Kinflicks (40 page)

‘I must remind you, Mrs. Babcock,' he finally said, ‘that I
did
warn you of possible repercussions from failure to take your medication.'

Mrs. Babcock pointed mutely to the empty spot on her table, formerly occupied by the spurned steroids. Dr Vogel flushed and said, ‘Hmmm, yes, hmmm.'

‘Well!' he said. ‘Hot enough for you?'

‘I haven't been outside for weeks.'

‘Yup, a scorcher today. A real scorcher.' He folded his stethoscope and stuck it in the jacket of his lab coat and sidled toward the door.

‘Dr. Vogel?'

His blond head swiveled toward her with reluctance; his hand was on the door handle.

‘I don't understand what's happening to me, Dr. Vogel. Would you be good enough to explain it, in simple words?'

He blushed to the roots of his blond hair. ‘Well, I
do
have to complete my rounds…'

‘After your rounds, then.'

‘Yes, certainly, Mrs. Babcock.'

Mrs. Babcock settled back to await the arrival of a nurse to walk her to breakfast. She punched impatiently at her embroidery hoop with the needle. Pamela, the high school girl who was helping her with it, would be crushed this afternoon at how little she'd accomplished in a week. She glanced out the window at the red squirrels, which were dashing up and down the trunk of the elm and flicking their tails and chattering busily.

She tried to calculate when Ginny would be arriving. It was difficult without a clock. If only Ginny would think to bring her one. But Ginny had never been noted for her thoughtfulness…Judging from the sun, it was about six. Knowing Ginny, she wouldn't be out of bed before ten. Today Mrs. Babcock proposed to suggest that she return to Vermont. After all, these weren't ideal conditions for a pleasant mother/daughter visit. Ginny could return to Tennessee when Mrs. Babcock had recovered. Their relationship had been difficult in the best of times: Ginny's repertoire of responses to her parents had been twofold — sulking and joking, both equally irritating. But the relationship that even normally was trying for them both seemed impossible under these circumstances. The blow-up yesterday had been absurd. If inevitable: Ginny had her household in Vermont to worry about, and Mrs. Babcock her blood. They couldn't help each other, and it was ridiculous to try. It was best that Ginny leave. Her child and her husband needed her.

After a breakfast of tea and toast, Ginny went to the pine to check her birds. They were hanging from twigs, their eyes closed and their mouths open — screaming silently. No sign of their parents.

Ginny searched the book cases, finally locating the bird book her mother had mentioned. It was bulky and authoritative-looking and had been written by the famous ornithologist Wilbur J. Birdsall, living proof of the axiom that name is destiny. Under a section entitled ‘Fledglings,' Mr. Birdsall said, ‘Only ten to thirty percent of all baby birds survive to maturity. The others die of starvation, exposure or disease. Parents do not feed congenitally deformed offspring. Some disaster may befall the parent birds, on whom the infants are totally dependent for food. Often baby birds fall from the nest, either by accident or when learning to fly, where they either starve or are eaten by animals. The young of some species can be raised successfully by humans. Others, the swift family for example, feed on partially digested regurgitated food from the parent birds and cannot be hand fed in captivity. It is best to kill such birds should they be found, to avoid prolonging their suffering.'

Feeling ill, Ginny shut the book and sat for a long time. Then she went in the kitchen and got a glass of water. Outside she dipped her index finger in the water and shook a drop into the open mouth of a baby bird. Its eyes opened wide, and it trembled — and finally its pink throat contorted and the water disappeared. She repeated this several times for all three birds. It occurred to her that she could just as well pick them up one at a time and submerge them in the glass until they stopped struggling.

Instead, she sat on the stone steps and brooded. It seemed unlikely that she could throw up at will to provide them with food. And anyway, human digestive juices would probably corrode a bird's gastric tract. Staring distractedly at the stone steps, another image assembled itself: She was holding a baby bird on a step in one hand. In the other hand, she held a big stone, like the decorative piece of white quartz next to the doorway. One well-aimed stroke would do it…

Seizing a machete off the wall, she went out front and hacked away at the kudzu in the hot sun, trying to postpone the decision. But as she was hacking, she had another vision: a baby bird on the chopping block by the side of the cabin; one deft slice with the machete…

She marched to the pine tree. As she unhooked one bird from his perch, he opened his dark round eyes and screeched at her, as though beseeching her to deal with him mercifully. The water had apparently revived him? She made the decision not to decide. She would give the horrid parents one more chance. She definitely didn't relish being God.

