Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas

FICTION

Omensetter’s Luck

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife

The Tunnel

NONFICTION

Finding a Form

Fiction and the Figures of Life

On Being Blue

The World Within the Word

The Habitations of the Word

Earlier versions of
Cartesian Sonata
were published in pieces: “The Clairvoyant” (called here “The Writing on the Wall”), in
Location
1, no. 2 (summer 1964); “The Sugar Crock” (called here “The Clairvoyant”), in
Art and Literature
no. 9 (1966); and “I Wish You Wouldn’t,” in
Partisan Review
42, no. 3 (1975), as well as in
The Pushcart Prize
(1976–77). “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” (then in the form of a short sketch) appeared in
The Iowa Review
24, no. 2 (1994), and subsequently in
Hard Choices: An Iowa Review Reader
(Iowa University Press, 1996). The final version came out in
Conjunctions
(1998), and in its final form, with photographic illustrations by Michael Eastman, in
Conjunctions
30.

This is the story of Ella Bend Hess, of how she became clairvoyant and what she was able to see.

There was nothing in her childhood to suggest it. Her gift was the gift of the gods, not a natural product of her past, I am sure of that. It was a true gift: free and undeserved, as beauty is supposed to be, or the descent of the dove: inexplicable and merciless.

Marvelous is what I mean. Miraculous. Mysterious? Surely not a word so weak. Yet it has to begin with an
m
.

You see how little pride I have, to let you watch me fumble. I could have sent that wretched word away and written what I wanted, you’d have been no wiser; but I haven’t got that kind of courage anymore, the courage of the liar. My will, somewhere along the way, has grown most deathly tired; now I have the scruples of a worn-out thief—fierce, painful scruples—and I wish I could recover everything I’ve stolen from my stories over the years; maybe then my angry blood would quiet. Of course, they do catch up, these phrases that I’ve condemned, poor awkward creatures, and occupy my dreams. They remind me of a row of prisoners, rapping on their bars. They shout their names and shout their names. I laugh with all my nerves. Well … prison is my only metaphor.

Is it right or honest? After all—Ella Bend—where is she? Isn’t she as much in all those scraps I threw away as in the scraps I saved? Threw away, mind you, when they held her name. Where else did she have her life? I’d given her a long nose, I remember—no good reason why. Now her nose is middling. I made her sing a bawdy song—a poor idea. And I cut the nursery scene entirely, the whole scene, you understand, where she comes in, more than half asleep, the baby bawling, frightened, pawing at the darkness, helpless as a beetle on its back. When Ella touches him she shares his skin and feels him stiffen. Just then she understands the dreadful quality of his confusion. Her mouth falls open. She strikes the air.

I’ve never had the experience myself. How would it be to bump things like a spider? Anyway, there were too many principles against the passage.

I didn’t give her a long nose exactly. She
had
a long nose. Now it’s gone. I decided she looked too much like a witch, and since she really was a witch, it wouldn’t do to have her look precisely like one. If I weren’t honest you’d never know; you’d think her nose was middling. So it is. My god, don’t blame poor authors. Think how shameful it would be to say: Ella Bend had a long nose, which I shortened to a middling one because a middling one made her look less like a witch, although a witch is what she was. You won’t find many who’ve got the guts. They make a cheap product—skimp on the goods. If you want my advice—don’t buy.

Passage
is the right word.
Passage
. Every sentence is a passage. So I changed her life; changed it; not in advance but afterward, after it was over. That’s real magic for you, not the merely manual kind. What is this art but the art of appearance? I make bright falsehoods to blind the eye.

Maybe it was
merciless
I meant. Beauty is often a curse, and I suppose clairvoyancy could be. Now: what do I mean? You
realize that time has passed—another thing the cheapskates hide. Time. Whole weeks. A lot happens. My mother dies. I am caught by a famous disease. Or nothing happens. My mother does not die. I am not caught by a famous disease. Do I still intend whatever it was I did? Ella Bend is lucky to be alive. I have a terrible pain in my head. Of course she’s dead. But not yet. She doesn’t die in the story. At the moment all she has is an altered nose and nervous eyes. Think if that were all you were.

Cassandra’s curse wasn’t clairvoyancy. It was not being believed. Suppose it had been Cassandra who saw but who also disbelieved. That would have been more interesting.

I wonder if you understand about that
m
. The other day I idly scribbled twelve of them in the margin of a canceled page: mmmmmmmmmmmm. They doubtless affected my mind. I was writing away, “the descent of the dove” and all that, when I caught those
m
’s in the corner of my eye. That’s how I came to feel some force in its direction. But, good lord, why? Could anything be more absurd? Would God create that way?

