Peaceable Kingdom (10 page)

Ours was a doomed love. To have acknowledged it, even to each other, would have meant taking on the world—and for what? We might have been forced to have a conversation. In fact, we could barely manage a sentence. My greatest dream and greatest fear was being alone with him, and I liked to terrify myself by imagining occasions on which this might occur. One place where it seemed this might happen was the museum; our class was scheduled to visit the Egyptian wing. For weeks before the trip I invented impossible scenarios of escaping with him into the shadows of the church-like medieval hall that I alone among the sixth-graders knew about. And what would we do then? My mind refused to go further, so I thought it again and again until I came up with a plan to arrange what I wanted and dreaded most.

On the morning of the trip I woke up shaking with fever. I still remember staring down into my dresser drawer, wondering how many sweaters I could get away with wearing. I must have put on three or four, but nothing felt warm. At breakfast, I shivered and tried to hide it. How strange that my parents didn’t notice; normally, one sniffle and they were feeling my forehead. But sometime during the night we must have entered that world of mischance that parents so fear, with its history of catastrophes occurring in eye blinks when parental vigilance lapsed.

Briefly I wondered if maybe I did have polio, as my mother so dreaded, but I was still a child, and didn’t know what was worth fearing; children rarely fear airplanes but, almost always, the dark. The prospect of missing the trip scared me far more than polio. Besides, I already knew that first principle of everyday magic: once you say something, give it a name, then, only then, can it happen. So I kept quiet and shivered and wrapped my hands around my cocoa cup and everything around me slipped in and out of focus.

This is how I recall that day—at moments the edges of things would be painfully sharp; then they would blur and turn wavy. Kissing my parents goodbye, I was so confused I imagined my father would be interested to hear that the world looked to me like an El Greco painting. But just in time I caught myself and climbed onto the steamed-up bus.

Our classroom was in chaos, but through it all rang Miss Haley’s strained voice, yelling, “Hang on to your coats,” which struck me as the most deeply kind, the most thoughtful thing she’d ever said. There was one moment, as we lined up to leave, when I knew I was in danger, that I should tell someone and go home. But then I felt someone bump into me, and even through all those sweaters, I knew who it was. Kenny was right behind me in line, and as we pushed toward the narrow bus door, he whispered, “Can we still go see it?” It took me a while to think what he meant, though for days it was all I had thought of.

What he meant was the Ghirlandaio painting, which he’d heard about from me. It had required astonishing bravery to approach him in the schoolyard, to speak to him for so long, but that was minor compared with the courage it took to mention the unmentionable—that is, Miss Haley’s nose. I don’t recall how I’d phrased it, how precisely I’d made it clear that there existed a work of art with a nose like our sixth-grade teacher’s. It had left us both feeling quite short of breath, as if we’d been running and had gotten our second wind and were capable of anything. And in that light-headed state I offered to take him to see it. It would be easy, I said—I knew the museum so well we could sneak off and get back before anyone noticed.

Yet now the idea of walking even the shortest distance exhausted me, and my plan (which I’d never expected him to agree to) seemed to demand impossible stamina—though less than it would have taken to shake my head no. I told him to be on the lookout for the right moment, and my voice dopplered back at me through an echo chamber of fever.

At the museum, a guard instructed us to throw our coats in a rolling canvas bin. And this is my clearest memory from that day—the panic I felt as my coat disappeared, how it looked to me like someone jumping, vanishing into a sea of coats. Suddenly I was so cold I felt I had to keep moving, and I caught Kenny’s eye and we edged toward the back of the crowd, and dimly I heard my fever-voice telling him: Follow me.

Not even running helped. I just got colder, wobbly, and unsure; of course we got lost and crisscrossed the damp medieval hall, where the shadows climbed the chill stone walls, pretending to be doorways that vanished when we got close. At last we found the staircase, the right gallery, the Ghirlandaio. And I gloried in the particular pride of having done what I’d boasted I could.

Kenny stared at the painting. Then very softly he said, “Wow. Disgusto.”

“Disgusto” was the word, all right. And yet I felt strangely hurt, protective of Ghirlandaio’s old man, as if he and his grandson were relatives of mine and Kenny had passed judgment on my family, on my life, on those afternoons when I stood here with my father pretending that this was something compelling and beautiful and not what it was: disgusto.

