Mary
After his death, Mary’s half sisters were always around—like faded aunts, somewhere in the background. They were kind to her but restrained. Their mother, who was her mother, had run away to live with her father, who was not their father. Jennie, Kate, Patsy were older sisters who treated her kindly, especially after everyone’s mother died. Mary. She was sweet, wee Mary. But neither Mary nor her sisters could forget she was a Gibson.
Susan
When Susan told Ann Crisillo that her family was moving all the way to Seattle for her father’s shore job, Ann let Susan into the clique. Susan was invited to play in the family room which Dr. Crisillo had panelled and hung with the heads of dead animals. There was an all-color gumball machine. In June, Ann Crisillo came around to the house and pressed her nose on the warm back door screen. “Mrs. Campbell, will you see Eskimos in Seattle?” Susan was mortified by the question. She dreaded her mother’s honest, boring answer. “There are snowy mountains,” said her mother, “and the Pacific Ocean.” The Pacific Ocean! Ann and Susan regarded each other seriously. They were passionate friends those last three weeks in New Jersey on the Atlantic Ocean.
Mary
Now, Mary always thought of her favorite teacher, Miss Mackie, when she started her shift at Fairley’s Café. It was a kind of magic insurance policy against Miss Mackie coming in and discovering that she wasn’t going to be a bookkeeper after all. That day, two years before, when Miss Mackie treated her to lunch at Fairley’s had been the high point of Mary’s entire life. Better than being Top Student. Better than getting married which Mary would never do anyway because she was going to be a career woman like Miss Mackie, as she had promised her father.
Susan
Susan’s chubby thighs stuck to the green naugahyde chair. She cried and cried. The kitchen chair had been baking on the sidewalk with the rest of the furniture, ready to be confiscated by the Mayflower man. It took a while for them to find her bawling in the street. “Some sight you make, clownface,” her mother said. “I won’t go.” “He’ll always be with us from here on out,” her mother said. “I won’t go.” Her mother hugged her tightly. Susan didn’t want to be childish, so she went into her empty bedroom and played with the doll Ann Crisillo gave her to make them blood sisters. The doll’s arms fell off just before supper.
Mary
Mary saw them come in the side door. Miss Mackie and a pudgy little girl smiling and chattering under her freckles and straw hat and red hair. Luckily, Mary’s morning shift was almost over. She had a date with that sailor Andy Campbell who always wanted her to marry him and go off to America.
Susan
It was late. Susan’s father never came home before midnight now. Because of this Alaska oil line. Tricky business. So Susan would sit up with her mother and talk about times as long ago as Ann Crisillo and the Eskimos. Susan always fell asleep in algebra the next morning, but someone had to stay up with her mother to say he would be all right. Even though the roads were slippery and he was a terrible driver, especially through whiskey fumes. Susan longed for the Easter cablegrams and the calls from Argentina. She knew it would never be all right and here they were on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Susan wished he would die. Instead, he and the bleach-blonde woman took off together for San Diego.
Grey hair across the booth of the downtown diner. Mary’s hazel eyes reflecting back to Susan what once was, what might have been. She cuts the deck, deals them each a canasta hand and keeps an eye out for customers. An old lady, cashiering at an all-night coffee shop. A middle-aged daughter, keeping her company. Hail Mary. Our Father. Glory Be. The words slip out with the cards. Who said them? Neither woman acknowledges. But perhaps someday yet they will talk about the blood too high up for toes.
The Green
Loudspeaker
The green loudspeaker was the first thing Emily noticed about school. The round, peeling, chartreuse loudspeaker hung over the Ten Commandments which hung over the blackboard. Every morning class commenced with a voice from the loudspeaker—Sister Mary Francis calling them to their feet to pledge allegiance to the flag (to God and our country) and to pray the Our Father. They would all look up at the box—as if waiting for Howdy Doody to appear—and listen to the announcements about confession schedule, lunch milk duty, and the competition to adopt Pagan Babies.
