Things Invisible to See (2 page)

On the highest shelf stood the St. Joseph’s Men’s Club softball trophies. Father Legg coached the team and was fond of using baseball analogies in his sermons. Wouldn’t you like to pitch for God’s team? Don’t let temptation strike you out! Once he asked Willie, “Are you the baseball player I’ve been hearing so much about?”

No, answered Willie, he was not.

On the bottom shelf was a complete set of Little Blue Books, covering all forms of human knowledge, from Shakespeare to Evolution. It seemed to Willie that he could be neither as rich nor as successful as Father Legg until he owned them all.

While Willie was managing his money and plotting his success, Ben was thinking of new ways to put some real stuff on the ball he pitched for the Ann Arbor High Pioneers every Saturday during baseball season. Durkee, the coach, said you had to live the game to play it. The two years Ben had his paper route, he’d thrown fast papers, curve papers, spit papers, fadeaway papers, for a total of seven hundred and thirty throws. In the dark hours before dawn he could put a newspaper on a porch, a front step, a flowerbed, a doormat. Sunday afternoons he’d work out in South Avenue Park with whoever showed up. Tom Bacco and Tom’s cousins Louis and Tony Bacco came by. And George Clackett, Jr., came, with licorice sticks in his pockets for everybody and sometimes Hershey bars if his old man was feeling generous, and Sol Lieberman came, who would have given all the gold in his father’s jewelry store for Ben’s left arm, and Charley LaMont, who lived in a funeral home and whose father kept corpses in the parlor, and Henry Schoonmaker, his parakeet perched on his shoulder like a sky-blue epaulet, and Stilts Moser, who galloped around the bases in such a way as to suggest that God, who winds and watches the footage of humanity, speeded up the reel when Stilts picked up a bat and swung. In him alone Durkee found no fault.

“He has the guts of a shark,” said Durkee happily, tugging on his visored cap. “He’s been beaned twice and look at him. Four hits in a single game, three right-handed and one left-handed. Maybe he’ll go on to the Monarchs,” he added. Durkee didn’t follow the Negro leagues himself, but he knew talent when he saw it.

Eight games into the season of ’41 Durkee got drafted, and the principal canceled baseball. Ben Harkissian and Tom Bacco and his cousins Louis and Tony, and George Clackett of the free Hersheys, and Sol Lieberman of the secret longing, and Henry Schoonmaker of the faithful parakeet and Charley LaMont and Stilts Moser met anyway, every Saturday afternoon. They kept it up all through the summer, after graduation. Kids from other neighborhoods and other schools showed up, and people who hardly knew each other filled the first fifteen rows of the bleachers and cheered. Baseball season was endless.

Five days a week that summer and into the fall, Ben sold sweatshirts and trophies at Burney’s Sporting Goods and waited to be drafted. Tom and Louis and Tony also waited as they tinkered with radios and electric fans at Fix-It Land and sold bottle after bottle of Fix-All, “guaranteed to extend the life of any appliance.” And George waited while he sorted the mail at the post office, and Charley waited while he drove his dad’s hearse, and Stilts and the dozen other men on his construction gang waited. Sol took a defense job and dreamed of medical school. Real life would start after the war, if America entered the war.

Only Willie, born with flat feet, still had a future he could call his own. He delivered groceries for Clackett’s Fine Foods and did odd jobs around the church for Father Legg and interviewed for dozens of better jobs. Prospective employers found him sharp but cold, and they’d turn him down and hire a woman. It wasn’t fair, Willie knew, but who would hear his complaint? You didn’t have to pay a woman what you’d pay a man for the same job.

By mid October, darkness ended the Saturday afternoon games before supper, and the faithful remnant would gather their gear and hike across the street to Mike’s Grill for malts. Mike wouldn’t serve Stilts, but he’d put up a drink for him all the same, and Stilts waited outside till the others came with the orders, and they’d all pile into Tom Bacco’s old green Packard, which was specially made for traveling salesmen to carry their goods and had so much room in the trunk that Charley and Henry and Tony could sit in it, with the lid bobbing over their heads.

