Читать книгу The Age of Reason - Marian Birch - Страница 1

On the last day of school, Edith got off the bus at the foot of her own driveway, not at Granny and Pop’s house, where she’d gone after school for every other day of first grade.

She marched straight up the gravel drive, never turning to see the old blue car parked thirty yards up the road. She inhaled the fragrance of the lilacs that hung over the drive in thick panicles. Two ravens squawked, soaring up from the branches of an old ash tree as she passed underneath. She felt her bones resonate with their cries. Her house, covered in weathered gray clapboard the exact color of a paper-wasps' nest, stood on a little hill. The meadow behind the old house was covered with apple trees that Granny had told her were almost as old as the house which was three hundred years old. But Kitt, her mother, said that no apple tree could possibly live that long. She said that Granny meant that they had already been there when she was a little girl. Today the trees were covered with pink-and-white blossoms and the buzzing of bees.

When she pushed open the sliding glass door into the “new” kitchen, the quiet of the old house surrounded her. To Edith the kitchen didn’t seem new at all, because it had always been there as long as she could remember, but she knew everyone called it that because it had been added on to the house in the 1930s. It was new ages before she was born. Pop had built it to give Granny Gladys a modern kitchen to cook in. That was before Pop and Gladys moved to the house up the road.

The icebox was purring softly and the big clock on top of it ticked loudly and everything else was hushed. Edith found herself walking lightly, like Indian braves do in the woods, trying not to make a sound, as she crossed the fake-brick linoleum and put her schoolbooks down on the kitchen table. She was hungry. She opened the icebox, excited and proud that she had permission to eat whatever she liked. Although she would have really liked chocolate milk, her parents never bought the Bosco syrup to make it, like the DeMelos, her neighbors, did. She made herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and washed it down with ordinary milk. Then she headed up to her room.

She had gone up and down the narrow and uneven stairs to her small room at the top of the house so many times, often two at a time, that she didn’t need to turn on the light to know which steps were shorter or taller than the others. Her bedroom was the only room on the third floor under the eaves. Kitt referred to it as a garret. She once told Edith that Raskolnikov had a similar room, though Edith had no idea who Raskolnikov was. “Just a crazy Russian teenager,” Kitt explained. Edith’s garret had no door. The ceiling sloped and the room was almost completely filled by Edith’s ivory-painted wooden bed and the sagging jam cabinet with screened doors where she kept her dolls and clothes. The single mullioned casement window, glazed with six small panes of ancient, wavery glass, was propped open with a stick so the room wouldn’t be stuffy. A very gentle breeze blew in.

Edith rummaged through the wicker laundry basket where she kept her dress-up things. She pulled out a threadbare black-velvet circle skirt that used to be her mother’s, a big ivory shawl of fine wool, some phony gold bangles and chain necklaces from Kitt’s college theater days, and finally an old yellowed napkin edged with dingy lace that smelled faintly of camphor.

Edith extracted her blue leather missal from its hiding place under her mattress and leafed through it, looking for the Sacrament of Baptism. The book had to be a secret because her parents didn’t like praying. Besides, she had stolen it from the Church of the Holy Innocents a few weeks before. Sometimes she would go to Mass with her best friend Daniel DeMelo and his family so that Kitt and her father, Arthur, could sleep late.

Today Edith was a bishop-cum-nun who was baptizing her congregation of dolls and stuffed animals. Her friendship with Daniel DeMelo and his siblings, especially the knowledgeable nine-year-old Betsy, had made her well-informed about Church matters, so she knew that nuns aren’t supposed to baptize and can’t be bishops, but she also knew that, if necessary, in an emergency, anyone can baptize as long as they say the right words and put some drops of holy water on the person they want to baptize. Daniel had learned this in catechism class. When the DeMelos’ youngest, baby Peter, was born last winter, Betsy had told her all about his baptism, so Edith knew just what to do. However, when she played 'Baptism' with Daniel she had to let him be the bishop since he was a boy. Now she pretended, I, Mother Edith, must perform the sacrament because it is the middle of a war and there aren’t any bishops here behind enemy lines. In her imagination she could hear bombs exploding not very far away.

Despite the open window in the gable end of her little room, it was still warm and stuffy up here on the third floor. Ignoring her own comfort like a good nun, Edith draped the ivory shawl over her head. On top of it she arranged the velvet skirt and draped it over her shoulders. She didn’t have a mirror, so she touched her forehead to be sure the white wimple showed beneath the black veil. Then she put the gold chains around her neck and spread the lace napkin on a footstool. She had brought up a drinking glass filled with water and a shot glass filled with Wesson Oil to be the holy water and the chrism. She liked the sound of chrism. Solemnly she made the sign of the cross and muttered in something she hoped resembled Latin.

In hominy patrice,

Filly-hoo et speary too sank toe.

