by Laurie Fox
“Maybe you could have written something better for us, Mu-Mu? Something publishable?”
“Yes, that’s it. I could have written a better story. For Freeman, Mummy, you. You could say this story sucks big-time.” Berry flashed a nervous grin. “I just need some rest, Ber. I need to go to sleep and wake up somewhere else. Preferably not on an island.”
“I thought you were a Neverland junkie, Mommy. I thought you were due back on the island, like any minute now?” Berry mimicked a finicky person checking a wristwatch, then wiped her face clean with the cuff of her sweater.
“I’m not due anywhere,” I said tautly. “And Neverland’s not a life. It’s a diversion, a card trick. Haven’t you heard? No one believes anymore. Especially not in fairies—they’re out of favor. Way out. And faith? Well, it’s almost sacrilege to have faith. Look at me. Once upon a time, I had all the faith in the world. I had faith in spades. But faith is messy, there’s just no telling where it leads you. Not to mention how embarrassing it is. Yes, compared to its alternative—uncertainty—faith is practically insane! Which may explain why I’m here—in a hospital.”
Our session was cut short by Dr. Candace Song. In a matter of weeks Candy Song had made measurable progress with Berry. At first Berry had been a tough nut to crack—refusing help of any sort, she’d tried her best to alienate the doctor with snarky observations about hospital life, and then blatant attacks on Song’s weight and fussy mannerisms. But Song was unflappable. Hour after hour, she held her ground, if quietly, and soon she commanded Berry’s respect with her intolerance for bullshit; she earned Berry’s trust with stories of her own grinding youth in a Beijing orphanage. The tools of Song’s trade? Confucian sayings, pickles, and surprise visits that resulted in hugs.
Walking in now on this mother-daughter scene, Song recognized that pickles had no place in the exchange to follow. She cut to the chase with medical precision: “I’ve an urgent fax for Wendy and Berry Darling.”
Song handed the page to me, the wiser, elder Darling. I studied the near-empty piece of paper. “It’s Daddy,” I gasped.
Berry and I sat down on a courtyard bench; she held the page as I read aloud:
Wendy, your great-grandmother is dead. The same goes for your great-great-grandmother, Berry. Great is le mot juste: no question that our Nana was a great dame. To that end, I expect your presence at her memorial service this coming Friday. Please, for both your sakes, get it together. I’ve plane reservations waiting for you as well as for Margaret, unless she’s promoting some new screed, and for Freeman, if he’s not on deadline for some cartoon. Ring my office. See you shortly.
Cheers,
Daddy/Granddad
“Ch-cheers?” I sputtered.
“Triple is gone,” Berry whispered.
“He could have called,” I said.
“Triple is gone,” Berry repeated, looking at me as if I had missed something crucial.
* *
GREAT-NANA’S memorial service was shockingly high-tech for a person who was, famously, a dreamy Edwardian girl. Daddy had his publicity department at Brave Hearts Airlines cook up one of those video biographies that combine still photographs, film footage, tinkly music, and voice snippets from people who knew and loved the deceased into a morbid quilt of remembrance. In a matter of days they’d assembled something remarkably polished, as if Great-Nana were a beloved brand of detergent, or better yet, an airline unto herself.
Lined up as if before a firing squad, our family sat on a wooden pew in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, where the likes of Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and William Blake had their memorial services. Spines straight and eyes wide, we watched as Great-Nana’s life unfolded before us on a silver projection screen. There we were, the Bravermans cavorting with Nana at Brighton Beach—Mummy and I waving gaily in our candy-colored bathing suits, Great-Nana concealed inside an enormous jeweled caftan; Daddy and Nana striding across our London rooftop, Nana feigning flight; Mummy and Nana at a costume ball, dressed as floozy fairies; Nana and I doing the Charleston in her drawing room, winking at the camera like showgirls.
