Louisa Meets Bear (22 page)

“I remember Eric once saying something about his father that astonished me. That really the ice hockey had been as much dictated by circumstances as the fishing—only with the hockey his father had had the illusion of choice, the feeling that his life was under his control.”

Margaret raises her hand to her breastbone. An opal ring, the stone fat and cloudy, rests on her middle finger. “It occurred to me that the same was true for me with medicine. I'd felt like I'd chosen to be a doctor, but it had been more reaction than anything else. Math and science had seemed less intimidating than the humanities, where my Wellesley classmates were leagues ahead of me. With differential equations, it's irrelevant if you've ever seen the Joffrey or spent a summer in Avignon.”

Margaret spins the ring around on her finger, and then presses it to her lips. “I was so agitated by the thought, I got up and started pacing. Back and forth across the room. Eric paced with me, holding my elbow to keep me from bumping into things. Talking all the while: that he didn't mean to sound like a Pollyanna, that he wasn't telling me to look for the silver lining, but that it had happened, my losing my sight, and I could rail and scream and make life miserable for myself and everyone around me and still I wouldn't be able to see.”

Charlotte can feel herself straining forward—as though she might miss one of Eric's words. As though she has never heard her son speak before. And really, when she thinks about it, what she's always listened for in Eric is the sound from his fingers. There had been very few words, very few words from any of them, so that it seems all the more wondrous to learn that Eric has grown to be a man of so many.

“I'm not saying I was out of the woods after that day. There was plenty of hell still to come. I'm talking hatred. A hatred at white people like I'd never felt before.” Margaret pauses. “I don't know why I didn't take that out on Eric. Maybe because I'd never seen him, maybe because he's so young. He felt to me like the Buddha in a body without color.”

Margaret leans back in her chair. She runs a hand over her hair. “I felt something, that day, pacing back and forth with Eric holding my elbow, a sense of possibility, of going with what had happened the way they teach you in tai chi, that you move with the aggressor's energy, not against it. And it came back, at first so fleetingly it would be gone before I'd even recognize it had been there, but then, later, for longer stretches, even a few minutes. The agitation would subside and I could breathe.”

The maid comes in with a new bowl of cashews. She wipes the damp spots on the tray with a cloth. Reaching behind the curtains, she pulls down the shades. Sealed from the streetlights, the room intensifies, each object gaining the gravitas of things late in the day. She waits by the windows, her red hair electric in the artificial light.

“That's fine, Janie. We won't need anything else.”

After the girl leaves the room, Margaret continues. “Of course, it got worse before it got better, since once I stopped ranting and raving I had to face how frightened I was of the darkness, that it was dark all the time.”

Charlotte closes her eyes. On the inside of her lids are shades of black, a shimmering red aureole.

“And then there was the trial. Having to listen to that sorry excuse for a human being and his sleazy lawyer arguing temporary insanity. That set me back. It was then that I'd think about Eric's father. Your husband.”

In the dark, Margaret's voice seems to Charlotte both lower and more distinct, the words silky and abundant with meaning. “That Eric had told me about him as a warning.”

Opening her eyes, Charlotte sees Margaret's face as a triptych: the smooth brow, the opaque glasses, the tranquil mouth.

“Eric never talked about him again. Later, I'd wonder if I'd imagined the conversation. But then I'd be struggling with some new piece I'd spent all week memorizing from the Braille, practicing it phrase by phrase, and I'd go blank and do something stupid like start to kick the back of the console and Eric would hold my shoulders and exhale deeply and I'd know that he was instructing me to let go, let the music enter me, let myself understand what he was teaching me. Then I'd wonder if he'd told me about his father because he truly believed I was going to be able to play the piano if I let myself or if he just took a risk.”

Margaret laughs. “That would have been something—if, after all that, it turned out I had a tin ear.” The pleasure in the thought sweeps across her cheeks. She runs her thumb over what Charlotte realizes must be a Braille watch. “Good Lord, is that right? Is it nearly seven thirty?”

Charlotte looks at her own watch. “Yes.”

“I wish I could invite you to stay for dinner, but I have a date.”

