Читать книгу The Age of Reason - Marian Birch - Страница 2

If Edith woke up before her parents on Sunday mornings, she was allowed to go to Mass with her friend Daniel’s family, the DeMelos, who lived on the other side of Buck Hill Road. On a chilly May morning the month before the tornado, previous, Edith dressed in her flannel-lined jeans, her red sneakers, and a green hand-knit cardigan that Kitt had made for her. She crept down two flights of uneven stairs from her bedroom in the attic. Opening and closing the creaking south door carefully behind her, she trotted downhill on the gravel drive and crossed Buck Hill Road to the DeMelos’ ranch house.

It puzzled her a little that Kitt and Arthur let her go to Mass. They didn’t like churches. When Arthur read her the story of Spartacus last winter, where all the slaves who rebelled against their masters were crucified, she asked him if Jesus was also a revolutionary like Spartacus.

“Well, maybe he meant to be,” he answered gruffly, “but the Church today is an ally of Capital. It collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis too.”

As far as she knew, Arthur and Kitt had never set foot in a church, except possibly to go to a wedding. Their own wedding, they told her, was performed by the justice of the peace in Worcester. Arthur wore a red bandana around his neck, and Kitt wore a red dress.

Edith didn’t care much for Jesus herself. She couldn’t bear to look at him hanging bloodily from the nails in his hands and feet, and would get stabbing feelings in her own extremities when she had to see him. Usually she was able to find something nicer to look at in church, like winged angels. Sweet-faced Mary with the baby reminded her of Daniel’s pretty, gentle mother, Mrs. DeMelo, who liked Edith to call her Aunty Grace. Also, Edith loved to see the colored glass in the church’s arched windows, refracting the morning sunlight in small rainbows around the nave where the people sat. It felt like being in fairyland. Her heart swelled with the beautiful organ music old Mr. Szymanski played while the priest walked down the aisle. Father Bernard was as beautiful as a bride in his magnificent brocade dress, and she breathed in the spicy incense from the smoking golden censer.

Edith knew that on the Sundays when she went to church, Kitt gave her little brother Marcus, a spoonful of his terpinhydrate and codeine cough syrup, so he wouldn’t wake up. Then she’d go back to sleep in the big bed she shared with Arthur. Edith used her parents’ first names when she remembered to, since she believed that Mommyand Daddywere “bourgeois affectations”—a bad thing, in other words. Edith felt a little bit bad that, if she’d stayed home to play with him, Marcus could get up and wouldn’t have to take medicine when he didn’t even have a cough. She would miss the Sunday breakfast too. When Kitt and Arthur finally got up, they would relax in their bathrobes and drink Bloody Marys while Arthur made them something nice to eat—blueberry pancakes in the summer, jelly omelets or scrambled eggs with bacon and fried potatoes in any season. They didn’t believe in God, and they told Edith when the subject came up that religion was the opiate of the people. They would never have imagined that she could be stupid enough to take it seriously.

Daniel silently opened the door to Edith’s knock, still looking sleep-tousled in pajamas with rocketships on them. Daniel DeMelo had been her best friend since the DeMelos moved in across the road two years ago. Daniel was a boy, although a very short boy. Like Edith he was always at the front of the line when they lined up in size places at school. Like Edith, he loved to make up stories and play outside in the woods and fields at being pioneers or Indians or soldiers or Robin Hood or elves and fairies. They were both very good readers and loved to read, especially books that came in series. They were currently racing each other through the Little House books. They took the books out of the Whitby Town Library at the Commons where Kitt took them on Saturdays. They had just finished Farmer Boy.

This morning, though, Edith’s business was with the girls. Without a word, Edith pushed past Daniel and headed through the DeMelos’ messy kitchen straight to the girls’ bedroom, where she happily doffed her jeans and sweater and let Mary and Betsy, Daniel’s big sisters, dress her up for church and try to subdue the wild cloud of red hair that drove her mother to despair and threats. Betsy applied water and Alberto VO5, with excellent results.

“You really need to have it styled,” Betsy said ruefully. “Mommy could do it for you if your parents would give permission.”

