Metro Winds

by Isobelle Carmody

  I wrote the letter sitting at the little desk by the window seat in my room. I had chosen that room for the window seat, which had a cosy, secretive feel that had enchanted me, especially when the curtains were drawn. And of course, it had the best view of the park.

  3.

  Our apartment was in a many-winged building three storeys high and covering an entire town block that on one side faced the great, wild park where it was always winter to my eyes. There were more windows than anyone could possibly need facing the park, and it was said that a madwoman had designed the apartment, forcing the builders to make it so. This was what came of having a woman design a building, people muttered. Mad she may have been, but if mad, it was a kind of madness angels have, for though the park was a strange and fell place, it was also beautiful beyond describing, for those few of us who could perceive its beauty. Our apartment was the one that faced it most squarely, and my own chamber was at the very centre of the apartment, so that its windows only showed the park, making it seem that outside it was truly winter. I knew the servants thought me morbid to keep the room after what had happened, and subtle pressure had been exerted on me to shift to another chamber, but I had resisted.

  As I gazed out over the park, I found myself remembering how Rose had always asked to be taken to play on the apron of snow that sometimes blew a little way out from the ghost trees marking the outer border of the winter park. The snow could be fashioned into snow witches and Rose was always urging me to come and help her before it melted in the heat. I would hang back at the edge of the drift of snow, longing to join Rose, but conscious of Mama watching me and wondering when she would demand the same promise of Rose she had extracted from me.

  Occasionally, instead of watching over us as we played in the snow, Mama would walk right to the line of ghost trees and peer through them, as if she were searching beyond them for someone or something hidden from her. She never passed through the trees, but occasionally she would stand there for so long that daylight would seep from the world and Rose’s lips would turn a soft lilac, since she would not leave the snow until she must. One day when Mama had stood staring into the trees for a long time, I walked over the crisp snow to her side and put my hand into hers. She looked at me and the fear in her face faded into a tender sorrow. She said softly, ‘It was snowing the first time I saw your father.’

  I do not know what more she would have said, but Rose came running up and threw her arms about Mama’s soft waist, saying impulsively, ‘Let us go into the park now, all three of us together.’ Her little heart-shaped face was flushed with longing and it had astounded me that she, who saw so much, did not see that Mama feared the park.

  ‘It is late,’ Mama whispered, seeming to speak more to herself than to Rose.

  ‘It is not so late,’ Rose protested. ‘By dusk we could be at the tower.’

  ‘Mama does not like the park, Rose,’ I told my little sister gently, wondering if Mama had hidden her fear from Rose, having judged her too young for the litany of warnings given to me. Mama never seemed to realise how clever Rose was, perhaps because she did not focus upon her as she did on me. But to see Rose misunderstanding my mother was astonishing and made me wonder if I knew her quite so well as I thought. Before either of us could speak, Mama caught Rose in a quick embrace, smoothed her hair and urged her to run back to the house to see if Papa’s carriage had drawn up yet, for he was to come home early today so we could go to the fair.

  Rose gave a squeal of delight, for she loved the fair, and went running off. I knew the task was a distraction and looked to see what Mama meant to tell me outside the hearing of my little sister. But she only cupped my chin in her cold hand and stared down at me with such a look of baffled angry love that I felt a queer slipping of fear through my bones.

  ‘Understand that I did not know,’ she said, holding my gaze. ‘I did not know that what I gave away to win my heart’s desire would come to mean everything to me.’ She stroked my hair now and looked down at me with a sorrow so striking that even after her death, a long time after, I could summon up that expression of desperation clearly.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I told her with perfect honesty.

  ‘No,’ she said as Rose came skipping back to report that the carriage was not there. Mama’s expression changed and she gave Rose a brisk warm smile and held out her hand. Rose took it and then reached out as she always did to take my hand, too, giving me her sweet, open-mouthed smile.

  Thinking back on those early days in the apartment, I noticed anew the way Mama had always been brisk and cheerful with Rose, rather than tender. She had cared for her and played with her and dressed her up like a doll and sung her songs and tickled her. My mother had needed little enough to fly into a rage with me, but I had never heard her speak a cross word to Rose. Of course, Rose was so good it would have been hard to find a reason for anger, yet I had never felt jealous, because all the overt attention and showy affection Mama bestowed upon Rose had seemed to me a compensation for the fact that she did not love Rose as she loved me. I ought to have felt sad for my little sister, but in truth it had not always been pleasant to be loved so intensely. Indeed, I had sometimes felt Mama’s love for me as a rich, lustrous fur blanket that was beautiful and wondrous but too heavy. Now, pondering the difference in Mama’s treatment of her two daughters, I found myself wondering if she had loved me more intensely than Rose because she had loved Papa more than she had loved Ernst. Certainly her light, affectionate love for Ernst matched the lightness of her love for their daughter, just as her possessive love of me matched the depth of passion she had borne my father.

