It is hardly fair to speak of notebooks and pencils as the implements of her trade, and yet that’s how she thought of them; she had come to think of the composition of Elizabethan and Petrarchan sonnets as a trade in the sense that the trade of Jesus of Nazareth had been carpentry. Notebooks and pencils, hammers and nails; in the end, crucifixion, an honorable though God-awful painful way to get out of mortal existence.
Going out alone, prostrate before a dead fire. Father, why hast Thou?
The distant cock had crowed and she had stretched out a hand curved as a hook toward the nearly empty fiasco and had upset it so that the remnant of wine was spilt upon a cushion.
Quickly, with a famished “hah,” she pressed her mouth to the purple pool and lapped it up with her tongue. “Hah,” she said once more, and was about to bury her head in the moist pillow when into her mind flashed the final quatrain of what must have been an early lyric of hers since she couldn’t remember its title nor the preceding lines of it.
She clutched at a pencil and made a trembling tight fist of her hand about that implement to scrawl into the nearest notebook this bit of verse that bore so clearly the stamp of her springtime vigor of expression.
In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file
Yet none has merited my fear
And none has quite escaped my smile.
She waited and waited till the blue of daybreak slit through the shutters for the rest to come back to her; it would, and indeed it did, and the fact that she remembered the fact that it was a fragment of a poem by Miss Elinor Wylie was a fact that completely escaped her smile and almost merited her afternoon-long depression.
Curvature of the spine!
The physical being pointing itself remorsely back toward earth.
More and more bending itself back that way, as if the earth had flung a welcoming door wide open for its timorous guest.
Clearly things had not followed an ascending line at Sabbatha’s Eyrie during her time of all but total seclusion. She had not heard from Giovanni, not at all directly, but last week a bank official in Bangor had informed her by mail that a young man of a foreign extraction had been forging checks on her name there. He claimed, said this official, to be her husband but admitted that they were now permanently separated; and there had been other complaints about him of a nature that the bank official preferred not to discuss with a lady. He did tell Sabbatha that the young man had been jailed several times and hospitalized also. Of course the bank was interested only in the matter of the forged checks. Did she wish to have him prosecuted? They understood that he was not actually her husband but a former employee, and, given her approval of such action, they could have him put away for at least a year, maybe more.
She got through to the bank by telephone and told them that the young man was not a former employee but her husband by common law.
How large were the checks, she inquired, and for what had the gifted but unbalanced young man been hospitalized, was it a serious condition or—
“Madam,” said the official, “I doubt that a lady would care for specific information of this nature.”
“All truth,” Sabbatha told him, “is scandal. Why not?”
He may or may not have understood this epigrammatic comment on “truth” but it was obvious to him that her voice was deep in drink…
How to go on? You go on, in solitude, implements of the trade turned treacherous to you or you to them, cocks crowing thrice before daybreak, detestable as a jail-keeper to the condemned, the whole bit, on you go with it, don’t you?
“Oh, my Lord, I don’t believe I ordered my instant freeze-dried from Hollow Market and I’ve run completely out. Oh, my Lord, oh, shit…”
She said this aloud, not having heard the approach of a taxi from the village, the shutting of its door and the opening of the front door of the Eyrie behind her aching back.
“Sabbatha, that’s the first time I ever heard you say shit.”
It was the voice of Giovanni, or was she out of her senses?
She rolled over with a crunching sound in her pelvis and there above her stood—no, not Giovanni but the ghost of him, it seemed! He looked ethereal, but not poetically so, and his youthful appearance was gone.
“Oh, my Lord, is that really you, Giovanni?”
“Is that really you, Sabbatha?”
Very slowly, it must have taken a full minute, they came to accept the present realities of each other’s condition without further speech between them.
When she spoke again she said to him; “I understand you have been ill and hospitalized since you left me?”
“Yes, fucked too much,” he answered. “It’s possible, you know, to get too much of a good thing sometimes.”
Again the conversation between them stopped for close to a minute.
“I didn’t understand what you said about your illness.”