At the same time she waved her hands over the two glasses just like Mickey Mouse waving over the mop in Fantasia.This was to make the water and oil be holy. Her dolls and her two teddy bears were lined up solemnly on the chair behind the footstool. They were orphans whose parents had been killed by bombs before they could have their children baptized. She knew the orphans would go to straight to Hell if something happened to them before they received the sacrament. Using two brushes from her painting set, she planned to sprinkle the blessed oil and water on the expectant Cat-a-cue-mens. Wet brush raised above her waiting flock, missal open to the correct page, Edith was distracted by a funny smell. It tickled her nose and the back of her throat. She looked up and saw that outside the window, the sky was now a sulfurous yellow-green that she couldn’t remember ever seeing before, a color sort of like the week-old black-and-blue mark on her arm from when she had walked into the bathroom doorknob. Just a little while earlier, when she’d come home from school, it had been a soft, warm late-spring day, smelling of apple blossoms and lilac, and the sky had been baby blue. Now instead of the quiet of a spring afternoon, she heard a swelling of sound like the train coming into the Worcester station when her mother took her to New York to see her other grandparents, the Russian ones. But the Worcester station was thirty miles away and there were no trains here in Whitby. There were hardly even any vehicle bigger than a farmer’s flatbed truck hauling hay bales on her road. But now she definitely heard a train . . . or something like a train. Could it be Pop using his chainsaw in the woods? she wondered.

Suddenly, in less than the time it took her to gasp, Edith was sucked—whooshed—by what felt like an enormous vacuum cleaner out the open window into the air above her favorite apple tree, the one she liked to climb. Alongside her flew the glass of water and the glass of oil, the footstool, the neatly seated dolls and animals, and the napkin. Her heart startled straight upward, as if a small bird nesting inside her fluttered, squawked, and soared. Edith’s mind was swamped by her feelingss. She felt her skin and her hair and her clothes all being sucked by the warm strong wind. Her whole body felt the way her feet had when the waves were sucking the sand underneath them at Ocean Beach last summer, if the ocean had been warm like a bath. Today’s sucking wind was almost hot, like the air coming out of the back of the Hoover and, though it was very strong and smelled like ammonia, it was oddly gentle.

Edith floated through the air, her small mouth forming a big O. She floated so very, very slowly that she could see everything below her and around her in remarkably vivid detail, much sharper than ordinary seeing. Usually things were a little bit blurry for her because she didn’t have very sharp eyes except for things that were right under her nose like words on a page or blueberries on a bush. But now everything was sharply etched and clear. Her doll Teddy (the one whose hair she had cut off so she would have a boy and who was named for her uncle who was killed in the war before she was born) as well as one of her bears were floating alongside her. They all sailed together over the yard and above the very same apple trees whose flowering she’d admired coming home from school earlier in the afternoon, now stripped of every dainty pink-and-white blossom. She floated over the gravel driveway, over the woods, just above the trees, over the pond. Then, very gently, the air dropped her to the northeast of the barn into a small grassy hollow surrounded by blackberry briars. She descended as gently as if she had a parachute. This is just the way, she thought, that Uncle Teddy floated down into a field in France in the war the grown-ups always talk about.She landed softly on the long, wet grass. No one shot a machine gun at her the way they shot Uncle Teddy. She landed, rather softly, on her bottom. Seconds later, her bedroom window, unbroken, landed upright beside her. She thought, It will fall over, but despite a slight wobble, it remained standing. She scurried on hands and knees like a crab, under an enormous rootball from a fallen maple. Has the wind just knocked the tree over or has it always been here?She found that the ground under the maple’s twisted roots was soft and warm, a comfortable light-brown dirt that her father called “duff.” She noticed that she had lost her black velvet cape and her ivory wimple, as well as her shoes and socks and the red-and-brown plaid skirt Kitt had told her that morning not to wear. Kitt had said scathingly, “It swears with that shirt.” Edith now wore only her white Lollipop underpants and her pink knit T-shirt. Through the tangled roots and bittersweet vines above her head she could see that all sorts of things were still flying by overhead; a chair, a wheelbarrow, a bird’s nest, lots of branches, some quilts and laundry from the neighbors’ clotheslines were tumbling and flapping in the sulphurous sky. Is that a lady on a bicycle flying by? Or . . . ?The roar of the storm was so very loud that she could hear no other sounds, and yet somehow it was also distant and hollow. She crouched over her bent knees and put her hands behind her head the way Mrs. McKay had showed them to duck and cover for the grade school’s weekly air raid drills. Then she looked through her bent elbow across her little shelter hollow and saw her Teddy and her two best bears sitting in the soft duff, looking expectantly at her, as if they were still waiting for her to complete their baptism. Kitty, her Madame Alexander doll was there too, but upside down with her skirts over her head. When she’d gotten Kitty for Christmas, the doll had a tag that said she was meant to be Jo March from Little Women,but Edith had renamed her after her mother because of her brown hair. She didn’t see her blue leather missal anywhere. Was there an A-bomb?Edith looked at the skin on her leg to see if the plaid pattern from her skirt had been etched onto it by the blast. Arthur had been reading her a book called Hiroshimaat bedtime, about the A-bomb, and he’d read her one story about some Japanese ladies. When the bomb dropped on them, it burned the pattern of their kimonos into their skin. She knew there was another war now, in a place called Korea, that the grown-ups talked about a lot, and that they worried if there would be more A-bombs, but she’d also heard them talk about something they called the Dust Bowl. There was a lot of dust in her hollow, so she softly hummed a Woody Guthrie song that Arthur sang to her sometimes.

