Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  Now a couch is no equal to a bed, but I can attest to its soothing power, for many a Sunday afternoon have I fallen asleep stretched out in front of the television, some sporting event going on without me, and an occasional all-nighter with a black-and-white movie long since over or a book tented on my chest or dropped to the floor. I could picture the seductive cushions, the warm afghan folded over the arm, and the throw pillows casually, yet artfully, positioned, and I entered the darkened living room with a lover’s anticipation. From his customary perch atop the VCR, the cat mewed once and pointed his tail to the LED clock. I was glad to see some things had not changed and was grateful for the reassuring presence of another living being. Arranging myself on the sofa, I closed my eyes and waited for sleep and some relief from the hot poker pressing behind my eyeballs.

  I must have dozed off, though for moments or centuries I cannot say, for I was awakened quite suddenly by the sensation of being smothered and deprived of air. A surge of gasping panic overwhelmed me, and I swatted at the thing on my face, realizing in the same instant that I was striking the cat. He screamed to be so rudely handled and leapt to the coffee table. “Harpo,” I called for him and sat up to apologize. Diffident, the cat slunk to the throw pillows, and I had to grab him before he escaped completely. I held him in my lap, stroking him between the ears, whispering sweet nothings, and trying to make amends. Now, the old wives’ tale about cats smothering people, particularly sleeping babies, is based upon the notion that when a child is completely out of it, the cat, attracted by the scent of milk, will sit on the face to suck out the baby’s breath, but the plain truth is that cats dislike the smell of human breath. There is a report from a doctor in Helsingborg, Sweden, who wrote about his cat and new baby. Seems the cat had just given birth to kittens a few days before the infant son was brought home from the hospital. Upon hearing the child’s first cry, the cat went to the nursery to investigate, and later that night, she moved all her kittens into the cradle. The crying baby, the doctor surmised, attuned the maternal instincts of the cat, and since she could not move this giant “kitten” to her litter, she brought the kittens to the baby. But no, it is not generally true that a cat will smother anyone intentionally, and in Harpo’s case, he bothered my rest only if he wanted to be let out of the house.

  As we walked to the front door, the cat weaved between my legs at each stride, and when I let him out, he scooted across the porch into the yard, disappearing in the darkness. For some reason, I thought I heard him say “So long,” but soon realized the words were merely the play of my own thoughts on the radio of my imagination. I stood on the threshold watching the quiet early morning. On the lawn, where the tangle of bicycles should have been evident as a dark heap, there was nothing but smooth grass and empty space, and I began to question my memory of having seen them that afternoon. No traffic passed, and no one strolled along the sidewalks. In both directions, the lampposts glowed in a line that followed the curve of the street, and above the rooftops and leafy trees, a corner of the National Cathedral loomed, my private parapet. An airplane cut across the heavens, red lights on the wingtips in contrast to the faint white stars. A mockingbird sang in some treetop blocks away, the changing patterns of its stolen melodies designed to attract a mate to the nest. Crickets kept time. But all else was still as if painted on some universal mural, and I felt unable to enter into this outside world, for if I did I would be trapped by the landscape and would vanish forever when the moment passed. One step forward, and I would be swept out like Bachelard’s dreams. The house, despite all of the strange things happening here, felt safer, and I retreated behind the door. My headache abated at once, but I just stood motionless, trying to sort through the events of the day. A woman moved through my mind, insisting upon being remembered. Her face began to take shape like an unfinished portrait on a canvas.

  A cry broke my reverie, sudden and sharp, almost inhuman in its urgent intensity. At first I thought the skirl emanated from Harpo, for he often sounded like the bagpipes when he was desperate to come back in, but the sound repeated itself from inside the house, upstairs in the vicinity of the bathroom, judging by the echo. I took the steps by twos, anxious at the cause of such distress.

