Delicate Edible Birds Read online

  Then there were six ghosts. The two that were sisters were punished, locked in a room. The air was bad, and one died, the other almost did. And one of the remaining ghosts found the dead girl and her half-dead sister. She touched the blue cheeks of the dead girl, and she felt only cold. Something old rose in her, some small courage. She stole one moment with the phone, spoke words, clumsy, ugly, perhaps, but those words breathed life back into the girls, brought liberty in the form of flashing red and blue lights.

  IN THE END, AFTER THE LONG TRIAL, the men who’d imprisoned them were imprisoned themselves. The girls went to San Francisco, where they chose to stay, where, slowly, they went out into the streets. They saw the green of the water, the gold of the sky, and they learned what it meant to be girls again. I imagine them there, together, walking in some garden, their hair gleaming under the sun. I imagine them happy.

  And it is a happy ending, perhaps, in the way that myths and fairy tales have happy endings; only if one forgets the bloody, dark middles, the fifty dismembered girls in the vat, the parents who sent their children into the woods with only a crust of bread. I like to think it’s a happy ending, though it is the middle that haunts me.

  L. DeBard and Aliette

  HE IS AT FIRST A DISTANT WAVE, THE WAKEWEDGE of a loon as it surfaces. The day is cold and gray as a stone. In the mid-distance the swimmer splits into parts, smoothly angled arms and a matte black head. Twenty feet from the dock he dips below the water and comes up a moment later at the ladder, blowing like a whale.

  She sees him step onto the dock: the pronounced ribs heaving, the puckered nipples, the moustache limp with seawater. She feels herself flush, and, trembling, smiles.

  It is March 1918, and hundreds of dead jellyfish litter the beach. The morning newspapers include a story, buried under the accounts of battles at the Western Front, about a mysterious illness striking down hale soldiers in Kansas.

  The swimmer lifts his towel to gain time, wondering about the strange, expectant trio that watches him. The man in the clump is fat and bald, his chin deeply lined from mouth to jowl. His shave is close, his clothes expensive. A brunette stands beside him, the wind chucking her silk collar under her chin: the fat man’s young wife, the swimmer thinks, mistakenly.

  Before them sits a girl in a wheelchair. The swimmer’s glance brushes over her and veers away when he sees her wizened child’s face, the diluted blonde of her hair, her eyes sunken in the sickly white complexion. A nothing, he thinks. That he looks past her is not his fault. He doesn’t know. And so, instead of the lightning strike and fluttering heart that should attend the moment of their meeting, the swimmer feels only the cold whip of the wind and the shame of his old suit, holey and stretched out, worn on the dark days when he needs nostalgia and old glory to bring him to the water.

  THE SWIMMER IS A FAMOUS MAN. He is an Olympian: gold medalist in the 1908 London Olympics in the 100-meter freestyle, anchor on the 4×200 relay. Triple gold in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics: 100-meter freestyle, 100-meter backstroke, anchor again on the 4×200. He was on the American Swim Association’s champion water polo team from 1898 through 1911. He is, quite simply, The World’s Best Swimmer.

  His name is L. DeBard, though this was not always his name. He was Lodovico DeBartolo, but was taken from Rome at the age of six and transplanted to New York, where the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Chinese couldn’t pronounce Lodovico. He reworked his last name when he discovered in himself literary agility and a love of Shakespeare.

  He is a swimmer, but he is other things, too. A forty-three-year-old with a mighty set of pectorals, one chipped front tooth, and a rakish smile; a rumored Bolshevik; a poet, filler of notebooks, absinthe-drinker, cavorter of the literary type. He knows a number of whores by name, though in the wider world he is thought to be a bit queer, his friendships a mite too close with the city’s more effeminate novelists and poets. He has been alone in the company of Tad Perkins, C.T. Dane, Arnold Effingham. Something is suspect about a man-poet, anyway, and many of his critics ask one another, pursing their lips lewdly, why he is not in France, fighting for the Allies. The reason is that his flat feet make him unfit for battle.

  And today, he is one last thing: starving. Poets and swimmers are the last to be fed in these final few months of the Great War.

