Celeste Read online

  Sometimes Daddy teased Mommy by calling her his gypsy lover because of all these superstitions and the stories he said Mommy's mother told him about the gypsies, who she said stole children and wandered about the Hungarian countryside, putting on carnivals and magic shows and reading fortunes. Daddy stopped just short of calling Mommy's mother a witch, herself. He told us she had ways with herbs and natural cures that, he had to admit, seemed magical. Mommy knew a great deal about those things, too, and relied on them more than she relied on modern medicine.

  In fact, she and Daddy had some serious arguments about our getting our -inoculations. He finally convinced her by assuring her he would just sneak us off and do it anyway if she didn't cooperate. She relented, but she wasn't happy about it.

  Daddy was a healthy man who was hardly ever sick. Both Noble and I thought he was invulnerable, an extension of the wood and metal, the steel and cement, he used to build houses. He could work in bitter cold weather and in hot, humid weather and never get discouraged. When he came home to us, he was always happy and energetic. He didn't fall asleep on the sofa, or drag himself about the house. He loved to talk, to tell us about his day, mentioning people or places as if we had been there with him. Both of us wished we had. but Mommy would never let us go to a work site even though Daddy wanted to take us.

  "Get distracted." she told him, and they'll get hurt. And don't tell me you don't get distracted. Arthur Madison Atwell, You and your political speeches. When you make them, you're oblivious to everything else and don't even know you're standing in the cold rain."

  Mommy was right, of course. Whenever Daddy had an opponent he deemed worthy, he would argue politics, but that wasn't often at home because we had so few visitors and Mommy wasn't very interested in politics. Daddy criticized her for that and said she cared more about the politics of the afterlife than of this life.

  Most of the time. Noble and I would sit at his feet and smile and laugh at the way he shouted back at the television set when he watched the news. He did it with such vehemence, the veins in his temples popping, that we actually expected he would be heard and whoever it was on the screen would pause. look out, and address him directly. Mommy was always chiding him about it, but her words floated around him like so many butterflies who were too terrified to land, fearing they would flame up instantly if they dared touch his red-hot angry earlobes.

  No matter how she yelled at him, or how sharply either of them spoke to each other, we could see and feel how strong was the love between them. Sometimes. unexpectedly. Daddy would take Mommy's hand and just hold it while they sat and talked or when they were walking about our house and land. Noble and I would follow behind. Noble more interested in a dead worm, but my eyes were always on them.

  And then there were times when Mommy would get a chill, even on hot summer days. and Daddy would throw his arms around her and hold her. She would lay her head against his shoulder and he would kiss her temples, her forehead, and her cheeks, raining his kisses down upon her like so many warm, soothing drops. She would hold on to him and then feel better and walk on or do whatever it was she was doing before the evil spirit hiding in a breeze had grazed her forehead or touched her heart.

  Noble rarely saw any of this. He was always more distracted than I was. Everything competed for his attention. and Mommy always complained that he wasn't listening properly or thinking hard enough about what she had just said.

  "Your thoughts are like nervous birds. Noble, flitting from one branch to another. Settle down, listen to me," she would plead. "If you don't learn to listen to Inc, you'll never learn to listen to them," she would say and glance out the window or into the darkness.

  Noble would raise his eyebrows and look at her and then steal a look at me. Mommy didn't know it. but I knew he didn't want to listen to them: he didn't want to hear any voices. Lately, in fact, the very idea of it had suddenly begun to terrify him. I could see that he dreaded the day he would hear someone speak and see no one there. whereas I longed for it. I wanted so much to be like Mommy,

  "You should be happy they will speak to you. Noble. You'll know things other people don't," I told him.

  "What things?" he asked me.

  "Things." I said, and made my eyes small like Mommy often did. "Secret things," I whispered. "Things only we can know because of who we are," I recited. I had heard Mommy say it so often.

  He grimaced with skepticism and lack of interest, and I couldn't make him listen like Mommy could.

  I didn't look as much like Mommy as I wanted. Both Noble and I resembled Daddy more. We had his nose and his strong mouth. Although both Mommy and Daddy had brown eyes. both Noble and I had blue-green eyes. which Mommy said had something to do with our spiritual powers because sometimes our eyes were more blue and sometimes more green. Mommy claimed it had to do with cosmic energy. Daddy shook his head, looked at me, and pointed to his ear.

  Half an ear. I thought, and smiled to myself, but never out loud in front of Mommy. I always thought of smiles as whispered or spoken or even shouted because Mommy seemed to be able to hear our feelings as well as look at us and see them.

  When I was older. I would wonder how it came to pass that two people with such different ideas about the world and what was in it fell so deeply in love with each other. Mommy would tell us that love was something that had no logic, no formula, and was, in her opinion, the hardest thing to predict, even harder than earthquakes.

  "Sometimes. I think love just floats in the air like pollen and settles on you so that whomever you're with or see at that time is your love. Sometimes I think that," she whispered, as if it was sinful to think it, to believe that something as powerful and important as love could be so carefree and incidental.

