Plains Song (17 page)

Rosalene and Caroline came back from the fair with blistered heels. A coolie hat had sheltered all of Blanche but her insteps, which were sunburned. Ned had bought Rosalene a yo-yo and Blanche a live chameleon she wore like a pin on her blouse. Cora saw its colors alter when it was placed on the carpet. Later it was lost, then found, high in the fold of a curtain where nobody could reach it. All but Cora went with Ned to eat hot dogs, one of which they brought her, with a bottle of root beer. She had thirst, but no desire for food. During the night she woke thinking the chameleon was in her bed. The lights of beacons crisscrossed on the sky, and what she thought to be the moon proved to be a balloon descending. Late as it was she could hear music, and the sound of revelers. It dazzled her to think, as Ned had told her, that the fair covered more ground than Norfork, some of it on
an island of rocks built into the lake. Lights came and went, but at no time did the room grow dark. Above the half-lowered window of the bathroom she watched the sky light up before sunrise, the street below her littered with papers that fluttered about like chickens. If asked at that time she would have said that she had seen everything.

Yet it left her unprepared for the bedlam of the fair itself. Weary and dazzled, she sat with Rosalene on a bench near where music was playing. The players were on a stage, the sun glinting on their instruments. It differed from anything she had heard in the way it soothed and calmed her.

In one of the vast exhibitions, so tired she was dazed, Cora sat with the girls for a photograph. Over them arched an arbor, with painted flowers and birds. The thought of a true human likeness is miraculous, but the picture itself is even stranger. The scene is dark, but there she sits, like a stuffed owl. Perhaps she had no idea what she looked like. A tight line seals her pleated lips. Caroline squealed with laughter when she saw it, but Blanche pressed her hands to her cheeks as if to widen her eyes, her lower lip held fast by her teeth. The pin at Cora's throat reflects the light, wisps of hair appear to be lines in her face. As the ears have grown larger, the head appears to be shrinking. Unquestionably it is Cora, but it is also an image that defies grasping. Madge puts it away to look at it later. Cora will never see it again. What she saw was so bizarre it left no afterimage. However briefly she had seen this “likeness” it changed the substance of her
nature. She was no longer the person she had been, but something more or less.

Later that day they watched the fireworks until the air had cooled and Madge could put her shoes back on. Ned said that Cora was asleep before her head hit the pillow, but she was awakened by claps of thunder and flashes of lightning. The curtains puffed like sails until Madge closed the windows. In the morning Caroline found Blanche's chameleon under the covers at the foot of Cora's bed, a piece of its tail broken off.

Cora and Madge had planned for weeks to meet with Sharon Rose on the last day of their visit. Ned would take the girls to the zoo in Lincoln Park, and Madge, Cora, and Sharon Rose would have lunch in the pavilion, where they could talk. At the very last moment, while Ned was parking the car, Cora was possessed by something. She could hear the shrill piercing voice of Sharon, and feel the rage in her body, like that of a trapped animal, when Cora had whacked her palm with the hairbrush. “That will teach you!” she had cried, but what had it taught her? When Ned appeared she flatly refused to go along with Madge. “Mama, you sick?” Madge asked her, and maybe she was. As if she couldn't bear to do it alone, Madge took Rosalene along with her. Caroline and Blanche went along with their father, leaving Cora free to sit on a bench facing the animal cages. Ned bought the girls balloons they asked Cora to hold. Seated alone, in this throng of people, Cora was seized with a sadness so great her throat pained her. Madge didn't like the way she looked when she came back to
her, and they drove to the lakefront, where it was cooler. Ned parked where they could look at the water. So much of it, endless and calm, soothed Cora, the color deep as a bluing rinse, her gaze fastened on the smoke of a boat beyond the horizon. Madge said that Sharon Rose was fine, prettier than ever, and still doing her music.

They drove back through the Dells, in Wisconsin, where Ned took them all for a boat ride. Cora sat at the front where the oars wouldn't splash her. It frightened her to look deep into the clear water. Rising to leave the boat, one hand extended toward Madge, Cora became confused, the boat tilted, and she toppled, her arms flung wide, into weeds and shallow water. She was pulled from the lake like a drenched fowl, spread to dry in the sun. Her left hip seemed strained. The twisting fall had wrenched her back. Ned drove from the Dells to the farm without stopping, Cora propped bolt upright between him and Madge. Long after sundown they reached the farm, the pits scratched by the chickens visible in the car lights. The noise and commotion stirred up the hens, but did not disturb Emerson. Because of her lameness Cora was put on the cot off the kitchen, propped up by pillows. Ten days later she was still there, but able to move around with the support of a chair, gripping the back. It broke her lifelong habit of being first person up and down the stairs. When she was able to climb the steps if she cared to, she had grown accustomed to the cot off the kitchen, and to sleeping propped up. Emerson
made no comment. As he had all his life, first thing in the morning he drank a dipper of water without skimming off the flies. What was left in the dipper he tossed through the screen, which caused it to rust.