  Huddled around the bathtub, the old man, Dolly, and Jane had their backs to me, and only when I stepped closer could I see the object of their rapt attention. Seated on the rim, Alice held to her breast a baby, not the cloth poppet, but an actual newborn, the soft spot on its bald head beating in rhythm as it nursed and one tiny fist clutching a long red tendril of its mother’s hair. Mashed against her skin, its tiny mouth sucked with gusto and then paused to catch its breath, repeated the process, slowed, and then stopped. Alice pinched the tiny lips to break the suction and then slid her nipple out of the child’s mouth, and by reflex, it gulped once or twice, the mouth pursed as if imagining what it had been about, and then the little one fell asleep. My eyes lingered on Alice’s bare breast as she tucked it inside her dress. Tattooed just above the nipple appeared the tiniest of witches, astride a broom, as if flying over a full moon.

  “Isn’t he adorable?” Jane asked. “A perfect little boy. Ten fingers and ten toes.”

  Alice handed the baby to Dolly, who laid him upright against her shoulder and began patting him gently on the back. Rearranging her dress to its standard position, Alice sidled up to me and said, “He’ll have red hair, too, when it comes in, but he has your eyes.”

  “Pardon me?”

  All three women grinned and gawked at me as if I were a specimen in a zoo.

  “I have no idea what you are inferring,” I said. “Where the devil did that baby come from?”

  The old man clapped a bony hand on my shoulder. “Ah, Sonny, you don’t mean to tell me you are uncertain as to the workings of the birds and the bees? When a man and a woman love each—”

  I shrugged out of his grasp. “Not that … I understand the mechanics, you old fool. What I want to know are the particulars concerning this particular child of Alice’s. It wasn’t here when I left just a minute ago.”

  “Nine months,” he said. “Or more precisely forty weeks, if all goes right.”

  “The details of human gestation are quite well known, even to a single man such as myself.”

  The little boy burped, loud as a trucker, and the rest of them giggled. Dolly handed the baby to his mother, and Alice laid him to sleep in a magazine rack where I usually kept my bathroom reading material, old issues of Architectural Digest and noteworthy issues of the weekly “Home” section of the Washington Post. The newborn fussed upon leaving his mother’s arms, but soon settled into a deep sleep. Mesmerized, we all watched for several minutes as if there was nothing more fascinating than a baby at rest, seeing perhaps in the child’s complete surrender some capability lost to our world-weary adult selves.

  I whispered to Alice, “You had no baby when you flew through the mirror.”

  “No need to keep your voice down,” she said. “That child could sleep through a tornado if he has a full belly.”

  “But you had no baby when I met you last night.”

  “Perhaps your memory is at fault,” said Alice. “Or perhaps your sense of time?” She winked at the old man, and on her closed eyelid, the third eye appeared, just as it had on all of them. The witch tattoo streaked across her bosom and disappeared behind the red fabric over her opposite shoulder.

  The old man gathered his robe more modestly and sat on the toilet seat. “Yes, you were telling us about last night. Something about a theatrical performance in your former brother’s former room? A woman singing.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember where I was. I followed the sound of music and entered my house, drawn upstairs by the beauty of the singer’s voice and the unmistakably live piano, though as far as I know, there’s never been such an instrument in this house. There were seven women: the singer and her accompanist, and five more sitting in two rows of chairs, listening to the performance. But I don’t remember any baby.”

/>   Dreaming of the breast, the child in the magazine rack sucked in his sleep, as real as any of us.

  “The women took scant notice of me when I entered the room. The singer flinched but she did not stop her singing, and the pianist did not miss a note. Some in the audience halfheartedly looked my way, a quarter turn of the head and a glance over the shoulder. To a person, they were stunning, though they seemed oddly out of date. Dressed in the kind of costumes seen in old cowboy movies, where the fella comes into a saloon and there’d be dancing girls in petticoats and velvet, bright crinoline, fishnet stockings, and long gloves. Like Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again, or Lili Von Schtupp in Blazing Saddles. Open trunks spilled over with sequined dresses and feather boas. In the scenes, the girls would be laughing, sitting on the cowboys’ laps, running their fingers through brilliantined hair, or perched atop an upright pianoforte, or leaning over the poker table, watching the action, waiting for some sap to buy them a free drink.”

  “Barflies,” said Dolly.

