The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

by Kathryn Davis

  As Act Three opens, we follow the progress of Rook and Kite, both partial to carrion, both wearing black feathered capes over breastplates of scale armor, the eyeholes of their black casques ringed with gold. They stand together within a small clearing, looking out across the audience as if toward the ocean; just behind them the base of a lighthouse, its twin beams—one white, one red—illuminate the stage at regular intervals. A copse of stunted trees, their trunks twisted and pearl gray, extends back toward the rear wall, on which hangs a drop cloth showing the barbed wire fence, the moonlit meadow, the dark limbs of the elm, the yellow light of the kitchen window, reduced to the size of a star. The music: a deep strand of sound, full orchestra; a series of five-note runs, up and down the scale, commencing simultaneously on five consecutive notes in such a way that the effect is of a seamless, undulant whole. Rook and Kite discuss their options. This place is obviously a nesting ground for terns. They can please themselves, eat their fill of eggs, or they can try to please Nightingale. Kite (hi-hi-heea, why why be a dupe?) favors the former alternative; Rook (kaaw kaaw, cost cost is too great), the latter. As they argue, they walk, so that by the time the valet appears, threading his way through the tree trunks, they are standing out of his sight on the apron, stage left.

  The valet removes a letter from his pocket as the violins flutter into dreamy prominence. An assignation! But with whom—the scullion or the maid? Fuglespil is designed so that clouds of human drama drift, typically fugitive and ambiguous, through the landscape, obscuring or abetting Nightingale’s plan. The downstairs maid approaches from the wings, stage left; the scullion from the wings, stage right. “Why not both?” sing Rook and Kite. Of course they’re referring to their own dilemma, the solution to which presents itself in a mutual recollection of Magpie’s advice. “Why not both?” they repeat, concluding on the high C toward which their duet has tended all along, on that sharp point of sound where the cloud snags, releasing the valet’s passions in a sudden cloudburst of sixteenth notes. “My dear my dear press here press here your lips your lips your hips your hips …” He reaches out and, suiting the action to the words, draws the maid and the scullion into his greedy embrace, thereby creating a composite creature of multiple, flailing appendages, a parodic version of darker things to come. A brief trio commences, the music a cunning pastiche of sentimental favorites (“Mi chiamano Mimì,” “La fleur que tu m’avais jetée,” etc.). “But what is this?” sings the valet, his hands having discovered simultaneously the scullion’s gender and the maid’s condition. “They call me Billy,” laughs the scullion. “The flower you planted,” sneers the maid. “O terra addio,” sings the valet, backing away. On his final, sustained “o” the scene ends.

  Thus the pattern is established: time and again Nightingale makes a request which Shrike communicates to the rest of the birds. With each change of scene we move further and further from the original elm, witnesses to an increasingly complicated series of events involving both birds and people. Eventually it becomes clear that what we are seeing, at least insofar as the birds are concerned, is representative activity. Rook and Kite might report back to Nightingale with the wings of a tern, only to find that he has already affixed to his upper spine the white wings of an egret, the purple-tipped wings of a mallard, the stippled wings of a plover—even the bright green wings of Bee-Eater, which Shrike confesses she could not resist. More wings than a seraph, boasts Nightingale. With all of these wings I can fly higher than God’s throne. My voice, he sings, will be more beautiful, its range greater, its tone purer, its essential quality intensified by my depth of experience. Of course he ignores the fact that the company’s number has been diminished by one: perfection requires sacrifice. Besides, Shrike points out, at the critical moment, as they were preparing to steal the wings of a mourning dove, Bee-Eater got cold feet. “It’s not just her feet which are cold now,” sings Wren, and this expression of remorse, however understated, causes the other birds to look around uneasily. They know that a new form of peril has been admitted into their world, and that they must either embrace it or succumb to its wanton displays of force.

