She saw it behind her eyelids, a small cloud but deep, suddenly come,
suddenly gone. The light strengthened; there was the rock, and a
whiteness in the water. _How could you know, Callista, that she was
dead?_
She had, as usual, dared to move her cot nearer the wall with the barred
door and the graffiti, so that if she crouched at that end of the cot a
triangle of shadow protected her from the glare of the naked bulb in the
corridor. Matron Kowalski on night duty had a habit of turning that
light off and on at chancy intervals after midnight. Regulations
probably said it should burn steadily, but Kowalski was a zealous screw
when not deep in a comic book, and doubtless hoped to catch her charges
in bottomless wickedness by playing cute with the switch. Short-sighted
as well as thick-witted, Kowalski had apparently never caught on to
Callista's crime of moving the cot. Callista generally tried to retrieve
the sin before Matron Flannery came on in the morning, though whenever
she forgot, Flannery just looked sad and grumbled: "Now dearie, we gotta
put that back where it belongs or it's my arse." And sometimes even
shoved it back herself with a heave of a massive thigh.
Interesting but maybe unprofitable, to contrast that kindness with the
satisfaction Flannery had shown a week ago in disciplining a shouting
and clawing wench who didn't want to go downstairs. Flannery had caught
the girl from behind with an arm like a side of beef, in the pattern of
rape, a stiff block of finger jabbing at nerve clusters here and there,
leaving no mark. And if Callista Blake the Weird Woman, Cold Callie the
Monkshood Girl, were to create a disturbance, Flannery would be ready,
would spread her flat feet and grunt in the same way, like a boar in
rut, in the interest of law and order.
"I want more heat, I want more foodibles. I want more heat, I want more
foodibles." The old woman down the corridor had been silent a while, the
interval like the recession of a toothache. Hearing her resume, Callista
dropped her face on her knees, listening more or less. Listening is an
act of living. Listening, the human unit can at least say: I am not
dead, I am here, I can prove it, the current of life is dancing in the
delicate nerves, the brain recording, comparing, remembering--understand,
I am not dead!
"I want more heat, I want more foodibles." She sounded plaintive at the
moment, harping on a single string, a note in it much resembling
enjoyment. The name was Watson; the nearly baritone voice brought the
image of a body shriveled and small, crowding seventy perhaps. "I want
more heat, I want more foodibles." Watson must have been picked up
Sunday as a D&D, Callista supposed, raising hell somewhere in the chilly
streets until somebody called the wagon. She couldn't be drunk now, two
nights later, but the noise continued unchanged. She didn't belong here
of course. "Ya-_hoo_! Kiss my cold aching ass, you dirty-dirty-dirty--all
rise! All rise! I want more heat, I want more foodibles." Sooner or
later the fumbling dustmop of the law would pick her up, shake her out
into a different sort of institution. Or back to the streets and
whatever dim hole of a room she lived in--with small possessions? Old
photographs? Sewing-basket? Rocking-chair? "All rise!"
"You Watson, you shaddap." The voice of Kowalski.
"Fuck you, Polack, I want more heat, I want more foodibles."
"Listen here, you don't shaddap, I'm coming in there again."
"Yah!" Weary, diminuendo, but not actually a sound of yielding. Silence
followed, as dust settles after an eddy of wind.
Callista tried to review the course of the day, long in retrospect. Maud
Welsh all morning. Sergeant Shields, sober, exact, not unkind: four
bobby pins and a paper clip. Sergeant Peterson a bleached mechanism for
the production of not very good photographs, including one of the rock
and the pond by daylight, not the light of a troubled and hazy moon.
Trooper Curtis, plaster casts and fingerprints and so what? Sutherland
R. Clipp who did everything. Trooper Carlo San Giorgio the nice boy. And
Dr. Devens. None of them except Maud Welsh had remained very long on the
stand; Cecil who understood the nature of the conflict had let most of
them pass by with little or no questioning. Callista found she was
remembering too mechanically; names and faces would not coalesce to any
rationally useful larger pattern. Yet at some point--she thought it was
during the testimony of Cousin Maud--something had been done or said
that had lessened the opacity of the Blank, like a hint of dawn or false
dawn beyond a dirty window.
