by Gary Amdahl
And he was able “to be in love” with Vera.
Which was not to say that he was free of his creamy blue-veined marble character, his personality of privilege and its habitual weaknesses, its routines of intellectual passion—the nearly impervious Charles Minot-ness that was inseparable from the dictates of his ceaselessly and excellently-trained brain and the receipt of constant confirmation from all those other brains around it—of the reality he had counter-trained himself to disavow for a decade. He was not free of the necessary falseness of reality, not free of the stage, but wished to be. He embodied this wish as “Vera.”
He found as well that he was becoming altogether welcoming of alcohol and narcotics and firearms—things that had never had lives of their own, things that had been present, certainly, but only unremarkably so, in a family whose patriarch was not only a Westerner, but one who had been shot twice representing law and order and nearly been blown to pieces in a natural disaster. He was susceptible to “thrills,” to “somnolence” or at least to the ideas of same, to inner thrills, if he could put it that way, and superhuman manifestations of same—thanks to Vera, who had her own frank but mysterious need of them in her drugged entanglements, and thanks to the fact that someone had tried and nearly succeeded in blowing him, Father’s boy, after all, to pieces in a political disaster—shredding, if truth be told, his nerves once and for all. Vera knew, had known for some time, long before she met Charles, how perilously close to sudden death she—everybody—was living. But that was remedial, not mysterious, a superficial explanation, not a need. When she talked about it, when she felt she could and wanted to talk about it, she could only speak of home and exile. The world is the dark and our home is the light. Evil wants to return to its home in the light just as much as good does. Good and evil was useless distinction, if not an altogether maliciously false one. Charles said she was a gnostic and that he wanted to learn the gnosis from her. Which of course made her laugh and cry and laugh and cry, and drink and fuck and take on a reckless attitude to work that could, at some point in one of a hundred projected futures, become dangerous. That would.
But if there was nothing you could do about it, did you want to talk about it? Or not.
Vera struggled with what she quickly chose to call her “addiction”—though to what, precisely, could not be ascertained—far more desperately than Charles did—she had been at it longer, he supposed, but he was better at it because his nerves, he now saw so clearly, had been ruined when he was a child, and it made him weak and sick. Vera was not sick and weak or fragile, but she spoke more and more of a friend who had died in New York three years earlier, Rosemary, who was simply a fragile person, talking as if Rosemary had been a part of her that had suffered and died to allow Vera to suffer and live. It was a variation not at all lost on Charles of the understudy who had been onstage where Vera had been meant to be. Rosemary had a story about her father, who worked on a match factory, toiling over phosphorus fumes that had made his bones brittle: Rosemary said she saw her father step awkwardly from a curb, saw the twisted ankle break, saw her father falling and cracking to pieces, and it seemed to Vera more and more likely every time she told the story. She had left Muscatine and buttons for Willimantic and thread, and a strike that was getting national attention. Body and soul were strung together with Willimantic thread and wrapped in smoke. It was possible Rosemary was some kind of otherworldly creature, a goddess, even, Vera didn’t know. But she clung to her as the world wove the fabric of affliction ever more densely.
“We lived,” she told Charles, “in a worker’s paradise. That was how I liked to put it, it made Rosemary laugh, and that was all there was to it. We were just teenaged girls, and we liked to laugh. We called ourselves ‘The Champions of Work’ and we whistled a great deal. The owners were in fact kind and generous people, decent, intelligent people, and were famous for those qualities in all the mill towns of southern New England. They built an opera house in which works by all the greatest composers were performed: Verdi, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Ponchielli, Puccini, Giordano, Cilea, Catalani, Leoncavallo, Mascagni—oh, I could go on and on!”
“You will forgive me if I don’t quite believe you.”
