Labrador Read online

  Labrador

  Also by Kathryn Davis

  The Silk Road

  Duplex

  The Thin Place

  Versailles

  The Walking Tour

  Hell

  The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

  LABRADOR

  A Novel

  KATHRYN

  DAVIS

  GRAYWOLF PRESS

  Copyright © 1988 by Kathryn Davis

  First published in 1988 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

  Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted material: Lyrics from “Secret Love” (from Calamity Jane). Words by Paul Francis Webster. Music by Sammy Fain. Copyright © 1953 (Renewed) WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music. Lyrics from “Bell-Bottom Blues” by Hal David. Music by Leon Carr. Copyright © 1953 (Renewed) Casa David and Music Sales Corporation. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN 978-1-55597-830-3

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2019

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947089

  Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

  Cover art: Anne Davis, Sisters

  For Eric

  What is this face, less clear and clearer

  The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger—

  Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye

  T. S. ELIOT

  And what about the children who do not want to be loved?

  ISAK DINESEN

  Labrador

  “Once long ago,” Rogni said, “an old woman in a flowered housedress sat on a kitchen chair steeping tea in a cracked brown teapot. She was the Nurse-of-Becoming; she was getting ready to imagine two sisters. Only she made three mistakes. First she imagined Willie, the elder, without a sister. Then she imagined Kathleen, sister if ever there was one, mooning after the impossible. And third, she imagined them without a history, like the earth without form and void—which is how that other storyteller started things off. This old woman was greedy and filled with rapture at the prospect of seeing them rise from the steam of her teapot, and she thought about how she would take them, like damp and rumpled handkerchiefs, and shake them out into the little lace-edged things that they were—Willie a rectangle, Kathleen a circle—and hang them over the cookstove to dry.

  “Listen, she is gulping down her tea even now, in her small square house in the middle of the tundra, where the bake-apples speckle the muskeg in late summer. But how will the sisters eat this fruit? She gave them no mouths. She is a terrible thing, the Nurse-of-Becoming, watching the two sisters stiffen and then catch fire at the edges because she has placed them too close to the stove. She has a tiny pig-like nose and huge flat eyes like the animals that live in caves. She lets the sisters burn and the black pieces of them drift through the air of her kitchen; she puffs up her cheeks and blows, and they fly, in bits, everywhere.

  “In the beginning, this is how it was.”

  THE ANGEL

  Into my eye, Willie. A fleck of you flew in there, making a tear well up—that little shining star you saw and swept onto the tip of your finger to suck. It fell and fell down the dark shaft of your throat, trickling into your heart, where it glowed. The room filled in with light. I must have been about two years old and you—you were six, all dressed up in a red-and-green plaid dress, the bodice smocked with X’s and O’s of white thread, the sleeves puffed. You leaned over the edge of my crib and brought your face down, closer and closer, so that it was enormous, like the moon when it rolls across the horizon, when it has stopped being the moon and is imperious, rolling up and unrolling whole oceans. The black centers of your eyes got bigger, your nostrils got bigger, too, and then your mouth opened. “Kitty,” it said.

  What did you want? You were just a six-year-old girl on her way to school. You were just a six-year-old girl whose red plastic purse dangled from a gold chain worn across the wrist. Maybe you were finally going to give me one of the religious pictures that you accepted from the boy whose mat was adjacent to yours at nap time—shiny pictures of the Lamb of God that, ordinarily, you would never let me touch but would show to me mysteriously behind Mama’s and Daddy’s backs, as if we were doing something wrong.

  “Kitty,” you said to me, and the black oval of your mouth was so close to my face that I thought my name gave off a smell like milk. “Say, Goodbye. Say, Goodbye, Willie.”

  But my love for you tied my tongue, and then you whirled around and all I could see was the sparkling absence of you, which turned, little by little, into rosebuds: the flat, high walls on every side of me where scolding, bunched-up cat faces peeked out of the petals. Shadows of birds flew there, Willie, and I began to cry. “Hush,” said Mama, “hush.” Her hands were firm and wet and the shadows of birds flew across her face—so many faces, Willie!—and the flying had to it a whiff of flowers. She lifted me up. There was an egg to eat far away. Snip snip the top lifted off and out came the steam. This was in the kitchen.

  For a long time this was the only day there was. There was the quiet morning out of which so many things flew—the dark fleck and the star and Mama’s wet hands; the birds and the yolk of the egg—before afternoon came and you took me with you to the lake. On the dirt road I looked down and saw your long thin feet in ballet slippers the same whitish pink as your skin—in fifth position, you told me, the most difficult position of all—the T of your feet marking that exact place on the dirt road forever. You pointed to the west, where the mountains of the Presidential Range stuck up, still covered with snow on their peaks, and you told me that if we were standing there we could see all the way to the seashore where, long ago, our mama and daddy had participated in an event called a honeymoon. There the world fell apart into black rocks, against which the sea crashed over and over, like the boy in the story who hit himself on the head with the hammer. “Kiss me, my darling,” our daddy whispered. You described it all to me: the bright red lips of our mama puckering up, the way her eyelids fluttered and then flapped closed. “You’re not supposed to look.” you told me. “That’s how you fall in love.”

