Inheritance of the Meek

 

"Could you come over?" she asked. "I'm lonely."

When I did go over, saw her for the first time since early summer when school ended, she was a changed person. She waited for me on a chaise lounge set up on her front porch. She'd always been bigger than me, taller. Her shanks stuck skinny now, out of her house dress, pulled up around her as she reclined. The skin of her upper arms hung in a loose fold whenever she lifted her hands in that old gesture, patting her hair into place. Her face had a skeletal aspect, her nostrils flaring, the skin pulled tight around sunken eyes. Her hair sprung sparsely out of an egg-shell scalp.

"I'm better" she said, taking my hands, smiling. "Only I'm annoyed. I always look forward to the taste of new potatoes in the fall. Now everything tastes like ashes. It's the chemotherapy."

"Tell me what's new", she demanded, settling back. "What is she like, my replacement." I told her what she wanted to hear, that the new librarian didn't have her qualifications, the library no longer ran as smoothly; that everyone asked after her. She nodded satisfaction.

"And you? Still going with Ray Brennan?"
"No. He's taking Linda out now."
"Good. He's a cold fish - you can do better. Did you ever notice his eyes? Dead."

At the school, the staff asked me how she was as time went on. I don't know exactly why I kept going over. I felt sorry for her; felt, I suppose, that I couldn't abandon her. I remembered the times she was kind to me, her concern coming through, around that acerbic tongue of hers. She gave me advice which I rarely took. None of the other staff bothered to go. Everyone was busy. Well, it wasn't my business to tell them how lonely she was. They had their classes draw up get-well cards, all the kids signing them. Clara put them up for display on the mantel in her living room. Later, in the early winter, the vice-principal visited her, but that was to tell her they couldn't wait any longer for her. They planned on advertising for a permanent replacement - and she understood, didn't she? Well, what else could they do? Although she kept talking about coming back it was clear she never would.

"They could wait a little longer" she said to me later. I'm getting stronger every day. They'll never get anyone with a library sciences degree like me again!" It had been a blow to her, she always thought of the job as there, hers, waiting for her.

There was a succession of women from an agency who came in daily to look after her. Clara had money, that was no problem. "She's a German" she confided to me about the first one "and I can't stand them. They're so ... authoritarian. She's always telling me what I should do." She didn't last long and another, quieter woman took her place. I'd squirm, hearing Clara complain loud enough so she could hear, that the toilet bowls weren't being cleaned properly. "Clumsy, aren't you? she said coldly to yet another one. "That happens to be my Coalport" she said, her eyes a frigid blue damnation, when the woman brought a handle-less cup over for her inspection. It had broken while being washed.

After a few months I noticed a definite improvement in Clara. She looked progressively better, gained some weight, her skin less slack. She said she felt better, when I remarked on how well she looked - comparatively speaking, but I didn't add that disclaimer when I complimented her. And she'd resumed her weekly hairdresser appointments but complained that they refused to give her the blue rinse, were afraid of using the dye on her. "They're just afraid to handle me", she laughed contemptuously. "Think they'll catch cancer from me or something, without doubt."

And finally, "I'm driving again!" she laughed, a hysterical note of triumph in her voice. "You'll see, it won't be long before I'm fully recovered and then I'll look for a part-time job; maybe the public library."

At Christmas, her mother, a hale-looking seventy-two, came over from Montreal where she still ran her own house, refusing to either move into a senior home or in with one of her children. "I'd like to thank you" she said to me "for coming over so often to spend time with my daughter."

And Clara's daughter Brenda came home from the mid-western American university she was attending. ("She just can't get the same level of education here, in Greek archaeology", Clara had told me.) Brenda was in her early twenties, a few years younger than me. She was a large, clumsy girl with various enthusiasms. She spent most of her time in the kitchen during her stay at home, cooking up exotic dishes, freezing half of them "so Mom can enjoy them later" she told me.

After, Clara said she was glad her mother lived in Montreal, she got on her nerves. "And I'm mad at Brenda. That girl spent too much time in the kitchen. That's not why I'm sending her to university, to become domesticated."

And she told me Brenda had persuaded her to try Transcendental Meditation. "Oh, I know you think I'm crazy" she said, waving hands at me as though to push away my incredulity - this had been a very pragmatic woman who had once talked with scorn about Eastern mysticism. "But she said", she went on, "look Mom, what have you got to lose? And she was right. She arranged for this young man to come over and he talked to me, gave me a mantra. And it works, believe it or not, it helps me to relax."

Her enthusiasm for TM waned though, and it wasn't long before she began complaining again about being lonely, how no one ever came to visit, how she was sorry she'd completely immersed herself in her work after Clark died, and let friendships lapse.

"Well, why not have Brenda come home for a while, spend some time with you?" I ventured. Unspoken was the thought that there wouldn't be much time.

"I won't have it!" she snapped back. "Her education is more important. It's not to be interrupted for anything!"

Her brother would come over once a month to take her into Riverview Hospital for her regular chemotherapy sessions. It was his routine to do that, the only time he saw her. "He's a busy man", she explained. "He's got his own life to lead, his own family to look after, his law practise." The chemotherapy made her so sick, depressed and irritable, she always called to tell me not to come over until the effects were dissipated, when, she said, she could be more companionable. Once, the depression was so acute, they'd had to admit and treat her in the psychiatric ward. She didn't like to talk about it.

Toward the middle of January she started smoking again, would tap the cigarettes nervously, dropping ashes everywhere. She was more bad-tempered than ever, asked me to call the agency for her, to send over a replacement.

"I drove the car into a stop sign today" she laughed nervously. "Somehow I couldn't control the damn thing and it just skidded."

"Maybe you shouldn't be driving ... ?
"It's the one pleasure I have left" she said, shortly. "My only independence."

I had visions of accidents, of a child being hit by her car. But soon she began to almost visibly weaken, would stay in a semi-reclining position all throughout my visits and it became impossible for her to get out and about, even as little as she had done.

"You look pale", she observed in early February and I felt a mild surprise; she was usually so preoccupied with herself she hardly noticed me as an entity; rather I was a sounding board, or so it seemed to me.

"I've just gotten over the flu" I told her.
"Well you should take better care" she said, then casually "and I guess you forgot to mention it to me, but I see from the newspaper announcements that Ray and Linda are married."
"Yes. I forgot to tell you."
"They'll be good for each other" she said, watching me. "They can feed on each other's egos."
"Yes."

By the time the snow started melting and the days began getting longer, she was weaker yet, and her clothes hung like bad jokes on her spare frame. As I entered the house I heard her snap at the new woman "in my house we don't cook turnips with the stew!"

"Good for nothing", she grumbled as I settled across from her. "Like taking money under false pretences - they haven't a brain in their heads, and that's why they're doing menial work."

Another month and she was experiencing trouble with her bowels. Her doctor had put her on a liquid diet and she was taking pills to help. But nothing did help and she was in constant distress and her weight loss became more rapid. Sitting across from her, talking, I could hear her stomach rumbling and sloshing; rudely, nauseatingly.

"I'll be going in for an exploratory" she said. "They'll check, maybe it won't be necessary to go all the way, operate."

Walking down the hospital corridor on her floor, my nostrils recoiled from the antiseptic odours covering that of impending death. I had to resist an urge to turn around, run away, leave the hospital. But I turned the corner of her door and there she was, a wan smudge on the hospital bed. Smiling, looking more skeletal than ever; her arms, lying neatly at her sides, mere sticks, while her bloated belly under the grey hospital blanket looked hideously pregnant.

"It didn't work" she whispered, beckoning me closer, motioning me to a chair beside the bed.

Beside her bed, on a little table, stood a pot of daffodils, bright and insouciant. I'd sent them, hoping to brighten her up. She didn't mention them, didn't thank me and I thought how gauche I had been to send them. How could the promise of spring gladden her now? Instead, she complained bitterly about the noise in the corridor outside her room. "Too close to the nursing station" she rasped. "Bad enough I can't sleep at night, but I have to hear them going all night too, damn 'phone and all!"

Finally, as I turned to go, she asked me to call around to the agency again, she'd want another woman when she got out. "And I've been thinking about selling the house. What I need is a little apartment, central to the downtown area" she said. "I'll have to get rid of some of my things, I guess. Won't be enough room for everything in an apartment."

I told her I'd call some antique shops, find out if they were interested in going over, giving her an appraisal value for her things. She had some fine furniture, good pine Canadiana.

"Tomorrow they may operate" she said, the last words I heard her say. But they didn't after all, I discovered later. They had decided it was too risky.

Her brother cabled Brenda and the girl came home. She telephoned me the next Saturday afternoon, asked if she could come over to my apartment. "It's boring, sitting there" she said. "She can't really talk now, she's going pretty fast. But when I'm there, sitting with her, she knows it. There's a strength that goes out from me to her. It comforts her." I recalled Clara telling me once that there was a special understanding between her and Brenda. "We're close-knit" she'd said.

Brenda sat and talked, drinking my Darjeeling tea, telling me about the trip she'd taken last summer arranged by her university and the Greek government, to Mycaenae. She said how wonderful it had been, the experience; hoped she could look forward to a similar experience the coming season. She went on to explain to me the differences between the Minoans and the Mycaeneans, how Santorini had probably been responsible for wiping out the Minoan culture.

A few days later, just as I was getting ready to dismiss my last class for the day, the principal made an announcement over the speaker system that Clara had died, asking for a moment of mourning for the school's former librarian. "Our much-loved Mrs. Bayntree" was how he described her. Some of the students looked about with blank faces for explanation, couldn't seem to place the name.

In the staff lounge, gathering my things together to leave, there was idle chatter about Clara, how it was a pity, wasn't it? and she'd be missed.

