Marianne, the Magus & the Manticore

DURING THE NIGHT, Marianne was awakened by a steady drum-ming of rain, a muffled tattoo as from a thousand drumsticks on the flat porch roof, a splash and gurgle from the rainspout at the corner of the house outside Mrs. Winesap's window, bubbling its music in vain to ears which did not hear. "I hear,"

whispered Marianne, speaking to the night, the rain, the comer of the living room she could see from her bed. When she lay just so, the blanket drawn across her lips, the pillow crunched into an exact shape, she could see the amber glow of a lamp in the living room left on to light one corner of the reupholstered couch, the sheen of the carefully carpentered shelves above it, the responsive glow of the refinished table below, all in a kindly shine and haze of belonging there. "Mine," said Marianne to the room. The lamplight fell on the first corner of the apartment to be fully finished, and she left the light on so that she could see it if she woke, a reminder of what was possible, a promise that all the rooms would be reclaimed from dust and dilapidation. Soon the kitchen would be finished. Two more weeks at the extra work she was doing for the library and she'd have enough money for the bright Mexican tiles she had set her heart upon.

"Mine," she said again, shutting her eyes firmly against the seductive glow. She had spent all Cloud-haired mama's jewelry on the house. The lower floor, more recently occupied and in a better state of repair, was rented out to Mrs. Winesap and Mr. Larken—whose relationship Marianne often speculated upon, varyingly, as open windows admitted sounds of argument or expostulation or as the walls transmitted the unmistakable rhythm of bedsprings—and the shimmy part was occupied by Marianne herself. "Not so slummy anymore," she hummed to herself in the darkness. "Not so damn slummy."

If she had been asked, she could not have said why it had been so important to have rooms of her own, rooms with softly glowing floorboards, rooms with carefully stripped woodwork painted a little darker than the walls, all in a mauvey, sunset glow, cool and spacious as a view of distant mountains, where there had been only cracked, stained plaster with bits of horse-hair protruding from it to make her think for weary months that she was trying to make a home in the corpse of some great, defunct animal. At the time she had not known about old plaster, old stairs, old walls, nothing about splintered woodwork and senile plumbing—either balky or incontinent. Something in the old house had nagged at her. "Buy me, lady. You're poor. I'm poor. Buy me, and let us live together."

Perhaps it had been the grace of the curved, beveled glass lights above the front door and the upstairs windows. Perhaps it had been the high ceilings, cracked though they were, and the gentle slope of the banisters leading to the second floor.

Perhaps the dim, cavelike mystery of the third floor beneath the flat roof. Perhaps even the arch of branches in the tangled shrubbery which spoke of old, flowering things needing to be rescued from formlessness and thistle. "Sleeping Beauty," she had said more than once. "A hundred years asleep." Though it hadn't been a hundred years. Ten or fifteen, perhaps, since someone had put a new roof on it. Forty, perhaps, since anyone had painted or repaired otherwise. Both times someone, anyone had run out of money, or time, or interest, and had given up to let it stand half vacant, occupied on the lower floor by a succession of recluses who had let the vines cover the windows and the shrubs grow into a thicket.

Perhaps it hadn't been anything unique in this particular house except that it stood only a block from the campus. From her windows she could look across the lawns of the university to the avenue, across acres of orderly green setting off rose-ash walls of Georgian brick, a place of quiet and haven among the hard streets. "Damn Harvey," she hummed to herself, moving toward sleep. This was part of the daily litany: at least a decade of "mine's" and five or six "damn Harvey's."

It shouldn't have been necessary to sell
all
Mama's jewelry.

Harvey could have advanced her some of her own inheritance—

even loaned it to her at interest. The past two years of niggling economies, the endless hours using the heat gun to strip paint until her ears rang with the howl of it and her hands turned numb.... "Carpal tunnel syndrome," the doctor had said. "Quit whatever your're doing with your hands and the swelling will stop. With what your papa left you, sweetie, what's this passion for doing your own carpentry?" Dr. Brown was an old friend—

well, an old acquaintance—who believed his white hair gave him license to call her sweetie. Maybe he called all the people he had once delivered as babies sweetie, no matter how old they got, but the familiar, almost contemptuous way he said it didn't tempt her to explain.

"Look," she could have said. "Papa Zahmani was pure, old-country macho to the tips of his toes. He didn't leave his little girl
anything.
He left it all in half-brother Harvey's hands until little Marianne either gets married—in which case presumably her sensible husband will take care of it for her—or gets to be thirty years old. I guess he figured if Marianne wasn't safely married by thirty, she never would be and it would be safe to let such a hardened spinster handle her own affairs. Until men, however, Harvey controls the lot—half-brother Harvey who treats every dime of Marianne's money as though it were a drop of his own blood."

Anyhow, why explain? It wouldn't change anything. The truth was simply that she hadn't the money to pay anyone to paint the walls or strip the woodwork or reupholster the furniture scrounged from secondhand shops. "Junk shops," she reminded herself. "Not so damn junky anymore...."

"You can live on what I allow you," Harvey had said, offhandedly. "If you get a cheap room somewhere. There's no earthly reason for you to go on to school. You are by no stretch of the imagination a serious student, and if you're determined to live the academic life—well, you'll have to work your way through. If you're determined to get a graduate degree—which will be useless to you—you'll spend most of your time on campus anyhow. You don't need a nice place to live. A little student squalor goes with the academic ambience."

Not that Harvey exposed himself to squalor of any kind.

