Little Fugue Read online

  She creaked the marbletop across the floor, moving backward, hunched, seeing herself in her mind’s eye, a perfect crossbow. She did it the mercy of cleaning its hull of the London air. Seven years have elapsed since the passage of the Clean Air Act, and the coal smoke is still left to fester in the atmosphere, blackening the laundry on dense days, and killing off the infants and the old. She buffed the table with a drizzle of floor wax. There’s a bloodless patch upon her cheek. See it there. It’s a blight upon the rose. When she tans, it glows coal white. She is not above telling the meddlesome that it is the kiss of her first love. Her cheek was abraded in the dirt-bottomed bay of the basement of her dead father’s house on the day when she first decided to do away with herself. She ground her cheek into the gravel as a kitten curls its head to its master’s leg. When the bandage finally came off, the attending nurse got a mascara pencil and circled the scar. “Let this be a lesson to you,” she told Sylvia, flashing a compact. Sylvia scrubbed the marbletop with the same earnestness that she had formerly applied to her poems. Her brain-children come as whole as babes lately, wriggling and bewailing.

  She blinked. She crossed and recrossed the room. She saw an etching deep in the finish of the marble, abstract, drawn with smoke. But, squinting, the design of a swastika came clear.

  The swastika, she knows from the scholarship of German calligrapher Rudolf Koch, a favorite with her father, who also doted on Darwin and Bee Bazaar Magazine, was originally extracted from the emblem of the sun wheel. This symbol was prevalent in ancient Babylon. The sun, as a deity, was considered both maleficent and benevolent. According to mood. Like the effulgent /tenebrous Rorschach of a poem.

  As though, Sylvia cannot help thinking to herself, there were not already enough tragic history and encoded iconography to endure in her house. Or enough good and evil omens present, accounted for, and on nonspeaking terms. Or as though Ted, by his absence, hadn’t already invited the Devil in.

  She placed Abdiel’s gift in the center of the table, covering over its winged scar.

  The shingled cross under ice enkindled the suggestion of smoke. At first it was only that. A sort of pervading innuendo, blandly demonic. She has never smoked cigarettes and she never would. Her diabetic bee master father smoked heavily. Otto Plath was a broad-shouldered man with thinning hair and pink pouches beneath his eyes. Professionally, he was an ornithologist and an entomologist, and he held a fellowship at Boston U, but it was bees alone, which he thought of as the manifestation of electrodes, and the key to the very mystery of existence, that were his singular passion. He ignored the swelling and blackening of his right foot in order to have a lark of Darwinian roulette with himself. Groggy with dope, he managed to both quote and misconstrue Goethe, whose Sorrows of Young Werther sparked a suicide craze among romantic young men in the eighteenth century. The doctors apologetically intimated their intent to amputate. Otto raised up a few inches in the bed. He said, “Mighty, me in dust distressed.” Or that is at least what the doctors thought that he had said. One of them happened to know that it was a quotation from Faust. Sylvia wasn’t there to hear him say it, and so her father’s affinity for poetry would always remain a rumor. Like his love for her.

  Daddy was borderline morose, quietly breathing fire, butt in hand, pink-rimmed eyes averted, but this is what endeared him to his daughter. A jocular father might have created her in order that she serve as a cheerful distraction. Even as a child she could not see herself playing such a role. So many men in her life would evidently be incapable of seeing her as playing any other. This proved unequivocally that romantic love was the extravagant misunderstanding that she had suspected from childhood that it was. In the years before she met Ted, she would gauge the success of her relationships by the savagery of their dissolution. And yet her agreeably morose beekeeper father had dissolved his relationship with her by way of a sort of capstone and crescendo of masochistic frivolity. Otto smoked merrily in his hospital bed with the great plaster nub of his sawed-off metatarsus swaying slightly in the rigging above. He looked like a mariner in a hammock. What a callous disregard for his other bodily parts, she thought at the time. Herself, for instance.

  One glowing in the tray when the nurse pulled up the sheet, to hear her mother tell it.

