The Changeling Read online

  “Did he carve the handle too?” Pearl asked. “He was very good, wasn’t he? I mean, he was a real artist, wasn’t he?”

  “No.” Thomas smiled. “This is from the Yucatan, from the Mayan-Toltec period. Aaron was a collector. He liked nice things, extraordinary things.”

  “Was his wife extraordinary, his Emma?”

  “Aaron married far beneath him,” Thomas said.

  Shelly smiled against her glass. Pearl moved closer to Walker.

  “The children will tell you Emma was a witch,” Thomas said.

  Pearl stared at the fresh drink Walker had given her. “I don’t believe in witches,” she said.

  “Why on earth would you?” Shelly asked.

  “What about ghosts?” Thomas raised his brows indulgently. He was looking at Pearl with the interest one usually reserves for dust.

  “I thought this was supposed to be the adult hour,” Shelly sighed.

  “Many of my correspondents believe in ghosts,” Miriam said.

  “They live in foreign countries,” Shelly said impatiently.

  “Ghosts don’t have access to this world, do they?” Pearl asked. “I mean they just remember it, don’t they?”

  Thomas laughed. “The children will get along fine with you, Pearl. They fancy the mysterious. They like to invent their own histories.”

  “I’d hate to think our history is as the children recollect it,” Walker said. “The only odd relation I recall was the aunt who wanted to be a professional boxer.”

  “Oh God, yes,” Thomas said.

  “There are so many children here . . .” Pearl began.

  “They come and go,” Shelly said. “Thomas is always getting new ones.”

  “Well with so many of them and their birthdays . . . there must always be an occasion for a party . . .” The drinks had made Pearl feel gay.

  “We celebrate everyone’s birthday on a single day,” Thomas said. “It makes things easier.”

  “For you maybe,” Miriam protested. “I’m the one making the cakes. They can eat a cake apiece, I swear, and they all want different colored frostings and designs . . .”

  “You love it, Miriam,” Walker said.

  “When are we going to eat?” Shelly said. “I’m off early tomorrow, you know, and I haven’t packed a thing so far tonight.”

  “Fancy you asking about supper,” Miriam grumbled, “you who never eat a thing.”

  “Shelly needs her energy,” Thomas said. “She’s off to college to get her mate.”

  “Oh honestly.” Shelly blushed.

  “Pick one that will make good babies,” Thomas said.

  They went into the dining room then. The children were summoned and everyone sat down. The children’s faces were clean, their hair smacked down. They sat politely, serving one another. Thomas acted the role of catechist with them. There was much eager conversation which Pearl did not grasp very well. The drinks had made her dizzy and troubled. To see a child of six or seven running around like a wild animal one moment and sitting genteelly at the dinner table the next, discussing Meister Eckhart’s formulations of transcendence into the nonself, was very disconcerting to Pearl.

  She sighed. She raised a fork.

  “Look, Pearl,” a child said. His name was Johnny. His eyes looked old and tired and held an odd disintegration in their depths. He pushed a sea shell across the tablecloth to Pearl. “Hold it to your ear.”

  “Oh yes,” she said, smiling. “I hear the ocean. I hear waves.” The sea shell felt sticky and smelled sweet.

  “No, you don’t. You hear your own blood. That’s the sound of your own blood singing in your ears.” He took the shell back and put it on his lap. His face twitched nervously.

  “Well,” Pearl said, “I suppose.”

  A red-headed child with a rather large mouth sat beside Pearl. She ate quickly with swift, neat movements, and patted her mouth with her napkin after each mouthful.

  “Emma got pregnant and had a baby that wasn’t her own,” she said to Pearl.

  Children . . . their poor confusions, Pearl thought. “If she gave birth to the baby it had to be hers,” Pearl said reasonably. “Sometimes men don’t know if they’re the father of the baby or not, but the mother has to know.” She coughed. She felt she was getting in a little over her head.

  The children across the table looked at her, interested. They shook their heads.

