A House Like A Lotus Part 22

out. The light breeze from the sea, and the moving air from the fan in the room, met and blew across me. I slid into sleep.

The breeze from the Mediterranean blew over me, blew through the window of the car in which I was sitting. No. Not the Mediterranean breeze, but a stronger wind from the Atlantic, spattering me with raindrops as I sat huddled in Ursula Heschel's car, parked outside Beau Allaire. I sat there in the humid hothouse of the car and waited. What else could I do? It was still pouring, although the electrical storm had pa.s.sed over. I couldn't walk very far-I noticed blood and saw that I'd cut my foot on a broken sh.e.l.l, a deep, ragged gash.

All I had on was a too-small, very wet nightgown.

I felt tired as though I had been running for hours. A wave of sleep washed over me, and I gave in to it, as into death.

Ursula woke me. 'Polly. Child. You'd better come in.'

I didn't want to wake up.

'Polly. Come.' 'I want to go home.'

'No,' Ursula said.

'Please. I want to go home.'

'I can't take you this way. Your nightgown is soaked. Your parents are expecting you to spend the night here.'

'No.'

'Polly, child, I know that you are shocked and horrified by what happened. I am, too.'

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I couldn't hear Ursula's shock, or any but my own.

'Please take me home.'

Ursula got in the driver's side of the car and sat beside me but did not touch me. 'Child, I'm sorrier than I can say for what Max-'

A funny little mewling noise came out of me, but no words.

'Poor child. Poor little one.' Ursula lifted one hand as though to pet me, then drew back. 'It wasn't Max doing any of-of what she did. It was pain and alcohol and fear . . .' I didn't answer, and there was a long silence. Finally Ursula spoke in a low voice. 'Max, unlike the true alcoholic, will not sleep it off and forget what happened. She will remember everything. I wish she could forget.

I.

wish you could.'

I looked at her.

'Come.' Ursula spoke with her authoritarian doctor's voice.

I followed her in. I didn't see Max.

'What's wrong with your foot?'

I looked down, and there was blood on the soft green of the Chinese rug. 'I cut it, on a sh.e.l.l, I think.'

Ursula took me into the kitchen, washed my foot, and bandaged it. Warmed some milk. I took a sip and nearly threw up.

'I'm going to give you a mild sedative,' she said.

'No-Daddy-'

'I agree with your father. I do not use a sedative unless I consider it absolutely necessary. You must get some sleep.'

I don't remember how we got from the kitchen to the green guest room. It was as though fog had rolled in from the ocean and obliterated everything.

'I've brought you a nightgown,' Ursula said, and 206.

helped me into it, much simpler than Max's satin one, but more elegant than my old seersucker.

Did she kiss me good night? I don't think she touched me. The sedative must have been working. Everything was blurred. I thought I heard someone crying, but I wasn't sure whether the sound came from me or from Max.

I closed my eyes.

Saw Max running after me with the Laughing Christ cradled like a baby in her arms, saw the statue fall, crashing, down an endless flight of stairs- My scream woke me.

A woman came hurrying toward me from the path which ran just below the balconies. "Hoy! What's wrong?"

I looked at her in confusion as she jumped up onto the balcony. "I think I had a nightmare." "This heat is enough to give you one. You're Polly O'Keefe, aren't you? I'm Virginia Porcher." She p.r.o.nounced it the French way, Por-shay.

"Oh-Mrs. Porcher-I love your writing-"

"Not Mrs. Porcher. Virginia. Or Vee, as most people call me. We're all on a first-name basis here. You'll understand why when you hear the last names of some of the delegates-they make me understand why most people p.r.o.nounce my last name as though it were the back porch. Simplify, simplify. And I understand you prefer being called Polly to Polyhymnia?"

I smiled at her. "Wouldn't you?"

"I think you could probably carry Polyhymnia, but 207.

I sympathize. Polly. Krhis tells me you'll be helping me with the writing workshop, among your many other ch.o.r.es."

"Yes, anything I can do to help, anything at all."

"I expect there'll be a good deal. I hope this heat breaks. It's not at all seasonable. It's usually pleasantly warm during the day, and cool at night, by late September. Weather all over the world seems to be changing drastically.

