Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

by Kate Wilhelm

  She danced with Barry, then with Meg and Justin, then with Miriam and Clark, and again with Meg and Melissa and two of the Jeremy brothers; not with Jed, though, who stood against the wall and watched his brothers anxiously. He still wore his own bracelet. The other brothers had an assortment of bracelets on their wrists. Poor Jed, Molly thought, and almost wished she had given hers to him.

  She sat with Martha and Curtis and ate a minced-beef sandwich and drank more of the amber wine that made her head swim delightfully. Then she danced with one of the Julie sisters, who was looking solemn now as the hour grew late. Presently the Lawrence brothers would claim them for the rest of the night.

  The music changed. One of the Lawrence brothers claimed the girl Molly had danced with; the girl looked at him with a timid smile that appeared, vanished, appeared again. He danced her away.

  Molly felt a tap on her arm, and turned to face Ben. He was unsmiling. He held out his arm for her and they danced, not speaking, neither of them smiling. He danced her to the table, where they stopped and he handed her a small glass of wine. Silently they drank, and then walked together from the auditorium. Molly caught a glimpse of Miriam’s face as they left. Defiantly she held her back stiffer, her head higher, and went out into the cold night with Ben.

  Chapter 15

  “I would like to sit down by the river for a little while,” she said. “Are you cold?” Ben asked, and when she said yes, he got cloaks for them both.

  Molly watched the pale water, changing, always changing, and always the same, and she could feel him near, not touching, not speaking. Thin clouds chased across the face of the swelling moon. Soon it would be full, the harvest moon, the end of Indian summer. The man was so cleanly outlined, so unambiguous, she thought. A misshapen bowl, like an artifact made by inexpert hands that would improve with practice.

  The moon in the river moved, separated into long shiny ropes that coiled, slid apart, came together, formed a wide band of luminous water that looked solid, then broke up again. Against the shore the voice of the river was gentle, secretive.

  “Are you cold?” Ben asked again. His face was pale in the moonlight, his eyebrows darker than in daylight, straight, heavy. He could have been scowling at her; it was hard to tell. She shook her head, and he turned toward the river again.

  The river was alive, she thought, and just when you thought you knew it, it changed and showed another face, another mood. Tonight it was beguiling, full of promise, and even knowing the promises to be false, she could hear the voice whispering to her persuasively, could sense the pull of the river.

  And Ben thought of the river, swollen in floodtide, flashing bright over gravel, over rocks, breaking up into foam against boulders. He saw again the small fire on the bank, the figure of the girl standing there silhouetted against the gleaming water while the brothers pulled the boat up the hill.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come today,” she said suddenly in a small voice. “I got almost to your door, and then didn’t come the rest of the way. I don’t know why.”

  There was a shout of laughter from the auditorium, and he wished he and Molly had walked farther up the river before stopping. A cloud covered the face of the moon and the river turned black, and only its voice was there, and the peculiar smell of the fresh water.

  “Are you cold?” he asked again, as if the moonlight had held warmth that now was gone.

  She moved closer to him. “Coming home,” she said softly, dreamily, “I kept hearing the river talk to me, and the trees, and the clouds. I suppose it was fatigue and hunger, but I really heard them, only I couldn’t understand the words most of the time. Did you hear them, Ben?”

  He shook his head, and although she couldn’t see him now with the cloud over the face of the moon, she knew he was denying the voices. She sighed.

  “What would happen if you had an idea, something you wanted to work out alone?” she asked after a moment.

  Ben shifted uneasily. “It happens,” he said carefully. “We discuss it and usually, unless there’s a good reason, a shortage of equipment, or supplies, something like that, whoever has the idea goes ahead with it.”

  Now the cloud had freed the moon; the light seemed brighter after the brief darkness. “What if the others didn’t see the value of the idea?” Molly asked.

  “Then it would have no value, and no one would want to waste time on it.”

  “But what if it was something you couldn’t explain exactly, something you couldn’t put into words?”

