At daybreak, I rise and go outside. I’m still wearing what I wore yesterday during my long drive here, what I slept in on that sofa. I need coffee, need a shave and some mouthwash, but there’s another need I have to see to first. On my way to the car, I’m stopped by the sound of the ocean in the distance—the same sound I heard when I placed Ariane’s nautilus shell against my ear and knew this was the place where I had to be. A gull calls. A small brown rabbit scurries from the clearing into the woods. Something rustles behind the bushes, sight unseen. I can smell the ocean as well as hear it.
I pull that second duffel bag from the backseat of my car. Open the trunk and grab the box of rocks that’s in there. Yesterday before I left, I walked around the property, picking up nine or ten of them for my private ceremony. I place the rocks, one by one, into the duffel bag. It already contains my license to practice psychology, the university awards I’ve received, my farewell pen and pencil set, and the mushy, now-melted top of Annie’s and my twenty-fifth anniversary cake. There are photographs in there, too: Annie and me on that cruise we took to the Virgin Islands; the two of us seated with Muriel Clapp and her husband at some social function. . . .
Well, some of what you’re saying jibes with what Jasmine contends, Orion, but there are crucial differences in your stories, too.
I’m not telling you a story, Muriel. I’m telling you the truth. What did she say?
That she went to your office that night because she was afraid for her safety and she thought she could trust you. That you drove her home and, when you got there, you asked her if she had anything to drink. That you more or less invited yourself in.
That’s a lie. She asked me to come in and have that drink.
But you were inside her apartment?
I was. Because she said she was afraid to go in there alone. Her boyfriend wouldn’t give her back her key and . . . I said no at first, Muriel, but then . . .
Did you seduce her?
No, what happened was—
How many drinks did you have while you were there, Orion?
One. And granted, she’d poured it with a heavy hand, but . . . one drink. That was it. Look, the bottom line is that she’s lying about who seduced who. I swear to god. What happened was—
Did you ejaculate in her presence? Just tell me that.
When I get to Long Nook Beach, I park, get out of the car, grab the duffel bag. I walk the path to the top and look out at the rolling ocean, the surf crashing at the water’s edge below. It’s somewhere between high and low tide. Something down there is lying half in and half out of the water. The surf washes over it and then retreats. I climb down the steep dune path and walk toward it.
It’s a dead seal. Its organs have been eaten away. The frozen grimace on its face is the same as Jesus’s as he looks up toward a heaven, a Father, that doesn’t really exist. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? . . . That letter? The one I wrote Francis Oh, the father who’d wanted nothing to do with me? Who had died instead of facing me? That’s in the duffel bag, too. Unopened, with the word deceased scrawled across the front of the envelope. I should have gotten rid of that thing long ago.
Standing beside this dead, devoured seal, I rear back and hurl the bag, as far as I can, into the gray-green water. I watch it sink. Then I jimmy my wedding ring back and forth until it slips over the knuckle and off my finger. I fling it into the sea. Am I crying? Laughing? Both?
Who am I, now that I’ve thrown my life into the ocean? Who will I be?
Chapter Nine
Annie Oh
Hurrying toward my studio with the wine-stained bridal dresses, I pass the grocery store where that hostile Korean boy works. I stop, turn around, and rush in. He’s there, behind the counter. “Hey!” I say. “Spray starch!”
“Aisle four,” he says without looking up from his magazine. I throw the dresses onto his counter and race to aisle four. Grab the three cans on the shelf and hurry back to him.
“Do you have more in back?” He shrugs. “Then go look. It’s urgent.” He doesn’t budge; he just sits on his stool and stares at me. “Goddamnit! Move!” He flips over his magazine and heads toward the back room. Lucky for him, he’s hurrying. Leaning on the counter, my elbows on the dresses, I call to him. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got!”
The spray starch, twenty-four cans to the box, plus the three I’ve already grabbed off the shelf, comes to sixty-nine dollars. I dash over to the ATM machine in aisle one, do what the screen says, and grab the hundred dollars that come shooting out. I’m feeling frenzied. I need to get to the studio and start. I put four twenties on the counter and tell him to keep the change. Then I give him the remaining twenty, too. “Here,” I say. “Buy yourself something pretty.”
