Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn

by Nell Gavin

  I had a reasonably contented life except for one thing: I wanted a child of my own with desperation so intense I could not even describe it. I spent many hours doing volunteer work that would place me near children, working with the school and the orphan home, or caring for children when their mothers were ill. In place of children in my home, I kept animals, as many as I could find and of any species: rabbits, dogs, cats, horses, ducks, squirrels and wild things I found that needed care. I stepped over insects rather than kill them, caught them in my home and set them free in the yard, speaking to them as I let them go. I mothered everything, my siblings and their offspring, my parents, my neighbors, and even the plants in the garden, and the furniture in the house.

  I watched my sisters and my friends marry, one after another, but felt no temptation to follow them, except to envy them the children they bore, and to wish I had one of my own. I had daydreams of a baby girl, although a boy would suit me as well. It did not matter as long as it was a child.

  My mother fretted about finding me a husband, for I was short and squat and large boned, given to excessive weight, and had a face that was mannish. I took after my Russian father, whereas my sisters favored my willowy Scottish mother. I had never had a suitor, and my mother thought this brought me grief. I reassured her often that I wanted no marriage and preferred to spend my life caring for her and my father. It did not pain me, I insisted, to remain the “maiden aunt”. I was not lonely with a large, ever-growing family close by. My father had enough inherited wealth so that I could be assured of an income throughout my life and would never need to live with a sibling or a niece as the recipient of charity when I grew old. Only the prospect of being a burden to my family might have prompted me to consider marriage.

  I had thought of all that, when I selected my place in this life. I chose to see that nothing about my circumstances would ever force me to wed.

  My entire family was close, but it was toward Emma, my younger sister, that I directed most of my devotion. We shared a room and all of our thoughts, and throughout childhood, could always be found together, Emma doing mischief and me fretting that she would be caught and punished.

  When Emma married, I was ecstatic. More than any of the others, I knew that her children would seem closest to being mine. It took her many years, but finally when all hope was lost and she, scandalously, was old enough to have had grandchildren, she got pregnant.

  For months I fussed over her and visited her daily, cooking and cleaning while she rested or sat with her giant belly, and gossiped and watched me. We talked endlessly about names and plans for the baby and, as the birth approached, my anticipation kept me awake in the night. I knitted tiny sweaters, and embroidered little dresses to calm myself, and babbled to my mother every detail of the conversations Emma and I had had earlier that day, repeating them oftentimes until my mother rolled her eyes and laughed.

  I was at her side when Emma gave birth. I was the first to hold the baby, whom I cradled in my arms, pretending it was mine. I was so enraptured that it took me a moment to notice the doctor’s sweating brow and frightened eyes, and to allow his frantic motions to register, while he bent over Emma and desperately tried to save her life.

  “She was too old to try for a baby,” he muttered, as if the fault lie with Emma, and not God’s will or the doctor’s own impotence when faced with inevitable death.

  Then, she slipped away without ever having held her little daughter.

  The doctor took the baby from my arms to show it to Emma’s husband, and to tell him that his wife was dead. I remained in the bedroom with Emma, sobbing, tenderly smoothing her hair and patting her hand, stunned, shaken, wondering how I could continue to live without my beloved sister. I had never known such shock, grief and loss before.

  Emma’s husband was stricken with terror at the thought of raising his child alone. He was an older man, unused to children, and he looked at his daughter in bewilderment.

  “I cannot. I would not know how,” he whispered plaintively with tears welling in his eyes as the doctor held the baby out to him. He recoiled, even from touching the infant, and the doctor did not insist.

  “You can hire a woman,” the doctor suggested. “I know of one. Or you can leave it with family.”

  Hearing this from where I sat, I rose and joined them.

  “I’ll take the baby,” I offered. “No one could love her as much as I do.”

  Emma’s husband nodded in gratitude and relief, then hesitantly walked into his wife’s room to say good-bye.

