7191 (23 page)

*

Strong ocean winds, lashing rains, and an extreme drop in temperature. The monsoon has come. With the suddenness and force of an avenging god. In minutes, the streets of Benares are flooded. The river is forced hundreds of yards beyond its banks. I hear that some of the villages to the south have become mudholes in the space of a day. There is no traffic, trucks, carts, cows, or people, as the roads are impassable …

*

Barclay’s Bank has received a wire from their correspondent in New York. It seems my credit cards are not sufficient identification to satisfy my Pittsburgh bank. Forms will have to be filled. Signatures compared. A delay of at least a week… All is lost…

*

The monsoon is in full flood. Every day it rains and rains and rains. The Ganges covers the land to each horizon in a vast, swirling grey-ness. Treetops protrude from the water, and now and then the bloated carcass of a cow or a human corpse is carried away across my vision…

*

All over the floods are spreading across the land. Men, women, and children labour to stem the water’s fury, but cannot. I wonder about my village and think about Amdhu and Rama and the children and how it is with them …

The flood control officer attached to the Rescue Commission in the third sector told me today that most of the villages to the south are under water. He said that all India is suffering severely and that it’s one of the worst monsoons in memory…

The flood tide has retreated, leaving the land dark and loamy with death and decay. Good for planting. But where are the people?

Arriving at my village, I see it all but deserted, and there are no dwellings left. It’s as though a huge trowel had smoothed the land…

I find Jafar Ali and his two boys trudging among the muddy runnels. He tells me they were away when the water came. He also tells me that Aunt Kastori is somewhere about but will say no more. He seems dumbstruck …

The settlement stretches along the left bank of the river. Water still. Intense sun.

A few bodies of drowned dead are laid out in beautiful symmetry along the base of the rocky piles. Aunt Kastori and I forage about for Pachali faces, but terribly bloated features make it difficult to recognize Amdhu, Rama, Prana, Shira, Arun, the twins, Uncle Chupar, Shakur…

Aunt Kastori joins another family in their search as well as ours. They are friends from a neighbouring village. Even in her grief, Aunt Kastori cannot help being what she is - a busybody. She had been visiting neighbours on high ground when the flood tides swept across the village, taking people, dogs, cows, houses, everything. Her busybody ways saved her life…

I secretly wish not to find any members of my family here among the rescued dead. I prefer to think of them now as part of the river, which Sesh once told me contains chemical properties that can dissolve a human body in less than a day, flesh, hair, and bones …

We find Prana’s body. Bleached. Puffed. Her belly distended as though she had eaten a great meal…

First Audrey Rose. Now Prana …

Aunt Kastori wails her grief, which will be shortlived, as Indians do not brood over death. I shed no tears. I find I can look upon Prana’s death and no longer feel the need to cry, which was not true of Audrey Rose’s death.

The Ghats are working at full tilt day and night…

The sweetly acrid smoke infiltrates every pore of Benares’ ancient skin. Long lines of carts, rickshaws, and bamboo stretchers exceed the city’s limits as families progress in sluggish clusters towards the steps leading down to the sacred river. Since death is defiling, all are anxious to cremate their corpses quickly so that the spirits of the dead may be purified.

There is bargaining and bribery going on with the police, who keep the lines in order. Some of the wealthier families are escorted to the front of the line …

I wait my turn, along with Aunt Kastori and the slight linen-clad form lying across the seat of the rickshaw wallah I hired…

Flowers in water-filled vases cover the floor of our rickshaw. Freshly cut this morning, they are beginning to wilt in the unsparing humidity…

Aunt Kastori carries the ceremonial tray of pindas …

Although I am neither family nor blood relation, I will light the cremation fire, but that is as far as I will go. I will not remain for the offering of the pindas, nor will I perform the annual ceremony for the spirits of Prana or her family. I am neither worthy nor prepared for that responsibility.