Toward the end of the week the principal asked me if I'd like time off to attend the funeral. He was going, he said, as were some of the department heads. No, I said I wouldn't go. The social ritual of interring a body does not appeal to me. I didn't tell him that though, I just said no. He gave me a peculiar look. I was told later that he'd mentioned to somehow how heartless I was. Well, yes.

Two weeks later Brenda popped in for a minute, leaving me two shopping bags full of her mother's library sciences books, to dispose of. "I don't know what to do with them", she apologized. "I thought maybe you could give them as a gift to the local library, or something."

She was in a hurry, she said, wanted to call a few dealers in to have them appraise her mother's collection of Mary Gregory glassware. The furniture had already been taken on consignment. "My uncle's been made executor", she said on the run. "He'll look toward selling the house. I'll be leaving in a few days."

I said goodbye, she said goodbye, and thanks.

I felt a little disappointed. Clara knew how much I liked the glassware. I thought she'd leave me a piece, as a memento.

 

 

Someone's Child

The bedroom stuffy, oppressive. Not even a stray breeze wandering through the bedroom windows. Was it that, the heat, that woke her? Outside, something outside. A voice mumbling something. Then what, sobbing?

Her hearing seemed to sharpen, determined in some manner as though independent of her wishes, to pick up the sounds. The voice below her window walking along the street outside the house, the sidewalk running below and fifty-feet before the window. Just a voice? a disembodied voice? A girl's voice, a young girl.

Why was she so awake? And if she was so wide-awake, why didn't she get up, walk over to the window and look out? Was it a dream, only a dream?

She thought of the newspaper story, surely she'd read it earlier in the week? Of a bus driver stopping his bus at four a.m. because he saw a young girl crying in a bus shelter. He'd urged her to get on the bus, gave her some of his thermos coffee. She told him her father had thrown her out of the house. Just like that, thrown her out! Only fifteen years old and nowhere to go. Ah, but there must have been some reason, mustn't there? For throwing her out? A father wouldn't ... would he? Pregnant? Is that a reason, is it?

She'd gone to the end of the line with the driver, talking and weeping. He gave her a few dollars; she had no money. Perhaps he didn't know what else to do. Take her home, say to his wife "Hi dear, here's a lovely girl I've just picked up". At any rate, the girl had thanked him, got off the bus and said she had to work things out for herself. Then she disappeared. He didn't know where, he said, reporting the incident.

The voice outside the window became clearer, or closer, that was it, closer - and she stiffened in horror; could it be the same girl, wandering forever down city streets only to be seen and heard in the small hours of the night, trying to understand, to come to terms with her life? A young girl; vulnerable and unhappy. Nowhere for her to go. If your parents won't have you, who will? At fifteen.

Oh God, she breathed, let it not be so: Let it be several people walking down the street, talking. It happens, happens often enough that I wake up hearing their voices, snatches of conversation floating on the night air, through the window. Annoyed that they've awakened me, but soon falling back to sleep.

But not this time. The voice went on, moaning, keening in the black night air. Black - she hadn't even opened her eyes, just lay there, listening, waiting, wanting to hear another voice, to know that someone was there with the girl who could comfort her, the forlorn creature.

The words - muffled, indistinguishable. Could she be saying: "And what's to become of me? Where will I go? I'm frightened: Help me, someone help, please!" Then that sobbing again, and the voice growing stronger as it comes abreast of the window - and she listening, helpless, aghast at her own inaction, her pitying inaction - went on and slowly receded. The voice echoing in her head, drowning itself in the darkness, going on down the street.

She was awake. Fully awake, but hadn't opened her eyes. Wouldn't.

She turned on her side, her face feeling weighted. It had been her imagination hadn't it? No, it hadn't been. A scream in the night, a cry for help and she hadn't responded. Beside her, Robbie, his back to her; asleep, naked. She drew herself to him, hugged her nightclad body, clammy, to his, hot and dry. No response, he slept on, hadn't heard the night noises. Perhaps only a woman could.

She passed her hand over his chest, then further down; he lay relaxed. She removed her hand. But he turned to face her and brought his face close to hers, lips covering hers. The odour of the shallots he'd eaten with dinner enveloped her. But it was his breath, and comforting. She clung to him.

No word, not a word passed between them. She marvelled at the heat of his body; hot but not sweaty. She felt lathered with sweat. He ran his hands over her, cupped her buttocks, prepared her. She had a need and here he was, completing it, responding. How could he know, how know she needed this? This ... reassurance.

Finally, she clutched at him as he rose above her, pressed him feverishly close, closer, moving her legs traplike, up over his back, capturing him, forcing him to slow. He stopped, gently reached behind to push her legs down and began again. Her hands busy over his shoulders, his back, his skin smooth, fine-textured and silky like a woman's yet with a kind of hard plasticity her own lacked.

Later he lay on her, the dimples in the small of his back clammy. He was asleep, sleeping on her; his breathing shallow, regular. Had he ever been awake? or just answered her need.

She moved, then again, insistently, and he lifted himself, lay once again on his side, back to her. Was she forgotten now? But then, had she been thought of at all? She moved close to him, fastened her body to his outline.

But sleep would not claim her mind. Instead that lonely, hopeless weeping echoed in her head. Get up, she told herself, get up and look out the window. Lean over the sill and look at the sidewalk. You'll see there's no one there; never had been. The street lamps, she knew, would illuminate a shallow patch of sidewalk, then the walk would recede into the night. The only night sounds she'd hear would be the endless gnawing of tent caterpillars on the leaves of the maples.

From another bedroom, a mumbled question. One of the children talking in her sleep, she knew.

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Robert sat there at a round table in the McDonald's feeling foolish as the place began to hum with the noon-hour crowd from the high school. He fumbled in his pocket for his cigarette pack, lit one, then nervously butted it out on his coffee saucer, noting there was no ashtray, belatedly recalling the 'no-smoking' sign posted over the entrance. Wondered where the hell she was, and just as the thought crossed his mind again, she stepped through the door, looked around tentatively, waved at a table of her peers, then spotted him and pushed her way through the throng. He watched her approach with an unaffected appraisal he usually reserved for strange women. But this honey-haired girl with the high cheek bones and sensuous mouth was his daughter. He shifted uneasily - what was the matter with him?

She plunked herself unceremoniously into the seat opposite his, shrugged her bag from her shoulder and sat there, appraising him, it seemed, as coldly as he had done her. "Well?" she prodded.

"Can I get something for you?" he offered.
"No", she waved his offer aside.
"Colleen ..." He cleared his throat ... "How are you?"
"Fine", she said, flipping the ends of her hair. "Have a look, don't I look fine?"
"Yes", he agreed. "You look fine. But you know what I mean. I guess I really want to know about your mother. How is she, your mother?"
"My mother?" she mimicked. "Oh, you mean your wife, how's your deserted wife? Gee Dad, she's fine too, just fine. Can't keep track of all the guys trying to hustle her. The other day she got a movie offer she just can't refuse. And a distant relative popped off, leaving her a fortune."

Robert dropped his eyes from his daughter's derision-flecked green eyes, those same eyes that had fascinated him in Irene, when they were younger and he'd thought that her looks and submission might be enough.... And then, even he couldn't lay the ghost of her father tossing her out, her desperation. He'd been trapped. "Try to understand", he pleaded softly, knowing how useless it probably was, but hoping anyway.

"Understand? Sure Dad, don't give it another thought. The power of the pussy, isn't it? She's a tender young thing, isn't she? At least I've been told."

"It's not like that at all!" he hissed, looking surreptitiously around, hoping no one had heard, embarrassed by her crudeness. "Look, I love the girl ... woman", he hastily corrected himself, flushing. "You don't know what a hell it was, living with your mother all those years. When you kids were young, it was always for the kids that we had to sacrifice - me anyway - when I said I wanted to leave. Well, now you're old enough to be understanding. I've got my own life..." God, that whining inflection in his voice, and it doesn't cut any ice with her, she's still sneering.

"Well, live it!" she snapped, throwing back her head. Then, lowering her voice: "You selfish bastard. You took everything from her, left her an empty shell. You know what it's like to live with her, see her drag herself around? She woke us up last night, moaning and crying in her sleep, mumbling something about someone's child, about how she loves you. And you come creeping around like this, saying "how's your Mom?"

A hot compassion flooded him for her, for her mother. The other kids would be okay. She was most like her mother, most attached to her. No use trying to explain how Irene's cloying possessiveness, her deadly suspicions drove him crazy, all those years. The irony was that she had driven him to someone else, him looking for some relief from her, finally finding it with another woman. Hell, it was just one of those things. Marion was young, it could've been an older woman just as easily.

"Okay, I'm not going to try to convince you that I'm concerned about her, but I am. You're too young to understand what it's like to feel genuine affection for a woman, but loving another one. And I want what I've got now too badly to let you manipulate me by feelings of guilt. I miss you all, but I made my choice and I'm prepared to live with it."

"Jeeze, fine. What the hell do you want from me then?" she snapped.
"Colleen, I owe something to her too. She's pregnant now." He recoiled from the disgust he saw on her face, flushed again. "I'm not too old to start another family", he defended himself.

"Hell no!" she agreed. "You did such a great job with the last one, why not try again? You might even want to make a lifetime career of it, with your special serial talents."

"Colleen!" he said sharply, "you're an adult, behave like one. I'm trying to reason with you, trying to have a civil conversation. This is important to me."

"Sorry Dad", she said, a look of mock contrition pushing the implacable sneer off her face.

