The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Six

  I STOOD up on tiptoe, so as to make eye contact with Mrs. Arruda over the bakery counter. “We haven’t seen you for weeks,” I said. “Is everything okay?”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” she said, smiling with some distant El Salvadoran humor I didn’t recognize.

  “Well, I wish you’d come into the library sometimes,” I said. “We miss you.”

  She took a quick, puzzled glance at me. Why would we miss her? People never guess the effect of their own qualities—Mrs. Arruda’s matter-of-fact manner, her determination in the face of difficulty, had given me an inspiration I didn’t find anywhere else. Whenever she came in and I talked to her, I always felt like my job at the library was worth it, that I was doing some good.

  Now her shoulders sagged and she admitted she couldn’t make her way through Cyril’s Civil War history. And Cyril having honored her, by lending her one of his own books … she didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t just put it back in the return slot, but neither could she bring herself to come into the library and confess that she’d failed.

  “When a man has learned so much,” she said, “and wants to give some of it…” she ran out of words and extended her open hands to try to show all the loan had meant to her. “And then I don’t read…” she said. “I was a doctor, in El Salvador,” she said, suddenly, to counter her shame.

  “You were?”

  “A…” she needed courage to pronounce it, “pediatrician? For children?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said.

  “I went to take the test, here, I study and study—and, no pass,” she said, “—the language—You don’t believe me,” she said sadly.

  “I do believe you. Why wouldn’t I? Can’t you work on your English and take the test again?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Will you give the book back to Mr. Tremblay?” she asked me.

  Yes, I said, of course. When she brought the book back to me in the library, all wrapped in layers of brown paper and twine, I felt like beating Cyril to death with it: he’d wanted to show Mrs. Arruda how much more learned he was than she, as if that learning had been put to any useful purpose! He’d isolated himself with his reading, as my parents had living on their farm.

  “She’s from El Salvador, Cyril. She doesn’t need history lessons,” I said. “Did you ever look for it, Gone With the Wind? It can’t be very hard to find.”

  He was sitting at his desk, checking through a batch of overdue notices, and he held up a finger so I would see he had to get through the job before he could give me his attention. When he finally looked up he seemed to have forgotten the question, so I repeated it, but his answer was a slurred dismissal. I started to speak to him angrily, but what good would that do? He’d be hurt and he’d get even more pompous.

  His young self was still alive in him, alive and fierce and disgusted with the old, beaten inebriate he’d become. This angry young idealist had to be kept in check somehow, hence the wine, which didn’t, in the end, subdue the young Cyril, but went straight to the frustrated old pedant’s head, giving the young Cyril all the more opportunity to savage the poor old man. I knew, though we never mentioned it, that Cyril was gay, and that his own times had not provided him with the flying-closet-ejector system available to people like me. He’d just suffered the little jokes about his extended bachelorhood, then the waning of those jokes and the silence that replaced them. Now he was twice isolated—neither his love nor his intellect dared speak their names anymore.

  “It’s a book,” I said. “It’s our job to get books for people—the ones they ask for, not the ones we think they should read.” How amazing to hear myself, addressing the good side of Cyril.

  It was my night to stay until eight, though after Cyril left at five, the only other person in the building was Mr. Klipsch, trying to sleep off his desolation in the back, and taking the finish off the chairs. Without him I’d have been lonely. With him, I was competent: shelving books, typing up the new cards, recognizing myself for once as essential: I kept the world going here. When I went to empty Cyril’s wastebasket, I found it full of torn-up interlibrary loan forms: in spite of all his demurrals, he had been trying to get Gone With the Wind, but each time, he had gotten confused—first he’d filled in Mrs. Arruda as author; then he’d asked for it to be sent from our branch rather than to it; then he’d sealed the receipt in the envelope and kept the request in the file; then he’d given up.

  He didn’t do it because he didn’t know how. Cyril knew a great deal; he knew that a general looking down over the Charge of the Light Brigade had said to his companion: “C’est magnifique. Mais ce n’est pas la guerre.” He knew that the great works of literature had already been written, because actions don’t have clear consequences anymore. “Anna Karenina risked the loss of her child for ‘love’!” he’d say. (Certain words he always spoke with implied quotation marks, as if he was above using them himself.) “What would she risk now, less alimony?” He knew all the odd alleys (the lacunae, he said with relish) where a man might relieve himself in some privacy, walking home from the bar. He didn’t go to Kingdom Come, of course, but to Sallie’s, which he called a “wrinkle bar” because it catered to men his age, who had grown up “effeminate.” No one at Kingdom Come was effeminate, styles had changed. But he couldn’t write out an interlibrary loan form. So, although I’d dreamed he would take me under his wing, I realized now that I had to take him under mine. I’d been trying for so long to find people to teach and protect me, as if I weren’t a fierce and learned being already. I was full of answers but they weren’t the answers people expected, so I hadn’t dared give them. I’d rather believe myself a fool.

  I pulled out a new form, filled it in, and sent it to the main branch. Just like that.