  “What is the real question, Molly?” Ben asked, turning to face her. Her face was as pale as the moon, with deep shadows for eyes, her mouth black, not smiling. She looked up at him, and the moon was reflected in her eyes, and she seemed somehow luminous, as if the light came from within her, and he realized that Molly was beautiful. He never had seen it before and now it shocked him that the thought formed, forced itself on him.

  Molly stood up suddenly. “I’ll show you,” she said. “In my room.”

  They walked back to the hospital side by side, not touching, and Ben thought: of course, the Miriam sisters were all beautiful, most of the sisters were. Just as most of the brothers were handsome. It was a given. And it was meaningless.

  She pulled a blind down on the window in her little room and threw her cloak on the chair behind her worktable. Then she pulled out drawings, sorting through them. Finally she handed one to him.

  It was a woman, no one he knew, but vaguely familiar. Sara, he realized; changed, but Sara. Beside her, mirrors reached into infinity, and in each mirror was another woman, each Sara, but none exactly like her. Here a scowl tightened the mouth, there a wide smile, another was laughing, another had graying hair, wrinkles . . . He looked at Molly in bewilderment.

  She handed him another drawing. There was a tree, nothing more. A tree rising out of a solid rock. An impossible thing and he felt unsettled by it.

  Another drawing. She thrust it at him. A tiny boat on a vast sea that filled the paper from margin to margin. There was a solitary figure in the boat, so small it was insignificant, impossible to identify.

  He felt upset by the drawings. He looked at Molly on the other side of the drawing table; she was staring at him intently. She looked feverish, her cheeks flushed, her eyes too bright.

  “I need help, Ben,” she said, her voice low and compelling. “You have to help me.”

  “What?”

  “Ben, I have to do those things in paints. I don’t know why, but I have to. And others. It won’t work with pencil, or pen and ink. I need color and light! Please!”

  She was weeping. Ben stared at her in surprise. This was her secret then? She wanted to paint? He suppressed an urge to smile at her, as if she were a child pleading for what was already hers.

  She read his expression and sat down and put her head back against the cloak. She closed her eyes. “Miriam understands, and so do my sisters,” she said tiredly, and now the high color in her cheeks faded and she looked very young and weary. “They won’t let me do it.”

  “Why not? What’s wrong with painting?”

  “I . . . they don’t like the way the pictures make them feel. They think it’s dangerous. Miriam thinks so. The others will too.”

  Ben looked at the tiny boat in the endless ocean. “But you don’t have to paint this one, do you? Can’t you do something else?”

  She shook her head. Her eyes were still closed. “If someone had a bad heart, would you treat his ear because it was easier?” Now she looked at him, and there was no mockery at all in her face.

  “Have you talked to Miriam?”

  “She took some drawings I did of the brothers on the trip. She didn’t like them. She kept them. I don’t have to talk to her, or the others. I know what they will say. I bring them only pain anymore.” She thought of them with the Clark brothers on the mat, laughing, sipping the amber wine, caressing the smooth boy/man bodies. It wasn’t group sex, she thought suddenly. It was male and female broken up into parts, just
as the moon broke on the smooth river. The sisters made one organism, female; the Clark brothers made up one organism, male, and when they embraced, the female organism would not be completely satisfied because it was not whole that night. One part of its body was missing, had been missing for a long time. And the missing part, like an amputated limb, caused phantom pain.

  “Molly.” Ben’s voice was gentle. He touched her arm and she started. “Come to my room with me. It is very late. Soon it will be dawn.”

  “You don’t have to,” she said. “I thought I wouldn’t tell you, that’s why I turned around before I got to your office today. Then tonight, I thought I had to tell you because I needed help. You don’t have to.”

  Almost reluctantly Ben said, “Come with me, Molly. To my room. I want you to.”

