On Keeping Women (32 page)

The hand he’s been clasping on the granite ball is raw, wet—bleeding? No, dimly white, birdlime or some insect jelly-mass, rank with living-smell. Something from nature, sticky as semen, seeping from the stone of his house. In the second he’s examining it, the light lifts; it’s day.

Out there. On his wave.

A speck, a sail. Unmoving. Flotsam, water-wrangled into human color, wood into limbs.

No, he knows that odalisque. Yearly, daily, he’s paid for it.

Dead or alive, it tells him what he knows already. For two people, there are two dawns.

Wiping his hand on his pant-leg he runs toward it, in his new yellow shoes.

And one more dawn, for the children. This is the morning the guerrillas will struggle down from the alps of childhood, onto the great divide.

Royal’s asleep. It’s always a surprise to catch him at it. Charles watched. His younger brother sleeps like a man of affairs. Royal’s bad luck came early; now everything else can be arranged. And will be, handily. With all his excuses in the best order of any of us. He’ll leave this house the way he slides from Lexie’s lap.

It’s the father and mother who make the enclosure, anyway. Charles is going to tell Lexie that in the morning. And write his father wherever he’s gone off to again. I feel nothing, when you’re not here. No obligation. No boundaries. The front door here opens too easy to the riverbank; the back wall has collapsed into Spain. I’ll tell her that in the morning. I’ll write Ray.

The time-wheel he’d constructed to show his father’s travel-zones is still hung down in the kitchen. He’s ashamed to have it there, a signal plain, showing the scientific gap between his one-sided romance with his father, and the latitude to which a father can desert. For whether his father is still here or not—or even, impossibly, was not the man in the hall—can make no difference now. He’s seen the possible visionary side of his father. Of them both. Thing to do is to desert them first, both of them.

He steals off Royal’s bed, and down the curved back stairs. The kitchen door opens on a paved alley directly under the mossy hillside, roofed by the second-story porch. Facing him, built into the hill itself, is an earth-cellar with a blackened, vaulted door, behind which ancient cables, once good for something, subside into the years. He takes from the wall the cardboard contraption, whose precision and calligraphy cost him a week, and slips it into the trashcan. Up above, it’s getting faintly light now, but there are stains of diurnal dark here which keep their own earth-clock. Where the old pavestones end is a millwheel which no one can move, has ever moved. Never was a mill here within record, not for miles around. It’s a man’s whim, or a team’s—sunk here. The alley’s an unresurrected place, in a house which has had room for many; he loves this one best. Mill-smell itches his nostril like catnip. He stands on the edge, pooling his reflections, unresurrected too.

Absently, he ghost-walked back inside, movie-stalking through the front of the house—Monsieur Hulot on holiday, smartly heel-toe—and bounded up the front stairs. The girls’ bath was open, dimly. Early morning, in the half-dark, all the bathrooms here smell like cathedrals, cool with damp thoughts, and time. Is time a thought? Before it intersects with space? Is space infinite duration? Or is it the presence of matter eternally referential to itself—like Dutch Cleanser clinging to the tub where the enamel’s chipped? Always been that black tin-spot there. Since his own eyes began. A span which is holy to him in spite of all his efforts. Careful of noise, he lifted up the closed toilet-seat. Suspended in the interior moment of animal muscle communing with its own consciousness, he peed.

Oh Christ. I was happy. On the floor near the toilet, a pad stiff with what must be blood. Damn the girls. He won’t pick it up. Quietly he put down the seat again without flushing, closed the lid.

A long whisper, his name, from the back of the hall. In the mirror, shadowy over the sink, he summons his captaincy.

“Charlie.”

It’s only Maureen. He steals close enough to confab.

“Our toilet’s stopped up.”

“Jesus. Can’t it wait until morning?”

She doesn’t know whether. A retriever only, these days she brings him and Royal all facts with the same tentative woe. He understands why the Greeks killed messengers.

“I’ll get the plunger.”

“Thanks, Charlie. It’s only that I get—you know.”

“Sure.”

“Scared. When anything.”

A roundcheeked comic girl in her long nightie, too comfy to be in the middle of this. But a blessing to him because of that. His mother, always casting Reeny as the spinster-to-be, is dead wrong. Lexie’s always casting all of them, in her mind. In the good times, before things went bad, where she put Maureen used to anger him. And Chess. “Don’t worry, Reeny,” Chess herself used to say, tickling her sister’s woe away. “Know what? You’re going to marry hard and fast, red and early. The missionary boy is already stuck on you.”

