Ghost Dance (30 page)

Jacqueline Kennedy

“This is black cornmeal,” he said, lifting the first bag up. “After my death, pass it around your head four times and cast it aw av. This makes the road dark so as to prevent dream visits by the spirit. Don’t follow me,” my grandfather said, “no matter how much I beg.

“The white cornmeal comes next,” he said, and he pointed to the second bag. “Take the white cornmeal in the right hand and sprinkle it, saying, ‘May you offer us your good wishes. May we be safe. May our lives be fulfilled.’ Please don’t follow me, no matter what.

“Now, children,” his voice grew softer, “on the fourth morning after my death, leave the windows and doors open so that my spirit can leave the house for good. There,” he said, pointing to the third bag—pine resin incense. “Burn this on the fourth day.”

It’s December. And gradually now I feel it coming on. The mildness breaks. Drafts of cold air move down from Canada. This will be the harshest winter in decades, meteorologists say.

He heard the gray screech owl and knew the cold was coming. He looked into the sky and began to count the stars, despite the legend that said to count even one would surely mean his death. He did not care. He thought he saw a great gourd of ashes in the sky about to spill over. Still counting he took the golden-haired child and pierced arrows through her eyes, then took off her scalp. It was the end.

“I know nothing about you, Jack.”

“Oh, Vanessa,” he sighed. “You know all that is necessary,” he whispered.

“I know nothing.”

“Would it help? Do you think it would really help?” He smiled.

“I don’t know.”

“What would you like to know?” he asked. “Where I grew up? Something like that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Detroit. I grew up in Detroit. Does that help you at all? Does that change anything that will happen here? I don’t think so, Vanessa.” He smiled, put on his wire-rimmed glasses, and studied my face. “Oh, love,” he said, “it won’t help us.”

When my brother was in Detroit he sent me a postcard of the Ford Motor Company plant. Only my name and address appeared on the back.

I stumbled into the white room. The mercury fell. I hugged my black coat to me. White envelopes fell from my pockets and the package of needles. Jack looked into my eyes.

“Can’t you do anything,” he cried, “but surrender?”

When I think of Detroit, I do not think of the men who pull themselves from their beds each gray day to hug fender after fender until their backs curve like wheels into retirement; I think of you, Jack, just a boy surrounded by books in your father’s library. You’ve read there all day and now your eyes are beginning to hurt. You take off your glasses and watch the afternoon as it slowly surrenders its light. I wonder where your father is—probably working on some difficult equation in another part of the house. You set up the chess set and wait for him. You have just finished reading
The Rise and Pall of the Third Reich
and wonder what it is all about. You’ve never heard it mentioned before, not even in passing. You punch out numbers on your father’s calculator and try to count up the dead, as if you could. Is this why your father’s head always seems to be bowed? Why no one speaks German in your house anymore, not Father, not Mother, not Use? Not the eldest Uncle Werner or the youngest cousin Christa? And Wagner, once Grandfather’s favorite composer, is missing from the shelves of records now. Why? You would ask your father these questions but sense that you should not, that it would draw you even further apart. Besides this, chess requires great concentration and you must not speak. When he walks into the room you stand. His wire-rimmed glasses seem to shine in the failing light. You wonder how the equation is going but do not ask; it would be an indiscretion. Sometimes you wish you could see his brain. It must be a wonderful thing.

“Your move,” Father says quietly. You are only nine but already a good match for him. As you put your hand on the pawn’s carved head and move it toward the center of the board, I am just being born. You move again and I cry out. A large woman with long thick hair comes into the room with “refreshment.” Her English is unsure of itself. Now and then a “weights” still slips from her tightened lips. Something troubles her. Is this your mother?

“Wagner,” my father says.

“Wagner.”

“Mahler.”

“Mahler.”

“Bruckner.”

“I couldn’t stay away” was what he said now more and more often, coming at unexpected times, not to our hotel anymore but to my apartment where he knew he could find me. He will disappear, I thought, as simply, as mysteriously, as he has arrived, with a word about the weather, a shrug, a last cigarette. But he had not disappeared. I saw him more and more frequently. “Please,” he’d say into the intercom, “I couldn’t stay away.”

