Robert Wilson - Gypsies

Her mother looked infinitely pained and, in that protracted moment, impossibly old. Her cotton print housedress dangled limply from her shoulders. Outside, the wind raised up a whirl of snow.

“I can’t,” she said finally. “Try to understand. I never spoke to anybody about this. It’s hard. Maybe later. I have to think…”

Then, at the front of the house, the door rattled and slammed. A draft of cold air swept in along the floor. Jeanne Fauve stood up, composing her face. “It’s your father,” she said, sweeping the photographs back into the shoe box. “I have to get dinner ready.”

The house was quiet that night, but Michael couldn’t sleep.

The dark third-floor windows were shrouded with snow. The snow, he thought, should have melted; it was early for this kind of weather. But the temperature had dropped and the snow had deepened, cold air sweeping down the valley where the Polger met the Monongahela, whipping through these old blacktop streets.

Michael had spent the day exploring the town, walking from the north side to the south and back. He had bought a couple of paperbacks at a sad-looking Kresge’s and stopped for warmth and a cup of coffee at the tiny McDonald’s on Riverside, but mostly he just walked. One long depressing afternoon hike, one side of the valley to the other. The town, he had estimated, was about as big as Turquoise Beach, but older and dirtier and poor in a different way. Michael understood that many of the people in Turquoise Beach had volunteered for poverty, lived that way so they could paint or write or make music. But poverty in Polger Valley was an unforeseen accident, a disaster as tangible as a train derailment.

He had climbed a hillside until he could see all the sooty length of the town and the broad winding of the Mon, the steel mill and the gray highway, clouds rolling like winter itself from the northwestern sky. Standing there in his heavy coat, Michael felt the power in himself—stronger, it seemed, than ever before. It was like a current rising out of the depths of the earth, the old coal veins buried there, carboniferous ruins—it was a river running through him. He understood that it did not come from him but that he was a vehicle for it; the power was something old, eternal, fundamental. There was no end to it; by definition it was limitless. The limiting factor was Michael himself.

He thought, I can go anywhere I can imagine. The places he had seen were real places—as Turquoise Beach was a real place—but accessible only if you could dream yourself there.

He thought about this, walking home. He endured Willis’s pointed stares that evening, thinking about it. He took his thoughts to bed with him.

He lay in the cloistered warmth of this ancient bed with the comforter pulled up to his chin and the wind sifting snow against the window.

He thought, What we dream, we are.

Some things would be closed to him forever. There were worlds he couldn’t reach, worlds beyond his grasp. He felt them out there in the storm of possibility, tenuous doors he could not quite open. It made him think of what Laura had said about Turquoise Beach: It’s the best I could find. She wanted paradise but couldn’t truly dream it… maybe didn’t really believe in it.

He figured Laura knew all this, understood that her ramshackle seaside Bohemia was also a testament to her own limitations.

But at least she had tried. Michael thought about his mother, who hadn’t, who pretended she didn’t have the power at all—and maybe that was true now, maybe she had lost it. Maybe it atrophied, like a muscle. She had spent her life living up to the pinched expectations of Willis Fauve, trying to lead a “normal” life that was, when you came down to it, as ephemeral as Laura’s paradise.

A better world, Michael thought.

Maybe there really was such a thing.

Maybe he could find it.

He felt sleep tugging at him. He felt, too, the maze of possibility, the twining corridors of time. He could walk that maze, he thought, pick a destination, feel for it, follow the tug of intuition… here and here and here.

He closed his eyes and dreamed a place he had never seen before.

He envisioned it from an immense height and all at once, a place where brightly colored cities stood amidst plains and wilderness, buffalo and redwood forests and busy towns where the rivers branched. He thought of names. They came into his mind unbidden, but with the feeling of real names, place names: Adirondack, Free New England, the Plains Nations.

He saw fragile aircraft swimming through a clean sky; the focus narrowed and he saw crowds thronging a city marketplace, caged birds chattering, acrobats in a public square, a man in feathers buying spices from a woman in Chinese robes.

And then he turned his head against the pillow, willed his eyes open, and saw only the dark outline of this attic room, the snow against the window.

The vision was gone.

Sleep, Michael thought longingly. Sleep now.

He lay in the dark and listened to Willis moving through the house, locking and checking the doors, maybe taking a last sedating drink before he climbed the stairs to his own long and dreamless sleep.

Laura shared the twin beds in the guest room with her sister, but tonight she couldn’t sleep.

She sat up, glanced at the motionless form of Karen, then pulled a robe over her nightgown and went to the child-sized desk in the corner of the room.

It had been their study desk, hers and Karen’s, years ago. How like Mama to keep it preserved up here. Laura switched on the lamp and blinked at the bright circle of light it made.

The desktop was bare.

She reached into the big bottom drawer and took out two bulky items. One was the shoe box containing her mother’s photographs. The other was an immense, leather-bound family Bible.

Buried truths here, Laura thought sleepily.

She examined the photographs first. There were maybe thirty or forty altogether. She shuffled and fanned them like cards, painstakingly arranged them into a rough chronological order.

One of the pictures was very old, a ghostly image of Grandma Lucille with a tiny girl-child—who must have been Mama—and two older boys, Uncle Duke and Uncle Charlie. Charlie had died in Korea all those years ago; Uncle Duke had vanished out of a bad marriage. Laura could not deduce, from the photo, anything extraordinary about these people. Just Lucille Cousins and her three children by the railing at Niagara Falls—the date on the back was 1932. A sunny day but windy: everybody’s hair was blowing around. Bland, sunny smiles. These people, Laura thought, were about as occult or supernatural as a shirt button. Maybe this was where Mama had derived her vision of perfect normalcy, from this smiling woman, her mother, the easy contentment in those eyes. Grandpa Cousins had died a handful of years after he took this photo; Grandma Lucille had gone on public relief. So here was this picture: the Eden from which Mama had been expelled.

The power, Laura thought, the specialness, must have come from somewhere else.

She had never met any of Daddy’s family except Grandma Fauve, another widow. Laura remembered Grandma Fauve as a huge woman, obsessed with a mail-order fundamentalist cult she had discovered through radio broadcasts out of WWVA in Wheeling. She embroidered samplers with queer, threatening passages from the Book of Revelation; her bookcases spilled out pamphlets with titles like Warning from the Sky and Living in the Last Days. Laura, as a child, had looked very hard at her grandmother, peered deep into those dark unblinking eyes… scary eyes, in their own way; but she had never seen the power there, none of the recognition she had longed for.