The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

  On the lower deck there are the crew’s quarters, the galley, the officer’s mess, and a locked door marked “Smoking Room.” There are also four shower baths for officers, crew, and passengers. Not very many for a hundred people, thinks Eliza who is a stickler for hygiene. They look into one and read the instructions. Pushing a button will make two gallons of water come out of a small nozzle; you must be sure to be wetted, soaped, and rinsed before it stops. The water is reclaimed and used for ballast, says the notice. Looking around to see if anybody is watching, they push the button, hold their hands under the shower, and sprinkle each other in a water fight as if they were two children.

  “My hair!”

  “Well, it’s my best shirt. In fact it’s my only shirt.”

  “A shirt is nothing to a woman’s hair.”

  He smiles again. With a kind of awkward affection he rumples her carrot-colored hair, which he has never touched, even though he had touched almost every other part of her body. She smooths it again, irritated but at the same time pleased by this gesture which seems to be a compulsion of males. They pass on, look into the open door of a cabin where two crewmen are playing cards, and inspect the galley. A chef who looks like a Transylvanian brigand gives them a hostile stare, and they hurry on down the corridor. They try another door, one they haven’t noticed before, at the rear of the crew’s quarters. It opens into the dark belly of the airship, illuminated only by a row of tiny lights along a catwalk that goes down the center. They catch a glimpse of some immense swelling shapes that quiver slightly in the current of air from the door. This is frightening and they close the door quickly and go away. What to do? They go back to the lounge and look out the windows again, but Joan Esterel is occupying the best place and the Belgian landscape they are passing over is dull, a patchwork of identical green squares each with an identical farmhouse in the corner.

  They are saved by a soft chime announcing lunch. The dining salon is an aluminum compartment identical in size and shape to the lounge but on the other side of the airship. There is a soft quiet, a gleam of silver and white linen, a pleasant odor of carnations. They take their places at a table for two, the only one in the salon; the other tables are all for four or more. They are not sure whether this is just chance or whether someone is watching over their love through telepathy or True Vision and deliberately arranged for them to be alone at meals. Not far from them is Aunt Madge Foxthorn, at a table with the manager Cereste Legrand and the Lake Sisters. There is Joshua Main with his ruddy smile, there is Joan Esterel, and there are the Vestals and the Frieze, at different tables according to sex. There is John Basil Prell, who catches Romer’s eye but doesn’t smile, only stares at him through his round glasses. He, of course, is the reason they can’t be alone in Romer’s cabin. There are a number of other people that Eliza doesn’t even know; probably they are converts from Mainz.

  Where is Moira? They look around the salon but she isn’t there. No one has ever seen Moira eat. They try to remember all the hotel restaurants and railway dining cars. Moira was never there. In spite of her vibrant health, she is as thin as a wraith.

  “She doesn’t require ordinary nourishment. If she ate food like us she would lose her powers.”

  “Probably she has them bring her something in her cabin.” But he too is in awe of Moira and ready to believe that she is nourished by the air or by some ethereal spirit that permeates the Cosmos.

  The lunch is caviar and smoked salmon, then cold venison, salade russe, and a galantine of pheasant. To drink there is Temperance Nectar, a beverage they are familiar with, since Moira has somehow made it appear in all the hotel restaurants of Europe and America. It tastes like nectarines with a tang of cranberries, and is slightly effervescent. For dessert, apple tart with cream.

  Some passengers are already leaving to go back to the windows in the lounge. Others, more blasé are lingering over their coffee or toying with grapes. Eliza and Romer bend toward each other in a complicit way as though concealing some sacrament in the small coffee cups. Their hands meet under the tablecloth.

  “Romer.”

  “Eliza.” It is amazing what power there is in the mere name of a beloved one; neither of them would have suspected it.

  “Sometimes I feel that I hardly know you.”

  “I’m the same way.”

  “I don’t know anything about your family.”

  “Family?” she laughs. “I didn’t have a family.”

  “You must have had someone.”

  “What about you?”

  “There’s nothing to tell. I grew up in Venezuela. My father was American and my mother Spanish. I wanted to be a poet. This disappointed my father, because he wanted me to stay home and take over the family plantation.”

  “Plantation?”

  “Yes, a cork plantation.”

  “Cork? Do corks grow on trees?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact corks do grow on trees,” he says, astounded at her ignorance. “I went away to a small college in Pennsylvania because the catalog said there was a poet on the faculty. But after I got there, I discovered philosophy and I studied that instead.”

  “And you studied about angels.”

  “That was later, in graduate school. Now,” he says, “I’ve told you something and you have to tell me something.”

  It is amazing how secretive they both are about their pasts. It’s as though there were something to conceal. But there’s really nothing shameful in either of them. Although in mine there is, thinks Eliza.

