“You really think there haven’t been costs?”
Marta’s shrug implied; the human condition, so what?
“You don’t know about Tory.”
“I know about Tory. I heard. I’m terribly sorry.” She touched Elizabeth on the arm and Elizabeth flinched, but thought: She’s generous, she always was. “She was such a beautiful child,” Marta said.
“You’re right about my bloody-mindedness. I think it was my fault, Tory’s decline.”
“Elizabeth.” An indulgent, almost affectionate smile. “You’re so extreme about everything.”
“You don’t know what happened —”
“Even as a child she was unnaturally intense. I remember.”
“Yes. But there was something I did. And something Edward did. We pushed her over a brink.”
“Anything might have done it. Much as the thought of your writhing with guilt appeals, Elizabeth. But everyone knows its neurological. Inherited.”
Elizabeth reached out uncertainly, like a duellist gauging a distance, and touched Marta’s wrist. She was sifting the evidence for absolution, seemed to be weighing something. She said quickly: “I’ll regret telling you this, I know.” A long pause. “I was not confident … about Joe. We quarrelled that last night. Your pregnancy changed things, I could feel a tide turning.” She sighed. “After the war … probably … he would have gone to you and his children …” Though who can know? she thought.
Marta said only: “It was such a long time ago.” But her eyes were bright with tears. And then an imp of a smile began playing about her lips. “Doesn’t this strike you as bizarre? Two scrawny old ladies with grey hair and arthritis … discussing passion.”
They smiled, they began to laugh. Gusts of mirth shook them as a cat shakes a bird. They gasped and held on to each other and laughed and the guests turned to watch in amazement.
Sobering up, Elizabeth said: “You have to say hello to Edward. He’s in the gazebo.” And thought: What will he do with this rabbit he has pulled from a hat? Will he brand me with a scarlet A?
Well, the music would play itself, no matter what she did.
When his grandmother walked into the gazebo with the stranger, Adam knew. It was the moment his grandfather had been waiting for. Adam thought of the sheep. This was what he remembered:
When the shearing began, Dave used to say: It doesn’t hurt them. They remember the smells — the men, the machinery, the tar, the lanolin slick of the clipped fleeces. That’s why they tremble, not because it hurts. Adam hated to watch them standing so perfectly silent and still except for that shivering as the shears moved between flesh and wool.
His grandfather was trembling like a sheep standing next in line for the shearing pen and it was because of the woman, the stranger. She was small and old, though in a way she didn’t look old. His grandmother was like that. He thought it was probably the way his mother would grow old. Their skin turned as leaves do, but only their skin. Not their eyes or the way they moved their hands. Those things stayed young.
He knew he had shaken like that, like the sheep, when the loudspeakers in Sydney boomed that it was time to get on the plane and he had asked his mother: “Isn’t Dave coming to say goodbye?”
He whispered: “Who is she, Grandpa?”
But his grandfather didn’t hear him, he didn’t notice anything at all, so Adam wandered off to look for Uncle Jason.
Edward looked up and she was there. In the gazebo. He waited, unable to speak. Out of grief or discretion or ignorance — he didn’t know which — Bessie left them alone. Other guests, stray talkers, drifted away.
“Dear Edward,” she said, and took his hand. “After all these years.”
Marta. He had never said her name aloud. He still could not do it.
“I have a grandson,” he said. What he wanted to say was: I love you as I have always done and yet I choose my family again. “I have a grandson called Adam.”
“And I have five grandchildren, Edward. Can you believe it? Three are Sonia’s. She lives in Philadelphia. And two belong to Joseph Junior. He was born … during the war. He never saw his father. But you knew that, of course.”
“I didn’t know … you had a son.”
She was amazed. “Elizabeth didn’t…? No. I suppose she wouldn’t speak of it.”
“Bessie?” This confused him. “She wouldn’t have known. She’s never suspected …” Until today, he supposed, until today. What must she be thinking now? He would have to worry about that later.
