Galilee

III
i

She knew better of course. I’ve lived, damn her! Before my injury I had almost as great an appetite for experience as Nicodemus. I take that back. I was never as interested in the sexual opportunities afforded by my travel as he was. He knew all the great bordellos of Europe intimately; I preferred to wander the cathedrals or drink myself into a stupor in a bar. Drink is a weakness of mine, no question, and it’s got me into trouble more than once. It’s made me fat too. It’s hard, of course, to stay thin when you’re in a wheelchair. Your backside gets big, your waistline spreads; and Lord, my face, which used to be so well made I could walk into any gathering and take my pick of the female company, is now pasty and round. Only in my eyes might you glimpse the magnetism I once exercised. They are a peculiar color: mingled flecks of blue and gray. The rest of me’s just gone to hell.

I suppose that happens to everybody sooner or later. Even Marietta, who is a pure-blooded Barbarossa, has said that over the years she’s noticed some subtle signs of aging; it’s just much, much slower than it would be for a human being. One gray hair every decade or so isn’t anything to bitch about, I remind her, especially when nature had given her so much else: she has Cesaria’s flawless skin (though neither she nor Zabrina are quite as black as their mother) and Nicodemus’s physical ease. She also shares my delight in getting drunk, but as yet it’s taken no toll on her waist or her buttocks. I digress; again. How did I get onto the subject of Marietta’s backside? Oh yes, I was talking about how I traveled as my father’s envoy. It was wonderful. I stood in the shit in a lot of stables over the years, of course, but I also visited some of this planet’s glories: the wilds of Mongolia, the deserts of North Africa, the plains of Andalusia. So please understand that though I’m now reduced to being a voyeur, this wasn’t always the case. I don’t write as a theorist, pontificating on the state of a world that I only knew from my newspapers and my television screen.

As I get deeper into the story I’ll no doubt season it with talk of the sights I saw and the people I knew on my journeys. For now, let me just talk of England, the country where I was conceived. My birth mother was a woman by the name of Moira Feeney, and, though she died a short time after my birth, of a sickness I’ve never quite comprehended, I passed the first seven years of my life in her native country, looked after by her sister, Gisela. It was not by any means a cosseted existence; Gisela was enraged when she discovered the father of her sister’s child did not intend to bring us into his charmed circle, and rather than accept the substantial sums he offered her to help raise me, she proudly, and foolishly, refused all subsidy. She also refused to see him. It wasn’t until Gisela also died (she was struck, somewhat suspiciously, by lightning) that my father appeared in my life, and took me with him on his travels. In the next five years we lived in a number of extraordinary houses, the guests of great men who wanted my father’s advice as a horse breeder (and Lord knows what else besides; I think he was probably shaping the destinies of nations behind the scenes). But for all the glamour of those years—two summers in Granada, a spring in Venice; so much more that I can’t recall—it is my years in Blackheath with Gisela that I still return to most fondly. Gende seasons these; and my gentle human aunt, and milk and rain and the plum tree at the back of the cottage, from the topmost branches of which I could see the dome of St. Paul’s.

I have a pristine memory of what it was like to perch in those gnarled branches, where I would linger for hour upon hour, lulled into a happy trance by rhymes and songs. One of those rhymes I remember to this day.

It seems I am,

It seems I was,

It seems I will

Be born, because

It seems I am,

It seems I was,

It seems I will

Be born because—

And so on, round and round.

Marietta’s right, I do miss England, and I do what I can to keep remembrance of it. English gin, English syntax, English melancholy. But the England I yearn for, the England I dream of when I doze in my chair, no longer exists. It was just a view from a plum tree, and a happy child. Both went into history a long time ago. It is, however, the second reason why I am writing this book. In opening the floodgates of memory, I hope to be carried, at least for a little while, back into the bliss of my childhood.

ii

I should tell you, just briefly, about what happened the day I told Marietta I’d begun this book, because you’ll understand better what it’s like to live in this house. I had been sitting on my balcony with the birds (there are eleven individuals—cardinals, buntings, soldier-wing blackbirds—who come to feed from my hand and then stay to make music for me), and while I was feeding them I heard her down below having a furious argument with my other half-sister, Zabrina. As far as I could gather Marietta was being her usual imperious self, and Zabrina—who keeps out of everybody’s way most of the time, and when she does encounter one of the family doesn’t say much—was for once standing up for her own opinions. The gist of the exchange was this: Marietta had apparently brought one of her lovers into the house the previous night, and the visitor had proved to be quite the detective. Apparently she’d got up while Marietta was asleep, had gone wandering around the house and seen something she should not have seen.

