The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  Rundgren’s invocation of these names, combined with the faraway music of the orchestra, cast a greasepaint-scented, dust-spiced, orange-perfumed spell under which Propp seemed to find it impossible to lift so much as a finger. A fly was walking across his forehead, pausing midway between the commas of his eyebrows; his mouth was hanging open, and where his pink tongue rested on his lower lip Helle could see a faint glistening of saliva; his eyes were likewise moist. Dahh—dedada, dahh—dedada, dahh—dedada, dah: the dancers were twirling around and around at the feet of the pretty, brainless automaton.

  And outside, the sun made the spokes of the school-children’s bicycles glitter as they pedaled home to their mothers. How separate Helle felt from that world. She was twenty-six years old, competent, adult, ready for anything.

  Part Four

  FUGLESPIL

  I

  NO, she wasn’t good at endings, but then who is? And even though Helle had clearly gone to great pains to provide me with a version of her life that was durchkomponiert, lacing every element of the composition with clues hinting at the finale, my first glimpse of it took me completely by surprise. This was on a fresh breezy Saturday in early May, one of those days when with each breath you feel as if you’re swallowing water from an underground spring. We were sitting on Buggy Moore’s porch, which ever since he’d given Helle a cigarette the winter before, had become one of our routine stops. The three of us were smoking; the twins and William were arranged at different levels along the stream on the steep hillside across the road, their small, stooping bodies and the landscape which contained them looking strangely precise and two-dimensional, the work of a painter ignorant of the laws of perspective. Flo, in a white T-shirt at the top, was sending leaves down the stream, the idea being that William, in a red T-shirt near the middle, would put a passenger stick on each leaf, and Ruby, in a white T-shirt at the bottom, would collect them. The stream was sparkling, the surface of each rock washed over by a thin gleaming sheet of water; you could smell water everywhere, the sharply mineral smell it leached from the rocks tempered by the sweeter smells it drew from newly unfolded ferns and banks of tiny, umbrella-hatted mosses.

  “You’re a lucky man, Buggy Moore,” Helle said, going on to explain that as far as she was concerned, it was a mistake for a human being to try to live any place where there wasn’t a lot of water. Water, not air, was our natural element. “Always so proud,” Helle said, “humans. Always wanting to prove that we don’t remember our origins.” Her own feet, she boasted, were delicately webbed between the first two toes; and when I regarded her doubtfully, she pointed out that it wasn’t as if she’d never offered me the opportunity to see her naked. “You’ve missed the boat, Frances,” she said, “on more than one occasion.” She sighed, exhaling, coughing lightly, and then, because Buggy Moore was also shaking his head, she complained about being surrounded by a bunch of doubting Thomases. Wrong, Buggy said. It wouldn’t shock him to hear that Helle had fins and a tail. He was only thinking about what his daughter would say if she heard that he was lucky to be living around all this water. As Buggy described it, his daughter—Dolores Soames, whom I knew slightly in her role as the mean-spirited president of the PTA—thought that her father should be living at the Soldiers Home, playing bingo every night with a bunch of zombies. “Stubbornness is an admirable quality,” Helle said. “Then you’d love Dolly,” Buggy said, to which Helle replied that she was referring to the father, not the daughter.

  Yes, stubbornness was admirable, Helle repeated, lighting another cigarette on the burned-down stump of the one she’d just finished, then suddenly tilted her white, nutlike face upward. “Hear that?” she asked. “Zoo-zee zoo-zoo-zee? That dreamy lisping noise in the treetops? B, A-sharp, B, B, A-sharp?” Spring warblers, she said; blackthroats mainly, although there seemed to be some high-pitched, rachety zip zip zip titi tseees mixed in, which indicated the presence of Blackburnians as well. Aptly named, didn’t I think? That little wiry squeal, just like Sam’s, at the end of each sentence? But you couldn’t even begin to compare these spring birds with the steadfast, stubborn birds of winter, she said, the ones brave enough to stay no matter how cold it got. Spring birds were fickle, showing up only when the world was fair again, once the worms had again started to emerge from their tunnels of dirt onto the new grass. Spring birds flitted and preened, craving nothing more than a plenitude of worms and unceasing admiration. They woke you early, hundreds of jewel-bright nuggets weighing down the tree branches. They would never dream of eating carrion; it took a stubborn winter bird like a crow to understand that kind of desperation.

