Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders (6 page)

But, in reality, my father didn’t take me in. We only had lunch at a Steak ’n Shake. He was broad-shouldered, as brutish-looking as Eleanor had made him out to be in the bedtime story she shoved down my throat as a child, as if trying hard to raise victims. But he didn’t chomp a cigar or yell and curse. He was a fast-talker, slightly marble-mouthed—nervous, tired, a little drunk? He still had a thick head of coarse hair, taut skin, a fresh tan.

He told me he had spoken too soon offering to take me in. His home life was tricky. “Things are delicate.”

I’d hoped that my father had married the widow, Marie Cultry. I could blame his leaving us on true love, like Johnny Cash leaving his first wife to marry June Carter. But I was too afraid to ask. I didn’t want to have to take the rejection personally. But I was so crushed that he didn’t want to take me in that I told him I had a place to stay. By then I was dating Jim, who would become my first husband, Hailey’s dad. Plan B was pushing Jim to let me move in, which was what happened. He was eighteen and a housepainter, working his way through college part-time.

My father asked if I was eating well, if I liked reading or movies or sports. He was probably trying to ferret out if I was doing drugs. (I was doing some drugs.) Eventually, he laid out his plan. “Why don’t you let me get you an apartment? You get your GED, take community college classes. I’ll foot the bill.”

I took down my father’s address and phone number. When I needed tuition a few years later, I called and he delivered, true to his word. But we had no relationship. I didn’t invite him to graduation and didn’t tell him about grad school. That would have felt like milking it.

The ringing is endless. I hang up.

One of the dogs trots in. I can’t tell which one. Who gets custody of the dogs if neither of us can tell them apart? The dog stares at me, head cocked, reminding me of hosting foreign exchange students who were sometimes frustrated by an insurmountable language barrier.

Ron walks through the room then, into the bathroom, where he starts moussing his hair. “Found my cell!” he says. “It almost took a spin in the washer.”

A rare memory of my father pops into my mind. “My dad got us a Lab from the pound. It ate its own poops after they’d been left in the yard to harden.” He fed the dog fat rinds from the table, which Eleanor took as a comment on her cooking. The dog would be flatulent for the rest of the night.

“Eating your own poop—that’s the height of vanity, if you ask me,” he says, which is hard to take from a man who is moussing his hair. Ron’s hair shifts unnaturally in wind, as if it’s a single unit.

I hit redial and hope that Tilton picks up. She has a birdlike voice. She’s a chirper. Not surprising, as she’s spent more time listening to birds in the garden than to actual human beings—aside from our mother. Still no answer. I hang up again.

“Who do you keep calling?” Ron asks from the bathroom.

“Tilty.” My Tilt-a-Whirl! How many times did I say those words as a kid?

“Just leave a goddamn message,” he says. He’s always been slightly jealous of Tilton even though he’s never met her. He wanted to visit the house—home of Harriet Wolf—and pouted when I refused to reach out beyond the wedding invitation. I’ve admitted to myself that perhaps I’ve started calling Tilton, as my marriage is crumbling, out of a desire to reunite with my family, but the prospect scares me as much as it draws me in. I want to flirt with it, perhaps—the way one might flirt with, say, Melody Roth, if one were, say, on her PhD committee. “Why do people hate leaving messages nowadays?” Ron says.

“Eleanor Tarkington is stuck in 1974,” I say. “There’s no answering machine. I wonder if the phone is the color of avocado and has one of those ringlet cords.”

“I’m making a pot of coffee before I leave. Do you want a cup?” He doesn’t usually make the coffee. He struggles to negotiate the heaping-spoonful-to-cup-of-water ratio. His smile says, “I’m trying! Look at me trying!” He still thinks he might get his way—an open marriage that includes dating Melody Roth. I’d get his benefits, his pension, house privileges? It’s very retro of him, vaguely prostitution.

But I do want coffee. “Yes, I’ll take a cup.”

As he jogs downstairs, I call home again, and this time Tilton answers. “Ruthie? Is this you?”

“Why haven’t you been answering? Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.” With this phrase, I’m reminded of how stunted Tilton is. At what age do you stop saying “Sure I’m sure”? “I didn’t answer because I was watching TV. I watched TV all night.”

“You did
what?
” Eleanor Tarkington despises television. When I was a teenager, she blamed television for my insubordination as well as the general collapse of society.

“I watched large women in bras and underwear wearing huge wide wings walk down this flat ramp over and over. And a man poured blue liquid into a pad. This morning there were people on couches, drinking coffee, trying on wigs. They had guests and a studio audience.”

