Love Sleep

by John Crowley

  “Please God get her better.”

  All they really had to do was nothing, which they agreed to do without speaking, to sit suspended in guilty trance between the obvious need to tell adults and the impossibility of telling, until at length Mousie opened the door.

  Only it wasn’t Mousie who first opened their door, but Sister Mary Philomel.

  She was only taking seriously her promise to Doctor Oliphant to keep an eye on the kids, a promise Winnie had received without thinking much about it; she had a Saturday morning’s work to do, and it could be done in her schoolroom as well as anywhere. Perhaps she sensed she might be trespassing here on this day, though, for she peeked around the half-open door of the bungalow more circumspectly than was usual for her.

  Pierce remembered later that she did nothing foolish; she saw the sick child in Bird’s bed, who was beginning to cough spasmodically as though shaken, and she came to help.

  “Who is she?” Sister asked gently, sitting on the bed beside her. Bobby, still coughing, pushed weakly back into the corner as though she could push right through, staring at Sister, seeing who knew what in the black habit and wimple.

  “Bobby,” said Bird, nearly weeping with grief and relief.

  “Well we’ll have to get a doctor for Bobby. Won’t we.”

  “Yesster.”

  “We’ll take her temperature, shall we.” Her pink hand pressed against Bobby’s forehead, her arm around Bobby’s trembling shoulders. For a moment Bobby ceased coughing; her eyes grew huge and crossed and her mouth opened in an unrefusable gag; she arched like a vomiting dog, and expelled a mass of yellowish sputum. Sister Mary Philomel tried to draw away, but a lashing of grue wetted her black habit as the children watched in deep horror, a horror each could recall with gleeful exactness when they were grownups: the time Bobby puked on Sister.

  “I sicked up,” Bobby said weakly, her lip flecked with foam. “Again.”

  Hildy was sent to find a thermometer in the big house. Bobby, panting and swallowing, sat immobile like a caught bird in the grip of Sister Mary Philomel. At Sister’s elbow was the stolen holy water; she might sense it there, Pierce felt, recognize it by some vibration it put out; in the pocket of his jacket Pierce’s hand stirred of its own accord, wanting to take it back, but then Hildy returned, having met Warren and Mousie in the summer kitchen, on their way here.

  She opened the door wide, solemn, all secrets patent now, and stepped aside for Mousie to enter.

  “There she is.”

  Mousie’s hands rose slowly to her cheeks, her white fingers fencing her open mouth, looking from the child to the nun to the fouled towels on the floor and the tortuous spotted sheets where Bobby lay: more stricken even than the children could know, for she had grieved and worried ever since she had so high-handedly turned the child away, no place for such a one in the household that had been entrusted to her, afraid of the chaos Bobby might cause, nothing this bad though, what on earth.

  Bobby, who had at first not even seemed to recognize Mousie, now broke at last; she seemed to arise or descend again into her body, she lifted her hands to Mousie as though they burned, she began to sob in the quick, panting rhythm of a baby.

  “Now what on earth,” Mousie said, sitting with her and pushing the damp hair from her brow as Bobby clung to her sobbing. “Now what on God’s green earth.”

  She turned then, and Sister Mary Philomel did too, to Pierce, who was now, he knew, to begin the explaining; but in the moment’s silence that fell came the sound of a car door slammed, so distinctly that it could only be in their own driveway.

  “Daddy’s here,” Warren at the window said.

  “Well,” said Sister Mary Philomel, “well there,” with a smile breaking on her face of a sort the children knew well, whose obvious import they would not at that moment have wanted to dispute: prayer answered, in so drastic a form they might have wished it not answered, but answered for sure. “The doctor’s here,” she said cheerfully to Bobby. “It’s all right now.”

  Then Sam and Winnie were in the breezeway; the door opened, and the children jumped, as though they were as startled as their parents were. Sam and Winnie (their faces unwontedly orange, hands too, as though colored with movie makeup) looked around the room, and for an immeasurable time no one spoke; Pierce waited with held breath for Bobby to be instantly ordered out of the house, and maybe himself finally as well, Sam’s house and his perfect right after all and Pierce with nothing to say.

