The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  In “Role Reversal,” the babies effected a cataclysmic shift that turned mothers into fathers and fathers into mothers, and in “The Miniature Caretakers,” the babies wound up nursing and feeding and rocking and singing to the adults meant to care for them.

  In every one of the stories, Joan’s creatures unspooled odd familial tales. She called them her Rare Baby stories, but they weren’t written for children.

  She was surprised by the new lightheartedness in her writing. So much of her earlier work was about the damaging events that bowled her people over, and she had thought Daniel’s birth would intensify her dark view of the world, that she would envision tragedies that would take Daniel away, but she found she did not fear for his safety at all, had faith in her newfound abilities, and in Fancy’s and Martin’s, to protect him.

  Despite the disturbing qualities of her fictional babies, they were additional proof that motherhood was continuing to soften her. She had feared the opposite would occur, that she would become rigid and unyielding, as her mother had been. Instead, because of her own child, her writing was veering in a new direction; it was an unanticipated surprise.

  Joan wrote five, then eight, then ten, then fourteen of the Rare Baby stories, and there were so many more bouncing around inside of her brain, in her heart.

  “Tell me about them,” Martin said. But the work was too new, and strangely personal, and Joan gave him no details; she did, however, tell him the truth: “Their sole purpose is just to get me working again, amidst the glorious mess of my reconfigured life,” and he laughed the way she had hoped he would.

  When Daniel was fussy at naptime, he settled when Joan leaned into his crib, stroked his face, and said, “It’s time for a Rare Baby story.” She took the recliner, and Fancy, hunched down on the short stool, reached through the wooden bars to hold Daniel’s hand, her small hazel eyes already focused at some distant point, her mouth, with the gap between her front teeth, already opened, breathing excitedly about what was to come. One afternoon, Joan said to them, “This is the beginning of a story called ‘Speaking in Tongues.’”

  Since nearly the beginning of time, there were four inalienable truths about the Eves.

  The first truth was that every single member of the family was female. There were no grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers, or nephews; there never had been. Each woman, on her own, without the need for any man, gave birth to a single child, and it was always a girl. It was Eve lore that their pure matriarchal line was a result of DNA, or caused by an undiscovered aquatic element, or was passed down in dreams from Eve to Eve, generation after generation.

  The second truth was that the Eves had a specific, hallowed mission, every single one a musical thanatologist, playing harps or violins or cellos or flutes or lutes or using their lush a cappella voices as prescriptions rather than performance. Musically ushering the dying into the next world, or providing a quiet space for those facing eternity to reflect, ponder, rest, and muse on the meaning of life and death. Some of the dying were recipients of a single musical vigil, their time so near and at hand; others were treated to several, over weeks or months, calibrated to diagnoses, blood pressures, the insistence of diseases, the contraction of organs, the shifting of breaths, before they were claimed. Patients called the Eves angels of mercy, protectors of souls, but they were merely women curiously suited to the work, able to provide profound human connection with their invulnerable flesh, the way suffering flowed right through them without creasing their hearts.

  The third truth was that every single Eve came out of the womb with identical features: long brown hair that fell to the waist, brown eyes that watched everything, and seashell ears that heard the slightest of sounds.

  The fourth truth was that all Eves spoke early, by their eighth month. Training to become a musical thanatologist took a very long time, involved classes in music theory, in appreciation, in instrument and voice preparation, in rehearsal time, classes too in the workings of the body, in anthropology, in the history of death, potential sources of an afterlife. Over the eons, evolution unique to the Eves had shaved away the extra sixteen months normal children required to find their tongues, their voices, their words, their speech. Any Eve who did not begin speaking in that special eighth month faced an uncertain future, potential banishment from the clan, relegated to an unhappy life among boys and men whose harsh voices could force birds from the sky, turn soft rain into a killing machine, cause floods, famine, disease.

