“You will forgive me if I don’t quite believe you.”
“I remember German and French names as well — tip of my tongue, can’t quite get to them, though I am sure I will remember before I get to the end of this story. We never saw a performance, of course, but the owners made sure that singers with incredibly loud voices and insanely gorgeous clothing provided free concerts in the parts of the mill that weren’t so noisy you couldn’t hear even the loudest tenor wailing directly into your ear. Once there was a free concert by the lake in Coventry, on a Sunday. There were many, many people of Italian ancestry working in the mill (myself included) who could appreciate the lyrics just as they were sung, but we were proud of the diversity of our workforce: it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that we came from the four corners of the earth. The owners, I know for a fact, subsidized the emigration of peoples from fourteen nations, including Syria, Borneo, and Patagonia. We enjoyed exotic foods, vibrant festivals celebrating ancient and obscure rites, and the glorious singing I have already mentioned, the singing of songs that made the whistling we engaged in while working something entirely out of the ordinary. We sang, too, once I’d taught the words to her, seeing who could sing the loudest. She fancied herself Italian, and could have passed for Italian in all but the most rigorous of audits. Rosemary said she knew nothing of the circumstances of her birth. I could not imagine such a life. I could not believe it was true — but of course she was right: none of us can know. I was not at all sure but I think I envied her: all that trackless solitude where there was nothing for me but immensities of architecture. She did believe that the man and the woman with whom she lived in the earliest years in Willimantic were in fact her mother and father. The father had been employed for several years as a matchmaker, which meant that he worked unshielded over great tubs of white phosphorus, the fumes of which in that cramped and dirty, unventilated shop rose up and hung in the air like the ghosts of all the tyrants of history and prehistory, or like fallen angels from which even evil had been wasted, leaving only a radiant, naturally occurring poison. With his head in these clouds twelve hours a day and his hands in the tubs dipping and plucking thousands of little sticks, he began to come apart. At first made only nervous and irritable, he suffered headaches and losses of memory that he knew were so near and yet gone, she said, that they reduced him to weeping. Then he became simple and docile and yet somehow witty, full all of a sudden and for no reason with gems of wisdom. He spoke in a kind of singsong that often rhymed. As his brain became desiccated, so did his bones become brittle. His jaw rotted and his teeth fell out, and one day, waiting for the Sunday excursion train to Coventry where we planned to sit by the lake and listen to the lapping water and hopefully the opera stars too, holding Rosemary’s little hand in his frail yet still warm and big own, he stepped off the curb, found the street further below than he’d imagined, and broke his ankle when he touched down. In a kind of chain reaction, the bones of his left leg broke, and when he swung himself wildly to the right, the bones of that foot and leg snapped also. He collapsed in a bloody, powdery heap, pelvis, backbone, and neck cracking in swift succession. Finally his poor skull shivered like an egg-shell, leaving smiling face and cooling brain to rest softly on the cobbles of the street. Thus, at any rate, did my Rosemary narrate the tragedy, the tale of the matchmaker sick with phossy jaw who broke his leg stepping off the curb: many times and in many places, for many different reasons. She did not understand what had happened. Neither did I. She did not understand where her father had gone, nor why. Neither did I.”
“Nor I. Even though he is still here.”
