We went down to the cellar. Alexandra lit a lamp and took me back to the corner farthest from the doors, where there was a stall. In the stall was a two-humped camel. I couldn’t help laughing as I looked at him because he grinned at Alexandra so foolishly, displaying all his huge buckteeth and blowing bubbles through them.
“She said we weren’t to tease him,” Alexandra said severely, rubbing her cheek against the preposterous splotchy hair that seemed to be coming out, leaving bald pink spots of skin on his long nose.
“But what—” I started.
“She rides him sometimes.” Alexandra held out her hand while he nuzzled against it, scratching his rubbery lips against the diamond and sapphire of her ring. “Mostly She talks to him. She says he is very wise. He goes up to Her room sometimes and they talk and talk. I can’t understand a word they say. She says it’s Hindustani and Arabic. Sometimes I can remember little bits of it, like: iderow, sorcabatcha, and anna bibed bech. She says I can learn to speak with them when I finish learning French and Greek.”
Poor Little Saturday was rolling his eyes in delight as Alexandra scratched behind his ears. “Why is he called Poor Little Saturday?” I asked.
Alexandra spoke with a ring of pride in her voice. “I named him. She let me.”
“But why did you name him that?”
“Because he came last winter on the Saturday that was the shortest day of the year, and it rained all day so it got light later and dark earlier than it would have if it had been nice, so it really didn’t have as much of itself as it should and I felt so sorry for it I thought maybe it would feel better if we named him after it…She thought it was a nice name!” She turned on me suddenly.
“Oh, it is! It’s a fine name!” I said quickly, smiling to myself as I realized how much greater was this compassion of Alexandra’s for a day than any she might have for a human being. “How did She get him?” I asked.
“Oh, he just came in.”
“What do you mean?”
“She wanted him so he came. From the desert.”
“He walked?”
“Yes. And swam part of the way. She met him at the beach and flew him here on the broomstick. You should have seen him. He was still all wet and looked so funny. She gave him hot coffee with things in it.”
“What things?”
“Oh, just things.”
Then the witch woman’s voice came from behind us. “Well, children?”
It was the first time I had seen her out of her room. Thammuz was at her right heel, the fawn at her left. The cats, Ashtaroth and Orus, had evidently stayed upstairs. “Would you like to ride Saturday?” she asked me.
Speechless, I nodded. She put her hand against the wall and a portion of it slid down into the earth so that Poor Little Saturday was free to go out. “She’s sweet, isn’t she?” the witch woman asked me, looking affectionately at the strange bumpy-kneed, splay-footed creature. “Her grandmother was very good to me in Egypt once. Besides, I love camel’s milk.”
“But Alexandra said she was a he!” I exclaimed.
“Alexandra’s the kind of woman to whom all animals are ‘he’ except cats, and all cats are ‘she.’ As a matter of fact, Ashtaroth and Orus are ‘she,’ but it wouldn’t make any difference to Alexandra if they weren’t. Go on out, Saturday. Come on!”
Saturday backed out, bumping her bulging knees and ankles against her stall, and stood under a live oak tree. “Down,” the witch woman said. Saturday leered at me and didn’t move. “Down, sorcabatcha!” the witch woman commanded, and Saturday obediently got down on her knees. I clambered upon her, and before I had managed to get at all settled, up she rose with such a jerky motion that I knocked my chin against her front hump and nearly bit my tongue off. Round and around Saturday danced while I clung wildly to her front hump, and the witch woman and Alexandra rolled on the ground with laughter. I felt as though I were on a very unseaworthy vessel on the high seas, and it wasn’t long before I felt violently sea-sick as Saturday pranced among the live oak trees, sneezing delicately. At last the witch woman called out, “Enough!” and Saturday stopped in her tracks, nearly throwing me, and kneeling laboriously. “It was mean to tease you,” the witch woman said, pulling my nose gently. “You may come sit in my room with me for a while if you like.”