  For some reason, my thoughts drifted to a night some months after the memorial service for Rose, when the solicitor and some business associates and their wives and daughters whom he wished to introduce to Reynaldo had come to dine. After the meal, when Reynaldo and the men withdrew to the library, they to drink porter and smoke their pipes and he to observe how men of substance deported themselves in the absence of women, I suggested a walk in the garden to the wives and daughters. The older women declined, but urged their daughters to go with me.

  ‘The men go out so they can exchange their secrets, then the older women send their daughters away so that they, too, can tell secrets,’ said Bernice, who was the oldest and boldest of the daughters. ‘I think that we should make up our own secrets in revenge. Let us talk about which of us should be married off to Reynaldo.’

  ‘You are a terrible cynic to speak of such a thing,’ said one of the others, a tiny, dark girl called Magda. ‘Besides, my mama said it is Willow who is to be married off.’

  Bernice, who was frankly and contentedly ugly, smiled and said she supposed I could marry Reynaldo, since he was not related to me by blood and the gap in our ages was not so very great.

  ‘I think of him as a brother,’ I said firmly, wondering how long it would be before I could be alone again, wondering too if it was true that Reynaldo was trying to arrange a marriage for me. Certainly he had not spoken of it, and in truth it was my stepfather or Silk who ought to manage the matter, but Reynaldo was never averse to taking control of a situation.

  Bernice sighed as if I had taken a tray of sweets away without giving her time to choose one. ‘Well then, one of us must certainly be wed to Reynaldo, since we are all daughters of the wealthiest families in the town.’

  ‘Oh, you are such a silly,’ said Friday, the fourth of our party. ‘First he is too young for any of us, and second, a girl who has a fortune, such as we all will have from our parents, need not marry save for love, and I do not think any of us feels that for Reynaldo.’

  ‘It matters not what man we wed, so long as we will be safe and cared for, since our husbands will not be the love of our lives,’ Bernice said calmly, stolidly.

  Magda gave a shriek. ‘What are you saying, Bernice?’

  ‘Only that women do not give their deepest love to their husbands. Oh, we can love them, and serve them and adore them. We even obey
them if we cannot get away from it. But I believe it is the children we will bear who will bind us most deeply. The love of a child is the love that will truly enslave us, for we might leave a husband, but never a child.’

  ‘I do not believe the love of a husband must be lessened by the having of children,’ Magda protested.

  ‘I did not say the love was lessened, only that the love of a child will inevitably eclipse the love a woman has for its father. I am sure that is why men stray so, because the pretty princess they fell in love with has inconsiderately become a wife and a mother,’ Bernice continued. There was a glimmer of amusement in her eye that made me wonder how serious she was.

  ‘You think a man cannot love the mother of his child?’ Magda snapped.

  ‘Some rare man might even love the mother of his children more than when she was a princess, but in general, a man has not the capacity to sacrifice himself for love. Not the love of a woman, anyway. He is all too ready to sacrifice himself and his family for an ideal or for his country.’ There was a touch of bitterness here, but none of us remarked upon it, since the voracious political ambitions of Bernice’s father, as well as his neglect of her mother for an actress he kept in an apartment on the other side of town, were all too well known.

  ‘Men do not love as women do,’ Friday conceded, after a moment. ‘But I think there is a reason for it. Men were once the hunters and the protectors of their families, and they could do neither if they were dead. So they must be selfish and keep themselves alive, for the sake of their families. And also in order to hunt, they must be single-minded and ruthless. Those aspects of their character remain even in this day, preventing them from abdicating their souls when they wed, as women do.’

  ‘Oh, what a vile discourse,’ Magda cried, looking really repelled. ‘Don’t you think so, Willow? What of falling in love?’

  ‘I do not think one falls in love in the same way one trips over the edge of a Persian rug,’ I answered her composedly. Yet even as I spoke, I could not help but think of Mama, telling me she had fallen in love with Papa before he had even seen her. And Papa had said he had fallen in love the first time he had set eyes on Mama. Even Ernst spoke of falling in love with Mama at the ball, though she had not told me when she first loved him. Perhaps my poor stepfather grieved Mama’s loss so because he had not felt he ever had a proper grip on her. Perhaps he blamed himself for not winning from her an undying love. Poor broken Ernst. ‘At least,’ I amended, ‘I do not wish that sort of love for myself.’

  ‘Then what sort do you want? It seems to me we have agreed that there is only romantic love in stories, full of princesses and princes, or the love that comes after, where a woman loves her children and her man is neglected and sulky and goes looking for another princess,’ Friday said with interest.

  ‘Perhaps that is it,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I want some other kind of love than those kinds. I don’t want a prince or a ruthless hunter. I don’t want someone to fall in love with me at first sight. I want a man who will look more than once before he loves, and when he loves, can love all that I may be as well as all that I am. That probably sounds terribly dull to you,’ I added, fearing that I sounded pompous and self-righteous. They all regarded me in silence, and then Friday spoke. ‘What I think is this,’ she said in her decided way. ‘A woman does not fall in love as a man does. A woman must entice a proposal as a flower sends the scent of its honey to draw the bee to it. Therefore she must judge a man and seek out one who suits her purposes. Consciously or unconsciously, she chooses a father for her children.’

