The Daredevils (29 page)

“Nor I. Even though he is still here.”

“She blamed herself and yet could not understand where she had sinned or erred. And in what way, exactly, was she being held responsible? She had been a very small child and the truth, she suspected, was that she remembered nothing, that some other kind of activity was taking place in her mind, that, perhaps, an agency representing some other kind of reality, dreams, for example, that wasn't so difficult a concept, that an agent of dreams was operating while she was awake. It was dismissed in all but the most credulous quarters—even by sympathetic listeners—as apocryphal, as propaganda, propaganda of a different sort of deed, a story of a life, understood and made to function as a folk legend to comfort and amuse the weaker and more poor, who cannot understand the actual workings of alchemy, the medical arts, and the large-scale drift of money, the things you were born knowing, my darling Chuckie!—but believed devoutly by a few, myself included, who claimed to have seen it happen. I will swear to it if need be. And when, some time later, perhaps as short a time as a few days, perhaps as long a time as a year—Rosemary could not say and neither can I—her stricken, suffering, perhaps overly sensitive mother in turn died—whether of causes natural or unnatural, by her own hand or the hand of God, her story too is ambiguous—all that Rosemary could find in their meager belongings to tell her who they were, now that the testimony of their presence no longer sufficed, was a last will. It was written in a shockingly violent, nearly indecipherable scrawl and blot, and we treated it, in yet another of our games, as a treasure map. Places of birth were stated—Lower East Side and Canarsie—but believed to be false. More suitable nativities were imagined. Ages could be puzzled out with arithmetic. Her
father, Rosemary calculated, was twenty, her mother nineteen. Lines at the bottom of the document, where their names would likely have been entered in less violent circumstances, were left blank. Rosemary thought she sewed it into her skirt. Wandering about the town, she found herself at the well. That was how she put it: ‘Mother died and I wandered off to a public space where I might be afforded some amusement.' After drinking, looking around, drinking again, daydreaming out loud and drinking finally to soothe a throat now quite raw from talking to herself as she wandered, and from crying, she began to muse with the complicated fancy and helpless rigor that is the hallmark of the philosophy of children. She considered her condition—its causes, effects both immediate and clear and as yet unknown, and her prospects—then came out of what can only be described as a delightfully enchanted fugue, marked equally by a sorrow that was not indulged in and practical resolve that had little relation to reality, and saw three persons approaching. Used to the hustle and bustle of her small city, to herds of people being driven here and there with an urgency just shy of stampede, the sight of a small and isolated group, in the middle, as it were, of a nowhere we had conjured around ourselves, made her uneasy. They appeared to be dressed alike, too, in heavy black robes or cloaks or skirts and shawls, and this kind of uniformity of course makes ordinary people uneasy. Then she saw that they were old women and that their faces bore the look of kindness that only tremendous age and silent suffering can account for. They bid her a good afternoon, addressing Rosemary as “Little Girl,” which she did not mind the least little bit. Her name, and the strikingly pronounced emphasis on the “Little” of Rosemary's, gave her the strange impression that it was an Indian name but the old women resembled in no other way Indian squaws as she had seen them, in illustrations. She had no idea, either, what time of day it was, but saw suddenly, as if invited by the immediate presence of the three women, how sharp and long the shadows were around her. She was surprised by the pale and empty sky, believing that it had been cloudy, turbulently and loweringly so. She then wondered if she hadn't simply imagined the clouds—or, it occurred to her, strangely,
for a reason she could not quite come to, but which she felt came from her father's ghost—had they not gathered in response to her histrionic sulking? The season, too, was middling and mysterious: Were there buds on the trees, as she remembered it, or were they bare; and if bare, had the leaves just fallen or were they about to appear? The air was warm but the wind was cold—or was it the other way around? Warmly reposing in a cleft of rock, or cooling pleasantly in its shade? She did not know, she did not know, she did not know. Clambering down from the rocks, she debated naming herself to these strangers, and decided not to, asking the women instead if they were Sisters of Mercy. It was a phrase she had heard and liked, one that she associated with the Maker of Heaven and Earth, and that seemed to describe them in the same way Little Girl did herself. ‘Little Girl and the Sisters of Mercy!' chuckled one old woman. ‘We have a fairy tale on our hands!' said the second, smiling but with an air of prudence regarding a serious if not grim responsibility. ‘Sisters of Mercy,' murmured the third. ‘I should say not.' ‘Are you,' asked Rosemary, ‘servants of the Devil?' ‘No!' laughed the first woman. ‘No, no,' said the second, shaking her head judiciously. ‘Yes,' said the third in her odd but clear murmur.”

“This happened in a theater, did it not?”

“Rosemary laughed as her father had often laughed, calling a bluff, and demanded to know which one of them was telling the truth. Or which two.

