Mother and Child Read online

THE PAINTER TOLD the child: she remembered that after her father died, she would watch the train each day on the horizon depart at 9 AM, and that she could still see it crossing the horizon at noon, that was how vast the world was, and it was not until 3 that the train disappeared entirely. That was what life was like on the Plains. I was a small, magical girl, she said, with a wand that could not save my father; he clutched his heart, and the world was flat and wide and the train was so tiny and the horizon was a hovering stripe.

  For years she painted the blue horizon, multiplied. The painter takes the child’s hand and they move through rooms and rooms of stripes. It took a long time—almost my whole life, but finally I found it: the grid; and the child saw stripes that moved back and forth and also up and down. And that is what I wanted all along.

  The Mourning Party moves along the grid now to the Spiegelpalais. It’s a strange diagonal step we take, they say, strangely cheerful, but a bit bewildered, the invisible father leading the way.

  MR. MIN APPEARS again, some miles away. He has come with his cages to catch the woodchucks because woodchucks, Aunt Eloise says, are the kind of creatures that can take down a whole barn if you let them. How many can you catch in those Have a Heart Traps? Uncle Lars asks.

  Oh it depends, says Mr. Min. The lady said to come and trap them. The lady says she is at her wit’s end.

  How much to catch them? Uncle Lars asks.

  Fifteen dollars each, says Mr. Min.

  Uncle Lars can’t complain.

  Aunt Eloise had called to have Mr. Min come and trap the varmints in his very nice Have a Heart Traps and take them with him, but when the varmints were caught, Aunt Eloise was away.

  In the cage, the woodchuck is making a tunneling motion. After a while, exhausted, it stops. Uncle Lars looks at the large face of the creature that fills the cage. On the radio someone is saying the war is botched, there is no way to make any good of it.

  Mr. Min is getting out of his truck; he’s brought along his grown-up son—he loves him very much. Mr. Min, where have you been? The woodchuck has been in here a long time, Uncle Lars says, pointing to the cage, and with that Uncle Lars hands the cage to Mr. Min.

  What will you do with him now? Uncle Lars asks.

  I will let him out in a green, green field, some miles away from here, says Mr. Min.

  And what happens out there? Uncle Lars asks, lighting his pipe.

  Out there? says Mr. Min.

  Out there, says Uncle Lars.

  Out there he will have no place to go. The others will shun him. And eventually he will die.

  Uncle Lars blows some smoke into the cage, and thinks awhile.

  How much would it cost to let that woodchuck go? asks Uncle Lars.

  Right here?

  Uncle Lars looks around and nods.

  Fifteen dollars, Mr. Min whispers. On one condition.

  Yes?

  You won’t tell the lady.

  Uncle Lars winks.

  And that is what it was like with Uncle Lars and why the child loved him most. He always asked one question extra.

  UNCLE LARS SAYS the soldiers on the green, green grass are only children. Boys in helmets, they might easily have been playing football. When day is done someone throws a last ball, and they take off their helmets, then lie awhile on the green, green grass and fall asleep. They are not expendable fodder this time. Their lives are not sacrificed for a few meters of land.

  THE LADY CALLS Mr. Min one day to retrieve his cages. She is pleased with how many woodchuck faces she has seen, and she is happy that so many have been released into a green, green field far away. She has seen not hide nor hair, she says, since Mr. Min has been on the case. She shakes his hand goodbye. In the driveway, she sees a large, slumped shape in the front seat of his truck. I see you have brought your dog today, Aunt Eloise says.

  No, Mr. Min says, that is my son. I love him very much.

  11

  THE CHILD STANDS on a vacant stage bathed in white light and makes her petition to the Grandmother from the North Pole. I wish you were here, she whispers. I feel in my body you are due. Light floods the child. It’s the distances that make it so hard. I need you so much closer, she says. She stands for a moment longer, all alone, holding her box of melting snow.

