The Daughters

by Adrienne Celt

  “About you,” I tell my mother. “Wouldn’t you be?”

  She smiles. “Oh, definitely.”

  But the smile fades. She sits down in the last pew and drums her nails on the space beside her. I hesitate, but follow, and we both watch John at the front of the church, directing people around. There’s something funny about the arrangement behind the altar, but before I can think too much about it, my mother asks, “Don’t you want to know what I’ve been doing all these years?”

  “What?”

  “You know, Hello, Mama, I’ve missed you. What on earth have you done to fill the time? I’ve been waiting for you to ask any one of the sensible questions, but you never do. It’s not your style, I guess.”

  “Huh,” I say.

  Sara plays with her bottom lip without realizing it and then sees the lipstick on the tips of her fingers. She pinches her lips together to smooth out the shade, and runs a nail along the line of pink and pale, to assure the definition. This is what she pays attention to as I sit beside her, not answering. I, the daughter, a vague notion she has carried in her head.

  “Maybe I don’t want to know.” My voice, catching in my throat, sounds husky. “Maybe I have other things on my mind, or maybe I’m just not interested.”

  “Oh, you’re interested.” She takes my hands, both of them, just what I wanted, only times two. Too hard. “You’ve always liked to be told scary stories.”

  “Come on,” I say. “You live in the city. How scary could it be?”

  She tilts back her head to look at the ceiling and her mouth falls open, just a little. Puppet jaws, on a hinge. The inside of her mouth is just as dark pink as her lips, teeth pearlescent, but studded with aluminum fillings. One gold, in the back. Sara sighs, upward.

  “You asked me, on the phone,” she said. “About Greta? I mean, talk about your spook stories. Let me tell you something.” My mother rights her neck and I hear a small crick. “About you.”

  “Okay,” I say. Sara angles her head and indicates me closer.

  “Well, doll.” She used to call me lalka, like Ada did. Little doll. I guess I’ve grown up. “You were always looking for the curse. Always. Every little bad thing that happened to you, everything you did wrong, you asked me, Was that it? Was that the curse? As if taking five dollars out of my purse without asking is the kind of thing that you’d be forced to do by magic.”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t remember that.”

  “You were a child.” Sara squeezes my fingers so they crush together. “What the hell do you know?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Sometimes,” she says, and then stops. There’s a sound up by the sanctuary. “Things happen just because we do them. Not for any other reason.”

  The sound comes again.

  “What is that?” I ask. But Sara doesn’t answer. She knows. I know.

  It starts as a low moan. The keening of a child who is lost in the woods. And then the sound lifts mercifully, a feather on the wind, that same child looking up at the trees to see a familiar face through the leaves. There is an element of sobbing that I can feel in my own chest—the phlegmatic stickiness and heaving—but also something of joy. I feel my body unsettle as though it had been covered with six feet of dirt and then suddenly dusted off. Light as air.

  A violinist I recognize from the Lyric orchestra, the assistant concertmaster in fact, stands on a podium dressed in a dark blue gown. She tilts to one side with her instrument cradled under her chin, bobbing back and forth. Her hair, chopped short against her ears, shakes against the movement of her body. If she tilts right, her hair falls left. Beside her sits Rick, looking at her with suspicious eyes and wearing a tuxedo. With tails. I didn’t expect that from him, today, though I knew he would be here. The godfather. Apparently Ada planned something more for him and didn’t tell me. I put a hand over my mouth and bite back a bit of sudden laughter at the seriousness of his dress—I don’t want to interrupt the violinist. She’s practicing an accompaniment to “Ave Maria.”

  The song is so common that it’s almost a rite of passage for singers—everyone must record an “Ave.” Jazz it up or dress it down. And it’s a rite for musical audiences too, performed so often that people like to pretend the song bores them. Like to think they know the story of it. But they’re usually wrong—ask almost anyone on the street and they’ll tell you the piece is a song of worship, in Latin, when in fact it’s Schubert, and the words are German.

