Second Skin

The Gentle Island

And so, fresh from the wartime capital of the world, we became her unwitting lodgers, Cassandra and I, Cassandra with her pretended mothering of Pixie, I with my recent and terrifying secret knowledge about Fernandez. Already the fall winds were gathering and every morning from my bedroom window I watched a single hungry bird hang itself on the wet rising wind and, battered and crescent-shaped and angry, submit itself endlessly to the first raw gloom of day in the hopes of spying from on high some flash of food in the dirty undulating trough of a wave. And every morning I stood blowing on my fingers and watching the tom and ragged bird until it flapped away on the ragged wings of its discouragement, blowing, shivering, smiling to think that here even the birds were mere prowlers in the mist and wind, mere vagrants in the empty back lots of that low sky.

Briefly then our new home. White clapboard house, peeling paint, abandoned wasp’s nest under the eaves, loose shingles, fungus-like green sludge scattered across the roof. Widow’s house, needy but respectable. In front a veranda — the old green settee filled with mice, heap of rotted canvas and rusted springs — and a naked chestnut tree with incurable disease and also two fat black Labrador retrievers chained to a little peeling kennel. Protection for the poor widow, culprits who heaped the bare front yard with the black fingers of their manure. And in the rear the widow’s little untended victory garden — a few dead vines, a few small humps in the frost — and, barely upright and half-leaning against a weed-grown shed, the long-abandoned wreck of a hot rod — orange, blue, white, no tires, no glass in the windows, big number five on the crumpled hood — the kind of hopeless incongruity to be found behind the houses of young island widows. Our new home then, and with its cracked masonry, warped beams, sway-backed floors and tiny old fusty fireplaces packed with the rank odor of urine and white ash, it was just as I had dreamed it, was exactly as I had seen it and even smelled and tasted it during all my exotic hot nights at sea when I suffered each separate moment of my personal contribution to the obscene annals of naval history. This house then, and every bit the old freezing white skeleton I had been hoping for. So on my rickety pine bureau I propped my photograph of the U.S.S. Starfish and flung the flight bag in the bottom drawer and hung my uniform in the closet which contained three little seagoing chests made of bone and brass and dried-out cracked turkey skin. Propped up the picture, hung away the spotted uniform, admired the way I looked in a black and white checked shirt and dark blue thick woolen trousers. Ready for gales, ready for black rocks. Everything in order and as I had expected, even to the identical white bowls and pitchers and washstands in Cassandra’s room and mine, even to the marble sink, lion claws on the tub and long metal flush chain in the john. Of course I could not have anticipated the black brassiere that dangled as large and stark as an albatross from the tin shower curtain pole. I stared at it a long moment— this first sign of the enemy — and then shut the old heavily varnished ill-fitting door. There was a tap leaking on the other side.

Of all those mornings, darkening, growing colder, dragging us down to winter, I remember most clearly our first in the widow’s house, because that was the dawn of my first encounter with Miranda. Dead brown rotten world, heartless dawn. Innocence and distraction at half past five in the morning.

I awoke in my strange bed in my strange room in the old white worm-eaten house and heard Pixie crying her fierce little nearly inaudible cry and looked about me at the bare sprawling shadows of monastic antiquity and shuddered, smiled, felt my cold hands and my cold feet crawling between the camphor-ridden sheets. It was still dark, as black as the somber mood of some Lutheran hymn, the flat pillow was filled with horsehair and the blanket against my cheek was of the thin faded stuff with which they drape old ladies’ shoulders in this cold country. And the wind, the black wind was rising off the iron flanks of the Atlantic and driving its burden of frozen spray through the abandoned fields of frost, across the green jetties, over the gray roofs of collapsing barns, driving its weight and hoary spray between the little stunted apple trees that bordered the widow’s house and smashing the last of the dead apples against my side of the house. From somewhere nearby I could hear the tongue swinging about tonelessly in the bell hung up in the steeple of the Lutheran church, and the oval mirror was swaying on my wall, the gulls were groaning above me and Pixie was still awake and crying.

