The Bride of Catastrophe (15 page)

“So what's going to happen?” I asked Ma.

“
He's
going out west,” she said. “And I … well, I have to see what…”

“Ma, this boy,” I began.

“I didn't do anything, I did
not
!” she cried, so sharply that I had to stop and try to figure out what I'd accused her of. “What kind of monster do you think I am?” she asked.

I thought she was a very charming sort of monster—a monster who Meant No Harm. Just to sit close to her was to feel her panic in the face of life—to feel it exert itself on your own senses, pulling them into agreement with hers until everything swung wild and the air was full of unseen danger and you were alone and at its mercy and it was driving its needles in, and you'd do anything, break anything, tear at your own skin even, to escape.

I moved my chair a little. “No, Ma,” I said quietly. I was exquisitely aware that Philippa was right behind us. “I didn't say you did anything wrong.”

“Oh, my head,” she said suddenly, dropping it into her hands as if it had grown too heavy with all the dread and woe. “Sylvie, go through my purse, would you, see if you can find my pills?”

Sylvie heaved the thing onto her lap. Across the lawn, Pop was talking with great animation, as always when forlorn, and Dolly cupped herself toward him, listening as if the force of her attention might hold the poor splintered man together a little longer. I tried not to look, to keep Ma from noticing, though of course she could see nothing else. If he stopped to pet the cat, she despised the creature for stealing the crumbs of tenderness that rightly belonged to her. And Dolly didn't have to stick at his side either; he understood we ran an awful risk by being nice to him; he never pressed the point.

“Larry, that's his name,” she said, as if those syllables proved something immense. “He's not a boy, he's nearly twenty. And Bea, he's so bright, if it wasn't for the dyslexia you don't know what he might have done.”

Sylvie pawed in the bottom of the purse. “Here, here, I've got 'em,” she said. “Is there water?”

Ma gulped them down with her wine.

What had I been thinking, when I said I'd go home? Of the mock orange, how I used to walk right into the middle of it, to smell the flowers, rain dripping down my collar from the leaves, bumblebees working around me. Beauty is an anesthetic, that's why we love it so. Mock orange smells so sweet, you can forget everything, including the reason why you're hiding from your family in a bush full of bees.

“What will I do? Where will I go?” Ma was asking.

“A liaison, a dalliance, that's all,” Philippa was saying to Pedro across the way. How had she become such a dashing conquistador? What about those shy phone calls when I'd felt something in her creeping out to meet me, though she'd tried to lock it in? Or the way she'd imagined me as “one of those bunnies”?

“Though, the bosom,” she added, in a tone of lascivious regret.

“Yes, lovely, lovely,” Pedro breathed, sounding very deeply moved.

“I've hated him for twenty years,” Ma was saying, “… since even before you were born. What they did to people, Beatrice, how they tortured them, despised them.” You had to know her logic to understand this—
they
were the Nazis, my father's people. She shuddered. “That I
married
a torturer. And now here I am, alone with three little children.”

“How'd you come by those children, by the way?” I asked, thinking that it did look careless, this absentminded bearing of children by a Nazi year in and year out.

“Oh, for God's sake,
so
we had sex four times! So what?” she said, though some instinct caused her to pull at her hem. “You don't know—you really don't know, Beatrice—how I've suffered. And now, now what?” Her voice was heavy with tears again.
“I have nothing.”

This was the first phrase of an aria whose crescendo might shatter the perfect bowl of sky above us, and I interrupted quickly:

“You have me, Ma.”

“Thank God for you, Beatrice,” Ma said, looking into my eyes so that I saw how badly she needed something, some thing she was sure I could give her. She took my hands in a gesture at once imperious and abject, and my heart swelled toward her against my will. She was awash in a torrent of her own making and I would have to fish her out somehow, and then would come the next flood, and the next, but I couldn't bear to see her drown.

“I don't know what I'd do without you,” she said. “I knew, Beatrice, knew from the minute you were born.”