“Eleanor let you watch TV?”

“It’s okay. I won’t get the big call. The house tried to eat her. Then she had a heart attack. There was an ambulance. She peed her pantsuit. I touched her face. I took a bath in my nightgown, which had blood on it.”

“Slow down! Wait,” I say. The Pomeranians have started yapping downstairs. I can’t be sure I’ve heard Tilton correctly. “Did Eleanor have a heart attack?”

“Yes,” Tilton says. “Mrs. Gottleib is taking me to the hospital to see her.”

“To see Eleanor because of her heart attack?”

“Yes.”

“Eleanor is in the hospital.” I can’t imagine my mother with a head cold, much less in a hospital. Nor could I make sense of the rest of it. My mother was eaten by a house? What on earth did that mean? “Why was there blood on your nightgown?”

“I hurt my thumb trying to open a window.”

“Is it okay?”

“It hurts.”

“Mom wants you going to see her in a hospital?” This would expose Tilton to germs.

“I’m sure she doesn’t. But Mrs. Gottleib is taking me there anyway. I want to see her. I’m both agoraphobic and claustrophobic so maybe they’ll cancel each other out.”

“You’re not either of those things. How many times do I have to say it? You’re fine, Tilton. You’re
better
than fine. I mean, my God, you’ve been through a trauma and you’re okay!” I am no good at crises myself. It’s one of the reasons I let my ex get custody of Hailey. I was afraid something might go wrong on my watch. “Was it a mild heart attack?” I ask in a soothing voice.

“Do they come in mild?”

“Have you talked to a doctor? Will there be surgery?”

“Maybe Mrs. Gottleib talked to the doctor.” Then Tilton’s voice shifts a little deeper. “Have we come to an impasse?” It’s Eleanor’s voice.

“Don’t say things like that,” I say.

“Like what?”

“Eleanor things in an Eleanor voice!”

“But have we?”

“I’m sure Eleanor’s made an emergency plan. A what-to-do in case of X, Y, and Z.”

“She keeps that kind of thing in her head. But don’t worry. She won’t die,” Tilton says. “Not in a hospital.”

“Of course,” I say, trying to be positive. “That’s right.”

“I have to get ready to go,” Tilton says.

“It’s going to be okay. You know that.”

“I know!” she says brightly. “Because you’re coming home!”

“I am?”

“You are!” she says, and then she hangs up.

My first thought is illogical:
Someone should call my father. He should know.
Of course it’s none of his business. I do know how to reach him, though. Six months earlier, I found myself at the university library, doing a quick search for my father in their computer lab. It revealed that he didn’t get far. His real estate practice is in Oxford, Pennsylvania. Within seconds, I had an office number, a fax number, and a home number.

I haven’t called. I know what it’s like to be the one who left.

My mother forced Tilton and me to make a pact as kids. “Never look for your father,” she said. “It will only stroke his ego. He doesn’t deserve us!” Our family was big on pacts. I remember the feeling of string winding around my hand pressed to my mother’s and Tilton’s, the too-tight weave, and afterward the red indentations from the string. I rub my hand as if the string is still there.

Ron reappears with a mug of coffee for me, but I don’t reach for it.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Eleanor’s had a heart attack. She’s in the hospital. Tilton keeps saying she’s not going to die, which makes me think she’s going to die.”

He sets the mug down on the bedside table. “Are you going to see her?” he asks.

“I don’t know.” I think of Tilton—a child in my mind’s eye, blonde hair, round cheeks, a little bow of mouth. She’s in her nightgown, now bloody. “I abandoned her, you know,” I say.

“I’m sure your mother never saw it that way. She’s very independent.”

“No,” I say. “Tilton!”

“Oh.”

“Did I ever tell you that in middle school she cut my hair once when I was sleeping? My mother never even yelled at her about it.”

“Maybe this is the time for all three of you to set things right,” he says. “You should go. It’ll put you on the East Coast, in driving distance to Colette’s wedding and the HWS convention.”

But his concern, I know, is false. He wants me to inch closer to my family merely so he can inch closer to Harriet Wolf. “Colette doesn’t want me at her wedding,” I finally say.

“Look, if you don’t come, people will wonder why. I don’t want to tell people at my daughter’s wedding that you’re divorcing me. It’s bad form.”

What if I did go home and reunite with Tilton and even Eleanor? Wouldn’t they want to meet Hailey? Wouldn’t Hailey want to meet them? And if Hailey met Eleanor and Tilton, wouldn’t she have more sympathy for me?

“Come to the wedding. Just show up.” Ron pauses a moment and then whispers, “Pretend you like me.” It’s what Weldon says to Daisy when the photographer has them sit for their wedding photograph.

