The Fourth of July

by Bel Mooney

  “She won’t come down. She said to say that she’s sorry, but she’s got a headache, and she’d like to go to bed. If that’s okay?”

  I half-expected him to leap to his feet, and go and drag her downstairs, but Carl was dismissive. “If she’s gonna be down here looking like little orphan Annie I guess we’re better off having her upstairs.”

  “Mmmm-mm, any time!” said Corelli. Even Carl looked weary at this, and made no response.

  The meal had ended; nobody wanted cheese; Luenbach had risen to reach for the brandy.

  “I’ll go up and see her,” I said, getting to my feet. “She might want some coffee.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that, honey,” said Zandra, “Miranda can go up. You enjoy the rest of your evening.”

  “It’s okay. I’d like to go. Really. And honestly I feel tired too, after our trip. It was such fun.” I was smiling at her with utter determination; she flashed her teeth back with a similar hard edge, as if challenging me to dare to leave their table. “Tell Babs she doesn’t have to play nurse, Anthony,” she pleaded, in a wheedling voice. Carl was not listening. He was inviting everybody to cards, and looked up vaguely in my direction.

  “Sure. You go ahead,” he said.

  I paused outside Annelisa’s door, afraid she would be snorting cocaine again. But when I entered she was lying on the narrow bed, her dress crumpled, her face once more a stained wreck.

  Pulling across the dressing table chair, I sat down beside her. For a few moments neither of us spoke. Outside I could hear crickets; somewhere in the room an insect rustled.

  “Do you want me to get you anything?”

  She shook her head.

  Silence again. Part of me wanted to leave, to run away from the chaos of her face. I used to come away from jobs, early in my career, with the faces of people in pain etched as sharply on my mind as on my negatives. Gradually I ceased to worry, wanting only to avoid it if I could. The helplessness – theirs and mine. So I stopped guessing at reasons (after all, it was the writer’s job to fret about the spirit behind the expressions) and saw only shadows, the way the light illuminated cheekbones, and the way a smile would suddenly change the proportions, making the ugly beautiful in that instant.

  “Stay here with me,” said Annelisa.

  “Don’t you want anything at all?”

  “No.”

  For a moment I had the illusion that she was dying there before me, that I had to gratify her last wishes somehow, and wanted desperately for her to ask me to run and fetch her tea, coffee, or a bourbon, just to give me something to do.

  “I wish you’d talk to me, Babs,” she snuffled.

  “No, Annelisa,” I said, “I think you should talk to me.”

  The bedside lamp lit her features harshly, making the flesh yellow and puffy, and intensifying shadows into bruised purple. She sat up, and suddenly snatched the wig from her head, throwing it down to the foot of the bed where it lay like a red setter puppy, tumbled in deep sleep.

  I would not have recognised her now. With the close-cropped head, and those huge eyes black with smeared make-up, and the odd light forming hollows in her cheeks.

  I was reminded for a second of many photographs I have seen – of victims. Jewish women in the camps, or the French girls who fraternised with Nazis, publicly humiliated by the victorious Resistance. Not all those faces show passive despair; some of them look out towards the camera with a mixture of defiance and confusion, as Annelisa was looking at me then.

  “What about?” she asked.

  “Anything.”

  “Got nothin’ to say. Dumb broads never got nothin’ to say.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Annelisa!”

  She looked at me bitterly. “Who’s he?”

  Her fingers were twisting and pulling at her necklace, sending the initials and their diamond back and forth along its length. For a few seconds that little rasping was the only sound in the room. The insect had given up.

  “Do you want to tell me what’s bothering you so much? Is it all of them downstairs – getting at you?” I asked, clumsily.

  She shook her head. Then she sighed. “No, it’s more than that. They don’t bother me too much, not really. Marylinne, she’s just jealous, that’s all. Jealous! Shit!” She rolled her eyes. “No … It’s just everything. It goes way back.”

  “To where?”

  “Oh, I guess … Home.”

  “You know something, Annelisa. I don’t know anything at all about you. No reason why I should I suppose, but …”

  She looked at me with a wry, wrecked smile. “You wouldn’t want to really. What’s there to know? Small town girl runs away to go for the big time – what’s so special ’bout that?”

