by Isla Morley
Shortly after I started working for the magazine, Buella adopted me as part of her coven. When she found out I was the wife of a preacher, she pronounced her almost psychopathic loathing for all things religious and made me promise not to genuflect or pray in public. “I am not Catholic and I’m not Charismatic,” I told her, but it was only after she saw that I was not the reincarnated version of her evangelical great-aunt that she felt reassured.
“Good morning, Reverend Mother,” she would call out from her desk when I walked by to pick up my mail each morning. Often she would use her pet name for me in the company of others and flounce off, scarves and jingly jewelry trailing, leaving confused expressions and fumbled explanations. At first I liked her little nickname for me, but a few months ago, while folding laundry late at night, I realized what the moniker said about the person I had become. One word relating to my husband, the second relating to my child. Somewhere between preacher’s wife and toddler’s mother were the unnamed, unknown parts of me. An Abbe of the blank space, the person of the synapse, the imperceptible pause between those two words. And now, with a rush of regret, I realize that I am no longer “reverend” or “mother,” and the two definitions have taken the junction with them.
The first two pews are roped off, but fortunately Rita and Frank, and old Mrs. Scribner with her toy poodle assuming her regular Sunday morning post, ropes or no ropes, have taken some of the seats reserved for family. Michael, Greg’s younger brother, and his wife, Martha, have flown in from Ohio with their three sons, and take up the front row with us. Mike’s suit is a size too small for him, quite possibly the one he wore on his wedding day ten years ago. Martha, a woman who has modeled herself after her biblical namesake with an impressive exactness, has made sure all her boys are wearing matching plaid shirts and have their hair trimmed like hedges. She leans over Rhiaan—a buffer—to me and touches my knee. “Those are from Mother,” she says, nodding to the two unsightly bouquets that stand like sentries on either side of Cleo’s casket. “She wanted to be here.”
“No she didn’t,” I reply tartly, to which she responds by clearing her throat. For a moment I imagine the saints of departed family members seated among the living; the ones I miss most—Mother and Grandmother—and those I do not know. It is all I can do to stay seated in the pew and not lurch toward the coffin, bear down on it with all my weight. You cannot have her, I want to shout. Go back to your graves, the lot of you!
I look across the aisle at the five rows clothed in black, the Samoan choir. At the director’s signal they rise like a swarm of hornets to their hive, and even the wind seems to retreat at their deafening voices. The words are indecipherable, but the melody weaves its familiar thread through the crowd. Behind me people begin singing along in English “Abide with Me.” Their song seems to rock the church as though it were a cradle until we are all gently swaying, swaddled in song.
The rocking dislodges the last few bolts battening down my composure. When I careen forward, two hands—Greg’s on one side, Rhiaan’s on the other—anchor me to the pew. Chuck, in his Easter ensemble, moves to the lectern and reads from the open Bible: “At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ And calling to him a child, he put her in the midst of them and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me.’ ”
“Let us pray,” he says. “O Lord, who yourself did weep beside the grave and who are touched with the feeling of our sorrows, fulfill now your promise that you will not leave your people comfortless but will come to them. Reveal yourself to your afflicted servants and cause them to hear you say, ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ Help them, O Lord, to abide in you through living faith, that, finding the comfort of your presence, they may have sure confidence in you for all that is to come. Amen.”
I straighten up, accept Rhiaan’s handkerchief, and stare out at the courtyard. A mother has taken her fussy child outside and is pointing to the plumeria blossoms on the tree. I do not recognize her. Two little boys chase after each other, hands shaped as pistols.
It cannot be that she is no longer here.
Chuck nods at us and for one wild minute I cannot remember what I am supposed to do. But Greg gets up and walks to the mike, unfolding his piece of paper. He reaches inside his jacket pocket for his glasses, slips them on, stares down at the page, and then glances quickly at the crowd. He looks down again and says, “Eleventy-twenty: A poem for Cleo.”
“When you count as high as eleventy-twenty . . .” he begins, and then pauses. Blinking hard against the shifting tides in his eyes, Greg repositions his mouth and begins again. Go on, I urge him silently, but he does not speak. Way behind me someone coughs. Greg’s hands begin to tremble and he lifts off his glasses and rubs hard against his brow as if clearing a windshield of splattered bugs. When his shoulders begin to quake he folds his little piece of paper into a tiny square and slips it back into his pocket. Chuck puts his arm around him and guides him off the chancel. He sits down next to me, finds his crumpled handkerchief, and mops up the sorrow. “I can’t,” he whispers. The organ pounds out the opening bars of “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” not taking no for an answer.
Putting love away, Emily Dickinson writes in her poem about death, and as I stare at Cleo’s coffin I figure my love has been put away in that small box. We shall not want to use again/Until eternity. Sealed up tight with decorative latches, it is a box one strong man could surely hoist onto his shoulder. While Greg sniffs and wipes and fidgets with his father’s pocket watch, I turn to look at him and suddenly think, There’s no leftover love, nothing to be warmed up and served to you. And fleetingly I feel sorry for him. Peering out through the fogged-up window of my own grief, I see that Greg has lost his child too. And then, just as quickly, he becomes a blur.
