by Bruce Bauman
7
THE SONGS OF SALOME
The Sound of the Silents
I must digress. Please don’t be impatient. Impatience has the mixed aroma of a too-hot baby’s bottle and a freshly unwrapped rubber. Listen closely and you’ll see that others hurt me much more than I ever hurt myself. Others burned my brain and others promised new drugs and therapies and others always send me back here. No longer can I be rescued by Alchemy. Now my granddaughter Persephone is lost to me.
Now, my prebirth in Orient: a mix of fragrant colors humming of nature and the sinister odors of incessant prattle. Often splendorously unencumbered by trauma, more often than not marked by days of boredom, nights of tedium, except when the kids and their parents ostracized me with taunts of “retard.” The joyless cadavers impugned me for my raucous, intrepid, and immodest life. They were the first, but not the last, to despise me for telling untrue truths. Alchemy always claimed there is no Universal Truth, only shadows and permutations of truth. Yes, I teased him, that is true and false, because I have lived between the shadows of the truths and the lies.
It is my fact that I have suffered periods of despair and staggering pain when I wondered if I should have ever left our isolated two-story clapboard house about a quarter mile from the bay, across from the old slave cemetery. I’d sit for hours on the roof, painting watercolors or just inhaling nature.
Except for Hilda and Dad’s room, I painted murals on all the walls about every six months, perhaps more often. My own imagined treeflowers and natural hallucinations. My dad shook his head. He endearingly called me “Salo in Wonderland.” Hilda, the woman who called herself my mother, possessed not one iota of magical wonder. We spoke different languages. “Salome,” she would declare, “there is no such thing as a treeflower!” When I asked, “Why not?” she turned away from me as if I were a miscreant daughter from another planet, denying any culpability for my behavior. Dad was a man who loved order. He had the most compulsively groomed farm in Suffolk County. Too often my “shenanigans” sent him to his twelve-pack and smokes. But he loved me, my creative chaos, more than he loved order.
My dad said, “We’re all common as snowflakes and not near as pure.” He was only half right. Thinking of them always raises a guilty sorrow. It never made sense until later. They called me their “number-one girl.” Like Dad and Greta—not Hilda, who could rattle on and on—I was introverted and, I would say, socially unemancipated. I barely talked to anyone until I was ten. I never spoke in school.
I knew pretty early on I was different. Hilda was round and short and Dad muscular and compact as a frozen haystack. I ended up even taller than Dad. I looked like her. That’s what Life magazine wrote in ’69 when they printed Xtine’s photos of me as one of the new “faces of the year with a Garboesque profile.” And they didn’t have a clue.
Each May we’d take a trip to the city for dinner at the “21” Club. The only extravagance I remember. To Dad, New York City represented the citadel of hedonistic heathenry. We took the trip when I turned chronologically thirteen, in 1956, not long after I’d seen Ninotchka on the one television station we got clearly, one Saturday afternoon. At the table next to us: Greta. So regally alone. Hat on her head. Eyes dissecting me. I’ve never stopped imagining what she thought as she watched me. She spoke not one word to us. Her face implacable. That day, while I sipped my tomato bisque, I felt her eyes, smelled her fatigue, her horrid despair. Yes, I did. I could. She didn’t acknowledge me. When we exchanged glances, it triggered the same inexplicable hurt I felt whenever I examined myself in the mirror for too long.
The next day, Dad asked me to talk to him in the living room after lunch. He sat on the awful rose-patterned sofa. He almost never sat there but in his wooden rocking chair with its tobacco-stained tan seat cushion, smoking. He loved those Winstons. I thought about sitting in his chair but chose the sofa. He puffed on his cigarette and then ground it out in the ceramic ashtray I’d made in grade school. He clasped his massive, powerful hands. “That woman you saw yesterday, in the hat, you saw her, right?”
“The weirdess who was constantly staring at me? Uh-huh.”
“Did you recognize her?”
“Yeah, some old-time movie star.”
“Yes, and well, your mother and me, we were never able to bring a healthy child into this world.” He just spit that out and I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about and he started tearing up. His voice all strangly, like mine is now. “That woman is your mother. Your birth mother.”
