The evening star rose.
2
Clare
CLARE WOKE UP WITH a terrible headache in a dark room she did not know.
On the nightstand: a steel basin curved like a kidney bean, a steel pitcher, and a vase in the guise of a white cat. Pink carnations rose from its ceramic head like bright ideas.
On the facing wall: the silver body of Jesus on the cross, His head dropped to His chest. Asleep.
A window gleamed, half open, its pale curtains shifting. Under the pane, in the open eye of the window, the city skyline glimmered.
Was that her mother asleep in the easy chair, her arms resting loosely in her lap, her red hair a shadowy cap of curls?
Silence emptied the room of warmth; Clare tried to bend her knees. They were not there. She reached down and touched them. Her hand felt her knees; her knees felt nothing. She could not move her legs at all.
Before the cry rising in her throat could escape, she caught sight of the stranger.
The old woman hovered over the foot of Clare’s bed, and into the room crept the fragrance of laundry drying outside and of leeks and clover and tall grass mowed early in the morning. A faded blue sunbonnet hid her face.
You see me with your spirit-eyes, daughter, said the woman. Now run to me on your spirit-legs.
The forget-me-nots on her skirt nodded, and in its pleated shadows flashed ferrets and mallards and owls.
She sank close to Clare and touched the girl’s side. A wind swept through Clare, as if the bars of her rib cage were parting. Her own breath carried her out.
Out of her body.
Weightless and fleshless, Clare hung in the air beside the old woman and stared down at the slender body that had housed her so faithfully for seventeen years. The long brown hair fell like water down both sides of the pillow. The wide green eyes stared past her, empty. Only the bruise on her forehead was new.
I can’t believe it! I can’t believe time has run out!
You are not dead, my daughter, said the woman.
In the chair, Clare’s mother slept on, still as a snowbank. Through the carnations on the nightstand flowed streams of light, the spawning grounds of a million tiny stars.
Molecules, said the old woman.
The steel vessels on the nightstand hummed; swarms of diamonds kept the shape of basin and pitcher.
Everything alive looks dead and everything dead looks alive, said the old woman and floated to the door, where she paused, glancing over her shoulder, and nodded for Clare to follow.
Clare hesitated.
I’ve known you since you were born, daughter. It was my hand guided you into your body then, same as I guided your mother into hers. She could see into the future when she was your age.
They were rolling together down the corridor like fog.
You were born here, daughter, in the women’s wing. Sixth floor. So was your brother, who died before you were born.
Who are you? whispered Clare.
They passed the head nurse, asleep with her eyes open, frozen at her station.
They passed Clare’s chart on the wall beside her. The chart, on which very little was written, fluttered in the rack like a flag of truce.
What’s wrong with me?
Concussion by baseball. Thrower unknown—to you.
But not to you? asked Clare.
The Ancestress did not answer.
Tomorrow morning your mother will ask you, “How do you feel?” and you will tell her, “I can’t move my legs.” Doctors will give you tests and find no damage. They will tell you they’ve done all they can and that only time and rest can heal you.
And will it? asked Clare.
That depends on the doctor you carry within you, replied the Ancestress. Look into this room. What do you see?
On the bed nearest the door lay the shape of a sleeping man.
I see a house with lamps burning in two windows, answered Clare.
And in the other bed?
Clare drifted over the nightstand with its pitcher and basin identical to hers.
Is this another house? A very dark one?
Abandoned, said the Ancestress. So many people give up the ghost at this hour, when pulses beat slower and hearts close down to rest.
He’s dead?
The Ancestress nodded.
And the other one—he’s alive?
He has his lamp on, does he not?
And for everybody, it’s the same? asked Clare.
The Ancestress nodded. The nearly well leave many lights burning. Others leave—
Did I leave a light burning in my house? exclaimed Clare, very much frightened.
At the rim of her house she sank down and pushed at the warm flesh. Cell parted from cell, rib from rib; she glided in and looked out of her eyes at the Ancestress, who was binding the ribbon of her own breath around Clare’s head.
Then, turning toward the night, she spread pale wings that Clare had not noticed before. The speckled bird that the Ancestress had become darted out the window and was gone.
Until that night it was her mother, Helen Ericson Bishop, and not Clare who had the gift of second sight. On her eighth birthday Helen overheard a neighbor tell her father, “You’ll never raise that girl,” and she believed she would never live long enough to grow up. The long tunnel of time leading from her past to her future closed down. Time became space, a great pathless field.
In exchange for three of her father’s osteopathic treatments and two jars of honey from her father’s bees, the doctor who lived across the street gave Helen an X-ray on his machine, the first one in Corunna. It found a spot hovering on her lungs like a shadowy bird.
“Let her drink a pint of cream every day and sleep outside till she’s well,” said the doctor.
All winter Helen slept on the back porch and woke under drifts of snow heaped high on her eiderdown, like a tombstone of cold wool. In the spring birds thumped and murmured on the roof overhead where her father scattered suet and seeds. Every morning, when the light shone milky on the wicker furniture, a raccoon stepped through the hole in the screen and stared at her for a long time before helping himself to the apples she set out for him. Once, when she threw off her blankets, a flying squirrel leapt up, sprang through the screen, and vanished into the cherry trees.
