could do to ease their pain. She recalled her anguish as she’d waited to learn if Barty’s eye tumors had spread along the optic nerve to his brain. The thought of her neighbors losing a child to war made her turn to Paul in the night. “Just hold me,” she murmured.
Barty and Angel would soon be four years old.
1969 through 1973: the Year of the Rooster, chased by the Year of the Dog, followed fast by the Pig, faster by the Rat, with the Ox passing in a stampede pace. Eisenhower dead. Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin on the moon: one giant step on soil untouched by war. Hot pants, plane hijackings, psychedelic art. Sharon Tate and friends murdered by Manson’s girls seven days before Woodstock, the Age of Aquarius stillborn, but the death unrecognized for years. McCartney split, Beatles dissolved. Earthquake in Los Angeles, Truman dead, Vietnam sliding into chaos, riots in Ireland, a new war in the Middle East, Watergate.
Celestina gave birth to Seraphim in ’69, saw her painting on the cover of American Artist in ’70, and gave birth to Harrison in ’72.
With his sister’s financial backing, Edom purchased a flower shop in ’71, after ascertaining that the strip mall in which it was located had been even more soundly constructed than the earthquake code required, that it didn’t stand on slide-prone land, that it did not lie in a flood plain, and that in fact its altitude above sea level ensured that it would survive all but a tidal wave of such towering enormity that nothing less than an asteroid impact in the Pacific could be the cause. In ’73, he married Maria Elena (that boy-girl thing, after all), whereupon she became Agnes’s sister-in-law in addition to having long been a full sister in her heart. They bought the house on the other side of the original Lampion homestead, and another fence was torn down.
Tom proved to be more useful than either a cop or a priest to Pie Lady Services, when he discovered a talent for money management that protected their funds from twelve percent inflation and in fact brought them a handsome return in real terms.
Then came the Year of the Tiger, 1974. Gasoline shortages, panic buying, mile-long lines at service stations. Patty Hearst kidnapped. Nixon gone in disgrace. Hank Aaron toppled Babe Ruth’s long-standing home-run record, and the inflation rate topped fifteen percent, and the legendary Muhammad Ali defeated George Foreman to regain his world-heavyweight title.
On one particular street in Bright Beach, however, the most significant event of the year occurred on a pleasant afternoon in early April, when Barty, now nine years old, climbed to the top of the great oak and perched there in triumph, king of the tree and master of his blindness.
Agnes returned home from a pie run with the usual team—grown to five vehicles, including paid employees—to find a gathering in the yard and Barty halfway up the oak.
Heart jumping like the heart of a fox-stalked rabbit, she ran from the driveway into the yard. She would have cried out if her throat hadn’t seized up with terror at the sight of her boy at neck-breaking height. By the time she could speak, she realized that a shout, or even the unexpected sound of her plaintive voice, might unnerve him, cause him to misstep, and bring him caroming down, limb to limb, in a bone-snapping plunge.
Among those present before the caravan returned were a few who should have known better than to allow this madness. Tom Vanadium, Edom, Maria. They stared up at the boy, tense and solemn, and Agnes could only suppose that they, too, had arrived after the fact, with the boy already beyond easy recall.
The fire department. The firemen could come without sirens, quietly with their ladders, so as not to break Barty’s concentration.
“It’s all right, Aunt Aggie,” said Angel. “He really wants to do this.”
“What we want to do and what we should do aren’t one and the same,” Agnes admonished. “Who’s been raising you, sugarpie, if you don’t know that? Are you going to pretend you’ve been brought up by wolves for nine years?”
“We’ve been planning this a long time,” Angel assured her. “I’ve climbed the tree a hundred times, maybe two hundred, mapping it, describing it to Barty, inch by inch, the trunk and its four divisions, all the major and minor limbs, the thickness of each, the degree of resilence, the angles and intersections, knots and fissures, all the branches down to the twigs. He’s got it cold, Aunt Aggie, he’s got it knocked. It’s all math to him now.”
They were inseparable, her son and this cherished girl, as they had been virtually since the moment they had met, more than six years ago. The special perception that they shared—all the ways things are—accounted for part of their closeness, but only part. The bond between them was so deep that it defied understanding, as mysterious as the concept of the Trinity, three gods in one.
Because of his blindness and his intellectual gifts, Barty was home-schooled; besides, no teacher was a match for his autodidactic skills, nor could anyone possibly inspire in him a greater thirst for knowledge than the one with which he had been born. Angel went to this same informal classroom, and her sole fellow student was also her teacher. They aced the periodic equivalency tests that the law required. Their constant companionship seemed to be all play, yet was filled with constant learning, too.
So they had cooked up this project, math and mayhem, geometry of limbs and branches, arboreal science and childish stunt, a test of strategy and strength and skill—and of the scary limits of nine-year-old bravado.