“I developed a fistula,” he said.
“A what did you say you developed?”
He threw off his coat and crouched in front of her and repeated the word to her loudly, separating the syllables.
“I’ve never heard of that. Fist full of what did you say?
He grinned at her then.
“I didn’t say fist full of nothing. I said a fistula which is a perforation of the mucous membrane that lines the rectum and I got it from being gang-banged in Bangor, ten cocks up my ass in one night and one of them a yard long. Now did you hear me, did you understand me that time?”
“I don’t know medical terms, you know, dear,” said Sabbatha. “I’m afraid I’ve finished the wine but there’s some rum in the kitchen and some tea bags and why don’t you take off those wet things and dry off in front of the fire.”
“The fire’s out,” he told her.
“Oh, well, if it’s burned out there’s dry logs and pine cones under the shed. You fix your drink and undress and I’ll crawl out for the wood.”
She did start to crawl but he stopped her.
“Jesus, woman, have you turned into a snake?”
“Giovanni, I am the Serpent of the Nile,” she replied. “And you are Anthony but our fleet has been defeated and scuttled in the harbor of Alexandria.”
Apparently some of her old wry humor had returned.
She twisted her neck, which made a creaking noise, and cried out, “Charmine, fetch me the ass!”
After a moment she smiled sleepily and corrected herself; “I meant the asp, of course, dear.”
]une 1973 (Published 1973)
Completed
Although Miss Rosemary McCool was approaching the age of twenty she had yet to experience her first menstruation. This was surely a circumstance that might have given pause to her widowed mother’s intention that season of presenting her daughter, an only child, to the society of Vicksburg, Mississippi, since presenting a girl to society amounts to publicly announcing that she is now eligible for union in marriage and the bearing of offspring.
This being the situation you might suspect the widow McCool of harboring a marked degree of duplicity or delusion in her nature, but such a suspicion, like many suspicions about genteel Southern matrons, would not be fair to the widow, for Rosemary’s mother was so caught up in her multitude of social and civic and cultural activities throughout the southern Delta, all of which seemed important to her as the world itself and human life in the world, that it simply seemed to the widow that it was socially meet and proper for her daughter to make a debut and what, then, should deter it.
Of course, “Miss Sally” McCool could not be described as a very devoted and conscientious mother. In fact every time her eyes rested briefly on her daughter, she had to repress a look of trouble and disappointment, if not of personal aggrievement. Even for Miss Sally McCool it was impossible not to admit that Rosemary was an oddlooking girl, very pale and gangling and certainly not endowed with an aura of being much involved with a world of externals. She had the face, especially the eyes, of a frightened little girl, a
nd her Aunt Ella, the widow’s older sister, was the only person to whom Rosemary could speak in a voice much above a whisper. This vocal inhibition had naturally been a detriment to her in the Vicksburg high school, such a considerable detriment, in fact, that during her last year there the superintendent had called on the widow McCool and after a lot of effusive guff about her daughter’s sweet and charming nature, had announced that Rosemary was simply not suited for the sort of schooling that the high school could give her and that it was his opinion that she should be transferred to a small private school which was called Mary, Help a Christian.
Miss Sally had stared at him open mouthed for a minute without producing a sound except a slight gasp.
He had returned the stare without flinching and had interrupted the silence with a sympathetic remark.
“I know that this suggestion must come to you as a bit of a shock. Miss Sally, but I can assure you personally that this precious young girl of yours is just not adjusting at all to her teachers and schoolmates at Vicksburg High. I’m sorry. Miss Sally, but nobody at the high school knows what to make of the child and I would be very dishonest if I didn’t report this to you, privately, here in your house, and suggest Mary, Help a Christian as the best if not only solution I can think of.”