After that, the perforated green box was silent until the next morning, unless. Unless, and Emily’s heart beat faster thinking of this, unless Sister Mary Francis had to call someone to her office on “a discipline issue.” Barbara Francini was called twice in the first grade, once for shooting a water pistol and once for not wearing underpants. Barbara was the kind of tough girl Emily’s mother had told her to avoid. The near occasion of sin Father Boyle had warned about. Barbara would grow into one of those juvenile delinquents they described in Look Magazine.
Emily’s older brother Tommy had been called up at least once a term for fights at recess or for insolence to his teachers. By the eighth grade Tommy was a veteran. He was tough, but not delinquent material. He was too busy playing baseball, practicing to make the Majors like their father never had. Tommy didn’t mind being called up. He always laughed about it after school. But Emily was worried, worried for his immortal soul if he kept on disobeying like that. Everytime she heard Sister Mary Francis call “Tommy Dolan” over the loudspeaker, she worried. She had the fear of God in her, that girl, and the fear of Sister Mary Francis.
Sometimes she tried to think of the loudspeaker as the Wizard of Oz. She would stare at the zillion holes in the round circle and imagine magic. Actually, she knew how it worked. She found out one morning when she had been excused from class with a sudden case of diarrhea. Quickly she rushed through the empty corridor, the voice of Sister Mary Francis echoing from the open classroom doors. Passing the glass-enclosed principal’s office, she saw the old nun (forty at least, according to Mama) leaning over the microphone and reading the novena schedule from a long yellow pad. She scurried by lest Sister catch her and demand an explanation that would be heard over the loudspeaker. Sister Mary Francis wasn’t the sort to get diarrhea, especially not before class had even started.
Emily survived almost four years of Assumption School without being summoned by the loudspeaker. Then one afternoon during geography class, in the middle of a confusing discussion about isthmuses and peninsulas, she heard the loud click. Like the click of her parents’ alarm clock which woke her before the bell woke them. “An isthmus is,” she repeated to herself, concentrating, trying not to worry about the imminent voice of Sister Mary Francis, just as at home she would try not to waken from the alarm’s click and worry about the day ahead.
“Good afternoon,” came the cool, crisp voice. “Good afternoon students and teachers.”
Emily knew that today she would not understand isthmuses.
“Will the following students please come to my office immediately: “Emily Dolan.…”
She did not hear the other names. Accomplices? All she could hear was “Emily Dolan.” “Emily Dolan.” “Dolan,” with a tint of Irish like Grandma Helen. Emily Dolan. Cool, clear. No doubt she was being called. Is this what a vocation was like? Would the call be this clear? Of course she always knew it would happen. Always knew she would be found out. And so it was with some excitement and fear that Emily got to her feet, walked past Sister Mary William, whose face betrayed only the slightest distraction from her geography glossary, past the desk of Barbara Francini, whose eyes showed a new respect for Emily. Nervous, yet prepared to face the will of God, Emily walked into the hallway. She noticed how the waxed floor shone yellow from the flourescent ceiling lamps.
Half-an-hour later, Emily quietly slipped into her desk. Sister Mary William faced the blackboard and did not even glance up from the long division with which she, herself, was having some trouble. Emily pulled out her exercise pad and flew through math like she had never flown before. Every once in a while, her hand would brush against the bulge in her sweater
pocket and she would glance at the loudspeaker in the same complicity she felt with certain statues in church.
Not until 2:45 did Sister Mary William notice her sitting there. She assigned a short writing exercise and called Emily to her desk to inquire about the summons. The nun blushed and looked like she might cry as Emily returned to her place.
“Class,” Sister cleared her throat. “I have an announcement to make.”
Emily tried to keep her eyes off the loudspeaker.
“Sister Mary Francis has just awarded Emily the 4th grade literary prize for her poem, ‘Jesus’ Love at Easter.’”
Emily could hear Barbara Francini’s short, gruff laugh. A few ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs.’ But most of the other kids could have cared less since it was five past three and they wanted class dismissed.
Tommy waited for Emily after school like he hadn’t waited since she was in kindergarten and he was required to walk his sister home.
