See Now Then (12 page)

6

It was in the middle of that night, way, way into the middle of that night, fifteen minutes into the new day, that the beautiful Persephone was born. And her birth, her arrival in that world of the room in the hospital, with big bright lights and lots of shouting from people who were commanding Mrs. Sweet to push and push out the baby from her womb, that moment, that now of the beautiful Persephone’s arrival into the world, made all of the months before she became the baby who cried as she emerged from her mother’s insides, disappear, that time when Dr. Fuchs examined Mrs. Sweet’s uterus and found a fibroid, round in shape like a fruit, with a stout stem anchoring it to that pear-shaped soft organ, and the fibroid after he removed it weighed fifteen and three quarter ounces and this was before the time Mrs. Sweet became a gardener herself and so could not see then, as now, could not see anything at all, not that the thing growing on her uterus was prophetic or a metaphor. But that time just then, just now, before Persephone was born, and before that, before she was even conceived, Dr. Fuchs removed the growth that was the size of a well-grown tomato like “Prudence Purple” and Dr. Fuchs wore clogs and moved about in the maternity ward at New York Hospital, as if he were meant to do that, and he told Mrs. Sweet, who was not yet that, for she would only become that when she possessed her children, that she would become pregnant, and soon, three months after, Mrs. Sweet felt ill and thought she was suffering from an unusual attack of anxiety and so took so many doses of medicines meant to reduce the feeling of wanting to throw up and the feeling of wanting to make still the flutterings which were not her heart in her upper chest and then one day, in April it was, in the middle of a late snow falling in Londonderry, Vermont, the woman who was married to a man, a doctor himself, who was a figure of fun to Mrs. Sweet, for he had a silly mustache and wore tweeds and it all made him look as if he was a character in a Penguin paperback published in England in the 1950s, and it was his wife who told Mrs. Sweet that she wasn’t anxious or suffering from a seasonal disease, she said that Mrs. Sweet was pregnant, and Mrs. Sweet then drove through the unplowed roads, swerving and skidding, avoiding the pond at the sharp turn of the road that led to the bridge and went into the rented apartment above the garage of Jill’s house and called Mr. Sweet and said, I am pregnant, and Mrs. Sweet, then, did not resist this unexpected turn in her life, but it frightened her, for she vomited constantly, and then when that stopped she still felt as if she wanted to vomit constantly and that feeling never went away at all, not until that time when the beautiful Persephone was born; and Mrs. Sweet craved grapefruits and then immediately threw up after she ate them but all the same couldn’t avoid the craving, which if it was not satisfied would not lead to her throwing up, but a craving in such a circumstance is unavoidable; and she saw a film about some creatures called gremlins and threw up after that, lots and lots of vomit all over the floor of the little apartment where she lived, an apartment built for a boy who was so well situated in life and who was so ill suited to be well situated in life that he joined the army, and while a passenger in a military jeep he had a catastrophe and it left him crippled from the neck down, and this boy’s mother built him a house to accommodate his new feebleness; and it was in their house that Mrs. Sweet bore and carried the beautiful Persephone, who was perfect.