  “Dad!” Warren whispered. “Can we keep her?”

  “Warren!” Hildy warned.

  “But can we? If we don’t she’ll die and go to hell.”

  Somehow, wonderfully, they weren’t ever really interrogated about Bobby, how she had come to be there, what they had done with or to her in that time; Sam and Winnie had automatically held Mousie responsible for her, and anyway she was so sick that the first thing was to see to her, and ask questions later, by which time the children had their exculpations and evasions ready.

  As soon as Sam returned from fetching his black bag from the car, the two women stepped aside for him, and he concentrated solely on Bobby, calming her with quick skill and an astonishing firm gentleness even as he learned what was up with her. Pierce, seeing Sam for the first time as doctor and not as uncle, seemed to be seeing him turned inside out or reversed back to front, a different person entirely, not teasing, tired, fussy, but full of knowledge, full of compassionate regard. Bobby looked not at the instruments he used but at his eyes, and his eyes, though Pierce couldn’t see them, must have reassured her, for she didn’t shrink from him.

  “And what about everybody else?” Sam asked, not looking away from Bobby. “All okay?”

  “Okay,” said Hildy.

  “Okay,” said Bird.

  “Okay,” said Warren.

  “I don’t feel so hot,” Pierce said, “actually.”

  He was sent to his room, to wait for his examination, and everybody else was ordered out; and he lay afloat on his bed, no longer himself, and said in his heart over and over Thank you thank you thank you: though to whom and for what he could not have said.

  Bobby got a shot—the word spread quickly from Hildy at the bungalow door to the others who had been excluded. Through the flimsy wall that separated their rooms, Pierce witnessed the procedure, which Bobby apparently didn’t even know enough to protest; he heard Sam move aside the matter on the bedside table (among which was Pierce’s match case and its unsuspected contents), and ready himself. Afterwards, she would be given the minute plastic box with neat snap closures in which the ampoule had come, almost recompense for the pain. Pierce, knowing he was next, lay with his buttocks clenched, waiting for the cry he knew she wouldn’t be able to withhold when she was pierced.

  Through that day and night he and Bobby lay quarantined in the bungalow; from far within his mounting fever Pierce heard someone, Winnie, come in and clean up in Bobby’s room, and he saw Bobby pass in a nightdress of Bird’s through his room to the bathroom, or maybe he imagined that.

  When he closed his eyes he didn’t so much dream as believe that, even as he lay in bed, he was also walking a spiral track up a featureless conical mountain, a mountain consisting of nothing but his walking up it, which he did for hours, never getting any higher; the path was like the whirling spiral on a moving barber pole that eternally ascends without progressing. Exhausted, he would start awake, damp with sweat, the room shuttered and the heater high; he would rise up on an elbow, feeling unreal, and listen to the bungalow, to Bobby’s breathing; then he would fall back, and as soon as his eyes were shut, start climbing again.

  Sometime after dark he at last alighted in the old world, like a magic-carpet voyager, feeling new-minted and fire-hot. He hadn’t seen night begin, and so didn’t know if it was young or old. He was thirsty; his chest felt solid, and his penis was stiff.

  “Bobby?”

  She didn’t move in her bed, but her presence there was large to him. The head of her bed was
pressed against the same wall where the side of his own bed ran. He rolled over against that wall and listened, but couldn’t hear anything.

  He slipped from his bed, sure that he was not dreaming because he was awake, but otherwise feeling just that dream compulsion, the rooms around him empty of actuality but charged with dense meaning and looking at him. The heater’s grille glowed blue and orange. He went into the next room.

  “Bobby?”

  He could not have spoken more softly; only if he had spoken it right into her whorled ear could she have heard him, and she didn’t. She had thrown off the covers in the thick heat, and lay on her back across the bed; the flannel nightdress she had been given to wear had ruched up over her thighs, and her pale legs lay together. He stood looking down at her for an immeasurable time, his own breathing in and out matching hers, and then he went back to bed.