There was nothing I liked better than to sit in the witch woman’s room and to watch her while she studied from her books, worked out strange-looking mathematical problems, argued with the zodiac, or conducted complicated experiments with her test tubes and retorts, sometimes filling the room with sulfurous odors or flooding it with red or blue light. Only once was I afraid of her, and that was when she danced with a skeleton in the corner. She had the room flooded with a strange red glow, and I almost thought I could see the flesh covering the bones of the skeleton as they danced together like lovers. I think she had forgotten that I was sitting there, half-hidden in the wing chair, because when they had finished dancing and the skeleton stood in the corner again, his bones shining and polished, devoid of any living trappings, she stood with her forehead against one of the deep red velvet curtains that covered the boarded-up windows and tears streamed down her cheeks. Then she went back to her test tubes and worked feverishly. She never alluded to the incident and neither did I.
As winter drew on, she let me spend more and more time in her room. Once I gathered up courage enough to ask her about herself, but I got precious little satisfaction. “Well, then, are you maybe one of the northerners who bought the place?”
“Let’s leave it at that, boy. We’ll say that’s who I am. Did you know that my skeleton was old Colonel Londermaine? Not so old, as a matter of fact; he was only thirty-seven when he was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill—or am I getting him confused with his great-grandfather, Rudolph Londermaine? Anyhow, he was only thirty-seven, and a fine figure of a man, and Alexandra only thirty when she hung herself for love of him on the chandelier in the ballroom. Did you know that the fat man with the red mustache has been trying to cheat your father? His cow will give sour milk for seven days. Run along now and talk to Alexandra. She’s lonely.”
When the winter had turned to spring and the camellias and azaleas were blooming in a wild riot of color in the overgrown garden, I kissed Alexandra for the first time, very gently and shyly. The next evening when I managed to get away from the chores at home and hurry out to the plantation, she gave me her sapphire and diamond ring which she had hung for me on a narrow bit of turquoise satin.
“It will keep us both safe,” she said, “if you wear it always. And then when we’re older we can get married and you can give it back to me. Only you mustn’t ever let anyone see it or She’d be very angry.”
I was afraid to take the ring, but when I demurred, Alexandra grew furious and started kicking and biting and I had to give in.
Summer was almost over before my father discovered the ring hanging about my neck. I fought like a witch boy to keep him from pulling out the narrow ribbon and seeing the ring, and indeed the ring seemed to give me added strength, and I had grown, in any case, much stronger during the winter than I ever had been in my life. But my father was still stronger than I, and pulled it out. He looked at it in dead silence for a moment and then the storm broke. That was the famous Londermaine ring that had disappeared the night Alexandra Londermaine hung herself. That ring was worth a fortune. Where had I gotten it?
No one believed me when I said I had found it in the grounds near the house…I chose the grounds because I didn’t want anybody to think I had been in the house or indeed that I was able to get in. I don’t know why they didn’t believe me; it still seems quite logical to me that I might have found it buried among the ferns. “But then why,” they said, “didn’t you tell us? Why hide it on a ribbon about your neck unless there was something strange? And where, anyhow, did the ribbon come from?”
It had been a long, dull year, and the men of the town were all bored. They took me and forced me to swallow quantities of
corn whiskey until I didn’t know what I was saying or doing.
When they had finished with me, I didn’t even manage to reach home before I was violently sick and then I was in my mother’s arms and she was weeping over me. It was morning before I was able to slip away to the plantation house. I ran pounding up the mahogany stairs to the witch woman’s room and opened the heavy sliding doors without knocking. She stood in the center of the room with her purple robe, her arms around Alexandra, who was weeping bitterly. Overnight the room had completely changed. The skeleton of Colonel Londermaine was gone, and books filled the shelves in the corner of the room that had been her laboratory. Cobwebs were everywhere, and broken glass lay on the floor; dust was inches thick on her worktable. There was no sign of Thammuz, Ashtaroth, or Orus, or of the fawn, but four birds were flying about her, beating their wings against her hair.