  The fat man steps forward. “L. DeBard?” he says. L. wraps the towel under the straps of his suit. “Yes,” he says, at last.

  The girl in the wheelchair speaks. “We have a proposition for you,” she says. Her voice reminds the swimmer of river rock: gravelly, smooth.

  THE GIRL’S NAME IS ALIETTE HUBER. She is sixteen, and she is a schoolgirl, or was before her illness. She won her school’s honors for French, Composition, Rhetoric, and Recitation for three years in a row. She can read a poem once and recite it perfectly from memory years later. Before the polio, she was a fine horsewoman, a beautiful archer, the lightest dancer of any of the girls at the children’s balls society had delighted in staging in the heady days before the war. Her mother died when she was three, and her father is distantly doting.

  She knows L. from his book of poetry, which she read when she was recuperating from her illness. She feels she knows him so intimately that now, freezing on the dock, she is startled and near tears: she has just realized that, to him, she is a stranger.

  AND SO, ALIETTE DOES SOMETHING DRASTIC: she unveils her legs. They are small, wrinkled sticks, nearly useless. She wears a Scottish wool blanket over her lap, sinfully thick. L. thinks of his thin sheet and the dirty greatcoat he sleeps under, and envies her the blanket. Her skirt is short and her stockings silk. L. doesn’t gasp when he sees her legs, her kneecaps like dinner rolls skewered with willow switches. He just looks up at Aliette’s face, and suddenly sees that her lips are set in a perfect heart, purple with cold.

  After that, the swim lessons are easily arranged. When they leave—the brunette pushing the wheelchair over the boards of the docks, her trim hips swishing—their departure thrums in L.’s heels. The wind picks up even more and the waves make impatient sounds on the dock. L. dresses. His last nickel rolls from the pocket of his jacket as he slides it over his yellowed shirt. The coin flashes in the water and glints, falling.

  ALIETTE LIES IN HER WHITE starched sheets in her bedroom on Park Avenue, and listens to the Red Cross trucks grinding gears in the street below. She puts the thin book of poetry under the sheets when she hears footsteps coming down the hall to her door. But the book slides from her stomach and between her almost useless legs, and she gasps with sudden pleasure.

  Her nurse, the brunette from the dock, enters with a glass of buttermilk. Rosalind is only a few years older than Aliette, but looks as hearty and innocent as Little Bo Peep, corn-fed, pink with indolence. Aliette tries not to hate her as she stands there, cross-armed, until Aliette drains the glass. The nurse’s lipstick has smeared slightly beyond the boundaries of her lips. From the front hall, Mr. Huber’s trilling whistle resounds, then the butler says, “Good afternoon, sir,” and the door closes, and Aliette’s father returns to Wall Street. The girl hands the glass back to Rosalind, who smiles a bit too hard.

  “Do you need a trip to the water closet, Miss?” the nurse asks.

  Aliette tells her no, she is reading, and that would be all. When the nurse’s footsteps have faded, the girl retrieves the book of poetry from under the covers where it had nestled so pleasingly. Ambivalence, the title says. By L. DeBard.

  While L. and Aliette wait to begin their first lesson the next day, the mysterious illness is creeping from the sleepy Spanish tourist town of San Sebastián. It will make its way into the farthest corners of the realm, until even King Alfonso XIII will lie suffering in his royal bed. French, English, and American troops scattered in France are just now becoming deathly ill, and the disease will skulk with them to England. Even King George V will be afflicted.

  In New York, they know nothing of this. L. eats his last can of potted meat. Aliette picks the raisins from her scones and tri
es to read fortunes in the dregs of her teacup.

  THEY WILL USE THE NATATORIUM at the Amsterdam Hotel for the lessons. It is a lovely pool of green tile, gold-leaf tendrils growing down the sides and a bold heliotrope of yellow tile covering the bottom. The walls and ceiling are sky blue. They cannot use it during the guest hours and must swim either in the early morning or at night.

  Both, insists L., hating to take so much money from Mr. Huber for so little work. He comes early for the first lesson, marveling at the beautiful warmth and crystal water. He leaps from the sauna to the pool, laughing to himself. His moustache wilts in the heat.

