The Folded World Read online

  She had been in the room when Charlie was born. In those days, men considered it impolite to watch the delivery. Poor Luddy had had a very difficult time of it with Charlie, just as the grandmother had had a difficult time with Luddy. After twelve hours of labor, when the child was out, Luddy, hair pasted to her cheeks, reached out to the nurse for the bloody baby. Let them wipe him off, the grandmother had whispered. But Luddy wanted the baby right away. She reached out for him, licking the sweat off her lips. It seemed she was using her last bit of strength to reach out for him.

  By the time they wiped the baby down and place him swaddled on her breast, Luddy’s aspect had totally changed. Her face was the color of caulk, and her eyes rolling like a horse’s, as if she were horrified by what she had done—begin a life, a life that from this moment would only be, in a way, its own undoing. Her hands wavered over the little body as if she did not know the right way to touch him. Her thin white johnny fell off one shoulder, and her eyes rolled ominously toward the nurse who had come to her side, as if to say, Don’t, Don’t let me have the baby.

  Come now, the grandmother had said with irritation, though she herself remembered being frightened of one’s own baby. Come now he’s just a baby and he won’t mind what you do, she said. He’s tougher than he looks.

  But something had gone horribly awry. Luddy’s skin was gray. Can’t you breathe? Can’t you breathe? The baby, on the other hand, was not crying, was not making a sound, but was lying there in complete cooperation with the vagaries of life. The baby appeared to be listening to his mother’s heart. The old woman leaned over and looked at him. He lay, red and inured and cooperative, with a little preternaturally handsome face and big ears like his father and a rather patient, scientific expression. Her daughter’s breathing was by then very labored, and two nurses were now swinging her legs back up into the stirrups and calling urgently for a doctor. On the floor underneath them, a puddle of blood grew. It seemed to the grandmother that the earth had been kicked in casual malice by some great force, some thug of the universe, and now everything was spinning out of hand. The old woman reached out to take the poor red blind baby off her daughter’s chest, as they began cutting off his mother’s thin gown.

  Just then, holding the baby in her hands, the old woman’s sight went dark, and she was overcome with a feeling of emptiness so profound that it annihilated the hospital.

  She was standing in an open field, a savanna in winter, all of the grasses broken at the stems, snow compressed by boot soles, boot tracks wending off between the frozen hillocks in separate trails. In this vision, wind blew solemnly across the snowy emptiness. In the distance, she heard a search party calling thinly. She was trudging through the snow. She was part of the search party. She was looking everywhere—under logs, bushy thickets—to no avail. She took a sharp turn into a darkened copse of evergreens. Nearby, along the banks of an icy creek, she spied a shoe, a leg propped casually on a log, as a man suns himself in repose. I’ve found him! she cried into the wind. Over here everybody! She approached frantically, staggering forward.

  What she saw was the sort of spectacle meant to freeze all those who saw it in a kind of binding horror. The arms were carved by a knife, the belly was destroyed the same, in the reckless way a hungry animal might destroy. He was coatless, in only a dress shirt and thin sweater, the sweater torn into strips, written on with blood, damp with blood, all of him looking so cold, so tolerant, as if he had been too polite to cry out and had spent the long night dying but not screaming. She staggered backward from the body, cut as it was, lying as it was, throat cut, the head cocked and eyes staring as if appraising a last loveliness, and once again the grandmother became aware that she was standing in a white room, holding a newborn baby. She shook her head violently, keeling to the side, putting one hand against a cool wall, cradling the baby. After a moment, she felt a strong urge to get the baby out of the delivery room. She lifted the baby up and over the heads of the nurses. The baby sailed across the bright lights. Good little baby, said the old lady, in tears from what she had seen. Good little baby don’t you worry.

  Once outside the delivery room door, she allowed herself one glance back at her daughter, who now lay with a doctor working between her legs, working seriously but not in a hurry, as a man putters on a Sunday. The grandmother kept looking around for a nurse to take the poor swaddled thing to its crib and give it its tests. But they were all consumed with saving the mother and had lost track of the baby.