Carrying the dresses and the starch, I run toward the studio without even bothering to look at what people have left out on the sidewalk. In my head, I’m inventorying the storehouse of accumulated stuff that’s waiting for me to use: mannequins and tailor’s dummies, rubber hands and rubber hearts, a bolt of pink net, a bust of Medusa. A couple of blocks before I get to my destination, I catch myself mumbling an old prayer I learned in parochial school.
Hail holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,
Our life, our sweetness, and our hope.
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve;
To thee do we send up our sighs,
Mourning and weeping in this valley of tears . . .
Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God,
That we may be worthy of the promises of Christ.
Wait. What’s Jesus got to do with it? I’m praying to Gaia.
I work all night on the disturbing and evocative piece that, by week’s end, will become The Titan Brides of Gaia, the largest and most ambitious assemblage I have ever made. The day after it’s finished, Viveca will return from Greece, come up the stairs to my studio, and stand at the entrance, staring in at it. At first, I’ll not be able to read her face as she looks at the wedding dresses, stiff with starch and bloody from battle because I’ve turned them into art. Is she angry? Sad? But then she will walk toward me, in tears, and take me in her arms the way Winona Wignall did the day of my miscarriage. The way my mother used to. Viveca will pronounce this latest creation of mine “stunning,” “sensational,” “a tour de force.” Three weeks later, there will be a feverish auction among art patrons, and The Titan Brides of Gaia will sell for a hundred and seventeen thousand dollars, the highest price anyone has ever paid for one of my works. A venture capitalist will be outbid by some new singer named Lady Gaga who Marissa says she loves and dances to at the gay clubs she and her friends frequent. Viveca will invite Lady Gaga to our wedding, but she’ll send her regrets, much to Marissa’s disappointment.
But all that will happen in the days to come. Right now, exhausted and spent after having been up all night—having seen in my head and begun creating The Titan Brides of Gaia—I stumble out of my studio, down the stairs, and through the streets toward our building on Elizabeth Street. It’s early morning, a weekday not a weekend, and so Rocco is on duty at the front door and Hector is probably arriving at the 9/11 site for his day’s work there. Minnie must be en route to our apartment—on a bus or a ferry or a subway train. Hopefully, her babysitter has gotten himself out of bed and is helping Africa get ready for school. It’s a lovely late summer morning. The sky is blue, the air is crisp and dry. Mykonos is better than this?
Inside the apartment, I open four of Viveca’s expensive bottles of red, then grab the kitchen funnel and, one by one, pour each bottle into Minnie’s jug. I’d hate to have her realize I know her secret, and that I drank her wine.
Later that sunny morning, too agitated, still, to sleep but too exhausted to return to the studio, I decide to take one of my scavenging walks. I’m on Delancey when she passes me at a brisk pace, going the opposite way, a study in self-satisfaction. It’s her, all right: that Dr. Nancy woman from the Today show. Without really knowing why, I pivot and start following her. A f
ew blocks later, she stops and reaches for the door handle of a Starbucks. At first I only feel like saying it, but then I do say it. Shout it, in fact. It’s as surprising and sudden as when I threw that wine at Viveca’s dress. “Hey, Dr. Nancy!”
She stops, turns to see who’s calling her. When she notices me, she smiles a patient smile in the name of fan recognition. Then she starts into that Starbucks. “You know what goes good with one of those overpriced chai lattés you’re probably going in to buy?” I yell. “A cigarette, that’s what! Live a little! Light up!” The smile drops off her face.
It’s a beautiful, blissful day. My two canvas bags are brimming with people’s sidewalk discards: faded yellow silk roses, a Pee-wee Herman doll that talks, a painting of Saint Martin de Porres with purple sequins glued to the frame, a dented bicycle fender, a skein of yellow yarn. My new finds have reenergized me, and those four bloodied brides—Gaia’s daughters, their dresses stiff with starch—are waiting for me. I turn and hurry toward my studio, walking as fast as I can. But that’s not fast enough. I break into a run.
