In Upper Magrit streets were rivers; beds were boats. A wintry lake wrapped itself around the trunks of apple trees, spread over parlors and kitchens like a cold, green carpet twelve feet deep. Books floated off the library shelves and settled to the floor, their pages rippling. Fish circled the legs of parlor chairs, glided over the dinner plates. Cups and saucers rattled against each other—half speed, double volume. Corked wine bottles popped to the ceilings of kitchens.
You must think of the Magrit that remained in the same way you think of other divided lands—Ireland and Ulster, the North and the Confederacy, India and Pakistan. You wouldn’t expect a little thing like the complete and permanent drowning of Pakistan to stop the troubles there and you mustn’t expect it in Magrit either.
When she heard the matter would be decided by vote, Madame Nadeau sent for her five sons. The Nadeau brothers were in Canada, following the pine. They came hurrying home. This was not just a matter of five votes. The Nadeau boys, as a group, were remembered as persuasive. “Persuasive” was my mother’s word, although the Nadeaus barely spoke English and rarely spoke at all to anyone but each other. Joe Nadeau had once eaten a live snake, tail first, to settle a bet.
Their boat capsized on Lake Superior. Since it was Superior, the bodies were never found and word was slow getting to Magrit. The boys weren’t there for the vote, but their mother clung to the hope that they would still arrive in time to be persuasive. Henry Collins sent south for a crew to set the dynamite and Madame Nadeau sent north with a second message for her sons. When the dynamiting began she had to be forcibly removed; by this time she knew her sons were not coming and was determined to drown with her house. She died anyway within the month, on a stuffed chair in her daughter’s home, of grief.
It was three years later, in the spring, that Tom Baldish was doing the supper dishes and thought he heard the first of the geese passing overhead. He stepped outside to watch and wave but saw instead, in the sky right above his house, the bottom of a boat with five oars dipping and pulling through the air. The apparition of the flying boat had been seen before; the residents of Magrit called it the Chasse Galerie, because that was what it was called in Canada, where it appeared more often. It floated down to Magrit roughly once a decade. But it had never had five oars before. Clearly the Nadeau brothers were still trying to get home.
All of this had kept Henry Collins from being as popular locally as he might have been. Every misfortune that befell the Collins family was said to be caused by the curse of Upper Magrit in general and the Nadeau family in particular. Madame Nadeau, whose mousy manners had been quite overwhelmed by those of her sons in real life, was remembered as a woman with unnatural powers. When lightning struck the Collins home and caused a fire throughout the second story in April of 1928, no one was surprised. The Nadeaus had been attacked with water and responded some thirty years later with fire. It made perfect sense.
Magrit in 1947:
After the dynamite, the small remnant of Nadeaus who survived, all female, left Magrit, but the Upper families who stayed—the Mays, the Leggetts, and the Kinsers—continued to speak on their behalf and to hold Nadeau grudges loyally along with their own. The Doyles moved to Magrit when Irini was four and were often oblivious to these ancient tensions, but no one could mistake the animosity between the Mays, who lived on the Doyles’ right as you faced the house from the street, and the Tarkens, who lived on the left, and all because the Tarkens were Lower Magrit and the Mays were Upper.
When she was little, Irini’s father used to tell her that Magrit was right on the border between America and storyland. “There’s you, princess, always losing your shoes,” Irini’s father would say, as evidence. “There’s Rapunzel of the river.” Rapunzel was her father’s name for Margo Törngren, a schoolmate of Irini’s who now worked with her in the Kitchen. Margo was a capable girl with a broad, pleasant face and magnificent hair. She was one of Irini’s closest friends.
Irini’s father drew Irini a map once with colored pencils. When I was a girl this same map hung on the wall in a succession of my bedrooms, more permanent than any home I ever had. It showed a troll’s bridge over Glen Annie Creek. A Hansel and Gretel cabin out in the woods, which was called the Sweet place. The castle was Collins House. In a leap of imaginative cartography, the castle moat contained the drowned city of Upper Magrit. And in the very center of the map was the Doyle home on Brief Street.