Although she knew how, and although she knew the pointlessness of asking why, Agnes asked, “Why? Oh, Lord, why must a blind boy climb a tree?”
“He’s blind, sure, but he’s also a boy,” Angel said, “and trees are something that boys gotta do.”
Everyone from the pie caravan had gathered under the oak. The entire family, in its many names, adults and children, heads tipped back, hands shielding their eyes from the late sun, watched Barty’s progress in all but complete silence.
“We’ve mapped three routes to the top,” Angel said, “and each offers different challenges. Barty’s eventually going to climb all of them, but he’s starting with the hardest.”
“Well, of course, he is,” Agnes said exasperatedly.
Angel grinned. “That’s Barty, huh?”
On he went, up he went, trunk to limb, limb to branch, branch to limb, to limb, to trunk. Hand over hand up the vertical parts, gripping with his knees, then standing and walking like a tightrope artist along limbs horizontal to the ground, swinging over empty air and stepping from one woody walkway to another, ever upward toward the highest bower, dwindling as though he were growing younger during the ascent, becoming a smaller and smaller boy. Forty feet, fifty feet, already far higher than the house, striving toward the green citadel at the summit.
As they moved around the base of the oak from one vantage point to another, people stopped by to reassure Agnes, although never with a word, as though to speak would be to jinx the climb. Maria placed a hand on her arm, squeezed gently. Celestina briefly massaged the nape of her neck. Edom gave her a quick hug. Grace slipped an arm around her waist for a moment. Wally with a smile and a thumbs-up sign. Tom Vanadium, thumb and forefinger in a confident OK. Lookin’ good. Hang in there. Signs and gestures, maybe because they didn’t want her to hear the quivers and catches in their voices.
Paul stayed with her, sometimes wincing at the ground as though the danger were there, not above—which, in a sense, it was, because impact rather than the fall itself is the killer—and at other times putting his arms around her, staring up at the boy above. But he, too, was silent.
Only Angel spoke, with nary a catch or quiver, fully confident in her Barty. “Anything he can teach me, I can learn, and anything I can see, he can know. Anything, Aunt Aggie.”
As Barty ascended higher, Agnes’s fear became purer, but at the same time, she was filled with a wonderful, irrational exhilaration. That this could be accomplished, that the darkness could be overcome, struck music from the harpstrings of the soul. From time to time, the boy paused, perhaps to rest or to mull over the three-dimensional map in his incredible mind
, and every time that he started upward again, he put his hands in exactly the right place, whereupon Agnes would speak a silent inner yes! Her heart was with Barty high in the tree, her heart in his, as he had been with her, safe inside her womb, on the rainy twilight that she had ridden the spinning, tumbling car to widowhood.
At last, as the sun slowly set, he arrived at the highest of the high redoubts, beyond which the branches were too young and too weak to support him farther. Against a sky red enough to delight the most sullen sailors, he rose and stood in a final crook of limbs, pressing his left hand against a balancing branch, right hand planted cockily on his hip, lord of his domain, having kicked off the trammels of darkness and fashioned from them a ladder.
A cheer went up from family and friends, and Agnes could only imagine what it must feel like to be Barty, both blind and blessed, his heart as rich in courage as in kindness.
“Now you don’t have to worry,” Angel said, “about what happens to him if ever you’re gone, Aunt Aggie. If he can do this, he can do anything, and you can rest easy.”
Agnes was only thirty-nine years old, full of plans and vigor, so Angel’s words seemed premature. Yet in too few years, she would have reason to wonder if perhaps these gifted children foresaw, unconsciously, that she would need the comfort of having witnessed this climb.
“Goin’ up,” Angel declared.
With a nimbleness and an alacrity that a lemur would have admired, the girl ascended to the first crotch.
Calling after her, Agnes said, “No, wait, sugarpie. He should be coming down right now, before it gets dark.”
In the tree, the girl grinned. “Even if he stays up there until dawn, he’ll still be coming down in the dark, won’t he. Oh, we’ll be fine, Aunt Aggie.”
Testing Celestina’s nerves as fully as Barty had tested his mother’s, Angel pulled-levered-shinnied-swung herself so fast up through the tree, arriving at the boy’s side while red streaks still enlivened a sky that was repainting itself purple. She stood in the crook of limbs with him, and her delighted laughter rang down through the cathedral oak.
1975 through 1978: Hare ran from Dragon, Snake fled from Horse, and ’78 bounced to the beat, because disco ruled. The reborn Bee Gees dominated the airwaves. John Travolta had the look. Rhodesian rebels, grasping the dangers inherent in any battle between equals, had the manful courage to slaughter unarmed women missionaries and schoolgirls. Spinks won the title from Ali, and Ali won it back from Spinks.