  “I grew up in Reading. It’s a horrible place. It’s not near enough to London to be sophisticated, and it’s not far enough out in the country to have any bucolic charms. My father,” she blurts, “was a veterinarian, and because we were poor, he sometimes gave me animal medicines when I was ill.” To her astonishment she has made this up out of whole cloth, not that her father was a veterinarian but that he gave her veterinary medicines. What should she tell Romer? She feels guilty. A large part of the blame she must place on herself, on the weakness and corruption of her own body. She is determined not to go into her medical history with him, her backaches, her migraines, her pissing blood, her quinsical throat, her nightmares that made her breathing stop so that her father had to come into her room and push her chest to start it again.

  The house was a row house exactly like the hundreds of others on a winding street that came down a hill. Eliza dusted the house and had asthma from the house dust. After she dusted she went outside to slap the rag in the air, creating a little cloud around her that smelled of despair. Her parents were old, and her mother died when she was still an infant. Her father wrapped her in his arms and asked the world what he would do if he didn’t have her. Dust the house, she imagined. He was seventy, arthritic and wheezy with a heart that didn’t run right, but she imagined he could dust the house as well as she could with her asthma and the pain in her spine.

  Her father examined her body periodically, pushed down her tongue with a wooden stick, peered scientifically into the bowl of the lav after she had used it, attempted to manipulate her back, and, after she was fifteen (late menarche, he brooded with wagging head) demanded to inspect the stained napkins she produced on an irregular schedule. She was tired of her body and would have given it away to anybody who wanted it: her stringy red hair, her narrow angular frame, her freckles. She met a boy in school, then another one in her first job as assistant in a chemist’s shop, but nothing came of them. She was not well enough to go out with boys. In the course of the evening, she was sure to have a coughing fit or an upset stomach.

  Her life was filled with cooking meals, washing up, dusting the house, and being ill. Her father demanded her constant attention but wouldn’t let her do anything for him. If his collar-button rolled under the chest of drawers he would call her to come and witness—“There! My collar-button’s rolled under the chest of drawers”—but then he would get down on his creaky limbs and retrieve it himself, bumping, his head as he came out from under
the chest of drawers, while she stood and watched him.

  She was always afraid he would fall and break a limb in the bath. But that wasn’t what he did. On a Sunday night when she was twenty, he went into the bathroom as he always did on Sunday night—she was washing-up and cleaning the Aga cooker, which had many little crevices for grease to hide in. She heard the bath filling, then a half an hour of splashing accompanied by gurgles and chortles of enjoyment, a sound she had known from the time she was a tiny child, and which he made in the belief that no one could hear him. Bathing was his only voluptuousness. The sound of the bath draining, which took some time, since the drain didn’t work well. Then a silence.

  After a half an hour, when she was finished with the kitchen, she went to the bathroom and opened the door. He was lying on the floor, naked and soaking wet, clutching a corner of the towel he never had time to use. She said, “Father.” And then again, “Father,” in an admonishing, even slightly threatening tone she had never used to him before. One eye was slightly open and its blue film examined the ceiling, ignoring her.

  She covered him with the towel and went to the telephone box down the road. The boring formalities took a week, during which her father shrank until he was no larger than a tin soldier from a toy-box, and yet a memento, she found to her surprise, of which she had become quite fond; tears welled into her eyes as the realization struck her that this person, the only person in the world she had known in any sense, apart from a teacher or two, no longer existed and would never again manipulate her spine or look into her throat with a tongue depresser.

  She dusted the house one last time and shook the rag outside the back door. Then she packed a few things into a small traveling case, locked up the house, and went away to London. She found a bed-sitter in Bayswater where she could live quite comfortably on the tiny annuity she had bought by selling the row house in Reading. Of course, she no longer had a bath or a lav; she had to go down the hall for that. The bathroom smelled the same as the one in Reading; it smelled of old men. Whenever she opened the door she half expected to find him lying on the floor, examining the ceiling through his one blue eye.

  She never encountered him or any other old men in the bathroom, but she did meet a creature that, in her disturbed imagination, she thought might be some kind of avatar or revenant of her father. Looking a second time before turning on the tap, she found a spider in the bath. She washed it down with many glasses of hot water. It clung; finally it let go. Then it was difficult to steer it toward the rusty drain. After she finished bathing she got out, pulled the plug, and watched while the scummy water slowly drained and drained. Finally the last of it disappeared with a sucking noise. When she happened to look into the bath a few minutes later while toweling, there was the spider, clambering around wetly and as though dazed. It was fat and hairy and not at all like a tiny polished toy soldier.

  “Father,” she said, “I’m sick and tired of you.”