  The old woman knew, however, that her daughter’s life was not in danger. Yes, death had been in the room with them. She had stood there and seen its interminable distances. But that search party was not calling for her daughter.

  It was calling for the baby.

  And now, would you look at that, the old woman thought, there he was, her most beloved grandchild, all grown up and crossing a stage with a piece of cardboard on his head. He kept spitting the tassel out of his mouth, grinning. She remembered him at the breakfast table, his paw in a pot of plum jam. She remembered him carrying a bucket of rainwater across the yard. She remembered him hanging upside down, his hair like quills. Beside her, the girl Alice leapt to her feet when his name was called and clapped above her head. On the stage, one hand in the hand of the dean, Charlie looked for them in the audience and saw her, his dark-haired pretty girlfriend, and he clasped his diploma romantically to his chest.

  Maybe I was wrong, thought the old lady. Maybe at last I was wrong! Maybe she would never see such horror in her lifetime. She would die before him, as was natural. Then and there she let herself imagine what she had resisted imagining for years: that he might marry and have children and live a good long time, live to smoke pipes and shuffle about in some old house, and that she had been wrong those many years ago in the hospital and she was just a touched old woman. The pretty girlfriend flopped back into her chair and blushed. Luduina reached over, across the grandmother’s lap, and squeezed the girl’s hand. Well that just about seals it, thought the old woman. Luddy approves. They might as well get married this instant. Shutting her eyes, she saw the girl in a party dress on a hot day, a large white flower in her hair. The grandmother clapped lasciviously to herself. She was very happy. She had carried her awfulest premonition with her in secret for twenty-five years, and wanted nothing more than to be rid of it.

  “Alice? Alice?”

  “Yes?”

  “Wake up,” he said.

  “I’m here.” She drew him closer. “A bad dream?”

  “No. Alice?”

  “But I’m here.”

  He paused. The morning light crept upon the bed.

  “Marry me,” he said.

  She sat up. The sheet fell in a pool at her hips. “What?”

  “Marry me. Marry me today. Marry me tomorrow. Marry me every single day of your life. Ha! Will you?”

  “Will I what exactly?” She was laughing. “Will I—”

  He buried his face in her neck. Then he fell back on the pillow, his hands over his face. “No, no. Don’t do anything or say anything. Don’t move. I’m messing this up. Listen. Would you just—tolerate my presence your whole life? Can I just be there? Watch you dress and move from room to room? I’ll be very quiet. Please say yes. You don’t have to marry me. Just—let me watch you.”

  “Charlie.”

  “No. No, you don’t have to say anything. I’ll scare you away behaving like this. I’m sorry. It’s just—”

  “Charlie,” she said.

  “It just overcomes me. You. Overcome me.”

  “When I was a child, I dreamed of you.”

  He was motionless on the bed. “What?”

  “When I was a child, I dreamed of you.” She pulled his hands from his eyes. “I dreamed of you, Charlie Shade, thinking I’d made you up. If I had known you existed, I suppose I would have lived an entirely different life. I would never have wasted a day.”

  He looked at her.

  He smiled. “You dreamed of me?”


  “I did,” she said. “I swear.”

  She held him.

  “Why are you crying?” he whispered.

  “I suspect that you are forced to lose everything,” she said. “But maybe. Maybe sometimes they let you keep one thing.”

  “No,” he said. “You don’t have to lose everything.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She wiped her eyes. “I’ll hide you under my pillow.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We’ll hide.”

  It was July. Outside, the neighborhood steamed from a late-night thundershower. The world bled flowers. Late summer roses gaped at the sun. Alice lifted her dress off the bedroom floor. In the dim light of Charlie’s washroom, she washed her hair in the sink with a bar of Ivory soap and twisted it, black and wet, into a loose chignon.

