Ghost Dance (9 page)

“Thank you,” I told her, “thank you very much,” and, looking back to the stage where my brother still stood surrounded by people, I saw it now finally: my mother’s wonderful white bird of peace.

It was Fletcher.

It is morning. The man stands facing east and watches as the sun, that great disk on the horizon, flares, rises up, and slowly climbs the enormous sky. This is what he loves: a succession of colors—deep umber, dark blue, lightening to rose, smoke gray. He lets his eye linger for a long time on the mesa, the sunlit cliffs, the loping hills. He sees many things: buffalo, bison, doe. Rabbit, quail. Dragonfly, spider. He breathes deeply, smells sweet grass and clover. He looks to the sky. Two eagles dip and spin in the morning light. The clouds live in him; the wind. The shining river runs through him. He smiles, touches his palm, and looks out at the valley.

The last time I saw my brother he was dressed in a charcoal-gray suit and following a fat man down a street in Mystic, Connecticut.

I knew nothing about this large man who came to me now more and more often, offering not comfort, I thought, not pleasure, but something else.

“Jack,” I said, and as I said it I felt unsure as to whether or not that was his real name. “Why don’t you ever tell me anything about yourself? I don’t know anything about you. Why is it all such a big secret?”

“The facts,” he laughed, “would only get in the way. What do you want to know? About my dreary life in some suburb? The name of my wife? My 2.5 children? What I do? The details only make us lazy. The details only limit us. We can be anyone we want. Don’t you see that? Please,” he said, “please start over with me.”

“Who are you?” I whispered.

“Anyone you want,” he said. “Invent me. Use your imagination. I shall not exist if you do not invent me.”

“But I know nothing about you.”

“On the contrary,” he sighed, “already you know me too well.”

He had barely been able to fit through the hotel room door. His massive shoulders had made it impossible for him to enter without turning to the side, and he had to bow his head to get in. I have never seen such an enormous man—his neck like the trunk of a tree, his head the head of an animal, a horse or a cow, his skin like leather. A man like that eats a dozen eggs for breakfast, two gallons of milk, three steaks. When he goes to the refrigerator it looks like a small white box next to him.

He moves slowly through the heat. A man like that loses his footing easily. A man like that causes a thousand small deaths without even being aware of it.

A man like that is so enormous with power that, when he dreams of a faucet dripping, a whole town is submerged under water. When he dreams of the death of a small house pet, the blood of thousands of innocent people is shed in some Latin American country. A man like that speaks softly, for he knows to raise his voice would cause the people whom he loves to go deaf.

A man like that does not ht easily into a family. I lis brothers are jealous of his tremendous appeal to women. His mother wonders from what love he fed to become this size. He is large hearted, too, she thinks. His father puzzles over what in him made this fantastic man. His brothers do not dare try to emulate him.

Any curious woman would want to know, need to know, what it would feel like to be crushed in his arms, in his thighs. Anyone would wonder what it would feel like to die a little under him.

“Mom,” I’d yell in the dark, having woken from a nightmare. “Mom, Mom.” But she would not come. She must have been working. It had been silly of my father to worry so much about keeping silence, for w hen she was really writing, she heard nothing.

She is not far away on the day I fall off my bicycle, my knee shredded, bits of the driveway embedded in the wound. She appears from around the corner when she hears me crying. She is wearing her gardening clothes.

She helps me up, looks at my knee, kisses me on the ear, and whispers, “Your dress is magnificent.”

“Your dress is magnificent,” I whisper back to her. I smile a little, the tears still wet on my face. My mother is inventing just for me.

“You may tell your carriage to leave,” she says, and she w heels my bicycle into the garage.

“The ballroom is gigantic!” I say.

“I have
never
in my life seen a chandelier like this one before,” she gasps, pointing to the sun. “Oh, have you ever in your life seen anything like it?”

“Never,” I say. “Where are we?”

“Vienna, I think.”

“Maybe Spain!” I say.

“Yes, perhaps you’re right. Maybe Madrid.”

“And the orchestra! Oh, my!”

