Ultraviolet Page 3

  “Just a message,” he says. His English is very good. She wonders where he learned it. But she is disappointed by his answer. Does he think her a dolt? Obviously, a message. What else, if not a message?

  “Business?” she asks. She would never pry at someone’s reticence like this. She would consider it rude. But.

  The Sikh’s eyes, framed in a glance, seem exasperated. Then they disappear, because there is the increasingly steep road to attend to.

  “Business, yes. The business of the Sikh people.” A note of challenge in his voice.

  She has heard this note before: It comes with talk of politics, which are at a low simmer everywhere in this country, a miasma you can’t help but breathe.

  She doesn’t think there is an answer to his statement; what would it be? That God’s business is all people, and all people’s business is with God? She knows the Sikhs have a God, and unlike the Hindus they have just one. J.N. always says the missionaries will never make any inroads with the Sikhs. He says this cheerfully enough. He has pointed out the line waiting at the door of a gurudwara, where anyone, regardless of faith or caste, may come and receive a meal.

  The business of the Sikh people. Elsie is not in possession of the nuances. Though the British are the ones now granting the mission its land leases, J.N. is convinced that the survival of their work will be dependent on the goodwill of the natives. She understands the issue in the main, of course, the part about white skin, the Britishers’ and hers, too. But there is layer upon layer of complication, and that is where she gives up: too many factions here, Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs. The missionaries are not supposed to take sides about government, and Elsie has found it easier to be impartial if she is ignorant. They are here to nourish spirits, minds, and bellies—there is clarity for her in that. She looks away from politics like she looks away from the ultraviolet light. And they must stick with the British, at least for now, at least on paper, or all the walls they’ve raised and whitewashed could come tumbling down, the land beneath them pulled out like a tablecloth in a magician’s trick. When Mahatma Gandhi came to speak to the farmers in their district and invited the Mennonites to tea, Brother Lapp directed J.N. to write with their compliments and their regrets.

  Look away and save your sight.

  “Well, I’m glad you were able to see to it. Your business,” she says, with a sudden feeling of generosity.

  The eyes that flick to the mirror are amused. Then, after a few seconds, “You have been here for a long time?”

  Elsie sees the steamer; the gangly young man with his perfectly white minister’s collar waiting to escort her through the fetid air of the docks; the Mennonite brothers and sisters singing hymns at their wedding.

  “Yes, a long time.”

  “And you like India?” This time the eyes have something else; an edge of hard mockery. Her usual answer is Yes, very much.

  She hesitates. “Sometimes I miss where I come from.”

  “Then why not go back?”

  “We will. My husband has helped build a school for Hindu children in the plains. It has been his life’s work.”

  The eyes do not appear. But the turban nods slightly.

  “I do like India,” she says after a moment, as if he has been pressing her. “But I’d also like to go home.”

  The turban nods again, barely.

  “Maybe when your husband’s life work is finished.” When he looks in the mirror, his eyes are kind.

  Elsie’s hand rises to her throat. “Oh, dear.”

  They laugh together.

  Home is India, too, but broken in pieces. Home in Dhamtari, flat and hot, checking shoes in the morning for sleeping snakes. Home at the hill station in Landour, all of them together for the sweet season. J.N. will put down his burdens for a brief spell. There will be much baking, and the cooking of group suppers nearly every night. By day the mothers will knit, and make lists, and measure the children for clothing they will need during the school year. The children will catch beetles to race; Kathryn will frisk on the trails with the neighbor’s dog. They will all sit outside after supper, prolonging their fellowship into the twilight. When darkness comes, the adults will allow a final game of flashlight tag—just squiggles of light instead of their children, shouts and laughter blurring in the night.

  Kathryn stirs in her sleep and raises her face to look at her with half-dreaming eyes.

  “Mamma?”

  “Shhh, sweetheart. Not yet.”

