The Sunken Cathedral (11 page)

“I was saying when I was a kid we had a teacher. Shivers,” Sid Morris says. “That’s what we called him, as in shiver me timbers. Anything, he’d jump out of his skin. France, though I didn’t know squat.”

“France,” she says.

“We were shits. We’d slam our books. Push them off our desks. Then we’d say, Sorry, Mr. Shivers.”

“Terrible,” Marie says.

“I was the worst,” Sid Morris says, stubbing out the last of the cigarette, the old clamshell saved from a party in Red Hook—forgotten friends who lived close to the docks, she remembers.

“One day our principal’s at Shivers’s desk. Open your books, he says, some chemistry bullshit. And that was that. No Shivers. And no one had the balls to ask.”

“What happened?” Marie asks.

Sid Morris shrugs. “Who knows?”

Sid Morris wets the tip of the brush in his mouth.

“I never thought about Shivers,” he says. “All these years and now I’m thinking about Shivers. All the time I’m thinking about Shivers. Even now, here,” Sid Morris says, painting something she cannot see. “I’m thinking about Shivers.”

In the dark, dark, beyond the movie star’s floodlight, the newly bloomed forsythia hides a swarm of ghost spiders spinning webs, their spinning systems on overdrive, ramped by the frenzy of the City’s vibrations: subway crossings, thermal energy, steam, plumbing, satellites, fleets of taxis, and down the street, on the farthest corner at the Rawhide, the regular men of ladies’ night dance and dance, refusing to believe the bar’s impending closing: they dance in two-for-one oblivion, dance like all get-out in their get-ups, pedestrians crisscrossing the thronged bicycle lanes, impossible passages, the delivery boys and muscle boys and pretty women who work at magazines weaving in and out of the stalled traffic on Citi Bikes, on foot, this a balmy almost-spring spring night, or close to it, an intimation of what will come—heat, almost tropical, rain falling in sheets, trash bins brimming, washed away, eddying—too much stuff; too many people to count.

“Fuck, Shivers,” Sid Morris suddenly says. “What kind of
meshuga
backyard with so little light?” He strikes a match for another cigarette. She can feel the heat of his lap through her cast or maybe she is just imagining. Far away, in history, the bell rings, the child hiding up a tree. But she will not go home and she will not go home and even though the bell clangs she will never go home.

“Hello? Hello?” Sid Morris says, knocking on her cast with his free hand. “Are you with me?”

“I’m here,” she says. “I’m still here,” she says.

I
. The man with the thick beard and the woman unwrapped her in a warm place. In the dark she felt her own shivering. The woman rubbed her legs with warm hands. Someone lit a candle. She was in a shop of some sort, photographs on the walls, portraits of people sitting for portraits, men and women and little children arranged like fruit on a raked wooden table, children looking serious and strange, dressed in their best dress. They did not look like her parents or like Ernest and Rose and Sylvie. She thought of Ernest and Rose and Sylvie and then she did not; she shut her eyes hard and the woman spoke to her and said she would bring her a cup of tea now that she looked awake and maybe it would not be too hot to taste and would that be fine?

Marie nodded, a mouse nod.

She might be a little mouse in someone’s pocket; she might burrow into a fluff of cotton. She would like to speak but she is a mouse and so can only squeak.

Don’t, the woman said to her little mouse voice. Don’t speak.

The woman came back and put a cup of tea into her tiny mouse hands, her tiny claws, and the woman held the tea as well so that Marie would not spill it because she was shaking, shivering, and the tea felt too hot and so she coughed.

I’m sorry, she said in her real voice.

And the woman said to the man, Too soon.

And then the woman said something else to the man that Marie did not understand, something in a language she did not understand, and then the man picked her up again and carried her through a smaller door to a dark room where there were no portraits only boxes stacked upon boxes and a wooden table and chair and a cot and here the man set her down and the woman came behind with blankets and said, Sleep.

And Marie nodded.