On the morning in August that Agnes came home from Dr. Joshua Nunn’s office with the results of tests and with a diagnosis of acute myeloblastic leukemia, she asked that everyone pack up and caravan, not to deliver pies, but to visit an amusement park. She wanted to ride the roller coaster, spin on the Tilt-A-Whirl, and mostly watch the children laugh. She intended to store up the memory of Barty’s laughter as he had stored up the sight of her face in advance of the surgery to remove his eyes.
She didn’t hide the diagnosis from the family, but she delayed telling them the prognosis, which was bleak. Already, her bones were tender, packed full of mutated immature white cells that hindered the production of normal white cells, red cells, and platelets.
Barty, thirteen years old but listening to books at a postgraduate college level, had no doubt studied leukemia while they were awaiting the test results, to prepare himself to fully understand the diagnosis on first receiving it. He tried not to look stricken when he heard acute myeloblastic, which was the worst form of the disease, but he appeared more ghastly in his pretense than if he had revealed his understanding. Had his eyes not been artificial, his stiff-upper-lip pose would have been utterly unconvincing.
Before they set out for the amusement park, Agnes pulled him aside, held him close, and said, “Listen, kid of mine, I’m not giving up. Don’t think I ever would. Let’s have fun today. This evening, you and I and Angel will convene a meeting of the North Pole Society of Not Evil Adventurers”—the girl had become the third member years ago—“and all truths will be told and secrets known.”
“That silly thing,” he said, with a half-sick note in his voice.
“Don’t you say that. The society isn’t silly, especially not now. It’s us, it’s what we were and how we are, and I do so much love everything that’s us.”
In the park, rocketing along on the roller coaster, Barty had an experience, a reaction to more than the canted turns and steep plunges. He grew excited in much the way that Agnes had seen him excited when grasping a new and arcane mathematical theory. At the end of the ride, he wanted to get back on immediately, and so they did. There are no long waits for the blind at amusement parks: always to the head of the line. Agnes rode twice again with him, and then Paul twice, and finally Angel accompanied him three times. This roller-coaster obsession wasn’t about thrills or even amusement. His exuberance gave way to a thoughtful silence, especially after a seagull flew within inches of his face, feathers thrumming, startling him, on the next-to-last rollick along the tracks. Thereafter, the park held little interest for him, and all he would say was that he’d thought of a new way to feel things—by which he meant all the ways things are—a fresh angle of approach to that mystery.
After the amusement park, no hospital for the Pie Lady. With Wally near, she had a doctor all her own, capable of giving her the anticancer drugs and transfusions that she required. While radiation therapy is prescribed for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, it is much less useful to treat myeloblastic cases, and in this instance, it wasn’t deemed helpful, which made treatment at home even easier.
In the first two weeks, when she wasn’t on pie caravans, Agnes received guests in numbers that taxed her. But there were so many people she wanted to see one last time. She fought hard, giving the disease all the what-for that she could, and she held fast to hope, but she received the visitors nonetheless, just in case.
Worse than the tenderness in the bones, the bleeding gums, the headaches, the ugly bruises, worse than the anemia-related weariness and the spells of breathlessness, was the suffering that her battle caused to those whom she loved. More frequently as the days passed, they were unable to conceal their worry and their sorrow. She held their hands when they trembled. She asked them to pray with her when they expressed anger that this should happen to her—of all people, to her—and she wouldn’t let them go until the anger was gone. More than once, she pulled sweet Angel into her lap, stroked her hair, and soothed her with talk of all the good times shared in better days. And always Barty, watching over her in his blindness, aware that she would not be dying in all the places where she was, but taking no consolation from the fact that she would continue to exist in other worlds where he could never again be at her side.
As terrible as the situation was for Barty, Agnes knew that it was equally difficult for Paul. She could only hold him in the night, and let herself be held. And more than once, she told him, “If worse comes to worst, don’t you go walking again.”
“All right,” he agreed, perhaps too easily.
“I mean it. You have a lot of responsibilities here. Barty. Pie Lady Services. People who depend on you. Friends who love you. When you came on board with me, mister, you bought into a whole lot more than you can walk away from.”
“I promise, Aggie. But you’re not going anywhere.”
By the third week of October, she was bedridden.
By the first of November, they moved his mother’s bed into the living room, so she could be in the center of things, where always she had been, though they admitted no guests now, only members of their family with its many names.
On the morning of November third, Barty asked Maria to inquire of Agnes what she would like to have read to her. “Then when she answers you, just turn and leave the room. I’ll take it from there.”
“Take what from there?” Maria asked.
“I have a little joke planned.”
