Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  “That purple stuff has gone organic,” Toby suggested. “One day a flatworm will crawl out of it and we’ll have a new universe.”

  Through the cluttered house moved nine adults and two teenagers and seven children, seeking each other, avoiding each other, carrying books wine rackets flowers teddy bears. The smallest ones liked riding on the shoulders of their fathers and their uncles. Sometimes Gramp played pony to one or another of them. “You’re killing me!” he complained, groaning with happiness.

  Every summer the daughter who lived in Buenos Aires drew up a detailed schedule for ridding the house of unnecessary items; sooner or later she abandoned the project. Meanwhile the once-a-week cleaning was accomplished, more or less, by a mother and daughter from the nearby town. They had brown teeth. Meals were prepared by Myrrh, a large, hunch-shouldered, muttering woman who was Gran’s second cousin with a few removes. Myrrh was paid for her work, and she dined with the family—it was her family, too. She endured without comment the nightly dinners, everybody talking at once; she endured the endless Sabbath-eve meal. Gramp had returned to religion in his later years, and he recited a long individualized blessing over the heads of each of his twelve offspring. The three daughters and the nine grandchildren took turns helping in the kitchen, obeying a complicated rotation devised by Gran. While cleaning up, Myrrh grunted an occasional brief command: “Here,” or “Discard.” Recently she had snapped “Cut that out” to Toby and Angelica, who were merely standing at the trash barrel hip to hip, scraping plates.

  Myrrh slept in the room next to Angelica’s. She spent most of the day in the house, though sometimes she took a walk with the youngest grandchild, who still spoke only her native Spanish. They came back looking peaceful, carrying pails of blueberries. They sat next to each other at the table. “Silent, depthful,” Myrrh said one dinnertime: an actual remark, apparently addressed to Gran. “Reminiscent of Abigail the lumber woman, our progenitress.” Gran nodded.

  At night the kitchen became Gran’s domain. Here she endured her famous insomnia. She read books about extinct mammals and examined her childhood collection of bird skeletons. “My cat brought me the corpses.” She smoked. She worked chess problems and played an old flute. By day the flute rested on a table in the big useless front hall; the instrument, too, caught the light.

  TOBY AND ANGELICA were drifting on the lake. He rowed from time to time. Her fingers trailed in the water. It was a cliché of a pose. Why strike a pose for this amusing relative, her favorite. He was like a brother, like a sister … “We are a terrified family?” she wondered aloud.

  A different fellow might have forgotten he’d thrown out the phrase. Toby remembered. He remembered the dates of kings and presidents. He remembered all their Scrabble disputes. Could you really add -tous to anathema? You could; anathematous was right there in the American Heritage. He could recite entire paragraphs from the books they chose for the nine months each year they were apart. In Angelica’s Paris house, in Toby’s dormitory cell, the cousins read by arrangement Ransome, Colette, Naipaul … During the past year they’d read Russian novelists. They agreed to study Russian at university—no one in the family spoke it; it would be theirs alone. This summer Toby kept trying to Russify various words—Gothamgrad, the Volvoskaya, anathematouski.

  His gray eyes searched her face. He was not smiling. “Terrified. Look at yourself, moy Angelica. You have every reason to be confident. Beauty—don’t shake your head, dushinka. Those ochi charnya, your eyes are yellow, not dark, but I don’t know the Russian for yellow”—as if he knew the Russian for everything else; the scamp had about five words. “You belong to a noble house …”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, Toby. Jews recognize only … nobility of purpose.”

  “Spiritual meritocraski, sure, but we’re a first family all the same.”

  “—okay,” she said, sighing.

  “And yet … our importance rests on sand, and we all feel it. You feel it.”

  “The diamonds, you mean?”

  “They’re carbon. I mean a metaphysical sand … no, metaphorical,” he corrected, suddenly sounding very young. “It shifts, the sand. It casts us out, or accepts us unwillingly. We don’t belong anywhere, so each generation flees to some other place.”

