This lilies-of-the-valley bed is dizzyingly fragrant when the little white bells on their arched stems are in bloom. Once Toby stood on its edge persistently worrying at a loose front tooth with his tongue and fingers until finally it came out, with a fleck of blood at its rubbery root. He carried the tooth back into the house to win praise from the grown-ups, for growing. He wants to cheer them up. They give off a scent of having lived so long they are stuck where they are for good, as if with a disease he doesn"t want to catch. His mother is not pleased by the tooth, worrying that because he forced it out the next one will come in crooked. She had told him that what he had were baby teeth and that stronger, bigger teeth would come in when they fell out. This knowledge hung over him as he stood there worrying at the tooth, adding to the pressure that hangs invisibly over the town, especially over the vacant lot next door.
The grown-up sadness he feels around him is thickest in the smaller side yard, the neglected one toward the Eichelbergers". The houses cast a constant shadow between them, and green moss grows in the gloom beneath the hydrangea bushes. These bushes produce blossoms as big as a person"s head but are almost the only flowering things here, as opposed to the other, sunny side. There is on this shadowy side (its lawn faintly spongy underfoot) the stillness of things Toby doesn"t like to think about-church, and deep woods, and cemeteries where a single potted plant has been left in memory of someone but, itself forgotten, has long dried out and died. The Eichelbergers" house looms close, and the child has the fear that Mr. will somehow pounce, though in fact the stooped stout old man, in his baggy gray sweater with gray pearl b.u.t.tons down the front, slightly smiles on the rare occasions when his and Toby"s eyes meet across the property line.
All by himself on this side of the house, Toby becomes more frightened than when alone elsewhere in the yard. The house has fewer windows on this side, so there is less chance of Mother or Grandmother glancing out and seeing him to check on his safety. He might almost be on the moon. Though there is a long clear s.p.a.ce here for a game of catch, he and Wilma never stay at it long. If the ball gets loose and goes into the Eichelbergers" peonies next to their house, the pair of them-Mr. in his greasy gray hat and then Mrs. with the ap.r.o.n she always wears and her horrible goiter-might come out and catch him retrieving the ball and, after giving him a good shaking, pen him into their cellar, among the cobwebby shelves of sealed fruit staring out and the skeletons of other caught children. Already the Eichelbergers, he has overheard, have complained to Grandfather about children making noise when they are trying to nap.
And yet, safe inside his own house, his grandfather"s house, Toby looks out one of the few windows in that direction and feels sorry for the side yard, it looks so unused and unvisited. It is as still as the toadless terrarium at elementary school. It brims with the adult sadness he feels at his back, in his family.
What is the sadness about? Money, Toby guesses. They never spend any without Daddy worrying. When the coal truck comes and backs up over the curb on thick wooden triangles carried along for just that purpose and the long chutes, polished bright by sliding anthracite, telescope out of the truck"s body into the little cellar window under the front porch, and the whole house trembles and fills with the racket of coal roaring into the bin, Toby feels the wonder of all the world"s arrangements for his happiness, where Daddy feels money sliding away. He is usually at work, teaching unruly students, but when he is at home he looks worried, wringing his hands in a way Mother calls "womanish." They are a man"s hands, square and freckled with raised warts on the backs, but they do perform a scrubbing, wringing motion like women"s housework as Daddy tries to rub away the worry inside him. He sometimes says of himself that he has "the jitters" and "the blues." He calls Toby "Young America" and, when Toby is bored or complaining, announces to an unseen audience, "The kid has the wim-wams."
The sadness acc.u.mulates toward the back of the house, in the kitchen, farthest from the street and its daily traffic. The linoleum floor with its design worn off where feet walk most, and the old slate sink smelling like well-water, and the long-nosed copper faucets turning green, and the oilcloth that covers the little table where the corner pokes him in the stomach and they eat with bone-handled knives and forks-it all looks tired and old-fashioned, compared to the kitchens some of his playmates have. Not Wilma Dobrinski"s people, but the Nagel twins three doors up from there, and some of the houses across the street, which sit higher than the houses on this side, above retaining walls and flights of cement stairs so long the mailman takes a shortcut along the porches by stepping over the low hedges-these ordinary houses have purring electric refrigerators instead of iceboxes dripping water into a tin tray, and toasters that plug in and pop up the toast instead of simply sitting on a smelly old gas stove, above the dirty burner with its little purple flames like dog teats.
And at Christmas, other front parlors, where people pa.s.sing on the sidewalk can look in and see, hold in their windows, like ill.u.s.trations in a magazine, long-needled evergreens drenched in tinsel"s silver rain and bearing as thick as holly berries thin-skinned hollow ornaments sprinkled with glitter. Mother favors keeping the tree natural, and her ornaments, as simple as the gla.s.s eggs that trick a chicken into laying, emerge from a few boxes in the attic, where each is thriftily nested in tissue, in its own little cardboard square. The Nagel twins say their uncle in Alton buys new ornaments every year, all blue or red or on a "theme," like a department store. Toby doesn"t want that; he just wants to be ordinary, and to have an ordinary amount of money.
Toby is not always good. He is timid and obeys rules but harbors dark things inside. His grandparents" house reaches around him with cobwebby corners and left-over s.p.a.ces and even entire locked rooms where things not of this world, monsters and ghosts, have room to lurk and breathe. The five human lives in the house are not enough to crowd out these menaces, to oust the terrors in the coal-dark cellar and in the attic with its aromas of mothb.a.l.l.s and cedar chests. Deep under the eaves the attic holds folded old carpets and fancy dishes with piecrust edges and kerosene lamps and k.n.o.bby trunks that will never travel again and cloth-covered alb.u.ms full of his grandparents" "people," ancestors long dead but with b.u.t.ton-bright eyes staring right at him when he opens an alb.u.m"s thick gilt-edged pages. The men have mustaches and hair parted in the middle. The women have hair pulled tight back and layered stiff clothes of different shades of black. Throughout the house Toby is aware of little-used closets and creepy s.p.a.ces under the bed. He avoids a back stairs whose doors are never unlatched, as if a mummy or a maniac is locked in there.
