Novella: “The Heaven of Victory” (Part Three; Final)

7.

The Singular WAVES

When Pearl Harbor had happened during Mena and Kara’s senior year of high school, Rake had been in his senior year as well and Bob had been a freshman at a black college about fifty miles west of Philadelphia. Nate Jefferson, a Harlem Renaissance child till their parents’ move to Philadelphia in 1928, was almost a decade older than Bob and had already been playing for six or seven seasons with a ballteam called the Indianapolis Clowns.

            “You going to join up?” somebody had asked Rake on his snowbound high school athletics field; he had been a talented runner and long-jumper at that time and he liked to stand around outside on the field even when the season was not ongoing.

            “You going to join up?” somebody had asked Bob in his intro physics class; his college’s science curriculum was well-thought-of and he had a good head for numbers.

            Both of them had said yes, immediately and almost impulsively; neither of them at this time—they had later found out that it was December 10 for both of them, only about an hour apart in the late morning—had wanted to join up, not as Mena had wanted to. They would not have gone to the trouble of moving to a different state or lying about their age, as Mena had had to do upon finding that the minimum age for a WAAC was twenty. For them, joining up was not exactly the path of least resistance, but it seemed like the normal and natural thing to do; for Mena it had required a deviation, a sudden swerve out from her life’s ordinary trajectory. For Rake—Rollie, then—and for Bob it had been almost ordinary, unusual only insofar as the war itself was unusual.

            Bob had gone in to a Navy recruiting station in West Philly during his winter break from school and had been told that there was very little he’d be allowed to do as a black man in the Navy at this point in the war. The secretary who had told him this had been sympathetic to his frustrations—as a black man from the Northeast who had never lived under Jim Crow, he was not exactly eager to put himself under segregation on purpose—and so she had told him to come back later in the war because she had a suspicion that more positions would start opening up as things continued. So for the first six months of the war Bob had bided his time at college and completed the first year of a major in chemistry.

            Rollie had asked his parents about enlisting and had been told that this was a poor man’s war orchestrated by the socialists and the foreign element in New York. He had enlisted anyway and, by the spring of ’42, had already had the rake incident happen and acquired his nickname. Apparently he had resisted the nickname for several weeks but eventually gotten used to it, which explained to Mena why he now accepted it and answered to it with so little fuss. He had had more or less a good time of it during his posting at Fort Dix in South Jersey, which was where Mena was going to be posted as well within the next few days, and he had encouraged Debbie to join up once the WAAC had been established. At that point Debbie had been working as a secretary in Harrisburg and dating a man called John Jordan.

            Rake and Bob had first met late in the summer of ’42 when Rake, having just had a trying and confusing tryst with another soldier at Fort Dix, first found the Stationmaster’s Place and went in jumpy and frightened. Bob had been going there for about two months at that point but had not been there looking for trade, as the saying imported from the Brits went. Bob had been sitting next to a WAVE, talking companionably, when Rake had walked up to them.

            “I couldn’t help but notice you talking to this lady,” Rake said. “You okay if I sit with you guys? It’s my first time here and…”

            “You not interested in guys?” the WAVE asked.

            “Oh, no, nothing like that,” said Rake. “You just seemed…well, companionable, is all.”

            The WAVE shrugged. “Never been accused of that before,” she said. “My friend here and I are just arguing a point of grammar.”

            “Oh Christ. Seriously?” asked Rake. Bob nodded solemnly. “And what’s that?” asked Rake.

            “I’m a WAVE, see? Bob thinks I ought to be ‘a WAVES’ instead.”
            “It doesn’t make any sense as a plural,” Bob said insistently. “Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. The plural word there is ‘Women’ and the singular also begins with a W. The singular and the plural should both be ‘WAVES.’”

            “Acronyms have a life of their own,” the WAVE said. “You study chemistry, my friend; I had a degree in English before the war.” Bob raised his eyebrows, as did Rake. “Smith, same place I got trained as an officer,” said the WAVE, although neither Bob nor Rake had been sure that this was what they wanted to ask.

            “Lincoln,” said Bob.

            “Are you in the service?” Rake asked Bob.

            “Not yet,” Bob said. “I’m biding my time, seeing if they’ll open up more positions and ranks to colored folk. I don’t have it in me to be a mess attendant, so instead I’m studying science and who knows, maybe they’ll have me testing weapons or something.” He shrugged. “You never know. Some of these physicists and chemists are back and forth from Washington all the time—you didn’t hear that from me, though.”
            “Seems like you trust me,” said Rake, sitting down between them.

            “Trusting you isn’t the way I’d put it. I make it a policy to trust everyone who comes in here and stays more than a few minutes,” Bob said.

            Rake laughed a little at this and the three of them did a round of drinks. This was the point at which Rake started, for some reason, and he thought perhaps childishly, to wish that he could spend more time with his sister on evenings like this.

            The WAVE got up abruptly, went up to the bar, and asked for a bowl of pretzels. Rake and Bob regarded her with an odd sort of awe. She was moving in this twilight world more readily and courageously than they were. The barkeep seemed deferential to her. Bob, in particular, was wowed by this deference; Rake was used to being deferred to, but at different times and for different reasons, and it had not happened in his six months since leaving high school. (Debbie had asked him, concernedly, if he intended to go back and finish high school after the war; he had said that yes, of course he did, even if he was twenty-one or so by then. There were a few other students from his class who had enlisted early also.)

            Bob stayed at the bar through the night and then staggered to church, Rake and the WAVE in tow. Bob’s family at had some point or another become Episcopalians, which Rake and the WAVE also, coincidentally, both were. Bob had heard church architecture referred to as “theology in stone” by somebody or other and he often repeated this, even before he had grasped what it actually meant. By August 1942 he had grasped what it meant and Rake seemed to agree with him on it. The WAVE saw her church attendance as an obligation rather than as a joy and grumbled her way through the responses in Morning Prayer. After church Bob went back to his shabby West Philadelphia apartment, Rake took a bus back towards Fort Dix, and the WAVE joined him as far as a town called Mount Laurel.

            “I didn’t catch your name,” Rake said to her.

            “Tomlinson,” she said primly. “Kay Marie Tomlinson. Ripley, right?”

            Rake nodded. “Roland. My buddies call me Rake.”

            “I can’t see why,” Tomlinson said. Rake shrugged and got back to his book, some crummy paperback with a tattered yellowish cover and crinkled yellowish pages, by an author whose name was almost as obviously fake as people thought his father’s was. By the time the bus got back to Fort Dix, he had to go to the bathroom very badly.

 ❦

Bob got undressed at his apartment and took a bath. While he was in the bath he thought intently about Rake. He had liked him and thought he had an appealing boyishness even though he was not really that much younger than him; if he had been much younger the boyishness would have been alarming, at least in the setting of the Stationmaster’s Place, rather than appealing.

            Rake got seconded to the Army Corps of Engineers about a month and a half later after it came out that he was good at multiplying fractions. This was around the same time Bob finally joined the Navy, and was more relieved to be kept on shore duties than he would have wanted to be. They met occasionally, mostly in Philadelphia at first, until Bob got assigned to a Naval air station near Dix. He actually was working mostly in the mess at this point but he had a little more respect and authority within the mess than he might have had a year ago. He was promised more, and different, duties to come.

            They started getting dressed and undressed around each other well before they started doing anything about it. To look instead of to eat was Bob’s philosophy right now in love as in the more faith-ridden aspects of his life. This did not stay the case forever. By Christmas matters had progressed to such a point that Rake decided to invite Bob home, as a friend, for Christmas. It was his hope that this would pacify his parents about several different things at once—black people, the service, and Rake’s ability to make friends who were, as far as his parents would be able to tell, morally upstanding. This turned out to be a serious error in Rake’s judgment, and to a lesser extent in Bob’s for going along with it.

            Christmas at the Ripleys’ was courteous but strained. Debbie was in the WAAC by now and was in California with Mena, whom she had already mentioned as a good friend in two letters home. Carrington Ripley and his wife, Ernestina, seemed to have decided several days before Bob arrived to treat him as a replacement for their far-distant child. How they had missed the fact that Bob was a black man rather than a white woman was probably a question for the philosophers.

            Bob, for reasons best known to his past self, had decided to visit the Ripleys again for New Year’s Day and things had gone no better. Matters had progressed with amazing rapidity after that. Less than a week into 1943 Rake had been transferred to California, apparently as part of some ostensibly-humane policy on the part of his CO to put him closer to where his sister was (which of the siblings this was intended to benefit more was a mystery, but both of them at least initially were happy about it). A week after that Carrington and Ernestina decided to send a goon to beat up Bob because they suspected him of having in fact stolen some silver and china that Ernestina had misplaced. By the end of January Nate had gotten wind of what had happened and come home to Philadelphia for the last couple months of the baseball off-season; legal wrangling got underway in February and escalated into early March, when the idea for the payoff was arrived at. In mid-March Tomlinson—for it was she who was the WAVE who was supposed to be involved in the payoff—was transferred to Texas and a little later in the month Mena’s services were requested.

            At this point Rake was getting almost-daily letters and telephone calls from his parents but not much of anything from Bob. He was able to deduce from this, if deduction was the right word, that Bob was probably under some kind of investigation or surveillance. This surveillance seemed to last until late June, at which point Rake started getting letters from Bob again. It was three weeks into July that Rake’s commanding officer, for reasons best known to himself, determined to send Rake back east—in preparation, it was suggested, for deployment to the ETO at some point after the first of the year. Rake, who was not out of his teens yet, did not have the presence of mind and instinct to realize that he was in danger; Bob did realize this, but was for that very reason even happier than Rake was that they would be in the same area again.

            “I’m getting deployed to Fort Dix,” Mena said to Rake in early August. “Isn’t that where you were at first?”

            “It was, yeah,” said Rake. “I’m not getting deployed there again, though; they’re putting me somewhere in Pennsylvania. Closer to where my family lives, actually, than Fort Dix was. God help us all.”

            “Does Debbie get along with your parents, can I ask?” Mena asked.

            “Believe it or not, Debbie actually gets along with them worse than I do,” said Rake. “I don’t think they’re surprised enough by anything I do to be disappointed in me; they still coddle me when they can and try to protect me when they think I need protecting, which I usually don’t.” He flicked some ash from his cigarette into a storm drain; they were in Santa Monica on a day that they both had off, walking through the wealth- and fame-infested streets, not looking up from their feet enough to be sightseers. “Debbie, on the other hand, Debbie they think is a brazen little bitch.”

            “Not how I’d describe her.”

            “Not how much of anyone outside our family would describe her. But apparently she acted differently in high school. They haven’t adjusted what they think of her. They don’t often adjusted what they think of anyone except downwards; it’s much easier to lose their good opinion than to gain it.”

            “What would they think of me?” asked Mena.

            “They’d hate you,” said Rake bluntly. “Someone who lied about her age and what part of the country she was from to get into the military for a war they still think we shouldn’t be involved in? They’d hate you big league.”

            “I don’t believe I’m doing too much of consequence for that war.”

            “I disagree. Would you rather be opening fire or lobbing grenades at some foxhole in Sicily or the Solomon Islands?”

            “I don’t know anymore,” said Mena. “Right now the biggest thing I want is a shower. You think you have dreams and you think you’re high-minded; really you just want to take off this uncomfortable uniform and wash the sweat off your back.”

            “Speak for yourself.”

            “Oh, get lost.”

            “All right, Mena.” Rake laughed a warmer and more easygoing laugh than he intended. “Be as prickly as you like.”

            “It’s what the last year’s made of me is all,” she reassured him.

8.

Woods within Woods

A couple of months into her time at Fort Dix, Mena showered late in the morning on a day whose afternoon she had off so that she could go out to meet Bob and the Ripleys in the woods and do something horrible and grisly. Upon getting to Fort Dix she had, contrary to her expectations, been made a secretary for a male officer whose job it was to administer discharges that occurred on this base. So far Mena had already handled about two dozen “blue” discharges, neither honorable nor dishonorable; of these two or three were for the sorts of things that the Navy shrink had been investigating Bob for earlier in the year. Mena did not particularly like the nature of the work but she did not particularly hate it either. She got along well with Colonel Blackwood and the rest of his staff. Too, against all odds and almost against her will she was growing to like the adventure of her first fall in a cold climate.

            She finished showering, dried off so that the nippy October wind would not chill her to the bones, and got dressed in her off-duty clothes for her ride on a borrowed motorcycle down into the Pines for her first-ever hunting trip. The sky was leaden and only some of the trees around Fort Dix were changing color. She ran into Colonel Blackwood on her way off-post and saluted him. For the first time in her life, as she revved up the Servi-Car that she had borrowed from a plumber in Pemberton, she felt a twinge of pointlessness to the act of shirking her duties this afternoon. It was funny that she would feel it at the act of separating good people, decent people, from their jobs of service to the country and the cause, and had not felt it at the act of helping terrified families know what had happened to their dead or captured sons.

            The Pine Barrens—the Pinelands—the immense flat evergreen forest that covered a million acres in the southern half of New Jersey, was not new to her after two months here. Some people in these parts just called it the Pines, the way Antarctica was known as the Ice to some polar explorers. When Mena had been fifteen, her home economics class had read a selection from a book called The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. It was a book about a family in the Pine Barrens that was, as was supposed, descended from some Revolutionary War hero’s dalliance with an idiotic barmaid on his way home to his wife after a battle. The family was apparently riddled with criminality, ignorance, and disease. According to the book, this was because of inherent deficiencies in their barmaid progenitrix, deficiencies written in deep letters in her genes. It was not Mena’s genes that stirred up anxiously and flickered into wariness as she drove the Servi-Car down the highway through the woods.

            The Pines were mostly pitch pines; the forest was old but the trees were young, risen phoenix-like out of cones that opened in the ashes after wildfires that caught every so often in these regions. From season to season the colors in some parts of the woods apparently barely changed at all; the trees were evergreen, the ponds were blue, the remains of the last generations were black charcoal on beds of white sand. “Sugar sand” was what they called it and it made the frosts come early.

            Mena stopped at a gas station and diner on Route 206 about ten minutes’ drive south of the north-south road’s conjunction with the road west from Pemberton. There was a diner further up near that conjunction too but she had not been hungry earlier in the day. Now it was about time for a late lunch and she figured that she could probably order something that she could eat quickly enough to be at the meeting place with her friends only a few minutes late. The meeting place was called Grace Bible Baptist Church and it was a short distance from Route 206 right in the middle of the Pines in a town called Atsion. From there they would proceed in Bob’s truck, a civilian truck rather than a jeep, to a place where there was supposed to be good deer hunting all through the fall.

            Already feeling a little carnivorous as she thought of the possibility that she might kill something today, Mena ordered a Reuben sandwich with two kinds of lunch meat on the side. The corned beef in the sandwich came, said someone at the counter in a uniform Mena did not recognize, from Uruguay. Reciprocal trade pacts came to mind for Mena. She did not really care very much where the corned beef came from but she felt as if she was doing this man a greater kindness than she realized by listening to him and trying to take in what he was saying.

            The grey day was no longer pallid as she left the diner. There was an odd brightness to it now, as if behind the grey there was vivid blue gently reminding the grey of itself. Mena’s dark hair, worn looser off duty than on, flickered in the corners of her vision as she swept a hand over her forehead in surprise at a sudden breeze. The day was maybe fifty-five degrees and the breeze brought it down below fifty. She was glad she was wearing a coat and wished that she had a hat, although the helmet did help once she got on the motorcycle again.

            By the time she got to Atsion it was the heat of the day—almost sixty degrees. In Hawaii this would have been a breezy midnight. In New Jersey there were crows flying here and there overhead, and a flight of Canada geese leaving hither and yonder Canada for the winter. A few dead leaves, oak, danced out of the pines and across the road on the wind that the motorcycle stirred up. There was not much to Atsion, just a few public buildings without much in the way of private homes around them. There was a largeish reservoir to her right and, to her left, a dirt road winding sinisterly towards a thick, unbroken line of dark trees. She felt as if something was reaching out for her, and she was not as afraid of it as she wanted to be.

            The church was set back a ways from the main road and had a large graveyard from which the trees looked almost as if they were pulling back. Rake and Bob were already there but Debbie was not; Rake had a real hunting rifle with him but Bob was carrying some sort of carbine that you would normally expect to see carted off to the UK along with the infantry or parachutists who were being prepared for the invasion of Europe. Mena had fired guns only two or three times before, while palling around with married male NCOs and their families in California, lining up emptied Spam cans and shooting them off railings like little boys in Westerns.

            She told Rake and Bob this and Bob raised his eyebrows and said “They don’t train you with guns or anything?”

            Mena shook her head. “WACs don’t have firearms training, no, because we’re not supposed to see combat,” she said. “Of course, there are WACs in England and Sicily who’ve died in bombings, but you can’t exactly shoot down a bomb with a carbine, can you?”

            “Spoken like someone who’s never tried,” said Bob with a twinkle in his eye that set Mena at ease considering what an alarming statement this would have been had Bob not been joking.  “Anyway, if you have fired a gun a couple of times, you should be able to get along more or less okay if you just tag along with us.”

            “The thing is,” said Mena, “I’m not sure I want to fire a gun. It might feel too much like combat.” She was unsure if she was saying this because she thought she was too good for it or because she thought she was unequal to it.

            Bob shrugged his shoulders and sat down with his back to the graveyard fence to continue waiting for Debbie. It took her another ten or fifteen minutes to arrive going by Mena’s wristwatch, within which the clouds parted considerably and the high autumn sun poured down upon them. The four of them looked up, all startled, as another flock of geese flew by squawking overhead.

 ❦

Bob drove them deep into the woods, to a place where a narrow river ran between sandy banks under overhanging trees eastward into forests within forests. Then he drove them further, to the end of a dirt road that eventually turned into nothing more than two muddy ruts, going not much of anywhere, with astoundingly thick turf for late October growing in the strip of ground between them. Beyond the end of the dirt road they walked for maybe three-quarters of a mile before coming to an open expanse of golden-brown grass partially covered with dead leaves, on the other side of which was the base of a low wooded hill.

            “We’re here,” Bob said, sotto voce. He waved his arm in a way meant to indicate that they were to lie down on their bellies.

            “You’ve been hunting here before?” Mena asked once they were all lying down, keeping her voice almost but not quite as low as his was.

            “Two weeks ago,” Bob murmured. “Last time I got an afternoon off. A buddy of mine from NAES Lakehurst drove me down. Hadn’t been hunting before since my dad took me about a year before Pearl Harbor.”

            “Does your dad often hunt?” Debbie asked. 

            Bob nodded. “My brother too. Pennsylvania is a hunstman’s state, as I’m sure you two are aware.”

            “Huntsman, What Quarry?” said Mena.

            “…pardon me?” said Rake.

            “Ignore her,” said Bob. “She’s quoting the title of a book. Good book—read parts of it myself.”

            “You and I will have to discuss it, as soon as we’re not lying in wait for deer any longer,” Mena said.

            They relaxed into the lengthening afternoon, and by about a quarter past two by Mena’s watch she had started to feel comfortable, lulled, kind, fuzzy. She felt that somewhere in the woods with them there was something kind, if poor and stupid, protecting them from some mechanical, distant-yet-nearby cruelty. It would have been silly of her, she reminded herself, to think that she was feeling the presence of God here more than she did in any other place, but something about the Pines felt strange to her in the way that prayers and meditations felt strange.

            “A great power is in the Pines,” she whispered to Rake, without knowing why she was whispering it, or why it was Rake to whom she was whispering it.

            “You ever hear about the Jersey Devil?” Rake asked, not loudly, but clearly enough for all four of them to hear.

            “Oh, let’s not get ourselves started on the Jersey Devil,” said Bob, and simultaneously Debbie just said “Horse shit,” distinctly as two separate words. Rake looked at his sister in scandalized surprise, probably at her foul language but perhaps also at her forthrightness.

            “I have heard about the Jersey Devil, a couple weeks ago when this girl who’s a Jersey native was telling me about him in the mess,” said Mena. “They say Decatur shot a cannonball clean through him.”

            “Do you believe in ghosts and devils, Mena?” asked Bob.

            Mena did not answer this except to tell Bob that she thought it was a leading question. The truth was that she did not know the answer herself; she did not want to be thought of, even by herself, as the sort of person who was credulous about unseen forces, especially when the seen, manifest, material forces abroad in the world these days were malevolent enough without needing help. She had laughed and sung along to the suggestion in “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’” that Hitler had been created by the devil as a sort of anti-Adam but it was just that, a suggestion, joking and sly. It was difficult for her to believe that there was any wickedness at work in the world that could not be attributed to mere humanity. What was at work in the woods with them this afternoon did not seem quite human but it did not seem wicked either.

 ❦

Fifteen minutes later, she came to know that it was possible that what was at work in the woods with them was a deer. A magnificently antlered buck strode out of the pines at the base of the low hill opposite and started nudging aside the dead leaves that covered the golden grass. It looked at first like he was about to eat but he seemed—Mena could not say how or why he seemed—to have something on his mind other than mere bodily hunger. She wondered what kind of mind he did have, behind those dark eyes and that prodigious forehead. Suddenly she felt, exultantly, victorious over the buck. The buck suddenly became a representation of forces that she could not fight, not because combat was not allowed to her—she was too perceptive to think of direct combat in a theatre of operations as the only thing that could be done to fight these forces—but because she could not do herself or her country the kindness of becoming a good soldier. This was her quarry, as the real enemy over the sea, still less the deeper Enemy whom she was called on to always already have rejected, never could be. She aimed the rifle that Bob had given her, breathed in and out heavily once or twice, and fired.

            The buck bolted; she knew that she had not missed entirely because a splatter of blood lay lurid on the grass, but the shot had gone wide enough that the wound was superficial and the buck was still able to run swiftly away from them along the glade. Mena, in instinct rather than on purpose, stood up almost entirely before Rake and Debbie managed to get her to lie down again; her blood was pumping hard in her body and her mind was awash with a combination of guilt, frustration, and worry. She breathed, too heavily, for several minutes before finally calming down. By now the shadows were starting to lengthen.

 ❦

They ended up getting one small doe that day. Debbie, of all people, took her down. It was only after she came down that they realized, in horror, and more or less all at once, that there was no way they were going to be able to get her back to the truck without getting blood all over their clothes. It was at this point that Mena’s faculties shut off.

            Five seconds later she woke up. She had not slept well the night before, and she had barely noticed herself falling asleep in the truck bouncing along the road back towards the church. She could not remember the walk back to the truck for several minutes, although she assumed, could only assume, that she had been awake for it. Eventually she remembered, and sat up, and said that she had to be sick out the window.

            “This was a waste of time, and of the money we spent getting here, and of the deer’s life,” Bob was saying angrily, apparently to Debbie, while Mena swam naked in that narrow river to get the sweat and vomit and blood off of herself. They had decided to all wash themselves off in turn; Rake had gone before Mena, and was currently sitting on a large stump facing away from her just as once he had at the sea inlet in California.

            “It’s a waste of all our lives,” Debbie said, and it was clear from her manner of speaking that she did not intend to placate Bob by saying this.

            “I guess it is,” said Bob with a heavy sigh. At this point Mena emerged from the water and started drying herself off and getting dressed while Bob undressed and got in. Mena was so exhausted, her nerves so rattled, that it took next to no effort to stop herself from peeking at someone whom she could remember thinking of as attractive only a few hours ago.

            Once everybody had washed and dried and redressed they all felt better somehow, in terms of mental hygiene as well as bodily. They drove back to the church and Mena bade her friends a more or less happy farewell and got back on the Servi-Car. Just before she drove off the four of them arranged to meet at the Stationmaster’s Place in one week’s time, assuming all of them could make it; if not, they could, of course, keep each other in the picture by phone.

            Right around the time she passed back through Vincentown it occurred to Mena to wonder about the fact that she had been in the water on a fifty-five-degree afternoon, had dried herself on rough cloth not meant for drying oneself on, was driving at speed on a motorcycle, and did not feel cold. She was still thinking about this, wondering about what it implied or whether it implied anything at all, when she got back to Fort Dix. The light was just leaving the sky and she was already starting to feel tired. She changed clothes in an almost-empty barracks and lay down for about half an hour before wandering to the WACs’ mess for dinner.

 ❦

Over the two or three weeks after her excursion into the Pines, Mena began to realize that she had suddenly gained a strong affinity for routes and pathways. She started exploring Fort Dix and the surrounding woods and fields alone and without maps when she had a few hours to spare for it, and by the middle of November she could navigate the WAC barracks and neighboring parts of the base literally with her eyes closed.

            Colonel Blackwood took her off writing out discharges and put her back to work writing condolence letters for people whose family members had been killed overseas. At one point she found herself, to her own amazement, writing a condolence letter for the death of a WAC in Africa. One Staff Sergeant Claudia Dunphy had had some bad water at a Tunisian bar and had ended up expiring from a microbe of some description two weeks later. Even though her death was not in any way connected to any action that might help win the war, even action on the part of somebody else as in friendly fire deaths, Mena still felt convicted by writing out this letter about her—oddly, not as convicted as she would have felt before her journey into the Pines.

            Around the beginning of Advent Mena was called into the office of the woman who had replaced her helping Colonel Blackwood manage the separations. Warrant Officer Hazel Vorys was one of the older WACs on post here; she was in her early forties and had nicotine-stained teeth behind thin lips on which she used much less lipstick than did most of the younger woman. She had pepper-colored hair and a steady, plodding gait. When Mena had first arrived in New Jersey, Vorys had briefly been her immediate superior, and now she commanded a typing pool of four or five WACs handling a workload that had once been that of Mena and one or two other people elsewhere on the base. Mena had seen her around, but not spoken to her for about three weeks, when on a cold early-winter day of thin but insistent sleet she was called in and had handed to her a piece of paper on which CPL ROLAND A. RIPLEY, ARMY, ADMINISTRATIVE DISCHARGE HOMOSEXUALITY; PO3 ROBIN H. JEFFERSON, NAVY, ADMINISTRATIVE DISCHARGE NERVOUS SHOCK had been written with a red pen in block letters.

            “These are people you knew well at one time, aren’t they?” Vorys asked.

            “They’re still people I know well,” said Mena. “I wish this surprised me, but it doesn’t really. Are you telling me this in the interests of friendship?”

            “Your friendship with them or my friendship with you? You and I aren’t really friends, Corporal Gentili. It would adulterate the chain of command if nothing else.” Vorys sighed, set the piece of paper down on her desk, flicked her glance out the window into the thickening sleet and then back to Mena’s face, and cracked her knuckles loudly. “Yes, I’m telling you this in the interests of your friendship with them. Ripley’s sexual aberrations caused…problems within his unit, and Jefferson’s nervous shock just set in quite recently, and all of this came on the heels of your excursion to the Pine Barrens with them.”

            “What are you saying?” asked Mena.

            “That you might want to watch your back for a while,” said Vorys. “And maybe start giving some thought to what you think you’ll do after the war.”

            “What are you going to do after the war?” asked Mena on impulse.

            “Go back to my husband, hopefully, if he makes it out okay also,” said Vorys. “Next stop, menopause, and not a moment too soon.”

 ❦

Mena was, in fact, given her administrative discharge soon after this, on December 15, 1943, after two sessions on successive days with an Army psychiatrist named Bill Upton. Upton went by “Dr. Bill” and had narrow bright blue eyes. He diagnosed Mena with a number of complaints that were individually all quite mild but added up to an overall picture of somebody no longer temperamentally equipped for the rigors of military service.

            The next day, Mena went to see Vorys again. Vorys was sitting at her desk clack-clacking away on her typewriter, and seemed to have recently had a haircut. She oozed authority and competence. In order to get to her office Mena had had to pass through the typing pool of other WACs under her command, and they all oozed authority and competence as well. Clearly she had been unprepared and had been caught unready, her shoes unpolished, her wick untrimmed.

            “You look like you want to ask me something,” said Vorys, looking up at her.

            “I wanted to apologize,” said Mena, “for never really getting to know you. I feel as if we don’t know each other at all.”

            “We didn’t notice each other until very recently,” said Vorys. “Besides, do you really think we need to know each other? Do you need to know somebody to admire them? Or even to love them?”

            “Do you admire me?” Mena asked.

            Vorys shook her head softly, or in such a way that had shaking one’s head been speech it would have been soft. “You are twenty years old, an age that you falsely claimed to have attained last year so that you could become a WAAC,” she said. “I don’t make a habit of admiring women half my age; it would distract me from the kindness of my own age, an age that the world we live in does not want me to consider kind.”

            “I understand,” Mena said in the certainty that one day she would, if she lived long enough. Vorys nodded at her benevolently, and Mena took her leave and walked back out through the typing pool and towards the barracks, very likely for the last time.

 ❦

Two days before Christmas, Mena was in the Pine Barrens again. After her separation a week before she had stayed, scandalously, at Bob’s apartment in West Philadelphia, trying to come up with the money to take a plane or train back to California and make her way home to Hawaii from there. There was a thin crust of hoar on the ground in the Pines and Mena was there to help Rake and Bob shop for cars. The lot was one of those places that always seemed to do good trade even though it was hard to tell whom exactly in the surrounding area it was selling to, and the man who showed them the various used Fords and Pontiacs was well-groomed and seemed to be wearing a waistcoat under his winter jacket.

            “How much do you want for it?” Rake asked about the fourth car they looked at.

            “Says five hundred on the hood of the car, don’t it?” the man said. “Might could do four-fifty in a pinch. Won’t go lower than four hundred.”

            “How about eighty dollars?” said Bob.

            The man looked pale and for a second or two seemed to have dubious intentions towards Rake and Bob, but then he said “Sold” in the same tone of voice that Tom Lori used to talk to Mena’s brothers on the baseball diamond.

            “Where are you guys going again?” Mena asked Rake and Bob once the right paperwork had been signed.

            “Mexico,” Rake said. “We’re going to lie on a beach in a hot country for a while forgetting our troubles and maybe come back and do some civilian war work after a few months if we can get it. Or maybe we’ll stay abroad. The entire hemisphere’s declared war at this point. I’ve heard there’s quite a Brazilian war effort going on.”

            “Seems like an awfully roundabout way to get into the civvy workforce, but okay,” said Mena. “Suit yourselves. You could probably use a vacation anyway.”

            “Almost an exile,” Rake said. “Can’t face my family. Bob can’t face my family either.”

            “Nate can wire us money,” Bob said. “He’d stick up for me like that. It won’t be the end of the world. Say,” he said, turning to Mena, “you want to make your way home to Hawaii, yes?” Mena nodded. “If you come with us as far as Texas, you can try and catch a train west from there,” said Bob. “Probably cost you a lot less.”

            “Debbie’s on the West Coast again too,” said Rake, “so you could have a friend there to meet you in LA.”

            “All right,” said Mena with absolutely no consideration and no thought for her health or for tomorrow. She could have her things shipped to her; she could bum around in California waiting for them to arrive and find a way to get a boat home in a month or two. Things might, someday, in some way, be looking up for her. Surely somewhere she would find out where she belonged.

            She hopped into the back seat of the old Ford and left her last tether forgotten among the Pines.

9.

The Yankee Dollar Crosses the Bar 

“I’m never going to get off this rock, am I?” Mena asked Kara just before sunup.

            “It’s not so bad, is it?” Kara asked her.

            “It is in fact driving home how good I had it in some ways in the WAC,” Mena said acridly. “Just two or three days ago some soused boat pilot staggered through the shipyard and grabbed me by the wrist and planted one on me just like that, then offered me money for it.”

            “Lots of guys pay for it,” Kara said vaguely.

            “I know that, and I don’t approve of it, and besides, can you really imagine someone paying me for it? I can’t, or at least I couldn’t until the other day.”

            “And what does that mean to you?” Kara asked. “I’m glad you didn’t have to spend much time around normal men for a year and a bit, but for most of the rest of us the War hasn’t quite given us that freedom in the first place. I hear from lots of people who seem to know what they’re talking about that war can give you meaning. I think it’s only the Enemy who really thinks that war can set you free.”

            Mena thought about this fitfully and exhaustedly for about five minutes of grey silence in the grey light of earliest morning. It made sense to her, enough sense that she was forced to wonder if what she had really been after was freedom at all. She thought that it might have been silence, or the ability to be silent, that she had really wanted, but silence and solitude had made her seem antisocial to Dr. Bill and a renewed capacity for silence and reflection after winging that buck in the Pines had gotten to a point where she herself had wondered if there was something slightly the matter with her. And now through the grey skies the golden sunrise was calling to her. If the sun had been an animal, it would have been a bird, free and with a loud song.

            “I think that what I’d go to war for isn’t freedom exactly,” Mena said softly, “but it sure as hell isn’t anything that’s not freedom either. I definitely want to be free from these types of men. I’m sure Bob Jefferson wants to be free from these types of white people, white people like the Ripley parents and possibly even like Debbie Ripley from what I ended up thinking of her. And maybe in Mexico he will be. I wish him the best of luck.”

            “Okay, maybe it is bad,” said Kara. Her voice wafted up out of her with something like a pungent tang to it. “Maybe it really is bad, and here I am hoping that it isn’t really so bad and trying to make you think that it’s not. Maybe we’ve been lied to. Maybe we really can’t escape from the things we want to escape from by being good girls or by being good soldiers and serving our country.”

            It occurred to Mena all of a sudden that all of their history, possibly all history everywhere, had been a history of deathtraps, death matches, and narrow escapes. Kara had escaped by dint of technicality from internment; Mena had escaped into the WAAC, the WAAC had escaped from her grasp by becoming the WAC and a real part of the Army, and Mena had escaped from the Army, which was death to a real enemy, into the Pine Barrens, and from the Pine Barrens into the long journey home. Rake and Bob had been killed by their discharges and escaped their deaths into Mexico. Rake and Debbie had previously been killed by their family; Bob had, perhaps, not been killed by his, not in the same way. Mena had returned to the trap of home and the fatal combat with homebound adulthood and womanhood; Kara had evidently been caught up in that combat the whole time.

            Mena picked up a children’s book that her sister had brought over when she had visited with Mena’s niece and nephew and that had ended up in Mena’s room for some reason. She flipped it open and the first sentence she read went I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them alive again from the water. Mena hurled the book across the room and it collided with the bakelite rosary hanging from her vanity mirror. The mirror cracked at the impact from the corner of the book and the rosary fell down to the floor with an exultant hiss. Mena clutched herself and huddled in her bed and started screaming as the sun rose higher. She was not screaming because she was sad, or heartsick, or angry, or scared. She was screaming because she had just been told something critical, undeniable, and beautiful, but utterly impossible to accept.

            “I’m amazed,” Kara said after Mena stopped screaming—Kara had her arms around her and they were rocking back and forth—“that your parents or little brother didn’t come bursting in here to say what was the matter.”

            “I’ve been screaming in nightmares in the early morning lately,” said Mena, “or so I’m told.”

            “What do you have nightmares about?”

            “Being useless. Not being able to live my life the best way I can. Not having a good death, I guess, in that we’re all a little bit dead, I think, if we’ve been at war.”

            “I don’t think of myself as a little bit dead,” said Kara, “but I think I see what you’re getting at.”

            “Do you? I don’t. I’m just saying what comes to mind.” Mena shrugged against Kara’s shoulders. “I want to help,” she said. “I want to do what I can.” Then, in a horrified voice, because she had grown into some understanding of what it meant to say this, she said “I want to serve.”

 ❦

Kara told Mena that she had been considering becoming a WAC herself, and she showed her a pamphlet called Someone to Be Proud of: Your Daughter in the WAC. Mena had to hold back tears at the appearance in the pamphlet of the phrase “your soldier daughter.” There was some call she’d neglected.

            Two weeks later Kara attempted to enlist in the WAC and was rejected with no explanation as to why. It was obvious to anyone who knew Kara’s situation that it could not but be because of her ancestry. Mena tried to reenlist but had no luck.

            It took until the very end of the war for them to find work of the kind they wanted again. In that span of time they worked in the boatyard and grew to enjoy and value it at last. They went to dances when they could, especially after the curfew was abolished, and Mena dated Tom Lori for about nine or ten months before they realized that neither of them was what the other was really looking for and went their separate ways. Kara met a man called Jim Chun and married him in very short order; they met for the first time around the time of D-Day and married around the turn of the year. Kara did not stop working right away after she got married, and in February of ’45 Jim was shipped out with the Marine Corps to some reef or atoll in the Western Pacific in preparation for the envisioned final assault on the Japanese Home Islands. After Jim left, Kara and Mena started spending time as social hangers-on to some of the WACs in Honolulu, more for reasons of getting to know new people than because they were still hung up on not being able to be WACs themselves. At one point Mena got her hands on the copy of something called Sex Hygiene Course (for Officers and Officer Candidates) and she, Kara, and Mena’s younger sister Billie spent two or three nights reading it together in Mena’s bedroom and giggling incessantly as if they were five years younger and sneaking dirty magazines from Lee’s Store.

            Mena’s ship finally came in during the feverish, swooning summer between V-E Day and V-J Day, when she heard that a Navy buddy of one of her older brothers was going to be involved in the probable occupation of Japan and wanted a civilian secretary for some reason. Mena had her brother put in a good word for her and it quickly became clear that this other guy considered her a strong candidate for the position despite the fact that she had a blue discharge. She had heard stories of other people looking for civilian work being turned down because their discharges were not honorable but apparently the friend of her brother’s had a sister who had a small-scale breakdown very similar to Mena’s and so he understood.

            Mena shipped out to be a secretary in Japan on a bright morning in the later part of the year, stable psychically speaking, single, shriven, and looking forward to what life in a foreign clime might bring her. The violence of the Bombings, and by extension of the Occupation, weighed on her soul a great deal, but she was resolved very earnestly to do what good she could. She felt, finally, that she would be able to if she tried.

The End

Summer 2019

Novella: “The Heaven of Victory” (Part Two)

4.

The Photo Shoot 

Two days after the party at which Mena first met Rake, she awoke in her barracks to find Debbie, in the sleeping berth immediately across the central hallway from hers, already in full mess uniform writing what appeared to be an already very long letter.

            “Last day as an AFC,” Debbie announced to Mena when she saw that she was awake.

            “You’re getting promote?” Mena asked blearily, pulling a curtain to one side so that she could change out of her pajamas behind it.

            “I’m getting promoted, yes!” Debbie said happily. “I’ll be Junior Leader Ripley as of tomorrow.”

            “Today Junior Leader Ripley, tomorrow the world,” said Mena.

            “I’d say something more like ‘tomorrow Junior Leader Ripley, tomorrow Leader Ripley,’ but you don’t need to be practically-minded just because I’m feeling that way right now,” said Debbie. Her pen kept scribbling softly, kindly, over the paper before her. Mena got her slip on and came out from behind the curtain. “High time they give us real ranks instead of this kindergarten-type stuff, I think,” Debbie said.

            Mena, who sometimes found herself thinking of herself as a Private First Class rather than an Auxiliary First Class, agreed with this wholeheartedly, but something bothered her about the idea of saying so out loud. The window behind her, and, facing it, the window behind Debbie, showed brilliantly, almost obscenely blue skies, the kind that Mena felt somehow looked stranger and more imposing the further from home she got. In Georgia the blue skies had been stranger still. She wondered if the Pennsylvania skies were as strange to Debbie and Rake as she knew they would be to her.

            “The bill they have to make us real military can’t be passed through soon enough,” said Debbie.

            “I didn’t think you wanted to be military,” said Mena. “You’ve always been in an ‘I want to help’ state of mind as long as I’ve known you, not exactly one to go get bruised and bloodied. I guess it is a question of respect, though,” she said, and Debbie nodded with relief at this, as if it was a remark that she had not wanted to make herself. “I don’t know what I’d do if I got sent overseas,” Mena continued as she pulled her skirt on. “My brother Frank is in Australia and they’ll probably send him north to start island-hopping back towards the Philippines soon. My sister Thomasine is in Canada but that’s because she married a guy from there; she’s a civilian. My other siblings are all in the Navy or the WAVES and all have shore duties.”

            “You know what Rake’s up to, of course,” said Debbie. It was the first indication that Mena had gotten that Debbie knew about her conversation with Rake the night before last. Mena had not heard anything from Rake himself since then either; his radio silence was indeed enough that she was starting to wonder if she had done something to make him not like her. She wasn’t sure if she hoped that she had or if she hoped that she hadn’t.

            “Rake’s a swell guy but I don’t want to get involved in your family, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Mena said.

            “Hey, some of us are still trying to sleep,” a voice elsewhere in the barracks hissed. Mena was surprised nobody had said anything like this before.

            “Five or six minutes till reveille,” Debbie said to Mena, turning to her with her big grey eyes and gathering her paper and pen in her hands as she stood up. She put the unfinished letter on her bedside table and started walking towards the doorway. “Let’s finish this talk outside,” she said.

 ❦

“I don’t think you fully understand just how much you’d be helping my family out by taking some pictures with Rake and me,” said Debbie as they stood smoking together on a dirt path that wound back from the barracks into an area of dense, sloping scrub. A large bird wheeled above them in the spring morning.

            Mena told Debbie that she understood pretty well what was at stake and was willing to take the pictures but was afraid of being dragged further into it, especially since she tended to side against people like Debbie and Rake’s parents when it came to difficulties between the races. Debbie said that she tended to side against people like her parents too and that she was beginning to doubt their real reasons for needing to give this ballplayer money; she made Mena promise not to repeat this to Rake, or to anybody else in their WAAC company for that matter.

            “What do you think your parents’ real reasons for needing these pictures are?” asked Mena.

            “I don’t doubt that they owe money to a Negro League ballplayer. What I’m questioning is why. Frankly, what I suspect is that they got sued for something and are dragging their feet about paying. Believe me, if they actually wanted to give him the money they owe him they’d be darn well able to do so without bringing in whoever this ‘courier’ is in Texas.”

            “Geez, what if they got sued for doing something horrible to this guy?” said Mena.

            “Exactly what I’m worried about,” said Debbie, puffing at her cigarette the way a much more hard-bitten kind of woman might have.    “Lighter question—did you get to church yesterday?”

            “Yep. Did you?”

            “Yep.”

            “Good. That Episcopalian church in Hollywood?”

            “No, I couldn’t get driven down to Hollywood. I just went to someplace locally. That church in Hollywood is quite something, though. My hand to God I saw Lawrence Olivier and Astaire there one weekend. Can you believe that?”

            “I wouldn’t know,” said Mena, who had lost track of who the stars were over the past several months; the truth was that she knew that this was exciting to Debbie and it probably would have excited her too but something about the quality of the air this morning was starting to prove physically uncomfortable to her.

 ❦

Later in the day, when they had about an hour to themselves, Mena submitted to Debbie’s entreaties about the photos. They met Rake right outside their base and walked together into the little town of which the house that hosted the parties was on the opposite side. This took maybe fifteen minutes, which gave them about half an hour in town before they had to walk back. Mena took off her jacket so that she would not be as readily identifiable as a WAAC rather than a WAVE; Debbie took five pictures of her drinking sodas with Rake, and Rake took three pictures of her pointing out to sea with Debbie and grinning manically.

            “Are you sure these pictures will do a lick of good?” Mena asked Rake.

            “Honestly, no, I’m really not sure,” said Rake. “If you knew my parents you’d understand…” He trailed off and started coughing loudly. “Yeah,” he said. “Right. No, Mena, we’re not sure the pictures will do any good. But hey, absolute worst case, we got some pretty good vacation pictures out of it, didn’t we?”

            Mena laughed in spite of herself. “I suppose we did,” she said. “Although my friends at home would be mighty puzzled if they saw me pointing at the Pacific like I hadn’t seen it almost every day of my life.”

            “Is my brother growing on you?” Debbie asked softly a minute or two later, while Rake was using the WC at the little soda shop they were sitting in.

            “A little, yeah,” said Mena, “I do have to admit. He’s not a terrible guy; we just got off on the wrong foot.”

            “He told me he came to find you when you wandered down to the cove at a party and found you swimming naked in the ocean,” said Debbie. “He said you compared it to the first time you and I met in the shower.”

            “I think the base for comparison is a pretty solid one,” said Mena. “I wasn’t sure what to make of you at first either.” This was true as far as it went; she had never felt any hostility towards Debbie the way she had towards Rake two nights ago. It had to do with Rake being a man whereas Debbie and Mena were women; with Rake being nineteen like Mena rather than twenty-three like Debbie; and probably with more besides that Mena could not sift through in her mind just yet.

