Ghost Dance Read online

  “Plumage,” I said, trying to imitate her.

  “And you must follow it—wherever it takes you. You must not be afraid,” she whispered. “It means us no harm.”

  I love her in the deepest cells of my sleep. I feel her warm breath as I descend into sleep and hear her voice long after she has left the room. The Topaz Bird sings in her throat. The Topaz Bird flies from her mouth. I could almost see it those nights. There was such longing there in the dark.

  I would love to follow that bird through my moody half-sleep. “My precious, precious,” I would say, reaching, straining.

  She kisses me on the forehead and shuts off the light. I have never seen the Topaz Bird but I feel that something of it forms with the part of my mother I keep after she has left the room—her smell on me still, her kiss resting on my forehead. Each night, I take the simple, strange story into sleep and dream it.

  I will find that precious bird. I build a nest in my ear for it. I prepare a place. I make a circle of my forefinger and thumb and fill it with something soft. I open the palm of my hand and offer it.

  Oh, if I saw that bird—

  Oh, if I saw that bird I would not hesitate to follow. The kiss lingers…

  Though I am nineteen years old now, I have never seen that precious bird, but the kiss lingers. “Mom,” I say.

  She is so far away.

  Mother, here are the parts of the story you forgot to tell, the parts of the story I learned in my sleep.

  When the Topaz Bird finally appeared after hundreds of years, your mother recognized it, even before opening her pale eyes, and through the layers of her fatigue she let out a small cry. Her family had waited so long and intently for that mythic creature to appear again that she could hardly fail to see it, even in the dark, even through her lidded eyes, as it flew past the hospital window at the hour her first child was born.

  The doctors had advised my grandmother, a young woman with a rheumatic heart, not a grandmother at all then, not to have children; the consequences would be grave. But, holding in her arms her healthy baby, which felt quite strong, she knew it had been the right thing. “I will have children,” she had told the doctors, “there is nothing you can do about it.” The bird flew bv again. She opened her eyes. She saw only a blur but she knew what it was, and the pain from childbirth was mingled with an enormous joy. So the bird was the Bird of Luck, she thought, and of Good Health.

  She heard its song. No one as far as she could remember, not even George, had ever mentioned its song. She wondered whether anyone had ever heard it before. She did not know if it was a happy song or a sad song—that was the way she was accustomed to thinking—but its beauty brought tears to her eyes, and she would write in her diary often of the haunting melody that followed her up and down the sloping terrain of her illness.

  As she sat up in the white bed holding her daughter close, the melody grew louder. She struggled to get up so that she might see the bird clearly at last. When she finally reached the window and looked out into the snow, she gasped, for she saw exactly what she had pictured since she had first heard the story as a little girl. It was perched on the bare branch of a chestnut tree. It was tiny, tiny, a sort of hummingbird, she thought, with a few crimson feathers, green at the throat, and possessing an all-over topaz glow. It was beautiful, even more beautiful than they had said, and the young mother and her daughter stood drenched in its magnificent light.

  Grandma Alice knew right away that her life was a bordering life, that the bird was not reallv hers to see, and she wondered, looking at it, what transformations the Topaz Bird had made on that journey from the branch of the chestnut tree to her brain. She was aware that she was probably not seeing it clearly. She held her daughter up to the glow and watched her new eyes turn from pale blue to violet to deep blue to turquoise then back to pale blue again. What did the bird, here on this first day of March, mean for her sweet, smiling little girl?

  She held my mother at the window for what seemed a long time. The Topaz Bird continued to sing and did not move from the tree, and my grandmother, too, standing in the brilliant light, felt only an hour old. She felt as if the world were only beginning for her, too. In fact my grandmother was entering a new stage as she stood before the Topaz Bird, having brought it back, after so long, with her daughter’s birth: it was the beginning of the end of her life.