  THE ICE LOSS was contiguous to the Bone Loss. There is a sadness that is spreading. The Grandmother from the North Pole, on the move, leads the delegation that brought the consensus of Ice Loss and Bone Loss to the President. The President said he did not believe in the loss, and he walked to his jet plane. The Grandmother from the North Pole blocked the entry to the jet and offered her needle-thin arm to him as proof, and she jutted her pointy hip at him, and then her even pointier other hip. No one give up the ship, she cried, and they moved into the White House and waited for the President to change his mind. Hour after hour they wait. He sits in the rose garden in the dark holding his mother’s ice-cold hand.

  He will ruin the whole planet if you let him, his mother says.

  EVERYTHING WAS RETURNING to funnels and everywhere there was proof of it, the Grandmother from the North Pole told the child. Just look around. The Grandmother thought that in this new Age of Funnels, Presidents should be made to take lie detector tests on a regular basis, and along with all the other pledges, they would be required to take the Doctor’s Oath: First Do No Harm.

  THE MOTHER WARNED the child that they would be seeing unusual things, and at the H sign, she seemed to tremble. The mother had said that once she possessed a nurse’s demeanor, but that the nurse’s demeanor had left her. The child in turn thought that once you have a nurse’s demeanor, it never leaves you entirely. The H, the child surmised, must stand for Hospital, as they walked toward the front door. Earlier in the day, the child had heard the word distend—but she did not know what it could mean—then she heard the word lesion, and then the word occult. The psychic landscape grew desolate. What next? the mother wondered. She did a little dance for the child in the reception area. The child was not used to seeing her mother this way.

  The child noticed how the letter H was shaped. A bridge united two parallel lines, which would otherwise never meet. It calmed the child to carry the image of the letter H in her head as they now ascended a white elevator.

  Upstairs, their friend, all bones, was curled nearly into a complete circle now.

  The mother said that she had not meant that the child see this so soon: eventually, yes, but not today. She unfolds the picture of the gallbladder the man had drawn on a small paper a few months before. They had thought that that had been the problem. But the doctors had been 100% wrong. (She had gotten that from the child: “100 percent.”) The gallbladder had nothing to do with it.

  While the mother sits at the man’s bedside, the boy wanders down the hallway. On her walk, the child sees a small boy who had swallowed a dime holding up the extracted coin in a glass jar. In another room, a blue light is being shone on the abdomen of someone’s grandmother. In a third room, behind drawn curtains, a father sobs. The mother had told the child that when she was still a nurse, she once saw the doctors drill through a small skull. She never forgot that. The mother remembered bits of bone flying in the room.

  Once long ago, they had to return the heart to a child’s body after they had repaired it, stitching him back together as neatly as they could. Though he was her brother and his name was Lars, everyone who saw him called him Frankenstein, but at least he was alive.

  When the child returns, she and the mother stand before the body of the man—what body there is—so many bones on a plate, a continually warping harp. The man is a magnificent and terrible instrument from which music now originates.

  When the child is dismissed again, she continues her long walk down the hall. There is an old man asking for his mother; a child in a paper dress holding hands with another child in a paper dress; there is a boy gasping in blue diamonded pajamas; a belly dancing lady; a child with a red balloon; a black cat at the foot of a bed. The child walks
and walks, and it seems as if the walk might go on forever down this endlessly elongating hall, but then all of a sudden she is at the last door.

  When she looks in, she sees it is the Virgin, resplendent in a mantle of blue, standing in a grotto, next to a waterfall.

  THE CHILD KNEW things it was impossible to account for, and this frightened the mother, for she feared, having already learned the lessons this life had to offer, that she would be taken away. Now the child is holding a bird in her hand like a statue at Versailles, and she has a star at the top of her head. In dreams, the child stacks the crypts of Europe and she tells the mother not to worry; it makes a swift and neat pile. She pulls a curtain or a tarp over them, and she assures her mother there is really nothing there to fear. But the mother fears the tarp and the martyrs that are quite obviously underneath it. Why are they calling her? And the flagellation, and the starvation, and the levitations, and the seven states of grace, and the Virgin and the fawn waiting in the wings, and the incense lantern and the smoke . . .