At that moment we heard footsteps, angry taps on the parquet floor, and we knew whose steps they were, though not how Miss Haley had found us. Instinctively, we moved to the center of the gallery, so no one could tell what painting we’d been near, and I thought—as fast as the fever allowed—that if she noticed the Ghirlandaio, I would direct her eye to the grandson, at how he gazed at the old man, how trustingly and with what love. But she just stood there, glaring at us in the silence of the gallery.

Then Kenny burst into tears. Miss Haley and I looked away from him, embarrassed and upset, though I doubt that she could have been feeling the same emotions that I was—revulsion, and the strong desire to be anywhere, with anyone but him. Sometimes, in later years, I ran into old loves and wondered what I had seen in them; but that day, in the whirl of eleven-year-old love, this shift of emotion happened instantaneously. The love I had felt just a few hours before now seemed grotesque and absurd. I caught Kenny’s smell of hair oil and damp wool, and for a second I gagged.

Was it the tears that so turned me against him? I think it was something more: we were at the age when love cannot stand exposure, when to be caught brings humiliation so profound we can only blame the beloved. We were, in that way, not much older than Adam and Eve, whom we must have resembled as Miss Haley chased us through the galleries, past those paintings of the expulsion from Eden which my father always rushed by—perhaps because the couple was naked or, more likely, held no interest for him, having nothing physically wrong.

Meanwhile, my fever was climbing, the chill in my bones transforming itself into needles of ice. When we rejoined our classmates in the Egyptian wing, I hardly recognized them. Shuffling obediently, gazing morosely at their feet, they could have been the funerary procession that the docent was describing. Miss Haley had prepared us for the highlight of the tour—a trip through the vast Egyptian tomb that the museum had imported brick by brick from Luxor. But as we approached it, the docent narrowed her eyes and dropped her voice to an ominous register and warned us to stay together because the tomb had been built as a maze to foil robbers. And then it hit us all at once—we were entering a grave.

Inside, the temperature dropped. I had never been so cold. Perhaps the docent was chilly, too, or didn’t like it there; in any case, she walked faster, until the children were practically trotting to keep up. I knew I couldn’t do it—and then the urge to curl up and lie down suddenly overwhelmed me. I let the others push ahead through the twisting corridors, and when we passed a roped-off room, I ducked into it and found a corner where I couldn’t be seen from outside.

I crouched in a cul-de-sac, surrounded by glass-covered walls. Beneath the glass were friezes, lit with a soft golden light. Figures in a procession surrounded me. It was a funeral procession, extending into the afterlife to follow the dead and their gods, and it gave me a strange sense of comfort that I knew who everyone was. First came the mourners, shedding their broken-line tears, then the cows, the oxen dragging the carts with all the dead’s possessions, then the boats that would ferry them across the waters of the other world. And now came the lesser gods: Bes, the dwarf; Tauret, the hippopotamus; frog-headed Heket; the lioness Renenet; the scorpion Selket.

Slowly the line began to move forward, and I watched it moving across the glassed-in walls like an animated cartoon—the goddess with the balances for weighing the souls of the dead, then Thoth, Isis, Osiris to greet the lucky spirits. And all at once it seemed to me that the figures were leaving the walls and marching straight at me, coming for me and for everyone I loved. In silence came the fifty-two judges, then Horus, Bast, Anubis, the hawk, the cat, the jackal streamed toward me through the air, and at the end of the line stood Amement, the Devourer, crocodile, hippo, lioness, receiver of the souls who had been tried and found guilty.

But really the goddess I saw was Miss Haley, who stood looking down at me, her white hair backlit, flaming around her head. She must have come searching for me, and yet she seemed not to recognize me.

Her face was opaque, her eyes looked visionless and dead, and that seemed strange because it had just occurred to me that I had been wrong, that all this time I had been thinking Miss Haley and I were opposite, when in fact we were just opposite sides of the same coin—she and her Christian Science, me and my father and our Ghirlandaio. We had precisely the same concerns. We did the same things in our spare time. This thought made me strangely, inexplicably happy; I was suffused with affection, not only for Miss Haley but for my father and me, a compassion much deeper than anything we credit children with and so consider the exclusive province of adults. I felt like someone who had solved a hard problem and now could imagine relaxing. I was sleepy and closed my eyes.

