“A long time ago,” Agnes says in a dull voice, sitting stiffly, “during a summer week in Blackpool, on the boardwalk by the sea, passing by Cocker’s Aviary with my baby swaddled in her blanket, thinking my life was good and I was happy, a gypsy from Benin stopped me on the pier and ruined my life. Her name was Fulani. She started waving her hands in front of me and muttering foreign words.”
“Foreign words like halakar?” Julian says, bowing his head. They speak Hausa from Mali to Benin.
“I don’t know about that, what does it mean?”
“You don’t want to know.” Halakar. Annihilation.
“She was in black rags and she scared me, and she scared my husband.”
“I bet.”
“She followed us all the way to Mooky the Clown, and that’s a long way, if you know the Blackpool boardwalk.”
“I don’t.”
“My Jacob, the mildest of men, nearly beat her to get her away from us. She refused to leave my side. She told me to come back and find her. I would have never come back, I was so superstitious then—still am—but she whispered, your baby is in mortal danger. You want to save her life or no? What was I going to do?”
Julian and Agnes inhale painfully. Julian scans the empty tavern. Kiritopa sits in the far corner watching them. A native girl mops the floor. “Please,” he says, “give me a drink before I hear the rest.”
Agnes motions to Kiritopa. They don’t speak until he returns with a full stein. “I’ve dispensed with the cider for you this time,” the Maori says to Julian. “But drink it slow. It will knock you out if you’re not used to it.” He glances at Agnes. “Are you all right, Mother?” he asks, and only after she nods does he leave.
Julian forces himself not to drink it all in one gulp. He doesn’t like the way the woman is studying him. And he doesn’t want to hear the rest of her story. He doesn’t want to hear it because he knows what she is going to tell him. Agnes will have heard a prophecy, ruinously incomplete, which has determined the crooked course of her crooked life, and the life of her only child.
“The next day, by myself, I went looking for the woman on the boardwalk. I was determined to know what she knew. Gypsies have the gift of sight.”
“Partial sight,” Julian says. It’s worse than blindness.
“Hers was pretty full. When I found her, she told me my baby had a deep red aura. She said that a red light around a baby was a terrible omen. She’d only seen babies with red auras a few times in her life. When you move toward the source of light, all things including human souls appear blue. But when you move away from light, they turn red. The redder the red, the farther from the light. And my baby, she said, was the reddest she’d ever seen.”
Julian says nothing.
“You got nothing to say?”
“I got nothing to say.” The first time he saw Josephine at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York, she was bathed in blood red footlights. I’m dead then, good, she said to him and swiveled her hips, and now he was here.
“Do you want to save her or not?”
Julian keeps himself from shuddering, almost. “Are you asking me or telling me what the witch said to you?”
“Both.”
Julian says nothing.
“You don’t believe her?”
“I wouldn’t believe her if I were you,” Julian says.
“You are lying to me. Why?”
“Listen to me, Mrs. Patmore…”
“Let me finish.” Agnes’s lip trembles. “The gypsy Fulani said to me”—Agnes fights her tears—“death knows her by her name.”
Julian sinks into his seat. Where is that tiger water to strengthen his bones? He brings the cup of moonshine to his lips instead and with all his will fights the desire to gulp it down. He takes two hard swallows.
“So I changed her name and ran,” Agnes says. “And brought her here.”
“How has it been?” Julian stares into his half-empty cup.
“I haven’t finished telling you the rest.”
“Just tell me how it’s been.”
“She’s still alive, so all right, I suppose, until a year ago. Last spring I made a mistake. A man had come walking down the road, and I thought he was you. He also came out of the darkness wearing black. I said to him, are you the one, and he said yes, he was the one. I brought him in, but he turned out to be…”
“Not the one?”
“He wasn’t good. He scared the whole town, scared my child, scared us bad.”
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
“Probably matters to him.”
“He became obsessed with her.”
“What happened to him?”
“He vanished,” Agnes says, leveling her burning gaze on Julian. “Like he was never here.”
