Palimpsest

Behind her eyelids the image of her father with his hands full of catalogue cards like a poker player warred with the image of Aloysius weeping, begging her: Leave me alone, I cannot bear it, I cannot bear you.

November sunk her head in her hands. I cannot bear it, either, but the alternative is too big for me. I have nothing. I am not a brave girl.

The bay fog slid over the hills like tea steeping. I am not brave, she thought, but I do have a dress. I have that. A dress like a sail.

She dried her eyes and pulled a cough of orange silk from her closet. She brushed back her hair into a librarian's bun so that no one would miss her face. Alleyways burned triumphant on her cheek. She turned all her rings firmly outward. They glittered like a knight's glove.

It took nine nights in the city. She drank foully sweet things and waited. Hard-angled, fashionable people stared nakedly at her. Her skin flared hot with shame and determination. I will stand upon my raft until the Green Wind comes for me, she thought, quoting Weckweet, quoting the book of her childhood. My dress; my sail

And the Green Wind did come, slowly, gently, though in no chrome-walled bar or library annex. November was tired, heading home, walking through the thronging battalion of pigeons in Union Square, back to her car, back to the bridge and the bees and home, to Hortense Weckweet and a thousand unfinished lists.

The woman looked like she must have come from the North Pole: frizzy pale red hair blossoming around broad red cheeks whipped flush by the cold, a great long scarf trailing behind her. She wasn't pretty, but she wasn't plain. She didn't say anything, but her face was so bright and hopeful, so welcoming that November's ribs ached. The woman ran to her and stopped up short, her breath fogging in the evening air, the cutting blue breezes that belong to the Bay at dusk. She unbuttoned her peacoat with shivering gloveless fingers and pulled up her sweater like a child. It was on her belly, just under her left breast, like a patient spider crouching on her skin. The girl glanced at November's rings and grasped her face in delicate fingers, kissing her with the ferocity of a newborn bear suckling at its mother.

A HOUSE SITS SQUARELY ON THE CORNER of Krasnozlataya and Corundum Streets. Over the years it has grown to encompass nearly the whole of both boulevards, up to 19th Street and down to 6th. Through the spaces where its cornerstones do not mark the earth, the gardens of this house spill out onto the street in long emerald swathes. Beggars sleep beneath the pomegranate trees, and the carriage tracks swerve gracefully to avoid the intruding verdancy.

The house itself was planted as a sapling, its roots bound up in muslin and soaked in rose water. Three women brought it in a pine bucket, stroking its bark to keep it calm. They buried it in secret, hidden by a complicit moon, in the soft earth that was then Krasnozlataya Street, before the underground trains and the elevated tracks, before the great spires, before water-spouting, mice-headed gargoyles bred on that broad road with such zeal. The women wore gray veils and crowns of steel gears. They knew how to conduct rites properly-how to dress, how to stand. They came each night thereafter to feed it and whisper to it, they came silently and with sweet things in their pockets: sugar and apples and Spanish tiles and slivers of False Crosses, braids from their own head, ivory buttons, golden sewing needles and the heels of a thousand Sunday roasts, cherries with pits of hard molasses, faucet heads in the shape of men's mouths, frankincense and myrrh, lye and whiskey, long black pokers and swaddling clothes, handbags and haircombs, Christmas cakes, hemlock, lemon tea and glass goblets, a slaughtered blue sheep, and, lastly but most important, the sad gray form of one of their sons, who had strangled in his umbilical cord.

Whose child it was none of us may tell.

All of the women were named Casimira. They did not find it confusing.

The house, well-fed beyond all dreams of cornice and window hinge, began to grow so quickly and with such vigor that the houses on either side of it were forced to pick up their prodigious suitcases and, with much pointed sniffing, homestead elsewhere. The house threw up radiant cedar walls and windows of smoky glass. Bronze roof tiles clattered out from the chimneys like dominoes falling. Palisades and sweeping stairs twisted up from the earth, and long hallways stretched their arms for children to hide in. It opened room after room like blossoms, each furnished in a single color, for it was an orderly house and liked things just so. It sent up eight floors to begin with, and more sprouted with the harvest each year. It peaked and gabled its tiled roof, and threw towers into the air. At night passersby heard the house singing little nonsense songs to itself as it dressed up, a girl waiting with breathless hope for a festival to begin.

