The Whole World (21 page)

So it’s my fault that he did what he did. He’s not a monster. He never would have made me listen.

The doorbell rang, followed by the bell cluster jingling. Harry’s feet on the stairs. The knob, and a click.

“Is Dr. Paul here?” a woman asked. She sounded too mature to be one of my students, thank goodness. I’ve had enough of students. They remind me of Gloria’s children.

“Oh,” this woman said, to what I assume was a shake of his head. “Well, I wanted to thank her. And you, of course. Mr. Paul?” That happened to him often.

“Call me Harry,” he said, not bothering to correct her.

“I don’t know what I would have done. I would have hired some solicitor, of course, but Mr. Tisch was a wonder.” Aha. Miranda Bailey. “I got out last night. He made them wake me up and let me out. He wouldn’t let them keep me till morning. There was a teenager. He’d seen Nick later that night. He’d mugged him. I hope Nick isn’t hurt.”

The voices shifted. Kitchen. Harry serves food as a reflex.

She blathered on. “You and your wife have been so kind. Mr. Tisch stood up for me. That policeman …” A pause. To shudder, to cringe? “I know he was just doing his job. But he wasn’t nice.” How fastidious of her to put it that way. How British. Polly told me that her mother was originally British.

“How is Polly?” Harry asked.

“I think Polly’s … depleted, you understand? I don’t think she has it in her to deal with me and my problems, which she shouldn’t have to anyway. She’s just a baby…. I just want to pick her up in the middle of the night and hand her what she’s dropped over the side of the crib and make everything all right again….”

The kettle whistled. “It must have been hard on you, Mrs. Bailey,” Harry said. The tea drawer squeaked as it opened, spoons clinked.

“I didn’t care for it!” She forced a laugh. “But whatever Nick’s going through must be far worse. They were right to detain anyone who might have hurt him. I can’t blame them.” Pause. Sipping at the hot stuff, stirring it, blowing on it. Tea gives something to do with one’s hands. “You don’t have children, do you?” she asked him. He would shake his head. He doesn’t use words for that subject. “Well, I love my children, but sometimes it’s very hard. Will, my son, sometimes I think he’s been lost in all the fuss. He’s become peripheral. Isn’t that awful? Good grief, I’m a terrible mother….”

Here is where Harry would be embarrassed. He’s terrible with tears. When my mother died he cooked for me. He didn’t know what else to do. Miranda must be hemmed in by biscuits now. He would be thrusting them at her, making hills of them around her. “You’ve done well with Polly,” he said. “She’s a good girl.”

Miranda laughed, a sudden, horselike sound. “When I was a girl, ‘good girl’ meant something else entirely. It meant sexless. I like that ‘good girl’ means something else now. Strong. Determined. She’s a good girl. I try to tell her that, over and over I tell her, but it’s hard for words to compete with what her father did. I’m grateful that people like you tell her too. Maybe if we all keep telling her … Anyway, I’m glad there are people here who care. She must be very dear to you both, for you to have rescued me as you did. So thank you.”

She thinks Polly was like a daughter to me. I don’t even like Polly. I don’t think she’s strong. She let go when it was most important to hang on. She would have left her mother to humiliation and punishment. She’s spoiled. She thinks a mother is some kind of entitlement, something everyone just has, something easily replaced, or dispensed with entirely. She thinks mothers are permanent; she thinks mothers don’t die, don’t leave. That you can walk away and come back and there the mother will be, still breathing, still welcoming, still … making dinner? Patching clothes? That a mother is a statue in a park, who stands through graffiti and bird shit and rain and time, not eroding, not falling apart. Not walking away. She thinks mothers are made out of rock, and have no choices, and can’t shift position, and won’t leave when the persistence and drudgery drive down on them day after day. Polly thinks having a mother is her choice: Today I don’t want my mother, maybe tomorrow I will. She doesn’t know how tenuous it all is. She doesn’t know about mothers being people, sometimes terrible people. She doesn’t know to cling, to bribe, above all to not look away for a moment. She doesn’t understand that any moment they may sneak away, that they can if they want to. She doesn’t understand how tempting it is. She doesn’t know that they can, and she doesn’t know how much they think about it. How much they plan in their ticking minds what they could do if they ran away, and how it would feel. That it would feel good.

