With an imagination, they reminded each other, as fertile as the mulch they put on their lilacs.
“You must remember, Felicity,” Aunt Ernestine cautioned, “that you cannot believe the half of what you read in the papers.”
“I do hope, Felicity,” Aunt Norwich sighed, “that you are not going to clip out any more of those dreadful stories. Such things are always with us, there is no point in getting morbid. It is better to use the proper channels.”
Felicity lifted up her eyes from the ephemeral and unreliable newspapers to contemplate the garden that had always been there. And the aunts, white witches, who were now perhaps seventy, or perhaps a hundred, or perhaps more, smiled back from their youthful untroubled eyes. All is well, they promised. And all manner of thing shall be well.
Felicity, I’ll say, when she calls in from wherever she is. You’ll love what I’ve done with the aunts.
Though maybe she won’t.
Maybe she’ll say: Jean-Marc, you’ve never even met my aunts. I won’t have you making fun of them.
But it’s her own fault. She’s told me a thousand and one tales about them. Felicity weaves her past as she goes, she spins out memories, the facts of her life are as clear as riddles.
On the subject of your aunts, I’ll tell her, I’ve been restrained compared to some of your versions. When I think of certain anecdotes, when I think of your flippant tone —
That’s different, she’ll say. I love them.
Tra la, tra la. Kathleen is the same. She alone is permitted to criticize her father. I am expected to agree at appropriate moments (when her mood requires it); I am rebuked for concurring. You don’t know him, she says. He wasn’t like that at all.
A full and frank confession: I do not understand women. Or anyone else I’ve ever known, for that matter; which is why I appreciate the reliable mathematics of pianos.
Still, Felicity is Felicity. You can’t sail round her. And I know her aunts and her ayah and her grandparents (none of whom I ever met) better than I know anyone except Felicity herself, with the possible exception of Kathleen — but that’s something recent. Whereas Felicity and I go back forever, we go back to before she left the Old Volcano, we go back to that day I was running away in the woods near L’Ascension. At least that far. We may even go back as far as the Marblehead Ball.
Jean-Marc, she’ll dream, you’re impossible. I hope you’re not upset, I did mean to call earlier. There’s a frightful racket — can you hear me? — because of these two old volcanoes arguing. I’m hiding under the grand piano. Maman says hello.
Really, Jean-Marc! the aunts will say. This is quite improper. You’re beginning to laugh her laughter.
16
In the middle of the regular Monday morning staff meeting at the Winston branch office of the Greater Life Insurance Company, Gus heard a stifled scream. It was a long, thin, eerie sound, like the distress of a bird whose nest has been violated. Or like the kind of high-pitched throat noise made by a mute person who is in pain. He knew it was the voice of La Magdalena.
Everyone else heard it too.
There was a sense of disturbance.
Bob Wilberforce, the branch manager, pressed the pause button on the video machine. “You okay, Gus?” he asked.
“It wasn’t me,” Gus said.
They were all looking at him strangely. “Sorry,” he said, embarrassed. “Yeah, sure. I’m fine.”
Mr Wilberforce released the pause button and Reggie Jackson flickered back into motion. His face was in close-up. “It’s all in the head,” he said. “Whatever’s goin’ on inside your head, that’s what’s gonna happen when you come up to bat. First you gotta be winning inside your head.”
Reggie’s face began to float backwards from the camera, his Yankees shirt came into view, his whole body was suddenly rocketing in reverse, getting smaller and smaller, until he was just a tiny white figure at home plate as seen from the eye of a cruising blimp. First the baseball diamond filled the screen, then the whole green field, and then the funnel of the packed stands. There was a pause in the blur of distancing. The ball park hung there, motionless, waiting, like a bauble at the stretched limit of an elastic string. Music indicated that something of great significance was about to occur. The room was hushed with expectant tension. Gus wondered how it felt to be Reggie Jackson, exposed there so tiny and alone, at the vortex of the watching world.
Then slowly, slowly, as though he was moving in a dream, Gus seemed to be on a languid slide toward the pitcher’s mound. Or else the pitcher, along with Reggie, was beginning the leisurely elastic return to a distant hand holding a stick.
