Labrador Read online

  I stood then at the window, its panes congealing into a solid barrier of glass, beyond which the world filled in with darkening vegetation. And then I heard a door slam far off in the house, signaling your arrival.

  “Kathleen, you’d better go now,” Rogni said. He sat down heavily on the mattress, like a person. I noticed that he was wearing work boots and that they were scuffed and nicked, as if with use. I hesitated, watching as he bent down and began to undo the laces—his fingers were shaking.

  “Are you going to bed?” I asked.

  “I’m going to lie here,” he said. “That’s all.” He removed a boot and a sock, and I saw his foot—long and white and more beautiful than any foot I’d ever seen—more beautiful, even, than yours. “Kathleen,” he said, “please.”

  Still I didn’t move. “You scared me,” I said.

  “I’m sorry.” He tugged off his other boot, peeled off his sock, and stretched out across the mattress. “I thought it would be all right. This body—” He shook his head from side to side. “It’s cold. It’s a cold house to live in.”

  “We can’t afford to heat all of it,” I said. “It’s warmer downstairs.”

  “What?” His head was turned on the mattress, looking at me, a dark blade of hair falling across his cheek. And then he smiled. “Oh,” he said, “I see. But I meant this.” He reached out and ran his fingers down my forearm, so that all the hairs jumped up, expectant.

  “Are you going to live here?” I asked.

  “I’m going to stay here. Just for a while.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Kathleen,” he said, “she’s looking for you.”

  There was something in the way he said “she” that broke my heart—if only for a second—in a fierce and adult way, because I knew that I was hopelessly inadequate and that the only thing in the world that he wanted was you. Since then I’ve come to see that I was wrong: that the transaction to be made was more complicated, involving all of us. But at the time I was afflicted with a simplicity of vision that didn’t account for complication. I could close my eyes and see those bears—their rapturous dancing—projected on the undersides of my eyelids. I could open my eyes and see you.

  You were sitting at the kitchen table—its surface a changeable still life of keys, toast crusts, unopened mail, the star-shaped piece from a jigsaw puzzle, which meant that the swain with the mandolin would go through life without a nose—you were drinking a glass of milk, your upper lip white, your body sleek and elusive, turning in the chair to watch me as I came into the room.

  “Did you hear the news?” you asked. “Raymond Naples’s mom is dead. She hit a tree near Tyler Bog this morning.”

  I began crying and then continued crying softly as you sat on the green chair staring at me. The kitchen was hard to see, as if we’d fallen under the surface of the lake, into the domain of the pike with teeth like knives. A pot rattled on the stove and I could hear you swallowing milk.

  “The whole school’s going to be invited to the funeral,” you said. “That’s what Jojo Melnicoff says, anyway.”

  “I’m not going,” I said.

  “Do you think Mrs. Naples is in heaven?” you asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess so.”

  Gusts and breezes of excitement made you toss around in the chair. “Her body isn’t,” you said. “Jojo says we’ll get to see her body at the funeral.” You tied your braids under your pointy chin and made a face at me, rolling your eyes upwards and lowering your lids, so that all I could see were crescents of white.

  “Cut it out, Willie.”

  On all sides of me the mustard-colored walls inched closer; the refrigerator motor began its low humming and I felt as if some process had commenced by which my soul would be pressed out of me—a little gelatinous blob that you would catch in a blue bowl.

  “When I die,” you said seriously, “I’m going to take my body with me.”

  “I don’t think you can,” I said.

  “How do you know?” You were sitting very close to me, so that I could see, dancing on each of your irises, pricks of light shaped like butterflies. “It’s my body,” you said. You stretched out one leg and pointed the toes—a white, sparkling line which you raised slowly, indicating the path of your ascension. “It’s my leg,” you said.

  In fact, I didn’t go to the funeral. I stayed home instead, with Daddy, decorating the dining room with crepe-paper streamers and balloons for your birthday party. We rarely used the dining room, except for special occasions, and the smell in it was ceremonial and inhuman, compounded of old varnish, mildewed fabric, and a mysterious sweetness, like almond extract. A long, dark room, papered in green, down the length of which ran an immense mahogany table—do you remember the chairs, how they were carved to look like bamboo, and painted gold? Where do you suppose they are now?