Now she was apparently in a state of panic, and Marietta was quite out of patience with her, so she was trying to cajole Zabrina into cooking up some spiked candy that would wipe the woman’s memory clean. Then Marietta could take her back home, and the whole untidy business could be forgotten.

“I told you last time I don’t approve—” Zabrina’s voice is normally reedy and thin; now it was positively shrill.

“Oh Lord,” said Marietta wearily. “Don’t be so highhanded.”

“You know you should keep ordinary folks away from the house,” Zabrina went on. “It’s asking for trouble, bringing somebody here.”

“This one’s special,” Marietta said.

“So why do you want me to wipe her memory?”

“Because I’m afraid she’s going to lose her mind if you don’t.”

“What did she see?”

There was a pause. “I don’t know,” Marietta finally admitted. “She’s too incoherent to tell me.”

“Well where did you find her?”

“On the stairs.”

“She didn’t see Mama?”

“No, Zabrina. She didn’t see Mama. If she’d seen Mama—”

“She’d be dead.”

“—she’d be dead.”

There was a pause. Finally Zabrina said: “If I do this—”

“Yes?”

“Quid pro quo.”

“That’s not very sisterly,” Marietta groused. “But all right. Quid pro quo. What do you want?”

“I don’t know yet,” Zabrina said. “But I’ll think of something, don’t worry. And you won’t like it. I’ll make sure of that.”

“How very petty of you,” Marietta observed.

“Look. Do you want me to do it or don’t you?”

Again there was a pause. “She’s in my bedroom,” Marietta said. “I had to tie her to the bed.”

Zabrina giggled.

“It’s not funny.”

“They’re all funny,” Zabrina replied. “Weak heads, weak hearts. You’re never going to find anyone who can really be with you. You know that don’t you? It’s impossible. We’re on our own, to the very end.”

About an hour later Marietta appeared in my room. She looked ashen; her gray eyes full of sadness.

“You heard the conversation,” she said. I didn’t bother to reply. “Sometimes that bitch makes me want to hit her. Hard. Not that she’d feel it. Fat cow.”

“You just can’t bear to be in anybody’s debt.”

“I wouldn’t mind with you,” she said.

“I don’t count.”

“No, I guess you don’t,” she replied. Then, seeing the expression on my face. “Now what have I said? I’m just agreeing with you, for God’s sake! Why is everybody so damn sensitive around here?” She went to my desk and examined the contents of the gin bottle. There was barely a shot remaining. “Got any more?”

“There’s half a case in the closet in the bedroom.”

“Mind if I—?”

“Help yourself.”

“You know we should talk more often, Eddie,” she called back to me while she dug for the gin. “Get to know one another. I don’t have anything in common with Dwight and Zabrina’s been in the foulest mood for the last couple of months. She’s so obese these days, Eddie. Have you seen her? I mean, she’s grossly fat.”

Though both Zabrina and Marietta insist that they’re completely unlike—and in many regards this is true—they have some essential qualities in common. At their cores they’re both willful, stubborn, obsessive women. But whereas Marietta, who’s eleven years Zabrina’s junior, has always prided herself on her athleticism, and is as lean as a woman can get and still have a lushness about her body, Zabrina gave into her cravings for praline brittle and pecan pie years ago. Occasionally I’ll see her from my window, wandering rotundly across the lawn. At the last sighting she was probably three hundred and fifty pounds. (We are, you’ve doubtless begun to grasp, a profoundly wounded group of people. But trust me, when you better know the circumstances of our lives, you’ll be astonished we’re as functional as we are.)

