During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

by Joan Chase

  We hadn’t heard him arrive, but when we came down, Neil was at the kitchen table drinking whiskey. He stared at the table, ignoring even his two daughters, though he had just driven in from Illinois. We stopped crying, shrank from him. We felt that he loathed us as if we had conspired to hold his wife captive and tortured her for amusement. There was an enormous mood in the room, weighing of regret and denial, guilt and anger. Anne and Katie sat at one side of the long table, away from Neil.

  Uncle Dan came into the kitchen, walked over to Neil and put his hand on his shoulder. “Come on. I’ll take you up.” His eyes were their same mild gray again; he’d cried himself out, according to Aunt Libby. But we felt this moment shocked Neil as it did us. Not because his wife was dying but because nothing had been asked from him. He stood and called his daughters. Their heads stayed on the table. Neil shrugged and followed after Uncle Dan.

  We waited awhile, but Anne and Katie didn’t move. We slipped away and followed up to Aunt Grace’s room, where it was quiet, nearly dark, Neil just a shadow by the window, his arms folded, his back to Aunt Grace, who must have been sleeping. Anne and Katie were gone when we got back to the kitchen. Snow blew in the draft of the half-open door. The trail of their steps led us across the porch and down the stairs. We found them crouched on the floor of Neil’s car. There was a sound, like singing or wind. Our teeth were chattering.

  “She made me.” Katie was crying again. Anne said nothing, just got out and stood there. Their eyes looked as if they had tried to die.

  “Are you girls crazy?” Aunt Libby came out on the porch. “No coats! No boots!” We went to her and she took us on past Aunt Grace’s room to the attic.

  Sometime after we had fallen asleep, we heard a loud angry brawling and we thought maybe Grandad had come back and was fighting with Gram. The house was open to all the spirits; gravestones were shifting. From the distance we heard Aunt Grace moaning and crying. Anne slammed a pillow over her head.

  We woke again. Heard a swelling sound that was like the murmuring of a great throng. Perhaps we were all going away. Pulled without will or intention, we went from our beds down the attic stairwell and stood at the doorway to Aunt Grace’s room, on the edge of the dark. Particles of snow stung on the glass. Neil sat with his head in his hands. A few coals glowed. Anne wasn’t with us. Gram said, “Leave her be.”

  Aunt Grace woke and said, “Hello, Dad,” in her recognizable voice.

  Aunt Rachel whispered to Gram, squeezing her hand: “You see, she’s passing over.” From tears, Aunt Rachel’s face shone as though it were a shell clarified in the sea.

  Then Aunt Grace looked at her sisters, her mother, husband. Then at us in the doorway. And we knew that at last she was saying goodbye. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered, slowly, slowly. “It’s like going into another room.” There was a strangling catch in her breath and a gurgling noise. Everybody was standing. The snow on the wind made the night seem even deeper. The wind funneling in the chimney fused with our spirits and demanded that we release her. Within ourselves we cried, “We can’t hold on.” There was a sudden draft as if we had let her go. Gram sat down and put her head on Aunt Grace’s bed, pressing up against her leg, one hand folding and refolding the hemline of the woolen blanket. All around the house the wind was moving, swirling and piling the snow.

  Led by Aunt Libby again, we went up the stairs to the wide attic landing. Up above, the high window gleamed and sparkled with frost in the dimness. Then we turned and went further up into the last blackness of the unheated attic and the night took hold. We nestled against Anne’s body, warm in her sleeping. It seemed that she might never have to know.

  The instant Anne sat up in bed we were awake. Katie’s eyes watched over the rim of the covers. Beyond the window frost was the concrete-gray light and snow accumulating. Rills flipped on the screens, curving over the sills. We saw Anne’s arms, long and white, then her legs, as she sat on the edge of the bed. Katie’s eyes closed. Opened again. There wasn’t a sign of anything, but Anne ran from us. We heard her bare feet slap on the stairs, and going after her, we saw her standing alone in the doorway of the room where Aunt Grace had been for so long. Anne’s braced legs were paler than the faded cotton gown which, outgrown and ragged, made her neglect and outrage palpable. Her hoarse convulsive breaths seemed to injure her. The bed was empty, stripped to the mattress, the blinds lifted and the windows too, so that the fresh light snow was powdered over the dark floor. Even the fireplace had been swept clean.

