Honeydew: Stories (16 page)

The rains continued. Mushrooms appeared overnight on lawns. O-Kay fed some of them to the gerbils. “Enjoy your sweet life while you can,” she told them. “Because someday soon…”

“Shut your hole,” Miss Valentine said, and she hit O-Kay on the side of the head with her pocketbook. Miss Valentine was immediately barred for twenty-four hours by the staff. A volunteer put her arm around O-Kay. O-Kay ducked under the arm, embraced Pam, and began to shake uncontrollably. Pam suggested that O-Kay lie down. The volunteer burst into tears. Donna suggested that
she
lie down. The gerbils passed out, but they woke up half an hour later with no apparent ill effects.

Still the rains came. Storefronts gleamed coldly in the brief intervals of pale sunlight. The alley behind the church bubbled with mud, and a black lake formed in front of the stairs leading to the Ladle’s door.

Donna too would soon be awash. Her sac of amniotic fluid was just holding. On the Wednesday of the second week in December she felt a mild wrench. She had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon. Leaving, she recklessly told a little clutch of women that the baby, male, would be theirs to name.

“Oh, Jesus, Donna,” groaned Pam, but her voice was drowned out by suggestions: Achille, Nelson, Steve…

The obstetrician looked pleased during the examination. “Any day,” she said.

Donna returned to the Ladle. The Cuisinart had broken again; maybe she could fix it before the baby came. And O-Kay’s car had sprung some new leaks. She’d speak to O-Kay about spending a night or two in a shelter.

In the alley Donna paused dreamily before the big puddle. The rain had stopped, probably only briefly, just to tease them. The sky was a deepening mauve. The puddle was the color of garnets. Beyond this jeweled lake the three stone steps descended damply to the Ladle’s door, which was slightly ajar, as if by inadvertence. But that heavy door couldn’t have been left ajar accidentally. Donna squinted. A brick made of Legos had been inserted between the door and its jamb. She walked around the puddle to the nearest ground-level window and lowered herself into its well, her sneakered feet sinking into decaying leaves. She peered into the dining room.

O-Kay and Miss Valentine and Mimi sat side by side at one of the long tables. On the back of each chair was draped a coat—O-Kay’s schoolgirl parka; Miss Valentine’s black sateen trench coat, plucked from donations one lucky day; Mimi’s suede garment, the fur hat resting on its shoulder. The cage of gerbils had been removed from the platform and now occupied most of the center of the table.

For a while all three gazed at the cage. Then Mimi lifted its gate. The gerbils ran out. Mimi lowered the gate.

From the window well Donna moaned aloud. The creatures would head right for the pantry. They’d get into the rice or the cornmeal. She’d have to call the exterminator again, and throw out half the dry produce.

But the animals surprised her. They raced not for the kitchen but for the hall leading to the back door. She lost sight of them. She stood up in the well in time to see them leaping over the Lego brick. Pell-mell, with all the willfulness of the crazed, they ran up the cement stairs and into the lake. There they drowned.

Donna sat down again. Mimi was replacing the cage on its platform. O-Kay and Miss Valentine were putting on their outerwear. O-Kay wasn’t shuddering and Miss Valentine’s mouth was closed. Even on medication they had never looked so placid. Then the two disappeared from Donna’s view, like the gerbils. She transferred her gaze to the door and saw Miss Valentine pushing it open. Miss Valentine and O-Kay climbed the stairs. They skirted the puddle and companionably got into O-Kay’s car and drove away.

Mimi, wearing coat and hat, stooped to pick up the Lego brick. She put it into her pocket and pushed the door open and climbed the steps while the door closed behind her, locking itself. She bent over the puddle where the drowned animals eddied. She retrieved them with her right hand, which was protected by a surgical glove. She lifted the lid of the nearby dumpster with her ungloved hand. She tossed in the corpses and lowered the lid.

“What about that empty cage?” Donna called from the well.

“Steve will deliver a new pair of gerbils tomorrow,” Mimi said. She peeled off her glove and raised the dumpster lid again. The glove arced palely into the trash. She walked to the window well. “If you stay there any longer, your baby will be born with the sniffles,” she predicted.

Donna extended her hand and Mimi took it and helped Donna climb out of the well. They stood for a moment, hand grasping hand, like friends who have known each other long but never intimately and who now must say good-bye.