But Marta was agitated and walked to the doorway and looked across the lawn at the house and then paced the little octagon of the gazebo, leaning at last against its honeysuckle-thick lattice. “The potency of place,” she marvelled. “Forty years and it seems like yesterday. Wasn’t it hard to forgive? Or did it all seem irrelevant after the war?”
He was not sure what she meant, he waited for clues.
She brushed away time with her hands. “Oh well. I expect I would have done the same. If he’d come back.” She sighed. “They were rough years, weren’t they?” And when he didn’t answer, she said brightly “Well, we’re both survivors. We should toast each other: To the wounded who never fell. And you, Edward. Fifty years, all this, it’s astonishing. I’m so glad for you.”
“What … did you …” His lips worked at shaping themselves, it seemed difficult for them to build words. “What did you … do … with your life?”
As soon as words flowed evenly again, he would say: It is still impossible and we will still survive. Your grandchildren. My grandson. I love you as I have always loved you, but it is still impossible.
Again she seemed surprised. “You don’t know? I did a doctorate in history I was teaching by the time Joe Junior was five. I’m still teaching part-time although I was supposed to retire a couple of years ago. You never read any of my books? The war in the Pacific, that was my area.”
He was dumbfounded.
“I went to your daughter’s concert in New York,” she said. “When I saw the name first, I simply wondered idly … and then I read somewhere, Ashville, and I thought: it must be. So I went. Extraordinary.”
She was there. He might have seen her. Even through such connections … His Beatrice, always thinking of him. Now he would tell her. He would touch her. He would say: A million times I have come back here and walked into your outstretched arms.
She said: “I can stay for less than an hour, Edward. Terribly complicated arrangements, and such short notice, you know. When the telegram came, I thought I couldn’t do it. The associations. Everything. But I’m glad I did. It was certainly high time to cauterise old wounds. Yes, it was good to come.”
She put both her hands out to him and he took them.
Now he would tell her.
“Marta,” he began.
The darkness had been thickening around Tory. After Jason let go her hand, the air turned brittle. Lacerations, with every breath she took. People came up to her and spoke and when she opened her mouth to say don’t, please don’t, please leave me alone, it would bleed.
People stood staring at the blood trickling out of her mouth. They took photos, they poked at her through the bars of her cage, they offered peanuts.
She closed her eyes until she knew the waves had come and hidden her completely. Lullaby. Lulled in the water. She swayed, steering herself with her fins.
She knew a place.
She swam to it, gliding from rock to rock unseen, sliding in under great trailing fronds of seaweed. Under there, in the dark against a cave, was something infinitely long and green, coiled like a sea serpent. It mesmerised her, and filled her with horror, both. She touched it — all scales and slime. She picked up its limp reptilian head.
And then the waters receded with dizzy suddenness, as though a plug had been pulled in the ocean floor. Clarity. She was under the honeysuckle, her face pressed up against the slats of the gazebo, the garden hose in her hand.
She could see her father and a woman h
olding hands. She could read the rhythms of air around his body. He smelled like an old stallion watching a mare in heat. Tory’s mouth filled with salty juice, the taste of the taboo.
Something hummed piercingly inside her head, something primitive and coercive like a wolf howl or the scream of a ruptured blood vessel. She knew by instinct where the brass faucet was. She turned it as far as it would go, she dragged out the hose which cavorted like a sea serpent, she took aim, she watched the water hit her father and the woman like a flogging administered on a quarter-deck.
She screamed incoherently, on and on and on.
Now Edward would tell her, her hands in his.
“Marta,” he began to say as the water struck him. It pounded his face and chest, freakishly darting aside and then leaping back like a cat-o’-nine-tails. It was in his mouth, his nostrils, his lungs. He was gasping and coughing. Judgment. Now he would die. He tried to stand and there was a torrent around his feet and he fell.
For a moment, beneath the arc of water, he looked up and saw Victoria and then the whip of water was lashed across his face again and he cried out, he remembered, he tried to say: But you didn’t understand. I was saving you. I wanted to keep you pure. You were perfect, Tory. I loved you.