Stiff new black and white checked shirt of the lumberjack, dark blue woolen trousers — heavy, warm, woven of tiny silken hairs — my white navy shoes. I fumbled in the darkness and for a moment stood at my front bedroom window — silhouettes of bending and suffering larch trees, in the distance white caps of hectic needlepoint — for a moment stood at my rear window and watched the high weeds beating against the screaming shadow of the hot rod. And then I felt my way down to the cold kitchen and fixed a day’s supply of baby bottles of milk for poor Pixie.

A lone fat shivering prowler in that whitewashed kitchen, I lit the wood in the stove and found the baby bottles standing in a row like little lighthouses where Cassandra had hastily stood them on the thick blond pine kitchen table the night before, found them standing between an antique coffee grinder — silver-plated handle, black beans in the drawer — and a photography magazine tossed open to a glossy full-page picture of a naked woman. It was five forty-five by Miranda’s old tin clock and noiselessly, listening to the stove, the black wind, the clatter of the apples against the window, I took the bottles to the aluminum sink, primed the old farmhouse pump — yellow iron belly and slack iron idiot lip — discovered a pot in a cupboard along with a case, a full case, of Old Grand-Dad whiskey, and filled the pot and set it on the stove. Then I plucked the nipples from the bottles and washed the bottles, washed the nipples — sweet scummy rubber and pinprick holes that shot fine thin streams of artesian well water into the sink under the pressure of my raw cold thumb — punched two slits in a tin can of evaporated milk — slip of the opener, blood running in the stream of the pump, fingers holding tight to the wrist and teeth catching and holding a comer of loose lip, grimacing and shaking away the blood — and as large as I was ran noiselessly back and forth between the sink and stove until the milk for Pixie’s little curdling stomach was safely bottled and the bottles were lined up white and rattling in the widow’s rectangular snowy refrigerator. I wiped the table, wiped out the sink, dried and put away the pot, returned the cursed opener to its place among bright knives and glass swizzle sticks, paused for a quick look at a photograph of a young white-faced soldier hung on the wall next to half a dozen old-fashioned hot plate holders. The photograph was signed “Don” and the thin face was so young and white that I knew even from the photograph itself that Don was dead. Squeezing my fingers I tiptoed back upstairs, leaned in the doorway and smiled at Cassandra’s outstretched neatly blanketed body and at her clothes bundled on a spindly ladderback rocking chair that faintly moved in the wind. I leaned and smiled, sucked the finger. Pixie had fallen back to sleep, of course, in the hooded dark wooden cradle that sat on the cold floor at the foot of Cassandra’s little four-poster bed.

And so I was awake, dressed, was free in this sleeping house and had forgotten the signs — the black brassiere, the naked woman, the full case of Old Grand-Dad — and I could think of nothing but the wind and the shore and a set of black oilskins,cracked sou’wester and long black coat, which I had seen in an entryway off the kitchen. Back down I went to the kitchen and yanked open the door, dressed myself swiftly in the sardine captain’s outfit and was shocked to find a lipstick in the pocket. Carefully I let myself out into the first white smears and streaks of that approaching day.

I tried to catch my breath, I socked my hands into the rising and flapping skirts of the coat, I smiled in a sudden flurry of little tears like diamonds, thinking of Cassandra safe through winter days and of a game of Mah Jongg through all the winter nights, and put down my head and made off for the distinct sound of crashing water. From the very first I walked with my light and swinging step and my chin high, walked away from the house ready to meet all my island world, walked actually with a bounce despite the wind, the crazy interference of the black rubber coat, the weight of my poor cold slobbering white navy shoes drenched in a crunchy puddle which I failed to see behind the kennel of the sleeping Labradors. The larch trees with their broken backs, the enormous black sky streaked with fistfuls of congealed fat, the abandoned Poor House that looked like a barn, the great brown dripping box of the Lutheran church bereft of sour souls, bereft of the hymn singers with poke bonnets and sunken and accusing horse faces and dreary choruses, a few weather-beaten cottages unlighted and tight to the dawn and filled, I could see at a glance, with the marvelous dry morality of calico and beans and lard, and then a privy, a blackened pile of tin cans, and even a rooster, a single live rooster strutting in a patch of weeds and losing his broken feathers, clutching his wattles, every moment or two trying to crow into the wind, trying to grub up the head of a worm with one of his snubbed-off claws, cankerous little bloodshot rooster pecking away at the dawn in the empty yard of some dead fisherman. … Oh, it was all spread before me and all mine, this strange island of bitter wind and blighted blueberries and empty nests.