Or was it anything done or said? Cousin Maud of the Plum Jam understood
nothing of the interview with Ann at Covent Street, a happening far
outside the cage where the life of Cousin Maud fluttered and squeaked.
Perhaps this was the way of it: during the examination of Cousin Maud
the Blank had thinned temporarily, of itself; a coincidence in time,
maybe nothing to do with any word spoken. Probably during the
cross-examination, when Cecil was questioning Maud about the Saturday
night, the bedroom scene--_A sorry Hamlet I made!_
"Fuck your stinking jail too! We got rights, Polack. You ain't saving
the taxpayers nothing, we all die of pee-neumo-nia, they gotta pay for a
box. Listen, I been flang out of better jails before you was old enough
to shove a finger up it. I want more heat, I want--"
Callista winced at the smack of Kowalski's feet passing her cell. She
heard the clash of keys, clang of the iron door, high anticipatory
whimpering (still that note of enjoyment?) broken off by the crack of a
flat hand against flesh, repeated and repeated, Callista's body
clenching in misery at each repetition of the sound, her scream of
protest choked into silence by a bitten lip. _They can't! Stop it!_ But
it had happened the same way last night, would happen again and again,
maybe always, here and there in the world, throughout the extent of
foreseeable time: how long is that? Callista's fingernails were hurting
her legs. Her mind held firm somewhere, listening.
Watson wasn't yelling much. She hadn't last night either, only a small
rhythmic outcry. Mouse in a trap. "You gonna quiet down now?"
"Uh-huh. I'm sorry, Kowalski."
"Mrs. Kowalski."
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Kowalski. Gi' me a butt."
"This ain't no charity ward." Anger spent, Kowalski probably just wanted
to get back to her comic book. "Nor you ain't no psycho, you're putting
on to get attention, beat the rap for what you done wit' your busted
bottle. All the jerks on Mullen Street, you had to stick it into
plain-clo'es cop. That was crazy, but now you're crazy like a fox. You
know that t'ing punt'red his intestyne? Still in hospital, and that
ain't good news for you, Crazy-like-a-fox."
Watson giggled. "Couldn't he'p it, he wasn't nothing head to foot on'y
one big turd. Gi' me a butt. Just one, huh, please?"
"God give me patience!" That noise of Kowalski's was mechanical, a kind
of breathing, blurred by the iron clang. Callista was standing by her
own cell door. "Matron--"
Kowalski's square bulk swung about, her flat face slipping into shadow
as her head turned from the light. "You, huh?"
"Will you take her a pack of mine? I don't use 'em much."
"Got plenty, huh?"
"Yes." Callista held the pack through the bars. Kowalski made no move to
take it. "I'd like her to have it."
"You'd like.... You feel pretty big, don't you, _Miss_ Blake? You feel
real big wit' them cigarettes. I t'ought we was just dirt, now
everyt'ing's okay, you can bend low 'n' give an old woman a pack of your
butts." She held her voice down; Watson was mumbling and crooning to
herself, perhaps not listening. "Maybe it wouldn't occur to you, _Miss_
Blake, but that old trot's got pride. She ain't lickin' up no at'eist
prisoner's dirty leavings. Me neither. Miss Blake, I wouldn't touch you
not by a ten-foot pole." Callista saw thumb and forefinger of the
woman's hand pinched in a circle at the shelf of her breasts. Her soft
tones had lost distinctness, slipping back into the vaguer argot of a
South Winchester childhood. "Ain't comin' in 'ere, not 'less Sheriff or
somebody gives me direc' order, you can drop dead. You ain't human,
you're a stinkin' t'ing, you can hang yourself I won't go in, leave you
for Flannery to find by the morning."
Callista put the cigarettes away and sat on her cot gazing at interlaced
fingers, trying (as if the time allowed were not short but the need
urgent) to grasp the nature of hatred, especially in this new guise.
Kowalski had not displayed it before, had seemed only an indifferent
mechanism busy with her job. It occurred to Callista that she herself
must have been shamefully unobservant. Did others unsuspectedly ache
with this kind of loathing for her? T. J. Hunter? Cousin Maud? Jim?
