“So it went, year on year. We didn’t need the world or the people of the world, we had each other. We worked at our ordinary jobs by day, and then, till after midnight, there was Willy at my ankle, there was Willy at my elbow, there was Will exploring up the incredible slope of my back toward the snowy-talcumed crest. Willy wouldn’t let me see, most of the time. He didn’t like me looking over his shoulder, he didn’t like me looking over my shoulder, for that matter. Months passed before, curious beyond madness, I would be allowed to see his progress slow inch by inch as the brilliant inks inundated me and I drowned in the rainbow of his inspirations. Eight years, eight glorious wondrous years. And then at last it was done, it was finished. And Willy threw himself down and slept for forty-eight hours straight. And I slept near him, the mammoth bedded with the black lamb. That was just four weeks ago. Four short weeks back, our happiness came to an end.”
“Ah, yes,” said the doctor. “You and your husband are suffering from the creative equivalent of the ‘baby blues,’ the depression a mother feels after her child is born. Your work is finished. A listless and somewhat sad period invariably follows. But, now, consider, you will reap the rewards of your long labor, surely? You will tour the world?”
“No,” cried Emma Fleet, and a tear sprang to her eye. “At any moment, Willy will run off and never return. He has begun to wander about the city. Yesterday I caught him brushing off the carnival scales. Today I found him working, for the first time in eight years, back at his Guess Your Weight booth!”
“Dear me,” said the psychiatrist. “He’s … ?”
“Weighing new women, yes! Shopping for new canvas! He hasn’t said, but I know, I know! This time he’ll find a heavier woman yet, five hundred, six hundred pounds! I guessed this would happen, a month ago, when we finished the Masterpiece. So I ate still more, and stretched my skin still more, so that little places appeared here and there, little open patches that Willy had to repair, fill in with fresh detail. But now I’m done, exhausted, I’ve stuffed to distraction, the last fill-in work is done. There’s not a millionth of an inch of space left between my ankles and my Adam’s apple where we can squeeze in one last demon, dervish or baroque angel. I am, to Willy, work over and done. Now he wants to move on. He will marry, I fear, four more times in his life, each time to a larger woman, a greater extension for a greater mural, and the grand finale of his talent. Then, too, in the last week, he has become critical.”
“Of the Masterpiece with a capital M?” asked the doctor.
“Like all artists, he is a superb perfectionist. Now he finds little flaws, a face here done slightly in the wrong tint or texture, a hand there twisted slightly askew by my hurried diet to gain more weight and thus give him new space and renew his attentions. To him, above all, I was a beginning. Now he must move on from his apprenticeship to his true masterworks. On, Doctor, I am about to be abandoned. What is there for a woman who weighs four hundred pounds and is laved with illustrations? If he leaves, what shall I do, where go, who would want me now? Will I be lost again in the world as I was lost before my wild happiness?”
“A psychiatrist,” said the psychiatrist, “is not supposed to give advice. But …”
“But, but, but?” she cried, eagerly.
“A psychiatrist is supposed to let the patient discover and cure himself. Yet, in this case …”
“This case, yes, go on!”
“It seems so simple. To keep your husband’s love …”
“To keep his love, yes?”
The doctor smiled. “You must destroy the Masterpiece.”
“What?”
“Erase it, get rid of it. Those tattoos will come off, won’t they? I read somewhere once that—”
“Oh, Doctor!” Emma Fleet leaped up. “That’s it! It can be done! And, best of all, Willy can do it! It will take three months alone to wash me clean, rid me of the very Masterpiece that irks him now. Then, virgin white again, we can start another eight years, after that another eight and another. Oh, Doctor, I know he’ll do it! Perhaps he was only waiting for me to suggest—and I too stupid to guess! Oh, Doctor, Doctor!”
And she crushed him in her arms.
When the doctor broke happily free, she stood off, turning in a circle.
“How strange,” she said. “In half an hour you solve the next three thousand days and beyond of my life. You’re very wise. I’ll pay you anything!”
“My usual modest fee is sufficient,” said the doctor.
“I can hardly wait to tell Willy! But first,” she said, “since you’ve been so wise, you deserve to see the Masterpiece before it is destroyed.”
“That’s hardly necessary, Mrs.—”
“You must discover for yourself the rare mind, eye and artistic hand of Willy Fleet, before it is gone forever and we start anew!” she cried, unbuttoning her voluminous coat.
“It isn’t really—”
“There!” she said, and flung her coat wide.
The doctor was somehow not surprised to see that she was stark naked beneath her coat.
He gasped. His eyes grew large. His mouth fell open. He sat down slowly, though in reality he somehow wished to stand, as he had in the fifth grade as a boy, during the salute to the flag, following which three dozen voices broke into an awed and tremulous song:
“O beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain …”
But, still seated, overwhelmed, he gazed at the continental vastness of the woman.
Upon which nothing whatsoever was stitched, painted, water-colored or in any way tattooed.
Naked, unadorned, untouched, unlined, unillustrated.
He gasped again.
Now she had whipped her coat back about her with a winsome acrobat’s smile, as if she had just performed a towering feat. Now she was sailing toward the door.