I took deep breaths, battling the stupid coat, and I swung down a path of wet nettles, breathed it all in. Breathed in the salt, the scent of frozen weeds, the briny female odor of ripe periwinkles, the stench from the heads of blue-eyed decapitated fish. And the pine trees. The pine trees were bleeding, freely giving off that rich green fragrance which as a child I had but faintly smelled in the mortuary on Christmas mornings. Just ahead of me, just beyond the growths of crippled pine and still in darkness lay the shore, the erupted coast, and suddenly I the only-born, the happy stranger, the one man awake and walking this pitch-black seminal dawn — suddenly I wanted to fling out my arms and sweep together secret cove and Crooked Finger Rock and family burial mounds of poor fishermen, sweep it all together and give it life, my life. Pitching through brier patches, laughing and stumbling under the dripping pines, I hurried on.

And wet, rubbery, exuberant, I emerged into a clearing and stopped short, opened my eyes wide. I saw only a listing handmade jetty and a fisherman’s hut with boarded-up windows, a staved-in dory and a tin chimney that gave off a thin stream of smoke. But beside the dory — gray ribs, rusted oarlock — there was a boy’s bicycle propped upside down with its front wheel missing and a clot of black seaweed caught in the sprocket. And though there were days and days to pass before I met the boy— his name was Bub — and met also his fishing father and no-good brother — Captain Red and Jomo — still I felt that I knew the place and had seen that bicycle racing in my own dreams. I could only stop and stare at the useless bicycle and at two squat gasoline pumps pimpled with the droppings of departed gulls and wet with the cold mist, those two pumps once bearing the insignia of some mainland oil company but standing now before the hut and sagging jetty as ludicrous signs of the bold and careless enterprise of that outpost beside the sea. I knew intuidvely that I had stumbled upon the crafty makeshift world of another widower. But how could I know that Captain Red’s boat, the Peter Poor, lay invisible and waiting only fifty yards from shore in its dark anchorage? How could I know that we, Cassandra and I, would sail away for our sickening afternoon on that very boat, the Peter Poor, how know about the violence of that sea or about the old man’s naked passion? But if I had known, if I had seen it all in my glimpse of Jomo’s pumps and Bub’s useless bicycle and the old man’s smoke, would I have faltered, turned back, fled in some other direction? No. I think not. Surely I would have been too proud, too innocent, too trusting to turn back in another direction.

So I was careful to make no noise, careful not to disturb this first intact and impoverished and somehow illicit vision of the widower’s overgrown outstation in the collapsing dawn, and staring at bleached slabs of porous wood and rusted nailheads I restrained my impulse to cup hands against the wind and cry out a cheery hello. And I merely waved to no one at all, expecting no wave in return, and gathered my rubber skirts and swept down the path to the beach.

Overhead the dawn was beginning to possess the sky, squadrons of gray geese lumbered through the blackness, and I was walking on pebbles, balancing and rolling forward on the ocean’s cast-up marbles, or wet and cold was struggling across stray balustrades of shale. At my shoulder was the hump of the shore itself — tree roots, hollows of pubic moss, dead violets — underfoot the beach — tricky curvatures of stone, slush of ground shells, waterspouts, sudden clefts and crevices, pools that reflected bright eyes, big smile, foolish hat. Far in the distance I could see the cold white thumb of the condemned lighthouse.

