Centuries of June (23 page)

“Who?”

“Eleventh-grade literature class. My teacher.”

“Mrs. Stottlemeyer. Funny what we remember.”

“So
are
you?”

“Beckett?” He raised his bushy eyebrows. “I am afraid Beckett is dead. Some time ago.”

“Beckett’s ghost, then?”

“Did you not pinch yourself a while back there and conclude the evidence of your current corporeality exists? Don’t you trust your own
senses? And if I were mere ectoplasm, what does that make those young beauties over yonder? I can assure you, Sonny, they are as real as you or me.” With a flutter of fingers, he waved to the women.

“If you are not a ghost and not my father and not the Irish playwright Beckett, then who are you?”

“You attempt to answer a positive but avert to the negative. All in good time, bucko. First, there are several more women in your bed—”

“And that’s another thing,” I said. “Why are they here? What are they implying with their stories? That somehow I am to blame?”

The old man laid a fatherly hand upon my shoulder. “You are overwrought, my boy, and yet as I’ve said—as you’ve said—there are more women in the bed from whom we haven’t yet heard.”

The very thought of those other creatures nearly drove me to tears.

“Now, now,” he said. “Take your mind off your woes. You are an architect of some sort, aren’t you? A builder? Why don’t you patch the hole in the ceiling?”

A frying-pan-sized hole provided a portal into the attic. All kinds of junk had been stored up there over the years. Anything was liable to come spilling through the opening. He had a point. Given the chore, I felt a deep sense of relief settle in my chest. I had a job to do.

“Right, so. Off you go.”

“Thanks—”

“Would it make you feel any better to give me a name? Call me Beckett or what-you-will?”

“Okay then, Beckett. I’ll be up in the attic, fixing a hole. To stop my mind from wondering.”

“Very cute. And I’ll mind the four ladies. Now there’s a poker hand for you. Four queens and a knave.” As we passed, Beckett patted me once on the back, and it felt good to be getting somewhere finally.

To reach the attic, one must pull on a string that releases the door and a set of stairs that descends nearly to the floor. An ingenious
contraption from another era of home engineering, but with two important drawbacks: one must use a stepladder or chair in order to reach the string, and one must step off the ladder before pulling the string for the attic steps come down quickly and without warning. I grabbed a chair from my brother’s room, remembering how he wrapped his feet around the chair’s legs as he worked at his desk, but forgetting the sliding stairs, which hit me square in the chest and knocked me on my keister and sent the chair clattering across the hall. I expected someone to come rushing to my aid, but there was no reaction other than a muffled “Keep it down!” from Beckett behind the bathroom door, doing God-knows-what with the four women. I picked myself up and climbed the stairs to the attic.

There was a light waiting for me that threw shadows but brightened all but the corners of the eaves, and the musty room smelled faintly of fried steak and hot metal. A persistent hum increased in volume whenever I stood still. Hunting for the source of that white noise would have taken all night and easily obsessed me, but fortunately, I thought more about my predilection for obsessive behavior rather than the noise itself and hit a plateau of absurd self-reflection where I could quit thinking altogether. Amid the clutter, some clues existed that would help me piece together a rational explanation for how I ended up this way, a long-forgotten artifact that would illuminate the recesses of my mind, but my immediate purpose was to find a patch for the hole in the floor. Against the far wall rested a framed lithograph, a gift from a girlfriend—Sita is her name, I am pleased to remember. We bought it on a date to a Gustav Klimt retrospective at the National Gallery of Art. The poster was just large enough to cover the hole, but as I slid it across the opening, I chanced to spy on the bathroom below. It was empty. There was nobody inside. No Marie, no Alice, no Jane, no Dolly, and old man Beckett had disappeared. Nothing to be done. I poked my head through the opening and scanned all four corners and over the shower curtain.
Even the baby was gone. For the first time since falling, I felt utterly bereft. Sometimes there is nothing more terrifying than being alone in your own house. I checked my watch and then carefully positioned the poster to cover the hole. No light shone from below. If possible, I was even more alone with my thoughts.