The discussion continued a good deal further than that but it resulted exactly as the Vicksburg High superintendent had intended it should and Rosemary was transferred almost at once to Mary, Help a Christian. However, even there, with teachers trained and accustomed to dealing with problem students, Rosemary had shown no improvement in adjustment. While many of the students were irrepressibly outspoken, Rosemary still could not be asked a question by a teacher but had to be graded entirely upon her written work. Of course some of the teachers ignored this vocal inhibition and would sometimes ask her a question. On these awful occasions Rosemary would crouch low in her seat, breathe noisily and raise a trembling hand to her lips as if to indicate that she was a mute. Her written work was not much help in the matter. Her essays were childishly written, her spelling was atrocious, and her handwriting barely legible due to a nervous tremor of her fingers. A condition like this ought to have met with some sympathy but there was something about Rosemary that drew no sympathy toward her, neither among her elders, nor those of her own generation or younger. Not only did she fail to make any friends, she barely made any acquaintances. She seemed determined and destined to slip through the world as an all but unseen and unheard being.
This is harking back half a year, but it is too pertinent to her history to be excluded. Once in her English class at Mary, Help a Christian, she submitted a long, laborious and illegible essay on the assigned subject “My Purpose in Liie.” This essay was rejected by the English teacher, it was returned to Rosemary with a note that demanded she condense it to a few sentences, write it in print, and adhere precisely to the assigned subject. Miss Rosemary did exactly that. In very large printed letters she wrote not just a few sentences but one sentence only, which sentence was shakily printed out as follows: “I HAVE NO PURPOSE IN LIFE EXCEP COMPLETE IT QUIK AS POSIBLE FOR ALL CON-SERNED IF ANY BESIDE MY ANT ELLA.”
Reading this one-sentence essay on Rosemary’s purpose in life, the English teacher marked it A plus and added the marginal question: “Who is your ‘Ant’ Ella?”
Now about Rosemary’s sexual malfunction, her failure to menstruate as she neared twenty and her presentation to society in the Grand Hotel ballroom of Vicksburg, this was a considerable peculiarity but it remained a thing that neither Miss Sally nor her daughter had ever discussed. Miss Sally was a Southern lady of the sort that considered such matters outside the pale of discussion, even between a mother and a daughter who was her only child, and so she sailed right ahead with her plans for the girl’s presentation to society.
The occasion came off, in the sense that it occurred, but it was not only a pathetic affair but a distinctly bizarre one. It was attended mostly by Miss Sally’s middle-aged club-women associates and they attended it as if it were a spectator sport.
Whispering on the sidelines, they said such things as this:
“Imagine bringing out a girl like that one!”
“I have never known a girl more suited for staying in!”
Of course, there was a cluster of younger folks in the ballroom but most of them suggested rare species of birds.
The local society editor was there and her comment wasn’t whispered.
“I don’t know how on earth I am going to write this thing up.”
This “thing” in the hotel ballroom didn’t last very long; it was cut short by an encounter between Rosemary and a skinny young man of whom it was rumored that he suffered from a physiological deficiency that was somewhat analogous to hers. He was called Pip or Pippin, as a nickname, and his rumored deficiency was that his testes had never descended and that this was the reason he spoke in such a high, thin voice and had never shaved in his twenty-two years.
But Pippin was a young man as animated as Rosemary was reserved, and when the colored band struck up their opening number, which was “Beale Street Blues,” he rushed over to Rosemary as if shot out of a cannon, shrieking “May I have the pleasure?” and before she had a chance to deny him the pleasure, he clutched her about the waist and attempted violently to move the girl onto the dance floor.
“LeU Me! Go!” she screamed.
It was a preposterous incident to occur at a debut party, and the party began to break up at once.
Rosemary was silently furious with her mother for having inflicted this embarrassment on her and had gone to her Aunt Ella’s house with no intention of returning home ever.
