CONTINUED FROM LAST ISSUE

She gave them hugs.  They called her Nannie Lecky, trotting after her in their shoes without the laces.  Why couldn’t they have laces?  O, there was that kid who tried to hang himself by his… And she was careful with us.  Used to check us every fifteen minutes, even in the bath: You in dere, Helen, Honey?   Yeah, I’m digging out the grunge under my big toe with a plastic fork, she’d holler out.  Impossible to croak yourself with a plastic fork.  She knew because she’d tried.  She tickled Helen, Nannie Lecky.  She’d run back to her if she could.  To Nannie Lecky…You in dere, Helen?  Yes, I’m taking off my purple stockings, washing them in the basin.  Now I’m looking at my pores in Eulalie’s magnifying mirror.  I have some things in my pocketbook you wouldn’t like.  A lady’s razor, all my pills.  If you could see me now you’d come and grab me.  You weren’t like the social workers with their contracts: you sign here and you can see your sister for a weekend.  You just grabbed us, held us to your bosom.   Helen, what you doing now?  Says voice of Nanny Lecky in her head.  I’m watering this yellow plant Eulalie has that can’t decide to live or die.     Plant reminds her of those two old desiccated senior citizens on Lura Lane, Her parents.  If they would die, she could live comfortable in a six-room house.  Or if the other voices, not these kind ones, did come back, she could afford a private hospital with that nice blond furniture and the snacks in the refrigerator and the fruit bowls on the tables, and the libraries full of books and stereos, and the puzzles with all the pieces….But the yellow desiccated cast deceives.  They’re like this plant and will outlive me like the long line of pricks that I’m descended from.  Or if they die, she’ll get it all, who doesn’t need it.  Helen.  What you doing Helen?   She’s found Eulalie’s lilac writing pad, has taken Eulalie’s Parker pen to bring her sister up to date about the last fifteen years of her life:    

    …left the State ten years ago and found myself a little room, she writes.  The luxury—a room all to myself instead of that dorm they locked you out of after breakfast until suppertime, the filthy, noisy day-room… I entertain myself.  Don’t think I sit around and wait for you to call.  I go to yard sales, and just last week a car ran into me and my name was in the paper…Only they misspelled my name.  Sheed, they spelled it.

     Achoo!  Alcide sneezes

     …I read a lot of books, too, in spite of never going to college—Voices, they took care of that. Just now I’m reading one from the Library about a doctor that treats an otter that had a spine stuck in him.   Missed an education, but I make up for it.  I come across a word that I don’t know, I look it up in the diction

     Something crashes loudly in the bedroom, but she chooses to ignore it.

     …dictionary.  ‘Ubiquitous’ I bet you don’t know what that word means.  Everywhere, it means. Everywhere, all the time.  Oh, well you probably know it being a college graduate and all…You always were the lucky one.  I knew it since that day you got the part I wanted…Emily in Our Town.  I always knew I was a better actress, but you were prettier, and the kids chose you…

     Another crash.

     Would’ve been different if the teacher’d chosen—like she should have.  Teachers always favored me; they saw my promise.  Kids, what do kids know about talent…pick the prettiest, most popular.     We put a play on in the hospital.  I was a shell-shocked soldier in it.  I frightened everyone; I was so good.  Your eyes, they said, your eyes were chilling.

     Achooo!

     Helen Schade has rummaged in another drawer and found a lilac envelope to match the stationery, enclosed and sealed her letter, realizes only then that she’s forgotten long ago the number and the street name where her sister lives…

     Ach OOO!

    She goes, finds Alcide out of bed and barefoot, opening all the drawers and throwing clothes all over the floor.

     What do you think you’re doing?

     Marry her.  Give the child a name.  The man’s the one to take respons…ach ooo!      See there, you’ve gone and caught a cold.  Get back in bed.  I’ll call Eulalie!      Go ahead.  A man’s a man!  My teeth, my cane.  Where are my…

     Helen shuts the door on him.  He’s made her lose her train of thought.

'Old men ought to be explorers.' I like that, says Megan.  Old women too.   What makes them different?  Menstruation, it's menstruation makes girls different.  Hated it.  It’s not…how can I put it?  Not elegant, like other things in nature.  Not economical.  And it holds girls back while boys go off adventuring.  Degrading if you ask me, too.  You had a set of towels, before these sanitary napkins, and you had to hem them up, then wash and iron them.  It took a lot of time when you might have been doing something more edifying. 

Cleopatra, I remember reading somewhere, used a sachet of crushed roses…

     A sachet of crushed roses!  Wonderful, exclaims Priscilla.  Wherever did you read it?

    Oh, I'm a mine of information, Megan says.  An autodidact, Louie used to call me, and I never went beyond the seventh grade.  Yes, an autodidact.  I bet you don’t know what country has the highest number of saints per capita…

     Priscilla doesn’t.

