Ghost Dance (3 page)

And so my Grandma Alice, though not surprised to see the bird outside her hospital window, must have smiled to herself, thinking of her family through time. And it must have occurred to her, remembering George and Eva, that they had only seen the bird for a short time, a moment really, and here it had lingered already all afternoon around her sweet but rather ordinary daughter. What could this mean, she wondered that night, as the nurse brought her baby to her. She held her tightly and felt her own heart give way. She would not live to read a single poem of her daughter’s or to find out what the Topaz Bird really meant.

What she knew was that the bird that followed my mother was precious.

I hope my young grandmother could fall a bit easier into death knowing that this special bird, years in forming, would always be with my mother. I hope she knew that it meant her no harm.

It was the Bird of Genius, Grandma Alice.

The wild, brilliant Bird of Imagination.

The Bird of Great Invention.

Invention was everything to my mother and in that quiet, dark house I too learned how to fill empty space and dispel silence.

In that house where she was so often absent, I learned how to conjure her back a little. Silence would give way to footsteps, shadows would lighten, and she would come a bit closer. I could see her stepping momentarily into light; I could see her gray gaze and the beautiful bone structure of her face. “Mother,” I would say, and she would turn to reveal the tendons in her neck or a curl that encircled her ear. I would see some familiar motion of hers and it would become new. I would see something more than I had before and I would understand her a little better.

I learned to halve the distance, then make smaller divisions. I might suddenly smell rain though the day was sunny, feel the texture of her hair, wild in such humidity, or watch her walk in moonlight as she followed a premonition, a strand of long hair in the rain, a scrap of voice, a melody, down a dark street in Nice.

And in that house Father, who was always so silent, would come clearer, too. I could invent the stories behind his cloudy glances, the hesitations in his speech. I could understand his hands finally, the mysterious way they moved from object to object but never landed. I could remember for him what he said he could not. I could easily fathom the great depths of his love for my mother and his loneliness because of it. Longing in me took shapes, but I think my father saw nothing when my mother was away—or what I imagine nothing to be: fields and fields of black or dark green or blue.

I was never lonely. In my house the darkness always gave way.

In my house, Grandma Alice is alive. She grows old. She has a long gray braid down her back. She has trouble reading the fine print. She watches my mother and me out in the garden. She sits with me on the porch and tells me the story of the Topaz Bird. She hugs me with her woolen arms. She never tires. “Tell me about Eva again,” I beg, and she always does.

My house whirls and whirls with mist and moonlight and lovers. On hot summer nights a handsome stranger from Spain plays the guitar and a slow fan turns within me.

In my house there are dresses of twilight, and snowstorms, and towers and castles, and music and laughter.

In my house there are intricate scenarios. I have seen a beautiful bride whispering her marriage vows in the white curtains that flutter in the wind. I have seen the groom in the dark door step forward, then back. In my house there are racehorses and flowers and satin and my mother is a little girl there, drifting off to sleep, dreaming of flowers and horses.

In my house the sun constructs perfect golden rectangles on the ceiling; they clang together, making lovely music. In my house there is always music: Mozart and Vivaldi and Bach.

And in my house there is order. In my house there is sense. In my house the father who is so remote smiles finally, as the crime he has brooded over for years, the crime he has carefully outlined on the table with his finger, finally falls into place. Everything has an explanation, a reason. Why the mother seems always to be leaving for France becomes clear.

In my house I can hear my grandfather two states away walking on the crackling earth, listening for water. In my house I can hear a clock ticking. It grows louder and louder and larger and larger as she stands under it, bathed in apricot light. In my house I hear her bracelets clinking; I hear the bright laughter of two women.

I move slowly through these fall days. In my heavy house, which I carry on my back like a turtle, a dark-eyed woman weeps for someone who is permanently lost to her.

But they are not lost to me. In my house, which is vibrant and alive, my Grandma Alice does not die before I am born. In my house there is love and there is mystery and there is longing. In my house my mother is a little girl, a college student, a woman reclining on a pink couch, sipping a cool drink and reading the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke.

