Part 3 (2/2)

A curious symptom, possibly fatal: when I stand holding an infant in my arms, my knees go weak, so watery-weak I fear I will fall down with my precious burden. An effort of will holds me upright until the fit pa.s.ses, or else I ease my weight onto a chair. I first noticed this with my seventh grandson, Duncan. I nearly crumpled, there in the cream-colored maternity ward of the hospital. The boneless bundle in my arms, with a round face still blue from its pa.s.sage through the v.a.g.i.n.al channel, added seven nearly unbearable pounds to my own weight.

When I confided to Gloria my mystical symptom, she diagnosed simply a drop in blood pressure and prescribed water for me. She herself tried to drink eight eight-ounce gla.s.ses of water a day. ”Drink and tink” was a beauty tip from one of her bawdy Calpurnia Club friends. It kept the skin hydrated from within, moist as a baby's, went the theory. I must say, baby Jennifer's skin is so delicious that I cannot restrain myself from pus.h.i.+ng my cracked old lips against her semi-liquid cheeks, her solemn great smooth brow, her fuzzy pate fragrant of shapeless, powdery thoughts. It is enough to make one laugh and even scream with delight, these infantile textures and aromas. I feel dizzyingly swept along by the whirl of life. I think that when my own children were infants I was too distracted by the world's business-by the unstoppable, fortune-forming bull market that persisted through my thirties-to inhale. Not until the Crash of 2000, when the addled computers deleted billions and billions from the world economy, did I look up at my children, who were teenagers by then.

Jennifer is a charmer; we all tell her so. Her brother and eight male cousins, all of whom she has met, reinforce her power. She is a sacred larva being stuffed with royal jelly. It is she who will take the male magic into herself and carry the Turnbull DNA, diluted by half with some O'Brien stuff, toward eternity. Solemn in the authority of her slate-blue stare, the electric fuzz of her hair as yet colorless, she is a unitary person, with the full regalia of human interaction at her command. When she closes her mouth on the liquefied carrots and untidily smiles, I am pleased; I was hurt and offended when, at the beginning of the visit, she hid her face in her mother's shoulder at the strange sight of me. We vie for her approval; I have an unworthy urge to tear her from her father's thick arms and murmur in the velvety folds of her ear how his contracting business teeters on the edge of debt, how his creditors would have torn the shelter from over her head but for my discreet financial interventions. I am jealous of the young married life Tony leads, here in the pastel tract houses of Lynnfield, with my dear daughter as his chattel. Roberta stands in their little kitchen over the electric stove, and from the graceful, drifting way she turns, plastic spoon in hand, to attend to a gruff and complaining remark of Tony's (”This kid smells like she needs a diaper change”), it could be Perdita of thirty-five years ago in the corner of my eye. Her elliptical physical style lives on in her daughters, who choose husbands, I am repeatedly a.s.sured, who resemble me. The resemblance eludes me.

Little sulky Keith and I are alike in this household: we are insider-outsiders, inside but not altogether in, excluded from the holy triangle of father-mother-infant. Keith and I are outer layers being shed, helpless neglected witnesses as Jennifer powerfully wields her spell, rewarding or dismissing those who court her favor. Roberta tells me that in the early mornings, or during the baby's afternoon nap, Keith would make his silent way into her room and heap his toys- teddy bears, wooden trains, plastic telephones, metal dump trucks-into the baby's crib, piling them on experimentally until her entire body, including her head, was covered. Tony has installed a lock on the door too high for Keith to reach.

They feed me well on these visits, and invite me to carve the roast chicken or pot roast as tribute to my seniority, my chiefdom; but I am always relieved to be off, out the door into my car with its heater and radio, as if escaping a discreditable past or removing my variable from an equation intricate enough without me.