I been doing some hard travelin’

I thought you knowed

I been doing some hard travelin’

Way down the road

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the roaring of the storm fell silent and the air was perfectly still.

***

Fifteen miles to the north, on the green wooded campus of Reese College, Mrs. Katerina P. M. Brynn sat in the tiny office she shared with Brian Cahill, who taught German. He wasn’t in today but she could still smell his revolting cigars. Kitt was not entitled to be called “Professor” because she was merely a lowly instructor. She was wishing, as she often did, that she weren’t so relentlessly irritable and critical of everything that everyone else said or did. Just a moment before, Beth Frost, the sweet, earnest departmental secretary, had come in and offered her a freshly baked loaf of her homemade bread. It smelled heavenly. Beth and her husband, Arnold, were followers of Scott and Helen Nearing, the pacifists and communists who lived on a farm in Vermont making maple syrup. Beth and Arnold did everything the difficult, time-consuming but natural way. They didn’t exploit anyone’s labor or extract any surplus value, so Arthur thought they were the salt of the earth. Beth and Arnold not only baked their own bread, they had probably milled the flour from their own wheat. Just like the Little Red Hen,Kitt thought, remembering the story she had read to Marcus last night. Kitt had reflexively hefted the heavy loaf that Beth offered her, tossed it back and forth between her hands. Acidly she’d commented, “Just the thing to fling at dangerous assailants!”

Irony and sarcasm were lost on Beth, whose blue eyes had filled with tears. Always a little red-rimmed, her eyes had grown redder still, her cheeks flushed. Kitt noted unkindly that Beth didn’t blush attractively pink but blotchily red. Beth had tucked a wisp of the blond hair she wore in a modest bun behind her ear, then without another word had beaten a hasty retreat to her typewriter in the adjoining room, leaving Kitt holding the leaden loaf.

Kitt rued that she was always saying unkind things like that, things that hurt people’s feelings for no particular reason. She’d done it all her life, or at least since she could remember, even (especially) to her own mother. She passionately believed in being kind to others and would have liked to be able to, but often she couldn’t. She didn’t seem to have the knack of it. If she saw a spray of lilacs through the window, she was more likely to remark on the streaks and smudges on the window glass than on the beauty of the flowers. That morning, she recalled, she had made a gratuitous comment about her little Edith’s last-day-of-school choice of outfit. It looked, she had told her daughter, like the get-up of a circus clown. The pink shirt, she’d added, “swore like a sailor” at the red-and-brown plaid skirt.

To distract herself from the uncomfortable memory of Edith’s pleasant little face shutting down, Kitt concentrated on the headache she felt coming on. She pressed her thumbs and forefingers against her temples. It had been ten weeks since her last menstrual period and she hadn’t told Arthur yet that she was late. The truth is, I seriously wonder if this is Arthur’s baby anyway.Their sex life had been all but nil since Marcus was born almost three years ago. Something about diapers and bottles and lack of sleep had drained all the fun out of it for her, at least with Arthur. Arthur had never been the most skillful of her lovers, though she still enjoyed his vigor and his unbridled enthusiasm. Most likely this baby’s father was her brother-in-law Edwin, with whom she’d been sneaking clandestine trysts since the previous February. That first time it happened, on Edith’s birthday, they had both been quite drunk, though that didn’t explain why they’d kept at it since.

Well, she thought, at least it’s the right gene pool. No one need ever know.Now she’d slept with all three of the handsome Brynn brothers—Dead Teddy, her husband Arthur, and Baby Edwin. Gladys would be appalled, she reflected. More accurately, my mother-in-law probably isappalled, since she’s a very keen observer. She probably won’t put this story into her Bradstreets of Whitby book, though. Edwin was much more imaginative as a lover than his brother, and anyway, the secrecy and the treachery made the sex terribly exciting.

Kitt scrolled a clean sheet of onionskin paper into the typewriter and opened up the folder with the Akhmatova poems she’d been working on. Translation was so difficult to do well. So far the results of her efforts either sounded like her own not-so-good poetry that had little to do with the Russian original, or else they said, mechanically, in English, what Akhmatova said beautifully, without strain, in Russian. She didn’t know which was worse. As to the amazing little tricks of sound and meaning that studded the Russian poems like cloves in a ham, those were nearly impossible to make anything of in English. She shrugged and typed:

There is in every mortal closeness

A cut-off limit you cannot cross.