The scratchy old footage ended with a burst of light and segued to crisp video of a host of distinguished authors and playwrights, their grave faces betrayed by the occasional eye twinkle. Each spoke deliriously about Nana as his muse, as the mother of all whimsy, as a goddess on this earth. Berry took to coughing conspicuously whenever one of the testimonies got out of hand, its platitudes so vaunted and myriad that somebody might get hurt. One novelist referred to Nana as “my sole reason for living,” which was curious in light of his misogynistic tomes, but who was to argue? Another old codger, a poet of some renown, tagged Nana as his personal assistant, and this I took as a veiled confession of his lapsed status as her lover. The two had dated in the forties, I knew, during which time his poetry became infected with her harmless surrealism. Soon thereafter, he’d published a bizarre, illustrated bestiary that included a woodcut of a bird that bore a woman’s mocking face. Identified as the “Darling Harpy,” the creature clearly resembled Great-Nana and had caused a minor scandal. There was no doubt that the poet had loved and lost her, the end product of their relationship the inevitable, bitter poem.
Other faces appeared on the screen—Sir Edmund Hillary, Sir Stephen Spender, Sir Peter Ustinov—virtually all the Sirs. Lord Richard Attenborough spoke of the necessity for humans to go in search of otherness, to seek out other worlds and new species, a cause well championed by Great-Nana over the course of her life. At this Berry failed to suppress a titter. She associated Attenborough solely with Jurassic Park, that mythic home to rebellious dinosaurs that refuse to die off. A distant cousin of J. M. Barrie gave tribute to Great-Nana’s needlework, of all things, and a great-aunt of Daddy’s recited a poem, too many windy verses to count about Nana’s “unique specialness.” I was hoping the gathering of friends wouldn’t gag on the treacle; Nana would have put an end to that. Not to worry: after the video ended—with a pan of the stars in the night-sky accompanied by the genuinely lovely “When You Wish Upon a Star”—Mummy rose from her pew and approached the podium. There was an audible gasp; only later did I recognize that it had come from me.
Dressed for the occasion in a screaming red sheath, tomato-red tights, and a brick-red shawl, Mother herself looked chalky, grief-stricken. Her hanky, a shell-pink tissue that was well used by this point in the service, hung limply from her right hand while her left hand gestured slackly. Her pale, damp face, lined with creases, told the same sad story.
“Well,” Mother said to the assembled mourners, “what can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach.”
“The opening lines of Love Story!” I bristled, and seized Berry’s hand.
“Now that I have your attention,” Mother continued, “I want to tell you about the grandmother I knew. Not the little girl who was close to Sir James, but Wendy the woman, Wendy the warrior!” Everyone in the pews looked at everyone else, as if their neighbor held the answer to the riddle of Mummy’s logic.
“Like a sunflower, Wendy Darling outgrew her little garden. She outgrew society’s ideas about bright young things, that they should be seen but not heard. The girl knew a lot of places, she had a lot to say. And, against the wishes of the literary establishment, she became an adult—an adult who would never easily mesh with mainstream culture, who was hard-pressed to blend in, whose ideas about the world were often applauded, then taken with a grain of salt. If anything, Wendy was the first woman to publicly stand up to modern, immature man—to say sod off to his desperate need to stay young, beautiful, and purposeless. Indeed, Wendy sent out a powerful message to males of every stripe: Be responsible—and suffer the consequences!”
Here I sneaked a sideways glance at Freeman, who seemed to be relishing Mother’s words, though not permitting their meaning to penetrate his skull. Daddy, on the other hand, looked wildly entertained; he had moved on emoti
onally years ago and no longer let Mummy get to him. Berry looked bored but I knew better: she had lost an important ally and couldn’t understand why everyone seemed so jolly when she was devastated.
“Now, I don’t want to get all weepy on you”—Mother dabbed at her eyes with her tissue—“but it begs to be said that Wendy Darling was screwed by the mental health professionals of her day, she was screwed by the mental health professionals of my day, and she continued to be misunderstood by the National Health Service in her twilight years. Characterized as ‘a danger to herself,’ she spent these last years incarcerated at All-Saints Sanitarium”—here, Mother scanned the audience as if policing the joint—“but in fact she was only a danger to society. For if we choose to ignore the other dimensions—those places that can’t be seen with the lights on—we are in serious danger, my friends.”
