CONTINUED FROM LAST ISSUE

The governour and some companie with him went up by Charles River above Watertown and named the first brooke on the north side of the river being a fair streame and coming from a pond a mile from the river-Beaver Brook, because the beavers had shorn down divers dams across the brook…Thence they went to a great rock upon which stood a high stone cleft in sunder that men might go through, which they called Adams Chair…

Governour Winthrop l631

The Kisser pops a peanut butter cup in his mouth and crushes it against his palate, sweet and salty. It’s eleven twenty. A parachutist, practicing for the Policemen’s Expo, lands in front of the field house at Leary Field. This date in l970, a tank of liquid oxygen aboard the Apollo spacecraft, burst three quarters of the way to the moon and forced its return to Earth.

The Kisser…sweet and salty, sweet and salty…spies a pouting…catch her undefending, fresh and sulky adolescent, lanky hair…He crosses, and she disappears in the crowd that’s gathering in The Common. Nuclear Disarmament. The evil that I do not want is what I…Gone. He dodges the Number 60 bus, and crosses to the French Church, as they call St. Joseph’s, finds the old broom he’s hidden by the rectory shed and sweeps the steps. Who will deliver me…? He picks two paper cups out of the hedge, a vodka bottle, throws them in a trash bag that he carries for the purpose.

Who will deliver me from this body of death?

He goes in the sanctuary next, and gathers up the Shorter Missal booklets from the back pews and distributes them in the front where the small congregation sits.

You needn’t. Sister Muriel says, coming in from the convent with the Hosts and a tray of water glasses. He averts his eyes from her lips and continues what he’s doing. He’s his duties—self-appointed—she has hers.

At the Sunshine Club, they’re eating the meatloaf, canned peas, instant mashed, fruit Jell-O with canned peaches and a dab of Cool Whip. Priscilla, who’s arrived with the two sisters and seated them at tables, tries to unwind in her head the processing of this food, to visualize these peas back in their pods, the potatoes in their earthy skins, and peaches in their fuzzy jackets. She finds it difficult if not impossible. Adie’s food, they’ve blended further into a pap, which she spoons into her.

Yes, spring’s expected to be late and cold, says Henrietta Rose—a rather elegant lady felled by drink—to her tablemates. It has to do with some volcano down in Mexico, I hear…

The hell you say, growls Terry Fratus. Adie licks the mashed potatoes from her fingers, hardly scintillating dinner conversation, thinks Henrietta. She recalls the dinners that she used to hostess…Henrietta’s extravaganzas, people called them, there on that plateau of Sogamoso…dusky little wives of her husband’s underling engineers…the waiters in and out with appetizers, children underfoot in nighties…barman, who had had a few himself just after midnight beginning to improvise a copla that would last till three. They’d find him in the morning stretched across the front seat of the guitarist’s taxi in the drive, the rest of the conjunto sleeping under the great ceiba hung with orchids in baskets…Oh it was lovely.

It was the dusky little wives that exercised her hostess faculties, the beautiful, dark women with their oily perspiration, their silences. They’d only talk of servants, babies… Apple cake! says Adie, gabbling the mashed.

Yes, quite a partygiver I was once, says Henrietta to Priscilla, sitting beside her. I don’t know where it went, sometimes, where I lost it all, the children in their nighties, the rambling house, so lovely. The clouds would lift; we’d see the paramo. All pink it was sometimes.

Babbling woman, says Terry.

You might be civil!

Hell, you say.

I will simply ignore you. Henrietta turns to Alva Otting.

It’s a lovely meatloaf, Alva, won’t you eat?

I wanted catsup, Alva whines.


You might have asked, says Henrietta, passing it.

An old rag bundle, just an old rag bundle. Why should anybody bother? Everything, they took away, my house, they took.

Too bad, says Henrietta. I feel that way about…of no great value really…pots, my baskets from the Amazon…they moved with me, three continents, and still I have some of them…a little cannon that I found in the grass in San Mateo, where Bolívar…

Hell, you say.

I will ignore your rudeness…a bit of grapeshot that I dug out of an old door. More than a century ago, that war, and everything as if it happened yesterday. It wasn’t open to the public, I recall; we bribed a workman with a bottle of Ron Viejo...

Rum, she drank, those days, a cheap dark brand of Ron de Caldas; she recalls they bottled it in the same bottles as the purgative they made for cattle. She took to drinking it a day after, horrified, she saw she’d downed in fifteen minutes a bottle of Gran Marnier that took forty years to age… Aguardiente, she came down to next. Six pesos for a liter and the next worst thing to witch hazel.

I lived on Squires Court Road and owned my house, says Alva. I had the Polish grocers one block down, the Russian Church and…

What a conversation, growls Terry Fratus.

Well, it’s better than a sullen silence, Henrietta says, and Priscilla, mopping up Adie’s plate, thinks she’s rather heroic.

Was that when? wonders Henrietta, was the aguardiente when? They moved to India soon after. More dusky wives, her husband’s engineers. She left them now—their talk of servants, babies—to their own devices; and discovered bwana bap, the people’s drink. two rupies the half gallon…

Have you children? Henrietta asks Priscilla, noting her milky skin, the small patch of adolescent acne healed beside her brow, the bitten nails and mannish haircut. But she has nice brown eyes and a womanly shape—she could be pretty if she cared for herself.

I have three, Priscilla says.

An air of breeding too. Henrietta can always pick that up.

Notice them, she says. I didn’t notice mine and I regret it.

I’ll try to, Priscilla says, thinking again of the hickey on Solie’s neck.


A second parachutist lands in Leary Field before a gathered crowd of mothers, infants in their strollers. Father Tours begins the Mass at the French Church. Eulalie Arsenault—who’s hidden Alcide’s walk-aid at a neighbor’s—and The Kisser seated at the front, loud with responses. Eulalie mumbles hers in French. She’s already devising a way to avoid him going out. There’s also Megan Blakey’s brother Leo, several French Canadians related to Eulalie, and a scattering of ladies of the Holy Name,

A good man, Leo, thinks Eulalie, comes to see his sisters every day, and all of them good Catholics, with the exception of that Megan.

