I’ve alluded already to the friendship with Gus that animated my childhood. Those memories now appear to me transformed, their homely fabric ablaze with anger, though at the time I know I felt very differently. Can I still give an honest accounting of those hours, one unsinged by retrospective rage?
My father groomed the Farrows’ horses, my mother took in their laundry, and I myself was always popping in and out of the hedge that delineated their lawn. The Farrows and their house were grand in a small way, enough to put them among the preeminent families of our middling town. It was the sort of small grandeur that twists and yaps like a small dog, predisposed to bite when it feels itself impinged upon. When their young son formed a stubborn attachment to the daughter of their servants, it was a positive trodding upon the unpleasant beast’s tail. But this is getting ahead of my story.
I cannot recall when Gus and I met, for we were no more than infants then. So many of my earliest memories include him that I cannot put an order to them, or say with certainty which came first, so I will begin with a recollection that gains its primacy through vividness rather than sequence. It finds the two of us hiding behind a large leather armchair in a corner of the Farrows’ library—for their small grandeur swelled far enough to include such a haven—poring together over the colored plates in a book, rustling the protective veils of tissue. It was a volume on marine life, and the illustrations were of polyps and medusas, jewel-toned and frilled and looking not at all like animals as I then understood them. They seemed too fanciful, too wonderful to be real. I observed as much.
“They’re only bits of jelly bobbing in the sea, though. That’s what my father says. If they were really wonderful they’d be the size of cart horses. And they’d fly.” Gus delivered these words in lordly tones that made my admiration feel too cheaply bestowed, so that my gaze lingered on the images with a certain shamefacedness—as if I ought not to love them so dearly, as if that love showed me poor and ignorant, awed by those things that Gus could take for granted—
There it is, my dead woman’s rage refracting through the past. At the time, though, Gus appeared to me colored by the brilliance of the medusas, for it was through him that I had access to such marvels, and the wings he wished to give them seemed to sprout from his own shoulders.
“Are there any that fly?” I asked him, with undue faith that he must have the answer.
He lifted his chin in a way that I later learned meant he was concocting nonsense, and he was about to reply when we were interrupted by the whisper of oiled hinges. A step sounded in the library and we caught our breaths and huddled closer, knowing that his parents would not be pleased to find me there. But the snappish cadence of those footfalls calmed us an instant later, and we jostled and tittered.
“The mice are nibbling knowledge again,” Gus’s aunt Margo observed, not bothering to peer behind the armchair, “as they no doubt did even in the Garden. The Good Book neglects to inform us what became of those wise mice, fat on the windfall of good and evil. But you may be certain that their stomachs pained them mightily.”
Gus and I both were stifling our laughter by then, and rather unsuccessfully. We knew from experience that Margo’s assumed severity was nothing to fear.
“Dreadful animals,” Margo pursued, “such mice grown too knowing for their own good. Why, I find it necessary to stop their mouths with gingerbread or they will cheep their sophistries without ceasing! Here, mice!”
At that inducement we tumbled out from our concealment, climbing over each other by turns. The book thudded out with us, and Margo snatched it up and looked it over.
“The tissue covering this plate is creased. Your father must not see that his fine volume has been damaged, my bright boy. I will put it right with a touch of the iron.”
Gus was habitually cool and distant with his parents, who reciprocated his reserve with a chill of their own. But his arms were already wound around Margo’s knees and his face nuzzled into her skirts. I stood near the chair, bashful now that I felt myself hemmed in my own singularity—the eldest Bildstein girl, who ought to have been in the kitchen—rather than part of the protective tangle Gus and I formed together. I fidgeted under Margo’s sharp pale gaze, which held me as if its immaterial rays were so much steel.
“You will discover that the world suits you poorly, Catherine Bildstein,” Margo observed at last. I was taken aback by the softness of her voice, for Margo’s speech was habitually a snapping, springing thing. “A girl of too much daring, who hungers too much after the sort of truths that don’t get the washing on the line. What will you find to do with such a spirit except lose it?”
