When Henry was being stoned by boys in Harlem, undergoing the clerical equivalent of a nervous breakdown, was it God who pulled him out of the soup, or the fact that he had inherited Conrad Lieber’s iron constitution? How had God kept Henry on the hook for so many years? Had He revealed Himself again, given Henry a peep, peeled off a glove, dropped a gauze scarf, unzipped, flashed His countenance? While Henry and I were courting, telling each other the story of our lives, I asked him these questions. How many times had he heard the Voice in the foxhole? “It never happened again,” he answered, “or perhaps it did and I was so tied up I missed it.” Season after season Henry prayed to a drawn black curtain. The curtain never opened. No magic show was staged for his benefit; nor did he expect one. “Prayer is not a slug,” he said. “God is not a slot machine.” I honored my suitor’s persistence and his courage. He was hungry for the supernatural, but he curbed his appetite. Gardeners like me had it easier than religious believers. Most seeds would sprout if they got enough sunlight and water. Nature made a better idol than the Christian god: she was just as theatrical and infinitely more generous.
Chapter Three
I lived with my mother, Emily, until I married Henry Lieber. There was a father, or the absence of a father, who died when I was seven and my sister, Hannah, whose name means “the favored one,” was nine. When I think about my father, Francis Whitman, I summon up an image of closed doors: the door to his bedroom, the door to his workshop in the barn, the door to his hospital room. Francis Whitman was a master cabinetmaker and woodworker, an unforgiving perfectionist in matters of craft and aesthetics. He resembled the furniture he designed and built in his workshop: very clean, unadorned, and offering little comfort. Francis restored antique furniture for historic houses and museums all over New England. These commissions were his bread and butter, but not his avocation. His original work was sought after by modern architects, especially his series of unmatched side chairs in Ceylonese ebony and his free-standing cylindrical bookcases mounted on casters.
Emily and Francis moved to Dry Falls from Portland after her parents died, leaving them their house and its contents. My grandfather Beaulac was descended from Huguenot lumbermen, exiles from the persecutions of Cardinal Richelieu, who fled from France to Cape Breton Island in 1630. Ruined by a pine blight that swept the Atlantic Provinces, my mother’s people fled again to Maine in the late 1870s and remained in Portland manufacturing asbestos shingles. Our house on Rough Lane was my grandparents’ summer residence and later their place of retirement until they died within a month of each other. A simple clapboard farmhouse, it was full of incongruous appointments and ornamentation, collected by Great-grandfather Beaulac as his fortunes improved, reflecting the taste of a late-Victorian merchant. Francis Whitman, with his spartan rules for beauty, was required to live among these heavy, old-fangled objects, not one of them the genuine, antique article, each one copied, or mistranslated, from an earlier period.
Almost immediately Francis moved into a cell-like, high-windowed back room, used by my grandmother for airing household linen. The room is still as he left it, with its cot and candlestand, and pegs on the wall for hanging his pared-down wardrobe. As soon as I was old enough for school, he left the house and set up separate quarters in the heated cow barn. Later on, when my sister, Hannah, was in a friendly mood, we would walk through the house playing our favorite game, trying to guess which object had driven Francis out. Was it the alabaster lamp with crimson fringe on its shade? The andirons topped by smiling Cheshire cat faces? Francis maintained that the furniture drained him of inspiration. As long as he lived in the house he did ugly work. As soon as he moved out, his business became successful. My mother would smile her uncertain smile at his eccentricity. Her eyes were so cloudy and distorted by her thick-lensed spectacles that none of us could read her expression or measure her reaction, although everyone seated at the table or around the fireplace suspected that Francis’s barbs were intended for the heiress to the furniture.
When my father started to grow the tumor that took him out, he kept us ignorant of his condition and its prognosis. He cooked for himself in the barn during the last year of his life, and left my mother’s share of his earnings in unmarked envelopes in the mailbox. I remember seeing him wave to me from a window when I was outside building a snowman, and once he came to the kitchen porch, walking with a cane, to ask for another pillow and an extra blanket.