‘The first to speak told the truth,' giggled the first woman, ‘and so did the last. The second was a liar.' ‘Now, now,' remonstrated the second. ‘Let's have no paradox here.'

‘Certainly we are sisters,' said the third. ‘But we serve no one and do not know the meaning of mercy. Finally, Little Girl, if you must ask us which of us is telling the truth, then I simply do not understand what we are doing here talking to you, when there is a world full of people just as confused as you are but who frankly have their wits about them.' ‘I AM NOT AT ALL CONFUSED!' Rosemary shouted. The old women flinched, ducked, cowered, stepped back, and drew closer together. When they had finished doing all this, Rosemary understood that they were only feigning alarm, and
were in fact having some fun at her expense. When they saw that she saw, they left off pantomiming and came boldly around her. ‘You are very bright, Little Girl,' said the first. ‘It does my heart good to see such warmth of brain in one so young. I believe you will become wise as the years go by.' A gust of wind blew the hood of her cloak from her head. Her blue eyes twinkled in her wrinkled, grizzled face. ‘You are very brave, Little Girl,' said the second. ‘It does my mind good to see such warmth of heart in one so young. I believe you will turn away from no fear in the war to come.' Another gust blew the hood of her cloak back as well. Her eyes were green as emeralds. ‘You are very dark and frightened, Little Girl,' said the third. She was barely audible in the rising wind. ‘I have never seen such anger, confusion, and recklessness in one so young, and it quite undoes me to imagine how you will make your way in the years left to you. I believe you will find little peace in them.' The wind was very strong now, and loud, and gusts of it smote the three as if with fists. Their garments fluttered around their trembling limbs, flapped and snapped until finally the hood of the third lifted away from her head, billowing and falling away. Her eyes were black but the look in the old face was one of commiseration, not of hate or malice or fear. She looked at Rosemary in a sad and friendly way too. Then she reached up, putting one withered hand to the side of her skull, the other under her jaw, fitting them carefully, sighed, and pulled her head off. The first and second quickly followed suit. From their sagging old necks rose, like gnarled and crooked arrows from grotesque quivers made from the bodies of trolls, the branches of trees, stripped of bark and white as bone, bare of leaves, and tossing in the wind. She was largely unmoved by this display of witchcraft. She recognized it as something out of a nightmare, but accepted it as yet one more grim aspect of a reality that, it was clear, had infinite powers of derangement and that she would never fully understand. Buds appeared on the branches and this seemed to be a sign of better times just around the corner. From the buds tiny leaves eased forth and grew. The old women nodded and swayed over her and the succulent green leaves grew larger and larger. Rosemary swooned with the majesty of it, and lay down. When we awoke she realized
she was staring into the beady but strangely still and calm eyes of a squirrel. He was upside down, clinging to the trunk of the tree among the roots of which she lay, no more than a foot or two above her head. They began to converse about the pleasant weather and the indescribable pleasure of a nap in the afternoon on a day when there was wind in the trees. Then they were silent for a time. Rosemary asked the squirrel how it made ends meet, and the squirrel spoke of life in the tree, of ordinary successes and failures in the familiar places, stories of its vastness, trials and tragedies in its most remote reaches, of proper conduct and good government. The squirrel wanted Rosemary to understand that while they were free, the quality of that freedom depended utterly on circumstances. Rosemary tried to give the squirrel the impression that this was elementary reasoning, but the truth was that she could not grasp the meaning of it. Then the squirrel said, ‘The tree remains the tree no matter what I think about it,' and Rosemary awoke. ‘Stop pretending your mother is dead. It hurts her terribly. Be dutiful and loving toward her,' said the squirrel. And Rosemary awoke a second time.”

White spaces, in the time and confines of the minds of the storyteller and story hearer, were made irregularly and infrequently.

“Our mill was not merely a legendary worker's paradise; in fact it was famous for its looms—or rather, more precisely, for an innovation in the design of the looms' flying shuttles: they had lead tips and were ten times as durable as the all-wood shuttles, whose tips cracked and splintered and fell to pieces under the stress of the new high speeds with unacceptable frequency. But before we could get to a loom, we would have to spend several years—‘the best years of our lives,' I liked to say, making Rosemary laugh—on the drums, working the ‘jumbo exotic carders,' as they were technically known. There were eleven drums of varying sizes connected by belts: the big central drum was called ‘the swift' and ran clockwise; two drums about
half the size of the swift, ‘the doffer' and ‘the fancy,' were high and low at the back of the swift, running counterclockwise. There was a little ‘stripper' between the fancy and the doffer, and above and below the feeding tray, which was in front of course, where the cotton fibers entered the carder, at tit level, were two little drums called ‘nippers,' with a little stripper on top of the top nipper. Going up over the swift were four medium-sized drums, two pairs of strippers and ‘workers.' In the back, below the doffer, was the fly comb, tit level, where the cotton fibers left the carder, again at tit level. I stress this point of the description because we could never let our arms hang, they were always raised from the shoulder and spread. This was a job considered especially suitable, for an unknown or undeclared reason, for little girls, teamed, as often as possible, with their mothers. Rosemary's ‘mother' was a devious and secretive harridan who hated Rosemary, and hated me too, again for an unknown or undeclared reason. Confronted with the truth, as she had been at the well by the witches, that harridan was Rosemary's actual, biological mother, Rosemary would hold up her hand and slowly shake her head: she was a distant relative who had hated Rosemary's parents because of their interest in unionism, and feared they had passed this interest on to a little girl who clearly had troublemaking on her mind anyway, and for whom she had an unpleasant but unavoidable responsibility. But whatever the cause of the hatred and the nature of the relationship, there was one constant in the acting out of it, and it required two actors and a long-forgotten understanding of who had started it. Rosemary, despite the fact that we were living out the best years of our lives in a worker's paradise, was deeply disturbed by the monotony and sensory assault of her job—it's hard for most people nowadays to imagine a child of six or eight or sixteen on the edge of nervous collapse, but not me.”

