GEORGE
Bright girl, bright girl. Still easy. Now, translate: Die Fenster des hauses gingen zur Strafs hinaus.
MARY
The windows of the ’ouse looked out on the street.
GEORGE
The windows of the hhhhhouse looked out on the street. Say it. Hah. Hah. House.
MARY
Hhhouse.
GEORGE
You sound too much like your mother. I won’t count it unless you pronounce it properly. Now, explain for me, please, what a brachis-tochrone is.
MARY
It’s the idealized path a body will take. The curve of fastest descent. Developed by Johann Bernoulli, his brother Jakob, Gottfried Leibniz, and Isaac Newton.
They have come back to stage right. A gold cast to the light, now. They gaze at the house, and after a moment’s hesitation, he puts his hand on the door latch. When he speaks, it’s with a dispirited lack of conviction. He looks off.
GEORGE
She was somewhat better this morning, did you notice it?
MARY
Not really, Father.
They enter the house. Enter Guillemard, wearing a cape now. He still has the papers in his hand. He holds them up as if to show them.
GUILLEMARD
Great mountainous clouds in the eastern sky, bruised-looking in places, and showing snowy heights where the sun reaches them. Kinsley might as well be staring out at the perspective of tropical forests. From Mary’s earliest memory, her mother has had to do with illness—Mary can recall sitting out on the lawn with Uncle Henry, who smelled of gin and whose features were always ringed with smoke from his tobacco, while her mother cared for a sick family across the street, cooking for them and washing out their soiled clothing, and bathing them in their fevers—her mother was always going among the sick, caring for those who were suffering, nursing the dying. Mary has no direct recollection of when her mother took to her own bed. She has been nurse to her since before she was old enough to understand that there was any other way to be with people. She has become very proficient at caring for all the members of the household. And she still manages to keep to her own habits—warm cereal in the mornings, with spiced apples, when available. And the hours of reading, and study, poring through the books in her father’s enormous library: Solar Physics and The Anatomy of Melancholy; Charles Darwin; Dickens; the marvelous book, her favorite, about the robberies and murders of the notorious pirates. The thousand travel books, and papers from lectures given at learned societies, accounts of explorers of the Arctic, the Antarctic, the Himalayas, the Amazon, the South Seas, Australia, Africa. The writings and remembrances of adventurers.
3
ONE HUNDRED YEARS, one hundred years…
Lily put herself there, walking a sunny street in a suburb of London, having never been to England.
There was only Dominic to talk to about it. And he was mostly a cheerleader; he didn’t seem able to see through to her doubts. She felt presumptuous, writing scenes, a child pretending to be a writer, since in fact it had all begun in childhood; it felt like an indulgence. She was a person prying into things, a detective, searching through files and histories for a name, the traces of a life that had ended tragically early, at thirty-seven years of age, a life lived in what would seem to anyone to be a kind of prison, until the last seven years of it….
How does a person become someone wholly different, in seven little years?
Back at school, she busied herself finishing the semester’s work. She wanted so badly to be done with all of it—the classes, the crowds, the snippets of academic talk you heard crossing the quad, the people all so tied up with their own concerns, their own bundles of paper and books, the weight of what was left to do. There would be only the one semester left, and she worried herself sleepless about that, about courses she hadn’t even signed up to take yet. The final project for her degree, she had decided, would be a monologue, from the point of view of Mary Kingsley. Or a series of voices and scenes about her; or a full-length play about her. Why not?
How about because you haven’t got the slightest idea of how to do it?
“You’ve got big shadows under your eyes,” Sheri said. “You’re studying too much. Come on out with me.”
“Aren’t you even going to study for your final exams?” Lily asked her.
And Sheri began to cry. “I don’t stand a chance. I’m not gonna lie to myself.”
“But you’ve come this far.”
“Honey, I’ve been on and off probation every other semester here, and now it’s check-out time. I got sick just when I needed to bury myself, and it’s gone past everything.” She stood by her bed with the bright banners from her high school in Oxford and cried, letting the tears drop down her cheeks. It struck Lily that the other girl envied her—she, Lily, with her books and her scribbling and her supposed talent, though Lily knew it was more a talent for being alone than for anything else.
She went home to her mother’s house for Christmas with a sense of increasing unease. Christmas morning, her father and Peggy visited (Baby, we’re a family, and it’s Christmas and I’m fine with it and I want you on your best behavior about it. Please?), and Lily watched her mother bustle around, trying to keep everything smooth. It galled her; it made her heartsore and angry. Scott gave her a scarf, and a recording of the songs of Nat King Cole; from Peggy she received a Chet Baker CD. They had apparently talked about her love of jazz. Her mother had made a sweater for her, and a shawl, and also bought music—a boxed set of Ella Fitzgerald. Everyone wanted to spend time with her, and her mother invited cousins and aunts and uncles, some of whom Lily hadn’t seen in years. It came to her that they were all worried about her. She worked to reassure her mother, and strove to behave as though she were carefree, happy.