After she was well Helen discovered she could predict the sex of unborn children and the outcome of illnesses lasting more than three days. During a typhoid epidemic women came to her, begging to know whether they should order their coffins now or later. Depressed by these visits, Helen announced that the gift of prophecy had left her. Two weeks later she was declared dead of a burst appendix, during which pronouncement she left her body—she saw it lying on her bed, helpless and heavy as a fur coat in summer—and rose and passed through the walls of her room like steam.
To her surprise she did not meet the east wall of the First Congregational Church, which she knew stood next door, but found herself knee deep in snake grass on the bank of a river. The water was so clear she could see white stones resting on the bottom, like eggs, except that they were perfectly round.
On the opposite bank waited a vast silent throng that receded, as if on invisible bleachers, their faces still and strange to her, though in some she recognized her own eyes—the “Ericson eyes”—and the shape of her own face, and she knew herself to be part of that family, closest to the recently dead, the women in white, the men in black, the lovely fabric growing faint, almost threadbare among the more remote ancestors, turning, in those farthest from her, to feathers, wings, the faces of birds.
Come over, called the Ancestors.
“And I would have done it, too,” Helen told Clare many years later, “if it hadn’t been for the Dresden clock. Before Nell broke it, when it chimed the hour, a tiny moon came up in the window. Nobody but Mother was allowed to touch that clock, but when I was sick she carried it to my bed and put it in my hands. I died at five in the afternoon, and the clock began to chime, and I hu
rried back into my body to watch the moon come up.”
After she was well she found she could read the minds of dogs. People brought her their dogs to train. While she housebroke the doctor’s Irish setter, the family gave her room and board for a week. That winter she discovered she could hear the whistles of hunters calling their dogs, pitched beyond the range of human hearing.
Her marriage to Hal Bishop and the move to Ann Arbor changed her. She heard fewer such sounds, and the minds of animals gradually were closed to her, as if her own mind hid a sanctuary for birds and beasts to which she had lost the way. Sometimes, when she received bad news, the gift would surface, and Helen would say, “This knowing a thing before it happens is terrible. It’s a power from the devil.”
Hal taught chemistry at the University and did not believe in the devil. But Helen’s father would say, “It’s a gift from God. You’re a good girl. Why shouldn’t God give you a little something extra?”
3
Common Prayer
IF ONLY HE’D BEEN someplace else.
“Willie?”
Ben knew Willie was a light sleeper. The shape under the covers did not stir.
“Willie, I think I killed somebody tonight.”
A hand snaked out and switched on the reading lamp hooked over the bedboard.
“What are you talking about?”
“I hit a baseball across the river at Island Park and it konked somebody.”
Willie sat up.
“You know for sure it hit somebody?”
“I heard an ambulance.”
“You didn’t see it?”
“I ran,” said Ben. “We all ran.”
“Better to walk,” said Willie. “When you run, you admit your guilt.”
Ben shook his head.
“I should’ve waited. I should’ve waited to see how bad it was.”
“What do you mean you should’ve waited? You want to go to jail? You want to be paying somebody’s doctor bills for the next ten years?”
“I want to know who I hit.”
“If it was real bad, it’ll be in the paper tomorrow,” Willie said reassuringly.
“Will it tell which hospital?” asked Ben.
“It always tells which hospital. For God’s sake, Ben, don’t hang around the hospital asking questions.”
Willie turned off the light and slid back under the covers.
“It might not be serious. Don’t worry about it till you know. Thank God for one thing.”
“What?” asked Ben in a tight voice.
“You didn’t get caught.”
The light of what their mother called the hunter’s moon silvered everything in the room except the balsa model Piper Cub which seemed to float just below the ceiling, out of the moon’s reach. Their father had made it for Ben’s fifth birthday (Willie had received a box of soldiers), and the balsa struts were so complicated and the tissue wings so delicate that neither Ben nor Willie had been allowed to touch it. Hanging on the wall just below it, their father’s mitt gathered the moonlight in its sunken palm.
Lord, make it so that whoever I hit isn’t hurt.
“Willie?”
Light on again.
“What is it now?”
“Can you pray that whoever I hit isn’t hurt?”
“You think God listens to me and not to you?” grumbled Willie, secretly pleased, since he himself believed this was true.
“Come on, Willie. You’ve had more practice.”
With a snort of irritation, Willie climbed out of bed, knelt at his bookcase, and pulled out The Book of Common Prayer.
“Can’t you just pray from your bed?” asked Ben, a little awed.
“I don’t address the Supreme Being of the universe lying in bed,” answered Willie.
He opened the door to the wardrobe he shared with his brother.
“Guess you have to get dressed to talk to the Supreme Being of the universe, huh?” said Ben.
Willie cast him a chilly glance.
“I’m putting on a bathrobe.”
Like an overgrown shepherd in a Sunday school pageant, he opened the prayer book and cleared his throat. Ben, deeply touched by all this effort on his behalf, listened attentively as Willie’s voice tolled:
“‘Oh, most gracious Father, we fly unto Thee and implore Thy mercy for Thy servant lying under the visitation of Thine hand. If it be Thy will, preserve his life, that there may be place for repentance; but if Thou has otherwise appointed, let Thy mercy supply to him the want of the usual opportunity for the trimming of his lamp.’”
