The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (11 page)

Why ever did Tory, so grey with terror, not stay with those little puppets of people on the ground? Why did she not stay with Mother? Because — I remember now — Mother was away in Boston or New York. I forget which. Visiting relatives whom Father didn't like, I think. Or maybe old friends from Radcliffe. And I remember that Tory was even more afraid of being alone on the ground than of being with us in the sky.

Father would be so utterly different when Mother was away, taking us to movies or to parks, telling us bedtime stories.

Consider that day. He did not rage at Victoria. I waited for him to shake her roughly as the wheel rushed down and under and up again, to tell her irritably that she was a big girl now. But he took her in his arms, he pushed her head gently against his shoulder, he wiped her ghastly blotched mouth with his handkerchief, he did not even flinch when more pink vomit gurgled from between her lips and down his shirt front.

I was dumbfounded.

Poor darling, he kept saying. Poor darling.

When the ride stopped, Tory was white as new porch paint but she had her arms around Father's neck. He carried her, I remember. She was eleven — a slight eleven, it is true — and he carried her, while I tagged along hanging on to his coat sleeve, amazed.

I loved him at that moment. I remember it distinctly because it was so unusual. Most of the time I was afraid of him until I began to hate him.

When he sent me away to boarding school (so you'll be well prepared for Harvard, he said) how old was I? Seven? Eight? About Adam's age. More terrified than Tory on the Ferris wheel, though not showing it of course. But he never offered me his handkerchief or his shoulder. I wrote to Mother almost every day, but I never wrote to Father. What is it that I can't forgive? Not boarding school itself. I came to love that school. Why, when it would have been so simple, did I never add “and Father” to my letters?

What was it stretched like barbed wire between him and his father?

Staring down into the funnel of his past Jason focused on departures. On saying goodbye. On sensing damage to the women in his life: his mother, his sister.

He thought: I fear being responsible for women. I fear leave-taking the way other people fear death.

He was in his new school blazer, his mother was holding him at arm's length surveying him proudly, sadly. September was just brushing the garden with brilliant decay.

“Jason,” She couldn't say anything else. She pulled him toward her and held him and ran her fingers up and down the back of his neck as though memorising him.

“Jason.”

And after a long while: “It's very important to him. He has so little.” (Yes, Jason knew she had said that. He had always remembered it, wondering what she meant.
He has so little
.) “He thinks it will make everything possible. My brothers went, you see. It's really quite usual.” She buried her cheek in his hair. “You must write to me, Jason. I can't bear to lose you totally.”

She took his chin in her hand and turned his face up to hers.

“Don't grow away from me, Jason.”

And he remembered feeling a love so strong it made him dizzy, and a terror that she was somehow being damaged, that he was part of it, that he had to intervene. He felt, he remembered now,
responsible.

And with Tory it was even worse.

They had hiding places under the caves of honeysuckle behind the gazebo and there he found her. Just sitting and staring at nothing. She was, perhaps, the loneliest fifteen-year-old in America. She bridled at shadows, she was frightened of everyone. Boys followed her home from school, at a distance, overawed by her beauty. She was too shy to look at them. Though Jason would see her at her bedroom window, watching from behind her curtains, sighing. There was one boy who always lingered near the fence.

Under the honeysuckle, as Jason tried to say goodbye, she cried: “Don't go.”

He thought: I'm her only friend.

She held out her arms to him and for a moment he submitted awkwardly. Uneasily. But then it seemed … she was murmuring, wanting to kiss him. He was her baby brother still. Or perhaps the boy she liked to watch through the curtains …

At first he thought she was playing a game and when he realised she was not he was momentarily horrified, then furious.

“You're crazy!” he had shouted at her. “Tory's going loony, Tory's going loony.” Taunting and darting about her like a dragonfly. She reached for him and he ran away but she did not chase him. Unseen he crept near again and heard her sobbing. He hated himself. He knew he was responsible. He avoided saying goodbye.

