In Partial Disgrace (37 page)

Felix had turned away from this, but was immediately cornered by the Professor.

“My gratitude is boundless, Councilor, but have you no concern at all that the Pzalmanzar method, this taking of the animal into liberality, is something of a trick?”

“Balderdash,” Felix replied in a stage whisper. “We are tricked into being born and tricked into staying alive. Each time we’re saved, it’s with a different trick.”

Öscar Ögur actually served drinks with aplomb, spilling only one tray, which no one mentioned. He had taken over for Catspaw, who could now be seen furiously ferrying Gubik downstream to the
Penelope III
, in the hope of catching a ride to overtake the
Desdemona
at Razacanum on her route to Chorgo, there to pick up the
Valse de Mocsou
. As Catspaw strained at the oars, Gubik stood in the bow of the copper-prowed caique, arms folded like Napoleon, caped and white-gloved, his swineherd’s Phrygian cap pulled tightly over his skull. As they drew abreast of the
Penelope III,
a rope net was thrown down from the scuppers and our prodigy scrambled aboard, his white gloves flashing, just as the frigate, with its magical cargo and dispirited crew, disappeared into a fogbank at the mill. Felix and Ainoha toasted him sadly and silently as his pig herd filled the woods with bellows of protest. The Professor noted irritably that he seemed to be carrying one of his custom plaid valises, and I realized that the red sash about his waist was the banner from my sister’s tomb.

After much cranking and cursing, the limousine finally started. The golden ponies in the far pasture galloped from corner to corner as the ignition coughed.

As a celebratory gesture, all the kennels, coops, and stables were flung open, and the
menagerie entire
was released for a run. Moccus and Epona thundered up and down the drive at forty miles per hour, packs of Chetvorah dove off into the woods for randy deer, arthritic seventeen-year-old cats tottered through portals, doves alighted on the furniture, chickens and ducks strutted fearlessly about, and the tame gray parrot, Arnulph, whom I hadn’t noticed for years, hopped from shoulder to shoulder. Topsy walked like royalty, calm and dignified amongst the miffed, milling Chetvorah.

The Professor thanked Father over and over.

“The Princess is always welcome,” Felix lied, “but keep her well clear of the stables. She gives off a scent of fear.”

But just as he concluded this, he realized the Princess was standing behind him and had already forgiven him.

“Topsy and I will be forever in your debt,” she said modestly.

“Ah,
Prinzessin
.” Felix bowed deeply and kissed her hand. “Now that you have seen a few miracles, perhaps you will begin to appreciate realism.”

“The next thing you know, we’ll be hunting her!” the Professor beamed.

“This child was not meant for the field, my friends. While she will raise many cocks, I fear you will get few shots.”

Topsy had lain down next to them, head between her forelegs. The Princess’s eyes began to dart again. “Shouldn’t one write all this down?”

“All dog literature is worthless, because it is written either by owners or scientists. Everything you want to know and more you will find in this pamphlet, Prinzessin,” Father bowed again as he handed her his private printing,
Breaking Strange Dogs and Vicious Horses
, bound in white satin. “I’ve inscribed it for you.” And she read it out, her voice quivering.

“I am not desirous of making you unsatisfied with anything you possess, Prinzessin,” Felix adumbrated, “but a judicious exertion on your part will add much to Topsy’s usefulness, as well as to your own enjoyment. Much may be done through the affections. Do not be contented with a disorderly cur, when a trifling addition to your pains will produce an extravagant companion.”

“I am most grateful for the proper commands,” the Princess said, a bit choked up.

As the two couples walked to the hissing limousine, Father took her arm. “I must tell you honestly, Prinzessin, such commands mustn’t smack of an order. Language is hardly absolute. Words have meaning only in the stream of life. And the world is, I’m afraid, full of independent subjects.” He opened the car door and Topsy raced by them, flinging herself into the back seat. The Princess pressed a small bag of uncut garnets into Father’s hand. Had she looked down, she could have picked up twenty more from the road.

