A light when nights are long.
She watched Edith quickly read her poem with a studious expression. I suppose she has rehearsed that look when she looks at her reflection in the toaster, Kitt thought. She knew Edith didn’t much care for poems, except for the funny ones in Winnie the Poohor Alice in Wonderland. The poem she liked best was “The Hunting of the Snark,” which Kitt could recite by heart when the mood struck her. Edith gave her mother an appreciative nod and ran upstairs to her bedroom in the attic.
After tucking Kitt’s poem into the flyleaf, she hid the stolen missal back between her mattress and the thick canvas straps that held it up. Now when she secretly said prayers at bedtime, she’d be able to sneak a look at it and get the words right.
She slid her magic box out from beneath her bed. No one knew about the box, not even Daniel. She’d never told anyone about the little worlds—castles, houses, streets, trees, brooks, ponies, cows, and people—that dwelt inside.
Today a circus was coming to town. A great line of brightly painted tiny wagons with throngs of gaily dressed acrobats, jugglers, and clowns paraded down the wide avenue that ran the length of the box, into and then out of the village center. Edith had never been to a real circus. One of the few things her parents and all four of her grandparents agreed on was that circuses were dirty, smelly, and noisy. She was sure that the tiny one in her box was as good or better than the genuine article. Two beautiful velvety gray elephants no bigger than mice proudly led the parade, holding rose silk banners with their trunks.
Edith never knew what she might see in the box. When she’d pulled it out a few days back, the box contained a village of Red Indians who seemed to know nothing of the existence of white people. They lived in little birchbark wigwams and carried their belongings on long travois poles over their shoulders. Their village was in a clearing surrounded by a dark forest of tiny beech and oak and spruce trees. A hunting party was bringing back a brace of wild ducks and the women were building up the cooking fires.
The little people and animals in the box never seemed to notice Edith watching them. They were never disturbed when she moved the box out or pushed it back under her bed. She wondered what happened in there when she was not watching, when the box was under the bed. Was it dark then in the box? Whenever she pulled the box out, there the tiny people were, busy, in the middle of things. She knew she must miss a great deal.
CHAPTER 3
THE CRYING ROCK
Kitt had been holed up in her study all that long, hot July afternoon. She was supposed to be working on her translation project. But instead she was taking a break and writing a letter to Earl Pipher. They hadn’t spoken or met since last February, when he’d offered her the work over coffee at the Plaza’s Palm Court and accepted her invitation to the ballet. But Kitt had frequently relived their long, starlit walk and their kisses and caresses on a bench in Central Park in her daydreams. Thoughts of Earl—his flawless Russian, his bristly crew cut, his easy familiarity with Russian poetry, his nice clean smell—kept distracting her. These daydreams were much more pleasant than trying to get inside the skin of Madame Akhmatova. The Russian poetess (a patronizing term she found it hard to forgive Earl for using) had a voice that was imperious and austere, yet wildly sensual. Working her way into these poems at a sufficient depth to find bridges to English made Kitt feel hot and flustered. She pushed a limp strand of damp hair off her forehead and filled her fountain pen with blue ink.
Dear Earl,
I haven’t written in so terribly long! It’s not that I’ve forgotten you, or forgotten our wonderful evening together last February. I have been working on translations of the poems you gave me when I can fit them in between teaching, commuting, and the dreary doldrums of domesticity and rural idiocy. I have had a lot on my mind, and I scarcely know . . .
She thought it improbable that Earl had made her pregnant. They hadn’t “gone all the way,” as her coed students would say. She hadn’t mentioned her pregnancy to him yet, and she hesitated now, undecided if she would. But those goddamn sperm were tough little bastards, as Arthur would say, and she was quite sure that some of them were present on that icy bench in Central Park last February. They’d met up at the ballet, then gone for a long late dinner at the Mandarin Chinese Restaurant on Broadway and Ninety-Eighth Street. They’d talked and talked, about poetry, about Russia and the Russian language. Earl was fluent. He had actually spent six months at the A. A. Zhdanov Leningrad University doing his doctoral research. They had talked about their favorite writers (Dostoevsky for her, Turgenev for him). Nothing at all had been said about their personal lives. She thought she’d glimpsed the obligatory wife-and-child photo in his wallet when he’d taken it out to pay for their moo shu pork and egg foo yong.
Her fortune cookie had read “You will receive an unusual offer.” But when they sat down on a bench in the Ramble section of the park, and he’d put his arms around her, she hadn’t been sure at first that she wanted him too. She’d just taken Edith to see Oklahoma the night before, and Ado Annie’s rueful “I’m Just a Gal Who Cain’t Say No” began playing in her mind.
I’m just a gal who cain’t say no
I’m in a terrible fix.
I always say “Come on let’s go”
Just when I oughta say “Nix.”
And so she hadn’t said no. Earl’s huffing and puffing and thrusting and rubbing had suddenly stopped with a low moan that she knew how to interpret. She hadn’t expected anything of the sort (though she had to wonder why she hadn’t), so she wasn’t protected. And they were fully dressed. in winter coats, no less, and, more or less, upright. She remembered heated but poorly informed discussions in her Smith dormitory about how you could get pregnant when you wouldn’t think that you could, and what things were safe to do with boys. She knew from experience that pulling out didn’t work: that had resulted in her first visit to the émigré Hungarian doctor in Pittsfield who made his living as an abortionist. If only she had called him this time, before things had gone this far, but now it was too late. She recalled Sartre’s protagonist in The Age of Reason—you couldn’t call him a hero—searching for an abortionist for his mistress and referring to the fetus he wanted to get rid of as a “strawberry.” But by now hers was more like one of the naked baby mice she’d found in her sock drawer that morning. She was too far along. She’d already told Arthur, and he was all excited again about his supposed virility and fertility. If it were up to him, she’d have as many babies by now as Grace DeMelo across the road.
And really, her brother-in-law Edwin was the most likely culprit. Much more likely than Earl, since they’d had sex at least a dozen times since that first time on Edith’s birthday in February. only days before her meeting with Earl. But Edwin, darling and clever though he was, deft though he was in bed, couldn’t hold a candle to Earl when it came to culture. Earl was even more sophisticated than Arthur, who at least had done his graduate work at Columbia in New York, while Edwin was just a country boy despite law school in Boston.
Sometimes Kitt wondered if she was a nymphomaniac. She seemed prone to lust over almost any male she met. The more inappropriate and dangerous the better; hence her current dalliance with her brother-in-law. It had been this way since she’d been a seventeen-year-old virgin freshman at Smith who craved (and attained) the caresses of her forty-five-year-old faculty adviser, Professor Panin. She’d been coaching him (at his request) in French pronunciation. Arshily Panin was a Russian, like her parents, and since she had lived in France until she was eight, French was practically her first language. He’d selected Les Liaisons Dangereuses as their text. He’d taken her to a rustic motel in the Berkshires for their one
