I remember noticing how her toenails were abnormally long, how they curved down over the tips of her toes, as burnished and opaque as claws. Wasn’t I tired of being my own worst enemy? Helle said, exhaling a great cloud of smoke into the breezeless air. “Better me than you,” she said, leaning closer. Nor did I pull away; a creature not entirely human, I thought, had singled me out. “I will never desert you,” the creature was saying, “never never never.”
Is it any wonder, then, that on that June morning, when I wiped the steam from the bathroom mirror, I was relieved to see my own face staring back at me? Pinched and wet, my own face—although there was no denying the fact that somehow it was set on my neck differently, with an uncharacteristic lift to the chin, which in turn improved my overall posture. What had become of my slouch, my tendency to scowl from beneath a lowering brow?
Meanwhile the music persisted, as if a tower of notes were fiercely intent upon erecting itself, over and over again, deep inside of me. “Forget it,” I said, but when I hunched my shoulders, testing the possibility that posture itself might be destiny, I felt a sharp pain—the sharp pain of dislocation—traveling up my spine. Was this how the girl had felt after she sank to the bottom of the bog? “Go away,” I said. Only the music was so beautiful—spires and peaks of unearthly beauty rising into a deep blue sky. The towers of Copenhagen, as Helle had described them to me: green towers and golden towers, towers flying flags and pennants, square towers and tapering towers, turrets and minarets and crenellations, towers twisted and sleek as a narwhal’s tusk. All that was required now was one final bright point of sound, a needle-thin, endlessly ascending note, and the music, no matter how severe and uncompromising its source, would at last manage to pierce through the sky’s membrane and into the house of heaven. Helle’s music, I thought. Except Helle was dead.
I pressed my lips together to keep whatever was taking shape inside me from getting out. Maybe it was nothing more than the sound of my blood, racing toward my heart. When a person is dead, she’s dead, and that’s the end of it. Maybe it wasn’t music; is there any real difference, after all, between superstition and a belief in metaphor? “Never,” Helle had said. “Never” was the key, the only key a new ghost confronted with the netherworld’s outer wall—that wall composed of an infinite number of shifting and shadowy boxes, each box containing a shifting and shadowy object—might use to unlock doors into the here-and-now. Like the notes of an opera waiting to be composed, like notes unrecognized yet disturbingly familiar, these objects resembling objects from our world would be dissimilar enough that the ghost might think it was floating among the snowflakes and pine trees of a glass paperweight, only to find itself stuck in a damp blue mitten.
Winking light and rushing water; the medicinal smell of cedar, like an antidote to mystery. Nor had the message seemed anything other than clear; reassuring, even. “I will never desert you.” But when I’d said she surely wasn’t talking about a real ghost, Helle was suddenly disdainful, impatient. Real? Real? Had I ever known Helle Ten Brix to care whether something was real or not? Operas had nothing to do with reality, I should know that. No one says “Ah, the czar, to the life!” when they watch Boris Godunov. No one protests that in Un ballo in maschera Verdi changed the name of King Gustavus III of Sweden to Riccardo. Could a woman accidentally throw her own baby onto a lit funeral pyre? Could Dorabella and Fiordiligi actually mistake their boyfriends for Albanians? Could a man actually be dragged to hell by a statue? Not to mention the age-old complaint that no one can manage to simultaneously die and sing an aria. Real? Feh! When I said “real,” what I meant was “boring”—wasn’t it?
Unlike what I meant when I said I was haunted.
III
EVERY OPERA has in it bit parts, apparently inessential roles, servants in livery and masked revelers, plume-hatted soldiers and irritable minor deities, animal trainers and orphans, toadies and slaves, harem girls and priests. These characters hover on the fringes, their costumes less lavish, their voices less remarkable than those of the men and women around whose struggles with fate the stories revolve.
Mrs. Helen Sprague, the twins’ third-grade teacher, seems to me such a character, a swart and efficient matron generally clad in pea- or lime-green, her hair firmly coiffed. Mrs. Sprague served as stage manager for the Operateers, our local company, and it was her idea that Ruby, by merit of her birdlike bone structure, would be perfect for the part of the spectral child who appears during the final moments of Puccini’s one-act opera Suor Angelica. “I’ll dress her in gauze and tinsel,” said Mrs. Sprague. “There won’t be a dry eye in the house.” Which I know for a fact wasn’t the case: Helle Ten Brix’s eyes remained as cool and dry as nickels, round with reproof, her mascara intact.
