In the Country of the Great King Read online

  “What is it, Katelyn?” she whispered. They couldn’t have sung Christmas carols together, thought Arista. Nelson Little was a depressed and unharmonious Jew.

  Katelyn tried to speak, but heaved and gasped instead. What was it? Arista wondered. Then she realized. They were singing “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  The Christmas service had progressed, Katelyn now sniffing and blowing in her accustomed way. Arista, after consoling her friend as best she could, found herself watching the religious rites somewhat like a traveler in a primitive, foreign country—fascinated but not awed, sometimes slightly amused as the preacher went on about Christ moving among us, or through us, or in us. Then to her surprise he said something that moved her. Something she would be embarrassed to repeat, and so she had, to this day, repressed it. Damn, she had said to herself as she responded to the sermon, as the tears welled up in her eyes. Not this, not now. But there had been a whisper.

  The following Sunday, she was drawn back to the church—almost, it seemed, against her own will. The handsome minister spoke of Christ’s quiet, mysterious shepherding of lost souls. A whisper was one thing, but the possibility that she was being herded, like some fat sheep, into faith horrified Arista. Sheep were stupid. She was not a herd animal. She didn’t believe in souls. She was not yet ready to think of herself as lost. She did not wish to be found. She did not wish to be hooked, like a failing vaudeville comedienne, and dragged from the stage of secular life at the whim of a long-dead, gravely misunderstood rabbi. She had, after all, Clayton. Clayton, insubstantial as he was, represented her claim to a place in the rational, solid, sensual world. The real world.

  Nevertheless, the Reverend Christian Davies, with his shock of snow-white hair and his shocking faith in the goodness of God, was making a formidable claim on her attention. From childhood, she had been drawn to such men—to professors or activists or politicians—men who dared to stand up before other men and declare their beliefs. Men she could look up to. There were fewer and fewer such men as she got older and taller. But a preacher? A magician? Never! Well, not since her grandfather, who was, no doubt, the model on which all her other men were made. Grandpa Brainard, the Reverend Elam Brainard, had saved her from her father, the only saving she had ever wanted, or ever needed.

  On the Sunday after Christmas she was back. She had taken Communion on New Year’s Eve because she had wanted to see the preacher up close—wanted to see the lines around his eyes, hear his breathing—wished for some form of communion with Christian Davies. She had taken the soggy wafer, which was all that was offered. She had begun to want to know what this strange man would say about life and how he would say it.

  Once, in her bathtub, she imagined that she was a believer, that she had bought the whole kit and caboodle: the angel, the virgin, the manger, three wise men, God walking the earth as a man—the whole nine yards—even resurrection; and though it was impossible for her to believe, she noticed a subtle change in her feelings as she entered into the fantasy of faith. She felt calmer, open, responsive, warmer. Her characteristic tenseness—a guardedness, a fear that her mind would be torn away from her—had, during the moments of her daydream, lessened. From time to time over the next few months she had tried the fabrication on, like a hat. Once she even looked into the mirror as she did so. Yes, her features softened, not in stupidity, but in relief. The imagination of faith gentled her. Belief was out of the question, of course. Reason simply had to prevail, even if, especially if, it was tougher.

  The sermon had begun. Reverend Davies was telling his congregation about his childhood; about bluebells and little girls in Ireland. Arista arched an eyebrow. There were no bluebells in the fields of her youth. She remembered goldenrods and golden buttercups, black-eyed Susans with yellow-gold petals, daisies with yellow-gold centers and white petals to be torn off, one by one. He loves me, he loves me not. And wasn’t there something about holding buttercups under your chin? She was called Abigail then.

  She and Ted Hackett had made love for the first time among the wildflowers. She had liked it. Ted had been allergic to all the pollen and had sneezed repeatedly and his eyes had puffed up, so after that first fondling in the fields they had made love in the backseat of Ted’s parents’ car, like all the other teenagers in all the other backseats of all the other cars belonging to all the other parents. Arista had missed the feel of the earth at her back, the beating of birds’ wings above them, and the sun-saturated air. She had been carefully conditioned by years of parsonage life to believe that sex was sinful, and she had tried and tried to feel guilty about it. But she couldn’t. Sex, she discovered, was too glorious to be sin. In Ted’s arms she began to resent religion with all its rules and restraints. She soon detested her grandfather’s sermons, which had, until the loss of her virginity, intrigued her.