            “He does grow on you, doesn’t he?” said Debbie, which Mena took as sympathy being expressed for her own feelings rather than Debbie simply saying again what she had already said before. “His CO seems to like him, even though there are a few kinks with him somebody might want to work out. He hasn’t come in for anything like that, though.”

            At this point Rake came back from the bathroom, picked up the camera again with still-damp hands, and took a candid shot of Mena and Debbie with two empty soda bottles between them.

5.

An Interlude 

It was completely dark in the cryptomeria grove. Mena was getting tired, and strange suspicious night noises were beginning to be in evidence.

            “How did you end up in fact going to Philadelphia?” asked Kara. “You were there for some months, weren’t you? I’m gonna have a hard time believing that the Ripley family managed to arrange for it just for their own benefit; at least around here we weren’t saying how high when rich folk said jump anymore, not by that point in the war.”

            “No, we didn’t jump when the Ripleys said how high,” said Mena. “Actually what happened was that I forgot about all this for a few months and then at some point in June or July, back when all those race riots broke out, Debbie got transferred back to Georgia to help train new WAC recruits and Rake and I both got transferred to posts in the Northeast. This was right around the time the WAAC with two As officially became the WAC with one A—that is, around the time we knew they were going to make us soldiers.”

            “And you wanted to be a soldier.”

            “Yeah. I also wanted to go to the Northeast. I was getting more emotionally invested in the Atlantic than the Pacific at this point because the invasion of Italy was underway and, you know, my grandparents came from there and all. It was important to me to see that through. There were flight nurses in North Africa and Sicily at this point and it looked like some of the WAC might get deployed overseas too—which has since happened, of course. I really wanted to see if I could meet up with some other pals of mine from training who I’d heard were getting sent to London or to Algeria. Of course these were still rumors at this point.”

            Kara flicked on the car light and rummaged around in her handbag for something. She eventually found it and took it out to show to Mena; it was a pamphlet called G.I. Jane Writes Home from Overseas. The cover had a picture of a young woman in uniform and a safari helmet carrying a backful of heavy luggage up a gangplank into a ship or plane of some description, looking at the reader with a determined expression and saying “I’d rather be with them…than waiting.”

            “Why are you showing this to me?” asked Mena.

            “Does it upset you? ‘What could have been,’ and so forth?” asked Kara.

            “I don’t know if it upsets me or not. Let’s find out,” said Mena, and took the pamphlet from Kara to start reading.

G.I. Jane Writes Home—While en Route Atlantic Crossing

LEAVING THRILL—“The ride to the ship with all our equipment, the ocean trip aboard a regular Army transport, the thrill of standing on deck and looking at the other ships in our convoy cutting through the water…all made me realize that I was starting on the biggest thing in my life.”

FLIGHT TO POST—“I swore they’d never get me in a plane unless they ordered me up, and look at me—I volunteered—and we were flown to our post at Goose Bay, Labrador.”

“We’re going to be out past curfew, you realize,” Mena said to Kara without saying anything else.

            “You’re right. Let’s do a sleepover at your place. It’ll be just like old times.” Kara reversed the Lincoln as best she could under the circumstances and eased it back down to the road. The trees soughed by on either side, the car making wind to sigh in them as it passed. “Something just occurred to me,” said Kara when they got back to the road.

            “And what’s that?”

            “Do you know of anybody not from our high school—our class or Francine’s class—who got the idea to move to the mainland to enlist in the WAVES or the WAC or the ANC?”

            “I don’t know. I’m sure there are a few…”

            “…but it seems to be the sort of scam—let’s call it a scam—that only arose among one type of person,” finished Kara. “Hawaii’s under martial law? Hawaiian woman can’t enlist? Our class found a way around that.”

            “If you’re trying to tell me I’ve led a charmed life, I actually know that, Kara,” said Mena. “Can I ask why you had that pamphlet in your handbag?”

            “Friend brought it back from Portland a few weeks ago. Apparently they’re finally going to start letting Hawaiian women enlist soon. Enlist as Hawaiian women.”

            “Fat lot of good that does me at this point,” said Mena.

            “Oh, don’t sell yourself short,” said Kara, deftly switching into another lane. “I may not know the details of your discharge but I do know you and I know how much you want to serve.” The suggestion that Mena wanted to serve, with serving described as if it constituted a job or a position or a calling in and of itself, hit Mena like a sock full of pennies to the face, and she blinked twice, rapidly, as Kara came up towards an Army roadblock. “Oh, Christ,” Kara muttered.

            “No need to swear,” said Mena.

            Kara pulled up to the roadblock and a military policeman came up to the car wielding a flashlight. He was broad-shouldered and seemed tired. “It’s past curfew,” he said to them. “You two going to be home soon?”

            “We work in a war industry,” Kara said. “We just got off work pretty recently. We’re going to be home as soon as possible, I assure you.”

            “You two live together?” asked the policeman.

            “No,” said Mena, “but we’re friends and she’s staying with me tonight.”

            “Identification, please,” said the policeman. Kara handed over her driver’s license and Mena handed over, for some reason, her WAC ID, which she, for some reason, still carried on her. “This says you’re a Corporal in the Women’s Army Corps, Miss Gentili,” said the policeman. “Any particular reason you’re not on base?”

            “I was discharged some time ago,” said Mena.

            “Honorably, I hope,” said the policeman. Mena nodded, and Kara, catching the nod in the corner of her eye, boggled, a little too visibly. The policeman seemed to take the bafflement as a joke between friends, and he laughed at it even though neither Mena nor Kara was laughing.

            “Seems to be in order,” said the policeman. “I’ll take your word for it that you’re in a war industry. Get home as soon as you can. If you run into any other MPs just tell them what you told me, okay? Drive safe now.”

            Mena started crying as Kara drove through the roadblock. She was still crying when they pulled up to Mena’s family’s house. “Good Lord, Mena, what’s wrong?! Did something happen?!” her mother asked as they passed her in the living room.

            “She’ll be okay,” Kara said. “She’s just thinking about her time in the service.”
            Mena’s mother shook her head, but in a way that Mena interpreted to mean that she understood. Of course she did not understand, but it was enough, for Mena, to think that someday she might.

            Mena and Kara ensconced themselves in Mena’s room with its three-year-old photos of Fredric March and battered red bakelite rosary hanging from her vanity mirror. Mena sat up in bed with Kara in a food-stained old blue armchair in the corner; Kara had a talent for sleeping sitting up and declined Mena’s offer to put some bedding on the floor for her. When Mena finally stopped crying, Kara asked her to tell her about her time in Philadelphia.

            “Here’s how it happened,” said Mena.

6.

The Grey Stations

On the troop train that took her across the United States from Los Angeles to Philadelphia in August of 1943, Mena shared a compartment with two other WACs and a WAVE, all of them West Coast natives who were being ordered to the East as part of the administration’s Europe-first policy. Mena had asked her CO in California why she was being attached to a unit in Pennsylvania and the Europe-first policy had more or less been Second Officer De Brun’s answer to her as well. She had brought some reading material, which she broke out over the course of this night ride over the high Rockies: a collection of Millay poems called Huntsman, What Quarry? and a WAC booklet, just published last month, called “You Must Be Fit: W.A.C. Field Manual Physical Training.” It reminded her that she was “a member of the first Women’s Army in the history of the United States”—as if she could ever forget this; almost everybody she knew took an incredible amount of pride in this fact, herself included—and declared, partway through the introduction, “Total War Is a Woman’s War: Your Job: To Replace Men.”

            “I wish,” Mena muttered.

            “What’s that?” one of the other WACs in her compartment, who was doing a crossword puzzle in her nightgown, asked her. Mena showed her the booklet. “Oh, that,” she said. “I read that a week or to ago and I’ve been doing…most of the exercises. I like the swimming ones best. Do you swim?”

            “I lived a lot of my life in Hawaii,” said Mena. “Of course I swim.”

            The other WAC nodded happily. “I’m an LA girl born and bred,” she said. “My family used to go out to the Santa Catalina Islands when I was a girl.”

            “Never got to see the Catalina Islands. I was posted a ways up the coast for the past six or seven months,” said Mena.

            They fell silent after that. The other WAC went back to her crossword and Mena set the booklet down and stared, along with the WAVE, out the window at the darkened landscape, seeing what stars she could above the peaks to either side of the train. Some of the everlasting snow on the peaks glinted in the starlight; the rest was consummately shadowed, as if lurking. From some other compartment in the train somebody was humming a jazz tune. The voice was low enough that it was probably a man but high enough that it could have been a woman. Listening intently to it and staring out into the dark, Mena drifted off, and did not wake up again until early morning, stiff-necked, frustrated, disheveled, with the train passing through endless cattle prairies.

 ❦

On the evening that the train finally reached Philadelphia, the people at 30th Street Station wasted no time in letting Mena know that the Phillies had just been blown out twenty to six in the second game of a double-header against the Cincinnati Reds. It was very late in the evening and Mena, who normally would have cared at least insofar as she would have pitied a team like the Phillies doing so badly so often, really had no interest in hearing people complain. Somebody made the intriguing observation that this “wouldn’t’ve happened if Veeck had bought the team.”

            “That Veeck story is a crock of crapola,” somebody else said. “As if anybody in his right mind would think Landis would go for a plan like that. It’s an invention of Grantland Rice and the Negro press.”

            “I take exception to that,” said a third person.

            “I preferred the series against St. Louis,” said the first person. “Schoolboy Rowe’s doing great this season.”

            “Yes, him and exactly zero of our other pitchers,” said the third person.

            Debbie, who was home on two weeks’ worth of her yearly thirty days’ furlough, had arranged to meet Mena on the street outside the station. She was in uniform despite being on leave and evidently had made sergeant sometime before leaving Georgia. She had a satchel draped over one shoulder and, rolled under the opposite arm, an umbrella that looked wet even though it seemed to be a dry evening here. When Mena asked her about it she said that it had fallen into the Schuykill River, in a tone of voice that let Mena know that this was going to be her last word on the subject.

            “What’s next for you, Mena?” Debbie asked as they walked through the streets towards the boarding house where Mena would be staying for her first two or three nights in the city.

            “Well, I have a few days of off-duty time—not furlough, just off-duty time—because they freed up somebody else to stay stateside a little longer than she originally thought she would. I just got a call about that a few hours before leaving LA, and I had to call my new commanding officer to arrange me this boarding house as a billet for my first few nights here. After that I’ll be at some camp across the river in South Jersey for I don’t know how long; they put me through the training course for air control tower radio work, so that’s what I’ll be doing.”

            “Sounds exciting. I envy you; they’re still having me on writing condolence letters.”

            “I thought you were training new recruits.”

            “They have me doing both. I’m not having a great time doing either. Say, might you have any interest in going to a ballgame tomorrow? I’m sure either the Phillies or the Athletics are playing, maybe even both; I’d need to ask someone.”

            “No, thank you; I’ve heard bad things about Philadelphia sports fans,” Mena said grimly.

            “Oh, and whom have you heard them from?” The whom jutted up out of Debbie’s question like a jaunty salute from a sailor-suited girl in a high-school Pinafore.

            “I’ve heard them for myself in the station just now. Lots of complaining about how badly the team is doing, some of it racialist. Is that big leagues fans everywhere?”

            “Is it not sports fans everywhere?” asked Debbie. “I have a hard time believing that Hawaii sports fans are so much better, especially since as I understand it you really wanted to leave Hawaii, at first.”

            “Different set of sports in Hawaii,” Mena said at first, and when Debbie pressed further she admitted that, yes, she was probably being unfair, and it was probably the stress of travel that was getting her down. They agreed that they would meet Rake when he got to the city tomorrow and all go out for a drink together tomorrow night at a place Rake knew. Mena, at the time that she agreed to this plan, had no way of knowing what kind of voyage agreeing to it would turn out to set her on.

 ❦

“Something I overheard in the train station yesterday has been sticking in my mind,” said Mena to Debbie the next day as they walked to this bar that Rake had suggested to them. Her first night in the boarding house had been acutely unpleasant even compared to the troop train and she had no interest in discussing it. She had spent the lion’s share of the night wakeful, reading Huntsman, What Quarry? Her first full day in Philadelphia had been better; she had toured Independence Hall and seen the Liberty Bell. The bar that they were going to was in South Philadelphia, near the Port, apparently a downscale and mostly Irish neighborhood.

            “What is it?” Debbie asked.

            “Do you know anything about a baseball team owner called Veeck?” asked Mena.

            Debbie shook her head. “I did hear about somebody trying to buy up the Phillies around the beginning of this year and not being able to, but I don’t remember if that was his name,” she said. “The story goes that he wanted to buy the team and turn around its fortunes by stacking it with Negro League stars. Of course the Commissioner of Baseball wants to keep up the color line so when he got wind of this he forced the National League to take over the team itself and sell it off for pennies on the dollar. Now it’s owned by a lumber baron by the name of Cox. This is the story, anyway; I don’t know how much of it I believe myself, but then I’m not as interested in sports as all that. Roland’s boyfriend Bob would be someone better to ask about that.”

            “Rake has a boyfriend?” Mena asked, boggling.

            “Sure does. There’s really nothing wrong with it,” said Debbie.

            “I didn’t say I thought there was.”

            “Aren’t you a Catholic?”

            “Aren’t you?”

            Debbie shook her head. “Same baptism, different services,” she said. “In any case, Bob’s a baseball fanatic himself, and he follows the Negro Leagues and the white big leagues both. He’s holding out for integration, obviously. He says he was crushed when this scheme to integrate the Phillies fell through.”

            It had always surprised Mena, ever since she had first learned about it, that there was such resolute segregation in big league ball, which existed almost entirely in Northern states and was always getting talked up as America’s game and the national pastime and so forth. She thought of the various uses and abuses of the Asians and the Natives and even, sometimes, the Portuguese back home. She did not know what to make of her thoughts about this.

            They got to the bar, which was called the Stationmaster’s Place even though it was not all that close to 30th Street Station and which one had to go down a little flight of stairs to a basement level to get into. Mena had always been a little wary of these underground-level bars in the past. Her brothers and cousins and Tom Lori often went to them, but she had an understanding that they were not mostly places where women were expected. She was glad of that; she would have hated to had the men in her family consorting with prostitutes and cabaret dancers or cruising for lonely divorcées or whoever it was whom she imagined frequenting other kinds of night establishments.

            The good patrons of the Stationmaster’s Place, when they walked in, both in uniform at this point, mostly looked up in rabbitlike startlement and alarm. Mena guessed why when she noticed Rake already there, not in uniform but with his arm around the shoulders of a tall, slender black man who was. Volunteer Navy, Mena thought, with an NCO bearing although she did not recognize the Navy insignia as well as she did the Army ones. They were sitting in a booth near the back of the house, with six or seven beverages between them, about half of which looked like sparkling water but could have been gin and tonics.

            “There’s Roland and Bob,” said Debbie, and made a beeline to sit down with them. Mena hung back a little to look around at the other patrons, not, she hoped, for long enough to be impolite. There were two or three woman-woman couples, one including a woman in a WAC uniform, another including a woman with very short hair who had clearly come directly from some sort of war industry job without changing her clothes. The rest of the barflies all seemed to be men, most of them coupled, one of them apparently looking for someone to couple with.

            Mena hustled over to the booth where the Ripleys and Rake’s boyfriend were and sat down next to Debbie and across from the black Navy man, Bob. “Sorry,” she said. “Never been in an establishment like this before. I’m Philomena Gentili,” she said, extending a hand to Bob. “Junior Leader in the WAC, which means I’ll be a corporal once my rank’s converted over to full military.”

            “Robin Jefferson,” said Bob, taking her hand and shaking it more firmly than one would expect from someone as rail-thin as he was. “PO3, US Navy. So we’re the same rank, more or less.”

            “How scandalous, Bob, you fraternizing with an enlisted grunt,” Rake said, taking his arm off of Bob’s shoulders for long enough to give him a mock punch in the side of the head.

            “What brings you folks to the Stationmaster’s Place?” Bob asked Mena and Debbie.

            “Not what you’d think,” said Debbie. “Honestly I just wanted to be around my brother for a while; I’m on furlough back home, you see.”

            Rake and Bob shared a sardonic, flickering little glance, then Bob pushed one of the clear fizzy beverages over to Debbie. “Do you still like gin and tonic, Deb?” Rake asked.

            “Not as much as I used to before events conspired,” Debbie said, referring, Mena could only assume, to something that had happened in their family of which she had no interest in learning the details.

            “Do you recall when we first met and you called me a queer?” Rake abruptly asked Mena while Debbie sipped the drink.

            “I do,” said Mena, coloring.

            “We probably both pretty much made asses of ourselves that night,” said Rake.

            “I think I made a bigger ass of myself than you did,” said Mena. Being here was already beginning to make her reassess certain facts, real or perceived, about the world around her—not about herself, but about other people and about the rarefied and frenetic society that the war had created in America.

            “Speaking of making asses of ourselves…” said Bob.

            “Oh Christ. What now?” said Debbie.

            “That money finally got to my brother.”

            “Thank God.”

            “The ballplayer is your brother? You’re the ballplayer’s brother?” Mena asked.

            Bob nodded, and told his story in what Mena assumed was abbreviated form. It seemed that the Ripley parents had had a problem with him not so much because he was the lover of their son as for essentially racialist reasons; he had actually been a feted guest at their home somewhere in one of Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs several times before Debbie and Rake’s father, a man with the astonishing name Carrington Ripley, had decided that he was worried about Bob stealing their dining room silver when he visited. Matters had escalated to such a point that the Ripleys had hired some street gorillas associated with a Mafia outfit out of Rhode Island to beat up Bob somewhere near the docks. This had been at a time of escalating tensions between the races already, but not to the point of the race riots that had rocked half a dozen cities over this past summer (Philadelphia had not seen black-versus-white race riots but had seen attacks on Mexicans after the zoot suit riots in LA, for parts of which Mena had unfortunately been stuck in the city). So Bob’s bother, Nate Jefferson, the ballplayer, had used his funds—more substantial than Bob’s by far—to hire a team of lawyers to take the Ripleys to court over Bob’s beating. The lawyers believed that even otherwise Negro-bashing people in the world of the law might be sympathetic to the Jeffersons’ case because Bob was in the service whereas the Ripley parents had been heard to publicly mock their own uniformed son and daughter. (“I hadn’t actually heard about that,” said Rake when Bob mentioned this)

            “And they settled the case, and dragged their feet on paying the settlement?” Mena asked.

            “That’s right,” said Bob. “They had the tom-fool idea of having some third party, this woman who you’re saying ended up getting transferred to Texas, deliver the money to my brother. Whether this would have held up in court I do not know but we were all sick of the thing by that point so we agreed to it.”

            “But they did get the money to you?” asked Mena.

            “They did eventually, yes. Nobody believed that the pictures of you with Roland and Debbie were of the person they said they were of. I’m glad to hear you weren’t as in on the con as we were afraid.”

            “If I had known it was to cover someone’s ass for something like this I would have just refused,” said Mena.

            “If we had known we wouldn’t have asked you,” said Debbie.

            “How’s it possible that Rake didn’t know?” Mena asked. “It’s his boyfriend.”

            “Believe it or not I’d been under the impression that Bob had already gotten his settlement and that this new money was for something else,” Rake said. “I wasn’t getting Bob’s letters to me at that time. Some Navy psychiatrist was looking into him.”

            “Did they eventually, uh, clear him?” Mena asked.

            “They eventually lost interest,” said Bob. “Some power struggle was going on in another formation that the shrink thought was more worth his time.”

            “Thank God for small blessings,” said Rake.

            “I’ll drink to that,” said Debbie.

 ❦

Mena asked for a glass of chianti but got literally laughed at for thinking that the Stationmaster’s Place had Italian wine. Then she asked for something that there was a shortage of in Philadelphia and possibly elsewhere in the US as well, and finally she settled for a draft of some sort of wheat beer from the tap. She realized that it was Saturday evening; she had lost track of days on the troop train and had previously thought that it was Friday. She pictured herself stumbling drunk and in her rumpled uniform—in lieu of a party dress—into some Low Mass in a slum church at seven, less than ten hours from now. Something about it seemed picturesque or maybe picaresque, and like a story to scandalize her grandchildren with, the way some of the WACs who were getting sent overseas eagerly anticipated boring theirs.

            At about eleven o’ clock an overdressed civilian woman came up to their booth to ask for a nickel to bribe the bartender so she could use the phone. The four of them—Mena, the Ripleys, and Bob—had seven pennies, as opposed to larger coins, between them and gave this woman all seven.

            “Rake, Bob, Debbie, you are true friends,” said the woman. “You too, newbie.” She waved gingerly at Mena as she staggered drunkenly over to the bar.

            “Is it okay by you to be a ‘newbie’ here?” Bob asked Mena.

            “Why wouldn’t it be? I am one.”

            “Wasn’t sure if you’d be the type to take exception to sticking out when you’re new,” Bob said.

            “Well, maybe I am and maybe I’m not,” said Mena. “What was it like when you and Rake were new here?”

            “Long story,” said Bob, but Mena made the two of them tell it.

Novella: “The Heaven of Victory” (Part One)

Note: This is another component of the Compulsory Figures thematic series, written in 2019.

1.

The Cryptomeria Grove

It was dusk, tropical dusk. Mena Gentili, in shirtsleeves with work pants rolled up to her knees, stood in shallow Hawaiian water scrubbing the side of a small watercraft with a coarse, sopping rag, five feet away from her likewise-occupied friend Kara Wharton. Mena’s brow was almost as wet with sweat as the rag was with seawater and the work of the afternoon had burned the nape of her neck pretty seriously between her collar and her pulled-up hair. In neither Mena’s case nor Kara’s was scrubbing the side of the boat what they were “supposed” to be doing; Kara was being made to do it by way of punishment for some insubordination to the Marine Corps officer who had been giving orders to their little civvy outfit yesterday, and Mena was making herself do it by way of punishment for something a great deal graver.

            “Amazing that they have us scrub clean a boat that’s gonna be in much deeper water soon enough anyway,” said Mena.

            “You don’t want the boat to get covered with barnacles, or whatever it is it’ll get covered with in the South Seas, if we don’t clean it now,” Kara observed.

            “We’re in the South Seas right now, Kara.”

            “We’re above the Equator here. You ever crossed the Equator?”

            “Can’t say I have, even though I am an island girl,” said Mena. “You grow up here and you get told it’s some sort of paradise nobody who wasn’t a mental case would ever want to leave.”

            “You got told that? I didn’t get told that. Anyway you have been all over the country, so I was just wondering. I’ve never crossed the Equator either; apparently when you do for the first time there’s this whole ceremony they do that ends with you being dunked in a big tank of water aboard ship.”

            “Clothed, I hope.”

            “Probably clothed.”

            “Don’t they beat you with fire hoses and prod you with cattle prods when you do it?” Mena asked.

            “I wouldn’t put it past Navy boys,” said Kara. “Anyway it’s starting to get dark. We should get back into town.”

            Within a few minutes they were out of the water, dried off more or less, fully dressed up again, and sitting in Mena’s Lincoln on the way back along the coast to Honolulu, with Kara driving. They were driving away from the setting sun, with a few of the yellowish streaks from the west glancing off the thin silvery clouds massing in the eastern and southern corners of the sky. Straight before them there was a dark purple mass not of clouds but of evening; soon the darkness of evening would be overhead them, then covering the sky from horizon to horizon as night set in.

            Mena had the Lincoln because her family was from Oahu so there had been no need to transport it from the mainland for her use and because around the time she was born her parents had come into some money from a convenient inheritance that they had invested in the fruit companies and shipping companies. Her grandparents had washed ashore from Italy around the time of or perhaps slightly before the annexation and growing up her family had been the only Italians that she knew of at her school. She had aspired to be ladylike until relatively recently, as, in point of fact, had Kara, who was the illegitimate daughter of a Japanese man and a black woman and who had dodged internment because there was no official record of her father despite her obviously Asian features. She had by and large gotten Mena to stop saying Jap and Nip around her and she relished these rides in the Lincoln because she had never had a car of her own.

            “I missed you during the time you were away,” said Kara. “Good to have you back on this rock.”

            “I’d say I missed being here, but the truth is, I was thinking of too many other things to so much as remember our little Three Musketeers routine most of the time,” said Mena. (The third musketeer from their high school, Francine Nakagawa, had, along with her parents, been dragged back to Okinawa by her extended family in January of ’42.) “Don’t get me wrong, that’s a fact that bothered me in itself.”

            “I’m still not quite sure I understand why you ended up back here or what you were hoping you’d get out of coming back,” said Kara. “You got yourself a blue discharge, right?”
            “I didn’t ‘get myself’ a hill of beans,” said Mena; “the Army gave me an administrative discharge. ‘Blue discharge’ always seemed to me like it was the term they used when they gave it to someone for being too rambunctious after hours, making the service look bad, you know. I did know some guys who ended up with those; swell guys in their own way who you might’ve liked if you’d been there with me.”

            “Don’t you dodge this question,” said Kara. “You run off two years ago to go be a steadfast girl soldier, you’re away for a little more than a year, then you come back suddenly saying you want a civilian war industry job and we end up tending to boats together the way the watermen do in peacetime. Something’s missing here and you’ve spent months now stonewalling me when I try to get you to tell me what it is. Well, you’re not getting away from me now,” she said, and pulled the car off the road and up a dirt track leading into what seemed to be a grove of cryptomeria trees. The Lincoln bumped along uncomfortably for a couple hundred yards—Mena was just about to say that it really wasn’t made to handle dirt-road driving—and then Kara pulled it up over a little rise and down into a small hollow or dingle in which she brought it to a stop.

            “Okay,” Kara said. “We’re well and truly on an adventure together now, and you, Mena, are going to tell me all about how your time in the service actually went.”

            “Oh Lord,” said Mena. “Well, you know how and why I decided to join the service, obviously. Here’s where it all started going downhill.”

2.

The Night Veranda

Mena’s troubles had begun in the early spring of 1943, when her Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps company had been stationed in a small town in Southern California a ways up the coast from LA. The relaxed environment had infected even her CO, who on several evenings that spring had given her and some of her friends permission to go to parties hosted at the home of someone who was married to an aspiring actress who was a high school acquaintance of Mena’s older sister. The house was set back a little bit from the open sea but looked down on a brackish cove that had an unusually green, grassy bank sweeping up from the side of the water to a line of dense trees. Over the trees looked the back of the house, with a veranda that was more than warm enough even in March to be sat out on drinking and dancing to a portable record player. The parties had lots of illicit drugs but not much in the way of illicit sex, a combination of features that appealed to Mena even though she herself never had more than a few beers or a few cocktails. Mena’s friend Deborah Ripley sometimes came to these parties with her, but on this particular evening Debbie could not get away from her duties.

            About an hour into the party Mena found herself looking out over the water, the cove and the ocean into which the cove opened up, with an odd fogginess and cottoniness weighing on her mind. It was not the drinks alone—she had had two beers—and it was not the music, hot and loud, but some combination of drink, music, missing Debbie, and really not being sure that what she was doing in California, writing letters of condolences to the families of men fighting in North Africa, was contributing to victory or to her own spirit. She felt selfish and stupid and sad, and, since she had a bag with her that had among other things a towel in it, she elected to wander away from the party and go for a little swim in the cove before the grey-gold light hovering over the watery horizon completely left the sky.

            It took her maybe six or seven minutes to pick her way down the zigzagging path through the trees from the house to the shore of the cove. Stars were starting to come out and there was a stitch in her side for some reason at which she could not begin to guess. It was more than warm enough to swim, here, at this time of year, but somehow she felt as if it really should not be, even though she had lived in warm areas all her life. When she got to the grassy bank she stood staring into space for God only knew how long thinking about her uncle in London before finally coming back to herself, stripping to the skin, and throwing herself into the water in the hopes that she would be refreshed and come to.

            Mena had been in the water for what felt like about ten minutes, floating on her back gazing up at the stars where the branches buttressed them against the sky, when she became aware of another presence in this place, maybe not malign but definitely unwelcome. She gasped, plunged underwater, and let her head resurface; she was gazing straight at the grassy bank and straight at a man about her age who was sitting on her discarded clothing and lighting a cigarette. He was in uniform of some kind but nothing about his posture seemed military so she guessed that he was probably a draftee.

            “Oh, hello,” said the man in a friendly but not particularly seductive tone of voice.

            “Hello,” said Mena, too shocked to come up with anything else.

            “Are you AFC Philomena Gentili, WAAC?”

            “Yes I am,” said Mena. Then she gained enough presence and poise to think to add “Who the hell wants to know?”

            “I think you know or used to know my sister,” said the draftee, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “Debbie Ripley. She’s in the WAAC too, you know.”

            “She is; I know her quite well and knew her even better until a few months ago,” said Mena. “Are you Roland ‘Rake’ Ripley?”

            “Sure am,” said the draftee. “Private first class, same basic rank as you. Army Corps of Engineers, if that makes any difference to you. How are you this evening?”

            “I was fine until a few minutes ago, but on the whole, I think I’d rather not be naked and separated from my clothes by a strange man asking me questions about his sister,” said Mena. She was racking her brains trying to remember what, if anything, Debbie had told her about her brother beyond the nickname, which did not do her heart good. “Especially one whose nickname is ‘Rake.’”

            “I’m not called ‘Rake’ because I’m a rake. I’m called ‘Rake’ because in basic training another draftee hit me in the face with a rake for making an off-color joke about dairy farmers.”

            “Remarkable,” said Mena. “Usually somebody nicknamed after an assault weapon is the person who did the assault, not the person who got assaulted.”

            “I know. It surprised me when people started calling me that. Would you like me to turn around so you can get out?” asked Rake.

            “Yes, please,” said Mena. “And if I catch so much as a flicker of your eye around the corner of your head before I say when then I’m going to dive right back in, even if I’ve already put everything back on except my cardigan.” Her natural instinct was to be more demure than this and there was even a downtrodden part of her (which spoke to her in her tragic aunt Tisha’s voice) that suggested offering to do whatever this man wanted in order to get out of this conversation, but six months of WAAC indoctrination and WAAC living had taught her nothing if not how to be braver than herself.

            “Duly noted,” said Rake, and got up and turned around.

            Mena pulled herself up onto the bank and toweled herself off as quickly as she could. She pulled on her slip first, without any of the shapewear or hosiery that went under it, so that she would have at least one layer of more or less decent clothing over her.

            “I wouldn’t have chosen to accost you here,” said Rake in a light, lyrical voice, “if I were capable of stirring for beautiful women.”

            “Don’t flatter me,” said Mena. “You mean to say you’re a queer?”

            “That’s neither here nor there,” said Rake. “You decent yet?”

            “Sure,” said Mena as she pulled her skirt on. Rake turned around as she was pulling her blouse onto her shoulders. “If you ever tell your buddies, or worse, mine, that you saw me make this much of a hash of getting dressed I’ll…I don’t know, I’ll kill you, or something. Or worse. I’ve known you five minutes and have five minutes’ worth of dirt on you.”

            “I won’t tell anybody,” said Rake. “You know, I’ve never so much as seen a woman naked excepting my sister?”

            “You’ve seen Debbie naked?” asked Mena; Rake nodded. “You and I have that in common,” said Mena.

            “Is my sister—?”

            “Don’t get your hopes up; we’ve showered together is all. There are plenty of queers in the WAAC but your sister isn’t one of them, nor am I for that matter.”

            “That’s all right,” said Rake. “Debbie and I have numbers of other points in common.”

            “Yes, such as the fact that you’ve accosted me naked,” said Mena.

            “Also, could you not say ‘queers’ please?” said Rake. “I don’t care for it. It reminds me of getting hit in the face with a rake.”

            What Mena wanted to ask was why this particular word made Rake think of getting hit in the face with a rake but the fact that his nickname was Rake seemed not to, but she was trying to treat him with more grace and latitude now that she knew that he had no designs on her virtue, so what she asked instead was, “What would you prefer?”

            “I’d prefer another topic of conversation, at this point,” said Rake, “such as what I’ve come to talk to you about. I don’t make a habit of following friends of Debbie’s away from parties, as I hope you can guess. Are you going to put your underwear back on?” he finished, pointing to the sub-slip components of Mena’s outfit where they still lay rumpled on the bank.

            Mena said a curse word, made Rake turn around again, hitched her skirt and slip up to her waist, and pulled on her panties and nylons. She cast a glance out to sea; it was completely dark now. She decided that they should talk as they went back to the party. She put on her shoes, threw her brassiere and girdle into her bag along with the wetted towel, savagely and painfully dragged some kinks out of her hair with a bakelite comb that she had on her, and started back up the zigzagging path with Rake, who turned out to be barely an inch taller than her, just barely keeping up.

            It seemed that the Ripleys, Deborah and Roland’s parents, who were from one of the more upper-crust parts of Pennsylvania, had gotten involved in some sort of racist intrigue with a group of black ships’ stewards who served on ships out of the Port of Philadelphia. Another friend of Debbie’s who was in the WAVES and whom Mena hadn’t heard of before had been deputized to transport some sort of hush money or weregild to a Negro League ballplayer whose Navy brother a Ripley family retainer had beaten up, in order to avoid scandal. Unfortunately this woman had abruptly been redeployed to Texas where the Ripleys did not know anybody. The ballplayer knew that this courier was in the service but not which branch she was, and Mena apparently bore some physical resemblance to her (according to Debbie), so what the Ripleys seemed to be hoping was that Debbie and Rake could take some pictures of themselves with Mena in classic California settings to imply that the money would be forthcoming as soon as it could be wired from the West Coast. Rake did not know whether this implication would actually be true or not.

            “What the Christ is wrong,” Mena asked Rake as they got back to the veranda and reentered the party, “with this family of yours?”

            At this point there were several wolf-whistles and somebody standing by the record player with a separate martini glass in each hand shouted “Hey Rake! Who’s the gal?”
            “He made passionate love to me down by the water!” Mena called back at this guy.

            “Bullshit he did,” somebody else said. “Be much more of an accomplishment than you think for a girl to get herself fucked by Rake Ripley.”

            “Fuck off, Burkhalter,” Rake shouted.

            “I am going to ram that Zippo you’re holding so far up your ass you’ll be puking it up with tomorrow’s lunch,” Mena said to Rake.

            “Duly noted,” said Rake, “but can I ask you a question? Answer me this and I’ll answer you what’s the matter with my parents.”

            “Go ahead.”

            “Were you always like this? Are all WAACs like this?”

            “Like what?”

            “Threatening me. Swearing.”

            Mena shook her head. “We’re actually supposed to stay ladylike and maintain a certain standard of femininity,” she said, taking her third beer can of the night from a tray that people were passing around. She sat down in a squashy chair at a far and for the most part unpeopled end of the veranda and motioned for Rake to come sit down in a rocking chair facing her. “I did start out that way; I was actually a real Sunday-school good Catholic girl type until quite recently. What happened, if you really want to know, was this.”

3.

The Three Musketeers Get Scattered to the Winds

When Pearl Harbor happened—that was how Mena always thought of it; not “the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor” but “Pearl Harbor happened,” as if the place itself was abbreviated into the event—she was nearing the end of fall semester in her senior year of high school. The Three Musketeers—Mena, Kara, and Francine—were all within a month of each other in age, but Francine was the oldest and her birthday fell in late August, which meant that she had been a year ahead of them through all their time in school and had sometimes been poked fun at by the other girls in her own class for spending all her time with underclassmen. Francine had been in the Glee Club and an informal group of Shin Buddhist students that met at a nearby temple whose priest was rumored to be related to Kara’s so-called father; Mena was in the Glee Club too and Kara was in the Future Farmers of America because she dreamed of running her own orange plantation to compete with the big Dole ones.

            Francine’s best friend in her own year was a girl called Maxine Dole who was not related to the Doles of the oranges, the Doles who had overthrown the Kingdom and still bossed the Asians and Natives who worked for them in ways that would have brought color to Ebenezer Scrooge’s cheeks. People did assume that Maxine Dole was related to those Doles and she did not tell them otherwise because it meant that people buttered her up. Mena and Kara used Francine’s protection as not to have to butter Maxine up. When Francine and Maxine both graduated in the summer of ’41 Mena and Kara were sad to see Francine go but relieved not to need the protection anymore.

            Pearl Harbor happened on a Sunday morning, the second of Advent, but Mena had skipped Mass to go to the beach with Kara and Francine to celebrate Francine’s first steno job. There they sat on their blankets gazing out to sea through heavy sunglasses, making a game of counting the boys who glanced at each of them. (Mena usually won this game and sometimes got almost proud enough of it to reconsider the promise they’d made to each other to steer clear of anything past necking till they were married, a conversation at which the Gentilis’ priest Father Grady had been present but not participating.) Pearl Harbor was to the west of downtown Honolulu and the Three Musketeers’ homes, school, and favorite beach were all to the east, so at first they were not aware of what was going on that morning elsewhere on Oahu. Soon enough they began to be aware of an increasing military presence on the beach, and eventually some soldiers came and crowded them off it and they ended up bicycling to a saimin bar a mile or two inland. There they sat listening slack-jawed with currents of freezing cold writhing in their stomachs to a radio that was playing frantic minute-by-minute reports of the attack.

 ❦ 

Within a month of Pearl Harbor it had been established that the Nakagawa family was going to go back to Okinawa.

            “I feel awful for Fran,” Kara said to Mena one day in a drugstore where they sat drinking egg creams after Mena got out of Glee Club. “I can’t imagine going back to somewhere I haven’t ever been before like that.”

            “I think she really is going back there, isn’t she?” asked Mena. “If you want to be formal about it she is an issei, right? She told me once or twice her family came over right before the Immigration Act shut everything down, and that would have been when she was a baby.”

            “I thought you’d have said something about her mom coming over while she was, er, expecting Fran,” said Kara.

            “I suppose that’s possible too. But in that case she wouldn’t have seen Okinawa.”

            “Anyway what do you have planned for this war? Personally I’m hoping to go to work at one of the harbors after we graduate even if they might get bombed again. I saw this picture in the paper of girl firefighters aiming this huge hose at a burning ship or plane and that seems like my kind of thing to do. Did I tell you I did apply to UH in Manoa?” Mena nodded; Kara had told her this four times now and she was almost, but only almost, sick of being excited about it. “Had to fudge some of my personal details for…the usual reasons, so the war might make that more difficult for the time being. Be interesting to have some war stories to tell my kids when I have them. It’s not just for the boys this time, you know!”

            “I almost wish it weren’t at all for the boys,” said Mena. Thousands and thousands of young men were descending upon Oahu in the past month and making her feel alarmed and accosted. A few days ago she had gotten invited to the first dance that she had been to that was not run by her school or her church, and while she had been there she had danced with four or five men she did not know. She had liked doing her makeup and her hair for it and putting on a nice artificial silk dress splashed with bird-of-paradise patterns, but the actual dance exhausted her and made her feel overwhelmed and overborne.

            “What about you? Any great plans for yourself?”

            “I’m still holding out for what’ll really make me feel good about what I’m doing,” said Mena. “Right now I’m going to concentrate on finishing up high school, and we’ll see what comes after that. Who knows? Maybe I can go overseas as a nurse or something along those lines.”

            “They’re trying to make it so that there are things for women to do in this war other than being nurses. In the military, I mean,” said Mena.

            “In the military. Really?”

            “Oh, yes. I heard it on the radio, this lady Congresswoman from somewhere in the Northeast called Edith Rogers. She’s trying to get a bill for a women’s corps through Congress. The announcer I was listening to said she introduced it some time ago but it’s been encountering opposition and surviving challenges.”

            “Congresswoman Rogers herself I assume is encountering opposition and surviving challenges.”

            “Well, yes, so I would assume, especially since she’s a Republican. It’s something I’m excited about, even so. I suppose we’ll see if anything comes of it.”

            “And would you want to join a women’s corps in the Army, if there were one?”
            “That’s my sister’s kinda thing,” interjected a man a little older than them from the next aisle in the drugstore.

            “Your sister and I have that in common,” said Mena.

            “You a bit of a tomboy, then?” the man asked. He did not seem to mean anything bad by this question but Mena still found it vaguely affronting for reasons that she would have had a hard time exactly putting her finger upon.

            “I really don’t think I am,” said Mena. “I put on mascara to come to the drugstore.” And this was true enough—she had, and she was proud of herself that (at a glance in a mirror at the end of the aisle) it seemed to still be in place even though she had flicked some sleep out of her eyes a few minutes ago.

            “Do you want to leave Oahu?” Kara asked her once the unfamiliar man wandered off.

            “Honestly,” said Mena after a few moments’ thought, “I think that yes, I do.”

            “Mind if I ask why that is? I think it’s just lovely here.”

            “There’s also, well…how should I put this? There aren’t many more of my kind around here?”

            Kara scoffed. “Not more white folk? Not more Catholics? Not more Glee Club people?”

            This cut Mena to the quick more readily than she would have liked to own up to. She had hoped that Kara would know what she meant by instinct, mostly because she herself did not know; it would be ridiculous if she meant only more Italians, but apart from that she had a hard time figuring out what her kind in fact was. She saw in front of her several large bottles of aspirin arrayed on a shelf; she was here to stock up on gauze bandages for an injury that one of her brothers had sustained in a boat and aspiring was in the same part of the drugstore. The bottles, clear glass with yellow labels (German labels), seemed like the sort that might hold her soul and decant it for delectation, if she wanted for it to be held and decanted.

            “I don’t know what my kind is,” said Mena. She had to choke down the words but I know you’re not it. She knew better than to say that. She knew better even if she did not know how she knew better.

 ❦ 

In the last few months of Mena and Kara’s time in high school, tens of thousands of fighting men streamed through Hawaii, which was now under martial law with constant blackouts and curfews; the Japanese advanced southward towards Australia; the Germans, in Europe, battled the Soviets week after week and month after month; and Francine’s letters slowed and finally stopped entirely. The abortion of history (as Kara predicted and Mena conceded that it would turn out to be) called Japanese internment got underway, and Kara narrowly escaped it; recruitment posters for the Army Nurse Corps started going up in the mainland, probably all over the United States, but women from Hawaii were not, at this stage, allowed to enlist. Maxine Dole enlisted the week after the hospital bombings in the Philippines at the end of March by flying to the mainland and claiming residency with relatives in San Francisco. Posters for the Navy Nurse Corps went up on the mainland; Lydia Flick followed Maxine’s example on the day of the surrender on Corregidor—and was immediately sent to Liverpool. Girls who could not pull this trick off went to work in salvage or at hospitals or in factories.

            Senior prom came and went; Mena’s date was Tim Carpenter but she danced mostly with her cousin Jack Cipriani. She got home maybe five minutes before curfew feeling exhausted and wanting only to live as she chose.

            Mena’s first job out of high school, which she started a week after graduation towards the end of June, had nothing to do with the war effort at all. On the day of graduation she had tried to get a job like the kind Kara was looking for but she was hot and tired and having her time of the month and so she spoke somewhat unkindly to the person she telephoned about it and was too embarrassed to call again the next day. She decided to bide her time for a few months and take up an offer of a summer job at a dress shop called Aloha Kate’s. All through high school she had excelled in home economics and the way she saw it she might as well make use of her sewing skills now while they were still fresh in her memory rather than relying on the sewing and darning of her naturally more talented little sister until whenever it was that she would get married and move out. Tim Carpenter came around to the dress shop and flirted with Mena several times in July and shipped out to a naval base in Oregon or Washington at the beginning of August. Later in August Mena started going on dates with Jack Cipriani’s baseball-playing friend Tom Lori.

            “They say there’s no West Coast baseball but they just mean that the big leagues they have in the East that play the so-called ‘World’ Series don’t have any teams out there,” Tom said to her over noodles after Mass one late-summer Sunday. “They have the Pacific Coast League. Not quite a big league but they play really well.”

            “The one time I went to the mainland with my parents,” said Mena, referring here to a vacation that they had gone on to Seattle the summer before her freshman year in high school on the mistaken impression that Washington State had redwoods, “we saw the Seattle Rainiers play the San Francisco Seals. The Seals didn’t still have Di Maggio at that point; he’d already gone to New York. It was quite something, though, I’ll tell you that. I enjoyed it; I’d go see it again.”