  Charlie unfolded the stiff fresh shirt that his mother had packed with cedar, meant for church. With solemnity, he fastened each button. He drew a comb across his hair. He stepped into the kitchen. Alice was waiting. When he came in, she stood. Below the dripping eaves of the house, doves overslept.

  Some people are born again by God. Charlie and Alice Shade were born again by one another. After the judge married them, and they emerged from City Hall into the heat of the rain-washed city, they could hardly remember the old words for things. What was the name of this month? This hot season? What was the word for the cars that wait for strangers? Surely the words would return, but they would return back from the land of meaning, ponderous and heavysweet, like words in a poem. Walking uphill, toward the older neighborhoods where Charlie’s apartment was, they tread on a soft carpet of juneberries. Children played in the streets, running back and forth under sprinklers and screaming, for they did not want to go back to school. Charlie reached for a wide white blossom that hung over a fence. What was it called, this flower? He plucked it and held it in the palm of his hand. Alice touched the slippery blossom, murmuring at its perfect smoothness. Charlie pulled back her hair and placed the flower behind her ear. A wind came up and blew her dress against her body.

  July! she remembered, finding the word exquisite. That’s what they call it.

  July.

  Summer.

  Taxi.

  Husband.

  Silk.

  Magnolia.

  The dentist died. His office was dismantled and everyone was let go. All Alice was left with was her furry boots and a hundred gorgeous afternoons of unemployment. Back then, waiting for Charlie to thunder up the stairs to their apartment after work, she came to know her own body. In this bliss and idleness she spent hours washing her hair, hours brushing it. She would lie on their bed, one hand absently naming the curves of her newly married body: hip, thigh, belly, throat. Hand on her mons, she petted the humid softness there. Only after she became tired of this would she take up a book, lift the window, light a cigarette. Hours, she would watch the people moving like soldiers and soldiers’ prisoners out toward their schools and offices. She resisted pitying them, that they were not she. Then she would laugh out loud, for since when had she become so self-important? Her mother would have been horrified. Did she think that just because she was married now there was nothing left to worry about?

  They had decided to give up her apartment and move into Charlie’s. Charlie’s apartment was on the top floor of an old gray house on a sunny, wind-swept corner. It was a small one-bedroom affair with a galley kitchen. They slept in the living room because it was roomiest and sunniest. Water stains on the ceiling provided hours of lazy naked speculation. Down the hall, in another zip code, was the actual bedroom. But now that was filled with books. Books was all Alice had brought with her. Books, a reading lamp, a pair of red crushed-velvet curtains, a set of eggcups, and a large tin of Earl Grey. Everything else she left right where it lay, like a woman who’d fled the continent. Her landlord could charge her for it if he wanted. She did not care an ounce. Those days, she was content to drift about the cheerful, beat-up apartment, touching the linens and the wallpaper as newly married women do. Then she would dress and descend the two sets of stairs into the summer air. If the Russian bookseller was around the corner with his card table of dollar books, she’d say hello and touch each of his musty books while he watched her and smoked. Then she would buy as many as she had money for and hoard them, laughing, back up the stairs.

  Of course she knew it could not go on forever like that. Which is precisely how she was able to do it at all. She had never been forewarned of happiness, so to her it was a complete surprise. She had a husband of the sort she never dreamed existed—gallant and tender and loyal as daybreak. It was as if she had died and gone to heaven, a heaven where you made love to yourself all day and he made love to you all night, and in between, you read.

  She read anything. It didn’t matter what it was. She read biographies of obscure historical figures. She read pamphlets of self-published poetry by society ladies who were long dead. She read obsolete scientific research about animal behavior. She read the demi-classics: Twelve Angry Men and Darkness at Noon, and swashbucklers, Sarabande. As a married woman she read more slowly, less searchingly, but with far more retention. All the love stories clicked into place. Toward every heroine, she felt sisterly.