“I look forward to volunteering under your supervision,” Donna made herself say. She discovered that once said it sounded true and perhaps even was true. “That business with the beasties—an inventive cure for madness, transferring the demons. Though of course you need animals always at the ready…” She trailed off.

“We’ll have them,” Mimi said.

I
t took my aunt Toby twenty years to profit enough from fictohistoriographia to give up teaching, to release the two of us from New York, to realize her dream of buying a house on Lake Piscataqua in New England. But at last, the year the century turned, we could afford the very house she had in mind. We packed up the little Eighth Street apartment—furniture and a few treasures: the Turkish rug, the Dutch menorah. Toby held what you might call an exit interview. The interviewer was a young reporter from a literary rag. I sat in.

“Fast and loose? I?” Toby repeated to him. “With men or women?”

“With data. It’s been suggested. I heard,” said the flustered fellow.

“No. Not. Not on your backside,” Aunt Toby said. “Never have I claimed something to be true that I knew was not true—or claimed something to be true that was discovered to be false.”

“Fabrications, they say…”

“Oh, fabrications. Literally, yes. I make things up out of whole cloth—that’s
to
fabricate
definitions one and two. One: ‘to make; create.’ Two: ‘to construct by combining or assembling diverse parts, as in to fabricate small boats.’ However, three: ‘to concoct in order to deceive, as in to fabricate an excuse’—I don’t do that, darling.” He blushed. “I concoct,” she continued, “but only to illuminate! How could I possibly write a history of, say, the Slavic cleverness employed in the Battle of Thessalonica without adding some tricks of my own divining?”

The Battle of Thessalonica left traces of itself in old histories. All the rest—the winged mercenaries, their pinions fabricated from cloth, the boy spy Dimitry and his pal the giant Vladimir, one on the other’s shoulders—is Toby’s doing, imagined by her dedicated intellect, unprovable, also undisprovable. The art of fictohistoriographia has been perfected by her, and without it the world would be a poorer place. So always said Mr. Franz Szatmar, her steady admirer. Franz Szatmar of the deep eyes, the major nose, the transparent hair fluttering on either side of his narrow forehead.

I always called him Uncle Franz, though his poor frail wife I addressed as Madame Szatmar.

“Lance, your aunt is generosity itself,” Madame Szatmar once declared, addressing me while Toby strode from our Village living room into the kitchen to brew a deep blue tea that might just prolong the old lady’s sad, barren life. “Discretion too. She keeps secrets as if her tongue has been torn out.”

I am Lancelot. Toby inherited me from her brother and sister-in-law, my parents—dead tragically early. I have no memory of them. I have been Toby’s adoptee and later her assistant during the two decades in which her books, never claiming to be factual history, claiming only to be possibly true, found favor among young people, though they never threatened to outchart the witchy-wizard series.

Toby’s version of history depends on the principle of parsimony. That is: her accounts are the most economical way of explaining what cannot be explained in a briefer way. The rout at Thessalonica required subterfuge and optical illusion. As for the Alchemist of Rotterdam, his existence is postulated by the metaphoric pricking of the infamous tulip bubble. We know now that the prized tulips were made multicolored by a virus. The virus inducer is Toby’s, a scientist who understood that invading organisms could work their will within a plant. He infected bulb after bulb, using a rudimentary syringe. Gorgeous, those tulips were. The second generation died.

“Produce evidence of the existence of that protobiochemist,” said some rigid historian.

But,
wrote Toby’s most admiring reviewer,
she does not fill up her books with data and a bogus sense of the past. It is her genius to be able to imagine time and place and person so fully that they are as good as real—or better. History as diversion.

We bought the cottage on Lake Piscataqua with the continuing royalties from
The Spy of Thessalonica
and
The Alchemist of Rotterdam,
and with the honoraria from Toby’s appearances on panels and platforms. A devoted suitor brilliantly invested the money.

Toby was by now sixty—I was twenty. She was tall as a young tree, thin as a spear. Her hair that had once been blond, my hair that had once been blond, both had darkened to the brass of an ancient Greek drachma. She wore pants and shirts of a similar shade. Her chin was cleft, like mine. Her eyes were pewter. (Mine, certain young women told me, were dark chocolate.) Her tales unfurled behind a brow broad as a garden spade. (My own brow is narrow, like a dibble.)

