Blackbird House (12 page)

Virgo, the goddess, always watchful.

Lion stood there for a moment, gulping down the sweetness in the air.
 
He realized that, although he heard his brothers and sisters shouting as they ran through the woods, he couldn’t understand a single word they were saying.
 
Here he was, at the age of twenty, a man with extraordinary talents, and yet he felt like crying.
 
He wanted to be just like the rest of them.
 
He wished for it desperately.

Violet found the application in his pocket on washday.
 
She took it out, unfolded the paper, read it twice, then put it on top of the bureau in her bedroom.

“He filled it out, but he didn’t turn it in,” she told George when he came to undress.

“Maybe he doesn’t want to go.”

George got in bed beside his wife.
 
They had been married for twenty years, enough time for him to know that, although her back was to him, she wanted to talk about this.
 
George slipped his arms around her waist.
 
His love for her felt heavy in his chest.

“He’s meant to go,” Violet said.
 
“How could anyone not want to go to Harvard?”

George West had salt on his skin no matter how often or how thoroughly he washed.
 
He thought about how he’d always wanted Violet, even before she’d ever bothered to look at him, how he’d admired the way her mind worked.

“I wouldn’t want to,” he said.

Violet turned round to face him.
 
The room was dark, but she could see him perfectly well.

“Do you ever think about it?”
 
She didn’t like to bring up the subject, and she knew George liked it even less.
 
There’d been another man before him, Lion’s father.
 
It had all been a wretched mistake, except for the outcome, which Violet had never regretted, not ever, not once.

“Never,” George told her.

“How could you not?”
 
As for Violet, she thought about it every day, even after twenty years.

George laughed.
 
“I think about fish.
 
I think about you.”

“No you don’t.”
 
Violet laughed.
 
When she laughed she sounded like a girl again, but then she started crying.
 
She tried to hide it, she turned away; all the same, George knew.

“I’ll talk to him,” George said.
 
“He’s my son.”

It was a few days before George could manage to get Lion alone.
 
Since George Jr.
 
was now fishing with them, the boat was no good.
 
The house was too crowded, the days were growing shorter, and so George asked Lion to go hunting with him.

“Hunting?”
 
Lion said.
 
They’d never done so before.
 
“What would we hunt?”

“Muskrats,” George said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for two men who had never gone hunting before to suddenly go after creatures who did no one the least bit of harm and had no worth to anyone except each other.

Lion thought it over.
 
He got his coat and put on his heaviest boots.
 
It would be muddy out by Halfway Pond, the best area for muskrats, if that was what a man was after.
 
They left early, while everyone else was asleep; they took the horses and rode down the King’s Highway then into the woods.
 
There was a fellow who lived out here, old Sorrel McCluskey in a cabin he’d built on town land, who’d pretty much hunted the place clean and wore a coat made out of the pelts of the muskrats he’d caught.

“Bad weather for hunting,” Sorrel said when they stopped by his cabin to pay their respects.
 
“Muskrats like fog.
 
Foxes like rain.
 
But a clear day’s good for nothing.”

Well, they would see about that.
 
They were fishermen, after all.
 
They had patience and plenty of time.
 
There probably weren’t more than two muskrats left in the area, but that was fine.

“Your mother wants you to apply for that fellowship,” George West said after they had both gotten comfortable.

They had a nice view of Halfway Pond, but it wasn’t any prettier than the pond on their own property.
 
“The thing is, if I apply for it, I’ll get it.”

“I think your mother knows that.”

“She doesn’t know me the way you do, Dad,” Lion said to his father.

“The way we feel about this place.”

George had brought along a breakfast of two ham sandwiches wrapped in kitchen cloths, and the men set to eating.
 
It was so odd that George felt closer to Lion than he did to any of his natural children.
 
Was it because Lion had been the first, or because Violet had needed him so at that time?
 
Or was it simply because of who Lion was and always would be: George West’s favorite son.
 
While they had potato salad, George thought about telling him the truth that George wasn’t his father, that his real father had been a better man, a smarter man, a professor, as a matter of fact but if George West was anything, he was honest, honest to a fault.
 
To say Lion wasn’t his son felt like a lie, so instead he said, “Well, she’d like for you to apply.”

They didn’t catch anything that day, but Lion brought his application back to Town Hall later in the week, and the entire family was proud of him when Jack Crosby came to town to present him with his fellowship.
 
The whole town planned to gather down at the green on that glorious day more to see Jack Crosby’s automobile than anything else, but there all the same.
 
Lion was to leave with Crosby that was part of the hoopla a ride all the way to Cambridge in this gleaming carriage, rather than the dusty old steamer that left out of Provincetown.
 
All of Lion’s sisters dressed up for the occasion, and George West put on his suit, the one he wore to funerals; Lion’s brothers made a plaque, which they hung on Lion’s bedroom door: Here slept the first man in town to go to Harvard College.

After George had sent the children on to the celebration, he got the horses harnessed to the cart and went to look for Violet.
 
She was in the field of sweet peas that were all abloom, at their glorious peak.
 
The goldfinch came here at this time of year, for the thistle.
 
The crickets’ call was even and slow.

George West leaned one foot up on the stump of an old oak tree.
 
Something white moved across the sky, a cloud, a puff of milkweed, the snow-colored blackbird that lived up by the pond.

“Do you think I made a mistake?”
 
Violet said.

She was not yet forty, but she was tired.
 
