Let the Dark Flower Blossom (14 page)

Do you suspect some small speck of demise growing within you?

If it has already begun, how will you stop it?

There is nothing quite like the factual certainty of a plate smashing against a wall. Or a lilac bush bursting into bloom. As the illness ate. I read to her. She tired of words, until she could tolerate only Pound's
Cathay
poems and Eliot's Prufrock. She drank cream soda through a straw. And she would repeat aloud in a sweet morphine dope, the lines that I had just read.

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang
,

Please let me know beforehand
,

And I will come out to meet you

                
As far as Cho-fu-Sa
.

We lived in Little America, Minnesota.

Pound was from Idaho.

And Eliot from Missouri.

Because there was no future, we talked about the past.

We talked about
either
and
or
.

I said that art is called art because it is not nature.

“T. S. Eliot hated girls,” she said.

She loved him anyway.

Pru said, “
The silent man in mocha brown

Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;

The waiter brings in oranges

Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;
”

His rhymes helped her as much as morphine.

Proo from St. Looey.

The hot summers were dry and hopeless.

The winters were unrelieved.

Pru.

With her tangled hair.

With the rise of her hip and the fall of her heel.

What did Eve say to the asp?

This bites!

She spent her days in bed.

She worsened.

And then she spent her days in a hospital bed.

Is one bird more rare or remarkable than another?

Is one person so much more remarkable than another?

And does this quality, this spectacularity that can be found in such small details as a scarf knotted around a white throat or a key fallen from a hand in a darkened hallway—have more to do with the moment or the memory of the moment?

Memory has made me a spectator of my own past.

I watch each scene play out again and again.

I can say that Pru liked cinnamon candies. A soft sort of jelly heart that burned the tongue. And she ate them one after the next at the movies.

That she lived for a while.

And then she did not.

“Oh El, don't torture us. Tell the story already,” said Rachel.

Pru died.

Boo Boo nibbled a deviled egg, waiting.

On the burning August day that Prudence Schell died, as I left the hospital, I noticed the billboards were advertising some new television show that she would have liked, but that she would never get a chance to watch.

“I used to imagine that I was the heroine of a novel,” Eloise said.

I went on living in the house on Valhalla Street. And then it was autumn, again. Fall fell. And it was beautiful. Each leaf and tree. Each bird and branch. The days were bright. I taught classes. I graded papers. My colleagues offered their prayers, but I wanted none. Faculty wives brought food to my doorstep. My students were dull. The Blue Jays won the World Series. The frost came early. I cut down the roses. And I cleared away the rot of flowers in the garden. Winter followed. With storms and winds and ice. I shoveled snow from the walkway. Neighbors strung up Christmas lights. Children
played in the snow. Girls made snow angels. I had become a widower. My typewriter sat on the kitchen table.

Eloise was dressed in black.

She said that a long time ago—

Show, don't tell
, I taught my students.

Eloise had mistaken cruelty for a species of kindness.

Pru had wanted to take her inheritance and see the world. And then when there was nothing left to see—she would find an island. She died when she was twenty-eight, before she ever got her long-awaited soda pop loot. Two years after her death—on what would have been her thirtieth birthday—the loot came to me. I could no longer bear the sight of my typewriter with its blacked-out letterless keys. I gave up writing. I quit my job. I abandoned Lindbergh College. And I sought out an island. I found myself this house among the mourning doves who coo
Perdoo, Perdoo
. For the death of my wife left me a very rich man.

Eloise told her friends a story. She told them about a room over a movie theater. About a haunted house. About white flowers in the darkness. About streets that twisted like an endless argument. About marzipan, about almonds and cherries and chocolate. And how she had eaten salted black licorice. And lived for a time by the ocean.
For a moment she faltered. As though on a branch in winter. She didn't know how the story should end. Then she felt her heart flutter upward—and she knew just what to say.

Beatrice is in the kitchen. She is watching
Tomorrow's Edge
on the television as she turns her wooden spoon round and round in the mixing bowl.

Like a hand untying a knotted loop of string. Eloise did not disappoint. She gave her audience what they wanted. Just when they most wanted it. When the women of the book club left Eloise that winter night—each one was happy. And a bit sad as well. For she had heard a love story. With hero and heroine. Separated by fate. Thwarted by chance. Undone by their own undoings. And if it wasn't true? At least it was beautiful. Some say beauty is a form of truth; don't they?

If only I were in love with Beatrice Lemon. Her narrow shoulders; her small breasts; her childishness; her slim legs; her feet in woolen socks on the tile floor. I do not think that I am in love with her. Instead, I feel terror and pity—for the both of us, for the inevitability of us. As though her father wills us as such. Our lack of choice in the matter makes love an impossibility.

