A Cabinet of Curiosity Read online

  “It was written after your son died,” I said. “I think you can imagine what my employer might have wanted to tell you.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” The director gave me a pinched smile. Her hands were in her lap, but there was enough space between her chair and the desk for me to see her long fingers coil into fists. “I saw my son just this morning.”

  “Sylvie,” I said. “Let’s stop this. Please.”

  All the windows were open, the linen curtains billowing in the breeze. The gardener kept a team of hounds on the edge of the property, and I could hear them baying in their kennels.

  “This is a strange conversation,” she said. “Brought on by a strange woman. I can’t say it was ever clear to me what he saw in you.”

  “Show me a photo,” I said next, with the cool of a detective closing in on a suspect.

  “What?” The a stretched with genuine surprise.

  “Show me a photo of your son that was taken right here, in Italy.”

  The director stood and went to the espresso machine in the corner of her office. She placed a tiny white cup under the spout and pulled the handle to tighten the contraption, but she did not press the button. She just stood there frowning down into the empty cup and then finally abandoned whatever private negotiation she had been engaged in and returned to her desk.

  “I owe you nothing,” she said, sitting back down.

  I was starting to wonder if a miraculous transformation had occurred during the director’s time in Italy—if, through the powers of her own imagination, she had managed to liberate herself from the terrible reality of her grief. I was fascinated by the possibility of such a transformation and wanted to better understand the inner workings. On the one hand, the correct part of my character had wanted to force the director to right her story; on the other, I remembered arriving at my employer’s studio and finding his body hanging from a rope that had been lashed around the strong wood rafters—after such a sight, who could make claims about the right way or the wrong way to survive?

  “Why did you accept his collection?” I asked. “The foundation had to undertake renovations to accommodate all his books, a lot of trouble and expense for a library that was already well-appointed.”

  “The collection is priceless,” she replied. “Many years ago he wrote the play that made him famous here. He felt he owed the foundation a great debt and debts should always be paid.”

  I saw the wood footstool kicked over on the striped rug, all four legs in the air; in the moment, I had thought of turtles. To my shame, I had not tried to cut him down; I had not called 911 or the police or his children. I backed out of the room and ran down the spiral staircase and out the front door, slamming it behind me like a harried teenager, straight out into the glorious blaze of summer. It was a beautiful day; the air smelled floral. For a little bit longer, my life was still my life. I ran for blocks and blocks. I only stopped an hour later, after I got a call from his daughter on my cell. Come right away, she had wept into the phone. Something terrible has happened.

  I looked out the window; across the lawn, the gardener was trimming the hedges.

  “It was me,” I said. “I found his body. Nobody knows.”

  The director did not say anything back. She sat slumped in her chair, her expression flat and inscrutable, utterly disinterested in my confession; she seemed to have floated away to some other place. I left her in her office, staring down at the envelope in the center of her desk.

  On the day of my departure, the story spread first at a hush, from the chattering of the kitchen staff, and then at a roar, for no one enjoys gossiping about human tragedy more than intellectuals and artists. The director had been arrested that morning, for attempting to steal an infant. The theft had occurred at a market in the village center. Apparently Sylvie had lifted the child straight out of his bassinet while the mother was haggling over the price of porcini mushrooms. When the mother heard her child wail and chased after Sylvie, she had started to run, the baby jiggling in her arms; before long she was apprehended by the carabinieri. So she had not been liberated from her grief at all; rather, it had mutated into an underwater state, where the distinction between the living and the dead, between the debts that could be repaid and those that were bottomless, had been erased—a confusion that could turn a person monstrous.

  “Her child died,” I told the kitchen staff, hoping that they might take pity on her if she were ever permitted to return to the foundation. “In a drowning accident, not long before she came here.”

  On the train from Perugia to Rome, where my employer’s children had booked me a room at a storied hotel beloved by their father, I thought about what a peculiar existence I had been leading, so consumed with enhancing the presence of another life that it had not even occurred to me to be surprised that the children had not asked where I wanted to stay; they had assumed, and not incorrectly, that I would want whatever brought me closer to him, that I had few curiosities of my own. There had been a safety in my vocation, a concealment, that I would miss and that I would have to learn to live without. How did people begin to learn to live without the things that they had loved and would miss?

