Hey, Francie, a voice called from the far end of the diner, how about some more coffee; but when I started to walk toward it, Patti slid with admirable grace across her leatherette seat and jumped to her feet, her free hand grabbing my wrist, her other hand raising the pocketbook to hit me on the shoulder. Hey, I said, hey! The pocketbook’s silver hasp sprang open and a plaid wallet, a plaid glasses case, car keys, loose change, a bottle of aspirin, a pair of white cotton gloves, several lipsticks, a black plastic comb, and a brown plastic compact spilled onto the floor. Filth, Patti yelled, I was nothing but filth. Hers was the strong grip of a farm wife, of a woman who’d extricated from between their mothers’ legs the stuck wet bodies of calves and lambs, the grip of a woman who could lift a fifty-pound bag of grain and tighten the bolts on a tractor—the grip, in short, of a woman who, having thrown in her lot with a man, would never relax her hold on him. She could only feel pity for my poor little girls, Patti said, having to be brought up by trash like me. What kind of an example did I think I was setting? Me and that old pervert, who probably had them in her clutches at this very minute. Did I think I was so special to be having an affair with Sam Blackburn? With Mr. Caught With His Pants Down? Wipe that smile off your face, girl! she yelled, even though I wasn’t smiling.
In fact my response was twofold, and took me completely by surprise. To begin with, I found myself filled with respect for Patti Judkins, for her brave refusal to back down even after Kosta and the teenaged boys had pulled her away from me to a presumably safe place behind the counter, for the way she pretended to acquiesce and then, the moment they’d let go of her, picked up a cup filled with coffee and hurled it in the direction of my head, the coffee hanging in the air in a wide brown arc before splashing onto the floor, an extended splat immediately followed by the loud crash of the cup breaking in half against the metal rim of the table. Two pieces of blue-banded white ceramic landed at my feet, two parts of the same cup—just as the second part of my response, in which I found myself filled with a new longing for Sam, my former indifference giving way to a vision of permanence and constancy, seemed to me nothing more than the necessary correlative to my respect for Patti Judkins. It was as if I’d been infected by her violent sense of moral rectitude. Maybe I did want Sam for my very own. Was that so crazy? A father for the twins, a husband for me? A normal life, whatever that meant. Sam. Whatever that meant.
Of course, when you’re one of the principals in a drama it isn’t always easy to distinguish the underlying themes. “Là ci darem la mano,” the Don sings to Zerlina in the popular first-act duet from Don Giovanni. Your hand, he urges, honey-mouthed, doing his best to woo her away from her unpolished yet faithful betrothed, the stalwart Masetto. Such charming music, so sweet, so romantic, although neither the Don nor Zerlina is aware of the fact that this is the same request the ghost of the murdered Commendatore will make of the Don at the opera’s conclusion. “Dammi la mano in pegno,” the Commendatore will ask—“Give me your hand in token”—the implication being that since he’s honored the Don’s dinner invitation, the Don must reciprocate, only this time they’ll be dining with the damned. Patti’s strong grip across the countertop, Helle’s weaker grip on her deathbed, Ida’s pretty fingers lacing through her daughter’s, drawing her along behind her into the bog—a net of symbolic imagery was dropping over me, but I was too involved to recognize it for what it was.
Kosta let me leave work early, and I immediately drove up Airport Hill past the limp wind socks and limp flags, the huge, heat-baked hangars and bright private planes; down the hill past the rows of small airless tract houses, their dust-caked lawn ornaments and their dead lawns; ending up at the high school at the bottom of the hill, where Adirondack Community College held its summer-session classes, and where I knew I would find Sam. The parking lot was nearly empty, a still gray field of asphalt bordered on one side by a still gray football field, on the other by a still gray building. Inside, it was even hotter; a bored-looking woman sat behind the front desk at a typewriter, her long blond hair stirred at intervals by the slow oscillations of a portable fan next to the wooden partition which during the school year would protect the administrators from the students. Mmmm? she said, keeping her eyes on the typewriter, her hands poised over the keys. Professor Blackburn? Room 109, at the end of the hall to the right. Hands preparing to pounce, a silent system of bells preparing to ring, a silent hive of rooms preparing to fill with the din of autumn. Was it my imagination, or had the woman, at the mention of Sam’s name, briefly smirked?