The upper stands disappeared. The benches and bleachers slipped off the sides of the screen. The outfield went.
And there was the pitcher rubbing his hand on a piece of rosin. The bases were loaded, the crowd was going wild. The pitcher manoeuvred a wad of something around in his mouth and spat toward first base. Reggie’s disembodied voice floated over the trajectory of spittle. “You can’t afford to listen to anything but the words inside your own head.” Now the pitcher’s face in close-up, readjusting the wad in his cheek. And Reggie’s voice: “There was a stretch early in the season I struck out several times in a row. The crowd took to booing from the moment I stepped out of the dugout. Didn’t make any difference. You can’t let it get to you. I never quit believing in myself. I went right on —”
Click.
Mr Wilberforce, finger on the pause button, looked out over his lectern at the sales force. “I want that to sink in,” he said devoutly. He leaned on his pulpit and his eyes rested on the members of his congregation one by one. “The essence of higher sales is right there. I want everyone just to concentrate on those words while I rerun Reggie for a bit.”
With bowed heads and reverent demeanour the sales force reflected on the week’s First Lesson.
There was a blur of images rushing to return to their starting positions, the spittle flew back into the pitcher’s mouth, Reggie’s voice clambered out of a moment’s squealing static and continued: “ … the words inside your own head.” Two beats, the mole on the pitcher’s nose, the deformity of the wad inside his cheek. “There was a stretch early in the season I struck out several times in a row. The crowd took to booing from the moment I stepped out of the dugout. Didn’t make any difference. You can’t let it get to you. I never quit believing in myself. I went right on listening to the words inside my head.”
Now the video screen was arranging itself as a frame around the ball, which moved forever in a slow and beautiful arc toward the batter, trailing streamers of voice-over. “And that voice said: You can do it, Reggie. You’re the greatest! Just listen to the winning.”
“And I just kept listening to the sound of that thwack.” Reggie’s voice was still unfurling, looping itself like ribbons around the trajectory of the ball. “I listened to the sound of a ball being hit out of the park. I listened to the sound of winning.”
Now the languid ball was falling, floating, falling towards Reggie’s bat, and Reggie’s body was turning to meet it in a slow-motion ballet that was exquisite to behold. Ball and bat touched. They kissed. The kiss was voluptuous, a soulful smack, and now everyone knew that this was the sound of a ball being hit out of the park, the sound of winning, the sound of that crucial home run against the Red Sox in the Eastern Division play-offs for the 1978 World Series.
Bob Wilberforce blinked his eyes rapidly. More than one member of his sales force surreptitiously fumbled for a tissue. Grown men wrestled with bronchial disturbances.
Just as the ball was winging its dreaming way out of the park, just as Yankee stadium was teetering on the brink of delirium, Gus heard La Magdalena scream again. He was caught off guard and lurched convulsively in the manner of one waking from a fall in a dream. No one noticed or heard. Everyone else was jogging around the bases with Reggie, preoccupied. No one heard Gus’s gasp of pain. This time she was digging her fingernails into the soft flesh of his forearm.
A national executive of Greater Life stepped out onto home plate and surveyed the suddenly deserted baseball diamond, the empty stands. Reggie’s voice spoke to him from the clouds. A light shone on his face. He repeated Reggie’s words, he read his text, he began a short sermon. He had a voice like Aunt Jemima’s buttered syrup.
Do not abandon me, La Magdalena whispered.
Gus glanced nervously around. He massaged his bruised forearm.
The Aunt Jemima voice was oozing its sticky way around the room, lapping at the sales force. It flowed through home runs and hard work and never giving up just because you might strike out a few times. It covered all bases, it bathed all agents. It stressed the importance of listening to the inner voice.
Do not abandon me, La Magdalena whispered.
Since it was difficult to know where the sound was coming from, or how to help, Gus closed his eyes and tried to visualize the cottage outside L’Ascension. But all he could see was the pond of lamplight and the dark shore of the room beyond it where the face of La Magdalena hung like an icon, pale and luminous, and streaked with tears.
