The Words of Every Song

by Liz Moore

  IV.

  There has always been something childlike in the aspect of Pacifica Powers, and it is upon this quality that Abraham now meditates. He is supposed to be reading as Pacifica sleeps in the sitting room, her head on one end of the sofa, her mouth ungracefully open, her stockinged feet tucked into the crevice between an end cushion and the upholstered arm. This is her midafternoon nap. Light from the three-paneled window strikes her cheek and makes Abraham recall a time, many years ago, when he and Pacifica stayed for a weekend on the coast of northern Maine. It was summer and the light was as it is now: warm, memorial, specific—as if created to emphasize all of Pacifica’s loveliest parts: then, the dark hair that pooled about her face on an unmade bed; now, the white of her brow, the warmth of her cheek.

  Abraham is moved. I am fond and foolish, he thinks, and scolds himself for the tears that come more easily than they used to. He looks down at his book, checks his watch to distract himself, and sees that Maris is overdue. The lamb, he thinks. The lamb will not be done.

  Maris buzzes. Pacifica awakes, her left cheek reddened by the fabric of the sofa.

  “I had a dream about you,” she says to Abraham. “You were wearing your green sweater, and you had to swim across the Hudson.” She thinks for a moment. “I don’t know why.”

  “Perhaps you were on the other side,” says Abraham, dashingly, he hopes.

  “No,” says Pacifica, who is not yet fully awake. “I think it had something to do with Reagan—or Gorbachev.” She rests her head once more on the arm of the sofa. “Yes, I think it was Gorbachev: I remember his birthmark.”

  Abraham walks from the room, turns down the hall, and sees Maris’s stocky outline through the wavering glass of the front door. He assumes his gravest face and opens the door and says, “Maris, you’re late.”

  Maris knows he’s not serious. She and Abraham have been friends for years. She is short and dark. She was slight when she was younger, but the years have widened her and compressed her slightly, so she stands bent despite her relative youth. Her hair is graying at the temples. It just reaches her shoulders and Abraham has never seen her without two tortoiseshell combs in it, one on either side of her broad face. She has a son named Che, who does not know his father. Maris does not know him either, anymore. He was a mildly famous Jamaican reggae singer who claimed to have taught Bob Marley everything he knew. Maris didn’t believe him, but she tells Che this and Che tells his friends this because it sounds romantic. Sometimes he lies and says his father was Jimmy Cliff, because that’s who he wishes his father was. Che is musical, so Maris figures that part of what his father said might have been true—Maris herself is tone-deaf and rhythmless and likes Diana Ross and the Supremes because her older sisters played their records over and over again.

  When Che was applying to college, Abraham called the president of NYU, with whom he plays chess each Wednesday evening. Che now studies music at Tisch; he is finishing a rap opera he has tentatively named Diva: The Barbra Streisand Story.

  Now Maris thrusts a bouquet of flowers into Abraham’s hands and says, “I was picking these up.” They’re violets. Violets are Pacifica’s favorite.

  It is warm inside, and Maris makes small huffing noises as she enters the house and takes her coat off. “Hoo,” she says.

  “After you, Maris,” says Abraham, and places a gentle hand on her back. The two of them walk toward the kitchen, where the racks of lamb sit heavily on the lowest, widest shelf of the refrigerator. Maris has not told Abraham this, but she has never cooked a rack of lamb before—does not, in fact, even know what part of the lamb the rack is, though she has some shocking ideas—and she is terrified. She has hatched a plan to extract the information from The Joy of Cooking, which is tucked in a drawer in the kitchen, once Abraham has left the room.

  In the sitting room, Pacifica sits up and stretches. How does it feel to be eighty? she asks herself.

  She doesn’t know. In her mind, she is still watching her husband swim across the Hudson in his green sweater, being chased by Reagan or Gorbachev.

  V.

  Jax Powers-Kline, suddenly confronted with the embarrassing task of either admitting to her father that she has forgotten her mother’s birthday or clearing her evening of long-standing plans, stares at the Elvis cutout in her office.

  “I haven’t heard from you since I left a message last week,” Abraham is saying. “Guests are coming at seven. Maris is cooking rack of lamb.”