More than five years after Orion's death Sharon reexperienced her troubled sense of loss as suppressed feelings of guilt. She neither liked nor disliked her father. She felt detached from and indifferent to him. Perhaps she rather hoped it would be possible for her to overlook him. Like an infection that had failed to localize, her feelings of guilt had been slow to surface. When he came back from the war, however, it had shamed her to feel only pity for him. For Fayrene she felt a distressed compassion since she seemed doomed to complicate her misfortunes, but
she was aware that her attitude toward Blanche had changed.

Sharon marveled at, rather than pitied, the gangly puppet-limbed child with elbows that appeared to bend inward at the slightest pressure, or when she clasped her hands behind her back. She was now trapped in a school with oafish boys and giggling girls, where she was moved from class to class, from desk to desk, to accommodate her ungainly figure, her still growing legs. She was leaner and more cranelike than Cora, with the matchless complexion her father thought to be unhealthy. Sharon could not help staring at the pearly lobes of her ears, the shell-like transparency of the wings of her nose. If a lighted candle could be placed in her mouth, would she glow with an inner light? Yet she seemed as at ease in her environment as she looked out of place. She could not learn fractions. She had no interest in civics or history. While these subjects were under discussion she made her childlike drawings of animals and birds. Her teacher, Miss Ringle, had been relieved to find she could entertain herself and not prove to be a problem.

At home Blanche was the darling of her father and the object of Caroline's relentless taunting. She made beds, and sat for hours attentive to little Rosalene's prattle. Was it any wonder that she was silent? Any impulse to speak was reserved for her father, who put his finger to her lips to spare her the trouble. Sharon sensed that it embarrassed him to confront a girl child who was taller than he was. He thought it enough, by way of communication, to blink his eyes in such a
manner it led her to shyly lower the lids on her own. That's what she had always done as a child, and she was still his child. Put out to Mrs. Ord, to learn piano, she had not progressed beyond “Chopsticks.” Was there possibly a problem with her hearing? What business was it of Sharon's?

Sharon could no longer bear the thought, nor avoid it, that this girl child would soon appeal to some loutish youth stimulated by the seasonal fall of pollen, and be thick with child. The thought almost sickened her. In a family of girls one sacrifice (Fayrene's) was enough. Before the cocoon of Blanche's childhood had peeled away she would be locked into the trap that nature and man had set for her.

Hadn't Madge repeatedly said that what Blanche needed the most was an older sister the likes of Sharon? (Rosalene had such a companion in Blanche, silent though she was.) With a directness that would appeal to Ned (she had to be tactful) she would write to Madge suggesting that Blanche might attend this school for girls in Waukegan, since there was simply nothing further for her in Norfork. She would spend her weekends with Sharon. The Briarcliffe School, which Lillian had attended, made allowances for young ladies who were unusual or gifted in the manner of Blanche. These things were on Sharon's mind when she heard from Madge (such coincidences were not unusual between them) wondering if Blanche might pay her a visit (it was early July), since with school out, and all the girls at home, Caroline was almost too much for them, especially Blanche. Rosalene
would fight her back and shriek at her, but Caroline couldn't resist heckling a person like Blanche. Nor could Madge plan to go off to the Ozarks, or somewhere else, without them. All winter Ned had had his heart set on going to the Black Hills, where he hoped to do some fishing, but the girls would simply not allow him a moment to himself. Blanche would not be going on to the new junior high school but would help Fayrene with her newest baby. She was so patient with babies it was too bad she didn't have one of her own.

If Madge had not closed with that remark Sharon might have done no more than think it over. Instead she wrote to say yes, yes she would be glad to, if the time could be arranged before her own vacation on the Cape in August, never dreaming that when that time came she would cunningly contrive, like a kidnapper, to take Blanche along with her, rather than spend the weeks at the sea without her, brooding on her exile and waste in Norfork.