  “Working girls,” said Jane. “Remember Madeline Kahn: ‘Who am I kidding, everything from the waist down is kaput.’ ”

  The old man slapped his knee, sending a cloud of dust and a pair of dazed moths into the air. “Tarts? Harlots? Ladies of the night?”

  “Now, now,” I stammered. “They were more like cancan dancers.”

  “It’s all code, boy,” the old man said. “Back in them days the films couldn’t come right out and say so, but those were pros. Flirt with the boys to buy more liquor, then a romp upstairs on some ramshackle cot with the old cowpoke. What you saw were seven strumpets.”

  With an exaggerated curtsy, Alice flared the skirts of her dress. “Strumpets,” she said. “Oh, I like that. How wonderfully old-fashioned and misogynistic of you.” When she laughed, she exposed a set of flawless white teeth and a tongue that flared and fluted along its thin perimeter.

  “Don’t get the wrong impression,” I said. “They weren’t prostitutes, just dressed that way. Like they were playing a part. Actually, aside from the costumes and makeup, they acted very refined. A spread had been laid out on the sideboard. Cakes and pastries, petits fours, a silver samovar piping hot with tea, and bone china cups. Cake forks and demitasse spoons. White cloth napkins. Bottles of cold ale clotted with drops of condensation. It was very formal and elegant and showed a great deal of careful preparation.”

  Jane opened the medicine cabinet and drew out a small tray laden with leftover crumpets, which she passed around the room. When it reached the old man, he dithered over the options till choosing a mille-feuille, drizzled with chocolate, which he sampled with a delicate nibble. The moment the sweetness hit his taste buds, his eyes widened with pleasure, and he popped the whole thing in his mouth. Flakes of pastry sprinkled from his lips as he spoke. “So, these cancan dancers in their petticoats rode their bicycles to your house—pardon my dust—and they set up this piano recital in your former brother’s former room—this napoleon is to die for—and brought in full service for high tea?” He licked the icing from his fingertips. “And crumpets?”

  I nodded meekly. A short cough allowed him to swallow the last and address Jane with a parched throat. “You wouldn’t have a spare bottle of that ale in the medicine cabinet, would you? Try behind the shaving cream.”

  Anticipating his logic, I volunteered an answer to his next query. “Of course, such a strange situation ordinarily would provoke a more immediate reaction on my part: what kind of show is going on here? Or: what are you women doing in my house?”

  “Precisely. A perfectly natural line of reasoning. Indeed, I was expecting such interrogatories well before this point in your narrative. Why didn’t you ask such questions right away?”

  My provisional answer was a shrug of the shoulders. “I was dumbfounded—”

  “Bewitched,” said Alice, with a laugh.

  “Yes, bedazzled, confused. Like walking into a real daydream. And besides, I wanted to hear the song through to the end.”

  Dolly smiled as though I brought her some maternal satisfaction. “He was only being polite.”

  With a crisp snap, Jane uncapped a bottle of ale for the old man. As she handed it to him, she added, “He was raised to follow etiquette and decorum. You can always tell a gentleman by his manners and whether he was brought up proper.”

  The old man drank deeply and then stood, the crumbs in his lap tumbling to the floor. “You were a good boy. Listened to your parents, kept your room tidy. The kind of boy who could occupy himself with a book or a pencil and some paper, always off drawing buildings and such in the corner of the bedroom. And then, following the rules: always stay on the outside of the sidewalk when strolling with a lady, hold open doors for strangers with packages, help old women across the street, and that sort of thing. You were a good boy, perhaps to a fault.”

  His sentiments encouraged distant memories to unmoor from my hippocampus. “You seem to know a great deal about me and my life, and I’ve been meaning to ask you all night: are you my father?”

  The three women in the room sniggered at either the naïveté or the audacity of my question, and some whispered bit of editorial gossip raced among them. From the magazine rack, the baby stirred in his sleep as a vision knitted his doughboy features and troubled his tender soul. He kicked both legs together like a tree frog and then raised a protective fist, only to let it drop in slow motion as he relaxed again. What dreams could such a young person possibly have? What dreams might visit us in the womb? If Bachelard is right about the need to sweep out the phantoms and shadows of our dreams when we rise each morning, what is swept away when a child is born and first awakens to the world? Can he remember anything of prior existence?

