Honeydew: Stories Page 16

  I always called him Uncle Franz, though his poor frail wife I addressed as Madame Szatmar.

  “Lance, your aunt is generosity itself,” Madame Szatmar once declared, addressing me while Toby strode from our Village living room into the kitchen to brew a deep blue tea that might just prolong the old lady’s sad, barren life. “Discretion too. She keeps secrets as if her tongue has been torn out.”

  I am Lancelot. Toby inherited me from her brother and sister-in-law, my parents—dead tragically early. I have no memory of them. I have been Toby’s adoptee and later her assistant during the two decades in which her books, never claiming to be factual history, claiming only to be possibly true, found favor among young people, though they never threatened to outchart the witchy-wizard series.

  Toby’s version of history depends on the principle of parsimony. That is: her accounts are the most economical way of explaining what cannot be explained in a briefer way. The rout at Thessalonica required subterfuge and optical illusion. As for the Alchemist of Rotterdam, his existence is postulated by the metaphoric pricking of the infamous tulip bubble. We know now that the prized tulips were made multicolored by a virus. The virus inducer is Toby’s, a scientist who understood that invading organisms could work their will within a plant. He infected bulb after bulb, using a rudimentary syringe. Gorgeous, those tulips were. The second generation died.

  “Produce evidence of the existence of that protobiochemist,” said some rigid historian.

  But, wrote Toby’s most admiring reviewer, she does not fill up her books with data and a bogus sense of the past. It is her genius to be able to imagine time and place and person so fully that they are as good as real—or better. History as diversion.

  We bought the cottage on Lake Piscataqua with the continuing royalties from The Spy of Thessalonica and The Alchemist of Rotterdam, and with the honoraria from Toby’s appearances on panels and platforms. A devoted suitor brilliantly invested the money.

  Toby was by now sixty—I was twenty. She was tall as a young tree, thin as a spear. Her hair that had once been blond, my hair that had once been blond, both had darkened to the brass of an ancient Greek drachma. She wore pants and shirts of a similar shade. Her chin was cleft, like mine. Her eyes were pewter. (Mine, certain young women told me, were dark chocolate.) Her tales unfurled behind a brow broad as a garden spade. (My own brow is narrow, like a dibble.)

  At Piscataqua we repaired the little stone house and whitewashed its inside, and in the middle of the one room (the bedrooms were lofts, a minimal kitchen occupied a corner) we spread the Turkish rug that had inspired Who Set Fire to Smyrna? In that tale the incendiarism was caused by Turks dressed as Armenians and Armenians dressed as Turks. No one could tell friend from foe, according to the twelve-year-old Jewish narrator who observed the entire conflagration, running and hiding, running and hiding, scribbling all the time…

  Behind the stone house we staked out a plot for a vegetable garden and began digging the foundation for a gazebo—Toby would write her next work there, whatever it was. We became regulars at the post office—Toby’s letters to the Szatmars, along with photographs of me, went out twice weekly. We made friends with fishermen. Every morning at four they came with their glistening catches to the docks at the sea, ten miles away from us.

  Our smooth lake in sunlight resembled Toby’s tea of immortality. Under the moon, ruffled, the lake looked like the carbon paper that lay crumpled in our wastebaskets. Toby disdained computers and word processors, typed her work on an old Hermes. Carbons for copies she had always purchased in the secondhand typewriter store on the third floor of an East Side building, a store right next to Uncle Franz’s shop. Uncle Franz was a numismatician, dealing in history himself. But he was history himself, Toby mentioned more than once; he embodied a grim horror—a schoolboy who, alone among everyone he knew, was not murdered. Toby’s eyes grew dark, her jaw stiffened when she referred to this.

  “Will you put Uncle Franz into a book someday, his miraculous escape? It’s time you told me about it, anyway.”

  A day passed before she responded. Then: “Here is how Franz escaped. A large group of Jews including his family had been marched from their small city to a village near a forest some miles from Budapest. They were crammed into a three-story wooden structure. They knew they would be moved any day to a cruel and permanent place. Franz and his family were on the third floor. Snow covered the hard earth. The building was unguarded.