"Look" he leaned forward. "Would she be amenable to divorce? After all, it's been over a year. There's no chance I'd leave Marion. I want to marry her." He sat there, muscles taut, hoping beyond hope she'd relent, her voice lose its bite. She'd try to understand, put herself in his place, in Marion's place; realize that her mother was sick in hanging onto a dead issue like their marriage.

"You want me to help you?" she laughed incredulously. Then she rose, grabbed her bag and snarled "rot in hell, dear Dad, rot in hell."

He watched her angry exit, sighed and gathered up his briefcase, cigarettes. No mistaking whose child she was.

How would he tell Marion?

 

The Honolulu Sun

Years ago we used to drive down the Don Valley Parkway, past the old brick factories on our way to the old Toronto Zoo, at Riverdale. We'd pass great mounds of leaves gathered by the Parks Department, to moulder and turn into compost - anyone who wanted to, could go and get some to fertilize their gardens. We had no gardens then. Once, we saw two hippos at the zoo, a young one and an older one, and watched them cavort in a shallow pool of water. They snorted water joyfully from their great snouts, diving and surfacing. It was fascinating. I read once somewhere that the hippopotamus has an unique method by which it claims territorial imperative. Waving its silly little switch of a tail at the end of its locomotive-heavy body like a fan, it defecates. The fanning action of the tail spreads a uniform spray of excrement everywhere. Where the ordure falls, that is its territory.

All of which isn't terribly relevant, but interesting. We mark our territories differently. The ponds we inhabit bear no resemblance to the hippos' and we think we differentiate our territories elegantly, but in actual fact, we throw dirt around just as extravagantly, only we think we don't.

And oh yes, I remember now - about the Riverdale Zoo - when Ben and I were a lot younger, oh, maybe about twenty some-odd years ago, when I was working and he was out of a job, he'd call for me at lunch time. Sometimes we'd eat our bagged lunches across the street in the little park at Avenue Road and St.Clair near where I worked, sitting near the statue of ageless Peter Pan. And sometimes we'd drive hurriedly down through the Rosedale Ravine, under all those bridges. It was a wonderfully private place, no other cars at all. We'd pass the Toronto Crematorium. We'd hurry to get  to the zoo before the factories blew the twelve-noon whistle, and if we were on time, we'd get there on the second level, or was it the third? to stand before the wolves', the coyotes' and the foxes' cages in time to watch them lift their heads as though on cue and all howl and yodel with the factory whistles. Now the zoo's moved, what do they howl at, I wonder?

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In a supermarket last week I shoved my buggy up to the check-out counter, trying to decide whether my purchases could legitimately go through the express check-out. Ahead of me was a young woman with a maybe month-old baby in her buggy, surrounded by food. A five-year-old, obviously her older child, was sneaking his fingers into boxes of chocolates at the end-of-aisle counter. He had a plastic gun in one hand and while munching chocolates, banged the gun down on the display, smashing the chocolate boxes. I can't remember ever letting my children behave like that. Then I saw the boy slip behind his mother's buggy while she was busy putting her groceries onto the counter, and quickly look around him. The little brat stood on his toes and reached over to pinch the peacefully sleeping baby. Hard, on the nose. Of course the baby screeched and its tiny nostrils looked painfully red.

Never one to mind my own business, I said to the startled mother "It's your other child, the little boy. He deliberately hurt the baby. I saw him." She glared at me as though she saw the indelible mark of a child molester engraved on my forehead.

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Watching i musici play a piece for solo violin and bass continuo by Viotti, I was struck by their intensity; as though only they alone in the universe existed. As though, aside from their abstracted vision of sublimely soaring music of the spheres, nothing else is real. The sensitivity of the violinist manifested itself plainly in the exquisite pain on his mobile face. His face seemed that of an angelic mafioso. The earnest little bassist climbed all over his bass - a symbol if I ever saw one. Decadence is everywhere.

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I've got to stop collecting recipes from newspapers and magazines. Every time I see an interesting recipe, I tear it out and stick it behind the cheese board, meaning to type it out on a card after I try it. Kind of amass an interesting collection. Well, I've got a mass of newspaper bits-and-pieces now and I've still not typed any of them up. I guess I should toss them out, but I wanted them for something to do, kind of stretch out the time. There's so much of it.

Yesterday I tried one of the cakes. It was called a Daffodil cake and I thought it sounded intriguing. It failed, and I looked at the dismal mess, trying to decide whether to scrape the rubber uck out of the pans onto a plate and pour chocolate sauce over it, to serve as a 'special dessert' or just throw everything in the garbage, when Teddy came in from school and gave me his generous sympathy.

"Too bad, Mom. Don't feel bad."
"I don't, just inept."
"Aw, you're not. You're pretty good. Anyway, everyone has failures", he tells me and I long to tell him it's not the little failures that bother me but the big, big ones that band-aids won't cure.

"Tell you what", he says, his face brightening, "It's like this Mom, like when I get a rubber airplane kit and work like mad to get it done and then it won't fly. I know the fault isn't with me, 'cause my workmanship is painstaking, so it must be the faulty aerodynamics of the kit, Mom", he beams. "Buy cake mixes."

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When I was a little kid I always suffered from constipation. I used to get really desperate. I'd complain to my mother. She was indifferent. When I got older, I learned about nutrition and bulk and I guess, in retrospect, that I hadn't a proper diet as a kid. Now I know I'm a better mother than my own mother was and I know what constitutes a healthful diet and my kids don't suffer from constipation or anything else. I have no more problems - that way. Sometimes just a kind of mental diarrhoea, but that's all right.

I know my mother suffers from chronic constipation now. She's always complaining, always letting wind, always going for long walks, drinking hot water.

God, she used to drive us crazy, me and Ben. Our families disliked each other and we weren't supposed to meet. Well, we used to sneak out and meet at Christie Pits Park. I was supposed to be taking care of my youngest brother, Sammy.

Now Sammy's a cheerful twenty-six year-old bachelor. Last time he visited, he told us about his latest trip up to Tuktoyaktuk. He's an environmentalist, goes up there for Indian and Northern Affairs to check pollution, the effects of a possible oil spill on the flora and fauna.

"Me and two other guys, we were sleeping in this tent. We were bushed. All of a sudden I woke in a panic - someone was screaming. I saw one of the guys banging a long-handled frypan against the side of the tent, shouting. He's nuts, stir-crazy. We'll have to tie him up and wait for the helicopter to pick us all up, I thought. I started to move slow and easy toward him, kicking the cot of the other guy to wake him up. He slept like the dead and I was hoping that he wasn't yet - like the nut hadn't got to him yet or anything, when the screecher turned to me, his eyeballs rolling and yelled Bear! Polar Bear!

"I ducked my head around the corner of the opening and saw a mean looking bastard standing a few feet away, like it couldn't make up its mind to leave the tent area where Omar the Tentmaker was yelling like crazy, or assault the canvas and get all our edible goodies and us too. I started to yell and bang things around, and so did the third guy. We were all groggy and scared stiff. We must've been yelling and hitting each other with anything we could get our hands on long after the bear ambled off. Next time we'll take a rifle. We had to leave it behind that time, because the helicopter was loaded so heavily with all our equipment..."

He would've made a lousy meal anyway - all bone and gut. Ben always looks a little dazed and wistful when Sammy tells his tall tales. Like he's missing some great life's adventure.

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One day, an early spring afternoon, I answered the doorbell and was mildly surprised to see May Ennis standing there. She looked like spring herself, cool and promising. For some reason, I didn't want to ask her in - I don't know why I felt that way. I kept her standing in the doorway and asked yes? It was crazy, but I had a sudden premonition.

Later, we sat in the living room, me the stiff matron, her the courageous young beauty. Hell, she's not that much younger than me - she has a child by a previous marriage and I'm not bad looking myself.

"I love him", she said.
"Very nice. I love him too. I'm married to him. I've borne his children. What's more, my dear, he loves me."

A barely perceptible frown creased her smooth exterior. "But you don't understand, Mrs. Frier, he doesn't love you! He told me. He said he loves me!"

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I can remember when I was really young, that my mother helped a friend of hers get rid of a tape worm. She described for me in disgusting detail how she pulled in the bathroom and the tapeworm kept coming and coming. I vomited and never again asked her where she had been when I came home from school and no one was at home.

Much later I learned that anyone who tastes the raw fish she's grinding for seasoning when making gefulte fish, is a likely candidate for worms. My mother regularly tasted the raw fish she was grinding. She never got tape worm.

***************************************************************

That bloody little dog from across the road - Myra's pet, keeps coming over to do its job on our lawn. Once, Ben said he was going to collect the feces and put them in a paper bag. "Then I'll put them on the Adlers' verandah and set the bag on fire."
"What then, Dad?, Teddy asked, mouth agape.
"Then, of course, I'll ring the bell and leave." We all waited, blank-faced.
"Stupid! Old Adler'll stomp on the burning mass to put out the fire, won't he?"

Well, he never did, and that dog keeps coming around. The Adlers aren't bad, just kind of vacuous. Years ago, when we first moved here, we found out that they had a kind of cozy thing going with the Bensons.

The first neighbourhood party we went to was at the Adlers'. A swimming party. this must have been around two a.m. by then. There were around eight couples from the neighbourhood. Maybe ten. Lou Adler was kind of happy and he pulled Marg Benson's bikini top off and then Myra's (so she wouldn't feel neglected, I guess). Myra laughed, but Marg ran home next door, crying. She has tiny breasts and I imagine she was mortified. The party went on and Marg came back dressed to kill in a long white georgette dress.

That night, they switched and neighbourhood gossip has it they've been doing it regularly ever since.

*************************************************************

"Look honey, how can you even think I don't love you? Of course I do! You and the kids. What would my life be, without you?"

"Then how could you? How could you do that to us ... to me? How humiliating! This little tramp comes to my door, invades my privacy and tells me to get ready to give my husband up!"

