The Hawkman

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  Miss Williams often did this: try to write the course of her own dreams into something useful. She’d apply the streams of what could be remembered with what her dream was teaching her, and come up with words and pictures suitable for a public audience. As the fever slid deeper into her muscles, diaphragm, and lungs, she regressed back to her mother’s pearls, how soothing their cool skin would be against her hot throat. Her mother had said pearls were much like the shot, like the lead poured for the air to shape; but pearls lacked the threat of violence, unless one thought of their removal from their mothers. That must have been why her mother’s pearls felt so cruel and indignant in her hand, once Eva was made into an orphan. The abbess had promised to return the pearls to Eva upon her manumission from the asylum. The pearls were not restored to Eva until she had long since departed St. Joseph’s, as one of her professors intervened after hearing Eva speak of them. The professor needed only to write to the abbess, asking after their worth. The inquiry was enough to warn of the consequences.

  Helen had once told Eva that she was much a pearl, formed as she was in bellies and warmth, and from a deliberate act of love, whether it be a union of light and seed or a protective reflex against an irritant. If a pearl is taken too soon from its mother through some inadvertent act, it will never mature into what it was meant to be: a teacher, a physician, a titan of a humane enterprise—a settlement house, perhaps. A pearl is a spinning compact of minerals and luminescence and therefore not meant for human ownership; it can be owned only by itself, like a star, or its reflection streaking through water.

  Miss Williams decided in the midst of her dream and fever how she would have her pearls conceived: through their mollusk mothers as they opened their mouths and hearts to the father of their children, the moonlight. Once the mollusks captured enough of this light, they sealed themselves against the darkness of the sea, and balanced their babies on the edge of their tongues. There they grew, as interwoven layers of frost and radiance. In this way, the pearls were much like the needles in a pine tree, each requiring time and freezing to set properly, so as not to die off immediately with the coming of spring. To keep their children, their mollusk mothers could not speak, lest their offspring be jettisoned into water, into waves, into another existence that would find them as servants, rather than the masters of brilliance they were bred to be. A pearl was born only when a mother was asked to speak too soon, for purposes of profit or human indulgence.

  But perhaps there could be a girl, an orphan, young and solitary: a pearl diver who might believe she could forge a family out of the water that was her most consistent companion. She might steal a pearl to love and nurture, so that it might grow as large as herself, to become her sister or at least a cousin. They would share a grandfather in a conch shell, and their parents would be fish and birds, koi and doves, that met in the ebb and flow of air and seaweed.

  Yet this story did not wholly make sense to Miss Williams. Though she was either sick or dreaming, she knew where such stories truly came from: from Africans who wanted their children to understand the origins of their world, where there is not necessarily good and evil, but intentions and consequences. Yet it was also a world of plains and deserts, trees that did not wear leaves as much as they could balance head dresses. The world of pearl divers, of stars and orbits and their effect on bodies of water, belonged to another continent. Asia: China, the shores of Indonesia, and the island of Japan. Every civilization must have beliefs or its practices will devolve into superstition, Miss Williams had learned through her studies.

  Miss Williams thought she had stepped out of her dream, into consciousness, and tried to open the palm of her hand. She wanted to find Mr. Sheehan. He was at the cottage gathering flowers or harvesting peas, or perhaps he was reading or studying the space just beyond his hands, as they were poised at the edge of his knees. She wanted to sit him down, her hand at his back, and tell him the story she had written. She believed she felt someone’s hand in hers, between her fingers, but she could not say to whom that hand belonged. The skin of this hand was cool, almost like a pearl’s, perhaps Mr. Sheehan’s when he was young, before he had taken whatever trade that gifted him with the calluses that had hardened on his fingertips and palms.

  She strained, to thank him for the comfort he provided, but felt that too much of herself was alternately melting and hardening into new forms. She felt the hand within her fingers cast a pearly brilliance over her skin, a weightlessness that she wished would transpose itself into her limbs, so that she would have the ability to float, to glide, to fly away from her illness. Perhaps she had died, she thought many times, and had failed to make arrangements for Mr. Sheehan.

  It seemed to Miss Williams that once she awoke, in a number of days she could not count and no one would help her to quantify, she was suddenly without her most basic faculties. She could no longer sit up, or speak, or drink from a glass. When she tried to accomplish such tasks on her own, her body felt light, insubstantial, almost foreign, and there were no arms on her body to lift herself into sitting; no mouth on her face to take in the water. But Mr. Sheehan was there, adjusting her pillows, encouraging her to swallow. He could do nothing as she strained to accommodate air within her ribs, but he ran his hands up and down her back, as if clearing room for the oxygen to come in.