It was not, as it happened, polio, but a kind of meningitis that did no lasting damage but kept me in the hospital three months. I came home to two separate houses. Since then I have often wondered why my parents—who were always so careful of me—failed to consider the effect on me of a homecoming like that. Why couldn’t they have waited? But I think that they must have considered waiting and found that they had no choice.

My father and I were never so close again. For a long while I was angry at him, and somewhere in that time stopped wanting to please him and tell him interesting things, including something I remembered, a thought I had but couldn’t say when he came to pick me up at the museum.

I remember very clearly lying on a cot in a room with adults gathered around. I looked up and saw my father’s face, all wavy and distorted and extraordinarily beautiful, and I wanted to tell him something but couldn’t speak, wanted to say it so badly that I can remember it now.

What I wanted to say was this: that he had been wrong about El Greco, that if something was straight and you saw it curved, you would actually paint it straight; your hand would correct what your eye had seen wrong, so it finally came out right. Then the objects in your painting would appear to you just as everything always did—distorted, buckled, and curved. But anyone else who looked at it would see what you never saw—a perfect likeness of the world, the world as it really was.

P
HILIP ASKS FOR PAPER,
crayons, and tape, and papers his bedroom walls with drawings of cats. He’s trying to work magic, to bring his cat back home. It’s been four days since he and his parents returned from Cape Cod to find Geronimo gone. Philip and Frank and Jenny took turns calling the cat, and then, when it got dark, Philip sat on the front steps with a flashlight and an open cat-food can.

“Amateur voodoo,” says Frank. Basically Frank approves; some part of him even thinks it might work. In that way he and Philip are different from Jenny, who, from the start, assumed the cat was gone for good.

Philip hasn’t mentioned Geronimo since that first night, and even when he takes Jenny upstairs to see his room, she senses that he still doesn’t want to talk about it. He has used maybe fifty sheets from the reams of Xerox paper they buy him. Every picture is different. Cat close-ups and long shots, cats that are all whiskers and others doing things like riding bikes. Later, Frank says, “He’s got his room done like Lourdes.” But Jenny has had another kind of flash: those little Mexican statues of skeletons playing volleyball, riding bikes, doing just what Philip’s cats are, and with similar crazy smiles.

Both of them think this is basically good, this evidence in Philip of loyalty and love. Jenny just wonders: good for whom? On their vacation, Philip, who is six, fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl. Cheryl’s parents were renting the house next door; there were no other kids around. She and Philip would go to the beach. Jenny and Frank weren’t surprised—Philip is better company than most adults. Free babysitting, they thought. But then a sixteen-year-old boy showed up and Cheryl went off with him. Philip said he was sleepy and wouldn’t come out of his room, and they realized that it had been—in every way but one, they hoped—just like an adult love. It shadowed everything for a day or so, until Philip cheered up. Things must be in proportion if Philip is working harder to get back his cat than he did to get back Cheryl, though maybe it just seems to him more possible.

Already this cat has had a fairly complicated history. Philip got him in May, as a kitten. A friend found him on her lawn; a passing car must have left him there. Well, not a friend, exactly; a woman named Ada whom Frank was in love with for two very terrible months. That was four years ago. At that time, Jenny had felt certain that she and Frank couldn’t go on; now she is shocked by how much she has—or mostly has—forgotten. Ada has half moved back into Boston; they rarely see her. They hadn’t seen her at all this spring till the pond—directly across the road from her driveway—was blown up.

Pedersen’s pond was where everyone used to go. When they first moved to New Hampshire, ten years ago, the pond was where they found each other, couple by couple and one by one. They swam there as young people with bodies pretty enough for skinny-dipping, then as mothers bringing their children to play, even after some of them could have afforded to put in ponds of their own. It had never been safe—no lifeguard, slippery banks—but they were careful. Sometimes swimmers had to be dragged in to shore; Frank used to ride with the rescue squad, and several times he was called out there to make sure some drunken teenager was okay. But no one ever really got hurt, no one ever drowned.