Therefore it is with Angels and Archangels, Thrones and Dominations…

Henrietta is going to perform a piece by Brahms on her harp as soon as the Mayor arrives.

Priscilla tells Megan about it in hopes of perking her up.

Brahms, you say?

Yes, would you like to meet her?

No, the music will suffice. My Louie and I used to concerts every month. We would have gone more if we could. He played the oboe in one of Roosevelt’s orchestra, and only earned a pittance for many years, so there never was much money, but we entertained ourselves. We went on lovely walks and recited the lyrics of Sir William Gilbert to each other. He was knighted, did you know…

We will walk down Picadilly with a poppy or a lily…

Ah, yes, there was always music. We were rich in music. The symphony cost fifty cents, and even that a sacrifice. We heard the Greats, yes, Charles Munch, and Rudolf Serkin. Louie worshipped ground he…I remember, later, hearing Peter, Peter Serkin, Rudolf’s son you know…had the effrontery to appear once in a pair of old brown shoes. Imagine it! Imagine it! A little difference with his father, we heard later. A little difference with the world, his generation. Well, my Louie wouldn’t clap. He was incensed, of course; and then one heard he’d thrown it over, Peter, all the work, the discipline. What did Papa Rudolf think, one wonders? Yes, music was a holy thing to us.

Eulalie takes the host on her tongue from Father Tours, returns to a seat near the choir door to avoid The Kisser, who has taken the Host in the palm of his hand, denying himself oral pleasure in this setting. The final blessing and Eulalie slips out the back way where a hearse is arriving for the funeral Mass to follow: One of the numerous Aucoins, Armand; he owned a machine shop— stamping, drilling—was married into a flock of Robichauds—the Nova Scotia, not the Acadian ones. She goes around the back to reach the convenience store on the corner of Main and Regis Court, there buys a Megabucks and puts her telephone number, in case it was a sign—that man calling from Indiana.

The Kisser notes Eulalie fleeing. Sooner would he kiss a mackerel than that woman. He tastes the little papery Host becoming Our Lord’s Body as it passed his tongue and down his…pure. He’s left the church by west door, lopes toward The Common, where he waits at the railroad crossing at the foot of Moody for the Boston & Main to pass. One-fifty-eight. It’s thirteen minutes late. The husky dyke in mountaineering boots emerges from her little house to wave her flag. He glimpses a pouting adolescent on the other side of the tracks. The train pulls through. He loses sight of her, but here she is again in front of him, sullen puss in greasy denim. Pouting rosebud…

Rosa Mundo. But his heart is pure…

Oh, no you don’t! Not at my crossing! yells the husky dyke. Her crossing! And she’s going to strike him with her flag it seems! He skitters sideways, but she catches him on the back of his neck and shoulders, she’s not having any funny business at her crossing!

And so, redeemed, he passes on, around the Bay Bank on the corner, up Moody Street where Enedina, one of the Guatemalans in Rosa’s Basement, hurrying past Grover Cronins, doesn’t see him till he’s almost…hasn’t time to cross the…Well, it’s quicker, let him…let it…and he kisses her quite gently on the mouth. His soft dog’s eyes look into hers, and Enedina laughs and hurries on. Nut capital of the world, she thinks, this town. Her lips retain an impress of softness. Quite a nice man, really, she thinks. He’s always clean and nicely dressed in one of his uniforms—he has several, including a military one with medals. She often sees him sweeping the steps in front of the French Church.

Eulalie, on her way home, stops at her favorite place, a grave of rough pink granite on a little spit of land that juts into the river where it’s widest. A plaque reads

ANNE HATHAWAY ABBOT
SHE WAS, ABOVE ALL THINGS, GLAD AND YOUNG
1945-1975

Barely thirty. Shame.

THE DAUGHTERS OF POTATO FAMINE STAGE SIXTH ANNUAL LUNCHEON… reads the sign around the Shawmut Bank.

It’s two o’clock, and they’re still waiting for the Mayor at The Sunshine Club. They make some Easter bunnies out of felt, for decorations meanwhile. The Easter Bunny’s dead, the real one, Bertha Bechtel says. When I was younger, at The Children’s Own, he was alive. He brought me, once, a doll with curls and little holsters with pistols.

Eulalie’s followed the funeral to Mount Feake Cemetery, climbs the little rise behind Le Watch, as the French Canadians called the old watch factory. A wash of green is over the early leafing willows…grabs her heart right out of her chest. The beeches are coming out in copper too.

Thence they came to another high-pointed rock having a fair ascent on the west side which they called Mount Feake, from one Robert Feake who had married the Governour’s daughter

Governour Winthrop

The hearse has disappeared behind a rise. Aucoins will be at the farthest end. Eulalie marvels they got in at all. Acadian Aucoins. They came here victims like her own of Le Grand Derangement: the broken families, twelve of them distributed as public charges in surrounding towns—three here, four there; her grandfather, Theo, wandering deranged in search of his lost children.

PLASTIC FLOWERS ARE PERMITTED ONLY IN OCTOBER THRU MAY CYCLISTS AND PICNICKERS PROHIBITED is posted on an ancient beech tree. She sits to get her breath among the Weekses: Nahum, Father; Minnie Mae, Beloved Mother. Daughters, Lucy and Mabel lie under smaller stones. We Will Meet in Heaven…


Jose Maso on WHYY spins Cuando Tu Te Hayas Ido, for Concha from Ambrosio. It’s almost three o’clock, and Alcide’s napping, dreaming of Antoinette Fandel, the little girl that comes in to help Eulalie Mondays, cleans the oven, swabs the floors. She tells him that she’s pregnant. Zut! He should have known he’d get her into trouble dreaming of her constantly! Fresh. She can’t be more than fourteen; you only have to look at them, their bellies swell, those fresh ones.

