IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE, moral ambiguity was not allowed. It was considered unhealthy, like soft drinks and candy, not to be kept in the house and to be eaten only with reprimands that kept you from enjoying it. As a result of this stricture, until I was ten, my father and I saw little of each other. We had a nodding acquaintance at meals, during which he listened to the news on the radio and spoke to no one. When I heard his car crunching up the driveway at night, bringing him back from the laboratory where he worked both morning and evening, I knew I should be asleep.
It was my mother who gave me my faith in the black arts, which came to dire fruition in my tenth year. Faith takes root in the insignificant. We would be sitting round the dinner table and I would drop my knife.
“Pick it up, Erica,” my father would say. Or perhaps he would say nothing, but I would feel a discomforting frown.
“A man is coming,” my mother would add.
Or if I dropped a spoon:
“A child is coming.”
I never thought to notice whether or not the prophecies came true. I only remembered that if you dropped a knife, a man would visit the house for certain. Not that day, perhaps, nor the next, but sometime when you did not expect it. When you had even forgotten you dropped the knife.
My father did not recognize the power of a knife to bring a visitor, any more than he recognized the power of an umbrella opened indoors to bring bad luck. Knowing that differences exist most peacefully under one roof when they are unaware of each other, my mother did not practice her black arts openly before him. If she knocked over the saltcellar while clearing the table, she brushed a small pile of salt aside and waited till he was napping before she threw a pinch of it into the fire. She knew he would ask, just as I asked, and he would be harder to answer:
“Why?”
“Judas spilled salt at the Last Supper. And look what happened to him.”
I had seen da Vinci’s Last Supper hanging like an enormous postcard in the Sunday school parlor of the Lutheran Church, and I resolved to look for the salt.
“See for yourself. It’s lying on the table by Judas’s hand, just like it’s lying on our table now.”
“But just because Judas had bad luck, why should I have it?”
“Just because.”
Not because one man, this particular man had had it, certainly. The more I thought about it, the more I knew I could not inherit Judas’s bad luck the way you inherit the color of your eyes and the shape of your face. Rather, in spilling the salt he had somehow stumbled upon a law. Others had probably discovered it before him. But it took the Crucifixion and Potter’s Field before its validity was recognized.
It occurred to me that there must be many such laws I did not know. It had never worried me before. I knew it was my father’s business to find out the laws which kept the world running. When he took me to the laboratory with him, I saw that it was full of things whose secrets he was wresting.
“What are those pretty stones?”
“Those are minerals.”
“Why do you keep them in that funny box?”
“Because they’re radioactive.”
It was his pleasure to open the laws that lay hidden in things and make them clear, so clear that I could touch them with my hands whenever I picked up the models of molecular structures he kept in a little glass case on his desk. What he found was beautiful and utterly irrelevant to the way I lived my life. The world would go on turning whether my father or anyone else’s father found out why. To discover the law of gravity, for example, was only to name what you already knew. It didn’t change a thing.
The uselessness of my father’s laws made them easier to learn than my mother’s. He had marvelous instruments to extend the range of the senses and reach into the very cells of being. And when you found one law, you found others contingent on it. Whereas the laws in my mother’s world were utterly capricious. You stepped on a crack and if your mother’s back broke, you knew you’d found the reason. There were no conclusions, only an infinite number of particular cases.
And knowing the laws that worked in particular cases did not free you from the fear of breaking them. It only committed you more deeply to a power that gave you nothing in return for your obedience, except the vague feeling that you were somehow maintaining the status quo.
As soon as I acknowledged the existence of my mother’s laws, life became immensely more complicated. Since each law was a particular event, the smallest events suggested themselves as a possible means of discovery. Riding my bicycle, for example, I would innocently imagine that if the stoplight turned red before I reached it, something bad would happen. If it didn’t, things would stay the same. Nothing good would happen, but nothing bad would, either. Once I had decided it might be so, the game became real. The stoplight had the power to direct the traffic of my future. I began to avoid stoplights.
Other events acquired a similar authority which had to be countered with rituals and taboos. Certain dresses brought bad luck and hung unworn in the closet. Tuesdays meant low marks on spelling quizzes and mistakes in mathematics.
