The Marriage of Sticks (25 page)

Hugh stood out on the field holding our baby. There was no one else out there but the two of them. They looked so small in all of that green space. He was staring at me but made no gesture for me to join him. I gave a little wave. He made the baby’s arm wave back. What was I supposed to do? Why were we all here? Who were these people? What was this stadium?

As these thoughts tumbled around in my head, the noise dwindled, decreased slowly, wound down to almost nothing. It was almost quiet. That’s when I looked around to see how others were responding to the new eerie quiet. And something else. Cologne. The scent of an exquisite and very familiar men’s cologne made me search for its source. Diptyque. I even remembered the name.

Looking to the left, I was shocked twice. Because everyone was watching me. And because I saw my old friend Clayton Blanchard, the man who had introduced me to both bookselling and Frances Hatch. It was
his
cologne I had smelled. Sitting no more than three feet away, he was dressed beautifully, as usual—perfectly pressed dark suit, multicolored silk ascot, white shirt. I mouthed his name and a silent question: Clayton? Here? He smiled.

Next to him sat a boy I didn’t recognize at first. But all at once I did. Like a swimmer struggling up from deep water, my memory rose to the surface, slowly but when it broke through I knew him. Ludger Pooth. That was his ridiculous name. His family lived next door to mine on Mariahilferstrasse in Vienna in 1922. He and his friend Kuno Sandholzer once lured me to the attic of our building and made me pull down my underpants. They thought they were making me do something terrible, but I didn’t mind. Just so long as they paid attention to me. Ludger wore a brown tweed golf cap that he kept tugging on. I remembered the gesture very well.

Next to him was another person I didn’t initially recognize, but his name too quickly came to me: Viktor Peduchen, the first man Lolly Adcock ever slept with. Scanning the hundreds, the thousands of faces watching at me, I soon recognized everyone I saw. Names. More and more of their names came to me and with them the stories that went with the names.

In my past lives I had known every one of these people. I began to remember those lives, these faces. How we met and parted, what they had meant to me. All of them were in this stadium.

How many people do we meet in a lifetime? How many have an impact on us, and vice versa? Imagine being surrounded at one moment by every person you have ever known—some for an instant, some your whole life. All of them are watching you because the only thing that links them together
is
you. You are their thread.

Now imagine there is reincarnation. Imagine all the people of
all
your lives, together.…

It grew even quieter. There was noise, a quick cough, a shoe scraping across the floor, hurried whispers. We were all waiting for what came next. I could not stop looking around because each new face brought back another memory.

These people wore the clothes of their time, so there was an incredible array of dress and looks. Men were decked out in worker’s overalls, in rough linen, rags, and double-breasted suits from Huntsman of Savile Row. Thick mustaches or shaved heads, fur hats, astrakhans, baseball caps, sandals, wooden clogs, spats, leather boots up to the knees. They carried guns at their sides, briefcases. Women wore high powdered wigs, bonnets, dirndls, floor-length robes, a pink Chanel suit, a T-shirt advertising the rap group Black-Eyed Peas. People’s names I had said hundreds of times sometimes hundreds of years before came back like forgotten facts: Viktor Peduchen, Henry Allison, Jasna and Flenda Sukalo. Elzbieta Dudzinska. My friend Dessie Kimbrough, the English ambassador’s daughter, who fell from the Reichsbrucke and drowned in the Danube on New Year’s Day, 1918. 1949, 1971, 1827, 1799…Each of my lives, all of my years, all the living and the dead people I had ever known, together in that stadium. The thousands and thousands.

When I could bear it, I turned back to the field, feeling their eyes on me, waiting to see what I would do next. Down on the grass Hugh stood next to a young woman I did
not
know. The baby was no longer in his arms. Watching this new woman, I tried to remember her face, but nothing came.

“It’s your daughter when she grows up.” Hugh’s son with Charlotte, my nemesis, walked up the aisle toward me.

I glared at him, not trusting one word. He sensed it and his expression hardened. “It’s true. I don’t care if you believe me. Go see for yourself.”