  “Portugal,” she said. There was a shameful legend: some ancestor had advised the Portuguese king against sponsoring Columbus’s voyage. “We started in Portugal.”

  “We started in the desert, like everybody else.”

  They had reached a cove. “Literal sand,” he said, hopping out, dragging the boat onto the tiny beach with Angelica still seated in its stern. He helped her get out; all the grandchildren had been taught good manners. They walked up a path, Toby leading the way. “Terrified was too strong,” he said over his shoulder, giving her a glimpse of his rippling profile. “Uneasy … that’s what we are.”

  But now she had indeed become terrified. His long straight hair, held back by a headband; his brown back; his buttocks taut within iridescent trunks. Like many Parisian teenagers, she found older men sexy. She planned to marry someone mature and experienced. She planned to teach in the Sorbonne like her father and his father. She’d continue pencil sketching. Young men were a necessary feature of her life plan. She knew she would soon surrender to one, but this littermate? His shoulders, so bony …

  They stopped in a clearing. An old stone fireplace, stumps, an abundance of pine needles. He turned to her.

  “Will you, Angelica Laurentovna?” His voice was grave. Had he embraced her she would have spun away. But so respectful a request …

  “Yes,” she said, her terror melting.

  She stepped out of her bathing suit. His eyes widened. He flipped his trunks off, flung them onto a branch. She lay down. Needles stabbed her back, her nape. He knelt, she spread, this was how, wasn’t it; and he entered her like a … chemist, she thought, someone intent on transferring liquid from beaker to vessel without accident. He frowned. Helplessly she whimpered. He looked at her with hungry eyes, merde, his desire was more painful than the pain, at last thank God he closed those ochi grayski. He thrust once, twice, and all of a sudden it was over. His head slammed onto the pine needles. “God,” he said. “Angelica, sorry, too soon,” he said.

  Poor boy, his first time, too. She turned wet eyes toward his burrowing head.

  “Did it hurt a lot?” he mumbled.

  “Yes.”

  “It won’t next time, I promise.”

  IT NEVER HURT AGAIN. What a strange boiled stalk he had. It grew from fleshy mauve pads. Veins ran along it. It wore an opaque cloak during the few days each month they dubbed terafacient, though that their issue would be monstrous was not at all certain. “I think there has to be generations of inbreeding,” Angelica said one night.

  “We share approximately one-eighth of our genes,” he said, spent, garrulous, his familiar nose pointing toward the bedroom ceiling. “But that’s only statistical. We could share as many as half, our mothers could be as alike as twins, you never know, everything is chance.”

  “No, fate.”

  “And that hap of yours—whatever happened to hap?”

  “Shh, not so loud. Our fate was decided long ago,” she insisted. “Before dinosaurs, even before Jews.”

  They didn’t return to the clearing in the pines. They met here instead, in Angelica’s bedroom. Its furnishings had been flung upward by generations of Gran’s forebears who never gave anything away, who never moved out of New England, who never had to flee to a new land with the family’s assets distributed about the person of the youngest child. Beside the bed a copper pheasant stood in a brass bowl on top of a skeletal night table. The deep reds and greens of the darkening wallpaper had run into each other and become one rich color. A glass-fronted bookcase held medical textbooks. “They belonged to my great-uncle Jim,” their grandmother had said. “Good old Jim. Never too drunk to make a house call.”

  The windows on the third floor were shaped like lozenges, wit
h smaller lozenges their panes. These windows opened outward on a hinge. Their screens had been made to order a hundred years earlier, and were now full of holes. “Ridiculous diamond windows,” Gran grumbled. “Maybe a century ago somebody anticipated my alliance with a great Antwerp house.”

  “I thought they thought you’d hook up with some inferior primate.”

  “My parents feared I might marry a monkey, yes. And maybe I did.” Gramp had a monkey’s long upper lip and wide nostrils. A tall, well-dressed monkey, an organ grinder’s handsome pal. He and Gran were reputed to have had youthful arguments that involved broken crockery. But Gran’s remark was said softly. This plain stick of a woman loved her playful husband. He loved her in return. Their love brought the three daughters back to the inconvenient summer house. “We are replicating an ancestral passion,” Angelica told Toby.

