I sat down on the bed. I saw her bags were packed, and I felt the wind go out of me again. It’s crazy, isn’t it? I’d gone up to tell the girl to go, that I’d be calling to the sisters to expect her, but when I saw she’d beaten me to everything, it almost made me sad. I hadn’t thought that things would go so fast. You’re leaving? I asked her. Today? I looked at my own hands along the crocheted bedspread for a moment, and though I didn’t mean it, I was tatting at the blanket like a child. Thérèse put on her belt. She breathed in very hard to make her waist as small as it could be before fastening the buckle. Trussed up like a sausage, she let all the air out that she could, and then said, very softly, which was not her usual tone, “Ah, non. Merde!” I looked to see what she was doing. She was not speaking to me. She was frowning, looking down. My mouth went very dry. It’s not pleasant to say, but the fact is that there was a stain on the girl’s bodice. A leak, I mean. You know. She reached down to the bureau for a handkerchief, which she pressed against her breast and then tucked tight and rather easily into her brassiere.
When she looked into the glass again, more herself, or nearly, Thérèse smiled at me. You’ll wonder what I did. I crossed my legs and leaned towards her. Serious. I had something to say. But my throat wouldn’t open. When she spoke she sounded sorry. “C’est pas grave,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.” I wasn’t sure what didn’t matter. She looked down at her chest. I nodded, I suppose. Then she put a hairpin in her mouth and started combing her brown hair. For a girl who cared so much about her looks, I thought, she isn’t very lucky. Rather a lot of that thin hair came out into the teeth. She went on, “Petra wants to see the coast.” Her hands moved very slowly. “A rest would do me good.” She put the comb down, and she blinked. “All of that nice wind.”
I was looking at her eyes. Very blue, they were. I looked into the mirror at myself to see if my own were that blue, too. I even wondered if her baby’s eyes would turn out that same color. Then of course it came to me that Thérèse would likely never know, because she’d given it away. It didn’t bother me just then that she was looking at me, or that we do get winds right here, and as I said, now and then some gulls. But it did make my jaws hurt, that they were leaving me before I could order them to go.
Then she made me jump. “It’s not so bad, Celeste,” she said, and winked at me. That wink felt like a slap, you know, the way you feel when you’ve held out a piece of cake to someone, and they keep talking and don’t take it, though your hand is plain as day. The plump girl winked at me just like an actress would, as though we had a secret. And that wink helped me pull myself together. I do not balk at hardship. I smoothed the blanket down.
I said, You’ll be out before lunch, then, and she looked a bit surprised, and I tell you I was pleased. I didn’t feel like unwrapping any meat for them or cracking any eggs. I made myself get up from the bed and I went to see Gustave, who was in the study. He was clacking at the typewriter, and he didn’t hear me when I pushed open the door.
The girls are leaving us, I said. And though sometimes I sneak up very close, and quietly sit down on the free arm of his big chair, I couldn’t make myself go in. “That’s strange,” he said. “So sudden.” And he kept clacking at the keys. “Both of them?” Clack-clack. Both of them, I said.
I waited in the tower staircase at the bottom, while the girls packed their last things. I made myself very small. I heard Petra going down one flight, but she did not come to me. She slipped across to Gustave’s room to say good-bye, and I’ll give her this much, she sounded awfully polite. Her French had gotten better. Then she came bouncing down in that pale dress, that cardigan pulled tight around her bony little waist. I asked if she wanted me to call a car for her, but she kissed me on the cheek and said they’d walk their luggage down the hill. “Don’t worry about us,” she said. “I’ll write you.” She giggled. “We’ll send you a card!”
Did she think I’d gone to all the trouble of inviting her out here for the summer so she could run off to the beach with a cheap girl who’d given up a child? I guess she did. I guess that is exactly what she thought. I was wrong. I’d been wrong from the start. Here is what I thought about while she stood waiting in the hall. She never gave me presents from New York. She’d never smelled like eucalyptus or like milk. She was not well behaved.
