Donna sat down again. Mimi was replacing the cage on its platform. O-Kay and Miss Valentine were putting on their outerwear. O-Kay wasn’t shuddering and Miss Valentine’s mouth was closed. Even on medication they had never looked so placid. Then the two disappeared from Donna’s view, like the gerbils. She transferred her gaze to the door and saw Miss Valentine pushing it open. Miss Valentine and O-Kay climbed the stairs. They skirted the puddle and companionably got into O-Kay’s car and drove away.
Mimi, wearing coat and hat, stooped to pick up the Lego brick. She put it into her pocket and pushed the door open and climbed the steps while the door closed behind her, locking itself. She bent over the puddle where the drowned animals eddied. She retrieved them with her right hand, which was protected by a surgical glove. She lifted the lid of the nearby dumpster with her ungloved hand. She tossed in the corpses and lowered the lid.
“What about that empty cage?” Donna called from the well.
“Steve will deliver a new pair of gerbils tomorrow,” Mimi said. She peeled off her glove and raised the dumpster lid again. The glove arced palely into the trash. She walked to the window well. “If you stay there any longer, your baby will be born with the sniffles,” she predicted.
Donna extended her hand and Mimi took it and helped Donna climb out of the well. They stood for a moment, hand grasping hand, like friends who have known each other long but never intimately and who now must say good-bye.
“I look forward to volunteering under your supervision,” Donna made herself say. She discovered that once said it sounded true and perhaps even was true. “That business with the beasties — an inventive cure for madness, transferring the demons. Though of course you need animals always at the ready…” She trailed off.
“We’ll have them,” Mimi said.
Fishwater
Truth lies within a little and certain compass.
It took my aunt Toby twenty years to profit enough from fictohistoriographia to give up teaching, to release the two of us from New York, to realize her dream of buying a house on Lake Piscataqua in New England. But at last, the year the century turned, we could afford the very house she had in mind. We packed up the little Eighth Street apartment — furniture and a few treasures: the Turkish rug, the Dutch menorah. Toby held what you might call an exit interview. The interviewer was a young reporter from a literary rag. I sat in.
“Fast and loose? I?” Toby repeated to him. “With men or women?”
“With data. It’s been suggested. I heard,” said the flustered fellow.
“No. Not. Not on your backside,” Aunt Toby said. “Never have I claimed something to be true that I knew was not true — or claimed something to be true that was discovered to be false.”
“Fabrications, they say…”
“Oh, fabrications. Literally, yes. I make things up out of whole cloth — that’s to fabricate definitions one and two. One: ‘to make; create.’ Two: ‘to construct by combining or assembling diverse parts, as in to fabricate small boats.’ However, three: ‘to concoct in order to deceive, as in to fabricate an excuse’—I don’t do that, darling.” He blushed. “I concoct,” she continued, “but only to illuminate! How could I possibly write a history of, say, the Slavic cleverness employed in the Battle of Thessalonica without adding some tricks of my own divining?”
The Battle of Thessalonica left traces of itself in old histories. All the rest — the winged mercenaries, their pinions fabricated from cloth, the boy spy Dimitry and his pal the giant Vladimir, one on the other’s shoulders — is Toby’s doing, imagined by her dedicated intellect, unprovable, also undisprovable. The art of fictohistoriographia has been perfected by her, and without it the world would be a poorer place. So always said Mr. Franz Szatmar, her steady admirer. Franz Szatmar of the deep eyes, the major nose, the transparent hair fluttering on either side of his narrow forehead.
I always called him Uncle Franz, though his poor frail wife I addressed as Madame Szatmar.
“Lance, your aunt is generosity itself,” Madame Szatmar once declared, addressing me while Toby strode from our Village living room into the kitchen to brew a deep blue tea that might just prolong the old lady’s sad, barren life. “Discretion too. She keeps secrets as if her tongue has been torn out.”
I am Lancelot. Toby inherited me from her brother and sister-in-law, my parents — dead tragically early. I have no memory of them. I have been Toby’s adoptee and later her assistant during the two decades in which her books, never claiming to be factual history, claiming only to be possibly true, found favor among young people, though they never threatened to outchart the witchy-wizard series.
Toby’s version of history depends on the principle of parsimony. That is: her accounts are the most economical way of explaining what cannot be explained in a briefer way. The rout at Thessalonica required subterfuge and optical illusion. As for the Alchemist of Rotterdam, his existence is postulated by the metaphoric pricking of the infamous tulip bubble. We know now that the prized tulips were made multicolored by a virus. The virus inducer is Toby’s, a scientist who understood that invading organisms could work their will within a plant. He infected bulb after bulb, using a rudimentary syringe. Gorgeous, those tulips were. The second generation died.
“Produce evidence of the existence of that protobiochemist,” said some rigid historian.
But, wrote Toby’s most admiring reviewer, she does not fill up her books with data and a bogus sense of the past. It is her genius to be able to imagine time and place and person so fully that they are as good as real — or better. History as diversion.
We bought the cottage on Lake Piscataqua with the continuing royalties from The Spy of Thessalonica and The Alchemist of Rotterdam, and with the honoraria from Toby’s appearances on panels and platforms. A devoted suitor brilliantly invested the money.
Toby was by now sixty — I was twenty. She was tall as a young tree, thin as a spear. Her hair that had once been blond, my hair that had once been blond, both had darkened to the brass of an ancient Greek drachma. She wore pants and shirts of a similar shade. Her chin was cleft, like mine. Her eyes were pewter. (Mine, certain young women told me, were dark chocolate.) Her tales unfurled behind a brow broad as a garden spade. (My own brow is narrow, like a dibble.)
At Piscataqua we repaired the little stone house and whitewashed its inside, and in the middle of the one room (the bedrooms were lofts, a minimal kitchen occupied a corner) we spread the Turkish rug that had inspired Who Set Fire to Smyrna? In that tale the incendiarism was caused by Turks dressed as Armenians and Armenians dressed as Turks. No one could tell friend from foe, according to the twelve-year-old Jewish narrator who observed the entire conflagration, running and hiding, running and hiding, scribbling all the time…
Behind the stone house we staked out a plot for a vegetable garden and began digging the foundation for a gazebo — Toby would write her next work there, whatever it was. We became regulars at the post office — Toby’s letters to the Szatmars, along with photographs of me, went out twice weekly. We made friends with fishermen. Every morning at four they came with their glistening catches to the docks at the sea, ten miles away from us.
Our smooth lake in sunlight resembled Toby’s tea of immortality. Under the moon, ruffled, the lake looked like the carbon paper that lay crumpled in our wastebaskets. Toby disdained computers and word processors, typed her work on an old Hermes. Carbons for copies she had always purchased in the secondhand typewriter store on the third floor of an East Side building, a store right next to Uncle Franz’s shop. Uncle Franz was a numismatician, dealing in history himself. But he was history himself, Toby mentioned more than once; he embodied a grim horror — a schoolboy who, alone among everyone he knew, was not murdered. Toby’s eyes grew dark, her jaw stiffened when she referred to this.