Fever (16 page)

Every night Tonio woke us with his moans and cries, and more than once I woke to find him standing in my room, sometimes at the foot of my bed, sometimes beside me or again, facing one of the half-walls. I learned to say, “Tonio, you’re in my room, go to bed,” and he would obey, although at first I was terribly frightened and shrieked and woke my cousins who were angry with me, saying things like, “Oh, it’s only Tonio for god sake, what’s the matter with you,” so that I learned to suppress my fear and to respond to him as they did, matter-of-factly.

Sometimes Antonio had fits. Or what my cousins called fits, although he didn’t roll up his eyes, foam at the mouth and thrash about on the floor as I’d been told epileptics did. We would be sitting at the table eating or lying on our stomachs watching television and suddenly Tonio’s eyes would widen, his mouth would fall open and then stretch into a terrible, mirthless grin and he would scramble backwards making gasping noises and my uncle would have to catch him and hold him before he ran away or started to scream and break things. Sometimes he would be alone in another part of the house when it would start and we would all run to him and block his path so that my uncle could catch him. Then he would take Tonio away into his bedroom and what he did after that I never knew, but it always quieted Tonio and we wouldn’t hear anymore from him for hours.

When this happened, my aunt was the only one who didn’t help. She never rushed to him or tried to hold him or spoke to him. She watched him, her body rigid and her hands clenched, her dark eyes brilliant with light, but hard somehow, and if it got
really bad, she would close her eyes and put her fists over her ears, her face contorted, as if she couldn’t bear it, simply couldn’t bear it.

Tonio never talked much to anybody. His sisters would speak to him in a gentle, jocular way: “Move over, old Tonio,” they’d say if he was in their way, or, “Hey, old Tonio, that was some dream you had last night,” or, “Tonio, Tonio,” half-sung, “How’s your eyes and earlobes today,” which made no sense to me, but apparently alluded to something that he had said when he was a child. He was the only one in the family who was treated with tenderness. I even saw my aunt sitting in her chair in the living room once with Tonio seated on the floor in front of her and she was brushing his hair back with the palms of her hands, gently, absent-mindedly, while he sat before her, his eyes closed, mute, as content as an animal being stroked.

My uncle was a writer. He wrote long magazine articles about politics, or history, or discussions about society and culture, and he was always working on a book. He was away a lot too, gone for months at a time during the winter, my cousins said, researching articles, doing interviews, studying cultures. He had light brown hair which Tonio had inherited, that he brushed straight back from his high forehead, and he wore neat, gold-framed glasses. Unlike my father, who was tall and spare, he was a stocky man, and his skin was scarred and pebbled, probably by adolescent acne, although I never guessed that when I was young. I thought his scarred skin beautiful. It too, spoke to me of mystery and of probable suffering, the existence of which was confirmed for me by his silence and his way of looking, with an expression filled with pain, right through you.

I was in love with him. I’m not talking about the kind of love a child feels for an adult who treats her well. My uncle didn’t pay any attention to me, he rarely even spoke to me. But I loved him,
I saw him and my little girl’s legs went soft with love. It was perhaps bizarre, but it was real, it was the same feeling I have had since for men who became my lovers after I was grown, and it was at its worst when I was ten and eleven, though I never really stopped loving him.

The summer I was ten I kissed him. He was sitting across the room from me reading a book, there was no one else about, and I stood in the doorway for a moment watching him, then walked quietly across the room and kissed him gently on his forehead.

He didn’t move, only blinked twice, didn’t raise his eyes from his book. I turned and went out of the room as quietly as I had entered it. I don’t know what I expected from him; I wasn’t disappointed in his lack of reaction and I knew nothing conscious about adult love and what it led to, why I kissed him I don’t know, other than that I loved him so much I couldn’t stop myself.

