Chapter 2, ‘According to Legend,’ by Anne Arlington

The Prime Mover of my unplanned day left the cafe so quickly that I stepped lively to catch up with him, still sucking the frappu through a straw that was too short for the clear plastic cup and remembering I hadn’t paid for the drink. Oh, well. Bocca knew where I lived. He could always come to my door or text me, unless he trusted I’d pay up later.

Chatty little groups of people I didn’t recognize as locals curdled around outdoor tables and at the threshold of pocket-pet-size shops whose doors were wide open. Nearly all of them were dressed in shorts, bathing suits, sleeveless tees and other garments better suited for the Bahamas than for the Jersey Shore just coming out of the tail end of spring. The temperature inland was expected to reach into the high 80s, but here, a few blocks from the ocean, it was in the high 60s. I had lived at the Shore long enough to know that some people at the beach on the first day of summer dress for the beach no matter how chilly it is, for no other reason than that it is the first day of summer and they are at the beach, and nothing is going to stop them from acting as if they belong on the beach.

Put in perspective with this crowd, the white suit wasn’t so incongruous, after all. The person who filled it, who by that point had introduced himself as Rolands Dzenis, gestured toward the half-naked forms along the way and stepped aside so the cameraman could get a clear shot.

He edged close to the side of the camera, speaking so only the microphone, the cameraman and I could catch his voice. “This is amazing,” he said as if fearing to disturb a rare, nesting beast. “Two hundred years ago, what we today call casual dress was called ‘undress.’ I’d say these folks were closer to being just plain undressed than casual.”

He accosted a ring of women whose pale flesh around their bikini tops shone with tanning product. “Ladies, aren’t you cold?”

Huge sunglasses concealed a good deal of their faces along with their eyes, an arrangement that reminded me, queasily, of ant heads in a macro lens. But I knew they were looking at Rolands. Their heads turned toward the sound of his voice; they were giggling and flashing the kind of perfectly aligned, American-white teeth that shine brighter than the Transfiguration.

“This is the Shore,” one protested as her friends half-laughed, half-simpered. “This is how you dress at the Shore. Don’t you have beaches where you come from?”

“Yes, but where I come from, we like to stay warm! Tell me: the people who lived around here more than two hundred years ago didn’t have fancy swimwear. If they went swimming, they went in the altogether. Do you think they’d have been happier swimming in bathing suits instead of birthday suits?”

The directions of the women’s heads denoted them looking at each other. There were hesitant splutterings. A voice emerged. “I don’t think they’d have known any better.” The speaker turned her head from the camera to Rolands. “They were products of their times. They didn’t have bathing suits, so they didn’t know about bathing suits. They’d have been happy just being in the water.”

“They didn’t have to worry about squeezing themselves into something that fit or that made them look good, either,” the friend on her left chimed in.

“People think women have it easier now than they did in the past, but when you think about how contemporary society dictates how women are supposed to look, I think women in the past had it easier. Unlike them, we’re high maintenance. Really high maintenance. We can’t be fat. Our hair can’t be gray. We have to get facelifts. We have to make our breasts bigger and our tummies smaller.”

“Not all of us have to do that,” said a friend who until that point had not been heard clearly. “Some of us have parts that don’t need to be fixed.”

Rolands jumped on the verb. “Fixed? Contemporary women feel they have attributes that need to be fixed? Doesn’t ‘fixed’ imply that something is broken and needs to be mended?”

“Not necessarily. I think it means something can use improvement. There’s nothing wrong with improving what you have.”

“Why would you want to improve something that you have and that’s not broken and would otherwise not need anything done to it?”

“It’s the same thing as with a house,” said the first woman. “You live there, but every now and then you like to give it a fresh coat of paint or knock out a few walls.”

“Have you done that to your own house?”

“We turned our home from a three-room cottage on the beach into a home entertainment venue with a wet bar.”

“You did all that with a three-room cottage? On the original footprint?”

“We had to get permission from the town, but it sure was worth it.”

“You said it was a cottage. Was it a summer bungalow, like the ones built south of here, in Ocean Beach?”

“Oh no, ours was nothing like that. It was a real cottage, built the year after this town was founded.”

“And when was the town founded?”

“I think it was 1869, 1870.”

“So you razed a house that was built when the town was founded and was likely considered part of the history of the town. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“You tore down your home knowing it was part of local history.”

“It was old.” The whine approached the defensive. “We wanted the kids to have something better. Would you want your own kids growing up in a place that was more than a hundred years old?”

“Actually, where I come from, a house built a hundred years ago is considered new. Most of the houses on my street where I lived had been built two, three hundred years ago.”

“Wow! What was it like with everybody trying to use the outhouse at the same time?”

I think that was the moment when Rolands realized it was time to go and till another part of the landscape for more fertile soil. After a hasty thanks to the interviewees, he scurried down the alleyway between Jer’s cafe and the pizza parlor. All the while he spoke to the camera, walking backward. Despite the low pH of what he’d found on the sidewalk, he was optimistic.

“I confess, that turned out a wee bit more cerebral than I expected. Like a contestant in a beauty pageant waxing intellectual as she answers the judges’ questions clad in a thong and bandeau. Do you know,” he continued, without taking a breath, “it’s amazing, how little Americans appreciate their past. In this country, it’s all about progress, which is a poor euphemism for the making of money. You don’t build things to last, you build things so you’ve got to take them down and build anew so people can make money in the process. There’s no sense of or appreciation for heritage.”

“That’s not true,” I said, having no desire to precede my annoyance with an apology or to decorate it with niceties. “This nation is exceptionally concerned about its heritage. The federal government has a Federal Preservation Institute that’s part of the National Park Service. Every state has a historic preservation commission; so does every municipality. Historic preservation has been a priority of this nation since before the Centennial, in 1976, when the places like Pennsylvania Station in New York City were being torn down in the name of modernization.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” mourned Rolands, shaking his head. “I’m not talking about a nation’s obligation to its historical past. I’m talking about families’ preservation of their own past. Don’t you know anyone who lives in a house that was passed to them from their parents, and that house had been in the family for generations before that?”

