Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders (21 page)

“It’s like our wedding party,” I said. “We never had one.”

“I don’t even know your bride.” Isley’s lids were fat, his eyes bloodshot. “Are you from Sparrows Point like Eppitt? Before the industrial wreckage and poverty, it was a beautiful marshland. Named after those swarming sparrows. Beautiful! Imagine air muscled by thousands of beating wings!” He gazed at Eppitt. “Just when you’ve written me off completely, I go and say something worthwhile!”

“It was named after Thomas Sparrow,” I said. I’d read too much. “Not birds.”

Isley ignored me. “What I wouldn’t give to be on the roof of the RCA building. They’ve got Japanese trees up there, a Tudor arch, a cobbled Spanish patio with a wellhead transported from Granada. And lemon trees, Eppitt!”

“It was a great party, Isley! Everyone will be talking about it.”

“Really?” Isley asked, but then he quickly pouted. “Still, what I wouldn’t give just to be in that horrible taxi dance hall on Fourteenth!”

“How could you leave your mother?” I said to Isley, thinking of my own. I stuffed my fingers through the opening between two buttons on Eppitt’s shirt—like he was Napoleon and I was Napoleon’s hand.

“Abercrombie & Fitch is selling riding breeches of cavalry twill!” Isley was wistful. “And all summer Tripler’s had a hat of coconut fiber being worn by people throughout the Bahamas. And I’m only ever here.”

“You could get a real job,” Eppitt suggested.

Isley straightened and turned his head, as if smelling something sharp. “Work doesn’t suit me. It’s why I can never quite get on with the Communists.”

Then the girl in search of the Mistol Drops appeared, cupping something in her hands. She’d lost the ribbon wound around her hair. She opened her hands. “It’s dead!” she said, holding one of the doves.

“No, it isn’t dead, dear!” Isley told her. “It’s sleeping.”

“It’s dead,” she insisted.

“If you go looking for tragedy, you’ll find it! Clapp knows that. He’s gotten married, for Christ’s sake. Beyond all reason!”

Eppitt ignored him. He leaned toward the bird and then back toward me. “It’s dead, Isley.”

And it was, limp and lifeless.

“I’m sure it’s
barely
dead,” Isley said.

“It’s dead dead,” the girl said.

“Let’s have a burial! We could have a ritual ceremony. Are you a virgin?” he asked the girl.

She looked up at him, wide-eyed.

“Don’t worry. I don’t believe in sacrificing virgins!” Isley comforted the girl. “No, no, dear. That’s just a silly waste! You’ll find I’m quite civilized.”

He walked off with the girl, away from the house, the fiends, out toward a distant stand of trees, his green dress billowing in a puff of wind like a rising balloon. I thought of his mother in the upstairs bedroom, shifting with the caged doves. “Men die. Men leave. Men are untrustworthy.” Doesn’t everyone leave at some point—or we’re the ones who get left behind? Isn’t that what life had taught me? “Pray for daughters.” It had never dawned on me to pray for anything, and I’d long since given up on the idea of having a child. But if I could be anyone, if this could be home, why not a family? Why not children?

I was drunk and everything was churning. My life was different now. This was a new world, and whether it needed me or not, here I was in it. I gripped Eppitt’s shirt with my fists and held tight.

I
’m inside a Wawa waiting out a late-afternoon rain shower. Eleanor would call this dawdling. She’d have rushed out of the store by now, hunched over her purchases, and driven off in the driving rain. She pops into my mind constantly, forcing me to compare myself to her. It’s like living my own life and my mother’s at the same time.

It’s been a few days since I promised Tilton I’d take her to George. She keeps asking if I’ve located him yet, whispering so that Eleanor can’t hear. I’m worried about Tilton. She’s agitated and restless but isn’t leaving the house—out of deference to Eleanor?

Ron’s called a few times, left messages that I haven’t returned. He still wants to know if I’m coming to the wedding and the gala. He once said, “How about the rest of our lives? Are you in for that too?”

But I need him to look up George’s whereabouts and I should touch base too. I can’t keep avoiding him.

I call and he answers, “Yes?” He sounds harassed.

“Are you okay?”

