The Tricking of Freya (30 page)

I missed my mother. Who was keeping track of her canes? I imagined
her sitting alone knitting Icelandic sweaters in our darkened house,
haunted by ancestor photos. Sometimes I talked about leaving school and
coming home again, but Mama wouldn't hear of it.

"College is your time, Freya," she'd say. "I'm fine here. You put me right
out of your mind."

If only.

Iceland and Gimli were easier to forget. The immigrant Icelanders are
so obscure you could easily go your entire life in this country and never
hear a word about them. The English, the French, the Italians, the Irish,
the Eastern Europeans, the Japanese and Chinese, the Mexicans, the
Norwegians and the Swedes, even the histories of the African slaves and
Native Americans were touched upon in my college history classes. Not
fully, not truthfully, but at the very least mentioned. Of the Icelanders
who settled in Manitoba, Ontario, British Columbia, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, even Utah, not a word. And why is that? you ask. For
you yourself, I imagine, have never heard of us either. New York, New Jersey, New England, New London, New Brunswick all the old world
places made new but New Iceland? Nobody's heard of New Iceland.
Was it because we were so wretchedly oppressed? Hardly. If anything, the
opposite was true. We assimilated more quickly than most, with our fair
features and devotion to literacy, our ability to persist through hardship
etched in our genes. No, the answer is simple enough, it seems to me:
there were too few of us to matter. All said, only fifteen thousand Icelanders emigrated at the tail end of the nineteenth century-a droplet
lost among the million-size waves of immigrants who flooded North
America's shores. It's no wonder we never made it into my college history
books.

And that was fine with me. Gimli and the house called Oddi; Sigga and
her Blue Book; the old ladies at Betel recounting their dreams; the old men at
Betel peering at chess pieces through wire-rimmed glasses; the annual Fjallkona spectacle; Gisli and his lying rhymes; Stefan and his historical expeditions; Birdie and her Word Meadow-especially Birdie-gone, gone, gone. Icelandic? I never spoke a word. When people asked about the origin of my
name, as they inevitably did, I answered, Scandinavian. So pleasingly generic.
Or sometimes, A Norse goddess. Guys liked that. Guys liked me. I was tall and
blond and thin. And if I bordered on being too blond with my wispy whiteblond hair, and too gangly thin, and so pale I verged on ghostly-no matter.
My near-albino looks were considered exotic; my reserve was mistaken for
confidence, my shame for mystery. No one knew me, of course; I let no one
in, distanced myself most especially from myself. Alcohol is good for that. I
skidded along on the desperate surface of things. Only at night did my old life
emerge, dream images flashing like a drowning swimmer bursting to the surface: the ice cave, Brekka, Askja. Kaleidoscope dreams splintered with fragments of lava and glacier and ash and the brightest greenest grass on the
planet.

It was at the end of my junior year, on a hungover May morning, that my
mother dropped dead in the A & P supermarket. Yes, just like that. No
comma this time. Just a full and sudden stop. Aneurysm. Related to the original fall, the coma, the brain damage? The doctors couldn't say. They weren't
sure. She didn't suffer, they assured me. But I did.

How could Mama up and die like that? Before I'd ever had a chance to
confess, to tell her It was me. Before I ever had a chance to apologize for
vanishing to Iceland. Granted, I'd had years and years to say those things.
But I was young, I believed I had years and years more. It never occurred to
me that my mother could die. My father had died, my aunt had died, but
my mother? After her first lucky resurrection, I guess I'd come to believe
her immortal, or at least ... enduring.

I left school and returned home to Connecticut. Stefan and my mother's
dear friend Vera flew in from Winnipeg. It was a shock to see them after so
many years. But everything was a shock. Vera arranged the funeral, she was
good at that kind of thing. She'd run the Ladies Aid, she'd been the Fjallkona. Stefan came as Sigga's emissary. Sigga was ninety, too frail to travel.
He was to discuss with me my plans for the future. He was to convince me
to come back with them to Gimli. If only for a visit. It'll do you good. It'll do
your amnia good. Maybe in August, for Islendingadagurinn? Maybe, I finally agreed. I was nothing if not a good liar. Not brilliant like your mother, Cousin, but competent, convincing. I would return to school, I promised,
as soon as the house sold. Above all, I insisted, I would be fine.

As soon as Vera and Stefan returned to Gimli I began to cry. Weeks on
end. It was not the only thing I did. I also watched television, lying on the
living room rug with my chin propped in my hands, my feet crossed in the
air behind me. Talk shows, mainly. A lot of incredible things were going on
in people's lives. Twins separated at birth, living with a longing and never
knowing what it was ... reunited at last. Fathers who had never said "I love
you" to their sons ... choking out the words for the first time. When the
guests cried, I cried. But where was my second chance?

After three weeks of crying I turned off the television. I would contact
the real estate agent Vera had found and start the process of selling the
house. I would pack up Mama's things and ... do what with them? I
walked through the house. My bones felt oddly light, like the wings of
origami birds. And my vision seemed strangely keen. Certain objects belonging to Mama seemed to ... glow. Glow is too strong a word. To emanate. As if something of my mother remained inside. Like a cut flower in
a vase, dead but with some life still coursing through the stem. This was
how I saw my mother's hairbrush sitting on top of the television set, the
reading glasses attached to a woven red cord hanging from the kitchen
doorknob, a pair of brown leather loafers, molded exactly to the shape of
my mother's small wide feet. The essence of Mama's life still clinging to
her belongings. But how long, I worried, until that essence would begin to
evaporate?

