The Bride of Catastrophe (2 page)

“
Mordant
, not
verdant!
” she'd remind me when I started looking homesick, and I'd snap back and go on with my story. Philippa had considered a career in archaeology, and wanted every detail.

“What were you having for dinner, I mean, a typical menu?”

I saw Ma at the stove, frying, yes, a sliced puffball. She'd picked it in the woods, where one didn't see other humans or undertake conversations. Velveeta has more taste and texture than fried puffball, but puffball:
(a)
defies convention
(b)
demonstrates privation and so
(c)
sets those who dine on it above the commonplace others one might meet in the grocery store. The dinner table was small and low: they'd gotten it for ten dollars at a garage sale, and every time they drew their chairs up and bumped their knees, they could be reminded that they cared not for the things of the material world, that their lives were centered on love. We had five chairs for six people, so the last to come to dinner would find himself standing, until Ma learned to dramatize her sense of isolation by eating her meals seated on the washing machine, feet swinging, plate on her lap. She needed to dramatize her every thought and feeling, for fear no one would notice her and she'd just disappear. And as her heart and mind were fixed completely on my father, the washing machine was the perfect spot—it was right behind his place at the table so she could make satirical faces over his head at us while he spoke.

Because after all, what was he saying? “Everything in moderation”; “Still waters run deep”; “What cannot be cured must be endured.” Murderous platitudes, meant to kill ambition, silence debate, keep Ma from doing whatever it was she was bent on, her eyes blazing, foot pressing some cosmic accelerator, hands gripping her dinner plate tight because any minute she would,
finally
, take off.

Out of the corner of her eye, she'd see something—a spilt juice cup, a gobbled dessert—and flash over into rage. These were not, to her, merely childish lapses of manners, but proof we were shameful creatures, manifesting all the greed and sloth she'd worked so hard to conquer—or at least, to hide, in herself. Was she going to have to despise us, her own children? But then, suppose she managed to perfect us? Then—of course!—
we
would despise
her
! She was waiting for that sign that would prove what she knew at the bottom of herself, that we didn't really love her. A wrong look, a wrong word, a wrong bite and
ba-boom
, in a blinding flash, the mother we knew would be gone.

She loved fire. What else destroys with such majesty? In winter she stared into the hearth for hours, in summer went tree to tree with her torch, lighting the gauzy gypsy moth nests with a grave, ceremonial air. The caterpillars inside popped like corn.

When the clouds towered up, late on a summer afternoon, she felt the torch was coming for her.

“Thunderheads,” she'd say, portentous. “Inside, now, all of you.” She herself towered on the doorstep, calm in the face of danger, calling her chicks in under her wing. For once her purpose was clear: it was to close all windows, unplug all appliances, and hurry us into the closet under the stairs, where we'd wait out the summer shower as if it were the tempest itself.

“Okay,” Philippa said. “She heroically shelters her children from a peril she has, essentially, invented. I
love
mothers.”

“Well, I never thought of it quite that way,” I said, but I could see Ma standing in the closet doorway, murmuring
“thar she blows,”
with a drama no less heady than the fragrant summer air. She was about to shut us in the stifling dark, where we would huddle close for an hour or more, hot, sticky, and feeling the thrill of being safe together amidst danger.

“It's just like London,” she told us, “during the blitz.”

She had grown up in New York, had never been to London, so if she was going to discuss the blitz, this—a closet with four small children in it—was the proper forum. And she needed to talk about the blitz: the tension of her own life found a mirror there. She smouldered, yes, but no one knew when she'd blow, and this was such a source of suspense that we hated to leave the house for fear of missing that moment. It was the focus of our lives.

So I did have to laugh, hearing Philippa's view, though this felt vaguely sacrilegious toward my mother. “Lightning
is
very dangerous,” I said, in the tone of a model third-grader. “Have you ever seen ball lightning? When my mother was little, one came in through the window and scared her to death.”