His voice was not tender, I thought, as I pressed the button that would open the door downstairs and allow him up. No, there was no tenderness there. It was not love that brought him here; it was something else. I don’t think even he could understand his own actions anymore, what it was that kept leading him here to me. He looked bewildered, angry, as I opened the door. “I couldn’t stay away,” he hissed.

I smiled. “Come in,” I said. “Did you really miss me?” I laughed.

He took my arm. “I try never to think of you when we are apart,” he said softly. “It makes me crazy. Sometimes just the idea of the force of your thighs crushes all thoughts from me. I can’t remember anything: where I was going or what I wanted. This is something I did not plan on, Vanessa, something I did not foresee—your power.”

“I have no power.”

He laughed. “It is what you love to believe about yourself. It is what you want to believe.”

“I am at your mercy.”

“Ha!” he laughed.

“Who are you then?” I asked. “I don’t even know your last name. I don’t know anything about you—why you are here at all, what you are trying to do with all these games. That’s power? I want to know where you go when you leave me. I want to know what your mother looks like. I want you to tell me things.”

“You already know everything,” he said. “You know me only too well.”

“Just to know where you sleep when you’re not here, what your days are like.” I began to cry.

“What’s with you, Vanessa?” he asked, taking my hand in his. “What’s with you, anyway?” My hand was smooth, unlined. Like a stone it felt heavy, impossible. Jack’s hand was large, rough, veined, as if it had lived a thousand lives, had a thousand stories to tell, all of them off-limits to me.

He took me in his arms. Slowly his large hands fumbled with the robe I was wearing.

“Oh, love,” he whispered, “what’s happening to us?”

“You think you can be free,” I said, “because I know so little? Because you keep me ignorant?”

“On the contrary,” he said. Anger rose in his voice. “I will never really be free of you.” I stepped back.

“Don’t you know that one simple thing vet?” he asked, nearing me. In one strangely gentle motion, he tied my hands behind my back with the belt of my bathrobe, which he’d hung around his neck.

“We can pretend that you are the dog—but it is only a game. Get down,” he said. “Good. Now just watch me.” He patted my head. Slowly he took off his clothes and folded them neatly and placed them in a pile.

He flipped me over suddenly, took his necktie and tied my feet together.

“Now,” he said, “we can pretend, if you want, that you are the one who cannot move, that you are the one who is going now here, that you are a poor innocent victim of circumstances. This big man has come and tied your hands behind your back and now your feet together and you cannot escape.”

He just looked at me lying on the floor. “Poor, poor Vanessa.” He tied his handkerchief around my head so that I could not see. “You want to be the victim forever. How very dull—the one who’s been wronged, abandoned.” I could feel his mouth at my ear, his hot, urgent breath.

“Who hasn’t been asked to suffer terribly?” he whispered fiercely. “How long can vou go on like this?” he demanded. “You can get out of it if you want. Picture yourself free,” he said. “Fight back.” His voice sounded very sad. I began to thrash on the floor trying to get my feet loose. My arms ached.

“You have the ability to escape, Vanessa, but you don’t want to.”

“I want to,” I said.

“Not badly enough. You are in charge of your own life. You are in charge even now.”

“Help me,” I said.

“How can you possibly believe that a man, a stranger really, can come in here and rescue you—help you—save you?” He laughed. “Don’t buy into it, Vanessa. It is the myth of the oppressor.”

“I don’t care. Do what you want.”

“Fight back. Save yourself.”

I began to cry. “Help me,” I said.

“We’ll sit here all night this way.”

“Please,” I said.

“Be ingenious.”

“Please,” I whispered.

“Fight back,” he said in desperation. “Don’t give up.” He untied the handkerchief from my eyes so that I might watch. “Please,” he said. “Don’t make me do this.”

He took his leather belt from the pile of clothes, raised it over his head, hesitated, I thought, for a moment, then lowered it, hitting me over and over again. He was crying as he hit me harder and harder. “Say something,” he screamed. He could not stop now. I felt only pain, nothing else. I could not see him, but only his motions, only his sobs.

“Why?” I cried. “Why?”

