Part 74 (1/2)
”Well, you already know so much by heart.”
”Yes! Are the consolations of G.o.d small with thee? No, very great!”
”She is quoting from Job,” Father Emilio said, placing a pleased hand on Nalini's shoulder.
It was true. Larissa noticed that the child was able to mouth the recitations of a number of very long pa.s.sages during the daily services. Well, sure, from hearing them five times a day. Larissa, when she rehea.r.s.ed The Tempest, also knew it nearly by heart.
”Why do you take her?” Larissa asked, making a subtle face of distaste. ”I mean, for a small child, to see all that unpleasantness, sickness, and suchashe has it hard enough, don't you think?”
Father Emilio lightly shook Nalini's shoulder. ”How do we answer that question, Nalini?” he asked. ”We say, of course, it's not so beautiful as a garden of flowers or a park with birds, buta”
”It might not be as beautiful,” Nalini said. ”But it's more holy.”
The children have never performed on the stage, Father Emilio told Larissa. Are you staying through Christmas? Maybe we can do something? Che had mentioned you loved theater. Perhaps a small play?
Like Twelfth Night?
Father Emilio studied her with gentle curiosity.
The Tempest perhaps? Now my charms are all overthrown, and what strength I have's mine own. Which is most faint. Larissa wondered if he was appraising her, wondering perhaps how good her kidneys were, whether she should be asked to volunteer to donate one, or three. Maybe old habits died hard with him. Now *tis true, I must be here confined by you. Too much time on her hands, despite the near constant obediences. The stillness, the quiet, the lyric chants of the nuns, the repet.i.tion of the psalms, the boiling of the water, the disinfecting of all fresh fruit, the pervasive vinegar smell mixed in with tamarind leaves, flowers, and the heavy sweet smell of brown sugar and coconut, the scouring of the soup pots, and the incense permeating all, the solitude hours spent not in prayer but in remembrance, as Larissa checked the window screens at the orphanage for holes the awful dengue mosquitoes could get through, while composing letters to Kai in her head.
”Well,” Father Emilio, after minutes of contemplation, finally replied, ”Tempest is good. But I was thinking more along the lines of a Nativity play.”
”A what?” And release me from my bands, with the help of your good handsa ”Maybe you could write it for us, and we could rehea.r.s.e it to get ready for Christmas?”
”I'm not staying through Christmas, Father,” Larissa hastily reminded him. ”I'm going back in October. Plus I don't think I know what a Nativity play is.” She shrugged. ”I've never done one.”
”Children don't perform Christmas pageants in America?” he asked. ”As I recall, it was quite a popular thing to do in the Ess.e.x schools.”
”Pageants? You mea.n.a.like about the birth of Jesus?”
”Yes,” he said. ”Like about the birth of Jesus.”
Now I want spirits to enforce, art to enchant. ”You know I'm not very familiar with that. When I was a child, my mother never took me to one. She believed I should judge for myself, decide for myselfa”but only when I got older. So it's just not in my background.”
”Did you?” he asked. ”Judge them for yourself when you got older?”
”No.” And her kids didn't either. She pa.s.sed that on to her own children, the nothingness. And my ending is despair unless I be relieved by prayerawhich pierces so that it a.s.saults mercy itself and frees all faults. Mouthing Shakespeare by rote, not feel.
Larissa wanted to defend her mother on this rainy afternoon inside her favorite placea”the kitchen overlooking the lawn. There were plenty of other things she taught me. She taught me to be politea”to strangers and my family. Not to be too demonstrative. To have good manners. I have very good manners. I learned to stay calm through crisis because of my mother. I am not a histrionic like Che. I can handle anything. Skinned knees, broken bones, bee stings, dog bites.
Obviously there is something she had not given me. But my mother was always a libertarian and proud of it! Live and let live was her motto. All our friends envied me for her laissez-faire parenting, for all the books I was allowed to read, for the no-limits approach to any adult material. Find your own way. Teach yourself. Play music, or not. Read, or not. Believe, or not. Whatever I wanted was fine with her.
But there was one thing. At the very end, when Dad was leaving, it was the only time I saw a c.h.i.n.k in what I now know was my mother's armor. I heard her all the way from upstairs, screaming at him, and I had never heard my mother scream before; it was so guttural and jarring. I heard it only for a moment before I slammed the pillows against my ears. I lived my whole life only for you! And other things. It went on and on and on. It was unbearable. It was as if Dad had taken a crowbar to her.
The bitterness that flowed from the black end to their thirty-five-year union never dried out, which is another reason I couldn't visit my mother too often, because it hurt me to look at her. Dad died soon after and we never got an answer to our question that, like rhetorical cyanide, remains in my mother's heart and in mine: what was so completely missing in him that he couldn't see, blinding him to the scales on which all of us were outweighed by one pretty stranger twenty years younger?
