Whistling for the Elephants (6 page)

‘Were
they here? The animals?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’
she said.

‘How?’

‘The SS
Uritania
from Europe and then Amherst’s finest railway. They had to walk
from the station. Couldn’t get the giraffe in a cab.’ It sounded like a joke
but she said it seriously so I didn’t laugh. The brown woman reached her hand
out to the picture for a second. ‘Poor Phoebe.’

Then
she sort of fluttered off I followed her into the next room. The room beyond,
with the french windows overlooking the terrace, was entirely white. Well, ex—
white. Ghost white. The carpets, the curtains, the walls and all the furniture
had once been polar. Now they had a grey sheen of cobwebs. Despite the dust, I
could see the river flowing purple through the rose-colored glass of the
windows. A real moth fluttered from the grey curtains and made me jump. The
insect woman nodded at it. What did I know, maybe they were family.

‘They
say the first primitive moths fluttered over giant dinosaurs a hundred and
forty million years ago. Imagine that. The butterflies came much later. Forty
million years. Really they are the new kids on the block. The moth is
beautiful. Here, look.’ From inside her folds of brown clothing she removed a
large black-rimmed magnifying glass, which she held up to the moth near my
head. ‘Look. See how it has a tiny kind of hook-and-bristle thing linking its
fore and hind wings? It can fly better than an airplane. Land more accurately
than a helicopter. Of course some female moths can’t fly at all.’ She put down
the magnifying glass and looked at me.

‘Did
you know that there are more species of beetle than any other type of insect?’

‘No.’

‘Butterflies
and moths are unique. Almost every part of their body from their wings to their
feet is covered by thousands of delicate scales. That’s what gives them colour
and pattern, but we don’t see them. Do you like insects?’

‘I don’t
know. I don’t like spiders.’

‘A
spider could catch this moth. Some spiders can make a smell like a female moth
and attract the male.’ She nodded at me confidentially. ‘Attraction is all
about chemicals.’

‘Whose
house is this?’ I asked.

‘It is
mine.’ She gently touched a cobweb which glistened against the tinted glass. ‘My
father built it for my mother. John, big John. It was the house of love. He
wanted to marry her before they even met.’ The house of love stood silent as
the woman sighed.

After a
moment she pointed to the spider’s work. ‘See this web? See how it is shaped
like the sun and its rays? Spiders always spin them in the morning to remind
people of their divine ancestor. It was Grandmother Spider who brought the sun.’
Behind her the tinted glass made ripples of palest crimson, aubergine, blue,
yellow and green on the river. ‘Do you think spiders feel?’ she asked. I had
never thought about it. I was sure my family had never thought about it. We
were English.

‘I don’t
know.’

‘Do you
know why people hate spiders? Because they aren’t cute. I like trapdoor
spiders. They live in the ground and make silk-lined tubes. Sometimes they have
silk trapdoors and they can shoot out from them to capture passing insects. I
put one in alcohol once.’

‘What?’

‘A
trapdoor spider. They twitch awhile if you put them in alcohol but after that
you can keep them for ever. She had babies on her back. I took them off with
tweezers and put her in alcohol. After a while I thought she was dead so I
dropped the babies in. The babies floated down in the jar and as they passed
their mother, the spider reached out her legs, folded her babies beneath her
and clasped them to her till she died. I think it was a reflex. I figure she
would have seized anything floating near. Of course it wouldn’t have happened
if I had used chloroform instead of alcohol. That kills them stone dead.’ The
insect woman clutched herself smaller. ‘Then I thought about it. The spider’s
web is very complicated. If they can do that, why can’t they love their kids as
well? You don’t know what’s in the mind of a spider, do you?’

The
light was fading but we sat there on the floor, trying to imagine the silent
spinning spider with the potentially rich inner life harbouring a riot of
emotions. Had I known what it meant I think I would have felt almost philosophical.
Until a single word cut through the silence.

‘Cunt.’

