Adeline (3 page)

THEY ARE LYING
on the narrow bed side by side, woman and girl, facing each other like mirror images, each propping the side of her head with the heel of one hand against the temple. The supporting arms are bent at the elbows. The opposing arms are stretched the length of each body, the wrists languid on the curve of the hips, the fingers loosely spanning the upper thighs. They are looking intently into each other’s eyes, not besottedly, as lovers do, but studiously, as if examining rare stamps under a loupe.

You first
, says Adeline, squirming to adjust her pose.

“Patience, little goat,” Virginia chides, leaning in to place her lips playfully against the tip of the adolescent’s nose. Adeline wriggles delightedly, then goes quite still again, softening her gaze so as not to blink.

“Now then, shall I begin?” says Virginia, bringing her own eyes very close to and even with Adeline’s so that she can see all the shapes and shades in the hazel pinwheels of her eyes.

Adeline nods once, gravely.

“Very well. There is the black dot in the bottom half of the iris, exactly in the center.”

My second pupil
, Adeline says.

“Yes,” answers Virginia, “through which you see the first world.”

And what is the first world?
Adeline asks, knowing the words that Virginia will say but needing to hear them again.

“The one that lies behind this one,” Virginia obliges, dreamily.

Adeline sighs at the confirmation, relieved.
Yes.

These answers, said and heard many times before, are the game between them, the reestablishment of sameness.

Adeline prompts again:
Is it very like?

“Not at all like,” Virginia says. “Quite different.” She pauses tenderly to stroke Adeline’s cheek. “But you must tell me. What do you see?”

Adeline drops her propping right arm and rests her head on the pillow, hugging it for comfort. She lets her eyes unfocus and glaze.

I see the man sitting at the end of Mother’s bed
, she begins, very slowly and precisely.
I see the darkened room, the heavy drapes, the bedclothes carefully arranged, the shape of Mother, laid out. I have never seen her lying down. Not ever before. But now she is perfectly still and straight. The composure of her face is
. . . Adeline falters here. She darts her eyes away and back.
Her face is like
. . . She breaks off, unable to go on, and so the other dredges up the description.

“An ecstasy of absence,” Virginia says, smoothing the familiar phrase.

Adeline nods, and her cheek makes a soft breathy sound on the pillow. They lie there quietly for a moment, breathing. Virginia reaches over and brushes a loose strand of hair behind Adeline’s ear.

“And what do you feel?” she asks.

The answer comes quickly this time, sharply, with the usual stab of self-reproach:
Nothing.

She waits again, still stroking Adeline’s hair, patiently, coaxingly, letting the somnolence of ritual take its effect. “What then?” she says at last.

I stand beside the head of the bed, bend and kiss her cheek.

Another pause for the seeing of it, fractured in their minds’ eyes. Then Virginia asks,

“Which is like . . . ?”

Which is like cold iron
, says Adeline, frowning.
Like kissing cold iron.
She closes her eyes wearily.

“Yes,” Virginia confirms. “Yes.”

The recitation is complete, the moment shrined. It casts its pale shadow on them like the watermark of an event too imprinted to erase.

This is where I remain
, Adeline says,
and where I come to you.

“Broken off,” the other continues absently to herself, as if this were all written down somewhere word for word. “The seed of me that was then, and grew no further.”

Adeline says nothing to this. She has no line. But after a long pause, she lifts her head, newly inspired, and asks brightly,

Do you remember Mr. Wolstenholme? The mathematician who used to come and stay with us every summer at St. Ives?

Virginia thinks for a moment. The name, the image of the man are fixed in her memory, yet the man himself, if there was such a thing, is obscure. He is only as she remembers him, sketched and kept, the placeholder for an idea.

“Of course,” she says at last, fondly and only a little dishonestly. “The Woolly One. He sat in his chair and smoked and read and never spoke.”

Yes.