  And when her mother did tell her of it, at bedtime on a night of her eighth year, she said, “I will never speak to God again.” She would soon take up writing poetry to prove the truth of her statement. For the time being, she refused to get out of bed. Her mother tried to grapple her limp, lifeless daughter awake to no avail. Finally, after two days, she did the one thing that she would ever apologize to Sylvia for. She stood there in the little girl’s room and lit one of her husband’s cigarettes.

  Soon afterward Sylvia discovered Ovid. Maybe one of the faceless old-maid schoolteachers, who doted upon her intelligence to the detriment of her popularity with the other children, gave her the copy with the imitation gilt panel that she remembers. Ovid had the poet’s healthy mistrust of the corporeal. If the universe, the invocations of the human heart, the temperaments of the deities, and the molecular structure of language were not in any way immutable, then why should anyone suspect that human form was moribund and invariable? In subtext, therefore, Ovid turned the deathbed to a magic carpet. Daddy died in the air.

  She had already lost her heart to Lewis Carroll. She searched the text of Metamorphoses for an auxiliary identity. Ovid’s Princess Myrrha loved her cold father King Cinyras beyond station and shame, while he raised her in disinterest, sooner sharing his kingdom than his humanity. A dutiful daughter, she tried suicide. The underworld, not systematized until medieval times, was unsure how to classify her and did not view itself as a suitable intermediary in what was obviously a family quarrel. They turned Myrrha from their gates. Thus, in her mind, both heaven and hell had spurned her. Her dignity, it was now evident, had been a casualty of her birth. Death was not a solution, but only the final complication of the problem. With nothing to lose, she went to her father as a harlot and more or less ravished him in the darkness of his chambers to the cawing of the screech owl. She escaped his postcoital wrath by changing into a tree. Myrrha, to Sylvia, was a true artist in that she understood the redemptive power of degradation; the sureness of bringing oneself low in order to rise above. In the end, she ingeniously metamorphosed herself into a fruit-bearing medium.

  Smoking was her mother’s frantic means of coping. It was her father’s alternate means of communication. It was a part of the body language with which Daddy pleaded to be left alone with his misery. Maybe Ted would show up before the night was over for one of his wardrobe and working-paper interludes. She could stand there and breathe in his ruminative little pipe signals while he pretended to sift through his belongings. She could funnel the air with her fingers, inhale, and feel the smoke skate over her tongue, piercing the stem of her vocal flower, and leaving her standing there when Ted had left, still gesturing like a harpist.

  Or, if Ted didn’t come by tonight, she could make do by burning some roses. She could burn roses, one after the other, in an iron tray as she has done since she was nineteen and first underwent electroconvulsive therapy to combat the rabidity that her grief for her father had turned into. She could bundle her babies, get out the pram, and run to the market before it got much later. She could buy a dozen roses and turn them all to ashes. She could burn an ambrosial hole into the cotton barrow of her mind.

  There are no roses in the market. It is ten degrees below zero, and the snow is as high as her hip. Instead, she might burn a poem or two. She might commit a poem to memory and then to flame. She has a laden new notebook and a despoiled mind. She needs, once again, to scent the garden.

  There’s a nurse coming first thing in the morning to pre-interview her for yet another round of psychotherapy. They will leave no lobe unturned. He general practitioner has lost patience. He said that it was either submit to therapy or have her pill supply cut off entirely. She is looking forward to the m
orning’s examination as something that might make her feel like a normally depressive and unbalanced person once again. Instead of the victim of a haunting.

  She is in her bedroom now. She is leaning forward to look into the bassinet where her two children are lying. She feels the cold draft coming in through the window. The candle flame, burning on the window box, bows at the wind’s solicitude. Her girl is almost too big for her crib. It is reckless to sleep her and her brother together. He is not her match in case things go cranky. But then again, he is her match and she is his. As they taught her at Smith College, and later at Harvard, and finally at Cambridge, symmetry will save the world. He is she and she is he in their fluted, Renoir-flush sleeping gowns with the body mittens beneath. Their foreheads are touching. She listens to the buzzing fugue of their breaths. That all-clear call to Mommy from the fog of their dreams. They have a touch of the flu. Everyone has. This is the coldest night of the coldest month of the coldest winter of memory. Her children are little oarsmen tonight, rowing in sync. Their breaths come in duplicated, slavering bellows. Their sleep is a race that they will not run for long. Sylvia must begin the night’s writing.