  She crushed it in a bit of toilet paper. That did it and the creature didn’t show up anymore. She fell into a routine, her new Bayswater life, which was neither better nor worse than her old Reading life. She thought of taking a job but decided not to; the only thing she knew was working in the chemist’s shop and the odor made her ill. She dusted her room, fried sausages on an electric cooker, and went for long walks. She walked from Bayswater through the royal gardens to Kensington, past the Victoria & Albert, past Harrods which she never dared to enter, and back through Hyde Park along the Serpentine where muscled young men in their underwear propelled racing shells. Or she went the other way, to Maida Vale and Lord’s Cricket Ground, where there was a free museum in which you could examine bats, balls, and other paraphernalia of the game. She found that at night her hearing became abnormally sensitive, especially to the sounds of coitus coming through the wall from the next room; gasps, moans, little whispers, and creaks of the bed. She bought some sleeping balls that you put in your ears, consisting of wax wrapped in oily cotton wool. They didn’t suppress the sound completely, only muffled it. Lying on her back in the dark, she waited for day to come so she could fry her sausage, make her tea, dust her room, and go out for a walk.

  In the winter, of course, there were no semi-nude young men rowing boats in the park, and the trees were as stiff and leafless as hat-racks. However she persisted in the hope that something new would come into her life. It was on a December day in Kensington, when the air was gray with frozen fog, that she saw the polished brass sign of Dr. Bono on a door. It said that he treated pulmonary diseases and diseases of women, so she went in. Dr. Bono was able to offer her a consultation without an appointment. His office was barren and needed dusting. Dr. Bono was perhaps some kind of a foreigner, although he spoke a London English without an accent. He was a hawk-like man with a piercing eye, and he first sat her in a chair and took a thorough history from her, looking up from his notebook to stare at her as she answered each question as if to see if she was telling the truth. He asked her if she was married or “on terms of intimacy with anyone” (a hawk-glance), and questioned her closely about her female clockwork (that’s what he called it, he said, “Tell me about your clockwork”). He then asked her to lie down on the table, seized her wrist and held it for a few minutes, felt her throat and armpits, and pressed his thumb into her abdomen in the vicinity of the gall-bladder, all with the same sharp motions and frowning, bird-like glances.

  “I’ll give you some tincture of wintergreen for the asthma,” he said.

  She hardly paid attention. Her eyes were fixed on his clinical gown, which was not entirely clean, but not from the soils of his patients; there was a bit of egg on it, and a spot of something that looked like pea soup. She provided a urine sample for him, paid him half a crown and left. When she sprayed the wintergreen into her bronchi it seemed to help, and the alcohol in the mixture made her feel pleasant for a little while.

  When she came back a week later the asthma was gone but her back hurt. He adjusted this by seizing her shoulders in his powerful wiry arms and tugging on them. So it went on, week after week at a half-crown a time. He gave her ergot for her dysmenorrhea, and it disappeared in favor of sore throats, stiff necks, upset stomachs, and strange patches and discolorations of the skin. She went to see Dr. Bono once a week, saving up her new complaints each time to offer them to him as a freshly wrapped gift. Dr. Bono became the person she knew most intimately in the world, taking the place of her father.

  One night she woke up before daylight and found she couldn’t breathe, or could breathe only with great pain. If she lay on one side she could get a little air into her lungs. She sat on the bed and found that one side of her chest had caved in completely; she couldn’t sit upright and the left side of her body seemed to have fallen in like an old shed. She lay down again and waited until ten o’clock when Dr. Bono’s surgery would be open, breathing carefully with half her lungs. She couldn’t afford a cab and at ten o’clock she tottered through the park and down the Gloucester Road leaning at an angle, in constant danger of falling onto the pavement.

  As usual, Dr. Bono had no other patients. He examined her calmly and told her to go lie down on the table. He poked his finger into the empty cave under her ribs and said, “Spontaneous pneumothorax is quite common in people like you, especially when they’re thin.”

  “What causes it?”

  “It’s caused by an influx of air into the pleural cavity, between the lung and the chest wall.”

  “That’s what it is” she said, made lucid and cross by the pain. “But what causes it?”

  “It’s quite often brought on by a violent burst of laughter. Or if you have T.B., it may have eaten a hole in your lungs. Pneumothorax may be the first symptom of a more general illness in the patient. However, the first thing is to get the air out of your pleural cavity.”

  He went off and came back with a contrivance that looked like the hypodermic that her father had kept to use on horses. He worked the needle into her collapsed midriff; she felt it sl
ipping in like a stiletto. He sucked the air out of her thorax little by little. Finally he removed the instrument and put a patch of plaster on the hole in her chest.

  “You’d better came back again in a week. Half a crown, please.”

  The next week he palpated her with an unusual seriousness, with particular attention to a certain place on her abdomen.

  “Ever feel any pain there?”

  “I’ve felt pain just about everywhere. And it hurts now when you’re pushing on it.”

  “If I were you I’d have that gall bladder removed.”

  “The gall bladder?”

  “The chances are it’s the source of all your troubles.”

  “What’s the gall bladder for anyhow?”

  “It produces gall.”

  “Then why does mine have to come out?”

  “Sometimes it doesn’t work right. It produces too much gall, or perhaps too little. Or it produces the wrong kind of gall, or sends it to the wrong place. No one is sure. In those cases, we take it out.”

  “Do you know how to take out my gall bladder?”

  “Oh yes. I’m a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.”