  Chapter 16

  Snow fell lazily, silently; no wind blew, and the sky seemed low enough to touch. The snow built up on level surfaces, on tree branches, on the needles of the pines and spruces. It sifted down through a crack between a gutter and the roof of the hospital and built a short wall of snow that soon would topple of its own weight. Snow covered the land, unsullied, pure, layer on layer so that in protected spots where no intermittent sun melted it and no wind disturbed it, the snow depth had grown to six, seven, even eight feet. Against the whiteness, shadowed into grays and blues, the river gleamed black. The clouds were so thick the light that lay over the land seemed to come upward from the snow. The light was very dim, and in the distance the snow and sky and air merged and there were no boundaries.

  No boundaries, Molly thought. It was all one. She stood at her window. Behind her an easel waited with a painting on it, but she couldn’t think of it now. The snow, the strange light that came from below, the wholeness of the scene outside held her.

  “Molly!”

  She turned sharply. Miriam stood in the doorway, still wearing her outdoor clothing, snow clinging to her shoulders, her hood.

  “I said, Meg’s been hurt! Didn’t you hear me?”

  “Hurt? How? What happened?”

  Miriam stared at her for a moment, then shook her head. “You didn’t know, did you?”

  Molly felt disoriented, as if she were a stranger who had wandered in and understood nothing. The painting looked garish, ugly, meaningless to her. Now she could sense Meg’s pain and fear, and the sisters’ presence easing it. They needed her, she thought clearly, and didn’t understand why, and Meg faded from her thoughts. “Where is she?” she asked. “What happened? I’ll come with you.”

  Miriam looked at her and shook her head. “Don’t come,” she said. “Stay here.” She went away.

  When Molly learned where Meg was and went to the hospital room to be with her sisters, they would not let her in.

  Ben looked at his brothers and shrugged at the question: What were they to do about Molly? Exile her, as they had exiled David? Isolate her in a hospital room? Quarter her with the breeders — the mothers? Ignore the problem? They had discussed every alternative and were satisfied with none.

  “There’s nothing to indicate she is making progress,” Barry said. “Nothing to indicate she even wants to resume a normal life.”

  “Since there’s no precedent for anything like this, whatever we decide will have to be the right thing,” Bruce said soberly. His thick eyebrows drew together, separated. “Ben, she’s your patient. You haven’t said a thing. You were certain that allowing her to paint would be therapeutic, but it wasn’t. Have you any other suggestions?”

  “When I asked permission to withdraw from my work in the lab and study psychology instead, it was refused. The rest of us who went to Washington have made a complete recovery, a functional recovery,” he added drily. “Except Molly. We don’t know enough to know why, how to treat her, if she’ll ever recover. I say, give it time. She isn’t needed in the classrooms, let her paint. Give her a room of her own and leave her alone.”

  Barry was shaking his head. “Psychology is a dead end for us,” he said. “It revives the cult of the individual. When a unit is functioning, the members are self-curing. As for letting her remain in the hospital . . . She is a constant source of pain and confusion to her sisters. Meg will be all right, but Molly didn’t even know her sister had fallen, had a broken arm. The sisters needed her and she didn’t answer. We all know and agree it is our duty to safeguard the well-being of the unit, not the various individuals within it. If there is a conflict between those two choices, we must abandon the individual. That is a given. The only question is how.”

  Ben stood up and went to the window. He could see the breeders’ quarters across the hedge. Not there, he thought vehemently. They would never accept her. They might even kill her if she were put among them. Only a month ago they had had the Ceremony for the Lost for Janet, who was now counted among the breeders, who was undergoing drug and hypnotic conditioning to force her to accept her new status as a fertile female who would bring forth a child as often as the doctors decided it was necessary. And the new children would be transferred to the nursery at birth, and the breeders would then have time to regain good health, to grow strong enough to do it again, and again, and again . . .

  “No point in putting her in there,” Bob said, going to stand by Ben at the window. “Better if we simply admit there’s no solution and resort to euthanasia. It would be less cruel.”

