by Thomas Tryon
“Changeling,” Holland whispered hoarsely, tapping the glass.
“What?”
“Little changeling child.” His tapping of the jar agitated the liquid and the baby bobbed to and fro, rising and falling; rising again, head back, pale puckered lips breaking the surface as though gasping for breath. “Little baby,” he taunted bitterly, “pretty little baby.” He turned to Niles. “That’s what Torrie’s is going to look like, just like that. Won’t that be nice?”
Niles was dumfounded. “No—no, it won’t. It’ll be beautiful—”
“Will it?” Holland chuckled wickedly. “If you think so, wait and see.” And he went away, laughing, into the darkness.
“Hey you!” the barker cried as Niles, hurrying to catch up, appeared at the entrance. Clutching his doll-lamp, he turned and ran in the opposite direction, fumbling for the slit at the rear of the tent. In another moment he had slipped through the canvas, leaving behind only a frayed and gaping hole. Back in the dim light leaking through from the entrance, on the shiny black oilcloth that decked the rickety table, sat the glass laboratory jar, its tiny specimen still bobbing in the solution, the blank marble eyes dead, staring, the mouth pink and toothless, open in its silent scream.
2
In a chair on the veranda, Ada rocked in the soft light coming from inside the house and fingered the coverlet she had been binding with careful stitches. Her hands, the joints red and swollen, were seldom idle; there was always something: beans to snap, fruit to preserve, socks to knit, a scrap quilt, a coverlet to sew; day in, day out, till year’s end. And begin again. It was the way she’d been taught. But now it was too dark to work any longer, and she rocked to the strains of music from the parlor while dusk fell about her.
At a sound she lifted her wrinkled lids. Niles crossed the lawn, his shoes making slick, whispering sibilances on the wet grass. Inside, at the top of the stairs, the clock struck ten booming notes.
“I was hoping you’d be up.” He blinked at her in the light lying in square patterns about her feet. “Mrs. Rowe didn’t take her flag down,” he observed, handing her a paper cup of ice cream.
“Poor thing, she is forgetful. Patriotic but forgetful,” she said, taking the cup and the small wooden spoon. “Ah, you knew.” Eagerly she lifted the cover from the half-melted contents, peeled away the circle of opaque paper on the back and peered at the picture. “Who shall it be? Oh, I like Anne Shirley! I’ll just put her in my collection, shall I? Yah and strawberry, too. My favorite. Spasiva, douschka. How was the fair?”
“Carnival,” he corrected, and took the time to describe for her the Ferris wheel, the fireworks, the crowd. “And I won this for Torrie. It’s a bood-war lamp.”
“A doll into a lamp, imagine. See that wicked little face.”
“And two midgets,” he went on, laughing about the impending enema. And Zuleika, the hermaphrodite, and the magician.
“What was he like?”
“A Chink—I mean Chinaman, sort of,” he said and told her about Chan Yu’s trick. “And he ended up in a paper suit like they wear for funerals.”
“Oriental thrift,” she replied with a wry twist.
“And I know how he did the trick.” He told her how he’d discovered the method by concentrating on the nest of lacquered boxes. “Holland couldn’t feel what it was like.” Well, she knew about that anyway; it was seldom he and Holland saw things the same.
“And there was a pig,” he went on, “a five-legged pig.”
“What was that like, I wonder?”
He chortled. “I thought it was like Mr. La Fever.” She acknowledged his little joke and he sat on the step while she ate the ice cream. Through the open window came the soft saxophone sounds of a dance orchestra over the Atwater-Kent radio. Waltz Time, that would be; Abe Lyman’s band. “Do you want to hear First Nighter tonight?”
“Is that next?”
“Uh-huh.” From his position on the step he could just see over the sill into the parlor. The curtains were pulled aside to let the breeze in and his eye drifted to Mother and Her Boys, smiling down from over the mantel. That was where Aunt Vee and Uncle George had gotten married, right there in the parlor. He recalled Torrie’s tale—no one else in the family ever mentioned it—about how Aunt Vee had come down the stairs in her bridal gown to stand before the wedding guests at the fireplace. And how, halfway through the service, Grandmother Perry had sprung from her chair with a cry to tear the veil from Aunt Vee’s head; how she had clawed at the garlanded banister when they led her upstairs; how she had cried out again when they came to take her away.