Crocuses are up in the driveway circle, at a spot in the bed where sunlight reflected from the granite outcropping warms the earth. Their colors, purple and white, seem a bit vulgar and trite-determinedly Easterish-compared with the pristine and demure ivory of the drooping snowdrop heads, an especially large cl.u.s.ter of which still glows in the otherwise lifeless woods. The earth in Gloria's beds looks friable, developing fissures as frost works out of the soil; a giant is heaving from underneath. The daylilies in the bed that I pa.s.s along the driveway are enough out of the earth to show a trifoliate, heraldic silhouette-pale-green fleurs-de-lys. The forsythia wands are lined with symmetrical buds, like saw teeth, but in this slow gray spring have not yet unsheathed their signal yellow flowers. Yesterday I spotted my first robin, strutting along the driveway's gravel shoulder in his familiar dusty uniform, gawkily startled into flight by my approach: a stuffy bird, faintly pompous in its portly movements, spoiled by the too many songs and poems unaccountably devoted to him. I was more interested, returning up the driveway with my Globe Globe, in two small tan birds, one with a faintly rosy head, whose names I didn't know. They revolved in the net of the maple-leaf viburnum's pale and brittle branches, performing a kind of leapfrog, one perching on a twig lower than the other and then the other flicking to take a place above the first: some kind of courts.h.i.+p dance, carried on with a diagrammatic rigor.

Nature's background noise picks up: making the bed after tumbling a half-willing Deirdre in its sheets, and opening the window and its storm window a crack to let out our body smells, I heard a m.u.f.fled thrumming that sounded too mechanical to be even a woodp.e.c.k.e.r's bill attacking rotten wood. Purely inorganic creatures exist on this planet, as yet a mere underbrush to the flesh-and-blood, oxygen-breathing fauna but indisputably existent and evolving, biding their time as did our own mammalian ancestors during the long age of the dinosaurs. The microscopic first forms, it is conjectured, arose in city dumps, or more likely dumps attached to the perimeter of vast army bases or nuclear-fuel plants wherein a soup of spilled chemical and petroleum by-products was energized by low-level leaks of radioactivity. Metal particles smaller than iron filings fused, propelled into a self-sustaining reaction perhaps by the chemical activity of oxidation accidentally placed adjacent to a fortuitous mix of chemical influences. These tiny resultant creatures, with an anatomy much simpler than their organic equivalents, still possessed complexity enough for reproduction, in the soup of industrial waste. A ghost of intentionality, as it were, within their already refined and processed const.i.tuents enabled the metallobioforms to experiment with varieties of anatomy much more prolifically than the essentially conservative, ateleological DNA-dominated organisms. Within two centuries of their first lowly, unwitnessed emergence- which could scarcely have taken place before the Industrial Revolution and the invention of combustion-powered engines-there were metal species the size and weight of tree shrews and field mice, and two distinct phyla.

One phylum, the ”oil-eaters,” ”lives” off the traces of petroleum to be found on roadways, in asphalt and in natural upwellings of tar, and on beaches, both rocky and sandy, heavily affected by oil spills. The other, the ”spark-eaters,” takes energy from electricity itself, as found in still functioning electric fences and cables, whether overhead or underground; like arachnid ticks, they penetrate the insulation and cling until sated. These metallic pests never need to sleep or mate; they are free to devote all their days to consumption, which includes the search for oils, natural and artificial, whereby their parts can be protected from corrosion, rust, and friction. The spread of their population seems limited only by the amount of material which mankind has used and discarded. Where a territory needs to be cleared for their access to some chemical resource, they quite mercilessly exterminate the local organic wildlife, leaving the shredded bodies to rot and attract organic predators, who are then themselves slain, from the feet up. The heads of some trilobite-sized species-resembling giant wood lice-are miniature chain saws.

Television commentators go through spells of alarm over the threat of these ”pseudozoans,” since science predicts the evolution of ever larger and more voracious forms; this development seems remote, however, among the many more urgent issues of survival on our blasted, depopulated planet. The pseudozoans, or metallobioforms, or in popular parlance ”trinkets,” seldom venture out of hiding in daylight. They keep to the dumps that fostered them and the oily, electricity-rich underground realms of cities, but lately have been spotted farther afield, in wilder areas. So perhaps it was a pseudozoan whose mechanical thrumming I heard, mistaking it for a sign of spring.