  “‘Jump from the window,’ his mother hissed that first night.

  “‘Mama…’

  “‘Jump.’

  “‘Mama.’

  “She opened the window and picked him up—he was a slight twelve-year-old—and held him to her massive chest. Then her iron hands grasped him under the armpits. She thrust him through the window toward the icy night, and held him in the air like a blanket to be shaken. He had stopped saying ‘Mama.’ She held him and held him and held him. Then all at once she bent double over the sill and released her child. He landed unharmed on snow, and stumbled into the woods, and kept going. He met others. They survived the war there, some of them: the ragged, the starving, the ill. If you put your ear to Franz’s chest you can still hear the rattle of an old lung disease.

  “Could I offer that story to the world, Lance? What could I add to it that would not degrade it? Winged soldiers, Dutchmen poking needles into flowers, scamps on the docks of Smyrna—they are my material, history as diversion, the fellow said. They are my antidote to the unbearable past.” She added in a labored voice, “Franz was the only member of his entire family to survive, the only student from his school.”

  “Franz and Madame…they met as refugees?”

  “Yes.”

  “They couldn’t have children together, Franz and Madame?”

  “No.”

  “Uncle Franz is the last of the Szatmar line.”

  Silence. Then: “You could say so.”

  We attended the annual business meeting of the lower valley historical society. “Piscataqua?” Toby inquired during the social hour that followed.

  “An old name dating from the centuries when the area was populated and governed by its aboriginal inhabitants,” said Mr. Jennings, the chairman, bending his head toward the beautiful woman with the metallic hair. “It has been determined that the names of the lake and the river came from the Abenaki language, the word being a probable combination of a syllable meaning ‘branch’ and another meaning ‘a river with a strong current.’”

  “How ancient is Abenaki?”

  “Oh, it was spoken before Columbus.”

  “Latin was spoken before the Babylonian captivity.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “Nevertheless,” she repeated in her golden voice, “linguistic economy indicates that the river and the lake were named not by the Abenaki but by the Roman-Briton arrivistes.”

  “My dear Ms. Bluestein,” he said, falling in love before my eyes—well, he wasn’t the first to do so—“Romans didn’t arrive on these shores until the nineteenth century, when they came in droves. Mostly shoemakers and fruit farmers.”

  “My dear Mr. Jennings, you are talking about Italians, as you well know. The Roman-Britons came in 500 A.D.”

  “How on earth—on sea, ha-ha—did they travel?”

  “In Roman longships, descendants of Roman galleys, themselves descendants of Roman quinqueremes. The longships made it to shore and then crumbled.”

  “Then there is no proof of their existence.”

  “There is no proof of their nonexistence.”

  Mr. Jennings produced a smitten smile. “What do you think they were like, these ships that sailed the sea before the era of sails?”

  “Oh, they had sails. And oars, of course.”

  “The last of the Romans left Britain in 410,” Mr. Jennings said. “They did not sail the Atlantic, then called Thalassa. They sailed only to the Continent and then made their way home on foot. According to popular belief, the first Europe
an to reach North America was Leif Eriksson. He landed on the coast of what is now Newfoundland in 980.”

  “I respect popular belief,” Toby said. “It’s mostly guesswork, like my own endeavors. Mr. Jennings, there are things we know without knowing that we know them.”

  “Yes, but…” He didn’t finish the sentence. Both he and I could tell there was no stopping her.

  So she started her next book before the gazebo was begun. She wrote in her bedroom loft. The book’s hero was young Titus of the port of London.

  For Titus in the shipyard, working with the oaken, the sea always beckoned. It beckoned with the crooked finger of death, for he had lost father, brothers, uncles, and a cousin to the foam. Some with his history might have fled inland and become a laborer on a farm, or made his home in a town, or joined an abbey. But water was Titus’s passion.

  “How are you getting on?” asked Mr. Jennings, whose feet were planted on the Turkish rug. He had dropped in with a basket of zucchini; I was slicing the squash on the tiny counter.

  “Getting on fine,” Toby called down.

