Farthest House (19 page)

“Let’s begin,” Father Steinhouse said.

The wedding party followed on his heels and climbed the three wide marble steps to the altar. Willow turned away from Mrs. Crat. Willow had been experiencing a slight dizziness since entering the church, and rather than abating, it grew. The air around her felt charged, buzzing, the yawning space filling with the sound of bees.

“Miss Starmore,” Father Steinhouse sighed, “can we begin?”

Derrick stepped back to her, his voice nearly a whisper, “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

She ignored him. The buzzing sense of
otherness
had goose bumps splashing over her shoulders. Something, she couldn’t decide what, wanted her attention. She looked around at the statues on plinths with their imploring hands and saintly eyes lifted heavenward. She’d seen it all through a hundred school Masses. Still, something was terribly wrong. Or terribly right. She sat down on the step, using dizziness as an excuse. “I just need half a sec, or I’ll faint.”

She saw it then, lying on the far end of the communion rail and in front of the statue of the Holy Mother, a place she’d looked not more than five minutes earlier. A Damask rose.

Derrick squatted at her elbow. “Come on, you’re pissing everyone off. Your old man isn’t coming.”

“I know, but look,” she pointed. “It’s a Damask.” Her face widened in a smile. “It has to be from Mémé.”

“That flower? You want that flower? I’ll get it.”

“No. I will.”

“Come on, Willow, don’t start this.”

“Your mom’s here,” she said, “F.S. has to be nice in front of her.” She didn’t want to cause a scene, but Mémé was also there. That realization changed her mood suddenly from elation to shame. Mémé was seeing her pregnant at eighteen, wearing a dress she’d been tricked into, Papa’s absence, and all of that after Mémé had dreamed so much for her.

She stood. She didn’t doubt Mémé’s ability to join them, but trusting Mémé wanted to join them required a bigger leap of faith. Why would Mémé come now, after so many years in which Willow ached for some sign from her? Why hadn’t Mémé appeared in the back seat of Derrick’s car and kept their clothes from coming off? Why hadn’t she come the night Friar needed protection from Mary?

“She’s coming,” Derrick was saying, “she found a flower.”

Going as slowly as she dared, Willow went back down the chancel step and down the length of the long communion rail. She picked up the flower, and as she did so, it twisted in her hand, a single quick wrench that sent a thick bristle, sharp as a thorn, into her finger. A garnet of blood beaded from the wound. Mémé had indeed come to her wedding.

A shaft of light broke into the back of the church, and before Willow could look up to see who had opened the door, she knew Papa had arrived.

The sunlight backlit his silhouette. His height and the light combined to fill the doorway. He stepped inside, slightly out of breath, his eyes adjusting to the dim and scanning the altar area where the body of the wedding party stood. His lips were pressed together, hardly more than a line until he saw her, by herself. His lips turned up at the corners, and he started down the aisle, not hurrying now, but purposeful, his old shoes with a hole in each sole, polished. To Derrick’s casual khakis and navy blue blazer, Julian wore his dark suit, something Willow had not seen him wear since Mémé’s funeral and the raven’s visit. In the suit, his shoulders rounder and thinner than when she’d ridden them, he looked a generation past and representative of something lost in her own generation. He meant to carry on. He was an old-time man who from this day forward intended to act with honor.

He moved as balanced as the dancer Mémé had seen in him, and Willow thought of Sister Dominic Agnes across the street in the convent or classroom. The nun once asked Willow if he avoided going to church because he couldn’t walk straight down the aisle. Someday, in some eternal mind-reel, Willow hoped the nun would have to watch this moment over and over.

She glanced down at the rose and the garnet of blood on her fingertip. Mémé had sent both, but the bigger gift had been holding up the service for Papa.

While the group on the altar stood hushed, and even Mrs. Crat turned to look, Julian passed through the varied colors of light streaming through the stained-glass windows. His suit changed hues as he was touched by scarlet, maroon, and gold. He didn’t come far though before he stopped and held out his hand. Willow walked to him carrying her rose and put her arm through his. He walked her down the aisle.