Late that April Emily took us to Raymond to buy new sneakers. On the way back Ellis Smalley from down the lane hailed the car and stopped us. He had seen an ambulance coming from our house with its sirens screaming. We turned around and drove straight to North Windham, to the only local hospital. The head nurse told us the patient had requested no visitors. We went back every day for a week and camped in the waiting room. When he finally lapsed into a coma, the night nurse took pity on us. She said we could stay in his room as long as he remained unconscious. With his prominent beaked nose, thin lips, and smooth, domed forehead, he looked as he had always looked, self-contained and indifferent. Francis never woke up to acknowledge us or dismiss us. He died by himself while we were downstairs in the cafeteria.
Some widows begin to live when their husbands die. My mother laid down one cross and took up another. She buried Francis on the sixth of May, 1942, the day the Allies surrendered at Corregidor. She was forty years old, graying, sallow, and self-neglectful. It was lucky she had money from my grandparents, because Francis had none to leave her. The war was both far away in Europe and the Pacific and nearby on the coast of Maine at the navy shipyards. We lived forty miles from Portland, out of range if Axis planes bombed our fleet; but we had a war of our own close at hand, a homely version of the big one. Part of Francis lived on in the body of my angry sister, who had her father’s curved beak and high forehead and the coarse black hair inherited from the Whitmans.
When my sister was in her mid-teens, I dreaded coming down to breakfast. My mother and sister would already be stationed in the kitchen, both of them vying to do tasks best done by one person. Their backs were turned when I finally entered the room. They would be standing shoulder to shoulder, minding the toaster. When the timer pinged and the toasted bread rose up, each one would capture a slice and start to butter it. Sometimes they grabbed for the same piece of toast. Hannah would strike my mother’s arm to make her release it. Emily cried out but retained her grip on the toast. Hannah pulled harder, tearing the piece in half. They would start to argue, a longstanding, frequent argument, over which was the thriftiest method of buttering toast. Emily scraped the top of the stick with the blade of a knife. Hannah sliced a pat, let it begin to melt, and spread the liquid. At the end of the meal, they rose to clear the table. Without fail, they reached for the same dish simultaneously. Just as inevitably, a glass or a cup tipped over; and Hannah would blame Emily’s awkwardness or Emily’s eyesight.
No one bothered with me. Their business was with each other. I ate my meals to a background of bickering, left the table unnoticed, and thus avoided helping in the kitchen. As I made my escape, my mother and sister might be squabbling about the garbage for the compost, whether to leave the orange rinds whole or cut them in pieces. Hannah might have opened the icebox and be running an inspection, quizzing my mother about the age of the various leftovers, little mounds of this and that plopped in cereal or soup bowls, covered with waxed paper fastened tight with a rubber band.
They lived in a world of desperate struggles over everyday matters—the conservation of butter, the way to fold towels, the depth of water in the bathtub. Hannah stalked my mother like a bird dog, leaving her no privacy. Emily took refuge outside but still Hannah followed her, pointing out branches weighed down by snow and in danger of breaking or places where the deer had chewed the bark off the yew trees.
One mild day in April, Hannah took it into her head to prune the clematis, the Duchess of Edinburgh, whose double white flowers bloom all summer. The Duchess requires only the lightest shaping, or she
will not flower; but Hannah had cut the vines to the ground before Emily caught her. I heard such a howling I thought one of them had been injured. From the window I saw them wrestling for possession of the pruning shears. Suddenly Emily broke free and threw herself against the trellis. Hannah tried to pull her away. Emily held on tighter. I had learned over time that my role in these family disturbances was the same as that of a chambermaid who opens the door on two lovers. Like the maid, I would retreat until it was safe to come back. As I withdrew from the window I saw them on their knees, embracing. Broken sections of the trellis were lying on the ground around them.