  “You didn’t call me. You left me.” Anne was screaming at us.

  Neil came up the stairs. He lifted his arms toward Anne, but she whirled and hunched her shoulders as if he would hit her and scuttled down the wall. “I’ll never. Never. Not for you. Not for her.” Anne still screamed. Neil shrugged and went away.

  Anne slammed herself into the back room where Grandad had slept on a mattress so ancient it was stuffed with straw. Katie tried the door. It came open and out banged a shoe.

  “Don’t take it out on me,” Katie yelled. “You were the baby that stayed in bed.”

  We knew the second time the door opened and we saw Anne that we’d better get help. We ran, calling the women. Gram was the first one to reach the stairs and when we caught up, Anne was lying on the floor face down, in her clenched fist a wad of Katie’s hair, her fist pounding and pounding on the floor. Katie’s neck was flaming where Anne’s hands had strangled and at first she couldn’t get a breath. She didn’t cry. On Anne’s shoulder was a welt from the crack Gram had given her with the spatula she still had in her hand. Gram was panting from the tussle and Anne was sobbing and sobbing, banging her fist on the floor.

  Katie was just rubbing her neck, her face blank-looking, as though she couldn’t figure anything out and had quit trying. “She tried to kill me,” she said.

  “Now, now,” Aunt May said. “We’re all brokenhearted.” She put her arms around Anne as tenderly as though she were holding pieces of her shoulders together. Anne grew quieter and Aunt Libby pulled back a length of her wet hair and uncovered her red face. “Old sorrel’s tail,” she said, and switched Anne in the face, which got a little smile. She led Anne off to the bathroom to wash and we overheard Anne say that she would try to be better, to be good, and when she came back her expression proclaimed that the effort would change her drastically. Katie continued to look addlepated, slack-jawed, as if it had all become too much for her. Gram said it wasn’t the first fight she’d ended.

  The women led us down the back stairway to the kitchen, to the breakfast that was arranged and waiting on the table. We felt formal and shy with each other, arriving in the high-ceilinged room, the pure illuminating snowlight blazing off the walls. Beyond the drive the black-barked apple trees pointed every last twig, it seemed, toward heaven, and its immensity was what was left at the end. Gram lifted a teakettle from the stove to pour boiling water into the coffeepot. She shook the iron burners around—slam, bang. She looked over at Anne and Katie. Her daughter, their mother, was dead. “Eat quick now. You’re going to get Elinor.” Her voice was hard. We thought that must have been what Aunt Elinor meant about God not telling the difference between living and dying, the way Gram mixed up loving and getting mad.

  “You tell Tom he’ll be needing them chains,” Gram said to Aunt Rachel, who answered that she figured Tom Buck could think that much for himself, which made Gram make a further clatter over the burners as if she were putting down an insurrection.

  It took two hours to get through the snow, the forty miles to the station, but the leisurely pace and the uneven rumbling beneath us, together with the air, that was steadily colder and clearer as the snow decreased, then stopped, took us back to another time, one we’d seen in old photographs, the aunts as girls, snuggled to their chins in furs, drawn by horse and sleigh along the drive. We traveled along, swaying and gliding over the snow, wrapped in blankets, letting motion and desire carry us forward into one timeless union.

  The first pass
engers leaving the train from New York seemed to be appearing out of the clouds from heaven, the way the steam billowed. We hurried forward, one last time to enter the fold where we might meet the living and the dead. We saw Aunt Elinor. From the top of the iron steps she regarded us with her eager and yet composed expression. Her eyes touched ours. Then she looked at Tom Buck for the answer to her question, even as her smile for the rest of us came to her lips. We all watched her, as if with her we would at last know.

  “Yes.” He nodded. “She went in the night, near dawn.”