Marietta had emerged with a fresh bottle of gin, and, unscrewing the top, poured herself an ample measure.

“Why do you keep all those clothes in the closet?” she said, knocking back a mouthful. “You’re never going to wear most of them.”

“I presume that means you have your eye on something.”

“The smoking jacket.”

“Take it.”

She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “I’ve underrated you all these years,” she said, and went back into the bedroom to fetch the jacket in case I changed my mind.

“I’ve decided to write the book,” I told her when she emerged.

She tossed the jacket at Nicodemus’s chair and fairly danced with excitement. “That’s so wonderful,” she said. “Oh my God, Eddie, we’re going to have such fun.”

“We?”

“Yes, we. I mean, you’ll be writing it most of the time, but I’ll be helping. There’s a lot you don’t know. Dirt about Cesaria that she told me when I was little.”

“Maybe you should keep your voice down.”

“She can’t hear me. She’s always in her chambers these days.”

“We don’t know what she can hear,” I said. There was a story that she’d had Jefferson design the house so that it funneled sounds to her chambers (which I’ve never entered, by the way; nor has Marietta). The story may be apocryphal, but I wonder. Though it’s many, many months since I caught sight of the woman I don’t have difficulty believing she sits there in her boudoir listening to her children, and her husband’s children, conniving and weeping and slowly losing their minds. She probably enjoys it.

“Well if she can hear me, so what? She should be happy we’re going to all this trouble. I mean, it’s going to be a history of the Barbarossas. It’ll make her immortal.”

“If she isn’t already.”

“Oh no…she’s getting old. Zabrina sees her all the time and she says the old bitch is failing.”

“I find that hard to imagine.”

“It was her saying that which started me thinking about our book.”

“It’s not our book,” I insisted. “If I’m going to do it, it’s going to be done my way. Which means it’s not going to simply be a history of the Barbarossas.”

She emptied her glass. “I see,” she said, with a little chill in her voice. “So what’s it going to be?”

“Oh, it’ll be about the family. But it’ll be about the Gearys too.”

Now she fell silent and stared out of the window at the place where I sit with the birds. It took her fully a minute to bring herself to speak again. “If you write about the Gearys, then I’m having nothing to do with the fucking thing.”

“How can I write—”

“Or indeed you.”

“Let me finish, will you? How can I write about this family—particularly the recent history of this family—and not write about the Gearys?”

“They’re scum, Eddie. Human scum. And vicious. Every one of them.”

“That’s not true, Marietta. And even if it were, I say again: what kind of bowdlerized account would this damn book be if I didn’t include them?”

“All right. So just mention them in passing.”

“They’re part of our lives.”

“They’re not part of mine,” she said fiercely. Her gaze came back in my direction and I saw that she wasn’t so much enraged as sorrowful. I was revealing myself as a traitor with my desire to tell the story this way. She measured her next words with great care, like a lawyer making a pivotal argument.

“You realize, don’t you, that this may be the only way people out there get to know about our family?” she snapped, showing me a glimpse of her temper.

“All the more—”

“Now you let me finish. When I came in here suggesting you write this fucking book, it was because I had this feeling—I have this feeling—that we haven’t got very long. And my instincts are rarely wrong.”

“I realize that,” I said quietly. Marietta has prophetic talents, no question. She gets them from her mother.

“Maybe that’s why she’s looking so haggard these days,” Marietta said.

“She’s feeling what you’re feeling?”

She nodded. “Poor bitch,” she said softly. “And that’s another thing to consider. Cesaria. She hates the Gearys even more than I do. They took her beloved Galilee.”

I snorted at this nonsense. “That’s one sentimental myth I intend to lay to rest, for a start,” I said.

“So you don’t believe he was taken?”

“Absolutely not. I know what happened the night he left better than anyone living. And I intend to tell what I know.”

“Of course, nobody may give a damn,” Marietta observed.

