by Lauren Groff
Then the pigeons burst into town, the wind from their wings blowing shingles off houses, bringing sheets from the lines. The blue sky drowned in orange and black feathers. The women ran indoors, arms above their heads to shield their bonnets from scat. Boys and men ran to the fields by the lake, faces shining with glee. Whatever they threw brought down a bird. Sticks, stones, shoes, brooms, butter churns, toy soldiers, planes, lathes, rolling pins. Men shot once and dropped three beasts. A strange-looking boy with a wandering eye waved a scythe in the air, and when he pulled it down, he’d pierced six birds in their still-fluttering breasts. Clothes and faces were splattered with blood and waste. Remarkable Prettybones, Duke’s housekeeper, swooped like an old bat, catching birds in her bare hands, breaking their necks, stuffing them in floursacks. The old Clinton cannon, the Cricket, was dragged out. With a boom rolling off the hills and a great huzzah, a buckshot of old nails exploded the brains of a thousand pigeons.
When the great mass of birds flew back over the hills like a black mist, there were pigeons knee-deep, some sobbing like babes. The settlers, glutted, left them there to suffer.
I had watched this all, sick to death. I couldn’t move. The pigeons had come, every few years, falling on the land like a prayer. For the first time, they had been welcomed with a massacre. I crushed the head of a bloody bird beneath my boot to put it out of its misery, and anger rose dark and strong in me. The waste. The needless pain.
Duke was the one who allowed this, the massacre. He had laughed and laughed. He had suggested the cannon. He had carried his smallest child, pinch-faced four-year-old Jacob, on his shoulders. The boy was big-eyed, bloodied, flushed, and smiling.
There was a terrible pain in my chest, and my old friend Sagamore had sunk to his knees, gasping. Across the quieted killing fields, Duke saw Sagamore kneeling and the joy fell from his face. He let Jacob down, sent him into Remarkable’s skirts. He approached. I took one step forward and kept my eye on my old friend’s tomahawk. Despite what I felt for Duke Temple, despite that I could have killed him just then, I saw his sweet, weakly little wife Elizabeth in my mind’s eye, and I kept my hand from my rifle.
Duke came toward us and bowed his head. Chief Chingachgook, he began, but Sagamore looked at him with such heat Duke stopped. You may have the buck you shot, Davey, said Duke, but when that did not soften my old friend’s face, he said, And may I offer you some money in recompen—
I quieted him with a violent motion. We’re leaving, I said. Tonight. I had decided that instant. We’re going, I said, to live with Sagamore’s son, Uncas, in the westy wilderness of this state.
Sagamore looked at me, and though he did not like English he understood it. It was perhaps with relief that he nodded. I did not know then what I knew later, about Uncas and Cora, about Noname, their beautiful daughter. And when I turned to Duke, I did not know we’d return. I said a thing then that perhaps I should not have said.
I looked up into Duke Temple’s great, broad face and cursed him, I said, and may your town and your family be cursed, Duke Temple, for seven generations, for all your sins. Then Sagamore stood and we walked away together. I remembered enough from those long Sundays of my childhood, my father raging on the pulpit, my tailbone aching from the hard pew, that nothing in this good world could have stirred me to look back.
15
Vivienne’s Superhero Side
I HAD ABOUT four hours of sleep before the passing tourist trolley rolled by on Lake Street, and the guide’s voice infiltrated my dreams, saying…off to the left here is Averell Cottage, where in Marmaduke Temple’s time there was a tannery…I rolled to the telephone to dial Clarissa before my eyes even opened, and when I moved, my brain felt like a small pickled beast sloshing in the jar of my skull. My friend picked up the phone on the first ring, saying, “What,” her voice already tight and angry.
“Clarissa,” I said, but that was apparently the starting pistol; Clarissa was off to the races. “Oh, Willie, you are freaking dead,” she said. “Dead. Don’t you ever go behind my back and decide what’s best for me without talking to me first, ever again. Jesus Christ. I woke up this morning, and Sully’s like, ‘Don’t worry, Willie’s coming soon, we talked last night and she promised’ and I just about went ballistic on his ass.” There was the sound of a door slamming on Clarissa’s end, and I could imagine Sully, red-faced in fury, stalking out of the apartment building. “Don’t you think,” she said, “that if I wanted you to come I would have asked you to come? Didn’t you stop to think that the last thing I need right now is to babysit someone even more of a wreck than I am right now? Don’t you think that what I need is some freaking peace and quiet? What gives you the right to think for me? That’s all I want to know. What gives you the fucking right?”