Farwell, Moody, Jellison… Eulalie climbs through the Yankee ghosts. Fiore, Lawyer—they didn’t used to let Italians in here—with a lovely sandstone angel standing over him. Pages, mother, father, little one that lived a month. The Roberts Family grandly gathered round a mausoleum, fenced in with iron spikes. She trespasses among them, pondering mortality; then climbs. Swedes here, Isaakson, Borg, Helsingius, Oscar—worked at Le Watch. They called him Snowball. Kept to themselves and had their chapel there on River Street. Always had the best jobs at Le Watch. She caught her hair once in the machine they had for buffing pinions. It was Snowball freed her, scolded, comforted. She moves among her own now at the furthest end. It doesn’t even look like cemetery here, but like some raw new housing development. Labbe, Lebrun, Langille…Le Grand Derangement. They sent her grandfather in chains to Cuba, where he escaped and stowed below the deck on a ship to New Orleans. He lived on water and sardines for three months. Wasn’t sure where he was when he emerged, had to ask two people was this New Orleans before he believed.

Ah, here’s the hearse, the gash, the pile of red earth. Eulalie watches as they lower the late Armand Aucoin to final rest.


Rosa takes Wolfie down to the Sunshine Club in the elevator. Rebecca is handing out juice and cookies, and Mrs. Rose is telling the group that a spaceship called Columbia is in orbit today and just passing over Africa. At least this is something more interesting for Wolfie than what is the next holiday coming. He probably has all different holidays anyway. She knows Jews do. She puts his chair next to Mrs. Rose, who sometimes performs on her harp, and who, Rosa knows instinctively, is a person Wolfie would like to talk to if he could. Stupid Adie Blakey, who’s legs are apart in her geriatric chair so that you can see way up to her diaper, asks Rebecca if she is Adie’s mother. Adie calls for her mother all day long.

I couldn’t be your mother, Adie, I’m Rebecca, and I’m thirty-two years old and you’re a hundred. This also is an interesting and true fact. Today is Adie’s one hundredth birthday and the Mayor, the Honorable Arthur Clark is coming for a birthday party. Rosa feels another clot rush out of her and thinks maybe it will be a good day and Laureano will come down off the roof and catch the two roosters and put them in the cage.

Innerspring, says Adie’s sister Winnie, who is tonto in a different way than Adie, and who no one likes. Rosa wonders what that word means. Innerspring. She’s never heard it.

Eulalie’s home, takes off her shoes, and Alcide wakes from his dream of the little girl he’s made pregnant. He’ll have to marry her, of course, he thinks. He’ll find the money somewhere… He’s out of bed and searching for his walk-aid. It isn’t in any of Eulalie’s customary hiding places: cellar landing, laundry room…a…job…some money…breathing hard. He found it this morning stuck on the shelf above the coats in the hall closet. Of course it won’t be there now. There’s still a chance, of course, that she’s not in a family way…he hasn’t touched her, only dreamed. And possibly she doesn’t bleed yet. Just a kid, but they bleed early now. He makes his way down the hall, sees Eulalie in her EZBoy. Eulalie hasn’t bled last twenty years; he wonders does Melissa at the Press Box still? That Rosa that comes to bathe him, he would wager she…


Rosa goes upstairs to change her flooded pad and make Wolfie’s bed. They did it in the bed once. He wanted so bad to try, “the normal way.” She got him in there somehow. Lay on top of him, but nothing happened. It was something that needed to happen just the way it happened, without all the planning and the wanting to be like other people, she concluded, and she guessed Wolfie did too, for he never asked for it again.

She crosses the sluicegate again, feels her blood gushing out of her just like the dammed up river water. Wofie has undammed me, thinks. Maybe it won’t last a month this time. She’s ten minutes late for Alcide’s bath when she enters the yellow brick building at the foot of Crescent Street, wonders if they’ve found him.

He’s there. He was brought home by police, Eulalie tells her, for shitting in the gutter on Moody Street. He probably just needed to badly, Rosa says. Men in her village did this very neatly all the time.

Well it’s the second time, and I was very upset. She is calming herself with the horoscope from The Globe. It’s telling her to focus on “extra earnings,” she says. She’s going to get a job so she can put Alcide away. She can’t tolerate him any longer. She probably could get a job, thinks Rosa, watching Eulalie’s energetic legs as she crosses and recrosses them, concentrating on the horoscope. And she’s legal for the past sixty years at least. Do the French just come over the border without anyone bothering them? It seems so. Eulalie told her once how she used to work at the mill, when it was a mill, not apartments for ancianos, and come home every night and cry for the farm in Canada, where they kept sheep and wove their own blankets. But there wasn’t enough food for so many children, so half of them had to come here and live in a little room on Cherry Street and wash their stockings in the sink and work six days a week cleaning the lint from the looms. But they had schools and English lessons and clubs, Eulalie told her, not like now.

She has a soft spot for Eulalie since she told Rosa these things. Still, she could never shame a man the way Eulalie does.

Of course, he is a trial. Almost worse than Laureano, who is still strong as an ox though as old as Alcide at least, and who keeps the place going with his rents from the countless Guatemalans occupying the cellar, and his eggs from the leghornes he keeps hidden in the garage, and his pension from the factory.

I hid it at the top of the closet, this time, Eulalie says. “I can no imageen how he find it. Rosa laughs and passes another clot. Eulalie hasn’t bled for fifteen years, Alcide told her once in the bath. As if that put her past his interest. He never put his hand up Rosa’s skirts, in any case, and she doubts she’d let him. He just likes to think about women, she concludes. What they might be like if he had them. Probably he imagines everything, just like the job he thinks they’re offering him at the used car place. A job, they tell him. You meet the public. He keeps going back to hear it over and over. Eulalie, on the other hand, could get a job. Eulalie was probably goodlooking in her day, she thinks.

Innerspring. The words pops in her head. What it mean, innerspring? she asks Eulalie.

It’s the bottom part of the bed, Eulalie says. With the springs in it.

Rosa feels a fool and vaguely disappointed. Of course, Eulalie knows things she doesn’t know, the French being better schooled than the Hondurans and all that bunch. Probably there weren’t so many of them all at once, coming in. And there was the mill that needed them, and the watch factory, where Eulalie worked after her first job at the mill.

