Labrador Read online

  “I listen to that dumb clock,” you told me, “playing its dumb tune. It doesn’t always play the whole thing, it only does that when it’s going to strike. You ever notice? Ding-a-ding-dong, ding-a-ding-dong. And then I think about heaven—how when you die you go to heaven and it never stops. There isn’t any way out.”

  You were sitting on the end of my bed, staring down at one of the rag rugs our mama bought every fall from the blind woman with the gray felt slippers and drooling dog.

  “Some people go to hell,” I said.

  “Thanks, Kitty. That’s very consoling.”

  Then, because I started to whimper, you leaned over and took my face between your hands. You held on tight and whispered something, but your hands were pressing against my ears and I couldn’t hear a word of what you said. And then you were gone.

  For Daddy, I think, the solution to what we all came to refer to as your problem had its sources in the past—maybe in the precise moment when your palm slapped against the pony’s flank. It was on his suggestion that you spent an hour, every Wednesday afternoon, in the company of young Dr. Varney, whose habit of moistening the thick pads of his lips with his tongue, prior to asking you a question, you duplicated over dinner with terrible accuracy. You were always such a talented mimic, Willie, and you possessed the mimic’s gift for defining personality in terms of weakness. Dr. Varney’s approach, evidently, was slangy and conspiratorial. “Hey, kiddo, how goes it?” you would drawl, stretching out your legs and crossing them at the ankles. And then you would sneer, your upper lip rising like a curtain to reveal that row of tiny, even teeth. “Jerk,” you would say.

  Daddy retained through all of this a scholarly determination. Whatever the nature was of his private “research,” he seemed to draw solace from his endless note-taking, as if killing off the idea of entropy might help you sleep. His journal entries, during those five years, before he gave up—before you moved out, providing your own solution—testify to this determination. “December 10, 1959,” he wrote. “Spent day shoring up back foundation wall. Guilty as all hell. House on verge of collapse. Great diligence called for. W. unchanged. Conscience as seat of counter-entropic energy? Political ramifications unlimited! Letter to Dulles. Reread Henry Adams.” There followed a drawing of three doughnut-shaped objects: the first, whole; the second cut in half, rendered in cross-section; the third outlined in dots. “W. to Varney’s, p.m.” he continued. “In car W. describes childhood fear of light fixture over bed. Replace tomorrow.”

  He wrote pages of this stuff, interspersed with perfectly rational plans for newspaper articles; plans for fixing up our house, accompanied by lists of supplies and schedules. On the first page of one of these ledgers he’d taped a photograph of our house when it was new. In the photograph three women posed in the front yard among plantings of ornamental shrubbery, long waving arms of delphinium, clumps of loosestrife. The women wore high-necked blouses and long dark skirts, and they held baskets filled with flowers, while behind them the house rose, every line true, every window sparkling, into a cloudless sky.

  I think, Willie, that this was the way he understood your problem: in the beginning there was grace and brilliance with which, as time wore on, the world’s multiple hands would begin tampering, like a mob of fans dismantling an idol. There was a caption printed under the photograph. Time’s arrow reversed, it said. And so he continued to drive you to Dr. Varney’s office; he remained hopeful.

  Understand, he had to. He had to because his sorrow was not all for you, some of it was reserved for himself. That’s why he began to spend more and more time at his desk, writing. He’d pretend he couldn’t hear you tossing around upstairs in your bed and, if he couldn’t block that out, then, I think, he’d pretend what he heard was the sound of generative activity: a spontaneous creation with a name more redemptive than “daughter.”

  Mama, on the other hand, was fatalistic. Her vision of the world included the possibility that, on a designated morning, the planet might leap from its orbit to freeze in the far reaches of space; on a designated morning you might come down to breakfast with the thin sheen over you of the sleeper. She wept, remember, one Easter morning, because no one was able to locate, where she’d concealed it among the windflowers, the porcelain egg from Italy, with its window through which you could see the Tuscan landscape: plane trees and a sugary road. “It’s a sign,” she said.

  These were our parents, Willie.

