John searched my eyes, as if to measure which answer was more likely to impress me.
“No.”
“Right,” I said. “No. Not now. So follow me.”
The Basilica bubbled white behind us, a lure of light. I tilted my chin towards the entrance and we walked inside.
We were in time for the end of afternoon Mass. I dropped to one knee in the doorway, crossing myself, and then stepped in line for Communion. John followed me with a look of game incomprehension. He raised an eyebrow. I mouthed, Do what I do.
So we shuffled slowly to the front, looking up at the golden mosaic in the apse and the Latin lettering hammered into the walls. When my head turned, John’s head turned. When I put a hand in my coat pocket, he did the same. There were two priests up at the altar, splitting the line to more efficiently deliver the sacrament. Bless me, Father, I thought, for I am about to sin. I turned to the left and signaled to John that he should go right, hoping he’d better be able to see me and mimic the two-fingered motion of crossing myself, my bowed head before the priest and the silver dish of Eucharist wafers.
Around us rumbled the lowing chants of the monks, and through them rose the ivory spires of soprano voices. I’ve never been able to resist the drunkenness inspired by the church smell of candlewax and incense. The vegetable taste of old paper, the masked sweat of old women, the polished wooden pews—as a child in tow to my babenka, these mingled aromas made me feel both minute and infinite. As an adult, the combination of them hitting my senses still humbles me with the feeling of being in God’s presence. Bashful and in awe.
I presented my tongue and accepted the host. I had swallowed so many of these tasteless wafers that one more should have made no difference, but it called to mind every Communion of my life with its unflinching sameness. The priest blessed me and turned to the woman behind me in line. Across the altar John closed his mouth on his own bit of Eucharist, holding his lips in a pinch as if to keep the wafer protected by a buffer of air. He looked around but didn’t see me, turned a whole circle before starting for the exit. I watched him watching the rise of the walls, the eggshell sheen of the dome above us. The river of bodies moving up towards the front of the Basilica to receive a bit of that same bland bread.
I followed him at a small distance. Outside I took a deep breath and stretched, letting the wafer melt into glue on my tongue. Then I walked up behind John, the shivering entirety of him, and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Now,” I said, “how do you feel about God?”
He turned, and if I could not read his smile, I still fell into his arms as he lifted me into the air by the waist.
“Let’s go sing with Maria Callas!” he said.
Because I wanted to, and because I was distracted by the pressure of his hands sliding onto my hips, I felt that I had been understood. We laughed and ran down the white steps of the Basilica, laughed all night as our bodies knocked together and we reached our fingers towards each other’s faces. I laughed as John fed me vanilla bean ice cream, as his arm got stuck in the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt when we tried to pull the shirt free from his body. Laughed when his mouth brushed my belly, my ribs, because I realized this was what it meant to share a secret. We would look at one another in rehearsal the next day and smile and no one would know why. No one but us two, and the God who saw us take Communion unpurified by anything but our new love.
The question that nags at me is: was I understood though? Really? It makes a difference to me whether John saw what I meant, felt what I felt. Jumped into that passion with the same resolve and abandoned himself to it. It is a question of the possibility of faith.
The problem lies with Rabbit, you see. His false dog. The future, causing the past to crumble. It’s a good story for getting a girl to fall in love with you: the mistakes you’ve made and how you mourned them. But when I found out it was not true, it became something different to me. A fable that explained why John thought a girl—any girl—might fall in love with any boy. A pretty package with nothing inside it but tissue, tissue. Layers of tissue and air.
I wanted to laugh it off and forget. But instead I peered backward at all the things about John I’d believed. There are many such things, when you’re in love. Each day, new ones—a favorite flavor of tea, or a dislike for getting up before seven in the morning. He always told me he thought granola bars were tawdry, the downfall of a civilization too lazy to prepare real food.
Was that true or did he just say it because he thought I’d agree? And was there any one truth that I could pull away without the rest crumbling down around me? If too many tourists pocket white pebbles in Montmartre, after all, the city will be made naked of her temples.
