Boy, Snow, Bird(74)
“Stop calling her ‘him.’ You’re telling me my mother has been desperately ill for decades and I’m fighting like hell to take it in, but you’ve got to stop calling her ‘him.’”
“I don’t know that I can. As it stands right now he’s been Frank longer than he was Frances. It’s gone beyond alter egos. Boy, I’ve been reading medical monographs about people whose alleged alter egos have different blood types from theirs—one guy’s alter ego was diabetic, and he wasn’t—or he was the alter ego and the diabetic was the ‘true’ personality—who’s to say? When those kinds of biological facts start coming in, you have to ask if becoming someone else is more than some delusion or some dysfunction of the mind. What I mean to say is that Frank’s personality is pretty awful—he tried to hit me when I told him I was going to tell this story, but he wasn’t fast enough—but he’s awfully sane. Well, maybe not when it comes to thinking of names. He says he almost named you Pup.”
“Mia.”
She took my hands, and kissed them. “Boy.”
“Please don’t write about this. Find someone else to write about.”
“I’m sorry, cara. I don’t expect you to understand this, but I have to tell. You know, Bird sent me something in the mail a few days ago. Some notes she’d made while Frank was talking to her over lunch.”
“What?”
“He said some stuff to her that’s probably going to upset you—no, he didn’t threaten her. I think he was actually trying to tell. Trying to tell her what he had agreed to come down here and tell you.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” I said.
“I’m sorry it’s like this. You’ve got a daughter who has to know and a friend who would do anything for you apart from not telling. This can’t be what you signed up for.” She squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back.
“Do you think Frances is gone forever?”
“Boy . . . you know I can’t answer that . . . I never met her.”
I don’t know why that was a comfort, but it was.
2
reading Bird’s notes took the comfort away. Frank’s claim that I’m evil doesn’t shock me so much, partly because I’ve questioned myself on the very same subject before. It’s not my actions that raise the questions, but my inaction, the way I’ve consciously and consistently avoided chances to reduce other people’s unhappiness. I call it a side effect of growing up in a building full of families and thin walls and floors: We all heard everything and did nothing. I heard love going wrong for people, so wrong. The silence for weeks when Mrs. Phillips next door miscarried. Then the weeks of noise that followed—Mr. Phillips came home later and later, and Mrs. Phillips waited up for him, playing records until the small hours, switching off the gramophone and sobbing when he came in through the door. Mr. Kendall on the other side of us kept spending the rent money; his wife kept faking surprise at this. Every month Mrs. Kendall asked, “How could you, Fred? How could you? What are we going to do?” and you could hear her hatred and her boredom; it stayed in her voice even as he hit her. For a few months there was a pretty glamorous-looking couple upstairs—down on their luck, I guess. I remember them particularly because I never found out either of their names, only heard him calling her whore, whore, WHORE. Of course they must have heard the rat catcher knocking me around too. We all got a little less human so we could keep living together.
No, these are the words that kissed my equilibrium good-bye:
It was the one time in my life I wished I was a woman.
There it was, in my daughter’s handwriting. Frances had wanted to come back.
I couldn’t sleep. Arturo snored blissfully beside me until I put a stop to that.
“Arturo. Arturo. Wake up.”
He gasped and waved his arms. “What? What is it? Fire?”
“No. I need to know how to break a spell. Any ideas?”
“Break a spell, you say?”
“Yeah. How?”
“Woman, how the hell should I know? Let me sleep.”
“Quit yelling.”
“I’m not yelling.”
“Sounds like yelling to me.”
He stuck his head underneath his pillow; I got up. Dawn broke calmly and filled the house with its glow. And Alecto Fletcher answered the phone when I called her.
“Oh. I knew it was you. Who else could be so disrespectful of an old woman’s need for rest?”
“I won’t keep you long, Alecto. I just wondered if you knew how to break a spell.”
“That’s right, ask the crone; she’ll know. Are we talking about a magic spell?”
“Um. Not in origin, but in effect maybe.”
“And you’re asking for a friend . . .”
“My friends just don’t know how to behave.”
“Your friend already asked me herself. Sid Fairfax came over yesterday with a fairly interesting book of art monographs and the very same question you’ve just called me to ask. I’m worried about her too. It’s plain to see that she loathes this town, but she’s told herself she can’t leave because she loves her mother and she can’t be happy if her mother is unhappy.”
“I didn’t know any of that. I thought she was staying because she’s in love with Kazim.”