It was easier with Emily, playful toddler. She loved the coloured towers he built for her with blocks, she loved to knock them over, triumphantly destructive, squealing with delight. He built her a last tower, she demolished it a last time and became fretful, sensing unhappiness.

It was his father's fault, he perceived, all that grief and loss. His father's fault.

And somehow, obscurely, his own. For which he would not forgive his father.

In the space behind
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy
there were two additional bundles, both wrapped in tissue and tied in string. He had never opened them though he had packed them and moved them with him more times than he could remember: from school back to Ashville, and then to Boston and then through a trail of apartments in New York. He treated them as though they held totemic power.

He reached behind his books and touched the bundles, paused, thought better of it, and left them there. He began to scoop up the other shards of his life and to ram them back into the shoebox.

Over the blather of paper the door creaked. Someone knocking. Jason stiffened with implacable hostility, waiting for Ruth to go. But the sound — scrabbling, more than knocking — continued. With tight lips he reached out, turned the key, opened the door an inch. It was Tory, elephantine with the unchangeable past, huge with shadow. An eclipse of the electric light. Instinctively Jason put his hands up to his head to ward off a landslide of what? Of Tory's memories nudged back to life, perhaps, by this unexpectedness.

She sank down beside him with a little whoosh of released air, her nightgown settling around her like a dejected balloon. Fat lady at the circus, he thought, hardening himself, stuffing a crude and bitter wit into his wounds. In his hands he held the envelope with the photographs of Victoria young and lovely. She reached for it, he jerked it away, she grabbed, they pulled, two children in a sandbox.

God, he thought, yielding. This can't be happening.

“You didn't write to me, Jason,” she said mournfully. “All through the term I wrote to you and you never answered.”

Time snaked around him like a fun-fair ride.

“I did, Tory. I wrote. You've forgotten.”

But he had not kept her strange letters, her alarming poems. He had known at the time he was guilty of sacrilege. He had disposed of them as though they were living things, as though he were drowning kittens.

She was staring at the picture of herself and the young man and he watched the pleating of her eyebrows, the effort, the agitation beginning. He remembered her stages of brilliant lucid bitterness, the vitriolic letters that had chased Emily and himself from address to address, the searing lines left on placemats, under pillows:

before birth, when the gills,

still gills, breathe blood, they know.

Unfair. They know it already.

Unjust.

He waited for revelation, for judgment, for atonement.

Nothing.

He watched the energy losing itself like ripples flattening out in a pond. She began to cry silently, a passionless sentimental concourse of the tear ducts. A pantomime of loss. Rag doll in a puppet show, she asked him:

“Where did she go? Where's Tory gone?”

A nursery school game, he thought, wanting to smash something: his inadequate profession; the false god of medication. Reverberations inside his skull
: gone, gone, gone.
Levelled out under drugs, rendered grotesquely amiable, disguised in a costume of flesh, her rages and poetry cured.

What cures we peddle, he thought with horror. He wanted to beat on his own breast.

“Where's Tory gone?” his sister repeated, a child with a tattered nursery rhyme. “Where's she gone?”

He took her plump clammy not-herself hand and leaned her Hallowe'en costume of shapelessness against himself. He thought of the wood carving when it had stood so wrongly on a packing crate in his old student apartment. (He seemed to be crying for Nina too, for all his failures; she seemed to be drifting waif-like across his vision.)

He said: “Tory, you were beautiful. Everyone remembers. I remember.” He tapped his forehead. “You're still here.”

“Do you remember the ferry?”

“The ferry?”

“The ferry in New York.”

“New York?” It was the first time she had visited him here. He usually went to the clinic, took her for walks.

“We went to the Statue of Liberty. We took you out of school.” He felt a prickle of excitement.

“My god, Tory! You remember that? I'd forgotten it. I'd completely forgotten it. You and Mother just showed up one day. I was called into the principals office and there you were.”

“The train,” she said, excited. “We went to New York on the train.”