Too many of us, she thinks. Alcide told her once how he loved the pigeons that he fed in the park. They are really very beautiful,” he told her. If you look closely at them. It’s just there are too many of them.

Too many of us, yes, she thinks. This thought always brings an image of the Guatemalans downstairs, flooding the toilet, clogging the washing machine, taking apart their cars in the yard. Fortunately they were Laureano’s worry. She would come home and find the toilet pulled up by its roots and the washing machine set out to the trash and one of the spare ones in the yard installed.

It seems, says Eulalie, some woman’s little girl saw him about his dirty business, and screamed, and the police came and brought him home. They would have taken him in if Officer Menard who’s married to my cousin, Ottilie Rosier hadn’t been one of them. So they bring him to me. Going to have to watch him better they tell me. ‘We should have booked him.’

Book him, I scream at them. Go right ahead. Maybe they send him off somewhere! I’ve had my fill. Dieu! Man that can’t keep his pants on.

Alcide is docile and exhausted. She gives him a sponge bath, as he says he’s too weak to get in the tub. He’s grateful and leans up against her like a little boy while she sponges him off seated on the toilet. You’ve missed the Sunshine Club, she tells him. They’re having a birthday party for Adie Blakey and the Mayor’s coming.

Ah, well, I have to tend to my affairs, says Alcide. It’s no small thing when you get a young thing pregnant.

What young thing? asks Rosa, shocked.

What’s Her Name, that comes to clean.

Oh, he means the little girl that Eulalie hired for after school, to mop the floors.

But she can’t be. She’s only eleven or so...

She bleeds. You just have to look at those young ones to knock them up.

That’s probably what he did, Rosa thinks, looked at her.

You can still go if you want. Get your mind off things,” she tells him.

The Sunshine Club? Pas. What kind of a club is that? In my day we had real clubs: The French American Athletic and Literary Club. That was a club.

What did you do?

We recited poetry. Racine, we recited. By memory. then we played quoits.

That sound nice. Maybe you give them some ideas like that. Some intelligent people go there. Mr. Wolfe was a famous lawyer once. And Mrs. Rose has lived all over the world, they say. I’ll bet she recites poetry.

Merde, he says, leaning his head against her flank and closing his eyes.

Mierda, she says in her own idiom, and laughs. Que se vayan todos a la mierda!

She dries him off. He has a healthy red sex. Probably did very well in its time. It’s best to have it all in his head at this time of life, though she probably wouldn’t say the same for Wolfie. They are all different, she thinks, marveling. On one of her soap operas, there’s a man who comes back from war and passes for another soldier who was killed. Fools the whole town, even the man’s wife. She disbelieves it. She knows there are no two people enough alike in the whole world to fool anyone. Pigeons were another matter. Not even Guatemalans were close to being as alike as pigeons.

Lets go, she says. She wants to see the party, and the Mayor.

He lets her push him in the chair, across again to The Mill. Poor man. She ought to let him rest, but Eulalie needs a rest too. She finds a place for him next to Adie. He looks very nice, she thinks. She’s combed his hair straight back and straightened out the earpieces of his glasses.

Am I alive? cries Adie, waking from a little nap in her chair. Rosa gravely takes her pulse. Yes, you are Adie. I can feel your heart. You don’t want to die today”

The Mayor hasn’t arrived and Mrs. Rose is filling up the time with music on her harp. It is turning out a nice day. Priscilla is sitting with Megan Blakey--the one sister who is in her right mind--who is telling everyone in a loud voice how, unlike others of her race, she was able to have only one child.

Coitus interruptus, that’s how. If ever any of them read a book that wasn’t prescribed by the Pope they’d have known! Megan hates the priests and the Church. It’s shocking to Rosa.

Where she comes from it’s the men who hate the Church, never the women. And never would a woman wish for only one child, and such a one as Megan’s daughter who has never even come to see her, and who’s out in California smoking pot. Even Laureano, who says he hates priests, called for Father Artemio that time he fell off the roof and broke his head....

Ah, but it’s bad luck to even think such a thought.... She breaks off to remind the Virgin of her petition for Laureano not to fall off the ladder today.

Not today. She feels faint from loss of blood and lack of lunch, and asks Priscilla to watch Alcide a minute while she goes to drink some Cool Aid. She thought they’d be cutting the cake by now. Has to change her pad again. Rebecca has Winnie Blakey in the Ladies, just gets her pants down, when Winnie hauls them up. Help! she cries. Not having any funny business in me panties, thank you very much! Rosa helps, and they settle her. The Mayor’s more than an hour late, Rebecca complains.

Berta Bechtel, clutching her patent leather pocketbook to her breast, sings the Marine Hymn through two times, and Megan tells Henrietta Rose how the Church, she reads, has opened up the case of Galileo to reconsider if possibly they made a little blunder back in 1542.


The Mayor’s come, The Honorable Arthur Clark.

They bring the cake, with ten candles to blow out. Adie doesn’t understand what’s wanted, so Rebecca blows them out. I made a wish you’ll live another bunch of years, she tells Adie.

I’d shoot myself first, says Megan. She doesn’t even know that she’s alive. Another bunch of years indeed! Megan told Rosa once that if she had the used of her legs she’d kill them both. It wasn’t any good to tell her it was a sin.

The Mayor stands to make a speech now. He talks about Adie’s birthday, and the coming birthday of the city, and about the spaceship Columbia going round and round overhead, and how this is the same date in April as the first space flight of Yuri Somebody of Russia in the spaceship Vostok. Rosa is moved by this special day. It is a fine speech, and reminds her of a man from her village who used to speak on special occasions, all in rhyme. He could just stand up on his legs, without thinking about it ahead of time or writing it down, and say it all in rhyme.