I thought that a scruffy boy from the wrong side of Maui who extended his hand to me made me blind. But what if I, too, like my father, was always blind, and just didn't know it?
Larissa blinked, came out of it, smiled blankly at Father Emilio. ”Come on,” he said cheerfully. ”You do theater, we do Jesus. Let's muddle through the Nativity play together. It'll be like the blind leading the blind.”
”Uh, okay.” Larissa glanced away from him, trying to shake off her reverie. ”Does Shakespeare do nativity?”
The priest laughed. ”You tell me, Larissa. You're the drama expert.”
”May I use your phone, Father? I'm going to tryatry to call Kai one more time today.” Morning, eveninga”why didn't he ever answer the phone? Though in Kai's defense, the rectory was closed after compline, at 8:30 and that was 11:00 p.m. in Pooncarie, so perhaps they were out drinking. She didn't know. The phone just rang and rang.
Nalini wanted to be one of the Wise Men. But you're not a boy, Nalini. I can be anything I want, said Nalini. Why can't I be a Wise Man? I want to bring myrrh.
”How about if before you bring myrrh, you and I go to the market and get us some fabric so we can make costumes? We need cloaks for the Shepherds, and robes for the Wise Men, and a dress for Mary. We need ornamental rope to use for belts, and silk or satin scarves to tie on heads. Plus we'll need some thick paper and paints, because we've got to make crowns.”
”For Jesus?” Nalini squealed, jumping up and down.
”No, not for Jesus. For the Wise Men. Jesus is not a king.”
”Of course He is,” said Nalini, puzzled. ”He's the King of kings.”
”I meant,” Larissa corrected herself, ”he's just a baby inside the manger.”
”Yes! We should get Him a halo. And Mary too. And Joseph.”
”Joseph needs a halo?” Larissa didn't know if she was going to be up to this.
Nalini laughed. ”You're so funny. You're joking, right?”
”Yeah. Sure I am. Well, if we get gold foil, we can make some halos.”
They made sheep and goats out of cardboard. The orphans painted them in rainbow colors. They shaped an angel out of white clay. Father Emilio suggested they build a cave. They got wood, and nails and hammered boards together. They ripped gra.s.s out and when it dried, they had hay. They got Christmas lights and hung them around the wooden structure so it lit up like a Christmas tree. The afternoon rehearsals morphed into morning rehearsals, and evening rehearsals. All the children who could walk and talk wanted to partic.i.p.ate, all thirty of them. Larissa made it happen. The Narrator, Joseph, Mary, King Herod, three Wise Men, three Shepherds, and twenty angels dressed in white sheets with silver halos. Jesus was played by Benji, a severely cleft-palated three-month-old, born without any left limbs, who lay in the manger through the rehearsals.
Larissa stood by the door to the common room watching them. So simple to teach them, yet so hard for them to learn. First, to teach them to be someone else, to be other people.
Perhaps if she had been other people, she could've remained more of herself. Perhaps had she been given alternate lives to play on the stage, she could've come home and lived in a place with the tall oaks and the view and the cold windows. Perhaps she could've continued to touch with her hands the faces she loved while during the day walking out into the cold and ascending three steps, four, to the wooden platform in a darkened theater, standing on it, and lifting her gaze to the rafters, the way Nalini, standing in daylight, lifted her gaze to Father Emilio as she learned the words that were hard to remember, memorized the cues that were hard to keep.
Nalini is quite something. She wants everyone's lines, not just her own. She wants to live many lives, not just her own, not even her one part as Magi Number Three. ”Myrrh is mine: its bitter perfume, breathes a life of gathering glooma”sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in the stone-cold tomb.”
The little girl loves to sing that and bellows with all her might, but then her little hands go up, and her black eyes sparkle as she mouths, then whispers along to the words of the Narrator too! Glorious now behold Him arise!
Nalini, pipe down, beckons Larissa, standing across the room from Father Emilio, while Sister Martina, excellent on the piano, plays ”We Three Kings,” and the children sing, and uncontained Nalini jumps up and down. ”How am I doing, Larissa? How am I doing?” Though she is not the Prophet, she speaks with the prophets, as Larissa rolls her eyes, yet with pride, with desperate tenderness at the child's vulnerability. She wants to promise her, swear to her that she will never leave her, that she will never be the one again to break that bond.
Except Larissa is not the one Nalini longs for. All the vows in the world can't bring Che back to look after the beloved child that stands in the light of the ancient adobe room and announces with the Prophets, ”Look! The redeemed of the Lord shall return, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! How am I doing, Larissa?”
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