_Why?_
"I guess you don't talk, you can't be bod'ered."
"No, Mrs. Kowalski, I'd rather not talk."
"Oh, you'd rather not. Much too good to talk to a dumb Polack. Let me
tell you somet'ing, Miss Blake, what they do after they pull the switch
in that little room--what they do, they take out the heart, doing the
oddopsy, understand? No matter you got lots of money, 'r' gonna be
buried fancy somewheres, they take out the heart. They got a reason. All
right, you don't talk."
Kowalski stood there a while longer, exercising great courage perhaps,
or having faith in the cold iron of the bars. Then Callista sensed that
the woman had gone away. _I will think about the night of Saturday, the
15th of August._
Cousin Maud must have been telling the truth about that episode on the
front porch. Callista could not remember seeing or hearing Ann then, but
Cousin Maud would not have lied.
How unmistakably the bedroom was Mother's! Nothing there of Herb, who
slept at the far end of the upstairs hall in a room Mother indulgently
called "his den," as one might refer to a cat's favorite basket. Well,
the entire house merely tolerated Herb Chalmers, who after all did
nothing except own it, pay taxes and upkeep, and exist there. _Poor
Herb! If only he wasn't so inclined to agree with that estimate
himself!_ By contrast, the spook of The Professor, the great Malachi
Chalmers so respectably dead, was quite at home. Cousin Maud liked to
behave as though all major directives were announced jointly by The
Professor and Victoria.
The room smelled of Victoria, a scent resembling dilute vinegar now and
then penetrating the ordinary flavor of sachet and face powder. That
night, without asking, Callista knew her mother had been sitting for
some time at the antique secretary desk, dealing with correspondence of
the Thursday Society of Shanesville. And Victoria, after her
absent-minded greeting, would go on sitting there preoccupied, long
enough to make the point. "I'm sorry I didn't know you planned to come
out tonight, dear."
"No plan--impulse. I wanted to talk to you, Mother."
"Oh, something terribly important? Well, dear, just make yourself
comfortable till I'm through here and we'll have a nice little visit."
Callista stood near the desk, where Victoria must at least be aware of
her. "I wish you would sit down, Callista. It is a little trying to be
stared at when one is attempting to concentrate."
"Sorry. But I wasn't staring at you, Mother." That was true. Her mind,
too swiftly to be caught in the act, had generated an image perhaps well
worth staring at: a thing approximately sixty days old (for it must have
been conceived in the deep middle days of June) possessing a bent head
larger than the blob of body, stubs with a blind intent to become legs
and arms; a thing charged with the strain and pressure of life, and yet
finger and thumb (if they could reach it) might pinch it out of
existence like a soft bug: _Mrs. Chalmers' grandchild_. Callista's hand,
driven by involuntary thought, dropped to rest at the level of her womb
where the thing sheltered inaccessible--whether a motion of hostility or
protectiveness or both, impossible to say; and Mother would never
notice. "I was staring at something that happened a long time ago. You
may not remember it. I wanted to find out if you did."
Resignedly, Victoria capped her pen and laid it on the unfinished
letter; took off her amber-rimmed reading glasses and retired them
deliberately to their case. "Callista, I must say that for anyone so
young this habit of mulling over past events is not healthy, not the way
to become adjusted to reality."
"I know, Mother. I'm not in tune with the times, am I?"
"If you realize it, I dare say that's a step in advance."
"What," said Callista, "is the virtue of being in tune with the times
when the times are corrupt?"
"Callista, I am rather tired. Must we have one of your--your rather
naive philosophical discussions? All part of the process of adjustment I
dare say, but frankly I am not up to it."
The big questions, Callista thought, always break the line and swim
away. Too big, and a weak line; who wants the great dangerous things
anyhow? Not Mrs. Chalmers nor the Thursday Society. "Mother, do you
happen to remember the time I spilled that nitric acid?"
"Happen to remember! Callista, that passes belief." Large gray upturned
eyes filled with tears. "I am not a monster. Am I?"
