The Pagan House

by David Flusfeder

  But Marilou is not in the opera; she’s at a lower table with school husbands and wives. (The Blackberry Festival Welcomes the Educators of Creek and Vail! is the placard on the centre of their table.) Mon is to sing the part of Mary Pagan, despite Edgar’s advice and protestations.

  ‘But you won’t know the words!’

  ‘Warren’s written them all out for me.’

  ‘Or the movements.’

  ‘Warren says that’s a good thing. When in doubt I’ll just keep still.’

  ‘But,’ said Edgar, ‘but but but but.’

  ‘You sound just like a speedboat. Don’t worry, it’ll be a laugh.’

  A laugh! Edgar likes the sound of Mon’s singing voice, it is very tuneful and pure. He always liked to hear her doing chores in the flat in their pre-Jeffrey days, singing the country-reggae songs that Rufus’s band used to play, but that was a private, intimate pleasure that he would pretend not to be listening to and which she would pretend was something for herself alone.

  ‘Would you like to come up to the dressing rooms?’ Guthrie asks, and Edgar says that he would, even though there are few things he would like less.

  In the frantic waves of activity before the performance, last-minute costume alterations, Guthrie coughing through the pins in her mouth as she stitches and sews, Husky Marvin stoically waiting his turn in frock coat and underpants and glued-on whiskers, his trousers folded over his arm, Mon’s nerves show themselves in a rising flush in her cheeks as she recites the first few words of each of her speeches and lyrics in soft cradle-song, and Warren is everywhere, trying to summon up the Association past in this unruly, unmanageable present—at the piano; checking the tape-player; lightly clasping Mon’s shoulder saying, ‘Yes, yes, that’s right’; adjusting Marvin’s chin-beard; with a paintbrush in his hand touching up the backdrop on the stage, the first, wooden, Mansion House executed in a smeary shade of brown that even children would avoid.

  The audience gathers, not quite filling the Big Hall. They sit on wooden benches, dark with the weight of generations of Association members and descendants. Photographs hang on the wood-panelled walls, men in frock coats and trim little chin-beards, women in dark blouses and pantalets and overskirts. Dew-drop electric lights that might once have been modern jerkily dim.

  The curtain rises to show the cast in frozen tableau on the stage and it all instantly feels interminable. Warren conducts from the piano. Jeffrey has been put in charge of the scenery. It might have seemed like a good idea to have so many backdrops—a nineteenth-century Bowery scene for George and Mary’s first meeting, a rugged farmscape with a glimpse of the river for the old stone house at Rondout, and the bare wooden walls of the Big Hall for all the Mansion House scenes; but it hadn’t been properly considered how the scene changes were going to be made. The curtain drops and rises often to show Jeffrey, in desperate exertion, moving off one painted wooden board and, puffing, sweating, pushing on another. Seldom do the backdrops stand quite straight, which gives, Edgar thinks, trying to be charitable, a becoming weirdness to the show. But Jeffrey’s scene changes are, by far, the most entertaining thing about the whole enterprise, and no one laughs louder than Edgar when the curtain rises too abruptly, finding Jeffrey trying to move off the harbourside scene whose casters have become lodged between floorboards on the stage, the spotlights gleaming on his bald head, his toe-hairs made golden.

  The singers, in ensemble, don’t notice that the harbourside scene is stuck, askew on the stage. Already, and they haven’t even reached the interval yet, they want this event over no less than the audience does. Headlong, at double-triple-time, despite Warren trying to wave them slower, they sing the first big number: Mon waves her arms just as Marilou Weathe rs would have done, Husky Marvin whirls an imaginary microphone lead, the chorus jumps and hops as they race through the words towards an envied, seemingly unreachable peace and silence.

  The Soldier’s Wedding

  Give me your hand, my own Jeannette, the wars at length are over;

  And welcome are the wedding bells that welcome back the rover.

  The Song of Peace is on our hills, and all is cheerful labor,

  Where late we heard the din of strife, the war-pipe and the tabor.