The most discouraging part of the whole business was that it was so much easier to bring bad luck on oneself than good luck. It was so much easier to break a mirror and live in the shadow of impending misfortune than to count a hundred white horses and wish for happiness.
As the games I invented mysteriously turned into statutes, I believed that I was maintaining the even keel of our joys until one day I came home from school to find two suitcases in the front hall. Grandmother had left her husband and decided to live with us.
She was to live out her life in our guest room, which quickly took on the color and smell of her life. It was a cold room, shut off from the house, with a pink satin bolster on the bed and doilies on the dressing table and a clean blotter on the desk; one of those anonymous rooms often slept in and rarely lived in, like a room in a hotel. Now the bolster gave way to a dozen eiderdowns. The radiators clanked and pounded; the room was kept at eighty degrees. My grandmother went about in heavy underclothes and sweaters and seldom left her quarters for more tepid parts of the house.
Further, its innocent spaces were suddenly thronged with medicine bottles of all kinds: lecithin, calcium, supplementary organic pills, Kaopectate, and Hexylresorcinol. There were also cases of vitamins, each regulating some function of the body and therefore necessary—Grandmother believed—to its survival. In her suitcase, which I observed was never wholly unpacked, she kept a reserve supply of everything.
On the wall over the bed hung a Chinese painting of a mountain. This she disliked, though she never asked us to take it down.
“Mountains! What good are mountains? You can’t farm land like that.”
Her chief amusement was going to church. She listened to the sermon with great attentiveness but could never remember a word of it afterward. She enjoyed the music and the feeling of being united with so many people for the good of their souls, which she had been taught was the only good.
She passed her days with what I considered an unbearable monotony. In the morning my mother brought up her oatmeal and orange juice on a tray. Grandmother sat at the dressing table and ate in front of the mirror, while my mother combed her long white hair into two braids and pinned them crosswise on her head. Then my mother went down to the cellar to hang up the wash—for it was early April when my grandmother came, and too cold to hang clothes outside—always listening for the sound of the old woman’s voice.
“Daughter?”
“I’m right here.”
Assured she was not alone, Grandmother would set about arranging the accoutrements of her life—that is, the contents of the suitcase. In addition to her impressive collection of medicines, she kept extra sets of heavy underwear and rolls of toilet paper which she sometimes unwound and wadded into her garters like an amulet to ward off attacks of nervous diarrhea.
It seemed to me that she was pursuing a secret journey, the destination of which constantly evaded her. Sometimes she would come to lunch wearing her hat and her big sealskin coat, inquiring about bus schedules, hinting that she had not been well treated. My mother’s response was always the same.
“There are no buses today. It’s a holiday.”
“Ah, then, I’ll have to wait.”
Then she would mention her responsibilities at the house in Corona which she had so recently left and where my mother had grown up. Men were coming to pick the cherries in the orchard; she had to look sharp that they did not cheat on the hours. Grandfather was waiting for her; who would fix his dinner? She would explain it to us with pathetic urgency.
My mother maintained the illusion through a round of outings which never got the woman to her destination but only postponed the total collapse of her reason.
Grandmother’s favorite escort on these outings was her brother Oskar. He was seventy-one, seven years younger than my grandmother. To me he was ageless, a spry, dapper little man who always wore two-toned Oxfords and a black and yellow vest, giving him the look of a frail and friendly bee. He was retired, not from any single occupation but from a great variety of them, including brief stints as homesteader, circus barker, undertaker’s assistant, and shortstop for an obscure ball team in Minnesota. He had once had a wife and child, both of whom were dead, and I remember neither.
Sometimes he wrote poems—jingles, he called them—on the placemats he got every noon at Howard Johnson’s, surfaces as suggestive to him as marble to Michelangelo, their floral borders and bright colors concealing clusters of language. Slipping a finely folded jingle into my hand, he would greet me with a mock bow, his shoes twinkling.
“Ah, Miss Callard,” he would say.
“Oh, Bowser, how I’ve missed you.”
That was in honor of the candies he kept in his pockets, Callard and Bowser’s Plain Jane Toffees, or Lady Fingers, or Licorice. If he had no candy, then I knew he was bringing a game, a card trick, perhaps, or a Cracker-Jack toy. My mother justified his passion for Cracker Jacks by saying they reminded him of baseball, but I could see well enough how he broke into smiles of satisfaction when the toy appeared at the bottom of the box. Of all his presents he said, with a mixture of shame and pride,
“It’s nothing; I got it for pennies.”