My mother grew quieter and spent all her time in her garden. In her forty-fifth year she took up the subject of genealogy. Her sense of herself was steadily frittering away, so she began to construct an independent identity, building on facts and stories she had heard from her family. There was a branch of the Huguenot Society of America in town on Main Street. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, when the Society was open to the public, she pored over books in its well-stocked but badly lit library. Finally I ventured to ask her what she was researching. Her face lit up at once in response to my questions. When Emily smiled, years, if not cares, dropped away, making her look like a young person burdened with worries. Interest and encouragement caught her entirely off guard, releasing a grateful flow of talk, breathy, eager, and unpunctuated. She ticked off the Beaulacs who had died for the Protestant cause, fighting at the side of their leader, Prince Henry of Navarre. The list was so long that I wondered how any Beaulacs had been left to carry the name and the faith down the intervening centuries. One of these ancestors came to life for me by the manner of his death. In a barn at Vassy, a town outside Paris, a company of Huguenots had met to worship in secret. The king’s men set fire to the barn, burning everyone in it, among them a boy of fifteen, Antoine Ariste Beaulac. My distant cousin was exactly my age when the Catholics murdered him. After that I stopped asking my mother about her research. There might be something unhealthy about being related to Huguenots.
When Hannah was seventeen she became engaged to a Huguenot descendant. She was failing three subjects and quit high school in December of her senior year. Bobby Court was a tongue-tied young man who sold sporting equipment and acted as a wilderness guide who took groups on white-water canoe trips. Hannah was at loose ends and Bobby qualified as an older man, since he was over twenty-one. No man of any age had ever paid so much attention to her, although Bobby’s courtship was conducted in silence, for the most part, and consisted in following her around and mutely adoring her. Hannah’s friends were envious of her engagement, and soon began to think she was romantic and daring for quitting school, instead of an academic washout. No one looked very far into the future, least of all Emily. The young couple planned to live over the sporting goods store, which was right in town, within walking distance.
The wedding date was set for mid-October, on Bobby’s twenty-second birthday. Hannah had a good word for everyone, including my mother, although of course they locked horns over issues like a train for the wedding gown. The war had been over for five years, but fabrics were still costly. Hannah had never worn a dress except under protest. Now she turned into an expert on fashion, arguing the merits of satin, peau de soie, or faille; cream, blush-pink, or oyster; stand-up collars versus portrait necklines. It was a good thing she settled on Grandmother Beaulac’s wedding dress, the least expensive solution, under the circumstances, since the invitations had been printed and paid for and could not be refunded.
The bridegroom did not survive to see his wedding day. In the Huguenot tradition, Bobby Court expired before his time. He died in the open, by the banks of the Kennebec River, under empty blue skies at a Court family Labor Day picnic. The cause of death was an air bubble in his bloodstream. I was present at his death. Bobby was sitting in an old canvas director’s chair holding a full plate of food, bright orange carrot slaw, charred spareribs, purple blueberry relish, yellow cornbread, dark green olives, pale green celery sticks. When Bobby pitched backwards, I thought the canvas had ripped. The Courts hung onto their furniture, indoor and outdoor, until it constituted a hazard to human safety. Bobby went down. For a moment his full plate was airborne. Each item of food left the plate in an orderly file, like planes taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. My only view of Bobby was the treadless soles of his sneakers. Hannah began to laugh because Bobby had a history of pratfalls. Katrina Court was annoyed by the breakage and the waste of food. “Get up, Bobby,” she directed. “Thank goodness I didn’t use the best china.”
Living with my sister after Bobby Court’s burial was like living with a pound dog, a creature who snarled and bit and came to no one. Hannah asked for Bobby’s clothes to remember him by and the Courts could not refuse her, although they thought it would have been more suitable if she had wanted his watch or his silver baby cup. She dressed in his clothes, her only keepsakes, which bore stains from food spilled by Bobby, holes and tears inflicted by Bobby on expeditions, and retained, in the case of woolen garments particularly, a sharp, musty reminiscence of his wilderness exertions.
Hannah slept in the house and shut herself up in Francis’s workshop in the daytime. It would be more accurate to say that she spent the night in the house, since we knew from her complaining that she usually lay awake until the sun rose. Like many bad sleepers, Hannah was proud of her affliction. It was a mark of sensitivity, like her white skin, her heavy, peaked eyebrows, and her broad, flat fingertips.
