The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (12 page)

Back at the hotel she explained. Something about the unicorn tapestries. How she always went there next after Renaissance paintings. And she was so used to being at the Met alone, that after they wandered off into forests of armour … “Oh, how could I? I forgot … I thought I was alone … I went straight to the Cloisters without even thinking … Oh you poor darling children. But I'll take you tomorrow. You'll understand.”

It was all magic to them. They did not expect to follow. When they saw the tapestries, they understood that explanations are always arcane and mysterious. They saw maidens and white horned horses that flew perhaps, or lay down in impossibly flowered fields. They understood that nothing could be clear.

Jason asked: “Do you remember the unicorn tapestries, Tory?”

But the glory had gone from her, the little lightnings of memory extinguished. Grey and slack again, in her medicated present, she oozed into sleep. Jason put a cushion under her head, a rug from an armchair over her. Her breath gurgled like a child's.

He stared at his walls of books. Then with the air of one breaking a curse, he reached for the bundles behind the bottom shelf. He untied them and felt the soft pelt of onionskin, his mother's letters. But he could not read them. Gently he put them aside. His father's letters were fewer and firmer, in envelopes. He opened one. A stiff solitary page of good bond, and also a postcard showing a black-and-white etching of his school. He turned the postcard over. It was stamped and addressed to his father in his father's own handwriting, but the left half of the card was blank of communication. The accompanying letter was in India ink, a genuine nibbed pen, a schoolmaster's hand.

My dear boy:

I know that you are extremely busy with school work and sports and I rejoice in the achievements that you have described to your mother. We are very proud of your letters. I do not want you to fritter away time with any such foolishness as writing everything over again to me.

But perhaps you could take two minutes to scribble something on the enclosed card and that will suffice. When you come home we will be able to sit and talk together and discuss literature and politics like two educated gentlemen.

With fondest love, Father.

After a long time, Jason looked into the other envelopes. There were stamped and pre-addressed cards in all of them. He had never mailed one. Not one. He did not read the other letters. He had an image of himself as implacable. He thought that if he turned out the light and looked at his face reflected back from the dark window, it would be the face of a savage. Or would perhaps be carved from ice. A cruel face.

Dear god, he thought, burying it in his hands. Who is more guilty, him or me?

XII Elizabeth

Elizabeth is standing in Jason's old room. There is dust on the mirror, months of it, a powder of absence. Her ghostly reflection observes her as through a shroud. She winks at it.

Art thou there, truepenny?

She writes in the dust with her index finger:
The British are coming
,
the British are coming.
Joke, she explains. But you should hear the way Adam talks.

Jason has called and she knows it for certain now. Not that she had permitted herself doubt. A Thursday flight. They are committed to it. Catalysis, catalysis, she sings, brushing away the dust with her sleeve. And the woman in the mirror, unshrouded, smiles smugly: You did it, my dear! Congratulations.

I told you, Elizabeth says. Prospero is my middle name. Just wait for the final act of my Elizabethan opera. The pun her rambling thoughts have stumbled on delights her.

She makes up the bed and places a dish of potpourri on Jason's dresser. Lavender, thyme, and rose petals.
Where the bee sucks, there suck I
, she hums. All from her garden. Dried in bunches hung by the kitchen window and crushed between pieces of muslin in her own hands.

Nevertheless the room smells of Jason.

There is a dream that still haunts her once in a while. It used to come over and over, a nightmare. In the dream, she is taking a taxi through Central Park. Faster, she is begging the driver, but a million things impede. She is frantic, the children are waiting. When at last, at last, the taxi reaches the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the steps are empty. It is past closing time, even the stragglers are gone. The children are nowhere to be found, they are never seen again.

Elizabeth closes her eyes and sees Tory and Jason, lost waifs. She hugs Jason's bedpost and clasps the children in her arms, weak with relief.

Batten down your life, she warns herself. You're flapping loose in the rigging of time.

