Читать книгу The Age of Reason - Marian Birch - Страница 3

Kitt had been holed up in her study all that long, hot July afternoon. She was supposed to be working on her translation project. But instead she was taking a break and writing a letter to Earl Pipher. They hadn’t spoken or met since last February, when he’d offered her the work over coffee at the Plaza’s Palm Court and accepted her invitation to the ballet. But Kitt had frequently relived their long, starlit walk and their kisses and caresses on a bench in Central Park in her daydreams. Thoughts of Earl—his flawless Russian, his bristly crew cut, his easy familiarity with Russian poetry, his nice clean smell—kept distracting her. These daydreams were much more pleasant than trying to get inside the skin of Madame Akhmatova. The Russian poetess (a patronizing term she found it hard to forgive Earl for using) had a voice that was imperious and austere, yet wildly sensual. Working her way into these poems at a sufficient depth to find bridges to English made Kitt feel hot and flustered. She pushed a limp strand of damp hair off her forehead and filled her fountain pen with blue ink.

Dear Earl,

I haven’t written in so terribly long! It’s not that I’ve forgotten you, or forgotten our wonderful evening together last February. I have been working on translations of the poems you gave me when I can fit them in between teaching, commuting, and the dreary doldrums of domesticity and rural idiocy. I have had a lot on my mind, and I scarcely know . . .

She thought it improbable that Earl had made her pregnant. They hadn’t “gone all the way,” as her coed students would say. She hadn’t mentioned her pregnancy to him yet, and she hesitated now, undecided if she would. But those goddamn sperm were tough little bastards, as Arthur would say, and she was quite sure that some of them were present on that icy bench in Central Park last February. They’d met up at the ballet, then gone for a long late dinner at the Mandarin Chinese Restaurant on Broadway and Ninety-Eighth Street. They’d talked and talked, about poetry, about Russia and the Russian language. Earl was fluent. He had actually spent six months at the A. A. Zhdanov Leningrad University doing his doctoral research. They had talked about their favorite writers (Dostoevsky for her, Turgenev for him). Nothing at all had been said about their personal lives. She thought she’d glimpsed the obligatory wife-and-child photo in his wallet when he’d taken it out to pay for their moo shu pork and egg foo yong.

Her fortune cookie had read “You will receive an unusual offer.” But when they sat down on a bench in the Ramble section of the park, and he’d put his arms around her, she hadn’t been sure at first that she wanted him too. She’d just taken Edith to see Oklahoma the night before, and Ado Annie’s rueful “I’m Just a Gal Who Cain’t Say No” began playing in her mind.

I’m just a gal who cain’t say no

I’m in a terrible fix.

I always say “Come on let’s go”

Just when I oughta say “Nix.”

And so she hadn’t said no. Earl’s huffing and puffing and thrusting and rubbing had suddenly stopped with a low moan that she knew how to interpret. She hadn’t expected anything of the sort (though she had to wonder why she hadn’t), so she wasn’t protected. And they were fully dressed. in winter coats, no less, and, more or less, upright. She remembered heated but poorly informed discussions in her Smith dormitory about how you could get pregnant when you wouldn’t think that you could, and what things were safe to do with boys. She knew from experience that pulling out didn’t work: that had resulted in her first visit to the émigré Hungarian doctor in Pittsfield who made his living as an abortionist. If only she had called him this time, before things had gone this far, but now it was too late. She recalled Sartre’s protagonist in The Age of Reason—you couldn’t call him a hero—searching for an abortionist for his mistress and referring to the fetus he wanted to get rid of as a “strawberry.” But by now hers was more like one of the naked baby mice she’d found in her sock drawer that morning. She was too far along. She’d already told Arthur, and he was all excited again about his supposed virility and fertility. If it were up to him, she’d have as many babies by now as Grace DeMelo across the road.