It was the smallest house on the block, as the Doyles were the smallest family. It was made out of brick, with apple green shutters and a peaked roof. It was built along the same lines as the most successful and final house of the three little pigs and was, as a matter of actual fact, the only house on Brief Street to survive the Big Blow of ’88. Or so Mr. Henry had said when he sold it to them.
Henry had bought it for a song from the widow Kinser, added indoor plumbing, and offered it for the same song to Irini’s father as part of an employment package. It was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, which meant that was comfortable enough. People didn’t expect as much of their houses in 1947.
And truthfully there hadn’t been another option. Before coming to Magrit Irini’s father had taught chemistry at Lewis High School in Indiana at the same school where her mother taught English. Irini’s mother had died the day Irini was born and Irini’s father began to drink the day after that.
Four years later, with his teaching career gone south, he brought Irini north to Magrit and Brief Street for a new start. She couldn’t remember Indiana at all, except, she told me once, for a watercolored recollection of following her father’s shoes out of a tobacco store, only to realize they weren’t her father’s shoes at all. What she really remembered was the way the shoes looked, worn and creased over the toes, and that moment of being lost. She never forgot that part.
In Magrit Irini had her share of ordinary neighborly troubles. The Mays traveled frequently to Florida up until the war and left Irini in charge of the house. They’d come back in the summer of ’42 to find their basement flooded in the last downpour. Irini had somehow failed to notice. “I never went down there,” Irini said, which seemed reasonable enough to her, if now regrettable. The Mays’ basement was as dark and unpleasant as anyone else’s basement. It smelled of spiders.
“I would think six feet of water would be hard to miss, missy,” said Mr. May, although Tracy May said she’d waded across it, so either it was no six feet or Tracy was lying.
The Mays had brought Irini a conch shell, with a sandy outside and a polished pink curl that disappeared into darkness. They decided not to give it to her. “You can hear the ocean in it and everything,” Tracy informed her to make certain she regretted the loss. Tracy was the middle daughter, ten years younger than Fanny, two years older than Cindy, and the May girl closest in age to Irini. She was just as annoying as most middle children. Irini told her she already had a conch shell anyway, even though she didn’t, and Tracy, of course, said, “Show me,” and Irini climbed up into the apple tree instead and had to be coaxed down for dinner just like a cat.
And then, years later, Mrs. Tarken had spent an entire day planting a victory garden, and Tweed, Irini’s collie, spent the entire night digging up the bulbs and potatoes. She left an easy trail of footprints to the Doyle porch, where she had laid the vegetable matter out in a neat line. She had even arranged the items by size. Irini’s father had been enchanted. “It’s an amazing effort,” he’d said. “For a dog.”
But Mrs. Tarken said it was unnatural, and of course it was, even for Magrit. She all but accused Tweed of being a Nazi agent.
The point being that these arguments were transitory and niggling compared to the hostility the Mays and the Tarkens had for each other, and all because the Mays were Upper Magrit and the Tarkens were Lower. Local legend had it that the name Magrit was created out of the first letters of the family names of the six original inhabitants. The M stood for May. And then, as far away as possible, was the T, which stood for Tarken. T
he Tarkens had for several generations referred to the town as Tirgam, but no one else did, and eventually even they forgot to. When Margaret Mill opened, Magrit became the indisputably right name.
The Mays and the Tarkens passed each other on Brief Street for the whole of Irini’s life there without once speaking except for the week of the telegram. The telegram arrived in a black car, in the gloved hand of a soldier. It said that Jimmy Tarken had disappeared in the jungles of the Solomon Islands.
It came in a hush that everyone heard. The Mays had never expected Jimmy Tarken to die for them or they would have been nicer to him. They joined the rest of Magrit in leaving cakes and sandwiches on the Tarken porch. It was a momentary truce, forced on them by the war. When VE Day came, hostilities recommenced. “I don’t think she even ate the sandwiches,” Mrs. May told Mrs. Leggett who told Mrs. Kinser.