"I'm sorry, I spoke clumsily. I meant, do you remember the details? I
was going-on-five--it's difficult--"
"What details? Naturally I remember them all perfectly. What do you want
to know?" The sharpness was excusable; yet Callista wondered whether she
truly regretted the cruelty of that blurted question. Hamlet, Act III,
Scene 4--she had reread the play in the afternoon. A catalytic action,
although it had been a seemingly random choice, a turning to Shakespeare
for relief, illumination, distraction, and something more, in a time of
trouble, as another might have turned to music, or physical exertion, or
the warmth of a friend. Her thought still rang with it, reverberated,
and she understood now that the choice had not been random at all: "_Let
me be cruel, not unnatural: I will speak daggers to her, but use none._"
"Your father was drunk, Callista, otherwise I don't suppose even he
could have been so heedless as to leave that bottle where a child could
knock it over. Is that what you wanted to know?"
"No. That's only what you've told me before. Drunk?"
"Of course."
"It keeps coming back to me that his face was burning."
"What?"
"His face was burning. It was the malaria. Wasn't it? You've told me
yourself, he brought that home from New Guinea, latent but never cured."
"Oh, he had that, yes. A mild form."
"Mother, malaria is not mild if it gives you recurrent fevers and
collapse. I've read up on it. I had to, trying to understand."
"You're very full of book knowledge, certainly."
"I've found more truth in books than in people. A mild form--why, two
years later he _died_ of it, didn't he?"
"Now, my dear, your father died, and I think you know this perfectly
well, of pneumonia. The doctor informed me that the malaria was at most
a--a complicating factor. The pneumonia was induced by exposure, and
that in turn was caused by his passing out, as they call it, on a
January night, in a drunken stupor, on his way home from a bar."
"A drunken stupor, or a blinding fever. I was seven; I remember hearing
you answer the telephone--the hospital, I suppose it was, where they'd
taken him. I'd been put to bed long before, but wasn't sleeping. You
were having drinks or something with Cousin Trent, after Aunt Cora and
Uncle Tom Winwood left. I even remember hearing Aunt Cora say good
night, and then your voice going on a long time, to Cousin Trent. I
don't suppose I heard many of the words, but I knew the tone, the one
you always used when you were explaining Father's shortcomings."
"Callista!"
"Wait! I must tell you what I remember, but not about this; I mean the
earlier time, two years earlier. Let me tell you what I remember of
that, and then I'll go. I remember running into the studio, dragging my
red fire-engine. Father was on the couch. He'd been working, the big
table was littered with his things. He sat up and smiled and held out
his arms to me. I climbed into his lap. When he kissed me his face was
burning, his hands shaking. I know he talked to me, but the words won't
come back. Except 'Draw me a big horse and a little horse.' Then I
remember lying belly-down on the floor, working with crayons--the
horses, I suppose. And he went out of the room, for quinine probably--he
had an allergic reaction to atabrine in the Army, didn't he?"
"Something like that. Callista, I can't see--"
"It was morning, Mother. Sunlight in that east window. Shining aslant
across the things on his work-table. From what I've learned, what I can
remember and piece together, I don't believe my father would have been
drunk in the morning."
"Callista, is this your time of the month?"
"No, God damn it."
"Really! Callista, I must ask you to control yourself."
"I was never colder. I think I must have a fuller memory than most. It
comes back, how serious I was about the drawing, at going-on-five.
Precocious. I still possess some talent that way."
"Callista, as you know, you have a quite considerable talent that way,
if you would learn to discipline it, and--well, and outgrow your taste
for the unpleasantly morbid and erotic subjects that seem to attract you
so much. I have never understood in fact why you chose to be so
childishly disagreeable a year ago when I ventured to show some of
your--your less controversial drawings to the Thursday Society. Very
well, I should have asked your consent, being merely your mother. Now
Mrs. Wilberforce, who is after all an art teacher of somewhat wider
experience than yours, to say nothing of having written and illustrated
a number of altogether charming children's books, Mrs. Wilberforce felt
that one or two of those drawings showed distinct promise. Distinct
promise."
"Yes, Mrs. W.'s a nice lady. O Mother, so much comes back! Spring of
1945--he was invalided home a whole year before then, wasn't he? 1944?