“I remember German and French names as well—tip of my tongue, can’t quite get to them, though I am sure I will remember before I get to the end of this story. We never saw a performance, of course, but the owners made sure that singers with incredibly loud voices and insanely gorgeous clothing provided free concerts in the parts of the mill that weren’t so noisy you couldn’t hear even the loudest tenor wailing directly into your ear. Once there was a free concert by the lake in Coventry, on a Sunday. There were many, many people of Italian ancestry working in the mill (myself included) who could appreciate the lyrics just as they were sung, but we were proud of the diversity of our workforce: it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that we came from the four corners of the earth. The owners, I know for a fact, subsidized the emigration of peoples from fourteen nations, including Syria, Borneo, and Patagonia. We enjoyed exotic foods, vibrant festivals celebrating ancient and obscure rites, and the glorious singing I have already mentioned, the singing of songs that made the whistling we engaged in while working something entirely out of the ordinary. We sang, too, once I’d taught the words to her, seeing who could sing the loudest. She fancied herself Italian, and could have passed for Italian in all but the most rigorous of audits. Rosemary said she knew nothing of the circumstances of her birth. I could not imagine such a life. I could not believe it was true—but of course she was right: none of us can know. I was not at all sure but I think I envied her: all that trackless solitude where there was nothing for me but immensities of architecture. She did believe that the man and the woman with whom she lived in the earliest years in Willimantic were in fact her mother and father. The father had been employed for several years as a matchmaker, which meant that he worked unshielded over great tubs of white phosphorus, the fumes of which in that cramped and dirty, unventilated shop rose up and hung in the air like the ghosts of all the tyrants of history and prehistory, or like fallen angels from which even evil had been wasted, leaving only a radiant, naturally occurring poison. With his head in these clouds twelve hours a day and his hands in the tubs dipping and plucking thousands of little sticks, he began to come apart. At first made only nervous and irritable, he suffered headaches and losses of memory that he knew were so near and yet gone, she said, that they reduced him to weeping. Then he became simple and docile and yet somehow witty, full all of a sudden and for no reason with gems of wisdom. He spoke in a kind of singsong that often rhymed. As his brain became desiccated, so did his bones become brittle. His jaw rotted and his teeth fell out, and one day, waiting for the Sunday excursion train to Coventry where we planned to sit by the lake and listen to the lapping water and hopefully the opera stars too, holding Rosemary’s little hand in his frail yet still warm and big own, he stepped off the curb, found the street further below than he’d imagined, and broke his ankle when he touched down. In a kind of chain reaction, the bones of his left leg broke, and when he swung himself wildly to the right, the bones of that foot and leg snapped also. He collapsed in a bloody, powdery heap, pelvis, backbone, and neck cracking in swift succession. Finally his poor skull shivered like an egg-shell, leaving smiling face and cooling brain to rest softly on the cobbles of the street. Thus, at any rate, did my Rosemary narrate the tragedy, the tale of the matchmaker sick with phossy jaw who broke his leg stepping off the curb: many times and in many places, for many different reasons. She did not understand what had happened. Neither did I. She did not understand where her father had gone, nor why. Neither did I.”
“Nor I. Even though he is still here.”
“She blamed herself and yet could not understand where she had sinned or erred. And in what way, exactly, was she being held responsible? She had been a very small child and the truth, she suspected, was that she remembered nothing, that some other kind of activity
was taking place in her mind, that, perhaps, an agency representing some other kind of reality, dreams, for example, that wasn’t so difficult a concept, that an agent of dreams was operating while she was awake. It was dismissed in all but the most credulous quarters—even by sympathetic listeners—as apocryphal, as propaganda, propaganda of a different sort of deed, a story of a life, understood and made to function as a folk legend to comfort and amuse the weaker and more poor, who cannot understand the actual workings of alchemy, the medical arts, and the large-scale drift of money, the things you were born knowing, my darling Chuckie!—but believed devoutly by a few, myself included, who claimed to have seen it happen. I will swear to it if need be. And when, some time later, perhaps as short a time as a few days, perhaps as long a time as a year—Rosemary could not say and neither can I—her stricken, suffering, perhaps overly sensitive mother in turn died—whether of causes natural or unnatural, by her own hand or the hand of God, her story too is ambiguous—all that Rosemary could find in their meager belongings to tell her who they were, now that the testimony of their presence no longer sufficed, was a last will. It was written in a shockingly violent, nearly indecipherable scrawl and blot, and we treated it, in yet another of our games, as a treasure map. Places of birth were stated—Lower East Side and Canarsie—but believed to be false. More suitable nativities were imagined. Ages could be puzzled out with arithmetic. Her father, Rosemary calculated, was twenty, her mother nineteen. Lines at the bottom of the document, where their names would likely have been entered in less violent circumstances, were left blank. Rosemary thought she sewed it into her skirt. Wandering about the town, she found herself at the well. That was how she put it: ‘Mother died and I wandered off to a public space where I might be afforded some amusement.’ After drinking, looking around, drinking again, daydreaming out loud and drinking finally to soothe a throat now quite raw from talking to herself as she wandered, and from crying, she began to muse with the complicated fancy and helpless rigor that is the hallmark of the philosophy of children. She considered her condition—its causes, effects both immediate and clear and as yet unknown, and her prospects—then came out of what can only be described as a delightfully enchanted fugue, marked equally by a sorrow that was not indulged in and practical resolve that had little relation to reality, and saw three persons approaching. Used to the hustle and bustle of her small city, to herds of people being driven here and there with an urgency just shy of stampede, the sight of a small and isolated group, in the middle, as it were, of a nowhere we had conjured around ourselves, made her uneasy. They appeared to be dressed alike, too, in heavy black robes or cloaks or skirts and shawls, and this kind of uniformity of course makes ordinary people uneasy. Then she saw that they were old women and that their faces bore the look of kindness that only tremendous age and silent suffering can account for. They bid her a good afternoon, addressing Rosemary as “Little Girl,” which she did not mind the least little bit. Her name, and the strikingly pronounced emphasis on the “Little” of Rosemary’s, gave her the strange impression that it was an Indian name but the old women resembled in no other way Indian squaws as she had seen them, in illustrations. She had no idea, either, what time of day it was, but saw suddenly, as if invited by the immediate presence of the three women, how sharp and long the shadows were around her. She was surprised by the pale and empty sky, believing that it had been cloudy, turbulently and loweringly so. She then wondered if she hadn’t simply imagined the clouds—or, it occurred to her, strangely, for a reason she could not quite come to, but which she felt came from her father’s ghost—had they not gathered in response to her histrionic sulking? The season, too, was middling and mysterious: Were there buds on the trees, as she remembered it, or were they bare; and if bare, had the leaves just fallen or were they about to appear? The air was warm but the wind was cold—or was it the other way around? Warmly reposing in a cleft of rock, or cooling pleasantly in its shade? She did not know, she did not know, she did not know. Clambering down from the rocks, she debated naming herself to these strangers, and decided not to, asking the women instead if they were Sisters of Mercy. It was a phrase she had heard and liked, one that she associated with the Maker of Heaven and Earth, and that seemed to describe them in the same way Little Girl did herself. ‘Little Girl and the Sisters of Mercy!’ chuckled one old woman. ‘We have a fairy tale on our hands!’ said the second, smiling but with an air of prudence regarding a serious if not grim responsibility. ‘Sisters of Mercy,’ murmured the third. ‘I should say not.’ ‘Are you,’ asked Rosemary, ‘servants of the Devil?’ ‘No!’ laughed the first woman. ‘No, no,’ said the second, shaking her head judiciously. ‘Yes,’ said the third in her odd but clear murmur.”