I found my mother's camera, which itself did not have the glow-the
camera had not been much used-then drove Mama's car to the drugstore
and bought a roll of black-and-white film. Why black and white? It seemed
more ... objective. Scientific. By the time I got home the sun was setting. I
had no flash. I had to work fast. I brought each object into the den, where a
narrow beam of setting sunlight streamed onto the carpet. First I laid one of
Mama's lace cloths on the floor. Then each object by turn hairbrush,
loafers, sunglasses-I photographed, from different angles. Even through
the lens I could distinguish the glow of my mother rising out of the objects
from the ordinary late afternoon sun falling onto them.

A week later the photographs were back from the drugstore. I sat behind the wheel of Mama's car and opened the package. The hairbrush was a
hairbrush. The shoes shoes. The glasses glasses. All nearly lost against the
white lace background. It was something about the exposure, I decided.
That was why you couldn't see the glow. So I took the train into Manhattan,
to a professional photography lab on the far West Side. Klaus Steinman's
Photographic Ltd. "Specializing in black & white," the ad in the yellow
pages claimed. I took a screeching old freight elevator two floors down,
then rang a bell on the counter and waited. A small man with age spots on
his forehead and only a lick of white hair down the middle of his skull like
a skunk appeared from a back room. Klaus Steinman himself, the hottempered ex-Prussian army officer who would become my first employer,
although of course I didn't know that yet.

I handed the package of photographs to him. "They didn't come out very
well," I explained. My voice sounded thick; I hadn't spoken to another person
since the funeral. "I was wondering if you could fix them. Reprint them."

"Let's take a look-see." His voice was gruff, with a heavy accent I couldn't
place. He opened the envelope and spread the prints on the counter. Then
he smiled oddly, and I saw for an instant the photographs through his eyes:
hairbrush, shoes, sunglasses on a white cloth on top of a green shag rug. Except it wasn't green but a medium shade of gray. He was shaking his head,
still smirking.

"Not sure what you are wanting such pictures for," he said finally.
Quizzically.

There was no reason to tell him, but I did. "They were my mother's."

"Ah." Nodded his speckled head. Then he opened up the envelope again
and held the negatives against a board that was lit up. He clipped each strip
to the board and studied it.

"There was a light," I started to explain.

"Not enough light, that's the problem, missy." He didn't understand.
"But I can work on these for you. Get them a bit sharper. Bit of dodging do
the trick."

When I came in the next week to pick them up, the photos were
sharper, clearer. But still no glow. He sensed my disappointment. "Best we
could do, I'm afraid. Of course, there's always more tricks we could try, if
you're willing to pay for it."

I nodded; he took me by the arm. "Come on back, I'll show you some
things we can try. Ever been in a darkroom?"

I shook my head and followed him through a curtain down a hallway.
"This door here," he said, is called a light trap. Does just what it says. Go
through it like a revolving door. Keeps the light from leaking in."

In the darkroom there was only one red light on. Everything seemed to
glow. The air was close and stank like vinegar, and worse. Klaus made me
pick one of the prints for him to work on. I chose the one of the shoes. The
shoes had glowed the most. I watched while he fitted the negative in the
machine, set a timer, flicked a switch, and in the brief seconds of exposure
fluttered a piece of paper over the negative with the delicacy of a butterfly
in flight. Ding. The light went out; the exposed paper he dropped into a
tray. And there while I watched emerged my mother's shoe. It didn't matter,
then, that the glow was gone. It was enough to see Mama's shoe come out
of the darkness like that. I wanted to do it. To give some image its watery
birth.

"Can I try?" I asked, surprising myself.

"Don't see why not. No business now anyway. Lemme just put up the
CLOSED sign."

He left me alone in the darkroom. I stared at the print of my mother's
shoe, which now hung by metal clips to dry. I walked across the room to the
red light. It had the kind of switch that's set into the cord, a small nubby
wheel you slide with your thumb. I pushed it and it clicked and for a moment I stood alone in the darkness. Absolute. I took a deep whiff of vinegarair into my lungs and held it there. Not breathing. Still.

I never tried to explain to Klaus about the glow, even after he took me on
as an unpaid intern, then a lowly apprentice, then after three years a fullfledged printer. Certain things can't be photographed as seen. You get as
close as you can.

I sold Mama's house, but there wasn't much money left over-she'd
mortgaged it to pay for my college-and I used up the proceeds subsidizing
my apprenticeship. A few blocks of day are all I see on either side of my
subway ride, East Side to West Side on the L train. Then I drop down two
floors on a rickety freight elevator to the Sub. Such is my life, if you'll grant
me that. A sub-life. All of it I considered temporary. When I was good and ready I'd emerge from my lair, hungry for world again. I was just calling
time out, getting my bearings.

Meanwhile, the earth circled the sun. Then again. Years passed. Eight, to
be exact. I continue taking my own photographs, seeking to animate objects.
A bit of the pagan, I suppose. I have boyfriends here and there, most less
than a year, one for nearly three. All make the same complaint: Ice Queen. A
conspiracy of exes. For friendship I rely mostly on my darkroom compatriot,
Frank, who is gay and nearly as reclusive as I am. Each in our own lightsealed cell, we listen to the same talk radio shows, chat on the intercom, and
ally ourselves against Klaus and his rages.

Before my mother died, before I dropped out of college, I'd imagined
that forging an adult life involved setting goals, making decisions, taking actions. Not so! My underground existence simply formed itself, untethered
to any grand plan.

And that, Cousin, is how I got from there to here. Abbreviated, yes. But
this is not supposed to be my story, exactly. Or only partly. This is the story
of how I knew your mother, and then, how I came to find out about your existence. I have to stay focused. I may find you soon, and I want this letter to
be finished when I do.

This past August a thick cream-colored envelope arrived in my mailbox, an
invitation to the one hundredth birthday celebration of my one and only
grandmother Sigga. And what did I do with it? Nothing. I took no action, I
let it pend.