The Unfinished World Read online

  The jazz babies still listen to jazz but are no longer an act, no longer a pair. They still share a room but Patty has strung a bedsheet across the middle of it, halving it neatly, and they do not cross into each other’s spaces. Patty keeps her pearls and poison lists and Gershwin records stockpiled in a locked drawer, and Cat has no idea her sister still has nefarious notions. Cat keeps her toe shoes and Fats Waller records in plain sight. Neither sister knows where Hard-Hearted Hannah has gone. It seems somehow to be the part of the sisters that disappeared in the split.

  One night, Patty comes home very drunk from a party and passes out on the divan. The menswear salesman and their mother are due back any moment from bridge club, and Cat does not know what to do. She looks at the clock, at the door, at her sister’s face, sweet and young in such sleep, even under the rouge and the lipstick and the jeweled headband. She dithers and waits—she has not touched her sister in months, not a kiss or a hug or a caress—but finally she hoists Patty by the armpits and half-walks, half-drags her to their bedroom. She is surprised by her twin’s weight—when did Patty get so solid? But they finally make it, and Patty is laid out on the bed, and Cat removes her boots and stockings, her dress and girdle, as gently as a lover would. Patty snores like an old woman. When she is laid out, fully bare, Cat stares at this new body, no longer a mirror of her own. They have different muscles now, different thin and fat places, different soft and hard places. Cat pulls the covers up to her sister’s chin and kisses her forehead. Patty’s eyes pop open, just for a moment, flicker into consciousness. I think, she says to Cat—the first words she has spoken in six months to her twin—I think I will let you live.

  Later that night, when Cat is tucked in her own bed and dreaming of riding in the wealthy farm boy’s Model Q, her sister suddenly intrudes. In the dream, they are driving around a sharp corner, and Patty appears just around the bend, planted in the middle of the pavement. They stop the car and realize, too late, that Patty is holding an ax behind her back. She swings, and swings, until the farm boy is a bloody blur on the road, and then she turns to Cat. I think I will let you live, she says, and Cat kneels on the pavement beside the farm boy’s remains. She puts her trembling hands over his body, butterflies over flame. His body is so warm still, her own hands warm over the heat of it. Behind her, the car is dead, its arteries grown cold.

  The Cemetery for Lost Faces

  Louise and Clarence are pinning butterflies to a board. Louise’s eyes are wide in appreciation of the markings, orange and gold, but Clarence’s are closed. He doesn’t want to see the flightless wings. Louise takes his hand and squeezes it, tells him it’s okay. The pins don’t hurt them, she says. They’re dead.

  Clarence understands that his older sister is brave and he is not. And even at two years old he adores her. Even at two he knows she is the sky and all the stars scattered over it. He squeezes back. The siblings are beautiful in the light, golden and brown sprites in tattered jeans. Their mother frowns and says to their father, They should be in school, with other children. This is when their mother was still speaking to their father, if only just.

  School! Their father laughs. This is school. And they’re learning what’s important, not a lot of nonsense. They’re learning how to live in the world.

  Are they, their mother says. Or are they learning to leave it?

  You would know, says their father, and for just a moment the sun falls out of the sky. The two parents make stone figures, faces turned downward; life-sized gargoyles against the gray. Pain ripples through the space where they stand, frigid air in the lungs and nostrils.

  Then suddenly, the sun is back, and the warmth is back, and the blue and brown and gold is back. Their father laughs, and the world is tipped back toward summer once more.

  It just goes to show, people said later. It just goes to show how fairy tales always stop too soon in the telling.

  Others said it was never a fairy tale at all. Anyone could see that. They were all too lovely, too obviously doomed.

  But the wisest said, that’s exactly what a fairy tale is. The happily-ever-after is just a false front. It hides the hungry darkness inside.

  The funeral was the first thing they’d ever wanted to forget. Yet with the bodies came the unbidden hoarding of memories, the desire to consume and digest their parents’ histories whole. With the bodies came the beginnings of silence, too, though neither of them much minded. Preservation of the past requires a monastic sort of quiet. A hushed pause in dusty rooms.

  Before the service Louise found Clarence weeping over their mother’s coffin, trying to pry open the lid. They’re sealed shut, Clarence, she told him, grasping his hands, pulling them hard. He jerked and shuddered and his face fell into shadow. How can we remember what they looked like? he asked, and the question was acid in Louise’s veins.

  Clarence and Louise were not children, but they were still young when their parents drove into a ravine and died. They were still left very much alone.

  Clarence is already tall as a man, with small, restless hands. He begs bones and horns from the slaughterhouse, carves things like combs, hairpins, buttons and figurines. Louise sits beside him in their playroom, stretching scraps of hide over plaster-of-Paris frames.

  Clarence and Louise are trapping death in amber. They are learning how to make time stop.

  Home has always been less house than sideshow gallery, a careless museum of strange objects and curiosities, filled to the brim with cheap knickknacks and sentimental turn-of-the-century souvenirs by the hoarding habits of their great-great-grandfather and his wife.

  There is a room full of sea battle dioramas, another jammed with full-size decorative staircases to nowhere. There are halls lined with ceramic dolls and jelly jars, hurdy-gurdies and Chinese puzzle boxes, tiny ivory elephants and jeweled fans. The ballroom contains a life-sized mechanical music hall orchestra that still wheezes out “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” when you put a quarter in the slot. And the parlor is given over to the display of Victorian taxidermy tableaux. Bird-weddings and classrooms full of kittens, frogs jumping rope—the kind of extreme anthropomorphism in which the Victorians excelled. (Louise and Clarence’s great-great-uncle was a taxidermist, famous for his depictions of Beatrix Potter’s stories. Their father took up the family calling as well, though he was not in the business of animating picture books. He specialized in mounting trophies for wealthy big-game hunters and museums.)

