Boy, Snow, Bird

1

i don’t know who or what anybody is anymore. There are exceptions: My husband is one, and Alecto Fletcher’s another. The other day Arturo looked into my eyes and said: “Here I am, with my stupid face. Remember? The face that’s so stupid you told me you never wanted to see it again?” His hair’s thinned a lot on top, but he’s even more lionlike now that he’s all bewhiskered, and I just haven’t got a single defense against him anymore. I almost spoke about it to Webster. Ted gets cheaper and cheaper all the time; his behavior at restaurants is becoming incredible — how convenient that he falls asleep or has to use the restroom just before the bill arrives. The question “How can you love him?” could sour my friendship with Webster at this point. Because she does love Ted. Fiercely. Wives are uncanny creatures, the day is a boxing ring and we dart around the corners of it, pushing our luck with both hands. We risk becoming so commonplace to the men we’ve thrown our lots in with who can’t see us anymore, and who pat the sofa when they mean to pat our knee. That or we become so incomprehensible that it repulses our husbands, who after all can’t be expected to stomach a side dish of passionate misery at every meal, no matter how much variety there is. But husbands are uncanny too. It all seems to come from having to be each other’s anchor, bread and butter, constant calm. Emotionally speaking he and I have to remain in some fixed state where we can always be found if necessary. In the midst of arguments I should rightfully have won I’ve found myself conceding points to him because some appeal is made to this fixed place. A look, a word, a touch. How could anyone enjoy this, the possibility, necessity even, of their being called to heel in this way? It disturbs me that there’s a part of my heart or mind, or some spot where the two meet, a spot that isn’t mine because I’m a wife. This part isn’t really me at all, but a promise I made on a snowy day. A promise to stay and to be with Arturo and to be good to him, and when there’s no other way, I have to go to that promise to find my feeling for my husband. We walk the finest of foolish, foolish lines. How can Webster still love Ted? How can anybody love anybody else for more than five minutes?

Alecto Fletcher was the only one I could tell about Charlie and Arturo — without using their names, of course. I said: “Suppose there’s a woman who’s finding that she’s only really started to love somebody now that somebody else has stopped loving her — do you think that’s real, or would you say this woman’s just trying to make the best of things?”

Alecto picked caviar out of her teeth and said: “Well.”

“I’m asking for a friend.”

“Were those exact words said: ‘I no longer love you’?”

“No.”

“No. Hardly anybody ever says it like that, do they? They simply become unkind. Look — for some people love is like a king they swear allegiance to. That kind of person has to be released from one bond before they can begin to forge another. All very conventional behavior, but fiercely interior convention. I’m not trying to imply that such people are wise or that they impress me — I’m one of them, and it’s probably the most futile form of integrity going. But if it’s a side dish to other forms of integrity, then it’s all right. And there are worse scenarios, Boy.”

“Worse scenarios than what?”

“Than love not beginning on time, of course.”

All right, I don’t know what or who anybody is anymore except for Arturo, Alecto, and Clara and John Baxter. Clara and John are a fine couple and that’s all there is to it. They put an impenetrable barrier of good manners up against some of Olivia’s more insulting inquiries, but didn’t bow their heads to pray when grace was said. As we all sat around that table together, Gerald putting away heavy-duty quantities of turkey and stuffing so he didn’t have to talk, Vivian clearly wanting to show some warmth toward her sister but ending up just squeaking platitudes at her, John attempting to drink away the feeling of being pretty damn unwelcome, Agnes keeping Snow’s left hand prisoner so that the girl had to alternate between use of her knife and use of her fork, as I sat there with that family of mine I reassessed Olivia as a fellow nonswerver. She stood by the decisions she’d taken with Clara because there was nowhere else for her to stand. Clara has a good heart, but goodness is independent from gentleness. Had Olivia exposed a chink in her armor there could’ve been a bloodbath. Quite rightly so, I guess. That old woman treats my Bird as coldly as she can get away with, stopping just short of making Arturo lose his temper. But the sight and sound of her acting out all that hostility… I couldn’t sit next to that without wanting to try to shield her somehow. I don’t know, just so she could rest for a moment before picking up her battle-ax again. Olivia was young when she sent Clara away, young and probably so brutal that Gerald thought it was better for the child to grow up in Biloxi than stay home and be stepped on. If that’s what Gerald thought, who’s to say he wasn’t right about that? Olivia had raised Vivian, and there Vivian was, a thirty-eight-year-old attorney-at-law who should have had enough poise to keep her from gaping when her brother-in-law told her some of the things he used to do for youthful kicks. John Baxter used to follow middle-aged white ladies down deserted streets at night, walking faster as they walked faster, slowing down if a witness appeared. He found their fear of him hilarious and sad. One woman begged him to leave her alone and tried to make him take her purse. Another woman turned around, walked toward him, put her hand on his arm, and whispered, “How much?” That took the thrill out of the game, and he stopped playing it. Clara, Arturo, and I were the only ones who laughed at that. Snow said, “Uncle John,” in a tiny, distressed voice. It was pretty effective, the gasp of distress combined with the white dress and the ardent glance and the shadowy hair all loose around her face.

“I don’t get it,” Bird said. I told her I’d explain later, and she answered: “No, you won’t.” She nudged me and pointed her chin in Gerald’s direction. My usually amiable father-in-law had stopped chewing and was just holding his food in his mouth. He looked revolted by John and everything John said. But then Gerald had been eating too much.

“Emmett Till,” he said, suddenly. “Emmett Till did what he did just one time. Livia, what is it he did… right, he whistled. He was a Northerner and he didn’t know any better. So he whistled at a Mississippi white woman. She didn’t like that, so fetched her gun. But she didn’t have to use it; she had a husband and a brother-in-law, real men who weren’t afraid to take on a fourteen-year-old boy. You saw what they did to Emmett Till. You saw the boy’s face. Agnes, you cried and said he looked melted—”

(Fourteen years old. So close to Bird’s age. Too close.)