The English sounded like a traffic manual. She tried again.

There is a sacred boundary . . .

No, sacred was wrong.

The poems had been given to her by Earl Pipher, who worked at the United States mission to the UN. Earl (a man whom Kitt thought she would like to seduce) was the New York delegate of the executive committee of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Congress was a group of artists and thinkers who believed in democracy and freedom for artists to express themselves. That was what Earl said at any rate. Arthur thought the Congress was an anti-Communist front. Earl had a friend in the Cultural Affairs branch of the Soviet United Nations delegation to whom the Russian poet had whispered her poems, in secret meetings at Moscow subway stations, line by line, while he memorized them. Later, stationed in New York, he had transcribed from memory the verses Kitt was now trying to translate. Harrowing stuff, that poetry. Kitt had quit the Party years before, almost as soon as she’d joined, indignant at the nonagression pact with Hitler, but this poetry would have made her do so now if she hadn’t already.

She pulled the sheet out of the typewriter, crumpled it, and tossed it on the floor, then scrolled in another. “My dear Nancy,” she wrote,

Oh how I wish you were here—no, far far better, that I were there sharing the pleasures of a Paris spring with you and sipping pernod in a warm café. Massachussets just now is still coldish and dampish, though new grass, croci, and daffodils offer faint hope of impending warmth. But really, as I seem to say each time I write, perhaps to discourage you from following in my (staggering) footsteps, no one in her right mind would ever marry or have children. The children are good-enough sorts, viewed from a distance I think. Edith is grave and wise beyond her years and has always been able to entertain herself since she played with her fingers and toes as a baby. She has quite an independent spirit and a manner I can only call “imperious.” She reads so much, I fear for her eyesight and her posture. And when she’s not tyrannizing or torturing him, she helps to keep Marcus cheerful and out of danger. Marcus is sturdy, lively (!! as in dervish!) and he is finally starting to talk comprehensibly. But oh my lord, the upkeep they require, and the attention they crave, are enough to drive one mad, which for “moi,”as you know, is not a long ways off at best. Why don’t I have a wife? Which brings me to the second part of my warning. I can distinctly recall finding Arthur terribly attractive, even before Big BrotherTeddy’s death thrust me suddenly into his arms. But now the unending whirl of laundry, cooking, bedtime-story reading, nose-and-bottom-wiping, etc. is scarcely aphrodisiac, as you can (or perhaps—I hope—you can’t) imagine. And although I think he’s more helpful than most men, and thinks heought to be ( he, not I, managed to plow through The Second Sex when the Parshley translation came out this year), there’s so much, being a man, he simply doesn’t notice, or else thinks is unimportant.

That’s enough complaining. I’ve become one of those women who talk about nothing but their domestic affairs, something I always loathed and despised. I love to think of you in your little garret on the Ile St. Louis, or meandering over medieval bridges and cobblestoned streets to your lectures. Maybe seeing Camus, De Beauvoir, or Sartre as you go. I’m so glad the Sorbonne no longer makes students sit on bales of hay for lectures as they did in Aquinas’s day. And speaking of Sartre, does it feel to you as if you’ve reached “the age of reason” yet? I feel as if I’ve skipped right over it to what the brother character (forgot his name) calls “the age of resignation.”

Our little college here is buzzing with intrigue this spring—the usual love affairs, drinking scandals, and much political fuss. Arthur will never give up his faith in the Revolution—no matter what terrible things he hears about Stalin, he thinks it’s all a CIA disinformation campaign. I think I may have seen his eyes water when his darling Uncle Joe died in March. Arthur remains a devoted member of his “cell,” is trying to organize a faculty union, and peppers his lectures to students with the (ever-changing) party line. Remember when we joined up at Smith? It seemed so exciting and romantic then, but the pact with the Nazis was enough to disenchant me. That wasn’t CIA disinformation! Though I have to admit when I fell in love with Arthur, I almost became a believer again. Lust is not good for thinking, is it? Or ethics. Ike’s anti-Red minions, the unsavory Dulles brothers, and the insane and very unsavory Senator from Wisconsin foster a dismaying atmosphere that may threaten our Massachusetts academic idyll. I honestly don’t know whether to hope for that or fear it. I really am a city person, for all my fondness for scenic views of the countryside. Of course, if we couldn’t go on here, we’d go to New York.

I’m sending you a poem I’m working on; tell me honestly what you think. Is it too melodramatic? How I’d love to have one of our grand typewriter races, speeding down the page in iambic couplets. Hope to hear from you soon,

Love

Kitt

The ravell’d sleeve again unstrung

And still we’ve not come home.

Love’s taste still lingers on the tongue,

The songs of homecoming unsung,

An ache deep in the bone.

