The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “I’d jump out on the bank!” I was eight years old, first in my class, and I assumed he was testing me, that I’d give the right answer and win his love like a spelling bee prize.

  “And if the bank was hot? Hot as an iron skillet?”

  “I’d climb up a tree!” My eagerness only baited him. Did I really imagine I could outrun life’s terrors? Outsmart him? His eyes gleamed; he’d show me …

  “What if the tree turned out to be nothing more than a red-hot wire, like the element on the stove? And the skin on your hands melted against it and pulled off like gloves?”

  “I guess I’d burn up and die,” I’d answered … the answer he’d wanted, that showed I understood how he felt about everything.

  “Howards End?” Philippa shrieked suddenly, laughing like Grace Poole, “If that isn’t the summit of Wolfean rose-colored thinking: You feel you grew up at Howards End? The House of Usher, you mean. Oh, really, Howards End!”

  Had I learned nothing from her classes? My father was clearly Dickensian, and he married a woman who’d stepped directly out of Poe! “You must learn to read more closely!” she said.

  Two

  IF ONLY my father could have managed our deaths better than he had our lives. If he’d driven faster, turned sharper, but no, he had swerved without true conviction and instead of smashing into the light pole, the car had skidded over a shallow embankment into a little grove. My mother climbed out, dusting herself and preparing to sail proudly onward, but felt something at the back of her knee, brushed it, and found blood on her fingers.

  A hemorrhage, and the doctors urged an abortion: the child would be retarded, they said. Heroic, she insisted on carrying the creature to term, and so five long months had passed, with this rabbit question looming. It was a figment of his imagination, didn’t he see? He hadn’t wanted a rabbit to die, because he didn’t want the baby, didn’t really love her, would have done anything to escape.

  She sailed proudly on, with never a reproach (if there was something of the martyr in her movements, well, who could blame her, expecting this poor damaged child who would need constant care). And he, the gentle boy she’d married, became unaccountably sullen, withdrawn. He had seen a rabbit, he had—he had swerved to spare it. He was young and tender-hearted, it was his worst fear that something should suffer because of him. In fact, that was part of the reason why—why he had married her.

  She’d been the girl from the valley whose divorced mother took in washing. Every week he brought the laundry down, to peer down the dim hallway with its smells of liver boiling and cheap perfume, the apartment doors left open for air in summer so he’d see old women groaning in their beds, children peeping back at him. He had the loose, quick gait, the lifted chin of a frat boy: an exotic in their world. Behind the next door: Claire Ledoux, eyes narrow, cheeks wide, carriage … majestic, despite the mountain of wrinkled shirts in her basket. She would escape this place; she would iron her way to the stars.

  The girls he knew could afford to be gentle. The doors of the future were wide open to them. Claire had only her presence, and her iron. When he asked her to the movies, her eyes blazed and something flashed open in him; a carnal premonition. What might it be like to lift her out of this place—wouldn’t her gratitude make for a fiercer love?

  She knew him, from the labels on his father’s shirts. She knew what he represented. She spent the whole day preparing, was still ironing her sweater when the doorbell rang. Yanking it over her head she was seized with a qualm—was there a wrinkle? She must be perfect; this might be her only chance. She picked up the iron without thinking and pressed it to her heart.

  Waiting at the doorway, he heard her scream. A minute later though, she opened the door and smiled with perfect, if seething, composure, grimacing only when she’d straddled the motorcycle behind him and he couldn’t see her face anymore. She wrapped her arms around his waist: the girls from the Academy wouldn’t have done this; they’d been sheltered unto inanity. Claire was free of their scruples, better than they. She had to get somewhere; he was going to give her a ride.

  They went to see A Streetcar Named Desire. How is it we remember the fifties as a neat, false decade, when they knew everything about sex back then? To take a man into your body is to possess him entirely: from then on his raw voice will call only your name. Of course this knowledge must be kept quiet, as it could drive whole societies mad. But they were reminded that they knew this secret, and each felt the other’s awareness. Riding home she held him closer than before, arms across his chest, thighs against his, cheek pressed to his shoulder … all delicacy, she saw now, was a sham.