    South Korea.  South Korea has a saint for every thirteen million people.  I read that.  Yes, I always was a reader.  They used to catch me reading Anthony Adverse under the counter in my father's store.  'Dear Heavenly Father, can’t the child go out and play?' my Pa would holler.  'Go out and get yourself some air!  Dear God, the child’s pale as death!'  I’d, go and toss a ball against the cellar door for fifteen minutes, then come begging to come back.  Came by it honestly, in any case.  A family affliction.  Words.  My Ma would write a three-page letter telling Pa to come to supper.  Print.  We had a love of print; and great reciters, too, of verse.  My Uncle Leo used to render D’Arcy’s ‘Face on the Barroom Floor' at the drop of a…And Irish tenor, Uncle Leo.  Funny, isn't it, how Russia gives us basses, and Ireland, tenors.  You remember Dennis Day?  MacMahon was his real name.  A brother of his married Ann Blyth.  D'Arcy, yes, Antoine D’Arcy wrote that song.  I imagine he’s forgotten now.

 

Nelson and Dennis have made a deal with a kid from Thornton Road to sell two watches, split the fourteen dollars.  Dennis goes off on his own.  Hey, yells Nelson, running to keep up.  You ask her can I watch?

     She don’t like kids.  I tol you.

     You a kid.

Hey, listen, Nelson skips to catch up to Dennis.  I’m the one had the idea first, remem…

     OK, OK, says Dennis, climbing the dark stair to Ana’s.

   She opens wearing a purple wrapper.  Two of them! she screams.  Dos mocosos! No me digas!

  He just wants to watch us, Dennis tells her, indicating Nelson.

     Watch us?

    And he pay you too.  We both pay you.

    Yes, and then his Mama kill me!

     But they’re through the door already and in the living room.  Nelson’s never seen a room like this, the dove gray velvet sectional, the lamps, the cushions.  Dennis starts into the bedroom…Nelson Márquez, you stay there and don’t touch nothing, oyes! or I tell your Mama. Ana screams. Meanwhile, Dennis has his pants and shirt off, is starting on his socks.  You got to take the socks off too? says Ana, lolling on the tiger skin that covers the bed.  Her purple robe is fallen open to reveal her dusky breasts, and Nelson’s penny’s getting emocionado.  Dennis crouches by the bed to work on himself.   Que es lo que…?

     Getting myself ready.

    Getting yourself what?

     I make it big, you know.  Dennis’s face is burning.

   Little shit!

    Now, now I’m ready, Dennis moans.

    Little shit!

    I ’m coming!  Better let me put it…

    Put it,  si, si sabe donde!

    Shit!

     You little…

  Shit! cries Dennis, coming in his hand.

     Oh, hell! he moans.  Oh hell.  Why didn’t you…

    Me.  You comin’ fore you in the door.  Que puedo yo?!  Jesus, Maria, look at this, my

spreadbed!

  Let me have another chance.  It’s you don’t help me…

     Earth’s ancient dwellers studied the moon with instruments, believed they could see valleys, mountains there.  They pondered, certainly, the possibility of travel, there, beyond, someday…

 

    Young and Crippen are testing thrusters, putting on the suits they’ll wear for re-entry.  Just for practice this time.  The cabin’s chilly and the toilet doesn’t function; but these are minor matters.

In the Second Century AD, the Astronomer continues on public television, a writer, Lucian of Samosata, wrote a book about a hero carried to the moon by waterspout.  A Frenchman, Montgolfier, devised a taffeta container, filled it with hot air, and watched it rise.       Cold! cries Adie.  They’ve let the fire go out!  The little ones have nothing on but little summer shirts.     A Russian, Konstantine Tsiolkowsky, wrote a work about exploring space in which he advocated the use of multi-stage rockets, a mix of liquid hydrogen and oxygen was proposed as a means of achieving heights unheard of… But it was a physics teacher in Worcester, Massachusetts, who put the principle into practice by firing his first rocket on a cold March day in Auburn, Massachusetts.

Priscilla, who can hear the program through the old heat ducts of the house, catches herself slipping down into the water, sits up abruptly.  I could drown if I’m not careful…  She wonders if any one ever croaked themselves this way.  Gandhi, thinks Priscilla at her leisure now.  How could she not think of it?  She must call Frostie.  Gandhi perceived the central problem of our age.  How to get what you need and yet not harm…  It’s all of our problem, she thinks.  Gandhi, married off by as a boy to a girl of his family’s choosing…needed.  Chose his need.  Chose his need.  She has chosen her need.  And previous to that she chose her want.  Yes.  How careless she has been.  She is appalled by herself.  And now the debris of all these needs and wants lies around her.  Care for your own, care for the world.  And the only time she has to contemplate this is in the bath, and riding on her bicycle.  But Gandhi lived with the same dilemma.  You can live with the dilemma.  That’s what living is.  One of the doctors at McLean’s, a subtle Jew with the same name as a well-known Israeli violinist, said to her, you love all these people downwind of the reactor; do you love yourself?  She remembers the expression on his face.  The genuine curiosity.  How careless she has been.

Father Bustamante takes the choir at the French Church through the Ave Verum.  Eulalie is the only alto, unless you count Yvonne Aucoin who sings the melody an octave below the sopranos. 

       And meanwhile, upstairs in the kitchen of the First Congregational, Eula Toler and Gladys Schoolcraft in to set the tables for tomorrow’s ladies’ luncheon, watch the spoons jump, and lament the necessity to rent the chapel to these burgeoning Latino cultists— galling that they outnumber their own congregation, sprinkled sparsely through out the stately sanctuary, elderly and perishing, their young folks moved to Lexington and Belmont; only the Italian Catholics choose to build brick villas in the Highlands as an expression of prosperity.  Eula notes another soup spoon missing from the service, wonders if it made it’s way into…

     And meanwhile, also, Soledad, Priscilla’s daughter, is sitting in Ramona’s darkened parlor in the lap of a sailor friend of Angel Márquez, Nelson’s older brother.  The sailor is fondling her buds through her jersey top.

