The Almanac Branch (13 page)

The ravishments for some months in the aftermath of Desmond's death continued. They abated, on the hotter nights of late summer and early fall, when Desmond came out of the tree least. The flare man—I missed watching him do some of his electric tricks—had behaved the same way. I was convinced at the time that the heat made Desmond lethargic. Also, the only time to prune a tree, you know, is in the winter, or late fall, or early spring. If you prune during the warmer seasons the wound will bleed its resinous syrup. It will draw insects, and disease. It will turn a yellow, the same yellow you see in the blossoms on the spring forsythia, that most yellow and slovenly of bushes, when they get heavy on their branches and fall into the muddy water that stands in puddles at their base. No, Desmond would not risk, it seemed, cutting into me if he thought there was a chance I would bleed.

So was Desmond a light person now? No, not really. I have never figured out exactly what he was. Was he just some reverberant part of my imagination, maybe of a premature sexuality, maybe of an accelerated need to be loved—a superbly detailed projection of a prepubescent mind that was left alone too often and for periods of time too long for its own good? Desmond never did anything that smacked of the light people's carnival theatrics. But he did show an ability to come through the glass. If I lifted the casement window, he came in. If I didn't, he came through anyway. In other words, even if Desmond had been some kind of child's projection I, as the child, had no control over my own skill at persecuting myself.

When you lose someone early in life, I've begun to believe, no matter how dear they had been toward you and to you, the precise picture of who and how they were changes. It evolves, it devolves. There is no avoiding it. I knew, even then, within weeks after Desmond was discovered on the stone patio, that try as I might to keep him true in my memory, I would never succeed.

I wanted to remember everything, and began to record whatever I could in the almanac book, and the more I sequestered myself from going on living in order that I might make a perfect picture of what I had already known and been, the more I watched Desmond change under my very fingertips. I could say or write that Desmond's skin always smelled of sweetgrass to me, but what would that finally mean? Would it mean he became associated in my mind with apricot, and megrims? That this is accurate and does connect two important elements of my juvenescence is valuable, at least to me. But anyone might just as easily remark, “Grace, I cannot feel his realness,” to which I could only reply, “Neither can I.” Which is to say, as much as I had wanted to preserve Desmond, as hard as I'd tried to buoy and nurture and sustain the only Desmond I thought I would ever know, I just couldn't do it. I failed. He kept growing, there was no preventing it. He had stopped living, but he continued to exist, metamorphosing, mutating into whatever my imagination chose to make him.

We all have a desire to be remembered. But how prepared are we to be remembered in such a way that we might not even recognize ourselves? It is dangerous to harbor this passionate wish for our image, our deeds, our thoughts, to fare forward into the brazen new world, tended by others who are assured of molding us into their own preferred image, no matter how genuine and wholesome are their intentions, isn't it?

The night my brother died he became my imagination's toy, like it or not, and I have to face that for what it was and is. I know he couldn't have wanted to do some of what I made him do, made him make me do. There is no man but he becomes a blank slate for those who knew him to mark up with their emotional graffiti once he's left his life behind. We who cherish our privacy as individuals, and our sense of some truth in what it was we did when we lived, can only hope for this: the preservation of our integrity and our personal truth through the death of each and every person who ever knew us, loved or hated us. Awful irony. That those who would mark our lives must join us in that state of perfectly helpless blankness, as tabularasae unable to mean, or alter, or add. Only when those who loved us join us are we free from the impetuous creativity of memory. Nothing to do about it: we're all grist, we're all mills.

Having thought that, all I could do was apologize to Desmond, and tell him he was too young to understand that ravishment is a two-way street. I did, later that fall, before the water got too cold, take the almanac down to the ocean, and swim out with it into the fizzing, salty waves, and when I was as far away from the shore as I could possibly be and still have the hope of swimming back to safety, I let it go into the water. As the waves carried me back in, and the undertow tickled my toes, I knew I had done something very pure, and as I cried I thought what better place is there to shed tears than in the ocean? If only I were able to shed them backwards, like the flare man had taught me. I tried, and wound up instead with a mouthful of seawater—which tasted not unlike the liquid light, but engendered nothing of its euphoric effect.