I hurried to the staircase and backed down the steps, hopping from the final one, and paused at my bedroom door to determine whether the sleeping beauties had also deserted me. The tangle of limbs and bodies had diminished to just four sets. Three of the women opened their eyes in the sudden light, and the fourth still showed her back, not having moved all night. I quickly retreated in hope that they would all go back to sleep. My fingers wrapped around the cold doorknob brought back memories of Christmas mornings when my brother and I would sneak out of bed, check if my parents were asleep behind their closed door, and then tiptoe out of their room, carefully turn the knob so that it would not so much as click, and then tramp down into the living room, turn on the strings of shiny lights on the tree, and stare at our toys and presents till well past dawn. In the stillness of those moments filled with hope and anticipation and goodwill, my brother and I were never closer. We waited with patient excitement for Mr. and Mrs. Godot to arrive, sleepy-headed, but caught, too, by the surprise of their own deep and holy joy. So many years later, the doorknob in my hand brought them back, if only in the instant before I let go.

The hallway rugs muffled the sound of my bare feet, and I was able to sneak as quietly as smoke to the bathroom door and press my ear against the surface. A woman’s laughter rose and trailed off, and a low voice said something funny that made all the women howl. I could not decipher their actual words, so instead I began alternately to worry that they were speaking about me and to regret missing out on all of the merriment. I knocked twice and entered.

Caught in the middle of their party, they all turned to face me. Marie stood on the edge of the bathtub, towering over the others arranged in front of her as though an audience to an impromptu demonstration. She seemed to have just stopped shimmying, so I deduced she had been performing the voodoo dance. I launched my question full force: “Where were you?”

“We have been here,” Beckett said, “waiting for you. The question is: where were you?”

“You know very well I went to the attic to fix the hole. I found an old poster from Sita that covered the whole thing—”

“The hole thing?”

“No, the whole. Whole, with a
W.
”

“The hole in the whole?”

“When I looked through the opening, there you weren’t. Not where you were supposed to be. Nobody at all in the bathroom.”

Dolly interrupted. “Perhaps we stepped out.”

“To powder our noses,” said Jane.

“Or maybe,” Alice suggested, “you went down the wrong hole.”

Marie took the conversational baton. “Right, like a fifth dimension.”

“You have a point,” the old man agreed. “If there can be a crack in time, why not a hole to some other space?”

From a corner, the baby gurgled, investigating his fingers with the inside of his mouth. He was sitting up by himself, straight as you please, as if he had aged in the fifteen-minute intermission.

“But,” I protested, “I was only gone long enough to cover the hole …” I looked up to verify, expecting to see the vivid colors of Klimt framed by a skillet-shaped hole, but there was no painting and no opening, only the smooth white plaster and the small ceiling fan humming politely in the background. In the sink, no crayfish shells. No ruined tiles on the floor. The room had healed itself, and the only difference
from usual, aside from the small mob crowding close, was the weapons stacked in the corner—the cast-iron pan, the broom, the rusty harpoon, and the bear-faced war club. I scratched the top of my head.

“You did a right good job,” Beckett said. “If there ever was a hole, you can’t tell by looking at it.”

Nothing to be said. His compliment had a disingenuous air.

“But there is another hole, a real hole. You have left us on the precipice high above the canyon with the girls in their cancan frocks gathered about the pianoforte.” Perhaps he could hear the wheels spin in my cranium, for he added: “Begin again if you must. Come home on a June afternoon to find an orgy of chrome and rubber on the front lawn. Seven ladies’ bicycles, and just who are these lascivious two-wheelers? And what’s that melody but the house itself singing Pagliacci—”

“Strauss,” I corrected. “A woman singing the laughing song from
Die Fledermaus
in a makeshift music chamber set up in my brother’s room. Odd, though, but it was my brother, not me, who cared for the classics.”

“Right, so,” he said and winked. There was that third eye tattooed on the lid, and the others had the same design except for Marie, whose second sight was in her hands. Each palm bore a cartoon eye, though the words on her skin had vanished.

“They were dressed in fishnet stockings and petticoats, like they just stepped out of the Old West.”