He rarely goes into his grandparents" room, and when he does there is a smell, an old people"s smell, parched and sweet. Right at the heart of the house a certain s.p.a.ce frightens him: the front stairs climb to a landing from which little sets of two steps lead one way to his grandparents" room and, in the opposite way, to his parents" room, and then a third way into the upstairs bathroom. When he does toidy in the bathroom, he is frightened by the door that closes behind him; something might be waiting for him behind the door when he comes out, so he makes Grandmother wait there, sitting on the little steps, to protect him. It is her duty because like Toby she is aware of the ghosts in the house. He has caught his belief in them from her.
One time when he came out of the bathroom she had fallen asleep on the steps, her wire-rimmed gla.s.ses tipped on her sharp small nose and her false teeth slipping down in a frightening way, and Toby was furious to find she wasn"t awake protecting him. He leaped up and pounded on her hunched bony back as she tried to stand. She softly grunted as his fists. .h.i.t. Her long gray hair seemed to fly out in every direction from her head. He knew he was being bad but knew she wouldn"t tell Mother, and even if she did Mother would understand his being upset. Her mother annoyed her too.
The worst thing he does is torture his toys. His teddy bear, pale woolly Bruno, once lost one gla.s.s eye, the tempting brown of a h.o.r.ehound drop, to Toby"s infant fingers, in the time before he can remember. The baby he once was had pulled it out on its wire stem and then forgot where it went. Now that he is older he likes to pull out the remaining eye, and gloat at Bruno for being blind, and then have mercy and kiss the woolly blank place and stick the eye back in. If he loses this eye they will have to throw Bruno away, to where he will lie in total darkness not seeing anything.
By saving pennies and begging for presents Toby has collected rubber dolls of Disney characters-a black-limbed Mickey with a hollow head that comes off, leaving a neck with a rim like the top of a bottle, and a Donald with a solid fat white bottom that weighs pleasantly in Toby"s hand, and a Pinocchio who isn"t as satisfactory, with his k.n.o.bby knees and goody-goody, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed boy"s face without the long nose you get by telling lies. In the stretch of bare floor beside the dining-room carpet he lines them up and bowls them down like tenpins, with a dirty softball. The hardest to knock over is a chocolate-brown Ferdinand the Bull, dense and short-legged. When he is playing this game just by himself, not with Wilma, as he sets them up again he threatens them with what he will do to them if they don"t obey him and fall down.
Once, Toby got carried away with a single-edged Treet razor blade he used for cutting cardboard into shapes, holding the edge against Donald"s long white throat to get him to confess, and to show he was serious went deeper than he had meant to, so that now when he bends Donald"s head back a second mouth opens in his throat, below the yellow beak. This evidence of his own cruelty shames Toby to see-each time he tips Donald"s head back, the cut widens by a few molecules-but, then, he doesn"t step on ants like a lot of boys and even girls do, showing off for boys, or go fishing out by the dam and put worms and gra.s.shoppers on hooks. He doesn"t see how people can do it, torture like that.
After Pearl Harbor, the United States is at war and violence has taken over the world. There are mock air raids in town. They have to turn off all the lights and sit, he and Mother and Grandfather and Grandmother, in the windowless landing that has always slightly frightened him anyway. Daddy is out in the dark with a flashlight, being an air-raid warden. While they are sitting there on the steps trying not to breathe, an airplane goes over, high above their roof. Toby knows that it will drop a bomb and they will all be obliterated. That is a new word in the paper, "obliterated," along with "Blitzkrieg" and "unconditional surrender." Incredibly, in England and in China children are among the obliterated. The saw-toothed drone of the airplane slowly recedes. Toby"s life goes on. Elsewhere, millions die.
When he strips a tin can of its paper labels and removes the top and bottom and bends them in and, on the cement floor of the chicken house, jumps to flatten the shining cylinder, it is like jumping on the face of a j.a.p or a Kraut. Chicken-dung dust rises from the cement with each impact. Mother doesn"t understand fighting-that you have to do it sometimes. On the walk back from fourth grade, the fifth-grade boys pick on Toby because he is still wearing knickers, or is a schoolteacher"s son, or lives in a big white house, or raises his hand too much in cla.s.s. They know this even though they aren"t in cla.s.s with him; he just has the annoying air of a boy with too many answers. Kids sneer to him, "You think you"re much," when all he wants is to blend in, to be an ordinary boy.
Boys from the ordinary world keep attacking him. One time, one of the fifth-graders, Ricky Seitz, and Toby wrestled to a sort of standstill on the weedy asphalt behind the Acme"s loading porch, except that Toby was on the bottom and emerged with a b.l.o.o.d.y nose. When he came in the front door, his mother saw the b.l.o.o.d.y nose and in a minute was on the phone-to the Seitzes and then to the princ.i.p.al of the elementary school. The telephone stands next to the Philco radio on a little table like a thick-stemmed black daffodil of Bakelite.
