Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  A soft belch forced its way between my lips. The girls chortled at my impropriety, and while there is never a good occasion for a burp other than in private as relief to gastric distress, it seemed particularly impolite at the moment. I could not help myself. My stomach felt bloated, my limbs gravid. Sneaking a look in the mirror, I noted the foreshadowing of jowls and a general puffiness about my face. Was I, too, getting fat? The old man, now below Marie’s knee, signaled that he was going to begin again.

  “All through that summer and into the fall, the prodigals returned to make their claims on their late father’s fortune. First, the four girls, all of whom lived nearby, each with a dandy husband on her arm, and each one chagrined by the paltry remains of the estate. Their mother, the Mistress, had nothing but disdain for her girls and told each fancy man to go out and make his own money. Then the eldest, named after the father, arrived only to discover that there was little left in his name. We had to build a new house, his mother shouted at him. Did you expect me to live on the street? Her son left four days later, bound for the Argentine. Lastly came Georges driving in a carriage from Baton Rouge with his young bride. The poor woman, she had no idea what kind of man she had married. I kept my distance but could not avoid her when she came into my kitchen to find my daughter and me at the stove. Who is this enchanting girl? Hardly more than a child herself, she had never been told, it seems, about Georges’s black bastard. Clothide bowed with a grin at the compliment. Is she yours? the woman asked. Is your husband one of the men who works here as well? Gaston? I took hold of Clothide and covered her ears from behind. I am not married, I said. Her father is a Buckra man. She took my baby’s hands in hers for a moment, and then excused herself. As for Georges himself, he refused to even look at his daughter or speak one word to me. He was only here to court favor with his widowed mother, but she would have none of it. Over dinner that last night, Madame told her son and daughter-in-law, There is nothing left. I have barely enough to pay my own bills. From where I stood, facing Madame with a tureen of rice in hand, she spoke as if in a trance. Your father ate it all, she said. Like a pig, every scrap.

  “Next day, after they had gone, Madame called me into the parlour. Marie, how long have you been in my employ? Near thirty years, Madame. And your girl, she is already eight, is she not? I nodded. Till this week, she said, I had not noticed how much Clothide resembles her father.

  “I had no answer, for the admission of her son’s behavior toward me had never before been brooked, though I was certain she knew at the time of my pregnancy and had held her tongue all along. To speak of the matter would have meant shame on her part and on mine. My husband, she said, treated you most grievously, Marie, as has my son. Both could not control their appetites. Oui, Madame. Had he lived, she said, the Master would have never given you the terms of your contract. Not while you kept his belly full. I made the sign of the cross as she mentioned his name and felt a brief swell of remorse over the use of the Vaudoux to get rid of him, but that quickly passed. How much money do you have? Nearly three hundred Spanish dollars, Madame, but I had that amount when the big fires came. Yes, I know, enough to buy your freedom and Clothide’s, too. She stood before me, but I could not bear to look in her eyes. Marie, she said, we shall go to the courts tomorrow, you and I. We shall sign the papers for you and your daughter, and when you are ready, you are free to go on your own, and you are to keep what you have earned and saved, and I will make amends of one hundred more. But Madame, I protested, you said you have nothing—She held up one finger to her lips. I cannot bear the sins of my husband and my children. Now, come give me a kiss, for I shall miss you.

  “Clothide and I went to the Tremé and found a place with Hachard, an ancient crow now, but enlivened by our presence. Mr. Puckett gave me her old job cooking in a tavern for the Cajun people, and on Sundays, I went back to the old church, though Sunday nights I still danced the Vaudoux. When the yellow fever struck the following summer and so many died throughout Orleans, I worried mostly for my child and for old Hachard, but they escaped the plague. My misfortune was to contract the fever in June of ’96 and quickly wither. Do not worry, ma chérie, I told my daughter weeping at my bedside, Hachard will take care of you and besides, you are a free person. Don’t go, she cried as I left this world, don’t go, and the last thing I remember was the sight of my mother being led away as I shouted the very same words.”