Daddy squeezed my hand with a steady cadence, and I must say it felt good.
“I am here to tell you,” Mother roared, “that Wendy Darling wasn’t crackers. She wasn’t even close.” To drive home her point, Mother pounded the podium a tad roughly for your traditional memorial service. “You see, as far as Wendy’s health was concerned, her vision was 20/20, her mind sharp as a pin, her attitude tip-top! And her heart, well, her heart was—” Mother’s voice broke up. “Her heart was bigger than her body.” She rested her shoulders on the podium and bobbed silently.
Daddy scrambled out of his seat and, with unexpected tenderness, escorted his ex off the stage. A draft whistled through the church, scattering the programs and blowing out several white tapers. When the air was still, we were left with our thoughts and the unmistakable scent of mint and clove. The emptiness seemed fitting, for no one could translate Great-Nana’s essence into words. Nevertheless I gave it a try.
Filling the awkward gap created by Mother’s departure, I watched my legs make their way to the stage. Shortly I found myself behind the podium, looking out at a sea of befogged, expectant faces and a few rectangles of cobalt sky. Daddy gave a nod that served to stabilize me, and I opened my mouth to speak before any thoughts presented themselves. Pervaded by a general shakiness, I combed my fingers through my graying ginger locks, a childhood habit that has never deserted me. Then, seemingly doomed to repeat myself, I gathered and regathered my hair in a loose ponytail, letting it drop and pool at my shoulders.
“My name is Wendy Darling,” I said at last into the microphone. “Wendy Darling, Junior.” Nothing else came to mind and I feared that that would be the sum of my remarks. “For I am every bit her junior,” I said, recovering. “As Mother noted, my great-grandmother’s heart and mind were vast, open to entertaining more worlds than one. She was fond of the wildest notions: synesthesia, sentiment. It was Great-Nana, after all, who taught me that sentiment has gotten a very bad reputation. If you think about it, sentiment packs the combined power of mentality—the intellect—and sensation, the senses. What could be more potent than that? In the stories she told, Great-Nana was keen to mix the two in equal parts. This balance, she said, ensured that stories grabbed at your psyche and your throat. Great-Nana’s tales were fearless—feeling, romantic, wise, and true. Sadly, she never wrote them down—she preferred the role of transmitter. Now it’s up to us to piece them together in the wake of her ‘retirement.’ I don’t think we’ll suffer from a lack of volunteers. Surely those children who choose to believe—in nonsense, in illusion, in poppycock—will contribute to our cause.
“Finally, I have got to share something personal.” I lifted my eyes to take in the soaring South Rose Window—so the cobalt sky was stained glass, not the real sky at all. “None of us Darlings are sure of what we’ve seen or what we’ve experienced. None of us can swear on the Bible or swear to God about any of it. We’re all shady customers in that respect. But we wouldn’t change places with any of you—being certain exacts too high a price. What I’m trying to say is, don’t worry about us. So what if we’re unstable. Great-Nana told me: Never be jealous of the stable ones, they’re all lying anyway.”
This was coming out wrong. I just wanted to tell everyone that I’d fallen for Nana the first time I spotted her picture in a storybook: a brave little girl winging her way over the rooftops of London. Love at first flight, we’d always joked. I blew my nose with a fresh tissue. “I really have nothing else to say. I’d ask you all to clap, as long and hard as you can, to bring back our Wendy. But that’s just, you know, wishful thinking. I will ask that, in place of flowers or cards, donations be made to the Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity—the address is written on the back of your program—”
I couldn’t hear my own voice. The walls were . . . throbbing, the air displaced by a crisp low pounding that could only be understood as the clapping of true believers. I bit my thumbnail and held very still, for I was not accustomed to affirmation. The clapping continued, its amplitude rising in waves. If we hadn’t woken the dead, at least we were disturbing their sleep.