  Ted had been more tentative about sex than she, a characteristic she would discover in many men over the years to come. Yet those first caresses had, in some gentle way, been more exciting than all the lovemaking that had followed. She could not forget him. He could not forget her. Could any man? Ted looked out across the lake where he had first made love to Abigail, who was now Arista, in the hot, dry, flower-filled fields that had long since been plowed up and flooded over and now rippled with sky-blue water.

  Why was he thinking of her at all? It must be twenty years since she had left him and Boar’s Wood, Ohio, for New York City and yet she had appeared in the dawn as if she, and not a dream, had entered his bed.

  “You’ll be back in a month,” he had said to her years ago, helping her up onto the train. She had smiled a pensive smile from the clouded train window, waved once, and was gone. She had written to him for a while, and in spite of her artful, vivid descriptions of galleries and coffeehouses and walk-up apartments, he couldn’t imagine where in the world she was. He could only think of her here, in her hometown, in the high school they had attended together, in the strange parsonage where she had lived with all the old Bible thumpers, and in the fields. He remembered her most vividly in the fields. Later, in the dark backseats of automobiles, she had seemed hidden from him, though she was always quick to disrobe. Ted Hackett had not replied to her letters. He realized now how monstrously angry he had been with her for the abandonment. At the time he had thought his refusal to write was just a shrewd move; that she would come to miss him and would return to him. But she hadn’t and she didn’t. He had waited. Then he didn’t. He had married Ivy Sue and been unusually happy—usually.

  Ted returned to his gardening, but soon found himself staring again at the lake, trying to see back through time and down through depths to where he and Abigail-Arista had been young and tender lovers. The water was almost still, reflecting the sky, revealing nothing.

  “How’s it going?” shouted Ivy Sue from the deck.

  “How about a weeping cherry right here?”

  “Good idea.”

  The earth waited. Ted dug deeper. What, he wondered, had possessed Abigail to change her name? He liked Abigail. He liked calling her Abigail when everyone else had called her Abby. And how was it that his wife, even now, knew so much about the woman who had once been her high-school rival?

  “I wonder what happened to Abigail Brainard,” he had mused over their leisurely Sunday breakfast.

  “She doesn’t exist anymore,” Ivy Sue had replied.

  “What do you mean? She’s not dead, is she?”

  “Sort of. She changed her name to Arista Bellefleurs.”

  “Pretty.”

  “Pretty pretentious.”

  “I wonder why she changed it.”

  “She’s a writer now.”

  “She always was, Ivy Sue.”

  “Well, that’s what she calls herself now. And every year she either gets married or divorced or takes another lover.”

  “And how is it that you know these interes
ting tidbits?”

  “Grapevine.”

  “Gossip.”

  “Are you looking for an argument, Ted?”

  “No. But changing your name isn’t the same as committing suicide.”

  After breakfast Ted Hackett lingered in the breakfast nook, watching as his wife took down the family portraits one at a time. They were all lovingly preserved in matching brass frames with nonglare glass. She sprayed Lemon Pledge on the paneling and polished the wall carefully; then she sprayed Windex on each of the pictures and polished the glass; then she rehung the pictures. There were all the Hacketts, hanging before him: young Ivy Sues and Teds, smiling through college graduation and courtship and marriage. There was Seth as a happy infant, and Holly, also an infant though less happy; the two kids, older, posed together, looking strained; the four of them together, arranged in a traditional family group looking out at life with nonglare eyes. He felt a moment’s pride for his well-polished family. His exactly-as-he-had-been-raised-to-believe-a-family-should-be family.