An even more humiliating intervention of his mother"s once occurred on the softball field. The field is two minutes" walk away, across the alley and along a little stand of corn, from the lower end of his yard, through the narrow s.p.a.ce between the chicken house and the empty garage. Mother complains that this s.p.a.ce smells of urine, and blames the men of the house, including Toby. It makes her wild just to think about it. "What"s the point of having indoor toilets?" she asks, getting red in the face. Still, Toby keeps doing it. Just being in this s.p.a.ce between the two walls, the chicken house"s asbestos shingles and the old garage"s wooden clapboards with the red paint flaking off, makes him need to go wee-wee.
Daddy walks this way to the high school every day, wearing a coat and tie, out past the buzzing j.a.panese-beetle traps, down between the yard and the asparagus bed, out through the lower hedge. Mother almost never comes down here. She avoids the school grounds; that is part of what made what happened so shocking. It involved Warren Frye-Warren Frye of the bleeding head, who never came to the house any more and possibly resented Toby"s being here in the territory of the lower alley, where Warren lives in a tight row of asphalt-shingled houses. Behind the backstop of the softball game-not a school game, a league game, on a Sat.u.r.day, with players graduated from high school and an older crowd of spectators-Warren pushed Toby, and Toby pushed back, and soon they were tussling on the dirt, before a small standing crowd that included Daddy.
Daddy was just standing there, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his combed head high, trying to forget his worries and watch the game, trying to blend in. Perhaps, teaching school all week, he was enjoying not having to enforce any discipline, letting nature take its course, ignoring the child"s fight in front of him and the crowd around him, which was noticing and loudly beginning to take sides. Toby was getting slightly the worse of the tussle-Warren had had a growth spurt, in the thickness dimension-and tears of fury were spouting in Toby"s eyes when his mother appeared.
She was just suddenly there, his tall young mother, seizing Warren by the hair and slapping him in the face, as smart a sound as a baseball being hit. Then, not missing a beat, holding Toby tightly by the hand, she wheeled and with the same amazing accuracy reached out and slapped Daddy in the face, for just standing there and letting nature take its course.
She pulled Toby home. He was blinded by his tears and burbled protests, while the part of his brain not dissolved in shame tries to figure out how she had known to appear. She must have heard crowd noise from inside the yard, and then somehow seen, out across the lower hedge, him and Warren tussling in the dirt. Why, Toby wonders at the center of this scene (the softball field fading behind them, the white house and side porch and grape arbor drawing closer, the asparagus bed on their left already beginning to turn frothy and go to seed, his tears warping everything like bubbles in window-panes), does he have to be the one with a mother living so close to the school grounds, a mother so magical and fierce and unwilling to let nature take its course? His arm feels pulled from its socket. He begins to resign himself to the fact that with such a mother he can never be an ordinary, everyday boy.
The Apparition
HER APPEARANCE startled Milford when she stopped his wife on the hotel stairs, to ask a question. There was a flushed urgency, a near-breathlessness, to the question: "Have you been to the hairdresser yet?" startled Milford when she stopped his wife on the hotel stairs, to ask a question. There was a flushed urgency, a near-breathlessness, to the question: "Have you been to the hairdresser yet?"
"No, not yet," Jean answered, startled to be abruptly accosted, though, since they were all members of a thirty-person museum-sponsored tour of the temples of southern India, in theory they were all comrades in adventure. It was so early in the tour that the Milfords hadn"t yet thoroughly worked out the other couples, but he recognized this woman on the stairs as paired with a bespectacled, short, sharp-nosed man in a blue blazer, the two of them hanging back a bit shyly at the get-acquainted c.o.c.ktail party beside the hotel swimming pool. Somewhere in their early forties, by Milford"s estimate, they were among the youngest people on the tour, whereas the Milfords, in their early seventies, were among the oldest. Yet age differences, and differences of wealth and cla.s.s, were compressed to insignificance by the felt presence of the alien subcontinent all around them. "How was she?" Jean asked, abandoning her usual reserve. There was, Milford had often noticed, a heated camaraderie among women when they touched on the technology of beauty. Already, he saw them as sisters of a sort.
"Horrible," came the swift, nearly breathless answer. "She didn"t understand my hair at all. It"s too curly. curly." The word was p.r.o.nounced as a spondee-cur-lee. The woman, wearing her own, more snugly cut blue blazer, spoke with a faint strangeness-not an accent exactly but with her mouth held a little numbly, a bit frozen in the words" aftermath, as if whatever she said slightly astonished her. Her hair, now that he looked, was indeed remarkably curly, bronze in color and so thick and springy it seemed to be fighting to expel the several tortoisesh.e.l.l barrettes that held it close to her head. The woman, wearing her own, more snugly cut blue blazer, spoke with a faint strangeness-not an accent exactly but with her mouth held a little numbly, a bit frozen in the words" aftermath, as if whatever she said slightly astonished her. Her hair, now that he looked, was indeed remarkably curly, bronze in color and so thick and springy it seemed to be fighting to expel the several tortoisesh.e.l.l barrettes that held it close to her head.