She put on a fresh Boone's Farm Apple Wine T-shirt and some bib overalls. Then she sat down and tried to decide whether even to go to the hospital. She and her mother had wound up yesterday yelling at each other. That certainly couldn't be very good for her mother. And she
knew
it wasn't good for herself. She had woken up that morning with a horrible headache and overwhelming seizures of remorse. Maybe she should think of an excuse for rushing back to Vermont? And then go somewhere else instead. If only she had somewhere else, anywhere else, to go. And if only she could learn how serious this disease was.

She went to the phone and dialed Dr. Tyler. No answer again.

On the way to the hospital, she stopped at the big house and gathered up the photos of relatives from her mother's bedroom mantel. She would take them as a peace offering. Taking down the photo of her Great-grandmother Hull, her mother's grandmother, Ginny scrutinized it. Her mother had always said that Ginny looked so much like her. She was Ginny's age in this photo, in her late twenties. She wore a high-necked lace blouse with a pin of some sort at the throat. Her hair was mostly pinned up, but wisps escaped here and there.

Ginny moved in front of the ornate gilded mirror above the mantel and studied herself. As always, it was a shock. She rarely recognized her own reflection. Her estimation of her looks varied with her mood; today she rated herself well below average. She held up the picture of her great-grandmother so that she could see the two of them side by side. Squinting her eyes and then opening them wide, she still couldn't see the physical similarities that everyone had always insisted existed — other than the fact that they each had a nose and two eyes and so forth.

She stared hard at this great-grandmother whom she'd never met. Dixie Lee Hull. She had been a legendary cook, right up until the day she had cut her finger on the recipe card for spoon bread and had died of blood poisoning. Nine children she left behind her. One of her daughters, Ginny's grandmother, had loathed housework and cooking and had spent her adulthood going to club meetings. One child had been more than enough for Ginny's grandmother, Ginny's mother, who had devoted herself completely to her family and her home. And so it went, alternating generations, each new scion implicitly criticizing its parents by rejecting their way of life. Ginny knew that even before she was born, she had been fated to neglect her child and her housework, to be driven from her home at gunpoint. Just as poor Wendy was now fated to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by her grandmother, Ginny's mother, and to keep a spotless house packed to the rafters with babies. It was exhausting, this process, and in contradiction to Hegel, no progress appeared to be resulting from this recurring juxtaposition of thesis and antithesis.

But the most remarkable thing, Ginny reflected, was that she contained within each of her cells the tiniest fraction of a germ of nucleic acid from the very body of the woman in this cracked yellow photo, delivered to her via the intercession of her mother and grandmother. Traced back twenty generations, or six hundred years, Ginny calculated that she would find herself directly related to some 1,048,576 people — probably the entire population of northern Europe at that time, which was where her forebears had come from. It gave her a creepy sense of continuity, as though she were onstage now, muffing her lines, with ghostly ranks of ancestors backstage hissing and booing.

If you cared to carry it back through the centuries, every person in existence had identical submicroscopic specks of genetic material from the original man and woman. Forget Adam and Eve — each person had the tiniest imaginable flecks from the original cell, fertilized into existence by a lightning bolt.

It was stifling really. No wonder humankind was insane, with so much inbreeding through the eons. This speck of genetic material from her great-grandmother exercised such a pervasive influence as to make Ginny look almost identical to her — or so everyone said, although Ginny herself still couldn't see it This speck accounted for the fact that, although they had never met, Ginny could see that their smiles were exact duplicates: They both smiled mostly with their eyes rather than with their mouths.

Ginny wondered what one picture her descendants would seize on to remember her by. This was probably one of the only pictures ever taken of Dixie Lee Hull. To have it done, she would have had to take a day out from her spoon bread baking, put on what was probably her only fancy outfit, and travel to Big Stone Forge by wagon. It must have been a big deal. Whereas Ginny had appeared in hundreds of photos by now, in various poses and moods and modes of dress, to say nothing of the thousands of feet of Kinflicks that featured her. How would her descendants be able to settle on one shot as representative? Which one would Ginny herself select?