What does it mean? Gus wondered. And what had Saturday’s phone call meant? And what had it meant that no one answered at the number he had been given? He felt ill with the same sort of apprehension he felt in a dentist’s waiting room.
On a flip chart Bob Wilberforce was drawing forceful lines with a black felt marker. The lines gathered themselves up like twigs and began to whirl in front of Gus’s face, faster, faster, their black skirts rising over long white legs soaked in blood. He could not contain his sense of dread, he needed air, he rose to his feet, his chair made an unseemly comment to the vinyl floor. Bob Wilberforce stopped in mid-exhortation. From the way a chasm formed to let him through, from all the startled upturned faces, Gus knew that he must have looked dreadful.
He felt dreadful. He felt as though he had received word of a death.
He felt conspicuous and embarrassed.
At the door he paused and rallied himself, holding on to his dignity and a chair back. He was aware of the clammy tide of sweat in his palms. “Sorry,” he said. “Must be something I ate.”
He waved a secretary off — “Just need to put my head down on my desk for a few minutes” — and swayed down the centre hallway to his own office. He felt as though he were walking along the deck of a rolling ship. He shut his office door and sat down. He was shivering a little. His hands were shaking. There was a sour tincture of panic on his tongue. He felt horribly queasy.
He knew what he needed.
He took Felicity’s business card from his pocket and dialled the Montreal number. This time he was answered on the first ring.
“Hello,” a male voice said. “This is Jean-Marc Seymour. Because of heavy bookings there will be a wait of at least three weeks before your piano can be tuned. At the tone, please indicate the make and approximate age of your piano, and also your name and phone number. Your call will be returned as soon as possible.”
Gus hung up. His head was throbbing now, his lips numb from being bitten. He turned Felicity’s card over and dialled her Boston number. Someone answered on the second ring. “Hello?”
He recognized her voice. “Felicity?”
“Yes. Speaking.”
“Thank God. This is Gus.” He swallowed. He had to know what had happened, he was afraid of finding out. He made a false start, coughed, cleared his throat, plunged in. “My wife said you called on Saturday morning. What happened?”
“Pardon?”
“What happened?”
“Who is this?”
“Gus. Gus Kelly. Don’t you remember? We — er — you know … the border.”
“Oh!”
“You remember me?” he asked.
The silence seemed interminable. “Hello?” he said. “Hello?
Are you still there?”
“Yes,” she said, so softly he had to strain to hear.
“You don’t remember me?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” It was clearly an admission she would rather not have made.
“In L’Ascension,” he began, “after I left —”
“She’s gone.”
“What?” He felt the lurch of dread again (as when the dental assistant beckoned him into the chamber of horrors). He said faintly: “Already? They’ve sent her back? But I thought —”
“No, no. She’s gone. Vanished. When I went back with the priest, she wasn’t there.”
He asked nervously, cupping his hand around the receiver and dropping his voice: “Why are you whispering?”
“I — I don’t know.” It was increasingly difficult to hear her. “Where … do you think she is?” he whispered.
There was another long silence, though he could hear her breathing.
“To tell you the truth,” she said slowly, her voice thinner than air, “she disappeared totally. Right out of my mind. I was hoping she never existed.”
“But she did,” he said. “She does.”
“Yes,” Felicity sighed.
“So then where …?”
Felicity did not answer. The woods? they both wondered. Montreal by now?
Aggrieved, as though she had criminally mislaid something priceless, he accused: “She was injured, she had no money, she —” “Don’t!” Felicity sighed. “Please.”
“We should never have left her alone, I knew we shouldn’t, I said we shouldn’t …” His outrage flagged and dwindled. Another long silence as each began to realize: the albatross has gone.
Then Felicity offered: “Perhaps she had people waiting for her. You know, friends. Or relatives. I believe there are church groups in Montreal, something like the old Underground Railroad for runaway slaves.”
“Remember that car? The other car?” Gus asked suddenly. “They turned their lights on the cottage?”