18
“Where’s Mama now?” I asked Baba Ada. For months after Sara left I pestered Ada with this question.
“I don’t know.” Ada, curt, looked at her watch. “Who knows. It’s only ten o’clock. Wherever that woman is, she’s probably still sleeping.”
“Don’t you think”—I wrapped my hands around Ada’s wrist—“she’s probably wearing a dress as dark as the ocean? Don’t you think she’s walking through a long hallway that’s only lit by fireflies?”
“Don’t you listen, child?” Ada shook me off. “She’s in bed somewhere. That bad bed she always insists on keeping, with those terrible pillowcases she never remembers to wash. They smell like they’re fermenting.”
I sat down on the living room couch and pressed my knees together hard, so the inside skin of each developed a distinct patch of red.
“If Mama was in some kind of maze, she might not be able to find her way out.” I peeled my knees slowly apart and pressed the red spots, leaving momentary white fingerprints. Ada didn’t seem to be catching on, but this was important. “Say it was a really tall maze made out of bushes.”
“A hedge maze.”
“Yeah, a really tall hedge maze. Maybe there are flowers in there that she’s allergic to, and she sneezed so many times she had to fall asleep.” I considered. “Or else someone poisoned her. It’s possible.”
“Is it?” Ada rubbed her face with both hands. “Listen, lalka, I need to do the laundry.”
“No.” I crossed my arms. “Tell me a story.”
“What kind?”
“A story about Mama. A Sara story.”
But Ada just sighed.
“You already know everything about that woman that you need to know.”
In spite of Ada, I didn’t stop imagining stories about my mother. It was a habit too deeply ingrained to let go. Her disappearance smacked of Greta—both were great queens, kidnapped somewhere, asleep. Or scheming. Both were dangerous and powerful and full of misbehavior. Both were missing, and in neither case did I understand quite why.
At night, after Ada left my room, I lay with my eyes closed and imagined her still there, holding my hands and telling me this:
“When your mother left here, she went to live in a castle, and all around her were battlements and gargoyles spitting hot oil and men with guns. She brought in women from all over the world to brush the hair off of the deer in her bestiary and card the fur into usable material, spin it into thread. Sometimes they spun thread from shining gray cats instead, or thoroughbred horses. Sometimes they plucked feathers from tropical birds and snipped them to pieces and wove that into the fabric, so the colors were always changing under different angles of light.
“Her dresses were golden and brown and littered with white spots, and sometimes she wore one that had a long tail. Not a deer’s tail, but a lion’s tail, which switched back and forth while she walked through her castle’s stony hallways to a great room filled up by an admiring audience. They listened to her singing and threw roses at her feet.
“When she had sung, the fawn most recently born in her forest would be walked into the great room on trembling new legs, a lead of silk around its throat. Sara stroked the animal’s head and slit it open from belly to sternum so that its organs scattered on the floor
and mingled with the shining silk. The servants struck up a fire to roast the animal’s body, and when Sara had feasted on tender deer meat and fruit and fine wine, she would recline onto the piles of pillows that her servants carried into the room, and people would ask her about her beautiful daughter. She would smile.
“ ‘My daughter is so small that she can stand on my thumb, but her voice is as big as a cloud surrounding a mountain. It wraps around your body and shields you from the world, so you can’t look out and no one else can look in—not while she’s singing. Of course, a voice like that is a dangerous gift, and she can’t completely control it, not yet. Sometimes it will lash out and tie a man or woman up with its cords, and before my daughter knows it that person will be choked blue, as still as a statue forevermore.
“ ‘That is why my daughter isn’t here with us now, even though together we could make music that would freeze the air into crystals of ice. She has to tame her voice, become one with it, so that the power it contains is hers to wield, and no one will be harmed by it unless she intends them to be. I miss her,’ she would say, ‘with all of my heart. And when we’re together again we’ll be happy.’