The spirit gate is open wide

The hungry ghosts pour in.

They suck the heart’s receding tide,

They mutilate the unborn child

And scream in bitter pain.

A life’s not long enough to reach

The final row, the final stitch.

We are cast off before we’re done.

And leave the pattern just begun.

She knew that Shakespeare’s ravelled sleave was a skein and not part of a sweater, but she was a knitter and her poem reflected that.

Kitt’s longing for Paris was ingrained. She had been born there and had been brought to America at the age of eight speaking only French and Russian. She rapidly made herself an absolute master of a somewhat archaic form of English by reading all the novels and stories of Dickens, some of them repeatedly, before she was twelve. Lewis Carroll was another influence on her style of expressing herself; she learned much of his verse by heart and now would recite it to her children.

Kitt recalled how when she arrived at Smith College in western Massachussetts in 1938, she had lost her virginity at the earliest opportunity and begun what would be an extensive collection of paramours. Sex, she had decided, was better than ballet or music or poetry, and her appetites were both deep and broad. She’d met Teddy Brynn, a scholarship boy at Williams, the summer after her sophomore year when they were both tutoring the children of textile workers in nearby Pittsfield. Teddy was now only a memory, but her desires were still with her.

Pushing her chair away from her desk, Kit stood, put the cover over the Smith-Corona, and rolled her shoulders. At nearly five feet ten inches, she was almost exactly the same height as her husband, but thanks to early ballet training, she had better posture and looked taller. She knew that breastfeeding and lugging babies around had not been good for her posture, but she believed in the health benefits of breastfeeding, much as she disliked it. She retwisted her wispy brown hair severely into a knot at the nape of her neck, adding to her ballerinalike air, and smoothed her navy-blue skirt. It was one of three identical skirts that she rotated throughout the term. Today it was paired with other perennial garments—a saggy blue cardigan over a man’s tailored shirt. When she remembered, she put on a bit of lipstick, though she always seemed to put it on crooked and get some on her teeth. But by this time of day—midafternoon—the lipstick was long gone. She wore round tortoiseshell glasses that magnified her already large and very myopic blue eyes. Overall, since her head was rather small for her height, she worried that she had a vaguely newt-like appearance. She had never worn high heels—she was too tall and besides they were stupid devices to make women into sexual playthings—and this June afternoon she was sporting a favorite pair of deerskin moccasins with thongs that laced up her lower leg, footwear that she had acquired on her prenuptial trip to Mexico with Arthur eight years before. She paused to remember that thrilling and awful year when, after Arthur drove up to Smith to tell her that Teddy had been shot down in Occupied France, they had fallen into each others’ arms and one thing had rapidly led to another. Their month in Acapulco and San Cristóbal was magical, she recalled, and the moccasins always made her think longingly of tequila and of the powerful corn liquor the Indians drank and poured over the saints in their church. Under the thongs, her legs were bare, pale, and stippled with razor bumps, for she assiduously shaved her legs (though not her armpits).

It was half past two when Kitt put on her duffel coat and left her office. She got in the blue 1938 Buick—she and Arthur had had it since before they got married—and drove the fifteen miles south on Route 169 to Buck Hill Road. She parked the ancient sedan on the side of the road a little past their driveway, and then she waited and watched in the rearview mirror until she saw Edith get off the school bus and start to walk up toward the house. She waited a few minutes longer, then quietly got out of the car and followed her, keeping out of sight.

She and Arthur had decided, last night in bed, that Edith deserved a chance at being more independent, as a reward for doing so well in first grade. Kitt could think of nothing more rewarding than more independence from one’s elders. Her own mother had always been and still was smotheringly helpful. So they had told Edith that morning that she didn’t have to to stay with Arthur’s parents after school, as she had done all year, but could come home alone and entertain and take care of herself until Arthur and Kitt came home with Marcus around five thirty. Edith was a remarkably responsible, well-behaved girl on the whole, Kitt reflected, no trouble at all to speak of. The child’s only complaint about school was that she got bored because she was so far ahead of the other children. Really, sometimes Kitt thought Edith was much more of a grown-up than her mother was. Edith seldom had temper tantrums, though her mother knew that her feelings got hurt easily. This morning her face had crumpled at her mother’s “circus clown” remarks about her outfit.

Kitt knew she had been lucky with Edith. Her daughter had a lot of common sense for a seven-year-old and didn’t risk life and limb doing foolish stunts. She was helpful with her little brother and liked to play with him and read to him. Sometimes Kitt felt irritated by how good Edith was and how, when Kitt lost her temper and shouted and threw things at her, she just sat silently, big-eyed, waiting for it to be over.