Even in
the richness of the English language there are not many words which can have so
immediate an effect. I had never heard it before and it had much the same
impact on me then that it might still have in the middle of a BBC wildlife
documentary. Cunt. It is a splendidly satisfying, sharp sound. The least
onomatopoeic word in the world. I looked through the doors to the tower room.

High up
on a balcony I could just see someone standing. The last rays of the sun were
behind them, spilling down from the tower windows. I couldn’t see if it was a
man or a woman. Certainly it was a person. A tall person with what appeared to
be a parrot on their right shoulder. My storyteller folded up like a moth and
scuttled away.

I ran. Out
of the house, back through the gardens, across the tracks over the river and on
to my bike. I was frightened but all the way home I couldn’t stop thinking
about spiders. Even steeped in alcohol I couldn’t imagine my mother reaching
out to haul me in.

Chapter
Three

Donna Marie Dapolito lived
next door but one at Cherry Blossom Gardens. Although she was twelve, and two
years older than me, I wanted her to be my friend. I thought if we became pals
she could tell me if I still had cooties from sipping her cream soda. After my
visit to the Burroughs House I held off exploring for a while. Most afternoons
I would just drift up and down on my bike past Donna Marie’s house. Mother and
Father might be beautiful people with perfect manners but the Dapolitos — that
was a family. They had the untidiest house in the street but it also looked
like the most fun. There was the best part of a 59 Oldsmobile, several
abandoned bikes and most of an old bathroom on the front lawn. Round back they
had a trampoline. It was the noisiest house on the block. Boy, could the Dapolitos
yell. Aunt Bonnie yelled and her kids, Donna Marie and Eddie Jr, yelled. The
noise was as much part of the neighbourhood rhythm as the banging of the
halyards across the water. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t used to noise. Not
just because Father’s voice never rose above a soft breath and Mother rarely
got up, but because it wasn’t welcome in our house. Everything, every footstep,
was taken quietly, carefully and with much planning, preferably by map.

Three
of the houses in our dead end had their own floating docks with gangways from
the backyard down to the harbour edge. There was ours, the Dapolitos’, and
Sweetheart’s, who lived between us. The Dapolitos’ dock ran way out into the harbour.
Uncle Eddie was in salvage. He wasn’t a yeller. He left that to the family
while he worked the waters of the harbour all day on his flat-bottomed boat
with a large crane. When he wasn’t pulling things up from the bottom of the
river and the sea he was helping rich people move their yachts. Uncle Eddie
knew every inch of the seabed. He’d either dragged it or fished it. Other than
recycling from the deep, fishing was Uncle Eddie’s life. He was a big man.
Everything about him was big; he was maybe six foot four and as wide as an ox.
Every year he won the ‘Biggest Hands in the County’ competition at the Harbour
Island Carnival. Eddie Jr said his dad could catch a shark by just scooping it
out of the water with his bare hands.

Aunt
Bonnie was the thinnest woman still actually breathing in the United States.
She was thin because she never ate anything. She just sat on the back stoop
drinking Budweiser straight from the can and watching over her kids. The Dapolitos
didn’t have much money but whatever her kids wanted they got. She was always
there for them. Never asleep when they got home. I guessed it was because she
spent so much time on her family that Aunt Bonnie didn’t really ‘make the most
of herself’. She always wore trousers (pants) and I think she even cut her own
jet-black hair. Maybe she had been pretty once. Now she just looked kind of
used up. If she were a Dixie cup you would take a new one. Of course they weren’t
my real aunt and uncle but that was what they said I should call them.

I tried
making friends with the Dapolito kids a few times before I finally got invited
over, but it wasn’t a big success. I kept getting little things wrong. Like the
time I was waiting with the Good Humour man on the corner, trying to decide
what kind of ice cream I wanted from his truck. He stood there patiently in his
short-sleeved white shirt, skinny black bow tie, black pants and matching
peaked cap. Donna Marie and Eddie Jr came tornadoing over from their house.

‘Hey
you, English, you wanna go to the zoo later?’