In museums, she always goes backwards through history. A conditioned response: after the Renaissance paintings, the fifteenth century. That was why, on that day … she turned from Tintoretto and thought of carved ivories and illuminated manuscripts, the lure of things medieval snared her, the pull of the Cloisters. A logical progression.

(And then the past had interfered. Especially a stolen afternoon before the war. The Tapestries Room.

“Liz, look at the maiden in the fifth fragment.”

“What wicked eyes.”

“Not as seductive as yours.”

She had looked up from her guidebook with dismay: “She's betraying the unicorn.”

Despondent, they had pondered betrayal.)

The children were safe in the armoury, this must have been backdrop knowledge. Elizabeth did not even remember leaving the museum. She slipped from the moorings of the present, she supposed she took a taxi but it might have been an uptown bus, she forgot time. She sat in a chapter house shipped stone by stone from the twelfth century, she lingered over the ivories, she came to the Tapestries Room. When she saw the maiden with treacherous eyes and the unicorn pensive inside its picket fence, she remembered. Betrayals and captivity and responsibilities.

She remembered the children.

Elizabeth knows the panic all over again. She is promising the taxi driver double to break all speed limits. She is aware that the distance from West 190th Street to 82nd and Fifth is infinite. In the dream Tory and Jason are not on the steps of the museum. They are nowhere to be found.

But Tory had already been damaged.

And Jason?

She remembers the day he left for boarding school. Edward's doing, for complicated reasons. She holds Jason to herself, she does not want him to go, she is so fiercely anguished by his leaving that she knows it is better if he goes.

Elizabeth acknowledges something to the face in the mirror: I always thought of him as mine alone. The solitary pregnancy, the solitary birth.

Solitary Jason.

The face in the mirror accuses solemnly: One may smile and smile and be a villain.

She looks at her hands. They are always covered in blood. She dips them in the bowl of dried petals and rubs them together until her palms are stained with fragrance. She smooths the bedding with her aromatic fingers, strokes the pillow .She takes a palmful of dried petals and herbs and scatters them inside the pillowcase.

From down the hallway comes a sustained crescendo of command and petulance. Something like an enraged cello, Elizabeth thinks, whose player is overly fond of vibrato.

Probably she has forgotten something again. His lunch perhaps. Or his newspaper.

She tucks the perfumed pillow under her arm and goes to Edward's room. An unusual dilemma. She reconstructs it: it seems he has been gesticulating at squirrels again, with one of his canes. He has been vehement, his point has been firmly made, the walking stick is in the garden below, the rip in the screen somewhat larger.

“Oh Edward,” she laughs.

But he prefers to intimate that the incident is full of an esoteric dignity.

Elizabeth's shoulders are shaking, she leaves quickly. In the hallway, she hides her laughter in the pillow, goes outside and retrieves his cane.

“Good shot!” she calls up at the window. “It landed upright, like a javelin throw.”

But he probably cannot hear her.

She considers re-entering the room with the walking stick carried as a rifle. Presenting arms. She thinks better of this manoeuvre.

She places the cane with due decorum beside his chair. She straightens his blanket, ignoring his irritable bridling. She plumps his pillow — then, with a deft movement, switches it with Jason's.

She flashes her Cheshire Cat smile at Edward's mirror, at Jason's mirror, in passing. She sprinkles petals inside Edward's pillow and leaves it on Jason's bed.

She is not superstitious. Not exactly. It is a matter of meeting kind with kind: the workings of damage are so arcane and mysterious, so elusive to the moral eye in the present, so mocking in hindsight.

She is setting a stage.

She demands of herself a well-composed finale.

She leaves Jason's room and goes downstairs to the piano. Ariel's Song from
The Tempest
trips from her fingers. She adds Prospero, confident in the bass notes.

XIII Edward

It's the war we should blame, I suppose, we of the disrupted generation. I never think of those years, a matter of discipline. Sometimes in dreams I smell excrement and the stench of dismembered bodies. I put on lights, I play Mozart, I read Shakespeare aloud. I shrug it off.