“So whadid they send ya up for?” he asked, revealing both pride and astonishment. “My baby sister and old Battleaxe Francis. Whadid they get ya for?”
Emily looked at him, past him and saw through his toughness, saw through Barbara Francini’s smirk.
“Gone deaf?” asked Tommy, pronouncing it “deef” like he had heard on Gunsmoke. “I said, whadid they get you for?”
“They got me for a poem,” she said.
“A what?” He started to laugh.
But she was already three paces ahead.
XIII
Afterlife
“I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Judy will be hurt if you go.”
“Ridiculous. With twenty other people here, she doesn’t have time to talk with me. Besides, she’s tucked in the corner with that Englishman.”
“Then there’s Hank. Remember how hard it was to approach a writer when you were in school?”
“Oh, fuck Hank. I’ve got my own work to do.”
Susan tried to stop bickering with herself and examined the Guatemalan tapestry on the opposite wall. She wished Hank would hurry up with that cheese and wine. She hoped he would remember “dry”; she couldn’t handle a hangover tomorrow.
Too much work. What to do while she waited? She was over thirty years old and still nervous about being spotted alone at a party, still self-conscious enough to try to look busy studying album covers and tapestries. Really, she did have better uses for her time. Like the book. Oh, it had become an obsession. Her friends had learned to treat it like a difficult child—or treat her like a difficult parent—inquiring tentatively, offering generous, but puzzled sympathy.
Susan left the party quickly, not bothering to take Judy away from the Englishman or Hank away from the gobs of sweaty cheese. They would understand.
(“A writer, you know, actually makes her living by it. Maybe a little shy, eccentric, maybe even a little neurotic about her work, but in a productive way.”)
Lately Susan often left places in the middle of the evening to go back to her office. She was finding social life, these civil banalities, anecdotes, pickups, such a waste of time. Now she was always calculating time, always looking downhill—only three more days until Friday; only two more hours until bed. Parties and leisurely lunches and midnight telephone conversations all seemed so extraneous, such a waste of time. They interrupted work or postponed sleep. How had she spent so many hours just lying around listening to her clock radio when she was fourteen or talking to Guy in their tiny kitchen in Toronto when they were first married? How was there more time then?
The street lamps along Hearst Avenue condensed the cold night into stalactites of potential energy. She watched the cars cut through luminous fog, sliding toward the bridge to San Francisco. San Francisco. Her father had worked from all those port towns to be stationed one day in San Francisco. San Francisco was why she moved from school to school. Eventually the family wound up in a suburb, city rents being what they were, of San Francisco. San Francisco of Oriental steamers, gold rushes, Spanish padres, earthquakes, home some day.
(Nightmares still. Coming back from class and finding the empty house in Newark or Seattle or Portland. Searching for the family on the road to San Francisco. Finding them in the hall of mirrors, endless, beginningless mirrors at Palisades Park.)
Susan often imagined herself in San Francisco, living in one of those Victorian North Beach apartments, working by a bay window overlooking the Golden Gate, going out to browse at City Lights or to drink coffee at Café Trieste. But she still lived in Berkeley, tucked in a small apartment on the north side of the Cal campus. She had a good view of the city from her back window when the Acacia wasn’t in bloom.
She climbed Hearst, enjoying the cold stillness. They told her not to walk at night. As a rape crisis volunteer, she knew more than statistics. But she could not lock herself up to protect her freedom. She needed this nighttime solitude, this stillness. Nothing but clear winter and the city across the water. Winter, with its survival course of contemplation and work, enlarged her. She cherished the grey, the constant steel grey. San Francisco grey. She had read Thomas Wolfe and had gone to Britain, but the London fog was shadowy rather than grey.
Susan understood now that something was intrinsically wrong with the last chapter. Sometimes you had to destroy to create, right? It takes courage to admit you’ve failed. The piece was too cognitive. It said what she thought, but had no emotional integrity. Perhaps she would have to begin all over again.
