Mother and Child Page 23

  TAKE THE CHILD, the mother whispers to the wolf, as you once took me. Ferry her across the divide now back into life. Initiate her into the world of grown up charms. How beautiful you are and how handsome; look at the stars in your fur!

  The wolf’s eyes glistened sadly.

  Help me. I’ve not much time.

  THE BAT WAS an angel. The bat was a messenger. The bat, it is true, has an enormous capacity for poignancy—a marvelous creature—it has a true aptitude for geometry. All in all, it is a miraculous being.

  The wind came up and they walked looking straight ahead and at no time from side to side. Behold, the bat says, and it begins its Annunciation. The mother is desperately trying to decipher what it says at this moment from the shape its mouth takes. And then, just like that and no one knows why, least of all the mother, she gives up trying and lets the bat sink back into its jibber and lets the revelation slip away.

  Whatever metaphors the bat dragged and carried with it, it could no longer touch her. Whatever associations there might have once been slip from her as if off utterly smooth black wings.

  EVERYTHING WAS HAPPENING so quickly and seemed now to be speeding up. The mother did not know why everything had to change; she just knew that it did. Things were changing even when they seemed not to be.

  THE MOTHER PICTURES a wondrous girl. One day she will awake and the child, gigantic, beautiful beyond belief, will stand before her, a girl capable of anything, towering impossibly in just a few years’ time, surpassing even the height of the Spiegelpalais.

  Pupa is from the Latin for puppet, and from puppet, or young girl, comes an animated doll-like puppet creature. Pupa is the life stage of some insects undergoing transformation. The Romans also noted that when you looked into the center of the eye, you saw a small doll-like image of yourself reflected, and this was called the pupil. Look, the child said, shining a light into the Grandmother’s eyes.

  THE CHILD HAD a plan. She would place the Grandmother in salt for forty days. Then she would soak her in molten resin and preserve her in perfumed oils. Then she would wrap her in linen. After that, she would put her in her kayak and climb in beside her.

  THE GRANDFATHER FROM the North Pole says that the ice is a dynamic, living entity. The Grandmother says mush, and eight huskies obey. Frosty Boy leads the pack. Visibility is so low you can’t see from flag to flag. Whiteout conditions, someone manages to call, above the snow!

  From the gleaming depths, the Grandfather from the North Pole sits bolt upright and bellows in an arresting baritone:

  Who has made me rise

  unwillingly and slow,

  from beds of everlasting snow?

  He looks to his daughter. It’s beautiful here, Bibi.

  But what about the child, Father?

  He shakes his head.

  What about the child, she repeats.

  You already know Bibi. You already know it was always too late.

  And with that he lay back down, and once more froze again to death.

  HERE FROSTY BOY, the mother whispers, and her voice echoes in the room. She looks at her father, sunken back into splendor.

  THE NATIONAL SNOW and Ice Data Center’s ice expert says that the cap of floating sea ice on the Arctic Ocean is shrinking at an unprecedented rate. This year’s ice retreat is unmatched by anything in the previous century.

  Even though the Grandmother from the North Pole is a strong swimmer, the mother was grateful that when the ice waters come to be the size of six Californias, the Grandmother from the North Pole would no longer be alive.

  THE TIME IS running out. The world in its present form is passing away. What Saint Paul had said was as true now as it was then.

  She was neither here nor there, and like the infants stranded in Limbo, she felt such discomfort, and it seemed to propel her—but whether up or down, whether back or forth, and whether she was asleep or awake, she did not know.

  Even in sleep, the body was accelerating because the earth was in rotation. Even the coffins spun under the ground, with the spinning of the earth. All she knew was that the child was there again, at her side. And she smiled.

  IT’S FRANCE, SOMEONE shouted, and the child jumped up and down with glee and pulled at her mother’s sleeve. France had come to the Spiegelpalais: A four-dolphined fountain was brought in, a glass pyramid, a grotto, and gargoyles. Fragments of the river Seine arrived—it glistened in the mirrored walls and kept the great American river company. The Little Sparrow sang.

  BY MOONLIGHT THE mother works tirelessly. If she had made a bargain and had, as a result, been allotted so many years so as to watch her child be born and grow, she could not remember. All she knew was that she could feel the Great Fading, and along with the fade, the desire to make the child a safe place.

  See how hard the mother is trying to fend off a catastrophe that has already happened. See how desperately she is trying to save them—and see in this last effort how beautiful they have become.

  THE CHILD POINTED to the burning sky in fear.

  Look! she cried.

  The mother and she stood high, high atop the towers, which were in flames. From there it was clear to the child that the mother, who appeared very pregnant, could never have survived. It was almost ten years ago now that the towers had fallen, taking the three thousand souls. The child gasped, for she knew what it meant for them.

