Delicate Edible Birds Read online

  THEY HAVE A MONTH TOGETHER in that tiny flat. L.’s mother bustles and looks after them, feeding them elaborate meals and rocking the baby while L. reads Aliette his new poems.

  “You are growing into the best poet in America,” she says.

  “Growing?” he jokes. “I thought I already was.”

  “No,” she says. “But now you might be.” And she lies back, letting the words from his poems sift into her memory. She looks a little ill, and doesn’t complain, but L. can see that something is not right with her. He worries. At night, he hears a soft rasp as Aliette grinds her teeth in pain.

  SOON, THE DETECTIVES RETURN. L.’s mother does not let them in this time, but their voices grow loud in the hallway. They shout and rage at her. At last they leave. L’s mother is shaky and collapses into a chair, puts a cloth over her face, and weeps into it, unable to look at the couple for fear.

  L. looks at Aliette. “I am taking you back,” he says. “I’ll keep Compass with my mother.”

  Aliette says, very quietly, “No.”

  “Yes,” L. says. He tells her that he knows she is ill and her father can afford physicians that he cannot. That if she returns without Compass, her reputation will not be tarnished, and no one will know about her pregnancy. Later, when they marry, they can adopt him. Their argument is quiet, but goes on for many hours, until Aliette finally succumbs to her illness and pain and his arguments. She has been afraid that she is growing worse: she feels herself weakening, and allows herself to be convinced about something that, if she were stronger and less frightened, she never would have countenanced.

  At last, she clutches Compass to her chest and smells her fill of him. Weeping, feverish, she agrees to go.

  L. STOPS THE CAB half a block from Aliette’s father’s house and leans close to her. Their kiss is long and hungry. If they knew how often they would remember it, for how many years it would be their dearest memory, this kiss would last for hours. But it ends, and she climbs out, wincing with pain, and he watches her walk away, so lovely, the feather of her hat bouncing.

  WHEN ALIETTE WALKS BACK into the house, her father is sitting in the parlor, head buried in his hands. When he looks up, it is clear that he does not recognize her. She looks at the mirror above the mantel and sees herself: pale and skinny again, hair dun-colored, her face above her fur looking a decade older than her age. When she looks back, Rosalind is in the doorway, and the tray she is holding is chattering. Her face is pinched with unhappiness, while a broad, bright smile spreads across her father’s.

  After the doctor visits Aliette, she is forced into bed rest. She sleeps while, across town, L. holds Compass and traces Aliette in his son’s small face.

  ONLY YEARS LATER CAN ALIETTE TRACE the pieces of her loss in the evidence scattered through her fever. There is her father’s expression when he looks at her as she first walks in, a mixture of hurt and relief. How the doctor asks prodding questions about her delicate parts until she admits to the pain, and allows him to examine her. How her father’s expression changes after conferring with the doctor, how he looks at her angrily. And a year later, she will hear him shouting at Rosalind one night when drunk. “Nobody, nobody abandons a Huber,” he’ll say. “We were right to do what we did.”

  Two nights after L. has returned Aliette to her father’s house he is feeling a little restless, anxious to hear of Aliette’s health. He decides to take a walk in the wintry streets, to kick through the snow and work off his anxiety. He leaves Compass in his mother’s lap, and hurries down the dank stairwell and into the night.

  He does not see the shadows detaching from the alleyway, or how they steal close to him. He feels the sudden grip on his arms, then the handkerchief with the sour stink of chloroform pressed over his nose and mouth. The gas lamps flicker and darken, the street becomes wobbly, and a snowdrift catches him as he falls.

  MUCH LATER, L. CAN SEE A GOLDEN LIGHT growing between his lids. His head is bound with pain. His eyes open slightly. He is on the hard wooden floor of what appears to be an office, a vast mahogany-paneled room, bookshelves, paintings of ships. His fingertips lie on what feels like rubber.

  Two unfamiliar faces loom over him. “He’s waking up,” one says. The men back away, and in their place stands Mr. Huber, transformed and dangerous with rage. Beside him is Rosalind’s brunette head, in her mask, eyes filling with tears. Suddenly L. feels cold. He is naked, he realizes, a window is open, and snow is pouring in and powdering the rug.