  BUT FOR THE smoke, so dense, so dark, they might have jumped into that blue lake named for the explorer and survived. It’s very deep. The mother is dreaming. And no bats skim the surface.

  IN THE MORNING, the child announced that she was going to cut her hair and donate it to the wig for the Virgin. This frightened the mother who did not understand why the Virgin needed a wig. She remembered the child’s first official haircut, and she wondered how in this brief passage it had come to this. The child’s hair had fallen from a great height that day, an unspeakably dark cascade, and the mother had been there to catch it. She wanted to hold the child now by a long braid, a different tether altogether, and keep her close to her, but already the mother knew that she was no match for the Virgin, who waited patiently in the alcove for the plaits.

  THE CHILD HAD made up her own language and was now speaking it in front of the mirror. What if she was speaking in tongues? the mother worried. In a bag with a target on it at the end of the child’s bed slept the hair to be given to the Virgin for a wig. The mother feared that the child was going to be taken and turned into a saint, and she did not want the life of a saint for the child. The Virgin was coming to get her—the one the mother was asked only to protect. The child was too young to be taken away or to become a saint. The mother could not bear the idea of the tears of blood, or the flagellations, or the visions. For a moment she thought of Saint Stephen, the first martyr, holding an open book that supported three rocks, the instruments of his martyrdom. Maybe she should take the target bag while the child was sleeping. Life was already hard enough.

  The mother was determined not to let these intimations get the best of her—she would not be intimidated. She would stand up to all the angels with their herald horns, and all the lacerated saints, and the Virgin herself if it came to that. During Mass, she kept the child close to her side to protect her from the endless petitions, the bombardments of light, the bats, the exactitudes and beatitudes and plentitudes and indulgences, and during Communion she implored the three-personed God to leave the child alone.

  Each week when the Mass was ended, she hurried down the aisle and she put up her black umbrella to shield the child from the Light of Christ. They were alive, and not in any way would they be pulled to the other side. The people of the congregation thought that the mother had gone mad since the appearance of the bat, but the mother didn’t care what they thought.

  CECIL PETER HAD always said to place human hair on the sills at night for protection, and the mother now consented. But at night, she thought she could hear someone taking it away and collecting it in a bag.

  THE SOLDIERS DRAG their rucksacks through the mournful terrain. Aspects of the slain, still intact, follow them, the remnants of their day. Perhaps it is they who have come in the night, having mistaken the child’s hair for that of their German maidens.

  THE MOTHER’S HAIR lines one of the small tents at the Spiegelpalais used for sheltering the sleeping Aunt Inga. It breathes well, all agree, and holds up in every weather. Aunt Inga dreams peacefully. And a velvet curtain blows in the breeze.

  IN ONE CORNER of the tent where Aunt Inga slept, the mother thought she saw a particularly blue patch, and she went to it and stood there a long time, and the berries fell dull and sweet into the bucket. Row after row of dusty silver blue berries called to her. For a moment the invisible God was made visible.

  She had picked berries there forever, it seemed. She thought of her childhood now: a beautiful blue mountain seen through the parted black curtains. Lars, Anders, Ingmar, Sven, and baby Inga. She loved the sound as the berries fell—dull and sweet into the bucket.

  AFTER THE OTHERS had left she and the baby remained behind. She wanted to swaddle her, here among the blueberry bushes, to protect her, her little sister. It was getting late.

  Each beat of the heart is triggered by a surge of calcium ions that cause millions of overlapping filaments in a heart cell to pull against each other and contract. What would happen, she wonders, if white dwarfs—small, dense, dying stars, emitting axions, could attach their luminescence to stricken cells? What a beautiful world that would be, the mother thought, and bathed in moonlight and still holding the baby, she fell asleep.