  “No,” a little boy named Trip said. He had a long thin face with a birthmark on his cheek. “No, Emma’s baby wasn’t hers.”

  Pearl smiled. “Emma’s someone you’ve made up, isn’t she?”

  “No, no, Pearl,” the red-headed girl said. “She’s Walker’s great-grandmother. And Thomas’s. And Shelly’s and Miriam’s too.”

  “Well,” Pearl said, “what happened to the baby that wasn’t hers? She loved it just the same, didn’t she?”

  The children looked at her slyly.

  “It got took back,” they said together.

  The gentle way they’ve appropriated death, Pearl thought.

  “Oh that’s very sad,” she said. She looked down at her plate from which the design of a fish gaped at her and swam beneath her untouched food.

  “When Emma died, nobody heard a token,” an older girl said.

  “Token? I don’t . . . what’s a token?”

  “A token is the sound that tells you when somebody you know has gone. Sometimes it’s a knock on the door and you open the door and nobody’s there. And sometimes it’s the sound of an owl coming from some place where there aren’t any birds. It’s a way people have of telling you they’re dead.”

  Pearl looked at the little boy who had worn the feathers in his hair. His name was Peter.

  “You should drink your milk,” Pearl said.

  “Magicians don’t drink milk.” He chewed on a piece of fish and, grimacing, took a sliver of bone from his mouth.

  Pearl looked around the table into the intricacy, the darkness of the children’s faces. She was relieved that she hadn’t come to this place years before, when they had all been babies. Now that would have been too shocking, really. She suddenly saw them like that, screaming and laughing, blond-headed or bald, all being kept and cared for by the big, odd man at the head of the table. What a corrupt thought. Pearl made an odd, constricted gesture with her hands, pushing, in her mind, against the welter of children. Thomas looked up at her, holding a knife and fork in midair. He ate like a European, without switching hands. He watched her coolly, and embarrassed, she dropped her eyes.

  When she and Walker were back in their room again, Pearl curled up on the bed. Her stomach ached. The white spread was dirty with footprints.

  “Oh, my feet are disgusting,” she said, kicking off her sandals. “Look at that. Awful. I’ll be better, Walker, really I will.”

  He shrugged. He gave her some Bourbon in a glass. It sparkled warmly from within the glass. In her stomach, it burned.

  They undressed and lay beneath the sheets. Walker made love to her. It felt good. Pearl’s cries were channeled by the house’s ducting. The children lay on the transoms in the dark, mute as rugs, listening.

  “I don’t think they like me here,” Pearl said later, sleepily.

  “The children adore you, Pearl.”

  “I mean . . . the grownups.”

  “Of course they do,” he said. He caressed her face.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Now, in Miami, Walker’s caress pushed her halfway across the room. Pearl tried to view the situation objectively. Perhaps Walker had not actually struck her. Nevertheless, she found herself sprawled on her back in the corner. And yet . . . she might have fallen on her own accord. She might have had a little too much to drink. The baby wasn’t in her arms anymore.

  Walker stood over her.

  “How did you find me?” she asked.

  “Darling, I’m forever tracking you. Now this is twice I’ve found you. I’m tiring of it.” He spoke softly and helped her up. Her wrists hurt where
he held them. “You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.”

  “But how did you find me?” Pearl asked, bewildered.

  “You’ve been muttering about leaving ever since Sam was born. You’ve been depressed. Thomas suspected you were depressed enough to do something like this.”

  “I went into town to buy Sam some little shirts,” Pearl said vaguely.

  “When you didn’t come back over with Joe, we checked the air shuttles to Boston. And of course you had been on one. And then we simply checked with Boston. You talked about Miami, Pearl. You talked about leaving. It took no psychic to find you.”

  “But I thought I used the name ‘Tuna.’”

  “Tuna?”

  “Listen, Walker,” Pearl said, “I don’t mind living with you but I don’t want to live with your family.”