They all knew Edith’s parents wouldn’t give permission. To smart people, fancy hairstyles were almost as stupid as church. Mary was taking her golden hair out of the rag curlers and combing it artfully into shining ringlets, like Shirley Temple’s but a less babyish style. Though unstyled, Edith’s red hair now gleamed in the light like Tonto’s hair on the Lone RangerTV show. It was shiny and lay smooth. She lacked Tonto’s nice beaded headband, but Betsy lent her rhinestone barrettes to hold her hair out of her face. It was only thanks to the DeMelos and their television set that Edith was familiar with the Lone Ranger and Tonto, as well as with Winky Dink, Shirley Temple, Roy Rogers, and Howdy Doody, not to mention the soap operas Search for Tomorrowand As the World Turns. Aunty Grace let the children watch TV after school as much as they wanted. She often joined them, curling her stockinged feet under her on the big sectional couch and sipping something amber from a big white mug. Edith’s parents didn’t approve of television. They would say things like “Only an imbecile would watch such nonsense.” Edith didn’t think Mrs. DeMelo was an imbecile. She was nice and she never yelled.

The big girls dressed her for church in Betsy’s last year’s Sunday best: a turquoise-and-orange plaid taffeta dress with knife-edge pleats and a little bolero jacket.

“I don’t think the orange looks too good with your red hair, but there’s lots of turquoise,” commented Betsy. Her hair, like Mary’s, was golden. “Lots of criminals have red hair, did you know that?” she asked. Betsy, who was nine,was a treasure house of astonishing information that she was eager to share. The two blond sisters tucked Edith’s freshly subdued locks under a round straw hat with a white grosgrain ribbon and slipped her feet into a pair of socks with lace edging and shiny patent leather Mary Janes. The shoes were a little too big.

“I’ll stuff Kleenex in the toes,” Mary said, pulling out a wad of tissues from the box on the dresser. Edith remembered, with a small inward cringe, the time she and Mary and Betsy stuffed Kleenex under their blouses to make boobies. All three girls wore stiff lace-trimmed crinolines under their skirts,which stuck out like ballerina tutus, so wide that they brushed the doorframe as they exited.

All the little boys—Daniel, James, and even tiny Baby Peter, wore navy-blue bow ties with white polka dots that matched the tie that Mr. DeMelo wore. These were the kind of bow ties that were sewn onto an elastic neckband so you didn’t need to bother with tying or untying. Beautiful Aunty Grace had Mr. DeMelo zip up her pale-blue crepe dress while she perched a tiny pink hat, festooned with a single fake rose, precariously atop her heavy golden chignon. A wayward lock was already slipping loose from the tortoiseshell hairpins to dangle down her long white neck. As she held Baby Peter in her left arm, she applied lipstick with her right. When she was ready, she gently herded the rest of the children out the door and into the nine-seater Chevrolet Bel Air station wagon. She reminded her brood: “Don’t fight on Sunday, sweethearts, you all know where you’re supposed to sit.” As the humans arranged themselves in the car, two ravens flew overhead; their resonant musical clonk echoed in the pale sky. Three-year-old James croaked back at them from the front seat, where he sat between Mr. DeMelo, at the wheel, and Mary, who, at ten, was the eldest DeMelo offspring. Aunty Grace held Baby Peter and sat with eight-year-old Betsy in the middle seat. Daniel and Edith were in the way back.

As the station wagon backed carefully out onto Buck Hill Road, Daniel inserted a forefinger deep in his nose, extracted a sizable pale-green booger, and silently, delicately placed it on Betsy’s straw hat. Edith, feeling a gag and a giggle coming at the same time, made a noise somewhere between a snort and a cough.

“Cover your mouth, dear,” said Aunty Grace, without turning around. And Edith did, using her right hand, while with her left she tilted her genuine Italian Leghorn hat over her eye so she couldn’t see the offending snot. The hat was one of several in graduated sizes that Aunty Grace had brought back from the pilgrimage she took to Rome with her rosary group last fall.

***

After a ten-minute drive, the little troupe disembarked at the Church of the Holy Innocents. Holy Innocents, an old, mossy stone church, stood on Route 169, perhaps a quarter mile from the crossroads at the center of town where the snowy-white Congregational Church presided over Whitby Green. Edith’s Granny Gladys, who grew up in Whitby, said they built Holy Innocents when she was a little girl, when the first Catholics—Poles and Italians and Portuguese—started moving to Whitby. “Before that there wasn’t a soul in Whitby whose name ended in a vowel,” she’d told Edith, adding to clarify, “like DeMel-O.” And Granny ought to know, as her ancestors had founded the town three hundred years ago.

