It had been thrilling when she was ten, eleven, twelve. To be special. To have a secret land where they went together in imagination, travelling by foot or mule along the pathway of old-fashioned words, to cities and museums and brilliant tombs. Flying on the wing of myth carefully made safe for tender ears.
But she’d long ago discovered the real stuff in his bookshelf in the tower. She went there when he was elsewhere, waited till he was elsewhere, so she could touch his things, close her eyes and breathe the air he breathed, and after she had put his pipe into her mouth — moved the bitten stem in and out between her lips, wiggled the tip of her tongue into the small bitter-tasting slit at the end — she would then pick up the Ovid and read versions of those same stories that made her hot all over. The things that happened to these girls when they strayed into the countryside to gather flowers. Leda. Europa. Versions of their peculiar adventures were already familiar from his telling, but even then Clare had sniffed the darker incense that coiled behind his beautifully spoken words.
He never spoke of the likes of Myrrha. But surely it was not so dreadful to imagine a version where the bold girl crept into the bed of a lover — no relation, really — just inconveniently the husband of an undeserving aunt. Far less damning, anyway, than the imaginings of Myrrha with her excuse that farm animals did it all the time, bulls mounting their own calves, stallions mounting their fillies. Easy for the bold girl to imagine her hands growing his long fingers, letting them explore, always with results that left her weak with the loss of something she would never have.
Now that she was becoming ripe, sometimes she’d catch a moment of indrawn breath when she came around the corner and their eyes met. Then came the aunt’s pronouncement that her uncle had his own work to do upstairs. Clare should not be going up there all the time to get help with her homework. “If you need help with your math, come to me. After all, I’m the one who balances the books.”
Clare had been a top student till then, the surest way to lay claim to his attention: to study hard, to come up to his room with her questions, to stay and settle in a deep chair with her homework, breathing the air made dense with his tobacco and his thoughts, his thoughts of her. She was sure they were of her. Of what they would do one day soon, how he would finally have had enough of being husband to a witch who denigrated the success of his writing. How together they would make a break for freedom. This had started as fantasy, an alter-life she led: how they would travel not as uncle and niece, but as lovers. Nothing wrong, as long as she could go inside of it the way she entered a book, feel it pulsing the way the life of a book pulses inside its covers. But as she became twelve, thirteen, the book more and more frequently crept open on its own, till she could no longer close it up. So Myrrha’s mind, weakened by wound on wound, wavered uncertainly this way and that … no respite for her love except in death. Amazing, to find exactly her own story there, so close to his hand. She was sure he read it. She knew the whole of it by heart. It ended badly, yes, but that was long ago.
THAT GIRL OF THIRTEEN. Books jammed up against her chest as she walked along the highway after she missed the bus.
Eric Klassen, picking her up. Star of the basketball team. Old enough to be in grade eleven though he got held back a grade. He sidetracked down to the canal, and she let him kiss her, and before she knew it he was hard and hot and when she stopped him he made her hold it. And when she started crying, first he was sorry. He’d been watching her for so long, he said. Thinking about her for so long.
When he drove her home he said, “What’re you acting like such a virgin for? Everybody in Skagit County knows your uncle does you all the time.”
After that, she was very good. She did not go up to her uncle’s room. Sometimes her looks got tangled up with his, and she smiled, and if she glanced sideways at the mirror above the old oak buffet, it did not seem out of place to see the face of a bad angel staring back.
MEANWHILE, A PUBLIC CONCERN had blown up. Her uncle had learned of plans to bypass environmental hearings regarding a nuclear plant. He wrote a piece for the local paper that got picked up by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and even The New York Times.
Shortly after this, she looked out the window at school and saw him standing by his car. When she sneaked out, he took her for a drive. He said he had come to an important decision. “And you, Chiara, are the one I needed to share it with.”
The one I needed. It was like flying in a dream. She knew he was going to leave the aunt. He and Clare would travel to all the places he had always told her they would go.