  (Maris, in the kitchen, has just discovered that someone has moved The Joy of Cooking. Refusing to panic, she picks up the phone to dial her son, Che. “Get on the Internet,” she tells him. “I need to make rack of lamb.”)

  “Of course, Daddy,” says Jax. “I’ll be there.”

  Abraham knows his daughter has made plans already. He does not know when Jax changed, exactly, but he fondly remembers a time when he and Pacifica called her Jacqueline: before she left for Harvard and became Jax, before she began wearing orange velvet blazers and calling everybody “babe.” Once, in Brooklyn for dinner, she called Pacifica “darling” to her face. Her mother had recoiled in distaste, and Abraham hadn’t known what to say, so he asked Jax how work was going.

  “Fabu,” she had said, and had taken a sip of wine unenthusiastically.

  That was six months ago. They haven’t seen each other since. When Jax left after dinner, Pacifica and Abraham talked late into the night. Abraham put on a record of Joan Sutherland and Pavarotti singing Turandot—always a comfort to his wife—and poured a glass of wine for Pacifica. She looked dazed; she pulled at memories of her daughter as an infant, at four, at fourteen.

  Together, they mused at the fact that they were old when they had her. Abraham had come home from the war with two convictions: that he would marry Pacifica, and that they would not have children—for Abraham could not bear the knowledge that his children would someday die. He was young and deeply hurt by what he had seen abroad; he trembles still at times, remembering the deaths of friends and, more distressingly for Abraham, the deaths of enemies. He still does not speak of his service.

  Despite his insistence that the world did not deserve a new generation to populate it, Abraham was also the one to insist, when Jax was conceived accidentally in a Parisian hotel, that Pacifica keep the baby. She was forty then. Their rapidly increasing wealth could have made it possible, even in the 1960s, for the Powers-Klines to arrange a discreet and safe termination of the pregnancy. But Abraham said no, and said that the baby’s name would be Jacques, after the bellboy at the hotel—Jacqueline for a girl. Perhaps his years since the war had given him a gentler idea of the world; perhaps his age had presented him with a vision of his dotage that he did not wish to see. Jax was born because of his insistence on her birth, and since then she has changed, and changed, and pulled away.

  For Pacifica, there is no fate worse than having a daughter who does not care for people, who sees people as means to an end. It is Pacifica’s great mission in life to be kind, to elicit reciprocal kindness in others; and she cannot deny the knowledge—the realization hit her stunningly one day, like a comet—that her daughter has lost her compassion.

  “It sounds great,” says Jax to her father. She scans the ceiling, thinking of ways to cancel between now and then. “What can I bring?”

  VI.

  Maris is sweating. She has turned the oven to 325 degrees, as instructed. She has taken the racks of lamb from their place in the fridge and put them in a roasting pan, where they sit staring at her, daring her to make her next move.

  “You there, Ma?” asks Che. “Ma?”

  “I’m here. What next?” She gives the racks of lamb her look of death.

  “It says you have to slit them and put garlic in them.”

  “How much garlic?”

  “Doesn’t say.”

  “Of course it says.”

  “Doesn’t say,” says Che.

  “How many slits?”

  “Doesn’t say.”

  Maris,
exasperated, walks to the left of the pan, paces back to the right. The truth is that Maris is a good cook; she is a very good cook, but she is also a know-it-all. So when Abraham informed her that racks of lamb were on the menu, she had said instinctively that she loved rack of lamb—even referencing a fictitious rack of lamb that she had fictitiously prepared last week. A bit over the top, she now realizes; a bit unnecessary.

  She examines the meat from all angles. It is red and dripping. Selecting a large sharp knife from the block on the counter of the Powers-Klines’ generously proportioned kitchen, Maris stands at arm’s length from the meat and brandishes the knife like a sword.

  “I’m gonna do it, Che,” says Maris.

  “Do it, Ma,” says Che. In his dorm room, he is leaning back on a wooden chair in front of his computer, dressed in his boxer shorts and a shirt that says PHATTY DRUMS. He closes his eyes, imagining his mother exactly as she is—one arm clutching the cordless phone, one arm extended, legs braced, face twisted in concentration.