It was not easy for me to be quiet through her harangue, but the image of Clarissa before my eyes, tiny, pale, her little face knotted in fury, only made me say through clenched teeth, “Being your best friend, just maybe? Relieving Sully, who’s about to have a breakdown, maybe? Or maybe the fact that you need me?”
“I don’t need you,” she said. “I’m doing fine.”
“Right,” I sneered. “Homeopathy. I’m coming today. You can’t stop me.” I swung my legs out of the bed but was instantly so dizzy I had to lie back again.
When Clarissa let out her breath it was in a long, slow hiss. “Wilhelmina Upton,” she said, “I love you very much. You’re my best friend. But, dammit, if you insist on coming back to San Francisco in the state you’re in right now, I’ll be forced to tell Vi something that you probably don’t want her to know. If you know what I mean. Miss Audiodidact.”
My stomach roiled even more at this, my head throbbed, my tongue felt sickly furred. “You wouldn’t,” I said.
“I would,” said Clarissa, grimly.
“You wouldn’t,” I said again, but I knew she would. The only thing I could never tell Vi was a thing only Clarissa knew about: how, in college, in lieu of having to tell my mother about a tuition hike that wasn’t covered by my scholarship, plus credit card debt rapidly deepening by dint of mere proximity to spendthrift Clarissa, I began a small side-business called Audiodidact in “academic paper transcription.” This meant that slackers with enough money to afford my prices would hand me a microcassette on which they blabbered mindlessly, ostensibly on their assigned paper topics, which I would then “transcribe” by doing their research for them and actually writing the papers. Only once did I get a B on some freshman lacrosse player’s paper—I was sick with mono—and had to give the money back. It was such a slick deal that every writing center at each of the five colleges in the area trumpeted my business as if it were totally legitimate, and I’m sure they thought it was. Vi, however, would never have believed it. If she knew, it would be the bitterest disappointment of her life: I may not be able to give you money, Sunshine, she always said, but I can give you brains and I can give you morals. With my business, I used both badly, and I knew she wouldn’t forgive me for it. She would look at me differently forever afterward. It would break both of our hearts.
“Clarissa,” I said now. “Nasty, nasty. Blackmail?”
“Yup,” she said. “I can’t do it, Willie. You’ve got Vi to help you out. I’ve got Sully. I’ll give you a call later. My soap’s on right now,” and she slammed down the phone.
I was ill, yes; sick at not being able to go to Clarissa. But the other feeling growing in my gut was a lightness, a brightness; perhaps (a little bit) of relief. I fell asleep again, and when I awoke at four o’clock that afternoon, I knew it was Vi’s day off because she was vacuuming and kept knocking the machine against my door. The birds outside were trying to sing themselves over the racket, and when I awoke, it was to a thumping roar pricked with shrill little chirping, such terrific noise it made my stomach churn. When Vi shut off the vacuum to move it elsewhere, I heard her chuckling to herself.
“What?” I called out. “You think you’re clever?”
My door opene
d and my mother put her head inside. “Yes,” she said. And then she saw me, small and pale under my canopy and in my heap of pillows, and said, “Oh, heavens, you look horrible.”
“Thanks,” I said. Vi came over to my bed and sat beside me.
“Are you sick?” she began, but she must have caught the scent of residual alcohol on my skin because she froze, and her face fell. “Oh, Willie,” she said. “You drank? What about. You know,” and she looked away.
“The Lump?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “I don’t know.” I considered telling her that it was no use; there was no way I was ready to be a parent; that I had to forget about the Lump and worry about everything else. Then I considered the cross she wore on a thong so long it brushed my bedspread, and a little inner devil poked me into saying, maliciously, “How was your little sleepover party last night, Vi? Did you have a good time?”