His six-room Boston apartment took up half the upper floor of a mellow old brownstone on Beacon Hill, and an endless skein of nubile, saponaceous Melissas and Randis and Cheryls replaced one another at eager intervals as unpaid housekeepers, cooks, and laundresses for Harvey S. Zahmani, professor of Oriental languages and sometime ethnologist, who had had the use of all his own inheritance and all of Marianne's since he was twenty-six. Papa hadn't believed that women should take up space in universities unless they "had to work," a fate evidently worse than death and far, far worse than an unhappy marriage. "I do have to work," Marianne had said to Harvey more than once. "Do you really expect me to
live
on $500 a month? Come on, Harvey, that's poverty level minus and you know it."

"It's what Papa would have done." Bland, smiling, knowing she knew he didn't give a damn what Papa would have done, that he hadn't cared for Papa or Papa's opinions at all, giving her that twinge deep down in her stomach that said "no fury like a man scorned," and a kind of fear, too, that the man scorned would try something worse to get even.

"Hell, Harvey," she whispered to herself. "I was only thirteen and you were twenty-six. I don't care if you were drunk.

You're my half-brother, for God's sake. What did you expect me to do, just lie there and let you use me for one of your Randis or Cheryls because I was convenient?" It had been a frightening scene, interrupted by the housekeeper. Neither of them had referred to it since, but Marianne remembered, and she thought Harvey did, too. Why else this nagging enmity, this procession of little annoyances?

"You give up this graduate degree business and do something more in keeping with your position, and I'll see about increasing your allowance...." He had sneered that polite, academic sneer, which could only remotely be interpreted as a threat. Marianne hadn't been able to figure out what would have been more in keeping with her position. What position did a poverty-stricken heiress have? Great expectations? She had on occasion thought of raffling herself off on the basis of her Great Expectations.

Perhaps temporary matrimony? No. She was too stubborn. Sue?

It was possible, of course, but Marianne felt that going to the law to gain control of her money would involve her in more of a struggle with Harvey than she had the strength for. Nope.

If Papa had been a chauvinistic Neanderthal, Marianne would play it out—all the way. But she would not do it in squalor, not even student-style squalor. The jewelry had been given to her when Cloud-haired mama had died. So far as anyone knew it was still in the safe-deposit box. Marianne had never worn it. Now it had gone for fifty percent of its value to pay for three stories of dilapidated Italianate brick across the street from the university, and Marianne spent every available hour with tools or paintbrushes in her hands. The worst of it was done.

Even the scrappy little area out front had been sodded and fringed with daffodils for spring, with pulmonaria and bergenia to bloom later, and astilbe waiting in the wings for midsummer.

Harvey, if he ever came to Virginia to visit her, which he never had, would find only what he could have expected—a decently refurbished apartment in an elderly house. Not even Mrs. Winesap or Mr. Larkin knew she owned the place. "Mine," she said for the tenth time that day, sinking at last into sleep.

There had been a time, long before, when there had been gardens lit by daffodils fringing acres of lawn. There had been a time when there had been many rooms, large, airy rooms with light falling into them through gauzy curtains in misty colors of dusk and distance. Sometimes, on the verge of waking, Marianne thought of that long-ago place. There had been a plump cook Marianne had called Tooky, even when she was old enough to have learned to say "Mrs. Johnson." There had been an old Japanese man and his two sons who worked in the gardens. Marianne had trotted after them in the autumn, her pockets bulging with tulip bulbs, a bulb in each hand, fascinated by the round, solid promise of them, the polished wood feeling of their skins, the lovely mystery of the little graves the gardener dug—what was his name? Mr. Tanaka. And his sons. Not Bob, not Dick. Robert and Richard. Robert digging the round holes, Marianne pitching in the handfuls of powdery bone-meal, Robert mixing it all into a soft bed, then taking the bulbs from her one by one to set them in an array. Then, filling in the hole, the hole so full of promise, knowing the promise would be kept. And then, in the spring, the clumps of green stalks, the buds opening into great goblets of bloom. Marianne standing with Cloud-haired mama to peer into those blooms, into the bottoms of those glorious vases where bees made bel-ligerent little noises of ownership against the yellow bases of the petals, a round sun glowing at the bottom of the flower to echo the great sun burning above them.

Marianne didn't even remember it, and yet when she had bought the garden supplies last fall, she had stood in the garden shop with her hand deep in the carton of tulip bulbs, not seeing them, unaware of her own silent presence there. When she had paid for the plants there had been tears running down her cheeks, and the sales clerk had stared at her in perplexity, for her voice had been as calm and cheerful as it usually was while the tears ran down her cheeks and dropped off her chin. Later, she looked into the mirror and saw the runnels from eyes to chin and could not think what might have caused them.

Cloud-haired mama had died when Marianne was thirteen.

That was when Harvey had... well. No point in thinking about it. After that had been boarding schools, mostly. Papa Zahmani had sold the big house with the gardens. Holidays had been here, in this city, in the town house. Then, only a year later, Papa Zahmani had died. The headmistress had told her in the office at school and had helped her dress and pack and be ready for the car. Two funerals in less than a year, and no reason anyone could give for either one. No reason for Mama to have died. No reason for Papa to have died. Dr. Brown acted baffled and strained, with his mouth clamped shut. After that was more school, and more school, and summer camps, and college, and more college. There had not been any home to return to, and the only career which occurred to her was the same one Harvey had entered—ethnology. Which might be another reason for his sniping at her. Harvey didn't like competition. As though Marianne would be competition—though someday perhaps, when she was decades older, if she became recognized in the field, and... Well. She tried not to think about it. It was better not to think about Cloud-haired mama, or Papa Zahmani, or Harvey. It was easier to live if one were not angry, and it was easier not to be angry if she did not think about those things.