Many Mansions

by Isabel Bolton

  So the days passed. And then that day, that moment—impelled by the almost suicidal impulse to get up and go to the parapet. Standing there looking down on Florence—the churches, the bridges, the river flowing golden through the plain; and suddenly with no warning, no preparation for it, those sharp pains ripping through her abdomen. It has begun, it has begun, she’d thought, and clutching her side, holding her breath, she’d managed somehow to get back to her seat in the shade, seeing Cecilia, scaring up the pigeons in front of her while behind her they descended in an arch upon the shadows, coming towards her along the path between the cypress trees. How determined she had been not to let her know her labor had begun. She’d braced herself, she’d taken those long deep breaths, and she had vowed that she would play this game of silence to the bitter end. She’d counted one, two, three, four, five, six; and suddenly it was over and there was Cecilia closing her parasol, kissing her lightly on the forehead. “Oh, darling, here you are,” she’d said, “how comfortable you look.” She was on her way to Florence. She wouldn’t be long. There was a call that she must make, a most important errand. She’d turned and, waving gaily, traveled down the path that led her to the gate in the garden wall as though bent upon angelic business.

  How long before the nuns discovered her condition she has not the ghost of an idea. And as for that tragic childbirth, in the big bare room above the valley of the Arno, her labor had been so long and unremitting, the Angelus ringing, and later the same bells ringing for the matin services, that she had never been certain whether it was the call to morning or to evening prayers to which she listened.

  Would her anguish never cease? Could it be possible that it was evening—that it was dawn? Was it a feast day? Was it Sunday? In Italy they rang the bells for all the great occasions, for birth and death and burial, and it comforted her to think that they were answering each other across the hills and valleys while she labored with this painful birth, tugging with all the strength remaining to her at the sheer tied to the bedpost, hearing the doctor say “Coraggio,” sinking back among the pillows, and in the intervals between the spasms experiencing that extraordinary exaltation. The intervals grew shorter and the pains intolerable. If she listened she could locate the various chimes. A little way down the slope the bells of Settignano. Those nearer, louder, rang in Fiesole, farther down the hill the bells of San Gervaso. Ah, the tolling of the great cathedral bell in Florence and such a curious sense of being lifted up in the moments of exaltation between the brutal spasms, of floating out, drifting away with the church bells, distributing herself among the olive groves and vineyards, of being one with earth, with the processes of life, renascence. If she held to the thought that she was assisting at the greatest of all life’s miracles it would help her to be brave, for the pains returned with redoubled violence.

  She’d sat up, the sweat beading her forehead, streaming down her face.

  She heard the doctor, “Pull, Signora, pull with all your strength.”

  The sister came with a wet cloth and wiped her face, her hands. “Oi, oi, oi,” she’d screamed.

  And still the doctor’s voice, “Coraggio.”

  “Oi, oi, oi,” and the voice of her anguish mingling with the voices of the church bells answering one another with their ancient earthy tongues, and then that sudden stream of sickly sweetish air, breathing it thirstily. Taking another and another breath, the gradual annulment of the torture. And had she or had she not above her exaltation and her anguish heard the doctor saying in Italian, “Un bel maschio, Signora,” falling into deep abysses of fatigue and sleep?

  And then that rude awakening, thought the old woman, and she moved in her chair and stretched out her arms as though she still implored Cecilia to let her have her child, being to all intents and purposes back again in that cool dim room, the shutters closed against the midday glare—hearing voices drifting through the windows, seeing the sunlight dropped in rungs like a bright ladder tremble on the floor and on the wall against her bed and aware that her cousin looking very fresh and energetic sat beside her—that she was telling her—what was Cecilia telling her? that she looked so rested after her refreshing sleep.

  She was unable to speak the words—“Where is my baby? I must see my child.” They were on her tongue, her heart was bursting with them, but she was listening to Cecilia. What was it Cecilia was saying, prattling on so brightly, stressing certain words and going on with such enthusiasm? “Darling—it’s all right; it is your grandmother’s doing. You must give your grandmother credit for it—that lovely couple being here in Florence and at just this moment. Think of it, coming all the way from America, the loveliest people. I met them by your grandmother’s appointment; but the loveliest couple, people of excellent family. I am not going to tell their name. They want to adopt your little boy, to give him their name and bring him up exactly as though he were their own. They have plenty of money and they will give him the happiest of lives.”

  That was word for word exactly what her cousin said. And there she’d lain, paralyzed, unable to speak or move, looking blankly at Cecilia while she went on with further explanations. She had brought the couple up from Florence. There was nothing to do but sign some papers, make some promises, it had all been made so simple for her. It was her grandmother that she must thank; all too good to be quite true. Grandmother had managed it with such perfection. She wanted her to stay in Europe for another year. When she returned it would be exactly as though nothing had occurred. “Tabula rasa,” she had said, repeating the phrase as though she’d coined it.

  “Tabula rasa.”