  He woke again without knowing he had slept, as though no time had passed; but day was coming on, filling up the world outside the window with a skim-milk light. If he rolled over on his bed and extended his arm as far as possible, Pierce could just reach the books in the bookcase, and he did so now, snagging by its spine the one he wanted and (feeling the volatile blood rush to his head) lifting it to his bed.

  This time around he had decided to read it systematically, from beginning to end, starting with ABBA and ending with ZOROASTER, reading every entry, forgetting each one even as he dutifully ingested it. He had got to the F’s.

  FIRE is a God in every clime and time, and while worshipped in itself by the PARSEES (q.v.), it is more often personified. Fire is AGNI (q.v.) among the Hindus, and HEPHÆSTOS (q.v.) among the Greeks, who is the same as VULCAN (q.v.) among the Romans.

  He started when his eye, in moving from one page to the next, caught movement in his doorway. Bobby watching him.

  “You readn that?”

  “Yes.” PROMETHEUS the trickster stole fire from heaven, and bequeathed it to the human craftsmen whose patron he was; and those who have wielded fire have seemed ever since to share in divine power, and to be connected to the Gods: smiths, alchemists, torturers. There is a reason why the auto-da-fé is done with fire.

  She came to stand beside him, to see what he studied. “Read me,” she said.

  “PARACELSUS (q.v.),” Pierce read, “supposed that as there were creatures indigenous to the elements of Earth, Water and Air, so there must be creatures of the Fire too, and he called them Salamanders.”

  “Push over,” she said.

  “There is no explaining why a humid, soft-bodied creature of the forest floor should be supposed to be fireproof, but so it has always been.” He moved so that Bobby could get up on the narrow bed next to him. “Benvenuto Cellini as a boy saw the Great Salamander in his own fire, and his father gave him a great clout on the head, so that the pain would cause the memory of this rarity to stick there.”

  Bobby looked down at the page. There was a sort of coin or seal pictured there, with a muscle-y lizard of sorts surrounded by tongues of symbolic flame and Latin words. “What’s that?”

  “That’s the Salamander,” Pierce said. “I guess.”

  “My grandpap seed a Salamander once,” Bobby said. “Right round chir.”

  “So have I. In the woods.”

  “Not one athem little red things,” Bobby said. “A spert.”

  “Oh yeah,” Pierce said.

  “It was a mockn spert. It mocked my grandpap when he ast a question of it.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Then it showed its power, and defied my grandpap. And that was the night them woods was set afar. Look at another page.”

  Pierce turned to other gods. Hermes in his winged construction worker’s hat and Keds, very like the figure bearing Flowers by Wire on the back cover of the telephone book. And nothing else.

  “Bar Nekkid Land,” said Bobby appreciatively. “Did you ever.”

  “Well,” said Pierce, but just then she leapt from his bed and hustled to her own, having heard, though Pierce had not, someone approaching over the dogtrot. Winnie came in the door just as Bobby pulled Bird’s covers up to her neck. Winnie had breakfast for them, and she wore her New York suit (so Pierce thought of it) and her autumnal hat, fox-orange plush with the pheasant feather, and her Sunday makeup, including the perfume he inhaled as she put his toast beside him on the bedside table.

  “Sam says he thinks it’s best if you stay home from Mass this morning,” she said. “And just rest. All right?”

  Pierce nodded solemnly.

  “You’ll be all right?”

  “Yes.”

  She paused by Bobby’s bedside, and asked her too if she would be all right, getting the answer she expected since it was evident she would not have known what to do with any other, and said that she thought her father would be coming soon to see her.

  “Not my father.”

  “Well a Mr. Shaftoe. Mrs. Calton told us …”

  “Ain’t my father.”

  “Well.” She drifted away, unwilling to solve this. “We’ll be back soon. Rest.”

  She closed the door softly behind her.