Thérèse came down with her yellow case. She was far more able with her suitcase than Petra was with hers, what with those broad arms. Thérèse stopped in front of me and I noticed that her posture was not bad. She looked right into my eyes. She’d put some hairpins in, and they looked very neat. I could look at her whole face. “Écoute,” she said, “tu vas quand même pas leur dire?” She was asking me quite underhandedly not to call the sisters to tell them she was gone. It’s a special program, don’t you see? One they were just trying, and if Thérèse did any wrong she’d not get help again. And girls like her don’t manage without help, do they? She’d also given up on vous, and maybe if she hadn’t I’d have made a different answer. “Of course I am,” I said. “I will telephone the very moment you are gone. Don’t think you’ll get far.” Thérèse considered me and the import of my words. Then she shook her head and closed her eyes. As if the wayward girl was me! I opened the front door for them myself, and then I stepped aside.
At first while they were walking I imagined calling up the sisters and telling them precisely what I thought about their large, abandoned girl. How I’d done my best for her, but when someone hasn’t any manners nothing’s going to suit them. And how she’d damaged me. At the same time, and I can’t tell you why it is, I also felt the way a person does after they have made a lovely meal and the guests are getting up to go. That sad, sweet peeling into darkness that makes you think you’ll do it all again. And how you wish that they would stay, just a little longer.
It was another green, dull day, a whitish sky like thin, gray milk, and the girls stood out quite sharply. When they reached the very end of our long driveway Petra turned around and waved at me, with that strange smile on her face, which was both Hermann’s and Sylvie’s. Though just then it didn’t look quite like her mother’s or her father’s, and it wasn’t Persian, either. Thérèse only turned her head over her shoulder, and maybe she smiled at me, too. The bells rang from the abbey for the morning mass. In the stillness, from the upper road, which is rather far away, I could hear a car. I didn’t wave at them, exactly, but I did curl my fingers in my pocket. Well, I suppose I made a fist.
Petra waited, then she shrugged, Thérèse leaned on her arm a moment, and the two of them walked off. From far away, you know, they looked like two ordinary girls. Nothing special. Certainly not horrible, not from a distance like that, when they were growing smaller and I could hear their footsteps echo in the gravel, their cases dragging on the ground. You wouldn’t have known at all as I did that Thérèse had had a child, or that it had been taken off to someone else, or that she was the kind of girl who’d drop her skirt so easy. She was having a hard time with her dancing shoes and swollen feet, but I supposed once they found the blacktop she would be just fine. I couldn’t help but think: After all, they did have extra money.
When I went back inside, Gustave was sitting at the table with his demitasse and a magazine on Pharaohs. “They’re gone, then,” he said. And I said yes they were. Then he said the coffee didn’t taste quite right, and I can’t help it but I told him Petra made it, and that made me feel better. I went into the kitchen for the apricots. Tomorrow’s Tuesday, I told him. There’s a topiary tour. He groaned. “I wish you’d stop all that, Celeste. It’s like throwing pearls to swine.”
I stuck my head out and I looked at my own husband. Pearls to swine. There he was, the famous archaeologist, telling me about giving pearls to swine. I left him at the table and went in to make the pies. I must have gotten very busy with them, and that’s why I never made the call. In fact it was already afternoon when I remembered. And the number for the sisters was all the way upstairs. And then, well, I put the p
ies in and washed up, and once it came to me that I’d forgotten, well, it seemed a little late. I did tell Gustave I had called, so he’d be relieved that I am not a person to be fooled with. I even told him, though I am not the sort of woman who will trifle with the truth, that the nuns were informing the police and would make them bring her back to Liège. He nodded at me once, then went back up the stairs.
Already I could smell the apricots get warm and soften in the oven. I went into the hall and pulled the cloths out for the tables. I could iron them and get them fresh before the pies were done. I set up the tables in the field, not too far from Gustave’s beasts. Later on I’d clean the two rooms in the tower, make them fresh again.
The pies came out quite well. I arranged them in a circle on the kitchen table and covered them with cloth. Then I went out onto the patio with a glass of bitters and some ice and a novel I had longed to read. The sun came out at last. The petunias were as sturdy and as bright as I had hoped they’d be when I’d watched the urns in winter. I could smell the chamomile and very slightly, too, my baking. I opened up the book and before I started reading I thought how pleasant it was going to be when lots of children came to look at Gustave’s zoo. If they would finish off the pies, and thank me, and promise to come back.
