Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods, Page 2

  So that was the reason for the messages. When the old stone church begged her to ‘remember,’ the word was not from this time, not from this life but from some other time, some other life in which the church had also existed. Another Marianne had known the church then, there. She had been inside the church, intimate with it, able to do something there, leave some symbolic taint of herself, some word, some information. Marianne the child struggled with the concept. It was as though someone had put a message in a bottle or a hollow tree, except that the message was just for her. Someone, herself, had left her a message about a terrible thing.

  ‘Something terrible happened in that other world,’ she told herself. ‘To me. To that Marianne. And in this world, it must not happen. That is what the messages are all about.’ She was as certain of this as she was of her name. Marianne. Marianne Zahmani. This Marianne. Herself.

  As she lay there in bed that early morning, she worked it out, slowly. The person who had left these messages was another, a grown-up Marianne. She began to sense, however vaguely at first, that the life of the grown-up Marianne had always been there, hanging at the edges of each day’s experiences, awaiting its own reaffirmation. The discovery came with a sense of shock and ultimate recognition, like seeing her face in a mirror and realizing for the first time that it was her own unique and mortal image, not an immortal shadow awaiting her in some other world. Most of her present life had simply affirmed and repeated another life! A life previously lived. By someone else! By that grown-up person that was in some strange way herself! That is why everything had been so familiar!

  She had figured it out by the time people had begun to stir. She dressed for breakfast as she did every morning, not suspecting what would come next. She had not foreseen the implications of the change. Because this thing had happened that had never happened before, this morning, for the first time in her life, she went down the stairs to confront a day in which there were many events she would not foresee.

  Harvey said something angry at breakfast, something she did not understand and had not anticipated. There was a guest for lunch, someone she did not recognize. By early after-noon, she was in a panic, unable to deal with this sudden, horribly surprising world. She retreated to her room, trying desperately to appear poised, failing miserably.

  She felt lost, betrayed, and angry, too, at that other Marianne for having done this to her. Other children met the strangeness of the world as babies; by the time they were ten, they had some notion of how it was done. Now she must learn it all at once, late, without letting anyone know how hideously unprepared she was.

  She learned.

  Most days there were only one or two things she was not ready for. Some days were totally anticipated, just as they had always been. As she learned to poise herself upon the moment, taking her clues from others, reacting as they did, her fear and panic dwindled, but the anger remained. It was not fair to have done this to her. Not fair. Not right! Even though there was reason for the messages she had received, still, whoever-it-was shouldn’t have done this to her! Shouldn’t have done it even though Marianne believed that what it had told her was true.

  Gradually, she came to act on that belief.

  Harvey asked her to go riding with him. She remembered having done so on a bright spring morning just like this one. Now, on the morning of that day – on this morning—she decided it was better not to go.

  ‘What’s the matter, Marianne?’ asked Mama. ‘Don’t you want to go riding with your big brother?’

  ‘No thank you, Mama. Not right now.’ Knowing why, precisely. That other time, in that other life, she had gone riding with Harvey and he had asked her certain questions about Mama that Marianne, all unwitting, had answered. It would be better not to talk about those things. Better not give him the opportunity to ask.

  But since she did not go with him, she spent the day being terrified. By changing now what she had done in that other life, she had changed the day completely. Everything in it was different and unexpected. By evening she was exhausted at the emotional battering, and yet there was a touch of wild exhilaration as well. It had been like a roller coaster. A kind of swooping weightlessness.

  Was this the way most people lived? With this shock of events? She could not decide whether she could bear it or not.

  As the spring and summer wore on, the choices became more difficult and the former life increasingly unclear. Sometimes it was only possible to guess what had been done before and what kind of deviation was needed to change the old life into something new. Still, she kept trying. By August, the greater part of every day came as a surprise, and she relished the few familiar hours as rewards for the struggle she was making.

  ‘I wish you’d girl-talk just with me, Mama. When Harvey’s there, he spoils it.’