But time, the white monster, had already gripped this edge of the island in two bright claws, had already begun to haul itself out of an ugly sea, and the undeniable day was upon me. I slipped, the coat blew wide, and for some reason I fell back and found myself staring up at a gray sky, gray scudding clouds, a thick palpable reality of air in which only the barometer and a few weak signals of distress could survive. An inhuman daytime sky. And directly overhead I saw the bird, the gray-brown hungry body and crescent wings. He was hovering and I could see the irritable way he fended off the wind and maintained his position and I knew that he would return again and again to this same spot. And against the chopping and spilling of the black water I saw the lighthouse. It was not safely in the distance as I had thought, but was upon me. Black missing tooth for a door, faint sea-discolorations rising the height of the white tower, broken glass in its empty head, a bit of white cloth caught up in the broken glass and waving, the whole condemned weight of it was there within shouting distance despite the wind and sea. I could even make out the tufts of high grass bent and beating against its base, and even through the black doorless entrance way I could feel the rank skin-prickling texture of the darkness packed inside that forbidden white tower, and must have known even then that I could not escape the lighthouse, could do nothing to prevent my having at last to enter that wind-whistling place and having to feel my way to the topmost iron rung of its abandoned stair.

Hovering bird, hollow head of the lighthouse, a sudden strip of white sand between myself and the mud-colored base rock of the lighthouse, little sharp black boulders spaced together closely and evenly in the sand, and then as white as a starfish and inert, naked, caught amongst the boulders, I saw a woman lying midway between myself and the high rock. Vision from the widow’s photography magazine. Woman who might have leapt from the lighthouse or rolled up only moments before on the tide. She was there, out there, triangulated by the hard cold points of the day, and it was she, not I, who was drawing down the eye of the bird and even while the thought came to me— princess, poor princess and her tower — I looked up at the bird, still hovering, and then turned to the strip of beach and ran forward. But I stopped. Stopped, shuddered, shut my eyes. Because of the voice.

“So here you are!”

It was deep, low, husky, strong, the melodic tough voice of the woman who always sounds like a woman, yet talks like a man. It was close to me, deep and tempting and jocular, and I thought I could feel that enormous mouth pressed tight to my ear. It sounded like a big throat, shrewd powerful mind, heart as big as a barrel. And I was right, so terribly right. Except for the heart. Her black heart.

“My God. What are you doing down there?”

Somehow I opened my eyes, looked over my shoulder and raised my eyes from bright pink heart-shaped shell to bunches of weed to jutting hump of the shore to rising tall figure of the woman standing wind-blown on the edge above me. Looked and fought for breath.

Slacks. Canary yellow slacks. Soft thick canary yellow slacks tight at the ankles, cut off with a cleaver at the bare white ankles, and binding the long thighs, binding and so tight on the hips — yellow smooth complicated block of flesh and bone — that she could force only the tips of her long fingers into the slits of of the thin-lipped and slanted pockets. Slacks and square white jaw and great nest of black hair strapped in an emerald kerchief. Great white turtle-neck sweater and trussed white bosom, white breast begging for shields. Shoulders curving and muscular, unbowed. But yellow, yellow from the waist down, the tall easy stance of a woman proud of her stomach — lovely specimen of broad flat stomach bound and yellow and undulating down the front of the slacks — and staring at me with legs apart and elbows bent and eyes like great dark pits of recognition in the bony face. A strand of the black hair came loose and there was a long thick silver streak in it.

“Water’s about twenty degrees,” she said, and I heard the deep voice, saw the mountain of frosty breath, the toss of the hair. “You look like a damn seal. People shoot seals around here.” And with one canary stride she was gone.

“Wait,” I called, “wait a minute! ” But she was gone. And of course when I looked again there was no bird in the sky and no poor white dead thing lying between myself and the blind tower on the rock. So I flung myself up the hump of the shore, knelt for a moment and carefully ran my fingers over the earth where she had stood — the footprints were real, real enough the shape of her large naked foot in the crushed frozen grass — and bewildered, cold, I sped off across those empty fields as best I could; cold and sweating, I found my way back to the sleeping house.

