Time and the Tapestry

by John Plotz

  She lifted her hands helplessly. “Some people always know just what to say, don’t they? May certainly does. But I expect I’d just have written something useless in the note, like …”

  “What’s undone can be done again,” I said promptly.

  Her eyes widened; after a second she gave little laugh. “Why, yes, that’s certainly something that May would say. I must remember that one.”

  “But you’re wrong,” I said abruptly, and the hotness in my voice startled me. “You’re wrong if you think that just because I’m a girl I know what to do with that thread. It’s Ed you want if something needs mending …” I broke off suddenly, shocked how raw my voice sounded. What was I so mad about? She couldn’t possibly know why I’d be embarrassed, even scared to see her again after throwing myself into her arms like that.

  “No, dear,” she said gently when it was clear I’d ground to a halt. “It’s not for you; it’s a gift. When I spoke with Ed, he told me a little about your grandmother and your …” Clearly at a loss for the right word. “… your voyage?” She shot a quick glance to see if I approved.

  I took my closest, clearest look yet at Jane’s perennially sad face. Here it was, the expression I’d tried to connect to the ill-fated marriage between Guinevere and Arthur or the love between Guinevere and Lancelot, or to Jenny’s epilepsy. Maybe, though, I’d gotten it all wrong. Did some people just have sad faces, like freckles or a limp? Maybe that sadness was just part of who she was.

  I looked down shyly and nodded yes. Voyage, a good word.

  “Well,” she went on, looking down at Mead, who stirred but didn’t wake, “could you give your Granny this little present?” As she held it up again, I saw tucked into the thread not gray sticks but two beautiful little metal needles.

  She had become more business-like and confident, speaking about the thread, holding it up slightly for me to see. “Of course it’s not quite the same as sitting down at the loom; there is something, well, makeshift about the repair this thread will help your Granny do.”

  “Thread from Morris and Company,” I burst out suddenly, light dawning on me. “With that kind of thread, nobody would ever guess—”

  “Exactly!” said Jane with a delighted laugh. “It’s just the same thread Morris and Company might use in the factory, if there were patches to be done before sending a piece off to its owner.” Then she looked simultaneously pleased and guilty and glanced up at me—I must have had the same expression on my face, because suddenly we both laughed.

  “I don’t know much about your reasons for coming, Jen,” Jane said after a long while, “but what I tell myself”—and something in her voice warned me not to correct her—“what I tell myself is that you’re here because you care about what Topsy, and our May, and Ned and—” She hesitated. “—and all the rest of us have been doing.”

  I gave a vigorous nod, but she wasn’t even looking at me now. Unconsciously she’d started stroking Mead’s side, at a place where the glossy feathers still grew thick.

  “I think I should thank you, Jen, because having a visitor from afar”—she held up a hand to make it clear to me she didn’t want me to tell her anything more—“it’s like feeling that you live on somewhere else.”

  I remembered a William Morris line that Granny had taught me, and without thinking I blurted it out. “Though I die and mankind liveth, therefore I end not.”

  To my surprise, Jane’s eyes flashed indignantly. “Oh yes, that’s very fine for Topsy to say, very fine!” she said bitterly. “But perhaps he could spare the occasional thought for those who live right around him. They’re awfully hard to find when you need them, Mankind!”

  My face felt as red as if she’d slapped it. After a minute, she swallowed and went on. “Yes, Jen, we live on in mankind, it’s true, if we’re artists and we make something just right, something that’s not thrown away or left in an attic somewhere.”

  She paused, took a breath, and gently resumed stroking Mead’s side. “But I don’t think it’s wrong to think of mankind a little less, and the people right around you a little more. Is it so bad to want people to know that you existed, that you …” Her voice thickened, and she stopped mid-sentence.

  I wasn’t sure I understood, but I made a sudden guess. “You want to know that the best things you did will survive you?” I asked. I found myself thinking of how we’d gone on without Mom and Dad for so long, trying to convince ourselves we were what was best in them, that we were carrying them forward with us.