  That table and those chairs, the bust of Kermit Roosevelt on the sideboard—was it true that once upon a time our family had been wealthy, but the wealth had been squandered by our peripatetic grandfather Jasper Mowbrey, whose face looked out from behind the yellow and blue balloons affixed to the gilt frame in which he now resided? He was a fine-looking man, Jasper was, whom Daddy resembled exactly, feature for feature, except that Jasper’s expression was filled with a numinous and unthinking glow, common to all self-styled nineteenth-century explorers, while our father’s expression changed from minute to minute, depending upon his proximity to any member of the human race.

  “Will they be here soon?” I asked.

  “The Napleses are Catholic,” Daddy answered. “They may never get home.”

  During the four days intervening between the accident and the funeral I’d helped keep the pony a secret, standing beside Daddy in the half-light of the barn, touching the little creature’s soft brown nose as it bent down to gobble up oats. And I’d kept Rogni’s presence a secret as well—a simpler task, because he hadn’t reappeared. The room remained empty of all traces of his existence. At least I couldn’t see any: the mattress wasn’t dented from the weight of his body, nor was the dust on the floor marked with the shapes of his feet. Metaphysicians tell us that there’s no such thing as a trace of the future—that’s why time is asymmetrical. I looked, Willie, believe me, I looked. But I was only five years old—how could I recognize the imprint of desire when I didn’t even know the meaning of the word?

  Meanwhile, desire triumphed. Our family argued about the appropriateness of a birthday party on the evening of a funeral. We could celebrate it the following day, according to Mama’s suggestion. But you were adamant. “Saturday is my birthday, not Sunday,” you said. You provided a guest list, which included the names of people who were specifically not to be invited. At the head of this list was Jojo Melnicoff, whose attentions you felt, no doubt, would distract you from the romantic offerings of Peter Mygatz, whom you had invited secretly one morning during recess. Should it have been a surprise to me to find him—an early arrival—filling our doorway with his large and diffident frame? Probably not, since in the afternoons while you were still at school I’d been in the habit of rummaging through your closet, where I’d found his navy-and-maroon scarf folded up under a pile of stuffed animals; where I’d found, in the bottom drawer of your musical jewelry box, a drawing of a red-haired girl dressed like a bride, holding hands with a tall, bearded groom. When I pulled the drawer out, the lid of the box flew open and the miniature ballet dancer twirled around and around, her lips painted on askew, sneering at me.

  “Hello,” Peter Mygatz said, when I opened the door to let him in. He was wearing one of those tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, like Mr. Simms, the sixth-grade teacher, and he’d recently showered, making the hairs of his beard lively and electrical. “Miss Kern’s room,” he said. “Am I right? What’re you doing here?”

  “I live here,” I said.

  He made no attempt to hide his surprise. “You mean to say you’re Willie’s little sister?”

  “Who is
it, Kathleen?” Daddy called from the dining room.

  I couldn’t bring myself to answer. Instead, I led him—feeling the heat and heft of him behind me, as if he were the celestial body to which I’d recently become satellite—through the kitchen, depositing him near the sideboard on which Daddy knelt, wrestling to tape a long banner that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY WILLIE across the wall. I knew I had an ally in our father, you see, even though I didn’t understand that it was an unreliable alliance, based upon his bitterness, the sources of which were beyond me.

  “Hello, Nick,” Peter said.

  Daddy whirled around, his arm brushing against the cool marble cheek of Kermit Roosevelt. Under different circumstances, I suppose, it would have looked normal—those two intellectual and relatively unkempt men having a conversation in a dark green room—but there were balloons, Willie! There was the faintest aroma of cake!

  There were the blue pores of their faces in which masculinity welled up, and I’d seen the alternative.

  “What do you want?” Daddy asked.

  “Your daughter invited me,” Peter said.

  “My daughter!” Daddy looked at me, but I shook my head. “Look,” he said. “Willie’s ten years old. And you, you’re what? Thirty?”