She realized that this one August day divided the before from the after.
 
All at once she knew that Lion wouldn’t be coming back.
 
She was right about that, as she had been about everything else.
 
Oh, he’d visit now and then during his four years in Cambridge, but then he’d go on to Oxford, and he’d be given a position in London, teaching higher mathematics at the university.
 
He’d be so concentrated on his work, so very busy, that he wouldn’t even fall in love until he was forty-two, older than Violet was right now.

One day he’d be walking through Hyde Park and he’d see a young woman, an American girl, Helen, visiting an aunt and uncle, and he’d feel as though he was pierced through the heart.
 
Nothing in the world of mathematics had prepared Lion for love.
 
Nothing about it added up.
 
He would think about the sweet peas back home at the moment when he met Helen, how they changed color depending on the sky pale and pearly at dusk, pink under the noon sun, purple and violet and finally gray as the day disappeared.

Lion would send photographs of his wedding, of course, a small affair in a lovely chapel in Knightsbridge.
 
He would send Christmas cards faithfully birthday greetings to all his brothers and sisters, books he thought his father would appreciate, illustrated texts about fishing mostly, hunting occasionally perhaps as a reminder of that day they went looking for muskrat.

To his mother, Lion sent a photograph of himself and Helen and the new baby, Lion Jr.”
 
framed in silver.
 
They were poised in front of his MG roadster, his favorite possession.
 
It was nearly impossible to see the baby’s face, but Helen looked lovely and young, and there were glorious chestnut trees, and the roadster shone like a mirror.
 
Lion had been a fan of motorcars ever since that day when Jack Crosby gave him a ride to Cambridge.
 
It had taken the best part of the afternoon to get to the city, and the motor had twice broken down, but Lion had been won over completely
 
He especially liked the feel of the wind, the sense of flying, the way the trees floated by.

“This is the beginning for you, kid,” Jack Crosby had told him.
 
He’d had to shout so that Lion could hear him over the rattling noise of the motor.
 
They were both wearing goggles to keep the bugs out of their eyes.

Every time he drove his car, Lion thought about that day.
 
The way his senses had been heightened, the way he’d understood, all at once, what his mother had wanted for him.
 
He thought about it when Helen and he went on holiday their first after becoming parents, when the baby was three months, old enough to be left behind with a sitter.
 
They needed a bit of time together, they needed the feel of the wind, the flying, the trees floating by.

“Not too fast,” Helen said, even though she knew he wouldn’t listen.
 
Lion had a mind of his own.
 
Always had.
 
The chestnut trees were flowering, and there were roses blooming.
 
The car was going so fast, the air felt like honey, warm and sunlit.

At home, their baby was asleep in his cradle.
 
He had a wonderful temperament, and that was lucky for everyone.
 
His babysitter would have to stay on, as it would be at least four weeks after the accident before his grandmother could come over by ship to get him.
 
By then the child was sleeping through the night.
 
If that wasn’t luck, what was?
 
He didn’t make a peep.
 
Not a cry, not a wail.
 
He was absolutely lovely.
 
One of a kind.
 
A nurse could have easily been hired to take him across the Atlantic; certainly he’d be no problem.
 
Even the sitter who’d grown so attached to him had volunteered.
 
But Violet wouldn’t hear of it.
 
No one would make such a far journey with this child, except for her.
 
Not as long as she had anything to say about it.

THE CONJURER’S HANDBOOK

Lion West, Jr.”
 
was a man in love.
 
He thought about how this had happened to him at the absolute worst time in his life, and he wondered if that’s the way things were in the world.
 
A person thought he was headed north, only to have the ice melt away.
 
He thought it was daylight, only to realize what he was seeing was the trajectory of stars in sky.
 
Lion was already engaged to a perfectly nice girl from Boston when he was sent to New Jersey for his basic training; he was still engaged to her when he was shipped off to France, and then to Germany, there for the liberation.
 
Lion was a mathematician, like his father before him, but he had also studied German at Harvard, and was fluent enough to be thought useful.
 
He was steady and smart, and more than anything, he was loyal.
 
And yet, as time passed, that perfectly nice girl he’d been engaged to drifted further away from him; she’d become Carol from Wellesley her easy temperament and innocence more and more of a puzzle, considering the times they lived in.
 
Her memory had been replaced by the intensity of the things Lion saw all around him each and every day: blood and sorrow, starvation and terror, all kept pushing her out of his mind until she was tiny and elusive, a firefly of desire.
 
They’d seemed so perfect together and their future had seemed completely assured, and then, one day, he couldn’t remember her name.

Lion was among the men who walked into a camp north of Munich on an April day They had a guide along with them, a woman who could speak not only German and English, but French, Italian, Polish, and even Yiddish, and who could therefore say, Show us to the dying, the children, the lost, in all those many ways.

“These poor people,” Lion said of the people in the camp.
 
The idea of

the sort of horror that could exist erased everything he’d known

before.
 
What had he been thinking all his life?
 
What had he been

dreaming of?
 
Columns of figures that always made sense, that’s what he

had always admired.
 
He was attracted to order in a world where there

was none, and now he felt empty.
 
When the wind came up,

it cut right through him in some strange way that made him feel as though he were only half a person.

“I’m one of those people.”
 
The interpreter was a plain woman, a few years older than Lion, with sharp cheekbones and a wide mouth.
 
“I’m a Jew.
 
Do you have something you’d like to say about that?”