Delicate Edible Birds (8 page)

Just when his fever begins to dissipate, L. catches one of the last strands of the flu.

For three days, the only thing he can hear is the gurgle of water in his lungs. He doesn't think he'll live. When the worst is over and he can sit up again, a young doctor whose face is prematurely lined comes to see him. He looks as if he might begin to cry.

“Mr. DeBard,” he says. “I am afraid that your lungs are so damaged you will never swim again. They're so bad, you won't be able to walk far unaided. You will wheeze for life.” Then he gives a curious half sob, and says, “I followed your swimming, sir. When I was a boy, I admired you greatly.”

L. looks at the doctor for some time before closing his eyes and sighing.

“Frankly, Doctor,” he says, at last. “Of all the many things I do extraordinarily well, it is not the loss of swimming that upsets me.”

The doctor frowns and is about to say something. Then, remembering, he flees.

 

BY THE SUMMER, L. IS STILL RECOVERING,
walking about weakly. His mother leaves Compass with a neighbor when she visits, but brings a photograph of the boy that L. stares at for hours and keeps in the breast pocket of his pajamas when he sleeps.

 

IN ALL THE TIME L.
is in the hospital, Aliette does not come to see him. She is paying dearly for her transgressions, supervised day and night, only allowed to go to the pool with her female coach. She is not allowed to see Compass, though two or three times she tries to slip out at night, only to be collared each time by her coach or her father. She is not allowed to keep the baby blanket she had taken with her, and is not allowed to send money for his care. Rosalind and another nurse follow her everywhere, even to the bathroom. She spends her rage in the water, holding her breath until she almost drowns.

 

L. COMES HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL
on the day his new book sells out in one hour. Though his enemies claim it is the shock of his story, the scandalous tale, they cannot explain why it continues to sell after the story is forgotten. Compass
cries when he sees this strange man, but slowly grows used to him, and in a fortnight, tugs on L.'s reinstated moustache and touches his cheek in wonder.

 

AT LAST, AFTER ITS THIRD TIME
around the globe, the pandemic burns itself out. By the end, whole villages have been wiped clean from history; in a single year, more Americans have died from it than from all of the battles of the Great War. In one small part of its aftermath, the plague will be linked to an encephalitic state in which patients can walk, answer questions, and be aware of their surroundings, but with such vagueness that they are described as somnambulists, or sleeping volcanoes.

 

L. AND ALIETTE NEVER MEET AGAIN.
She will hold her breath every time she sees a man walking a little boy down the street, and go home so agitated she will be unable to speak. She will begin letters that she will never send, and with every new one she tears into confetti, she will hope fervently that L. and Compass understand.

But at first L. doesn't understand. Her absence is an ache. He knows that if they were to meet, they wouldn't be able to look at each other, hot with shame and loss, but he doesn't understand how Aliette could give up her own son; it seems a horror. Then Compass begins to speak and to develop his own little grave personality, and on the boy's fifth birthday, as
they sit on the glowing grass of the park and eat cake together, L. looks at his son, who is kicking his legs at the sky, and in the fullness of the boy's presence and his delicious joy, L. finally knows what Aliette has done. She has released Com pass to him, an exculpatory gesture, a self-sundering. He imagines her in the city somewhere, staring out the window on her son's birthday, and knows she is dreaming of the child.

By then, though, no other life is imaginable, and Compass will never tell L. he missed having a mother, for the older he becomes, the more his father will depend upon him. And L. will still be drenched with sweat every time he smells lilacs or sees a tiny blonde from afar.

 

L. READS ABOUT ALIETTE'S FEW,
small rebellions in the newspapers. How she is arrested for nude bathing at Manhattan Beach after removing her stockings before swimming, and how through this act and its subsequent uproar, women are liberated from having to wear stockings when they swim. He reads of how she goes, with an escort of four strong matrons, to bombed-out Antwerp for the 1920 Olympics, and wins two gold medals in women's swimming, breaking world records in that estuary, more mud than water. He saves the papers for Compass, for when he is older. And L. is there on the opening night of her water performance in the Royal Theatre, but leaves when he sees the falseness of the smile pasted on her face. When he wakes up the next morning, his heart still hurts.

In the papers he notices her one last rebellion: she is arrested for swimming at night in the pond in Central Park. But the mayor intervenes and from this incident comes New York's first public swimming pool. She sinks quietly back into her life, coaches a few women swimmers, and has no more children, as far as he can tell. He hopes, from his spacious apartment on the East Side as he watches Compass grow, that she is happy.

