The Almanac Branch (2 page)

Of New York, where I was born, in April 1957, and lived until my seventh birthday, I can remember a few fragments.

There was a sailboat pattern on my bedroom curtains, with tall brown mountains that ringed the tan water in which the boats rode. The wrought-iron in front of our townhouse near the park up in Harlem was strong, and the smell of summer garbage along the streets was strong. The nocturnal visits of the light people and the aphotic bouts with my head were often followed by my father's reading to me from
The Arabian Nights.
Those ribbons of Sir Richard's words, his translation of the epic in lush and honeyed sentences—how they wrap my memory even today. And Shahrazad, my heroine and mentor, liar for the ages, was the sister I never had. My mother, Erin, was a pale, blue-eyed woman of medium height, with a tall brow and angular, honest cheekbones, fine manly hands whose veins were very prominent. Her hair, auburn shot through with scotch, was to my eye so flowing, as flowing as any Pre-Raphaelite's but without the usual
douleur
, and far more Irish. (People sometimes said that when I got older she and I would look like sisters, as we shared these features—except my eyes were green.) My mother often smelled of potpourri, which was an obsession of hers, an eccentric one I always thought, wresting petals off cut flowers, roses mostly, and drying them on the kitchen counter spread with dish towels. These are clear, unblocked memories, and they're the only ones I have got, because what my life was before we emigrated to the island seems to blend into an indistinction that is as familiar as the perfume from those cloisonné bowls of potpourri, and as impossible to distinguish as the scent of one flower from another.

My migraines, which were alluded to as seldom as possible in our family, as if they were leprosy or madness, were referred to by us with the amiable old name of “megrim”—which sounded to me like “my grim,” an accurate-enough homonym. They were the source, it was agreed by the several doctors to whom I'd been taken, of my visions … psychotic ecstasies, as one of the specialists—whom Faw loathed—called them; auras was Dr. Trudeau's word. Everyone was always more upset, and perhaps awed by the sheer phenomenological peculiarity of the visions than I, and as a result tended to ignore the migraine itself. For me, the auras, the whispering lights and fantastical occurrences, were indeed enthralling and even ecstatic, whereas the megrims that led to them were just weighty and deadening. During the megrims all I wanted was for my senses to stop receiving signals from the world, and for everything to come to an end. The megrims backed me into a dark wet quiet which, unlike the darkness my jolly haunted ailanthus tree thrived in, forbade growth. It is common for us to speak of St. Hildegard's sublime visions, when we speak of such things, and to marvel at her mystical stars and her descriptions of the city of God and the Fall of the Angels and all that stuff, but seldom do we think of her as just a pitiful girl racked by pains she didn't understand, and which to this day medicine has neither explained nor been able to cure. Rarely have I rued the fact we weren't religious. But when I have, I've fantasized what my so-called visions might have meant to me if we were. I could have been a saint, instead of Grace Brush. But some of the things I've done in life as a result of not believing I wouldn't give up for anything, let alone a martyr's seat up in big bad boring heaven. Let others retire in celestial peace and walk the Elysian fields—which I picture as being a kind of golf course, pristine and manicured, with paths of raked stardust. For myself, give me my earthly weeds and I'll go my own direction.

I didn't like, and still don't, people feeling sorry for me, so as often as not I did my best to mask what was going on. The flare man I can see in my mind's eye as clearly as if it had been yesterday, rather than a quarter of a century ago. If I hadn't lived in a migrainous world would I remember more about—and thus be able to better record—what our family was like before we left for the island? I'd like to think that I would have sharper memories of my brother Desmond. As it is, I do not.

There were other houses on the island that dated from the same period as Scrub Farm, mid-nineteenth century. Families lived on and on in them, passing them down to children who married some cousin or another, in the island tradition. There they settled, just as their ancestors had, and stayed put, rather than to risk launching themselves like sea-battered coracles out toward the world beyond their shores. Like most islanders, they preferred to live among their own kind, and together survived all the hardships that poverty and ignorance and bad weather brought their way.