  Kissing her, he pulled her in tight with a motion he’d just learned from Marlon Brando. In fact she reminded him of Stella—made for love, for childbirth—a real woman. He’d always suspected that real life took place along the dim corridors where stains were scrubbed from the collars of the upper class. His parents were away for the weekend—he’d take her home. He wanted her to see what he had to offer her. A Tudor cottage, with a steep roof of slate scallops, herringboned brick, and holly trees in dark masses beside the door. And Claire, burning with defiance—and confidence: men, even strangers on the street, seemed to recognize something powerful in her that she could only believe when she saw it reflected in their eyes—followed him in through the rounded oak door with its four leaded panes inset, into the hallway with the brass salver and the woodwork rubbed with oil. The grandfather had been an ironmonger, come over from Germany or somewhere, “done gates and fences for all the best people in Manhattan. J. P. Morgan, for one,” said her mother, who took her own status from that of the people she washed for.

  Claire went to the window—the harbor glittered there, and Brooklyn beyond. To have grown up looking out over these places—to know things from above that way—it was nearly as if he owned them. The windows were clever: one pane in each belled out to accommodate a small trapdoor. She lifted one and found a screened panel—for fresh air, in wintertime.

  “God forbid you should suffer a draft,” she said, thinking of the matchbook under the sash at home.

  “It saves oil,” he explained, stung.

  So, then, what she thought mattered to him. “It just … shows such care.” She smiled so warmly, to salve the little wound. Impossible not to touch her, and when he did, her smile only became more tender. The wondering, grateful smile that broke from him at this was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

  There was a wistfulness in it, poignant to her because she’d have been wistful herself if life had allowed her such liberty. In her face he saw a fierce aspiration, which would have counted as crass at the Academy. What if it were possible to become like her—unrestrained?

  “We come from different worlds,” she said, sounding so hopeless and picturesque, as if they were in a movie together. The harbor lights, the plush carpet, the leaded windows that reflected, yes, her own beauty. Her burn was stinging.

  “We’ll make our own world,” he thought, feeling he’d fallen into this movie too. He kept from speaking it, though, thinking that he’d just met her, how could his feelings run this high? Her breasts moved him to tenderness as much as lust. That she was willing to let him touch her: she was so terribly kind. He would return the favor, would rescue her. He recast her mother’s flat in his mind, from shabby to truly squalid, so the deliverance would mean more. In bed beside her, in the incredible luxury of it, he tried to confide the deepest things in himself, how his father died just after the first pictures came back from Auschwitz—as if his ancestral people had turned to monsters, his pride turned to shame, and it killed him.

  “Cancer, cancer,” she said, holding him tight, keeping her own horrors swallowed. “Not divine retribution.”

  “I know,” he said, squeezing her breast to remind himself, love and warmth were right there.

  And she, arching up to say, “Take, take of my love and warmth”—she had infinite warmth to give, to him who would otherwise have so little.
The sterility of that house, these people embalmed in their own wealth. They wanted fresh air, did they? Well, here she was. (Coming to “Tyger, tyger, burning bright” in her anthology of English poems, she’d felt a thrill of recognition. She would burn bright too.) She’d save him from his own stolidity. Behind him, on his mother’s piano, stood a globe, colored the hallowed gold of old documents, that showed the earth as men had once imagined it. It was encircled in a double ring of iron, as in the hands of a benevolent god—it must have belonged to his grandfather. The ambition that showed there, the intention to possess! Yes, she would take her part in this tradition, beside this boy; she could see how soft he was, how he needed her. She leaned in toward him …

  He was beyond speaking. After all, they had things in common: the same loneliness, the same longing. Now it would be fulfilled. And they slipped together into the forest of the night and lost the sense of the outer world.

  * * *

  TWO YEARS later he was drafted and woke out of the ether of that love.