  Miss Sylvester closed her eyes, and there before her was the angel in the Annunciation she had seen that day upon the train—the rush and spread of wings, the garments full and flowing, the hand upraised.

  And then suddenly the poor woman jumped as though she’d been struck a violent and unexpected blow, for the telephone was ringing, stridently demanding her attention. “Dear me,” she said, “dear me,” and with the greatest difficulty she got up, went to the desk and lifted the receiver from the hook.

  NINE

  She rose from the telephone and began to pace the room. Dear me, she was highly irritated. Adam was a most exasperating young man, and there was little consistency about her own annoyance since she had been eager to get in touch with him. Now they’d dine tonight together and she could at once discover his address. Capricious enough of him not to have let her have it on the telephone. Where was he living? Oh, he’d said, in a new dump, a hole in the ground below the sidewalk in a street she wouldn’t know.

  He’d moved, he said, and her supposition about that love affair was, presumably, correct. He was in the bitterest of moods and very exigent about that check he wished to have her cash. She looked at the clock upon her desk. There had been plenty of time for her to have cashed it, if she had wished to do so. Her bank was most accessible, and why she’d been so contrary she didn’t know. Surely he could wait until tonight. Down to his last red cent, he’d said. It was his mood had set her off, to say nothing of his having broken into her flow of thought and memory. Well, well, she musn’t let her irritation work upon her thus.

  It was the way he had responded to her when she spoke to him about the morning’s news. It was quite all right by him, the sooner we got blown to Kingdom Come, the better it would be for all concerned.

  My God, she said, my God. This world in which we lived, these past decades, unprecedented, unparalleled in history. She had no patience with those who retorted that other ages had been comparable, nothing new or different in this. What utter nonsense! The nightmare of our lives today had no parallel in history. Those monstrous images of terror and the dark, Geryon, Belial, Beelzebub (what were the other names?), prophetic images of evil riding the whirlwind in the Apocrypha, were not to be compared with the shapes that stalked the world today. The skies above our heads were crowded with them, the seas beneath the earth, and in the satanic mills, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge (heavens, there were so ma
ny others located who knows where), what shapes, what forms were now materializing. Voices, voices over the air, announcements, appropriations, threats, phantasmagoric images of wars to come. Everyone listening, waiting, and this simultaneity, hearing it together all around the world, shuddering, turning in our sleep, walking through the dream, pure nightmare in which the whole world walked together, pushing the horror down, letting the usual events, the joys and sorrows, the expectations, the personal desires, the vanities and the ambitions, submerge it, hide it deep, deep down, away from our investigation. All in the dream together, every man Jack of us, big fry and little fry alike: and now, for one reason or another, she saw the face of Einstein, its uncanny beauty, the white hair like a halo circling the countenance of a charming, an innocent child. On which of the terrible horses would he be mounted? she wondered, for certainly he rode in the forefront of the procession, along with the politicians, statesmen, the brass hats, the military strategists, and in the rear she saw the rest of the inhabitants of earth, unnumbered, unidentified, running full tilt like so many Gaderine swine, head on for destruction. Mad it was, an insanity unprecedented. Was there in it a self-determined will, a drive towards general, wholesale suicide? No, no, she cried aloud, and again she struck her breast. It was not so, nobody wanted it.

  What if, she thought, there could come a moment’s pause, everybody ordered to halt, big fry and little fry alike? What if some voice of supreme authority, a voice that could be heard in every corner of the earth, ordained a general pause, a moment’s halt in the inexorable procession? What if, in that silence, the wheels of these satanic mills should cease, the voices in the air, the threats and proclamations? If in the silence all could drop upon their knees and pray, pray together for five minutes, give due thought and due consideration to the general madness, might we not somehow or other find that we were saved? But no, we didn’t dare, we hadn’t the nerve to look it in the face; the only thing was to prepare for it, to accelerate the procession. That seemed to be the great idea. This side and that side of the curtain that divided the world into two opposing camps, the monstrous, the subhuman mechanizations, materializations continued, the whole world geared to the wholesale production of death. Once more the old woman put her hands before her face. Was she trying to drive away the pictures that came into her mind, or was she attempting to visualize them? They staggered the imagination.

  No wonder that Adam shrugged his shoulders and asked her why she got so worked up about it all, intimating by his voice and his expression that since she was so soon to exit from the scene forever, there was no need for such agitation. “Well, it matters to me,” she said aloud, “it matters more than anything” and again she seemed to be engaged in one of those endless arguments that she carried on with the young man. He belonged, in his surly, stubborn manner, to the wars-have-always-been-and-always-will-be school of thinking. He liked to quote history and trot out his greater knowledge to confound her. Nothing different in the human situation, only on a larger scale—that he would concede, the scale of it. He was a Spenglerian and used to quote those passages about the great Khans and the epochs soon to dawn upon us, the bigger and the better wars about to come. It was apparent enough to her that he was sick to death of the whole dreadful subject. Had he not, poor boy, seen enough of it already, waiting there in France for them to soften up the enemy’s resistance, and later marching into Germany over the Remagen bridge, and seeing the wreck and ruin of all those bombed-out cities?