In room 109 Sam was leaning against a chalkboard on which he’d written in his backward-sloping, loopy handwriting, “Aristotle versus Plato—the question of Free Will.” Though class had been dismissed, a heavyset man in a seersucker suit remained—an insurance salesman, I thought, or a teamster, depending on whether he’d dressed up or dressed down for the occasion—who appeared to be older than Sam, and who was consequently unwilling to concede the position of authority. “I’ll be with you in a moment, Miss Thorn,” Sam said, his eyebrows lifting briefly above the pink rims of his glasses, his eyes briefly, waggishly, crossing. Why did Mr. Gruber persist in his misguided belief that Plato advocated a relationship between free will and body weight? Surely a bright man like Mr. Gruber should realize that such a theory would suggest that the destiny of a lightweight, like, for instance, Miss Thorn here, was more circumscribed than his own? But hadn’t Plato said that any man—or woman, for that matter, appended Mr. Gruber, sending a conspirator’s smile in my direction—who knew what good was couldn’t choose anything else? He was grinning slyly, as if he’d at last set a trap from which escape was impossible. Well, Sam replied, he guessed the final verdict would rely on how convincingly Mr. Gruber had managed to argue his case in his paper, wouldn’t it?
I’d heard the rising pitch of exasperation in Sam’s voice, the pinched squeal of his vowels, so I knew what kind of mood to expect by the time Mr. Gruber had at last taken leave of us, backing reluctantly out the door. No one could pay a person enough, Sam said, slamming it shut behind him, to put up with a moron like that. This was the last summer! Absolutely the last! He was violently shoving papers and books into his briefcase, then all at once surprised me by stopping dead and looking sadly out into space, his expression tender and heartbroken, as if he were about to cry. Footsteps in the hall, a jingling of keys, the whiskery sound of a broom moving across linoleum, a deejay’s hearty voice giving way to Dion DiMucci’s, that unbearably erotic little moan with which “Ruby” begins. “Ruby, Ruby, how I wauncha, Like a ghost I’ma gonna hauncha”—the most sublime rhyme in the world, according to Helle Ten Brix. God damn it, Frannie, Sam said. You think you know what you’re doing with your life, and then what? Maybe Gruber was right. Maybe our combined weights weren’t enough; maybe what fate had set against us in the scales was a fat man in seersucker. Because I should correct him if he was wrong, but it wasn’t Gruber, was it, who was stuck teaching philosophy to a bunch of morons? It wasn’t Gruber who was going to be stuck grading a bunch of moronic papers until all hours of the morning. No, Gruber was off to ride across the green lawns of the golf course in his expensive, motorized golf cart. I didn’t realize until I’d come close enough to put my arms around Sam—approaching cautiously, since you never can tell whether a person prefers to lick his wounds in private—that he was laughing. Gruber on a golf cart. The Platonic ideal. Better than the usual tired old examples, didn’t I think? A number, a tree, an elephant, a bed? Speaking of which, how about it? The Hi-Ho, the Ho-Hum, whatever the hell it was called?
I hesitated, and as I did the fat man tipped the scales, sending Sam and me flying through the hot air of summer toward the chill air of fall, toward the moment when the typist’s hands would land on the keys, the bells would ring, the classrooms would fill with noisy students. No, I said, not today. I was tired of sneaking into motels, of lying to the twins, of pretending not to care about the future. Couldn’t we move away? Couldn’t we decide to throw in ou
r lot together, pack up the children and move away? It wasn’t as if Sam still had anything invested in his marriage or his job—Maren would probably be happy to see him go. Of course William was a problem; she’d want to keep William. But we could sort all that out later. For now we could get in my car and start driving—east toward one ocean, west toward another. It was bound to be cooler the closer you got to the coast. We could camp out on beaches, cook fish over driftwood fires, sleep under the stars. I knew only a few of the constellations, Orion, the Dippers, the one shaped like a big W, and this would give me a chance to learn the rest. I’d always wanted to learn them, ever since I’d flunked out of the Girl Scouts, aged eleven, without earning a single merit badge.
