State of Grace Page 4

  “And yet still her eyes would be flooded with darkness,” Daddy says. “Her knowledge would still be empty knowledge because it was corrupt. She continues beside us, still in the error of her ways.” He puts down the brush.

  “Live without a suspect, sweet. There are no criminals. Only God’s largesse and plan.” His voice stirs, rises. “When you were a child, I would hold your hand while you were sleeping. You never had bad dreams when I watched over you. Your tiny curved hand. A baby rabbit. Such a blessing. You were my child.”

  Mother had dried me with a thin striped towel. Her hands were brief upon me. The water went down the drain sluggishly, as though there were truly substance to it, as though she had actually washed off some of my sin.

  HOW LONG WILT THOU FORGET ME O LORD? FOREVER?

  I do not interrupt. Daddy is addressing me.

  “Such a sweet deep sleep with never any dreams at all when I was beside you, but I couldn’t stay there forever. Each night I had to leave and then there was no way of knowing, there was no way I could tell, what rose up to trouble you, what words you heard, what wicked lies came to seem real in the dark.”

  Yes, Mother had spoken then. I would creep through the house. I would watch them together under the modest glow of a single lamp. They would be in bed side by side. I am ransomed to that vision of comfort, of safety. Mother faced the door behind which I was concealed. I have forgiven her that which I accused her of, she had said. I have no courage left. I have nothing. Once I wanted to save her, to take her away from you, but it doesn’t matter any more. I don’t even want to save myself any more. I want to suffer. There’s nothing else I can do. I want to suffer terribly. I have forgiven her that which I accused her of, she had said, the words hardly words at all but some endless redeemless anguish falling, saying, Why is my child so far away? how did I go into such a different land … but he did not reply. And never had I seen him take her in his arms.

  “I’m going to buy you some new clothes. Nice clothes to travel in. We’ll stay today and go back tomorrow morning.” His voice is bored, uxorial. He goes into the wretched bathroom, takes my things from the rod and stuffs them into the wastebasket. He opens the door and puts the wastebasket outside. I am surprised to see the daylight, the street, folding chairs set up in a rigid row in the distance. In the distance also is a singular fellow standing beneath a light pole. He looks like the gentleman on the Beefeater’s bottle. Flowered red jerkin, hammerhead shoes and a kindly self-conscious beard. He carries a staff. It is all totally reasonable. He is a float marshal, waiting for his float. I have always wanted to go off with the fellow on that bottle but this was not my chance. Daddy shuts the door.

  “We have so much to talk about,” he says. “Up home, the herbs from your mother’s garden are still growing. The mint is particularly strong. I think that even now, my shoes smell of mint.” He does not look at his shoes. “Who gave you that camera?”

  “I bought it myself.”

  “You must come back with me, sweet. I’ll absorb the harm you’d bring to others.”

  “I never hurt anything,” I beg. “I would take the moths out of the house in my hands, remember? I was a simple child.” The room seems all the darker since he shut the door on the street. Everything is black. He is in black as he sits beside me once again. I can almost smell the chemicals, hear a hose draining in the soapstone basin. Where my clothes had been, there are now curling photographs, still wet, dangling from wooden pins. Everything has been recorded.

  “How can you forget, darling?” he says. “Why should you ever want to forget?”

  7

  I protest, don’t I? “Daddy, let me be. There’s no one I can hurt.” I want a new clear picture so badly I could cry but there is no light in this dingy room. All the pictures there are going to be have been taken.

