Memories of the Future, page 28
My voice was commanding. I said, “There’s blood, blood everywhere. What the hell have you done?”
“No, no, no,” he whined. “No, please, put it away.” He was gasping. “Listen, listen to me. I had a fight with my girlfriend.”
I stopped breathing. I thought murder. I thought body parts in the bag. I thought to myself, This is real. This is happening now. He’s carrying around the girl’s dismembered body. I moved the knife closer to his shirt. “Tell me now,” I said, “or I’ll push it in.”
“We haven’t been getting along.”
I grunted at him, “Why is your fucking bag bleeding?” I don’t talk like that. Was it the Baroness speaking? No, it was a man in the movies. That’s what men in the movies say.
He was gasping for breath. “I was shaving. Ally was so angry, she yanked at the razor, so I would listen to her, and it cut me bad and I bled all over the bathroom. I was crying, but she didn’t care, and she kicked me out, and I grabbed a towel before I left. I had to clean myself in a diner and change my shirt. The lady was nice about it. She gave me some Band-Aids but they bled through. It’s the truth. I swear. I swear. There was so much blood I thought I would pass out. I had to press the cut for about an hour to get it to stop.”
“Where’s the cut?”
The pale young man lifted his chin. I looked at the fresh gash underneath it, two inches long and deep. It looked as if it could easily start bleeding again.
“I should have thrown it away,” he said, “but I stuffed it in the bag. I had to see someone. I didn’t know what to do with it . . .”
“Get out the towel,” I said, moving the Baroness back and forth near his gut. “Take it out of the bag.”
He knelt down again and extracted the soaked towel from the bag.
“Now open it up and let me see what’s in there.”
There was nothing in the bag, Page, but the mess from the towel and his miserable belongings.
“You need stitches,” I said. “It will heal badly without them. It will open and bleed again.” I slowly and carefully closed the Baroness.
He began to shudder, then he gagged, and I thought he might throw up, but he didn’t. He gulped the air, squeezed his eyes shut, and rocked himself back and forth as if he were regaining control of his body. Then the motion stopped. He opened his eyes. He stared at the thing in his hand. “I still want you to take it to her. Okay?”
“What the hell is it?”
“It’s Lindy’s wand. It was lost for years.”
I didn’t answer him.
“It was at Dad’s. I found it.”
I took the wand. I remember he crouched over his duffel bag to zip it closed, and he pushed the bloody tumor of a towel back inside it, and I turned away from him, put my key into the lock, turned it, and pushed the heavy door open. If he had wanted to, he could have rushed in with me, but he didn’t. It wasn’t until I had made it inside 2B that I saw that the star attached to the wand wobbled precariously and had been reattached with a thick application of duct tape.
Minnesota would not see the pale young man again. She could never bring herself to call him Ted for some reason, not after she had threatened him with the Baroness. She might have killed him, and for many years she thought about that particular horror story, which might have happened but didn’t. She saw him lying on the sidewalk bleeding, and she saw herself, an unhinged murderess wailing at the night sky, bloody knife still in her hand, and she heard the sirens blast in her ears, and she dimly made out the crowd of policemen in their blue uniforms before she fainted, and she imagined the trial and the prison where she lived with hundreds of other women and spent years and years studying their hard, unforgiving faces. When she was optimistic, she wrote many books during her life sentence, but when she was pessimistic, she dwindled away in her cell to next to nothing, a wan and wasted being, drained of the future altogether.
She did not see the pale young man walk down 109th Street and turn left at Broadway and walk one block north to descend into the subway at 110th Street and ride off into the sadness of the Upper West Side and beyond. She didn’t know then that the pale young man was a heroin addict, that he lied to and stole from and cheated all the people who loved him or had loved him, including the enraged Ally, who had troubles of her own, but whose story in this book ends when she shuts the door on her boyfriend’s bloody face.