  The Eves began with Ruth and wound through thousands of years down to Esther, who birthed Bessie, who birthed Annette, who birthed Willa. Of course, Willa looked exactly like her mother, like all her forebears, but she had sailed past her eighth month of life and had not said a word. Now that her first birthday had come and gone, fear was often in Annette’s heart.

  Willa was a good baby otherwise, a calm and still child, but she made no sound, not even a peep, and even when she cried, which was rare, she made no noise, her tears falling silently until they dried up and disappeared, leaving her long eyelashes beaded together, and the faintest silvery trail down her pink cheeks, grains of salt that sometimes her mother licked off.

  It was lunchtime on a Tuesday, and Annette was expected at two at one of the hospices on her regular route, a request for a violin vigil, made by the man himself. When he called, he said, “I’m 110, so there’s no time like the present. To be bathed in the sweetness of the violin in the hands of a master like yourself must be one of the loveliest ways to go. I have come to terms with it all and I am ready to close my eyes for the last time, to be taken away by the melody of a nigun, the Baal Shem specifically.” A nigun was the most taxing of soulful and religious Jewish songs, calling upon Annette’s deep improvisational abilities, but the man’s choice of the Baal Shem meant she had centuries of that nigun to follow, its overarching form structured by so many other violinists who had come before her, reflecting the mystical joy of intense prayer.

  As she fed Willa the mashed peas she adored, one spoonful at a time, the Baal Shem was soaring through Annette and droplets collected in the corner of her eyes. Any crying by a thanatologist had to occur in advance, but certainly outside the walls of the hospice.

  Another spoonful of the green mash and when the food slid in, Willa closed her perfect little cherry-red mouth and swayed with happiness. The kitchen clock never made any noise, but suddenly Annette heard the ticking, turned to look, watched as the second hand stopped sweeping, then moved forward again, one noisy click at a time. She felt her heart flutter, watched the spoon flip over in her hand, a dollop of green landing on the black and white tiled floor. Her head whipped back to her lovely little daughter, and she screamed.

  Willa’s unspoiled face had altered entirely, was suddenly abstract. There was her original mouth, the cherry-red one, so pert and lovely, but right next to it, as well-shaped as the first, was a second mouth, the deep purple of an overripe plum.

  And then Willa spoke for the first time. From the cherry-red mouth came the words, “I love you, Mommy,” and simultaneously, from the plum mouth, came the words, “You are a witch with a black heart, Mommy, I know what you really think about when you play your music, send those people to death”—

  and Fancy inhaled so sharply that Daniel turned his head at the sound and let out a funny little laugh.

  * * *

  There was a timelessness for Joan in the act of creating these stories, a harkening back to when she was a young girl and beginning to write. After the failure of The Sympathetic Executioners, it was a relief to write without thoughts of publication, awards, and best-seller lists. The writing was pure again, the way it had been with both collections. And by reading aloud parts of the Rare Baby stories to Daniel and Fancy, she experienced the youthful pleasure denied her as a child, all that intense longing for a different mother who would have sat on Joan’s bed and read Joan’s stories aloud, exclaiming over what her child had produced. In the nursery, Joan’s good voice floated, and the words of
her strange stories rode the quiet air, and something way deep down inside of her was soothed, a release of the anger and hatred she had long carried about her mother, Eleanor Ashby, the force that colored Joan’s earliest memories.

  Each time she sat down to work on these stories, she knew they had something specific to tell her, perhaps about how she would be as a mother to Daniel as he grew up, encouraging his creativity, making true the positive effects of the buttercup-yellow paint. She sensed they were not meant to be heard by any others, not to be read by anyone else either.

  At least once a weekend, Martin said, “How’s the work coming? When can I read them? When are you going to send them to Volkmann?” He asked these questions, one or all of them, again and again, opening the door to her study while she was working, throwing her a kiss when he finished his querying, until shivers ran through Joan when she heard the knob turning, making her breath catch in her throat.

  Each time, she said, “Soon, maybe,” the way she had when he wanted to read pages from The Sympathetic Executioners, then said, “Martin, I need a little more time, then I’ll be out.”

