Night Soil Read online

  3

  My mother was twelve or thirteen when she saw the house on the eastern bank of the White Woman for the first—and, until I bought it, only—time. But though she never spoke of it, I realized later that she often spoke from it. That part of her imagination had resided there for almost twenty years, and part of everything she made was formed with the view from its windows in mind. Her father had taken Guy on a tour of the conservancy to familiarize him with the scope of his future responsibilities. The public school in Wye was on break (“Easter?” my mother said, the word dropping from her lips with the same lack of comprehension that one of her classmates might’ve said “Eid?”) and she was allowed to tag along because she’d recently manifested a rebellious streak that got her into “mischief and mayhem” when she was left alone. The old mill, or bawdy house, or whatever it was, wasn’t actually on Stammers’s land. It sat almost directly opposite the Capitoline, more or less in the middle of the range, and after conducting the twins on a tour of all seven hills—standing over the two-hundred-foot-deep well from which the pellucid, polluted waters of the White Woman rose in speckled turmoil; walking them into 150-year-old adits still glittering with exposed sheets of coal; even leading them down a pair of shafts to convey the torturous conditions under which the family fortune had been amassed—my grandfather shooed his children back in the car and drove them to the east side of the creek in order to show them just how big 33,000 acres was.

  Had them driven, I should write, by the chauffeur that came with the car that came with the stipend that came with the hereditary positions of president of Lake Academy and director of the Magic Mountains Conservancy. My grandfather, who died before I was born, wasn’t so much stuffy or pompous as intellectually inflexible (“I never heard the man use a contraction in his life,” my mother said once; “when he found out I’d been going to classes dressed as Guy he made a remark about my stealing ‘the robe belonging to your brother’ instead of ‘your brother’s robe’”) and she paid scant attention to his lecture. (When I pointed out that “your brother’s robe” was a possessive, not a contraction, she rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”) She’d heard it a million times before—from him, from her grandparents and the servants, from the masters and the residents of Marcuse and Wye, who still stood aside when a Stammers passed on the sidewalk, still said “Morning, Mr. Stammers” or “Afternoon, Miz Stammers” and no doubt still would have doffed their hats if the custom for men to keep their heads covered in public had continued in force. But she perked up when they crossed to the east side of the creek and she saw the seven perfect domes of the Magic Mountains stretched along the horizon like the spine of a sleeping dragon. By that point she’d been sneaking into Academy classes for years, but she’d only recently begun to question what was taught in them, and as a consequence was also taking painting lessons in secret with a man in Wye who, in the finest tradition of Bob Ross, taught his young pupil that no more meet subject existed for a budding “paintress” (I’m guessing she made that up) than the glorious sunset, sunsets qua sunsettiness being universally glorious fans of light illuminating mother rabbits or deer, or tender, toothless wolves sitting watchfully while kits or fawns or cubs gamboled about on dark green grass. After less than a month she’d grown bored of the man’s watercolored, watered-down sentimentality. But this—this was a sunset! It streamed from the hilltops in a wind-whipped cloak of the intensest oranges, reds, and purples she’d ever seen. There wasn’t enough color in her teacher’s paintbox—in the sunny catalog from which he ordered his pigments—to capture a tenth of its gradations, its depth, its weight. It was, my mother said, the most arresting thing she’d ever seen, not just because it was what it was, but because it wasn’t what she’d been taught it was. It wasn’t “beautiful.” It wasn’t “awesome” or “sublime.” Or if it was these things, they were just by-products of radiance and refraction. In this she sensed a troubling correspondence to things she’d heard in the Academy classes she’d trespassed, but before she could parse the thought it was eclipsed by something even more dramatic.

  Between the onlookers and the hills lay a strip of reedy land, so perfectly flat that the White Woman ribboned across it in loopy meanders more than a mile wide—if pulled straight, her father told them (redundantly: did he think his children couldn’t read the “Fun Facts” on the placard commemorating the victims of the 1881 explosion?) the creek would measure nearly forty-eight miles from the spring on the north side of the Esquiline to the mouth of the Lake, despite the fact that only seventeen miles separated the White Woman’s source from its tail. But then her father abruptly stopped talking as, simultaneously with his children, he saw the sharp-edged shadow of the Capitoline push out from its base and glide toward the flood plain like an avalanche peeling off the side of the range. The mountain’s shadow didn’t so much push the light forward as shim it from the ground, slipping under it “like crème de cassis into a pousse-café” (my mother wasn’t prone to metaphor, but when she did use one she went for it). It was as if the day, as if the universe itself was being wedged open, the clockwork motoring the planet around the sun about to be exposed. All three onlookers waited speechlessly for the revelation, barely breathing as the darkness surged toward them across the vast expanse of reeds and water and then—oh, and then!—washing over them, the shadow so solid that my mother half expected to be lifted up and knocked to the ground.