  And do you remember how Mama took you to see Rosina, that local woman who grew herbs all around and inside the turquoise-blue trailer in which she lived? On every surface—even on top of Rosina’s television set, which you told me was always turned on—sat clay pots filled with tangles of vegetation, drooping their strange leaves over hundreds of salt and pepper shakers. Rosina had a mustache, and a voice so beautiful that new mothers would hire her to sing their colicky infants to sleep.

  You never made fun of Rosina. In fact, you seemed to look forward to the time you spent with her, drinking tisanes or more potent concoctions from doll-sized teacups. But, despite the ease with which you were able to fall asleep across her huge lap, her cures were limited to the trailer.

  Eventually, Mama resorted to psychics—to a Dartmouth professor who claimed to locate clear channels in the brain with a dowsing rod; to an ancient member of the DAR from Tamworth who threw the I Ching. Mrs. McGuire, unsolicited, suggested that Mama mix some of your menstrual blood into a glass of port wine and give it to you at bedtime. “Then the poor benighted child must say her prayers, kneeling, mind you, at the foot of the bed.” She paused, letting this all sink in. “A prayer once in bed calls the Devil to your head,” she explained.

  One morning, on my way to breakfast, I found a drawing on the wallpaper at the foot of the stairs: a banana-shaped object filled with smaller, wobbly objects, many of them labeled: fenchlet, the doorway of Merbus, Kitty’s bone-garb, hooma. You were lounging on the porch in nothing more than a large gray T-shirt, slyly watching Daddy through the window, as he sat drinking his coffee and reading the paper. “What?” you said, when I asked you about the drawing. “Oh, that. That’s a picture of God’s brain. We’re all in there, don’t worry.”

  I sat on the porch railing and it was still wet with dew; the spiders’ necklaces dangled everywhere and the spiders themselves rose and fell, rose and fell, filled with heavy liquid. “I wasn’t worried,” I said, and you whirled around, outraged.

  “Well, you should have been,” you said. Then you grinned. “Maybe I’ll erase you.”

  “You can’t,” I said.

  “What do you mean, I can’t. Of course I can.”

  But I was patient and perfectly serious. “You can’t erase crayon,” I said. “Everybody knows that.”

  I never knew what to expect, Willie. My life was like that of an assistant at a magic show, wondering whether it would be a red flower or a skull that would pop, next, from the hat. Because, of course, sometimes it was a red flower: something lavish and beautiful, like a peony.

  At about the same time that I found the drawing on the wall, you planned a family trip for all of us. “We could ride the cog railway up Mt. Washington,” you said. “Please?” A boy in your class had described for you the weather station and restaurant at the top; the plaque commemorating the deaths of hikers and climbers; the excitement of being drawn, like a toy on a string, upwards. In those days, you might recall, we were not a family given to such outings. But the specificity of your request—the fact that it named a desire he was capable of fulfilling—made Daddy spring into action. “Mt. Washington, here we come!” he said.

  The car we had then was a two-tone Chevrolet: mint and forest green. In front of us we could see the backs of our parents’ heads—the black curly hair of Daddy’s head, longer than the hair of the fathers in magazine pictures, longer than the hair of the other fathers who stood helping charming wives and children out of cars in the parking area. And there was the gray fuzz that Mama had arranged in what she referr
ed to as a “Psyche knot,” pretending to be playful as, I suppose, she thought a mother should be at the outset of a family expedition. They disagreed, as usual, about the radio. “For crying out loud, Constance, it’s just the news,” Daddy said, as Mama twirled the knob to find music—any music. It was spring and the branches of the trees were dark red, clustered with buds, and there was a heat coming from inside things that had nothing to do with wind or air but was like the heat you feel in the palm of your hand when you exhale into it. Mama’s hands were always cold, because she had poor circulation. “The girls,” she hissed at Daddy, twisting the radio dial back and forth, as if it was a shameful thing for him to let us hear the voice of the newscaster describing Ike’s golf game, or the confusing politics of Berlin, or the presence in our milk of strontium-90; as if it was on our account that the car had to be filled with the sad voices of the Everly Brothers, whose music made me feel worse than anything the newscaster might have said.

