The Light of Evening (26 page)

“I ate my dinner cautiously and without schnapps,” he says, quoting Strindberg, poor Strindberg with his deathly melodies. They are drinking schnapps and washing it down with beer in an isolated pub, ropes, chains, and anchors hanging from the ceiling, memorabilia of seafarers and an old battered jukebox with its bellied front. A dried white orchid scummed in dust. The owner, a sullen full-breasted woman, is behind the counter, her hair the

same color as Siegfried’s, but unwashed, her face with that same pallor and rising blood, eyeing them with suspicion. At the large wooden table there is a group of young men, loud and laughing, and by the fire an old man in a faded military jacket muttering to himself, the fire being nothing more than stubs of used candles thrown in over a thick log and some pinecones encrusted with lichen, the flames fitful and with a ghastly greenness.

It was in the cottage not long after they had sat down to dinner that it happened, that Strindberg came to the rescue. Why, he had asked her, did every woman he ever met have to bring her bloody mother into the bed, every bloody woman, including his own wife, Siri.

“You have a wife,” she had said.

“Of course I have a wife … everyone has a wife,” he answered wearily, then told her of his wife, Siri, aboard a ship in the south seas with her then husband, a radio engineer, who knew with a certainty that her mother had just died in Cologne and even guessed that her mother had taken her own life, all done with such propriety, such consideration, the bed not slept in, her mother choosing to die on a mat on the floor.

“But my mother is not dead … she’s not even dying,” she had said.

“How do you know?” he said, the words carrying such a ring of doom and the glass of milk leaving her hand, traveling across the room, not fast, not meteorlike, mapping its course, before it chose to crash against the windowpane, where it made a pattern of a jagged, bursting star.

“Strindberg! Strindberg!” he had said with soft and beautiful surprise.

And now they are in the pub and he drinks to Strindberg, in that cold room in Montparnasse, with his utensils and his smelting furnace, trying to wrest the secrets of matter, choosing science as he believed over love, yet consumed by love, a first wife, a second wife, a third wife, his hands black and bleeding from his experiments, remembering a child of his, white-clad with a toy

sloop, somewhere in a castle in Austria with its mother, mistletoe on the Christmas table, poor Strindberg, outcast and torturing lover.

“I have been a pig to you,” he says and takes her hands, leaning across the table, almost to kiss her. It is the cue that one of the youths has been waiting for. Since they sat
—
Siegfried having his back to them
—
she has been aware of him, blond, podgy, lewd, soliciting her with grimace, with gesture, running one of the pinecones over his tongue, his friends spluttering with laughter.

Now he is at their table standing above her, his eyes small and drained, eyes full of nothing, and without uttering a word places a gift on her lap. It is a cigarette carton and it feels warm.

“I don’t smoke,” she says, says it several times, then to Siegfried, “Tell him I don’t smoke” and the two men exchange heated words. The youth refuses to push off, instead and with a skittish aplomb opens the packet and allows a shower of warm ash to spill onto her skirt. Proud of this feat, he picks up Siegfried’s cap that is on a table. It is a special cap, far grander than his, with its rich trim of fox fur, brown and reddish-brown, the neat V-shaped panels of the crown in differing, sleeker furs, ending in a topnotch of ocelot.

“UFO, UFO, UFO … flying saucer, flying saucer,” he says, veering it to simulate the snout of an airplane and having made an impression with his friends, he dons it and walks around, enquiring how he looks. Siegfried crosses to retrieve it and suddenly they are all standing, all shouting, the burliest one with a bare arm coiling, uncoiling, asking that it be broken or do its breaking. The jukebox has been turned on and she is pulled up by the podgy boy into an ugly dance, jounced about, the sweet, banal words of the song, “I do I do I do I do I do,” ropes and chains from the ceiling conking her head and the old man holding up a chair, the dirty legs forked out in defense. It would only have been moments, except that it seemed far longer before the woman behind the counter bestirred herself and came among

them, wielding a crowbar, prodding them as she would prod cattle, calling them by their first names, sending them back to their table, ejecting the two unwelcome visitors, his mauled cap tossed onto the road for him to retrieve.