I made a wide circle around him and walked down the stairs. There was a small open gate at the bottom. I went through it and onto the field. Hugh and the young woman watched me, smiling. She looked at Hugh and he nodded eagerly. She touched his forearm and came toward me. I stopped and caught my breath.

She was tall and plain-looking and had big hands, my hands. Her smile was lopsided and heartbreaking. She had her father’s brown eyes and eyebrows that turned up at the ends.

“Mama?”

As I was about to say “Yes, yes, yes, it’s me, I
am
your mother,” the world behind us erupted. For an instant our eyes met and I’m sure we both wore the same terrified expression. It was the crowd. The tens of thousands of people gathered together were suddenly screaming their collective fury, their hatred and resentment of me.

Because somewhere in the course of their lives I had selfishly used every one of them. Used them in small or large, forgotten or impossible-to-conceive-of ways to get whatever it was I wanted at the moment. I had loved them and tricked them or hated them and forgotten them, had ignored them, paid them court, stolen their hearts or said no when they offered them. I had gone into their lives blind; I had gone in knowing everything. I took their love, I took their hopes, I took their time, and I paid them no respect.

Some of them had asked for something back, some for a lot back. Each time I gave only what I wanted or had a surplus of and wouldn’t miss. They gave what they cherished or what kept them alive, what made them tick or gave them faith. What they got from me in return was nothing, wrapped in a fine empty box with tinsel and glitter on it. Most people steal because they believe what they steal should belong to them anyway. To me it wasn’t theft, it was barter: I’ll trade you what I don’t need for whatever it is about you I want. That’s fair.

They shook their fists; some faces were purple or dead pale. One woman was so furious she wept. One man, driven mad, was throwing something at me. Nothing. He held nothing in his hand but was trying to throw something anyway. He did it over and over. Their hatred was crushing, resentment as thick as stone, hot as flame.

And all of it was my fault.

In the midst of this frenzy, Hugh’s son walked out onto the field and stopped a few feet from me. Another casualty. A child my selfishness had stopped from being born. He brought two closed fists up to the sides of his mouth. Then his index fingers came slowly out and pointed down. Like teeth. Like fangs.

“You’re a vampire.”

And I heard the word above the roar because I had already realized that was what this was all about.

I spun around to see if Hugh and the girl had heard, but they were gone. I stood looking at acres of perfect green grass, wishing with all my might they would reappear so I could say something, anything, to them to explain. But there was no explanation. There was only that black word and it was the truth. Vampires take the one thing that keeps a person alive. Sometimes it is blood, sometimes hope, love, ambition, or faith. I took them all.

Behind my back the noise stopped. Not even the sound of the wind. When I turned, only the boy was still there. The stands were completely empty. He stood in the same spot, his hands at his sides.

I took a step toward him but this time
he
pulled back, afraid I would touch him.

I tried to speak but my throat was thick and dry. “What’s your name?”

“Declan.” He said it beautifully, melodiously, as if it were the easiest word in the world to say. “It’s the name of a saint.”

I smiled, remembering Hugh and his saints.

“I’m going to go now, Declan. I understand why they wanted me to come here, but I don’t need to see any more. I understand everything. Is that all right? Can I leave?”

“I guess. I don’t know.”

I walked back across the field, through the gate, up the steps past the empty seats. At the top I almost turned around for a last look, but I knew that might kill me and there were things I had to do before I died.

THE HISTORY OF SHADOWS

O
UR HOUSE WAS NOT
on fire when I reached the top of the cellar stairs. No surprise. But what did startle me was how I perceived the house and the objects inside as I walked through it on the way to the front door.

Before Hugh and I ever became intimate and I was wrestling with whether or not I should let myself fall for him, I said, “I don’t want to fall in love with you. It would be too big a memory.”

Now as I walked through our home,
everything
was too big a memory. From the antique brass letter opener on the side table to the four paintings of young Lolly Adcock on the living room wall, it felt like I was walking through a museum of myself. Almost everything held brilliant, crushing memories of the time when I didn’t know the truth about myself, when I was only a woman in love with a man and a vision of life with him I thought sound and possible.