Of course not. But I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t the American way. Or, at least, it wasn’t the way of the Americans I knew. “If every family did that, there’d be fewer houses built. If there are fewer new homes, there’s no work for construction workers. And if there’s no demand for new homes, there’s no demand to make the materials that go into home building. The people who make the materials would be out of work. More people out of work means less money available to put into the economy.”

“No, there would be other ways to make money and get it into the system. A nation with a sense of heritage always finds those ways. If this country had a sense of heritage, it would never use cheap, shoddy materials to build houses. But it doesn’t have a sense of heritage. It doesn’t want things to last. It prefers to tear down, like a religious zealot casting opponents into Hell, enjoying every moment of doing so.”

Well. The speech was a tad on the strong side. Rolands’s homeland had broken away from the old Soviet Union in 1991, during a string of peaceful revolutions that proved Communism was a failed form of extreme micromanagement. What he said could have been lifted from a Communist party handbook on the evils and inefficiencies of capitalism. But was he old enough to have been active in the party? He had the face of a thirty-year-old but the graying hair of someone at least ten years older. And his eyes … steady with intelligence, glittering with wit, warm with patience, but sharp with a reluctance to suffer fools. Of course, he needed a full range of emotion. He was the core of this program. His producers wouldn’t let him travel the world if he couldn’t deliver a product that was entertaining. He must have known what he was doing. I didn’t.

While I stood there, ruminating, uncertain what to say but unwilling to make Rolands mad at me, he wagged his finger at the cameraman, and the recording stopped. “What happened? You were doing brilliantly! Not everyone is comfortable with the camera.”

“I can’t decide if you’re out to discover the Hessians in Monmouth County or to make fun of whatever you run into along the way.”

I’d never known eyes to gasp, but Rolands’s did. They popped wider and faster than the window we threw open at work the day the egg burst in the microwave. I thought I was about to be yelled at. Instead, those popping eyes tripped into an expression of joyful astonishment that flooded Rolands’s voice.

“Darling! This is a trip of discovery! If we find Hessians, we find Hessians. If we don’t, we don’t. Now come along. Avos! as my Russian friends would say. Hit or miss, it will all turn out for the best, and we shall see what we shall see!”

For the second time that morning he was leading me on, and I followed, little suspecting that his quest would have nothing to do with Hessians or even the world as I had allowed myself to know it.

from ‘According to Legend,’ by Anne Arlington: From the Top

Tags

friendship, History, Jersey Shore

Despair and stupidity: people of sound imagination aren’t supposed to confuse the two, but by the time the sun set on the longest day of the year, I sure had smudged the line between them.

I don’t know who or what was responsible—my old friend Jer or my addiction to the coffees he served at his cafe down the street. At any rate, it happened, pushed off an allegorical cliff by a metaphorical malcontent and carried toward the ground like a flying squirrel scrambling to ride the thermals when it misses a branch.

It was the first day of summer, and I was home on vacation from my job as a shop girl. I wasn’t going anywhere, either on the week off or in my life. The best thing was that I had a chance to save badly needed funds. I didn’t have to spend money on food from the mall eateries because I was worked so hard I was hungry all the time, and I didn’t have to waste money on a cab to get home when my manager kept me after the public buses stopped running. My inclination to continue saving money that week was so earnest that I decided not to indulge in a professional hairstyling and as usual would cut my own hair. Nothing short or elaborate, mind you. Just a bob, straight across the bottom, with irregular bangs that blended in with the long hair on the sides. Simple. My technique required holding a small mirror to see the back of my head in the bathroom mirror and taking short snips with a steady hand. Sometimes the line was even; sometimes I had to go running to Clarissa at the salon near the store for some quick damage control. She never charged me. She said she couldn’t put a price on the laugh she got from seeing what I’d done to myself.

That new-summer day, however, I had one of my best forays into haircutting ever. Regrettably, I was feeling so low about my impecunious lot in life that instead of dredging up any pride in what was really a socially acceptable form of self-mutilation, all I could think of was how Jer would style my hair when we were kids in the industrial part of North Jersey, on the kind of street where mechanics and garbage men lived next door to CEOs and surgeons. Jer’s dad was the CEO, and mine was the mechanic. It didn’t matter to Jer, though. He treated me as if my dad owned the world and I could pay for the most expensive makeover in Manhattan.

As sometimes or often or inevitably happens to young adults, the vagaries of parental decisions and schooling brought us miles and fortunes apart. Now I was living at the Jersey Shore a few blocks away from the ocean, in a hamster cage of a cottage that had no central heating or an adult-size fridge. Jer owned bed and breakfast inns all over the state. One of those “B&B’s” was in my town, next to a coffee shop that Jer also owned and was a fond watering hole with locals and tourists alike. Jer himself stopped by only in the off-season. He loathed summers here. Too much heat and humidity, he said, so he forsook us for his ancestors’ home in the highlands of Poland, where the air was cooler and cleaner. He didn’t speak Polish.

He was in Poland now. We were keeping in touch through social media. I posted an epistle in which I bewailed the dismalness of my state of non-being.

The response was immediate: “You need a vacation.”

“This IS my vacation.” I softened my whine with “:P, “ which turned into a smiley sticking out its tongue.

Jer liked that, but that was the end of the exchange, and I figured that was all he had to say about my illustrious circumstances. About an hour later I heard the popping bell sound of a notification and saw, in a fading text box in the lower left corner of my screen, “Go to the coffee shop. Bocanegra will make you his new frappu: four regional blends, hazelnut spread and naturally effervescent water from the local reservoir.”

My reply: “If the water’s local, the fizz is hardly natural.”

