“Mummy,” Adam whispered. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, darling”
She focused on nowhere, played an entire Vivaldi movement in her head, gripped the table, felt its old scars and hollows. Was startled by a memory.
“Jason! Here’s the gouge you made with the knife” She traced the jagged indentation with her index finger.
Jason laughed. “Poor Beethoven”
“Beethoven?”Everything excited Adam, the whole rich panoply of family and history. “Tell me, tell me”
“Uncle Jason was carving Beethoven out of a cake of soap,” Emily said.
“Can you sculpt, Uncle Jason? Did you know that the world’s oldest sculptures are made of bone? From the Old Stone Age. I learned that in school, I’ve seen them in the British Museum. Why were you making Beethoven?”
“I was making him for your mother’s birthday. Let’s see. Her tenth?”
“My eleventh.”
“Right, her eleventh. Soap is about the only thing I can carve. I was taking a filler course in art in high school. Anyway, I was having terrible trouble with the curly hair when the knife slipped.”
“Where is he, Mummy? Did you keep him? You didn’t use Beethoven in the bath, did you?”
“No,” Emily said. “Poor Beethoven, he got …”
She stopped suddenly and caught Jason’s eye across the table. Everywhere, impasses. To converse in this house, they acknowledged, is to cross a mine field.
Perhaps genuinely dangerous.
Emily thought of New York again.
Nothing, none of the debris of old battles, was safely defused. Anything could sputter into violence again.
Adam’s curiosity was piqued. “What happened to him? What happened to Beethoven?”
“Adam, darling,” Elizabeth said. “Would you like some ham and salad?”
“Yes, thank you, Grandma. Mummy, what happened to Beethoven?”
“He just got … Uncle Jason never finished him, that’s all.”
But the scent of family mystery was in the air. It was as familiar to Adam as the cabalistic secrets of schoolboys in England. He knew the smell.
Carefully polite, he asked: “Why didn’t you, Uncle Jason?”
Emily and Jason looked at their father. Did these memories shame him? Or would he still justify himself? Would he rage again for the desecration of the table, the scar on its antique surface? Would he grab the nearest equivalent of the waxy Beethoven and hurl it through the window, a shower of glass on the kitchen floor again?
No sign. No indication that Edward was disturbed by anything beyond a recalcitrant slice of ham which was not submitting docilely to the knife in his arthritic hand. He glowered at it, muttered under his breath.
“Grandpa,” Adam asked sweetly. “Do you know what happened to Beethoven?”
“Hmm?” Edward was vaguely startled. Harumphed. Patted Adam on the hand. “What was that? Beethoven? Died in the early 1800s, I think.”
“No, no, Grandpa. Uncle Jasons Beethoven. The one he was making out of soap.”
A knitting of the old man’s brows. A sense of reaching for something. Of concentration, of confusion. Then nothing. A trail followed to somewhere else, a different memory. Adam was about to persist, but Emily signalled a warning, mouthed silently: I’ll tell you about it later.
She saw a muscle tighten in Jason’s cheek (How dare the old tyrant forget!) and then relax. Jason looked at her and shrugged. Conveying: the past is not absolute after all.
Edward followed his own memory to a bench in the gazebo, waiting for the moment when incandescence would implode. When he and she would stand there together and he would say her name. Nothing could stop it now, he could feel the momentum, the whole Faustian tragedy bearing down on its final act.
Adam knew his grandfather was waiting for something to happen. Tory knew it too, the air tight as a drumskin around her, sharp with splinters. She would have to retreat under water, she began to whimper, to pucker her mouth into gills, to paddle the air lightly with her hands.
“Look, Tory.” Elizabeth’s voice was soft. Not furtive, not a whisper, more the sound of lullaby. There was a bowl of fresh fruit in front of her. Apples, peaches, small melons. She lifted Tory’s hand toward them, guided her fingers over pieces of fruit like a teacher with a blind child. Soothing. Sensuous. She lifted a peach to Tory’s cheek and rubbed its soft pelt against her daughter’s skin. They both seemed oblivious of the room. It was as though the two of them had stepped through an invisible door. To Narnia, perhaps, or some other magical world that existed between one molecule of air and the next.