  Marie dressed quickly, pinning the purple cloth at the shoulder, and then hid her face in the corner, her head bowed and her shoulders heaving as though sobbing at the memories. The homunculus who lived in my belly raced across the lining, grumbling and cursing as he ran. I loosened the belt to my robe, yet found no relief to my growling stomach. My feet and my hands ached and seemed waterlogged, and when I lifted my fingers to my face, the skin at my cheeks was taut and tender to the touch. The more Marie cried, the fatter I got, and when I looked in the mirror, a blimp stared back at me. I had doubled in weight, my features diminished by the beachball of my head. My belly escaped from the confines of the robe whose seams strained to stay together. My fingers and toes felt as thick as sausages, and my legs as stout as totem poles. “I am becoming well rounded at last,” I joked to the old man, but the words came out in a helium squeak.

  “You are a zeppelin,” he said. “Entirely too rotund to contain yourself.”

  “I feel as if I shall pop.”

  In one swift motion, he stepped away from me and spun Marie by the shoulders. An enormous yellow balloon, imprinted with a cartoon version of my face, was at her lips, and her cheeks were puffed to deliver the next, perhaps fatal, blow.

  “Don’t you dare,” he told her. She sucked in her breath and pinched the stem between her fingers. The pressure hurt my brain, and I could scarcely bear to watch for fear that she might wield a sharp fingernail or a straight pin and burst me with a casual gesture. Instead she let out the air in one long raspberry, the latex blubbering in an obscene manner, and at the same time, I deflated, the air hissing from every orifice in the most embarrassing way, though I was relieved in the end to be back to my normal self. Holding out an insistent palm, the old man demanded that she hand over the balloon. They argued for a moment in furious French, the words zipping by so quickly that I could not make out a single one. Marie surrendered reluctantly, and the old man held up the balloon for my inspection. In addition to the caricatured face, there were two stubby arms and two legs molded into the shape. He wadded it into a ball and stuffed the balloon into his breast pocket. Chagrined, Marie joined the other three women on the edge of the bathtub perched like spectators consigned to the cheap bleacher seats.

  “A word, monsieur, s’il vous plaît?” I led him to the threshold and the illusion of privacy. “First of all, let me thank you for saving my life once again. Without you, I might have been clubbed or speared or blown into bits or who knows what.”

  He tapped me twice on the meat of my arm. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you—”

  “That’s awfully decent of you.”

  “—before you finish the story of the performance of our friends in your parlor. I’d like to know how you got to where you are today.”

  “You and me both, brother.”

  Behind the glass of his spectacles, his bright eyes blinked back a film of moisture that could have been taken for the beginning of tears. His bottom lip quivered, but then he composed himself. I was growing quite fond of the old bugger. He winked at the girls. “What do you think of the most recent one?” He jerked his thumb in Marie’s direction. “Took every ounce of concentration to keep reading the words on her skin and not give in to distraction.”

  “She is quite beautiful. Stunning, really. And that accent.”

  “A Frenchwoman could make the shopping list sound sultry. Must be all that red wine and cigarettes.” In the bare light, he looked even more recognizable, tall and thin as a scarecrow, swept-back thatch of silver hair, the wire-rimmed glasses, and a face etched with wrinkles earned f
rom ten thousand Gitanes and night after night of staring down a blank page. The famous French playwright.

  “You remind me of someone.”

  “Your father.”

  “No, yes. Him, too, but someone else.”

  “I am glad it is somebody else. I was getting concerned.”

  “What was the name of the French fella who wrote that play? Waiting for Godot.”

  He patted the pockets of his robe. Reaching in with two fingers, he pulled out the wrinkled balloon and considered it as though he had no memory of the object. A thought tickled his lips. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Now would be an odd time to start then. Still.”

  “It is a very famous play. About nothing.”

  “Nothing? Everything is about something.”

  “Even this?”

  “Especially this. Even silence has meaning and countless interpretations.”

  “Yes,” I said, agreeing simply to be sociable. “It’s about two tramps who are waiting for Godot to return.”