“Ha. Ha. Just go. I don’t want you staying home stewing in a mobile dutch oven of misery.”

“I can’t afford to do so little as DREAM of going anywhere.”

“GO! Now. The drink’s on me. Besides, this is a new recipe. Bocanegra needs a victim.”

“Something untoward about that fizzy water?”

This time it was Jer who supplied the “:P” “You might be surprised.”

Yeh, right, I thought.

All the same, I went, partly to humor Jer and partly because of the promise of a free treat. As soon as he saw me, Boca started making the promised frappuccino.

It was the hour after breakfast and before lunch, too early for a full meal but just right for the first snack of the day. A few people lounged around the little, marble-topped tables reading tablets or actual newspapers. Yet not all was calm. A man in a crisp white suit stood in front of the counter, pointing to the desserts in the glass showcase. He was speaking English English, but his accent was touched by something else, inflections that struck me as Eastern European. Polish, perhaps? Lithuanian? Estonian? In a mood that could have been optimistic in excess or downright manic, he pointed to the contents of the showcase and turned to a man who supported an impressive-looking video camera on his shoulder, filming the event.

“Of course, this restaurant, this town, these delicacies weren’t here when the Hessians straggled by in 1778,” I heard him say. “But if they were, those soldiers would have been tempted to settle down and these people would all be eating in German instead of English.” He bit into one of Boca’s famous butter-stuffed scones with a clamping of the teeth that scared me into thinking the butter would spurt onto the pristine jacket with the unbridled ejection of a ruptured artery. It didn’t. The man chomped away, grinning with the “uh-oh” expression that comes with knowing you’ve actually bitten off more than you can chew.

He should have known better about more than the limits of that man-cave of a mouth. There was no proof that German troops allied with England during the American Revolution had come this far west in the county, either after the Battle of Monmouth in June 1778 or before. I knew this. Well. The letters after my name gave some weighty credence to the abundance of odd facts I carried within me, despite my humble occupation.

All at once Boca’s sublime new frappu became a once-sublime new frappu. There I was, a bona fide historian reduced to counting on the kindness of friends to satisfy my basic human need for food that morning, diminished further by an interloping teller of tales who was living well and on the wings of fantasies. The fellow had gutted me of the sense of delight at Boca’s creation and crammed the void with disgust, anger and the uncontrollable urge for revenge which invariably manifests itself in the equally unrestrainable need to spew rash words.

“That’s ridiculous. You can’t say the Hessians were here. There’s no evidence at all that the Hessians were here.”

The man, who had been staunching the butter with the back of his hand before Boca gave him a napkin, signaled the cameraman to continue filming. Another man scourged with such verbal belligerence might have retaliated. This one radiated back all the joy he had just sucked out of me.

“I’ve encountered a local who tells me the Hessians were NOT here,” he confided to the camera as if I was the world’s greatest secret revealed. He then accosted me with merry eyes, and words that quivered amid giggles. “According to legend, they were. But you don’t buy into the legend, I gather.”

“I dare say I don’t buy into anything.”

Boca intervened. With delicacy. “Actually, Rolands, it was Clara here who discovered that the Hessians really did pass through a place called Walnford, about twenty miles west of here?”

“She did?”

Boca nodded. “She knows everything there is to know about the region, even way back to before the letters patent that made it Monmouth County in the 1660s. She used to teach history at a couple of local colleges.”

Used to? Don’t go there, I thought.

Close to simpering, “Rolands” again confided to the camera. “I’ve had the incomparable luck of running into a real, lettered historian! Here, in a coffee shop, of all places. I wonder …”

Again, he looked at me. The ebullience was dampened. I suddenly sensed a man who was more elegant than effusive and feared I’d judged him unfairly. Perhaps the high spirits were demanded by the program’s producer, and were nothing more than a bit of calculated buffoonery for ratings. Such is life in show business. Even so-called “reality television” is an artificial construct, edited for dramatic effect, to keep the viewers engaged and returning for more every week.

“I’m filming a series for Latvian television about mysteries in history,” he said. “My work explores the culture and people of a place as well as what happened there.”

“What’s so mysterious about Hessians fighting for the British in the American War of Independence?”

“Trust me, what is common knowledge in our own land would strike you as wondrous and entertaining as what is common knowledge here, for you, strikes us. Besides, there isn’t one dull, uninteresting, most ordinary thing anywhere in the world that I can’t turn into a story. Come with me. Be my guide. Don’t let me get lost. Or yes, let me get lost. And if you can’t take any more of me, tell me to get lost. I can see you’ve got a lot of knowledge. But have you got a taste for adventure?”

“Are you asking me to go along with you?”

“For this episode, yes. Food, travel, lodging if necessary, will all be taken care of.”

Well, this was different. I had nothing better to do, really. I was on vacation, with no money to do anything or go anywhere. Had I not gone to the coffee shop for Boca’s frappu, I’d have stayed home not merely having no money and nowhere to go, but lamenting that I had no money and nowhere to go. I was worse than bored: I was disheartened. Stay home, and I would spend the day feeling sorry for myself, possibly sending Jer more strophes that were obnoxious variations on the theme of “woe is me.”

But this stranger traveling in a gently impractical white suit was an experience in himself, without the added attraction of a movie production. I perceived a mix of intelligence, self-awareness, bravado and gentility that didn’t exist among the men I knew, including Jer’s courtly old Uncle Marek from Cracow. I felt a faint twinge of beguilement. He was too smart and nice-looking to let himself act like a fool in front of the camera, yet that’s precisely what he was doing. I supposed it was nice that his abilities landed him in a line of work that let him trot the globe in search of historical oddities, but I couldn’t help wanting to believe he was more than a batch of embarrassing behavior. So I agreed to go along with him.

More fool me: I was so attuned to a life of disappointments, I’d already forgotten that he wasn’t always what he let the camera see.