  I looked at my watch. “I’m not tired and I’ve got all night. Why don’t you try me?”

  Half-suspicious, half-flattered, she puckered up her mouth, as if choosing something, and let her hands drop from her neck into her lap, where they smoothed the rumpled silk out over her thighs.

  “All I keep thinking about …” she began, then stopped. I was quiet. People will always continue, afraid of the silence.

  “Respektuj sebe a svt bude respektovat tebe” she whispered at last.

  I stared at her. “I don’t understand.”

  “Respect yourself and the world will respect you. That’s what it means. It’s something my grandmother always used to say. She lived with us, okay?”

  I nodded, glad to see that she needed no response at all. She had settled back with her head resting against the wall, her hands still now, loosely folded. Fixed on the shadows in the corner of the room behind me, her eyes narrowed slightly, as if by focusing carefully they could summon up ghosts.

  Still staring, she screwed her face into a small regretful grimace. “It ain’t a very long story to tell,” she said.

  Chapter Seven

  The important thing was that Annelisa Kaye was not Annelisa Kaye but Anna Karina Cvach. Her four brothers, all older, called her Annie, but to her parents and grandmother she was always Anna – little Anna, the girl, the blessing of her mother’s fortieth year.

  Lisa would often tell her she had prayed to Our Lady for a girl; in the corner, hearing this, the grandmother crossed herself devoutly and then reached out for her, to lay a hand on her head. Little Anna in her home-made red and white checked frock, with puff sleeves you could untie to make them smooth for ironing, red-brown hair in pigtails with matching ribbons – knowing she was the chosen one, the unexpected miracle, the girl. She asked her mother, Lisa, why she so wanted a girl, knowing even then, at the age of five or six, that the answer would not please her. She wanted to hear about … princesses, and prettiness, and being special in an undefinable female way – although of course she could never have articulated the thought. “Mothers need their daughters,” Lisa told her, “to be with them in the kitchen and doing the chores, to be friends.” And Vlasta Jirankova chimed in her sing-song voice, still heavily accented,

  A son is your son until he takes wife,

  A daughter’s your daughter the rest of her life.

  “Yes, Mother, yes,” said Lisa, smiling happily across the kitchen at Vlasta, where she sat cradling Anna on her knee. But the child wriggled away.

  The kitchen was golden pine, created by Anna’s father John, whose mother-in-law had not approved the anglicising of his name. “Jan” she had told him, “is a name the Lord has blessed.” He was a good man, and loved Vlasta as much as it is given to a man to love his mother-in-law, and so made no protest. It was natural that in marrying Lisa Jirankova he should marry her mother too, no question in his pious mind that his duty was to make a home for them all. There were no choices. You rose at 5 am to see to the animals, worked all day on the land, and went to sleep exhausted each night, knowing that your sons would do the same and that all this was given. John Cvach was one who believed in making the sign of the Cross over the corn before it was cut, as his father had done in the Old Country, as he
had been taught. He taught his own sons too – all that he knew, both spiritual and practical, making few distinctions.

  Everything in the home that could be made was made, by John’s hands and Lisa’s sewing machine. One of the first things his bride had asked him to make was the little glass case that stood in the middle of the sideboard in the sitting room. In it, dusty and yellowing now, was the small collection of objects Lisa and Vlasta had arranged so carefully, as if in a shrine. There were the immigration papers of Joseph Jiranek and Vlasta Benedikt, separated by an ivory-backed prayer-book, a pattern of trailing ivy leaves picked out in mother-of-pearl on its cover and the cross of solid brass nailed to the front. Behind them, pinned to the back of the cabinet was a man’s waistcoat in black woollen stuff, embroidered vividly with stylised flowers and birds in reds, yellows and greens; draped across it was a wide sash in similar patterns, the ends weighted with rows of little mother-of-pearl buttons, and a beaded fringe. Vlasta’s little bonnet was in there too, of fine white cotton, trimmed with drawn-thread work and embroidered all over with tiny scarlet flowers. At each side was an appliqued heart-shaped motif, embroidered with more red and green flowers and trimmed with lace which matched the long hanging ties. Two rosaries and three delicate blown eggs, painted crudely with simple flowers in bright colours, completed the display.