So Kitt wasn’t really worried about Edith’s being home alone, but still, there she was, home early, surreptitiously watching Edith getting off the bus. Clearly, everything was fine. She was already feeling annoyed with herself for being overprotective—just exactly like my mother—and irritated about having to drive the fifteen miles back to campus to pick up Arthur at five. Once Edith was inside, Kitt got out of the car and walked quickly to the open grassy space around the house, then skirted its edge to the back and darted silently up to the small window on the north side of the new kitchen her in-laws had added in the thirties. The “old kitchen” in the farmhouse was the adjoining long narrow room, with a wide stone hearth and fireplace, and hand-split floorboards. These days the old kitchen was a sort of crossroads for all the house’s rooms. It connected the new kitchen with Kitt’s study, with the parlor where the children’s books and the phonograph were, the stairs to the upper two floors, and the door they most often used to come and go, at the south end of the house.

Kitt pushed aside the pale-pink Cecile Brunner climbing rose and peered through the glass, standing between the house and the old apple tree Edith liked to climb. Its trunk was all but horizontal owing to God knows what early stress. Looking in, she could see Edith standing at the open door of the icebox, musing. She had already kicked off her sensible dark-blue school shoes. After a rather long time, she pulled out a bottle of milk and a jar of Welch’s grape jelly. She got a loaf of Wonder Bread and the peanut butter from the pantry. Thus equipped, she made herself a sandwich and poured herself a glass of milk. She put her sandwich on a plate and sat at the Formica kitchen table to eat it. As she ate, she made faces at herself in the shiny metal toaster.

Once she’d finished off the sandwich, Edith unbraided her tight pigtails and fluffed her wiry red hair. She always complained that braids make her head hurt, and she regularly resisted Kitt’s rough morning plaiting, meant to prevent her hair from “looking like a rat’s nest.” But she would submit when Kitt threatened to cut her hair off short.

Kitt could just make out what Edith was telling her toaster reflection in her high musical voice.

“Baba says I’m pretty. Auntie Grace also said so, but Betsy says she always says that to all the little girls.” Edith stuck out her tongue and tried in vain to touch its tip to her small nose. Then she bared her teeth like a lion. Finally, she made a sad face, the sides of her mouth drooping, then used her thumb and fourth fingers to push them upward into a patently false smile.

“Cheer up, love,” she said in what she wanted to be a Cockney accent.

A more aristocratic accent answered, “Cheer up cheer up cheer up! Have you nothing better to suggest?”

This making faces in the toaster and talking to herself was an odd habit of Edith’s that annoyed her mother. Kitt would tell her, when she caught her doing it, that her face would freeze if she didn’t desist. Kitt had carefully schooled her own face to maintain the expression of supercilious condescension she learned to assume in ballet school. Her inner emotions were visible only in the degree to which she clenched her jaw.

She watched as Edith took a last look at her reflection, patted her plump cheeks, and carried the dish and glass to the sink. She washed them and put them in the drainer. Then she walked out of the new kitchen into the narrow steep stairwell and vanished from Kitt’s sight, presumably to her attic bedroom in the gable of the steep roof.

Kitt felt a bit silly and more annoyed now, thinking there really was no need to watch a child who washed up her dishes without being told, and thinking that she could have had another hour to work on her translations.

Realizing that she was directly beneath Edith’s bedroom window and would be seen if her daughter looked down, Kitt pressed her body against the splintery clapboards. Clearly there was no point in going inside and sneaking up the very creaky old stairs after her daughter and then trying to make up some excuse when Edith heard her. She skirted the old flowerbeds full of tiger lilies, purple irises, Canterbury bells, and hollyhocks the color of oxblood, flowerbeds planted by her mother-in-law and her mother-in-law’s ancestors and now quite weedy. Kitt cared nothing about gardening and knew less. She went around to the the so-called front of the house, the west side, above the road. They never used this door, since everyone came and went through the door into the old kitchen on the south side of the house where the driveway was. A thick band of ancient beeches and maples shielded the front door from Buck Hill Road below. She sat on the wide granite step under the oak lintel, its white paint peeling in long strips, and thought about what to do next. She leaned back against the door and soon was deep in thought about Anna Akhmatova and one of the translations she was working on, the one about Stalin. It was a searing poem, inspired, if that’s the right word, by waiting in a queue with the families of other prisoners, outside the Moscow prison where her only son was held each time he was arrested, before being sent to Siberia. As she was picturing that line at the Lubyanka, Kitt dimly sensed that a peculiar silence had fallen. There was an odd sharp and sour scent, somewhat like ammonia, in the air, and then all at once her whole being, mind and body, was filled with a deep, deafening, unceasing roar. An absolutely weird light, like a bruise—deep purple, green and yellow at the horizon—made everything glow like a Maxfield Parrish painting. She could both hear and see a fierce southerly wind as it stripped the tender new leaves off the trees. It made a popping sound—like machine-gun fire, she thought, though she had never heard a machine gun. Her mind jumped to poor Teddy: Is this what he heard?. Was he floating down into the potato field as the Nazi soldiers fired up at him? Or was he shot on the ground? He always used to let me have his dessert. She realized suddenly then that the deafening wind couldn’t reach her on that side of the house.