Milford, standing lower on the curved stairs, his feet arrested on two different steps, recalled an earlier glimpse of this apparition, also on steps. Those on the tour not too distinctly infirm were climbing the six hundred fourteen steps carved into a stone mountain, Vindhyagiri Hill, at whose summit stood a monumental Jain statue, a giant representation of a fabled sage, Bahubali, who had stood immobile for so many days and months that (legend claimed) vines had grown over his body. At the beginning of the climb Milford had been shocked by his first sight of a live "sky-clad" holy man. The naked man moved upward, one deliberate step at a time, with ceremonial pauses for chanting and shaking his wrist bells. His stocky, even paunchy body was tanned an oily coffee brown unbroken but by patches of gray hair on his chest and elsewhere. The ugliness of such an aging male body disturbed Milford. Did the holy man proceed up and down the stairs all day long? Wasn"t there any law in India against indecent exposure? Or was it legal on sacred sites, in the vicinity of a giant nude statue whose p.e.n.i.s, the guidebook calculated, was six feet long? Preoccupied by these questions, Milford felt himself being pa.s.sed. A body brushed past his. He was being pa.s.sed by a youngish woman in khaki slacks and white running shoes and a yellow baseball hat tipped rakishly forward on her head, as if her hair were too bulky, too springy, to fit into it. Without effort, it seemed to the gasping Milford, she moved upward and out of sight, amid the many other ascending pilgrims at Sravanabelgola. By the time he had made it all the way to the shrine at the top, out of which the huge effigy, symmetrical and serene, protruded like a jack-in-the-box, she had disappeared.
"But she shouldn"t have trouble with your your hair, it"s so hair, it"s so straight, straight," the woman was telling Jean, with that terminal emphasis, her lips ajar as if there was something about straight hair that left her stunned. "I"d love to have straight hair," she did add, and thrust out a shapely, heavily ringed hand for Jean to take. "I"m Lorena. Lorena Billings," she said.
"I know." Jean smiled. "I"m Jean Milford, and this is my husband, Henry."
He wondered if Jean was lying, or if she had really known. Women lied, often for no other reason than simple politeness or the wish to round out a story, but, then, they did retain details that slipped by men. He had already forgotten the apparition"s name. Taking her hand-startlingly warm and moist-he said, to cover his betranced confusion, "You pa.s.sed me on the Jain steps yesterday. Breezed right up by me-I was impressed. You must be in great shape."
"No," was the thoughtful, unsmiling response, as she looked at him for the first time. Her brown eyes were a surprisingly pale shade, almost amber. "I just wanted to get it over with quickly, before I lost heart."
"Did you really know her name?" Milford asked his wife when the other woman had gone off, with her horrible haircut. It had looked pretty good to him, actually. With hair that curly, always retracting into itself, how could a hairdresser go wrong?
"Of course," Jean told him. "I looked over the list they gave us when we signed on to the tour and tried to match up names and faces. You would get much more out of these trips, Henry, if you did some homework."
She had been a schoolteacher in her early twenties, before he had met her, but he had a clear enough vision of her standing in front of the second- or third-graders, slender and quick and perfectly groomed, demanding with her level, insistent voice their full attention, and rewarding them at the end of each cla.s.s with her brilliant, gracious smile. She would have subdued those children to her own sense of a proper education, and she was still working to subdue her husband. Sometimes, when he sought to evade one of her helpful lectures to him and sidle past, she would sidestep and block his way, insisting, with a blue-eyed stare, "Look at me!" at me!"
He said, kiddingly, kidding being another form of evasion, "I prefer the immersion method-to let it all wash over me, unmuddied by preconceptions."
"That"s so so sloppy," Jean said, endearingly enough. Physically she and the apparition were both, Milford supposed, his "type"-women of medium height with a certain solid amplitude, not fat but sufficiently wide in the hips to signal a flair for childbirth; women whose frontal presentation makes men want to give them babies. His and Jean"s babies were themselves of baby-making age, and even, in the case of their two older daughters, beyond it. Yet the primordial instinct was still alive in him: he wanted to make this apparition the mother of his child. sloppy," Jean said, endearingly enough. Physically she and the apparition were both, Milford supposed, his "type"-women of medium height with a certain solid amplitude, not fat but sufficiently wide in the hips to signal a flair for childbirth; women whose frontal presentation makes men want to give them babies. His and Jean"s babies were themselves of baby-making age, and even, in the case of their two older daughters, beyond it. Yet the primordial instinct was still alive in him: he wanted to make this apparition the mother of his child.
Lorena Billings"s body differed from Jean"s not only by thirty years" less use but by being expensively toned. Though open to dowdy, education-minded New Englanders like the Milfords, the tour was basically composed of Upper East Side New Yorkers. They seemed all to know one another, as if the metropolis were a village skimmed from penthouses and museum boards, and their overheard talk dealt with, among other cherished caretakers of their well-being, personal trainers.
Much of the conversation among the women was in Spanish. The tour group included a strange number of wives from Latin America-remnants of an old wave of fashion, Henry surmised, in trophy mates. Lorena was one of them, the child of an adventurous American mining engineer and a Chilean banker"s daughter. This explained her charming, intent way of speaking-English was not her mother tongue, the language of her heart, though she had been sent off while young to American schools and spoke the acquired language fluently. She even spoke it with a pinch of New York accent, that impatient nasal tw.a.n.g so useful, in her husband"s mouth, for announcing rapid appraisals. Ian Billings was a lawyer, with unspoken depths of inherited, extra-legal resources lending his a.s.sertions a casual weight. Milford took what comfort he could, as their trip wore on and as acquaintance among the tourists deepened, in the observation that Billings had the thin skin and pink flush of a candidate for an early heart attack. He was no taller than his wife. In talking to Lorena, lanky Milford felt himself towering as if literally mounted on Proust"s figurative stilts of time. He was plenty old enough, if he thought about it, to be her father, but in the society of the tour bus-a kind of school bus, with the discipline problems in the back and the brown-nosers up front next to the lecturers-they were all in the same grade.