  “You deserve this, and more,” says Mr. Huber. L.’s lips move, but he can’t say anything. He closes his eyes.

  “Rosalind,” says the fat man. “Give it to me.”

  When L. looks again, Rosalind’s eyebrows have come together above her mask in a frown. But she hands Mr. Huber what he wants, something that appears to be a blade, glinting. Aliette’s father stoops closer. Through his numbness, L. can feel hands grasping his legs roughly and pulling them apart.

  “Bastard,” Aliette’s father breathes in his face. L. has only a moment to smell his sour breath before he goes out of L.’s line of vision.

  He hears a thunk. Then such pain, and so impossible, that L. blanks out again.

  TIME RUNS FLUIDLY THROUGH THE REST: the discovery of the fiercely bleeding L. in the snowbank by a police officer on patrol. The rescue and delivery to the hospital, the doctors unveiling his wound, vomiting, the cauterizing of the hole between his legs. And, at last, the fever that makes him delirious for months.

  His literary friends come to visit him, and out of kindness, they do not bring the newspapers lurid with the story of his gelding. When L. seems unlikely to survive, W. Sebald Shandling visits L.’s mother. He finds her holding Compass. The baby is chewing on his father’s most recent poems. In an act of uncharacteristic selflessness, Shandling persuades a publisher to take the collection, to provide something for the baby in case his father dies. And L. rages while the world shifts into treaties and recovery, while President Wilson is struck by influenza but recovers in time to sign at Versailles.

  Just when his fever begins to dissipate, L. catches one of the last strands of the flu.

  For three days, the only thing he can hear is the gurgle of water in his lungs. He doesn’t think he’ll live. When the worst is over and he can sit up again, a young doctor whose face is prematurely lined comes to see him. He looks as if he might begin to cry.

  “Mr. DeBard,” he says. “I am afraid that your lungs are so damaged you will never swim again. They’re so bad, you won’t be able to walk far unaided. You will wheeze for life.” Then he gives a curious half sob, and says, “I followed your swimming, sir. When I was a boy, I admired you greatly.”

  L. looks at the doctor for some time before closing his eyes and sighing.

  “Frankly, Doctor,” he says, at last. “Of all the many things I do extraordinarily well, it is not the loss of swimming that upsets me.”

  The doctor frowns and is about to say something. Then, remembering, he flees.

  BY THE SUMMER, L. IS STILL RECOVERING, walking about weakly. His mother leaves Compass with a neighbor when she visits, but brings a photograph of the boy that L. stares at for hours and keeps in the breast pocket of his pajamas when he sleeps.

  IN ALL THE TIME L. is in the hospital, Aliette does not come to see him. She is paying dearly for her transgressions, supervised day and night, only allowed to go to the pool with her female coach. She is not allowed to see Compass, though two or three times she tries to slip out at night, only to be collared each time by her coach or her father. She is not allowed to keep the baby blanket she had taken with her, and is not allowed to send money for his care. Rosalind and another nurse follow her everywhere, even to the bathroom. She spends her rage in the water, holding her breath until she almost drowns.

  L. COMES HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL on the day his new book sells out in one hour. Though his enemies claim it is the shock of his story, the scandalous tale, they cannot explain why it continues to sell after the story is for
gotten. Compass cries when he sees this strange man, but slowly grows used to him, and in a fortnight, tugs on L.’s reinstated moustache and touches his cheek in wonder.

  AT LAST, AFTER ITS THIRD TIME around the globe, the pandemic burns itself out. By the end, whole villages have been wiped clean from history; in a single year, more Americans have died from it than from all of the battles of the Great War. In one small part of its aftermath, the plague will be linked to an encephalitic state in which patients can walk, answer questions, and be aware of their surroundings, but with such vagueness that they are described as somnambulists, or sleeping volcanoes.

  L. AND ALIETTE NEVER MEET AGAIN. She will hold her breath every time she sees a man walking a little boy down the street, and go home so agitated she will be unable to speak. She will begin letters that she will never send, and with every new one she tears into confetti, she will hope fervently that L. and Compass understand.

