by Carson, Tom
strength, and they are reborn as a noble race of winged men.
To be honest, the epilogue was a bit funny, with nature photography of some distinctly noncommittal-looking seagulls on a rock dissolving into a view of a similar number of men striding around bare-chested in front of a black curtain in strapped-on papier-mâché wings, and trying hard to look like a noble race of winged men without getting unduly puffed up about it, as that wouldn’t be noble. The lack of winged women also did leave one rather suspecting that, noble or not, this race was unwittingly doomed to the briefest of evolutionary trajectories. And the Heart of Avis itself, at which even Daisy coughed very suddenly, did look rather more like a bladder.
But even though some people snickered toward the end, overall Das Herz von Avis had been a smashing success in Provincetown, certainly compared to its awful predecessor. Whatever you thought of the story—which proved awfully hard to follow for those who hadn’t troubled to read the program notes, especially after the organist, already somewhat off her feed after the razor sliced through the eyeball, accidentally played part of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” during Avis and Siegheidi’s love song—the film was tremendously well done, with lots of gloom and mountains and warlocks leaping out from behind chunks of scenery. I had enjoyed it, but on our walk home, Daisy seemed preoccupied.
Her daughter was trotting along between us, gamely enough but looking as if it would be a very long time before she gambled on seeing a film again. The silence was making me uncomfortable, since around Daisy I wasn’t used to it. “I thought the girl who played Siegheidi was awfully good,” I volunteered.
Glancing up and smiling a tad too quickly, Daisy tapped me with her handbag. “Lech,” she said. That made me sulky, because of course I hadn’t meant anything of the kind. I just thought that the actress had done marvelously well at looking like a statue while Frack-Frack was defiling her; even her eyes hadn’t moved. To see how long this could be done in reality, I began to stare at my nose as I walked. But soon I stumbled over Daisy’s nightmarish little dog, who had just come running up from the surf, wondering as usual why the bone that it had found there had disappeared in its mouth. To get another, it ran back down to the waterline, barking squeaky little attacking barks.
When we got back to the cottage, I went into the bathroom. After only a few days, I noticed, I was getting much more nimble with the hypo when I had to inject myself. I forgot to shut off the electric light before I opened the door, and the silvered whites of Daisy’s daughter’s eyes looked back at me from her little bed in the darkened front room before I groped behind myself and found the switch.
In our room, Daisy was lying on our bed, looking at the ceiling. Even though the overhead light was on and she was fully dressed, I automatically started to pull my nightgown off over my head.
“You needn’t bother.” In those words, I heard how much my grudging ways at night had made her suffer, for all that she did what she wanted anyway, and I was glad that the nightgown covering my face had prevented me from seeing hers as she said it. By the time I poked my head back out of the collar, she had composed herself, if indeed she had been visibly discomposed at any point.
“I’m thinking of starting a little project, just for me,” she said.
“If it’s not for me, I don’t care,” I yawned. “What is it?”
“I’m thinking I might write a book.”
“I’ve sailed away,” I said. “I couldn’t even read one.”
“I don’t mean tonight"—she smiled in bright desperation, realizing she couldn’t afford to pass up a single chance to pretend we were amusing to each other-”silly. But I should write a book.”
“What for?” I asked, sitting down on the bed and feeling the marvelous, euphoric morphine lassitude start to creep outward from my bones, which in defiance of physiology was where it always began.
“Because it’s a book nobody’s ever written,” she said, sitting up as I lay down. In the bright light, which I wasn’t accustomed to in this room at this hour, her eyes looked almost green. “About a man—a man that everybody thinks is wonderful, because his dreams soar so high and he’s so full of ardor and he loves his idea of you so much more than the reality of you, which nobody else thinks deserves love anyway. And how nobody understands that this man is a tyrant and a dictator who carries your head around on a stick even though he calls it his banner, because he’s in love with himself but he can never admit that, and so he makes you his idol and loves himself, adores himself, worships himself for having one.”
