Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

Her father waved away her questions with his sausage. Some cowards might not want to fight, he said. I’d hang them right now if I could. Their place, those traitors, is on the battlefield. Just like Albert. You’re a smart girl, God knows. You should understand.

But Inge didn’t understand. How she could be asked to suddenly hate her cousins? Why was her father opposed to independence for Ireland? Why did the village children throw rocks at her family? Why did the butcher’s son and his friends attack the village priest and tear the collar from his neck? She knew there were two wars, one in Ireland and one out in the vague wide world, but she didn’t understand either one. She only knew they were taking away the only good things in her little life.

Curiosity #1209: 24-inch tail feather, taken from peacock, circa 1884. Layered shades of gold, black, cobalt, navy, turquoise, viridian, teal. Brushed with the soft iridescence characteristic of the species .

After Constance moved out, he heard Oliver refer to her as a “kept woman,” which seemed to mean that she lived in a tidy brownstone in the fashionable part of the city, dressed in expensive furs and jewels, and was never out of bed before noon. When Pru finally allowed him to visit Constance, she summoned him in her booming, imperious way to her bedroom, where he found a gentleman wrestling with his pants and a long, languorous Constance, eating chocolates from a gold box and clad in a frothy cream peignoir. Set was mildly horrified to see she was wearing nothing underneath. The gentleman without pants appeared to be equally horrified, but Constance smiled and held out the chocolates to Set. Have one, dear, she said, and her gown fell open on a vast expanse of white thigh. Set fled in terror.

When Set was thirteen, Constance took him into the city to see a daring new showcase of very modern art. It’s upsetting all sorts of dignified people, said Constance, and Set could tell she heartily approved.

The show was in a big armory on Lexington Avenue, and Set was fascinated by the strange, distorted figures. None of them were anything like the realistic paintings Pru had hanging on the walls of their home, food on tables and hunting parties and dour people looking down their noses. These were full of loud, impertinent color, of bold strokes, of strange shapes and impossible people. And the sculptures! They seemed to belong to another world entirely — so alien and unfamiliar they were.

Matisse, shouted Constance, gesturing at a naked lady tinted blue, lounging in front of a fringe of palm fronds. The fashionable people next to them glared. Constance ignored them and dragged Set over to another painting, a woman’s face, cut into sharp shapes and put back together all wrong. It gave him a muddled feeling to look at it, like looking at time coming and going.

Picasso, said Constance. She smiled. Gertrude takes all the credit for him here, but I put in a good word with a certain gentleman as well. She can’t claim all his successes though lord knows she bloody well tries. Set nodded, hypnotized with horror over the scene she was making. Look, look at that damned painting, she boomed, and tell me he isn’t a genius. Her voice echoed through the hall and seemed to charm the paintings, colors leaping from their walls to be with her. Even these bold artworks couldn’t fill a room like Constance. People smiled despite themselves. Set shrank down to make more room for her, just as he did with them all. Constance made both the most and least sense to Set. She reminded him of his father, of what little he remembered — the laugh, the self-assurance, the great height and massive straight white teeth. She didn’t give a fig for anyone’s opinion, her family’s included, and Set knew that made Pru furious. She said so often. Constance seemed the most, of all his family, to belong to the outside world. Our family, she told him, their superstitions — it’s all bosh. They wanted me to be a dancer, and well — look how happy I’ve made myself on my own damn ambitions.

No one ever quite said so, but Set at some point realized they shared a mother — for Constance was the spitting image of the pretty ballerina, though she was strong where the ballerina was soft, strident where their mother was graceful. But Constance inherited the same sweet smile and the same coaxing way with men. She told Set with pride that there were surefire ways for people to get what they wanted on this earth, and she was one of the few selfish enough to use those means — to use any means at all. It’s a good life if you own it, she told him. Be your own man.

But when he returned home, there was Oliver in the parlor, making careful notes about some new artifact from the Dark Ages. And there was Cedric in the court, playing tennis with Pru in his whites from thirty years ago. And Set knew then, as he had since he’d returned from the Arctic, that whatever was wrong with him, his missing piece, his hollow — it anchored him at home as surely as if he’d never left at all. If he was going to find his body anywhere in the afterlife, he supposed he would find it here. He felt the family’s pull as though caught between powerful magnets — suspended, spinning between, a little polestar.

Photograph: Inge Agnew, circa 1916. Hair a pale cloud, pinned down here and there but escaping to blur the edges. Wide, high cheekbones. Lips pale, skin pale, close-up face obscuring any background .

Their cook had a son who lived in the village. He came to the manor sometimes to see his mother, when the little village school was dismissed (and how Inge wished she were one of those students, streaming out of the one-room schoolhouse with tidy notebooks and freed-prisoner faces). And that meant seeing Inge, too — Inge who eagerly drilled him on all the town gossip and who had kissed whom and what had they learned in school. Sometimes he had good stories and sometimes he furrowed his brow and told her, in his funny accent, that he was worried about Inge and his mother. See, your father’s gone papish, he’d say, and Inge didn’t even know what that meant, but worried, too, in a nameless sort of way — was this the cause of the glares she got on the rare occasions when she rode her bicycle into the village? She knew the tenants had slowly moved off the land when she was small, and that her father fought with and evicted the rest. She remembered some of the ugly scenes. She knew, also, that the people in the village spoke differently, dressed differently. Inge wore her sisters’ old dresses, chiffon and lace. Though they were out of fashion and moth-eaten, they were still nicer than the drab woolen frocks the village women wore. But she couldn’t imagine these differences were dangerous.

Since the cook’s boy was her only friend, it stood to reason his would be the first body she knew. In the moldy smell of hay and the damp cold of the barn, she kissed him with reckless abandon, asked him to push into her like the footman used to do to the housemaids back when they had a footman and housemaids. I’ll marry you, he said after, his young freckled face between her breasts. She was sixteen but already bursting into something older; soft, warm fat over coltish limbs and long muscles.

She laughed. Don’t be silly, she said. I’ll never marry. Why should I?

His face darkened to red, streaked with white, and he started to get up. She pulled him back, hands on his shoulders, and this time her want was a little red star, was a fire in her belly, and he couldn’t help but be flamed. She felt something lovely and then, the star, it burst, and she smiled like a Valkyrie as he said, nervous and coltish now, I have to go , turned tail, and she breathed and breathed in the barn-stained air on that flattened patch of hay. And she learned that sex was a weapon she could wield, even and especially as a woman. It seemed a useful thing to know.