  She whispered this to us after one of those beautiful times when she told Noble and me the store_ of her and Daddy. She had told it before, but we both loved hearing it again and again, or at least I did. She told it like she would tell a fairy tale with us sitting at her feet and listening, me more attentively of course.

  "One day, a little more than five years after my father had died, we had another serious leak in our roof," she began. "Since my father had died trying to fix a leak, my grandmother thought it was an evil omen, and she was adamant we get the new leak repaired immediately."

  "What's adamant?" Noble asked her.

  We had just turned six when she told us her story this particular time. We were having a geology lesson when something made her think about it, and she closed her book and sat back. smiling. The year before. Mommy had decided she would home tutor us, at least for the first few years. Daddy was not happy about that. but Mommy told him that her experience as a grade school teacher made her more than qualified to provide us with the best possible early education, and the early years are the most formidable ones, she insisted.

  "Besides," she said, "postponing all the extraneous and foolish issues surrounding public education today can only be a good thing. Arthur. Parents. boards of education. and educators are all bickering, and the children are getting lost and forgotten in all this."

  In the end Daddy reluctantly agreed. "But, Sarah, only for the first year or so," he added. Mommy said nothing. and Daddy looked at me with a worried expression. It was she who was using only a half an ear now. I thought.

  "Adamant." Mommy told Noble. "means determined. Nothing can change your mind. Stubborn, like you get too often." she said and then smiled and kissed him. Mommy never said anything bad about Noble without kissing him right afterward, It was as if she wanted to be sure what she said didn't linger, didn't matter, or maybe wasn't heard by any evil spirits in the house, a weakness it could exploit to get to his very soul.

  Yet she didn't do that for me. I realized, Why wasn't she worried about an evil spirit touching me?

  "Anyway," she continued. "the first nice day after the rain. Grandma Jordan had me on the telephone searching for a builder to fix our roof. It wasn't easy to get someone fast, and in truth, it wasn't easy to get any
one at all."

  "Why?" I asked.

  Noble looked up, surprised at my question. He very rarely had any to ask. and I had not asked this question during the previous times she had told us her story.

  The job wasn't very big. It was more a handyman's job than a licensed contractor's, but your great-grandma Jordan wanted what she called 'a real carpenter,' so I had to call and plead with people," Mommy said. "Almost all of them said either they had no time for it or they couldn't get to it for weeks and weeks, maybe.

  "Finally, I called your father's number, and as hick, or maybe something more, would have it, he picked up the phone himself. He heard me pleading, and he laughed and said. All right. Miss Jordan. I'll be there this afternoon.'

  "The way he said 'Miss Jordan' told me he knew of me. knew I was what people called a spinster schoolteacher just because I was in my late twenties and still not married."

  She paused and looked thoughtful a moment.

  "To tell you the truth." she continued as if something she hadn't thought before had just occurred to her. "it made me a little nervous to hear him speak so casually to me."

  "Why?" I asked. Mommy was never nervous about speaking to Daddy now. I thought.

  "Why? Well," she said, looking at Noble as if he had been the one to ask. "I never had a boyfriend, not really. Dates occasionally, but no steady beau."

  "Beau?" Noble asked looking up quickly. "You mean with arrows and everything?"

  "No. silly, Beau-- b...e...a...u. It means lover" she said. smiling. "Some day when you're a teenager, you'll accuse me of being old-fashioned, even in my speech."

  Noble grimaced with disappointment. It was obvious to me that none of this was very interesting to him. He looked at his hand and moved his fingers as if he had discovered an amazing thing about himself.

  "Your father drove over in his truck. and Grandma Jordan went out to inspect him," Mommy continued, her voice straining with some

  disappointment at Noble's small attention span. That was the way your grandmother was with people. She didn't meet them. She inspected them. She looked for flaws, for something dark. I thought to myself. Oh no!" she cried, seizing Noble's attention again. "She'll get a bad feeling about him just like she had about a plumber we called, and we'll lose him.

  "But she surprised me," she said, running her hand through Noble's hair. "She smiled and nodded her approval of your father. I brought Daddy into the house, and he looked at where the roof had stained the ceiling. He had this flirtatious smile on his lips every time he talked to me. I'm sure I was blushing. Fm blushing now, just thinking about it," she told us. and I saw that she was. It put a small feather in my stomach, and the tickle went right to my heart.

  She sighed before she continued.

  Noble was beg-inning to lose interest again. He had a dead caterpillar in his pocket and brought it out to straighten on the carpet.

  "Where did you get that?" Mommy snapped at him. It made me jump because turning her sharp voice on Noble was not something she did very often. Most of the time, she turned it on me.

  "I found it on the porch step," he said.

  "You didn't kill it, did you?" she demanded with a note of fear in her voice. He shook his head,

  "Never kill anything as beautiful as that. Noble. Every bad thing you do is kept in an evil bank account, and when there is enough in it. Nature will punish you severely." she warned, her eyes now not full of anger as much as they were full of real worry.

  He widened his eyes, but he didn't look afraid. Somehow. nothing Mommy said or did frightened Noble. It was as if he had been inoculated against threats, especially ones that emanated from the world of mystery. If he couldn't see it for himself or hear it, he didn't believe in it. Nature was just too abstract an idea.

