by Craig Nova
That silence, or the not talking about it, made me realize, with a certainty like the one you feel when the sun rises, that I had missed something in the attic of the farmhouse. My grandmother would never have left a silence like that, not for the panicked descendents who needed to reach her.
[ CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE ]
IN THE MOONLIGHT, as I ran to the farmhouse attic, thea dust in the road was as white as flour, and the woods went by like a black wall, smeared by my own locomotion. I went up to the main road but thought, No, no, that will take too long. I don’t have the time. Then I went into the swamp, which was not completely dry at this time of the year. Were the copperheads on those hassocks, those rises where scrub grew? Or were they in the water? I knew for sure that they were pit vipers and that they sensed heat. Well, I was hot, sweating, the moisture under my clothes even at night making me as wet as though I had been in the rain. And then my shoes filled with water, since it seemed more likely that the snakes would be on the semidry land, rather than in the brackish part of the swamp. The splash of the water, the glistening of it, silver as the moon, was like amniotic fluid. I pushed through the brush, came up to the road and into the scent of the pines, then went across the field, the pond, the moon sliding across the still surface like a small round boat pulled by a child. Then up the stairs of the house, the creak of one step louder now than ever, the dust exploding as I opened the trunk and threw the notebooks on the floor, the check registers, the letters in that ribbon from a piece of lingerie.
My grandmother, dead these many years, was testing me. Or was it that she wanted me to be desperate enough to refuse to give up? Is that how she saw the world: desperation used as a tool, as a motivation?
My pocket knife was jaundiced in the light, yellow steel, and I held it in one hand and opened her trunk and then ran my hand along the one place I hadn’t touched before, the underside of the lid, that cloth lining which appeared to be just covering the leather of the top. But now, under my fingers, the shapes were hard and had been disguised only because they had been packed in, above the lining, so tightly as to seem like a solid piece, but were really just pieces of a puzzle that hung together.
My knife ran along the inside of the top of the trunk. The lining came away like the gentlest shroud, and under that gray cloth and held in place by tape that was yellowing, too, were three notebooks. She wrote on the first page:
So, you found them. Of course, I am curious about whatever relations would take the time to look for these books or to be interested. And there is something else here, too, whoever you are. Now that you have these notebooks, it means I am speaking to you across a darkness of infinite scale. And what does it feel like for you to be at the edge of the infinity that separates us? Or for an instant, to sweep that dark curtain aside?
I can say that this moment is what makes us human, and the very darkness you confront will make you burn with a light so heartbreakingly short, just a breath on the coals, but which (if you are like me) will be distinguished by caring for others. That is the best. The darkness you face is cunning and it knows that time is its ally, its devious, vicious compatriot, and that the two together can get people to do all kinds of things out of fear, out of terror, which, let me tell you, is not something to be sneered at. So, this is the moment of dark illumination, where all love is dark (because it is gone) and all fear is white (because it has been proved out). And as to who you are, if you are one of mine, you probably have the illusion of the strength of solitude, and I’d like to say that I want to embrace that hard, hard joy of being alone and making a decision. What you know in solitude can allow you to endure moments like this one, a combination of the wonderful and the horrifying.
But I wonder how you knew where the notebooks were? What hint, what clue? Or did you just go through the box, top to bottom? Are you one of those people who are methodical, or one like me, one who looks for the hint of a pattern in the way creatures live? That’s my mystery, or the one I will not be able to resolve, not unless things are far more surprising than I believe. Here is what I believe: one day you will stand in front of this box alone. And the abyss will be between us.
Outside, an owl hunted with a rush of wings that instantly stopped, only to be replaced by a perfectly grieving shriek. A field mouse out too late. Then the wings, the rush of silence.
•••
I have hidden these out of shame as I know they could cause someone grief, but after a while, when I knew what had happened, I thought that perhaps the truth, that dangerous substance, will want to emerge, no matter what, and that it might one day be of some use. That is my hope.
