The sheet snakes over headboard and catches the neck before returning whence it came. During her vigil, kneeling like a supplicant before the bed, Amaryllis contemplates the creamy cable of linen whose underbed origins are too spooky to imagine, let alone investigate. What, exactly, did this sheet want with her mom? It was like something out of that movie she saw on TV — alarm clocks, blankets and dustpans flying around behind bedroom doors as if they had minds of their own (that little midget woman came to save the day). But Amaryllis is busy enough hushing and feeding and changing the babies to dwelclass="underline" been busy like that for years. The babies are good and beautiful and she loves them with all her heart. She sings made-up lullabies, and, when they finally sleep, goes out to forage.
The giant gave her food and pastries. At first, she thought he wanted to touch her, but he never did. Topsy — that’s what Will’m wished her to call him — was a scavenger himself and provided the girl with cooked meals in hard plastic containers covered with aluminum foil, courtesy, he said, of chefs at the Biltmore. Sometimes the unlikely couple ate high-end spoils under the 4th Street Bridge, where he lived; he threw scraps to a confederate’s dog, a mangled pit bull called Half Dead. He spoke British and the sound of the words was rich and full and coarse and it seemed to her he’d shatter the air itself if ever he gave full voice.
Topsy hailed from a village called Essex, a place “now terribly Cocknified and choked up by the jerry-builder.” The house he was evicted from had been (might still be) called Woodford Hall, and he said he longed to go back — though he sometimes referred to the childhood seat as Elm House or Red House, Kelmscott Manor or Horrington; Bexleyheath in Kent, the Retreat at Hammersmith, Queen’s Square or Merton Abbey on the River Wandle near Wimbledon. Among many peculiar things he spoke of were his “beastly, wondrous” adventures in Iceland, his beloved wife, Jane, and Jenny, their epileptic daughter; and a current labor of love, the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings. Topsy loathed anything modern, and it seemed to Amaryllis he had the impression the year—this year of Our Lord — was 1840 or ’60 or ’80 or sometime “bigly twixt.” He used words she read in the newspaper but had never understood, and took the time to tell her what they meant (she thought that explaining the English language was all part of being an Englishman).
He lived in a box on which he’d painstakingly drawn a colorful woodsy scene. Underbridge denizens had dubbed this nomadic place the Cadillac because of its capacious dimensions and luxury; Topsy called it the Manor. She had never seen such a lovely thing — graced by a mural filled with bounteous trees and birds and fruits, leaves and blossoms, flying insects and little branches. On sallow windblown trompe l’oeil banners, Topsy had inscribed
i once a king and chief
now am the tree bark’s thief
ever twixt trunk and leaf
chasing the prey.
He never asked her inside, and of that she was almost glad, but Amaryllis heard its sturdy corrugated cardboard furnishings had been fashioned by his able craftsman’s hands. When visiting, Topsy made sure they sat out of sight of the street; the police, he said, mostly left the encampment unbothered, but the presence of a young girl was something they’d be forced to look into. The underbridge wasn’t gloomy — airy as Union Station, its hilly carpet of dirt was packed clean and firm. On sunny days, a breeze like the sigh of a secret garden blew through. There were sleepy dogs (other than Half Dead, who never seemed to sleep at all), well-behaved “town-birds”—that’s what Topsy called them — and bleached white dishrags that on closer inspection showed themselves to be large rats the English colossus had poisoned and deposited by the gray concrete stanchions like so many houseplants. Most of the time, the two didn’t take a formal meal; he gave her the boxes to bring home, offering samples from each, along with simple, civilized lectures about their individual ingredients as she tasted. He knew something about her, because she’d told him things over the months. He knew about her brother and sister and gave food for them that was easy to chew: butter-squash soups, marmalade and mashed potatoes. (She always made certain to bring the containers back, neatly scrubbed.) Lately, when he asked after her mother, Amaryllis lied.
When she tired of Geri’s bedside and the babies were napping or settled and there was no more gathering to be done, Amaryllis sorted through her treasured “classifieds”—the cigar box of pages torn from yellowing newsprint and magazines. There was a sheaf about the child-goddesses of Nepal that told of a Special Council of Selectors, who went from village to village looking for little girls. If the parents agreed, the child was plucked from the family house and put in a palace. Her face was painted and her body adorned with golden robes and she was then called the Royal Kumari. The Royal Kumari was allowed out only during holy festivals. The Royal Kumari couldn’t play with other children, because if she cut herself, her godly powers seeped away with the blood. Amaryllis thought she would like to be chosen, but when she read that the Special Selectors wanted a child with unblemished skin, she cried. They would probably want the girl to be virginal, too.
She reread another brittle bundle — this one about Audrey, the Massachusetts girl who’d been asleep with open eyes for the past eleven years. She had fallen into a backyard swimming pool when she was three and had been in a magical coma ever since. Audrey never spoke, but seemed aware of her surroundings; when the family said mass in the house, they noticed that blood sometimes appeared on communion wafers and light-colored oil dripped down statuary. Soon, people made pilgrimages to gaze at her through a big window. Audrey had become a “victim soul,” who took on the suffering of those who came to ask for intercession with God to hear their pleas. Though she would be performing a valuable service without having to do much — without having to do anything, really — Amaryllis didn’t relish the idea of being half asleep, stared at by strangers all day. She looked up at her mother, imagining for a moment that Geri was Audrey and they were separated by candles and a pane of glass.
She kept her very favorite at the bottom of the pile: the dossier on Sister Benedicta, formerly known as Edith Stein, a “Jewish” who converted to Catholicism and was killed at a place called Auschwitz. The article said that Edith Stein was on a “fast track” to sainthood. When she first read about her, Amaryllis didn’t understand. For one thing, she didn’t even know saints came from people; she thought they came from angels or myths. When she read about this mere girl, this Jewish who the pope wanted to canonize — which, to Amaryllis, meant shot into sainthood — whole worlds opened up. The orphan was smart enough to know there wasn’t such a thing as a Jew saint (her mom had told her), so when she learned Edith was “eligible,” it was confusing. But then she grew hopeful; she wanted in. If a Jewish who died not so long ago — a girl—could officially become a saint, why not Amaryllis Kornfeld, a half-Jewish herself? Was not the name of their very motel — corner of 4th and Los Angeles — the St. George? Was this not a sign and a wonder? (St. Amaryllis Motel would have been more of a sign, but it was still something.) A quotation read in a Reader’s Digest left in the lobby clinched it: If they, why not I? If these men and women could become saints, why cannot I with the help of him who is all-powerful? A man named Saint Augustine had said it, obviously before he’d been shot through the canon. Amaryllis’s father was a Jewish and her mother, part African, but maybe none of it even mattered.