     Priscilla gets out of the tub and dries off.  She uses the phone before she goes downstairs.  Frostie answers.

     It’s Gandhi, she tells him.

     Whoodi?

     Gandhi.  The greatest man our age.

     Cold!  cries Adie.  They’ve let the fire go out.  They didn’t stoke it.  Leave it all to me!

     The sailor kisses Solie’s neck.  She’s looking through his wallet, finds a picture of his mother a hospital card with blood type O.  What’s your type? he asks.  She doesn’t know.     You ought to, you could bleed to death, he whispers in her ear.  She shivers at this intimate remark. He’s seventeen.  Dropped out of school to join the Navy.  She looks at his wrist.  He’s wearing an expensive watch.  The black hairs on his arm curl over the gold band in a way she finds attractive. 

She turns to look in his good looking brown face, then looks away, overcome by shyness and nervousness.  She doesn’t know if her mother’s home yet, if she’s wondering where she is.  Most likely not.  Her mother only cares about her union, about her brown lung workers.  Before this, she only cared about her sit ins and her marches.  She’ll tell a lie, she’ll say she had to go and help Nelson with his homework, and her mother will believe her.  Nelson’s schoolwork is the only thing that matters to her mother.

Cold! cries Adie.  She’s going to wet her diaper again.  Cold!  It comes.  Delicious warmth.  Her mother will come and change her before it turns cold.

Priscilla comes downstairs and sits with Megan till the program’s over.  In l990, they’ll be going off to Mars.  Imagine it! says Megan. They’re simulating settlements already.   Just for practice.  Already they’re receiving applications.  You have to be a vegetarian, non-smoker, have a sense of humor.  Listen, nights, I hardly sleep.  I think of interstellar travel.  Yes!  This putrefying orb, we will escape it.  That’s the meaning of all these disturbances.  Six million inhabitants we’ll soon have.  Think of it.  You don’t smoke, and you’re a vegetarian.     Well, only off and on.  I’ve lost my sense of humor too, Priscilla says.   Well, your son then, he’ll go, cries Megan.  Tell him not to smoke.  Listen.  We’re the only animal that’s not at home her on this Earth, that must wear clothing, spectacles, appliances of all sorts, that can’t be comfortable in its fur.  We’re meant for something else, a journey. I just know it!  Maybe, says Priscilla, thinking about Solie.  She forgot to ask Frostie was she home.

Have you given up that bicycle, Megan asks.

     No, I’ve bought a helmet though.

     Oh, wonderful.  You’ll be a quadro plegic, but at least your brain will be…Intact, ha ha!  I wish that I could be around when we move out of here. You don’t appreciate the opportunity you might have.   I worry you won’t live long, though; you’re too special.  It’s tedious people live the longest. 

    Like that Fahey woman comes to clean…

    It only seems so.

    What?

    They only seem to live the longest.

    Oh, yes, ha, ha!   If she tells me one more time about her husband’s prostrate, and her granddaughter’ photogenic memory… No Irish need apply.  The wealthy used to post that in their windows.  It was this Fahey woman’s type they had in mind.  If she tells me one more time about her daughters I will cut my throat.   I’m perfectly happy to have no progeny.

    But you have a daughter.

    Who did not chose to reproduce.  A perfectly ordinary child she was. I don’t know why I ever thought she might be special.  She used to worry if she broke her fingernail.   And music meant rock and roll to her.                                                                     

    Priscilla gets up to look in on Winnie.  Sleeping with her mouth open.  Dreadful to be seen in sleep.

    Cold, cries Adie.  Priscilla goes in to find her messed again.  A sewer smell.  Methane, she thinks.  Someday they’ll make a fuel from it.  The washing machine is still filled with the earlier sheets.  She moves them to the drier, rinses out the one she just took off.   She’s very tired suddenly.  Two more hours till Rosa comes.  They’ve had to call in Rosa, thrown the whole schedule off.   She pours detergent in again.  So much detergent, so much water… They tried the plastic pads you throw away awhile, but they cost too much.  She’s heard that the Indians kept things sterile by putting them in the sun: products of miscarriage, placentas, they used to hang in trees…      Megan’s asleep in front of the news.  The Bruins have lost to Buffalo.  A light fog likely after midnight.   A carpenter from Hull has won a half a million in the lottery.  He tells the Boston Globe reporter he’ll report to work as usual tomorrow.  Toshiko Seko is the favored runner in the Marathon this year.   Food and heating oil prices up, while housing starts are…     Priscilla wakes Megan, moves her into bed.  Then sits to do her notes.  Reads her earlier report: Clifford’s bath, BM, Winnie’s passage of three stools resembling blackberries, Adie’s birthday party.  Add the brother’s visit, loose bowels and Megan’s going docile off to bed following her favorite program… She’s brought her notes from the last Health Workers’ Union Formation Committee to write up, but she barely gets started on them, when she puts her pen down to rest her eyes a moment and  falls asleep.