The Reverend Alex Takamura reads the second lesson in a thespian voice and then Chuck, in Greg’s pulpit, begins his homily. The words buzz around. I see his mouth moving and I hear sounds, but it all seems to come out like a badly dubbed movie. What does he have to say about Cleo? Is he saying anything about her? Maybe it is a prayer he is saying, or a Scripture verse. I try to listen closely but keep being drawn back to the coffin. A box. That she should be lying in there seems all wrong, and suddenly I recall the ghoulish story Beauty told me of the albino girl with the crooked back whose family had once lived on my grandmother’s land. The land that had swallowed the native girl, still alive in her box, because the white doctor had pronounced her dead. You can still hear her scratching some nights, especially during a full moon, Beauty told me. I sit and stare, waiting for the box to wobble slightly, straining beyond the blah-blah-blah to listen for the sound of nails against wood.
Chuck and Alex beckon to Greg, who joins them at the coffin. Laying his hands on it, Alex says, “In infinite wisdom and love, our Lord has received the innocent spirit of Cleo. We therefore tenderly commit her body to its resting place in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection unto eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Amens recited, benedictions pronounced, Greg and I now stand like store-window mannequins while a long line of people take their places to bestow on us their tidy condolences. Teary faces, pulled long like Edvard Munch paintings, crowd in on mine. Cleo’s preschool teachers, the bedraggled clump of widows, the parishioners, the Rotary Club board members, the neighbors I all recognize, but others just come and go without names. And suddenly here is the unexpected guest. Sal takes my hand and kisses the back of it so tenderly I feel like I have splintered into a thousand shards of light.
“ELIZABETH DEIGHTON, meet Salvatore Mariotti,” said Buella on my first day at the magazine, “art director and resident Italian stud.” When he stood up from his chair and came around to the front of his desk to shake my hand, it
was as though he had stepped off the page of a Barbara Cartland paperback.
“Watch out for Buella.” He laughed, taking his spectacles off and hooking them into his dark, curly hair. “She is fond of building reputations that are impossible to live up to.”
“But you do your best, don’t you, darling?” she retorted. “This one is spoken for, by a man of the cloth no less, so try not to incur the wrath of the Almighty, won’t you?” she said, spiriting me away before he could say another word. “Charming but harmless,” she said of him as we wandered to the next office. “He’s still pining for his ex. A nasty piece of work, rumor has it, who dumped him for a wealthy divorce lawyer. You fill in the rest of the blanks—it’s all too cliché for me.”
“It’s not cliché, it’s sad,” I said.
“It’s sad because it’s cliché, silly girl.”
After that, every morning on his way to the coffeepot, Sal would pause in my doorway to give a smart bow as if he had just concluded conducting an aria. Sal in faded jeans and a shirt that always looked slept in, with black eyes casting dark shadows beneath them, could smile the saddest of smiles, a smile that made you want to run for your first aid kit.
“How goes the war?” he would ask, meaning the deadlines and their casualties lying in scrappy piles on my desk. Or maybe he never meant that at all.
“The barbarians seem to have the upper hand,” I usually answered.
After a few weeks he started coming in, as if the desire for conversation was enough to make one happen. Sometimes it was only when he got to my desk that he realized he had nothing to say. And I would apply the energy it took to jump-start a dead battery just to find a way to reply. Instead of exchanging any words then, we would look at each other the way mothers tell their children not to look into the sun.
Sometimes he would pick up the galleys of an article I was proofing and make a comment, and we’d keep it light. And then one time he picked up a book from my stack.
“Nietzsche,” he said. “You read Nietzsche?”
“When I’m having trouble sleeping,” I joked.
“A man who fell in love only once, with a Russian girl sixteen years his junior.”
“I didn’t know he married,” I said.
“He didn’t. She turned him down and later became involved with Freud. Salomé was her name, perfect for a woman who caused him to lose his head, don’t you think?” It seemed to me then that Sal was speaking of himself and his own Salomé.
A few days later, Sal returned to my office with a book under his arm.
“I come bearing gifts,” he announced, handing me the book. I opened it to the page with the bookmark. It was Raphael’s painting of the Transfiguration of Jesus.
“Are you religious?” I asked, drawn not to the ascending beatific Lord on the mount, but to the demonic expression of the boy’s face at its foot.
“A lapsed but well-intentioned Catholic,” he replied. “See, our friend Nietzsche used this painting to explain one of his philosophical concepts. He believed the world was divided between the Apollonians and the Dionysians. Apollo, the god of light, represented reason and self-control. Dionysius, on the other hand, the god of wine, stood for intoxication and passion. And pain.”
“I think I can guess in which camp he would put his dear Salomé.”
“And himself.” Neither of us was looking at the painting anymore.
“What about you?” I asked. It was a cheeky question, one that sprinkled crumbs into the forbidden forest, and one we could both pretend was meant for the birds, the way we could pretend we were talking about philosophy and not people losing their heads.