  The eggs fascinated Annie. “Why didn’t you break them, Grandma,” she would ask, “carrying them all that way over the sea?” The answer was always the same. “I prayed to Our Lord to keep them whole, because I believed that if the eggs were whole we should be safe. And with God’s blessing it came true.”

  “That’s why they’re in the case, so that they won’t get broken,” said Lisa.

  She believed in talismans. For their fifth wedding anniversary, when Joseph was four and Luke one, she had given John a simple little wooden box she had managed to find in Wahoo, and painted it all over with the old Czech peasant patterns. She had broken an old necklace of blue glass beads inside it, and covered them with a piece of paper folded into four. On it she had written her poem in beautiful copperplate:

  These beads a loved one’s tears do signify,

  That shall be shed if ever love doth die.

  If thou shalt from this box ne’er set them free,

  Then thy sweet wife shall never weep for thee.

  Sometimes Annie would take the box from her mother’s dressing chest, and shake it, enjoying the beads’ rattle. It seemed magical, a good luck charm – which John always smiled at as unnecessary. He was not a man to make his wife weep; he had heard of such men but they did not live in Little Prague, where their friends and neighbours led lives according to old ways, old values.

  It was Annie who made Lisa cry, when, in a savage temper, she ran into the bedroom, seized the box and deliberately scattered the beads around the room – little flashes of blue catching the light before rolling into dark corners, between floorboards, and behind the furniture. But that was not for a while.

  Lisa was born when Vlasta was only twenty, five years after she had flattened herself against the ship’s rail, pressed from behind by hundreds of others, all of them gazing with weary excitement as the famous statue took shape out of the mist – Liberty welcoming them with her torch to the land of opportunity. “I had dreamed of it at home in Slovakia,” she used to say in a faraway voice, “because my parents had told me of her, but I never dreamed that the lady would look so beautiful, or that on her tablet I would see a happy future, like a vision, as I did that day.” She smiled. “And you know something, child? I was so glad that Liberty was a lady. I thought that with her and Our Lady looking after me I would surely be safe and happy!”

  More than once she would ask her grandchildren if they knew what was written there in Liberty’s tablet, and although they knew they liked to hear her repeat it in a voice that quivered with emotion: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” Vlasta shook her head: “And only the Lord knows how tired and poor we were when we arrived here, only He can tell!” She would tell Annie about the big echoing halls on Ellis Island where they queued to be processed into the new land, nearly two thousand of them a day, before the world was shattered (the year after Vlasta arrived) by war, and the flood was halted.

  Vlasta followed her parents, hung about with bundles and bags, up the long flights of stairs, with her two smaller brothers clinging to each hand, and felt her heart beating fast with fear. Even many years later she remembered how shy she felt, standing before the medical inspector’s high wooden desk, as he bent in silence and examined her eyes for trachoma, his hands smelling strongly of disinfectant. “Oh, the journeys, the journeys,” she would sigh, rolling her eyes. At last they arrived in Nebraska, where there were already cousins. “But it was hard, very hard,” she said, shaking her head as if to say that no one now, not even her son-in-law, could have survived those times.

  Like all the new arrivals they made themselves a small sod house, and began to farm the new land. Six months later Joseph Jiranek arrived alone, and Vlasta fell in love with the strong young farmer, marrying him on her eighteenth birthday. By then even Saunders County was split, the Czechs despising the Germans who sympathised with the cause of their Fatherland, and holding their own musical evenings to raise funds for the other side. Joseph said little, believing it was more important to husk corn than worry about what was happening across the world.