 

ALIETTE WATCHES HIM, TOO.
She follows him as he grows famous, and reads every one of his new books. She leaves them strewn conspicuously in her home on nights when she holds soirées; her high-society guests, most of whom have never read a line of poetry, cite him in interviews as their favorite poet. She reads the profiles of him in the papers and watches Compass grow and become his father's amanuensis, his nurse, his friend. Compass goes to Harvard when his father is offered a lectureship there, and lives with him during his collegiate years. Compass graduates with a degree in English, and holds three school records on the pool's walls. Later, when the interviewers can induce the boy to speak, he smiles his serious smile, and says, “I can't imagine a better life than that I live with my father.” Aliette snips this quote and carries it in a locket that hangs from her neck.

One night she turns on the radio and hears L.'s dear voice reciting some of his oldest poems, the ones from
Ambivalence
. He gasps slightly with his troubled lungs as he
reads the lines, “I have dreamed a dream of repentance / I have known the world eternal.” She listens, rapt, and when she switches off the radio, her face is wet.

 

SHE SEES HIM ONCE,
in all this time. They are both old, and he has published his twelfth book of poems. He stands on a stage, behind a lectern. His hair is white, and he is stooped. He reads deliberately and well, stopping between each poem to catch his breath.

He does not notice the plump woman in the gray cloche and chinchilla coat in the back of the auditorium. He doesn't see how she mouths with him each word he reads, how her face is bright with joy. Later, after he has shaken the hands of his admirers and is alone with Compass in the theater, she is long gone, in bed with a hot-water bottle. But though she is nowhere around, he has felt all evening the change her very presence makes in the air.

He walks on the arm of his handsome son into the cool New York street glistening with rain. Out on the sidewalk, he tells Compass to halt. L. lifts his face to the drizzle and closes his eyes, breathing deeply once, twice. When he brings his face back down, he is grinning.

Then he tells his son, “This feels like that breath you take after coming up from a long swim underwater. The most gorgeous feeling, that sip of air you feared you'd never have again.” He looks at Compass, and touches his cheek, gently. “Surfacing,” he says.

THE NEW HOUSE, AND ALL ITS NEW FURNISHINGS.

The Sears rugs, the pasteboard sideboard, the pine table made by the groom, who, just then, had his arms full of his bride. She, only sixteen, in an ivory crepe de chine suit, baby-faced, pincurled, a rosebud of a painted mouth. Hershey Queen, 1951.

Also, this: a bundle in the oven, the baby yet invisible but still extremely present.

When the bride was deposited on the floor of the twilit hall, she threw her white roses into the air, smiled her victory smile, gave a little dance in the dining room, and draped her newlywed body over the sofa. The groom smiled glumly, emitting fumes of the whiskey bought all night by the stepdad of the bride, Joe Helmuth, breeder of basset hounds and bearer of a menacing handlebar moustache.
The girl's mother gone these past two years, it had been up to Joe to come into the surveyor's office one day and stand over the not-yet-groom's desk. And all he had to do was pick up the compass on the desk, trace a few interlocked circles in the blotter, and the boy gulped and looked up, comprehending. When Joe Helmuth left, tipping his hat at the boss, the compass stood embedded through the cardboard, into the wood, kicking out the pencil leg like a Rockette.

Hence the Saturday festivities in the church with a few frantic sips from the flask, then at the Kiwanis Club with the clucking ice cubes in the tumblers of booze. Now here they were in the splitlevel on the outskirts of Hershey, encumbered with a thirty-year mortgage. Thirty years! the groom thought. He'd be dead by then, what, fifty-five. An old man. He had two years of college—though technical college, true—and had dreams, but his new wife didn't much fit into them.

Pretty, he'd said to his best man, taking a nip in the nave before the ceremony. But she don't have a whole lot going on upstairs, see? He'd been angling for a country club wife, the wife of a professional man, the kind that knew how to speak that double-speak that drove all the men mad, but saved the sweet stuff for her husband.

But his best man had said, salacious, Pretty's the best kind, don't know much more than they need to. At that, the groom just shrugged.

On her new couch, the bride kicked off her heels and laughed at the spangled asbestos ceiling, sending her ciga
rette smoke toward it. The wind rose, carrying with it the mysterious sweet scent from the chocolate factory, and she heard her groom go into the kitchen, then heard the refrigerator smooching open. Jingle of a bottlecap hitting the floor, groan of chair legs against the linoleum, soughing of wind in the chokecherry sapling in the yard. When she went in to find her new hubby-hubby, he was in the dark, staring at the bottle in his hands, head in a dark wreath of smoke.

She went to him and stroked the hair back from his handsome forehead. He was stiff, unyielding. She pulled his hand from the bottle with her plump fingers, and he sighed, moved to her, rocked his forehead against the belly where the bean-sized baby was forming. Softly he kissed the belly where the child pulsed and grew, where her little body was building cell by cell, so beautifully.