  But at first L. doesn’t understand. Her absence is an ache. He knows that if they were to meet, they wouldn’t be able to look at each other, hot with shame and loss, but he doesn’t understand how Aliette could give up her own son; it seems a horror. Then Compass begins to speak and to develop his own little grave personality, and on the boy’s fifth birthday, as they sit on the glowing grass of the park and eat cake together, L. looks at his son, who is kicking his legs at the sky, and in the fullness of the boy’s presence and his delicious joy, L. finally knows what Aliette has done. She has released Com pass to him, an exculpatory gesture, a self-sundering. He imagines her in the city somewhere, staring out the window on her son’s birthday, and knows she is dreaming of the child.

  By then, though, no other life is imaginable, and Compass will never tell L. he missed having a mother, for the older he becomes, the more his father will depend upon him. And L. will still be drenched with sweat every time he smells lilacs or sees a tiny blonde from afar.

  L. READS ABOUT ALIETTE’S FEW, small rebellions in the newspapers. How she is arrested for nude bathing at Manhattan Beach after removing her stockings before swimming, and how through this act and its subsequent uproar, women are liberated from having to wear stockings when they swim. He reads of how she goes, with an escort of four strong matrons, to bombed-out Antwerp for the 1920 Olympics, and wins two gold medals in women’s swimming, breaking world records in that estuary, more mud than water. He saves the papers for Compass, for when he is older. And L. is there on the opening night of her water performance in the Royal Theatre, but leaves when he sees the falseness of the smile pasted on her face. When he wakes up the next morning, his heart still hurts.

  In the papers he notices her one last rebellion: she is arrested for swimming at night in the pond in Central Park. But the mayor intervenes and from this incident comes New York’s first public swimming pool. She sinks quietly back into her life, coaches a few women swimmers, and has no more children, as far as he can tell. He hopes, from his spacious apartment on the East Side as he watches Compass grow, that she is happy.

  ALIETTE WATCHES HIM, TOO. She follows him as he grows famous, and reads every one of his new books. She leaves them strewn conspicuously in her home on nights when she holds soirées; her high-society guests, most of whom have never read a line of poetry, cite him in interviews as their favorite poet. She reads the profiles of him in the papers and watches Compass grow and become his father’s amanuensis, his nurse, his friend. Compass goes to Harvard when his father is offered a lectureship there, and lives with him during his collegiate years. Compass graduates with a degree in English, and holds three school records on the pool’s walls. Later, when the interviewers can induce the boy to speak, he smiles his serious smile, and says, “I can’t imagine a better life than that I live with my father.” Aliette snips this quote and carries it in a locket that hangs from her neck.

  One night she turns on the radio and hears L.’s dear voice reciting some of his oldest poems, the ones from Ambivalence. He gasps slightly with his troubled lungs as he reads the lines, “I have dreamed a dream of repentance / I have known the world eternal.” She listens, rapt, and when she switches off the radio, her face is wet.

  SHE SEES HIM ONCE, in all this time. They are both old, and he has published his twelfth book of poems. He stands on a stage, behind a lectern. His hair is white, and he is stooped. He reads deliberately and well, stopping between each poem to catch his breath.

  He does not notice the plump woman in the gray cloche and chinchilla coat in the back of the auditorium. He doesn’t see how she mouths with him each word he reads, how her face is bright with joy. Later, after he has shaken the hands of his admirers and is alone with Compass in the theater, she is long gone, in bed with a hot-water bottle. But though she is nowhere around, he has felt all evening the change her very presence makes in the air.

  He walks on the arm of his handsome son into the cool New York street glistening with rain. Out on the sidewalk, he tells Compass to halt. L. lifts his face to the drizzle and closes his eyes, breathing deeply once, twice. When he brings his face back down, he is grinning.

  Then he tells his son, “This feels like that breath you take after coming up from a long swim underwater. The most gorgeous feeling, that sip of air you feared you’d never have again.” He looks at Compass, and touches his cheek, gently. “Surfacing,” he says.

  Majorette

  THE NEW HOUSE, AND ALL ITS NEW FURNISHINGS.

  The Sears rugs, the pasteboard sideboard, the pine table made by the groom, who, just then, had his arms full of his bride. She, only sixteen, in an ivory crepe de chine suit, baby-faced, pincurled, a rosebud of a painted mouth. Hershey Queen, 1951.

  Also, this: a bundle in the oven, the baby yet invisible but still extremely present.