    Eulalie brings ‘How Amiable Are Thy Dwelling Places’ home to practice, gives a couple dollars and a box of cream-filled donuts to Helen Schade.  Then, going into the bedroom finds Alcide asleep on the floor, one hand clinging to his walker.  La Schade probably never even looked in on him even once!  She wakes him.  I can’t lift you.  You have to get up yourself.   I can’t.  Well, you’ll have to lie there then till I can call the Agency in the morning. She hasn’t the heart anymore to be angry.  Gets his pillow and a blanket.  My Woman, he says, reaching for her.  I have the lump, she tells him.  Tears come, finally, gratefully.  She gets another pillow and stretches beside him and he reaches for her breasts.    He knows them to be flaccid, hanging to her middle, but the skin is still white and smooth as when she was a girl, the nipples rather pale and maidenly in spite of suckling two.  The thighs, too, silky, and the calves firm and muscular as he used to admire them winking under her ample skirts.  He puts a nipple in his mouth and feels her loosen, open to him.

    Megan wakes and rings the little bell.  I slept an hour, she tells Priscilla.  That was good.  Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get another two.  Priscilla standing by the window looks out on snow.  In April, is it possible?  No, it’s only moonlight.  I hear the ducks, says Megan.  There, I think I’m finished.  No, I’m not.  Another moment.  There, just let me look and see how much.  It feels a good amount.    Priscilla shows her.   Yes, a good amount.  It ought to let me sleep another hour…  Cold, calls Adie.   Or maybe not, says Megan. They’ve let the fire die.  And Ma is dead and Pa is dead, and Adie is alone…cries Adie. First sensible remark she’s made in months, says Megan.  Priscilla puts another blanket over her, and all is quiet.

    It’s ten thirty and La Schade is settling to watch The Movie Loft, a mystery with Peter Lore.  Since the State she never goes to bed till three or later, as she pleases.  She tries a donut, but her craving is for something salty, so she finds a jar of peanut butter, eats it off her finger. And Rosa wakes from her nap in front of the eleven o’clock news.  A Bemis bus has been hijacked they’re reporting on channel 6.  The passengers are taken safely home in a police van, and the driver is in custody…A Mr. Prasad…part time student at Boston University.  His motive is unknown…  A passenger with strawberry hair and two canes is being interviewed before she gets into a police van to be taken home.  On the Late Show, Peter Lore, as Mr. Moto, builds a tower of matches on his table at the International Hotel. Rosa throws cold water on her face, puts on her shoes and goes to the bus stop on Mount Auburn Street.  The Fahey woman from upstairs is already there with plastic bags of knitting, flip flops, large bottle of Pepsi—she makes herself comfortable--police radio, she listens to all night.  You going to sisters?  I got Wolfie.  Dirty bastard, she tells Rosa.  He’s actually very kind and thoughtful when you get to know him, Rosa says, and sets her mouth against any further conversation, but Mrs. Fahey doesn’t notice. You can call me Rita, you know.  We’ve known each other long enough.  I’d rather call you Mrs. Fahey, Rosa says.  She thinks of Wolfie.  Of their pleasures.  She wonders if they know of it at the agency, if this Fahey woman knows it.  His caresses to drive her wild.  Him too.  Why should she deprive him?  She recalls this morning.  His hands on her belly, her breasts; his tongue up in her.  Her womb leaping.   Aah my darli, darli…  Suppose that they know, now, and that this Fahey woman’s told.  And she’ll never again feel under his sleeping, slackened flesh to see if he is dry at night.  It will be this woman, interrupted in her knitting, or her eating, going to him without feeling, putting her hands on his sleeping flesh that is so alive in the mornings when she takes him in her kind and powerful hands to help him pee.  A lawyer that tried to help her kind.  He got a cousin of hers off one time, when they were holding her accountable for a monstrous electric bill run up by a family that rented from him.  Did I show you the card my daughter sent me for my birthday? the Fahey woman asks.  Must have cost five dollars if a cent.  This big.  It didn’t fit in the mail slot.  They had to leave it on the porch… Yes, you showed me, it was very nice, says Rosa.  Always buy the best, my girls.  My Vivie wants a blue Sedan de Ville, but you have to wait five weeks you want a certain color, and she wants the black with red vinyl seats.  And opera windows.   So she’ll wait, she says; she always was like that.  Things have to be just so…

    Priscilla takes Megan’s bedpan and empties it.  She ought to sleep another hour if she can, thinks Megan.  She sets out the Solar System in her mind’s eye; sometimes that induces a couple hours of sleep, at least distraction: to let her mind range outward, like that unmanned Pioneer, our data scratched in its antenna; line drawings of a man, a woman, diagram of sun and planets. The Astronomer thinks it’s highly likely that there’s life on other planets.  And not the green humanoids of science fiction, but something totally unexpected.  He thinks it highly likely, too, that we’ll pack up and move to other planets.  Mars once had a better climate, might regain it…not just planets, either; the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are known to have an atmosphere like ours.  And even asteroids…  She wonders if the Universe is infinitely expanding, or contracting, hopes that it’s the former.  She doesn’t like the thought of all this swirling like bath water down one of those what- you-call them, holes…  She wishes she could understand this entropy.  Will Bach and Beethoven be gobbled up, or will they, in the form of data, be flung out, that ultimate microsecond, to some other universe being born?