  ON HER BACK she felt a searing heat. Maybe she was on fire. Instinctively she rolled on the floor to smolder the flames. Still she was not burning. There was no fire yet, only heat, and more and more smoke. People broke windows. The mother told herself to breathe. Maybe if she had a wet towel and could place it over her face.

  One by one they were falling asleep.

  She was falling into the smoke-filled Valley of Sleep. But for the baby, she might have succumbed. On her hands and knees she crawled over the sleepers in an effort to get closer to the window.

  SHE WONDERED WHERE the Spiegelpalais had come from—why it had materialized, and why, in the end, it had gone away. One day it was just there, and she could not remember, after a time, having ever lived without it. It seemed always to have been in her presence. And just as it had appeared from nowhere, and out of nothing, so it had now disappeared, and she could no longer be sure that it had ever existed at all. All that remained was the longing for something: large, circular, luminous, very beautiful—but what? She wept, for soon she knew even the memory of the Spiegelpalais would vanish.

  SEE THE INTENSE immobility of the mother. The mother had been put into a twilight state. She saw that the bat swooped around her head in shallow circles, but there was nothing she could do about it. The circumference of a circle in Romania is determined by the diameter of the arc made by those heat- and halo-seeking creatures. Saint Stanislav, patron saint of Poland, throws a discus or a Frisbee to them, lifts his hand as if in protection, and gives a benediction. The mother, in a twilight state, feels something like fear. She has no idea what part she is being asked to play. But it is a part, now hers, that she will not relinquish.

  WITH SOME DREAD and some excitement, she stepped into the capsule. More than anything, she wanted to be a winged thing. She lowered her head and assumed the pose she had seen in the great science books of the Fathers. She tucked her head down to her chest. Slowly her eyes blackened and grew liquid. Her legs were pressed together, and her feet were crossed one over the other as is often depicted in the crucifixion.

  She was wrapping herself in filaments, threads, gossamer, papery thin skins. Brown leaf-like strands were attaching themselves to her back. All was quiet. In a stillness, which seemed to signify a coming into being, and also the sloughing off of being, she was enclosing herself slowly in a firm case.

  When the child came upon the mother, she was already wrapped in her mesh dress. Wrapped like a little mummy princess in papyrus and rags. Her gold-leafed head was elongated, her inky eyes had blackened, her appendages were immovable. She was gold-encrusted, sun-soaked, sessile, remote
. Her pupa hung motionless and mute. Seeing her mother like this, the child, for the first time, begins to cry.

  There is the mother like a mirage at the end of the Sphinx Road, and though the child walks toward her—the mother comes no closer. Now she was spinning more and more threads.

  Moth pupae are usually dark in color and formed in underground cells, loose in the soil, their pupae contained in protective silk called a cocoon. Cocoons may be tough or soft, opaque or translucent, solid or webby, of various colors or of multiple layers. Insects that pupate in a cocoon must escape it.

  PUPAE ARE IMMOBILE and have few defenses. Some species are capable of making sounds or vibrations to scare off potential predators, or sometimes just for communication. The child waited outside. She hoped her mother was the sort of species that made sounds.

  She remembered now the mother singing, Tomorrow will be my dancing day, and it pained her to think of it. Her mother wrapped tightly in thousands of overlapping filaments.

  NOT TO WORRY—if the world ends at this moment, the child said, God keeps track of where all the bodies are, the ones in the ocean, the ones scattered as ashes hither and thither, the ones entombed in silk and gold filaments, silent.

  THE CHILD SITS quietly next to the little mother holding the shining pod in her hand. The mother seemed to be working very hard. The mother had assured her she would be back. The child smiled. She thought that she could see at last the place where her mother’s wings had finally begun to form.

  Extreme darkness pours down on them, but they are not afraid anymore.

  IN THE WOOD, a girl child is breathing like a beast. The mother is careful to stay very still. She recognizes the girl from a long time ago, but wonders how it is that this girl has not changed. She has remained exactly the same. The girl can hear her mother’s voice calling to her. She becomes a brindle color and light and gallops. It is the Grandmother from the North Pole who calls, but the Grandmother is young, and her yellow hair gleams. It was a mysterious life. Every night the girl thinks of the infinite forest that lay just beyond her door: immense, dense with totems and stars. She soothes herself by pulling the darkness and the cool around her like a cloak. The girl gets out of bed and goes to find her Bird Atlas, and her book of animal tracks. She cannot wait for morning to come.

  AFTER THE MOTHER had her hair shorn for the war effort, the back of her neck could be seen for the first time since childhood, and it was only then that the child noticed that she had a stork bite at the nape, as infants often have, to mark the place they had been carried before they were dropped to earth. Mysteriously, the mother’s stork bite would appear and then fade, and after a while, it would disappear altogether only to come back at another time, bright red again. It was as if she were continually being born and carried and dropped to earth, over and over. Each time she landed, she was brand new and she possessed no hindsight and no foresight; she remembered and had learned nothing—but also, the world was always new, never seen before, and she never aged.

