Tweed came running outside to chase the car. It was a surprise and a delight to her when she caught it and Irini and her father got out. She panted great gusts of enthusiasm into the air, her long fur damp on top and jeweled with fog.
All three of them stood a moment on the porch, watching until the flickering brake lights of Holcrow’s car disappeared. It was hard to say exactly when this happened. There were ghostly red echoes.
“I confess I liked him better tonight,” Irini’s father said. “A little too regulation, for my taste. A little too fill-out-your-forms-and-wait-in-line. But you can’t blame him for that. No, it’s the war has made our young men so starchy. A very salutary experience for all of us, I’m sure, except the ones who were killed or maimed or went completely nuts. And maybe those parents who are never going to be grandparents. But he’s still a sore loser and I don’t trust that in a man. Now, Walter, Walter’s a man who knows how to lose.” He turned to smile at Irini. “Tell you what, muffin. You just let me take care of everything tonight. I’ll feed the dog and clean the kitchen. You go to bed and straight into the arms of the sandman. Just as quick as you can now.” He was all consideration.
Maggie Collins writes: “To prevent snow from sticking, cut an onion in half and run it over the windshield of your car.
“To avoid tears while slicing onions, hold an unburned match (wood end) in your mouth.”
Back at Collins House, Henry Collins was having trouble sleeping. He lay in bed and passed the time, as he often did on sleepless nights, happily dreaming of the kitchen of the future.
The kitchen of the future was made of a metal that didn’t exist in 1947, a man-made metal cooked up in a chemistry lab at a major university on a federal grant. Henry didn’t know the elements, but it had a glossy, ceramic finish that cleaned up nicely. It came in any color, but Henry himself preferred traditional white.
The kitchen of the future was on the moon.
The woman of the future resembled Maggie Collins in every detail. Whatever had happened with fashion and hairstyles in the interim, Maggie was too self-confident to care. She had a natural elegance; her look was classic maternal. Rembrandt could have captured her essence just as easily as Ada had.
She was absolutely at home in the kitchen, moved as gracefully through the reduced gravity as a swan on a lake. She wore no apron. There was no longer any need. The measuring and mixing, the paring and slicing were already done. Every dish from potato salad to baked Alaska was made in the future by opening a box and adding water.
A row of pinholes circumscribed the room. At the end of a meal, the entire room could be vacated, locked down, set on “wash.” Water would pour from the holes and drain from the floor. Light would pour off the scalded surfaces.
Henry was asleep now. The kitchen of the future boiled inside his dreams with a steady, lullaby sound like rain on the planet Earth.
8
Ada made Henry give her the next day off, so it annoyed Irini to wake at the usual time. The sandman had compensated for the lack of hours with extra sand. Her eyes were scratchy and she had to rub them open. Just before waking she had had a dream. It involved the three May girls, which could be distressing; they could come off like the Furies or the Fates or something they clearly weren’t during the daytime. The details were gone, but the distress remained.
The sun filtered in through the curtains with a halfhearted, underwater light. Irini looked about, relocating herself, shaking off the dream. The bedroom was preadolescent, prewar. There were dog books on the shelves, and dogs as well, miniatures made of china and plastic Irish setters and German shepherds. Irini had completely skipped the horsey stage; she took no small pride in finding her own path.
There was the start of a collection of dolls from around the world, but she had never been much into dolls either. The entire collection consisted of one Irish colleen in a stiff green dress, with bright red curls, and one Indian maiden in beads and soft leather and black braids. There was an antique doll with a china head and an elaborate christening gown that had belonged to Irini’s mother. Their colors were dampened with dust. It would have saddened Maggie Collins to see it, all of it, from the dust to the lack of follow-through.
Irini had often thought of redoing the room. She cut pictures out of magazines for inspiration, priced white wicker bed sets and yellow-checked spreads. It could be done on the cheap if she sewed and painted herself, and would surely look it. It seemed all too likely that she would take a decorating misstep. She imagined that her mother, had she been there, could have helped her. Her mother would have had opinions on gingham and chenille. Her father, who had opinions on everything else, was useless.
