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Authors: Bradford Morrow

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BOOK: The Almanac Branch
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“Dr. Trudeau? Listen. I respect you, I love Grace, I have a schedule this afternoon that will not allow, what, if you'll pardon me, do dogs have to do with anything?”

“Anything, as you well must know in business, may have anything to do with anything. As Blau has suggested, as different as grand and petit mal, incidents of an epileptic nature—”

“This isn't epilepsy.”

“I never said it was, if you'll hear me through—”

And I interrupted, “Those horny toads died, they dried all up.”

“What?”

Trudeau proceeded, holding my father's eye as best she could, “When Grace—and Grace you should be listening to what I'm saying, too, dear—when you find yourself hyperventilating, which means you're finding it hard to slow down your breathing, the simplest way for you to regain a regular breathing pace is for you to breathe into a paper bag, all right?”

“Okay,” what that again?

“In and out, and Grace you must concentrate on breathing slowly and regularly, just like counting sheep.”

But I said, thinking of the orchard apples, “They looked like the shrunk head Desmond got from India,” and the doctor reprimanded, “Grace, listen to me,” but Faw corrected me, “Brazil, Grace, it's Brazil,” and explaining to Trudeau, “I was down there on business, brought the children something from Brazil.”

“Those shrunk heads was gross,” I concluded.

“Neither of you is hearing a word I'm saying,” as she glanced at her watch.

I looked up at the panels in the dropped ceiling. We were back to square one. Eggshell white crawling with half-paralyzed worms. They stayed in place, and they smelled like rock candy, smelled of nothing. Which was to say they didn't carry the scent of apricot, which was the smell I most often associated with my visions. They didn't slither much like any of the worms I'd ever seen on television, just boring worms I would step on if I could get my foot up there to the ceiling. Except no, I thought, then the bottom of my foot would be gooshed-up with boring worm juice—

“So now, let's just to conclude: what you recommend, let me understand exactly, what you recommend as antidote to all this, her face disappearing, these flare people”—and I would have sighed here with loving exasperation, and wouldn't have corrected him, but would feel kind of sorry for having to put him and Mother and all of them through this—“waving to her in the tree, peach smells—”

“It's apricot,” Mother asserted from her chair, and I smiled back over my shoulder at her. She looked white as the bald white paint of the wall.

“—is to stick her head in a bag.” As he spoke he'd slipped on his jacket, which had lain in his lap, rather neatly folded as Dr. Trudeau had noticed. I now stared at Dr. Trudeau's shoes, tidy matte leather pumps, delicate for work shoes, pointed and with some extra heel. I liked Dr. Trudeau, and I worry as I write this that I err on the side of burlesque in the way I report such painful and profoundly embarrassing times. I wished that Faw got along better with her; I thought that because the doctor was a woman she somehow understood how that worked when the hole in the middle of my icicle hair came to be. I wanted to ask her whether she'd ever seen such a thing herself, because she seemed to know about it, but if she hadn't she figured Faw might get mad, and march off to yet another doctor, which I didn't want. Trudeau was speaking, and I found myself looking at her eyes, which were now quite amber, and very glowing, and I thought, “Her eyes are in upside down.” I dropped one of my shoulders down, lay my head to one side, bent over, and got a good look at her face from this different perspective. I was right. Her eyes would look much more regular if she were suspended from the ceiling.

“Grace?”

I nodded from my cocked-head position.

Trudeau moved close, put her hand on my shoulder. Her grasp was firm, confident, “Grace, can I tell you what I think? I think you're doing much better. I think we were right when we thought that flare men weren't able to leave their trees. That's where they live. And they have to stay where they live. And since he wasn't able to follow you out to the island, you've been doing better. Isn't that right?”

Well, that was all fine, but, I wondered, getting back to Dr. Trudeau's eyes, which were so close now and how for sure they were in upside down, and how they would look right if she were hung from the ceiling, I couldn't help but wonder, would the wiggly worms up there be able to eat their way through the lashings tied around her feet, and make her fall straight down on her head?