Only a half an hour till the van comes and the party’s over. Rebecca starts to clean up the colored paper and felt markers. Berta Bechtel tells Rosa the Easter Bunny’s dead. “When I lived at the Children’s Own, he was alive. He brought me once a little doll with curls and little holster with real pistols. Rebecca lets this go again without bringing in Reality, and praises Bobby Rosier for coloring within the lines. Henrietta tells Ada a story about a ride she had once on an elephant. Ada’s asleep, but Rosa can tell from Wolfie’s intelligent eyes that he’s listening and would like to push some words out of his own.

The Mayor comes around now, shaking hands. Rosa has her turn, and starts to blush, thinking how maybe he can see that she’s illegal. She falls into another of her imaginings of how Wolfie, if he could, would make Laureano marry her for all her caring for him all these years and nursing him after all his accidents. She feels low when she thinks about this problem. Like those Haitians who walk up Moody Street asking passersby to marry them. One young man even asked her once. “Marry me won’t do you no good,” she told him. “Well, then maybe you got a daughter legal?” “I got a daughter and she got a daughter,” she told him. “Not one of them wants to marry you.”

They just smile and stop the next woman they see. No pride left. She has pride, yes. She follows Wolfie to the elevator, settles him. He’s tired and leaves her alone, so she does his wash and cleans up the kitchen, then makes some instant coffee and puts her feet up. Sometimes she pretends she’s living with Wolfie as his adored mistress.


A black and white feline, presents himself as stray at the door, is let in by Albert, who takes it on his lap; and, grinning, strokes him, infuriating Henrietta Rose, who cannot bear his baseless mirths, the self-sufficiency of his pleasures.

Obfuscation! Winnie roars. Objurgation!

Chloroform them if I could, says Megan, pleased at shocking Rebecca.

Lovey Mother, cries Adie, overtired, picking at her cake and ice cream.

Unnatural acts with animals, Henrietta thinks, watching Albert. Berta is to sing once more and she, to play.

Priscilla, meanwhile is in the bathroom wrestling with Winnie’s panties. She has a stiff-armed way of opposing you that’s highly effective Priscilla’s found. Help! she cries, in concert with Berta’s warbling.

…twas there that I firsmet sweemolly Ballone…

Berta Bechtel, whose singing is made much over, hasn’t anybody, never did. Her unknown mother bore here in an insane asylum, and they sent her to some foster parents after, who kept her seven years. She went to school and learned to read, but started acting funny, so they put her in the Fernald School. She got out at eighteen, and there was a man she was to marry. An ice truck ran him over and he died before her eyes. It sent her simple.

But someone must have loved her somewhere, sometime; she’s so good, thinks Rebecca, who has theories. Winnie passes a stool resembling a blackberry. And Henrietta Rose, her rouged old cheeks aflame, is next on the program, performing Liebestraum upon her harp.

Lovey Mother, Adie wails. The Honorable Arthur Clark is studying a place where Albert put his fist through the wallboard.

Chloroform them if I could… They never enjoy these birthday parties, Rebecca thinks. Well Bertha does, and Bobby. And Megan has enjoyed the harp. After the Liebestraum, she requests something by Brahms, which Henrietta is able to provide: one of the intermezzos arranged for harp that’s stored in some part of her memory unaffected by the alcohol damage she’s suffered—the Korsakoff’s that will cause her, by this evening to forget this whole event.

The harp’s an instrument I wouldn’t have chosen myself, Henrietta tells Priscilla when she comes back to the table; but my mother thought it ladylike. Wouldn’t have her daughter playing horns or big bosomed viols, or tucking dirty napkins under her chin and contorting herself to play a fiddle. I think I would have liked the cello.

Oh, I too, Priscilla says. Henrietta notes the grammar of her reply. A well bred girl, just as she thought.


Yes, gently bred, Priscilla is, and liberally educated. She keeps it pretty much a secret. That is since her sophomore year at Mount Holyoke when she dropped out to participate in an occupation of the projected site of the Seabrook Power Plant, and to have Solie. She and Solie’s father lived downtown behind the library, and Solie slept in a bureau drawer under a poster with Mario Savio’s words in large red letters: There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious you’ve got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels to indicate to the people who run it that unless you’re free the machines will be prevented from working at all.

She didn’t actually put her body on the growing reactor. Other people did that. She and David and the others who formed their group that met in the basement of the Congregational Church were the supply team, who brought food and water and clean clothing in to the campers inside the facility. David, who was still hanging in with his studies at Brandeis, was their trainer, for there was great physical strength and skill required for their work. At night they practiced wire cutting and knots: figure eights, butterfly, Prusick, double fisherman’s. And in the day, they went to an abandoned playground behind the Banks Street School to practice ascents: Texas High Kick. Prusick, Tree Stirrup, Low Anchor. Because of Solie, her work was mostly shopping and preparing cartons of supplies in the basement of the church: but she did go over the fence once, using the inch-worm method because she was carrying a heavy load of dried beans and powdered milk. Sitting on the upper ascender with her feet on the lower she inched up at dusk one February night, using the rocking motion she’d practiced at the playground, cutting the barbed wire at the top, and then inching down. She wasn’t seen, there was never any danger until she was over and saw a flashlight from a quarter opposite the area occupied by the campers. So she hid in the bushes for several hours, fearing dogs. She was still nursing Solie then, so her breasts flooded with milk. She’d brought a hand pump and occupied herself emptying the milk, discarding it on the ground and drinking some of it herself, she became so hungry before the campers finally found her and gave her coffee and helped her back over. Eventually David ended up inside, and she went on marches with Solie on her back and sat in jail once for five days while Mrs. Osorio next door watched Solie. Sharing a tent on Boston Common with Ross Pfister, who ran the business end of their enterprise, she ended up pregnant with Frostie. This sobered Ross, it seemed forever, and they married the year the first reactor started going up.

She didn’t see her family at all during this time, for which her mother still hasn’t forgiven her. It wasn’t so much Rowans she was rejecting, for they were a varied lot, including a number of eccentrics and even criminals. But Gideon Rowan had married Rika Madsen, daughter of a Swedish forman at The Watch. And Rika had a stricter notion than any Rowan ever had of what was required of and due a Rowan. Priscilla supposes it was these notions she was rejecting. And it was a time of trying out new notions of what one’s life path might be. David, for example, who came of a long line of lawyers, eventually left Brandeis to apprentice himself at the glass blowing works downtown.

