During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

by Joan Chase

  About eleven o’clock, Uncle Dan would carry the bowls and glasses to the kitchen and go up to bed and we would feel a little lonely, although not ready to leave ourselves, Gram and Celia yet to come home, perhaps the real drama of the evening still to happen. Our entertainment with Uncle Dan was the beginning of the night and as he was on his way up to bed, Aunt Libby was on her way down from reading in bed—passing like ships in the night, Uncle Dan called it. There in the downstairs hall Aunt Libby would position herself with her needlework and then later, when Celia would be parked out in the drive, staying in the car with whoever her current boyfriend was, she would begin to flip the porch light switch every five minutes, until Celia would fling herself in for a moment, demanding more time, pleading for it, then disappear again, finally to be forced in by the light signaling in warning across the dark like a lighthouse probe. Aunt Libby figured that Celia wasn’t going to get too carried away in her own driveway with her mother announcing her presence. Sometime in there Gram would come home. Uncle Dan always said what a pity it was that an old woman like that had to work the night shift. When he couldn’t sleep because of all the commotion, the comings and goings, he would appear on the stairs, decently wrapped in his bathrobe, and announce to one and all that there was more going on in his house after dark than in a whorehouse.

  One night we overheard him talking to Aunt Libby, serious for once. “Let her be. Let her live her own life. You had your chance.”

  “Yes, and see where it got me.”

  We couldn’t hear what he said next, but we knew his mild and quizzical expression.

  “Oh, shut up, Dan,” she said. “You know very well what I mean. It’s just that I think Celia has a real good chance. Better than most.”

  “You’ve got two daughters,” he reminded her.

  “Jenny’s like me. She can compromise if she has to. She’s got good sense. Celia’s different. It’s the waste I object to. Pure waste. If I can just get her married to a good man. Before it’s too late.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt her to lose a little blood first. I’ve heard of worse things.”

  “Dan Snyder, are you crazy?”

  “Probably am. Always was, about you.”

  We heard the familiar capitulation in her tone, a warming current touching her place of love. “Well, I always knew I got better than I deserve. I’m not easy.”

  Later we heard Uncle Dan whistling his way down the stairs to the cellar, where he was learning to draw. Following an open workbook, using an arc and a ruler, he was trying a vase of flowers. In the dimness beyond the aimed desk lamp, he told us, there were sometimes rats that scurried past, though there was no longer food stored there. Uncle Dan said he didn’t mind sharing, made him feel he was suffering for art, and anyway they were a lot less troublesome than a pack of overheated females. All the same, we thought he might amount to something, mastering sepals and petals with mechanical precision in a dungeon.

  When Celia was a senior in high school she met Phillip. He was going to study law when he was through at the college, and already he had more money to spend than anybody we knew, including Gram, and he took Celia to dinners in Mencina and Cleveland, for Swedish smorgasbord at country inns. During the summer he drove up the fifty miles from his hometown. Increasingly he spent time talking to Aunt Libby and after a while he was even stopping off at the store to pick up things she needed. Theirs were serious talks, Aunt Libby confiding her concerns about Celia, her high-strung nature, her willfulness, her sympathetic heart. It was as though Celia were a bred filly that Aunt Libby was handing over to an experienced trainer; Phillip had gained her confidence. There were fewer fights. He brought Celia home on time, soothing them both, the go-between.

  Phillip would say, “We’ll be a little late tonight; the dance is in Oakland,” and Aunt Libby would nod, agreeable and relaxed, her legs hooked up over the side of the armchair, showing most of her thighs, the way she sat when she felt peaceful. Her stomach settled more easily now and her face had regained that glow, hint of gilt, suggesting the edges of pages in an old cherished romance.

  “Is she smoking?” Aunt Libby would ask.

  Phillip had the smoking in hand, allowed her only four an evening. Celia’s best interests were his.

  He was undeniably handsome, and his whole bearing expressed his instinct for command. Well-clothed and organized, he didn’t interest us the way Corley had, or the other boys. Already he seemed as settled in as Uncle Dan. Uncle Dan said he certainly had the gift of gab; he said it as if it were nothing he had ever wanted for himself. But for Aunt Libby Phillip was a godsend, someone who understood Celia, and although there was plenty in him smoldering just beneath the surface, he was content to wait. She liked that in a man—self-control.