“At least I’ll have set the record straight. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“I don’t know what the hell I was thinking,” Marietta replied, her distaste at what I had proposed now resurfacing. “I’m beginning to wish I’d never suggested a fucking book.”

“Well, it’s too late now. It’s begun.”

“You began already?”

This was not entirely true. I hadn’t yet laid pen to paper. But I knew where I was going to begin: with the house, and Cesaria and Thomas Jefferson. The work was as good as started.

“Well don’t let me delay you,” Marietta said, going to the door. “But I’m not guaranteeing you my help.”

“That’s fine. I’m not asking for it.”

“Not now you’re not. But you will. You’ll have to. There’s a lot of pieces of information I’ve got that you’ll need. Then we’ll see what your integrity’s worth.”

So saying, she left me to my gin. I didn’t doubt the significance of this last remark: she intended to make some kind of bargain. A section of my book she didn’t approve of excised in return for a piece of information I needed. I was absolutely determined she wasn’t going to get a single word removed however. What I’d told her was true. There was no way to tell the story of the Barbarossas without telling that of the Gearys, and thus also the story of Rachel Pallenberg, the one name I do not ever expect to hear crossing Marietta’s lips. I had deliberately not mentioned the Pallenberg woman myself, because I was certain as soon as I did so Marietta would be screaming inventive obscenities at me. Needless to say, I intend to devote a substantial portion of this story to the vices and virtues of Rachel Pallenberg.

That said, this narrative will be somewhat impoverished if I don’t get Marietta’s help; so I intend to be selective in the way I talk about what I’m doing. She’ll come round; if only because she’s an egotist, and the idea of not having her ideas in the book is going to be far more painful to her than my talking about the Gearys. Besides, she knows very well there are so many matters that I’m going to trust to my instinct on, matters that cannot be strictly verified. Matters of the spirit, matters of the bedroom, matters of the grave. These are the truly important elements. The rest is just geography and dates.

iii

Later that day, I saw Marietta escorting from the house the woman I’d heard her talking to Zabrina about. She was, like almost all of Marietta’s lovers, blonde, petite and probably no more than twenty years old. By the look of the clothes, I’d guess she was a tourist, perhaps a hitchhiker, rather than a local woman.

Zabrina had plainly done as Marietta had requested, and relieved the poor woman of her panic (along with any memory of the experience that had induced that panic). I watched them from my balcony through my binoculars. The blank expression on the girl’s face disturbed me. Was this really the only way human beings could deal with the appearance of the miraculous: panic rising to insanity; or, if they were lucky, a healing excision of the memory, which left them like this woman, calm but impoverished? What pitiful options they were. (Which thought brought me back to the book. Was it too grand an ambition to hope that in these pages I might somehow prepare the way for such revelations, so that when they came the human mind didn’t simply crack like a mirror too frail to reflect the wonders before it?) I felt a kind of sadness for the visitor, who had been washed, for her own good, of the very experience that might have made her life worth the living. What would she be after this, I wondered. Had Zabrina left deep inside her a seed of the memory, which, like the irritant mote in an oyster’s flesh might with time become something rare and wonderful? I would have to ask.

Meanwhile, under the cover of the trees, Marietta had halted with her companion, and was saying a more than fond goodbye. Having promised to tell the truth, however unpalatable, I can scarcely remain silent on what I saw: she bared the woman’s breasts while I watched; she teased the woman’s nipples and kissed her lips, while I watched, and then, while I watched, she whispered something, and the woman went down on to her knees, unbuckled and unbuttoned Marietta’s pants, and put her tongue into Marietta, flicking it so cunningly I heard Marietta’s yelps from my balcony. Lord knows I’m grateful for whatever pleasures come my way, and I’m not about to pretend that I’m deeply ashamed of watching them make love. It was perfectly wonderful to watch, and when they were finished, and Marietta escorted the woman to the path that winds away from L’Enfant and back into the real world, I felt—though this may seem absurd—a pang of loneliness.

IV

Though Marietta had mocked my belief that the house is a kind of listening device, which brings news from all its rooms to the ears of one soul in particular, that very night I had that belief confirmed.