“Then the audience would applaud your mother again, and they would all talk late into the night while the animals outside tiptoed around the grounds, dreaming of giving their fur to Sara’s dresses and their children to her table.”
Instead, when I really bothered her, Ada told me that we couldn’t see my mother because she lived in a bad part of town, somewhere I wouldn’t want to go.
“Or would you, złota?” She tilted her head, gave half a smile. “Do you want to go someplace full of cigarette smoke and see your mother from a distance? Would you like to beg her to come home?”
When I heard this, my face grew cold and pale. The blood trickled out of my cheeks down into my stomach, into a hot and gurgling bowl.
“No,” I said. It was a misunderstanding. All I really wanted was to hear stories about my mother. That was how we fixed things: with stories. Anyway, that was how we tried.
But once I got her started, Ada was relentless. She wrapped an arm around my waist and told me to go grab my coat, we’d take the train right away, absolutely.
“You can get down on your hands and knees.” She rubbed her palms together. “Tell her how sorry you are that she’s gone. How much harder things are now. How much worse, lalka.”
“We can’t.” I stomped one foot. “She was kidnapped.”
“She wasn’t.”
“She was.”
I started to cry, tugging my body away from my babenka’s, curling up into a tight little ball. Ada watched me for a time, and then leaned down and put her arms around my shoulders. With great heaves, I wept.
“Oh darling,” Ada murmured. “What do you want me to say?”
As John, Kara, and I approach the church, I can see a figure that must be my mother, from an almost impossible distance. She is the first point my eyes focus on in the horizon, the dark mark on the road, the glint in the glare. I watch her grow from a featureless manikin into a woman. Her hair emerges, combed into a bun. The curve of her hip issues out from her waist. As we get closer, I can see her fingers, the blink of her eye. Our driver stops the cab with a lurch at the corner.
“Cortland and Hermitage, right?” he says.
She was kidnapped, I think. Taken by pirates and sent around the world in a galleon with only old burlap to make into dresses. Life with the pirates made her hard. Too much salt on her skin. Too much sea rum. Even with no one to contradict the story, it doesn’t much satisfy. Sara idles on the sidewalk, one foot atop a pile of calcified snow. She looks like she’s waiting for us, but I think she’s just smoking. My mother. She’s here.
Leaving John behind in the cab to handle the payment, I step carefully out and stand beside her. Without speaking, I breathe in the scent of her cigarette smoke, which hangs around us like a cloud. It smells sweet and like dirt, with a bit of canned tomatoes underneath it, a trace of peat. I can tell right away it will stick in my hair and on my clothes, clog my throat. So that’s real enough.
“Mama,” I say. “Hello.”
She’s looking at me. No, she’s looking past me, for the baby. She won’t quite meet my eyes. I, however, cannot look away. I take in every inch of her. So different. So the same.
My mother’s cigarette has burned down almost to its base, and it’s only when the heat reaches her fingers that she realizes. She lights another from the glowing tip, tossing the spent one onto the sidewalk and grinding it beneath her boot. Her hands are stained orange between the index and middle finger. Now that I’m next to her, I can see that her skin is loose in odd spots around her face—not uniformly, like an old woman shrunk into herself, but here and there. A sag near the left eye. A few too many lines by the mouth to be accounted for as the product of old smiles.
And yet for all that she’s held on to at least a modicum of her beauty. She’s managed it well, with dark lines around her eyes and a professional dye job in her hair. Still dark, almost black. Shining against her shoulders.
I feel a stab of impatience. Isn’t she even going to speak?
She fought the pirates and came home, brandishing her sword. They let her go when she kicked a chest full of treasure off one side of the boat, then jumped into the water and swam the other direction. The pirates all dove after the gold, stuffing coins in their mouths for safekeeping so they could grab more and more, until they sank. Too heavy with treasure. My mother was picked up by the coast guard of a small island nation and flown back to civilization, and now here she is. But she has a heavy coin in her mouth, too.
“So,” I say. “You came.”
