On the River Styx: And Other Stories, Page 3

  Dave stood up, but his legs moved uncertainly. The sun was very hot. He watched the other men meet and pass the oncoming family, both groups moving shyly, in single file. Following Joe Robitelli’s example, most of the men had removed their caps.

  1951

  THE CENTERPIECE

  In 1941 Grandmother Hartlingen, Madrina to the family, was considerably older than anyone I had ever known, “too old for Christmas presents,” as she said. She had given way gently to her years, lowering the window upon her past as on a too early snow, yet thoughtfully aware of its delicate weight on the high eaves of her household.

  None of her family lived beneath her roof, nor even in the township of Concord, but they were present nevertheless, in neat smiling ranks upon her bedroom tables, ones and twos and threes, and in various postures of memory throughout the rooms. Most of them would gather for her German Christmas, and the rest had preceded her into the ground. These she had long ago forgiven, they lost no favor on the bedroom tables, represented only a certain unsatisfactory transience, like gypsies or violets.

  In the dark December of 1941, I alone among Madrina’s descendants suffered no misgivings about her festival. To a boy of fourteen, German Christmas meant receiving presents twelve hours in advance and Christmas Day free to enjoy them, and had nothing whatever to do with Germany.

  The relation of Christmas to war seemed as tenuous to Madrina as to myself. She had visited Germany but twice in her lifetime and did not intend to visit there again. At the same time, although she was born in New York City, a heritage of Christmas in Bavaria was imprinted in the first pages of her mind, not only of the Hartlingen gathering itself but of the beauty of this tradition to all Germans, at home or abroad. For Madrina, like a fountain sinking back into its well, had returned unconsciously to her source as she grew older, and had long since astounded her countrymen of Concord by referring to herself as High German. No shell threatened the household of habit her universe had become, and although she crocheted for the soldiers, and was offended by the Red Cross refusal of her offer of blood—good German blood, she assured them—she saw no grounds whatsoever for renouncing her German Christmas. It never occurred to her, in fact. Those of the family to whom it did occur awaited in vain the reprieve from Concord, and finally, not daring open rebellion, forgathered uneasily on Christmas Eve. It was the last German Christmas ever celebrated in our family, for Madrina died late in the following year.

  Everybody forgathered, that is, except Cousin Millicent, aged fifteen, who refused to leave the car.

  My cousin was known in school as Silly Milly, and, as cousins are apt to be, she was ill-favored and even a little distempered. She contributed to family gatherings her own special brand of lackluster silence, as if life in general were a personal affront and no stratagem on the part of others would make her a party to it. Milly was the last descendant Madrina would have suspected as the viper, and Milly’s parents, Uncle Charles and Aunt Alice, were as startled as the rest of us. Milly’s teacher in school, her one friend in the world, had lost a brother at Pearl Harbor, and Milly’s awareness of the forces of good and evil was far keener than my own. After all, I told her, Madrina isn’t celebrating a Japanese Christmas.

  We had gone to sing Christmas carols in the country church. When the tramping of boots had died in the hallway, and the family, the snow still white on their heads, had picked their way into the living room and paid homage to Madrina, there was a moment of silence for the mutineer.

  “Good,” Madrina said, taking the census through her lorgnette, attached by a wisp of chain to her collar. I can remember how struck I was by this large matriarchal woman with a full-featured serenity of visage entirely absent in the generations grouped before her. “Good,” she repeated, “you’ve come at last. And where is Millicent?”

  “Silly Milly,” I remarked, from behind the Christmas tree. I had winnowed my presents from a heap which cornucopiaed from the base of the spruce to the shoulder of the hearth, and was engaged in arraying them in good order for opening. The face of the tree was splendid in red candles, with fine antique ornaments, gilt and silver, garnet and emerald, and Bohemian crystal of the sort Madrina said was no longer made. “Silly Milly,” I said, “won’t come to German Christmas.”

  Uncle Charles requested my silence, and Aunt Alice stepped forward.

  “It’s nothing, Madrina,” she said, and smiled.

  “What? What’s nothing? Don’t smile at me that way, Alice. Are you ill?”