Julian feels pale, watered down, even though his throat is on fire from the moonshine. “You don’t know. Maybe he was the man you’re looking for.”
“I’m not looking for the man. The man is looking for her.” Agnes lowers her voice again. She’s nearly whispering. “The gypsy said he will walk through the ice desert for forty days trying to find her.”
“Who did she say was coming?”
“The one.”
Julian was hoping the mother would say the one who will save her. But that’s not what the gypsy told Agnes. Julian may be the one. But he isn’t the one who will save her.
“I’m not the one,” he says. “Believe me.”
“I don’t believe you,” she says. “Look how upset you’re making me. I’ve never felt this way before. In my bones, I know it’s you. But also”—Agnes leans forward—“if I needed more proof, Fulani said the proof was on your arm. She said you carry a map to her life and death. Show me your arm, pilgrim.” She reaches for him.
He yanks away. “Don’t touch me.”
“I thought so.” Tears roll down Agnes’s face. “I don’t need to see it. By your face I know the truth. Through your eyes I know you.”
They don’t speak while he finishes his drink. Julian is swimming in moonshine. “Where is she?”
“Wait.” Agnes grabs his arm. There’s hatred and terror in her eyes. “The gypsy said you’d bring light, but you’d also bring death. Because death follows you to her. It’s how death finds her. By you.”
Julian’s worst fears are being realized, one by one. It’s not only the girl who’s in danger. It’s him, too. Oh, the fucking soothsayers. He falls back against the chair, while Agnes composes herself.
“You have a plan?” she asks. “I did my part. I kept her safe until you found her. Now what are you going to do?”
Julian is afraid a word will give him away. Why did he have to admit he knew Jacob Patmore! Where is he going to go now? He is penniless. He is so far from mercy. He wants to ask what month it is, what day it is, but doesn’t want his ignorance to expose him further.
“What I’d like to do,” he says, “is ask you for some food and be on my way.”
“On your way to where? You got money to pay for the food and the shine? I didn’t think so.” She stands up. “You don’t need money. You are where you need to be.”
“Tomorrow I’ll find work and repay you.”
“You can work here. We got plenty for you to do.” Agnes glances toward the kitchen. “I’ll let you meet her. Don’t be put off. She’s lived her days with me like this. That can’t have been easy. She doesn’t believe me or doesn’t want to. Amounts to the same thing. You know how the young can be. They think they will live forever.”
“Yes,” Julian says. “I was young once.”
“She’s hard. It’s my fault. She’ll come around eventually.”
“Like the emperor penguin perhaps? By coercion?”
“If need be,” Agnes says. “As long as the baby chick lives. That’s all you should care about. How you get there is your problem. She is pig-headed. She could use some coercion.”
“Great.”
“Listen
, boy,” Agnes says, leaning to him. “You think I’m happy you’re here? I’m wretched. Now that you’re here, I know her death is near, too. But the witch was sure you were the only one who could lead her out. She said when you showed up, to let her go. She has only one narrow path to salvation—with you.” Agnes spits on the floor of her restaurant before she heads to the kitchen.
∞
Julian sits palming his empty mug of shine. In a few minutes he feels a dark shape approach and stand silently by his table. He doesn’t want to lift his eyes. He’s only going to see her for the first time once. He takes a deep breath. “Hello,” he says, raising his gaze, his heart rending.
The hostile baby chick stands in front of him.
And he thought the mother penguin was unwelcoming. The young woman’s square face is hard of jaw—like his—and free of makeup, the pale skin on her large forehead wind-beaten. Her bright brown eyes glare at him defiantly. She is as plain and cold as the land he just walked through. She wears a long brown dress cinched at the waist and a black apron. If her hair is long, Julian can’t tell; it’s pulled back from her face and hidden under a black cap. She hides her body under ill-made, ill-fitting clothes, too long in the hem and sleeves, too loose in the hips and chest.