  Chased back to bed by the nurses, the Topaz Bird flown off, the baby back in the nursery, my grandmother had a chance to think now for the first time about what was happening. There, as she drifted in and out of sleep, each member of the Hauser family appeared before her, perfectly clear against the hospital white. So the dead are even more detailed in appearance than the living, she sighed, looking at the knotted hands, counting the wrinkles, noting the many tones that made up the color of hair. She felt exhausted.

  They were still searching for the Topaz Bird as she conjured them. Since the reunion in 1900 when they were alerted of the bird’s existence, each Hauser had searched for it, dreamt of it, convinced they would see it if they were diligent, patient. In the middle of many nights they had opened their eyes, positive that the bird would be there, only to see empty space, a straight-backed chair, a bowl of fruit. A few had written through the years of a glowing feeling, a sudden flush on their faces, a strange fluttering in their chests, the bird apparently caught in the human rib cage with no way out.

  I imagine my grandmother must have felt the Topaz Bird near her her whole life, that presence having grown stronger and stronger with each month of pregnancy. Perhaps it was the Bird of Death after all, she thought through those months, as the doctors had said. But no, now she saw that it was not. Her baby was healthy and she felt fine.

  Whatever it meant, she had prepared for it, knowing it was getting closer and closer, and so she was not surprised to see it at the birth of her daughter Christine. Yet despite her preparation, she was frightened a little, she didn’t know why, and she wrote later in her journal of that fear. What did it mean for her perfect, healthy daughter? In the family folklore the bird was rumored to be the Luminous Bird of Genius.

  In the long history of the Hauser family the Topaz Bird had been sighted only twice. The first time was in Germany by George Hauser, a pianist and composer. He had had a glimpse of it, the story goes, while out for his mid-morning walk. “A piece has broken off the sun and taken the shape of a bird,” he told his wife Hannah, breathlessly, upon his return. But at this point Hannah was no longer a good listener. She shook her head; her large arms shook as she kneaded the bread. So I have married a crazy man, she thought. This vision of a bird only reinforced what she already knew. On endless staves he furiously wrote notes, but what came out was not music, everyone agreed about that. What came out, despite all the notes he wrote, the neat clefs, the rests, was not music. It was noise, anarchy. He looked so much like a composer as he wrote. Oh, that was the worst part; he looked so serious, so concentrated, so wrapped in it, but it was all nonsense. There was no discernible order. Everyone said so. And order was everything in Germany in those days.

  What he heard no one else would hear for hundreds and hundreds of years.

  The second time the Topaz Bird had been seen was in 1803 when Eva Hauser saw it one afternoon on the bough of a pear tree in Cummington, Massachusetts. Later, in her diary, she wrote, “All my art has been an attempt to recapture one image, that of a topaz bird I saw for one hour outside my house as a child. It refreshes me to think about and urges me on. Though I am already forty-five, my eyesight is still good and I have not given up the hope of seeing it once more.” She wrote this in 1837, having failed to make the gold leaf that would perhaps have approximated that vision. “It would have been easy to confuse it with the light of the sun and to have shaded my eyes or looked away, but it was a bird and I could not take my eyes from it.”

  In the last years of her life, Eva, in an attempt to capture the Topaz Bird’s magnificent flight, found it necessary to add to her paintings snippets of pap
er, foreign stamps, pictures from tobacco packages, wood fragments, bits of glass, broken plates, photographs. “The audacity,” people said, “the audacity of this Eva Hauser.” But the women of the sewing circle gathering each week to make patchwork quilts were gentler; they felt sorry for Eva. “Let her be,” they whispered to their families, “let her just be.” She was mad, they knew, to see things that way, but “let her be.” And so they did. Eva was found dead in 1865, dried flowers, French stamps, corn husks, yarn, and scraps of paper surrounding her on the bed.

  In the next century both Eva and George were treated more seriously by a nephew, Karl, who was studying the Hauser history. “It shall be very significant indeed,” he said, at a family gathering in 1900, “whoever sees the Topaz Bird next. It shall be very significant. This time we will know not to ridicule or humiliate. We know more now.”