  The third act continues, its dramatic action revolving around Nightingale’s persistent dissatisfaction. If only I did not have a single mouth, he sings; if only I did not have a single pair of eyes. Wary, the birds scramble to bring him what he wants. His beautiful head is transformed into a seething, spiny mass, beaks opening and closing, a ghastly hybrid combining the animate and inanimate, echinoderm and battle mace, the mindless sting, the malicious blow. His body is studded with eyes, dark and shining, vigilant, covetous—he can look everywhere at once, but this implied omniscience is limited by the absence of a governing intelligence. You might just as well expect a jewel-studded reliquary to distinguish between right and wrong, to be capable of sustaining a moral vision. Still, it’s impossible not to notice that these accretions, however hideous, serve Nightingale’s ultimate purpose. His voice is becoming more and more beatific, unearthly, issuing from his many mouths like light itself, like a radiant halo of sound, higher and higher, as if he might actually contain within himself a holy relic, St. Peter’s knucklebone, a strand of St. Catherine’s hair, a splinter of the true Cross. By the time he makes his final request, his voice has become so perfect that it is almost inaudible. “If only I could live forever,” Nightingale sings. This is the music that precedes, out of nothing, the birth of a star, the cell’s gasp at the moment of mitosis.

  As Nightingale undergoes his metamorphosis, the clouds of human drama begin to thicken, to assume the towering anvil shapes of thunderheads, out of which flicker tongues of lightning. The downstairs maid and the scullion admit to a mutual attraction and decide, in a touching duet, to run away together. Meanwhile, the master of the house has received a letter promising a piece of vital information if he shows up for a midnight rendezvous on the beach. The author of this letter is the second scullion, whose attempts at blackmailing her mistress have proved fruitless. Cast-off dresses, a mangy stole, a necklace of pearls with a broken clasp! the scullion fumes. Now she will have her revenge; she will play both ends against the middle. Indeed, the mistress of the house has received a more explicit letter, the scullion not only threatening to tell her husband about the affair with the cook but also describing her husband’s infidelities. “To take the bait,” sings the outraged mistress, “is to kiss the traitor, to marry treason is to bow to fate.” This aria, with its great swooping leaps from upper to lower registers, with its dramatic syncopation, is in frank imitation of the style Mozart employed for Donna Elvira’s two similarly outraged arias in Don Giovanni. The mistress goes on to lament her own credulity: “I missed the point—the food on the table, the steaming joint, the loaf of bread, didn’t come from his heart but from his pocket, the gleaming lure, the marriage bed. To eat the food is to love the cook, to kiss the hands that removed the hook.” And where might she be now? the mistress wonders. In the kitchen, it turns out, with the twins, baking cookies.

  So the groundwork is laid for the opera’s penultimate scene: we see a shingle beach at midnight; stage rear, an expanse of marram grass, its razor-sharp blades stained, alternately, snow white, blood red; a blue rowboat on the apron, stage right. For the first time since the twins’ duet in Act One we hear the glass harmonica, an overlapping series of faint, tingling glissandi. The sound of grass blades rubbing against each other in a sea breeze, or pebbles and shells rattling together within the trough of a wave? Perhaps the harmonica’s music reminds us of the twins. But they are nowhere near this beach, we think. They are safe in the house with the cook, baking cookies in the kitchen. We can just make out the kitchen window, its tiny pinprick of light. Yes, the twins are safe, we think, and we’re relieved, because the music, despite its delicacy and sweetness, is also ominous.

  VII

  HOW MANY DAYS had it been since the last rainfall? You could feel the thick layers of hot rainless air piling on top of one another, an atmosphere in which it was impossible to
do anything except remain motionless, inert, like the gold ring Sam gave me the day before Helle’s party. A token of his intentions, he told me. I pictured the marble lips of a ghost statue cracking open, heard emerging from those lips a deep bass voice singing “in pegno, in pegno.” Cotton wadding packed around a piece of metal, an object replete with significance but essentially useless—the depressive’s habitual condition. In such monotonous, sedative heat your anticipation of things to come, whether a masked ball or the plighting of a troth, acquired an itchy, annoying texture; it nagged at you like a raveling label in the collar of a blouse, like road grit thrown into your face by the tires of a passing car.

