Cindy and Daniel were sick more often that spring than Marjorie could ever remember them being. Allergies, the doctors said. Asthma, they said, when Cindy started having trouble breathing. “Will you buy me another Barbie ‘cause I’m sick?” was all Cindy cared about.
And then Cindy was in the hospital with a tube in her throat, and Ron was out getting drunk with “the boys,” because that was how Ron coped in a crisis. Daniel was supposed to be doing his homework, but he was watching TV. Marjorie stood in her spotless kitchen and thought about the strange plants that had taken over her flowerbeds.
Fiddleback ferns.
Alien spores.
“Fuck,” said Marjorie, who never swore.
“Mom?” Daniel said, turning away from the TV.
But Marjorie wasn’t there.
She stood on her front lawn in the twilight, staring at them.
“Why?” she said. “Why here? Why us? The most important problem in Cindy’s life was that her Barbies were too big to ride her My Little Ponies! If you’re going to beam down from outer space and kill some poor little kid, shouldn’t it be Einstein or Gandhi or somebody?”
The ugly purple-green fronds ignored her and unfurled another millimeter.
“Ignore this, Audrey,” Marjorie muttered.
“Marjorie honey?” said Mrs. Higgins next door. “Is that gasoline?”
Marjorie ignored her, and Mrs. Higgins went inside to call 911. But Marjorie lit the match before the police got there.
Daniel stood on the sidewalk, watching his mother capering like a witch before their burning house, watching the greenish oily smoke rising up from the flowerbeds, and when the policeman asked him why his mother had done it, he said, “An exorcism, like in that movie.”
“Too much TV,” the policeman said, and went to radio for a fire truck.
And Marjorie went to ask Mrs. Higgins next door if she could borrow some salt.
Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland
When Philip Osbourne found the letters, he did not do so by accident.
Since the birth of their son, he had become worried about Violet. In the evenings, when they sat together, he would look up and find her staring at nothing, her hands frozen above her embroidery. When he asked her what she was thinking about, she would smile and say “Nothing.” Her smile was the same lovely smile that had first drawn him to her, but he knew she was lying. At their dinner parties, where formerly the conversation had sparkled and glimmered like a crystal chandelier, there were now silences, limping faltering pauses. He would look around andsee Violet watching the reflections of the lights in the windows, with an expression on her face that frightened him because he did not know it.
He had come to believe, in the fullness and flowering of his love for her, that he knew Violet’s every mood, every thought; but now he seemed to be losing her, and this sense that she was drifting away, borne on a current he could not feel, made him angry because it made him afraid.
The first letter:
Dearest Violetta,
I have obeyed your prohibition. It has been a year and a day. I have not spoken to you, I have not come near you, I have not touched your dreams. It is my hope that you have changed your mind. My garden is not the same without you. My roses still bloom, for I will not let them fade, but the weeping willows have choked out the cherry trees, and all the chrysanthemums and snapdragons have become love-lies-bleeding and anemones and hydrangeas of the deepest indigo blue. You are missed, my only violet. Return to me.
On that afternoon in late May, Violet Strachan had been in her favorite place beneath the oak tree, a cushion stolen from her mother’s boudoir protecting her back from the tree roots. She was writing poetry, an activity her mother disapproved of. Happily, as Mrs. Strachan abhorred anything closer to the state of nature than a well-tended conservatory, she did not come into the garden. Her daughters, Violet and Marian, spent much of their time in the little grove of trees along the stream.
Violet was never sure what made her look up—a noise, a movement, perhaps just the faint scent of honeysuckle. Something tugged at her attention, causing her to raise her head, and she saw the woman standing barefoot in the stream. She knew immediately, viscerally, that the woman was not mortal. Her eyes were the deep, translucent blue-green of tourmaline; her hair, held back from her face with cunningly worked branches of golden leaves, was a silken, curling torrent that fell to her hips. Its color was elusive—all the colors of night, Violet thought, and then did not know where the thought had come from. Neither then nor later could Violet ever describe the inhuman perfection of her face.