Tom drove. He alone knew how to keep the motor from stalling. They’d drive down to the river and sit on the running board and the fenders with the empty golf course at their backs and drink from waxed paper cups the last sweetness of summer.

Night came early under the black willows, and if you stood on the golf course side you could look across the river at Island Park. You could see the fireflies. You could not see the island itself, nor the families gathered at picnic tables across the water. But you could hear them talking and laughing, you could hear their dogs barking and their kids yelling, just as if you were standing shoulder to shoulder with them, a single family in the darkness.

Henry said he’d heard that Durkee was in Manila.

“Where’s Manila?” asked Ben.

Charley said he hoped America would keep out of the war.

“Look at that bird,” said George, nudging Ben. “Bet you can’t hit it.”

“Bet I can,” said Ben.

He tossed the ball to George, who backed away and pitched him a high, fast one, and Ben whammed it hard to the space where the white bird would be in three seconds, flying low and slow over the water.

The ball burst past it.

In the darkness under the willows a girl cried out. People strolling along the river on the last warm evening of autumn stopped in their tracks, chilled.

The evening star rose.

C
LARE WOKE UP WITH
a terrible headache in a dark room she did not know.

On the nightstand: a steel basin curved like a kidney bean, a steel pitcher, and a vase in the guise of a white cat. Pink carnations rose from its ceramic head like bright ideas.

On the facing wall: the silver body of Jesus on the cross, His head dropped to His chest. Asleep.

A window gleamed, half open, its pale curtains shifting. Under the pane, in the open eye of the window, the city skyline glimmered.

Was that her mother asleep in the easy chair, her arms resting loosely in her lap, her red hair a shadowy cap of curls?

Silence emptied the room of warmth; Clare tried to bend her knees. They were not there. She reached down and touched them. Her hand felt her knees; her knees felt nothing. She could not move her legs at all.

Before the cry rising in her throat could escape, she caught sight of the stranger.

The old woman hovered over the foot of Clare’s bed, and into the room crept the fragrance of laundry drying outside and of leeks and clover and tall grass mowed early in the morning. A faded blue sunbonnet hid her face.

You see me with your spirit-eyes, daughter,
said the woman.
Now run to me on your spirit-legs.

The forget-me-nots on her skirt nodded, and in its pleated shadows flashed ferrets and mallards and owls.

She sank close to Clare and touched the girl’s side. A wind swept through Clare, as if the bars of her rib cage were parting. Her own breath carried her out.

Out of her body.

Weightless and fleshless, Clare hung in the air beside the old woman and stared down at the slender body that had housed her so faithfully for seventeen years. The long brown hair fell like water down both sides of the pillow. The wide green eyes stared past her, empty. Only the bruise on her forehead was new.

I can’t believe it! I can’t believe time has run out!

You are not dead, my daughter
, said the woman.

In the chair, Clare’s mother slept on, still as a snowbank. Through the carnations on the nightstand flowed streams of light, the spawning grounds of a million tiny stars.

Molecules
, said the old woman.

The steel vessels on the nightstand hummed; swarms of diamonds kept the shape of basin and pitcher.

Everything alive looks dead and everything dead looks alive
, said the old woman and floated to the door, where she paused, glancing over her shoulder, and nodded for Clare to follow.

Clare hesitated.

I’ve known you since you were born, daughter. It was my hand guided you into your body then, same as I guided your mother into hers. She could see into the future when she was your age.

They were rolling together down the corridor like fog.

You were born here, daughter, in the women’s wing. Sixth floor. So was your brother, who died before you were born.

Who are you?
whispered Clare.

They passed the head nurse, asleep with her eyes open, frozen at her station.

They passed Clare’s chart on the wall beside her. The chart, on which very little was written, fluttered in the rack like a flag of truce.

What’s wrong with me?

Concussion by baseball. Thrower unknown
—
to you.

But not to you?
asked Clare.

The Ancestress did not answer.

Tomorrow morning your mother will ask you, “How do you feel?” and you will tell her, “I can’t move my legs.” Doctors will give you tests and find no damage. They will tell you they’ve done all they can and that only time and rest can heal you.

