Norman Rush - Mortals

Iris was back, bearing a clutch of photographs, papers, and index cards.

“May I just show you a few things from Ellen to win your heart, Ray? I’m after your heart. I need you to want me to be with my sister. This is the last thing I’ll bother you with on the subject, I promise.”

He couldn’t go out, which was what he wanted to do, and he didn’t want to go through the pictures, the miscellany she was bringing to him, because he was tired and because it was supernumerary, and because in effect he had already agreed she could go to the States, that she should go. She had won, and this was a way of gilding the lily of his defeat, it felt like to him.

He said, “Suppose we do this at breakfast instead? I’m tired. I’m flagging. I’ll get us up in time to go through your things. We won’t have to rush. That’s a promise.”

She seemed to Ray to be flattered that he was so unhappy at the prospect of being left alone in Africa. She acceded graciously to the postponement, but then she was always gracious.

Later when he couldn’t sleep, he decided that breakfast would be the wrong time too. She had a pile of things to get through and he was agitated about the Kerekang tape, which he could handily secure and review before noon, thus getting it off his back. Then at lunch he could be himself. So now it had to be lunch.

Ray felt triumphal over what the footage had given him. But it was subtle and he had to formulate the meaning of the captured images, the ritual, so that Boyle would grasp it. What they had was Kerekang performing a personal ritual. What he had would be the capstone of a Profile, a Life, if he were still writing them. That day could come again. At moments like this it was a curse not to be able to discuss something like how to present this to Boyle, how to phrase it with Iris. She was subtle.

Lunch was a leftover pork chop with applesauce, brown rice, and fresh peas. Iris had laughed at him when he had shown himself dutifully prepared to eat with a fork the roast garlic puree served to him in a ramekin. It was a garnish, not a dish in itself. He knew that. They had had it before. He had forgotten.

Iris said, “I think what happened is that Ellen fell in love with this darling child of her next-door neighbors in the condo. She’s very precocious. An only child. Ellen’s downfall was baby-sitting for this child, Catherine.”

Iris dealt out three Polaroid photographs of Catherine.

“Completely adorable,” Ray said.

“She is. Everyone is always suggesting she should be taken to a modeling agency, hideously enough.

“So in any case Ellen decided that Catherine was indeed adorable, and not only physically. Ellen began writing down her little bons mots. At first she just included them strewn throughout her letters and then later she began printing them sort of calligraphically on these index cards, which I now have a small archive of. The child is barely four.”

Ray pulled the stack of cards toward him. Was sampling enough? Probably not.

“Are these in chronological order?” he asked.

“I don’t think I’ve kept them in order, actually. They’re from when Catherine was two or three. Some Ellen wrote up after the fact, from stories Catherine’s mother and father told. The order doesn’t matter.”

Ray browsed. Some cards recorded brief anecdotes. Others seemed to record examples of a precocious ability to classify things.

Catherine was given an Etch A Sketch for her third birthday. She produced two jagged parallel lines right off the bat and said “I have drawn a crevasse.”

Of course you cannot drink bathwater, it is not a beverage.

Catherine’s parents note Catherine’s fixated gaze at a passing wheelchair, the first she’d ever seen, in which was seated a visibly spastic child about her own age. As the wheelchair drew abreast of them, Catherine said, “Interesting chair!” Then she said, “I feel sorry for ghosts. If I ever saw one, I wouldn’t be afraid. I would try to comfort it.”

Iris said, “They’re not complicated. And you don’t have to memorize them, either. And you don’t have to read all of them. Give them to me and I’ll try to pull out the best ones.”

He returned about half of the pack to her, but continued his own browsing.

It was friendlier to read them aloud.

“I like this.

“Catherine went to the zoo. She said of the elephants, ‘They have no knuckles.’ Later, when her parents said to Catherine that it was time to go to bed, Catherine said, ‘Unfortunately, I don’t want to.’ ”

Iris said, “Listen to this. These.

“Her mother wanted Catherine to wear her Birkenstock sandals but Catherine preferred to wear her sneakers. She pointed to the sandals and said, ‘I won’t be nimble in those.’ ”

Iris was looking dreamy to him. This exercise was depressing her, he could tell. It was involuntary. He was sorry.

She said, “This is the last one. I guess it’s very recent. It’s a poem Catherine wrote.

“Two people were walking down the road

They saw two insects down below

One was a flea

And one was a bee

And the flea was wearing clothes.”

Iris was very inward now. Mechanically, she squared up the packet of cards.

He tried to be brisk. “Well you can see what happened here. Of course you have to go to be with her. It’s fine with me, Iris, it really is.”

Iris said, “I should mention two other things about this. She thinks the mother is much too cavalier about this child. For example, the parents make no effort to get these gems written down. You know how precious these things are when your child gets older. I mean, we can imagine it. So she began writing these bits and pieces down and then, as a gesture, gave them to the child’s mother, who was, I gather, put off by it, basically. I guess she felt criticized. So Ellen sees her own qualities as a mother going to waste, and the rest is history. The other thing is that she thinks the father is evil because, when they were having terrible trouble with Catherine over her bedtime, he proposed the idea of having her hypnotized and giving her a posthypnotic suggestion that it was time to go to sleep. They’d snap their fingers and she’d go off. I’m sure it was completely in jest, but Ellen can’t stand him now. So there you have another thing that might incline her to leave the father out of it. There’s much more of Catherine in the letters.”

Sadness will kill you, he thought. He got up. He had to find time to rehearse what he was going to say to Boyle. He thought, It could go like this, we have three weeks of taping at Kerekang’s place, we covered two rooms, bedroom and kitchen, the only two places he could use for meetings, and we did both sampling mode and straight coverage of six through twelve every night … now this was all during the time you were convinced he was having meetings there twice a week, at least … we know from our other sources when he got home each day, all during this time, and there are no meetings going on … But what is going on?… He has one thing that he does before bed without fail every night, which is what?… He goes up to his bookshelf and touches his books and then he turns the light off and goes to bed early, and what books does he go up and touch?… Not Das Kapital , nothing by Trotsky, no, he goes up and touches his Complete Poetical Works of Tennyson , Cambridge Edition, and his little Everyman Palgrave … He sleeps in his underwear … There is nothing for us here.

“What if I like it better there when I go back?” Iris asked softly.

He was startled.

“You won’t, my girl,” he said, and thought, She can’t.