And Give You Peace Read online

  And Give You Peace

  Also by Jessica Treadway

  Absent Without Leave and Other Stories

  And Give You Peace

  A NOVEL BY

  Jessica Treadway

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2001 by Jessica Treadway

  Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Significant support has also been provided by the Bush Foundation; Dayton’s Project Imagine with support from Target Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; a Grant made on behalf of the Stargazer Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks

  “Burnt Norton” from FOUR QUARTETS by T. S. Eliot,

  copyright 1936 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot,

  reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Ste 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 1-55597-315-9

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-916-4

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  First Graywolf Printing, 2001

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-101778

  Cover design: Julie Metz

  For my sisters, Molly and Laura

  And my beloved Jack

  “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Lewis Carroll

  1. We are the Dolans

  Q. Why do we call a possible answer to a mystery a “clue”?

  — F.B., Guilderland, N.Y.

  A. A clue, originally spelled “clew,” was a ball of string in medieval England. The word was used repeatedly in the retelling of the mythical exploits of the Greek hero Theseus, who killed the minotaur. Theseus was the only one to escape the monster’s deadly labyrinth on the island of Crete. He found his way back from the underground maze by retracing the string he had begun unwinding when he entered, thus following the clew.

  I once saw a policeman in the Public Garden helping a blind woman feed sugar to his horse. This image—the cop gently lifting the fingers folded around the sugar cube, the blind woman’s sudden smile—is why I went to college in Boston and why I moved back after the deaths, although I didn’t realize this until years later when I began looking for meaning in small, forgotten things.

  The summer I was twelve, my family took a driving trip through New England. We went on a boat tour of Boston Harbor and visited the USS Constitution. On the lowest deck of the old ship, between the hammocks and cannons, a guide in a naval suit pointed at my youngest sister, Meggy, who was five. “Can you take this and scoot down to the other end of the deck?” he asked, handing her a folded black satchel. I felt the momentary piercing of not having been picked, but at least it was Meggy he’d chosen and not Justine, my middle sister, the one most often noticed by the world.

  Meggy nodded, accepted the satchel, and made her way—lips pursed, pink sneakers squeaking—away from us and other members of the tour.

  “When I say ‘Go,’ run to me as fast as you can, okay?” The guide was a college student whose enthusiasm for his summer job was still new, as it was early in the season. Meggy nodded again, brushing aside a stalk of her dark blond bangs. She wore purple shorts and a T-shirt that showed the Cookie Monster munching a cookie and giving the thumbs-up. The guide said, “Ready, set, go!” I held my breath as I watched my little sister, clutching the black bag with crossed arms to her chest, pitch across the floor. When she reached the guide, he gave her a clumsy pat on the head as we all applauded, and Meggy leaned back in flushed pride against our mother’s knees. My father reached over to rub her hair, and I raised my own hand to push at a pimple on my chin. It was the summer I stopped being cute, and I kept waiting for the shock and the hurt of it not to feel so fresh.

  “Okay, say this little girl was a boy, and it was the early 1800s,” the guide instructed us. “That bag would have been filled with gunpowder. Can anybody guess why they would use children to run ammunition between the guns?”

  “Low to the ground,” a man in the back said, chuckling as if he’d made a joke, but the guide told him, “No, you’re exactly right. Powder Monkeys, they were called. Young people were also more expendable,” he added. Behind me, I could feel my father growing tense.

  “As you can probably imagine, anybody who ran ammo became a key target for enemy fire,” the guide went on.

  Justine, who was nine, asked, “What does that mean? You mean they just killed all the kids?”

  “Well, not all.” The guide blushed as my father clapped his hand over Meggy’s ears.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he said to the guide. He took Meggy over to a corner, and I could see that she didn’t understand any of what was going on.

  “Sorry,” the guide told my mother. He was humble or perhaps young enough to seem genuinely chagrined.

  “It’s not your fault.” My mother pulled out a compact, looked at herself in its mirror, and waved vaguely in the direction of my father and Meggy. “He’s oversensitive.” The small tour crowd dispersed, in deference to the guide’s loss of composure.

  “Let’s blow this Popsicle stand,” Justine said, and once again I marveled at my younger sister’s sophistication. She was always making adult-sounding declarations that I had never heard. She’d bought half a dozen bangle bracelets at Quincy Market that morning, and impatience made them sing against each other, up and down her arm. We left Old Ironsides a few minutes later to catch the boat back to Boston. I remember vividly the ride across the water, because it was the only time I ever saw my father refuse to pick up Meggy when she asked him to.

  “Too hot, honey,” I remember him saying. Then he moved by himself to the other side of the boat. My mother offered to take Meggy onto her lap, but Meggy shook her head and plunked down between Justine and me. The breeze tangled the hair of all three of us girls together. My mother took a picture, and when it came back we made it into a family joke, how we appear to be three heads on a single body—six arms and legs and eyes, thirty fingers, each of us looking happy to be part of such a freak.

