FOURTEEN
The big farmhouse was built in 1740, and while it remained untouched in structure and line, it contained the distinctive mark of generations of Lee women. His grandmother had used it only a few times a year when she went there to hunt, early in her marriage. She always thought it too small and too American. She left behind a few good quilts and some pieces of country furniture and Philadelphia silver when her decorator, in 1932, introduced her to the ancien régime.
His mother, however, had made the place her own. She often came with her friends to search in the small towns nearby for antiques and to swim in the freezing river and to use a few drugs. She named her son after the round-leaved trees that grew along the river that ran through the farm.
Alder had never changed the rooms, or his name, and her belongings—sculptures of the Egyptian goddess, Isis, and Tiffany lamps and big batik pillows—filled the old house. There were even a few relics of the woman and the child who had come after her—a high chair in the pantry and a pair of pearl earrings in the drawer of a hall table. Alder came across his wife’s earrings while looking for the keys to a shed. Mamie was embarrassed for a moment, afraid that he might regret these souvenirs.
“She didn’t like it here,” he said. “I think we only came a few weekends, at the end, when I thought the answer was to spend more time together. She found a snake on the tennis court and that was it.” He smiled.
It was a house full of women, and even the housekeeper, Mrs. Bellows, amiable and competent, with her kitchen garden bordered by hollyhocks and pale delphiniums, glazed the house, like one of her famous doughnuts, with the sweetness of her temperament. Full of things left behind by other women, the house, thanks to Mrs. Bellows, was also full of their ghost-smells—Connecticut peonies in old red glass jars; oily black tea still shipped by Mrs. Lee’s merchant in London; lavender sachets, made late each summer from flowers planted in 1952 by Alder’s mother’s college roommate, and tied each September to bed posts in the guest rooms; even the cooking smell of roast chicken, made from Mrs. Lee’s grandmother’s recipe. Alder was surrounded and protected by all of this. It was no wonder that he chose to live at the farm. What was interesting about Alder, despite his withdrawal from the world and his safe enclosure within the embrace of all these women, was that it did not deprive him of his own strong mark—to the contrary, it offset his individuality. The piles of books, the Weegee photographs, the Francis Bacon, the cigars, the pamphlets from the Department of Agriculture on grafting and duck raising—were his own.
Alder, who did not frequently invite people to the farm, having had enough of house parties when he lived with Teddy Shannon and his mother, was happy to have Mamie there.
She was astonished by the greenness. It was not just a color. She could hear it and smell it. It was a dense, buzzing leafiness, fragrant of lilac and river grasses. The garden was airless and still, except for the black gnats that swarmed at twilight. It was not like the gardens of her childhood whose charm came from the gay coming and going of gardeners in straw hats, and bare-legged boys carrying transplanted royal palms like rolled-up carpets. The garden in Pennsylvania did not smell like her colorful tropical gardens, either, with their thick, sweet smells of ginger and plumeria. In Alder’s garden, listless with humidity, there were sassafras trees, once favored by Indians for their fragrant dugout canoes.
The gray fieldstones of the house, the oak trees, the cobbled stream, the cool stone roof of the icehouse had born witness to hundreds of years of greenness, and to silent Delaware braves and to young, tired Union soldiers and even, in the last half of the twentieth century, to Mrs. Shannon’s nude scavenger hunts. The greenness held its peace.
When Mamie said vaguely that she did not think that she would be working any longer for Mr. Felix, Alder did not question her, but said instead that she should come with him to Paris. “Travel as longing for the past—you should be good at it, Mamie,” he said, teasing her. He held her hand as they waded across a cold, clear brook. He was taking her to the small experimental hatchery where his manager was restocking a chalk stream with brown trout.
“What about Claire?” Mamie asked.
“Claire will have to take care of herself.”
“I don’t think she can.”
“It is always very interesting when someone is left on his own—for years, my stepcousin begged her husband to have children. He refused, she finally left, and he married a woman with five daughters.”
“I go to Paris, Claire becomes head of the UN?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
Although there were many examples to the contrary in his own family, Alder would have said that a gentleman did not divorce his wife. He did say so, in fact, to Mamie, her first night there, as he sat in a Windsor chair in the bathroom upstairs and talked to her while she had a bath. Mrs. Bellows had made a pitcher of Rum Collins and they had cocktails while Mamie bathed.
Mamie, lying in the hot, soapy water, wondering if the Foaming Bath Petals were left behind by Baby, did not know whether this idea of how a gentleman behaved was honorable or pompous. She was confused. She wanted to ask him where it left her, or some other woman he might come to love, but they had never spoken of love and she would not allow herself to ask him. She had vowed, the second time they had gone to Mrs. Lee’s, that she would not tell him that she loved him, and although there had been moments, especially when he was inside her, when she longed to admit it, she never broke down and confessed. That it was unnatural not to tell someone whom you loved that it was so was a refinement overwhelmed by the unfortunate suspicion that she had a better chance of holding onto him if he were a little unsure of her devotion. Gertrude would have approved of this subtlety, even if it were a technique that she herself had never used.