I do not sleep well; never have, never will. It doesn’t matter how weary I am, as soon as I put my head on my pillow all manner of thoughts, most of them utterly without merit, circle in my skull. So it was last night; fragments of my conversation with Marietta, all rearranged so as to be nonsensical, and punctuated with her libidinous yelps, constituted the soundtrack. But the images were from some other store entirely. Neither Marietta’s face nor form appeared in my mind’s eye; rather the faces and forms of men and women I did not even recognize. No, I take that back. I recognized them; I simply couldn’t name them. Some seemed grotesquely happy with their lot; going naked, some of them, on the streets of what I think was Charleston, darting along the sidewalks and defecating from the chestnut trees. But there were others I dreamed of who were far less happy: one moment blank-faced brothers and sisters to Marietta’s concubine, the next moment shrieking like tortured animals—as though their forgetfulness had been snatched away, and what they were remembering was unbearable. I know there are some psychoanalysts who theorize that every creature which appears in a dream or waking dream is an aspect of the dreamer. If so, then I suppose the naked beasts in the streets of Charleston are the part of me that’s my father, and the other, the terrified souls sobbing incoherently, are that human part which my mother made. But I suspect the scheme’s too simple. In search of a pattern, the theorist ignores all that’s ragged and contradictory, and ends with a pretty lie. I’m not two in one; I’m many. This self has my mother’s compassion and my father’s taste for raw mutton. That one has my mother’s love of murder stories and my father’s passion for sunflowers. Who knows how many there are? Too many for any dogma to contain, I’m certain of that.

The point is, these dreams had me in a terrible state. I was close to tears, which is rare for me.

And then, in the darkness, I heard the sound of shuffling, and of clicking on the wooden floor and, looking down toward the noise, saw in a lozenge of moonlight a prickly silhouette waddling toward my bed. It was a porcupine. I didn’t move. I simply let the creature come to me (my arm was hanging off the bed, my hand close to the floor) and put its wet nose in my palm.

“Did you come down here on your own?” I said softly to the creature. Sometimes they did just that, particularly the younger, more adventurous ones; came shuffling down the stairs in the hope of finding a snack. But I’d no sooner asked the question than I had my answer, as my body responded to the entrance of the quill-pig’s mistress, Cesaria. You see, this pitiful anatomy of mine, wounded beyond all hope of repair, was quickening. It was uncanny. I was in the presence of this woman, my father’s wife, very rarely, but I knew from past experience the effect of this visit would last for days. Even if she were to leave the room now I would feel spasms in my lower limbs for a week or more, though the muscles of my legs were atrophied. And my cock, which had been just a piss-pipe for far too long, would stand up like an adolescent’s and demand milking twice an hour. Lord, I thought, was it any wonder she’d been worshiped? She could probably raise the dead if it pleased her to do so.

“Come away, Tansy,” she said to the porcupine.

Tansy ignored the instruction, which I will admit pleased me. Even she might be disobeyed.

“I don’t mind it,” I said.

“Just be careful. The spines—”

“I know.” I still had the scars where one of her quill-pigs, as she preferred to call them, had taken against me. And I think it had distressed Cesaria to see me bleed. I remember the look on her face quite clearly: her eyes like liquid night in that obsidian head of hers; her sympathy terrifying to me, because I suppose I feared her touch, her healing. Feared it would transform me, make me her devotee forever. So we’d stood, neither one of us moving, both distressed by something essential to the other (her power, my blood) while the quill-pig had sat on the floor between us and scratched its fleas.

“This book…” she said.

“Marietta told you about it?” I said.

“I don’t need telling, Maddox.”

“No. Of course not.”

What she said next astonished me. But then of course she would never be who she is—she could not trail the legends she trails—if she were not a constant astonishment.

“You must write it fearlessly,” she said. “Write out of your head and out of your heart and never care about the consequences.”

She spoke more softly than I’d ever heard her speak before. Not weakly, you understand, but with a kind of tenderness I’d always assumed she would never feel toward me. In truth, I hadn’t believed she felt it toward anybody.