Violet’s notebook fell from her hand unheeded. She knew she was staring; she could not help herself. The woman regarded her a moment with a bemused expression and then waded delicately across the stream, saying, “Our gardens abut. Is that not pleasant?”
“Beg pardon?”
The woman came up onto the bank, her sheer silver-gray dress instantly dry, its hem lifting a little with the currents of the air. She flashed Violet a breathtaking smile and said, “We are neighbors. What is your name?”
Violet had known the neighbors on all sides of the family estate from infancy, and this woman could not be imagined to belong to any of them. Yet she found herself saying, “Violet. Violet Strachan.”
“Violet,” the woman said, seeming almost to taste the syllables. “A lovely name, and a lovely flower.” The tourmaline eyes were both grave and wicked, and Violet felt herself blushing.
“What . . . ” she faltered, then recklessly went on, “What am I to call you?”
The woman laughed, and the sound made Violet feel that she had never heard laughter before, only pale imitations by people who had read about laughter in books. “I have many names,” the woman said. “Mab, Titanic . . . You may pick one if you like, or you may make one up.”
Her words were only confirmation of what Violet’s instincts had already told her, but they were nonetheless a drenching shock. While Violet was still staring, the Queen of Elfland came closer and said, “May I sit with you?”
“Yes, of course,” Violet said, hastily bundling her skirts out of the way. “Please do.”
“I have not walked among your world for decades,” the Queen said, seating herself gracefully and without fuss. “I cannot reconcile myself to the clothes.”
“Oh,” Violet said, pushing vaguely at the masses of cloth. “But you’re here now.”
The Queen laughed. “I told you: we are neighbors.” Her long white hand reached out and touched Violet’s, stilling it instantly. “Have you chosen what to call me, Violet?”
“I cannot,” Violet said, staring at their hands where they met against her dark blue skirt. “I know of no name that suits you.”
“You turn a pretty compliment,” the Queen said. She sounded pleased, and Violet felt even more greatly bewildered, for she had not meant to flatter, merely to tell the truth. “I would tell you my true name, but you could not hear it if I did. ‘Mab’ is by far the simplest of the names mortals have given me, and I find it has a certain dignity to it. Why do you not call me Mab?”
“No,” Violet said, struggling against the weight of embarrassment—and a queer, giddy feeling, as if her blood had turned to glowing champagne. “Nyx is closer.” For surely the Queen’s beauty was the beauty of Night.
The Queen was silent. Looking up, Violet saw the beautiful eyes staring at her, the perfect brows raised. She saw that the Queen’s eyes were slit-pupiled, like a cat’s. “You speak more truly than you know, lovely flower. Very well. I shall be pleased to answer to ‘Nyx’ from your mouth.” And she smiled.
For a moment, Violet’s heart stopped with the impact of that smile, and then it began trip-hammering. She could barely breathe, and the world did not seem wide enough to contain the Queen’s eyes.
The Queen lifted her hand from Violet’s skirt to touch the piled chignon of her hair. “You have beautiful hair, Violetta. But all those pins with their cruel jaws! Why
do you not let it free?”
“I couldn’t,” Violet said, purely by reflex—she was so dazed that she only knew what she was saying when she heard her own voice. “Mother would have a fit.”
“Your mother need not know,” the Queen said, her fingers as light as moths on Violet’s hair. “I assure you, I am skilled enough to replace these ugly dragons when the time comes.” And then, leaning closer so that the smell of honeysuckle surrounded Violet, she whispered, “I dare you.”
Later, Violet would wonder how long the Queen had watched her—weeks? months? years?—before she had made her presence known. Certainly it could be no accident that she had found so exactly the chink in Violet’s armor, the phrase she and Marian had used since childhood to make each other braver, stronger, less like the daughters their mother wanted. By the time Violet caught up with what her own hands were doing, they were already teasing out the second pin. And then it seemed there was no going back. In moments, the pins were out, resting in a natural hollow in one of the oak tree’s roots, and the Queen was gently finger-combing Violet’s hair.