“I thought it was Justin. I sent him for ice. Do hotels have ice machines anymore? Shit. He’s probably lost out there.” He shifts his tone quickly. “I’m glad you called back. It’s good to hear your voice.”

I say that it’s good to hear his too, but I don’t know how I feel. “Do you have Internet access?”

“You don’t?”

“I’m living in 1974. I can’t even hope for dial-up.”

“I’ve got the laptop running. What do you need?”

“George Tarkington.”

“Didn’t you promise yourself that you’d never have anything to do with him?”

I walk past the antacids, tampon boxes. “Tilton needs this. And it will piss off my mother.”

“Still devoted to pissing her off?”

“It’s a lifelong vocation,” I say.

It’s quiet as he searches, and then he says, “I thought you might lighten up on her so close to the end.”

“Oh, right,” I say, remembering my lie. “I’m sorry about that. She isn’t dying. I told you that so you wouldn’t pop in.”

“You lied to me?”

“We’re all dying, technically.”

“Damn it, Ruth! I told Susan Burchard.” Susan Burchard is a cofounder of the Harriet Wolf Society. “She’s been desperate to get in touch with you. Damn it!”

“My mother isn’t dying. This is
good
news.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just…She was thinking that maybe before Eleanor dies, she’d give an indication. You know—”

“Eleanor isn’t ever going to give an indication.” Our mother made us promise to never talk about the book’s demise, page by burnt page. Can I break a pact that was based on a possible lie? I scratch my forehead with the edge of the phone. The pact with Tilton is the one that matters. Wound string, labeled and kept all these years—it sits in the zippered pouch inside my pocketbook.

“You know what I think?” Ron says. “Tilton knows. She’s a savant, isn’t she?”

“Just look up George Tarkington. Oxford, Pennsylvania.” I stare at the bank of fogged freezer doors and remember this winter party scene in one of Harriet’s later books: the party has spilled onto the lawn because it’s started to snow. Daisy watches from an upstairs window that’s laced with ice. If only the Harriet Wolf Society would throw parties like the ones in my grandmother’s books. Dance halls, boating parties, drunken picnics, gins in hand, Daisy weeping in a tub, Commies in the kitchen, men climbing trees in tuxedos—
that
would be worthwhile.

“Oh, look at him,” Ron says of my father. “He’s still in real estate and very toothy.”

“Real estate agents are supposed to smile broadly. It’s a prerequisite.” I dig a pencil from the linty innards of my purse. Ron tells me the address and phone number, and I write them on the back of my Wawa receipt. “Thanks.”

“Wait,” he says. “How are you really doing?”

“My mother keeps intruding on my thoughts.”

“Trapped thinking,” Ron says. “You’ve got to break it.” And he reminds me about his first wife’s struggle with OCD. “Have you ever heard her say ‘Stop,’ aloud, but kind of to herself?”

“No,” I say.

“She used to all the time. Sometimes people around her would just stop, thinking she was talking to them. It’s Wolpe’s theory, fruit of the 1950s. I know what you’re thinking—a real apex in psychological research, right?” This is not what I am thinking. “You say ‘Stop,’ take a deep breath, exhale, and divert your attention.”

“Did it work?”

“She opted for high doses of medication.”

“I’m thinking of Hailey too.”

“Hailey,” he says. “Well, Hailey.” Ron has never tried to be Hailey’s father, which is good. He’s always known, too, in ways I couldn’t even fully appreciate, that my relationship with Hailey would define me as a person, for better or for worse. He’s been a parent longer and understands the depth of those waters. “Are you okay?”

“Just kind of out of my head, but fine.”

“I was using Wolpe’s theory a few days ago whenever I thought of you. But I don’t want to stop.”

Teenagers have bounded in from the rain, loud and wet. “Do you think we got married casually?” I ask. “Were we cavalier?”

“Cocky, yes.”

“If we get divorced, will we have a casual divorce?”

“No such thing,” he says. “I need to know what the rest of my life is going to look like. Don’t you?”

“I need to help Tilton.”

“Justin and I can still visit. We’d like to, but not if you’re going to fake someone else’s death.”

“Don’t.”

I stare down at George’s address and number. I won’t call first. I’ll pop in. Did he give us warning before he deserted our family?