Footsteps between the carpets. Miranda wore hard heels. Into the lounge. The hiss of the heating system coming on. The neighbours driving away.

“Did she ask you to help me?” I pictured her big, hopeful eyes. Harry would want to lie but wouldn’t.

“She’s understandably confused just now,” he said.

Crying sounds again. “I’m sorry, Harry,” she said, the name coming easily. “I’m sorry. Poor Polly. She shouldn’t have been put through any of this…. Do you know, when she was a little girl, she used to cry at just about anything. She cared about other people. She’d cry if someone else’s toy broke, or if they weren’t chosen for a team she was already on. She was never just herself. She felt for everyone. I never saw her cry after … what her father did. She must have. Maybe with the counsellor, or one of her friends …” Snuffling, weeping. “She cried for everyone else her whole life but couldn’t manage it for herself. Oh dear, I seem to be managing it entirely too well …”

I cried when my mother died. When the woman who raised me died. Harry circled me but didn’t get too close. I was a maelstrom. He made tea.

“Have some more tea,” he said to Miranda. I put a hand over my mouth to smother laughter as Miranda snuffled and honked her nose.

“Mrs. Bailey,” he began.

She interrupted, “Call me Miranda.”

“Miranda,” he said, “your Polly has been pushed around by some hard things, but she’s going to be all right. If she’s keeping her distance, well, it’s just because she needs to for a small while. But a girl needs her mother. I well know that from my wife. A woman needs her mother….”

“Oh, I hope so, Mr. Paul. Harry. She wasn’t happy that I came to England and … you don’t think she thinks I hurt Nick, do you? She can’t think that—”

“You’re free now, Miranda. No one thinks that. No one.”

More snuffling sounds. Cup and saucer sounds. “It made me wonder, does your wife …?”

What?

Miranda said more: “She seemed to take it all very
… personally
. I understand she lost her mother recently. Is there anything I can …?”

Harry laughed. It boomed out. I hadn’t heard that in years. “No. There’s nothing any of us can do.” Then, “Would you like to see my birds?”

Harry’s birds. We bought the house because of the top floor, an attic aerie for Harry’s canaries. The walls are covered with cages and prize rosettes, and in the centre is a grand aviary, waist high, for them to fly about in. They chitter all day, and birdseed has been ground into our carpet from Harry’s shoes. His hands smell like sawdust and soap.

“I keep Norwich canaries. They always cheer me up when I need it. I have a grand champion. Let me show you.”

Harry’s bloody birds. He doesn’t even name them. But he loves them; I have no doubt that he loves them. He got glasses made with plain lenses in. He has perfect vision; but he wears them up in the bird room, so if they’re ever confronted by a bespectacled judge they won’t be frightened.

When we’d just met, he’d been mad for South American birds with their colours and magnificent tails. I’d thought he might become a counter, one of those people who make lists and try to catch sight or sound of every species in the world. But somehow he got here, with these fat, round Norwiches. He tells me that some are orange, and some are white. I’ve held one, briefly. He let me hold one, because I couldn’t look. But he was impatient and nervous about it. Apparently, they ought not to be handled too long. Even when he holds them, it’s just for quick transfer from one environment to another. Never to fondle or pet. Except for me, just that one time.

He led me upstairs, and had me hold still while he clicked his tongue and rummaged in a cage. Then he brought it to me. I cupped my hands. The heart beat so quickly, it felt like a racing clock. The claws of its feet scratched my palm. Harry wanted me to understand something, to feel … something. I tried. But all I felt were feathers, and a fearful heart, and sharp feet. It was a bag of bird bits. I don’t have it in me to perceive a bird as something more than its parts. He wanted me to share something with him, but I don’t know what it was.

I tried to support the birds. A hobby is good for the mind. Then he’d brought in the fosters.

Apparently, Norwiches aren’t good at raising their own young. He takes their eggs as soon as they’re laid, and puts them in warm little drawers. He marks the date on a calendar. He has several different pens for writing on his big chart; they squeak when they write. He has “lizards” (birds so called for their markings) and fifes in cages apart from the Norwiches. He gives them the eggs, and they parent the new birds. I think that’s disgusting. Why fawn over a breed so unsuited to the fundamental functions of life?

I don’t enter the bird room anymore.

