During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

by Joan Chase

  Aunt May and Aunt Elinor, the two competitors, would have challenged each other to repeated speed trials, while Aunt Grace taught Aunt Libby and Aunt Rachel dives off the limestone boulder which marked the deep end. They would all look at each other openly and appreciatively, strong in their shared beauty.

  All the more reason for the shame and fury they felt when they left the pond to dress and found their clothes missing. Right away they knew that it was Neil who had spied on them. While they became hungry and chilled, waiting for the cover of evening, they plotted their revenge. As it approached dark they opened the car, hoping to find a blanket or at least a few oily rags, and found on the floor their carefully concealed clothing.

  After that they had to laugh. But their plans were made. They took the back farm road and parked by the barn. Then all together, stifling their laughter, they sneaked up to where Neil’s car was parked on the drive, released the handbrake, took it out of gear and pushed and steered it downhill to the barn, where they felt it was safe to start the engine. Both cars proceeded to the next county. By a creek where fishermen left their cars, they hid Neil’s, after letting the air out of the tires. Back at the house, they teased and joked with Neil, who was surprised at their good humor.

  The next morning he discovered his car was missing. They couldn’t imagine why he was accusing them. Neil became furious. Aunt Grace wouldn’t let him get her alone. When the sheriff brought the car back, his two suitcases were already set on the porch and he left without a goodbye. The women—what did they care? They had each other.

  Aunt Grace had met Neil for the first time at the town lake. She had driven her mother’s brand-new white Chrysler convertible on that July day during the Depression when most people in their county considered themselves lucky to have a plow horse. Neil couldn’t take his eyes off her, slender, with very dark eyes and hair, and when she went home that day he was sitting up front alongside her and before long he was driving them everywhere.

  Neil liked Aunt Grace. He liked the car. He visited the farm and before long he asked to live there. He paid for his board and room; Gram liked putting the empty attic rooms to good use although she didn’t care much for Neil from the beginning. She sometimes laughed at him, along with her daughters, but mostly his jokes seemed silly and her girls daft, for Aunt Grace wasn’t the only one who encouraged his fooling. All of them, along with their dates, seemed to end up at the house and in the evenings the kitchen was noisy with the cooking and fixing, the card games and the constant horsing around. Aunt Grace’s lovely face, nearly always sad-looking when not lit up by her white teeth and sparkling eyes, astonished her mother, who even as she saw the evidence of love became increasingly short-tempered with the cause of it. She said Neil was just hanging around their place for what he could get, that all he was wanting was a good time.

  “Well, I hope so!” Aunt Elinor had said. She didn’t think any of them should be in a hurry to get married. She was an aspiring actress then and one of the liveliest of the crowd when she was home from New York for a visit. More seriously, she would remind Gram that Neil was in college and that he had been made captain of the baseball team and didn’t that show a pretty responsible nature under all the kidding around. Aunt Elinor admired Aunt Grace and thought it appropriate that her beauty and intelligence would have attracted a man who balanced her serious side, someone who could make her laugh. Aunt Elinor was further impressed that Neil was the son of a country doctor and she thought the chances of his eventually making a successful career as a writer were good—heaven knows he had a flair for the dramatic, the gift of gab and a lot of charisma.

  “Speak English,” Gram told her.

  “Well, I’ll never marry him anyway,” Aunt Grace had said. She had plans for herself, thought someday she would get a master’s degree in zoology and maybe teach at a college.

  And for three years she held firm, while Neil continued to hang around, sometimes in school, sometimes not, pursuing her in an offhanded way, so that no one could really be certain he wanted to marry her. Off and on he rented one or the other of the attic rooms, whichever was available, and then he might follow Aunt Grace around the place for quite a while, dallying with her, weaving garlands of daisies to hang about her until, sitting in the high meadow grass, she was nearly buried, her chin aglow with pollen. Under the apple trees she took down her hair and he lay with his head in her lap, a buckwheat stalk tickling her throat as he chewed on it and said things that made her push at him and laugh out loud. He followed her into the henhouse when she gathered the eggs, and pretended to block the door, grinning and holding on to her when she tried to leave. Then for a time he might seem indifferent; they would quarrel and he would move into town, and Aunt Grace would not speak of him. They would all feel his absence through her and be relieved when one day he would be there again.