Wondrous Strange
A Kingdom to the North, 1992
The mediums of the Thursday Club dealt commonly in ghostly things: the disembodied voices, thoughts, once or twice the ephemeral likenesses that hovered, in best suits or favorite aprons, by the sofa or the door, echoes of the dead, all in all, the dim but urgent stirrings of humans human-born. The Medium Fontanella, the founder of the club, heard the ghost words in her head, responded to them, and, stylishly, lugubriously, related most of what was said. She could speak back to them, too, asking questions that the shades would sometimes answer. Maxwell Black the Scribe did automatic writing, bringing the old energies to life through the channel of his arms. He loosened his fat wrists and lifted up his pen, himself hearing nothing, thinking nothing; the revenants used his hands and showed him what to write. Maxwell Black produced remarkably neat, impressively coherent missives, which, once he had come to, he read aloud in measured, even tones. Max and Fontanella were the leaders, the most versed.
Eva Bright, no special clerk like Blackie, not as skilled as Fontanella (she could not converse with spirits, and she never, ever saw them), occupied the second tier. For souls she was no more than an unruly mouthpiece. When Eva let her mind go blank, opened up her throat, the spirits, without censor, spoke their thoughts right through her, while she remembered nothing. She was learning, had potential. She was getting better.
Susan Darling, amateur, the newest of the group, had smaller, more diversionary gifts. She listened for the needs and dreams of objects and found things that were lost. She was like a parlor trick. The real heart of the Thursday Club was the funneling of ghosts, their messages from the beyond: of human flotsam, that was all.
On Thursdays, the function room above the Overlook Café became a center of communications, a human phone booth, post office, and microphone for the Rogers, Junes, and Mikes who’d died with things unsaid, or who, unable to observe the fleshy march below without wishing to meddle, required a human slot for their two cents or five. For more than seven years now, until the astounding show that upset everything and made a mockery of Max and Madame F., the usual guests from the Beyond had been possessed of ordinary age: they’d reached seventy, or eighty, sometimes a bit more than that, but never very much. Or theirs had been an interrupted span: she did not see thirty, for the woman-in-a-crash; or taken far too young, a dear child surprised. And young meant five or nine or ten, not two thousand years. Old was ninety-five, not—as the most recent visitor insisted—more than twenty centuries lived out under the sea. Indeed: Eva Bright, Fontanella’s protégée, had been possessed (or so the manly, foreign voice that issued from her said) by no ghost, but a djinn.
A sea spirit from Africa, who, while Eva’s body shook, while she stood and waved her arms, gave his name through her loosed mouth as Sheikh Abdul Aziz, and furthermore averred: he had never been a child; he had landed in his fishy home on the Indian Ocean floor by some equatorial islands when King Solomon himself—the very one all Christians know—had flung all tricky djinn from the north to the far south and banished them from Galilee, Jerusalem, and Sodom.
And this djinn who spoke through Eva Bright was not come on a fluke, not an accidental visit for hello-here-I-am-and-now-right-back-I-go! Sheikh Abdul Aziz had come up for a reason: a message for one long-standing, solid, prim, and docile member of the club, an avid follower of ghost news, an admirer of mediums, who had never had a message in her life. A Mrs. Flora Hewett. This madame, Sheikh Abdul Aziz announced, could by following his lead cure her ailing husband, George. By doing some incredible, appalling, extraordinary things (involving jewelry and rose water, and the slaughter of some goats), all of which he detailed using Eva Bright’s tight vocal cords and lips. In the dizzy wake of which, Eva Bright, exhausted, had fallen to the floor. Astonishing, indeed. What were they to think?
Aftermath
When Eva had come to, the room above the Overlook Café felt quieter and cooler than a full room ought to be. She had the sharp impression that almost everyone—and there’d been thirty, forty, a healthy, eager crowd—had gone. On the floor, laid out on her back behind the mediums’ table, she had been upended. She was looking at the ceiling: brownish blooms, a water stain. At the edge of her left eye, the crystal chandelier, asway. Beyond that, the peeling strips of wallpaper (chestnut-patterned), which no one ever managed, or remembered, to bring down. Her mouth hurt, yes, her mouth hurt, and her arms and hands and ankles (itching in their soft, not-made-to-itch brown socks) and each one of her toes (hot and trapped in her well-laced walking boots), and her heart was beating fast. In the aching confines of her mouth, incomparable, distinct, the biting taste of cloves.