“This happened in a theater, did it not?”
“Rosemary laughed as her father had often laughed, calling a bluff, and demanded to know which one of them was telling the truth. Or which two.
‘The first to speak told the truth,’ giggled the first woman, ‘and so did the last. The second was a liar.’ ‘Now, now,’ remonstrated the second. ‘Let’s have no paradox here.’
‘Certainly we are sisters,’ said the third. ‘But we serve no one and do not know the meaning of mercy. Finally, Little Girl, if you must ask us which of us is telling the truth, then I simply do not understand what we are doing here talking to you, when there is a world full of people just as confused as you are but who frankly have their wits about them.’ ‘I AM NOT AT ALL CONFUSED!’ Rosemary shouted. The old women flinched, ducked, cowered, stepped back, and drew closer together. When they had finished doing all this, Rosemary understood that they were only feigning alarm, and were in fact having some fun at her expense. When they saw that she saw, they left off pantomiming and came boldly around her. ‘You are very bright, Little Girl,’ said the first. ‘It does my heart good to see such warmth of brain in one so young. I believe you will become wise as the years go by.’ A gust of wind blew the hood of her cloak from her head. Her blue eyes twinkled in her wrinkled, grizzled face. ‘You are very brave, Little Girl,’ said the second. ‘It does my mind good to see such warmth of heart in one so young. I believe you will turn away from no fear in the war to come.’ Another gust blew the hood of her cloak back as well. Her eyes were green as emeralds. ‘You are very dark and frightened, Little Girl,’ said the third. She was barely audible in the rising wind. ‘I have never seen such anger, confusion, and recklessness in one so young, and it quite undoes me to imagine how you will make your way in the years left to you. I believe you will find little peace in them.’ The wind was very strong now, and loud, and gusts of it smote the three as if with fists. Their garments fluttered around their trembling limbs, flapped and snapped until finally the hood of the third lifted away from her head, billowing and falling away. Her eyes were black but the look in the old face was one of commiseration, not of hate or malice or fear. She looked at Rosemary in a sad and friendly way too. Then she reached up, putting one withered hand to the side of her skull, the other under her jaw, fitting them carefully, sighed, and pulled her head off. The first and second quickly followed suit. From their sagging old necks rose, like gnarled and crooked arrows from grotesque quivers made from the bodies of trolls, the branches of trees, stripped of bark and white as bone, bare of leaves, and tossing in the wind. She was largely unmoved by this display of witchcraft. She recognized it as something out of a nightmare, but accepted it as yet one more grim aspect of a reality that, it was clear, had infinite powers of derangement and that she would never fully understand. Buds appeared on the branches and this seemed to be a sign of better times just around the corner. From the buds tiny leaves eased forth and grew. The old women nodded and swayed over her and the succulent green leaves grew larger and larger. Rosemary swooned with the majesty of it, and lay down. When we awoke she realized she was staring into the beady but strangely still and calm eyes of a squirrel. He was upside down, clinging to the trunk of the tree among the roots of which she lay, no more than a
foot or two above her head. They began to converse about the pleasant weather and the indescribable pleasure of a nap in the afternoon on a day when there was wind in the trees. Then they were silent for a time. Rosemary asked the squirrel how it made ends meet, and the squirrel spoke of life in the tree, of ordinary successes and failures in the familiar places, stories of its vastness, trials and tragedies in its most remote reaches, of proper conduct and good government. The squirrel wanted Rosemary to understand that while they were free, the quality of that freedom depended utterly on circumstances. Rosemary tried to give the squirrel the impression that this was elementary reasoning, but the truth was that she could not grasp the meaning of it. Then the squirrel said, ‘The tree remains the tree no matter what I think about it,’ and Rosemary awoke. ‘Stop pretending your mother is dead. It hurts her terribly. Be dutiful and loving toward her,’ said the squirrel. And Rosemary awoke a second time.”