Olivia gave Gerald’s sleeve a brisk tug, to remind him he was in mixed company and that people were trying to eat. He lowered his voice a little: “But you, John Baxter, you know that the men who killed Emmett Till didn’t do a single second of jail time on account of that murder. And you, a Kentucky man yourself, not even a Northerner… you say you scared white women for fun. Didn’t you value your life? Didn’t you see that if the authorities didn’t give a damn about you, you had to give that much more of a damn about yourself? I don’t know what you think of me, and I don’t much care, but I’ll thank you not to sit at my table and brag about your stupidity.”

Clara laid her knife and fork down, and placed her hands in her lap. She and John made a painfully obvious point of not looking at each other. They seemed more embarrassed for Gerald than insulted on their own behalves. Arturo said: “Now wait a minute, Dad—” but John shook his head. “Your pa was just speaking his mind. I wasn’t bragging, Mr. Whitman. It didn’t matter too much whether I was deliberately following them or whether I just happened to be going their way, those women would’ve been just as scared regardless, so why not make a joke out of it? I guess I had some form of death wish, and I knew just how little anyone who looks like me has to do to get killed. I saw the face that Emmett Till was left with. I want you to know that I wasn’t bragging.”

Clara had shifted her chair so that her shoulder rested against John’s, but she still didn’t look at him. The two of them kept right on facing Gerald, who muttered something about John still needing to take more time to think before he spoke.

I’d hoped that Bird was too busy reciting Spanish poetry to her father to overhear that particular exchange, but the kid dashed those hopes of mine by suddenly asking me if I had a pen. I said I didn’t, and that there was to be no leaving the table in search of one, either. I know I can’t keep my daughter from tracking down that picture of Emmett Till’s remains lying in their casket — Mia will probably show it to her, if nobody else will — but I can make it harder for Bird’s grief to begin. I doubt she’ll believe that I share it; not at first, maybe not for a while. It’s been thirteen years since the murder, but for Bird the news would be minutes old. I’ve tried to tell her a few things I’ve figured out, but I can see that she doesn’t get what I’m saying, it’s like I’m just bothering her, all she hears is mumbling. The three things I know:

First, I’m with Bird in any Them versus Us situation she or anyone cares to name.

Second, it’s not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things — fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too… I’m still of two minds about that.

Third, we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship.

Bird needs time. I hope I’ll remember thinking this if she ever comes to disbelieve that I love her. No revelation is immediate, not if it’s real. I feel that more and more.

When it was time for each of us to say what we were thankful for, Agnes thanked Clara and John for taking such good care of Snow “for us.”

Clara didn’t raise her voice, but the aftermath was just as if she’d yelled and smashed her wineglass. “For you? We did it for Snow.”

Bird nodded at her. She’s growing up into a huntress, every line in her clear and strong. She got her eyes from me, and when I talk, she dissects me with my own gaze. That’s gratitude for you. Her first period came, and she called me into the bathroom. She was sitting on the can with her knees pressed together and her underpants in her hand, and she showed me the blood with an expression that asked me how she could possibly be expected to tolerate this level of inconvenience. I remembered her at six years old; she came home from her first day at elementary school and wanted to know who she could speak to about not having to go there anymore. She was sure that there was some official type who took you off the school register if you just went to them and explained that you didn’t like it. I wouldn’t have minded a tender mother-daughter moment in which I reassured us both that she was still my little girl, but in reality I had to say “Welcome to womanhood” quite assertively, maybe even aggressively, for fear she wouldn’t accept it otherwise. I’m leaving it to Arturo to give her the talk about fooling around with boys and waiting until she’s sure that the boy respects her. Louis is well brought up and their friendship strikes me as genuine, but he’s older than she is, and his friends set each other stupid dares. Those knuckleheads think they invented pig Latin. About three years ago Arturo got wistful about not having a son. I told him we could look into adopting a boy and he said: “Let me ask you something, Boy. Where do you get the balls to bluff the way you do?”

At the dinner table John began to tell another story from the good old days (this one had a carefully edited sound to it), but Bird reached across the table and pushed the edge of Vivian’s dinner plate with her fork. “What’s that in your cranberry sauce?”

Vivian hurriedly stabbed at the subject of Bird’s inquiry with her fork and flipped it into a paper napkin, but Clara declared: “Hair.”

“Hair?” Gerald said, and Vivian looked ready to die. A couple more sizeable clumps fell onto her turkey as her fingers fluttered nervously around her glossy beehive hairdo, and Arturo and I gazed at each other with dread. For my part I was sure this drastic shedding signaled a serious illness, and my memory suddenly opened up an uncomfortable index of all the occasions upon which I hadn’t shown her the kindness she deserved.

Olivia was unimpressed. “What is the meaning of this, Vivian?”

Vivian scraped more hair into her napkin, forced a laugh, and said: “Sorry, Mama — I think it’s the lye. Too strong, or too regularly applied, something like that. But I’m fine”—she glanced at Arturo and reached around the back of Snow’s chair to squeeze his arm—“I’m fine.”

“You always did overdo things, Vivian.” Olivia gestured to Agnes to pass down the wine carafe, but Clara handed the wine to her mother herself, saying: “You always did preach about hair. So tell us, what did Viv overdo? Was she supposed to pass as white, but only just? Was she supposed to come top of her class every time, but only just?”

Olivia very calmly began to remind Clara that we were having a family dinner and that it was unpleasant for everybody when people spoke out of turn, but Vivian took a gulp of wine, rallied, and said: “No, Mama. I want to know. What did I overdo? It’s more than what Clara says. I could go on and on…”

Gerald cleared his throat. “That’s enough. You listen to me. All your mama and I wanted was for our children to make some kind of difference in people’s lives. To serve justice, to teach, to do good — Clara, this includes you. Circumstances — we — well. We’ve tried hard to make it easier for you to do those things without people slamming doors in your faces.”

Arturo sighed and said tonelessly: “Thank you.” Gerald turned in his son’s direction with a look of puzzled appeal, but Clara spoke first: “Can you really mean it, Pa, that all folks have to do is look the part? Does Viv get no credit at all from you for working damn hard and being good at what she does, plain and simple?” Her tone wasn’t aggressive, more idly inquisitive, and she didn’t look her father in the eye, but stared at the square of floral wallpaper above his head, clearly not expecting great things of the halting answer he began to give her.

Olivia leaned forward and snapped: “For God’s sake, wake up from your dream world, Clara. You go and find out how many colored women are pulling down the salary that Vivian is, and we’ll talk about this again.”