"Look honey, it's all a big mistake. She's been working too hard lately. It's gone to her head. I gave her a little gift, kind of a gesture of appreciation for all her hard work ... and then her kid's been sick lately and causing her all kinds of worry. You've got to pity her, all alone."

"Are you kidding? What's to pity? I don't mind if she's looking for security, but not mine!"

"What're you talking! Don't think things like that, you scare me. Look, if it makes you feel any better, I'll speak to her. I'm going to tell her to behave herself. If worse comes to worse, I'll fire her."

****************************************************************

When my mother comes over for a visit, she sniffs around everything. Anytime I get something new, she pounces on it. How much did it cost? Where'd you get it? What for?

I bought a pair of late Nineteenth-Century terra cotta Blackamoor busts and marble plinths for the archway between the living room and the dining room and she sniffs 'Schvartzes!'. I tell her the Blackamoors were highly respected princes during the Italian Renaissance. She sniffs disdainfully.

"Where's Ben?" she asks. "'Ent he coming home for dinner? He's working late, lately?" She pries incessantly, infuriatingly.

*******************************************************************

Ruthie thinks I'm crazy. I should have kept my mouth shut. Now everyone'll know. She says no. She says I can trust her. She doesn't want her mother to know. It would break the old lady's heart, she says.

"He's too damn good-looking for his own good", she says. "Where does he sleep?" I'm startled.

"Where? In his bed. Where should he sleep?" She's aghast.

"Rhoda, you're crazy! You let him sleep with you? From her to you? How could you!"

"Ruthie, I love him!"

"You stupid fool. He's a naughty kid - you catch him with his grubby little paws in the cookie jar and you give him candy? Make him pay!"

"He's going through a phase. What good would it do if I threw him out - I'd just be throwing him at her." She looks at me suspiciously.

"You don't ... you wouldn't let him ..." She's disgusted with me. I don't care.

****************************************************************

Kathy knows something is wrong. I'm broody and pensive all the time. She's very sensitive. Even when she was a toddler she used to say intuitive things, as though she had a psychological line running from my head to hers in place of the umbilical cord. Strange, she's a mystery to me. I can't begin to imagine what goes on in her head, but she always seems to know about me.

I thought that teen-age girls, when they realize their father's sexual interest is wandering, viewed their mothers with contempt.

Last night, when she was at the piano playing a lovely little piece, Hayden, Ben crept up on her as he often likes to do and planted a big kiss on the nape of her neck. She turned and angrily brushed it away, called him a creep. I was embarrassed for him. I've told her nothing's wrong, that she should stop picking on Ben. I don't want to turn our children against their father. Ben would never forgive me.

******************************************************************

When I was watering my house plants I noticed those squiggly little things on top of the soil again. I guess I've been keeping the soil too moist. They're the larvae of flies, I think. Sickening things. I consider whether I should try a folk remedy; pour a thin layer of boiling water over to cook them dead, or use the spray can of insecticide I bought and suffer pangs of conscience.

There, that's something. If we all contracted skin cancer from the radiation of the sun because we've destroyed the ozone layer, we'd be so busy moaning about our disease, we'd forget our pursuits. Monogamy by default.

*******************************************************************

A while ago, for my thirty-sixth birthday, Kathy built me a birdhouse in Industrial Arts. Sparrows inhabited it as soon as we put it up, and started their families. We'd find the occasional featherless blue corpse under the Maple. One year we counted five separate broods, all from the same pair of adults. The following autumn a miserably behaved black squirrel bit away at the opening until it'd been stretched large enough to admit it entry. The birdhouse was only made of thin plywood. The squirrel was one of our regulars. We had about four who came around for handouts all summer. All that winter we'd see the black tail switching around outside the opening in the blowing snow. Occasionally, the squirrel would come down for peanuts. If we weren't quick to put them out, he'd climb the screening on the storm door and make a racket. When spring came, the squirrel abandoned the house and made a regular squirrel nest of leaves and twigs over in the park.

A new sparrow family came along. We were always hoping for a more exotic kind of bird, but we had to be content with sparrows, they were the only kind who nested in our backyard. Then the starlings came along and bothered the sparrows. I understand they lay their eggs with the sparrow eggs and the baby starling bird-curmudgeons, when they hatch, do in the sparrow-innocents. Well, we didn't want that happening, so Teddy and Kathy, him holding the ladder and her hammering on a new front, put up a smaller hole.

But it was too small and the sparrows couldn't get in and soon we noticed a regular ingress and egress of bumble bees which didn't really bother us all that much.

One of the last things Ben did before he left for Honolulu was to take down the birdhouse with the intention of fixing up the front for a new crop of birds, next season. But when he looked inside, he found it full of all kinds of larvae, different sizes, colours and shapes. The house, he said, was beyond redemption. Like some futures.

**************************************************************

"You've got to understand, Rhoda. It's true I still love you. But, God help me, I love her too. She's so helpless! She needs me!"

"God won't help you. You can't love us both. You love me and you letch after her and she's helpless like an aroused bull. She's hoodwinked you; she wants the security you give us, that's what she wants."

"You're wrong, dear. She would never do anything to harm you or our family. We're both helpless in the face of our love for each other. It's pure."

"Pure! You mean Platonic? Honest? No sweating between sheets? Just holding hands and looking into each other's limpid pools? And we've been doing all those gross things in bed all these wasted years!"

"Don't be bitter ... it's not like you. It's not like you to be so coarse. Please, please try to understand, Rhoda. You don't know what it's like to be a man and never to have any kinds of experiences. What did I know? I was just a kid and there you were, before I had a chance to live, to know anyone else. I want to know what I've missed! I want to live a little too!"

**************************************************************

Tartini, that dazzling violinist, that brilliant composer, was also not satisfied with his life, with his prolific, admired output. Nothing would do but for him to make a bargain with the devil. His soul for a scintillating work of art par excellence, a tour de force of heavenly - pardon me - devilish melody - and so was born "The Devil's Trill".

What have I got to bargain with? Would I wish a tape worm on her? A dybbuk. A dybbuk should inhabit the temple of her defilement.

My uxorious husband. I want him back!

******************************************************************

I was crabby at the supermarket yesterday. Told two different people, almost snarled at them, to put their cigarettes out until they got out of the store. I don't want my meat and vegetables ashed upon; my air polluted with their second-hand carcinogens.

I meant to get some wheat-germ and looking close at some torn packages on the shelf, saw unmistakably, rodent droppings. I marched right up to the manager and demanded the place be cleaned up. He ignored me. I was stunned. He said he was busy.

Funny. I tried pointing the mess out - and it was a mess; on the lower shelves of the loose-packed cereals there were even small dried pools of urine among the feces - to other shoppers and no one was interested.

***************************************************************

A week ago, I wandered into Robert Dirstein Interiors for a look around. I hadn't really meant to. I hadn't planned on buying anything. I just thought that looking at beautiful things would cheer me up.

I liked a 17th-Century Flemish landscape, unsigned, a la Bruegel the younger. But I liked even more a French commode in the style of Louis XV. Serpentine-fronted with exquisite floral marquetry, brass-mounted legs and escutcheons with a pie-crust bracchiated brown marble top. I was almost certain I had seen a similar one at the Royal Ontario Museum, once. It was expensive for a mid-Victorian reproduction of an earlier era, but I figured I could afford it. It was meant to grace my living room, lighten my heart.

The piece was delivered today. Two men clomped their heavy shoes through the living room and set it down beside the blue velvet loveseat. After some deliberation, I topped it with an earlier acquisition from the shop: a French baroque rococo clock with a cunning suspension, ornamented by a bronze shepherd boy fluting to his bell-wether.

It hasn't cheered me up, it hasn't lightened my mood at all. I feel forlorn, strangely removed from pride of acquisition. It doesn't mean anything now.

*************************************************************

"How long is he going to be away?" Ruthie wants to know.

"Who knows?" I shrug. "He's there, finding himself. When he discovers exactly what it is he's looking for he'll come back. There's no hurry, Morley is looking after the business."

"You seem unconcerned. Not at all what I'd thought you'd be like. Don't you care?"

She wants to see me bleeding. My nerves are shot, my stomach churns, my head aches, and I can't sleep.

"Of course, I care. Would you like to see me wear sackcloth and ashes?"

"Rhoda, take my advice. An ultimatum. Give him an ultimatum. You're entirely too calm. When he comes back, scream and rage. Tell him it's either the tramp or you and the children. He adores the kids - it'll be battle over. And don't sleep with him until you're sure!"

"He'll make his own decision, unassisted by any histrionics on my part. I want him back because he wants to come, not because I've issued an ultimatum."

"Listen to me, Rhoda. Don't be so proud. You think he's a man? All men are babies; they need to be told what to do. Show me the man who's a true adult and I'll show you a man with more than his share of female hormones. Men are just grown-up kids. As long as you don't get upset by his fooling around he'll take it for assent. You're just fooling yourself!"

*********************************************************

I find myself wondering how his ice-maiden shapes up in that hemisphere of Gauguinesque beauties. I wonder what she's done with her daughter. If we were truly civilized I could have offered to look after the girl. The height of sophistication. My head is splitting.

***********************************************************

Teddy's read his way through Ryder Haggard. Nordhoff and Hall, and now he's working on Joseph Conrad. Doing his adventuring vicariously. Like me. I wonder if he'll mature earlier than his father.

Kathy is reading, of all things, Machiavelli's 'The Prince'. What's she plotting, I wonder. What a crafty adversary she'll be in some future life.