And really, her brother-in-law Edwin was the most likely culprit. Much more likely than Earl, since they’d had sex at least a dozen times since that first time on Edith’s birthday in February. only days before her meeting with Earl. But Edwin, darling and clever though he was, deft though he was in bed, couldn’t hold a candle to Earl when it came to culture. Earl was even more sophisticated than Arthur, who at least had done his graduate work at Columbia in New York, while Edwin was just a country boy despite law school in Boston.

Sometimes Kitt wondered if she was a nymphomaniac. She seemed prone to lust over almost any male she met. The more inappropriate and dangerous the better; hence her current dalliance with her brother-in-law. It had been this way since she’d been a seventeen-year-old virgin freshman at Smith who craved (and attained) the caresses of her forty-five-year-old faculty adviser, Professor Panin. She’d been coaching him (at his request) in French pronunciation. Arshily Panin was a Russian, like her parents, and since she had lived in France until she was eight, French was practically her first language. He’d selected Les Liaisons Dangereuses as their text. He’d taken her to a rustic motel in the Berkshires for their one and only tyrst, and after skillfully deflowering her in the fake log cabin, he’d patted her on the arm in an avuncular fashion and said, “Now go find a boy your own age and I will go home to my Sofya.”

After him, it had been one boy after another until Teddy Brynn. Teddy and then, after he was killed, his brother Arthur had briefly sated her cravings enough for a few years of almost-fidelity. That lasted until Edith was born, when she learned that Arthur had been banging one of his students while she was in labor. Why isn’t there a word like nymphomaniacfor a man like Arthur, who goes through girls like Kleenex?she wondered.

She put down the pen with the blue ink and reopened the folder with her translations. Then she got up and pulled a record off the shelf—Schubert’s Winterreise— and put it on the phonograph to settle her nerves.

***

Uncle Edwin and Edith were playing checkers in front of the cold fireplace when they heard the Schubert begin. In the pictures Edith had seen of her father and uncle as little boys, her father had towered over her uncle. But now they were the same height. They had the same tightly curled glossy black hair, though Arthur had a small bald spot and Edwin did not. They shared the same blue eyes and fair skin and the whiskers that scratched her face except for the first five minutes after they shaved. Edwin liked to tease, and Arthur liked to teach: he was a professor, after all. But their voices were hard to tell apart. It was funny when they argued. The fights were usually about politics, because Edwin was not in the Party and Arthur lived for the Party, and when they quarreled, it sounded like someone fighting with himself. Like when Edith talked to her reflection in the toaster.

In the new kitchen Arthur vigorously mixed cream cheese, grated cheddar, green onions, and chopped walnuts with his big bare hands, making cheese balls to eat with the predinner drinks that they had started drinking right after lunch. He had learned to cook from his mother but, at least in his own eyes, had long since surpassed her. Making food and feeding people were things he deeply loved, so he did most of the cooking for his family. Kitt made a few exotic things like beefsteak tartarewhen the whim took her. Now that Edith was old enough to help him, Arthur had taught her how to slice carrots and dice potatoes and mince onions with the knives that he kept gleaming and sharp. A smoldering Chesterfield hung from his lip, and smoke swirled over his bowed head. He tossed another apricot-sized cheese ball into the stainless steel bowl and walked with it into the old kitchen, just in time to see one of Edith’s red checkers gleefully pounce catlike over one of Edwin’s black men.

“You sure that’s what you want to do?” her uncle asked.

Edith, carefully stacking her latest prey on top of the neat pile of her previous victims, nodded, jaw firmly set.

Bam! Bam! Bam!Her uncle executed a triple jump she hadn’t seen coming. Edwin swept her captive checkers into his palm.

Edith howled, “No fair!” flushing red as a wave of acid rose to her throat. Outrage flooded her in spite of her efforts to keep calm. She slammed the flat of her palm down on the checkerboard, and all the remaining checkers flew up and landed all over the board, the floor, and on Edwin’s lap.