  ‘Now, Mist Princess. Harvey is your half brother. My stepson. He’s family, and we have to make him feel loved and welcome.’ Cloud-haired mama looked surprised and a little offended, but Marianne persevered.

  ‘He looks at you like the man looked at the lady on TV when she took her clothes off. I just don’t think he should come in your bedroom with us all the time. He makes me feel nasty.’

  That was not something an eleven-year-old Marianne had said the other time. Now that it had been said, however, Mama saw what Marianne had seen. What she had accepted as filial affection—Mama had very little experience of the world and Papa liked her exactly that way—could be interpreted as a much more basic emotion. Harvey was, after all, a grown man only a few years younger than Cloud-haired mama and not of any blood kin to her. The bedroom visits were curtailed, and Marianne felt relief. That particular juncture had been safely passed.

  Mama did not leave well enough alone, however. She spoke to Papa in the garden.

  ‘Haurvatat, you should set Harvey up with his own establishment up in Boston. He’s twenty-six. He’s teaching full-time now, and he needs the experience of having his own establishment rather than living in hotels and commuting back and forth every weekend.’

  Papa agreed, somewhat surprised.

  Harvey sulked, furious. ‘What do you and your pretty-girl mother think you’re doing,’ he attacked Marianne. ‘He was my father a long time before he was yours. You think you’re going to get me out of the picture, you’re crazy. I’m his heir, his only son, and don’t you and pretty-face forget it!’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ the child Marianne had retorted, honestly confused. ‘It’s not nice to talk that way about Mama, Harvey.’

  ‘Papa never told me I ought to leave home until she started on him!’

  ‘Nobody wants you to leave home. Mama just thinks you need to have a place of your own. She said I should have one, too, as soon as I’m finished with school. She says everyone needs the experience of independence.’

  ‘She’s a fine one to talk.’

  What could Marianne say. Papa had come along and married Mama when she was only a girl. Everyone knew that. ’Maybe she regrets not having had the experience, Harvey,’ she said in a suddenly adult voice with a mature insight, making him stare at her incredulously and coming closer to the truth than she knew.

  Her feelings about all this were uncertain, vacillating. None of this had happened the other time. She didn’t know what to do. There was no dream message to enlighten her, no voice coming from one of those strange places that seemed so familiar but were not. She spent long hours hiding in her bedroom or riding alone, trying to understand what needed to be done next, but there were no answers. Was Harvey being changed by her changes? Or was he doing slightly different things but remaining the same? Was the danger still there?

  Her confusion was growing into something approaching a nervous collapse when an invitation arrived from Harvey’s aunt, his mother’s sister, Tabiti Delubovoska. Madame Delubovoska was inviting her favorite—and only—nephew for a visit in Lubovosk. A long visit.

  Great-aunt Dagma had much to say about the inadvisability of this. ‘Tabiti
is not a nice woman,’ she said to Papa and Mama, not seeing Marianne where she was curled behind the pillows on the window seat. ‘She cannot be a good influence on Harvey. She is likely to be just the opposite.’

  ‘Harvey’s twenty-six,’ Papa said in a mild voice. ‘He’s a grown man, Aunt Dagma. I can hardly forbid it.’

  ‘Ever since Lubovosk split away from Alphenlicht and mixed with those people from the north, there has been evil there. You know it as well as I do, Haurvatat. No good will come of this visit.’ She tapped her ebony cane on the floor to emphasize the point. ‘Mind me, nephew. No good will come of it.’

  Though Marianne did not remember this conversation having happened before, Harvey had gone to Lubovosk that other time as well. It was as though nothing had really changed! She was puzzled and anxious about this. Every time she changed something, the time pendulum swung back again. The finicky details of daily life as it had been lived before were becoming more and more vacillating and obscure, but the broad pattern seemed as though graven in stone, unchangeable.

  And yet, she was grateful to see him go. With him gone, the daily pattern of life became calm, almost placid, each day’s path as simple as a ribbon, running from end to end, almost totally familiar. There was danger in this placidity. Danger in the easy living of each day, danger she could feel without being able to respond to it at all. She began to wake in the middle of the night from restless dreams believing there was some message important to her that she was not receiving.