  Neil took great liberties to make Aunt Grace laugh. Once when he was renting a room still, although he and Aunt Grace were on the outs, she entertained another young man in the parlor. Neil stopped in the doorway, holding his shoes in his hand, and yawning and stretching, he said, “I’m going on up, Grace. Don’t be too long.” She was so embarrassed she could have killed him; but she could laugh at it too, her reputation not quite so sacred a thing now that she had a college education and her mother had come into money. It was all new to her, the large house, new clothes and new opportunities. Neil’s background as the son of a doctor impressed Aunt Grace also and although he often drank too much at the parties they went to, there seemed little connection between his revelry and her father’s drunken isolation. Aunt Grace and her sisters now felt increasingly pity and tolerance as both their father and the past he represented became more distant, less binding.

  Sometimes Neil went too far and Aunt Grace would send him away—for good, she said. He would comfort himself any way he wanted, making a scandal of himself in the ingrown town, exaggerating and glorifying his whoring and dissipation to everyone, until there didn’t seem that a word of it could be true. Anyway, Aunt Grace and her sisters would be delighted to have him around again and Neil would say he felt like he’d come back home. He always seemed brand-new; though he was never remorseful, he still could convince them that he was just sowing his wild oats and would soon grow up.

  Then both Aunt Libby and Aunt Rachel, seven and nine years younger than Aunt Grace, almost her own children from her years of caring for them, were married and pregnant. Neil ruined his knee stealing home; the team star abruptly became a has-been. Aunt Grace, holding on to her teaching job by the skin of her teeth, decided life was passing her by and married him. They ran away in secret because the school board immediately fired any female who was married and gave the job to a man with a family, and they kept their secret for eight more months until school was out, living on Aunt Grace’s money while Neil finished college.

  When he did, they announced their marriage. Gram was furious and declared she would never contribute to that marriage. She had made no secret of her disapproval, hadn’t really imagined that Grace would marry that kind of man—which partly explained why she’d let him hang around the farm in the first place. The further reason was that she didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to any of her children after they were grown. But now she couldn’t stop talking about how Grace would rue the day! Neil was a trifler, with women and affection, a drinker, and furthermore greedy. When this last was repeated to Neil, it made him howl. “Those pitiful pissant dollars. The woman has deluded herself.” But soon after their marriage, Aunt Grace and Neil were living back at the farm with Gram and the others; Neil could not find a job and Aunt Grace had compromised hers. Neil and his mother-in-law were locked in open hostility, with Aunt Grace in the middle.

  It was hell for everyone: Gram and Grandad still warring, the constant sniping between Gram and Neil, his partying in the kitchen nearly every night and then drunken episodes in which he attacked Aunt Grace. It was a relief to everyone when at last Neil landed a job as a book salesman. Th
ey moved away to Chicago and Aunt Grace got substitute teaching work with the expectation that the following year she would have a full-time position, which would allow Neil to quit his sales job and devote himself to his writing.

  But before long Aunt Grace was pregnant and unable to work at all, she was so sick. When her time was near she went back to the farm so she could deliver her baby where she was truly happy, in the room where Gram slept, with its open view of fields and woods, above the fireplace mantel the picture of the Indian brave. They called Neil in plenty of time to be there. Two years later, when Katie was born, Aunt Grace’s labor was faster and they couldn’t contact him in time. Over the phone when finally they reached him and told him he was the father of a second healthy child, another girl, Neil retorted: “How come you bothered to call?” By now Aunt Grace was living back at the farm, on and off, for reasons other than delivering babies, sometimes for as long as a year. There was plenty to do with family always about, Aunt Rachel already divorced and home with Rossie, Aunt Libby and Dan occupying the attic. Aunt Grace couldn’t make up her mind. She’d come home furious and depressed, would talk about a divorce, and then would as abruptly go off to join Neil wherever his job had placed him, and they would begin again. Then something would happen between them and Aunt Grace would show up at the farm. Gram would just say, “Well, it’s you back, I see,” and take her and her girls in, same as the rest. For all Gram complained about the commotion, it seemed that it was less bother to her than the alternatives of sending money or feeling guilty, as long as she had the room. Besides, she’d told her so.