Anyway, redecorating the room at this date would suggest that she was staying. She couldn’t live with her father forever. It was hard to imagine how he would get along without her, but as long as it all remained in the future somewhere, she didn’t have to dwell on this. She was secretly appalled at the way Fanny still lived at home at twenty-nine, and Claire Kinser and Norma Baldish, too, at twenty-four and twenty-five. But especially Fanny, who was so old and had so much energy and drive. If Fanny couldn’t get out of Magrit, then how on earth could Irini?
She rose and opened the curtains. Perversely, Magrit had never looked more beautiful. Last night’s fog had curled itself around each tree trunk, brushed over every branch, coated all the dead straw-colored grasses and then, sometime in the night, frozen into a thin skin of ice. Outside her window, Brief Street glittered like the crystalline insides of a geode. Everything was glacéed. As far as she could see, everything was dressed in light.
The temperature was rising. It was a day to be alone, and a day to be outside. Irini decided on a hike to the top of the falls. She celebrated the day off work by wearing snow pants. Step lightly, Irini told herself, but her waffle-soled boots shattered the shining blades of dead grass beneath her feet.
By the time she reached the falls, the jewels had melted away. The glittering turrets became trees again; the rainbowed ground softened into an April patchwork of old snow and new mud. Sometimes Irini stepped on the first, sometimes the second. Crunch, shloop, crunch, crunch, shloop. Winter, spring, winter, winter, spring.
A deer had passed the same way earlier this morning; Irini saw the occasional print where the mud was. She picked up a tiny pine cone with the tight unfolded shape of a rosebud. She picked up a buckeye, because a polished buckeye was always a nice surprise when you found it in your pocket.
As the landscape about her turned to mud, so did her mood. Down in the Kitchen they were baking thumbprint cookies, singing along with the radio, and gossiping about her, even though Maggie did not like a gossip. “Where’s Irini?” someone would ask, sticking their fat thumb into the raw dough. “Got the day off,” someone would answer. And someone, Irini didn’t know who or how, but someone would know why. “Mr. Doyle was at Bumps again. Irini waited two hours,” someone might say. “Poor Irini.” Or else, “She thinks she’s too good for the Kitchen. They eat soda crackers with jam for dinner and she thinks she’s too good for the Kitchen. No wonder he never goes home. Poor Mr. Doyle.”
They might be talking about Walter coming back. They might know that Thomas Holcrow had come to fetch her last night. It drove Irini wild just to think about it. She hated being talked about. “Oh, well, we all have a skeleton or two in the closet,” Tracy May had said one day to Irini when they were gossiping about Claire, and this thought had taken her completely by surprise. Eventually she dismissed it as typical Tracy bravado. Irini had no secrets and she very much doubted that Tracy did either. Someday Irini would go somewhere where no one knew her and no one talked about her. Someday she would give them all something to talk about.
Or not. She was definitely not going to think about this today. She walked into the chilly dark behind the falls and then emerged back into the sunlight on the other side. She kept walking until she hit the barbed-wire fence intended to keep children from swimming in Upper Magrit during th
e polio season.
Swimming in Upper Magrit was absolutely forbidden to Magrit children. Once a year, on the Fourth of July, Henry stroked across to prove that, due to his excellent diet, he still could. But just because a man in his eighties could make it didn’t mean that an eight-year-old would. Hadn’t Opal May gone over the falls back in the days when the water was nowhere near so swift nor the current so strong? And along with the current and the threat of polio, there were the submerged houses to worry about as well.
In most kinds of light, little was left of the houses, beyond the occasional algae’d foundation. But every once in a while, usually by moonlight, someone reliable would see Upper Magrit just as it had been, intact and inhabitable, except for the water. Mr. Törngren hiked up every year and spent the night on the first full moon after the ice melted. It was the local variation of Groundhog Day. If he saw Upper Magrit, there would be good fishing in the summer.
