This Magnificent Desolation (11 page)

Through Father Toibin's office window is everything Duncan knows: harrow-ribbed green pastures, still as a painting, and, at a great distance, ashen smoke plumes along the Iron Range, and men walking on the steeper hillsides beating the furze where blazing stars, goldenrod, and asters bloom, and beyond them the striated ridges of
hardwood: red maple and pin cherry.
Everything I know
. And now, his mother coming to get him. Just like in his dream.

Father Toibin is still talking. He's worried about how such a visit might affect him. Would he like to see her? Is he nervous? Excited? Scared? How does he feel about leaving the Home? Has he been sleeping? How are his friendships with the other children? Brother Canice has had nothing but praise for him, but Father Malachy has mentioned his withdrawal, his recent lack of participation in events, and he is worried because—

But Father, my mother, Duncan says. My mother. I thought she was, I mean, isn't she … dead?

Julie fiddles with the brilliantly lacquered black wig she has pulled down over her hair, and smiles. This, she says, was from the children's production of
Whose Baby Are You Now?
that the Home put on when she was eight, but of course Duncan wouldn't remember that. She takes Duncan's hand as they walk among the gardens. The smells of late summer come and go with the winds that always seem at twisting motion upon the plains. At a bench they sit down and Julie lays her head against his chest and he stares at the fake tea-colored center part in the hair.

On the far side of the garden, toward the soccer pitch: the sound of children at play. The hoarse coughing of the prefix. They laugh as he shouts, and Duncan imagines his ineffectual attempts to control the children or whatever game they are playing. They listen for the names they know, the usual culprits and offenders.

I have to leave, he says. Julie pulls at a knot in her wig. She sighs.

My mother is coming to get me. You'll get to meet her.

A Brother begins to shout at a boy, and Duncan laughs, expecting Julie to do so also, but she merely stares toward the sound.

I'm the only one who knew you were sleeping, she says. I'm the one that knew you'd woken up from a divine sleep. I'm the one that found you.

I know.

Your mother, she says, is she pretty? Is she a great actress?

I don't know. I don't think so. But Duncan does; in his mind he pictures the woman from his dream standing before the Festival of Lights Holiday Train as it glitters in fractured and failing illumination through the swirling snow, and he sees his mother's bright, damp cheeks, and the fierce blue of her large, almond shaped eyes, and everything—the land, the storm, the train—is lost in her and subsumed by her: In his dream she is the center of the world.

Julie thinks about this for a moment and nods. She says: If your mother is going to leave you, she should be beautiful and rich and fantastic. Those things are important, more important than any child, don't you think?

On the walkway a group of six girls are playing jump rope. On each end a girl swings two ropes, the rope on the left turning clockwise and the one on the right turning in a counterclockwise loop. They pass the two ropes from hand to hand and their arcs are parabolic, shifting orbits crossing and merging, crossing and merging in a hypnotic blur; and as the girls turn the ropes, and as the other girls skip, they sing.

Julie kicks her legs in time to the skipping song. Faintly: the slap and scrape of the jump rope upon the stone, the girls' voices in song, unchanging despite the failing light.

Julie stops her legs and grasps at his shoulder with a thin hand. It doesn't matter anyway, Duncan, she says. She'll leave you again. She will. It's what mothers do.

Waiting, Duncan stands on the hill and looks out over the valley. The sun is high, and despite a breeze pushing the long grass this way and that, the air is thick. A small herd of cows lazily chews cud, others flick their tails as they drink from the stream. Cicadas thrum loudly in the trees of the arboretum. Upon the pond the heat of the day shimmers; ducks have been attacking one another all day, and their feathers drift through the air like flax.

Upon the far slope a row of wire bales trembles, flashes refracted sunlight in Morse code. He sees the dust cloud first, and then the car as it speeds through the valley and up the winding road toward the Home, the dust cloud behind it growing larger and more violent. As it comes nearer, it takes shape: a black Chevy Impala from the late sixties, a decommissioned police car with the outline of the original star-shaped emblems upon its doors, blacker than the rest of the faded metal, and it buckles and bottoms out on the rutted, potholed road spiraling up to the Home.

