On Keeping Women (28 page)

The innocence of such a woman is unfathomable; believe J. J. Hoppe, it goes beyond the good. Bypasses it. But not in the style of a lady upstaging a peasant—there you’d be wrong. It’s the innocence of intelligence isolated—I told her once. And she replied, her heart pink on her cheeks, and in the holy voice kept for such subjects “The three i’s.” She’ll never get past language, that one. It’s at some such trading-post that women like her generally stop for good, I told her.
Halfway
—I said. “Skirting the steppes
you
scouted at thirteen?” she answered. “Leaning into the waterfall with my collapsible cup?” … There you have it. And them. They waken in full flesh, those women—to their digressed lives. It sensitizes them—she saw mine. But the windings of
his
mind were closed to her. Couldn’t bear to read it because she’s married it?—who said that, back there? Could be you’re right—little voice-in-the-crowd. Great readers, women are—but read right past the premonitory brute, always. Won’t see the cheapness of circumstance.
Doc?
He’s an item.

Did he first creep pitty-pat into the his-her bedroom and see she wasn’t there? Down in her city, maybe, stretching those afternoons into nights. And no one hears him. And he’s home. He’s never gone for the river-dom of this house like she has; the office-wing is where he’s at. His profession is what keeps this strange guy mucked in reality—or did. But now he’s home. In the house-by-the-river that’s kept Lexie with him so long. She don’t know that, yet. The house hid it from her. Just as to the very last it hid from both her and him that—nestled in its ample corners and other-century opportunities—a band of four children can and does lead a totally separate life.

Here he is though. We’ve followed him. Up onto the broad landing, where he stands in the not-quite dark. Suits him. Some of Doc’s patients—I, Hoppe, was among them—complain he’s too glad of another opinion. I like to have a man—I won’t have a woman at me medically—who’s definite about your disease, and about its afterlife too. Its prospects, and yours. If I’m sterile, say—should I let Lilian have the artificial impregnation she’s always nagging for? Yes or no? What I want is to be recognized for the item I am. But Doc—know that niggling little catch-in-the-throat he has, always saying “what-what?” I’d say that the man himself, when it came to do this or that, was always waiting for the specialist. Well—here I am.

Here we all are, the whole town, watching. All except me prepared to pity him. Watch the door of the little center bath, I say. The daughter, Chessie, is going to come out of it.

She’ll be in one of those crazy-pretty gowns of hers, and through that thin stuff it’s as clear as Darwin and Krafft-Ebing both, that her long bone-structure is a ditto for Doc’s. His bones are his imprint. Striking girl. After her mother worked for us, I cased the girl, looking for Lexie-spots. All in the head only, I found. Lexie’s brain, the farthest-out nerves of it, in that body—and making a terrible outcry. Happens. The child in question has to make the best of it. Doc’s legs look like a deer’s on that girl. And his long hands like the long hands of the Lady of Shalott—or a monk’s. Going to be a swinger, that girl. Who hates men. But will sink her teeth into herself.

Go on, whisper, Grand River.
Did
the gown belong to Lex. Did the girl borrow it, like she often did with Lex. Or did Lex wear it once—and then give it to her.

And now the main whisper. Does Doc think it
is
Lex?

Really think you’re going to reach an answer, folks? Agghh—townfolk.

Now then—we do know something real. What Doc said to her. From the other children? Maybe. Who knows who told who? In the end, they always tell a lot. In that kind of young circumstance. The child-guerrilla life can’t last. We always get to it.

“Brought you a present,” he said, in Doc’s formal, even way. He has a standard voice. Can’t make much of it. Something doggy about it maybe; his father was a vet. But at this point, I’d say, is when the ogre begins to form on him. Some put it further back, to the disease. Some put it even further back. Either way—Doc’s going to kiss his daughter. Hear it, that little snigger?

Done. On the mouth. But
before
he recognizes her? Or—and here it comes, the little item, out of its rustproof existential file—or
then?

Well, folks. We’re a village aren’t we. Of unnatural acts.

She knees him, by God. We have that on oath. Or the nearest those specialists like the one who treated her ever come to it.

(“Mrs …. er—” they say he had the gall to ask poor Lexie, “is it true that Chessie’s father made a point of teaching both her and her sister the … er … art of self-defense? Eye-thumbing, and so forth? Made them practice it? With him?” And poor Lexie, by now numb with the life of her children, those Christian guerrillas, as they have now been revealed to be, will say sardonically—with that stricken, Aesop-smile growing on her—the narrator’s smile, ever in her mirror—she tells the friends who mark it, “It’s
all
true.”)