My mother cocked her eyebrow and made a tight little face. “Grand,” she said, dryly. “Not as fun as yours, I guarantee.”
I thought of Felcher and winced. “Mine wasn’t fun at all.” Then I thought of Clarissa, my half-sober conversation with Sully, and said, “Vi, I have to talk to you. I called Clarissa back.” My mother’s face lit up, and with her smile the flesh around her eyes rose, and she looked far younger than she normally did; she now looked like a woman of forty-six, her actual age.
“How is she?” she said, in her softest voice. “My little Clarissa.”
As I thought of how to answer this, a knot of tourists passed on the street, and they were so loud I could hear their voices all the way in the back of the house, where my room was. At least four men seemed to be arguing; at least one child was crying; I thought I could hear the slow cataract of two women’s voices as they complained. All the happy tourists are gone in August; in August, there are the angry tourists, the frustrated ones, the hot and sticky hopeless ones. Boston fans always came in August. I waited until they were gone and said, “She stopped doing her antibody therapy, Vi. The one I told you about.”
The smile fell from my mother’s face. “What?” she said.
I sat up in bed. “Clarissa is going homeopathic, and now she’s in big trouble.”
My mother frowned. After a while, she said, “What can that girl be thinking?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Not too much, I think. Sully asked me to go back to San Francisco soon, to help him take care of her. I think he’s so overwhelmed he’s about to break. It’s kind of scary.”
“What are you waiting for?” she said, pulling the covers off me. “Go.”
“I know,” I said. “But there’s a problem. I called Clarissa this morning, and she refused to let me come. She was furious. She said I’d be more of a strain on her than anything, and I should just stay here and let you fix me. That I was as much of a mess as she was.”
My mother looked at me, and drew a hand over her worn face. In the light from the window, her skin looked mottled, pocked, and it sagged below her cheeks, as if weighted with beans. “Oh, Sunshine,” she said, slowly. “You should be with her, and yet I don’t think that she’s wrong. I just don’t think you should leave right now, I don’t think you’re healthy. Plus, if you left without knowing who your father was, just knowing that he was here, I think your brain would play its usual tricks on you. You’d have worse and worse thoughts about Templeton, about how every single man you ever met could have been your father. You’d start to hate it. You’d be scared off for good. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?”
“I know,” I said. “And I’m not sure I’d ever come back.”
My mother kicked off her slippers and crawled up the bed. She settled in beside me on the headboard and took my hand. “I couldn’t live with you never coming back,” she said. “This is your town, Willie. And I know you can’t give a whole town to your daughter, but your family has so much history here that you couldn’t not come back. You have to. You are a Temple in the best way. And you’ve always known I want you to move back here someday. Whether that’s when you retire at age seventy, or what, I don’t know. I just know this town needs a Temple to live here. You can’t hate Templeton. Now what should we do?”
For a while, we sat like this in the calm morning. I could feel my mother’s pulse in the meat of her hand, and it was strong and warm. “You could tell me who my father is,” I said. “Then I could go back to San Francisco and just deal with everything there. Break down Clarissa’s door if she locks it. Set up camp in her hallway. If you told me who he is.”
“I could,” she said. “Do you want me to?”
“No,” I said, surprising myself.
My mother seemed to have expected this, and I could feel her nodding beside me. “No,” she repeated. “You can’t just have it handed to you. I think you need to find out on your own. Otherwise, a little piece of you would never believe me.”
“Plus,” I said. “It keeps my mind off…things.”
“All right,” said Vi. “I’ll talk to Clarissa, see if she can change her mind on one or both counts. So,” she said, “where are you in the whole quest?”
I sighed and sat back against my pillows. “I just began looking into someone on the Hetty side called Cinnamon Averell Stokes Starkweather Sturgis Graves Peck.”
My mother whistled. “Now, that’s a name,” she said.
“Big-time player,” I said. “Five husbands. All dead. And I’m also looking on the legitimate side at Charlotte Franklin Temple. She’s Jacob Franklin Temple’s daughter. Novelist herself, I found out. Nom de plume of Silas Merrill. But I’m stalled out. No information on obscure Victorian ladies in the public record. Who knew?”