Finished with her ice cream, Ada laid the Dixie cup and spoon aside, wiping off the cardboard lid on her handkerchief and placing it in her sewing basket. How peaceful it was, sitting there in the quiet night. Partially screened by the branches of the elms, the moon etched into the steel-dark plate of grass fine silvery cross-hatchings. Somewhere a night bird sang. Crickets concertized. Boards answered the creaking chair, a hum along the metal rails announced the streetcar. In the blackness beyond the veranda, out of the patch of electric light, a swarm of fireflies hung suspended, their thoraxes and underbellies emitting a Morse code of phosphorescent dots and dashes, secret messages, Niles thought, for him.
“I saw Mrs. Pennyfeather on the way home. She said she’s going to ask you to do the flowers for church Sunday.”
“Oh? That will be nice. I must give it some thought. How is Laurenza?”
“She’s fine. She asked for everybody.” Mrs. Pennyfeather, who had charge of the Congregational choir, under the supervision of Professor Lapineaux, lived with her husband several blocks up the road. Instead of a mayor, Pequot Landing had a town board of selectmen, and Simon Pennyfeather, who was blind, had for many years held the post of First Selectman. He had been Vining’s oldest friend and was the executor of his will. Each year there was held a memorial dinner in honor of Granddaddy Perry, and Simon Pennyfeather’s jokes always kept the company which gathered in the dining room holding their sides.
“What’s wrong,” Niles asked. Suddenly Ada was sitting tight-lipped, her hands clutched in her lap.
“Nothing—it’s all right.” She was fighting the agony in her fingers.
“Does it hurt—have you got the pain again?”
Frightened for her, he raced to get her pills from the bottle over the sink, codeine, to relieve the pain. “Is it gone?” he asked when she had swallowed one with the water he brought her.
“Soon,” she told him, and he took the glass back and filled it with cold root beer from the refrigerator, adding several cubes of ice and squeezing in half a lemon to make it tart, just the way she liked it. He returned to her and she sipped the drink, then set the glass down. “Spasiva,” she thanked him, catching her breath. He sat again on the step; after a time her face seemed to relax and take on its natural color and she leaned her head back, the chair making slip-slip sounds on the raffia runner beneath the rockers. An expression he could not fathom played over her features. With her eyes closed, her head keeping ever so slight time, it was as though the music she listened to was played for her ears alone.
What was she thinking, he wondered, with that tiniest of smiles curling at the corners of her lips? And, as if answering his unspoken question, she made a little face and wrinkled her nose.
“Ach,” she said without raising her lids, “Tchaikovsky—with saxophones. Saxophones are the devil’s instruments.”
That was the Russian in her. Ada Katerina Petrichev. And being Russian, why shouldn’t she have her Tchaikovsky pure? It recalled to her her childhood, in the old Russia, that Imperial Russia which existed before the Bolsheviks and the Revolution, the girlhood she loved recounting, he and Holland popped into bed on either side of her, she warming blocks of colored wax with her fingers for them to make little figures, frog, unicorn, angel, and telling them long-ago stories.
Stories of the big estate, the dacha outside St. Petersburg where her father worked as the major dom
us, her mother the housekeeper, her two younger sisters chambermaids, and Ada Katerina herself doing all the sewing for Madame, the great lady of the dacha, and her little daughter, because, Madame said, how nimble were Ada Katerina’s fingers.
Though it was the habit of the servants to be early stirring, Ada Katerina was earlier yet, throwing off the covers of her white iron bed, kneeling on the floor, praying before her icon, then dressing and going abroad to walk solitary along the path between the fields of wild sunflowers, fields spread so wide and far and deep that they seemed unending, stretching away from the path in gentle undulations as far as the eye could see, bobbing and swaying like a sea of gold, on which Ada Katerina had thought a ship might sail away, sail away forever over those waves of flowers, as high as a man’s head.