“We didn’t eat the sandwiches,” Mrs. Tarken told Mrs. Baldish. “You know tuna. It’s not really a gift spread unless you know exactly what you’re doing.”
3
On the night of the Thomas Holcrow–Irini Doyle arm-wrestling match, when her father stepped back outside, a towel wrapped around his sliced and iodized fingers, Irini put her coat over her bathrobe and followed to make sure her father hadn’t woken the neighbors. The windows next door were shuttered, except for one room upstairs at the Tarkens’ where Jimmy had slept. The glass in Jimmy’s window had a dull gleam. The room was just as Jimmy had left it, except that his mother had made his bed. She’d done this the day he left, of course, not the day of the telegram, which spared Irini having to think about Mrs. Tarken making her dead son’s bed. Even as it was, she didn’t like to think about it. She supposed it would have been even worse to think of the bed unmade.
The air was icy. Irini put her bare hands into her pockets. “Ah, Irini,” her father said. “You’re not a gentle nurse. Fortunately, I took the precaution of anesthetizing myself first. And I forgive you. I more than forgive you. Come outside and turn off the porch light. You’ve never seen such a sky for stars.”
The moon had already dropped beneath the horizon, untouched as yet by boots and nationalism, and made up only of poetry and metaphor and cold, reflected light. Without it, the stars blossomed above her. They had always made Irini think of the dead, with their distant, icy, unreachable fires. Once this had meant her mother, but since the war Irini’s ideas of dead people had grown to encompass more starlike numbers. The Tarkens had a gold star in their window for Jimmy.
The sky was brighter in 1947. This must be why our parents’ songs are so celestial: “Stardust,” and “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” and “Deep Purple,” and “Blue Moon,” and “Shine on Harvest Moon,” and so on and so on. In Magrit, where there were few houses and no street lights at all, the stars were crowded into every corner of the sky, thick as summer clover.
The stars have always made people feel small. Depending on what size you think people ought to be, this message is either cold or comforting. It is only us and only now, after all those centuries, finally drowning them into silence with our own innumerable lights.
The more fragile constellations have been the first to go. “There, Irini. There spins Cassiopeia, round and round the Maypole. See her? She’s never looked lovelier.”
“Um,” said Irini. She had no idea where Cassiopeia was. When she was younger, she used to try.
“See the two stars there.” Her father would point. “The pink one is Shedar. The blue is Caph. Caph is her hand. Take a line, down and then east and then down again. They form a W. See? Just up from Pegasus. Not the dim little clump of blues. Just past it. See?”
How could she see? There was a sky full of stars and her father expected her to find one by finding another. She didn’t know where to start, so she couldn’t know where to finish. The only constellation she could find with any assurance was Orion and that was only because the belt was so astonishingly bright.
Her breath was painting the air, she was shivering, and her teeth were beginning to click. “It’s very late, Dad,” she said. “The sky is beautiful and all, but why don’t you come inside?”
Looking up was apparently making his head spin. He took a sudden, shaky step, then sat down on the porch. “And just listen to them, Irini. Can you hear? Thank God for all their little bell-like voices.”
Irini closed her eyes and stilled her teeth in order to listen. She willed herself to be warm. She could do that, but only briefly, so it was rarely worth the effort.
She heard water. Every few winters or so, the falls froze. You knew immediately when this happened. Once it woke Irini up from a dream—that eerie absence of noise. Otherwise, you always had to listen around the water. So she listened harder and perhaps there was another sound underneath, something at the very bottom of her hearing. Not a discrete or sequential sound, not a tune, not bell-like voices, but the way bells might sound if there were so many of them that they overlapped and ran together. A soft sound, continuous and watery, like the falls, but lower. The stars were sighing.
Of course, they were so very far away. Those sighs could have been explosions—deafening, deadening, screaming—but by the time the sound reached Magrit how would she know the difference?
And maybe she didn’t hear it at all. But just the thought of hearing it filled her with a blurry sort of longing. She kept her eyes closed and a stream of stars poured over her.
“Of course, they were even better during the blackouts,” her father said. “Remember? What stars we had then.” He got with some difficulty to his feet. “Thank God for darkness,” he said. “Thank God for a sun that goes down.”
