Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  For a few seconds, they were both quiet, and they heard the unearthly sound of long distance humming between them.

  “Seems a shame to come this far and then not graduate,” Doris said.

  “It’s just for now,” Lily said. “It’s not like I’m quitting altogether. I’ve just decided to take some pressure off myself.”

  “I don’t mean to nag—but this all sounds so—so final. Maybe it’s me.”

  “I have to go now,” Lily said. “I’ve got an appointment.”

  “Call me?” Doris said, and began to cry.

  Lily stood by the rumpled bed in her dorm room and listened, saying nothing. A sorrow rose up in her, that just as her mother seemed to need something from her in the way of solace, she had no solace to give. “Of course I’ll call you,” she got out.

  “’Bye,” Doris said.

  “Love you,” Lily said.

  “Me, too, baby.”

  The line clicked. She put the receiver down and walked to the window. The sky was banded with pink-streaked clouds, thin as jet trails. The quad below her was empty, not a soul out. A beautiful windless dusk, in spring. She watched as a couple came from the crest of the far hill and crossed toward the Rotunda. An older man went along the street pedaling a ten-speed bike, one pant leg rolled up. She closed the curtain and lay down on the bed again, and began trying to read. But there was no sense in pretending that she would go to any of the remaining functions of the last year of her college career. It made no difference at all to her, and the book she held was all words words words. None of it took the slightest shape of meaning for her.

  She tried writing a few pages, sketching toward the play. Dreaming life a hundred years back felt like refuge of a kind. But then she saw it as being just that—a form of escape—and ultimately she couldn’t even put her mind on that. She put the pencil down, lay her head on her arms and slept, and woke, and slept again. She lost track of time. A day passed like this, and a night, and another day. She had a dream in which someone said to her the word anorexia, and she sat bolt upright in the bed. It seemed impossible to remember the last time she had eaten anything. The thought of food made her nauseous. In the common room of the dorm there was a vending machine, and she tried to buy some crackers. The machine wouldn’t work. It took three quarters, and the return slot would not give them back. She pounded on the glass, and a package of chewing gum dropped from its little corralled row. She hit the machine again. Then put another fifty cents in, and it yielded up a small bag of M&M’s. She ate them, standing right there at the machine, and then felt as though she might be sick. She went into the bathroom and washed her face, and after a pause, waiting for something to develop, she returned to the room, still light-headed.

  Outside, the world went on. There were sirens, sounds of traffic, music, voices. The days had become brilliant with spring sun, bright with blooms, whispery with winds from the green mountains in the near distance, the blue ones beyond. She sat near the window and took her pencil and tried to make something come.

  2

  Early April 1875

  The downstairs hallway of a house. Stairs to the left. Door leading to other rooms on the right. Stage center is an open entrance giving onto a room lined with books. The same girl stands in this entrance. It’s as if she’s appreciating the room for its contents, the riches there. Now she seems to peer out into the dark beyond the end of the stage. Mary’s accent is cockney in all her speeches with others; but in her monologues to the audience, she speaks without accent; her voice is strong, and sonorously alto.

  MARY

  My mother used to sleep through the night after the evening meal, but lately she’s been calling out for me. I’m thirteen years old in this memory. Highgate again; the house is closed up, the one window facing onto the street, the others facing the garden in back. All closed. The bells sound periodically, and there are gamecocks out in the garden, but mostly the noises of the street are kept out. In the mornings the gamecocks are up with the sun, crowing, as if trying to signal someone faraway. They belong to me. I’ve been raising them for a little more than a year now. They will never fight, though they squabble in what looks like a deadly enough fury with each other—I’ve had to wade into them with a broom more than once. I confess I’ve shown a talent for getting into mischief. Recently, out in the garden, I conducted an experiment with some of the gunpowder my father brought back with him from Canada.

  She curtsies.

  It caused an explosion, which splattered the sheets hanging on the line with manure and alarmed the whole household. When he came into the garden and shook me, I’m afraid I uttered an oath. That is, I quoted him. He did not find the experience salutary. He picked me up, carried me like a package under his arm, and climbed the three flights of stairs to Mother’s dim room. He rammed through the partly open door and stood there.

  She lowers her chin and speaks deep in her throat.

  Who has been teaching this girl such language? Do you know what she said to me?

  Raising her voice to a level of pleading softness.

  Leave me in peace, can’t you? I’m dying of the ’eadache.

  She returns to character, pages desultorily through the book, then closes it and stares out again.

  In the afternoons, the light in the top of the door falls on the upper part of the stairwell, a shaft with motes in it. You can almost tell the hour by its shifting up the wall, until it goes thin, and is finally extinguished. I’ve learned by degrees to tell every inch along the wall of that shadow.

  Light comes to the top of the stairs. She hears the sound, and turns slightly.