  Only wasn’t Helle ignoring the fact, I asked, that a bird hardly bigger than a pea would dare to fly thousands of miles, year after year? Understand, I felt compelled to take issue with her views on this subject not only because of the way in which they implied a criticism of Sam but also on behalf of my own powers of judgment. Wasn’t there something admirable, I asked, in flying thousands of miles, from Peru to Northern New York? “I think you’re missing the point, Fran,” Buggy Moore said. “It’s their goddamn flightiness she’s objecting to.” A strong gust of wind sprang up, stirring through the needles of the pines on the ridge; the hindquarters of the white cat perched on the Chevy’s aquamarine hood were likewise stirring as it charted the progress through the knee-high grass of something we couldn’t see.

  “Precisely,” Helle said. “Flightiness.” She let out another little cough—hhh hhh—and then, just as Buggy Moore was reaching over to offer her a sip from his beer can, the cough darkened, acquiring a darkly resonant rattle as it moved from her throat to somewhere at the base of her neck, finally settling low in her chest, welling up in huge, wrenched barks, each of which left her gasping for air. When I tried to reach around and clap her on the back, an arm swung out and punched me in the chest; her face, tucked down over her knees, was getting redder and redder. “Holy shit!” Buggy said, and it alarmed me to see how frightened he looked. Well, he said, it turned out Dolly had been right for once, getting the phone installed right after Christmas, even though he didn’t need one. Emergencies, she’d said. He glanced at me to make sure I shared his opinion—this was an emergency, wasn’t it? Meanwhile, Helle continued coughing, the color of her face changing from crimson to purple to blue. Yes, I said, an emergency. I grabbed hold of her shoulders, as if each cough were a result of their frantic jerking, not the other way around; once again her arm swung out and punched me, feebler this time, but still a punch.

  The coughing had finally stopped by the time the ambulance arrived. Helle was lying on her back on the porch, her face having returned to its former whiteness, although now it was the white of a marl pond, unwholesomely opaque, faintly green. At some point Buggy had managed to tuck a pink afghan—a gift from Dolly, he explained, embarrassed—up under the sharp tip of her chin. A little sliver of tongue emerged, licked her lips—she was preparing to speak, preparing to curse us all, I’m sure, except that the minute she’d croaked out a single husky “What … ?” she once again started to cough, and the shorter of the two ambulance attendants, a big tipper named Jim whom I recognized from the diner, ordered her to be quiet. He took out a hypodermic needle, squeezed several drops of colorless liquid from it into the air, pulled back the afghan, and jabbed the needle into Helle’s upper arm. “This’ll calm her down,” he said, “for the ride.” The other attendant, a blond, handsomely weathered woman I’d never seen before, asked if one of us would be able to accompany the patient, and when I gestured in confusion toward the children on the hillside, Buggy volunteered, stubbed out his cigarette, put on a faded Dodgers cap, and hopped with unexpected agility onto the little fold-down seat in the back of the ambulance.

  What’s happening, I thought, what’s happening? It seemed inconceivable to me that a woman as tough and woody as old gingerroot should be on her way to a hospital, that a woman as resourceful and glib as a magpie should be rendered speechless, that a woman as fierce and proud as Helle Ten Brix
should be forced to succumb to the trickery of her body. The attendants lifted her onto a stretcher and slid it through the ambulance’s waiting doors the way you slide a loaf of bread into an oven. Her feet, shod: maybe I’d never find out if she’d been lying about her toes. I yelled to the children, then went inside the house to call Maren, who was, I reminded myself, next of kin. A pink Princess phone—to match the afghan, no doubt. It was sitting on the floor between a blue macaroni-and-cheese box and a cow-faced condensed-milk can. The cheese has landed on your macaroni, I thought, listening to the far-off burring of the Blackburns’ phone inside my ear. Helle’s favorite line from Il barbiere di Siviglia, an opera which she otherwise claimed to prefer in the Bugs Bunny version. How could no one be home? Maren never went anywhere, and Sam usually spent Saturdays grading papers. I was about to give up when I heard his voice. “Yes?” he said, abrupt, peremptory, aggravated. And then, to my distress, I burst into tears.