But while Scrub Farm's owners got through the Depression, the widow Merriam outlived every relative she ever had, and died heirless at the beginning of the new year, 1964. Scrub Farm was hardly a farm. For one, there wasn't much land to cultivate. The wind had for centuries blown across its stony fields, bending the trees, drying the soil. Whenever a storm came in off the ocean, Scrub Farm would have been the first to be hit, set as it was at the foremost edge of the island.

The house hadn't been kept up, and it attracted on the day of the bank auction no bidders except Faw, who bought it over the phone, having seen a photograph of it. He acquired the house and all its contents for less than five thousand dollars. “As is,” was the phrase used by the auctioneer. Within a week of closing—early March then—he made arrangements and out from the city we came, the Brush family, in a borrowed truck stacked high with our belongings.

Never give up a known for an unknown, who said that? Still, the way we piled into the front of the truck made for a kind of physical, animal togetherness that shadowed the currents of anger that were running, especially between my parents, in a binding way—the same way a prisoner's striped pajamas bind him with the prospect of being in his barred cell.

Dr. Trudeau's idea was coming to pass and at least in the beginning Mother was willing to play her role in it, because of me, and because she was so surprised that Faw had decided to take the advice of one of my doctors, something he had never done in the past. She had doubts, to say the least, however. If I didn't improve, would she be stuck out there with all those inbreds and fishermen, hated by the natives as a summer person who got it in mind to live there year-round? Mother never liked even leaving our neighborhood in Manhattan, thrived in her way on the city's chaos, loved nothing better than to look out from the roof of our building, on summer nights, into the steamy black of Central Park limned with lamplight down its lanes and at its borders. Was she to be not just exiled to this island, but to a remote part of it as well, there at the end of a causeway? She had looked at the photograph of Scrub Farm—that Polaroid glazed with streaks dark as the skin of the eggplant she sliced for our last supper, boxes stacked high in every room of the apartment, the place oppressive with that combination of melancholy and anticipation which fills rooms about to be vacated.

The photograph showed a weathered exterior of bleached-out, sun-cupped clapboard. Two stories with a filigreed widow's walk dangling like a tottery derrick, or one of Gumby's ant-enemies, from the peak. A carriage house, fuzzy in the background behind a row of decrepit trees. A single bayberry bush caught in a moment of shivering in the low scampering air. A yellow cactus clung to the stony soil. It didn't look like such a place could be in New York State, it looked foreign. Everything appeared dilapidated, bare, and, but for the house on the slight rise and the sizable cherry tree next to it, low—no doubt from aeons of sea and wind working away at it. She hadn't liked what she saw. Aside from the thin green trace of horizon, and the blue line of ocean, which reminded her of the blue line the police barricade makes along the avenue and the green line they paint on the pavement when they're going to have a St. Patrick's parade, the very thought of which cheered her flagging spirits, everything in the image felt prehistoric and desolate to her, and wholly untenable.

I heard my parents talking that last night, when I couldn't sleep, when I stood there at my window trying my best to ask the light people to come out to say good-bye, knowing that since I didn't have a megrim there was little chance they'd be conjured. I heard her ask him why she had to leave home and he didn't. She said, “I hate the country, I hate the idea of having to water trees”(to which he answered, “For chrissake you don't water trees, Erin”)—and so forth. I do remember her reminding him, and about in these words, “You've always preached to the children that you've got to stand square and fight your demons”—so wasn't this exodus to Shelter Island just the supreme example of how not to face problems? And could he deny her the claim—she was crying, then, and it made me afraid, how hysterical her voice sounded—that he was all for this island move because it would leave him free to spend his time in town, building “your goddamn Geiger,” while the family moldered, safely out from under his feet, in bucolic isolation? I didn't know what bucolic meant, but I can remember the word because it was said when the flare man came out, much to my delight, for just an instant.

What gives, girl?