  So much of my time is spent in this, well, rather complicated silence, this house with its thousand creaking sounds, the flicker of the gas lamps. Charley’s at school; the gardener’s somewhere out behind the house; Mrs. Barrett, our housekeeper, is occupied in the downstairs kitchen, addressing the Lord, in her definite little voice, about all of her various needs. The Lord, to Mrs. Barrett, resembles nothing so much as a sort of celestial footman. When my father’s letters arrive from afar, I read them before taking them upstairs to Mother’s room. One of my cousins, also named Mary (this is a family of Marys, Georges, and Henrys: my middle name is Henrietta), Mary writes sweet, interesting little letters—she wants, like Uncle Charles and Uncle Henry, to write romances and novels (Uncle Charles wrote the famous children’s book Water Babies)—and I read her letters aloud. Sometimes it’s just for the sound of a voice. Even if it’s my own. Mother likes to hear them read out, too, but that’s different, reading them to her. She’s quite good company, actually. Rather witty, though one would never guess it from her troubles; and the rest of the family—Father’s side of the family—will have nothing to do with her. Hearing my voice calms her, she tells me. Our Mrs. Barrett comes and goes with an imperiousness born of her place as Father’s secretary. But I’m getting old enough to take these tasks for myself, and poor, threatened, pious Mrs. Barrett knows it. But there’s no drama here, really. The drama is to come. This is my faithful drudgery, some of which you should see. When I walk up these stairs, to care for my mother, imagine me climbing to the top of a mountain in Cameroon, just to see it all from there. No one in my family dreams that I am the one who inherited the daring and the strength. I am not speaking only about my father and uncles, either.

  She turns and crosses to the stairs, climbs them, and stands outside the entrance to her mother’s room. She opens the door, letting the light in from the gas lamps in the hall. The light falls across her mother’s bed. Her mother is not old, yet her bearing and her voice sound it. She’s clearly someone who has not seen fresh air and the outdoors in a long time.

  MOTHER

  Mary, I’ve been calling you. The light ’urts me eyes, Mary.

  Mary closes the door, turns and moves downstage, stands there looking out, then heaves a deep sigh.

  MARY

  As you can see, I’m growing tall, growing out of my clothes, and this house is not the
world; the world is where Father is, making his investigations, gathering his specimens. The great mystery, out there.

  Lights down.

  3

  ONE AFTERNOON a little more than a week after the failure with Dominic, Lily heard footsteps out in the hall, and then silence, someone hesitating just on the other side of her door. She had been sitting under the window, book open in her lap, staring at the pattern of sunlight and leaf shadow on the opposite wall, and, in her mind, wandering through the gaslit halls of a house she had never been in or seen. There was someone outside her door—a friend of one of the girls who lived across the hall, perhaps? The girls had gone to Pennsylvania for the week, to visit with the family of one of them. Lily had heard them talking about it.

  The someone out in the hall moved—shuffling feet, a creaking floorboard. She sat very still, not even breathing. When Sheri lived here with her, there had been a couple of episodes of drunken boys coming to their corridor, calling names out and lurching against the wall. The thump and clatter of them had enraged Lily. But this someone was quiet—too quite, as if listening, waiting.

  Or had she imagined it?

  The knock on her door almost made her cry out. She closed the book, slowly, and kept quiet. The footsteps went off. She heard the sound of them on the stairs. She leaned into the screen of the window to see down to the entrance of the building, thinking that if it was Dominic, she would follow him. She did not want to be in this room with him again.

  It was Tyler. She saw him step out to the lawn and start away, toward the road on the other side of the quad. She called out: “Hey!”

  He stopped, turned, and then smiled. It struck Lily absurdly that this was like a scene in a movie. She waved at him, pushed the hair back from either side of her face. She hadn’t brushed it in days; she must look like a witch. “Wait for me?” she called, and hated the sound of the question in her voice.

  He sat down right there on the grass, folding his arms and crossing his legs. She rushed to the bathroom down the hall and brushed her teeth, ran a brush through the knotted tangle of her hair, and fumbled with her makeup. She couldn’t get the lipstick right—her hand shook. She kept going outside the line of her lips. When she stood back and regarded herself, she saw, for perhaps the first time, what a catastrophe she had made of her appearance over the past few days. She washed all the makeup off and reapplied it, with still-trembling fingers, remembering, in a roil of embarrassment, her mother’s first lessons in the use of it—light touches, never too much of anything, just enough to highlight her best features and appear not to be wearing it at all. But here was the uneven border of foundation along her hairline, and seeing this she almost washed it all off again. Instead she daubed at it with a piece of toilet paper, like a house painter trying to remove the unevenness in the trim of a windowpane. Finally she got herself to some sort of semblance of being presentable.

  But it seemed that so much time had gone by.

  He hadn’t moved. And he stayed seated as she approached. “I’m a mess,” she said. “I’ve been studying.”

  “I think you look great.” He sat there smiling, gazing up at her. “Are you eating enough? Sleeping enough? You do look a little dark around the eyes.” He stood, slapped at the back of his jeans. “I’ve got one more exam.”

  She had lost the sense of time; she had been under the impression that exam week was still several days off. So she had been missing exams, too.

  “What about you?” he said.

  “Oh,” she managed to say. “Right. I’m through.”

  “I thought maybe we’d go have dinner or something.”

  She had been so happy to see him out the window of her prison room. But now, abruptly, the last time she’d seen him came rushing back.

