Was (52 page)

I want, thought Dorothy, to go home.

She didn’t want to see any more, because she knew this was a truth. Would her father be here? How could she find out? Wilbur said there might be a list in the County Offices.

The County Offices were two stories high and were made out of brick, with stone arches over the windows. There was a gaslight outside them on the corner and signs by the door saying PROBATE AND LAW OFFICE. There was a telephone. Dorothy could hear it ringing and ringing, with no one to answer it.

Inside, the County Offices looked like a bank. Ruined, desperate men lined up in front of tellers, all in peaked caps. Everyone was shouting. A policeman bustled a howling man out of the place. Telegraph messages squeaked like a flock of birds.

Dorothy was in despair, waiting in line. In her dream, she knew no one would be able to help her. They wouldn’t even be able to hear her over the din. Wilbur took her arm and led her into another room. Great doors opened, and beyond them, the County Offices looked like a church.

There were Gothic pillars and fragmented, colored-glass windows and beautiful distant singing that was forever out of reach, like a colored scarf being blown away by the wind.

And all around them, the people worshiped, on their knees. Worshiped what was good, able to worship what was good by deliberately using it to cover up the bad. They worshiped the things they had destroyed.

Our father, who art in Heaven
.

And Dorothy was afraid and knelt down and prayed.

They worshiped the buffalo. They had his head and horns on the wall, and his hide on the floor.

They worshiped the Indian, his blankets around their shoulders a row of drums in a glass case. They worshiped their heritage. A heritage is something that was never yours, and which has been destroyed.

They worshiped a child in a manger. The Kings and Wise Men, the shepherds, the cattlemen and thieves had all gathered around the crib. They worshiped the mother of the Child, but only because she was a virgin. All other women were bad.

As Dorothy watched, the Wise Men and the Kings, the shepherds and the cowboys and the mayor of the cowtown lifted up the Child, who was plump and innocent and happy. “Dear little thing,” they said. “Isn’t he dear?” He smiled at them without guile. And they smiled back, knowing.

Knowing they had a cross. And Dorothy cried out, but all the people around her wore the Green Glasses and couldn’t hear, because they were praying. They bound the Child tightly in swaddling clothes so that he could not move. They pulled tighter and tighter on the linen.

They drove a nail through his swaddled feet. The Child screamed and wailed and howled. The men looked around in embarrassment.

“I told you what would happen if you did that again,” they said in warning, shaking their heads.

Then they placed a nail on his forehead, and they raised a hammer. No, said Dorothy, no, but the words came out like glue, viscous and silent. And the hammer struck home, piercing the skull, pinioning the babe to the cross, and the cross was raised, and his murderers knelt to worship him.

The Child hung, like a scarecrow, and the wood of the cross bent gently in the wind like a tree. There was a gentle, sighing sound, and the Child stared like the buffalo.

His mind had been ruined. He could only speak now in the language of words. And he looked to Dorothy and cried aloud, “I’m alive!”

I know, said Dorothy in silence, but she seemed to be the only one who heard.

“I think I’m alive, aren’t I? Am I alive?”

One of the Wise Men turned and sat next to Dorothy.

“I was alive,” said the Child, perplexed.

“Hello, Dorothy,” said the Wise Man and hugged her. For a moment Dorothy thought she had found her father. She felt his broad male shoulders and his trimmed whiskers and her heart rose up into her mouth out of fear and desire, which for her were confounded.

Then the Wise Man pulled back and Dorothy saw that he wore a straw boater and had his jacket off, and that metal bands held up the shirtsleeves that were too long for his arms. He had a moustache and merry eyes. He was the Substitute.

Frank, whispered Dorothy, for she loved him too.

“What have you learned, Dorothy?” he asked her.

Dorothy thought a moment and said, “I learned to be disappointed and not to hope too much. I learned how to be beaten and how to beat others. I learned that I am worthless and the world is worthless, and that love is a lie and if it’s not a lie, then it’s wasted.”

“They learned you wrong,” he said.

Love is real? Where? How, how do we find it, Frank?

“You don’t have to go the way they want you to go,” he said. He pointed backward, behind her. And she smiled, and Frank kissed her chastely on the forehead, as a mother might.

Dorothy rose up full of joy in her dream, and she turned, and she walked the wrong way. She skipped out of the bank. It had fallen on hard times. The president had absconded with all the funds and the windows were boarded up. The city was a ghost town. Something about the extension railroad and quarantine lines. The wind whispered in the hollow eyes of its windows, and grass sprouted up between the planks of the boardwalks. Mrs. Langrishe clutched a nosegay over her nostrils. It was to kill the reek of death that rose up from her own body. She stumbled, blind.

The settlers had moved on, hoping to find the perfect pasture, the land that would make them rich. Dorothy saw the great trail they had left behind them, discarded pianos, broken clocks in the mud.

She laughed at them. Wheeee! she said, and spun on her heel. What did they think they would find, but more dust, more work, more dry wells and bankers and mortgages? There was no magical land in the West. They would all have to find another kind of Territory to explore.

One dream was over. Another began.

The train was hauled backward into St. Louis, with sgnilaeuqs and sgniffuhc. Dorothy stepped off it, wearing her white theater dress. It blazed in sunlight.

There was the wooden platform, the brick concourse, the stone frontage, just as Dorothy had forgotten they looked. She began to hear music. Somewhere there were calliopes playing, as at a fairground. The station was full of little people with funny faces she could not quite see, passing out pennants, tiny flags. It was a Day of Independence. Dorothy walked down the steps of the station and saw that everything was different.

St. Louis was a park, full of trees and great open areas. There was prairie grass and prairie wildflowers among them. Great gusts of laughter seemed to be blown across the fields, and Dorothy heard her best lace-up boots swishing through the long grass, with a cripple’s uneven gait.

