Cardinal Numbers: Stories (11 page)

Delivered from the twenty-one interminable days of winter, he now could say, please, no more demands on my time. Tradition, unquestioned, though it lent discernible advantage to no one, made winter the season for petitioners and supplicants. Day and night they came—old men from the desert with performing horses, a firewalker, tumblers, women who told the future with nails, with dung, a farmer’s boy who had glazed a microscopic likeness of Ilse, the Concubine, inside an almond shell—all desiring but his tiniest gesture of acknowledgment.

Interminable. Stinking tapers, mice in the blankets. And the shortage of fuel: trees unfelled and peat uncut. Sven, the Woodsman, was imprisoned. The dungeon was perfectly black, a place to think of larch and tamarack in acres, and the yield potential in planks. This worked for quite a while. It was just lately that Sven had lost his mind.

For contractions of the imperial stomach, its doggish growling, the twenty-first day and one at last brought relief: raw cockles and flatbread, which Franchise Rogelio ate dutifully, and without savor. The gold cutlery and damask cloth made him sad. They had come over trade routes which were forgotten in that diabolic one-day winter when honey turned to varnish, and husbands woke up strangers to their wives. Now clouds rolled by. Sea gulls miles from any sea roosted on the parapets.

Ilse was compelled by spring and in her velvets came to Rodolfo, the Confessor. And she knelt before him to say, Little Father, I have inflicted pain. I have corrupted children and had congress with animals and I have not repented. Rodolfo silently moved his lips, and the Concubine licked rock salt from his hand until her throat burned.

In a tiny lime-white cottage, Lenore, the Virgin, bent over her tatting, didn’t see that sunlight had come in the window. Her slender perfect hands were careful at the work. She had a simple heart, never was troubled by expectation. At the time of the siege by heathen mercenaries, she had sealed both her cleft and her fundament with red wax and gone out to tend the wounded, the mad, the sick, and the dying. Bowmen dissembled their pain to fall in love with her, and running pus turned to milk.

Evening descended quickly, with click beetles at their posts, fumes of new dust on the air. The flock politely breathed together, formed rhomboids, pentagons. Zoltan, the Shepherd, did not know patience as a word or an idea, but he was replete at the end of the winter fast simply from watching worms move through a hunk of cheese. He fed his reed pipes into the fire piece by piece.

The ragged shape stumbling over bogs in a conflation of bell-chiming was Cassius, the Leper. Moonlight very much became him. He preened with despair, groping for edible mist. How could he live on integrity alone? But no one else had cared to design his banishment. Clear chiming amid the drift. He called out indictments to challenge the Emperor: Flaccid in the pose of strength, you have outlived your time. Resourceless! Unbegotten! Spayed!

Mating cavies filled the afternoon with spray and newts tumbled out of the trees. It was the second day of spring; from guano-spattered ramparts the disconsolate Emperor looked abroad. Where once there had been garden, roses to gather and tangerines to squeeze, there now was featureless meadow. Where there had been meadow on which to ride out hawking, there was a tangle of thornbush and stranglers. No more Animating Divinity in and of the earth, no more heroism, no will to overcome.

Possibly, things had not been disremembered, but only, as Rodolfo said, elided. And so the Emperor slept on a board while his Confessor made a bed of lavender and furs, brooded over a jug of moss water while the Little Father, sipping clove liqueur, played motets at the harmonium. And so Ilse was still unrepentant, raking her sleepless flesh with nuggets of bee varnish. But the route was lost. She could no more dream her frescoes of venery.

The Woodsman made history. Deranged, disarranged, he had never been more himself. He issued edicts, decrees. From the fountainhead of Sven! And the people shrugged, mumbled, obeyed. He minted coins with his profile on both sides. He stayed executions, bestowed lands and titles on deserving hermits. His shackles dissolved in rust. He went blind.

Spark struck tinder and caught. Cassius was no less entitled to spring appetite. The lampreys he had speared from the common sewer now were ready to be dangled in smoke. He hurled florid epithets at all the dead chefs of the land. Misanthropes! Fakirs! Let them poke in middens for their supper. And chase ghosts through long meat kitchens. The Leper hunkered down. Split skin, fat and smoke. Such aromas as approached fell back from the crater that had once been his nose.