I felt discarded and unwhole, like one of the hollowed-out shells I collected on the beach. Hilda had been listening in the kitchen. I heard her weeping and I started crying, too. I picked up Dad’s sweaty right hand and squeezed it between my two hands. I used to have spectacularly agile, sexy hands that made men mad with desire. I am seventy-eight in human years and now they look as if they are the hands of a thousand-year-old leper.
I wanted my hands to tell him I loved him.
After a minute, he girded himself and began rambling on about how they “got” me through the lawyer William Bickley Sr., who all the kids made fun of because he was such a priss—found out later he was married—who owned this ridiculous Tudor mansion overlooking the Sound. Hilda’s sister, my Aunt Clara, worked for Bickley Sr., and he arranged the adoption even before I was born.
“Dad,” I asked, not at all intending to hurt him, “who is my father?”
He wiped his lip, his face a mask of impassivity, but I sensated beyond the mask that my question gorged his soul. “I don’t know, Salo. Miss Garbo and Bickley got everything fixed. We are your parents.” He lit another cigarette. “Salo, sometimes you have to wait a long time before you realize that the pain the truth has caused is for the best in the end.”
I never told anyone in Orient except Kyle. My one true friend. Kyle was a year older than me. With her blond-reddish hair and creamy skin like a Botticelli Venus, everyone on the whole North Fork bowed in her presence.
We first met Malcolm Teumer outside Boyle’s Diner. He drove up and parked his two-seater Karmann Ghia, which was something special. He slow-strutted like a Euro Marlon Brando and leaned forward, his face inches from Kyle’s. Her voice so provocatively flirty, she asked, “How about you let me drive your fabulous car for a while?” She jumped in the driver’s seat. “C’mon, man. Let’s go.”
Off they went, while I stood there. Art, who was sweeping up the sidewalk in front of the diner, frowned. “Salome, stay away from him. I don’t like him.”
We started hanging out with Teumer in this deserted, decrepit shed in the Huddler cornfields overlooking the Sound, which he wanted to turn into a winery. One night, I watched the meteor showers sing across the moonlit sky while Malcolm and Kyle fucked. A few weeks later, Kyle left Malcolm’s one late night and drove off alone in the Karmann Ghia. Maybe she was drunk, or maybe they had a fight. She skidded into the bay at the end of Route 25 and drowned.
The night before her funeral, I walked alone along the Sound. I sank to my knees on the pebbly beach and cut my palm ever so slightly with the sharp edge of a shell. From my blood appeared Kyle. She knelt beside me and held my bleeding hand. “Salome, my sister, before I leave you, I bequeath my enchantress powers to you.” She brought her lips to the cut on my hand and kissed it. “I must go.” Her voice and translucent body elevated above the gravitational hum of the waves.
She came to me again only one more time. Other ancestors came more often.
I ached for Kyle. I missed her so. I don’t regret my many pleasure-burying-pain fucks, unlike lust fucking or angel fucking, which is when you are in love and which I cherish. Malcolm, I regret. We met in his shed. He made a fire. We got drunk. I got pregnant.
That pregnancy caused Dad and Hilda so much pain. I woke up earlier than usual one morning and went into the kitchen. Hilda was crying. Aunt Clara was sitting next to her, stroking her cheek. She told her, “It’s not your fault you couldn’t have your own kids.” When she noticed m
e in the doorway, Aunt Clara jumped up and asked what I wanted for breakfast. I pretended like I hadn’t heard them.
And then I overheard Dad on the phone with Greta. His voice, usually as sturdy as his tractor, shivered with shame. “I’m so sorry we failed you. We failed. I failed. I just don’t know how this happened.” The belief in his failure as a father began the decay of his physical self that signaled the first signs of Gravity Disease.
Dad had a talk with Teumer. I bet he did more than talk. Teumer left town. I didn’t want him to be the father of my child.
Hilda wanted me to hide my pregnancy. I refused. And Dad agreed. I always stood up for my actions. I began making drawings of Petra Sansluv, Pearl Diver by the Black Sea, the story of an abandoned boy who formed special bonds with the creatures in the Black Sea.