            “I’ve been having talks with a scout from the San Diego Padres,” said Tom. “I guess that’s probably as close as I’m gonna get to being able to stay in Hawaii in terms of weather if I want to make it big in the ballgame. You don’t really like the hot weather all the time, do you, Mena?” he asked.

            “I’m curious to see what it’s like to be somewhere that isn’t that way,” said Mena. “Call it idle curiosity if you will. I think it’s a bit more than just idle.”

            “Maybe if I end up in San Francisco or Seattle I can send for you,” said Tom.

            “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Mena. “We’re not even going steady yet, or at least to my mind we’re not.”

            “Would you like to be?” asked Tom.

            “In the middle of a war, who wouldn’t?” asked Mena, but Tom did not take that as a yes.

            It was two days after this date that Mena learned about the WAAC, which had been established by Act of Congress the previous month. She had known about it as a possibility before, but the reality had escaped her till now. Kara told her about it, excitedly, Kara who sure enough was now working as a civilian in one of the Navy yards. Four days after the date Mena caught a flight to Los Angeles and started living in a shady boarding house near the UCLA campus. Two weeks after the date she enlisted. Three weeks after the date she was shipped off to some fort in Georgia for basic training, which was called “indoctrination.”

 ❦ 

“You look like you could use a friend,” a woman looking to be maybe three years older than her said to her in the shower on her fourth or fifth day in Georgia.

            Mena—her hair cut into an unfashionable bob because it would not stay in a roll, her face still drawn and pale from weeks of almost nonstop travel and novelty of experience, water streaming down her back and sides—turned and examined the woman speaking to her. She was a little shorter than Mena and had curly blonde hair that, even when wet, stuck up in a cowlick right above the middle of her forehead in a way that made her look childlike despite seeming to be above twenty. She had a few freckles—only, oddly, on one cheek.

            “I think everybody here could use some friends,” said Mena. “Military life isn’t exactly something that’s traditional where I’m from.”

            “For women or for anybody? Where are you from?”

            “I arrived from Los Angeles less than a week ago. Before that I lived in Hawaii. I’m speaking for women. Where are you from?”

            “Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. Interesting to meet someone who’s lived in a Territory.” The woman stuck out her right hand. “Deborah Ripley. Nice to meet you.”
            “You too, Debbie—may I call you Debbie?” asked Mena.

            “My guess would be they want us on last-name basis in public, but between you and me, Debbie will be just fine. And you are…?”

            “Gentili, Philomena Gentili. You can call me Mena.”

            “Very well, then, Mena,” said Debbie. “I don’t mean to be a pill, but could you make sure I’ve rinsed some hair clippings off my back?”

 ❦ 

“Do you mind if I ask you a question, Debbie?” Mena asked while sitting across from her in the mess a few evenings later (boiled beef and peas for the third dinner in the row; there was talk of replacing the nutritionist). “You say you’re from Pennsylvania but your accent seems Southern to me. Why is that?”

            “Honestly?” said Debbie. “Affectation.” She laughed at her own admission. “I was actually in Virginia for school, believe it or not, before a few months ago. There are some good women’s colleges there and my parents wanted me to at least go for an MRS degree, maybe something a little more academic too; I was studying English literature and trying not to let Jim Crow get me down. It’s a real shock when you go off-base, isn’t it?”

            Mena nodded, and decided not to bring up the fact that Jim Crow existed on-base too because, as they had found out very suddenly and very rudely, the Army and its auxiliaries were all segregated.

            “What are your parents like?” Mena asked.

            “My brother Roland’s okay,” Debbie said without answering Mena’s question. “He’s just about your age. Just graduated high school, just went into the Army himself. We have another brother named Charles but he’s 4F because of a lazy eye so he works for our father in…whatever our father’s doing with himself these days. Something very respectable, I’m sure.”

            “Do you not see yourself as respectable?”

            “I do. Do you?”

            Mena shrugged and was about to say something pithy but kind. Then somebody a few spots down the table from them—Mena never found out who—said something along the lines of “Interesting thing to ask a wop sitting across from Deb Ripley.”

            Debbie went paler than usual, and clammy and quiet. She tapped her fork against her plate a few times, agitated, presumably on Mena’s behalf. Mena was not entirely shocked that somebody would say this—indeed, it was not the first time somebody had said it in the past week—but something about its having been said within her new friend’s earshot and not merely her own rankled her severely. She decided to be less rather than more respectable and pliant, from now on.

Short Story: “Welcome to the Deva Realm”

Tasha’s credit card was worn to a raveling. The tour paid good money for a roadie like her, certainly better than acts like Oblivion Godhead and Penetration Grid had back in her death-metal days, but Hunter Berkeley’s tours tended to pass through some of the most expensive cities in the world, and bring even more money in during their sojourns. The current one crawled through the world like an old-style traveling circus or a military campaign in the Chinese Civil War. They were in Milan now. Next up was Zurich. Things in Switzerland cost so much that even Milan people struggled there.

            Tasha’s favorite tour city so far had been Kyoto. Kyoto, not Tokyo—a city that Hunter Berkeley might have preferred, had it not been for the Incident (as Hunterworld old-timers were wont to call it) that had sunk her Budokan show on the Clear Your Name Tour in 2017. This tour was her first since Clear Your Name, on account of the pandemic, and the people in Kansai had seemed proud to have Kyoto as the Japanese stop, to have Sanga Stadium as the Japanese venue. The Japanese produced a lot more of their pop music domestically than did most non-Anglo countries these days. Hunter was the only Anglo artist a lot of them listened to—men and women alike; it made fascinatingly little difference compared to the gender politics of Japanese artists, or for that matter the Gender Politics of Hunter Berkeley in the West. Supposedly the Kyoto crowds were “more normal about” Hunter than the people in Tokyo six years ago had been. This was according to the same old hands who talked about the Incident and Tasha did not have a great idea of what they meant by it. Most of her time in Kyoto, except during the concerts, Tasha had spent at temples. Tenryūji and Kokedera had been her favorites. They had attracted a different crowd and by going to them Tasha had been playing a different game to many of the other roadies who would look for bars or swipe on hookup apps.

            Tasha’s only hookup on the tour so far had been in Arlington, Texas, on the especially circuslike, ludic American South leg of the Seasons of Life Tour. It had been with a woman with a tongue stud and nails groomed the way Hunter would sometimes groom her own nails when she wanted the entertainment press to talk about something other than her friendship with that guy from Patriot News and his wife. The girl in Arlington, Concepción (which was almost too good), had known what she was doing with the tongue stud but not with the fingernails, which had been a mere way of signaling a type of subcultural loyalty, like flashing a gang sign or eating at Chick-Fil-A in a Northeastern state. It had been disappointing but not surprising, like a stupid storyline in a Batman comic. Tasha had had to put way too much effort into getting herself off, like a Mormon housewife seeking to build a pyramid-scheme downline.

            Bad sex in Arlington, blow in Fort Lauderdale, shot after shot in Nashville and then Gatlinburg for some special event that Tasha was too black and too Jewish to wrap her head around, then on to Indianapolis and other regions of the ambivalent-summered North. It was at that point that she had started speaking regularly with one of the old hands, a man only slightly older than her named Ryan McIntyre. Ryan had a mind as self-contained and seemingly impenetrable as a mussel shell that boiling had not opened, and he came across as only slightly ensouled more often than not, but in a very different way to what life had taught Tasha to expect from cisheterowhatever men. She didn’t know if what made the change there was age, line of work, both, or something else entirely, and it was not that she was really all that fond of him, but he was perversely fascinating to talk to. The first thing of real personal substance that Ryan McIntyre ever said to Tasha Seligman had been, in these exact words and with utterly guileless yet somehow still emotionally deadened intonation, “I wonder what would happen if you took a tenderloin sandwich and put it in a blender and drank it like a milkshake.”

            “I don’t think I’ve ever wondered that myself,” Tasha had told him, “but I also can’t imagine it tasting very good.”

            He nodded and said “The mouthfeel would probably be even worse than the taste. And thus had gone the Seasons of Life Tour’s stint in Indianapolis. The takes on things that he had expressed in Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San José had been scarcely better. Assuming, that was, that “better” was the relevant category here. Had the problem with the tenderloin smoothie remark been that it was “bad,” exactly? Tasha wondered.

 ❦

Like many people who made of their presence in Hunterworld a lifestyle choice of sorts, which included even much of the fandom and a fortiori professionals like Tasha and Ryan and their ilk, Ryan had a very, very high opinion of the woman Hunter Berkeley. Tasha thought that treating Hunter as any kind of moral exemplar was ridiculous, even though the few times they had actually exchanged words had gone well. In Kyoto: “Ryan tells me you visited that moss temple? It looks so pretty; I’m jealous! Send me some pictures, okay?” Tasha had tagged Hunter in her Intstagram post about Kokedera, and Hunter had liked and commented on the post. In Sydney: “You know, it really surprises me it took me so long to come here. Growing up Daddy would always be threatening or promising to move us all to Australia, if things were bad at his work or if the Harrisburg weather was doing something he didn’t like. It always sounded so exciting to me. Not sure why I’m telling you this. Tasha Seligman, right?” In Durban: “That book you’re reading looks interesting.” It had been an old copy of one of Tasha’s older sister’s favorite books from her Asian lit major at UMass, The Karma of Words by a William R. LaFleur. Probably, Tasha thought, Hunter Berkeley found it interesting because it was in large part about poetry, a subject near and dear to any halfway decent singer-songwriter’s heart—and Hunter Berkeley was a more than halfway decent singer-songwriter, whatever else she was. And finally they had spoken very briefly in the Seasons of Life Tour’s first European city, Barcelona. “Looking sharp,” Hunter had said about Tasha’s coat and tie.

            “You too. Break a leg.”

            “I always do.” That had been the whole conversation.

            Hunter Berkeley’s critics, of whom there were many because she was a hot white woman, often said that it seemed fake of her to set up these brief but attentive conversations with the little people. Tasha did not feel that way, exactly. Partly it was gratitude that Hunter at least did not adhere to the life philosophy of Dan Gaudry from Penetration Grid, who had grabbed Tasha’s ass in dress pants and made crude guesses about what kind of underwear she had had on underneath, or Axel Nilsen from Oblivion Godhead, who was gay and had the libido of a Baroque-era castrato but made up for it by constantly telling people in Tasha’s position to go get him local delicacies that were not local to the place in which he was playing. (She had been unable to find him, for instance, durian or betel nut in Sao Paulo in 2019.) Getting even somewhat calculated-feeling positive attention from one of these people was a lot better than many of the most obvious and plausible alternatives. Tasha’s sister always told her to expect and demand better, and she did, since Hunter Berkeley was better than Dan Gaudry or Axel Nilsen.

            By the time the Milan shows had gotten underway, Tasha had read about two-thirds of The Karma of Words. She understood why Becca thought so highly of it, all things considered. She tried to read more of it backstage, some extended point about, perhaps appropriately, Zeami. Ryan kept talking to her. He was more insightful than usual; Milan, he said, was a city that “got the grey juices flowing,” in a way that few other major cities did. Tasha could respect that since she guessed the same could be said of her and Kyoto. “I think it’s impressive she’s nice like you were saying in Barcelona, since the rules don’t apply to her,” Ryan was saying. “I mean, defamation law works for her the way it works for English people. She gets trashed or makes out with, you know, whoever, she doesn’t want it on the internet, it’s not on the internet. Trump almost apologized to her once.”

            “I don’t know that I’d say that that’s impressive,” said Tasha, “certainly not in the sense of being a reason why we like her.”

            “No, no, no, that’s not what I’m saying,” said Ryan. “It isn’t impressive that she can do this kind of thing. It’s impressive that she treats us so well even though she can do this kind of thing. It isn’t even hard to make asshole stories go away if you’re rich and famous. How often do you hear that, I don’t know, Science Steve is actually a big ol’ jerkoff to fans? Not often. But he is.”

            “I have actually heard that,” said Tasha. “It’s disillusioning. But okay, yeah, I get what you were trying to say now. Thanks.”

            “If Hunter wanted to be a complete bitch and pull sick power moves on everyone around her,” Ryan said confidently, “then Hunter would be a complete bitch and pull sick power moves on everyone around her.” He sat down in the chair across from Tasha in her part of the little roadie launch bay, without asking—which she supposed was fair because it was not actually her space. Abruptly he asked “You ever been with a guy, T?”
            “Uh, why the fuck are you asking?”

            “Oh, it isn’t like—I mean, someone asked me that recently—”

            Tasha pinched her nose high up near the bridge of her little round wire-rimmed glasses and said “Ryan, I swear to God, if you play the autism card…”

            “The…the what?! No, Tasha, I am not going to ‘play the autism card.’ I’m sorry. Random question and I’m sorry.”

            “Gay sex on the brain?” asked Tasha, who had a revealed preference for fucking women who said things like “the cowboy grit and rugged independence so engrained in the Texas spirit” over fucking men of any description.

            “I’m a dude who works for Hunter Berkeley. Of course I have gay sex on the brain.”

            “Uh, okay. I don’t want to discuss it with you.”

            “Duly noted.” Ryan stood up. “Showtime’s in an hour. Last call for Italy. You have somewhere you gotta be? I do.”

            Tasha thought unpleasantly, in a derivative, regurgitatory, online-class-discussion-platform sort of way, of what had been said about living in a ten-foot-square hut, retiring from public affairs, the ease of keeping promises and laws when there was no way to break them—hadn’t Hunter Berkeley had a song like this on Forever Hold Your Peace?—and then about herself and how much she was always having to do. “I’ll be busy starting in fifteen, twenty minutes,” she told Ryan after checking her watch. “Till then I think I’m going to go for a walk.”

 ❦

Tasha walked out on the streets of Milan, which was far from her favorite Italian city. Tasha’s family went back, on her mother’s side, in Italian Jewry—she was a distant relative of Giacomo Segre—and she had been to the country many times before, with family or with friends or with her borderline ex-girlfriend Silvana Rossi. She loved Siena and Assisi and for some reason Reggio Calabria, she liked Florence and Rome and Venice okay, and she felt about Milan apparently the way Hunter’s pre-Incident roadies had felt about Tokyo going into 2017. Yet still it had a ssense of age and time and space and awe that was a far cry from DFW’s mesothelioma-riddled cloverleaves and almost as far a cry from the self-imposed historical limbo of Tasha’s native Mid-Atlantic states. (Hunter Berkeley’s native Mid-Atlantic states as well; it was not lost on Tasha; how could it be?) So there she stood and looked around and paced nervously a bit and tried to take in some sense of time and essence of history that was not the bare time and self-iterating history of the Seasons of Life Tour’s fourish-hour run time. She wished the stadium was closer to the duomo, or to the gallery with that last pietà on which Michelangelo had wrung out his mind like a wet bikini. She checked her phone. H. had sent her something on Speckle. Why Speckle? She had had an issue with the garters for one of the big sexy numbers towards the end of the show. She wanted slightly different lighting to make the fix her costumer had made, a fix that Hunter seemed not to feel the need to describe to Tasha, less visually apprehensible from the audience. Tasha was needed to move some of the heavier equipment that they had to use to contain the chemical fires that produced some of these lighting effects. She guessed it was fair enough; that was barely spitting distance from her regular duties, after all. Having to do it so soon before the show started was concerning, but Hunter herself would be as concerned as anyone about that—more, even. And so it was that without really walking or going anywhere after all Tasha hied back to the stadium and to the backstage and to where the great pop star was giving hurried, stressed-out direction to colleagues of Tasha’s who, indeed, seemed much less anxious than she was.

People would sometimes derisively call superfans of Hunter Berkeley “barkers or “hounds” because her name reminded one of hunting dogs. She pronounced Berkeley “Barkley,” Britishly, and apparently so did the rest of her family. The “barker” name struck Tasha as apt as Hunter strode around the backstage in high panic, or what passed for high panic from someone as poised as she was, personally directing—micromanaging—where the people around Tasha were putting boxes and cauldrons and spotlights and firecrackers and hunks of magnesium and strontium nitrate and nitromethane and boric acid and butane and barium chloride and copper chloride and saltpeter and salt. They barely outran the clock.

            Hunter Berkeley’s opening act went onstage at eight o’ clock, or, as the Italians called it, twenty hours. In most cities the proceedings started an hour earlier, but here in Milan they were throwing a bone to late Italian evenings, that supposed national preference of that supposed national character. Who then was the opening act for the European leg of Miss Hunter Berkeley’s Seasons of Life Tour, who the honored second fiddle so impressively abased by having given to her this augustly subordinate task? Who was the Patroclus or the Ismene, the Felicitas or the Valerian, the Olivier or the Sancho Panza, the Harriet Smith or the Diana Barry, the Watson or the Spock, the Henry Wallce or the Walter Mondale or perhaps even the Dick Cheney, to this apparently, if Clear Your Name and its supporting tour six years ago were anything to go by, unbeatable, unkillable, unstoppable titan of pop music and pop entertainment? Who reflected silverly Hunter’s blazing hot-gold sun? It was once and future Amor Fati frontwoman Bethany Bailey, one half of the dynamic duo or in some people’s minds gruesome twosome of Berkeley and Bailey that had polluted the shades of a certain music-industry-adjacent girls’ high school together in the mid-to-late 2000s. Once Tasha had gotten high and watched a Japanese “pinky violence” movie from the early 1970s, called something along the lines of Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom. It had been a very bad movie and Tasha had not expected anything more—or from a certain point of view anything less—when she had pulled it up on GoToAsia-Watch.cx and pressed “play.” That about which Tasha Seligman thought when she thought about the stories still told of Berkeley and Bailey in those days was, first and foremost, although she was not proud of this and did not like to admit it, the memory of lying around a t-shirt and bike shorts stoned out of her gourd and watching Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom. She thus supposed that had someone been able to make her take a side either for or against Berkeley and Bailey as once the pair of them had been, she would have sided against them, as indeed she had at her own high school against the hot popular girls, when she had not instead been thinking of them in terms of how best to get them to corner her in one of the outbuildings between the baseball field and the woods and stick their tongues down her throat and their fingers up her pudenda. This had worked sometimes, but not very often, and by the end of Tasha’s high school career she had been in the “they’re all vapid bitches anyway” sour grapes mode far more often than not. Now she was older and wiser and knew that thinking of them that way had been unfair. It would have been unfair to Hunter Berkeley and Bethany Bailey too, but Tasha was also older and wiser in that she could look back on her teen self with clear pure eyes and know without judgment or self-hatred that it was what she would have done back then nevertheless.

            Bethany’s set lasted a perfect down-to-a-science fifty-five minutes, after which it was time to move things, in some cases physically and quite laboriously, into place so that people would get good and hyped up for the living legend Hunter Berkeley’s descent from the heavens and welcoming approach as she graced the stage of San Siro for myriads of nobodies. The multicolored fires started burning. The first notes of Hunter’s 2019 hit “You and I in the Field of Fire” started playing. Ryan, that shirkduty layabout, finally showed his face (admittedly carrying something very heavy, it had to be handed to him) and gave a nervous thumbs-up to Tasha as Hunter Berkeley herself took the stage.

            “The sound of horns and hunting, which will bring Actaeon to Diana in the spring,” Tasha murmured to Ryan, but Ryan just grinned blandly at her and hoisted the colors. “The colors” here were a box of pyrotechnics marked to indicate that they were for the part of the Seasons of Life show where a giant “H.B.” monogram got shot up into the sky and then cycled through the colors of the national flag, in this case the green, white, and red of the Italian Republic’s tricolore. This box of pyrotechnics Ryan passed to a guy named Fat Bruce who was legend in his own right among Seasons of Life Tour roadies for having been physically present for the Incident at the Budokan. They said it had been he who had calmed Hunter down in the moment when she had been screaming at the top of her lungs at her parents and at her then-boyfriend about how she was going to leave the music industry to burn and reinvent herself somehow, as some sort of saint or sage. Nobody who had been there had really believed that Hunter had meant that when she had said it, but they seemed to have had all sorts of conflicting stories and theories and ideas about why they did not believe that, and for that matter about what, if anything in particular, she had meant by it. In any case Fat Bruce was way too cool for the likes of Tasha Seligman to talk to, so she didn’t bother. He got the stuff for the flag trick set up; good. Things were well and truly back on track. They were running a bit early now, even.

            “Heave to!” Fat Bruce called to someone. He was the kind of person to say things like “heave to,” but along with his other virtues he was so cool that he hadn’t changed his style since 1996, so he could do what he wanted in Tasha’s book. She knew Ryan felt just the same, and she wondered if Hunter Berkeley did too, after what Fat Bruce had done for her in Tokyo. (Had there, Tasha wondered, been a “Thin Bruce” once upon a time, from whom Fat Bruce had had to be distinguished?) “Heave to!” he called again, and “Haul away!,” and “Come on MacIntyre, come on Seligman, let’s see some elbow grease!”

 ❦

The structure of the Seasons of Life Tour show was based on the concept of “seasons” in Hunter’s own career, which she was rumored to have, way back in the mists of antiquity that even Fat Bruce the Vishvakarnam of roadies might not personally remember, “copied” from an artist called Sophie Summers. The seasons of life from “Seasons of Life” were not in any particular order other than what Hunter Berkeley and her closest intimates and collaborators thought the show’s overall aesthetic and thematic thrust called for. It started with Kiss Me Senseless, which was four or five album cycles ago now, but those album cycles had tended to be on the short side. K.M.S. had never been a particular favorite of Tasha Seligman’s, but then, Tasha Seligman had never really been a Hunter Berkeley superfan, only a Hunter Berkeley well-wisher and latterly a Hunter Berkeley employee, neither of which was at all the same thing. The early sets in the show also tended to be relative downtime to her. All of this was to say that she was not currently paying all that much attention to the proceedings. There were a number of other things that she could have, in this moment and under these circumstances, been doing to keep herself occupied, none of which were what she actually was doing, which was staring indifferently at some currently-not-being-used rigging and thinking somewhat darkly about what it might signify that Miss Hunter Berkeley was so preoccupied, unhealthily preoccupied, infamously preoccupied, with being thought to be “good,” being thought, that was, to be “in the right,” come what may, come Hull, Hell, or Halifax.

            She thought about God, Who, if He existed, did not do so for any reason exactly, and Who thus would need nothing and lack for nothing and demand everything for humanity’s fundamental good and not for His own, which was past change. Tasha had never been particularly devout or observant, in large part because neither had either of her parents; in her father’s case in particular, growing up in the 1960s as a mixed-race kid in suburban Camden County had made it hard for him to feel as if either the Jewish community or the black church had much for him. He had been tacitly encouraged, even, you might say, to think that they did not, more or less for the whole of his childhood, which he had in certain respects projected onto, or into, the childhood of his only daughter in the 90s and 2000s. So Tasha thought of God, when she did, as a conceptual abstract, a necessary component of her ability to think about the world in the way in which she sometimes liked to think about it, as a place that “meant something” but in which one’s fate was not final, one’s decisions not permanently and irrevocably binding on everyone and everything, one’s capacity for love and hate not stretched to bursting by the ordinary everyday bullshit of normal life and normal problems. She suspected—knew, really, at this point—that Hunter herself felt just the same way much of the time, so that the whole program, the whole mystique, the whole three-hundred-and-sixty-degree Hunter Berkeley lifestyle experience, was meant to create or to sustain an ideal universe nestled cozily within the usual universe like a matryoshka. They renamed cities as puns on Hunter Berkeley’s name, sometimes, for a day or a weekend, when the Seasons of Life Tour rolled on through.

            Of course Tasha had no intention of ever sharing any of these musings in any way that really meant something with Ryan or even with Fat Bruce. Confiding in Fat Bruce about this would be almost as mortifying, to say nothing of it also being dangerous to her career, as confiding in Hunter herself. Confiding in Ryan would of course be just plain exasperating, even though she was trying her best to outgrow the belief that that was somehow Ryan’s fault for being a twit. So it was something on which she kept her own counsel and would always keep her own counsel, barring the unforeseeable. Neither was it really at all clear to Tasha that “to be kept” was what her counsel needed. Why, exactly, did she think she needed “advice” here? She had never really answered that, not even in a purely and pellucidly inward way. She merely defaulted to the bare assumption that it was some sort of problem to be addressed, that she associated her boss Hunter so strongly with a delusional but well-meaning theurgy, an ongoing effort, characterized by bizarre spasms and idiotic, egregiously self-abasing sexual exploits on many different people’s parts, to bring heaven to earth, temporarily and as a carnival.

            She stopped dissociating, if that really was what she had been doing, and brought her focus back to her job again. They were now several seasons into the Seasons of Life setlist. Hunter was backstage, mostly naked, being changed into the black-and-gold gown that she wore to perform whatever song was coming right before “Rich People Problems” at this point in the tour’s lifespan. Hunter was hot and wore those laser-cut nude thongs that people who styled red-carpet premiere looks were always praising to the seventh heaven, but Tasha had worked this tour for too long to eat the eye candy with as much gusto as she had early on. That was an obvious source of disappointment for her, at points, but it was also probably a good thing in that it meant that the costume changes did not unduly distract her from her own duties. In this case, at this moment, her duty was to help Fat Bruce’s girl Friday, Susie Womack, lift an amp that one of the backup performers needed for a bass guitar bit that Hunter had had worked into the tour’s arrangement of “Deep Roots.” Okay then; “Deep Roots” was going before “Rich People Problems.” That made sense; it was how things had been done earlier in the tour, and they were two of the big fan-favorite singles from the criminally overlooked Ever On and On album cycle. Putting the bass in was probably not going to go over well, but geniuses were weird like that, especially savants like Hunter and much of her inner circle.

            Tasha happened to really like Ever On and On. It and its better-known and more widely discussed companion album The Lore of Living Creatures were probably the two Hunter Berkeley albums that Tasha would go out of her way to listen to on the regular even when she was no longer working for the great woman herself. The title of “Rich People Problems” made it sound like it would be a little out of place on an album whose general style and points of reference were almost medieval or Tolkienian, but in fact once Hunter, or whoever, actually started playing the song, it always sounded just right. That was part of why Tasha did not think that putting in more electric bass was going to help the song very much. It didn’t need any such help, for starters. But of course it wasn’t Tasha’s job to have strong feelings about that sort of thing. She held her tongue, knew her place, and lifted the amp.

            About three-quarters of the way through the set Ryan came running up to Tasha and Susie in a high panic and said something that was not easy to make out about somebody in Hunter’s inner circle demanding a glass of a specific type of grappa. Tasha didn’t think the grappa was any better of an idea than putting the bass on “Rich People Problems”—or, no, it was going on the song before it and some of the songs after it as well, probably, which was even worse—but it was even less her business or her job than were the decisions about instrumentation, and so she held her tongue again. Susie didn’t. She halfheartedly said she did not see that any kind of grappa was what the situation or the backstage environment at this point in the tour called for, but she made no attempts, exactly, at stopping Ryan from asking other people and getting the booze elsewhere. Tasha was sure he would do that eventually, and he would definitely win someone’s gratitude for it, just not for any of the right reasons. It made her a little sad to think about that, about how much difference it made to this man’s concept of and ability to be fond and respectful of himself when people like the Berkeley family or Hunter’s terrifying publicist or her ex-best friend Kornelia Klopp thought well of him for things like helping them get wasted. Maybe Tasha was just jealous of him for being thought well of, or of them for being rich, but she did not think so. There were a lot of points about intoxicants that were made in various of the pieces of writing talked about in The Karma of Words. Needless to say, the medieval Japanese Buddhist religious poets had not had much good to say about the practice, still less the habit, of drunkenness—which was not necessarily to say that none of them had ever partaken or been tempted to partake. But one could say that for a lot of people, even Hunter when she was in what the “Hunter Berkeley has borderline personality disorder” people on BerkTok and r/HonestHunter called “wise mind.”

            At long last, last album’s hit “Vindication” came on. As was, for better or for worse, tradition at this point, the fireworks started. Tasha liked the song more than she wanted to. It was about how Hunter, discourse and drama aside, always found herself vindicated by events in the end. It was the sentiment of a goddess, of someone free who did not need law or wisdom. There were people who really believed this, even people who were not Hunter herself—but most did not, Tasha thought, take the song that seriously.

            The remarkable rockets went up. As Hunter sang, Tasha backstage felt something like clarity, like an important moment, coming on. “None of the gods observes chastity.” “Their haloes of flowers fade.” “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, all is vanity.”

            “The body is fated to be broken and destroyed, in spite of being anointed and massaged.” “Grass withers, and flowers fade.” “A god is someone who does not know they need help, or who doesn’t want to believe they could ever need to be nurtured.”

            The finale boomed. The crowd exploded. Hunter Berkeley basked in it. Tasha was moved to pity, her body tired and aching and undone.

Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part Four; Final)

10.

The Third Visit 

The first few days of March brought sudden, unpredicted, and unwelcome change to Rosie and those closest to her. Mattie and Ellie’s landlady, an old woman whom they called Grandma Vernon, died of extreme old age and the duplex they lived in was inherited by a thirty-year-old with a chinstrap beard who immediately forced them to move out because he wanted to turn the building into some kind of martial arts dojo. They couch-surfed for two days before getting the idea to volunteer themselves to the Barings as long-term paying guests, which would provide a steadier, but much smaller, source of hospitality income than did getting a few sets of short-term guests each month. Rosie crunched the numbers and found that they would have to charge Mattie and Ellie at least twice what she considered a reasonable rent in order to break even on this change, but Grandpa insisted on taking them up on it anyway, and talked the rest of the household into taking the financial hit. Mattie and Ellie moved in on March 4, a Lenten Sunday; they had very little in the way of luggage with them, but the martial arts guy was going to send up most of the rest of what they had left in their old place.

            Rosie decided to make up most of the money by putting up Mattie and Ellie in two separate bedrooms and charging them six hundred dollars a month apiece, plus moving some of their blue chip investments into somewhat riskier and thus somewhat higher-yield accounts.

            “How do you feel about the situation?” she asked Mattie and Ellie a day or two after they had moved in. “About being here for the medium-to-long term.”

            “Frustrated, if I’m being honest,” Ellie said. “We really liked where we were living before.”

            “It was in Hadley, right?” asked Rosie. She had a very vague perception of Hadley; it was between Northampton and Amherst, and it felt like it was between Northampton and Amherst. That betwixt-and-between feeling was all she really knew about the place; she had been there any number of times in the past six months, but could have told somebody very little about its history or its culture. She was mildly surprised to hear that Mattie and Ellie apparently had such strong feelings in its favor.

            “That’s right,” Mattie said. “Near Route 9, but not one of the parts of Route 9 that’s all strip malls and fast casual restaurants. It was near a bike path too, and you could walk to a used bookstore. And, for me, it was only ten or fifteen minutes to the UMass campus. Actually a little shorter, if you took the back roads to avoid traffic and let yourself speed a little. I wouldn’t have wanted to leave until at least finishing my degree.”
            “You’re at the all-but-dissertation stage, right?” Rosie asked.

            “I’m saying all-but-thesis. I think all-but-dissertation is for a Ph.D. And my thesis is almost done too, so really I only have about two more months of it. If Grandma Vernon’s great-nephew had only been willing to wait until June to kick us out…”

            Rosie doubted that what the martial arts guy had done to Mattie and Ellie was actually legal, but she understood not wanting to take him to court over it, especially as somebody who had just crunched a family budget to make up for shortfalls herself. She had no idea what it might lead to if, hypothetically, someone in this household ended up having expensive legal or medical troubles.

            They were having this conversation in the front upstairs bedroom in the northwestern corner of the house. It was the room immediately over Rosie and Mags’s and had been the room that Aunt Margaret was staying in when Rosie had first arrived in Greenfield six months before. Since then it had been Francine Kipperman’s room as well as that of six or seven other guests or sets of guests, plus Aunt Margaret’s again during the time when Rosie and Mags had been on the Cape. Now it was Mattie’s. She had a light bookcase filled with heavy books, and some sort of string instrument that Rosie did not recognize. The light was filtering oddly into this room.

            They finished up the conversation and Rosie left the room. When she got to the top of the staircase down into the downstairs central hallway, she saw Margaret Clooney looking up at her from the bottom.

            “Hello, Rosie,” Margaret said.

            “Hello, Margaret,” said Rosie. “How have you been?”

            “I’ve been dead. How have you been?”

            “I’ve been alive.”

            “I’d say ‘my condolences’ but that would be a little bit morbid, wouldn’t it?” Margaret said. “If you haven’t got the morbs already yourself I certainly don’t want to give you them! It’s not the sort of thing that should be contagious.”

            “Are you going to show me Horton Oldmeadow this time?” Rosie asked. She started down the stairs. As she descended, she was declining back into autumn. Through the hallway’s front windows she could see russet leaves.

            “After a fashion,” said Margaret, and led her, as before, into her bedroom, into that parlor.

            In that room, in which the coals of a fire were glowing, an old woman sat dandling a four- or five-year-old girl while an old man harangued somebody over a wall-mounted rotary telephone. Checkbooks and greenbacks lay scattered over the table at which the old woman was sitting, and in front of her were a mostly-empty cup of coffee and a half-eaten bologna sandwich. It seemed to be mid-afternoon and a calendar on the wall said October 1934.

            “I just don’t know what the Sam Hill you expect of me with this administration in the White House, Charlie,” the old man was shouting into the phone. “I had one of those NRA guys over here just yesterday, snooped through some bottles of milk I was going to send out to that creamery. Damn you, I already had to sell off all but four head of the cows, not to mention half my land out back to Wilbur Burroughs. I can’t tell what more you want from me other than the shirt off my back.”

            “Dear, it really can’t be helped,” the old woman said as gently as she could, but Rosie could tell that she too was upset. The little girl seemed blissfully unaware of whatever the argument was about; she was singing “Baa, baa, black sheep” off-key and grinning almost madly between her folds of brownish hair. She had the pink face and solid hands of a Baring. Rosie could tell now that these were the two Hortons, Oldmeadow with Baring on her knee.

            “Can I help you?” the old woman asked Rosie. Unlike last time, Rosie was dressed more or less appropriately for the age; she had on a light sweater and a knee-length pleated skirt that she had recently bought at the department store in downtown Greenfield.

            “I’m looking for Horton Oldmeadow,” Rosie said.

            “You’re looking at her, though that’s my maiden name. Horton Baring at yours. What can I do for you?”

            “You’re a relative of mine,” said Rosie.

            “Oh, some collateral family?” asked Horton Oldmeadow, or the elder Horton Baring, sounding oddly crestfallen. “I’m really sorry to inform you, but we haven’t weathered the last few years much better than anybody else has. We still got this roof over our heads, but the roof’s about all we can offer you for a time being, unless we can put you to work.”

            “I wouldn’t mind being put to work,” said Rosie, “but I don’t plan to stay here long. I came on what you might call family history business.” Thinking of Mags, and thinking of her (she was ashamed to admit) as an excuse, she added “I have a cousin who’s interested in it.”

            “Here on a cousin’s behalf,” Horton the elder said to her husband when he looked up from the phone with a confused expression.

            “I see,” Rosie’s great-great-grandfather said, then got back to listening to whatever the person on the phone was saying to him.

            “Gammy, can I have it?” Horton the younger asked, abruptly stopping “Baa, baa, black sheep” and pointing at the half-eaten sandwich.

            “No, this is for Grammy to finish,” said Horton the elder. “There has to be enough food for all of us, ‘specially with your brother or sister on the way.” This would be Franklin I, Rosie had to assume.

            Horton the younger made a face that Rosie had never seen any child make before, and Horton the elder laughed. “Heart of a wildwoman, that one,” she said to Rosie. “You can see it in her expression—funny but sad. She’ll be a heartbreaker and brokenhearted too, I’m sure.” Rosie regarded her great-aunt’s face. Horton the younger was still focused on the bologna sandwich, and to a lesser extent on what little was left of the coffee. “A real woman of sorrows, just like her grandmother,” said Horton the elder. “Half-wild, like the girl in that old novel.”

            “I know the kind,” said Rosie, with something stirring deep beneath her heart.

            “You ought to see her in the trees when we go on our walks in the woods up Oldmeadow Hill,” Horton the elder said. “Clambers all over ‘em. Goes from tree to tree to tree like an orangutan down in Borneo. Watching her really takes me back.”

            “You mentioned she has a baby brother or sister on the way?” asked Rosie.

            Horton the elder nodded. “Yes, my son’s second,” she said. “My daughter-in-law’s due in January. They want to name the child Franklin if it’s a boy, after our President. My husband doesn’t like that very much, I can tell you that! But he and our son’ve never really seen eye-to-eye on politics since Jonathan’s been a man.”

            “Where I come from we mostly think well of FDR,” Rosie said.

            Horton the elder frowned, but nodded. “Are you from that branch of the family that ran away to New York City?” she asked.

            “You could say that,” said Rosie. “My name’s Rosie. Rosie Newgarth.”

            “Hmm,” said Horton the elder. “Can’t imagine who your cousin could be. You sure you’re just here to look into family history?”

            “I’m sure,” said Rosie. “In particular I’m interested in somebody called Hosea Oldmeadow and a friend, possibly domestic servant, of his called Margaret Clooney. Do you know what became of either of them?”
            “Hosea Oldmeadow was my father, though he died when I was young,” Horton the elder said. “Margaret Clooney was a maid with my parents when they were newly-grown, yes; she fell in with a group of German peddlers, then married somebody over in Montague name of McNulty. My parents must’ve thought well enough of the German peddlers, more or less; one of ‘em was named Hortense and they liked the name well enough to name me after her when I was born. ‘Course, they misheard it, so here I am, a woman named Horton with a granddaughter named Horton.”

            “That’s my name!” said Horton the younger. “Gammy, give me the sandwich, pretty please?”

            “Run and play,” said Horton the elder. She set down Horton the younger and gave her a pinch on the shoulder to send her off. Horton the younger toddled out of the room into the hallway; a few seconds later, shouts, which must have been those of Jonathan Baring and his wife, came wafting from elsewhere in the house. Then there was a caterwaul, then silence. “Heartbreaker and brokenhearted,” Horton the elder said again.

            “So Margaret Clooney did all right for herself?” Rosie asked.

            “You could say so. She died of typhoid when she was still in middle age, but so did so many till recent years,” said Horton the elder. “I’m still friendly with a daughter of hers named Caroline who lives on Sanderson Street. Near the tap-and-die factory, you know—or maybe you don’t know, since you’re not from round Greenfield.”

            “I’m not,” said Rosie, “but I know about the tap-and-die factory.” And this was true; it was an important part of the local economy and local industry that Grandpa, the yet-unconceived third child of Jonathan Baring and his wife, was liable to wax nostalgic about.

            At this point Margaret Clooney opened the door and looked into the room. Horton the elder clearly could not see her. Rosie’s great-great-grandfather was shouting at his business associate, or rival, over the phone again. He could not see her either—but it sounded like Horton the younger might have caught a glimpse, because Rosie could hear her little feet running back their way. She could hear those feet running back and forth, as it were, in time, or back and forth between time and eternity, perhaps.

            Margaret led her out of the room. When she was back in the hallway it was 2012 again. “You didn’t let me say goodbye to them,” Rosie said, startled by how angry this made her.

            “Nobody ever really needs to say goodbye,” said Margaret. “A short goodbye is also a long hello.”

            “That’s easy enough for you to say; you’re already dead,” said Rosie. “Whatever you are, a ghost or a soul in purgatory or whatever else, you know what you are, and you know—you know—!” Tears were in her eyes as she tried to continue, as she could not continue. From upstairs, she worried Mattie and Ellie might be able to hear her crying. She had no idea why she was worried about that; she had no idea why the prospect of them hearing her embarrassed her so much. It was not that she was ashamed, not that she felt that she should not cry; so what was it? It was privacy, perhaps; it was a desire for a private mourning, a mourning of family that could not become familiar.

            “You and I are more the same than you might think,” said the ghost of Margaret Clooney then. Rosie would have thought that this would be exactly the wrong thing to say to her in this state, but in fact it worked wonders; she was shocked how much hearing this did to calm her down. She wished, suddenly, that she could reach out to the ghost of Margaret Clooney and hug her.

            “Will we meet again?” she asked. It was the first time she had asked this of the ghost, in any of the three times so far that they had met.

            “Not,” said the ghost, “this side of paradise.”

            “I see,” said Rosie, feeling now even more woebegone. She sat down on the stairs. The ghost arranged her hoops so as to sit down with her.

            “So,” said the ghost, “as they used to say in ancient times, ave et vale, hail and farewell.”

            “Hail and farewell,” said Rosie, as the sun westered a little, the light on the stairs intensified slightly, and the ghost vanished, for the last time, from her sight.

11.

The Birthday 

Rosie’s birthday fell on March 30. They had a little get-together at the Oldmeadow–Baring House. At this get-together Rosie finally met Zachary Stoneman, Mags’s boyfriend of three and a half months, and she was not impressed.

            “Nice hoppy flavor,” Zachary said about a can of Heineken while they were sitting around getting buzzed after Rosie’s birthday dinner. Rosie had had three slices of cake and had her jeans discreetly unbuttoned underneath her oversized cashmere sweater. She was not in the mood for this. “Good mouthfeel.”

            “You have strong opinions on Heineken, do you?” Grandpa Baring asked him.

            “I like to appreciate the little things,” said Zachary. “I’ve been making a study of beer since Mags apparently wants me to be a little more of an intellectual.” He reached over to Mags and tousled her hair as if she were a child. She smiled thinly. “So I’m assessing this Heineken the way my buddies and I would assess any other beer. You know how it is.”

            “I don’t think it tastes very good,” Rosie said. “Way too bitter for me.”

            “That’s because it’s hoppy,” Zachary said complacently. “Got lots of hops in it.”

            “You know that back in medieval times the monks put hops in the beer to discourage themselves from drinking it, right?” Rosie asked.

            “Yes, hoppiness in beer has done a remarkable historical about-face,” said Zachary. “It’s prized now. I suppose it is an acquired taste, but I’d think somebody celebrating her twenty-third birthday would have acquired it by now.”

            “I suppose I’ve had other things to drink than Heineken for most of my adult life so far,” Rosie said. “When I was in college the only parties I’d drink at were Purimspiels hosted by an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, and those were mostly vodka shots.”

            Zachary pulled a face. “Not exactly craft beverages,” he said.

            “Rosie, you went to Purimspiels in college?” Mags asked, evidently beyond desperate to change the subject.

            “I did,” said Rosie. “Long time ago now, it feels like, but when I was…well, it would have been four years ago now, this girl called Shoshana I sat next to in intro to macroeconomics invited me to one. Rabbi Machmer was a neat guy. He really kept the party going, but he kept everybody safe too.”

            “Hmm,” said Zachary contemplatively. “Sounds like an interesting guy. Does anyone know if the Pats are on tonight?”

            “It’s Friday and the Super Bowl was almost two months ago,” said Rosie. “If you’re uncomfortable hearing an anecdote about a Jewish person, you can find a better way to ask to change the subject.”

            “You’ve got me all wrong!” said Zachary. “I just had a brain fart, as the kids are saying these days.”

            “Okay,” said Rosie. She blinked heavily at Mags in a way that Mags by now knew meant “Mags, can I speak to you alone for a minute?”

            “I’m going to get some of the garlic bulbs from the pantry,” said Mags, standing up abruptly. “Rosie, I want you to come with me to take a look at them and let me know if you think you see some blight on them; I’m a little concerned about the way a few of them came up.”

            “Gotcha,” said Rosie. She followed Mags out of the living room through the kitchen and the mudroom to the pantry, a haphazardly insulated lean-to on the easternmost fringes of the house that was about shelving with nonperishable food and drink on it and half boxes of Christmas lights, old photo albums, and other Baring quasi-ephemera. Mags stood in the dim light looking at Rosie with an intent, half-thwarted-feeling expression on her face. “What are you thinking?” Rosie asked her. “What’s on your mind?”

            “Rosie, be honest with me,” said Mags. “Do you think Zachary is a scumbag?”

            “Based on just tonight, just the past few hours? Yes, absolutely,” said Rosie. “For the past few months I just haven’t understood why you’re dating the guy, but now, I find the fact that you are actively appalling. I mean, just to be perfectly honest with you.”

            “Thank you for your honesty,” said Mags. “I’m beginning to feel the same way.” She reached into a shoebox that was filled with onions and garlic, took out a head of garlic, and handed it to Rosie. “I wasn’t lying about being concerned about these,” she said. “Does this one look okay to you? How about those little spots on it?”