  “Yes,” she said finally, “yes, I want what we did here to live on, even if it’s only in part, or only in dreams. Even”—she gave a faint chuckle—“even bad dreams! What we did is worth an uneasy night or two, isn’t it? Or so I tell myself sometimes in the dark, when I find I can’t quite get to sleep.” I wondered if I’d ever rid myself of that image of her, lying next to Morris (who snored, I was sure), trying to gather courage for the day to come.

  Jane, though, suddenly smiled. Something about our conversation had cheered her. “And now, Jen, if you don’t mind I’d just like to show you a few things about how I think this thread might be used. Could you watch me carefully?”

  How long did we stay there? Days, weeks, months even. All I can say for sure is that one fall afternoon Ed and Mead and I found ourselves carefully circling into the front garden of Kelmscott Manor. I caught sight of Commonweal stuck up on the front door (OCTOBER 1896) as we did our best to stay hidden ourselves behind two drooping apple trees.

  We were in luck: People sprawled lazily all over the tidy green lawns, and the talk rose from them in waves. Even the sound of two children and a horse-sized bird doing its best to pace stealthily across the gravel didn’t reach them. Jane and Jenny sat upright in wooden chairs, bundled up tight despite the mild early-fall air—but they were smiling at something together. In fact, they were even starting to chuckle.

  “Listen, Father,” Jenny was saying in her frail, uncertain voice, “there was a lecture given in the city of Chicago, in America, by a Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright, called ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine.’ He says”—she switched into the worst American accent I’d ever heard, way worse than Ed’s Sherlock Holmes voice—“‘All artists love and honor William Morris, the great socialist.’” Morris gave a startled grunt.

  “But the Art and Craft of the machine?” he exclaimed after a moment. “What does he mean by the machine?” Jenny and Jane giggled together in a pleased and friendly sort of way. “Oh let me finish, Papa,” went on Jenny, squinting as she held her newspaper up in the bright sun.

  “He says that you distrust the machine because in our time—I suppose he means in factories and armies—it is ‘the deadliest engine of enslavement.’”

  “Quite right,” roared Morris immediately. “Why, I saw a factory floor in Leeds once that—”

  May was lying next to Morris: she’d grown tall, nearly as tall as he, and her cheekbones had grown firm as her mother’s, all her baby softness melted away. She chose this moment to drop a fat handful of apple leaves in his open mouth. He subsided, spluttering.

  “Yes, Father,” went on Jenny smoothly (she looked so happy in the sun today). “But you see, he also says that we have always had both handicrafts and machines, though we didn’t like to admit how the two go together. See! Down here he even says that ‘printing is a perfect representation of the Machine … human thought stripping off one form and donning another.’”

  Morris had cleared his mouth now, but he wasn’t barking an interruption. Instead, holding May’s hand in his absently, he seemed to be thinking. “Yes,” he said after a long pause, “yes, that’s what I’d say, too. I think, Walker”—here he looked over his shoulder to Emery and Ned, both draped companionably over proofs from a medieval-looking book—“that’s what I meant years ago when I said it was your photographs that allowed us to reach back to what was purest and best in medieval books. That’s why John Ball and his peasantry belong in my Nowhere. Why should we not use what is here an
d in England, now, to save what is best worth saving from the past. Who needs complexity? After all, carving a potato to make a block print is terribly—”

  “Simple,” interrupted Jenny triumphantly. “That’s just what this clever Mr. Wright says. Listen to what he writes: ‘A work may have the delicacies of a rare orchid or the staunch fortitude of an oak, and still be simple.’ He says that you, Father, showed that the best and ‘highest form of simplicity is not simple like the side of a barn.’”

  “Oh, dear!” said May, covering her ears automatically (“oh dear,” said Mead, too, in the same voice, fluffing what was left of his feathers high and tucking his head low). A second later I realized why, as Morris gave an offended howl.

  “So Mr. Wright is not impressed by the simplicity of the side of a barn,” he shrieked in anguished, wounded tones. If his left leg had just been removed by a marauding tiger he couldn’t have sounded more hurt. Yet with a flash of worry I couldn’t help noticing that that he wasn’t hopping around as he would have in earlier rages. Like a grandfather clock, I found myself thinking, he’s winding down.

