A Convergence Of Birds (8 page)

In fact, Oldcorne had compared the plot to a pilgrimage made by Louis XI of France, in the course of which the plague erupted twice, wiping out most of his retainers the first time and killing Louis himself the next. His enemies came through unscathed. So much, Oldcorne said, for excursions organized by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. Someone flinched at the second syllable in Clairvaux, but no one spoke. “The principal thing,” Father Oldcorne had said, “was what the expedition was for and how it was conducted. Many failures are honorable, and can only be judged by the moral good they bring about.” Father Oldcorne still does not know what Catesby was trying to do. “It is between him and his God. Of course, I am against all reckless violence, sir.” How easily, though, his words could be twisted into treason and treachery; between the inability to reveal what was said in confession and a general ignorance of the plot’s aims, all priests were both unable to defend themselves and guilty to begin with.

To swell the general clamor, Mary Habington has her servants begin cleaning the household silver, tons of it, all dun and gray from disuse, and suddenly Sir Henry feels at home in the presence of a familiar ritual, as if in readiness for some social event, a banquet, say, and his mind saunters away from his reasons for being here and starts to dream of banquets, balls, near-orgies he himself has sponsored (they watch one another talk and listen to one another eat). The acrid tang of silver polish rises upstairs to the nostrils of Father Garnet, gagging and trying not to cough. He has been here since January 21. It is now Monday, January 27; it feels like years since Monteagle revealed the plot. He thinks he is going to faint as someone outside begins to hammer and grind. Surely this will be the ultimate discovery. He has no idea of what has happened to John Owen and Ralph Ashley, and he wonders if Anne has stayed on at Hindlip, convinces himself she has not. If not her, then, who has been sustaining them with warm broth sent through a long reed coming through the chimney? Was it not she who plied them with caudle, a food for invalids, succulent and sharp? Marmalade and candy they have provided for themselves, but that is all, and with the house in a state of perpetual siege from within there has been no chance of anyone’s doing better. Their past week has been an elegy to egg and bacon, the aroma now overpowered by the reek of silver polish, the high acid content rising above everything else to tickle and scald the noses of those nearest.

“Well,” says Garnet to Oldcorne, “shall we? I am choking, Edward.”

“If we do, Henry, there will be no turning back. You well know how they proceed.”

“Eternity in a byre,” says Father Garnet. “Is this a perpetual penalty or have we earned our keep?”

“Our keep has always been free.”

“Ita vero. Do we brave them, then?”

“Another day?”

“My gorge rises at the thought.”

“Mine too. But shall we stay?”

“Shall we go out together?”

“To bathe and eat,” Garnet echoes. Against their will, they take deep breaths and then have trouble uncoiling limbs. Then they impede each other, slithering out of that noxious narrow cupboard, Garnet coming out headfirst, his grievously swollen legs dragging behind him. He is an iguana, that ungainly. Oldcorne follows and, for a moment, they lie side by side, the old position, in the open, gasping and weeping tears of supreme effort mingled with self-disgust. “Were you ever in the one at Sawston,” Garnet whispers. “I was,” comes answer. “I know why you ask. There is an earth closet.”

“Just so,” says Henry Garnet, feeling like an incontinent schoolboy who has messed his pants during Latin grammar and will soon be thrashed, given a good hiding (he winces) once he has been scrubbed. “With one of those close-stools,” he murmurs, only inches from the stone floor, “we could have endured another three months. If we had only been able to get outside for an hour, we could have set ourselves up in there for life, with a folding altar and everything.” He feels cheated: A brilliant idea has died at the hands of crass matter. “Oh to stand,” he sighs.

“Or to stretch,” Oldcorne adds, rising to kneel.

They both have a look of stunned arthritics, unshaven and wan and shattered. They are the palest priests in or near Worcester, not as pale as Guido Fawkes, but victims of stilled blood.

“Ho,” says Sir Henry, “who are these stinking fellows?”