Minnesota didn’t know until months later that on the same night that she was brandishing the Baroness at Lucy’s son, the witches were casting a spell from the apartment filled with books on Riverside Drive to bind the pale young man, Theodore Brite Jr., an exploded lost young man without a future or without much of one. It was Patty who told Minnesota the story, and it was Patty who would tell her years later that he died of a heroin overdose on a sofa in a friend’s apartment in Orlando, Florida, in April 1987, a town I cannot think of anymore without speeding ahead to June 2016 and the massacre in a nightclub called Pulse. I live in the United States of Weaponry, land of the lone gunman, armed, as they say, “to the teeth.”
Another spell the witches cast that spring night was intended to heal Lucy, who wrestled with ghosts and demons, or maybe astral bodies—as you prefer. Lucy, officially a member of the coven, was sitting on the floor in a circle with Patty and Moth and Gorse and Alistair, and they were chanting and burning candles in a thick cloud of herbal scents as they rocked back and forth to the rhythms of the greater universe. Minnesota never found out whether they were naked or not on that particular evening, but sometimes they were and, as the weather was warmer, they may have been, and she couldn’t help but find this a little ridiculous. She couldn’t help but imagine their old bodies and cringe, but then she was young and foolish, and perhaps her feelings were only natural for someone her age.
* * *
On June 2, before the female Quixote, also known as Minnesota, sat down to write the extended passage in her notebook, she washed the wand carefully and dried it carefully and walked over to Lucy’s around eleven thirty in the morning. She felt that the plastic stick with its black duct tape and unstable star had the quality of a relic. It was an object irradiated by grief and madness, a dead child’s toy that could unleash an emotional tempest if she didn’t act with great subtlety and tenderness before she handed it over.
I was nervous, Page, really nervous, and I knew I had to tell Lucy everything, and I knew I couldn’t just wave the wand at her without warning, so I decided to leave it outside in the hallway and then retrieve it if she wanted it. When she opened her door, Lucy looked different. Her hair was wet, therefore darker, but I also realized she had no makeup on, which gave her features a wan, younger appearance. The bathrobe she was wearing had a monogram on the breast pocket, LBC. I wondered what the C stood for. Her eyes were shiny just as they had been on the morning we ate bagels. After I had stepped inside, Lucy chirped, “The door, the door.” I closed it, left the wand alone, and hoped no one would grab it. She seated herself on the ghost-of-Lindy chair. I sat on the sofa, my onetime bed, and I asked how she was, and she said, “Fine,” and I said that something had happened, but I didn’t exactly know how to tell her about it.
She stared at me. Then she said, “Fire away, honey.”
“I met someone yesterday who said he was your son. He had a driver’s license. Theodore Brite. You said that he was dead.”
“He was dead, dead to me.”
“That’s not really the same thing, Lucy.”
Lucy looked away into the room. “You can’t know,” she said. “You’re too young. You don’t have children. It’s probably wrong to say he’s dead. I know that now. Last time I let him in here, we talked, and I thought he was better. He stole a hundred dollars from my purse. It’s not the stealing, though.” Lucy clenched her jaw. “I took him to see Patty. I thought she might be able to look into him and find out what’s true and what isn’t. I’ve begged him to tell me, but Patty says I’ll never know. She says that Lindy won’t come back and tell me, and I have to stop thinking she will. She says the magic can’t do that.”
“What, Lucy? What can’t the magic do?”
Lucy walked over to the little table with the pentagram, picked it up, and pulled out the little man I already knew was hidden there. Then she lifted him into the air for me to see. I drew a breath. The thing wasn’t the same—different hair, different clothes—another little man tightly bound with string. She put the doll in my lap. It was wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt.
“Lucy, I saw a doll the morning I was here. It was behind the picture and I looked at it.”
“That was the father. This is the son.”
“Poppets?”
“One poppet. Gorse made new clothes for him. Senior and Junior cut from same cloth!” She laughed. “It’s just a symbol, you see, a thing we use. I thought we could force it out of him, do a kind of long-distance hypnosis by breathing into the doll. I really did, but Patty says that’s too much to ask. She said the magic can’t do that. It can’t get it out of him.”