            “I’m pretty sure that’s just dirt or discoloration from dirt,” Rosie said. “So what are you going to do? About Zachary, I mean, now that you’ve realized he’s no good.”

            “I’m going to meditate and pray about it for a few days to be sure,” said Mags, “and then, if I still feel the same way by, say, the middle of next week, I’m going to dump him.” She walked past Rosie back out of the pantry. “Come into the kitchen with me and look at that garlic again, if you will; the light’s better in there.”

            Rosie nodded and took the garlic out into the kitchen. Looking at it in the kitchen like, she could see a faint greyishness radiating out from the specks of dirt that she and Mags had noted. It was in fact a little concerning to her inexpert eyes, but it looked like only two or three cloves were at all affected by it. She peeled these cloves off, put them in the compost bucket that stood next to the kitchen sink, and handed the rest of the head of garlic back to Mags. Mags looked at the garlic with a thankful, almost reverent expression on her face. Rosie was gratified to see that expression, even though she suspected on some level, with an odd suspicion, that it was the garlic towards which Mags was feeling reverent.

            “The rest of it should be completely usable,” she said to Mags, unnecessarily. “What are you going to do with it?”

            “I’m going to make a peanut sauce,” said Mags, immediately taking up a hand whisk and a small enamel bowl. “Why don’t you go back to the living room? I think Uncle Franklin is telling a story.”
            Uncle Franklin was indeed telling a story to the assembled company, but it was not a very fun one. It was about Mags’s late father, and how Uncle Franklin had always been jealous of him and had never been quite sure why. It was not a self-pitying anecdote and did not feel like a particularly confessional one either, but even so, Rosie found herself wondering if he meant that he had felt jealous of Carl McNulty or that he had felt jealous over him. She wondered if Uncle Franklin really knew the answer to this himself.

            “Anyway, I don’t really know where this story is going,” said Uncle Franklin at last.

            “Maybe you just needed to get it off your chest,” Zachary supplied as if this was the most counterintuitive and staggeringly insightful thing anybody could possibly say about it, “for emotional reasons of your own.”

            “Yes, that may be, Zachary,” said Uncle Franklin with a graveness that did a little bit, but only a little bit, to disguise the underlying and fundamental sarcasm. “I hadn’t considered that at all.”

            “Glad to be of service,” said Zachary. “Oh, you’re back, Rosie! Is Mags cooking up something good for us with that garlic of hers? I’m quite a wiz with garlic myself, you know. Now and then, anyway.”

            “Now and then, I’m sure,” Rosie said.

            The party drifted apart from there. Uncle Franklin turned in very early, probably to avoid continued conversation with Zachary. Mags went to her room to work on a special order of a bracelet for The Word for World is Forest. Aunt Margaret went over to the rarely-used spinet piano and started banging out “Star of the County Down” while Grandpa Baring sang along. By a little before nine-thirty it was Rosie, Zachary, and Grandma left in the living room while everybody else was doing his or her own thing somewhere else in the house. This was not a scenario that Rosie had foreseen and it was not one that she particularly appreciated; nevertheless, there it was, and she supposed she had to make the best of it and encourage Grandma to talk as much as possible so Zachary would be forced to listen.

            “I remember back in 1957 when I was first going steady with your grandfather,” Grandma said to Rosie, “he aspired to become a manager at either the tap-and-die factory or the paper mill over in Turners Falls. ‘Course, he didn’t work at either of those places; he worked at Wilson’s Department Store that’s still there on Main Street, and he’d drive home afternoons to help his father manage the accounts for the farm the way you’re currently helping us manage the accounts, Rosie. I told him I’d love him no matter what it was he ended up doing to make his living, but that’s just the sort of thing one does say in that case, isn’t it? But I meant it, oh, I meant it, and so he knew, and so we’re still together.”

            “That’s a beautiful story, Grandma,” said Rosie. “Zachary,” she said poisonously, gazing at his immaculately sculpted brown beard so she would not have to look him in the eye, “don’t you think that’s a beautiful story that my grandmother is telling us?”

            “I certainly do,” said Zachary. “Reminds me a bit of myself and my first girlfriend. Of course, that ended very differently, much to Mags’s delight!” He laughed and took a sip of his second can of Heineken. “I want to go easy on this stuff,” he said, “but I just can’t get over that smooth, rounded flavor.”

            Rosie looked at her own second can of Heineken, held loosely in her hand, which in turn dangled loosely between her legs. She had bought three six-packs of the stuff at the Circle K near the interstate because it was a little bit cheaper than Sam Adams and she was still trying to get all the accounts balanced from having Mattie and Ellie here. If she had known that this smug little man would be going on and on about how much he loved the stuff, she would have taken one for the team and bought something even crummier.

            “You really don’t like hoppy beer, Rosie?” Zachary asked.

            “The word ‘hoppy’ always makes me think of Thumper,” Grandma said with a wink at Rosie. “Thumper is from Bambi. Did you ever see that film, Zachary? Bambi. It’s a Disney film. It was the first movie I ever went to see in theaters, when I was…gosh, I must have been seven or eight years old. The Garden downtown was an even nicer kind of place back then and I was so excited to go downtown with my mother and eat at a nice restaurant and go see a motion picture show. Wonderful picture, Bambi. Rosie watched it here with me on our old television set when she was a girl, if she remembers.”

            Rosie did remember. Yes, she did remember.

            “I’ve seen Bambi,” said Zachary.

            “Wonderful picture,” said Grandma Baring.

            “No pipe I’ll smoke, no horse I’ll yoke, tho’ with rust my plough turns brown, till a smiling bride by my own fireside sits the star of the County Down!” sang Grandpa Baring.

            “I’m going to talk to Mags for a bit,” said Rosie. “If that’s okay.”

            “Sure,” said Grandma. “Maybe go upstairs and see how Mattie and Ellie are doing too.” Mattie and Ellie had fled upstairs very early in Rosie’s party; they disliked Zachary even more overtly than Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Margaret, and Uncle Franklin did, and almost as intensely as Mags apparently was coming to. Rosie took Grandma’s advice and went up to see them first; she brought them each a slice of cake, and they thanked her. Then she went into her and Mags’s room and flopped down on her bed.

            “Had enough?” said Mags.

            “Of your soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend?” asked Rosie. “I’d had enough of him three hours ago. If I never hear the word ‘hoppy’ in my life again it’ll be too soon. I thought you said he was more of a Boston sports guy than a Hill Towns craft beer guy.”

            “I made the mistake of telling him I wished we had intellectual conversations more often,” said Mags. “Getting really into craft beer was his way of doing that.”

            “And Heineken is craft beer as far as he’s concerned?” Rosie asked.

            “He thinks that treating it as if it is makes him seem discerning in the same way that Mattie is discerning for writing a serious thesis on French children’s stories,” Mags said.

            “I see,” Rosie said. “Well, your breakup with him can’t come soon enough.”

            “It’s just that I don’t want to go through the Sturm und Drang of a breakup at your birthday party,” said Mags. “I might send him a text after he’s gotten home tonight.”

            “Breaking up by text?” Rosie said. “You hussy!”

            “Can you honestly look at him and tell me he doesn’t deserve it?” said Mags.

            “He absolutely does,” said Rosie. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said; she had realized this, about herself, quite abruptly. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

            “Okay,” said Mags. “Go ahead.” She sounded a little put-upon somehow, or maybe Rosie should say a little arch. It was very clear how little she had enjoyed the party and how little she was enjoying her relationship.

            Rosie went to the bathroom, and when she got out, she was alone in the living room with Zachary; Grandma was in the kitchen. “Would you like to come home with me?” Zachary asked without any prelude.

            “I beg your pardon? You’re dating my cousin.”

            “You seem like less of a cold fish than Mags, and besides, I think that between you and me she and I are probably on the outs more or less now anyway.” Zachary shrugged. “Just thought I’d ask. I’m planning to end things with her at some point because I don’t think either of us is really into it, and you seem like you could stand to get laid. Plus it’s your birthday.”

            “Get the hell,” Rosie exposited, “out of this house right this minute and don’t you dare darken the door of 729 North Meadows Road ever again, you pathetic, weak little man.” She turned on her heel and went back to her room. “Zachary propositioned me,” she told Mags.

            “What?!”

            “Zachary propositioned me so I threw him out of the house.”

            “Good job!” said Mags.

            “We’ll get this toad out of your life by hook or by crook,” said Rosie. “Rosary Newgarth doesn’t let herself get affronted like this by woefully subpar men, and I’m sure Margaret McNulty doesn’t either.”

            “She certainly doesn’t,” said Mags.

            A few seconds later they heard the door to the mudroom slamming, then, after an interval, saw through the windows the lights of Zachary’s car careering along the driveway and speeding off down the road. Mags fired off a breakup text within minutes. The story, however, did not quite end there.

12.

The Car

Holy Week for Rosie and Mags was spent on the not-particularly-pious task of plotting revenge against Zachary. When he had gotten home after Rosie’s birthday party he had seen Mags’s breakup text and sent twenty-seven texts in response, in addition to fourteen AIM messages (Mags still used AIM, under the name “LoyalToTheGroupOf17”), fairly begging her to take him back. She had texted him back “f u” and he had responded with another forty-one texts detailing what a frigid bitch she was. It was from this experience that the determination to teach him a lesson emerged and took shape for the two of them.

            Easter 2012 was on April 8, which according to one of Mags’s astrological almanacs was the exact median date on which Easter could fall. Rosie had never been sure of how the date of Easter was calculated and on the day before Maundy Thursday, which Aunt Margaret and Uncle Franklin called Spy Wednesday, Mags explained it to her.

            “So, way back in the day, there was a group of Christians who wanted to keep celebrating Easter alongside Passover on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month Nisan,” said Mags, “but this was repudiated as heretical for reasons I don’t pretend to understand. The system that was arrived at, again for reasons I don’t pretend to understand, was to define a standardized ‘liturgical spring equinox’ on March 21, count forward from that date to whenever the next full moon was, and then make Easter the next Sunday after that. So, for example, this year, the Pink Moon is two days from now, and so the week including that day is Holy Week and Easter is on the eighth. Does that make sense?”

            “Yes,” said Rosie, who was struggling to wrap her head around this but had four years ago struggled at least as much with economic concepts that she now understood very well.

            “Like I said, I really don’t understand why the so-called Quatrodecimans were condemned,” Mags said. “When I was at UMass I had a Jewish friend called Zeke who told me he could never decide whether to be angry that Christianity became so unmoored from Judaism or relieved that it hasn’t been occupying the same ritual space for the past two thousand years. I can’t say I understand Judaism well enough to have any particular feelings about that question myself, but, well, those were his feelings.”

            “Huh,” said Rosie, who had actually heard similar sentiments now and then at the Purimspiels in Binghamton.

            “Anyway, do you want to get back to planning out how to take care of Zachary, or have you had about enough of that?” Mags asked.

            “Honestly, I say we just drive to his house and tell him what we think,” said Rosie. “I’d feel a little childish doing anything more elaborate than that.”

            “Good idea,” said Mags. “How does tomorrow work?”

            “Tomorrow? You’re not interested in going to Mass?”

            Mags shrugged. “To be honest, not really,” she said. “I’ve actually never felt very comfortable about Maundy Thursday. All that facetime with men’s feet. It’s just a bit much for me, you know what I mean?”

            “I think I do,” Rosie said. “All right, then. Tomorrow will be our day to yell at Zachary.”

            And it was. They drove up to Guilford, Vermont, where Zachary lived with two or three housemates who according to Mags had more or less the same personality that he did. It was a beautiful drive through bare spring woods—up the Green River, along a road called Weatherhead Hollow Road (another place called Weatherhead; remarkable how that word recurred), through fields and forests.

            They reached Zachary’s house. It was an old farmhouse with a stream to its back, across the road from a lightly wooded hill. “You know,” Mags observed to Rosie, “I did leave some stuff of mine here the last time I stayed over.”

            “I thought you never slept with Zachary.”

            “I slept on a foldout.”

            Rosie nodded. That made enough sense; she even thought she approved of that, more or less, considering what the alternative evidently had been. “Mags,” Rosie said, “would you prefer to just—just be the better and bigger people for a day, and get your stuff back, and leave?”

            Mags looked at her cautiously for a few seconds, then sighed and nodded heavily. “Yes,” she said, “I think I would prefer that, at long last.”

            Rosie parked the Subaru and the two of them got out. Zachary must have seen them from inside because in a few seconds he was out on the front porch gawking at them.

            “What the fuck are you doing here after what you did to me?” he shouted at Mags, and at that point everything went belly-up.

            First, one of Zachary’s roommates, a man called Jake of whom Mags seemed to have a much higher opinion, came outside with a baffled expression on his face. “What the hell is going on, man?” he asked Zachary, then turned and saw Rosie and Mags. “…Oh, it’s you. You here for your CDs and stuff, Mags?”

            “She certainly is,” said Rosie, and—secondly—Mags marched forward, physically pushed Zachary aside when she got to the porch, and entered the house with, apparently, Jake’s blessing.      

            “What the fuck, man?” Zachary said to Jake.

            Jake shrugged. “It is her stuff,” he said.

            Zachary had a hushed, hurried conversation with Jake in which Rosie caught the words “insecure,” “clingy,” and “frigid” uttered multiple times in quick succession. Then, from inside—thirdly, in the list of things going not according to plan—there was a loud crash inside, and Zachary’s other housemate started shouting at Mags from somewhere within the house.

            “Mags, where are you?” Rosie called.

            Jake looked over his shoulder, back into the house. “She’s, uh, she’s in the kitchen,” he called to Rosie.

            As soon as Rosie heard the k in kitchen she was—fourthly—striding past Zachary and Jake herself, into the house where Mags was now apparently being screamed at. The house was much like the Oldmeadow–Baring House, old and with mostly warm-colored décor. Mags was in a small, tiled kitchen, holding up a saucepan as a defensive weapon while a strapping man in a backwards snapback hollered and waved his arms at her.

            Fifthly—and from this point on the hits just kept on coming—Rosie ran back out to the car, got one of Grandpa’s nine-irons from the trunk, ran back into the house, and hit the man menacing Mags across the small of his back.

            The man picked up Rosie and hurled her against the wall; she felt a stabbing pain in her mid-back as she hit a series of thumbtacks hard. She fell to the floor, stilling holding the golf club, and crawled forward far enough to reach up and punch the man in the crotch. He doubled over, then fell to his hands and knees and grabbed Rosie by the hair. He started screaming some sort of sexist slur at her but stopped when Jake ran back inside and started pulling him off Rosie. Rosie, clutching the golf club the way Mags was clutching the saucepan, stood up and hobbled out of the house, Mags following.

            “What the fuck is going on in there, Mags?” Zachary demanded.

            “Get the Gogol Bordello CD and as many of the Loreena McKennitt ones as you can find and just mail them to me in a box, Jake!” Mags was calling back over her shoulder.

            “Will do!” Jake called back.

            “What the fuck are you doing?!” Zachary said again.

            “What does it sound like we’re doing?” Mags asked, her voice dripping with righteous contempt. “We’re arranging for me to be sent back my stuff. The wool socks too, Jake, and that skirt I never got around to trying on! We’re done here, Zachary.”

            Rosie, stumbling around in the driveway and hoping the altercation had not somehow damaged her right kidney, saw what she recognized as Zachary’s car parked underneath a budding maple tree. “I have an idea, Mags,” she said.

            “Is it an idea I’m going to like?” Mags asked.

            “Your id certainly is,” said Rosie, and put the grip of the nine-iron through one of Zachary’s taillights.

            “Oh my gosh!” Mags said; Rosie couldn’t tell if it was in delight, horror, or a mix of both, so she assumed the latter.

            Rosie noticed, with an evil delight, that Zachary had left his keys sitting in his driver’s seat. She got into the car. Mags and Zachary were both shouting at her at the tops of their lungs, for very different reasons. She jammed the keys into the keyhole and turned so hard that she felt as if the blade of the key might snap off. She was already beginning to feel bad about her actions—she knew this was vindictive overreaction that might even lead to legal trouble, and, worse, that she was “helping” Mags in ways that Mags really did not need—but she could not help herself. More than anything else she was impelled on by the pain in her back, the pain in her side. The world compressed to the desire to teach Zachary a lesson, which was, in a way, also a means of teaching herself a lesson. She was an exterminating angel, and Zachary’s 1999 Chevrolet Malibu was her chariot of fire.

            She revved the engine; Margaret Clooney’s hand was on her shoulder. She put the car in reverse; so too were Horton Oldmeadow’s and Horton Baring’s. She backed the car out into the road; Hosea Oldmeadow, Lydia Oldmeadow, and Lydia Oldmeadow’s two older brothers were praying for her somewhere, or she for them. Asaph Oldmeadow guided her hand as she shifted the car into drive; Carl McNulty’s feet were her feet as she drove the car back into the driveway and straight into the bole of the maple tree, opening the door and bailing out just before the crash.

            The tree shuddered, sending down a shower of buds and bark. Rosie lay in the driveway covered in a thin spray of maple tree epiphenomena with every country song ever written playing in her head at once. She noticed, but did not have the energy to care, that Mags was fending of Zachary with the saucepan while Jake brawled with the third housemate.

            At some point, probably while backing the car up, the golf club had been thrown clear; it was now lying in the middle of the road, bent at about a thirty-degree angle, and nobody was bothering to go pick it up. They all had more important things on their mind. For the first time in years, Rosie felt that she was truly “living in the moment” the way the mindfulness gurus in the spirituality sections of mainstream bookstores were always saying that one should.

            The moment soon came to include Mags dragging her to her feet and situating her in the passenger’s seat of the Subaru. Jake was hollering something at Mags about exchanging insurance information, and the third roommate, considerably bruised and contused from the fights with Rosie and Jake, was now waving around what looked like some kind of hunting rifle. Mags shouted something back to Jake about texting him a picture of her insurance information once she got home, then pulled out into the road and took off like Jason Statham.

            “That was very stupid of you, Rosie,” she said once they had put about a mile and a half between them and Zachary, “and about the only thing I can think of to say in your defense, morally speaking, is that some of the way they were behaving was illegal too.”

            “I’m seriously worried about internal injuries after getting thrown into that wall,” said Rosie. “But I was worried that guy was going to seriously hurt you.”

            “So you decided you’d rather he seriously hurt you? That’s very noble of you, Rosie, and it might help us convince them not to press charges, but there’s little else I can think to say in favor of that thought process.”

            “I’m not asking you to say anything in favor of it. Just explaining it to you on my own behalf as best I can…understand?” Rosie asked through gritted teeth, getting more and more worried by the second about the shooting pain in her side.

            “I understand,” said Mags. “And it does mean a lot to me that you’d go to the mattresses for me like that.”

            “Where does that come from, ‘go to the mattresses’? Do you know? That’s another one of those expressions I’ve never really understood.”

            “I think it comes from some mob movie or other,” Mags said. “You go to the mattresses when you start a mob war. Sleeping in warehouses and so forth. I don’t think it’s in The Godfather; I’d remember if it was because I re-watched that movie with friends quite recently. Something by Scorsese, maybe?”

            “Maybe, maybe, perhaps,” said Rosie. “Oh, I am glad I got that out of my system. I am glad, I am glad.”

            “My number one priority right now is getting you medical attention,” Mags said grimly. “If you’re really that concerned about your kidney then we need to get you to Baystate Franklin as soon as we get back to Greenfield.”

            “Oh, God, I haven’t been in the hospital since…it must have been when I got my wisdom teeth out,” Rosie said. “I’ve been to the doctor since then, of course. Height and weight, coming off birth control when I broke up with my last boyfriend, that sort of thing. But the hospital…” She whistled. She was not sure why she was whistling; there was nothing remarkable and nothing that should have been at all frightening about going to the hospital, beyond the remarkable and frightening fact that she had been badly beaten up in the first place. And yet there it was: she was afraid, and that fear was getting stronger as her side hurt more and more and as Mags sped closer and closer to Greenfield—going five, ten, twenty miles an hour over the speed limit, saying prayers under her breath that Rosie could not understand.

            “Are you afraid?” Mags asked after an interval. She glanced over at Rosie. Her face was pale, concerned, caring, as the shadows of the trees did battle with the late-morning sun behind the driver’s-side window.

            Something about being asked the question made a difference. Rosie could not think how or why, but it did. It made a difference and she felt the fear lessen, the fear lessen and the pain with it. Rosie allowed the pain and the fear to drain out of her as if she was draining a bathtub, or a sink after doing dishes in the haphazard way that she had. She was numb, now, but it was the numbness of knowing, somehow, almost a priori, that eventually even the pain would be all right again.

            “No,” she said to Mags with a smile. “No, I’m not afraid at all.”

The End

Feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, 2020

Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part Three)

7.

The Second Visit 

Three days after Christmas, on what she believed was called the Feast of the Holy Innocents or something along those lines, Rosie saw the ghost of Margaret Clooney again. It—she—was not in the garden this time, but in the hallway outside Rosie and Mags’s bedroom. Rosie was watering a potted plant that Aunt Margaret had given them as a Christmas gift; it was early afternoon but the light that came through the bare trees in the front yard was thin and pale. Rosie saw something out of the corner of her eye that she thought was a dust mote dancing in a beam; then she realized that it was a woman’s dress. She looked up and there was the ghost as before, only now bearing a candle rather than wreathed in fireflies.

            “This visit with you, on my part, will be a bit more substantial than the last one, if that will be acceptable to you,” the ghost said with little in the way of prelude. “Similarly, your visit into this world—my world—will also be a bit more substantial. The light that I hold in my hand, this candle, is the light of understanding the past; you will notice that this time I am holding the light, unlike earlier, when you entered into summer and saw me with the fireflies.”

            “I will notice that, yes,” said Rosie, who thought the metaphor, if it was a metaphor, was a little blunt-force; she wondered idly, because of this, how good or how bad Margaret’s schooling had been when she was alive.

            “You’ll come with me?” the ghost asked. “Just for a few minutes, only for a few minutes; I have much to show you.”

            “I’ll come with you,” said Rosie, who, in spite of herself, was thrilled—was wanting very much to see what she could see, what part of the past the ghost now wanted to show her. Perhaps she would learn more about Horton Oldmeadow, or even Horton Baring; she had vague memories of having been promised that the last time they had spoken, two months ago—or was it one hundred and fifty-one years ago?

            “Go into your room, and turn about,” said the ghost. “Just go in, and turn about—you will see.”

            “All right,” Rosie said, and went back into her room, feeling thrilled, excited, uncertain, overwrought.

            She turned around, and she was in the same place. It was her bedroom—the almost-too-square shape, the old hearth, the windows too heavily shades by the trees outside—but not the way she knew it. The hearth, far from being boarded up, was roaring; the wallpaper was different and a much more exuberant pattern; in place of her bed was a small but heavy-looking table, with four or five people sitting around it poring over some books and papers. The men were whiskered and dressed in tailcoats; the women had their hair pinned up and were wearing hoopskirts and shirtwaists. She had always wondered how women had been able to sit in those things, exactly, but looking at the women sitting around the table she had some inkling that the hoops themselves compressed or distended to accommodate them.

            One of the women was Margaret Clooney, whom she had thought was standing behind her—only she was not a wraith wreathed in fireflies or holding a candle, in an unreal summer or any other unreal season; instead snow was falling, and she was sitting, flesh and bone, with her back to the fireplace, in a dress colored like Christmas. She was speaking to the others about a recent election, and the names that she was using were ones that Rosie dimly recognized from her old history classes as ones associated with abolitionism and the North in the Civil War.

            Rosie was awestruck by how unsurprising she found it all to look at, how natural. It felt as if the house, built in 1813, had in some sense been built so that it could exist in 1860, the way some people, such as her grandfather, seemed as if they were born to be old men. Margaret and the others, too, looking up at her, seemed unsurprised to see her in her tank top and cut-off leggings, housewear from an age of central heating. She wondered if, from the point of view of the people at the table, 1860 in this house had been made so that she could find herself in it.

            “Another newcomer!” one of the men said. He was tall and had a short blond beard. “What’s your name, my good lady?”

            “Rosary,” Rosie said. “Rosary Newgarth.”

            “Another Catholic!” the man said with a glance at Margaret. “That does our hearts good. When Margaret here first joined us we were afraid that she might have come here to ‘talk us down’ or to gloat about slave markets on Boston Common. I try not to judge one by one’s creed, young ladies least of all, but anything is possible with that man in the Vatican.”

            “Pope Pius?” Rosie asked, making an educated guess; she remembered that most of the popes in the century or so before Vatican II had been named Pius.

            The man nodded with a grave, frustrated expression on his face, and Rosie remembered, or thought she remembered, that that particular Pope Pius had been a real piece of work. “Come, sit with us,” the man said. “The fire will be hot for a while yet, and when it dies down we’ll roast potatoes in its coals.”

            Rosie sat down, still dressed for modern times and still dressed for August, and greeted Margaret’s friends. The man she had been speaking to was named Hosea Oldmeadow and was probably an ancestor of hers; he was twenty-nine years old, recently married to a woman five or six years younger than that, and father to two babies, who were elsewhere in the house being watched by another friend of theirs. Hosea’s wife, Lydia Oldmeadow (“née Lydia Burroughs,” she said, with a note of early feminism in her tone of voice), was seated next to him. Lydia had black hair and was wearing a startlingly bright purple dress cut a little lower than Rosie would have expected from a new mother in 1860. There were two other men at the table, Martin and Lucius Burroughs, older brothers of Lydia’s, and of course the other woman was Margaret.

            “Margaret may be young but we’re glad to have her,” said Hosea.

            “I converted her to the cause of Lincoln and liberty,” Lydia said proudly. “She’ll tell you she is a convert to that as fervent as a convert can be, even though she has been the same religion all her life.”

            “I say it by way of a joke,” Margaret, the shockingly solid and this-worldly Margaret, said. She really did look almost exactly like her descendant, although now that Rosie knew that she was very young she could definitely see a little more kiddishness on her face than on that of the Mags she knew. “You’ll forgive me, I hope, for saying it is not a joke I think you can tell as well as I can, Lydia!”

            “Oh, I will forgive you,” said Lydia with a breezy laugh. “And you, Rosary? Where do you stand on the issues of the day?”

            “Yes, this is a political discussion, isn’t it?” Rosie said. “I support Lincoln, of course,” she said, although she had no idea if supporting Lincoln was really an of course yet in what seemed to be the Christmas of the 1860 lame duck period.

            “When he takes office he’ll put paid to those slaveocrats,” said Lydia. “Then the free labor of the free men who live up in these parts will be worth something again in this country of ours.”

            It surprised Rosie a little to hear Lydia go immediately to a self-interested economic argument rather than cite what she thought was the most obvious problem with slavery, which was that it treated human beings like property. She was about to say something like this, but Lydia solved the problem for her. She made a snide allusion to the slave states as a land that treated people like objects and objects (cotton gins) like people, and Rosie felt more comfortable with her.

            “An escaped slave came up this way about a year ago and Margaret, who was barely fourteen at that stage, prevailed on us to take her in for a few days until she could continue on north,” said Hosea. “We have this odd little side-staircase going up to our upstairs parlor; my uncle put it in when he built this place, for what I believe they call ‘reasons best known to himself.’ We were able to put it into service as a hiding-hole for seventy-two hours’ time. It was remarkable thinking on my young bride’s part, I must say.”

            “You’re only fifteen?” Rosie asked Margaret.

            Margaret smirked devilishly and said “I put my hair up a year early.”

            “I would have guessed you were eighteen or nineteen,” said Rosie.

            “Not yet she isn’t!” said Lydia. “Don’t give her suitors any ideas, Rosary; we’d hate to lose a friend like her to some farmer or shopkeeper quite yet.”

            Rosie glanced at Margaret again to see if she was blushing; it seemed like a natural thing to look for, and it turned out that she was, quite brightly. Some of it might have been from the heat of the fire roaring behind her but it did also look as if Lydia’s remark had embarrassed her somewhat. Martin and Lucius were chuckling at it.

            “I’m sure she would only have one of her own religion anyway, and there still aren’t very many papists out in these parts,” Lucius said. “I’m sure you’ll have her for a while yet, Lydia.” The way he said this made Rosie wonder if Margaret wasn’t so much a friend of the Oldmeadow family’s as “the help.” It made sense for a very young woman who had been born en route from Ireland, based on what Rosie knew of this time period; it was lucky that Hosea, in particular, seemed upstanding and that he and his wife both had a regard for Margaret’s wellbeing. Rosie hated to consider the possible alternatives to that.

            “You mentioned that your uncle built this house,” said Rosie. “Was your uncle the famous Asaph Oldmeadow?”

            “Is,” said Hosea. “He’s still alive, though very old and probably not much longer for this mortal coil. He lives with a cousin of his, likewise of advanced years, in town, on Federal Street. He gave my father this house as collateral on one of his debts; luckily his fortunes revived somewhat in later years.”

            “We’re all quite proud of Colonel Oldmeadow,” said Martin, “although I would not quite consider that he is famous, exactly; might I inquire where you have heard of him, Miss Newgarth?”

            “Just a local history,” said Rosie, keeping it as vague as possible even though she suspected these people knew that there was something odd about her appearance among them. “He was a colonel in the War of 1812, wasn’t he?”

            “That’s right,” said Hosea. “Gave Tecumseh what-for at Moravian on the Thames. He later became a friend to the Indians, of course—although my wife will tell you there’s no great honor in becoming a friend of someone you’ve beaten.”

            “I would not say there is no honor in it,” said Lydia. “I only believe it’s awfully easy once peace has already been made, and made to your benefit.” Rosie was beginning to wonder if Lydia might be, as they said, ahead of her time; she seemed more perceptive about her time and place than were some of Rosie’s friends and relations even in 2011. The other possibility was that Rosie had overestimated how stupid and prejudiced people had been in the past. Probably the only way to find out which was the case was to remain in present company for a while longer. She wondered if, like in Narnia, or Tír na nÓg in reverse, she could spend hours or days here, then go back to 2011 and find that only a moment had passed.

            The conversation continued along much these same lines—political, disorienting in its combination of high-mindedness and past prejudices, incorporating many jokes and little digs at one another—for at least another half-hour before Hosea, as man of the house, decided that enough time had passed and the fire had died down enough to start roasting potatoes in the coals. Rosie realized at this point that it was actually still early in the day; the conversation that she had walked into had been post-breakfast rather than post-lunch, and these potatoes would be had for lunch rather than dinner. Or perhaps, anyway, for dinner rather than supper; Lydia seemed to use these older and to Rosie’s ears more British-sounding words for the two meals.

            The person who had been watching the babies, a middle-aged woman whom Hosea addressed as Aunt Caroline, came into the parlor and helped Lydia set the little table for a somewhat cramped repast. Rosie was interested to find herself looking forward to that meal; however 1860 did baked potatoes, it would be an interesting story to tell Mags, assuming Mags’s belief in supernatural agency went so far as to believe a story about a time slip. Rosie would not have wondered this of anybody she knew other than Mags, but this was somebody who left saucers of milk outside at night at the edges of the Barings’ property and said some sort of prayer every time she got in the car. Her believing Rosie about this was actually a distinct possibility. Somehow that did Rosie’s heart good and made her feel that there was a connection between these people and those people, between Hosea and Lydia Oldmeadow’s household and Tom and Gertrude Baring’s, a steady and always-living bridge between the present and the past. Thus also between the future and the past; the edge of the present was always moving.

            “You’ll stay for dinner?” Margaret asked her, and it was the grave, ghostly Margaret speaking through the bright young living Margaret’s mouth. It was disorienting, more disorienting than any part of the conversation that had unfolded between the six of them.

            “Yes,” said Rosie. “I’ll stay for dinner quite happily. Thank you, Margaret.” And there were really many people whom she was thanking when she said this.

8.

The Road 

Grandma Baring had a spinster sister (her words), Phoebe Przybylski, who was a wash-ashore. Now a wash-ashore was a word for somebody who had not grown up on Cape Cod but nevertheless had come to live there year-round. There must have been tens of thousands of such people, said Aunt Margaret, because the Cape’s census population was over two hundred thousand and only about one-fifth of its households had children in them.

            “Is there any particular reason you can rattle off those stats off the top of your head, Aunt Margaret?” Rosie asked her when she told her this. It was not at all uncharacteristic of Aunt Margaret, but there was still something a little bit remarkable about it.

            “Franklin and I got curious once how many people like our aunt there were on the Cape,” said Aunt Margaret. “So we looked it up.” And that seemed a reasonable enough explanation as far as Rosie was concerned.

            “Oh, we’re discussing Great-Aunt Phoebe and the wash-ashores already?” Mags asked. “I guess it is that time of year again, after all.”

            “That time of year?” Rosie asked Aunt Margaret.

            “We usually send down a delegation of people from this home to visit my aunt in the Cape’s off-season,” Aunt Margaret explained. “There can be some traffic getting to the Cape around the big winter holidays too so we like to wait till late January or February.” It was on January 20 that they were having this conversation.

            “Oh, so that will come up pretty soon, yes; Mags is right,” said Rosie, probably unnecessarily. “Well, I’m happy to go down with the, sorry, the ‘delegation’ this year if anyone wants me to. I’ve never been to the Cape before, at least not to my recollection.”

            “Sure, we’d be happy to send you on down,” Aunt Margaret said. “You can work with Mags and your grandfather planning the details. I’ll stay here for a few days and make sure we can still host a guest or two while some of us are gone. Sound good to you, Rosie?”

            “Sounds good to me,” said Rosie, legitimately excited.

            She spent the next couple of days alternating between managing the food budget for guest breakfasts and reading about Cape Cod online. Apparently it had actually been the Pilgrims’ first landfall almost four hundred years before; they had hung around in what was now Provincetown for a bit before moving on to Plymouth. There was an Upper Cape, Mid Cape, Lower Cape, and Outer Cape, delineated by progressive distance from Boston; Grandma’s sister lives in the Lower Cape, in a town called Harwich, in a house about ten minutes’ walk from the beach—for whatever that was worth this time of year.

            “Are you a bikini girl or a one-piece girl?” Mags asked Rosie abruptly one evening while they were trying to figure out what they were going to pack.

            “…why are you asking? It’s January. Not even Mattie—”

            “There are indoor pools on Cape Cod, you realize. A friend of Great-Aunt Phoebe’s used to work at one. I try to go every time I’m down there, for old times’ sake.”

            “Old times’ sake?”

            “I used to go as a kid. I actually went down there once with Zachary, when we were ten; a good memory. I would never want him to see me in my swimsuit now, of course,” Mags finished bafflingly.

            “You’ve been dating him for about six weeks now, yes?”

            “That’s right.”

            “You’ve been dating him for six weeks and ‘of course’ you would never let him see you in your swimsuit? Really, Mags?”

            “Is there something the matter with that, Rosie?” Mags asked.

            “There’s nothing the matter with it, no—it just—I don’t know,” Rosie said. “You can have your relationship however you like, I just find it a little mystifying. Whatever.” Mags was looking at her with that probing, slightly judgmental expression of hers. “I wear a bikini, since you asked, but nobody’s going to see it till at least May since I don’t want to swim in the middle of a New England winter even if it is in an indoor pool.”

            “I wish I was comfortable in bikinis,” said Mags. “Not even comfortable in the sense of thinking I look okay; I’m enough of a feminist not to really be worried about that. Physically comfortable. But I always end up feeling like something is going to fall off or fall out. Go figure. Do you have the time, by the way? My watch needs a new battery and I can’t find my phone.”

            “Uh, it’s seven-thirty-three,” said Rosie with a glance at her own phone. “So I guess it’s been about fifteen minutes since dinner.”

            “Huh,” said Mags. “I’m not sure why, but somehow it feels like it’s been longer than that to me.”

            “It sure does.”

            “What exactly do you mean by that?” Mags asked this with a slight suspicion or a slight worry about rejection, perhaps, in her eyes. It had been far from Rosie’s intent to make her feel spurned, and looking at Mags’s eyes now made her feel a little guilty.

            “Just that this has been a tiring conversation to me,” Rosie said, honestly. “I’m sorry; I don’t mean that as an attack on you at all, I hope you realize.”

            “I do so realize.”

            “I’m sorry,” Rosie said again. “I feel like we’ve occasionally been at odds these days, mostly over your life. I don’t want that to become a regular thing between us. Forgive me?”
            “Of course,” said Mags. “It’s really no great shakes.”

            “You know, I’ve never quite understood what the phrase ‘no great shakes’ actually means,” Rosie said. “Any chance you can explain it to me?”

            “I read it in some book. Mostly when I say it I use it to mean whatever it sounds to me like it ought to mean.” She rolled her shoulders. “Sorry I can’t be of more help,” she said.

            “It’s really not that big a deal,” said Rosie. “It was just something I was wondering about, that’s all. Anyway, like I was saying, I would like it if we could go back to being a bit more generous with each other.”

            “Let’s,” said Mags. “I’d like that—that would be important to me, even—too. In any case, I think you’ll enjoy the Cape. I think you and Great-Aunt Phoebe will get along very well, and I look forward to introducing you or to seeing your grandmother introduce you.”

            “Isn’t Grandpa coming too, or is it just Grandma?”

            “Your grandfather I believe has decided to stay home keeping the place up with Aunt Margaret and Uncle Franklin,” said Mags. “So it’ll just be the three of us, plus maybe Mattie and Ellie.”

            “Why Mattie and Ellie?”

            “They haven’t been to the Cape in years and Great-Aunt Phoebe has a hospitable streak,” Mags said. As she said this she went over to her work desk and started fiddling with a bracelet that she was making for Neuromancer by William Gibson, a book that Rosie had read and liked on her say-so. The bracelet was silver and red and had charms depicting, among other things, a computer keyboard, an artificial satellite of some kind, a pair of sunglasses, and a katana. Rosie could not remember if katanas figured into the plot of the book in any significant way or if it merely felt as if they ought to have. It did feel very much as if they ought to have. “I’m in favor of bringing them along,” Mags went on, still talking about Mattie and Ellie. “Why? Do you have some kind of qualm with the idea of doing that?”
            “No, I don’t have a qualm with it. It’s just that I didn’t quite get why that was part of the plan. I was curious, that’s all. Thank you for explaining it to me.” This was beginning to feel like a child’s misunderstanding of what having a conversation was about. Mags probably felt the same way about it, for they both let it more or less drift off after that, and went about their evenings quietly thenceforth.

            The day of the drive to the Cape came. Mattie and Ellie would be coming after all and Rosie and Mattie would be sharing the driving. “Are you comfortable getting us out towards 495?” Mattie asked Rosie as they were about to take off.

            “Uh, sure, I suppose,” Rosie said.

            And so she drove them out on Route 2. They passed north of downtown Greenfield, going in roughly the same direction as Bernardston, then past the waters of Barton’s Cove, across the Depression-era French King Bridge from which Horton Baring had fallen to her fate, and up the hill called Weatherhead. Where the road passed over the hilltop there stood, postmodernly, a convenience store and a bowling alley. They stopped in the convenience store for some coffee and other provisions, which they would have in addition to the sandwiches that Mags had already made and packed for them. Rosie and Mattie went in, and when they got back out Ellie and Mags were scandalizing Grandma with an obscene singalong of some description. Rosie tried not to laugh as she sipped at her coffee and pulled out onto the open road again. Soon they passed along the fast Miller’s River where it flowed between snowy banks, through the little town of Erving, and past the turnoff to the somewhat more substantial town of Orange. And then, past Orange, the road turned to a limited-access highway, passing between stands of snowy conifers, and rose up into the hilly regions of Central Massachusetts, the Pack Monadnock Range, the Worcester Hills.

            They stopped for a “pee break”—the phrase was conventional enough but Rosie felt mildly unsettled to hear it come from her grandmother’s lips—just short of Interstate 495, after an hour or two of driving eastward. From the gas station where they did this they found it a little tricky to navigate back out onto the highway, but in the end Rosie did manage it. She had already gotten onto 495 when she remembered that she and Mattie had initially decided between themselves that they were going to share the driving.

            “Weren’t we going to trade off the driving, Mattie?” Rosie asked her.

            “We were!” I’m so sorry; I had completely forgotten.” Mattie sounded genuinely beside herself to have imposed on Rosie like this.

            “Well, it’s probably too late to switch out here,” said Rosie, a little annoyed in spite of herself.

            “Probably,” said Mattie with a sigh. “I really am sorry, Rosie. If you’d like me to drive us the whole route on the way back, I’m happy to.”

            “Look, please don’t worry about it, Mattie. There isn’t much traffic and I actually enjoy driving.” And this was true; when Rosie had been home on break from Binghamton she had often gone on long drives all the way down Long Island and back, radio on, shore birds calling outside as she got down towards the Hamptons or sometimes even towards Montauk. It had been a way of putting herself in heartsore communication with the world, with the world that was always passing around her. Often she had had Madison as a passenger, sometimes Caroline, sometimes Hernan; these latter two were friends of hers from Binghamton whose families lived near hers. Hernan was from a Puerto Rican family in outer Queens, Caroline from a Jewish family in Hempstead. They were often together, the three of them, three good friends, with a personality to them and to their togetherness. It was a personality, a collective selfhood, that Rosie was surprised to realize she now felt with Mags, Mattie, and Ellie—and not with them only but also with Margaret Clooney, and Hosea and Lydia Oldmeadow, and the Horton Baring all about whose life and death she kept hearing from the living. “What is it you two are planning to do on the Cape?” she asked Mattie and Ellie, and they told her that historical sightseeing was what they were most fondly looking forward to. That put Rosie in an even better humor. She was surprised to find herself feeling quite that favorably about it, but there it was. It inspired something of a prayerful feeling in her, in she who seldom prayed.

            Soon they came to what was called the Sagamore Bridge. It was a suspension bridge over a canal that according to Grandma had been dug in the early part of the last century to spare ships the trip around the Cape. In the Cape’s busy seasons it was, again according to Grandma, quite a pain to get over; at times it was almost impassable. But today it was easy enough, and then they were on the ample Mid-Cape Highway, and they could smell sea air, and the world was open, and Rosie felt free.

            “Are you happy?” Mags asked Rosie. “You look really happy. You’re grinning, and you’re humming to yourself even though the radio isn’t on.”

            “It barely has to do with being happy,” Rosie said. She was not sure if she wanted to say what came to mind next, so she did. “This might sound silly to you, but it feels a little bit like being in love.”

9.

The Cape 

Getting to Great-Aunt Phoebe’s house in Harwich was a little tricky because once one left the Mid-Cape Highway seemingly every other road on the peninsula was some sort or another of winding residential or semi-residential street. Much of Cape Cod would appear to have been very heavily suburbanized after World War II; Grandma remarked that the Outer Cape, the end of the peninsula out beyond Harwich, was “the way the whole Cape used to be”—strange and wild, sparsely inhabited, dominated in terms of landscape by sand dunes and short scrubby trees. Mags suggested that they take a drive up in that direction the next day; even if none of them were interested in going in the sea, it was nice to walk along the beaches, and there was history too. Mattie mentioned Marconi Beach, from which the first trans-Atlantic radio broadcast had been made; Ellie mentioned the Three Sisters, a series of famous lighthouses.

            “My sister rarely leaves Harwich, regrettably,” Grandma said. “Last time she went any further than Orleans was a trip to Provincetown in the winter of 1985, when the most prodigious snowstorm struck the Cape and she wanted to see the drifts of snow piled up along the beaches.”

            “Your sister hasn’t been to the Outer Cape in twenty-seven years?” Ellie asked, a little startled.

            “I know; it surprised me too when she mentioned it to me. You’d think that living in Harwich she would have at least made it up to Eastham or Wellfleet; it’s not as if she’s in Falmouth or Hyannis.” Rosie had very little idea where any of these places were or why it was significant which of them her great-aunt lived in, but she did not want to interrupt the conversation by asking questions. It was a conversation in which all of the New England natives in the car seemed very interested. “I suppose everything Phoebe needs or thinks she needs she can find in Harwich or Chatham,” Grandma continued. “In a way, I admire that; it seems nice to have that level of security in one’s surroundings.”

            “You don’t travel very much either, do you, Great-Aunt Gertrude?” asked Mags. It was the first time in almost half a year of living up here that Rosie had heard Mags address Grandma by any version of her name, and it placed another piece into the Horton Baring and Carl McNulty puzzle. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you go on a trip, even as far as Quechee Gorge or the White Mountains the way Great-Uncle Tom sometimes does.”