  It’s not a prayer. It’s an appeal. A young woman, called the Lady of the Lake, asks the Virgin Mary for help and peace in a time of war. Families fighting one another, families perishing. And a man who loves the singing lady leaves for battle, realizing he will never hear her voice again. But the lady doesn’t sing for this warrior, she sings for her father, who has declined to fight and has therefore made himself terribly vulnerable. Hear for a maid a maiden’s prayer. And for a father hear a child.

  We haven’t had very many fathers in my family, so maybe I’m not accustomed to them. What I hear is a girl crying for her mother. For a hand that soothed her in the night, and touched her cheek, and disappeared.

  I look at Sara. She seems bored, or maybe just distracted. Where did you go? I do want to ask her. How on earth did you fill the time? But I think I missed my chance. Maybe I’m not supposed to know. Or maybe it’s not fate, but just the choice I made. Things happen just because we do them, she said. Sometimes.

  The violinist reaches the end of the song and nods to Rick, seated beside her at a piano that I’m sure he had brought in especially for the occasion. He’s very particular about what he’ll play on, sometimes going to the trouble of tuning an instrument himself if he’s displeased with a damper or the tension in a wire. The two of them wait for a moment and I can hear them counting, getting into the same rhythm of notes per heartbeat. And then they begin to play together. The piano is the lake water. The violin plays the part of the wind in the trees.

  As they run through it, the song begins to feel like a round, or a fugue. Repeating itself only to pick up more steam, to grow and expand. First there was silence, then the violin, and then the piano layered on top. I sway slightly, listening. Because soon the piece will end again, and if it picks back up, I could add my voice. Take the journey a little further.

  I feel a bit nauseous in my desire to do so. To sing this song, and every song. To never stop, and damn the consequences.

  The Lady of the Lake performs her “Ave Maria” in a woodland cave, and I can feel the forest floor beneath my feet, the soft bed of pine needles and birch leaves dried into a crackling path. I bite my lip and watch Rick’s hands tremble over the keys, the violinist bob and weave like a river wave. The past, and the future, I think. The past and the future. Ada lying on the hospital floor, already gone while busy people touch and urge her. And Kara, my baby. Is it worse if she caused Ada to fall by being born, child of a curse made well before her reckoning, or is it worse if I let her become part of that birthright so that someday, somehow, she loses something too?

  The answer is: both, both. Somehow I am the survivor of both deaths, if I believe all that nonsense that my grandmother told me. If I stand up and do the only thing I’ve ever known how to love completely. If I stand, and sing my appeal.

  Last night when I was dreaming, I sat beside Greta on a knoll in Poland and we shared a cigarette. A luxury for both: Greta chewed tobacco because the papers were expensive, and the absolute proscription on smoke coming anywhere near my throat has long been a contentious part of my existence. Sara once threw an ashtray at the wall when Ada asked her to take her filthy habit out to the fire escape on a cold day.

  In the dream I liked the smell. It was more like pipe tobacco, sweet. Greta squinted and pinched the small rolled thing between her fingers, exhaling into the distance. She blew perfect smoke rings of outlandish size: as they emerged from her lips they were minuscule, but the farther they drifted away the larger they got, until several were resting on the treeto
ps in the forest below us.

  “What happened to you?” I finally asked. We might have been sitting there for an hour, ten minutes, several weeks. I was in no hurry, but it was a question I’d always wanted to know the answer to.

  Greta’s chin lay on her hand, and with the fingers of the other she passed me our cigarette. I inhaled with gusto, feeling the curls of smoke caress my throat, the mass of black breath coil and undulate within me.

  “There was a war on,” she said at last.

  “Yes, but you were you.” Greta was the size of a mountain, safe as houses. “At least,” I said apologetically, uncertain how much I’d spoken aloud, “that was always my impression.”