  “Are you cold? You’re shivering.” He wore a light blue sports jacket over a T-shirt. He took the jacket off and draped it over her shoulders. “I should’ve called or something. Just walking up like this—it’s rude. I didn’t think.”

  “Don’t think,” she said. It was good to see him. There was no complication in it, and no denying it, either. She didn’t care anymore. “Now you’re going to be cold,” she said.

  “I’ll take it back if I get cold. We’ll be like a couple of people taking turns on a joint.”

  They went down to the row of shops and restaurants along University Drive. At the street corner, Tyler stood closer to her, and put his arm around her. The surprise of it, the gratification in it, was startling; she drew a quick breath.

  He didn’t seem to notice. “What do you feel like eating?” he said.

  “I don’t have a preference.” The thought of food gave her a small tremor below her heart. The light changed and they crossed.

  He stepped into the corner doorway of a place advertising Bavarian food, a variety of beers. “This all right?”

  She nodded. There were several groups of people in the dimness beyond the long bar on the left-hand side. Others sat at the bar, most of them drinking. Tyler knew the waiter, a barrel-chested red-haired man with a lot of blond hair on his arms. They shook hands. The waiter’s name was Thornton. Tyler introduced Lily, and Thornton took her hand, then let go with a small bow. He led them with his ambling, big-man’s gait to a booth against the far wall, past the last group of people, a gathering of middle-aged men belonging to a group whose purpose it was to preserve barbershop quartet singing. Now and again these men broke into song, elaborate harmonies that were very pleasing to the ear, but faintly annoying, too, for their antique and rather too cute arrangements. Lily and Tyler listened to them, then applauded when they finished, and they politely acknowledged the applause, then launched into another song.

  “Now we’re stuck,” Tyler said.

  The singers were performing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” There were all sorts of harmonies inside harmonies, and repeated phrasings, intricately designed to complement each other.

  “I guess I picked the wrong place,” Tyler said.

  “Was this where we were going all along?”

  He nodded, watching the singers. “I’d’ve gone wherever you wanted—but, yeah, I was headed here. I like the food. Do you like sauerkraut?”

  “Sure,” she said, keeping her tone as light as she could. “What else do they have?”

  4

  THE BARBERSHOP SINGERS sang four or five other songs, and Lily was grateful for it, because it drew the two of them together in silent agreement about it. The arrangements were so elaborate that the songs began to blur. Thornton, waiting on them, rolled his eyes as they ordered, and the harmonizing went on. Tyler ordered a full meal: Polish sausage and sauerkraut, with steak fries and salad, and a small pitcher of lager. Lily asked for a chicken sandwich, the only thing she felt she could keep down. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and tried to calm her own mind. She had ordered a dark beer, because she had read somewhere that dark beer soothed the stomach. And when Thornton brought it, Tyler offered a toast.

  “To philosophy,” he said. “And to what it will buy me on the open market.”

  They drank. The beer seemed to burn all the way down. She drank again, and the burn was blessedly gone.

  He said, “I’ve got the oddest news. My mother’s, um, husband, has offered me a job, down in Oxford. Selling Oldsmobiles. I don’t know if this is Sheri’s doing or not.”

  Lily said nothing. It came to her with a pang that he had wanted to see her only to tell her he was leaving.

  “Sheri told you about us, right? About what happened. You know all that.”

  Lily nodded.

  “Well, I’ve gotten these things, you know, from my mother. A couple of little cards. Small communications through Sheri when she was here, and a couple of letters after Sheri went south. I think with my father being gone—I think my mother wants to—”

  “You’re going to Oxford.” Lily had said this with a note of alarm that she now tried to cover with a smile.

  “I haven’t laid eyes on her since I wa
s about five years old,” he continued. “And I don’t have much memory of her. But I think I’d like to see her on her own territory. There isn’t really anything waiting for me anywhere else, you know. So why not?” He shook his head. “I think they’d like to draw me into the family circle.” He looked down at his hands, which rested on either side of the glass of beer.

  “Well, she is your mother,” Lily said. “And they are your family now.”

  “So I’m told.”

  She sipped the beer and stared at him.

  “I guess I sound bitter. I’m only a little bitter. More than anything else, I’m curious. Of course I’m also curious about him. And scared, too. It scares me. The idea of going down there and spending time with them like that.”

  “I heard from Sheri,” Lily told him. “She wants me to go down there and visit.”

  “Why don’t we go together?” he said.

  She shrugged. “Right.” She couldn’t return his look.

  “I’m serious, Lily.”

  She didn’t answer. The singing had grown loud again, a woven strand of melodies and harmonies around the tune of rowing the boat gently down the stream.

  He drank from his beer, and turned to watch the men singing. It seemed that there were more of them now.

  “I’m not going to graduate,” she told him.

  He nodded. “I’m not going, either.”

  “I don’t mean the ceremony. I stopped going to classes.”

  “But that seems like such a waste, to come this far and then stop.”

  “You mean like, say, taking a philosophy degree so you can sell cars?”

  He held his beer glass up, as if to offer a toast. “That’s different. That’s exploration. That’s family and blood and all that.”