Carole Maso: Mother and Child: A Novel

IN THE WINGS, the Cocoon Theater troupe and the wolf-escorts waited. Dapper, stage right, magnified, Mr. Min stood in blue light pulling swollen bats from a hat.

The Virgin in blue, accompanied by a little deer, and holding a lantern, moved majestically to the center. She’s looking for the child, but the child has hidden behind the mother’s skirt and for now is out of view. The Virgin says she’d like to take the child. She’s come, she says, for the child.

The Virgin assumes rightly that if she can only cajole the child to come with her, the mother will come too.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, children of all ages — and before them out of nowhere, the blue stars of the Cone Nebula, and the dazzling Horsehead Nebula.

All was beauty and brightness. There was a preponderance of antlers and whiskers and shining coats.

Irrefutable is the night, but the light show is unrivaled and the mother and child stand in awe at the mouth of the nebula. And suddenly the astounding figure of the Grandmother from the North Pole in the lights of the aurora borealis appears in the heavens.

She points and directs the mother’s gaze to the room where Aunt Inga lay.

Bathed in light, the mother takes the child’s hand and climbs over the large slumbering body of Aunt Inga. The room her younger sister sleeps in is shaped, it seems, like a curving shell. There is a whirling feeling and a whooshing sound. The child asks if they might rest here awhile.

No they may not, the mother says.

The Virgin whispers, it’s nearly time. The play is about to begin. Everything is ready now.

As if the strange mix of anticipation and dread were finally too great, the mother falls into a dream, and in her dream she sees quite clearly that the small eternal flame has been left unattended, and the Spiegelpalais has caught fire. Smoke fills the atrium. It becomes so heavy that she can see nothing at all. Where has everybody gone? she wonders. She cuts a drowsy swathe through the smoke. Never has she seen so many sleepers piled one on top of the other, on top of the other, or such thickness, or experienced such peace. There is a thicket of sleep; there is a mountain of sleep.

Lined against the walls were the Seven Sleepers — the polar bear, the snow goose, the arctic fox, the wolverine, the ermine, the vole, the snow leopard — awaiting reanimation. Every stage of sleep could be seen. Before the mother, a caribou was in the process of going still — a foreleg stiffened, the eyes went glassy, and it began to list to one side. It is promised one day, the Vortex Man said, that each shall be retrieved.

She has to pull herself out of the dream now as if a figure out of marble. She knows, above all else, she must keep her eyes open. She rouses the slumbering child and puts her on her back, and in the last moment before it is too late forever, they make their way over the hordes of beautiful sleepers through flames and the irresistible pull of smoke toward home.

That was a close call, the child says.

The mother smiles. It certainly was.

THE MOTHER OPENED her eyes and recalled nothing of the dream, only that she was refreshed and free of worry and care. She had not missed a thing. She looked to the stage. Everyone had taken their seats. The glass orchestra had been joined by the children’s choir, and now a hurdy-gurdy could be heard, and a bone piano, a panpipe, and a herald horn. Never, the mother remarked, had music ever sounded so beautiful. Final announcements were being made signaling the play was about to begin. When she looked in the wings, the mother saw all the players were now lined up loosely in order of appearance.

A narrative of great mystery and beauty was about to unfold. A struggle, as they had been told, of epic proportions, if that peculiar fellow was to be believed. It was an odd position to be in, the mother thought — to be at once both part of the audience and part of the performance, and even though they would be entirely at the mercy of the script, something about that comforted her.

Minutes passed. There was some snafu, she was sure of it, and the pageant was delayed, and she felt suddenly relieved to think there might still be a little more time left. The music, however, seemed to suggest otherwise. The overture began to play, introducing many of the key scenes to come. They looked at their programs and read, The Disappearance of the Lamb, The Mothering Place, The President in Evening Coat, The Appreciation Cake, The End of Childhood. .

Music for a while, the mother sang to herself, shall all your cares beguile . . Another phrase came to her and through it she tried to hold on to the shrinking world before her, framed by red velvet curtains. Music. . source of gladness. . heals all sadness.

If she was sad, she was not cognizant of it. Still, thinking about the play before her about to begin, tears streamed down her face.

The dog Shimmer, though he wouldn’t be needed until the third act, bounded onto the stage. Let him run outside until his time has come. And the same for the Hamster Ball lovelies. Release them into the meadow and into the sky: the Dall Sheep, the Gray Goose, the Arctic Tern, until the end.

The Grandmother from the North Pole sat beside the mother for a moment and handed her a bowl of cloudberries. The mother smiled at her mother and accepted the deep blue bowl graciously and fed a few to the child who was growing restless.

Just then two children holding a banner appeared on the stage and recited:

Welcome to our play.

The banner read, Scene 1—Pastoral, Spring.

It’s a Pastoral!

Someone turned on the fog machine.

No, it’s a ghost story.

Frogs could be heard.

A dream within a dream. .

The curtain opened.

GHOSTS GATHERED IN the early hours while the mother and the child stretched a mesh between two poles at the pond. They had come, as they did many mornings, to extract water from fog. Though they were far from the sea, the mother heard the doleful sound of a lighthouse and felt the eerie piercing glow coming from it. After the net was secured, the mother and child sat in the grass.

If the child were a monkey, she might take the mesh to the tallest trees and install it there. If the child were a monkey, there would be cymbals and a little hat and an organ grinder. Many people do not realize that a little organ grinder monkey, not the chimp or the ape, is the next smartest mammal after man.

After a while, the pond slowly came into clarity, and the sun came up. It is strange the way one state is always bleeding into another.

Frogs are a sentinel species. The skin of a frog is permeable. Recently, frogs have been growing longer legs or extra legs. Boys catch these frogs in boxes and bring them to science class.

Frogs can be said to have beautiful voices, especially at mating season, but one part per billion of weed-killer in the water shrinks the voice box of the male frog, and they cannot sing their song so well. The earth was turning from one kind of place into another. This frightens the mother who knows all things must change.

She looked at the monkey, now a child again.

All the frogs in the world were singing their crooked songs in the fog. The child did not think the songs crooked, she thought the frog songs lovely. They were the only frog songs she had ever known.

THE MOTHER DIRECTS the child to the eyepiece of the microscope. Ordinarily, if you cut open a bee, its insides viewed under a microscope appear white, the mother said. But these bees were black with scar tissue and disease. Everything you can think of is wrong with them, including new pathogens never before sequenced. The mother knows well that there is a trigger that takes an otherwise borderline population and throws it over the edge.