I was sure Miranda would feel the same about it. How could any mother not? How could any daughter not? He would go on about shape and feathers; how he’d successfully campaigned to make the standard rounder. He’d go on. Miranda would mark time, those fosters impossible to ignore. The “singing” is overwhelming. It comes from all sides.

Perhaps I ought to rescue her, I thought. Woman to woman. Give her a break.

The noise was indistinct, and strange. Wood smacking a wall. Was Harry building something? I couldn’t hear the bird room from my study. I was underneath a guest bedroom.

Its bed has a wide wooden headboard, up against a plaster wall. The joints must be loose. It exaggerated every movement on it, thumping like a timpani.

People feel sorry for me, not being able to see, but very little in the world is exclusively visual. This rhythm didn’t need looking at to know what it was.

There’s nothing profound that uses just one sense. There’s nothing that can hide itself by just holding up a curtain. Everything real has scent and sound and makes the air move differently. Real things shake. Real things loom. Being blind is bloody useless. For all its inconvenience I ought to be able to miss this. I ought to be able to not know, to walk by, to not see him on her. Everything I “see” is in my mind anyway. This is as vivid as if they were in front of me. This is in my mind, made of pieces of Harry I know from my own hands, and made up of envy of Miranda, who in my imagination is younger than she could be with Polly for a daughter.

The last time Harry reached for me was the day I sent Nick away. He came home just after Nick left. It was my birthday. Harry had bought flowers in the market. I smelled juice on his breath. Grocery bags crumpled at his feet. He leaned close to me but I put my hand up between us. I was still reeling from Nick. I’d remembered something. I used to have a trinket, a key chain I think. It had a lion on it. Someone had given it to me as a toy when I was very, very young. Children like lions, but that wasn’t why. They’d given it to me because I was a Leo. I suddenly remembered that. Someone, some friend of the family, giving it to me and telling me why. Because I’d been born in August. But I wasn’t born in August. My birthday is in December, my birthday was that day. My mother used to make an extra fuss to ensure I wouldn’t feel dwarfed by Christmas. But I remembered that lion. Harry put his face to mine but all I could see was an enamel painted lion head dangling from a cheap chain. I pulled back from him, from both heads, his and the lion’s. I’d said, “Liv’s upstairs,” to make him stop trying, even though she’d left before Nick.

Upstairs now, the
thunk-thunk-thunk
of the headboard hitting the wall continued. Miranda cried out. Then Harry too. “Oh!” he said, like he does. Like it’s taken him by surprise. The hum of pillow talk, he more than she. I couldn’t make out the words themselves but their content was predictable. Excuses. Explanations. Harry got out of bed, the squeaking, loose-jointed bed. His robe wouldn’t be there; his robe hangs on the post in our bedroom, not this one. He’d reach, then remember, and rise with his bottom bare.

Pull up trousers. Zip and belt. The bathroom is en suite. Miranda with a few minutes of privacy: Find clothes, straighten the bedspread. That’s the bed his mother sleeps in when she visits. That’s the bed his nephew used when he came last year to interview for the engineering department.

He came downstairs. I heard the door of the guest room open and close, then the whooshing sound through our pipes; she was in the bathroom, then. She came down the stairs too, her steps clicking on the wood. Neither had showered. They would still smell like what they’d just done.

I could hear the words once they were downstairs, she first: “I, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“Shhh,” he comforted her.

“I didn’t mean to. I’ve been lonely. This whole … Polly doesn’t want me here. But I need to be away from home as much as she does. Her father, he—I’m divorcing him, of course. Not that I—I don’t mean that I’m trying to … You’re married. I know. I’m not trying to impinge on that. I’m not looking for something—commitment … I sound like a slut. A slag, you’d say, right? I remember that. My mother once called me a slag.” She laughed, high-pitched. They were ten feet from the door of my study.

“You’re not a slag. I shouldn’t have taken advantage.”

“It’s just … Sometimes I feel like right now is just this thing all by itself. I know that life is a … a chain … that moments are all in some kind of line and they connect and they affect each other. But sometimes I can’t feel that. I only feel now, just now, and that’s all there is. And … it was good, just now. I’ve done something terrible, but it felt good. There must be something very wrong with me.”

“It’s all right,” he said, “for two lonely people to comfort each other.”