Speaking of precocious children; although I don't mean to imply that I feel my children qualify for the genius category. I've read about Leonardo da Vinci, apprenticed as a child to a guild of artisans and already turning his brain and cunning hand to works of art. Then there was Beethoven, a reluctant marvel whose father insisted that genius come to fruition. And clever Mozart who at three and a half followed his sister to the Clavichord; a virtuoso before he was five, a composer of sparkling music toasted by cultured Europe, and just incidentally delightedly exploited by his loving father.

Will Teddy read Darwin next and relish his voyage of discovery to the Galapagos? Will Teddy be influenced by him as Darwin as a child had been by von Humboldt, and will Teddy go on to discover new frontiers? For example, that mankind doesn't really exist? That we are demented figures of our own tortured imaginations?

Will Kathy go on in the shadow of tyrannical Indira Gandhi, tempered by the clever political finesse of Golda Meier to become Supreme Ruler of this Earth, to complete a manifest destiny of a people that doesn't exist? Angels of Destiny!

I am a babbling idiot. All that Honolulu sun and play has gone to my febrile brain. I can actually feel my brain bubbling and fermenting in the heat of the Pacific. There'll soon be nothing left of me but a mechanical shell, a dutiful automaton.

Ben, come back!

 

The Covenant

 

The old man sat in the centre of the tent, glowering. His striped robe lay carelessly on his shoulders, the waist-belt untied, his bare legs ropey with lean muscles, dark with hair not yet turned as white as his flowing beard. He hooded his eyes and brooded, watching the three women, his wives, as they bustled about the tent nervously. He followed the movements of the youngest one, Rebeka, as she fluttered around, re-arranging his bed, the coverings, drawing the old matted straw out, piling it in a heap under the watchful eye of her mentor Hagar, who knew just how Ab-ram liked his bed. Not too stuffed so he found it difficult to rise from its depth in the mornings and not too brittle so that pieces chafed his skin through the loosely-woven fabric that covered it. As though sensing his mood their voices, often raised in light banter, were hushed and only simple directions, often-repeated reminders, punctuated the uneasy silence.

Rebeka, he thought, had been a poor choice. He should never have listened to his brother. A closer alliance between the two houses yes, but not through Rebeka. There was that about her that invited men's glances. Lithe and handsomely dark, the flowing robe that covered her could not hide the suggestion of lush flesh which lay beneath; she moved too sensuously, her eyes, dark and large, promised that which she could not give. Little wonder, then, that I-sak walked so often by the women's tent. Not to see Sarai, his mother, but to furtively watch Rebeka. How far had it gone? Ab-ram wondered and flushed with a new wave of anger.

His eyes glazed over and he momentarily forgot the women, recalling yesterday's confrontation with the tribal men. E-nor and his brother Mar-duk, he was certain, were the instigators of the growling protest which, left unchecked, threatened to become a revolt. They had always agitated for the keeping of swine. They had shorter memories and less respect for tradition than he. They scorned the ancient malediction visited upon their great forbear, that "Thy sons' sons will consort with swine!", the meaning of which could not be lost on those wishing to perpetuate their line. Sheep were their mainstay and so it would remain.

He had promised them a sign, some significant indication that the new God that spoke to him in his trances would undertake to be their sole totem. And now he wondered, could he induce the God to do this thing? To protect and enrich them, bring them to a state of comfort, a belief in His ineffability?

A spasm of pain washed over him as his stomach rebelled from the morning meal, and he passed wind.

A titter from the women brought him back to the present and he glared at them. "Go! Be you gone with your women's airs and your nattering patter!", he ordered, raising himself and towering over them.

Rebeka looked worriedly at Sarai who motioned the other two to leave. They quickly gathered up the discarded straw and in their haste tripped over their robes, leaving a litter trail behind them. Ab-ram kicked angrily at the strawbits, raising a fine layer of dust. "And you?" he said to Sarai.

"Soon enough", she replied calmly, rising to stand before him, her wizened face still carrying traces of her fabled beauty, questioning his anger. He sighed, lifted his hand to her shoulder and pulling her close, rested her head on his chest.

As always her touch, her steadfastness soothed him; her calm manner instilled him with confidence. The past intruded; even when he ordered his sister to become his wife, his wife to be transformed to his sister, she had remained by his side. Fear of the hegemon called Faro caused him to disown the flesh that had cleaved to his, yet she had never rebuked him. She had followed him from Chaldean Ur acknowledging him her master in all things. Now, these late years should have brought them surcease of discontent, of troubling decisions.

If only their son, the image of his mother in her young days, were not the tribulation he was, a weight would be lifted. But Sarai would hear no ill word of the boy, and he would not make her unhappy.

"Is there something?", she asked, drawing back, her dark eyes searching as no one else could, within his. He looked away uneasily, fearful that she could read his thoughts as she sometimes seemed to do.

"No thing is wrong", he said finally. "Other than I must persuade the others that our way is the way and the others are false."

She nodded. "What will you do?"

"Wait for the voice again. It no longer visits my dreams, so it is to the man-thing that I must turn for advice."

An obvious revulsion washed over her face. "That abomination!" She spat three times to ward off evil - not believing in its efficacy entirely, yet not wishing to leave herself vulnerable to unknown malicious powers. "Wait", she said. "Yesterday I found a ring of the mystic growth under a large Terebinth. I dried them and ground them and will bring them to you in a fermentation."

He agreed not to consult his oracle, the newborn manbaby Rebeka had borne, her first. As was customary, its head had been taken, anointed, and left in sacred oil to speak when advice was needed of it. The women always complained, but no leader of men could be without the Teraphim. Every few years a new one was needed as the old one gradually disintegrated, becoming one with the holy oil.

*****************************************************************

As the day wore on, the heat became more intense and activity ceased. Men, women and children made for the still, yet cooler air of the tents. The fragrance of myrtle rose on the sultry air. Children's chattering voices were stilled in afternoon sleep. Ab-ram, alone in his great tent since the morning, still sat and thought about the problem facing him. Nothing had been resolved and he was tired of trying to summon the wisdom of the years reputed to be his, to his aid. He rose and painfully slid his feet into the thongs of worn leather sandals, then awkwardly bent and fastened them, his fingers stiff with disuse. But he was unwilling to summon one of the women to help. He was wearing now a chiton of dazzling whiteness, the linen fine and kind to his tired flesh.

Walking out of the tent, he stood for a moment in the furnace of the still air, momentarily blinded by the fierce intensity of the sun sitting high now in that great bowl of the sky, and merciless. It had been a long time since he had been foolish enough to expose himself at this time of day, but he had been overcome with a sudden compulsion to walk through a nearby olive grove. He flung the cowl over his head and strode laboriously over the dun, cracked earth, a lizard scuttling out of his path, frightened from its shelter under a nearby rock.

Lifting his eyes past the great cypresses throwing their meagre high-noon shade over the line of tents, his eyes followed the long swoops of two vultures over the nearby hills. The hills appeared verdant and sheltered from that distance. He wondered about the sheep; whether a lamb had strayed.

Arrived finally at the grove, he cast about for a likely resting place, selected a gnarled old specimen, its leaves defiantly glowing the splendour of its life's aspiration despite the rotten state of its trunk, bleeding sap, inviting invasion from hordes of insects, and under it he slid to the ground. His back resting on the trunk, Ab-ram thrust his legs before him and watched a retinue of termites busy with the work of moving a dead unfeathered fledgling inexorably closer to their nest. He felt revolted at the dry shrivelled thing that had once held life, teeming now with the large insects determined to use it in the perpetuation of their own cycle. "And so it is with me", he sighed. "No sooner than I relinquish my authority will my enemies feast with Termagant on my rotting carcase."

The question was, how to persuade his people of the rightness of his vision? How describe to them the fleeting image come to him of the dark unknowable that was the Divine Spirit? Elohu, the Spirit of the One, the Only. That something, some gesture, some consecration would be necessary to bind him and his people to the Great Power, that Seminal Being, was obvious. Some sign was paramount to his being finally able to convince his reluctant followers - but what could that sign be?

The intense dry and burning heat seemed somehow magnified in the grove. Surely, it would have been better to have remained in his tent. Somehow, though, he felt, there was a possibility of communion out here, with the Divine Spirit. Not here perhaps, but on higher ground where such a one might reside, closer to the heavens. The hills? He raised his eyes and looked to the hills. For sacrifice, what? His bell-wether, a faultless and spot-free white specimen? Even so, not enough.

Ab-ram's eyes narrowed, his head seemed to be bursting with the fierceness of his concentration. Suddenly the answer was simple. Solving both his problems, temporal and spiritual. Ah, but was the intent without blemish? Who, he convinced himself, would ever know? His heart thudded, then skipped like a wild bird attempting to escape confinement.

******************************************************************

I-sak walked behind his father, an early morning mist dissipating before them as they approached the well-worn pathway leading to the nearest and highest of the two hills. Mountains, they called them, but they were merely tall mounds on the arid landscape.

"My brother was aggrieved that he was pressed into service. He mislikes tending the sheep", I-sak observed mischievously, glad to place his brother Ish-mael in a poor light; flattered that their father had this time chosen him, the younger son, to assist on this solemn occasion. Ab-ram nodded, noting the slur, but choosing this time to ignore it.

The trail wound tortuously around the hill. I-sak footsure, the shepherd, and Ab-ram, long unaccustomed to the demand, stumbling on the gravelly pathway, stopping now and again to draw breath, his chest fiery with the effort. Strapped to the sides of the ass were the necessary paraphernalia - two flasks, gurgling their contents, a large flat stone, some ground mandrake, a flat bread and cheese for their mid-day meal. Last, wound in linen, a ceremonial knife of obsidian blackness and a sprig of hyssop plucked from the foot of the mountain.

"But my father", I-sak had earlier observed, "the sacrifice? Where is it?"