Coming soon: According to Legend

Tags

Comedy, fiction, romance

Despair and stupidity: people of sound imagination aren’t supposed to confuse the two, but by the time the sun set on the longest day of the year, I sure had smudged the line between them.

I don’t know who or what was responsible–my old friend Jer or my addiction to the new coffees he served at his shop down the street. At any rate, it happened, pushed off an allegorical cliff by a metaphorical malcontent and carried toward the ground like a flying squirrel scrambling to ride the thermals when it misses a branch.

–from According to Legend, a new novella by Anne Arlington

from ‘Meeting Amalek:’ What I Learned About Defeat

Tags

Confederate States of America, relationships, Stonewall Jackson, US Civil War

The pile of saddlebags and covered, unknown implements lurked in silhouette against the drapes like Vesuvius in the background of an awful play about the last days of Pompeii. But it was being caught in a transgression more minor than murder that turned the assassin’s face raw-meat red.

“Begging your pardon, Miss Elodie,” Boniface Antony said as he continued to play the piano. “It’s been ages since I had the benefit of hearing some beloved pieces. I simply could not resist.”

“It’s a tad out of tune,” I cautioned, though he must have perceived the overwhelming presence of the fact.

“Don’t trouble yourself over such a small matter. I do understand.” His compassion did not deter him from making a face when keys at the high end emulated the wavering pitch of a soprano past her prime.

Anshel snatched some books and sheet music from the piano lid. “Here! We have lots of music. What do you want? Beethoven? Mendelssohn? ‘Oft in the Stille Nacht?’”

“‘Stilly Night,’” I corrected. “‘Oft in the Stilly Night.’ ‘Stille Nacht’ is a Christmas song.’”

Boniface Antony coughed out a laugh. “Have you never heard of ‘Silent Night?’”

“ He’s an Israelite.He doesn’t celebrate Christmas,” I advised, though Anshel, I knew, was able to do so himself.

“What’s he doing in Virginia?”

“My mother’s uncle in Germany sent him to help us with the farm after Daddy went to war.”

“I see.” Boniface Antony continued playing the Chopin. To tell the truth, he was out of practice and tended to play more cracks than keys. But he played with the kind of sense that turns a musician into a storyteller, making listeners cling to every word, wondering where they would go and what they would feel next. Somewhere around the middle, his concentration waned. Perhaps he was aware of Anshel standing between us and the heap of weaponry, leafing through a book of piano duets. Or perhaps something else was on his mind. “You’re mother’s an Israelite, too?”

“Yes.”

“And your father?”

“Yes.”

His questions were delivered with the spontaneity of tone that inhabits one stranger’s attempts to grow acquainted with another. What caught my attention was the fact that Boniface Antony had been in our company for the better part of two hours when they came out of him. Was he so caught up in his mission to murder deserters that he never noticed Anshel’s sidecurls or the business with the kippah? I looked at Anshel, striving to shout at him, with my eyes, that his plan was a forlorn hope. Never would Boniface Antony be distracted from his mission. We were doomed.

“And you?”

Our incipient executioner was talking to me? “What about me?”

“You’re an Israelite, too?”

“Yes.”

“So I don’t suppose you would have any mammals of the porcine persuasion moping around your barn, would you? Dearie me, I was hoping for a nice side of bacon. Haven’t had a satisfying slab since … why, bless me, I don’t know how long it’s been! Do you know, Miss Elodie, I think my consternation deserves an airing. If you’ll be so good as to indulge me?”

He aired that consternation by clobbering the keyboard with the opening chords of Beethoven’s Pathétique piano sonata. The instrument quaked beneath the blows, then shimmied and swayed as Boniface Antony ripped through the rest of the first movement. The assault was enough to drive the deserter pretending to be Daddy into the room with a very real display of displeasure.

“Ease up, son! Turn that piano into a lump of firewood, and I’ll turn you out into the storm.”

“I do apologize, sir.” Boniface Antony sat with his hands in his lap. The piano stopped shivering. “An instrument as fragile as that deserves a lady’s hand.”

“Yes, yes, here, Loydie, play Mendelssohn. Here.”

Anshel opened a book of duets to an arrangement of the Swiss Song from Mendelssohn’s eleventh symphony for strings. I pulled a chair beside Boniface Antony, but Boniface Antony was not to join me in this performance. Heeding the summons for a lady’s hand, Mama took the bench. Boniface Antony stood at my side, eager to turn pages.

The deserter found his way amid the towers of books to an easy chair flanked by a side table and the empty bookcase. Anshel discreetly stationed himself between Boniface Antony and the mound.

There was no possibility of finishing the jaunty tune. Once again the porch was a platform for people on the outside trying to escape the storm.

Boniface Antony watched as Anshel peeked through the drapes. “Are they soldiers or civilians?”

“I can’t tell. The snow, it’s blowing too hard.”

“No matter. We can’t leave my things here.”

“Why not?” asked my pretend-daddy.

“I don’t want anyone to see them.”

“We see them.”

“No, no, Mr. Sternbach. If the men out there are deserters, and if they see these things, they’ll grow afraid. They’ll try to overwhelm us.”

“You mean they’ll try to overwhelm you! They’ve no argument with us, son. We were here first.”

The glass in the door rattled as the blows reflected the growing desperation of the travelers. At least two men were shouting, demanding to know if anyone was home.

False Daddy set a stern countenance upon Boniface Antony. “Well, son, what are you going to do?”

“We’ve got to move my things.”

“So bring them out to the barn.”

“It’s too far. I can’t carry them all by myself.”

“Then put them in the cellar.”

“It’ll still take too long! I can’t do it all by myself.”

“It’s your stuff, son. You managed to get it all here by yourself. I’m certain you can convey it down a few steps all by yourself. Leave the visitors to me. God forbid I get in the way of business between you and your superior officer.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Sternbach, but my business is with someone greater than my immediate superior officer. I was given this task by General Jackson himself. I daren’t fail.”