The victims, Emily thought bitterly, her throat constricted. You see, her eyes said fiercely to Jason. You see what I mean about Mother.
He shook his head slightly: You are misinterpreting.
Edward’s voice startled them, a peremptory fractious tone. “What are you doing, Bessie?”
A vibration began in Tory’s fingers and spread through her body so that her chair rattled on the floorboards. Elizabeth paid no apparent attention but went on talking quietly, offering pieces of fruit one by one.
“Tory,” her father spluttered, exasperated, “Tor —” He cut himself off, agitated, the habits of a lifetime dying hard. He reached for a slice of bread and tore it into little pieces which he scattered over his ham as though forgetting that the soup course was finished.
Adam, smiling at him, asked: “Grandpa, what are you doing?”
“Eh?” When the old man looked at Adam, he would seem to remember something. He would abandon the febrile and cantankerous trails in his mind. His facial muscles would pause shyly, as it were, like a bashful teenage suitor in a lover’s presence.
Elizabeth said soothingly: “Edward, darling, perhaps you two would like to sit out in the garden? Adam, would you fetch Grandpa’s canes from the hallway?”
Jason thought of courtiers waiting uneasily for the exit of George III, mad monarch, from the stateroom, as old man and child made their slow way to the door. A suspension. When the voices — bass and soft treble — floated in from the lawn, the figures at the table relaxed.
“Plus ça change.” Jason, his peace made, seemed imperturbable; his smile affectionate and rueful.
Emily blurted out: “I don’t know how you’ve stood it, or why you’ve stood it, Mother. Or why I’ve come back.”
Elizabeth, still stroking Tory’s hands, seemed to return from somewhere else. Her eyes, cloudy, withdrew their gaze from Narnia, or wherever, and focused clearly on Emily. “People do terrible things just by lifting a finger,” she said. “We all do it, every one of us. If we didn’t understand that, and didn’t forgive it, we’d be savages.”
Think distance, Emily warned herself. Think infinite space. What was the point of getting impatient with her mother or angry with her father? Nevertheless she found she had to say: “Some things shouldn’t be forgiven.”
“Even though Dave was badly hurt, he writes me such warm letters.” It came out calmly, idly, as though a comment were being made on the weather. For a stunned moment, the implications being so preposterous, Emily had a sense of time and space dislocation. Which country was she in, which year of her life? Vertigo. A reeling about among the discrete compartments of her history. When it caught up with her — the shock, the sense of violation, of betrayal — she gasped.
In Jason’s eyes, first startled then amused, she read: You see. I told you so. You’ve always been wrong about Mother.
Emily stared at Elizabeth. She could not have been more surprised if somebody — Van Gogh, say, with his crazy mutilated ear, his clotted oils — had painted in a snarl on the Mona Lisa. Her mother’s eyes, always the essence of benign passivity, were bright with accusation.
“We are all capable of brutality, aren’t we, Emily? I am. You are with Dave. We all do it as easily as breathing.”
Emily thought she might faint, her breathing came in ragged little spurts.
“So you see,” Elizabeth
continued quietly, a maths teacher summarising proof of a simple theorem to a slow student, “there’s no point in not forgiving the others. Tory, darling, would you like to help me make the punch, while Jason and Emily set up the tables under the trees? People will be arriving soon.”
XXI The Tiger Pit
When clusters of guests began spilling out of cars, strolling under the trees, milling in the gazebo, Victoria shrank away into the house. She leaned on the windowsill of her old bedroom and watched the swirling about on the lawn below. Ants, they seemed to her, moving in intricate arabesques. How was it that so many people knew exactly what they were doing and where they were going?