The more involved I became in my monologue, the less it seemed to have to do with Sam. In fact, the image I was coming back to over and over again—Francie Thorn wading among dark wet rocks, plucking from nests of seaweed the iridescent mussels she would later coax open over a fire, revealing to her two little girls first the small secret of the meat hidden within each shell, and then the larger secret of the figures hidden in the black starry sky—didn’t include Sam at all. Meanwhile, he was standing by one of the classroom’s three tall windows, staring thoughtfully out at the parking lot. My car, his car, a car I didn’t recognize, a powder-blue Corvair, probably the typist’s. His white shirt was open at the collar, the sleeves rolled up, damp under his arms and between his shoulder blades. The heat made his hair curl, his eyebrows wild. I thought he looked handsome, but like a stranger. Where were his hat, his pen? He tapped on the window, waved; the powder-blue car made a slow circuit of the lot, then drove away.
“What are you saying?” Sam asked. “Are you asking me to leave Maren? Is that it?” We were all alone in a building designed to accommodate hundreds of people, meaning we were more than normally alone. So many strangers in the world! There on that cool northern beach, for instance, as my twins dropped off to sleep under a powder-blue blanket, as the darkening sea thumped its dark green paws on the dark moist sand, a stranger approached, a man in a white shirt, the damp air making his gray-brown hair curl at the temples, over the ears, coating the lenses of his pink-rimmed glasses with a thin, salty film. While I watched, he removed them, regarded them curiously, wiped them on the tail of his shirt, one flap of which was hanging out like the tongue of an exhausted dog over the waistband of his chinos, folded them, and put them in his breast pocket. What was going on here? Who was it who was slipping his hands up under the skirt of my waitress uniform? Why was my head pressed against a flat hard surface that smelled like chalk? I could taste salt on the man’s lips. “I didn’t realize,” he said. The building was so silent that every noise we made—the sound of a zipper, the sound of static electricity as the bunched skirt of my uniform came in contact with the small hairs on the backs of the man’s hands—resounded with meaning. “I never thought you wanted anything more than this,” the man said. But I didn’t, I told him—not before. And now? And now? No, I said, not now either.
The truth is, whereas before I’d known what I didn’t want, now I didn’t know what I did. If I had, would it have made any difference? Would I be living with Sam and the twins in a shingled cottage near the ocean, filling the shelves of a neat wainscoted pantry with jar upon jar of homemade beach plum and rosehip jam? Sam in the next room, sitting at a large oak table writing scholarly articles; Flo standing behind an easel on the beach, painting; Ruby wandering through the dunes with her newest beau, Lily at their heels? Of course not. Of course not. As we say these days, get real. Get a life. Which I did, in a manner of speaking.
Before we left—steering our cars in opposite directions at the place where Airport Drive intersected with the Branch Road, a light tap on the horn by the way of acknowledging that we were once again about to be gathered into the desperate embrace of our separate lives—Sam removed an envelope from his briefcase. Did I know about this? It was a formal invitation, engraved in black on heavy cream-colored stock: “Un Ballo in Maschera!” it said. “A gala celebration of Helle Ten Brix’s last birthday in this world! The sixth day of August, nineteen hundred and sixty-three.” Costumes, the invitation explained, were required but presents discouraged, since the celebrant would have no use for them where she was going. Guests should plan to arrive at the trailer no later than nine P.M.; an unmasking at midnight would be followed by a light supper. When I shook my head, confused, Sam told me that he’d found it in the mail just that morning—one was probably waiting for me at home. The whole family was invited, even William. But didn’t I think it was odd that Helle hadn’t mentioned the party to me, of all people? Not really, I said. She was a tricky woman. A tricky, dying woman—a dangerous combination. In this world, at least. At the very least, Sam said. Frannie. Oh Frannie. In this world that had me in it, whom he loved.
