Borderline

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Dust covered them. They moved like two figures in an inferno.

  “Jonathan Springer said that he saw you in your car in the lane behind the school stadium … he said there was some woman … that he often …”

  Gus had moved on to the flank now. He ignored the wincing of the car, he was merciless.

  “And another time, he said he saw you in Sandy’s Bar with … with Miss Matthews, our gym teacher. I told him she was a client. I told them that’s the way insurance agents do business, over coffee and all that.”

  His sanding block made long, sweeping gouges across the flank, toward the rear thigh. He was heading for the car’s privates, he had a sharp instrument.

  “Anyway, everyone knows Jonathan Springer is a liar. He’s such a pain. Like, he wants to prove that everyone’s parents are like his. I feel sorry for him, really. You can’t believe anything he says. It’s just that … well, it was when the other kids looked away. It won’t make any difference, daddy. Well, it will, I guess … but I mean, I’ll still love you just as much. I just don’t want to be the only kid who doesn’t know, daddy, that’s all. I would just like to know.”

  He was raking at the inner flesh between the rear wheels now, his hands bloodied with rust.

  “Daddy, why is mummy crying in the bathroom?”

  Over the trunk of the car, he stared at his daughter in despair. The dirge of his abused muscles ascended. He was clothed in red powder, the sun set him on fire, he writhed in flames. Only the sheltered areas beneath his eyebrows and nose were free of dust, and to Kathleen he looked weirdly owlish. His ghostly eyeholes frightened her. She thought with alarm: My father is even unhappier than my mother.

  The world seemed suddenly fragile as tissue to her, full of gaping holes through which she might fall and fall forever.

  “Daddy,” she said urgently, beginning to giggle with a panicky hilarity. “Oh daddy, you should see yourself. You look like a clown.”

  15

  On Beacon Hill the aunts waited with Sunday tea. They lived on Chestnut Street in a house dating from 1820 (at least that early, they always said, with a knowing and mysterious smile), where nothing untoward or unpleasant would ever be so rash as to intrude.

  “I had horrible dreams last night,” Felicity told them. “It’s because I drove straight back to Boston. I didn’t come by way of L’Ascension, I didn’t even try to look for her. I convinced myself she’d rather not attract extra attention.”

  “Listen!” Aunt Ernestine raised an index finger, her expression ravished. She leaned into the slow movement of a Beethoven sonata. “Lovely,” she whispered. “Lovely.”

  “Telefunken,” Aunt Norwich told Felicity.

  The Misses Sayer, as they were called on Beacon Hill, restricted themselves to the better recording labels.

  “Suppose she dies out there in the woods?” Felicity asked. “Suppose it’s true, those reports about the death squads, suppose she’s deported?”

  “Felicity, my dear.” Aunt Norwich poured more tea. “Such a melodramatic imagination.” And in such poor taste, she implied. And all for the want of another cup of Earl Grey, which had calming properties. There were very few problems that could not be cured by Earl Grey provided it was properly steeped and made from loose leaves. Aunt Norwich murmured incantations over the teacups as she filled them. They were Royal Albert’s Springtime Bouquet, her favourite pattern.

  “Do you remember,” Aunt Ernestine smiled in fond reminiscence, “the time Felicity heard starving children calling to her?”

  “Hordes of them,” Aunt Norwich said. “We told her she’d heard squirrels in the attic.”

  They beamed at each other, delighted. They were connoisseurs of eccentricity. Only Beethoven pleased them more than the finer family oddities.

  And it turned out to be bats, they chuckled.

  “We always knew you’d do something artistic, dear. Actually we rather thought you’d become a writer, making up stories the way you do —”

  “Though goodness knows, Norwich, with the kind of novels being published —”

  “Oh indeed, we much prefer … How are the arrangements for the Florence thing coming along? Weren’t you having trouble getting one of the paintings, my dear? The one you particularly wanted?”

  “Wasn’t it a Perugino?” Aunt Ernestine asked.

