The Almanac Branch (11 page)

She tried to stiffen, to show him that she was confused. He must have known. There was a smell of mayonnaise, yes that was exactly what the air had come to smell like then, which she attempted to wipe off her mouth onto the sheets. It was as if she'd fallen into a cactus plant like the ones they had found on the dunes, yellow and barbed to protect themselves from animals that were thirsty and would like to eat their green flesh, and Desmond began to work his mouth along her lower spine and her thighs, which were spread apart as far as he could make them give. He was kissing her through what seemed like impossible curves, and she bit her knuckle so as not to scream out, which she both wanted and didn't want to do. To steady herself, she hooked one knee over the side of the bed. Was this what was supposed to happen? she thought, and made the thought travel through her back down into her pelvis, and spread through her buttocks, all over her flesh, through her naked pubis, and again, as the thought traveled the thought itself knew there was no fact of Grace but for the dense, magnetic scent of apricot and Desmond and mayonnaise, all of it mingling into something delicious, into which he sank his tongue, his mouth, his face and, ultimately, his whole head, which she understood to be … well it had to be impossible, for he would have had to open her up between her legs in a way that they just wouldn't be able to be opened, to fit his precious head there, but it seemed so simple and not the result of such violence that he was moving in and out of her slowly, deliberately, and when she thought what it meant, thought of her brother's head, the delicate brain tissue (she had seen brains once, in a restaurant, and watched Faw spoon it, it was like burnt tapioca, into his mouth, unable to eat her own food as she was so overwhelmed by what he was dining on, what it once had been) cradled within his bone-bowl, his cranium, and thought of his soft ears, the silken hair that now was running damp with her, and wet with the oil of forgiveness, it became concrete and imaginable, and therefore familiar, and she gave herself over to it as not just a possibility but what was happening to her, the magnificent wisdom of what she had needed to have happen to her, and sensed new clear distinctions such as the grit of his tongue passing over her, again, and having her, again, and her control was gone, she was moaning and heaving and she didn't care whether Djuna or Berg or Faw or Mother or all of them came rushing into the room to find her with Desmond there on her bed, crazy with the pleasure of being bold, and just as the scream rose into her throat he stopped and rested his soaked face in the small of her back.

Between her legs she ached like fire under bellows and prong. He clutched her tightly, kissed her hair, chewed—even roughly—at her temple and on down her cheek. What happened then would prevent her from ever understanding the nature of Desmond's love for her, because what appeared to happen to her after this delay was that her head in a fever was gently knocked into the mattress, and he hardened over her, binding her hands with his, raging with his mouth over her shoulder and down her neck, until her megrim was abstracted so that she could shove back, with him and at him, and when he felt her moving at him and with him and against him he entered, except that now she was on her back and he was under her, his arms wrapped around her chest, his ankles wrapped around and over her ankles.

Lights like crystals started up on the ceiling. Their sharpness seemed to have nothing in common with the bite of Desmond's hips and thighs. They were measured, she soon realized, against the beat of her own heart. Once she understood this her eyes and throat began to hurt, as did her fingers, her neck, and before long her whole body. She carried on, forward, thrusting by herself. Desmond some how had maneuvered himself out from underneath her and stood beside her on the bed and burst into light over her face and breasts and belly. The room was full of the apricot scent, and Grace, breathing hard, began to worry again that the smell would escape the room, creep under the door, to give her away here at the height of their freedom, bring the others who loved her into the room from without and bring her to some kind of new shame and with it an absence of freedom.

But it didn't happen. Desmond, again himself, was already out on the ledge, and back into the tree.

The window was ajar. The house was silent. The wind buffeted the branches in the cherry tree, and the waves knocked as ever on the stones. The sheets and blankets on her bed were mussed with their extraordinary perfume—a perfume that reminded her then of her mother's potpourri—and she pulled them, and the perfume they gave off, back over her against the fresh chill in the room. This was how the ravishments began.