  KK lowers her head again, flinging her white-linen arm across her mother’s lap. Elsie would like to remain in this moment indefinitely; her daughter tucked against her as a mother and child are meant to be. She tries not to think ahead to September—Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself—but cannot fend it off. She sees Kathryn lining up with the other Woodstock students as the mothers and fathers prepare for their descent to the road head at Kin Craig. Final kisses. Her daughter is stubborn and will stand still, not changing her face. Turning back to the path, the adults must concentrate on the uncertain ground beneath them as they pick their way.

  But Elsie, carried on her infernal dandie, will not need to look down to watch her step. She’ll see the dark-clothed backs of her fellow missionaries, bobbing in the dimness, all of them a herd of migrating animals obeying some unrelenting need to return to the plains. She’ll wonder if it is better to glance back one final time at her daughter, who has never been away from her side, whom she will not see again until Christmas, or if it is better to remain facing front. She will not have solved this riddle by the time her bearers round the bend.

  YOUR BEST YET

  Chicago, 1942

  Through the square of the train window Kathryn sees her father, whose tallness is strangely diminished on the platform. He is wearing his black overcoat over his black minister’s clothing, but is bareheaded, so his shock of white hair and long pale face seem to float amid the dimness of the station. She gives a little wave, suddenly overcome with affection for him, but he seems unable to distinguish her from the faces at other windows. He smiles in a benedictory way at all of them, his hands clasped behind his back.

  Suddenly they are moving, an effortless gliding without warning, but it turns out to be the train opposite them, a swimming sensation followed by the shock of still being in the same place after the other train slips away like a blur of silk. When she looks out her platform-side window, her father is still at attention. She doesn’t try to wave again.

  She hears the sounds of a late passenger coming up the aisle behind her seat, and can tell they are masculine sounds, the noise of someone taking up room in the world and not caring who knows it, a cheerful bumping along. The sounds stop just behind her, and she tenses a fraction.

  “Is this seat taken?” The face that bends down to speak is about her age, friendly. He is in uniform.

  “No, not at all.” She hates how even simple phrases like this sound unnatural coming from her. She hates that her face is coloring, as she knows it is, a fanning of warmth.

  The train lurches and he catches his balance. He does it easily, in the way of someone at home in a strong body. Then he hoists his suitcase up into the rack above them and flings himself into the seat.

  “That was close.”

  He is saying something else about being late, but she must turn her back on him if she is to catch a last glimpse of her father. Craning her neck, she does, barely. Her father is waving, but at all the cars now; hers has already passed him by. She presses her fingertips to the window, just above the sill, watching until he’s gone behind the posts.

  “I’m sorry, what were you saying? I was just turning to see my father.”

  “Oh, sure. Came to see you off?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’ll miss you, wherever you’re going.”

  Kathryn, who has up until this moment believed that he would not, or perhaps told herself this in order to be ab
le to leave, suddenly knows that this is so.

  “Where are you going? Wait, sorry. First things first. Mitch Myers.” He extends a hand.

  She shakes it, glad she has not yet removed her gloves. “Kathryn.”

  “Where are you headed, Kathryn?”

  “Oregon.”

  He tilts his head at her, slack-jawed in mock astonishment. “Where they have Indians? Great Scott, I thought you were going to say Chicago, or maybe Milwaukee. What takes you all the way out there?”

  She knows which Indians he is thinking of, though the fact that the word always means something different to her first is a perpetual gulf between herself and others. Even when she thinks she is all finished catching up.

  “I’m going to visit my brother and his wife for a while.” She doesn’t add that she is going to find a job, live there on her own. Not even her brother Russell knows that. She’s been working on the mental picture of herself doing this for over a year, so that the Kathryn off in Oregon seems almost like a separate being from her, someone established in the greater world. She is looking forward to joining up with that person.

  He whistles. “Well, that’s an adventure.”

  “Where are you off to?”

  “Back to Fort Custer. I had a leave for my sister’s wedding.”