  “A French play? Sounds like a film I saw once with the poker-faced actor Buster Keaton. He had gotten into a number of jams and was awaiting the return of his partner to straighten things out. Man’s name was Godot, but he never returns. Or perhaps it wasn’t Keaton at all, but Laurel and Hardy.”

  “No, Waiting for Godot is a kind of existential comedy.”

  “But Laurel and Hardy would make a good Vladimir and Estragon, don’t you think? Two tramps. Laurel and Hardy were always two tramps.”

  “I am beginning to feel like we’re two tramps, waiting for some order out of this chaos.”

  “No, I am sure it was Keaton. He was much admired by your playwright. He even used Keaton in a film without words. Not a silent film, mind, but nothing to be said.”

  “You even sound like him,” I said.

  “Your Frenchman? Perhaps he only wrote in French. Forced himself to think harder.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “Beckett. An Irishman who wrote in French first and then translated his own words into English. God bless you, Mrs. Stottlemeyer.”

  “Who?”

  “Eleventh-grade literature class. My teacher.”

  “Mrs. Stottlemeyer. Funny what we remember.”

  “So are you?”

  “Beckett?” He raised his bushy eyebrows. “I am afraid Beckett is dead. Some time ago.”

  “Beckett’s ghost, then?”

  “Did you not pinch yourself a while back there and conclude the evidence of your current corporeality exists? Don’t you trust your own senses? And if I were mere ectoplasm, what does that make those young beauties over yonder? I can assure you, Sonny, they are as real as you or me.” With a flutter of fingers, he waved to the women.

  “If you are not a ghost and not my father and not the Irish playwright Beckett, then who are you?”

  “You attempt to answer a positive but avert to the negative. All in good time, bucko. First, there are several more women in your bed—”

  “And that’s another thing,” I said. “Why are they here? What are they implying with their stories? That somehow I am to blame?”

  The old man laid a fatherly hand upon my shoulder. “You are overwrought, my boy, and yet as I’ve said—as you’ve said—there are more women in the bed from whom we haven’t yet heard.”

  The very thought of those other creatures nearly drove me to tears.

  “Now, now,” he said. “Take your mind off your woes. You are an architect of some sort, aren’t you? A builder? Why don’t you patch the hole in the ceiling?”

  A frying-pan-sized hole provided a portal into the attic. All kinds of junk had been stored up there over the years. Anything was liable to come spilling through the opening. He had a point. Given the chore, I felt a deep sense of relief settle in my chest. I had a job to do.

  “Right, so. Off you go.”

  “Thanks—”

  “Would it make you feel any better to give me a name? Call me Beckett or what-you-will?”

  “Okay then, Beckett. I’ll be up in the attic, fixing a hole. To stop my mind from wondering.”

  “Very cute. And I’ll mind the four ladies. Now there’s a poker hand for you. Four queens and a knave.” As we passed, Beckett patted me once on the back, and it felt good to be getting somewhere finally.

  To reach the attic, one must pull on a string that releases the door and a set of stairs that descends nearly to the floor. An ingenious contraption from another era of home engineering, but with two important drawbacks: one must use a stepladder or chair in order to reach the string, and one must step off the ladder before pulling the string for the attic steps come down quickly and without warning. I grabbed a chair from my brother’s room, remembering how he wrapped his feet around the chair’s legs as he worked at his desk, but forgetting the sliding stairs, which hit me square in the chest and knocked me on my keister and sent the chair clattering across the hall. I expected someone to come rushing to my aid, but there was no reaction other than a muffled “Keep it down!” from Beckett behind the bathroom door, doing God-knows-what with the four women. I picked myself up and climbed the stairs to the attic.