  So I ended up riding to the hospital in the backseat of the Blackburns’ car, Sam driving, his eyes fixed on the road, Maren twisted around, grilling me. Had there been any warning that something was the matter? It was a cigarette, wasn’t it? Didn’t I know that Larry Kinglake had ordered Helle to stop smoking months ago? Emphysema, he’d said. Had she been smoking when it happened? Or was it possible that something upset her? God knows she’d often get worked up after her walks. I thought of the twins and William sitting where we’d left them around Mary Kinglake’s kitchen table, paper napkins stuck into the neck holes of their T-shirts, eating tomato soup. All this talk about smoking was making me want to smoke, although I knew my overall appearance—the strings of my windblown hair, the strings dangling from the bottoms of my cutoff jeans, my secondhand football jersey, through the front of which I knew my nipples were visibly erect, not from arousal but because the sun had set and Maren had rolled her window all the way down—was affront enough. The twins had looked so placid and content sitting there in Mary Kinglake’s kitchen, the pristine kitchen of a childless couple, with its mirror-bright appliances, shining yellow Formica countertops, ruffled white café curtains trimmed with yellow rickrack, the nearby humming in the pantry of a giant, well-stocked freezer.

  No, I told Maren, Helle hadn’t been smoking. It just happened out of the blue. Out of the blue, I said again, liking the sound of it, snapping my fingers, and Sam laughed, glancing up at me for the first time in the rearview mirror. We were approaching the hospital, all of its windows lit, all of its inhabitants undoubtedly propped up behind the trays containing their awful dinners—if Helle was in any shape to eat, I thought, she’d be livid the minute she stuck her finger through the little round opening in the silver dog-dish-shaped warmer and lifted it off. Well, Maren said, if there was anything funny in this situation, she certainly failed to get the joke.

  According to Dr. Kinglake, who met us at the intensive care nurses station, Helle’s condition was stable, the severity of her coughing spell a result of what looked like chronic bronchitis, exacerbated by emphysema. He was going to recommend oxygen therapy, but clearly nothing would do any good if the patient continued to smoke. He’d already engaged in a tug of war with her over the pack of cigarettes she’d hidden under her pillow upon arrival, and a candy striper reported that Helle had tried to bribe her to buy another pack in the machine down the hall. “She pinched me,” Dr. Kinglake said, holding out his arm to show us, within a nest of thick black hair, a small mauve bruise. How could she! exclaimed Maren, bending over for a closer look, and I felt Sam’s lips land briefly, daringly, on my neck, the frames of his glasses brushing across my cheek.

  During the week Helle spent in the hospital I came to visit her every day on my way to and from the diner. On Sunday, both morning and afternoon, she was still in a savage mood, which wasn’t improved by the presence in her room—211, the same room she’d be assigned a year later when she was dying—of a man-sized green metal capsule on a wheeled trolley. Who could sleep, she wanted to know, in the presence of a nuclear warhead? It wasn’t a warhead, of course, but an oxygen tank. NO SMOKING, warned the sign on her door, OXYGEN IN USE. On Monday morning she was staring blankly at the television weather map; on Monday afternoon she was staring blankly at the trellis of pink and yellow flowers in the wallpaper. Nice view, I offered, and she hissed at me. By Tuesday afternoon she’d discovered Marco, and I found the two of them playing cutthroat rummy for cotton swabs, aspirin tablets, and suture buttons. Ennui, Helle said, was the killer, not disease. La noia, echoed Marco, sì, sì. Besides, the signorina didn’t look sick. As indeed she didn’t, sitting there in her intricately tucked and pleated white gown (Lucia’s mad scene, Covent Garden production, 1959), her hair bound into its usual shining knob at the nape of her neck, her bracelet of silver birds encircling her right wrist, her kohl-lined eyes darting this way and that, her lipsticked mouth dispensing orders, so that the effect was more that of the levée than of the sickroom. On Wednesday she received the get-well cards the twins had made using their colored pencils from Switzerland. Ruby’s showed a snub-nosed unicorn grazing in lumpy clouds. “I hop you feel better son,” it was inscribed. Flo’s was a self-portrait, severe in its interpretation yet skillfully rendered: she drew herself standing in front of the trailer with her hands jammed down into the pockets of her overalls, her eyes cast down characteristically to the left, her feathery eyebrows slightly raised over the bridge of her nose, a speech balloon saying “I miss you” emerging from her tensely set lips. An artist, Helle said. People probably took Ruby for the artist, because she looked so dreamy, but people were fools. For while Ruby was merely dreamy, Flo was observant. Well, observant and patient, Helle amended. Disappointed and stubborn. An unusual child.