    Rosa arrives, and wants to know where Margo is.  They called me in, Priscilla tells her.  She called the office, said she couldn’t take it any longer.  Megan says she thinks she’s pregnant. Ah…I’d just got home.  I spent all afternoon waiting for the Mayor to come for Adie’s birthday.  She didn’t enjoy it, and now she has the runs.  I just finished changing her the fourth time.  I have a second set of sheets in the washer now.

    Dios! says Rosa.

    Well Megan enjoyed it a little bit.  There was a woman played the harp. That woman with the pink hair and the two canes?  

    Yes, her name is Henrietta Rose. 

    I saw her just now on the television. 

    You didn’t!

    Yes.  A bus was hijacked.  She was one of the people that they talked to.

    A bus…

    It is a man from India.  The driver.  He is all the way to Watertown when they stop him.

    Why would a driver want to hijack a bus?  It couldn’t have been the driver.

    Yes, they say it is the driver.  Maybe he want to go back home. 

    To India?

    Supongo que sí.

    It isn’t possible to drive a bus to India, Rosa.

    Oh, well, maybe he just can’t stand it any longer.  I get so I can just get on a bus and make them take me back to Puebla.  To Puebla you can drive a bus. 

    Ah, Rosa. 

    That Fahey woman’s standing at the bus stop with me, going to Wolfie.  She make me angry.  

    No Irish need apply.

    What’s that? 

    What Megan says about her.  It’s an old thing they used to say when the Irish first came over. 

    Now they say it about us. 

    Well, yes.  I have to go.  I left some notes.  You can copy them and add your own.  Just spell things the way I do.  She puts her helmet on.  She doesn’t like to ride her bike this late.  She had it snatched once, by some kid.  A week later saw him, a big kid riding it past the CVS.  She grabbed it, unthinking of the danger–a kid as big as she–and dumped him off.  He came with a story about his father giving it to him; but she knew it was her Nishiki by the lamp Frostie had put on and by some rust spots she had scraped and painted with another blue not quite the same.  You come down to the police and tell your story, she invited, and he ran off.  

    I never indulge in games of chance, says Mr. Moto’s friend to an invitation to step upstairs.  Mr. Moto accepts the invitation; and, under the pretext of composing a haiku, passes a note to his lady friend, instructing her to call police.   The lady friend excuses her self to go to the Ladies, turns a corner and rushes to the phone booth, but it’s occupied by a sailor talking French.  Helen Shade unable to bear suspense tosses the cat off her lap and goes to the kitchen for more chips and surprises a cockroach in the sink.

    Priscilla coasts down Adams, then crosses a block to Moody where the lights     The sailor is still talking interminably in French when Helen Schade returns to the movie with a plateful of chips and a bottle of green olives.

    And Priscilla comes to in a blur of faces, glasses gone.    Don’t move.  Just lie there.  Ran the stop.  Light colored LTD.  Or a Mercury.  Ford product.  This gentleman saw it.  The eye-witness is a kid they call the Maggot.  Out looking for a bottle he has stashed in one of the hedges along Norumbega.  Helmet saved her.  Ambulance on it’s…  She moves her arms and legs a little.  Nothing broken.  But her glasses…  No, don’t move.  But I’m…  The ambulance is coming.  But my bicycle.   Cruiser’ll take it in.  But is it…  Busted?  Well the frame might be OK.  The wheels are twisted.  We’ll take it in the station.  You just lie there.  And my glasses…  Someone hands them to her, miraculously unbroken.  Just relax.  Your front wheel’s a little bent, and the handlebars.  It can be fixed.  We’ll keep it for you.  You relax.  She does.  Three EMT's, efficient with scoop stretcher, wedge her in with sandbags.  Collar on her neck.  Relax and let them, thinks.  She’s sorry for bad thoughts about police with Nelson earlier.  Relax.  She closes her eyes.  Alive.  Now she can think it.  Now, her bicycle, her glasses all accounted for, she thinks about her life.

    The Fahey woman hears about the accident on police radio as it happens.  A nurses’ aide on a bicycle.  She calls Rosa at the Sisters.  Mr. Moto turns an ace up.  It is said success in games, he tells his companion, is a sign of success in other…  I would have sworn you had the Jack, says his companion.  Megan tries reciting kings and queens of England.  These galaxies over excite her.  She pauses first to savor Priscilla’s visit.  She hopes she’s safely home.  At least she’s bought a helmet.   Alive, Priscilla thinks.  How many times has she imagined this?  Her broken body flung in the air, crushed under semi-trailers; never saw herself surviving.  Helmet saved her.  Lucky.  How good life is.  A beautiful young man is sitting at her feet.  It’s been awhile since she could appreciate male beauty, she thinks.  Another, darkly attractive, is fixing the pressure cuff.  I think I’m perfectly all right, she says.   Well, if you are, it’s due the helmet, and the dark man shows her the crack inside the lining.  The other shines a penlight in her eyes:  follow finger…  But I really think…  The pupils are a bit…  I really think if you’ll just let me up… uneven, and the left a little slow.  Or if you could leave me off at Varnum Circle.  My kids…  How many kids you got?  Two, no, three…you sure?  Yes, three, of course.  I was forgetting younger.  Before puberty, they were like puppies, children…you didn’t worry…Street you live on?  Why is he so severe with me? Spring Street, she says.  Number eighty…no, that was before…Funny now I can’t… Children’s names?  Well, Frostie, Sol…you just relax.  A certain item, of interest to us both, has turned up in a curio shop in San Francisco, says Mr. Moto.  Merchandise on which we both can profit. Megan starts with William the Conqueror who pretended to retreat, and then fell on the flanks of Harold’s English.  William the Red, and his son, Rufus.  Scoundrels…