  We would hear the women talk as they went about their work at the farm, as they sat for hours over coffee at the kitchen table. We heard all sorts of things. Once Aunt Libby said that Neil would do anything when he got drunk, that he had stumbled into many beds where he didn’t belong and in some he had stayed until morning. She snapped her eyebrows up and down, whispered. We would hear Aunt Rachel’s name. Hear that Aunt Grace had left Neil again and again, that it had become a little tiresome—same old thing. Sometimes, though, Neil was a hero in the stories—he’d saved Gram and Aunt Grace from being poisoned by leaking gas and he had saved a little girl from drowning, jumping into the river current in his Sunday best. Once he had fooled Gram into changing her bet to another horse while he stayed with the winner. To us it was all romantic and fun to think about, seemed scarcely to concern us, like fairy tales or cautionary fables that are not to be taken literally or to heart.

  But now the Hudson is in the drive and we know that the Neil who is real to us is back. This time he has come because Aunt Grace called him after she came back from the Cleveland Clinic. A buzzard had flapped over the house at dawn with three red-wing blackbirds diving and pecking at it, and Gram said that meant the coming of trouble and confusion. Though Gram still hates Neil, she doesn’t let his coming bother her. She just goes right on plowing through whatever she has to do, the few chores that occupy her, her struggle with time and the rest of us, until she can get away. We want to be like Gram, who says whenever anyone crosses her, “I know better,” her lower lip stuck out a mile. When we are grown up and have been through everything, we’ll be like that. We’ll order kittens drowned by the bagful. Then at night we’ll dress in our silken best, pile on jewels and whiz off to parties, bring home prizes for the family. We’ll bet on horses.

  We all see the car. Celia says, “He’s here. Neil’s come.” We stop and stare like the mouth-breathers Neil says we are—idiots bound for the cannery, the sweatshop, goods headed downriver. “Well, we’re going in”: Jenny speaks then like her mother, the expert fatalist. She and Celia go away toward the house.

  The Hudson, slouched under its metal visor, the sun shifting over it, gives the impression of a wild beast in repose, the light skimming a fierce though disguised wakefulness. We hear a voice calling us; it is our mother, Grace, calling and calling. Do we only imagine she wants to come out with us and run away? We feel separate from all of them, and we will have to go in alone, stupid and tardy, exposed, the family watching. “Well, if it’s not Mutt and Jeff,” Neil will say, because one of us is taller and the other shorter. Other times he calls us the two sad sisters, two sad sacks, two milkmaids, two of everything, as if we are just the same, would fetch the same price. The others laugh when he says these things, but they will put their arms around us and whisper for us not to mind, to smile even, although that won’t fool Neil. We know that—we know him. Better than anybody.

  When we go in, Neil is sitting at the table with his drink before him. No one else is drinking, none of the women. They fear it and keep their distance. They feel that they have the same weakness the men have and must guard themselves from becoming sots. None of the women has a taste for it either. Sometimes Neil coaxes Aunt Grace to loosen up and have some fun; so she drinks and gets glittery and laughs a lot. Later she sometimes gets sick.

  Neil notices us the moment we step inside but he doesn’t show it to any of the others, goes on teasing Aunt Rachel about her new boyfriend, Tom Buck. Neil knows him from college, when they were on athletic teams together. Also at one time Tom Buck had wanted to marry Aunt Grace. We don’t understand exactly what Neil is saying now but we know it has to do with the private, disturbing and exciting things between a man and a woman. That shows, as does the whiskey, he’s drunk.