One what? I wondered vaguely, as the lassitude reached my brain. But Daisy hadn’t stopped talking:
“And all you ever wanted was a little bit of room where you could live as you pleased in your own mind, and you’ve gotten it by marrying someone who’s too stupid and pigheaded to even know what you’re talking about most of the time, but won’t beat you or let you starve. But then the dreamer turns up one morning and knocks all that away—with never a by-your-leave, of course, because how could your opinion of the situation possibly compare to his, when he’s been thinking of nothing else while you’ve been doing silly, shallow things like have children. He pushes you down and puts the pillow of his love over your face, right over your nose and mouth, telling you how pretty they are the whole time and how divine you look with a pillow on your face, and as you start to have a hard time breathing you hear him say, ‘This is better than anything you could have possibly thought you wanted! This is love, my love! My darlingV “
I hated it when she called me that, I thought sleepily. But her voice hadn’t stopped. In fact, it grew shriller:
“You try to push him away, but you’re starting to suffocate and little lights are flashing in your head, and then you hear other voices, a crowd, you hear the whole planet all cooing at once, ‘Isn’t that beautiful! Isn’t he wonderful! How shallow she is! How self-centered she is! Oh, look at how he’s suffering! How little she deserves such great love! Oh, Daisy, it’s so beautiful, what he’s doing to you right now! Daisy, Daisy, look at the green light!’ I CAN’T LOOK AT THE GREEN LIGHT! I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING! I CAN’T BREATHE! CAN’T YOU SEE HE HAS A PILLOW OVER MY FACE! HE’S TRYING TO SMOTHER ME, FOR GOD’S SAKE! And with your last…ounce … of strength, you push him off—and slowly you sit up, gasping for air—simple, precious air. And you think, my God—my God—why—did all those people—want me to—die…”
The sobs that were wracking Daisy’s slender frame by then were the end of the only time she ever told me about what had happened between herself and Gatsby. And there I was so morphy-brained and noddy that I barely took in a word. If she tried to go on, and for all I know she may have, the only thing that answered her was a snore.
I awakened with a muddled recollection that she had told me something important the night before; something that should make me watch out. Mildly surprised that I had my nightgown on, I yawned my way into the front room. Daisy was sitting at the card table there, writing. Her pen stopped scratching as she heard me, and she looked up with a tranquil smile.
“Just making a few notes, dear,” she said. “For my ‘little project.’ You know, I think I might really try it—why not? Did you sleep well?”
But something was missing, or possibly two things. As I tried to recall what they might be, through the back window I saw her daughter playing with SooSoo on the beach, apparently unattended. I looked back at Daisy, who read my mind:
“It’s all right,” she said. “Wong’s watching them, but you can’t see him. He’s on the roof.”
“Wong? Oh, Cheng,” I said.
Daisy put down her pen. “You know, darling, I do think that joke has worn a bit thin. After all, it’s not really true that ‘they all look alike.’ “
“Didn’t say he all looks alike,” I grumbled, scratching my derriere. “Said he’s Cheng. And what do you know: Cheng looks like Cheng. Ripso facto.”
“Do you want a bath? I’ll run the water.”
“No. I want tod
ay to be tomorrow. I want to be back in New York.”
“I don’t want to go back to New York,” Daisy said.
I shrugged. “Then so be it. You’ll probably have to set the roof on fire to keep warm here in January. But I’m sure that Madame Bohemia’s Provincetown Academy for Unmarried Chunkygirls will give your daughter an education that SooSoo will never forget, unless you’ve had to put SooSoo up on the flaming roof to roast her for food by then, of course.”
Daisy’s face was suspended between mild amusement at my absurdity and less mild alarm that I was talking about her living somewhere I wasn’t. After a second, she gave a light-hearted laugh, and said, “No, silly. I don’t want us to stay in Provincetown either. I want to go to Paris.”
“What’s in Paris? And don’t say Parisians.”