  Indeed, I arrived in room 211 on Thursday afternoon to find Flo sitting in a chair beside Helle’s bed, the two of them busy setting up a large, squarish, boxlike object on an adjustable table. When I asked where Ruby was, Flo whirled around, her irritable expression a perfect duplicate of Helle’s. Just because they were twins, why did I have to assume they’d always be together? Ruby, for my information, was with William; she and William were helping Mrs. Blackburn make a Jell-O mold that Helle didn’t even want. She’s right, Helle said—have a seat. But how did Flo get to the hospital? I persisted. It was much too far to walk; and even though she was mechanically inclined, I found it difficult to believe that she’d figured out how to hot-wire a car. Hot-wire! crowed Helle. Hot-wire! She loved it when I used words like that. Meanwhile, Flo turned her attention back to the mysterious object, lifting a thin metal rod from a carton on the bed, a metal rod with something small and colorful attached to the end of it, and waving it around in the air like a wand. “I came in a taxi, Ma,” she said. “Helle paid.” Helle told me to sit down, for heaven’s sake, and explained, as if to a child, that she needed Flo’s observant eye. Also the theater. Between the two of them, she said, they were going to design an opera.

  The object on the table was a model theater—one of the famous Priors Dukketeatre, or doll theaters, constructed and sold by an old man and his wife in their shop at 52 Købmagergade, Copenhagen. It was, according to Helle, a perfect replica of the stage of the Danish Royal Theater, a wooden framework with grooved abutments into which you could insert heavy cardboard panels, some of them entire rectangles, such as the curtains, drops, and scrims; some of them die-cut, such as the proscenium arch, borders, and drops. A beautiful building, Helle said, the Danish Royal Theater—of course we’d have to imagine the domed ceiling’s nine trompe l’oeil lunettes, a muse hovering in the center of each one, surrounded by a light blue section of sky, all of them arranged in a ring around the millions of glittering prisms of an enormous crystal chandelier; we’d have to imagine the three tiers of red velvet seats, the top tier held aloft by golden swans, their wings extended, their long necks arching outward, the middle tier by seraphim, their wings folded in against their golden flanks, the bottom tier by naked golden women. It was as if the potential for flight decreased the clo
ser you got to the floor. But who paid any attention to the floor in a theater? Helle knew, for instance, that the floor of the Royal Theater was carpeted, but she couldn’t recall the color. A theater’s floor, after all, bore such evidence of common human traffic as dirt or mud or snow; the crumpled white bags which once held toffees or licorice allsorts; dropped gloves, coins, ticket stubs—evidence, no matter how transcendent the architecture rising above it, of everything you came to escape.

  But the rugs in our opera house, Flo said, were red. She knew because the night Ruby played the part of the little dead child, when Flo had opened her pocketbook to put in the program, all of her money had fallen out. She remembered it: silver and copper circles on a red background, like planets in another universe. You see, Helle said, an observant girl; marvelously observant. The trash was different, too, Flo continued, warming to the praise. No gloves, no white bags. Just a lot of squashed soda cans and candy wrappers. Programs with black shoeprints on them. Cellophane. She didn’t know what licorice allsorts were, but she was pretty certain there hadn’t been any. Definitely no toffee.

  Helle nodded her head, pleased. Although when you got right down to it, there wasn’t any real difference, except a difference in degree, between the Copenhagen Royal Theater and the Canaan Opera House. Oh, ours was smaller, the audiences more casually dressed; usually a chamber group, rather than the full orchestra called for by the score, would accompany the singers; and the singers themselves would sometimes have to run out during matinee intermissions to put quarters in the parking meters. Still, weren’t the colors of our theater also red and gold? And hadn’t the anonymous, itinerant nineteenth-century artist who painted its fly curtain (Daphne in her moment of metamorphosis, her father rearing up to watch from out of the swollen currents of the Hunger River) been every bit as attentive to detail as his Danish counterpart? Helle picked up the cardboard panel representing the Royal Theater’s fly curtain and slid it into place, turning the whole structure around so we could see it better: on the curtain, stage left, a red velvet drape was being tugged back by three cherubim to reveal a terrace, its floor a checkerboard of black and white marble, a single rosebush drooping over its ornate stone railing. Could that be the Parthenon, miniature and spectral, perched on a cloud-wreathed mountaintop in the distance?