  Her husband, brash and brave in the operating room, in his focused research for groundbreaking ocular surgeries, seemed truculent in those freighted moments, before she responded, petulant even, and she felt incapable of explaining—had no desire to explain—the intrusiveness of his endless questions.

  One day when they were alone in the living room, Fancy with Daniel in his room, Joan said, “Does it work for you that when you want to talk about your successes or failures in surgery, whether the research is going well or not, I listen, but otherwise I don’t try to burrow into your world, just give you space to move and roam and be on your own, with your thoughts, hopes, and beliefs?”

  “You’re wonderful that way,” he said, failing to make the leap he should have been able to make, to see that he was trying to burrow into her world, a place where he did not belong, and the single unspoken sentence jammed in her mind: You’ve got to leave me alone.

  For a man so attentive to his patients, aware of their fears and their foibles, how had he forgotten this about her, her need to keep her work to herself? At the very least, when he was home, why didn’t he notice that Fancy never, ever, knocked at the study when Joan was inside? If she thought a sign on the door would do the trick, she would have hoisted that sign right up, written in big black words: MARTIN—DO NOT DISTURB ME, but even that, she knew, would not keep him out. Sometimes she thought the only way to silence his voice, extinguish his interest, would be to stone him to death.

  Breast-feeding ended, and bottles began, then rolling over and baby food, then gummed toes, solid food, first steps, and when Joan was not with Daniel or working on her Rare Baby stories while he napped, she and Fancy planted infant red maples, elms, and Cleveland pears around the property’s entire perimeter, a weeping willow tree not far from the house. They hoed and raked the ground, eliminated the weeds, prepared the soil, tilled and fertilized it, then planted Kentucky bluegrass, tall fescue, fine fescue, Bermuda grass, Zoysia grass, and perennial rye, and took turns watering every morning and afternoon from spring to late fall. On weekends, Martin pitched in, allowing Daniel to think he was helping, his small hands gripping the hose just behind his father’s big ones.

  In their second year of planting, when the grass was finally fully established, Joan and Fancy figured out how to lay down sprinklers, and turned them on. “The water’s going to be cold,” Joan warned Daniel, but he ran laughing through the arcing sprays. “Look, Daniel,” she said, and he stopped and looked at all the rainbows dancing around their backyard.

  Joan and Fancy devised the shapes and boundaries of all the various gardens, marked them with sticks and flags, then got down to work, troweling, fertilizing, and planting lilac bushes, bougainvillea, hyacinth, phlox and poppies, tulips, wild violets, and gerbera daisies, everything in various hues of lavenders and pinks and purples and scarlets and burgundies and white, a field of lavender too. Their first vegetable garden was seeded with carrots, cucumbers, radishes, domestic tomatoes, beans, and lettuce, the vegetable world that thrived regardless of the gardener’s abilities. Near the house, they built the playground Joan had imagined while weighing Daniel’s early extermination. He now had a large sandbox to play in, and a swing set, and a bright-red jungle gym that took Martin three days of hard labor to put together.

  In their third year of planting and gardening, all the flowers came up, a riot of blooms. Joan and Fancy took Daniel with them to the lumberyard, bought planks of wood and panes of wavy old glass and the building specifications for a gardening shed. They sawed and hammered, figured out how to make window frames, how to install the glass, and the shed rose up behind the weeping willow tree that was still so small, Daniel shimmying up its baby trunk yelling, “Look at me,” all of twelve inches above the ground. When Fancy went home to Canada for a family visit, Joan painted the shed green by herself and stored all the gardening equipment within. By then, they had a potting table, ceramic planting pots stacked up like mismatched wedding-cake tiers, a large assortment of dinged and muddy trowels, rakes and hand mowers, bags of rich dirt for settling cuttings of delicate flowers into the pots until the new baby plants were sturdy enough for life outdoors. Sometimes, Joan escaped to the shed for an hour of quiet with a glass of wine, lowering a window for an illicit cigarette, briefly longing for the time when she had not created a different story for herself, longing too, for other ideas to flow through her mind, something beyond her rare babies.