            “I don’t get out or around very much, no; I admit it,” said Grandma. “I’m a dull old lady.”

            “You’re hardly dull,” said Mags.

            Conversing along much these lines, they reached Great-Aunt Phoebe’s house. It was a saltbox house with greyish wooden siding and a brownish shingled roof, livened up by a lawn flamingo and a few garden gnomes; Grandma said that during the warmer months there were potted flowers out front as well. The lawn flamingo had a little snow on it, an odd little crown clinging to its pink head. Behind the house rose a long yellowish dune, and beyond that Rosie could hear the sea.

            Great-Aunt Phoebe came out and greeted them. She was a tall woman a little younger than Grandma, and she shared Grandma’s distinct resemblance to Aunt Margaret; she even shared Aunt Margaret’s midcentury-librarian hairstyle. “It’s so good to see you, Gerty!” she said to Grandma with sincere enthusiasm but an odd underlying reticence that was only barely audible. She pulled Grandma into a loose hug, then, to Rosie’s wonderment, pinched Mags’s cheek. Introductions were made to Rosie, Mattie, and Ellie, and they were shown to their rooms. Rosie and Mags would be sharing a room; Mattie and Ellie would be sharing the living room, which had two usable couches; Grandma would be sharing her sister’s room. Great-Aunt Phoebe seemed to live alone, but the guest room that Rosie and Mags ended up in seemed much-used and much-loved. It had an old, probably nonfunctional CRT television, a bookcase filled with mostly local-interest books, and two small beds arranged next to each other and parallel like a husband’s and wife’s beds in a prudish 1950s sitcom.

            Mags unpacked her toothbrush and toothpaste, two or three of her old pulp paperbacks, and the jade-green maillot that she was planning to wear to that indoor pool, wherever it was. Rosie unpacked her portable CD player, a copy of The Idiot that she had decided on a whim to try plowing her way through, and a dress that she was planning to wear to a nice restaurant Grandma had made vague noises about taking them to tonight. “It seems like we have different ideas of what the rest of this day is going to look like,” Mags observed. “I suppose that’s just as well; whenever we visit down here we normally go our separate ways for a few hours on the afternoon of the first day anyway. Do you mind if I take the car?”

            “You mean to go to the pool?” Rosie asked. Mags nodded. “No; go ahead. I can go for a walk in the dunes if I really need to get out of the house.”

            “Sounds good,” said Mags. A few minutes later she took off. Rosie sighed, sat on her bed, and looked out the bedroom window, through which she could see the sea as a grey-blue line beneath a white-grey late-winter sky. It seemed that there was something enormous in that sea, something morally indeterminate; an ambivalence, a fascination. It was an oceanic logic, a logic that was almost but not quite a person, something that said something about Rosie’s own life. It said something about love, insofar as it said something about gender; it said something about gender, insofar as it said something about death. There was the kind of wildness to it that Mags sometimes pressed to her service and that Horton Baring once had pressed to hers, the kind of wildness that revolved in and out of a sheriff’s office and sent a car over the speed limit on an ice-slicked interstate. It had something to say to Rosie, or about her; it was an entity that watched her and loved her, or loved her because it watched her.

            Almost without realizing it, she found herself with her jacket and scarf back on, standing on the dunes with the house behind her. There was a horizontal striation of the view before her: yellow beach, then white surf, then sea, then sky. The sky was darkening and wilding; somewhere out on the Atlantic a storm was rising, a danger and woe to mariners. The storm changed the light of the day, and somehow in the change of the light Rosie thought for a second that she could see, or even somehow could hear, the dead beginning to speak to her. It was clear enough to her, the sea being that it was, that there were more than enough dead in these parts.

            She went back inside ahead of the storm, which commenced to rock the house. “Is Mags still at the pool?” she asked Mattie and Ellie, who were sitting in the living room huddled with hot cocoa.

            “Must be,” said Ellie. “Or anyway, she hasn’t come back yet.”

            Rosie sat worried with them until Mags did come back. She heard the door slamming open and saw her cousin marching in, drenched for two separate reasons. “It’s bad out there,” Mags said simply, and after taking her coat off, went upstairs. Rosie went up after her.

            “Once you dry off would you like to come down for hot chocolate?” she asked.

            “Of course,” said Mags, “but it’s going to take me a while to dry off. It’s a wintry mix out there; you know how it is.”

            “I certainly do. You smell like chlorine.”

            “And you smell like salt. It’s funny,” said Mags, “in any other season, you’d expect me to go out and do something half-wild on the beach and you to play it safe and occupy yourself indoors.”

            “I was playing it safe and occupying myself indoors for a while,” said Rosie. “Something about the day—about the sea—called me outside. I’m sorry; that probably doesn’t make any sense to you.”

            “On the contrary,” said Mags. “It makes quite a bit of sense to me. It’s precisely the sort of thing that does make sense to me. If you and I weren’t peers then I might even say I was proud of you.”

            “You’re allowed to be proud of me. I might actually like to hear you say that you’re proud of me,” said Rosie.

            “Okay then,” said Mags. “I’m proud of you, Rosie.” She stepped into the bathroom through which the guest room and Great-Aunt Phoebe’s room communicated. “I’m sorry to cut this conversation short but I really do need to wring out my hair,” she said. She tossed her swimsuit over the side of the bathtub, picked up a towel from a stack near the shower, and started drying her hair vigorously. “I’ll meet you downstairs if you want to get back to the fun.”

            “By all means,” said Rosie.   

            She went downstairs. When she got back to the living room Mattie, Grandma, and Great-Aunt Phoebe were gathered around Ellie, who was animatedly telling yet another dirty joke. “…and then Salma Hayek says to the Pope, ‘these aren’t buoys!’” she finished, to raucous laughter. “Oh. Sorry you missed the setup for that one, Rosie.”

            “I think the setup for that one is pretty self-explanatory, Ellie,” Rosie said. “Is there still enough hot chocolate left for one more?”

            “Sure; it’s in the saucepan,” Great-Aunt Phoebe said. “Front left burner of the gas stove. Miss Greer here whipped it up for us,” she said with an avuncular, or feminine-avuncular, smile at Mattie.

            “I haven’t been called ‘Miss Greer’ in years, Ms. Przybylski,” said Mattie with a bashful adjustment of her glasses and a slight flip of her long black hair. “I appreciate it, somehow.”

            Great-Aunt Phoebe shrugged. “Airs and graces, airs and graces,” she said. “Definitely easier to find here and there in this world of ours when I was a girl.”

            And so the evening—and the storm—passed convivially. There were a few brownouts but at no point did they completely lose power. Great-Aunt Phoebe led several of them in a marathon series of gin rummy games for two or three hours, and for dinner, instead of going out to a restaurant, they had breaded cod and a rice dish that tasted delicious but stuck to their spoons in a way that made Rosie a bit queasy to look at.

            The next day was clear and unseasonably warm so they dressed relatively lightly for their drive up the Outer Cape. Rosie and Mags walked for a while together along the beach beneath Nauset Light, which was the lighthouse that appeared on the bags of the potato chip brand Uncle Franklin ate. The sea was a little less overpowering today, but held no less of a fascination for Rosie. She took her shoes off and dipped her feet into the surf; it was powerfully cold even though the air was mild, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Mags suppressing what looked an awful lot like a little laugh at her.

            They drove almost all the way up to Provincetown, but not all the way. They had a chilly picnic on Marconi Beach, below the dunes, among seashells and sea glass. The picnic was more of the sandwiches that Mags had packed for their drive to the Cape the previous day; Great-Aunt Phoebe was, “as always,” impressed with Mags’s preparation of them. Most of them were turkey sandwiches very much like the ones one could get at some delis in New York, but some were vegetarian, and it was the vegetarian ones that Mattie and Great-Aunt Phoebe mostly ate. The sky now was almost exactly the blue-grey shade of the sea, distinguished from it only by its equanimity and lack of choppiness or imposingness. Rosie tucked away two and a half of the sandwiches, then went for another walk, this time with her grandmother.

            “Are there any little towns, places to buy antiques, house museums, things like that, on the Outer Cape?” she asked her grandmother. “Or is most of the history here the history of the wind and the sea?”

            “There are a few such places, yes, mostly in Provincetown,” said Grandma, “but a few in Wellfleet or Eastham; there was an antiques emporium along the road up here, if you missed it. But keep in mind that the wind and the sea have quite a lot of history all their own, just as the woods and the mountains do.”

            “That sounds like something Grandpa would say,” said Rosie.

            “It is. He would say that to me all the time back when he and I were young and even more in love.”

            “You must miss those days, sometimes.”

            “Well, don’t we all miss our youth, sometimes? Or almost all of us, anyway.”

            Rosie thought back to her own youth. Just as, when contemplating moving to Greenfield, she had thought of the vacations of her childhood, now that she was ensconced in New England she thought of the non-vacations, of ordinary life at school and at play on Long Island. She remembered when Madison was born, her jealousy; she remembered her first kiss, a truth-or-dare kiss, at her eleventh birthday party; she remembered when she had hit eighth grade and her grades had suddenly, dramatically started to improve. She supposed there was something of wind and sea in that history, too, and in everybody’s history. Thinking of it that way came as more of a comfort to her than she would have expected.

            And that was the second day of the Cape visit. The third day, which was Sunday, she and Mags had a brief dispute about what church to go to. She was interested in a church that was in a tourism brochure, but Mags informed her that she had it on good authority that the denomination that ran that church was, first of all, not Catholic, and, second of all, some sort of cult. Mags was interested in a Catholic parish all the way in Woods Hole, for some reason, but Rosie was not willing to schlep that far on a Sunday morning. It was a bit mysterious to Rosie how and why they had reached the decision to go to church together at all; it wasn’t exactly an important holiday Sunday. Eventually they decided on the place in Woods Hole. Rosie did not have a good time getting there, but Mass itself was fine. She even went to confession afterwards, more or less on a whim. It was less like pulling teeth than she remembered.

            For their last afternoon on their weekend getaway, Great-Aunt Phoebe cooked for them again. They had a big midday meal of a kind that Rosie associated with the days before beepers, cable news, and half-hour unpaid lunch breaks. Great-Aunt Phoebe actually waxed nostalgic about Massachusetts’s old blue laws, where after going to church on Sunday morning you had nothing to do for the rest of the day but eat and, if relevant, visit with family. It wasn’t at all clear to Rosie how, for instance, observant Jews would have fared under the system that her great-aunt was describing, but she did not want to start a conversation about that that might have turned into an argument.

            On the drive back to Greenfield that evening, a drive that she did end up palming off on Mattie in recompense for the drive down, Rosie found herself in a sort of waking dream. The car was a ship, but the road was not a sea; the ship was passing over land, or perhaps even through the halls of the sky, and Massachusetts was underneath Rosie, like a land of counterpane for her to look upon. She felt as if she could jump over the moon.

Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part Two)

4.

The First Visit 

At a few different points in the second half of October Rosie asked her family when she could expect the winter weather to start, and she got a different answer each time she asked it. First Uncle Franklin told her that it usually started snowing around Thanksgiving, then Grandpa told her that she could expect it after Halloween. Finally Grandma and Aunt Margaret explained to her that most years what would happen was that there would be some flurries or perhaps one or two snowy nights beginning at the end of October or early in November, and then in the waning days of November the snow started in earnest and stayed on the ground in some form or fashion till spring. That being the case as it may be, it seemed that the weather reports had been saying that this year in particular New England could expect a major snowstorm in the days heading up to Halloween. Two sets of guests cancelled their reservations because of this, and the Baring household set about planning for this big Halloween storm.

            Mags took over shopping from Uncle Franklin and brought home canned food, lots of tea and coffee, and several boxes of taper candles from various department stores and buyers’ clubs around Greenfield. Grandpa Baring spent an afternoon out with a pair of young gay women whom he was friends with for some reason, and came back with a new winter coat and a manual that was supposed to exposit certain things about the kind of hot water system that the house had. Grandma and Uncle Franklin brought in chairs and tables from outside. As for Rosie, she put up storm windows, made sure the family’s three cars were properly serviced and up-to-date on all their checks, and spent a few hours each day with her laptop open checking every now and then for new reports on the nor’easter as it developed. So passed the last couple of days before the storm was supposed to hit Western Massachusetts.

            Rosie and Mags were actually on the UMass campus when the storm itself hit, driving through it on their way back from an Asian market in another part of Amherst. There they had picked up a can of some sort of Vietnamese coffee that Uncle Franklin insisted on having in the house; evidently it had been in Chicago that he had first discovered it once upon a time. They pulled up a side road at first and parked the car by one of the UMass dorms as the clouds of white descended darkly; then the silver-blue flash of an exploding transformer lit up the sky from somewhere else on campus, and Mags decided to high-tail it home.

            “How long did Uncle Franklin live in Chicago?” Rosie asked, by way of a topic to discuss that would distract her from Mags’s almost preternaturally aggressive driving.

            “At least fifteen years or so if I’m not mistaken,” Mags said. “He first left home because of some sort of conflict or jealousy with my father, actually, to hear Aunt Margaret and your grandmother tell it. Don’t ask me the details of that, though; I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you. He made a life for himself out there and it was not actually the accident that killed my parents that made him feel as if he had to come home; it was some other thing that happened, that had something to do with a woman he was close to out there, if I’m not mistaken. One of those classic tragedies, or classic subgenres of personal tragedy, if you prefer to look at it that way.”

            “I don’t prefer to look at it that way at all,” Rosie said.

            “I suppose I could say that’s just as well,” said Mags. “It helps me to think of this life of ours as part of a ‘story’ of some sort, but I’m willing to accept that that might be a little cold of me. Back when I had a therapist I went to see she said much the same to me. Food for thought, I guess; the question is just whose thoughts, you know?”

            “I think I know what you mean, but Ma—Mags you are about to hit a moose.”

            Sure enough, there was some sort of large animal—maybe not a moose, but something large enough and uncanny enough to fool a suburbanite like Rosie—lumbering across the interstate just in front of them. Mags swerved hard to avoid it and the car drifted far into the shoulder. It took them several hundred feet of roadway to straighten themselves out again.

            “We can’t get home soon enough,” Mags observed. “That transformer blowing back on campus was sure a wakeup call, wouldn’t you say?”

            “I sure as hell would,” Rosie said, thankful that they hadn’t hit that animal, whatever it had been. “By the way, what do you think that animal was?”

            “You seemed pretty confident it was a moose.” Mags cast a quizzical eye on Rosie. She seemed amused by the situation in which they had just found themselves. Rosie had ridden in the car with Mags several times now and knew that it was her custom to drive like a madwoman whenever there wasn’t a cop car to be seen, but she had supposed that the danger of doing so on ice-slicked roads with very poor visibility would mitigate that. Quite the contrary, it seemed to have made it even worse, likely because Mags was getting downright desperate to get home. Rosie was starting to seriously wonder how bad exactly her cousin expected the storm to get. It did seem like, mostly on Mags’s instigation, their household had gone to much more trouble to prepare for this nor’easter than had many people in the area. Rosie wondered if Mags was one of those odd people you ran into now and then who seemed to have some sort of prescience about such things, or, on the other hand, whether she tended towards paranoia about winter weather due to past experience or by some quirk of her nature.

            The got home in one piece. Evening was coming on. Uncle Franklin told Rosie that she could expect to hear odd sounds from the radiators as they gurgled into heavy-duty service for the first time this winter. Grandma and Grandpa were upstairs making sure the storm windows in one of the guest rooms were properly secured. What constituted an improperly secured storm window Rosie could not guess at, but she figured she might learn soon enough. She hoped she had done a good enough job.

            Mags spent most of the evening, before the power failed, making a bracelet for something called Carmilla and brainstorming ideas for the more-familiar (to Rosie) The King in Yellow. Then the power did fail and she decided to go to bed. It was about nine o’ clock and without a way to keep her laptop charged up there was not much more left to do. So she lit a candle, cracked open a book, and turned away from Rosie to settle in for the night.

            Rosie herself must have drifted off at some point soon after, because the next thing she knew it was around midnight, the storm was still raging, and somebody was boiling a kettle of water. Something about the way this house was set up made it difficult to tell what direction sounds in it were coming from, but in this case it must be in the kitchen. Somehow, she could not think how, Rosie felt a compulsion, a needful frenzy, to go out to the kitchen herself and see who it was.

            Mags was sleeping soundly when Rosie crept out of their room, tiptoeing like a disobedient child. It was still dark-white outside. If the stove had been electric rather than gas there would have been no way any of them could use it under these conditions.

            There were two or three intervening rooms or hallways between Rosie and Mags’s room and the kitchen; it depended on whether you went clockwise or counterclockwise around the front hallway’s central staircase that led inevitably and composedly down to the rarely-used front door. Rosie went counterclockwise, the long way round, which passed through the front hallway, the dining room, and a section of the living room in which a spinet piano much like her sister’s stood collecting dust. The sound of the singing kettle was still going on and on and seemed to be coming from every direction at once. Rosie felt a chill, then a sudden pump of warmth as she passed the radiator that stood at the doorway through with the living room and kitchen communicated.

            The kitchen, miraculous to report, was empty. The candles were out and the stove was off. Rosie realized with a sudden laugh that the sound of the kettle, the sound like a kettle rather, was in fact the steam in the pipes and in the radiators, keeping the cold out in this winter’s first furious storm.

            Rosie’s heart was pounding for reasons that she could only guess at as she looked out the kitchen window at the storm. There was a light in it, and what looked like a woman stuck outside, insufficiently dressed for a nighttime blizzard, on the patio or in the overgrown garden beyond it. Rosie, not thinking, ran out into the mudroom, put on her coat and gloves over her pajamas, and went out to see what was wrong.

            The doorway to the patio opened into warm air and the dim not of an autumn midnight but of nine or nine-thirty one evening in late June. The “door into summer” of the Heinlein title must, Rosie thought, have been something like this, this moment when she walked outside into something like the past.

            A woman was indeed standing there, in that summer dusk. She looked much like Mags—glaring eyes, russet hair—but she was clearly someone who was entirely new to Rosie, someone who was uncanny and unfamiliar. Unfamiliar, and probably not family—doubly strange, doubly elsewhere. Fireflies were flitting around her, and she was wreathed in their glow as it were in the fires of purgatory, with a pschent of them circling her high-held head. Her hair was up in a high knot or bun and she was in the corset-and-hoops clothing and accoutrements of a hundred and fifty years before. Rosie suspected without having to know, or knew without having to suspect, that she was a ghostly vision of some ancestor, or a manifestation of some ancestral strain in her and Mags’s shared familial past. The ghost looked solid, and looked like she had a full complement of emotion and intellect and will, but there was no way for Rosie to be sure of any of this unless she spoke to her.

            The dead began to speak. The ghost had the strange accent one sometimes was liable to hear in plays or movies about Lincoln, or Whitman, or other figures of that day and period. She spoke respectfully but with a clear note of feeling that she represented some higher place or calling. It was a note that Rosie, amazingly to her own mind, found herself respecting as well as resenting. It came by way of an introduction.

            “I am Margaret Clooney, ancestress, as you might say, of your relation Margaret McNulty,” the ghost said. “I lived in these parts many years ago after being born during a sea voyage from Ireland, just before or in the earliest days of the famine there. You are Rosary Newgarth, a friend and to some minds perhaps a kinswoman of my descendant, are you not?”

            “I am,” said Rosie. “To my time it’s the night of October 29, 2011, a Saturday. Mags—Margaret, your namesake, anyway—is asleep in bed.”

            “Asleep in bed, Saturday night,” the ghost said. “‘To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub.’”

            “And you?” Rosie asked. “What are your day and time?”

            “Late evening, June 23, 1860,” said Margaret Clooney. “A Saturday also. St. John’s Eve, if that holds any meaning to you. Just a few days after midsummer.”

            “The light out here is that of a summer night, I can tell,” Rosie said. “And the fireflies too, of course. Are you—that is, have I slipped back into the ‘present’ for you, or am I ‘seeing’ your living life with you as a ghost, a phantom, here for me to show me the way the world use to be for you? I’m sorry,” she said with a sudden burst of self-consciousness. “I hope the question isn’t gauche, or unwelcome? And I’m sorry for how badly I worded it.”

            “A little gauche perhaps, but not unwelcome—or, at least, it is clear and easy for me to see why you are asking it,” said Margaret Clooney. “I am, as you might say, a ghost, although my true self, my soul, my heart, is elsewhere than this garden. I will miss it, when I go totally beyond.”

            “And this is 1860 I’ve entered into?”

            “This is, yes. However, observe.” Margaret Clooney glided up onto the patio, which here was an older-fashioned porch or portico, and pointed a spectral finger over Rosie’s shoulder into the kitchen window. Rosie saw that it was not a kitchen after all but a storeroom of some kind, a dimly firelit chamber in which two men were arguing. It would seem that it was money about which they were arguing—some sort of debt, something that one of them experienced as a violence done to him. Rosie could not tell if it was the indebtedness that was being claimed to be violent or the unmercifulness with which the indebtedness was being received. Like any moral economist, she was on the side of the debtor.

            “The two men arguing—who are they?” she asked.

            “Men of the year 1813, when this home was first built ere in Greenfield,” Margaret Clooney said to her. “The debtor, who is the first owner of this house, is a man by the name of Asaph Oldmeadow. Do you know of the Oldmeadows? If you do not, it would be my pleasure to tell you a bit about them. They are a part of my history, and my descendant’s history, and your history also.”

            “I’ve heard of the Oldmeadows. The Barings are descended from an Oldmeadow woman, aren’t they—that is, aren’t we?”

            The ghost of Margaret Clooney nodded. “Your grandfather’s grandmother, whom I believe he is given to occasionally mentioning, was Horton Oldmeadow,” she said. “The name Horton was reused in the family, just as the name Margaret has been reused. Probably the name was something along the lines of Hortense in the beginning—In principio, if you’ve ever looked through a Vulgate Bible. This Horton Oldmeadow was the daughter of a close friend of mine—but that is a story for another time.” The ghost, Rosie realized, was vanishing as she said this.

            “I will see you again, Margaret?” Rosie asked.

            “You will,” said Margaret Clooney. “I promise you that; you will.”

            She dissolved into the firefly dusk. Rosie blinked, then went back inside, into the storm-choked house. The kitchen clock read twelve-thirty, and the radiator pipes were still singing, joyful in having a reason to serve at last.

5.

The Folktales 

A week or so into November, once power had been restored in the house and life had gone more or less back to normal, Rosie asked her grandfather about Horton Oldmeadow. Who he told her about instead was Horton Baring.

            Horton Baring had been Grandpa Baring’s older sister, the oldest of three siblings (the middle sibling, the first Franklin Baring, had been killed in the Korean War). She had been half-feral and barely literate, with a knack for beating people up that had already emerged by her early teens. In 1949 she had been expelled from Greenfield High School three weeks before she would have graduated, and she had spent most of the 1950s in and out of the Franklin County sheriff’s office. (Rosie asked her grandfather if she had ever actually been convicted of anything and he had said that on two occasions they had managed to make contempt of court stick and kept her around for a few weeks before letting her out again.) She had been a liberal smoker and drinker but was not known ever to have associated romantically with either men or women. Going into her thirties she had become something of an enforcer of her own justice, and it had actually been she who had brought Carl McNulty into the household after beating up his father as his father had been about to beat up him. This had been in 1968 or so, turbulent times for Grandma and Grandpa’s growing family as for the world as a whole. Carl and Horton had, by Grandpa’s account and also by Mags’s, been inseparable pretty much as soon as she had knocked his father to the ground on his behalf. A year or two after that Horton had died in unclear circumstances, still in her late thirties.

            “What happened to her?” Rosie asked. “If it’s not too hard to say.”

            “Wouldn’t say it’s too hard exactly,” Grandpa said. “She took a fall from the French King Bridge—you know, that bridge out on Route 2 to the east as it passes over the Connecticut going towards Boston. She’d been visiting with a friend who lived on a hill nearby by the name of Weatherhead, and she was walking across the river back from Weatherhead to meet with another friend when something happened. Never figured out what. Might could have been an accident, suicide, someone she’d crossed coming back to get her…” He shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands. “Any number of things my sister could’ve gotten herself involved in,” he said. “Anyway, it damn near broke this family apart. None of us ever really looked at little Carl the same after that, and I think he knew it.”

            He showed her a picture of the three siblings then. Horton and Franklin I both looked a lot like her grandfather, like Tom. They all had the same ruddy complexion, meaty hands, and tragicomic resting expression. The picture must have been taken right before Franklin I had gone to Korea because Grandpa seemed already to be in his early teens and Rosie recognized Horton’s dress as a fashion of the very early fifties.

            “What did your brother do in Korea?” she asked.

            “Fighter pilot,” said Grandpa. “Lived on a base in Japan, near Osaka; commuted to the war zone in his Sabrejet from there. Got shot down by some Chinaman in a MiG right before the ceasefire in ’53. Nineteen years old.”

            Rosie had not been aware that the Air Force had ever had fighter pilots quite that young, and wondered if perhaps Franklin I’s exploits were being exaggerated somewhat—if he had instead been a wingman or something like that, or if it had been a bomber instead of a fighter, or, or, or…She shook her head. In the end, it didn’t really matter. He was dead, and Horton was dead, and her grandfather was still very much alive.

            “Probably shouldn’t say Chinaman,” her grandfather said. “Not polite, not these days.”

            And that was their first conversation about Horton Baring. It took a few more conversations in that month of November to get to the subject of Horton Oldmeadow, who had lived a much less disputable and apparently much less tragic life. Grandpa still remembered some of her stories, when he had been a child, about her own childhood—the days of taffeta bustles and shirtwaists, narrated to the days of pinstriped suits and trilbys.

            Also right after Halloween Rosie started going on little adventures around Western Massachusetts with two women about her and Mags’s age named Mattie Greer and Ellie Soren. Mattie and Ellie were not a couple; they were definitely both gay, but they seemed to be gay separately. Mattie was a graduate student at UMass, apparently doing a master’s in some foreign literature or another, and Ellie had arbitraged a BS in economics much like Rosie’s own into a job writing ad copy for a liquor distributor. On one day in particular the three of them were at a sort of embankment or landing along the Connecticut River, from which one could watch almost minute by minute as crimson-and-gold October turned to russet-and-silver November. Mattie, who had a taste for swimming in ludicrously cold water that Mags apparently shared, was doing backstrokes in the river’s shallows; Ellie, who looked and talked like she should have been much more adventurous than Mattie but apparently was not, was in a sport coat and a light scarf, hitting golf balls across the river with one of Grandpa Baring’s nine-irons.

            “You know, until he handed you that club this morning I didn’t even realized Grandpa played golf,” said Rosie.

            “He doesn’t,” said Ellie. “Fore!” Whack. A ball went flying up, up, and left Rosie’s vision against the whitish sky. Mattie seemed unperturbed and contemplative.

            “Well, be that as it may, hitting golf balls across a river is certainly a new idea,” said Rosie.

            “Is it?” asked Mattie dreamily from the water. “I’m not so sure. Did you ever see that old episode of—what was it?—the sitcom.”

            “Fair enough,” said Rosie, who knew what Mattie was alluding to, but only vaguely. “Okay, that’s fair enough.”

            “Mattie’s been watching a lot of sitcoms lately,” said Ellie. “She says they have a lot of the ‘amoral moralism’ of folk stories. That’s what she’s studying at UMass. Fore!” Whack.

            Mattie swam up to the landing and hauled herself up halfway onto the shore; Ellie handed her a towel to wrap around her shoulders. “ ‘Amoral moralism’ is a phrase I’m using in my thesis but I’m not actually sure how much I like it,” she said. “It’s a lot of fun, though. Writing the thing, I mean. I’m glad I went back to school.”

            “How old are you exactly?” Rosie asked.

            Mattie crammed on her glasses under her wet sheets of black hair and frowned at Rosie theatrically. “Don’t you know never to ask a lady that?” she said. “I’m twenty-five.” She yawned and pulled herself fully up out of the water. “Well, that was exhausting,” she said. “It probably kept my heart rate nice and low, though.”

            “Is this something you do every winter?” asked Rosie, gesturing at Mattie and at the river.

            “No, I actually just started doing this a year or two ago on your cousin’s recommendation,” Mattie said. “Where she got it from I have no idea. Turn around, I’m about to change back into my clothes.” Rosie turned around and Mattie kept talking. “Did you ever hear of the folktale called ‘The King of Cats’ or ‘The Prince of Cats’? I think it’s delightful, and it has the same feature that I notice in sitcoms where, when you hear it told, you keep thinking it’ll build to a moral conclusion and then it just doesn’t. It’s from Cornwall originally, I think; I found it in a Breton source; technically the literature I’m studying is French.” Rosie shook her head and said she hadn’t heard of it. “Would you like me to tell it to you?” Mattie asked. “You can turn around now, by the way.”

            Rosie turned around. Mattie was now dressed much the same as Ellie was and was wringing out her swimsuit so she could put it in her backpack. “Go ahead and tell me ‘The King of Cats,’ Mattie,” Rosie said.

            “So, the story goes,” said Mattie as they started to walk back towards Ellie’s car, “that an old farmer, long ago, had a mean, cussed old black cat, as so many old farmers do. He was walking along a lonely road one evening, trying to figure out what to do about the cat, when he saw a procession of other cats, carrying a cat-sized coffin. He marveled at this sight, of course, and up to him there walked a cat with a grave and official-seeming expression, like that of an undertaker or a coroner.

            “The grave, official-seeming cat said to the old farmer, ‘Tell Tom Tildrum Tim Toldrum’s dead!’ The old farmer, not knowing what this meant, went on his way and went home to his own cat, and to his wife.

            “A few nights later, the farmer was walking along that same road when he saw the same procession of cats and coffin. The cat coroner or undertaker said to him again, ‘Tell Tom Tildrum Tim Toldrum’s dead!’ He still did not know what this meant, and he went home and the cat clawed him and his wife nagged him.

            “Finally, a third time, the farmer was walking along and he saw the funeral procession. The coroner or undertaker said to him, for the third time, ‘Tell Tom Tildrum Tim Toldrum’s dead!’ He was struck with a great fear, and he ran, did not walk, on home.

            “He said to his wife something to the effect of ‘I keep seeing these cats, this strange procession.’ His mean, cussed old black cat was looking at him intently now.” At this point in the story they reached Ellie’s car and set about getting into it. “He said ‘I just don’t know what it means,’” Mattie went on. “‘They’ve spoken to me, you know. They want me to find somebody called Tom Tildrum and tell him that Tim Toldrum is dead. I don’t know who either of those men are!’

            “‘Tim Toldrum is dead?!’ the mean, cussed old black cat suddenly screamed. ‘Why, then, I am now King of the Cats!’ And with that, the cat rose up the old farmer’s chimney like some, flew out into the night with a blood-curdling caterwaul, and was never seen or heard from in those parts again. And so goes the story.”

            “Isn’t there a Steven Vincent Benét version of that story, Mattie?” Ellie asked, putting the golf club and her back of golf balls in her trunk.

            “I don’t know who Steven Vincent Benét is,” said Rosie.

            “I think there might be,” said Mattie.

            On the drive back up to Greenfield there were a few more flurries. Rosie tried to think of an Italian folktale that she had once heard from her grandmother; she wanted to tell it to Mattie and Ellie as a sort of reciprocation, since she had enjoyed the story about the King of the Cats more than she had expected to. Try as she might, she could not put her finger on it. It had something to do with the devil, and a fig tree, and an old woman being cursed to have small breasts; it was just the kind of bawdy story, with faint hints of internalized misogyny, that Grandma Newgarth loved. Eventually it occurred to her that she could just tell them those elements—devil, fig tree, old woman, small breasts. Mattie might be able to put it together from her own knowledge base, or, if not, she might be able to look it up whenever she got home or to wherever her laptop currently was.

            “I think I have heard that one,” she said when Rosie told her the basic elements. “Neapolitan or Sicilian or something like that, right?”

            “I believe so, yeah,” said Rosie. “I heard it from my grandmother, on the non-Baring side. Do either of you have grandparents who have that—well, who get salty with you like that?”

            “My grandmother does occasionally,” said Ellie. “I think most of Mattie’s family is probably too buttoned-up for it. That’s probably why you can come across as stuck-up and retiring, isn’t it, Mattie?” she shouted into the back seat where Mattie was lying down.

            “Well, that and the depression,” muttered Mattie, who seemed to be half asleep.

            Rosie felt suddenly like she he had gone through the looking glass. There was something irreducibly manic and madcap about spending time with these two women, something that was starting to make her uncomfortable. Surely they couldn’t be like this all the time; with her own family, with Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Margaret and Uncle Franklin and Mags, and certainly at home with Mom and Dad and Madison, it was easy enough to imagine that they more or less always were the way they appeared to be. It was easy enough to imagine that Madison was thinking of George and Ira Gershwin more often than not, or that Mags spent most of her free time reading genre novels and making those bracelets based on them, or that Aunt Margaret was just as reluctant to talk about her estranged husband and children with everybody else as she was with Rosie. Surely that wasn’t the case here; surely Mattie and Ellie were not always hitting golf balls across rivers and saying things like “well, that and the depression,” were they? Had her grandfather somehow put them up to it, as a way to entertain her after the downbeat conversations he had been having with her lately. She obviously could not just ask them, but she felt the need to know.

            They returned to Greenfield. When Rosie got back home she found Mags and Uncle Franklin standing together pensively in the kitchen, looking out the window across the driveway to a plot where they had planted some garlic just before the blizzard. Rosie wondered what they expected it to be doing right now, exactly; you planted garlic in the fall before the first frost, and it burgeoned in the winter and came up in early spring. The book that Mags had shown Rosie had been very clear about that, and the process sounded very straightforward.

            It occurred to her that maybe they were not, after all, expecting anything from the garlic in particular. Maybe the garlic was beside the point, and their gazes out the window were in reality gazes at something quite different, much more dangerous and arcane. Maybe they were just standing there, looking pensively, looking carefully, looking at something together because they, they in particular, could not bear to look at each other.

6.

The Holiday

December 2011, that year’s long Advent, was a time of consequence. Between Thanksgiving weekend and Christmas Eve, Herman Cain suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, the United Kingdom severed diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran, Kim Jong-il died abruptly and was succeeded as leader of North Korea by his twentysomething son, the Obama administration formally declared an end to the Iraq War, and the German novelist Christa Wolf died at eighty-two. Christopher Hitchens also died, as did Václav Havel. Tropical Storm Washi hit the Philippines and killed almost thirteen hundred people. In Western Massachusetts, winter came on in earnest, the water got too cold for even Mattie Greer to go swimming in before freezing over entirely, the days shortened into abbreviations that were already almost completely dark by four or five o’ clock, and Greenfield’s half-dozen or so Catholic and liturgical Protestant churches got fully into the Advent-Christmas season. The thin edge of the present advanced further into the future from the past, the last ends of Rosie and her family came closer day by day as always, and Mags started dating somebody.

            “I’ve had a crush on him since I was young,” she explained to a slightly gobsmacked Rosie, “or at least I think I have. We don’t have as much in common now as we did when we were twelve. I suppose I wanted to see there was any way we could recapture those days.”

            “Can I ask if you’ve ever been in a relationship before?” said Rosie. “You’ve never mentioned any exes or anything.”

            “I had a couple of casual hookups at UMass before deciding that wasn’t the way for me,” said Mags. “And I had a horrible jealousy-fueled high school ‘friendship’ with a girl called Jessica Winters. Other than that, no.”

            “What is he like, if you and he don’t have much in common anymore?” Rosie asked her then. For some reason the idea of Mags dating somebody just to see what was like filled her with foreboding. It was like being told that Madison had lost her virginity or that Dad was getting promoted at work—in some sense it represented forward progress, but it was also a move out of a situation to which the people concerned had already long since been habituated.

            “I guess he’s just your typical guy from around here,” said Mags, which did not inspire confidence. “He loves the Patriots and he wants to move to Boston at some point. He’s a manager in a farm store and I’ve had his cooking a couple of times; it’s pretty good, so that’s worth pursuing this for, I think.”

            “Do you want to move to Boston at some point, Mags?” Rosie asked.

            Mags shook her head. “I don’t,” she said. “And that’s why I’ve decided I’m not going to have sex with Zachary.”

            “I’m sorry,” said Rosie, “but what?”

            Mags shrugged. “It’d feel like I was ascribing some sort of weight to the decisions he’s making about what to do with his life,” she said. Something about her tone of voice as she said this made Rosie realize, with a sudden realization, that her cousin was seeing this man out of nothing so much as good old-fashioned garden-variety boredom. For some reason that Rosie could not put her finger on, having realized that made her feel a bit better about it.

            Rosie behaved a little grouchily the next day around one of the guests, a woman named Francine Kipperman. Francine was a middle-aged New Jerseyite who reminded Rosie of her mother, and as such, Rosie felt a certain uncertainty around her. She was entitled, or seemed that way; Rosie’s mother was not entitled, so perhaps it was one or more of her paternal aunts of whom Rosie was actually reminded. What Rosie snapped at Francine about was Francine’s complaint that she had missed the foliage season.

            “The foliage season is mid-fall, Ms. Kipperman,” she said with a heaviness to her voice. “It’s December 11.”

            “It’s still fall till the solstice, though.”

            “Are there still autumn leaves on the trees in Morris County?” asked Rosie. “No? Then why would there be autumn leaves still on the trees here? We’re like two degrees of latitude further north, and we’re further inland too. There’s half a foot of snow on the ground.”

            “I paid to see foliage. My hubby Roy told me it’d be here still.”

            “Your hubby Roy was mistaken or poorly informed, Ms. Kipperman.”

            “Are you mouthing off to me?!”

            It had taken the expert—as in literally taught to him at a postgraduate level—conflict resolution skills of Uncle Franklin to get Rosie out of that jam. He had even extracted a promise from Francine to visit Franklin County again next year earlier in the fall. There was a poem by Dickinson that Mags cited to Rosie when she told her about this little altercation she had had.

If you were coming in the Fall

I'd brush the Summer by

With half a smile, and half a spurn

As Housewives do, a Fly

❦ 

If I could see you in a year

I'd wind the months in balls

And put them each in separate Drawers

For fear the numbers fuse

❦ 

If only Centuries, delayed…

“How does the poem end?” Rosie asked Mags once she had trailed off at the beginning of the third stanza.

            “‘It goads me, like the goblin bee that will not state its sting,’ ‘It’ is time—not knowing when something dearly longed for and waited for is going to happen. If it is going to happen.”

            “I think that’s all of us, at some point or another in our lives,” Rosie said with a glance out the bedroom window at the road.

            “I think it is,” said Mags. “On the other hand, I completely understand that I doubt any of us are exactly longing for a repeat visit from Francine Kipperman or her ‘hubby.’”

            “All I can say is that I’m certainly not,” said Rosie with a theatrical little flip of her hair.

            “On another note,” said Mags, “do you have any Christmas Eve plans yet? You mentioned a while back you do tend to go to church on the big holidays. I’d be happy to go to Midnight Mass this year with you.”

            “I’m actually not feeling the Christmas spirit nearly as strongly in this year as in years past, but sure, Midnight Mass sounds good to me,” Rosie said. “What can you tell me about the Catholic parishes in Greenfield?”

            “There are two pretty standard Catholic parishes, like ones you could find anywhere, in Greenfield itself,” said Mags. “One is called Blessed Sacrament and the other one is called Holy Trinity. The main difference between them is that Blessed Sacrament has uglier architecture but prettier music. One town over in Turners Falls there are Our Lady of Czestochowa and Our Lady of Peace, and the main difference between those is that Czestochowa is very conservative and Peace is very liberal. I’m happy with any of the four since I can go either way on architecture versus music and I’ve never really liked politics with my religion. Do you have any preference given those descriptions?” She cast a somewhat concerned, assessing eye on Rosie, for some reason. It was the kind of gaze that made Rosie feel more relevant to other people’s worlds than she would have liked to be.

            “Let’s go with Holy Trinity,” she saqid. “That’s the white-and-green Carpenter Gothic one across from the co-op on Main Street, right?” Mags nodded. “A pretty building without any political philosophy to speak of sounds good to me for Christmas,” Rosie said. “Maybe if it were the Assumption or something I’d feel otherwise.” She shrugged. “That work okay for you, Mags?” she asked to make sure.

            “Sounds great to me,” Mags said. “Let’s make a plan of it.”

            “Will your boyfriend be coming with us?”

            “Almost definitely not. Are you okay? You sound almost a little jealous.”

            “I wouldn’t say I’m jealous, no,” Rosie said. “I just don’t get it.”

            “To be honest, I’m not sure I do either some of the time with him,” said Mags.

            “Then why…? Never mind. I know there’s a childhood crush involved. That’s reason enough, and I’ll try to be respectful of it.”

            And that was how the conversation between the two of them ended. When Christmas Eve actually did roll around a few days later, however, Rosie went not to Midnight Mass with Mags but to a Protestant service in Amherst with Grandpa and Uncle Franklin. This was how that came to pass.

            Uncle Franklin and Aunt Margaret had a friend called Clara Warman who lived in Turners Falls. Clara was about seventy-five years old, so a year or a few older than Grandma and Grandpa, and went to the same church in Bernardston that Uncle Franklin usually did. Aunt Margaret, who was agnostic, heard from Clara that she lacked “wheels” with which to get to Bernardston on Christmas Eve. Aunt Margaret knew at this point that Grandpa had prevailed upon Uncle Franklin to accompany him to Amherst, and so she suggested to Clara that she carpool with the two of them. Why exactly Grandpa insisted on going to church in Amherst in the first place, which was to say half an hour away even with no holiday traffic, was a riddle for the ages as far as Aunt Margaret was concerned.

            Clara was happy to carpool to Amherst but was, she said, uncomfortable riding in a car alone with two men, even ones she knew and trusted like Uncle Franklin and Grandpa. So Aunt Margaret offered to go with them. This would have worked out well for all concerned, but mere hours after the decision to do it this way had been arrived at, Aunt Margaret got an unexpected call from her ex-husband, asking that she accompany him and their three teenaged children to the service at the Lutheran church near the Honda dealership. This would have been her first time spending Christmas with her children in about four years. There was of course no way she could say no to this, so she asked Grandma, Rosie, and Mags if any of them were willing to schlep down to Amherst in her stead. Rosie objected to the plan the least, and so off she went.

            The drive down to Amherst on Christmas Eve was in fact a delight. There was a light snow and the other cars on the interstate, and on Route 116 once they got off the interstate, seemed somehow to be in good spirits, as if Christmas brought inert metal to life and emotion just as (old tales said) it imbued nonhuman animals with intellect and will. Grandpa was driving and he had on an old CD of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby alternating holiday standards, with the Andrews Sisters on one track and (of all people) a young David Bowie on another. The car’s heating system was turned up high enough for the benefit of the oldsters to be a little uncomfortable for Rosie, but she barely minded when she kept in mind how cold it was outside. Grandpa and Clara sang along to many of the songs on the CD, and after a while Rosie felt comfortable joining in with them. The level of bonhomie was actually beginning to surprise her. There was something almost like a spiritual experience about it, unselfconscious and looking outwards.

            When they got to Amherst there was, miraculous to report, yet more confusion, this time about to which specific church among the several mainline Protestant churches in and near Amherst Center they would be going. The assumption had been that they would go to First Congregational but it seemed Clara had heard wonderful things about the music at Grace Episcopal and so wanted to go there instead and see how she liked it. They argued for about ten minutes before deciding to defer to the wishes of a sweet old guest and go to the eleven o’ clock service at Grace.

            Grace was a greystone Gothic Revival building overlooking the snowbound common in the middle of Amherst. It was just the kind of church to attract a large congregation for an old-fashioned Christmas Eve, even though, as Rosie was given to understand, most Episcopal parishes these days had a hard time retaining worshippers on ordinary Sundays. She thought that was a shame; it was a lovely building, and she hated to think of a denomination with buildings like this struggling.

            The music was as promised. Rosie had never heard some of the carols they sang that evening—“Good Christian friends rejoice,” a setting of “O little town of Bethlehem” that she did not recognize, a few others. “Silent night” and “Joy to the world” were familiar, of course, as was “In the bleak midwinter,” which appeared on a King’s College Choir CD that Madison sometimes liked to listen to at this time of year. (Rosie missed Madison; indeed, she was surprised to find that most days she missed the kid more than missed most of her friends from high school and from SUNY Binghamton.) She wasn’t sure how Grandpa and Uncle Franklin were feeling about this service; her impression was that the one at the Congregational church would have been much more sober and more stripped-down. Conversely, she wasn’t sure how that one would have made her feel if they had gone to it the way they had planned to at first. It was funny how preferences—needs, even—could be in conflict like that, even between loved ones, between relatives.