In the midst of all this death I cannot keep my mind from dwelling on life. Not life past or life future, but life present - full, sweet, beautiful, bursting with promise…

In the presence of Prana’s ruined beauty, I experience no enlightenment. I sense no lesson to be learned from her wasted and emaciated body or from the final anguish of her cruel death. I can foresee no consequence of good being derived from all of the terrible suffering I have witnessed…

I do not understand any of it…

Standing now within sight of the Ghats, watching the bodies burn, I know that these steps I take to the river will be my last, for in the morning I shall depart this city, never to return …

I know not in what direction I will go, or why…

I am hopelessly lost…

*

Janice’s eyes blurred with strain and emotion as she raised them from the small, difficult pencil scratchings of Hoover’s diary and glanced at her wristwatch. Four fifteen. There was much left to read, but she would have to stop now and think about waking Ivy. The limousine would be arriving in an hour.

After replacing the diary on the upper shelf of the hall closet, she went to the kitchen to prepare breakfast.

Watching over the witch’s cauldron of bubbling oats, Janice’s mind reeled with a dizzying jumble of thoughts. While she understood only some of what she’d read, the sheer passion of Hoover’s words had made a profound and powerful impression on her.

All at once Janice felt herself in the grip of nausea, her body shuddering uncontrollably in huge, lumbering waves. She shut her eyes and tried to will it to stop, even tried to find humour in her own pathetic weakness, but she was finally forced to rush upstairs to the bathroom to vomit. Afterwards, she felt better.

Ivy was surprised to be leaving the house in the dark, but was so tired and feverish she hardly questioned it. She allowed the chauffeur to bundle her up in robes and almost immediately fell asleep.

Dominick, too, was slightly mystified at the early departure and asked Janice if they were joining Mr Templeton.

‘Yes,’ Janice replied. ‘Look after our mail.’

The rain had slackened to a fine drizzle. A silvery luminescence between a stream of dark and rolling clouds above their heads. Autumn leaves, sodden, had collected at the kerbside, and the wind blew bitingly off the Hudson River, lashing their faces with the sting of winter.

It was five twenty-six when the limousine pulled away from the building and plunged smoothly ahead into the morning mist.

Sound-Side Cottages were not, after all, designed for winter use. Situated as they were on an unsheltered knoll of land fronting the storm-swept Sound, their flimsy, clapboard facades creaked and groaned under the onslaught of the wintry gale. Lacking insulation of any kind, the sievelike walls admitted icy draughts of wind and moisture.

Janice and Ivy sat by day directly in front of the fireplace, bundled up in electric blankets, reading books, and feeding logs onto the sputtering fire. The first vestiges of the storm had greeted their arrival nearly a week before, starting with a gentle rain and steadily burgeoning into a full-fledged nor’wester, bringing snow, wind, and driving sleet in continual cycles.

They would have moved out after the first day (there was a snug inn just outside town) had not Mr Stuart shrewdly insisted on the full two weeks’ rent up front.

Janice had come to Westport to think - to sort out her alarms and confusions and attempt to tidy her mind - but now, a week later, she was in as great a state of mental upheaval as when she had left New York. Hoover’s diary, that simple, deeply felt chronicle of death and despair, had only served to reinforce his sincerity, and validate his dark assertions. ‘… the soul of Audrey Rose … will keep pushing Ivy back to the source of the problem; she’ll be trying to get back to that moment and will be leading Ivy into dangers as tormenting and destructive as the fire that took Audrey’s life.’ His words, like portents flung ahead, clung like amulets before her eyes.

Ivy’s temperature had returned to normal soon after their arrival, and her hands, which Janice scrupulously medicated and bandaged each morning and evening, were beginning to heal. Thus far she had been spared the ordeal of the nightmares, which, to Janice, was a mixed blessing since this only confirmed Elliot Hoover’s theory of their origin.

Possibly the biggest shock was Bill’s reaction when she called him that first morning. He accepted each of her bombshells calmly and quietly, making no real protest, but probing her on every detail of her evening with Elliot Hoover: what he did upon entering, how long it took for him to quiet Ivy, what he said to Janice afterwards, how long he remained, and what his parting words were. He thought her decision to flee to Westport was a good one; was glad they hadn’t come to Hawaii since it was hot, sticky and dull; told her to stay put until he arrived, which would probably be just after the weekend as he was cutting out the trip to Seattle, and screw Pel.

Monday, the day before Bill was to arrive, the storm drifted out to sea and, like a curtain being drawn across a child’s painting, disclosed a big, yellow, make-believe sun in a sky of azure blue.