  Everyone, including his children, thought that we had been lovers through the years, but they were wrong. There had been one moment, early on in my tenure. I was helping him organize documents for a project and I said a word—cumulus, I think it was; I had been talking about the sky—and he removed his glasses and asked me to say the word again. I repeated “cumulus”; he touched my wrist. The slight music of my pronunciation had caught his ear because that’s how he was, obsessed by the smallest details, the details that anyone else would miss. In his study I watched the dawn of shifting possibilities pass over his face and wondered if my life was about to change forever—but the moment came and went, a door swinging open and then shut, leaving me uncertain as to whether I should never say “cumulus” again or if I should say the word every day for the rest of my life.

  I kept thinking that the door might swing open some time in the future, but it never did. I suspect that I became too useful to his day-to-day life to be considered erotic. He moved on and he moved on and he moved on until a door was flung closed in his mind, one that, try as he might, he could not push open.

  Then again I couldn’t say how hard he tried or didn’t; I had been just as shocked as everyone else by the way he had died. I began to count the stops—Assisi, Foligno, Trevi. I got off in Trevi for no reason in particular beyond the fact that the name made me think of the Trevi Fountain in Rome, which I had read about in a guidebook. I walked uphill to a café in the town center, pulling my suitcase behind me. I wondered where Sylvie was right then, sitting in a jail cell or in her own home, and what would ever become of her and the ghost of the child her imagination had birthed. I thought about the grace of finding oneself among strangers, unanchored from your own history—a refuge I had robbed her of, I will admit, though the shelter she had constructed for herself was very fragile and so it was only a matter of time. I sat down on the edge of a piazza, under a crimson awning. A waitress, a young woman with heavy eyeliner and a crooked smile, approached my table and I began to marvel at all that I could tell her.

  Why Brother Stayed Away

  Ann Beattie

  The moment had come to see if it was true that Grumpa had a collection of ties lined with pictures of what her brother called “naughty ladies.” Her brother lived in Buffalo and had not volunteered to have any involvement in cleaning up their grandparents’ house. That had fallen to her and her husband. Only three ties hung on a hook inside the wardrobe. She examined the lining of the first. Weren’t the women supposed to be naked, even if only from the waist up? Was Grumpa so lame that he was showing his men friends a picture of a woman wearing a scarf wrapped around her tits? Or a girl smiling over her bare shoulder from under a sunhat? The third tie was lined with a drawing of a carved pumpkin, smoking a pipe.

  Her husband reached around her, opened
the door of the wardrobe, and fingered Grumpa’s polka-dot robe, his scuff slippers barely visible on the dark floor beneath it, and a couple of poorly hung, sagging sweaters. There were other clothes mashed together. With one finger, she separated a striped shirt from a wrinkled vest Grumpa had sometimes worn on holidays, his father’s watch fob dangling an ornate, gold-filled watch, tucked inside a pocket.

  In the secret shed—well; it was hardly a secret that the shed stood at the back of the property under the maple tree that had once been hit by lightning; only its contents were unknown because of the padlock. She watched with little interest as the screws were drilled out of the hinges. They fell on the ground as he walked off to do the next chore.

  Call me if you find a dead body, he said. Sure, she replied, she certainly would. She stepped in. The shed was remarkably uncluttered. There was a lawn mower. A bicycle entirely missing its front tire, the back one deflated. A box. Inside the box, various tools, some of them rusty. A barbecue fork. An old issue of Life magazine with Richard Nixon on the cover. There was a dead body: the rotted carcass of a squirrel, the tip of its tail still bushy, like a groomed poodle.

  Received information was that Grumpa had put the cash from the sale of his business into his wife’s sewing basket, but that was not to be found on any shelf, in the attic, in the shed, in the garage, or anywhere else. In the garage, however, a cedar box was found, unlocked. Inside was half a pack of Camels, a cork coaster imprinted with the words Ben Bow, a splayed toothbrush with blackened bristles that had been used for something other than brushing teeth, Murine, a bottle of solidified glue, a white pill with no marking, and a small calendar (1962) from a local gas station. Also a penny, a dime, a tin soldier about the size of her husband’s thumbnail, and two buttons.

