by Carole Maso
Mother & Child
ALSO BY CAROLE MASO
Ghost Dance
The Art Lover
The American Woman in the Chinese Hat
AVA
Aureole
Defiance
Break Every Rule
The Room Lit By Roses
Beauty Is Convulsive
Mother & Child
Carole Maso
COUNTERPOINT
BERKELEY
Mother and Child copyright © Carole Maso 2012
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-61902-090-0
Cover design by Natalya Balnova
Interior design by meganjonesdesign.com
COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
As we fall through the
Terrible Beauty of Time
Light floods the Children’s Garden—
for Nana and Rose
And Music moves through the Heart’s Dark Atrium—
for Papa
And for Tata, at the Vortex
Hansel, in the Dark Wood
And in the Soulstorm, Paul.
In memory of the disappearing men,
who were my friends:
Liam Rector
Jason Shinder
David Foster Wallace
Romulus Linney
Peter Jennings
Daniel Simko
David Markson
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgments
1
wind
THE GREAT WIND came and the maple tree that had stood near the house for two hundred years split in half, and from its center poured a torrent of bats. Inside, the child was stepping from her bath and the mother swaddled her in a towel. Night was all around them. The child thought she could feel the wind moving through her and the places where her wings were beginning to come through. Soon it would be the time of the transformation, the mother said. The child said she was almost ready, but she was not ready yet.
Before bed the mother told the child a story. When your body begins to transform, you will bleed in a new way each month for several days. The child pictured herself as a fountain: a mermaid or a dolphin or a fish spouting blood and magnificence. She closed her eyes. In the Children’s Garden, the first rose was about to open. The child’s tooth was loose. She tinkered with it and listened to the mother and smelled her hard like an animal and loved her with all her heart. She felt happy to be alive in the blood conversation and in the night and the world that grew deeper and stranger and somehow brighter with her mother’s words. She held her arms open to the night, but her eyes closed; she could not hold on to waking life any longer.
The mother looked at the sleeping child before her and indulged herself for a moment in the illusion of stasis. For a full minute nothing changed.
That evening, in the hours still left to her, after the child was asleep, the mother felt at the mercy of all things: the wind, the tree, the story, the child’s beautiful and curious face, the rate at which the rose opened. Out the window, pure light flooded from the tree. She tried to look away, and though it filled her with a certain dread, she could not. Whether she was turned toward the tree or away from it, it did not matter now. The world possessed the mother and not the other way around: she did not possess the world. She closed her eyes but something in the empty space above her head was emphatic and hovered and would not let her rest.
Like so many others, she had fled the burning city and returned to this dark wood, but she wondered now if by choosing to come back here to the place of her childhood, she was putting them at risk in some way. No one else would think that: the Valley was a paradise, and in summer it attracted many vacationers and people from the city. The Valley was verdant and the silver river glistened and on the river there were bright boats. With this the mother must have drifted off, for when she opened her eyes, the child was standing over her, holding something glittery in her open hand.
Look, she whispered. The mother sat up. What have you got there? The child opened her hand. Oh, she said, a tooth! It was smooth and shiny and they both admired it. Open your mouth the mother said, and she saw the gap where the tooth had been. Then she turned to the darkened window and looking out she sighed, soon you will be all grown.
She remembered when the child was just a baby and was placed in the silver basin and raised up into the air, her arms and legs open like a star. Tell me that story again of the silver basin and the water and the star, the child said, and the child placed her stuffed lamb and her last baby tooth on the ledge. All blew in the wind, and the mother’s story came in and out of audibility, but the star was constant, and the child listened. The night world pressed up against them. There was no way of partitioning it. The mother knew there was no safe place inside, though she did not like to think of it. You never knew what might be happening next: the cat, Bunny Boy, rushing by with a chipmunk in his jowls or a snake or worse. Even her garden, without her, in only a short time would go completely back to wilderness—to loosestrife and milkweed and nettles. A tangle of wild grasses and reeds and dark brambles would take over, and in the deepening furrows, rodents, winged and not, would come in great drifts, and moths and beetles in abundance.
Yes, she said, pulling herself back from the welter, when you were a baby and had been placed in the silver basin and then raised up into the air by the feeble priest, you had opened (it was December) like a Christmas star and sin was washed away.
After the story was finished, the child retrieved her lamb from the sill and placed the tooth under her pillow, and the world, unfastened, blew by. There was much swirling and world being blown in backwards through the chimney to them, but at that moment all that mattered was the child, the tooth, and the lamb. In the distance they heard the sound of sirens. It was one of those nights, rare even in the life of a person who has lived a long time, when clarity comes. The mother looked out the window, as if something long concealed could now be seen in stark relief.