  Good omens bless this happy day, the sun’s bright rays are shedding

  Their loving light of Hope and Joy upon the soldier’s wedding.

  Rich fields of waving corn are seen where hostile flags were streaming,

  And where the sword was flashing, now the sickle bright is gleaming.

  Lie still, ye brawling hounds of war. Let peace our hearts enlighten.

  Rest sword, and rust within your sheath, but let the plowshare brighten.

  Good omens bless this happy day! The sun’s bright rays are shedding

  Their loving light of Hope and Joy upon the soldier’s wedding!

  The loving light of Hope and Joy uh-pon! The—SOLDIER’S WEDDING!!!

  And Edgar ducks out. He slips past the Indian Fighters taking suck of reefer and beer, and walks across to the Pagan House, drinks two glasses of milk, eats three cookies, and carries a fourth upstairs. He knocks softly on his grandmother’s door.

  Fay is wearing her best clothes and lies perfectly straight on the bed.

  ‘I’ve finished my picture,’ she says.

  Edgar praises the painting of a large horse in a small field. The horse pulls a black instrument behind it that Edgar guesses might be a plough. The horse is brown and the field is blue. The picture has been done on several sheets of crispy old paper Scotch-taped together.

  ‘I want you to have it,’ she says.

  ‘That’s very nice of you. Thank you. I’ll brush your hair.’

  ‘Oh, but I don’t want you to miss out on all the fun!’

  ‘That’s okay,’ Edgar says, in fake magnanimity.

  ‘It’s the Blackberry Festival today.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  20

  On the Rebecca Ford, there is an air of excursion. The sloop skids swiftly up-river, the passengers interrupt their Bible readings and songs to wave to pleasure boats and cargo vessels and tugs. The wind has been kind to them and they should arrive home in good time for the Blackberry Festival. They have paused along the way for picnics and rambles through the woods, and picked several quarts of blackberries that sit pleasantly stowed beside the cargo of limestone on the deck. Mary, in keeping with her mission, has stayed close to Mordecai Short. But now, as they pass the old stone house at Rondout, she is alone below deck, laying out the supper. Short is at the helm, Franklin and Glass share a pipe on the aft-deck. Abram Carter is plotting their course on an old navy map, and George stands at the bow, watching Short, listening to water and wind.

  Mordecai Short, without the awakening presence of Mary, is gloomy as before, mistrustful, his sense of unworthiness perhaps worsened by the touch-memory of her, the brush of her overskirt against his hand when she sat to read to him; perhaps he is thinking of that as he stands absentmindedly at the helm; perhaps he is seeing the two of them in fellowship, the things that she might allow him to do, the transcendence he could find in her, because all men sense in Mary the glory of infinite possibility. Maybe this so-called Perfectionism is unutterably futile and all that she wants is a man, stripped of Biblical metaphor—except she has such a man: he has built stone walls with John Prindle Stone, and John Prindle worked harder and happier than all of them.

  Whatever he is thinking he is not paying attention to the boat, or to the river, when the sudden squall hits them, a breath of God, punishing Mordecai Short for all his failures and impieties, a reminder, as if he needed reminding, of his powerlessness, God’s discarded toy, so when George staggers towards Short, yelling for him to steer, for the love of God, to the starboard, Short does nothing at all: he is shivering with fear and doubt, he cannot control this boat, how can he, when he has no mastery over himself?—and Carter rushes to take the helm but it is too late: the boat is deep to its side in the water,
the weight of the limestone on deck inexorably pushing the sloop further beneath the rough waves, and the five men must swim for it, they have no choice, sliding, tossed into the turbulent river.

  George catches hold of a snap of wood that is floating towards the shore, Providence here has lent him a helping hand, he is gasping with the cold wet fury of the waves and the struggle to hold on, when the awful realization hits him that none of the heads bobbing around him in the river is his wife’s.

  He lets the driftwood drift away, the weight of his boots and soaked clothes pulls him beneath the water, he exerts himself to swim beneath the tide towards the smashed sinking sloop, to the cabin porthole to see Mary being tossed and broken by the consuming waves that fill the cabin, her spirit returned to the harsh arms of her Creator; George bumps with hands and head against the porthole but he is nothing here in this abysmal wet emptiness, there is no power in his movements, and the weight of the water is no longer to be feared, it blankets him and he wants only to join her.