After she steps from the car and stretches her long body, she pauses and surveys the land—isolated farmhouses upon yellowed siderite fields, the dark Iron Range stretching like a storm cloud entrenched across the horizon—and then squints up at the sun. Her skin is so white it looks as if it has never seen the sun, and the wind has turned her hair in knots: it's as red and as wild as flame. Something in her shifts, something indecipherable and almost undetectable—he senses it in her posture, in the conflict of softness and tension that comes to her face, and he wonders if it is fear—and then she straightens her skirt, reaches back into the car for a wide-brimmed sun hat, which she places upon her head, and takes a determined step toward the gate of the monastery. And that is when she sees him. She stops and the world seems to tilt about her.

Duncan, she says, and he wonders how she knows it is him.

She crosses the dirt driveway and takes his hand and he searches her face for some truth, some sign of fear or hesitation. Her eyes are the same blue as his own.

I'm your mother, she says. You probably don't remember me—and she laughs as if at the absurdity of it all, and Duncan smiles. From the valley below a wind cock clanging hollow on tin, the faraway thock of axes on wood. Within the monastery's walls children are running and calling to one another and he wonders if Julie can see him from her window.

So, she says slowly, testing the words for the both of them. Shall we go home? Would you like that?

Yes, he nods, yes, wanting to say
Mom
yet knowing that he can't, not just yet, and then she pulls him to her and he holds on tightly, smelling things he will only later be able to identify as her: patchouli, apple-scented shampoo, the pungent red burley of her hand-rolled cigarettes, and strangely, oil and lye-heavy industrial soap of the type men who spend their days working on engines use, as if she had just stepped out of an auto repair shop, and he wonders if this smell comes from the man who might be his father or if her car broke
down on the way here and whether it is capable of taking them the vast distance across America to San Francisco and where he imagines home, whatever such a place is, must be.

Beneath the Romanesque arches of the main entrance Brother Canice and Father Toibin are waiting with his bags, a bulging tattered brownish-yellow suitcase held together by old clasps spotted with rust and his army duffel bag. There are some of the boys from his dormitory and other children with whom he has shared classes. Most of them look bored or indifferent and he knows that Father Toibin has arranged this for him. Julie stands slightly to the side as if unsure of what to do or say. The sound of children from the playing field comes to them from over the ivy-covered stone walls.

Today Julie has two red hair clips in her hair, and there is a small beauty spot an inch or so above the far right corner of her lip that he knows was not there before. She pulls him to her, and he can only think of her smell—of glycerin soap and warm, moist skin; of her hair, washed and brushed and shining like lacquer. Finally, smiling, she pushes him roughly away, and he watches the beauty spot rise on the curving edge of her lip. He whispers to Julie that he loves her—and he does—and that he will never forget her.

Brother Canice's eyes are red-rimmed. The thick, untamed orange-red sideburns that run rampant over the sides of his jaws and neck are matted down with oil. He's freshly shaven and so severely his skin looks raw and tender. A breeze bends Father Toibin's pant legs lazily around his ankles and he must constantly mat down the thin hair he lays over his bald crown.

Julie stares defiantly at him as the car pulls away, Julie who every year will never age but remain a little girl, thinking that if she remains a little girl, her mother will finally come back for her and she will be everything her mother has ever desired.

They stand at the gates of the orphanage and wave goodbye and
he watches from the back window of the car as they drive away, knowing that he will never see them again. He sits watching from the backseat of the car until he can no longer see them and the Home is nothing but a glinting speck in the divide of two valleys darkened by strip mining. Distantly the bell for Vigil tolls from the campanile and he bends his head toward its plaintive, tremulous sound, imagining Brother Canice heaving heavily upon the ropes.

I'm sorry about your friend, Duncan. Father Toibin told me. His name was Billy, is that right?

The sound of his mother's voice startles him and it takes a moment for him to understand what she's said to him. He nods. Tattered-looking, windswept clouds move quickly across the sky, seeming to follow their car; in the east a large dark front whips the plains with black virga, and he shivers imagining the cold rain that is coming and the trains that he and Billy never took.