“Dusty and busty,” the old man said. From the bathtub, two short whoops of endorsement. I thought I heard a horse nicker on the staircase.

“Only more refined,” I said. “A cross between elegance and decadence.”

Marie cleared her throat. “The virgin and the whore.”

I ignored her editorial. “When the mezzo finished her song and the last note of the piano sounded, the rest of the women clapped politely,
and one or two began to wave silk hand fans, for though only June, summertime had come to town, and the room was close and moist. I should have thought to turn on the air conditioner, but my principle is to wait till the official first day of summer.”

“Ah, the solstice,” Beckett said. “The longest day of the year. Though this night rivals it, or perhaps only seems eternal. When we are waiting, every moment is pregnant. Are you sure you have no cigarettes?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Never start. They’re the devil to give up. And a thousand pardons for my interruption. We left the showgirls perspiring in the parlor.”

“That’s when they first took notice of me. The piano player stood and tapped the vocalist on her shoulder, and she motioned for the rest to stand. The music lingered in the chamber. A collective jolt of recognition ran through the group. As I may have said, they were perfect strangers to me, though young and beautiful, of all shapes and sizes pleasing to the eye. A more attractive group of women would be hard to imagine. Yet for all their novelty, they behaved in ways traditional and comforting. I had heard that pianist before and recalled her elegant phrasing. The singer, too, brought back the buried memory of the same song in another place and time, but more than the aural echoes, for the music caused deep emotions to come gasping to the surface. A lot like a love that had once been deliberately forgotten. While I did not know them, they knew me and had been waiting for my arrival, and now that I had come, they rushed forward with open arms, each racing the others to be first to embrace and kiss me.”

“Kiss you, is it?” Beckett asked. “I find that difficult to accept under the circumstances.”

My pride was hurt, but I showed nothing.

Beckett stepped forward and whispered confidentially, “You know I have always been on your side, right? A word of advice: do not turn
around, but reach back with the bottom of your foot and shut the door behind you.”

I did as instructed, and as the door slammed into the jamb, something slammed into the door. The wood splintered with a wrenching crack as a sharp metal point poked through. The weapon that had just avoided my head looked like a grappling instrument of the kind issued to mountain climbers, only larger. “A gold miner’s pick,” Beckett said, as though reading my mind.

A stream of blue curses flooded the hallway, and the swearing woman on the other side of the door clasped the handle and tugged mightily to free the pick and wield it again. Two clomps preceded a renewed effort, and the old man suggested with a hand signal that I should open the door to see what was on the other side. Fastened like a pit bull, a rather short but wiry young woman tugged at the pick, her bare feet propped against the door so that when it swung into the bathroom, she swung with it. Her blue crinoline rode up along her thighs, and her face flushed red beneath her dark brown hair each time she re-exerted herself. Like Merlin’s sword in the stone, the point of the axe lodged firmly in the wood, and try as she might, she could not budge the lethal tool. The more she struggled, the worse her temper grew, till she was little more than clenched teeth and unspent fury, a torrent of obscenities gushing from her delicate mouth in a most shocking display.

“Young lady,” Beckett entreated, “you will never succeed by ignoring elementary physics.”

She bundled her muscles and hunched her shoulders and strained again, to no avail. At the moment of surrender, her whole body slackened. One cold hard look at the old man gave way to resignation and abject hopelessness. For a brief second, I felt sorry for her and wished she had reached her goal, despite its dire consequences for me. In a final gesture of defeat, she let go the handle and dropped to the floor on her bum. Bending gently to her, the old man helped her to stand and held
her by the elbow as she fussed with the waist of her dress and brushed the lint and wrinkles. A gentleman always, he escorted her farther into the room to a place among the other females, and with a slight bow, let go of her with a signal of one finger that she was to behave. And then, stepping up to the pickaxe, he pushed the handle, rather than pulling as she had, and once the point was thus free, he eased it from the wood as deftly as lifting a splinter from a little boy’s palm. He hid the pick behind his back, and the girl in blue crossed her arms and pouted.