My mother told me the story of Cassiopeia once when I couldn’t get to sleep. Cassiopeia was a beautiful queen, she told me. But she angered the gods of the sea, who sent tidal waves and typhoons and sea monsters against her kingdom. To stop the devastation, they demanded the highest price imaginable. They demanded her daughter. At the last possible moment Perseus saved the girl, and in gratitude Cassiopeia allowed him to marry her. The ending was a happy one. Perseus was handsome and royal and desperately in love. When Cassiopeia died, she was turned into stars.
Like all my mother’s stories, this one was long on love and short on detail. There is more to the story. If I were telling it I would point out that Cassiopeia’s great crime was pride. She had claimed to be more beautiful than the sea nymphs.
Her daughter was named Andromeda. When Andromeda was, as per instructions, chained to a rock in the ocean, her mother and father came and lamented over her. A great sea monster with a serpent’s head rose up before them. It opened its enormous mouth; green saltwater and white foam flowed out.
It was just then that Perseus appeared. He was wearing Mercury’s shoes, early precursors to the Nike line, so his hang time was birdlike. And all he asked was that the daughter be given to him instead, along with a suitable dowry. There was no time to quibble. The foam from the monster’s mouth had reached Andromeda’s feet.
There they were—the guilty mother, the desperate father, the eager monster, Perseus hovering, Andromeda, her maidenly beauty set off to its best advantage by chains, and the sea. Yes, said Cassiopeia. Please.
So it was a happy ending, just as my mother said, although the wedding party was a raucous one, spoiled by some unpleasantness on the part of Andromeda’s previous boyfriend. Half the guests had to be turned to stone. Eventually, Cassiopeia landed in the heavens, but she still spends half her time on her head as a reminder to be humble. The sea nymphs have long memories.
Which is why you hardly ever hear women claiming to be more beautiful than the sea nymphs anymore. Women used to say, I can weave better than Minerva, or Minerva’s hair is not so beautiful as mine, or my fourteen children are better than Latona’s two. Not, I need to lose ten pounds before I buy a bathing suit, or I hate my thighs. Those ancient women had some self-esteem.
In fact, it must have been an enormous problem, since so many cautionary tales were generated agai
nst it. Just try to picture an entire society of boastful women. Who’s doing the dishes? Cleaning the toilets? Nursing the sick? How amazed the ancients would be if they could wander for a bit through any contemporary bookstore, reading the current stack of be-your-own-goddess books.
Irini did know one exceptionally confident young woman. This was her next-door neighbor, Tracy May. There was no accounting for Tracy’s assurance. She was a middle child in an all-female family. There had been a silent sort of father around there somewhere, before he went to work at Willow Run, where, corrupted by the salary and the city, he fell in love with a barrel-shaped, black-haired woman who owned her very own gas station and he never remembered Tracy’s birthday again.
So nothing in the family dynamic explained Tracy’s confidence. In fact, the three May sisters picked at each other constantly. They were all attractive, and Tracy was no exception, neither was she exceptional. She had the same coffee-colored hair as her sisters, maybe even thicker, but she was not as large and toothsome as her older sister, nor as petite and wholesome as her younger. Her nose humped slightly and her lips were thin enough you’d think she’d notice. At school she was an average student, and in the Kitchen she was an average cook. She had tried out for the lead in the school play for three years and for three years it had gone to Arlys Fossum.
Arlys Fossum was so shy she was the last person you would think of for the lead, but she was strikingly pretty with red-blond hair and light blue eyes and fragile, perfect skin. And even in the first grade, when Arlys could hardly read at all, Miss Curry, the teacher, praised her for the way she read with expression. You only had to give her something to say and she metamorphosed into someone you didn’t know. That last year she’d sung “How Are Things in Gloccamorra” and there hadn’t been a dry eye in all Magrit. Tracy was given a part with no dancing and no talking. So there was no reason for Tracy to feel particularly good about herself, but she always did. This is a gift worth having.
The Sweetheart Season Page 3