  “Will you not answer a direct question?” I asked again. “You do not look exactly like my father, or at least what I remember of him, but you share some familial characteristics and you appear to be the right age, had he lived, and you have treated me like a son, with a mix of love and disdain. Will you make me guess?”

  He quaffed the dregs of his ale and set the empty bottle on the windowsill. A few crumbs stuck to the collar and sleeves of the terrycloth robe, and he picked and rolled them between his thumb and middle finger only to drop the crumble to the small rug in front of the toilet. With the toes of his left foot, he rocked the magazine rack like a cradle, humming under his breath a short, well-known lullaby, all the while glancing upon each person, though never looking me in the eye, before settling on his wizened reflection in the mirror. Startled by his own appearance, he combed his upswept silver hair with the rake of his fingers.

  “Are you deliberately avoiding me?” I asked.

  He rolled his eyes and suddenly stopped to focus on a spot directly above my head. “Not to change the subject,” he said, “but do you have a small electrical fan built in to this room, of the kind designed to exhaust fumes and circulate the air?”

  Petulant, I answered, “Yes. A ceiling fan.”

  “Ordinarily, is it black and made of cast iron?”

  I looked up. Where the ceiling fan had always been, a much larger black disk appeared to be working its way through the plaster. Instead of the usual hum of the fan, the surface began to groan and splinter.

  “Would you kindly,” the old man asked, “take two steps either to your right or to your left?”

  The object above expanded in size and circumference, and from the twelve o’clock position a handle emerged just as the frying pan loosened from its moorings and fell, crashing to the floor with a bang, cracking the tiles, and clattering as it bounced until it settled on a spot. The skillet, large as a hubcap and blackened with the seasonings of thousands of meals, was solid and heavy, and had I not moved, the weight might have fractured my skull or broken my neck. The old man reached out with a bare foot to assess its density, but he could not budge the cast iron so much as a millimeter.

  From the direction of my bedroom, an angry voice roared some unintelligible curse, a door flew open, and some
one stomped into the hallway. She arrived in a fury, gaped at the pan-shaped hole in the ceiling and then at the skillet on the tiles, and spewed another torrent of gibberish, which sounded like swearing in the French language or some personal patois spiced with Spanish and English. Her dark brown eyes fixed upon me, and I could see the anger flare and then recede. Acknowledging the absurdity of the moment, she began to laugh in a tone rich as coffee sweetened with sugarcane.

  She was a beautiful young woman of African descent, her skin shaded to rich brown, and tall and slender limbed. Like the others she wore an elegant dress, hers a royal purple wrap trimmed with a trail of golden lionesses at the collar, sleeves, and hem. Rings of gold decorated the fingers on both hands, as well as the second toe of her left foot. A thick golden chain encircled her ankle, and enormous gold hoop earrings, round as saucers, hung to her shoulders. Hiding her hair, a cloth not unlike a turban was knotted at the base of her skull. “J’arrive trop tard,” she said. “Il n’a pas reçu la casserole sur la tête. Merde.”

  “Ah, you are French,” the old man said, and then seeing the confusion on my face, he asked, “Parlez-vous anglais?”

  “Speak French to me. It is the universal language.”

  The old man chuckled softly to himself. “Once upon a time,” he said, “but now you are in modern America. Ce fou-là ne sait rien du français.”

  Clearly exasperated by his reply, she said nothing, but simply undid the clasp of her gown and let it fall to the floor. Naked and unashamed, she closed her eyes and reached back to untie the knot of her headdress, and as she lifted the cloth, a torrent of black ink washed down her face and covered her body like a waterfall. When the last drop dripped into the dress at her feet, a pattern remained behind on every inch of her skin. “Don’t be suddenly modest,” she said in halting English. “Come closer and have a look. Don’t tell me you have forgotten your Marie.”