"The Great Spirit will provide", Ab-ram had replied, not elaborating, his face an enigmatic mask.

"But my father ..." I-sak had begun his objection again - surely it was best to arrive prepared rather than trust to chance? But a curt "be silent!" cut him off.

They climbed the slope slower now, near the summit where the cedars were no longer symmetrical in shape but grew deformed yet defiant on the inhospitable mantle of rock barely sifted with soil.

Ab-ram drew laboured breaths, the sound stentorious, rasping his throat.

A harsh sound above them, familiar yet still startling, tore through their separate thoughts. Both raised their heads, stopping for a moment, glad of the rest, to look upon the rusty black form of a great rook, its harsh beak giving voice to a warning of trespass. The bird rose into the air, rising toward the pitiless sun. They watched as it became a mote above them, then noticed that a curtain of clouds, dark and menacing, drifted toward them, and around it, billowing grey clouds. It was as though the bird had changed, become dark water vapour and still stood over them, transformed, watching, jealous of its territory. But rains, seldom as they blessed the land at this time of year, were welcome and surely the glaring sun would soon be obscured by the scudding clouds and give them relief from the oppressive heat.

***************************************************************

They were shortly at the summit and tethered the ass to a gnarled cypress where it could feed upon the sparseness of grass. Ab-ram directed his son to remove the stone and place it on the ground. The sun was hidden now and its fingers of fire no longer touched them. Still, breathing was difficult. Silently they both slaked their thirst with wine. That same wine into which Sarai had sprinkled her dried morels. Already, I-sak's head was light and he walked with a delicate precision, obeying his father in the placement of the ritual objects; the euphoria granting him a girlish grace.

When the hyssop had been placed just so on the flat stone, and the obsidian blade sprinkled with oil so it glimmered as with a life of its own, reflecting the dark clouds above, Ab-ram urged more wine on his son, then sat and watched drugged sleep overtake the youth. In repose I-sak's face became the youthful trusting Sarai's and Ab-ram's heart was wrenched with misgiving.

A light breeze made itself evident, rustling the leaves of the sycamore, bringing relief to the two figures, one unaware, the other too painfully aware. Ab-ram looked to the sky and saw it was now completely veiled with clouds and oddly, the black cloud sat over them still, a dark squatting thing, unmoving. He sighed, then moved his son with the great effort that was required, on his back over the stone, and raised I-sak's chiton to his chest, revealing his naked form.

Ab-ram sat back on his haunches and took into his hand the ceremonial knife, rubbed his thumb carefully along its cruel edge. Great Spirit, he implored, let this be the end of your promises, let this mark the start of your commitment to us, to my people. No other sign can I think of that will indicate to you, oh Unseen One, my abandonment of the hegemony of other gods, my belief in only You, You who will make this existence finally explicable.

As though in reply, thunder rumbled above him, and he believed.

In a lesser hallucinatory fog than his son, Ab-ram believed that the voice that visited his dreams, his drug-induced trances, would utter finally the words to seal commitment. Even through his euphoria, a thought given to his sly triumph - ah, even the gods, even the greatest of them were amenable to flattery, could not delve into the true intent of homage; this sacrifice. This thought he banished from his mind, angry at its independent impudence; unworthy of the sacred moment.

Ab-ram raised his arm and began to plunge, but some thing stayed his intent. Through the pulsing thunder he could hear a voice. Clearly, he could hear a voice! Could he not?

"ABRAHAM! HEAR ME! I AM THAT WHICH IS! YWHWH IS MY NAME. DO THOU, ABRAHAM, AS DO THE EGYPTOS AND OFFER HENCEFORTH EVERLASTING PERPETUITY'S FLESHLY COVERING. SO IT SHALL BE A BOND BETWEEN ME AND THINE TRIBE."

Perplexed, thwarted, but awed and frightened by the lush richness, the awe-inspiring command of the voice, the mystery of its emanation resounding through his head, he could not but obey.

Reluctantly, confused and inwardly seething with impotent rage, he nonetheless obediently sliced his son's foreskin, then poured holy oil over his son's body to purify it, and consecrate the offering.

Minotaur

I had to backtrack before I could find the street named on the mimeographed invitation. Then I drove down narrow winding corridors (one could hardly call them streets) with numbers on signposts and arrows pointing haphazardly as though placed there by some playfully malicious spirit. It must have been a lunatic who planned the layout. Some latter-day Hephaestus, I cursed, as I stumbled on a curb in the darkness, after parking the car. Then I began limping cautiously up walkways to the various warrens, peering at numbers.

Finally, the right one ... where a tall bearded man with a beaming face welcomed me like an old friend into a brightly-lit vestibule, took my coat and directed me downstairs. There, in the uh, well, cellar, stood a semi-circle of a dozen-odd chairs arranged neatly around an executive-size desk. Bookshelves ranged the walls and above them photographs, certificates and crucifixes. Crucifixes everywhere. At first, I found their presence encouraging, re-assuring. Over a table groaning under piles of booklets, papers, pamphlets, hung framed Aubrey Beardsley prints. At the end opposite to the desk, above double washtubs hung a cheap tapestry of Leonardo's 'Last Supper'. Tacked up at the corners, the tapestry hung limply; the faces of the disciples appeared twisted in mortal agony.

"This is our director, Marcel Brisbois", the bearded, genial one said, from behind, having clattered down the steps right after me.

"Yes, of course", I said brightly and stepped briskly toward a handsome dark man, my hand outstretched. "Your name is on the letterhead ... of my invitation, that is." Flattered that I'm meeting the director, himself. Wondering vaguely where everyone else is ... the invitation spoke of an 'introduction' to a writer's workshop.

"And me, of course", the tall one chuckled, stopping me in my forward motion. "I'm Claude Rampal." Almost self-effacingly.

"Ah, yes. You're ...?"

"Editor. I'm the editor of our Canadian Poetry and World News magazine."

A moment of awkwardness. What to do with myself, after having pressed palms with these two, after the usual comments on this fall's unusually brisk weather? I take off my jacket and sit down. We talk desultorily, feeling one another out. It is obvious that we are waiting for others to show up. Other invitations, I am told, have been circulated among this town's thriving literati. No one does, however, show up. My eyes begin to glaze over; straying against my will toward the small coloured television set playing a silent farce on top of some filing cabinets - cowboys or something, lots of action.

Then he begins, Claude, to describe to me their purpose. I am trying to appear calm, yet cannot help wondering at this point what I have let myself in for. A small dark woman; that's me. And here I am, sitting in someone's basement, for God's sake, in the middle of a labyrinth that no one in their right mind would enter to begin with.

"What remains to be done of course", Claude is saying, "is that we seek out other people like ourselves, interested in good literature, the arts in general, who will want to join our little group".

I nod brightly. It is only polite to appear interested. After all, that is why I came ... an interest in things literary?

Marcel sits in silence, permitting Claude to talk. Marcel listens. Almost broodingly, it seems to me. I momentarily panic; wonder fleetingly if anyone would hear my screams, wonder where my poor broken body will be discovered, come the morn....

But then someone stumbles down the wooden steps, catching herself at the bottom, and stiffly rights herself. A slight woman whose clothing envelope her oddly, like a dishevelled moth preparing for the chrysalis state.

"And this is Madeleine, my wife", Claude tells me, beaming benignly at the woman. I relax and look with relief at the other two. They appear harmless now, my newfound literary confreres. Madeline has brought us coffee, bless her. She clinks about, arranging cups, spoons and other paraphernalia on a low table, then leaves quietly, casting shy smiles at us.

Claude asks to see some of my work. While he is looking, reading my awkwardly proffered poetry, passing them on to Marcel, I walk self-consciously about the room, looking at everything. There are photographs of Claude in what I'm uneasily certain must be a bishop's vestments. Was that a ruby ring on his hand? I stroll to the long table where letters addressed to 'Archbishop Rampal' are ostentatiously pinned on the wall. I feel as though I am prying, although they are obviously placed there to be seen. However, I balk at reading them, edge past them as one might an embarrassing nudity. And on the table there are copies of stapled, stencilled broadsheets with the acronym CP&WN and below that heading a large photograph of a hieratical Claude Rampal, a medallion hanging heavily on his robed breast. It is embarrassing, but I don't ask myself why and just shy away.

"Hey, you're good!" voices Claude enthusiastically, holding out a sheet of my paper. And now, I do blush. "Eh?" he says, turning to Marcel. "Isn't she, Marcel!"

And from him, soft-voiced, grudgingly optimistic: "She shows promise." I warm to them both.

Claude calls up to his wife who appears tentatively, blinking, down the steps. He tells her to show me around the house, while they discuss 'business'. Madeline is very willing, and me, what can I say? I must, after all, follow her up the stairs and about their three-story dwelling, listening to her chatter.

Downstairs - the first floor that is - a typically middle-class living room, a notional dining room. Upstairs, three bedrooms, only one with a bed, the other two host desks, bookshelves, photographs of Claude on walls. And on the third floor another bedroom-cum-den and a tiny 'library' flanking a sewing room. Everywhere on the upper two levels schlock art; abstracts poorly executed drip from the walls.

Madeleine natters edgily on about how they've just moved in, about their recent marriage (something previous to that about having 'lived together' for some seven years) and his, Claude's, grand function in the church. Oh yes, there'd been a pastel, a good one, of Cardinal Spellman, in one of the 'offices'. What this all means, all these conflicting observations, I don't quite know but I do know that I will not ask for details, explanations of any kind. This woman strikes me as very fragile with an eggshell-delicate equilibrium; short on the kind of sanity I've been accustomed to. She twitters like an addled bird, throwing anxious glances my way time and again, but not breaking off her high-pitched, yet drawling monologue; and shows me a satin-bound wedding album, herself in a hand-made dress she's proud of with 'frog' fastenings she'd made herself. She tells me breathlessly that she looked pale in the photograph because she'd just gotten over a miscarriage, at the time.