She is Mirabelle’s shadow. She is less tall and less long and less shining than Mirabelle, for who could be more shining. But she’s still tallish, still longish, still dimly shining. She looks impolite, not genteel, she has grown up in a town and a climate where people work all day in the harsh wind and have become weathered and hardened and silent. Her once delicate hands are knuckled and calloused. But she’s got two magnetizing features that are visible to Julian, traits she can’t hide, that draw him near. She’s got a vivid, sharply drawn, abundant mouth and insolent wildfire eyes.
At the moment, the eyes are glaring at Julian as if he’s Bluebeard.
In her face he searches for what he had once found in Mirabelle. It’s not there. But his problem is not just the lack in her. His problem is the absence of what she must find in him. There is nothing for her to react to. Julian’s eyes that had once gazed on Mirabelle with adoration now stare at this young woman in a pall, as if they’re seeping blood from their unsurvivable wounds.
“Hello,” she finally replies. “Cold out there.” Her usually soft breathy voice is hoarse in Invercargill, deep and croaky, as if the wind has calloused her voice box. She’s got a Scottish accent, trilling her Rs, cold ut therrrrrrr. “What can I get you,” she says.
“How about a menu?”
“Corrnish pasty, fish pie, fish and chips, shepherrrd’s pie with lamb, maybe a mutton chop, and brread and butterr pudding.”
Julian watches her standing at his table in her soiled apron.
“What?” she says. It’s as if she’s looking at him through snow goggles, her eyes blinded by cornea burn from the cold. She doesn’t see him. In another life, her eyes shined for him. Not here. In another life, his eyes shined for her.
Still, they don’t look away from each other, facing straight on, his eyes up, her eyes down, appraising, searching, contemplating.
“What’s your name?”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“What’s your name?” Julian repeats.
She sighs. “Seamaisiona.”
He sits. He doesn’t know what she said.
“You didn’t get that?” she says. “Want me to spell it for you?”
“Yes.”
“Shay-ma, shay-na.” She enunciates slowly. “It’s like Mother wanted to punish me for the rest of my miserable life. She said to me Jesus told her it would be all right if she changed my name. I said to her, not Jesus, Mother, Fulani the witch.”
“What was it before?”
“Mary-Margaret.”
Julian twitches. She ignores him.
“Mother switched it like she switched hemispheres and oceans,” she continues. “I told her, Mother, couldn’t you just leave me Mary, that’d be like hiding in plain sight. Everyone’s named Mary in our bloody Scottish town.” She pauses. “What’s the matter—you don’t think I look like a Seamaisiona?”
“I do,” Julian says. “The first thing I thought when I saw you is that girl looks like a Seamaisiona.”
She almost laughs. She doesn’t seem like the type who laughs easily. Her throaty chortle surprises even her.
“What do your friends call you, Mary-Margaret Patmore?”
“Shae.”
“Is that what you want me to call you?”
“It don’t matter what you call me. Are we done? Can I go get your food now?”
He takes her hand before she walks away. She doesn’t pull away, just stares into his face. “You don’t want to do that,” she says quietly, her expression darkening.
Julian lets go.
Everywhere I’ve been—where I’ve made no effort, but even with her, where I’ve made all the effort—what a cold wake I leave behind, Julian thinks, finishing the last of the moonshine, thirsting for more. It’s as if nothing I do matters. Nothing matters at all.
On the lower level of the tavern’s basement, they’ve built a public bathhouse, but in the corner, there is a private room, and in this room, there’s a grotto in the earth that twice a day fills up with steaming hot water. The water is soothing, delirium-inducing, like the homemade hooch. Julian undresses and immerses himself in the heat, to get away from the ice and the girl and his memories.
I’ve been used, banished, sent away. I’m a pauper. In another life, you could have been someone else’s bride, and he would swear to you he’d never leave you, just like me. Go ruin someone else. Count me with the dead. Flood him with daisies and monologues, with chains and fiction and dust, cover him with your mocking laugh. Riley was right. I want to be free. Of love, of you, of longing, of wanting, of feeling, of leaping, of being deceived, of grieving. I want to be free of everything.