A once-white shutter was banging, the wind was whistling down the halyards of the clothesline, the nose of the hot rod peered at me through the tall grass, all was quiet around the kennel, and the house was sleeping, was only an old wooden structure with a tin mailbox on a post by the gate and crusts thrown out for the birds. Nothing more peaceful than the cord of cherry-wood— ash, spruce, hemlock, whatever it was — piled up for the dogs to foul. But I walked with the woman in my eye, entered the house with the vision of her handsome white face before me. Striking magic. Bold hostility. And I had begun now to suspect that sleeping house and I began to raise a first faint guard in my own defense, approaching the lopsided back storm door with care. But I was too late, of course. Too late.

I entered the darkness, drove the door closed with my shoulder and stood panting and dripping and leaning against the cold rough wall of the entrance way, stood glancing at broken flowerpots, hedge clippers hung from a nail, coil of anchor chain and pile of gunny bags, stared for a moment at a half-empty sack of charcoal briquettes. The place smelled of cold earth and congealed grease, was a wooden bin for the dead leaves and rubbish of the past. Apple cider turned to vinegar. Set of moldy and rusted golf clubs flung in a corner with rakes and a pair of rubber hip boots. But nothing that I could see to fear, and I tore off the sou’wester, pulled off the coat and hung them again where I had found them. Then I put my hand on the old-fashioned glass knob, gave it a gentle turn, and stepped into the kitchen. Cold, trembling, sighing, I was glad to be home. Then I stared at the cruel mess on the kitchen table.

Bottle of Old Grand-Dad. Tall, burnished, freshly opened, bright familiar shape of every roadside bar — there was even a silver measuring device squeezed onto the neck instead of a cap or cork — that oddly professional and flagrant bottle of whiskey stood in the middle of the kitchen table, was a rude incongruous reality in the middle of the mess. And there was the mess itself: all of poor Pixie’s baby bottles, all of them, bereft of nipples, emptied, lying flat and helter-skelter on the table in little globs and pools of white baby’s milk. I walked to the sink — sides and bottom furiously splashed with the milk poured, shaken, from the bottles — I walked to the table and picked up a bottle, turned it in my hands, replaced it and picked up another, and I could make nothing of this sad vehement litter, merely stood there with my face draining, chin quivering, mouth working and twisting, trying to set itself into the shape, the smile, of my self-sacrifice.

But the nipples. The horror of the nipples. I seized each of them one by one, examined them closely and helplessly until I held five in the palm of my hand, five nipples side by side and each one neatly cut off about a quarter of an inch below the rip. Pair of steel shears spread open near the Old Grand-Dad. Bits of rubber glove made for a midget. I looked and looked and then dropped them — considerable bouncing like wounded jumping beans — and knelt on the floor, felt about under the table for the sixth nipple which I never found.

I was still on my hands and knees and thinking about the pot, the boiling water, the bottles to wash, the extra set of nipples to bring down from my drawer upstairs, thinking of the bottles I had lined up in the refrigerator — had I been watched even then? — when I heard the music. Loud music at eight o’clock in the morning in that sleeping house. I lifted my head, climbed to my feet, and slowly, more slowly than ever, I hitched a little and straightened the front of my trousers, tucked in the checkered shirt, stood listening with jaw jutting and tip of the ears red hot.

Because of course it was not ordinary music. Not that morning, not in that house. It was coming from beyond the dining room — sweet tinkle of cut glass, spindle chairs, ghosts of little old seedless ladies with chokers and gold wedding bands — was coming from the radio-phonograph in the living room. With indignation I recognized the blasting exuberant strains of that brassy music. The Horst Wessel lied in full swing, with percussion instruments and horns, trumpets and tubas, and the heavy bass voices of all those humorless young marching men. The Horst Wessel lied. I could hear the waves of praise, the smacking of the drums, the maudlin fervor, the terrible toneless racketing of the military snares, could see the muscles of the open mouths, the moody eyes locked front, could feel the rise of their preposterous love and bravery, feel the stamping feet, the floating sentiment — blue castles, beer, blood — the catching treacherous rhythm of that marching song. And I was drawn to it, drawn to it. With scowl and frown and hot wet palms, was nonetheless drawn to the impossible intensity of that barbaric unity, found myself leaving the wreck of my efforts for Pixie in the kitchen and walking toward the sound, the incredible military mass of that captured phonograph record. I reached the door, stood in the open door, and those German soldiers were singing the song of death, the song of the enemy.