And will it?
asked Clare.

That depends on the doctor you carry within you
, replied the Ancestress.
Look into this room. What do you see?

On the bed nearest the door lay the shape of a sleeping man.

I see a house with lamps burning in two windows
, answered Clare.

And in the other bed?

Clare drifted over the nightstand with its pitcher and basin identical to hers.

Is this another house? A very dark one?

Abandoned,
said the Ancestress.
So many people give up the ghost at this hour, when pulses beat slower and hearts close down to rest.

He’s dead?

The Ancestress nodded.

And the other one—he’s alive?

He has his lamp on, does he not?

And for everybody, it’s the same?
asked Clare.

The Ancestress nodded.
The nearly well leave many lights burning. Others leave
—

Did I leave a light burning in my house?
exclaimed Clare, very much frightened.

At the rim of her house she sank down and pushed at the warm flesh. Cell parted from cell, rib from rib; she glided in and looked out of her eyes at the Ancestress, who was binding the ribbon of her own breath around Clare’s head.

Then, turning toward the night, she spread pale wings that Clare had not noticed before. The speckled bird that the Ancestress had become darted out the window and was gone.

Until that night it was her mother, Helen Ericson Bishop, and not Clare who had the gift of second sight. On her eighth birthday Helen overheard a neighbor tell her father, “You’ll never raise that girl,” and she believed she would never live long enough to grow up. The long tunnel of time leading from her past to her future closed down. Time became space, a great pathless field.

In exchange for three of her father’s osteopathic treatments and two jars of honey from her father’s bees, the doctor who lived across the street gave Helen an X-ray on his machine, the first one in Corunna. It found a spot hovering on her lungs like a shadowy bird.

“Let her drink a pint of cream every day and sleep outside till she’s well,” said the doctor.

All winter Helen slept on the back porch and woke under drifts of snow heaped high on her eiderdown, like a tombstone of cold wool. In the spring birds thumped and murmured on the roof overhead where her father scattered suet and seeds. Every morning, when the light shone milky on the wicker furniture, a raccoon stepped through the hole in the screen and stared at her for a long time before helping himself to the apples she set out for him. Once, when she threw off her blankets, a flying squirrel leapt up, sprang through the screen, and vanished into the cherry trees.

After she was well Helen discovered she could predict the sex of unborn children and the outcome of illnesses lasting more than three days. During a typhoid epidemic women came to her, begging to know whether they should order their coffins now or later. Depressed by these visits, Helen announced that the gift of prophecy had left her. Two weeks later she was declared dead of a burst appendix, during which pronouncement she left her body—she saw it lying on her bed, helpless and heavy as a fur coat in summer—and rose and passed through the walls of her room like steam.

To her surprise she did not meet the east wall of the First Congregational Church, which she knew stood next door, but found herself knee deep in snake grass on the bank of a river. The water was so clear she could see white stones resting on the bottom, like eggs, except that they were perfectly round.

On the opposite bank waited a vast silent throng that receded, as if on invisible bleachers, their faces still and strange to her, though in some she recognized her own eyes—the “Ericson eyes”—and the shape of her own face, and she knew herself to be part of that family, closest to the recently dead, the women in white, the men in black, the lovely fabric growing faint, almost threadbare among the more remote ancestors, turning, in those farthest from her, to feathers, wings, the faces of birds.

Come over
, called the Ancestors.

“And I would have done it, too,” Helen told Clare many years later, “if it hadn’t been for the Dresden clock. Before Nell broke it, when it chimed the hour, a tiny moon came up in the window. Nobody but Mother was allowed to touch that clock, but when I was sick she carried it to my bed and put it in my hands. I died at five in the afternoon, and the clock began to chime, and I hurried back into my body to watch the moon come up.”

After she was well she found she could read the minds of dogs. People brought her their dogs to train. While she housebroke the doctor’s Irish setter, the family gave her room and board for a week. That winter she discovered she could hear the whistles of hunters calling their dogs, pitched beyond the range of human hearing.