The other twin finished the question, saying; “Dark is better for us?”
“Temporarily only,” said Miss Coynte. “Now, you listen to me, Mike and Moon! You know the Lord intended something when he put the blacks and whites so close together in this great land of ours, which hasn’t yet even more than begun to realize its real greatness. Now, I want you to hear me. Are you listening to me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Mike or Moon.
“Well, draw up closer,” and, to encourage them toward this closer proximity to her, she reached out her hands to their laps and seized their members like handles, so forcibly that they were obliged to draw their chairs up closer to the wicker chair of Miss Coynte.
“Someday after our time,” she said in a voice as rich as a religious incantation, “there is bound to be a great new race in America, and this is naturally going to come about through the total mixing together of black and white blood, which we all know is actually red, regardless of skin color!”
All at once. Miss Coynte was visited by an apparition or vision.
Crouched upon the front lawn, arms extended toward her, she saw a crouching figure with wings.
“Lord God Jesus!” she screamed. “Look there!”
“Where, Miss Coynte?”
“Annunciation, the angel!”
Then she touched her abdomen.
“I feel it kicking already!”
The twin brothers glanced at each other with alarm.
“I wonder which of you made it, but never mind that. Since you’re identical twins, it makes no difference, does it? Oh! He’s floating and fading…”
She rose from her chair without releasing their genitals, so that they were forced to rise with her.
Her face and gaze were uplifted.
“Good-bye, good-bye, I have received the Announcement!” Miss Coynte cried out to the departing angel.
Usually at this hour, approaching morning, the twins would take leave of Miss Coynte, despite her wild protestations.
But tonight she retained such a tight grip on their genital organs that they were obliged to accompany her upstairs to the great canopied bed in which Mère had been murdered.
There, on the surface of a cool, fresh linen sheet, Miss Coynte enjoyed a sleep of profound temporary exhaustion, falling into it without a dread of waking alone in the morning, for not once during her sleep did she release her tight hold on the handles the twins had provided—or surrendered?—win or lose being the name of all human games that we know of; sometimes both, unnamed.
Now twenty years have passed and that period of time is bound to make a difference in a lady’s circumstances.
Miss Coynte had retired from business, and she was about to become a grandmother. She had an unmarried daughter, duskily handsome, named Michele Moon, whom she did not admit was her daughter but whom she loved dearly.
From birth we go so easily to death; it is really no problem unless we make it one.
Miss Coynte now sat on the front gallery of her home and, at intervals, her pregnant daughter would call out the screen door, “Miss Coynte, would you care for a toddy?”
“Yes, a little toddy would suit me fine,” would be the reply.
Having mentioned birth and death, the easy progress between them, it would be unnatural not to explain that reference.
Miss Coynte was dying now.
It would also be unnatural to deny that she was not somewhat regretful about this fact. Only persons with suicidal tendencies are not a little regretful when their time comes to die, and it must be remembered what a full and rich and satisfactory life Miss Coynte had had. And so she is somewhat regretful about the approach of that which she could not avoid, unless she were immortal. She was inclined, now, to utter an occasional light sigh as she sipped a toddy on her front gallery.
Now one Sunday in August, feeling that her life span was all but completed. Miss Coynte asked her illegitimate pregnant and unmarried daughter to drive her to the town graveyard with a great bunch of late-blooming roses.
They were memory roses, a name conferred upon them by Miss Coynte, and they were a delicate shade of pink with a dusky center.
She hobbled slowly across the graveyard to where Jack Jones had been enjoying his deserved repose beneath a shaft of marble that was exactly the height that he had reached in his lifetime.
There and then Miss Coynte murmured that favorite saying of hers, “Chicken Little says the sky is falling.”
Then she placed the memory roses against the shaft.
“You were the first,” she said with a sigh. “All must be remembered, but the first a bit more definitely so than all the others.”
A cooling breeze stirred the rather neglected grass.
“Time,” she remarked to the sky.
And the sky appeared to respond to her remark by drawing a diaphanous fair-weather cloud across the sun for a moment with a breeze that murmured lightly through the graveyard grasses and flowers.
So many have gone before me, she reflected, meaning those lovers whom she had survived. Why, only one that I can remember hasn’t gone before, yes. Sonny Bowles, who went to Memphis in the nick of time, dear child.
Miss Coynte called down the hill to the road, where she had left the pregnant unmarried daughter in curiously animated conversation with a young colored gatekeeper of the cemetery.
There was no response from the daughter, and no sound of conversation came up the hill.
Miss Coynte put on her farsighted glasses, the lenses of which were almost telescopic, and she then observed that Michele Moon, despite her condition, had engaged the young colored gatekeeper in shameless sexual play behind the family crypt of a former governor.
Miss Coynte smiled approvingly.
“It seems I am leaving my mission in good hands,” she murmured.