“All Dionysius around you, I’m afraid.” He said it straight-up, eating the crumbs just as I had intended. It’s a game that children play, getting lost, just for that one delirious moment when you’re in the middle of something unfamiliar, where you have to smell and taste and guess your way. Sal was looking at me, unblinking: had he guessed right?
There was no finding the way back by flipping the book’s pages, but I did anyway, to the page featuring Moreau’s painting of Salomé’s dance. I have since looked again and it is indeed the Baptizer’s head served on a silver platter, but at the time I could only see Greg’s. When I returned Sal’s look, it could only have been with Salomé’s eyes.
All Dionysius around you. It was a dare, not a compliment, but nevertheless it confirmed that for someone I had ceased to be invisible. That I might be something other than mother, wife, baker, candlestick maker. That I might, if I were painted on one of Raphael’s cream canvases, be the siren whose plaintive song caused men’s ships to be dashed upon the rocks. It had not occurred to me then how closely my feelings might have resembled my mother’s.
“She’s a beauty,” he said a few mornings later, returning the framed photo of Cleo to my desk. He touched things on my desk, lifted books, stroked picture frames. Everywhere were his hands, claiming, to begin with, the inanimate parts of me.
“Do you have children?” I asked, digressing.
“No, but my wife—my ex-wife—and I talked about it. She said she didn’t want children, but I thought she’d come around . . . She has now, with her new husband,” he said, and his hands ceased moving, came to rest in a clasp in front of him. “They say children change your life one hundred and eighty degrees. Is that true?”
I rolled my eyes in reply and nodded. “Yes. And when it’s not dizzying, you sometimes see that one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turns mean better views.”
“Ah yes.”
“I AM SO VERY SORRY for your loss, Abbe,” Sal now says. “This is for you.” Pressing into my palm a tarnished filigreed heart, he explains, “It was my mother’s.” It is heavy like a stone, and when I spring open the latch, the locket reveals a tiny pen-and-ink drawing of Cleo’s face. A view from a thousand miles away.
“Didn’t you get my letter?” I ask.
“Please,” he implores when I look up at him, ready to return the gift. “Take it.”
Dizzying views. They don’t have merry-go-rounds anymore. Why is that? Playgrounds are static these days. Everything is safe, bolted down, rustproof. They’re paved with squidgy material so if there is a landing to be had by anyone, it is a safe one, no harm done. I’m all for that. But in exchange for safety we have given up merry-go-rounds. Cleo never knew the thrill of a merry-go-round. She never knew what it was like to hang on to a metal bar, one foot cemented to the circular wooden platform, the other kicking up speed till everything spun crazily, hanging on tight to keep from flying off. There were no thoughts of landing on hard concrete, of getting concussed or having the wind knocked out of you. There was only spinning trees and the blurred horizon, the still air suddenly whipped into froth; and the pull. A tug so hard it turned your knuckles white with the fighting of it. A tug that wrapped its invisible arms around you, its one hundred invisible arms, and tried pulling and prying you from that speeding platform. It was a pull that made the cells in your body pop with excitement, that made something race around under your skin, made percussion instruments of your internal organs. And instead of screaming in fear, you could only laugh, hysterically, the way you weren’t supposed to, inches away from being splattered. And when the world slowed down and the risk of falling ebbed, you stuck your foot back out on the earth and pushed and pushed and pushed till the world went around at a dizzying speed again. This time you’d risk a little more: lean out from the platform, tip your head back, close your eyes, and let the day contract into a single great battle between holding on and the tempting desire to let go.
That’s what Sal was. My merry-go-round.
Each time he came by my office, I heard that platform creak as I stepped on it. Each time I put out my foot and gave a tentative push. When he left, everything slowed, everything became so infuriatingly solid, immovable, predictable once again. Things didn’t move. Objects didn’t fly about. Not the cabinets or the desk or the house. Or Greg. Dear bolted-down, rustproof, net-protected Greg.
If Greg was a piece of playground equipment, he would be the sandbox. It is hard to get hurt in the sandbox, and I had loved that about him right from the start. After my father, it was all I ever wanted in a man. If not happy, I might have been content within those boundaries if someone hadn’t had to go pointing out the merry-go-round.
There’s been a death in the family, is what I thought when Sal and I were in the janitor’s closet. I was expecting sparks, not tears, but tears there were, surprising tears because there was nothing to cry about. A man was holding me with the tenderest of looks. And, not speaking, he reached across the spinning gap and wiped them with his thumb, the way he would wipe his own tears. And there it was again: There’s been a death in the family. Shh, he whispered, even though no one was making a sound. Perhaps he was shushing the wind that had gathered speed around us, which was lifting our hair and setting it in arcs. And even when his lips were so close that even the wind couldn’t squeeze through, he called for quiet, so close there was nothing round about his eyes—they had flattened to an escarpment, the end of which I couldn’t see. And I did not make a sound. It was my body who was the family, and there were bits inside it that had climbed into their graves. Bits that didn’t even have names, so there were no tombstones. But all at once they rose up like the swirling skirt of a girl on a merry-go-round, and I let them rise and rise till modesty spun off and sailed away with the breeze. After his lips left mine I still had my head tilted back, so he came back, and we rode around one last time.