Finally the house opened a room in its topmost tower, the largest of all the rooms it had ever grown before, and this room it colored in every shade of scarlet so that to stand within it was to stand within a beating, bleeding heart. This done, the house locked itself and waited, growing only as a tree will grow, one ring for each year.

It became the habit of the Casimiras in subsequent years to bring each heiress to the door of the wonderful house and press her little hand against the knocker, a lovely thing in the shape of a lion s paw. For many years, the house remained quiet and inert, no matter the charms of the young visitors. When the current Casimira turned eight years old, she was brought to the house. Her mother took her steady hand in hers and lay it against the door.

Perhaps you have already guessed it, for you are no doubt very clever. I certainly knew it must happen this way, but then, anticipation is one of my great hobbies.

The lion-knocker sounded clear and long, and the door opened without the smallest creak. It closed sharply behind the child, however, and kept her parents in the snow.

Little Casimira stood in the great hallway at the foot of a staircase like a tier on the wedding cake of a giant. After a long while, she fell asleep on a plush lavender chair for lack of anything better to do.

When night came spooling blackly through the tall windows, a little boy came tiptoeing down the stairs and held Casimiras hand. He had a thick blue ribbon around his neck, like a girls necklace, but wider, and it was very tight, but the boy was lovely all the same, with a high flush on his pale cheeks and extremely proper slippers on his small feet. He shook her awake, but very gently, with solicitude.

“Wake up, Casimira,” the boy said. “Wake up.” The boy smiled at her very perfectly, an expression of pristine technical accuracy, as though he had practiced the smile in a round mirror for eight years. “I do not have a name,” the boy demurred, “so I cannot introduce myself to you, but I would have been your grandfather, if I had not been so clumsy and tripped over my mother when I meant to come into the world.”

Casimira did not answer.

“I have kept a room for you,” the house said, and blushed perhaps more deeply than it is correct for boys to blush.

The sky is needled with stars, and November breathes in the green cardamom and laurel of the Palimpsest winds. She wears the violently blue dress of Aloysius, and her belly prickles in the breeze. Peacock feathers graze her shoulder. The buildings of Krasnozlataya Street spindle tall and thin around her, so tall that long scarves of clouds obscure their peaks, and she wants to shiver, but she cannot manage it. From every terrace and corner grin gargoyles through which old rainwater spurts in sprays and splashes, only to be caught in long pools at the base of each tower. The little faces are mice and hedgehogs and opossums, foxes and rats and blind, nosing moles. Their faces contort as all gargoyles do, peering from within curling stone leaves, licking sharp teeth, but their faces seem so sweet and dear to her, she laughs in the middle of the street, and they grin wider on their heights.

Yes, she thinks, it is all right. I am here. I am here and it was worth the price. It was worth a stranger with red hair, worth a boy who loves his sister, and his sister, too. Worth all of them.

But the bees are impatient with her gladness. They pull her to a door so great she does not right away realize that it is attached to a single house. An enormous lions paw marks its center, and she puts her hand upon it, as if greeting tenderly the beast whose foot it must be. The bees scream, and the screams of bees are joy or rage; there is room in them for only two kinds of cries. The lavender-suited manikin circles her waist with its buzzing arms; the door opens with a grand sweep, as though it had practiced just such a sweep for a decade and more.

Framed by thick ferns and far too many umbrella-stands, a woman stands just inside in the hall. She wears a severe dress, just the sort of thing a governess might wear, green-black from throat to floor, clasped by an enormous copper wasp at her collarbone and a long, ornate belt, copper too, a shining chain of tiny boxes that circle her compressed waist and trail to the floor in line like a monks knotted rope. Her curly hair is piled high, an artful, decorous shade of green, deeper than emeralds or water, a sedate and proper color It is the exact shade of her eyes. She holds a child by the hand, a boy with a blue ribbon around his neck, dressed like a little dauphin, and he hides be-hind the woman's voluminous skirts, peeking out at the newcomer.

The bee-manikin strides jubliantly to the woman and tips her chin towards itself. She kisses the bee-crowded face warmly, tilting her head in the classical pose of the seduced woman. The manikin gestures emphatically toward November and promptly dissolves into a swarm which dissipates through the house, leaving Aloysius's

beautiful suit in a ripped, wrinkled pile on the immaculate floor

“I like your dress,” the woman says coyly The boy hides his face in her bustle.

“Aloysius made it,” November says, unable to think of anything better, more clever, more deserving of the woman before her. Her throat constricts.

“Oh, I know! I have several of his. There's no mistaking his work, really.”