“She blamed herself and yet could not understand where she had sinned or erred. And in what way, exactly, was she being held responsible? She had been a very small child and the truth, she suspected, was that she remembered nothing, that some other kind of activity was taking place in her mind, that, perhaps, an agency representing some other kind of reality, dreams, for example, that wasn’t so difficult a concept, that an agent of dreams was operating while she was awake. It was dismissed in all but the most credulous quarters — even by sympathetic listeners — as apocryphal, as propaganda, propaganda of a different sort of deed, a story of a life, understood and made to function as a folk legend to comfort and amuse the weaker and more poor, who cannot understand the actual workings of alchemy, the medical arts, and the large-scale drift of money, the things you were born knowing, my darling Chuckie! — but believed devoutly by a few, myself included, who claimed to have seen it happen. I will swear to it if need be. And when, some time later, perhaps as short a time as a few days, perhaps as long a time as a year — Rosemary could not say and neither can I — her stricken, suffering, perhaps overly sensitive mother in turn died — whether of causes natural or unnatural, by her own hand or the hand of God, her story too is ambiguous — all that Rosemary could find in their meager belongings to tell her who they were, now that the testimony of their presence no longer sufficed, was a last will. It was written in a shockingly violent, nearly indecipherable scrawl and blot, and we treated it, in yet another of our games, as a treasure map. Places of birth were stated — Lower East Side and Canarsie — but believed to be false. More suitable nativities were imagined. Ages could be puzzled out with arithmetic. Her father, Rosemary calculated, was twenty, her mother nineteen. Lines at the bottom of the document, where their names would likely have been entered in less violent circumstances, were left blank. Rosemary thought she sewed it into her skirt. Wandering about the town, she found herself at the well. That was how she put it: ‘Mother died and I wandered off to a public space where I might be afforded some amusement.’ After drinking, looking around, drinking again, daydreaming out loud and drinking finally to soothe a throat now quite raw from talking to herself as she wandered, and from crying, she began to muse with the complicated fancy and helpless rigor that is the hallmark of the philosophy of children. She considered her condition — its causes, effects both immediate and clear and as yet unknown, and her prospects — then came out of what can only be described as a delightfully enchanted fugue, marked equally by a sorrow that was not indulged in and practical resolve that had little relation to reality, and saw three persons approaching. Used to the hustle and bustle of her small city, to herds of people being driven here and there with an urgency just shy of stampede, the sight of a small and isolated group, in the middle, as it were, of a nowhere we had conjured around ourselves, made her uneasy. They appeared to be dressed alike, too, in heavy black robes or cloaks or skirts and shawls, and this kind of uniformity of course makes ordinary people uneasy. Then she saw that they were old women and that their faces bore the look of kindness that only tremendous age and silent suffering can account for. They bid her a good afternoon, addressing Rosemary as “Little Girl,” which she did not mind the least little bit. Her name, and the strikingly pronounced emphasis on the “Little” of Rosemary’s, gave her the strange impression that it was an Indian name but the old women resembled in no other way Indian squaws as she had seen them, in illustrations. She had no idea, either, what time of day it was, but saw suddenly, as if invited by the immediate presence of the three women, how sharp and long the shadows were around her. She was surprised by the pale and empty sky, believing that it had been cloudy, turbulently and loweringly so. She then wondered if she hadn’t simply imagined the clouds — or, it occurred to her, strangely, for a reason she could not quite come to, but which she felt came from her father’s ghost — had they not gathered in response to her histrionic sulking? The season, too, was middling and mysterious: Were there buds on the trees, as she remembered it, or were they bare; and if bare, had the leaves just fallen or were they about to appear? The air was warm but the wind was cold — or was it the other way around? Warmly reposing in a cleft of rock, or cooling pleasantly in its shade? She did not know, she did not know, she did not know. Clambering down from the rocks, she debated naming herself to these strangers, and decided not to, asking the women instead if they were Sisters of Mercy. It was a phrase she had heard and liked, one that she associated with the Maker of Heaven and Earth, and that seemed to describe them in the same way Little Girl did herself. ‘Little Girl and the Sisters of Mercy!’ chuckled one old woman. ‘We have a fairy tale on our hands!’ said the second, smiling but with an air of prudence regarding a serious if not grim responsibility. ‘Sisters of Mercy,’ murmured the third. ‘I should say not.’ ‘Are you,’ asked Rosemary, ‘servants of the Devil?’ ‘No!’ laughed the first woman. ‘No, no,’ said the second, shaking her head judiciously. ‘Yes,’ said the third in her odd but clear murmur.”