4
SHE SAW TYLER AGAIN early in the spring semester, shortly after a snowstorm swept down out of the mountains, covering the town. It went on for a day and a night, then turned to a fine rain, and the rain had frozen over the crust of what had accumulated. It was as though the world were encased in milky glass. And then it was snowing again. People were sliding around on the new layer, which blew across the hardened surface like dust across a table. Sheri had dropped out of school, and gone back home to Mississippi. She called to say that she was getting married. The young man was someone she had never mentioned or talked about in the time Lily had known her, but Lily was not really very surprised. In any case, she supposed she would probably never see her or her half brother again.
One day in the worst part of this second snowfall, while trying to make her way to an improvisation class, she fell on the sidewalk, and had to be helped by two elderly gentlemen to a bench near the corner. From out of the whiteness surrounding the men, a shadow moved, and Tyler Harrison leaned in to look at her. “Lily, is that you?” he said.
“Does she belong to you?” one of the men asked.
“Come on.” Tyler leaned down to give her his arm.
She thanked the men for their help, holding on to Tyler’s arm.
“Where were you headed?” he asked her.
“Caball Hall,” she said.
He walked with her to the building, and when she thanked him, he said, “What time is the class?”
“Two-thirty.”
He looked at his watch. “That’s forty minutes from now. Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”
They went along the walk to a set of brick stairs, which led down to a wide patio in front of the student union. There was a path shoveled through, but it was snow-covered and uneven, and they had to hold on to each other to get to the doors. They went into the cafeteria to a table against the wall. He held a chair for her, and then asked how she wanted her coffee.
“Black,” Lily said, showing him a little smile. “With lots of cream and sugar in it.”
She watched him cross to the counter, to order. The room was large, and only a few people had braved the weather to come here. They sat separately and in s
mall groups, and there wasn’t much talk. Several people were studying. Someone had put INXS on the juke box. But the sound was low. You could barely hear it.
Tyler came back with the coffee, and sat down next to her. She breathed the leather odor of his coat, and there was something else, too: talcum powder or shaving cream, pleasantly sweet. He turned in his chair, leaning one elbow on the back of it and the other on the table, sipping the coffee, gazing at the room.
“You came to my rescue,” Lily said. “I looked up and there you were.”
“I fell this morning, going down my stairs,” he said. “And there wasn’t even any ice. Just clumsy and stupid, I guess.”
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“A little.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shook his head, sipped the coffee, then shifted in the chair, resting both elbows on the table and looking over at her with a ruminative, but faintly amused expression. “I’ve noticed something about girls—um, women—and I wonder if you have any thoughts on it. It’s begun to seem to me that girls feel responsible for stuff that has nothing whatever to do with them. There’s an earthquake on the other side of the world, and women all over the world—or maybe only American women—feel responsible for it. What do you think?”
“I never discuss sociology before dark,” she said.
“Well, see, I fell like an idiot on my stairs this morning and when I told you about it, more than seven hours later, you apologized.”
“That’s the way you heard it,” she said. “Maybe when a man falls down he starts to think some woman must be responsible for it. Maybe we’re all conditioned by these kinds of expectations. But that’s sociology again, and I can’t go into it.”
“It’s an interesting theory.” He smiled.
A moment later, he said, “You were just great as Rosalind. I know I already said this. But I couldn’t take my eyes off you. I don’t think anyone else could, either.”
She told him that saying the lines of the play felt more natural the more you got into the part, and that every time you performed the part, it seemed to come more naturally. Yet it wasn’t ever exhaustible; you were always learning more about the character. It was always opening out, and you knew more, felt more, every time you went through it. But the lines. You felt the antique lines as perfectly made for you as breathing. And they weren’t antique anymore.
He gave her a little sidelong grin. “So this Shakespeare, he’s pretty good then?”
“He can write,” she said, laughing. “I think he has some talent.”
“Tell me about your class.”
She waved this away.
“No, really. Is it an acting class?”
“Improvisation. They give us situations, and we have to act them out. No script.”
“A life class. Let’s do one.”
She said, “Okay. You start.”
This caught him off guard, and his embarrassed groping to come up with something made them both laugh.
“I think it’s better if some third party gives you the scene,” she said.
He put the coffee cup down and cradled it with his hands. She had a sudden urge to reach over and touch his wrist, and then, to her surprise, she acted on it. There was an element of admiration about the gesture, as though she were appreciating the fine curvature of an artist’s work in stone. He turned and a light came to his eyes.
“I’m glad I saw you again,” she said.
They were sitting there gazing at each other, and then he looked down at the table. The music was Van Halen now, and someone had turned it up.
“How’s your writing going?” he said, speaking louder over the music.
“Fits and starts.”
“Are you working on the Keats or the Kingsley?”
The fact that he remembered this made her abruptly quite happy. “The Kingsley,” she said.
“I wish I could write.”
“Maybe you can.”
He shook his head, laughing. “No, I think we have it pretty well established by now that I’m not a writer.”