“My God, yes.” Her voice was warm. “It was deliberate. I’m sure you’re right.”
“It’s out of our hands then,” he said.
“Yes.”
They were both relieved. But then Gus remembered something else. “And the priest? What happened? Didn’t you report —?”
“He just thought I was a bit crazy. Neurotic or something. A woman afraid of being alone.”
“Well then.” Gus inhaled deeply. (No fillings necessary, the dentist might have said.) “Nice meeting you. Good luck with that show.”
“Show? Oh, you mean my exhibition. Thank you. And for you too, all the best with …” — she was obviously uncertain about the aspirations of insurance agents — “all the very best.”
Gus hung up. He felt expansive. Benign. With an air of modest accomplishment he tipped back his chair, put his feet on the desk, and touched his fingertips together in an Eiffel effect, an elegant gesture — the kind one saw in advertisements for expensive watches on successful wrists. He was savouring the pleasure of arrangements that had gone well. It seemed to prove something, this happy ending. He had been mapping it out even as the woman had had the presence of mind to get away from the cottage. It was just as promised. And who, after all, could begin to doubt speakers paid such fabulous fees (so he’d heard) to address an audience of fifteen hundred people in a New York hotel where even the bellhops wore black suits and bow ties?
It was a little tip I picked up from my friend Reggie, he said to an imaginary interviewer. Think it, see it, make it happen. It works. You should try it.
He leaned back in his chair — at an executive angle, as he could see from his reflection in the window — and realized he was a man who, from his own desk phone, made calls to Montreal and Boston; a man who made such calls as nonchalantly as if he were telling his wife to bring the kids down to Lino’s for a pizza. He was a man who made, on a regular Monday morning, international phone calls.
More than that, he was someone who chatted to people involved with Culture. Capital C Culture. Oil paintings. The kind of stuff you had to go to auctions at the Holiday Inn to buy. A contact of mine in the a
rt business, he might say casually over a beer to Bob Wilberforce one day, is putting together a little show. Some Oxford and Florence stuff. She’s given me some good leads. Perhaps I should, you know, expand my horizons, travel a bit more.
Debonairly, in what an observer would have had to acknowledge was an unpremeditated and exceedingly graceful movement, he swung his feet down from his desk. He brushed lint from polyestered thighs and heard his pocket handkerchief prophesy of lightweight woven wool. Pure wool. His suit buttons spoke of new spheres of influence. His star was rising.
He reached for his fourteen-carat Bic pen and made a few notations on a scratch pad for Headquarters. Mission accomplished, he wrote. Miss Moneypenny gave her special 007 rap on his door and stuck her head around it.
“Gus? Mr Wilberforce wants to know if you’re okay?”
“Uh —” he said, hastily covering up classified information. He wished she would not open the door without waiting for his answer. How many times had he … ?
“Should I call your wife?” She sounded concerned. “Perhaps she should come and get you?”
“No, no.” He rested his head in his hands. “It’s nothing. Some sort of dizzy spell. Seems to be gone now. Just give me a few minutes.”
He waited for a while after she had closed his door in case there were to be any further oracular hints or warnings or instructions. But his inner voice was silent. After all, La Magdalena was safe now.
With a small shock of recognition, he thought: Of course we did it on purpose. We left her there alone. We wanted this to happen.
Probably, he thought, it would have been simpler if that first time we’d stopped, when Felicity’s car ran off the road, before we even got to L’Ascension, closer to the main highway … Nevertheless, it had all worked out for the best. For good measure he pictured the underground church network in Montreal as a hearth by which La Magdalena could warm herself.
And he saw Therese too, putting new patches on Tina’s jeans, smiling over her needle and thread. The carnations were nodding at her elbow. All was well.
He squared his shoulders and walked resolutely back into the hard, real world where Bob Wilberforce was laying out game plans. Gus, he said, glad to have you back in the dugout. It’s a hitter’s game. Now we can all see that since New York you’ve got the ball and you’re running with it. You’ve got momentum. You’ve got the largest client pool in the agency. Your bases are loaded, man. This is your chance to move up to the majors.
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