Young and Crippen are talking to the Vice President—the President is still at the White House convalescing from an assassin’s bullet.

Romania has expelled the British envoy…crackdown foreseen this year on acid rain…Two bodies have been found in the Merrimack River.


The cat with the appointment leaps down from Albert’s lap and heads for the door. He belongs to a woman who pushes him around in a supermarket cart on top of a pile of old clothing. Her name is Helen Schade and she has been released from the Metropolitan State Hospital for almost a year and rents a little room with hotplate, share a bath on Myrtle Street.

The feline finds his Mistress on Norumbega Street. She’s on her way to a yard sale out at Piety Corner. Well, jump in, you ingrate, had yourself an adventure, did you? Well jump. I’m not going to stoop and pick you up, don’t think it.

Hey you Cat Lady, the Maggot calls. He’s curled around a bottle of Lambrusco on the river bank. The Professor sits above him with a finger raised.

Cats won’t ask you, Madame, what’s the meaning of it all. No man asks, Madame. Have you heard of Sigmund Freud?

She hurries on. She doesn’t know this Sigmund, and cannot understand how anyone can live like these two with out a little place—with hotplate, share a bath—to call their own.

The Purpose, madame, of this life is, simply speaking, nothing more than the Pleasure Principle. That man ought to be happy, Madame, to be sure, is not included in the plan, dear lady, of Creation.

She pushes her cart over the bridge. They found a body here once.

…happiness only possible as episodic…prolonged, produces nothing more than feeling of mild contentment. Goethe warns us nothing is as hard to bear as a succession of fair days… he calls after her.

It’s disgraceful, thinks Helen Schade. It used to be that you could walk home an evening undisturbed. She doesn’t know what’s happened to this town. She stops to catch her breath, and watches an MDC launch pass below. Will it be a body? She remembers February past, the girl that floated after the thaw, near Roberts. Pregnant, they said she was. The launch is nosing in the weeds near the pilings where Nutting’s Ballroom used to be…Find that professor dead, one of these days, for all his fancy talk. Drowned, or electrocuted, like that one last year that pissed the third rail of the trestle.

…though, hard, that may of course be an exaggeration, The Professor finishes, kicking The Maggot.


Three o’clock. They line up for the minivan at the Sunshine club. Rebecca helps Priscilla with the three fretful sisters. Margo’s come, the evening girl. Priscilla gets them settled in their rooms, and scribbles her notes, while Margo measures out the sixteen ounces of Sparkling Rose that Megan gets on her shift, On her bike then, and hurrying to her other job at the Service Center on Charles Street, where Antonia and Concha and Ana Gil await her in the kitchen.

Jesús Roldán is absent. Antonia says he’s sick today:

Oh, bad, is bad, oh, missus, cold is cold y aun suda. He sweat and is cold at same time. And leg don’t heal. And not eat. I make him all the thing he love.

Not sweets. You must not give him sweets.

Que puedo yo? I say him no, but he is want sometimes.

She sits and drinks the boiled and reboiled Café Bustelos that they’ve made, a guava tart that Antonia’s brought.

Do you test him?

Yes, Missus. It turn pink.

That means sugar. No sweets. He must not have the sweets. What else?

Conchita has the toothache. Concha shows her an upper molar.

You call Dr Vurgopolis. Tell him pain, dolor.

Pain.

Goes on and on?

No, Missus, como un cuchillo…

Like a knife. You tell him. And tell him he promised you can make the payments monthly.

Payments. Monthly.

She asks them the question from the English book. Where are you from? What do you do?

Antonia was born in Aguadillas on Puerto Rico’s western coast. There’s an airforce installation there. What does she do?

A housewife, Missus, que mas va a…?

Concha is from Aguadillas also. She’s a housewife also.

Ana Gil’s from Cochabamba, Ecuador. She doesn’t mention what she does, and no one asks because it’s suspected she entertains men overnight for large sums. Dr. Vurgopolis is among them and all her dental work is free. Let her have it, is Antonia’s opinion. But Concha is bitter.

Antonia’s children come in from school. They are beautiful children, and sit down at another table to do their homework. Antonia forbids them to play in the street. Only the oldest is allowed to play baseball with Los Padres.

What did their fathers do?

‘What did they did, Missus?

No, What did they do. The auxiliary tells you it’s past tense, Priscilla explains. Pero, ‘do’…

Ah, did, do. The English language is difficult to explain. One is the auxiliary, and one Only Antonia nods in understanding.

Antonia’s father was a country teacher. Concha never knew her father. Nor did Ana Gil.

Ana’s mother took in washing from the great houses, washed the sheets in the Rio Cochabamba and stretched them on the banks in the sun to bleach. Ana didn’t want her mother’s life; she got away soon as she could.


A paper cup! You bring me wine in a paper cup! cries Megan.

Adie, overtired, throws her gifts off the tray of her geriatric chair: a little bottle of Jean Nate from Becky; A yellow incense candle from Henrietta Rose, a Snoopy pin from Bobby.

Margo brings the Rose back in a tumbler. She needs to ask if Megan’s had a BM today.

You’re blushing! Megan hoots at her. Every time you ask me that, you blush. A bowel movement. It’s a natural phenomenon. Where’d we be if we didn’t move them? All this whispering about and blushing! Bring it in the open, girlie! Death, decomposition. Natural things!

Margo carries her burning face to Adie’s room and straightens the bureau blindly, noting the letter from the President and Mrs. Reagan, greeting Adie on her hundredth…Why? Why don’t they die. Why don’t they die and let us live? There’s something owed the young, too, after all!

Oh, what is wrong with me? It’s no use blaming them. You got into this by yourself, girlie. They didn’t make you throw away your education.

Why don’t I die? frets Adie.

And Megan’s turned her radio to one of Chopin’s rueful, stumbling mazurkas.