There on the path she felt all the world was yellow, and tranquil. So enormous she could not even begin to imagine how enormous it was. To be alone in that sunflower world was to be at peace, and this was something that belonged to her alone. “Always I would go by myself, for I did not want to talk or chatter like those other magpie girls. And me barefooted—yes, always Ada with her bare feet no matter what mamuschka would say, this being in a time when my toes had not corns and bare feet was always such delight for me. I am thinking on these fine mornings how homesick I should be if ever I had to leave my sunflowers, and how contented I was in my heart. And I could see things. That is, one kind of thing in another kind of thing, things that were not really there at all. And I could find faces and figures in almost anything, in everything: in the clouds and in the trees and in the water. On the ceiling, even.”
Oh, yes, they had a face too, on their ceiling.
“And then, afterward, came the game.”
Oooooh, the game.
Stroking her hair with a brush as she leaned back against the pillows of her white iron bed, modestly, “Oh, well, the game is not so hard, you know. Not so special.” (Or so she made out, though they knew better.) “A little pretend game is all. There is a trick to it, do you see? Just—well, thinking, that was all. Pick something and look at it. Pretty soon you are looking and looking and looking at it. And you are thinking about that one thing, you are thinking so hard, and sometimes you squeeze up your eyes and you remember the picture of the thing behind your eyelids, and the sun is making all colored dots behind there, and then you open your eyes and you can see what that thing is really like. What it really is. Looking into it, you pass through it.”
It’s a trick, isn’t it?
“Yas, I think so, but if a trick, it is a Russian one.” As if that explained it all.
But how? How?
“Well, Russians, if you can see it, feel more than do most people. Deep down. Russians, I suspect, have a sixth or seventh sense that God didn’t give to most other people. They have a lot more of what do you call it—” Thinking a moment. “Insight. Yas. That is the word. Insight. They are mystical folk, Russians, and,” she added jokingly, “the drunker they get, the more mystical they get. Worse than the Irish, Russians.”
But they could do it too.
“But of course, you are half Russian. What should you expect?”
But tell some more. Tell about the little daughter and the dog, the mad dog that lurked! All excited, waiting for the familiar tale.
“Well,” she would always begin, “that damn dog was a terror about the place, a big Russian hound they used on the wolves, and what belonged to the gamekeeper; named Zoltan, that dog. I am standing by the thicket near the woods when he goes by, skulking at the heels of Wasill, who is the gamekeeper, and I look at it, and I am thinking what nobody else is thinking, that dog Zoltan is mad.” Tapping her forehead. “Not yet completely, but it is coming, slowly, you know, and he must be watched. I say to myself, ‘Beware of mad dogs lurking, for lurking, they shall bite.’ Then I think, ‘And biting, shall bite again.’ I hear my mind say this to me two, three times, whenever that Zoltan goes by, and I believe it. Well, one afternoon Madame is in the summer house with the little daughter and some other ladies, and I am bringing for them koschnoijca, tea and little cakes arranged on a tray, and the gentlemen are away between the stone deer where was the croquet lawn. The ladies are all talking together and I am laying out the tea things and I see how the little daughter is going down the steps and over the grass to watch the croquet, and behind her at the edge of the lawn by the wood is that thicket, all dark and evil-looking with prickly brambles and I am forgetting altogether about the tea things as I am looking and looking there at that thicket. I am thinking, what is there about it? And I say to myself, well, a crow is sure walking on my grave. Now, at once the hair at the back of my neck is rising, I can feel it, and I am standing up from my chair with all the lovely tea things crashing to the floor, and my hand is reaching out to stop whatever it is I know must happen.”
Yes, they say solemnly, knowing what must happen, waiting breathlessly for her to go on. Now there follows the pale astonished look on the face of Madame, her little cry as Ada Katerina dashes from the summerhouse, across the lawn to the child, who is smiling at the croquet players, who do not know anything of what is happening, and Ada snatches up the child just as the great mad dog Zoltan plunges from the thicket where it is lurking, its terrible jaws all white and foamy. It means to eat up the little daughter—“Ach, so strong the jaws, so sharp the teeth”—but instead it gives a fierce bite on Ada’s leg, trying to fell her. But Ada has pulled away, the back of her dress in the dog’s teeth, and, trailing blood, runs to safety in the summerhouse, where the child is given into the grateful mother’s arms, and then, oh then, the pain of the doctor treating the terrible bite on Ada’s leg, which to this day still makes her limp when the weather turns cold, or she is tired or upset.