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Then, though it was Now, Then was Now: Mrs. Sweet was lying on a stretcher in a room and Dr. Fuchs, a man who may have invented the amniocentesis test or not, held in his hand a wandlike instrument and he moved it back and forth across her stomach with a childlike glee (so Mrs. Sweet thought then and now), and a childlike intensity, as if defying all his years of learning and acquiring knowledge, as if masking a deep need to, from time to time, repeat actions that were without any obvious meaning but mysteriously significant all the same; and as he did this, move the wandlike instrument back and forth across her stomach, he could see, on a monitor, the beautiful Persephone (not yet beautiful, not yet Persephone then) a shaped mass of filaments and membranes and jellylike stuff, moving relentlessly, moving without pause, in a large amount of water, which Dr. Fuchs knew to be amniotic fluid; he could see Persephone’s hands, already large, the fingers long and then tapering off into the not known, her legs short, her head a normal size and hairless, her torso a normal size. And then he plunged a large needle into Mrs. Sweet’s slightly swollen belly and withdrew some of the amniotic liquid and he was pleased that this whole procedure posed no danger at all to the beautiful Persephone. Then also, Mr. Sweet, who had accompanied Mrs. Sweet into that room in which Mrs. Sweet lay on a stretcher, could make out the image of the beautiful Persephone on the monitor, not immediately, only after a while, only after his eyes got used to the dark and the color of the fluid in which the beautiful Persephone (though, then not beautiful and not yet Persephone) existed. And immediately, on seeing her, Mr. Sweet loved his daughter and so therefore she was beautiful and she was new, and her newness was not yet original, not unique, the young Persephone was like a season, spring—just for instance—and spring especially! The dear Mr. Sweet, on seeing the remnants (for we are all made of remnants) that was then all there was of the beautiful Persephone, floating about serenely in the amniotic fluid contained in a sac, which lay within Mrs. Sweet’s womb, immediately conceived a symphony of sounds, inspired by her appearance, an evocation and tribute to the simple fact of renewal, whether it be the seasons, spring in particular, whether it be the life cycle of an amphibian, whether it be the skin covering his own being: there was a cycle of living fully and then a decline into death for a while and then living fully in joyousness again. The beautiful Persephone, in utero, catapulted Mr. Sweet into the cycle of living joyously and as if living joyously would and could last forever. He could see immediately, so Mr. Sweet said and thought also to himself, that her fingers, long and strong, were perfectly fit to play the lyre and already—Then, Now—he could hear her renditions of variations of this and that; her renditions, by way of the lyre, of concertos, quartets, quintets, suites, and all other such things. And then Mr. Sweet worried that the beautiful thing swimming around in Mrs. Sweet’s womb would be born too soon, before it had spent the usual nine months in utero, and then its brain might not be fully developed and those fingers might fall short of the lengths required of fingers to play the lyre properly and its digestive track might not work properly, and Mrs. Sweet was sent to bed and sang—to herself and to the beautiful Persephone also, who was not yet beautiful or even Persephone, yet—songs she knew from her own childhood: “Two pence ha’penny woman, lie dun on the Bristol, de Bristol e’ go go bum-bum, an e’ knock out she big fat pum-pum!” And the beautiful Persephone—for after a while she was really becoming beautiful and Persephone, at that—grew and grew to perfection in her mother’s womb and then one day, in autumn, she was born.

Say Now about then:

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At the time that Persephone was born, three years and nine months before the birth of the young Heracles, Mr. and Mrs. Sweet lived in the greengrocer’s house, just above the Holland Tunnel, and that house, built in the middle of the nineteenth century, by the time the Sweets lived in it had been stripped of any niceness: it had no plumbing and no proper walls, it was hollowed out and they had to make repairs to it, and get permission to run water lines and gas lines and electric lines and exterminate because at least forty-five mice lived in that house. Then Mrs. Sweet grew large, so large that Mr. Sweet, as a joke, meaning to keep her spirits up, for she was in despair at her ballooning figure, as she saw herself in a mirror, began to call her Charles Laughton, and by that he was referring to the actor who had once been married to the actress Elsa Lanchester, but then he (Mr. Sweet) was not thinking of actor or actress, he was not thinking of the person and the impersonation, he was, in his real heart and mind, thinking: my wife is pregnant, there is a person to come inside her and this person is someone I do not want to know, do not want to become part of me, I am not capable of such intimacy, a baby, a child, a person, how to make all of this go away, how to remain myself (by that he meant Mr. Sweet) if this being must come into existence; and Mr. Sweet thought: How happy I am to be the father of this beautiful girl, who will play duets with me, for I will write for her music to be played on the pianoforte, music for four hands, and I will call them Nocturnes for Persephone, I will call all of them Nocturnes for Persephone. I shall love her very much and will keep her close to my heart. Mr. Sweet smiled at his wife, who was in a constant state of throwing up, and she threw up all the contents of her stomach, over and over again and sometimes she felt as if she had thrown up her stomach itself.