“I admire your initiative, Boniface, but General Jackson does not command this home.”

“Yes, sir. And sir?”

“Yes, Boniface?”

“It’s either Boniface Antony or B. A., never Boniface.”

“I’ll remember that, B. A.”

“Thank you.”

“B. A.—Boy Attila,” the deserter muttered as the laden youth commenced the first of several descents by way of the stairs in the kitchen. “Who on God’s great earth had the dimness of intellect to make that child an officer?”

Now the people on the porch were pounding on the side of the house. I read a certain anguish in the deserter’s eyes. He must have been afraid to answer the door. But how could he not answer the door? He was the head of the house. How would it look if he left his wife to deal with strangers aching to escape the blizzard and perhaps fearing for their lives if they were denied shelter? He asked Anshel if the new arrivals had horses. They did. The animals would need shelter, too.

The deserter directed Anshel to go to the barn and make certain his horse was blanketed and his uniform was out of sight. When Anshel returned from the barn, he did not return to help us greet the latest guests. I happened to catch him tiptoeing up the stairs that led from the passage at the back door.

I asked him where he was going.

“It’s time for mincha, mid-day prayers.”

“You have until close to three to say mincha, haven’t you?”

“I have until shkia, sunset, but I need to say it now.”

He didn’t look at me as he spoke. That, and his hurried manner, led me to suspect something was amiss. Had he found something or someone in the barn?

I followed him up the stairs, not stopping for breath as I asked one question after the other. He relented only when we reached his room. He leaned against the door as though anxiety and disbelief were mashing the energy out of him.

“We’ve made a mistake, Loydie,” he whispered. “We let Boniface Antony bring all those weapons into the cellar. I think he means to entice us down there, and to kill us, and to bury us. We’ll never be found. Nobody will ever know what happened to us.”

from ‘Meeting Amalek:’ What Awaited Without

Tags

Confederacy, Stonewall Jackson, US Civil War

“This guy on the porch, he might be looking for deserters,” Anshel said as I tried not to issue sounds of female alarm against this new interference. “I saw pistols on him, and saddlebags and coils of rope on his horse.”

I thought of the soldier—the zelner—in the barn. If the man on the porch was out for deserters, and the man in the barn was a deserter, then reason hinted that the man on the porch, armed to his horse’s teeth, would prevail over the man in the barn, who might not have had any teeth of his own beneath his beard.

“We’ve got to let him in.” Anshel spoke with some urgency as the visitor rapped on the door with the insistence of someone who believes the homeowner is loitering in the bowels of the garret. “He knows we’re home. He must. The lamps are lighted, and there’s smoke coming from the chimney. Besides, if we don’t let him in, he might break down the door.”

“If we do let him in, we’ve got to keep him away from the barn,” I said.

“He’ll want to put the horse in the barn.”

“The deserter is in the barn.”

“No, Loydie, a man we think is a deserter is in the barn. He might not be a deserter, after all. We don’t know. We didn’t ask, and he didn’t say.”

Again, the visitor banged on the door. We could hear his boots as he walked along the porch, perhaps trying to peer in through an opening between the poorly drawn drapes.

Mama’s face went as dim as the expression in a portrait by an artist who can’t paint people. I knew what she was thinking: One interloper was enough. Two were a catastrophe. She couldn’t support it. She turned to Anshel. “Tell him to wait a minute. You can’t come to the door that fast.”

“Me?”

“He’ll think twice about doing mischief if he hears somebody other than a woman.”

Anshel shouted from where he stood. “Wait, wait! I can’t walk so fast.”

I hoped the stranger was more convinced than I. At least acknowledgment by someone in the house seemed to stifle him. He returned to the door. Silence suggested he waited. We all supposed he wouldn’t wait very long. I hoped to push Mama into a decision by whining “Mama!”

The aural excoriation moved her to advise me to be quiet and to direct Anshel to open the door. We would all greet the man, she instructed, so he would know he was outnumbered. Then Anshel would bring the visitor’s horse to the barn.

So Anshel opened the door. We tensed, anticipating a grizzled tree-trunk enhanced by a collection of hardware associated with his occupation. But rather than look up to encounter the visitor’s face, we had to look straight ahead, into the visage of a youth so pretty, I thought he was a girl in disguise. The long, luxurious hair beneath his snowy kepi was the color of clover honey; his eyes were as blue as the relieved sky after a vicious downpour.

Looking back, I think the fellow might have been thinking Anshel, too, was a girl, because of the sidecurls, which were the envy of any female who had ever struggled with a curling iron. After a moment in which youth and youth beheld each other with the kind of look that shrouds a pup upon first seeing itself in a mirror, the new arrival became aware of Mama and removed his hat with a crisp motion that could have been attained only through years of signaling respect for the gentler sex.

“Begging your pardon, ma’am. I’m lost in the storm. Your hearth led me here. I smelled it.”

Mama’s smile was the one that bloomed whenever she encountered a tiny child or a small furry mammal. She swept aside her skirts as if she were wearing a moiré ballgown instead of a calico, opened wide the door and welcomed the lost warrior to a place by the fire. Her nephew, she said, would be delighted to tend to the horse.

“That’s right kindly of you, sir,” the soldier said to Anshel. “First, however, allow me to relieve you of some of my necessities. I wouldn’t want you to trouble yourself to carry it all the way back here.”

“Some” of those items were two saddle bags; a roll of thick fabric we couldn’t tell was an extra greatcoat or a bedroll; a rather long musket; a rather short musket; rope; a shovel; an ax. He arranged it all in a clanking heap in the corner of the parlor, amid Mama’s towers of books.

Only then did he proceed to set himself in front of the fire and accept a cup of coffee. His name, he said, was B. A. Smithson, “the B. A. signifying Boniface Antony,” of the Smithsons near Richmond. He was a cavalry lieutenant, scouting for deserters under orders of T.J. Jackson, Lieutenant General, Second Corps, the Army of Northern Virginia. “It is my deepest desire that your home, the sole outpost of succor in the wasteland of this unnatural event, will attract the traitors as surely and swiftly as it had attracted your humble servant.”