No, it wasn’t them that made you throw away your education. You did it all yourself. She’s in her second year of nursing, Margo; and also in her first trimester.

Lima beans, Priscilla says.

habas de las Indias

They’re gandules, Ana says, in Ecuador.

Alberjas, zanahorias. Peas and carrots.

Banana, banano.

Platano, plantain.

When she was shopping for the Occupiers, she used to buy plátanos at the market, thinking they were bananas. The latinos in the market called her, La señora who buys plátano for bananas,

She studied Spanish then, with Sr. Hugo, who was a Cuban refugee and a spectacularly handsome and elegant man. Castro’s Cuba was not for him. They were good friends, though she disagreed with his politics and he with her scruffy life. To him Spanish was the language of Cervantes, and to her an entry into the neighborhood she and David shared on Spring Street with the Mexicans who had the market and the Colombians who lived below them. She used to watch his hands with fascination and the twitching of his little moustache. Soledad, solitude, he told her, was a beautiful word. She named the baby Soledad, Her mother hated the name, and now Solie hates it too.

Inagotable, another beautiful word she remembers from those days. It meant inexhaustible. Agotar meant to wear away drop by drop. She can still recall the graceful little gestures with which he illustrated the little drops, gotas…

The plátano is longer, says Antonia, and its skin is thicker.


The Kisser lopes home. He’s sated with the liftings up and castings down of the day. He’s cursed, he thinks. He sees a glory no one else…

He thinks of Rosa. She told him, once, her name, one of her gifts. And she allowed his kiss. Twice. The second time she laughed. She laughed, like Sarah, like old Abraham. She laughed and spread wide her body to a blessing.

Rosa. Rosa Mundo. He smelled her earth smell, generative juices. Fecundated not by him. His kiss was chaste. His kisses always chaste as he recalls them. But only she allows, vouchsafes, receives them as he gives them. Laughs.

A Negress, tall, she must be seven feet, roller skates past him, right up the middle of Moody Street, she strides on wheels, and disappears below the rise. A queenly figure, hair piled on her head and bound in an exotic scarf that flows behind. An apparition? No, he catches the look of disapproval on the face of an old Black woman carrying two shopping bags, and disbelief on other faces… Some one whistles.

Back, she comes now, over the summit. The low sun lights her blackness from behind. The largest life that’s ever been seen on Moody Street, and he isn’t the only one to see it. It’s offered to all, because of him. She’s almost upon him now, her waist nipped in above the briefest scarlet skirt. Regally she glides, her left skate lifted, eyes the hardest onyx, past him: Who do you think you’re kidding, Jerk Off! Young and Crippen are turning somersaults in the cabin, and having a light snack. One of the power units is running a low temp; but not a matter for concern.


They’re having a conference on Nelson Marquez at the Service Center. …A system of rewards, says Mr. Jones, the Baptist minister who runs the place. He shows Priscilla a book he’s reading about a man who trained a seal with cookies. Reinforcers, they are called. He wants to make a list of reinforcers for Nelson and he’s numbered on the blackboard, one to ten.

He can go with me for donuts, Carmen, the receptionist suggests. She loves Nelson. That’s good, says Mr. Jones. How many points? Oh, ten, Priscilla says, impatient with all this. She’s had too many failures. And how will he earn points? He’ll learn to read ten syllables, she says. She’s given up on words. Out the window of Mr. Jones’s office she sees Nelson skirting the flank of St. Charles’s Church. Is it a rock he has in his hand? She can’t watch, gets herself a cup of tea.

She started working here back in the days of the nine room house in Weston, acre and a half of grass, two Volvos, husband and three children, dog and cat with pedigrees. One day it turned to ashes. A day like this in early spring, standing at the kitchen sink…

How had it happened?

After the battle seemed to be lost and the first reactor was scheduled to open in a year, Ross quit the project and took his administrative and accounting skills to a Arthur D. Little, where he was totally successful and totally fulfilled by solving such problems as why banks needed so many workers to process checks, and why this processing couldn’t be accomplished by three-thirty each afternoon so the whole place could close and go home with the tellers. Frostie had been born, and she was expecting Benno. Her parents visited and presented them with rugs and dryers and electric knives and all the little appliances that crowded her counter and which she never used, so that she had requested that henceforth her father should give her nothing that had been invented after the stone age. Her only link with the reactor days was Sr. Hugo, who still came to give her classes, and David’s appearance now and then to take Solie to the zoo or the science museum. By then David was making and selling glass jewelry in Haymarket and teaching himself classical guitar while working as a security guard at night. Solie firmly held to Ross as being her father and liked to consider David as just a family friend. She convinced David to take Frostie along on the outings, and soon Frostie and David were like father and son.

So, they were all happy except for her, and she ought to have been happy in that beautiful neighborhood with its large groomed lots and brand new houses with four bedrooms and two and a half baths and family rooms as big as their apartment on Spring Street used to be. She walked around it pushing Benno in his stroller and thought it a terribly deprived environment. There was nothing at all to see. No children, no playgrounds, no stores, no animals—well there was a rabbit in a cage they used to visit, but a servant came out to ask them not to come as they were setting off some kind of security device.

She took to going into town and taking them all on the train one stop down the line to Waltham Common, where they watched the buses and the trains pull in and out, the demonstrators, and the madmen standing on the benches and delivering orations, the people from the halfway houses walking to the store; and eventually she made her way back to Spring Street and Mrs. Osorio.

But it wasn’t enough. She didn’t belong any longer.

And then the first reactor opened. And then there was Three Mile Island. That was the time of her great fight with Ross:

You never cared!

You never really foresaw what could happen to the ocean. To the people downwind… It was all just one of your problems, like making it so banks can close earlier. In a way, it was, he admitted.

Even David, with his hopes of a concert at Carnegie Hall, didn’t seem to care. David was becoming crazy. She went to hear him play at the deCordova Museum. He wasn’t happy with his performance and tossed his guitar off a precipice. She couldn’t believe it, looking down into a brush filled gully and seeing his best guitar at the bottom of a gully. Later he admitted it was only his second best guitar.

And so it turned to ashes.


