Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel Read online

  As pillows go, my bag served pretty well. I listened to the drumming of the bus wheels on the road, made a note that running away from home was as easy as pie once you’d made your mind up to it, and fell asleep with my limbs carefully arranged so as not to touch my neighbor’s.

  2

  it was snowing when I got off the bus at Flax Hill. Not quite regular snowfall, not exactly a blizzard. This is how it was: The snow came down heavily, settled for about a minute, then the wind moved it—more rolled it, really—onto another target. One minute you were covered in snow, then it sped off sideways, as if a brisk, invisible giant had taken pity and brushed you down. Next, just as you’d caught your breath, a boomerang effect made a snowman of you all over again. I could only see a few steps ahead of me, and about one step behind me. When a pair of headlights slid past my elbow, I got out of the road and began following the voices of two women huddled under a broken umbrella, mainly because I heard them mention their landlady. I had to find a landlady. Any landlady would do. I stuck close to the umbrella girls, even when the snow hid them from me for seconds at a time and I began to doubt that they were real, even when they took what they called “the shortcut” across abandoned railway tracks overgrown with grass and through a pitch-black tunnel—I retched and retched again at the smell of it. Dead things and rotten eggs. Insects dropped onto my shoulders, tentatively, as if wondering whether we’d met before. More than once I became certain we were being pursued by the very darkness itself. But if the umbrella girls could take it, so could I. A couple of times they stopped and called out: “Hey, is someone there?”

  I hung back, kept my mouth shut, and thought: This landlady had better be great. Once we were out the other side of the tunnel, the umbrella girls giggled and accused each other of being nervous Nellies. Of course that got me thinking about times I’d been in the dark and felt that someone else was there but convinced myself that I was wrong. Probably nine times out of ten there really had been someone there.

  When the umbrella girls finally went in at the door of a prim, skinny, redbrick building, I walked up and down in front of it for a few minutes after the door had closed, wondering what story to tell. But I didn’t know the landlady’s name and it was too cold to think. I knocked at the door and managed to walk in and ask for the lady of the house without shivering too much. She had steel gray hair, an elegant figure, and a “Honey, I’ve seen it all” expression that served as the basis for all her other expressions, from amusement to annoyance.

  I said: “I heard you’re a landlady. Please don’t tell me I heard wrong,” and then I ran out of vocabulary. She sat me down on her own personal sofa, piled cushions onto me until only my head stuck out, and called for soup and blankets. Her name was Mrs. Lennox, and she was Flax Hill born and bred—“A Massachusetts classic, you know.” She told me she’d never lost a prospective tenant yet, and the girls who answered the cry for soup and blankets backed her up. “Doesn’t get under your feet, either,” one of them added. (That turned out to be correct. She wasn’t someone that you just saw around, you had to make appointments with her.) The girls hadn’t consulted one another, so there were four bowls of soup and seven blankets. I took that as a sign that I was welcome and said “Thank you” about fifty times in a row until someone laughingly pointed out that it was only soup.

  Over the days that followed, I tried to identify the umbrella girls by the sounds of their voices, since it was all I had to go on. But fifteen women who live together get to talking alike. It could’ve been any two of them who’d led me in out of the snow.

  As for Flax Hill itself, I was on shaky terms with it for the first few months. Neither of us was sure whether or not I genuinely intended to stick around. And so the town misbehaved a little, collapsing when I went to sleep and reassembling in the morning in a slapdash manner; I kept passing park benches and telephone booths and entrances to alleyways that I was absolutely certain hadn’t been there the evening before. My boarding house room was the cheapest around, and truly, I got what I paid for. A narrow bed, low beams I kept knocking my head against, and a view of a bus stop with a hangdog air (its sign was illegible). There was no chair to sit on, and no mirror in my room, so I made brief consultations with myself as I washed my face in the bathroom down the hall—“I heard she’s a gangster’s moll,” I whispered, repeating things I’d overheard while supposedly out of earshot. “Nah, she’s an actress studying her next part. Trust me, I’ve seen this before.” The woman in the mirror gave me a big wink, told me it’d blow over soon enough, and sent me to bed on my own.

