THE DEEP and Other Stories Hardcover - 2003

after

Here there are two tall windows, very tall, many-paned, and the gauzy white curtains swirl in the breeze, lift and fall like a breath, like a sigh. There is a faint, sweet smell, like blossoms; perhaps it is spring. The leaves on the trees also lift and sigh, all that can be seen through those windows. Sounds reach us from the street, wheels turning and hard shoes and sometimes a voice raised, calling out something, but they are muffled, all these sounds. Distant. Father told us once about the queen’s funeral, straw laid in the street to mute the sound. It is like that, and we wonder if someone has died.

how to begin

Has it ever happened to you, that you have wakened suddenly from a long, deep sleep, that it takes some time for you to realize who you are, where you are? Familiar objects, even faces, become mysterious, remote. You stumble about, trailing the fog of sleep into the waking world, and nothing makes sense. Just a few fuddled moments, if you’re lucky. Until you splash your face with cold water and recognize it again in the mirror above the basin. Until you drink a cup of tea, breathe fresh air, let routine tasks draw you back. Where do we go, in such a sleep, what is the world that we enter?

It may be France, in 1918.

survival suit

How to explain it, what it was like? The interview, and then the notice that we were accepted, the official look of it, and then the date for sailing, ten days on. A sudden twinge of panic, of dismay—ten days, such an imaginable length of time. So many things to do, to gather together, the momentum of that carried us for a while. The vaccinations and the endless lists. Blankets and heavy stockings and high boots. Coats, Thermos bottles, sewing case, flannel nightgowns. Knife. Two closely written pages listing essential equipment, with a note at the bottom reminding us that it was our patriotic duty to bring as little luggage as possible.

We laughed about that when we went to dine with Miss Reilly, and she told us how envious she was, how she wished she were setting off too. We talked about the brave boys who had given their lives, James, and the friends and brothers of people we knew. And we reminisced about our European journey, spoke of the spirit of France, of Belgium, of how much we had learned. That time we stood in the little church of San Maurizio, tears streaming down our faces, and how no one thought it strange. Miss Reilly gave us each a slim black pen that evening when we left, so we would remember to write her everything.

The next day Father took us to lunch. Someone had told him that the crossing was more dangerous than anything we’d be close to in France, so after we had eaten, he insisted on going with us to try on lifesaving suits. We saw the flicker in his eyes when the woman said that one suit could support fourteen additional people hanging on to it. But then it was gone, and he said very firmly that we would require two suits. To make him happy, we tried them on all afternoon, though it all seemed quite ridiculous. The heavy rubber suits lined with cork, the snapping steel clamps at chest and ankle, the headgear to buckle on. The woman showed us the special pockets, designed to hold bread and a flask of whiskey, and assured us that along with the fourteen hangers-on, the suit would support the person wearing it for forty-eight hours in a standing position, submerged to just above the waist. “Ophelia!” we said together when we heard this, remembering the doll we had once. The flowers we braided in her long stiff hair and how we tried to float her in the shallow stream. How she kept bobbing up to stand, petals falling everywhere, until we finally tied our heavy wet stockings around her neck and then she did float, but facedown. The trouble from Nan when she found us, not because of the stockings but because we’d been at the stream, and she hadn’t known.

We left the store with two bulky parcels, and Father seemed quite relieved that he had been able to purchase what was required to keep us safe.

the castle

Our mother was a sad woman lying on a couch, on a bed, or very occasionally wrapped in shawls and blankets in a chair on the veranda. We killed her, of course; everyone knew that.

We saw her every day, almost every day, though sometimes only a glimpse from the doorway. Her hazy face, eyes, amid the pillows in the darkened room. Nan holding our hands tightly, keeping us back. Our mother’s pale face shifting, swimming toward us through the gloom as she whispered, “Hello, my darlings.”

“Hello, my darlings,” we mocked sometimes, laughing ourselves silly as we rolled in the soft grass, collecting stains that Nan would scold us for. And we whispered it at night, lying in our narrow beds, holding hands across the gulf between us. Good night, my darling. Good night, my darling.

Our mother had a smell, something flowery over something heavier, a little sweet. We recognized it in France, or something very like it. The smell of fear, of despair, of things slowly rotting.