I have the distinct sense that he may have invited me to crawl out onto the ledge and give him a farewell kiss, but that doesn't sound very flare-man to me, now. That is to say, he wasn't much of a sentimentalist, more of a performer—so if he did, it would have been in the cause of showmanship, or else to murder me.

What gives?

“We're going away.”

Want to see a trick, real neat one?

My mother's voice came pushing in toward my room, and I did my best to close it and her off, then looked at the flare man again, who tonight was a mustard yellow. “I said we're going away, didn't you hear me?”

Well, do you want to see, or not?

“You want to come, too?”

Grace, he said, impatient.

I still don't understand how imagination works, what it is, what its relation to the body is, because the flare man was so sophisticated, and I, who (surely must have) created him there on his ailanthus branch, so young to have invented this. He flipped himself over onto one skeletal finger of one hand and balanced on the branch, then filliped himself to a twig, still aloft on the finger. A wiggly tongue of yellow light streamed from his navel, and he slowly lifted his finger up so that he was perched on the yellow stream, which just barely touched the twig. Arms and legs extended, he turned his face toward mine and a wry smile began to curl across his lips, a wry and yet loving smile. He didn't say anything, though usually, in my experience with him, he would have said something at about this point during one of his exhibitions, something like, Can you believe this, or, Check this out, or, Am I amazing or am I amazing? Rather, he winked, and seemed to concentrate, and then he did something I never thought was possible for him to do. He pulled the yellow light back into his skeleton belly, and turned his head in order to look at me full in the face. He was floating.

I stood there in awe. He knew that I'd seen him do some fantastic tricks before, but never abandon the tree itself. He didn't brag, though. What he said was this. He said, Open your eyes wide, girl.

“Why?”

Open them, go on.

I opened my eyes.

Then he said, Have you ever cried backwards, Grace?

“Huh?”

Cried backwards, listen, it's great. Open your eyes wide, and don't move. It's great, it's a great way to cry, because nobody can see that you're crying, just so good to know how to do it, in case you need to do it in the future sometime. So just be still, and what we're going to do, it'll be really neat.

And he did, he came over, floated to the window, and I was looking straight at him he couldn't have been more than a few feet away from me (he seemed smaller the closer he got) and he reached out with the tip of his finger toward my eyelid—my eyes were closed, I couldn't keep them open, and yet I still could see him—and a stream of light came into the pupil of my eye. My mouth began to fill with liquid light, and he said, Swallow, and I swallowed, it was acrid, and I gulped it down.

See you around, Grace, and I was still gulping when he swam back into the bark of the tree. I felt almost rapturous at having been allowed to commune with my friend without having had to pay the usual dues. My parents' room was quiet, when I listened against the panel of my door. They were all asleep.

We arrived on Shelter Island midafternoon. Gray clouds bore into the slate sky above. The ferry wake hypnotized a flow of gulls, and we stared down into the churning, engine-chafed water and watched the loading dock recede. The farmhouse was out past not one but two causeways, on Rams Island, as it was called, along a sparsely built beach road, and faced out to the white ocean. A mild breeze tripped across the flat, and I pulled my hair out of my mouth—there were always to be mist and air moving across the flat of the island here, buffeting the surface of Coecles Inlet and Shanty Bay. Faw and the boys unloaded, while Mother fidgeted with her wavy masses of hair. She touched the back of her sturdy hand to her lips, and caught her breath—having rummaged in her purse she realized she'd lost the keys. We stood before the front door on the deep green porch. It didn't matter about the keys, the door swung open when I pushed against the handle.

Inside the front room were shimmery cobwebs jeweled with flecks of sandy dust. Mrs. Merriam's possessions were draped with sheets. The first-floor bedroom had been used by squatters. A boot missing its tongue lay at the foot of the stairs. Throughout there were signs of trespass and of trespassers' lovemaking. A display of nature's own encroachment took the form of a bald vine that had crept up from the cellar—imitating, it seemed to me, my ailanthus back in New York. It grasped at the maple-snipped sun in the oriel window. What was dingy melded with mystery in my darting mind.