Now that April is here, Deirdre and I took Gloria's mulch- buckwheat hulls and oak leaves, held down by boughs I hacked from a hemlock-off the rose bed, on the sea side, on a breezy Good Friday. Looking down the hill, toward the left of Mrs. Lubbetts' house, we could see the spume of breaking waves on the beach, silently flas.h.i.+ng up and drifting away. A seagull was suspended in mid-air, level with our eyes, its flight into the wind holding it motionless. Inside, our cheeks ruddy, we had rum in tea and felt more companionable than for days.

On Easter, she surprised me by wanting to go to church. She said it would be bad luck not to go. Thus Christianity, once an encompa.s.sing cathedral built on swords and crowns, holding philosophy in one transept and music in the other and all the humanity of Europe and the Americas in its nave, has died back to its roots of mindless superst.i.tion. We went to the nine o'clock service in the church of her childhood, a shabby United Something (Presbyterian and Methodist? Congregational and Reformed?) with windows that were half lozenges of clear gla.s.s and half sickly Biblical scenes from that furtive first-century world of violet and saffron robes and wistful, genteel Aryan faces wedded to the gesticulating poses of Jewish rabble-rousers. The high, airless s.p.a.ce, with its creaking pews, smelled of camphor and beeswax and the gaseous excessive heat of a furnace stoked up once a week.

We had come to the children's service, which was the one Deirdre remembered. Ten years ago she had been a girl of thirteen. Whereas I ten years ago was much as I am now, only with a thicker, browner head of hair and a five-days-a-week commuting habit. The children in the congregation rustled and prattled and squalled so that the voice of the young clergyperson, a woman with glossy Joan of Arc bangs and straight short sides, could hardly be heard. She read from Colossians 3 (”Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in G.o.d”) and prettily embroidered the Resurrection story in John 20 into a woman's story-the adventures in feeling and relatedness of Mary Magdalene.

It was she who, before dark, found the stone taken away from the sepulchre on that first Easter, and the sepulchre empty ”Then she runneth,” the Gospel tells us, and met Simon Peter and ”the other disciple, whom Jesus loved....” These two compet.i.tively raced to the sepulchre and concurred in its emptiness, but for the neatly folded burial linens, and raced away again. Men! Always rus.h.i.+ng on to the next thing! Mary stayed, and wept. While weeping, she stooped and looked into the sepulchre and saw two angels, one standing at the head and the other at the feet of the empty place where the body of Jesus had lain. They asked her, ”Woman, why weepest thou?”