The road was black, the sky black with it, and not a single star, the wind whipped their faces as they hurried along, he faster than she because of her high heels, and not a word exchanged. As the first sound of a motorcycle, only a few hundred yards away, reached them, he grips her arm and leads her through an opening in the fence into a flat plowed field, where they stagger like drunkards until they find a hiding place behind the high earthen bank. They listen as the sounds of the engines draw nearer, then the screech of the brakes when the riders stop directly on the other side, as though they have smelled their prey, splotches of light out there and raised voices, he and she listening with every pore of their being, breathing almost as one, but not holding on to one another, separate and tensed as they listen to the wheels pawing the ground outside and the engines puttering in an indecision.

Then a name was said. It was the name Henrik. It was either one of the group or the One who waited for them, but whatever its significance the engines started up and as if in answer to some more daring warrant they rode off, yelling, to give notice of their next maraud.

In the thick confounding darkness, he kept pouring gourd after gourd of freezing water from the barrel over his head and down onto his face, cursing, shouting, goading them to come and find him and she pleading with him as he bellowed, but her entreaties going unheard.

*      *      *

She sat on the bed without undressing. The wind tore around the house, inside the room the tarred beams creaked and sagged, while outside a weathercock rasped and re-rasped on its metal

socket. He had not come up. The wind had many voices and she sat there listening to it, discharging its furies, the slow mournful notes as it subsided then rose and swelled, the very howls purposing to wreck all before it. Had it, she wondered, chased across the North Sea in the wake of the little airplane, or was it from the far-off tundras, making its way to the hospital grounds to send the dickie bird on its mad maraud. Much later, as she leaned over the banister, she saw that he was asleep on the floor, the gaudy rug over him, his arms folded penitentwise.

She sat waiting for daylight, waiting to leave, when suddenly the window flew open, swung back and forth on its hinges, as if something was about to come in, and she waited in dread for what that something might be.

Storm

a little figure, slight and fidgety, is at the end of the bed, whispering, “Did I waken you, missus?”

“No, I’m awake … the wind kept me awake,” Dilly answers.

“Pat the porter asked me to bring this up … your daughter left it … there might be jewelry or valuables in it …”

“What’s all the rumpus?”

“It’s the wind and the hooligans out of the pubs … they smash all before them … we’re lucky to be indoors,” the girl says, plonks the bag into the woman’s hands, and creeps away.

Dilly turns on the overhead light to see. It resembles a tapestry bag such as she herself once had, a salmon pink with little figurines and two bone handles the shape of a crescent moon. What happened to it? What happened to so many things? Unthinkingly she has opened it. Inside a journal with a mottled green cover and the insignia of a brown eagle on a plinth. Always in America there were eagles, gold eagles, silver eagles, brass eagles, on a coin, on a dollar bill, above the doorways of the big banks and insurance offices and in that inglenook where Mrs. McCormack’s fashionable portrait hung.

She read at a glance the sentence so arresting:
“The milk thou sucklest me with hath turned to marble.”

She lay still but wide awake, the words in Eleanora’s favorite gentian-colored ink slanting away under the light and her heart like a wild beating bird in her chest.

Part VI

the journal

she, the motherless mother, I, the motherless mother, the million zillion motherless mothers with their skinless mysteries.

When she coughed blood we stared down at it, together, down into the well of the kitchen sink, the cream-colored porcelain with millions of little black strokes, like charcoal strokes; stared at it, the small clots so bright, so impudent, striking fear and doom into us, the presage of her untimely death. Death for her meant death for us both. Thinking that if I picked primroses and put them in a jam jar to cheer her up that she would not die.