That I would someday work the miracle that saved her from herself. “And now, look, all this.” She gazed around, at the tent, the lawn, the stone chapel with its reflecting pool, and all the other parents, among them a couple of movie stars, a famous disbarred lawyer, and of course the modernist, Bill Canterbridge—as if the place belonged to me.

“Ma,” I said, looking helplessly back at Philippa …

Who cried “Beatrice!” in apparent surprise at seeing me. She rushed over saying, “
This
must be your mother!” with a glance at Pedro: Did he see
now
what a peculiar conquest she'd made? Toward me she arched a brow—she'd seen, she was properly aghast, and in this way at least, she loved me; she wanted to know the story.

“You must be very proud of your daughter, Mrs. Wolfe,” she said in a voice full of secret allusion.

“I certainly am,” Ma replied, as if Philippa had challenged her to a duel whose winner would have the exclusive right to take pride in me. “It's an odd thing for me to say, I know,” she went on, “but Beatrice is my … my role model. Through these
horrible
times…” (Philippa shot me a glance and I tried to signal—folly, destitution, divorce—with my eyes) “… she has been a constant inspiration to me. No matter what, I can always think, no, no, there's Beatrice, she's
your daughter
, and look what
she
can do.”

Yes, surely someday I would lead a revolution, star in an epic, burn at a stake. Then, finally, everyone would know who my mother was. “I only hope I can follow in her footsteps,” she summed up, as if pledging allegiance.

“I wish you every success,” said Philippa with a very slight bow, and a glance at me in which the expression “
Off
with their heads!” could easily be intuited.

“She's my thesis advisor,” I thought to explain, watching her go off toward the bar, but Ma had already forgotten her and was looking over at Dolly and my father. “I can't take this, I'm going to explode,” she said—seeming to foretell a physical inevitability.

The provost came along, stepping aside so Philippa could pass, and stopped for a minute to congratulate me, gripping my arm and pulling me toward him to say, into my ear: “You look
savagely
beautiful.”

I fell on this like a jackal—could it be, that there was some quality in me that I hadn't recognized? Because I really was savage, so mightn't he be right about the beauty too? If he was, the world would take me in, I knew.

“I can't be here with him like this,” Ma said, louder,
“I am going to explode.”

“Would you like to go to the library and see my thesis?” I asked, feeling what a feeble gambit this was. That I had written a hundred intelligible, if ponderous pages,
must
prove I had some inner compass and might be able to move forward instead of going around in circles all my life, but Ma could hardly be expected to see this. Was that thesis going to get up and pay her mortgage, after all, or restore her lost love? No, it wasn't lurid enough. It would lie there in the library, serving no purpose at all.

“My life is crashing down around me,” she said, with angry tears, “I can't think about your thesis now.”

Of all the things that rushed into my mind, not one could be spoken. Across the lawn I saw the provost lean in to whisper to Kitty LaWren, a modern dance major whose senior performance—“Bunny Life,” for which she had worn only a pelt of white fur glued to her buttocks—had been hailed as a brilliant commentary on the way women are reduced by men to sexual playthings, and must certainly have had a salutary effect, since it had been attended by every single student and professor at the school. I read his lips: Kitty was looking savagely beautiful too.

My thoughts, torn so rudely from the mock-orange bower, took refuge in memories of Philippa. She had read everything, thought about everything. She was on intimate terms with Emma Bovary and Dorothea Brooke and all those women conceived not by mere parents, but by authors: ordinary women whose lives had extraordinary depth because they were lucky enough to work, love, connive, fail, and die in the warm light of their creators' understanding. How wonderful to have someone like Philippa studying you every day.

I'm a Lesbian
, I thought stubbornly, and with this, a little wall flew up between me and my mother, and I felt safe for a minute. But I couldn't very well say it, and casting around to fill the silence, I found another way to prod her. “I guess I should go over and see Pop before the ceremony,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. So, it was just as she'd suspected, I was her enemy and like it or not she would have to order my execution. “Ask him,” she said bitterly, “just ask him, if he thinks you're brilliant
now
.”

