All Those Vanished Engines (11 page)

Despite years of applications, the author had been denied the necessary permits to excavate the great Leviathan. To him this proved the truth of his account. For my part, I admired the way a monomaniacal and paranoid idea could decay with age until it was itself an artifact, encrusted and frozen with nostalgia. And I had another, more personal source of interest in the story, because my mother's grandfather had been present at the actual battle and had given lectures about it afterward. In the 1880s he had been awarded the Cross of Southern Honor by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. I liked to imagine that everything he told those ladies in their parlors was factually incorrect.

Of course, as much as anything, this same idea had grown into the entire museum project, a seed that germinated like a mutant Damsel's Rocket in the humid dirt outside the boiler house. I looked over toward the line of new saplings that had been dug into the riverbank there. Someone was hovering at the end of the bridge, and I smiled. She came up to me. “You know,” she said immediately, “he's still alive.”

“Who is?”

“The guy in your story. His name is Roy Whitney. He's not blind, though.”

She mentioned the Commons, which was the nursing home where my mother had died, the basis for the one in my text. Following a sequence that had begun with her grandfather, I had been thinking about her maybe thirty seconds before, as I examined the water flowing underneath my feet. I had imagined her here. She took pleasure in what she thought of as her children's accomplishments. Aphasia would not have hindered her ability to compliment me. Of course my father had been too frail to attend.

“He's had a stroke,” she said. “But he can still talk. Sort of, anyway. A little.”

I stood up straight, then turned to look at her. She was a gray-haired woman in her early fifties, with gold-rimmed glasses and a pleasant, open, pretty face. Her eyebrows had been darkened artificially. I'm no judge of these things, but I thought she was wearing fashionable clothes, a burgundy suede vest with a fawn-colored lining, a gold and citrine necklace and earrings, black jeans, and boots. Fleetingly—cruelly, I suppose—I wondered if she imagined herself as a real person or else just a device in an invented world, designed and manufactured to transmit information. But did we really need all this detail? I smiled at her, and not knowing what was funny she smiled also. It was a lovely evening, and she was holding a glass of wine.

Stephen Vitiello, an elegant figure dressed in black, stalked along the concrete riverbank under the trees, surrounded by a knot of curators and fans. The woman turned to look where I was looking. Maybe she knew what side her bread was buttered on. Maybe she recognized an opportunity to expand her existence into the larger context. Or else maybe she was happy to be standing on the bridge with me, listening to the noises from the boiler house.

“How do you know?”

She lowered her chin. “He's my boyfriend's uncle,” she told me.

I've heard that this is sometimes a complicated way of flirting, to mention your boyfriend right off the bat. Not always, though. We stood side by side. “What's your name?”

“Constance,” she said, which was a surprise. She drank her wine and looked up at me. “It's not why I came. I saw you'd be here in the newspaper. I don't give a shit about contemporary art,” she confided shyly.

What was her secret process? I let her speak: “I just wanted to mention that I saw you at your mother's funeral. I was sitting at the back. And I just wanted to say that your mother was my inspiration—no. She always said the problem with phrases like that, phrases you've heard before, was their lack of precision. You're somewhere in between the other times you've heard it and right now. Your mother—we thought she was so very strange, with those sandals and long skirts, and her endless array of handmade necklaces from—you know—Afghanistan or Pakistan. She sat in her office like a migrating bird that had made a wrong turn.”

I didn't want to hear any of this. I looked up at the sky—look a plane! A machine in the middle of the air. It only looks like a bird.

“She was the first person who made me understand that my life didn't have to be so fucked up, that I could make choices, and it mattered if they were good or bad. After my son was born I was looking through my old Dante notes for her class—you know how Virgil can take Dante through hell, but couldn't take him up to Paradise? That was for Beatrice, someone from Dante's real life, sort of an imaginary combination of a mother and a lover. But there's nothing creepy about it. She leads him up where he can see the whole machine that moves the sun and stars, powered by God's love. That's the end of the poem. So I'm looking at my notes and I see that ten, fifteen years before I'd written in the margin, ‘Mrs. Park is my Beatrice.'”

