The Eighth Day (35 page)

“What is that new sign they're putting over the door downstairs, Ruby?”

“I'm changing my name and the name of the store. I've wanted to do it for two years, but I had to wait until the business was going well. Tomorrow's an important day for me, Trent. Please, will you, please, never call me Ruby again. My name is
IZUMI
.”

He kissed the tips of her fingers and said, “Izumi, Izumi.”

Weightlessly, trailing her soft robe, she left the bed and knelt on the floor. She lowered her forehead, as though acknowledging a courtesy. “You are the first person to call me by my name.”

“What does the name mean, Izumi?”

“Trent, have you heard that some people believe that men and women are reborn many times?”

“As many times as there are sands in the Ganges River.”

“Trent!”

“And that we either go up a great staircase to the threshold of happiness or that we sink down and drag others down with us.”

“Trent!”

“We become almost-Buddhas. I forget what we are called then.”

She put two fingers on his lips. “The Lady Izumi was a poet. Because her poetry was beautiful and because she loved the Lotus Scripture she became a Bodhisattva.”

“Do you believe that, Izumi—that people are born again and again?”

Again she placed her finger on his mouth. “We call the world the Burning House.”

“What?”

“We are born again and again in the hope that someday, someday, we shall escape from this burning house.”

“You are very high up on the ladder, Izumi.”

She drew herself up straight as though she were offended. Then she laid her head down upon the pillow and turned away.

“How can you tell whether a person is high up or low down? Is it when a person is good?”

“Do not use the word ‘good.' Say ‘free.' I am very low down on the ladder, Trent.”

“
You?
”

“Yes, I have a great many weights that hold me down.''

“No!—Name just one, Izumi.”

She placed the knuckles of her left hand between her breasts. “
Here!
I have a great ulcer,
here.
”

“Ruby! Ruby! Izumi!”

“Weights. Weights. Of anger. Of spite. I cannot forgive the people who tried to be kind to me. They hung their weights on me. Why should I be angry at them? They were ignorant. They were
Christians!
Oh,
their
burning house! To please them I was a detestable, unnatural, false little girl. They robbed me of my childhood and girlhood. See how angry I am! Go to sleep, Trent. I must say the Lotus Scripture.”

“Name one more weight, Izumi.”

Again she turned her head away on the pillow. She whispered, “You.”

“No!” He seized her hand. “Say no.”

She raised herself on her elbow and said, “You are very high on that stairway, Trent.”

“I! You don't know what you're saying!”

“You are not attached to things. You do not want fame or riches. You do not want to crush people with your power. You do not envy others. You are not proud. You have no hates. You are freeing yourself from everything that is bad in your Karma. When I first knew you I thought that maybe you were a Bodhisattva. But when I knew you a little better I could see that there was a little violence in you, left over, a little violence in your Karma.”

“What is Karma, Izumi?”

“It is the burden of fate that we have created for ourselves during all our thousands of past lives.”

He went around to her side of the bed and knelt before her face. “I am a weight in your life. I am not helping you to climb the great ladder.”

“Trent, do not be impatient. Impatience never freed a man from the burning house. I think you are helping me to forgive those people who were so kind to me. Will you go to sleep now?”

“Yes.”

She returned to whispering her sacred text.

“Translate to me the words that you were saying just then, Izumi.”

“I had come to the place where it tells of the plants that are reborn.”

“
Plants go to Heaven, too??!
”

“Trent! Trent! Every living thing is a part of the nature of the One. You know that. That's why you write about animals so well. And about the planting of oak trees. We are all in the One.”

The turbulence of these associations subsided. When he came to have more money in his pocket he invited one or the other out to dinner. How they talked to him and his large ears! He laughed oftener—with them and at them and at himself.

Roger's interest in the opera had abated. Reading—his new discovery—was now feeding his hunger for the noble and the heroic. He occasionally returned to the opera house, however, when his favorites were performed.