  For a long time Bobby and Pierce lay silent, listening to the bustle of the family leaving the house, going to the car, someone running back for something forgotten, the car starting, shifting gears, departing. And then for a moment Pierce still lay unmoving, in the almost unbearably intense peace and silence of the empty house and his own missing of Mass, a peace pregnant with unguessable possibility, like a flame in his sternum.

  He got out of bed this time, bringing the great dark book with him.

  “Is she your ma?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not thers.”

  “No. Theirs is dead.”

  “Where’s your pa?”

  “Brooklyn, New York.”

  She pulled away her covers. “Show me,” she said.

  “This was a long time ago,” Pierce said. “In the Old World.” He opened the book on the sheets of her bed: Bar Nekkid Land.

  “Let’s,” Bobby said.

  Winnie at her place in Blessed Sacrament would be kneeling now, taking out her beads to pass the time till the show started (so her face seemed to Pierce always to suggest); the pale amber beads like a string of glycerine cough drops.

  “Lookit it,” Bobby said. “Why’s it do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Pierce said. “It just does.”

  “Hang yer hat onm,” Bobby said.

  “You can touch it,” Pierce said. “If you want.”

  She did, delicately, with one finger. She herself remained covered, small fingers delicately holding the mound, just as the motherly Venus on the next page of the Dictionary did. She laughed and turned half away from him when he pulled gently at her hand; then she flung herself back on the pillow, hands above her head, stretching, gleeful: the balls of her knees still tight together, though.

  “You can kiss it,” she said. “If you want.”

  Probably she meant that as the sort of mocking challenge he wasn’t supposed to rise to, the kind she liked to throw at him; maybe he surprised her by his willingness. Osculation. Softer than its firm plumpness suggested, still fever-hot, and with an odor he would not often remember but never entirely forget, different from the sea-smell of the grown-up women whom now and then his willingness would also surprise.

  Cumberland girls of eight and nine in those days either knew everything about sex or they knew nothing. Bobby knew nothing, nothing but a few scandalous words, and Pierce didn’t know even that much; when his mother had found out that everything she thought she knew was wrong, she had decided the whole subject could not be spoken of, and she had not tried. So mostly he and Bobby only lay together side by side, chaste as knight and lady separated by a sword, knowing the effervescent delight of their choice to see and touch: the delight was the knowledge, the snake’s knowledge brought to Adam and Eve, which the Ophites rejoiced in: they knew that they were naked.

  “Your grandfather’s here!
” Bird called around the door into the bungalow (Pierce and Bobby again in separate beds, jammies chastely up). “He’s right outside!” She watched Bobby closely to see what effect this news would have, but Bobby’s face revealed nothing that Bird could read: except that for the first time Bobby looked foreign to Bird, temporary, out of place in Bird’s bed and house, and in passage away.

  NINE

  His hair stood up thick and black, not gray or white like a grandfather’s, but his face was lined, so deeply lined it seemed to have been gruesomely scarred, furrows running not only down his cheeks and across his forehead but diagonally too over the ridge of his brows and across his eye. He arrived in a pickup driven by someone else, who remained in the truck while Floyd got out and came up to the porch.

  Sam at his Sunday dinner was called out by Winnie, who had been alerted by Warren, who had been sent in by Hildy, she having seen the truck drive up as she came out of the bungalow after bringing Pierce’s and Bobby’s trays. Winnie looked down from the porch at Floyd, who seemed unwilling to come closer. The engine of the truck was still running.

  “Come to get my daughter.”

  “Well I wonder if you’d mind talking to Dr. Oliphant first.”

  Floyd chewed, blew impatiently, looked off into the distance.

  “Just for a minute,” Winnie said. “She’s just been so sick.”

  Floyd looked back at the truck, and after a moment the driver turned off the engine. Floyd started up the steps of the porch, and as he did, Hildy ran through the kitchen, disposing of the trays and gathering Bird and Warren with her as she ran, pulling them up the back stairs and down the hall to the register where (they well knew) conversations in the room beneath could be heard.

  They had missed the howdys and other careful compliments, and the ritual offer of a cigarette, which Sam made and Floyd accepted, slipping it behind his ear like a carpenter’s pencil.