Freeman took this lush, ambient sound as his personal cue. At some point in the syncopated clapping, he’d mounted the stage and strapped on his acoustic guitar. In place of his trademark barrage of sound, we were treated to a monastically simple version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which segued into the lullaby “Tender Shepherd,” which flowed seamlessly into “Golden Slumbers.” The effect was transcendent.
The congregation filed out in tempo with Freeman’s humble guitar-picking. Mummy and Daddy and Berry and I made our way out the doors of the Abbey, leading the other mourners in a snaking line that eventually wound its way over to the Black Cat, a local pub. Looking back over my shoulder, I searched the subdued, misty faces that I found so comforting—could that old fogey be Gaston, the baker from Cooke? Was that eminence gris Sidney Farrington, Nana’s once-upon-a-time husband? That tall gaunt lady, the fugitive Jane? And what was this—this posse of homeboys? They vaguely resembled other boys I had known, but this lot looked like hip-hop artists: baggy trousers, gold chains, unlaced running shoes. What in the world were they doing here?
That was precisely the point, wasn’t it? They didn’t belong here, in this world. One of the little fellows winked at me, and I got a psychic chill. Surely he meant no harm; he was paying his respects like all the others. It was the feather in his Nikes that troubled me, the still-damp clod of moss hanging on to the laces.
PART
FOUR
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night
in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to
find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day
are dangerous men, for they may act their dream
with open eyes, to make it possible.
—T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Wendy, let me in, I wanna be your friend
I want to guard your dreams and visions
—Bruce Springsteen, “Born to Run”
XIV
GREAT-NANA’S death was Berry’s and my ticket out of the loony bin. Berry was handed an “honorable discharge,” and while the verdict was still out on me, the doctors felt that Berry would benefit from having her mother at home. If anyone were to inquire, I’d say I wasn’t exactly cured, but rather paroled.
Nevertheless, a new feeling of hope prevailed in the hills of North Berkeley, as Freeman, too, arranged his schedule to spend more time with us. Family life turned eerily normal: movie and theater outings, music concerts, bookstore readings. We ate together at least four times a week and remembered to say kind things to each other on these occasions. Other times were awkward and self-consciously weird. Freeman and Berry walked on eggshells around me, but I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy this. My shell, you could say, remained shocked, and I still required a wide berth.
For all my family’s fondness for metaphysics, I’d always shown little interest in death, in what might be called its downside. Hence, Great-Nana’s passing had come as a surprise. No question that I’d had my fill of loss; at times I’d eve
n gorged on it. Girl waits for boy. Girl sort of gets boy. Girl sort of forgets world. Boy truly forgets girl. Longing and exile and amnesia—need I say more? For in spite of The Neverland’s fabled love affair with life, the place was infected with loss. Just to make the scene, a boy had to forfeit a little thing called parents. Now, just who was officially absent—the boy or the parents—I cannot say for sure. But I can say that absence was the source of The Neverland’s power, its dark underbelly and very foundation. While absence isn’t death, in practice it’s far more insidious. The lack of closure trumps your garden-variety fatalities—your stabbings, your shootings, your overdoses, your car wrecks.
In Neverland the Laws of Absence are utterly clear, albeit cruel and unusual: if a boy is wanted by his parents—profoundly, strenuously wanted by both or even one of the people who first imagined him—he won’t find himself among banana-nut trees and mermaid-infested waters. On the contrary, he will be content with the scarred oaks and polluted ponds back home, the sharp fact of his significance cutting a swath through all obstacles in his path. However, if a boy is discarded, ignored, or stupidly left behind, forgotten at the market or at the mall; if he is violated or misused, probed and thrown away, then nature takes its course and The Neverland intervenes. It’s the damaged ones who are picked up by the wind.
And we can do without those blissful flying metaphors of which writers are enamored. The left-behind child either lifts off by conceiving of something finer—a life more decent—or hits the ground with a thud and has to deal with the shit on this plane. Those few who do both, who straddle the ground and the air, are torn-apart creatures. We live in the hospitals in every community. We get to go home when we’re good and ready to shed our beliefs, the formal proof of our absence.