“Get what out of him?”
Lucy took a deep breath. She pressed her fingertips against her mouth and then released them. “Patty says I’ll never know if he pushed Lindy out the window or not. He was in me, but that doesn’t mean I can control him. We can’t read people perfectly, not even our own children. Patty thinks it’s wrong to think we can. And then she asked me what I would do if I knew he had really done it. What would I do?”
I had a curious sense of relief. I said, “Lucy, do you think he pushed her? Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know!” There was a cry in her voice. “I think he could do anything. That’s the problem. He’s like his father. He hides behind all his smiley and sad and sorry faces. He never felt guilty about anything. He doesn’t really care about anyone, so I can’t tell what’s in there. I don’t know. That’s the torture. But I’ll bet Daddy-O is kicking around that slut from Virginia right now. She got herself a real bargain. And I wanted that bargain! I wanted it. Can you believe it? It’s disgusting.”
I examined my knees.
Lucy kept talking. “And me? And me? I just keep wrapping up Lester and throwing him into the trash under the sink.” I looked up. Lucy blinked and slowly shook her head. The rest of her face remained rigid. “Patty says that it was awful to kill his hamster and that it shows he hasn’t been in his right mind since he was little, but it doesn’t mean he pushed Lindy.” And then, as I looked at her, I saw it, or rather I saw him in her—the resemblance between Lucy and her son. It vanished in an instant, and I couldn’t retrieve it. I wondered why I hadn’t seen the similarity in their faces on the street or at Tom’s or when we were standing outside the door with the bleeding bag, but I hadn’t. Lucy closed her eyes and grimaced. “I thought I would die if I didn’t know,” she said. “I thought I would die. She was here, you know, Lindy was here, right in this chair. And she forgave me.”
“What was there to forgive, Lucy?”
“I stayed in that place. I stayed with him in that place, and I didn’t save her. I should have taken the kids and left, gone somewhere. But it was like I couldn’t move. I was stuck. That’s the shadow, my shadow. There are days I forget all about it. I feel okay. I made brownies with Moth yesterday and I felt so happy. We ate them all up. They were yummy. And then, I remembered.” Lucy made the birdlike movement with her head. “Moth told me to lie down, and she chanted over me, and she stroked my arms ever so gently.”
“That sounds pleasant.” It was all I could think to say.
“It was,” she said. “But, you know, there’s a big hole in the world where Lindy was, and it will never get smaller. The best I can do is walk farther and farther away from the hole. It’s still there, you see, but I’m not as close to it, so I’m less likely to fall in.”
I had a strong feeling that this metaphor belonged to Patty, but I said nothing.
“Distance,” Lucy said. “It makes you stronger. But then there’s Teddy, my own kid who’s alive, not dead. Remember after the party when you came in with me, remember there was someone in the street, right outside?”
I nodded.
“Remember he yelled ‘son of a bitch’?”
And then Lucy growled at me in her other voice. “That was him.”
And I thought, the insult is about origins, about coming from an inferior mother, an abject cur. “Oh, Lucy,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Lucy avoided my eyes. “Don’t be sorry for me,” she said sharply, “I’m leaving this dump at the end of the month. I gave notice a while ago. I’m moving in with Patty and Moth. They’ve got a whole big room for me. Patty inherited that apartment, you know. It’s just the maintenance we have to pay, and it’s nice over there. I can’t see him again. I’m afraid of him. I don’t want him to know where I am. Don’t ever tell him. I’ll bet he played you, too, sweetie. He plays everybody.”
I remembered the deadly edge of the Baroness in the lamplight.