In that household I survived by keeping quiet. If the adults were around, and sometimes this applied to Morgan too, I spoke only when spoken to, and I was careful to keep out of my aunt’s way, to set the table if there was to be a meal and when we finally did eat, to stay after and clear the table, and if somebody was doing the dishes, to help. I had been trained to silence by my mother, who liked to say that children should be seen and not heard, but at home it wasn’t hard to be quiet because there was never much I wanted to know about. At my aunt and uncle’s it was a harder task, I was full of questions yet when I walked in their door, I buttoned my lip, as my mother said I should. I was always taking deep breaths and letting them out slowly till my aunt once snapped at me, “For god sake, Charlotte, have you got asthma?” But it was only that I wanted to speak, had opened my mouth and taken a breath and then, remembering the precariousness of my position in her house, had shut it quickly, then let the air out slowly to cover up that I had been going to speak.

My aunt had to be avoided, but at least she allowed you to avoid her, not like my mother who hung just a step behind me always, keeping a constant watch on me, making sure I lived exactly as she wanted me to. Yet, strangely, in the summer she would wash her hands of me, I was sent off to do whatever I would.

One day my aunt arrived home from one of her long afternoons in the city and said, to nobody in particular, but as it happened we were all there, “Dorcas is coming to visit.” To be told in advance that someone was coming to visit was in itself so unusual that I had no trouble recognizing this as important. My cousins were silent; there were none of their usual groans or screams of laughter or immediate, violent quarrels. Antonio spoke finally.

“I’m afraid,” he said. “Tell her not to come.”

“Why, Tonio,” my uncle said mildly to him, “she wants to see you.” But Tonio only shook his head violently and then covered his face with his hands. He did look frightened, haunted even, or perhaps it was only that he had one of his terrible headaches. My aunt was smiling to herself and sat down on the sofa, kicking off her high-heeled shoes that she only put on to go into the city.

“She’s my cousin,” she said. “My only cousin.” I realized she was speaking to me. “I was raised with her,” she said, and there was in her tone a brooding resonance.

“You have lots of cousins,” my uncle said, but he didn’t even look at her, “and you were hardly raised with her.” Morgan said to me, loudly, “Spirits talk to Dorcas.” I stared at her, unable to tell if this was a joke or not, and wondering why people were suddenly speaking to me.

“Where’s she coming from?” Rhonda asked.

“She’s been working in Italy,” my aunt said. “How the hell do I know where she’s coming from?” I was dying to ask what
Dorcas did, why she was coming to visit, how she was going to get here, but managed, with one gulp of air, to suppress my questions. “You’ll have to sleep on the couch in the sitting room,” my aunt said to me.

“Sure,” I said, quickly, brightly.

It was a tiny room on the main floor overlooking the backyard where a garden would have been if there had been anybody to look after one. The room was never used, when we were in we spent our evenings sprawled in the living room where the television set was. The yard the sitting room overlooked was overgrown with wild grasses which had invaded even what must once have been elaborate flowerbeds. There was shrubbery too, lilacs, honeysuckles, spirea, rosebushes and neglected plum and apple trees. With all the shrubbery and the fact that nobody ever picked the fruit from the fruit trees, the backyard was always full of birds which, in the early mornings were so noisy that sleep in that room would have been near to impossible. We didn’t hear their racket in the basement, but my aunt was always complaining about it.

I suppose that back sitting room with the big window in it had been placed there by the builder of the house so he could sit and enjoy his garden. There was once a view too, of the land sloping away to the river a mile or so back from the edge of the property, but the shrubbery had grown up so tall and bushy that now the view was hidden.

At supper that night Aunt Jacqueline remarked that Dorcas had never married, looking at my uncle as she said it. “She has all kinds of lovers, though,” directed at nobody in particular. “She even had a child by one of them. I forget which one.”

“Dick, the farmer,” Morgan said grumpily and threw down her fork. “The poor kid.” I never saw anybody as angry as
Morgan. It was a surprise to me to hear her say she felt sorry for the child, since Morgan never felt sorry for anybody, except maybe Tonio.

“She raised her,” Aunt Jacqueline said. “What was her name?”

“Sybil,” Morgan said, slamming down her water glass so that some of the water sloshed out onto the table. “Sybil. And she didn’t raise her. Dick did.”

