But I believe in that white house. I believe in those towns of perpetual summer. I believe in you, Camden, Bath, Castine, Wiscasett. I believe in your summer.
The mug turns to white flowers in her hand. The ocean wind warms. She is back in summer though it is December now. She hears the neighbors’ voices far off. The beach ball bounces in the sand. We chase after it, wave to her.
“Is that my sweet pea I see?” she sang out to me through the blossoms and the leaves and the light of the garden. “My hibiscus? My wisteria? My alyssum? My primrose?
“Sweet William, is that you?” she called to Fletcher, and my brother blushed.
“Is that my daffodil?” I chirped back to her through the Queen Anne’s lace she refused to weed out. “Is that my forget-me-not?” I giggled. “My lilac? My bluebell? My mimosa?”
“This mildness will kill us,” Jack says, shaking his head. “This summer haze we are forced to see everything through, even now.
“Jesus, Vanessa,” he laughs. “It will kill us.”
I always wanted to believe that someone like my mother would know what she needed and where she could go. But arriving sometimes in Maine and parting the musty curtain, or directing a taxi in Italian to some new address, or stepping onto the pavement and hearing a strange clock toll, she would realize in one terrible moment that she would not be able to stay She was afraid, uncomfortable, and she would be unable to work. Many times she’d turn right around and travel hundreds of miles, thousands of miles, back home.
“It was a foolish idea,” she would say to my father over a dinner it seemed he always had waiting for her. He never knew quite when to expect her, and I think he always hoped in part that she would stay where she had decided to go and in part that she would come home. She was a solitary traveler, her expectations rising high as she left the house, only to have the message reiterated: there are limits, places the architecture of your brain will not permit you to stay, to experience. It was a terrible message, she thought.
“You must have known from the beginning, Michael,” she sighed. My mother trusted my father implicitly and depended on him for advice of all kinds. “It was just another of my crazy schemes. You should have told me; I would have listened.” But she would not have listened, my father knew. He shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t matter, Christine,” he said, smiling at her. He had let sadness go. He was happy just to see her sitting before him. She was back. He squeezed her hand. She was back.
But she is not back, Jack seems to be saving as he steps into the room. If a pen or a paper knife or a scissors had been handy, I think I would have killed him right there as he smiled and put the newspaper down in front of me.
From the paper I read that “despite the warm temperatures now, meteorologists say this will be the coldest winter in hundreds of years” and for some reason I believe it. “One theory is that volcanic eruptions in Mexico will have a drastic effect on the temperature. And,” it says, “it is a fact that months ago jet streams failed to migrate toward the Arctic and dissipate.
“There is cold water all over the Pacific,” I read to him, “from Japan to Alaska. And this configuration carries certain implications.”
Jack just moans. “I don’t know, Vanessa,” he says. His voice is thick and slow, a mirror of the weather. He puts his enormous hand gently on my neck, then smoothes the hair back from my face. He is sweating. He shakes his head. “Your mildness will kill us,” he whispers in my ear.
From the east came the men with faces and hands the color of snow. The men were ugly. Hair covered their faces and bodies, and when Drinks Water saw them he thought of the hairy water monsters w ho drew swimmers into their mouths by making waves. He worshipped the large boulder for strength. They came riding Shoon-ka wah-kon, fearful, mysterious dogs—wonderful dogs, fast as the wind. Drinks Water offered a pipe to these men and they let him touch the beautiful clogs. Trust us, they said to Drinks Water and they passed the pipe back and forth.
Drinks Water dreamt with his eyes open as the men sat with him in a circle. Already he could hear the ringing of their axes in his ears. As they inhaled the sacred smoke he saw them building small, gray boxes, and beside those boxes he watched his people die.
The water rushes around the rocks in wild, violent circles. He looks at it with a scientific eye. Here chaos begins, he thinks to himself.
My mother cannot stop walking. She goes from one room of the big house to another, then outside, one state to the next, then across the ocean.
“A body breathes under the earth,” she moans. “Its lungs are filled up with dirt.”
My father talks under his breath. “This is the hardest part,” he says, and he is right—w hen she hears and sees what is not there.
It is not there, he is sure of it and tells her so.