But she did not throw up her stomach itself and eventually the beautiful Persephone grew in it and one day she was born. Persephone was beautiful, without doubt: her face itself, each part, each aspect of it, was in perfect proportion to the other: the eyes themselves were exactly alike in shape and size and set apart on either side of the bridge of her petallike nose; her mouth, like the beginning of the moon, before it reached fully, the first quarter; her ears like the shell that had protected some delicate morsel that lived in the bowels of the sea and then died on the shore; she was beautiful, thought her mother and her father, and they then had no inkling that all mothers and fathers everywhere, on seeing their firstborn child, said to themselves: love is beautiful, beauty is perfect and just. As Persephone emerged from Mrs. Sweet’s womb, she was, then and now, beautiful, and on seeing her covered in vernix caseosa, Mrs. Sweet fell into a violent trembling, she wanted to run away, far away, but she could not, for Dr. Fuchs placed the beautiful Persephone in her arms and he was so pleased because he imagined that he had made three people very happy: the mother and father and the newborn child. In her fit of trembling, her body shaking as if it would shortly exit to the next world, Mrs. Sweet held on to the newly born girl as if she were a lifeline to her own existence, and indeed so it was. And Mrs. Sweet was so afraid that because she was in such a state she would drop her baby on the floor of the delivery room of the hospital in which the beautiful Persephone had just been born, and on falling to the floor, the baby Persephone would shatter and scatter all over, pieces of her lying here and there; and just before she entered a state of panic, of unreasonableness, Mr. Sweet removed the baby from her arms and swaddled her in a blanket provided by the hospital and took her to the nursery and placed her in a bassinet, where she fell asleep among many other babies that had been born just around the same time. Of course, the beautiful Persephone had opened her lungs by crying upon emerging entirely from Mrs. Sweet’s body (she had been living parasitically off Mrs. Sweet as she lay growing contentedly in that dear woman’s womb) and then she fell deeply asleep and in that sleep she became the beautiful Persephone, again and again and forever. The beautiful Persephone, for she was that by then, needed nutrients, so true, so true, for she could not exist all by herself taking in only the air for breathing, and Mrs. Sweet took her and placed the full sacks of milk that lay indifferently on her chest into the mouth of the beautiful Persephone, who drank and drank, making noises as she did so: amounting to quartets, suites, a monody, a solo, a duo, orchestral, symphonic, a combo of every sound imaginable in harmony, pleasing and pleasurable to a listener of such things, but frightening to someone sitting next to her mother, and that was Mr. Sweet.

The postnatal Mrs. Sweet, that is the mind and body that was then Mrs. Sweet, existed in the faintest circle of a hell not recognized in any of the scriptures. Her body, from her head to her toes, had blown up in a pleasing way to someone: Mr. Sweet continued to lovingly call her Charles Laughton, but when she saw a reflection of herself in the mirror (while brushing her teeth in the bathroom, for instance), her hair unwashed and needing a touch-up, she looked like his wife, the actress Elsa Lanchester, in particular when she portrayed the young bride of the hero Frankenstein. All the same, “Yum, yum, yum” were the sounds then echoing from the mouth of the beautiful Persephone as she tugged at the nipples of Mrs. Sweet’s breasts, devouring loudly the milk coming out of them in a rush, and the flow of the milk would have drowned her if Mrs. Sweet had not been paying close attention. Looking up at her mother’s face, which was also perfectly round and bulbous, the beautiful Persephone fell in love with the entire being of her mother, without knowing love is accompanied by hatred and contempt, too—which is a benign form of hatred. In any case, how the beautiful Persephone loved her mother, the sweet Mrs. Sweet, the sweetest of all the Mrs. Sweets there had been and the sweetest of all the Mrs. Sweets that might come: her round and full breasts, her round and full face, a glistening brown altogether; her eyes the color of barrels full of molasses, her nose swelling out like a chipmunk’s, his cheeks full of chestnuts, or a mongoose’s, his cheeks filled with any amphibians or weaker mammals he finds in his way; her lips wide and fat, like the spout of an already large-petaled flower (the hibiscus); her ears large and soft and unusual and remarkable but bearing no likeness to anything in the animal or vegetable kingdom. And so the beautiful Persephone came to fall in love with her mother, the sweet and kind Mrs. Sweet, as she drank from the sacs of milk that lay on her mother’s chest. And Persephone grew beautiful and beautiful and even so, more beautiful again.

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Immediately after Persephone’s birth, Mr. Sweet began to secrete her; first he took her for a walk around the block, placing her in a pouch designed and manufactured by a woman who lived somewhere in California; then he took her for a walk to a park, an emptied-out space near the elevated West Side Highway, and then he took a walk to somewhere, and eventually he took her on a walk, just that, a walk, so that soon a walk became a destination all by itself. Where is she? Mrs. Sweet would ask herself and Mr. Sweet too, if she managed to see him; from her own self came no answer, for she really did not know what happened to the beautiful Persephone, and when she turned to Mr. Sweet he would only smile and say to her, “Hmmmmmh!” and that “Hmmmmmh!” humming to himself, the first few bars of a symphony, a suite, a quartet, a quintet, or so on, predictable as the natural order of things as they would appear in the sphere in November and December, the stars that could be seen in all their glory, if you were standing on the lawn of the Shirley Jackson house and if you were looking up, overhead could be seen the galaxy Andromeda and inside it a bright light called the Great Nebula and nearer still the Magellanic Clouds and Fornax and Draco and Ursa Minor, among other things to be seen overhead; and also Perseus and Cassiopeia and Mirfak and Algol; all this could be observed if you were standing on the lawn just outside and beyond the Shirley Jackson house, but when Persephone was born the Sweets then lived in the old house that was built just above the Holland Tunnel, right next to Canal Street.