Why indeed do women weep? They weep, it seemed to my wandering mind, for the world itself, in its beauty and waste, its mingled cruelties and kindnesses. I once saw Perdita break into tears within, I believe, the Church of San Miniato al Monte in Florence. It was a lesser sight, on the far side of the Arno, with a barrel-vaulted interior of black and white stripes, receding mistily, as I remember it, up several levels toward the altar and choir. Shocked by her tears, I touched her and asked her why, thinking I was somehow to blame. ”Because it's so beautiful,” she got out. Gloria, a reluctant weeper, nevertheless was hard to console after the death of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth The House of Mirth-Lily, the barren heroine of a barren auth.o.r.ess, imagining a child nestled asleep beside her as she dies. And there were tears in Gloria's eyes when she came into the house a spring ago announcing that the deer had eaten all her tulips. My mother, mired in poverty and boxed in by my father's limitations, cried often in my childish witnessing, over some domestic frustration or new manifestation of bodily decay. Her teeth gave her a lot of grief, first in their twinges-so keen they started tears- and then in the disfigurements of their piecemeal loss, pathetically patched by additions to a little pink partial upper plate she kept in a water gla.s.s in the bathroom. She had been, by the evidence of old photographs, a pert, fair, small-boned and freckled country beauty, the baby of the Kimball family from Ches.h.i.+re. At the kitchen table during a quarrel-my parents' quarrels were always about the same thing, it seemed to me, about there not being enough enough-she would fold her arms and hide her grief-reddened face in them, terrifying me, for her face was the face of life to me, and I could not bear to have it hid. I witnessed so many tears of anger and frustration and pain on my mother's face, there in our bleak house on the shadowy northern side of the hill on the road out of Hammond Falls, that I wonder if my heart was not permanently hardened, to save me from a lifelong paralysis of grief. Stuck it seemed forever in latency and then the helpless middle teens, I would burrow away from the family sorrows into the warm corner of the kitchen behind the wood stove, or go upstairs in summertime and lie across my narrow bed, and read science fiction-Amazing, Astounding, those cheerful pulp monthlies costing only fifty cents in the Sixties-or popularized cosmology, by Asimov or Gamow, in plastic-wrapped volumes borrowed from the Pittsfield Library. Implausibly remote, radiant, exploding facts relieved the pressure of the immediate bare facts around me-the kitchen linoleum with its black-edged worn spots, the pine thresholds so often scuffed they dipped in the middle like tired mattresses, the thin painted doors with their black latches, the beer-blurred gleam of defeat, almost crazy, in my father's eyes when he came home later than usual from work. Giant realities-G.o.d's facts-lifted me a bit out of it all and out of my poor skinny claustrophobic self.

The clerical collar gleamed white on the slender girlish throat of our sermonizer. It seemed a provocation, like the forms of mutilation, nipple and tongue rings and livid tattoos, with which the young scorn their own flesh and announce their scorn for us, the unpunctured and tattoo-free. Above the rustle and whining of the children I heard her preach, ”Mary answered the angels that she wept because they had taken away her Lord and she did not know where they had laid him.”

One can see Mary Magdalene, over the gap of a decade less than two full millennia, giving way to a fresh gust of tears with this confession of confusion. They were young, all these disciples and camp followers of the youthful Messiah-younger than many a contemporary rock group.

Then the question was repeated, by a new figure, a man standing behind her. ”Woman, why weepest thou?”

Supposing this new presence to be the gardener, in this garden near the place of crucifixion, Mary said-steadying herself now into a certain dignity, drying her streaked cheeks with the backs of her hands, not really looking at this man-”Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou has laid him, and I will take him away.”

This carnal pa.s.sion of hers for the body, though a dead body, our female exegete glides over, her little hands gracefully flitting from the sleeves of her robe.

”The strange man, whom she has mistaken for the gardener in this disorienting place, says her name: 'Mary.' She turns and says, 'Rabboni,' 'Rabboni,' which is to say, 'Master.' At this point, she must have reached out in the joy of recognition, for He says, 'Touch me not.' which is to say, 'Master.' At this point, she must have reached out in the joy of recognition, for He says, 'Touch me not.' Noli me tangere Noli me tangere, Jesus spurns her instinctive attempt at contact. Why?”

In her expectant silence we could hear the children squirming in the creaking pews and one infant whimpering against the pressure of his mother to keep him quiet.

Superposition, I thought. Before Christ ascended, He was in what quantum theory calls superposition-neither here nor there, up nor down. He was Schrodinger's cat.