  When Aliette comes in, steaming from the showers, her hair in a black cloth cap with a strap under the chin, L. lifts her from her chair and carries her into the water. Rosalind sits in the corner by the potted palm, takes out her knitting, and falls asleep.

  IN THE BEGINNING, THEY DON’T SPEAK. He asks her to kick as he holds her in the water. She tries, making one tiny splash, then another. Around the shallow end they go, three, four times. Rosalind’s gentle snores echo in the room. At last, Aliette slides one thin arm around L.’s neck. “Stop,” she says, panting with pain.

  He brings her to the steps and sets her there. He stands before her in the waist-deep water, trying not to look at her.

  “What is wrong with Rosalind?” he says. “Why is she sleeping?”

  “Nothing is wrong,” says Aliette. “Poor thing has been up all night.”

  “I trust that she was not caring for you? I assumed you were healthy,” L. says.

  Aliette hesitates and looks down. “She was caring for me, yes—and others,” she says. Her face is tight and forbidding. But she then looks at him with one cocked eyebrow and whispers, “L., I must admit that I like your other suit better.”

  He is wearing a new indigo bathing costume with suspenders, and he looks down at himself, then at her, puzzled. His new suit cost him a week’s wages. “Why is that?” he asks.

  She glances at the sleeping nurse, then touches him where a muscle bulges over one hip. “I liked the hole here,” she says. Then her hand is under the water where it looms, suddenly immense. She touches his thigh. “And here,” she says. Her fingertip lingers, then falls away.

  When he has steadied himself to look at her face, she is smiling innocently. She does not, however, look like a little girl anymore.

  “They were only small holes,” he says. “I am surprised you noticed.”

  “I notice everything,” she says. But her face grows a little frightened; her eyes slide toward Rosalind, and she gives a great roar as if he’d told a stunner of a joke. This awakens the nurse, who resumes her knitting, blinking and looking sternly at the pair. “Let’s swim,” cries Aliette, and claps both of her hands on the water like a child.

  DURING THE LATE LESSON THAT NIGHT, as Rosalind again succumbs to the heat and damp of the room, Aliette watches with amusement as L. tries to hide his chipped tooth from her by turning his face. He has waxed his moustache mightily, and the musky fragrance of the wax fills her head and makes it swim. She laughs, her face in the water. He thinks she is only blowing bubbles.

  BY THE END OF THE FIRST WEEK, Aliette has gained ten pounds. When she is not swimming, she is forcing herself to eat cheese and bread with butter, even when she is not hungry. She loosens her corset, then throws it away. At night, though exhausted from swimming, she climbs out of bed and tries to stand. She succeeds for one minute one night, and five minutes the next. She has a tremendous tolerance for pain. At the end of the week, she can stand for thirty minutes and take two steps before falling. When she does fall, it is into bed, and she sleeps immediately, L.’s poetry beating around in her brain like so many trapped sparrows.

  ALL THAT WEEK, L. PACES. On the cloudy Friday, he kicks the notebooks full of weightless little words, and they skitter across his floor. He decides that he must quit, tell that Wall Street Huber that he has another obligation and can no longer teach Aliette to swim. Blast her pathetic little legs to hell, he thinks. L. stands at his window and looks down into the dark street, where urchins pick through boxes of rotting vegetables discarded from the greengrocer’s downstairs. A leaf of cabbage blows free in the wind and attaches itself to the brick wall opposite L.’s window, where it flutters like a small green pennant.

  “Porca madonna,” he says. Then, as if correcting himself, he says, in English, “Pig Madonna.” It doesn’t sound right, and in the wake of its dissonance he finds that he is completely unable to walk to Park Avenue and quit.

  Late that evening he sits by the pool. He touches the place on his thigh where Aliette’s finger had touched him a week earlier. He does not look up until he hears a throat clearing, then startles and finds himself staring up into Mr. Huber’s face, the fat man’s hand on his daughter’s capped head.