Berg drifted, like a jellyfish can drift in rough waters, but was pulled in by Faw from time to time. Over the protests of his teachers at school, Faw, having decided it was time that his eldest son learn something about how the world of commerce worked, announced that he was taking the boy with him to an island in the French West Indies. There he had intentions of setting up an extension of a foundation he had established the year before in Cape Hatteras, the Gulf Stream Trust. We none of us understood what such a project was about, nor what this Gulf Stream Trust meant, nor even where Cape Hatteras was, and when he attempted to explain any of it to us it only became more obscure. There was something about a church for drowned sailors; there was something about Columbus's younger brother Bartholomew; there was something about a woman there who burned a candle every night, all night, for the mariners who had been lost at sea—something about how their souls could find their way across the dark waters to the safety of the church by following the candle that she'd set in the window on the side of a hill. It all sounded very mysterious (churches and Faw, as I have said, never having been attractive to one another).

No matter what it was, both Desmond and I knew we were supposed to be envious of Berg's new status. Mother did not throw a tantrum. She was anything but hysterical. She even seemed to be in favor of the idea, a response that surprised each of us in different ways. Speaking for myself, I was confused at first. Here Faw was doing something with Berg that he'd never done with Mother, taking his son to this exotic faraway place—it seemed unfair. Her disaffection quelled quickly what jealousy I might have felt on her behalf, and began to make me think once more about what I'd noticed that first day in her. Of course, I thought. She must want him out of here, and then she could do whatever pleased her. Was she that far gone? I wondered. Looking back, I think that she was. I also think she sensed I was watching her.

When they returned, Berg more than ever distanced himself from us younger children; the transition in him that Faw had been looking to midwife seemed to have been accomplished. While the dinner at which Berg was invited by Faw to sit with the guests, while Desmond and I were told to play as quietly as possible in my room, may have signaled that this reconstruction of the hierarchy—as I viewed it—was to be permanent, later events would show that it would not turn out as my father might have hoped.

Things were changing, nevertheless, in the family. Balances were being reweighed and reweighted. Faw and Berg were over there, Desmond and I over here, Mother elsewhere on her own. And what was I to think, before the guests arrived, when I overheard Faw telling Desmond, “Your brother is a scrapper, a fighter, and that's going to stand him in good stead, you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You could use a little more of that yourself, you know.”

“I'll try,” said Desmond, and though I couldn't see him, given I was eavesdropping per my dearest habit at the time, it was easy to envision him standing directly before Faw with his hands in his pockets and eyes averted downward.

“Don't try, do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That's my guy.”

Stuart Hollander, the Pannett and Neden of Pannett & Neden who were producers, Beth and Howard Silliman, the del Russes who were the Geiger accountants—as best Djuna, with my help, could make out from Faw's hand written notes about the dinner, which he scribbled out at her behest—all were showing up within the hour, and here were two dozen woodcocks skewered on their own beaks, heads skinned, trussed like intricate kites with baking string, standing in almost military order on the butcher block counter in the kitchen and turning before Djuna's and my eyes from the sallow gray and pink a healthy woodcock ought to show, to the green tinge of the fungus that grew up the stone wall at the easternmost corner of the yard opposite the orchard. Djuna looked out the window at the wall. Her face was blank; the game was tainted. How was it possible? They'd been shot that very week (it was Saturday) in the Yucatan or in Guadalajara or maybe it was just Louisiana—wherever Faw and Berg had been on their way back up from the Gulf Stream trip, what did it matter now, now that they were removed from the container? It was nice, Djuna noted, that the guide had taken it upon himself to pluck the birds before he packed them in ice for the flight home. She had seen the pictures of him, a handsome, flat-nosed cowboy of sorts standing next to my father who had his arm draped on Berg's nearest shoulder, each not smiling but rather looking straight into the camera even as they cast their shadows across the fan of game birds laid out on a palm-frond bed at their feet—were there palm trees in Louisiana?