There was a late spring season in 1905. At the close of a performance Roger stood near the main entrance watching the audience disperse. His attention was attracted by a very beautiful young woman who was also lingering by a marble column. He had noticed her on a number of occasions, always seated in a box with a handsome couple of older years; he assumed she was their daughter. On this evening the mother was absent. The father had been detained in conversation by friends. The young woman had just replaced an enormous hat on her head. She was elegant, tightly laced, conspicuous, accustomed to the world's gaze and unabashed by her temporary isolation. She had acquired the art of looking through the admiring faces that turned toward her. With one gloved hand she meditatively smoothed the veil drawn over her chin, with the other she played with a feather boa thrown over her shoulders. This was not the kind of woman that Roger found attractive. What had long interested him in her, however, was her air of being upborne on some tide of supreme assurance.

Suddenly he realized that this was his sister Lily.

Her companion rejoined her and they left the theatre, Roger following. Apparently they had only a short distance to go. They talked in Italian. He heard his sister's laughter—of a kind he had not heard from her before; it ranged over an octave and a half; it echoed in the streets. They came to a grey sandstone house that bore a brass plate: “The Josepha Carrington Jones Club for Young Ladies.” Lily, latch key in hand, turned and thanked her escort warmly. He continued down the street, humming. As she was unlocking the door Roger spoke her name softly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Lily, I'm Roger.”

She flew down the steps on the wings of her great cloak and threw her arms around him. “Roger, Roger! Darling Roger!—
Oh!
How tall you are!
Oh
, how you look like Papa!—I want to show you to Maestro Lauri, my singing teacher. He just left me here at the door.”

How long had he been in Chicago? What did he do? Oh, how he looked like Papa—dear wonderful Papa!

“Can we go somewhere for a cup of coffee? No
man
is allowed in this building after six. Wait for me here until I change my clothes. . . . ? I have to kiss you again. Roger, what does it all
mean
—what happened to us?” She started up the stairs then turned back. “Roger, I have a little boy—he's
wonderful, wonderful.
Roger, how did Mama feel about my running away? I had to do it, Roger. I had to get away from Coaltown. I'm never going back—never, never. I send Mama money every month.”

“I know you do.”

“Soon I'll be able to send her
lots.
”

Twenty minutes later they were seated in a German restaurant. Lily resembled her mother and Constance; Roger resembled his father and Sophia. For a time what they saw was more engrossing than what they said. The cascades of laughter.

“I have the most beautiful baby in the world and I'm not even married.” Laughter. She raised her hand and showed him the gold band. “I bought it in a pawnshop! I'm Mrs. Helena Temple. The boy's name is John Temple. He's living with an Italian family that loves him to death. I don't know when he'll learn to speak English.”

It was not new to Roger that those who ask no questions receive the fullest answers.

“I passed his father on the street yesterday. He hates me.” Laughter. “He hates me because he struck me.”

“What?”

“Twice, in fact. He struck me because I laughed at him. Men hate to be laughed at. He kept trying to teach me such stupid music. He wanted me to go on the vaudeville stage with him. He wanted me to practice kicking a top hat off his head. Imagine!” (Laughter.) “But—in his way—he's a perfectly nice man! I'll always be grateful to him for taking me to Maestro Lauri. I sang two of those songs I used to sing in Coaltown and the Maestro said that I was the pupil he'd spent his life hunting for. Every month I write him a receipt for the lessons I've had and when I earn enough I'll start paying him back. I sing at funerals and weddings and I sing in the Episcopal church on Sunday mornings, and in a Presbyterian church in the evenings. The funeral parlors send for me five and six times a week—Schubert's ‘Ave Maria.' Fifteen dollars—take it or leave it! I won't sing ‘I know a garden where roses sleep.' I'm a tartar, Roger! Weddings—Handel's ‘Where'er you walk'—fifteen dollars. I won't sing
‘Oh, promise me.'
Lots of people are furious at me, but I get jobs.—Roger, what do you do?”

“I'll tell you later. How did it come to an end with the father of your boy?”