“I never expected,” he said, “that it would happen this way, or that my daughter would be taken away from me. And taken from me in order to punish me. Of course, now that it has happened, it seems predictable and inevitable. The only mystery is how I didn’t see it.”
“I had a friend who told me when she was drunk that there was a terrible secret in her family. I tried for years to get it out of her, imagining all sorts of things. She finally broke down and admitted that her father had been married before.”
“Harry Shannon, my uncle, your uncle, too, our stepuncle, left his first wife the morning of the honeymoon.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She leaned forward to turn on the hot water and she held the soap bubbles modestly around her breasts.
“He was madly in love with her. He came downstairs the morning after the wedding, they were staying in Nantucket, and she was sitting naked on the toilet eating a big bowl of Rice Krispies. She greeted him happily and he was so appalled he went out the front door and took the first plane back to New York.”
Mamie laughed. She didn’t know if he was teasing her.
“I always thought it was a little harsh of him,” he said.
He was looking out the old sash windows as the blue darkness fell slowly across his fields and woods. Ribbons of mist threaded through the horse chestnut trees, laden with white flowers like candles. “There is a vixen that sometimes sits in that meadow at nightfall,” he said quietly, as if the shy fox might hear him. He watched for the fox, but she did not come.
“I’ll leave you some time alone,” he said. She had been given her own bedroom. “We’ll meet at eight.”
She rose in the bathtub, the water streaming from her, puffs of soap bubbles, like clouds, clinging to her body.
He was at the door. He turned back into the room and took a towel and began to dry her back and waist, and the tops of her legs. When he reached the backs of her knees, the end of the towel fell into the water, so he gave her his hand, the second time that day over water, and she stepped out of the tub.
“This is going to be very interesting,” he said, not looking at her, intent on drying her shoulders and stomach.
&nb
sp; “What?”
“This. From now on.”
He sat her down in the chair and took one of her feet in the towel to dry it. He was very thorough, drying between the toes and rubbing the heel. He dried the other foot. It was only when he finished and had put the towel aside on the wood floor where he was kneeling, that he looked at her face. She was the color of a pink rose, and her skin was porous and faintly swollen from the heat and the moisture.
He slowly pulled her knees apart so that her thighs were against the sides of the chair. He opened her gently with his fingers and looked at her.
She tried to close her legs, but he took her knees in both his hands and held them against the chair. She tried again to conceal herself, but this time he pushed her legs open with sudden, even impatient, firmness and he bent over her and put his mouth on her.
She did not want to watch him, even though she knew that what he was doing to her and what he was giving her were the very things that she and Lily Shields used to wonder about when they studied their vaginas, each in a separate room.
The sensation that began in her clitoris, of frustration and tension and startling pleasure, spread quickly through her body. She could feel the blood moving through her arteries, away from her strong heart, straight to his mouth. She could feel the electricity gathering slowly in every eager nerve. She could feel the slide of liquid between her buttocks and she did not know if it had come from her or if it was his saliva.
She made herself watch him. He took her hips in his hands, her knees splayed now in slack submission, and he tilted her hips so that she was more exposed to him and more open. He moved her hips back and forth in the chair.
“Do this,” he said. “Slowly.”
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.
“I’ll tell you. I’ll show you.” He moved her with his hands until she caught the motion and began to move herself. She closed her eyes, afraid to let him see her.
“Breathe,” he said. “You aren’t breathing.”
She didn’t answer, pressing herself against him as if she could not draw him deep enough inside of her. She put her hands on his head and held him to her.
Later, when he kissed her on the mouth, she could taste and smell herself on him, and to her surprise and delight, it tasted and smelled like the sea.
Mamie would not swim in the pond with him. It was not the opaque brown water; the ocean at Hanalei, after a storm, was no more limpid. Mamie needed running streams, a tidal change, and, despite the muddy rainwaters of lovely Hanalei Bay, she liked to be able to see the bottom.
“It is very like you,” he said, floating on the pond. He was sorry that she would not come into the water. “The need for clarity. It will cause you to miss some things, Mamie. Such as this swim.”
Mamie did not defend herself. As someone who had seen as a child that the consequences of one’s actions could induce a terror and despair never implicit in the act itself, Mamie did desire clarity. While Alder, too, had the temperament of someone who wants to diminish, as much as is practical, the possibility of surprise, Mamie had gone far beyond that rather fundamental wish. Mamie knew there would be surprises; it was inevitable. What she hoped for, and it is why she sought clarity, was the relief in knowing that the surprise had not been occasioned by herself. Mamie, who embraced every kind of responsibility, real and contrived, may have been, in truth, avoiding responsibility by taking it on so eagerly, but she would never be accused of neglect or carelessness.
Of course, Alder was right, too. She would miss some things. She would have to fight in herself a certain rigidity and impatience. She would grow tired, sooner than others, from the unflagging concentration needed just to make out the bottom through the muddy water. Her watchfulness would exhaust her.
