Peaceable Kingdom

by Francine Prose

  It was reassuring that we all started eating at once, food that was so delicious, who cared if it was lethal? Behind Nelson was a window and all through dinner I’d been distracted by dark shapes swooping near the glass.

  “What kind of birds are those?” I finally asked.

  “Bats, darling,” said Lucia. “But my bats are very strange bats. Most bats squeak, you know, like mice. But my bats cry like kitties. Isn’t that right, Hecuba, my love? Tell our friends what the little bats say.”

  Lucia couldn’t remember if she had gas in her car, so we took Nelson’s VW, with our sleeping bags still in back. I offered Lucia the front seat. I was shocked when she accepted. Since then I have met others who take you up on what’s only politeness; it’s like some spiteful playground trick you fall for again and again. I scrunched up in the back seat: a relief, in a way.

  Lucia slid in front and said, “I don’t believe in seat belts. To me, is a fascist plot.”

  Then the whole grim scenario played out before my eyes, Nelson having an episode, Lucia not wearing her seat belt. Was it more or less scary that this was wishful thinking on my part? I felt like a child in the back seat, sullen and resentful. I thought mean thoughts about Lucia and Nelson, that they had more in common than just Marianna. By temperament, they were spoilers, they enjoyed ruining your pleasure, making you hate what you might otherwise love: Mozart, bachelor’s buttons, mushrooms, food…in Nelson’s case, my whole life.

  For just the briefest moment, I was sorry for Marianna. And suddenly I felt frightened, alone, at Lucia and Nelson’s mercy, like a heroine in a thriller, Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, held prisoner in South America by Claude Rains and his evil mother. But Lucia and Nelson weren’t conspiring to kill me. It was fine with them, enough for them, to make me acutely unhappy. Though it wasn’t—ever—clear to me if they even knew, or cared.

  It was a soft July evening. We drove along a river, past a waterfall. Light and water splashed on us, beading up on the car. A valley opened before us, rolling fields studded with barns, silos, farmhouses, kitchen gardens: quiet façades behind which families and household pets must have been eating dinner, inside, out of the golden light.

  “Look!” I said, unnecessarily. Nelson and Lucia were already staring at a blazing wedge of sun streaming down from one high cloud.

  “People say I am imagining,” said Lucia. “But I know for a fact I am psychic. Yesterday morning I woke up and I knew I would hear from Marianna though it was, oh Jesus Christ, early spring since I hear from her last. That time she turned on the gas in your apartment, Nelson, I was at a party in Manhattan, and at the very moment my daughter was trying to kill herself, I suddenly faint and throw up all over the dinner table.”

  There was a silence. Nelson said, “Two hundred years ago my ancestors would have burned women like you and Marianna at the stake.”

  Now I was glad that I was in the back, I could burrow down in the lumpy seat and try not to be hurt that Nelson’s forebears wouldn’t have wasted their time burning a woman like me.

  “So would the people in this town,” Lucia said. “They would boil me in oil on Main Street if they knew anything about me.”

  Only then did I realize that we were in town. On the way to Lucia’s, Nelson and I had passed many pretty country villages crowded with tourist couples shopping for maple products. But Lucia’s town wasn’t one of those. Two grim rows of water-stained Greek Revival houses led up to the business section, a dusty crossroads—gas station, post office, grocery, hardware—uninterested in a stranger’s patronage or in any hospitable cosseting frills, like, for example, a sidewalk. I tried to imagine a life for myself and Nelson in such a town, in one of the nicer houses, near somewhere he could teach…but it didn’t seem like a good idea, thinking too far into the future.

  “If they knew…” Lucia said darkly. “About me and Hecuba…and my work. It is very anarchist, very un-Puritan and subversive. But to them I am just a crazy Italian, her house always needs fixing, her checks clear at the bank. Meanwhile, they tell me the gossip, the carpenters and electricians and plumbers. This town is a pit of snakes.”

  What people was she talking about? There was no one in this town, no children wheeling on their bikes as their parents watered the shaggy lawns. It was as if a bomb had dropped while we were out at Lucia’s, and we hadn’t known about it, and we were the only ones left.

  “Turn here,” Lucia instructed Nelson. Nelson pulled up to the grocery, a one-story brick-red cinder-block structure streaked with patches of oily black. Against the wall was a phone booth and a rickety picnic bench with an uninterrupted view of the gas pump.

  “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” cried Lucia.

  “What is it?” Nelson said, and from the back seat I echoed lamely, “What’s wrong?”