Look at them again: mmmmmmmmmmmm. Hear the hum. Isn’t that the purply dove? the witches’ mist? It’s Ella Bend in receipt of her gift. Her eyes fill.

The dove descends, says here you are, accept it and forgive. Her eyes fill.

There was nothing in her childhood to suggest it. She was pudgy. She’d worn a red coat that buttoned to her chin, scratching her neck; Sallydale highshoes, secure as a mother’s love, the salesman said; thick stockings with tight elastic tops; bloomers that cut her skin; severely woven braids tied with pale fluttery bows; and wool mittens that itched when her hands began to sweat. The salesman had a case that folded out impressively. Even Ellareen had hoped he’d fold it out again. He unlidded and unpleated it. It was a polished black sample tray with shiny chrome catches—a shoes-in-the-box, Ellahen had said—and
everyone had laughed, Ellareen putting her hand on Ellahen’s colorless head, deciding right then to buy her a pair; and the box undid itself, legs sliding out, secret after secret coming until the shoes were there, even yellow ones, red, very vulgar and beautiful, making Ellareen feel like an Indian, covetous and primitive. The salesman was talking and smiling. He had fine hands and smooth black hair.

Let’s just try this on for size, he said.

A shoehorn dangled from a chain that disappeared into his vest.

Black is useful.

Ella trembled when he held her feet. The shoes seemed cool, but they didn’t feel like a mother’s love.

It don’t show wear.

Thomas thumped the case.

Stands up noble, Ellareen said.

It gets them all, the salesman said. They want to know how it works. They love it.

The salesman rubbed his thumb against the side of Ella’s arch.

Walk on that. See how it feels.

Ella stood awkwardly, wiggling her toes, rocking as she was bid, while Thomas touched the leg-joints of the sample tray. Her mother stooped quickly, closing her thumb and finger on Ella’s ankle.

Is it tight enough there?

Oh yes ma’am, you need some play.

Has to be some support, too. I like things to fit. She snapped erect. Try a pair on Ellahen.

We like to sell our shoes in the home where they’re worn. That’s why we come here like we do. See there, he said, holding up the mate, that’s well made.

He folded the toe into his hand, then crumpled the top, and Ella felt a pang for the shoe that might be hers.

Feel that—soft and smooth.

He held it out to Ellareen, who balanced the shoe on her hand, squinting at the heel.

Has to be firm, she said.

The shoes were in tiers, one from each pair, on deep puffed velvet like valuable jewels. He had the others loose in a bag.

The salesman measured Ellahen.

Ella has weak ankles and her feet are flat, takes after Mister Bend in that. It’s Ellahen who’s real strong there.

The salesman smiled at Ellahen, who blinked and rubbed her nose. Well all of them lace high, he said, and Ella thought he seemed like a knight, kneeling in front of Ellahen, making his vows, and she wondered how in the world all those shoes went in. She wanted him to fold it up so she could see, and the request shaped her mouth. Then she wondered instead what the salesman thought of Ellahen, whether he’d ever seen an albino before (she supposed he had) and what he would think if he knew why Ellareen had broken her rule against men who sold from door to door to let him in.

This salesman’s name is Philip Gelvin; he’s a thoroughly bad hat, as the saying was then, and he hates albinos; they make his flesh crawl. He hates their pink rabbitlike eyes. His uncle saw one sunburned once. The lines in the skin were embossed on the blisters. She was helplessly sick to her stomach; terrifying white hair fell about her face; her tinted glasses lay in the grass. That was Willie Fogal—his uncle—who is ninety and who saw Pister Welcome, he says, shoot The Badman in the boot, like the rhyme says. Willie was always claiming to have seen this or that. Who could tell? He’s in his dotage now and takes a dislike to death that’s far too late to be sincere. But poor old man and
his dissolving head. Visit him at the farm sometime, he’ll tell you what he sees: gray mists, vapors, spaces, holes. Stares straight ahead. The kindly ladies keep him clean. Might as well look one way as another, he says, it’s all around, just open up your eyes and
look …
Quite a change from the warrior days … Well I pity everyone his age. Anyway that’s what he said: he saw Pister take his rifle down the first the pigs got loose, mad as hell naturally, and he saw him walk up the street with it under his arm until he was where The Badman was standing, where they all were standing, and then Pister says, according to Uncle Fogal, you ain’t worth shooting in the head; you ain’t worth shooting in the ass, whereupon the gun went off, as though, really, it was accidental, and The Badman fell on his shoulder in the mud. The boot, even with the hole through it, held the blood from The Badman’s shattered foot so well it hardly stained the puddle. I never shot anybody just because of pigs, The Badman said.