John began nodding. “You know she’s got a point there, Clara.”

Olivia half smiled at him and Clara half frowned at him and he said: “Not that passing is the way.”

“That statement would carry far greater weight with me if it had come from someone who stood even a remote chance of passing,” Olivia said.

(From the moment Clara had first spoken up, Agnes Miller had been sadly humming “Sinner Man,” of all songs. Oh, sinner man… where you gonna run to? Arturo asked her to cut it out and she said: “Cut what out?”

“The humming, Agnes. The humming,” Arturo told her. “We don’t need it right now.”

She stopped, bewildered. “Who was that humming? I didn’t like it, either. Oh… I see… you’re sure it was me…? I’m so sorry.”)

Olivia looked across the table at Vivian, who’d tied a scarf around her head. “I see now that you must do what you want, Vivian. Stop keeping your hair tidy, if that’s what you think is damaging it — I’ve never had any trouble in that area, but as I say, do what you want to do. I’m your mother and God knows I’d rather have you well than sick. Do you understand?”

Everybody kept still. I’d become aware of my neck swiveling as I looked at each person who spoke. This watchfulness was partly selfish, I was anticipating an episode of plate hurling and wanted to be sure I wasn’t caught in the crossfire. Snow and Bird hadn’t moved their heads much — it was their gaze that had been traveling from person to person, on opposite sides of the table. But if my daughter and her sister had noticed each other’s expressions, they might’ve been surprised to find that they both looked exactly like Judgment Day.

Vivian walked around the table to her mother’s seat and shyly submitted to being kissed on the forehead. There was also a whispered recital of pet names I never knew she had. Agnes piped up: “I hear they’re beginning to say that black is beautiful now.”

Olivia gave her friend a deeply cynical look and said: “We’ll see. Would anyone like some more of these potatoes? They’re very good, Clara.”

“Fattening, though…” Agnes murmured, but Olivia continued: “I hope you’ll let me have the recipe.”

“Sure,” Clara said, in a faint voice. Maybe she couldn’t find the caustic tone she wanted. Brazenness can knock you sideways like that.

—

i volunteered to clear away the plates once everyone was done eating, and Snow got up to help me. Vivian and Agnes and Olivia talked over one another. Oh no no no, Snow, you’re the guest of honor, leave it ’til Phoebe comes tomorrow—but Clara gave Snow the nod that sent her to the kitchen sink with me.

I meant to ask Snow how she and Bird were getting along. I’d thought they’d be inseparable, but I hadn’t really seen them together. I’d seen Bird roaming the woods with her gang of five, and I’d seen Snow out on the terrace of Flax Hill’s European-style café (European-style as far as any of us could tell, anyhow), smoking cigarettes, hearing out marriage proposals, and giving them marks out of ten. The girls in the group laughed indulgently, knowing that Snow was too nice to want what wasn’t hers, and why not let your boyfriend practice proposing so he’d get it just right for you? The girls’ laughter got a little artificial when Snow dropped her lighter and six or seven of the boyfriends vied to pick it up. Bird’s fifteen-year-old beau couldn’t speak for stammering when he encountered Snow on the porch; yes, of course he did. Here’s what I couldn’t have foreseen — that I’d be anxious for Snow and her sister to be friends. More specifically, I thought it would be better if Bird liked Snow. I couldn’t give a reason for this anxiety; Bird has disliked people before and they’ve been fine. But like everybody else around here, Bird isn’t quite as she was. Maybe the timing of this visit is bad. While Snow’s out in the evening, Bird plays Julia’s lullabies at low volume and sits cross-legged beside the record player, listening with a vacant expression. Arturo asked me if Snow was aware that Bird had borrowed her records, and I mixed him a drink and handed it to him before I answered. “Don’t take this as me bad-mouthing your daughter; I’m not. It’s not so easy to tell what Snow is and isn’t aware of. She very sweetly keeps those cards close to her chest; I hope you won’t deny that.”

My husband drained his glass, and when he spoke again, it was about Bird, not Snow. He reminded me of how she’d been deeply interested in the Cinderella story for a few months when she was nine years old, how she’d had one or the other of us read it to her a countless number of times and gone to sleep without expressing approval or disapproval until one night when Arturo closed the storybook and she asked: “Is it a true story? Not the fairy godmother stuff and her dress turning back to rags at midnight — I know that’s true. But Cinderella just sweeping up all those ashes every day and never putting them into her stepmother’s food or anything — is that true?” He said he knew it was dangerous to say yes, but another part of him thought So what — she can’t prove it isn’t true. Our daughter settled back onto pillows and said pleasantly, “I think they’re lying to us, Dad,” before switching off her bedside lamp to let him know he was dismissed for the night. He said that the way Bird was listening to Julia’s voice reminded him of the way she’d listened to the Cinderella story all those times we’d told it to her. He was understandably concerned, so I told him everything was going to be okay, which was another lie of the Cinderella variety.

The sink was big enough for Snow and me to stand side by side while we soaked and scrubbed all the sauce boats and soup bowls and the swallow-patterned plates. We looked into the dishwater instead of at each other. She trickled water through her fingers.

“Weren’t we here together like this years ago? Only I sat up on the counter. It was your birthday and you were stirring things and chopping things and begging a cake to rise.”

“That was in the other house.”

She brought both her hands down and punched the water, spraying us both with greasy suds. I took a few steps back in case she was about to run amok, but she went still and kept her eyes averted. I wiped my face with a kitchen towel, decided to work the “game of charades” angle, and said, “Angry?” in the same tone of voice I’d have used to ask Animal, mineral, or vegetable?

She said: “I’m sorry. Close the door, please. This isn’t like me.”

When I came back to the sink, she was scrubbing again, elbow deep in dishes.

“Snow. Who told you it isn’t like you to get mad?”

She didn’t answer, just dragged her sleeve across her face, then returned both hands to the sink.

“You feel I’ve treated you badly? Snow?”

“Yes, you have.”