”A little later in the same chapter,” our inquisitor preached, ”Jesus invites His disciple Thomas to touch Him, to ease Thomas's doubts. Thomas has said he will not believe in the risen Jesus unless he sees in His hands the print of the nails, and puts his own hand in the wound of sword-thrust in Jesus's side. Jesus obliges. He lets Himself be intimately touched to ease the other man's doubt. It is a guy thing. For Mary Magdalene, seeing must be believing. Jesus tells her not to touch Him because He is not yet ascended to the Father. He is in a fragile in-between condition. Still, He has some orders for Mary: she should go tell the disciples that He is risen. Mary obeys. Like so many women in the Bible, she accepts her subservient role and obeys. But because she needed to weep, to stay at the tomb and come to terms with her feelings, it was she and not Peter or the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, usually identified as John, son of Zebedee-it was not these but Mary Mary who first sees the risen Christ and who hears her name p.r.o.nounced by Him: 'Mary' For the people of Biblical times, spoken language was as good as a touch, each word lived in their ears. They didn't have TV, they didn't have MTV or animated holograms, for them the spoken word was the hottest entertainment around. 'Mary.' who first sees the risen Christ and who hears her name p.r.o.nounced by Him: 'Mary' For the people of Biblical times, spoken language was as good as a touch, each word lived in their ears. They didn't have TV, they didn't have MTV or animated holograms, for them the spoken word was the hottest entertainment around. 'Mary.' 'Rabboni.' 'Rabboni.' 'Touch me not.'” 'Touch me not.'”

The child in the pew ahead of me, a toddling male with : runny nose and hair much the same translucent lemon color as his snot, had become fascinated by me, and distracted me from the minister's concluding peroration, her parallel between Mary's confusing Easter experience and the way in which Christ sneaks up on all of us, in the morning mists, in the semblance of a gardener. Amen.

As we bowed our heads in the post-sermon prayer I was intensely conscious of the body beside mine, familiar and yet not, Deirdre's meekly bent back sheathed in a stiff purple dress I had never seen before. I moved my elbow on the pew-back to touch hers and she pointedly moved hers away. Noli me tangere Noli me tangere. I pictured her tan skin and supple half-shaven underparts beneath the vulgar s.h.i.+ne of her crocus-colored dress with its starchy white collar. Her submission to this service, to the giant male ghost it bespoke, roused me. Like many of the younger women here, she wore no hat, no Easter bonnet: her ”big” hair, its oiled curls inflated by a hairdresser's patient teasing, was her headdress. Somewhere, Saint Paul devotes many verses to the vexed matter of how women should shave or cover their overexciting hair.

The clergyperson was stationed at the door, though the day was cold, alternating spells of pale sunlight with unseasonable spittings of snow. She greeted Deirdre by name, but after a hesitation that showed a long gap of attendance. When introduced to me, she darted her sensitive bright eyes back and forth between our ill-matched faces before granting me a firm little handshake and an abrupt smile I must call boyish. Her teeth were as straight and neat as her bangs.

I like these contemporary females, stripped of so much of the devious nonsense the rise of capitalism imposed upon women.

I liked, too, my drug-raddled consort's dragging me to church, this homely brown church out of Protestantism's fading, working-cla.s.s middle range. There was a nakedness in that, a bared need. Gloria had been an old-style Episcopalian, resenting any tampering with Cranmer's prayer-book language and any evangelical or feel-good pollutions of the service, such as a homily at morning prayer or the pa.s.sing of the peace at any service. Perdita had drifted from Unitarianism into Buddhism and settlement-house good works. Both women were religious aristocrats, for whom G.o.d was a vulgar poor relation with the additional social disadvantage of not existing. For primitive Deirdre, something existed, hot, in the knots of her nature, that she was unashamed to bow to. Though I was was ashamed, I was also somewhat primitive, and had willingly attended as an extension of my wors.h.i.+p of her body. ashamed, I was also somewhat primitive, and had willingly attended as an extension of my wors.h.i.+p of her body.

We walked arm in arm out of a swirl of snow into a pollen-colored cloud of suns.h.i.+ne on the way to the parked car. I felt better for having done this-put Easter behind me. Perhaps Easter is my problem with spring-the unreasonable expectation of it. That distant spring when I was too paralyzed by dread to build little Mildred's dollhouse, I went, gigantic in my numbness, out on a warm day and marvelled to find little swarms of tiny winged ephemerids already active in the air, jiggling together in some obligatory procedure, offering themselves as a humble rung in the food chain, though it seemed too wintry still for spiders to be stirring and for swallows to have migrated north. Snowdrops- an early small amaryllis, Galanthus nivalis Galanthus nivalis-have always worried me: if flowers exist to attract insects, where in this just-unfrozen world do the insects come from? Well, here insects were, in my muddy backyard, and if these gnats were not oppressed by death, why should I be? A vast camaraderie of living cells, all doomed to disintegrate back into insensate dust, cheered me for a moment. I shouldered my life-my house, my four and a half children, my two cars, my half-acre-and moved on, toward this present moment in time.