    I believe that I’m perfectly all right, Priscilla says.  This is a waste of taxpayer’s money…  She strains at the straps as the pull up the hill below the hospital.  Blue lights of Emergency.  She’s handed out and pushed through double doors and down the long passage where she came, how many hours ago? with her offering of blood for Terry.  Bright lights.  A curtain drawn around.  What time is it?  One-forty-five.  Two nurses pull at her clothing: sweater, blue jeans…she’s wearing, naturally, her oldest, yellowest brassiere.  They struggle with it as the two young EMT's look on.  You want to try, the nurses offer.  You’ve more experience than us, this sort of thing.  Priscilla laughs.  Oh, life is good, she thinks.  So let them, let them care for her.  It’s true she can’t remember her address, had trouble remembering Benno’s name…Benno’s very existence!  She recalls, now, carrying him to bed, his elbows and knees poking her, his finger to his cusped.

    Henry the First, another scoundrel.  White ship lost with heir and sister.  Only the Butcher of Roen is saved to tell the tale.  I’m perfectly awake, thinks Megan.  Henry the Second:  'Is there no one her that can deliver me?' And four knights hear and cruelly stab his enemy Thomas, at the altar of St. Bennet.  Rosa changes Adie, who’s still oozing.  She thinks of Wolfie’s sleeping flesh, potent with manly emanations when she touched him, how the Fahey woman will be changing him as if he’s some giant bothersome baby… They did it in the bedroom, once, she recalls; it wasn’t successful, the bed requiring standard positions he wasn’t able any more.  Who has seen them?  They always locked the door.  She remembers the Fahey woman once saw her on the street when the Kisser caught her unaware.  The look on her face.  Probably right there she began to have dirty thoughts about Rosa.  It’s raining slightly, has turned warmer.  The Professor, under the Gold Star Mothers Bridge, sheds his coats, flings out an arm comfortably, discovers the Maggot isn’t there beside him.  Henry Second, thinks Megan, then Stephan, of whom nothing worse was known than that he was a usurper…The Maggot has felt an itch to have a shower and a woman, has engaged a room at the Maple Shade Hotel.  Having witnessed an accident on the corner of Norumbega and Conant, he lopes toward Prospect.  He hasn’t found the woman he expected to pick up earlier at O’Reilly’s Daughter, or even the other one that sometimes lurks outside the Indian bistro; he still has hopes, and has remembered the fifth of Wild Turkey hidden in the bushes outside the Irish Travel Bureau. The Professor, missing him, is having night thoughts: Old, he thinks.  His bones are aching.  Where did it go, his brutish youth?  And now this senseless dotage.  Why?  So we may palpate, sing, and suffer Godhead out of every crack and crevice of Creation…?  Admittedly, for some, the perspective is the Godhead’s asshole, yes, but all, he swigs the last of the Lambrusco…all will be known.  At the hospital, Priscilla’s covered with a johnny and a blanket, wheeled to X-ray with her house key in one hand and her wallet on her stomach.  These, she must have by her, so they‘ve dug them for her out of her backpack.  Gandhi, she remembers on the elevator.  Did she tell Frostie?  Yes, she called him.   Benno was in bed and Solie not accounted for.  Was she there?  How could she not remember her baby?  Must have been an awful bang.  The greatest figure of our century was Gandhi, yes.  And telling them she lived on Spring Street.  What was she thinking?  It was seven years ago, now, that she lived on Spring Street.  Feeling rich after the divorce settlement, she did volunteer work and ran the PTA, lived in an apartment that cost three hundred a month, spent half the money on saving Frostie’s dog’s life after she was hit by a car.  Months of bills at Angel Memorial Hospital.  It was all they thought about for a whole year, that sweet beagle with the liquid eyes.  And she was saved, but always dragged the leg.  It took them just six months to go through the rest, and end up sitting in the anterooms of welfare offices and charity clinics.  Ross would have given more, of course.  But she was proud and wouldn’t take it.  This was her idea and she must make it work, was her notion.  And Ross must remarry.  She would not ruin his life.  And she wasn’t ever worried.  It was all a novelty.  You act like you’re on a Girl Scout camping trip, Ross told her when he visited the children once and found them all sleeping in sleeping bags on the floor of a two-room apartment.  He was full of scorn for her giddiness, but she’d have never got through it if she’d been properly serious….Estrambótica…A word Sr. Hugo used about her.  Porqué sois tan estrambótica?     Three pictures are taken of her head.  It isn’t cracked, they tell her after a fifteen-minute wait.