I was sitting on the steps of the Canaan Opera House, smoking a cigarette and waiting for Ruby, who was backstage drinking punch with her less ethereal sister and the rest of the cast. “Nonalcoholic,” Mrs. Sprague had assured me. “My own mother’s recipe—strictly WCTU.” Still, it hadn’t escaped my notice that the Abbess had a vodka bottle hidden under her habit, the contents of which she was slyly tipping out into the sisters’ paper cups. A humid night in late June: the yellow cones of light projecting from the few cars that made their way along Broadway, either east toward the lake or west toward the mountains, were lively with insects, as were the bluish tents around the street lamps, the golden nimbi surrounding the two glass globes on their acanthine pedestals, one to my left, one to my right, guarding the door.
Who, I wondered, made up these stories? A young noblewoman has a love affair, gives birth to an illegitimate child, and is compelled by her family to enter a convent. Years go by; the family ignores her. It’s only when her younger sister wants to get married that the Princess, her aunt, shows up, explaining that before the wedding can occur Angelica must sign a document granting her permission, a simple enough request. All Angelica asks in return is for news of her child. “Dead,” says the Princess, clearly relishing her role as the bearer of bad tidings, “your child died two years ago,” whereupon the disconsolate Angelica drinks poison, then prays that she should not be allowed to die in mortal sin. A miracle follows: the Virgin appears with the child on the chapel steps. As a chorus of nuns and angels sings “Thou art saved,” Angelica dies.
Of course it’s possible that when I disgraced myself at the age of twenty-four, my family might likewise have preferred to ship me off to a convent. My mother could have raised the twins as her own; she could have explained them to her judgmental friends as the last flowers of her womb, change-of-life babies who, according to folklore, can’t be aborted unless the mother kills herself. Instead of taping cutout snowflakes or turkeys or pumpkins to the windows of Mrs. Sprague’s classroom, Ruby and Flo might have conjugated French verbs, as I did when I was their age, hypnotized by the opaque gleam of Mademoiselle Tzara’s monocle. Understand, my parents are rich, their money of the kind referred to as “old,” as if greed only recently entered the picture.
While I sat there on the opera house steps, a salmon-and-white convertible approached, filled with teenaged boys, their outward appearance rangy and dull, their pale arms draped over the doors and across the seats, so that you couldn’t immediately recognize them for the predators they were. Only their eyes gave them away: when they swiveled their pale necks in my direction, their eyes were blunt with desire. The driver leaned on the horn. Hey, baby! I thought I recognized him from the diner, an affable creature with the coffin-shaped body of an athlete, who frequently wore a tiny silver earring in his ear. The car slowed, veering toward the curb. And then, just as I was beginning to feel the first dim tingling of fear or arousal—that common confusion which Helle claimed accounted for the Don’s great success with women—the focus of their eyes suddenly shifted to a place several inches above my head. Their eyes blinked; the desire drained out of them; they turned downward, became deferential.
A hundred years ago, when the railroad barons were just settling
into their elaborate mansions on what was to become Rose Hill and the green marble of the opera house façade was still folded within a Vermont cliff—when Helle Ten Brix herself was only a fleck of sea foam on the Skagerrak, a gust of wind across the Øresund, whatever form the spirit takes before it gets stuck in a body—no doubt the town would have considered itself lucky to count such a woman among its inhabitants. Whereas when I met her she was regarded more or less as a liability: an elderly Dane of ambiguous sexual orientation, a supposedly famous composer who’d decided, for reasons unknown although widely guessed at, to move in with the Blackburns. She was, it was said, Maren’s aunt, otherwise Sam would never have put up with her. Of course, only in hindsight does the flaw in that statement become obvious. The truth is, no one really paid very much attention to Helle, even after the Met’s ill-starred production of Fortune’s Lap was featured in the New York Times Sunday magazine. That everyone knew her by sight, including a carload of seventeen-year-old boys, was evident from their response. But as for who she was, that was another story—one with which I was about to become acquainted.