I’d like to know if Snow has come to feed on adoration, on the gentle tone of voice people take with her. Does everybody who crosses her path have to love her? Capture all hearts and let none go free, is that the way she wants it? But I don’t think she knows the answer any more than I do. She’s mad that I haven’t been able to love her. Maybe she’s afraid that I see something in her that she isn’t able to see for herself. But the trouble is, I don’t see much of anything when I try to see her. She stands near me and I know that someone’s there, but when I look, I find another face in the way, and hear another voice, not Snow’s at all, but distorted versions of my own face and voice, I think. And even though this screen and I have become aware of each other, the screen rests easy, banking on its history of standing between people and my own aversion to closeness. I’ve been so afraid of getting closeness wrong, because I don’t know how to do it, because I don’t know what my mistakes reveal — maybe they reveal very good reasons for my having been unloved as a child, I just don’t know.

“Let’s make up,” I said.

“How? I don’t hear you apologizing.”

Our reflections rippled in the water, stretching to breaking point, and swam away from each other in pieces, then the pieces shivered together again, stretched to their limit, burst.

“Let’s do it the way kids do it,” I said.

“The way kids do it?” She was looking at my reflection, not at me.

“You know… when you treat a friend badly and you both know it and the only way to get them to forgive you is to let them hurt you.”

“What? That wasn’t how I made up with my friends,” she said with alarm.

“Oh. Maybe it was just a Lower East Side thing.” (Maybe it was me who’d taught my classmates that this was the way to make up.) “Anyway. Hit me.”

She blinked rapidly. “No.”

“I recommend it.”

“But I don’t want to. So.”

“Look… the way it was when I was a kid, the person you’d treated badly had to hurt you back, or there were two possibilities. The first was that you continued to like them but you lost respect for them, because in the world of kid think, not taking revenge can be a sign of weakness. The other option, and this is something that continues into adult think, is that the other person’s not taking their moment to hurt you made you stop liking them as much. You started to fear them, because it seemed like they were waiting for a better chance, a chance not just to hurt you, but to devastate you. The only way for there to be both liking and respect is if you hit me now and we call it quits. Do you get what I’m saying?”

I could see I’d somehow sold her on the method, but still she hesitated.

“I’ve never hit anyone before.”

I drew her arms up out of the water and brought her right hand down against my cheek. She pulled back sharply, scattering soapsuds. “Okay, it’s done,” she said.

I shook my head. “Come on. That was nothing.”

She tried to run, and knocked a chair over — Arturo called out “Everything okay in there?” and we called back: “Yup!” and “Absolutely!” It was like a two-legged race around the room, a race against nobody, but I wouldn’t let her go, I had her by the wrists and I used both her hands to strike at my face until she began doing it for herself. That girl slapped me so hard my ears rang, and she said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” even as she hit me. She simmered down, sank onto a chair, and I folded up onto the floor and rested my chin on her knee. According to the clock on the wall five minutes had passed.

“I hate Olivia,” she said. I looked up at her.

“I believe you.”

“I asked her if she was surprised that you sent me to Boston. I said I bet she’d expected it to be Bird who was sent away. She said, ‘Surprised?’ and she told me about a white woman who went to Africa back in the thirties. While they were out there, the woman’s husband shot a gorilla dead. They didn’t realize it was a female gorilla until they saw the baby gorilla she’d been trying to protect. They felt guilty, so they brought the baby gorilla into their home and got an African woman to nurse it—”

“What? These people got an African woman to nurse what? The baby gorilla?”

“Yeah, I said something similar. And I asked Olivia why she was telling me this, and she said her point was that one can waste a lot of time marveling at the decisions of white folks. She said there’s nothing any of them do that can surprise her. Then she went right on signing her charity checks. That’s Olivia Whitman, can’t stop giving. I think she might hate herself, but I can’t help her out there. I feel so little love for her. I want to, but just when I’m getting there, she says or does something that makes me go nuts.”

I said: “Don’t let her see. At her age… I don’t know. It’d probably finish her off.”

Snow had given me a black eye. And Arturo asked me a leading question before I even attempted an explanation. “Did you fall over?” That was what he asked. Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly what happened. It became an odd little running joke between Snow and me for the next few days. As she passed me, she’d whisper into my ear: “Did you fall over?”

And then there’s Mia. Mia and what she’s been doing behind my back. She only came clean when I phoned her and told her about the rat catcher. I couldn’t work out who’d told him where we were. Olivia and Agnes and Gerald didn’t know his name, and even if they did, what would their motive have been? For half of a sleepless night I thought it had to be Arturo. Arturo knew the rat catcher’s name. Arturo could have tracked him down. This thing he has about completing things, having the whole gang there for the head count—

Mia interrupted me. “We need to talk,” she said. “I’ve got an all-nighter to pull, but I’ll come over when it gets light.”

She was true to her word. She arrived as I was making coffee, slouched in a chair in front of the stove, too decaffeinated to stand. The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it’s ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot. Snow was there with me, smoking her breakfast cigarette and telling me something about her job. Her tone suggested she wasn’t looking forward to getting back to work; I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what she was saying. I was merely making listening noises. I do remember that she said she’d helped Bird get ready for school. It’s been a long while since Bird’s requested help getting ready for school. I don’t know what tasks would be involved in helping her get ready at this stage of her advanced ability to comb her own hair, get her own books together, and eat her own cereal, so I thought it was a good sign that she’d allowed Snow to think she was helping. Mia was carrying a red folder. She passed it to me, kissed Snow, and asked her, “Remember me?” Snow’s smile was perfectly vague and perfectly tender, and she said: “Of course.”

“And how’s your Aunt Clara?”

“She’s back in Boston now, and doing just fine, thank you.”

She left us; she had errands to run. Agnes wanted her to buy fuchsia wool.

Mia stopped smiling as soon as she’d gone. “Give me a break,” she said. “That girl cannot be for real.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I don’t know. Maybe this is actually as sincere as she gets.”

“I’ll take that under advisement. What happened?” She brushed my bangs to the left. “Don’t tell me Arturo…?”

“No, Mia. But if I ever want to make him cry, I’ll tell him ‘people’ think he has the makings of a fine wife beater. I tripped over a chair. I know, I know. Why is my life so exciting?”

Mia’s folder contained a single sheet of paper. It was a xeroxed birth certificate. Name: Frances Amelia Novak. Date of birth: November 1, 1902. Place of birth: Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

“Where’d you get this?”