  Titus was in charge of the construction of the longboat. The Roman/British longboat, unremembered by historians, was graceful, narrow, light, with a shallow draft hull designed for speed and which allowed navigations in waters only one meter deep. The longboat was fitted with oars along the length of the vessel. It bore a rectangular sail on a single mast which was used to replace or aid the effort of the rowers, particularly during long journeys like the one planned now.

  The next time he brought wine. “Full sails ahead,” Toby informed him.

  They left London, Titus on the seventh oar—for though he was master and captain, there was no provision made for rank; everyone rowed. He was a short, muscular young man with a Saxon profile grafted onto a Roman head, and his hair was dark…Months later, his battered ship sighted the coast of what would one day be called these United States.

  “Would you like to give a talk at the library?” Mr. Jennings asked on his now daily visit.

  “Love to.”

  A coastline of cliffs and gorges and rocks presents an unwelcoming aspect. The newcomers rowed on. Romans were aware of premonition: the feeling that imminent disaster is hiding behind every cloud, every wave. They lived in a permanent state of anxiety. Titus feigned boldness, but he constantly fingered the good-luck coin his sweetheart had given him, which hung on his chest. Where on this earth would they land?

  They landed in the estuary formed by the then unnamed river and the sea. Now called Piscataqua, of course.

  “Would you read me some of your work?” said Mr. Jennings, looking loftward from the chair I’d provided.

  “…Okay.

  “‘After the brave beginning came the deaths by disease, by unknown poisons in plants, by animals; came wars with natives, peace with natives, children. Came hurricanes, surely sent by the God. Came the final disease, a mercilessly lengthy fever; and then came the collapse into itself and then into dust of everything remembered, everything that could be remembered, obliteration as complete as that of…’”

  “Atlantis?” wondered Mr. Jennings. “Troy?”

  “I am thinking of a Hungarian community in 1943.”

  He was respectfully silent.

  She continued…

  “‘Titus had taken a wife, had become chief, as was his destiny. He burned his dead children one by one on rafts sent out to sea (the Vikings did not invent the Viking funeral, just added the dog at the feet of the deceased). He himself was slain by fever, and the few remaining Piscataquans, dying themselves, managed to bury him, not burn him. He became part of the dust of the encampment beside Lake Piscataqua.’”

  Well, everybody knows about the publishing business today, perishing like the longboats. Toby’s usual editor had escaped into another line of work; the imprint which had sponsored the editor immersed itself in a larger company and that company into one larger. That conglomerate assigned to its greenest editor the new offering by an author from, as they saw it, the generation previous, though Who Set Fire to Smyrna? was still on the backlist.

  We met in the young editor’s office. “The thing’s just too fucking unlikely,” he said. (He didn’t say fucking, but the word was essentially printed on his curled lip.) “Your other stories…you could make a case for them. Not this one.”

  Toby tapped her manuscript with two fingers. “Much here might have happened.”

  “Viking artifacts are thick on the ground in the Piscataqua area.” He had done his homework. “There’s not so much as a Roman fishhook. Your other heroes, your children as it were, have a habit of seeking their fortunes and finding them. That still sells books. But poor Titus finds only oblivion. Please change tack. Write something different…And, Ms. Bluestein,” he added as she was walking with that cleft chin raised, “no more carbon copies, I beg you.”

  We met Uncle Franz in our favorite Hungarian place. He wore a black ribbon on his lapel; he had been a widower for several months. “There are other publishers,” he said.

  “Not for me. Fictohistoriographia is out of style. Everything is out of style except sex”—Uncle Franz reddened—“and money.”

  “About that…”

  “There’s plenty to live on.”

  Silence. “When,” he said.

  “Now.”

  “I must alarm the store.” While Toby went to Penn Station to buy him a ticket I accompanied Uncle Franz. He busied himself for a few moments among his display cases. A small satchel was beside the door, already packed. We met Aunt Toby at the train. We passed woods, farms, glimpses of the sea.