In my house there are love and violence and wonder—full orchestras, huge chandeliers, and champagne. In my house she is always there, next to me.

My mother is in a black cocktail dress and pearls. It must be about 1960. She twists the black phone cord in her hand. She is so beautiful standing there in the hallway, talking in French to the woman across the ocean before she leaves for the party.

He lives in another country but it doesn’t matter, we see each other often—he wants me so much. No matter what the weather, how difficult the trip, the number of stops, the price of the fare, somehow he always gets to me. I know this and so do not worry. For coming such a long way, he is reliable, hardly ever late; pure desire keeps him from harm as he races through the city streets to me, asking directions in broken English if he must.

He glides into the room as if he hears music, Jacques Brel perhaps or Piaf. His black beret, the baguette under his arm, these let me know that tonight the distance he has come from is named France.

He pours two glasses of wine—Beaujolais-Villages. He closes his eyes, breathes me in. I lower my mouth; this wine, this music, this man—it is all perfect. He tears the bread. “Le beurre,” he says, “la confiture.”

We gaze at each other and our hunger grows. Outside it has begun to rain. There is a swell of music. He takes out a package of Gauloises; I recognize the light blue color, the wings on the package. Before he opens them our clothes are off. Our bodies are lovely—all perfect, graceful arcs. We perform our slow sexual ballet flawlessly, mouth to mouth to mouth. Afterwards we smoke a cigarette and it is piano music we hear now, Chopin or Poulenc. In his face I detect some waywardness. The camera that records our every move pulls closer. It means he will die soon. It brings further romance, an urgency to our next embrace when it comes, a meaning to the silence. I close my eyes, naked, twisted in the perfumed sheets. In a few hours he will be returning to a country I cannot really picture at all—mythic, far away, filled with beautiful women, I suppose.

“It’s just like a film,” I whisper: the rain, the wine, the stranger from France. “Le cinéma,” he says. His voice is deep and tragic. “Au revoir, je t’aime,” I say, as he slowly puts on his clothes and I look on, smoking his last cigarette.

“Au revoir,” he sighs. A tear falls from the corner of my eye. Then the final credits.

Sometimes I will notice, while sitting in the kitchen eating lunch, that the trees outside the window are moving, slowly at first and then more and more quickly. By now I recognize this movement—it is a ride I love: the linen; the silver; this most elegant of dining cars; the scent of cologne, of fresh flowers; the clinking of fine china, of crystal; the pale rose in the pewter vase; chicken in wine with mushrooms; the French countryside.

“You must watch for small bones,” the handsome waiter whispers in my ear, and I can feel his whisper lingering somewhere near my throat as he pours me a glass of champagne.

“Champagne in the afternoon makes me dizzy,” I smile. A few tables over, two women in hats begin to blur. “Meet me in the back car in five minutes,” he says, his body covering mine in shadow.

“Vanessa,” my brother shouts, finishing his lunch next to me. “Vanessa.” The man in white in the back car lights a cigarette from the blue-winged package. “Vanessa, come back,” Fletcher says.

Yes, it is probably best—leave him there for a while, smiling, loosening his tie in the last car.

“Are you dreaming again?”

I watch the landscape slow down outside the window, then stop.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Are you dreaming again?” Fletcher says.

“Do you think Mom will ever take me to France with her?” I ask Fletcher, who smiles, happy to be able to answer anything for anyone.

“Yes, I do,” he says. “Sure. Why not?”

My father walks into the kitchen carrying an empty soup bowl.

“Do you think Mom will ever take me to France with her, Dad?” I ask.

He runs his hand along a copper pot that glints in the half-light.

“Oh, probably,” he says finally. “Someday,” he sighs.

My father is far away. His silence is so deep and seductive that it seems he has had to travel a great distance to the surface to form even these few words. He does not buoy up to the surface like a swimmer or some other temporary guest of water. His life is down there—in deep blue, in gray, in green, in tangled plants, in dim light.

Still, I would like to rescue him. I put on a black bathing suit. A silver whistle hangs around my neck. My eyes are clear and focused, my body is muscled, much stronger than my ordinary body, set for the task.