  SHE STOOD HIGH, high up atop those towers now and looked out. It was one of her favorite spots in the world. When the mother was pregnant with the child she would often come and admire the world which was so blue and so wide. She was tired, having come directly from the night shift, but the view always soothed, and the height.

  12

  blue

  THE MOTHER UNDERSTOOD more than most about the ways that people got sick and then got better, or got sick and then continued to get more sick, because of course she had been a nurse. In the neo-natal unit where the mother was often stationed, there were always many blue palm-of-the-hand babies to nurse.

  Sometimes the child wished they could keep one of those babies, but she worried that it would need a lot of attention and she would lose her mother to it and she might end up hating the little palm-of-the-hand baby who needed only love. The child was so lonely some days that even a little sick palm-of-the-hand baby would do. She didn’t think the mother could take care of two children anyway, though it would be nice to have a little company. She would make the baby little dolls out of hollyhocks. She would make a tiny doll bed out of a walnut and some straw.

  If the baby got sick, the mother would know what to do, how to wrap it up, and if it stopped breathing and turned blue, she could always put it under grow lights on stainless steel trays where it could be warmed, and the mother would breathe on it for extra protection and she would make it a tent out of her hair like the tent for Aunt Inga.

  THE BOY IN Room 11 had been the only child of the three to survive the operation. Even though they had had wheelchair races in the halls in the days before, the other two children had died. When the boy who survived got home and was well on his way to recovery, he said, now I must live for three people, and an unimaginable darkness entered him.

  The Boy in Room 11 was always a fighter, his mother said, but since having his chest opened and the blood field exposed to air, something had changed. He lived now in constant terror of invasions and contagions: attackers, burglars, rapists—those who might violate, dismember, or take something away.

  After the surgery, the mother had handed the boy a glass hammer. She wondered now how things might have turned out if instead of a hammer she had handed him a sapling; instead of a sword, she had handed him a raft; instead of a stone—a pear, or a guitar, or a thread.

  NO ONE COULD tolerate the girl in the newspaper’s death from an undiagnosed, treatable form of diabetes after her parents chose to pray for her rather than take her to the doctor. There was too little insulin in her body, the autopsy said, but when opened up, all that could be seen was that she was overflowing with prayer. The prayers could be examined and dissected, but the God had already exited the body, leaving behind the wreckage. After the au
topsy, the child’s sweetened organs were placed in a glass jar as a lesson for all.

  When the girl in the newspaper at last finds her way out of the jar, she is miniscule, a fetus in fact, but all her organs are back, and she crawls to the best of her ability to her parents and nestles in the crook of her father’s arm awhile, and then moves back to her mother where it had all begun, and burrows herself into the porch of her ear.

  Who’s there? the mother whispers.

  At the Spiegelpalais, a little master of ceremonies appears from beneath a tent flap: once I saw a deer no more than twelve inches tall emerge from underneath a rhubarb leaf, somewhere in the Andes, and I caught it and brought it back for you to see today here on display! And he places the tiny deer on a little amber block, said to be a million years old.

  The little master is lonely even now, surrounded by Atlas the Dwarf, Quasimodo, the Half Man–Half Woman, and the Bearded Lady. He’s come now to fetch the little fetus girl, the child says.

  Who’s there?

  The praying mother feels more and more as if she is being called, but by whom she does not know. She experiences a strange somber sound in her left ear—a plaintive sound that no matter what will not leave her now. Those who remember the girl in the jar, and the mother standing over her, look on now with a special pity reserved for a certain elevated category of tragedy. Who’s there?

  The sweetened fetus falls into unconsciousness. The mother bows her head.

  DOWN THE HALL they were dislocating the football playing boy’s hip in order to shave the bone, which was growing like a tree inside him. But the muscles of a boy who plays football are strong, and so are the bones, and it took a long time to pry the bone from its socket. When they were finished prying and shaving, they put big screws in to hold the hip together.