The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Page 6

  VI

  THOMAS MORLEY, in A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, describes a fantasy as “when a musician taketh a point at his pleasure, and wresteth and turneth it as he list, making either much or little of it according as shall seeme best in his own conceit.” Helle would object to his exclusive use of the male pronoun, but otherwise I think she’d agree with me that what Morley was describing was something very close to her own method. In “Fantasi for Mors Støyle,” for example, Helle began with the idea of her mother’s boot, a simple line of melody in A minor, and elaborated on it until she’d managed to create a foot in the boot, a leg attached to the foot, and, finally, an entire woman, her face tilting upward to receive her lover’s kiss as all the while she’s being dragged by her ankles into a peat hag. “Red boots or green boots or blue boots, why cavil?” the lyrics read. “You’re either halfway to heaven or down with the devil.”

  Not so very different, I came to realize, from my own method, except that I eventually found I couldn’t go on unless I shifted my focus away from a boot to a man: to a specific man, one who wouldn’t have been caught dead in a cape and a funny hat—to Sam Blackburn, in fact, whose eyes were hazel, flecked with orange, whereas Viggi Brahe’s eyes were like glove buttons, pearly and small, his lashes pale and sparse. Or at least that’s the way Viggi Brahe looks in the miniature portrait I came upon one day while sorting through Helle’s jewelry. The portrait was in a gold locket, inserted in the opening on the left side of the hinge; on the right side there was no portrait, though someone had scratched an X in its place. A delicate-featured face, aristocratic and rabbity, resembling Tycho Brahe’s as it appears in the frontispiece to Astronomiae instauratae mechanica, but without Tycho’s spread-winged white mustaches, without his expression of gravity and purpose. I would never have wanted to kiss Viggi Brahe.

  Whereas I certainly had no trouble kissing Sam Blackburn, although when at last I gave in to him the ballpoint pen he habitually kept in his breast pocket jabbed me in the armpit. Sam. Sometimes I still confuse the noise of birds in the bushes with his footsteps. He used to sneak up like a storybook lover, tossing pebbles from the driveway at my window. Indelicate Sam Blackburn in his brown-and-green-plaid flannel shirt, in his cloth cap with the name of a popular hybrid strain of corn printed above its visor, the kind of hat that’s given away free at grain stores. The pebbles would hit—ping pang pong—echoing the names of the three ministers in Puccini’s last opera. Peuh, they sing in their pinched falsetto voices. Who is Turandot? A woman with a crown on her head and a fringed mantle. But take off her clothes and there’s flesh, raw flesh. It’s stuff that isn’t even good to eat.

  Or so Helle encouraged me to recognize the nature of the problem. Puccini was only the tip of the iceberg, she explained. A man like Sam was more like the Don, a man in whom appetite was just a symptom of a comprehensive vanity. They’re counting on your remorse, she went on to say. That’s so they’ll have an excuse to lock you away with your own personal Calaf, a nice man who’ll run his hands through your hair, who’ll flatter you with metaphors. In exchange you’ll be expected to make three promises: your heart is his, your body’s his, your soul is his. What he’ll be hoping for, really, is that you’ll provide him with a child. Only he’ll have forgotten the most important thing. He’ll have forgotten that the child of vanity is violence.

  Except I didn’t forget. There was a gun, three fingers and a thumb closing around its pearl handle, the fourth finger—the index finger—speculatively stroking its trigger. Point that thing away, someone yelled. The sound of the stream; the first drops of rain beginning to fall. Was it remorse that I felt? Would that have accounted for the unnatural heaviness of my limbs—my sense, night after night, of being unable to pull myself from the sofa and go to bed? Get up, Francie, I’d tell myself; and if anything I’d sink down deeper, driving the sofa’s broken springs further and further toward the floor, letting loose a cloud of dust and feathers.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. How thin the membrane containing the imagination, how easily disposed to leakage! Let me go back instead to the week following the Operateers’ production of Suor Angelica. When the letters came—one on a page torn from a loose-leaf notebook, one on a piece of music composition paper—I wrote out my replies, stuck them in envelopes, and handed them over, one to Flo, one to Ruby, with specific instructions about the way in which they were to be delivered. Ida might have used Helle as an accomplice to her infidelity, but I improved on her crime: I used my children as go-betweens.