  So generation after generation of Hausers began to look into the air. People mistook them for snobs because their heads were always raised, but what they were looking for, of course, was that elusive bird. The tale was passed from father to son, mother to daughter. Filtered through time and various personalities, the interpretation changed. “It is the Bird of Truth and Light,” one man said. “It is the Bird of Supreme Sacrifice.” “The Bird of Insight.” “When it returns, it will be the Bird of Ultimate Pleasure.” During World War II, the Hausers, now real Americans, decided it was the Bird of Absolute Power, the Bird to Wipe Out Hitler. “No, it is the Bird of Peace,” another said.

  Unbeknownst to them, the Topaz Bird was in Paterson, New Jersey, following a small girl as she went to school.

  And so my Grandma Alice, though not surprised to see the bird outside her hospital window, must have smiled to herself, thinking of her family through time. And it must have occurred to her, remembering George and Eva, that they had only seen the bird for a short time, a moment really, and here it had lingered already all afternoon around her sweet but rather ordinary daughter. What could this mean, she wondered that night, as the nurse brought her baby to her. She held her tightly and felt her own heart give way. She would not live to read a single poem of her daughter’s or to find out what the Topaz Bird really meant.

  What she knew was that the bird that followed my mother was precious.

  I hope my young grandmother could fall a bit easier into death knowing that this special bird, years in forming, would always be with my mother. I hope she knew that it meant her no harm.

  It was the Bird of Genius, Grandma Alice.

  The wild, brilliant Bird of Imagination.

  The Bird of Great Invention.

  Invention was everything to my mother and in that quiet, dark house I too learned how to fill empty space and dispel silence.

  In that house where she was so often absent, I learned how to conjure her back a little. Silence would give way to footsteps, shadows would lighten, and she would come a bit closer. I could see her stepping momentarily into light; I could see her gray gaze and the beautiful bone structure of her face. “Mother,” I would say, and she would turn to reveal the tendons in her neck or a curl that encircled her ear. I would see some familiar motion of hers and it would become new. I would see something more than I had before and I would understand her a little better.

  I learned to halve the distance, then make smaller divisions. I might suddenly smell rain though the day was sunny, feel the texture of her hair, wild in such humidity, or watch her walk in moonlight as she followed a premonition, a strand of long hair in the rain, a scrap of voice, a melody, down a dark street in Nice.

  And in that house Father, who was always so silent, would come clearer, too. I could invent the stories behind his cloudy glances, the hesitations in his speech. I could understand his hands finally, the mysterious way they moved from object to object but never landed. I could remember for him what he said he could not. I could easily fathom the great depths of his love for my mother and his loneliness because of it. Longing in me took shapes, but I think my father saw nothing when my mother was away—or what I imagine nothing to be: fields and fields of black or dark green or blue.

  I was never lonely. In my house the darkness always gave way.

  In my house, Grandma Alice is alive. She grows old. She has a long gray braid down her back. She has trouble reading the fine print. She watches my mother and me out in the garden. She sits with me on the porch and tells me the story of the Topaz Bird. She hugs me with her woolen arms. She never tires. “Tell me about Eva again,” I beg, and she always does.

  My house whirls and whirls with mist and moonlight and lovers. On hot summer nights a handsome stranger from Spain plays the guitar and a slow fan turns within me.

  In my house there are dresses of twilight, and snowstorms, and towers and castles, and music and laughter.

  In my house there are intricate scenarios. I have seen a beautiful bride whispering her marriage vows in the white curtains that flutter in the wind. I have seen the groom in the dark door step forward, then back. In my house there are racehorses and flowers and satin and my mother is a little girl there, drifting off to sleep, dreaming of flowers and horses.

  In my house the sun constructs perfect golden rectangles on the ceiling; they clang together, making lovely music. In my house there is always music: Mozart and Vivaldi and Bach.

  And in my house there is order. In my house there is sense. In my house the father who is so remote smiles finally, as the crime he has brooded over for years, the crime he has carefully outlined on the table with his finger, finally falls into place. Everything has an explanation, a reason. Why the mother seems always to be leaving for France becomes clear.

