Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 19 Read online

  I put my hands firmly on his back and stand up and get out of his tub. He's sprawled over the edge with his head near the floor, his arms and legs still in the tub and his butt in the air.

  "You're not so smart about your stinking nomenclature now, are you?” I ask him.

  I don't wait for an answer. I put my shoulder under his body a little way up from his stomach and lift. My feet slip, and I scramble to keep my balance and bang down hard on one knee. I take a few minutes to get my breath and then try again. I push him up and up and then I'm standing with my legs braced against his tub.

  I try to turn but his feet are still in the tub. I make a little jerk to the left and another to the right, but I can't get them out. I take a step back and then another. Digby's legs stretch out before me. He is hanging on with just his toes now. I take another step back, and his feet break free, and his legs swing down hard at me, and as I brace myself for the impact, I suddenly wonder if we will still be two men out of our tubs even if he isn't touching the floor. He hits me hard, and I'm knocked back but not over, and we don't get shocked. I take a few steps to keep my balance.

  I glance over at the others. Maybe I'm expecting applause. They are both hunkered down and hanging onto the edges of their tubs obviously looking for the electricity to arrive any moment now.

  It hits me that if I fall, we are doomed. As soon as we both hit the floor, the electricity will come, and it will be so strong I will never be able to lift Digby again. I will have to crawl away to my tub and get in it, and once I'm in my tub, there will still be one man on the floor—dead Digby who will never get up again. We three survivors will be trapped.

  If I drop him, I kill us all.

  I see the others have realized this, too. I smile at them like I'm saying to hell with it, I'm going to drop him, and they get wide-eyed, and I turn away from them.

  I walk Digby over to the other dead guy's tub and dump him in. There is a foul splash. The alarm hoots twice. I cover my ears with my hands. I should have seen that splash coming. I should have lowered him gently onto the other dead guy.

  Too late now.

  "It's still an improvement,” I tell the others when I'm pretty sure we're not going to get shocked.

  They won't even give me that much.

  I use the hole. Then I walk around like a rooster. Maybe the others don't think the way I'm walking is anything like a rooster. Maybe they think I've gone completely crazy. Good. Let them think that. I give them each a direct you-want-a-piece-of-me look and then get back into my own tub.

  I consider the faucets.

  Probably on a regular basis (how would we know when all of our moments are of different sizes) the cold-water faucets turn all by themselves, and cold water gushes into our tubs to replace the loss from dripping and evaporation (and sometimes splashing). There is a hot water faucet, too, but it never moves.

  The hope of my life is that someday the hot water faucet will move and not only move but be effective. Someday hot water will rush into my tub. Steam will form above the surface. I will submerge myself in bliss.

  But in the meantime, we take what meaning we can from the things we do. I wonder who will be Digby now, and if he will have anything intelligent to say.

  I decide to get the ball rolling again. Why not? It's not like we're going anywhere. I speak without turning to look at them. “So, tell me, boys, what is your thinking on the matter of friezes?"

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  How the Burkhina Faso Bicycle Fell Apart

  I guess the little straps of leather dried to beef jerky or ligaments of shriveled toad while it still looked ready to hit the (tiny) road from its home on a shelf next to a Blue Guide.

  Admired, even as its dusty tendons were loosening, it dissembled well, until one day, it dis—assembled into the hectic chumminess of true collapse, wires released from miming mechanical form so you could no longer discern what had just been handlebar, mirror, kickstand.

  Even the naked wheels couldn't be spun.

  An artist, not some hack, made it by hand and couldn't have intended such a grim display of how easily attachments fall away.

  Forwarding Address

  Summer afflicts me with a certainty:

  if I return to Rome I will again meet gnomic Ruth at Piazza Cairoli, typing the gossipy truth—not dead at all—about days with Carlo Ponti,

  Sophia, and the Master (we smirked) who gave her the rules for living a Hindu life, still calling us “girls"

  and warning us about “boys” who might ask for a date, their syringes trashing her sixteenth-century gate.

  Rome was Ruth's—she taught us diciassette,

  the melted scream of Giordano Bruno's story showed us glittering swordfish in Campo dei Fiori, the Sistine before the soot was cleared away, and angels in Trastevere's Santa Maria.

