect piano-playing hands, so they stood in my mind for all my undeveloped aptitudes, the possibilities latent in me. At home I’d sit under the mulberry tree, drawing on the back of my father’s old stationery just to watch those hands at work. And to know my mother would look out the upper window and see me—diligent girl in beautiful landscape—and feel, for a minute, calm.

  “You’d be surprised how wild it can get in Connecticut,” I told her, with some hint of insinuation which she caught with a raised eyebrow.

  “What kind of a farm, though? Dairy?”

  No one had ever asked me this question, and I barely had an answer. “A … sheep farm,” I said, “sort of. I mean, we have chickens too. And, a pony. And, you know…”

  “I do? I know?” she asked, blinking rapidly, considering. “No, I don’t think I do,” she decided, and fixed me with a piercing look. “Sheep, for mutton? Does one say mutton anymore?”

  “Mutton,” we both tried at once, and looked at each other amazed. Was it true there were two people on earth who would repeat the word “mutton” to catch its musty sound?

  “One thinks of Hardy,” she said to herself. Then to me: “Or, sheep for wool? What breed of sheep, for instance?”

  “I … I don’t know.” Of course, there were different breeds, the kind with black faces, and others I’d seen at the county fair. Ours were all white, with wool so thick and oily you couldn’t push your hands deep enough into it to touch their skin. They grazed and gamboled, the bells around their necks tinkling in a very authentic alpine way. One of my deepest satisfactions was to pretend I was herding them back from a high field after a long day … to imagine how gratifying such work must feel. We had them sheared every spring, but I had no idea what breed they were, or what we had done with the wool. I didn’t seem to have solid answers for any of Philippa’s questions.

  Curiosity was unheard of at Sweetriver. The students were from Westchester or Malibu, they summered in Cannes and the Hamptons, they knew everyone, and if they were ignorant of something that was only because it wasn’t worth the bother.

  Philippa found this amazing—she was fascinated by whatever her eye lit on. The students laughed at her fast talk, her unseemly enthusiasm, but she was our teacher (though she was barely older than we were) and—she was a lesbian. This gave her a mystique her more prosaic qualities couldn’t dull; it made her seem dangerous and exotic even as she amassed notecards in the back corner of the library. Rumors swirled: Philippa had put a curse on a student who refused her advances and the girl developed a nervous condition, left school, and either committed suicide or became a Hare Krishna, no one was sure. Or: Philippa went to the East Village and bought “forty minutes for forty dollars.”

  “Forty minutes of what?” I’d asked, but the question was unanswerable somehow, though its dark suggestions were clear. And seductive. It was impossible not to keep an eye on Philippa, because you knew she was going to surprise you. Though you’d never expect her to do anything as jaw-dropping as taking an interest in me.

  I was there on a scholarship. My cheeks were still pink, I was still young and hopeful, and the dean felt Sweetriver students needed exposure to such a person. They managed to overlook me, though—it was pretty clear that I was not going to become a useful contact. Catching my reflection in a dorm window, I’d see myself burrowing along, face screwed up tight like a mole in fear of weasels. Dressed up for a dance, I looked like a braless Little Bo-peep.

  Philippa saw me as raw material. And (this, it would take me years to understand) as
a kindred spirit, one of those few others on earth who would repeat the word “mutton” until she’d heard every one of its implications. I wracked my brain, knowing she was truly interested in what kind of sheep we’d been raising, that she would attach as much meaning to my answer as she did to Causabon’s dry pamphlets, so I couldn’t get away with being vague.

  “I mean, it’s not just farming, we have a little ping-pong ball factory too,” I said, trying to prove my legitimacy, but her eyes widened hugely.

  “My.”

  So there. I’d surprised her; I’d had an effect. Somewhere my mother must be feeling a little spring of happiness: her dreams for me were coming true.

  * * *

  AND SHE—my mother—had not only given me my life, but had saved it, saved me from a heinous crime even before I was born! I’d heard the story a thousand times: my father had wanted to kill me, to kill all three of us in fact. How else could it be, that when he was driving her to the obstetrician (on a wide, newly paved road, on a dry, sunny afternoon), he swerved “to avoid a rabbit” and ran utterly off the road?