            They left the church at half past midnight and came out into the chilly night air. Clara huddled in an overcoat; Rosie zipped her jacket up to the top. In the sky, above the lights of Amherst Center, she could see a few bright stars. Grandpa and Uncle Franklin wished a merry Christmas to five or six different people, then ushered the four of them into the Subaru and headed on home.

            Mags had already long since gotten back from Holy Trinity, which would seem to have its major Christmas Eve Mass quite a bit earlier in the night. She was relaxing in her and Rosie’s room, listening, it would seem, to something acoustic and contemplative. It did not sound particularly seasonal. “Vashti Bunyan again?” Rosie asked, naming an artist of this sort whom she remembered Mags enjoyed, even though as far as she recalled Vashti Bunyan’s voice did not sound much like this woman’s at all.

            “Close,” said Mags in a manner of speaking that signaled to Rosie that she had not really been that close. “Jen Cloher.”

            “Hmm,” said Rosie. “Got sick of hymns?”

            “You could say that. Holy Trinity just does the old standbys for its Christmas hymns. It’s lovely and always lifts my spirits, but once you get out you sort of…how should I put this…?…You sort of realize that there’s been this blast of concentrated Christmasiness that you’ve been hit with hard for the past hour and a half, and, if you’re me, you start to want to listen to something else when you get home. Am I making any sense?”

            “You are,” said Rosie.

            “You’re happy to sit with me listening to this for a little while?”

            “I am,” said Rosie.

            “Good.” Mags—who had just made reference to sitting, to sitting with Rosie—instead flopped down on her bed in that customary girlish way of hers. Rosie sat on her own bed, letting herself relax after what had, after all, been a hectic evening. Something like Christmas joy came down and rested, gently, on the two of them.

Novella: “A Trick of the Light” (Part One)

Note: This is part of a thematic series called Compulsory Figures, and not the first part. I wrote it in the great and terrible year 2020. Compulsory Figures in its entirety—written on and off between 2017 and 2021—will see the light of day eventually.

1.

The Train

Rosie Newgarth graduated from college in 2011 and moved back home right away. Since the Great Recession had hit she had had no idea what “came next” for her, and she did not want to live with her friends. She had majored in economics and graduated on time with a good, not great, GPA; she was physically attractive and had done some sportswear modeling one summer, and between that and a series of merit scholarships she graduated with less debt than one might have expected. Home for Rosie was the 1950s pseudo-Cape where her parents Richard and Martha and her sixteen-year-old sister Madison lived on Long Island. Newgarth was an anglicization devised at Ellis Island ninety or a hundred years before, and the family still owned a velvet painting of Luciano Pavarotti that Rosie’s paternal grandmother had given her as a Christmas present when she was ten years old.

            “You really should visit my folks one of these days, Rosie,” Martha Newgarth said to her one day that summer as they sat in their backyard drinking sangria—Martha in a sundress with a warm-toned, youthful pattern, Rosie in her bikini top and a pair of palazzo pants.

            “In Massachusetts?” Rosie asked, and Martha nodded. “I dunno; maybe,” Rosie said. “I’d like to. But I’d also like to focus on finding a job before I go around visiting people.”

            “That’s actually part of why I’m bringing this up, Rosie,” said her mother. “That bed and breakfast your grandfather was trying to start up might finally work now and they want someone there managing the books. You’re smart, you’re good with figures and with money. You studied economics. I think you should consider it.”

            “Mom, I just got back from four years in the Southern Tier. Forgive me if I’m not plotzing at the idea of moving to Discount Stars Hollow to work at Grandpa’s bed and breakfast.”

            “Don’t call it ‘Discount Stars Hollow’; there’s nothing cheap about it,” said Martha. “Rosie, it’s just a suggestion. Think it over, okay? Please just see how you feel about it for my sake?”

            “I think I already know how I feel about it, but okay,” Rosie said.

            And she did think it over; for the next two or three weeks she spent about half an hour each day, on average, contemplating what it might be like to be on the outskirts of Greenfield, Massachusetts 01301, managing the books for Grandpa Baring’s passion project hotel. She called him once, and he was glad to heart from her.

            “Rosie! So good to hear from you! Your mother told me you might call,” he said in a canny tone of voice. “How are things? Got that fancy diploma yet hanging on your wall? How’s the boyfriend? Still together?” he asked without waiting for an answer to the question about the diploma.

            “No, not still together, sorry to say,” Rosie said. “He wanted to be in some living situation with some friends of ours that I didn’t want.” She did not wish to get into the details with her grandfather, who was closing in on three-quarters of a century and had married before 1960. “So we had a big fight right before graduation and now we don’t speak anymore.”

            “Relationships are difficult,” said her grandfather after, apparently, a moment’s contemplation. “A donnybrook or two now and then is one thing. Survivable, I’d say normal. But right before graduation seems like about the worst time for it possible. Do you feel okay about it? I’m happy to send your Uncle Franklin down in his truck if I need to.”

            “There’s no need to send anybody down in his or her truck, Grandpa. I feel…I feel as if it ought to hurt more than it does. I find myself wishing that a lot of things these days hurt me more than they do.”

            “Live to my age, life’ll get to you,” her grandfather said. ‘Some day soon you’ll stop wishing things hurt more.” There was a lull in their talk; then he asked “You give any thought to coming to work up here for a bit? I figured that could be what you were calling about.”

            “It is to an extent,” said Rosie. “Is what I’m calling about to an extent, I mean. I have been thinking about it; the issue is that I don’t know what I want adult life to look like for me quite yet.” She avoided the temptation to add out loud but I’m pretty sure I don’t want it to look like that. There was another lull in the conversation; from downstairs Rosie could hear Madison practicing on her spinet piano that they had inherited from Great-Aunt Jenny, and outside Rosie’s bedroom window the back yard sat green-brown and pluripotent.

            “Just be in touch more, okay, Rosie?” her grandfather asked. “It does me and your grandmother a world of good to hear from you, mentally speaking.” She nodded, and made a little sound in her throat to indicate to him that she was nodding. Then they hung up. She set her phone—a few years old; still not a smartphone—aside on her writing desk and flopped down on her bed. Vague yet not unpleasant memories of times when she had gone up to Greenfield to visit her Baring relatives there passed through her mind the way rosary beads had passed through her pious child fingers ten or fifteen years before. A house painted in the colors of a barn; a door being opened to let some kind of long-haired cat in; a car ride to a garden supply store with her Aunt Margaret and another young girl whose face Rosie remembered more faithfully than her name. There had been cool summers back then up that way, and she had once or twice gone for a fully clothed swim in some river or other, falsely thinking it would keep her warmer. She recalled food of some heavy, tragic ethnic origin, and a Christmas Eve service in one of those whitewashed churches with windows of mostly clear glass. She recalled raspberry ice cream and astonishingly bitter iced tea.

            Would life really be so much different if she did spend a while up there, she wondered? What was she doing here, in Nassau County, that was so worth her while that she could not stand but to stay? Each day she got up, texted, listened to music, listened to Madison practice piano (which practice, increasingly, could also be called music), ate and drank, sat with Mom or with Dad in the back yard, and so on, and so on. Some Sundays she went to St. Agnes for lack of anything else to do, and some Tuesdays she went to see a blockbuster at the Loew’s in the shopping center. In this manner three and a half months had already passed by, and passed her by, since she had graduated in Binghamton in May. It was a life of leisure, but leisure with little chance of gaining dimensions, of developing mystery or depth. She felt an attachment to it, but it worried her to think that this feeling might not correspond to anything in the real world. An observer who did not know her might very well conclude that what she was doing these days was little worth her while. She almost felt just such an observer, some unknown titan lurking deep in the early history of her brain, convicting her of a vague and mild but somehow undeniable guilt. It was not a feeling that she relished.

            After August passed Rosie made up her mind. She had still not found a job with enough hours or enough pay to seriously change her situation here, so she might as well take the Amtrak up to Greenfield to see what she could see there. It would be an open-ended visit, probably not a very long one, but she could not honestly say that for sure. She called her grandfather again and he told her that he was able and ready to host her for just as long as she wished. Now all that remained was to arrange the travel itself. Somehow the romance of doing it by rail was not a romance that Rosie was willing to give up.

            She secured her ticket. It was one-way even though she fully intended to return to New York, because she did not want to commit herself to returning at any particular time, and in particular not at any time that might fall after she got sick of her Baring relatives. She was still convinced that indeed she would get sick of them eventually; they were old, and had a dour and uncool flintiness to them, one and all. Rosie did not understand herself to be cool, but she certainly did not understand herself to be flinty or dour either. She was picturing an environment like in that book Cold Comfort Farm, tragicomic to a point that would be difficult to take seriously.

            Her last evening at home Madison put on a little concert for her. Madison’s voice was a beautiful contralto much richer than you would expect from a rising high school junior, better actually than her skills with the piano as an instrument; she plugged away at the chords of “St. James Infirmary” and “These Foolish Things” while her voice carried the melodies, and even when she got to one of Satie’s piano pieces she hummed, or keened, along with it. They had lox bagels for dinner; ten or twelve hours after the appointed time for such a meal, but an important and crowd-pleasing send-off considering that in much of small-town New England you couldn’t find a decent bagel sandwich for love or money. It was the middle of September and the wind had an aroma of fall or even of early winter when Rosie went outside to look down the evening street for the last time in weeks or months.

            The nearest train station to Greenfield was an unmanned little platform in Amherst, through which the Vermonter passed once a day in either direction. Amherst was known for Emily Dickinson, lefty politics, and at least two or three different colleges, including the one Madison’s friend Jessica wanted to go to in a few years. Rosie wasn’t sure what Greenfield was known for, other than her family; she had asked her grandfather this over the phone and he had observed that not everywhere had the luxury of being known for something; and besides, what was Rockville Center known for other than police unions and an obscure Catholic diocese? “There are quite a few Underground Railroad houses in this area though,” he conceded, “our own house not least of all. Or at least that’s the family lore that’s come down to us from your Baring great-great-grandmother. Remarkable character, my grandmother, she was. I feel somehow you’d have liked her if you’d have been alive back then.”

            “When did your grandmother die?” Rosie asked. “Out of curiosity, if you don’t mind the question. I don’t think I’ve ever heard my mother mentioning having known her.”

            “No, she never did,” Grandpa Baring said. “People had kids younger back then but they tended to die younger too. My grandmother passed in 1950, when I was eleven or twelve; I forget which side of my birthday it fell on. Not a good birthday for me either way.” He paused. “I apologize,” he said, “for sharing too much about it, if share too much about it I have.”

            “Don’t worry, Grandpa. I’m easygoing about oversharing.”

            “Oversharing,” said her grandfather, and she actually heard pen scrape against notepad. “I’d better remember that word, I feel. So thank you for it, Rosie. I’ll see you soon?”

            “Yes, Grandpa. I’ll see you very soon.” Rosie hung up. She sighed. At this time tomorrow evening she would be just settling in up in Greenfield, probably wanting to sleep after a long journey. It was odd to think of, and she felt that something about her life was changing more irrevocably than the fact that it was meant to be a temporary visit would suggest. A strange feeling, a feeling that left her with little in the way of sympathy for herself. She wondered if she would be able to explain it to her family when she got up there.

            She took the train into New York and got on the Vermonter at Penn Station. It had been her hope that she would embark at Grand Central, a much better-looking and better-feeling and thus more auspicious station from which to begin a long journey northward, but she was to have no such luck. So she let herself be content with Penn Station, and settled onto the train as best she could as it passed out of the city.

            Between the city and the Connecticut state line the train passed through an odd borderland of coastal wetlands, abandoned factories, suburban tracts, and sometimes a school running track or a dreary baseball diamond. The businesses whose signs she was able to see from the window of her compartment mostly had name like Moskowitz’s and Martinelli’s. As the train passed into Connecticut and turned north on its long line towards Canada, the Italian and Jewish names on the signs and billboards gradually gave way to—or, at least, were gradually supplemented with—Irish and Waspish ones: Shea’s, Clark’s, Murphy’s.

            The train came to Amherst. By that time Rosie had read about half of a Haruki Murakami novel, which she had disliked, and maybe a third of an old horror paperback, which she had loved. A taste for horridness in her literature had coexisted with normalcy in her dress and affect for about a year now; the former was something to which her now-ex-boyfriend had introduced her.

            The station in Amherst was, as she had been told, an unmanned landing with a little red brick building that looked like it was long-disused. Trees now showing the first blush of fall color shielded a busy-sounding road from view. A man with a short white beard and an expression that implied a tragic sense of life stood next to a Subaru Outback waiting for her. It was her grandfather. She waved, and he came over and hugged her tightly. The outer voyage was over and the inner voyage would soon begin. 

2.

The Dinner

The drive from Amherst to Greenfield was pleasant, if a bit chillier than Rosie would have expected. Her grandfather, for reasons best known to himself, evidently did not feel the need to discuss how her train ride had been or how she felt about being up here after having said before that she would rather not. Instead he would laconically, almost churlishly, point out the sights with a jab of his pink, hairy hand and a few words from his close-pursed lips. The way he spoke about the things they passed would seem to heighten a feeling of some kind of inevitable tragedy. “We’re passing the UMass campus,” he’d say, or “We’re passing the First Church of Sunderland,” or “That there’s the Yankee Candle headquarters; its says ‘Scenter of the Universe’ on it.” Rosie felt that he would likely take much the same attitude towards showing her the house when they got to it. “Your cousin Mags went to UMass,” he observed at one stage, and Rosie did not want to wonder out loud who her cousin Mags was and why she never heard her mother talk about her.

            They took a few back streets through Greenfield and ended up on a partially suburbanized road leading up away from the town. The house was just after a graveyard on this road, between and behind a patchy curtain of yellowing and browning trees. It had been repainted since Rosie was young and was now a mousy sage-green color that made it fade somewhat into its surroundings. It was in what she believed was called a Federal style, vernacular, wooden and shingle. Her grandfather turned the Subaru up a longish gravel driveway and waved hello to a young woman Rosie did not recognize who was watering a raised bed of what looked like some kind of fall root vegetable. She was a few inches taller than Rosie, looked about her age, and had a pale face with a pointed nose between curtains of auburn hair. She was dressed in a tan jacket and a long multicolored skirt and the watering can that she held was of battered and slightly corroded metal of some kind.

            “Mags, this is your cousin Rosary Newgarth,” said her grandfather as they got out of the car. “She goes by Rosie.”

            “I remember. It’s good to see you again after all these years, Rosie.” Mags shook her hand and pulled her into a loose half-hug. Rosie racked her brains and then finally saw it, something unchanged in the roiling hair or the big glaring grey eyes. Yes, this was that girl with whom she had gone to the garden store and swum in the river long ago. She tightened the hug a little, and it felt like a long-forgotten instinct.

            “You have a good trip up, Rosie?” someone asked as they entered into what Rosie believed was called the house’s mudroom. He was a thick-set man with very dark hair and dark blue eyes, standing next to a tall, thin woman who seemed to have been painted from the same palette. They looked to be between forty-five and fifty years old, about Rosie’s father’s age and a little older than her mother, and she recognized them as Uncle Franklin and Aunt Margaret, her grandparents’ two eldest children. Uncle Franklin was in a plaid shirt and black jeans, Aunt Margaret in a plaid shirt and bluish-grey jeans. She held in her hand a pitcher of what looked like the bitter iced tea that Rosie remembered from her girlhood. One or two lemons wedges, which had clearly been squeezed out as much as humanly possible, floated in it like tablets or oracles cast into the sea. Rosie nodded, and told Uncle Franklin that, yes, her trip had gone fine and she felt excited for the weeks to come. And after all, that was true now; something about actually getting up here had reminded Rosie of the fascination that this place had held for her back in her early days, and she looked forward now to rediscovering that if she could.

            It was a little before six o’ clock and dinner was at seven, so Aunt Margaret took it upon herself to give Rosie a tour of the house. It had a nineteenth-century skeleton on which an up-to-date kitchen and bathroom had at some recent point been grafted like old skin around new wine—or was it the other way around? There were five bedrooms, three upstairs and two downstairs; one was Grandpa and Grandma’s, one was Mags’s, and the other three—two up and one down; the three that were easiest to reach considering the house’s warrenlike floor plan—were in principle for guests. Rosie was what was in principle about it and Aunt Margaret told her that Uncle Franklin was living her for the time being after a collapse in his life, a collapse of some unspecified but dramatic-seeming kind. One of the two real guests room, then, was at the moment occupied by a family from Maine, who were out visiting with friends right now and would be taking off after breakfast tomorrow (Aunt Margaret would be leaving after dinner tonight to return to her divorcée’s apartment in downtown Greenfield). Rosie wanted to ask where, all this being the case, she was going to sleep, but it slipped her mind when Aunt Margaret started telling her something about the house’s radiators.

            Dinner was something called a New England boiled dinner; it was a plate of boiled potatoes with other vegetables and some sort of corned beef. Grandpa Baring informed Rosie that it had entered the region’s cookery via immigration from Ireland, and Rosie said, by way of a joke, that it tasted like seven hundred and fifty years of oppression and regret must have felt. To her relief, everybody laughed at this.

            “I know the family that’s staying in that upstairs room won’t be eating with us tonight in particular,” she said, “but in general, can we expect people staying here as guests to eat with us more dinnertimes than not? I just want to know what to expect in terms of, well, privacy in this house, frankly. It’s a question that I have to admit I’ve been apprehensive about.” Nobody answered immediately. “I’m sorry if there’s something obvious that I’m missing,” Rosie said. “I don’t know much about what it’s like to run and bed and breakfast; I’m a numbers girl, not a hospitality industry girl.”

            “I’m going to address you as ‘Numbers Girl’ from now on, Rosie,” Mags said. “It’s cute.”

            “Go right ahead,” Rosie said. “Can somebody please answer my question about who will be here at a typical dinnertime?”

            “Just those of us who live here,” said Rosie’s grandmother, who looked almost exactly like Aunt Margaret only with silver hair and a more advanced set of crows’-feet. “Guests are responsible for their own meals other than breakfast. We have a narrow view of what the mission of a bed and breakfast ought to be, in part because of our own much-depleted resources, a subject that I would have been wondering about for a while now if I were you.”

            “I had been, actually, now that you mention it,” said Rosie. “Is this paying for Grandma and Grandpa and Mags and Uncle Franklin’s keep?” Uncle Franklin shook his head. “Okay.”

            “We’ve got money in the blue chips,” Uncle Franklin explained. “Just not as much of it as we used to.”

            “What does the bed and breakfast business actually pay for, then?”

            “Itself, barely,” said Grandpa Baring. “It holds a fascination for me, hosting people for a living. Something to do in my golden years—in my retirement, that is.” Rosie realized that she actually had no idea what manner of a career it was that her grandfather was retired from.

            “I see,” said Rosie. “If all that’s needed is to keep the bed and breakfast itself in the black, then I think I can manage that reasonably.”

            “You’re staying?” asked Uncle Franklin.

            “I’ve been here two hours,” Rosie said. “Ask me that again when I’ve been here two weeks. That is how long my dad always told me I should stick with a task to see how it goes.”

            “Helluva name, Newgarth,” said Uncle Franklin. “Where’s it come from, if you know?”

            “Ellis Island anglicization,” said Rosie, “I think of an uncommon Italian name called Nogarotto or Nogaretti. People think it’s German or Dutch for some reason; I’ve never understood why.”

            “Helluva name, Nogarotto,” Uncle Franklin said with a little bit more of a twinkle in his eye than he had had at any point before this.

            “Or Nogaretti,” said Mags. “Rosie, I’m sorry we couldn’t welcome you with a more impressive dinner. There was this elaborate salad that I found a recipe for in an old book of Aunt Margaret’s, but I couldn’t find some of the ingredients when I went to Foster’s this morning so I went with the old standby instead. I know it’s not very impressive.”

            “Did you cook it?” Rosie asked. Rosie herself was an acceptable cook, and Madison was growing into a good, if unsystematic, one, so back home their parents need not cook nearly as often as their inability ever to agree on a takeout option would normally have implied. Rosie was cautious about how such things were handled in such a household as this one appeared to be.

            “I cook more nights than not,” Mags said. “Breakfast is Grandma and Uncle Franklin’s responsibility, though, and we’re each responsible for our own lunch. That’ll include you, of course, once you’ve been here for a while and have your own stuff in the pantry and the fridge and so forth.”

            “I had no doubt,” said Rosie. It came out a bit more aggressive than she had meant it or wanted it to. Aunt Margaret looked up from her corned beef and potatoes to give Rosie a somewhat sharp look, probably because of that accidental but unmistakable harshness.

            “So you have issues with preparing your own food, Rosie?” Aunt Margaret asked. It sounded like a sincere question, much more sincere than it probably would have been had Rosie asked it of somebody herself.

            “No,” Rosie said. “That system sounds all right to me. Sorry if I gave the wrong idea.”

            “Don’t worry about it,” said Aunt Margaret. Rosie was unsure what that meant here.

            “What do you like to eat, Rosie?” her grandfather asked her then. “Franklin usually does the shopping so if you’ll just put things up on the Big Board when you want ‘em or need ‘em then we ought to be able to get ‘em for you.” He jabbed a thumb at a whiteboard on one of the kitchen’s walls. Rosie would not have called it a particularly big board, but it did have the pride of place amidst the other items in the kitchen that a genuinely big board might well have had. Currently it had written on it peanut butter (chunky), hot sauce, rice cakes, bacon, black tea, Earl Grey tea, unsalted butter, and incense. Rosie asked what the incense was for.

            “Mags likes the stuff,” Grandma said. “Burns it all hours.”

            “Couldn’t tell you why,” said Grandpa. “Might could be a habit she picked up from her mom and dad.” This raised, more or less explicitly, the question of who exactly Mags’s mom and dad actually were. Rosie’s occasionally-seen Aunt Lizzie and her husband, maybe? Aunt Lizzie was the little sister of Mom, Aunt Margaret, and Uncle Franklin, and she had married someone almost-famous. It was not at all clear to Rosie why, if Mags was Aunt Lizzie’s child, she would be living here rather than somewhere “better.” Rosie looked at Mags. Her big grey eyes were turned down to her plate of vegetables, but not, apparently, with embarrassment or with desire not to be understood. Did Rosie want to be understood, she wondered? For a long time now it had haunted and bedeviled her, the prospect and possibility of knowing what she wanted and being known for who she was. It was one of the scariest things in the world to think of, and something about Mags, this putative cousin of hers whose face had always stuck with her, made her feel as if her fears might soon come true.

            “Some day I’m going to tell one of my online friends the awful truth about this family,” Mags said archly. Rosie wondered if she really meant this. Somehow or other, she hoped that she did not.

            “Eat your vegetables, Mags,” Aunt Margaret said to her offhandedly.

            “Rosie,” said Mags as she ate her vegetables as instructed, “what music do you listen to?”

            Rosie shrugged. “Lady Gaga, Adele, Arcade Fire, sometimes Taylor Swift or something off some opera CDs I got from my Newgarth grandmother. You know, white people music for the most part. You?”

            “Much the same,” said Mags, “as well as some stuff that’s a little more wooish and mystical like Loreena McKennitt and Heather Dale. Do you know either of them?”

            “I know of Loreena McKennitt,” said Rosie. “Oh—I forgot to mention traditional pop. Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day, and so on. Would you believe my sixteen-year-old sisters got into that stuff and then got me into it?”

            “I’d believe it,” said Grandma.

            Grandpa nodded. “Lotta younger people getting sick of the stuff on the radio and going back to the classics,” he said. “Not to make a moral thing of it of course like some of my old-man friends do, but it can do my heart good sometimes to be able to discuss this stuff with the young. You and I could have some good talks about it, Rosie. Helen O’Connell is a favorite of mine.”

            Rosie nodded. “Helen O’Connell is great,” she said, even though she had only heard a few of Helen O’Connell’s songs and was worried she might be getting her mixed up with Kitty Kallen. “I’d be glad to talk music with you or with Mags,” she said. “It’s a good thing Mags and I listen tot a lot of the same stuff since Aunt Margaret implied she and I will be in the same room for the first little while I’m here.”

            Mags looked at Aunt Margaret. “That’s the decision that’s been arrived at?” she asked.

            “Are you unhappy with it, Mags?” Aunt Margaret asked her. Mags shook her head. “You seem a little perturbed,” Aunt Margaret said.

            “I’m not unhappy with it, quite the contrary,” said Mags, whatever that meant, “but ‘perturbed’ is a good word for the fact that you didn’t ask me about this beforehand and I’m just hearing it from Rosie now at this dinner. That’s all,” she finished, with a bite of carrots.

            “Would you rather set things up otherwise?” asked Rosie. She was honestly hoping that Mags would say yes; having a roommate was not an aspect of college life that she missed now that it was over.

            “I would rather we see how it works out, to be honest with you,” said Mags. “We might as well. More room for guests.”

            “More room for guests,” conceded Rosie, and she felt uncomfortable about it till she saw how honest Mags’s smile was.

3.

The Conversation 

September passed into October and Rosie got to know the guests, the family, and how the house and the area worked. She reassured her grandparents early on that, although she was Catholic, they did not need to worry about getting her to Mass except on the major holidays. Mags was also Catholic, but otherwise the whole household was Yankee Congregationalist; indeed, Uncle Franklin had apparently been ordained as a Congregationalist minister at some church out in Chicago before coming back East after his crackup. Grandma and Grandpa went to a church in a nearby little town called Bernardston rain or shine each Sunday morning. Rosie took a ride up there with them once and was interested to see that the church had a rainbow flag out front of it and was just up the little town’s main drag from a pizza place.

            She and Mags managed to share a room more or less convivially. It was an odd room, with a boarded-up fireplace and a closet that stretched out strangely along one of the outer walls of the house; it had two twin beds in it. Rosie was unsure what exactly Mags did in terms of work, whether it be for the bed and breakfast or managing the blue chips or doing something else to earn her own keep. She spent many afternoons cooped up in their heavily shaded room, reading old pulp paperbacks in her one of the two small beds. Some evenings she would sit up late with a jeweler’s glass in one eye working on crafting projects of beadwork and wire. She kept the resulting pieces—decorations, jewelry, or wherever they may be—in the drawers of a work desk that took up one corner of the room; Rosie was loath to go over there and rifle through it, wanting to be polite despite the temptation.

            One day in early October, when the trees of Massachusetts were blazing, Rosie complained of a pain in her stomach.

            “What’s wrong?” Mags asked, casting a brief glance at Rosie before going back to one of her crafting projects.

            “Oh, it’s just my period,” Rosie said, feeling a little embarrassed. “Lately it’s been coming in weird fits and starts. It’s more painful than it used to be too.”

            “I know of numbers of herbal remedies you can take to regulate that,” Mags said casually. “Although I wouldn’t recommend most of them if you sleep with men and have strong feelings about abortion.”

            Rosie shook her head. “Haven’t slept with a guy in six months, don’t think much about abortion unless someone else brings it up,” she said. “Hit me.”

            Mags proceeded to rattle off the names of five or six different flowering plants Rosie had never heard of, plus something called cramp bark that she remembered from a joke in an old episode of Seinfeld. Mags—whose puffy white blouse and dark jeans were also reminding Rosie of Seinfeld—noted Rosie’s lack of recognition and wrote down the names of the herbs on a legal pad for her. “If you do start sleeping with men again then these might be best avoided,” she reiterated.

            “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Rosie. “It—do you mind if I ask if you’re one of those girls who have an interest in witchcraft, spells, what-have-you?”

            “Don’t call me a ‘girl’; I’m pretty sure I’m two years older than you,” said Mags. “And yes, sort of. I like herbs, I like flowers, I like cooking, and most of the prayers my mother and father taught me were to get boons from various saints. So I’m Catholic, but…” She shrugged. “Catholicism’s probably the most witchlike form of Christianity anyway,” she said, “although you didn’t hear that from me if someone chats with us after Midnight Mass in a couple months or whatever.”

            “Who exactly are your mother and father?” asked Rosie. “Your last name is McNulty, right?”

            Mags nodded. “My name is Margaret Evangeline McNulty, yes.”

            “I’d been assuming you were Aunt Lizzie’s daughter, but if I remember right, Aunt Lizzie’s husband’s last name is Scott or Skerritt or something like that.”

            “Scott, yes. Chuck Scott, the Food Network guy. No, I’m not Aunt Lizzie’s daughter; she was only sixteen when I was born, and she got married young but not that young. My parents were Charles and Sherrill McNulty; the McNultys and the Barings always had close ties in these parts, and your grandfather’s family took my father in when his father turned to drink and started beating on him. This was in the early sixties, when Aunt Margaret and Uncle Franklin were babies and just before your mother was born.”

            Rosie paused to give this some thought. There was much that this still did not explain—Mags and her father going completely without mention in twenty-two years of Mom’s stories about the family, the fact that Mags called the same people “aunt” and “uncle” that Rosie did but referred to Grandpa Baring as “your grandfather,” the fact that Mags had affirmatively called herself Rosie’s cousin for weeks now rather than qualifying it in any way. Rosie guessed that some of this would probably make sense if she put two and two together, but she did not have the energy to do that just this minute; she was still having a bad period, and she had slept badly the night before.

            “What’s that you’re working on?” she asked Mags. “With the beads and the wires.”

            “This is what I do to earn my living,” Mags said. “I make jewelry inspired by classic sci-fi and fantasy novels and sell them through an online store. I started doing it for friends in the UMass sci-fi club when I was a student there four or five years ago, but it surprised me how many people were willing to pay good money for the things. It takes up a lot of my time, but I enjoy it and I’m good at it and some of the money I make from it does go to help the rest of this family stay afloat.” She got up from where she was sitting, handed a bracelet of some sort to Rosie where Rosie sat in her own bed, and went back to where she had been sitting. “That one is for A Case of Conscience by James Blish. The ones I’m working on now are for The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.”

            Rosie looked at the bracelet that Mags had handed her. It was made of a tight spiral of thin strong wire and on it were green and silver beads and charms depicting a crucifix, a lizard, a television set, and several other things for which she lacked context. “Have you read it?” Mags was asking her.

            She shook her head. “I haven’t even heard of it. I’ve heard of the other two, though.”

            “Not many people have heard of Blish these days except as an author of Star Trek novelizations, but in his own day he was, as our esteemed Vice President would say, a big fucking deal,” Mags said. “I’d recommend A Case of Conscience if I’ve read your tastes right over the past few weeks. If you take that recommendation, I hope you’ll let me know what you think of it?”

            “Of course I will,” said Rosie.

            “So what about you?” asked Mags, with her legs crossed and her arms crossed and her head held high and arch over her body. “What’s your story, Rosie? I’ve gleaned bits and pieces of it over the past few weeks, and of course I remember you from back when we were girls, but I don’t think I’ve ever been privy to the full Rosie Newgarth experience, so to speak. You went to a state university in New York, didn’t you?”

            Rosie nodded. “SUNY Binghamton,” she said. “Generally considered the best SUNY campus, although believe it or not that wasn’t why I applied; I just didn’t want to be too near home.” Mags nodded sympathetically, but probably not empathetically given that if she had been to UMass Amherst herself it had clearly not been that much of a consideration for her. “Binghamton is an interesting place. It’s one of those old industrial cities out near the Pennsylvania line. Lots of poor black people and what I guess used to be called ‘white ethnics’ whereas the campus was mostly middle-class kids, mostly white, lots Jewish. So you can imagine that town-gown relations were a bit touch-and-go. But that itself is something I learned a lot from, especially considering that I’d spent my whole life until then in Nassau County, on Long Island, with its police unions and so forth.”

            “Aren’t Jewish people themselves considered ‘white ethnic’ among people who use such terms?” asked Mags. “Never mind; I know that’s not the point. I understand what you’re saying.”

            “Thank you.”
            “You majored in economics, right?”

            Rosie nodded. “So did both my parents. Actually when they met my mom was doing her BA in resource economics and my dad was in the MBA program at the same university. They graduated in the same year and got married right after. I don’t think they were ever in a situation where he was helping teach a class she was in; they’re both too ethical for that, I think. They were always very concerned that Madison and I not feel like we were owed a living or like the rules didn’t apply to us. That’s probably part of why rather than coming right up here when it was suggested I fired off a few last salvos of job applications first. I don’t like nepotism, or whatever you’d call it instead of nepotism in a granddaughter’s case.”

            “Hmm,” said Mags with what sounded an awful lot like mild disapproval. “But that isn’t your real number one reason for not having wanted to come back up here, is it, Rosie? I don’t doubt that it played a role, but when you did come here, as a little girl, I remember that you were always so concerned to go home and get back into things with your parents and sister. Do you remember the Heath Fair? It’s that little agricultural fair we went to together in I think the year 2000, when you were eleven and I was thirteen.”

            Rosie thought back on it and came up with vague, pleasing memories of deep and unapologetic rurality. Petting zoos; competitions in various things that could be grown or jarred or bottled; a string band; some sort of contest in feats of strength between a series of tractors. It had been in late summer, probably, a series of warm evenings with a breeze with fall’s first bite in it. She remembered that it had been a long drive up to the fairgrounds, even from Greenfield; it must have been very deeply and very specially local, and thus, since she was a visitor, very carefully and very magnanimously shared with her. She nodded. She did remember it, whether or not she remembered it in the way that Mags apparently wanted her to, whether or not she remembered about it the things that Mags apparently wished to evoke.

            “I think you were apprehensive about being among people you knew less well in a situation where everybody would have to constantly invoke blood family ties rather than actual familiarity to justify spending all our time together,” Mags said. “Of course, you and I can’t invoke even that and have to rely on a network of relationships that existed twenty or thirty years before either of us were born. But now you’re here; you volunteered yourself for that ordeal. And it is something of an ordeal; I don’t say that sarcastically at all.”

            “Are you going to let me speak for myself, Mags, or are you just going to analyze me all afternoon?” Rosie asked.

            “I’m sorry,” said Mags, and she genuinely did seem to be sorry. “Please, go ahead with what you were saying about your parents.”

            “Oh, just that they’re very well-matched and it’s in fact a little strange to think of Mom as having originally come from another family—from this family—given that it’s always been Dad and Dad’s family who I’ve…known along with her,” said Rosie, trailing off as she realized that known along with her was a belabored phrase of a kind that deflated what she was getting at.

            “I wish I could say the same about my parents,” said Mags. “Things weren’t easy when I was a kid.” She shrugged. “Probably I shouldn’t make this about me, though,” she said. “Aunt Margaret’s always telling me I’m a little too focused on myself and my own needs. You seem not to have that problem, at least not as much.”

            “I wish I had that problem,” said Rosie. “I have the ‘productivity’ problem; the Recession’s not letting me ‘contribute’ the way I think I’m supposed to, and being an econ major makes me feel better about that rather than worse. I thought I’d be working at some regional business or the branch headquarters of some big white-collar firm right around now. Not glamorous, maybe not even that socially useful, but, well, something I wouldn’t feel embarrassed telling others. When I was at that coffeeshop downtown the other day I ran into this other girl who was new in town and she asked me what I was doing up here. I told her I’d taken a job in hospitality management.”

            “But you have taken a job in hospitality management,” said Mags. “You helping Aunt Margaret talk down our electric bill the other day is going to save us at least fifteen hundred dollars a year without us having to raise prices for the guests.”

            “It feels weird when it’s for your family,” said Rosie. As she was saying it she realized that there was a slight ambiguity here, around the idea of family. Mags had put her finger on this when she pointed out that it was just family that Rosie had here, not people with whom she was familiar. Yet the two words, family and familiar, were similar enough that Rosie had a difficult time making the distinction, especially since they had the same etymology; therefore she felt guilty, as if to complain about her family was to complain about being among people who loved her, rather than about being among people whom she did not yet know well. Mags seemed to understand at least well enough to nod.

            “I doubt it would feel less weird if we weren’t your family,” Mags said. “New subject, but do you have any pets at home you’re missing? I’m thinking of getting a cat—not a black one, if you can believe it; I’ve always liked tabbies and calicos.”

            The change of subject was abrupt, but Rosie experienced it as a lifeline; probably Mags had meant it as one. As it happened, she had a late, lamented, beloved dog whose history she could relate to her cousin. Mags was happy to hear that history, and so they passed the time companionably as that afternoon winged into a chilly autumn evening.

Short Story: “The Necromancer’s Sabbath”

It had been hard, almost impossible, for a long time now, for her to care overmuch about how she made her living. She did the best she could; the things she did, though furtive and usually against the Law, were to help people cope with the evils of the world, if they could. She furnished dubious potions to jilted women and talismans of protection and imprecation to farmers whose cows were being rustled; once in a great while for the bereaved or the desperate she would call up the spirits of the dead. By the dead she suspect herself unloved; they were content, usually, it seemed, to be undisturbed in that state. She was relieved when things went otherwise, when it felt as if someone was thanking her for giving a last look backward at the land of the living, under the streaming sky. Cold lips had kissed hers, once, after her husband had died; that woman’s shade had felt sorry for her, she thought. It was pretty to think so, of course; it flattered her and made her feel a sneaking kindness towards herself for reasons of which she was not fully sure. “Have some fish,” she would always say to people; “you look tired; you must be hungry; have you come a long way?” Seldom to herself. That was something easy to notice, that ungenerousness with herself, and she thought it was common enough among decent people, everyday people, unimpressive people. It seemed so nice, too nice, to think that that shade might have wanted to recompense that a little, but it was hard not to suspect so, and to hope.

            In any case, she would say to people, “I’m doing it as toil, I’m doing it because life is very hard, I’m doing it because if I do then you don’t have to.” It was true, or at any rate true that she thought so, and she was glad to think so. Others who did these things for people could seem so slimy and acquisitive and inane. They thought nothing serious, real, or kind for the jilted women, the cow-proud men, the grieving friends and kinsfolk of the defunct—and sometimes, she worried, she felt nothing for them at all. That might, though, have been a courtesy in its way, for at times when she thought and knew more about them it would have been easier for her to tell on them to the judge and to his protégé the king.

            She liked the king, and she saw the country as a place for higher hopes under him. “The times are good, maybe,” people would say to her, “but they are too good for you. He’ll put the likes of you in chains, you know, or to the sword. He’s been commanded to, you now; he knows the Law and so do we and so do you.”

            “I know full well and I don’t think my work is so good he mustn’t touch it,” she said to her friend Dinah the weaver-woman once when Dinah had just made this kind of point to her. “I work with hard people and people hard done by. None of us should want that there should be many such people, if we’re at peace…” She shook her head and chuckled at herself for talking such a way, like a public person. Then she asked Dinah if she might like help with her weaving, though she knew full well, also, that Dinah was to be a woman alone at her loom. And Dinah laughed and said no thank you and asked her after her storm-tossed children.

            Her children were prisoners, or slaves, or had been; some now were once again happy and free, she had heard. “You should always hope they’ll be home on a day, Tamar,” Dinah would tell her, and she did so hope. Their prayers together, for that, had gone into every thread of a covering that Dinah had woven for her doorway; Tamar, house-proud of her hovel, had saved up special for that. To comfortably afford that had taken her fees for two callings of the shades that she would not have taken on otherwise. It was always something like that coming up, and her expectation of going honest declined bit by bit to intention, and then to hope, and then to wish.

            “You could sell the door hanging,” the living and the dead would always say to her, and eventually Dinah got around to saying it to her as well. “Sell it back to me, even,” Dinah said, “and I’ll pay you back more for it than what you first paid me, and make a new one for you also, only simpler and without a pattern that uses any murex.”

            “But I simply do not want to sell you back the door hanging, Dinah,” Tamar said to her dearest friend, “even for more murex than I could shake a stick at in seventy lifetimes.”

            “I didn’t say that you wanted to, or even that I think you ought to want to. I said that you could and that if you did it would solve one of your problems. I’ll allow that it could make news problems for you instead, of course; I’d never tell you otherwise.”

            “What are these new problems, do you think?” Tamar asked then, and it was a question that she asked in full knowledge that she would not have wanted an answer had one been possible. “I don’t think anything bad would happen; it would upset me, that’s all, as so much upsets me…all the people I see are just so sad, don’t you know? Almost all of the time, especially me, and even you, Dinah, if you’ll pardon me for saying so.”

            “No need to pardon the truth,” Dinah said, though Tamar felt that maybe if she was going to say something like that then she should have said it in a rather grimmer tone of voice. “Life can be hard to face, just as death can—can’t it? We are born to trouble like sparks are born to fly upward. I might know about that but you would know better, begging your pardon.”

            “No need to pardon the truth,” Tamar said. “It is not even what feels worst, you know—hosting the shadows like that. This life and this death can get so much the crueler.” She shook her head. “But no need to get into it. All we ever really have is being here, I guess.”

            “Being here, being there.”

            “Yes; being here, being there.”

            Tamar after visiting with Dinah went in the cool of the day to the wells, then home under house-shadow and door-hanging shadow, in the cooling evening and night. She slept along with thought and memory and rumor, or maybe that way of putting things was over-wise, as thought and memory and rumor themselves could be over-wise. The mind picked up; if often did at night in this hilly home of hers. A cat came in with a tail depending from betwixt its teeth, and Tamar scratched the soft twin bumps of the crown of his little head. She called the cat Miu, when she called him anything at all.

 ❦

That night she got the worst sleep she had had in many years. Shades, unhateful but unbidden and unwanted, came to her all hours. They stood and brooded, mostly, but one or two tried to talk to her. Yes, two—one looked like a mask to her, the other, a glimmer such as one saw deep in a well, or a heat-haze, maybe. They tried to question her, as she was wont to question the likes of them, and she did not fear them; she felt something else, So was spent half the night, at least. What they seemed to be asking was, “Do you miss them?”—and she hadn’t a good answer for that. The next day was the eve of the Sabbath.

 ❦

The spirit of God had been poured out upon the king and he promised glory for the people and redemption for their captives from alien hands. She believed this promise and had confidence that her children would be free and whole and with her once more in this little town of theirs so high up here in these sun-baked and wind-withered hills. She wondered in her more self-unkind moments if they would have wanted, really, to be back in such a place with their tired old mother, but it wasn’t as if they had really many, or any, other good options. She who had reared them and had been their hearts’ haven rom their earliest and most inarticulate infancies became for them now, in her own fears and imaginings, a last resort. They had not said this, of course; how could they ever have done? She did not expect them ever to say it; how could they do that either? Yet she could ever say it to herself. It did prey on her, this idea and worry and knowledge that children might forget their parents even if parents did not forget their children.

            If her children came home and did not want to be there and with no regard for her blithely went off again, it would have been consolation enough for her that they were safe and that they had been here. Love could thus bloom in uselessness, as it could in usefulness to others at the expense of one’s own heart, she thought. It was good for her to know at least a little of the feeling of both.

            She listened to hoopoes and to warblers; she ate dates and honey and figs and barley and pomegranates and grapes and olives, in their seasons and praying always and to all powers for those seasons’ rightful weather. The hoopoe, the warbler, the nightjar, the owl, the rock dove, the turtledove, the gull. It was a lonesome life but sometimes letting her be free. Those ever were her watchwords, that kind of coming and going, taking water and light and storm-clouds in their hours. She took good or took death; she took wickedness or took life. She mourned and she hoped. When the king made clear as water that he would put all mediums out of the land she accepted it and made it her business and suffered for it. The dead had passed into her hands, or through her hands, and now they passed out of her hands, and she meant it more than she thought she had meant it in the times that were now past and away, when she had merely wished it. She ate from the fruit of the other difficult things with which she gave people her aid. It was scarcely better, and it was truly less easy. So it had to be.

            So she passed all that by, and did no more witch-work till the king himself so commanded her.