She lifted her coffee cup to her mouth and set it down again. “I went looking for your mom, Boy.”

“Why would you do that?”

“That doesn’t matter as much as the fact that I found her. I found her.”

“It was you who brought the rat catcher after me.”

“I told him where to find you, yes. Sit down, Boy. Sit down and hear me out. I thought he deserved the chance to tell you what I’m about to tell you. He had one last chance and he didn’t take it and he’s not going to bother you anymore.”

Frances Amelia Novak. Date of birth: November 1, 1902. “I’ve got to get to work. Tell me later.”

“No, now. You need to know this now. Mrs. Fletcher will understand.”

Mia was bleary-eyed from her all-nighter, and when she jerked her head, three neon pins escaped her hair and scuttled across the floor. I still wanted to trust her. “Start with why you did this.”

“Okay. I wanted something to write about. The way you’re looking at me, people have looked at me that way before. One guy called me a bloodsucker. That’s not it. It’s more like my mind’s stacked with all these incongruous items, other people’s stories that I’ve been telling pieces of. And the people don’t come back for their stories, but that doesn’t make them mine. The Mia Cabrini pawnshop, I call it sometimes. But since the termination… my termination, I should say, but that sounds like the termination of myself, doesn’t it… I’ve got to write something. That or get a hole drilled in my skull to let the fog out.”

I poured us both more coffee. It was cold and thick. “It would’ve been better for you to write about the termination itself. Maybe it’d help you. I’m not just saying that because you’re using me.”

She didn’t flinch. “I don’t think it would have been better. I want to describe what someone goes through when they refuse to be a mother, or when they realize they just can’t do it. I mean, okay, so I knew what it was for me. I knew that I was afraid of yet another relationship in which I care about someone a hell of a lot more than they care about me. For that to play out between me and a kid, for all our lives… I don’t regret the termination. I know I cried all over you about it being my last shot at having a kid, but I think I’ve done all my crying over this. I hate that my life is teaching me that I can only be loved if I put my love out of reach and just drift above people until they love my remoteness. I’m not just talking about romances, but about friendships too. Whoa, Mia, you’re too intense. I get a lot of that. So I know that I won’t be loved the way I need to be. I know that’s not going to happen in my life. I’ve got other stuff to do, I can just get on and do that other stuff. But say I go ahead and print that, it’s just a sob story, easy enough for most readers to think they understand. If I’m going to talk about this thing, I don’t want to be confirming anybody’s theories about the way life goes — not even my own. So I was thinking. I was thinking, maybe I could do a well-disguised piece about Olivia Whitman. She sent Clara away. But then she raised her other two. I wondered if I could write about you and Snow for a second, but Snow isn’t your kid anyway. And then I thought about your nameless mother, and I thought she might be dead. But if she was alive…”

“Is she?”

Mia leaned forward in her chair. “Boy, don’t you get it? When I started searching, I started with the rat catcher. I thought I could find your mother through him, and that turned out to be true. I searched public records for anything connected to Frank Novak and Francis Novak and Frantisek Novak and I found a few, but none that led me to that address on Rutgers Street that my pal mailed that money to years ago. I went down to New York for two weeks and pestered poor innocent Francises and Frantiseks. I stood outside the brownstone you grew up in, trying to switch on X-ray vision. I looked up your birth certificate—”

“I haven’t got a birth certificate.” I’d been proud of that, having to enroll at high school with an affidavit sworn by the rat catcher that he was my father and that I’d been born on the date he said I’d been born on.

“It’s on record that you have. But this is stuff you could’ve looked up if you’d wanted to… anyhow, your birth certificate says your mother is Frances Novak and your father is unnamed. The Frank Novak who raised you doesn’t officially exist.”

“Doesn’t exist?”

“Not officially.”

I cackled. I couldn’t help it. She didn’t know what she was saying.

“Keep hearing me out. I’m not just talking out of my ass here. I did a lot of work on this and I can show you all the paperwork. That’s why I haven’t been around much. Maybe you thought I was moping. Maybe I hardly crossed your mind. Anyhow, my earlier searches came to nothing because I’d been looking for men. Frances Amelia Novak was born in Brooklyn in 1902. Her father, Sandor, was a Hungarian immigrant, a concert cellist turned delivery-truck driver, and her mother, Dinah, was an Irish-American seamstress who made these quilts… I went to see one of them at the folk art museum, the tiny one in Midtown. It was art, what your grandma made. Frances was a scamp with a knockout smile—”

Mia was showing me a series of xeroxed photographs. Oh, God.

“And she was super, super smart. It was a pretty mixed neighborhood — linguistically, I mean — the warmest reception a colored messenger boy would get around there in those days were questions like ‘Do you think this is Harlem?’ But Frances picked up snippets of Czech and Dutch from the neighbors, as well as speaking Magyar, her father’s first language, fluently. She brought out the best side of her more idealistic teachers, made them feel that she had just the kind of intellect they’d got into teaching to help develop. She’d ask for additional reading and extra assignments. You’d think the other kids would’ve hated her, but they were glad for her, voted her Most Likely to Succeed. She made it into Barnard on a scholarship, got her BS in her chosen field of psychology, embarked on postgraduate research, maybe with a view to becoming a faculty member… that’s what she told her friends, anyway. She knew that the first female member of the psych faculty had been taken on less than five years ago, and they’d taken her on as an unpaid lecturer. She knew that she’d need more than just a flair for the subject, more than just curiosity, she’d need to be utterly single-minded in her pursuit of a faculty position, and the research itself meant more to her than that. She was interested in sexuality. More specifically, she was interested in proving that homosexuality isn’t a mental illness. But she never finished her paper—”

“How do you know what she thought and what she was interested in?”

“I met four of her former girlfriends for coffee, and they all brought letters with them. Letters she’d written to them when they were all at Barnard together. I’d thought the friendships were platonic, but the letters get pretty raunchy in places, and all three of the ex-girlfriends said, ‘Yes, yes, we were true friends, but we were lovers as well, you know’—these serene intellectual women who only really get bashful about abstract theory. They brought me photos too. Look at her. Apparently impressionable young woman after impressionable young woman would just up and leave their boyfriends for her. I know she’s your mother, but you get the appeal, right? I don’t know when Frances started expressing a preference for females, but it was most certainly by the time she was in the final year of her BS studies.”