  Ted sighed. Except for Seth. Seth was exceptional. Music had bubbled up and spilled out of the boy since infancy. Seth had come into the world singing. A toy piano had given way to a real one by the time he was three. There had followed a succession of horns and stringed instruments, all of which hurried into melody at his touch. His final choice, a flute, now sent up strains of Mozart from the music room in the basement as it did during most hours of the weekend.

  “You know, you didn’t do a very good job with the soundproofing in the cellar, Ted,” Ivy Sue complained. “Holly has taken to wearing earplugs when she’s not wearing her Walkman. And I may invest in a pair myself.”

  “I’ll get some more acoustical tiles and put them up next weekend,” he promised, knowing he wouldn’t, for in truth, he loved to hear the kid play. He wished he could communicate better with Seth, but the music made a distance between them. Ted couldn’t read, let alone play, a note himself. He could not carry a tune and had difficulty remembering one. He had no knowledge of the grand and complex world that his son inhabited, no language in which to speak to him. Seth, for his part, had shown no interest in business or sports or hobbies or television, the natural items of discourse between father and son; so they seldom spoke to each other except out of necessity and then, awkwardly—about Seth’s schoolwork, which presented no problems, or to arrange the day’s mundane activities. He hoped that Seth wasn’t gay.

  Ivy Sue got out the vacuum cleaner. The Saint of Ceaseless Sanitation. Ted suddenly felt the need to move.

  “Where are you going, Ted?”

  “I thought I would dig out the dead evergreen in the backyard.”

  “Good idea.”

  It didn’t seem like an idea to Ted. It felt like an escape, though he didn’t know the name of his enclosure. He was glad now to be at work in the earth. The roots of the tree went deep and the ground was hard. He remembered that as an adolescent, hired about the neighborhood to do yard work, he had planned to be a gardener. Now he noticed he had worked up a sweat in spite of the chilly morning air, and his breath came heavy. He was out of shape. Too much success had weakened him. What would Arista think of him now? What would she say if she came home for a visit?

  He rested on the shovel again and cataloged his kingdom. She would see a convenient, conventional ranch-style house, a white gravel driveway looping toward the double garage holding matching Mercedeses, acres of well-kept lawn, hedges, hillocks covered in domesticated flowers; a dock covered in AstroTurf jutting out from the edge of the lawn into the private lake; a small Sailfish tethered to the dock; snowmobiles parked in the town garage awaiting the white, cold pleasures of winter. These were not the accomplishments of a gardener. His successful real-estate business was elaborating into a regional chain. He should be content. She should be impressed.

  “You live your life like a laundry list, Ted,” Abigail-Arista had once said to him. He had been very angry. She had been very angry. He couldn’t remember why.

  He stepped hard onto the shovel. Damn it. This was no list. This was the best place to live in Boar’s Wood, Ohio—and he was glad he had stayed. His life made a recognizable kind of sense. The television sets in the corners of all the major rooms reflected his life like mirrors.

  “You wear the golden handcuffs like a whore wears a rhinestone bracelet,” she had taunted him in a dream. A nightmare; for Arista could get angry, but she wasn’t vicious. They were different sorts of people. That was all. He just wasn’t like Arista. He didn’t court fear. And she, underneath her quiet resolution, had been frightened to leave their hometown. She wouldn’t admit it, but he had sensed it, and those city letters full of the picturesque and the optimistic, had beat, beneath the upbeat, with a pulse of fear.

  Before she had left town, her great-uncle Meshach had given her a gun, a small two-shot derringer with a mother-of-pearl handle; and he had taught her how to shoot it. She became skilled at hitting the empty Coke bottles lined up on the fence out behind the shed, enjoying the explosions as they shattered into aqua shards of light. The derringer wouldn’t kill a rapist, Uncle Meshach had explained, but it would slow the bastard down. A woman had a right to defend herself. Arista wondered what had become of the little gun. Had she hidden it in some forgotten cranny or tossed it away into the trash? In those first weeks after her arrival in New York the gun had been a comfort to her. Arista recalled its reassuring weight in the palm of her hand as she crept down the darkened hall of the Ashcraft Hotel on her way to the bathroom in the dark middle of a hot Manhattan night.