He would drive Grandmother around town to parade, as he called it, in my father’s car. Sometimes I went along, sitting alone in the backseat.
“You want to take the wheel, my girl?” he suggested, turning solemnly to his sister.
Grandmother looked at him with horror.
“You used to do very well. I remember how we had the only car in Deep River, and how you used to make me get out at every corner and look in all directions to see if another one was coming.”
Her early scruples eventually overcame her, for when my mother was fourteen, Grandmother drove the car into the garage and forgot to take it out again. No one else in the family had a license, so there it remained while my grandmother thought of more and more reasons for walking to this place and that, until it was understood that the car was now part of the house, as immovable as the walls and the floor.
On Sundays, my great-uncle came for breakfast, bringing with him a small flute of his own carving. He never went with us to church but waited at the house to join us for dinner, after which he retired to the sun room for a nap. He slept with his eyes open for about an hour and then I would hear him talking to the flute, as if he had no idea of gaining my audience.
“There was an organ in the house where we grew up. All the German farmhouses had them. Your grandmother used to sit in the parlor and play it by the hour.”
“Where is it now?” I had always wanted to play an organ but thought that all organs were indissolubly joined to churches.
Oskar shook his head.
“The spitzwinks took it.”
It was the German farmers in Iowa who told Oskar about the spitzwinks. Sometimes the crops failed because of rain, sometimes because of drought. And sometimes they failed for no reason at all. Then the farmers said, “Ah, the spitzwinks have done it.” The spitzwinks made holes in your best stockings and chipped the cups and saucers that you used every day. They were the reason that plants marked “annuals” on the box at the market would not return in the spring.
“But why didn’t Great-Grandpa lock up the organ so the spitzwinks wouldn’t steal it? Didn’t he know there’d be other children?”
“He never thought of it.”
The spitzwinks, I thought, were a sort of game, with no more substance than a figure of speech. But as weeks turned into months and Grandmother stayed on, I soon saw them as a name for forces which enmeshed her in propitiatory rituals far more suffocating than my own.
When she was dressed for bed and had drunk the hot milk that my mother brought her, she closed her door and began the long process of barricading it. Lying in my bed I could hear the moving of furniture, the heaviest pieces in the house and a chilling testimony of my grandmother’s strength. A long slow scraping across the floor was the chest of drawers. Then came the slow bump of the dressing table with the oval mirror. That did not move so easily because the castors had disappeared. And finally I heard a persistent scuffling sound, as if my grandmother were waging a battle with the forces of darkness. In half an hour the sounds ceased but the light still shone under her door; she was awake.
“Margaret, did you lock the front door?”
That was my mother, who always sounded like somebody else when anyone called her by her first name.
“Yes!” My father was already asleep; he left to my mother the responsibility of answering.
For a few minutes it would be still. Then I heard the furniture moving again, the chest of drawers, the dressing table, the chair. This time, it was being forced away from the door. When the door opened, Grandmother’s voice sounded near. She had stepped into the hall.
“I say, did you lock the front door?”
“Yes, of course!”
“I think I’ll just go down and try it.”
Like the soul of an extinct bird she glided swiftly down the stairs, her two braids springing out over her ears just as they fell when she took out the pins. She rattled the knob of the front door for us all to hear.
“Good. I just wanted to be sure.”
Then her own door would slam, as if she had reached her room in a single bound. And presently the moving of furniture would begin again.
Night after night I acknowledged the danger that lay in such defenses. Clearly my grandmother’s rituals only brought her closer to the fears she wished to avoid. Mine were still part of the games that a child plays, when by an act of the imagination he wills his own life into what has none, for the sake of companionship. If my grandmother’s rituals were a game, then it must be a game that she played in deadly earnest, the stakes to be paid with her own life. Whenever I recognized this, I had the uncomfortable feeling that we were becoming more and more alike.
What linked us was a discovery that the faith we had gathered from generations of Sundays was no match for this greater faith in the reality of darkness. Where did it come from? We had not invited it. Who put it into my heart that the darkness under the bed gathered itself into invisible hands, waiting to snatch my feet when I groped my way back from the bathroom at night? How was it that my mother, my father, and Uncle Oskar stepped quietly into their beds with no knowledge of this danger and therefore no fear? How could you lose your freedom without knowing who had taken it? If my faith in the darkness could not be broken, then it was not faith as I knew it but a love for all that could not be named and a secret desire that it never should be.