“I’ll get the plunger,” he said.

“Uh-huh. Gee thanks. You try. I already used it.”

And she put it back, of course.

They retrieve it from the utility closet over the back stairs. He cuffs her, patting her back down the hall. Her habits are as circular as her outlines. Some guy will love her for it.

In the girls’ bath the horse-chestnut trees were clumbering inward a greengold light.

“Gee, you’re not kidding.” The toilet’s chugging up pink-stained pads. “What the hell—”

“I didn’t.”

“I know.” And the same guy will fall out of love with her. But maybe not in time. “I’ll have to get a wrench.” The toolbox is downstairs. On such an errand, there and back, the house seemed endless.

Why does she do it?—he thinks, working at the old trap, working back to Chess. In the commune, they’d had to group-censure a girl for doing the same—or nearly. Using their john he himself had seen the withered purplish rag tossed near the can it had purposefully missed. The other girls had complained, Rocky told him, grinning. “When they themselves leave a line of pill-bottles on the shelf stretches from here to Christmas, just to keep in our minds what they go through.”

Digging in the old U-pipe, he whistled; the commune always cheered him. Last time there, the girls had been spouting Teilhard de Chardin. Which was not—they said haughtily—religion. Stirring the polenta, they were. Pretty as polenta-machines, all of them. He was just in, fresh and hardy, from his books. “No, more like intellectual perfume,” he’d said. “You can dab it behind your ears.” They’d squawked at him. Little tape-recorders, their soft arms covered with flesh pink as bubble-gum. If they all hated their families, why were they living in what they prated as an “extended” one? He could see them around the same table three years from now, with all the babies—one was already sneaking from behind the pills—reading Emerson.

He laughed out loud and dropped the wrench.

Royal comes out and down the hall, on his hod foot. That rhythm is enough to impress quiet on them. He never has to waste words. He’ll have some competence Charles and Maureen don’t. Or analysis.

Older than he, they wait, silent. He has to have it.

He leans over the toilet. “How long those been in there?” He picks, delicately.

“Ick.” Maureen.

“Must you?” Charles stands up. “She was tired when she went to bed, that’s all. Depressed.”

“That kind of blood. Menstrual blood. I’ve never seen it.”

“Bide your time then. Or ask James.” Charles picked up the wrench. “Stick to earwax. And shut your mouth.”

“What do you bet it’s not that kind of blood.” Roy’s eyes are bright. “Fools.”

All three heads swivel. As if on the same neck. Their mother’s often commented on it.

Chessie’s door was still closed. It breathed closure. The two boys turned to Maureen.

“Oh Lordy.” But she knows her duty. As more than sister. As female guardian of the secretions of the house. Cautiously she opened Chess’ door.

Empty. Not slept in? Who knows? Chess’ bed is never made. On the bed is a large leather folder, shining new. Charles draws nearer, to the other object.

“What is it?” Maureen whispers. “Where’d she get it?”

“An astrolabe.” Yearning, he picks it up.

Underneath, scattered on the sheet, some bright metal bits.

“Oh,” Reeny says. “Oh what a shame … Earrings … Oh—they were beautiful.”

Royal’s their leader. Though Charles forges ahead of him. Up the tower steps.

The tower’s full of light now, straining through the high fracture of the trees. Chess is sitting madonna-still, on the up-ended bucket. She’s wearing a tee shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and khaki shorts. Her long showgirl legs are twined. Her hands are palm-down in her lap, clasped tight. When Royal pries them open the handled razorblade falls to the floor. The bloodsoaked pad in her lap remains. The wrists haven’t been slashed, but hairline-sliced. What oozing there was has stopped. A few drops are on some paperscraps near the blade.

She must have stroked so delicately. Teasing the blood out from the skin. Daring the vein. Waiting for them to find her? Or not?

“It’s already healing,” Royal says. “Quick, get my kit.”

Maureen’s already running for it.

The kit is Royal’s pride. “No time to prep. But the glove-pak is sterile.” He works nimbly, taught by Ray, and such practice as he himself can find. “Oh, let
me”
he’s said to their kneescabs since he was five. When Ray services the Little League’s injuries for free, he goes along. And more than once in hard-pressed emergency rooms—as he’d gleefully reported—a little lame patient wandering in from the wards hadn’t been noticed until too late.
Don’t look,
they said to him.