Please turn around, Duncan, and sit down, his mother says gently, and he turns back in his seat and sees for the first time the country that they are passing through: gray furrowed hillsides scraped raw from boring the pith. A fine dusty powder of anthracite ash bleached white from the sun lies upon the alkyl hills and plains.

And then they cross into pastureland where men are shadows of black metal in the shimmering fields. They are burning the dead crop: bright flames cutting swathes across the valley, black choking smoke billowing and sweeping across flattened fields and rising, churning, up to the sky. Duncan has seen this only from beyond the walls of the Home and he wonders with not just a little fear at what will become of the two of them, him and his mother, now that they only have each other. He pulls his body inward; the comforting sense of his mother is gone—the physical space between them widening. His hands scrabble for his bag and the hard, reassuring edges of Brother Canice's radio, which he wraps his arms about and pulls to his chest.

If you're tired, she says, and her voice seems very far away, you
can lie down. There's some blankets back there on the floor. It's a long trip, and we'll both need to rest.

Thanks, he says, and stretches across the backseat, bunches a blanket beneath his head, pulls another over him. The thrum of the engine and the vibration of the road up through the chassis begin to lull him toward sleep. The partially open windows seem to shudder and bow silently with wind. He hears the clicking of the turn signal as she changes lanes, then the irregular thump of the wipers as they pass through a sudden rainsquall and the interior of the car grows dark. He looks at her in the rearview mirror, watches her glancing back every now and then, until he can no longer hold open his eyes.

Maggie watches him until he is asleep, then allows her eyes to follow the far horizon, its indeterminate distance teasingly close and yet seemingly untouchable, always just beyond them. She turns on the radio, hums softly to an old Western ballad that comes crackling through the speakers, raises her voice slightly and attempts to sing, but her voice falters and breaks and she begins to cough. She reaches across to the glove compartment for the fifth of whiskey that she keeps there, but then pulls her hand back. She doesn't need it, not yet. This is her time to prove to him and to herself that she is a different woman, a better woman than the one she has been all these years.

An hour passes and she considers pulling over but doesn't want him to wake. Heat lightning blurs the top of distant hills. The black shapes of wide-winged birds turn in slow circles way up there and she peers beneath the visor to get a better look at them: buzzards waiting for something on the ground to give up the fight. She punches in the cigarette lighter at the base of the dashboard, and when it pops out, she fumbles with lighting a cigarette, then takes it in long and deep before exhaling out the window, stares blankly at three bowed-backed, dun-colored cows taking water in a grassless pasture, ribs pressed like dark bars against their skin.

When the cigarette is done, she runs her tongue across her teeth
and grimaces, checks Duncan in the rearview: asleep and snoring softly. She chews on her lips, is conscious of how dry her mouth feels, heat and dust on back of her throat. Finally she reaches across, careful to hold the car steady, and opens the glove compartment, pulls the fifth from beneath parking tickets and the car registration, does the top with one hand, and takes a swig. It is only for the heat and for her nerves, she convinces herself, and for nothing more. She turns the radio louder over the sound of the car pushing forward toward the horizon and the hot wind pressing in at the open windows, and begins to sing softly. This time her voice does not falter but she knows that this is a temporary thing, that her larynx with its scar tissue will never allow her to sing as fully as she once did. Absently she takes another swig, holds the whiskey in her mouth, and touches her throat as it convulses and the alcohol slides slowly down.

As a child and as a teenager, she'd been classically trained by Madame Buvelle of the Boston and Berkeley conservatories, and in her early twenties had debuted as a coloratura soprano with the Boston Opera. When she sang, she reached notes that had rarely been recorded before—in a bureau drawer, beneath her old stage dresses, programs, and all the yellowed issues of
Opera
with reviews of her performances, she's kept the live recording of her reaching G7, the highest vocal note in the history of recorded opera. And with her remarkable low, which she sang as Amelia in Verdi's
Un ballo in maschera
, her voice ranged over more than five octaves.