And the woman asked her name but Marie had turned into a tiny mouse, again, like the kind that used to sneak into the kitchen when her mother made stone soup. Nothing for you, little mouse, her mother would say. Not even a crumb. And Marie would watch the mouse circle around and around, looking for anything, and then scurry away, back into the hole beneath the floorboards where sometimes, if her father had earned some of the hard cracker bread or a neighbor took pity, she would slip a crumb down so that the mouse might have more than stone soup for its dinner, too. When Marie waked she thought for a moment she might be back in her old house, or maybe in the dark of the orchard; it was very dark here. She felt sore beneath the soft blankets, and hungry, and then her eyes cleared and she saw the woman sitting next to her, in the wooden chair, at the wooden table, looking at her as sometimes her own mother looked at her while she slept.

Good morning, the woman said.

Good morning, Marie said, surprised by her own voice.

You speak, the woman said.

Yes, she said.

I am Colette.

Marie.

Marie, Colette said.

Somewhere beyond them the sound of water, a faucet turned on and then off. Maybe shuffling.

It is Sunday today and we’ll have no customers, Colette said.

She did not understand Colette, and she did not understand where she was but it was warm beneath the blanket. Her eyes saw through the dark like a cat, saw the grain sacks like the ones her father had for the horses over the windows and the wooden table and the wooden chairs and saw, in the corner, the tripod though she did not know the name. She remembered how once she went with Mother and Ernest to the place where Rose and Sylvie sat for the man who took their pictures. This must be that kind of place.

This is his studio. We don’t live here, Colette says. People come and sit. Even now. Last week Coco Pellet. You know her? A great favorite. Carné’s muse, they say. Last week she waltzed in soldier on her arm. An officer. Maybe she on his arm, like a Cartier. He had these eyes. He said he wanted Coco Pellet’s portrait. Nude, he said. You imagine? Jules said, this is not a penny arcade. Sometimes he forgets. He forgets and works, forgetting. Coco Pellet said nothing. You could see her collarbones. She gave her cigarette to the officer and said let’s go and they walked out, thank God. Usually he knows what to say. He is smart. This time he was a fool.

Colette pauses a moment, looking out toward the window as if admiring a view though the only thing to see is the sack, burlap, tacked across it, the way the burlap filters the day.

This is our darkroom. We can stop them from looking here. Jules is well known and they are vain men. They want a portrait. Something to send back home: their girlfriends, their mothers. They are little boys. They want to remember the beautiful women. Idiots.

In the near dark Colette walks to the door and when she opens it stark light comes from the other room, the shop where it may be daylight, suppertime. Marie waits, shivering. She might get up from here quickly and climb out one of the windows or she might hide under the bed but the woman Colette seemed more like her mother than anyone she should be afraid of. Do not be afraid of everyone, her mother had said to her. Do not make her afraid of everyone, her mother had said to her father. What kind of life is this? her mother had said to her father.

In the famous cave of Lascaux, her mother said, a little train takes you into the dark and you cannot see and then you can—they have candles—and it is very cold and the colors are like no colors because they have never been seen and the animals are four-headed or flying with wings, dragons, and they are all creatures drawn by persons from the imagination. All the things we cannot know and wish for maybe.

Her mother’s eyes are blue. Her father sometimes smokes a pipe.

Now, Colette says. She has walked back through the door of light and is here, again.

We’ll go slowly, she says. She puts the bowl on the table next to the bed and then she pulls Marie up. Marie can sit. Colette props the pillow behind her back and then she holds the bowl in her own hand and gives Marie a spoon or takes the spoon and scoops and helps Marie to carry the spoon to her mouth.

Slowly, Colette says.

It is difficult to swallow and she spits, and then she does swallow, the soup pressed down her throat as if by hands, one and then two, squeezing, squeezing, the soup must go down, the stones, one and then two and then three, they are magic stones and they will weigh her to the ground so that when the others fly away she will still be here.

She is still here.

I am still here, she says.

Yes, Colette says.

Colette wipes her mouth with the apron she wears. She scoops the soup into her mouth; she is not a mouse but a bird, a tiny baby bird.