At Piscataqua we repaired the little stone house and whitewashed its inside, and in the middle of the one room (the bedrooms were lofts, a minimal kitchen occupied a corner) we spread the Turkish rug that had inspired
Who Set Fire to Smyrna?
In that tale the incendiarism was caused by Turks dressed as Armenians and Armenians dressed as Turks. No one could tell friend from foe, according to the twelve-year-old Jewish narrator who observed the entire conflagration, running and hiding, running and hiding, scribbling all the time…

Behind the stone house we staked out a plot for a vegetable garden and began digging the foundation for a gazebo—Toby would write her next work there, whatever it was. We became regulars at the post office—Toby’s letters to the Szatmars, along with photographs of me, went out twice weekly. We made friends with fishermen. Every morning at four they came with their glistening catches to the docks at the sea, ten miles away from us.

Our smooth lake in sunlight resembled Toby’s tea of immortality. Under the moon, ruffled, the lake looked like the carbon paper that lay crumpled in our wastebaskets. Toby disdained computers and word processors, typed her work on an old Hermes. Carbons for copies she had always purchased in the secondhand typewriter store on the third floor of an East Side building, a store right next to Uncle Franz’s shop. Uncle Franz was a numismatician, dealing in history himself. But he
was
history himself, Toby mentioned more than once; he embodied a grim horror—a schoolboy who, alone among everyone he knew, was not murdered. Toby’s eyes grew dark, her jaw stiffened when she referred to this.

“Will you put Uncle Franz into a book someday, his miraculous escape? It’s time you told
me
about it, anyway.”

A day passed before she responded. Then: “Here is how Franz escaped. A large group of Jews including his family had been marched from their small city to a village near a forest some miles from Budapest. They were crammed into a three-story wooden structure. They knew they would be moved any day to a cruel and permanent place. Franz and his family were on the third floor. Snow covered the hard earth. The building was unguarded.

“‘Jump from the window,’ his mother hissed that first night.

“‘Mama…’

“‘Jump.’

“‘Mama.’

“She opened the window and picked him up—he was a slight twelve-year-old—and held him to her massive chest. Then her iron hands grasped him under the armpits. She thrust him through the window toward the icy night, and held him in the air like a blanket to be shaken. He had stopped saying ‘Mama.’ She held him and held him and held him. Then all at once she bent double over the sill and released her child. He landed unharmed on snow, and stumbled into the woods, and kept going. He met others. They survived the war there, some of them: the ragged, the starving, the ill. If you put your ear to Franz’s chest you can still hear the rattle of an old lung disease.

“Could I offer that story to the world, Lance? What could I add to it that would not degrade it? Winged soldiers, Dutchmen poking needles into flowers, scamps on the docks of Smyrna—they are my material, history as diversion, the fellow said. They are my antidote to the unbearable past.” She added in a labored voice, “Franz was the only member of his entire family to survive, the only student from his school.”

“Franz and Madame…they met as refugees?”

“Yes.”

“They couldn’t have children together, Franz and Madame?”

“No.”

“Uncle Franz is the last of the Szatmar line.”

Silence. Then: “You could say so.”

We attended the annual business meeting of the lower valley historical society. “Piscataqua?” Toby inquired during the social hour that followed.

“An old name dating from the centuries when the area was populated and governed by its aboriginal inhabitants,” said Mr. Jennings, the chairman, bending his head toward the beautiful woman with the metallic hair. “It has been determined that the names of the lake and the river came from the Abenaki language, the word being a probable combination of a syllable meaning ‘branch’ and another meaning ‘a river with a strong current.’”

“How ancient is Abenaki?”

“Oh, it was spoken before Columbus.”

“Latin was spoken before the Babylonian captivity.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Nevertheless,” she repeated in her golden voice, “linguistic economy indicates that the river and the lake were named not by the Abenaki but by the Roman-Briton arrivistes.”

“My dear Ms. Bluestein,” he said, falling in love before my eyes—well, he wasn’t the first to do so—“Romans didn’t arrive on these shores until the nineteenth century, when they came in droves. Mostly shoemakers and fruit farmers.”

