The Witch House of Persimmon Point (16 page)

Look at Lucy, how she sleeps. She looks like a young girl, her curly hair sweeping out onto the pillow beside her, her graceful hand, palm open, next to her cheek. Lucy is dreaming, dreaming of a life before this one, one with the sticky sounds of a happy baby, boats coming in from the harbor, and her Vito coming in from a long day of work. “Dance with me, my Lucy, dance with me, Forever Lucy.…” Lucy's lips turn up in her sleep. She always wants to be dreaming, longs never to wake up. There are wind chimes in her dreams, and mourning doves. She smiles; she is happy.

See Anne; see her tucked into her grandmother's bed. See the ghosts on either side of her. Anne does not dream. She sleeps balled up like an infant in the womb, yet she is all angles and tense lines.… See how she curls her thin body around Ava protectively. How she holds her tight. Ava is snuggled with her face buried in Anne's chest (she need not breathe), her little ghost hand entwined in Anne's hair. Gwyneth spoons them both, absorbing Anne's dreams, and watching over Ava in a continuous act of redemption.

See Nan; her sleep is orderly, everything just so. See the blanket tucked in neatly, hardly disturbed. A cup and saucer are on the nightstand, out of place. Nan was tired this evening. Nan dreams. It is always the same one. Nan dreams of playing with her sister outside their farmhouse in the Italian countryside. She dreams in Italian. She can smell the grass and the dirt baking in the sun. Her mother is cooking inside; Vincent is singing in the fields. She is laughing and spinning and teasing her sister and her brother.… There is nothing but comfort here. Nan dreams of home. When she wakes up, she will carry that dream with her all day, like she does every day, and she will resent everything around her, because she will never be home again.

It is coming on morning now,
andiamo 
…

 

17

Lucy in the Bedroom with the Crucifix

1940

Lucy was screaming and God wasn't listening. She'd labored in her mother's bedroom because that's what Nan said she should do. Something about God and Sin and being unmarried. The window was open, letting the winter in. She needed the air. The first snow collected in delicate layers on the wide, wooden sill.

Earlier, when the pains were coming farther apart, Lucy went to the bedroom window and held her hands against its icy glass to cool them off. The cold beneath her palms was lovely, it calmed her. She watched the dancing snow and wished she could be standing in it, letting it glitter in her hair, letting it clear the antiseptic, old-woman smell of the midwife from her nose. She wanted the snow whirling all around her, in her, through her. She knew that if she could just get out into the snowy night, all would be well.

When the pains came on stronger, with no relief or pause, she began to panic. She opened the window, struggling to unstick it from its frame. She felt a fleeting sense of victory when it lurched open, and she breathed in the night. The snow cooled her face. The feeling of respite lingered, and she rolled her body to lean against the wall, pressing her face against the wallpaper. It was covered in blue flowers blooming in a constant spring. Lucy traced the leaves with her finger before doubling over in pain. This aching was urgent and tore at her fragile mind. She kneeled on the wooden floor.

She was naked. Her suffocating nightgown had been tossed aside. Damp curls clung to her face and spilled over her shoulders.

Lucy closed her eyes, clutching a set of garnet rosary beads to her with clenched, white knuckles, and she prayed. She prayed to the statue of the Virgin Mary on the dresser, she prayed to the crucifix above the attached mirror, she prayed to the house.

“Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” Another pain ripped through her. “Oh, damn it!” Her eyelids flew open and she jerked her head up, staring with bright, lunatic eyes at the statue. “I can't do this! I don't even remember the whole prayer.… Please, sweet lady, please make this child come out and I swear … I swear to God I will name her after you!”

“Lucia!” Nan shushed her, entering the room with the midwife, Zindonetta, to see her there, crazy on the floor, arms outstretched to the statue, her body shaking with sobs. They brought her, scratching and kicking, back to the bed and held her down. Her struggle against them, coupled with her screaming, forced the baby swiftly out.

“Let me see her, let me see her,” begged Lucy, only the baby did not make a sound. She was absolutely blue. The room was silent and heavy with worry. It was as if the house were heaving … pushing now that Lucy's turn was over. The floorboards, the doors, windows, and even the walls bloated from strain. Lucy knew the house was trying to give birth to something of its own.