Even though it was night, bright light poured from the center of the felled tree. She had experienced such a fall into brightness only once. So much illuminated in an instant, so little time. Though the moment had not yet arrived, it was fast upon them. The child closed her eyes, and soon enough, she was asleep once more. And though the lamb and the tooth had been removed from the sill, their traces remained, insinuating their way into the mother’s consciousness.
>
The mother would like to keep them in this moment, to stop the process now, to hold them like this a while longer, but no one was interested in what the mother wanted. Was there nothing but indifference, she wondered? She remembered last Sunday’s Mass. At the service, they announced that the God was not there, and His presence in the sacred species had been relegated to a static state, and the congregants reduced to a passive presence. They would have to sit with the absence. No priest available to animate the dormant God. The child had not understood.
Now all was darkness. Sometime in the night, the power had gone out. The wind had not let up. In the early morning when she opened her eyes, the empty space above her head had been filled. The night before, a flame had descended on her head in a dream. She was sure of it, and she was afraid. There was not a soul who could help her now. She heard babbling and chatter, and the child in turn began chattering in her sleep.
Something had entered the house.
LEAVES BLEW BY and branches and brambles covered the floor. The child did not know how the tree had gotten inside. She could barely move around the wreckage. As exciting as it was, she knew that a tree did not belong in the house. Suddenly she remembered the tooth and she found her way to her pillow. The tooth was gone and in its place was a sparkling Sacajawea dollar. She held the radiant head of the Indian girl and walked through an eternity of green in search of her mother. As she made her way to the kitchen with the coin and the lamb, her feet made a whispering and crisping sound that grew louder and louder until the sounds, at first so natural, became deafening: the boughs scratching and keening, and pinecones and nuts bouncing off the windows. In the violence, the child had to shout to be heard.
She decided to sing, and all other sound was absorbed by the song:
Now I Walk in Beauty—
More than a voice it seemed an act of radical purification.
Beauty is Before Me—
Beauty is Behind Me—
Above and Below Me . . .
There, at the end of the hall, in the predawn, the mother stood. She was making a fire.
If in the frenzy of embers the child turned her head, the flames appeared to consume the mother entirely. She stared at the mother encased in light. The mother smiled now when she saw the child, wiping cinders from her brow.
She remembered the light that day was mesmerizing and though it was necessary to look away in order to survive, her entire being was drawn back to that place and there was nothing she could do—thousands of bright souls rushed from the wounded site.
An enormous heat was being generated by the fire and the child knew not to step too close to the flames. It was not yet time for her to become a child of glass, or a child of wax; she had barely begun her life.
The child struggled to speak above the wind and the branches breaking on their heads. Mother, I have a question, the child implored.
The mother looked up. Yes, she called from across the abyss. She handed the child a small flame in a cup.
How old were you, the child asked, when you transformed?
OVERNIGHT THE HOUSE had changed shape. It was now a marvel of transparency. The walls seemed to disappear, and all around them the green world pulsed. Light spilled onto their nightgowns and sap poured down on them. The child knelt and put her head to it. The mother lay next to her, and together they marveled at the dappled light, and the boughs of the tree, and the way it cradled them.
In the night the Great Wind had pollinated the tree’s small, inconspicuous flowers, and they knew that soon the flowers would turn into small fruit that would in turn change into seeds with wings. Wings abounded now, in the tree, in the birds, in the small of the girl’s back. The world is resonant with patterns and repetition. In the mother’s dream, the descending flame reminded her of another flame, and that flame, another, and if she followed the flames back far enough, she might get back to the first flame, she thought, the one that haunted her—but always she lost her way, or got sleepy or distracted and was left in the end only with an inkling, an intimation, and she walked through the world bearing something inside she could not entirely remember or entirely forget, and she was always pulled in two directions.
She sunk for a moment into the lull of moss and loam—the house had become a lair, and it brought her rest. In a way, the mother loved this new house of leaves. She wanted to stay as inconspicuous as possible, as near to invisible as possible, so she might not be sought out, so that she and the child might be forgotten. She wished to be assumed, taken into its shade and be made a shadow for a while. She wished for an aloof god, a distracted one, not a god that sent wind and animated the night. A serene and patient one—one that did not summon or issue edicts. She wanted only peace. A crib or a husk.