When Eva turned her head, she first made out the shining sphere of worried Maxwell Black: at the lower end of him, the pointed, polished twinkle of his brogues; farther up, the silk glow of his shirtfront. Behind him, in the wings, portly Fontanella, painted eyes agog. These two, Eva’s oldest colleagues, used to seeing her take on the voices of the dead (in these past months someone’s redoubtable aunt Celia; next, thoughtful cousin Jim; a longshoreman named Trevor), were looking at her as though she’d unbuttoned her blouse without a reason or begun braying like a mule. In shock, Fontanella, dedicated to the maintenance of what she thought a proper medium’s poise (usually unruffled, never too sharp or hilarious), was bathed in a slick sweat, and speechless; Blackie—pencil snapped in half from the surprise—waved two wooden wands. “Nella,” he kept saying. “Nella, did you see?”
Eva, still reclining, limbs like lead and pupils full of light: “What is it, Blackie? Tell me. What on earth just happened?” Toupee out of place, aglow with chalky sweat, Blackie stepped towards her and knelt slowly. Faltering, he explained. When it was her turn to commune, he told her, she had not sighed slowly as was usual (they all knew Eva’s modest puff, a low sound like a whistle). No, she had groaned out loud, “And very loudly, too.” He opened up his throat and tried to show her what he meant, but Fontanella, from behind, stopped him with a hiss, as though a groan too much like those given in the trance might provoke Abdul Aziz, turn that switch back on. Blackie acquiesced. Nella was his sweetheart. He did not like to displease her, so he turned to whispering and tried to sum it up.
He spread his hands along his thighs and leaned closer to Eva. In an accented (“Oriental,” he said) English, Eva’s channels had tuned in to the wishes of a spirit. “Listen, Eva. Not a shade, it wasn’t. Not a proper ghost.” He turned to check on angry, exasperated Fontanella, who was already stepping away, undone and annoyed; he went on, voice a little clearer.
Taking charge of Eva’s mouth and will, he said, “A Mohammedan!” (so it did appear) had introduced himself: “I am from the islands off the coast . . .”
Blackie’s imitation, blurred and nasal, Ah-frick-ahhh. “The coast of Ah-frick-ahhh. Bahr al-Zinj!” he said, and then again, much louder, in an imitation, “Bahr al-Zinj!” He snapped the fingers of both hands. As the pencil bits skittered to the floor, Blackie paused and looked at Eva doubtfully, as if she had caused them to. He did not know what to think. Amazed, he said, “Sheikh Abdul Aziz, Eva. You gave us his name.”
Eva, with the discomfiting but growing sense that she was being told a story she had always known but had never heard a person tell, begged him to go on. Did she remember that? Her throat hurt, yes, as if she had used it harshly, in an unaccustomed way. That odd tang remained with her, a hot numbness at her gums. And in Eva’s ears . . . what tune was that, what words? La Illahi ila . . . Wondering, she said the words out loud. Blackie, suddenly impatient, not sure he should trust her, snapped, “There is no God but Allah, yes, I do know what that means.” Eva was surprised. She didn’t. “Et cetera, et cetera,” he said. “Mohammed and so forth, yes, you did recite it all.” He wiped at his damp brow with an embroidered handkerchief and then went on.
The coastal force from far-flung seas had next addressed himself directly and by name to Flora Hewett (who was there, who had stayed behind, and whom Eva, if she craned her aching neck and peered under the table’s dark green cloth, could see: a frozen woman on the other side of the long table, red cardigan a vivid slash in the ill-lit, greenish room, white hair shocked among its pins, hands massaged by hearty, flustered Fontanella). To return her husband, George, to health, so said the interrupting thing, Flora Hewett must acquire a silver ring, drape herself in light blue cloths, sprinkle rose water about, obtain a white goat and a black one, and—“Do you remember, Eva? Listen. Kill them in the garden. Kill them,” Blackie said. “Moreover, by a well, if at all convenient.” Blackie said these last words with distaste, as if Eva had somehow intentionally demeaned him. “Does Mrs. Hewett have a well? I mean, does she, Eva? I’m telling you, I don’t know what to think.” He seemed almost afraid. Fontanella called to him, and Blackie turned away.
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