  The hotel, her first residence, was located just off Times Square and was cheap—full of weak, old people and tough, old whores. She had been scared to death, but determined to live here, in spite of her fears, in spite of the terrible aching loneliness, even longing, for home, and Ted, and the safe familiar lanes of Boar’s Wood. Yet she knew she had to be in New York. She had imagined, with the romantic truth of youth, that this city held her destiny, that she must experience and suffer and persevere in this place; and then write and write and write. Ted had no experience with inspiration.

  It was right that he had stayed behind. He would not have been happy. They would not have been happy. Of course, she had not been happy. Writers are not happy people, she reminded herself. Narrative, like silk, is spun by the worm of pain. There were other examples besides herself. Her friend Katelyn was another proof of Arista’s theory. Through all the long years that Katelyn Wells had been miserable over Nelson Little, Katelyn’s poems had improved, as if she had scratched out her lines with blood and a used razor blade.

  The new minister startled Arista back into the present moment with a burst of William Butler Yeats, the randy, rascally Irishman who was as good as they got:

  Red Rose, proud Rose, Sad Rose of all my days!

  Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways . . .

  All the men she had ever loved, loved Yeats.

  She realized that while her thoughts had been wandering she had been staring blankly at the man in the pulpit, and as a result her eyes were playing tricks with the light. The Reverend Christian Davies, in the center of her vision, was clear to her—glowing, haloed—while the periphery of her vision had become misty and dim. Her eyes watered and her face warmed. He truly was a handsome devil. And he knew it, by the look of it. Strong, even features, prematurely white hair edged in black, black robes edged in white. Coincidence? She thought not. There was a theatrical surge to his speech. He had carefully kept his Irish brogue. There was a glint of gold on the third finger of his left hand.

  Arista Bellefleurs at forty-five years of age, with her cynicism honed by the slow surcease of her biological clock, two marriages, a half-dozen love affairs, and one middle-aged passion, all failed, all behind her, was finding her way to yet another man. If Christ was indeed moving within her, she thought, Christ had a genuinely strange sense of humor, causing her to fall in love
again and again like the devout, demented schoolgirl she had once been.

  When Katelyn found out about this particular crush, she would laugh and shake her head disapprovingly at Arista. They were not, either of them, lucky in love.

  He’s killed himself, Katelyn was thinking. He’s not actual anymore. It’s not just that he’s hidden. He’s dead. Am I responsible? I cannot be without guilt. Katelyn had reached out and taken hold of Nelson Little’s limp left hand and felt nothing. Nothing at all.

  She had, throughout her life, felt responsible for the failures of her men; thinking if only she had loved them more or understood them better, they would have flourished. She imagined that loving men was her vocation, one in which she constantly fell short. Arista had often chided her about this belief and the waves of disappointment that followed inevitably in its wake. “You can’t make up a man like you can make up a poem,” she declared. “They don’t scan.” Still, nothing in Katelyn’s history had prepared her for the shock of Nelson’s deflation.

  In truth, the love affair had killed them both. Katelyn dragged her mind back over her own dead time, the first three years after she had broken off with him—no, she had not been dead, though she had wished she would die. The memories had congealed into one mental picture. She saw herself lying in her own bed, gripping the bars of the headboard behind her, her knees drawn up in agony, as if giving birth to the emptiness that would be the rest of her life. She had tried to put the broken pieces of her world back into some semblance of order but there were no pieces. There was no husband now, or child, or dog. Victor had taken Great Daniel, their toy poodle, away with him. And Amas, her teenage son, had walked out of her life.

  Katelyn discovered that without Nelson, without her family, she could not go on, in spite of women’s liberation, in spite of therapy, in spite of the concern and support of her friends. Alone, she had teetered around without direction, finally paralyzed. A nervous breakdown, it was called. It was then, in that time, when she could no longer move at all, that the words had begun to come. She began to scratch out jagged verse across the empty plains of middle life, wishing, hoping, longing, willing, wanting, praying, and bargaining with God for Nelson to come back.