“Well, I’m probably not a writer, either.”
They were having to shout to be heard now. They went on a little, talking about that, amused by the absurdity of it. When they got up and went outside, the cold and the quiet provided a small shock. They held on to each other again, crossing the open patio and making their way back to Caball Hall. At the entrance of the building, they paused.
“Don’t I get a kiss on the cheek?”
She was too anxiously seeking some words to extend the moment, some pretext for them to get together again. She thought of cutting the class. But his lighthearted tone stopped her. “Some other time,” she got out.
“Listen,” he said. There was something tentative and nervous about his eyes, now. “I never called you because Sheri said you didn’t want it.”
She said, “Sheri—what—”
He took her by the shoulders, pulled her to him, and kissed her. It was a long kiss. Then he was simply holding her.
She didn’t want to move. But others were filing by them, and finally he stepped away, slipping a little on the ice, and laughing. He righted himself and stood there with his hands in his pockets. She saw his breath on the air. “Maybe I ought to wait here and walk you home after the class.”
“See you?” she said.
“Count on it,” he told her.
When she came out of the class, she thought he might be waiting for her, but he was gone.
5
SHE MADE HER WAY across the ice, home to the silence of her room, and sat in the light by the window, thinking of him out there in the dark. She could call him. She reached for the phone book on the desk and looked up the name. There was a listing for Harrison, but with only the letter L before the name. The address was not a university address. She dialed the number anyway. She let it ring twice, then hung up. This was absurd. It had been a kiss, and probably meant little to him. They had sat in the student union and chatted and tried to be smart for each other. She closed the blind on the window, and took up her study of dramatic monologue and social context in theater. There were examinations to study for. She geared herself up, and began to concentrate. Nothing would stay in her mind. She went out in the hallway to the water fountain and drank. Then walked up and down the hall. The building had an abandoned, run-down feeling.
Finally, back in the room, she sat at her desk, trying to study. She stared out the window at the bleak landscape, hoping to see someone come walking out of the night. Often, when she let herself dream it through, she saw herself in a tall house on a London street, and she could almost believe the smell of coal was on the air. When she was a little girl, her father read stories to her—Peter Pan, and Dr. Seuss; Laura Ingalls Wilder and others—and his voice had been so gentle and enveloping. There were always hopes, from everyone, father and mother, uncles, cousins, that she would go out into the world and make her mark. No, there had always been the assumption that this would be so. She thought of her fourteenth birthday, and stood abruptly, as if having come upon a spider in the papers before her. Sometimes, the memory of it could still move in her blood with a sudden heat, as if she had only now come from the confined space of that icebound house.
Her mouth was dry. She stood there breathing in small panting gasps, then realized the sound she was making and stopped.
When the knock at the door came, a little cry rose from the back of her throat. She looked with alarm at the mess of the room, and realized her own state of slovenliness. Running her hands through her hair, she said, “One minute.” She fixed her blouse, tucked it in, glancing at herself in the mirror beside the door before she opened it.
Standing in the light of the hall was Dominic. She had to work to keep her sense of disappointment from showing.
“I saw your light,” he said. “I was on my way home from a humiliating date.”
“Well, at least you had a date,” she said.
“Sometimes these th
ings happen,” he told her. “Now and then I can get one of the lady wrestlers, or someone on the bowling team, or occasionally somebody from the nursing home to feel sorry for me.” He gazed at her as if at something exotic. But then his familiar smile came back. There was the doughy, open-faced look of high school about him. “Come out and have some coffee with me?”
“I wish I could,” she said. “I’ve got all this studying to do.”
He ran his hand nervously through his straw-colored hair. “Here’s how I see it happening. This is a vision—a dream of the common man, like a proletarian soap opera, sort of, you know—sun coming up over a hill, Copland’s Fanfare playing. And, like, I’m the man you’re talking to in your dreams when the man of your dreams comes along. He beats me up, and the two of you walk away.”
She laughed. “You’ve got my dream pretty well worked out.”
“How’re you gonna meet the man of your dreams if I’m not there for him to beat me up?”
“Dom, really—some other time?” she said.
“You won’t mind my getting beat up. As long as it’s some other time.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Okay,” he said. Then he made a gesture, tipping a nonexistent hat. “And don’t think I’m not humiliated.”
“It’s not that,” she said, laughing. “We’ll go later. Come on, Dom.”
“Cool. I can tell that this really isn’t rejection because you’re not hitting me or throwing anything at me or screaming at me.”
She shook her head. “Poor baby.”
“Something’s going on,” he said. “Tell me.”
She leaned against the door frame. “It’s silly.”
He seemed discouraged. His shoulders sagged. “Jesus. The man of your dreams has come along.”
She said nothing.
“Really?” he said.
“Dom, I’ve got to study.”
“I’ll be goddamned.”
“Come see me tomorrow,” she said. “And I’ll tell you all about it.”
Hello to the Cannibals Page 7
