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Penitential colours – less like something she’d chosen to put on than like something she’d been locked up in.
The factories of Port Ticonderoga are situated amid a profusion of greenery brightened with gay flowers, and are soothed by the sound of the rushing currents; they are clean and well-ventilated, and the workers cheerful and efficient.
toilet-cleaning brushes with the heads of smirking ducks. Myra’s idea of city folks’ idea of country life, the life of their pastoral hicktown ancestors – a little bit of history to take home with you. History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.
Or perhaps she’s softening me up: she’s a Baptist, she’d like me to find Jesus, or vice versa, before it’s too late. That kind of thing doesn’t run in her family: her mother Reenie never went in much for God.
It was my Grandfather Benjamin who built the button factory, in the early 1870s.
things they concealed would have been pendulous, vulnerable, shameful, unavoidable – the category of objects the world needs but scorns.
And so Laura and I were brought up by her. We grew up inside her house; that is to say, inside her conception of herself. And inside her conception of who we ought to be, but weren’t. As she was dead by then, we couldn’t argue.
Nevertheless, in this way I collected enough fragments of the past to make a reconstruction of it, which must have borne as much relation to the real thing as a mosaic portrait would to the original. I didn’t want realism anyway: I wanted things to be highly coloured, simple in outline, without ambiguity, which is what most children want when it comes to the stories of their parents. They want a postcard.
As she looked at the boyish faces around her, the war became real to her, not as an idea but as a physical presence. Her young husband might be killed. His body might perish; it might be torn apart; it might become part of the sacrifice that – it was now clear – would have to be made. Along with this realization came desperation and a shrinking terror, but also – I’m sure – a measure of bleak pride.
She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can’t have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast. He would have been helpless against it, for how can you repudiate something that is never spoken? She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had tended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his
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What would that be like – to long, to yearn for one who is right there before your eyes, day in and day out? I’ll never know.
This is his home, this besieged castle; he is its werewolf. The chilly lemon-coloured sunset outside the window fades to grey. I don’t know it yet, but Laura is about to be born.
Her comportment as a mother had always been instructive rather than cherishing. At heart she remained a schoolteacher.)
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.
I was tired of her getting away with being so young.)
Why are women such trophy-hunters, why do they want mementoes? Or does she wish him to make a fool of himself, as a demonstration of her power?
people always forget about prophecies unless they come true.
I could remember her absence, now, much better than her presence.
He got his way, of course, since he was paying.
Reenie said that was one way of looking at it. “What is the other way?” said Laura.
he could do it anyway, without you drowning yourself.” This was the only way to talk to Laura when she got into such moods: you had to pretend you knew something about God that she didn’t.
“So true,” said Miss Violence, with a sigh. But she sighed about everything. She fit into Avilion very well – into its obsolete Victorian splendours, its air of aesthetic decay, of departed grace, of wan regret. Her attitudes and even her faded cashmeres went with the wallpaper.
I became thirteen. I’d been growing, in ways that were not my fault, although they seemed to annoy Father as much as if they had been.
He was stocky, tweed-covered, thirty or thirty-five perhaps, with reddish hair and a plump wet red mouth, and a tiny goatee and a cutting irony and a nasty temper, and a smell like the bottom of a damp laundry hamper.
“Rapio, rapere, rapui, raptum,” said Mr. Erskine. “‘To seize and carry off.’ The English word rapture comes from the same root. Decline.” Smack went the ruler.
It was the purpose in life of all older people to thwart me. They were devoted to nothing else.)
I watched her curiously to see whether she would lick them or wipe them on her dress, or perhaps on our sofa, but I moved my eyes away at the wrong time, and so I missed it. My hunch was the sofa.
Laura touches people. I do not.
There is nothing more onerous than enforced gratitude.)
Being Laura, I thought, was like being tone deaf: the music played and you heard something, but it wasn’t what everyone else heard.
When what you could manage to sell a thing for was less than what it paid you to make it – which was what had been going on at Chase and Sons for some time – this was how the numbers behaved. It was bad behaviour – without love, without justice, without mercy – but what could you expect? The numbers were only numbers. They had no choice in the matter.
(I say “her,” because I don’t recall having been present, not in any meaningful sense of the word. I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view – I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can’t see me at all.)
It’s not the lying that counts, it’s evading the necessity for it. Rendering all questions foolish in advance.
She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
“I’m not senile,” I snapped. “If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.”
A paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they’ve learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used – metaphorically, of course – to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?
It’s Paradise, but we can’t get out of it. And anything you can’t get out of is Hell.
“I promised Father I’d take care of you,” I said stiffly. “And Mother too.” “Stupid of you.” “No doubt. But I was young, I didn’t know any better. That’s what young is.”
Such items do not assort very well with tragedy. But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell-burst, the plummet of the car from the bridge.
Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.
Collecting Winifred’s explanations of what she meant had become a reprehensible hobby of mine.
Much about Winifred that I’d once found mysterious and alluring I now found obvious, merely because I knew too much. Her high gloss was chipped enamel, her sheen was varnish. I’d looked behind the curtain, I’d seen the strings and pulleys, I’d seen the wires and corsets. I’d developed tastes of my own.
Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can’t put love into a contract.
It was snowing that day, I remember, great soft wet flakes: I’d looked out the window after I’d levered myself to my feet, and seen the chestnut tree, all white, like a giant coral.
An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.
Perhaps I should have stretched out my own arms. I should have hugged her. I should have cried. Then I should have sat down with her and told her this story I’m now telling you. But I didn’t do that. I missed the chance, and I regret it bitterly. It was only three weeks after this that Aimee fell down the stairs. I mourned her, of course. She was my daughter. But I have to admit I mourned the self she’d been at a much earlier age. I mourned what she could have become; I mourned her lost possibilities. More than anything, I mourned my own failures.
I no longer knew how Laura would have answered these questions. She had become unknown to me, as unknown as the inside of your own glove is unknown when your hand is inside it. She was with me all the time, but I couldn’t look at her. I could only feel the shape of her presence: a hollow shape, filled with my own imaginings.
But not here; not in this gentle, tedious backwater; not in Port Ticonderoga, despite a druggie or two in the parks, despite the occasional break-in, despite the occasional body found floating around in the eddies. We hunker down here, drinking our bedtime drinks, nibbling our bedtime snacks, peering at the world as if through a secret window, and when we’ve had enough of it we turn it off. So much for the twentieth century, we say, as we make our way upstairs. But there’s a far-off roaring, like a tidal wave racing inshore. Here comes the twentyfirst century, sweeping overhead like a
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He was ruthless, but not like a lion; more like a sort of large rodent. He tunnelled underground; he killed things by chewing off their roots.
He’d been too cozy with the Germans in his business dealings, too admiring of them in his speeches. Like many of his peers, he’d turned too blind an eye to their brutal violations of democracy; a democracy that many of our leaders had been decrying as unworkable, but that they were now keen to defend.