  I was so different. I looked for Mommy's spirits in every shadow and corner. I listened to every breeze that threaded through the trees or through our open windows. I even sniffed after odors that were different or strange. In my heart of hearts. I felt it was all coming to me faster and stronger now. Soon. soon. I would be as Mommy was, and maybe then she would kiss me when she whispered in my ear or be worried more that an evil spirit would touch me. Maybe then.

  After all,, hadn't she told me often that the reason she insisted I be named Celeste was that something divine would be passed on to me?

  "Anyway," Mommy continued, refusing to be distracted from her wonderful, romantic story. "your father went out and set up his ladder. Just the sight of it against the house drove my mother and my Grandma back inside. The memory of my father falling was still too vivid for my mother. She found him lying there unconscious while I was at school, you see. I'll never forget that phone call when they summoned me to the office, and she was screaming and crying, He wasn't moving. He wasn't breathing."

  She wiped away an errant tear and sucked in her breath.

  Noble was attentive again. Any reference to death captured his imagination. but I sensed it also frightened him a little. He moved a little closer to me so that we could touch.

  "Be careful. I told your father when he went up that ladder. He looked down at me, smiled in that way of his that can put you at such ease, and then he went up to the roof so gracefully and confidently, I had no anxiety about it.

  "What a beautiful view from here." he called down to me. "Your home is in a perfect place in the valley. I can see clear to the lake that feeds the creek and a beautiful pond. You ever go swimming there? I would," he said, sitting on the edge of the roof as if he was sitting in a rocking chair on someone's porch and had all the time in the world,

  " Please hurry,' I shouted up at him." Mommy told us, and then paused to give us the same explanation why. "There were nasty spirits twirling about the house. and I did all I could to keep them from climbing the walls to get at him."

  "What did you do. Mommy?" I asked in a whisper. This I had asked before, but it was like it was my part in a play. She looked to me for the question, anticipated it.

  "I chanted at them. and I recited the Lord's Prayer.

  Finally. Daddy was finished and started down the ladder. I held my breath and watched him nervously. He jumped down the last five steps or so and smiled at me.

  " 'Fixed,' he said.

  " 'Thank you,' I told him.

  "Then he asked me about my school-teaching job and about the house itself. He was truly intrigued with the construction. We didn't go back inside right away. and Grandma Jordan didn't come out and interrupt us. My mother was always so anxious for me to meet a man and get married, you see. Anyway, I showed him around the property and we talked.

  "There were few long, pauses between us. I wanted to hear his voice, and he wanted to hear mine. Finally," she said, smiling that soft smile that made her even more beautiful. "he asked me out on a date. I was so surprised I didn't say yes and I didn't say no. I just stared stupidly at him until he said. 'I have to know before I go or before I go on social security.'

  "Of course you know I said yes, and the rest is history," she concluded, folding her hands over each other as if she were folding the covers of a book.

  "What's history?" Noble asked. His interest in the word surprised both of us.

  "All the events, the time that passed, our marriage, your birth, up until today," she explained patiently.

  Noble thought a moment.

  "Is tomorrow history, too?" he asked.

  "It will be." she said, and that seemed to please him.

  Why did it matter at all to him? Of all the parts of the wonderful love story, why did that matter?

  Noble was always a puzzle to me, even though we were as close as identical twins. Daddy said we were so close in our looks and mannerisms, we could have been born Siamese. It was true that we looked so much like each other, but there was something different in his eyes from what was in mine. I guess it all had to do with his being a boy and my being a girt It was something I would learn about very soon, but never quite understand,

  Although Noble wasn't
looking for the spirits or listening for their voices as I was, he did a lot more pretending than I did. Mommy often complimented him on his imagination. I used to think that maybe his inventions, space creatures and the like, made him more capable of eventually hearing the spirits, but that wasn't so.

  All we had were our books and our

  imaginations anyway. Mommy wouldn't let us watch much television, and we had never been to a movie. She believed television and movies could muddle up our brains and make it harder for us to be good students. Daddy couldn't oppose her when it came to our education. He would say. "You're the expert when it comes to all that. Sarah, but it didn't do that much damage to me,"

  "How do you know? How do you know what more you could have been?" she fired back at him, and he shrugged.

  "I guess I don't. I just don't want them to be odd. Sarah. Its going to be hard enough for them to attend school when you finally let them attend, as it is."

  "They'll be so far ahead of the other students, it will be easier for them," she assured him.

  He backed off. but whenever he could. whenever Mommy wasn't home, he would let us watch children's television shows. Only we had to promise we would never tell Mommy.

  We promised, but shell 'mow. I thought. The spirits will tell her.

  That was the way it had always been in our house. We couldn't keep secrets from Mommy. There were too many ears and eves around us, ears and eves friendly only to her. I think there came a time when even Daddy began to believe it.

  "I didn't see anything again," Noble told Mommy when darkness had stolen the last rosy glow of dusk and was all about our home now. Another time on the chintz sofa had proven to be a failure. "I wanna go out with my flashlight and look at the ants," he whined, squirming under her embrace.