The town gossip, here in the hall too now, is salacious. Did Doc erect—they want to ask—wouldn’t he of? Long time away, long disease. In a dirty foreign place full of dirty ideas. Give
us
an idea, Hoppe.

Fuck off. Everybody tighten your bootstraps, belt and brain, and think of your own children. Or your sacred lacks. For here comes young Charles.

And my stint’s over. J. J.’s had enough. Ask
them
for the rest of it. All of them. Even him, Doc.

Will I meanwhile print my little item, as is, or otherwise? Do I ever? Unless it goes to court? I’ve got the story; that’s enough. That’s what attracted
her
to
me,
that I had them. But we’re not two of a kind. She’ll want to hang her story on the line, somewhere. It’s hers of course. And she’s not the gal to remain an item. That’s what attracted
me
to her. I like metaphysical cunt. Never have any luck with it. Oh, language is acts, yes. But leave that to Wittgenstein. Between a woman and a man—it’s dangerous.

So hop to it, staff. What’ll I do with that item? What we always do. Bury it.

C
HARLES IS DEAD ASLEEP
on Royal’s bed. After nights of not having enough of it. Reading philosophy downstairs, with his ears pricked. Or lying with the door to his own room ajar, until Chess noticed. She never saying. Each time just shutting it in passing, with those airy, deft fingers of hers, never making a sound. Whenever he comes to the miniature parts of a machine he’s making—a watchpin-size camshaft to be slid in, the frailest wire to be hooked—he’s always asked Chess. She moves between noises—his sister. Loudness is pain to her; nobody’s whisper escapes her. She always heard Dad come in, no matter how late. Lying stiff on her bed, eyes fixed on the wall. But she only began to hear voices when he left. It took Charles a long while to see why.

Meanwhile, on nights when he and Maureen and Royal find it’s necessary—no need to take a vote—he shuts his own door ostentatiously and steals in to bunk with Roy. Whose nightlight insomnia is a part of the household. Roy’s door can be left ajar. Roy and Chess are the poles, the constants of their team of four. For different reasons, those two have to get what they personally want. Maureen and he, Charles—the sub-team—are maneuverable that way. Still, it’s agreed that what he and she want for all four of them—not adult standards, never, but a cautious compliance—is now the only thing to do. Against those standards—which loom ahead of them like furniture they don’t want—they’re all four a united front. With an aim which for the past months has fused them even against their one-time squabbles. Which seem to him now like the cast-off mittens of four other children entirely.

Yet it’s a game they’re playing too, or else the three of them couldn’t stand it. Or maintain it as they have. A game in which the deer is real, but he and his brother and Maureen don’t hunt to kill, but to preserve. We’re conservationists, he tells them: Chess can stand anything, in one way—and nothing, in another. And this house is her only preserve.

How can this be, when both their parents frighten her?

“I’m their mix,” she said once, in one of those sleepwalker lulls which can come over her mid-sentence—when the voice takes over and meanwhile those same delicate fingers of hers, unnoticed by Chess, shred anything in them. Last week slipping her own gold watch-bracelet off and twisting it apart link by link, until he noticed. Maureen sneaked it off to the jeweler, blaming the dog. Royal, their front man, carping “He knows we don’t have a dog.” They’ll put the repaired watchband back on Chess’ dresser, and she’ll say nothing. But never do that again. Whatever does this in her never tries the same thing twice. It shifts objects, and catastrophes. That’s why half the time people never notice—even their mother. That’s why Chess is so hard to protect. Maybe only a team like theirs, nearer to groundlevel, to childhood offenses still in the blood, and to fairy-tale belief in their own powers—could manage it as they so far have. For on the subject of those damages that inflame adults—to possessions first, and then to principles—they’ve all had a short but bitter lifetime of training. On how to dim back such offenses in and among the other already broken adult toys and rules of the household—or else hide them utterly.

Chess will never have to explain to him or Reeny or Royal why such a house can still be her preserve. It’s theirs too.

When Dad left, she bloomed for a week. Then it got to her. What had already got to him, Charles. Finally, and with the kind help of Uncle James, it got to all of them. That Dad, if he was leaving for good, would be taking the house along with him. In similar cases along the road here, the house-as-was had never survived.