Part II
Coecles Inlet and Other Destinations

THE ANSWER TO THE
question of what Gabriel Segredo was doing in my room will never rest easy with me. He was looking for a scarf for her to wrap around her head, a brash, brilliant skein of silk to frame her treacherous face—this was the object of a search that ended with Desmond being frightened from his perch to his death. I'm glad I didn't know this detail until later—when my mother decided to get it off her chest in one of her letters to me—or else I would have gone after the both of them with a kitchen knife, I swear it.

He was looking for the scarf because she, my poor unwitting mother, asked him to look for it, and already he was so trapped by his conviction that he wanted to have her for himself that he would do whatever she wanted. How these desires revolve in such ironies. Segredo's needs and his wants slowly rotated around his belief that this Erin Brush, while married, and while a mother, was not an impossible target; and yet, despite his pluck, he was never, in my eyes, a strong person—emotionally—not then, at least. Strength as often as not can work against you, and so in Segredo's case I believe it was in part his emotional weaknesses that drew my mother into his orbit as much as anything. With him, she could have her own way, for once, or so she thought, and in that capacity he was dutiful, whether he meant to be or not.

If she had shown the courage to pack her belongings and leave her family on her own, I can't help but think my brother Desmond might be alive today. The same thought has bothered her over the years, I know because she's confessed as much to me. We've each seen our way clear to forgiving her—indeed, Desmond's responsibility in his own demise has not escaped us—but forgiveness never quite washes anger out of all the dark corners where anger clings. It may not be fair to feel anger toward her after having truly forgiven her, but I don't see by what standards I'm supposed to be fair at all times. Fairness is part of my nature, it is deep in my skin and bones; it's not in my blood, though. Blood judges for itself.

I knew he was in the house that day because I noticed, from the library window, his car parked down the road, and from a second window saw him walk—a large, heavy (strong, not fat) man dressed in loose, drab clothes, a red and black kerchief tied around his neck—across the field toward our house. There was an air about him, maybe it was the deliberate way his hard shoes came down to meet the dirt as he moved toward the house, maybe it was the way he kept his eye averted and his bark-brown hair toppled down over his forehead, that informed me not to run out and say hello. He seemed grim, determined, powerful. I heard him stamp the dust off his boots on the mat on the porch, and stayed where I was. Their voices, rather more quiet than they should have been if nothing was afoot, I strained to hear; soon enough their intentions became clear. He brought a few suitcases up from the cellar, and he commented, I heard him, on the mildew that had begun to destroy them. “Set them out in the sun for a while and let them bake it out,” is what he told her they would have to do with the luggage sometime. He was trying so hard to make it sound as if nothing of any special importance was going on, so soft and purposely even was his voice, and so ostensibly simple were his concerns. The suitcases, the damp basement, the mildew. It was all so easy, in fact, that despite my pounding heart I failed to notice when it was they had gone upstairs, to the master bedroom—I forget what I was watching on the box, but for all my natural inclination to know everything I wasn't supposed to know, see things that were supposed to be hidden from my sight, I continued to stay where I was, agitated, but not inclined to move upstairs after them. Djuna was over in Orient, her day off. Faw was, as I've said, in New York. Berg was down at the shore shooting his air gun into the crests of waves, like the Irish king Cuchulain that Mother said was one of her distant relatives, using pellets instead of a sword to slay his phantom sea monsters. It was all so well planned, plotted, timed, in other words, Segredo's arrival, the discreet placement of the car in which they would leave, the way in which they carried on inside the house, I can still scarcely believe it. Time has its way of piling experience on experience, crowding data and whim and reaction and error and triumph together, one upon the other, so that whatever a person experiences in a life will someday, like the person himself, be buried under by his own myriad gestures (this is, by the way, why suicide out of shame never makes sense)—but, sometimes, to this day, I have wondered how she could look back to that August evening, and stand herself.