  And it was in this state of frustration that she sought the Beale Street church again. Perhaps the message that had evaded her when she was a child would be clear to her now that she was twelve.

  The church was usually locked. On several occasions before she had gone around it, pulling at the doors, trying to find a way in. Today, however, there had been a funeral, and the mourners were still gathered in muted clusters on the side-walk as she slipped past them, through the open door and into the nave.

  She knew it. The minute the lozenges of colored light from the tall windows began to swim across her face, she knew the place. There was a bell tower, reached by a twisting flight of stairs behind her in the corner. There was a choir loft on either side of the sanctuary, and a row of bronze plates set into the stone floor where the bodies or ashes of parishioners rested. It was, she guessed, a Catholic or Anglican church. Not a church Marianne would ever have attended. She was being taught the Magian faith of her ancient forebears, and that sect built no edifice in this place or in any other. Still, she knew this church as she knew her own bedroom. Grown-up Marianne had been here.

  And she had left something here. The other Marianne had come to this place and set something here, some word, some symbol perhaps. Something meant to be found by the young Marianne in this separate life. Something to help. Here, and in the house, the shelter, the tree, the wall. In each of them was something she needed.

  She sought what it held for her.

  It was no message writ large in the stone. The only words carved there were ones of praise to God or thanks for past gifts. It was no song being sung. It was nothing written into the back of a hymnal. She had not really expected that.

  She sat down, waiting. The place had summoned her, “here,” and she was “here,” ready to listen. Time went on. The sun swam a bit lower, sending new jewels of light into the floor and drawing her eyes up to the stained-glass window that cast them. St George. She recognized him from a storybook. St George and the dragon. It was not a very reptilian dragon, rather more doglike in general appearance but with a spiny crest and a lashing, lizardine tail. Its hide was blue as steel. The knight’s horse was reared high in fear, and the saint looked likely to lose his seat in the instant. The spear was only a straw. The dog-dragon would bite it in two.

  Sitting there in the glow brought it back. Grown-up Marianne had come here before, between times, to sit in this place and look at this same window. “Remember,” she had whispered to the stone, the wood pews, the stained glass, the carved altar screen. “Remember,” bidding them summon herself when she returned as a child, as they had done. The memory was amber, warm, glowing with satisfaction. Whatever had been done here had been done well. ‘Are you here?’ she whispered to the window.

  The dog-dragon in the stained-glass window moved its head to look at her, staring at her with large, sunflamed eyes. It panted, its pointed tongue sinuous as a serpent’s. ‘Are you ready?’ it asked. ‘Do you need me now?’

  She gasped, wrapping her arms tightly around herself in self-protection. The dog continued to stare, its tongue flickering, an isolated shimmer of sunlight. Perhaps she was merely having another of those double visions, those bizarre transparencies laid over the reality of life. And yet, in her mind the voice seemed real and very clear, demanding an answer. ‘Do you need me now?’

  ‘Not quite yet,’ she answered softly. ‘Soon, maybe.’

  The dog-dragon turned back to contemplate the knight poised above him, dog eyes laughing. One knew he had no fear of either the steed or the armor. When both the saint and the horse were ashes upon the wind, the dog-dragon would remain.

  ‘He’s a momentary god,’ a voice inside her said and was then silent. Marianne was frowning as she left the church.

  Driven by a need to clarify what was happening, to connect it to anything she understood, she went to the house where the little old Chinese woman often slept upon the porch, and stood at the edge of the public walk where the brick path curved to the house. She called, tentatively, as one might call a puppy. ‘Here, come on, come on.’ Through the closed door a red dog came out, fluffed like a pom-pom, his black mouth gaped wide and his long, black tongue extended in a monstrous yawn. His face changed as she looked at it, becoming another kind of face for a moment, an Oriental face, wrinkled away from fangs much longer than any mere dog could have needed. He turned, posed, raising one foot as though to rest it upon something and she recognized him. There was a statue of him at home in Papa’s room. One of him and one of his mate with a cub beneath her paw.