Madame now took the brave Ada Katerina into her care, giving her a gift of money and a dress as well, one from her own wardrobe, and some ribbon for her hair, and never saying anything about the broken teacups, which were costly. And how strange, Madame thinks, that Ada had known about the mad dog lurking in the thicket; how could she have known? But, Beware when mad dogs lurk, for lurking they shall bite, was all Ada could reply to her queries, remembering always to add, And biting, shall bite again. So it became common knowledge in those parts that Ada Katerina had the Gift, and playfully they would tease her, Ada Katerina, be for us a bee, a flower, an owl.
Sometimes in the evenings Madame would call for her sewing girl, who was now permitted the pleasure of reading books to her as well, and to come out into the summerhouse where sat all the ladies and gentlemen, and Ada Katerina, very shy in her new dress embroidered with flowers, but mysterious looking, too, her hair with ribbons braided in it and hanging about her shoulders like a gypsy’s, seated on a stool at the great people’s feet, would tell what it was like to be a bee, a flower, an owl.
Ahhh. Yes, Holland and Niles loved that part. But what about Zoltan. You didn’t tell what happened to the lurking dog!
“Enough, children, time to go to your own beds.”
No, no. Pajalsta, pajalsta! And, tugging on their hair, each in turn, she would continue.
“Ach, that damn dog. Russians, as you know, are most fond of animals, they can love them with a great love, like you love a person, even though they should do a bad thing. So Wasill the gamekeeper would not destroy the dog, refusing to believe that it was mad at all, and he chained it in the stables. But one night Wasill, who had been out on his horse looking for poachers (so they all thought), came home drunk, they said, for they could hear him singing in the wood. Well, when he got in dat stables dere, de horse became frightened of dat dog Zoltan and he must have t’rown dat Wasill and before you know it dat Zoltan has torn Wasill’s t’roat out for him!”
Here Ada would become excited, they could tell, listening, for her English always got worse when she was like that. And sometimes she would shiver at the memory and, laughing, say that a crow was walking on her grave.
Now about Grandpapa! Yes, Grandpapa!
W
ell, it so fell out that Ada Katerina became in love with the son of the gardener, he who tended Madame’s roses, Pavel Vedrenya was his name, and he knew all there was to know about flowers, and when they had enough money together they were married, and he bought their passage to America, and thus the clock that stands at the top of the stairs came to the little house in Baltimore where Ada and Grandpapa lived for many years until he died and where he had a glass house full of plants and flowers to sell. The rest of her family dead, Ada paid for the passage of her sisters as well, Josephine and Fania, who was called Fanuschka, so they might come to America also.
But there were always sunflowers, her beloved podsolnechniki, that Ada would plant to remind her of the fields of St. Petersburg and of the Ada Katerina who had been and who was now Ada Vedrenya, sunflowers in her dooryard, along the fence, beside the garage. And when she came to Pequot Landing she put seeds into the earth behind the carriage-house, where they grew tall and these flowers were favorites of all the others, each with its own sun-face to greet her in the summer morning. As the Sunflower turns on her god, when he sets, The same look which she turned when he rose. These lines she had found in a book and copied them out, and the thought seemed to please her. But with the passing of the years the flowers reminded her less of the old country and more of her grandsons, with their twin fringes of bright yellow, like the rays of the flowers, and truly, to her, it seemed their shining faces sent forth rays. And it was only sometimes, like this evening, with the Tchaikovsky music on the radio, that she permitted herself to be reminded of white embroidered dresses and ribbons and the soft evenings in the summerhouse on the big dacha at St. Petersburg.
Slip-slip went the rocker. The music over, Ada opened her eyes to smile wistfully at Niles. “Tchaikovsky with saxophones,” she muttered, “it is like salami. Ach, I should not complain—I never hear Tchaikovsky hardly before I come to America.”