If only. If only the past were not the thing that it is.

One day I will forget everything.

Like a drunkard waiting for a shoe to drop.

Like a patient etherized upon a table.

Like a poet on payday.

Like a child at sundown.

I saw Mother give Father his medicine.

I saw Father turn his spoon round in his cup.

I tell Dr. Lemon the same story over and over.

Beatrice was barefoot when first I came to this island.

Now she is eighteen.

She's a good girl
, the doctor would say wearily, as Beatrice brought for him a book down from the shelf; he sighed the way that a man sighs over a woman whose life he has lovingly, without intention or malice, ruined. Oh, Beatrice: at dinner with the doctor the three of us used to sit. If I chanced a look, I might catch her lost in the responsibilities that begin in dreams—her face propped on her hands as she stared out the window into the darkness at the dark water.

And still it never occurred to me to fall in love with her.

It never occurred to me that this is what the doctor wanted from me.

He was elegant, in his velvet robe and striped pajamas. He clung to civilization. After dinner the doctor offered me a glass of his cordial—Goldwasser, perhaps. He held the bottle like a small treasure. He did not care for games of chance. He didn't deal cards. He preferred chess. For it relied upon reason rather than chance. I argued that even reason relies upon chance. We sat up late arguing the finer points of impossibility. He was an expert host—offering coffee, tea, sweets and bitters—telling stories.

Later, I was the one who confessed while he sat in silence.

He asked me about my mother, about my father. And about my wife.

He asked about writing, and what it was like to be an artist. He held artists in tremendous regard.
To the life of the mind
, he said, raising his glass of caraway pale aquavit.

We moved our pieces across the board. And thought of the future as a game.

The doctor was already an old man when he came to this island—for solitude—with his books and his collection of rare wines. He married a local girl. Beatrice was the child that he did not expect. His wife died after the difficult labor. And the doctor raised his daughter. He taught her left from right. He taught her right from wrong. On the island all knew her; everyone called Beatrice: the doctor's daughter.

For twelve years, we have shared nothing more, nor less, than a devotion to her father.

He is extraordinary.

His gray eyes see luxury beyond limitation.

So many nights. I sat. And do so still.

I will sit at his bedside and tell him my story.

I can't untangle my years on the island.

I wander the years like Beatrice in the blackberry brambles.

The old doctor fought his illness. He tried to trick his memory into forgetting that it was disappearing. He told us stories. He told about how when he was sixteen he took a train to Chicago. In a jazz club he heard a tragic chanteuse sing her sad songs. When he left the club, outside on the street, he asked a beat cop where he could find a hotel. The cop looked the boy up and down, and he said in brass-button brogue:
Would that be a hotel with hoo-ers or without hoo-ers?

Whores or no whores.

Beatrice laughed.

The next time that her father told the story, she laughed again.

And the next time and the time after that.

He was happy to remember it, but he soon forgot that he had already remembered it. And that he had told it to us. Each time it was a new delight to him.

Beatrice and I learned to forget the story. And to take it as new.

This is how the game is played.

This is how the years pass on an island.

Would you trade a tactical loss for a later advantage?

Beatrice's small feet are scratched and scarred. Bruised berry-blue.

Sometimes in the evening we play chess.

In the moonlight at the glint of her skin—

I feel terrible guilt.

When I do not lament the past too much, I feel the creep of conscience.

When I ponder the future, I do not see myself.

When I imagine tomorrow, I see Beatrice.

When I sleep I dream that I am in a hallway of locked doors.

One day—

A door will open.

And what will I do?

Pru with her hand on her hip.

Beatrice breaking an egg.

Ro on a roll.

Father pacing the floor.

Mother measuring out his medicine.

El and I looking on.

In dope there is hope
.

We always said.

In the end the dope ran out. And hope was never quantifiable.

Eloise under the apple tree.

Pru eating a peach.

Pru in the parking lot.

Pru on paper.

Beatrice, bruised.

Dr. Lemon sighing,
Queen takes castle
.

The doctor raising his glass of Goldwasser.

Ro in the snow.

Ro on the ropes.

Ro hitting the bottle.

Ro hitting the road.

Ro hitting the floor.

Ro in the fire.

Ro deep with Dante.

Beatrice is baking a cake.

In a certain light, she is something better than pretty.

What was it that I came here to forget?

Beatrice—

Jars me from such thoughts—

Beatrice stands in the doorway.

“I have the strangest feeling,” she says.

“Benjamin Salt is on his way,” she says.

“How can I stop him?” she says.

She holds out a letter to me.

And I take her hand.