Mother was like something delicious, a fresh peach perhaps, in her soft dress, the ants all converging on her, paying court. Victoria stroked her own cheek, felt the soft fur of peach skin, of other securities. Perhaps if she kidnapped her mother and they lived alone …? But even Mother was unpredictable. There was nothing that could be counted on, there never had been. Suppose Jason knocked on her door and said she must come outside? She would not. There were safe and unsafe places, and only her bedroom was safe at the moment.
The people below sucked at her like a whirlpool.
Her knuckles gripping the windowsill were white with strain. If she did not hang on tightly, she might slip, fall, crash down on the guests, be battered on the rocks of their staring. She could feel it tugging at her, a vicious undertow, and felt ill and dizzy. It was pulling her toward the gazebo which she could not look at, which she had never been able to look at since that night, her eyes always bridling away from it — the way a person with a pathological fear of snakes or spiders will quickly close a book that is too vivid with photographs.
But the gazebo always lay in wait for her wherever she was. Even dreams would fall away into it, flattening themselves out and orbiting it at a crazy speed, dropping into its vortex.
Swirling, swirling, the current of people was trying to drag her back to that night. It was going to be necessary to flap her wings and rise above the flood. She wondered if it would be possible to fly backwards through her life, to get to the other side of the great wall which had flung itself up, a black barrier. On the far side of that barrier there had been hope. Not the absence of fear. No, there had never been a time when she was not afraid, but there had been a time when she had expected to be like other people. She had managed to keep certain scenes intact in the scrapbook inside her skull: the Boston grandparents and aunts taking her to a birthday dinner at the Ritz, treating her like a little princess. Perhaps she had been four or five? Father had scowled throughout, making her fearful, but her fear had squatted, toadlike, on the far side of the crystal cruet set and the silverware, and her Grandfather Hampstead, Mother’s father, had protected her with his raised wine glass: To our little Victoria, the prettiest granddaughter in the world, who will grow up to be a great lady.
Yes, they had all believed that, and she herself had believed it before the fears began reaching out like bats scuffling from eaves. Gradually all the little fears had rolled themselves into something vast, an army of spiders that crawled out of the bedding every night, advancing on her, beginning at her feet and advancing, advancing. The night she came down the stairs and lost Mother the spiders had reached her neck. If she had gone back to bed they would have invaded her mouth, her nostrils, her eyes.
She had roamed through the garden in terror.
And then Father had rescued her. Not scolding, not frowning even, he had held her against his chest so that she had felt the spiky coiled hairs below his cotton shirt. How safe that had been. But Father was unpredictable. She never could fathom his changing rules.
Below her, she could see him now with Adam on the porch swing — royalty receiving guests. He pretended to be impatient and embarrassed, but he loved it, she could tell; all those people bowing and scraping. She watched Mother greeting people, smiling, shaking hands, embracing old friends.
From above, she was shocked to see how frail and birdlike her parents were, infinitely smaller than the hulk of her own body whose accretions mystified her — layers of blasted hopes settling on her year after year. Was it possible that she had begun as half a seed from each of those slight figures? Perhaps this was the worst thing, to be larger than both parents together. The violation of a natural law.
Her mother looked up at the window and then spoke to Jason. Betrayal again. They would drag her down, her flailing wings punctured and snagged. Like a bumblebee on its back on a windowsill, to be tormented by thoughtless boys. She would have to retreat into water and swim out of their reach.
When Jason came to find her she was huddled in an underwater cave in the comer of her room, hiding behind coral, disguising herself with a shroud of seaweed.
“This little gala will not be without surprises,” Miss Perkins of the School Records Office, sender of eleventh-hour invitations, murmured to Mrs Fitzsimon, widow, member of the Board of Trustees. “I could intimate something if my lips were not sealed.”
They both nodded to a cluster of local dignitaries.