  … When I was a child, I also had a camera which I had sent away for and which came directly to me. What a thrill when Mr. Bolt the postman stepped off his red white and blue bicycle and waded through the damaged daisies to our door. I was a darling dangerous child then with my little crazes and habits. Oh, she adores her father, Mother would say as I scampered down the street in his shadow. And only the obtuse would fail to detect the note of sadness there though perhaps I erred on hearing an entire symphony. But what if I should have fallen from Father’s silhouette? The sunshine was a pit to me. And even though it was a game, my mouth would fill with drool, my chest would ache as though I’d dropped my heart if Father strode away from me. Daddy’s little girl, Mother would say, though it was just words that she was using. As Father would use the holy writ and I, my too literal love, and poor sister her sweet adjustment. Oh poor sister, she never heard the coded humming of the world …

  Yes, the day of the postman. The sea was all white and furious that morning from a storm the day before and was beating up the rocks and filling the air with a fine spray … I accepted the package reverently. It was almost consumed in Mr. Bolt’s huge hands. His fingernails were tan and thick as hoofs, shiny and smooth but at the same time a bit maimed, as though they’d all been crushed. His thumbnail leapt into an orbit all its own, his one significant feature. It was half again as long as his thumb. A lovely ocher and shiny as a writing slate. Perhaps there was something engraved thereon. And doubtless from the Scripture, I WILL MAKE THEE A TERROR AND THOU SHALT BE NO MORE? It’s really not for me to say. Etched with a pin? A reminder of something that hadn’t happened yet. For why else such a coarse and local epidermis? But then, perhaps it was he who had the hidden vice. Perhaps he worked with crayons or played the guitar. Of his face, nothing remains today. Just the impossible hand bringing me my plastic camera from Battle Creek, Michigan. And down by the water, on a folding chair beneath the salt blasted pines, sat Daddy.

  Mother was absent then and sister was gone. Just me and Daddy, like it was and like it would be in a little while, forever.

  And I am running in my hand-me-down dress, a dress that contained far more incident than myself, having belonged to two town girls and then sister before being passed on to me. A drunk exposed himself when it was worn by little Lola Roebuck. We had the longest winter in fifty-seven years when it adorned Jackie Fucillo’s ratty frame. And I am running with my new possession which is shooting out cartoon images on cardboard the size of a movie ticket.

  The moment was mine, I knew, because I grew up all intuition and no curiosity. There’s not a curious bone in my body. Like clockwork, I grew up with an innate sense of the proper order of things. I left it to the others to discover their egotistical sexuality. They were programed for impulse but lacked true desire. I recall my own schoolmates professing to enjoy the dopey pleasures of the Tip-O-Whirl in the bleached grassless playground of kindergarten as they wrapped their little thighs around the banana seats. I was not affronted by such behavior. How could I be? I was up to Jeremiah in my insatiable quest for order. THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS AND DESPERATELY WICKED: WHO CAN KNOW IT?

  But I was a child and I was running and I’ve never been prettier than I was that day as I ran so sincerely thrilled, on my long white legs, to Daddy. The world reflected me, the symptom and the disease, as I ran so childishly simple toward him. The sea smoked with its foam and the sunlight fell bone white on his head as he sat beside the leaping water, all rumpled and harangued as he always seemed when he was by himself, wrestling with the Lord. “Daddy!” I said, “Let me take your picture.” And of course it is so innocent. An incorruptible request. He shields his lame eye from the wind with a piece of scarf, for it couldn’t help itself that eye, it lay open continually, gaping at the world. It has never rested but has only watched, tireless and constant, blazing and cerulean, thick like a muscle.

  “Daddy,” I cried so adorably.

  And he kissed me then, didn’t he, he drew me to him as guilelessly as he does now in Fred’s Sunnyside?

  8

  Everyone that has ever loved has loved this way.

  There is no other way.
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br />   9

  Father and I are eating in Woolworth’s. I am in my new clothes. There is still tissue paper in one of the sleeves. I pull it out.

  “We are not going to return to Fred’s. We are going to a beach-front hotel. This is our first vacation,” Daddy says. “I am not a worldly man, as you know, but I want you to enjoy yourself. We’ll take a small vacation every year if you’d like. You look very nice. I remember that you often wore that color. Your mother dressed you in that color because she said it did so much for you. That was her term, but she was quite right. You look lovely.”