  The cog-railway car was charming in the manner of things from the last century, frail and outmoded. Mama gasped when she saw it. As the descending passengers, their faces lit with relief, climbed out of the car, we watched a big youth in a blue knit stocking cap, his hair cut in that Dutch-boy style that makes the whole head look like a peasant hut with a thatched roof, jump down from the engineer’s seat and begin furiously squeezing oil from a can into the engine’s working parts.

  “Look,” you said to me. “You can see his crack.”

  “Shh,” I said.

  In the car we sat two abreast. You sat next to Daddy; he had his long arm looped across your shoulders, across your bright red braids, drawing from the other passengers admiring, approving stares: the handsome father and the delicate, beautiful daughter. Behind you I sat next to Mama: a large, bespectacled girl beside a tiny, gray-haired woman. No one paused to admire us, although I was certain that we aroused curiosity—a nurse and her charge?—and that no one, seeing us, linked us with you and Daddy.

  You could have maintained that illusion. I realize that. I think if it had been the other way around, I’d have made the denial aggressively, like Peter in the Bible. “Nope,” I would have said, “those weirdos? Never saw them before in my life.” But you were kinder.

  Mama pressed her hands to her face during the earlier part of the ride, before we hit the higher elevations, where the trees grew smaller and smaller, more and more lopsided, eventually vanishing, to be replaced by huge damp stones, out of which shelves of ice stuck, all in the same direction. Then she hid her head in her lap. It was the only way to avoid seeing it: the terrible vertical track of our ascent, unimpeded, as we neared the peak, by any upright object on which a falling body might catch. We were flotsam being carried to the crest of a wave miles high. We passed the alpine meadow and it diminished, the lake in its center becoming a small blue circle of water, like something left out for a pet.

  At the top we climbed onto a wooden boardwalk, where we could see the machinery and cables responsible for our well-being. The weather station was festooned with wires and slowly rotating disks, and a man in camouflage fatigues leaned against one wall, chewing gum and grinning.

  “Kitty!” Mama said, wildly gripping my arm. She presented a variety of aspects, our mama, but the one which predominates in my recollection of her is the one which took over there on the mountain, as we made our way slowly to the restaurant. We were like figures in some unsettling fable from a foreign country that honored neither good deeds nor a pure heart; we were a giantess and a mantis, companions in a quest filled with tricks and obstacles.

  You danced towards the restaurant. I’m sure you knew that the man in fatigues was watching you, watching the way the wind caught your braids and flung them straight out behind your head, as if frozen, pointing. “Willie!” Daddy yelled, but he couldn’t keep up with you either. We found you standing inside the building, transfixed by the plaque, your arms respectfully folded behind your back, your leg tendu.

  “Look at this,” you said. “A little kid died up here in 1931. She was only eight years old.”

  We both ate up this piece of information: children are interested in the deaths of other children; they hold those deaths up to the light and then align the contours of their own lives against them, looking for similarities. That’s why the part of Little Women that gets reread is Beth’s death; maybe that’s why we decide that too much goodness is a dangerous thing.

  Mama found our glee shocking. “Girls,” she said. “I’m surprised at you.” Her hands were shaking and even though she was inside a familiar structure, through which wafted the smells of coffee, fried food, and that steam-table aroma so impossible to assign—who knows if it is exuded by the thing we will eat or the people who will serve it to us?—it was obvious that she hated being up so high. “The poor mother,” she said.

  You stared at her, then you stared at me. I guess you made a choice. It was a good one, too: at the very least, with my big, heavy bones, I could provide ballast. Gravity as well, although my skills there were still undeveloped. “C’mon, Kitty,” you said. “C’mon. Let’s see what there is to see.”

  And then you took my hand. Do you remember that? Sometimes I think it was that memory which, four years later, pulled me right back from the actual edge of the world. You led me outside to where the wind hit our faces, making my glasses fog up, and you stood there, the soul of patience, as I wiped them against my sleeve and put them back on, so that I could see how the man standing by the weather station raised one arm, languidly, to wave at us. His face rotated in our direction like one of the disks and he winked. “Some guys,” you said, “are pretty rude.”