She was shame-faced as she admitted this, which I appreciated. In the months since my mother died I had heard a number of these stories, all of which had sounded, like this one, rehearsed. I looked down at the water. “Why were you looking through your notes after your son was born?”

She looked puzzled, and then remembered how she started. “No, it was when he was first diagnosed. I went back and read her books on autism, about your sister. That was so amazing at the memorial, when Elly spoke.”

The service had taken place in Thompson Chapel on the Williams College campus. I had been dreading it. And in fact it had begun badly: remarks from a math professor praising my mother's memory, how she could recite pages of poetry by heart, how he had heard her, for example, rattle through Homer's catalog of the ships in Book Two of the
Iliad.
No one in the audience, he seemed to imply, could hope to duplicate this feat. But an hour later, speaking last, Elly concluded with an impromptu roster of my mother's cats, including the precise dates of ownership, short physical descriptions, lists of character traits, and causes of eventual demise—several dozen animals in all, a catalog of the cats, ending with Magnus (“a long-haired calico, just like two of my mother's favorites, who is still alive!”). On a bad day Elly's memory was better than my mother's.

“I think I saw you once,” said Constance. “I came to your mother's house to do my hundred lines of
Paradise Lost
. I think you were still in high school.”

Maybe she had known Jack Shoots, I thought.

Lately I had been thinking a good deal about Jack Shoots, who had been one of Mom's favorites. “I remember that long entrance hall lined with books from floor to ceiling,” Constance said, “and that beautiful long stairway to the second floor.” She went on to describe the exact place where mother fell over the banister. Elly, painting upstairs in her room, had heard the noise and, apparently, stepped over mother's body on her way to the kitchen, where she vacuumed and did chores for ten minutes at least. Afterward, on her return, seeing mother struggle, she'd run out into the street and screamed.

I thought about this as Constance described walking upstairs to try and find a bathroom, peeking in at my sister's drafting table (“such an amazing sense of color”), etc. As she spoke, I manufactured a history for her—she was not, I reckoned, one of the working-class strivers that my mother tended to champion. Instead I imagined another kind of history. Things had evidently worked out for her long term. She looked like she was happier than I was, had learned more from my mother than I had. With purposeful cruelty, I imagined her son's autism as just a little bump in the road.

We chatted a while longer. She pressed her business card on me, and then I managed to break away. I said goodbye to Stephen, made my escape. Afterward I went back to Williamstown and took a walk in the woods behind my parents' house on Hoxsey Street. I climbed the hill to a place that had been important to me when I was a child and then later in my teens when I would go there to smoke dope. Karnak, I had called it then, an area of gradually collapsing maple trees and rocky outcroppings, one of which contained a shallow cave. I climbed inside and sat back against the slope of the rear wall.

I wondered if I would ever come here again, if the house were to be sold. I could see from where I sat a small shelf of rock at about eye level, painted in various shades of umber and sienna, and the purple rays of a setting sun. In the old days I had kept pyramids of incense there, and a pumice-stone statue of Ganesh, which my father had once brought from Indonesia.

This cave had made regular appearances in my fiction, most recently as a portal to another world in a franchise novel I was writing for Wizards of the Coast. I brushed my fingers against a bulging vein of rock, vaguely dragon-shaped, more so in memory than in fact. My cell phone rang: Nicola, in Baltimore. “Where are you?”

“In the house,” I said. “I'm going through my mother's files. It's interesting. I found a bit of an autobiography.”

I paused, as if I had the text at that moment in my hand. “Just a few pages. She must have gotten sick of it. Guess how it begins. ‘I was born in the nineteenth century…'”

I quoted from memory. “That's nice,” interrupted Nicola. “It's always good to start with a complete lie. It's a lot more transparent down here,” she said. “It's pretty much all vomit all the time.”