“I do like you.” And it’s true. I’m not quite sure why, but the feeling persists—even when I hate him.

“I like you too,” he says, and then he adds, “Wow, so the gatekeeper’s really in the hospital.”

The gatekeeper—I hate the term although I’ve employed it myself and used to dole out memories of Harriet and Eleanor to Ron and other members of the Harriet Wolf Society. When I ran out, I made some up. I’ve never told Ron that my grandmother burned the pages of the seventh book every day after she wrote them. In fact, I hinted that she shipped them to another writer—the identity of whom I said I could never quite figure out. Perhaps a lover? Perhaps a
female
lover, I intimated once, just to make it more interesting. The real confession is that I loved my grandmother’s books—not in a scholarly way, but in a heartfelt way that I’d be embarrassed to talk to Ron about. “Don’t call her the gatekeeper. She’s my mother right now, okay?”

“But your mother could well have kept it locked up all this time. If someone unearths the final installment, I tell you, it’ll be big news. The publishing event of the year, if not the decade! The feminists alone—they’ve
canonized
her for being a single mother. It’ll be a feeding frenzy.”

I’m trying to imagine my mother in a hospital. “The idea of Eleanor dying is surreal,” I say. “She’s always been so, I don’t know,
vivante!
”

He starts pacing. “Maybe this is what our marriage needed. This—helping you through this—would give me purpose,” he says, as if I give a shit about
his
purpose. And then he realizes this or reads my disgust enough to amend. “It could bring us together.” He stands there, hands on his hips, waiting.

“Are you kidding?”

“What would happen if you needed someone? Really
needed
someone? And what if that person was
me?
”

“I’m going without you. I needed somewhere to go, and now I have it.”

I
’m not naive. If Tilton pulls these pages from their hiding place, they will likely move out into the world. Will Tilton read them herself? It doesn’t matter, Tilton. We know each other as constants, deeper than any details. Ruthie will read these pages, if given the chance. She may be a grown woman with her own vexations, but she won’t outgrow her curiosity, that beautiful suspicious gaze, and her deep need to be understood. No one can know someone else, I want to tell her. We can’t even know ourselves. (Are you here, Ruthie?) She’s taken George’s absence the hardest. It’s burrowed deep down and dwells.

Eleanor is so willful, she may choose not to read this. Hello, Eleanor, if you’re here. For so long I didn’t speak of your father. To know the truth now may be useless. I was too heartbroken to explain my own loss. I opted for fictions. I’m sorry. I wasn’t capable of anything else. And I know that my choices took a toll on you. When George first came along, you grabbed hold of him like someone spurned. Did I spurn you? As for your father, you should know that you were no more spurned by your father than I was by my mother. You need to understand that. I
hope I can make it clear. With your George long gone, I watch you push on. You’re doing it more admirably than I ever could and with greater strength than I ever had.

Still, I can’t write the truth through the lens of your perception. I held up some other version of myself for so long, thinking I was doing you a favor. Forgive me if it’s hard to change that now. I’ll have to pretend you’re not here.

As for my readers, I’ll pretend you’re not here too. I know that you really want Daisy and Weldon. The books changed on you as they went, but Weldon and Daisy were constant—wanting, wanting, wanting. A love story. I didn’t know it until the end. All stories worth telling are love stories.

I haven’t forgotten you, my readers. You were young when you read my first book; I got in early and created a wild terrarium. Remember the family of sparrows, how Daisy and Weldon helped them burrow to the underground? Daisy’s mother, a woman made of moths? How you wanted the monkey king to save you—yes, you—from your quarreling drunken parents? You wrote me letters about those parents, the cruel teachers, your sick pills. (The sickly often have the best imaginations.) One of you had a brain dysfunction. In a fit, you’d bitten off most of your tongue, but you wrote to me about the talking tree, filled with tongues. Could I get you one?

The tree wasn’t make-believe, I told you. But at some point you probably didn’t believe me and ripped the letter up.

You became splintered versions of myself, ones I wanted to mend and paste together to re-create myself, as if I, the writer, were only an accumulation of pieces of you, as if you’d written me. Maybe this is impossible to understand.

And after the first book, the second, the third, I started to fear that the terrarium was aired, bleached by a proper education, more metal filing cabinet than terrarium. You grew up, so
did I, and there was Weldon in his loafers and adman suit. He felt like a pet lion wearing a strap-on bowler, belted into the motorcycle sidecar at a boardwalk amusement. For Daisy, in a library, dizzy as motes in shifting sun. Insanity was realism. I offered sex and death—you dog-eared the racy passages and passed them around.