The morning was a special gift for Ivy.

As they trudged along the water line, gingerly sidestepping the larger breakers, Janice rejoiced to see a faint tint of pink return to Ivy’s pale cheeks and hoped her appetite would return as well. They walked barefoot down miles of beach, seeking treasure given up by the sea during the storm. The booty presented itself to them in a continual line at the water’s edge, like a long counter of goods at the dime store. Shells, crustaceans, rocks, pebbles, sea plants, bits of driftwood, punctuated by larger set pieces - cruciforms of tree limbs, massive pilings, acres of bubbly seaweed - a variety of manufactured oddments: sea-weathered boards, bricks, and sundry bottles and rusted cans, their labels and messages obscured by tides and time.

‘Look, Mommy!’ Ivy called. ‘It’s dead!’

Janice, who had been lagging some distance behind, now approached to find her daughter squatting at the water’s edge over a large dead fish. Huge bites had reduced its flesh to the skeleton. A small shell had found a home in its eye socket.

‘Come away from it,’ Janice gently ordered and, taking Ivy’s hand, quickly led her past the mutilated carcass.

‘It looked so - dead,’ Ivy said, incredulous.

‘Dead is dead,’ Janice lightly replied.

‘Is that how people look when they die?’

‘People look like people, not like fish.’

‘I mean, all stiff and - broken?’

‘Sometimes. If the death is violent.’

‘Like in a car accident?’

Janice felt her heart leap.

‘Yes,’ she replied, her voice faltering slightly. ‘Like in a car accident.’

‘It’s awful dying like that.’

Janice said nothing.

‘Sometimes I have dreams about it,’ continued Ivy.

Janice bit her lip. Then: ‘What kind of dreams?’

‘Oh. Dying dreams.’

‘In a car accident?’

‘Sometimes. Sometimes I dream I’m dying on my bed. And everybody’s standing around me and crying. Bettina says the living suffer more than the dead. Her mother still suffers.’

‘Do you have these dreams a lot?’

‘No. Just sometimes.’

They walked a bit in silence.

‘Will you mind very much?’ Ivy asked wistfully.

‘Mind?’

‘Dying.’

‘Yes.’ Janice’s voice was heavy, stark. ‘I’ll mind very much.’

‘I suppose I will, too,’ Ivy said simply. ‘Especially if it’s in a terrible car accident.’

The conversation ended, leaving Janice to battle the rattling crash of the breakers with her own pounding heart.

There could be no doubt.

No doubt at ‘all.

Audrey Rose’s terrors were beginning to leak into Ivy’s waking thoughts.

For a week, her daughter had been free of nightmares…

The week away from Hoover…

Audrey Rose sensed her father’s presence… - ‘Wanting! Needing! Crying out for my help! For my help!’

His proximity alerted Audrey Rose, brought on the cruelly punishing nightmares …

Away from Hoover there would be no nightmares…

She must do everything in her power to keep Elliot Hoover away from her child…

Somehow, she must think hard, and find a way to keep them

apart … for ever—

*

On their return to the cottage they passed a group of uniformed girls about Ivy’s age, sifting and sorting among the sea forms. A nature study class, Janice surmised, private, probably parochial, and very expensive. A middle-aged woman, not a nun, was seated nearby on a camp chair, attending her brood. There was an exchange of smiles between Janice and the woman as each paid tribute to the glorious morning, while Ivy squatted among the girls and became part of the class.

The scene was idyllic, restful, secure, an obvious and perfect answer.

‘No!’

Why not?’

‘No discussion, Janice, I’m not buying—’

‘Why not?’

I’m not going to let this guy break up my family, that’s why not.’

Bill had rented a car at the airport and had driven directly to Westport, arriving just after 10 p.m. With Ivy safely asleep, they stood on a tuft of knoll a few paces away from the cottage, within sight of the moon-speckled waters of the Sound.

‘I happen to like our life the way it is,’ Bill continued hotly. ‘All of us together under the same roof. I’m surprised to hear you suggest such a nutty idea. Correction: I’m not that surprised. You’re really sold on this guy.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You let him in, didn’t you? You let him help you - wash your wounds, take care of things, isn’t that what you told me?’