    Richard the Lion Hearted, kicked the Duke of Austria.  Crusader Richard, he whose enemy, Saladin, on hearing he was ill, sent fruit fresh from Damascus, snow from mountaintops.  The doctor will be with her shortly, they tell Priscilla.  My glasses?  The nurse steps forward, hands her the pair of aviator glasses that she got from the poor box back in the days when she was orchestrating public welfare.  At the sisters, Rosa dozes.  She loves these quiet, small hours when her body goes slack yet not quite into sleep.  Funny how you have to be at least a little awake to appreciate sleep.  It’s always bothered her to miss deliciousness of sleep because it’s a time stolen from you by oblivion.  Helen Schade has dozed and waked again to the flickering black and white…‘Can I be certain,’ says Mr. Moto’s companion, ‘you are what you seem?’  ‘We are, both,’ says Mr. Moto, ‘in the same business, one might say…’ And in the meantime, young Mr. Hitchings and the nightclub singer have been trussed up in a vault because they ‘know too much.’  Helen’s missed that part, but has seen it all before.  The voices have started up again.  And someone has tapped her shoulder as she slept.  And stolen her breath.  She can only get a scant amount of air into her lungs.  It feels like a need to yawn that’s been prevented.  The black and white cat lies like a lion couchant on her breast and breathes into her face.  She rises, upsetting him toward the floor and his claws scrabble into her ribs.  A shot!  They’ve killed Mr. Moto.  No.  He’s wearing his steel weskit, rises from the floor, and at that moment, the police, at last… The doctor, Dr. Yee—she reads his nametag—stands over Priscilla.  You have a slight concussion he tells her, exquisitely, orientally polite.  You will stay here, and be observed until tomorrow.  There is nothing, really, to be worried…  Have you pain? No pain.  And can you touch your chin to your chest?  She can.  She looks around the shiny cubicle…a gift of Dr. and Mrs. Morton Bloomberg, says the plaque on the door.  Oh, good, yes, life is…all these people caring for her, telling her, relax, and let us…And she, one of the Players in the Great Orchestra of Life, a term her father used to quote from some old book.  Estrambótica.  Means eccentric.  Yes, she is eccentric in the tradition of the Rowans.  What of Madsens, she wonders.  She thinks it must be Madsens in her that makes her want to make an honest workman of Nelson.  Rika had left The Watch behind her, but Priscilla knew her grandfather, Oscar Madsen, till she was ten.  He spent his retirement in the basement of the house on Myrtle Street, in his workshop.  Making something useful out of things he found in the neighbors’ trash.  And Grandmother Hulda in the kitchen.  Cooking.  Joyful cooking.  Where had that got lost?  The second movie starts, but Helen Schade wanders down the hall in darkness, fleeing voices…Megan, still wide awake, ticks off Henry Fourth.  High-spirited Hal, the Fifth.  His marchers mowed down the French at Agincourt.  Red Roses here, and white.  She never can keep them straight… Fleeing voices, Helen, runs out her door and down the steps in mules and housecoat, over dewy grass to sidewalk, stubbing her toe on a trashcan.  Turning into Moody Street and into the arms of Maggot.  Jesus! Jesus!  Women have been slipping through Maggot’s fingers the entire… Edward of York.  Another usurper.  Queen Margaret wandering about the countryside with Henry’s sons…The Fahey woman calls the sisters’.  Rosa, startled, answers.  That girl that rides a bicycle.  On police radio…what girl?  The one that rides a bicycle.  Comes to the sisters…who is this?  Rita.  Are you asleep or something?  Oh, Mrs. Fahey…did you hear what I said?  …hit by a car.  Yes, that girl that rides a bicycle.  A hit and run.  They haven’t found the car.  White Mercury, they’re saying…Priscilla!  Yes, that was her name. Hit!  She just leave here.  Two hours ago… Thrown over the hood, the Fahey woman says with satisfaction.  And didn’t stop.  A Ford make of car, they’re saying.  She was there, you say…yes, they call her in for Margo.  Oh, Margo, yes.  She’s preggers, did you know?  No.  How do you know?  I just know.  Just how you know the things I do with Wolfie, Rosa thinks.  Bad magic.  She wants to hang right up.  But Priscilla!  Is she OK?  Who?   Priscilla!  Rosa screams.  Oh, I suppose.  They took her to the hospital.  I guess you like her.  Yes, I like her.  Cold fish, I’d say.  She never gives me time of day.  And whoever heard of riding a bicycle… I keep her, Rosa thinks.  I ought to let her go.  She has her helmet on, and I keep talking… Girl with a college education, says the Fahey woman.  What is she doing riding around changing diapers?  Myself, I only do these couple nights to keep me busy.  Mr. Fahey gives me anything I want.  He asks me the other day, do I want to go to one of these islands down there where they have pools with bars floating in them like little islands, you swim up and get your drink… They say she is alive?  Rosa shouts.   I told you they took her to the hospital.  That’s all they say.  And you needn’t shout. I’ve never had a problem with my hearing! says the Fahey woman with dignity.  But Rosa has hung up.

    the space ship Columbia’s been turned, is traveling tail first now, and right side up.