  The screwdriver was required to remove the latches on a wooden box dragged out from under the bed. “Voilà!” he said, walking out. She thought the box looked too rugged to contain, for example, her grandmother’s wedding dress. It contained a quilt, log cabin pattern, twin bed size, nice. There was also a second quilt, badly folded. That one was not quite equal in size, but also intended for a twin bed. There was a faint, very faint, scent of lavender that disappeared as her nose pressed into the fabric.

  Twenty minutes early, the man showed up who’d bought Grumpa’s “antique” Ford truck and was having it hauled away. He stood around, one hand jingling change in his pant pocket. The flatbed arrived. Some twitchy guy loaded with chains jumped out. He and his young helper, or son, or whatever he was underneath all those tattoos, got the black truck onto the flatbed in no time, and just like that, they were gone. The check had cleared the day before. The man drove away in his Saab without even waving.

  In the dream she has that night, Nixon requests, by engraved invitation, her presence at the White House. Well, dreams can sometimes be like smoking perilously strong weed. Like she’d be invited to the White House! Like Nixon would send a carriage for her, pulled by prancing white horses! Cinderella, off to a fabulous evening, wearing her finest gown, the night just a bit chilly. Fuckin’ Ambien, she thinks, or dreams. The quilt warms her as she bounces in the back.

  (She clutches the duvet.)

  Through the gates she goes! Mrs. Nixon, wearing a midcalf fur coat, waves a gloved hand. She and President Nixon approach. The driver opens her door. He offers a gloved hand. A horse snorts, raising its head.

  (This is her husband, snoring.)

  She steps out, her satin slipper as beautiful as Mrs. Nixon’s shoes with sparkling buckles. She swirls, to delight the adults. She’s a child again. She opens her cape, exposing the deep blue lining. Big mistake! The velvet’s imprinted with dancing figures: long-legged showgirls, high-heeled, bare breasted, red lipsticked, one with her butt stuck out, another whose lips coquettishly kiss a rosebud.

  The Nixons are flabbergasted. Then they laugh so hard they frighten the horses, who run away, the driver helpless as his carriage disappears. All smiles vanish. Nixon narrows his eyes. What to do? She can’t even flee without the carriage. Imploringly, she turns to Mrs. Nixon. But she’s vanished, fur coat, splendid shoes, and all. Desperately, she turns toward the president. Men in military uniforms flank him. They’re everywhere, a child’s soldiers grown life-sized. Go ahead then, Nixon says to one of them: that driver fellow lost his carriage. Now he’s gotta be beheaded. Who’s our swordsman? Or will we have to have a firing squad and so forth?

  She’s sputtering spit, she finds, as she awakens and wipes her fingers across her mouth. Her weight is on one hip; she’s propped awkwardly on her elbow, her nightgown tangled, the duvet, as always, sliding off the bed. Her husband sleeps.

  She forgets the dream until she’s about to toss the Life magazine down on a pile of someone’s recycling in the trash room that stinks of mold mingled with pine, when she looks at Nixon’s jowly face. Such an awful, dishonest man. He even extended a war because it better suited his purposes. In that instant, she realizes that her husband found the money. He must have found it, and not said so. Why else be so incurious about everything from the old man’s ties to the contents of the shed? “Call me if you find a dead body.” All he did was drill latches and walk away.

  I’m going back to take another look, he says, picking up the car keys from the hall table as she reenters the apartment. Half senile or not, your grandmother insisted to her dying day that he’d hidden a vast sum of money in her sewing basket. It’s a sewing basket I’m looking for, not a needle in a haystack. What’s that look supposed to mean? Remember I’m the one who’s giving up my weekends doing this, not your brother.

  How Tsala Entered the Spirit World and Became a Hawk

  Brandon Hobson

  The same encroaching spirit will lead them upon other land of the Tsalagi.

  —Chief Dragging Canoe, 1740–1792

  COMPILER’S NOTE

  Osiyo! Last year my grandfather passed away, quite suddenly, of a heart attack, and since that devastation I have begun to embark on a journey to live my life according to traditional Cherokee teachings. I had never followed these teachings before, despite my traditional Cherokee upbringing in Oklahoma, where my grandfather raised me from the time I was four until I left for college. His name was Eli Wadie Chair, and he was a full-blooded Cherokee who believed in the spirit world of the ancient Cherokee teachings. I loved him very much. He was a man who told me stories my whole life while staring at birds outside our window. A man who believed strongly in talking to wolves and hawks and in the desultory joy of watching the trees. The first time he took me to Geronimo’s grave in southern Oklahoma, he quoted Geronimo, “The sun, the darkness, the winds are all listening to what we have to say,” and afterward I began to think about Geronimo’s life, about justice, good and evil, the dead and living. With history showing its temperament, such equivocation shouldn’t be surprising. And shouldn’t we all be worried about our spirits before it’s too late? By too late, I mean death, of course, unless the world burns up first, or unless people are swallowed up by earthquakes, as Wodziwob the Paiute prophesied in the nineteenth century.