The Emperor’s last Queen had betrayed him, disgraced him with a pardon-seller, and was beheaded. Now his Concubine sat beside him in the chapel and they stared at the malachite-inlaid casket rumored to house the Queenly remains. Hadn’t she been gutted, then packed with opals? (Or was it potatoes?) And what of the alley trade in bone amulets? Ilse whispered that he had every right to break the seal, and go ahead, don’t wait. He took up her cool fingers and with them pressed shut his eyes.

Henceforward, all sins are venial. Was that the way Rodolfo said it?

Gathering blooms for a votive bouquet, Lenore saw the Shepherd as he came over the road with a lamb in his arms. And what a fine countenance, she told herself, such purity. Zoltan had for so long been asleep inside the smell of lanolin that he could not begin to understand the warm nuances through which passed the Virgin’s gaze. All he could think of to do was to open the lamb’s throat with his poniard, letting its blood into the chalkdust of the road as a kind of offering.

In the same dark library vault where the Confessor combed through enchiridions of prophecy, where, amid moth powder and glue fragrance, Ilse refined her science with codices of nerve expansion, mucosal viscosity, Francois Rogelio IV, the last of his line, bowed over family chronicles and wept at the loneliness of power. Under his hands the parchment was stiffly rucked, its illuminations flaking. The old proverbs made a deadly weight. At opposite ends of a fracture, a fissure, and nothing to hand across.

Some petty villain mixed feathers into the hay and now the Little Father’s best stallion had foundered. This vexed him quite as much as His Majesty’s whimpers, not to say Ilse’s pious melancholia. Yes, he could see they were under compulsion—like ants guarding larval packages under a rock—but this was not a useful recognition. And what was he supposed to say, take out and smash all the mirrors? Hazards, both of them, in any palace. Not that Rodolfo necessarily liked eating alone, but nobody else knew how to relish food. They saw the most succulent curries as masking ground glass, the perfect blushing fruit as a vehicle for parasites. So it was his part to play from the great carved mahogany chair, to stretch forth his arm, there there, kiss the ring, my child, partake of serenity. And among all these demands on his patience, someone had found a motive and murdered his favorite horse. Revenge was too small a thing to stay for long in the Confessor’s mind. Hoofbeats, hoofbeats. He might go down into the village for a game of dominoes. Perdition. He had only to stretch forth his arm.

The flock was long gone over the hill. Silver bubbles broke behind the weir. Woodbine and dog rose neatly shared a single trellis. The Virgin made a steamed pudding of blood and offal of which, until she coaxed his hand around a spoon, Zoltan took no more than he could admire with his eyes. She watched the motion of his burly stalwart arms. This was a different kind of grace. Not like her salad greens planted as radiant spokes from the wellhead, or like afternoon sun on the flank of a pail. Better. Not so definite. Zoltan explained that he’d been sent out with the animals just as soon as he could walk. Seasons might follow seasons without his seeing anyone, and so, not even wanting to, he had taught himself to sing. Lenore described without a blush what she did each night to fall asleep. They wanted to tell each other everything, or at least as much as could be remembered.

Ilse had come far to reach the cave mouth, far enough that her naked legs were all cut up with nettles and sedge grass. The Leper vibrated. She asked for his invitation in such a sweet, warming voice. He said, do come in and sit right down there, all with the clapper of his bell. The Concubine did not seem the least bit nervous or shy. Cassius thought, well, I could be more than a creature, but he was still wary of a trick. She picked stones out of the packed clay floor and rhymed them. He presented her a birdwing fan. Side by side, their legs were a single description. I envy you, she said. Aging is merciless in my profession. The Leper was a young man. He was not surprised when she took down her beautiful hair and with it washed him up and down.

Effigies dangled from the highest turret. Cactus blocked the pantry entrance and garbage crammed the bake ovens full. Whelping went on under slogans written in candle smoke on the walls of the ransacked library, and the old desert men traded puppies. There was an intricate system of demerits. Turtle eggs appeared at every dungeon level. The nights got longer. Loyalties went untested. Life was cheap.

With grunts and bewilderment, the people massed to say contrition.

Rodolfo said go in peace.