Others found the apparition less benign. Maybe it was the sunlight that played tricks on people’s eyes; maybe the hallucination was that the buildings were not there. Maybe the houses had returned, built entirely of malice this time. Even a good swimmer lured into entering a window at the Nadeaus’ might lose his bearings and drown in the living room. The area was fenced off and posted with many signs.
At the end of every winter there were new places where the fence could be easily got through until Norma Baldish got up there to fix them. Or it could be avoided altogether by the simple method of walking farther upstream and then floating down. It was understood by all the children that one part of the bank was reserved for the girls and another for the boys. The boys’ bank had a large tree with a branch that served for diving. The girls’ had a little gravelly beach where they could lay their towels. Even without boys, it was hard for the girls to break this habit.
It wasn’t only the fun of swimming or the prohibition against it that made Upper Magrit irresistible. There was also the lure of buried treasure. Arlys Fossum had once found a fork with a monogrammed handle in the rocks close to the shore, although the monogram had rubbed off and couldn’t be deciphered. Jimmy Tarken had cut himself on something in the mud that turned out to be half a coffee cup. They never did find the other half.
And as a final inducement, there were the ghosts. Opal May haunted the falls, although people were too polite to say so when the May girls were present; since there were three of them, at least one of them always seemed to be.
Madame Nadeau haunted the millpond.
The Baldishes, who lived the closest to Upper Magrit you could live and still be Lower Magrit, were particularly tormented. Norma Baldish’s mother had once hung her husband’s heavy coat in its usual place, on a hook made of a severed deer leg. The Baldishes had been among the first to explore the possibilities of decorating with deer.
But when Mr. Baldish went to fetch the coat, it was nowhere to be seen. A thorough search of the house did not produce it. Then one day, twelve years later, there was the coat, back on the deer leg, but ripped and stained, as if it had undergone twelve hard years of wear and tear. “It gets pretty cold under the waters of Superior,” the residents of Magrit said knowingly.
It got pretty cold under the waters of Upper Magrit. Irini found a spot where the wire was down and stepped across. On the far side was a line of white birches. The top of the millpond had been frozen since Christmas. Even frozen it still looked like water. The ice was a pale cloudy blue, the occasional drifts of snow were like whitecaps. Only the lack of motion gave it away. It looked like water the way a picture of water looks like water.
To the right, the falls flowed out from under a ledge of ice whose edges dripped with icicles. In the years that the falls froze, Irini would hike up to see. There was so much air in them, they had the look of whipped egg whites. This winter had been long, but not particularly deep.
Irini walked through the brittle cattails on the bank and onto the ice. During the war Maggie Collins had written a column in which she recommended picking unripened cattails, removing the sheaths, and boiling the spikes in slightly salted water until tender. Properly prepared, cattails could be eaten like corn on the cob.
Irini had never actually tried this. The response had been uniformly disheartening. It proved hard for the average housewife to determine when the cattails were done and the average husband seemed to have no sense of adventure when it came to food. But corn had once faced similar prejudices, and it had caught on eventually. Maggie was laying low on the issue, but she was far from giving up. She had, as Henry once said, stick-to-it-ivity and she had it in spades. “You’d be surprised at how much of the world is edible,” Maggie Collins says. “If you only learn to prepare it properly.”
The ice itself was the color of clouds, so perhaps it looked more like sky than like water, after all. As you stood on it you could forget for a moment, if you tried, which way was up and which was down. Somewhere beneath Irini’s feet was the site of the Nadeau house; she was suspended above it, walking on water, walking through air.
I like to picture her this way. When she was little, she used to think she might fly. Her father told her stories about Charles Lindbergh, who once flew an emergency medical mission right over Magrit, and Amelia Earhart, only the way Irini heard it was Air-heart, a name so full of poetry that she pretended to be Amelia Airheart sometimes when she sat astride a branch in the apple tree in her backyard and it was sort of a plane and sort of a pony.