He spoke like a schoolboy trying to be a bad poet. Mama’s mouth quivered, and I wondered if she was amused or if she pitied the youth for his airs. She controlled herself. “What will you do with the deserters if they come here?”

“What I’ve been ordered to do, of course: exact justice with speed and economy of measure.”

“How many deserters do you expect to find?”

“A number sufficient to render my presence in such a purpose and at such a time as essential.”

“More than one, Lieutenant Smithson?”

“Many more than one, ma’am”

“But you are by yourself. How will you bring all the deserters back to your encampment, or to General Jackson’s headquarters?”

“I’m not to bring them back, ma’am.”

“Surely, you can’t mean to imprison them indefinitely on the premises.”

“Oh no, ma’am. Rest assured, I shall burden you with not one living soul underfoot.”

“You should understand, Lieutenant, that I have no carriage or wagon, if you were hoping to borrow one.”

“No, ma’am. As I said, I’m not to bring back deserters.”

“What, then, do you mean to do with them?”

“They are a threat to our country, ma’am. My orders, therefore and as I have stated with conviction and belief, are to exact justice with speed and economy of measure. These are desperate men,” Boniface Antony continued as the hints entrenched in his narrative sealed our lips with horror we dare not express if we dared to dwell upon the horror he implied. “I cannot convey to you the degree of danger you are in once they come under your roof.”

“I see,” said Mama, though she later confided that she truly could not see how a being so attractive should appear to relish the use of his person as an instrument of death and vengeance.

She asked the military sapling if he would like some fried eggs. He accepted, so long as it did not pose an inconvenience for his gracious hostess.

“Not at all,” Mama said, and asked me to join her on the hunt for the freshest eggs. I could stay downstairs, if I wished, while she retrieved our warmest shawls from upstairs. Of course, I went with her, desiring to converse with her about this startling trick of fate. But she said nothing. She dug amid the armoire, and tossed over her arms not merely a heavy shawl, but Papa’s trousers, shirt, and waistcoat , which she concealed beneath the shawl until we were away from the house and hidden by the storm.

Exertion and the promise of all that could savage our house in the hours to come must have played upon her, for when we reached the barn, I and our deserter inside had to support her before she sank to the floor on her knees.

All the while, she pressed the pile of Papa’s clothing at the soldier, saying, “There’s a man sheltering in our house who would murder you, sir! These are my husband’s things. Put them on, I beg you, and come into our home as one of the family.”

It seemed to me the soldier’s eyes twinkled. “Now, who on God’s great earth would want to murder me?”

“A cavalryman. His name is Smithson, B. A. Smithson.”

“Confederate or Federal?”

“Confederate.”

“Begging your pardon, ma’am, but with a name like that, he don’t sound much like danger to a mouse, never mind to me.”

“He looks like an innocent babe, but believe me when I say he would eradicate you with a piece of the arsenal he’s unloaded in my parlor. Now please! Again, I beg you! There’s no time. My daughter and I are supposed to be getting eggs from the henhouse. He’s expecting us back without delay.”

Only the soldier’s assurance that he would indeed put on Papa’s suit gave Mama the strength to gather the eggs and return with me to the house.

We were watching Boniface Antony gorge himself with fried eggs when we heard someone at the back door, and Anshel cried, in greeting, “Onkel Dovid!” Uncle David.

With those two words, my cousin Anshel flung a fistful of my life against the wall and made me grovel among the scattered shards, bleeding, cut, and making believe that nothing had changed.

NOTE: The word “guy” is not an anachronism. It became popular during the Civil War (Louisa May Alcott uses it in ‘Little Women,’ set during the CW). The word may be a variation on “goy,” the Hebrew word that denotes a non-Jew. Federal troops were followed by Jewish sutlers (traveling merchants), and the soldiers might have mispronounced “goy” as “guy.”

from ‘Acquaintance:’ Reason To Flee

Tags

Regency, relationships, romance

Despite Phyl’s assertion, Wallis Hartshorne knew that somebody was indeed afraid of him—and there she stood, unwilling to reveal the real reason why she had been on the staircase the night before with as much intention to deceive as he was unwilling to reveal why he had followed her.

He had gone after her hoping to speak to her in a place that bore the safe appearance of a coincidental encounter and the assurance that nobody was around to overhear. But she had moved through the gloom with the steady gait and path of someone proceeding toward a destination. The sight of the phaeton was surprise enough. The true blow came when Phyl stepped up to the seat.

He should have made a noise—tossed a rock or broken a branch to give her pause to stop long enough to know she wasn’t acting in secret. What would she have said upon seeing him? Would she have chided him for spying on her? Would she have screeched in guilt? Would she have made an attempt to explain herself? He would never know. All he did know is that he did nothing, and she drove off with a man who printed bills for playhouses in Drury Lane. Her attachment to the fellow must be of more consequence than he’d been led to believe. There could be no other reason for an assignation after nightfall—and with someone who had driven out from London, no less!

No matter that the tryst had ended well before dawn and Phyl was delivered safely back to the manor. She had left the premises with a man who took her away in a manner that was as base and hurtful as it was clandestine. But the harm was not to Phyl’s repute. It was a gash in Wallis’s judgment. Never did he think himself so rich in stupidity. He had declared his fondness for Phyllida, and he had trusted that he proved that esteem through the most honest, respectable tokens: the gowns, the lodgings, the freedom to work with the children as she saw fit. Those tokens, he now saw, spoke not for him but for themselves. Since that confessional walk on the road to the village, he had done nothing to reinforce his regard for Phyl. If she fled in the night with a printer, it was because he had given her no reason to flee in the night with him. Continue to do nothing, and her actions would rob him of any reason to keep her at Blystone. His work of the last few weeks would be more than all for naught. It would be void, and Phyl would be gone.