“Wait—” said the doctor.
But she was out the door, in the reception room, babbling, whispering, “Willy, Willy!” and bending to her husband, hissing in his tiny ear until his eyes flexed wide, and his mouth firm and passionate dropped open and he cried aloud and clapped his hands with elation.
“Doctor, Doctor, thank you, thank you!”
He darted forward and seized the doctor’s hand and shook it, hard. The doctor was surprised at the fire and rock hardness of that grip. It was the hand of a dedicated artist, as were the eyes burning up at him darkly from the wildly illuminated face.
“Everything’s going to be fine!” cried Willy.
The doctor hesitated, glancing from Willy to the great shadowing balloon that tugged at him wanting to fly off away.
“We won’t have to come back again, ever?”
Good Lord, the doctor thought, does he think that he has illustrated her from stem to stern, and does she humor him about it? Is he mad?
Or does she imagine that he has tattooed her from neck to toe-bone, and does he humor her? Is she mad?
Or, most strange of all, do they both believe that he has swarmed as across the Sistine Chapel ceiling, covering her with rare and significant beauties? Do they both believe, know, humor each other in their specially dimensioned world?
“Will we have to come back again?” asked Willy Fleet a second time.
“No.” The doctor breathed a prayer. “I think not.”
Why? Because, by some idiot grace, he had done the right thing, hadn’t he? By prescribing for a half-seen cause he had made a full cure, yes? Regardless if she believed or he believed or both believed in the Masterpiece, by suggesting the pictures be erased, destroyed, the doctor had made her a clean, lovely and inviting canvas again, if she needed to be. And if he, on the other hand, wished a new woman to scribble, scrawl and pretend to tattoo on, well, that worked, too. For new and untouched she would be.
“Thank you, Doctor, oh thank you, thank you!”
“Don’t thank me,” said the doctor. “I’ve done not
hing.” He almost said, It was all a fluke, a joke, a surprise! I fell downstairs and landed on my feet!
“Goodbye, goodbye!”
And the elevator slid down, the big woman and the little man sinking from sight into the now suddenly not-too-solid earth, where the atoms opened to let them pass.
“Goodbye, thanks, thanks … thanks. . .”
Their voices faded, calling his name and praising his intellect long after they had passed the fourth floor.
The doctor looked around and moved unsteadily back into his office. He shut the door and leaned against it.
“Doctor,” he murmured, “heal thyself.”
He stepped forward. He did not feel real. He must lie down, if but for a moment.
Where?
On the couch, of course, on the couch.
Some Live Like Lazarus
You won’t believe it when I tell you I waited more than sixty years for a murder, hoped as only a woman can hope that it might happen, and didn’t move a finger to stop it when it finally drew near. Anna Marie, I thought, you can’t stand guard forever. Murder, when ten thousand days have passed, is more than a surprise, it is a miracle.
“Hold on! Don’t let me fall!”
Mrs. Harrison’s voice.
Did I ever, in half a century, hear it whisper? Was it always screaming, shrieking, demanding, threatening?
Yes, always.
“Come along, Mother. There you are, Mother.”
Her son Roger’s voice.
Did I ever in all the years hear it rise above a murmur, protest, or, even faintly birdlike, argue?
No. Always the loving monotone.
This morning, no different than any other of their first mornings, they arrived in their great black hearse for their annual Green Bay summer. There he was, thrusting his hand in to hoist the window dummy after him, an ancient sachet of bones and talcum dust that was named, surely for some terrible practical joke, Mother.
“Easy does it, Mother.”
“You’re bruising my arm!”
“Sorry, Mother.”
I watched from a window of the lake pavilion as he trundled her off down the path in her wheel chiar, she pushing her cane like a musket ahead to blast any Fates or Furies they might meet out of the way.
“Careful, don’t run me into the flowers, thank God we’d sense not to go to Paris after all. You’d’ve had me in that nasty traffic. You’re not disappointed?”
“No, Mother.”
“We’ll see Paris next year.”
Next year … next year … no year at all, I heard someone murmur. Myself, gripping the window sill. For almost seventy years I had heard her promise this to the boy, boy-man, man, man-grasshopper and the now livid male praying mantis that he was, pushing his eternally cold and fur-wrapped woman past the hotel verandas where, in another age, paper fans had fluttered like Oriental butterflies in the hands of basking ladies.
“There, Mother, inside the cottage …” his faint voice fading still more, forever young when he was old, forever old when he was very young.
How old is she now? I wondered. Ninety-eight, yes, ninety-nine wicked years old. She seemed like a horror film repeated each year because the hotel entertainment fund could not afford to buy a new one to run in the moth-flaked evenings.
So, through all the repetitions of arrivals and departures, my mind ran back to when the foundations of the Green Bay Hotel were freshly poured and the parasols were new leaf green and lemon gold, that summer of 1890 when I first saw Roger, who was five, but whose eyes already were old and wise and tired.
He stood on the pavilion grass looking at the sun and the bright pennants as I came up to him.
“Hello,” I said.
He simply looked at me.
I hesitated, tagged him and ran.
He did not move.
I came back and tagged him again.