“My husband often gets carried away with the spirituality of his projects,” Mother now confided, fearing a scene, while helping the Princess negotiate her way into the dark petit point interior of the limousine. “Let me send you on your way with some practical observations. First, the little hussy ought not be tied up, even if she wants it. Straining at her collar will throw out her elbows, and she will grow up bandy-legged. Two, if you must administer a powder, mix it with a little butter and smear it on her nose. She will readily lick it down. This is also the best time to pare her nails. Lastly,
never
lend your doggie to anyone, not even a brother. It may seem selfish, but an ignorant sportsman will bring you nothing but grief. I hope you will forgive me for saying so.”

The Princess did not reply, but for the first time in her visit did manage to make eye contact.

“And what departing advice have you for me, dearest lady?” the Professor queried, batting his coal-chunk eyes. But before Ainoha could answer, Felix had broken in:

“For you, sir, keep it simple, songful, and slow. And go easy on the melancholy.”

“And next time,” the Professor sang like a child, “we shall do the
phui, phui, phui
!”

So it was that the
goldenischechow
, Pouilly-Gepacht, was delivered back to her mistress with the silvered words of her commands written in a daybook, to demonstrate that even with the most spoiled of bitches, bloodsport can ultimately be put in the service of civility—that in all of us the urge to pounce can be turned, if not quite to grand effect, nevertheless to leading gestures and illusions of spectral beauty.

Leaving the estate in chastened profile, the Princess lay her hand on the Professor’s shoulder as he pulled his bowler ever more tightly on his head, while Topsy, punished but forgiven, could be seen in the front seat in more of a
demi-plié
than a rapt quivering point, but nevertheless scanning the barren fields for signs of life.

She would outlive both the Princess and the Professor, and from that day on, never had a leash upon her.

Master and Mistress walked arm in arm down to the bathing beach in the wolf-light, reflecting upon the bankruptcy of their business venture, smoking their pipes, and regarding their new island, so amphorously regurgitated from the Mze. Only yards from the bank, it already sported a fern.

Felix flung the bag of garnets far out in the stolid waters. Ainoha snapped the pleats out of her skirts, raised them above her sunburnt legs to her golden bee, and beckoned her husband to follow. He removed his boots and trousers, and they waded through the murmuring reed-beds, the face of a virgin saint on the tip of each stalk of underwater grain. And there like Quality and the Muse, Mnemosyne, they had a quiet conversation on an uninhabited island.

“I’ve never seen the Mze so low,” Felix murmured, and for the first time in his life, he saw a streak of fear in his wife’s eyes. Realizing that her sorrowing, even for good reason, was the only thing which could frighten him, Ainoha took her husband’s hand and resolved to change the subject.

“Dearly beloved, I know you have need of your men friends, but it’s
their
friends who have become the issue. What a pair of cold fish, I should say.”

“Indeed,” Felix concurred, “there is such a thing as too thoughtful a performance—and too singular a person.”

“But perhaps the Professor is on to something with his obsession with . . .
bourgeoisiosity
? Darling, what sort of century do we face when aristocratic royalty behave like plebs? Perhaps,” she threw back her head and laughed like a horse, “perhaps the time has come for a bit of
anti
-bourgeois thinking?”

Felix stroked her hair as he stroked his beard. His concentration had been broken for a moment, for while pondering the receding waters, he had noticed a dark shape circling the island, a shadow longer than the largest sturgeon. “Well,” he murmured absently into her loosened hair, “it’s their century, no doubt, but wouldn’t it be grand to throw them off-stride for a moment?!”

They embraced as he placed his right hand on the flat of her back. Then Felix began a gliding stride about her, counterclockwise, though he was following more than leading, and once she had thought several moves ahead, sure of her loveliness, Ainoha tempered his figures by placing a bare foot with great care into his pauses, as if the new sand of the island was scorching—and with this counter-proposal, it was he who twirled in the air, a grin in his underwear.

“Oh, Cavalier,” she gushed, “one is always making history, isn’t one.”

“Let us put it all behind us, dear. Live and learn.”

“Oh, darling,” she punched the heavy air. “Learning or forgetting. Who knows what’s worse.”

They raced each other back to Semper Vero for an early dinner and bed, but were surprised to find Count Zich’s sweat-drenched grays standing at the door. He sat slumped behind his silver-buttoned groom, swathed in a cadmium orange blanket embroidered with his huge monogram, his granite hatchet-face pale and unshaven.

