A Mind of Winter

by Shira Nayman

  “I’ll see to her education, the Canon said one Sunday, taking the girl by the hand. The woman fell to her knees and covered his feet with kisses.

  “The Canon believed the world sullied women, and that if he shut the girl away, she would, under his tutelage, flower. He placed her in a spacious cellar and brought in a staff to care for her: two servant girls—children themselves—along with a tutor and a cook.”

  I realized, as I spoke, that this strange story had all been there in that heightened glimpse, the week before, as I lay reading in bed with Simon.

  “For five years, the Canon came every week to visit the girl. She noted some of their exchanges in her diary. It’s a curse to see things too clearly, the girl had said one day, to take one example. No vision is ever a curse, the Canon had replied.

  “But on her thirteenth birthday, the pattern changed. Late that afternoon, the staff suddenly vanished (they would reappear later in the evening). The Canon swept in, bulky beneath the heavy velvet he wore, and took the girl onto his lap.

  “The flower is formed, he muttered. Then, in a whisper, to himself: The sweet nectar at the core.”

  I could feel the expectancy in the room; I could see it in the faces around me. Only Barnaby seemed not to be listening, lost in some faraway private domain, an elsewhere that in some intimate way included me.

  “It struck the girl as odd that with all the care her master had taken with her wardrobe he should tear so at her clothes.

  He repeated these same actions on the next visit, and the next.

  “The girl quickly grasped that this was the new order of things. Sometimes, the Canon instructed that the clothes he tore be mended, and then the servant girls would sit stitching into the night. On other occasions, he would simply press the ruined fabric to his nose and inhale.”

  Barnaby took his hands from his chin. Why the look of puzzlement, as if he’d been presented with a difficult theorem it was somehow his business to solve?

  The story went down well, judging from the general liveliness that replaced the crowd’s prior drowsiness. Afterward, the room emptied with the usual uninhibited performance of bonhomie—too-ardent back slaps and goodnight kisses, the more sober supporting the less. Until there were just the two of us, Barnaby and me, alone.

  “Misfiled,” I lied, when Barnaby asked me about the tale. “In the Agriculture section at the New York Public Library. I was looking for something on the history of corn and there it was. A facsimile edition of the original diary which was published in 1821, two hundred years after it was written.”

  It was an unseasonably cold night and earlier Barnaby had made a fire. Now, three burning coals—all that remained of it—eyed us redly from the grate.

  “There’s the matter of the truth quotient,” he said quietly.

  “Diaries always tell some kind of truth, don’t you think?” I rejoindered.

  “The question is, what is the truth of it for you?”

  I took a cigarette from the polished wooden case on the table. Barnaby did not rise to light it but sat peering at me, head cocked, the vertical shadow in his cheek.

  “That’s changing the rules of the game,” I said, striking a match. Looking at Barnaby, I was suddenly blindsided by an intuition that my marriage to Simon depended, in some crucial way, on the abiding love of this man.

  “I imagine you keep a diary,” he said. “A journal. Some account of your life.”

  Oscar furnished Galois, and now the tarry smoke hung in the air between us.

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  “And how does the truth quotient figure in that?”

  I flicked ash into the bronze ashtray, shook my head. “Barnaby, your parlor game and my personal life are two quite different matters.”

  The smoke thinned; through the dissolving, gauzy swatches, I could see that the shadow in Barnaby’s cheek had disappeared, leaving not a trace of the rogue about him.

  “Are they?”

  Typically, when I came into the yellow suite, I would find Simon at the desk. Sometimes he would be staring out the window; then, he would turn to look at me, offering a faint smile. At other times, he seemed not to notice my presence, keeping his head lowered as his pen moved across the page. I would walk quietly into the bedroom, sit by the window in the chintz chair, and read, glancing occasionally out at the scene below me—a gardener raking the lawn, a handful of flush-cheeked guests returning from a walk, servants covering a trellis table with white linen and then lining up glasses and setting out little dishes that would later hold olives and nuts and tiny sweet gherkins.

