The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  Papa would bring coffee to Dee, who ached when she first woke and would not leave bed without it. Merle was first in the bathroom and rousted the children for school when he came out. Jane always got up quietly and was mysteriously and calmly ready at the table by the time they came down, whether or not she needed to go to the city. Merle dropped her off and picked her up at the train three days a week. She almost always came home for the night. Rita was never up before they left for school, and usually never came out of her room until noon on weekends. No one ever tried to wake her.

  They did not have G.I. Joes, Easy-Bake Ovens, BB guns, spangled hairdressing dolls. Polly had two Barbies, both a little worn, origami and puzzles and books, glass figurines she kept on a high shelf after an experiment with roller skates as carriages. Edmund tried to trade a Batman figure for Polly’s rock collection and a Lego set from an Irish uncle for her board games. They spent a stunning amount of time dangling upside down in a tire swing, spinning each other, occasionally using it as a weapon. Dee, with a fear of malaria that Merle considered irrational, made them rinse it out after every rain.

  Edmund had arrived with a collection of wooden swords and shields and a crossbow-style rubber-band gun. Papa gave him a heavy German pellet gun, but after a flurry of wild pumping—Polly had been beside herself with the mechanical magic of it all—the first dead squirrel ended all but target practice. They both knew it was one of those moments that they’d despise being lectured about, but still Edmund stared down at the way the fur on the squirrel’s chest gaped and closed around the wound for the last few breaths, and he pitched forward in a faint, giving himself a bloody nose. Polly never brought it up.

  Arnold Galante, a poet who had been Papa’s brother-in-law and was still his best friend, taught them card games—euchre and hearts and spades, games of solitaire that turned into feeding frenzies when three or four people played at once. Dee loved cards but didn’t play well, and her insults were another game. Polly was a strumpet when she won a rare hand of hearts, Jane could learn to cook for herself, Arnold was an ass, Papa was an arrogant, horrible man. Merle was the best player in every game, especially poker, and card nights were the only nights when he was reliably not drunk. Jane tended to float away, and Arnold lost track while he told stories about the war in Spain, ocean liners, and the people he and Papa had known when they’d worked on movies together. He loved to goad Papa.

  “Ask about what he did to the guy who called him a German in 1919.” Or: “When you’re older, ask him why so many people used to be afraid of him.”

  “We might not manage to be older at the same time,” said Papa, who was almost ninety. “They don’t need to know the bad stuff, Arnie.”

  Arnold was the only one who brought up the people who were missing. He said that Jane’s mother, Asta, had loved to ride and fish and camp, and that Polly could be like her, someday. Asta’s mother, Perdita, on a movie poster in Papa’s office, was also dead and therefore beautiful and mysterious forever. She’d loved to sing and dance (even then, no one seemed to think Polly would ever sing or dance).

  “Ask your great-grandfather how he acted when he first saw my pretty sister. I mopped him off a London sidewalk.”

  Perdita, frozen on the poster, looked nothing at all like Arnold, who was wizened and brown, with wild gray hair. Arnold had one blind eye, like May the cat, who loved him, and he drove out every other weekend or so—he taught poetry at Columbia, where Papa taught—and would spend the night in the last empty bedroom at the top of the stairs. Polly always put a rubber spider in the bed, and Arnold always screamed for her benefit.

  People were always visiting—old professors and poetesses, ancient Californians from the movie years, Jane and Merle’s friends. A convention of poets and historians, said Papa, was like a murder of crows, a conspiracy of ravens, a clamor of rooks, a scold of jays. He’d move through the crowd, people making way, and sit at the head of the table and have Polly open a window to let the smoke out while he showed off his superior cigarette-rolling skills. She did not understand the humor or notice what was being smoked.