  In that manner, in a way I would never, ever have wished—a cruel and twisted answer to a prayer—I finally became a mother.

  I named the baby Margaret Ann, for it was the name Emma had selected for a girl before she died. I called her Maggie. I had always wanted a baby girl as I had never wanted any other thing in life, and insisted against my parents’ wishes that she call me “Mama”.

  I could not put her down, when she was an infant. I held her, and covered her with kisses, and changed her dresses and hair ribbons several times each day. I held her in my lap when I played piano, marveling and cooing over her cleverness when she pounded the keys with her fists. I twirled her hair into the neatest ringlets, sewed her the fattest ruffles, made her the most cunning bonnets, and sang nursery rhymes until my voice was hoarse. I prepared her food myself, not trusting the cook. I could not bear the thought of her being cold and lonely in the night, and had no husband to object, so I slept with my arms around her as if she were a doll I took to bed.

  She did not grow spoiled, as my mother had warned, for I was strict with her and consistent in my expectations. (“You have a gift for it,” my mother admitted.) She grew to be open and sweet, kissing me impulsively and saying “I love you, Mama,” conversationally each time the thought occurred to her throughout the day. She helped with simple chores from the time she was able to walk. She shared her toys, and rarely fought with other children or cried. She never had a nightmare in her entire life. I was proud in having somehow seen to it that she was happy, for she clearly was a happy child. I would not have been as proud if she were my very own, and was perhaps more proud, knowing a child that was truly mine would never be so lovely to see as Maggie.

  Still, she was “a pistol”, in the words of my father. Maggie was Emma all over again, mischievous, playful and comical, always getting into trouble and always finding trouble where I would never expect her to find it.

  She had an imaginary friend who was always responsible for her naughtiness. She sawed away at her cello with a look of grim importance, but kept stolen sweets hidden in her apron, and tucked them into her cheek whenever my back was turned. She carried on lengthy conversations with puppets she’d hold in either hand. She loved to dance and twirl about like “a gypsy princess”, she said. She made up stories about the circus, to which she planned to run away when she grew up. She liked gaudy, whimsical things, and sometimes decorated the family dogs with ribbons, bells, and flowers. She taught two of them to jump through hoops, had them flip backwards, head over tail, and put on shows for us in the yard. I once caught her standing on a tree stump, trying to make the smallest dog walk along a clothesline.

  Maggie dressed up in clothes from the attic, wore quaint old-fashioned hats she found there in the dust, and play-acted with her cousins when she wasn’t racing the dogs and chasing the ducks around the yard, or climbing trees.

  She made me laugh.

  She called me one day from the top of the attic stairs, “Come see Mama! Come look at me!” and I called back that I was busy, and that she would have to wait.

  Impatient to show me, dressed in a long satin ball gown and a pair of dainty ladies’ dancing slippers that were too large for her, she tried to maneuver the stairs, tripped on her skirt and fell. Her neck snapped and she died, instantly.

  We buried her beside her mother in the churchyard, and the light of my life flickered out.

  Chicago, 1947-1970

  •~۞~•

&n
bsp; “I am not ready,” I say.

  “Then just walk away.”

  “Not yet,” I plead.

  “Now,” says Henry. “Please.”

  “It is still too soon,” I insist.

  He says: “Please. It will be different. I am different.”

  A thought like a moan consumes me. No. No.

  But he is calling me.

  Then there is silence, and I have a short time to decide. I look upon him squalling in his new mother’s arms, and hesitate.

  They are all converging: Hal, Emma, Henry, Katherine, Mother, Father, Mary, George, Elizabeth, the court, the music room. They are all arriving, or will arrive, or have arrived one by one in different places, with different stations in life, with different plans to meet at different times. I am included in many of these plans, if I choose.

  I wait, perhaps a little longer than I otherwise might have, then I select a situation.

  I will walk away from Henry, I have decided. I have not come here for him.

  And so I am born. I shriek with colic.

  And then I grow, and Henry grows.