When she had called out to her daughter, Michele Moon, it had been her intention to have this heroically profligate young lady drive her across town to the colored graveyard with another bunch of memory roses to scatter about the twin angels beneath which rested the late Mike and Moon, who had died almost as closely together in time as they had been born, one dying instantly as he boarded the ferry on the Arkansas side and the other as he disembarked on the Mississippi side with his dead twin borne in his arms halfway up the steep levee. Then she had intended to toss here and there about her, as wantonly as Flora scattered blossoms to announce the vernal season, roses in memory of that incalculable number of black lovers who had crossed the river with her from Tiger Town, but of course this intention was far more romantic than realistic, since it would have required a truckload of memory roses to serve as an adequate homage to all of those whom she had enlisted in “the mission,” and actually, this late in the season, there were not that many memory roses in bloom.
Miss Coynte of Greene now leaned, or toppled, a nylon-tip pen in her hand, to add to the inscriptions on the great stone shaft one more, which would be the relevant one of the lot. This inscription was taking form in her mind when the pen slipped from her grasp and disappeared in the roses.
Mission was the first word of the intended inscription. She was sure that the rest of it would occur to her when she had found the pen among the memory roses, so she bent over to search among them as laboriously as she now drew breath, but the pen was not recovered— nor was her breath when she fell.
In her prone position among the roses, as she surrendered her breath, the clouds divided above her and, oh my God, what she saw— Miss Coynte of Greene almost knew what she saw in the division of clouds above her when it stopped in her, the ability to still know or even to sense the approach of—
Knowledge of—
Well, the first man or woman to know anything finally, absolutely for sure has yet to be born in order to die on this earth. This observation is not meant to let you down but, on the contrary, to lift your spirit as the Paraclete lifted itself when—
It’s time to let it go, now, with this green burning inscriptio
n; En avant! or “Right on!”
November 1972 (Published 1973)
Sabbatha and Solitude
In your earlier work,” wrote a former editor of the famed poetess Sabbatha Veyne Duff-Collick, “you had a certain wry touch of astringency to your flights of personal lyricism, and being such a close friend as well as your editor, whilom, I cannot help but admit to you that I am distressed to discover that that always redeeming grace of humor which, in this skeptical age, must underlie the agonies of a romanticist has somehow withheld its delicate influence on these new sonnets, admirable though they…”
“Why, this old fart has gone senile,” Sabbatha shrieked to her audience of one, a young man whose Mediterranean aspects of character and appearance had magically survived his past ten years of sharing life with Sabbatha in her several retreats.
“Oh, he says you’re senile?” the young man murmured with no evidence of surprise.
“I say he is, read this!—since you didn’t listen!”
She crumpled the letter from the senior editor of Hark and Smothers and tossed it at Giovanni like a rock at a dangerous assailant, but it was only a crumpled sheet of paper and did him no injury except to distract him from certain private reflections. He was lying on his back before the open stone fireplace, his black-curled head on a throw-away pillow, he was becomingly undressed to the skin, and the fingers of a hand were scratching at the crispy bush over his genitals.
“Johnny, Johnny, Giovanni, for God’s sake are you infested with lice?”
“How could I get crabs in this old birdhouse of yours unless I had ’em shipped in from—Bangor?”
Giovanni emphasized and lingered over the name of that city because those unspoken reflections which she had interrupted had to do with the city, well, not so much with the city itself but with a certain frolicsome night place in that city which was frequented mostly by men employed at gathering shellfish and who were presently barred from that employment by a phenomenon of the Maine coast that was called “the red tide,” and this red tide was not a political incursion but a form of marine flora which made the shellfish inedible and therefore unmarketable when it made its appearance in the waters. This phenomenon was an economic disaster for the men who frequented the night place in Bangor but it had an appealing aspect to Giovanni, in that it would certainly increase the cordiality of his reception at the waterfront bar if he should drop in there again while the “red tide” was polluting the waters; the difficulty was that the name of the place had slipped his mind and he had discovered it one night which remained quite vivid in his recollection despite a state of drunkenness that approached a mental blackout. The experiences of the night were as memorable as any in his thirty-five years and yet the name of the place and the name of the street of the place and even the general locality of the place had somehow refused to surface in his memory, which was an extremely exasperating thing to him for the night which he had spent there stood out as boldly as the Star of Bethlehem over the many, many nights of shared solitude with Sabbatha in her several retreats from the world.
Now all of a sudden the name of the night place in Bangor, Maine, flashed on the screen of his recollection with such a startling effect that he jumped up and shouted it out.
“Sea Hag!”
“How dare you!” screamed Sabbatha, thinking that he was addressing her by this name.
Of course Giovanni had addressed her by many equally unflattering names in the course of their present long winter retreat, and sometimes just as loudly, but she was not at this moment in a humor to tolerate any further abuse than she had suffered in the rejections of her new sonnet sequence by Hark and Smothers and a number of others.
Sabbatha retaliated to the presumed insult by kicking Giovanni’s very well-turned backside with the toe of her slipper but this resulted in nothing but a stab of pain in her arthritic ankle-and knee-joints, since her slipper was a bedroom slipper of soft material and Giovanni was too comfortably insulated where she kicked him to be jolted out of his elation over remembering the memorable night place by name.