Finally, the midwife broke the frightened paralysis and put her mouth over the infant's nose and blue-tinged lips, sucking out the mucus and spitting it on the floor. The baby's eyes snapped open and she turned pink, but she did not cry. The house went straight again.

In the attic of the house, snow fell in through a cracked window onto the small square floor of the cupola and arranged itself in the form of a marble Madonna and child, just as a phantom woman held a phantom child in the attic and twirled away the snowflakes, dancing in wide circles, soundlessly.
Chaînés, chaînés
 …

Later, after Lucy slept off the haze of pain, she held and examined her new baby. She had a strange fluttering feeling, like a life leaving her. And even as she cradled the baby, ready to love her, ready to coo and coddle like she had with Dominic, she noticed that the feeling would not leave. It was still there, a strange …
grayness
. And the child! She just stared. Was she broken?'

“Have you decided on a name? The child could die any moment. Zindonetta, go get the priest. Just in case.” Turning back to Lucy, she said, “I know you liked the name Peach, but how about Plum or Strawberry? Maybe Pineapple?” Lucy was too tired to play Nan's game. When Nan predicted a baby girl, Lucy had thought that Peach would be suitable, something bright and vibrant to help ward off the evil in the house. But there had been no end of recrimination from her mother.

“Well, I suppose you win again, Mama.” Lucy pointed half-heartedly to the statue she had prayed to. “I promised the virgin over there I would name this baby after her, so I guess she will be Mary.”

“Lucia,” the old woman said, “that isn't the Virgin Mother, that's a statue of Saint Anne. Notice the hair and the color of her robes? As that good-for-nothing excuse for a man is gone now, we don't have to name her after his mother. What kind of Anglo name is Ivy anyway?”

“Of course,” whispered Lucy. “I guess she will have to be Anne. Like you, Mama. And like the little orphan in the funny papers.”

Lucy began to fall asleep. Though she loved dreaming, she didn't like falling into sleep. It was suffocating. Usually she eased it along with a drink, but this tired wouldn't wait.

“Mama?” Lucy called out despite herself. Nan was quickly by her side. She took baby Anne and handed her to the midwife.

“Yes, Lucia? Are you all right?”

“Mama?” Lucy's face was damp with sweat and tears. Nan resisted the urge to crawl into bed with her and instead took her hands. “Mama, I don't want to fall asleep.”

“How come, my Lucia? You worked so hard. How come you don't want to sleep?”

“I am afraid … I am afraid of the dark behind my eyes.”

“Ahhh, yes.…” Nan released one of Lucy's hands and began to push her daughter's curly locks back from her face. “Do you remember when you were just a little girl, and you were so afraid of the night? How I would take you in your nightgown to walk down the hill to the river? Remember how beautiful the moon was, how the whole world was quiet? I told you to not be afraid of the night. God is in the night, Lucia. He created the night for us. It is like a dark blue velvet blanket, made to comfort us, not to frighten us. Do you remember, Lucia?”

Lucy let go of Nan's hands and rolled away from her.

“I remember being dragged to the priest.” Then she brought her arms up to embrace herself.

Nan sighed and glanced over at the baby. The child was fine, cooing in the Moses basket, reaching out already, pulling her arms free of the swaddling and grasping at invisible fingers in the air.

“Zindonetta, come with me out of the room.”

The two women conferred in the doorway, speaking fast with their hands, using their native language.

“What is it, Nan? She can't sleep?”

“It is not just that, Zindonetta. You know very well she has never been right in the head. Now I have another child to raise.”

Zindonetta knew. Everyone knew Lucy was damaged. It was so sad. And now this new shame brought upon the family, this child with no father. Nan was a saint to put up with it all. Nan, a respected member of the parish, was looked on as a wise woman or
strega
, the curer of the evil eye—so why would God give her so much evil to deal with? Zindonetta once sent for her in the night when her son was having fits. Nan took the curse right off him. It was the reason she agreed to help with this birth. She owed a favor.