I hear Ron’s voice slightly distant from the phone. “The conquered hero returns! No ice?” I hear the thrum of Justin’s voice in the background. “No ice,” Ron says to me.

“No ice.”

I
have two hearts, Wee-ette, and you know why. Both of them are beating inside of me, still. One is the heart of a mongrel king that I ate from a museum display with you right beside me, and one is my own original heart. But now that they’re both within me, there’s no difference. I know what you’re thinking: that heart I ate was a pruned and leathery thing that’s long since moved through my digestive tract. But you’re wrong. It’s always been with me. It was supposed to make my father appear. It failed. Hearts always eventually fail us. (Take my mother’s heart, for example—attacked. And yours, which stopped.) I wish I had more hearts—like one for my mother; one for my father; one heart just for you, Wee-ette; and another for Ruthie. And one for Benny Elderman? Maybe. And one for Hailey, even though I’ve never met her. My two hearts must do a lot of work: missing my father; missing you, Wee-ette. One wants to be with Ruthie out in the world and one wants to stay here and take care of my mother.

I need more hearts.

I’m in Ruthie’s bedroom. I shouldn’t be. She’s out. But the doggies are with me, and it’s their room too so I’m an invited guest. One of the dogs has very wet eyes, one of which is winky. It has a shorter snout, legs, and tail, broader ribs. I call this one Pim. The other has a more fully fanned tail and head fur, more closely cropped ears. I call that one Pom. Both cock their heads when I make birdcalls. They understand that language better than English. It’s clearer, more urgent, more honest.

I open one of the windows and look out, knowing that my mother would have a fit if she saw me at an open window. She was almost eaten by a window. But that’s not true. That’s just what it seemed like. It was her heart attack. If one of my hearts was attacked—or attacked itself, that is—I would have a spare. If they attacked each other, I would be a goner.

Am I at this open window because I want to get back at my mother because she’s a liar?

This window is directly over the roof that protects people who knock on the front door in the rain. But no one knocks on our door in any weather except an occasional low-level political candidate or two girls from the local high school dressed in band uniforms, selling submarine sandwiches so they can go to Ontario for a competition.

I wonder what it would be like to go to Ontario in a band costume.

Ruthie climbed out of this window, onto that roof, and ran away in the night at sixteen. I could never do this. I’m sickly and weak, with lacy skin. I’ve had many illnesses: fevers, vomiting, coughing, sneezing. Sun can redden my skin. It can even blister and peel. I’m allergic to most greenery and animals, but not these doggies. I don’t have enough body fat to float, much less swim. Milk gives me gas. I’m asthmatic; I get all breathy sometimes. Bee stings make the affected area swell. Mosquito bites too—my body overreacts and there’s itching and puffiness.

I touch the tar shingles, warmed by the sun and wet from a fast rain. I lift each doggy so it can look out.

You know what’s true? I ask the winky one.

She doesn’t know.

Ruthie left us, I tell the dog. My mother didn’t lie about that.

And here is the Eldermans’ youngest son, Benny. I describe him this way: head of moderate size, oblong; neck long; arms and legs lanky; kneecaps bony, protruded; hair shaggy, dark, wavy; eyes blue with dark lashes; nose high at bridge, knotted; ears inconspicuous; lips nice. It’s 3 p.m. He’s stretching in the yard. He’s one year older than I am, but he looks older. Maybe living in the world ages you—sun and weather—like a deck chair. He wears a visor—red, white, and blue, like a proud American.

As I lean out the window, I wonder if he’ll notice me.

He does. He squints and puts his hand above his eyes, shading them. He then waves his hand, which seems loosely attached to his lanky arm.

I flip my hand up and back down and then dip back into the window and lean against the wall.

That was true. It just happened.

I’m thinking of my two hearts, beating wildly. The trip I took with you, Wee-ette, out to the museum was true too. My mother was agitated. You hadn’t been out of the house in ages! Why now? Why this place? Why with Tilton? Tilton is only a seven-year-old! My mother had many whys—legitimate questions, she called them. But you didn’t answer, Wee-ette. You used to say, It’s my job to write the books, not to explain them. You got used to not explaining things, including yourself.

Since you couldn’t drive and my mother wasn’t invited, we took the bus. This was before I stopped doing things like public transportation. I was still in school. I was still almost normal.