  The letter from Sam Blackburn was the more obviously amorous of the two, and thus required a more cautious response. After remarking on my qualities of intellect, and after expressing his dismay that a bright woman like myself should be stuck waitressing at the Airport Diner, Sam went on to tell me that his Tuesday-night class had been canceled, and that he was hoping we might be able to spend a little time together. I must have realized, he said, that he was attracted to me. Why else would he choose to stop at the Airport Diner, since it was obviously three miles in the wrong direction and the food was lousy?

  To be honest, it wasn’t as if he, too, hadn’t caught my eye. Whenever he came into the diner, Sam always used to order the same thing, tuna on rye toast and ginger ale; then he’d take a stack of student papers out of his briefcase, set them down on the table next to the ginger ale glass, remove the pen from his shirt pocket, and stare off into space. Sometimes he’d put on a pair of glasses with pinkish translucent rims; sometimes he’d turn his cap around so that a small clump of curly brown hair would stick out through the half-moon opening above the adjustable plastic band. A withdrawn and gloomy man, I thought, despite the occasional smile. Our conversations, for the most part, were not unlike the conversations I had with the other customers. Were the roads icing up? How was the hill into town? Was Mrs. Hightower once again going to keep her Christmas decorations up until Easter? Still, whenever I reached over him to remove an empty glass or plate, or to sponge away the toast crumbs, I could feel the space between us like a wedge that wasn’t supposed to be there. And even though I knew that our children were friends, we never talked about them.

  As for the other letter, at the time I didn’t have a clue that its author’s objectives might differ from those she so overtly and formally stated:

  Dear Miss Thorn:

  Having had the good fortune to meet you the other night (depressed nun, the steps, smoking) I’d like to expand on the acquaintance. Would you and your charming girls be free to come for tea? Let’s say Wednesday, four o’clock. I’ll count on you unless I hear otherwise.

  Sincerely,

  Helle Ten Brix.

  A tryst Tuesday night, tea the following afternoon? I wrote back on postcards, figuring that in both cases the less I said, the better. For Sam I chose a winter scene, tiny figures photographed skating on a frozen lake—a landscape intended to appeal to tourists, and one which I hoped would reflect the tone of its accompanying message. I told him I could probably manage an hour; maybe we could go somewhere for a drink. Period. Signed. Mainly, I guess, I was curious; I never planned to do anything more than flirt with him a little. Whereas I admit that Helle’s card, a reproduction of a painting by Thomas Cole—a hazy panoramic view of trees and a waterfall—was selected with a desire to impress. At the time I couldn’t have known that she hated the Hudson River school, that in her opinion men didn’t know how to paint nature and any man who tried ought to have “his fingers cut off.” We’d be delighted to come for tea, I told her. Four o’clock would be fine.

  The Blackburns lived just off Broadway on Quarry Road, in a fairly large house with cinquefoil window arches, an attached semicircular tower, and three separate porches. Our town had many such houses, the railroad barons’ taste for architectural excess having been stirred by the writings of John Ruskin: seductive houses, their cornices dripping with ornate molding—unlike my house, the work of a more subtle architect, one bent on seduction through pity. Th
e twins had to walk past the Blackburns’ every day on their way home from school, and occasionally they’d end up staying there with William until dinnertime. He had an older sister—Joanne? Joan?—but she was away at college. Besides, Flo had informed me, William was in love with Ruby. Thus the delivery of the cards posed no problem: Ruby was to give her card to Helle, Flo to Sam. Into their hands, I said. But not if they were together in the same room. And not if Mrs. Blackburn was watching.

  Of course, once I was actually sitting at her dining room table, watching the steam rise from her Limoges teapot, watching her organdy curtains blow into the room, their motion dreamy and faintly erratic like seaweed, there was no longer any reason for keeping Maren Blackburn in the dark, at least not about her aunt’s invitation. The table was mahogany and smelled as if it had been recently polished; in its center, providing a kind of barricade between hostess and guest, someone had put a mason jar filled with daffodils, around which buzzed a solitary bee, under which spread out a whitish stain where water had spilled. We were to have Nonnefad, Helle informed me, Nun’s Platter, in honor of our meeting. Nonnefad and elder tea.