Didn't I have him a whole year before my face was burned? Why are you
crying? Wasn't it 1944?"
"1944? Yes, he came home that year. And to think, she even offered to
let you try some illustrations for one of her own books, was willing to
instruct you, help you in every possible way!"
"Who?--oh, Wilberforce. Yes, she's nice--what a pity the books are
garbage. Why are you crying? Cousin Trent? That little man?"
"Trent--why, I never--Callista, you are hysterical."
"I was never colder. 'Mother, you have my father much offended.'"
"What? What are you saying?"
"I'm not thinking of Cousin Trent--that doesn't matter. It couldn't
matter if you sneaked into the sheets with him a hundred times--"
"Callista!"
"It doesn't matter, I said. The real infidelity was in the way you
treated my father, day to day, the nagging, belittlement, the wearing
down, little needles of disparagement, mental castration--but I don't
think you ever managed that, I think he stayed a man. I was seven when
he died--you think I couldn't feel what you were doing to him, and can't
remember it? I do. Even more I think of how you've gone on since then,
trying to destroy him for me--why, in your view nothing he ever did was
good, or wise, or even honorable. Isn't that why you cut me off from
Aunt Cora Winwood--because she knew better? Mother, he was one of the
gentle ones--a fault if you like--is that what you held against him?
That he couldn't black your eye when you needed it? Mother, I have three
paintings he did to please himself, escape from commercial work. Just
three. He must have done a great deal that was never sold. There must
have been sketches, unfinished things, portfolios put aside. I never
asked you this before, afraid of the answer I think: what became of that
work?"
"I simply will not endure any more of this."
"What became of my father's work?"
"Oh, if you mean--well, when we moved here from New York, and there was
so much--"
"I was right then. You threw it away?"
"If you will control yourself and listen reasonably: yes, your father
did leave certain drawings and paintings which were very obviously done
to please himself, as you put it. They were--I am sorry, Callista--they
were vile. No one could call me a prude, but there are certain
limits--"
"Now it's out."
"Callista, I must ask--"
"They were all destroyed, all his visions? Everything beyond the level
of, say, the Thursday Society--destroyed? Everything? You didn't save
one charcoal sketch, one line drawing, one bit of a doodle on scratch
paper? If you did I'll stay, to beg you for it--or steal it if I can. I
want nothing else from you, ever, but for one scrap of my father's work
I'd go on my knees."
"Callista, you are out of your mind."
"'Mother, for love of grace, lay not that flattering unction to your
soul, that not your trespass but my madness speaks.'"
"Oh, this morbid dramatizing, this neurotic--quoting 'Hamlet' at me as
if I--are you _laughing_?"
"Not very much. I was thinking how neither poor Herb nor Cousin Trent
fits the picture very well--it doesn't matter. There's more than one way
to pour poison in the ear of a king. You did it with words, millions of
little nibbling words, all the years he lived with you and--and for a
final dirty joke of the fates, begot me--but I think he knew I loved
him, as much as a child's capable of loving, maybe it gave him
something, after all he couldn't see ahead. And I was thinking: I must
write to Aunt Cora, I think she'd remember the crazy brat who adored her
and then couldn't come to see her any more, because Tom Winwood
d-r-rinks! She might have some of his work, and might send me to friends
of his, people you never knew. I was thinking, Mother, how differently
you'd feel if his work could be recognized, now that he's been safely
dead for twelve years. What a change! Then you'd be--what, his
inspiration?"
"Callista, don't! Stop it! Do you have to break my heart completely?
What have I done?"
"'Such an act'--oh, poor Mother, nothing, nothing at all. Maybe that's
the worst of it. You've done nothing, just lived inside the shell of
your own vanity--as everyone does, I suppose. I'm sorry, Mother. It's
all right, I'm going, and I won't come back. My own vanity tricked me
into saying too much, but you'll forget, and go on in your own way. I
haven't changed anything. 'Assume a virtue if you have it
not'--remember? 'Forgive me this my virtue, for in the fatness of these
pursy times'--you don't have one little scrap, a three-line scrawl on
the back of an envelope?"