Because of this love my mother wore her best dress wrong side out to my cousin’s wedding for fear of bringing bad luck on the heads of the newly wedded pair. Because of this love she knocked on wood whenever she spoke of my achievements in school and asserted half-jokingly—but only half—that Thomas Dewey had lost the presidential election because he had a horseshoe hanging upside down over his door and all his luck drained out. She had grown up in a neighboring town and seen for herself the quiet gnawing emblem of his doom which, if heeded, might have changed the course of nations.
By day, Grandmother’s diversions alternated between drives, church, and Abby’s beauty parlor. The beauty parlor and the church stood kitty corner from each other, on a block named by persecuted German immigrants who wanted their children to grow up on Liberty Street. The slow but ceaseless arrival of new settlers gave it such a vivid restlessness that even now I think of it not as a place but as a way of being alive.
The excitement began early in the morning when men in white overalls streaked with blood hauled carcasses from trucks to the back of the butcher shop. But when its doors opened for business, the very memory of blood had been quenched. Sausages were hung high on the ceiling, tucked out of sight like poor relations, to be asked for by name but not displayed. On shelves that ran the length of the shop you found cocoa from Holland in delftware jars, flatbread from Norway, and flowered tins of gumdrops from Paris.
Abby had her beauty shop above the butcher’s, and it was there that I met Mary Ellen. She was two years older than I and had the job of answering the telephone and unwrapping the little pieces of cotton which Abby tucked into the hairnets of her customers to protect their ears from the sirocco blasts of the dryer. She also kept the glass atomizers filled with the heavy scented lacquer which “set” the finger-waves so that hair came out dry and rippling as dunes of sand.
In exchange for these favors, Abby allowed her to read the movie magazines she kept by the dryers. Mary Ellen devoured the legends of her favorites as faithfully as she attended Mass. The stars were her secular saints, their changeless identities to be consulted in the minute crises of daily life. She borrowed a gesture from one, a hairstyle from another; all, I thought, to no effect. There was a faint aura of dirt about everything she wore, like a shading sketched on the original color, and as she washed the pins and curlers, customers would stare at her fingernails in amazement. For she did not believe in cleaning them; she simply bit the dirty portion away, peeling it with great fastidiousness like a delicate fruit.
In warm weather we walked to a vacant lot behind a funeral parlor, where we could play undisturbed. The only other building on it was a warehouse full of coffins. Squeezing among them like bankers checking their safes, we would collect the number of different kinds, the way you collect out-of-state license plates or the number of white horses you pass when you are traveling. Most of the coffins were dark and plain. We decided it was lucky to find a baby’s coffin, because we found them so seldom. A few of the large ones were scrolled, and we watched for these, too, though their luck was considered less potent. At the end of the day we remembered how many we had found.
Or rather I remembered how many we had found. I had come to believe that the luck things carried augmented like interest only if I kept my books straight, never forgetting how much I had saved. When the total number of white horses, license plates, loads of hay, baby coffins, and other spectacles deemed lucky by us grew too large to keep in my head, I wrote the sums down in a little notebook, with the conviction that it was both useless and necessary to some final reckoning of my fate.
By this time the last platoon of Abby’s customers would be touching their brittle curls as they emerged from under the dryers. Grandmother never sat under the dryer, as it threw her into a panic and she would roll her eyes about like a horse being pushed into a van. With her hair pinned in wet braids across her head, she turned the pages of the movie magazines, clucking at the wages of sin until my mother emerged with her hair pitilessly knotted into ringlets.
“It’s so hard to find someone who can do my hair plain the way I like it,” she would say.
Abby’s hairdos were utterly without style. She believed in durability rather than immediate effect. She made pincurls so tight that they kept their kink for days and only ceased to remind you of sheep’s wool or unshorn poodles a week later. On her walls hung photographs showing a wide variety of styles, but no matter which one you ordered you always came out looking the same. This attracted a host of elderly ladies whose conservative taste could not be met in the salons uptown, where ratting and backcombing were the fashion.