  “Milly’s taking a stand,” Uncle Charles announced, and I saw my father wince. “I’m sure she’ll be in in a while, Madrina.”

  “Taking a stand? What on earth is he saying?” Madrina seized her lorgnette again and peered at her elder son as at an impostor. “The child is far too young to take a stand on anything.”

  She pronounced “take-a-stand” all in a word, as if Milly, in conspiracy with Uncle Charles, were doing something unheard-of, even a trifle indecent.

  “What is it, Charles? Have her come in this instant.”

  “In a few minutes, Madrina,” my father said. “She’s being very silly about it.”

  “Silly Milly,” I repeated, vindicated, and was promptly admonished by my sister Polly, the eldest of the younger generation and its unofficial keeper. Madrina’s attention was thereby drawn to me.

  “Wolfgang,” she said, “come out from behind that tree and fetch a candy to your cousin.”

  “My name’s not Wolfgang,” I objected, but out I came. Madrina had taken to calling me Wolfgang quite arbitrarily, since my given name is Wendell and my popular title is Sandy. I think Wolfgang satisfied a curious humor of Madrina’s devoted to the nettling of my parents. “What candy?” I said.

  “What candy, Madrina,” Polly said. Polly was very tiresome as a child.

  “It doesn’t matter what candy,” my mother said. “Do as you’re told, Wendell.”

  “Sandy,” I said. I ran into the dining room to look for candy and greet the servants, but was arrested, as I had been every year, by the wondrous centerpiece on the table. It was five feet long, Saint Nicholas and the reindeer before a hostelry, hand-wrought of mahogany and bone, and restaged each year with cotton-and-mica snow. After a long service in Germany, a century of Hartlingen Christmases, it had been delivered into Madrina’s hands, and now symbolized to all of us not only Christmas but the past. It was girded round with pine fronds and holly, the orbit of a vast oval of silverware and banquet oddments, muscat raisins, mints, almonds, wine, cranberry jelly, and butterballs. Madrina had beautiful silver, ancient and heavy with Hartlingen history, the epochs of pigs with apples in their mouths and wine from golden goblets.

  I secured a thin mint for Milly, but it deteriorated in transit, and Madrina instructed me to throw it into the fire. “Take one of those,” she said, and pointed out a gleaming coffer on a side table, guarded by dancing Dresden figurines, ivory burgomeisters, and a peevish dachshund named Bismark V, decaying on a period chair.

  “I hope they’re not German candies,” I said.

  “You’d be in luck if they were,” Madrina told me, and laughed so oddly that I turned to stare at her. The reason for Milly’s stand had obviously been explained, and now my grandmother regarded the family, fourteen strong about the room, with an abstracted gaze, as if they could not be her family after all.

  Uncomfortable, I selected the biggest item from the box and hastened through the snow to Milly. Milly had her nose pressed to the rear window of the car, and although she ducked back at my appearance, I knew she was happy someone had come.

  “Here, silly,” I said.

  She struck the candy from my hand.

  “Oh-h!” Milly gasped. “That old German thing! I don’t love her anymore.”

  “Can I have your candy, then?” I said, picking it up.

  “No!” Milly said and, snatching it from me, burst into tears. Now she was uglier than ever, and I had neither the age nor wisdom to be sorry for her. “And I won’t com
e in. I won’t!” Her knee, in stamping, knocked the candy into the snow.

  “All right,” I said, seizing it, “but you’re spoiling everything.” I ran back up the path, my mission a delightful failure.

  The wreathed light from the windows gave body to the darkness, breathing tracery into the slow arras of snow. It gave the house a snug, enchanted air, like some magic sanctuary of childhood deep in a wood. The holly berries on the door wreath, round red as picture peasants’ cheeks, and the deep green halo of ground pine itself were as fresh as our New World winter. Inside, the voices traveled on pine-scented air, safe from the future and from Millicent’s war.

  “Silly Milly lost the candy in the snow and won’t come in,” I reported, swallowing the last of it.

  There was a pause, and eyes turned to Madrina for her dictum.

  Madrina said, “How very foolish.”