  With a sudden lunge, Maris spears the first rack. She touches bone and slices downward. She yanks the knife back out. She is crazy with the recklessness of her actions; she always has a plan when she cooks, and the spontaneity, the lack of method in this preparation, is giving her a thrill.

  “I did the first one!” says Maris. Once again assuming her fencing position, she turns on the second.

  VII.

  Once, when Jax was Jacqueline, her mother did something very kind. When Jax remembers it now, she thinks it might be her best time with Pacifica, who was always very kind but rarely impulsive.

  Morning came to Jacqueline’s bedroom in the great brownstone early because of her eastern-facing window. So it was that on the first nice day of each year, she woke to sun that seemed endlessly, impossibly bright and warm.

  They had said it would be nice out on the evening news the night before. Jacqueline woke up and saw they were right, first, and then saw her mother sitting on the end of her bed.

  “Good morning,” said Pacifica.

  “Good morning,” said Jacqueline. She felt she was on unfamiliar territory—the territory of TV sitcoms or after-school specials; the territory of her friends with mothers who insisted on being called “Annie” or “Sharon,” never “Mom” or, worse, “Mother,” as she had been taught to call her own. Pacifica had never before, in her daughter’s memory, sat on her bed.

  She was thirteen. She was miserable in school. Her teachers called her “bright” and “polite.” Steve Garron called her fat. Jacqueline called herself nothing; she read quite a bit and drew quite a bit and did things like taking out books on tarot cards and learning how to read her own fortune. Every weekend, her parents took her to a museum of her choice. Most of the time it was the Met. Occasionally she would ask to be taken to the Children’s Museum, just to prove something about herself to Pacifica and Abraham, something about their expectations of her. For the same reason, she insisted on reading the entire Nancy Drew series, though she didn’t even like them that much. She simply got satisfaction from seeing the look on Pacifica’s face when, at the bookstore, Jacqueline would shake her head at Edith Wharton and choose yet another yellow-bound Nancy Drew book, a pretty sketch of its clever heroine splashed across the front.

  When Jacqueline woke to find Pacifica sitting on the end of her bed, she wondered what was wrong.

  “What would you like to do today?” asked Pacifica.

  “It’s a school day,” said Jacqueline. “I have school.”

  Pacifica was gazing out the window, and Jacqueline reconsidered. “I would like to bake cookies with you,” she said. She had done it once with her friend Marie’s mother. It had been thrilling: Marie’s mother wore an apron with a kitten on it, and she had let them lick the spoons.

  “Would you like to come out for a drive?” Pacifica asked, as if she hadn’t heard her daughter at all. “It’s so lovely outside.”

  At the Green-Wood Cemetery, Pacifica showed Jacqueline how to look for “Powers” and “Roth” and her father’s name, “Kline.” She produced a bag with charcoal in it, and some paper from her large leather purse.

  “Here,” Pacifica said, handing these things to her daughter. “When you see a grave you like, hold the paper over it like this”—she demonstrated—“and rub the charcoal across it.”

  Jacqueline watched as letters emerged smoothly across the page. ISABELLA WARD, they spelled. BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER.

  Together, they scanned the expanse of graves for names that bore some meaning for them. Jacqueline had never been to a cemetery before, though she knew her parents went when she was in school sometimes. It frightened her and excited her at once. Pacifica seemed intent on exploring the farthest reaches of the cemetery.

  “How do you remember where you’ve been before?” asked her daughter.

  “I don’t try to,” said Pacifica. She passed her hand along the top of a grave and touched the damp earth before it. It had rained the night before, and Jacqueline imagined the very drops of water that hung on the blades of grass she touched working their way down through the earth, down toward the coffins, down toward the terrible fullness or the terrible emptiness of the coffins.

  Pacifica knelt as if in prayer, and closed her eyes. “I’ll be buried here too someday,” she said to Jacqueline. “And so will your father, and we’ll be buried together.”

  She paused then, and looked at Jax. “You may be buried here too, if you’d like. We’ve arranged a family plot.” She said it as if it were a gift, and smiled generously, and Jacqueline knew it was the only way her mother knew how to make her daughter a part of the love she felt for Abraham.

  That day, Jacqueline allowed herself to say what she had felt since she was born: that her parents loved each other better than they loved her. That she was their gift to each other and nothing more.

  VIII.