She did not look at me or in any way acknowledge my presence. Her arm about Alexandra, she led her out of the room and to the drawing room where the portrait hung. The birds followed, flying around and around them. Alexandra had stopped weeping now. Her face was very proud and pale and if she saw me miserably trailing behind them she gave no notice. When the witch woman stood in front of the portrait, the sheet fell from it. She raised her arm; there was a great cloud of smoke; the smell of sulfur filled my nostrils and when the smoke was gone, Alexandra was gone, too. Only the portrait was there, the fourth finger of the left hand now bearing no ring. The witch woman raised her hand again, and the sheet lifted itself up and covered the portrait. Then she went, with the birds, slowly back to what had once been her room, and still I tailed after, frightened as I had never been before in my life, or have been since.
She stood without moving in the center of the room for a long time. At last she turned and spoke to me.
“Well, boy, where is the ring?”
“They have it.”
“They made you drunk, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“I was afraid something like this would happen when I gave Alexandra the ring. But it doesn’t matter…I’m tired…” She drew her hand wearily across her forehead.
“Did I…did I tell them everything?”
“You did.”
“I—I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t know, boy.”
“Do you hate me now?”
“No, boy, I don’t hate you.”
“Do you have to go away?”
“Yes.”
I bowed my head. “I’m so sorry.…”
She smiled slightly. “The sands of time…Cities crumble and rise and will crumble again and breath dies down and blows once more…”
The birds flew madly about her head, pulling at her hair, calling into her ears. Downstairs we could hear a loud pounding, and then the crack of boards being pulled away from a window.
“Go, boy,” she said to me. I stood rooted, motionless, unable to move. “Go!” she commanded, giving me a mighty push so that I stumbled out of the room. They were waiting for me by the cellar doors and caught me as I climbed out. I had to stand there and watch when they came out with her. But it wasn’t the witch woman, my witch woman. It was their idea of a witch woman—someone thousands of years old, a disheveled old creature in rusty black, with long wisps of grey hair, a hooked nose, and four wiry black hairs springing out of the mole on her chin. Behind her flew the four birds and suddenly they went up, up, into the sky, directly in the path of the sun until they were lost in its burning glare.
Two of the men stood holding her tightly, although she wasn’t struggling, but standing there, very quiet while the others searched the house, searched it in vain. Then as a group of them went down into the cellar I remembered, and by a flicker of the old light in her eyes I could see that she remembered, too. Poor Little Saturday had been forgotten. Out she came, prancing absurdly up the cellar steps, her rubbery lips stretched back over her gigantic teeth, her eyes bulging with terror. When she saw the witch woman, her lord and master, held captive by two dirty, insensitive men, she let out a shriek and began to kick and lunge wildly, biting, screaming with the blood-curdling, heart-rending scream that only a camel can make. One of the men fell to the ground holding a leg in which the bone had snapped from one of Saturday’s kicks. The others scattered in terror, leaving the witch woman standing on the verandah supporting herself by clinging to one of the huge wisteria vines that curled around the columns. Saturday clambered up onto the verandah and knelt while she flung herself between the two humps. Then off they ran, Saturday still screaming, her knees knocking together, the ground shaking as she pounded along. Down from the sun plummeted the four birds and flew after them.
Up and down I danced, waving my arms, shouting wildly until Saturday and the witch woman and the birds were lost in a cloud of dust, while the man with the broken leg lay moaning on the ground beside me.
That Which Is Left
Matilda’s cable was phoned to me. I was in my garden, painting. Pink roses with a tinge of lavender climbed against the deeper rose of the brick wall which enclosed the garden on two sides, the L of the house making the third and fourth. Indoors the phone rang. Still holding my brushes, annoyed at the interruption, I nevertheless ran to answer it.
PLEASE MARTIN COME NOW
She did not say whether it was Mother or Father. Her Yankee blood restrained her from phoning except in case of death, but presumably something was wrong with one of our parents. And I had promised each summer, on my annual pilgrimage to the home place, that if ever she really needed me, if one of our parents became really ill (I could use the word “dying” in connection with Mother and Father but never quite mean it) all she needed to do was send for me and I would come. At any time. All the way across the Atlantic. Brother Martin’s big dramatic gesture, but sincerely meant.
