The Figures of Beauty

by David Macfarlane

Over the years the two of them might occasionally have thought of one another. There is a place of special affection for a first love, and they might well have resided there in one another’s memories: a kiss on a grassy hill by a college walkway in the autumn sunshine, a trembling hand on the snug white angora sweater it was daring to touch.

  But that’s not what happened.

  Bryson ended up at the bottom of the English Channel along with the rest of the crew of a Lancaster bomber returning from a U-boat raid in 1945. Miriam ended up alone.

  She decided—unwisely but with the conviction of the young and broken-hearted—that she would never love anyone else again. The photograph of the handsome flyer in fleece-lined boots and bomber jacket who didn’t know pickled herring from gefilte fish sat on her mantel for the rest of her life. And Miriam Goldblum, the daughter of Haim and Hannah, continued to oversee the annual production of Bryson Scott’s The Wayward Lamb: A Christmas Story at Montrose United Church.

  My earliest association with the waxy, ecclesiastic sensation of marble occurred in 1958, when I was chosen for the role of the shepherd boy in Miriam’s pageant. By then, The Wayward Lamb’s association with Bryson Scott was growing more archival for everyone except Miriam. His name appeared in the program that was run off every year on the Gestetner machine in the church office. He was credited as playwright and originator. But there were fewer and fewer people in attendance every Christmas who were sure who he was. Over the years, the annual production settled unquestionably into Miriam’s domain.

  The historic details of her association with Montrose United faded until it was only dimly known to the younger members of the congregation that there was something about it that was sad—but no more sad than the word frequently used to describe her. At what today seems a very young age to be defined with such apparent finality, she became a spinster.

  Bryson Scott had written The Wayward Lamb because, when he was first asked to take on the pageant, he was enough of an undergraduate drama major to know that there were serious challenges to staging a story in which nothing happens. “Chekhov notwithstanding,” Bryson always added. More challenging still: a story everyone knows.

  Bryson couldn’t see that there was a lot of stagecraft to be employed in the business of abiding in the fields, however frost-covered he was able to make the choir stalls and pulpits in which the shepherds stood. There’s not a lot of action when it comes to watching sheep. And so Bryson Scott invented the story of a little shepherd boy who, searching for a lost lamb, becomes lost himself on a cold December night. But not just any cold December night, needless to say. His father sets out to find him.

  The text was performed each Christmas at Montrose as faithfully as if the story had originated with one of the apostles. But in 1958—partly because I was quite small—Miriam Goldblum contemplated a change to the traditional staging.

  Miriam could see possibilities in me that she had not previously imagined in the role of shepherd boy. I happened to be as slight and pale as any Hollywood casting agent would like a lost child to be. It wouldn’t hurt that most of the people in the congregation knew that I was adopted.

  Preparations for the Christmas pageant always began in November. This extended Advent always ended with a post-performance buffet dinner at Miriam’s parents’ modern, single-storey home. The cast, the stage crew, their families, and anyone who had helped with the pageant in any way—a good third of the congregation, usually—were invited. Miriam served a feast: potato and onion knishes that were made with enough schmaltz to oil a tank; moist, tender brisket; smoked whitefish salad; and gefilte fish with red (it had to be red) horseradish.

  Reverend Gorwell was particularly fond of the rugelach. “My,” he said at one of the first of what became a popular annual tradition for Montrose parishioners, “yours is a rich culinary heritage.”

  “We do what we can,” said Haim Goldblum.

  The appearance every November of Miriam’s silk scarves, red lips, and black hair at Montrose was a clear sign of the passing of fall to winter. The caretaker took her arrival as the signal that he should soon retrieve the Christmas candles and wreaths from the cupboard above the tea service in the pale-blue kitchen behind the Sunday school piano. The choir began practising “The Trumpet Shall Sound.” The Women’s Circle started their careful planning for the carol service and poinsettia deliveries and white-gift Sunday.

