Quiet as the Grave (27 page)

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The dictionary defines
clubas “a group of people
associated for a common purpose” and “anything used to threaten or coerce.”

Coincidence? I'm not so sure.

My own history with clubs has certainly included elements of both.

I joined my first club when I was about eight years old. It was the I Hate Boys Club, and it had only two members, my best friend, Celie, who was vice president, and me, the president.

I'm not sure why I was president, except that I was bossier than Celie (being a few months older, which was important when your years could be counted on both hands), and the fact that our clubhouse stood in my front yard, not hers.

Before we got so lofty, that structure used to be called the dollhouse. It was one large room, about the size of a decent potting shed, and had been built by my father to look like a miniature version of our real house, just a few yards away. It
was white wood, with a front porch held up by columns and a bright red door. My mother later told me that my dad hammered it into being in the weeks after his own mother died, pounding off the grief.

But, heady with the power of being self-appointed executives, Celie and I redecorated the dollhouse with everything a club needed. There were cast-off chairs and nicked desks and three rather surreal stiff blotter-paper hands, to which we stapled small boxes labeled “Dues” “Donations” and “Debts.” The fact that our club had no funds whatsoever didn't diminish our delight in the bureaucratic alliteration.

I don't remember how long the club lasted. Probably not long. Our only purpose was to spy on my boy cousins, who lived next door. Celie and I would climb to the top of the clubhouse, stretch ourselves out as flat as possible on the hot, sticky roof, and watch their comings and goings. We provided a typical eight-year-old's commentary, heavy on words like
gross, jerk
and
yuck.

I don't think my cousins ever heard us, so the I Hate Boys Club probably didn't do any real damage to anyone. But two years later, when we started our next club, we had obviously lost a lot of that innocence.

The new club was formed for the purpose of staging a play my father had written for us. Celie
and I had the lead roles, of course, because he had written them expressly for us, and the characters were even named Kathleen and Celia.

But we handed out the rest of the roles like political appointments to the classmates who pleased us most. The power went to our heads immediately. “You may be Sister Zulema,” we told Connie, but later we retracted it on some trumped-up charge. I think, in fact, that we envied the rag curls her mother wound into her pretty hair each night.

We set up membership requirements, attendance at meetings and rehearsals, and a set number of lines to memorize each week. I cringe now, thinking of how insufferable I must have been, but at the time I saw myself as the captain of the ship, saving us all from ruin, steering us toward the glory of a successful performance.

One day, a girl on whom we'd bestowed a desirable role didn't show up for rehearsal. Celie and I were incensed. My father was a lawyer, so I immediately thought how cool it would be to hold a “trial.” We assigned the other classmates parts in the drama—this one would be the defender, this one the prosecutor, another girl the judge. I don't know why someone didn't just tell us to take our control-freak arrogance and stuff it, but they didn't. It's hard being ten.

I don't think it ever occurred to Celie or me that anyone might take the whole theatrical nonsense seriously, but the girl on “trial” absolutely did. The night before the trial, her parents called my parents. Their daughter, they said, was nearly sick with fear and distress.

I will never forget the look on my father's face when he came into my room that night. I adored him, and the realization that I had profoundly disappointed him was almost unbearable. He sat down on the edge of my bed and asked me my side of the story. Then, when he saw that it was all true, he began to talk to me about empathy, about the beauty of “inclusion” and the unnecessary ugliness of “exclusion.” The grace of kindness, which brought joy to the giver, and the pettiness of cruelty, which crabbed and soured your own soul.

He took his time. He had a talent with words, and he used it to make me look at myself clearly. Before he was finished, I was limp with shame, and I was finished with clubs forever.

Until it came time to imagine what a self-centered control-freak like Justine Millner Frome might do to ease her burden of boredom. What could she do to keep herself feeling comfortably important, the glittering center of a subservient universe?

A club, I thought, remembering the shame and the pain. Definitely, a club.

• 1) Tom and Becky explore Injun Joe's Cave. For millions of young readers (including me), this was our first detailed description of a cave, and it imprinted indelibly on our psyches. Forever more the word
  caveconjured up the images
  Tom and Becky saw—stalactites as big as a man's leg, a spring lined with sparkling crystals and exotic spaces called “The Drawing Room,” “The Cathedral” and “Aladdin's Palace.” It was Mark Twain's genius that he could make the experience of being lost here both thrilling and terrifying. When I learned that there really was a similar cave near Twain's Hannibal, Missouri, I was so tempted…. The real-life stories rivaled anything in the novel. Apparently a local doctor named McDowell did experiments on corpses in this cave, and rumor had it he kept his dead fourteen-year-old daughter's body in a glass cylinder down there. Exciting stuff. But I'm not as brave as Becky, and, sadly, plain old
  claustrophobia kept me from seriously considering a trip of my own.
  