The woman standing behind me on the porch of the opera house was no more than five feet tall, her pose oddly suggestive of a woodland creature accustomed to going about on all fours, who now has suddenly reared up on its hind legs, rigid with attention. She was wearing an ankle-length gown of black crochet work, its high Victorian collar embroidered with jet beads, as were the cuffs of its long sleeves, the narrow belt fastened with a crescent moon-shaped, pearl-studded buckle. Was she wearing gloves? I don’t think so, but my memory of my first close look at Helle Ten Brix may not be entirely reliable; too much has happened since. Her face, though, I can conjure up: white, papery skin stretched thinly over a neat, nutlike skull; close-set, shining eyes; the noble blade of the nose, its bridge straining the skin to a whiteness verging on incandescence; the ironic lift of the eyebrows; the narrow lips opening to release a plume of smoke. This was a face designed to imply a severity of intellect, with disconcerting hints here and there of a desire to charm as well as to intimidate. Why else would she have painted her lips the color of poppies, outlined her eyes with what looked like kohl, thickened her lashes with mascara? In his 1957 monograph Helle Ten Brix: Prophet or Phryne? Joseph Kerman focuses on this ambiguity as it’s reflected in the work of her middle period, specifically The Harrowing of Lahloo. “Ten Brix,” Kerman writes, “juxtaposes the seductive power of the ascetic against the ultimately evasive stance of the libertine. It is the genius of her art to be able to make us experience, through the music itself, the inevitability of this struggle; the opera’s final image, the bleached bone of the figurehead floating up into the tidal wave’s crest, reminds us of how apocalypse is not only ablutionary, but also erotic.”
Or you might say that Helle Ten Brix was a complicated and difficult woman. For example, she smoked like a gangster, holding the cigarette between her thumb and index finger, inserting it shallowly at the corner of her mouth and then leaving it there, hanging down at a slight angle, while she talked. “Very close, don’t you think?” she said. Her voice was husky, foreign in its cadence rather than its intonation. I didn’t know what she was talking about. The outcome of the opera we’d just seen? The confrontation with the convertible? She didn’t wait for a reply, but plunged on in a manner which would later seem characteristic, her interpretation of the world around her happily unencumbered by reliance on fact. “You found the music pretty but unsatisfying,” she said, “the music of a little boy who is trying to please his mother. Naturally you’re outraged. You came knowing that Puccini is a little boy, but still you’re outraged. Boys in cars, girls in robes. Soon enough we’ll all be drenched, and then we’ll feel much better, no?”
By now she’d made her way to the sidewalk, where she was walking rapidly to and fro, occasionally pausing to look back toward where I sat. “Too sullen,” she said finally, as if having reached a decision. “Gnaven. The key is wrong. C-sharp minor, but bright, bright. And then the oboes, sneaky like boys.” Had she in fact been the small fidgety presence which I’d noticed earlier, several rows ahead of me, seated between Sam and Maren Blackburn? At the time I’d assumed it was their son, William, one of the twins’ classmates, but William was, I recalled, a blond, and the head I’d seen had been dark. It must have been the head’s constant restless movement, its frequent tendency to tilt upward as if the ceiling were more interesting than the stage, which had misled me.
“Drenched?” I asked, and Helle Ten Brix responded by pointing dramatically across Broadway to where, in Dr. Kinglake’s front yard, the heavy blue panicles of the lilac hedge were stirring. The wind was picking up out of the east; you could smell a storm in it, the odor of fins breaking through the swelling and far-off surface of the sea.
People were beginning to leave the opera house, stepping around me with the exaggerated precision that is meant to make you get out of the way. “Oh no,” someone said, and the first drops of rain landed on the steps. The sky, I suddenly realized, was the color of mineral oil. Haphazardly, and then with increasing persistence, the rain started to fall everywhere, large heavy drops turning the concrete black, bouncing off the wrought-iron coats of the two startled deer in the doctor’s yard, weighing down the daffodils in the curbside planters, tearing loose the new leaves of the sugar maples along the street. Several couples made a run for it, hunched over, the husbands’ arms protectively looped around their wives’ shoulders, like Adam and Eve abandoning Paradise. “Ma?” I heard, and when I looked back I could see Flo, a perplexed expression on her face, peering out from within the crowd of bodies in the doorway. “Aren’t you getting wet?” she asked.