Although I knew Abby had been a widow oftener than some wives have been mothers, I could not imagine her in love. She was a stocky figure, in her white smock, with sparse brown hair and thick glasses, and as she tipped your head into the sink and scrubbed your scalp, she sang at the top of her voice:
“When you’re smiling,
When you’re smiling,
The whole world smiles with you.”
And while she sang, always a little breathless from reaching and scrubbing, she talked and talked and her bosom heaved like a full sail over your face. Neither I nor my mother knew any of the people she talked about, except as we might feel we knew the characters in a radio serial—Pearl, Maria, Charley, and all the others whose foibles she expounded to us according to her mood.
“He’s gone to see that widow lady downstairs, that’s what. He lies around on her bed all day and she feeds him white albacore tuna. It’s nothing but grub what he’s after, a heartless beast, no feelings at all.”
Not for a long time did I learn that many of the names I associated with people actually belonged to cats. Abby fed all the stray cats that came to her door and demanded in exchange a scrupulous fidelity. If one stayed away for two days, or a week, she railed against him like a forsaken lover.
With Grandmother, however, she never spoke of cats. Every conversation was an exchange of ailments and remedies, Grandmother defending her drugstore prescriptions and Abby speaking for her teas. Among her rinses she kept a packet of Alba chamomile, the label of which showed a man coming out of a forest and handing a spray of blossoms to a little girl. To me, that alone argued for its magical properties.
“Someday you’ll be drinking a good dose of henna if you’re not careful, keeping it all mixed up like that,” warned my mother.
But Abby’s cupboard contained a greater wonder than Alba chamomile tea. It was locked away in a small chest behind the bleaches and dyes. Sometimes, when all her customers were safely tucked under the dryers and time lay heavy on her hands, she would bring it out for Mary Ellen and me to look at.
“It’s the hucklebone of a saint,” explained Abby.
I did not dare to ask what a hucklebone was and decided that it was the place on your elbow that tingled when you accidentally bumped it against a table or chair. I have since learned that it is the anklebone.
The tiny splinter of bone lay pressed between two discs of glass in the middle of a brass sun from which crude rays emanated. Abby’s grandfather, a connoisseur of the marvelous, had bought it in the catacombs outside Rome from a priest who took him through by the light of a serpent twisted around his staff. At Cologne he had kissed the skulls of the Magi and the nail driven into Christ’s right foot; at Trèves he had touched part of the thigh of the Virgin Agatha and seen the devil carrying the soul of his grandmother in a wheelbarrow. He had walked on the holy stair of Saint John Lateran and wagered for a tooth of Saint Peter. He lost the wager, but the same day he was miraculously healed of a lifetime of headaches by combing his hair with the comb of a saint.
“Which saint?” asked Mary Ellen.
“I don’t know. What does it matter?”
I liked the saints, faded as they were in the liturgies of my church. I liked them because they attended so patiently to the smallest human catastrophes. If you lost something you went to Saint Anthony. If you wanted a husband you went to Saint Nicholas. Even thieves found a comforter among the ranks of the blessed, who would not turn a deaf ear to their problems.
I had need for such a comforter. Since my grandmother’s arrival my dependence on the dark powers had grown steadily worse. I had come to believe that certain words released the forces of evil, being part of that vast body of laws of which spilling salt was only a tiny amendment. All my life, words had come to me wrapped in feelings that had nothing to do with their meanings and everything to do with the way my hand felt when I printed them. But now they lost all connection with the things they named and took on the opacity of a magic formula. Not being able to say tree didn’t mean that trees were evil. It only meant that saying the name released forces beyond your control.
Perfect obedience led, clearly, to perfect silence, and the slow death of all my delights. You cannot serve two masters. Or rather, you can, but the moment will come when you must choose between them.
We were crossing the lot on our way to the coffins when suddenly Mary Ellen stamped her foot and cried,
“Lucky Strike!”
“What?”
“I stepped on a new one. See?”
So I stepped on it also.
“Lucky Strike.”
She shook her head.
“You can say it if you want to, but it isn’t as good as if you’d found your own. It counts less. And don’t ever step on a Pall Mall.”
I felt a whole new mesh of complications engulf me.
“Let’s not count cigarette packs. It’s too hard.”