“How can you be so sure, Michael?” she asks over and over, and he says it again with an authority he does not often call up.
“I am sure. Believe me.” And he holds her shoulders and looks into her eyes. This is the worst part, we children think, watching her from a far corner. I wonder to myself whether she w ill ever be well, and Hetcher somehow knows this and puts his hand on my shoulder and whispers, “It will be fine.” I want to know w here his faith comes from, his eves that shine confidence as she begs us to come to her, calling us out from the shadows.
“Mom,” he says, hugging her with the whole of his strength. He is so little still.
“Tell me the weather, Hetcher,” my mother says. But before he can tell her of the cold spell we are in, the temperatures below freezing each day, no sign of a break, she says, “I wish there were tulips here,” and brushes his head. She picks up the phone, books a flight to the Netherlands—then cancels it—books it again.
“Tulips,” she says again and again, “tulips,” until somehow she sees the heads of her children, our heads, blossom red and yellow, and she is satisfied.
“Oh, my!” she exclaims. “You two are so beautiful!” To see our heads blooming in brilliant color makes us dearer to her; she understands us better in that moment, loves us more. I w ill gladly make my head a petaled top for her, I think, my arms the green leaves of tulips, my body a stem she might pluck and hold close to her breast; something she needs, finally.
Sometimes I think I have heard the fluttering of wings. Sometimes I think I have seen something: a tip of a tail, a piece of beak, a leg, one thin leg of that incredible bird. Sometimes I see the bare branch of a tree swaying in slow motion in my sleep and I know what that means. I try to get myself past the tree to see what’s beyond it—the held that opens like a great hand, the w ide breath of sky. I search for a trace of the Topaz Bird. Only moments before it was perched on that bobbing branch. I am getting closer. I follow the horizon line of my dreams. I watch. My mother’s robe is shining and gold. I listen. Her voice is sweet and low. I close my eyes in the dark and ieel her warm breath. I try to picture that bird in my mind. But it’s so tiny, so hard to see.
“You must not be afraid,” she says in her lovely night voice. But still I must be. Still I can’t see it, not even now as I fall into this twenty-year-old sleep, this grown-up sleep.
“Mother,” I whisper, though she is far away now, “help me, please.”
I wait for the leap—the way to see past the tree to that place—her voice. I will wait forever, if I must, for that wonderful flapping, and me right there, on the wings of it.
“Gently,” her biography reads, “gently in recollection, Colette led her visitor to the bedroom she had known as a child; she showed him the cat-door, through which at dawn, the vagabond cat had ambled in and fallen on the bed, ‘cold, white and light as an armful of snow.’ Finally she led him into the garden.”
Her voice sails on the air, skimming it. “Quelle surprise, Sabine!” she says. She is delighted to hear from her friend who is so far away. It is a miracle, she thinks—and she says so—how one can sound so near, how one can be so far and so near at the same time.
My mother’s voice is a small boat being tossed on the waves. Giddy and light. It gets bigger and moves steadily through the water. “Absolument,” she says, “oh, absolument.”
She is so charming. “N’est-ce pas?” she laughs. “Evidemment. Oui, maintenant, je suis très heureuse—oui.” She is glowing. She laughs again. I close my eyes and pretend I am the woman on the other end of the phone. I concentrate on her voice. She is so delightful. “I would not hesitate to love her,” I sav to mvself. “I would not hesitate to love that voice.”
“They dined on mince,” she sang, “and slices ot quince—” Her eyes lit up. “Which they ate with a runcible spoon,” we said together. “And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon, the moon. They danced by the light of the moon.”
“The waves beside them danced, but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not be but gay,
In such a jocund company,
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.”
“The Daffodils!’” I yelled.
“By whom?” my mother asked, smiling.
“Wordsworth!” I screamed.
“For oft w hen on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon the inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
“You must never forget,” she would whisper, leaning over me, after all the bedtime poems had been recited, all the bedtime songs had been sung, as she covered me with her night and shut out the light and kissed me on the forehead, “that the Topaz Bird means us no harm.”
“It’s even more beautiful than a swan,” I said, my head feathery with sleep.