I shuffled through all the photos of my glamorously disheveled bluestocking mother, hair as long as Lady Godiva’s at a time when short hair was all the rage. She had the look of someone who sings inside themselves, silently and continually; at least I hope that’s what people mean when they say someone has a twinkle in their eye. Hers was there even when she was playing possessive, her arms tangled around the woman on her lap. “What happened to her, Mia?”

“This is exactly what Frances’s girlfriends wanted to know. They all showed up hoping I could tell them. She was twenty-nine and that was supposed to be the year she got her doctorate, but she skipped campus and the apartment on Morningside that she shared with two other women. She was there on a Tuesday — spotted in the library — she asked one of the women I met with to loan her some money, but her friend was just as broke as she was. Then on Wednesday she didn’t show up to a talk she’d agreed to give to some undergraduates. She’d never done anything like that; she was the kind who showed up to lectures even when she was ill. Nobody seems to remember her as being particularly highly strung, either. By Friday her friends were making active efforts to track her down. Then other friends suggested she didn’t want to be tracked down, that she was just working hard on her paper. But working where? She hadn’t returned to the Morningside apartment since Tuesday evening. Her roommates wanted to call the police but everybody said they were overreacting. Her parents ended up reporting her missing in April 1933.”

“I was born in November 1933,” I volunteered.

“Yeah.”

“So what have you found out?”

Mia looked out of the window and braced herself, then looked back at me. “Frank told me this himself. Frances was raped. It was an acquaintance of hers; a male friend’s younger brother. He was an undergrad at Columbia who thought that all lesbianism meant was that you were holding out for the man who really got you excited. Frances had warned him to stop airing this view. He’d also, I don’t know, grabbed at a friend of hers and called her a tease and so on. Frances had issued her warning to this guy in front of other people and I guess that had humiliated him and — don’t let me rationalize what he did anymore, Boy. He caught her coming out of the library that night in February, seemed contrite, told her he was just a boy trying to grow into a man and that his motto was live and let live, and he urged her to visit a speakeasy he’d heard about. And she went with him, to show him there was no longer any quarrel between them. He bought her three drinks. They went for a drive along the Hudson. He said, ‘What do you say we drive all night?’ She said sure. Being in motion helped her get a lot of good thinking done. His parents were out of town and he drove up to their house in Westchester, drove into the garage, shut the doors, and broke her life in two.”

“What was his name?”

“Steven.”

“Steven what?”

“Steven Hamilton.”

“Is he alive?”

“Screw him. I didn’t check. It’s Frances I followed, and she didn’t encounter him again.”

“So where did she go?”

“There was a women’s shelter she knew of, run by a Harlem heiress out of her own home. Mainly for nonwhite women, but they didn’t automatically turn you away if you were white. She stayed there for three months under the name Francine Stone, but they eventually asked her to leave. She was… uh, demoralizing the other women who ‘had suffered their own violations but were determined to continue their lives as women in spite of them,’ I think the note said. Frances understood and admired that, but it wasn’t her way. Her distress had hardened. You know how Frank says he became Frank? He says he looked in the mirror one morning when he was still Frances, and this man she’d never seen before was just standing there, looking back. Frances washed her face and fixed her hair and looked again, and the man was still there, wearing an exact copy of her skirt and sweater. He said one word to her to announce his arrival. What he did was, he flicked the surface of his side of the mirror with his finger and thumb and he said: ‘Hi.’ After that he acted just like a normal reflection; otherwise she would’ve felt like she had to go to a psychiatrist and complain about him. Once she’d established that he was there to stay, she named him Frank and stopped off at a barbershop and got a short back and sides — she felt that haircut suited Frank’s personality. She went around in heavy boots, and a high-collared shirt… maybe you’ll remember the rat catcher’s collared shirts and the way he’d wear them even in the summer, to hide the fact that he didn’t have an Adam’s apple… she took to speaking in an artificially deep, gruff voice. The people around her didn’t know what to do about her and frankly they didn’t like her. To them it was as if she’d been bitten by something vile and that in some way she was becoming the thing that had bitten her. She left the shelter, found a room that she shared with a girl on a strict twelve-hour basis — from six in the morning to six in the evening the room was Frank’s, and from six in the evening to six in the morning the room belonged to the other girl and Frank had to get out.”

“I take it the roommate was a hooker?”

“Maybe. However it was she made her living, she knew all kinds of people, and hooked Frank up with a physician who was willing to turn criminal for a reasonable fee. Frank made two appointments, and ended up breaking them both. He was afraid of dying on the physician’s table. He’d heard stories, and he wanted to live. He worked jobs that didn’t require documentation — an extermination company that had a high turnover of illegal immigrant employees turned out to be the job he lasted longest at, but it was a job he lost when he had you. You were premature and he said he had to take a lot of time off. He remembered his father’s rat-catching methods and started working for himself—”

“Stop calling her ‘him.’ You’re telling me my mother has been desperately ill for decades and I’m fighting like hell to take it in, but you’ve got to stop calling her ‘him.’”

“I don’t know that I can. As it stands right now he’s been Frank longer than he was Frances. It’s gone beyond alter egos. Boy, I’ve been reading medical monographs about people whose alleged alter egos have different blood types from theirs — one guy’s alter ego was diabetic, and he wasn’t — or he was the alter ego and the diabetic was the ‘true’ personality — who’s to say? When those kinds of biological facts start coming in, you have to ask if becoming someone else is more than some delusion or some dysfunction of the mind. What I mean to say is that Frank’s personality is pretty awful — he tried to hit me when I told him I was going to tell this story, but he wasn’t fast enough — but he’s awfully sane. Well, maybe not when it comes to thinking of names. He says he almost named you Pup.”

“Mia.”

She took my hands, and kissed them. “Boy.”

“Please don’t write about this. Find someone else to write about.”

“I’m sorry, cara. I don’t expect you to understand this, but I have to tell. You know, Bird sent me something in the mail a few days ago. Some notes she’d made while Frank was talking to her over lunch.”

“What?”