I did.
I desperately did but I didn’t want to look keen. ‘Sure. I mean in a minute. I
was just getting a lolly.’

Eddie Jr,
who was only seven, looked at me and started laughing. ‘A lolly? What the hell
is a lolly?’ And they began to chant the word. ‘Lolly, lolly!’ It was a cooties
kind of chant and then Father arrived from the station and I could see him
eyeing the Good Humour man’s ready-made bow tie with disgust so I went inside
and never got the ice cream or went to the zoo.

The
second time I was trying to see if I could ‘pop a wheelie’ on my bike. Mother
was asleep and Father was at work so I concentrated on my chopper. Trying to
make the whole thing rear up on the back wheel like a high-spirited horse. I
had just fallen heavily onto the hot tarmac when Aunt Bonnie drove past in her
car piled high with kids. I had a leg full of grit and I could feel a small
rivulet of blood making its way down the inside of my knee-socks but I got up
and smiled.

‘Hey,
kid, you oughta come. Get in,’ she yelled. It seemed like an order, so I leaned
my frisky bike against the stop sign and got in. I felt really pleased with
myself I had sussed car-getting-in technique. The very back of the Dapolito
station wagon had a large window which was always wound down. You could open
the back like a door if you wanted, but that was not cool. The trick was, if
the window was down, never to open the door. You climbed in through the window.
I climbed in and landed on a pile of kids. I don’t remember seatbelts in those
days. I don’t even know if cars had them. If they did no one used them.
Certainly in Aunt Bonnie’s car you were mostly held in by the sheer number of
other kids. There were a lot of big boys in the back of the car. I listened as
they talked, making myself as small as possible.

‘The
minister is so weird.’ It was an argument not a statement. ‘He says he talks
direct to God.’

‘Yeah,
right. That’s only since he found his wife giving head to that Cuban refugee in
the belltower during the Christmas service. You’d need to talk to God after
that.’

The big
boys laughed. The world was becoming more and more incomprehensible to me. It
wasn’t till we got to the Methodist church that I found out what we were doing.
Boat safety classes. Presumably under God’s supervision. Being right on the
water, Sassaspaneck was a big sailing community. All the kids in the neighbourhood
took ‘Boat Safety’ down at the Methodist church. About a dozen of us, most from
Aunt Bonnie’s car, fell into the church, where we stood giggling. The minister,
Reverend Harlon, was wandering up and down the aisles babbling loudly. A man in
desperate conversation with his Lord. He had once been famous for talking in
tongues. Apparently it had been very impressive. Then his wife left him and he
had a kind of breakdown. After that he
only
talked in tongues and no one
liked to be the first person to be less than impressed so they just let him get
on with it. Harry Schlick, Judith’s husband, boomed into view.

‘Come
on, you bunch of little jerks. Let’s go. Hup two.’ We filed into the hall at
the side. No one argued with Harry. Harry had been in the Army in Europe or, as
Mrs Shepherd would have it, Yarrup. He had fought for Yarrup. Indeed if you met
him you might think Yarrup owed its freedom to Harry. Apart from his role as
Freedom Fighter for the old country, Harry had two claims to fame. He was Mayor
of Sassaspaneck and he had been quarterback in his senior high-school year when
the Sassaspaneck Senators had scored a perfect season. Amherst’s gift to women,
he owned Schlick’s Corset Place
(Est. 1946)
next to the drugstore. He
also ran Boat Safety. He was older than Judith. I guess he must have been
around fifty that summer. A little younger than Father anyway. Still
good-looking though. A large man with a chiselled face chipped straight off of
Mount Rushmore. It was a hundred percent USA. He had a huge jaw and a fantastic
number of straight teeth set under a neat pencil-line moustache. Far too many
teeth to be of practical value except possibly to look good in team photos.

‘Okay,
shape up, here we go. Grab a life preserver, your port and starboard reminder
cards and take a look at this.’ Like a magician with an oversize rabbit at his
disposal, Harry produced a large life-size rubber doll.