Beneath Ceaseless Skies #164

by James Morrow

  “Tanks are rolling towards Halispell. We are at war.”

  * * *

  My parents were killed in the first bombing of the invasion. After I had barely written to them in the past year, brief and vague, never mentioning Avardi. I sobbed helplessly as I re-read my mother’s last letter from the week before, she still so blithely convinced that I was becoming a dancing star. She died never knowing that her daughter had lain naked in front of a genius, with the full complicity of his wife. (Though we had never touched each other. My adoration of him was something beyond sex, and he would no sooner carnally desire me than he would a block of wood or marble.)

  Perhaps it was better that way. I do not know.

  Avardi’s home and studio, and he himself, were commandeered by the War Office. He was sent away to apply the art of transfiguration to hide potential targets from the bombers. I could prove no connection to him or Oinhoa that would let me follow them, and I did not have the spirits to try.

  I volunteered as a nurse, as one way to prove myself useful. My hands were still clever and my back still strong. I took the too-quick course of training, easily: bandaging I knew from winding dancing shoe ribbons, stitching up wounds from the sewing my mother taught, and as for preparing patients for transfigurational surgery, few could match my expertise in that from the patient’s perspective.

  I made my patients comfortable, because I knew how they felt.

  And so six months into the war I found myself in what had once been a town, transfigured into bombed ruins, and into our mobile hospital they brought him in on a stretcher. A young man, round plain face that reminded me of Oinhoa, now nearly bloodless with shock, both of his feet stumps oozing blood as mine had been that day on the drowned grand piano. Only this time the blood was red and real and his.

  Dancers do not like to look at those with crippled feet; it arouses too primal a fear. In Halispell, I would avert my eyes from a beggar on the street with crutches, or from the characteristic limp of those whom only wooden transfigured prostheses allowed to stand again.

  I had changed. I had bandaged enough horrible injuries before; I had learned to look at them, even at the feet. Yet this time as I dressed his stumps for the surgery, I found myself looking at his eyes instead, his clear blue eyes laughing even as he gritted back the pain.

  “I hope the new feet they give me have nicer toes,” he joked. “I had mighty ugly toes.”

  “Beauty is a construction,” I replied, unable to suppress a smile as my voice sounded so different saying these words, “to be dictated by geniuses to the mortals who do not understand what it means.”

  “Does that mean, sister, that if you call me beautiful I will be?” he asked with a sudden chuckle, and then gripped the side of the camp bed as the laughter brought on another wave of pain.

  “Does that make me a genius?” I was more eager to distract him than truly thinking about it.

  “That, and beautiful too,” he replied as soon as he could get the hiss of pain through gritted teeth. “If saying so dictates it, I name myself a genius and dictate it. Avardi can name himself a genius, why not me?”

  I had already heard many men call me beautiful and profess love; they tended to, when I’d saved their lives. I had not taken it seriously before, but this time, something made me keep returning to him after the surgery whenever I could be spared. To say his name, Ceyx, and support him in the nights when he would get out of bed and try to walk on his replacement feet that will never again let him dance, not even when he held me and we tried to dance together. Transfiguration could do many beautiful things, but it could never replace the original.

  We married an hour after his discharge. It was war, and he would be evacuated as a decorated invalid; I was the one risking death, and we did not put things off. But we both survived the next three years, seeing each other when possible, writing when not. I never again postponed writing a reply letter.

  When my tour of duty ended with the war, I returned to my husband in the now-liberated Halispell. I took him to see the Conservatory that had been hit in the last bombing raid before liberation, the wing with the rehearsal rooms caved in, the floors on which I had furthered my ambition now buried beneath charred rubble. They would be rebuilt, the Queen and city government vowed. We would take the students back. I knew, holding Ceyx’s hand, that even if the record of my expulsion had burned with the rest in the firestorm, I would not go back.

  Avardi’s studios that I remembered were completely gone. The newspapers said that much of the art collection survived, as it had already been moved and the studios used as a temporary hospital when the bomb had hit them. The art had escaped the shrapnel; the people had not.

  The Butterfly Lounge had avoided all the air raids unscathed, belying its fragile appearance. We entered, and I saw him at the corner table where once my dress had sprouted crab claws. Avardi. His hair gray now, the famous piercing eyes dimmer, yet they lit with recognition at my face.