Without a trace of compassion, her uncle sneered, maddeningly, “No fair that you weren’t paying attention? I’m not buying it. If you’re going to be a big baby, game over.” Edwin swept the few checkers still on the board into his big palm and tossed them into the box. Edith was sobbing now, great wet furious sobs. She knew she was a sore loser, which made her a baby, but she couldn’t help herself. She felt stupid, and duped. And she really, really hated to lose. She could feel that hatred in every part of her body, burning, swelling, and prickling inside her, as if she were a hot-air balloon about to burst or a torrent of lava hurtling down the side of a volcano. She couldn’t stop the surge of bile, thatlfelt as if it would drown her.

Standing behind her, Arthur leaned over her, smelling revoltingly of sweat, tobacco, and garlic. He popped a cheese ball into her wide-open howling mouth. Chesterfield still between his lips, he said, “Can that crap or I’ll give you something to cry about.” For Arthur believed that when feelings get too big to ignore, you either have a stiff drink, eat something rich and spicy, bang a girl, or best of all start an argument, preferably a political argument. Edith didn’t know any of these tricks and failed to see the cheese ball in the helpful light in which he offered it. She spit it out, spattering bits of cheese on her uncle and the checkerboard, and she yelled, “I hate you. I wish you were dead!” sounding more like her mother than Arthur wanted to notice.

As if summoned, Kitt cracked open her study door, stuck out her head, and pronounced in her most acid voice, “A deaf man couldn’t work with all this racket and carrying on. I can’t bear listening to it another minute. Go sit on the Crying Rock until you’re ready to be human.” She withdrew, with overtones of Schubert in the background, and slammed the door.

Edwin and Arthur both looked at Edith and, in unison, twinlike, they pointed to the door.

Just like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, she thought furiously as she exited, slamming the screen door behind her so hard it rebounded several times like a drum roll.

Whenever Edith cried for no good reason—and as far as she knew there were no good reasons—she was sent out to sit on the Crying Rock until she was prepared to act like a civilized, pleasant, and inobtrusive child. The Crying Rock was an ordinary piece of New England granite left behind by the Ice Age. It was more or less the size of her grandfather’s’s old sheepdog, Miss Hazel, when she was curled up to sleep with her nose tucked under her tail. The rough oblong boulder was covered with a delicate tracery of gray-green lichen and had a few scattered fingertips of soft deep-green moss sprinkled here and there. Recently Edith had also been expected to mind Marcus, when he was sent to the Rock to calm down. Arthur said that he and his brothers used to sit on it too, when they cried when they were boys growing up in this house, though it was hard for Edith to imagine them crying about anything. If anything, her grandparents had even less use for crying children than her parents did. Whingeing, Granny called it.

She felt like running away but, obediently, she sat down. At first her face was hot and red and her nose was running. She felt as if she might throw up and her heart was pounding so hard she could hear it. Her fists were hard, white-knuckled little balls. Her chest was tight and her breathing ragged.

After a while her snuffling faded and her breath evened out. Shutting out any more thoughts about checkers, she minutely examined the tussock of sword grass near her feet. She looked for the perfect flat-bladed stalk that she could hold lengthwise between her thumbs that would, if she blew in just the right spot, produce a piercing whistle. Uncle Edwin had shown her how to do this, and although she had tried again and again, she had yet to make a sound. Across the yard, through the screen door of the kitchen, she heard laughter, the tinkle of ice in the highball glasses, Uncle Edwin and Arthur tuning up their guitar and fiddle. Then they launched into a rousing chorus of “Los Cuatro Generales.” Arthur had learned that song when he’d gone to fight the Fascists in Spain a long time ago, when he was a teenager, before Edith was born. Edith knew how to make the drinks they were all having now, and had been having since Marcus went down for his nap. A jigger of Scotch on ice cubes made Scotch on the rocks; if you used Irish whiskey and lemon juice and sugar, that made a whiskey sour. Her favorite, which Kitt would usually let her sip, was the hot toddy—like a whiskey sour but with hot tea and more sugar. Kitt liked hot toddies when she needed to go to bed in the middle of the day with a headache or a cold or just because being pregnant again made her always tired.