  Aunt Elinor accepted it and bowed her head. Then she said each of our names in turn: Anne, Katie, Celia and Jenny, and took our hands in hers and slipped a ring on each of us. They were bits of turquoise on adjustable silver bands. We could see how much she loved us. It was in her face as she gathered us into her arms, welcomed us into the enclosure of the full-flowing black coat with its downy cuffs and collar of ermine. She offered her strength to us, longing to lift us from grief into Life eternal. We could no longer follow her there. We didn’t know about divine love, knew only an insufficient human love. But we let her comfort us, her throaty and musical voice, her russet eyes warm in the burrow of her furry coat, starlets of snow blown in her hair.

  PART FIVE: GRAM

  IN Tom Buck’s Chrysler, going home from the train station, Aunt Elinor and Katie sat in front, holding hands. Turning to take the rest of us in too, Aunt Elinor said, “I made reservations as soon as Libby called me. With the storm, I was lucky to get here. Still it’s a long trip at best.” There were limitations, even for her.

  Tom Buck’s silence could have meant he was disappointed too. Or that he was utterly weary. Leaning forward with our chins on the front seat, near to Aunt Elinor, we could see his galoshes flopping open at his ankles. Behind us, the iced back windows enclosed us in a dim sanctuary. The run of chains over the snow seemed all that held us fast to earth.

  “If only I’d known sooner. I prayed for her to hold on. To wait.” Aunt Elinor would have stopped Aunt Grace from going, she seemed to be saying, her eyes fixed to outdistance the progression of the car. At the edge of the road we saw the snow-filled fields, then the dark solemn woods.

  “She gave up,” Aunt Elinor said. “Libby told me she had accepted it that morning.” We looked down. “We must never give power to evil. It must always be denied.” Although she turned toward us, we would not meet her gaze. We were all guilty.

  Tom Buck didn’t say a word but we felt him wanting to, something stirring inside him. He shifted his body and gripped the wheel so tight his knuckles bulged under his gloves.

  Aunt Elinor sighed, then gave us her good warm smile, indicating what we had left between us and the full extent of our darkness. We had wanted to believe. Might still. Perhaps, miraculously, the empty bed in the upstairs room would float out of memory.

  “I’ve never seen the snow so fine,” she said. “Remember He said that it was good.” Again all things were made new—the long sweeping vista of snow pools iced over and glittering before the motionless woods, the veil of illusion drawn away. We stared and stared, maybe to become snowblind.

  “Was she calm at the last?” Aunt Elinor asked Tom Buck. No one wanted to say Aunt Grace’s name. Neither would we mention the way she had suffered, although we sensed the memory licking behind the ways we avoided remembering. We had never talked openly of Aunt Grace’s pain. We had never been told exactly the name of her disease, as if identifying it would give it a further advantage. So the secret name would bring further evil out of our own knowledge.

  At last Tom Buck spoke. “Goddamn, goddamn. I don’t know how or why to go on living after any of it.” We remembered Aunt Libby saying that his mother had been buried alive in a nursing home. Aunt Elinor reached over to touch his arm, then her own head fell forward. Suddenly we were all crying.

  Aunt Elinor blew her nose on a handkerchief of embroidered chambray. “This is the true demonstration. When all is dark. Didn’t even the disciples despair? And then there was Easter!” For a time we rode on in silence, pulled both ways. The chains beat around us like nails.

  “You couldn’t have done anything, Elinor,” Tom Buck said. “She wasn’t going to get well and she went on too long as it was. I’m goddamn glad it’s over, I tell you, and I don’t care a whole hell of a lot about anything else.”

  On Tom Buck’s cheek we could see the intricate purple webbing that underran his ruddy color, stark evidence of what everyone said was an incipient weakness for drink which might get worse. Sometimes Gram vowed she would cut Aunt Rachel out of her will for marrying him, for being such a damn fool as to think she could change any man. Hadn’t she learned the first time? That marriage had been over in a moment, but all the same Aunt Rachel had nearly lost her mind afterwards. Now this wedding was planned. Watching Aunt Elinor, her eyes staring open to the farthest sky, we knew she was praying for Tom Buck. Pray for us, Aunt Elinor, we yearned. Tom Buck slumped behind the wheel. And we remembered the plain metal bed, the stained mattress, a few snow feathers wafting across.