Dusty villages and green rice fields flowed past the windows of the bus. Vendors and mendicants cl.u.s.tered at the door whenever the bus stopped. Temple followed temple, merging in Milford"s mind into one dismal labyrinth of dimly lit corridors smelling of rotting food-offerings to G.o.ds who weren"t having any. At the end of some especially long and dark corridors stood the linga, linga, a rounded phallic symbol periodically garlanded and anointed with oil and ghee. In especially well-staffed temples, robed priests guarded the a rounded phallic symbol periodically garlanded and anointed with oil and ghee. In especially well-staffed temples, robed priests guarded the linga linga and stared expectantly at the tourists. and stared expectantly at the tourists.
Milford was not good at Hinduism. He kept confusing Vishnu and Shiva, missing the subtle carved differences in hairstyle that distinguished them. He kept forgetting whose consort was lovely Lakshmi, G.o.ddess of wealth and good fortune, and whose consort was Parvati/Durga/Kali, daughter of the Himalayas, G.o.ddess of strength, warfare, destruction, and renewal. Jean and Ian struck up an alliance, a conspiracy of star students, comparing notes and memorizing lists of primary and secondary deities and their interrelations and of the eminently forgettable long names of the temples nested in their various dirty, clamorous cities, among their endless one-man shops and mutilated beggars and heartbreakingly hopeful, wiry, grinning brown children.
While their consorts matched notebooks and one-upped each other with s.n.a.t.c.hes of Hindi and Sanskrit, Henry and Lorena were thrown into a default alliance of willful ignorance. They became, with sideways glances and half-smiles, connoisseurs of irrelevant details-the tour leader"s increasing vexation with aggressive j.a.panese and Korean groups; the dead-on mimicry by Indian officials and maitre d"s of an obsolete imperial Englishness, bluff and haughty; a startlingly specific s.e.x act included in a time-worn temple frieze; a lonely bouquet of withering flowers at the base of an outof-the-way shrine to Parvati, G.o.ddess of (among much else) fertility.
In the bat-cave recesses of the larger temples, wild-eyed Brahman priests appeared, selling blessings to the tourists. The tourists learned how to put their hands together in offering their namaste, namaste, and how to bow their heads and receive a stab of bright henna or oily ash on the center of their foreheads. Lorena, it seemed to Milford, retained the fresh mark all day, a third eye above her two topaz-colored own. She had an apt.i.tude for being blessed. In several of the larger and busier temples, a tethered elephant had been trained to receive a piece of paper currency in the prehensile, three-lobed end of its trunk, and to swing the trunk backwards to pa.s.s the note to the trainer"s hand, and then to lower the pink termination of its uncanny and docile proboscis upon the head of the donor for a moment. At every opportunity, Lorena submitted to this routine, her eyes piously closed, her canary-yellow baseball cap tipped jauntily forward on the dense ma.s.s of her curls. The cap, Milford supposed, served as something of a prophylaxis, but it was with a wide-eyed merriment that after one such blessing she complained to Henry, "He spit at me! Right in my face!" and how to bow their heads and receive a stab of bright henna or oily ash on the center of their foreheads. Lorena, it seemed to Milford, retained the fresh mark all day, a third eye above her two topaz-colored own. She had an apt.i.tude for being blessed. In several of the larger and busier temples, a tethered elephant had been trained to receive a piece of paper currency in the prehensile, three-lobed end of its trunk, and to swing the trunk backwards to pa.s.s the note to the trainer"s hand, and then to lower the pink termination of its uncanny and docile proboscis upon the head of the donor for a moment. At every opportunity, Lorena submitted to this routine, her eyes piously closed, her canary-yellow baseball cap tipped jauntily forward on the dense ma.s.s of her curls. The cap, Milford supposed, served as something of a prophylaxis, but it was with a wide-eyed merriment that after one such blessing she complained to Henry, "He spit at me! Right in my face!"
Wanting to feel an elephant"s blessing as she felt it, he submitted to one, for the price of a pink ten-rupee note bearing the image of Gandhi, and did feel, on the top of his head, a fumbling tenderness, a rubbery heaviness intelligently moderated, as if by an overworked G.o.d.
He did not want to draw too close to Lorena. At his age he preferred to observe at a safe distance, to embrace her with a wry sideways attention. She was beyond his means in every way. On the one occasion when, in the informal rotation of the couples and widowed singles and gay bachelors whereby the tour group sought to vary the round of thrice-daily meals, the Milfords and the Billingses shared a dinner table, the younger couple radiated an aura of expenditure, as their conversation revealed details of second homes in Southampton, Long Island, and Dorset, Vermont, not to mention a Miami apartment and annual trips back to Chile. Though to the Milfords they seemed youthful, they were old enough to be much concerned with their children"s admissions to preferred day schools and, eventually, Ivy League colleges. Like the solar beads that wink through the moon"s mountain valleys during a total eclipse, an undeclared fortune twinkled in their humorous offhand complaints about the unbridled expenditures of nouveau-riche condo boards and the levies that New York City, in taxes and charities, extracts from its fortunate on behalf of its omnipresent poor.
Not that the Billingses were anything but pleasant and tactful with the elderly New England provincials. Milford observed that Lorena warmed in her husband"s presence, her eyes and voice taking on a cosmopolitan quickness and gleam as she touched on plays, fashions, art exhibits, and Manhattan architectural disputes of which, she slowly realized, the Milfords knew almost nothing-only what had been laggardly reported in the Boston Globe. Boston Globe. Her mouth lapsed into that frozen, uncertain look with which she had addressed the strangers on the stairs; but then she decided, with an inaudible click, that the Milfords were happy to bask in a reflected glitter, and talked on. Her mouth lapsed into that frozen, uncertain look with which she had addressed the strangers on the stairs; but then she decided, with an inaudible click, that the Milfords were happy to bask in a reflected glitter, and talked on.