  Ruth of the catacombs, not trattoria.

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  Grebe's Gift

  Daniel A. Rabuzzi

  "All kinds of eggs, any kind you want, mein Herr, like dewdrops from the sun,” she said, her German a flatlander's dialect strewn with Livonian vowels. Among the rookish farmwives on the market square under the bell tower of Saint Nikolai, she was a goldfinch with her yellow head-scarf and her coat piped in red. At her throat was a bronze brooch. I had never seen her before and was certain she was not from any of the farms that ringed Ollemunde or from anywhere on Fennica Minor at all. Everyone knew everyone at the market; the same farmers had brought their goods every Tuesday and Saturday their entire lives to the same buyers. Yet nobody knew who the young woman was. I had asked Frau Giesemann, from whom I bought my honey, and Frau Ockel who sold me beets and cabbages, and even old Fraulein Hemmel the herbalist, who was considered half-mad, but none of them had ever seen the young woman. To ensure that I did not cause offense to the league of farmwives, I had bought some eggs from the Widow Harloff as I always did, and then I had ambled over to the stranger's stall with the blandest look I could muster.

  "What are those?” I had said, my feigned incuriosity disappearing as I looked at plates heaped with eggs large and small, speckled, streaked, bluish, greenish, some the color of mud, some of sedge. She kept her gaze fixed on the hillocks of eggs. A braid of hair red as berries peeked out from under her scarf. Staring at the braid, I almost missed her explanation.

  "Those are teal's eggs, unhatched in rushes next to the nale and neeve,” she said, using phrases that we did not use in the High German of Ollemunde or any other city I knew. “And these are jewels from the reyer-duck that dawdles down restharrow dunes. Those that seem carved from elfin-bone ivory are of the eider-duck, and these brash-brown like chestnuts are gifts from the sheldickle. More, sir? Yes, these beauties are from the goosander, the pochard, the scoter."

  I shook my gaze free of her chokecherry braid, and contemplated the landscape of eggs. She had only indicated a fraction of those she offered. I queried further, trying to catch her eye. Her head stayed inclined to the eggs as she continued to recite: hazel hen, partridge, ower-hen, bittern, stork, crake, plover, lapwing, redshank, whimbrel, curlew, woodcock. I shook my head at the litany. The birds that laid these eggs weren't kept in a coop like the chickens on the Widow Harloff's farm.

  "...and here an egg like a pearl from the grebe that dabs in the dike, and there two burnied eggs from the godwits that cry over the mud-rappling river,” the young woman finished. She still did not look up. “What's your pleasure, sir?"

  With a guilty glance across the market square at the Widow Harloff's booth, I bought the grebe's egg and several varieties of duck. Who had ever heard of eating such things? Moreover, I would be eating eggs at every meal for the next two days. Feeling a little foolish, I handed the young woman some coins. As I put the eggs into my basket, I asked the stranger where she was from. My question brought her face up. She had eyes bluer than cornflowers. I had thought her perhaps eighteen but something in her look made me feel younger than my twenty-seven and younger than her.<
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  "I came to Ollemunde in my little boat,” she said, waving in the direction of the harbor. (When she said that, I believed I heard in my mind the sound of wings over a sweep of fir-trees.) I asked for more detail but she demurred, saying only that she came from across the water. I could see the Widow Harloff staring at me and knew I should be going. I thought about coming back later but, after all, one has one's dignity and besides everyone knew everyone else at the market and I could feel the accusatory looks of Frau Giesemann and the others following me as I left. I contented myself with the thought that the stranger might well be back on Saturday for the next market.

  Herr Classen arched an eyebrow when I arrived in the office with a basket full of eggs, some of them not of the usual sort. Herr Classen had worked for my family for many years, keeping all the accounts straight so that neither I nor clients of Gersterbusch Widow & Son could ever complain. (I am the son, my deceased mother the widow who greatly increased the fortunes of the firm my father started.) The skills that made Herr Classen such a fastidious bookkeeper were the same that kept him from being an entertaining dining companion. He made it clear that he had no intention of eating any egg that a chicken had not laid, unless it was the egg of a goose but that was as far as he was prepared to venture.