  The temperature fell ten degrees in the space of a heartbeat. The barometric pressure dropped so rapidly your ears rang. If you opened your mouth your tongue felt like it would fly out like a cuckoo from a clock. Her father, Academy empiricist, turned nonchalantly to watch the shadow continue to bulldoze the day away. Gaius, his traitor’s heart at the mercy of a sycophant’s limbs, turned also. But my mother couldn’t tear her eyes from the darkness deepening like the fog of memory between her and the hills. She tried to ascertain if the colors she was seeing, the phragmites’s green, the bright yellow of the goldenrod that poked up here and there among the reeds, the bruised purple loosestrife that fringed them, were based on information her retinas were actually receiving, or if her visual cortex was in fact supplying the palette from stored data. She wondered if the phragmites Great Grandpa Marcus’s scientists had planted to clean up the creek was the native P. australis americanus or the invasive P. australis australis. She asked herself if the oceanic feeling that had surged through her body a moment ago had been nothing but wishful thinking, no more miracle than the burning bush that lured Moses out of Egypt, the delusions of grandeur that condemned Jesus of Nazareth, the schizophrenic echo that spoke to Mohammed in his cave. And then, for the third time in as many minutes, nature paid good.

  A herd of deer, thirty of them maybe, maybe forty, maybe fity or more—a host of deer stood up from the reeds on the far side of the stream where they’d been sleeping the day away and, moving as a single entity, hopped westward toward the more palatable ryegrass that grew at the base of the Capitoline. The deer were barely visible in the twilight, and distance and the sound of the stream were enough to swallow whatever noise they made. But there was nothing to suggest that my mother’s eyes were playing tricks on her, and her gaze flitted ecstatically from one white rump to another, the white tails flickering in the gloaming, as if morsing out a private message while her father and brother’s backs were turned.

  “Dixie,” her father called. “Mrs. Brown will be keeping supper.”

  “Just a min—”

  “No.”

  The deer were all but gone by the time this brief exchange was over, banished by her father’s voice or swallowed up by the shadows at the base of the hills. Sighing theatrically (maybe I’m making that part up, but my mother’s been a champion sigher—and gasper and groaner—for as long as I can remember), she turned, and this time it wasn’t nature that surprised her, but something made by human hands.

  When they first drove up the chauffeur had parked next to what she’d taken to be
an abandoned house. She hadn’t paid the building much attention because her gaze had been glued to the polychrome horizon. Now she realized it probably wasn’t a house. It was too big, too plain, the brown bricks laid in the most basic Flemish bond. (“What do you mean, how do I know? The brickmaker’s the potter’s next of kin, that’s how I know.”) The only relief from the sameness was a large patch on the northwest corner built of bricks that were paler, pinker, smaller than those that composed the rest of the building. If it had been a mill, that explained where the waterwheel’d been, though not why it stood so far from the nearest loop of creek. Three tiers of five tall narrow windows stretched down the west side of the building, all fifteen aflame with the light of the setting sun. The glowing windows weren’t as grand as the sunset, as the shadow-wave or the deer, but they weren’t supposed to be: the building had been placed there, my mother understood suddenly, not to compete with the view, nor become part of it, but to take it in. It was a novel concept to her thirteen-year-old mind: that you might make something not so it could be appreciated in itself, but so it could help you appreciate something else. It was, she said once, why no one understood her pots: people were too busy oohing and aahing to hear what the clay might have to say about them.

  It didn’t occur to her, not then—not consciously anyway—that she could live there. No Stammers had lived elsewhere than the President’s House for a century, and she didn’t get the idea to leave campus until five and a half years after her brother disappeared. But still, the image stayed with her, the semicircular patch of pale bricks (“Store-bought,” she sighed when I questioned her fascination with this detail; “the original structure was built from bricks baked from the land it sat on, but when they tore off the waterwheel they patched the hole with bricks from a goddamned Home Depot”), the fifteen windows (“Let me tell you, Judas, it says something—about the house, about the people who live in Marcuse and Wye, I don’t know which—that no one ever broke one single pane of those windows in the thirty or forty years that building sat empty”), the sunset they looked out on, the hills’ shadow, and, finally, the deer, who every night would rise like ghosts to forage on the aquamarine grass of the place Marcus Stammers had, at the end of his life, taken to calling his own Megiddo. She never mentioned what she’d seen to her father, nor even to her brother, who, though he said he thought the exclusion of Dixie from the Academy and the Stammers inheritance was “ridiculously archaic,” not to mention “like, totally sexist,” never made any noise about refusing it either, or sharing it with her once it was his. Well: the land might all be Gaius’s one day, the Academy too, but this vision, Dixie decided, would be hers alone.

  For the first time I had a palpable sense of the Northern Passage of patriarchy my mother had had to navigate as she grew up, the monumental act of will it must have taken to pursue a path of her own, an art, a child. For a moment I thought we were about to get our life back on track. She would go back to her clay and I would go back to my brushes—scrub, not paint—and things would go back to normal. But, alas, she kept talking:

  “He was gone within the month.”

  My mother said these words with a strange tone in her voice. Not plaintive, not wistful, not defiant or self-pitying. It almost sounded like she was angry, and, warily, I said,

  “Your . . . father?”