It came back to him in gusts like a knowledge of ocean swimming to someone who has spent years inland. There had been an air of wicked hilarity, he remembered. It had been a conspiracy. Father did not know, was not to know. Mother had been going to New York, Tory was supposed to stay with grandparents in Boston, and Mother had decided on impulse to collect him from school, to take them both with her.

“Beethoven,” Tory said, plucking scenes from the air. “Mother said, ‘No, Tory, I'm not crying. It's just Beethoven.' ”

He did not remember that. Only the concerts themselves, the splendid hush of the packed hall, the conductor as magician, pulling music from the air with his wand.
Ex nihilo
. Like God saying: Let there be symphonic harmony.

He remembered the art museums — acres and acres of canvases on walls, forests of sculptures, scores of hollow rooms that throbbed with footsteps and heartbeats like a womb.

That was when he became aware that his mother was something quite other than any of them had realised. That in Ashville she lived incognito, in a dormant state; that she had this other life tucked away inside herself. In New York she was the kind of person who said witty things to elevator operators. Taxi drivers flirted with her, gallery owners deferred to her. She sat in concerts like phosphorescence, lit from within. One of the cognoscenti. She frolicked in an almost febrile way with Tory and himself (now, as an adult, he was reminded of the nuns at a hospital with which he was associated; of nuns at a picnic the day after Easter Sunday, an austere Lent behind them) but she also seemed infinitely removed from them.

He had wondered, that time in New York, what kept her attached to them. She was a helium balloon with her string tangled in domestic muddle; if they ever let go, she would fly beyond reach forever and forever. He had held her hand very tightly.

“We got lost,” Tory said.

Jason blinked away clouds, shaded his eyes from the rude present, still on the trail of a lost balloon, an impossibly distant bucking dot of colour.

“Lost,” he confirmed.

Yes. Babes in the woody thickets of culture, forlornly holding hands, they had wandered astray in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I'll meet you back in this room, their mother had said, because they lingered so long over swords and dagger hilts gaudy with jewels. But which was the room? Hadn't they only turned a corner or two? They had dragged their feet by Etruscan treasures telling each other that
this
was the door. Or maybe that one. She could hardly be far away, just a room further on or further back.

They dawdled through Egyptology. In Costumes they forgot her for a while, became anxious again among French and Dutch paintings. The tense face of a Le Nain peasant, perhaps, reminding them. Or Vermeer's
Woman at the Window
: looking for someone, waiting.

The reverent gloom of lighting seemed to be dimming. It was getting late, the crowd thinning out.

“She's probably following us round and round,” Jason said, “and we keep moving away from her. We should stay here.”

They sat on a bench facing Gauguin's
Tahiti Women by the Mango Tree
,

“If Father finds out …” Tory said.

And he had not known whether she meant the entire trip, the being lost, or the lush coffee-coloured breasts offering themselves with blossoms and mangoes. He thought that it would be almost dusk in Central Park and that women might emerge from the shadows with baskets of fruit, their breasts flowering from purple drapery like rare orchids. He imagined that the fruit would be watermelon, soft with juice and sin.

“Let's wait for her in the park,” he suggested.

But Tory was appalled.

“She'd never find us. It's dangerous there. I won't let you go. I have to look after you.”

He let her do that, hide her panic behind her protective role. The older one, bearing the brunt of life's terrors for him. She must have been sixteen, he must have been nine.

“Soon they'll be closing,” he said.

They had to sit outside on the steps, huddled in their coats. Tory's teeth were chattering, not, he thought, from the cold. He wondered if they would join the lost children in Never Never Land with Peter Pan and Wendy. He was sure he could fly like Peter Pan. He wondered if he would manage to pull Tory's weight.

And then their mother was released from a taxi at the foot of the steps and she gusted her way up to them, a darting balloon.

“Oh my darlings!” she gasped, laughing and crying, hugging them .to herself A miraculous rescue. “Oh my darlings! Can you ever forgive me?”