The bus launched us through space into the country, which appeared, at first, like a filmstrip of fields and trees stuttering through the rows of windows. I felt loose in the bus’s vinyl seat. It seemed possible to simply drift up, weightlessly gliding around in a test rocket. I offered to hold your pocketbook because I wanted the enormous weight to hold me to my seat. Sometimes I wondered if you carried a bowling ball around in your pocketbook. It was shiny and fat as a bee’s rump. It seemed to be part of your body, with its straps clamped in the lock of your elbow. No matter how much lotion I rubbed into your elbows, they were calloused knobs, and one jutted out protectively, and the straps disappeared into that fine inner white skin of your arm, so delicate with its pucker of blue veins.

The bus’s brakes barked lonesomely. We waddled down the rubber-matted aisle. You know this is why it’s hard for me to go out, Wee-ette: everyone was waiting—their faces perched in our direction—and I took each face in, which is how I am. The faces were: shiny, dull, flushed, sad, hopeful, destitute. I held on to each for as long as possible. My mother doesn’t understand. She knows only that it’s too much for me. And it is!

Right this minute I am here in this room looking at the box marked Ruthie—Random, and I still remember one face on the bus, fatter than the rest, with a jubby chin that jiggled due to the bus’s throbbing motor.

See how it is, Wee-ette? You know how it is. My mother says that my memory is one of my greatest burdens. But it’s more than that too. Better and worse.

The bus doors opened, and we climbed down the big steps. The bus doors shut. And with a groaning cloud of dust the bus abandoned us at the end of a long road. It was late spring and everything smelled like honeysuckle—a version of sweetness I associated with my teacher Mrs. Blaskow, and her stiff hair and liver spots.

I’d never been in the country. Its wide-open spaces were unsettling. The grass rose up green and vicious everywhere. The buds of bristly, thick-necked roadside flowers gaped at me. My mother would tell me not to get close to greenery. It could be poison ivy. But there were birds. Warbling, fluttering.

We walked until there was a house. It wasn’t a museum at all. Wild peacocks in the yard, their dusty feathers all knit together. Dogs howled near a statue of Saint Francis that was stained with brittle bird droppings.

A small white clapboard sign read, Welcome to the Isley Wesler Museum of Antiquities. Free to the public.

You knocked on the door, Wee-ette, while we blocked our crotches from the dusty dogs.

Isley Wesler was old and lispy. One arm clamped to his chest, he said the museum wasn’t appropriate for a child my age. She won’t understand, he said. His skull was dotted with liver spots.

She understands everything, you said back to him. Don’t you, Tilton?

I do, I said.

Something was going on. The air had shifted. Wee-ette, I could tell you wanted something from Isley Wesler. We were there for a reason.

Isley Wesler took us around his house, half shuffly and half knee-buckly. He pointed out paintings of dead Weslers looking withdrawn. He pulled ancient curios from behind glass-front hutches, including a set of wooden teeth that his great-grandfather had worn. He was proud of a photograph of a Wesler wearing jodhpurs and a netted helmet like a beekeeper, holding someone’s head—just the head. Above the photograph hung a sword that had supposedly done the job of removing the head. This Wesler wasn’t bored. I figured that it took a lot to keep a Wesler’s attention.

There was a small pantry-sized room filled with unopened letters.

Why don’t you open them? I asked.

Oh, I’ve let it go. That’s history.

Wee-ette, your eyes went wild over those stacks.

He hobbled upstairs. We followed him. Isley Wesler said, This is the bed in which my parents had relations and I took root in my mother, growing inside of her until I was a mere four pounds two. This is also the spot of my birth. I was pushed out of her and into the world. I was so small that they configured an incubator of sorts, surrounded by bricks that were alternately warmed in the oven and replaced. This is also where Weslers come to die.

I wanted to know if he was the last Wesler alive. Was the bed waiting for only one more? And what if he died while on the toilet or in the tub? I didn’t ask. I’d said that I understood everything, so I kept my mouth shut.

The death room was small, with a double bed draped in mosquito netting that was swooped up and tied to a ceiling hook. I imagined Isley Wesler dying there. I imagined myself dying there too.