Papa had returned, she was positive, even if he’d be unsure himself for months or years. He’d bested the raven, and that was bigger than her wedding.

24

The sun not yet up, Derrick gathered his things in the dark and crept from the bedroom. Willow pretended to sleep, though she’d spent the last few hours awake. He showered and dressed in the bathroom and tiptoed through the main room with his books and shoes in hand. When she heard the soft click of the front door close behind him and then the louder, freer sound of his car accelerating down the street—the sound of someone believing they’d escaped—she rolled from her side onto her back.

Her head pounded. The first thirty-six hours of Holy Matrimony had been anything but holy. Saturday night, their first night as an officially wed couple, he stepped into the bedroom, looked around at the walls in need of paint, the shabbily dressed windows, the old bed, and in his throat cursed, “Holy shit.”

With his disbelief and disappointment still hot on her skin, he crawled into bed. Before their marriage, he’d used sweet-talk. She thought of it as white-lies, a form of posturing and pandering. It was beggarly and dishonest, but it was still a form of asking. The last two nights as her husband, he acted as if her body were a purchased object, certainly an entitlement. When he finished, he rolled off, turned his back to her, and retreated into a space as small and hard as a walnut chamber. His attitude hurt as much as the empty sweater cuff he raised years earlier to make the class laugh at her.

She continued staring at the ceiling, her gaze following a plaster crack, the fracture creeping from one end to the other and looking like a child’s black magic-marker line. She once set up rows of empty wine bottles to see her reflection there, to fool herself into believing she existed despite Papa’s drinking, or existed in his drinking, and now if it were possible, she’d set up more rows of fun-house mirrors that let Derrick see only her best side. She’d spend her life standing wedge-wise, her feet planted heel to insole, like photographs of women trying to hide their wide hips. She’d be whatever he wanted her to be, and then he’d fall in love with her. He’d have to; she’d be his creation.

The thought of that future scared her, but all futures were scary. At least her baby would have two parents.

The smell of coffee brewing and the sound of Papa closing a cupboard door finally made her push back the blankets and swing her feet over the side of the bed. She reached back and slugged Derrick’s pillow. “Take that, Crat!” She went to the closet and brought Mother Moses down from the shelf and wrapped herself in it.

Julian leaned against the kitchen counter dressed in the suit he’d worn to her wedding, steam lifting from his coffee cup. At the table, a cigarette burned in the ashtray. He smiled. “How’s the new bride?”

“Restless. Where you going?”

He hesitated, “To see a man about a job.”

“A job?” She wanted to hug him, but his severe nonchalance told her he didn’t want fanfare. He wasn’t proud of his situation. “You’re getting back on the force?”

He set his coffee down and turned the mug back and forth before stepping to the table, taking a drag on his cigarette, and returning it to the ashtray rim. “Not exactly.”

“Why not go back to your old job? They didn’t fire you. You’re trained; your record is clean.”

“I’m done with that.”

“Why?”

“I’m applying for a security cop job.”

“You mean a mall cop? You’re kidding.”

He didn’t look at her. “Yes. Different events too, it depends where they need me. Teenagers acting up in food courts, shoplifting, that’s as deep into crime as I want to go.”

“You loved your work.”

“A man changes.” He nodded a good-bye and walked from the room. The front door opened and closed.

Happy for him, though frustrated, she sat at the table considering. What secret was he always so determined to keep from her? She’d never know because he never gave clues.

On the table, his cigarette still burned in the ashtray. He’d left another cigarette burning the day before, but that one hadn’t given her much thought, except to be thankful the stacks of fire-thirsty newspapers had been carted off. Studying this cigarette, she lifted her hair off her shoulders, twisting it until the length coiled up tight against her head. The burning cigarette didn’t mean anything, she promised herself. Papa deserved to be taken off her list of worries. Was it any wonder he was distracted: his slaying his netherworld raven, Derrick invading their house, her pregnancy and marriage, and now, after so long, his going to apply for a job.