  Phillip had his eye on the future and on his path for getting there in law, real estate, politics. Aunt Libby’s gaze inched over him. She squinted, as though she were measuring him against a pattern she had in mind. She accepted his prospects as good ones; hazy about the particulars of that future he anticipated, she put her stock in her judgment of the man. It was as though that future time need not concern her, after she had turned Celia over to him.

  Those two would talk comfortably and confidentially while waiting for Celia to appear. She was always late. Then at last she would be coming down the stairs, calling ahead with her rattling excitement so we’d be expecting her, straining toward her.

  She stood in the doorway, dressed in a gathered print skirt, newly made, the colors clear as fresh-cut flowers, her white blouse starched, open at the throat.

  “I guess you just had to iron it a second time,” Aunt Libby said. “And no stockings.” We all looked with her at Celia’s fine-boned ankle, circled by a mesh chain dangling a tiny locket heart. As yet no man’s, she was ours, our achievement, our possibility. This wealth was ours—the hundred acres of woodland and field, Gram’s fortune, Celia’s bewitching charm. Her hand drooped against her skirt. Phillip reached for it. We could have stabbed him. But she went with him out the side door onto the solid cut-granite stoop and down the four steps. The car started up and left. We heard the leaves fanning against the screens. And smelled Celia’s perfume lingering on the air, as though all of nature were excited too.

  “That man is a blessing,” Aunt Libby said.

  “Too bad you can’t have him for yourself,” Uncle Dan answered, dead level, carrying a tray of Cokes into the room. “What our Libby needs is a honey-tongued talking mule.” He winked at us.

  “Oh, hush,” she said, but he couldn’t make her mad. She said, “If that’s what I need, then I’ve already got it.” And she went on peaceful, gazing into the evening light which filtered across the gray ferns of the wallpaper, bending them up and down.

  “I’m just so thankful she didn’t marry Corley,” Aunt Libby said one afternoon while she did some hand stitching on a bridesmaid dress she had designed in pale rose silk, with insets of lace taken from an old gown of Gram’s. “I wouldn’t doubt he’s partly Italian. Dark like that.” Now that Celia was preparing for her wedding, Aunt Libby was regaining some of her old style, thinking out loud to us, her fingers advancing over the fine silk, the rose ruffled against the ivory lace.

  “He loved her a lot,” we said, recalling his masking indolence, the half-glutted lion roaming behind the grasscover of his lashes.

  “I never doubted that. And I thought I’d never stop her. Doubling all the time with that Ruthie Thompson and Rossie and heaven knows what they were up to. That winter her nerves were terrible; she was thinner and wilder every day. I just don’t know.”

  We knew—for once, more than Aunt Libby maybe—what Rossie and Ruthie were up to. Ruthie told us that once when she was sitting on his lap he said for her to look down and she’d about died laughing after she got over the shock of it; because he’d opened up his pants and it was standing up beside her elbow, fresh as a daisy. We were so embarrassed for Rossie, our cousin, we could hardly think about it, but Ruthie got a kick out
of it —always jolly and easygoing. About sixteen, she dropped out of high school, pregnant. “Right on schedule,” Aunt Libby said.

  “There’s nothing to be done about it,” Aunt Libby said now. She meant us, our family. Being female. She referred to it as if it was both a miracle and a calamity, that vein of fertility, that mother lode of passion buried within us, for joy and ruin. “None of us can no more than look at a man and we’re having his baby. Look at Florence”—Aunt Libby’s cousin, who still took in ironing to help support over a dozen children. And there was Gram with her soiled and faded apron and her exhausted face, marked like an old barn siding that had withstood blasts and abuse of all kinds, beyond any expression other than resignation and self-regard.

  “It will be my release, the day I hand her over to Phillip,” Aunt Libby said, molding a rose out of scrap velvet, to set in the bodice on a green-piped stem. We remembered Corley, his lips hot as a brand on Celia.