“We all know Victoria will appear, my dear.” Portentousness, Mrs Fitzsimon indicated, was inappropriate. “Poor Victoria. I can remember her from school days, you know, before it became apparent. A tragedy. From Mrs Carpenters side of the family, I believe.”
“Oh I wouldn’t consider Victoria a surprise.” There was a delicate disparagement, a tone of ever-so-faintly amused dismissiveness. “After all, it would be surprising if she were not here, wouldn’t you say?”
“How do you do, Mr Meecham? Yes, such a long time. Lovely day … yes, and Emily too, I believe ”
The small talk and acknowledgments, the constant scanning of the passing parade, were automatic things that occupied only the fringes of their energies.
“Of course it is interesting to see Emily after so long.”
“Oh Emily.” So passé, the exploits of Emily, Miss Perkins implied. “I will admit, one occasionally asks oneself whether or not there is a husband.”
“Shall we try the punch?” Mrs Fitzsimon was determined not to give the satisfaction of curiosity.
Miss Perkins was not fooled by the indifference. “The pink lemonade? Or shall we be daring and sample the rum-spiked concoction?” One did not, she thought to herself, give up a rare trump card so easily. She would volunteer nothing until Mrs Fitzsimon paid due court.
“I suppose,” the latter prompted, “that invitations have gone out far and wide? The records office combed for past colleagues and acquaintances?”
“Not on a large scale. Not on a large scale at all, really. Though I must say, some of the most surprising contacts, from way back, from before the war …” She took an open-faced tuna and cucumber sandwich and asked casually: “Do you remember the Wilsons? Joseph Wilson, the deputy principal before the war?”
“Faintly. Wasn’t he killed in action? I seem to remember there was something slightly scandalous about Mrs Wilson. My mother used to mention her in a certain tone of voice”
“That’s what I thought,” Miss Perkins mused reflectively. “I was working in Boston, my first job after college. When I came home on weekends, people would point her out to me. She used to wheel her baby girl around town in a stroller looking demure as could be but you could see black lace on her petticoats. And then she left town. Of course the war dislocated everything, didn’t it? We simply never found out what became of people. And after the war I became Edwards — Mr Carpenter’s — secretary.”
“Oh Emily, my dear child, how lovely to see you again … quite put Ashville on the map, such a thrill for us … and your little boy up there with Mr Carpenter, I believe? Such a shame your husband couldn’t …”
His grandfather, Adam thought, was like one of Dave’s sheep when its feet were stuck fast in mud after the rains. It’s brown eyes would say: Nothing is the matter; nothing at all is the matter (it thought the problem would go away if it pretended for long enough), but its flanks trembled so that t
iny flying insects rose in gusts from the clashings and small earthquakes of wool curls.
His grandfather was expecting something to happen. He stroked Adams hair absent-mindedly, watching for whatever it was. It had nothing to do with the women in soft dresses and floppy straw hats, nothing to do with the men in summer suits and cigars.
Adam did not think it had to do with his grandmother or his mother, though the old man looked at them often. His grandmother and his mother were very beautiful, especially his mother. Everyone looked at them. The men looked at his mother as though it were an accident — while they were rubbing a nose or lighting a cigar or just thinking about the chestnut tree. They pretended she had bumped into their eyes and taken them by surprise; they smiled at her and turned back guiltily to their wives.
Whenever his mother looked at him she smiled. He knew she was very happy that he was holding his grandpa’s hand and that sometimes he put his arms around the old man’s neck and kissed him. He knew it was because she wished she could do it herself. He could’t tell.
Perhaps she was waiting for him to ask Dave to come because she was afraid to do it herself. He couldn’t tell.
Jason climbed into childhood, up the worn stairs with their soft oval hollows. There was the V, darkened in against the blonded oak, that he had made with his penknife before he went to boarding school. There was the sitting stair, third from the top, where he and Tory used to camp (back in the time of peace, before the war ended) while she read him stories: Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel. She was always half mother to him, being seven years older.
The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Page 21
