Carole Maso: Mother and Child: A Novel

Without a doubt, the bat had presaged change. Still we linger, keep them in sunshine skipping here awhile longer in this afternoon, though it is getting darker and cooler already now. We dally — relishing the moment that, unbeknownst to us, has already passed. How else to account for the sudden sadness, the melancholy as evening comes on? They are bathed in last light, and then they are gone.

AS CHILDHOOD COMES to an end, the Girl with the Matted Hair’s mother has already been dead for over ten years, and there is something unforgivable about that.

Her resurrection concoction left forgotten now in the far corner of the schoolyard. Her recipes — drain the blood of the toad, pet five sleeping sheep — tucked into the stone wall.

CAREFULLY THEY WALKED into the Spiegelpalais. Even from the periphery they could feel the great sleep pulling at them, and they were afraid. The atrium’s walls were lined this day with fifteen metallic medicine cabinets filled with medication. Thirty sheep slept floating in thirty formaldehyde tanks arranged in rows, and they half resembled schoolchildren nodding at their desks. Nodding and humming, this multiplication of sleep made the child yawn. The sheep beckoning were branded in red with stencil. What do they want of us? The child tugged at her mother’s arm.

Submerged in a twelve-foot tank slept two sides of beef, a chair, a row of linked sausages, an umbrella, and a birdcage housing a dead dove.

The sheep were branded in red with a stencil. The child, anesthetized, dreamt on the floor of the Spiegelpalais, and the mother had to pick her up and carry her over her shoulder as she did when the child was an infant. More and more, the mother remembered Infant Time. All heads, sleeping and not, slowly turned toward the mother and child. The somnambulant sheep seemed to nod in their direction and gesture with their cloven hoofs. Their eyes were open, but not seeing, glassy and smooth, and the lightest light blue — like the mother’s eyes.

THE CHILDREN GATHERED in the firefighting wing where many of the fire stories had been collected and preserved. Relics from the great incinerations were housed in glass. In one of the cases the children saw a scarlet bird, a glove, a briefcase, a burning bush, a rose the size of a human heart, a father suspended in liquid. No one was sure if the objects behind glass had done the saving, or were part of the saved. It did not really matter — the child thought the fire world was beautiful.

WONDER POURED DOWN on their heads. Sometimes the adventure of being alive felt too great. On these days, something began to fray in her. Smoke was filling the stairwell.

Oddly, as there would have been time, she might have said billowing while she looked out the window, which in turn sounded like pillow. . pillowing, as she grew sleepier and sleepier with each breath.

A PLATOON OF soldiers, enveloped in smoke, drift to the shore. Every one of them is dead. They have been snuffed out like wicks. They have nodded off and could be revived no more.

But should living soldiers ever return, should any war ever be over again, on that day the mother will eat the pasta called campanile — campanile is Italian for bells — and they will dance with a kind of joy reserved only for the most auspicious of occasions: the Great Resuscitation, or the return of the bees, or Easter.

LATER, WHEN THEY were back in the house and the fire was lit, the child would take out a piece of paper and draw an elaborate prismatic snowflake, and underneath it she would print: The way nobody is perfect and God is. For now, they kept walking. The moon shone and the coyotes turned into liquid light and spilled into luminous shapes on the night’s page, and the light in turn was devoured by great swooping night creatures, not bats — she knew not what — and the world in its wonder and violence entered her and she did not flinch. The birds appeared, and flying wild cats in the night in primordial splendor and chaos abounded, undeterred by whatever civilization may have tried to tame or diminish.

THE MOTHER YEARNED for the wolf, at once so dapper and so wild, who had escorted her across the threshold so many years ago now. Shiny, bright. She paged it in the night. She did not want it to leave the child behind. She wanted the child to grow up — immersed in world and in time; she wanted the child to thrive.

SHE CANNOT FATHOM the time that has elapsed since the galaxy was formed or the vastness that they are situated in. The oldest star in the galaxy is 13.2 billion years old, and the galaxy itself about 10 billion years old. The next arm of stars can be located about 7,000 light-years away. What is 7,000 light-years to her? She cannot imagine how infinitesimal they are; there is not a word that comes in her language to describe the quality of the smallness or the distance or the wonder or the fear. In the vast black cosmos, the planet floats. She thinks of their planet, beautiful beyond belief, swaddled in blue.

She looks to where the child now stands under the arbor in the Children’s Garden. It is the first time she has been allowed to use the sharp clippers to prune the roses. Light floods the entrance to the darkened garden.

Holding the glinting clippers above her head, the child whispers, I feel important, and she reaches up. All time, all space rush to her side. Her life is flooded with beauty and purpose. All the energy of the universe streaming toward that tiny, immeasurable, yet indelible, indestructible moment, the child illuminated and on tiptoe — it can never be destroyed: I feel important . Or taken away.

All had been preparation for this moment — so that the child standing in the Children’s Garden under the arch, pruning the roses now with great seriousness and delicacy and care for the first time, might feel the full force and enormity of her one life — claimed for a moment from the vast and rushing void all around her — and the flames, and the heartache. This was their job all along, the mother thought — to make transactions with beauty and enchantment — morning glories and roses covering the arbor.

One day, the mother imagines, without her, the child will stand under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and she will reach up as if to touch it, and it will come to her again suddenly, gravely, inexplicably: I feel important.

IT WAS IN the Garden of Night Miracles where the moth — now half-moth, half-mother, made its appearance in the moonlight. How beautiful the half-mother is — and how alone. The child longs for her, but she cannot find her anywhere, and she is afraid to go outside.

THE MOTHER PUTS out one of the small blue chairs of Childhood, and the tea set, and she waits. Though the little being may not come, the mother thinks if she sits long enough, there is always a chance. The mother has read of the Little Hominid in the local paper. This tiny person once occupied the island of Flores, one, maybe two million years ago, and does not fit into any place in the evolution of the species. He’s got no place in the early human family. He’s a hobbit, an anomaly. Out of place in time and geography, his ancestry an enigma.

Come to me, she whispers, completely inexplicable little person. He’s terribly small, but not a pygmy, his skull the size of a grapefruit. Little Hominid who lived isolated, while others made their way to Australia.

Some scientists insist he was a mere human dwarf with genetic or pathologic disorders, but the mother, who was a nurse, rejects this so-called Sick Hobbit Hypothesis. Come to me, Little Hominid, and stay awhile, and I will protect you from the ardent hobbit skeptics. Come to me and we will have some tea and keep each other company. The same mysterious force, discovered the year of the child’s birth, that is speeding up the expansion of the universe is also stunting the growth of the objects inside it, the mother reads to the little one.