  It was a fine thing to be a rarity, a child. No one patronized Polly or Edmund. The view from the screen of the stair railing, after they’d been sent to bed, was sometimes bizarre, sometimes crushingly boring. It was hard for Jane and Merle’s friends to compete with the strangeness of Papa and Dee, beyond the importation of an occasional bale of marijuana (this object, stashed in the basement, brought on a roaring argument between Papa and Merle; it was going too far). A friend of Jane’s from NYU went to Peru and brought back ponchos, dried seedpods and tarantulas, quartz pipes and something he claimed was a shrunken head. Polly and Edmund knew it wasn’t human and wondered what unfortunate species of dead monkey it might have been, but they loved the reaction when they brought it out at parties, letting the thing dangle from its hair. The head smelled acrid and funky at the same time, like a mix of cat piss and rotting tomato, and at some point it disappeared from the sill of an open window. Maybe the parrot or the cat was sick of smelling it.

  Rita always seemed normal when other people were around—Jane said it was like Polly’s fevers disappearing whenever they walked into a doctor’s office—and her accent varied depending on whether or not she was trying to be charming. She said Edmund was no fun anymore, and she needed to have more children as soon as Tommy got back, so that the world would be silly again. She said Tommy’s parents had a great deal of money and no taste, that she never thought she’d want to move back to the Old World (Papa curled his lip at this phrase) but if Papa and Dee would buy her an airplane ticket or drive her to a boat, she’d be gone.

  Rita said “she,” not “we,” but Edmund finally went to Jane and asked her to please not let him be hauled away. Had Jane promised? Polly didn’t know.

  The point about Rita, at least in hindsight, was that she was a good painter, on her way to being a great one. Her artist father brought her over from Dublin when he taught for a year at Cranbrook, in Michigan, where Rita and Tommy met when she was seventeen and he was a senior. When Tommy received a Rhodes Scholarship after Ann Arbor, Rita started showing and selling her work in London. They stayed after Tommy got his degree, until Mr. Ward cut them off and summoned them home. After which—again, nothing Polly could know at the time—Tommy pulled off the ultimate fuck-you and enlisted in the army.

  Rita without Tommy was unmoored, ineffectual. She’d lost her magic, said Dee. A Parisian gallery was interested in her work, and Rita’s agent kept calling, but she only drew tiny shapes with Polly’s pencils at the kitchen table, explaining that a pretty kitelike trail of triangles was actually a school of fish, a chain gang of slaves, the Virgin Mary’s pixie dust. The galleries wanted large oils, Klimt-like abstracts with haunted mosaic faces.

  Rita thought she’d lost her magic, too, and wandered around the house mourning it. By the third week, sometime in February, the push was on to give her whatever she wanted, do anything to shut her up. Merle phoned the elder Wards to ask that they send Rita’s painting supplies. A huge box arrived, postage collect, but when Rita opened it, she complained about what was missing. Papa paid to have canvases and new paints delivered. She fiddled with them, and decided that the colors were wrong, and the canvases were too small. More paints, larger canvases. Dee volunteered the greenhouse. They’d only fired the kiln once since fall, anyway.

  Your precious bolt-hole, said Jane. Our precious minds, said Dee.

  All the conversations Polly couldn’t understand at the time. In the moment—the slush of late winter on the Sound, the dreary, fraught hours at school, the jarring change of having someone out of key like Rita around—she and Edmund moved around the periphery, in their own new world.

  At the end of February, Polly answered the door on a rainy day and looked out at two men in uniform. They had dirt on their foreheads, like Rita, who’d asked Dee to drive her to church that morning. On one man’s face, a drop of rain made the ash bleed into a gray rivulet, which the ma
n reached up and smeared as the other talked. Edmund was in the kitchen with Dee, discussing leap years, and Papa and Jane and Merle were in the city, and Rita was painting in the greenhouse.

  The soldiers looked as if they’d rather no one was home. Dee told the children to go upstairs, and from the window they watched her lead the soldiers through the yard to Rita.

  My father is dead, said Edmund.

  But everyone told him no, not quite. Thomas was lost, a word that bounced in any child’s head. It was everything you didn’t want to be. People said missing, too, but lost meant something closer to a dog swept out with the tide or losing the keys to the world.