“Forgive us,” he said, and I felt a great warmth flowing over me.

“Why?” I whispered, in my blood voice.

“Please, say stop,” he screamed. “Please, say something.” It was the last thing I heard. I must have passed out.

“Untie me,” I said when I regained consciousness, “now.” I could not feel my own body. He said nothing but only followed mv instructions. I was covered with blood. “Lift me to the bed,” I said, “gently. Be careful.” Without a word he did this, too.

“Jack,” I said, and, hearing his name now in my broken voice, he started to weep.

“Please. Please hold me,” I whispered, “just hold me for a minute.

“Now sit in the chair,” I said calmly. “Sit there and watch me sleep. Take care of me. Do you understand?” He nodded. He sat in the chair and said nothing. I slept. I could not bear to stay awake.

When I awoke, he was sitting next to the bed on the floor, his face in his hands. He had not slept. He moved his hand toward me. I pulled away.

“You have the ability to get better,” he said with a huge tenderness, an impossible sorrow, “but you have to want it, you have to work at it. You can do whatever you want.”

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” I said. “What gives you the right to tell me how to live, to show me the way?”

“You’ve suffered enough, Vanessa, enough.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, my friend. I can never suffer enough.”

“It’s not your fault that your whole family is gone.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“Look at you, just look at you.” His anger filled his whole body, the whole room. With the sheer force of his anger he pulled the mirror from the door of the bedroom and brought it over to me. “Look at yourself.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” I said.

“Live,” he cried, “or die. Do you understand what I’m saying to you? You’re going to die, Vanessa.”

“Maybe,” I said. “What does it matter to you?”

“Don’t die, Vanessa. Please don’t die,” he said, and I heard a great wailing. “Invent the wav to live with this. Do anything you have to,” he whispered, kissing me. “Save yourself.”

The day we bought the bord the sun was shining, and the car salesman, who wore a plaid seersucker jacket, whistled “For Once in My Life” as he watched my mother slip one long leg then the other into the small red car. The glare was so great that day that my parents seemed to disappear in it when the Pinto’s doors were shut and they took the car for a trial run around the block.

This cannot go on, Fletcher—you an old man carrying your bitter root across the country in a jute sack. Let it go. Bury it deep in the sand. Let it grow downward into darkness now as it curls from the bag into your arms and crawls onto your back, as it wraps all around you. I always believed you: that somehow there might be a way to live.

Back in Detroit, you, too, loved Wagner and crept to the closet at night, after everyone was asleep, to reach up for him. On those nights something stretched in me, too, and I turned in my crib and cried out. And a few years later, when you lifted your dinner of meat and noodles to your mouth, I shuddered, knowing you were somewhere, waiting for me.

Father and Fletcher sat in the front and Mother sat in the back seat where she liked it best. She closed her eyes. She would try to rest in the car, enjoy life more, spend more time with the children.

Miss Cameron, the associate professor of English, pauses in front of me and smiles, helping me to gather the strength to go on.

As she lit a cigarette from the new pack she had just bought, we tell ourselves that she wanted to live forever.

There were three phone calls that night. The first came from her mother, regal even through the dirty receiver, her image instantly conjured with the sound of her voice. She was wondering whether France, rather provincial, she thought, on her last visit, was the right place for her daughter to pursue her studies in the history of art. Florence undoubtedly would have been the more logical choice. But there was nothing to worry about, her daughter assured her, then asked about her father and promised to write. After a few more monosyllabic minutes she hung up because, as she told her mother, she feared the sound of her disembodied voice.

We know now because we know the end of the story that she will die later on in this small room, but after the second call we forget; we cannot see how it is possible. The second call was to a man, age thirty-eight, named Paul Racine, a fashion designer she had met while in Paris a few weeks before. A flamboyant man, witty, energetic, the type of person Natalie liked to be around: he forced her into animation. The conversation was long and leisurely, and they discussed many things: the upcoming fashions—the shorter skirts, the longer hair, the use of color for spring, the lines of the future, cosmetics—and her chances of being a model. It was a call made by someone who planned to see the spring, someone with plans far beyond this cold January night. “Drugs were never once mentioned,” Paul said when asked afterwards.