When I came back from Guam, Jason was a three-year-old fact, Marta a midsummer night's dream. I never even inquired. What point? The school was waiting for me like a dinner jacket I had temporarily laid aside and I moved back into my life as though I had just stepped out for the newspaper. But certainly there had been changes. No more schoolhouses. To stay in the house we had to buy it with veterans” loans. Paper was coarser, chalk dusted itself on fingers. Everything was shoddier — the students, their studying, their values, their ambitions. Those of us who tried to maintain the old standards suffered of course.
Passé
, people said, smiling politely. It was difficult, for example, to find good Latin teachers.

As for Victoria and Jason, I should blame the war. Not myself, not them. It was the war — though Jason took advantage. This was asked of us: that a generation of fathers become strangers to their children. And this I suppose was what we could not forgive our wives as we lay drowning in mud and shrapnel. (Personally, I found that only anger stilled the nerves when I crouched in the bloodied trenches waiting for death.) We did not forgive our wives for hoarding our last precious seed, scattered in the thoughtless haste of parting while our minds reeled with apocalypse; we did not forgive them, custodians of stolen treasure, for tending it as though we had nothing to do with it. On alien fronts, we missed an entire war. When we returned the custody battles were already over.

And the battle for minds? It was as though we begat aliens. When Jason, when Emily, full of ingenuous righteousness, spoke of Vietnam, of the right to refuse, then the bodies of dead comrades rained down on me and I could never speak. No. We never argued about this. I could not speak at all for fear my jack-hammering blood would explode.

But when I first came home I brought hope like stale rations in my knapsack. I did not immediately concede defeat. Though Victoria shrank from me, I would take her on my knee. I would read Jason stories. I took an interest, I asked questions, I gave fatherly admonitions and exhortations. I did not want them merging into the sluggish flow of other children's lives. I was concerned that the slackness of the times had seeped into their bones. I wanted them to be extraordinary. Perhaps I was too exacting.

I remember I took them to the fair in Springfield one day and Tory was sick on the Ferris wheel. When she put her head on my shoulder, and when Jason clung to my sleeve, I thought with humble wonder: everything is still possible. But then Bessie came home and snapped her fingers of authority and privilege and of course they went to her, conditioned by my long, forced absence.

“Can't you tell when the child is terrified?” she asked. “Do you have to make her ill?”

You don't know, I thought. You didn't see her arms around my neck, her head on my shoulder. You know nothing.

At school I saw what was happening to the young. Everywhere, decadence. In the cities, women who once confined themselves for decency were flaunting pregnancies at dinner parties as though biology were a newly discovered triumph. Gentlemen of the old order averted their eyes for shame.

If I had sought out Marta then, she would have looked like one of Fra Lippo Lippi's angels. If I found her now it would be the same: ageless and pure.

I wanted to keep Victoria pure. Perhaps I was too strict.

For Jason I wanted excellence and Harvard. I do not see why a Spartan program should bother a child of the war years. I wanted everything, I gave everything, his future mattered too much for me to unbend. And he has, I suppose, what I wanted him to have — professional and scholarly standing, though I would have preferred law or classics. He chose an obscene field mainly, I would think, to cause me embarrassment. Two books published, which I refuse to read and not because of the blatant dedication:
For my mother Elizabeth
. There are areas where I draw the line. Freud, for instance. Pornography, in my opinion.

What I did not expect was that Jason would graduate into contempt for my pre-war humanism. Home from college one Thanksgiving, I remember he said: “Oh no! Not Wordsworth again!”

I realised it was a tic of my generation. We thought of it as deferring to a shared repository of wisdom. It was a communal act for us. After that I never quoted verse aloud again. (Except perhaps to Bessie on deranged nights when the war eddied into my sleep like smoke and I cried out with horror. She would bring me hot chocolate and my Shakespeare. We would turn on the stereo. Bessie is in many ways a comforting creature.)