  In my house I can hear my grandfather two states away walking on the crackling earth, listening for water. In my house I can hear a clock ticking. It grows louder and louder and larger and larger as she stands under it, bathed in apricot light. In my house I hear her bracelets clinking; I hear the bright laughter of two women.

  I move slowly through these fall days. In my heavy house, which I carry on my back like a turtle, a dark-eyed woman weeps for someone who is permanently lost to her.

  But they are not lost to me. In my house, which is vibrant and alive, my Grandma Alice does not die before I am born. In my house there is love and there is mystery and there is longing. In my house my mother is a little girl, a college student, a woman reclining on a pink couch, sipping a cool drink and reading the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke.

  In my house there are love and violence and wonder—full orchestras, huge chandeliers, and champagne. In my house she is always there, next to me.

  My mother is in a black cocktail dress and pearls. It must be about 1960. She twists the black phone cord in her hand. She is so beautiful standing there in the hallway, talking in French to the woman across the ocean before she leaves for the party.

  He lives in another country but it doesn’t matter, we see each other often—he wants me so much. No matter what the weather, how difficult the trip, the number of stops, the price of the fare, somehow he always gets to me. I know this and so do not worry. For coming such a long way, he is reliable, hardly ever late; pure desire keeps him from harm as he races through the city streets to me, asking directions in broken English if he must.

  He glides into the room as if he hears music, Jacques Brel perhaps or Piaf. His black beret, the baguette under his arm, these let me know that tonight the distance he has come from is named France.

  He pours two glasses of wine—Beaujolais-Villages. He closes his eyes, breathes me in. I lower my mouth; this wine, this music, this man—it is all perfect. He tears the bread. “Le beurre,” he says, “la confiture.”

  We gaze at each other and our hunger grows. Outside it has begun to rain. There is a swell of music. He takes out a package of Gauloises; I recognize the light blue color, the wings on the package. Before he opens them our clothes are off. Our bodies are lovely—all perfect, graceful arcs. We perform our slow sexual ballet flawlessly, mouth to mouth to mouth. Afterwards w
e smoke a cigarette and it is piano music we hear now, Chopin or Poulenc. In his face I detect some waywardness. The camera that records our every move pulls closer. It means he will die soon. It brings further romance, an urgency to our next embrace when it comes, a meaning to the silence. I close my eyes, naked, twisted in the perfumed sheets. In a few hours he will be returning to a country I cannot really picture at all—mythic, far away, filled with beautiful women, I suppose.

  “It’s just like a film,” I whisper: the rain, the wine, the stranger from France. “Le cinéma,” he says. His voice is deep and tragic. “Au revoir, je t’aime,” I say, as he slowly puts on his clothes and I look on, smoking his last cigarette.

  “Au revoir,” he sighs. A tear falls from the corner of my eye. Then the final credits.

  Sometimes I will notice, while sitting in the kitchen eating lunch, that the trees outside the window are moving, slowly at first and then more and more quickly. By now I recognize this movement—it is a ride I love: the linen; the silver; this most elegant of dining cars; the scent of cologne, of fresh flowers; the clinking of fine china, of crystal; the pale rose in the pewter vase; chicken in wine with mushrooms; the French countryside.

  “You must watch for small bones,” the handsome waiter whispers in my ear, and I can feel his whisper lingering somewhere near my throat as he pours me a glass of champagne.

  “Champagne in the afternoon makes me dizzy,” I smile. A few tables over, two women in hats begin to blur. “Meet me in the back car in five minutes,” he says, his body covering mine in shadow.

  “Vanessa,” my brother shouts, finishing his lunch next to me. “Vanessa.” The man in white in the back car lights a cigarette from the blue-winged package. “Vanessa, come back,” Fletcher says.

  Yes, it is probably best—leave him there for a while, smiling, loosening his tie in the last car.

  “Are you dreaming again?”

  I watch the landscape slow down outside the window, then stop.