  Magda gave a dramatic cry and fell back against the garden wall as if Friday had shot an arrow through her heart. But then she stood up and said almost spitefully, ‘Have they no say in it then, these brainless men? These breeding bulls? These bees who will fall to the lure of the flower?’

  For some reason, I thought of Silk, who was a closed door. Would he someday see a woman and fall in love? Maybe all men were locked rooms until someone opened them, and maybe the opening could only be done with love. But if love opened men, what did women do with what they found inside?

  ‘We can’t speak for men,’ Bernice was saying now, rather dismissively. ‘I am only pointing out that whatever reason we have for loving and wedding a man, we are bound by love to give our whole selves to them, not just our bodies, because of the children we will bear them. And when the children are born, our love is drained off for them and men get what is left, like skimmed milk after the cream has been taken.’

  Magda made a face. ‘How horrible and bare you make life seem.’

  Bernice shot her a look of friendly contempt. Then she said, ‘It seems to me that the old romantic ideal of falling in love for love’s sake is outmoded simply because it leaves out most of the truth of what it means to wed. That is, all that comes after the wedding.’

  The conversation was interesting to me because I had never heard love discussed in this way, as if there were various recipes for it. My idea of love had been shaped by the tales I had read, and by Mama’s loves, and it had surprised me to find I had any opinions on the matter, however muddled.

  I had got cold, sitting so long and thinking, and I got up stiffly, undressed and put on my nightgown, then climbed into my bed to lie shivering a while before I slept.

  I dreamed that Rose was not dead but in a stone chamber lying on a cobweb-draped bed in a gown of pink gold, scaled like the skin of a snake. Her face was pale as ice and still as stone, yet there was a blush of life upon her cheeks and a red bloom on her lips. A great window behind her opened onto a snowy park and I watched tiny flakes drift in and settle on the cobwebs and on Rose’s cheeks and lips and eyelashes.

  ‘I must save her,’ I thought. Then a wave of helplessness washed over me, for of course if she were a princess it would take a prince to find her and kiss her back to life. The only way to save her, then, was to bring a prince to her, but where was I to find him?

  I woke, and the room felt cold, as if the snow had blown from my dream into my bedroom. But it was only the wind from the winter park, flowing towards the apartment block and through my open window. The maid must have crept in and opened it, for of course she did not feel the cold of the park any more than she could see the snow.

  Wrapping myself in my shawl, I padded across the room and sank again into the window seat. I stared out at the moonlit park, thinking of my dream. The grey sky sagged over the white ground of the park, and the white trunks of the ghost trees shivered in the wind. Were those trees inside the park or outside it, I found myself wondering. Snow settled in them sometimes, but the next day their leaves would glitter greenly. Then I wondered for the hundredth time what had led Mama to enter the winter park. If I knew the answer to that question, perhaps I would know what had happened to Rose.

  The policeman in charge of the case had asked me soon after the tragedy if it was possible that Rose had gone into the park first, and that Mama had followed her, for while their tracks ran side by side to where my mother lay, the two might not actually have gone into the park at the same time.

  ‘But where is Rose, since her tracks stop where my mother’s body was found?’ I had asked, for despite all the speculation, there had never been a sign of any footprints to support the theory that Rose had gone away seeking help for Mama.

  The senior policeman, who was not old so much as weary and crumpled looking, had regarded me solemnly, perhaps waiting to see if I would answer my own question. He had watchful, intelligent grey eyes that offered neither judgement nor expectation. I had noticed that he spoke a good deal less than the other policemen, and yet when he did speak, it was always to mention something that no one else had noticed. After a long moment, he asked if I thought my mother would have lain down because she felt ill. I said I did not think she would have lain down in the snow if she was ill. A younger policeman who had been listening glanced sharply at me, and only then did I realise that I had spoken of snow. No doubt he thought my mind had foundered. The senior polic
eman merely looked at me, saying nothing.

  Now, I watched the moon cross the sky, thinking how many times the senior policeman had come back to the house to ask questions about Rose and Mama of my stepfather and me, and of the servants, and of the way Reynaldo mimicked with vicious accuracy the slow, careful, waiting silences that punctuated these interviews, muttering wrathfully about harassment.

  I felt the policeman suspected me of hiding something because he always sought me out in the end, no matter who else he questioned, yet I had been glad of his visits, for he had seemed to be the only other person besides myself and poor Ernst who had not given up on finding Rose.

  One day he came upon me in the garden, sitting on a bench in the shade and gazing across at the winter park. I asked him mildly if he suspected me of knowing something about Rose’s disappearance.

  ‘The mind is full of secret corners and strange rooms,’ he had answered. ‘It is possible you know something without being aware of it.’

  I wept, surprising myself more than I surprised him. He did not try to comfort me or question me or stop me weeping. But when I stopped of my own accord, he offered me his handkerchief and said in the same quiet, unprovoking voice he always used, ‘I thought you did not believe your sister was dead.’

  ‘I did not cry because I think she is dead,’ I said. ‘I feel as if I am to blame for whatever has happened to her. Mama was always so concerned about what would happen to me, when she ought to have worried about Rose!’