  I dreamt of rats. They spoke to me. They called me “cousin.” And I dreamt of being caught, dreamt of sedative smoke, tar, glue, and strange lights the size of the sun, switching from red to green so fast that I had no time to react. Then the rat catcher held me by the tail. He exhibited me at a conference and answered questions on my habits. He was awarded a medal, and I was very much against the whole thing, but I was dead. I’d wake up with both hands covering my nose, which twitched violently and felt like the coldest part of my body after such dreams. I tasted salt, and that was how I knew I’d been crying in my sleep. I think I missed home. A lot. It didn’t make any sense but I missed home a lot.

  —

  three things were unsatisfactory about me—the first, that I was from Manhattan.

  (“What could a girl from there be looking for around here?”)

  The second problem was my name.

  (“It’s Boy.”

  “Oh, sure. Very cute. And what’s your government name?”

  “I already told you: Boy. Boy Novak.”

  “Wow . . .”

  “Wow yourself.”)

  The third problem was that I hadn’t brought any skill with me. Flax Hill is a town of specialists, and if someone turns up in that kind of town with nothing but a willingness to get their hands dirty, that someone had better forget about being given a break. All anybody ever seemed to want to know about me at first was how come. How come I wasn’t good at anything? I went on a lot of double dates with a girl named Veronica Webster who lived on the floor below me. Like the other tenants, she carried her pawnshop tickets folded up inside an antique locket around her neck. Unlike the other tenants, she had a nice room with a fireplace, and she hosted hot chocolate parties, but you had to bring your own hot chocolate. Webster was seventy percent all right and thirty percent pain in the neck, one of those women who are corpselike until a man walks into the room, after which point they become irresistibly vivacious. She wore her hair like Mamie Eisenhower’s only with longer bangs, and she was out three nights a week, one of them with Ted Murray, her unofficial steady date. I kept feeling I should try to talk her out of her attachment to Ted. First of all he was a stingy tipper, just couldn’t seem to make himself round up to the nearest zero, and that filled me with foreboding. The other thing was that we all met at his place for predinner cocktails once and he had this garish oil portrait of Lincoln up on a wall—the product of one of those mail-order paint-by-number kits if I ever saw one. Something came over me as I stood there looking at that noble profile reproduced in puce. I don’t ever want to feel that way again. It’s Lincoln. You can’t do that to Lincoln.

  Back at the boarding house I said to Webster: “So . . . how about that portrait of Lincoln in Ted’s parlor?”

  She shrugged. “Nobody’s perfect. Anyway, I don’t know about you, but a man who admires Lincoln is my kind of man.”

  I said darkly, “Ah, but does he . . . does he?” and left it at that. I wasn’t supposed to rock the boat. It was up to me to try to keep Ted’s friend entertained. The friend’s name was Arturo Whitman, and he and Ted were a team—Ted sold the jewelry that Arturo made. I could see how Arturo might not be the best salesman; he was big and shaggy and not a little gruff. More often than not he knocked both our wineglasses over on account of waving his hands about too much while talking about the parallels between R
obespierre and McCarthy. He had tawny, heavy-lidded eyes, and he wasn’t very good at dancing, but I couldn’t help liking it when he held me in his arms. One evening when Ted and Webster were playing footsie and talking about Guatemala (Ted was describing parts of it he’d been to, and Webster chipped in with “Sounds divine!” and “I’m awfully jealous!” and “I’d sure like to see that for myself someday, Teddy . . .”), Arturo and I just sat there watching the rain wrap the window round and round in a trembling veil. I heard the raindrops say, “I have a daughter. She wears red amaryllis blooms in her hair”; then I realized it was Arturo talking.

  I looked across the table. He smiled. Not at me, but at the window, as if he saw her there. “Last month it was forget-me-nots,” he said. “And before that, yellow everlastings.”

  “I bet she’s pretty.” The safest remark I could think of.

  “Her name’s Snow,” he said, as if that explained it all. He checked his watch. “Her grandma will have put her to bed about ten minutes ago.”