  "Adam tamed some birds but not others for the purpose of egg-laying,” he said. “Wild duck's eggs will surely cause you an upset stomach, and those others you named just aren't fit for the table. Think on it, Herr Gersterbusch, it is well known that grebes eat worms and other muck from the bottom of ponds. I shouldn't want that in my guts.” He went back to our accounts full of forebodings for my health and thus for the viability of the firm, which inevitably led him to concerns for the safety of his employment. I suggested that the ingestion of one egg, no matter how strange, was hardly cause for alarm and that the firm needed instead to worry about the state of the currency markets in Hamburg and the prospects for the grain harvest. I left him to his fulminations and brought the eggs to Elisabeth Sophie, who doubled as cook and maid.

  "Mysterious is what it is, Herr Gersterbusch, just a mystery to everyone who she is and who she might be,” said Elisabeth Sophie as she inspected the alien eggs. “I heard already from Caroline Marie, you know, the maid at Herr Fridericius the wine-merchant's around the corner, about the strange woman selling even stranger eggs at the market this morning. No one else bought any of her eggs, they did not dare! Oh, you poor man, to be taken in like that, begging your pardon, sir, but I really ought to have gone this morning and not you, no matter how much you enjoy going to market. As your departed mother, may she be forever blessed, used to say, rightly speaking you should not be going at all, you a man and head of the house. She, your mother that is, would tell you, sir, that not even your lack of a wife is an excuse for your buying kitchen-goods in the square. There, I've said no more than the truth, sir, hoping you don't think ill of me. Now, about that seller of uncertain eggs, she is probably one of the Old Folk from out of the forest, or a witch who sailed across from Oesel or the Kurische Nehrung in a boat like a shoe, raising the wind herself. I hear she wears a yellow headdress, with feathers in it, and has a big cape held in place with some kind of heathen brooch."

  I chuckled at the description and knew that by nightfall the stranger would be described in far more outrageous terms. I could not, however, deny the truth of the assertion about the mystery of the young woman's origins. I kept hearing the melody of the egg-seller's recital and the peculiar phrases she used, as if she were translating literally from another language. I kept thinking of her vagueness about coming from over the water, surely a deliberate ploy since Fennica Minor is, of course, an island famous as the crossroads of the Baltic: anyone who is not from here comes from across the water. I wanted to dismiss the cook's charge that the egg-seller was uncanny, after all we are nearly at the end of the eighteenth century, and I had studied the enlightened views of Thomasius, Schloezer, and the Englishman Hume on the primacy of rationality over superstition. Yet, if nothing else, I wondered how the stranger had managed to collect so many eggs from so many elusive wild birds and transport them here before they spoiled.

  Elisabeth Sophie fried in a separate pan the eggs I had purchased from the stranger. I was the only one to eat them. The cook and the bookkeeper inquired several times that afternoon how I was feeling and seemed disappointed when I told them that neither worms nor stones had appeared in my stomach. The grebe's egg was especially tasty, and I looked forward to acquiring another one at the Saturday market. Another look at that hair and those eyes would also be nice, I admitted to myself. I decided I would ask her name and not leave until I knew where she was from. I did my best to concentrate on business for the rest of the week but bills of lading and customs declarations paled beside my anticipation of seeing again the stranger who sold eggs. Friday evening I laid out a fresh shirt and buffed my shoes, while checking my pocket-watch every ten minutes. I fell asleep practicing what I would say to her, carefully using Low German and avoiding the diction of the counting house.

  She was not there on Saturday morning. I searched the entire market, pretending to look for bargains at every stall and weaving questions about the young woman who sold eggs into every conversation. No one knew anything about her or why she had not come that day. The farmwives were pleased that the stranger was absent. Only the herbalist Fraulein Hemmel had more to say on the matter, as she packed some betony and mint into a pouch for me. I did not really need her herbs but I had always taken kindly to her when so few others did. I suspected there was wisdom mixed into the eccentric words she spoke, if one cared to listen.