  “Oinhoa!” he cried out, though, not my name, and I realized that I had never heard him say my name. He may never have bothered to know it.

  “Where is Oinhoa?” I asked, reluctant to move from my husband to this man. The long days and nights when I had pined for him terribly now seemed strangely drained of color and meaningless.

  “Nimrod’s brutes killed her.” Avardi’s voice was flat as Hyacinthus’s voice had been, in a litany he must have repeated many times. “During the occupation. Caught her carrying ‘The Metamorphoses III’ out. Stood her against the wall and shot her in the head. And set fire to the work.”

  The bartender set down the glass he was polishing to respect the silence that stretched between us.

  “Come,” Avardi said at last. “With you, I can make ‘The Metamorphoses IV.’”

  “Do you even know my name?” I said, shuddering.

  “I weep for Oinhoa.” It was as if he didn’t hear me. “But with the Metamorphoses, we can....”

  I put my shoulder under Ceyx’s and helped him turn, matching my dancer’s walk to his irregular strides as we walked away. Outside, the sunlight turned the crystals in the rubble into a thousand dancing rainbows, like the shimmer on a butterfly’s wings, like a transfigured creature about to be born anew.

  Copyright © 2015 Tamara Vardomskaya

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Tamara Vardomskaya is a Canadian writer and a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Writers’ Workshop. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D in theoretical linguistics at the University of Chicago.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  NOVEL EXCERPT: GALÁPAGOS REGAINED

  by James Morrow

  Galápagos Regained, the long anticipated historical epic from F/SF satirist James Morrow, is out this week from St. Martin’s Press. Dramatizing the coming of the Darwinian worldview, Morrow’s loopy saga centers on the irrepressible Chloe Bathurst, a marginally popular Victorian actress who, due to her outspoken political views, loses her job in the spring of 1848 and must seek employment elsewhere.

  In Chapter Two, presented here for the pleasure and amusement of Beneath Ceaseless Skies readers, we witness Chloe entering the sphere of the illustrious Charles Darwin (an eminent personage even before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859). We also become privy to the Great God Contest: an outrageous theological competition that will ultimately send our heroine on a madcap journey across the Atlantic Ocean, up the Amazon River, over the Andes Mountains, and along the Humboldt Current to the Galápagos Archipelago.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 2

  CHLOE FINDS EMPLOYMENT ON THE ESTATE OF CHARLES DARWIN, TO THE BENEFIT OF CERTAIN GIANT TORTOISES, EXOTIC IGUANAS, AND RARE BIRDS

  When Chloe first clamped eyes on a Times advertisement indicating that on Sunday afternoon, between the hours of noon and four, a Mrs. Charles Darwin would be entertaining prospective governesses at her husband’s estate in Down, County Kent, she decided to ignore it, having no reason to imagine the meet
ing should go better than the forty previous such interviews. But then she noticed the final line, SYMPATHY WITH EDUCATIONAL THEORIES OF M. ROUSSEAU DESIRABLE, and her hopes soared, for she’d once auditioned for the part of Sophie in an adaptation of the philosopher’s most acclaimed novel.

  On the evidence of Émile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau seemed to believe that amongst every child’s instincts were compassion, curiosity, and a love of adventure. The tutor’s job was to nurture these virtues, forswearing all forms of coercion and restraint. Very well, thought Chloe, if it’s amity Mrs. Darwin wants, I’ll become the most genial governess ever to draw breath in Britain. If freedom is the order of the day, I’ll let her offspring run wild as South Seas savages.

  Although her liquidity was at low tide—shake her purse, and you would hear naught but a single farthing clink against a bereaved ha’penny—Chloe straightaway secured the steam train fare in the form of yet another loan from Fanny. Upon arriving at Bromley Station (so ran Chloe’s scheme) she would spare herself the hackney-coach fee by donning her calfskin boots, hoisting her parasol against the afternoon sun, and walking all five miles to Down Village, where she would change into her best clogs prior to the interview. A well-laid plan, to be sure, which proceeded to go spectacularly awry. Detraining, Chloe was thrown off balance by her portmanteau, accidentally wedging her foot between the last step and the station platform, thereby wrenching her ankle. The pain was implacable—knife-sharp when she moved at a normal pace, spasmodic when she shuffled—and, worse yet, a storm now arose, so she was obliged to trek through a downpour against which her little parapluie proved useless. At five o’clock she presented herself at the estate in the sorriest of conditions: cold, wet, muddy, exhausted—and one hour late.