Our brothers said that she had been beautiful. Tall, with shining dark hair that she sometimes wore unpinned, and long silk dresses the color of every flower in the garden. When they came home from school every few months, they spent hours in her room, talking or reading to her; we heard their voices going on and on, with pauses where we imagined her own slipping in. They were much older than we were, with down already forming on their upper lips, and it seemed a different world they described. Picnics and music and parties with candlelight, a cake shaped like a Swiss mountain and mounds of strawberries. These things they told us when we were older. When we were very small they despised us, could not be left alone with us, Nan said, for fear of what might happen.

Once we performed for our mother, turning somersaults all over the front lawn. As we spun and rolled, we heard a sound we didn’t recognize; we stood, finally, looking up at the veranda, panting and brushing the hair out of our eyes. In her chair, from the midst of her blankets and shawls, our mother was laughing. She laughed until she cried, until she could hardly catch her breath, and then we stood, resting our heads near her lap, and she stroked our hair and said, “Oh, my dears, it wasn’t meant to be this way.”

So we understood that we were all under a spell. Crawling through the tangled vines in the kitchen garden we imagined them growing and growing, twining around the big stone house, blotting out the sun, growing thick and fast over the windows of the room where the princess lay sleeping for a hundred years. Smithson roared when we started to hack our way through, so we became more cautious, sitting in a sunny corner popping pods of stolen peas and imagining the prince, the white horse he would ride. How he would sweep Smithson aside and slash his way through the jungle with his sharp sword and ride through the big front door, up the curving stairs, leave his horse grazing in the hallway while he rescued the sleeping princess. Then there would be a feast with a thousand candles blazing; she would wear a sea-green gown shot with silver, and laugh and dance with the prince until morning.

The prince had blue eyes and long fair hair. Years later we found a photograph of our father as a very young man: the face was exactly what we had imagined and we were amazed, for we would never have cast our father as the prince. Or would we? Had we perhaps been shown that picture before, and if so, what did that mean? We talked about it for hours, warming our toes before the stove while a dark rain slashed at the windows, but we reached no conclusion.

Our father also had a smell. He brought it with him from the city, cigars and dust and ashes. As children we grew prickly in his presence, longing to hurl things about, to stick out our tongues, to do something shocking. But terrified too, of saying the wrong thing.

We saw him in his study, usually, before we went to bed. The shadowed room, his face lit strangely from the lamp on the desk, the piles of papers and folders and a thin curl of cigar smoke. We assumed that he blamed us too, and wished we had never been. He asked us if we had been good, if we had done all our lessons, and of course we said yes. Then he called us to him, we walked around the sides of the desk, and he circled his arms about our shoulders, planted kisses on our foreheads, first one, then the other, the scratchy tickle of his mustache. He never called us by our names, and we never tried to fool him as we did everyone else. It would have been pointless, for we were sure he didn’t know or care which was which.

When we talked about it later, those nights when the guns went on and on, we wondered if it was just that he didn’t know quite what to do with us. He had no sister, no other daughters; he may have been simply ill at ease. And busy, of course. Certainly when we were older, he would talk to us, ask us what we were reading or studying. He seemed to know things that, looking back through a rainy night, suggested he watched us, thought about us. If our mother had been there, perhaps—but then that was the whole point.

the corporal remembers

They made me think of horses—well, they would, wouldn’t they? Skittish white horses, dream horses, maybe. You know how they raise their hooves, their legs, holding them in the air, trying so hard to become weightless, not touch the ground. I can’t explain. But that’s what they made me think of. That’s all.

“What I find most compelling, even startling, about these stories is the urgency of feeling and the calm beauty of the telling.” —Alice Munro, author of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

“‘The Deep’ marks the deep strangeness of the project of being alive....It rescues the past—a particular slice of the past, the frequently limned period of the First World War—from the dead life of a museum piece....I chose this story as first among so many strong others because of its utter originality, its daring to assert the primacy of complexity and mystery, its avoidance of the current appetite for ironic anomie and thinness. It flowers entirely on its own terms, and the terms are rich and strange.” —Mary Gordon, author of The Shadow Man