You grew up. Your lisps dried out until they were as shrewd as purse strings. You learned to knot neckties and jostle into nylons. I missed the children, but I loved you too. I imagined you as you studied my work in college while hypersexual, forever pining. You sent me diatribes on love, violence, war, and symbolism, and I didn’t have the heart to tell you that I never wrote a symbol in my life. If you gaze at any text long enough, it disconnects from meaning, from inkiness, and becomes a symbol of something. Stare at your floor for half an hour and you’ll be able to found a new religion. Your papers were all wrong except in what they revealed about your own gazing and subconscious, a beautiful thing.

Your young faces became weighted by budding jowls. You’ve gone from doughy to taut to doughy again. We grew old together. You are bankers with fattened knuckles, pallbearers, librarians—like Daisy was—dithering through the stacks as if overseeing your own ward of loons. Some of you are dead. By the time you read this, I will be too. We’ll share that as well.

I went through a phase of reading the professors who dissected my books. I was a feminist, absurdist, magical realist, modernist, postmodernist. They gave me psychological, sociopolitical, religious, feminist contexts in terms of Foucault, Freud, and Jung, and diagnosed my anxiety of influence. What brains! What effort! And yet, in the end, it was like having a deaf psychoanalyst. Not that I wanted to talk—not then.

Sometimes I worry that the scholars spent much too much time on me. I imagine their children painting faces on their knees, portraits of pretend parents while the real ones toiled away.

Deep inside each of you—reader, scholar, critic—a molecule of the terrarium still exists. If you still exist, that is. Why else does the word “tiger lily” make you think of a flower with petals growling open to show rows of large teeth—as Daisy imagined it? Why sometimes are you struck by someone else’s full humanity, their rich imagined inner life, a version of a true self that can’t be expressed, and in that moment you feel your own inexpressible inner life?

Or how, in your dreams, you can conjure the entire ocean?

Each molecule of story is a universe—grotesque and stunning, all sunlit steam and engines laboring in the chests of trains and creatures with small pink hands and horns and, yes, a tree with tongues; it returned after all in book six just as childhood reappears in old age.

I write this in my old age—as agog as a lamppost.

I hope, my dear readers, that your hearts haven’t stiffened, rind-tough, or gone dowdy with flab—poor neglected hearts, a tragic crime. May you keep yourselves trimmed—hair, nails, suit jackets—but untamed within. (Be curious.)

Maybe after I die, you will all have grown weary of me.

But one lonesome biographer might soldier on to tell a quiet, falsified, feminist life—my blissful childhood, my daughter born out of wedlock without apology, and my reclusive end. Pale biographer, I want to comb the snarls from your hair and send you out to put your face in the sun.

To go on, I must ignore you all—by God, you’re a glorious distraction. I must especially ignore the beautiful faces of my own progeny. Know I love you, that this is a feeble attempt to show that love before it’s too late.

Mrs. Funk made an appointment with Dr. Brumus and told him there was God in me. Candid about her faith, she probably called me “Little Girl Jesus of the Dreaming Wounds” and described the bloody crown of thorns wreathing my pillowcase, the divine imprint of my face.

It wouldn’t have impressed Brumus, who wasn’t a religious man. But it must have stirred the old debate between him and my father. Someone saw some glimmer in me. Maybe my father should have handed me over to my mother after all, instead of this deceit. He sent his monthly checks but still had never laid eyes on me.

Brumus told Mrs. Funk he would look into the matter. I was called in and Brumus said the words I’ll never forget: “There may be something to you, Harriet. Perhaps we can prove it.” He was a detective now. If there was something, he would find it!

There was often a new secretary outside Dr. Brumus’s office. This one was young and pudgy, with a crimped chin and dimples. Dr. Brumus charged her with teaching me to read. This wasn’t normally done at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children—it was considered a waste or, worse, a cruelty. The school was designed to shush the criminal element in our souls, nothing else.

The new secretary taught me letters in Dr. Brumus’s office when Brumus was out. More than once, Brumus interrupted these lessons and took the secretary to a small room next door with a cot where he rested if too weary to head home at night. While he was in there with the
secretary, I heard the sound of an owl. I wondered if it was caged. Was it a pet or part of some medical testing that would one day help the feeble-minded? A child who hadn’t had such a stunted life might have understood the more logical reality, but I was a child trying to piece together how the world worked; my assumptions were sometimes illogical. I listened closely. The calls started as soft cooing and then rose louder and faster until they were clear hoots. I worried about the owl. What tests made it hoot like that? Did the secretary and Brumus have to hold the owl down while it struggled? When they came back into the room, they were always quite flushed, as if from exertion.