“I'm so sorry, lingering on like this.” A date. Charlotte has never known a grown woman to have a date.

“We're meeting at the Museum of Natural History. They're open late tonight. Will you walk with me? It's only a few blocks south.”

Charlotte nods and then—flustered because of course Margaret can't see the gesture and anxious too about the evening and finding her way to her brother's apartment, figuring out how to park the pickup overnight—blurts, “Sure, I mean yes, of course.”

Margaret rings the silver bell.

“Our coats, Janie, please.” A moment later, the maid returns with Charlotte's stiff green parka and Margaret's soft camel's hair.

*   *   *

Once inside the museum, Margaret switches her hand from atop Charlotte's arm to beneath so that she is now leading them. They're in a rotunda surrounded by murals of scenes from primitive cultures: loinclothed men, women with sleek hair that falls to their waists. Two enormous dinosaurs fill the middle of the room, one with an elongated neck, arched like a great giraffe, the other thick and compact with an immense pointy-toothed jaw, its left leg bent in preparation for attack.

“Oh, my,” Charlotte says.

“It's called
Barosaurus Defends Her Young
. They've redone the models so the tails arch up like birds'. Before, when I was a kid, the tail of the barosaurus—that's the taller one—dragged on the floor like a lizard's.”

Her young? Charlotte looks more closely. Crouched behind the barosaurus is a smaller dinosaur, its legs astride the mother's tail, its head no larger than the mother's ankle bone.

Margaret squeezes Charlotte's arm. “Come, I'm meeting my friend on the fourth floor in the old dino room.”

Margaret leads them to the left of the admission booth toward a wide staircase. Whereas the rotunda was bright and cheerful, the stairwell has the musty smell of old buildings where even new paint every two years fails to foil the dankness. She releases Charlotte's arm, grips the banister, and marches up the stairs with Charlotte following two steps behind.

At the top of the stairs, Margaret takes Charlotte's arm again. They walk down a corridor with no doorways, no exhibits. Could Margaret be lost?

“Here, to the right,” Margaret says, and suddenly they are in a room as sprawling as a high school gym. Glass cases line the walls and, in the center, there is another grouping of dinosaur skeletons—even larger than the ones below. There are no other people save for an elderly guard with broken blood vessels on his cheeks. He sticks his thumb in the book he'd been reading. “Evening, Doc,” he calls out.

“Jim, how are you? Your wife?”

“Fine, fine. The missus is doing better. Up and about like her old self.” He taps the book against his thigh. “You just tell me when.”

Margaret steers Charlotte to the center of the room. “You have to walk all the way around to really see them.”

When they reach the railing surrounding the dinosaurs, Margaret lets go of Charlotte's arm and moves ahead. Late Cretaceous, Charlotte reads on the placard, from North America. Looking more carefully, she can distinguish the three different specimens: the sad, cow-faced anatosaurus, a water-loving beast, she reads, who feasted on the plants along the river and lakeshores; the three-horned triceratops, also a vegetarian but able with its armored back to fight off attackers; and, the largest, the bullying snake-clawed tyrannosaurus, with carving knives for teeth and an appetite for meat.

Margaret stops by the skull of the tyrannosaurus. The yard-long jaw gapes, the hind legs thick as tree trunks, the tail a magnificent cord, stretching back the length of five men.

“That jaw!” Charlotte says.

“When I was a kid, my father took us here the first Sunday of every month. We'd travel in by train from Newark. Always, he'd say the same thing: Now, children, don't get the old daddy mad.”

Margaret waves a hand at the guard.

“Okay, Doc.” He walks to the entranceway, where he stands with his back to the room.

“Now I come here nearly every week, to this room. I don't know if it's because this guy's so big or because it's something I'd seen so many times, but when I take off my glasses it feels like I can see him.”

Margaret touches the arm of her glasses. “If you'd close your eyes,” she says.

Charlotte turns away from Margaret so she is facing the duck-billed anatosaurus. She squeezes her eyes shut, then opens her lids a tiny fraction. The anatosaurus looms toward her, the spaces between the bones occluded by the haze of her lashes. Viewed this way, the dinosaur seems almost full-bodied, as though flesh has found its way back onto the skeleton.