“How about the baseball?” asked Ben, to whom the lamp seemed a peculiar digression.
“The prayer includes all particular situations,” replied Willie.
“But will God know we’re talking about a baseball?” persisted Ben. “Couldn’t He—I know this sounds funny, but there are so many big problems, wars and floods and ships going down and—”
“He looks into our hearts,” said Willie.
“Oh. Our hearts.”
Willie found his place and continued.
“‘Stir up in him such sorrow for sin and such fervent love for Thee as may in a short time do the work of many days; that among the praises which Thy saints and holy angels shall sing to the honor of Thy mercy through eternal ages, it may be to Thy unspeakable glory, that Thou hast redeemed the soul of this Thy servant from eternal death and made him partaker of the everlasting life, which is through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’”
Whose prayer keeps buzzing round Your left ear? sings Gabriel.
And God answers: That’s Elena Kohn. Somebody stole her suitcase on the platform of the Nuremberg station. The pale wings beat harder. She had all her money and her passport in that suitcase, He adds.
And that prayer scratching Your right shoulder?
Wei Wu, says God. His father has been dying for forty-five days. Cancer.
And that one passing back and forth like a film over your eyes?
Willie Harkissian in Ann Arbor, Michigan, sighs God. Up to his old tricks.
Willie arranged his bathrobe on a hanger and climbed back into bed. Ben closed his eyes.
If he’d walked to Mike’s Grill five minutes earlier, whoever he’d hit would not have occupied that fateful space in Island Park. If Clackett had pitched to Henry instead of to Ben, the ball would have barely dribbled across the street. Henry was no hitter once darkness came on. If Sol had paid for his malt with a five-dollar bill and had to wait for Mike to make change, whoever it was would already have passed by.
To hit a ball into the darkness. That was truly a goofy thing to do.
Close your eyes. Imagine you are in outer space, standing on a distant star. Now look back at the earth. He could almost hear his father, telling him what he’d always told Ben when everything went wrong.
From a star whose single beam of light cut across the vast loneliness of inner space, Ben looked back and fell in love with the earth. It wasn’t perfect, but it was there. It was better than nothing, better than empty space. On the face of the waters moved convoys, merchant ships, battleships, troop carriers. In the bowels of the deep lay destroyers, U-boats, submarines. The Reuben James. The Kearney. The galleons, rafts, longboats, and fishing craft of his ancestors, their bones and booty and baggage. The sleep of slaves, of princes, of pirates. Of men and women searching for a better life.
And over the continents, over the ragged carpet of Russia, over North America and South America kissing at the Panama Canal, over the Great Wall of China and the gigantic bean that was Australia, over the silence of Antarctica, flew swarms of fighters, their small weapons glinting in the beams of the indifferent sun.
When Ben opened his eyes, Willie was gone and everything in the room looked as if it had a hangover. The grey pallor of early morning sifted across Willie’s desk, his papers stacked in two piles with their corners trued off, and across his own desk, littered with school-work, over which half a dozen baseball trophies stood guard. In this ligh
t, the little golden players did not look worth winning.
Why should prayers work? thought Ben. If prayers worked, Hitler would have been stopped at the border of Poland by angels with swords of fire.
He could hear his mother moving around in the living room, which was also her bedroom. When she was tired, she slept in her clothes like a traveler, taking off nothing but her stockings and underpants. It didn’t matter to Wanda what she slept in, as long as she had clean underpants when she was awake. And not torn, either. If she were in an accident, she didn’t want people talking about her that way.
Since she had never, in all her life, had her own room, she did not miss having one now. If she ever made enough money to buy a house as big as the one she grew up in, she’d rent rooms, the same as her mother did. As a child Wanda would come home from school to find that her room had been rented and all her things moved into another room, vacant—but for how long? The best rooms never stayed vacant. They had brass beds and marble sinks with oval basins. Once for a whole week she slept in a brass bed and washed at a marble sink—Wanda and her mother laundered all the sheets and towels, made the beds, dusted the rooms, and after someone moved out, scrubbed the floors on their hands and knees.
Her father sent money. He never came to visit, because it turned out that he already had a wife when he married her mother, but sometimes he sent a doll to Wanda on her birthday.
To Ben as he entered the kitchen, she looked thinner, almost a stranger with short grey hair—he still could not get used to her with bobbed hair—laying the cereal dishes on the green oilcloth.
“Marsha called,” she said.
“When?”
“Last night. Didn’t you find my note on your bed?”
“I must have slept on it. Did she say what she wanted?”
“You think she’d tell me?”
He opened the front door and a gust of wind fluttered the newspaper at his feet. His heart racing, he picked it up and carried it to the living room and sat down on the sofa that hid his mother’s bed. With studied casualness, he laid aside the comics and opened the paper and scanned the headlines.
ROOSEVELT PROPOSES OPENING MINES, PENDING MEDIATION BOARD STUDY
Things Invisible to See Page 2