He said, “We’ll find a beach to walk on, and I will tell you my plans.”
SO THEY WALK. THE tide creams in. Bleached driftwood, the waves, and the sand beneath the rising water carved into ripples thick as arms and thighs all interlocked. He takes her hand and helps her over.
She frees her hand, willing him to chase her, and skips from rock to rock and around the next point, where she balances along a thin log that has come to rest across two others. Laughing, he comes up and puts his hands around her waist and lifts her down. His face becomes solemn. He draws a finger down her cheek, down the length of her bare arm. She feels herself burn into being, like a falling star.
“I have decided to run for County Commissioner,” he says. “I filed my papers this afternoon.”
She frowns. She can see he doesn’t like her frown. She can see a wash of emotions cross his face as he struggles to remember: She is just a child. Be patient. Explain.
He says, “I have been told I have an excellent chance. I will run on a platform opposing the nuclear power plant. Think of it, Chiara. I will be in a position to make a difference.” When she still does not react, he says, “Your aunt opposes me. Things will be somewhat difficult at home. But I know I can count on you as my ally. That gives me courage.”
Her heart breaks for him, too, even as it floods with disappointment.
Can this be as far as his imagination reaches? To envision posters with his picture along the highway, and then an office with filing cabinets and forms in triplicate? Oh, no. Oh absolutely no, she will not allow this to be his fate.
“You can’t,” she says. She is so sure, at that moment. A girl-woman at the pinnacle of her power, the apple of her uncle’s eye, she’s always known that. The angel girl who can do anything. She sees the waves coming in, washing right up to the base of the point they have just rounded. Yes, anything, even turn back the sea if she must.
“You can’t be County Commissioner, because everybody is talking about you,” she says. “They’re talking about you and me. Everybody says we do things. We have to go away. To Europe. Like you always promised.”
Into his silence, she repeats, “Like you always promised.” He drops her arm, walks away.
Would he have left her there alone, if the wind had not suddenly risen, if the waves were not now lashing at the point? If they were not cut off by the high tide?
Everybody says we do things. As she watches him go, she catches a pungent whiff of why he’s walking away so fast, as if the wishes in him had long been hot coals ready to flare.
“But you love me,” she says as she runs after him. “You know that.” Her arms are around his neck and she makes him look at her. He does. He looks at her and she kisses him, just as always in her bed at night she has imagined, kisses him first chastely and then opens, a ripe fruit. He shudders, responds, and she is alive, lit with her power and his surprise.
The moment after, punished by what her power has let loose, she is weighted, pierced to her centre by a man whose face is already averted, blind with tears.
IT DIDN’T END THERE.
For a month she thought it had.
They had to scramble up the cliff because of the tide. He helped her. At the top she said she was sorry. “It didn’t happen,” he said. No further word the whole way home.
When the election signs went up, his were not among them.
The other thing that didn’t happen was her pe
riod. The medical book in the library suggested that at her age irregularity might be normal. But she knew. What did happen was that she started letting Eric Klassen take her home from school, and after a few days she let him take her down to the canal again, though she felt only the force of it, blotting out every other thing.
One Sunday, when her aunt drove off to a horseshow in Blaine, her uncle called her up to his study in the tower.
He said, “Chiara, I am a lost and ruined man.”
He said, “Come here.”
They didn’t speak. She hardly heard his beautiful voice again. They moved into another land where everything was touch, his fingers alive, warm and sculpting. But the genii of the place had turned her to metal. She denied the shocks that went through her body. She thought if she was careful, he would begin to talk to her again. That beautiful voice. So she was good, very good; she wanted to be very good so he would see that what he was doing was all right. But when she left the tower, she heard him pacing, shouting No!
She went back up and said, “Don’t worry. I do all that stuff with Eric Klassen too.”
THE AUNT FOUND THEM out. That is the short ending of the tale. The aunt pretended to be going off for the weekend, but parked the truck at the grandmother’s cottage and walked back the half mile and tiptoed up to the tower. The aunt had other evidence as well — for one thing, the boxes of Kotex that Clare had left untouched. Clare was almost happy, imagining that now the truth was out her uncle would come to save her, and save their baby. But even before the business with the doctor, he was gone.