  She had to relearn to walk, to talk, to laugh, and smile when prompted. Since the mass of her body seemed drained of muscles and blood, it was her chest, the flutter in her lungs, that powered her every move. If she spoke, or sat up, or stood up, her legs and feet free from the mattress and blankets, it was her lungs that propelled her forward, and her lungs that curdled with exhaustion in the following minutes. She had lost trust in her feet, and when she held her arms out for balance, they might as well have been webbed to her sides, for they could not be lifted instinctively. Like a broken fan, they would extend unevenly, one over-confident at half-mast, the other listless in defeat, no better than a flap of excess skin. Mr. Sheehan took to rubbing her arms in oil, as he was directed by the infirmary staff. He rubbed her feet and ankles too, though there was a weightlessness to them, almost an ecstasy that Miss Williams dare not reveal to her caretakers, for how could they understand her belief that some day she may no longer require her legs, that walking for her would soon be outmoded.

  Miss Williams also had to learn how to see again, for what was closest at hand now was distant, whether it was the glass of water Mr. Sheehan kept filled on her nightstand or the handkerchief that somehow always wound up knotted in her fingers. And what was remote, either across the room or far beyond that, in between the blades of grass outside, was now as close as her own bedclothes. It would be nothing to pull her hand from under the blanket and discover a ladybug drowsing on a leaf, or taste the juice of white bark and birch leaves.

  Only in the distance, and in the stretch of days, did the awareness of her limbs return, as well as her ability to direct them into motions and movement. It was as if, after leaving her body, the fever had been succeeded by a rime of ice. On some mornings, that frost sprouted anew. Mr. Sheehan would have to raise her in bed, and move the drinking glass closer so she might more easily reach it. On those mornings, Miss Williams felt the teeth in that frost, primed and hungering. She would have to be heaved out of the bed, the muscles in her legs locked as if undecided in their thoughts and determined against all resolution.

  On other mornings, which were far more rare, on those days when Miss Williams glanced upon a feeling that eluded all chances to capture it, bolt it down, and stretch it from seconds to minutes, Miss Williams still felt the preening in her lungs, but not the unfurling of their agile qualities. There was no ice to break through, nor was there blood, her heart stalled in its purpose, but all of her—shoulders, knees, ankles, hips, and elbows—immediately and immeasurably heavy. She would have to beg off her daily strolls on the arms of the doctor or one of the nurses. She would consent to lean only upon Mr. Sheehan, who took her int
o the corridor, where they could carry out their march in relative privacy. If this was death, she did not wish to complete it in as lurid a fashion as before an army of nurses and doctors bemoaning the haplessness of their profession.

  Her mother had died in just that way. A spectacle the nuns had made of her, as if they thought they were teaching Eva a lesson, or providing a warning to their other patients. There was no shouting, no dramatic last testament to be taken upon a demand in desperation. And there was no deathbed conversion. The last rites, which her mother did not request, were conveyed into Helen’s ear somewhere below a whisper, as far as Eva could make them out; perhaps it was the Latin. Nevertheless, the priest and the nuns and the novices and seminarians and orderlies and the undertaker and anyone else who could be summoned for the pageant made quite a production out of her mother’s death. Eva asked for a screen, a curtain on wheels, to at least shield her mother from gawkers: all of her, cheeks to feet, swelled near to the point of explosion. But the request went unanswered, and people kept fusting and swishing around her mother. Taking her pulse, her temperature, lifting her nightdress so they might listen to the gale that would submerge her organs. It was anything but dignified, her mother transformed into a doll or a medical seminar.

  Miss Williams did not want to die in this manner. She did not want to die with regret. But the resistance in her joints, the wear and weight of remaining upright, even in the bed—she was certain she was larded with regret and the slippery reminiscences that accompany it. She wished that she had been quieter as a girl, that she had devoted more time to studying her mother’s face. She did not want to die without being able to remember that face, the curls on either side pouring over her ears, the high bun pulled tightly to the back, the wave of hair above her forehead. But the face: it was blank, almost, except for the requisite features. But the contours, their reception of the light, were vague; her lips: were they thin or generous? How they might have curved as she smiled or thinned in anger? When she cried, did her mother conceal her tears by looking up, as though balancing them before they dared to trickle out and make landfall upon her cheeks?

  Out of the myriad of facial features Miss Williams had observed in her travels and teaching, she could not decide which ones might have fit her mother, who was certainly a pretty, if mostly unadorned, woman. Helen had no jewelry, but for a tawny wedding band that turned Helen’s finger green beneath the metal, a pair of earrings and matching string of pearls she rarely wore. Helen kept them in a pouch she secured to her wrist, and took them out only for “occasions”—when her father had a contract, for instance, for a new associate to sign. Afterwards, the pearls had to be retired to their pouch hidden in Helen’s sleeve.

  If she could not guess at her mother’s features, Miss Williams knew quite affirmatively that Helen had to be pretty, if she was going to survive the kind of life her father was furnishing. This Miss Williams had figured bit by bit over the years of her life, particularly as she had to teach herself the ignominious business of salesmanship. Miss Williams had manuscripts, her credentials, and her qualifications to sell, but Helen had Mr. Williams, Eva’s father, to peddle to the world. Helen not only had to be pretty but fetching, conspicuous in how she mastered beauty’s virtues and details. She might have had to bat an eyelash or apply a confident, supercilious stare, to either secure a scheme with her husband or take down a fool no longer so bewitched by her husband’s deals.