  “What? Oh. Yes. Still negotiating.” Felicity was stalled eye to eye with La Magdalena, she could not get around her. “Perhaps this is what happened to daddy,” she said. “Perhaps he ran into Circe. A nightmare looks you in the eye and it won’t let you go —”

  “Felicity, my dear, do sit down.”

  “— even though you know it might be pointless,” Felicity went on, “you have no way of knowing the rights or wrongs of the situation —”

  “Felicity, all this motion is very bad for the African violets. It distresses them. They are very sensitive to their environment. You really must be more considerate.”

  “— you even wonder if you’re quite rational, if you really saw … But it won’t let you go. It won’t budge. It marks you out. You don’t want to get involved, but you find you can’t not.”

  The aunts let Beethoven have his say, and when he paused Aunt Norwich offered an opinion: “I don’t think these pastries are quite as good as last week’s, do you, Ernestine? A shade too much butter perhaps. I must speak to Mrs Goodman about it.”

  “It could be the butter.” Aunt Ernestine pondered possibilities. “Or maybe the cream in the creamcakes is too rich.”

  “Or you might have brewed the tea too long. It can go to the head if it’s too strong. I hope she won’t do anything rash.”

  “Of course she won’t, will you, Felicity? That would be history repeating itself. Very tiresome.”

  “Your father was a terrible disappointment to us.”

  “Such a promising young doctor,” Aunt Norwich sighed. “Dreadful waste.”

  “Of course the war …”

  “Yes, yes, it didn’t help. But the tendencies were already there, you must admit. He didn’t have to go to the front. It could easily have been arranged …”

  “And after the war he just couldn’t seem to …”

  “Do you remember, Ernestine, that dance not long after the Japanese surrender? The Marblehead Ball? It was just before he went off to India —”

  “And the Westbury girl came.”

  “We had high hopes that night. They danced until dawn, remember?”

  “She would have made all the difference.”

  “We didn’t know that the Australian girl was already …”

  “And they could hardly have known each other. Ten days in Brisbane on leave, and then back to New Guinea. I blame the Japanese —”

  “Though we would never dream, Felicity, of holding you responsible for the circumstances of your conception.”

  “If he’d been free when he danced with the Westbury girl …”

  “Wasn’t Seymour at that party?” Felicity asked. “I’m sure he’s mentioned it.”

  Some tea leaped from Aunt Ernestine’s cup and she mopped at it with a linen serviette.

  “From what Seymour has said,” Felicity went on, “it wouldn’t have made any difference. Not my mother, or the Westbury girl, or anything you could have done. Seymour says that God swallowed him whole.”

  “Oh really!” The crocheted tips of Aunt Ernestine’s collars quivered. “It is quite unnecessary, really it is quite lacking in a sense of what is proper, to bring God into the conversation.”

  “I blame that dreadful man, that … that painter.” Aunt Norwich was so agitated that a Royal Albert cup was almost chipped. “You know Springtime Bouquet has been discontinued,” she said reproachfully. “If anything untoward happens, it will take months to track down a replacement.”

  “Norwich is absolutely right. He must shoulder a good part of the blame. There was something vulgar about him … a quality of … of unwholesome enthusiasm. It was like a disease.”

&
nbsp; “Nothing was done with moderation.”

  “A whole generation was infected. Everything to extremes.”

  “And to think, Felicity, of all the men in the world —”

  “You almost broke our hearts all over again.”

  “We were glad when all that … when your incomprehensible fascination was over.”

  “Seymour says” — Felicity felt her way carefully — “that he did an ordination portrait just before they went off to the war. He says that you have it. My father as St Sebastian.”

  She observed them closely. She knew the secret codes of agitation, the scent of lavender and attar of roses shaken loose from silk underthings set a-tremble. But how magnificently they stood guard against the unacceptable. What a flawless duet they played. She would never know who were the better liars, the grander mythmakers: her aunts or Seymour.

  “She’s in fine form today,” Norwich smiled.