  Helle, however, appeared unaffected by the torpor into which the rest of the town had sunk. She was exhilarated, energetic, immersed in preparations. On the afternoon of August the fifth, four men began setting up a large canvas tent in the meadow behind the trailer. In case of rain, Helle explained. But it was never going to rain again, I said, never, forever. Helle glared at me, stifled a cough, and continued removing the pits from a huge bowl of ripe cherries. Never was a meaningless concept, didn’t I think, at least if you tried to apply it to the physical world? The only thing she wanted to know was what had become of the man who was supposed to deliver the wine. She picked up a cherry, inserted it in the pitter, pressed down the handle, and out popped a pit. Her hands, I noticed, were stained dark red, but not her mouth. Amazing, I thought, Helle had managed to pit what looked like hundreds of cherries without eating a single one. Did she take Persephone for her model? Or was it more a case of honoring that crucial distinction she’d described to me not long after we met, between desire and its gratification? Here, she said, handing me a bag of oranges. They needed to be peeled, the white outer fiber pared away, the flesh sliced from between the membranes. No seeds. Did I think I could do it? Because they had to be perfect, these crescents of bright orange deployed here and there among the white slices of smoked turkey. It had taken her three days to get the turkey just right, and she didn’t want the effect ruined by sloppily sectioned oranges. Of course, as it turned out, we never got to eat any of the food, only to admire the way it looked, to regard it yearningly as it sat on top of a long damask-covered table at the back of the tent: the woodlike gleam of braided loaves of bread, the salamanderlike brightness of smoked salmon, the blue-green veins of mold running through stonelike cheeses, a glistening red moistness here, a leafy darkness there, all of it ceremoniously lit by beeswax candles in three elaborate silver candelabra.

  The first guests arrived a little before nine o’clock, two obviously nervous couples who climbed out of a Rambler and were led by Flo into the meadow. Even though there was still a thin smear of light left in the sky—its color that of the underside of a wave, a rising shadow preparing to fall—the Japanese lanterns strung around the meadow’s periphery had already been lit. Rose and lilac, cerulean and pearl, they hung motionless from the twisted branches of the shrub willows growing along the stream bank to the north; motionless from the green-black limbs of the cedars to the west; motionless from a row of fence posts to the east. At the southern edge, just behind the trailer, a space had been left open, the doorway into the huge ceilingless room of the meadow and, thence, into the smaller, contained room of the tent. Music issued from a loudspeaker on the trailer roof—chiefly waltzes to begin with, though, as the evening progressed, as the sky darkened and a vague half-moon appeared in a thickening nest of clouds, the musical program likewise darkened: Barbarina’s melancholy plaint on behalf of a lost pin, for example, interposed between the nebular folds of Chopin’s Andante Spianato and his Grande Polonaise. Meanwhile, embracing everything—the meadow, the tent, the dancing guests, the winking lanterns, and the shining wine-filled goblets—was the heat.

  You could remove your shoes, but it wouldn’t do any good; the ground still exhaled the heat of midday, and the grass was so crisp and brittle that it hurt. No sooner had you taken your shoes off than you’d put them back on, stuffing back into them your heat-swollen toes, your poor blistered heels. By eleven o’clock several guests, myself included, had waded into the stream, where we stood trying to maintain our balance on the wobbly, slime-coated rocks, our equilibrium threatened by the current, by our mask-impaired vision, by the limited glow of the lanterns, by the wine. Where was our hostess? one of the many men dressed like Zorro wanted to know. Had anyone seen her? Marie Antoinette, suggested a woman in a baseball uniform—a woman I thought might be Mary Kinglake but whose features had been pressed into an ominous blur by a nylon stocking. The headless Marie Antoinette in the blood-stained bodice. That would be just like Miss Ten Brix, didn’t we think? Too obvious, replied another man, a nun with a rubber death’s-head mask completely covering his face. He had appeared out of nowhere, pushing his way toward us through the denser thicket of willows on the far side of the stream, then stepping into the water without bothering to lift the hem of his habit. Antoinette was Helen Sprague, the man said, adding that he was convinced our hostess was the little spider monkey he’d seen creeping through the willows back there where he’d come from. A sly, watchful little monkey-woman, a sneaky little spy monkey, he said, and I knew, despite the way his voice was muffled by the rubber of the mask, by the noise of the stream and a nearby group of drunken revellers, that it was Sam.

  “Hello, Frannie,” he said. Had he been able to see my face he would have understood immediately that no matter what gloomy predictions I might have made about our chance at happiness in the dim and faraway future, for the moment I was perfectly happy to see him standing there beside me in the stream. But he could see only the papier-mâché shell of my mask, the eyeholes cut at an upward-tilting angle and outlined in black paint, the sneering lips painted bright red—Turandot, Puccini’s cannibal queen, the virgin priestess whose flesh her three fatuous ministers claim wouldn’t be good to eat. Helle had finally persuaded me to borrow the costume, claiming that if anyone could get away with wearing such an outlandish headdress and tight-fitting gown, it would be me. A bold move, she’d pointed out, a chance to spit in Patti Judkins’s eye. For Patti Judkins, together with her loathsome husband, had been invited. Indeed, it would appear that Helle had invited the entire town, her ill-starred plan having been to take leave of us all on the grandest scale possible.