No artist of any merit gets a full night’s rest, and Hannah decided, at age nineteen, to become an artist. Francis Whitman had been only a craftsman, however gifted. Hannah took up sculpture, although she worked in wood, like her father. She started making fan-shaped pieces inlaid with strips of painted wood, and went on to fashion objects from the natural world, snail shells, eggs, and skeletons of birds and rodents. As a child, Hannah had watched her father at his workbench, or tinkered in a corner with a pocket knife and scraps of lumber. Francis never spared the time to teach her, but he let her stay as long as she was quiet.
Without instruction or encouragement from her father, she had no confidence in herself and worked with difficulty. Her motivation came in fits and starts. When she could not work, she paced the studio, smoking cigarettes. Sometimes she let me come in when I brought her a sandwich for lunch or called her to supper. If I picked up one of her pieces and admired it, she grabbed it out of my hands and said it was too sentimental, or too illustrative, or like something in a museum shop. Her successes made her angrier than her failures, even more aggressive than her usual disposition, since she worked in large part to gain revenge on the parent who had ignored her.
With her mind full of conflict and partially blocked inspiration, my sister was a textbook candidate for insomnia. When she stretched out in bed on her back, preparing for sleep, her imagination broke loose and started to ride her. Instead of turning her wakefulness to profit, making sketches or paper models for future sculptures, she fastened her whole attention on the blanketing darkness, listening for sounds and watching for shapes and movement. Someone else might have chosen to turn on a lamp; but Hannah was inclined to act against her interests. Insisting she could not sleep in a lighted room, she not only lowered the blinds but also drew the curtains. She maintained that coffee “acted like a sleeping pill,” and drank a strong brew before bedtime without adding milk. By loading the dice in favor of a wakeful night, she managed to accomplish another unconscious objective. If she woke up late, blurred and heavy from accumulated fatigue, she could hardly be expected to work productively in her studio.
Lack of sleep and prolonged confinement in darkness can lead to a state of sensory deprivation. In this condition, as I have recently learned from my reading, a subject is apt to hallucinate, to see things or hear things. Hallucinations are perceived by the subject as real, unlike delusions, where he or she may be aware they are only imaginary. One night my mother and I were awakened by an uproar—footstep
s running in the hallways, voices shouting from one floor to another. While I lay huddled under the covers, too frightened to move, my bedroom door burst open, hitting the wall. The figure at the threshold snapped on the overhead light. In the yellow glare stood a startled young policeman.
The house was swarming with policemen, weapons at the ready, answering a call about a break-in at number one Rough Lane. Hannah was downstairs in her bathrobe directing operations, ordering them to look for broken windows in the pantry and the cellar. When nothing was found, she accused them of being too hasty and made them retrace their steps, not once, but several times. Emily smoothed matters over by serving them cocoa and pound cake while Hannah continued to search the house by herself, insisting she’d been wide awake when she’d heard glass shattering. When the policemen were gone, she turned her bitterness on my mother. “You took their side. You let them think I was crazy.”
Hannah left us on an ordinary day in early July, while Emily was taking some pink daylilies over to Ruth Hiram in exchange for a rooted cutting from her Thérèse Bugnet rosebush. I was working at Silver’s Coffee Shop in the mornings. It was Ernie Silver who taught me to cook, not my female relatives. He started me out frosting sweet rolls and chopping salad ingredients; soon afterwards he showed me how to stew a chicken for pies and how to bake a meatloaf according to his secret recipe, with oatmeal instead of bread crumbs and a blue cheese surprise in the center. Ernie often gave me leftovers to take home. I was hurrying back on my bicycle, carrying yesterday’s corn-and-lima bean pudding in the basket, since both my mother and my sister forgot to eat lunch unless I put it in front of them. I reheated the casserole and dished up a plate for Hannah, who had moved into the barn, like her father before her.
Incubus Page 3