So Charles has marshaled his summer militia, from basement to attic, and now the tower, too. They’re holding the fort at least until autumn, when Chess goes away to school. A freeish one, chosen by Lexie—where to be erratic is almost okay. Though there have been rumbles. Chess is never really with the others, the school reports. “Take a look at her on the playing field—she’s always in back of the others. Behind. Wandering.” And yes, she did those marvelous stage-sets, does those weirdly original drawings. But her school’s like any school really; brilliance is never enough for them. So—off with her, to the doctor they recommend. Who tells them, and tells Lexie, who whispers it to him, Charles (in one of her frequent intra-child breaches of confidence, which all of them in turn are used to receiving): “‘Get her out of that house,’ the man says. But do you believe that Charles?—that the house is bad for her. This house is her refuge …
isn’t
it?” He says yes. Aggh, those doctors, Lexie says venomously—practical suggestion is not their line—and the school of course is closed. No skin off their backs. And we all know what it took in the first place, to get Chess to go there. How last summer, her first year away, healthy as she seemed when she came home, they all saw her deep relief as the house closed over her. Closed. Charles understood that, though in him it is only a tendency. The call of the place where you are ultimately known. In a way, every other place to come will involve pretense.

So, in summer, Chess’ strangeness—which Reeny hates and fears, Royal dissects and Charles himself half-deifies and groans for—belongs to them. Their team is Royal the medic, Maureen the nurse if ever to be needed, himself the manager—and Chess. Chess is the quarry, and the goal. She has to outwit them—and the part of her that’s on their side—as she can. She’s under a spell she can’t stop. They understand that. Even Reeny’s “Why
can’t
she—” is no longer sighed. At the same time, they’re compelled to help her stop—and to pick up after her, repairing what can’t be helped. And to keep the whole proceedings—a parade that starts up again, like a millwheel, every morning—from the powers above. The team-members understand each other completely. Including Chess.

But he’s exhausted. So is Maureen, who has never given her full approval. Concealment of any kind assails her own timid hope to be an ordinary adult, which to her is now the apex. Royal is not emotional, maybe too young for it. He himself is at the breaking point of energy and fidelity. Both. He can feel the long muscles of maturity forming in his arms and in his thoughts; he’s eighteen. He’s got to break with this cops-and-robbers posturing of childhood, and yet he yearns to keep it on; it belongs to the soul, to a purity he doesn’t want to leave behind. It’s what Chess has, at her worst and at her best, undivided—but kept together as one by her madness. It’s what he admires her for. But why does such purity of intent, of vision, create only mayhem and despair around it?

To have no one to ask is what’s breaking him. No one to share Chess with. Her energy is endless. She’s possessed; he knows that. Her demon, which may destroy her, never tires. When under its dominion, wandering the house dressed in shorts maybe, in dead of a winter night when the furnaces are banked—she’s not even cold. He marvels that the adults haven’t noticed this among all her other oddities.

Royal’s noting all of these down, for his future medical purposes. How for instance, at the very times when she’s her old humorous, cynic self—funny as hell, sharp as any customer and saner than anybody—her tall frame locomotes badly. As if it has to be kept shyer than her brain. She has the best legs of any girl in town, but shuffles them. Yet when Chess is in trouble—a phrase they took from Lexie—she moves like a starved beauty, a power thinning to its own wraith. Hormones, we bet, Roy says primly. “I discuss it with James.” Swearing that he’s not told James what’s going on. True or not, Charles envies him. Royal’s done what he hasn’t yet but knows he’s going to; he can’t yet face how, or when. Royal’s deserting, to the other side.

Lexie’s going to be hardest to convince. Their whole technique of hiding Chess, of alternately not noticing and over-noticing, comes from his mother; teamwork has only extended it. Nowadays to beyond where it should sanely go; he knows that. “Chess is exactly like me when I was young,” their mother’s always said. But he and Maureen and Royal are
not
like Chess. Though young. It hurts them, that she won’t let herself see that. “Chess is in trouble,” Lexie’ll whisper to him at some town affair where they’re all together as a family—the PTA auction at Royal’s grammar-school, the Democrats’ bazaar. “Go cope, please, will you? Bring her over to your friends.” Or in reverse, she’ll even make use of Royal’s limp.” Chess,
dance
with him.”