*   *   *

“
THE EARTH
was formed out of chaos, honey,” he said when I'd reached his side of the lawn. “It's solid.” He put his foot down, to prove it. “Your life will be too.” He was given to flights of philosophy, assays into this or that territory that filled in for conversation. In conversation, the other person gets to talk, and you don't know what sort of thing they might say. The person who knew him most intimately was my mother, and she used that knowledge of his tender spots so she could know where to drip her acid. And maybe it was true that only acid could burn through his thick hide to reach his heart.

I brought myself up—never mind, it was my commencement day and he was trying, at least, to say something fond. I saw in his face how much he wanted to love me—to butt through the big block of his disappointment in me and come out into sunlight again. Standing there in his suit, he looked like the man he had wished to become, the father he ought to have been, and I wanted to say, “There
was
a rabbit, I'm sure of it. You didn't mean any harm.”

A great tearing noise issued from the orchestra. The graduation march had been written by one of the music majors, as a “realistic evocation of the great stress associated with growth and change.” This was all explained in the program, as if it were a new idea that growth and change might be stressful. Oh, how had I gotten stuck here, class of 1978, the most ridiculous year of the most appalling century in history?

I shuffled into line with Sid and Ross, who nodded at me as if nothing had ever happened between us. They looked right together—Sid's angles and his stare against Ross's dark, plush absorbency. There'd been a swing band at the graduation party the night before, and the music had tricked us into acting like people from another era. Sid had asked me to dance, though I'd never even imagined him dancing before, but suddenly he was more than able and I laughed and twirled and even dared fall back into a dip, to see Philippa watching with approval from the side. Then the tempo slowed and I felt a tap on my shoulder: Ross was cutting in. He took Sid by the waist and waltzed him away. As they came back to me, he looked into Sid's eyes and said, “You know, I believe you'd kiss me now.” Sid closed his eyes and bent toward Ross, and they had kissed softly as if in a dream. I'd closed the circuit between them; they'd gone to each other through me the way lightning goes through a body of water. Now they could court an intimacy that would have been forbidden, much more so than sex.

Philippa sucked the last butter off her fingers and adjusted her robe, ready for the processional. The thought that I was going away from her, that I might never see her again, opened in my gut with a black hopelessness like the thought of dying. What had I done, to push her away from me? I'd kept my bearings all this time by keeping focused on her—now I was going to careen away, and collide with—I closed my eyes, I didn't want to know.

I always sing when I'm nervous: music makes an emotional context you can live in like air. So I took a breath and tried to call “Pomp and Circumstance” to mind—
it
was what I'd been waiting for, the elephantine cadences, the sound of tradition, of certainties passed down and down. I had studied, studied with all my heart, Philippa would confirm it—surely, after all my efforts, I deserved something solid in return? Against the scratch and whine of the orchestra my voice was lost, and the next thing I knew I was singing the “Marseillaise.” It was sufficiently stirring,
“Le jour de gloire est arrivé.”
And it reminded me that there
was
something I could close my hand around: I was a lesbian. A little spring of something like patriotism welled up in me. The provost emerged at the head of the procession, and I fell into step with the rest.

Ten

P
OP AND
Dolly drove home in the Jeep, while the rest of us went in Ma's new Karmann Ghia: her motorcycle prodigy had traded it for the family Oldsmobile. Teddy was on my lap and Sylvie had to lie in the space behind the bucket seats, but the squeeze was worth it: Pop and Dolly were so
morose
, we wouldn't have had any fun with them. Ma was giddy—a blitz was destroying her life,
finally
, and she was driving a little scarlet car, and everything was shattering around her and who could guess what might come next?

“… So,” Sylvie continued, “She says to the man delivering the telegram, ‘Please sing it, I've always wanted to get a singing telegram.' And he says ‘Oh, no, no, ma'am, I don't think…' But she says, ‘Oh please?' So he says, ‘Well, okay … Da, da, da, da, your sister Rose is dead, da, da, da, da…'”