You see, just as Desmond is the hitch that prevents me from being able to care much about what was behind her desire to get out of her arrangement with Faw and the rest of us—I have no quarrel, objectively, with her desire to make a different life for herself—Desmond was the hitch in her own considerations. He was supposed to be off with Berg by the sea, or in with me watching television. He could generally be counted on to be with either of his siblings. But this once he'd gone out on his own, climbed into the cherry tree. Of course, when he fell, Erin and Segredo's plan collapsed. It occurs to me, did someone break the law? Did Desmond have a clear moment, before he slipped off his branch, in which his eyes met those of this man who was about to betray him? If I knew more about the Bible, would I find it ironic that the last person Desmond would ever see in his life shared the name of an angel? Or would I merely find it disgusting? The television was projecting its beehive of grays and blacks and rollicking with its canned laughter—once I knew what was happening in the house, in a general sense, I'd turned up the volume. A helplessness spread through me like megrim apricot. I wonder, since none of us heard him fall, how long my poor brother was out there all alone before my mother's screams carried across the yard? I wonder how she managed to put me to bed that night, knowing what she knew, knowing that by waiting until morning to tell me she would save her Gabriel from the implication of any guilt. I wonder why it is that canned laughter sounds like the chatter of waves when they come into a rocky beach. The waves made the most sultry and unique sounds that night. They laughed and laughed. I believe to this day they were laughing at my mother. That is what I'd like to continue to believe, because otherwise they were surely laughing at me, who stayed in the library, watching whatever was on the screen, as I pressed my hands tightly to my ears.

Grace wasn't alone in observing the beginnings of Erin's revolt. She saw it all starting to fall to pieces not because she had nothing better to do with her time, but because it seemed to her that more and more Erin had something better to do with hers. The way Erin had left it to Djuna to get Desmond and Grace dressed and fed and out of the house to school on time. The way she told Djuna that if Berg was being tiresome she ought to take it up with his father the next time he was in from the city. The way she said she had to run some errands, and she might be late for dinner. The way when Charles did come on Saturday afternoon to be with the family, some of Erin's stories about what happened during the week didn't align with what Djuna herself had thought happened.

For a while she was content to believe that what she thought had happened maybe hadn't. Djuna didn't for the life of her want to confirm what she'd begun to suspect, but as she well knew, what one wants and what one gets can be different as cats and canaries. This is what she told her uncle Webster—in whom she'd confided her fears, since Webster never bothered to gossip, indeed hardly ever condescended to talk with anyone besides himself. Webster told his niece he thought Mrs. Brush might have the right to feel lonely.

“Why is it married women are always the ones who've got the right to feel lonely?”

To that, Webster had no reply, and went back to his task of cleaning with a penny nail the facets of the fanciful white pavilion carved into the bowl of his meerschaum pipe.

A friend in town clued Djuna in as to what Erin Brush was up to that October, but Djuna felt it only right to say, “Jenny, mind your own business, would you?” And Jenny said something honorable like, “I'm only trying to protect you, Djuna,” and Djuna thanked her, and changed the subject to weather, or sea conditions, or old Ann Nicholls and how silly she was to keep up the pretense of going to town in her buggy drawn by draft horses.

But, no, it was no good, this business of Mrs. Brush being away from Scrub Farm so often and for such long stretches of time. The farm had come a long way since they had moved in, but still much remained to be done before the winter set in—the orchard was a mess, half the furniture in the house needed fixing still, or replacing, the carriage house roof leaked though Djuna didn't feel it was her place to complain and rather than tell Mr. Brush she simply set out pans and pots on the second floor of the little stone building whenever the rain swept through—and with Charles away six of seven days a week, and now with Erin out and about as she saw fit during her husband's absence, much fell to Djuna's lot to keep up with.

Sometimes she only wished she didn't like the children so much. She didn't care about the money, nor about the prospect of having to go back to living on Web's charity. Historically, Djuna harbored no great love of children. Kids, she had always averred, were put on earth to destroy things, heirlooms and valuable things primarily. They were here to produce unbearable noises and make unreasonable requests, and register complaints that later in their lives, if they had the misfortune of remembering how they had acted, they would recognize as callow and selfish. They were unformed, as a rule, they were manipulative.