Canary yellow slacks, bare feet, a man’s white shirt with open collar and sleeves rolled above the naked elbows. Oh yes, here was the second glimpse of her and she was on the floor in front of the fireplace, was kneeling and sitting back on her heels — wicked posturing, rank mystery of the triangle, bright and brazen cohesion between the rump and calves and canary yellow thighs — and her shoulders were thrown back and her powerful spine was a crescent and her broad hands were cupped on her knees. Her eyes were turned to the door and fixed on mine. No smile. Surrounded by leaves of an old newspaper. A tall glass of whiskey and a box of blue-tipped wooden matches waiting within reach on the brick apron of the fireplace. She waited and then jerked her head slightly toward the radio-phonograph, and I saw the picture of the dead soldier mounted upright in a silver frame on the cabinet.

“The Horst Wessel,” she said above the din of the conquering music. “Don sent me the record.” And then listening, abstracted in the pleasure of the loud marching song, slowly and with level eyes still on mine, she reached out one white hand, seized the full glass of whiskey, raised it in a salute in my direction: “Old Grand-Dad. Bottle’s in the kitchen. Help yourself.”

She was waiting, watching me, and now I was bracing myself against the doorjamb, leaning against it, sagging against it, stood there with one wet shoe tapping time to the march. “Thanks. But I don’t drink.”

“Oh. You don’t drink. Well then, you can light the fire.” And she tossed the box of matches at my feet, put the glass to her mouth — thick glass, white teeth, burnished whiskey — began to pull at it like a man, and her neck was bare, bold, athletic, and her rump was a yellow rock in the saddle of her calves, and under the white shirt her breasts were crowned with golden crowns. I thought of poor Sonny and his rum and Coca-Cola, I thought of poor Gertrude stealing frantic sips of gin out of her cheap little cream cheese glasses, I thought of poor Pixie’s milk curdling in the kitchen sink. But Don’s widow was sitting on her heels and drinking, and all the young German men were singing for her, marching for her. I failed to see the spinning wheel and bumped it, that construction of brittle cobwebs five feet high, and thought it was going over. Then I stooped down quickly and stuffed a few leaves of newspaper between the logs and struck a flame.

Iron pot on a hook, iron spit for the impaling and roasting of some headless blue turkey, a little straw broom and dusty heart-shaped bellows, and on the andirons great solid brass balls fit for the gods. Suddenly the tall swallow-tailed flames and crackling puffs of orange and deep green light between the logs threw all these hand-forged or handmade engines into relief, set them in motion, brought them to life, and I smelled the damp bursts of smoke and the widow was warming herself at the witches’ fire. Beside the bellows was a coffin-shaped legless duck — faded decoy carved with a knife — that stared me down with two tiny bright sightless chips of glass. Fire in the antique shop. Dead duck. Smoke in my eyes.

“Take off your shoes, for God’s sake,” she said, and the mellow voice was loud above the chant of the SS men, the firelight landed in yellow lozenges on the slopes and in the hollows of her slacks, “you must be frozen. But go ahead, warm your toes while I tell you about Don.”