  The twins had joined William on the porch and I could hear the squealing of the glider, the enchanting catch in Flo’s deep, hoarse voice, as she explained the rules of her favorite card game to William. This was a game she’d made up herself, a variation on slapjack, in which every card had a separate action attached to it. “Diamonds,” Flo was saying, “are luck cards. Clubs are hitting cards; spades are digging-for-secrets cards; hearts are love cards. Like, if I get the four of clubs I get to hit someone four times.”

  You could close your eyes and the breeze would wash your face: the smell of dill and bacon, of steeping elder flowers and smoked fish, of blue cheese and brandied cherries. I felt languid, distracted; I had, I knew, no business being where I was, but the idea that at any second Sam Blackburn might walk into the room, might see me sitting there across from the woman he’d told me only the night before was the bane of his existence, excited me. In fact I suddenly realized I was ravenous, and in no time at all I’d eaten everything on my plate except for three cherry pits. A summer afternoon, warm and slow. “Jack of hearts,” Ruby said, her voice like a little flute. “Uh-oh, William.” Hot even. So why was it that when I looked up and saw Helle’s face staring at me, what I found myself thinking of was winter, of how, sometimes, black water will shine up at you all at once out of a hole in the snow?

  “Thin people don’t usually eat so much,” she said. I told her I had a lot of nervous energy, and anyway, the food was delicious. “Acceptable,” Helle said, but I could tell that she was pleased; it wasn’t until much later, after she’d moved into the trailer, that I discovered just how passionate she was about cooking. By then, of course, I knew enough about her to place this fact in context, to see it in relationship to its opposing asceticism. One minute she’d be assembling the ingredients for an espagnole, chopping up veal and beef bones with a cleaver, rinsing sand from leeks, complaining about the quality of the parsley; the next minute she’d be advocating a diet of spring water and raw vegetables. Or in her own words (from the second of the five songs in the Stedmoder cycle), “The two horns of the moon never met in me.” That day in the Blackburns’ dining room, for instance, she only picked at the food on her plate, eating at most a sprig of dill, a morsel of salmon, a crumb of cheese. Then she pushed her plate away, folded her hands in front of her on the table, and sighed.

  “When I was a girl,” she said, “I used to have elder tea whenever I was sick, which was not infrequently.” Her mother would bring her the tea, along with a book to look at, a large book with pictures of the Holy Family surrounded by beasts and angels, gold spikes radiating out from their heads, or pictures of tiny figures walking among ruined temples and trees where you could see every leaf. This was the way your eyes worked when you had a fever. But the picture she liked best was a portrait of a girl, her head bound up in a pale blue turban, her face slowly turning, her lips parting as if she were about to tell a secret. Only one of the girl’s ears was visible, and from its lobe there hung a drop-shaped pearl earring, which the artist had caused to glow by adding a thick dab of white paint. “Pretty, like you,” Helle said, and though she made it sound more like an accusation than a compliment, I said thank you. I didn’t know what else to say.

  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried; Helle now lifted her razor-sharp elbows onto the table, lit a cigarette, and began a thorough interrogation. Sometimes, it is true, she looked more like a mantis than a woman. How old was I? she asked. Where had I grown up? Gone to school? Had I ever been married? Where was the twins’ father? Bit by bit she plucked pieces of information from me, and then, evidently having gotten what she wanted, she proceeded to give the information back, reshaping it to suit her own purpose, not unlike the way she composed the Fantasi.

  I was the heroine, Helle said, of a story which began ten years ago, just after my twenty-third birthday, five years after I’d left my parents’ home in Chestnut Hill, one year after I’d done my last exercise in counterpoint at Juilliard. Ten years ago a woman named Frances burned her finger when she went to put on the front porch light. This was because the whole electrical system in the house had shorted out. None of the lights worked. None, so that a few minutes earlier when the dog had gotten up from where it was sleeping in the hall closet, burrowed in among sweepings of insulation and plaster dust, I hadn’t really been able to see it; the dog hadn’t barked but had walked slowly to the door, growling. The snowmobile had stopped and then gone on to zoom past the window where Helle herself was sitting, composing the Overture to Fuglespil. The snowmobile had gone on, yet there he was, a man walking toward my house. The snow squeaked under his boots. For wasn’t that how children were made sometimes, even beautiful children like Ruby and Flo? Maybe it wasn’t a man after all, but a deity, transformed by its desire.