  THERE IS A fire at the center of the earth. From the fire, a child’s voice, so pure, so true, makes itself heard. It is marked by the peculiar suffering of children. It is refined, perfected—innocence and experience held in such sublime balance, and possessing wisdom, ancient and new. She could hear the child from upstairs calling her name—stranger than music, more plangent than bells, sweet in a way we have forgotten entirely. A child is reciting numbers. A child is making up a song. A Happy Dance, a Fippy Song, a Fippy Dance.

  SHE WAS ENCLOSED in a firm case. She remained in her pod stationary for ten days, and each day the pod would darken. About a day before the emergence of the creature, the chrysalis would become transparent.

  THERE IS SOMETHING so luminous and clear passing through the child, and so momentous. She can hardly express the grandeur she feels. She thought of the pictures of the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre and how it matched the one she carried inside her now. If there is anything the child wants to see for real before she dies, it is that glass pyramid. She closes her eyes and she sees that shape in three dimensions travelling through space.

  Right before the mother emerges again, the chrysalis becomes transparent. The child thought of Blanche Neige gleaming from her glass casket. She imagined her mother would at last be perfected and her soul purified, and at that moment their transparencies might speak. What is too sublime for you, seek not; into things beyond your strength, search not, the false prophet had said. The child’s body is transparent. Blanche Neige gleaming from her glass casket is at rest—everything is shining and bright.

  SHE THOUGHT OF the Luna Moth, very late at night, spinning silk, wrapped in a walnut leaf, and the slow formation of pale green wings.

  THERE IS A world not yet visible but there, before us. Welcoming, not hostile. And translucent. It is a matter now of attention—of perceiving the opening in the veil through which they might slip. The Virgin appears and welcomes her through, under a mantle of blue.

  AT THE LAST moment, the mother had an odd visitation. It was not exactly a visitation; it was more an intimation, but it came back with such intensity that it threatened to change the course of all that now lay fixed securely before her.

  She could feel herself and the child, who was a baby—the two of them, in the drafty, dangerous house, lying on the floor on a carpet she had purchased because that is what one did when you had an infant come to live with you. You made the surfaces softer. She read there were rubber edges you could put on the sharp corners as well, but she hadn’t gotten around to it yet. This is what she saw, and what she felt now in her body as she emerged. Perhaps she had tried to fly away from the catastrophe, and the flames, as would have been the only solution. She was a large winged Luna Moth. Black smoke billowing against the sky, arms outstretched, she was pregnant after all; she was sure of it. No, she did not die, she says to herself.

  NOW SHE WAS falling. And still she sees before her: the mother and the infant are lying on the carpet together. The phone rings in the next room, and the mother puts her hand behind the baby’s head to support it before picking her up and gathering the little one to her breast. And for an instant she feels completely happy, and it is as if she knows, for once, exactly what to do with this world. On the phone it is the Grandmother from the North Pole who is whispering as she bestows something like a blessing on the new mother and the new child and the new world. Everything is so beautiful, and so new.

  FOR AN INSTANT they stood without moving, the mother and her child, who was now almost ten years of age. They were both whole and they laughed and they ran in the grass. And they did not tire, and they saw a deer in a clearing, and its antlers were covered in velvet. They should have known who the deer was, and what it wanted of them, there in the dark wood, with its incomparable poise, and its terror—but their eyes were prevented from recognizing it. It did not matter. It was enough to be adorned in the charms of twilight. It was enough to be alive.

  acknowledgments

  FOR THOSE WHO make their appearance in these pages, my gratitude:

  Louise, Louis, Henry, Lisa, Paul, Liam, Emma, Genevieve, Hazel Ann, Jim, Larissa, Cathy, Jan, Jean, Peter, Krista, Michael, Emma S., Sally, Peter S., Martin, Ellen, Jill, Eli, Lorraine, Kenny, David, Dugan, Bunny, Nico, Reteeka, Eleanor, Kathy, Andrea, Father Ted, Father Chepatis, Father Flynn, Hardscrabble Jim, Mr. Min, Coco, Paris, Puff, Winter Bear.

  And for all those along the way who have offered their heart or their hand:

  Aishah, Alexandra, Anita, Annabella, Linda, Liz, Melanie, Therese, Jan, Lora, Jack, Georges, Barbara, Jean, Peter, Angela, Alison, Mary-Beth, Duke, Ben, Laura, Romulus, Catherine, Harry, Melissa, Cathy, Regina, Alicia, Sue, Thalia, Toad, Jill, Brad, Lance, Deborah, Ronnie, Ilene, Kelly, Micaiah.

 

 

 
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