“My dear Mr. Jennings, you are talking about Italians, as you well know. The Roman-Britons came in 500 A.D.”

“How on earth—on sea, ha-ha—did they travel?”

“In Roman longships, descendants of Roman galleys, themselves descendants of Roman quinqueremes. The longships made it to shore and then crumbled.”

“Then there is no proof of their existence.”

“There is no proof of their nonexistence.”

Mr. Jennings produced a smitten smile. “What do you think they were like, these ships that sailed the sea before the era of sails?”

“Oh, they had sails. And oars, of course.”

“The last of the Romans left Britain in 410,” Mr. Jennings said. “They did not sail the Atlantic, then called Thalassa. They sailed only to the Continent and then made their way home on foot. According to popular belief, the first European to reach North America was Leif Eriksson. He landed on the coast of what is now Newfoundland in 980.”

“I respect popular belief,” Toby said. “It’s mostly guesswork, like my own endeavors. Mr. Jennings, there are things we know without knowing that we know them.”

“Yes, but…” He didn’t finish the sentence. Both he and I could tell there was no stopping her.

So she started her next book before the gazebo was begun. She wrote in her bedroom loft. The book’s hero was young Titus of the port of London.

For Titus in the shipyard, working with the oaken, the sea always beckoned. It beckoned with the crooked finger of death, for he had lost father, brothers, uncles, and a cousin to the foam. Some with his history might have fled inland and become a laborer on a farm, or made his home in a town, or joined an abbey. But water was Titus’s passion.

“How are you getting on?” asked Mr. Jennings, whose feet were planted on the Turkish rug. He had dropped in with a basket of zucchini; I was slicing the squash on the tiny counter.

“Getting on fine,” Toby called down.

Titus was in charge of the construction of the longboat. The Roman/British longboat, unremembered by historians, was graceful, narrow, light, with a shallow draft hull designed for speed and which allowed navigations in waters only one meter deep. The longboat was fitted with oars along the length of the vessel. It bore a rectangular sail on a single mast which was used to replace or aid the effort of the rowers, particularly during long journeys like the one planned now.

The next time he brought wine. “Full sails ahead,” Toby informed him.

They left London, Titus on the seventh oar—for though he was master and captain, there was no provision made for rank; everyone rowed. He was a short, muscular young man with a Saxon profile grafted onto a Roman head, and his hair was
dark…Months later, his battered ship sighted the coast of what would one day be called these United States.

“Would you like to give a talk at the library?” Mr. Jennings asked on his now daily visit.

“Love to.”

A coastline of cliffs and gorges and rocks presents an unwelcoming aspect. The newcomers rowed on. Romans were aware of premonition: the feeling that imminent disaster is hiding behind every cloud, every wave. They lived in a permanent state of anxiety. Titus feigned boldness, but he constantly fingered the good-luck coin his sweetheart had given him, which hung on his chest. Where on this earth would they land?

They landed in the estuary formed by the then unnamed river and the sea. Now called Piscataqua, of course.

“Would you read me some of your work?” said Mr. Jennings, looking loftward from the chair I’d provided.

“…Okay.

“‘After the brave beginning came the deaths by disease, by unknown poisons in plants, by animals; came wars with natives, peace with natives, children. Came hurricanes, surely sent by the God. Came the final disease, a mercilessly lengthy fever; and then came the collapse into itself and then into dust of everything remembered, everything that could be remembered, obliteration as complete as that of…’”

“Atlantis?” wondered Mr. Jennings. “Troy?”

“I am thinking of a Hungarian community in 1943.”

He was respectfully silent.

She continued…

“‘Titus had taken a wife, had become chief, as was his destiny. He burned his dead children one by one on rafts sent out to sea (the Vikings did not invent the Viking funeral, just added the dog at the feet of the deceased). He himself was slain by fever, and the few remaining Piscataquans, dying themselves, managed to bury him, not burn him. He became part of the dust of the encampment beside Lake Piscataqua.’”

Well, everybody knows about the publishing business today, perishing like the longboats. Toby’s usual editor had escaped into another line of work; the imprint which had sponsored the editor immersed itself in a larger company and that company into one larger. That conglomerate assigned to its greenest editor the new offering by an author from, as they saw it, the generation previous, though
Who Set Fire to Smyrna?
was still on the backlist.