Julian has had too much drink and is slumped in the water when he hears Kiritopa’s voice and feels the man’s strong hands pulling him out. “Pilgrim, keep one eye open, even at night,” Kiritopa says, handing Julian a towel. “I don’t know if Agnes is right about the girl, but I know about you. You’re not safe.”
42
Masha at the Cherry Lane
JULIAN AND AGNES WALK QUICKLY DOWN CLYDE STREET. Julian wishes he had a coat or some money to buy one. It’s windy and cold. The Armani may be timeless, but the thin wool is no protection for Antipodean winds. He keeps his hands in his pockets. Like always, he hides the hands that perform the senseless work of his life.
“Do you see how she disobeys me?” Agnes is angry. She’s almost running. “I told her not to leave the house unless you were with her. Next time she disobeys, punish her. You have my full permission to do with her as you will.” They’re headed to the Civic Theatre on Tay Street where Shae is rehearsing in Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
Of course, she’s rehearsing in Three Sisters. What else would it be. Julian doubles over and runs to catch up with Agnes.
“You’ll see, she’s very good,” Agnes says. “Correction—she’s an obstinate insubordinate woman, but she is a very good actress. Her gifts need to be displayed on a real stage, not in Invercargill.”
“Where would this be?” Julian says. “Don’t tell me—London.”
“Not London. Why would I ever let her go back there? New York.”
“Ah, New York,” Julian says. “And how does Shayma-Shayna feel about New York?”
“Like she feels about everything that’s not her idea. She hates it. But who cares?”
The Civic Theatre is a large ornate building, built only a few years earlier, in 1905. Agnes marches down the aisle to the front of the enormous darkened auditorium and demands Shae come speak to her at once. Julian stands nearby, doggedly examining his feet.
“Shae, was I not clear?”
“About what, Mother?”
Agnes slaps her daughter across the face. “Don’t get mouthy with me. I told you—
you don’t leave the house unless he is with you. Not down the street, not to see Huhana—especially not her—not to rehearse, not to Bluff. Or Dunedin. Nowhere.”
“Does he come with me to the baths, too, Mother? To my bed?”
Agnes slaps her daughter again. Shae stands and takes it. The disrespect in her eyes doesn’t fade.
“Wherever you go, he goes with you. Is that clear?”
“Like a bell.” Ice is in Shae’s voice.
“Apologize to him right now.”
“Agnes, she doesn’t have to…”
Agnes silences him with a withering glance. Good thing he’s not closer, or she’d slap him, too. “Right now, Shae.”
Shae takes two steps to Julian. They don’t look at each other. “I apologize.”
“It’s fine.”
“Tell him it won’t happen again,” says Agnes.
“It won’t happen again,” Shae says through her teeth.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine, Julian. It’s bad manners. Don’t let her off the hook like that. What are you standing around for?” Agnes barks to her daughter. “Go rehearse. I want Julian to see what you can do.”
Shae swirls and returns to the stage.
As they make their way to the back of the theatre where they can talk without bothering the actors, Julian suggests to Agnes that maybe this “stick” approach might not be the best way to endear him to Shae.
“You think anything is going to endear you to her? You think you’ve got a carrot you can dangle in front of her instead?” Agnes snickers. “Try it, my boy. Be my guest. See how far you get.”
They take two empty seats in the back and Julian listens, unwillingly and mostly silently, as Agnes regales him with a fever dream about her daughter’s survival. What Julian would like to do is sit closer to the stage so he can hear Shae read Chekhov. Preferably the third row, as he did at the Cherry Lane. But Agnes has big plans and won’t stop until Julian has heard her out.
Her plot includes a world famous inventor named Ernest Godward and his ship.
“Has he invented a time machine?” Julian asks. “Because that might help.”
“The egg beater,” Agnes says. “It beats eggs in three minutes for cakes, not like before when it took fifteen.”
A Beggar's Kingdom Page 51