  “I’m twenty-nine,” Peter said. He fiddled with the white tissue-paper wrapping of a small package he held in his hands. “She was very insistent,” he said.

  Daddy put down the masking tape and climbed off the sideboard. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “Let me spell it out for you. Musical Chairs, you know the game? Ice cream and cake.”

  The dining-room windows faced out onto the porch, beyond which stretched an expanse of meadow filled with grayish and dead grasses, surrounded on all sides by the tall poles of the pines. In the center of this clearing I could see Rogni standing absolutely motionless, staring up towards the house. My heart began to whir in my chest and I imagined, crazily, the possibility of confrontation: Peter Mygatz lying on his back amid dead grass, the plate of his face broken into pieces by a single blow of Rogni’s fist.

  “Insistent,” Daddy said. “The government’s insistent, but I don’t see you falling all over yourself to make them happy.”

  “Come on,” Peter said. “You know it’s not the same thing. I like Willie. She’s a nice kid.”

  “Sure.”

  “I didn’t want to disappoint her.”

  Daddy came over and set his big hand on my back. “Kathleen’s nice,” he said. His hand rested there, like the humps on the backs of old women, and I thought how if I were to sit, humped and nice, tossing out bread crumbs to pigeons, you wouldn’t notice me; you would stand lounged up against a lamppost, a sailor’s knee wedged between your thighs.

  “Do you want me to leave?” Peter asked.

  But as he did so, several cars made their way in procession up the driveway, the faces of mothers peering out anxiously, sizing up the house in which their children would be spending the afternoon. Could they see those spiders, the size of fists, clamped to the eaves of the porch? Could they see Rogni, as he walked from the center of the meadow to the house?

  “It’s too late now,” Daddy said. But I knew that wasn’t true, that all he had to do was say the word and the janitor would be gone, gone, gone. Rogni looked up as he approached the porch; he smiled at me, then turned to the right and disappeared behind the woodshed.

  Now we could hear the back door opening, the sound of feet walking across the kitchen floor, the sound of high-pitched and sudden voices. “It’s snowing!” you shouted, as you ran into the room, followed by your guests. “It always snows on my birthday,” you told Peter. We were, the three of us—Peter, Daddy, and myself—the fixed and motionless figures consigned by medieval painters to positions as observers of the Mystery, our mouths slightly open, our limbs frozen in gestures of worship or solicitude. You brought the smell of snow with you into the house; small flakes of snow, widely spaced, drifted down outside the window. I watched as Daddy walked over to help you out of your coat. There you stood in your green velvet jumper with its pearly heart-shaped buttons; you stood regally patient as he bent to kiss the top of your head, where the snowflakes melted into diamonds, where the desires threatened to spring forth all at once from their sac, like a hatching of mantises.

  Meanwhile, your guests shed themselves of the somber outerwear provided by their mothers in deference to the dead—the dark coats and jackets they’d been instructed to keep on throughout the funeral—and revealed themselves as children. There was a plastic record player in the corner of the room on which Cissy Fenster, awkward in tiers of yellow organdy, placed a record. “I’ve got the bell-bottom blues,” sang Teresa Brewer, “’cause my sweetie is a sailor and he’s sailin’ somewhere on the seas …” Two boys stood staring at the magic lantern on the sideboard, brought back from the mission house in Hebron by Jasper, before he chose to disappear off the face of the earth. “This is neat,” one of the boys said. He was wearing a red bow tie and his hair was slicked back from his forehead; I didn’t know his name. The other boy was Rodney Hallenbach, Bobby’s older brother, captain of the Safety Patrol. “We’ve got one of those,” Rodney lied, “it ain’t so neat.”

  Presents filled the center of the table in a colorful pile, to which I saw Peter add his offering. He set it down furtively and then turned to me and winked, as if we shared a secret. I felt a tangle of hatred under my breastbone. There you stood among your schoolmates, smiling, while our father stood sadly watching you smile.

  Lemma, I heard, that in order for there to be rapture there has to be a trap.