  Moving away from the crib, she can feel the cold burn through the soles of her hose. The fizz of pure ammonia in her bladder. She forgoes her nightgown—it hangs from her bedroom like a calico scarecrow—and she does not remove her makeup so as to apply reverse psychology on Somnus. She is wearing a pleated dress with a bertha collar. She regrets the death of the space heater, about an hour ago. She heard the heater’s pitch go out of tune. She caught a whiff of electrical hysteria. She left it running for fear of having to face the horror of cloth-bathing her shivering children from a pot of water, warmed on the stove, in her tub of blackened zinc. The engine of the little electric radiator began to grind its gears. She pulled the plug from the wall and stood there sniffing the oracle. She put her babies down without their baths. She filled the bathroom sink with frigid water. She held her breath. She dunked her face. She raised her head. She saw her features melting away in the mirror.

  3.

  Ted

  He was born in West Yorkshire in a town in the Pennine Chain called Mytholmroyd after a Saxon settlement that had once stood there, canopied by those tree-lined hills from which, it is recorded, their long-eyed archers massacred invaders, and only a few kilometers from the mines that made Yorkshire famous and universally pitied, where Ted’s forebearers and relatives labored out their foreshortened lives. Tellingly, his first memory was not even his; it was his father’s. Sixteen fusiliers, a fraction from his father’s regiment, rose up after a night of slaughter at Gallipoli in 1915, his father told him time and again. To a man, they were bloody and scaly with mud. His father remembered a count of sixteen men standing when the guns quieted; he kept no account of how many perished before breakfast from wounds received the night before. The sixteen of them started back through the line in search of the command. The senior officers had, in fact, retreated hours beforehand, back to the safety of the ships in the harbor in their armored wagons, tugged along by dray horses that were half mad and all but totally blind from the effects of the chlorine gas. The cannoneers and the stretcher bearers, both of whom were considered spectators by his father and the rest of the fighting men, had followed in their commanders’ inchoate footsteps. It was rainy and marshy. To Ted’s father’s surprise, all of Asia Minor had not proven to be arid and biblical. He trod upon soggy, dark green bedding, his father told Ted, hearing, now and again, the sound of dead bones breaking. The smoke hung like a ragged bunting following a parade. Faces swam out of the mire. Maybe his father felt the shameful elation of being alive. Maybe for a moment there before he realized that the dead had no more battles to fight and that the abyssal shore had to be a comparative paradise. There could be no hell beyond this one.

  Then he heard it. Augmented by the hissing of the downpour, it was the chilliest sound imaginable and yet no other sound could have warmed the men back to life. It was the seventeenth survivor, a fife man sitting waist-deep in the russet-colored mud beside a broken drum that was filling up with black rain. The fifers had not been issued gas masks because they couldn’t very well muster a melody through a pachyderm’s nozzle and therefore they had, on the whole, grown understandably scarce in the Gallipoli campaign. The survival of this particular musician was something that the chaplain should look into, that is if the chaplain had survived the battle himself. The piper’s elbows were high, and his head was reared in the manner of the Dixieland musician. From the look of him, he was trying to sell his soul to the heavens, and the heavens were driving an antipathetically hard bargain. But the music did not sound anything like it looked. There was no vibrato and no nuance at all, but for the unbroken, lustrous lone chord of its tone. Who could he be calling with such resonance? No matter, no man among them had ever seen anything so ludicrously brave, nor heard any sound so nakedly vulnerable. There was always and there always would be, amid chaos, some manna of stopgap salvation, even if that stopgap salvation happened to be death itself. Here on the field of slaughter, it was the fife man’s silvery voice that restored the gravity of death by singing to the heavens of the precariousness of life. And this is what poetry was, as Ted’s father never said to him and never once had to. The dreamy and unequivocal return of the senses at the moment when one’s salvation depended entirely upon it. Every other means of communication pretty much amounted to the time of day while poetry qualified as the articulation of time immemorial.