  Then Uncle Dan came home right in the middle of a Friday afternoon. We knew something had to be wrong. He called out once, “Libby,” crossed the dining room and went up the stairs to their room.

  Before she followed him, Aunt Libby glanced out at the meadow dripping in the rain, beyond the thin aisle of lawn that every year Uncle Dan was making narrower, mowing less, leaving Gram’s peony bushes as the border. It was as though it fortified her, that swell of meadow; already she looked resigned to the worst, something she’d half expected all along. Often she’d warned us that moments of happiness hang like pearls on the finest silken thread, certain to be snapped, the pearls scattered away. Up the stairs she went, from the back, in her shorts, looking like a girl, her face, reflecting darkly in the hall mirror, capable of any age.

  And we were waiting, afraid; it might have been a long time, the pale rain rills sliding hypnotically over the glass. Then we heard water running above us, Aunt Libby in the bathroom splashing and blowing, and then she came down.

  “Oh, God.” She sobbed away, hugging her tumultuous stomach. “How will I ever tell her? And I trusted him. Fool.” Our wise conspiratorial Libby thrown. Still we were giddy with excitement, deliciously free to mourn openly with her over her wounded pride and bitter disillusionment, although we didn’t know exactly what the trouble was. Which caused Uncle Dan to examine us for an instant as he strode over to the high shelf where the unused milk crocks were lined up and brought down the whiskey bottle hidden there, and drank off in front of Aunt Libby one gulp which went on so long and seemed so agreeable to him that right then we understood something of her vigilance, knew we’d be just like her. His eyes darkened, then, taking on that same bordering indigo of the crocks, subject to his grim drinking mood. He drank again. Then capped the bottle. “I’m going now, Libby,” he said, and so we imagined his departure for war, before they knew he would be in California for the duration.

  Gradually, Aunt Libby calmed. Told us what a woman from Millersburg, Phillip’s aunt by marriage, had come to town to tell Uncle Dan that afternoon. She could not stand across the counter and ask for a pound of hamburger and not tell Uncle Dan that Phillip Masterson was the uncontested father-to-be of Louanne Price’s child, which was no longer anybody’s little secret. At one time Phillip had gone steady with Louanne. But this pregnancy had happened recently, since his engagement to Celia. Everybody was counting. Aunt Libby said that Uncle Dan was so fired up she didn’t know what he might do, and we all remembered Grandad’s rabbit gun still leaning against the back of the pantry closet.

  Gram came in from the matinee while we sat at the kitchen table. We could smell the rusty screening at the windows and the stale stained cloth as she pulled her apron off the hook. She reached into the potato bin and started a curl of peeling toward the drain.

  “Well,” she said as she plopped the first one in a pan of cold water and began a second. “I already heard. Reckon scandal borrows wings.”

  In the presence of her mother Aunt Libby was nearly herself again, restored to the stability of hard knocks and no nonsense. “I guess we’ve been fooled.”

  “Some fool easier than others. But sooner’s better than later, I’d say. Don’t ask me why she’s in such an all-fired hurry to get hitched anyways. Lasts too long as it is.” Gram turned the fire sky-high under the pork chops and they began to smoke and scorch right off. She couldn’t wait to get them on the table. Under the potatoes she raised a great flame, setting the pan on the burner with a bang as though she still cooked on an iron stove. “Have fun while you’re young, I say—not much you can do when you’re old and ugly.”

  “You’re beautiful to us,” Aunt Libby said, and indeed the afternoon sun turned Gram’s coiled iron-gray curls to a crinkly crimson when she stood just so in the light. But only an instant; she was in a great hurry, dropping plates on the table, dealing tableware like cards.

  “You’re not going out tonight—not tonight?”

  “Am too.”

  “But, Momma. Celia’s going to take it hard.”

  “Phooey. She’s well rid of him. Ain’t nothing I can do anyways. Maybe she’d like to come along with me,” she added, offering a real prize, her own one reliable pleasure.

  “The roads are terrible. Twenty’s closed on account of water.”