  She could pursue the wedding conversation or the soldiering one. One direction might lead unnervingly back to neighbors, churches, schooling, friends in common.

  “Have you been in the army long?”

  “Just finished up my basic. Won’t be long now before they ship me out.”

  His voice ends on a slightly mournful note. She reverses course, asks him about the wedding and he turns enthusiastic. He has a lot of sisters, three or four—she loses track when he is naming and describing them—and he is the baby, and, she gathers, the apple of various eyes, and he grew up on a farm, where they had the reception after the wedding, and yes, it does turn out that her aunt Lena and uncle Manny would probably know his parents as the farms aren’t that far apart, but—thank lucky stars—they did go to separate high schools, Mitch in Peoria, Kathryn in East Peoria. She wouldn’t have liked to have him slap his forehead in sudden recollection to say, Of course I remember you! She doesn’t want to be remembered from then, spots on her chin and forehead, extra pounds from the ice cream shop where she scooped sundaes, almost mute that first year when she was around new people. The gulf between India and America was so wide she could scarcely see past it. She remembers staring at all the green and silver money, trying to do the math in rupees. The ice cream shop finally cured that; hitting the SALE button again and again on the cash register: Forty cents equaled one banana split. She began from there until she finally had an understanding of the worth of everything else. Then she’d sit down on her break, spooning up butter brickle, a textbook open in front of her as a decoy while she surreptitiously tried to acquire her fourth language, that of American teenagers speaking boisterously to one another.

  But Mitch back then was at his own high school, carrying the football—she sees his head ducked in determination, ball tucked close as he sorts through the crush of opponents. His would have been one of the happy, loud voices in full possession of the currency and slang. There is the possibility that he could have sat at one of the crowded tables in her ice cream shop after a game. But she was invisible then, so she has no worries about him remembering that.

  She is suddenly hot. She is not that girl with the ice cream scoop, has not been for several years now, but thinking of that girl has made her hot. She makes motions to shed her coat, a new one, an elegant shawl-collared wrap like you’d find in the movies she is not allowed to see. She bought it with her earnings as a schoolteacher, the one beautiful thing to come out of that unsuccessful year. It is not a schoolteacher’s coat. It is not a Mennonite’s coat.

  “Here, let me help you with that.”

  She twists a little, rising from her seat as he expertly slides the coat from her shoulders. She sees him stroke the blond mohair as he says, “Very nice, we don’t want that to get dirty.”

  He stands and flips it inside out at the shoulders, so only the lining shows and the coat is divided into a long third of itself, a column of caramel satin. Then he folds it in thirds again lengthwise, tucking the hem section up first so that when he finishes it is a compact, shimmering lozenge.

  “I learned that in the army,” Mitch says. “I’m just going to put it right here between our bags. That way it won’t slide.”

  She wants to protest that now the lining, the part next to her skin, will be the side to get soiled, but she does see the logic of the inside-out move. Her father said nothing about the glamorous coat when she brought it home, except he hoped it was practical enough, being so light colored. She will not write and tell him that a soldier knew how to save its appearance.

  “It’s funny what they teach you,” he said, settling in beside her again. “The first day was all about our things. We had to mark our initials on everything in a designated place for that particular article of clothing, then we had to roll each piece a certain way so that when you opened the drawer the same part was showing.”

  “My goodness. Did you do that when you went home on leave? Was your mother surprised?”

  “Man, was she ever!” Mitch laughed to himself. “I wasn’t exactly the tidiest one of her kids. She couldn’t get over it. Kind of made her feel a little different about me being in the army.”

  Kathryn remembers how they were told to make their beds a certain way at boarding school in Landour. How they were shown the right method to put away their clothes. She was eight then; old enough, her father had said.

  “Of course, she’s still not crazy about it. But you know how mothers are. Your mother must be worried about you making this long trip on your own.”