  This time, when I opened the door, Simon put down his pen and looked up. He rose and crossed to where I stood in the middle of the gold rug with its border of bright green leaves. He raised his hand and with one finger stroked the side of my neck. For an instant, I looked into eyes that were certain of what they saw and yet claimed to know nothing. In the slow time of the slowest waltz we edged toward the bedroom. The sheets were crumpled into clusters of unruly shells; we lowered ourselves onto the bed and they rustled beneath us.

  Later, we lay there together sipping brandy, the curtains raised, lights out. Modest starlight gave a shady cast to the room.

  “The University of Montreal has a visiting writer’s fellowship,” Simon said. “The person they had lined up for the summer program canceled. They’ve invited me to come in his place.”

  “Would you like to go?” In the dim light, the brandy shone black like tar.

  “They want me for the month of August.” He turned, looked at me calmly, openly, a little sadly. I put my snifter on the nightstand and lit a cigarette, aware that my heart was pounding.

  “You’d be happy there,” I said. “A chance to exercise your French and write in outdoor cafés. You could pretend it was Paris.”

  Simon took my chin in his hand, turned my head toward him. “Would you visit?” he asked.

  “Darling, of course.”

  I rested my cigarette in the ashtray. We kissed. Simon closed his eyes. I looked at his lids, picturing his gaze, longing for the force of it, relieved to be free of it, aching all over for him, unsure what part of my pounding heart was panic and what part the slithering thrill of freedom.

  All week long, back in Manhattan, my mind flew forward to the weekend. When Friday morning came, I found myself dawdling—packing and repacking my small valise, flitting about to tidy this and that.

  I smoked the whole way there, the window unrolled, the summer air rushing in and tousling my hair. Thelonius Monk crackled on the radio, leaving me feeling slightly off-kilter; Simon relaxed, enjoying the music. Though we were driving at quite a speed, time felt irritatingly sticky and slow.

  Eventually, we pulled into the driveway. My mouth felt dry. Simon smiled one of his infrequent, happy smiles and patted my hand.

  “Run along, squirrel,” he said sweetly. “I know you’re eager to see your friends.”

  I stepped slowly from the car feeling puzzled, then walked around to Simon’s side and kissed him through the open window.

  “See you at dinner, darling,” I said.

  Dinner seemed to go on for hours.

  Why not, I thought, taking another sip of Oscar’s port, which sometimes, as on that night, when the sky outside was inky and blank, glowed so deep it was almost purple. Why not honor Barnaby’s rule: really tell them some of the truth as I see it?

  And then, there we were, Barnaby and I in the lead, heading up the stairs to the green room, me in the grip of an edgy desire—to show them something. Not just to tell a story, but to really make them see. Images from a troubling photographic assignment in the South clamored inside my skull, pressing for release. I sat in my usual place, waited for Barnaby to do the honors with the drinks. I could feel the grimness in my face, was uncomfortably aware of the locked bone hinge of my jaw. I surveyed the room; these people I only half knew with their cool linen jackets and sleek silk dresses, smooth brows and eyes glazed by not enough to think
about and too much good wine. I wanted to take them away from all this; I wanted to take them there.

  I had in mind a picture I had shot which appeared in a book I collaborated on years ago with a writer friend—of a sharecropper family in its shack. I had never here, in America, seen such poverty. It had seeped into the woman’s face; the children, too, were all of a piece with it, the way opulence becomes similarly stamped into the physical being of the wealthy. At the epicenter of the scene was the woman; in her arms, a bowlegged boy, too old to be held, and beside her, a girl of about thirteen, who wore a threadbare dress that seemed pasted on with filth. In all their eyes, the same strained bleakness.

  “In a small town in Alabama, long before the war, a sharecropper’s daughter was raped,” I began. As I described the woman’s circumstances, I recalled following her into a small room misshapen as the poor woman’s face: relived the feel of the camera before my face, the woman stone still, bearing the boy, regarding me without accusation as I focused and shot. She’s turned to salt, I remember thinking, focusing on her pale blue eyes, which I knew would show up slug-brown in the prints.