Billings, Henry saw with a vicarious husbandly pride, permitted her to be herself, to display herself. Her expanding curls softly bobbed, the faint formality of her English melted into bra.s.sy New York diphthongs. "People keep telling us j.a.p is so wonderful, but-no doubt it"s my stupidity-I find his post-Pop stuff to be so dry, dry, so so-so difundido. difundido. But then we don"t But then we don"t own own any of him, except for a few prints Ian picked up when he was still doing the alphabet and numbers. Compare him, say, with Botero, who"s just done a super series of drawings on the American atrocities at Abu Ghraib-utterly savage, like nothing else he"s ever done. They absolutely rank with Goya, any of him, except for a few prints Ian picked up when he was still doing the alphabet and numbers. Compare him, say, with Botero, who"s just done a super series of drawings on the American atrocities at Abu Ghraib-utterly savage, like nothing else he"s ever done. They absolutely rank with Goya, Los desastres de la guerra. Los desastres de la guerra." When she dropped into Spanish, a truer self leaped forth, sharp edges and trilled "r" "r"s, her voice a bit deeper, on bedrock.
Billings, more aware than she of a range of conservative opinion outside Manhattan, where the phrase "American atrocities" might possibly grate, readjusted his rimless gla.s.ses on his sharp-tipped nose. Almost inaudibly, he cleared his throat. These delicate alterations registered with his wife. Her lips took on their numb look, and she slightly changed the subject. "Did either of you happen to be in the city when they had these big fat Botero people in bronze all up and down Park Avenue? That center strip has never looked so good, even in tulip season. The statues shone shone-is that the word?-in the sun. They were n.o.ble, and ridiculous, and everything all at once!"
"Terrific," Milford said, meaning her entire presentation.
"I never saw them," Jean coolly interposed, "but I read about them, somewhere. Where was it, Henry? Time? Time? But I never see But I never see Time, Time, do I, except in the dentist"s office? Oh dear," she added, sensing her husband"s displeasure at her interruption, "we"re such b.u.mpkins." do I, except in the dentist"s office? Oh dear," she added, sensing her husband"s displeasure at her interruption, "we"re such b.u.mpkins."
Afterwards, when the Milfords were alone, Jean said, "They were very sweet, indulging us."
"I was fascinated," Milford told her, "by her husband"s face. It"s so minimal, like one of those happy faces. He gives away absolutely nothing."
"He"s a lawyer, dear."
Milford had been a professor, teaching statistics and probabilities at a small but choice business school in Wellesley. It surprised him, upon retirement, to find how little he cared about his subject once he no longer had to teach it to cla.s.srooms of future profiteers. His teaching had been dutiful, and so now was his tourism. The world"s wonders seemed weary to him, overwhelmed by the mobs that came to see them. The tour"s head lecturer, too, after two weeks of shouting to make himself heard above the echoing hubbub of temples and the shuffling distractions of museums, seemed to be losing interest and looking forward to his next tour, of German castles. The experienced travellers on the tour explained to the Milfords that everything was simpler and more concentrated on the Rhine; you stayed in your cabin in the boat, instead of hopping by bus all over southern India and constantly packing and repacking.
As the tour leader"s pa.s.sion slackened, his native a.s.sistant, Shanta Subbulakshmi, a short, dark woman from Madurai and the warrior caste, took the microphone in the bus and spoke, shyly yet fluently, of herself-her parents" unusual determination that she pursue an education, the ornate etiquette (the advance scouts, the ceremonial visitations, the seclusion of bride and groom from each other) of her arranged marriage. She spoke of the way the roads of Tamil Nadu used to run, when she was a girl, through the emerald green of rice fields, field after field, before the advent of industrial parks and a ruthless widening of the dusty, pitted roads. "The roads are deplorable," she said. She made the only case for Hinduism that Milford had ever heard. "Unlike Buddhism and Catholic Christianity," Shanta explained in her strict, lilting English, "Hinduism does not exalt celibate monks. It teaches that life has stages, and each stage is holy. It says that s.e.xuality is part of life, and business also-a man earns a living for his family, and this fulfills his duty to society. In the last stage of life he is permitted to leave his family and business and become a seeker after G.o.d and life"s ultimate meaning. But the middle stages, the worldly stages, are holy also. Thus Hinduism allows for life"s full expression, whereas Buddhism teaches renunciation and detachment. Hinduism is the oldest of religions still widely practiced, and also the most modern, in that nothing is alien to it. There are no Hindu disbelievers. Even our particle physicists and computer programmers are good Hindus."
Shanta helped the women of the tour dress in saris for the farewell dinner. The saris had been acquired in little shopping sprees squeezed between the long bus rides (some along a coast swept as bare as a desert by last year"s tsunami) and the great temples-dingy mazes surmounted by towering polychrome pyramids of G.o.ds, G.o.ds upon G.o.ds, their popping eyes and protruding tongues and multiplied arms signifying divine energy.
Jean, a thrifty New Englander, reasoned that she would never have another occasion for wearing a sari, and showed up in her best pantsuit. "These clothes people buy on vacation in a kind of frenzy of being there," she said, "look so flimsy and tawdry back in the real world. They just collect dust in the back of the closet."
The luxurious New York wives, however, wore saris; their silks and sateen glimmered in the firelight of the lawn torches while their excited voices shot Spanish compliments back and forth beneath the palms.
"Que bonita!"
"Tu eres una India! De verdad!"