  “I forget my money. We must go home. I will miss Marianna!”

  “I have money,” said Nelson. “Can you get change in the store?”

  “I can try.” Lucia rolled her head and flared her nostrils, breathing harshly. I felt as if I were in the car with a small pony starting to panic. “Two women work here, sisters, one nice, one bitch, you never know who you are getting…”

  Nelson handed her a bill. “It’s a ten,” he said.

  “I know that,” snapped Lucia, groping for the door handle.

  Nelson leaned across her. Presumably he meant to open the door, but he was restraining her, too. He had to twist around slightly. I was shocked by the look on his face. I was afraid he was having an episode. Then something in his expression reminded me of my lab partner in the split second he had to decide whether to relinquish the frog or fetal pig I was grabbing out of his hands. Briefly I wondered if Nelson had been right about the Mormon boy’s secret passion for me. Because suddenly I recognized the expression of a man who has just realized that he will—that he is helpless not to—humiliate himself for love. And that was my psychic moment: I knew what was going to happen. I knew what Nelson was going to say long before he was able to make himself sound even slightly casual.

  Nelson said, “Say hello to Marianna. Tell her I’m up here visiting with my new wife.”

  “Yes, of course,” Lucia said and jumped out of the car.

  The summer evening was warm and pretty, but Nelson and I stayed in the car. I didn’t move up front. We stared at the storefront, on which there was nothing to see, not even a beer or cigarette ad or a sign announcing a special. Eventually Lucia appeared, holding a small paper bag. She gave us the V-sign and dipped her hand into the bag. The last rays of dusky evening light shone on the silver quarters raining back into the sack. I thought of how “Hansel and Gretel” ends with a shower of pearls and jewels that the children steal from the witch and play with when they get home.

  As if we were at a drive-in movie, we watched Lucia kneel and gather some coins she’d dropped, then stuff them in the phone, and dial and listen and slam the coin return and begin all over again…

  “You know, it’s the strangest thing,” I said. “I thought Marianna was dead.”

  “Dead?” said Nelson. “Right on the edge, and the worst part is, she could live on that edge till she’s ninety. What else do you think she’s doing, fucking an entire ashram in Bombay? Just being in Bombay. She got sick as a dog every time she came down to see me in the jungle. Once she found this empty patch of jungle and was squatting there puking and shitting and she looked up and saw a viper coiled around a branch just over her head.”

  In theory Nelson was talking to me, but he was looking at Lucia. And now it seemed, unbelievably, Lucia had placed her call. She was talking rapidly, gesticulating…She turned her back to us and leaned into the wall and bent her head as she listened and shouted…

  At last Lucia got back in the car. “Okay, we go home now,” she said.

  This silence lasted the longest. “What did she say?” Nelson asked.

  “Nothing,” replied Lucia. “I couldn’t reach her. That was someone at the ashram, a man who speaks Italian. Yes,
they know her very well there. She has just left for the Himalayas. She will stay in the mountains until fall

  We drove back to Lucia’s, and when we got out of the car, Lucia said, “I am tired now. You can sleep in my studio. There is a little mattress with sheets and also towels. The first light switch inside the door.”

  Nelson bent to kiss Lucia good night. Lucia turned away.

  A full moon was shining on the fields. We didn’t stop to admire it. I tried a timid werewolf howl, but Nelson didn’t laugh. He was walking ahead of me; he knew the way to the barn, which had cooled off considerably since that afternoon.

  The switch lit an old-fashioned bedside lamp on a table near a mattress that Lucia had made up with pillows, clean white sheets, and a thin red quilt. She must have done it some time before she left the studio to cook dinner, just when I was assuming she’d forgotten us completely.

  The lamp threw out a circle of light, thankfully too modest to include the photos of the artist and her cat, or the killer fish in his tank. I didn’t want to see those pictures now, I didn’t want to feel jealous because Lucia’s passion for her cat was deeper and more tender than what Nelson felt for me.

  I shucked off my clothes and slid under the quilt. Nelson waited a moment. Then he took off his jeans and got into bed in his T-shirt and shorts. He rolled over so his back was to me.

  “Good night, Polly,” he said.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  I think he may have fallen asleep. I remember that he slept. I turned off the night-light; bars of moonlight took its place. I lay in the dark and listened to the cat, mewing like a newborn, a cry that seemed to get louder when I realized it might be a bat.