  “Don’t matter to me. It’s clear to the west. I’ll take number thirty. I’ve gone through worse, I suspect, and the horse was scared too.” Gram was proud of what she’d survived; once she’d turned eighty she boasted of her age, couldn’t tack on another year soon enough. She poured water on the chops to stop the burning and clamped on a lid, opened green beans she’d canned the last year she had a garden—they had to boil fifteen minutes and she’d wait for that. She’d known more than one family that had died, every last one, from a taste of spoiled green beans. Everything was now frying and boiling at top speed. Sow-bellied, spike-legged, there was still something about her tough management of the supper that stirred like an exuberant passion that had not been so much used up as outlived.

  We tried to eat what she’d cooked, working down small bits of the hard dry pork with lots of milk. Gram ignored the meat and ate through a plate of green beans with vinegar ladled on it and then cut herself two slabs of the white Dutch loaf. Its powdery dusting of flour sprinkled the table and her front; she cut it, cradling it in her arms, sawing the iron butcher knife back and forth across the front of her sunken breasts, squeezing the bread against herself. “I swear, Momma. Someday . . .” Aunt Libby flinched and held her own two breasts in her hands. But Gram paid no attention, knew what she was doing. She saw us watching her and, for once, in a shy flash of generosity, offered each of us a thin slice. “Don’t pester me for more, though, or the next time you’ll get nothing.” The country butter had little specks of white whey. The bread was so soft we hardly had to chew it. Maybe it was because Gram had lived so long and had so much trouble that she subsisted almost entirely on these soft white loaves. As she mouthed the bread her mouth gleamed with the fat of cows—content as a ruminant herself, forgetful. But then she startled: the pale watery veiling of sunlight over the orchard struck the hammered brass planter hanging between the two windows. That reminded her. Time to be gone. She gathered the plates in one sweeping motion while we were still chewing, rested them on the hump of her stomach and pushed what remained into a slop pail, as if she still had chickens and hogs to feed. “Now I done enough. You gals, wash them dishes. Boil that cloth. It stinks like shit.” She winked her childlike pleasure in her little joke, which had made Aunt Libby frown. She added then, “In my next house I’m going to have one of them dishwashers.”

  Then a car came down the drive and Celia got out. We heard her ring of good cheer as she called goodbye. Since her future was settled with Phillip she had become friendlier with other girls; they weren’t so afraid of her now. She was even more outgoing around the house. But when Celia came into the room she knew by looking at her mother that something had gone wrong with her life. We didn’t know until then that Celia was like the rest
of us, always waiting for something terrible to happen.

  “Goddamn it, Libby,” Gram said, “tell her”—nearly mad with impatience, Celia her favorite out of all her grandchildren. She moved toward Celia with her neck extended, taut as a goose’s and using every bit of her waggle of extra chin. “You ain’t going to fall to pieces because of a man’s fool doings.” And she told Celia, just that way, telling her what was wrong, and at the same time telling her how she was to take it. “Ain’t a man born yet that’s interested in more than a couple of inches of a gal anyway. So now you know it too,” she ended up, red as the fires she cooked over, as if to cauterize the whole house with the rage and passion that still persisted in her.

  Gram laid her old work-worn hand on Celia’s arm. “You go on and cry. Cry your eyes out and then get over it!” Before she left she took four nickels from her pocketbook and put them on the sink, as though we were still little kids.

  Celia sat and lit a cigarette, the first time she’d smoked in front of her mother since she had learned to do it from Corley. Although she didn’t cry, her face was mottled with the sudden splotch and bruise of high feeling which redheads show. Aunt Libby whispered to the rest of us, talking of Celia’s nerves so that we almost felt we could see them tracing her fragile skin, the way veins are visible on the surface of leaves held against the light. The way Aunt Libby talked, we expected Celia to blow up, smoking and sizzling, her nerves shorting out.

  “I can’t imagine what Dan’s doing,” Aunt Libby fretted. The wet orchard grass and briers gleamed like washed planking, while above, the branches held green sails to the wind. Aunt Rachel had fancied that once and we didn’t forget, never let ourselves forget any of it; we knew we’d have to live our whole lives off what they’d said and done around us.

  “Look,” Aunt Libby said. At the edge of the field two does stood. Their ears flicked. None of us moved. Gram banged out the side door.