“Beautiful hair,” she said, sitting back. “It is the color of sunset, my flower. I can feel dusk gathering in your tresses.”
Violet had not had her hair down in the daytime since she was a child. The feeling was strange, unsettling, but the champagne in her blood seemed now to have twice as many bubbles, and, as she felt the breeze tugging against the warm weight of her hair, she was hard-pressed to keep from laughing out loud.
“Now,” said the Queen, “I feel I can look at you properly. Tell me about yourself.”
It was an invitation, but from the Queen of Elfland, even an invitation fell on the ear like a command. Violet found herself pouring out her life’s history to the Queen: her father’s quiet, scholarly preoccupation; her mother’s ferrous dissatisfaction; her sister Marian; her friend Edith; the callow boys who came calling; Violet’s own true desire to write poetry and have a salon and never to marry, except perhaps for love. And the Queen listened, her knees drawn up to her chin, her eyes fixed raptly on Violet’s face, only asking a question from time to time. Violet could not remember ever being listened to with such care, such fierceness.
Only when Violet had done speaking, made shy again by those brilliant, inhuman eyes, did the Queen move. She sat up straight and gently pulled free a strand of Violet’s hair that had caught in the oak tree’s bark. Still holding the strand between her fingers, she said, “And you have no lover, Violetta? I find that sad.”
“The young men I know are all boring.”
“And one’s lover should never be boring,” the Queen agreed. She was winding Violet’s hair around her fingers, being careful not to pull. “What about your friend Edith?”
“Edith? But Edith’s . . . ” A girl, she had been going to say, but the Queen knew that already. Involuntarily, Violet looked at the Queen; the Queen was watching her with pupils dilated, a cat ready to pounce. “We couldn’t,” Violet said in a thin whisper.
“It is not hard,” the Queen said, releasing Violet’s hair. She caressed Violet’s cheek. “And you are made to be loved, Violetta.” There was a pause. Violet could feel a terrible, immodest heat somewhere in the center of her being, and she knew her face was flushed. The Queen raised perfect eyebrows. “Do I bore you?”
“No,” Violet said breathlessly. “You do not bore me.” The Queen smiled and leaned in close to kiss her.
Philip waited for a day when he knew Violet would be out of the house. She made very few afternoon visits since Jonathan’s birth, but he knew she would not refuse her childhood friend Edith Fairfield, who had been so ill since the birth of her own child. At two o’clock he told his clerk a random lie to explain his early departure and went home.
He was not accustomed to being home during the day; he was disturbed by how quiet it was. The housemaid stared at him with wide, frightened eyes like a deer’s as he crossed the front hall. The carpet on the stairs seemed to devour his footsteps. He had climbed those stairs a thousand times, but he had never noticed their breadth and height, the warmth of the glowing oak paneling, the silken run of the bannister beneath his hand.
He stopped on the landing. There was a bowl of roses in the window, great creamy-golden multifoliate orbs, seeming to take the sunlight into themselves and throw it out threefold. Their scent had all the sweetness of childhood’s half-remembered summers, and he stood for a long time gazing at them before he turned down the hall toward Violet’s bedroom.
Her bedroom was not as he remembered it. Standing in the doorway, he tried to identify what had changed and could not. The room, like Violet herself, seemed distant. It was the middle of the day—he thought of the torch-like roses—yet Violet’s room seemed full of twilight and the cool sadness of dusk.
For a moment, like a man standing on the brink of a dark, powerful river, he thought that he would turn and leave, that he would not brave the torrent rushing in silence through Violet’s room. For a moment he recognized, in a dim wordless way, that the name of the river bank he stood upon was peace.
But it was not right that Violet should have secrets from him, who loved her. He took a deep, unthinking breath and stepped into Violet’s room to begin his search.