  There was a light waiting for me that threw shadows but brightened all but the corners of the eaves, and the musty room smelled faintly of fried steak and hot metal. A persistent hum increased in volume whenever I stood still. Hunting for the source of that white noise would have taken all night and easily obsessed me, but fortunately, I thought more about my predilection for obsessive behavior rather than the noise itself and hit a plateau of absurd self-reflection where I could quit thinking altogether. Amid the clutter, some clues existed that would help me piece together a rational explanation for how I ended up this way, a long-forgotten artifact that would illuminate the recesses of my mind, but my immediate purpose was to find a patch for the hole in the floor. Against the far wall rested a framed lithograph, a gift from a girlfriend—Sita is her name, I am pleased to remember. We bought it on a date to a Gustav Klimt retrospective at the National Gallery of Art. The poster was just large enough to cover the hole, but as I slid it across the opening, I chanced to spy on the bathroom below. It was empty. There was nobody inside. No Marie, no Alice, no Jane, no Dolly, and old man Beckett had disappeared. Nothing to be done. I poked my head through the opening and scanned all four corners and over the shower curtain. Even the baby was gone. For the first time since falling, I felt utterly bereft. Sometimes there is nothing more terrifying than being alone in your own house. I checked my watch and then carefully positioned the poster to cover the hole. No light shone from below. If possible, I was even more alone with my thoughts.

  I hurried to the staircase and backed down the steps, hopping from the final one, and paused at my bedroom door to determine whether the sleeping beauties had also deserted me. The tangle of limbs and bodies had diminished to just four sets. Three of the women opened their eyes in the sudden light, and the fourth still showed her back, not having moved all night. I quickly retreated in hope that they would all go back to sleep. My fingers wrapped around the cold doorknob brought back memories of Christmas mornings when my brother and I would sneak out of bed, check if my parents were asleep behind their closed door, and then tiptoe out of their room, carefully turn the knob so that it would not so much as click, and then tramp down into the living room, turn on the strings of shiny lights on the tree, and stare at our toys and presents till well past dawn. In the stillness of those moments filled with hope and anticipation and goodwill, my brother and I were never closer. We waited with patient excitement for Mr. and Mrs. Godot to arrive, sleepy-headed, but caught, too, by the surprise of their own deep and holy joy. So many years later, the doorknob in my hand brought them back, if only in the instant before I let go.

  The hallway rugs muffled the sound of my bare feet, and I was able to sneak as quietly as smoke to the bathroom door and press my ear against the surface. A woman’s laughter rose and trai
led off, and a low voice said something funny that made all the women howl. I could not decipher their actual words, so instead I began alternately to worry that they were speaking about me and to regret missing out on all of the merriment. I knocked twice and entered.

  Caught in the middle of their party, they all turned to face me. Marie stood on the edge of the bathtub, towering over the others arranged in front of her as though an audience to an impromptu demonstration. She seemed to have just stopped shimmying, so I deduced she had been performing the voodoo dance. I launched my question full force: “Where were you?”

  “We have been here,” Beckett said, “waiting for you. The question is: where were you?”

  “You know very well I went to the attic to fix the hole. I found an old poster from Sita that covered the whole thing—”

  “The hole thing?”

  “No, the whole. Whole, with a W.”

  “The hole in the whole?”

  “When I looked through the opening, there you weren’t. Not where you were supposed to be. Nobody at all in the bathroom.”

  Dolly interrupted. “Perhaps we stepped out.”

  “To powder our noses,” said Jane.

  “Or maybe,” Alice suggested, “you went down the wrong hole.”

  Marie took the conversational baton. “Right, like a fifth dimension.”

  “You have a point,” the old man agreed. “If there can be a crack in time, why not a hole to some other space?”

  From a corner, the baby gurgled, investigating his fingers with the inside of his mouth. He was sitting up by himself, straight as you please, as if he had aged in the fifteen-minute intermission.

  “But,” I protested, “I was only gone long enough to cover the hole …” I looked up to verify, expecting to see the vivid colors of Klimt framed by a skillet-shaped hole, but there was no painting and no opening, only the smooth white plaster and the small ceiling fan humming politely in the background. In the sink, no crayfish shells. No ruined tiles on the floor. The room had healed itself, and the only difference from usual, aside from the small mob crowding close, was the weapons stacked in the corner—the cast-iron pan, the broom, the rusty harpoon, and the bear-faced war club. I scratched the top of my head.