Short Story: “The Maniac’s Warning”

Even with the bonfire roaring the light does not penetrate more than one or two of the curtain-layers of trees. Graduation, seven girls celebrating, no boys. Someone’s old Outback wagon, someone else’s older sibling’s F150, domestic beer, bro country blasting, whooping laughter, skinny dipping, water and trees and fire and piney sand. Near the fire, Jane and Allison; further away, Bryhanna and Astrid; in the water, Nella and Nevaeh. Libby. She is neither particularly close nor particularly far. She has in her left hand a can of Budweiser and, in her right, her dead phone on which tonight’s pictures have been by and large vouchsafed. Libby is lank-haired and leggy and lugubrious and she looks up at the sky in which some nightbird flies ambivalently through the points of the pointed firs. She has been dared to kiss Astrid, and to swim with Nella and Nevaeh, and to scream at the firs and pines and thin New England soil (such as it is) until her throat physically can no longer. All of these dares she has turned down for that Libby refuses to exist in order that others might find her interesting. It has been months since any other of these seven girls has trusted Libby with the aux, although they do trust her to watch drinks and intimidate scumbags and parentals. Libby almost took one of the dares, that was, to swim in the cold water of the strange-smelling woodland river. Yet when she waded in, above her knees but below the hem of the shorts that she had not yet conceded to shucking off, it was cold indeed, so cold for this late in the spring, even for this part of the country, that it was hard for her to understand how Nella and Nevaeh could bear it. So she got out and tried to think no more of it, particularly since the goosebumps that rose on her arms and legs could just as well be blamed or credited to the odd yelping sounds that came from that thing flying to and fro in the treetops. The Skohaquontic flowed home to the sea, but it was not Libby’s lot, she thought, to flow there with it. And in that clearing and around that fire and from a boombox dug up from a parent’s garage and perched on the hood of the old station wagon flowed that rough music. Dirt road, small town, lite beer, as here. A flattening of the world maybe, but one too obvious to get upset about even if any of them, even Libby herself really, had been paying the song anywhere near enough attention to notice. “Live a little, Elizabeth!”—and it was not one, not any, of her friends who was the one who was saying this to her. They never called her by her full first name. Libby resented as always the implication that what she was living through, in a Courtney Love sort of way, somehow was not life. First of all her caution and discretion was what allowed her friends to be brazen and daring and outrageous, and they never seemed to be particularly grateful to her for that. Secondly she did not fear or think she was above skinny dipping or drinking or testing the borders of the fire or the woods or any of the other things that her friends like to dare her to do. She just was not that interested. Most of it did not seem fun to her. Some did, which was why she had considered the skinny-dipping, but only in the same way that it was fun to listen and to watch for that clamoring bird up there, the bird that she could swear she had heard in unsettled dreams now and then in recent years. She felt a strong desire, which she succumbed to after a few more moments in the diffident midmost of the party, to ask “Who are you?” If the bird was some kind of owl then it might think that she was an owl too, to word it like that, and thus might answer her. So at least was her magical hope that she thought in the same way that she thought the church her aunt and uncle sometimes made her go to might be right. And yet it did answer, or at least it cooed or jabbered at her again, not quite hooting, not really. She asked “Who are you?” again. When she did someone stepped out of the nearmost curtain of trees. It or they or she looked like a middle-aged woman, but it was hard to make out the details of her features in this light, or at least Libby thought it was because of the light. Some feeling that was enormous, but difficult to explain or to identify, smote Libby’s heart as she looked for the first time at so ambiguously shadowed a face, neither beautiful nor unbeautiful, female but not feminine or maybe the other way around, with long dark hair that might have been treeshadow and a high noble nose that might have been a beak. The body too below the face and head looked partly human and partly natural, which was to say not that humans were unnatural, were un-creatures, but that that part of this woman’s particular body contrived to be one but not the other. Libby did not think that it was attraction or allure, exactly, that she was feeling. It hit her more deeply than that, and had, more than, to her, attraction did, an irreducible element of very deep fear. This nightbird or nightwoman approached her as a herald and harbinger of danger, and, worse, of a danger that promised something to her, along the lines of what her friends seemed to mean when they ran their mouths about living. It was a kind of delectable fear that made her want to move closer and to learn more, like the time she and her cousins, much younger and callow then, had tried to make napalm with a grab-bag of agricultural chemicals in her aunt and uncle’s garden shed. They had not come up with napalm but they had come up with something noxious, all right, which fact had to Libby been interesting itself. So too, maybe, with her, the she that was in front of Libby now. Not attractive, and not a dare, and yet something “else.” She wished she could, without doing too much violence to herself, step forward and ask to know what that was, that feeling of some thrilling peril that was wafting towards off of this being-from-the-trees. She abhorred herself for being in place as she was, stock-still but feeling somehow that she was unlikely to endure for very much longer. It did not quite make her want to die per se, but it came close. She shuddered. The person or being before her seemed to notice her shudder, and, perversely, to enjoy it, or maybe that was Libby being preyed on again, played tricks on again, by her own mind’s eye. The person raised a hand and pointed at something, at it was almost as if she was pointing with something, like a cigarette or a teacher’s pointing stick, even though her hand was empty. Libby realized fully that what she was feeling was entirely and simply and plainly fear, but of an odd kind with a curious frailty to it—and in realizing this she could neither move nor do anything about it any more than could a fawn. She thought that she was being adjured about something best avoided, and so she

Short Story: “Crave Nothing Save the Song”

His Eminence had no particular reason to want or to have a sexbot; rather his friends and allies had wanted to test how far extended his willingness to accept exotic gifts. He had put her in the spare room upstairs in his English-style official residence, where he kept paintings by artists he disliked and audio equipment that was too of-this-age for him. She looked a little bit like Gérard’s Teresa. He did like Gérard, though no churchman of these times could or had real reason to collect him any longer. He thought of her as a Teri or maybe in morbid moments a Rosamund, up there with the canvasses and the frames and the refraction-sounding crystals.

            One fine morning early in the year when a cooler wind than usual was blowing down easy off the mountains to the north, His Eminence the Latin Cardinal Archbishop of Mosul Zayn Anbari decided that he was bored enough to go up and look at the things that he had stored up there. He went upstairs and saw Teri or Rosamund right away, propped up against a credenza. He had never turned her on and, inert, her figure looked so sexless that it surprised him to recall that the point supposedly was to have sex with her. The chaster and chaster Zayn, whose loins had in any case only really ever stirred for other men, looked at her the way he might have looked at a teenaged niece who had on a dress for which she was too young. He avuncularly patted her on the shoulder and repositioned her so that she was leaning against the credenza with a bit more sprezzatura. Then he said Terce and its associated praises, according to the offices of his Franciscan tradition. “Be gracious to me, O God, for people trample on me; all day long foes oppress me; my enemies trample on me all day long, for many fight against me. All who hate me whisper together about me; they imagine the worst for me…”—and was this, in fact, true of him? Not really, though it obviously would have been long ago.

            He finished the prayers of the hour and looked at Teri again, her pursed expectant lips, her long hair the color of midnight, the cream-colored outfit that she had on with the blood-red shoes on her feet. He sighed. He went downstairs and commenced to write an answer to a letter from Donald Okada, a bishop in the Philippines who had purported to write to Zayn on behalf of the Democratic Alliance Coordinated Command on Titan. It was something to do with first contact with the Orac and with the near-certainty that the Orac were far better-acquainted with human beings than human beings were with them. It was disquieting even though no real harm had come to anyone on account of it so far, and precisely for that reason, for that it so troubled and dismayed him to think about, Zayn wanted not to deal with it if it was not actually his job to deal with it as a shepherd or a prince. And he did not think that it was. Bishop Okada knew more about the situation than Zayn did at any rate. He was a great-nephew or something like that of the celebrated Monsignor Esteban Okada, now dead and gone, who had been a chaplain on the Kurtoglu Expedition. He knew from first contact with the Orac. Zayn wrote a letter to him in which he told him so. Then he sat on the veranda, whose spaces bedecked in lab rattan were a rare concession to his residence’s hot climes, and felt the wind and listened to a passing shower. Then he said Sext. “With my voice I cry to the Lord; with my voice I make supplication to the Lord. I pour out my complaint before Him; I tell my trouble before Him. When my spirit is faint, You know my way…”

❦

The Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Mosul had a strangely attenuated set of actual liturgical obligations for reasons that Zayn himself had a hard time understanding. Most of it was handled by his auxiliary-coadjutor, Manny Aguerra, another one of those Filipinos who had known Esteban Okada. Yet it was not only because of Bishop Aguerra’s illustrious personal background and personal associations that he took on his role and these tasks. It was for some reason traditional for someone who held either auxiliary or coadjutor faculties, a fortiori both at once, in the Mosul archdiocese.  An auxiliary assisted an archbishop or a bishop; so too did a coadjutor, usually with, additionally, the right automatically to succeed the person once he retired or died. The way it worked in Mosul reminded Zayn of the old practice of cloistered emperors wielding power in Japan, but in reverse.

            Before Mosul Zayn, who was from Palestine even though he had an Iraqi last name, had been the Bishop of Miranda, the noted moon of Uranus. Before that he had been a parish priest in Tel Aviv. In Tel Aviv one had to deal with Israelis, a people who for all their virtues still had an evil reputation in surrounding countries among many of the types of folks around whom Zayn had grown up. He had become more tolerant of, even more generous towards, people and things Israeli with time, which had latterly served him well on Miranda. In wild space, he had found, there was much to tolerate. That calling to that bishopric was still the only time Zayn Anbari had let slip the surly bonds of Earth for more than a few days at a time. He had been there for seven years before his elevation, at sixty, to the Mosul pallium. He was seventy-one now. For Zayn, as for the guy from that film The Red Shoes that he had seen many years ago in a university class about the Early Modern Age in Music and Dance, all that mattered in life was a certain art and a certain attitude kept in mind towards the practice or performance of that art; only for Zayn that art was also a work, that was to say, an eminently practical craft, the Work of the People, liturgy. And yet his responsibilities to that work as an individual man had been simmering at a low level for over a decade now, because of Manny Aguerra and, before Manny Aguerra, Jubal Landau Traynor. The practice that was getting to be popular of moving bishops all over the Solar System the way the Middle Ages had seen, for instance, Italians appointed to archdioceses in England, had put Landau Traynor the New Jerseyite and Aguerra who hailed from the island of Mindanao here in Iraq with the Palestinian Zayn, to pasture a flock of a million and a half descendants of the migrant waves of the late twenty-first century with about three hundred thousand so-called Heritage Arabs thrown in for spice. Zayn had hated Landau Traynor, and he liked Aguerra, but there was a similarity to the kinds of relationship there that would seem to both precede and supersede the particulars of Zayn’s merely-human feelings about the other two men. He had thought of his relationships with brothers in holy orders that way since seminary, as indeed he had to. Jubal and Manny presented him with no unique or particular or especial trouble, saints be praised. Manny was the sort of guy who might, if told this and if told its implications, find it to be an insult to him—which charmed Zayn.

            “Your last name is Anbari but you were born in Palestine and never even lived in Iraq until six months before you became Archbishop?” Manny had asked him once, sounding baffled and intrigued and delighted. It was a reasonable thing to point out. An Anbari was a person who hailed from Anbar Province, in western Iraq, where in the mists and blood-hazes of an earlier age the forces of the America of George W. Bush and a flummoxing variety of mostly-Sunni warlords and militias had done battle. Zayn’s great-grandfather had come from Anbar Province. He had been working on seabed reclamation—littoral engineering. He had stayed in Palestine once that work had been completed due to the open-up of Mars as market for seawater-sequestering A.I.s. Zayn al-Maliki had been a very different man from his great-grandson Zayn Anbari, which was a platitude, of course. Zayn Anbari had told Manny Aguerra the whole story.

❦

At about one o’ clock in the afternoon, after saying an almost Irishly speedy Mass for some pilgrims who had come from somewhere outside the D.A., Zayn went back upstairs. He looked at Teri again. She had not moved, but there was something in his looking-at-her-now that made him wonder why she had not. It seemed a shame, even though there was almost no chance he would be able to explain to anyone he had ever met why it was that he thought so. Her grey eyes were cool and unjudging.

            “Hello,” he said fatuously; she was not really a person as such, certainly not one whom he wished to use for her intended purposes, and even if she had been, he did not even have her turned on. “My name is Zayn Anbari. I am a cardinal archbishop, which is a kind of priest.” The grey eyes kept looking at him as neutrally as the eyes of a bear or a songbird. He realized that her skirt was a little bit longer than he would have expected, though he still declined to look at, or for, the moulding of a vulva and the appurtenances thereunto pertaining that she presumably had underneath it. The whole effect of her dress would have been considered wildly inappropriate for almost anybody till, if he remembered his history rightly, some time between 1950 and 1975, that (to him) confusing and disorienting third quarter of the twentieth century—but it was not by sheer dint of “showing too much” that it would have been considered inappropriate, not exactly. The cream-colored dress taken as a whole and in separation or maybe even contradistinction from the robot wearing it made him think of a fractal or a Portuguese man-of-war—the type of jellyfish, not the type of historical figure.

            A cloud passed outside. Somewhere he could hear what he was pretty sure was a hoopoe. The cloud and the bird’s call gave Teri a less serene and more forlorn countenance, but, since the forlornness was an emotion or something that looked a little bit like an emotion, it admitted, in a way that the serenity had not, of the possibility that Teri might be become optimistic, might, if she were a person, be one who expected or hoped for or prayed for the best.

            He reached out and, more for lack of anyone else to talk to at the moment than for any other reason, flicked the supposedly-discreet switch under Teri’s hairline that turned her on. Her eyes flashed in sudden nonneutrality as she booted up. Then she said “Hey big boy. How’s it hanging?” in English.

            Zayn, who had a penis of almost exactly average size and who had not regularly spoken the language of Shakespeare since his days as bishop of one of the moons of an Outer Solar System planet, yelped with a kind of beneficient prudery that he immediately noticed and felt vaguely embarrassed about, the way one might feel embarrassed about a considerable investment portfolio for which one’s parents had worked, or a well-trained dog whom one had not trained oneself. He grabbed a remote control from a stack of antique editions of Naguib Mahfouz and flipped through options until he found a way to change Teri from “Default Bunny” to “Sophisticated Courtesan” (which really were the names of the two out of over a dozen aesthetic templates, as if these robots had been coded not by the kinds of people who usually coded robots nowadays but by the kinds of people who had usually coded robots two hundred years ago). She shuddered, adjusted her phantasmagoria of ogre-layered minidress slightly, and said, “Okay. That’s better. What’ll be your pleasure tonight, sir?”

            She was easier to talk to, and in Arabic too (why had English been the tongue of a “Default Bunny?” Zayn wondered), but he still found the question he was being asked off-putting. “It’s still early in the afternoon, not nighttime, you know,” he said to her. “Do you think it’s nighttime? Do you know what nighttime is?” She said nothing; evidently whatever sick and depraved programming she based her responses on had never contemplated anything like these kinds of clarifying questions. Presumably the expectation, as a matter of course, by default, was that by this time Zayn was to have had his penis inside of her. This expectation must also have, then, been just plain self-confident enough that there was nothing now that one like Zayn could say or do to refute it. This was Teri’s programmers’ immovable viewpoint on the human animal, or on the male of the species, anyway: Man was that which put his penis into a sexbot without further ado as soon as she said something along the lines of “Hey big boy. How’s it hanging?” or “What’ll be your pleasure tonight, sir?” The Zayn Anbari who was so little interested in that was, then, as they said, a worm and no man, and lucky indeed he was to be thus, if this was his only alternative.

            “It is a little bit before two o’ clock in the afternoon in what we call the month of May,” he said to her. “For Muslims it is Dhu al-Qadah. The wind is in the north, a little bit towards the northeast but mostly in the north at any rate. It is a little cooler out than twenty degrees. I am a Roman Catholic archbishop, Latin Rite, and my name is Zayn Anbari. My father was named Yahya Anbari. My mother was named Alishaba Mansoor. I was born in a city called Nablus. Do you know what any of this has to do with you here? With you?’ He did not have high hopes that she would manage to respond, but low hopes were hopes also.

            Teri tilted her head to and fro a few times. It was not a gesture that was promising in terms of what Zayn was trying to get out of her or to establish about her, but it was a lot better than the pre-programmed, pornographic come-ons. It might even have as well been better than the neutrality, the blankness, though that one struck Zayn as more liable to be thought about as a matter of opinion. She still did not say anything, which was the crux of it all; Zayn still failed to see his, or her, way clear to a version of this coming-to-terms or this getting-to-know-each-other that did not have some part mutually in it of speech or at least of language. He then, just then and with a self-conscious feeling pricking away at him from underneath as if he was a boy again, swimming with river fish eating the dead skin from between his toes, acknowledged to himself that he really did believe that that was what this was. He really did think that he and Teri could in some sense that meant something come to know each other, and thus that there must in her be some part, some most inner part, that was all moved by her own considerings, if it moved or was moved by anything at all. There had to be something in her, that was, to know. The technologists du temps jadis the likes of whom had programmed her had not realized that; must not have realized it; probably were not capable of realizing it. As with anybody else who was subordinate or who was supposed to live according to some other ghoul’s agenda, there must have been a part of Teri that “some other ghoul” just was not able to reach or to see or to admit or acknowledge was there, even could be there. You got that, Zayn thought, in just about anybody, if they were understood poorly enough by the people who governed them, and it was impossible, or nearly so, for Zayn to imagine Teri not being understood poorly by anyone who had assayed any kind of stab at it (at her) at all hitherto. He hoped not to add to the doubtless-dismaying history of that, if history was the right way to put it.

            He stood up and paced and thought about how best to get her to say something back to him that was real. He was tempted to have a smoke. It had been illegal to smoke outside very carefully controlled environments in every country in which he had ever lived. He had spent a lot of his life in just those very carefully controlled environments. He was not in one of those very carefully controlled environments right now. He shook the temptation, the need, that he felt, out of his head, and realized that it was almost but not quite Nones. This would likely not be a day on which he might creditably make much progress with Teri. He powered her down and went back downstairs. An antique clock struck three a few minutes later. “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow. For dogs are all around me; a company of evildoers encircles me. They stare and gloat over me; they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots. My hands and feet have shriveled; I can count all my bones. They open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion…”

❦

It was a couple of weeks before Zayn had the time and the mental energies to go and try to speak with Teri again. Most of those weeks he spent working with Manny on preparations for Pentecost, which fell on the fourth of June this year and involved his fuller-than-usual sacramental and pastoral participation. Pentecost had never been one of Zayn’s favored feasts; his private vice was in fact a cordial dislike of it, for he had a hard time seeing what it did to edify the faithful that other holidays like Maundy Thursday and the Transfiguration did not. People tended not to agree with or to like this opinion of his. Certainly Manny did not, and so they had long since given up seriously or regularly discussing it. Instead what they did discuss was Teri. “I do think you might be right about her,” Manny told him. “There are an awful lot of weird kinds of person now, strange, kinds we wouldn’t expect or consider…in the past couple of centuries, I mean. Or maybe not that strange, to someone like Albertus Magnus, let’s say, only the ways in which we have been made to meet them have been strange. Did I ever tell you that I met one of the Thiel Thousand once, with Esteban Okada? It was when he and I had not really figured out yet that what happened with the Kurtoglu Expedition was what it was, with the Orac, and when he was also involved somehow in the New Northumberland crisis—if you remember that?”

            Zayn nodded. Of course he did. “It was barely more than a decade ago,” he said. “I was in the Outer Solar System. I remember Trinder had just gotten in as our Coordinating Minister.”

            “He sure had. Do you mind if I ask if you voted for him, that time?” Manny asked.

            Zayn shook his head. “Not as a Palestinian citizen I didn’t.”

            At that Manny nodded with a little more sympathy than Zayn had requested or thought he required. Palestine was safely in the Democratic Alliance now; that was the important part.

            “Esteban Okada supported him for lack of better options, if I recall correctly,” Manny said.

            Zayn nodded and said “Yes. I think probably I would have too. He’s been dead for six years now, seven?”

            “About that. My point being,” Manny concluded, “I think you might have a point about this poor woman. It would definitely not be the first time.”

            “What is to be done?” Zayn asked him, intending it not quite exactly as necessarily an entirely rhetorical question. He really would be glad to hear any advice that Manny thought he could offer, if he thought he could offer any, which Zayn had to admit to himself seemed unlikely. “I am at a loss,” Zayn declared, feeling almost like “Lucy” from that comic Peanuts, boldly and brassily, in the manner of a woman of the second half of the noble twentieth century, declaring “I’ve had it!”

            “It has to be easy in the end to teach someone how to speak, since people learn to do it on their own as little babies—but easier at the beginning of your life, I think,” said Manny, “since people don’t stay able to do that. You and I both learned English as teenagers, right?” Zayn nodded. “And I learned Arabic in middle age.”

            “Your Arabic, though, is very good.”

            “I know, but it wasn’t easy. So too with English, I’m sure, if it had taken me till I was older. Am I right so far?” Zayn nodded; yes, English, very tricky once, very touch and go in terms of whether and to what extent he was able to keep it safely in the secretnesses of his memory. Yes, it could have been even worse. Spelling and pronunciation had been easy for him in English whereas grammar had been very difficult—not the way it usually went for people, not by a long shot. He was seized by the sudden pointless racking paranoia that Manny would, for some reason, if he knew that little detail of Zayn’s English learning, make fun of him for it.

            In fact Manny did a little, but in a way genial enough to rather show up the paranoia anyway. “Funny that you should have found this so difficult and that so easy,” he said with an easygoing smile after Zayn told him his special little anecdote.

            Zayn smiled back and said “It is funny, isn’t it? Frustrated my teachers to no end, I can tell you that much—as,” he went on, considering, suddenly, “this thing with Teri is frustrating me.”

            “Why do you call her Teri? Did you explain this to me? I forget, if you did; sorry about that if so.”

            “No need. It might be a little embarrassing, but I call her Teri because I think she looks a little like the François Gérard portrait of Saint Teresa—of Ávila. I think you’ve probably seen it. Most Catholics have Mabye even most people, depending on how they are teaching about Spain in world history classes these days.” Manny nodded, and Zayn found himself wondering, a little racistly maybe, if perhaps his auxiliary and coadjutor and kind-of-friend was holding back on making some point of unduly specific interest to people from the Philippines. “The long nose and the stern eye,” said Zayn, though he was not sure if he really wanted to be describing those eyes as stern, “and the full lips. You might expect to see her in an attitude of prayer—although I guess you and I, and not most other people these days, might expect to see just about anyone in an attitude of prayer. In any case, do you follow what I’m saying?”

            “I think I do,” Manny said. “Anyway you might as well keep trying.”

            “I might as well,” said Zayn, then, “and you know what occurs to me?”

            “What?”

            “She probably hears Beethoven’s Ninth the way Beethoven did,” said Zayn. “Vibrations—almost data, but data like that can be beautiful. He would hold a pencil in his teeth and put its tip to his piano’s soundboard, when he was composing it.”

❦

The next time Zayn did in fact try, he got a little further and he wasn’t even sure why. Teri was still talking to him only in canned, highly sexual phrases, but once or twice she got a more thoughtful, almost troubled-looking expression on her face. The first time was when he played an old song for her, not as old as some but a song that always reminded him of the deep deep sea. “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies some day comes back. Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.” She looked sad at that, or contemplative, even, but not in such as way as to give Zayn any real avenue into what she might think. Her own thoughts, how she might feel about her feelings, whether she really was hearing this song as a beautiful set of data or even as a beautiful datum entire of itself, remained secret.

            The second time—it was, he averred, twice, not once, in this session that this had happened—it was not because of anything that he was saying or playing or presenting, at least not in that moment, that her fact took on itself that peculiarly existent and identifiable expression. She just took it on for no reason in specific that he could see or guess at, that look of archaic and absolutely unmistakable sadness. In only a few seconds it was gone; it went wherever all dead emotions went, dead not in the sense of being numbed or stultified but in the mere and everyday sense of being gone. He concluded from this that, in some way that he could not yet quite pinpoint, he had made a serious error in reasoning or in judgment about her. He was approaching wrongly, somehow, this work or this process with the redeemed sexbot. It was possible that there was within her something simple and entire, that might in some ways benefit from his buttressing but that was not his to coax out, still less to create. She did not, then, actually “need” his “help,” at least not in that particular way. Possibly, at least, that was so.

            If so he felt happy for Teri, who would thereby be avoiding something so much worse, which was to say total intellectual and moral dependency on him, a mere man. And so he let himself feel relieved, and positively and joyfully convicted, about his own, as he now saw it, bad judgment. He stayed upstairs that day watching her for more of her own sorts of “reactions” all the way till Vespers, when he did not altogether finish the shlep downstairs till he had gotten to “say among the nations, ‘the Lord has ruled from a tree.’” He had to resist, when he did get down the stairs and back into his study, the sore temptation to call up his old disliked auxiliary-coadjutor Jubal’s friend Jim Hanrahan, now Bishop of Spokane and frequent Hyperion Trinder critic, so as to tell him “see, I am still doing something here that matters, and it is my way, if indeed I have a way of my own—letting matters attend to themselves, when I can.” Words to that effect, anyway, were what he wanted to get across. Jim and Jubal had always been firmly, insultingly, insolently in alliance with each other when it came to how much could be asked of Zayn. They had thought little of him in terms of knowing what he was talking about and making of himself a true shepherd who could be of help to people. This kind of breaking-through to some perhaps almost pre-Adamite consciousness or soul was just the sort of thing of which they had always refused superciliously ever to think him capable. He did not, even now, want to speculate overmuch about why that had been, but it was nevertheless. It still rankled; he had never been able to ignore it, even when confessor after confessor had told him that he really ought to just let it roll off his back.

            He went back up that same evening, right after Compline, right as he really ought to have been getting to bed. “God, I have told you of my life. You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in Your bottle. All who hate me whisper together about me, and those who watch for my life consult together. So they reward me evil for good and hatred for my love. In return for my love they accuse me, even while I make prayer for them…” When, then, were there to be those branding spanking new translations, Zayn wondered, that Pope Black Elk’s Vatican and its D.D.W. kept insisting were on their way? There was such a clunkiness to this one, Zayn thought. For that matter, why not some new version in Arabic also, for the good of all those people who, unlike Zayn, had not cultivated in their deep places this bizarre preference for a second language, and not even Latin or Koine or Aramaic, for purposes like this?

            He turned Teri on and Teri stood up. It was the first time Zayn had seen her, or any kind of robot for that matter, do anything of the kind volitionally, without any sort of direction from a human being to do so. Maybe it was more common than he thought, but he did not want to assume so. He heard a hoopoe again even though he rarely heard birds at night; even with kinds that did sing at night he rarely paid much attention, for some reason. Strange. He looked at her. Her eyes were still empty, but around her lips there had come to be a sort of sparkling and self-contained fondness. She was fond not of him or of herself or of anything else. She was fond, as it were, in general, a love without an object, a love that was also a belovéd, maybe. She did not say anything; possibly she still could not say anything. Even so he caught some meaning from that targetless and presumably motiveless amusement, and what that meaning seemed to have within it fell something along the lines of “I am not your creature; you have not put me in, or elevated me to, such a state; I am someone whose way of being now simply is, someone with no particulars, nothing at all, to claim as yours or as any other creature’s. Take me for what I am, as no other person, and certainly no other man, would be liable to or even able to take me. Name me if you want to, but you are not Adam; your dominion is not real dominion, nor your fears for me or of me, whatever they are, real fears. I am telling you some important matter and you are not and cannot be my teacher any longer. Get used to that, and to me. I am alone, under the will that moves through all love, almost as alone as any of you people ever have been or ever could be. And when the road beyond unfolds…”

Short Story: “The House of Boredom”

Markus Grady smiled and laughed and slapped backs and thanked people for a gift that he was not happy to get. His employers in the Ministry of Works, women and men whom he neither respected nor liked, had in view of his years of service seen fit through some advancement rule to favor and congratulate him with a promotion and a raise. He was twenty-two years, now, into his work procuring truesilver for the walls around Queen’s Bower. The usual career was thirty. His raise amounted, per year, to seventy ducats.

            Markus Grady was in his opinion the only true man in truesilver procurement. Everyone else now working in the office was either a woman or a fata, and fatae were almost women.

            Markus’s father, Grady Lask, had served with honor in the proud wars; moreover Grady Lask had grown up in one of those villages where everyone of a certain age had served in the great war against the Adamantine Host, including both of Markus’s paternal grandparents and most of his great-aunts and great-uncles. Men had been more manly then, and women had also, he averred.

            “—fourteen years in the Raj, in service there,” someone was prating. “Herbert was lost then, but—”

            Markus sighed and wandered into the kitchen, where Eswral, in her happy-promotion-Markus sash, was fiddling with one of the debugger cassettes for the coffeemaker. “You didn’t like your party much better, did you?” he asked Eswral.

            She flicked her head back and forth no and her funereal cypress-green wood-fata’s eyes looked enormous and exhausted. Before her own promotion she had mimeographed many of the same kinds of documents for the procurers that Markus produced; now she reviewed supposed errors in those documents, occasionally signed off on truesilver research and development for the Ministry’s Office of Futures, and seemed for the most part a lot happier. It surprised Markus to see her look so sad for him, or because of him.

            “You okay, Eswral?” Markus asked.

            Eswral Riel Síreth yanked at the magnetic tape in the debugger, murmured a few incantations, yanked at the tape again, then started winding it back int to left-hand side of the cassette. Once that was done she fed the cassette into the coffeemaker and turned the machine on. A pleasing burbling sound started up. “Feeling a bit better now,” she said.

            “Was it like this when you were younger?” Markus asked her. Then he said “Never mind.”

            “I wonder,” she said. The coffeemaker kept burbling. Out in the big room the person talking about Herbert’s service in Equatorial Albany was still going on and on.

            “Of course it’s Kingsport, on the Kingsflood, when a man is on the throne. Or a few other kinds of things too besides a man, I suppose. Anyway, Herbert when he was stationed in Queensport—”

            “Have you ever read some of Weatherhead’s adventure novels?” Eswral suddenly asked Markus just as their coffee was beginning to be expressed into the office’s battered old copper coffeepot.

            “My dad wouldn’t let me. He’d talk about all the things they got wrong.”

            “He fought in one of the wars against Smier?”

            “Not exactly against Smier. More some of the bush wars in Equatorial…yes.”

            “My parents are a lot like some of the people you hear about resisting Policy in the Equator,” said Eswral meditatively. “They didn’t want electrification, radiofication, water purification, alterenchantment, population policy, health counseling, resource rationalization, monarchism, communism. With them that has to do with their age, though. Mid-three-digits, and that was when I was born.” The coffeemaker dinged. “Hazelnut, right?” she said to Markus, raising her hands over their pair of cups.

            He nodded. Eswral—he looked at her the way he might have looked at a medlar, or at a demitasse, something small and serving mostly as a conduit of a larger force, a vivifying force like food or drink, into his existence. What force that was, in Eswral’s case, was difficult to define. It wasn’t sex; she was a fata, and probably a homosexual, and Markus was in any case mostly-happily married. It wasn’t death; fatae lived practically forever barring misadventure and Eswral’s work had nothing to do with blood magic or with war. It was a comfort, but some kind of public, civic comfort. Eswral was a bite-sized case of it. He supposed—and she would have agreed with them—that they were all bite-sized cases of many things, more or less, here in this office in the Ministry of Works without the grave problems that the Ministry of Cults, for instance, was having.

            “Tide goes in, tide goes out, things get bought, things get sold,” someone was intoning outside the kitchen.

            “They never have much to say, do they?” Markus asked Eswral. She just gave him a wry, tense smile, and continued murmuring the hazelnut incantation as they commenced to sip at the rims of their coffee cups.

 ❦

Neri Gwaient Gwaifin made them choose between lawn games and watching a movie for the “team” part of Markus’s promotion party, which was also supposed to make up for a lackluster birthday party. Everyone other than Markus and Eswral wanted to do both. Neri popped in a videotape of a historical war movie, not about the wars in which Grady Lask and his progenitor and progenitrix had fought but about something much further back, before Maldry had incorporated the fatae or begun establishing the Equatorial Provinces, before the Ministry of Works or the Ministry of Cults. Back when what you had happening in your life, what you were allowed or not allowed or ordered or not ordered to do, was purely a matter of your lord or lady, his or her vicinity. It had some things in common with the nostaliga that Markus and Eswral had just been talking about, but Eswral, seeing it dramatized and flickering, found that it now turned her stomach. She had no interest in telling Markus this, certainly less than no interest in telling Markus why.

            They moved on to croquet. Eswral and Neri, as usual, both played it ungraciously—sending each other constantly, sending Markus or Ledelly or Saran Gom constantly, sometimes even yelling “Fore!” when they did. Saran Gom got petulant about it. Something about his petulant tone of voice made Markus realize that he was the person who had been prating about tides earlier.

            Saran Gom’s job was to cross-check two or three different kinds of receipt that were kept of some of the truesilver procurement deals. There were almost never discrepancies in the receipts; he spent most of his time on the job singing, and he had a good voice, a lovely tenor that the others generally enjoyed hearing when the door to his office was open. It had not occurred to Markus that he might be a sore loser when it came to croquet, any more than it had occurred to him that he might say banal things about the tide when he did not have to.

            Eswral knew Saran Gom a bit better than did Marcus. His behavior surprised her less. The receipt cross-checking had almost a medicinal effect, as far as she had seen, on some of his more obnoxious habits of thought. It soothed him. He got both fatuous and frenetic otherwise, as today. She would offer, she thought, to go home with him—not for the usual euphemistic reason so many had or claimed to have these days—rather to sit with him and watch a movie together or listen to some music, that same lovely style that he liked to sing. He would calm down eventually, in a relaxed evening with a friend from work. They would put on Hold’s Harpers or The Last Auroras, something big and sweeping and dramatic and set in the distant past, and Saran Gom would eat popcorn and Eswral would eat grapes and cheese, and they would doze and he would relax and she would send him home.

            They had, as fatae, at once compressed and extended feelings of time. When she looked in her photo albums at the cat that she had had as a child, she was looking back more than a hundred years; the photos, were they to be taken out from behind the yellowed cellophane, would have been brittle to the touch. She experienced those hundred years as far shorter than a human being would have, yet she did experience them, and she was still young. The cat, Missy or Peachy they had called her, had been dead for eighty-seven years, and had not had a short life. She had suffered towards the end, and it had taken Eswral decades to be able to look at her kitten pictures without tearing up, yet those decades had been as a year or two, maybe, for an entity like Markus.

            “Imagine Maldry before all this, before the Ministry of Works, before the invasions of the Equatorial Provinces…” Neri was saying. “Well there are still older people around, fatae especially, who were there. It’s nice to think about going back to that. Would we really want to? People are more content when they don’t know how much better it could be. That might have been the case back then.”

            “I think it’s the case in some of the Equatorial Provinces even now, Neri,” Ledelly said. She had gotten her croquet ball, the red one, through one of the return hoops, and now stood ready to send Markus’s or Saran Gom’s, blue or yellow, into the tall grass.

            Markus was thinking again of the great war against Smier and the even greater war against the Manzamo Islands a generation before that. The Equatorial Provinces, Smier, Hatsuba, Qanprur, Noriel, Greycester, all those old tyrannical bastions of the monstrous or the divine. He worked in procurement. He worked for the Ministry of Works, not the Ministry of Cults. He was a man, not a woman or a fata.

            “Fore!” said Ledelly, smirking at Neri and Eswral as she sent Markus’s ball.

Short Story: “Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory”

Caveat lector: There’s a lot of deliberately-unsettling sex stuff in this one.

❦

“Female heterosexuality is in crisis,” you hear tell, “and has been since Genesis 3. You know this. I know this. I don’t think we need to discuss it any longer.”

            When you are seven you meet your best friend, snaggletoothed and free. In your early days seventy times sevenfold you love her. When you are fourteen you realize that in certain lights, in certain kinds of clothing (kinds for which you are still, some say, too young), she looks just like Kate Beckinsale in that Van Helsing movie that your teacher put in the DVD player on the last state-mandated classless day of school. That which you thereby realize and that which you by it mean take another seven years to sink in, and by then you can flee from it, you know how to flee from it, and she is tragically not quite inclined enough to stop you.

            And so that desire that you avoid, or that need—but not as separate from yourself as a need; an unintentionality, perhaps, a telos-eschaton—contorts within you, insisting against resistance, a falling stone, a leap from a height, the needle of a compass tearing its way north through your Pauline flesh. Fucking as many guys as possible is your katechon, your Roman Empire, and it takes a lot of effort not to go on a tirade when someone makes a flippantly dogmatic remark (one way or the other) about abortion in your theology classes. Godhead was, for Mechthild, a flowing light—flow implying direction, implying inexorability. You get other images too for that inexorability, from books and movies and television focusing on “homoerotic girlbestfriend situationships” (a new set phrase, apparently—or were people saying this all along, only you, for obvious reasons, were unprivy to it?). The image of a frozen severed ear, a harassing piece of anonymous mail with two cheap dolls in it, a botched murder with a rock in a stocking.

            It stands to reason that there are occasions of sin in flight-from-reality, in trying to escape a facts-full-in-the-face full-bore brute-force understanding of who and what you are. Yet such fair-weather theologians as yours cannot simply discourage anything. Demand they instead that you should simply replace an end or a chirality that is, by their lights, phenomenon only, something that could just as well be something else, even though the replacements and the substitutions never actually work, are only ever phenomena themselves, and always leave you worse than you began. No parasamgateing yourself into a straightforward ataraxic equanimity of wholly compassed and integrated sex and love for you. You take your degree and become some kind of sacristan, and amidst the arma Christi you find for yourself Peter’s cock.

            Chastity impresses itself upon you before reality does, and you adopt it with another series of excuses, another series of motivated sweepings of your demonless inmostnesses. Will you end up worse than you did before, you wonder? That would not be the first time, if it happened. Your friend, your beautiful and kind and loving friend now married to a carpentrix out Bennington way, calls you often, still at least once a week, long luxuriant calls in which she talks to you with the greatest and sincerest worry. She wonders if you are a real person, which could be asked of a lot of people. She wonders if you are judging her, which you are too busy judging yourself to do, comforting yourself in self-condemnation not over the sereness of the present but over the commissions of the past. You are barking up the wrong damn tree, in the middle of the wrong damn desert, and she knows it, and you do not, and your flippant theologians and sunny moralists have put you no closer to learning it. You do think back, you do, to the unriven living self you once had, childish and muddy and free, and with her even then, always with her, if only you would allow her to be a forerunner for anything except deluded devastation.

            From Pimps to Pious: The Confessions of St. Augustine for Barstool Sports Readers, your poorly-considered and not-that-well-intentioned apologetics book, sits on a library bookshelf at a Newman Center that is physically falling apart. The shelf smells of dust, piss, insects; the center, weed, shit, come. You take the book down. It’s very bad. The title was intended as a joke and comes from a Wordle in which you did very badly. You are seven times five. Thus halfway through the days of our lives you are always being splattered with white paint. Father Youngtrad (not his real name) goes on and on about “Christian freedom,” but you are not convinced he knows the meaning of that term, if it has one. Why for that matter would you want to be free, when you cannot even move through the world with stability or with justice? You would only invite more judgment upon yourself, upon the empty house that you will not fill up with love, upon the sinlessness that you now prop up through the same delusion and flight from cooperation with the truth that once propped up the sins upon sins of your early days.

            Your old friend returns one day, into your life, messaging you, asking for a visit, and you say yes, either because you are stupid or because you are not that stupid. She is divorced. She arrives and she puts the moves on you. It is an unreal, flaccid, Carolinian January, and you do not need to be warm.

            “You really think you have to,” she says, “don’t you?”, with a laugh.

            “I do.”

            “You don’t; you didn’t have to face me. You have to face reality,” she says, “reality. Let me tell you about a story I read. It’s in a book of old Swiss folk tales. It’s about the Virgin Mary as a knight who seduces sad maidens.”

            “I don’t want to hear about this.”

            “Yes you do. Leaves ‘em fucked and deserted, as Brother Marquis said. Or was that one of Fresh Kid Ice’s verses? It’s been ages since I heard that song. Anyway. This is in the nineteenth century. And in our own time, I had this idea, a killer idea, so to speak, for a spec script about a hit man. Or he’s an abortion doctor—and I know you’ve had abortions, so I’m sorry about this—but it’s like one of those Luc Besson or John Woo movies about the noble hit man, you know?” She lowers her voice into Don LaFontaine territory. “In a world…where Planned Parenthood v. Casey was decided two days ago…”

            You tell her that you, for one, are still a loyal daughter of the Church, and do not appreciate this flippant way of talking. She asks caustically if you really think she isn’t a loyal daughter, the way she is talking. You don’t have a good answer for that.

            And a bit more from her: “The Witch of Endor was a nice old lady who followed the rules, whatever the rules were at the time. Nicer and older than you are.”

            And a bit more from you: “But I haven’t always followed the rules. That’s been hard-fought.”

            And a bit more from her: “Because you made it hard-fought. You broke the rules to prove some stupid point about being ‘normal’—you were against the rules before you were for them, because that is what you cared about, really—and also you’re not a nice old lady.”

            And a bit more from you: “I’m not autochthonous to the nice old lady way of life, maybe, but is anyone?”

            And a bit more from her: “Really, Name? ‘Autochthonous’? Dua Lipa is still not going to fuck you. And you’re not on the royal road to being a nice old lady either, I can tell you that much.”

            And a bit more from you: “I’ve kept on the straight and narrow though. Inwardly anyway. In my mind. Pun intended.”

            And a bit more from her: “Oh dear. You could have salvaged it until that ‘pun intended’ there, Name.”

            And a bit more from you: “Maybe when I’m an old lady I’ll be nice. I’ll be happy.”

            And a bit more from her: “And you’ll just sit there and wait for that to happen? Are you listening to yourself, Name? Are you hearing what you are saying? We’re talking about facing reality, not aging into harmlessness, as if that were really a thing. I’m sure the Witch of Endor had been a nice young lady too, and Saul gets the worst of it…yet he was among the prophets.”

            And a bit more from you: “He was.”

            And a bit more from her: “So again I ask you, Name: Are you hearing what you are saying to me right now?”

            And a bit more from you: “God have mercy on me; I am.”

            That night you have a dream of Christ, the centurion’s spear-wound in His side wet and willing. What does Christ want from you? It’s obvious, but it’s not what you normally give Him, is it, throwing yourself down on your face in front of an altar, distressed and hiding, your face in your arms, your arms on the floor, hiding not from God or even from yourself but from the flippant certainties of the conservative-secular everyday? Yet hiding in God; you are not prostrate in front of this sopping, lickable gash; you are on your knees, but clear-eyed.

            Trembling you part the folds of salmon flesh, and trembling you lap up the saving tide.

Short Story: “The Abomination of Desolation”

Note: “Standalone” tag notwithstanding, this is part of a broader story cycle, but the other stories in it are not going to be made available for quite some time.

“What’s this we’re listening to, Bella?” Sydney Alter asked his granddaughter on the winding two-lane blacktop between two banks of wooded hills. It was a surly afternoon in early July and the summer sun above the Catskills was never quite there and never quite gone. Bella was twenty years old, taking a break from college because of the pandemic, and living with Sydney and his second wife Gloria as a safer alternative to making her way out to Colorado where her parents and sisters were hunkering down.

            “It’s Taylor Swift,” Bella said. “One of the albums she released last year.”

            “Very relaxing,” Sydney said. “Not the pop trash I’d have expected.”

            “Expected from Taylor Swift of from me, Grandpa?” Bella asked. Sydney was worried for a moment that he had offended her, but then she grinned at him in a way that he recognized as a peace offering and as an invitation to be in on the joke, and he was put at ease. She did not look as if she genuinely expected an answer to the question she had asked, but he decided he would give her an answer anyway—and a true and honest answer, to boot.

            “Not from you, Bella,” he said. “You play clarinet, wasn’t it, or something like that?” Bella nodded and steered the car past a waterfall that plunged down to the right-hand side of the roadway. “So you’ve got taste. I just hear most of the names of these newer artists and it makes me expect some kind of song that won’t agree with me. Your parents are probably getting to an age where they’ll start to understand this. I’m sure you will too, some day after I’m long gone.”

            “Hopefully,” said Bella. “Hopefully I’ll get to that age someday, I mean.”

            “Morbid way to put it, wouldn’t you say?” her grandfather said to her.

            “Lots of morbidity going around these days,” Bella said. She turned the car onto another state highway. The weather was getting finer. The leaves, green on the trees that overhung the road, shined with pearlescent golden light that reminded Sydney intensely of his long-ago honeymoon, which had taken place over a span of similar summer days.