The team of poursuivants, briefly dipping face into the hole, recoil, heaving and gurgling, and then move away from the two priests, who stand unsteadily in barbaric isolation. Anne Vaux, horrified and weeping, keeps her distance, marveling that a mere week can reduce a human to such an abominable pass. Sir Henry, sensing the situation requires a summary comment, says, “They have been undone by those customs of nature which must of necessity be attended to. Those little vital commoners of the body keep us all in slavery to them, requiring that we absterge the podex, ladies and gentlemen. These wretched prelates have squatted in there with the devil himself and he has paid them back. Who do we have, then? Do you have names or do you just make noises? Are you well enough to answer? Shall we wash you?” Anne Vaux volunteers, but it is a motley crew of Hargreaves and some six searchers holding their noses who escort the two priests to an alcove on the ground floor, to which water can be brought, and clouts that can be thrown away as infested, infected loathsomes. The water-bringing servants squeal in horror and hasten to wash their own hands and faces. Anne Vaux knows now that the rationale of the hiding place has another side she has never thought of. It was folly to feed these men at all or to succor them with liquid. A weeklong sleep, she decides, next time, like that—what is it, the polar bear in somebody’s play, when I was a civilized woman living a social life? Sub cardine glacialis ursae—usually she would ask Father Garnet and he would know, but not today. What does it mean? The rising of the ice? Ah, now I remember, ‘tis the snowy Bear! Her mind has eased itself a little, unable to hear any more about customs of nature, which, to be honest about it, nauseate her at the best of times, not per se but because the facilities impress her as primitive and gross; wood-ash and earth shoveled on the mire of the day. Pico, she recalls, says we stand in it to clutch at heaven. Pico was right. Now they are cleaner, Sir Henry is urging them along, he wants them in Worcester, but he seems oddly benign in his treatment of them. Perhaps he likes priests.

Sir Henry Bromley can hardly believe his luck, but he begins to lose faith in it when he questions Father Garnet. Hall, alias Father Oldcorne, he has no trouble identifying: A man with only one alias has no hypocrites among his friends, but someone such as Garnet, alias at least half a dozen other men, has been brilliantly dispersed and camouflaged. Certainly this emaciated, worn, shuddering person is not Mister Perkins, nor is he any kind of whoremaster or manual laborer (Bromley examines his almost silky palms).

“Are you a priest, sir?”

“I cannot lie before God.”

“Well?”

“I am a colleague of this gentleman.”

“Have you been rash enough ever to submit to a name, a single name?”

Father Garnet identifies himself in a listless monotone; Anne, eavesdropping behind a door, has never heard him sound so depleted, so dreary. Now she begins to understand the impact of month after month of hiding in abysmal quarters unfit for animals. She would like to start over and install him from the first in a luxurious apartment like the one they envisioned him having in Rome: a room full of sundials sheathed in gold satin. How reckless of me, she thinks. Now they know who he is, and what: Quite a catch. They are bound to let him go as guiltless. Look what brought him to this. She does a dry sob, blaming herself for making of him a constant fugitive.

Joseph Cornell

UNTITLED {CUTOUT COCKATOO}

c. 1954-55

16.75 x 11.125 x 4.375

box construction: wood box with glass pane containing wood bird on wood perch, painted reproductions, and plastic hair brush.

Siri Hustvedt

1.

The adult appeared parenthetical

Through the small double pane

And the frost’s ragged flowering.

Behind it, in a pharmaceutical vial, are

A violet feather and three blue beads.

They secure the map of constellations:

A peephole to our cosmology

Where the Medici princess bathes in bubbles

That move nowhere but stay afloat forever

Like marble.

2.

She is always on point—

To pirouette without turning, to suggest the movement only

At the entrance of the Hotel

Where the driver covers her with the stiff furs of legend

And the stellar showers are caught in mid-flight,

Like fastened sequins

On a yellow newspaper that reads into the corners

Behind an inert mechanical bird,

In a cell,

Lit by Perseus.

3.

The veins of the heavens are traced with seventy-nine reflected lines

From point to point,

From bloodless Andromeda

Preserved in the map like a demonstrative embryo

That floats, but never grows,

Conceived from the needles and short threads of the sewing basket

To the blues of an undying Swan Lake

Sunk in a damaged mirror,

Under chipped plaster like the frailty of a grandmother’s Doll house,

Kept for all these years.