  “Thank you,” I say. We are eating a turkey plate. The cranberries come in a microscopic fluted paper cup. They taste like peas. It is not Thanksgiving but it seems that the meal is a return to that sacred gala occasion of home–a perversion of it, a transubstantiation. Father blesses the food, then he gets up and puts the plate on a tray of dirty dishes. He is gaunt and elegant. The hollows of his cheeks had thrilled me.

  “In the year when you were gone from me, there were frequent periods when I went without eating for days simply because it did not occur to me.”

  “Speaking for myself,” I say, my mouth full of fowl, “I am hungry all the time.”

  “You have a very slim and attractive figure.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Someone knocks my arm and launches my fork against my molar. It’s very crowded. We’re crammed like mullet in a net. Beside us is a couple with a baby. The baby has a I SLEPT ON HOLMES BEACH FLORIDA T-shirt on and is waving his legs, firing off his legs as though he’d like to be rid of them. He farts. It’s long and bubbling, very satisfactory. The baby crosses his eyes. All motion ceases. The first sound in the universe and this baby has made it. “For chrissakes,” the father says, “get him away from the butter.” The young mother does nothing. She picks up a french fry and puts it in her mouth.

  “You know what I want,” she says. “You know what I really want?” The father pushes the seat board away from him, to the very end of the table. The baby regards us all furrily and falls asleep, mustard on his knee. “I want one of them deluxe facial beauty mist saunas and one of them O’Nite cases. You owe it to me at least for what you’ve done.”

  “Where you going overnight,” her husband grumbles.

  “I intend to do some traveling. You and me are going to travel right on out of this town.”

  “Set thine heart toward the highway,” Father says dryly. “Find grace in the wilderness.”

  “Philemon,” I say too quickly.

  “No.” He is cheerful. “You are trying to be exotic, aren’t you? My little grown-up girl.” He pats my hand. Our fingers make a little bridge. The counter girl sails a rancid rag beneath it. “Nothing will ever be Philemon,” he says.

  “A dull letter.”

  “I suppose you found my letters dull.”

  “I wouldn’t imagine so,” I say.

  We leave the counter and walk through the store. The floor is wooden and warped. I feel that I am nailed to a set of wheels and am careening across it. Father strolls easily. We pass notions. A fat child bumps into me. “Could you tell me if I have a stamp on this postcard,” he says, “I’m blind.” His friend is bent double over the nougatines. “I’ll sell it to you for a quarter,” the chubby says. “Give to the blind.” I careen along. “Hey, blackhead,” he hisses, “are you a boy or a girl!”

  We reach the door, the sidewalk. The sheriff’s posse prances by, leaving shit all over the street. They are followed by an enormous paper and paste alligator. His eyes are telephone spools. The crowd roars.

  “What is this,” Father asks, realizing the unlikelihood of a satisfactory answer. There is a marching band, composed, it seems, of dandruff. The parade is sad and ambitious and extravagant and mean. There is a dangerous and desirous mentality at work on both the viewed and the viewers but it is so heavy-witted and humorous that no one feels subject to it.

  “It’s Homecoming.” We squint up the street into the sunlight, into the traffic of gargoyles and beasts and athletes. “They march to the bay and they have a ski show and a slave auction and a gourmet booth. They have a barbecue and a bloodless bull fight and a calliope. Then they release twenty-four hundred balloons into the sky.”

  “We can walk to the hotel,” Father says. “I was told it wasn’t far.” We turn down a side street and, after several blocks, turn again. There’s not a soul visible. Some of the shops’ doors have been left open. A telephone rings and rings. “It seems as though the trumpets have sounded,” he says, “and everyone has answered but ourselves.”