Much much later she gave me flowers, shop flowers that she had had sent at considerable expense from the city, shop flowers and a glass of oversweet German wine, to win me back to the fold.

Her eyes a range of blues that could search out the slightest miscreance and then seethe with anger.

The two feelings pieced together and forking like the wishbone. Break one and the other snaps, or vice versa. You came again last night or very early this morning and the terror was if anything greater, magnified by your frequent visitations. You determine to strangle me. Yes, it is you … it is no one else. I do believe that I stop breathing for an instant because even in my cowardly cre-

tiny I prefer to die my own death, rather than have it inflicted upon me by you. After you have departed I am paralyzed, too afraid to open my eyes lest you have lingered in the doorway, too afraid to alter my wan clutch on the sheet, or the counterpane, or whatever. Legs like spindles. It takes an hour or more during which I think of crying out for help. I too have children but am ashamed to make that cry, that suppliance.

I waken from the dream, haul myself out of it, and think of you, also alone, a summer’s night, alone in the bedroom with the periwinkle-colored linoleum, the garish holy pictures, and the choking smell of broken camphor balls. You are no longer young, old in fact, yes old, in a blue crocheted bed jacket, missing your former life, maybe missing the mother that gave birth to you, maybe missing your children, filled with the morbid thoughts of the growth, dreading the growth growing inside you. Insects crawl through the open window and naturally veer toward the slightly warm fleshy mass that is you in which you fear decay has already left its calling card. How I pity you. You sit up and try, mostly in vain, to seize and exterminate these insects, to clap them between the palms of your chapped hands, saying to yourself, “All that is left in the end is yourself and these mites that you are trying to kill.” Words. Pitiable words. Pitiable plight. The growth on your mind. The growth, afeasting inside you. Your anti-lover, your anti-child, your anti-self. You took steps to eradicate it. You sought out this person and that. All hushed up. Buss, the hackney driver, to meet you at the hall door and help you into the front seat and chat to you about the foul weather and the scarcity of tourists as a consequence. You searched out a seventh son of a seventh son. He ran his hands over your body and then his hands stayed on the belly and he told you that he could see the green slush within, green bile at his touch turning to gold, and that you would go home cured, a spring in your step as of old. But you were not convinced. The next place was in a great furniture mart. Group healing. You recoiled from those

around you, their eczemas, their coughing, their phlegm. They disgusted you. When all knelt and sobbed in a stupor of emotion you prayed to escape, back to your own bed, beneath your own quilt, the dog in its hidey hole under a bit of rusted hedge, letting out the odd yap, your last companion, or as you so quaintly put it, your one remaining pal.

You ask me in the name of God to go to you, to comfort you, and I would dearly like to, except that it entails going back, back to that frankness that can lead to murder, that frankness that we only allow in in the madness of dream.

Someone has only to say roses or violets and I feel these transports … emanations so sweet, so fugitive, the flowers of long ago, seas of them, blue in bluebell time, yellow in buttercup time, carpets of color flung down there in the trampled fields and the honeysuckle with its flutes of nectar to suck from. White thorn and hawthorn, white and pink confections, the fallen blossom soaked with rain, mornings of such rapture, diadems of dew, evenings less so, raised voices then night to come, “Blankets-towntram,” the vaulting staircase, rooms, more rooms, creaks, sobs, rungs, a judder, juddering, feuds out there in the fields, the dogs getting their own back on their masters and on each other, discordant, the keening quiet.

That bit of rock made my hair stand on end. Appeared mysteriously in one of my cupboards, found its way in there somehow and nestled on the fleece, settled in as an animal might. It had not been there the day previous. I thought it to be either good luck or bad luck, being prone to the auguries. It was grayish and nobbled, a lump of slate and a veined substance halfway between marble and soapstone. Held at a certain tilt it had a face, the face of a man, solemn, one-eyed like the god Lugh or the giant Balor, who was able by the gaze of one eye to strike his foes dead. I could tell it was from home, something pained and disputing