As leaf subsides to leaf . . . She remembered the old poem, and Eden sinks to grief . . . Yes, that was it. There was a part of her that wanted to crawl into the hollow of the tree, into its wound, and sleep. She might succumb here in this leafy sepulcher. She might find herself lost in leafstorm or swarm.
The mother clung to the darkly lit hallway where the child once had sung.
The soul seeks solace. The child, who did not care about the soul, pulled at the mother’s gown. The mother was large and beautiful even with the tree in the room. That is what struck the child.
WHAT IF THEY fell deep into a tree trance and forgot to leave? How long had they been there anyway? The child grew frightened—she longed to see the world again, and the mother too longed for the spaciousness of day: the sun as it began, the field where corn would one day grow, the animals blooming beautiful and slow, and of course, the bells. They loved the way the bells held the day and marked time and kept things in place, but when the mother and child at last left the house, it was still dark and no bells could be heard.
Now they walk. The wind had awakened a place that had remained remote and nearly dormant in the mother and suddenly awakened to it, she felt dizzy. She looked at the recumbent figures in the distance, the men asleep in the slopes, the city far off in flames. The child ran ahead—how lovely is the laughing and singing child! The wind, which had diminished, picked up a little, and in the distance the mountains seemed to smoke.
She thought of the tree of light, without top or bottom, without beginning or end, endlessly falling in them. In a few days when the tree men come and hoist the great pillar away from the house, something will exit their bodies and a dark shape—a permanence—will take its place.
INFINITE GRACE WAS available to them, that is what the mother wanted the child to know. On a milkweed pod in the meadow, a crowned chrysalis hung serenely in wait.
The morning creatures were at last awakening in the Valley. Even though the mother had lived in nearness to the animals her whole childhood, every time she was surprised and filled with awe at their appearance. They were as astonishing to her now as when she was a small girl. Just the other day she had woken to a deer wading knee-deep in the pond through the water lilies, its haunches blazing red.
She could see still the white of its tail, its leap away inducing a hazy afterimage. Next to it, a slate blue heron.
The gigantic heads of the horses leaned over the fence. In the pasture, a cadence of sheep. A large, long-legged cat without a tail in shadow, hung back. Somewhere, the wolves traveling in silver packs . . .
IT HAD COME with the Great Wind, under the cover of night, while the Valley had been anesthetized, and now that morning had arrived, and the mist was beginning to lift, and the wind had at last departed, it could be seen quite clearly in the distance. Look! White sails could be discerned in the distance and a faint music—an accordion, cowbells, a most charming sound, and so inviting, as if conjured not played, could be heard wafting across the meadow.
There it stood, shimmering, next to the river. The mother and child walked toward it and stared, intent on memorizing it, for who knew how long this vision would hold? After all it was the Time of Disappearance, and all across the Valley the men had begun to vanish. A
s much as it was possible, the mother had grown accustomed to the subtractions and the diminishments, but with the appearance of this extraordinary shape before them—so unexpected, so compelling in the ever-emptying landscape—they were filled with longing.
People had begun to gather. Where had it come from? What was its country of origin? Some conjectured, Belgium. The mother did not know. Estonia.
Germany.
The Caspian Sea.
Arabia.
The Black Forest.
Perhaps Armenia . . .
Or Finland!
Now the child spoke. It says something! As they watched, red letters were hoisted one by one into the air on poles with streamers. It said—but it was hard to decipher. One of the elders took out her binoculars: S-P-I-E-G-E-
Spiegel, it says Spiegel! I told you it was from Germany, one of the Palatines of the Valley said. Spiegel is mirror in German. Spiegel—P-A-L . . . What is a Spiegelpal?
Spiegelpalais, it says Spiegelpalais. It’s some sort of tent, someone said finally, and the Spiegelpalais made the meadow new and strange to them.
With spiegels, someone sighed, and at night, white lights.
And a tightrope!
Perhaps it’s a kind of circus from Germany.
The sun made its slow passage across the sky. The onlookers increased. It was the Age of Wonders. No one moved.
2
THAT NIGHT WHEN they were back at home at last, it appeared to them like an apparition, separating the dark, parting it long enough to make itself visible and say, I am here. It had come in with the tree, but in the day it had folded itself up and waited.
Chittering came from the winged one’s mouth, and the child cowered and the mother ran to get the broom and the umbrella. It was an Annunciation clearly, but of what the mother had no idea.
Behold, the creature said, swooping down on them, and then all was gibberish. Its wingspan in the small room, enormous.