  “It’s early. How old is she?”

  He frowned. “She’ll be six tomorrow.”

  “Ah. Is it all happening too fast?”

  “No, it’s—fine. The birthday present she’s asked for is a tall order, though.”

  “Lemme guess: a pony.”

  “I almost wish it was. Two more guesses.”

  “Uhm . . . an enchanted object. A lamp with a genie in it, something like that.”

  “Not exactly,” he said, after wavering for a moment.

  The next guess was inappropriate, I knew, but I was too curious not to give it a shot. “A mother.”

  He stared. “You’re good.”

  “It’s just . . . you said it was a tall order.”

  “Yeah.”

  He closed his mouth tight after saying that one word. I figured he only kept coming out on those dates of ours because Ted was blackmailing him—he always looked so relieved when it was time to go home. On the boarding house doorstep I halved a cigarette and lit Webster’s half, then mine, so we could have a quick couple of smokes before going in for the night. Arturo’s wife had died a week after giving birth to his daughter, Webster told me. Childbirth complications. He’d been a history professor at Boston University at the time. But he took Snow and went away, he still wouldn’t say where. Wherever it was, he’d learned to work metal there; when he came back two years later, he set up a workshop in his home.

  “What was his wife’s name?”

  “Julia, I think.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “He doesn’t really talk about her.”

  “And have you met the kid?”

  I’d reached the end of my cigarette half before she had, and Webster grinned as she blew smoke past my ear. “Who, Snow? Sure. She’s a doll.”

  There was a misunderstanding between Arturo and me. An unspoken one, and how do you correct those? It happened at Ted’s place, when I was transfixed by that god-awful portrait. I stayed standing in front of it for longer than I actually looked at it. Time ticked by and I faced the portrait dead-on without seeing it at all. Had anyone asked me what it was that I could see, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them. It was almost as if I’d left the room. I say almost because I could still hear Ted trying his best to wet blanket Webster’s Halloween costume idea.

  “This year—wait for it—this year I’m doing the telltale heart.”

  “And how do you propose to dress up as a heart?”

  “Oh, I’ll just paint myself red all over and wear a red hat, silly. And I’ll tell tales.”

  “That’s just plain cryptic. Anyhow, didn’t the telltale heart throb horrifically loudly?”

  “Oh, that’s hardly difficult. I can throb horrifically loudly right now, if you like.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “Buh-boom,” Webster began, in a deep voice. “Buh-boom, buh boom.”

  I was smiling. My eyes came back into focus and that was what I saw—a face I recognized, smiling. I’d been looking at myself in the picture frame the whole time. The smile turned wry, I scanned the room without turning around, and there was Arturo Whitman. The left side of him, to be precise. The rest of him was out of the picture, but there was a look of steady dislike in that left eye of his. He seemed to think he’d caught me practicing being fascinating.

  He was pretty sarcastic with me after that, when before he’d been almost kind; he took to replying to any little observation I made with “Indeed,” and he got even worse a couple of dates later when I fell into a similar trance only to come to and discover that I’d apparently been contemplating my mysterious smile in the back of my dessert spoon.

  Our misunderstanding worried me. I thought: I should talk to him. I should tell him it isn’t vanity. If it was vanity, I’d have been able to disguise it, all this insipid smirking at myself. Other women did it all the time; it was just that they didn’t get caught. No, the only behaviors we can’t control are those caused by nerves. I rehearsed an offhand explanation. It began with the words: “Hand me some nerve tonic, Whitman.” But I didn’t know for sure that it wasn’t vanity running the show. What I did know was that I wouldn’t be able to stand it if I tried to explain myself in good faith and his only answer was “Indeed.”