He merely looked at Sabbatha with a sort of wolfish grin and repeated the name to fix it more sharply in his mind; “Sea Hag!”
“Son of a bitch!” she retorted, “Sea hag your ass!”
“My ass is homesick, Sabby, and this birdhouse is not the home of my ass…”
He was now on his feet to get the rum bottle and slosh more rum in his tea and he drank it down chug-a-lug and then he finally turned his attention to her latest letter of rejection. He dropped back down by the fireplace and uncrumpled the letter she’d thrown at him. He read it by firelight and as he read it a mocking smile grew pleasurably over his face, which was the face of a juvenile satyr.
The firelight was dimming.
“Christ, don’t you see the fire is dying out?” she demanded.
“Throw more faggots in it!”
“You do that!”
“Cool it, lady, don’t work yourself into a seizure.”
He built the fire up a bit and then finished reading the letter.
“Well? No reaction? To that piece of shit?”
“There’s no shit in this letter and that’s what you hate about it,” Giovanni told her. “All he says is you’ve got no humor about yourself anymore and he’s saying also that what you’re turning out now is a bunch of old repeats that no one requests anymore but that you keep on repeating.”
Now from his indolent attitude before the fireplace, he sprung up quick as a cat to snatch seven other letters of rejection from Sabbatha’s writing table in an alcove.
Some of the letters were scarcely more than perfunctory though all were penned or dictated by “dearest,” “darling” or “beloved” someone out of her professional past which had always been dangerously involved with her social past, due to the ingenuousness of her earlier nature.
“Don’t,” she screamed at Giovanni as if threatened by gang rape.
“Listen, shut up and listen and I’ll translate these ‘no-thank-you-Ma’ams’ into what’s back of the bullshit!”
(For a foreigner, Giovanni had picked up a startling fluency in the use of rough American idiom, mostly through his fondness for waterfront bars.)
She tried to climb up his body to get the dreadful letters from his grasp but he gave her the knee and she slid off him, painfully to her.
“I will not hear them, I have never descended to…!”
(To what? In pursuit of what? Her moment of uncertainty and her wild glare into nothing gave him a cutting edge that he used with abandon.)
“Sabby, you’d descend to the asshole of a mole and imagine that you were rimming Apollo and you know it well as I know it!”
“What, what, what, what, what?”
(With each “what” she had crawled a pace toward the door, she was now scrambling toward it, almost.)
But all of her motions, now, were subject to arthritis, so she was still short of the door when she collapsed and rolled onto her back and cried out: “Time!”
“Yeh, yeh, time has fucked you, with its fickle finger, let’s face it, Sabby!”
She managed to get the door open.
“I shall go out and stay out till you’ve drunk yourself into oblivion as usual, and then I shall make the—necessary arrangements…”
What these arrangements might be was a speculation lost in her dizzy flight from the cottage called “Sabbatha’s Eyrie.”
Sabbatha’s Eyrie was one and a half stories of weathered shingles, all mottled white and gray as a sea gull’s wings or as her own chestnut hair became when she neglected the beauty shop for a full season as she had done during these past few months of relentless work upon her new sonnet sequence. It stood, the Eyrie, upon the height of the highest and craggiest promontory on that section of New England seacoast. Among its appropriately lyrical assets was a pure narrow brook and it was to this brook that she now took flight, unconsciously hoping that its subdued murmurs of excitement would evoke voices from t
he past, the sort of excited whispers that she used to hear, for instance, when she would enter a certain little French restaurant in the Village, when Sabbatha was a pre-eminent figure in the literary world and the world of fashion as well.
Oh, yes, the pine wood through which she fled toward the brook was already full of voices, all in reference to her.
“Christ, I must be a little drunk,” she admitted to herself as she staggered among those trees which she thought of sometimes as her “sylvan grove,” and she was literally toppling from the support of one tree to that of another, and, oh, less than ten years ago, just after the importation of Giovanni from Italy, she had used to run like a nymph in her flowing white nightdress through these woods, crying back to him, “Catch me if you can!”
And of course he could but he didn’t. In fact she would often find that he had returned to bed when she returned, winded, to Sabbatha’s Eyrie. “Sleep, darling,” she would whisper a little crossly and certainly not sincerely, for she would make sure that her wanton caresses interrupted his sleep. She particularly liked to gather his testicles in her hand and to squeeze them spasmodically.
“Senta!” he’d shout. “You are not milking a cow!”
“The moon is bone white at daybreak,” she would whisper with her tongue in his ear, and often, after some such remark as that, she would scramble from bed to compose a sonnet beginning with such a line.
In a lecture at Vassar, or rather at the conclusion of her lecture when the students were invited to ask her questions, one young lady there had inquired impertinently if she didn’t feel that there was too much erotic material in her sonnets.
“Whatever’s included in life,” she had shot back at the girl, “must be included in art, and if there is eroticism in my work, it is because my existence does not reject it!”
Her head was full of memory tonight, and effect of red wine.
“I must chill my veins in the spring,” she advised herself. “I must go back to Giovanni chill and damp from the spring and have him dry me off with one of the big rough towels, and all things will be as they were…”