  She rang for Clara, who presently appeared with a copper caldron of brandy and milk and nutmeg, and a set of silver mugs. There was a fine bowl of nuts by the fire, black walnuts, butternuts, and hazel nuts, and seated in warmth, one eye cast luxuriously on my presents, I indulged myself in contempt for Milly and pity for Madrina, undone by the rude granddaughter outside.

  Seated in her flowered chair as still and enduring as the dry cattails and bittersweet in the vase behind her, her face alive with soft expressive rhythms, like a moment of birds in a winter tree, Madrina told us a tale of another Christmas, another century.

  Her German cousin Ernst was traveling with his mother to a Hartlingen Christmas of long ago, and as the carriage was to pass the region of the Black Forest, the coachman advised his passengers of the danger of brigands, then very numerous in the byways. The brigands were captained by a well-mannered man of noble extraction, so it was said, who treated his victims with great courtesy so long as they offered no resistance, but dealt very harshly with objectors. Madrina’s cousin Ernst was just the sort to object, he had no sense of humor in such matters, and his mother cautioned him strongly against rash actions in the event of trouble. No sooner had she spoken than the carriage halted, and she was handed down by an enormous bearded gentleman, who relieved her discreetly of all jewelery but a family brooch, of the sentimental value of which she had managed to persuade him. At this moment Ernst sprang from the carriage, brandishing a pistol, and was on the point of taking a stand on the matter, Madrina said tartly, when his head, parted from his shoulders by the sword of a mounted henchman, rolled ignominiously under the carriage. Very regrettable, the chieftain remarked, and seized the brooch.

  Madrina’s aunt was inconsolable. She bent and peered under the carriage, where, catching the eye of her son, she shouted at him: “I told you, Ernst! I told you, you blockhead!”

  Madrina peered from one descendant to the next, as if seeking a successor by the gauge of laughter. But her own smile faltered, then disappeared entirely. “We shall go to dinner,” she whispered. The family stared toward the hallway, where not Milly but Clara, her hands prim on her apron, leaned sepulchrally into the room. “We will start without Miss Millicent, Clara,” Madrina said, less to Clara than to Milly herself, as if she had said, I told you, Ernst, I told you!

  Marching past the faded tapestries and bronze-green urns from the halls of her forebears, artifacts far too ponderous for the houses of her children, Madrina entered the dining room, touching the oaken chairs fondly as she journeyed to her place.

  “She will come in a minute, Madrina,” Aunt Alice said.

  “She will do as she pleases,” said Madrina.

  From my position, far away below the salt, the centerpiece stretched eternally between the two lines of heads which converged on the white face of Madrina. She gave a whispered benediction, and afterward the family toasted her, holding high the glasses of Rhenish wine. Against the candlelight and the chandelier, the red wine glowed like liquid rubies, and I was a baron at a medieval board, drunk on the wine of my betters.

  When, late in the second course, the centerpiece ignited from a fallen candle, the flame ran a furious circle in the snow before an uncle had the wit to dash his wine at it. The inn was tinder in the molten cotton, and the whalebone reindeer pranced proudly on the table, freed forever of Saint Nicholas, who perished in his sleigh.

  In the chaos of motion and voices I saw Madrina, the only person still seated, observing the destruction as if the ruin of this antiquated treasure was somehow fitting, as if she sensed that, like the tapestries and urns, it was far too venerable and vast to serve the New World Hartlingens again.

  She did not respond to the condolences addressed to her, but sat in silence, her hands folded on her lap. When at last she could be heard, she said: “Milly … I would like to see Milly.”

  And as if the girl had been poised on the threshold, the door flew open and Milly appeared, in a flurry of snow and tears, stumbling forward to Madrina. Milly cried very loudly in Madrina’s embrace, and Madrina was crying, too, a harsh unwilling sputter which her glaring eyes denied.

  “It’s all my fault,” Milly was saying, “it’s all my fault.”

  And Madrina, looking over Milly’s shoulder at the black Saint Nicholas, said: “How foolish, my dear. I am as American as you are. We are simply celebrating Christmas Eve.”