I wanted her to tell me that in the scheme of things, Lucky Strikes and Pall Malls did not matter. Instead, she only looked at me in astonishment.
“Too hard?”
“I can’t remember so many things.” I was beginning to feel irritable. “Why do we have to count things all the time? You keep track of license plates, you keep track of everything.”
“It’s only a game,” she said in puzzled tones.
“Well, it isn’t a game to me!” I bellowed.
The door of the funeral parlor opened and a man stepped out and cleared his throat. We scuttled across the lot to the street and began walking quickly past the houses toward downtown.
“A lot of people in there,” whispered Mary Ellen, looking back over her shoulder. “You want to watch?”
“I don’t want to watch anything anymore! I’m tired of counting. All those things, I have to count them. I don’t know why but I have to count them. And I don’t want to. My head is so crowded with junk already that sometimes I feel like it’s going to explode.”
“Then why don’t you quit?”
“I don’t know!” My voice had risen to a shout. An old woman sitting on her front porch stared at us. “It’s like there was some other person inside of me making me do it. Every time I want to quit there’s that other person who won’t let me.”
Mary Ellen nodded.
“Somebody has put a hex on you, maybe,” she suggested.
“Maybe,” I agreed.
“If it happened to me, I’d just go straight to Father Hekkel and he would make it all right.”
The notion of involving a stranger alarmed me at once. Now that I’d dragged the thing into broad daylight it sounded foolish even to my own ears.
“Since you aren’t in our church, maybe Father Hekkel wouldn’t work. We better try and find somebody else.”
“What about Abby?”
We were lucky. The only customer was white-haired Miss Briggs who worked in a dry goods store and looked like somebody’s memory of a piano teacher. Miss Briggs was hunched under the dryer reading a confession magazine with the front cover folded back, and Abby was sweeping up the hair clippings that lay around the chairs into a feathery pile.
Mary Ellen walked in and came right to the point.
“Erica has a devil in her.”
“Lord-a-mighty!” cried Abby, nearly dropping the broom. “What makes you think so?”
And now I turned the light on my dark voices, and told her everything, all my rituals from beginning to end, spewing them out like a bitter and humiliating confession. White horses and spilled salt and words that went cold on my tongue. The number of steps to the bedroom door and the long leap in the dark.
Abby listened gravely, glancing now and then at Miss Briggs, who sat insulated by the hot rushing air like a silent and skinny warrior.
“Well,” she said at last. “Well, well. A devil. Yes, indeed.”
She did not seem to understand what we wanted of her, so Mary Ellen explained.
“We came to you because we thought you could call him out.”
“Ah,” said Abby, as calmly as if we’d asked her the time of day. “Well, I don’t know the words for it. Go get that little black book over by the telephone.”
Mary Ellen brought the book and Abby thumbed through it slowly. At last her finger paused on a page.
“Here are the words for the exorcising of the devil.”
She peered over her glasses, first at Mary Ellen and then at me. “A matter not to be taken lightly.”
“No, of course not,” I said, feeling myself in the presence of a great physician who would now perform a miraculous cure.
“If you’re absolutely certain it’s the devil, we ought to have the priest do this.”
“I’d rather you did it, Abby.”
Abby looked very pleased.
“Well then, you two stand behind that table.”
Suddenly inspired, she went to the cupboard and took out the reliquary.
“There’s nothing holier than the hucklebone of a saint.”
She set it in the middle of the dressing table so that the mirror caught it from behind. Then she pushed Mary Ellen and me together, joining our hands on the relic as for a marriage, and laying the book open before her, she began to read in a loud voice.
I exorcise, thee, most vile spirit, the very embodiment of our enemy, the entire specter, the whole legion, in the name of Jesus Christ, to get out and flee from this creature of God. He himself commands thee, who has ordered thee cast down from the heights of heaven to the depths of the earth. He commands thee, He who commands the sea, the winds, and the tempests. Hear, therefore and fear, O Satan, enemy of the faith, foe to the human race, producer of death, thief of life, destroyer of justice, root of evils, kindler of vices, procurer of sorrows. Why dost thou stand and resist, when thou knowest that Christ the Lord will destroy thy strength?