  It was 1955; he was stationed in Verona, which was more than she could bear. Her father had been there in the war; she could still see the red pushpin on the world map that she used to fix her eyes on to keep her balance, as she practiced her pirouettes. Eyes on that pushpin, she kept steady for three years, until the day his ship returned to New York. She was eleven years old: her dress had a red bow at the collar; her gloves buttoned at the wrist. A thousand soldiers streamed past her—all of them in the arms of their families by the time her father came sheepishly down the gangway. He had a new baby daughter, in Europe; he was going to return there. All the time he was away and she was tending his image in her heart, keeping him alive there with memories and prayers—he had simply allowed himself to forget her.

  If my father had been sent to Berlin, or the Philippines—who can say? But this struck too deep a nerve. Every day she wrote to him, and every night took the day’s letter, ripped out the abject parts, and worked the rest until it showed her with castanets flashing. This was how it worked: you created a magnificent self so a man could fall in love with you, then you’d have to keep that self up, so as not to lose the man. And that way you’d never disintegrate.

  But when he didn’t write back, she found herself begging. “You’re all that matters to me,” she wrote.

  It was the abjection that moved him—she needed him so badly her life depended on him, so he could dare to count on her. And she’d given herself so easily, so fully, she deserved something in return. He went home on leave, half thinking to reassure her and escape, but just being near her he felt the old drowsy warmth overwhelm him. When he left she was pregnant. They were married; then came the rabbit in the road.

  And the sense they were damned to each other, and to this child, the indelible proof of their shame. He hadn’t really loved her, had married out of duty. She knew this by the instinct that taught her everything. He’d rather she were dead, rather he himself were dead, than yoked to her. He denied this, of course, but without real feeling. And there had been no rabbit! What more was there to say?

  By the time I was born, they were living with his parents and he’d started his own business, raising praying mantises in his mother’s greenhouse.

  * * *

  “HIS FIRST venture,” I told Philippa, shaking my head with a rue I barely noticed, so completely was venture linked with failure in my mind.

  “You feel sorry for him!” Philippa said. “It has never occurred to me to feel sorry for either of my parents.” She squinted into the distance, trying to imagine it. “They’d be mortified,” she said, with a shudder.

  “Aphid control,” I said, feeling sorrier, wishing I could go back there to that first failure and flip the switch to set my father on the right track. He’d put an ad in the Sunday Times, which should have left him two weeks of incubation to take orders and make deliveries, but Saturday morning they started hatching and by afternoon there were thousands of them, advancing in phalanxes across the glass, cocking their eerie little heads.

  I had the story, like all stories, from Ma. And her stories existed to illustrate why she didn’t, and why I shouldn’t, love him. “The praying mantises were infinitely more important to him than you were,” she’d explained, telling how, when her waters broke (how like her, to go into labor like that right when he was in the midst of a disaster), he’d insisted she hold on until he herded the mantises to safety.

  But, here came the great moment of her life—the advent of motherhood, with its absolute authority.

  “You have to take me to the hospital right now,” she’d said, amazed at the quiet certainty of her voice, and anger had flashed over him. Who was she, to tell him what to do? Then he remembered: she was the mother of his child. He’d wrought this change, he would have to live with it. The deep, lush world she’d taken him into that first night, that he’d dreamed of swimming off into forever—where had it gone? He’d meant to rescue her from her fears and rages; instead, he’d found her mad stare fixed on him.

  “It’s the whole investment, gone,” he said, and she, incensed, lifted the perfectly wrought latch and smacked the greenhouse door open with her flat hand. She was sorry it didn’t shatter, the fine old thing with its row of wrought-iron fleur-de-lys along the ridgepole to keep the pigeons away. The emblem of wealth, comfort, and enervation. People would ask: “What does your husband do?” “Why, he raises praying mantises,” she’d have to say. The creatures marched out, turning their cold, curious faces toward their liberator, and streamed away. They’d have baked to death before the Sunday Times ad came out in any case.

