Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  ALSO BY KEITH DONOHUE

  Angels of Destruction

  The Stolen Child

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Keith Donohue

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Donohue, Keith.

  Centuries of June / Keith Donohue.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3604.O5654C46 2011

  813.′6—dc22 2010023574

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45030-2

  JACKET DESIGN BY JEAN TRAINA

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANDREAS KUEHN/GETTY IMAGES

  v3.1

  To Cara, Rose, Eilís, and Owen

  Is it my imagination, or is it getting crowded in here?

  —GROUCHO MARX, A Night at the Opera

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One - Brained, from Behind

  Chapter Two - The Woman Who Married a Bear

  Chapter Three - Bicycle Girls

  Chapter Four - The Woman Who Swallowed a Whale

  Chapter Five - The House of the Singing Windows

  Chapter Six - The Woman Who Swung with the Devil

  Chapter Seven - Crumpets with Strumpets

  Chapter Eight - The Woman Who Danced the Vaudoux

  Chapter Nine - A Hole in the Whole

  Chapter Ten - The Woman Who Caught the Gold Bug and the Silver Fever

  Chapter Eleven - Sea-girls Wreathed with Seaweed

  Chapter Twelve - The Woman Who Lost the Flag

  Chapter Thirteen - Love and Bowlers

  Chapter Fourteen - The Woman Who Fired the Gat

  Chapter Fifteen - The Woman Who Stayed in the Bed

  Chapter Sixteen - Here We Go Again

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  We all fall down. Perhaps it is a case of bad karma or simply a matter of being more prone to life’s little accidents, but I hit my head and fell hard this time around. Facedown on the bathroom floor, I watched my blood escape from me, spreading across the cool ceramic tiles like an oil slick, too bright and theatrical to be real. A scarlet river seeped into the grout, which will be murder to clean. The flow hit the edge of the bathtub and pooled like water behind a dam. I blinked, and in that instant, the blood became a secondary concern to the hole in the back of my head, not so much the fact of the wound, but the persistent sharpness of pain around the edges. Yet even the knot of it weighs lightly against the mysterious cause of my immediate predicament. I have an overpowering urge to reach back and stick my fingers over the wound to investigate the aperture and determine the radius of my consternation, but despite the willful signals of my brain, my arms will not obey, and I cannot alter a single aspect of my situation.

  Which is: I have landed in an awkward position. My left arm pinned beneath me, my right extending straight out as if to catch something or break my fall. My legs and lower half stretched out in the dark and silent hall, and on the threshold, bisecting me neatly, would be my belt, if I were wearing any clothes. But I am, regretfully and completely, naked, and the jamb presses uncomfortably into my abdomen and hips. I have a hole in the back of my head and cannot move, although the pain is becoming a distant memory.

  Just a second ago, I turned on the light, having awakened in the middle of the night to relieve my bladder, and something struck me down. A conk on the skull and my body pitched to the floor like dead weight. My left shoulder is beginning to throb, so perhaps it struck the edge of the commode as I fell. The bathroom fan hums a monotonous tune, and harsh light pours down from the ceiling fixture. Through the open window, the warm late-night air stirs the curtain from time to time.

  Falling seems to have happened in another lifetime. Even as I tumbled, stupefaction began to gnaw at me and consume all. In that nanosecond between the blow and timber, my mind began to hone in on the who and the why. When the hardness struck bone, just at the base of my skull, an inch above my neck, when I began to lose balance and propel headfirst to the floor, my vision instantly sharpened as never before. All the objects in the room lost dimension, clarified, flattened as if outlined in sharp bold black, a cartoon of space. I saw, for the very first time, the cunning design of the sink, the way the dish and the soap were made for each other. The nickel handles curved for the hand, the faucet preened like a swan. A hairbrush, its teeth clogged with the tangles of many crowns, lay pointed in the wrong direction; that is, the handle was on the inside of the counter rather than the more conventional placement at the outer edge. A fine coating of mineral deposit from a thousand showers clung to the folds of the partially opened curtain, and one of the aquamarine rings had lost its grip on the deep blue plastic fabric, forlorn and forgotten on the rod. The floor sped to meet my face. Not just the pleasing geometry of tiles, but all the detritus of the human body, the hair and scruff and leavings, and as I fell, I thought a good scrubbing was definitely overdue.

  Bathrooms are the most dangerous place in a house. With daily weather conditions approaching levels found in the Amazon, germs and other microbes flourish, and bacteria reproduce in unrelenting blooms across every moist surface. One could easily perish here. Seventy percent of all household accidents occur in this room and, in addition to hitting one’s head, include scalding, fainting from an excess of heat and humidity, poisoning, and electrocution. Because we spend so much leisure and indulge in self-pampering—long soaks in warm baths, ablutions, digestive relief, perfuming our hair and bodies, scraping away unwanted hairs, polishing our teeth, trimming our nails, reading the funny pages—the bathroom seems as warm and wet as mother’s womb, yet it is a death trap all the same.