In the church’s drafty entry hall, Edith watched carefully as Aunty Grace, Mary, and Betsy dipped their fingers in the stone basin of holy water by the door and then curtsied and crossed themselves at the end of the pew before sitting. She did her best imitation of their movements, though she was sure that everyone could tell she wasn’t doing it properly. If she leaned against the back of the pew, her legs stuck straight out, so she perched close to the front edge, bent her knees and daintily crossed her ankles. Her patent-leather-clad feet dangled well above the floor. They were even above the kneeler on which Mary and Betsy were now kneeling with their hands clasped and their heads piously bowed. She subdued her crinoline with difficulty so that her dress lay flat across her knees and her underpants didn’t show. She was seated between Aunty Grace and Daniel, which was perfect for the daring plan she had in mind. Aunty Grace was preoccupied with minding the little boys and also with whatever it was that kept her always a little dreamy, so Edith was pretty sure that she wouldn’t notice anything. As for Daniel, he owed her a favor for overlooking the booger in the car. Besides, even if he did see what she was doing, he had a mischievous heart and would admire her daring. Edith leafed through the missal she had taken from the rack on the back of the pew in front of her, looking for the part the priest would preach from today. The little book was covered in soft blue dimpled fake leather and the pages were as thin as onion skins. On the right side the words were black and strange—Latin, she’d been told. It was what Jesus spoke, and the priest here spoke it too. On the left-hand page, the words, a pale red, were English, though sometimes a rather strange English.

The priest, Father Bernard, was a tiny man, who almost disappeared behind the altar. Edith wondered if his feet touched the ground when he sat in his enormous carved chair. He was French Canadian and had a splendid accent. Edith listened to him carefully so that she could copy it when she pretended to be French. He read:

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding our of the throne of God and of the lamb. In the midst of the street of it and oneither side of the river was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits and yielded her fruit of every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations…

Edith had no trouble picturing the crystal river going down the middle of the street, or the king and the lamb sitting together cozily on the throne, but when she tried to picture the twelve kinds of fruit—cherries, apples, peaches, oranges, pears, bananas, blueberries, strawberries—she lost count. Father Bernard went on to tell them a story of some unborn twins who were still inside their mother’s tummy. Edith knew that uteruswas the proper word for where unborn babies are.

“At first they had plenty of room in the womb to play and sleep and do whatever it is unborn babies like to do, but then they kept growing and growing until it became terribly crowded, stuffy, and uncomfortable in there,” the priest explained. One twin (Father Bernard specified that it was the boy, of course) was ready to move on.

“Then the little boy said, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here! There’s no room to move! This is no place for us anymore!’ but his twin sister refused. She was very afraid. ‘But we’ve always been here!’ she wailed. ‘No, no, no, I’m too afraid to go! I don’t believe . . . I don’t believe in life after birth!’” The little priest whimpered pathetically, sounding just like Marcus when he didn’t want to go to bed.

As the congregation tittered appreciatively, Edith swiftly slipped the missal in one smooth, unaccented motion under her jacket. She could feel her heart pound and her stomach flip over, but she knew she still looked perfectly calm from the outside. A few breaths later, she picked up the missal that was in front of Aunty Grace, who was rummaging around in her voluminous purse for Peter’s pacifier. Edith opened it right to the correct page and resumed reading. Since she didn’t look at him, she had no idea if Daniel saw her do this or not. The small purloined book fit snugly against her chest under her jacket.