He looked at the place where I had touched him, on the shoulder, and was about to run after me when her voice came from a distance.
“Roger, don’t dirty your clothes!”
And he walked slowly away toward his cottage, not looking back.
That was the day I started to hate him.
Parasols have come and gone in a thousand summer colors, whole flights of butterfly fans have blown away on August winds, the pavilion has burned and been built again in the selfsame size and shape, the lake has dried like a plum in its basin, and my hatred, like these things, came and went, grew very large, stopped still for love, returned, then diminished with the years.
I remember when he was seven, them driving by in their horse carriage, his hair long, brushing his poutish, shrugging shoulders. They were holding hands and she was saying, “If you’re very good this summer, next year we’ll go to London. Or the year after that, at the latest.”
And my watching their faces, comparing their eyes, their ears, their mouths, so when he came in for a soda pop one noon that summer I walked straight up to him and cried, “She’s not your mother!”
“What!” He looked around in panic, as if she might be near.
“She’s not your aunt or your grandma, either!” I cried. “She’s a witch that stole you when you were a baby. You don’t know who your mama is or your pa. You don’t look anything like her. She’s holding you for a million ransom which comes due when you’re twenty-one from some duke or king!”
“Don’t say that!” he shouted, jumping up.
“Why not?” I said angrily. “Why do you come around here? You can’t play this, can’t play that, can’t do nothing, what good are you? She says, she does. I know her! She hangs upside down from the ceiling in her black clothes in her bedroom at midnight!”
“Don’t say that!” His face was frightened and pale.
“Why not say it?”
“Because,” he bleated, “it’s true.”
And he was out the door and running.
I didn’t see him again until the next summer. And then only once, briefly, when I took some clean linen down to their cottage.
The summer when we were both twelve was the summer that for a time I didn’t hate him.
He called my name outside the pavilion screen door and when I looked out he said, very quietly, “Anna Marie, when I am twenty and you are twenty, I’m going to marry you.”
“Who’s going to let you?” I asked.
“I’m going to let you,” he said. “You just remember, Anna Marie. You wait for me. Promise?”
I could only nod. “But what about—”
“She’ll be dead by then,” he said, very gravely. “She’s old. She’s old.”
And then he turned and went away.
The next summer they did not come to the resort at all. I heard she was sick. I prayed every night that she would die.
But two years later they were back, and the year after the year after that until Roger was nineteen and I was nineteen, and then at last we had reached and touched twenty, and for one of the few times in all the years, they came into the pavilion together, she in her wheel chair now, deeper in her furs than ever before, her face a gathering of white dust and folded parchment.
She eyed me as I set her ice-cream sundae down before her, and eyed Roger as he said, “Mother, I want you to meet—”
“I do not meet girls who wait on public tables,” she said. “I acknowledge they exist, work, and are paid. But I immediately forget their names.”
She touched and nibbled her ice cream, touched and nibbled her ice cream, while Roger sat not touching his at all.
They left a day earlier than usual that year. I saw Roger as he paid the bill, in the hotel lobby. He shook my hand to say goodbye and I could not help but say, “You’ve forgotten.”
He took a half step back, then turned around, patting his coat pockets.
“Luggage, bills paid, wallet, no, I seem to have everything,” he said.
“A long time ago,” I said, “you made a promise.”
He was silent.
“Ro
ger,” I said, “I’m twenty now. And so are you.”
He seized my hand again, swiftly, as if he were falling over the side of a ship and it was me going away, leaving him to drown forever beyond help.
“One more year, Anna! Two, three, at the most!”
“Oh, no,” I said, forlornly.
“Four years at the outside! The doctors say—”
“The doctors don’t know what I know, Roger. She’ll live forever. She’ll bury you and me and drink wine at our funerals.”
“She’s a sick woman, Anna! My God, she can’t survive!”
“She will, because we give her strength. She knows we want her dead. That really gives her the power to go on.”
“I can’t talk this way, I can’t!” Seizing his luggage, he started down the hall.
“I won’t wait, Roger,” I said.
He turned at the door and looked at me so helplessly, so palely, like a moth pinned to the wall, that I could not say it again.
The door slammed shut.
The summer was over.
The next year Roger came directly to the soda fountain, where he said, “Is it true? Who is he?”
“Paul,” I said. “You know Paul. He’ll manage the hotel someday. We’ll marry this fall.”
“That doesn’t give me much time,” said Roger.
“It’s too late,” I said. “I’ve already promised.”
“Promised, hell! You don’t love him!”
“I think I do.”
“Think, hell! Thinking’s one thing, knowing’s another. You know you love me!”
“Do I, Roger?”
“Stop relishing the damn business so much! You know you do! Oh, Anna, you’ll be miserable!”
“I’m miserable now,” I said.
“Oh, Anna, Anna, wait!”
“I have waited, most of my life. But I know what will happen.”
“Anna!” He blurted it out as if it had come to him suddenly. “What if—what if she died this summer?”
“She won’t.”
“But if she did, if she took a turn for the worse, I mean, in the next two months—” He searched my face. He shortened it. “The next month, Anna, two weeks, listen, if she died in two short weeks, would you wait that long, would you marry me then?!”