Sometimes it seems as if what I made, then, was a choice, although at the time I would have described myself as being without motivation, in the grip of the powerful inertia that’s usually a prelude to romance or to war. Either I could prove that I had enough sense to come in out of the rain, or I could remain where I was, getting more and more soaked by the second. If the former, the goodwill of my neighbors would be secured; if the latter, I’d be written off as a misfit. Across the street, flanked by the doctor’s deer, Helle Ten Brix sat on an ornamental bench, getting similarly soaked. I picture her winking, but of course even if she had, at that distance, through that curtain of water, I wouldn’t have been able to see it. Maybe I never had a choice. Maybe Helle was telling the truth when she said that she’d invented a landscape to contain just the two of us, a landscape both overblown and factitious, like the setting of the opera we’d recently watched, complete with its own audience.
“We needed this rain,” the Abbess said. “It’ll clear the air,” said Mrs. Sprague, to which Sam Blackburn replied that the rain was filled with poison from a thousand midwestern smokestacks. He was lounging at the edge of the group, a character waiting in the wings; I could feel his eyes on the nape of my neck. How delicate are the first whirrings of the carnal, that intemperate engine of multiple gears, its pulleys crisscrossing the spaces between bodies, a tiny wheel here making a tiny wheel there start to spin! Too delicate, really—you get mixed up when you try to assign the source. “Can’t you do something?” Maren asked. “She’s your aunt,” Sam pointed out.
Lightning flashed. There was the sound of wood cracking open, a brief pause, and then an extended roar, as if the heavens themselves were being drawn through the eye of a needle. Broadway became the corridor into which winds from every point of the compass penetrated, whirling madly, yanking off the red petals of Mrs. Hightower’s peonies, flattening the hydrangeas in front of the pizza parlor, scooping up toy trucks and garden tools and hurling them at windows—the silver tip of a trowel smashed through the doctor’s fanlight, sending wet triangles of glass into his vestibule. The rain tore sideways, or swept suddenly upward, as if smacked by a huge paw. And meanwhile the lightning kept flashing, over and over again, flickering down the trunks of the maples, rolling in greenish-yellow balls across the doctor’s lawn, eventually setting fire
to the bench, which, luckily, Helle Ten Brix had vacated a moment before. I could see her wandering toward the street, the pale disk of her face still tilted in my direction. “Tante Helle!” Maren yelled, but the wind caught her voice and stuffed it back into her mouth.
Feathers and rocks, frogs and keys and lockets, saucers and pearls—the air seemed to be filled with spinning objects, one of which landed in my lap. A hand? Of course not. It was a gray-and-white-striped work glove, soggy and smeared with mud. That’s just to show you how confused I was. I’ll admit that I’d lost all sense of proportion. From the wide black base of an anvil-shaped storm cloud, positioned directly over her, a single white finger of lightning pointed straight down at the top of Helle Ten Brix’s head. She was, when it hit, standing in the middle of Broadway; as I watched, her body appeared to shrivel for an instant into a dark, forked root, into the strict, metaphysical image of pure lust, surrounded by a sulfurous aureole, a green shoot licking from its crown.
Only afterwards did I understand that what I’d thought had happened and the actual event might not be the same thing. The storm retreated; for several minutes the rain continued to fall, the drops growing larger and larger, farther and farther apart, until you could see each individual drop. Over the gabled rooftops of the mansions on Rose Hill a little crescent moon, like Helle’s belt buckle, appeared. For a while I could still hear the muffled sound of thunder off to the east beyond the asphalt pits, and then nothing. Helle Ten Brix stood at the foot of the steps, smoothing down the wet folds of her skirt, the curved surface of each of her gray eyes pricked with a single dot of light. “Yours?” she asked, and I realized she was looking at Ruby and Flo, who had left the crowd in the doorway and now were standing on either side of me.
“But I thought—” I began, and then I didn’t know what to say. No one else seemed surprised to see her standing there intact.
The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Page 3