She didn’t have to walk up to the altar, because she wasn’t expected—wasn’t even allowed—to take Communion. Not only hadn’t she had her First Communion, she hadn’t even been baptized, although her Granny Gladys was dismayed by this. Granny wasn’t much of a churchgoer, but she believed strongly in doing the proper thing. Her own children had all been properly baptized and christened in the Congregational Church, even if they hadn’t spent much time there since. Granny usually took Edith to the Christmas carol service there, but that was all. Edith was not permitted to go to the Catholic catechism class at Ascension College that Catholic kids went to on Thursday afternoons on a special bus. So for her there would be no confirmation, no beautiful white dress, and therefore no taking Communion now or ever. Daniel had just had his First Communion last month at Easter, so he filed past Edith out of the pew behind his mother and sisters to go up to the altar and have the priest put the cracker on his tongue and give him a sip of grape juice. The only walking Edith would have to do with the missal tucked up against her rib cage was on the way out of church after Mass. As the congregants exited the church, Father Bernard did not shake hands with children as he did with the adults. He tousled the boys’ hair and gave the girls a little pat on the shoulder. He couldn’t tousle the girls’ hair because they all wore hats. So Edith could keep her arms folded across her chest to prevent the book from falling down out of her dress to the ground. She interlaced her fingers under the small bulge and assumed what she hoped was a pious expression as they exited.

Edith worried how she would manage when they stopped on the way home at Nipmuck Variety on the Green. Mr. DeMelo gave each child, including Edith, a dime to buy candy. But luckily for her, the DeMelo kids had eyes only for the candy counter, and Mr. and Mrs. DeMelo were busy distributing dimes and supervising. No one was really paying her any mind. She was able to keep one bent forearm supporting her trophy, while with her other hand she picked out two Mary Janes, her favorite amber-colored hard-molasses candy with a soft peanut butter center. They came in a yellow wrapper with a red band, and her mother told her that they would rot her teeth if they didn’t break them first. She laid them down on the counter with her dime.

On the drive home, Daniel tricked James into trading his red all-day sucker for a crummy piece of penny candy. James was only three, not able to calculate relative candy values with accuracy. Daniel always told him that the nonpareil or licorice drop was extra good and the kind of thing that big boys like, and that everyone knows that suckers are only for babies. You would think from one week to the next James would learn that he is being duped, Edith reflected. Of course, maybe he liked the penny candy because it came from Daniel, and he thought Daniel was practically God.

“Darling, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have Arthur be Peter’s godfather?’ asked Aunty Grace. Edith’s ears perked up at the mention of her father in this unusual context.

After a pause, Mr. DeMelo asked gruffly,”Are you completely out of your mind? He’s an atheist, and he’s not even a Catholic atheist.” Aunty Grace adjusted her pink hat.

“I know, dear, but he’s such a darling. He’s a wonderful father and he’d protect Peter no matter what, don’t you agree?”

“Where in heaven’s name do you get ideas like that?” Mr. DeMelo took the left turn onto Buck Hill Road so fast that Edith and Daniel slid to the right end of their seat.

“My mother always told me that God only cares if your heart is good. You know Arthur’s heart is good, don’t you?” Edith had noticed that Aunty Grace always laughed the hardest at Arthur’s jokes and listened raptly when he held forth about how mean and selfish bosses and bankers were.

Mr. DeMelo said, in an exasperated tone, “God’s one thing, Grace. I’m sure even you may be aware that Father Bernard is something altogether different. He’s not an idiot. It’s a small town we live in, and Arthur is always shooting his mouth off whenever he gets a chance. If there’s anyone in the county who doesn’t know he’s a Red, they must be deaf or an imbecile. I know he’s a great guy, but I hope you haven’t said anything to him, because it isn’t going to happen.”

“Hush, dear, don’t forget who’s in the back. Little pitchers have big ears, you know. Oh, I think he liked being asked, but I don’t think he’ll mind if I explain that we can’t do it. I’m sorry I’m such an moron, dear.” Grace went back to smoothing Peter’s scanty hair.

Betsy tried to trick Daniel and Edith into a “sucker race” to see who could finish theirs first, but they were smarter than James and remembered that when she’d done this before, she hadn’t sucked hers at all and when they’d waved their bare, limp, and soggy little white sucker sticks, she’d pulled a huge, glowing red, cherry-flavor Tootsie Roll pop, almost untouched, out of her mouth and gloated mercilessly.