  “You’re not yourself, Pearl.”

  “I am myself!” Pearl cried. “I am certainly myself.” Big tears rolled down her cheeks. “I will kill myself, Walker,” she said.

  Walker sighed.

  “I don’t want to go back there,” she said. “Tell me about Johnny. I want to know how Johnny is.”

  “He died this morning.”

  “See, see . . .” Pearl wept.

  “That is something to cry about, Pearl, it’s true.”

  “That child’s blood is on Thomas’s hands,” she said. “It may be invisible to you but I see it there.”

  “Stop it,” Walker said. He was tired and angry. He took off his sports jacket and draped it over a chair. He unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. Pearl had a peculiar feeling, wondering if he were about to beat her up. She sat down on the bed, folding her hands carefully in her lap. She must be very drunk, she thought. Thomas had once told Pearl that when she drank too much she became stubborn, secretive, and insulting. Thomas said that she behaved in a manner that elicited the possibility of ugly response.

  Walker’s voice was calm again. “You were very sick after you had Sam,” he said.

  “Your family makes me sick,” Pearl said. “I don’t want to live with them anymore. I want a normal life. I want a normal child.”

  “You can’t raise this child by yourself,” Walker said. “It’s an absolute impossibility.”

  “I would get someone to help me,” she said. “There are schools. I would send him to school. But before school I would get someone to help me and this person and I would play with Sam.” Pearl’s stomach hurt and her mouth was dry.

  She wondered if she could get to the telephone and tell the desk there was a man she did not know in her room. He was in her room and he was frightening her.

  Pearl picked up the phone. Walker held her wrist with one hand until she put it back. With the other hand, he traced the bones of her jaw.

  Pearl had once believed that she had the freedom to think about her circumstance in any way she chose, but she now realized that this was not the case. Freedom was an illusion even when one’s instincts were good and Pearl lacked instincts of any kind. The few simple beliefs and inherited moralities that she had adopted from her parents were as inadequate guides for her own life as they had been for theirs. Her mother, who was a Baptist, told her that she should not eat cookies in the bathroom because God would not like it. She told her that she should keep the top of her bookcase dusted even though no one could see the top of her bookcase because God would see it and judge her. She told her that she could be interested in the Devil as long as she did not allow the Devil to become interested in her. Her mother had been sentimental and kind-hearted. She had taught Pearl how to braid her own hair and how to arrange wild flowers in a vase. Then one Sunday at a church coffee hour, bustling about the pantry, she had run herself through with a knife that had recently been sharpened for the exigencies of frozen food.

  It seemed unrealistic. Pearl’s father took it unrealistically. He took to drinking all night long in the dark. In the daytime, he walked around his property, putting his hands on the trunks of trees and saying, “I like these people.”

  Pearl trailed around after him, her eyes downcast.

  “They’re only vegetables, Daddy,” she would say miserably.

  Pearl had become very nervous in her father’s presence because she could see quite clearly in his face that he was going to die soon. Near the end he talked about little except his grandmother, who had been a balloonist in Europe. He described her as a plain but intrepid little person with a neurotic fear of noise and of riding in carriages, who delighted in making night ascents for her own pleasure. He also said that as a child she had witnessed the murder of a Negro on the streets of Alabama.

  At the very end he wanted to discuss Pearl’s mother again. Of course they had both loved her. And where did Pearl think Mother was now? he had asked Pearl on that dreadful night. Pearl usually hemmed and hawed and tried to be noncommittal in her father’s presence, being both shy and terrified of his dying look, but that night she confessed that, secretly, she saw her mother enfolded in wonderful wings, hovering over her every action. She saw her quite literally with an aura fragrant and golden and big as the house.

  And what did Pearl think about death? her father asked. What was her opinion there? And encouraged by his calmness and his interest, Pearl said that death in her mind was mixed up with an image of a person opening a bulkhead door and descending into the cellar as though for an armload of kindling or a jar of tomato jam. The image was an amiable one. Her mother and father had always told her that she was an amiable sweet child, but when Pearl said this, her father had looked at her with real disgust.