Under my grasp, the hucklebone warmed. It had acquired for me a life of its own wholly different from its first life, just as it was Abby who read, and yet not Abby, but someone much older. Ancient, even. Not for Abby the beauty operator would the spirit of darkness depart, but Abby the magician’s daughter, daughter of Eve, descendant of saint-seekers and wanderers of holy places.
Her voice was rolling like thunder as she turned the page:
Now therefore depart. Depart, thou seducer. He expels thee, from whose eye nothing is secret. He expels thee to whose power all things are subject. He excludes thee, who has prepared for thee and thy angels everlasting hell; out of whose mouth the sharp sword will go, He who shall come to judge the quick and the dead and the world by fire.
“Too hot! Too hot!” shouted a voice, and we all yelled, and I thought I saw the devil in the mirror and shouted to Abby, but then he shriveled into Miss Briggs making signs that she wanted to come out, forgetting, as the deaf do, that others can hear.
There was a snapping of hairpins as Abby pushed the dryer back and Miss Briggs emerged, as dazed as if she had awakened from a long sleep. Her hair lay against her scalp in crusted waves like cake frosting.
“What a funny color,” observed Mary Ellen. “I believe your hair’s darker than it was.”
Miss Briggs sat down at the mirror and Abby took off the net and shook the pins loose. Nobody said a word for several minutes. Then Miss Briggs spoke up.
“It looks green,” she whispered hoarsely. “Does it look green to you?”
Abby bent low for closer inspection, but you could have answered her just as well from across the room.
“It does have a sort of greenish cast. Sometimes a person can be allergic to the cream rinse.”
“I never was before,” said Miss Briggs, her face working.
Abby shook her head.
“I don’t think a light rinse will cover it. You wouldn’t want anything stronger than a rinse, would you?”
“Oh my, no. Just something to cover up the green.”
“I could make it darker. Black, for example.”
“Black!”
“It’s better than green.”
The silence prickled with voices. Why, Edith Briggs, what have you done to yourself? Would you believe it, running after the young men at her age?
Abby stuffed some change into my hand.
“Run downstairs and get two teas and some honey rolls.”
Coming back, we met Miss Briggs talking to herself on the stairs with her hair hanging black around her face in big rollers, like spaniel ears. Abby was nowhere in sight.
When I got home, a palpable emptiness had invaded the house. Out of the dining room, with a rustling like blown curtains, stepped Oskar. He had been sitting alone in the falling light.
“They’re all out looking for your grandmother,” he said brokenly. “She’s run away. Slipped out of the house while your ma was hanging up clothes.”
“She couldn’t have got very far,” I said. “She has no money.”
“No. But she’s a strong woman.”
She was found about five blocks from the house, headed, she believed, for the bus station. It had started to rain and the drops glistened on her big sealskin coat and her white hair. Mother hurried her upstairs and I heard the commotion—bath water running and heaters being turned on—that always arose when I came home from school with wet feet.
“She’ll catch cold, you wait and see,” said Oskar, sorrowfully.
She could not go outside now but lay in her bed, swathed in sweaters, while the radiators pounded in her room and the lights burned all night long. On the fourth day after her flight she decided to get up. She seemed to have gathered strength from her illness instead of losing it.
“I’ll take her to market with me on Saturday,” suggested my father. “Better to take her out than to have her run off again.”
Market days were minor feast-days in our family. We bought honey and vegetables to last us for the week and sometimes such curiosities as acorn pipes and peacock feathers. Oskar and I would hold mock duels with our feathers all week till they broke.
It was unseasonably brisk for May. The egg-seller was warming her feet at a tiny stove and the honey-vendor had incarcerated himself in a little hut with a plastic window, behind which he waited as if for you to confess your sins. Grandmother walked among flats of pansies and beamed. For the first time that I could remember, she did not notice the cold.
She did not get up for church on Sunday, but lay whispering quietly in bed, unaware even of the presence of the doctor, whose attentions would have been a welcome diversion in her hardier days.
“For pneumonia at her age, there’s not much hope. You should take her to the hospital all the same; the oxygen facilities there will prolong her life a little.”
“I want to have no regrets,” said my mother. “It’s so dreadful to have regrets afterward.”
My grandmother was put into a private room with nurses round the clock and a little cot near her bed for my mother, who told us how awful it would be to wake up at such a time and not know anybody.
But on Tuesday she was dead.