  We’d left our car near the station. Uncle Franz and his satchel took the backseat. We drove the two-lane highway, then a smaller road, then a dirt road. And finally the water beckoned us, purple-blue in the afternoon, its surrounding pines blue-green.

  “As you described it,” Uncle Franz said. “An economy of palette.” His sigh quivered. “Beautiful. Beautiful no matter who discovered it first.”

  When we got to the stone house, Toby threw the manuscript on the couch and Uncle Franz settled his satchel beside it. We went swimming. Despite his age, Uncle Franz was fit, and a good swimmer, though he avoided jumping off our little raft, merely slid into the embrace of the water. His swimming shorts flared like a skirt. He must have bought them just after the war, when the Joint Distribution Committee brought him to New York.

  At dinner he said, “The vegetable plot needs immediate work.”

  The next day the three of us harrowed, raked, created furrows, planted tomatoes and lettuce and cucumbers. We dug up artifacts—barrettes, number 6d nails.

  One day Uncle Franz brought inside an object covered with mud and laid it on a newspaper on our trestle table. He washed it with water and a cloth and detergent from his satchel. A magnifying glass emerged from the satchel too.

  He passed the thing around and then held it in his palm and inspected it. “It’s copper,” he guessed. Once perhaps green, it was now as pale as the wings of his hair. “A woman on one side, a ruminant on the verso. The coin dates from about 400 A.D. It originated in Rome, traveled through the empire, perhaps spent time in Britain, who can say…”

  Uncle Franz had once given me a lecture on fakes. “Sometimes the fakes are tooled…authentic, but improved by the tooling. Sometimes they are fantasy coins, or modern coins made to look ancient.” But this wasn’t a fake. Lifted by his loving fingers from the New England soil, it was metal money from Rome. “It has been deformed by age but the only deliberate defacement is that hole near the animal’s horns. It was probably worn as a lucky charm.”

  “You could show it to that ass of an editor,” I said to Toby.

  “I will show it to Mr. Jennings.”

  She did. And Mr. Jennings, not questioning provenance or authenticity or age, accepted the coin on behalf of the historical society with the grace of a vanquished lover. He provided a display case on legs, and a card which read ROMAN COIN C. 400 A.D. Somebody snapp
ed a color photograph for the Piscataqua weekly—Mr. Jennings, Toby, me, Uncle Franz, all but one of us looking down at the coin. And then I saw what I had already known without knowing I knew it: I might have Aunt Toby’s hair and chin, but I had Uncle Franz’s cylindrical brow and chocolate eyes, those eyes that preferred to look at me rather than the coin, though I don’t think he was ashamed of either of us.

  I had long considered the train-wreck death that Toby had supplied for my vague father and mother unworthy of her imagination.

  Uncle Franz (I will always call him that) sold his shop and said good-bye to New York. He moved in with us. Toby gave up fictohistoriographia and turned to writing adventure books, frankly invented. So she never told of the heroism of a mother who let go of her child to save him. And she never revealed the story of a woman of forty and a man considerably older who briefly combined in order to perpetuate a Hungarian family, their secret connivance encouraged by another heroine, one who would have performed the task herself but could not.

  And I, my provenance acknowledged at last, my parents together at last, went off to seek my own fortune, as Toby’s children are destined to do.

  Wait and See

  I.

  Lyle stares at a lemon.

  How does the lemon appear to Lyle? The rough skin is what he has been taught to call yellow, and he knows many modifiers of that word—pale, bright, dull; he knows also metaphoric substitutes—gold, butter, dandelion, even lemon. What he sees in the humble fruit, though, and what he knows by now other kids don’t see, is a tangle of hundreds of shades, ribbons of sunlight crushed into an egg.

  And baby oil? His mother, Pansy, works baby oil into her pale satin face and neck before going to bed, and a drop inevitably spills from her fingertip: transparent, translucent, colorless, or so anybody else would say. To Lyle, however, the drop is a rosy viscous sphere. The shade of his skin—caramel or butterscotch or café au lait according to foodies, mulatto to those interested in mixed races—incorporates movement too: on his forearm writhe all the hues in Pansy’s drawer of muddled lingerie.