Rikki Ducornet - Brightfellow

He has time for a nap before dinner but his heart is pounding. He is famished and the air smells of fricassee (Billy’s word). . the mattress, chosen by Margaret, is impossibly luxurious, however, the bedspread the color of moonlight (starched!), the sheets nacreous. He thinks he will sleep like a chosen child, suspended in a pearly haze. He is soothed by the thought that he is destined for far more than he ever supposed. He is about to become a legitimate entity with an entire suite at his disposal, right smack in the heart of Faculty Circle (but he must be cautious, discreet, patient). He gets not only to see her, devour her, drink her in — but (and why not?) to talk to her. Because he is a scholar of promise and charm come all the way from New South Wales to study one of theirs, the elusive genius Verner Vanderloon. When Billy calls up to him for supper, he is awakened from a surprisingly profound slumber. Hastily Charter pulls himself together and descends to find a table regally set (candles!); he is served farmed chicken, Billy’s own rhubarb wine, biscuits. The carrots (how is this possible!) have been caramelized.

From the dining room window he can see that the brats are out in full number and a new game has begun. . but Billy is speaking, and for how long?

“. . always at cross-purposes. But then, isn’t that the nature of things, one moment undoing the next, the web spun only to be ripped to bits. Time compresses, time expands, and sometimes — as when one is in bed with the right person. .,” he closes his eyes and nods in the direction of a distant memory, “ceases altogether. How many times have I stumbled? How many times have I gathered myself together and set off again? How many times triumphant — yes, I have had my triumphs! — only to fall on my face?” Billy’s eyes fog with tears. “To tell the truth—”

The windows are open to the early summer evening. The brats’ voices, the voices of frogs and crickets, locusts — surge and recede.

“Forgive me,” Billy says. “I ramble on, I have become something of a fool. But I trust this, too, shall pass. .”

“No fool, sir! Billy—”

“It will pass. My mood I mean. Not my foolishness!” The brats are playing hide-and-seek. Charter sees them scatter. They will hide behind the familiar houses, in window wells, down the backyard basement stairs, in the limbs of trees.

“All that honey spilled,” Billy continues. (Or is it money spilled?) “All those fires stoked that might have been better left cold in their dead ashes; all the ice broken between the teeth; all the false starts, dreary roads taken — as meanwhile the stars pulsed blindly above!”

“You are a poet—”

“No, no, no. .” Billy shakes his head, yet for an instant a wistful smile enlivens his face and Charter sees the boy he once was, the youth. “What’s worse,” Billy sighs, growing darker, “is that the signs were there. I mean: one should have attended to those pulsing stars and all the rest. Recalled the beauties one had ceased to see. The myriad beauties, Charter. Of the world, the mind, the flesh. The spirit, my boy.” He clenches his teeth and sucks in the air. “The red flags. One must heed them!”

“Red flags?”

“Fog horns! Sirens! Rings around the moon! Oh! Fatality! Nevermore!” Billy ravens. “NEVERMORE!”

“Sir?”

“My marriage, for instance. To a woman who wielded a scythe.”

“ That deadly!”

“Too often,” Billy ignores him, “I have not paid attention. Spilled the milk. Soiled the linens. And yet. . and yet. .”

Suddenly Asthma dashes past as wild as a fox and unimaginably rich in life. And then she is gone, and Charter is irresistibly drawn to find her.

“. . and yet, Charter! How eagerly I longed for life. And still. . longing. . the longing ! Even now!”

“You,” Charter must force himself to speak, “have years ahead, years !”

“Bah!” Billy rises and goes to the kitchen where, astonishingly, he sticks his head under the cold-water faucet and gives himself a proper dousing before shaking his head vigorously from left to right like a wet dog. Charter rises to the occasion and hands him a clean dish towel.

“Good,” Billy says and pats him on the shoulder. “Well done. Time to retire!” he decides. “Don’t worry about the dishes. . in the morning. . I’ll. .” He wanders off.

Charter takes up the dishes and fills the sink with suds. His agitation has quieted. He can hear Blackie calling for Asthma, the other mothers calling (and one blows a whistle). Soon she will be in her room, tucked away for the night, a breath away from him. Lovingly he washes everything, gazing again and again at the Circle, the rich grass wet with color, the trim houses, their slate roofs and stone chimneys, the polished window glass. It all gleams. It is all wonderful.

Once everything has been dried and returned to its place, he steps out into the evening to smoke a Camel — a new habit he can currently “afford,” having, on a visit to the train station down by the river, a pleasant hour’s walk away, purloined the wallet of a well-heeled and permed crone on her way to the city for a hit of high culture. She had fallen into a deep nap beside the alligator purse, its mouth as open as its owner’s. Charter thinks how over time such acts repeat themselves, each alike, each distinct: the local hunter, dashing in sideburns and well-oiled boots, his back pocket unbuttoned; a young coed devoid of common sense, her little silk purse abandoned on the ticket counter as she, tucked into the phone booth, catches up on gossip ($150 in bills!).

How good it is to smoke a cigarette, one’s back against a solid wall, the breeze playing in the leaves, the Circle silenced, each window the promise of a shadow-puppet play. Pathos and terror, black comedy, tenderness and loss, fire and ice, pleasure and punishment — all this surging and ebbing in those ruthless, wondrous, persistent rooms. Such sweetness! Such menace! He looks on as lives grow stale, are renewed. As kittens grow into cats; as betrayal rustles the sheets, rolls under the crib, and comes to rest there; as Death catches a glimpse of a maiden and cannot turn away.

I am a part of this, he thinks, taking it all in. A shadow among the many. Not sleeping in the library among boxes or in reeking cabinets or in the woods but in a bed big enough to sail the seas on, squeaky with soap, dined and wined (my ear bent out of shape but everything has its price).

Just before Jenny had been sent away she had told Stub: “We soon will all be mad, as mad as a person can be, as mad as you and I.” And Stub had said:

“I’m not mad! Little kids aren’t ever mad!”

“The maddest,” she had told him gently. “The maddest of all.”

Now that Asthma, Pea Pod, and all the brats have vanished into their houses for the night, Charter ponders what she meant. He thinks she meant this: a child knows nothing else, nothing but the madness that preys upon it relentlessly, the madness that is in the food it eats, the words it hears, the dreams that, having failed to protect it, turn upon it. He thinks that from afar Jenny has directed him to the very place he now stands. It is his task to be vigilant. To assure that Asthma will come through childhood unscathed. He makes a promise to Asthma and to himself. He makes a promise to Jenny.

Asthma’s room glows with light. Dressed in flannel pajamas illuminated with starfish, sea horses, porpoises, and fresh from her evening bath, she hovers above a ping-pong table forested with plastic pine trees and all the rest. Squinting, he can just make out her little earnest face orbiting the table; round and round she goes. He has seen the mirror pond up close, the Italian opera house; he has held an ivory elephant to his cheek, counted geese and sheep — and here’s the thing: It is she who gives a shape to the shapeless, the formless days, the lost, the fragmented days. Her face. The games she plays. Her voice calling out across the lawn. The noise the can makes when she gives it a kick; her scolding tones when Dickie or another of the brats aggravates her. . all this makes it possible for him to breathe quietly, to get on with it —his life, such as it is. Her tiny frame, her wrists (like a bird’s), her sprawling tabletop town, her faded frocks, her mop of short hair, her gleeful laughter, her little buckled shoes. .