Then above her head she heard a high-pitched wail. Edith. She tried to open the front door, but it was latched from the inside. She ran to the southeast corner, and as she came around it, the wind knocked her flat on the spring-soaked grass. Returning to the front door, she rammed it hard with her shoulder, knowing the old iron latch was rusty. It gave way and she flew through the parlor into the old kitchen.

“Edith, Edith, come down, we can hide in the fireplace!” she shouted as she raced up the two flights of stairs, two steps at a time, and into Edith’s room. The garret was empty and all topsy-turvy, the clothes, toys, bedcoverings, and furniture in a crazy jumble. The window frame was gone, leaving a rectangular hole in the wall. Kitt spun around and flew back downstairs, her mind only now beginning to piece together what could possibly be happening, could possibly have happened to her daughter. Oddly, though she was a staunch atheist, she thought first of the Rapture, the end-time fondly anticipated by the Old Believers her parents had taken her to visit in Canada once when she was about ten. Surely, if it were the Rapture, it made perfect sense that well-behaved Edith would be taken up by God, and she, prodigal Kitt, would be left behind to wallow in her sins. Next, or almost simultaneously, as if her mind were showing two movies on adjacent movie screens, she thought of Nuclear Armageddon. The Russians had the bomb, the Chinese threatened to use it in Korea, and no one knew for sure if they really had it or were bluffing. Ike after all was a general who had authorized atomic tests in the desert, and Edith had to do drills at school and hide under her desk, of all the stupid things. If their appeal was denied, the Rosenbergs were to be electrocuted the following week, and that could make the Red world angry. But the bruised purple and yellow sky—no blinding light of atomic fission—brought her mind finally, in a matter of infinitely slow milliseconds, to tornado. The radio had predicted thunderstorms for that afternoon, though it had been so mild earlier that she had put the forecast out of her mind.

Should she continue to huddle fearfully in the big fireplace, or should she go outside to look for Edith? A quick glance out the window told her that she wouldn’t get far with the second option. Which would be more unbearable, she asked herself, getting killed or badly injured by flying debris as she tried to find and save her daughter, or living with the horrible shame and guilt of being safe in shelter while Edith endured . . . well, God only knew what? It took only a moment to reach the conclusion that the second option was by far the more intolerable one. Teeth chattering, legs trembling, she forced herself to stand, and leaning on the shabby wooden ladderback chairs for support, she pulled herself along the walls and made her way into the new kitchen and to the sliding glass door on the north side of the room, which, for incomprehensible reasons, had not shattered. And then a new silence fell like the blade of a guillotine, suddenly and absolutely. The wind, the storm had passed. Kitt opened the sliding door and ran out, shouting, “Edith, Edith, where are you, it’s me!” Calling, stumbling, twisting an ankle, she crossed the meadow and scoured the hundred-square-yard stretch of beechwoods north of the house, and finally found her firstborn huddled silently in a hollow under an uprooted maple tree, wide-eyed, half-naked, staring at her dolls. An old mullioned window with its six tiny panes of glass intact stood on its rim only a few feet away.

***

Edith sat on the table in the Fensterheims’ kitchen stripped to her Lollipop underpants again. When she and Kitt picked him up at the college, Arthur had yelled at Kitt.

“What kind of a mother do you think you are, anyway? You didn’t take her to the doctor?”

Kitt had slid across the Buick’s front seat as Arthur took the wheel.

“She’s perfectly fine, Arthur. Don’t be melodramatic.”

“I suppose you’re a doctor, you can tell if she has a concussion or something else inside that doesn’t show? Jesus!” Arthur had stomped his foot on the gas and the tires had squealed as they left the campus heading south. Edith didn’t know why he said “Jesus” or “God damn” when he didn’t like how things were going, since he’d often told her that Jesus and God are frauds made up to distract poor people from how rich people rob and cheat them. She’d expected him to take her to the hospital right there in Durham, but instead he had driven all the way to Whitby. After dropping Kitt off at Granny’s to get Marcus—“And try not to let him get run over!”—he had driven half a mile up the road to bring Edith to the Fensterheims.

It was after six, so Dr. Lenny was home from his square brick doctor’s office near the Whitby Green. So was his wife, June, who was also his nurse, as well as their two children, Adam and Ruthie. Edith squirmed uncomfortably inside because she was on the table in front of everybody, wearing nothing but underpants, but nine-year-old Adam acted like he didn’t even notice she was there as he worked on a jigsaw puzzle across the table. Ruthie, who was her first-grade classmate, stood feet wide apart and arms crossed over her stupid frilly taffeta dress, watching. At least school was out for the summer so Ruthie wouldn’t be able to tell everybody in their class until fall.