It turned to ashes and that day at the kitchen sink, she picked up one of the Sheffield knives her father had supplied in place of the electric one—they weren’t quite stone age, but closer than electric; and she slashed across her wrist, again, again, until Solie came in and started screaming, and she bound herself up and tried to hide what she had done, but Solie told Ross.

But why? Why? they asked her: husband, father, psychiatrist. Why? But she couldn’t say.

She sat at McLean for a month enduring all this questioning, but only, one night alone in the dormitory at Metropolitan State—they sent her there because she was uncooperative and didn’t appreciate all the amenities and freedoms of McLean Hospital—did she answer the question for herself. There, in those spartan surroundings, following the Haitian attendants with their dangling keys, along corridors with their great concrete walls and deep barred windows: to the baths, to the clinics, to the smoking lounge with its jigsaw puzzles, the great doors clanking behind and the great furnaces spewing heat that went right out the windows you had to open or suffocate; one night she got up from her bed in the dormitory where she slept with fifty other women and went to the window and looked out on deep snow that had fallen the day before and began to know what it was she needed.

She needed to be alone, and she needed to come back here.

And so she cast it off, that life she had lived with Ross. All of it except for the children,

She moved back to Spring Street. On Spring Street was something she needed. And though there were all kinds of difficulties with money, with schools, with Ross, who actually wept about her leaving, out of it she rose, somehow, altered and alive. Of course rents had gone up, because of all the new electronics firms on Route l28, and the apartment to be too expensive; but during that year, she became friendly again with the Mexicans and Colombians and Mrs. Osorio told her about Mr. Jones and his work, and she came here to the Community Service Center and asked for a child to tutor, and they gave her Nelson. Nelson Adrian Marquez, who told her right away that he couldn’t read, and then fell, three times in succession, out of his chair.

And it was true enough, she found. He could not read a single word, though nearly eleven years old and in fourth grade. How did he get there? And now, today, he still can’t read, in spite of all her efforts…well maybe three words…


She walks down to the tutoring room, past the playroom filled with broken toys, the two offices: one for the Dots—Savard and Arsenault (no relation to Alcide) the other for Mr. Jones. The tutoring rooms are bare with blackened walls. As if a fire burned throughout these buildings. Does it purify, this smoldering?

Nelson is in trouble again. He’s been suspended from school, has thrown a rock through a window of St. Charles. And Mr. Jones has just handed her the following citation:


…YEAR OF OUR LORD NINETEEN HUNDRED EIGHTY ONE, AFORESAID NELSON MARQUEZ, RESIDENT OF ONE HUNDRED BRANCH STREET, DID REMOVE FROM THE POSSESSION OF ONE AMANDA AUCOIN THE SUM OF SIXTY CENTS, A BAG OF FRITOS AND A PLASTIC PIG…

Carmen, at reception, has gone out to get him, brings him in, the rock is still in his hand, thank God.

He puts the rock on the table for her to admire. It has a band of white running through black. Quite strange. I was afraid you might throw it, she says.

I still might, he says.

Placing her hand on his chair so he won’t tip it, she introduces him again to the long sounds of vowels and how the silent ‘e’, but he’s not having any today, needs a cigarette. And so they sit in clouds of smoke and sound out the syllables he already knows. He’s twelve years old, she thinks, almost thirteen. There isn’t any time before he needs to get a job, to drive a car…

Pat, he reads.

No, Tap.

Sometimes he sees the letters backwards, sometimes the whole syllable. She doesn’t know enough, these disabilities…and breaking out in pimples, too. His penis gets emocionado he tells her, every time Carmen comes into the room. No, she doesn’t know enough.

Pot, reads Nelson. No, it’s top. He pushes the book away and spills the contents of her pocketbook. Hey, what’s this?

A charge card.

This?

A picture of my mother.

He removes the faded photo that’s been under a pile of appointment cards. Her mother, who on reaching the age of fifty, and feeling her body failing her, moved out of it. It had come to Priscilla one autumn day as she watched her, posing on the lawn for Harry’s camera, this idea that Rika’d vacated her body, found a new enclosure for her soul in the house she had Harry building for her

There it is behind her, almost complete. A house is almost immortal when you compare it to a body. The photo was from a roll of film begun at Luna Lake, where she and her husband had gone to accompany her parents. Harry thought he’d have her nightly on the lumpy double bed in the rustic cabin. He’d another think coming, man of his age, Rika said. She’s smiling in the photo, thinking how she’ll do the bath in a celery shade…strain of her insomnia about the eyes. Priscilla’s inheritance, kept at bay by bicycles, by mixing up her life with people like Megan and Antonia, and Nelson. Hey! he shouts. Dyslexia. She’s read a couple books. It’s not related, generally to intelligence. His black eyes snap at her. He speaks two languages. There’s speculation that it might be caused by birth anoxia; this disputed by…

Hey!

…a claim that it’s inherited from the father, linked to left-handedness…caused by a confusion of the two hemispheres. He’s right-handed in any case. In any case, untreated, leads to antisocial…other pathology…

Hey! His face is in hers. What’s the matter with you?

Thinking, thinking. She puts the pictures, cards away…one of them’s gone into his pocket…

You don’t need it.

Give it! she shouts. He hands it to her. He was only fooling.

Listen, I’ll read to you awhile.

OK. He sits still a minute while she reads him from a social studies text. General Knowledge, she calls this part of the lesson. He hasn’t any idea what date it is, what time it is, where in the world he is… Someone should have been reading to him all these years, told him things. She shows him a map. See, here’s Boston; here’s the Charles River… But he’s across the room. Your bike’s bein’ stole. She’s fallen for this one too many times to move. No, come and see the map. He won’t.

Untreated leads to antisocial…

It’s really bein’ stole this time.

She keeps her seat. Look here, I’ll show you Puerto Rico.

That little spot? He looks. His father lives there. Not a bad man, really, says doña Ramona, his mother; but he drinks.

It’s an island, yes; and this is the Atlantic ocean.

CONTINUED IN NEXT ISSUE