Why don't you come along to my room? Since I'm a workshop leader, I have the privilege of a room to myself. Krhis will have a folder for you at the staff meeting, but I thought you might like a preview of the schedule." She was chatting away, giving me time to wake up, to move out of the horror of the nightmare.

Virginia Bowen Porcher, one of my favorite writers, who wrote novels about people who were flawed but with whom you could identify, dealing with all aspects of the human being, the dark as well as the light, but never leaving you in a pit of despair. And in the simplest possible words and images she wrote poems which seemed almost light on the surface, and then, when you backed away from them, the fact that they were neither light nor simple kicked you in the teeth. Max compared Porcher's work to Mozart. When I told Miss Zeloski that Virginia Porcher was leading a workshop, that in itself was enough to get Miss Zeloski to urge the princ.i.p.al to let me take the month away from school.

And here Virginia Porcher was asking me to call her by her first name, and looking-well! Now that I had recovered enough from the nightmare to look at her, I saw that she had red hair. Not blatantly red like mine; it was much more subtle. But still, it was red. She had green eyes, really green, as my eyes are really blue. She 208.

wore a full cotton skirt with a tiny millefiori print, and a peasant blouse.

Meeting one of your favorite writers in the world can be scary. It's so easy to be let down. But I felt elated. I liked her, liked her as well as admired her.

And she had red hair.

Her room was almost identical to mine. One of the twin beds was covered with books and papers. "My filing system." She picked up a blue folder, opened it, and handed it to me, and I looked at the typed schedule. Three workshops in the morning, with an hour before lunch for swimming. An hour for lunch, an hour for rest, and three more workshops in the afternoon. The evening meal. An evening program. A full schedule, indeed. The writing workshop was the first one of the day, at nine in the morning.

"This weather knocks out swimming at noon." Virginia Porcher sat on her bed, indicating the desk chair for me. "It's a twenty-minute walk to the sea, and it's much too hot under the broiling noonday sun. I've been taking my swim at bedtime, but Krhis won't be able to come with me now that the staff is all here.

He'll have his hands full. This is a glorious place for a conference, isn't it?"

I nodded, looking around the room. On one of the desks was a picture of a man with dark hair and a kind, sensitive face. He must be her husband. He looked like the right kind of person to be married to one of my favorite writers.

"My sister-in-law, who's holding the fort at home, asked, 'Why Cyprus?' and I told her it's more or less a mean point geographically for the delegates.

But, also, if the conference were being held in-say, Detroit- I wouldn't have accepted the invitation to lead a work- 209.

shop. Krhis says you've had a week in and around Athens?"

"Yes. The Iliad and the Odyssey- all the Greek myths -everything means much more to me than it did. I'm overawed."

"That's a good reaction. So am I. No matter how many times I come to Greece or the islands, I'm swept out of the limited world of technocracy and into the wildness of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses and centaurs and nymphs. We'll have a full moon this weekend and you'll understand anew why the moon has so often been an object of worship. The moon G.o.ddess, beneficent while she is waxing, harsh while she is waning. Astarte fascinates me. She was a Syrian G.o.ddess, but her worship spread to Greece. Aphrodite is, I guess, her Greek counterpart, though she isn't as much a.s.sociated with the moon. So. How is Ursula Heschel?"

That startled me. "Fine, I guess. You know her?"

"I'm one of her more remarkable miracles. I had an aneurism which would have been inoperable before microsurgery, and even with all science now knows, it was a risky business. It was a long surgical procedure, and a very long recovery, and Ursula and I became friends. And then, of course, I met Max. And through Urs and Max I met Krhis Ghose when he was in New York. A conference like this tends to be very small-worldy. You're here because of Max, aren't you?"

"Yes." Beneficent while waxing, harsh while waning.

"How old are you?"

"Nearly seventeen. I'm a slow developer."

Virginia Porcher stretched out long, suntanned legs, wriggling her toes under the sandal straps. "I was, too. Still am. Some people say that we slow developers end up going further than the quick-flowering ones."

210.

I nodded. I hoped she was right.

"Are you interested in writing?"

"I don't think so. I enjoy it, but I'm not pa.s.sionate about it. I like acting, really a lot, but I know it's an awfully chancy field. What I'm best at is languages, but I don't want to be a teacher, and I don't think I want to be a simultaneous translator at the UN because I'm an island girl-"

"Manhattan's an island."

"Oh. I guess I mean small islands with low-density population."