  So, his project sputtered as hers was born. With each contraction, she loathed him more violently, until he seemed to be the force that convulsed her, the author of all her pain. And then the storm was past, the room was quiet, there were a few soft clouds in the sky, and in her arms, the baby. Seeing it, red and wrinkled, eyes screwed tight, fist up in futile defense against the light—she was overwhelmed with tenderness, for everyone, even for him. She remembered how badly they’d wanted each other, how their first touches seemed to be sacred. Here I was, whole, like the love that produced me: their new life, their real life, could begin. There had been a rabbit; from now on they would believe in this rabbit together. Exhausted, proud, filled with feeling, she smiled up at her husband, she forgave.

  “Retarded, indeed,” she said. “Look at her. She’s brilliant!”

  He recoiled. Yesterday she’d known the baby would be an idiot; now it was brilliant before it opened its eyes. For months she had despised him, and he’d believed she was right: never mind his intent, he had nearly killed them, and this child would shamble beside him for life as the visible proof of his guilt. Now she’d changed her mind, and he was to forget his anguish, dance and sing? To agree would be to consign himself to the fire of her madness.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Claire,” he said, and she, her bubble of hope burst, turned away.

  “Brilliant,” she repeated, though what her imagination conjured in my scrunched little face was more than brilliance: some kind of supernatural talent that would prove her own hidden genius and so resolve all her torments, sing her demons to sleep finally, make her whole. She held me closer, she kissed my forehead with that smile of infinite warmth that must certainly have reminded him of the way she had loved him once, showed what he’d be missing from now on.

  * * *

  “A HUSK,” Philippa cried, “the inseminator cast aside! A mother is red in tooth and claw. Praying mantises indeed.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. It was so good to see them as pawns of nature—if this were true, I wouldn’t have to go back and back over their story in my mind, trying to understand what poisoned their love, so I could look for the antidote.

  * * *

  THEY BROUGHT me home, stood over me terrified, working up their courage to change the diaper. How did you avoid hurting such a tiny, fragile thing? It needed them every second; Claire would barely fall asleep afte
r a feeding before it woke crying again. Its diaper was dry, it wouldn’t take her nipple, what was wrong? Claire held it—her daughter—tight, rocking her, saying, “It’s all right, it’s all right, your mama’s here,” waiting for maternal grace to take effect, for the baby to relax and sleep. But fretting turned to screaming, until Claire was sobbing too in the fear that she couldn’t give what the child needed, that she was not a natural mother.

  Ted slept through untroubled; she’d have liked to smash his skull. He’d rather have killed her than marry her, now her daughter had been born under an evil star. The baby whirled its arms like propellers, and Claire cried so deeply, she sounded to herself like an animal baying, low and angry and hopeless, in pain.

  “Wake up, wake up, can you be so deaf?” she asked her husband, shaking his shoulder.

  He sat up, bleary and irritated. Wasn’t this supposed to be her job?

  “I can’t, I don’t know how to do it, I don’t know what to do!”

  “Well, what do you expect me to do?” he asked. Why had she had to have this baby, if she couldn’t take care of it?

  But just then, Claire rested her head on his chest, and her crying calmed; she seemed to be consolable suddenly. Knowing how she’d have felt if she could have comforted the baby, she’d thought to give him this satisfaction. This was her instinctive intelligence, and she used it in this secret way.

  Ted had never seen himself have such an effect. He took the baby to his chest and made a low, manly sound, like an engine. And the baby was quiet, his little Beatrice, and Claire kissed him right over his heart. They were a family, it was like a miracle.

  They were alone together in the desolate dark … they held each other, and each promised, silently, to do better, to make it all work. Warm and drowsy under the feather quilt with him, she remembered a library book she’d loved as a child, about an orphaned girl raised on a farm, where privation and satisfaction went somehow hand in hand. The farm family awoke before dawn, stoked the fire, fed and milked the cows, cut the hay or tapped the trees, ate heartily and simply, and in the evening, settled back at the hearth while grandfather read aloud. Their floor was always swept, herbs dried in the rafters, days of work led to evenings of satisfaction, their children grew healthy and strong.