Then there was blackness.
And Jason remembered, as he scrabbled beneath the honeysuckle for the faucet while others clasped Tory with rude hands. He remembered what even his dreams had sheered away from. He stopped the deluge and ran to rescue her.
“Let go of her!” he was shouting. There was a man pinning back her arms and Jason lifted him up as though removing a burr from Tory’s clothing.
“Get your hands off her. Tory, it’s all right, its all right. Don’t cry.
Pandemonium all around them. Doctor, someone was calling, quickly, get a doctor! Ambulance. Guests milling around and shrinking back, already formulating gossip. Elizabeth, white-faced, leaned over the sodden bundle on the floorboards, chafing Edward’s hands between her own and ordering urgently: “For god’s sake, Marta, get into dry clothes. In my bedroom. Please!”
Marta was dazed. Her look perhaps meant: it’s a violent place, this. Always has been. But she said as though talking in sleep: “Yes. Thank you. Then I’ll call a cab.” She wanted to get away, wanted simply to be elsewhere, but seemed for a moment incapable of the effort required to achieve this. She was somewhere in New Guinea, leaning over the fallen body that had never been found.
Perhaps Elizabeth knew what she was thinking. Elizabeth’s eyes said many things: You are exceptional, Marta, I have always thought so. Would it mean anything, to ask for forgiveness?
But she only touched Martas wrist and murmured again: “Go and change, for god’s sake. You’ll catch cold.”
Marta said: “I’ll call you tomorrow. I hope he’ll be all right.”
Through a parting of bodies, Jason saw his father on the floor of the gazebo and felt a chill as of icicles forming in his blood.
“Oh Daddy,” Tory whimpered in terror. “Oh Daddy, I’m sorry I’m sorry Daddy. I didn’t mean it.”
She lay down beside him, shuddering violently, and Elizabeth moved so that her daughter’s head was in her lap. She stroked Tory’s hair, stroked her arms, crooning: “Hush now, its all right. Hush now, Tory.”
Helplessly, Emily held Adam against herself. He was shivering with fright.
Jason whispered to her: “Do you remember?”
“Something. It’s vague. Something horrible. Déjé vu.”
“You were only five.”
But it hung there in the memories of all of them, like a lantern seen through mists, now fading, now candescent. Emerging from blur like a print being developed.
For Elizabeth it had always been overly vivid, too bright to look at.
Tory’s seventeenth birthday party. Japanese lanterns in the garden. Dancing in the living room, the French windows open, young couples on the veranda sipping punch. All the right teenagers from all the right families present, Edward mellow and beaming.
“A toast!” he called, striding into the swirl of the dancers. “To my birthday girl.”
But where was Tory?
Edward embarrassed, then joking. Retreating upstairs, to where Jason and Emily, too young for the revels, played card games and made spying forays: peering from the staircase, watching the lawn from an upstairs window.
“Is Tory up here?”
No, Daddy, she’s not here.
How long after that before the shouting began? Before they ran to the window? How long had Tory been in the gazebo with that boy?
First the veranda floodlights hitting the honeysuckle. Edward did that: the shadowy area out of bounds to the partygoers now glaringly centre stage. And Edward, incoherent with rage, the garden hose in his hands, lashing about with his watery sword of justice. At the end of the long silver arc of anger were two strange little dancing figures, like puppets — paper white, naked — tied to the end of a crystal rope. They gasped and begged and danced and fell and tried to get up and tried to run and the beam of water followed them relentlessly.
Under the harsh flare of light, the watchers could see how the water punched into Tory’s jangling breasts and foamed at the V between her legs and how it hurled itself at the boy’s jiggling penis and spumed around his testicles.
It seemed to go on for ever, Edward’s cries and Tory’s sobbing and the dreadful lashing of water and the wide-eyed horror of the teenage guests (though already some of the boys were snickering), and Jason and Emily clung to each other at the upstairs window and shuddered, and afterwards Emily was sick.