“I have little doubt that balls of lightning turn up around your mother,” Philippa said. “But ‘scared to death'? No. I'd say she awaits them with breathless anticipation.”

“Well, there is that,” I admitted. We were laughing, and the little office with its posters of Philippa's idols—Napoleon and Catherine Deneuve—felt as cozy as that linen closet all of a sudden.

Which pricked my heart, since it seemed to betray my mother.

“I know, it was peculiar, but it was nice,” I said. “All of us together there in the country like that. The place had its own magic, it was so beautiful there. It attracted people, it made things happen … kind of like
Howards End
.” (We'd been studying E. M. Forster and there was a whiff of oxygen in making a literary reference to Philippa, as if I was up on Mount Olympus chatting with Athena.)

The corner of her mouth turned and a sharp dimple appeared in her left cheek. “Really,” she said.

“They—Ma's generation—suffered from the Second World War, somehow,” I went on. “I mean, they weren't anywhere near it, but they were children then and—I think the idea of hiding in a closet from an evil force, that it sank in deep, with her.”

“Why?”

“I don't know, because she's crazy! To hear them at dinner, night after night, reliving that damn war, the chance escapes and chance murders…”

I shook my head, which was full of those stories: Nadia for instance, age five, who threw a tantrum at the border so the harried guards waved the family through—she was screaming for the nursemaid they'd had to leave behind, as if she guessed the woman's fate. Cautionary tales, but what was the moral? That ordinary people can do unspeakable things; that Chance can destroy anything, so all effort is futile—all will be tears in the end. That you may not recognize the face of evil, even if it belongs to your neighbor, even if you see it in the mirror every day.

“What if you were wading in the brook and the water got hotter and hotter until it was boiling?” my father asked me one night.

“I'd jump out on the bank!” I was eight years old, first in my class, and I assumed he was testing me, that I'd give the right answer and win his love like a spelling bee prize.

“And if the bank was hot? Hot as an iron skillet?”

“I'd climb up a tree!” My eagerness only baited him. Did I really imagine I could outrun life's terrors? Outsmart him? His eyes gleamed; he'd show me …

“What if the tree turned out to be nothing more than a red-hot wire, like the element on the stove? And the skin on your hands melted against it and pulled off like gloves?”

“I guess I'd burn up and die,” I'd answered … the answer he'd wanted, that showed I understood how he felt about everything.

“Howards End?”
Philippa shrieked suddenly, laughing like Grace Poole, “If that isn't the summit of Wolfean rose-colored thinking: You feel you grew up at Howards End? The
House of Usher
, you mean. Oh, really,
Howards End
!”

Had I learned nothing from her classes? My father was clearly Dickensian, and he married a woman who'd stepped directly out of Poe! “You
must
learn to read more closely!” she said.

Two

I
F ONLY
my father could have managed our deaths better than he had our lives. If he'd driven faster, turned sharper, but no, he had swerved without true conviction and instead of smashing into the light pole, the car had skidded over a shallow embankment into a little grove. My mother climbed out, dusting herself and preparing to sail proudly onward, but felt something at the back of her knee, brushed it, and found blood on her fingers.

A hemorrhage, and the doctors urged an abortion: the child would be retarded, they said. Heroic, she insisted on carrying the creature to term, and so five long months had passed, with this rabbit question looming. It was a figment of his imagination, didn't he see? He hadn't wanted a
rabbit to die,
because he didn't want the baby, didn't really love her, would have done anything to escape.

She sailed proudly on, with never a reproach (if there was something of the martyr in her movements, well, who could blame her, expecting this poor damaged child who would need constant care). And he, the gentle boy she'd married, became unaccountably sullen, withdrawn. He had
seen
a rabbit, he
had
—he had swerved to spare it. He was young and tender-hearted, it was his worst fear that something should suffer because of him. In fact, that was part of the reason why—why he had married her.