She laughed, a nice, warm laugh, not at all at me. "You still have time.

Sometimes it's not an advantage to have too many talents." She reached down to scratch a bite on her leg. "Watch out for the bugs here. They're not bad during the day, but they're monstrous at night, and they love American blood."

"I'm pretty used to bugs," I said. "Benne Seed Island's off South Carolina-so I'm used to heat, too."

"You'll find"-she nodded-"when the delegates arrive that you'll be spending these next weeks with people who have experienced a great deal of life under conditions where personal freedom as we know it is hardly even a dream. When I.

fuss because the bathwater here is tepid, it chastens me when I remember that some of the delegates don't even have indoor plumbing. This dormitory building is going to seem wildly luxurious to most of them." She stood up. "I've got work to do now before we meet at five. By the way, a word of warning." I paused by the door. "The tap water here is quite saline, and you won't be able to drink much of it. And this heat that clamped down on us today isn't supposed to let up for a while. There's a little shop outside the monastery gates and up the hill where you can buy sodas. And if 211 /.

you have any other questions, trivial or cosmic, don't hesitate to ask me."

"Thanks," I said, still feeling too shy about calling Virginia Bowen Porcher by her first name to call her anything. "Thanks a lot."

I took the master key and made up the beds in three more rooms. Even though I opened the windows, I was still streaming with sweat, so I went back to my room and sat at the desk to record meeting Virginia Bowen Porcher in my journal for Miss Zeloski.

For Miss Zeloski? Max. Even though Max would never read it, the journal was also for Max.

Because of Max's insight into someone she'd never even met, I was able to see Miss Zeloski as someone who hadn't had many breaks in life, someone who'd wanted a family, and children, and instead lived alone. Or, as I found out when Max prodded me, not alone but with an elderly father she supported and cared for.

She was intelligent, and she'd probably have been a good college English teacher, but here she was, stuck in Cowpertown because of her father, teaching a lot of kids who weren't particularly interested in all she had to give. I hadn't been, until Max opened my eyes. I'd been as bad as the rest.

Here, in Osia Theola, I was on my own, making up my own mind about the people I.

was meeting, and learning that making up my own mind, just me, Polly, wasn't even possible. As I tried to describe Virginia Porcher to Miss Zeloski, I was seeing not only through my own eyes but through Max's, and through Miss 212 Zeloski's. And that was all right, too, because it gave an added dimension to what I was writing.

Left completely to myself, how much would I have noticed beyond the fact that Virginia Porcher had red hair? Would I have seen the kindness with which she drew me out of the nightmare?

But I didn't write about the nightmare, the Laughing Christ falling, falling.

I described the papers on Virginia Porcher's bed, and the small typewriter on the desk, with a pile of ma.n.u.scripts beside it. I wished I'd dared ask her if she was working on a new novel.

I told Miss Zeloski she probably was, and that what struck me most was how natural she was, not a bit a prima donna, but as simple as her own work. As deceptively simple?

Norine Fong Mar called for me a little before five, as promised. "Okeydokey, time to go." She wore, now, a long yellow cotton print dress with a Chinese collar, the skirt slit, with braid at the sides, and looked far more exotic than when I had first met her.

The meeting was in the golden stone building by the monastery gates. We gathered in a sizable room on the second floor, where Krhis was already sitting by a table, with Virginia Porcher next to him. She smiled at me and patted the chair by hers.

"Vee tells me the two of you had a good talk," Krhis said.

"Yes. She showed me the schedule and helped fill me in." She had done far more than that, but I was em- 213.

barra.s.sed to say, "She was wonderful." Could I let her be wonderful, and human, too?

"Good." On the table by him was a pile of blue folders, and Norine handed me one.

"Here you are. One of our delegates is already here, Omio Heno from Baki.

There are only two days a week when he can fly out, so he will be with us this weekend."

"I'm not sure where Baki is," I said.

Krhis answered, "It's one of those numerous islands north of Australia. It used to belong to Australia, and there are still many Britishers there in supervisory positions. Omio is in his mid-twenties, and very talented."

Norine added, "His English is considerably better than that of many of the delegates, and he devours books as we send them to him. He works in adult education, not an easy job, as the level of literacy is still very low on Baki."

Virginia Porcher suggested, "Perhaps the Australians wanted to keep it low.