To all appearances I was my father's child. I looked more like him; I'd inherited his scowl, his dogged skepticism. (As well as, eventually, his medals. He left them to me.) Reenie would say-when I was being recalcitrant-that I had a hard nature and she knew where I got it from. Laura on the other hand was my mother's child. She had the piousness, in some ways; she had the high, pure forehead.
But appearances are deceptive. I could never have driven off a bridge. My father could have. My mother couldn't.
Here we are in the autumn of 1919, the three of us together-my father, my mother, myself-making an effort. It's November; it's almost bedtime. We're sitting in the morning room at Avilion. It has a fireplace in it, with a fire, as the weather has turned cool. My mother is recovering from a recent, mysterious illness, said to have something to do with her nerves. She's mending clothes. She doesn't need to do this-she could hire someone-but she wants to do it; she likes to have something to occupy her hands. She's sewing on a button, torn from one of my dresses: I am said to be hard on my clothes. On the round table at her elbow is her sweetgrass-bordered sewing basket, woven by Indians, with her scissors and her spools of thread and her wooden darning egg; also her new round glasses, keeping watch. She doesn't need them for close work.
Her dress is sky blue, with a broad white collar and white cuffs edged in piquet. Her hair has begun to go white prematurely. She would no more think of dyeing it than she would of cutting off her hand, and thus she has a young woman's face in a nest of thistledown. It's parted in the middle, this hair, and flows back in wide, springy waves to an intricate knot of twists and coils at the back of her head. (By the time of her death five years later, it would be bobbed, more fashionable, less compelling.) Her eyelids are lowered, her cheeks rounded, as is her stomach; her half-smile is tender. The electric lamp with its yellow-pink shade casts a soft glow over her face.
Across from her is my father, on a settee. He leans back against the cushions, but he's restless. He has his hand on the knee of his bad leg; the leg jiggles up and down. (The good leg, the bad leg-these terms are of interest to me. What has the bad leg done, to be called bad? Is its hidden, mutilated state a punishment?)
I sit beside him, though not too close. His arm lies along the sofa back behind me, but does not touch. I have my alphabet book; I'm reading to him from it, to show that I can read. I can't though, I've only memorised the shapes of the letters, and the words that go with the pictures. On an end table there's a gramophone, with a speaker rising up out of it like a huge metal flower. My own voice sounds to me like the voice that sometimes comes out of it: small and thin and faraway; something you could turn off with a finger.
A is for Apple Pie, Baked fresh and hot: Some have a little, And others a lot.
I glance up at my father to see if he's paying any attention. Sometimes when you speak to him he doesn't hear. He catches me looking, smiles faintly down at me.
B is for Baby, So pink and so sweet, With two tiny hands And two tiny feet.
My father has gone back to gazing out the window. (Did he place himself outside this window, looking in? An orphan, forever excluded-a night wanderer? This is what he was supposed to have been fighting for-this fireside idyll, this comfortable scene out of a Shredded Wheat advertisement: the rounded, rosy-cheeked wife, so kind and good, the obedient, worshipful child. This flatness, this boredom. Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?)
F is for Fire,
Good servant, bad master.
When left to itself
It burns faster and faster.
The picture in the book is of a leaping man covered in flames-wings of fire coming from his heels and shoulders, little fiery horns sprouting from his head. He's looking over his shoulder with a mischievous, enticing smile, and he has no clothes on. The fire can't hurt him, nothing can hurt him. I am in love with him for this reason. I've added extra flames with my crayons.
My mother jabs her needle through the button, cuts the thread. I read on in a voice of increasing anxiety, through suave M and N, through quirky Q and hard R and the sibilant menaces of S. My father stares into the flames, watching the fields and woods and houses and towns and men and brothers go up in smoke, his bad leg moving by itself like a dog's running in dreams. This is his home, this besieged castle; he is its werewolf. The chilly lemon-coloured sunset outside the window fades to grey. I don't know it yet, but Laura is about to be born.
Bread day
Not enough rain, say the farmers. The cicadas pierce the air with their searing one-note calls; dust eddies across the roads; from the weedy patches at the verges, grasshoppers whir. The leaves of the maples hang from their branches like limp gloves; on the sidewalk my shadow crackles.
I walk early, before the full blare of the sun. The doctor eggs me on: I'm making progress, he tells me; but towards what? I think of my heart as my companion on an endless forced march, the two of us roped together, unwilling conspirators in some plot or tactic we've got no handle on. Where are we going? Towards the next day. It hasn't escaped me that the object that keeps me alive is the same one that will kill me. In this way it's like love, or a certain kind of it.
Today I went again to the cemetery. Someone had left a bunch of orange and red zinnias on Laura's grave; hot-coloured flowers, far from soothing. They were withering by the time I got to them, though they still gave off their peppery smell. I suspect they'd been stolen from the flower beds in front of The Button Factory, by a cheapskate devotee or else a mildly crazy one; but then, it's the sort of thing Laura herself would have done. She had only the haziest notions of ownership.
On my way back I stopped in at the doughnut shop: it was heating up outside, and I wanted some shade. The place is far from new; indeed it's almost seedy, despite its jaunty modernity-the pale-yellow tiles, the white plastic tables bolted to the floor, their moulded chairs attached. It reminds me of some institution or other; a kindergarten in a poorer neighbourhood perhaps, or a drop-in centre for the mentally challenged. Not too many things you could throw around or use for stabbing: even the cutlery is plastic. The odour is of deep-fat-frying oil blended with pine-scented disinfectant, with a wash of tepid coffee over all.
I purchased a small iced tea and an Old-fashioned Glazed, which squeaked between my teeth like Styrofoam. After I'd consumed half of it, which was all I could get down, I picked my way across the slippery floor to the women's washroom. In the course of my walks I've been compiling a map in my head of all the easily accessible washrooms in Port Ticonderoga-so useful if you're caught short-and the one in the doughnut shop is my current favourite. Not that it's cleaner than the rest, or more likely to have toilet paper, but it offers inscriptions. They all do, but in most locales these are painted over frequently, whereas in the doughnut shop they remain on view much longer. Thus you have not only the text, but the commentary on it as well.
The best sequence at the moment is the one in the middle cubicle. The first sentence is in pencil, in rounded lettering like those on Roman tombs, engraved deeply in the paint: Don't Eat Anything You Aren't Prepared to Kill.