Everything points to classical Catholicism ... but marriage? Ah yes, my historical voice tells me, counterpoint to her hysterical one; but wasn't Cesare Borgia born of a Pope? Another throwback. We may be entering a new Renaissance. The Church has always been accommodating to its clerics, and perhaps I haven't been aware of certain changes...? My head by now, is spinning.

************************************************************

Next week I bring some more of my poetry, rejects from literary magazines. Claude and Marcel had selected two of my poems for publication in Canadian Poetry and World News and had wanted a few more to select from. I'd continued during the week to muse on the paradox of a prelate in the Catholic Church married, living in a condominium, setting up a poetry workshop. A most um, unorthodox yet appealing, in a bizarre way, mystery. I felt compelled to return.

"My dear Rhonda! Do come in ... we have recruited a few additional members. Come right on down!" Claude greeted me effusively again, like a cherished friend.

Introductions then, to two new people, inductees into this literary temple of confused priorities. Now there was me, one lone woman, and four men. One, Red Blondin, is introduced as a sculptor. The other is younger. He looks like a university kid, but is not. He is an engineer.

I am handed the sculptor's album of his works. It is explained to him that I work in an art gallery and write poetry 'on the side'. Flipping through his book, I recognize the influences of Rodin, Picasso, Moore. His work is heavily derivative, devoid of personal creativity. I murmur recognition of some similarities.

"Yes", he acknowledges, a wry look wrinkling his broad face. "I learned from studying their work. But my work is uniquely my own now", he adds hastily. And goes on to tell us that his 'original' ideas have been pilfered by unscrupulous artists, copying and selling his creations. He tells us that because of his unswerving devotion to his art, his poor business acumen, an unwillingness to prostitute himself, his work languishes in obscurity. He talks bitterly about the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, even this city's Arts Grants Committee and its parochial failure to recognize his genius. Boring. I've heard it all before.

Soon we are taking turns reading our poetry. No one criticizes. There are supportive murmurs of gentle appreciation. Again Madeleine serves coffee, renders her tenuous smiles.

The other, younger man, Paul, shyly tells me he likes my poetry. His was very good too, I tell him obligingly, willing enough to reciprocate.

Wandering during a brief talk session to the table with my coffee, I see a familiar face looking back at me from a poetry book cover and over it, a discreet little sign: "Special to members of Canadian Poetry and World News - $3.95!" A booklet of Claude's poetry. Beside it, another sign: "Give what you can", hoisted over a deep dish with a five-dollar bill nestled cozily in its bottom. Beside that, a stack of fibreboard squares with oil paint drizzled imaginatively over them: "Original oils by Claude Rampal - special to members - $5.00!

"Oh, and I do some acting", Claude is addressing the others as I drift back and take my seat. "T.V., and some stage." He points overhead to piles of dust covers colourfully hanging from the rafters. "Freelance writing as well, but most of my income is from book reviews." Everyone is silent, impressed by this embarrassment of talents.

"Here are a few of my early books", he says off-handedly, pulling two volumes of religious history books off the shelf behind him, handing them around. They're published in French, beautifully illustrated. They look impressive. I am impressed. This is obviously a very gifted and complex personality.

He turns the talk in the direction of the future of 'our' magazine. We will publish in languages other than English, he says; eventually accept poetry from other countries. Translations, we'll do those too. He canvasses the group for translation potential. Essays and short stories. His book reviews, of course. and we'll run a book-of-the-month award of a hundred dollars to the best book submitted for review during any month. We will all judge.

*************************************************************

By the next meeting, another two literary hopefuls fill in the ranks of empty chairs. We read our poetry aloud. A few tentatively critical remarks pass around at one point and are serenely passed over by the reader; myself.

Claude, meanwhile, calls a temporary halt to the poetry reading. He has a few things to announce. Claude has probed our lifestyles subtly, is aware of our other interests. He knows things about all of us now, told him during unguarded coffee-break chumminess.

"For the next meeting we'll have a special poetry reading", he announces. "In fact, it will be a rehearsal, so bring your best work. A friend of mine" --, he expands, beaming his avuncular smile which assures us that 'Uncle Claude' thinks of everything -- "is a television producer on a local station and he is dropping by. We are planning to tape a program revolving about our workshop. My friend says the idea has tremendous potential ... next week will be the uh, dress rehearsal", he concludes with a fat satisfaction buttering his face. Everyone by now looks to him as the literary patriarch and excited questions blossom in the stale cellar air. He airily ignores them and continues.

"And you, Rhonda", he says, "are going to perform for us!"

"Me?" I repeat stupidly, briefly envisioning a mad moment of poetic strip tease.

"Ha! You're modest! I like a talented person with modesty: Paul has agreed to work on a duet with you - how's that?"

***************************************************************

Paul, the ersatz university student, comes up to my apartment during the week, with his violin. I said I would pick something suitable for us, but he has brought along his own music; all the literature of Paganini, Tartini, including the "Devil's Trill" of both. Trying to psyche me out, I figure. There's no part for me and finally he agrees that a Telemann trio sonata for flute and violin that I had transcribed for recorder and violin would 'have to do'. I am to play my alto recorder and he his violin; we ignore the continuo.

He's rusty, obviously hasn't played for a while, despite his attempt at flashiness. His tone is not bad, but his timing is sadly out and he keeps trying to get in tune, fooling with the tuning pegs, stalling for time.

"Paul", I tell him when we finally start, "try a little less vibrato? Remember, this is a baroque piece" I tell him starchily, fed up with his dickering around.

"You're going too fast", he flicks his wrist at me. "Slow down, would you?" He's behaving like a superior little jerk. That was the correct tempo.

I mean what the hell has this got to do with a poetry workshop anyhow? I feel trapped, want to get some help with my writing; don't want to antagonize anyone. It is, after all, obvious that Claude is someone with connections. I tell myself: have patience, Rhonda. Grit my teeth and smile at Paul.

**********************************************************

At the next meeting, we play, Paul and me, for the visiting television producer. He nods amiably at our efforts, has brought along a camera-man, has told us where to position ourselves. Then the readings, everyone emoting their favourite pieces, woodenly, performing to camera. Paul tells me sotto voce, that ours are the only good ones and congratulates me also, on my playing. Trying, obviously, to redeem himself in my estimation. Little twit.

Later, after the television producer and his sidekick have departed, Claude tells us he has received submission from other area poets who were unable to attend, but plan to, in future. Our ranks are growing. As well, he had made contact with a poet in Montreal and another in Buenos Aires who will become associate members ... if that is all right with everyone here? He calls Madeleine down to read a selection of poetry from the person in Buenos Aires. She reads the poems in a halting Spanish. We all clap when she is finished; relieved.

"Madeleine also has two pieces which she has written herself", Claude says proudly. I look at her, surprised. One of the things she had mumbled to me previously was that she couldn't write worth a damn herself. She hangs back but he insists and although it is obvious that she is reluctant, she reads her poetry. In French. No one else beside Marcel understands French but Claude, and he is positively entranced. They are, he says, love poems dedicated to him. Her voice is halting, she stumbles continually, says par-dahn, and continues her painful elocution.

The whole thing is somehow unreal. The only reality seems to be that Marcel, quiet and brooding Marcel, who sits silently through most of the meeting is the only 'mature' poet present. His poems are really polished. By comparison we others are rank dilettantes, even Claude. Marcel takes the rest of us aside from time to time, individually, and offers us gentle direction, encouragement.

************************************************************

Our discussions are expanding. We are beginning to talk of visual art and science, as well as philosophy. Hesitantly dipping our conversational feet into the areas of religion and politics, too. We discover hidden talents among more newly-recruited members ... and exotic lifestyles. One, a Lebanese, shyly tells us he has just been married by proxy. His bride, whom he has never met, is coming to Toronto the coming month. She is ten years younger than him; fifteen years of age. He has a photograph of her, which he glowingly permits us to see. Dark eyes, large and deep enough to drown in, and long black tresses; an Eastern gown, bare feet.

Oh, although nothing is said at first, a common thought seems to go the rounds: will she find this cold climate congenial to her warm Levantine blood? Will he, our Lebanese literary friend, repeat Eastern custom and treat her as chattel? Immediately impregnate this woman-child, then secure her forever to a cycle of childbirth? Will that fragile butterfly become a stolid moth in too-short years? The questions hover on curious lips, then die a cold and instant death before the young man's obvious pleasure, in avid anticipation of the approach of his new 'partner'.

The talk turns to other matters, but not so 'other'; those questions still lingering, refusing to be spoken, or to die. We discuss morality in marriage, outside marriage. And although that, per se, has nothing to do with Mahmoud, he appears embarrassed by it all.

Ordinarily, though, all this talk, these verbal explorations are good. Exhilarating, stimulating, nothing less. From such a tentative beginning, dare we hope ... who knows? From time to time each of us grows a dreamy look on his face. Thinking perhaps, like me, that we may evolve a worthwhile association of ideas, a cross-fertilization of talents. Is it too much to hope for a modern day Lunar Society? Like the one that Erasmus Darwin fondly named 'The Lunatic Club'? Might Claude be our catalyst, the one to propel us into world renown as a highly talented group? Remember the Bloomsburys? Only time would tell.

************************************************************

I open my door to find Claude there, filling the space with his bulk. Rakish, in a turtle-neck sweater, a medallion, a Harris tweed jacket, hands busy with his pipe. He exhibits an air of casual surprise when I open the door. As though he belongs there, on my lintel, and I'm some strange, unexpected intruder. He half embraces me, then sets me aside and walks in. He looks about my place, walking from one corner of my living room to the other.