“Why can't you get rid of these demons, Nan?”

“I don't know. I have tried. I pray all the time, nothing works.”

Zindonetta went to her bag and brought out a few bottles. “Here. She must take these. They will make her manageable.”

Nan grasped the bottles close.

The midwife gathered her things and left. She was happy to leave. The house had a stink about it that made her sick to her stomach.

*   *   *

Days later, Lucy lay in bed, nursing her strange baby. And something happened. Anne looked right at her mother, not into space as she normally did. She locked eyes with Lucy and moved her lips around Lucy's nipple into a milky smile.

Lucy was caught off guard. Love, deep and full, washed through her. A greedy love, a love she had not known with her first baby. She wanted to devour her. She could tell Anne would grow up to be striking—her eyes were bright green like the sea before a squall. It was too much, this love. She could not do it. She could not be this child's mother. She could not betray her true family this way. She would not love this child at all if she could not love her just a little bit.

And why was she always staring into space? What could she be seeing? The old Italian women always said that when babies stared like that, they were looking into the afterlife. Could Anne be seeing Vito? Taunting him with her existence? No. This would not do. She popped her nipple out of Anne's mouth and brought her downstairs to the kitchen.

Lucy plunked the wailing baby into Nan's arms and ran back upstairs. When safely back in her bedroom, she yelled, “I'm weaning her, you take her. Bring her to your church, give her to your God, make her a nun for all I care. I'm
done
!” And with that, Anne lost her mother.

 

18

Nan in the Kitchen with a Wooden Spoon

1940–1950

Anne was a good baby, by Italian standards anyway. She slept. She ate. She did not cry. Anne happily amused herself, even when there was nothing amusing around her. But when she turned three and could talk, things began to change.

One day, Anne was running through the rooms in delight, squealing as if someone was chasing her. This unnerved Nan so much that she pulled Anne to an abrupt stop by the neck of her dress.

“What do you run from, Anna? Who do you see?”

Anne, trying to get away from Nan and back to playing, answered, “Gwen and the little girl! Lemme go!”

“Gwen?” An icy shiver ran through Nan. “What little girl? Who do you speak of?”

“The little girl on the mantel! Lemme go!” Anne kicked her feet.

Nan picked up her granddaughter and sat her on the kitchen counter while she pumped cold water into the sink. Then she dunked Anne, fully clothed and screaming with fury, under the icy water.

“There are no such things as ghosts, Anna.”

It didn't take long for Anne to learn her lesson. Every time Nan thought Anne was playing with “her ghosts,” she punished her. A slap on the hand with a wooden spoon, a pinch to her arm, and sometimes just a cold stare. Anne learned to hide her joy.

She grew into a small little girl, thin and short for her age. Her hair was black like Lucy's, but straighter. Thick and unruly, as soon as it grew long enough it was braided, harshly, and braided it stayed. Her face was sweet and delicate, but no one noticed because her eyes were so large they took up most of her small face and, if caught in the right light, tended to disappear altogether. She had pale, freckled skin, unlike her mother's, or her Nan's, or her big brother Dominic's. Anne didn't look like she belonged to any of them. She was a quiet child in an unquiet house, who wandered around sneaking up on everyone by accident.

She preferred to be alone in the attic with her ghosts.

“No one believes me,” Anne said to an ever-twirling Gwyneth.

“It will be all right. You have
us
.” She could always make Anne feel better. Gwyneth even took away Anne's dreams. Anne never knew a nightmare. “Dreams can be bad,” she told Anne, “so I steal them away from you.”

Gwyneth wore the most beautiful old-fashioned white gown Anne had ever seen, even in storybooks. It was a dress perfect for dancing.
Chaînés, chaînés
. Anne loved the way it moved.

And ghosts move fast. And when they are angry, their eyes go black.

*   *   *

When Anne wasn't with her ghosts, she was with Nan.

Anne respected Nan because the house loved her. And Anne loved the house. Sometimes she thought she loved it more than her ghosts or her family or anything there ever was or ever would be. It belonged to her. The Witch House only existed because Nan created it. Anne understood this. And Anne understood Nan. Even when she spoke her native language.