Books were stacked high on a nearby table, favorite novels and volumes of verse, all of which Agnes h
ad read before. With time so limited, she preferred the comfort of the familiar to the possibility that new writers and new stories would fail to please. Paul read to her often, as did Angel. Tom Vanadium sat with her, too, as did Celestina and Grace.
This morning, as Barty stood to one side listening, his mother asked Maria for poems by Emily Dickinson.
Maria, puzzled but cooperative, left the room as instructed, and Barty removed the correct book from the stack on the table, without anyone’s guidance. He sat in the armchair at his mother’s side and began to read:
“I never saw a Moor—
I never saw the Sea—
Yet know I how the Heather looks
And what a Billow be.”
Pulling herself up in the bed, peering at him suspiciously, she said, “You’ve gone and memorized old Emily.”
“Just reading from the page,” he assured her.
“I never spoke with God
Nor visited in Heaven
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the Checks were given.”
“Barty?” she said wonderingly.
Thrilled to have inspired this awe in her, he closed the book. “Remember what we talked about a long time ago? You asked me how come, if I could walk where the rain wasn’t…”
“…then how come you couldn’t walk where your eyes were healthy and leave the tumors there,” she remembered.
“I said it didn’t work that way, and it doesn’t. Yet…I don’t actually walk in those other worlds to avoid the rain, but I sort of walk in the idea of those worlds….”
“Very quantum mechanics,” she said. “You’ve said that before.”
He nodded. “The effect not only comes before a cause in this case, but completely without a cause. The effect is staying dry in the rain, but the cause—supposedly walking in a dryer world—never occurs. Only the idea of it.”
“Weirder even than Tom Vanadium made it sound.”
“Anyway, something clicked in me on the roller coaster, and I grasped a new angle of approach to the problem. I’ve figured out that I can walk in the idea of sight, sort of sharing the vision of another me, in another reality, without actually going there.” He smiled into her astonishment. “So what do you say about that?”
She wanted so badly to believe, to see her son made whole again, and the funny thing was that she could believe, and without emotional risk, because it was true.
To prove himself, he read a little of Dickens when she requested it, a passage from Great Expectations. Then a passage from Twain.
She asked him how many fingers she was holding up, and he said four, and four it was. Then two fingers. Then seven. Her hands so pale, the palms both bruised.
Because his lacrimal glands and tear ducts were intact, Barty could cry with his plastic eyes. Consequently, it didn’t seem all that much more incredible to be seeing with them.
This trick, however, was far more difficult than walking where the rain wasn’t. Sustaining vision took both a mental and physical toll from him.
Her joy was worth the price he paid to see it.
As mentally demanding and stressful as it was to maintain this borrowed sight, the harder thing was looking once more upon her face, after all these years of blindness, only to see her gaunt, so pale. The vital, lovely woman whose image he had guarded so vigilantly in memory would be nudged aside hereafter by this withered version.
They agreed that to the outside world, Barty must continue to appear to be a sightless man—or otherwise either be treated like a freak or be subjected, perhaps unwillingly, to experimentation. In the modern world, there was no tolerance for miracles. Only family could be told of this development.
“If this amazing thing can happen, Barty—what else?”
“Maybe this is enough.”
“Oh, it certainly is! It certainly is enough! But…I don’t regret much, you know. But I do regret not being here to see why you and Angel have been brought together. I know it’ll be something lovely, Barty. Something so fine.”
They had a few days for quiet celebration of this astonishing recovery of his sight, and in that time, she never tired of watching him read to her. He didn’t think she even listened closely. It was the fact of him made whole that lifted her spirits so high as they were now, not any writer’s words nor any story ever written.
On the afternoon of November ninth, when Paul and Barty were with her, reminiscing, and Angel was in the kitchen, getting drinks for them, his mother gasped and stiffened. Breathless, she paled past chalk, and when she could breathe and speak again, she said, “Get Angel now. No time to bring the others.”
The three of them, gathered around her in the quick, held fast to her, as if Death couldn’t take what they refused to release.
To Paul, she said, “How I loved your innocence…and giving you experience.”
“Aggie, no,” he pleaded.
“Don’t start walking again,” she reminded him.
Her voice grew thinner when she spoke to Angel, but in this new frailty, Barty heard such love that he shook at the power of it. “God’s in you, Angel, so strong you shine, and nothing bad at all.”
Unable to speak, the girl kissed her and then gently placed her head against Agnes’s breast, capturing forever in memory the pure sound of her heart.
“Wonderboy,” Agnes said to Barty.
“Supermom.”
“God gave me a wonderful life. You remember that.”
Be strong for her. “All right.”
She closed her eyes, and he thought that she was gone, but then she opened them again. “There is one place beyond all the ways things are.”
“I hope so,” he said.