  She would have loved to try and write her own stories but in this she ran up against her long-held belief that she was not very smart. She had read more than anybody she knew and possessed a great desire to be smart, but it was still confusing to her how—if she were smart—she had missed college and ended up four indeterminate years later as a dentist’s receptionist. She remembered the time at which her friends were applying to college. She remembered holding the applications herself and even taking the tests. Then the slurping sound of the dentist’s suction hose behind a partition. She did not understand the logic in between. Just the applications, then the slurping. With several years in between of settling down to soup across from her mother. No college. No plaid skirts and no heavily accented professors and no confessional poetry and no secret confidence.

  The fact that Charlie had found his calling made her proud of herself, in the sense that she saw humanity as one team bonded against dark adversarial forces. Two months into his first job at Maynard Psychiatric Hospital, she had come to believe in his work as much as she could. She suspected that his compassion for strangers was something she loved most about him. Did he not love her with the same heart? And yet, early on, she learned that his work was different from any sort of work she had known. It was a particular sort of work that seemed to require the use of all human faculties—the heart, the mind, the senses, the reason, and the intuition, as well as simple physical stamina. At the end of the day, she wanted to hold him as a port holds a ship. She knew that while her days were lazy with bergamot and marriage and dollar books, he had been trying to save people.

  She had not gone to college, and she was unemployed, but that summer it did not matter. She wanted to give happiness all the space it needed. She saw how the shards of her life had magnetized around all this, this little apartment, this marriage, this man. For as small a thing as it was, her life felt monumental. She gave it her faith. She even fetched cold trimmings of secrets from the bottom of her heart. She allowed her mind small lapses, and in those lapses, memories arose: a poverty of love, a lost father (that great woolen absence, that transfixing hole). He took her secrets and carried them across rooms like candles. It seemed that the most guarded confession of lovers was that even at their most beautiful they had not been what they seemed, but rather, full of ache, getting on their bare knees as children with only an inkling of what might bring relief to the heart, getting on their knees and praying to God.

  When Charlie had first arrived at Maynard Psychiatric Hospital, he found it amusing that he had ever practiced going in and out of the revolving doors. Once inside, one forgot one was even there. There was no time, no doors, no oneself. On his very first day, he helped perform a restraint, right there in the waiting room, of a ranting obese man who referred to himself
as the General. The General went down almost gracefully, self-importantly, looking up with bold commander’s eyes at the army of the group of them, but not before tearing the eyeglasses off the face of the charge nurse. Later, six of them were needed to help him upstairs, docile now with sedatives, just a fat man.

  Charlie’s job was in Admitting, where he sat in a small dark office off the waiting room. The waiting room was large, tastefully decorated and strangely convincing. Table lamps gave the effect of a family den, copies of Redbook strewn about, a toy chest in the corner. The only thing that distinguished the waiting room at Maynard from that of some family doctor’s was the loud engagement of the lock on the main door behind each new arrival, and perhaps also the astonished, staring-straight-aheadness of the patients once they reached their chairs. At times there were upwards of thirty people waiting in the room, but in general the suffering was quiet and ordered. Often a mother or a boyfriend came as companions, looking entirely more stricken than his or her charge. For who in the world would imagine that a person who had just been talked down from a bridge would now be asked to please have a seat in Reception?

  In his small, shared office off the hallway, within earshot of these people, Charlie tried to peel through the epic stacks of paperwork as fast as possible and without shaking. Above all, it was necessary to be calm. Calm and engaged—yet efficient. He looked up, smiled. How are you? A grim nod of the head. A disbelieving laugh. A lurching forward of the tearful mother. Next, he tried to focus on the prescribed series of questions he was meant to ask: How had they come to be here today and Did they have insurance and What were they experiencing right now and Had they been to Maynard before and Did they have any history of trauma for example physical or sexual abuse or a history of hurting themselves or others? Some of the more acute patients, already having been medicated straightaway, like the General, appeared to just have been airlifted from wrecks. They were doubly remote, on a very small island with the tide coming in.