  “Any excuse will do,” he said, and grinned.

  In Angelica’s nighttime room, she and Toby, black marble statues, rubbed each other into life. The medical books were obscured behind the discolored glass, but the young lovers knew the titles by heart, knew even their order on the shelves. Principles of Otolaryngology, Textbook of Ophthalmology, Advances in Epidemiology … “Which epidemics back then, do you think?” Angelica murmured into Toby’s shoulder.

  “Influenza, rheumatic fever, Jew hating.”

  Angelica looked past him at the copper pheasant in the brass bowl on her night table. “Rheumatic fever isn’t communicable.”

  In one of the Antwerp graves lay a little boy who had died of rheumatic fever: Jacob, a year older than Gramp, his constant playmate. “So many decades ago … and I think of Jacob every day,” Gramp had said in his monkey’s grating voice. “Siblings can be closer than spouses.”

  Angelica wondered if the pheasant could ever be separated from the bowl. “Some people are struck down early,” she said. The old truth seemed like new wisdom.

  “Little Jacob? Yes. Not the Nazi boot: a bacterium. Hap, dear girl.”

  ON THE FOURTH THURSDAY in August the youngest grandchild at last deigned to speak the language she had long understood, and demanded, in grammatical English, to be taken with the other kids to a traveling carnival. She came back happy, with cotton candy in her hair and vomit on her clothing. “Loop the Loop, it was a mistake,” her father confessed. She wisely refused dinner and allowed herself to be bathed by Angelica and put to bed by her mother. By chance one of Gramp’s business pals turned up and took the child’s place at the table. He was a Broadway angel; he saw the house as a stage set and the family as the cast of a three-act comedy and he said so at such annoying length that Gran put him on kitchen duty. Twice during the evening he draped his long arm around Angelica’s shoulders.

  “I’d like to give him a karate chopakoff,” said Toby, much later, and he sliced the air with his flat, rigid hand and knocked the copper pheasant to the floor. The brass bowl shuddered for a while, as if thinking things over; then it fell, too. The rickety night table, deprived of purpose, collapsed. “Stop!” yelled Angelica’s brother from the boys’ room on the other side of Myrrh’s. He was subject to nightmares, and the three crashes might have had nothing to do with his cry.

  Shortly after midnight Angelica awoke to a different sound. Was it the wind in the pines, telling of autumn and separation? No: it was a large object being dragged along uncarpeted flooring. She heard grunts, also, and unpleasant words. Then she heard bumps. It was a crate, wasn’t it, perhaps with a frightened girl inside … It was a large wooden trough … After all, it was something ordinary, a suitcase, and it had reached the back stairs. It tumbled down.

  Toby slept. Angelica pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and sped down the back stairs herself. She opened the door to the second floor’s landing with its exquisitely carved railing. Myrrh was making her way down the rightmost branch of the grand staircase. She had her luggage in temporary control. What an old-fashioned valise it was, a hardened oblong with a chevron. It must have been elegant, once. Myrrh wore a yellow coat and a glazed brown hat, the outfit resembling a vile custard dessert she was in the habit of preparing. Her soliloquy had become louder. She reached the broad middle part of the staircase where the two large branches converged. She kicked her suitcase. It crashed into the front hall.

  Gran came out of the kitchen. Smoking, still in her daytime costume of pants and sweater, she looked up at her relative. “Myrrh,” she said. “What.”

  “Not another minute,” Myrrh said, clumping down the final stairs. “Decadence. Hospitality betrayed. Are youth and beauty always to have their way?”

  “The family is here for another two days, three at most.”

  “I am retiring to my brother’s house tonight.”

  Gran puffed. “The arrangement is that you will stay here for the summer. As always.”

  “Funk the arrangement.”

  “Fuck. The first bus isn’t until six o’clock.”

  “I am leaving this sinkhole now. I will walk if necessary.”

  Silence.

  “Do you hear my words, Grace?”

  Silence.