  My skin and bones smacked the floor with a kind of wet sound, and the pain shot through my cheekbone and knees and all the air inside my body escaped in a percussive puff. Bleeding does not alarm us until we see the blood. There is the famous story of a roofer who had accidentally shot an eight-penny nail into his brain with a nail gun. He did not go to the emergency room for several days until he began to suffer from severe headaches, but once there, doctors discovered the embedded projectile by taking an x-ray picture, whereupon he promptly fainted. Once the nail was extracted by surgical means, the headaches disappeared, as if nothing had ever happened. We must be shown evidence of our pain in order to feel the concomitant sorrow, but our joy comes and goes as it pleases.

  By instinct, I reached for a towel to staunch the mess, but could not move. Not one millimeter. Not one grasping fingertip or one twisting toe. I could not even blink my one open eye. Given that I was facedown on the cold floor, even the expansion and deflation of my chest in the act of breathing had to be taken on faith. I believed I continued to breathe. My imagination, however, could readily float above my body, able to see the figure on the stone-cold floor and chalk an outline around the naked form. The thought occurred that someone might discover me there in the bathroom, and I would be embarrassed to death.

  Just as that mortification set in, a noise in the room alerted me to another living presence. A little cough, not much more than the clearing of a throat, an ahem t
hat changed everything. The existence of another soul in the room produced a strange sensation in my mind. I forgot about the wound, and all at once, the bleeding stopped. I could open and shut my free eye, and feeling returned to my extremities. Conscious of the elastic restoration of my body, I sat up, perhaps too quickly. My skull ached worse than any hangover, so I pressed my hands against the temples in order to steady myself. The cougher coughed again, this time from the vicinity of the bathtub.

  He sat on the porcelain edge, clad in a terrycloth bathrobe, a pair of sandals keeping his bare feet from direct contact with the red puddle on the floor. His posture ramrod straight, the old man stared right through me. His thin bare legs hung like two pipe cleaners beneath the blue hem at his knees. In his lap, he clasped his hands together like a supplicant or a holy ascetic, and when the next cough worked its way from his lungs to his mouth, he lifted one bony fist to his lips. Jutting out from the collar, the rope of his neck strained to hold up his long head, and his face looked austere, like something by Giacometti, all severe angles, skin tight on bone, a hawklike nose holding up round rimless glasses, his eyes darkly colored of an uncertain hue but expressing a relentless sense of blinkless surprise. Atop his skull, a shock of silver hair brushed carelessly straight up and back, which added to his startled-in-repose appearance, and his ears stuck out like the handles on a ewer. When he coughed, small feathers escaped from the corners of his mouth and through the lattice of clenched fingers. Yellow pinfeathers wheeled in the air, then began to float like ashes to the tiles. A wan smile creased the lower half of his ruined mug for an instant, as if the cat apologized for swallowing the canary.

  His face was like one of those I carried in daily memory, and I had known a younger version of it for many years. I could not be sure absolutely of his identity, and if he was who I thought, his physical presence and existence threw rational thought through the window. That his arrival did not surprise me can be attributed to the other startling events of the day, or perhaps he was not there at all, but rather some hallucination brought on by the concussion I had suffered the moment before. Because of the haze in my head, I put it as a question to the figure perched on the bathtub.

  “Dad?”

  He went into paroxysms again, that dry cough rattling up from his core, and clamped his hand over his mouth. Tiny yellow feathers popped out of both ears. “Excuse me, Sonny, but I have a powerful thirst.”

  Aware of the deleterious effects of moving too quickly, I eased up to my feet and held on to the sink for balance. I removed my toothbrush from the rinsing cup and turned on the tap, letting the water chill before filling the glass. The fanlight overhead played on the liquid surface, and some opaque sediment swirled and settled in the bottom of the clear cup, another reminder that a general cleaning of the room was in order. I turned and handed the glass to the old man, who had remained motionless throughout the whole procedure. He considered the contents for a moment and then passed back the water with a look of disdain.

  “I never drink from anything in the bathroom.” He motioned over to the toilet, indicating by dumb show some symbiotic connection via the plumbing. “Do you have anything else besides this swill from the sink?” His voice had an unbecoming plaintive quality. From historical antecedents, I inferred a preference for something alcoholic, and when asked, he nodded vigorously, a delicate smile pursing his cracked lips.

  “I may have a beer in the fridge. Or a bottle of whiskey somewhere.”

  He raised his bushy eyebrows at the latter. “Smashing. On your way back, you may want to throw on some clothes.”

  The shock of again meeting my supposedly departed father, even an enervated version of the man I remember, made me forget momentarily that, except for a wristwatch, I was naked. On the hook screwed into the door hung a white robe, a constellation of fine red spots sprayed along the collar and one shoulder. I put it on and reflexively checked the time. It was 4:52 A.M. when I stepped into the hallway and out of the light and hum of the bathroom and into the darkness, which immediately compressed the visual stimuli that had set off the firing synapses. My mind cleared. With nothing to see and little to think about, I quite nearly forgot my purpose.

  “I’ll take that whiskey neat,” the old man bellowed from behind me.