  The kitchen is smoky and Maris is fanning the air with a dishtowel, aiming her flapping in the general direction of the open window. The stove is open and the racks of lamb are burned black on the outside and exploding with juice in the middle.

  When the buzzer goes, she nearly faints. The guests are arriving, and she has no racks of lamb, and she has not even begun the mousse she had intended to make for dessert. She grabs the portable phone and dials Che’s number.

  “Help!” she begins, and Che puts down the joint he has just rolled and pulls on a pair of jeans—which he has never washed, despite owning them for perhaps a year—over his boxers.

  “What’s up?” he asks.

  Outside the Powers-Kline brownstone, a small group has gathered. The Plasseys and the Harcourts have arrived at the same time, clutching bottles of wine. Waiting for Abraham to open the door, they regard each other with the easy familiarity that their many mutual social engagements have afforded them.

  “I always say this house is the loveliest in Brooklyn,” whispers Naomi Plassey, who rarely raises her voice. It is one of her many affectations; she thinks it brings people toward her, that it is more distinguished to speak in low tones. Tonight, as always, she wears a white gardenia tucked behind her right ear. Once, after a lengthy dinner and the consumption of six glasses of wine, Abraham had asked her about it.

  “I do it because of Billie,” Naomi had whispered, and she cast a languishing glance to her left.

  Naomi Plassey has always eagerly striven for the bohemianism that eludes her; the gardenia sits above her ear as awkwardly as it would on a politician or a garbageman. The child of soap magnates, Naomi has claimed jazz vocalists as her one eccentricity, the way the very wealthy decide that a charity or a child or a country will be the reason for their otherwise effortless existence. For Naomi, this cause is Billie Holiday, and tonight she hums “Strange Fruit” darkly while her husband makes small talk with the Harcourts.

  On the other side of the door, Abraham descends the grand staircase. Its banisters are dark mahogany, worn along the top by the touch of many hands and many trips up and down.<
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  He has left Pacifica to her dressing table. He has always loved to spy on his wife preparing herself for evenings out. He likes to sit on the bed as a child might and watch Pacifica lay out her brushes and bottles methodically. She always combs her hair first. In Abraham’s mind, he can see her when her hair was long—she would comb it until it shone and then twist it up off her neck, pinning it in brilliant ways that seemed to defy gravity. Now she combs it a few times through and then moves on to her face. She adds color to white cheeks. She removes her glasses and brushes across her eyelids with brown powder.

  Tonight, Pacifica takes special care not to smudge the mascara she applies to her sparse eyelashes. She darkens her brows with a pencil and dabs at her lips with a lovely pearlish pink and then she is finished, and downstairs she can hear Abraham opening the door and welcoming the guests.

  Pacifica stands. She is wearing one of her best outfits: loose black pants that end just shy of the green satin slippers that were brought to her as a gift by Bing Li, the wife of their tailor on Atlantic Avenue. She has been Pacifica’s friend since she moved here from China twenty years ago and Pacifica, eager to discuss her impressions of China with anyone, offered to teach her English.

  Over the pants, Pacifica wears a sort of tunic. It is plum, beaded with a design of climbing flowers. In any sort of light, the beads shimmer and flash, lending Pacifica an air of prismatic gracefulness. Her earrings are small mother-of-pearl disks that hang just below her jawbone. She feels lovely, and smiles at herself in the mirror, and thinks that she does not, after all, look bad for eighty.

  “Welcome,” says Abraham, receiving the bottles of wine delightedly. “Pacifica will be down in a moment.”

  The Plasseys and the Harcourts and the Blandes and Georgina Thompson, widowed five years ago, are all seated in the Powers-Klines’ living room. Naomi Plassey wrinkles her nose slightly at the smell of smoke and thinks with hope that perhaps something has gone wrong with dinner—something that rarely happens at these affairs. She looks around the room. There is a fire in the fireplace, which runs nearly constantly from October through April. It is kindled every hour by the housekeeper, Maris, when she is there, and by Abraham when she is not. It throws heat and light and the mustiness of a more rural place into the room, and throughout the house itself, so that inside the Powers-Kline brownstone there is a feeling at once of the country or a farmhouse or any cozy place. It is only the decor that places the home as a child of New York.