  “This event is not as popular as the Crowning of the Queen in summer,” I volunteer. I see the town suddenly as feckless and sweet, generous and hopeful, wanting only a little spectacle and a sauced pork rib. Nothing’s going to happen here. “Last year a national magazine sent several photographers down to cover the Queen pageantry. It was said that they took over one thousand photographs. It was said that they drank over five hundred pineapple gimlets. Nothing was printed, however.”

  We walk and walk. We can hear the Gulf of Mexico plopping and smashing, bringing frantic things in with the tide. I am hot. I roll up the sleeves of my blouse, extracting another piece of tissue. Father holds the camera. My hands are damp from holding it. The camera looks unsafe. He is holding it distastefully. It turns its foggy eye. The setting’s wrong for sunlight. Everything is wrong. My lungs seem frozen and I am hot.

  “Race disappeared, you know,” Father says. “He was old and had arthritis so badly. He’d have to be helped to his feet and when the poor dog was up, he’d stay standing until someone laid him down again.”

  “That happened when I was there, Daddy. It’s been a long time since Race died.”

  “I think he was down by the water. He was probably following a bird and went into the water and the current took him down.”

  “Well, Daddy,” I say uneasily, “that seems as good a way as any other. Actually it could be considered nicer than most.”

  “You invested in this camera, did you? You’ve become interested in such things?”

  “I know the terms,” I confess modestly. He puts his arm around my waist and ushers me forward. The hotel is ahead of us. Decorative boulders. Restful sago palms. Three men are playing bocce on the beach. They wear snug stretch trousers in Easter-egg colors.

  THE VOICE SAID CRY. WHAT SHALL I CRY? ALL FLESH IS GRASS.

  “It’s all a question of chemicals,” I say. “Potassium hydroxide, sodium sulphite, phenidone. It’s a matter of accelerators, preservatives, restrainers and water.”

  “I can’t imagine why you waste your time on such things,” Father says. “I find it most depressing. I have heard that film can be developed naturally in certain highly polluted bodies of water. I have seen the results. The eye of God enraged. A camera is simply not relevant.”

  “No,” I say sadly, AND WHEN THEY AROSE EARLY IN THE MORNING BEHOLD THEY WERE ALL DEAD CORPSES. My Camera teeters on his fingertips but he doesn’t let it go.

  “Let’s dispose of it,” he says, “this poor substitution of resurrection.” He puts it in a planter of succulents. There is a red wasp in one of the yellow flowers of a succulent. The camera appears all pocked with scale. It is a piece of junk.

  “Yes,” I say. I seem somewhat heavier than before and my hands are uncertain as to how they should handle themselves. We enter the lobby of the hotel. It is spacious and cool. The desk clerk gives a key to Father. Beside him is an extravagant bird chained to a perch. Below the bird is a drink tray with a circle of newpaper cut to fit. On the newspaper are flashy compotes of half-digested fruit.

  “If you get too close to Thalassophilia and she bites you, which she may,” the clerk begins in a bored voice, “don’t …”

  “Thalassophilia, that’s wonderful,” I say, rousing myself. I must make the attempt to keep witness. Daddy and I are here and that’s all there is to it. Tomorrow will be different but as for yesterday we have been other
places and as for now we are here. My womb turns to face its star.

  “How can it be wonderful?” the clerk says without surprise. “It is part of the hotel’s policy. The owner has other properties in Puerto Rico and Nassau and they too include birds named Thalassophilia. Now if I may continue? If you get too close to her and she bites you, pretend you haven’t noticed. Then she will stop.”

  The clerk and I look at each other with distaste. “Shall we go up to our room and freshen up?” I ask Father primly.

  We ascend to our room. It is on the third floor and soars out over the beach, which is empty except for the men playing bocce. All three seem to have achieved an identical degree of skill at the game. No one is winning. They yell at each other without passion in Spanish. There’s a knock at the door and Father opens it. “Would you care for luncheon or a beverage?” The tone is intense, funereal. An old man stands in the hall in dyed black hair and milkman-white.