And so, Page, by the time I told Lucy about my encounter with her son, it had diminished, had become a coda to the bigger story. I explained about going to Tom’s and the twenty-dollar bill and the duffel bag and the walk back to the building. I told her that I was carrying a knife because I’d been afraid of an attack ever since the night she and Patty and Moth saved me. It was true, and yet while I talked I felt as if I were lying. Telling the story of the Baroness in the simplest way possible—young woman sees blood in bag, is afraid, pulls knife, which is on her person to protect her person from new assault after old assault, discovers blood is from shaving-girlfriend injury, puts knife away—all those were facts, but the facts were oddly remote from the actual story.
After I had finished, Lucy looked at me and smiled broadly. Her face lit up with malicious mirth, and she began to shake with laughter. At first, I didn’t know what to do. She scared me, to be honest, but she looked so jubilant, I felt vindicated. “Oh my God,” she said, “you must have scared the bejesus out of him!” I smiled, and then I laughed. I found the whole story with the bag and the Baroness suddenly comic. I hadn’t jabbed him, after all. No one was hurt. Lucy slapped my arm and then rubbed it vigorously. “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?” She laughed so hard tears spurted from her eyes. When we had recovered from laughing, I told her about the wand.
I looked closely at Lucy. “Do you want it? It’s just outside the door. I’ll bring it in if you want it. He said you had been looking for it.”
She folded her hands in her lap; all merriment had left her face. Her eyes narrowed. “You say it’s in the hallway?”
“Yes.”
“Then get it.”
It looked forlorn as it leaned against the wall, its star-head hanging on its chest. I took it by its handle gently and walked into 2C.
When I held it out to Lucy, she took hold of it, looked at it critically, and in a loud voice, said, “That’s not it!”
I sat back down on the sofa. “He said it was, Lucy.”
“No,” she said fiercely. “It’s old and broken and ugly. Lindy didn’t love this, this stupid thing.” She threw it on the floor. I was tempted to pick it up, but I didn’t.
She looked at me, her face hard.
I turned my head away from Lucy. There was something mean in her, but I pitied her, too, no, more than that. I had charity for her. What would I be like if I had her story? Who would I be? How would I live?
On the little table beside Lucy I saw a book. The words on its spine read: Witchcraft Today, Gerald Gardner.
I pointed at the book. “The gardener,” I said. “Maybe that’s what I heard you talking about.”
“I read it every day,” Lucy said solemnly. “It’s a very important text for us.”
“The crippled gardener,” I said.
“Crippled?” Lucy said. “He’s not crippled.”
I wondered how he got crippled through the wall.
“You can go now,” she said. “And take that thing with you.”
It’s funny, Page, I’m used to Lucy, and her harshness didn’t bother me. I picked up the broken wand and walked to the door.
Just after I had opened it, Lucy said, “They want you in the coven.” Then she corrected herself, “We want you in the coven.”
I turned around and smiled at her. “It’s not for me, Lucy, but thank you. I’d like to see you again though, I mean after you move out.”
She spoke loudly. “You think you can be a witch all by yourself?”
The question surprised me, but an answer came quickly to mind: “I’m already a witch, Lucy. I’ve been a witch for a long time.”
Those are the last words on Lucy Brite in Mead, the end of the writings that turned into a little novel dense with dialogue I couldn’t possibly have remembered word for word, a never-published novel called The Mystery of Lucy Brite or The Woman Through the Wall.
In July, a graduate student moved into 2C, a short, plump young man with a beard, who smelled of high seriousness, carried around books by Willard van Orman Quine, and made no noise whatsoever.
I would see Lucy, Patty, Moth, Gorse, Alastair, and Alice the dog again, but not until after the notebook ends. The Three Ladies of the Broom lived together until March 1981, when Lucy suffered what was then called a “nervous breakdown.” She didn’t return to the apartment on Riverside Drive but became a resident of a psychiatric halfway house, where she made some trouble but not so much trouble that they didn’t allow her to stay. The members of the coven visited her. I didn’t. Several times I said I would join them, but I always called to cancel. I felt guilty about it, but Patty said to me wisely that she didn’t think Lucy cared all that much one way or the other. We like to think we’re important to other people, but we aren’t always that important.