I asked them about the owl, and the secretary said, “You have to start acknowledging the difference between real and imagined.” Her eyes jiggled between Brumus and me.

Once, alone, I peeked into the empty room with its lonesome cot and humid warmth. No owl. No empty cage that had once held an owl.

When the secretary taught me the letter
O,
phonetically in all of its variations, I heard the owl in her own throat. She was the owl. What had made her call out like that? Was Brumus holding her down? Poor, poor owl. In my head, I named her the Owl.

Somehow I never put together the secretary’s hooting with what began to happen between Eppitt and me beneath the Duck Porch. There was too much of a divide between my own life—as a moron—and the mysterious lives of normal adults who came and went of their own free will. Plus, though young Eppitt and I foraged mightily for each other, we never had sex.

Things started up between us a few weeks after we met. I was standing next to the Duck Porch, which I had assumed had something to do with ducks, and the sickly children stared out at the world as if they were looking at something far off on the horizon. Ducks, I imagined. And
so, whenever I could, I’d stop by the Duck Porch and try to see what they saw. The porch sat on low wooden stilts, with a crawl space below.

One day I heard a “Psst, psst” from under the porch.

I got down on my hands and knees and looked underneath to find the face of Eppitt Clapp. It was one to grow into. His nose, his lips, and his eyes crowded his face, so there wasn’t much face left. The slightest emotion caused a lot of action. His pouts made his face look rubbery. His “Excuse me?” looked like shock. His worry looked like a sudden affliction. None of this sounds beautiful, but it was. I loved the drama of his face.

He was lying on his stomach, propped on his elbows, holding up that face, which seemed heavy with its oversized parts. “I knew it was you because of your
shockings.
”

Shoes and stockings. That’s what he meant. He was nervous again. “What about them?” All of our shoes and stockings were identical.

“Your shoes are in-footed and your stockings sag at the knees. One’s got a hole and there’s blue skin under.”

My sharp shinbones collected bruises. With Eppitt, I was seen—in great detail. “What are you doing under there?” I asked him.

“This is my house. I live here.”

“You live in King’s Cottage.”

“Yeah, but here too. Come in before somebody sees you.”

I looked around—Parson, a guard of King’s Cottage, swatted the wide rump of Miss Wingrit, who taught weaving. Wingrit squealed and smiled, wagging a finger at him. Rules about boys and girls mixing were strict, but not for our keepers. They liked to gather and smoke, huddling away from us whenever they had the chance. We were their unwanted children.

I wasn’t sure whether I should go under or not. There was God in me. Would God scurry under a Duck Porch? I didn’t know the answer.

I scurried under.

We dug our elbows into the soft dirt. It was summer but the dirt was cool, holding on to some memory of winter. From this spot, we could see over the hills.

“It’s not a real house,” I said.

“I know it’s not.”

“Did you used to have a real house?”

“Sure.”

I’d been born in one but I didn’t remember it. “I’ve never visited a real house.”

He looked at me out of the corner of his eyes, surprised, I think, because he was now better than I was. “I lived on Sparrows Point.”

“Is it full of sparrows?” I asked.

“Nope. Just people in little houses and red dust because there’s steel mills. Red dust on everything, even this bowl of hard candies that the neighbor woman used to set out, all stuck together.”

Later I’d know Sparrows Point myself. Sitting on the industrial tip of Baltimore, bitterly cold in winter and oppressively hot in summer, it was a grid of lettered streets, a company town. Row upon row of tiny houses were dwarfed by thick electric wires, conveyors on long metal legs, hulking warehouses. Oily, greasy, smoky, the red dust—just as Eppitt remembered—coating gutters, fence posts, even your own skin. The natural humidity of what was once low-l
ying
marshland combined with the billowing steam from the boiler chimneys made the dust damp and pasty. Steeped in fumes and exhaust, the Clapp house surely suffered the noises of Sparrows Point: the
rattling gusto of the Red Rocket streetcar, which took extra hands in and out of downtown; the blast of tugboats hauling barges; the constant bleating of trains.

Eppitt told me how on his way to school—where the boys learned machinery, gears, and small motors, and the girls learned sewing and tucking hospital corners on beds—he walked past seven giant caged fans, connected to the mills. “I thought if they were set to full blast at the same time, they could make a tornado and blow the whole place away.”

“You wanted that?”

“It’s better here. Gillup tells stories at night. There’s food. I have my own bed. And I can’t be kicked out because I already got kicked out.”