We decided not to talk about it, Pop and me. That was best. After the paperwork for Chip and our grandchildren, if we had any, after Pop had tried to instill order into the chaos I had let into our house, we stopped the clock. It was as though nothing had happened. Still, I thought, while I was willing, at times, to say that what had happened to me was chaotic, in fact I thought and had to realize that it was not chaotic at all, but the item that keeps human beings flowing from generation to generation.
The boys were away at school. Chip and Jack, who died in the war. So, it was just me, alone at the farm, and Pop, who came for the weekends, although every now and then he brought the boys, too, but soon he stopped that altogether, especially when he told them that I had gone to Europe, and that women in their late thirties sometimes had the urge to culture. Of course he helped me, came up with the money, helped arrange for an apartment in Paris through his connections, and for a doctor, too. The doctor had such brisk, touching manners, and he treated me with an attitude that, I guess, would have been more suited to dealing with an American girl, a teenager, who had managed to get herself into this condition.
At first I thought it was some odd, physical missing of McGill. The first thing was a soreness and swelling of my nipples, but then I thought this was some physical ache, and that it always happened anyway, before I got my period, but the period didn’t come. Not for two weeks, then three, then a month. I sat at the farm, in the fall, and watched the leaves of the maples appear as though they were filling with blood, just as my breasts began to swell and become warmer to the touch. I was sick in the morning, but only Charlotte knew about that, but she was polite and restrained, although she left for me a light lunch afterwards.
Pop came to the farm and we sat in our coats on the porch. The wild turkeys walked across the grass. The hawks as they found the thermals. I worked in these books, as you can see in another one, included here: I tried my hand at drawing, too, and if you look at the pictures of raccoons, bears, deer, even copperheads and timber rattlers, which I saw as they looked for a den, they have, in their eyes, a longing, confused look, as though they realized that life is so brutal it cares for not one individual, but only all of them, and this means a lot of misery, if you are one that is not looked after in the pack.
•••
My grandmother wanted to know if Pop could really go through with it, pretending to be the father of the child, but while he said he could, he had a faraway look in his eyes, something my grandmother thought was just the beginning, and while he was a man of tremendous perseverance, she wondered if this look and the impulse behind it wouldn’t fester and make matters worse, especially if, after a couple of stiff bourbons, close to the top of a water glass these days, he might make a mistake . . . in front of the boys.
So, Paris.
•••
Pop had rented an apartment on rue Buci. And he had been considerate, too, since it was on the ground floor, at the back, quiet and not one that I would have to climb five flights of stairs, when heavy, to get the apartment at the top. The apartment had a room for a maid, a woman who was silent, dark, like a figure made of smoke, who drifted in and out. My French was sufficient, and we could talk about what we were going to have for dinner or lunch. I did the shopping at the open-air market on rue Buci, and across the street, where the butcher had his stall next to the one for the ch
eese seller, but when I brought these things home, the maid, who doubled as a cook, prepared what I had bought, although she set the table in the dining room for one and then ate her own dinner, a miniature version of what she made for me, in the kitchen, sometimes standing at the sink, sometimes at the small table there, with her glass of red wine and her constant, almost mechanical eating. I sat before the plate she left for me.
People passed by the window in the dining room, and I saw the men in their dark clothes, the women in their stylish coats, their gaits so proud, so elegant, as though they had practiced all their life to walk past the window of a thirty-eight-year-old woman who was pregnant by a man not her husband. It was here, when the clink of the silver against the plate was so loud as to sound like a small automobile accident, I went through the details of how I had come to be living on rue Buci with that silent woman who seemed to be a cloud of smoke from a sooty fire.
The eating alone, like this, seemed like part of the punishment. I ate slowly, as a matter of defiance, sometimes putting my hand on the swelling stomach, and while I waited, which I knew was coming, for the first kick, I kept brooding.