  Cinching my belt, I moved ahead through a house as quiet as a grave. At the top of the stairs, I stopped and listened, and faraway came a sigh from someone asleep, so delicate it may not have been a sound at all, but only the thought or memory of a whisper from some other point in time and some space beyond the walls or perhaps within the walls themselves. I could not tell whence it came, so I delayed my trip downstairs and sought its source. Three rooms flanked the balustrade. Two bedrooms and a tiny office where the drafting table and drawings lived. The sigh might have been a puff from the computer, putting itself to sleep, but when I opened the office door, the room appeared just as usual in mad disarray, heaps of paper, rolls of plots and plans. On the dear computer, blank and quiet, a dark apple rested like a shut eye. I ran my palm along the edge of the desk, furring my fingertips with a coat of dust. Another sloughing noise crept through the walls, and I dashed over to the adjoining spare room, threw open the door, and discovered them.

  The setting full moon cast a halo upon the bed. Some trick of mind allowed me, in that diffusion, to see with vivid clarity the fumble of colors and patterns, a swirl of quilts and coverlets of the most outrageous hues and designs. But I had forgotten, until that very moment, the strange naked women hidden beneath the fabric. They appeared at once and altogether, a floating cloud, flower and flesh, jumbling of limbs, hands, a bare breast, the curve of a hip, a half-dozen bare arms, skin and hair of assorted hues, some beribboned with garlands, others loose and unbound. Lips, faces at odd, unnatural angles. Eight women in a tangle, pretzeling bodies at rest. All but one of their faces were turned my way. One pair of eyes opened. Another blinked in my direction. The patterns on the blankets shimmered like colored glass in a kaleidoscope, stirring to life. The colors moved like a wave, the blankets parted like the sea. Another woman cracked alert and stared at me, caressed the shoulder of her neighbor as if to wake her, and I stepped back from the threshold and quickly shut the door. Someone sighed again, but I was not sure if this time it was not me.

  Silence returned, and torn between wanting to open the door again to see and my panic over what might be there, I listened at the keyhole. Only the respiration of eight sleepers, quiet as kittens, soft as a baby’s foot. A round of fierce coughing punctuated the new tranquility, and I pictured my thirsty father in the bathroom and a cloud of downy feathers swirling in the air, floating to the bath mat, sucked up to the fan, settling in the sink and commode. Right, the whiskey. Each step of the descent, I could not shake the image of those women. The sharp dissonance of patterns on the blankets, the swell of breasts and roseate nipples, a triangle of hair, a derriere turned and split perfect as a peach, faces flushed with warmth, eyes popping open as if they sensed my presence and suddenly sprang to life. The last woman, whose body lay outside the swirling colors, turned her face to the wall, and in that half-life made a crescent moon of her naked back. A film of perspiration clung to her dark skin. She resembled someone I knew quite well, though I could not place her name. Her utter mystery confounded me more than the others, whose faces revealed in the splendor of those few seconds some vestiges of intimacy. Yet I could not remember how they had arrived, what led them to my bed, why they had stripped themselves, where those richly hued covers had originated, and what, if anything, happened when I got up to empty my bladder a moment ago.

  Each step seemed to take forever, as if my mind and body traveled at two different speeds. At several points along the journey, the goal escaped me, and once or twice I stopped, bound by a fog of confusion. The mental image of the bedful of naked women plucked at my cerebral cortex, but rather than clarifying meaning, the girls persisted as enigma. At the foot of the stairs, I stood still for a few minutes, trying to decide which
way to turn and why. In the shambling gloom, a dark living object moved like a shadow met by shadow. A few seconds later, the cat unfurled himself against my bare leg, sending the thrill of memory straight from skin to spine. I whispered his name, and he mewed and ran away, a void in the blackness.

  All the liquor bottles looked ancient and untouched, caked with a film of grease and dust. One shot short of full, the whiskey in brown glass sparkled with life when held up to the dim kitchen light. The skin around the circumference of the wound at the back of my skull stretched and tightened, as if the hole could close on its own, but the constriction produced a small double pain. For medicinal purposes, I took two glasses from the cupboard. On the way back to the staircase, I chanced upon my orange tabby cat again, eyes reflecting the moonlight. He purred at me from atop the DVD player, his tail roped over the glowing clock. I called his name again, and he whipped his tail, just enough for me to see the numbers 452. With a fingernail, I tapped the crystal of my watch.

  Passing by the closed door that led to the bare ladies, I held my breath and could hear the cadence of their slumber. A floorboard creaked. Someone sighed again. A vision of mad ecstasy fluttered across my imagination. I tiptoed past the fortress and into the bathroom.

  Motionless on the edge of the tub, the figure of my father sat in the exact spot. A tiny pinfeather stuck out like a flag from the prodigious wrinkle of his brow. He did not drain his glass in a single gulp as might be expected of the parched. Rather, he held the tumbler to the light, judged the liquid’s clarity, sniffed its bouquet, rinsed his palate with a mouthful, and only then swallowed. The whiskey warmed him, brightened his eye, and raised the flow of blood to his pale skin. He sipped another mouthful and the dryness vanished from his breathing, and he looked almost alive. When he cleared his throat again, no feathers flew out of his mouth.

  “Feeling any better?” I inquired.