  “How did you know it was me?” I asked, and Sam walked closer, pointing down to where I’d bunched the silver satin up over my thighs. The stream gave off a moist, reptilian smell, the smell in the shallow basin from which the zoo’s oldest crocodile regards you sleepily, the smell of the lives we lived before we stood up on our hind legs and our sleepy hunger turned to greed. “Your knees,” he said, and although the stream blotted out his familiar smell of pepper, I knew that was there as well; the thought of it, of his familiar, irreverent body hidden under his black, holy garments, made me listless and weak. “I’d recognize those knees anywhere,” Sam said. “Those sharp little bones. Hear that, monkey face?” he shouted, but I told him not to bother. The monkey was Flo, I said, whereupon he took another step closer, reached out, and grabbed my hands. “Those bony knees,” he said tenderly, “these bony fingers.” How lovely I was, even when all he could see of me were the bony parts. But wait a sec—where was the ring, he wondered. Why wasn’t I wearing the ring?

  By now the other people in the stream were starting to move away, as if the combined weight of our desire were a heavy stone dropped from a great height, and they were the ever-widening band of ripples caused by its fall into the water. I could feel their movement, a subtle opening of the space around our bodies, creating a still and airless arena on the rim of which their masked faces hovered, expectant, wary, eager for entertainment. Isn’t that the woman from the diner? I heard someone say, and someone else—Buggy Moore?—suggested that maybe they should mind their own business. Suddenly everything seemed to be in motion: the stream kept pouring past us; the sky, when I cast a quick look up at it, had filled with enormous black clouds outlined in white by the
concealed moon, and those clouds, like the stream, were racing away, leaving us behind, leaving us there, me and Sam, the two of us alone in the dark, reptilian water.

  The ring was at home, I told him, safe in its box, and he made an angry, exasperated noise, expelling his breath in a raw hnnuh from the back of his throat. Didn’t I understand that the ring was just the opening statement in what was supposed to be a conversation? He’d already told Maren, last night. Told her what? I asked, and he made a noise again, louder this time, a kind of stifled growl. Jesus, Frannie, he said, and began peeling away the mask, bit by bit, struggling against the rubber’s grip on his moist hot skin, working it up carefully over his glasses, the lenses of which were so fogged up I couldn’t see his eyes. Once the mask was all the way off he threw it angrily into the stream. It must be midnight, a male voice said. Twenty of, corrected a female voice, a voice wavering with nervous laughter. Teenagers, I thought. You could tell because their voices hadn’t yet been dulled by resignation and its attendant sorrows.

  Sam yanked his glasses from his nose and wiped them on his sleeve, his face glistening with what I first assumed was sweat. It was only after I’d moved a little nearer, my heart as tentatively anchored to its floor of bones as the rock I stepped on was to the steambed, that I realized he was crying. “That I was in love with someone else,” he said. “I told her I was in love with someone else. What’re you staring at?” he snarled, by which I knew he meant the people standing on the bank, even though his attention remained fixed on me. “Don’t you have anything better to do?” he yelled. Had the music been turned up, I wondered, or was I only more aware of it, all those notes, those dark particles of sound clustering around me in the hot air? “To eat the food,” a soprano voice was singing—Anna Moffo in the Met production of Fuglespil, I found out later—“is to love the cook …” Was this what it was like for Helle, every breath a terrible effort, the oxygen itself so thick and hot you couldn’t draw it into your lungs no matter how hard you tried? And was that Helle I heard, down there among the black shapes of the cedars, coughing? “To kiss the hands that removed the hook …” As the clarinets began their wild, dark descent into a simmering pit of dissonant broken chords, the pure clear arrow of Anna Moffo’s voice was flying upward, upward, like an arrow into the pearly film of clouds around the moon. “But you never asked me,” I said. The mask had left Sam’s hair in a flat cap on his head, and the cap was starting to separate into wet, curly locks, into separate curling blades. Brown and gray. A shingle beach, a glass harmonica; blades of marram grass stained alternately red and white by the slowly rotating beam of a lighthouse. “Ask?” Sam said. “What are you, my mother? Ask? I was telling her the truth, that’s all.”