When the time came, Bickley arranged to send the doctor. He strutted into my room dressed in a navy blue suit, with his square jaw and comic-book-black hair. He looked and sounded like an actor playing a defrocked doctor on a soap opera. He gave me drugs and then I don’t remember much at all … The baby … Stillborn … Strangled by his own umbilical cord. I never saw him. That loss was over sixty years ago, but it was also only a second ago …
We buried the baby in the cemetery about a mile from the house. I burned the Sansluv drawings. I sleepwalked around because that week I was dying, too. I can still feel it in my ancient, dried up uterus—like I have this empty hole inside me—a bloody, ulcerous hole still seeping with babydeath. I can see it when I close my eyes.
I kept slapping my tummy, because I just couldn’t believe my body betrayed me.
Greta never wrote or called. She knew. I found out later that she knew all.
8
THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2001)
Future Shock
Moses flew to Newark and rented a car. He thought about calling a Stuy Town friend who now lived in Paramus, but he didn’t want to try to explain what he didn’t yet understand. He spent the night at the airport Marriott and headed out at 7 A.M. He exited Route 80 at Red Gap, New Jersey, where a sign greeted all visitors HOME TO OVER ONE HUNDRED MILLION B&B CHOCOLATE BARS. From there he drove ten miles to the Collier Layne Health Facility.
Dr. Barnard Ruggles, a small, balding, puckish man in his midfifties, with black-framed glasses and overgrown gray eyebrows, greeted Moses with extreme recalcitrance in his cluttered office. Ruggles explained that he had been treating Salome off and on since 1979 and fully grasped the intricacies of her disorder. Ruggles informed Moses that he needed to take a DNA test and that until he received the results, he wouldn’t discuss any details with him. “Get a room at the DoubleTree in Red Gap. Take a tour of the B&B factory. Eat some chocolate.” He wrinkled up his forehead and rubbed the small mole on the right side of his cheek, which seemed to usher in a complete change of mind. “I may be out of bounds here. I believe you are Salome’s son. I can hear it in your voice. Without qualification I can say it bears an unmistakable similarity to Alchemy’s. What?” Moses’s face must have revealed both his annoyance and surprise. “Did I say something wrong?”
Moses chose to make it easy for Ruggles. “Second time I’ve heard that in twenty-four hours. Go on, please.”
“If, as we presume, this is true, we will need to talk with serious purpose and you will have even more decisions to make.” Ruggles sighed through his nose and looked askance at his diploma from Dartmouth on the wall to his left, as if it could supply an answer. “This, I am sure, has come as a shock to you, but you will come as a, a”—he paused—“a potentially world-shattering shift to Salome.”
“I expected something like that.”
He nodded. “She had been at Alchemy’s compound in Topanga in California, but she’s back now because she managed to ‘escape’ and get down to the main road, where the police found her shining her flashlight at oncoming cars, throwing rocks at their windshields. She violently resisted them, saying she had a mission to accomplish. Which now, she does not remember.” He shook his head almost imperceptibly.
“I see,” Moses said.
“I suggest a man in your condition get some rest.”
“One other question. I assumed Alchemy Savant was paying for this, but you said she was here off and on since the ’70s.”
“I am not at liberty to divulge any particulars. Maybe William Bickley III can. Let me just say a trust was set up by a person of means who must remain anonymous.”
Still maneuvering cautiously, Moses kept his many other questions to himself.
After a visit to the lab, where they swabbed his DNA and drew his blood, Moses got the Collier Layne special at the DoubleTree. He called Jay and his mom, and started to read before soon falling asleep. He spent the next morning brooding at the resort and spa, in the midst of a treacly ex-suburb that made stars of the Barry Manilows and Celine Dions of the world, but also felt like the rural breeding ground for trigger-happy sociopaths like Gary Gilmore. He had less than zero desire to tour the candy factory, but he did make a quick trip the B&B gift shop and bought a box of specialty chocolates for Jay.
After lunch, he lay on the huge bed, aching with exhaustion, wondering, How many blows can my body absorb and comprehend in such a short time? This was the not the first, or last, of countless days and nights he would spend obsessing about the lies we are told, tell ourselves, and ultimately choose to believe. Moses steeled himself: Never again would he trust anyone’s truth to be unadulterated and without motive.
After his nap, he called Laban Lively. The machine-recorded voice played, and Moses hung up without leaving a message. He phoned Sidonna Cherry and updated her. He asked if she could find out some background on Lively and what she thought about the prospects of finding his father in Brazil.
“Now that he knows you have located him, if he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be,” Cherry said with matter-of-fact certainty.
“What if he has any other kids?”