  I wished I could have found the switch on Lucia’s stereo that activated the endless loop of the Mozart trio. It didn’t matter how often I’d heard it, I couldn’t remember it now when I most needed its soothing distractions. I wished I could recall exactly how it sounded, the voices of the women with their misdirected grief, each mourning because she imagines her lover is facing the dangers of travel, when her true misfortune is beyond what she can imagine: the cruelty of a lover who would want to test her like that.

  Twenty years later I went with my second husband and our children to visit friends in Vermont. Over dinner our friend reminisced about the past, the years when the woods in every direction were teeming with crazy artists. He mentioned people we all knew, who had lived there for a while…

  My attention had drifted, lulled by the pleasures of friends, food and wine, the distant shouts of children on the lawn, the sweet light of that summer evening. Then once more I had a moment when I knew what was going to happen, that my friend was about to mention an Italian woman artist who had lived just through the forest, essentially next door…

  I had forgotten, I never exactly knew, where precisely Lucia lived. And I wasn’t thinking about that long-ago night at her house until the moment—that is, the instant before—my friend mentioned Lucia de Medici’s name.

  I said, “I used to know her. I spent a weekend at her farm.” And everybody stared at me, because my voice shook so.

  There was a second coincidence, a shadow of the first. For dinner that night we were having chicken with wild mushrooms. For all I knew, our hostess had picked the mushrooms in the woods, but when I asked where the mushrooms came from and she heard my concern, she made a point of saying how much they cost, dried, in the store, because she knew that the fact of a store would reassure someone like me. To my friends, my having spent a weekend with their former neighbor was no more remarkable than having chicken with mushrooms twice in twenty years.

  And really, it wasn’t surprising for adults to know someone in common; by then the threads of our lives had stretched long enough to have converged at various places. But what shocked me was that my friends had known someone who seemed to belong to a whole other existence. I felt as if I’d been reincarnated and just now recognized the entire cast from my previous life: shuffled, playing brand-new parts, living in different houses.

  I said, “Whatever happened to her? To Lucia?”

  My friend said, “She went back to Italy. I think I heard something like that.”

  “Did you ever meet her daughter?” I said.

  “Her daughter?” My friend considered. “Oh, yes, she had a crazy daughter. Lucia was always worrying. She was always in some nutty place, Machu Picchu or Kathmandu…”

  “Was the daughter beautiful?” I said.

  “Beautiful?” my friend repeated. “Sort of pretty, I guess. Very nervous, overbred…like a big trembly Afghan hound.”

  Then my friend mentioned another friend, a mutual friend, a friend so close our families often spent holidays together. And it seemed that this friend had also been a neighbor of Lucia’s. He had also lived on a farm, but on the other side, and had lived there that same summer, perhaps that very same weekend. Did I know that? our host asked.

  But how could I have known that? How could I have understood that two messengers from my future were, even as I lay awake in that barn, just beyond the hedge? I wondered how often the future waits on the other side of the wall, knocking very quietly, too politely for us to hear, and I was filled with longing to reach back into my life and inform that unhappy girl: all around her was physical evidence proving her sorrows would end. I wanted to tell her that she would be saved, but not by an act of will: clever Gretel pretending she couldn’t tell if the oven was hot and tricking the witch into showing her and shoving the witch in the oven. What would rescue her was time itself and, above all, its inexorability, the utter impossibility of anything ever staying the same.

  But I—that is, the girl I was—couldn’t possibly have heard. She was too busy listening for the mewing of cats, or bats. To have even tried to tell her would be like rising up out of the audience just when those angelic voices are praying for gentle winds, a calm ocean, like interrupting the opera to comfort or warn the singers: Don’t worry, there is no journey, no one is going away, there is nothing to fear but your own true love, disguised as an Albanian.

  About the Author

  Francine Prose is the author of sixteen novels, including A Changed Man, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. A former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Prose is a highly regarded critic and essayist, and has taught literature and writing for more than twenty years at major universities. She is a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College, and she lives in New York City.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The following stories appeared, in slightly different form, in these publications: “Talking Dog” in The Yale Review; “Cauliflower Heads” in The Michigan Quarterly Review; “Rubber Life” in The North American Review and The Pushcart Prize XVII; “Amazing” in TriQuarterly; “Ghirlandaio” in Tikkun and The Tikkun Anthology; “Amateur Voodoo” in Boulevard and The Sophisticated Cat; “Potato World” in Boulevard; “Dog Stories” in Special Report and The Best American Short Stories 1991; “Imaginary Problems” in Antaeus; “The Shining Path” in The Indiana Review.

  Copyright © 1993 by Francine Prose

  Cover design by Jason Gabbert


  978-1-4804-4510-9

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