I might have spared myself the grand effort of getting rid of the almanac. As soon as I could find another notebook, I was back at it, and believe that I got down everything that I'd so willfully drowned. I suppose purity wasn't something that I was ever able to harbor in my heart for long.

My mother, when she was home with us, and wearing her other clothes, and being her other self, had become something of a hoarder of bitterness and discontent. That was something the adults wanted to be, and do, I decided; they liked to have and hold their bitterness all to themselves, like a dog his bone, and I felt, Let her have it if she wants it. So I watched the box. Here trepidation and troubles were shared by everybody equally. Andy Griffith, and that whistling theme tune, and his deputy thin as a sandpiper's beak who made all the mistakes so that Aunt Bee would be worrying all the time, worrying about her pies and whether they'd cool in time for the big picnic, worrying about Opie, who was such a moron hick anyway I can't imagine why anybody would bother worrying about him, let him go down to the old swimming hole and drown for all I cared, worrying about Ange,
Aange
is what Barney called Andy when they were happy and getting along—well, I watched that show. And I watched others. Gilligan who like me was stranded on an island, only his was made of papier-mâché and plaster of Paris, drank concoctions brewed by that professor who was sneaking around with the sexy woman who had those sequin dresses. He was okay. Sullivan I watched with devotion. All his acrobats from the Alps or Brazil, the bands of the British invasion, Senor Wences that fist with the lipstick mouth painted on, just mystic, just
fab
. I felt I could be friends with the Fugitive, Richard Kimble, the man falsely convicted of murdering his wife, an escapee on the run across the kaleidoscopic terrain of America—what a country ours was! what a place of propriety and obsession! all these people that Kimble met who must have been like the people that Faw in all his travels was meeting—on the run from the awful, long-faced detective who was keen on bringing him in, perhaps send him to the chair, even though he knew, deep down, that Kimble hadn't done it, as everyone on the road who met him knew at once.

Mother was particularly given to quiet hysteria now, and I knew why. On the other hand, Faw was serenely into his burgeoning businesses. I didn't mind being good, since I thought it was just as easy to be good as to be bad, and because I hardly understood what it meant to be bad. Except, I did sense—maybe because Desmond had told me not to talk with any of them about him—that in my secret life with him I was doing something that if they knew about they would think was bad. Even at that, not seeing much of a difference between good and bad, or rather seeing them as distinctions to which grown people paid a lot of attention, people like Andy Griffith and Aunt Bee considered extremely significant, I followed Desmond's advice to keep us a secret less because I didn't want to be bad than because I didn't want to have Desmond taken away from me. And I knew that was what they'd do if they found out about him.

Djuna knew better than anyone besides myself what wasgoing on in the house, and she took it upon herself to be my friend. I suffered a megrim one night and remembered how she saw me through it alone rather than insinuate my pain into the drama of a crumbling marriage. What Djuna couldn't have known, through that long, exquisitely exhausting ordeal, was that Desmond came inside from his branch and slipped under the quilt, and lay absolutely still down between my legs. She had fallen asleep in the chair by my bed. Shahrazad was someone I could only try to recall, as Djuna refused to read to me. I tried to sleep with my eyes open that night. I know that the Fugitive had to sleep with his open once in a while. It was hard to do, like levitating, or keeping a real friend. Anyone who can do it has my sympathy, and my admiration. I myself never pulled it off.

And then the inevitable stole upon us. It was I who found her note. She wrote it on a piece of Geiger stationery, and left it on Faw's dresser. He was the one whom she intended to have discover it. Her handwriting was more legible than my father's.