“So the business about the Gearys—?”

“Must go in. All of it. Every last detail. Don’t spare any of them. Or any of us, come to that. We’ve all made our compromises over the years. Treated with the enemy instead of stopping their hearts.”

“Do you hate the Gearys?”

“I should say no. They’re only human. They know no better. But yes, I hate them. If they didn’t exist I’d still have a husband and a son.”

“It’s not as though Galilee’s dead.”

“He’s dead to me,” she said. “He died the moment he sided with them against your father.” She snapped her fingers lightly, and her quill-pig turned round and waddled back to her. Throughout this entire conversation I’d seen only glimpses of her, but now, as the porcupine approached her, she bent down to gather it up into her arms, and the moonlight, washing up off the boards, momentarily showed me her entirely. She was not, as Marietta had reported, frail or sickly; far from it. She looked like a young woman to my eye; a woman prodigiously gifted by nature: her beauty both refined and raw at the same time, the planes of her face so strong she seemed almost the idol of herself, carved out of the silver light in which she stood. Did I say that she was beautiful? I was wrong. Beauty is too tame a notion; it evokes only faces in magazines. A lovely eloquence, a calming symmetry; none of that describes this woman’s face. So perhaps I should assume I cannot do it justice with words. Suffice it to say that it would break your heart to see her; and it would mend what was broken in the same moment; and you would be twice what you’d been before.

With the quill-pig in her arms, she was moving toward the door. But as she reached it she halted (all this I only heard; she was again invisible to me).

“The beginning is always the hardest,” she said.

“Well actually I’ve already begun…” I said, a little tentatively. Despite the fact that she’d neither said nor done anything to intimidate me, I was still—perhaps unfairly—anxious that she’d blindside me with some attack or other.

“How?” she said.

“How did I begin?”

“Yes.”

“With the house, of course.”

“Ah…” I heard the smile in her voice. “With Mr. Jefferson?”

“With Mr. Jefferson.”

“That was a good idea. To begin in the middle that way. And with my glorious Thomas. He was, you know, the love of my life.”

“Jefferson?”

“You think it should have been your father?”

“Well—”

“It was nothing like love with your father. It became love, but that’s not how it began. When such as I, and such as he, mate, we do not mate for the sake of sentiment. We mate to make children. To preserve our genius, as your father would have said.”

“Perhaps I should have begun there.”

She laughed. “With our mating?”

“No I didn’t mean that.” I was glad of the darkness, to cover my blushes—though with her eyes she probably saw them anyway. “I…I…meant with the firstborn. With Galilee.”

I heard her sigh. Then I heard nothing; for such a time I thought perhaps she’d decided to leave me. But no. She was still there in the room.

“We didn’t baptize him Galilee,” she said. “He took that name for himself, when he was six.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“There’s a great deal you don’t know, Maddox. A great deal you can’t even guess. That’s why I came to invite you…when you’re ready…to see some of the past…”

“You have more books?”

“Not books. Nothing so tangible…”

“I’m sorry, I don’t really understand.”

Again, she sighed, and I was afraid this offer, whatever it was, would be snatched away again because I was making her impatient. But she sighed not out of irritation, rather out of a heaviness of the heart.

“Galilee was everything to us,” she said. “And he became nothing. I want you to understand how that came about.”

“I’ll do my best, I swear.”

“I know you will,” she said gently. “But it may take more courage than you have. You’re so human, Maddox. I’ve always found that hard to like.”

“I can’t do much about it.”

“Your father loved you for that very reason, you know…” Her voice trailed away. “What a mess it all is,” she said. “What a terrible, tragic mess. To have had so much, and let it go through our fingers…”

“I want to understand how that happened,” I replied, “more than anything, I want to understand.”

“Yes,” she said, somewhat distractedly. Her thoughts were already elsewhere.

“What do I need to do?” I asked her.

“I’ll explain everything to Luman,” Mama replied. “He’ll watch over you. And of course if it’s too much for your human sensibilities—”

“Zabrina can take it away.”

“That’s right. Zabrina can take it away.”