And I could only nod, tug at the wet laces, free my heels, roll down the socks, wring them out — drops of steam on the hearth — could only make room for her and sit beside her on the cold wide naked planks of that floor with my hands propped behind me and my white feet and hers thrust into the heat. She dropped down on an elbow, crossed her long straight legs at the ankles, held out the whiskey glass — but it was not for me, that whiskey, at least not then — and breathing deeply, straining at the nostrils, shirt binding and slackening across her breasts, she began to wheeze. To wheeze! The big white knuckles of the fingers holding the glass, her crowned breasts, the mighty head of black hair, the stomach girding her in front like the flexible shape of a shield, the fluted weight of neck and arms and legs, all the impressive anatomy of this Cleopatra who could row her own barge, this woman who could outrun horses on the beach or knock down pillars of salt, everything about her revealed perfect health, denied this sudden swirling of mud or rattling of little pits in her chest. But even above the raucous melody of the eager Germans and their impossible military band I heard it: the sound of obstructed breathing, tight low crippling whine in the chest. Yet her eyes on mine were direct and heavy and dark, were large and black and fierce and cracked by spears of silver light. She wheezed on, mocked by the competitive fire, waiting for the steel needle to descend once more into the grooves of plodding Reichstag hysteria, and then whacked herself once on the uppermost yellow thigh and began to talk.

“That’s him in the picture,” she said without moving, without pointing, merely assuming that I had seen it when I entered the room. I nodded. “That’s Don. Young, good-looking boy. He stepped on a land mine, God damn him. In Germany. He took a wrong step and then no more Don. Poof. I met him in South Carolina. There he was, toward sundown standing at a country bus stop in South Carolina. The end of nowhere and burning up at the edges. Nothing but the road, a tree smothered with dust, the little three-sided shed where they were supposed to wait for the bus, a field full of scarecrows. And in front of the shed and surrounded by perhaps twenty cotton pickers, there was Don. I saw him. Short, limber, smile all over his face, head of tight blond curls, overseas cap like a little tan tent on the side of his head. Bunch of tattered damn black cotton pickers out for blood and this wonderful bright little guy with his smile and curly hair. Don. A little angel in South Carolina. So I gave him a lift. Sense of humor? My God, he had a sense of humor.” And suddenly she was choking on a snort of laughter, choking, gasping, giving my now toasty bare foot a friendly push with hers. And now her wheezing had found another depth, and each word came out shrouded in its cocoon of gravelly sound, its spasm of spent breath, and there were streaks of moisture at the hairline and on her upper lip. She took another slow drink of whiskey and the silver strand of hair hung down, the voice was deep.

She set down the glass and filled her lungs and said: “Good God, I married him for his humor. Because he was light on his feet and light in his heart. And because he was quick and talented and because he was just a boy, that’s why I married him. Why I gave him a lift and followed him to Galveston, Texas, and married him. Don. Three dozen roses, a brand new hot plate, a rented room outside Galveston, and one day Don telling me he had been elected company mascot — what a sense of humor, what a winsome smile — and that night our celebration with a spaghetti dinner and bottle of dago red. I should have known then that it couldn’t last. My God. …”

The golden foot was struggling against mine, the perspiration was as thick as rain on her lip, her shirt was wet and through it I could see the sloping shoulder, the handsome network of blue veins, the companion to the black brassiere that was still hanging in the john upstairs. Stretched full-length at my side she was wheezing and staring into the light of the fire, and now there were dimples, puckers, unsuspected curves in the canary yellow slacks, and now her chest was maniacal, was as trenchant and guttural and insistent as the upturned German record itself. So I looked at her then, forced myself to return the stare of those vast dark eyes, and she tried to shrug, tried to toss back the thick length of silver hair, but only glowered at me out of her stricken heaviness and abruptly tapped herself on the chest.

“Asthma.” Tapping the finger, squaring the jaw, watching me. “I get it from too much thinking about Don. But it’s nothing. Nothing at all. …”

I nodded. And yet the fire had fallen in and the pot and spit were glowing and her knee was lifting. Her lips were moist, pulled back, drawn open fiercely in the perfect silent square of the tragic muse, and I leaned closer to smell the alcohol and Parisian scent, closer to inspect the agony of the muscles which, no thicker than hairs, flexed and flickered in those unhappy lips, closer to hear whatever moaning she might have made above the racket of her strangulation.