“I can try. If they’re in Brazil, I wouldn’t bet on it.”
Dr. Ruggles called at 4:15. He attempted lightheartedness. “You’re unofficially a Savant. It is still considered preliminary, but I feel confident it will be confirmed.”
A silence wafted, which Moses deciphered as trouble. “I can sense an ‘and’ or a ‘but’ coming. You don’t want me to meet her?”
“Why don’t you come over and we’ll talk.”
In the lobby of Collier Layne, an orderly walked Moses to Ruggles’s office. Moses waited at the doorway. Standing hunched over his desk, shuffling papers, Ruggles barely lifted his head as he asked Moses to sit across from him. Moses sat while Ruggles remained standing.
Moses stiffened, waiting for the next body slam. “We are of the strong opinion that Salome will not be a match for the transplant. We’ve done a preliminary HLA tissue test. We will send samples to your doctor in L.A. You are aware that siblings are the preferred donors. You need to ask Alchemy. Although, as your half brother, there is only a fifty percent chance of a match.”
Moses nodded.
“No doubt you have questions, and I will answer the ones about seeing Salome and any others, but first …” Ruggles now sat down and stared at the four Dubuffet prints on his wall before speaking again. He turned his head and stared balefully into Moses’s eyes from behind his thick glasses. “Salome believes, I have no idea how to put this … that you are not alive … that you were stillborn.”
“What?” Moses shook his head, at first very slowly, then faster and faster until he put his hands on each temple like avise, clamping his head in place. His felt as if his entire body was retracting into itself, receding, collapsing into an embryonic ball. He remained wordless for a moment. Finally, he managed to push out a barely audible plea, “Repeat that and explain. Please.”
“Salome, your mother, believes you are dead and buried in a grave in Long Island close to where she was raised.”
Ruggles got up and gave him a bottle of water and a glass. “You want something stronger?
”
“How about a shot of liquid Valium?” Ruggles raised his forest of eyebrow hair as if to say, “If you need it …” Moses realized he could in fact give it to him. “No, just kidding.”
Ruggles struggled to formulate his words. “This situation has placed me in the most tenuous professional and ethical position. I hate to be the bearer of such an inconceivable”—he paused—“revelation. What I can’t even presume is if she was told you were stillborn by her adoptive parents or if she was told the truth but doesn’t believe it because the process was so traumatic. She is highly, highly sensitive and alternately elastic and brittle.”
“Did you believe I was dead?”
“We had no reason not to. The Bickleys never informed me until two days ago, and there was no mention of you in the trust, as there is of Alchemy.”
“Is my death part of her delusion?”
“Possibly, yes. With Salome, one never knows. She does not accept ‘psychology’ as existing in the remotest realm of science.”
“Is she sane?”
“That’s a definition question. One’s psychological state is based on a cluster of disparate symptoms that, no matter what any authority claims, we don’t really understand. Thomas Szasz made some good arguments, but mental illness is no myth. Salome’s received many reductive diagnoses over the years, ‘severe dissociative disorder,’ ‘depersonalization disorder,’ ‘dissociative fugue,’ ‘dissociative amnesia,’ ‘identity disorder,’ and simple schizophrenia. At first, she was accused of faking to escape arrest for her violent actions. If so, she is an even better actress than her mother.”
Moses’s head tilted forward quizzically.
Ruggles shook his head. “I’m sorry. I should not have said that. In Salome’s first visit here in 1976, the doctors treated her and others with insulin therapy and a primitive form of electroshock, which repulses me.” Ruggles stopped himself, refocused, and continued. “Sorry, I’ve been both too technical and veering off course. As I say, it is difficult for me to make a reductive classification for her. We have adjusted her drug regimen. She certainly has a keen memory when she wants to. The ECT caused some retrograde amnesia and anterograde memory loss, but it has not been significant. She functioned for many years, broke down, and then functioned again. Her accomplishments as an artist are well documented. I believe she can function again. She’s only fifty-seven and physically in excellent health.” Moses did a quick calculation and realized Salome must have been fourteen or fifteen when she had given birth to him. “Right now, with Alchemy being away and Nathaniel Brockton’s physical constraints, her risk of another traumatic …” Ruggles waved his hand and pointed toward some unknown beyond. “Alchemy, not the Bickleys, is now her guardian and her anchor.”