Later, Violet would recognize that the Queen had in fact enchanted her, that first afternoon by the stream. But by then she had come to understand the Queen of Elfland as well as any mortal could, and she was not angry. The Queen had done as she had seen fit, and the enchantment had not made Violet behave in ways contrary to who she was. It had merely separated her temporarily from inhibition, caution, guilt . . . so that the feel of the Queen’s mouth on her naked breasts, the feel of the Queen’s cool fingers between her legs, had brought her nothing but passion.
Only at twilight, as she was hastening up to the house, praying that her buttons were fastened straight and that there were no leaves caught in her hair, did it occur to her to wonder what had possessed her, to imagine what her mother would say if she were told even a tenth of what the Queen had taught Violet that afternoon. Her face was flushed with shame by the time she sat down at the dinner table. Luckily, her mother assumed her heightened color was due to sun, and therefore Violet received only a familiar diatribe about the quality of a lady’s skin. She bent her head beneath her mother’s anger without even feeling it, her mind full of the throaty purr of the Queen’s laughter.
That should have been the end of it—the encounter should have been a momentary aberration, from which Violet returned, chastened and meek, to her senses—but the heat the Queen had woken in her would not be damped down again. She found herself imagining what it would be like to kiss Edith, or Marian’s beautiful friend Dorothea, or even Ann the housemaid. At night she fantasized about the heroines of her favorite books, and sometimes her hands would creep down her body to touch the secret places the Queen had shown her. Two weeks after their first meeting, Violet went back to the spinney. The Queen of Elfland was waiting there, her hands full of roses.
Philip finally found the letters hidden in the back of a photograph of Violet and her sister Marian, who was now in India with her husband. He had never liked the portrait, had always wished Violet would get rid of it, but it was the only picture she had of Marian. He did not like the dark directness with which the sisters looked out of the frame. It seemed to him unpleasant—and most unlike Violet. That girl’s face, remote and delicate and somber, had nothing to do with the woman he had married.
He picked it up, turned it over, pried loose the back with a savage wrench.
The letters fluttered out like great helpless moths and drifted to the floor. He dropped the portrait heedlessly and picked them up, his hands shaking.
There were three of them; he could tell by the ink, which darkened from the terrible crimson color of blood, through a rich garnet, to a red so dark it was almost black. The handwriting was square and flowing, elegant yet as neat as print. The paper was translucently thin, as if it had been spun out of
the great richness of the ink.
He looked first, viciously, for a signature. There was none on any of them, only an embossed signet, the imprint of a linden leaf. It meant nothing to him.
He put the letters in order, darkest and oldest to brightest and newest, and began to read.
The second letter:
Violet, my song,
I dream of your breasts, their small sweetness. I dream of your thighs, of the nape of your neck, of your fragile hands. I dream of the treasure between your thighs, of its silken softness beneath my fingers, and its warmth. I dream of your kisses, my Violet, of the taste of your mouth, the roughness of your tongue. My truest flame, my mortal queen, I dream of the feel of your lips on my skin, the feel of your fingers in my hair. I dream of your laugh, of your smile, of your velvet-rich voice.
You asked me once if I would not forget you. I could see in your eyes that you believed I would, that you thought yourself no more than an amusement, a toy with which I would soon become bored. I could not tell you then that it was not true, but I tell you now. I have not forgotten you. I will not forget you. You are more to me than you can imagine. Return to me.
After he had read them all, Philip crumpled the letters in his shaking hands and hurled them away as if they were poison. His brain seemed full of fire. When he bent, automatically, to pick up the portrait, he found another object wedged in its back, an elaborately woven knot of hair, as firm and soft as silk; its color seemed to shift with the light, from ink to ash to fog. It had to be the token the final letter spoke of.
He was standing with it in his hand, staring at it in a dry fury, when he heard the rustle of Violet’s dress in the hall. As she came in, her face already surprised, his name on her lips, he shouted at her, “Who is he?”
She looked from him, to the crumpled letters, to the portrait, to the token in his hand. The expression left her face, as if she were a lake freezing over. She said, “No one.”
“Who wrote you these letters, Violet?” he said, striving to keep his voice low and even. “You said you hadn’t had suitors before me.”
Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Page 15