  Still, Morris did find the energy to growl: “Have you ever seen the great Tithe Barn at Coxwell?”

  “Actually, Father, yes,” said May, “yes we have. You’ve taken us there a dozen times; once you even made Mother and Jenny go by bicycle, which frankly was …”

  Morris was not even pretending to listen to May. He was standing on a little patch of gravel as if he were on a podium in some Arts and Crafts society lecture hall. “Simplicity, elegance, fortitude, Oxfordshire’s gift to world architecture has all these things. Massive, low-slung, harmonious in all proportions, it has stood nigh on six hundred years, un—”

  “Unapproachable in its dignity!” shouted Ned, Walker, Jenny, Janey, and May simultaneously. Morris looked around him violently, opened his mouth to go on … and stopped, sheepishly.

  “Well,” he subsided, unwilling quite to let go of his point, “laugh at the simplicity of the Tithe Barn if you must. But I hope that Mr. Lloyd Wright, and you May, and you Ned, find that you have made something with the massive simplicity you can feel in the Coxwell Tithe Barn. If you can feel that about a barn, or a chair, or”—looking over at the marked-up pages scattered in front of Ned and Emery—“a book, then I think you will have nothing to fear and little to regret when you come to the end of your life.”

  The stress he gave to the word your hit me—so did the way everyone looked down at the ground when he said it. I looked wildly around at Mead so he could tell me I was wrong. He, too, was looking at the ground. And Ed was staring at his William Morris notebook with a stony face; I’d never seen him so still. I started to reach over to check the first line of Ed’s Morris book, the one where he had printed Morris’s birth and death dates in neat letters. But something held my hands in place. Instead, I turned my head to listen to Morris one last time.

  “I hope”—now Morris was almost back on his podium again, except that he had May’s hand firmly in his, and was looking Ned in the eye—“you’ll also feel you’ve made something that’s beautiful and useful, something that reminds of how we might live, no matter how we do live now.”

  May picked up his hand again and planted a kiss on it; then another. “If any of us does make something that beautiful, Father,” she said firmly (she kept her head bent low over the hand she’d just kissed), “you know very well it will be thanks to you. Who but you could have taught us” (and the way she said “us” I know she wasn’t just talking about herself and Jenny) “to live bigly and kindly.”

  “Yes,” broke in Burne-Jones, with some of the same confidence I remembered seeing in him the first time he’d spoken with the Pre-Raphaelites. “Whether the Arts and Crafts of the next century come from a pile of stones, or from a printing press, or from one of those machines that Wright and his Prairie School are building, you can be sure that they’ll have a memory of you as firmly woven into them as, as, as …” Ned looked around, on the verge of tears.

  “As that valence May is making for Mother and Father’s bed,” broke in Jenny unexpectedly—pointing.

  May laughed—though the laugh had something heavy hidden deep inside it, like a stone in a blanket. She unfurled a bundle of cloth on her lap. “Yes, Father, have a look!”

  Holding the long piece of soft wool in her lap, she put her head down and read, with only a slight tremble in her voice:

  “No tale I tell

  Of ill or well,

  But this I say:

  Night treadeth on day,

  And for worst or best

  Right good is rest.”

  As she finished reciting, I noticed with a start that her voice was growing fainter and fainter. I reached out to her, I even started to speak, but the wind had suddenly grown fierce. Ed, Mead, and I were caught up spinning up and away from Kelmscott Manor; feathers would have made no difference in a gale like this. By the time I had grasped what was happening we were much too high to shout any final words. The only thing I could think of doing was to wave.

  So I did, frantically, not caring who saw me now. I saw May, and Jane, even Ned and Emery and Jenny, standing suddenly with serious faces, standing and waving back at us. But Morris? He was lost in some thought, strolling away toward the Thames, head down and back turned. No amount of waving would reach him.

  Then we were tumbling through the sky, with a storm cloud looming up behind us and the wind freshening. I pretended it was the gale that was making me tear up, and when Ed handed me his handkerchief he pretended to believe me.

