My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (59 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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MARJORIE SANDOR
The White Cat
IN THE STORIES YOU LIKED BEST AS A CHILD, MY LOVE, THERE WAS always a terrible repetition of tests. The hero, in order to win a wife and make his fortune, set out full of confidence to retrieve some object not even precious to himself. He was driven by the father-king who, facing the wobbling end of his reign, was in an unusually selfish, wheedling mood. And, let’s face it, this father had never been a noble fellow: forever trying to steal a kingdom, or defend his own against imagined enemies.
Three times the hero plunges back into the unknown world he has by dream or accident discovered, where the treasure—coveted by the king, whose hungers are unconscious and therefore impossible to sate—lies surrounded by obstacle, tedium, dragon. Three times he plunges in, three times risks his life to get the prize: first it’s the golden apple; second, the magical linen woven of thread so fine the whole cloth can pass through the smallest needle; and at last, the tiniest dog in the world, who can be heard barking inside a corn kernel, itself enclosed in a walnut shell.
The trouble is, in that other world, there appears someone more alluring than the object of the quest, for instance a beautiful white cat who begs the hero to stay—without words, of course. Please stay. Take the treasure back to the king, but come back. I need you here. I am forbidden to say why.
The mystery of the white cat’s need, not to mention her startlingly human beauty and intelligence, is far more deep and fulfilling and morally necessary than the foolish king’s demand for a golden something-or-other. It in fact turns the quest trivial, wrong, and inconsequential.
With each successive journey it gets harder and harder to cross the border back to the king, the real world. The reward—wife and land and future fortune—goes dim, the whole thing revealed for what it is, a repetitive, pointless exercise, an exchange of commodities: golden apple for king’s kingdom, princess-bride, etc. The taste of ashes in his mouth, the hero travels into middle age. Meanwhile, deep in the woods of his awakened imagination, the cat-queen, who can offer no material reward or even a logical reason why he should give up the world for her, waits helplessly by the midnight gates of her kingdom, bound by an ancient curse of silence, forbidden to ask favors or tell her story. Who is she? You don’t know, but the prince’s third and final return to his father’s castle, with apple, linen, dog at last acceptable to the king, and the earthly reward achieved, always left you feeling hollow, incomplete.
By now the lost domain, with its caverns and balustrades, its pointed gates and absolute danger, had gotten hold of you.
Meanwhile, back in the king’s palace, the elusive world is dismissed with shocking ease by courtiers and peasants alike. The prince himself is now bound by silence, too, his story trapped behind walls and briars and the hills in the distance, until, like the blurry cluster of the Pleiades, it is only visible when you gaze to the side.
But it’s too late: your heart’s been surprised, its true domain awakened. A domain that will haunt you until you go looking for it once more, on your own and without assignment, without hope that it will bring you anything useful in this world. Certainly it won’t make your fortune. It will, in fact, destroy you, as far as the king and his courtiers are concerned. Is this the world you lean toward, the one you cannot reenter a fourth time without dying, without abandoning the life lived reasonably, dutifully, under the king? Do you fear that if you put your sword to that life, everything, including the white cat, your silenced queen, might turn to ash along with everything else?
In the fairy tales of your childhood, my love, recall that the hero never came to this pass. He stayed home after the third journey, ever dutiful, and was rewarded by the last-minute appearance of a girl, strangely familiar, but from another kingdom entirely. And in that same moment, the father-king is released from the terrible grasp of his desires. Who can say which is the greater miracle? Never mind: the kingdom rejoices.
You rejoice, too, but even at the height of celebration you suspect the truth. I do, too: I watch you sleeping. I know that when you look across the border in your dreams, you see her plainly there, the white cat lost in her castle, her woods, her kingdom, she of fantastic, inhuman dignity, forever awaiting rescue. Observe her closely: she is your own kerneled heart, woven of miraculous thread and thrice-protected from human view, she whose life will open like a palm on the day—please, God, far from now—of your death.
White cat, I am revealed for what I am: his human wife. Be patient. Keep by the gate as you must. Silent sufferer, cruelly bound, wait as we wait, but on the other side.
In my effort to reconstruct the making of this little piece, I went looking for our picture-book of “The White Cat,” the elegant French fairy tale that inspired my retelling in the first place. It was, for a long time, my daughter’s favorite bedtime story, but she is packing for college this week, and her room, for the first time in eighteen years, is miraculously spare. A few days ago she delivered a stack of children’s books to a local used bookshop, and it is possible that for all her early passion for it, she let “The White Cat” go—though she is just as baffled by its disappearance as I am. With any luck, it is, as I write this, finding its way into the lap of another child in this town.