  Mrs. Darwin behaved with exemplary graciousness. Ignoring the raindrops cascading from Chloe’s bonnet and sleeves, she ushered her into the drawing-room, a commodious space boasting a bay window offering a panorama of sodden pastureland punctuated by mulberry trees and a Spanish chestnut. Mrs. Darwin proposed to serve her visitor a cup of chamomile. Given her half-frozen state, this offer delighted Chloe, though she accepted it with a studied restraint that she imagined bespoke refinement.

  “I apologize for my tardiness,” she said. “Alas, at some point during my railway journey, my purse fell prey to a pickpocket,” she added (knowing that the truth might suggest an inveterate clumsiness), “and so I couldn’t hire a fly. If you and Mr. Darwin are about to have supper, I shall gladly wait here.”

  “A pickpocket, Miss Bathurst?” said Mrs. Darwin. “Oh, dear.” She was a sweet-faced woman whose notable aspects included extravagant brown curls, pink cheeks, a pouty lower lip, and a pregnancy of perhaps six months’ duration. “Mr. Darwin and I should be pleased to put you up and provide for your return to London.”

  “Am I to infer the other candidates have come and gone?”

  “One stayed behind, a Miss Catherine Thorley, to whom I awarded the situation ninety minutes ere you arrived.”

  So often had Chloe’s profession required her to sob on cue, she’d forgotten how it felt to weep spontaneously, but now such an episode was upon her, muffled cries breaking from her throat, fat tears welling in her eyes. Mrs. Darwin relieved Chloe of her cup and saucer, then placed a tender hand on her shoulder.

  “I shall write to you the instant I learn that one of my relations requires a governess,” said Mrs. Darwin.

  As if summoned by the din of Chloe’s despair, a tall gentleman strode into the room bearing a terra-cotta flowerpot covered with a pie plate, his confident carriage marking him as master of the house. Beetle-browed and side-whiskered, with a nose suggesting a small but assertive potato, he was far from handsome, though Chloe found him attractive nonetheless—physically magnetic and also, by the evidence of his kind eyes and warm smile, a person of abiding benevolence.

  “There, there, my dear,” he said, observing her tears, “it can’t be as bad as all that,” a banality last spoken to Chloe by her gladiator lover in The Last Days of Pompeii. As articulated by Mr. Darwin, the platitude acquired a certain profundity—and he was right, she decided: it wasn’t as bad as all that. “If you like,” he continued, setting the flowerpot on the piano stool, “I shall lend you a pound or two till you find employment elsewhere.”

  “I fear I’ve run short of elsewheres, sir,” said Chloe. “My peers in the theatre have spurned me, and yours is the twenty-first household where I shan’t become governess.”

  “Miss Bathurst, meet Mr. Darwin, the county’s most celebrated naturalist and geologist,” said the mistress of Down House. “Charles, this is Miss Bathurst.”

  “Charmed,” said Mr. Darwin, then snapped his fingers so emphatically that Chloe half-expected to see a spark. “I have an idea. Tonight, Miss Bathurst, you will sleep in the guest room.”

  “The servants’ quarters,” Mrs. Darwin corrected him.

  “The servants’ quarters,” he agreed. “After you awaken, exit by way of the veranda, then proceed to the vegetable garden and thence to the rear gate. You will find me up and about, rambling through the thicket and pondering some scientific problem or other. Before our stroll is done I shall have made my proposal, and you will have given me your answer.”

  “Good heavens, Charles,” said Mrs. Darwin, pursing her lips in mock exasperation, “it sounds as if you mean to ask for our visitor’s hand in marriage.”

  “When a man has so marvelous a creature as you for a wife,” said Mr. Darwin, “he requires no additional brides. You are a harem unto yourself.”

  Mrs. Darwin blushed and lowered her head. Her husband issued an affectionate laugh. These people, Chloe surmised, took every imaginable pleasure in each another. Happiness was a hobby that she, too, hoped to pursue one day, but for now she must attend to more practical matters.

