The Sunken Cathedral (18 page)

“I want you to look at something,” Marie is saying. “I need you to look at something.” She limps by Elizabeth to the kitchen window facing the back, above the square of garden Marie still maintains—Elizabeth at odd times watching her as Marie putters about or sits in one of the rusting wrought-iron chairs.
^III

“Do you see?” Marie is saying. “Look!” And Elizabeth does; she looks to where Marie points: the cherry tree suddenly and remarkably in full bloom.

I
. Marie heard something on the front stoop and stepped out. This is all she says she can remember: robe, slippers, a cast, and crutches in the rain. It was the middle of the night. Stroke of luck that crossing Ninth—toward the seminary?—she met the tenant, Elizabeth, bicycling home. Elizabeth herself quite undone, Jules said: maybe the weather or, God knows, that teenager. We should all live on the West Coast, he said. Anyway, Elizabeth returned his mother long after midnight. We’re talking about a woman who would never go anywhere without her face on, Jules said.

And only then had Marie agreed to sell.

II
. Tiny! she had told Pete, like a French Audrey Hepburn but tinier than that and the most incredible blue eyes.

Wasn’t she French? Pete said.

Who?

Audrey Hepburn, Pete said.

Dutch, I think. A war refugee. Malnourished. That’s why she was always so thin.

But why speak of Audrey? she wanted to say to Pete. The point was Mrs. Frank: the look of the beautiful black-and-white photograph of the dead husband, Abraham Lincoln Frank, and the little boy Jules, Elizabeth had admired and all the other things on the ornate walnut sideboard, pennies in a bowl, etched glass, quills, and sundials. They’d had an espresso after their wine. They’d nibbled sugar cookies. It had all been something, she would say: miniature and beautiful and perfect. Like a lost fairy world.

III
. A few months back Pete had said he was sure there was a man there, too. He said he heard a man’s voice. “It’s the movie star,” she said. “He’s always on his roof acting.” But Pete said, no, a different man’s voice, and look, he said. “Someone’s down there.”

“Do you think he’s her suitor?” Pete whispered, and something about the way he whispered or maybe even said
suitor, suitor
a word like
blank
or
giggle,
made Elizabeth laugh and remember how much she loved him. She laughed and then she said, “God, I hope so,” and pulled Pete down to crouch at the back window, where they could listen and spy and maybe it was Pete’s idea or maybe it was hers but eventually Pete slid off her jeans on the kitchen floor in the way of years before so that she could not think of anything but Mexico and the convent and the little bird that hopped off its perch to read her fortune. What had been her fortune? This? Here? But no, it had been something else entirely, hadn’t it? She had no idea, she thought, losing whatever else she thought to nothing but the feel of him in her, with her.

XXIX

W
hat If your parents split when you are just a child?

What If the man you love loves men instead?

What If your child dies before you do?

What If your family disappears in an instant?

What If the plane goes down instead of up?

What If the boy refuses to say your name?

What If the man you love loves no one?

What If your brother does not leave a note?

What If your husband can no longer sleep?

What If your wife always leaves the room?

What If the ocean swamps the boat?

What If the forests burn?

What If the girl slips beneath the ice?

XXX

I
t is both true, and banal, that sometimes who you are changes in an instant. This is how Elizabeth will eventually begin “The Story of Molly.” She has come to understand the importance of structuring the details around a narrative, the expectation of histories having a beginning, a middle, and an end, though she doesn’t really believe this is the way life works: she does not know the way life works. She will perhaps include the Mexican chairs and Pete’s pink bicycle; Molly’s mitten in the ice, found later frozen like an autumn leaf. The black ice killed her cousin, Molly. Fact. Elizabeth was in charge for the afternoon. Fact. The pond was forbidden. Fact.

Everyone said they forgave her. Accidents happen. Her aunt and uncle said it, too, after a while, after a few years, after her aunt howled in a way that Elizabeth had never heard a human being sound, in a way that she will never, ever, forget.

XXXI

H
elen finds the sunken cathedral at the bottom of the sea, tangled in dark seaweed, its windows crusted over with dull shells and patterns left from the anemones, the snails and sea urchins that have moved on, and though she is bruised and sore from her own drowning, from the tumult and the weight of the water, from the explosion of her lungs, she swims beautifully toward it, her hands grown webs, her legs fused. In time she might rise to the surface of the water to sit on a rock and wreak havoc with the sailors, but now there is no hurry, the sea suddenly peaceful, her mother’s voice so distant as to no longer be heard above the chiming of the cathedral bells or maybe that’s only the wind; it might be only the wind above; there is now only wind.

XXXII

T
he movie star says he is beginning to forget who he is or, rather, who he was because he had been someone before and now it seems he is no one or, rather, he is only who others believe him to be. Everyone always believes him to be the person they think he is, which in truth is no one.

What do you mean? Slotnik asks.
^I

You know, not me but one of my characters, the movie star says.

He has been trying to understand himself, but every time he gets close to understanding, his mind wanders, as if bored. He is trying his best to explain it all to Slotnik, who, typically, jumps ahead to supply details that are both ridiculous and correct. This Slotnik habit infuriates the movie star but is also the reason why he is in Slotnik’s office. Although he has seen numerous therapists over the years, they run together as bland as paint mixed from several pints, the color a dingy brown. Brown, he thinks now, the color of therapy.

He pulls his mind back to the present, to the heavy, draped room with its requisite African art and, inexplicably, poster of Provence. On the coffee table, an odd collection of knickknacks—glass animals, mostly, elephants and camels and deer and rabbits—march toward him. Bookshelves line the walls crammed with volumes on the brain, on interpreting the brain—the child’s brain, the teenage brain, the brain on drugs, the aging brain—even a few on the soul, though Slotnik has said she believes the soul would be much better understood as the self, a construct that resides between the heart and the stomach, closer to the lungs, possibly, or wedged somewhere near a rib.

