Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [41]
Head aswirl, as the last fire of the season burned down to orange piñon coals, balmy and sweet smoking ash in the corner hearth of the bedroom, she whispered to him, knowing he was asleep, “I made all that up about those other guys. I never had any lover but you.”
Then she, too, fell asleep, having wrapped up the day in a ribbon of truth.
By the end of the letter, Ariel’s fingers were frozen. On a close warm moonful summer night, at that. Yet another gin, whose ice melted in the glass, stood on the wide arm of the Adirondack chair. Shouldn’t be drinking like this. Look what it’s done to Grandmother McCarthy. She took another gulp, saying aloud to the fireflies, “Stop,” though she didn’t heed her own advice, deciding instead this might be the perfect night to get stinking plastered.
No one who conceals transgressions will prosper, that passage quoted by Kip’s friend, from the Bible—she’d heard it before. Granna, of course. Gin on the rocks and the Holy Scripture had always been her twin stalwarts, no matter how much Brice complained about having to run their gauntlet his whole life. Still, Ariel recalled how Granna’s ginny interpretations of the Bible were something to hear that first time she flew by herself out to Los Alamos for a visit. Face blossoming and eyes weepy with conviction and liquor, Brice’s mother happily clarified for her son’s receptive daughter any textual questions the young lady might have about the Pauline epistles. Lecturing away, she stared at the adobe walls of her kitchen, walls white as the clay pipe she puffed. Ariel listened amazed, then was amazed the more by the woman’s brusque switch from one subject to another in the anemic air of that mesa where she lived, having stayed on long after her only son left. From her beloved Saint Paul’s—Kiplike?—wanderings and his awful crucifixion spiked head-down to a wooden cross, to other scandalous matters such as why the devil Ariel’s parents hadn’t given her a brother or sister, Granna progressed like a grand peremptory army of one.
—Your father says he’s an atheist but you know he isn’t.
—He thinks of God in his own way.
—No offense, Ariel, but why didn’t they? Have other children, that is.
What did Granna see on the wall there? Ariel’d wondered. It was as if she were reading its blank page as she drew deep on her pipe and blew out a cloud that spread over its surface, like airy fingers deciphering braille.
—Maybe one of me was more than enough, the young woman said, looking at her own fingers splayed on the pearlescent kitchen table, then glancing up to marvel at the polished silver knobs of the vintage McCarthy stove. Her grandmother’s kitchen was cluttered, much like Aunt Bonnie’s—Granna had provided Brice with a sibling—with a lifetime of human accumulation. Tins of Jackson of Piccadilly tea and of Fauchon Bourbon’s Preparation Aromatisée stood behind glass in canisters sent from New York, part of her son’s annual Thanksgiving parcel. Colanders, birds’ nests, herb wreaths. Granna liked things that came from places she might never visit—such as the postcard her son had mailed from Prague—and from people she’d never see in this world again—roses, now dried and dangling upside down, had been a gift from her late husband on some long-ago birthday. Her place was full of stuff but spotless. Immaculate as the Conception, pristine as her glass of Tanqueray. A long minute passed, measured by a ticktocking clock, while Ariel watched her grandmother frown at the wall calendar. What a magnificent, eccentric woman, she thought as she waited in the densely metered quiet for what would come next.
Finally Brice’s mother said with assurance, though perhaps