  Miriam threw herself into the challenges that each new production presented, insisting on more rehearsals than anyone ever thought necessary but that always proved, somehow, to be barely enough. Partly because the choir robe acted as a convenient duster, but mostly because it gave her a swoop of drama and authority, Miriam’s cashmere breasts and nylon stockings always preceded a black, billowing train as she worked through her blocking on the chancel steps. Rehearsals took place on Thursday evenings in the sanctuary.

  Miriam liked everyone to go off-book as early in the process as possible—even if this meant her chief role for the first several rehearsals was prompting. “Frankincense,” she would intone from the shadows of one of the rear pews when Melchior forgot his line. “I have travelled far, bearing Frankincense for the king foretold.”

  My costume was a bathrobe and a towel. Everyone’s was. Miriam was a good sport, which, of course, made me love her all the more. She laughed along with everyone else when Melchior read his line in one rehearsal as: “I have travelled far, bearing toothpaste for the king foretold.”

  I remember feeling very grown-up to be included in the enjoyment everyone took in his joke. I felt I was part of a special team, one that met in the evenings in the spooky, darkened church. The grey marble floor felt cool and strange under my bare feet.

  Miriam clapped her hands. “All right, all right. Thank you, Mr. Brown. Now, shall we pick it up at the second shepherd’s ‘I see by the richness of your garments …’ Mr. Hannaford, if you please …”

  I was required to hide—a concealment of the lost shepherd boy that could work to much greater dramatic effect, so Miriam Goldblum hoped, than in any previous production of The Wayward Lamb. But in order for the trick to work, I had to take my place on the chancel steps before the congregation began settling into the pews for the service—a process of muttered good mornings, clearing throats, rustling church calendars, and organ prelude that might take as much as half an hour. I had to lie perfectly still on a marble step, concealed by a cardboard outcropping of biblical-looking rock. I was obliged to remain there, unmoving, until the moment when I heard my cue.

  This wasn’t easy, as Miriam Goldblum was the first to admit. She informed me, at one of the first rehearsals, that nothing in the theatre ever was. As she spoke, her large eyes seemed to lose their focus. She looked beyond me into a past that I took to be rich in curtain-call and gracefully cradled bouquets. She told me she had played Juliet, and that lying still as death in the tomb had been no piece of cake. “Timing is all,” she said, and for a strange awkward moment I thought she was going to cry. But then she girded herself with her brave, red smile and carried on.

  Miriam had decided that my hiding space would be small. Very small. Impossibly small. The scenery that hid me was, in fact, one of the several pieces of rubble that flanked the empty tomb Mary Magdalene found during the Easter presentation every spring. There were bigger pieces of the Easter set, including the five-foot-high boulder that had sealed the tomb of the crucified Christ. It was this large outcropping of papier mâché that had been used in past years to hide the shepherd boy. But Miriam had something else in mind.

  She knew that if the rock was big and obvious, the congregation would assume there was a lost child behind it. As there always was. But that wasn’t going to happen.

  The revelation of my presence would only be effective if it seemed entirely impossible that anyone was there. “A coup de théâtre,” Miss Goldblum said, exuding an enthusiasm for French idiom that perfectly suited the cloud of perfume in which she was always enveloped.

  And so, for te
n minutes, or sometimes (depending on how many flubbed lines there were) closer to fifteen, I lay on my stomach every Thursday evening, stretched behind a piece of cardboard rubble that seemed too small to conceal anything. As a result, one of my clearest memories of The Wayward Lamb is cold marble. And my pressing oddly against its hard, sacramental smoothness.

  Montrose had been completed toward the end of the 1920s. Marble was put to generous use. Such grand, solemn aspiration was the result of an upswing in the economy that, like all such robust, happy periods, was doomed to be replaced by something like its opposite. But by the Depression, Montrose’s marble was firmly, unmovably in place. It was too heavy to have anything further to do with economic cycles. It looked like it had been there forever.

  At the first rehearsal, Miriam Goldblum took my hand and led me to the hiding place she had chosen. She seemed, as she leaned over me, to fill not just my vision but the entire dark space of the church.