  She stretched, and then looked at me. We both fell backward onto the grass, and I coughed a little puff of smoke out when my lungs felt the impact. From the ground, Greta reached out one hand and placed it on top of my head. Her palm moved back and forth across my hair, probably causing knots and tangles.

  “Little girl, I ran and ran across the fields,” Greta said, still stroking my hair. “I had a gun in each hand and I shot anything that moved. They were all bad ones. But that wasn’t my concern. I wanted to get to my boys and feel their foreheads one last time. Fil had such a funny shape in his, a line right down the middle. Andrzej’s was enormous, and Konrad’s was so smooth. He never got,” she gestured at her cheeks, “any spots. He was just a perfect child, except not what I wanted. It was hard to forgive him that.”

  I took a deep drag off the cigarette and moved it up to Greta’s waiting fingers.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “it took my breath away.”

  “What?”

  She exhaled through her front teeth. “The sheer cheek. The total lack of respect for what I had. For my husband, for my beautiful sons. And it wasn’t just my sons, no, I wasn’t content to give just them up. I gave up every son in every township. Every daughter I could have imagined a life for. What did I think the devil would want? Everything,” she said, stubbing the cigarette out in the grass. “From everyone.”

  “Even me?” I asked, though I knew the answer. She moved the cigarette around in the dirt—I could hear the shuffling—and brushed my hair again.

  “Of course.”

  I was silent. Wind whipped through the trees below us and dissipated Greta’s smoke rings. Pine crests tilted and croaked under the strain, but where we were the blustering had no effect at all.

  Finally I said, “That doesn’t answer my question. Where did you go? Where are you?”

  Greta sat up, and for a moment she looked so much, so achingly much like Ada that I cried out. But when she turned back to me, the likeness faded.

  “You want to know where my grave is?” Greta asked. “The order in which we died? Whether we tried to save each other or sent people out to be slaughtered? I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter.” Her eyes looked for something on the horizon, something they couldn’t seem to find. “Gone is gone.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If you can’t show me your grave, how can I know you really died?”

  But Greta just shrugged.

  “For all you know,” she said, “I never even existed.”

  I walk towards the front of the church as if in a trance. On the way I pass John and I gently peel my daughter from his chest and lift her up into the air. Her arms and legs dangle down towards me, and one leg gives a kick. A jig.

  With only a bit of difficulty, owing to the fact that I can’t use my hands for help, I climb up onto the podium beside the violinist and Rick. Rick winks at me.

  “Nice to see you,” he says. “Been wondering when I would.”

  “Hush,” I say. And then, indicating the violinist with my chin, “Who put you up to this? It was just supposed to be the choir.”

  He smiles at me. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  The three of us—four of us—form a semicircle. I shiver again, with nerves.

  “I’m not warmed up, you know,” I say. “I’m not ready.”

  “That’s okay.” Rick cracks his knuckles and runs a few fingers over the keys. “We’ve got some time.”

  And so I listen to them run scales, first the basics at an even tempo, and then Rick adds in a little verve. Takes things into minor, adds trills. Generally tries to entice me into joining. This is always our game, but I’m not sure I can play. Already my pulse is quick. There are knots in my stomach, and I can’t tell which are tying and which untying. I am, I realize, terribly unprepared for this.

  Instead of the sensations in my own body, I concentrate on Kara’s slack weight, and on what I see in front of me. John sits in the first row, watching me back, and a few rows behind him I see my mother. No longer in the rear of the church, she seems to have moved closer when I wasn’t looking. My chest pinches whenever she catches my eye, and still I am silent. Waiting until the last minute to decide. The violinist shoots me a very sideways look.

  At last the priest shows up next to me, nearly tripping on his own vestments. There are two altar boys lighting candles around the room, and I breathe deeply the fat-rich scent of melting wax.

  I keep my voice steady.

  “Is it time to begin, Father?” I ask. I want someone to tell me what to do.

  He blinks at me. “It’s your party.”