At night we go to the woods. That is where we found you. We go to the woods and meet people there. We do not know their names, we cannot know their names; we give them papers. It is all arranged. We give them the papers Jules makes. The watermark. The stamp. All kinds of papers—birth and baptism. ID cards. He has a special dust. I don’t know how he does it. Jules says I should stay behind but I do not want to be left and so I go. He cannot make me stay home. We have no children. I cannot or he cannot but we have none and so I would be alone and I would rather die.

Maybe your father once met him. Maybe your mother, who knows?

Colette wipes her mouth, again. She will soon draw a bath, she tells her. She is filthy though too young to smell, maybe eight? Nine? She has a rash on her legs. Her eyes are blue, which is good. Jules will photograph her later, after she has had more sleep, a bit more to eat, she says. You will clean up nicely, she says, and we will put you in the dress that will fit, the white one with the pearly buttons down the back and the sky-blue ribbon and the hat to match, an Easter outfit, a bonnet, and Jules can take your photograph like the ones in the lockets, the miniatures that were so popular when I was a little girl your age, miniatures we put into tiny gold hearts that would pop open with tiny clasps. You will like Madame Brouchard. Your likeness to her girls extraordinary. Jules has even said it and he doesn’t say much. They are good people.

XVII

A
fter Elizabeth won the small prize in graduate school, the entire department gathered, students and faculty, in the lounge to hear her read, the refreshments generously donated by the surplus at History, a department better-funded for reasons having to do with the tragedy of Miles Whitbread.

Elizabeth looked out from the little half-podium hastily set up on the conference table, and then she did what they had gathered to see her do, although moments before she had believed she just might faint. Still, she read, shakily, the four poems she had labored over for her three years of graduate school.

Three years, she thought, even while reading. Four poems, she thought. That was all she wrote.

“The end,” she said, looking up, smiling.

The applause surprised her, delighted her. She might have even said sustained. Hernandez approached first, beaming. “Brava,” he said. “Brava!”

She gave a little bow and a curtsy; she wore a skirt of her own making. Long ago she’d gotten used to stitching together fabric into skirts, sundresses, smocks when outings with her mother meant Woolworth’s for a grilled cheese and coffee and the bible of patterns in back, the fabric swatches on sale.
^I

“I need a drink!” Elizabeth said.

“Here, here,” someone said to her left and then she had a Dixie cup of white wine. “Cheese?” they said, and she saw Richard, the Brit, a speared orange cube on a pick. She should have known; should have heard the voice.

“No, this is perfect. Cheers,” she said, downing her thimble and immediately reaching for more. “I’m parched,” she said.

“You’re amazing,” he said, pouring.

“Go on,” she said, looking around for Hernandez but he had wandered off, again.

“You are,” he said. “The real deal.” The Brit’s eyes were green and freckled like the Irish—was he Irish? He had a smooth voice, a beautiful voice. His poems she never fully understood but others did and pronounced them brilliant; he would have won the small prize, she knew, would have beat her had he been in her own class, but he had only just arrived.

“You, too,” she said, gregarious. She felt a sudden whoosh of affection for everyone who had listened to her three years, four poems, anyone who stood now with wilted napkins and cheese and warm wine in the center of this room, littered with journals and reviews.

Years later, she will recognize the Brit’s name on a panel of distinguished Brits and think maybe she should show up and ask a question from the back. Or maybe she should just sit there and smile.

Who would come to hear him?

Who really has the time?

He sees a stranger among familiar faces and is puzzled—he knows he knows her from somewhere—but it isn’t until afterward, when she approaches him, that he puts two and two together, launching forth on their graduate school, the ones he’s seen the ones he’s read about the ones he’s lost track of given his distance across the pond.

And what of you? he would like to know. Tell! he says.

But this isn’t about that, Elizabeth thinks, standing in the administrative hallway, the checkerboard Who We Ares lining the painted cement walls. This is about how it all turned out for the rest of them. What do the rest of them say? What do they think? Carol Weisman, for instance. How did it all turn out for Carol Weisman?