It was Arthur and her uncle who made her cry, but it was Kitt who banished her to the Crying Rock. Her father and uncle got mad, like she got mad and Marcus got mad. They yelled and sometimes they hit. Their faces got red and scary. But when her mother got mad, her fury felt cold and terrifying, like a blizzard. It seemed as if she wanted to make Edith disappear. Forever. Kitt sometimes screamed that she wished she herself had never been born. And Kitt hit herself, slapped her own face, even harder than she hit Edith.

The grownups’ voices grew louder and brighter, singing and laughing, but Edith paid them no more and perhaps less attention than she paid to the trilling of late-afternoon birdsong in the treetops. She was wondering where, if they were to show up today and ask her for help, she could build a snug little home for the Borrowers. She had been reading the book about the tiny family that lived under the grandfather clock and furnished their home with items they borrowed from the humans to her mother at bedtime. The Borrowers seemed to like to be on the inside of houses. But perhaps she could persuade them to try a cozy woodland burrow like Mole’s home in Wind in the Willows. Or maybe like Rabbit’s hole in Winnie-the-Pooh—where tubby Winnie got stuck for days after having too much honey for his tea. Winnie-the-Poohwas one of Kitt’s favorite books, and as soon as Edith was old enough to be read to, her mother had read it to her so often that Edith had learned it all by heart by the time she was four and a half, before she really knew how to read. Kitt and Arthur had been surprised and pleased when she “read” them the story about falling into the Heffalump trap. They never suspected she had memorized the whole story. Now, of course, she really could read, although she’d only just finished first grade. In school she had pretended that, like most of the other children, she was just learning how. After she’d polished off the boring Dick and Jane and Spot story, she’d usually sneak one of her own books out of her bookbag during “quiet reading.” She was afraid she would get in trouble if her teacher saw that she was reading the wrong book.

The big stump of an old ash tree by the barn would be perfect for the Borrowers. Its thick roots had lots of crevices and nooks. If she furnished it nicely with things she stole from the house . . . and she began to review the contents of the kitchen in her mind. Matchboxes would make nice beds, with Kleenex for covers. Tin cans for tables. Maybe caps from whiskey bottles for chairs.

Her musings about the Borrowers were interrupted when she heard Uncle Edwin start to play the guitar chords for “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?” That meant Arthur had gone to get Marcus up from his nap. “Drunken Sailor” was Marcus’s dancing song. Really it was more of a lurching and swaying song, since not-yet-three-year-old Marcus was none too steady on his feet, even when they were both on the ground, and he didn’t know how to hop, skip, or twirl as Edith could. Edith’s dancing song was “Shebeg Shemore”—an Irish song that Arthur said was about two fairy armies having a battle, though he didn’t know any words for it. And Edwin said if there were words, they’d be in Gaelic and anyway he thought the song was really about butterflies. When Arthur played her song on his fiddle, she put on her pink tutu and the ballet slippers that Kitt bought her last spring after they went to a matinee of the New York City Ballet. She twirled on her toes with her arms gracefully held over her head, pretending that she was the tiny ballerina inside her Russian grandmother’s precious porcelain egg. Baba had brought the fragile handpainted egg all the way from her childhood home in Saint Petersburg. (Whenever that city was mentioned, Arthur said it was properly called Leningrad.)