• 2) Samuel Taylor Coleridge builds “caves of ice” under Kubla Khan's “sunny pleasure dome.” Though I'm still not sure
  exactly what the
  poem “Kubla Khan” means (with apologies to my long-suffering senior English teacher), I've always found the idea of those ice caves unforgettable. Below the “incense-bearing trees” and the fertile ground, and the gushing fountains, the caves lie waiting. Like a frozen, exquisite hell. That inevitable tension between beauty and danger, between joy and despair, is strangely exciting. So is the idea that the whole Kubla Khan landscape is so hauntingly beautiful that if you ever saw it, and dared to tell anyone what you'd seen, they would lock you up as mad.
  
• 3) Count de Almasy carries a broken Katharine Clifton into the Cave of Swimmers. Whether it's the book or the movie, the caves in
  The English Patient are romantic, beautiful and cruel. The
  idea that images of swimming people had been painted on the cave walls, proving that the land had once known water, was somehow heartbreaking and wonderful. It was as if the caves could immortalize a geography, or a love, that had been doomed from the start.
  
• 4) Hawkeye leads Cora and friends into a cave behind a waterfall in
  The Last of the Mohicans.
  This may be the most romantic cave moment in film history. Hawkeye realizes he'll have to leave Cora in the cave if he's to have any chance of saving her in the end. She'll be captured by the bad guys and taken away. But then he grabs her by the arms and says, “I will find you.” His wet hair is streaming in his face, and his voice is hoarse with emotion, half drowned by the thundering waterfall just inches away. I'm sure I heard a dozen women in the movie theater sigh. A few may have whimpered. I may have been one of them, although I'm admitting nothing.
  
• 5) In
  The Crystal Cave, Galapas takes Merlin into
  the crystal cave, and shows him his future. Everyone likes Merlin—he's the best part of the Camelot story, anyhow, once you've realized that Arthur is going to lose the girl. But the mental image of a cave made of crystal is simply too gorgeous to resist. In all that gloomy darkness, a secret stash of glittering magic! Even if I hadn't been a Mary Stewart fan already, the title alone would have made me buy this book, the first of the Merlin trilogy. And, of course, Mary Stewart never disappoints!
  

Suzie Strickland might be eking out a living painting portraits of children, but she's got a long way to go before she can compete with some of these amazing paintings!

• 1 Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, by John Singer Sargent
  

This picture of two little girls painting paper lanterns is one of the most magical works of art I've ever seen. The girls are in white, absorbed in their creation, seemingly unaware of being observed. In this fantasy garden of white flowers and green grass, blue twilight plays overall, capturing that ephemeral moment when the world holds no work, no struggle, no practicality of any kind…only beauty. The story behind the painting is wonderful, too. Apparently Singer Sargent painted only about ten minutes a day, when the light was perfect, and it took him about two months to complete the work. Dolly and
Polly, the girls in the picture, must have found that tedious, but it doesn't show!

• 2 Little Girl Sitting in a Blue Armchair, by Mary Cassatt
  

Any list like this could include half a dozen of Cassatt's extraordinary paintings, but I've chosen just one to represent them all. In this picture, a little girl lounges in a bold blue armchair, looking disgusted with life and completely unaware of how adorable she is. Cassatt didn't need to romanticize children. She understood that part of their charm was that they didn't care what anyone thought of them. This child is bored, bored, bored, and you can almost feel a tantrum brewing, like the cool air that hits your face before a storm. The puppy in the chair next to her is so small you almost miss him at first, but he knows what's coming and looks loyally resigned to riding it out.

• 3 Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander, by James Abbott McNeill Whistler
  

Cicely Alexander reportedly had to suffer through seventy sittings before Whistler finished the portrait, and the expression on her face shows that it wasn't easy! She seems to be struggling
not to just toss down her hat and walk away. Thank goodness she didn't, because this subtle, unsentimental portrait, with its wonderful interplay of understated colors, is a beauty. Notice the stylish dress that Whistler supposedly designed himself. And don't miss the feather on the hat, which is so real you can almost feel it tickling your skin. The butterflies above her were Whistler's favorite—he frequently used a butterfly monogram to sign his paintings. And how can you help loving a painter who had an infamous feud with an art critic? Critic John Ruskin once said that a painting of Whistler's was the equivalent of “flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.”

• 4 Girl in a Red Hat, by Alcide Robaudi
  

This is a much more romantic look at childhood, and might even be overly cute if it weren't for the joyous exuberance of this fantastic hat. This little girl, painted by a French illustrator from the late 1800s and early 1900s, has yards of flyaway copper-silk hair topped with a huge red hat decorated with leaves, flowers and berries. She always makes me think of Dylan Thomas's “Fern Hill,” in which the poet remembers a childhood when “honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns.” Here, surely, is the princess.

• 5 The Boyhood of Raleigh, by Sir John Everett Millais
  

This picture shows two well-dressed boys of privilege listening to a barefoot sailor telling stories of the sea. Both boys are absorbed, but the young Raleigh is almost feverish with enchantment. We see his whole adventurous, chaotic, tragic future in his eyes, and in the way he clutches his legs, as if he must hold himself together, as if he can only barely keep from jumping up and flying to the water that very moment. The romance of the sailor's tale is evident in the bright, overblown colors of his clothes, and the dramatic sweep of his arm as he points toward the open sea.