“Listen,” she savs. “The oboe, the Lrench horn! Would vou like to dance?” and she takes my hand and bows before me.

“Oh, yes,” I whisper. “Yes.”

Blood flows down my leg like red satin. She hugs me close.

The musician glides up the stairs to my bedroom in three-four time after everyone is asleep. He is very handsome, of course, and quiet; his music speaks for him. The musician comes to me with gloved hands. “You must be very careful with the hands,” he says.

“Play the fantaisie,” I beg. “Play the fantaisie slowly.”

He nods, smiles slightly, and sits before me. He poises his hands above me and we listen to the silence in the great hall. Then it begins. Our music fills the air. His hands rise and fall over my body; when he touches me, I make an exquisite sound. “Play on,” I whisper. I know how I will disappear in the crescendo. “Play on.”

And it is true: what happens at the climax is beyond all reasonable expectations. The tremendous force that has built up during the long cadence can scarcely be contained.

“Encore,” I whisper. “Oh, encore.”

Sometimes I did think that house was haunted, but it was my mother, that elaborate inventor, who looked squarely into the invisible and then suggested to me in her low, hushed way that there were ghosts there. I do not take credit for the vitality or the range of her imagination; it is she who did all the hard work, Fletcher and I merely assisted. We were her researchers, a role we never questioned. She was the genius and we were the servants to it, the lovers of it. Had it not been for my mother’s need to see the house’s prior residents, we would never have known Emily or Allison or any of the others who passed through our house with harpoons, with cats, with signs.

And so for a few weeks one summer we threw ourselves into the project with a sort of reckless zeal. Recklessness was new to us then, but we were naturals at it, welcoming the chance to hurl ourselves into the depths of our mother’s heart with the fabulous details of the dead that we might accumulate. We did not hesitate, we had waited our whole lives for the chance, and we grew giddy at the thought of pleasing her. The danger, of course, was all too clear, and I shivered a little as Fletcher and I began: it might not work; our best efforts, our purest love might not begin to bridge the distance that separated our lives from hers. But danger has little meaning to those who love as we did. Nothing could stop us. We were captives of her vision. She was such a commanding figure and so rapt in the idea of retrieving the lost that in her presence we had little choice but to follow. She was capable of making the past sound like something we could not do without. We listened, mesmerized by the quality of her voice, the novelty of her ideas. What we could not do without was her.

Tales of the South, the smell of orange peel and roses flooding the room, a drawing done in charcoal that mysteriously changed to watercolors—these things are what I first imagined when I thought of having a house that was haunted. Men aging in their portraits and curtains breathing, hearts beating madly under the floor—it seemed so exciting. “Yes,” my father said in his dreamy way, “a young woman carrying a cage of birds, her dress fluttering though there is no wind.”

“And mandolin music!” I sighed.

“A limping man,” Fletcher said, “with a long yellowed beard and a cane carved in ivory.”

“No,” my mother said, halting all speculation. “We must find the people who
actually
lived here. They are the ones who return.” She looked around the room with specific hope.

In our short feverish search for the face of the past, we stalked the libraries, pulled apart the town archives, and ransacked the brains of the oldest people in town for clues. We became so caught in our work that we barely looked up. Day turned to night. Children began wearing sweaters in the mornings. School started. Fletcher carried a red leaf on his sleeve.

“Hadley,” he said, tapping me on the shoulder. “Mr. F. L. Hadley, 35 West Maple Street.”

Frederick Lawrence Hadley, easily the oldest man in town, perhaps in the state we thought, recalled nothing anymore.

“You think your life is hard now?” he said to us with raised eyebrows. “Well, it is. But if you hold out to my age, it gets a lot easier. You’ll see.” We nodded though we could not see ever being as old as Mr. Hadley.

“I remember nothing,” he said. “It is one of the privileges of the very old, to worry only about letting the dog out or how long to cook the eggs.” He gave a long sigh. It suggested to me that he was not telling the entire truth. “But try ‘The Relics,’” he said. “They never did learn when to let go.”