  “All right,” I say. I fill my lungs and empty them. Bellows in and out, breathing over a fire. Then I give Kara a kiss on the cheek and hand her to the priest. I almost can’t; it’s like handing over a bit of my body. But I do.

  I nod at Rick.

  And I sing:

  Ave Maria! maiden mild!

  Listen to a maiden’s prayer!

  Thou canst hear though from the wild;

  Thou canst save amid despair.

  I feel a prickling behind my eyes, in my ears. The way blood builds up before you faint, when your head gets too heavy. I look at the door and for an instant I see Ada walking through it, and think, No, you’re not supposed to be here. But I blink, and it’s no one. Just a gray shadow come and gone with a trick of the light.

  Safe may we sleep beneath thy care,

  Though banish’d, outcast and reviled—

  Maiden! hear a maiden’s prayer;

  Mother, hear a suppliant child!

  The room is silent, listening. My tongue is an icicle, melting in spring. My throat is a river, rushing. My body is breaking. My breath is quick. Quick. Quick.

  Kara’s eyes are large white discs, shot through with blue. The pinpoints of her pupils focusing, watching my lips with hungry attention.

  There is a merciful moment where I’m able to feel surprised, just before I lose consciousness.

  The silence that follows a performance is a different silence entirely from the one that precedes it. Both are full—one with anticipation, the other with echoes, as if the silence itself were a vibrating bell.

  I feel the tremors of sound before I hear them, and then I hear smears, snatches without meaning. As the sounds warm up and gain flesh, almost distinction, I’m aware of something physical: my hands are shaking.

  Slowly, more leaks in. My hands in other pairs of hands, being held against a face that feels like ice. No. The face is warm. It’s my own skin that’s cold and pale as frost.

  “Baba?” So I have a voice, too. I open my eyes and see my husband, looking concerned. “John.” Only the people who are supposed to be here are here, after all.

  “Lu, what happened?” John asks. “My god, you really did blow a gasket. I thought that was a joke.”

  “So did I.” My hands find my abdomen, pressing gently against the schism of string and scar tissue that’s been holding me together. “Sort of. Am I bleeding?”

  “No, of course you’re not bleeding,” he says. Though even at that moment he’s looking, touching me gingerly, finding the same thing. Nothing. But he keeps checking, placing his hand against my forehead and lifting my chin with three fingers. Moving my face from side to side, inspecting me with urgent eyes. Everyone else is standin
g, peering, but keeping their distance as John waves them back. “Do you feel like you’re hurt?”

  In fact, for the first time in several weeks I feel calm, and whole. My body is radiating a peculiar heat, so it feels liquid and elastic. Beyond the possibility of harm. I don’t know if I can stand, but I don’t care. I lie propped in John’s arms, letting myself ebb and flow. What just happened? I can only half remember. There was a party. Or not quite a party. I sang a song.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “I just— It was too hot. I need something to drink.”

  John signals and someone runs to get something for me, bringing back a thick, riveted glass of cold water. I sip and it’s the best water I’ve ever tasted.

  “John, listen,” I say.

  “What is it?” His brown eyes find mine, and I think, I chose you. I would choose you again. John has told me many little lies, ones I know and ones I haven’t yet discovered. But in his arms now, I feel there is a larger truth still. Montmartre standing. Sacré-Coeur. The lies seemed so significant to me that they’ve shrouded the fact that I haven’t been better. Waiting for him to discover me. Waiting for him to call me out.

  “Listen,” I say again. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

  19

  Kara—the real girl, the one who lives and breathes and probably has her own thoughts, though I cannot yet fathom the shape of them—she deserves a real baptism. It’s a thing about the soul: even if you doubt it’s real, even if you don’t believe in heaven, you want your child to go there. To be invited, with or without you.

  John shakes his head. “Why would you tell me that?” he asks. I take his hand.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  No one else is standing close enough to hear what we’re talking about, but I can imagine what we look like, two dark faces shedding tears, and then nodding.

  “You think this is the right place for this conversation?”