  A crumbling, screaming shame, said Papa, in a letter to his stepdaughter Maude that Polly saw much later. Thomas Alden Ward, pride of his snooty family, who had cast aside a deferment and enlisted out of spite—toward his parents, his crazy wife, a needy little boy, himself—was in the process of disappearing, at that moment lying down to die near Hue.

  The Tet Offensive played every night. Papa bought a larger television, ostensibly so that they could watch the Grenoble Olympics, really to distract everyone from Rita’s constant babble. He realized quickly that the television was a mixed bag. The war and all the funerals and riots from the previous spring and summer, already Technicolor in magazines, were now larger, moving, echoing. Merle and Jane tried turning the news off, but Edmund kept turning it on and sat cross-legged in front of it, watching Walter Cronkite instead of cartoons. He studied every photo of the war in the Times, in LIFE magazine, every muddy white face in Southeast Asia that came his way. He dreamt of his father sleeping on a sandy path in a jungle, flowers and ferns blocking the hot sun, a line of ants walking around his head. It was possible Tommy was sleeping somewhere, even now. Polly would hear doors open when Edmund cried out in the night. Jane or Dee—never Rita—would go to him, and Polly would hear their whispers through her wall.

  When they first moved into the house on Long Island, Polly felt a moment of hope, a blast of her old belief—maybe they’d find Evie and Frank. Now she told Edmund about her theory. It was stupid to think that way, she said.

  I don’t know, said Edmund. Maybe we should still keep an eye out for all of them.

  After the officers visited, Rita was quiet for a day, and then she said she didn’t know why people were acting this way—Tommy wasn’t dead, he’d just gone off somewhere. Hiding out, like a smart person, she said to Tommy’s mother on the phone. A week later, she announced at dinner that she was going to have a baby, and that she needed to lie down. It was exciting, but that night, when Jane tucked Edmund and Polly in, she told them it was hard to be certain about such things. Through the floor vent, Polly heard Jane say, Do the math, she saw Tom last in September, and her waist isn’t much bigger than Polly’s. Everyone said something like this but Rita, who stopped coming out of her room. She asked everyone who brought her food what she should name the baby.

  Rita kept varying her information or imagination—Tommy was hiding out in Thailand, Tommy had been incinerated by some fiery bomb—but she never told them what the soldiers said. When Edmund tried talking about his dream, about Tommy sleeping on a sandy path, she exploded and slapped him, and after that, everyone kept him away from her room. Merle, maddened by the lack of information, and by the way Rita varied between candy optimism and horrific images, finally called his brother in the navy for help and learned that Tommy left on patrol in the middle of February with two other men to some warren of walled gardens—the Tombs? the Tiger Arena?—and never returned. Merle found a map in the New York Times and showed Edmund the area. Young faces, both of them, looking down in the light of the desk lamp. Papa talked to Edmund about dead heroes in myths and old wars, bad luck and the endlessness of love. They heard him say to Dee that because of Tommy they were all in limbo, and when Polly asked about the etching in his study—an illustration of Purgatorio, showing people whirling in a circle between a kind of ocean below and a sky above, and the title underneath said Limbo—Papa claimed he meant the limbo dance. He held out a cane and made them try, then whacked them gently with it when they fell backward.

  Thomas Ward’s family, back in Michigan, needed a funeral, but Rita said no, and the army refused to proceed without a body or a widow. The Wards tried for a memorial, and they insisted Rita and Edmund come. Rita refused.

  Everything slowed down. During the long Easter break—true spring, tulips following snowdrops, all sorts of color popping upward in the messy yard—Rita worked on tiny painted shapes as if she were working on a baby’s quilt and she talked about the baby’s growth as if it were the plot of a movie. Dee made dye for eggs and the room smelled of the vinegar she added to help the colors set. Papa put the television on—Martin Luther King had been shot—and he watched riot and war footage sloped back in his chair, stretched out, hands behind his head. Every once in a while, Merle would get up and freshen their drinks. Between the sounds of the news, the spoons Polly and Edmund used to roll the eggs clinked. The tips of their fingers were maroon and yellow and bruised brown-green from the blend of colors.