“Charles,” it read, “you know that I have tried. I went along with the hoax of getting away from the city on account of Grace. I went along with a lot of things that I thought were misdirected. You know in your heart how hard I tried but I can't do it anymore. I'll call.”

As a prospective divorcée, Erin had no very compelling case to bring against her husband. Abandonment was a charge that could only, in fact, be laid at her feet. Mental cruelty didn't seem to be viable, nor was it a desirable course to follow because she'd have to go through all the trauma of accusation and then would be expected to back everything up with dates, with facts, with one awful recollection after another. Charles never, to her knowledge, had cheated on her—except in the most metaphoric sense of hishaving devoted himself utterly, with sexual fervor, to Geiger's companies, which like a harem of mistresses he doted upon, so unabashedly that nothing could be said to have been done behind her back. No, the shopping list of grievances available to one who wants to seek a divorce is, she found, remarkably short. How was it possible in a world of so many ways to misbehave, to cause injury to those you supposedly love and have devoted your life to, that the rubrics of failure were so few?

Mental cruelty. Abandonment. Irreconcilable differences. It was so absurd. With all the complexities there were in any human life, with the strange and diverse directions love could take, how could the demolition of the union between a man and a woman be enacted with tools so paltry as these?

Given that Charles declared that he had no interest in seeking a divorce himself, even though his wife had left her family and was now living on another part of the island with this “half-employed hick,” as he called Segredo, this “scam artist,” she had to make a go of it with irreconcilable differences. She wished the divorce didn't mean so much to her; she was sure that it meant a lot to Segredo, or she thought she was sure. She would go back and forth on the subject any number of times over the next months. Divorce, differences, irreconcilable, cruelty—all these words were frightening and odious to her. But differences and that they had become irreconcilable were all, she was informed by her lawyer, she had, legally, to work with.

“Maybe you're right,” Segredo remarked when she returned from that first visit with the lawyer. “Maybe the divorce just isn't worth all the trouble.”

“Well, it's not going to be as simple as we thought.”

Then he said, “Not that I don't—”

“I know, look, I want to start over again too, be out of all that Geiger swirl.”

“Well, what did this guy say about the children?”

“He tried to call Charles about it.”

“And?”

“He wouldn't speak to him.”

“No surprise.”

“He said, Brown did, there's no way I'm going to get to see the kids unless I take Charles to court. He can keep his money, it's all he cares about anyway.”

Segredo didn't like hearing that but said nothing. He knew this was the one topic he couldn't discuss. Sacrosanct old bitch, money. If she could bring against Charles something of substance, something that might sway a court enough to at least grant her the divorce, and at least visitation rights, she would surely stand to come into some enormous amount of the stuff, of money—as he discerned, even a fractional token of Geiger was bound to come to more than enough. He'd like that. For some inexplicable reason, given that Charles hadn't particularly
done
anything to merit his animosity, he wanted to shove it to the man; it'd feel good, for once, to get one up on one of the big fish. Also, a little money would go a way toward dampening the gossip. Segredo wondered why he bothered to worry about what people were thinking, and would think in the future, given that he'd already gone this far playing against the rules. But he didn't want people getting the upper hand on him on the gossip front, if he could help it.

He knew his motives. They were pure—he assured his conscience—because he would want her even if she didn't have access to money, and wasn't he at least being honest with himself about how the money kept coming into mind? He wasn't kidding himself. If he chose not to address money in their conversations (endless, endless, and painful) about the divorce-to-be it was because he had his own system of weights and balances to maintain, too. Sometimes he did do his best to hint at it so Erin herself might bring it to the fore. For instance, just then: “I think you're right. I don't think you and I need paper—divorce paper, money paper, any paper—to be happy together. But I do worry about how this being kept away from your kids is going towear on you over time, you know.” Nauseating, he thought to himself; on his tongue as different as chalk and cheese the truth and this insinuation stuff. He held himself still and looked at her.