  “I am capable of waking up the entire dissolute, spoiled-rotten household, aswim in its liquidity—”

  Gran sighed. Her gaze rested on Myrrh, then traveled upward to Angelica, then traveled upward farther. “Girls! Get back to bed.” Angelica looked over her shoulder in time to see three bedroom doors close, her own parents’ last—she got a glimpse of Mama’s interested dark eyes. Gran now glared at Angelica. “Shoes.”

  Angelica descended the stairs, edged around Myrrh, ran into the kitchen. Another cigarette smoldered there. She stubbed it out, found her deck shoes, returned to the hall. Gran tossed her something. She caught the something—the keys to the Volvo.

  She had never driven at night, but it turned out to be easy to slip through the black-lacquer woods. There were some silver filaments—pine needles picked out by the moon. The long road ahead of them, their road, was soft and gray, like the dust in the fringe of the scarf on the piano. Would Russian prepositions be sensible? There were about a hundred tenses, she’d heard: the iterative, the durative, the … They reached the two-lane highway. In the back the elderly women were silent, the suitcase upended between them like a shared suitor. They reached the town.

  “Où doit-on aller?” Angelica asked her grandmother.

  “Après la gare, au droit.”

  “Cut the frog talk,” Myrrh said, her voice piercing Angelica’s nape. “Yid. Incesticator. Won’t anyone outside do?”

  “Myrrh,” Angelica wailed.

  “Exocrat!”

  “Turn right here,” Gran said. “Here!” and Angelica had to step on the brake, and reverse, and go backward. Finally she was able to turn. A few hundred yards along this road was a sign—BILL’S CABINS—and an office with a porch where a weak bulb burned. A narrow figure appeared under the bulb.

  Gran opened her window. “Bill?”

  “Miss Larcom?”

  “Here’s Myrrh, for a night. She’ll take the 6:00 a.m.” She thrust some bills at Myrrh. “For the cabin and the bus ticket.” Myrrh dragged her suitcase out of the car and slammed the door and passed in front of the headlights—head bent under the hat, shoulders rounded within the coat: a figure she’d like to draw, Angelica thought, and she’d leave the drawing untitled and some shrewd gallery owner would call it Exile. Myrrh stopped at the porch.

  “Cabin three,” Bill said.

  “Okay,” Myrrh said.

  “Drive,” Gran said.

  The ride home was shorter than the ride there—an eternal truth of the space-time continuum, Toby had once pointed out. Angelica and her grandmother went into the kitchen and sat down at the oak table. Gran turned off the lamp and lit a cigarette. Angelica handed Gran the keys, which caught the dull light from the window. The shadowy room slowly revealed its known treasures—pewter in a cupboard, the old stove with its cobalt pilot, some revolutionary’s portrait, several upended brooms flaring from an umbrella holder.


  “All in all,” Gran said without preamble, “a continued liaison would be a great deal of trouble. For you, for him, for all of us. Your great-grandfather didn’t rescue his line so it could get tangled up with itself like rotten old lace, like some altar cloth from Antwerp. I suppose I mean Bruges.”

  “Bruges, yes.” Angelica swallowed. “You are part of the lace now.”

  “Not noticeably,” Gran said. “The Larcom influence has not made itself felt.”

  Was that any wonder? The Larcoms had no golden-age ancestors, no diamonds hidden in coats, no displacements, no rebirths, no tragedies. No money.

  Angelica said: “Consensual incest is not considered a crime.”

  “I believe you are quoting Toby. We’re not talking about incest as criminal. Funk that. We’re talking about incest as undutiful. Broadening the group to insure its survival—that is your responsibility, yours and your coevals.” She lit a new cigarette, and in the flame of the match her eyes gleamed, the whites white, the irises almost white. “You will tire of this sooner or later,” she said. “Tire of it now, beloved daughter of my daughter.”

  For sixteen years she had addressed Angelica by name only. The sudden endearment—a declaration, really—was worth ten of Gramp’s long-winded blessings. What a rich phrase. You could live a life on the income it yielded.