The Blazing World

Maisie Lord (edited transcript, June 13, 2012)

Just a week ago, I found one of my mother’s notebooks hidden behind a row of books in the small building on Nantucket we called “the children’s house” because Ethan and I slept there when we were little. Mother has been dead for eight years already, but many more years might have passed without the notebook coming to light. Ethan and I had decided to sell the Nantucket house, and we were there alone, sifting through things and deciding what to save and what to give away, and we laughed a lot and remembered finding the dead gull on the beach and pretending the green stones we found were magic, and I swam every day, and Ethan didn’t, because he’s hydrophobic and can now admit it, poor guy. He used to go in the water when we were kids, and he learned how to swim, but I think he was always afraid of drowning, and now he doesn’t have to pretend he likes swimming anymore. The plain gray notebook was stuffed behind Treasure Island and Pippi Longstocking, and I instantly recognized my mother’s extravagant handwriting with its big loops, “Notebook O. The Fifth Circle.” She labeled the dozens of notebooks she kept with letters. I had spent years going through her notebooks for The Natural Mask, which is finally finished. After she died, we found hundreds and hundreds of pages of her writings that filled one notebook after another. Together they make a veritable tome.

I told Ethan I would read the notebook first and then give it to him. It’s funny, I would never have dared to read it when Mother was alive, but the dead lose their privacy, or much of it. The controversy about Mother and Rune and Maskings has not gone away, although those of us who were close to Mother have a pretty good idea of what the truth is because we believe what she wrote. After I had read the notebook, I handed it to Ethan and went for a walk down Squam Road, the old road I knew so well, feeling bruised and churned up. I suppose I was trying to fit together my discontinuous mothers into one person, and it wasn’t easy. I had to fit Father’s double life in, too, and that hurt. The game with the masks Mother and Rune played on Nantucket would be turned into the dances in Beneath, and it seems to me that the man Richard Brickman and the girl Ruina represented two warring sides of my mother. We all have weak parts of ourselves, and we all have dominating, cruel parts, too, but I think they are usually more mixed together than they were in my mother. Her entry about her visit to Rune and the tape he showed her made me sick. I had glimpsed a sadistic side of Rune when he taunted me with a key at the opening for The Suffocation Rooms. I have asked myself what Mother wanted, what she hoped for. It is so tiring, so crazy, so humiliating, this world of winning and losing and playing the game, but she wanted to be part of it somehow, and Rune knew how to get to her, where to aim the knife. To be honest, I had an urge to suppress that entry and others, too, to rip them out of the notebook and burn the pages, but that would have been stupid. As I walked under a hot sun on the dusty road past the familiar mailboxes, I kept seeing a picture of my mother, not as a grown-up but as the child in her simile: You were like a child frozen on a stool in the corner. That’s the mental image I still have when I think of that awful meeting between Mother and Rune: my tall, strong, passionate mother as a silent little girl, a girl who had been turned to stone.

When I returned from my walk, I found Ethan lying on the lower bunk bed with the notebook beside him. He turned to look at me, and I saw Mother. That moment of startling recognition lasted only seconds, but I saw my mother in my brother, and then she disappeared just as quickly as she had appeared, but it shook me up a little. I sat down beside Ethan, put my hand on his arm, and waited to hear what he thought. He looked over at me and said, “I like the writing.” I burst out laughing. I think I was relieved. I hadn’t thought about aesthetics at all. Ethan went on to say that he admired the way our mother shifted person from first to second to third. She made it look easy. I told my brother that I loved him. He nodded. When I send Ethan an e-mail I always sign it “Love, Maisie” or “Love and kisses, Maisie” or “Your loving sister, Maisie,” and he signs his “Ethan.” That’s how it’s always been and that’s how it will always be. I’m used to it. Ethan said that some entries in the notebook had to be included in the book, and he would scan the material and call Professor Hess right away before it was too late.

I thought we should think about it carefully, weigh the pluses and minuses. I wanted to know if he didn’t find the entries upsetting, creepy, in fact. He said yes, but we were talking about our mother’s legacy, her work as an artist. This notebook, Ethan insisted, explained the mystery of Richard Brickman. He believed “Harriet” would have wanted the story of that pseudonym told. Brickman was yet another of our mother’s alter egos, part of a larger narrative. In the end, Ethan convinced me he was right.

I asked Ethan which sinners were in Dante’s fifth circle of the Inferno, because I had forgotten. The wrathful and sullen, he said, Cantos VII and VIII. The wrathful and sullen are doomed to wallow in the filth and the stench and the fetid air of the river Styx. Ethan has a wonderful memory for books. He says that often, not always but often, he can see the page and the page number in his mind and sometimes read off the passage. He couldn’t do it this time, but he knew that Virgil and Dante meet the Furies, who call on the Medusa to come and turn Dante into stone. She doesn’t do it, of course. Had she succeeded, the poem would have been over. Rune turned my mother to stone, for a while, anyway. I hate him for it. I hate him still, even though he’s dead. And I understand Mother’s anger, her rage, her fury. Inside the cover of Notebook O, I found these words: “Let go upon this man the stormblasts of your bloodshot breath, wither him in your wind, after him, hunt him down once more and shrivel him in your vitals’ heat and flame.”

Those terrible words are from Aeschylus, The Eumenides, the third play of the Oresteia. Orestes has killed his mother, Clytemnestra, and in the play, the murdered woman’s ghost eggs on the furies to avenge her death, to punish the matricide.

Mother still comes to me in my dreams. She is always a ghost now. In the two years or three years after she died, she used to come to me as her old living self, and I would rush toward her and, a couple of times, she took me in her arms and held me, her lips pressed against my neck, and the sensation was warm and happy. But then she began to recede, and now, when I dream of her, I know she is a phantom, a dead person, and I cannot reach her. She is often rattling around in her old studio in Red Hook or making mime-like gestures at me that I cannot interpret. Just a few days ago, I dreamed that she walked into my bedroom at home. She was completely transparent, a real old-fashioned ghost, and when I called out to her, she turned in my direction, extended her arms, and opened her mouth. I could see way down into her lungs, and I heard her breathe once, and then the whole room was on fire. I wasn’t afraid of the blaze in the dream, and I didn’t try to speak to her. I just stood by quietly and watched the room burn.