Although she’d finished crying, Edith didn’t feel a bit like dancing. Sliding off the rock onto the grass, she laced her fingers together so that her pointers made a steeple. Softly she intoned, “Here is the church and here is the steeple.” The disappointingly unmusical blade of grass was still between the church doors of her thumbs. She softened her breath and held her thumbs close to her lips so that her gentle blowing warmed and tickled the people inside. She was lying on the grass by the Crying Rock on her stomach now, propped up on her elbows and not minding that her blue-checked dress got pulled up and that her bottom under her underpants felt pink and pebbled from sitting on the granite for such a long time. She whispered to the little people inside the church of her palms and heard them singing softly a let-us-out song with a tune like “Danny Boy” that Kitt had made up for her when she taught her the finger play. Kitt could make up a poem without trying at all.

Oh little friend

We’re calling on your sympathy

We’re stuck inside

on such a lovely day

Please let us out

so we can, as we’re meant to be,

Be free to roam

the world and free to play.

Then, louder, Edith proclaimed, “Open the door and out come the people!” She opened the thumbdoors. Rushing out of the little church came eight or nine Wood Elves, magical folk who sometimes let her see them. Today the minute figures scurried around, and they began loading two little boats, about the size and shape of walnut shells, that sat in a sparkling stream she suddenly spotted in the glade beneath her face.

All the tiny elves, no taller than Edith’s fingernails, were dressed in old-fashioned clothes of velvety brown and gossamer green. A father elf and his little girl were taking leave of the others; the girl was helped by her father into the first of the boats. He gave her a paddle the size of a chicken’s pin feather. The second boat was tethered to the first and the father now finished securing the sacks and boxes with which it was filled. Perhaps those contained their food and gear for the journey. The little girl jumped out of the boat again and ran up the bank to hug a round, comfortable-looking Granny elf, who wiped away tears with a cobweb hanky. They were so small that Edith had to have her nose right in the grass to see them.

So Marcus’s wailing startled Edith, and at once the Wood Elves and their gear vanished without a trace. Kitt was looming over her, tall and barefoot. Her pregnant belly stretched her turquoise Mexican skirt so it looked like a pumpkin was underneath it. Sobbing and flailing, Marcus hung askew from his mother’s pincer-like grip on his right shoulder. Twin reflections of the sinking sun shone in her round spectacles.

Kitt was in the state of mind she referred to, when in good spirits, as “high dudgeon.” She addressed Edith. “Since it appears that you plan to spend the rest of your life posed on this rock like the girl on the White Rock soda bottle,”—here she gave the dangling Marcus a shake in the rock’s direction—“kindly be so good as to take this horrid changeling before I am forced to beat him to a pulp.”

It was so unfair. Edith was lying on the grass: how could she look like the White Rock girl? And she hated hearing “beat him to a pulp,” which was one of Kitt’s favorite phrases. It conjured up mental images that made her stomach flop over in her belly. Instead of thinking about it, she imagined she was wrapped in an invisible shield like the one in the television ad for Colgate toothpaste. It was a clear barrier that stopped germs and decay from rotting your teeth. In the advertisement, various objects thrown at the people behind the shield bounced back without hurting them.

Kitt knew she sounded as if she were performing an opera, but there was no help for it. After his nap, Marcus had cried because she put the wrong (from his viewpoint) pants on him. This had driven Kitt, who had passionate views on her children’s dress, to fury. So now he wasn’t wearing pants at all, just his damp naptime diaper. He still wet the bed, despite the deafening alarm they’d put under his sheet that rand that woke everyone up in the house when he peed at night. To make matters worse, this afternoon he had squirmed out of Kitt’s grip and bolted for the stairs, which, as he full well knew, he was not allowed to climb without supervision. To keep him from falling, she’d grabbed him by his clambering bare foot and yanked him down the stairs. She’d heard his hard little skull thwonk twice on the steps. Why didn’t he listen to her?

Edith knew that a “high dudgeon,” when her mother spoke theatrically, with odd words no one else used, was usually followed by a meltdown. Kitt would scream and curse and wail that she wished she were dead, wished she had never been born, never gotten married, had never had children. This tirade would be punctuated by her walloping anyone nearby, but mostly herself. Now she swung Marcus, no lightweight, down to Edith with his arms and legs churning, his face snotty.