He wrote. “Come, walk with me.”

The response was sensible. Annoyingly so. “When? After the children’s lessons? Before tea?”

“Now,” he printed in large letters.

“What about the lessons?”

“There will be no lessons this morning. Let the children enjoy the day, as you must let yourself enjoy the day. Come.”

She hesitated, gestured toward the floor. “My shoes! They’re not for hard walking.”

Wallis needn’t study the black satin slippers to know this. “I’ll buy you a new pair.”

“What about my head! I need my bonnet.”

“So a bird can drop something on it?”

“Do you prefer that he should drop something on my hair?”

“Hair can be cleaned with no damage. Silk and damask, however, would be ruined.”

“Mr. Hartshorne, do you want to see me discolored by the sun?”

Envisioning a Phyl with cheeks and lips seared the color of a bold new rose, he thought, Oh yes, but wrote: “My dearest Portia, let me speak plainly. I fear my pre-occupations here have given me cause to neglect you, and you feel the neglect more keenly than your kindness will let you declare. I would like nothing more than to make amends, unless you are so discouraged on my account that you will not tolerate my company.”

She gasped upon reading that, and held her breath, and stood with eyes wide and fixed upon the note. “I’ve seen enough of the world to know that business makes people do things when they would rather not do them, even at the expense of a success that may allow them to lead lives in which they can do as they like whenever they like. It is a trick of life, Mr. Hartshorne, a necessary condition that can be a source of joy or a tool of disappointment and regret.”

“I would rather it be the former, not the latter.”

“So would I, most heartily!”

They returned to the dining room, where Wallis advised his mother that he and Miss Athol-Hight were going to take a walk around the land. “It is my hope,” he wrote, “that we will find flowers and stones and the like that that will serve as entertaining additions to the children’s lessons.”

The old lady looked him up and down. “That’s lovely, Wallis, but what are you going to bring them home in, your pocket, where’ll they’ll be squashed beyond usefulness, never mind recognition? Mary Eloisa, bring him a basket, will you?”

The maid, whose name was Eloisa without the preamble of “Mary,” tripped away, smiling broadly, and tripped back with a hamper large enough to provide temporary quarters for a family of otters. Wallis had the stomach-dropping sensation of having proposed the wrong lie, but there was nothing for it: He took the miniature edition of Noah’s Ark between his arms and with a silent laugh led Phyllida from the house.

When they crossed into the stand of trees where the phaeton had waited, Wallis set down the hamper and pulled out his notebook. “I fear the lady’s enthusiasm borders upon the excessive. We’ll leave the basket here. If we need it, so be it. If not, so be it.”

He noticed that Phyl said nothing about his claim, to his mother, that the purpose of their outing was to find “entertaining additions to the children’s lessons.” Nor did he detect anything in her manner that suggested she approved or disapproved. Though she took the arm he offered and walked along with him, her touch was light and stiff, utterly bereft of the strength and warmth one would expect from a woman at ease with her escort. He refused to let himself ask her what she felt for him. He was afraid not of what she would say, but of what he would think of himself for his role in forming her opinion. And so he strolled along, making himself contented with her silence, the touch of her hand, and the occasional brush of her skirts against his leg.

from ‘Salutaris:’ Banality and simplicity

Tags

Excerpt, Theology, work in progress

While the nuns bade their guests and each other good night, Mother Evarista gave Hance a blanket and a pillow and urged him to go to sofa and rest. “All the weather reports call for three feet of snow, with drifts as high as five feet.”

“With accumulation like that, we won’t be digging out, we’ll be excavating,” Celeste Warren called in from the hallway.

Hance had no reason to doubt her, not after feeling the raging elements for himself. “I’d better stay up and grade papers, then,” he told Ev. “Who knows when I’ll get the chance before mid-term grades are due?”

He spread assignments and lesson plans around the dining room table and happily accepted the unrequested pot of coffee that Celeste put beside him, but for most of the night he sat over his work thinking about what had taken place behind the convent. The wind slapped grainy sheets of snow against the windows, and he shivered despite the blanket, which he’d wrapped, shawl-like, around his shoulders. Emmy, now up in her room, perhaps slumbering as peacefully there as she had on the couch beside the blustery declarations from the piano, had given not one sign that she knew what had happened, or that she had even participated. Though he never doubted what he had willed her to believe—“there are many things we don’t understand”—he wondered if the assertion was his own form of Credo or a sign of submission. A Credo denoted acceptance embraced and expressed without any debate or reservation. Submission, on the other hand, entailed a sense of defeat and mandated introspection. He had felt no defeat, only wonder and something that he could never remember feeling or wanting to feel: gratitude. He was grateful that Emmy had been there, either through coincidence or by design, and he was grateful her presence had been allowed to happen. Maybe he was seeing for the first time the merciful aspect of the God he had been jailed to serve. Like a rebellious adolescent grown to manhood, he was beginning to see that Dad might not be so bad after all.

Nonsense. Never could he or God or his business with God be reduced to such banal, simplistic terms, not when whole books had been written on the nature of God; not when religions had dozens of names for God and the attributes of God. Hance’s case, though, was indeed banal and simplistic, as well as long-established and irrefutable: His purpose was to suffer, not to dredge up hope and happiness. The degree of his fondness for and amazement with Emmy Kydd was meant to equal the degree of his misery. The more he longed to examine Emmy’s presence in his life, the more he must remind himself that he was as base as she was pure, and he must feel that baseness as surely as he could feel the chair beneath him and the pen in his hand.

It was a little after three when the lights flickered, each time jumping back from their dusky faint like the hand of a drowning victim bursting through the surface, gripping air that would never reach his lungs. At last the light leaped back no more. The nuns, Hance knew, kept little nightlights burning throughout the convent hallways, lest someone given to rising during the night become disoriented in the darkness. Surely, the lighter sleepers in the house would be roused by the sudden loss of light and give little squeals of surprise, and go in search of candles or flashlights.