Of course I am long past caring for Jason's contempt. I return it. A life going nowhere, a stunted dying tree, no branches.

When they come, all of them — is it tomorrow? the day after? — they will take for granted that Jason will carry me downstairs. I will not let him. Never. I will never forgive him for not writing to me from school, not even when I stooped to begging. When Emily was born I thought it would be different, a fresh chance. (And perhaps after all, if she brings Adam.) Will they really bring Victoria? Will she kill me with her Circe's eye? Is it possible in any sense to feel grateful that they are coming?

Rather than let Jason carry me I will rise to my feet like Samson and let my faulty heart yammer as it will. Adrenalin alone would get me to the foot of the stairs.

Though I would not want to die in front of the child. Not until we have talked.

Emily does not dislike me as Jason does. She has no reason not to bring the boy. Adam. There is such a sound of hope to it. And Emily's letters have never excluded, always
Dear Mother and Father
…

Yes, that was how we knew, about three years ago.
Dear Mother and Father
;
I have accepted a position in London, address above. I must beg you not to give Tory my address. Her letters to Sydney were so constant and distressing. I expect to be in New York for a concert next month and hope to see
…

“New York!” Bessie said. “Oh, its been so long.” With her eyes like a starling's watching for spring.

And I thought, why not? It is something, a daughter playing on a New York stage, though one could wish for a less nomadic success. Nevertheless. Some people, not understanding the fostering of the exceptional, have claimed that I was a harsh father. Not true. But it is possible that I was exacting with Emily, whom I counted on to atone for other losses.

In any case I wanted to make whatever amends were necessary. At seventy, I wanted to bind wounds.

I did not, I suppose, want to die unloved.

I do not, quite simply, want to die.

I will not go tamely.

If she does not bring the boy it will be over in minutes, like a shell bursting over those steamy villages in Guam.

Will they fly to New York, I wonder?

New York. Her concert. I had forgotten its aftermath. How selective the memory gets, coddling and pandering. Yes, they hold New York against me, of course. They will punish me for that. And yet it is perverse of Emily. She must realise, I cannot believe she does not realise. I cannot absorb shocks so quickly. They should not expect it of me.

In Lincoln Center I was overcome. Even now, recalling it … Damn. I despise weeping. Tears have always enraged me. If Bessie comes in, I will say the ragweed …

This is what is intolerable about life. (Oh these furies, this wretched tin in my chest. Iago! Iago!) What cannot be borne is this clarity, this torturing knowledge of the turning points, with no possibility of skipping a chapter, going back a page, excising. (One of these spasms, I suppose, will go ripening on and on until I am harvested. Will I be lucid, I wonder, at the last unrewritable second? I will not go gently! Oh god. This pain is a grappling iron in the ribs!)

The war can be forgiven. Or rather, we can forgive ourselves for the war. It is the moments that could have been otherwise that torment. When Marta extended her milky arms in the gazebo, when Emily lifted her wine glass in Manhattan … If I had done otherwise then, if I could have those moments over …

(This pain has the jaws of a shark. I will die of rage at my own stupidity.)

This has to be distanced. I have to see the boy, I must live until Adam. This has to be put in perspective, I have to breathe slowly, I have to edit.

In the concert hall the old man thought of doves. It was the flutter of silks perhaps, or the cushioned seats raising and lowering themselves like injured wings. He thought of San Juan Capistrano which he had seen once during the war, a brief respite between dysenteries. He had been amazed, he was still amazed, by rhythms that were heedless of external event: birds massing and gossiping like theatregoers, people flocking to concerts.

As the orchestra assembled on stage in little forays and shufflings and tunings a woman in front of him murmured to her companion:

“However does Julian manage? Hailing taxis and such? It's like a fat mistress, that double bass.”

“Anton Kuerti takes his own grand piano with him.” Putting things in perspective. “Every concert.”