It was through “The Relics,” two ancient sisters who had once lived next door to our house, that we learned the unhappy story of Ted and Evonne Osbourne who, from 1920 to roughly 1940, lived in our house, danced in our hallways, threw things from our windows, fought in our kitchen, and drank. “Drunk in the morning, drunk in the afternoon, drunk, of course, at night,” the old women were saying. “Whiskey, Scotch whiskey. Day and night.”

“Anything breakable they broke,” the one who looked older said. The other one nodded. “Glass, furniture, everything, and they threw records out the window, too. Fine china, you name it.” Their voices trembled. “There’s nothing,” they said together, “quite like the sound of fine china breaking.”

It seemed that, when we walked in, these two women were already in the middle of a conversation about the Osbournes. It seemed that they never stopped talking about them, through meals, through tea, through naps.

“They threw books out the window and toys and lamps.”

“They swore like sailors.”

“And there was a child,” one whispered. “It would cry all night. They would hit it.”

“And they forgot to feed it and sometimes they went out and left it all alone.”

The Relics shook their heads mechanically. Long ago the horror had worn off. They could no longer react genuinely to their story, but took vicarious pleasure in other people’s dismay. In us they had a good and partisan audience. We held every nuance of emotion. We hung onto their words, our eyes wide, our brows furrowed.

They were caught up in the bravado of speech, in the storyteller’s art, in the desire to move, to impress, but my brother’s copious notetaking gave a legitimacy, a truth to their words that they were unaccustomed to. They paused and watched his hand slow.

“Well, we never actually
saw
them hurt the child. We never even saw the child, for that matter. But we heard it crying.”

“And they didn’t drink whiskey, I don’t think. It was something clear, gin or vodka. They would pretend it was water if you ran into them in the supermarket.”

The sisters were trying to come up with a version of the past they could both agree upon. There was a long pause. In it some exchange was going on between the two, impossible for us to know. After so many years they were adept at communicating without saying a word.

“Perhaps you would like some tea?” the older one said, getting up and stepping toward the kitchen.

“They tried to burn it down,” the younger one whispered.

Her sister sat back down, impressed with the perfect timing. “It’s true,” she nodded.

“Had we not been waiting up for our cousin to arrive from Duluth—”

“We heard them arguing back and forth about who would have the honor of doing it—”

“Then, quite suddenly, we smelled smoke and the next thing you knew there were flames. I got up and called the fire department.”

“Thank goodness only the garage was lost.”

They closed their eyes for a moment. The sisters were exhausted. They had given up their last story. Not to embellish it had taken a discretion they had abandoned in their old age. They felt young again.

“How can we thank you?” we asked. But we already had. We had listened carefully to them, and we had believed what they told us.

“I was sitting there on that red velveteen sofa we had and the phone was there and I got up and I called the fire department.”

The sisters were heroines again, and we had come a bit closer to understanding the long, troubled life of our house. Only the Osbournes suffered. Shortly after the fire, they were killed, as if not by accident, in a private plane crash, fleeing from the law.

“Let us know,” the sisters said weakly, waving from the porch, “if you ever write a book.”

I can see those sisters now reenacting their one great evening: putting on their bed jackets, looking out the window, closing their eyes, and saying to one another, “I could swear I smell smoke,” and then getting up and reaching for the telephone, the fire department number taped to the black receiver. I wonder whether they could still be alive today. I suppose that’s impossible, but if they are, it’s the Osbournes that have kept them breathing. Even then it was the Osbournes who kept them vigilant, who warded off senility.

My brother and I, too, could communicate with each other without saying a word. How else to account for the similar transformations the Osbournes’ story took as we drove home? In the silent zones of the brain, we had discussed and then agreed on yet another version of the truth. We thought we might make the Osbournes constructive in their afterlife. Ted could build furniture by hand and Evonne could be a glassblower. What pleasure we thought this would bring Mother. Maybe it was solely my mother’s reaction that determined the version of the Osbournes’ story we finally came up with, and not some real intimacy between my brother and me. Maybe it was always our mutual need for her happiness that determined our response to the events of the world. It is impossible to say what Fletcher and I would have been like without our mother at the center of our concerns; our lives as they were then and as they are now would not even be recognizable.