  When the bride was deposited on the floor of the twilit hall, she threw her white roses into the air, smiled her victory smile, gave a little dance in the dining room, and draped her newlywed body over the sofa. The groom smiled glumly, emitting fumes of the whiskey bought all night by the stepdad of the bride, Joe Helmuth, breeder of basset hounds and bearer of a menacing handlebar moustache. The girl’s mother gone these past two years, it had been up to Joe to come into the surveyor’s office one day and stand over the not-yet-groom’s desk. And all he had to do was pick up the compass on the desk, trace a few interlocked circles in the blotter, and the boy gulped and looked up, comprehending. When Joe Helmuth left, tipping his hat at the boss, the compass stood embedded through the cardboard, into the wood, kicking out the pencil leg like a Rockette.

  Hence the Saturday festivities in the church with a few frantic sips from the flask, then at the Kiwanis Club with the clucking ice cubes in the tumblers of booze. Now here they were in the splitlevel on the outskirts of Hershey, encumbered with a thirty-year mortgage. Thirty years! the groom thought. He’d be dead by then, what, fifty-five. An old man. He had two years of college—though technical college, true—and had dreams, but his new wife didn’t much fit into them.

  Pretty, he’d said to his best man, taking a nip in the nave before the ceremony. But she don’t have a whole lot going on upstairs, see? He’d been angling for a country club wife, the wife of a professional man, the kind that knew how to speak that double-speak that drove all the men mad, but saved the sweet stuff for her husband.

  But his best man had said, salacious, Pretty’s the best kind, don’t know much more than they need to. At that, the groom just shrugged.

  On her new couch, the bride kicked off her heels and laughed at the spangled asbestos ceiling, sending her cigarette smoke toward it. The wind rose, carrying with it the mysterious sweet scent from the chocolate factory, and she heard her groom go into the kitchen, then heard the refrigerator smooching open. Jingle of a bottlecap hitting the floor, groan of chair legs against the linoleum, soughing of wind in the chokecherry sapling in the yard. When she went in to find her new hubby-hubby, he was in the dark, staring at the bottle in his hands, head in a dark wreath of smoke.

  She went
to him and stroked the hair back from his handsome forehead. He was stiff, unyielding. She pulled his hand from the bottle with her plump fingers, and he sighed, moved to her, rocked his forehead against the belly where the bean-sized baby was forming. Softly he kissed the belly where the child pulsed and grew, where her little body was building cell by cell, so beautifully.

  WHEN THE BABY CAME AT LAST, she came screaming into the hands of the nurse, for the doctor was eating his veal cutlet at the club under the needling glare of his wife. He brushed the crumbs from his chin with his pinkie finger, rolled the wine around his mouth as if it were mouthwash. At last, avuncular, he patted her hand, said: No way it’ll take less than three hours, honey. First-time mother, seventeen years old, tiny little thing. We have time.

  Only fifteen minutes after that pronouncement came the crowning, the puckered face, the fishy shoulders slipping out, the fat belly, the kicking legs, the toes in their waxy, bloody patina. A beautiful, healthy baby girl, the nurse said, brushing sweat from her forehead. The baby latched with angry piglet grunts onto the bottle, and the mother, at seventeen years old, felt ancient, a Madonna under the fluorescent hum of the hospital brights.

  When the father came in, his knees were wobbly in his work-stained pants. He ran a finger up the tiny arm, holding his breath, and felt a terrible matching tenderness in his own, as if he were feeling what the new child was feeling, as if his callused finger were burning the brand-new skin. For weeks after she was born, he slathered the girl with air kisses, his lips stopping millimeters from the sweet cheeks, blowing smooches at his raw little girl.

  Thus petrified with anxiety, vibrating with thrill, the new parents agreed that their new daughter was a good baby. A very good baby, though soon she began sobbing with ferocity. All night long, she seemed to choke herself with sorrow, keeping the parents tossing in their twin bed, clutching their baby-care manual that told them…a terrible mistake to go to the baby when she cries…this will teach her to call for you with screams…Instead, you must steel yourself, go to her only once a night, for feeding and changing if she needs it. They slept with their fingers in their ears; they sat smoking against the headboard in the dark; the father rhythmically pounded his forehead against the kitchen table; and at last, the baby stopped screaming in the nighttime, resigned to lying in her wet and stink until dawn.