  Miriam’s dramatic inclination extended to her startling makeup. Her brows arched severely. Her nails were longer and a little more red than even her position as a woman of the theatre might have required. Her lips were wide and very red. Her black hair fell abundantly to the shoulders of her choir gown and its hem cascaded over the white stone steps. “You mustn’t move,” she instructed me. There was always mint on her heavy, sweet breath. “You must be as still as a statue.”

  Her long, flattened hand smoothed the place where she wanted me to lie. I did as I was told. And on that Thursday night, as at the rehearsals and the performance that followed, I became aware of something like discomfort, something like pleasure that was pushing against the stone. This hadn’t happened before. And then the Angel spoke.

  Angel: Wither goest thou on this poor …

  Miriam Goldblum (prompting): “What do you seek?”

  Please, Mrs. Rymal. “What do you seek, poor shepherd, on this cold night?”

  Angel: Sorry. What do you seek, poor shepherd, on this cold night?

  I lay there, waiting, flushed, turning red in the face, hoping that no one would notice the front of my bathrobe when I had to stand to deliver my line.

  Shepherd Father: Oh, strange visitor. I am seeking my son on this cold night. He is only young. And he went in search of a wayward lamb. And now the sky has grown dark. And there are wolves.

  Sound Cue: Wolves.

  Angel: Fear not. For this is a blessed night, as the prophets of old have foretold. And what was lost shall now be found.

  Shepherd Father: I kneel to pray that this be true. (He kneels.)

  Angel: Your faith is rewarded, old man. (Exit Angel.)

  Shepherd Boy (calling from concealment): Here I am, Father.

  “But don’t rush your line, Oliver,” Miriam said to me at the first rehearsal. “Allow a moment of silence to build after your father gets to his knees. A pause of expectation. A few beats for his prayers to rise to the heavens. Just as there are always a few long beats of nothing before Juliet awakens in her tomb. This is key. Do you see what I mean?”

  I said I did.

  “Timing is all,” Miriam Goldblum said. “We must not hurry our moments.” Her eyes were large. She reached to my forehead and began to smooth my hair dreamily. A shiver of fortitude ran through her, and her face became businesslike again.

  Miriam stood—with a momentary wobble on her heels. But she smoothed the front of her skirt so briskly it seemed as if her unsteadiness never happened. She turned away from me, toward the white stage of the altar, in a swirl of perfume and choir gown.

  “We shall be brilliant.” Her voice called out to everyone. “I just know it. We shall devastate them all.”

  And so, it is here, at what I admit is a late stage of my letter writing, that things begin to circle back to where they began …

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  IT WAS THE LAST THING Michael Barton expected.

  He was somewhere the hell in the rear of the advance. A dog-fuck. So said the Yanks.

  This was the fucking northwest sector. This was fucking Italy. This was fucking August, in fucking 1944.

  They were securing the dusty road to the south. This was the road that had been secured three days before. And two days before that. “The army secures roads the way it fills in forms,” his C.O. muttered when detailing the orders. “In goddamn triplicate.”

  The road wasn’t much more than a dusty brown line between the plane trees. There hadn’t been anything German on it for more than a week.

  The occasional crack of artillery echoed from the hills. The tanks were continuing north.

  His position was just past the cemetery. He was in a marble yard—one of several on the perimeter of the town. It was on the flats between the hills and the sea, backing onto railroad tracks that had been bombed to uselessness months before. The yard was a shipping area for blocks of stone, crusted brown on their outside but white with grey veins on their cuts. They were on wooden skids, lined in rows.

  He was thinking that they looked like giant iceboxes, a thought that led him to a momentary daydream of cold beer. Then he heard the transport.

  It was the only time in his life he could say, with perfect accuracy, that he couldn’t believe his eyes. He stared blankly for almost five seconds, not entirely acknowledging what was there.

  What could have been more unlikely than a German supply truck coming around the burnt-out farmhouse? What could have been more improbable than a Jerry flatbed bouncing over the potholes toward him?