  “Her imagination has always been extraordinary, though a trifle melodramatic.” Ernestine might have been speaking of one of her prize-winning African violets. “She has a fine sense of the symbolic.”

  “That’s what makes her such an excellent curator. Wouldn’t you say this is what distinguishes her exhibitions? A mythic dimension?”

  “And a startling originality, of course.”

  They smiled secret smiles and sipped their tea.

  Certain things were simply not permitted. No guest under their roof could sustain a belief in anything they disapproved of. You would think, Felicity told them dryly, that Beacon Hill was the gateway to heaven. The aunts did not perceive this as irony. Well, they said modestly, we have found that all things, when looked at from the right angle, lead to contentment.

  Nevertheless, nevertheless, Felicity worried.“Whether you look at them the right way or not, there are certain things, certain intractable things … If you’d seen La Magdalena’s face —”

  “Ah! Didn’t I tell you, Norwich? As soon as we knew she’d watched that documentary, I said this would happen. I said there’d be dreams.”

  “She takes history so personally.”

  “She keeps that dreadful file.”

  “And the Perugino. It’s her taste for myth again.”

  “You must see, Felicity, that it’s a projection.”

  On account of your deplorable childhood, their litany went. You were conceived in a pagan country, born into riots. And then your mother (of whom we know nothing, who was not even an American) abandoned you from Day One. Then your father went chasing obsessions while you grew into ruin. Who could say what the years in India had wrought? And then Australia. Now how could any place so remote not do harm? You acquired a very unreliable view of the peripheral in those countries, they said. You give it undue importance. All this before we managed to bring you home, and not without legal complications. You were thirteen already. It’s been uphill work.

  “These occasional signs of a relapse,” Aunt Ernestine said gently, “are therefore not surprising. But naturally they concern us.”

  “We’ve taken care of everything,” Aunt Norwich assured her. “You are not to worry. You mustn’t think we’re indifferent to matters like this. We make the appropriate donations, we take our own kind of action. In all things, the proper channels should be followed.”

  “But sometimes,” Felicity protested, “the proper channels seem to be on the wrong side. Or else dreadfully, if not wilfully, misinformed.”

  “It is not nice, Felicity, to impute anything but the purest of intentions to the people in charge of the proper channels. It is not our place to question. It is simply not done. It is impolite.”

  They offered more Earl Grey and applied a poultice of Mozart. The Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola,K.364, Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zuckerman performing with the New York Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta conducting. With the latest in digital technology. And also, they said, we have a little gift. The Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry in a new facsimile edition. Do you see how the ducal arms appear on the walls of heaven? One feels such affection for the artist.

  Of course this was the country Felicity preferred to have come from, the world of gold leaf and lapis. This was where she wanted to belong. Behind a parapet of art and history. Within the aunts’ walled garden where all was well, where all manner of things would always be well. Certainly the elements are improbable, she conceded to herself; a fifteenth-century face in a side of beef. She would have liked to believe that this was an arrangement of her scheming imagination.

  She smiled at the aunts, those purveyors of soothing magic.

  “The first time I saw you,” she began to remember fondly.

  Oh, they laughed, it begins much earlier than that. When we were children ourselves, we knew you were coming. It goes back to before we were born, it goes back to our youth, it goes back at least as far as the Marblehead Ball.

  But this was a ritual, and was always performed to the making of apple wine. Even as Norwich fetched the aprons and paring knives, and as Ernestine brought the barrel of apples up from the cellar, the telling began. Whatever the variants — and they looped and embroidered them differently each time, according to the age of the apples and the weather and their whim — it was all the same story.

  As the spirals of peel went slinking into bowls that might have held half the world, so the stories uncoiled themselves, and curled up again into new shapes, and twisted and laced their way into past and future and each other. Sometimes the aunts had been mere children, peeping from the stairway at the Marblehead Ball. Often and again they had watched, blood warm, from the womb of their dancing mother, your grandmother, my dear, they said. Though since you are not twins … Felicity demurred. You see, they would reply sadly, shaking their heads, you are thinking from the wrong set of rules. And in any case, we were seventeen and eighteen respectively, shy debutantes, stepping out at our first formal occasion.