Still, what I know about love, or a large part of love between men and women, comes from the time I had to consider the matter as I ate the rack of lamb with spinach, the salmon with morels, the steak tartare with fried potatoes. It was a variety of liturgy, I suppose, and something I did to keep myself company. After all, when you are most lonely you think of when you were most joined to someone else, to the point of feeling that you were not one person, but two combined. This matter of codifying what I knew about McGill, about my feelings, left me knowing that the sensation of this variety of love (of which, of course, we have many) was one that left me not only whole, but warm, and somehow correct, not in the right and wrong sense, but in the sense that I fit with the stars, or that because of what was happening between me and another human being, the night sky didn’t seem so mysterious, or its mystery was at that time reassuring. It made me feel as though the scale of what I felt was honored by the worlds, the distance of the stars that I saw with my own eyes. With that intensity, with that certainty, this experience, this sensation, which we all love, is as nearly as I can tell one of the most demanding, exquisite, and dangerous (not a sufficient word, really) of all the items that human beings go through.
This is what I missed, at those meals set for one and with those elegant women going by in the street: the warm certainty, the conviction that I could communicate by a touch, the warmth of a hand, just that. And so, I was left with a constant longing, a tug for something gone. That was the bitter lesson: even though it was all illusion, all hope and bizarre behavior, I still felt the tug of what had happened. On some occasions I stopped the fork, my hand on my stomach, and remembered a touch or a look, a kiss, a throb in some intimate place, all hitting me with that mixture of regret and desire. This condition, this suspended, protracted longing, which could never be forgotten, is right at the heart of what I taught myself at that dinner for one. That longing, that unbreakable isolation, which couldn’t be soothed by the lover (who had proven to be untrustworthy), is at the center of the regret when human love goes wrong. And the amazing quality, the item that left me woolgathering in that apartment in Paris, or when I went for a walk by those restaurants that put off the most wonderful aroma of roasts, of potatoes with garlic and rosemary, of tartes framboise in the oven, is that this desire for what would never have worked doesn’t make humans less, or diminished, but more, or larger, and that somehow the pain of this makes us wiser.
Of course, the loyalty from Pop was so unexpected. He reached to me from the depths, from all humiliation, all sense of self-loathing, all sense of betrayal simply pushed aside. He had something to do, and he was going to do it. I had a bank account. The maid. A doctor. The doctor had made arrangements for the hospital and a nurse. The baby kicked.
The telegrams came on Monday and Friday: Catherine stop report weight and health stop any needs stop love Pop.
Love? It left me shaking and added to my sense of what I know about this substance, which is so necessary, so hard to obtain, more difficult to keep, so easy to lose, and which leaves such a violent, vicious wake, sometimes, when it goes.
A telegram said: Practical considerations stop letter to follow stop Pop.
I should have known that the lawyer in Pop would take over at a certain point, since, after all, if you are a pilot, after twenty-five years, you think like a pilot, and if you are a lawyer, after twenty-five years, you think like a lawyer.
The letter was in the little box in the hall, and I put what is called a skeleton key into the lock on the door and took it out and read it at that plate for one. At least it was some company. Pop, in his letter, explained that he could not, in thinking about it, accept the child as his son, since that meant that the will he had made, the trust he had set up, and all the other benefits to his offspring would flow to this child, too. And while Pop could do this for himself, he could not, in all honesty, cheat his sons out of what was theirs because of, as he put it to be polite, “what had happened.” What ideas did I have?
We had one solution, which I sent to Pop: we would say to the boys, when I came home, that this was the child of a relative of mine who had lived in Europe and who had died in childbirth. Pop and I would take this “cousin” in. We would bring him up in our house, but he would not have the benefits of a son, in terms of inheritance and other advantages, since he would already have the generosity of our taking him in.
He wrote again to say that he would have the French birth certificate translated and that he had contacted the doctor in Paris to enter the name of the mother as not being Catherine Mackinnon but my sister Celeste Muriro. He would work out the details of citizenship. Everything could be arranged.