  Traditional Cherokee belief teaches that all souls after death continue to live on as spirits, some manifested into the bodies of animals while others are unseen. My fear is dying, and dying too soon. I have no reason for such a fear except speculation for what will happen to my spirit after I die, especially as I continue to study traditional Cherokee teachings. I recently spent a smokeless night in the living room of my grandfather’s house, where he died in a chair with a certain notebook open like a dead bird in his lap. The notebook contained hundreds of pages of drawings, symbols, and stories written in the Cherokee language by a man named Tsala, apparently my ancestor, whose death and after-death spiritual journey is detailed in the following selection, which I have provided with much wonder and horror.

  Having at first piqued my curiosity, this notebook has become my passion. Discovering it has changed my life.

  My first question upon the notebook’s discover
y was what does this say about my ancestor? However, as I continue to piece together Tsala’s writings, the more interesting question might be What does it say about death and the spirit world? Again, I had given very little serious thought to ancient Cherokee teachings, always dismissing them as mythical, but since I have begun compiling every piece of writing I can from this notebook, having read the creation stories and spiritual stories, poems of violence and suffering and indecipherable scribblings, having seen drawings of buffaloes and birds and smoking pipes, I am left astounded at the possibilities of what can happen to the spirit. I take the notebook with me everywhere, always thinking about it. There are specific dates and names concerning the stabbings of innocent men. There are detailed references to spirits walking and spirits flying and spirits reincarnated into the bodies of animals and birds. These characters are inexhaustibly memorable. Such is the case with the story presented below, which also deals with one of the cruelest events in US history—the Trail of Tears. Many Cherokees knew this brutal event was coming and therefore prepared as much as they could, hiding their families in caves in the mountains. According to Cherokee teachings, the thirteen heavens ended in 1519 on the day Cortés landed in Mexico. Three hundred years later, in the beginning of the period we Cherokees call “the seventh hell,” President Jackson ordered the removal of Native American people from their land. (Wado, Prez, old fool! Did you know westward was the direction taken by the spirits of the dead?)

  Of course, this was a time of betrayal and suffering and death. Are we the lost tribes of Judah? According to my grandfather’s notebook, my ancestor Tsala believed so; he was one of many who hid his family in the caves to avoid leaving the land, though sadly the soldiers executed him with his son. Before his own death, my grandfather was in the middle of translating Tsala’s writings, and there is still much to be translated. Is this something anthropologists, historians, writers, archaeologists, painters, and poets could use to help keep Native American heritage alive? How aware is the public of the cultural dispossession and displacement among the Cherokees and other tribes throughout history? Certain textual references to spirits and reincarnated spirits seem overwhelmingly complex, and they might actually be more sad than sapient, an apotheosis of courage and resilience. I consider everything I’m translating as indispensable to the development of the human mind. My grandfather’s interest in storytelling, much like my own, led him to learn the language, and today I study the language too, on warm days when I sit outside on my back porch and blow smoke rings from his buffalo pipe. Do not assume I’m not mortified by everything I’m translating, particularly the postdeath account, the spirits walking westward, the brutality from soldiers forcing the tribes out of their land. I am learning to pay attention to the outside world. I no longer hunt animals or kill insects. I no longer fish or swat at bees or mosquitoes, not even flies. Though hunting was a profession, a Cherokee would not kill a wolf, as wolves were messengers to the spirit world. Owls, however, are considered ominous by many Cherokees. It is believed people can turn themselves into owls at night and travel around to do evil things to other people. My mother used to tell me a story about when she was a young girl walking home with her sisters at sunset and saw an owl swoop down and attack a young boy who was playing in his yard. The boy fell down screaming as the owl dug its talons into his head and face until the boy’s father came out and the owl flew away. The boy lost an eye and suffered severe scars to his face.