  There was nothing cautious about the attitude of the soldiers who were in it. What led them to think that they could drive straight up the ass-end of the Allied advance, he couldn’t imagine. Then he heard their singing.

  Christ, he thought. They’re pissed.

  He could not clearly see the driver, nor the man seated beside him. But three others were perfectly visible standing on the back. They were holding on to a rail behind the cab of the truck. Michael felt a smile crease the dust that covered his face.

  There was something about the angle of the light that brought the transport into precise focus. The leader—at least the leader of the singing—had the happy, wide-open face of a young man who enjoyed his friends as much as he enjoyed anything. His free hand swung like a bandleader’s baton. Except for their helmets and their grey uniforms, they could have been students hitching a ride home from a good party.

  It wasn’t that Michael Barton tried to miss. But there was something about the innocence of their approach that was unsettling. He was a good shot. But he allowed his aim to be careless.

  He reasoned that their coming under fire when they so obviously anticipated nothing of the sort would alert them to their error. They might turn around before they reached the bridge. Instantly sober, they might just get the fuck off the road. Michael Barton’s wasn’t the most rigorous of military disciplines.

  “A bit of a good-time Charlie, I see,” Brigadier Todd had said, looking up from his desk in the red-brick Cathcart Armoury. A few trophies were listed on the form in front of him. “A yachtsman?”

  “Speedboats, sir,” Michael replied. It was a correction he’d made to people more than once.

  Todd was even less impressed than he would have been with sloops. Anyone with the money to buy a powerboat could race one, presumably. “The newspaper Bartons, is it?”

  “My father, sir,” Michael said.

  “But my understanding is that you are not seeking a commission.”

  “No, sir,” Michael said. “I am not. The ranks are my preference.”

  “I see,” Todd said. He considered the slender young man in front of him. His tan and his sun-lightened hair were the result, it seemed obvious, of an uninterrupted summer vacation. Todd guessed that the life of an enlisted man would not be a preference for very long.

  Michael Barton should have just cut the three soldiers in half. Then he should have picked off the two others when they jumped from the cab of the truck. But he didn’t.

  He was pretty muc
h sick of all of it by then.

  He preferred, that afternoon, in that softly exact light, to be inexact. He preferred to imagine these jokers telling the same kind of story that he would enjoy telling: About how they found an abandoned farmhouse somewhere north of Lucca with a cellar full of wine, and how they holed up there for who knows how long. The Italian campaign had passed them by. They were so tired they probably could have passed out for a week. They were all pretty much sick of it by then, too.

  And then, can you believe it, they almost drove, singing, straight into a town occupied by Allied command.

  He squeezed the trigger. And it was the last thing Michael Barton expected.

  The explosion hit him like a cuffed hand. The ball of orange obliterated the truck and the men. The smoke was like a dark fist, clenching and unclenching as it grew bigger. Michael never heard out of his right ear again.

  He had no idea what they were carrying. He never did figure it out. He guessed that his first burst of gunfire sparked off the truck’s chassis. It must have ignited whatever was under the roped canvas on the flatbed.

  There was some wind coming in from the sea. The smoke thinned.

  Their clothing was mostly gone. As was their hair. As was their skin. Their eyes were crazy with pain, and the holes of their mouths gaped with the howls they could not make. Their slow, sprawled movements on the ground were like the scattered legs of an insect torn away from its body.

  As Michael stepped through shards of tire and metal he could see that one of them had spotted him and was struggling to reach his service revolver. Both the belt and the gun were improbably intact: good brown leather, solid black handle.

  He gently moved the soldier’s fumbling hands away. The wrists felt like gristle. There was a sweet smell that would, for the rest of his life, seep into his many nightmares.

  It seemed important to Michael that he should explain. But all he could do was meet their eyes with what, from that day on, would be the terrible sadness of his own. Only when he was back in the marble yard, leaning against one of the slabs of stone, did he realize he still had the now-empty Luger in his hand.