“There’s not enough water in this landscape,” he greeted them in a bad humor.

From my lookout, I had watched their pretty dance, and knew my place in the Age to Come—the dumb dancer who must keep silent during the dance, acting the part of the clown and cracking a whip to keep away evil spirits. But I was also the flagbearer, the dumber one who will invariably assume the lead.

In the last of the wolf-light, the foothills and answering ranges beyond gleamed like sheetmetal hammered into angles, and the Mze was ablaze with floating shields and helmets. Deep, diurnal shadows rocketed up the peaks and zigzagged down ravines, convex and concave changed from insubstantial radiance into geometric figures—parallelograms, rhomboids, polygons—as drought brought spring and autumn into one. I felt it ludicrous that this landscape would one day be registered in my name.

But suddenly, as if to trump my own self-mockery, thermal hurricanes were charging down the gorge, a cold front turning the sky green and the grass blue. The air was filled with the disordered wingbeats and jargon of birds, lightning was held captive in the incandescent cloudbanks, and when it finally struck without a single drop of moisture, small fires broke out in the cornfields, and the currents paled in sulfurous ravines. White legions of thistledown blanketed the flickering thickets, and the woods were garlanded with snowy wool. Flash after flash of lightning ripped from the burst clouds, and the air was sullied by the chemical smell of fading leaves as the solar winds tore about our house.

A large tulip tree was uprooted in the garden, its soil-clotted roots ripping a hole large enough for a swimming pool, its branches parting just in time to fall to either side of a statue without injuring it. Shutters opened, slammed shut then opened again, shattering their hinges. Rooftiles and chimney cornices spun through the air like ducks with their heads shot off. Stripped of their leaves, empty colonnades of poplar bent double. Hedges were flattened, yews exploded. And from his tower suite, Father’s papers fluttered in an endless stream from the open windows, leaves of manuscript littering the grounds like a week-old battlefield of a lost empire.

The last aria had gone sharp and faint at the same time, shuddering bell-notes on our grim scene. Then there was a great beating of wings behind me, and against the gray clouds a flash of white, as dearest Waterlily, a lace-strewn dove in gilded talons, was borne from the cold heights across the lustral waters to the Field of Mars. Her corpse was never found.

The wind and sun went down together. A tongue of flame licked at my hair but did not burn; I was blushing for my sister and myself, Ainoha’s Fire Child. My thoughts were full of singeing old men’s beards and burning babies in their cradles, as I heard for the first time in many years the fly buzzing in the buried doll’s skull, and every image cried out, “Kill!”

I descended into the spinal fluid of Cannonia to cool off. The shore was no longer a resilient couch but a shingle in a chalk-white sea. The remnants of the Mze seemed to be a series of strings, syrupy, glassy, and clear, like something you could cut with scissors.

Half in unhappy love, I leapt into the slack shallows. The exposed reed-beds issued no love song; their chant had been replaced by cicadas. The young virgin’s faces on the stalks of underwater grain now fell flat on the black ooze. I washed my own flushed face as Ainoha once did when she smeared her half-frightened boy with mulberry juice upon his brow and temples, and set prehistoric time to ticking. But I now knew I was well beyond her rule over the limpid, beyond the reproval of her rosy lips. Stripping down, I walked briskly through the Mze to the meadow bank, never once submerged, then back again to the deepest part of the motionless channel, to take the tally of the darkness. The water came up only to my heart. There, beyond my father’s athletic instincts, I could ponder his pre-Christian lesson—that while the father can lighten every care and crisis and shape his fall, the father cannot save his son from fate or bring him back to life. For it is the
world
itself which has a tragic flaw.

The water boiled around me and the seething Mze went white with the bellies of dead fish. The percipiencies of the river washed my wounded senses; its susurances tempered something sharper than mere manhood. Rising from the sheen of marble with a penumbra of reeds and poplar leaves, beneath a straying moon, I moved naked through the clichés of shadows, returning to my home and a sleep of iron. Above the river, resting in its course, the stars ran backward.