  “There was no rabbit,” she’d tell me, and Sylvie and Dolly and Ted, her poor little children … children conceived, alas, with a man she despised, children sitting quietly, waiting for their dinner while this man washed his (very nearly bloodstained) hands at the kitchen sink …

  I glanced at Philippa, to see if she liked the story, and saw her face was full of suppressed laughter. My mother played even her own misery for laughs, though one had to give just the right laugh—one that denigrated my father and pitied her, while admiring the joke too. A single false note and one would be banished to her internal Siberia, to break rocks in the frigid dark. So I was glad I’d found a good tone for Philippa: it was becoming imperative to me to entertain her.

  “Okay, homicidal father, got it. Pray continue.”

  She leaned back. I was the perfect butterfly for her pin—a representative of that rare, unlovely species, the American. She had been lectured on such creatures from birth, by her father the bricklayer and her mother the file clerk, who had come together from Naples, anglicized Sarafoglio to Sayres, and undertaken to immerse themselves in their new culture, as soon as they could find it. They never did. To become ordinary Americans would have been to achieve grace, but everywhere they looked they saw only other immigrants searching for ordinary Americans to emulate. So they went on in perplexity, keeping their bushes trimmed neater every year, trying to live within an outline whose contours they couldn’t see, bent on one thing: that their daughters (they had no sons) should have a full, “American” education. So here Philippa was with her Ph.D., still getting it all figured out, and she had stumbled into me—my family that wasn’t striving for anything. She’d never seen such a spectacle. She wanted to hear it all.

  And there is no flattery to compete with true listening. My mother used to listen so closely; I’d run down the dirt road from the school bus, full of stories, each a bright gift for her. She rarely set foot off our land by then, and I realized she was seeing the world through my eyes … that I could shape it to please or comfort her, to keep her from crumbling. She was so fragile, but listening to me she’d seem to grow stronger: How intelligent the art teacher was, after all, to have noticed my pig! Yes, I had got the exact shade, not pink, not tan, but a perfect pale pig color. And could it be that Chip Murray had really brought a live mouse to school in his lunchbox? She laughed, she who was usually so sad.

  Recalling her for Philippa, I kept to the laughter. I’d have gone on about the beauties of farm life too (I was as grateful to recall it now as I’d been to escape it the year before), but Philippa would cry “Wordsworth, too Wordsworth!” to pull me back from the pastoral abyss.

  “Mordant, not verdant!” she’d remind me when I started looking homesick, and I’d snap back and go on with my story. Philippa had considered a career in archaeology, and wanted every detail.

  “What were you having for dinner, I mean, a typical menu?”

  I saw Ma at the stove, frying, yes, a sliced puffball. She’d picked it in the woods, where one didn’t see other humans or undertake conversations. Velveeta has more taste and texture than fried puffball, but puffball: (a) defies convention (b) demonstrates privation and so (c) sets those who dine on it above the commonplace others one might meet in the grocery store. The dinner table was small and low: they’d gotten it for ten dollars at a garage sale, and every time they drew their chairs up and bumped their knees, they could be reminded that they cared not for the things of the material world, that their lives were centered on love. We had five chairs for six people, so the last to come to dinner would find himself standing, until Ma learned to dramatize her sense of isolation by eating her meals seated on the washing machine, feet swinging, plate on her lap. She needed to dramatize her every thought and feeling, for fear no one would notice her and she’d just disappear. And as her heart and mind were fixed completely on my father, the washing machine was the perfect spot—it was right behind his place at the table so she could make satirical faces over his head at us while he spoke.