Tax time. Though no one takes it seriously-the District of Columbia is entirely given over to deserted monuments and warring gangs of African-American teenagers, who have looted every office of its last stapler and photocopier refill cartridge-a ghost of federal government exists in Maryland and Virginia, too weak to do anything but send out forms, which I sentimentally file in the drawer along with my prewar returns. Deirdre is very upset that I have allowed Phil and Spin to raise the protection money again-from an even grand to thirteen-hundred fifty. Spin explained that their own expenses have gone up, what with the teenage compet.i.tion coming out from Lynn, moving up the coast. ”They don't go by any rules, Mr. Turnbull,” he explained to me. ”To them killing is nothing-it's not a last resort, or taking care of business, it's for sheer entertainment value. You don't want those babies to get into your pocket-they'll take it all, and then hang your hide out to dry.”

Macho, rumpled Phil was offended by his partner's betrayal of fear. ”They're kids,” he said, ”for Chrissake. Fifteen, sixteen. Some even, Jesus, like ten, eleven. Kids can't stand up to experience. We're professionals, right? We provide a service, we keep our bargains. Our clients trust us, right, Mr. Turnbull?”

”Right, Phil.”

”Any of those Lynn kids show up on your hill, you know how to reach us. You have the phone numbers.”

”I do.”

Phil's eyes slid over to Deirdre, who always comes out-of-doors when she hears men's voices on the driveway. ”How's she treatin' you?” he asked me, as if she couldn't talk for herself. ”She keepin' in line?”

”She's my little lady,” I told him, not liking his tone.

”I could tell you some stories,” he said, ”from the old days. Huh, Dee?”

”Tell all you want. It still leaves you as a A-1 a.s.shole.”

His eyes did a dance from her face to mine to Spin's, and he held his tongue, with an effort that pushed his head forward like a bison's. They didn't want to offend me, they wanted to keep the scrip flowing.

But Deirdre was roused. She asked me, ”Whaddeya give these guys anything for? They couldn't do anything if you really needed protection. Look at 'em-they're scared s.h.i.+tless of these little kids from Lynn. Wait'll the Russian gangs from Mattapan get here. These are two-bit punks, Ben, and you're their only patsy.”

”They've taken good care of me so far,” I told her.

Spin seemed startled by my support; his toothpick bob-bled under his mustache as he said to Deirdre, ”Hear that, smart c.u.n.t? And this is one smart former financier talking. Outsmarted his way up the ladder from utter nowhere out in the western part of the state.”

”How'd you know that?” I asked, startled in turn.

Phil smirked, checking if Deirdre took this in. ”We know everything about our clients,” he said, ”we need to know.”

”f.u.c.k you two,” she said. ”When those kids from Lynn get here you're both going to wake up plugged some day. Or with a smile cut into your throats that'll make your mouths look like a.s.sholes.”

Phil took this in and winked at me. ”You watch her, Mr. Turnbull. Back in high school everybody said she could suck d.i.c.k all right, but that's not the same as dependable.”

Spin was pocketing the April money. To end the conference, he said, ”Trust us,” but the words had a shaky ring even in my ears.

Back in the house, as their rusty old Camaro wheeled down the driveway, I explained to Deirdre that what they charged was so much less than what the government used to extract that it was a bargain, regardless of how real their alleged protection was.

”Yeah, but when there was government, there were things like the FBI and the Federal Reserve Board to keep things stable. There was structure,” she told me. ”Structure is worth paying quite a lot for. Without it, you get just survival of the brutes.”

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