“Well, he struck me a second time. There we were in that hot hotel room and he'd been trying to teach me a song and dance called ‘The Way We Do the Cancan in Kentucky.' Imagine! I said I wouldn't do it
one more moment
and I laughed at him. He struck me hard. And he cried. He really loved me in a way. When he left the room I stole his amethyst ring and went to that club for working girls. For a while I washed dishes and helped cook. I showed them I knew everything about
boardinghouses!
They wanted to make me housekeeper. Then I had my wonderful baby in a Catholic hospital. I loved everything about it. I sang to the other girls. I sang even when I was having the baby. The doctor and sisters were laughing. Giovannino was born to laughter and my screeches and Mozart's ‘Alleluia.' He was a seven-months baby, but he's as strong as I am. I'm going to have a hundred boys and girls—all beautiful and strong like Gianni.”

Roger could not take his eyes from his sister's face. His mother, who had so beautiful a smile, seldom—never—laughed.

“But that's enough about me! Tell me, what work do you do?”

“I write for newspapers.”

“Oh, do that! Do that! Someday you'll be as good as ‘Trent.' Do you ever read ‘Trent's' pieces?”

“Yes.”

“I save them. I sent some to Mama. The Maestro thinks they're very good and Signora Lauri has collected every one of them.”

“Lily, I'm Trent.”

“You're ‘Trent'! You're ‘Trent'!
Oh, Roger, how proud Papa would be!
”

The Maestro had invited a group of friends to a musicale in his studio on the following night. He was introducing three of his pupils, including Lily. Roger had always known that the dreamy absent-spirited Lily could sing beautifully. What astonished him now was the noble utterance. The breadth. She set the window-panes rattling with passionate declarations of joy and grief. He thought:
“How proud Mama will be!”

Roger became a favorite in the Maestro's home. Signora Lauri enrolled him among her sons—the three living and the two dead. His chair was beside hers at the mighty nine-course Milanese dinners—the family's and the guests' anniversaries, the birthdays of Garibaldi and Verdi and Manzoni.

The Maestro was in his late sixties. Long ago he had been marooned in New York through the bankruptcy of an opera troupe which he had served as assistant conductor, chorus master, and occasional baritone. From there he was invited to Chicago to teach singing in a conservatory that had also failed. He had stayed on and prospered. Every five years the entire family returned to Milan to visit their relatives. He was tall, thin, and as erect as a drill master. He dressed with the greatest care. He wore a
toupet;
his superb mustaches were dyed and perfumed. His expression was that of a lion tamer whose beasts were constantly in revolt; lightning flickered in his eyes. Signora Lauri's life was not an easy one. She bore the brunt of his resentment against all that went wrong in existence. She was his unsatisfactory pupils, his dyspepsia; she brought the three-day snow and drove the thermometer to one hundred and four. Yet he was boundlessly dependent on her. If she were to die, he would dwindle to a peppery, posturing old man—old and emptied. Occasionally his impotent rage against circumstance burst forth. He heaped sarcasms upon her; he denounced her for having ruined his life, she and her wagonload of disrespectful children. She held her chin high; the glance from her eyes would wither a grapevine. The quarrels were necessary and operatic; the reconciliations were tear-drenched and very grand. Signora Lauri understood it all. That was marriage. She had the ring and a home and she had borne him ten children. Her greatest trials were his infidelities and her enormous size. She once showed her son Roger the photograph of a painting by a modern master. The original hung in a gallery in Rome, she said. It showed a lovely girl of sixteen, standing by a parapet over Lake Como. Roger looked up at her inquiringly; she reddened and nodded slightly. “
La vita, la vita.
”

The maestro spoke a number of languages with a singing teacher's precision and with the relish of one for whom languages are themselves artistic creations. It became his custom to lead Roger into his studio after dinner. He was in the mood for conversation. Lily and his daughters begged to join them, but were sternly told that the time had come for “men's talk.”

Roger had found another Saturn.

What is art?

Roger had a very low opinion of art. Chicago was full of it. The homes of the rich (weddings and suicides) and the choicer brothels (mayhem) that he had penetrated as a reporter abounded in art—bronze girls holding up lamps, paintings of ladies getting ready to take a bath. There were a lot of cows in art and monks holding wine glasses up to the light. Catholic churches were full of art.
Most
art, though, was about pretty girls.