Well, but we were trailing off and away, as sometimes we did, Djuna and I, and especially in moments such as these, where two elements were coming together, forming a trap really—our island world, and the outside world of the people who were coming, whose names were written out on that piece of stationery, a beautiful heavy paper Faw favored for the letterheads of his companies, people all so important to him, we knew, important enough that they could not be sacrificed to putrid woodcocks. Djuna went to Mrs. Beeton's book, her touchstone in running the house. In Mrs. Beeton the woodcock was shown in French as Bécasse, which naturally put me in mind of the question, “But why?”… but instead of saying anything about Bécasse, I said, “Where is Mom? She'd know what to do,” not meaning to slight Djuna, more meaning to redress my shaky image of Mother.

I don't remember what Djuna said, because the time was passing, frittering along with no concern for her or Mother or me or tainted woodcock or the brilliant green watercress that floated in the sink. She sighed a deep-throated sigh and it surprised her; that was the same tone she heard herself make whenever she was losing her cool (like when she made us turn off the box); then, one by one at first and soon in an armload she gathered the woodcocks and stuffed them into the trash compactor that Ernest had installed, and once they were all in the compactor—they filled it to the edge of the plastic liner—she pushed the drawer back into the counter, locked it, and pressed the black, rectangular button and listened to the birds being crushed together inside, their tainted skin and beaks and bones gliding into a single pulp. She pulled the compactor drawer out, lifted the remains, carried with some difficulty the bundle across the kitchen, and deposited them outside in the can.

Another low groan as she looked at her hands, which were wetted with thin blood. Across the floor ran a feathery pink line of the same blood. She would have to go after that in the morning. There was no time to get out the mop and pail. She washed her hands then remembered how sticky blood could be when it dried, and how the flies would be attracted so she thought better of it and told me to take a linen hand towel—knowing how wrong it was to use such a fine piece of fabric, but what else could she do, there simply wasn't the time to mop—and I dropped the linen on the tail end of the trail of red. “Women should endeavor to cultivate that tact and forbearance without which no man can hope to succeed in his career,” the venerable Mrs. Beeton observed. And I, who attempted to follow some avenue toward my father's success by skating the rag under my hands along that bloody browning-pink line which crossed the kitchen floor, wonder now what kind of life Mrs. Beeton must have had, what kind of father, what kind of mother. Would she have been able to see a flare man in a tree in England? Would the tact she spoke of have extended to getting down on the linoleum and on all fours wiping up woodcock juice? Her answer, of course, would be that she wouldn't have spilled the blood in the first place.

And Djuna read again from
Household Management
, “Accidents, of course, will happen (though but rarely with proper precautions)”—what a scolding old bitch she was this Mrs. Beeton—“… fires will not always burn, nor ovens bake as they should …the gas supply may be deficient; but if the joint, or whatever it may be, cannot be done to time, do not send it up only partially cooked, but ask for a little grace …”

For what? We laughed together, Djuna first, then I, and it seemed so funny to us (even though it wasn't terribly) that I had to run to another room and stamp my feet hard in order to stop. I looked out the window, to see that there were shadows cast by headlights from the side driveway. One of the guests was arriving, the headlights of a car reflected off the trees and trellises near the kitchen's windows. Djuna had dropped Mrs. Beeton to the floor where the veneer of fowl blood—I hadn't been very thorough in my clean-up—had already begun to dry into patterns; oh, indeed, we could already hear the flies pinging against the screen. She went to the wall phone and dialed the number in a kind of haze of defeat mixed with efficiency. Ernest was going to bring over some whitebait. Faw might wonder where his woodcock had gone off to, but the evening would not be lost.

Berg came down into the kitchen, uncomfortable in his tie and blazer, but rather superior for his social apotheosis.

“I see you've got your shirt on with buttons forward, Berg,” Djuna noted. “Isn't that against your principles?”

“Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't

“Faw had to tie his tie for him,” I added, recognizing this as one of the few moments in my life when the tables were turned, and I could tease him without fear of immediate retribution.

BOOK: The Almanac Branch
11.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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