  Because after all, what was he saying? “Everything in moderation”; “Still waters run deep”; “What cannot be cured must be endured.” Murderous platitudes, meant to kill ambition, silence debate, keep Ma from doing whatever it was she was bent on, her eyes blazing, foot pressing some cosmic accelerator, hands gripping her dinner plate tight because any minute she would, finally, take off.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she’d see something—a spilt juice cup, a gobbled dessert—and flash over into rage. These were not, to her, merely childish lapses of manners, but proof we were shameful creatures, manifesting all the greed and sloth she’d worked so hard to conquer—or at least, to hide, in herself. Was she going to have to despise us, her own children? But then, suppose she managed to perfect us? Then—of course!—we would despise her! She was waiting for that sign that would prove what she knew at the bottom of herself, that we didn’t really love her. A wrong look, a wrong word, a wrong bite and ba-boom, in a blinding flash, the mother we knew would be gone.

  She loved fire. What else destroys with such majesty? In winter she stared into the hearth for hours, in summer went tree to tree with her torch, lighting the gauzy gypsy moth nests with a grave, ceremonial air. The caterpillars inside popped like corn.

  When the clouds towered up, late on a summer afternoon, she felt the torch was coming for her.

  “Thunderheads,” she’d say, portentous. “Inside, now, all of you.” She herself towered on the doorstep, calm in the face of danger, calling her chicks in under her wing. For once her purpose was clear: it was to close all windows, unplug all appliances, and hurry us into the closet under the stairs, where we’d wait out the summer shower as if it were the tempest itself.

  “Okay,” Philippa said. “She heroically shelters her children from a peril she has, essentially, invented. I love mothers.”

  “Well, I never thought of it quite that way,” I said, but I could see Ma standing in the closet doorway, murmuring “thar she blows,” with a drama no less heady than the fragrant summer air. She was about to shut us in the stifling dark, where we would huddle close for an hour or more, hot, sticky, and feeling the thrill of being safe together amidst danger.

  “It’s just like London,” she told us, “during the blitz.”

  She had grown up in New York, had never been to London, so if she was going to discuss the blitz, this—a closet with four small children in it—was the proper forum. And she needed to talk about the blitz: the tension of her own life found a mirror there. She smouldered, yes, but no one knew when she’d blow, and this was such a source of suspense that we hated to leave the house for fear of missing that moment. It was the focus of our lives.

  So I did have to laugh, hearing Philippa’s view, though this felt vaguely sacrilegious toward my mother. “Lightning is very dangerous,” I said, in the tone of a model third-grader. “Have you ever seen ball lightning? Whe
n my mother was little, one came in through the window and scared her to death.”

  “I have little doubt that balls of lightning turn up around your mother,” Philippa said. “But ‘scared to death’? No. I’d say she awaits them with breathless anticipation.”

  “Well, there is that,” I admitted. We were laughing, and the little office with its posters of Philippa’s idols—Napoleon and Catherine Deneuve—felt as cozy as that linen closet all of a sudden.

  Which pricked my heart, since it seemed to betray my mother.

  “I know, it was peculiar, but it was nice,” I said. “All of us together there in the country like that. The place had its own magic, it was so beautiful there. It attracted people, it made things happen … kind of like Howards End.” (We’d been studying E. M. Forster and there was a whiff of oxygen in making a literary reference to Philippa, as if I was up on Mount Olympus chatting with Athena.)

  The corner of her mouth turned and a sharp dimple appeared in her left cheek. “Really,” she said.

  “They—Ma’s generation—suffered from the Second World War, somehow,” I went on. “I mean, they weren’t anywhere near it, but they were children then and—I think the idea of hiding in a closet from an evil force, that it sank in deep, with her.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, because she’s crazy! To hear them at dinner, night after night, reliving that damn war, the chance escapes and chance murders…”

  I shook my head, which was full of those stories: Nadia for instance, age five, who threw a tantrum at the border so the harried guards waved the family through—she was screaming for the nursemaid they’d had to leave behind, as if she guessed the woman’s fate. Cautionary tales, but what was the moral? That ordinary people can do unspeakable things; that Chance can destroy anything, so all effort is futile—all will be tears in the end. That you may not recognize the face of evil, even if it belongs to your neighbor, even if you see it in the mirror every day.

  “What if you were wading in the brook and the water got hotter and hotter until it was boiling?” my father asked me one night.