  “You know you need it. If you don’t I do,” he’s saying to Aunt Rachel, whose white skin is aglow; the color seems to float on her in blooms like water flowers. Then she isn’t laughing anymore, while he raises his glass and drinks a sip with that intimate knowledge of her plain and bold on his face while he stares at her. For all to see. Aunt Grace has her back to him as she works at the sink.

  He looks at us now. Before he does we know it is time, feel the connection. “Well, my own two daughters. Come give your old pappy a kiss.” He wants us, asking us from deep inside. We feel it. We resist. He tightens his mouth, shrugs, shrinks backward, angry. There is a place hurt in him now. It’s like when he sings, “Frankie and Johnny were lovers and oh how that couple could love.” He drinks and makes us more ashamed with his high laugh. “I see nothing’s changed here. Turning out like the rest of the bunch.” When Gram comes into the room he nods toward her: “Here’s to the Queen of Hearts,” but she’s already left without a glance, before he can raise his glass to his lips.

  “You know you love all of us.” We hear Aunt Elinor, who has also been called home to be with her sister. But still we are eroded by our shame, by the wearing force of our separateness and our attachment to him. In the pantry we stop a moment beside Aunt Grace, watching the arc formed as her long slender arms and hands move quickly and capably. She is too busy to notice us and we are in the way. Supper will be late because he is here and everyone, fascinated, can’t break away and says helplessly the things they know he’s wanting them to say—their eyes darting and ardent, playful, safe as long as they are together.

  Or until something happens to upset them. Neil leans back in his chair and holds his cigarette like a prop in front of his face as he says to his wife, “It’s a good thing that the girls’ school starts next month. Any longer and I might end up so lonely I’d have to get a girl friend.”

  Aunt Grace takes a deep breath and says, “I thought I would stay on at the farm for a while, Neil. I have to keep going back and forth to the clinic and the girls might as well begin school here.” We are all very still, but by the looks on their faces and the sound of their voices we know that it is best for them to say this to each other in front of everyone.

  Neil starts to say that he guesses there aren’t any other doctors in the world, then mutters, “Never mind.”

  Aunt Grace says, “We’ll see.”

  “Yeah,” Neil says. “I don’t know what more it takes, Grace. A house. A raise.” He is weary.

  The women get up and find things to do. Aunt Rachel makes coffee and it smells wonderful. We even hear the bell strike from the town clock—the wind amplifies
it, or the silence. Uncle Dan rattles into the drive in the delivery truck and we kids run out to greet him. It’s like a reprieve, for now Neil will talk to him and be the way we’ve seen him sometimes, on the street, serious with an acquaintance, or at a table in a room by himself where he fills page after page with his words.

  When Neil is on the farm the days begin with a grand breakfast. He says that being here puts him in mind of the summers of his boyhood, though he doesn’t know why exactly, since that was a working farm, where his relatives were, not some kind of refuge for misfits or playland for the idle rich. As though it’s a holiday, just because he is here to enjoy it, we all eat late, take several fried eggs from the oval ironstone platter, have extra bacon and Aunt Grace’s homemade bread toasted, with jam she has boiled from fresh fruit; all except Grandad, who has had his boxed cereal hours before and is already asleep in his chair in the corner of the living room, up against the console radio. It is nearly lunchtime when Aunt Grace goes to the sink to empty the coffee grounds and says, “You go on now,” to Neil. “We can’t get a thing done with you around.” When he rolls up his daredevil eyes at her, she adds, “Certainly nothing useful,” letting her hand for a second fondle and caress the back of his neck where his blond hair curls over the pitted scars of acne. Soon afterwards, Neil lifts his straw hat off the rack and says, “I know when I’m not wanted,” and strolls out the door, calling back over his shoulder to us, “See you gals in back of the barn.” He gives Aunt Grace a saucy look when she says, “Now, Neil. Nothing mean.”