My mother came home from the hospital, her eyes ringed with blue. Neighbors brought in food, and casseroles—mostly chicken—began to accumulate in the kitchen. Suddenly plans for the funeral absorbed her with a thousand tedious details which ramified and consumed her grief. When Oskar stopped by our house that evening, she ran up to him, eager and awkward, like a little girl.
“I don’t know how I’m going to manage. Oskar, if you’d only stay. You could sleep on the sofa.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to put me in Grandmother’s room? I’d be out of the way.”
My mother looked flustered.
“Do you think you’d be comfortable in there?”
I knew from her voice that she thought nobody could ever be comfortable there now.
“Well, well, we’ll see,” said Oskar.
His valise in the middle of the floor announced his decision. Keeping a wary eye on the open door, my mother stripped the bed with a studied casualness. Never had I heard her move so quietly, as if she were afraid of awakening the air itself. Suddenly the door slammed and she let out a shriek of terror.
Oskar rushed in.
“Let me do it,” he said.
And I heard him plumping the pillows and humming tenderly to himself, straightening the bed, it seemed, for the woman who had recently left it.
Darkness fell so gently that nobody remembered to turn the lights on. We did not sit down for supper, but picked at the casseroles spread out in the kitchen as for a church potluck. Oskar and my father, balancing paper plates on their knees, sat in the sun parlor, remembering death.
First Oskar remembered that the only extant photograph of his grandfather showed him in his coffin because Aunt Betty argued that a picture of him dead was better than no picture at all, and if you had the eyeballs touched in you could imagine him sitting in a first-class railway carriage.
Then my father remembered the funeral of a young girl he attended during a diphtheria epidemic, in which the mourners stood across the street and the coffin was tipped forward at the window by the girl’s mother at a signal from the minister, who shouted his sermon from the front porch within hearing of both parties.
And then, in low voices, like children after the lights have been put down, they mused on the motions of the body after death. How hair and nails continue to grow and how the dead sit up in the furnace and their bones crack.
“You won’t catch me being cremated,” said Oskar. “When I’m down, I want to stay down.”
At ten o’clock my father started the movement to bed. Last one up will be the first one dead—
I bit my tongue, remembering my newly won freedom, waited till the others had gone on ahead and then ascended the stairs. In my room I undressed quickly and started to jump into bed—
There is no one under the bed who will grab your feet.
I walked to the edge of the bed with slow and measured stride. Let the hands come if they dare. The body snatchers.
And then my mother’s voice called out,
“Oskar, are you sure you won’t be afraid in there?”
“Afraid?” His voice was filled with mild amazement. “Why should I be afraid? I loved the woman!”
His door closed, but I heard him moving around, and a light under the crack spilled faintly into the hall. Presently he opened the door. The radiators were pounding. Mother had turned up the heat for Grandmother.
I got out of bed and stood in the doorway of my room and saw him, isolated in a little shell of light, as if I were looking at him through a mailing tube. He was sitting at the dressing table where Grandmother ate her breakfast, and he was writing calmly and steadily. I decided for no reason that he was writing a poem. On the back of a placemat, perhaps, or a menu, the surfaces which he preferred to write on above all else.
He did not see me. His back was turned and the light touched the thin places in his waistcoat with a soft shine. His habit of keeping his shoes on until the moment he stepped into bed gave him an air of expectancy at this hour; he would arise soon and go out for a visit, or perhaps someone was coming to visit him. Suddenly I believed that if he turned out his light, every light in the world would go out. Then there would be no more left of him than the hucklebone of a saint.
When the sun came up, his light disappeared. I was awakened by the sound of shoes dropping, and I dozed intermittently until I heard him shuffling quietly downstairs. There was a brief clatter in the kitchen and then the smell of coffee. I pulled on my clothes and went after him, trying to remember if my grandmother was already dead, if they had buried her yet, or if they would bury her today, but the only person I could find was Oskar. He poured me half a cup of coffee and filled the other half with milk.
“Do you want to take a little walk to the park?” he suggested. “Before anyone else gets up?”
We walked slowly past the teeter-totters and sat down in the swing, though the seats were wet with dew. My uncle glided back and forth, trying to keep his swing even with mine, swinging without a word, as though the morning had turned him young again and he knew no more what had happened to Grandmother than I did.