  One of the soldiers, hardly in any shape to stand himself, had the piper up on his back before any of them realized that the little man’s legs had been blown off. The soldier stood wading in three-quarters of the piper’s blood volume. They took his flute away and cleaned it in the rain. Without it, the fife man continued to whistle.

  “Did he live?” Ted remembered asking his father.

  “No,” he said. You could see in the shrinkage of his eyes how it pained him. “But I did. And you did.”

  It made sense. Perfect sense. Poetry involved phlebotomy: blood simply had to be let somewhere along the cycle. And poetry was, in essence, a regenerative exercise, no holds barred. It made perfect sense that an ur-poet specifically had to die, and specifically dramatically and ceremoniously, so that Ted could be born.

  But poetry made converse sense, or rather a dearth of any sort of sense at all, out in the vast Yorkshire wilderness, his playroom as a boy, his questing grounds as an adolescent, the seat of his ever-waiting grave, and a reservoir of inspiration throughout his lifetime. In the midst of all the teeming competition for survival set against the strictest of formalisms, where one being’s death perpetuated another’s sustenance, there was also the transposed element of chaos and the intimation of not some greater good, but pure, unfathomable, random dramaturgy. Regal beasts toppled mock-forlornly at the blunt of a bullet. There was the scintillation of the sudden drizzle of gold through the boughs above. There was the wren’s cryptic recitative. The insouciant intricacy of a single kestrel’s wing. The grave stag’s silent cameo. The larval sinews of a loping, tick-shorn blood-hound. The way in which a bear would map the site of a kill with a swath of gore along the column of a tree trunk. This was all reflective not of what God had created in the space of seven days, but of what He had intuited in the space of a single instant. All of this was not the prudent, consummate work of a master, but the extravagantly brilliant, though immoderate, work of a dilettante, a god who could imagine pipers playing amid carnage.

  The shock of Ted’s life—well, up to now, anyway, Sunday evening, 10 February 1963—was when he found out that the other lads in his boarding school thought poetry sissified. The rest of the boys were readers of the adventure stories, the same Sir H. Rider Haggard and Rafael Sabatini that Ted’s father had had the opportunity to scorn as a child and would not sanction his son to read. The lads seemed convinced that adventure was something that had sadly taken place only in previous centuries. They thought that the mooning ov
er of anachronisms of their births would suffice as their lives’ adventures. They went to parties in pirate costumes, de rigueur. Ted thought, actually he still thinks, that adventure stories were scattershot and pandering, written for the rabble, whereas poetry is a living vine of direct communication; one mind milking another, an artery feeding tissue. The other boys wrote QUATERMAIN and SCARAMOUCHE on their cricket batons. They took copious piss out of Ted for writing OMAR KHAYYÁM upon his, but said nothing when he knocked their bowls to heaven and ran the creases with a dust devil obscuring his legs. He was always the biggest, shyest, most notable lad among them. He was eleven when he received his first love poem, written under the pseudonym of Hippolyta. He resolved to take the high road. He recognized the offending sixth former by the impertinence of his stare. He thanked the boy for his attentions. Then he threatened to break his arm if he or any of his schoolmates heard of this unfortunate and aberrant crush ever again. Ted’s sense of himself and his sense of irony grew in proportion to each other. His ego was counterbalanced by the inexplicable shyness that people would comment on for the rest of his life. He had a strong inkling that he could pretty much get anything he wanted, and he was genuinely abashed at the possibilities.

  He joined the Royal Air Force at eighteen, parting with boyhood. He had every expectation that they were going to teach him not only how to fly, but also how to kill from the air. He talked it over with his father and neither could come up with a better means of death for him, if death, indeed, were fated. “No one truly survives youth,” his father said, exhibiting the old soldier’s acerbity that might well have, if the time and the stars had been different, spared Ted the liability of romanticism. “Best in many ways,” Dad said, “to be through with youth young.” The Royal Air could not come up with a shooting war, and Ted had trouble taking the service seriously as a result. His father was secretly pleased, Ted suspected, that his son was not going to be shot at and had done nothing untoward to avoid the prospect. Combat soldiers, Ted knew from his father’s tales, tended to revere the lucky in advance of the brave.