  It was early in the spring and under our feet the road was dry, but the ditches were filled with mud and running water; off in the woods we could see humps of snow, those sleeping beasts whose only desire it was to cart us off on their backs to the blue-black countries marked by the stars. “They’re sleeping now,” you said. “We’ve got to be very quiet.”

  Mountains stood all around us but the road was flat, cutting through the places scooped away by the glacier. White pines and red pines grew on either side of the road, and the only way a person could tell the difference between the two was to pick one of the little bundles of needles. If it was a white pine the needles were five to a bundle and you could bend them without breaking them; the red pine needles were two to a bundle and brittle. “Pick a tree,” you said, “and if you can guess what it
is before you pick the needles then you’ll get your wish.”

  But all I could see was two green waves, chinked and ripped with sunlight. My eyesight was terrible, although we didn’t know that yet. “Green,” I said, pointing. “Green, green, green, green.”

  “Oh, Kitty,” you said, and you were laughing. “Well, okay, make a wish anyway. Go ahead.”

  I screwed my eyes shut as I’d seen you do over your birthday cake, and there we were, the two of us, standing together on the dirt road, with the lake winking through the trees in the distance. Then I felt your arm brush against mine so that, just for a second, the little hairs caught onto each other. “I can’t,” I said.

  Of course I could, now. And I wonder, would it have made a difference if I’d been able to tell you what I saw? Because, instead, you made a wish for both of us, and I don’t think it’s any secret that it was your wish that floated upwards in its silvery pod, calling attention to itself. “I wish,” you said, “that we could live forever.” And then you grabbed my hand and we walked together to the lake, where the pollywogs swam in jerks through the green ooze near the shore; where you reached way down into the back pocket of your shorts and handed me a piece of butterscotch wrapped in foil, and as I sucked on it I could see the moon printed on the sky, exactly like the vaccination mark on your arm, and I was perfectly happy.

  I know we were happy then, both of us. You would pirouette through the house, dazzling me so that I could scarcely observe Mama and Daddy’s dreary spawn: the knitted wool streaming from between Mama’s fingers; the blue words which filled up the yellow pages of notepads rising in towers around Daddy’s sorrowful face. What did they think they were doing? Were they trying to turn the downstairs of the house—their kingdom of chairs and tables and brownish lampshades—into wool and paper? It was a shifty thing they were making, and they worked at it purposefully and independently of each other, so that the parts didn’t fit together. I thought there were walls everywhere, but it was through these that you apparently danced, showing me the gaps.

  In those days there was no top or bottom to you—you were a beautiful, whirling X—the tips of your fingers and toes sending out a shower of sparks whenever they came into contact with some part of the world’s surface. The star from my eye that you’d swallowed had swelled to become all of you. My dancing sister! You were the North Star—the one Mama and Daddy planned to wish on, but they had to catch you first. Believe me, I never wanted to catch you. I only wanted to keep you, forever and ever, in view. “Wait for me,” I’d call, as you disappeared around a corner, and it was your glittering wake I’d follow, up and up, all the way to the third floor, where, in more opulent times, servants had lived their complicated and exhausting lives. The air in those third-floor rooms was hard to breathe; it was thick with an adult residue—whether from Mama and Daddy or from the souls of dead servants, we couldn’t figure out—but we chose to put up with it. At least there was almost no furniture: each room had a single metal bedstead, painted white, like the one I woke up in after the masked doctor plucked my tonsils out of my throat; each room had an empty dresser where the heartless nanny would set our pink bowls of gruel before heading back to the dining room, where choice cuts of meat and handsome suitors awaited her. “Listen to her laughing,” you’d tell me, but I was less interested in your story than in the spectacle of you telling it—in the possibility of seeing a piece of fluff riding your head like a lucky passenger.

  We were orphans. Our parents had both been killed in a freak accident involving a threshing machine, leaving us at the mercy of our nanny’s whims. While she frittered away our rightful inheritance, we sat cross-legged on the attic floor, dipping into our pink bowls with our spoons, gobbling up mouthfuls of stale air. But this was better than the life we’d lived before—oh, far better!—because we could sit with the skirts of our dresses rucked up high on our thighs, revealing our white cotton underpants, and no one cared. Nor did they care that we’d made a pact to love only each other, and when we curled up on the mattress ticking to sleep—my small fat body nestled within the curve of your bones—we dreamed the same dreams. I was never frightened then. I trusted the weight of your pale forearm across my chest and I trusted you, Willie. It was a long time before I figured out the perfection of your plan: how you always made me tell you my dream first and then, your face taut with astonishment, you would whisper, “That’s just like my dream! That’s my dream exactly!” I saw magic unstiffening, rising to parade on its thin legs around the room; I didn’t recognize it as the sly animal of your invention.