An esoteric language, the old man thought. He was still a beginner, able to make stilted small talk, ignorant of more profound syntax.

Which Stamitz? he heard from somewhere behind his left shoulder. Not Karl, someone responded. Karl did the flute pieces.

Johann then, it was agreed.

His wife knew this language. Her tongue could slide around Köchel ratings as easily as minnows through water. She could correctly assign: early Baroque, late Renaissance. She could distinguish Weimar Bach from Leipzig Bach. The old man could never hope, in his lifetime, to achieve all the necessary colourations, the fine stipplings, that would allow him to pass in her world as a native.

Probably it could be detected that his evening suit was rented. Probably people behind him were speculating: he has come because his wife wanted to; or: he thinks this is expected of out-of-town visitors; or even the truth: he is the father of the guest soloist but has never felt at ease in musical gatherings.

He realised, glancing covertly about, that he should be reading his program notes. A gauge of sorts, separating the devout from the frivolous. Like lowering the kneeling rail when one entered the pew in a cathedral, an indication of serious intention. He bowed his head.

On the page with small photographs the conductor gazed out intensely from between Einstein-like tufts of hair. The old man stared back at him, reading of the conductor's life and achievements and digesting the fragmented newspaper judgments of various critics. One would suppose the critics incapable of complete sentences: “luminous performance”, “provocative synthesis”, “masterly evocation”. Beneath these staccato triumphs was a photograph of a woman with her head tilted so that a waterfall of raffish golden curls snared the eye. She looked like a Burne-Jones angel. In the split second before he read the name, the old man realised that this was his daughter.

The picture interested him greatly since he had not seen her for many years. Odd, he thought, that she was so fair when her mother was dark. Had been. Without moving his head he let his eyes travel sideways to confirm that his wife's hair was indeed now grey as a rain cloud and had for this occasion been professionally moulded into soft cumulus curves. His daughter's colouring, then, had come from himself. There was at least that.

Emily Carpenter, he read beneath the picture, studied at Juilliard before taking up a position with the Montreal Philharmonic where she quickly distinguished, et cetera, et cetera … Sydney, one of the four principals … London … chamber orchestra … concerts in Europe. This is the first time since, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, returned to give a concert in her own country.

So, he thought. I learn nothing new. A skeletal life, sprung full-blown from Juilliard like Venus from her birth-shell.
What comes before and after, we know not
. Of course she would deny a prior existence, anything that would have the rank smell of family to it. Anything to extinguish him. He composed his emotions to expect nothing from this reunion. Going through a wardrobe of possible camouflages, fingering fabrics as it were, he chose sardonic detachment. This would be the best he could manage (pure indifference being a cloth too costly for his resources) and would, he hoped, protect him from the giving or taking of blood.

He looked around him at so great a congregation of doves, chirping and fluttering, nesting in balconies above, full of the honourable impulses of community and beauty and tradition, and knew himself a lone bird of prey excluded, crude, macabre, riddled with envy and contempt, capable of butchery.

But he would wear sardonic detachment.

He experimented. “The Mendelssohn should be interesting as
hors d'oeuvre.”

His wife smiled.

“Oh Edward.”
Con poco vibrato
.

She spoke of dreams fulfilled, not Mendelssohn.

They will exclude me, he thought, casting about to staunch incipient bleeding. Over dinner they will discuss shadings I have never suspected in the second movement, and whether woodwinds gave adequate support.

Not that he should care. He was expert at losing children, he could do it blindfold. An elder daughter marched to mad drummers, communing with strange voices. He had been crawling, when his son was born, on his belly through the world's yeasty private parts. What good could come of this?

His son would be somewhere in the concert hall. With that woman.

There was, in spite of all, a memory of passion from which all of them, wife and children, were excluded. He kept it like a relic in a sacristy of his mind. It's glow sustained him. Probably, here and there, people existed who made do with less.