He pointed out an eight-legged calf in a glass case perched in the corner. I imagined it staring at me while I died. But I was thinking of conception too, Wee-ette. And that’s when I blurted, What does that mean, had relations?

The old man glared at you, Wee-ette, like he meant, I told you she wasn’t old enough! And he rolled his eyes.

Then, Wee-ette, you turned to me and said, Oh, it’s nothing, Tilton. A man gets with a woman. He becomes herky-jerky like a mechanical pony in front of an old department store, grunts a bit, and a baby begins to grow.

Wee-ette, this is still just about all I know on the matter.

You make it sound so tempting, Isley Wesler said. His tone was filled with static electricity.

And you turned to him and you stared at him, leaning forward, nearly tipping over, and said, Eat your heart out, Mr. Wesler.

I don’t know what you meant, except I knew it was part of the reason we were there. You’d known Isley Wesler before we’d arrived. This was part of your past. At that moment his eyes got overly large, and you looked at him like you knew that he knew exactly who you were. You and Isley Wesler were locked together and unable to come up for air.

I thought about all of this later, when I replayed it in my brain. Because in that moment I only existed below you two. I was thinking of eating a heart out. Was that where babies came from? Was that where I’d come from? Had my mother eaten a heart? Was my father, George Tarkington, now heartless?

Is that how it’s done? I said. Is that how there’s a mother and a father?

Your attention fell to me.

Yes, hush, you said, and you tightened your grip on my hand and hurried me out of the room and down the stairs.

Wait! Isley Wesler said. Don’t go just yet!

And this is where it becomes strange and misty in my mind.

You paused, Wee-ette, at the foot of the stairs and turned, because you still wanted something from Isley Wesler.

And he said, One more thing: my heart!

I was thinking,
A heart?
It couldn’t just be a coincidence, Isley Wesler pulling a heart out at this very moment.

He shuffled past us down the steps and into the parlor. Follow me! he said, and we did. He pulled out a silver box, gray from lack of polish, from a bottom dresser drawer.

Regardez!
he said, which is French. Isley Wesler held the box out with his good hand because the other was wizened and tightly pinned, his curled fingers covering his frail chest protectively. He opened the box and whispered, The heart of a mongrel king!

The heart was a leathery prune sitting on velvet.

While tombs were ransacked, Mr. Wesler said, one of my ancestors absconded with the heart before it was lost in the tumult.

You started to back away, Wee-ette. This wasn’t what you wanted, but I stood still. I didn’t know what a mongrel was, but I wanted a father. I’d heard you tell the man to eat his heart out, and when I’d asked if that was how a mother and father came to be, you’d said yes.

And here was a heart.

I thought it would be better for my mother to eat the heart. But she wasn’t here. It was up to me. Before anyone could stop me, I reached inside the box, popped the heart into my mouth, and hoped for a father.

The heart was nearly tasteless and very dusty, if you’re wondering.

You gasped. Tilton, spit it up! Tilton! You slapped me on the back and rattled me by the arm. Tilton! Tilton!

But I gulped it as fast as I could—oh, the tight press as it made its way down my throat.

Mr. Wesler could barely breathe. Who, who would do such a thing? he shouted. How reckless!

But you pulled me to your bosom like a baby, although I was much too grown-up. How dare you offer such a thing to a child? You are a sick man! To offer a heart to a young child like it’s a candy! You glared at Isley Wesler and said,
You
have been reckless, Mr. Wesler.
You
have been reckless with someone else’s heart!

And that seemed like the reason we had come. You needed to say those words and here they were. You knew Isley Wesler because you had a whole big fat life. I don’t know how I know this. I just do.

You didn’t lie to me like my mother has, but you’ve withheld the truth. It’s like a life is a pact that gets wound from the hands of one generation to the next, but if you don’t tell your life, if you don’t hand it over, you’re cutting the string. Then the next generation has no tether. They float off like an astronaut, alone.

We have a pact. Only give them the book if there’s an emergency. If all’s going well, don’t. But it’s not going well. Maybe it never was.

This is what I remember: you marched me out of the museum, my head still clamped tightly to your chest. I could only see out of one wide terrified eye—the gaping flowers, the deathly honeysuckle, the greenery grasping at me, the dogs, the peacocks.