  This shall be his destiny too, so why does Captain Carter presume to intervene?

  George is dragged by Carter’s merciless boat-hook to the shore, the water in his lungs is squeezed out of him and life stuffed back in raw into the water-vacated space—but he does not want this life, he has no appetite for it, he wants only to be back in the deadening water beside his bride; but arms more powerful than he, the arms of Captain Carter and gloomy Mordecai Short, hold him so hard, when all he wants is obliteration, the final impeccability.

  He is overcome, he is made, against his will, to lie on the riverbank, to stare at the gorse bushes, at the sky, to the rooftop of the old stone house at Rondout that some accident of weather or history or God’s mockery or unfathomable love has brought them to.

  George could not make her happy. He could not keep her alive. He is not even to be permitted to die with her.

  Who may doubt Him in His infinite wisdom and justice? All the haughtiness of man shall be brought low, and the Lord alone shall be exalted.

  21

  Having soothed his grandmother into sleep, Edgar walked through Creek and Vail, which was filling up again because most of the Blackberry Festival guests have not stayed for Warren’s opera. At the Silver City Diner customers hunch at the counter drinking coffee. A Toyota and a Chevrolet are parked outside Tan Your Can! But Dino’s is still shut. Edgar stands by the pinball machine on the sidewalk outside. The table glass is cracked, the plug lies shattered by a careless passing skateboard, there’s Indian Fighter graffiti on the boarded windows of the pizza parlour. Edgar stands with hips braced against the machine, his fingers poised on the dead flipper buttons.

  Time sickens and dies. The sun sets slowly in Creek and Vail. Edgar scuffs through stones by the side of the creek, while a funereal procession walks down the Mansion House rise, the men in frock coats and plain black trousers and sturdy boots, the women in pantalets and overskirts, their hair cut short. He sees Husky Marvin, but then he also thinks he sees John Prindle Stone, so maybe in historical costume everyone looks possible, and he decides not to wave.

  The men are heavy and sweating in their black worsted suits and stove-pipe hats, the women walking more freely in skirts and pantalets. The grass is parched, the sun is low and heavy, shining on all ages. The body of the community martyr has been recovered by dredger. Brought home by river, Mary completed the journey she had failed to make in life. A sad procession carries her, or what is left of her, unreasonably light, up to the cemetery. Her father, the Reverend Mr Johnson, paid a stonemason in Onyataka Depot for a monument, a single tower in this burial ground of small unadorned stones. The mourners prefer to look at the waiting earth rather than the pitiable summer sky.

  Company Bob carries a bottle of champagne in each hand. Members of the cast, still costumed for the show, stand uncertainly on the lawn. The performance is over and it must have been awful but all the same Edgar had expected an unpinning, drunkenness, post-performance carousing, adults feeling justified by having endured stress to behave at their worst. Candle flames are attracting mosquitoes, so the slow conversations are punctuated by jerking heads and waving arms. Jeffrey is talking solemnly to a square-chinned member of the dignitaries’ table who might be the doctor or the newspaper editor. He blinks, sort of forlornly, at Edgar. Mon and Warren are sitting together at a table, talking softly, foreheads almost touching. Edgar’s heart lifts. The only explanation that he can find for all this mood is that the passion and intimacy of the production, no matter how inept, have pushed his mother and Warren together.

  Happy Edgar, wondering whether he might treat himself to a glass of champagne, is accosted by Jeffrey. Jeffrey’s hand presses against Edgar’s back. Edgar jerks away.

  ‘I’m sorry geezer.’

  Mon looks down, up, down. She opens her arms in the way she used to do when she was picking him up from nursery school and he feels compelled to enter them. She pushes his hair around the wrong way but Edgar, stricken by solemnity, may not wriggle out.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I expect you’ll see your father soon. Frank and Lucille are already on their way.’