Part II
Mercy
Chapter Ten
Ruth Fletcher
March 12, 1963
We buried my husband, Claude, today, finally. Me and Belinda Jean. His emphysema took him nine days ago, but the wake and funeral had to be put off because of the flood. McPadden’s Funeral Parlor was in the water’s path.
I cried when Mr. McPadden called to say they had to postpone things. The flood water had rose up to the windshield of his hearse, he said. He went on about sparkplugs and distributor caps, but car talk is Greek to me. He also said the wool rugs in the two rooms where they wake the dead got soaked and probably would take their sweet time drying out, even outside on the lawn in the warm sun. The weather’s been so strange lately. For three days, it rained like the dickens—a cold rain it was, just this side of snow. But the day after the dam broke, it got sunny and warm and it’s been that way since. Too warm, if you ask me. Seventy-seven degrees in the middle of March? The TV said yesterday’s temperature broke some record.
Claude’s wake was last night, from seven to nine o’clock. Sixteen people showed up to pay their respects, not counting Belinda Jean and me. I know because when we were the only ones left, I counted the names in the signing book. Claude’s sister Verna come over from Rockville, which I appreciated because she’s wheelchair-bound from her diabetes. Her daughter Carol brought her. My second cousin Wanda Brautigan came, too—her and her husband, Clifford. And a few of the men Claude worked with at the icehouse. Not that foreman, though; there was never any love lost between Claude and him. Oh, and our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Skloot: they came. I thought it was kind of them to pay their respects, especially since Claude had made that big stink about Mr. Skloot letting those colored brothers, the Joneses, live out back on his property. I never liked it that Claude was a member of the Connecticut Ku Klux, and that he was a part of the window-smashing that night out back on the Skloots’ property. My feeling when it comes to the coloreds is: if they don’t bother me, I won’t bother them. That’s not to say that I approve of whites and coloreds marrying each other, which was what Claude and the others were so hot under the collar about: when Rufus Jones, the older brother, was living with that white wife of his from Germany or wherever she came from and drove her all around town in his flashy convertible. Gerta van Hofwegen: that name sounds fancy, but she was cheap goods. Still is, I guess. She was in the arrest report a few months back on a morals charge—something about performing immoral acts on the men at Electric Boat during their lunch break. Well, that’s what she gets for marrying out of her race, I suppose. Her husband come to a bad end, too, of course. Got hit by the flood water and drowned in the river behind the movie theater. Divine justice, I guess. I don’t think the Good Lord ever intended for coloreds to mix with whites, because if He did, why would He make us so different? Our noses and hair and such, and the fact that Negroes rut like animals from being oversexed? Back when I was twelve years old and bled for the first time, my mama, with her shy ways, couldn’t bring herself to explain the birds and the bees to me, so she had her sister Bitty take me aside and explain the particulars. And that was the first thing Aunt Bitty told me: now that I had reached womanhood, I wasn’t to look a colored man or a colored boy in the eye because if I did, it would stoke their fire and I’d get raped. When she told me what rape was, it was all I could do not to put my hands over my ears and run from the room. Then she told me about what husbands did to their wives in private, which was how babies got made, and that for some women this felt natural and pleasurable and for other women it was something they had to do out of duty. I asked her what the difference was between that and rape, and she said the difference was that the one was natural and decent, the way God designed things so that His people would populate the earth, and the other was unnatural and indecent. . . . I don’t call them niggers anymore, like I used to; I’ve made an effort to stop doing that after I learned that it was disrespectful and ungodly to use that word. And I don’t contend, like some do, that them and us are two different species, or that we have souls and they don’t. We can interbreed, I know that, but I don’t believe it’s what the Good Lord ever intended. We’re different is all I’m saying, the coloreds and us. Maybe that’s why Rufus Jones drowned that night. The Good Lord works in mysterious ways, so maybe it was divine justice.