  Later the same day we drove up to Salem in the afternoon and visited the House of the Seven Gables. I was trying to read Hawthorne’s book about the house, but it was slow going, and I gave it up in favor of an illustrated history of the Salem witchcraft trials. I became fascinated with the stories of girls my own age who suddenly started throwing fits, their bodies convulsing as they accused neighbor-women of casting evil spells.

  To me, the most interesting detail was that the whole thing began with two girls who dropped an egg white into a glass of water and tried to tell the future from the shapes it made as it moved. The egg-and-glass method was an early variation on the crystal ball. But instead of the romantic visions they expected to see, the girls divined the image of a coffin in the spreading egg white, and went berserk. (Of course when I got home I wanted to try the fortune-telling trick myself, but of course—because we were never allowed to touch raw eggs—my father wouldn’t let me.)

  After we left the House of the Seven Gables, we went to get ice-cream cones and sat eating them at a picnic table near the center of town. My father had not been feeling well earlier in the day, when we took the tour boat back from the Constitution, but when we’d been on land again for a few hours his appetite returned. I finished my cone fi
rst, lay down in the grass, and began to imitate the wide-eyed witch-girls writhing and screeching, tongues wagging as they plucked at their hair. My father was amused, and so was Meggy, who plunked her cone down on the table and came over to imitate me.

  But my mother and Justine were embarrassed. “Mom, make her stop,” Justine said, in the voice that had recently agitated my father into composing a riddle: “What’s nine and perfectly fine, but inclined to whine?”

  “She looks like a total retard,” Justine added, and at that exact moment, a family with a retarded boy walked by us. I had paused in my rolling-around routine to gauge the level of my mother’s disapproval, and I saw the boy just as my parents and sisters did. He was younger than me, closer to Justine’s age, and he had the big head, jutting jaw, and uptilted eyes I later learned to identify as features of Down’s syndrome.

  He was walking between his mother and father, who turned to look in our direction, but not directly at us, when they heard Justine’s remark. Both of their faces wore the same expression—not anger, which would have been easier to witness, but sadness and a chagrin of which they were both clearly ashamed, but which they had learned to forgive in each other and, so, in themselves. Worst of all, I could tell they forgave Justine.

  “Oh, shit,” Justine said. It was the first time I had ever heard one of us swear in front of our parents. Instead of scolding her, my mother echoed, “Shit.” The boy and his parents were beyond us by then. He was wearing sneakers with neon orange laces and a Star Trek baseball cap. The father had a camera slung over his shoulder, and that night in bed all I could think about was whether they had any pictures of the boy that made him look normal, and if so, whether these were the ones they sent out at Christmastime.

  My mother told Justine, “Honey, you have to be careful. You can hurt people’s feelings.” My mother’s cone was dripping from the bottom as she said this, and she turned it sideways to stop the ice cream from flowing out either end. It had her full attention, but my father was still looking after the couple and their retarded son. I could tell he wanted to catch up with them and apologize, or say something to make them feel better. But he didn’t know what this might be. A few hours later at dinner, when my mother could tell that it was still bothering him, she said, “Tom, remember when we lived on Mercer Street, the sampler that old Russian lady had in her kitchen? When you live next to the graveyard, you can’t weep for everyone.”

  My father looked puzzled, as if he didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about. Justine said, “Who lives next to a graveyard?”

  “It’s just a figure of speech, honey.” My mother spoke into her restaurant napkin, so we could barely make out her words. Her lips left the stain of a kiss in the folded cloth.

  At the time, of course, I had no way of knowing the psychic torture my father had suffered earlier in the day, when he refused to hold Meggy in his arms on the boat as it sped through Boston Harbor. During dinner, I thought I understood what was troubling him. As my sisters and I flashed “see-food” at each other and giggled into our milk, I believed it was the memory of the retarded boy and his parents I saw haunting my father’s eyes.

  He was the one who named me Anastasia, after the youngest of the four duchesses in the Romanov family executed during the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918. My father believed the legend that Anastasia had survived the firing squad, escaped Russia, forgotten her own identity, and lived to be an old lady in the United States.

  My father’s thoughts turned often to the assassination as he had heard it described once in a documentary. Members of the Tsar’s family were awakened in the night, led to the cellar, and told that they were going to be shot. Nicholas, the father, asked the Commandant, What? What? The Commandant repeated what he had said and ordered the firing squad to get ready. Nicholas turned to his family and said nothing further. His wife and the children uttered a few incoherent phrases. “What do you think they were trying to say?” my father wondered aloud, as he told me the story of my name. My mother got mad at him for giving me all the gory details, but my father said I should be prepared for how much it was possible to suffer in this world. “Do you think they said ‘I love you’ or ‘Good-bye’ or ‘Don’t leave me’?” he asked me, and I could tell he didn’t really expect an answer; he just couldn’t help speculating aloud. “Or do you think it was just sounds of terror coming out?”