  I told the comfortable little group about how word of the rape had traveled and how the first order of business for the town was to nail a suspect. This they went about with a certain glee; it didn’t much matter who it was, so long as the color of his skin was black. As I talked, I recalled how easily the pictures had slid from my eyes, how alive I’d felt with the disconcerting harmony of the compositions.

  I glanced over to Barnaby; he was looking at me uncertainly. I wondered what he was thinking.

  There was murmuring in the room; the guests were restless. I knew I was losing their attention, but I didn’t care. This account was not for them. I wanted to show Barnaby what I’d seen. To let him know that I saw Oscar’s playground as just a pleasantry, a diversion. But I realize now, too, that it was also a test. It’s easy to sit back and watch. I wanted to know if Barnaby was also willing really to see.

  Barnaby eyed me oddly, as if caught between avoidance and approach. It was the first time I’d seen him look uncomfortable, and it intrigued me. And then, I could see that he’d made some kind of decision: not to listen to what I was saying, not to hear the story, after all.

  “The townsfolk were going to have a lynching. No matter that one of the sharecropper’s cousins as much as owned up to the rape, with little more than a slap on the wrist as punishment. They found a young black man and the sheriff booked him, though he conveniently forgot to lock the door of the prison hut. You can imagine the man’s fate.”

  My fellow weekenders were clearly disgruntled. A few polite and unconvincing remarks were made about the importance of my work in the South, but within very short order, the group dispelled, off to other distractions. Barnaby and I took leave of the green room along with the last of them. He offered me his arm; gingerly, I took it.

  Outside, I drew my shawl around my shoulders. We strolled to the edge of the patio and Barnaby leaned against the old silver birch. Its dangly pods released a handful of delicate gray-green seed flakes down on our heads.

  “I’m not sure how much longer I can stand this,” Barnaby said, looking at me with smiling eyes.

  “I could spare you any more accounts of the South,” I responded.

  “I’m not talking about your stories.”

  Barnaby put his hand on my waist and drew me toward him. The sureness of his reach stilled everything, snatched away my confusion. He had, of course, failed my test; there was no question about it. But in that moment, it no longer mattered; the very notion of a test seemed childish and absurd. I smiled back, allowed myself to be brought close. There was something marvelous in those eyes, behind the easy charm. And then, this recognition: that I liked what Barnaby had turned me into.

  From the back foyer, I watched as the others headed across the lawn toward the jetty, some holding bathing suits, others with long-stemmed flutes or a bottle of champagne. When they disappeared over the hump, I sat down at the piano and turned to a Chopin prelude. I floated with the music, forgot the tepid crowd and their bland remarks. The pressure, deceptively gentle, of the descent into the musical depths.

  Flashes of London: actual moments bubbling forth then flattening again to nothing. The terrible charred taste after a bombing, of inhaled ash. The feel of my camera—bewildered faces in the viewfinder, as if awaiting nothing but the snap of the shutter. The awful performance of the street, with its random guttings and deletions. And later, a house—or what was once a house—before which stood a boy, who could not have been more than seven or eight. He wore a green jacket: a drab olive-gray green, a color now burned into my memory. Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, visual compositions of gripping interest and complexity.

  The sudden sense, once again, of eyes. No tapping, the cane gone, now, for some weeks. I turned my head and there he was, emerging from the shadows.

  “Please, don’t stop playing,” he said. I turned my eyes back to the music. Barnaby’s soft footfall behind me, the feel of his approach. And then the warmth of his hand, moving my hair away from the back of my neck, the warmth of his hand in my hair. I faltered at the keys.

  “I enjoy listening to you play,” he said, his voice a whisper.

  I lifted my hands, let them fall into my lap. “Are you always there? Watching? Listening?”

  Barnaby said nothing, leaned down until his lips were close to my ear. I turned to face him; found, in the shadowy light thrown down by the wall sconces, that the hovering in his face was gone. Only stillness now, and a kind of pulsing certainty. Motionless, his hand there in my hair. The sound of his calm breath. As if he were breathing me in, taking in the whole of me through his olfactory sense.