But jeepers, that flood was a terrible thing—seven lives lost and half the downtown stores ruined. All the next day, there were helicopters flying overhead, and Walter Cronkite talked about Three Rivers on the news that night. Governor Dempsey traveled over from Hartford to look at the damage and talk to the families. I thought that was a merciful thing for him to do. I didn’t vote for him last election because he’s a Catholic and a Democrat. We got one of them living in the White House, and one’s enough for me, whether what they say is true or not: that if it come down to it, a Catholic would be loyal to the pope in Rome rather than to the Constitution. But I did appreciate the effort the governor made. They closed the high school for three days in a row so that the students could go downtown and help with the cleanup. The radio’s been saying those boys should all make sure their shots are in order, though, because the water might have bacteria in it. I’m not sure what the danger is. Typhoid, maybe.
Two of the flood victims were waked at McPadden’s last night, same as Claude. It was that young mother and her baby. Claude’s coffin was laid out in the smaller room, theirs in the bigger one across the hall. Belinda Jean and I got to calling hours early, and when I looked in the other room and saw that baby’s casket next to her mother’s, it nearly broke my heart. Myrna O’Day, the woman’s name was, but the paper said everyone called her Sunny because she had a sunny disposition. The baby’s name was Grace. They found that poor doomed child’s body tangled up in a tree that got knocked over. And this was a strange thing: they found the mother floating in the basement of McPadden’s of all places, where Claude’s corpse was waiting to be waked and buried. It said in the paper that the printing company down the street from McPadden’s had a lot of flood damage, too, and that the water was so powerful, it moved two heavy printing presses from one side of the floor to the other. I suspect Claude got moved around some, too. I could see it in my mind: his coffin floating around down there like a boat with him in it. I didn’t ask if that was the case, though, and Mr. McPadden didn’t say. But at least Claude was in his coffin, or so I choose to believe.
The paper said that, after the dam broke and all the water in Wequonnoc Pond went racing toward the downtown, the ice on top of the pond cracked and broke into big chunks that traveled along with the rushing water. It’s been a cold winter and the paper said those blocks of ice were a foot thick and as long and wide as cars, some of them. That’s what caused a lot of the damage in town, I guess: all that ice smashing into things, storefronts and such. I read that one of those ice chunks stove in the double doors at McPadden’s where they bring th
e bodies in. What I figure is that the water must have carried poor Sunny O’Day through those open doors, and that’s why they found her in McPadden’s basement. It’s hard to understand a peculiarity like that—a drowned woman coming to rest inside a funeral parlor. It’s like Reverend Frickee always says: The Good Lord moves in strange and mysterious ways that aren’t ours to understand.
Sunny O’Day: it just don’t seem like a name you’d associate with tragedy. Her surviving children had their picture on the front page of the newspaper the day after it happened. Those two, plus a nephew who lives with the family. The photo was taken at the hospital after they got rescued from that tree they were in and had to be examined by the doctor. The boys—the son and the nephew—looked gloomy, and the little girl looked like she was in a daze. That poor child: five or six years old and now she’s got to grow up without a mother to guide her. That would have been Belinda Jean’s fate, too, if Claude hadn’t married me soon after his first wife died. He never said as much, but I know that was why Claude asked me for my hand: not because he loved me and couldn’t live without me, but so that I could mother Belinda Jean. I’ve done right by her, too; that’s not pride, it’s fact. I was thinking about something on the ride to the cemetery this morning: that Claude was a widower when he married me, and now I’m his widow.
Those wool rugs at McPadden’s last night weren’t what you’d call wet, but they were still damp. At one point during Claude’s wake, when nobody new was showing up, I slipped off my shoes and felt the moisture on the bottoms of my stockings. They had a bit of a smell about them, too, and wet wool’s not the pleasantest of odors. But I suppose that couldn’t be helped. Maybe if I’d bought both the spray of carnations and the casket blanket like the florist wanted me to, the smell of the flowers might have cut down on the smell of the wet wool. Carnations have such a nice fragrance to them. Sometimes on my birthday, Claude would give me a few extra dollars so that I could go downtown and buy myself a present. I’d almost always buy carnations and that pretty smell would fill up the house. He’d come home from work, bend and smell them, and say, “Mm-mmm. These sure stink pretty. Happy birthday, Ruthie Pie.”