“Cinnamon,” my mother mused. “Charlotte.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure that if you keep just saying their names they’ll magically appear and bestow all their secrets upon us.”
“Charlotte and Cinnamon,” said my mother. “They sound so familiar.”
“Vi, now’s not the time to have one of your little flashbacks, all right? I’m sure they were just folk singers in your heyday or something. Don’t worry about it.”
But my mother had turned her face to me, and she was blinking quickly. “My gosh,” she said. “Wait here.” Then she lifted herself off the bed and hurried away over the house, down the long hallway, down the staircase, over the shaky floorboards of the entryway and into the Victorian wing of the house. I heard her go into the little room where she kept all of her books and paperwork, and laughed as I heard her run back upstairs, her great, heavy footsteps quick as a giant’s on the scent of an Englishman.
When she came back into the room, her face was flushed and she was almost pretty. She was waving a manila envelope so old that small flakes of it salted the ground around her. “Ta-da,” she cried. “I’m not insane.” She put the envelope in my lap and looked at me. “This is something my dad left when he died. I never opened it.”
I picked the envelope up and read in the elegant spidery script of my grandfather, September 14th, 1966. Correspondence of Cinnamon Averell Peck and Charlotte Franklin Temple. Do not open unless necessity forces you. Contents disturbing and painful. That was my grandfather’s voice from his little book, equally pompous and stern. I felt a wash of affection for that poor little man with his ingrown passions that he squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until they were sore.
Then I realized that this packet had never been read, that it had tempted my mother since Vi’s parents died, nearly thirty years ago.
“Vi?” I said. “You never opened this? With all your love of our family? Never?”
She frowned then at the ground. “No,” she said. “I knew my father, Sunshine. I just couldn’t do it. Besides,” she said. “I know all about Pandora.”
“Hm,” I said. “But in the myth in the Bible, it’s Eve who lets evil into the world.”
She gave me a little playful smack on the cheek. “Careful what you call a myth. And I don’t know,
I think we need a few more up-pity women in the world. Which,” she said, “brings me to my next point.”
“That is?” I said.
“Clarissa,” she said.
“God,” I said.
“Don’t blaspheme,” she said. “And don’t worry. I’m calling her.”
I watched as my mother lifted the old telephone and dialed the rotary dial. Without even a hello, she said into the receiver, “Well, if it isn’t Clarissa. I’ve got a great big bone to pick with you, darling, so you better listen up good now. I heard from a little birdy that you were just about to let yourself be a big, fat idiot, and go all alterna-nut on me, and not do your western medicine. I just have to say that since I want you around for a good while longer, I don’t think you should be doing that.”
She listened for a moment, then grinned and said, “Don’t you dare turn all tough-girl on me. I was the original Tough Girl and your imitation is piss-poor. Listen,” she said, and I watched my mother explain every issue to Clarissa, taking her arguments and turning them on their heads. I watched Vi as the sunshine crept across the ground, and spread up her thick legs, up her trunk, up her face until she was glowing, golden. She seemed to expand in a way that good people do when they’re being great. I listened until I knew my mother had, at last, convinced her. When Vi turned around and showed me two fingers, I understood that Clarissa had agreed to let me come in two weeks if she wasn’t better. I left the room with the envelope in my hands as Vi murmured and I stood in the hallway, feeling a vast and dark relief suck at me. I had time.
And then, before me, rose Vi’s face as it was on the day when I was twelve and Philip Tzara called me a bastard. We were at the gym, and it was after swim practice, and since it was nearly the summer, the sunset was drifting deep gold over the cornfield around the gym. This is what I remember: Philip and me doing the strange tough-mouthed little dance that was flirtation back then, our wet hair, the stretching shadows of the stalks, the excitement in my belly, me calling him Retard, he smirking, saying Whatever, you bastard, then that tremendous black bubble rising up in me. I was bigger than all the boys in my class, and I decked him easily. He lay, stunned, on the ground, in the sudden silence of the kids around us. I’d split one of his teeth in two and cut my skin on it. I couldn’t tell whose blood was whose.