V
This world, by which we usually mean the real world, the world which, by the time Helle had begun making her dreamy way into what would eventually emerge as Fuglespil, had come to resemble the nightmare world of that opera, its landscape controlled by such composite creatures as she was causing to roost in the branches of her invented elm. How seductive the aspect of a winged human body—how easy to turn such a man into a god! The power of the image, according to Helle, derived from the symbolic linking of bird and spirit, for wasn’t the Egyptian pharaoh’s soul carried to heaven by Horus, the hawk-headed deity, and didn’t the souls of Christian saints ascend to heaven in the form of doves? What this implied was the purity of the soul, its innocence, although the association wasn’t always so optimistic. In the Herakles legend, for example, the birds which rose from Lake Stymphalus represented the hideous issue of a stagnant soul; in the Book of Revelations, the whore Babylon became “the hold of every foul spirit, the cage of every unclean and hateful bird.” Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, Streicher, Hess, Rosenberg, Himmler—Helle said it was as if by conjuring up those names you might actually be opening Babylon’s cage, letting evil itself escape. Inhuman, you’d think, thereby investing those names with inhuman power, thereby repeating the error upon which the fascist, over and over again, builds his house of human skulls and bones. So it happened that in the early hours of the morning of April 9, 1940, German troops crossed the border into Jutland; an enormous merchant ship sailed into the Copenhagen harbor and docked, releasing its cargo of soldiers and tanks onto the Langelinie’s stone promenade. Within fifteen minutes the Germans had captured the Citadel, after which they advanced to Amalienborg Palace, where following a brief skirmish they subdued the King’s Guard.
At the time, Helle was living with Maeve in a large apartment on the Gammel Strand, overlooking the Frederiksholms Kanal. The apartment’s front room had two large windows facing southeast, and it was the women’s custom to start each day seated by those windows, drinking coffee as the sun came up, as the fishwives spread out their wares in the street below, the first rays of the sun catching on the scales of the sturgeon and mackerel and salmon, on the moist coils of the eels, on the wind-puckered surface of the water. They didn’t live in a quiet place, and Maeve was not a quiet woman. Helle was used to being awakened by the screaming of gulls and the shouts of the fishwives, by Maeve’s voice raised in song as she turned the creaking handle of the coffee grinder, preparing her own secret blend of beans, a mixture she would reveal to no one.
However, on that April morning Helle knew immediately that the sounds weren’t the result of routine activity: the apartment was empty, the kettle had boiled dry on the stove, and when she went to pick it up its tin bottom suddenly expanded, causing the whole thing to lurch in her hand as if it were trying to get away. In fact, Helle told me, you might say that overnight Copenhagen itself had become overheated, labile. Possibly this was why the front windows had been cranked open on such a cool, cloudy day; as Helle ran to close them, a shower of leaflets blew in, scattering like petals across the floor. We will bomb the capital if we meet with resistance—such was the basic message, although the l
eaflets also promised protection of Danish neutrality so long as the Danes “cooperated.” The fishwives were clustered together, their arms lifted, shaking their fists at the blunt-nosed planes which circled overhead; on the other side of the canal Helle could see Maeve pushing through a group of helmeted soldiers, heading toward the bridge. One of the soldiers tried to grab her as she passed, and another shook his bayonet in her face, but she ignored them both, picking up speed, her green dress blowing back between her thighs, her strong legs pumping up and down. Apparently nothing could stop her, not even the tank stationed in the middle of the bridge, not even the gun swiveling in its mount, holding her in its sights as she walked by—because the men hidden inside were thinking of firing or because she was pleasing to look at? Suddenly Maeve disappeared into a crowd of men and women on bicycles, and Helle didn’t see her again until she burst into the apartment.
The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Page 29