Dr. Lenny pressed the cold metal disk of his stethoscope under Edith’s shoulder blades and told her to take some deep breaths. Then over his shoulder he told June, “Turn on the radio for me, will you? Don’t want to miss the news. Hear if Ike’s granted the Rosenbergs a reprieve,” while, with his large hairy fingers, he poked along each rib and down her spine.

“The power’s still out, hon.” June opened the fridge. “Tornado, remember?” She grabbed two cans of beer.

As Dr. Lenny shone his tiny doctor flashlight into her eyes, Arthur pronounced,

“Forget about it, Lenny. Ethel and Julie are as good as dead already. Since they’re innocent of everything except being Communists, they have nothing to trade for their lives except betraying the comrades. She look okay to you?’ He ruffled Edith’s hair. “Now you can tell all your pals you know how to fly! Won’t they be jealous, huh?” He felt proud that his little girl was so tough even a tornado couldn’t hurt her, although she was only a girl and a good two inches shorter than sturdy Ruthie. “That’s my pipsqueak,” he said, accepting a can of beer from June. He gave Edith a playful punch on the arm.

***

For a few days, life on Buck Hill Road centered on the big tornado and its aftermath. Arthur retrieved and reinstalled the old window that had blown out of the garret behind Edith. Although her heart was beating fast with the expectation of another tornado, she was holding the extra screws while he screwed the hinges back into the window frame. As he looked around at the tiny attic, almost completely filled by the old wooden bed, and at Edith’s toys, clothes, and blankets still strewn all around, he declared that Edith should move downstairs.

“It’s no good you being upstairs away from everybody. There’s only one way out of here if there’s a fire or something. You should be sleeping on the same floor as the rest of us.”

That very weekend, he and Pop built her what they called a “studio bed” out of knotty pine. She helped them carry the boards up the narrow stairs to her new room on the second floor, a room that had been Arthur’s study. He said he didn’t really need a study since he had a nice office at the college, and he could put some of his books in Kitt’s study. They sawed and hammered while listening to the radio. It was Saturday; the day before, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison.

Arthur took the nails out of his mouth to tell Pop, “They had to kill them before sunset on Friday because that’s when the Jewish Sabbath starts.”

“But I thought they were Communists, so how can they be Jewish? Communists don’t have religion, right?” Edith asked, but nobody answered her.

Arthur put down his hammer and picked up the paper. He read aloud, over the radio, which was playing “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window”instead of the news.

Executioner Joseph Francel sent the electrical charges through their bodies. Julius, the weaker, went first. He died with a grotesque smile on his lips. A wisp of smoke curled toward the ceiling as the current charged through Mrs. Rosenberg. It took three shocks of 2,000 volts each to electrocute Mr. Rosenberg. Four jolts swept through Mrs. Rosenberg and still she was not dead. A fifth was ordered.

“It’s a damned shame to kill a woman like that,” Pop muttered. “These are bad times we’re living in.”

“Where do their little boys live now? Do they know that their mother and father were electrocuted?” Edith asked. She tried to imagine what being electrocuted would feel like. Was it like being burnt? She’d burnt her hand once picking up a pot on the stove.

Arthur too was picturing the electric chair in his mind and trying to imagine what the Red martyrs had felt. He thought about the way his whole body vibrated when he used his chainsaw. What if that feeling were multiplied by a hundred or a thousand? Pop started to whistle softly along to Patti Page, fitting the corners of the new bed together carefully.

“I would’ve gone down to DC to picket the White House yesterday, but my Contemporary Issues class had its final exam,” said Arthur. He noticed that Edith was looking dubious as her new bed took shape.

“It’ll be just like the beds the girls have in the college dorms,” he assured her. “They call it a studio bed.” Edith liked her old bed upstairs very much. It was painted a creamy ivory color, like vanilla ice cream, and the headboard had wicker panels on each side and a wreath of wooden ivory roses with ivory leaves in the middle. And her magic box was under it. But she didn’t say anything. Her garret was scary now and she wanted to move downstairs.

She went outside and wandered out to the hollow by the uprooted maple where she had landed. She walked very slowly in ever wider circles, dragging her feet through the duff and looking at the ground. She really would be happy if she could find her missal again. But it was nowhere to be seen. Of course she didn’t really believe in God, but possibly he did not like little girls to steal his books.

The missal was lost, but at bedtime, when she looked under her new studio bed, fragrant of knotty pine, she was happy though not surprised to find her magic box had moved itself downstairs. As she pulled it out, it slid as easily along the floor as a little sled, its light-colored wood sweet-smelling and smooth to the touch. Its sides were about as high as the length from her wrist to her elbow. Edith lay down on her stomach, propped her head with her hands, and peered into the box. She watched a tiny tornado whirl across a tiny prairie and sweep a herd of grazing buffalo into the air, along with a redhaired cowgirl. Then she pushed the box back under the bed and got into her pajamas.