I went back out to my garden, past the old, beautiful pieces of Georgian furniture I had slowly collected to go with my old, beautiful house, of which only the newest wing, the long side of the L, was Georgian. In the garden the pale April sun was gentle against the daffodils, which burned almost too brilliantly in the borders. I looked at the almost-finished portrait on the easel, a middle-aged woman, Lady Elinor Broughan, greying hair, hawkish aristocratic face: How did that happen? Some strange genetic throw-back? Lady Elinor’s father had been a pork butcher and Lord Evelyn Broughan had plucked her from behind the counter when she was sixteen and married her, to give their child a name, in a quixotic gesture against the establishment. So now I painted her, Lady Elinor Establishment, helpmeet to her mate, devoted and beloved daughter-in-law.
I yawned, which in me is always a sign of anxiety. There was something in my portrait of Lady Elinor which reminded me of my sister Matilda. Was it Mother or Father she had cabled about? They were both near ninety: Matilda, Helen, Billy, and I, born late in their marriage.
I took Elinor-Matilda indoors and dismantled the easel and all my painting things. I would never be as good a painter as Father, but I was far more successful, and my popularity eased any sense of bitterness I might otherwise have had. Father was long out of fashion, though he still painted. It was probably Father, possibly a stroke or a heart attack. We had always had a family joke that one day we would find Father draped over his easel, dead, a paintbrush still in his hand.
The joke had begun to wear a bit thin the past several summers. It took him months now to finish a canvas, though the results, it was my private opinion, were still extraordinary; one day Father would be rediscovered, and I think I hated him for that. I hated him far more for being silly. He lost things constantly: his fork at table, his glasses, his painting glasses, his current kitten. Sometimes he thought I was his brother instead of his son. He moved into a realm of chronology into which I could not and did not want to enter. Only Matilda, his first born, could push him out of it and into the passive present.
Or Mother. Mother had been bed-ridden now for three years, but she was—as she herself put it—catching up on her reading.
During my visit the past summer—I always stayed at least two weeks—she had piled on the big table by her hospital bed Nietzsche; Heidegger; Remembrance of Things Past; five Margery Allingham mysteries; a history of the Wars of the Roses; a biography of Catherine the Great. It wasn’t display. She knew what she was reading, despite the idiotic variety; she kept the authors and characters straight, and by the time I left the pile had changed. She was rapidly becoming physically incontinent, though Matilda kept her immaculate with disposable diapers; but, unlike Father, Mother knew where she was in time and space.
Matilda did not cable me three years ago when Mother fell and broke a hip. She wrote. Mother had gotten up to go to the bathroom during the night. Matilda heard the great thud as she tripped over something—what? A kitten? A turned-up edge of the hooked rug?—and her obese body, over two hundred pounds, went down like a felled tree, though that’s too poetic an image; we used to say that Mother was four feet around in any direction.
Still, it was more likely Father.
I yawned again and phoned my travel agent. Then I cabled Matilda—I, too, saved the phone for death, though, unlike Matilda, I always wrote airmail. Matilda wrote sea mail, except for events like broken hips. I told Matilda that I would arrive the next night, catch another plane to the local airport, rent a car from there, no need to meet me, and would drive over early the following morning.
I tend to sleep late but the five-hour time difference was in Matilda’s favor, eleven o’clock my time as I stood shaving, six o’clock Matilda’s.
As always, when I approached the long macadam road that wound uphill to our house, I felt an ambivalent churning in my gut, a longing to be home and a feeling of terror at what new changes time had wrought. I longed for Father’s ability to move in time. If I could return, during my visits, to the way things used to be, then it would bearable.
It was the first time in years that I had come before mid-summer, and I had forgotten the difference between April in old England and New England. In shadowed curves of field and roadside lay tired patches of snow. The trees were still winter-bleak, the new budding barely visible against the grey sky. Stone walls scratched black lines across pastures. In my brick-walled garden, I had roses year round.
The Moment of Tenderness Page 21