  When the shooting started, three of the daughters did not die right away. Something made the bullets ricochet all over the room, and when they tried to bayonet one of the girls, they found that the Grand Duchesses—Anastasia and her sisters—were wearing corsets studded with diamonds. “That’s what saved her,” my father said. “She played dead but she really wasn’t, and somebody helped her get away. But imagine living the rest of your life, if that happened to you. Imagine wanting to live, after that.”

  I used to look up Anastasia in those Name-Your-Baby books. It comes from the Greek for “one who shall rise again.” When I was younger, it comforted me to believe that I might come back to life somehow after I died, like the rumor of the real Anastasia. But now I know I wouldn’t want that—now, I can’t imagine a prospect more frightening than eternity. There has to be some relief.

  My middle name is Grace, for my maternal grandmother, and our last name, Dolan, came straight off the boat with our Irish grandfather. My youngest sister was named after our mother, Margaret, but there is no story behind Justine’s name. My parents told her it was because she was an original, but I don’t believe Justine ever took this as a compliment.

  The number of letters in each of our names—Anastasia Grace Dolan, Justine Carolyn, and Margaret Olivia—adds up to nineteen. It was important to our father that they all have the same sum. We didn’t ask him why, because by the time we were old enough to wonder, we already had a sense that it was one of the things he would never be able to explain.

  Being the oldest of three daughters is one of the first ways I think about myself, and it’s one of the first questions to come up in friendships, at least between women. Do you have any brothers or sisters? Where do you fall in the line? The answer helps put the two new friends in some kind of balance, gives them a landmark to show where they’re starting from.

  If I meet another oldest, I know she understands things about me already, as I understand them about her. If I meet a middle child, I assume she is like Justine, who always made sure to be noticed, not to get lost in the crowd.

  And if I meet the youngest in a series of siblings, especially sisters, I must endure the short shock to my head and stomach that is all too familiar to me now. I know it’s coming and I know it will recede, but I expect it will never leave me entirely, and I wouldn’t want it to. Painful as it is, it’s something to count on. Justine feels it, too. I think we both imagine it is Meggy in that moment, reaching through this other family’s youngest to touch us where we live.

  It depends on the person who’s asking, what my own answer will be. If I sense sympathy—not necessarily pity, although there are times when I want that, too—if it seems that he or she will understand what I am surviving without, I might tell the truth. In the old days, when early death was more common, people were accustomed to giving a qualified count. A mother would say she had “eleven children, six living.” Remembering this, I might tell someone, “I had two sisters, but one died,” so that I don’t have to feel I am betraying Meggy, the way I do when I give the other answer, which is that I have one sister, Justine, who is three years younger than me.

  Another choice is to try to be like the little girl in the poem by Wordsworth. When a stranger asks how many children are in her family, she tells him seven, including a brother and sister who lie in graves in the churchyard. “Then ye are only five,” the stranger tries to convince her, but the child insists, “Nay, we are seven!” So sometimes I try to get away with responding that I have two sisters, but then there are the follow-up questions that leave me stammering: Where do your sisters live? What do they
do?

  And even when I tell the truth, that one of my sisters is dead, it does not always end there. More people than not, when they hear this, will say they’re sorry and look distressed, and we agree in that moment, without saying anything, to talk about something else.

  But there is the occasional new acquaintance who will, after the murmur and the wince, ask, “How did it happen?” There are two kinds of people who pursue the question like this, and I have come to understand how important it is to distinguish between them. One is the person who has learned that life is worth living only if you admit it all. That there is nothing that can’t be imagined, nothing you can’t say out loud. These are the people I can end up loving, who can be my friends, because what did happen I never imagined, and it feels good to have company there.

  The other people who ask are the ones who hoard disasters, who collect sad stories like chits they can cash in against the misfortunes of their own lives. The more of these people you meet, the better you become at identifying them before you give too much of yourself away. They’re the ones who use the opportunity of a commotion in one room to check their teeth in the mirror of another. Anything could be causing the commotion—a dropped punch bowl, a heart attack—but the first thing they think, before going in to find out, is that they can check their teeth now without anyone noticing.

  To these people, I say, “It was a long time ago,” as if that is an answer, as if that’s what they want to know. If they persist, I say, “She died young,” and usually those words, along with the look on my face, are enough to make them back off. The few times someone has pressed me beyond that, I said, “She was shot to death.” There must be something final in my tone when I say this, because no one has ever gone on to ask, By whom?