  “But, Mead,” he was saying eagerly, maybe even angrily, “that can’t be right, can it? How can we gather the Thames …?” He was right. We’d certainly come to a place where the Thames ran chill, but what good did that do us, tumbling through the air with nothing to grab hold of, nothing we could bring back to finish off the Tapestry?

  The wind roared and blew his words away. As we surrendered completely to its force, I remember thinking that I finally knew what Dorothy felt like. Only that was wrong: I wasn’t heading to Oz, I was leaving it. And leaving too soon, leaving our job undone. Morris died young, I remembered suddenly; he died at sixty-three. Is this how he felt, too, pulled away when there was still so much to do? “What’s undone can still be done,” I found myself muttering over and over, “what’s undone can still be done.”

  Although Ed had subsided into a grim silence, Mead was saying one phrase over and over as we tumbled together through the air. Before I could figure out what he might mean, we were passing over a little village churchyard where a funeral was going on. The church had on its harvest festival decorations, and the tombstone where the ceremony was going on was made of some simple gray stuff, tilted and smoothed till it looked like the hull of an old Viking ship. With a shiver, I recognized the three women who were drawn close around the grave—tight, tight, as if it were a feeble dying fire that they still somehow counted on for warmth.

  Then everything sped up; it felt like something between a movie and a dream. First Oxford shot by—I caught a fleeting glimpse of those murals where Janey had once shouted, “Temper, temper.” Then we were zooming down toward a little complex of factory buildings; the roof of one had its name picked out in thick white tiles: MERTON ABBEY FACTORY. And the next building: MORRIS AND CO.

  As we tumbled down toward those buildings, I could finally hear what Mead was singing out over and over: “Not the Thames, the mead.” It still made no sense to me. But I could tell right away it meant something to Ed. He clutched his birdcage closer, his face red and twisted with horror or dread.

  Suddenly a downward gust left all three of us struggling to keep our balance. Then, as we tumbled downward, the wind without warning began to taper off. Within seconds it was down to a windy day on an inland lake; in less than a minute, nothing more than a gentle breeze.

  Horrible as the wind had been, it had at least been our propulsion. Without it pushing us, where were we? Mead couldn’t fly any more than w
e could. He was a sad featherless lump a century from home. Somehow managing to hold on to one another, the three of us glided forward into the building marked Merton Abbey, not so much flying as flung, coasting on the last of the gale that blew us from Kelmscott Manor.

  Inside, against the wall of a cavernous room, a redheaded old lady sat at a loom alongside a teenager. Both spun around to stare at us, wide-eyed—and I knew them both. But how? Hesitantly at first, the teenager began to giggle softly with a hand over her mouth, as if she didn’t believe her eyes. The older woman, though, threw her head back and laughed outright.

  “Behold the roc!” she cried delightedly, “and the Girl of the Ledge!” And she waved her arms over her head with a Morrislike gesture there was no mistaking. “Yoicks!” I shouted at her instinctively.

  Although the wind had dropped inside the factory, Mead, Ed, and I were somehow still moving forward, pulled now as much as pushed. Somehow it came as no surprise to look up and see that the wall we were heading toward had no window. Instead, hung along its whole length was a beautiful old tapestry. No, I corrected myself as Ed, Mead, and I barreled for it at full throttle, not a tapestry—the Tapestry. Only this time, though the colors and the shape were right, no picture was to be seen. Suddenly I had it: It hung with its back to us, where the knotted ends were. “We’re coming out!” I yelled, and I thought I heard Ed grunt in delighted agreement. It’s as if everything was happening in reverse.

  As the distance closed and I braced myself for a crash, things started happening. There was a low booming sound, like faraway thunder, and I smelled what I now knew was Kelmscott’s smell in a summer rain. At the same time, I felt the gym bag torn from my back—though I made a desperate grab for it, I felt it going, going. Ed’s birdcage tumbled open, and I thought I saw one of the little fledglings struggle free into the air, wings moving furiously. And then, just before we struck the Tapestry again, Mead turned his head to me and slowly winked.