“No. Americans. Americans and other people who get to live in whatever way makes them happy, without worrying about what other people think. And they write and paint, instead of talking about writing and drinking about painting the way Carmine Street does. There’s a woman named Djuna Barnes who lives on the Rue Jacob, and—and I want her life,” Daisy said. “Or a little bit of one that’s like it, anyway. Paris must be big enough for two of us to have it.”
“Can you fix there?” I said.
Daisy’s lip trembled for a second. “You could,” she said quietly. “If you still wanted to.”
“I can do that here.”
“It doesn’t have to be Paris, darling! I just want the two of us to be away somewhere, away from—things we’ve been. We’ll even leave SooSoo behind,” she smiled, making it clear to me that my powers of concealment had not been what I thought they were. “We could go to California.”
“I despise California,” I said sullenly.
“You’ve never been there, darling.”
“I’ve seen pictures.” One, anyway, I thought.
“It doesn’t matter! Choose a place. Choose anywhere you like! Do anything you like, and I’ll be happy, so long as you’re with me. Why,” Daisy giggled, her voice growing more and more desperate, “we could sneak down to Provincetown harbor tonight—and steal one of the fishing boats, what would you say to that? Yes, that’s what we’ll do! Freedom at last! We’ll set out to sea, and—throw all the morphine and the hypos and even SooSoo overboard, if you like—and sail away … Sail away … Oh, don’t you see, darling, we could just sail away”
With unexpected strength, Daisy was clutching my wrist—and for all ten seconds of the most desperate moment of my life, I did not know which of my parents’ faces I was looking into.
Behind her, the daughter stood in the door, SooSoo in her arms. I had no idea how long she—they—had been there.
“Let me O-GAY.” I screamed at Daisy, wrenching my arm free. Whirling on my heel, I marched into our room, slamming the door behind me. Pulling my nightgown off over my head with one hand, I chucked it into a corner. I got dressed with reckless haste, not even noticing until I was hooking the final button that my garters didn’t match my hose. Well, no one was going to see that anyway. I put on the first dress I found—one of mine, one of Daisy’s, nothing mattered now—flung my shoes here and there till I found two that matched, and checked my purse to make sure I had money.
When I stepped back out into the front room, Daisy was sitting on the ottoman, her daughter’s head in her lap. As she stroked the little girl’s hair, she was crying quietly. She didn’t look up, and neither of us said a word.
Outside, I looked up at the roof, shielding my eyes from the white sun. “Cheng!” I called.
He scrambled to his feet—no small trick in jackboots, on shingles that steeply sloped. “Wong,” he said.
“Come off the roof. You’re taking me to New York. Now.”
He jerked his head at the water. “Watch beach,” he said. “Watch girl. No drown.”
“Girl inside now. Also dog. Chop chop.”
“Might come back,” he said. “Early yet.”
“You don’t work for girl,” I said. “Chop chop.”
“Work for mother.”
“Not anymore you don’t, chum,” I said, holding up a fat wad of green bills in the bright, hot morning.
After a moment, he skidded down to the roof’s edge, and jumped off into the sand. Because of the dunes, it was only about five or six feet; he couldn’t possibly have hurt himself, no matter how clumsy his jump was.
“Luggage?” he said.
I had forgotten. Some of my best dresses were back there. And my gold hypo in its case.
“Never mind,” I said. “They’ll probably need to burn it all to keep warm here, come January.”
He looked at me uncomprehendingly. “No ruggage,” I said. “We go.”
He opened the back door for me. Then he got in behind the steering wheel, and started the Daimler’s engine.
As we drove off, I thought I heard squeaky barking. But SooSoo must have stopped chasing us by the time we got to the main road, because then I didn’t hear her anymore.
On an impulse, I reached forward and flicked my finger against the back of Cheng’s cap. “Cheng,” I said.
He didn’t contradict me.
Then I giggled, and started singing as I settled back in the seat. “Wong, Cheng, Wong, Cheng,” I sang-”give me your answer, do…”
I saw his eyes flick toward me in the mirror. Then they flicked away again, as precisely as a metronome; and suddenly, everything was back the way it always should have been.