    Tide turns, Henry’s brought from the tower, crowned, then killed.  That villain, Uncle Richard—he has one shoulder higher than the other—puts the two young princes in the tower…  Keeping me awake, these kings and martyrs, Megan thinks.  Refractory! calls Winnie out of sleep.  Recalcitrant!   Antonia wakes with a pain in her side and opens the Bible beside her bed: And also in the night my heart instructs.  Maggot passes Helen Schade the paper sack with Wild Turkey as he guides her over Ash Street to the room he’s rented at the Maple Shade Hotel.  She, though not a drinker, downs it.  “Whoa there! Save a mite.  They finish it in the room, and fall into the bed without a further introduction…  Tudors next.  Megan loves the Tudors.  Katherine of Aragon, that’s Isabella’s daughter.  Isabella rode in chain mail into battle with her troops.  Anne, then, Jane.  Heads roll.  Sir Thomas More, the wife of Pole.  She ran around the scaffold: ‘If you want this head, you’ll have to catch me!’ 

The astronauts are given final go.  The orbit rocket fires. 

    The Maggot doesn’t like the smell of this woman, decides to take her in the shower and wash both their bodies with a bar of Palmolive soap provided by the hotel.  And then their hair, with some Herbal Essence Shampoo left behind by a previous guest.  Her body isn’t bad, although she seems to be missing a breast.  And her hair is long and golden.  Helen looks where her right breast used to be and sees the evil face of a surgeon, plotting with her sister…  She must get a lawyer.  Are you a lawyer by any chance? she asks the Maggot.  No, but I know lots of them, he tells her.  In the morning I’ll take you to them.  He gives her another drink from the bottle and takes her back to bed.  A nurse comes in to take Priscilla’s vital signs.  They are all normal.  They’ve called the house for her and all her children are accounted for.  You know I couldn’t remember how many I had.   Well it was quite a bump, I guess.   Yes, they showed me the helmet.  It’s all cracked.  A woman named Rosa called to ask if you were alive.  We told her you were.  She was so upset.  She thought she killed you, keeping you late to tell you about that bus that was hijacked.  It couldn’t have been hijacked, Priscilla says.  A bus driver wouldn’t hijack his own bus.  They can’t have been thinking straight…  The Fahey woman is burning toast in Wolfie’s kitchen.  Megan wonders whether Isabella rode sidesaddle into battle, or astride.  With armor, she must have ridden astride.  Her daughter can’t have been as formidable a character to be discarded so easily; and she is followed by a flock of equally weak sisters: Anne of Cleaves, Great Flanders Mare; more Katherines: Parr and Howard.  A son reins briefly, Edward––gloomy Catholic Mary.  Glorious Elizabeth.  She knew how to handle men.  Elizabeth would have ridden astride had it been called for.  Now Stuarts.  Scottish cousin James.  His Sowship.  Baby Charles First, brought over a crowd of unpleasant priests and lost his head.  She’s getting drowsy now, of course, when it’s too late.  For the sun is striking the windows of the Nichols wing of the hospital.  The nurse shines a light in Priscilla’s eyes.  You’re fine.  The doctor will be in at seven.  She will go home.  Will she go to work?  Who will relieve Rosa?  She ought to go to sleep an hour at least, but her thoughts won’t allow…  Una felicidad rara.  She must preserve it.  Preserve.  Like her grandfather in his basement workshop.  Preserve, remake, make useful again.  Herself.  Herself first.  Yes.  How can Solie care about her life when it was she who saw her mother...  You will stay home from work I’ll assume, the nurse says.  OK, she says, relieved.  She’s sure Rosa will stay if necessary.  Solie, yes, who saw her mother take that knife…She must sleep.  She feels beckoned into sleep.  Strikes the bars of Billy’s cage; he ruffles his feathers, ticks and chuckles.  Obfuscation!  Winnie crows, strikes under a broken blind at the Maple Shade Hotel, and into Maggot’s…Mandible, says Winnie.  There’ll be no sleeping now.  Megan picks up a copy of Opera News and switches on the light.  One of the earliest lessons that Nell Rankin mastered was to sing the CEGC arpeggio in a single breath. 

At an altitude of one hundred and seventy miles over the Indian Ocean, two maneuvering rockets fire on the command of a computer…

    She, Nell Rankin, could hold the notes for eight beats each, ascending and descending.  Maggot studies the lock of last night’s platinum upon the pillow: Jesus!  Get your clothes on!  Jesus.  How old are you.  You must be sixty.  Jesus.  You liked me well enough an hour ago.  No beauty, kid, yourself, says Helen Schade.  In a dream, Eulalie Arsenault is present at the interment of a leg—her own.  Its multiple perfections are the subject of discussion among the Robichauds and Aucoins present.  But suddenly it turns into a monstrous purple horror.  The Maggot takes another drink and falls back to sleep.  Helen Schade, thinking of her cat, gets up and dresses.  The alcohol has shifted her thoughts a bit.  She wonders has she left the door open.  Her little room with hotplate, share a bath!  She must get back…Get out, the Maggot mutters.  Go the back stair.

The retrorockets finish firing, slow the spaceship just enough to drop i260t out of orbit into the pull of Earth’s gravity.

And don’t let no one see you!

Looking down in her dream, Eulalie notes that she’s standing not on her remaining leg, but a couple of inches above the ground and rising…When Rosa comes in to help her up to the toilet Megan shows her a color photo of Fernando Corena in a production of Elisir d’Amore, descending on to the stage of the old Metropolitan in a splendid hot air balloon.