I would like to dredge him up from those depths, breathe my life into him, beach him on some even shore. I dive once, twice, hold his head in the air, push water from his lungs.

He turns on the faucet and submerges his soup bowl in warm water. “How about a movie?” he asks in his dreamy, underwater way. He is back in the air again. I have succeeded in some small way, I think.

“Sure,” my brother and I say in unison. “What movie?” My father shrugs. “Whatever you like,” he smiles.

Father’s love of the movies always reassured us; it made him seem like other fathers to us.

“Oh, any movie will do,” he says gently, helping us on with our coats. But I wondered a little, as we drove into the afternoon without any idea of where we were going or what time it was, whether even the movies meant something different to Father than they did to us.

Grace Kelly turns to say good night to Gary Grant at her hotel room. A faint smile drifts across her face and she slides her pale arms around his neck.

My father gasps in the front row and sinks into his plush, red seat in the tiny theater at the edge of campus in Princeton, New Jersey. He looks through his fingers as she presses her mouth to his.

I imagine my father spent many afternoons peering through his fingers, marveling at the great and not so great movies of the 1950s in that dingy theater with its lobby of fake ferns, its big old stage, its touches of gold and brocade. Bits of plaster and paint would fall into his dark hair from the ceiling, and, looking up, he would see on either side of the stage an artist’s version of royal boxes, made from plasterboard, red painted curtains pulled back to reveal an attentive king and queen.

“What a dive, Louie,” my father must have said affectionately to the apathetic owner, wiping what he imagined was the dust of centuries from Louie’s bald head, pulling candy wrappers and gum from the bottoms of his own shoes. “What a dive.”

Dive or not, my father never missed a movie and indeed saw most of them at least twice. I can imagine him sitting alone in the front row, devouring popcorn and waiting for the masks, one of tragedy and one of comedy, pinned to the musty velvet curtain, to part and the screen to light up. In that final second before the first reel began, he must have felt a small thrill in the pitch black, his whole body weightless with anticipation. There were newsreels then, and before
To Catch a Thief
or
The Country Curl
he could watch his lovely Grace Kelly of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in real life, on the arm of Clark Gable or Oleg Cassini. “Oleg,” he thought, chuckling to himself, “what a great name.” He watched as she took the arm of Prince Rainier III of Monaco. My father witnessed it all. He saw Rainier visit Grace’s home. He saw the Kelly family, blond and athletic, smiling and waving for the camera, Grace off to one side, unlike them, distant and mysterious. He watched as tons of flowers rained down on her from Aristotle Onassis’s private plane as she stepped from an ocean liner onto Rainier’s yacht.

My father sighs. Her eyes are shaded by dark glasses. She is a million miles away, he thinks, walking down the aisle to the popcorn stand as Khrushchev and Eisenhower eye each other on the screen.

My father was probably not a very popular person at Princeton. He had many annoying qualities even then. He studied little and did exceptionally well, which his classmates found distressing, especially those sons of Princeton alumni who had to struggle to keep up or lose their lives. My father was also exceedingly modest about his achievements, and his modesty irked them.

He never really fit in anywhere. He was not a pusher, a striver, a tweed bag, a jock, or a lounge lizard. He was not even my father yet, or my mother’s husband. He did not join clubs. He would not give the password. He would not shake secret handshakes. He never went to a football game. He never sang the Princeton song or wore a black and orange scarf. He never pinned a pennant on his wall or gave a stuffed Princeton tiger to a woman. Women liked him for no reason, certainly through no effort on his part. They must have thought him dark and romantic. They liked him even despite the vague smell of popcorn and Baby Ruths that seemed to follow him everywhere. But my father had little interest in real-life women; after all those years in the front row, they must have seemed too small to him.

I can imagine my father sitting by himself in front of a large black-and-white television in his dorm, watching Grace Kelly the film star become Princess Grace of Monaco. “She will be a princess twice, a duchess four times, nine times a baroness, eight times a countess,” the TV commentator says. “However, since a majority of the prince’s domain now exists in name only, her kingdom in reality is a small one, covering three towns and 22,000 people.”