Aunt Ella had always provided Rosemary with a retreat in times of crisis. She was Miss Sally’s much older sister and she called Rosemary “dear child.” She occupied a little frame house on the outskirts of town, and was attended by a Negro woman whose voice was soft as a dove’s. At Aunt Ella’s everything was soft, the lights, the beds, the voices: Aunt Ella had no doorbell and no telephone, she’d had them removed long ago from her weathered blue-shuttered frame residence as abscessed teeth are removed to avoid a poisoning of the system. She also received no publications of any kind, not even the town newspaper, her excuse being that she didn’t wish to be informed of changes in the world since she suspected that there was nothing good in them. The shutters were kept almost completely closed day and night and although the house had once been wired for electric current. Miss Ella had permitted all the light bulbs except the one in the kitchen to burn out and had never replaced them since she preferred the light of oil lamps and candles. Receiving no news of births, marriages or deaths, she would refer to middle-aged matrons and grandmothers by their maiden names and she would speak of the dead as if they were still living, which she usually supposed them to be. Her connection with the world was elderly black Susie who did all her marketing for her, and if Susie received any reports of goings on abroad, she was wise enough to maintain a silence about them in Aunt Ella’s presence.
“Child, Rosemary, whenever you’re tired of that idiotic social business at Sister’s, just pack a bag and move out here with old Susie and me. The whole upstairs is vacant. I can’t climb steps any more but Susie can get it ready whenever you want it and there’s also your Grandfather Cornelius Dunphy’s comfortable little room which he occupied down here when he couldn’t climb steps any more and, you know, Rosemary, dear child, it’s been fifty years since I’ve received a postcard from him at that veteran’s hospital in Jackson so I have a suspicion that since he was over sixty when he went there, he may be resting now with Grandmother on Cedar Hill. Your mother may know about that if she knows about anything but pieces of local gossip not fit for a lady to know…”
Rosemary had heard variations of this soft monotone, so much like the sound a moth makes against a screen at dusk, so repeatedly that she could whisper it to herself like a memorized psalm, and there were times when it was seductive to her…
There
is much to be said for the exclusion of violent sound from the world. Aunt Ella’s house was not far from the airport but Aunt Ella did not seem to know about the airport and when she heard a plane fly over she would call out softly, “Susie, fasten the shutters tight, there’s going to be a thunder shower, I reckon.”
“Yais, Miss Ella, I’ll do that, don’t you worry.”
(But of course she didn’t and Miss Ella may well have known that she didn’t, since once, in Rosemary’s presence, she had given a little wink right after this warning about the approach of a thunder shower.)
Once a week, Sunday nights, Rosemary had supper at Aunt Ella’s. There was not much variation on these Sunday evening suppers, there would always be boiled chicken with dumplings, cooked till the chicken meat was falling off the bones in deference to Aunt Ella’s chronic gastritis and badly fitted dentures, a bowl full of turnip greens seasoned with salt pork, sticks of lightly toasted corn pone, and either blancmange for dessert or floating island, all of it soft and monotonous as Aunt Ella’s talk. The table linen and silver were of lovely quality and Aunt Ella’s talk was nearly always about the goodness of The Holy Mother and discrepancies which she had noted in the Scriptures according to the Apostles.
One Sunday evening supper Rosemary had brought up a concern of her own. It had to do with a comic valentine she had received which addressed her as “Miss Priss.”
“Oh, dear child,” Aunt Ella had interrupted, raising a hand as if to dismiss an intruder, “some people do such things, why, once your Grandfather Cornelius Dunphy, drinking wine at supper, raised his glass to me and said, ‘Here’s to your everlasting virginity, old Miss, if you know what I mean,’ and, well, I knew what he meant, you’d be surprised how much I have managed to know in the way of unwelcome as well as welcome knowledge in the course of my seventy-five or six years on this evil planet, so I simply bowed to him slightly and raised my glass of ice water and said, ‘Why, thank you. Sir, I have every reason to hope that my maiden state will continue to defy whatever conspiracy may be offered against it,’ and I must say that gave him quite a good, long laugh. Oh, dear, it was just a week later that he left the house for that Veterans’ Place in Jackson from which he never returned and has sent me no written message. Oh, I do trust that he has mended his ways, that is, if he isn’t now resting on Cedar Hill with your saintly Grandmother, and now, dear child, if you will push my wheel-chair into the parlor, well allow Susie to clear the supper dishes and tidy up the kitchen.”