Charlotte leans against the rail. A warm heaviness seeps down her limbs. How had these tremendous creatures been vanquished? What could have extinguished them? And then, as if set loose from the bottom of an old deep well, an image, static like a photograph, comes toward her: Wen in a racing stride, his weight on his right skate, the left held tautly behind, her first sight of him moving over the ice, she and Rachel Bigsby huddled together in the stands. Unable to see Wen's face under the helmet, she'd studied his body: the tremendous compression, an economy of concentration and action, eyes locked on the puck. A determination, Charlotte had thought, not simply to win that game—which they had—but to triumph over his own muscles, over that sweet, soporific sluggishness beckoning, always, release, release and die.

“Done, Jim,” Margaret calls out.

Jim turns, ushering in a short man, clad in a belted black raincoat, too crisp, Charlotte thinks, to have ever been used in the rain. Bald but with a plump babyishness in his face, he beams as he moves toward them.

“Looking at the old tyrant, Margaret?”

“Yes, poor Charlotte's had to stand here with her eyes closed.” The man tilts his face upward and kisses Margaret on the cheek. Margaret's fingers graze Charlotte's back. “This is Eric's mother.”

The man's eyebrows dart up but his look of surprise quickly disappears behind another of his beaming smiles. “Well, well,” he says to Charlotte, “When will our peripatetic musicologist be back?”

Charlotte stiffens. “December,” Margaret answers for her. “Or January or February,” she adds, her voice bouncing over the words. The man glances at a large gold watch. “My dear,” he says, tapping Margaret's nose, “I'm afraid we'd better scoot along. Our reservation is for eight forty-five and they're Nazis about the time.”

Margaret takes Charlotte's hands between her own. “Cold hands, warm heart.” She bows her head and kisses Charlotte's fingers. “Thank you for coming to see me.”

The baby-faced man encircles Margaret's waist. “Good to meet you,” he says, and then they are off and Charlotte is so taken aback by the sight of the two of them from the rear, Margaret towering above, her dark hair glossy next to his pale scalp, his black raincoated arm swept around her camel's hair coat, that it isn't until they are already at the door, their goodbyes to Jim echoing behind, that Charlotte realizes she and Margaret never discussed what Margaret will tell Eric.

Fleetingly, she feels an impulse to chase after Margaret, to catch her and her date halfway down the stairs, but it no longer seems to matter. Wen died, Eric will be told.

Facing the grouping of dinosaurs is a well-worn mahogany bench. Charlotte lowers herself onto the seat. From here, the tyrannosaurus looks even larger, perhaps how it appeared to smaller animals creeping through the grasses. Larger, though, in an absurd and vulnerable way, like the story she recalls from high school about Xerxes's ships defeated when they couldn't turn around in the channel. Was this how Wen had seemed to Eric, not simply bullying but also pitiable? Helpless. Blinded. Doomed. Always, when she's thought about them, about their threesome, she's seen Wen coiled to pounce, Eric and she hidden in retreat. Her remorse has always been about Eric, that she didn't intervene, that she let him be driven out. Now, though, this seems wrong. What she sees is Eric, his face easy and relaxed, a hand resting on the piano, his torso curled over Margaret.

In the distance, an electronic bell sounds, a long ring followed by two short blasts. Charlotte tries to picture Eric and Wen as they are at this instant. Eric, his skin golden from the Indonesian sun, a batik shirt, palm trees—are there palm trees? Wen, so shrunken the undertaker had to pin the back of the brown suit she'd buried him in, the white cords of his neck visible over the unfamiliar tie, his face—hadn't she read that the hair keeps growing underground?—covered with whiskers.

Behind her, Charlotte hears the guard's voice, “Closing in fifteen minutes,” and then softly, or is it shyly, “Ma'am.” They seem far away, her husband and son, apparitions that require conjuring. Her mind drifts to the awareness of her own heart beating and the feeling brewing inside her: fear—trepidation about moving from this bench, from this room of bones, about venturing out, alone, onto the darkened city streets—but underneath, swimming low, tremulous, quivering, excitement too.

 

Raya in Rapahu