I was at the outdoor market, very heavy, reaching for a banana, when the man there, François, of course, said, “Madame, il a commencé. Voici de l’eau.” Or “Madame, it has begun. Here is the water.”
So, I stood with the bananas, which François had put in the string bag I used to go shopping, as though this, the gift of the bananas, would help. Then he went across the street to use the telephone. I felt the cold air and knew that I should walk to my apartment and get the bag I had prepared and go to the hospital, just as the doctor had told me to do, just as he had told me to have the hospital call him, but for a minute, maybe two, I wanted to feel the cold breeze on my wet stockings, if only to be reminded of just how alone I was and how, if there was ever a time when I should take pleasure or at least strength from the solitude I had learned to live with, this was it.
The shadow, the whiff of black smoke, stood at the door, the small bag in her hand, which she gave to me as though she knew what it had taken for me to pack it alone, the thing open on the bed, and then I went to the bureau to take out clothes that would fit after the birth, the touch of them enough to blister my fingers, or, worse, that caused me to stop, as though frozen, to think of those moments when McGill and I had been alone or when he had come into the house with the scent of pine sap and sweat. I took the bag and thanked her.
“It is nothing,” the maid said and shrugged.
I had been in labor before, but not like this, in that French room with the gray walls and the nuns in their starched habits, not one of them ever really looking at me, and this, of course, left me to my own devices as the contractions came closer and closer. And much to my amazement, I thought of those moments of McGill’s when he said that he could see a blue storm coming, all blue as a bruise in the sky, and then he would go stiff. I often thought, and surely thought when I was in labor, that this was a price he paid for being in love, or at least not able to control himself with me, because he said that the sky got that blue when he had been excited or upset and when he was with me he had never been more excited and more upset, because, he had said, he had always wanted to be a decent man, but somehow it had come to this. I tried to remember how smooth his skin was, just as
the scent of pine seemed to be in the room as the worst of the birth came, the transition, and then I saw that the nun mopped the hall with a bottle that said L’odeur du pin. And so I came up against the hard fact that it wasn’t just love remembered or used as some defense against the birth, at which I finally screamed louder than I have ever screamed before. The scream came from the fact that I was alone, that McGill had been insufficient, and from a paradoxical but profound love for what Pop had done. Stood by me. And not out of vanity, or because he wanted to avoid a scandal, but from his belief that it is what he should do and what he wanted to do. Stand by me.
•••
My grandmother and the baby went to the apartment on rue Buci, and my grandfather had arranged for a nurse. My grandmother walked endless miles, to the Luxembourg Gardens, to the Tuileries, since, as she wrote to Pop, “No matter what, I must never, under any circumstances, look as though I have given birth. I must look five years younger.”
And not only did she exercise, she went to those perfume shops and cosmetics shops on the right bank, and spent a small fortune, she said, like the French women who went there to soften their skin, to make it clear, and when she came home, pulling up to the house in a Buick driven by my grandfather’s chauffeur, Wade, she had Jerry with her, in a small bassinet, and she looked more than five years younger. Jack and Chip looked at each other and then hugged her and said how wonderful she looked. I imagine she didn’t look old, although she began to age almost instantly, if the photographs from this time are accurate.
So, the baby was brought into the house, and Jack and Chip didn’t really pay him much mind, since he was twelve or fourteen years younger than them, and soon they went to Yale, and then the war started, and by the time they came back, Jerry was away at school himself, although it was a special school. And finally, after Chip had come home, gotten married, and started work as an academic and a spook, Jerry lived in a town along the Delaware, Lackawaxen, and worked odd jobs, getting by, odd, having seizures, and finally when my father was in his thirties and moving up as an academic-spook, Jerry built that house out of spare parts and junk he picked up along the side of the road and at the scene of accidents. This, of course, was about the time I was born.