  Daniel was nearing four when Martin began flying to England, Germany, Croatia, and Russia, requested by private hospitals to operate on their citizens. Against the odds, he was having great success with his newly devised surgery, returning sight to people who lived in an underworld of barely recognized shapes, or no shapes at all.

  Joan was on the bed watching Martin pack for his tenth trip abroad—lucky scrub caps, the funny clogs he wore during his long surgical days, his toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, two suits, shirts, ties, his shiny leather loafers, a winter sweater, jeans, and snow boots all went into his travel bag.

  He turned to her suddenly. “Come on, Joan. You’ve let me read a page here and there, but why can’t I read the Rare Baby stories from start to finish? I’ve got all these hours on planes and it would be great to read something other than medical journals and the newspaper.”

  Three and a half years writing those stories and they still felt like a secret to Joan. She had all the audience she needed in Daniel and Fancy. She touched her belly and wondered if she would read them aloud to the new baby. There was always going to be a second child, and soon there would be.

  She watched Martin’s mouth moving. He was still talking, inveigling her to let him read the work, but Joan was thinking of something else entirely, of how the news she was pregnant again had spurred a sort of silent trade-off: Martin no longer opened her study door without knocking, did not enter unless invited.

  She tuned back in when his mouth clamped shut, his face clouded with hurt, and she thought she ought to give him the benefit of the doubt. She climbed off their bed, went into her study, gathered up five of the stories, and handed them over. She watched as he placed them neatly inside his briefcase.

  A week later, back home, unpacking his bag, he pulled out her stories, all marked up, and her heart was once again beating too fast. She felt churlish, though, and remonstrated, when he pulled out a wrapped package and gave it to her. He had brought her a present, but when she opened it, there was a frightening device in her hand, antique and rusted, and Martin said, “That’s a scleral depressor from the early twentieth century. I found it in a store in Cologne. Isn’t it great?”

  He turned it over in her hand. “You insert the tip between the globe and the orbit, the space occupied by the probe displaces the retina inward and creates an elevation. It helps locate and diagnose lesions that may otherwise go undetected, like retinal holes, tears, or vi
treoretinal adhesions. It’s used to assess patients who present with complaints of flashers and floaters, or who are at risk for peripheral retinal anomalies, such as high myopes or those with a history of blunt trauma.”

  He returned the depressor to its velvet-lined box. “I saw it and thought since I’m traveling to so many places, I should keep a lookout for these kinds of things, start a collection of old tools of the trade.”

  She felt the ghosts of eyes touched by that tool, the coldness of the metal still singed her palm.

  Then he said, “Come on. Let’s take Daniel for a walk.”

  It was Sunday and they were Fancy-free. Daniel was in his room, on his bed, the novel she was reading to him—The Happy Island by Dawn Powell—on his lap, and he was pretending to read.

  “Mommy, listen to me,” and he read, “Everyone who knew James knew of his Evalyn, and that a visit from the Inspector General could not cast a town into greater confusion,” and Joan was shocked. She recognized the sentence from the book, and he read on, “No one found her agreeable. Desperately James told stories about her to make her appear interesting, but she only emerged a more intolerable figure than before.”

  She called out for Martin, and when he stood at Daniel’s door, she said, “He’s reading already! Whole sentences without sounding out the words. Just like I did, but I was older, five, when it happened.”

  Martin kneeled before Daniel. “Are you reading now, my man?” and Daniel nodded and began telling his father about the bachelors of New York City, and Martin looked up at Joan.

  When everyone was zipped into their winter coats and out the front door, Martin whispered, “Maybe we should make sure he reads age-appropriate books.” That wasn’t going to happen on Joan’s watch, but the battle could wait for another day.

  They walked the wide streets of their development, the paving all complete, young trees bare-limbed in the cold, and were quiet for a while.