  1951

  LATE IN THE SEASON

  It was just at the edge of the late November road, a halted thing too large for the New England countryside, neither retreating nor pulling in its head, but waiting for the station wagon. Cici Avery saw it first, a dark giant turtle, as solitary as a misplaced object, as something left behind after its season. She nudged her husband and pointed, unwilling to break the silence in the car.

  Frank Avery saw the turtle and slowed. If he had been alone, he would have swerved to hit it, Cici decided, selecting the untruth which suited her mood.

  The small eyes fastened on the man. The tail, ridged with reptilian fins, lay still in the dust like a thick dead snake, pointing to the yellowed weeds which, leading back over a slight crest and descending thickly to the ditch, were flattened and coated by a wake of mud.

  Cici, hands in her trousers, moved in unlaced boots past her husband. The tips of the laces flicked in the dust like broken whip ends.

  “Poor monster,” she whispered to the turtle. “It’s late in the year for you, you’re past your season.”

  “Monster isn’t the word,” Frank Avery said. “I’ve never seen such a brute.” He ventured a thrust at it with his riding boot. “It’s not really a turtle?” he said.

  “A snapping turtle,” Cici said. She was a big untidy girl whose straw-colored hair blurred the lines of her face.

  “A man-eater,” he said. “It must be two feet across.”

  “It’s a very big old monster,” she said, sinking down on the crest behind it and stroking the triangular snout with her stick. The mouth reared back over the shell, its jaws slicing the stick with a leathery thump.

  “Dear God!” Frank said.

  Cici eased to her elbow in the grass, stretching the long legs in faded hunting pants out to one side of the turtle. She studied her husband. Frank Avery, precise in his new riding habit, stood uncertain beside the bull-like turtle, afraid of it and fascinated at once.

  The very way he behaves with me, the thought recurred to her, as if I were some slightly disgusting animal, and yet he prides himself on his technique, which doesn’t include having children. Romance is the watchword, but no children, not for a while. And then he is hurt because I don’t love him. As if we were haggling over love as the stud fee, as if I had bargained with him for his manhood, she thought, and didn’t realize until I took it home what a rotten bargain I had made.

  Frank Avery stretched out his toe and sent the turtle sprawling on its back.

  “Come on, you coward,” he said. “Fight.”

  The turtle reached back into the dust with its snout and pivoted itself upright with its neck muscles, then heaved around to face the enemy.

  “Leave it alone,�
� Cici said. “It can’t help being a turtle.”

  “We should kill it,” Frank told her. “It’s disgusting.”

  We should kill it, she thought, because it’s harmful on a farm, not for your reason. Lying there watching him badger the turtle, she felt a slow hurt anger crawling through her lungs, as if he had injured her over a period of time and only now she understood. She was sorry for the turtle, for its mute acceptance of the riding boots which barred its way.

  “You don’t have to look at it,” she said. “Besides, it’s mine. I saw it first.”

  He turned to her, hands on hips, smiling his party smile.

  “A fine thing,” he said, and waited for her question.

  “What is?” she obliged him, after a moment.

  “Here we’ve been married a year and now it’s turtles. First it was kittens and puppies, and then horses, and now turtles. I appreciate your instincts, Cici, but you can’t get weepy over turtles!”

  He laughed sharply.

  “Can’t I?” she said. Unsmiling, she watched the laugh wither in his mouth.

  Frank kicked suddenly at the turtle’s head, but his toe shrank from the contact and only arched a wave of dust into the hard stretched mouth and the little eyes. When the turtle blinked, the dust particles fell from above its eyelids.

  “Did I ever tell you about Toby Snead, Frank? When the other kids would torture a rat or a frog, Toby Snead would jump around, squealing and giggling. He loved it. He was skinny and weak, and he loved to see them pick on something besides himself.”

  “Was I giggling?” Frank said. His face was white.

  I’ve gone too far, Cici thought, and I’m going to go farther. She felt exhausted, lying back in the natural grass, easing herself of a year of disappointment as calmly as a baby spitting up cereal, a little startled by the produce of its mouth, yet more curious than concerned.

  “And you’ll get your manly new boots dirty, Frank,” she murmured.

  “I haven’t been here every year to get them faded,” he said. When she didn’t answer, he added, “And pick up a local accent, and ogle the hired hand.”