  I was the one finally who drew toward him. I placed my lips on his, though I had no sense of choosing to do so.

  When Barnaby drew back from the kiss, his eyes were probing. “You look different,” he murmured, making warm, slow circles on the back of my neck.

  “People look different when you’ve kissed them,” I replied.

  Later, sitting at the dressing table, I heard the floorboards creaking in the next room as they bore the weight of Simon crossing to the bedroom. His compact frame appeared in the doorway, reflected in the mirror. I could see him watching me as I smoothed face cream into my forehead. I was thinking of the kiss—of me kissing Barnaby, of Barnaby kissing me. In the mirror, I saw my hand frozen on my forehead, as if stuck there with glue.

  “You’re looking lovely tonight,” Simon said.

  I put down the little porcelain jar and, in the mirror, our eyes met. Simon was smiling an open, direct, unfamiliar smile. There it was, the kind of openness I so often longed for from him. The merest glimpse of it; I shuddered that it should be now, now—not an hour after the kiss at the piano, the only moment of infidelity in seven ecstatic, disorienting, painful years of marriage to a man I continued to love with a fearful intensity that thrilled and unbalanced me. I waited, tightening the lid onto the jar, watching the stealth return to the balanced contours of Simon’s face. I reached for a tissue to wipe off my hand. Simon disappeared from the mirror and I listened as he walked back into the sitting room, puzzling over the image that had come to mind of a long dark passageway, a door cracking open, a knife of yellow light.

  When Simon told me he wanted to remain in Manhattan the next weekend—that despite his efforts he found Ellis Park too much of a distraction from his work—I felt relieved; it seemed somehow right that I should go there alone.

  I enjoyed the drive up; I cruised along slowly, leaving the radio off. After arriving, I took a long bath, then lay down, intending a five-minute nap. I awoke to find I had missed dinner. I dressed and made my way to the green room. I knew when I saw Barnaby sitting there alone, leafing through a copy of Life magazine, that he was not expecting anyone else to appear, and that he had been waiting for me.

  Up until that moment, everything that had passed between us was connected wit
h an Ellis Park event: a party or dinner, breakfast on the terrace, an amble in the woods or croquet, the storytelling evenings. Now, looking at Barnaby, I had the sense that Ellis Park and everybody who comprised it—the guests and servants, the stable hands, the endless stream of delivery men—had been a kind of scaffolding upon which we had, without realizing it, constructed something that could now exist on its own. The metal frame and planks could be removed; the structure behind it was complete.

  “The troops have deserted,” Barnaby said, closing the magazine and placing it on the coffee table.

  “So I see.” I stood in the doorway. We looked at each other.

  “Marvelous pictures,” he said.

  “You like factories?” I asked.

  “I worked in one once. Long time ago. Buttons.”

  I laughed.

  “You wouldn’t think it, but they’re actually rather complicated.”

  “Of course. They could be large or small, have two holes or four.”

  Barnaby rose and moved toward me. It was as if we both understood that this room had served its purpose, that we no longer needed it and were free to leave. He reached over and touched the top button of my blouse with the tip of his forefinger.

  “There’s more to it than that,” he said, letting his finger drift up to my cheek. A long pause. Then: “I missed you at dinner.”

  “I took a nap. I guess driving up by myself made me sleepy.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Simon decided to stay in the city.”

  “I see,” Barnaby said, reaching across me to the wall and flicking off the lights.

  He took my arm and we headed downstairs, along the hallway, and into the morning room, where French doors opened onto the patio.

  I had no idea where we were going, though once we stepped into the mild air it was clear, from the decisiveness of his step, that Barnaby had a destination in mind. I held onto his arm and we glided across the lawn. We cut through the vegetable garden and took a path that ended at a shed, beyond which stretched an uninviting wilderness. Barnaby unbolted the rusty door, struck a match, and led me around bits of machinery to a door at the back. This he unlocked with a key he took from his trouser pocket, and we emerged onto a tiny path, which cut through the thick brush and had to be taken single file.