She'd been the girl from the valley whose divorced mother took in washing. Every week he brought the laundry down, to peer down the dim hallway with its smells of liver boiling and cheap perfume, the apartment doors left open for air in summer so he'd see old women groaning in their beds, children peeping back at him. He had the loose, quick gait, the lifted chin of a frat boy: an exotic in their world. Behind the next door: Claire Ledoux, eyes narrow, cheeks wide, carriage … majestic, despite the mountain of wrinkled shirts in her basket. She would escape this place; she would iron her way to the stars.

The girls he knew could afford to be gentle. The doors of the future were wide open to them. Claire had only her presence, and her iron. When he asked her to the movies, her eyes blazed and something flashed open in him; a carnal premonition. What might it be like to lift her out of this place—wouldn't her gratitude make for a fiercer love?

She knew him, from the labels on his father's shirts. She knew what he represented. She spent the whole day preparing, was still ironing her sweater when the doorbell rang. Yanking it over her head she was seized with a qualm—was there a wrinkle? She must be perfect; this might be her only chance. She picked up the iron without thinking and pressed it to her heart.

Waiting at the doorway, he heard her scream. A minute later though, she opened the door and smiled with perfect, if seething, composure, grimacing only when she'd straddled the motorcycle behind him and he couldn't see her face anymore. She wrapped her arms around his waist: the girls from the Academy wouldn't have done this; they'd been sheltered unto inanity. Claire was free of their scruples, better than they. She
had
to get somewhere; he was going to give her a ride.

They went to see
A Streetcar Named Desire
. How is it we remember the fifties as a neat, false decade, when they knew everything about sex back then? To take a man into your body is to possess him entirely: from then on his raw voice will call only your name. Of course this knowledge must be kept quiet, as it could drive whole societies mad. But they were reminded that they knew this secret, and each felt the other's awareness. Riding home she held him closer than before, arms across his chest, thighs against his, cheek pressed to his shoulder … all delicacy, she saw now, was a sham.

Kissing her, he pulled her in tight with a motion he'd just learned from Marlon Brando. In fact she reminded him of Stella—made for love, for childbirth—a real woman. He'd always suspected that real life took place along the dim corridors where stains were scrubbed from the collars of the upper class. His parents were away for the weekend—he'd take her home. He wanted her to see what he had to offer her. A Tudor cottage, with a steep roof of slate scallops, herringboned brick, and holly trees in dark masses beside the door. And Claire, burning with defiance—and confidence: men, even strangers on the street, seemed to recognize something powerful in her that she could only believe when she saw it reflected in their eyes—followed him in through the rounded oak door with its four leaded panes inset, into the hallway with the brass salver and the woodwork rubbed with oil. The grandfather had been an ironmonger, come over from Germany or somewhere, “done gates and fences for all the best people in Manhattan. J. P. Morgan, for one,” said her mother, who took her own status from that of the people she washed for.

Claire went to the window—the harbor glittered there, and Brooklyn beyond. To have grown up looking out over these places—to know things from above that way—it was nearly as if he owned them. The windows were clever: one pane in each belled out to accommodate a small trapdoor. She lifted one and found a screened panel—for fresh air, in wintertime.

“God forbid you should suffer a draft,” she said, thinking of the matchbook under the sash at home.

“It saves oil,” he explained, stung.

So, then, what she thought mattered to him. “It just … shows such care.” She smiled so warmly, to salve the little wound. Impossible not to touch her, and when he did, her smile only became more tender. The wondering, grateful smile that broke from him at this was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

There was a wistfulness in it, poignant to her because she'd have been wistful herself if life had allowed her such liberty. In her face he saw a fierce aspiration, which would have counted as crass at the Academy. What if it were possible to become like her—unrestrained?

“We come from different worlds,” she said, sounding so hopeless and picturesque, as if they were in a movie together. The harbor lights, the plush carpet, the leaded windows that reflected, yes, her own beauty. Her burn was stinging.