  Mr. Darwin removed the pie plate from the flowerpot and pointed into the cavity. “Annelids,” he announced.

  “Earthworms, Mr. Darwin?” muttered his wife in a world-weary tone, as if crawlers on the piano stool were but one amongst many oddities that accrued to her husband’s profession.

  Saying nothing, he flipped back the piano lid. Gaze fixed intently on his worms, he struck the keys with both fists, filling the room with a distressing discordance. “Once again, they make no response.” He assaulted the keys a second time. “Not a wriggle, not a tremor, not a twitch. Yesterday they ignored Master Willy’s flute, the day before that Miss Annie’s tin whistle.”

  “Our firstborn son and elder daughter,” Mrs. Darwin explained.

  “I daresay, I’ve all but proved that earthworms are deaf.”

  “My goodness, that finding must be as significant as Mr. Newton’s universal gravitation—am I right, dear?” said Mrs. Darwin, her lips assuming a wry curve.

  “How blithely we underestimate the humble earthworm,” Mr. Darwin persisted. “Were it not for this species’s contributions to soil formation, agriculture would be at a standstill throughout the Empire and the rest of the world.”

  Mrs. Darwin now summoned a willowy domestic named Mary, instructing her to find accommodation for Miss Bathurst. The servant bobbed her head deferentially, then guided her charge along a candlelit hall hung with pastoral landscapes, Chloe limping as inconspicuously as her ankle permitted. Suddenly a rambunctious band of children came spilling down the stairs. They brushed past Chloe and marched towards the drawing-room with its earthworms and its doting parents. The tall, serious boy was surely Master William (studiously ignoring his little brother), while the taller, giggling girl was certainly Miss Annie (casting a protective eye on a toddling sister). Near the end of the parade marched a young woman cradling a babe to her bosom, a nursemaid, no doubt, followed by a second lass holding a chalkboard on which she’d written, “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all,” the capital letter A in “Adam” rendered in boldface, the lower-case a in “all” likewise enhanced.

  For a fleeting instant Chloe endeavored to despise Miss Catherine Thorley, this person to
whom she’d lost the coveted post. Her nemesis had at best eighteen years, exuded an air of rusticity, and evinced no obvious competence to cultivate Rousseauian curiosity in young minds. But then a sudden generosity took hold of Chloe, and she bestowed a smile on Miss Thorley, who smiled back. Blighted by workhouses, crippled by Parliamentary inertia, torn by Chartist unrest, the British nation in 1848 was not exactly Heaven on Earth—and yet by Chloe’s lights Mother Albion always had certain perennial virtues on display, not the least of which was governesses for whom even Adam’s lapse from grace could be turned to pedagogical advantage.

  * * *

  Hopes aloft, senses alive to the melodious larks and sun-soaked sky, Chloe stepped off the veranda and entered the grassy, clover-dotted back lawn of Down House, hobbling past an oval flowerbed bursting with lilies and larkspur. Her ankle felt better, and she moved at a sprightly pace to the brick-walled vegetable garden. Gimping quickly through the arched entrance, she sauntered amidst patches of turnips, rhubarb, and runner beans, then lifted the rear-gate latch and crossed into the wild environs beyond.

  True to his prediction, Mr. Darwin had reached the thicket ahead of her. “Welcome to my sandwalk,” he said, indicating a path of pulverized flint mottled along its entire course with medallions of sunlight, flanked on one side by a tangled woodland and on the other by a vacant field. “I laid it out myself, an ellipse fit for every sort of rumination.”

  She drew abreast of the scientist, and they proceeded towards a cottage located at the far swerve of the path, Mr. Darwin smoking a cigarette whilst propelling himself forward with his walking-stick. “Down to business,” he said. “Beyond the invertebrates whose deafness I demonstrated yesterday, other species occupy these premises, and they all require care and feeding.”

  Chloe cringed. A sour curd congealed in her stomach. She could imagine cultivating Mr. Darwin’s roses or whitewashing the walls of his villa, but she had no desire to become his goose girl, milkmaid, or resident shepherdess. “I grew up in the streets of Wapping. I am ignorant of farm animals.”