It wasn’t hard to persuade Eric Klassen to run away with her. She told him about the abortion, but she wasn’t honest. It turned out he had a heavy sense of moral responsibility for such a randy kid. He tried his best. He really did. Though after the first week on the road, what he wanted most was to take her back to the farm, and marry her, and somehow at the same time go on playing basketball.
FOUR
The Secret Meadow
CLARE WOKE IN THE dark, rain pounding on the roof, the rush of it down brilliant copper gutters. The sound confirmed the essential understanding she’d pulled from the night of dreams where her past invaded. She could not stay here. The gift, as she’d always really known, was tainted. She’d been handed it as a test. She imagined him picturing exactly how with her greedy nature she would accept, succumb again, never get free of the twisted Möbius strip of guilt and forgiveness. She would confound him, then. When she did manage to see the lawyer, she would sell. She would give the money to her aunt. Split it with her. Resolved, she slid into deep, almost druggy, sleep.
BUT WHEN SHE THREW open the shutters to the wet morning jittering with raindrops and sparks of fire, her interior landscape started to glitter too. The tree by the window had become a jewelled tree, every leaf and twig trembling with diamond points of light, magic, like the thought of Gianni, how she had agreed to see him again.
YESTERDAY SHE’D ARRIVED HOME from Cortona to discover evidence of Marta Dottorelli’s organization everywhere. Notebooks neatly stacked on the trestle table, though Clare had left them strewn. Pencils with chew marks segregated from the others. The book about Etruscan witchcraft she had brought from Vancouver now bundled up inside a linen cloth, wrapped the way a friend in Vancouver kept her tarot cards to prevent the leakage of arcane power. Her suitcase had been delivered, and Marta had unpacked it and organized the contents in the cupboard and dresser drawers, even her awful underwear.
Marta seemed to have discovered the newspaper clippings which Luke Tindhall must indeed have left somewhere in the arbour. Clare found the manila envelope propped against her notebooks, the flap suspiciously wrinkled. Steamed and resealed?
The truth was that Clare had been too narrowly balanced on a high wire of excitement to deal with any of this yesterday. Instead, she’d searched out the giant bar of Tobler chocolate from Duty Free, settled down with the copy of Anna Karenina she’d picked up in London, and happily lost herself in the whirl of unhappy families with multiple names, diminutives, patronyms.
AFTER SHE’D SHOWERED YESTERDAY’S foolishness away, she unwrapped the book of Etruscan magic. She folded the linen cloth around the envelope holding her uncle’s newspaper articles instead, and tucked the bundle out of sight.
The book of magic came from an antiquarian shop in Vancouver, a goodbye gift from a friend. Clare had barely glanced into it, though it had inspired the direction her new book might take. Now, as she looked through it, she shook her head, wondering how much was hocus pocus. It had been written in the eighteen-hundreds by an American folklorist who claimed to have mined deep caverns of Tuscan peasant wisdom. The illustrations purported to be reproduced from Etruscan artefacts, but they held heavy overtones of Victorian faux-serious naughtiness, and the text, telling of the folklorist’s meetings with a mysterious strega in Florence, gave details of spells, for good or ill, said to have lingered from the time of the Etruscans. Extremely creepy some were, involving the skinning of cats, the killing of spiders, the blinding of lizards; ways for women to rid themselves of love rivals by making comfits of disguised menstrual blood for their rivals to eat. No wonder Marta had covered it up.
When she heard Marta enter through the kitchen door, Clare stifled the urge to hide the book. Marta came and peered over her shoulder. Clare heard that disgusted lip-popping noise.
“Boh! These are not things to meddle with, Signora! This book — who is it written by? An American? What does an American know of these things?”
“And what do you know about them, Marta?”