  So I was humming “Summertime” to myself, imagining calling up that freshman adviser of mine and saying, “Listen, a few years ago you asked me why sex was so important to me, and I feel I owe you a fuller response…” when I heard a clear voice singing the words behind me:

  “One of these days, you’re gonna rise up singing…”

  “Stetson!”

  “Sorry, I couldn’t resist,” he said, “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “How did you learn to sing like that?” I asked him.

  “My father sang,” he said.

  Of course, I thought, that’s how people learn things.

  “I’m so glad to see you!” I said, “I’ve been dying to tell you…” About my interlibrary loan victory, though it might have been anything interesting and true. He’d want to know those things, think about them, try to see them clearly. His career of mistakes had brought him here, to a place beyond pretense, where life in all its infinite variety was to be gazed at with tender fascination. Everyone else I knew had a persona to tend to, a hypothesis to prove. Stetson was just interested, newly born out of rehab, with a bad headache, a fierce curiosity, and the knowledge of his own—of everyone’s—terrible fragility. A man is only the sum of his fascinations, I thought—Stetson was a giant.

  His sleeve was pulled up so I could see more of his tattoo: something like a dagger curving up his left arm, the initials ATWHHC lettered crudely above it. “What do the letters stand for?”

  “I don’t tell people that,” he said, yanking the sleeve down again. “A youthful indiscretion,” he explained. “Like everything else in my life. Listen, I just wanted to tell you—I’ve got to go away for a few days—a funeral.”

  “Not your mother?”

  “No, no,” he said. “My friend Duane, remember? The one who lent me the money for LaLouche?”

  “What happened?”

  “Relapse,” he said.

  “A relapse of what?”

  He glanced at me with puzzlement for a sec. “Of shooting up,” he said. “OD.”

  “But he had a new baby, he was fine!”

  “I know,” he said, angry at my innocent assumptions. But, of course a Princess Margaret type like me would need more explan
ation.

  “It happens all the time. They—we—can’t take much stress. You put one foot wrong and that’s it, out you go.” I remembered him singing “She’s gone,” when he missed me. And how the next verse of that song began “I need a drink.” I touched his sleeve where it covered the tattoo, but he pulled away with something between a shrug and a flinch, saying “Gotta go.”

  Seven

  “TELEGRAM,” SYLVIE said, rather drily. I’d picked up the phone on the first ring.

  “Is it a singing telegram?”

  “Oh, Beatrice, you’re too close to the mark.”

  “What do you mean? Oh, he crashed the plane.” Why would he have studied flying otherwise? That was what he did, that was his calling. He crashed the car, he crashed the house. And Ma, she was like some souped-up race car he’d saved up for, the kind with flames and teeth on the sides: he totaled her.

  “No, he didn’t crash anything,” Sylvie said, laughing sadly. “He’s fine.”

  “Well, if that isn’t just like him! But, what then?”

  “Dolly was struck by lightning.”

  “What do you mean? What was she doing outside?”

  “She wasn’t outside. She was inside, on the phone. There was a thunderstorm and it made her think of Ma, and she decided to call her up and try to mend fences.”

  “Wait a minute, she had a radical personality change due to an electrical disturbance?” (Yes, reader, I was capable of making a mean joke about my sister even as I waited to hear if she was still alive. And Sylvie was quite able to laugh at it; we’re sisters, we were both feeling the adrenaline high of bad news.)

  “I know,” Sylvie said, “but that’s what Pop says she was doing. And now she’s in the hospital.”

  * * *

  “… IN A coma,” Ma spat, when she called a few minutes later.

  News can never, apparently, be so bad that it wouldn’t benefit from a little tweak, a layer of gloss here or there. The word “coma” has an authority that mere unconsciousness cannot approach. It’s much better to be washed away by a hurricane than some pointless little tropical storm.

  “Not a coma,” I said. (Ninety-nine out of one hundred women prefer it when their children are not in a coma.)

  “What do you mean, not a coma?”

  “Well, she’s in and out of consciousness, but a coma is…”

  “I can’t believe you’re accusing me of exaggeration when my daughter is in a coma!”

  “I’m not accusing you of exaggeration…”

  “Well, the semantics don’t matter. What matters is that he killed her.”

  “Ma…”

  “I never would have let that child pick up the phone during a thunderstorm,” Ma said. “I told your father thousands of times that lightning travels over the phone lines. He probably told her to call me. He used to make phone calls during thunderstorms just to defy me. Oh, why couldn’t it have been him?”

  * * *

  DOLLY WOKE up in the ICU and tried to lift her hand, but her arm wouldn’t obey. Her body was feathered over with a pattern like a frosted window, Pop said, and there was a strange new turn at the corner of her mouth. It made her look sardonic and removed. I remembered how I’d felt that first night in Hartford, standing on the fire escape with my arms held out toward the oncoming storm. How good it felt to have escaped from the linen closet and feel the wind in my hair. And yet how good it had felt in the linen closet, when we were little—to know our mother was watching over us, keeping us safe. Dolly had been there in Wyoming, yearning for her mother, and determined to hold firm against her mother, and the storm came over the plain toward her, and she went to make the call.