  Lisa, Vlasta’s second child, was born on her twentieth birthday, in 1918. She grew up to husk corn too, for Joseph did not hesitate to keep his children home from school if there was work to be done. After her there were four more, and at meal-times the eight of them would bow their heads around the rough wooden table Joseph had made for his bride and pray. “Požehnej, Hospodine, nás i techtu darú svých, kterých z, tvé štdrosti poživati budeme. Skrze krista pána našeho, Amen.” One day, when Lisa’s older brother Jan was twelve, she was horrified to hear his voice rise above their own soft mumbles, saying clearly: “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which of Thy bounty we are to receive, through Christ Our Lord …” When the grace was finished, Joseph frowned at his son, who bravely asked why their prayers could not be said in English, since that was the language of their adoptive country. Joseph told them that Czechs love their native land as a man loves his mother; they love America as a man loves his wife who brings him children so that his line may continue. He said that they would speak in English but pray to God as they always had done, in their own language, because that is how He knew them. Then he made the sign of the Cross, as he always did, before cutting the bread Vlasta had baked in the rickety black stove.

  There were very hard times, dustbowl days, when the steel-wheeled tractor would only cut two or three inches into the hard earth, and four days’ work would only yield one wagon full of corn. Animals died in the droughts; Joseph could not even grow enough short oats to feed the horses. Families packed the few things they had left in wagons and departed to live in poverty in the city, thirty miles away. Joseph and Vlasta survived, to give thanks for times when the corn grew long, when there were bowls of golden rod on the kitchen table and a smell of roast pork in the air. Painted blown eggs hanging from the beams at Easter; Joseph’s handcarved toys opened on Christmas Eve after Vlasta had played hymns on the old piano; the rhythm of each ordinary day marked out by the Angelus, all of them bowing their heads at once to croon: “Zdrávas Maria, milosti plndá. Pán s tebon. Požehnand ty mezi ženarni a požehnány života tvého, Ježíš …”

  This went on the same when Joseph’s heart gave out, and Lisa married John Cvach whom she had known since childhood. One of her brothers stayed near Wahoo, the others and her sister moved to Lincoln and Omaha, leaving the land to work in shops and offices. John Cvach secretly preferred to say, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus …”, because he thought it sounded better than the flat gutturals of his own
language. But he was willing to do what Vlasta and Lisa wanted, and they wanted it done as it had always been done, adding that they had a duty to the next generation to make sure it was bilingual. Lisa shook her head as the old traditions started to slip, and her children’s friends wanted to be American, not Czech. So John made the sign of the Cross over the bread to please her and, besides, he believed it too.

  Joseph, Luke, Matt, Peter and Anna made no protest, but hid from their friends the fact that they still said: “Aj, já divka Pán, staniž mi si podle slova tvého … Zdravas Maria, milosti plna …” instead of, “Behold, the Handmaid of the Lord, be done to me according to thy word. Hail, Mary, full of Grace …” It seemed too old-fashioned. But their grandmother sat in the high-backed wooden chair in the kitchen corner, making rag rugs – the keeper of the house. And the children accepted the mystery of the Incarnation as part of the everyday, like the little display cabinet with its Czech relics, and the voice of Walter Cronkite,

  The gingham-and-dungaree times were the best. Annie went to the little wooden schoolhouse as her brothers had done, and her parents too. She put her hand on her heart each morning and sang out without thinking about the meaning: “We-pledge-allegiance-to-the-flag-of-the-United-States-of-America-and-to-the-Republic-for-which-it-stands-one-nature-under-God-liberty-and-justice-for-all.” About twenty-five of them were taught in one room, and as the years passed little Anna aged six and sitting in the front became big Annie at fourteen, sitting at the back and thinking about other things than the pioneers.

  Some weeks she liked to swing on the rail at the cattle auctions, watching as the cattle lumbered around the small ring, and the auctioneer’s voice banged out its monotonous crescendoes. Men flicked an eyelid; “Yup, yup, yup,” their bids were noted; the beasts crashed into one another, touched on the backs with long sticks. Sound of lowing. Men watching on the tiered seats, in stetsons and peaked caps, chewing on matches. Beef reached good prices; John and his friends drank beer in moderate celebration, smiling indulgently when the little girl, the pretty daughter, said she felt sorry for the beasts who were bought and sold and doomed. You feel sorry for the hogs and the chickens, Anna? You like the meat on your plate, hey? They don’t know no different. It’s what they were born to. It’s God’s will.