Susan was good at beginnings. “Engagé,” as her mother’s friend who read Lillian Hellman would say. Everyone envied Susan’s drive and energy. Everyone said she would make it one day, because she knew what she wanted. And she had already had some success with her writing. While her friends opted for money or prestige or marriage, Susan had, as Judy admiringly put it, “sanitized herself of sexist, capitalist compromises.” She was free of wifery, motherhood, careerism. She was free. That’s the way they saw it. Free to get on with it.
She let the empty bus trundle past her. Tonight she wouldn’t be encapsuled. That was why she left the party. It hadn’t been any different than most. The music, in fact, had been very good. But she hated how Judy flirted with that Englishman. Perhaps Judy hadn’t done anything except sit down next to him. No, it was the way Judy sat that bothered Susan. Just as it was the way Judy spoke. They had very different ways. In the end, she let Judy have her way. And she went on hers.
(No, Guy, it’s nothing you’ve done. I just can’t continue to be Professor Thompson’s wife. Not your fault. Not anyone’s fault.)
Susan knew she had to stop procrastinating. She just wasn’t concentrating on the book. It had been due three weeks ago. But she had been paralyzed. She had always met deadlines before. Lately, though, she had regressed into this childhood where she refused to work, where she waited for someone to motivate her, challenge her, cajole, scold. The punishment she managed herself: guilt was a ubiquitous noose.
She pushed open the door and switched on the light. She felt the cold immediately, realizing that she had been walking all the way with her coat open. She enjoyed working here in this office and having her apartment upstairs. In the evenings, she used to have friends over for coffee or hold meetings of the Left Caucus or the Rape Crisis Group. But she hadn’t invited anyone since December, two months ago. She had started sleeping in the office. She had to finish the bloody book. She had thought that spending time with it would help. She couldn’t give up an important project like this. Susan plugged in the electric heater, turned on the kettle, and dismissed her mother’s warnings about conflagration as she made her way up to the freezing bathroom.
The heat still hadn’t stretched across the room when she returned, so she stood by the electric fire, warming her hands on the cracking green elephant mug of tea. She should throw away this mug. Cracks cultivated germs. Besides, someday the thing would split in her hands. It was a kind of trophy, though, Professor Ash’s mug. Her writing had such control, he said. She was a fine student,
but he didn’t want to give her any false hopes. Most girls chose a practical program like research or teaching.
She looked at the typewriter, hulking under its dark cover like a Lenten statue. What was she waiting for? She pulled away the cover and read the half page she had produced that afternoon. The direction seemed OK. All she needed to do was summarize a few points and conclude. No, she didn’t know what it was, but something was terribly wrong.
She turned away again, opening the window for fresh air and looked across the Bay. She couldn’t see through the fog to the city’s skyline. A low cloud ceiling suspended Berkeley in the light night, as though under a private moon. Next to the window hung her own resin relief of a window—glossy green and orange irony. And next to that, a stream of magicians’ scarves she had brought back from India. She liked the room; the shelf of Victorian novels, the postcards of workers she had picked up at the galleries. She felt reassured, as natural as one might feel in a personal shrine.
Susan flipped through the last pages of her previous chapter. So hard to end this book, hard to describe what happened to Marya Terazinya, hard to explain why she had wanted to write a biography of the Russian pianist. Marya Terazinya haunted her. It was Susan’s own fault. She had single-mindedly sought out the woman after that night of Saint-Saëns at the Albert Hall. Susan hunted all over London for the faint Soviet recording of Marya’s concerto. She found herself leafing through music journals on Charing Cross Road, anxious for the slightest mention of the obscure musician. Marya was young, ascetic, had no time for anything but her music. She lived in a Moscow bedsit with her piano. Susan admired the spare, accomplished life and planned to get an assignment to interview her. But one night, ten thousand miles away in a yesterday that was still today in the objectivity of international time treaties, Susan heard that Marya Terazinya was dead. A heart attack, according to Pravda. No further details. Only time crosses such borders easily. Would that it were so easy to cross time.
Movement Page 17