Edith sat up and smoothed her checkered dress over her stone-dimpled legs. She knew not to look at Kitt when she was mad, so she lowered her eyelids halfway, clenched her teeth together, and hunched her shoulders slightly toward her ears, as she reached up for her little brother and took him under his arms.

She didn’t really feel like seeing his slobbery cryface, so she put him on her lap on his still-diapered bottom. She held him with his back against her chest and curled herself over him like an oyster shell over a pearl. No, she thought, Marcus is more like a slimy oyster than like a pearl.Softly she started to sing the lullabies she’d heard Kitt sing to her all her life at bedtime—Brahms’s Lullaby, “All the Pretty Little Horses,”“Good Night, Irene,” and a pretty Russian one about a little birch tree sleeping in a meadow.

“Na polye beryozhaya stoyala . . .”

"наполеберйожаястояла

наполеберёжаязасыпала. . ."

Marcus’s breath got softer, less ragged. Without needing to look, Edith could feel that Kitt and her stormy rage had gone back inside.

Sometimes at night in bed, if she glazed over her eyes and made the ordinary world get thin like a photograph, and then breathed softly to create a dizzy feeling beneath her breastbone, she was able to float effortlessly off her bed and fly all around her room and in and out the windows. She liked to fly this way when everyone, all the people, birds, and animals, was asleep. She’d never tried to fly outside, unless she counted the time the tornado took her, and had never tried to with Marcus in her arms, but just now she really wanted to. So she pressed her nose and lips softly but firmly into the tender, tangy-with-baby-sweat back of Marcus’s neck. He had stopped sobbing and was merely snuffling. She began to hum softly so that the sound made an ever-so-slight buzz in her nose and in his neck. She could feel her bones and her brother’s bones begin to resonate together. The tune she hummed was a song she had heard on a Mahalia Jackson record of Kitt's:

When I die

Hallelujah bye and bye

I’ll fly away.

Edith didn’t think that dying was required for flying away. You just half-closed and unfocused your eyes and hummed. Soon shapes began to dissolve in the air, and she and Marcus still looked the same but they were as weightless and translucent as the puffballs on dandelion stalks that she liked to blow away after she made a wish. She and Marcus lifted into the air light as bubbles. They floated gently up from the Crying Rock, up above the big ash tree where her swing was, and soon they were high up among the spinning stars of the young summer evening.

“Star bright, star light, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might have the wish I wish tonight,” she said under her breath. Edith was tempted to make a wish to be turned into a fairy, so that she could fly whenever she wanted to, and so she could go live in fairyland, which was located, she believed, near Neverland, beyond the sea, first star to the right and straight on till morning. But just before she flew out over the sea toward Neverland, she started to feel scared. She started to worry that Kitt and Arthur would be terribly sad— heartbroken—if she didn’t come back. The picture in her mind of their sad faces was too painful to bear. So instead of asking to be a fairy, she wished for a pony again and wheeled away from the sparkling stars in the now black sky. Holding Marcus securely in her arms, she swept them down through the cool evening air, following a lonely raven looking for its nighttime roost, toward the farmhouse. The gray cedar-shingled roof looked the same as always, but it was somehow as perfectly transparent as a soap bubble or an invisible shield, and she was able to look right down into the kitchen. Kitt was stretched out on the old brown couch by the pantry, lying with her head on Uncle Edwin’s lap, her clasped hands holding her drink on her bosom. She looked only a little bit sad. She might not have realized yet that her children had flown away. Arthur was playing his fiddle and singing “Kevin Barry gave his young life in the cause of liberty” in his clear baritone voice. His Chesterfield cigarette was propped at the edge of the table, a long ash on its end. The table’s enamel edge had many scorch marks from forgotten cigarettes. Uncle Edwin softly rubbed Kitt’s ear between his thumb and forefinger in time to the music.