But in truth the costumes did not flatter most of the women: the fashionably thin appeared scrawny and starved, and those with more flesh seemed uneasy in their wrappings, as if something might at any moment pop loose. Milford would not have thought that a garment consisting only of an underblouse and a few square yards of cloth could fail to fit anybody, but the women by torchlight resembled a cl.u.s.ter of hotel guests who, chased by a fire alarm into the street, had in their haste grabbed gaudy sheets to cover themselves.
Except for Lorena: this bronze-haired, Americanized Latina looked in Milford"s eyes as if she had been born to wear a sari, or at least this particular one, its pale-green border framing a ruddy, mysterious pattern that suggested in the flickering light rosy thumbprints. Her eyes seemed nearly golden. He had come up to her intending to say something jovial and flattering about her costume, but was struck dumb by how, with a kind of shameless modesty, she had given the tucked and folded cloth her shape-the inviting pelvic width, the exercise-flattened abdomen.
His voice came out croaky: "Terrific," he said.
She seemed uncomfortable, ambushed by this new version of her own beauty. Her shoulders defensively cupped inward and, in a plaintive New York whine, she asked, "You like it?"
Milford"s stricken voice regained a little strength and smoothness. "I adore it," he told her, adding, kiddingly, "De verdad." "De verdad."
He offered to move past her, releasing her to the company of her Upper East Side friends, but-a misstep on the uneven lawn, possibly-she moved sideways, blocking his way, just as Jean sometimes did, as a way of saying, "Look at me!" Lorena asked, "Do you and Jean ever get to New York?" at me!" Lorena asked, "Do you and Jean ever get to New York?"
"We used to, but now almost never," he told her, wanting to flee this apparition.
When, with the night"s torch-lit farewells jangling in his veins, Milford lay in bed face-down beside his sleeping wife, he seemed again to be confronting Lorena, body to body. A few nights before, the entire tour, but for its oldest and frailest members, had been taken to a giant city temple where, each night, a group of bare-chested, sweating priests carried a small bronze statue of Parvati, clad in wreaths of flowers, out of its sanctuary and through the temple corridors to stay until morning with the G.o.ddess"s consort, Lord Shiva. The bronze statue, much less than life-size, was carried in a curtained palanquin, so there was nothing to see but the four Brahman priests shouldering the poles, and the other priests accompanying the procession with drums and shouts and a blood-curdling long trumpeting. The priests trotted, not walked, except when they halted for a serenade to the hidden G.o.ddess. The trumpet riffed in an o.r.g.a.s.mic rapture that reminded Milford uncannily of, on a younger continent, jazz. The mob of sensation-seeking tourists and G.o.d-seeking Hindus jostled and stampeded in the fast-moving procession"s wake; flashbulbs kept flashing and Ian Billings, his arm uplifted like the Statue of Liberty"s, was videotaping the proceedings with a digital camera whose intensely glowing little screen projected what the camera saw-bouncing bodies, bobbing heads, the curtained palanquin-and betrayed, above the thundering pack, his and his own consort"s whereabouts.
Milford followed at a timid, elderly distance, but his height enabled him to see, at the intervals when the procession halted and drummed and trumpeted as if to renew its supernatural sanction, the circling, sweating, blank-faced priests. One of them looked anomalously fair, grimacing and squinting through the smoke of incense in a skeptical modern manner-a convert, perhaps, except that Hinduism, in its aloof hundreds of millions, accepted no converts. The procession, after one last noisy pause, hurried down the corridor to Shiva"s sanctuary, where non-Hindus were forbidden to follow.
Sleepless on the verge of departure, Milford saw that this had been truth, earthly and transcendent truth, one body"s adoration of another, hidden Shivas and Parvatis united amid the squalor and confusion of happenstance, of karma. He rejoiced to be tasting l.u.s.t"s folly once more, though the dark shape he was lying upon, fitted to him exactly, was that of his body in its grave.
Blue Light
THE DERMATOLOGIST was a tall and intelligent fair-haired man who gave the impression that of all the things that exist in the world the one that interested him least was human skin. Twice a year he inspected Fritz Fleischer"s epidermis-plagued by psoriasis in childhood, then by sun damage in old age-glancingly, barely concealing his distaste. Nevertheless, he kept up with the latest developments in the field. "There"s a new technology," he said, "that flushes out precancerous cells. Before they turn cancerous. It might do well on your face. Blue light." was a tall and intelligent fair-haired man who gave the impression that of all the things that exist in the world the one that interested him least was human skin. Twice a year he inspected Fritz Fleischer"s epidermis-plagued by psoriasis in childhood, then by sun damage in old age-glancingly, barely concealing his distaste. Nevertheless, he kept up with the latest developments in the field. "There"s a new technology," he said, "that flushes out precancerous cells. Before they turn cancerous. It might do well on your face. Blue light."
He spoke with a halting diffidence, while averting his eyes from the sight of his nearly nude patient.
"Blue light?" Fleischer echoed.
"The same sort ordinary light bulbs give off. No UVA, no infrared. Blue, only brighter. The skin is cleansed with acetone and then painted with delta-aminolevulinic acid. ALA. It sinks in and makes the cells respond. They shatter. It destroys them." A certain enthusiasm had entered his voice. His bills listed "destruction of lesion" and then some outrageous charge-two hundred ninety dollars, say-for spraying a spot with two seconds" worth of liquid nitrogen.
"Destroys them?"
"The bad ones," the dermatologist insisted, defensively.
"The immature ones?"