“He said some stuff to her that’s probably going to upset you — no, he didn’t threaten her. I think he was actually trying to tell. Trying to tell her what he had agreed to come down here and tell you.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” I said.

“I’m sorry it’s like this. You’ve got a daughter who has to know and a friend who would do anything for you apart from not telling. This can’t be what you signed up for.” She squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back.

“Do you think Frances is gone forever?”

“Boy… you know I can’t answer that… I never met her.”

I don’t know why that was a comfort, but it was.

2

reading Bird’s notes took the comfort away. Frank’s claim that I’m evil doesn’t shock me so much, partly because I’ve questioned myself on the very same subject before. It’s not my actions that raise the questions, but my inaction, the way I’ve consciously and consistently avoided chances to reduce other people’s unhappiness. I call it a side effect of growing up in a building full of families and thin walls and floors: We all heard everything and did nothing. I heard love going wrong for people, so wrong. The silence for weeks when Mrs. Phillips next door miscarried. Then the weeks of noise that followed — Mr. Phillips came home later and later, and Mrs. Phillips waited up for him, playing records until the small hours, switching off the gramophone and sobbing when he came in through the door. Mr. Kendall on the other side of us kept spending the rent money; his wife kept faking surprise at this. Every month Mrs. Kendall asked, “How could you, Fred? How could you? What are we going to do?” and you could hear her hatred and her boredom; it stayed in her voice even as he hit her. For a few months there was a pretty glamorous-looking couple upstairs — down on their luck, I guess. I remember them particularly because I never found out either of their names, only heard him calling her whore, whore, WHORE. Of course they must have heard the rat catcher knocking me around too. We all got a little less human so we could keep living together.

No, these are the words that kissed my equilibrium good-bye:

It was the one time in my life I wished I was a woman.

There it was, in my daughter’s handwriting. Frances had wanted to come back.

I couldn’t sleep. Arturo snored blissfully beside me until I put a stop to that.

“Arturo. Arturo. Wake up.”

He gasped and waved his arms. “What? What is it? Fire?”

“No. I need to know how to break a spell. Any ideas?”

“Break a spell, you say?”

“Yeah. How?”

“Woman, how the hell should I know? Let me sleep.”

“Quit yelling.”

“I’m not yelling.”

“Sounds like yelling to me.”

He stuck his head underneath his pillow; I got up. Dawn broke calmly and filled the house with its glow. And Alecto Fletcher answered the phone when I called her.

“Oh. I knew it was you. Who else could be so disrespectful of an old woman’s need for rest?”

“I won’t keep you long, Alecto. I just wondered if you knew how to break a spell.”

“That’s right, ask the crone; she’ll know. Are we talking about a magic spell?”

“Um. Not in origin, but in effect maybe.”

“And you’re asking for a friend…”

“My friends just don’t know how to behave.”

“Your friend already asked me herself. Sid Fairfax came over yesterday with a fairly interesting book of art monographs and the very same question you’ve just called me to ask. I’m worried about her too. It’s plain to see that she loathes this town, but she’s told herself she can’t leave because she loves her mother and she can’t be happy if her mother is unhappy.”

“I didn’t know any of that. I thought she was staying because she’s in love with Kazim.”

“Yes, we’d be in love with Mr. Bey, wouldn’t we, if we dared to be? Agnes Miller allows herself to flirt with him; perhaps we should too.”

“What can I say? He’s an actual Prince Charming. But what’d you tell Sidonie?”

“I told her that magic spells only work until the person under the spell is really and honestly tired of it. It ends when continuing becomes simply too ghastly a prospect.”

“I’m not sure I…”

“Pester your subject, Boy. Pester this person, whoever it is. Make the enchantment inconvenient for them, find myriad ways to expose their contentment as false, show them that the contentment is part of the spell, engineered to make it last longer. Do you see?”

“I take it you’ve broken a lot of spells, Alecto?”

“I’m speaking more from the experience of having been under them.”

“May you live forever.”

“Yes, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? So you could phone me at five in the morning forever.”

—

i made cocoa, took a cupful out onto the porch and closed my eyes as the sun climbed the sky. I pretended that the light was patting my black eye in a friendly, investigative way, trying to see if early light alone could heal it. I’d pretended this a number of times back in New York. It was the quickest way to feel cared for after you’d taken a battering. With my eyes closed, I returned to the apartment on Rutgers Street, tried to find something, anything, maternal in what I remembered of the rat catcher. There was nothing. I saw his sneer again. His sneer and his fists. His eyes I couldn’t remember so well; I rarely let him look into my eyes, I’d kept him out no matter what. Okay, scratch maternal. How about feminine? Maybe a few moments too fleeting to articulate, but that’s men for you — it was like that with Arturo too. Through the keyhole of the rat catcher’s bedroom door I once saw him place his hand on his girlfriend’s calf and slide upward to the top of her thigh. Could I file that under feminine? Yes and no. It was the touch of a lover. Slow and sure. Taking pleasure, promising more. She bent over him and nipped at his earlobe and they laughed a little and moaned a little and I backed away from that keyhole in a hurry.

—

snow came up the garden path and asked if there was any cocoa going spare. I said yes and made a fresh batch, ignoring her protests that she hadn’t intended to put me to any trouble.

“Why are you up so early?”

“I just wanted to walk around without seeing anybody,” she said, studying the porch floor. I thought she looked a little fatigued, so I made her take a vitamin tablet and tried to enact a talking cure.

“You go home tomorrow, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And do you go back to work right away?”

“No, I don’t have a case until next week.”

There was a skin on my cocoa, and a thicker one on hers, but she was drinking around the edges of it.

“A case?”

“I knew you weren’t listening the other morning.”

“I’m sorry, honey.” Honey. I’d never called anybody honey in my life before then.

She smiled. “Don’t be. It’s dirty work, Boy. I’ve been following men’s wives and taking note of their indiscretions. It pays well because it’s valuable to the clients. It makes their divorces significantly cheaper.”

You never really feel your jaw until it drops. I think it was the crispness of her words just as much as the worldliness of what she was saying. Should a diaphanous butterfly ever perch on my finger and provide analysis of the day’s stock market activity I won’t bat an eyelash.