What my mother meant was this: In Petersburg, Virginia, in her grandmother's house, the 1920s and '30s had felt cut loose from time. That was too hard to explain: I could hear Adrian crying. Three months old, he was colicky and feverish. “Listen,” Nicola said, and put him on the phone. Then she came back. “Sometimes you've just got to let them scream, right? Your mother said it, and my mother said it, so it must be true.”

Nicola's mother had been born in Bucharest. What she'd actually said had made a lot of sense: “You think if there's a problem, you have to solve it right away. But if you stop for ten minutes, the problem's going to be different. So why not wait till then?” My mother's advice had been more succinct: “You've got to break their will.”

“I'll be home soon,” I said. In fact there was a lot to do. In the morning I was going back to the Commons to talk to them about the possibility of admitting my father. For reasons that had to do with insurance, I needed to secure a place for him not less than ninety days before he actually moved in. Then I would notify the holders of his extended-care policy.

“Don't mind me,” said Nicola. “I just hate my life. What else does your mother say?”

Ninety days was a painful and arbitrary calculation. But Elly couldn't take care of him any more, not by herself. She was as much of a problem as a help. “She didn't mean it literally,” I said, meaning my mother. “She meant living with her sixty-year-old grandmother in Petersburg when her family broke up. She meant living with attitudes from the 1880s. When she was eight, she had to spend a year in bed with the shades drawn.”

“That sounds like heaven.”

She didn't ask about the reception at Mass MoCA. Adrian had stopped crying, or else Nicola had gone into another room, or maybe out into the street. With cell phones, you can never tell where anybody is. “Wasn't your mother's father gay?” she asked. “That's a strategy. Ben Burgis called.”

“Except he went ahead and had kids anyway,” I said, meaning my grandfather. “What did he want?” I said, meaning Ben Burgis.

“Was that before or after his court-martial? Or his disbarment? You see where I'm going with this.” She paused. “Nothing. He felt bad. I say serves him right for being such a fuckup.”

“Is that what you told him?”

“Not in so many words. I can't believe he still wants to apologize. You're the one who stole his job. When are you coming back?”

Then Adrian was crying again, and she had to go.

Every character in a story, I thought when I had folded up the phone, has both a purpose and a secret purpose. Which is another way of saying a person isn't whole unless they're hiding something. Outside the entrance to my little cave, I watched a garter snake among the dry leaves.

In my Wizards of the Coast novel, tentatively titled
The Rose of Sarifal
, the cave stretched underground and terminated at a round chamber hewn out of the rock, whose crystals glimmer in the lantern light. The fire also, when ancient words are spoken, sets aglow a circle of carved runes that are half a written language, half a rendition of dancing figures. The portal opens when the words are combined with movement, and the circle starts to spin. In the center, the black basalt tiles grow milky and indistinct, and as the lantern gutters and fails it becomes the source of light in the small chamber, as the enclosed smoke resolves itself into a glowing mist, and the circle that inscribes it falters, and the world inside grows larger than its shell. Needless to say, it's nicer down there as you step into it, less complicated, at least at first.

The snake was gone when I got up. I walked back into town, back to the house on Hoxsey Street. I went in through the side porch and found my father sleeping on the wicker couch. His mouth had sagged open. His bridge was at the dentist's for repairs. He'd taken out his hearing aids. Since my mother's death he had lost weight.

When I first moved from New York to Baltimore two years before, Nicola had manifested some ambivalence. Or at least that's what I thought: when I arrived with my suitcase on a Monday night, she told me to make myself at home. She couldn't stay to welcome me, as Mondays was her night for reading to the blind. And on Tuesdays she volunteered at a soup kitchen for veterans with AIDS. And on Wednesdays she counseled wayward teens at St. Elizabeth of Hungary, etc. Saturdays and Sundays she had filled with other irreproachable projects, which meant I rarely saw her before ten at night. I'd suggest we see a movie and she'd say, “What, the blind are supposed to read to themselves for a few hours?”