“Once Dorcas knew Sybil was going on a boating trip with Dick,” Rhonda said, her voice light and excited, “and Dorcas dreamt there was a storm and the boat tipped over and Sybil and a bunch of people fell out and drowned.” She paused for effect. “Dorcas is an actress,” she said, looking at me with such intensity that I lowered my eyes. “So she was in a play in London, but when she woke up and remembered her dream, she jumped on a train, just like that, and went up to where Dick and Sybil lived and stopped them from going. And you know what?” I said nothing. “The boat they were supposed to be on did tip in a big storm and a bunch of people on it did drown.” I stared at her. “Close your mouth,” she said.

My aunt made a few concessions for her cousin’s visit. She tidied the living room and brought home a bouquet of late summer flowers, daisies, zinnias, tiger lilies, from a florist in the city the afternoon the cousin was to arrive. And that evening when Dorcas was due in from town, my uncle having gone to get her, my aunt went upstairs and came down wearing a long purple robe, a sort of caftan, though I didn’t know the word then, made of rough cotton with designs around the hem. It emphasized her height and the wide silver bracelets and heavy silver earrings she wore I had not seen before. She was dark-haired, with dark, almost black eyes, and an olive complexion. I had heard her claim in an amused way more than once, as if she were testing to see if you would believe her, that she had gypsy
blood. My cousins said she was half-French and half-Italian, and my father, that his half-brother had met her in Paris where he had gone to spend a year after he finished university. She had run away from the house her mother had put her in in England and would have starved in Paris if he hadn’t found her, fed her, and eventually married her.

Though she was not beautiful, tonight she looked regal and so striking I found I couldn’t take my eyes off her, yet somehow at the same time, she looked older, almost haggard. It might have been that the heavy purple colour didn’t suit her, but I don’t think so. Looking back, I remember that she moved more quickly than I had seen her move before and that she seemed tightly strung and yet quite sad. Thinking back, I’m tempted to say that the gown was funereal, but I might be investing the memory with something that wasn’t there when all this actually happened.

It was growing dark outside, it was late August, I would leave in ten days to return to school and to my home two hundred miles away. The evening was cool with crickets chirping outside the open windows. Rhonda had fallen asleep on the floor beside me. I had wakened the night before when a window had creaked, meaning that one of my cousins was coming in from or going out to some nocturnal adventure. I usually roused myself enough to find out who it was and if I could, what it was about. Last night it had been Rhonda crawling out her window, pulling her bedspread behind her. I had crawled up onto the chest of drawers in my room to watch and to see what she would do with the bedspread, which had come from Italy and was a lovely blue-green colour with a pattern woven into it of flowers, crisscrossed with shiny threads that caught the light and glittered.

When she was outside, standing in the shin-deep wild grass under the moon, she swathed herself in it, twisting it around and around herself till she was wrapped like a mummy in it. She
began to turn, slowly at first, unwinding the cloth until she could move her feet and legs freely, then she began to spin and to leap and when she fell, she rolled on the grass till the bedspread caught on a low branch and pulled away from her. When that happened, she scrunched herself up into a little ball and stayed that way, as if she were waiting for her dizziness to pass before she rose again and stretched as high as she could on her tiptoes, reaching with fingertips for the moon.

I had seen it all before, or versions of it, but I still couldn’t stop myself from watching her, it was all so frightening and bizarre and beautiful and forbidden.

I realize now, when I think about it, that my mother must have known how it was in my cousins’ house, and my father too. Why did they never stop me from coming? I always had the feeling that my mother wanted to punish me for some crime I had unwittingly committed, an awful crime, but one that I knew nothing about, and that maybe her letting me come summer after summer to my cousins was supposed to be some kind of punishment for whatever it was I had done.

And it
was
a punishment, you know. In a way it was, for it was a frightening household and my aunt was a wild and cruel woman, quite crazy, as my mother said she was, and all my mother’s drastic predictions about my cousins’ fate came true. When I came home from there each fall I had nightmares, I had a hard time adjusting to our scheduled, colourless lives, my appetite was poor, and I would catch my mother looking at me when she thought I hadn’t seen her, with her lips pressed together tightly as if to say, that will teach her. Though what it was supposed to teach me, I never knew, just as I never knew what my crime was, and each summer I asked, I begged to be allowed to go back again, and even worse, she always let me.