  “My brother. He left a note saying he had to find his own path, and he disappeared.”

  Again I didn’t understand.

  “He was . . . giving it to you?”

  She shook her head vehemently.

  “He pushed it on me,” she said to me on the day we decided to move out of the apartment above the Browns’ bakery, and even though it wasn’t the last day we lived there, it was the last day our imaginations were contained by its walls. Though it took another four months to purchase the land and make the building habitable, from that day forward we took no more notice of the apartment than we would of a train station or an airport. Let the dust collect until it was a solid body, until it grew limbs, digits, and cranium and required only a scroll pushed down its throat to make it motile: the apartment had finally been revealed for what it was: someone else’s responsibility, someone else’s problem, and, most importantly, someone else’s home.

  “Guy forced me to shoulder a burden he didn’t want to carry himself,” my mother told me later that day, when we were back in the apartment—the apartment that she officially inherited five years after her twin disappeared, just as she inherited the couple whose family had rented it ever since Abolition liberated them from Great Grandpa Marcus’s attic, and who continued to cook and clean up after us (you didn’t really believe she entrusted the task to a five-year-old, did you?) after she forced them to move into what had, until then, been their attic. “Browns have lived on Stammers property for 160 years,” she said by way of justifying this displacement, and although American history would suggest that the situation was slightly more complicated, my mother shrugged and said, “I only know what I know,” and then, picking up a pheasant’s banded tailfeather and staring at it as though it were a syringe on a park bench, she said:

  “You were supposed to be my revenge.”

  “Against the Browns?” I said, even though I knew what she thought she was saying.

  “Oh, Judas!” my mother giggled, and she reached out and pushed her fingers through my hair and pulled it over my mottled left cheek. “Against the Stammerers!” she said, even though she knew that I knew what she thought she had said, and when she dropped the feather on my clean floor it was all I could do not to smack her in the face.

  She said he was the prettier of the two. Not feminine—“not like poo”—but finer of feature, delicate even. (“And you know damn well I said ‘not like you,’ not ‘not like poo.’”) A harrow-shaped face arbored by ringlets of dirty blond hair, limbs kept lithe by swimming and rock climbing and what my mother was pretty sure was an eating disorder. “Orthorexia avant la lettre,” she said, and though I thought I’d misheard she repeated the same bizarre combination of syllables three more times. “We were almost indistinguishable but even so, Guy was twice as pretty as I could ever hope to be.” Said wistfully, and the fact that her longing was directed at herself, at the beauty she felt she hadn’t been blessed with rather than the twin brother who disappeared when they were thirteen, almost made me feel worse for her. “When he was here I didn’t need a mirror. I looked at him and saw a version of myself a mirror could never match. And despite my doubts about my appearance I believed I did the same for him. I don’t know, maybe I was deluding myself. Maybe that’s why he ran.”

  Until the year before he left, she said, she outweighed him, could beat him at arm wrestling and outrun him too. But it was a question of ounces, not pounds, strength of will rather than limb; for all intents and purposes they were identical. Half the time they were mistaken for twin girls, not infrequently for twin boys. It was the rare person who saw one boy and one girl upon first meeting them, and every once in a while someone got even that backwards. So it should come as no surprise that my mother was able to sneak into her brother’s classes in the Academy, even though there were rarely more than fifteen novices in a room. Maybe it was the fact that my uncle was the only white person in the school by that point, or maybe it was just because he was a Stammers, but Gaius was treated as a kind of privileged observer by the masters; they almost never called on him, and when they did it was usually a softball, the kinds of questions that even my mother, with her scattershot knowledge, could answer, and when she couldn’t she would simply stare off into space. Once or twice, my mother said, she got a double take from one of his friends, but apparently none of the masters had a clue—“or just didn’t give a fuck, the old pederasts.” She went so far as to sit for his second- and third-form portraits. Since these are paintings rather than photographs, it’s hard to challenge her assertion, but when I compare the eight- and ten-year-old faces with the twelve-year-old in
the fourth-form picture for 1975 (which according to my mother Gaius did sit for) I see a difference, not so much in feature as in expression. My uncle’s twelve-year-old face is taciturn, shy or bored or peeved or put upon, I couldn’t tell you, but he refuses to look at the painter directly, just stares off to the right—not at anything, you can tell, just not at the painter, whose impotent “Look this way”s are almost audible on the canvas. My ten-year-old mother, by contrast, confronts the painter with a mocking, defiant expression, as if daring him to guess her true identity or reveal it in his portrait. Her shoulders are square, her hands rest on her thighs, whereas Guy slouches, arms plaited across his stomach, hands invisible inside the muffed sleeves of his robe. My mother, in other words, looks for all the world like a cocky, privileged boy, coddled merely for possessing a penis, rewarded simply for being a father’s son, which is remarkable not only because she was able to pull it off but because it was so far from her brother’s experience, which his own body reflected more clearly: the burden of expectation as palpable as his robes, as if his flesh were a garment propped up by Academy philosophy and he wanted nothing so much as to strip it off.