She watched the cigarette smoke rising, the thin patterns drifting into the air, the smoldering and morphing, the streaming ashen color and the lazy curves climbing, tugging on her tired brain. Her hair fell from her hands and uncoiled to fan across her back. The hypnotic spirals of smoke twisted up into one lazy bloom after another and made tiny, smoky roads and pathways that led into other flowering shapes. Some of the forms might have risen off Mother Moses, winged birds, fronds in a breeze. She thought of Farthest House and the gardens and Mémé with her long skirts and cat-head cane. She considered how the flowers, one on top of the next, were at first tight blooms before they spread and disappeared. The longer she sat and watched the ever-changing drifting images, the more she saw female faces in the smoke. Or parts of faces: a chin, an eye, the curl of a lip, only to reach a height and fade. But easy, easy the letting go, giving up their space for the next.

She looked down at Mother Moses, feeling admiration for the slave woman who in surviving the unimaginable helped birth the next generation of daughters and the one after that. A woman who hadn’t had the right to say who touched her, either to rape her or whip her, because her body was property and owned by someone else. Yet, she endured, carried by her art.

Willow smiled, wanting to stand and twirl around the kitchen. She, of course, would do the same. There was so much inside her waiting to be discovered. What was Derrick’s mood, good or bad, in light of this volume? She was a painter. With
her
work to do.

The eyes of the crocheting stretched wide over her shoulders, and she felt that if she only dared, she could slip like Alice through one of the thousands of gathered up spaces. How like the gaps between those stitches the world was proving to be, the knots having less substance than the space between them.

She looked again at the smoke, watched it unspool before her, and knew she needed to tell the stories of the women on whose backs she’d come. They weren’t recorded in history, which made her work that much more important, but like all women, they were part of the chain, each link of equal importance. Her line of female ancestors: Mother Moses, Mémé, Sabine, and I, the strange woman from the rocks were as vital and as mythical as any from the Greeks
.

She rose grinning and looked around the kitchen as if she saw us all there. She would tell our stories, just as Mémé told the story of Mother Moses. Her medium wouldn’t be words, but paint, and in telling them, she’d be telling the stories of countless women. Women who were ignored in history texts, but who could shout from gallery walls.

Julian’s cigarette was nearly burned away, but she snuffed out the remaining butt as if to put an explanation point on the inspiration she’d received. The paintings, several of each woman and depicting the different phases of their lives, was a long commission that could take a few years. The length of the project felt fitted and welcome. Derrick could go on with school; she’d return soon enough. Meanwhile, she’d be just as busy learning and painting.

She wondered how without tintypes, sepia prints, and even grainy photographs, she could execute the images. She didn’t even have a picture of her own mother. She’d destroyed them. Frida Kahlo had gotten around the problem by painting her face into her ancestor’s faces, and that idea felt as fitted to Willow as the entire project.

She needed paints, and with Mother Moses still wrapped around her, she headed back to her room. When she tried to give Julian back the forty dollars, he closed her fingers around it. “You need other things.” She supposed he meant maternity clothes, but she didn’t need them yet, and she didn’t need anything else as badly as art supplies.

On the dresser, Mémé’s rose stood in a tall glass of water. Willow lifted the flower and watched clear droplets slide off the end of the stem. The outer petals of the rose were drying and spreading, just as she’d seen in the smoke, but the heart of the rose still held rich color and even the pure and sweet Damask scent. On the wet stem, what began as no more than a series of tiny barbs at the top grew stouter and sharper, until at the bottom they were thick thorns. She pressed the longest and sharpest into her upper arm, piercing the skin, twisting the thorn, until it tore flesh and drew a bead of blood, just as Mémé had done to her in the church. She repeated the process, remembering and promising each woman who had visited her in the kitchen.