“We are lucky to see it,” she said. “You must not be afraid.”
The women wake early. It’s misty; there’s a smell of dew, of damp mushrooms, of nuts—chestnuts. They lie in the wet herbs, say nothing, listen to the odd two-note whistle of a bird. It’s spring.
Slowly the garden awakes, the world awakes—le jardin, le monde. They look down the Rue de Beaujolais where the milkman comes in his cart. Christine frames him with a stone wall off in the distance, puts lilacs in the foreground, a border of lavender.
They drink café au lait from cracked pink cups and eat tiny blocks of chocolate. They pet the cats. They open
Le Matin
and
Vogue
. Sabine looks up.
“Grand-père laid slabs of wet chocolate out on the roof at night to dry,” she smiles, “and in the morning there would be the most wonderful flower-petal designs on them.” She giggles. “They were the paw prints of cats!”
In the distance they can see the sunlit slopes where the grapes that have been in Sabine’s family hundreds and hundreds of years grow. It’s fall now. All is burnt orange, and yellow, and scarlet. The earth smells so lovely—the smoke, the leaves. The silence is thrilling. They walk into the dark woods together, pretending it is a virgin forest that no one has ever dared walk in, though an hour before they watched the woodcutter disappear into that leafy darkness.
“I’m cold,” Christine says.
“Maman used to carry a small metal box of coals and ashes to school to keep her warm,” Sabine says, running through the leaves in her boots. They laugh and laugh at the thought of Sabine’s mother and hug each other, fall into the leaves, get up and run back to the house for sweaters. “There were always wonderful winter roses on the Christmas table,” Sabine says, rosy cheeked, smiling, looking around the room. “Maman always saw to it.
“Come with me,” she whispers, taking Christine’s hand. Slowly they descend the dark steps to the apple cellar. The smell fills them. Thev lie on the cool dirt floor. My mother takes off her thick sweater. Their breathing grow s heavy. They move closer. They close their eyes.
After a long while Sabine opens one eye. From a small window she sees the face of a young goat looking in at them. “Look!” she cries, and they are doubled over in laughter. It seems that they have never seen anything funnier in their whole lives.
“Enough of this!” Sabine says, running up the apple cellar stairs. “A Paris,” she writes on blue paper and leaves it on the table of the w inter roses.
“Paris,” Sabine sighs, “finally!” They make a stop for cologne, a stop for blue paper, stamps, cherries, champagne.
“Oh, Paris!” my mother sighs. “Les fêtes, les soirées, les salons.” “ht beaucoup de femmes!” Sabine laughs. “Grand-mère told me that Mata-Hari danced her Javanese dances entirely in the nude once, for the women. Can you picture it?” She laughs and laughs.
My mother walks slowly, dropping her gloves, catching a falling scarf, stalling for time. Beautiful, vibrant Paris turns to watercolor sadness.
“Don’t worry,” Sabine pouts, “one day when we are old we’ll Join traveling circus and be together lower They mbrace, kiss good-bye lor the thousandth time.
“Au revoir, ma Pans. Au revoir, ma Sabine,” Christine say. She walks slow ly, turns once more.
“We’ll be tightrope walkers,” Sabine says.
My mother smiles and waxes good-bye.
She is dozing off now with the other little girl, her sister, in the cramped room. The tat man reads about New Orleans to them trom the newspaper’s travel section.
“New Orleans—that sounds, that sounds,” she murmurs, tailing asleep. What she means to say, what she would have said, was “that sounds so nice.”
In her dreams the notes of saxophone slide out of the windows &she is sure she has never heard anything like it before.
Creoles—was that those people were called? There are feathers and fans, men dressed as women, women dressed as lizards and birds, laughter, and a drink called bourbon. All of it follows her into her dreams.
And the fat man, too, leaving for work, dreams his wav into the dark mill.
“The rainbow-colored Painted Desert of Arizona sweeps in a great crescent from the Grand Canyon southeast along the Colorado River to the Petrified Forest.”
“The Petrified Forest!” Lucy cries.
“Go now,” my mother says. “There is no other way.”
The apartment is warm and dark. I turn in bed toward the wall and hug the cat. “But Mother,” I say.