  We’ve returned to join the others. We’ve chosen an interesting time when there are airplanes, and automobiles, and telephones. There is also television, and shows we sometimes watch simultaneously not knowing, of course, that the other is. We watch The Mickey Mouse Club, and Howdie Doody, and I Love Lucy, and Make Room for Daddy. We study American Bandstand (me for the dance steps and the clothes, and Henry for the burgeoning breasts), see a President shot in Dallas, and watch the first man to walk on the moon. We both can sing the advertising jingle for Lincoln Carpets. We both eat Cheerios for breakfast and have the radio as a backdrop to our lives (I prefer classical music and softer, melodic rock and roll whereas he prefers hard rock). We join the Cub Scouts and the Girl Scouts at the appropriate times, dress up in costume and go door to door for candy on Halloween, and have, on two occasions, passed each other in crowds.

  When the world begins changing in earnest, when 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970 come, youth is taking sides for or against social conformity and the war in Vietnam. We are unofficially called upon to choose a side ourselves. Henry and I are both riveted by news coverage of the Woodstock Festival, and are drawn to the counter culture–the “hippies”–that flooded upstate New York to attend. The whimsical outfits, the communal living, and life on the periphery of society is a homecoming for us in a way, but neither of us knows why that should be or, if asked, would describe it quite that way.

  Mostly, I’m attracted to the idealism and the activism. People everywhere are standing up, fighting for this and fighting against that, holding demonstrations and sit-ins, marching, picketing and changing things that need to be changed.

  I don’t like the aimlessness, though, and the lack of purpose inherent within some factions of this new movement. I don’t like the promiscuity or the drugs. Still I’m drawn to it all because it represents something that I have a yearning for, but can’t quite put my finger on.

  Henry is completely at home with all of it. He appreciates the fact that women are now so easy to come by, and so compliant.

  As for the drugs, he’s there at the forefront, experimenting with them all. In addition to this, he has an alcohol dependency that will reveal itself in time. He is now controlled by his addictions in much the same way as he was once controlling, and is usually intoxicated to some degree from one substance or another. He is in that state when I walk into a party where he’s standing, leaning against a wall.

  Had either one of us not gone to that party, we would have crossed paths in some other way.

  He sees me and stares. He experiences the impact of an adrenaline rush he attributes to very good hashish, and is suddenly fully cognizant with all of his senses on alert. He pulls a pair of mirrored sunglasses out of his jacket pocket and puts them on, even though it’s nighttime. He thinks I won’t notice him watching me that way.

  Knowing (even with the sunglasses) that he’s staring, not knowing the impact I’m having on him, used to being stared at and expecting it, I notice him but have no desire to meet him. My internal alarm is going off. There is something about him that makes me uneasy, almost as if I sense he’s dangerous. But that’s not quite it. I don’t know what it is. It might only be that I can’t see his eyes behind those awful sunglasses.

  I flirt with the knot of men that surrounds me (I always have a knot of men), but I’m not with any of them, nor does it appear that any of them are making much progress with me.

  I fill my paper cup from the spigot of a beer keg and sip one glass, but I pass the marijuana cigarette to the person next to me, holding it out at arm’s length. I ignore the lines of cocaine on the coffee table, and watch without interest as people inhale them up their noses through tubes made from rolled-up dollar bills.

  I talk with my friends (these include Valerie, whom I do not know is really Emma). The people I’m with pass pills among themselves, but none of them leans over to ask me if I would like any.

  The man sees all this and makes mental notes.

  He continues to stare, rebuffs some friends who wander over to chat and brushes off the overtures of two women, but makes no effort to speak to me. He’s immobilized with fear. He has started to walk over to me a hundred times and can’t. Almost two hours pass without him leaving his place against the wall, even to get another beer.

  Finally, he can’t wait a minute longer, and walks down the hall.