Fleischer had learned the term from his previous dermatologist, an older man who, before he in rapid succession retired and died, used to talk lingeringly, lovingly, about skin, tilting back in his swivel chair and closing his eyes as if peering into a mental microscope. Pre-cancerous cells, he explained, have simply failed to mature, and the reactive ointments-Efudex, Dovonex, Aldara-that he prescribed helped them to mature. "Maturing" seemed to be a euphemism for death-an unsightly convulsion of cells that faded away eventually, but not before making the patient look as spotty and insecure as a teen-ager. In his mental microscope Fleischer"s former doctor had foreseen a bright future when the molecular secrets of skin lay all exposed for manipulation and cure.
The old healer"s successor resisted the word "immature," with its implied teleology. "The damaged ones," he clarified. He manifested a faint, hurried enthusiasm: "You"d be a new man. Look ten years younger."
"A new man?" Fleischer barked out a greedy laugh at the thought, and the other man winced at the sight of the patient"s oral membranes. "I"ll give it a try."
The dermatologist bleakly nodded. "Let Sheela set it up. Mondays and Thursdays are the days we do it. Sixteen minutes and three-quarters-that"s the exposure time. Seems an odd time, but that"s what"s been worked out. Less doesn"t do the job, and more doesn"t seem to add anything. Good luck, Mr. Fleischer." While Fleisher was still drawing breath to thank him, the tall, fair man loped around a corner of the hospital"s labyrinthine dermatology department and vanished.
Sheela wore a sari, advertising the department"s diversity. She was short, with the round teeth of a child and a skin of smooth Dravidian darkness. Towering awkwardly above her, Fleischer felt disgustingly mottled and leprously pale. "How undressed should I get?"
"Not one bit," she told him in her merry lilt. "Today concerns just your face." Using swabs of cotton that felt like a kitten"s paws, she stroked Fleischer"s face with one colorless fluid and then with another. Her nostril-bead glinted in his peripheral vision as she worked, moving around him as nimbly as an elephant trainer. "Now," she announced, "you must wait an hour, for the skin to absorb. Please sit with a magazine." There were others sitting and waiting, men and women mostly as elderly as he, all of a Northern European paleness and pinkness, but with nothing conspicuously wrong with what of their skins he could see. We are all, Fleischer thought, victims of the same advertis.e.m.e.nts, the same airbrushed photos of twenty-year-old models, the same absurd American dreams of self-perfection. A new man, my foot.
He picked up a tattered month-old edition of People People and read of celebrities getting divorced, getting pregnant, confessing to unhappy childhoods, adopting an African orphan. He had never heard of most of these beautiful people, but, then, he had been long locked into the financial world, poring over and read of celebrities getting divorced, getting pregnant, confessing to unhappy childhoods, adopting an African orphan. He had never heard of most of these beautiful people, but, then, he had been long locked into the financial world, poring over The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal and its columns of figures, its rumors of collapse and merger. Now that he was retired from his Boston firm, he had begun to reread the cla.s.sics of his college years-d.i.c.kens, Dostoevsky-and discovered that his callow initial impression that they were windy and boring was, surprisingly often, reinforced, with the difference that now he was under no academic obligation to finish the book. He spent an hour a day walking, with other retirees, the sidewalk above the littered beach, lined with condominiums, from which the sepia skysc.r.a.pers of Boston could be seen like a low cloud in the distance. He watched his investments. He feebly tried to keep in touch with his three adult children, and their children. and its columns of figures, its rumors of collapse and merger. Now that he was retired from his Boston firm, he had begun to reread the cla.s.sics of his college years-d.i.c.kens, Dostoevsky-and discovered that his callow initial impression that they were windy and boring was, surprisingly often, reinforced, with the difference that now he was under no academic obligation to finish the book. He spent an hour a day walking, with other retirees, the sidewalk above the littered beach, lined with condominiums, from which the sepia skysc.r.a.pers of Boston could be seen like a low cloud in the distance. He watched his investments. He feebly tried to keep in touch with his three adult children, and their children.
The blue-light device proved to be less elaborate than he had imagined. A thick large horseshoe-shape, it half-encircled his head and bathed his face in a humming brightness. His eyes were covered with small cup-shaped goggles; Sheela"s voice kept him company in his blindness. "People tell me," she said, "the worst p.r.i.c.kling is the first five minutes, and then the discomfort diminishes."
Fleischer had lived near a beach for much of his life, and, aware of no remedy for psoriasis but raw solar rays, had done more than his share of sunbathing-lying in the sheltering dunes in the windy spring, and floating face-up in the soupy sea of high summer with bright b.u.t.tons and sequins of reflected sun glittering and bouncing all around him, and in the cool fall courting the last slant, dimming rays. Now, compressed into seconds, the sensations of those prolonged exposures were revived and ferociously intensified. Light pressed through the substance of the goggles and his eyelids to register red on his retinas. Needles of heat were thrust deep into his face. He could feel, at the tip of each, immature cells bursting like tiny firecrackers.
Sheela poured her lilting voice over his pain: "You"ve done two minutes. How is it?"
"Thrilling," Fleischer said.
"I can switch the machine off at any time, and resume after a break," she said. "Many patients are grateful."
"No, let"s keep at it." Fleischer liked talking while blinded; his conversational partner, unseen, filled the room, giving the inescapable radiance a voice.
"My offer is good at any time," she continued. "Many patients discover they cannot stand the sensations."
"Tell me," Fleischer said, as the fire consuming his cheeks and brow boiled deeper beneath his skin, "about Hinduism. Does it have a G.o.d, or not?"
"It has a large number of G.o.ds."
"I mean," Fleischer said, as if his agony gave him the rights of a seeker-as if being blinded made him a seer-"beyond all that, Shiva and Shakti and so on, an overarching G.o.d-a Ground of Being, as it were." In his mind"s eye the needles of light dug in like talons, each tipped with poison.