  They had been in fact of marriageable age and alarmingly beautiful — this was beyond dispute — dispensing rejections with a grace that left young men tongue-tied and drove them to ordination or poetry. For the aunts had hundreds of suitors who came pining from near and far. The aunts were legends in those days. Men murmured talismans as they passed, men staggered from the sudden weight of their own genitals, men consulted witches to find charms that would win the lovely Ernestine, that would soften the ravishingly remote Norwich. But the aunts knew all there was to know about happily ever after, and they laughed (in ever such a ladylike and mysterious way) in the faces of their suitors, and they spurned them every one.

  But on other occasions the aunts had been old and wise, past the time of their hundredth birthdays, on the night of the Marblehead Ball. They had looked back on the meaning of their youth and danced only with an old man in black.

  The paring knives flashed and the bowls (they had always been in the family, they had come over on the Mayflower, they had carried the porridge of Columbus) were brimming either with the sliced flesh of the apples or with rind. You must not think that the aunts discarded the rind. A certain amount (kept secret) gave the wine a baroque bouquet, for apple peel is baroque by nature and the aunts approved of the eighteenth century. An infusion of apple peel in Earl Grey will do wonderful things. When the rind was a dappled mix of red and green, it took curlicues to excess, it looped itself around Ernestine Sayer and Norwich Sayer, soothsayers at the Marblehead Ball. Depending on the mood and the temperature of the apples and the state of the lilacs, it allowed for a guest with a tarot pack at the epochal ball; though sometimes he had a slide rule that told fortunes with mathematical exactitude.

  There was also, on occasion, a hornèd artist — a dreadful man — who made unpredictable and showy appearances and insisted on unveiling the future in oils and acrylics. Though none of the guests ever liked him. (On this point the aunts did not vary.) They would turn their backs and get on with the next dance, and pouff, he would disappear.

  But whatever the means of foretelling, the fu
ture was always felicitous. For once they knew about the lost child, the aunts went out into the highways and byways of time and found her and brought her home. In their walled garden, where the lilacs bloom right through the winter, she was safe from all harm and she flourished.

  A speckled snake of apple peel slid around Felicity’s wrist.

  “This reminds me of my ayah,” she said. “We used to make the curry paste together.” She could feel the stone slab and the roller,smell the bruising of coriander, see the cumin seeds bleeding into the coconut, and the purple-skinned brinjal waiting to be cut into cubes. “My ayah used to sing me stories while she worked. When daddy was away — he was nearly always away — she used to sing the legend of —”

  “Oh dear,” Aunt Norwich said. “I’ve cut my hand.”

  There were bright beads of blood on her palm and a single drop lay like a scarab on the apple pulp.

  “We shall have to concentrate,” Aunt Ernestine said. “Though your blood will add a certain piquancy to the wine, Norwich.”

  “I believe we have reached the last apple,” Aunt Norwich said.

  When the right proportions of rind had been stirred into the pulp, and the secret ingredientsadded and the blessings murmured, then the mix was left to ferment through whatever variations it thought proper.

  Aunt Ernestine put away the aprons and paring knives, Aunt Norwich took down a corked stone bottle and three glasses, Felicity gathered up the Sunday supplements of the Boston Globe and the New York Times. In the cobbled garden, under a flowering dogwood and the lilacs that always bloomed, they sipped apple wine. Wisteria kept watch over the gate in the high brick wall and a little stone boy in a shell held out his hand, while Felicity read about the world. From the stone hand of the little boy, a fountain curled around the shell and over it and through the ground cover of myrtle and ivy and violets.

  “She was such a little hoyden when she came to us,” Aunt Ernestine said fondly, studying Felicity’s profile. Felicity did not look up from the New York Times.

  “A scarecrow,” Aunt Norwich confirmed.