  “Life,” he had said, “is tears, blood, sin, sperm and excrement. And death,” he had screamed, “is the same thing!”

  Pearl’s feelings had been quite hurt. Her father had never screamed at her before and she felt that it was quite an inappropriate time to be screaming such things about death when one was so ill and sick in spirit. There then fell a grim silence between them. Her father finally broke it by making himself another drink. He then walked to the garage, where he picked up his shotgun. Sipping his drink, he then walked around to the back of the house where he kicked the spring snow off the catches and opened the bulkhead door.

  “Daddy,” Pearl called timidly.

  But her father didn’t speak to her again. He went into the cellar and shot himself in the mouth.

  Pearl’s life had never lacked in gesture but it had always avoided significance. It avoided meaning as the bird does the snare. Nothing in her life had prepared Pearl for significance. Each moment that occurred lay mute within her, a buried stone, contained from and irrelevant to herself, an event with neither premonition nor consequence. She couldn’t imagine incorporating what was determined as yesterday into what was considered tomorrow. She saw herself as a little child still, the bourn of all her mother’s hopes. Sitting in this room, not nearly as drunk as she would like to be with a man who seemed more surgeon than husband, the surgeon with whom one would go into one’s last, unsuccessful operation.

  “You shouldn’t drink so much, Pearl,” the surgeon said. “You think you’re being revived when you’re only being deluded.”

  Pearl slid off the bed and looked into the crib, where Walker had put the baby. Sam was there in a snug, blue sleeper. He seemed to be chuckling. He was beautiful. He had a nice complexion, like Walker’s. She wanted to feel calm, looking after her baby, but all she could feel were the arguments between her and Walker, going back and forth. The air in the room seemed moiling with the arguments. She imagined small dark creatures crouched in the corners of her head, making insults and promises.

  She looked at Walker. “If you could just give me a little time away from the . . . your family.”

  “Why do women always talk about wanting a little time?” Walker asked. “It really annoys the shit out of me.”

  “You’re exactly like Thomas,” Pearl said faintly. “You’re cruel and overbearing . . . and unrealistic.”

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bsp; “Unrealistic,” Walker said, astonished. “Unrealistic.”

  “It means, I mean . . . to think that I would go back with you just because you happened to find me.”

  “I could certainly let you go,” Walker said. “You could stay here in Florida and get skin cancer, catch lobsters with your bare hands, fuck yard boys. I could take Sam back and leave you here, but it would upset the children. They’re amused by you, Pearl. They want you back.”

  She thought of the long year she had just spent there. The winter had been the worst. So much cold and so little daylight. They slept and slept like hibernating things. The children moved like shadows of their summer selves.

  “Please,” Pearl said wearily.

  “You have no other plans,” Walker said.

  “I just got here. Things will fall together.”

  “No plans,” he said. “Just mommy and new baby in a bright warm new world.”

  She said nothing.

  “A mommy living by sensation rather than intention.”

  “That’s right,” Pearl said.

  “You’re a woman who’s just birthed a son and you feel close to the great convulsive power, the life force.”

  She blushed. It was true. When she wasn’t frightened or in despair, she felt quite smug. The Amazons took crescent-shaped shields into battle with them. The symbols of womanhood offer less protection than most.

  “You think, when you don’t think about it much, that you understand everything.”

  “Everything is pretty understandable if you take away what people do to you and the shapes they assume and what they say,” Pearl said bleakly.

  Walker came close to her, put his arms around her, caressed her buttocks. “Your world is one of bodily urges and meanings. You don’t understand anything,” he said.

  “I’m not coming back there with you,” Pearl said.

  “You’re not going anyplace else,” he said lightly.

  “Oh don’t threaten me,” she said, annoyed. “That doesn’t matter to me, you know. I don’t care about that anymore.”