I did not fully apprehend Margo’s meaning, but I surely caught her menace. It seemed a betrayal that she had coaxed me from my hiding place with gingerbread only to jab me with this bleak, incomprehensible warning in its stead. It felt to me as if, had I only stayed concealed behind the leather chair, neither Margo’s words nor their import could have reached me. An inarticulate wish for eternity bubbled up in me: to stay enclosed in my naive moment, in the must of leather and the glint of colored inks, where I would never have to decipher the cold codes muttered by adults.
I reared back and glowered at her with childish resentment. “I helped hang the washing already!”
Gus pulled his face from her skirts and stared from her to me, and back again. “What do you mean?” he demanded. “What are they going to do to Catherine?”
“Only what they do to every girl like her.” Margo’s usual tone was back, all brusque plucked strings and leaping catlike rhythms. “Especially ones from working families, as she is, and I was as well, though of course we don’t speak of that old misalliance where your mother and father can hear us, Angus, my dear. Now, children, if you proceed with me to the kitchen you’ll find gingerbread fresh out of the oven, and no one will presume to tell me that I must slice it thin.”
But Gus was not to be put off so easily—though for my part, I would have been glad to set her uneasy words aside. “Then I won’t let them! Whatever it is. They’ll just have to do it to somebody else instead.”
Margo gave a half smile, as if she were pleased at Gus’s fervor—as I very much suspect she was. What exquisite amalgam of charity and spite was it that moved her, young as Gus and I both were, to begin this careful nudging of his inclinations? At that time I knew only that Margo was an inmate of the Farrows’ house, and that she brought to it her own disruptive vividness. Later I would come to know that she had married Gus’s wayward great-uncle Clement who had then died and left her a young and childless widow, awkwardly dependent on the family, stuffed into odd corners like the unwelcome legacy she was. And so she had remained.
I did not understand what made her spark so, as if she were always in danger of setting fire to their placidity. Now I would hazard that the quality of her fury in life was not so different from that of mine in death. She knew a bit too much of the eternal stasis that now rules me, and that I was once foolish enough to wish for.
That is, she was already dead in her own way, and it lent her a paradoxical vitality.
“And what will you do to stop them, my dear boy? Here is the world given to us, and rather more of it is given to some than to others. A plant can’t grow large in too small a pot, can it?”
I parsed her meaning somewhat better now. My cheeks flushed hot and my eyes were veiled by watery distortions. I cast about for ways to escape the fate Margo threatened; could I be a teacher? I was about to voice this novel ambition when Gus interrupted, and I saw that his eyes brimmed with tears.
“But Catherine can’t be small! Can I—give her enough—I mean, a big enough flowerpot?” His words were fumbling, but his meaning still came through. And, however naively, I felt as if Gus had rescued me. Not with the promised flowerpot, for I shied from the image. But the words Catherine can’t be small affected me like an unlooked-for reprieve. With his gaze on me, I felt an intimation of scope.
No one else in my small world would have seen in me a potential for largeness—or if they had, they would have wanted to suppress it. I looked gratefully at Gus’s tear-streaked face.
“Can you?” Margo asked pointedly. “You will need a will of steel to do so, my dear.”
It was on that strained note that we three slipped down to the kitchen, where Gus and I were fed the promised gingerbread along with blackberries and cream. I watched Margo with a distrust wholly new to me, one that I later came to know was misplaced—for Margo surely considered herself my ally—then yet later I knew to have been very apt—for her alliance betrayed me at my core—and may revisit still again, here in my death undying.
For all that nothing significant ever changes here in the awful brightness of Nautilus, for all that my dying will not resolve and my scream keeps tossing like a beaten rug, changes of thought and perspective are still possible for me. I keep my secret mutability, like that of a dream.
Consider this paradox, my pitiful one: even dead and captive in my twin prisons, I possess far more freedom and more possibility than you do. You can go where you wish, do as you like, but you can’t know what you are—whereas I, who can’t take a single step, have had ample time to study the ways of my own heart.
Self-knowledge is a map, and no true journey is possible without it.