  Kathryn by now has had almost three year’s practice saying it. She knows how to modulate the sentence to impose the least amount of burden on the listener.

  “Oh, geez. Gosh, I’m sorry,” he says.

  She is touched by the fact that Mitch looks not so much embarrassed as struck. Exactly as if someone had struck him physically. Part of her job now is to glance sympathetically at the nonplussed person, to console.

  “Thank you,” she tells him. After acknowledging the effort to comfort her, she must help him leave the painful subject. “She’d been ill for a few years.”

  “Oh, that’s tough.” But the words have had their magic effect. Something is relieved in him: that perhaps she’d had time to get used to it, that maybe it was for the best, to end her mother’s suffering.

  Her mother did suffer, no question. But she also had fun, right up to the final stroke that took her all at once. Kathryn would wheel her chair next to the kitchen counter, so she could supervise the making of a red devil’s cake, always the kind that church committees demanded Elsie bring, the special recipe that had been adjusted in the margins for both Himalayan and Illinois altitudes. They would count the strokes of the spatula together as Kathryn worked the batter, Elsie’s voice hoarse and the words slurred. They’d dissolve into fits of laughter, her mother’s more of a croak, when they got lost in the counting, and finally would just agree when it looked right. Even though she wasn’t supposed to have many sweets or fats in her condition, her mother would always taste whatever Kathryn made, working her mouth slowly, the good side chewing with judicious deliberation. Always the same slow and effortful pronouncement: “Your best yet.” Kathryn was the only one who could understand every word—not always on the first try, but she wouldn’t abandon any utterance her mother had worked so hard to make until she had turned it around from every angle and imagined her way so far into her mother’s thoughts that it would suddenly appear before her, in plain, crisp English.

  “Thank you,” Kathryn says again. Now it is finished, and she is allowed to change the subject, which she does. She gets him going on the farm again, which he intends to return to after
the war. As the only son, he will work with his father until it’s his to run. His enthusiasm makes him easy to talk to. She lets his words run over her, only half-listening, because she can supply the correct questions at the correct intervals. She knows farming from her aunts and uncles and cousins on her mother’s side. Her parents didn’t farm, of course, though her father came from a long line of Old Order Mennonites in Pennsylvania who did. Her father is a modern sort, a kind of businessman for God. A minister, yes, but always also a treasurer or secretary general of this or that, running the business of the mission. When they came home from India he had his talks to give, raising funds for the school in Dhamtari, or some village relief plan, or a new church. He is on boards and committees, and was made a bishop. He wrote his memoirs and couldn’t find a publisher but had them printed up, selling signed copies at his lectures. A celebrity of sorts. Her mother was just grateful to be home, reunited with her sisters, able to unpack once and for all. She’d been home just two years before the first stroke.

  “That must have been quite a sight,” Kathryn says, of the cow picked up by the tornado and placed back down in a neighbor’s pasture. She is just marking her place in the conversation, but forgets herself, and says, “We missed that one. We weren’t back yet in ’33.”

  Then—drat it—she has to explain. Mitch, unfortunately, is not just wrapped up in himself; he’s interested. Wants the details of their years in India. Can’t believe she lived more than half her life there.

  He gives a low whistle. “You don’t look like a Mennonite,” he whispers.

  Kathryn giggles, and doesn’t redden.

  “That’s the idea,” she whispers back.

  Oh, it is delicious, this riding on a train talking to a soldier. The fact of her new permanent wave, which for once got the bangs to curl just right, is delightful. As is the new coat, its soft nap staying spotless in the overhead rack. It strikes her that she is already acting more like the knowing and worldly woman she has conjured for herself waiting in Oregon, and less like the self-conscious, awkward girl left behind in East Peoria. Moreover, she is for the first time on her own in this interval, having left her father and not yet arrived at her brother. Even in college, there were housemothers watching on a daily basis, frowning over the dormitory sign-out log.