I stopped and picked up things because the impulse was irresistible. A pair of scissors we’d used to open boxes, a postcard from the electric company saying we were now registered customers. Artifacts in my museum, objects and ephemera from a stone age when I guilelessly believed in a just God, believed that people had only one life to live, and evil was a word most suited to the Bible, history books, or silly movies. Charming and quaint as a hand-carved cradle, our house and what it contained was the beautiful dream you had last night that, on waking, you ache not to forget, but inevitably do within minutes.

As I was passing the living room, something nudged my mind and I went in to find a book Hugh had once shown me.
Favorite Irish Names for Children.
I looked up the boy’s name.

Heaven gave Saint Declan a small black bell, which he used to find a ship for himself and his followers. Later, that bell overtook the ship and showed Declan where to establish his monastery off the Waterford coast. Declan Oakley. The kind of beautiful name a child hates when they’re young because it’s strange and foreign-sounding, especially in America. But he would love it when he grew older. Declan. I said it aloud.

“Actually, the formal name is Deaglan. Emphasis on the second syllable.” Shumda stood outside on the porch. The window was closed but I heard him perfectly. I hadn’t paid close attention to what he looked like the first time I saw him in the cellar. He appeared to be about thirty-five and similar to the portrait on the old poster Hugh had found for Frances. But if he was thirty-five in the 1920s, he would be well over a hundred today. The man on the porch did not look a century old.

“Come outside. It’s a nice night.”

“Why are
you
here? Where’s James?”

“You set him free, Miranda. Remember? Now he’s just a puff of smoke. Good closure! Besides, he’s not one of
us.
Not one of the chosen few. He’s only dead. Dead people are not high on our food chain.”

“But why did you come?”

“Because they told me to escort you through the next stage of your…pilgrimage. It’s more involved, but that’s enough of an explanation for now. You know those stories about after-death experiences? How dead loved ones come to greet you and take you toward the Light? Beautiful, and not a word of it is true. But in your case it is, sort of. Although you’re not dead. And neither am I.” He threw up both hands in quick denial. “That’s the beauty part. Oh, I think you’re going to like this. It just takes getting used to. Are you going to come outside? Should I come in? Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.” He ballooned his cheeks and closed his eyes.

“Go away.”

He stretched both arms out to the sides hands closed. He opened them slowly and in each was a small black bell. Saint Declan’s bell. Fingers extended, he gave each a shake. Their tinkle was light and crystalline. “I can go. But what if you have questions?”

“I don’t want you to answer my questions.”

Pouting, he jingled the bells again. “Brave girl. Dumb girl.” He put the bells on the windowsill, crossed the porch, and went down the stairs to the street. I hurried to the window to make sure he was gone.

Then I picked up the telephone and made two calls. I needed a taxi and I needed to make sure Frances Hatch was still at the Fieberglas Sanitorium.

“I gotta tell you, lady, this ride’s gonna cost you money. It’s about a half hour, forty-five minutes from here.”

“I understand that. Could we go now?”

“You betcha.”

We had been under way a few minutes before the cab driver spoke again. “You ever heard about bed mites?”

“Excuse me?”

“Bed mites. Ever heard of them?” We traded looks in the rear-view mirror. “Neither did I till the other day. Was watchin’ this documentary on TV about allergies. Ever notice how people think they’re intellectual because they watch the Discovery Channel? Not me; I just like finding out about the weird way the world works.

“Anyhow, there was this show on about human allergies. They got a new theory that things called bed mites cause a lot of them. They’re these microscopic bugs that live in our beds and pillows, the sheets.…They’re not dangerous or anything, but they leave
droppings,
if you know what I mean. And it’s the droppings human beings are allergic to. Strange, huh?”

Taken aback, I couldn’t stop myself from rudely blurting, “Did you make that up?”

“Nah, really, I saw it on this show! They suggested all these ways of protecting yourself if you’re allergic. Wrap your mattress and pillows in plastic, get an air cleaner to catch any droppings that might be floating in the air…No, it’s really true.”