  Jane and Rita were trying for fancier eggs with Russian-style shells, and kept a book open to photos of jewel and folk-art eggs. They made tiny holes in each end, inserted a long, thin needle—one of Dee’s trussing needles—to stir up the interior, and used a bulb syringe to blow the insides out. Rita held her colored fingers in the air and asked Polly to flip through the book until she found a design she liked. Jane, not as adept and unable to look away from the television, managed two and crumbled a last half-empty shell in her hand.

  What, asked Dee, was wrong with simply boiling and dyeing and eating the things when we’re done?

  On the television, a Gerber baby food commercial broke into the news coverage. Rita watched and let her wet brush fall to the floor.

  “I need to see the doctor,” she said. “I worry something’s gone wrong with the baby. It should be big like these babies.”

  No one said anything.

  “Take me now,” said Rita.

  Edmund took his bowls to the sink and Polly started to clean up her things.

  “Now,” said Rita.

  Dee dried the colored eggs and lowered them into the carton. “Jane, honey.”

  “No,” said Jane. She’d joined Merle and Papa in front of the television. “Real people are dying here.”

  “Now,” said Rita. “Call the damn ambulance.” She picked up a paring knife and gouged the palm of her left hand, then brought it down again on the back, between the tendons below her first and second knuckles.

  There was an immensity of blood. Merle and Jane took Rita in together. It was late when they all came back. Polly could hear Dee and Papa talking, Jane and Merle talking, Rita crying, Edmund talking to Lemon.

  In the morning—no ringing alarms, because school was still out—Jane swept into Edmund’s and Polly’s rooms and told them to get dressed and pack up—they were going on a surprise trip to the city with Papa and Dee, maybe overnight, because it was their vacation, after all. They needed to hurry, but when Jane pushed them down to Dee and Papa’s bathroom, past Merle, who was talking to Rita through the locked bathroom door, Dee was still lying with a pillow around her head, muttering about Irish lunatics. Through the wall they could hear Rita crying. Jane hustled Edmund and Polly through toothbrushing and peeing and shooed them back down the hall. They dressed and started to pack satchels in a lounging, scattered way until Rita started wailing in earnest, and Merle started to yell. Papa put Polly over the top of his shoulder and pulled Edmund along by an arm. In the car now, he said. He bellowed down the hall to Dee, to get a move on.

  Polly and Edmund waited in the back of the Volvo. Papa reappeared and tossed some books and their bags and jackets through the window. He said they’d have to amuse themselves for a few minutes, and he headed back to the house, stooped and intent. Two of the books he’d thrown in were albums. One showed kurgans and mounds in Russia, where Papa had been on several digs.
His strong, upright handwriting, different from Dee’s because he wasn’t American, surrounded the snapshots. The other album showed objects, gold birds and bright felt blankets, mummies and horse skeletons. The third book was The Family of Man. Polly and Edmund stared hardest at the section about war and birth, but eventually they each stuck a head out an open window, looking straight up at leaves and clouds, a strange whirlwind of birds that stayed within a pattern for long minutes.

  The crunching sound of Papa approaching. He stopped at Polly’s side. “It’ll be a bit longer.”

  “Why are they doing that?”

  Papa looked up at the birds. Polly brought her head back inside the car, and only saw his dangling hands, strong but old with a gold ring, dark trouser pants and a nice white shirt.

  “They’re starlings, and they’re talking about a storm,” he said. He circled the car and looked down at Edmund, who was also gaping at the birds. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “She’ll be better after some sleep.”

  Edmund didn’t answer, probably because he didn’t think this was true.

  Dee normally took her time with coffee, with dressing, with getting her body to move, but today she was fiddling with earrings when she hobbled to the car, and her hair was wet, in a ponytail like a girl’s. Papa took off while her door was still open. From the back seat, Polly swatted the half-gray ponytail while Dee kept turning the radio louder to annoy Papa. She was fond of all the Detroit girl bands and she wanted Polly to dress in shorter skirts and bright colors, and fought with Jane about the necessity of leotards.