 

WHEN THE BABY CAME AT LAST,
she came screaming into the hands of the nurse, for the doctor was eating his veal cutlet at the club under the needling glare of his wife. He brushed the crumbs from his chin with his pinkie finger, rolled the wine around his mouth as if it were mouthwash. At last, avuncular, he patted her hand, said: No way it'll take less than three hours, honey. First-time mother, seventeen years old, tiny little thing. We have time.

Only fifteen minutes after that pronouncement came the crowning, the puckered face, the fishy shoulders slipping out, the fat belly, the kicking legs, the toes in their waxy,
bloody patina. A beautiful, healthy baby girl, the nurse said, brushing sweat from her forehead. The baby latched with angry piglet grunts onto the bottle, and the mother, at seventeen years old, felt ancient, a Madonna under the fluorescent hum of the hospital brights.

When the father came in, his knees were wobbly in his work-stained pants. He ran a finger up the tiny arm, holding his breath, and felt a terrible matching tenderness in his own, as if he were feeling what the new child was feeling, as if his callused finger were burning the brand-new skin. For weeks after she was born, he slathered the girl with air kisses, his lips stopping millimeters from the sweet cheeks, blowing smooches at his raw little girl.

Thus petrified with anxiety, vibrating with thrill, the new parents agreed that their new daughter was a good baby. A very good baby, though soon she began sobbing with ferocity. All night long, she seemed to choke herself with sorrow, keeping the parents tossing in their twin bed, clutching their baby-care manual that told them…
a terrible mistake to go to the baby when she cries…this will teach her to call for you with screams…Instead, you must steel yourself, go to her only once a night, for feeding and changing if she needs it
. They slept with their fingers in their ears; they sat smoking against the headboard in the dark; the father rhythmically pounded his forehead against the kitchen table; and at last, the baby stopped screaming in the nighttime, resigned to lying in her wet and stink until dawn.

Only during the day was there peace, a gentleness, when
the mother would fill the bath with tepid water and for hours the two of them would be still, suspended, there. All afternoon, the baby's little rear bumped against her mother's belly, the tiny shoulders tethered to the dry land of her mother's chest, and in the buzz of the baby's grapefruit skull was the sweet release of familiarity. Together, they would float and breathe and stare at the hieroglyphs the smoke made on the ceiling until it was time for the meatloaf, the gelatin salad, until it was time for the mother to spritz herself with lily-of-the-valley perfume and crack open the beers.

Some nights, the parents, still so very young, put the baby in her stroller and propped her up with cushions. There, the baby watched the two planets in her universe swing each other around the dance floor of the kitchen, pink and sweaty, giggling, smoking, drinking. She laughed as the parents turned the radio up and up some more until it was very loud, and only began to scream when it hurt her cockleshell ears. She laughed until the father tossed his wife into the air too high and she hit her head on the ceiling; she laughed until the mother stumbled, drunk, and the father pushed her away, disgusted.

The baby grew, and learned soon enough that, though they looked sweetly chewy, her toes were not for eating, that when a father puts his little finger in one's mouth, gumming was fine, but practicing new teeth was not. She learned when one flailed one's sausagey arms against the linoleum, one could scoot forward. Such fun! With a snaky movement of the belly, then a lifting movement of the knees, she could
perambulate along nicely. She could grasp the little fuzzies that spun around under the couch, she could take the hard bits of corn from under the stove and suck happily upon them as her mother looked at the same page of a movie magazine, staring like this, for hours.

 

THE BABY WAS SICKLY,
whooping with coughs, quaking with colic. Even so, it took her no time at all to ignore her sickness and grin with nearsighted delight at any balloonish face that loomed above her stroller. Invariably, the faces said, What a beautiful baby!

And the young mother would sigh and say, Oh, well, she's pretty now, but her hair's darkening already. She'd say this, stroking the velvet head, but in the nighttime, she would stuff envelopes with pictures of the girl and send them off to baby food companies. At last, she won a spot on a can of formula for her lovely girl, which the family kept on the mantel-piece for decades until some rodent gnawed the label where her face had been.

Only Joe Helmuth, who'd had the foresight to have a framed picture made from the label, had any proof of her starring role on the formula canisters. Darling girl, you're a dandy little thing, he'd say to her, mouthing a cigar under his peppery moustache. He'd puff and regard her from his height, his boxer dogs snuffling under her skirt. Darling girl, you're my formula baby, and he'd pull a silver dollar from her ear. As she squealed with pleasure, he'd say, I'm going to
marry you, you know. Only have to wait me some sixteen years or so. And he'd give her a dashing grin until she fell over on her love-weak legs.

But soon, another creature began to grow in the mother, sucking all energy right out of her, and so the girl learned to totter then run when the mother was taking her afternoon naps. There was a terrible emptiness inside her then, a sickness that her mother used to soothe by her presence alone. Now, she sang to herself, but the songs didn't sound right; she licked the cranberry-glass goblets in the china cabinet to see if they tasted red, but they didn't. And so, rattling alone in the dim house, the girl learned to take off her dress, to slide button through hole, ribbon-end through the bunny-ears of the bow, because the frills and the starch of her dresses were harsh on her skin and she liked the sweep of air much better. And when the mother was weak in bed, and the father snipped violently at the hedges outside, she learned how to take off her little patent leather shoes and her lacy socks and her big-girl diapers with the pink-nubbed pins. She took off her dress, but left the red hairbow in her rag curls. And then she stood in the bay window that gave out onto the busy, sunny streets, the postman coming up the walk, the boys playing dodgeball with a flabby ball, the mothers pushing their babies in their strollers, the little girl stood there and pressed her belly against the cold glass like a sunbleached sand-dollar. She pressed her hands against the glass until they turned into suction cups holding her there. She stood in the window, nude and happy.

But a boy saw her and began to scream with laughter, holding the red rubber ball against his chest, pointing. The other boys began hooting. The mothers covered their smiles with their red-nailed hands, made little shooing motions, and the postman, talking to the father, turned and guffawed. In her pleasure, all the people in the glass laughing, the little girl laughed, too, sending out bell-like peals of joy. She was excited, fizzed to the bone, and clutched her crotch because she had to pee, which only made the boys laugh harder.

Then her father looked up from the hedges, grew pink, and stormed inside, still holding the clippers, so that, for a moment before he grabbed her roughly by her fat forearm, she thought he was going to snip her in the way he snipped the hedges, and she was afraid. She opened her little mouth in a round O and narrowed her eyes and sirened with alarm.

When the father spanked her, she screamed so loudly he thought he was doing her great harm. After he put the diaper and the dress back on and shoved the shoes roughly on her betrayed little feet, he held her so tightly she panted, kissing her until the mother came down from the nap, bleary-faced and asking groggily what had happened.

 

WHEN THE GIRL WAS BIG ENOUGH
to open doors and steal into rooms where she shouldn't be, she peered through the bars of the crib at her small brother, who looked like the baby rabbits that Fritz, the collie, found and ate in the yard. He smelled of celery, of urine, of baby sweat. He looked at her
with his pink and quivering face, opened his mouth in a rictus of joy.

You, she accused, are ugly. He reached out his tiny hand and clutched at her nose, sliding his earthworm fingers into her nostrils, grinning his bare-gummed grin. She put a thumb into his mouth and he clamped down on it, and his tongue was hot and squirmy. Some small warmth hatched in her, and for a moment, she forgot the sick feeling that she had felt since her mother was fat with him, since he came home. She sighed. It's okay, she said, taking his fingers out of her nose. You can be ugly. You're a boy. He let out a cackle, as if agreeing, then the sick feeling returned to her.

Girl things were beautiful. Beauty was in girl things. Pretty, she breathed as her mother lifted the charlotte pan from the quivering dessert. Beautiful, she said to her face in the puddle when she took the red berries from the chokecherry and smeared the juice across her lips. Lovely were the dance lessons, the little pink leotards and tutus that made her look like a carnation. There was a lot of jumping and leaping and twirling, and the girls told secrets and pulled their leotards from the necks to show their nipples and sat in the middle of the lesson to cry for no reason. The girl scorned such behavior;
she
did not sit and cry, and for that reason, for the performance, she was the one chosen to be the purple butterfly when everyone else was pink. Her mother spent all night on the clacketing sewing machine creating her wings, vast and fluttery, with wire supports. When she wore them she
was
a butterfly, and at night she would crawl from her
sleeping body and go spinning out the window over the rooftops of her neighborhood, flapping about with her spangled wings, looking down upon the daddies like her own, weaving home on the sidewalks and singing slurredly, the mothers like her own in the kitchen, in curlers, in housedresses, flipping through magazines, cigarettes in their downturned mouths. Above their unsuspecting heads, the girl spun unseen in the dark sky, so beautiful, so very beautiful.

She loved the wings so much she wore them on her first day of school. But the wings were crushed when she went out to play on the monkey bars and one boy twisted them savagely. Stupid, he said, You're not no stupid butterfly, you're just a girl. She said, I am so, you
monster
, I am so a butterfly, and she threw her shoe at him and ran away, one-shoed. When her mother came to get her, fat again with yet another baby, she clung to her mother's knees and choked until she vomited. The prettiest thing in the world, her wings, now dead, now gone, now crushed. Pure sorrow.

For consolation, her mother let the girl wear her Hershey Queen tiara and the girl fell asleep with it glittering on her head that night. Her baby brother patted her foot with his dumpling hand, the warmth of his flesh against her foot extraordinary, sweet.