William Kennedy - Ironweed

Her appearance, when she first set foot in the house next door to his, stunned Francis; her blond hair swept upward into a soft wreath, her eyes a dark and shining brown, the stately curves and fullness of her body carried so regally, her large, irregular teeth only making her beauty more singular. This goddess, who had walked naked across his life, and whom he had carried in his arms, now sat on the sofa and with eyes wide upon him she leaned forward and posed the question: “Are you in love with anyone?”

“No, m- no. I’m too young.”

Katrina laughed and Francis blushed.

“You are such a handsome boy. You must have many girls in love with you.”

“No,” said Francis. “I never been good with girls.”

“Why ever not?”

“I don’t tell ‘em what they want to hear. I ain’t big with talk.”

“Not all girls want you to talk to them.”

“Ones I know do. Do you like me? How much? Do you like me better’n Joan? Stuff like that. I got no time for stuff like that.”

“Do you dream of women?”

“Sometimes.”

“Have you ever dreamt of me?”

“Once.”

“Was it pleasant?”

“Not all that much.”

“Oh my. What was it?”

“You couldn’t close your eyes. You just kept lookin’ and never blinked. it got scary.”

“I understand the dream perfectly. You know, a great poet once said that love enters through the eyes. One must be careful not to see too much. One must curb one’s appetites. The world is much too beautiful for most of us. It can destroy us with its beauty. Have you ever seen anyone faint?”

“Faint? No.”

“No, what?”

“No, Katrina.”

“Then I shall faint for you, dear Francis.”

She stood up, walked to the center of the room, looked directly at Francis, closed her eyes, and collapsed on the rug, her right hip hitting the floor first and she then falling backward, right arm outstretched over her head, her face toward the parlor’s east wall. Francis stood up and looked down at her.

“You did that pretty good,” he said.

She did not move.

“You can get up now,” he said.

But still she did not move. He reached down and took her left hand in his and tugged gently. She did not move. He took both her hands and tugged. She did not move voluntarily, nor did she open her eyes. He pulled her to a sitting position but she remained limp, with closed eyes. He lifted her off the floor in his arms and put her on the sofa. When he sat her down she opened her eyes and sat fully erect. Francis still had one arm on her back.

“My mother taught me that,” Katrina said. “She said it was useful in strained social situations. I performed it once in a pageant and won great applause.”

“You did it good,” Francis said.

“I can do a cataleptic fit quite well also.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s when you stop yourself in a certain position and do not move. Like this.”

And suddenly she was rigid and wide-eyed, unblinking.

o o o

A week after that, Katrina passed by Mulvaney’s pasture on Van Woert Street, where Francis was playing baseball, a pickup game. She stood on the turf, just in from the street, across the diamond from where Francis danced and chattered as the third-base pepper pot. When he saw her he stopped chattering. That inning he had no fielding chances. The next inning he did not come to bat. She watched through three innings until she saw him catch a line drive and then tag a runner for a double play; saw him also hit a long fly to the outfield that went for two bases. When he reached second base on the run, she walked home to Colonie Street.

o o o

She called him to lunch the day he installed the new awnings. After the first day she always chose a time to talk with him when her husband was elsewhere and her son in school. She served lobster gratine , asparagus with hollandaise, and Blanc de Blancs. Only the asparagus, without sauce, had Francis ever tasted before. She served it at the dining-room table, without a word, then sat across from him and ate in silence, he following her lead.

“I like this,” he finally said.

“Do you? Do you like the wine?”

“Not very much.”

“You will learn to like it. It is exquisite.”

“If you say so.”

“Have you had any more dreams of me?”

“One. I can’t tell it.”

“But you must.”

“It’s crazy.”

“Dreams must be. Katrina is not crazy. Say: May I help you, Katrina?”

“May I help you, Katrina?”

“You may help me by telling me your dream.”

“What it is, is you’re a little bird, but you’re just like you always are too, and a crow comes along and eats you up.’,

“Who is the crow?”

“Just a crow. Crows always eat little birds.”

“You are protective of me, Francis.”

“I don’t know.”