Adeline lets herself down again on the pillow. Rolling on her back, she searches the canvas of the ceiling as if descrying there the image of what she is about to say.

But
, she resumes, with the lurch of disclosure in her voice,
he did speak once.
She waits for the surprise of this to penetrate, then adds solemnly,
I have never told you this before.

This falls between them awkwardly, but with the promise of something meaningfully withheld, the recovery of an event that Adeline has clipped out of time and stored in the hollows of her expurgated self.

She begins again dreamily, without prompting.

It was one of those washed late afternoons of late summer when the blue of the sky is so pale it feels as if it is fading away, but the sun is still fierce and small, glaring from its corner.

This is like something she would have written for practice in her diary, though if she did, it is lost, and Virginia has never found it among her things.

I was sitting on the lawn, squinting out at the waves in the bay, watching the whitish blue blossoms of foam spread and dissolve on the swells. I remember I was thinking that it was like watching lichens growing and dying on rocks, but in sped-up time.

“Good,” Virginia whispers. “That’s very good.” She waits for more, but Adeline is snagged on the memory. “Go on,” Virginia tells her soothingly. “You can.”

Adeline blinks rapidly and sighs. She brings her hand to her throat for comfort, resting it on the birdbeat of the pulse.

It was strange to think this
, she resumes hesitantly.
I remember being a bit startled by it, because I had never really had a thought like that before, and never one with such strange feelings attached to it. The world seemed to be speeding up and slowing down, going liquid and solid at the same time, and me with it.

Virginia considers this. Yes, she thinks, that’s right. That’s right. I remember it now.

“Yes,” she says aloud. “I remember.”

And Adeline continues more confidently, the words coming now without hesitation, the memory tumbling through.

I felt as though I had stepped—like Alice—into another world, or a slice of one that was showing through a gap in this one. It was so odd and hypnotizing, and the longer I looked, the odder and more hypnotizing it became, until I began to worry that I might be having some sort of fit or break or collapse. I didn’t know what, and it frightened me.

It frightened me only a little at first, but then the fear began to grow, getting larger with every breath, spreading like a cramp inside me and then breaking into a rush all through me. I could feel myself becoming physically weaker and weaker, less and less able to rouse myself or squirm or even go rigid against it. And then, finally, I lost the fight. I was paralyzed. I could not move.

Virginia lies back on the bed, seeming to stare into the same imaginary place and time that are locked in the girl’s memory.

I wanted to get up and go inside
, she hears Adeline saying.
Go anywhere to get away from this thing, whatever it was, and I tried several times, but I couldn’t. I could not even get my little finger or my lips to move so that I could make a sign or cry out for help to whoever might be near.

I was helpless, cut off by this kind of horrid waking seizure. I was panicking and trapped, as if I was being held down by some huge invisible weight. I began to think that I must be dying, and that this must be what dying was like, the mind going wild, and the body a sack. The horror of it went on in my head for what seemed like a very long time, with all my worst, most frantic thoughts and feelings swirling and swarming inside this corpse that my body had become.

This is all very familiar now, Virginia thinks, her body beginning to display the agony that Adeline describes. She is stiffening on the bed, as if the event is passing through her. Adeline is going on quickly now, without pause.

I could not put these opposites together. I did not want to. I fought with all the strength I had left, even though I knew it was diminishing all the time. Knowing this only made me fight harder with less, and with no relief.

But then, after a terrible struggle that seemed to last forever, though I suppose it must have lasted only a few minutes or even seconds, this awful whirlwind inside me sucked up the last of my resistance, and I was suddenly . . .

She pauses to get this right.

. . .
well, I suppose I was suddenly released. I gave up. I went slack under the fear. I stopped trying to push it away or avoid whatever it was bringing me to.

She stops again, not quite believing her own words, her eyes seeking out Virginia’s for the necessary contact, but Virginia is too deep now in her mind and in the past to act her part. Adeline must find her there, and by talking.