  Eventually I would learn to accept this tendency of Helle’s. In fact, no more than a week later, I was actually flattered when she showed me her reworking of the Hunters’ Trio from The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, in which the hunters now rode across the frozen bog on snowmobiles, the sound of the engines providing a menacing basso ostinato. But what I remember feeling at tea that day was confusion, anger. Hadn’t she heard a word I’d said? The light in the room grew faint, pinkish, with great arabesques of smoke near the ceiling; the walls seemed to be moving in, the curtains to be swelling. And Helle’s voice—how hypnotic it had been, like the waves’ gentle lapping away of sand from the edge of a beach, with hints of a darker, more comprehensive urge, the tidal pull of an entire ocean. Had she put something in the tea, or was it the tea itself? Elder trees, as I know now, are said to possess magical, visionary properties: while she was sitting under an elder, Helle fell into the trance in which she first heard the sound of Lahloo’s voice.

  I said that ten years ago I didn’t own a dog, and that it was no deity who had raped me. “You misunderstand my intentions,” Helle replied. Rape was an abomination. All she’d meant to suggest was that sometimes you couldn’t explain the love you felt for a child without reimagining the way in which that child had been conceived. Aside from certain lizards, which are apparently able to produce both egg and sperm, and aside from the parthenogenetic behavior of some turkeys, she found the whole idea of conception disgusting. Yet, she admitted, she adored William.

  At this point I heard the front door slam, the sound of footsteps, a light tread but with weight in it, moving toward the dining room. Sam, I thought. He walked down the hall, stopped, retreated a few steps. Had he seen me? No, he seemed to be going through the mail, ripping open envelopes, bills no doubt, because I could hear him swearing softly under his breath. And then, just when I thought he wasn’t going to come into the dining room, there he was after all, poised in the open archway, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the watery thinness of the light. The hand repositioning his glasses on the bridge of his nose was, I knew, spotted on the back wit
h large pale freckles. The fingernails were almond-shaped and perfectly smooth. The ring had been his father’s. Once he noticed me, Sam raised his eyebrows and one corner of his mouth lifted a little. “Sorry,” he said, turning as if to leave. “I didn’t realize you had company.”

  “Nonsense.” Helle waved her arm in my direction. “This is Frances. Frances Thorn, the twins’ mother. We were just talking about you.”

  “Oh, Francie,” Sam said. “Hi.”

  Helle scowled. “You two know one another?”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “From the diner.”

  It became immediately clear that whatever antagonism existed between Sam and Helle offered each of them the kind of antic pleasure some people take in seeing their own worst fears confirmed. “Sam is a Platonist,” Helle announced. He actually believed, she explained, that after God had mixed the soul of the universe, he poured back into the bowl what remained of the former ingredients, a gooey mass which he divided into individual souls, as many as there were stars in the sky, and this was the first generation of men. The ones who led good lives got to keep on being men; those who led bad, wicked lives, cowardly or immoral lives, got turned into women.

  “You’re just sore because of what Plato said about poets.” Sam leaned back against the sideboard, stuck his hands down into his pockets, and smiled at me. “What do you think, Francie? Were you immoral the first time around?”

  “Leave Frances out of this,” Helle said. But of course that was impossible. Almost as if she knew what I was thinking, she went on to describe Plato’s theory about the creation of heterosexual love. When our earliest ancestors drank, the liquid made its way through the lungs into the kidneys and thence to the bladder, where it was expelled by air pressure. At this precise spot a hole pierced the column of marrow extending from the head to the base of the spine, the column down which the “divine seed” of the brain traveled, eager for release. A man’s genitals were naturally disobedient and self-willed; they would stoop to any level in their wild lust to reproduce. While the womb, Plato said, was even more disobedient. And woe to the woman whose womb was never fertilized, for such wombs wandered aimlessly around the body, blocking the breathing passages, destroying everything in their path.