No one here to say that.

The wound in Chess’ wrist is already a jellying seam, puckering fast against the enemy. Royal, finished with it, turns up the other wrist, to show a seam identical.

A mewl comes from Reeny. Charles’ throat is grateful to hers. While Royal repeats his routine on the other wrist, Chess herself doesn’t make a sound. Doesn’t move, or look at them. Yet Charles can never quite believe she’s tranced. Not that she’s sly, or pretending. Somewhere he can feel consciousness, maybe bleeding too.

She’s bandaged. White handcuffs. Royal fingers them, longer than a doctor would. “She’ll have to have a tetanus-shot,” he says, proud. “But it’s okay.”

“We can take her to Doc Bly—can’t we? She can wear her longsleeved blouse. We can say she stepped on a nail. Can’t we?” Maureen is testing. Not only them. She leans toward Chess. “Later on, I can lend you my copper bracelets. She’ll be healed enough for them to cover, won’t she, Roy?” She almost touches her sister, her arm, just in time drawing back. “I’ll
give
them to you, Chess.”

Who does Maureen remind him of? Their mother. Lexie, pleading with normalcy behind Chess’ back, forever tidying up behind her. Trembling, at what she sees otherwise. Casting Chess loudly for all to hear, as that scruffy early heroine, herself. Challenging fate to contradict her, beating it by a hair.

Until now.

Out there on the riverbank somewhere, is his mother, moving her legs to a man’s. Soon she’ll be walking them back in here. He pities her.

And admires her. Both of which she knows. Sometimes flaunting it—casting
him.
“Fight me,” she’d said, stunned, after she’d slapped him.
“Be
me. Don’t back off, like your father. And don’t be sorry for it.”

But Chess, who hasn’t moved, has them all in the palm of her hand. Between those wrists.

Except for Royal.

He’s repacking his kit tenderly, each bottle and tube, keeping out only the probe and scissors which will have to be sterilized again, and the used gloves and roll of gauze. “No way,” he says, looking up. Clasping his kit to his belly like a skilled workman called in, and now dismissing them. “No way.” Maureen won’t look at him. Will brother Charles grant him that satisfaction? Yes, he can always count on Charles. On all of them really. “Give up. She has to go.”

The air in the tower creaks like glass wiped. It’s the trees, scratching. Not wanting in here surely. But it’s morning.

Royal screws up his eyes. “I could tell Ma for you, if you want. When she comes in.”

Maureen’s bending to Chess. “Sis. Say you’ll be all right. Say it.” Her hands accidentally graze the wrists. Head hanging, she stands up. Her eyes are streaming. “Where Lexie worked that time, they stamp their clothes. All the kids’ clothes, underwear, even. And when they go home for a weekend, they’re still wearing them.”

Royal is walking over to Chess. When he walks slowly, that compensating hip takes one’s eye. He stands in front of her, staring. “Like my rabbit. Remember? Just like him. It’s fright, James says. But there’s another name for it. See?” Before they comprehend, he’s passing the probe back and forth, back and forth in front of Chess. Her gaze is unflickering.

Charles knocks him back.

They are all three amazed.

“They
do
that to them,” Royal says, his jaw trembling. “It’s an
experiment.
”

“She’s not them. She’s us.”

Roy shrugs.

“You don’t own her,” his brother says. “Just because you patched her up.” But in hospital, they will, he thinks. They own them after a while—Lexie’d said. “Professionally, of course.” But they really do, you know. They own them. I wasn’t up to it. It takes such arrogance, Charles, to think you know what’s good for them. I flunked.

“You all play Chess’ game,” Royal says sullenly.

“
You’ve
been playing it too, Roy.”

Half-smiling, Royal looks up at him. Exactly as he did when he was in the hospital—looking up from his hamster, which was running in dizzy circles in the maze Charles had built for it. For little Roy.

Remember, your little brother’s only six, only eight, only ten, his parents say in Charles’ ear. Never speaking of the foot.

“Roy? I’m beginning to think we play yours.”

“Charlie—” Reeny says. “Charlie … Listen. We could all work in the hospital maybe. You and I could get jobs there. And stick around her, maybe.”

He could, almost. Not quite. No, he can’t. Reeny would try, bless her, but be persuaded against it. Or be turned away. He knows who would do it, could. And be considered crazy for doing it, if need be. His mother would do it. And stand up to it. She would qualify.