Adam, white faced, still shivering. Still clinging to Emily. Arrival of the doctor. General confusion. Guests hovering and discreetly leaving. The massaging of the fallen body. The injections. Tory weeping quietly. Elizabeth leaning over Edward, stroking his hand.
“Heart’s still functioning,” the doctor said. “Bit of a miracle. It’s weak and erratic. I don’t recommend this sort of excitement for my heart patients. Let’s get him inside till the ambulance comes.”
XXII Coda
Vacuum. The ambulance gone with Edward and Elizabeth, the guests vanished, the silence overwhelming.
On the porch four figures, still as a painting, gazed across a lawn full of tables abandoned in mid-revel, a litter of half-empty glasses, dwindling ice cubes, stigmata of single bites on sandwiches and pieces of cake, ice cream slowly drowning in itself. It might have been a garden bewitched, mysteriously deserted without trace or sign of cause.
Only the slow creak of the porch swing on which Jason and Tory sat suggested life. And also, to a close observer, the eyes of the child — which missed nothing, monitoring and translating every nuance of facial expression.
He said to them earnestly: “Grandpa’s not going to die, I know it.”
“Of course he’s not, darling,” his mother said quickly.
And he understood that she was not at all sure. He realised they all thought he had been stating his fears. It would be a waste of time trying to explain that he knew, that he could somehow tell, from the touch and smell of his grandmother as she hugged him and then climbed into the back of the ambulance, that all would be well.
How would he say it? Simply: She can make things happen. Or maybe: When she holds something in her hands in a certain way, it cannot slip through her fingers and get lost.
He was confident she would not let Grandpa’s life slither away from him. When he thought of his grandmother, he thought of something strong and anchored, like a maypole. He thought of everyone else as ribbons braiding themselves around her.
Could this be put into words they would understand? Probably not. Grown-ups were exasperating, noticing so little.
For example: he suspected that his mother and Uncle Jason were not aware that Aunt Tory was … different somehow. She had terrified him with all that crying and shouting and the garden hose and the water, but now — yes, it was her eyes. They didn’t drift as much, they focused. And also
, even the way she was sitting was different: as though someone had tightened up all her loose strings.
The telephone rang, a spattering of sound, and everyone jumped. Jason went into the house to answer it and the others waited, suspended. Five minutes. Six. Tory’s feet began to stutter against the porch floor like typewriter keys. Then Jason returned.
“Reprieve,” he announced. “Doctor says he’s out of the critical stage. He hasn’t regained consciousness yet, but of course he’s sedated. Mother’s going to stay with him tonight.”
The child wanted to remind them: I told you.
Tory hugged herself and smiled and said suddenly: “Now that he’s all right.” And then, as though there were a link: “Adam, when will we visit Australia?”
Even the boy, who followed his aunt’s switchback logic more easily than anyone else, was caught off guard. Every nerve in his body hummed like a telegraph wire. So much in the balance. He was afraid to speak. He crossed his fingers behind his back and looked at his mother — a mute plea.
Emily felt herself to be ten years old again, poised terrified at the tip of the high diving board, a crowd of children watching from below, others waiting impatiently behind her on the ladder. She’d had no idea how far up this was, how much the board swayed, how hard and deadly the distant surface of water would look. There was no way back. She had to close her eyes and dive in full knowledge of risk.
She breathed slowly and said: “I’ll call Dave tonight. We’ll discuss it.”
Adam did not move until he had counted to ten. Just in case he was dreaming. Then he was all over her like a jubilant terrier, hugging and kissing, his happiness a halo of incoherent sound, Tory began to produce something like a singing from deep within herself, and the garden filled up with their strange duet, non-verbal, high-pitched, and atonal — as though some avant-garde composer had written a new Ode to Joy.
Jason, not unaffected, touched his younger sister’s shoulder. “I think,” he said — though he had trouble speaking, and had to clear his throat — “that I’ll go to the hospital for a while.”
The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Page 23