  There were six rooms on the third floor of the house and we moved from one to another, trying them on like dresses. Two of the rooms were too small—more like closets, really; one had a stain on the ceiling shaped like a witch-face; one had a hole in the wall that showered plaster when your back was turned; one was the favorite home of spiders. The room we chose was at the corner of the house and had two dormer windows: one facing north towards the mountains, the other west towards a stand of pines—high bare poles at the tips of which we could make out a smear of vegetation. You explained to me that it would be through the northward-facing dormer that we would first catch sight of the silver wings of the planes, flying across the top of the world from Russia, carrying in their bellies the bombs they would release to drift down slowly—which, you insisted, we would have to catch in our arms like footballs and then set carefully on the lawn, blowing on them to cool them off.

  We were only permitted to come into this room together. This was your rule and you enforced it scrupulously the first time you found the pink bowls slightly—oh, so slightly—shifted from their places on the dresser.

  “I’m sorry,” you said, shaking your head from side to side, to let me understand that the whole matter was out of your hands. This was the autumn when I was five and you were nine; the autumn when tent caterpillars took up residence in our family tree. Your head had gotten smaller as I’d gotten larger, as I began to see all of you. There it sat, a small white triangle above your long white neck; your long red braids whipped against your shoulders as you confronted me with the evidence. Was it your boredom that made you look for such mistakes? Was it your sadness at growing bored that made you so angry with me, as if I’d remained small and dull on purpose, in order to mock your brilliance? “You’ll have to be punished,” you said.

  We were afflicted for the first time, that autumn, with the inevitable presence on Saturday nights of Mrs. McGuire, whose recollections of her Irish heritage extended back to the Tuatha De Danann, those earliest persecuted settlers of the Emerald Isle. Mrs. McGuire was at least one million years old, of this we were certain, and the years had caused to spring from the pores of her wedge-shaped face thickets of whiskers, as if the entire inside of her head was filled with nothing but hair. Her greatest pleasure was to take one or the other of us on her lap, where we would sink, ball-like, into the frightening socket of her pelvic basin. Hapless orphans!—once lodged in place we would have to submit to the nuzzlings and nibblings of Mrs. McGuire’s wild, Celtic mouth, the cabbagy odor of her body, her insistence on engaging us in a pointless game called Chin-Chopper. Meanwhile, Mama and Daddy, dressed up and erotic as loons, drove into Conway to the Palm Tree Lounge where, according to Mrs. McGuire, they flagrantly courted the Devil’s attention.

  Following my infraction of the rules, you left me all alone with Mrs. McGuire for an entire Saturday evening. You packed up your blue baby-doll pajamas in your pink quilted suitcase and left me all alone while you went off to spend the night at Cissy Fenster’s. You didn’t even like her, Willie! A chilly wind blew; all the fissures in our house were widening, letting in bugs and mice and, as the sun went down, an insinuation of bilge. I sat at the kitchen table in my pajamas—big things made for a boy and printed with friendly cowpokes—eating the sick-child’s supper of poached eggs on toast and cambric tea in a Limoges cup that Mrs. McGuire prepared for me. She didn’t know how, as Mama did, to hide the string in the egg t
hat was the chick’s ghost and, as usual, the toast was burned.

  She was nothing more than a lonely old woman—certainly no more irritating or desperate than Daddy—but her loneliness had so skewed her features, like the cauls worn by the afflicted infants in her tales of childbirth, that she seemed like a thing on loan from another universe. She watched me eat. I felt like a creature of her devising, chewing minutely. There was an electric clock shaped like a teakettle on the wall above the sink—I knew how to tell time and I knew, as well, that if we were silent on the quarter hour Mrs. McGuire would tilt the trowel of her face ceilingwards and intone, “There is an angel passing overhead.”

  “We have to wear socks for dancing,” I offered, out of the blue, at quarter to seven. “At kindergarten.” Mrs. McGuire sat dabbing at the corners of her eyes as if she’d just finished having herself a good cry. I thought of you, Willie, safe in the Fensters’ low-slung house, eating something like chicken à la king on toast points, fastidiously removing pimientos.

  Mrs. McGuire patted her lap, signaling the end of dinner; all the water that ever was, in which swam the souls of hapless children like myself, funneled down the drain of that lap. “Come here, my precious darling,” crooned Mrs. McGuire, “and I will tell you the story of my second cousin Patrick McCoo and the bloody milk cows.” There stood Patrick McCoo, his blighted herd lowing outside the window, as he watched the steam rise from the enamel pan in which he boiled the bloody milk. In this way he could discover the identity of the witch—on this occasion it was a Mrs. Fiona Houlihan, whose body grew so hot it burst open at the fingertips, from which spurted fountains of blood, boiling fountains of blood, which sizzled when it hit the cobbled streets of Dublin.