  ‘Now?’ he asked. ‘We’ve been reasonably patient.’

  ‘Not quite yet. I only wanted to be sure you were here.’

  ‘Where else would we be?’ the dog asked with stern amusement. ‘Didn’t you tell us to stay here until we were needed? You haven’t forgotten that, have you?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Marianne. ‘Sometimes I forget parts of things I’m supposed to know. Sometimes I get confused. I’m not always sure what’s real.’

  ‘There are five of us,’ the dog said. ‘You do remember that.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, surprising herself. She did know that. ‘I don’t exactly know what all five of you are.’

  ‘You’ll remember,’ said the red dog, turning to trot back to the porch beside the old woman. ‘You’ll remember.’

  It was late and Marianne was very tired, but she did stop at the viny wall and whistle, softly, wondering what might come to her call. What came was the size of a large calf, black as the inside of a fireplace, with a mouth and eyes the color of ripe cherries, red as jelly.

  ‘Just checking,’ said Marianne somewhat weakly.

  ‘Don’t waste our time, woman,’ the Black Dog said.

  ‘I’m not really a woman, not yet,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes you were,’ he replied. ‘Were, are, will be. We’re ready when you are. Just call as you ride past.’

  ‘Ride past?’ she asked, for that instant believing she understood everything completely. ‘Oh, yes. I will.’ She turned away, feeling the fiery eyes of the Black Dog burn into her back as she trudged home. She did not call up the dog of the shelter or the dog of the tree. Dragon Dog, Foo Dog, Black Dog—what would the others be? She was not sure she wanted to know, but her mind told her. Wolf Dog and Dingo. Blue dog, red dog, black dog, silver dog, and yellow dog.

  ‘Momentary gods,’ she said to herself, remembering the words without knowing what they meant.

  ‘Papa, what’s a momentary god
?’ she asked him at dinner. It was safe to do so. Harvey was still abroad.

  ‘A what, Mist Princess? A momentary god? Haven’t the foggiest idea.’

  ‘Perhaps a very little god?’ laughed Cloud-haired mama. ’Perhaps a very tiny one. Who only lasts for a moment?’

  ‘Where did you hear a strange phrase like that?’ Great-aunt Dagma wanted to know, cleaving immediately to the underlying significance of the question or event, as she always did. Others could be misled, or diverted by trivia, but seldom Great-aunt Dagma. ‘Who used those words?’

  Marianne shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I just heard it somewhere. Maybe on TV.’

  ‘I would say,’ Great-aunt Dagma told her, ‘that a momentary god is one summoned up or invoked for a momentary occasion. A brief time.’

  ‘Maybe that’s it,’ Marianne murmured.

  ‘I would say further,’ Great-aunt went on inexorably, ’that anyone who did so had better have strong nerves and excellent qualities of conceptualization. I shouldn’t think a momentary god would necessarily wish to be dismissed once the moment was over.’

  ‘What do you suppose one would look like?’ Marianne asked, not needing to pretend innocence. She was innocent of anything except conjecture. ‘Do you suppose one could look like a dog?’

  Great-aunt Dagma fixed her with a strange, glowing eye. ’I suppose one might. Or a lion, or a multi-armed idol, or a dragon or a worm, perhaps. Depending upon what one needed.’

  ‘Tsk, Aunt Dagma, you’re feeding the child stories again,’ Papa said.

  ‘Well, such stories were fed to you, nephew, and you suffered little from it.’

  ‘What did you mean, Great-aunt Dagma, about the god not wanting to be dismissed?’

  ‘Well, child. I suppose it would be like summoning a very powerful servant of some kind. Or perhaps a genie. One summons the creature up, and one says, “Mend me that fence,” or something suitable. And the creature does it. But then, when the task is done, it does not necessarily want to go into its bottle or to the servants’ quarters where nothing interesting is happening. It may insist upon staying around, perhaps eating and drinking or chasing pretty ladies…’