  "I'll not be the only one who has noticed your interest in that girl, mein Herr,” said old Fraulein Hemmel, who was rumored to be a quarter Lettish on her mother's side. “You've always been kind to me, so I will be kind in return. You know that you've set tongues to wagging in the past, you have, with your visits to the ruins of St. Adelsina's Convent by moonlight and your poetry readings, as you call them, and inviting that so-called natural philosopher from Rostock into your house last summer, the one who accused Frau Schlomann's oldest girl of being a changeling and who claimed that the Deputy Lord Mayor's grandmother had danced and more with elves in the birch-woods. Even if these things might be true, you know how it is here: you cannot simply talk about such matters as you would the weather or the state of the harvest or the market for ship's masts in London."

  No one had let me forget the episode with the philosopher from Rostock. He had come highly recommended from that city's society of experimental inquiry. In hindsight I suppose they were all too eager to rid themselves of such a disruptive character, as we in Ollemunde were in our turn when we recommended him for his new appointment in Reval. I was irritated that I should be the target of invective most appropriately aimed at another, but knew better than to complain. Besides, the man from Rostock had demonstrated the latest experiments in animal magnetism and physiognomic divination. His very presence suggested a world of thought beyond our pinched streets, our counting-houses, the market square, and the looming shadows of our churches.

  "Now you've got the burghers’ tongues clucking again,” said Fraulein Hemmel. “You should not have been so open, asking questions all over the market today about the girl who sold those eggs. Be careful, mein Herr, people like to believe all sorts of things when they do not understand them. Your streets press upon you here. A cradle of narrow alleys and courtyards protects you, yes, but keeps you blind to what walks on the moors and in the woods outside. People do not want to know the origin of the winds that rattle their chimney-pots at night, it frightens them. They abide me only as long as I mumble and fumble and sell harmless posies. An honorable merchant, son of merchants, has much more protection, but also a longer way to fall. Once a generation or so the city demands such a fall, it is the way of things. So, be wary, mein Herr, do not stick out too much. If you do, they will hammer you back or pull you out altogether."

  I shrugged as I h
anded Fraulein Hemmel an extra Pfennig but I knew that she spoke the truth. My mother had often spoken of poor Sieveleben, the Lord Mayor's son who had fallen from grace at the time of Karl the Twelfth. He had declared his love for a merrow-maid, and was found one summer night on the beach, curled up naked but holding a long strand of seaweed. He had been sent to a sanatorium in Hamburg and never returned to Fennica Minor. At the time of the Seven Year's War, the malt-master's son had left the island because his drawings of botanical “irregularities” (walking willows? mares nesting in alder trees? we younger ones were never told) had aroused intense suspicions about his stability or honor or both. He had fled to Amsterdam and from there took service with the Dutch East India Company. He died in Java.

  About the women who had lost their way we heard less but felt more. In previous centuries some had been hung as witches in the market square. In our enlightened eighteenth century they simply vanished, off “visiting relatives” in Riga or Danzig or Hamburg. Fraulein Hemmel was right: Ollemunde's equilibrium had to be maintained at all costs, at the expense of any one of its sons or daughters. The bells must toll the hours in St. Nikolai and St. Jakobi, the ships sail in and out of the harbor, the grain and chalkstone and timber must be weighed and assayed in the customs house, the Town Council must meet every fortnight as it has since the founding in 1257. Then Ollemunders could doze in the tidal pool of their minds, rousing themselves with a spinal whinny only when absolutely necessary and just long enough to chase out the alien and unconventional.

  I pondered Fraulein Hemmel's words and vowed to speak to her more often. I affected great indifference on the next market-day and the next and the next, all throughout the summer and into the fall. The stranger who sold the eggs did not return. I did not inquire about her. I made a show of commenting on the glory of Frau Ockel's carrots and beans, the velvety sweetness of Frau Giesemann's honey, the incomparable delights of the Widow Harloff's hen's eggs (after all, I would say loudly, what other kind tastes as good?). The young woman who sold eggs faded from our minds, a one-day wonder. I began to think that she had never existed, that I had imagined her and the grebe's egg.