“Can’t get anything by you.” Sara sucks in her cheeks to pull the smoke in deeper, faster. She flicks her ash onto the toes of my shoes but then, surprisingly, looks sorry. “Hmm.”
“Why, though?”
My mother glances up, at last, into my face. Her eyes are softer than I thought they would be. If I didn’t know better, I’d say there were some tears there. But of course it’s cold. The wind makes you cry, too.
“You’re kind of a mess, aren’t you?” Her voice strains towards indifference, clipped efficiency. Not quite reaching its goal. She licks two fingers and sticks a flyaway piece of hair down to my skull—I inhale sharply when we touch. Part of me wants to hit her hand away, and part of me just wants to hold it in my own, run the tip of my finger over the hard sheen of her painted thumbnail, as I did when I was a girl. She’s so close. I can smell a little something acid on her breath, maybe juice and unbrushed teeth. Maybe vodka. “You know, I went to see my mother in her goddamn grave and there weren’t any flowers there. I mean, dead flowers, yes, but not real ones.”
“I haven’t been back yet,” I say. “Since the funeral. I told you, I tried to go.” John has finished with the cab and is beside me now, holding Kara. He has a look on his face of unbridled morbid fascination. I ask, “Why didn’t you bring her any?”
“Ha.” Sara goes in to touch Kara on the cheek and then looks between her and John—fast, just a flash of appraisal. That’s all she needs to know everything. “Well, you’re right. I didn’t.”
My mother locks eyes with John, very casually. “When you’re not invited to the funeral, these things have a way of becoming someone else’s responsibility. Wouldn’t you say,” she asks, “that when someone takes matters out of your hands, that leaves you more or less free of obligation? To the results?”
“So you’re Lulu’s mom,” he says. “It’s nice to meet you.”
I tug on his coat sleeve. “Let’s go in.”
He’s still staring at Sara. “I can see the resemblance.”
“Can you?” she asks. “Me, I’m not sure.”
John balks, genuinely surprised—my mother and I really do look quite a bit alike. And Sara laughs a little, seeing him compare us. Looks between him and Kara. I hold my breath and wait for a wave to crash into me. To sweep us all away down the s
treet, our voices lost in the roar. But my mother doesn’t press. For once in her life.
“Yes,” she says. “I’m sorry. I thought we were talking about something else.”
As we walk into the church I want to hold someone’s hand. The idea is so grounding—a hand, like a lightning rod. John’s hand, with its funny wrinkles, or my mother’s, once pristine. Now a bit dirty and tattered. What I need is a little warmth to keep me going. Someone to lend me a little strength. But everyone is all bound up in themselves right now, and I can hardly blame them.
Sara bends down and picks a piece of paper up from a basket by the end of the pews.
“Programs?” she asks. “At a christening?”
“Baba Ada planned all this.” I take the paper from her and cluck at how it flops around, flimsy. “She wouldn’t have been very happy. It looks cheap.”
“She would have gone and burned down the store that sold it to her. Held the clerk’s whole family captive until he agreed to a twenty percent discount.”
“No.” I fold the program and replace it on the pile. “She wouldn’t have.” I’ve tried to bring Ada back with stories. Since she died, I’ve been telling myself every Ada story I ever knew. But even the true ones just make it clear something’s missing. False ones would be worse. Rewriting. Erasing.
“Are you cold?” my mother asks. I realize I’m shivering.
“No,” I say. “I’m just nervous.”
“To sing?” I can see how it would sound ridiculous. Me of all people. But whatever lurking danger has been following me since Kara’s birth has crawled here, certainly. The delicate balance between my mother and my husband—secrets. The knowledge that what happens to me could happen to Kara a hundredfold if I sing to her. Good and bad.
She could have a better voice, a purer song. And. My fingers find my midriff, walk along the scar, which has been slightly weeping, so I have to dress it again. Beneath my clothes, a thin band of cotton wool. Am I to be ridiculed for worrying that the wound means something worse is coming? I move my fingers to my forehead. It’s enough to drive you mad.
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