  She was discharged from the hospital. They said she was fine. Except for the blinding headaches, the strange slow heartbeat, and the loss of all hearing in the ear that had been pressed to the phone.

  * * *

  “LICHTENSTEIN’S FERNS, they’re called. The filigree pattern on a lightning victim’s skin, I was just reading about it, Beatrice. Literally, this was yesterday. Listen, they follow the perspiration, that’s how it happens.”

  Philippa had to be given credit here, for adding fuel to a drama by reading. “I’d love to really see it. Do you think your father’s got a picture? And what was she doing on the phone in an electrical storm?”

  “I don’t know. You can’t blame me!” I said. (Though of course, if I hadn’t been conceived and refused to be miscarried, if I hadn’t abandoned them for college when I knew they couldn’t manage, nor been such a disastrous surrogate mother to Dolly…)

  “You have to admit it’s odd,” she said, laughing. “I mean, how often do I make a special trip to the library to research the effects of lightning strikes? How often have I done that? There is obviously a connection here.”

  “You’re right!” I cried, because Philippa loved to hear this, and because it was so, so comforting to believe that while my family was dialing for thunderbolts, Philippa was studying them, getting it all figured out.

  “When did it happen?”

  “Around four.”

  “That is exactly when I was in the library,” she said. “I was reading that the highest incidence of lightning strikes is in the late afternoon and I looked up at the clock and—how extraordinary, Beatrice. Little did I know.”

  * * *

  “OH, THE doctor can’t get a word in edgewise,” Sylvie told me. “You know how they are. Ma wants to be sure Pop gets blamed for it all. He wants to prove the doctors don’t know everything…”

  She took a deep drag on her cigarette and laughed, awfully huskily for a girl of seventeen. “On the plus side, Ma’s eviction seems to have been staved off,” she said. “You can imagine it, can’t you?

  “‘Your honor, I have noplace to go, I’ve been abandoned by my husband, my daughter is lying in a coma, and this man wants to evict me, turn us all into the street.’”

  Springtime was barking wildly, a high-pitched little yap. “God, I just took him out,” she said. “No, Springy, you’re going to wake baby Jesse up. No. Shhh,” she said, to no avail. “Okay, okay, wait a minute, Bea.” I heard the front door squeak open and then silence, and she came back and said, “All right, now everyone’s happy.”

  Then she was screaming, and I heard her fly out the door screaming “No, no, no,” and a furious, snarling chaos, and she came back and wailed into the phone, “Beatrice, Beatrice, they killed him, they tore him apart.”

  “Call the police!” I said. “Call the police, and get out of there!” but Springtime was dead, and she was sobbing as if she’d lost her whole family, and I was a hundred miles away on the other end of the phone.

  * * *

  THE POLICE came and shot the neighbor’s dogs, and the next day they came back to search the trailer. The neighbor had told them Butch was selling cocaine.

  “They’re going to take the baby, Beatrice, I’m afraid they’ll take the baby away.”

  “Sylvie, what do you mean? Who?”

  “Butchy is clean, Beatrice! He’d never do anything like that. The cops have it in for him, that’s what it is.”

  “Sylvie, what happened?”

  “They came in the middle of the night,” she said. “He had some dope—joints rolled up in the drawer—maybe five or six. Bea, he likes to have a couple tokes every once in a while, the way some guys have a beer.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Police station,” she said.

  I heard the baby crying—a persistent rasp like the sound of a rusty hinge. She picked him up and the cries became louder, frantic, as if the baby had just realized what kind of life he was facing.

  “I won’t let them take him, that’s all,” she said, with that forlorn toughness I’d come to expect from her, but she began to cry again, so deeply. All this time, she’d been winding the rope for her own noose—and she was surprised to find herself swinging from it now? But seventeen-year-olds do that—generally it means they end up losing a driver’s license, not a chi
ld.

  “It’s my fault,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I shouldn’t have called them, about the dogs. Oh, I wish I didn’t do it, Beatrice! I wasn’t thinking, and it’s a violation of parole!”

  Eight

  STETSON DROVE us to the bus station to get the Pride Charter to New York—ninety lesbians in lavender—a beautiful thing. I could barely sit still in my seat—the parade would start at the Stonewall, where everything had started, where we (that’s right, finally I was part of a great, vital tradition) fought back against oppression and set off on the road to equal rights. Grace Jones was going to sing at the rally in Central Park. Pat came up the aisle with an air of immense self-importance; Susan behind her was wearing a T-shirt with a peace sign/woman’s symbol on it. The men were taking a different bus, which caused a stir as we debated whether we’d been excluded.

  “Honestly, didn’t we get into this so we could escape from men?” someone said, and I answered with asperity. “No, we got into this because we loved women.”

  “Please,” Lee said under her breath, and faced forward sharply. “Do not make a scene.”

  From behind us someone said: “They’re our brothers, but they don’t welcome us.”