***

It was a quiet morning in the farmhouse at the top of the hill. After a lazy alcoholic breakfast, Kitt watched with relief as Arthur put Marcus on his shoulders and wandered off into the barely budding woodland for a walk. Kitt retired to her study to work on a poem—one of her own, not the Russian translations that Earl Pipher in New York had invited her to do (she remembered their moonlight walk in the park with a small frisson), nor the awful, lead-footed effusions of her Creative Writing students. But these Russian poems—the way Mrs. Akhmatova managed to invoke a dark God of some sort, in the nightmare and horror and privation of her bleak Soviet world—were the inspiration for this poem she wanted to write for Edith. She had taken on the translation project almost absentmindedly, as a way of keeping a connection to a man she found attractive, but now she was deeply engaged. Some of the Russian poems were about the poet’s son, locked up in a prison called Lubyanka. Other poems were about the hopelessness of love, the impossibility of one person’s understanding another. Kitt hadn’t said much about these poems to Arthur, who, she knew, would find them decadent. She knew Akhmatova hadn’t been published in Russia for years and, supported herself with translation work. I'm sure she's a far better translator than I am, Kitt thought. Like the Party to which he was devoted, Kitt’s husband was partial to anthems and epics. He still believed in Communism and thought the awful stories about Stalin were lies. He didn’t know a great deal about poetry, so she’d let him assume that Akhmatova was a loyal Soviet writer.

As she filled her fountain pen with the violet ink she used to compose poetry (she used black ink for correcting papers, blue ink for letters), Kitt thought about her little Edith’s infatuation with everything Catholic. She wasn’t worried about it: Edith was much too intelligent to really believe all that nonsense. Kitt could see that church was like a version of Wonderland or Neverland for Edith. She’d probably grow out of it soon if she and Arthur didn’t make too much of a fuss. But just to gently push her in the right direction, Kitt was writing a poem for her daughter to help her with the outgrowing. It’s a child’s poem, she thought. Almost doggerel, but Edith’s too young for something without rhymes.

Kitt called to Edith from her study when she heard her open the door.

“Come here for a minute, dearest. I wrote you a poem while you were at church,” she said. She handed Edith a sheet of yellow-lined paper covered in her beautiful violet calligraphy. She’d written,

Let’s pretend there is a god

Let’s act as if he cared

For in this wild and cruel world

We’re either fools or scared.

So let’s all play god’s holy fools

Whose faith keeps them from harm,

Whose prayers are like a lullaby,

A light when nights are long.

She watched Edith quickly read her poem with a studious expression. I suppose she has rehearsed that look when she looks at her reflection in the toaster, Kitt thought. She knew Edith didn’t much care for poems, except for the funny ones in Winnie the Poohor Alice in Wonderland. The poem she liked best was “The Hunting of the Snark,” which Kitt could recite by heart when the mood struck her. Edith gave her mother an appreciative nod and ran upstairs to her bedroom in the attic.

After tucking Kitt’s poem into the flyleaf, she hid the stolen missal back between her mattress and the thick canvas straps that held it up. Now when she secretly said prayers at bedtime, she’d be able to sneak a look at it and get the words right.

She slid her magic box out from beneath her bed. No one knew about the box, not even Daniel. She’d never told anyone about the little worlds—castles, houses, streets, trees, brooks, ponies, cows, and people—that dwelt inside.

Today a circus was coming to town. A great line of brightly painted tiny wagons with throngs of gaily dressed acrobats, jugglers, and clowns paraded down the wide avenue that ran the length of the box, into and then out of the village center. Edith had never been to a real circus. One of the few things her parents and all four of her grandparents agreed on was that circuses were dirty, smelly, and noisy. She was sure that the tiny one in her box was as good or better than the genuine article. Two beautiful velvety gray elephants no bigger than mice proudly led the parade, holding rose silk banners with their trunks.

Edith never knew what she might see in the box. When she’d pulled it out a few days back, the box contained a village of Red Indians who seemed to know nothing of the existence of white people. They lived in little birchbark wigwams and carried their belongings on long travois poles over their shoulders. Their village was in a clearing surrounded by a dark forest of tiny beech and oak and spruce trees. A hunting party was bringing back a brace of wild ducks and the women were building up the cooking fires.

The little people and animals in the box never seemed to notice Edith watching them. They were never disturbed when she moved the box out or pushed it back under her bed. She wondered what happened in there when she was not watching, when the box was under the bed. Was it dark then in the box? Whenever she pulled the box out, there the tiny people were, busy, in the middle of things. She knew she must miss a great deal.