“Nor me.”

“Yes. The earthquake was hard on you.”

“Easy to make light of it now. You can be callous when you're high.”

“She would often fall to her knees in exhaustion and misery, or, if she had enough strength and will, would wander away from the drum. The
mother would catch her by the arm and yank her to her feet, keeping one hand in her game at the other end of the carder, or, failing to the catch the arm, Rosemary's hair, sometimes yanking so hard she would snatch Rosemary off her feet entirely, stretching her out like a no-holds-barred wrestler and slamming her to the floor with a thud. But while the floor was not the rumbling, screeching, eternally rotating drum, it was no picnic down there, either. Its warped and clattering boards were coated thickly with oil and grease and mud, sawdust and cotton waste, tobacco juice and tubercular spittle, blood and pus and the dust of our very skins, but it was the only place where a little girl might powder her nose. Given the carefully regulated clockwork mechanisms of the mill's fundamental movements, we were encouraged to eliminate our waste prior to or after the bells. Company policy stated clearly that no employee would be, indeed could be, allowed to vacate a station for any reason whatsoever—not even to urinate. So Rosemary—and I, later, though not so regularly or with such blasé facility—learned to piss on the floor at her station. The mother would grab her arm as usual, but a sign from Rosemary that urination was underway would almost always result in a loosened grip and a general tolerance. ‘You filthy little beast,' the mother would chuckle. ‘You are ignorant of the world below,' piped Rosemary, drawing herself up like an opera star and delivering her lines with a recitative-like eloquence. She was annoyingly precocious and took a great deal of undisguised pleasure in unusual tropes and words dense with multifarious meaning—as did I. It was another one of the ways in which we in effect whistled while we worked. They had to shout to hear each other and really couldn't make out much of it even when they did, but understood each other well enough, reading lips, remembering, imagining. In spite of the hatred that underlay it, the nervous tension that harried it, and the deafening thunder of the looms above, the constant but irregular banging of the rows of drums and creaking spools and thudding engines, the ordinary remorseless cries of horses and men and clanging bells and piercing shrieks of steam that overwhelmed their conversations, Rosemary and her drum-mother had somehow come to agree that whether or not
there was ‘another world below them,' they could at least argue about it. Somewhat in the manner of a prisoner and guard, they exchanged warm and candid, if not altogether friendly and sympathetic, observations, fanciful hypotheses, hilarious syllogisms, and straw men. Rosemary posited a world no bigger than the mill sunk a mile or so into the earth at the end of something like a mineshaft. It was a utopia in which hard but calm and therefore satisfying work alternated with intellectual seductions and sensual pleasures of the simplest and deepest kind: wind in the trees, water rushing over rocks, hugging, kissing. The people refused to take advantage of each other, and governed themselves with quiet talks and broad deliberations. They grew old very slowly, and death was almost unknown among them, but—and what a big but, I always liked to say at that point—they depended utterly on a magical precipitate, a gentle rain that fell upon them like mercy from their tiny heaven, coursing down their tiny mountains and running swiftly past their tiny mills, an elixir derived solely from the germ-laden phlegm and urine-sodden dust as it percolated down the shaft from the big mill above the ground. When they coughed in their anomalous illnesses, their germs sprayed up at her in turn, in faint puffs, like little angels of mercy. The drum-mother dismissed all this as fairy-tale nonsense, suggesting that whatever they got from the big mill came upon them like plague and flood. It was very likely a flammable liquid as well, igniting infernos where it didn't drown or cause pustules and lesions to form in the lung, the face, and the genitals. ‘And as for the utopia—!' ‘You are as ignorant of the world below as you are of this world!' ‘Dream on, you little nincompoop!' ‘I shall, allow me to assure you!' ‘Why would they behave any differently down there than they do up here?'