And so, suppressing the doubt, she goes on.

Then the whole nightmare . . . it somehow turned perfectly tame in an instant. I went numb all over and weightless and the terror
became a kind of nothingness that drew me into it and calmed me. All the parts of myself that had fought loosened their hold on me. Questions, worries, beliefs, doubts—all my thoughts—fell away one by one until I was left there floating, limp and colorless and empty.

“But aware,” says Virginia, rushing in to finish the thought. “Absolutely aware. Without sense. Without thought. Without will. And happier—more at peace—than you had ever been.”

Adeline does not answer. She has broken off, breathlessly, her chest rising and falling, flustered under her hand, which has moved from her neck to her sternum and curled itself into a fist. She has only a little more to say, but it is the most important part. She does not want to leave it for Virginia.

I was in a trance like that
, she says, the words coming quickly once more,
drifting blissfully for I don’t know how long, when all at once in a kind of mindless but somehow knowing flash I understood.

She is speaking now in Virginia’s language, the adult mind changing with the child’s, but the words are still in her mouth, running out.

I knew what was happening. I was not having a fit or a breakdown. I was not even having a vision. I
was
the vision. I wasn’t watching the foam and the waves and the lichen and the rocks change places and repeat. I was not finding their pattern . . . Do you see? . . . I had been woven into it. There was no separation. No girl on the lawn and no sea out there, no world with people and things and spaces and thoughts between. There was just this boundless, flowing sameness beneath everything, and I was part of it.

“Yes,” Virginia answers dreamily. Her eyes, like Adeline’s, are no longer engaged. They are somewhere else, and she is smiling absently at what she has heard, entranced by the recovery, amazed and not amazed at all, but pleased to find this event perfectly preserved, shelved inside her, and retrieved intact.

They are the same now—almost—the woman and the girl, but Adeline is eager to remain apart, just that little bit separate, and poised to finish her side of the story.

Without my noticing it
, she says, animated once more,
Old Woolly had gotten up from his chair, come all the way across the lawn and sat down beside me. I knew he was there only when he put his hand on my arm, his whole heavy hand on my forearm, and then squeezed. I looked at him, still half through the dream, and I thought he must be a ghost. He appeared so suddenly, and he was so pale and startled-looking.

It was so unlike him
, she says, touching Virginia’s shoulder, demonstrating what she wants to say.
Well, you know he never got up from his chair except for meals or if the weather was turning, and he never put his hand on anyone’s arm, especially not like that, as if he didn’t know himself that he was doing it until he was pulling away.

Virginia nods her agreement and places her own hand on her shoulder, gently covering Adeline’s.

And he pulled away so suddenly
, Adeline continues, encouraged by the touch.
As if he had been given a shock. But he never took his eyes from my face.

She turns to look at Virginia full on, adding,

He looked at me almost as you do, searching me, but he was also afraid, so afraid and completely without understanding. He looked for such a long time and in such a panic that I thought perhaps he had been paralyzed or struck just as I had been.

He looked . . . how can I explain this?
She searches for the words, scowling down at herself as if the obstruction is in her bowels or some farther reach of the illusion. She lights up triumphantly when she finds them.

He looked as if he was trying . . . with the whole . . . the whole force of his intellect to reconstruct something . . . like an event . . . an experience . . . no, no a revelation . . . yes, a revelation, like mine, that had been made to him whole, all at once, a moment before, but which had shattered against his categories and was now lying in pieces behind my eyes.

She is well satisfied with this description, and slows, warming to it now with the full power of her instinct.

He didn’t speak for a long time, but finally, when he did speak, it was in a terrible hoarse whisper that was so dry and far away and scratched with pain that it didn’t sound like human speech. “Sadness,” he said. “So much sadness.” That was all. Just that. And then streams of tears burst from his eyes and fell into his woolly beard, and he began shuddering with these awful wrenching sobs.