Hance waited for sounds that would signify just such a search. It was sad, really, how modern people feared the dark. They didn’t give themselves the chance to see that night was never as dark as they thought. Electricity and years of advertising had robbed them not merely of the ability to see in darkness, but of the ability to see that the night was never as dark as they had been taught to believe. The moon cast its own glow; so did the stars. The light might not be bright, but it was enough to dilute total darkness.

Then there was the light of a snowstorm. Storm clouds hid the moon and the stars, but those clouds carried their own illumination, a whitish smudge that reminded him of a lantern veiled by layers of gauze.

It was easy for Hance to close his eyes, refute the trappings of modernity, and believe it was more than two centuries before. In his mind, Mary Guaire’s eyes glittered upon him more precious than gems, and the feistier members of the opera company sang “When shall we all meet again?” as the tavern owner tried to close shop for the night. He remembered how one proprietor, the human likeness of a pale, plucked turkey, would threaten to call for a constable if they didn’t leave, and they would laugh, and take their time putting on their cloaks and coats, making the poor fellow stew in his steam. But they paid him well. They always paid him well.

All Hance needed to complete his mental tableau was candlelight. He needed light, anyway, if he wished to continue working. Having none and finding none, he accepted that his work was done until daylight. He had no trouble making his way back to the parlor and curling up on the sofa where Emmy had lain her head so many hours before.

Sleep was not to be, however. He couldn’t sleep where she had slept. He might have seduced her with his music, but he hadn’t put a hand on her; he couldn’t. To sleep where she had left her scent and sweet impression on the cushion was a violation—metaphysical as well as metaphorical. He returned to the dining room table and put his head down amid the papers.

A Lenten Reflection: The Detritus of Events (from ‘Salutaris’)

Tags

Lent, Meditation, Roman Catholic Church, social justice

The rain had stopped. Though classes were in session and the buildings formed a brightly lighted barricade against the dripping night, the campus felt like a small, humid room where dense drapes and carpeting digested all sound and incubated the air into invisible mold. Damp, and hush’d, and close as a sick man’s room when he taketh repose an hour before death, Hance recalled as he crossed the common.

He had become a reluctant participant in the detritus of events that should not have concerned him and that he would have warned against had he been thinking clearly. As he trampled mushrooms into velvety goo and heard the bloated splats of raindrops fallen from wherever they had lost their grip, he could do no more than reflect upon humanity’s unending inability to see that all those old sayings about times changing, people staying the same, and season following season were falsehoods, caused most likely by unrelenting unrequited hope.

In Hance’s sphere, people really did change, and though season followed season, no summer, winter, spring and autumn was like the one the year before. Each had its own ambience and an event to distinguish it from all the others. There was the spring he discovered Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, and the spring his mother died; the autumn he learned about Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Agincourt Carol, and the autumn he first read Tennyson, whose assessment of the season’s deathroom atmosphere always impressed him as the most accurate.

Autumn this year would be marked by the deliverance of Father Dario and two dozen students from the hands of the authorities. The woods where the homeless had pitched their camp belonged to the town, which that day had decided to arrest the squatters on charges of trespassing. From what Dario had told him, Hance gathered that as the police approached, the homeless receded into the woods, apparently as smooth and silent as a hump of ink hugging the corner of the paper absorbing it from the surface of a valuable desk. But Dario and the students stayed. They had no reason to run away. They were there to help the homeless. The police apprehended them on charges of aiding the trespassers and hindering arrests.

The police had allowed everyone they arrested one telephone call, and the students phoned the lawyer who had offered to come to their aid. With the lawyer on the way, Dario called a fellow priest––Hance. He said his car, as well as the students’ cars, had been towed from the campsite to the municipal pound. He needed a lift to the facility, which was too far to reach on foot. If Hance could bring him and a couple of students to their cars, they would go back for everyone else.

Sacerdotes tui induantur justitiam, Hance thought as he started up his car, a non-descript compact from the last century. May thy priests be clothed in justice. May they also be clothed in common sense and the ability to consider the consequences of their actions, especially if the justice they fight for is unpalatable in some circles.

For the Lenten Season: a Fictional Reflection on Noah

Tags

Lent, Noah's Ark, Reflection

“I was just enough of an ass to think of all the other asses in the world, and that got me to thinking about Noah and his ark. I remembered how a tender-hearted woman I once knew believed the great lesson of Noah’s ark wasn’t the saving of men and animals but the saving of Man’s conscience. She said Noah did more than ferry the animals to safety. He fed them, cleaned them, gave them a safe place to live. He was compelled to care for them and to care about them. His servicehood, she said, proved we’re not on the earth to live for ourselves alone. We’re here to live for others. Live for yourself alone, and you will indeed be cursed. Not by God. By you yourself.”

–from The Scattered Proud (Captive Press, 2013)

 

A reflection for the Lenten season

“Tell me something, Jan,” Kit said as he settled beside me at the writing table. “Why does a certain set of people come together to endure the unimagined horrors of life? Is it coincidence? Fate? The workings of a higher power? Or is it a little bit of everything, born of the desire to not suffer alone and the fear of dying forsaken?”

I chose my words with care. I could not be dishonest with Kit, but I had no heart to accuse him of inviting the things that had ruined him. “A year or two ago I might have observed that people are driven together by fear and self-interest. How could I not say such a thing? I believed my life was shaped by the actions of others engulfed and deluded by their own interests.”

“Myself among them?”

I placed my hand on his arm, willing him to understand he was blameless; he himself had been shaped by the acts of others. “We’re commanded to love one another. You taught me the difference between doing so out of thoughtless obedience and doing so because we understand each moment could be the last not only for ourselves, but for everyone we meet along the way.”

–from The Scattered Proud (Captive Press, 2013)