Callista's mother, weeping with her head on her arms, did not answer
that. To Callista, standing in the doorway not yet able to turn and go,
it seemed as though all hatred and resentment had drained away suddenly
from within her; including the old dark aching hatred for herself, which
until then had seldom released her except at certain times in the warm
presence of Edith Nolan. She would have liked to cross the room, try for
some physical contact implying comfort and forgiveness with that
stranger over there who still made strangled sounds of self-pity and
other kinds of pain, all of them real. But having no confidence in her
skill at such gestures, no illusion that a relation thus broken could
ever be repaired, and fearing to lose the new-found inner quiet,
Callista only said: "Good night, Mother." Downstairs then, pausing on
the landing, her hand tightening on the rail as she waited on the
passing of a curious nausea. Too early for the sickness of pregnancy,
wasn't it? Nothing else wrong, and the nausea did pass. "_My pulse, as
yours, doth temperately keep time._"
She wondered, standing there still faintly sick, how the self of a week
before could possibly have knelt in that wild garden, pulled up those
innocently wicked plants, broken off the roots to be dropped in her
handbag, and thought: _This way would solve everything and hardly hurt
at all._ Yet the self of a week before had done that; the self of a few
hours past had glanced at the brandy bottle, death dissolved and
waiting, and had thought: _Have it out with Mother--there could be some
of his work, maybe buried in the attic where my searching never
uncovered it--and then, then probably_--
The self pausing on the landing, hand letting go the rail and moving
again softly, shelteringly, over the secret life in the womb, had
thought practically and sensibly: _Throw away that stunk-up mess as soon
as you get home._ And the self of twenty minutes later, arriving at the
apartment with a burden of abnormal fatigue and drowsiness, had
forgotten--(_is there any true forgetting this side of death?_)--forgotten
all about bottle and canister, everything except bed.
The self on the landing thought: _It's all right, Funny Thing, look,
it's all right, I'm going to bear you. I'm going to take care of you. I
can do that. I will._ Had wondered, incidentally, if the small bra
wasn't already a bit tight. The girl on the landing ran a finger lightly
along the column of her neck--wasn't there slightly more fullness,
softness? _Should go to a dentist too--and--oh, lots of little chores.
Never mind anyhow, Funny Thing, never mind the details, it's going to be
all right for you and me._
The self seated on the cot where Kowalski had left her stood up
uncertainly, with a sense of listening, although she knew Kowalski was
gone, Watson was keeping quiet, the night also was in a deep hush with
no longer that occasional whine of wind beyond the barred glass. No one
had spoken. _Unless I did._
She glanced at the window, uneasy as though the blank of winter night
beyond it had paled, and might show again some light or color if she
stared patiently enough. No. Not that window. Not that blank. And no
true sound of speech.
She stood with eyes closed and hands pressed over her ears. Waiting; and
hearing at least the dull noise--muffled, as it ought to be on the other
side of a closed door--of a bottle, heavy glass, drawn across resonant
wood from the back of a shelf. Faint pop of a cork and clink of glass,
and tap of high heels: "Callie, come on now! I poured a little drink for
you." And that fool lying frozen on the bed down there--why, how long
had that fool held herself frozen, knowing everything?
How long before that fool was telling herself: _I didn't really hear
her, I couldn't make out what she said_--how long? Whining maybe before
the Blank shut down complete: _It wasn't anything I did, I wasn't there,
I couldn't move, anyway how could I know she'd drink it herself?_ Saying
later (O the Blank!) in righteous innocence to Mr. Lamson: "I don't
know, I can't remember." Screaming in the secret heart where not even
Cecil could hear it and understand: _I don't want to know! I don't want
to remember!_
Eyes open, hands fallen, she noticed by the cot the handful of trifling
possessions allowed her. She fumbled through it, unsure what she sought
until her fingers held the lipstick pencil. To the wall then, dizzy and
obliged to lean against the cool plaster while her hand labored, but the
effort was interesting; she could feel wryly, justifiably certain that
no hand had ever written _these_ words on _this_ wall, ever before. She
stood back, dizziness gone, and saw how the red letters in the dim light
took on a magnificence, a glory like tranquillity: