Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods (3 page)

What could Marianne say. Papa had come along and married Mama when she was only a girl. Everyone knew that. ’Maybe she regrets not having had the experience, Harvey,’ she said in a suddenly adult voice with a mature insight, making him stare at her incredulously and coming closer to the truth than she knew.

Her feelings about all this were uncertain, vacillating. None of this had happened the other time. She didn’t know what to do. There was no dream message to enlighten her, no voice coming from one of those strange places that seemed so familiar but were not. She spent long hours hiding in her bedroom or riding alone, trying to understand what needed to be done next, but there were no answers. Was Harvey being changed by her changes? Or was he doing slightly different things but remaining the same? Was the danger still there?

Her confusion was growing into something approaching a nervous collapse when an invitation arrived from Harvey’s aunt, his mother’s sister, Tabiti Delubovoska. Madame Delubovoska was inviting her favorite—and only—nephew for a visit in Lubovosk. A long visit.

Great-aunt Dagma had much to say about the inadvisability of this. ‘Tabiti is not a nice woman,’ she said to Papa and Mama, not seeing Marianne where she was curled behind the pillows on the window seat. ‘She cannot be a good influence on Harvey. She is likely to be just the opposite.’

‘Harvey’s twenty-six,’ Papa said in a mild voice. ‘He’s a grown man, Aunt Dagma. I can hardly forbid it.’

‘Ever since Lubovosk split away from Alphenlicht and mixed with those people from the north, there has been evil there. You know it as well as I do, Haurvatat. No good will come of this visit.’ She tapped her ebony cane on the floor to emphasize the point. ‘Mind me, nephew. No good will come of it.’

Though Marianne did not remember this conversation having happened before, Harvey
had
gone to Lubovosk that other time as well. It was as though nothing had really changed! She was puzzled and anxious about this. Every time she changed something, the time pendulum swung back again. The finicky details of daily life as it had been lived before were becoming more and more vacillating and obscure, but the broad pattern seemed as though graven in stone, unchangeable.

And yet, she was grateful to see him go. With him gone, the daily pattern of life became calm, almost placid, each day’s path as simple as a ribbon, running from end to end, almost totally familiar. There was danger in this placidity. Danger in the easy living of each day, danger she could feel without being able to respond to it at all. She began to wake in the middle of the night from restless dreams believing there was some message important to her that she was not receiving.

And it was in this state of frustration that she sought the Beale Street church again. Perhaps the message that had evaded her when she was a child would be clear to her now that she was twelve.

The church was usually locked. On several occasions before she had gone around it, pulling at the doors, trying to find a way in. Today, however, there had been a funeral, and the mourners were still gathered in muted clusters on the side-walk as she slipped past them, through the open door and into the nave.

She knew it. The minute the lozenges of colored light from the tall windows began to swim across her face, she knew the place. There was a bell tower, reached by a twisting flight of stairs behind her in the corner. There was a choir loft on either side of the sanctuary, and a row of bronze plates set into the stone floor where the bodies or ashes of parishioners rested. It was, she guessed, a Catholic or Anglican church. Not a church Marianne would ever have attended. She was being taught the Magian faith of her ancient forebears, and that sect built no edifice in this place or in any other. Still, she knew this church as she knew her own bedroom. Grown-up
Marianne
had been here.

And she had left something here. The other
Marianne
had come to this place and set something here, some word, some symbol perhaps. Something meant to be found by the young Marianne in this separate life. Something to help. Here, and in the house, the shelter, the tree, the wall. In each of them was something she needed.

She sought what it held for her.

It was no message writ large in the stone. The only words carved there were ones of praise to God or thanks for past gifts. It was no song being sung. It was nothing written into the back of a hymnal. She had not really expected that.

She sat down, waiting. The place had summoned her, “here,” and she was “here,” ready to listen. Time went on. The sun swam a bit lower, sending new jewels of light into the floor and drawing her eyes up to the stained-glass window that cast them. St George. She recognized him from a storybook. St George and the dragon. It was not a very reptilian dragon, rather more doglike in general appearance but with a spiny crest and a lashing, lizardine tail. Its hide was blue as steel. The knight’s horse was reared high in fear, and the saint looked likely to lose his seat in the instant. The spear was only a straw. The dog-dragon would bite it in two.

Sitting there in the glow brought it back. Grown-up
Marianne
had come here before, between times, to sit in this place and look at this same window. “Remember,” she had whispered to the stone, the wood pews, the stained glass, the carved altar screen. “Remember,” bidding them summon herself when she returned as a child, as they had done. The memory was amber, warm, glowing with satisfaction. Whatever had been done here had been done well. ‘Are you here?’ she whispered to the window.

The dog-dragon in the stained-glass window moved its head to look at her, staring at her with large, sunflamed eyes. It panted, its pointed tongue sinuous as a serpent’s. ‘Are you ready?’ it asked. ‘Do you need me now?’

She gasped, wrapping her arms tightly around herself in self-protection. The dog continued to stare, its tongue flickering, an isolated shimmer of sunlight. Perhaps she was merely having another of those double visions, those bizarre transparencies laid over the reality of life. And yet, in her mind the voice seemed real and very clear, demanding an answer. ‘Do you need me now?’

‘Not quite yet,’ she answered softly. ‘Soon, maybe.’

The dog-dragon turned back to contemplate the knight poised above him, dog eyes laughing. One knew he had no fear of either the steed or the armor. When both the saint and the horse were ashes upon the wind, the dog-dragon would remain.

‘He’s a momentary god,’ a voice inside her said and was then silent. Marianne was frowning as she left the church.

Driven by a need to clarify what was happening, to connect it to anything she understood, she went to the house where the little old Chinese woman often slept upon the porch, and stood at the edge of the public walk where the brick path curved to the house. She called, tentatively, as one might call a puppy. ‘Here, come on, come on.’ Through the closed door a red dog came out, fluffed like a pom-pom, his black mouth gaped wide and his long, black tongue extended in a monstrous yawn. His face changed as she looked at it, becoming another kind of face for a moment, an Oriental face, wrinkled away from fangs much longer than any mere dog could have needed. He turned, posed, raising one foot as though to rest it upon something and she recognized him. There was a statue of him at home in Papa’s room. One of him and one of his mate with a cub beneath her paw.

‘Now?’ he asked. ‘We’ve been reasonably patient.’

‘Not quite yet. I only wanted to be sure you were here.’

‘Where else would we be?’ the dog asked with stern amusement. ‘Didn’t you tell us to stay here until we were needed? You haven’t forgotten that, have you?’

‘Not really,’ said Marianne. ‘Sometimes I forget parts of things I’m supposed to know. Sometimes I get confused. I’m not always sure what’s real.’

‘There are five of us,’ the dog said. ‘You do remember that.’

‘Yes,’ she said, surprising herself. She did know that. ‘I don’t exactly know what all five of you are.’

‘You’ll remember,’ said the red dog, turning to trot back to the porch beside the old woman. ‘You’ll remember.’

It was late and Marianne was very tired, but she did stop at the viny wall and whistle, softly, wondering what might come to her call. What came was the size of a large calf, black as the inside of a fireplace, with a mouth and eyes the color of ripe cherries, red as jelly.

‘Just checking,’ said Marianne somewhat weakly.

‘Don’t waste our time, woman,’ the Black Dog said.

‘I’m not really a woman, not yet,’ she said.

‘Oh, yes you were,’ he replied. ‘Were, are, will be. We’re ready when you are. Just call as you ride past.’

‘Ride past?’ she asked, for that instant believing she understood everything completely. ‘Oh, yes. I will.’ She turned away, feeling the fiery eyes of the Black Dog burn into her back as she trudged home. She did not call up the dog of the shelter or the dog of the tree. Dragon Dog, Foo Dog, Black Dog—what would the others be? She was not sure she wanted to know, but her mind told her. Wolf Dog and Dingo. Blue dog, red dog, black dog, silver dog, and yellow dog.

‘Momentary gods,’ she said to herself, remembering the words without knowing what they meant.

‘Papa, what’s a momentary god?’ she asked him at dinner. It was safe to do so. Harvey was still abroad.

‘A what, Mist Princess? A momentary god? Haven’t the foggiest idea.’

‘Perhaps a very little god?’ laughed Cloud-haired mama. ’Perhaps a very tiny one. Who only lasts for a moment?’

‘Where did you hear a strange phrase like that?’ Great-aunt Dagma wanted to know, cleaving immediately to the underlying significance of the question or event, as she always did. Others could be misled, or diverted by trivia, but seldom Great-aunt Dagma. ‘Who used those words?’

Marianne shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I just heard it somewhere. Maybe on TV.’

‘I would say,’ Great-aunt Dagma told her, ‘that a momentary god is one summoned up or invoked for a momentary occasion. A brief time.’

‘Maybe that’s it,’ Marianne murmured.

‘I would say further,’ Great-aunt went on inexorably, ’that anyone who did so had better have strong nerves and excellent qualities of conceptualization. I shouldn’t think a momentary god would necessarily wish to be dismissed once the moment was over.’

‘What do you suppose one would look like?’ Marianne asked, not needing to pretend innocence. She was innocent of anything except conjecture. ‘Do you suppose one could look like a dog?’

Great-aunt Dagma fixed her with a strange, glowing eye. ’I suppose one might. Or a lion, or a multi-armed idol, or a dragon or a worm, perhaps. Depending upon what one needed.’

‘Tsk, Aunt Dagma, you’re feeding the child stories again,’ Papa said.

‘Well, such stories were fed to you, nephew, and you suffered little from it.’

‘What did you mean, Great-aunt Dagma, about the god not wanting to be dismissed?’

‘Well, child. I suppose it would be like summoning a very powerful servant of some kind. Or perhaps a genie. One summons the creature up, and one says, “Mend me that fence,” or something suitable. And the creature does it. But then, when the task is done, it does not necessarily want to go into its bottle or to the servants’ quarters where nothing interesting is happening. It may insist upon staying around, perhaps eating and drinking or chasing pretty ladies…’

‘Dagma!’ Cloud-haired mama cried warningly.

‘Tsh, child. Marianne knows that male creatures chase pretty ladies. Even godlets or genies may do so, eh, girl? Well, that is what I meant. Not everyone has the power to put a creature of that kind back in his proper place. Perhaps it may even be hard to know what the proper place should be!’

Marianne was properly sobered by this. Evidently she, the grown-up
Marianne
, had summoned five momentary gods for some inscrutable purpose of her own. ‘Some necessary purpose,’ the adult voice inside Marianne prompted. ‘You’ll know when the time comes.’ Be that as it might, the current Marianne thought very anxiously about the five great dogs. When they had done whatever it was they had been summoned up to do, what would happen then?

The familiar, dreamy time came to an end. Harvey came home from his trip to Lubovosk, bringing with him his Aunt Delubovoska who was properly invited by Cloud-haired mama to come to tea between visits to Washington of an ambassadorial kind.

‘Not that I can really think of her as an ambassador – ambassadress,’ Mama laughed. ‘Any more than I used to be able to think of my own father as one. Lubovosk and Alphenlicht are such tiny, unimportant countries, and embassies are so deadly dull. It seems to me no tiny country should need such boring places even though the great powers may have use for them. So full of maneuvering. Everything is maneuver, tactic, strategy. My own mother used to worry about the political implications of what she
wore
!’

‘I’m glad Papa came along and rescued you, then,’ Marianne had said. ‘Otherwise you’d still be trapped in one.’

‘No.’ Cloud-haired mama had been quite sad over that. ’Embassy life would have ended for me when my own father died, even if Mother had lived. I would have been sent back home to Alphenlicht, I imagine. Just think of that! Being sent back to a place you don’t even remember and being told it’s your home.’

‘This is your home.’ Marianne had hugged her. ‘With Papa and me.’