  The house had become surrounded again by unbroken snow and seemed mysterious and melancholy. Right then the granite sills at the window, the solid walls of maroon brick and the towering spruce at the back gave it the appearance of an ancient asylum, as if once committed we wouldn’t get out.

  “There’s relief in it. Christ, there’s relief.” Tom Buck stopped the car behind Gram’s and glared at the house. Tears were flowing down his face, but he didn’t brush them away. The remaining sisters were coming out then to greet Aunt Elinor, who left the car with her black ermine-ruffed coat sweeping behind her, walking as though she bore a crown. Into each other’s arms they merged, and went toward the house, leaving us with Tom Buck. After a while he got out and we followed him to the kitchen, where Gram was standing at the iron sink. Neil was there too, at the long table with a drink before him.

  “Jesus God,” Tom Buck said. “Let me fix one of them goddamned things, will you?” He was trying to smile and went over to shake Neil’s hand and gave him a clap on the shoulder. The two men looked alike in some ways, with their red faces and their blue eyes blurred with veins. But Neil, still lean, was almost emaciated, while Tom Buck was fat in the middle. Their difference we felt in other ways too, Tom Buck saying whatever came to mind, whether anyone listened or not; but Neil spoke deliberately—a man who meant to be heard.

  Gram didn’t look up when Tom Buck opened the refrigerator to take out the ice tray, but she said, “There ain’t enough for that.”

  “Hell, Grammy. I don’t care. I’ll go to the store and get some more for you. Christ, I could take it straight from a nipple if it comes to that.” He drank what he poured in one big gulp and then looked ashamed and touched Gram on the arm. “Sorry,” he said. Then: “I’ll get you some ice, Lil. In a little bit.” He poured more of the whiskey and sat down on the step stool, that kept him a little to one side of the table Neil occupied. Both men were smoking; the air held it low because the kitchen was steamy from cooking and the storm windows sealed us in, the smoke blending with the milk smell of the room, that room soured every inch by milk slopped and strained, churned and set by, year after year, maybe seventy of them passed altogether. We sat down on the floor, the four of us, our backs against the radiator, quiet and dulled, hardly there.

  “God almighty, Neil, how in hell can you stand it?” Tom Buck was looking out the window when he asked that. Maybe he didn’t want to hear really, and Neil didn’t answer. “I’ll say again, there’s relief in it.” His eyes slashed around the room but there was nothing he could do, and he clasped his hands as if he might say a prayer, then bent them backwards to crack the knuckles. “There are some around here, given their head, would force the hand of God Himself.”

  Gram went on moving her rag over the surface of the same dish. Her eyes were red too, the bruised red of sumac cones. Still she hadn’t lost sight of us. “You gals fetch me some of them apples from the cellar.” The cellar was
damp and smelled of dirt and the rotten, punk apples, many of them needing to be pared away to the small good centers left. Gram took the warped pan of them without a word. She sat down away from the table, drawing a chair over by the window. Again we huddled against the radiator.

  Neil cleared his throat. He spoke as though for the first time in days. “How’s business?”

  “Busy. Goddamn, it’s busy. Can’t keep help. Train a mechanic and he’s opening his own shop before you know it.” Neil nodded as if he were paying attention, but we felt Tom Buck was just talking away as usual. He owned the Ford dealership in town.

  Neil stood up and poured himself another drink from the bottle on the counter. He dropped an ice cube down Katie’s neck, which made her yelp and wiggle around; so he knew we were there too. Gram went on moving her knife, without looking up. Neil winked at us, but we looked down: we sensed that Gram and he were just circling around, using us until they got good and ready to fight.

  “We’re going now.” The sisters came into the kitchen. Aunt Rachel stood behind Tom Buck and pressed his head against her so that her throat showed over the collar of her dress, pearly white against his dark hair. She whispered in his ear.

  “Jesus,” he whispered back. “Don’t leave me here for long.” She pressed her finger over his lips.

  “Can we come?” we asked. We didn’t know where they were going, but we felt afraid of the house without them.

  “Not this time,” Aunt Elinor said. Kind as always, her face bore evidence of some personal obligation she was feeling. “But tonight, when you see her, she’ll look lovely. You’ll know then how happy she is.”