Sharon was not inexperienced in the far reaches of friendship, and infatuation, but nothing had prepared her for the great pleasure she received from Blanche's mute passive presence, her undemanding yet constant attention. Her beauty was certainly peculiar, as pronounced and unusual as something imagined (not at all lifelike), recalling the women seen in the paintings of the early Flemish and Dutch masters, so self-contained, so unrealistic they aroused no further expectations. To contemplate their appearance was more than enough.

Within a week of her arrival Sharon had begun her
connivance to keep her. In this, the situation in Norfork played into her hands. From the Black Hills Madge wrote her to say what a great relief it was to be free of the haggling girls. Caroline herself had changed now that she received all of her father's attention. As for Ned, not having a son, a tomboy like Caroline secretly pleased him. The two of them shot at bottles with an air gun. After a letter like this Sharon took the steps she had contemplated but feared to acknowledge. It was the declared purpose of the Briarcliffe School to accommodate the exceptional student, even when the student seemed markedly disadvantaged. The principal, Miss Holroyd, one of the founders of coeducation in England, had only to set her eyes on Blanche to exchange knowing glances with Sharon. Of course! Who would ever know what might flower on such a branch? Nor would it be hard, with so many to choose from (they came to Briarcliffe from all over the world), to find a suitable roommate. Sharon did not trust herself to write a letter, so she called Madge on the phone—pleading the need of a quick decision, to ensure her place in the school—closing the conversation with Blanche, herself, speaking softly but clearly to her father. Yes, she was happy. Yes, she looked forward to going to school. That in itself was so unusual no further discussion proved to be necessary. Blanche would come home for Christmas and spring vacation, but other, shorter holidays she would spend with Sharon, including most of her weekends. It all went so well Sharon overlooked the remarkable change in Blanche. How account for her assurance?
Reflecting on this transformation, Sharon thought back to the private decisions of her own childhood, when she had felt her nature threatened, culminating in the moment she had filled her lungs and shrieked to the intruder seated in the buggy with Madge. A force she was born with. One that would go off when it was tapped.

Blanche's roommate, a plump, thick-calfed girl named Shirley Caudwell, a hockey player from Charlottesville, Virginia, had the chronic cheerful nature of fat children and loved to eat. She received food parcels from her family weekly, as if they feared she might starve. Tinned meats, preserved fruits, baked Southern hams, baskets of fruit given to voyagers on shipboard. She shared it with her classmates, but to Sharon's dismay little of it clung to the limbs of Blanche. Eating so preoccupied Shirley that Blanche's reserve went unnoticed. Two weeks after her arrival Blanche did seem to experience a brief spell of withdrawal, thought to be homesickness, but it was hard to distinguish in a girl like Blanche her normal retired nature from an abnormal reaction. The activities of the art department, under Mademoiselle Arnaud, a Belgian woman, so preoccupied Blanche that her day proved to be too short. She was
slow.
There was little or nothing said, however simple, that she did not have to have repeated. The projection of slides, the collecting of art prints, the mounting of prints on varicolored papers, the drawing of plaster-cast hands and heads, in charcoal, on papers of assorted colors and textures, all of this in a room lit up by a skylight under trees
flaming with fall colors. Blanche wandered about in her bibbed green smock, her fingers ink-stained, her cheeks smeared with chalk dust, the marks of her sharp pointed teeth flaking the enamel from her drawing pencils. None of this long concealed from Mademoiselle Arnaud her unusual nature and remarkable beauty. Blanche was also content to sit for her portrait—something quite beyond the talents of the others—leaning forward, her chin resting on her hand, or comfortably slouched, her legs folded beneath her, the light falling in such a manner her skin was transparent as porcelain. That was quite beyond the students to capture, of course, but Mademoiselle Arnaud, who did watercolors, and knew exactly how to use the cream tones of the paper, in some of her quick sketches captured Blanche's serene detachment. It was quite uncanny in a girl in her early teens. Equally arresting was to observe Blanche when she was shown these portraits of herself. Most girls, their emotions confused, would giggle, or feel embarrassed to shamelessly stare at their own likenesses, but Blanche would soberly ponder these images as if they were portraits of someone else. One was used as a frontispiece for the yearbook—a portrait to please most Briarcliffe parents—and Sharon often found Blanche shamelessly gazing at it, as if pondering its meaning. There seemed to be so little vanity in this recognition Sharon did not speak to her about it. It might have been another person, understood to bear her a close resemblance.