It seems right that I can’t find it. The picture-book—and the writing of my piece—belong to a moment ten years ago, a moment both remote and always near, not unlike a fairy tale.
My daughter was eight at the time, and we had just joined households with the man I would marry six months later. Within days of our moving in together, he collapsed, and underwent double bypass surgery. Like the hero of “The White Cat,” he traveled back and forth between two worlds with courage and quiet patience, and in the midst of my terror of losing him, I clung to the notion that he was on a solitary journey, making his way back to me. I could do nothing but wait, so I did what we do at such times: I started a little story that turned into a love letter, and from there into a prayer, a plea, a stay against death.
—MS
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Blue-bearded Lover
I.
WHEN WE WALKED TOGETHER HE HELD MY HAND UNNATURALLY HIGH, at the level of his chest, as no man had done before. In this way he made his claim.
When we stood at night beneath the great winking sky he instructed me gently in its deceit. The stars you see above you, he said, have vanished thousands of millions of years ago; it is precisely the stars you cannot see that exist, and exert their influence upon you.
When we lay together in the tall cold grasses the grasses curled lightly over us as if to hide us.
II.
A man’s passion is his triumph, I have learned. And to be the receptacle of a man’s passion is a woman’s triumph.
III.
He made me his bride and brought me to his great house which smelled of time and death. Passageways and doors and high-ceilinged rooms and tall windows opening out onto nothing. Have you ever loved another man as you now love me? my blue-bearded lover asked. Do you give your life to me?
What is a woman’s life that cannot be thrown away!
He told me of the doors I may unlock and the rooms I may enter freely. He told me of the seventh door, the forbidden door, which I may not unlock: for behind it lies a forbidden room which I may not enter. Why may I not enter it? I asked, for I saw that he expected it of me, and he said, kissing my brow, Because I have forbidden it.
And he entrusted me with the key to the door, for he was going away on a long journey.
IV.
Here it is: a small golden key, weighing no more than a feather in the palm of my hand.
It is faintly stained as if with blood. It glistens when I hold it to the light.
Did I not know that my lover’s previous brides had been brought to this house to die?—that they had failed him, one by one, and had deserved their fate?
I have slipped the golden key into my bosom, to wear against my heart, as a token of my lover’s trust in me.
V.
When my blue-bearded lover returned from his long journey he was gratified to see that the door to the forbidden room remained locked; and when he examined the key, still warm from my bosom, he saw that the stain was an old, old stain, and not of my doing.
And he declared with great passion that I was now truly his wife; and that he loved me above all women.
VI.
Through the opened windows the invisible stars exert their power.
But if it is a power that is known, are the stars invisible?
When I sleep in our sumptuous bed I sleep deeply, and dream dreams that I cannot remember afterward, of extraordinary beauty, I think, and magic, and wonder. Sometimes in the morning my husband will recall them for me, for their marvels are such they invade even his dreams. How is it that you of all persons can dream such dreams, he says—such curious works of art!
And he kisses me, and seems to forgive me.
And I will be bearing his child soon. The first of his many children.
The legend of Bluebeard and his horrific castle is the oldest of cautionary fairy tales for women: here is the nobleman who marries young, beautiful girls, uses them up, and murders them to make way for the next young, beautiful, naive bride; to each bride he issues a warning—there is a room in his castle which she may not enter. But when Bluebeard leaves on a journey, entrusting her with a key, the overly curious young woman invariably unlocks the door, and discovers the corpses of her predecessors.
Because she has disobeyed her husband and master, the young woman is murdered by him.
In my variant of this fairy tale, the “young, beautiful, naive bride” is really not naive. She is calculating, canny. She will outwit Bluebeard by obeying his instructions—as he doesn’t expect her to—as if she were refuting the biblical Eve, who gave in to temptation. In this way, by totally succumbing to the rapacious male, the young woman “conquers” him—she is the first of his brides to become pregnant, and will bear his child in a lineage that is a compromise with the age-old rapacity of man.
There is no love here, no romance—only a kind of cold, cynical sexual manipulation.
But out of this manipulation comes the possibility of female survival—and the bearing of children.
I did not mean my young-woman figure to be exemplary. She is not a “sister” to her predecessors—she knows that if she aligns herself with them, Bluebeard will murder her as he’d murdered them. “Blue-bearded Lover” is a cautionary tale of its own, a tragic little fable, from which the reader should recoil with a shudder—“Thank God I am not like that. I would never compromise with evil!”
—JCO

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