Daisy died a few years later in Brussels, I don’t really remember how. By then, she’d lost all the Buchanan money in the Crash, and had married a Belgian supplier of windsocks and other safety equipment to small airports in out-of-the-way places, of all the odd careers. She never wrote a book. Of course, her daughter, Pamela Buchanan, became a writer, and I suppose that’s as good a way as any to fritter away your life when you’re too homely to catch a man. But I don’t even know where Daisy’s buried—or if, somehow, she did contrive to have her ashes secretly scattered off the railing around the Statue of Liberty’s torch, as she once whimsically told me she had decided would be best.
In our day—mine, rather—people used to be able to get up there, you know. Into the torch. However, if I had thought my troubles were over, I was wrong, for it turned out that I had a burial of my own to see to, once the Daimler glided to a halt in front of the Gramercy Park brownstone and Lii Gagni opened the door to me. Over the years, I had promoted her to housekeeper after the other servants drifted off, but she still had the same cretinous, blubbery look as ever. Then I saw she’d actually been crying.
“Oh, for God’s sake, what is it?” I said, “Did you lose the pantry keys again?”
“Oh, Miss, Miss—your mother passed away this morning, Miss.”
I stared at her.
“Where is she?” I demanded as I charged into the entrance hall, where for the first time in years I fancied I detected a faint smell of cigar smoke.
“Already at the mortician’s, Miss.”
Three steps up the stairs, hand on the banister, I turned to glare at her. “Without my permission?” I asked icily. Then a thought that for some reason I found truly horrific struck me: “Did you call my father?” I demanded.
“Today is Friday, Miss. Under the circumstances, I thought it would be better not to wait until the weekend—it’s so much harder to arrange things then,” she said, and started to blubber again. “We weren’t sure when you’d return, Miss,” she said, sniffling but now under control.
L hurried up the remaining steps and on into Mother’s drawing room. Her empty wheelchair was parked behind the escritoire, from which I had so often seen her look up from her writing to greet me as I came in for my daily visit. On the escritoire was a thick stack of paper, neatly squared off and with no loose pages lying around, as there had always been before. She had waited to go until she was sure she was done, I thought; it irritated me, since I was never sure of such things. I looked down at the top page, and read
this:
FOR OUR DAUGHTERS’ FREEDOM
The Story of Occoquan
I started to push the stack apart, looking at a page here, a page there. But there were hundreds of them in the stack, and it wasn’t getting any smaller, no matter how messy I was making it. Oh, it just went on and on—wads and wads of first-person reminiscences by Alice Paul, and Lucy Burns, and dozens and dozens of other suffragettes about all the good things that they’d done and all the bad things that had happened to them for it until they won the vote, all organized and collated into a single narrative in my mother’s elegant, old-fashioned handwriting. She’d used violet ink to write it with, and—and no sane person would ever get to the end of all those pages, no matter how hard he tried.
Impulsively, I gathered the stack up, and practically danced to the window, whose sash I virtually hurled upward. “The pigeons want to vote!” I shouted into the street, as I threw wad after wad of the manuscript out the window, where it swirled and danced away, one page getting speared on the hood ornament of a passing Rolls-Royce. “The cars are political prisoners!” I shouted, giggling madly. “The trees are on a hunger strike!”
As I threw the last wad out, I heard a horrified gasp behind me. It was Lil Gagni. She was holding something clutched so tightly against her body that at first I thought it was a child. But then I recognized what it was—none too surprisingly, since it had once given me nightmares for a week. The cloth had faded to a pale blue-gray, but the stains, though faint, were still visible.
“I thought my father gave you orders to burn that years ago,” I snapped.
“So he did, Miss.” But then all the “Miss” went out of her voice and face. “I wouldn’t have burned it for a million dollars]” she screamed at me, her eyes bulging and terrible. “I wouldn’t burn it in a million years!”
“I believe that you’ve just given notice,” I said, as crisply as I could. “And right now will be adequate.”