  And so, for the rest of that wintry afternoon, while all around the foot of the mountain spring’s modest flowers opened in warm sunshine; while our parents sat in the restaurant drinking coffee; while Daddy made the necessary small adjustments in his behavior to calm Mama down, you devoted yourself to me. We jumped from rock to rock, and the rocks wobbled under our sneakers; we followed a group of Cub Scouts partway down a trail marked by cairns, listening as their leader pointed out geologic features.

  “Sound off,” you mimicked. “Stokes, it’s going to be KP for you if you don’t shape up.”

  Stokes, who overheard, turned around, and you rolled your eyes and stuck out your tongue. Your arm was around my shoulders and I was so happy that I laughed out loud. There we were, you and I, high on top of a mountain, the blue air’s wild currents all around our bodies, the rocks shifting dangerously under our feet, but we stuck!—we didn’t fly away or fall, even as the world spun like crazy through outer space—we adhered to each other and our density was miraculous.

  On the ride back down the mountain you insisted on sitting next to me. Your breath smelled like mint, from the colorless Life Savers you adored; your pupils were fully dilated because, at least for that moment, you adored me more than anything else in the universe. “Stokes,” you intoned, “consider the awesome power of the glacier. Consider the awesome sight of all that ice.”

  From behind us came the sound of Daddy’s voice: “Consider the awesome mess if you two fall out of this contraption.”

  You jabbed me with your elbow and we both giggled hysterically. Our conspiracy was complete. It should have lasted. Why didn’t it last?

  That must have been late April or early May. In June you left us for the first time in pursuit of your career; with the sly urging of the woman who’d given Mama her card, you accepted a scholarship at a special camp in Vermont. This woman, Marina Protzeroff—who insisted on being referred to as “Madame,” and who called our house every single evening for a month, just at dinnertime, until Mama gave in to your pleas and her own exhaustion—swept you up one morning into her black Mercedes, like a scene in a school nature movie about predators and prey. In the presence of Madame you became limber and cool; you became something that one ought not touch. Each of us, in turn, approached the passenger seat window, which Madame caused to roll down at the touch of a button,
and you offered the sharp edge of your cheek to our lips. Had you seen one of your heroines, possibly Garbo, make the same gesture in a movie?

  “Take good care of our girl, please,” Mama said, and Madame, without turning her head, blinked once, the lids rising and lowering with exaggerated slowness, as if signaling accomplices hidden in our bushes. Now! that blink seemed to say and, as the dark car bore you away from us, I waited for the thugs, their faces mashed to a smooth marbling beneath nylon stockings, to tie us up and stow us away forever in the cellar.

  “I don’t care what anyone says,” Daddy said, “that woman is a complete phony.”

  “She studied with Nijinsky, Nick,” Mama said.

  “Yeah, and I’m Albert Einstein. You know what the trouble with you is? The trouble with you is, you always fall for the phonies.”

  “I married you,” Mama said. And then she stamped up the porch steps and into the house, where she began knitting, casting on stitches and humming frantically.

  Daddy followed. I could tell he was headed for the cabinet behind the wing chair where, among Chutes and Ladders, and decks of cards, and a partly assembled cuckoo clock, he hid his bottle of Scotch, as well as the several dusty bottles of liqueur we kept for company.

  “Kathleen!” he yelled, and I went to him immediately. These days, the minute he had the bottle in his hand he was already on his way to being irrational; I didn’t want to take any chances. “Did she say anything to you?” Daddy asked.

  “Who?”

  “Willie. Your sister. Did she say anything …” And then he stopped, flustered. “Do you trust that woman?”

  “You mean Madame?”

  “I mean Mrs. Protzeroff.” He was impatient now, trying to hurry our conversation along so that he could make his getaway to the kitchen, land of ice cubes and tumblers.

  “I guess so,” I said. “Why? Do you think she’s a crook?”