Ahead of her there were swings and a sandbox. There were rhododendrons and other ornamental plants. A flood of children suddenly broke out from under them, shrieking with glee. Surprise! they called in a circle. Come and play! they said. Oh, Dotty, come and play! They were her friends, they liked her. She knew their faces from long ago. A little red-haired girl covered with freckles who had a high, round forehead. Her quiet little brother in black shorts. Andy and Violet: she remembered their names. Dorothy took their hands and ran with them, and she stood on the swings and pumped back and forth. In her dream, Dorothy felt her hair rise and fall, along with her stomach. She felt the wind on her face. Below, the children turned somersaults on the grass and didn’t mind the stains on their clothing.

In the dream Dorothy knew that this was a place where children had been set free. She looked and saw that some of them were not children at all. They were a different kind of adults. They looked like Etta Parkerson. They were tiny and small and giggling, with funny whiskers and conical hats, and they played fiddles or sat with the children who were almost as big as they were, on their laps. They both started fires with magnifying glasses and hopped in sack races. The children and the adults were the same kind of creature.

Bison grazed on the grass and a wildcat lazed in a tree, flicking his tail. In the shade there were wigwams, with white smoke curling form the tops. Indian women sat on the ground sorting dried maize in baskets. The children and the Indians played together on the swings.

All around the park, there were rows of white houses with green shutters. Carts glided past them, pulled by huge gray horses with clopping hooves. The horses wore no blinders and the long white hair around their unshod hooves was flung from side to side by their dancing feet. Over the tops of the houses, there rose great domes of earth. Smoke curled out of them, and Indian ponies grazed on them. The bushes and trees seemed to hiss and whisper in the wind and the flowers made sounds like piano wires snapping.

A dog began to bark. His voice was echoing from far away. Dorothy swung back and forth, over ground that rocked like a pendulum. Then she saw him running toward her, as she always knew he would one day. She always knew he would come back.

“Toto!” she called. “Here, boy! Toto!”

She saw him charging through the long grass, partridge rearing up into the air around him. Dorothy launched herself form the swing and seemed to fly through the air. She landed in the grass and he burst through it and was all over her, whining and barking and licking her face, and she laughed and hugged him, remembered the feel of his tiny back and its wiry hair. He spun in a circle and his bark broke with joy. He picked up his red ball and dropped it at her feet. She had forgotten his red ball. It was covered with spit that smelled of him. Dorothy picked it up delicately, with two fingers only, and threw it for him. He sprang after it, rolled over the ground snarling, and caught it. Then, with a rambunctious toss of the head, he started to trot away, head and ball held high.

Dorothy followed him. She remembered the way now. She walked between the two huge chestnut trees and crossed the muddy street. She went to the front door, with the lion’s-head knocker. Dorothy remembered that there was a latchkey dangling on a piece of string inside the slot for letters. She reached inside for it with fat, clumsy fingers. She had to stand on tiptoe to open the door.

She smelled their hallway. There was the wooden table with the vase of dried flowers and the umbrella rack. There were the beat-up old shoes of the woman who cleaned and lived downstairs. There was the stairway.

Dorothy climbed, past the old framed engravings of the Jews in the wilderness, the parting of the Red Sea, the breaking of the tablets. Coats were hung on hooks, red and green and blue, brightly colored, and she recognized them as if they had been people. Dorothy heard, from behind a closed door, the sound of a piano being played. The door creaked as she pushed it open.

“Mama,” she whispered.

There she was, there she was, in a dress like a candy cane, red stripes, playing the piano, her back toward Dorothy, her hair in ringlets. There was her papa, sitting in his armchair, smoking his pipe, a brown-skinned man with black hair and black eyes and a moustache. I’m not Gael at all, Dorothy remembered. My name is Gutierrez. I am Dorothy Gutierrez.

Her mother saw and stopped playing. She turned and dazzled Dorothy with her smile. She was so young and pretty and she reached out to hold her. Dorothy ran.

“Dorothy. Where has my little girl been?”

Dorothy began to cry and fell into her mother’s arms and was held. “Oh, Mama,” she said. “I had a terrible dream! Daddy was gone and you were dead, and I had to go away, and I never saw you ever again!”

Dorothy buried her head against her mother’s bosom, her mother’s dress, her mother’s smell of soap and perfume she could not afford, and Dorothy wept. Her mother rocked her and sang to her gently. The song was an old one, one that Dorothy had not heard since St. Louis. She let herself be rocked and comforted.

When Dorothy had stopped crying, her mother patted her back, and moved her gently away from her and looked into her eyes. Dorothy’s mother was crying too.

“Everything dies, Dorothy,” she said. “Everything gets taken away in the end.”

Dorothy looked at the room. There was the rocking cradle in which her little brother slept. Toto peered into it, whimpering, his front paws resting on its edge. There was the divan with its lace covers. There was the black dresser with the cups with the gold edges and the dancing china pony on the piano, and the Nativity in the window, the china figures, the china manger. It was snowing outside.

Dorothy knew all of those things as if they had never gone, as if all she had to do was come here on a visit and find them there, solid, to be used. She looked at her father’s face.

“Muy linda
,” he said, and smiled at her. It was Spanish, but Dorothy understood. He smiled at her. Her father’s smile was not to be trusted. He was so young, young and handsome and not to be held by anything, even love. Everything about him was true, true to the point of cruelty.

“This is just a memory,” her father said. “Here and then gone. But you have to remember, to have a heart, to have a brain. You have to remember in order to be brave. That’s how you grow up.”

“But all you’ve got,” said her mother, who was pretty and quite tough, “is now.”

Time left you in another world where everything was different, even you. Memory held it together. So where was home?