  I notice that he’s left for the moment, and I see him enter the bathroom. Sensing the act is faintly, purposely malicious toward him—and enjoying it—I yawn, get up from the floor where I’ve been sitting cross-legged, say a few rushed good-byes and go home.

  ۞

  I have no idea that he has been on the phone describing me, asking everyone who I am and where he can find me again. He knows my name, now. He’s become obsessed with finding me and is single-minded in his pursuit. He prowls the usual hangouts, driving from place to place with someone who says he knows Valerie’s roommate (but not where she lives), ringing doorbells, crashing parties and waiting in coffee houses, scanning crowds, watching doors, asking questions, speculating on who my friends are, and where they might be found.

  “She’s a stuck-up bitch, man,” his exasperated companion tells him, again. “She thinks she’s too good for everyone. And, she’s got a mean mouth on her. Seriously. Don’t give her the satisfaction of cutting you down. I wouldn’t.”

  He steers the car onto a side street, and cranes his neck to read the house numbers. They’re looking for a party—or to at least be told where one is. They’re looking for me. They think they’ll try an apartment that someone earlier today said is Valerie’s.

  Henry now knows that she’s my best friend.

  “Did you hear what she said to Eddie?” He exchanges looks with his girlfriend who makes a face as if she’s heard the story before. He turns around to Henry who is impassively looking out the window in the back seat. “When he tried to put the moves on her, she asked him if he was doing cocaine, right? Because she said an ego like his ‘does not occur in nature’.” He says it in a high mincing voice. He interrupts himself to ask rhetorically: “Who talks like that, huh?” He continues: “So then she says to him, ‘Therefore, I conclude that you must be artificially ego-enhanced.’ Ego-enhanced. Snooty bitch. Like her point was: who the hell did Eddie think he was, to ask her out?”

  He does not mention to Henry that I once turned him down too, nor does he tell Henry what I said to him to send him scurrying away. Instead, he mimics me by tossing his head with his nose in the air, and flipping his hair over his shoulders. He mutters, “Therefore I conclude! THEREFORE myew-myew-myew-myew-myew-I’m-a-snooty-little-bitch . . . ”

  Henry snorts and hoots and slaps his thigh. He can just see the look on Eddie’s cocky face. Eddie definitely had it coming, but the story increases his terror of me. This isn’t the first one he’s heard. I’m leaving them strewn behind me, and word is getting a
round.

  “He probably had his hand down her shirt, knowing Eddie. He’s a slob.” Henry is still chuckling. “He was probably also doing cocaine. So did it shut him up?”

  “Nothing shuts Eddie up,” the girlfriend remarks. “That came close, though. Hee hee.”

  “Well, I don’t like her,” the friend tells Henry (and his own pride) indignantly. “I don’t even care how hot she is.”

  He realizes what he just said. “I don’t personally think she’s hot,” he says to his girlfriend. “I personally prefer brunettes, like you.”

  “Nice catch,” she answers ominously, staring at him. Then she addresses them both: “Would somebody please tell me what the big deal is about this girl? Seriously. She’s okay, but she’s not that pretty. She just has every guy in the world thinking that she is for some reason.” Then she mutters, “Men are such morons. Honest to God.”

  “She’s a goddess,” Henry says. The statement does not invite discussion or rebuttal. Then he leans over and whispers in sing-song, “You’re just jeal-ous . . . ” She reaches back and whacks him over the head with her purse. He ducks and laughs.

  Her boyfriend chooses to ignore the question. He can think of no response that won’t get him into trouble. He pulls the car in front of a fire hydrant and parks (it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t pay parking tickets anyway). He turns around to Henry irritably.

  I’m getting sick of being your damn chauffeur. Get your car fixed. Okay?”

  Henry rolls his eyes and salutes with his middle finger.

  The party was weeks ago. Now, on this night, I’m sprawled on the couch, barefoot, with my hair tied up in a messy knot. I’m waiting for Valerie to take her turn at chess while, in the background, the stereo plays Abbey Road by the Beatles.