“What does your mother know of me? Does she know you and I have talked as friends?”

“I wouldn’t tell her. I wouldn’t tell her anything.”

“Good. Never tell your mother anything about me. She is your mother and I am Katrina. I will always be Katrina in your life. Do you know that? You will never know another like me. There can be no other like me.”

“I sure believe you’re right.”

“Do you ever want to kiss me?”

“Always.”

“What else do you want to do with me?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“You may say.”

“Not me. I’d goddamn die.”

When they had eaten, Katrina filled her own and Francis’s wineglasses and set them on the octagonal marbletopped table in front of the sofa where she always sat; and he sat in what had now become his chair. He drank all of the wine and she refilled his glass as they talked of asparagus and lobster and she taught him the meaning of gratine , and why a French word was used to describe a dish made in Albany from a lobster caught in Maine.

“Wondrous things come from France,” she said to him, and by this time he was at ease in the suffusion of wine and pleasure and possibility, and he gave her his fullest attention. “Do you know Saint Anthony of Egypt, Francis? He is of your faith, a faith I cherish without embracing. I speak of him because of the way he was tempted with the flesh and I speak too of my poet, who frightens me because he sees what men should not see in women. He is dead these thirty years, my poet, but he sees through me still with his image of a caged woman ripping apart the body of a living rabbit with her teeth. Enough, says her keeper, you should not spend all you receive in one day, and he pulls the rabbit from her, letting some of its intestines dangle from her teeth. She remains hungry, with only a taste of what might nourish her. Oh, little Francis, my rabbit, you must not fear me. I shall not rip you to pieces and let your sweet intestines dangle from my teeth. Beautiful Francis of sweet excellence in many things, beautiful young man whom I covet, please do not speak ill of me. Do not say Katrina was made for the fire of luxuria , for you must understand that I am Anthony and am tempted by the devil with the sweetness of yourself in my house, in my kitchen, in my yard, in my tree of trees, sweet Francis who carried me naked in his arms.”

“I couldn’t let you go out in the street with no clothes on,” Francis said. “You’d get arrested.”

“I know you couldn’t,” Katrina said. “That’s precisely why I did it. But what I do not know is what will be the consequence of it. I do not know what strengths I have to confront the temptations I bring into my life so willfully. I only know that I love in ten thousand directions and that I must not; for that is the lot of the harlot. My poet says that caged woman with the rabbit in her teeth is the true and awful image of this life, and not the woman moaning aloud her dirge of unattainable hopes… dead, so dead, how sad. Of course you must know I am not dead. I am merely a woman in self-imposed bondage to a splendid man, to a mannerism of life which he calls a sacrament and I call a magnificent prison. Anthony lived as a hermit, and I too have thought of this as a means of thwarting the enemy. But my husband worships me, and I him, and we equally worship our son of sons. You see, there has never been a magnificence of contact greater than that which exists within this house. We are a family of reverence, of achievement, of wounds sweetly healed. We yearn for the touch, the presence of each other. We cannot live without these things. And yet you are here and I dream of you and long for the pleasures you cannot speak of to me, of joys beyond the imaginings of your young mind. I long for the pleasures of Mademoiselle Lancet, who pursued doctors as I pursue my young man of tender breath, my beautiful Adonis of Arbor Hill. The Mademoiselle cherished all her doctors did and were. The blood on their aprons was a badge of their achievement in the operating room, and she embraced it as I embrace your swan’s throat with its necklace of dirt, the haunting pain of young ignorance in your eyes. Do you believe there is a God, Francis? Of course you do and so do I, and I believe he loves me and will cherish me in heaven, as I will cherish him. We shall be lovers. God made me in his image, and so why should I not believe that God too is an innocent monster, loving the likes of me, this seductress of children, this caged animal with blood and intestines in her teeth, embracing her own bloody aprons and then kneeling at the altar of all that is holy in the penitential pose of all hypocrites. Did you ever dream, Francis, when I called you out of our tree, that you would enter such a world as I inhabit? Would you kiss me if I closed my eyes? If I fainted would you undo the buttons of my dress to let me breathe easier?”