Marta’s hand tightened on Clare’s shoulder. But then, in another of those unsettling about-faces into kindness, “Come, Signora Chiara,” she said. “Let me look at you.” Instead, Clare found herself burying her face in her hands, hardly knowing what was wrong — maybe shreds of the night’s murky dreams still clinging, but the interior sparkling of the morning was going on, too. “Come,” Marta said again, “Come, come, come!” Clare found herself rising, a great lump in her throat, as Marta put a hand on each of her cheeks, then pulled Clare to her thin chest. “The Signora is at the moment somewhat perplessa, yes? A little lost? To come here to this strange country, to start on this big work of a new book? And missing your good uncle, too.”
She released Clare and with one of her worn hands touched first Clare’s forehead, then her chest, then either shoulder, in a blessing. “What you should do is to go down into the valley and visit the great princely tombs,” she said. “These will be useful for your research, more than books like this.”
“But —”
“Now Signora Chiara. You must listen, please.” Marta shot a stern glance at the chimney mantel where Clare had propped the painting of the poppy from the other day. “Yes, this is a fine poppy that you have painted. And perhaps you have found it growing by the roadside. Good. But you must listen when I tell you of dangerous things. It is not good to read such books as this …” she broke off and crossed herself, “And it is not good just now for a beautiful woman to wander in our hills. If you need to study the wild plants, you will please go to the museum and study the work of our hermit. The paintings are a national treasure, available to study. They have all been copied onto plastic film, the microfiche.”
Clare took a breath to protest that she had her own way of working. But Marta turned the subject back to the tombs in the valley. This was where the princes had been buried, many generations and their families, in tombs that were themselves as big as hills. They were the only surviving tombs in the area. Very remarkable. Very rare.
“What happened to all the other people then? The ordinary ones, not princes?”
“Beh!” Marta said. “What happens to us all? We live. Then we are dust.”
When Marta had gone downstairs to clean out the bathroom drains, Clare assembled her painting gear and crept out the kitchen door.
THE NIGHT’S RAIN HAD turned the stream into a torrent; even the path along the level was next to impassable.
No one casually wandering by would get the idea of trying to follow such a violent flow up into the woods. It was hard and slippery going. Clare had to beat her way through the thicket along the side, clinging to bushes and alder branches for support. But, when she finally emerged from the trees, the meadow was a bowl of steaming light, brilliant with the glitter of millions of little flowers holding drops of water at their centres. Millefiori, she thought, remembering that chandelier.
But I am not thinking of you now, Gianni DiGiustini, she thought as she made her way over the spongy grass. I’m not thinking of the expression on your face when you looked in my car window. Probably it’s what makes your type so irresistible, that you actually feel such joy with each new woman, that you can pass along that gorgeous malady, fatal to others but never to you. If you cross my mind today I will simply wave you away, as one is supposed to in meditation when thoughts of any sort come up.
She caught sight of a patch of Cistus growing on a nearby rocky slope, picked her way across the soggy meadow, scrambled up. The tissue-delicate flowers were like little rosy gifts that had just come unwrapped; their yolk-yellow centres glowed. She settled on a flattish rock. She breathed in the smell of grass and stones and bushes warmed by the sun. She set to work.
FOR THE NEXT DAYS, Clare was careful to dodge Marta’s watchful eye as she made her escape to the upland meadow. She knew it was ridiculous to sneak around, and also to lock away the new paintings in the sideboard, pocketing the key. But Marta’s presence was so very present. It seemed impossible to reach a clear understanding about a set routine. Yes, yes, yes, Marta told her, she had come to Signor Geoffrey every second day. Yet these days varied. Clare never knew when Marta would turn up, to begin all over again the sweeping, cleaning, scrubbing that she had done the time before. Niccolo, too, was always somewhere about, working in the olive groves or dropping by the kitchen door with offerings of eggs from his chickens, cheese from his goats, early lettuce from his orto. It seemed churlish to chafe under all this hard work and largesse.
The Whirling Girl Page 10