All this while I am blushing. I am garbed in a dressing gown. I feel invaded, vulnerable. But he appears to almost ignore my physical presence, is more interested in my possessions.

"Have you got insurance?" he asks, briskly, businesslike.

"Insurance?" I respond, blankly.

"On these things", he says impatiently, sweeping his arm expansively. My mother's silver which I detest, which I polish guiltily, really aching sometimes to throw out, but cannot. My own pride, a semi-reclining fifth-size carrera marble nude. Nineteenth-Century. Italian. Signed.

He sits comfortably across from me, talking. Stuffing himself with chocolate chip cookies, like a kid. I pour him another cup of tea. He makes sly allusion to my living alone, in luxury, winks.

"That your bedroom?" he asks pointedly, then insists on seeing the whole apartment.

I show him around, reluctantly. He appraises everything minutely, with the most intense interest. At any other time I might feel flattered. I would talk about my books, my objets d'art, my paintings. Nothing modern; everything in traditional fine-art style.

Finally, he is seated on the sofa again. "Madeleine was just saying we've got to get a better coffeepot for our guests. You know, when I left my parish, we left so much behind ..."

"Oh, well ... look! You can borrow this one. It's been in my family ... I'd be glad to let you use it." I say this desperately, wanting him to leave, buying him off....

He is gracious in his acceptance. I feel strangely flattered by his attention, his acceptance, yet want him to leave. I squirm on the tub chair, pleating the skirt of my dressing gown in my fingers. He exudes confidence. Smiles beatifically at me, tucks the pot under his arm. But I take it from him firmly and place it into a paper bag. Don't want anyone stopping him.

************************************************************

Next meeting we are all more comfortable with one another. We read poetry, discuss some more philosophy. Everyone has decided to stay clear away from politics and religion. Claude discusses the literary market in Canada. He talks about what a hack Peter Benton is, but he is, he says, a good businessman, with great contacts.

"That's where the money is", he puffs knowledgeably. "The whole publishing industry in Canada is sick, incestuous. I could tell you stories...."

But he does not. He does though go on to tell us about some of his future plans for our little group. Poetry readings at the University of Toronto, at city hall, that kind of thing. Canada Council grants. Ontario Arts Council grants.

"So we've got to have some kind of concrete structure here; order. Something to show them, to place in front of them. That's why I want you to be secretary, Rhonda, to take notes of all our meetings. And Paul, you're going to be our marketing manager." He laughs at our confusion. "Red, you're our resident artist, okay?" I look over at Marcel. He has a sour look on his face, looks uncomfortable. But then, he always does, even to that twitch in his cheek.

Claude hands out printed forms. Signing over our work to him for publishing. "Just a formality", he laughs. "Everyone sign, and we'll have them witnessed."

"Just a minute, please", Marcel says, and reads one of the forms. Then he takes out a pen and prints in: "Publication rights to revert to author"; collects each one and prints it in, then hands them back out to us. All this time, Claude is watching indulgently, puffing his pipe, saying nothing further.

****************************************************************

Marcel walks in hesitantly, looks around my apartment. He appears agitated; smaller than he appears, at our meetings. He hands me a hard-cover book of poetry and ducks his head in a courtly, old-fashioned manner; a gift for me. Then he paces the living room until I say please sit down, he is making me nervous. Not nervous in the way that Claude did, however.

"Look", he says finally, running thin fingers through his hair. "I don't know how to say this ...."

"What? What is it?"

"Claude. Look, I really feel responsible for all of you ...."

"Well, look ... I don't understand."

Claude unzips his briefcase and pulls out a pile of papers. I recognize the Canadian Poetry and World News broadsheet, and Claude's photograph. Then out with the little poetry book I had seen on that table.

"Have you ever read any of this?"

"Why, no", I say, shamefaced. I had meant to read some of it, but somehow never got around to it. "I did mean to, though."

"This book" Marcel said, indicating the slim volume with unconcealed contempt, "he had it printed himself. No publisher would touch it."

"Oh." I glanced down at the one he had given me; his own, itched to see who had published it. He noticed and smiled wryly.

"It's like this: I didn't really know the guy. I just answered an advertisement in a literary magazine. I thought it would be great to get something going like, for example, 'Toronto Poetry Workshops'. First meeting I had with him, he showed me some dummy credentials. I was impressed."

"So what's wrong?" I pressed, impatiently.

"Have a look at these", throwing me two of the CP & WN publications. On the front page of each, under the photograph, a rambling pastoral message inveighing against our permissive society. I leafed through the pages, blinked at some entries, dated, like a diary. Leafed the little poetry book. Awkward poetry, misspellings. Every other page a photograph of Claude, smiling, scowling, gowned, displaying a copy of his broadsheet.

"What do you think it stands for, that CP & WN?" Marcel challenged me.

"What? Why, Canadian Poetry and ...."

"Wrong. It's Claudius Patriarch - His World News."

"It's what? Who is Claudius Patriarch?"

"Our friend."

"Oh, come on now, Marcel ...."


"No, really! Listen, he is Archbishop Claudius I, Patriarch of the Church of Byzantium."

"Well, what the hell is that?"

"Some Mickey-Mouse religious sect with a following of one. His wife. I called the Catholic Archdiocese here and they don't know the guy. That wouldn't bother me so much maybe, but he intends to publish our work in that rag. That's not what he told me at first. He said we would start a poetry magazine. What this is, is garbage. A proselytizing rag and an outlet for his frustrated clerical ambitions. Have another look! Read the parts I've circled. And by the way, that hundred dollar book award - he forgot to mention that all entrants have to pay a twenty-dollar consideration fee."

"Oh." And I read about how the R.C.M.P. had waged a vicious campaign against Claudius I. I read an offer to send (for a mere $5 fee) a copy of Claudius's 'Vindication Papers to the Canadian Parliament'. I read of the corruption of the Ontario Provincial Police, responsible for a three-year prison term for fraud; the loss of his wife and five children. I read that Madeleine was a hopeless alcoholic, his one true and sweet 'convert'. I read about a law suit pending for defamation of character. Of another law suit, brought against Claudius, for assault causing bodily harm. He would, however, rise above his detractors, his tormentors. He would prevail; God on his side.

"He's crazy!" I said, turning to Marcel, my head spinning. "Why would anyone write all this personal stuff in an organ he sends out to all kinds of people? And he wants to put our work in here?"

"That is correct. The man is a raving lunatic. He has a persecution complex. And even before I read those things I thought so, from his poetry. I want to get out. That's why I've come to see you. I felt I owed you that much."

"What about the others?" I asked, not really caring, my head reeling.

"I'll tell them too", he promised.

"He's got my silver coffeepot", I wailed.

"I'll go with you to get it back", he said reassuringly. "He's got some of my folding chairs."

*************************************************************

When we sat ourselves down, Claude behind his impressive desk, beaming, his photographs behind him, the coloured television set hysterically blinking its wonders in silence, I began.

"We ... I can't let myself be published in ... that C.P. & W.N."

"Rhonda dear ... what's brought this on?" Lifted eyebrows, a wondering smile of genuine concern.

"I ... just don't, uh, agree with some of your, um, philosophy."

"Really? And just what is it you don't agree with?"

"It's not the kind of publication to host literary work", Marcel interposed, a worried look on his face.

"Really?" Claude turned his scorn on Marcel; the smile he'd had for me transformed into a wintry sneer. "And just who are you to judge?" Marcel shrugged, shrank back into his seat, was silent. "I don't see why we cannot part amicably", Marcel began again, apologetically, into the silent, simmering room. "I ... I have simply come to the realization that I don't have time to uh, devote myself to this kind of endeavour ...."

"Fine!" Claude snapped. "Now let us see about Rhonda. You've obviously turned her against me. I can see that."

"No", Marcel objected weakly, spreading his hands blamelessly.

Claude worried the issue back and forth, questioning my motives for leaving. His voice took on by turns, a wheedling cast, a biting, sarcastic edge. Finally, he shrugged, called Madeleine downstairs. She had been listening anyway, I was certain. She smiled her vacant wavering smile, and sat beside me. Began to talk in her quavering voice. Poor thing, I thought; brain's all mush. I edged away from her breath.

The only Claudius I knew anything about was a first-Century Roman Emperor, a buffoon whose reign had been bracketed by those of two madmen; his nephew Caligula-the-horse-lover, and his stepson, fiddling-Nero. That Claudius had been fed Amanita Caesaria through the loving auspices of his doting wife so that her own son would ascend the Imperial throne. Here this poor soul was, imprisoned by her need, a slave to Claudius I, Patriarch of the Church of Byzantium. I wondered if I could interest her in mycology as a hobby. My eyes, however, kept straying to that damned television set. Her voice mesmerized me, as did that silent action, and I began to feel nauseated.

"I'd like my pot", I finally said firmly, breaking the deadly spell.

"Pot?" She turned a muddled gaze on her husband. He became his jovial self. Told her where she would find it, upstairs. "No hard feelings at all! If you've read my work Rhonda, you know I don't hold grudges", he said, hugging me. Grudges?

"And I want to tell you as a friend Rhonda, that you need help. You will never get anywhere in the world of letters without it. Remember, I'll be here and willing to help you. All you have to do is ask."

**********************************************************

I'm toying with the idea of moving. Every time I hear a knock on a distant door ... a door slams from somewhere in the building, I jump. I keep the door locked now, all the time. I keep looking over my shoulder, whenever I'm out. At work, Mrs. Bowles asked me if I need a rest, a short vacation. She says I look terrible.