Then she remembered that this question was strictly academic. At the rate she was going, her descendants would hasten to prune her from the family tree. Ira was doing his best to make Wendy forget her, and Ginny couldn't imagine that she'd ever marry again or have another child. The line of Hull women had perhaps gasped its last.

Inordinately distressed by this thought, Ginny rushed downstairs and rifled her mother's desk. She removed some pictures from an album — a shot of Ginny as a baby in a white dress being held by her own mother, and another of Wendy as a baby being held by Ginny. She stuffed these in an envelope and addressed it to Wendy in Vermont. Surely Ira wouldn't dare to confiscate Wendy's mail?

Drained, she picked up the cherished Hull family clock with its steepled roof and etched glass door. She dusted it carefully with the tail of her shirt. Then she wound it — eight turns and no more. She and Karl and Jim had waged horrible battles over whose turn it was to wind the clock each week. Even as a supposed adult, Ginny enjoyed the crunching sound as she wound. As she was wrapping the clock in a sheet, she heard a scratching sound at the door. In burst a middle-aged woman in a blond wig. Close behind her came a middle-aged couple, both dressed in fashionable summer suits. The woman was shrieking in a thick New Jersey accent, ‘Oh
Harry!
Don't you just
love
it? The children would be so
thrilled
to live in a
real
southern mansion!'

Harry grumbled, ‘Well, it needs a lot of
work,
dear…'

The woman in the wig drawled encouragingly, ‘Well, honey, you can't get much more authentic than this in Hullsport. It was
built
by Mr Zed Hull hissef. Lord, if you
knew
the people that would love to live in this house! Why, it's a gem, purely a gem!' She looked up, startled to find Ginny suspended midway through wrapping a clock in a sheet.

‘Well, howdy, honey,' said the woman in the wig. ‘I bet you're the cleaning girl?'

‘No, I'm a burglar,' Ginny said, staring insolently at the three housebreakers. ‘Actually, I'm Virginia Babcock. Who are you?'

‘Why, I declare!' the woman cried. ‘Ginny, honey, it's been so long since I've seen you that I like to not knowed you! Why, you must have grown
two feet!'

‘No, I've always had two feet,' Ginny replied, glaring at her. Who was this babbling idiot?

‘Thelma Buford, honey, from up at Southland Realty,' the wigged woman reminded her, sounding hurt.

‘Oh. Yes, of course. Mrs. Buford. How are you?' Ginny had been at Hullsport High with her daughter. The daughter had talked too much, too.

‘Fine, thank you. And yoursef?'

‘Fine, thank you.'

‘These here people are the Hotchkisses. They're moving down from up at New Jersey. Mr. Hotchkiss is with your daddy's plant. They're just real interested in your house here.'

‘We think it's just elegant,' Mrs. Hotchkiss assured Ginny.

Thinking fast, Ginny said, ‘Oh, you mean my father cleared up that mess about the title before he died?'

‘What
mess?' Mrs. Buford snapped. ‘The title is clear as a bell.' She smiled reassuringly at the Hotchkisses.

‘Oh, that's
right
!' Ginny gasped. She threw her hand to her mouth. ‘I wasn't supposed to mention it, was I?'

Mr and Mrs. Hotchkiss were glancing at each other uneasily.

‘What
are
you talking about, Ginny?' Mrs. Buford demanded.

‘Oh nothing!' Ginny said brightly, with a knowing glance at Mrs. Buford to indicate her infinite cooperation in deception. ‘Nothing at all.'

The Hotchkisses fidgeted nervously. ‘Well! What else do you have to show us, Mrs. Buford?' Mr Hotchkiss finally asked.

Her mother was at breakfast when Ginny arrived in her room. Hurriedly she unwrapped the clock and placed it on the bedside table. Then she took out some gummed picture hangers and positioned them on the wall beside the bed. When they had dried, she hung the photos — Dixie Lee Hull, Great-uncle Lester, Cousin Louella, Grandpa Zed with his wild white hair. Nothing got things accomplished quite so efficiently as guilt, Ginny reflected.