4.

The doll stands in a forest

In a dress

The color of tea stains,

With red in her cheeks, and lashes

On eyes that don’t close—

Speckled with white

In an enamel snow storm that doesn’t move her hair

But takes place undercover, in our stories,

Lying on the night table under a ruffled lamp shade

In a windowless place.

5.

Twined and entwined,

One of a pair in the charm of identical children,

Split in the spell of minutiae.

The photographed faces behind blue glass

Multiplied, so the sisters were mirrors

Of genetic coupling

(Recorded in the symmetry of Caelum’s four stars).

The two are discovered in an embrace without breath,

One small pair of white arms

Doubled in the other.

6.

It is going backwards, isn’t it?

Finding the amniotic night sprinkled

With the objects of later years,

Out of chronology or any breeze that might disturb

A sleeping princess, unseen in the rose castle.

She is not restless in her sleep,

But sleeps in the chilled air of the museum

Like a disembodied symptom,

Written down and recorded for future illnesses

And other cures.

7.

Glued to the globe’s peeled surface

Is a railway ticket.

Someone was traveling to Milan, a child,

Now missing in a pink hotel

Where confetti dots the vacuum.

We have closed ourselves in here,

With a floor and ceiling to things,

But we have names for all the remnants of these boxed dreams,

Unlike the fetus who sleeps and wakes in the unlit reticule

Of two hearts.

8.

We have gotten our things together

Before the trip,

A small hoard of connected points

To answer the nebula

That cannot be made out tonight

Or any other night.

We have chosen our clusters

And have loved them like the letters and spoons,

Thimbles and little pieces of twine

Forgotten in the beloved’s desk.

9.

They whisper,

Like those who see the dead in the same room:

Outlining the universe in a coffin.

It is strange to think that infinity has six sides.

Heaven is the cage of the cosmos,

Reduced to the minute and the placid,

Our reticulum visible in January,

Ten tiny lights on an oak lid,

Shining like glass where the world sleeps

In a cat’s-eye.

Joseph Cornell

FORGOTTEN GAME

c. 1949

53.3 x 39.4 x 10.2 cm.

painted, glazed, wooden box for a kinetic construction of wood, paint, paper rings, paper birds, cracked pane of glass, bells and rubber ball.

Robert Coover

THE GRAND HOTEL NIGHT VOYAGE

The Grand Hotel Night Voyage, described in its brochure as “a soaring tower of dreams and visions for transient romantics with repressed desires and eventless lives,” is the archetypal grand hotel, first of its kind and said to be the progenitor of all others. Originally designed as a colorful hot air balloon (thus its name), it acquired its pagodalike tower—at the time still under construction—as a consequence of an unexpected descent, although the lobby, with its caged tropical birds, its musical fountain, and its bright yellow walls, lined with mirrors, movie posters, and paintings of dancers and acrobats, retains still some of the lost balloon’s original charm and gaiety. Indeed, this chance encounter of balloon and tower, so like that of hotel guests in, say, the elevator or common restrooms or the hair salon, not only brought the Grand Hotel Night Voyage into existence, but made fortuitous juxtaposition a standard requirement for grand hotel classification thereafter.

Though the lobby is ever aglitter with its myriad reflections, bright paint, and exotic plumage, however, there appears at checkin time, drifting in from stairwells, elevator shafts, and inner passages, a somber blue haze, faintly redolent of fresh cut paper and silver nitrate, and of grass made fragrant by evening dew: a reminder to visitors that the hotel, as its name suggests, is not for lighthearted day-trippers or busloads of convivial tourists, but for dedicated and solitary explorers of the night. There are no double beds in the Grand Hotel Night Voyage. Many of the rooms have no walls, it’s true; or, better said, none of the rooms have walls all the time; but they do not communicate with one another. One may well meet fellow travelers in the night’s migrations (one speaks of this not as a passing by but a passing through), but they will not necessarily be residents of the same hotel. For those who are regulars here, as are most, it is upon entering (or being entered by) this curling blue mist, not unlike the gas that once lifted the hot air balloon skyward, that one begins to feel at home.