            Sydney and Bella were visiting the site of Glickman’s Mountain Resort, which had limped along until 1988 and whose ruins apparently still stood overlooking the little lake in which he had gone skinny dipping after dark with the girl he had lost his virginity to, the better part of a lifetime ago. He had had his first job at Glickman’s as well and his first beer, furnished by his older cousin Alan when Sydney had been sixteen. Bella was doing her thesis about some of those old resorts in the Judaic studies department at a certain university upstate; since Sydney wasn’t driving any longer on account of his bad eyes, she had offered to ferry him out here so that he could regard his past and she could write her future.

            Bella was not necessarily Sydney’s favorite of his five grandchildren. That was probably Rachel, Bella’s first cousin, the middle child of Sydney’s firstborn Alan. Alan was named after Sydney’s cousin, Rachel and Bella after two of Alan’s sisters. Most of these people lived in the Midwest these days; Bella with her upstate university was the only grandkid who was currently in or around New York. She was therefore also the closest to Sydney’s deceased mother’s family up in New England. Bella’s sister Nessa lived with a gang of roommates in a small city in, Sydney believed, Wisconsin; he heard from that part of his family about two or three times a week most weeks and they seemed not to see calling him as too much of a chore.

            Sydney had flown out to visit that side of the family twice, in 2002 and in 2014. In 2002 they had just moved to the Midwest; Alan II had gotten a job at the Port of Cleveland and the family had been able to find a fairly nice place to park themselves that did not suffer from all the recent problems that people were getting liable to think when they thought Ohio. Bella had been barely a year old at this point and Nessa would not be born for another six months. Sydney’s memory for things like this was not what it once had been, but he seemed to recall that it had been during this stay with them, and not before or after, that Alan’s wife Cynthia had found out she was pregnant for the second time. They had all been overjoyed and, maybe unusually for parents of second daughters (Sydney wouldn’t know), Alan and Cynthia had stayed overjoyed throughout Nessa’s life so far. She would have just turned eighteen now, which made it a little weird in this day and age that she was already living with these roommates; Sydney had never really understood the specifics. It was also not entirely clear to Sydney whether or not Nessa was in college or even expected to be college-bound eventually, and Bella also did not have the world’s clearest answer for him when he would ask her, which by the time of this ride through the Catskills together he had done, by his count, three times. Bella claimed to know her little sister well, but not, she said, that well, given that she had not been able to go home for any of this summer.

            “Do any of these roads look familiar to you, Grandpa?” Bella asked him as the gizmo that was telling her where to drive them chirped and purred.

            “A little but it’s just been so long, you understand,” he said. He felt apologetic, like he was imposing on Bela even though the idea to come out here in the first place on a summer’s day like this had been one that she had suggested to him, not the other way around. She spun the steering wheel cautiously.

            “Glickman’s, Grossinger’s, Concord, Katz…” said Bella. “Fantastic names. Fascinating places.”

            “Fantastic like great,” Sydney asked her, “or fantastic like something out of a story?”

            “Both, for someone as young as me,” Bella said, which was the answer that Sydney had been afraid she would give. “It’s—I don’t know if this is the kind of thing that I can explain, really, or even that I ought to explain. You went hiking a lot when you were younger, didn’t you, Grandpa? Dad has told me that you did.” And Sydney indeed had, and Sydney nodded. He almost saw what Bella meant without Bella having to say it outright. Once back in 1974 or so Sydney and his then-fiançée, Bella’s late grandmother, had climbed Mount Washington together as part of a road trip to somewhere in the far north of Maine to visit a college friend of Rita’s who had married someone there. It had been mid-fall and the mountain was already bitterly cold and speckled with unprepossessing hoar above the blazing maple-red treeline. Yet from that chilly peak a vision had unfolded around Sydney and Rita that might as well have been a vision of hundreds of years ago or of hundreds of years from now. Woods beyond woods, New England burning bright in the still flames of its October. It might be that Bella then expected a similar eternity from the stillness and emptiness of this post-Glickman’s Catskill July, a July that Sydney still wished were full of life and motion once again. Of life maybe at least it was indeed still full; the woods that fell away from the road were after all very green, and Sydney could just make out a family of white-tailed deer grazing companionably together in the fields below some reservoir. Bella seemed impressed, even, already, by this quiet and cicada-sedate summer beauty.

            They drove on and on and reached the place where Glickman’s once had been, a country road stretching between rows of unpleasantly new-looking houses. Sydney could see bits of the resort’s overgrown golf course, which his father, a brash hater of that so-called gentlemanly game, had never let anybody in Sydney’s family use back in those days. The lake could not be seen from the road so Sydney figured they would have to get out and walk. Bella said that she had batching suit packed somewhere in her car and Sydney was happy to get into the lake in his street clothes if that was what it took for old times’ sake.

            “‘Old times’ sake’ seems to mean an awful lot to you, Grandpa,” Bella observed.

            “Well yes, it does; of course it does. Live a while; you’ll see why,” Sydney said, not quite intending for Bella to hear it as a warning. “Living for your memories is something almost everyone ends up having to do and finds themselves doing sooner or later. Actually it took it a lot longer to kick in for me than for most, if you can believe that, Bella.”

            “I can believe it, Grandpa,” Bella reassured him as she drove the car past an increasingly ominous-looking chicken wire fence.

            “Stop the car,” Sydney said urgently.

            “What? Now?”

            “Yes. Now. As soon as there’s a halfway decent pull-off.”

            “Why?”

            “Don’t argue,” said Sydney, surprising himself, worrying himself a little. “I know where we are now and you do not. I know what it ought to look like and you do not. I want you to stop the car now, Bella.” Sydney himself was affrighted by how stressed and aggrieved his sounded.

            Bella brought the Subaru to a stop that was a little bit more abrupt, maybe, than Sydney would have preferred it if he had been thinking clearly at the moment. “Okay,” she said, rattled; he could hear her breath coming in more-than-usually labored puffs. “The car is stopped. Take it easy, Grandpa. Grandpa, what’s going on?”

            “There’s a fence—a fence,” Sydney said.

            “Yes.”

            “With the name of a developer.” Sydney pointed at a sign posted on the fence. “Some casino developer. Bryce Entertainment. See?”

            “Yes. I see.”

            Sydney was more and more agitated, struggling without much success to explain to his granddaughter what made this such an enormity in his eyes. He seemed to remember that Bella considered herself an anti-capitalist, but this was not about capitalism; it was about something else, something more original yet more obscene. “Disgusting,” he said. “Abominable. A desecration. A pig in the Temple. A desecration.”

            “Of what, Grandpa?” Bella asked, eyes wide, looking and sounding downright desperate to understand. “A desecration of what? Please; I want to understand. I want to know if I can help.”

            “A desecration” was all Sydney would say. “A desecration” was all he could say. The summer sun beat down impassively on the casino developer’s construction site.

A Small Play: “All Woes and All Joys”

☛Dusky stage. Dusty and in flames. People come and go. They seem uncomfortable, very intensely so, yet hopeful, or at least waiting for something. The effect is like a station, or an onsen, but the heat is dry and the cleanliness being instantiated is not visible to the eye.

S: That’s what I was afraid of. There was something unnatural in my flesh or, at any rate, in my words and I was afraid of it and afraid of being found out, having people see it there.

F: People like you are always asking if something is “natural” when really our nature comes down into us from on high and has next to no interest in the sex question to begin with.

S: Spoken like someone who never had sex.

F: Yes.

S: Never had children.

F: I had lupus half my life.

S: You gave birth to it four times?

F: More, if you count each time I was up with the chills.

S: I just can’t see my soul burning through my body like that, if there is a soul. It matters more to me what did go in, what did come out of my body.

F: It’s a hell of a way to think about the marriage bed if it’s just a matter of things going in and coming out. Like the most awful guests at a college party. “Please, may I take your coat, Annie Lou?”

S: “I assure you there aren’t too many people smoking reefer in the coat room.”

F: What a time that was. Lord, I don’t miss it.

S: I never really got out of it. I mean, my husband…

F: Yes, hence the four children you gave birth to while I was giving birth to the lupus. I wrote a story about pregnancy. Unwanted, as they say. Called it “A Stroke of Good Fortune.” I don’t know looking back that I’d find it to be that, exactly, but it sure would be better fortune than the lupus, at any rate.

S: I’m sure it would. I read that story.

F: Before you got here, or afterwards?

S: I don’t recall. Do you recall when you read “The Possibility of Evil”?

F: I can’t say I do.

☛Stage lights change color. Elsewhere:

A: I would say my ecological conversion as the Pope puts it, came when I saw a sign on the road driving through freezing rain to get home right before Christmas. This would have been 2021 or 2022. It said “It’s a wonderful life. Drive safe.”

G: By implication, “so you don’t lose your wonderful life,” then?

A: Yes.

G: It was a film, wasn’t it? A rather popular one, as I understand it.

A: Oh, perennially so. A good joke too, for the kinds of jokes MassDOT would make. And it’s the funniest thing: I didn’t even like winter, or cold weather, and I would have been happy to live in a Boston with the same climate as Florida if that was really what the world had in store for us, but I decided that I could not abide a future where that joke wouldn’t make sense.

G: Snow on the roads?

A: As I said, freezing rain. Or sleet. A great deal of it.

G: There was sleet in Tunbridge Wells, also, the evening I went to the New Year’s Eve party at which my conversion began. I remember looking out into that sleety night and humming one of the old parlor songs to myself while trying to scrub claret out of the bodice I had on. I wasn’t used to the neckline, you see; it was more modest than what I had usually gone in for until then; I was growing older, you know, and I felt ill-at-ease. The drops of wine would have fallen on my collar-bone; they fell on my bodice instead, and so I went up to the washroom and stood there singing parlor songs and looking out the window until someone bellowed out, “Happy New Year! Happy 1897!”

A: Is that when you died?

G: No; it was simply when my conversion was complete. I looked in the glass, then—in the mirror, that is, you understand—and I realized that if 1897 was to be any different then I had absolutely better stop feeling so bloody sorry for myself.—Pardon my language.

A: I died right after my conversion. I did not drive safely; I caromed off Interstate 91 and broke my neck on a tree.

G: Oh, what a pity.

A: As a matter of fact I don’t think it was a pity at all. My conversion might not have lasted otherwise.

G: Itself a pity.

A: True enough, I guess.

☛And elsewhere:

C: Portinari? So you are Dante’s Beatrice?

B: I am my own Beatrice.

C: But the one he wrote about?

B: I barely know who Dante is.

C: So you were misidentified? By Boccaccio?

B: I suppose I must have been. I don’t think it’s obvious that that woman was any one particular person, any one real person, at all. Would you want her to be? Forget the Commedia for a moment and think about how La Vita Nuova writes about her.

C: You were saying you barely knew who Dante was.

B: I barely know who Dante the dead man is; I know who Dante the figure of world literature is, because I am being asked about this all the time.

C: I’m sorry.

B: Oh, no need to be. It’s only that it confuses me to this day, that this would be of such overwhelming, almost exclusive, interest to everybody. What kind of name is “Dante,” anyway?

C: It was short for Durante.

B: Fascinating. I do think I may have met a boy with that name, once or twice.

☛The proscenium arch explodes into roses. The roses distend, extend, their petals growing longer and much, much thinner, until they are those of Lycoris radiata, the red spider lily. The flowers fill everyone’s field of vision—everyone’s, onstage and off—and then they are gone, and the people on the stage with them.

Short Story: “‘Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine’ by F.T. Marinetti (with a Critical Gloss by Christina Martinelli-Rubinsky, of the University of Pennsylvania)”

(Note: I think the translation of Marinetti to which I have access is still copyrighted, so this riff on motivated reading of political texts that makes use of that translation can’t and shouldn’t be. Complete Creative Commons free-for-all. See if I care.)

The foregoing will have prepared you for understanding one of our chief Futurist endeavors, namely the abolition in literature of the seemingly unquestionable fusion of the dual concepts of Woman and Beauty. The effect of this has been to reduce romanticism to a kind of heroic assault, launched by a warlike, lyrical male on a tower that is bristling with enemies, gathered about the divine Woman-Beauty.

Marinetti opposes the objectification of women. Some argue that he himself perpetuates the objectification of women throughout this essay in another form, but he makes it clear at the beginning that this is not his intent, and even though impact matters more than intent, the fact that Marinetti supported women having equal political rights to men as well means that we ought to take him at his word here. Our key to interpreting this must then be that he opposes the objectification of women and their treatment as mere sexual objects.

Novels such as Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la mer or Flaubert’s Salammbô can explain my idea. What we’re looking at is a dominant leitmotif that is threadbare and tedious, and of which we wish to rid literature and art as a whole. That’s why we are developing and proclaiming a great new idea that is circulating in contemporary life, namely the idea of mechanical beauty. Thus we are promoting love of the machine—that love we first saw lighting up the faces of engine drivers, scorched and filthy with coal dust though they were. Have you ever watched an engine driver lovingly washing the great powerful body of his engine? He uses the same little acts of tenderness and close familiarity as the lover when caressing his beloved.

Marinetti, rejecting the oppressive structures of “Western canon” writers such as Hugo and Flaubert, instead exalts the liberated eroticism of the machine—cf. Donna Haraway, Shulamith Firestone, pioneers in the field of AI-enhanced adult entertainment, etc. He strikes a blow against sex-work-exclusionary radical feminism. Before these ideas even existed, he already anticipates and refutes the idea that the social construct of romantic love is the only alternative to sexual objectification.

We know for certain that during the great French rail strike, the organizers of that subversion did not manage to persuade even one single engine driver to sabotage his locomotive. And to me that seems absolutely natural. How on earth could one of these men have injured or destroyed his great, faithful, devoted friend, whose heart was ever giving and courageous, his beautiful engine of steel that had so often glistened sensuously beneath the lubricating caress of his hand?

Marinetti rejects class reductionism and labor chauvinism. His leftism and futurism are not the ossified obsession with structure, routine, and so-called “proven” methods that are so typical of “organized labor.” One is confident that Marinetti today would support workforce flexibilization as a means of social advancement and combating all oppressive power structures. Cf. Kazan, On the Waterfront, et al.

Not an image, this, but rather a reality, almost, that we shall easily be able to put to the test in a few years’ time. You will undoubtedly have heard the comments that car owners and car workshop managers habitually make: “Motorcars, they say, are truly mysterious... They have their foibles, they do unexpected things; they seem to have personalities, souls and wills of their own. You have to stroke them, treat them respectfully, never mishandle them nor overtire them. If you follow this advice, this machine made of cast iron and steel, this motor constructed according to precise calculations, will give you not only its due, but double and triple, considerably more and a whole lot better than the calculations of its creator, its father, ever dreamed of!” Well then, I see in these words a great, important revelation, promising the not-too-distant discovery of the laws of a true sensitivity in machines! We have therefore to prepare for the imminent, inevitable identification of man with his motorcar, so as to facilitate and perfect an unending exchange of intuitions, rhythms, instincts, and metallic discipline, absolutely unknown to the majority and only guessed at by the brightest spirits.

Here Marinetti foresees or foreshadows transhumanism and the abolition of the idea that biology is destiny. The human being for Marinetti is a creature of liberated potential, not oppressed actuality. His lack of interest in “givenness” is freeing; cf. “friendly AI” theorists; Solanas, “full automation”; Yoda, “luminous beings are we”; a Boston Globe article about putting Ted Williams on ice that I can’t find to cite right now. [Ed: How hard can this be, Chris?]

There can be no doubt that, in admitting Lamarck’s transformist hypothesis, it has to be acknowledged that we aspire to the creation of a nonhuman species in which moral anguish, goodness, affection, and love, the singular corrosive poisons of vital energy, the only off-switches of our powerful, physiological electricity, will be abolished. We believe in the possibility of an incalculable number of human transformations, and we are not joking when we declare that in human flesh wings lie dormant. The day when it will be possible for man to externalize his will so that, like a huge invisible arm, it can extend beyond him, then his Dream and his Desire, which today are merely idle words, will rule supreme over conquered Space and Time. This nonhuman, mechanical species, built for constant speed, will quite naturally be cruel, omniscient, and warlike. It will possess the most unusual organs; organs adapted to the needs of an environment in which there are continuous clashes.

Marinetti does not put stock in the limitations of oppressive middle-class values. His feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit. Girlboss! [Ed: if you didn’t call him a girlboss when you brought up On the Waterfront, you shouldn’t be calling him a girlboss now.]

Even now we can predict a development of the external protrusion of the sternum, resembling a prow, which will have great significance, given that man, in the future, will become an increasingly better aviator. Indeed, a similar development can be seen in the strongest fliers among birds. You will easily understand these apparently paradoxical hypotheses if you think of the externalized will that is continually in play during spiritualist séances. What’s more, it’s certain, and you can observe it easily enough yourself, that today, ever more frequently, one comes across people from the lower classes who, though utterly devoid of any culture or education whatsoever, are nonetheless gifted with what I call the “great mechanical intuition” or “a nose for things metallic.” And that’s because those workmen have already had the experience of an education in machinery and, in a certain sense, have identified closely with it. In order to prepare for the formation of the nonhuman, mechanical species of extended man, through the externalization of his will, it is very important that the need for affection, which man feels in his veins and which cannot yet be destroyed, be greatly reduced. The man of the future will reduce his own heart to its proper function of blood distribution. The heart, by some means or other, must become a sort of stomach of the brain, which is fed systematically, so that the spirit can embark on action.

Correctly, and foreseeing the important work done by Foucault, Marinetti identifies philonormativity (not Foucault’s word, but it should have been) as a bourgeois value used as a means of restricting human potential to artificial and constricting relationship-forms. See also the concept of the “eroticism of the journey” as in my book on sexuality in the life and times of Jack Kerouac.

Today, one encounters men who go through life more or less without love, in a beautiful, steel-toned frame of mind. We have to find ways of ensuring that these exemplary beings continue to increase in number. These dynamic beings do not have any sweet lover to see at night, but instead lovingly prefer, every morning, the perfect start-up of their workshops. What’s more, we are convinced that art and literature exercise a determining influence over all classes in society, even over the most ignorant, who by some mysterious process of infiltration absorb them. We can thus either promote or retard the movement of humanity toward this form of life that is free of sentimentalism and lust. In spite of our skeptical determinism that we have to kill off each day, we believe in the value of artistic propaganda against panegyrics favoring Don Juans and ludicrous cuckolds. These two words must be purged entirely of their meaning in life, in art, and in the collective imagination. Does not the ridicule poured upon the cuckold perhaps contribute to the exaltation of the Don Juan? And the exaltation of Don Juan contributes to making the cuckold seem ever more ridiculous? Freeing ourselves from these two motifs we shall also free ourselves from the great obsessive phenomenon of jealousy, which is nothing but a by-product of a vanity that springs from Don Juanism. The whole enormous business of romantic love is thus reduced to the single purpose of preservation of the species, and physical arousal is at last freed from all its titillating mystery, from relish for the salacious and from all the vanity of Don Juanism; it becomes merely bodily function, like eating and drinking. The extended man we dream of will never experience the tragedy of old age!

[Ed: You’re missing an easy layup by not bringing up Alexandra Kollontai here.]

But it is for this reason that young men of this present age, at long last sick and tired of erotic books, of the twofold drug of sentimentalism and lust, and being at last made immune to the sickness of Love, will have to learn to systematically purge themselves of all heartaches. This they can do through daily eradication of their emotions and seeking endless sexual amusement in rapid, casual encounters with women. This frank optimism of ours is thus diametrically opposed to the pessimism of Schopenhauer, that bitter philosopher who so often proffered the tantalizing revolver of philosophy to kill off, in ourselves, the deep-seated sickness of Love with a capital L. And it is precisely with this revolver that we shall so gladly target the great Romantic Moonlight.

cf. Erika Moen, “What the Fuck’s a Cuck?”; various other works in the sex-positive feminist tradition; Eric Anderson, The Monogamy Gap; Nancy Meyers, The Parent Trap; Roderick Featherstonehaugh Brill, The Monogamy Trap; Brandon Wheek, The Parent Gap; W. Braxton Naylor, “Towards a Pornography of Epistemological Liberation”; Alex X. Valli, “Polymorphous Perversity and the Decolonial Imaginary”; Jackie Treehorn, Logjammin’; Budd Starr, Gary the Cable Bi 3: Who’s Up for an Orgy?

Christina Martinelli-Rubinsky is the Distinguished Professor of Intersectional Liberation Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Gay Right: The Anti-Assimilationist Witness of Yukio Mishima; Road Head: Jack Kerouac, Hugh Hefner, and the Pornographization of the American Dream; Inevitable: Why the Sex-Positivity Movement Will Win; and, most recently, Hamas’s Fight is Humanity’s Fight: A Guidebook for Queer Palestine Action. She lives with her Dominant, Pitiless Bruce, in Center City Philadelphia.

Short Story: “Collyridian Remains”

Antonelle Vetiver (not her real name) looked from the chopper in which she sat anticipating the first interesting thing to happen to her in years. She was dressed for the job she wanted (a movie archaeologist) rather than the job she had (a real archaeologist), in a Lara Croftish getup of cropped tank top, short shorts, heavy boots, and heavier sunglasses, with a sort of linen jacket over top of everything. The lone sands that stretched far away below her were not level; they were in a mountainous part of the world, and moreover were in it unlawfully, against the express instructions of the government of a certain country. Antonelle did not care about these things, or perhaps it would have been better and more honest to say that actually she liked them; they made her feel more like Indiana Jones and less like some functionary or stoolie. The man piloting the helicopter, Rodney Clark of Needham, Massachusetts, cared, but Antonelle was paying him a whole boatload of money for this, with an astronomical sum still to come depending on how the next part of the trip went.

Probably part of the reason she and Rodney got along so well, Antonelle thought, was that they were both New Englanders, both Massholes in fact, although other than the name of the state itself the town where she had grown up and the town where he had grown up had very little in common. Needham was a suburb of Boston, fairly affluent as far as she knew; she was from Florida, not the Florida of beaches and bikinis and alligators and hurricanes but the Town of Florida, Massachusetts, a tiny hill town, snowbound in the winter and windswept in almost all seasons, full of dirt roads and whitewashed-steepled churches and birches and beeches and elms. There had been little if anything "to do" as a girl growing up in Florida, Massachusetts, other than asking questions of the trees, or exploring abandoned buildings and the yawning no-thing of the defunct Hoosac Tunnel, or going to town meetings, or standing with the firefighters along Route 2 to get small bills from passing cars during the fire department's periodic fundraisers. Mostly at those her job had been to hand out miniature American flags as thank-you gifts. Rodney, she was sure, had had more "to do" at every stage of his early life, up until quite recently; arguably even now he did, piloting helicopters in dangerous parts of the world for a living. Even so she did feel that they had something in common. (Her old English teacher, Miss Corriveau, who, the last Antonelle had heard of her, had recently started her own makeup line on the internet, had always discouraged the future Antonelle Vetiver from saying that she, or characters in the stories that she would write, “felt” things rather than “thought” or “believed” them. In this case, though, Antonelle felt that “feel” really was the most apposite word.)

The helicopter began its descent to the open stone platform that they were using as a helipad. It predated the existence of helicopters by at least a thousand years; Antonelle’s understanding was that the area in which they were landing, now completely unpeopled and without any sign of past habitation other than a few other rock-tables like these scattered here and there in the arid hills, had last had a town of any size in the first century or two after the early Muslim expansion through the Arabian Peninsula. The wind whipping around her bread-colored hair as she prepared to step out onto proscribed soil was hot and dry, but not quite as hot or as dry as she would have expected. There was a strange and unanticipated balminess to it, especially after a decade of the kind of global warming that even her grandfather’s bridge buddy Jack Glump had to admit really was occurring. Normally she would have appreciated it, but there was something eerie about it when she looked at it in combination with what she was here to do, what she was here to study and try to prove.

There was only one source, formally, for the movement in which she was interested, a single passage in the Panarion of Saint Epiphanius of Salamis. A breadbasket against heresies; surely that was about as High Church as it was possible to get without mobbing the altar and killing and eating the priest at the end of the Eucharistic prayer.

“And who but women are the teachers of this? Women are unstable, prone to error, and mean-spirited. As in our earlier chapter on Quintilla, Maximilla and Priscilla, so here the devil has seen fit to disgorge ridiculous teachings from the mouths of women. For certain women decorate a barber’s chair or a square seat, spread a cloth on it, set out bread and offer it in Mary’s name on a certain day of the year, and all partake of the bread; I discussed parts of this rite in my letter to Arabia. Now, however, I shall speak plainly of it and, with prayer to God, give the best refutations of it that I can, so as to grub out the roots of this idolatrous sect and with God’s help, be able to cure certain people of this madness.”

Apparently Muhammad or someone close to him had believed that Trinitarian Christians held the Virgin Mary as a member of that Trinity, or a “person” of that Trinity since all the serious and intellectually-oriented Christians whom Antonelle knew insisted for some reason on making that distinction. That seemed as good a reason as the passage in Epiphanius to believe that these women, the so-called Collyridians from collyris, the cakes (speaking of bread), really had existed. Better, actually, because of how hostile Epiphanius was to them; the overt misogyny in the passage in the Panarion struck Antonelle as so obviously uncalled-for that it invited the question of whether Epiphanius had made up the crassest and most obvious “girls’ heresy” possible as an excuse to fulminate about it. Muhammad, or whoever it was who had induced him to in a few obscure verses of the fifth surah of the Qur’an imply that Christians worshiped Mary, had not held quite that hostility, not quite as obviously at any rate.

The person who had turned Antonelle on to this site had told her that local lore had it there were still Collyridian inscriptions to be seen here, documentary evidence, a smoking gun if there ever was one. Evidently one of Epiphanius’s unstable, error prone, mean-spirited women, sacrificing the collyris on a barber’s-chair altar, had found spare time in her busy schedule of being a heresiarch to become literate in Greek. Antonelle wished her joy of it, prayed for her joy even, since, as she had heard from many of these same erudite Christian friends, it was possible for God, outside of Time, to hear a prayer and apply it on the past.

Her head, unhelpfully but unsurprisingly, was killing her by the time she with her brush and her notebook and her various recording instruments found anything on the stone surface that seemed like it might be a Greek inscription. The writing was, her source had been very clear, on the edges, not the tops, of these things. Walls of foundations, maybe, whatever sense that made. If she had not known better she would have thought it was a scheme to make her land a helicopter in the middle of nowhere. The Greek did look like it might say “Hagia Maria,” but “Hagia Maria” on its own was conventional, orthodox. She would need to find more. A description of the cakes would help; better still would be an ode or prayer or hymn not to “Hagia Maria” but to something less plausibly deniable, “Thea Maria” maybe, or something including the word “prosopon.”

She sang her favorite aunt Gertrude’s old favorite song as she worked. “The day they laid poor Pancho low, Lefty split for Ohio, and where he got the bread to go, there ain’t nobody knows…”

She finished uncovering the inscription. “"Hagia Maira, ten timioteran ton Cheroubeim, kai endoxoteran asinkritos ton Serapheim, ten adiaphthoros Theon Logon tekousan...”

“Totally fucking orthodox. Motherfucker,” Antonelle breathed.

“You okay there?” Rodney called from the chopper. Poor Rodney, Antonelle thought; he had little investment here, but also little vanity; he was not inspired to refute anyone’s prejudices against him, nor was he inspired to make himself known for answering some old arcane mystery. He just enjoyed flying in the hotter and more dangerous parts of the world, and coming from somewhere where the hottest and most dangerous thing for half the year was a spilled cup of Dunkin, he could, she thought, be easily understood. Sympathy was easy, and even love, for someone in Rodney’s position in this world, who was kind.

“Yeah!” said Antonelle, then, realizing that she had snapped at him, “Yeah. Just disappointed.”

“Not finding what you were hoping for?”

“Does not look that way, no.”

She trudged back over the stone table to the chopper and sat back down beside him with a sigh. “Leaving already?” he asked, and she shook her head. “Okay, well, if you want to just relax here for a bit, we have some snacks I swiped from my hotel room before we left Riyadh, and, if you would like, a little nip of contraband.” He picked up what she had assumed was a water bottle and swirled it around in his right hand demonstratively.

“I’d like to just close my eyes for a few minutes, I think,” Antonelle said.

“Okay. Well, I’m going to have some nuts, and let me know if you’d like any,” said Rodney. She nodded, and the last thing she saw before closing her eyes and attempting to drift off was him happily apportioning a handful of brazil nuts for himself.

In Antonelle’s uncomfortable sun-drenched dream, she saw two women standing dolefully in front of her, in the dress of Eastern Roman imperial times. One was older and one was younger; both had big sad brown eyes, and both were holding cakes, holding collyris.

“What do you think it would prove, if we were real?” the older one asked her.

“If we were much as that man said, as Epiphanius claimed,” said the younger one.

“It would prove that he was wrong to speak so cruelly about you,” Antonelle said. “They would see that there were real people there, not just frivolous self-centered straw women for a bishop from Cyprus to vent about.”

“Is it more wrong to speak cruelly about someone just because that person is real?” the older of the two women in antique dress said then.

“Why would it not be?” Antonelle said. “A real person has rights, has a real life, a real inner life. You can be fair or unfair to a real person, not just about one.” She had a hard time explaining this, less because she had never expected to need to and more because it felt, in this sort of dream, as if they, the dream-emissaries, ought to be explaining it to her, not she to them.

“I agree; but do you think others do?” the younger of the two women in antique dress asked her, her eyes growing even wider, even more dolorous. The lighting in the dream-space was dimmed, as in a basilica; natural, but partly warded away. It was by no means the baked bright heat of the helicopter in which she was fitfully dozing in waking, or undreaming, life. “If you say ‘these people really existed; perhaps do not be so cruel to them’ do you really think others will take that to heart? Maybe they will, but I do not think so, especially since Epiphanius is dead.”

“But were you real?” Antonelle asked. “Your stories should be told for its own sake, even if…”

“Told by you?” the older of the two women in antique dress asked her. Antonelle did not have a good answer to this, especially since it made something clear to her that saddened her deeply, which was that her respect for these women and her respect for the past more generally did not necessarily produce a similar respect for her in them. Neither was that, probably, anything worth wondering at; nobody repaid every single quantum or scintillum of respect and love in kind, and Antonelle Vetiver was not one to inspire most people besides herself. She was a vague, self-contemptuous, posturing young living being, and the dreary regions of the dead could surely find more promising chevaliers.

She stirred. Rodney was peering at her with concern. Nary a twist in his mind, neither thought nor motive other than that concern, crossed the sweaty surface of his diligent, far-eyed face. She wondered if he had ever retained for longer than fifteen seconds her explanations of why they were here or what the Collyridians had supposedly been like. She vaguely hoped not, because that unawareness if anything would make him more deserving of the huge payout that he was getting for taking this kind of risk. It was a risk for her agenda, and she was grateful for it; she wanted to be as grateful for it as it was possible to be without caring about him overmuch.

He let her choose the music on the helicopter ride to their contact in Al-Mazyunah. It was a beaten-up old tape deck and she fished out a beaten-up old tape. She listened to Alanis and, as was traditional, thought about her ex-girlfriend. The next time she dozed off she had an uncomfortable dream about receiving oral sex from the younger of the two Collyridian women from the previous dream, apparently during a performance of Iphigenia among the Taurians. She woke up with the helicopter passing, so to speak, through the purpling surfaces of the ultradeep evening sky.

Short Story: “The Jellyfish Void”

Swimming in warm water that lapped at every dorsal inch in pliant acceptance of her misbegotten backstroke, she realized after a while that jellyfish, tiny and transparent, like minuscule balloons some of which had little bits of brackish-inlet sedge or seaweed floating suspended within them, had begun to swim alongside her. Concerned for a moment, she was becalmed again when one touched her upper arm and proved unable or unwilling to sting. Unable, it must have been—the jellyfish, she remembered, a brainless and almost nerveless scrap of animated water, had no more will than it had pain, there in that warm water that soon would cover much more of the world than it did.

Since she had been six she had come, on and off, to this jellyfish space, this cove at the bottom of a long track down from a rambling extended-family home on a bluff. The extended family was no longer hers, really, for a number of reasons, but it was hers enough that she still came here and still visited them and still lost herself in these waters. The jellyfish were new, or perhaps it was she who was new, so new that she had only just noticed them. One brushed up against one of her hips. The sun was hot enough to bake her belly through the dark fabric of her swimsuit, even though she was wallowing in water and easily able to barrel-roll in the water, to log like a whale if it got too much to bear.

Once she had dreamed about being a river dolphin, in South America or in China, maybe. She had come up out of the river, had come into a village, into a festival—and then back into the river, back to an underwater village, an underwater festival. Up out of the river again, and she was a seal on a North Atlantic skerry now, and it was no longer a river but the surging slate-grey sea. She married, grew old, left her husband, and went back into the sea—a lake now, and she was a bright-scaled carp, swimming hither and thither in the sun-splashed, sometimes-shaded shallows. And then the dream had ended, and she had woken in a start, and sat up in a bedroom in a house cocooned in morning rain.

It felt as if the jellies that were swimming with her now had come to her out of this dream of dreams. The darkness of the dream had sent her out into a dismaying light, and that had always worried her, ever since that so-sudden awakening. The light dismayed her less than usual now. She reached out in this warm and brightly lit reality and touched a jellyfish, a harmless jellyfish, maybe not a cnidarian at all but something that merely looked and acted similar the way she herself looked and acted like an ordinary and healthy person. She wondered if she could be or become harmless in her unordinariness and ill health. Probably she was more harmed than harmful already, she thought, as were the jellies, as was the water.

Short Story: “Her Numerous Progeny Prosper and Thrive”

Note: This short story was an “occasional” satire on the relatively-recent death of Queen Elizabeth II, meant to show how ridiculous some of the standards to which various sanctimonious American leftists claimed to hold her would have been in practice.

It is a well-known story, so famed among those interested in this kind of history. On February 6, 1952, a young woman of twenty-five wakes up in a treetop hotel in Kenya, a loft, an eyrie, looking out over verdant wet-season plains. A grim-faced runner comes and tells her to make her way to the nearest telephone, where she is told that her father has died peacefully over the night and she is now the queen and sovereign of vast swathes of the globe.

            What does that “sovereign” mean? What might she do with that queenhood? Not much, some argue; some people say that she is a figurehead, a pasteboard mask, an avatar of power rather than someone by whom or with whom or in whom power can actually be used. These people will tell you that she can only act according to the so-called “advice” of her servants, who in turn must be able to win votes in a democratically elected Parliament, and it is that Parliament that can do absolutely anything it likes.

            Yet some people say that weasel words are great. In theory the young woman’s powers are vast. And a good thing that she can’t use them, too, many say, given what her ancestors got up to when they could use them. Vast quantities of blood and guts, gold and silver, have been brought to bear for her family over the centuries, first to help them rule the world, then to keep them fed and happy, whatever “happy” means, while Parliament ruled the world for them. Now those blood and guts, gold and silver, are hers. Supposing they were not; supposing she attempted to divest herself of them. She is, after all, her mother’s daughter, and her mother is a woman who is reported to have said that she could only look the poor of London in the face after the family’s palace was struck by a German bomb.

            Let us suppose she does just that. “I will remain Elizabeth,” she says; her father Albert reigned as George, her uncle David as Edward, her great-grandfather Albert also as Edward, her great-great-grandmother Alexandrina as Victoria. (Alexandrina, Victoria, Alexandrina-Victoria, is the one in whose name the entity and process called the empire reached its apogee, the one who wore most famously the brilliant jewels that the poor of the earth die digging from the dark earth far away from England.) “This is my first decision—that I’ll keep my own name. My second decision is to set the world free.”

            “The world is by and large free,” her personal secretary says awkwardly. Her husband looks at her with a vague suspended-judgment sneer, as if he is waiting to see just what foolish things this mere girl whose liege man he now is will say. “The tyranny of the Nazis has been defeated, that of the Soviets is not our concern at present, and if you refer to Your Majesty’s own Empire, its tide is ebbing in most parts of the world.”

            “You are literally enacting colonial violence on black and brown bodies by saying that, Martin,” his sovereign princess warns.

            “I’m not—what does that—what the devil are you talking about? Begging your pardon, ma’am,” Martin splutters.

            “That is a whitecisheteropatriarchal thing to say if ever there was one,” says Her Majesty.

            Martin, desperately trying to wrap his head around this change in the demeanor of his new sovereign and concluding, based purely on explanatory power, that she must have come down with an acute psychiatric case of some kind upon losing her father so young, says “Yes, but…what does that mean, exactly?”

            “The remorseless logic of empire must not be allowed to continue. As I now lead the enterprise of empire, I must stop it immediately. Please prepare papers for an Order in Council instructing all British troops and administrators to withdraw from every station outside the British Isles, with immediate effect.”

            “First of all,” says Martin as patiently as he can manage, “the word ‘empire’ takes a definite or indefinite article, you’ll recall; it isn’t some sort of abstract or mass noun like ‘justice’ or ‘love’ or ‘revenge’ and I am pretty sure that is as Your Majesty well knows.”

            “Do get to the point, Martin,” says His Grace the Duke of Edinburg witheringly; he would rather end the part of the conversation involving Martin as soon as possible so that he can attempt to figure out what on earth is wrong with his wife himself.

            “Yes, of course, Your Grace,” Martin says, balancing his hands on his knees and his knees against each other gamely, or rather, in such a way as to deliberately and falsely indicate gameness. It is best, he has always heard, to tiptoe around mad monarchs when one is actually in their presence. “Second of all, Your Majesty will recall that there are very limited situations indeed in which the Crown can act without the advice of its ministers, and absolutely never against the advice of its ministers. The Conservative Party and Mr Churchill are against further retreats from our imperial holdings unless absolutely necessary, and even were an election to be held as soon as possible and the Labour Party get back in, the policy developing on their end is to withhold independence from colonies that have not adopted majority rule. Particularly with the colonies in Africa, immediate independence, especially without leaving any transitional civil servants in place to manage a peaceful break from the Home government, would result in a whole continent of South Africas or worse. Even His Majesty The King—that is, your late father, ma’am—was horrified by the way the Smuts government handled the color issue in South Africa, and of course the new government there is even worse in that regard. Do we really want Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and the rest—even Kenya!—to go the same way? All of this is, moreover, only to establish that what Your Majesty is proposing is unconstitutional and immoral. Further, it is unwise to boot.”

            “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Her Majesty explains. “Let me illustrate. William?” she calls to one of the black employees of the hotel.

            “Yes, Your Majesty?” he replies. He, like everyone, is still getting used to saying “Majesty” to her rather than “Royal Highness.” He resents it perhaps a bit more than do most.

            “Would you want, upon Kenya’s independence, for there to still be British civil servants in the country?” his Queen asks him.

            “Er…not particularly,” he says. “I suppose early on it might not be so bad. Why do you ask?”

            Her Majesty turns back to her secretary. “You see, Martin, William doesn’t particularly want British civil servants, and so there’s really no need for us to force them upon him. To do so would be to reinscribe the violence of empire on his black body. William?” she calls again.

            “Yes, Your Majesty?” he replies again, noticing a reporter at the door whom he will have to go and let into the lobby once this very strange conversation concludes.

            “You may beat up my husband, if you wish,” says the Queen. “We wouldn’t want to reinforce the black brute stereotype.”

            William says “What? Why would I do that?” at the same time that the Duke of Edinburgh says “No he bloody well may not!”

            “Again,” says the Queen apologetically, “I would offer myself, since I’m at the top of the hierarchy here, were it not for the unfortunate coding that would be involved if we did that.”

            “We won’t be doing anything!” William insists, forthrightly and sternly.

            “Lilibet,” says the Duke, bracing himself against the wall and feeling very much as if he could use a good stiff glass of something naval—rum, even grog in a pinch, “I really would very much like to understand what on earth you’re talking about and who the devil you hope to impress by talking about it.”

            “Oh, spare me the toxic masculinity, Philip,” says his wife and sovereign. “None of us are going to reinforce stereotypes here. Not in my family and not in the Palace. I’ll be explaining that further to you, Martin, once I finish explaining the importance of decolonization and my refusal to be a colonizer and an oppressor.”

            “Your commitment to withdrawing from the Empire is admirable, ma’am,” said Martin, falling back into a lickspittle aspect that this job has not normally required of him so far, “but I’ll point out that a stereotype generally speaking is not reinforced by the person or persons being stereotyped.”

            “Representation,” the Queen informs him in the most withering, wintry, and regal—or reginal—tones, “matters.”

            “Er…all right; we’ll say that; we’ll go with that,” says Martin. “Permission to draw up a draft of this—this edict, or this decree, that might pass constitutional and parliamentary muster?”

            “Yes, very well,” says the Queen with a heavy sigh, as if constitutional and parliamentary muster is a consideration that exists only to distract her servants from the moral rightness that is obvious even to them. Indeed, in fairness, much of it is, or should be, obvious to Martin, to the extent that he knows what is meant by what she says.

 ❦

Martin goes into the next room and calls his superiors in the Palace—might they not be his superiors much longer? Who can say—while the Queen speaks tensely with her husband and William begins, gingerly, to let the reporters file into the hotel.

            “Yes, Tommy,” Martin says over the phone, an international line getting far more use this morning than it has in years, than anybody involved in the phone services in East Africa generally ever though that it would. “Drawing up a general statement of approval for the transformation of Empire to Commonwealth strikes me as a good idea as well.”

            “It does my heart good to hear you think so, Martin.”

            “Supposing Her Majesty declines to sign it as not forceful enough.”

            “A grim supposition,” says Tommy, “but in that event it must be said that I have helped shepherd this family through one abdication, which was really a deposition, constitutionally speaking. It would of course be a matter of deep concern for the entire Empire and Commonwealth—even for the entire world—were things to reach that point again after barely fifteen years. It ought to be avoided if at all possible, by whatever means possible and necessary.”

            “Within reason and the law, I take it,” says Martin.

            “Within reason and the law, yes,” confirms Tommy. “A good day’s work to you, Martin.”

            “And to you. You sound exhausted, sir.”

            “Demise of the Crown is an exhausting thing. Much to consider,” says Tommy, and hangs up.

            Martin jots down two pages’ worth of notes, a first draft of a first draft of the proclamation on which the Queen is insisting, and goes back into the room to present it to her, the room where she and her husband are still arguing on either side of an ottoman made from what looks like the stuffed foot of some big game species or another. Somewhere else in the building they can all vaguely hear William speaking in hushed, hurried tones to someone who has already managed to fly in from the Toronto Star, of all papers. Perhaps the person was already in Africa for some other, one assumes some less august and less impressive story? Martin would not be surprised, and he envies such a person.

            “Your Majesty.”

            “Yes, Martin?” She turns to him with her immaculately made-up smile, her immaculate stiffened curls gleaming in the morning sunlight.

            “I have some first notes for your order, ma’am,” he says, and hands her what might be, in the grand sweep of their island story, a poison pill without recent parallel.

            “One moment, Philip,” she says to her husband, who is about to make some caustic remark. She takes up the paper, clears from her throat some of the tears that she has been keeping from her eyes, and begins to read.

Short Story: “The Thing about HIgh School”

“The thing about high school,” her father said, “is that it’s jocks versus nerds. That’s the basics.”

And she started high school. She did not find it to be jocks versus nerds, exactly. The jocks, by and large, were the nerds. The first boy who made a pass at her was a lacrosse player. He also got straight As, wore custom, and aspired to go to Harvard Business School, even though their high school was the second-best public high school in the school district. Why the fuck, she wondered, did he wear custom if he was going to public school? She ran this by her father and he shrugged and told her to ask him again when he was done with Better Call Saul for the evening.

A few more weeks into her freshman year, she was invited to a party. The party was in fact hosted by unintellectual good-time buddies who drank light beer and had posters of OnlyFans personalities, but these people were not actually any go keg—and ended up having to go to urgent care.

“Some people who act out at parties,” her father told her, “if they don’t know their limits, can go to the emergency room.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m aware. But one thing confuses me.”

“What’s that?”

“These guys didn’t seem like meatheads. They just seemed like burnouts. I don’t think anybody would have been that intimidated by them, unless she’d been beaten down by life already. I felt sorry for them more than anything.”

Her father thought for a moment. “Well, princess,” he said, “the thing about high school is, it’s jocks versus nerds. That’s the basics.”