  But Miss Williams was no longer confident of the distinct color of her mother’s hair beyond the requisite brown; whether it bore streaks of blonde and red, as the course of autumn foliage takes in its languorous exit; and as Eva’s own hair appeared, under the proper angle of the sun. Was her mother’s skin, before her illness, bright, or defeated and sallow as it was when she was dying? There were other changes, too, as Helen Conover Williams struggled with age and infirmity. The shapes that made up her face fell away. Was the almond of her eyes always drooping, the plane of her cheeks always collapsing in painfully minute measurements? Or was her mother beautiful in some other way that now she could not name because she lacked the terminology, the knowledge of those elements that completed her mother’s face? In the bed where her mother laid, benumbed and deteriorating, at the sanitarium, Helen was wrapped in shawls and linens but segregated from her animating properties. Her mother’s voice, high and thin, as if on the verge of disappearing from the horizon, was what Eva had managed to hold onto, and the stories it told as it went along in its own kind of determination.

  The first story Miss Williams remembered was the tale of the mirrored knight. He began life as a poor boy who liked to collect shiny trifles as any boy does. From the street he could cull screws and nails, horseshoes, and the spokes of bicycles. From the tenements, he took hinges off doors, and gears from clocks. The local ragman helped him yank the toes off steel-toed boots. He pulled buttons from uniforms and the metal levers off telegraph keys. They were just bits and pieces, salvage or junk, and people did not notice. This was a time of great factories, men and women pouring into buildings of brick-and-mortar to manipulate great machines. There was so much metal seemingly living and breathing among the people, and the bellows, and steam, that we humans were becoming mechanical ourselves. But the boy was not interested in saving humanity.

  His plan was to build a castle out of all this refuse, these crumbs and discards, because of how his family was forced to live, much as Eva’s family had to on occasion. They crowded into a quarter of a windowless room with three other families, each family’s space cordoned off with rope and furniture, and sheets worn thin as the walls that separated each apartment. They cooked and slept and suffered through fevers together in that room, and they had to relieve themselves in a pot all the families shared. Babies slept in old dresser drawers, and young boys cried facing the corner of the wall, if they were lucky and managed to chisel out any privacy.

  Once he finished building his castle, he’d take whatever was left to make tools and sundries, and he and his family would grow food on their own land, and raise their own animals; construct forges and roads and dig a moat so deep that none could pass over it. The boy wanted nothing less than a world onto itself so finally his family would have no need of landlords and butchers, grocers and dairy men, coppers who shooed them away from the public steps or the City Hall; and he wanted to be rid of carriage drivers, nurses, and doctors too, and all those who demanded too much in return for performing their duties when the boy and his family had nothing to give.

  So he kept on collecting his scraps and flotsam until it seemed to multiply against itself; it truly became worth something in its weight and height, a spectacle people would pay to see, if there was a place to show it. A wise man offered the boy a warehouse where he could store his treasure as he added to it; the man would charge visitors a penny a peek to look at this man-made wonder, a mountain of steel. The man promised to split the proceeds, a square fifty-fifty deal. The small civilization of forgotten brass, copper, silver plating, and nickel was transported to the warehouse, and placed behind a broad set of windowed doors. There it grew again from the axles and siding the boy wrenched off carriages and the roofs of railroad cars. From the blackened iron and steel of potbelly stoves, he harvested doors and drapers, and he took in old pots and pans, irons and bodies of sewing machines that had been dumped along the railroad routes out of town. From the rubbish of lost homes, he would build what would finally be his own; with the pennies that came in, he would have the money to furnish it.

  But one day he went to the warehouse to find the broad windowed doors open and his treasure gone. The entire lock, stock, and barrel of it had disappeared, not even a curl or shaving. It was as if his majestic collection had only been a figment of his imagination. All of those nights he spent staring at his work, seeing the castle take shape as though it would materialize out of silver clouds organizing themselves in the sky; all those days of hammering and ripping, the more stubborn and sharp castings slic
ing into his hands when a piece refused to be removed from its body, all for naught, unless . . . unless he could exact a price. For he knew who had done this, and the kind of man he was; a man who could only love himself, and wanted only for himself, so much so that he could not stand to think of another man’s riches or pleasures. The most selfish man of all could be brought down, though, by the thing he loved the most.

  So the boy started a new collection, one that would not have to be as nearly as massive as his original, but surely just as fantastic. It would be composed solely of mirrors. Out of hideous superstitions and disastrous circumstances he’d strike against the man who wronged him, and regain his fortune. What a small dream his first ambition suddenly seemed, to seek mere sanctuary in material that bent only to fire. Now he would avenge his loss through a method that was flamboyant yet invisible. Nothing registered among his friends and acquaintances as his hunting grounds extended throughout the city, for the antecedents of mirrors are so small as to go unnoticed, and yet they grow into instruments of mighty strategy. He found broken mirrors to be salvaged in the collapsed homes of the most desperate tenement dwellers, and he found broken mirrors in the former salons and parlors of beauticians and barbers, in old theaters, decrepit water closets, in schools and factories and any location where humans gathered and needed to be reminded they were still individuals.