O
LIVIA FROM HER BEDROOM
window watched the honeyed light of October sunset move slowly up the street of brownstones to cast long shadows and soften contours. It turned leafless trees to mahogany, flared richly on the windows opposite, alluding to darkwood interiors, a warm sepia comfort of roast meat and carved furniture. Olivia brushed out her long, light-brown hair. Night fell and the city filled itself with rhetoric.

FROM
the parlor of the house on West Seneca Street in Buffalo she had looked out at junipers in silhouette like hearse plumes. There you always knew you were at the edge of wilderness. Factory soot came down with the snow. The immigrant shanties were just waiting for a match. Her father saw, practically, that he would never grow beyond the ceramic insulator business. He gave Olivia two years at Rose Hill College for Women, and then sent her to Aunt Catherine in New York.

“Make a good marriage,” he advised. “Better yourself. Move up.”

Aunt Catherine had twice married well, first to an importer of wines and spirits, and then to a delicate scion. Her widow’s weeds were of the finest nankeen. She took her niece to the St. Regis for afternoon tea and was seated promptly. She showed how to use the mirror-lined entry of the Waldorf-Astoria’s Palm Garden to maximum effect without at the same time being seen to loiter. Discretion meant, equally, that custard be concealed under leaves of pastry and that the string quartet perform behind a lacquered screen.

“The elegancies of life,” Aunt Catherine explained, “when indulged to excess, cease to be elegant.”

Restraint was the method of gentility. No matter that Catherine thirty years ago would squat at the edge of a trash fire to pull hot mickeys out and pass them, split and steaming, to her brothers: The distance traveled might tempt one to put on airs, but you resisted, you smoothed over, and that was precisely the point.

The upper levels of the city were vigilant, alert to every signal. Catherine’s house, at its demure, almost reticent address west of Madison Avenue, was furnished modestly, for comfort rather than display. To maintain it required but one in service: Delia from County Cork, who had been with Mrs. Howe since 1896. Sometimes, when Mum entertained, Delia brought Rose, her sister, to assist, but it was never more than once a week, there were never more than eight at table, and the dishes were simple: consommé, poached fish, an apple tart. Catherine, in her choice of guests, did not favor those who were “interesting,” who would “make an impression.” She set her store in the even temperament, the conversational style that seldom surprised. After the meal there might be lotto or whist (but never charades) or someone might play the piano, Strauss, for example, perhaps Victor Herbert, and by ten o’clock at the latest, one had retired.

Olivia grew restless. Where were the young men, her introductions?

“It doesn’t pay to be eager,” Aunt Catherine admonished her niece. “Don’t rush.”

“Well, certainly, I wouldn’t want to reflect ill on you.”

Olivia sulked. She had expected something else. Restriction went with Buffalo, where the chophouses and oyster saloons were exclusively for men, where a woman with a cigarette disturbed the peace. But if New York society meant more dreary constraint—rules of speech and dress and deportment—then what difference did it make to have come?

SHE
wrote in her diary: “I cannot please everyone, and so I shall please no one.” Then she let the nib rest on the paper so it would make a bloom of ink. Delia brought supper on a tray, macaroni in broth and an unbuttered roll.

“I made it so mild,” she explained, “as you’re still feeling poorly.”

“I’ll go to bed presently, Delia. I shan’t need you further.”

With the precision of some kind of woodcraft, Olivia shredded the roll, watched the shreds swell with broth and turn gray. Then she covered the tray with the blue linen towel and placed it outside the door.

She wrote: “Were I to die tomorrow, there would hardly be a dozen words to say about my life. This might be sad, but not, I think, so terrible.”

AUNT
Catherine agreed that there was no breach of good conduct in attending unescorted the Cooper Union summer lecture series, held on Wednesday and Friday afternoons. Ladies of refinement gathered in the hall to learn, or at least to hear, about formal gardens or Chinese porcelain or the migration of butterflies, and Olivia could come to no harm in their covey. Only now she was faced with her artless inabilities, her deficient taste. Buffalo, of course, had ill served her formation, that railhead city with its beer-pail taverns and bargemen’s dance halls, its mills and waterworks and foundries, its pride in noise, raw power, machinery. Should she tell those fine ladies she saw twice a week that the Indian name of Lake Erie meant “Walk-in-the-Water”? That once, at the Pan-American Exposition, she had seen Elena Granelli sing an aria from
La Traviata
? Well, it was better to say nothing at all. It was better not to be quaint.