My mother had a floating rib, the movie star said. I never understood it. She spent days on the couch.

Precisely, Slotnik said.

I always pictured it suspended inside of her—you know, kind of floating there, sort of boomerangish or like the Starship
Enterprise.

She was your universe, said Slotnik.

She’s still alive, he reminded her.

She is your universe, said Slotnik.

She’s her universe, the movie star said. That time he had been in a feisty mood, eager to speak ill of his mother.
^II

Tell me, Slotnik said. She seemed interested.

Abigail still lived in the small town in Louisiana where the movie star had been born, a detail repeated quite often in the small town, so that now the signs that marked the town limits, both coming and going, include a rendering by a local artist of the movie star’s silhouette, along with the movie star’s name and birth date and the fact that, in addition to being a movie star, he had also been the winningest quarterback for the high school team, known then as the RedMen but now, due to a civil suit by the Muscogee in which the sensitivities of the Wild Snake rebellion were noted, known as the Men.

So it’s a big deal, the movie star said. Me: who I am.

They were in their first session and the movie star felt, as he did whenever he attempted this business, that he needed to offer a thumbnail, or blueprint, for what she should know, since everything she might think she knew about him was bullshit, the movie star said: he meant what she might have read.

I don’t read, Slotnik said.

He had been the winningest quarterback in Chalkton, and won a scholarship to the Big Ten university outside Indianapolis known for its football team and theater department. Had he not suffered an injury that first week and limped his way to auditions, or met Teddy Fine, soon to be in self-exile in Key West, a fading professor emeritus now known for his key lime pie and wicked mojitos but at the time very much the head of the theater department and the only man powerful enough to pluck a hobbled freshman to keep for his own, he might not be here now.

He of course understood Teddy Fine’s real intentions, but he had held Teddy back, he explained to Slotnik.

Uh-huh, Slotnik said.

I’d like you to engage, the movie star said.

How so? Slotnik said.

Speak, the movie star said. Say something. Give me your opinion. Argue with me. Tell me what I don’t know, what it means.

I don’t give answers, Slotnik said.

Understood, the movie star said.

But let’s start with your name, Slotnik said. Is it real?

No, the movie star said.

I like it, Slotnik said.

Thank you.

So, what’s it really?

What?

Your name?

I don’t say.

Uh-huh.

It’s not anything.

Uh-huh.

I
. Slotnik asks although she believes she already knows. Slotnik believes there is very little she does not know; very little she has not heard before. She has been around so long she has come to think that she has listened to the demons of every artistic person of a certain means, and many others on a sliding pay scale, in lower Manhattan, which may be true, though the fact that she listens to both the movie star and his neighbor Elizabeth is pure coincidence, the kind of thing that often happens in New York City, though no one can explain why.

II
. Abigail. Her name fitting her like one of the white gloves she and her friends still wore to church, Presbyterian, gloves they removed and folded and set next to them in the wooden pews, the empty fingers splayed on the needlepoint bolsters dedicated to the original founders of this particular congregation, names Abigail and the others had gleaned through much research and from the church cemetery.

XXXIII

I
n the glorious colors of a cooler autumn, Jules stood at the doorway home from law school, just a subway ride away, Columbia University, and Abe could not have been more proud. Abe, his skin waxy and cold to the touch, lay in their bed. Marie slept on the daybed in the sitting room. She was to give him the morphine in the syringe, a milliliter or a centimeter or something; every morning she drew the liquid to the line as the hospice nurse had shown her. The hospice nurse said every two hours but Marie gave the morphine every half hour and what the hell, she said to herself more than once, what the hell.

Jules has come home! He stands in the doorway, the light behind. He has his laundry, his socks; he wears a new beard.

“Jules!” she says.

“Hi, Mom,” he says.

He walks past and drops his backpack on the Queen Anne chair next to the walnut sideboard, his keys in the cloisonné bowl, the china one with the Chinaman in blue. Do you know why the Huns went west? she can still hear Abe asking Jules as a little boy, the two at the kitchen table over Jules’s history books. The Great Wall. It actually stopped them!

Jules gets into the bed with his father. He is careful not to touch his father’s legs or his knees or his shoulder. He is careful to lie on his side. Where Abe stares is difficult to see. Perhaps Very Grand speaks only the language of the dead, or the near dead, or perhaps he is just in his morphine dream.

“I have a joke, Dad,” Jules says. “Are you ready for a joke?”

He had always been a sensitive boy. There were never many friends. His mother and father were his friends, and then, mostly, his father. His father now lies in the bed, his face sunken, gaunt, his skin pale and stretched across his skull so that he already looks a skeleton.

“You’re going to like this one,” Jules says, touching his father’s hand.

Abe smiles and if his eyes could be bright they would be bright.

“So,” Jules says. He is very close to his father’s ear, though careful. The pain is terrible, he knows. Like breaking bones, the doctor has told Marie and she, unable not to say it to Jules, had said it to Jules and then immediately regretted it—after all these years such a good secret keeper, such a good stoic and this?
^I

“Ready?” Jules says. And almost imperceptibly but perceptibly Abe nods. He loves his boy. It is as if his body is already a shell he could burst from with the light of his love for his boy.

“Why did Noah not take any apples on the ark?” Jules says.

Do his eyes flicker? Jules wants to know. Is that a flicker?

I can’t tell, Marie says. I think I imagine it sometimes and then I think no, there’s definitely something.

I think that’s a flicker, Jules says.

He leans in to kiss Abe’s hollow cheek and Abe bursts with light.

“Because God said only pairs,” Jules says.