“What can I do? Isn’t there something I can do?”

“The secretary,” she said. “Bring me the box in the middle drawer. Saucer too. From the kitchen.”

So I embarked on this brief rump-swinging bare-and-warm-footed expedition, and with the woolen pants steaming nicely around my ankles and the checkered shirt pressing against my skin its blanket of warm fuzzy hairs, I glided heavily to the little chair, the papers, the oil lamp — God Bless Our Home etched on the shade — and calmly, backs of the hands covered with new warmth, licking my lips and feeling that I might like to whistle — perhaps only a bar or two, a few notes in defiance of the Horst Wessel—I returned to the cold kitchen with hardly a glance, hardly a thought for the remnants of poor Pixie’s breakfast and lunch and dinner. Solicitous. Professional search for a saucer. Long-faced scrutiny of the cupboards. The hell with the nipples.

And then I was kneeling at her side, leaning down to her again with the box in one hand and the dish in the other, and though she was heaving worse than ever with her eyes still shut, nonetheless she knew I was there and tried to rouse herself. “What next?” I asked, and was startled by the quickness of her reply, shocked by the impatience and urgency of her rich low voice.

“Put some powder in the dish and burn it. For God’s sake.”

Sputtering match, sputtering powder, glowing pinpricks and smoke enough to form a genie. I tried to fight the smoke, the stench, with my two wild hands. But it was everywhere. And now her voice was coming through the smoke and for a moment I could only listen, breathe in the terrible odor, keep watching her despite my tears.

“I don’t really believe in this stuff,” drinking in enormous whiffs of greasy smoke, “but sometimes it helps a little. Don told me about it, found an ad in the Galveston paper,” filling her lungs with punk and dung and sparks, “he was such a sweet airy little clown. Five months of marriage to Don,” swirling, sinking, drifting now on the fumes of the witches’ pot, “and then a land mine in Wiesbaden or some damn place and no more Don and me a widow. …

“I’m a widower myself,” I said, and I stood up carefully, avoided the large white hand that was reaching for my trouser leg, stared once at the little unmoving face of the dead soldier, and started out of the room.

But just as I approached the door: “Well,” I heard her say, “we’ll make a great pair.”

And when I reached the upstairs hallway Pixie was screaming in her cradle and Cassandra was wrapped in a musty quilt and stood trying to coil up her hair before the oval mirror. I heard the gasping breaths below turn to laughter and for a long while hesitated to enter my icy room. Because of the dressmaker’s dummy. Because she had placed the dummy — further sign of industry in the island home, rusted iron-wire skirt and loops of rusted iron-wire for the bold and faceless head, no arms, torso like an hourglass, broad hips and sweeping behind and narrow waist and bang-up bosom all made of padded beige felt, historical essence of womanhood, life-size female anatomy and a hundred years of pins — she had placed this dummy at the head of my bed and dressed it in my naval uniform so that the artificial bosom swelled my white tunic and the artificial pregnancy of the padded belly puffed out the broad front of my official white duck pants which she had pinned to the dummy with a pair of giant safety pins rammed through the felt. Cuffs of the empty sleeves thrust in the pockets, white hat cocked outrageously on the wire head — desperate slant of the black visor, screaming angle of the golden bird — oh, it was a jaunty sight she had prepared for me. But of course I ignored it as best I could, tried to overlook the fresh dark gouts of ketchup she had flung down the front of that defiled figure, and merely shut my door, at least spared my poor daughter from having to grapple with that hapless effigy of my disfigured self.

And moments later, scooping Pixie out of the cradle, tossing her into the air, jouncing her in the crook of my arm, smiling: “Have a good sleep, Cassandra? Time to start the new day.” In the mirror her little cold sleepy face was puffy and pitted, was black and white with shadow, and the faded quilt was drawn over her shoulders and her hair was still down.

“What’s burning?” she said. “What’s that awful smell?” But in the mirror I put a finger to my lips, shook my head, though I knew then that the noxious odor of grief, death and widowhood would fill this house.