  “Papa is going to chaperone us the nights that Rosalind is off,” Aliette says, her eyes bright with merriment. L. tries to smile, then stands, extending his hand for a shake. But her father doesn’t shake his hand, just nods and rolls the cuffs of his pants over his calves. He takes off his shoes and socks and sticks his legs, white and hairy, into the warm water. “Go on,” he says, “don’t let me get in the way of your lesson.” He takes a newspaper from his pocket and watches over the headlines as L. carries Aliette into the shallow end.

  L. is teaching her the frog kick, and she holds on to the gutter as he bends both of her knees and helps them swing out and back. When her father’s attention is fixed on an article, Aliette takes L.’s hand and slides it up and over her small breast. By the time her father has read to the bottom of the page, L. has removed his hand to her neck, and he is trembling.

  AS ROSALIND SLEEPS UNDER THE PALM the next morning, Aliette tells L. that her father didn’t say one word to her in the cab home. But when they were coming up in the elevator, he asked her if something wasn’t a little funny about L., something a little girlish. And she laughed, and related to her father the gossip about her swim coach’s bosom friends.

  “Very subtly, of course,” she says. “I am not supposed to know of those things.”

  She tells L. that later, as she was drinking her last glass of buttermilk before bed, she left out his book, open to a poem titled, “And into the Fields the Sweet Boys Go.”

  L. interrupts her, face dark. “That poem is about innocence; my Lord, I’m not—”

  She puts a hand on his mouth. “Let me finish,” she says.

  He shuts his mouth, but his face is set angrily. She continues that she heard her father and Rosalind talking about L. in the morning, and her father called him “that nance.”

  L. is so offended he drops Aliette unceremoniously into the water. She swims, though, and reaches the wall in three strong strokes, her legs dragging behind her.

  She says, grinning, “You didn’t know I was a nixie, did you?”

  “No,” he says, darkly. “I am amazed. And for your information, I am not a—”

  “L.,” says Aliette, sighing. “I know. But you are a fool.” Then, very deliberately, she says, “The nances of the world have many uses, my dear coach.”

  When he says nothing, trying to understand, she droops. “I’m tired,” she says. “This lesson is over.” She calls for Rosalind and will not look at L. as the nurse wheels her away.

  Only later does he realize she has read his book. He cannot look at her that evening, he is so flattered and fearful of her opinion.

  SUNDAY, HIS DAY OFF, L. goes to Little Italy for supper with his family. His mother holds him to her wren’s chest; his father touches his new linen suit with admiration. In Rome, Amadeo was a tailor; here he is a hearse driver. He mutters, “Beautiful, beautiful,” and nods at his son, fingering the lapels, checking the seams. L.’s older sister is blind and cannot remark upon the visible change in him.

  But in the trolley home, his stomach filled with saltimbocca, L. thinks of his sister when she touched his face in farewell. “You have met a girl,” she whispered. Lucrezia has never
seen her own face, and cannot know its expressions—how, at that moment, her smile was an explosion.

  IN LATE APRIL, THE NEWSPAPERS are full of news of a strange illness. The journalists try to blunt their alarm by exoticizing it, naming it Spanish influenza, La Grippe. In Switzerland, it is called La Coquette, as if it were a courtesan. In Ceylon it’s the Bombay Fever, and in Britain the Flanders Grippe. The Germans, whom the Allies blame for this disease, call it Blitz-katarrh. The disease is as deadly as that name sounds.

  Americans do not pay attention. They watch Charlie Chaplin and laugh until they cry. They read the sports pages and make bets on when the war will be over. And if a few healthy soldiers suddenly fall ill and die, the Americans blame it on exposure to tear gas.

  L. HAS GONE TOMCATTING with his writer friends only twice by the time spring rolls into summer. The second time, he has had only one martini when he pushes a very familiar redhead from his lap so roughly that she hits her head on the table and bursts into tears. C. T. Dane comforts her. When Dane is leaving, indignant redhead on his arm, he raises an eyebrow and frowns at the steadily drinking L.

  From that night on, his friends talk about him. “What’s eating old fishface L.?” Tad Perkins will ask anyone who will listen.

  Finally, someone says, “He’s writing a novel. It’s like having a mistress. Once he’s through with her, leaves her on the floor, weeping for more, he’ll be back.”

  The friends laugh at this. They raise their glasses. “To the mistress,” they cry.