  They are all acting as if someone has just died and, he realizes, someone has. He knows who it is.

  His grandmother died just before the final-act curtain. Dr Newhouse is with her now, signing the death certificate.

  ‘Can I look at her?’

  Warren says yes. Mon overrules him.

  ‘No. I don’t think he should. He’s too young.’

  Mon and Warren and Guthrie return to the house. Edgar watches his mother walk down the Mansion House lawn, pools of light, fireflies and moonlight shining on her pantalets and skirt.

  22

  George vows that the next time he visits this place it shall be for his own funeral. He can count more loved ones in the cemetery than the Mansion House.

  So this is the consummation of the first annual Blackberry Festival. And now a different kind of ceremony is taking place. The baskets of blackberries that Mary picked remain untouched by the side of her grave.

  ‘We are marching into public notice under cover of a funeral,’ Stone says at the graveside, in the exultance born of sleeplessness and grief. A late summer breeze catches at his hat. ‘It is a curious stratagem of God’s to bring about this death and excite sympathy for us. As the world looks on the funeral procession, they little think that they are looking at an army, that underneath are concealed guns and pistols.’

  Amens are muttered, these grieving soldiers accord, for whom every transaction with the world is a battleground, and every forest is a garden.

  ‘This is a woman’s dispensation, and I am thinking it possible that Mrs Pagan’s death is what the death of Christ was in the Jewish dispensation.’

  He pauses, wipes his eyes, looks around, as if daring his listeners, his followers, to guess where this encomium is leading.

  ‘Look at the history and character of Mrs Pagan. It is central and national beyond that of any other woman we have had among us. She was a child of the cities, educated in the metropolis, born spiritually in the focus of the Church. I can clearly see that the Church now being formed is coming out of material that is stored both in Hades and this world. God’s mind is on the invisible as well as the visible material. Mrs Pagan, instead of being thrown out of her position as mother of the Church, is now put into it. We have a father of our Church, we are sure now of its mother.’

  The breathless purified egoism of the man enchants George Pagan all over again. All truths, all history, cohere in the body and the will of John Prindle Stone. It is a magnificent responsibility even if he is wrong, and George, bowing his head, waits for his faith to be renewed.

  Afterwards, the senior members of the enterprise closet themselves in the parlour for the final wake.

  Stone says, looking into George, ‘In the flesh, the tendency of Mrs Pagan’s position has been to produce chafing between you and me and Mr Carter, but now that she has passed into
the spiritual world, I can see how her position may be the occasion of a splendid condensation. The women seem to be the heroes and martyrs in this dispensation.’

  George can bear it no more. An ecstasy of grief pulses through him, like the paroxysm of the sexual crisis. A world jerks out of him. He is emptying. ‘My flesh is suffering and dying out!’ is all he can say.

  He feels flayed, waterless, martyred, beyond pity. Mr and Mrs Stone hold him each by an arm. Are they trying to regather him to himself? He has no self. All is lost. His body cracks in the heat. The tears, though, once started, seem unlikely ever to stop, tapping to a perpetual reservoir.

  ‘I will behave as well as I can through the process,’ he promises.

  ‘I suffer with you,’ Stone says, and it is clear that he does. His eyes are wild, sweat sickly on his brow, his voice whispers, rasps with his old bronchial complaint. ‘I count this a token of God’s love, He chastens those whom He loves.’

  And they can accept this? These nodding acolytes, who sob and mourn, who loved her, can they celebrate this too, this abysmal event, as an indication of God’s peculiar love? Can George? Will he? Is it possible that he too may come round to seeing Mary’s drowning as a way-station on heaven’s road? What alarms him most of all is that one day, in a month’s time, two months’, three, a year, he might stop feeling this acute passion of loss, this flagellant pain, and when he does, what will he have left? He had little to begin with. All good things came from Mary.

  ‘I was thinking she had a fifteen-hundred-pound monument to go down with her,’ Charlotte Miller says.

  Stone says, ‘She had the river for a grave, the sloop for a coffin, and her short dress for uniform; enough for any soldier.’