  Ben felt a weight in his chest and turned toward his brothers. They were right, he thought distantly. “If it happens again,” he said, speaking slowly, uncertain where his own thoughts were taking him, “we will have this same agonizing meeting again, the same useless alternatives to discuss and discard.”

  Barry nodded. “I know. That’s what’s giving me bad dreams. With more and more people needed to forage, to repair the roads, to make expeditions to the cities, there might be more cases like Molly’s.”

  “Let me have her,” Ben said abruptly. “I’ll put her in the old Sumner house. We’ll have the Ceremony for the Lost and declare her gone. The Miriam sisters will close the gap and feel no more pain, and I’ll be able to study this reaction.”

  “It is very cold in the house,” Ben said, “but the stove will warm it. Do you like these rooms?”

  They had gone over the entire house, and Molly had chosen the second-floor wing facing the river. There were wide windows without curtains, and the cold afternoon light filled the room, but in the summer it would be warm and bright with sunshine, and always there was the river to gaze at. The adjoining room had been a nursery or a dressing room, she thought. It was smaller with high double windows that reached almost to the ceiling. She would paint in that room. There was a tiny balcony outside the windows.

  Already the sounds of music were drifting across the valley as the ceremony began. There would be dancing, a feast, and much wine.

  “The electricity is off,” Ben said harshly. “The wires are bad. We’ll get them fixed as soon as the snow melts.”

  “I don’t care about that. I like the lamps and the fireplace. I can burn wood in the stove.”

  “The Andrew brothers will keep you supplied with wood. They’ll bring anything you need. They will leave everything on the porch.”

  She moved to the window. The sun, covered with thin clouds, hung on the edge of the hill. It would start its slide down the other side, and darkness would follow swiftly. For the first time in her life she would be alone at night. She stood with her back to Ben, gazing at the river and thinking about the old house, so far away from the other buildings in the valley, hidden by trees and bushes that had grown as high as trees.

  If she had a bad dream and stirred in her sleep or cried out, no one would hear her, no one would be at her side to soothe her, comfort her.

  “Molly.” Ben’s voice was still too harsh, as if he were terribly angry with her, and she didn’t know why he should be angry. “I can stay with you tonight if you’re afraid. . .”

  She turned to look at him then, her face shadowed, the cold light and snow and gray s
ky behind her, and Ben knew she was not afraid. He felt as he had that night by the river: she was beautiful, and the light in the room came from her, from her eyes. “You’re happy, aren’t you?” he said wonderingly.

  She nodded. “I’ll make a fire in my fireplace. And then I’ll drag that chair up close to it and sit and watch the flames and listen to the music, and after a while, I’ll go to bed, and maybe read for a little bit, by lamplight, until I get sleepy . . .“ She smiled at him. “It’s all right, Ben. I feel . . . I don’t know how I feel. Like something’s gone that was heavy and hard to live with. It’s gone, and I feel light and free and yes, even happy. So maybe I am crazy. Maybe that’s what going crazy means.” She turned to the window again. “Do the breeders feel happy?” she asked after a moment.

  “No.”

  “What is it like for them?”

  “I’ll make your fire. The chimney’s open. I checked.”

  “What happens to them, Ben?”

  “They are given a course in learning how to be mothers. Eventually they like that life, I think.”

  “Do they feel free?”

  He had started to put logs in the grate, and now he dropped a large one with a crash and stood up. He went to her and swung her away from the window. “They never stop suffering from the separation,” he said. “They cry themselves to sleep night after night, and they are on drugs all the time, and they have sessions of conditioning to make them accept it, but every night they cry themselves to sleep. Is that what you wanted to hear? You wanted to think they were as free as you are now, free to be alone, to do what they want with no thought of their responsibilities to the others. It’s not like that! We need them, and we use them the only way we can, to do the least harm to the sisters who are not breeders. When they’re through breeding, if they are fit, they work in the nursery. If they’re not fit, we put them to sleep. Is that what you wanted to hear?”