She looked up (we were directly beneath Bird’s window) and continued in a whisper: “I don’t know if I can stick it out for much longer. You’re taking photos of a couple from across the street, you’re sitting next to them in some bar, eavesdropping for incriminating details, sometimes the guy will get up and go to the restroom and the unfaithful wife will turn around and just start talking to you. People in love are so trusting. They’ll say, ‘Hey, don’t worry, your prince will come,’ and I’m all no no no, don’t talk to me, I’m stalking you. One woman… I liked her, and it was sad to hand in the stuff I’d got on her… she started telling me about her life with her lover. It was all moonshine, I knew who her husband was, and where their home was, and where she sent her kids for their education. But she told me the man she was with was her husband and they had four boys he took fishing every Sunday, and between the boys and work they only had one date night a month so they had to make it special, and I just started shaking. I keep going to Isidor — that’s my boss — to tell him I’m quitting, but then he pays me…”

I sniggered, and then we were both laughing.

“Don’t go home tomorrow, Snow. Stay awhile, okay?”

She hesitated.

“Isidor might fire you, but if the job makes you shake, is it really right for you? Visit awhile longer. Please.”

“It’s not because of Isidor. It’s that kiddie bedroom. But I guess I only have to sleep there.”

3

on Saturday morning I had a long talk with Arturo about Frances and the rat catcher and what I meant to do. He laughed at me and then he forbade me and then he warned me. I walked out of the room and he followed me into the next room. Then he walked out of the room and I followed him into the next room, and not for a second did either of us stop talking. We split a sandwich for lunch and he conceded that if he were in my place he’d want to meet Frances too. If there’s still anything left of her. If she wants to meet us. I think he was just getting hoarse. Plus he knows this terrain. He’s been handling the difference between the mother you want and the mother you get for years, managing the discrepancy like a pro, making it look easy.

(Charlie would’ve been full of useless pity, I think. It’s so stupid to compare, or even to think of him at all.)

“But just for a week.” For some reason Arturo tapped his watch. “Bird can’t miss too much school. One week for now and then we’ll talk.”

“Right,” I said, remembering that Snow had thought she was only visiting Clara and John for a week. I kissed him and went upstairs before he could begin to remember that too. I packed a bag — books and records, things I thought Frances might get curious about or find offensive enough that she’d wake up just to challenge them — and I knocked on Bird’s bedroom door. She wasn’t in there, just a scattering of spiders hanging in midair, waiting for me to close the door again so they could continue on to their secret destinations. Arturo was back in his studio by the time I went downstairs, but Mia had arrived, with her suitcase, as agreed. She hadn’t seen Bird, either, but she had a lot of complaints and suggestions to make. This trip would seriously disrupt her work on the article, we could engage a suitable doctor from here, and so on, and so on.

“Hold that last thought while we go grab Snow.”

“Her too?”

Snow didn’t answer when we knocked, but Agnes had said she was in there, so we went in. She was lying facedown on her spangled blue bed. Her hands were pressed over her ears, and when we first entered the room, we couldn’t hear why (Mia looked around at all the mobiles and wall stencils and gave a silent whistle), but I stood beside her bed and heard singing. A clear, mellow voice with a hint of a ragtime pitch, as if the singer felt such emotion that the melody came out uneven.

All I do is dream of you is dream of you the whole night through…

Julia.

Snow’s lips were moving; she was involuntarily singing along. Mia grabbed my arm, then searched the tops of the shelves and the dresser for a record player. When she couldn’t find one, she knelt down beside Snow and tried to lift the girl up. I went to the window. I didn’t especially want to, but that was the direction the singing seemed to be coming from. The bedroom overlooked Olivia’s garden, which looked empty until I flung the window open and saw movement behind the hedge. The singing stopped. I ran down into the garden and out of the front gate and caught Bird about a millisecond before she vanished into the woods. I caught her by her ear, and I yanked hard.

“So you’re a mimic, huh?”

“It’s not a crime!”

“So you’re trying to drive your sister crazy?”

“I’m trying to see if she’s a phony or not.”

“And if you manage to drive her out of her mind that means she’s not a phony? I’m going to twist this ear right off of your head, Bird Whitman.”

I guess I must’ve sounded like I meant it, because she screamed with such fear that I instantly let her go. Mia and Snow came running toward us, and Bird wrapped her arm around a tree trunk as if depending upon its aid. Maybe she was given my eyes so that I can never stay mad at her. But you can’t let a thirteen-year-old just walk around with the ability to sound much too much like a dead woman.

“How long have you been doing this?”

She shrugged, and I turned to Snow.

“That was the third time,” Snow said. “But Boy, don’t kill her, or threaten to. She — she didn’t know what she was doing.” I think it took a lot for her to say that. Not that her sister appreciated it.

“Yes, I did know what I was doing,” Bird insisted.

“You will never do anything like that ever again. And you will go pack a bag immediately,” I told her.

She lifted her chin. “Where are you sending me? Can I write a note to Louis first?”

“We’re going to New York for a few days.” I looked at Snow and Mia. “All of us. We’re going to go look at a quilt your great-grandmother on my side made, Bird. It’s an important quilt. It’s in a museum. I don’t know why I started with the quilt. Really we’re going down there to go see somebody. She needs us, I think. I’ll explain more on the bus. And we need her. You, Bird, you’ve always got to know, and we’d better find you a way to do something other than devilry with that. And you, Mia, you’ve got to tell, and Snow — well, you’re a pretty face and more. As for me, I’ll do whatever else there is to be done. And yes, you can write a note to Louis. But get a move on. The bus we want leaves in an hour.”

Bird bolted into our house, but Snow tucked her arm through mine and whispered to me that she didn’t want to come with us, she didn’t think she could help, she wanted to go back to Twelve Bridges. I linked my other arm through Mia’s and the three of us walked slowly up and down the street, talking about Frances.

Olivia Whitman walked out of her house and into the road as Mia was driving us to the bus station. So we had to stop the car. She gestured for Mia to roll down the window, and when she was obeyed, Olivia said, “Where are you taking my grandchildren?” She tried to sound imperious, but she just sounded old.

Snow looked out of the other window and bit her lip. Bird almost startled the life out of Olivia by planting a noisy kiss on her cheek.

I told her to wait there, and that we’d be back for her, and Olivia stood aside and let Mia drive on.