  What the eyes of the young men had seen, the abhorrent scenes, the pictures pushed down into the deepest wells of memory; and hereupon she began enumerating the great terrains of battle, islands in the Pacific, the beachheads, the battles in the desert. She too had seen them, comfortably seated in her armchair, at the movie theaters; but to imagine it, the nerves, the senses—eyes, ears, the shuddering flesh exposed. It was a marvel to her that so many of them still preserved their sanity. No wonder they challenged the years to come with the supreme insolence of disregard.

  No wonder that Adam was disconcerted and irritated when she dwelt upon it with such persistency. He was determined to snatch eagerly, hungrily at all that he could get, living on so little, attempting to complete his education, and writing of course that novel which devoured him. The moment was pregnant with possibilities. Was her interest in Adam, she asked herself, a kind of substitution? He was the same age as that young man she would never lay her eyes on, stamped with the imprint of the same horrendous years. More than likely he too had been flung out into one or another of the outrageous areas. Perhaps his bones were bleaching on the Libyan desert. Maybe he was lying under a nameless cross on some island in the Pacific. It might be—and this seemed to her more right—that his dust was scattered among the vineyards and the hills of Italy.

  Well, the less she thought of him, that child to whom she had so rashly decided to leave the bulk of her fortune, the better for her state of mind. Anonymity was, when she reflected upon it, a condition she should now be willing to accept. Had she not kept her secrets to herself, and was there a soul alive to care whether she had a past or not? Anonymous she was, and somehow always had been.

  Anonymous was the word for the lot of us, she thought, as she continued to gaze at the accustomed view, the office buildings with their bright panes reflecting the scudding clouds, and behind the windows countless men and women in their busy cells. She seemed to see the entire world, the human hive collapsing, falling in upon itself, the integuments melting, disappearing, cities, insolent skyscrapers falling, falling. The bees swarmed; the cities fell, and, attempting to blot out the dreadful pictures fringing her imagination, she remembered how she had read, she didn’t know exactly where, that, measured against the aeons, the endless procession of evolving species, the birds were practically new arrivals on the stage of life, and how it had pleased her to call them little John the Baptists, singing in the wilderness, prophesying, preaching the gospel of one to come, the latchet of whose shoes they were not worthy to unloose.

  Ridiculous, she thought, for Adam to assert so stubbornly that this age did not in basic experiences differ from the other ages. It was the simultaneity of our responses to the catastrophes, what with the very waves of air transporting us, riding us round the habitable globe, photographs flowing through space, and voices, voices. Try to press the pictures and the voices down, to hide them in the deepest wells of the subconscious. The world was too much with us, it had entered the secret, the most uneasy placing of being—conscience.

  And here we were, hawking our souls about, writing novels, our own little autobiographies (all the novels were, in one way or another, autobiographical), young and old alike engaged in it, dissecting, anatomizing, breaking up the moments, and there was something not to be passed over lightly in the startling fact that the splitting of the atom and the splitting of the soul, the long, long range of human memory, had been contemporaneous, all in the open world together, no shelter for us, no place to hide. And suddenly there was a poem upon her lips, she couldn’t for the life of her remember where she’d read it, but the words seemed, as she recited them, the very voice of her apprehension.

  “Put out the stars an instant, Lord,

  Lest all these swords and scimitars

  Frighten this snail who goes abroad

  For the first time without his mail.

  Behold him laid along the slim

  Green blade of grass too frail for him.

  He has no home, no church, no dome

  To shelter him. He goes alone.

  Put out the stars an instant, Lord,

  Lest all these swords and scimitars

  Turn him to stone.”

  She repeated the last two lines, and found to her astonishment that she was standing in the center of the room, attempting to collect her wits.

  What had she intended to do? She must get herself some lunch. Stepping rather unsteadily into the bathroom, she looked about her. Here was a can of soup, here were biscuits, there on the w
indowsill was fruit. When she’d had something to eat she’d get back to her chair and go on with that manuscript to the bitter end.

  But where, where in the world was the can opener? She searched frantically among the queer utensils under the tub. It was these wretched little gadgets she felt unable to contend with.

  BOOK 2

  ONE

  It was a clear evening. Miss Sylvester stood at the window. She had finished her manuscript and she sighed heavily. Her novel had left her with a feeling of incredulity occasioned not so much by the fact that her story savored of the unusual, if not to say the melodramatic, as by the positively imponderable strangeness of the human condition, one’s existing in this world at all. There was something about this winter hour when the lights were bright in all the assembled windows which never failed to impress her as entirely unreal, especially if as was the case tonight a small slice of the wintry moon could be seen sailing round the corner of the Metropolitan Tower.