Ever since her adolescence, when she had so eagerly begun the long lesson of discovering what it was that she was going to be allowed to have, she had, in the trusting, concave way of her sex, accepted everything that she was given. Even the boys she picked were chosen with the idea of wanting to know what she would be allowed. If she was allowed kissing, what else was she allowed? Even if she was given only a little, it was better, at fifteen, than having nothing at all. It would only be when she was older, older even than she was now with Alder, that she would begin to understand that she had only two choices: if she could figure out what it was that she was permitted, she could take the risk and ask for it, or she could find safety and comfort, and even a kind of rigorous, intellectual pleasure, in having nothing at all.
What was so sweetly ironic was that the lack of clarity, so thankfully absent in most things, not only country ponds, was just what drew Mamie on, what lured her forward and kept her interested. The secrets of all things enticed her and ensnared her and saved her.
“Are there water snakes?”
“You sound like Baby.”
“They don’t have snakes in Hawai‘i.”
“So you’ve said.”
“Many times?”
He nodded.
She took off her T-shirt. She took off her jeans. Although it was very hot, her pale body, in her brassiere and underpants, was pricked with goose pimples. She stepped into the pond. Her toes sank slowly into the cloudy layers of silt and came to rest at last on the slippery clay bottom. Alder watched her.
“This is because of Baby and the snake?”
She shook her head. “If Pal Kaleihao ever knew that I was afraid to go into a little mud hole—”
He swam to her, making his way through the clotted weeds. He stood up and took her hand and pulled her back up the muddy bank.
“Mamie, he won’t know. I promise.” He looked at her.
“It’s not all a test.” He handed her her clothes.
“It isn’t?”
“I don’t think so. I can’t be certain, but I don’t think so.”
“I know that I seem to refer everything back to my childhood, but may I tell you one more story? Then I won’t ever say the words ‘palm tree’ again. I know it’s tedious. Even Claire is bored and she had the same childhood. Perhaps that’s why. I promise.”
“Tell me, Mamie.” He was laughing at her.
“There was a girl named Gwenda Tanaka at the local school. She was Japanese and she was particularly responsible and tidy and organized, the way Japanese girls are, and we elected her class treasurer. It was her job to collect the class dues, little sweaty piles of quarters and nickels, which were set aside for the dreaded Seventh Grade Picnic. Well, she lost the money one day, perhaps someone stole it, but it disappeared forever, and she never came back to school. They moved to another island.” Mamie looked at him. “Everyone in Waimea thought it was very honorable.”
Alder was amused, as much with Mamie’s odd little story, as by her choosing to tell it. “Why have you told me this?”
“It can’t have been that much money. Eight dollars maybe.”
“Mamie, is this all about the pond?”
“I do think, in the end, that it’s often a test.” She laughed at herself. “They all thought Gwenda Tanaka did the right thing. But I never thought so. That’s all.” She smiled up at him. He was standing over her, holding on to the low bough of a flowering pear tree. The white petals, like torn tissue paper, dropped onto his wet head and bare feet.
“Are there snakes in the pond?” she asked, pulling on her jeans.
“Yes.”
She put on her T-shirt.
“Did I pass?” he asked, watching her.
“That wasn’t a test,” she said in surprise. “I was afraid and I hate being afraid. Gwenda was afraid, not honorable. It is what I dread most.”
He took her hand and they walked home through the fox’s meadow.
It had been some time since Mamie had what she called in childhood “the white-bone fantasy.” Perhaps it was that, her body having completed its metamorphosis, she no longer felt the disgust and fear she had suffered at twelve when startling patches of new leaves and bark began to appear
on her body. That transformation, and the discovery of shame that had so interested her and Lily Shields that they held meetings just to discuss it, lost some of its immediacy the moment both girls discovered that boys rather liked the seedlings and nests on the girls’ bodies, and while they had not turned these strange physical manifestations to account, the way Gertrude or Alysse might have done, they tried, at least, not to despise themselves. Their girl friends, too, had the same wild grasses growing under their arms and between their legs.
It was not until Mr. Felix ejaculated on her stomach that Mamie had cause to remember the old longing, that old seeking for purification. In her fairness, she admitted that Felix had not asked for that much. If her part had been to discover how much the world would allow her, Mr. Felix’s part had been to see how much he could take. In his own way, he, too, had been passive.
Mamie was tired.
To be a castaway, sheared and stripped of the world; to teach, through the long, silent days, cats how to dance as the abandoned sailor, Mr. Selkirk, had done, was a way of starting fresh. She would be cleansed of the semen running down her hips, and cleansed of the city.
Her sister had exhausted her, too. Claire’s determination to be gratified; her assumption that the world was lucky to be just like her (“Everyone I know is masochistic”); and her contempt for the ineffectual, the damaged, the frail had left Mamie encrusted in chalky secretions of plankton and calcified shell. Mamie did not know how to scrape herself clean except by casting herself away. Like Aphrodite in Cythera, another island girl, she would rise from the foam and start anew, as smooth and as white as a bone.
She was not so sure, however, just what she would do once she had stepped ashore. She knew that she would not work for Mr. Felix. The Crawfords would be returning soon from Florence. Claire did not have a job, and even had she seen the need for one, her idea of employment was to take the test for the Fire Department. Mamie did not want to live in other people’s rooms, worried all the time that she had forgotten to rinse out the sink. She didn’t know what she was going to do.
The Whiteness of Bones Page 20