No later pilots ever matched the poetry of Lindbergh and Earhart, certainly not the astronauts, but when I was little, the sound of an airplane passing overhead was still extraordinary enough to bring children out of their houses. We would stand outside and search the sky, one hand cupped over our eyes in a gesture that resembled a salute. We would wait and watch as the thin line of cloud left behind by the jets turned feathery and dissipated into the blue. Now the sound is so common our children don’t even hear it.
The air around Magrit seemed always to be full of exotica. There was heat lightning and lightning bugs, flying boats and flying squirrels. There were geese arranged in arrows and stars arranged in stories. There were red-eyed vireos and ring-necked ducks. There was Lindbergh and there was snow. Above the drowned city of Upper Magrit, the air was particularly jammed. In addition to Opal May and Madame Nadeau, balls of light sometimes rolled through the sky. In foggy weather, the Baldishes claimed to see the little men known as the lutin dancing and flickering like candle flames just at water level.
People in Magrit had a gift for seeing things. It was the price you paid for living on the edge of nowhere. But the war changed everything. For the last few years people had seen Nazi spy planes instead of flying boats, or the coded messages from agents provocateurs instead of the dancing lutin. Magrit made every effort to stay current.
And if there was a loss of magic, there was a gain in purpose. During the war there was a reason to do everything. Maybe your job was to put on a uniform and go to London. Maybe your job was to clean your plate and do your homework and not sass your parents. Either way the object was the same. You did it, you did all of it, just to whip the Nazis.
You never knew what it would take. You saved the tin foil from gum wrappers and went south on buses with your classmates to help with the cherry harvest. If the government asked for milkweed fluff, to be stuffed into life vests because they could no longer get kapok, then you spent your spare time hunting out milkweed pods.
The Irini floating over Upper Magrit was nineteen years old. By the time she was nineteen, Mary Shelley was finishing Frankenstein. Joan of Arc had defeated the English and was already dead. By the time she was nineteen, Irini had defeated the Nazis, and was a lot older than she wanted to be. She had missed five years of her life because of the war and now she wanted them back. She put her hand in her pocket and there, left over from last winter or the winter before that, was a message Arlys had written her. It was in code and you needed the Sweetwheats’ decoder ring, 1945 model, to decode it. This was t
he special Atomic Bomb Ring Henry had designed, with the sealed atom chamber and the genuine atoms. “Look inside the gleaming aluminum warhead and see them smash to smithereens!” the ad on the Sweetwheat box back had said. “Absolutely safe for kids.” Cost fifteen cents and two box tops, unless your father happened to work at the mill and brought one home in his pocket.
Fortunately, Irini owned that ring. “Stop eating Sweetwheats! I already surrendered!” the message said. It was signed Hirohito.
The war was over. Everything was better again, except for those things that were worse. She had defeated the Nazis, but she never got to London the way some people who defeated the Nazis did. Now she was just a mill worker and the only way she could see to ever be anything else was to marry someone she wouldn’t ever meet, stuck in Magrit as she was. “It was my mistake to expect so much for you,” her father said on the day she started working at the mill. It was the only cruel thing he had ever said to her, in her whole life. That being the case, it seemed unfair and unkind of Irini to remember it so often.
The war was over and the magic was gone and there would never be a good reason to ever do anything again. Irini had lost her childhood and her hopes for the future all at the same time, all when she beat the Nazis. She felt for Arlys’s note and she was crying, remembering that she had once thought she might live in a world of spies and codes; that she had once been Amelia Airheart. “I surrender already,” she said aloud and saying it made her cry harder.
But it was only a nineteen-year-old kind of despair, and not to be confused with the despair a person can feel at forty-two or at sixty. What Irini was really feeling was a late night and a winter hanging on and a small town and her period coming. She tried to skate, but the waffle soles caught. She spun in circles, right over Upper Magrit, taking fast, tiny steps on the blue ice, spotting on the line of birches, faster and faster until she lost her spot, became dizzy, and fell down.
The Sweetheart Season Page 7