  The other two date nights Webster and I spent with bachelors eligible enough to stop Ted from taking her for granted but not so eligible that he quit competing. As for me, I knew I was onto a good thing. I was guaranteed three moderately fancy dinners a week, including dessert, and I was mingling with the locals. The only cost was a little of my pride. I had one dress that was fit for a dinner date, a deep red shantung number the rat catcher’s girlfriend had outgrown. Each time I went to a restaurant, that dress came too. My dates cracked jokes about it, and I acknowledged the jibes with an affable but distant smile. Every other young person I met was an apprentice at this studio or that workshop. The potters scrubbed up pretty well but never managed to shed every last bit of clay; there’d always be just a little daub of it on their chins or wrists. My favorite potter, whose name I forget, said, “Awww, not again,” when I told him there was clay on his forehead. He said: “You know how possessive clay is.” His tone of voice made me wish I could agree with him. As far as he was concerned, he was talking about something as true as thunder, as true as his thumb. So clay leaves hickeys. Who knew . . .

  I told Arturo Whitman about it, just to make conversation. He shrugged, and said: “You should go back to New York.”

  In my head I counted slowly to five before answering. “Oh, I should, should I?”

  “Yup.” He cracked his knuckles. Maybe he just felt a little stiff at that moment, but as a gesture made while telling someone to leave town, I didn’t like it.

  “And just why is that?”

  He finished his lunch and started on mine, methodically, without enthusiasm. He didn’t seem to approve of lamb chops and spinach. “You must’ve thought you’d get an easy ride around here. You must’ve thought you could show up and say ‘Hey, I’m from the big city’ and everyone would just roll over—”

  “Would it kill you to get to the point?” I inquired.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll keep it simple. People make beautiful things here. We’re interested in the process, not the end product. Now, you—you don’t have what it takes to start that kind of process, let alone see it through. So. There’s nothing here for you.”

  I looked him in the eye and said slowly: “Oh, isn’t there?” I wasn’t referring to anything in particular—all I was conscious of was the desire to give him a gigantic scare, right there in the diner, with the rest of the Sunday lunch crowd all around us, happy young families and grandpas carefully chewing the pasta in their minestrone as they listened to the baseball scores.

  Arturo didn’t turn a hair. “What were you at home, a dressmaker’s model?”

&nbs
p; “No,” I said, amazed that he could have got it so wrong. That “big city” stuff too. New York wasn’t a big city to me. It was no bigger than a Novak rat cage. The nearest of those blinded creatures always knew when I was nearby, and would turn their heads toward me if I made the slightest movement, just as if I’d called their names.

  “Well, you could probably do that kind of work here. I know someone who—”

  “I’ll find my own job. Thanks.”

  That evening I told Webster she should find someone else for her double dates. It was just one of those things, I said.

  I found it easy to disregard the suggestion that I didn’t belong in Flax Hill. The town woke something like a genetic memory in me . . . after a couple of weeks, the air tasted right. To be more specific, the air took on a strong flavor of palinka, that fiery liquor I used to sneak capfuls of whenever the rat catcher forgot to keep it under lock and key. But now, here, clear smoke rose from my soul every time I breathed in. A taste of the old country. Of course I knew better than to mention this to anybody.

  Arturo was right about the way Flax Hill worked, though. I swept the floors of European-style ateliers and watched luxury made before my very eyes. Brocade gloves in quarter sizes for a perfect fit, peau de soie slippers with a platinum sheen, hall-length tapestries woven from hand-dyed thread, wooden doorknobs shaped like miniature tigers midleap—the people of Flax Hill made all these things, packed them up in crates with no more emotion than if they were hen’s eggs, and sent them to department stores and private clients across the country. The town should really have been called Flax Hills, since it was huddled up between two of them, but maybe that was the locals’ way of instructing one of the hills to scram. The hills are ringed round with old, dark, thick-trunked trees. They’re so tall you feel a false stillness standing under them; when you look all the way up, you see the wind crashing through the topmost branches, but you hear all the commotion only distantly, if at all. I met men out among those trees. Bearded men who carried axes, and drove carthorses, occasionally stopping to deftly bind logs of wood more tightly together. The woodcutters didn’t seem surprised to see me. They’d just say hello and point, reminding me where north was so I wouldn’t lose my way. Light fell through the leaves, liquid in some places, sometimes stopping to hang in long necklaces—but only for a second or two, as if aware it wouldn’t get much admiration in Flax Hill.