  Someone extinguished the lights and Mama appeared holding the cake, its ten small points of flame wavering as she walked to the table, singing as she walked, her thin voice basted like a metallic thread through that adolescent panel of sound. She put the cake at the head of the table and handed you the knife. “Make a wish!” someone yelled. A record was skipping on the player—highest hill, highest hill, highest hill, it insisted. You took a deep breath, as if you were about to dive into the lake—as if you were standing on the dock in your knit bathing suit, your expression proud, assuming an audience—and then you blew the candles out. “I wish you were dead,” you said, to no one in particular. “I wish you were dead like Mrs. Naples and the maggots were eating you up.” Benny Stroup began to cry, and you drew the knife from the cake, licking it clean of frosting, to extend in his direction. “Can’t you take a joke, Benny?” you asked. You began cutting the cake with great precision, shrugging off Mama’s hand impatiently, when she set it on your shoulder. “Yeah, Benny,” said Rodney Hallenbach, “can’t you take a joke?”

  I heard the sound of the brass drawer pulls jingling against the mahogany surface of the Queen Anne highboy in the living room, as if someone were walking past it.

  Lemma, that the number-two traps are baited with red meat, that the white fox is dizzy with lust, that she made a compromise in order to become matter, I heard—the striking of the anvil bone against the inside of my ear.

  You began opening your presents and I stayed in the room long enough to see what was in Peter’s package: a thin silver chain, which he got up to clasp behind your neck, drawing apart the shiny drapery of hair in order to expose the nape. I wondered if you could feel his breath on your skin and the thought made me sick. But the smile on your face was a limited and private one, telling me nothing, and I was sure you never noticed when I left the party, slipping through a narrow space between the two huge sliding doors, which, in the days of Grandfather, had remained open, connecting the dining room and the living room.

  Rogni was standing in front of the fireplace on the caribou-skin rug, running his eyes back and forth across the mantel, assessing that museum of Mowbrey family history: the porcelain goose girl beloved by our poor abandoned nana; Grandfather’s beaded slippers; a Mason jar in which the woolly-bear caterpillar I’d found in the woods was now a slick black worm throbbing in its cylinder of fuzz; a biography of Anna Pavlova
, long overdue at the Conway library. Rogni lifted objects, blew the dust off them, and put them back, frowning. “Kathleen,” he said, “I need your help.” He was peering into a small stone bowl filled with a brick-red and powdery substance. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. Later, when I was fourteen, I’d learn its name—iron hematite—and that it had been bestowed upon our grandfather by Bella Tooktasheena, the Inuit woman who wrecked his marriage. “Where’ve you been?” I asked.

  “Where?” The room was lit by the snow, falling faster now, clarifying and sharpening—as if, were I to reach out and touch the edge of the sofa, it would cut my hand. Rogni shook his head. “I keep forgetting,” he said, “what it’s like for you. All these compartments.” He opened the drawer in one of the end tables and took out a red lacquer box. “In the universe there is a planet, and on the planet there are many countries, and in one of the countries there is a forest, and in the forest there is a house, and in that house there is a child with a little red heart in her body.” He opened the box and took out a single metallic blue jack. “See, Kathleen, it doesn’t stop.” He held the jack on the palm of his hand. “Is this Willie’s?”

  “How would I know?” I asked.

  “But she’s your sister …” he said, and then suddenly his mouth fell open, so that I could see a flickering of light where there should have been only a dark vault, a tongue. From the dining room came the sound of tearing paper and I heard you exclaim, “Oh, Nancy Drew!” The light inside his mouth flared up for a second and then winked out.

  Willie, the danger was everywhere, as it always is, except I was, if only briefly, immune—I was beyond history, where an old woman in a floral housedress stood, her back to me, an emerald ring on the fourth finger of her right hand. Old fat thing, the ring asserted placidly, and she removed it from her finger and placed it in the very back of the top drawer of the Queen Anne highboy. She placed the ring in the drawer and then stood twisting the hem of her floral housedress between her thumb and ringless finger. This was our universe, Willie, and I was standing on its threshold—all there was was a thin rectangle of light inching across the hardwood floor, making its way up the old woman’s body like a lover’s hand—our universe, in which you were getting up to dance with a janitor named Peter, whose sole pleasure was the joining together and then slipping away of your fingers from his as you jitterbugged to Perry Como.