  When she was very young, perhaps four or five, Louise had been given one of the valuable antique taxidermy pieces for her very own. Her father brought it down soberly from the attic and placed it on the mantel above her hearth. It was a tableau of the story of Thumbelina, in rough chronological order, and showed Thumbelina emerging from the flower; Thumbelina, asleep in her walnut-shell cradle, carried off by the toad and her son; Thumbelina being rescued by the fish and the butterfly; Thumbelina on the swallow’s back; Thumbelina and the flower-fairy prince at the wedding, butterflies and finches dancing attendance.

  Small Louise had been fascinated by the tableau, the animals caught in strange, unnatural poses. She did not care for fairy tales, but she was caught by the lifelike appearance of the creatures and wondered how her great-great-uncle had managed to achieve such a feat. Every day she would study the tiny feathers, the jet beads carefully glued in for eyes, the delicate feet and fins. She studied, Louise, and when she learned to sketch, the Thumbelina creatures were the first thing she drew.

  Clarence hated the tableau. Clarence was too softhearted to stand the sight of these long-dead creatures, kept in a mockery of life, their own feathers and fur a double prison. But that was Clarence for you. Louise was made, as her father said, of sterner stuff.

  Today is the day that Tony comes with the money. His driver and the other man—Jackson, Louise thinks he is called—stay in the big truck but through the window she can see a small black handgun resting on Jackson’s lap. The truck has made deep furrows in the road, still soft and wet from the rain yes
terday.

  Tony is pacing in front of the house now, waiting for the delivery. Waiting for Clarence. He looks up, sees her at the window, waves. He knows she will be watching because she always is. She does not wave back. She never waves back. She does not like Tony, and not because she’s afraid of him. Not exactly. He thinks he is fearsome. She has nicknamed him Tony the Tiger and he thinks it’s a compliment.

  She watches Clarence head over to the carriage house, emerge with the enormous crate on a dolly. She watches him exchange the crate for Tony’s cash, watches Tony the Tiger’s flashing smile as he heaves the crate into the truck bed, watches the debris the wheels kick up as they slash through the mud and sludge.

  Louise at fourteen: quiet, moon-faced, skinny white limbs with prominent veins running through them. Big nose, big eyes, small mouth, pushing long hair out of her face as she helps Father brush the fur of a Siberian tiger.

  Father at forty: garrulous, charming, handsome, and mustachioed, dancing through a series of professional and personal failures. He lectures his daughter on the tiger’s mating habits, explains how important it is that they respect this creature, teach others to respect it. That is what we do, Louise, he tells her, and his eyes are merry and brown and his fingers are light and small as those of the ladies who make lace in the historical village. He, too, is making something lovely: life, complex and grave and astounding.

  Not alive, he tells Louise, he is always telling Louise. We cannot strive for them to look like life.

  Then what? she asks, puzzled. Her eyes are perfect mirrors of his. What should they look like?

  Like a dream, her father says proudly, for he thinks of himself as a maker of dreams. The dream of a tiger, the dream of a rhino, the dream of a squirrel. The perfect form that preceded all the real tigers and rhinos and squirrels.

  Louise at fourteen, shy before such brilliance, asks her father if there is a perfect form for everything in the dream. Even me? she asks.

  Louise at thirty-four cannot remember now what answer her father made her, no matter how she opens her brain and shakes out the contents like an overstuffed handbag. Louise at thirty-four cannot remember.

  It costs an enormous amount of money to keep up the estate, even without servants. There’s the lawn service to pay, the estate taxes, the plumbing company because these old pipes are forever breaking, the roofers because this old roof is forever leaking, and a thousand other costs besides.

  And of course, there are the property taxes. Those, finally, prompted Louise to accept the offer from a friend of a friend: to meet privately with a very famous installation artist. Noel needed a discreet, talented taxidermist. His previous taxidermist had just died, No, not that sad, dear, he was good lord nearly a hundred so don’t worry about that, but we need a new and brilliant one now, don’t we? Noel speaks often in the royal “we,” though his bizarre Brooklyn/posh London mash of an accent sounds more like a bad imitation of both.

  She has always considered herself an artist, anyway, and she doesn’t like the limelight, so this arrangement suits them both perfectly. Noel pays her well, she pays the property taxes, and she can continue doing exactly what she likes and allowing Clarence to do the same.

  And she likes Noel. They are alike, very much alike, except that he is commercially minded and she is not. He is passionate about Audubon and says frankly if he were a better painter he would probably not be so bloody famous. He lost his little boy to brain cancer and his first wife left him six months later. Louise and he have sex sometimes on the floor of her workshop, surrounded by dead teeth and dead skin and the strong smell of formaldehyde. It’s not really a fetish so much as it is a pact of sadness, a shared wish to sail through the underworld and rescue the ones who left them long ago.

  Louise is a scientist. She is experimenting with new things, working toward a greater knowledge of the world, a vague sort of natural philosopher in her way.

  Clarence is an archivist. He collects and makes and organizes to preserve the past. He is working toward an understanding of the world through the memories it already holds.

  Brother and sister look nothing alike. A full five years separates them, but no one would blame you for mistaking their unusual, unspoken closeness for the bond between twins.

  The space between her and Clarence is a world. Sometimes she thinks they are the sun and moon, each rising when the other dies, each dependent on the other’s careful sleep. Together, she thinks, they are two strange creatures, and yet it is only together that they keep this place in a tense stasis; they are the precarious balance by which the estate holds steady.

  Clarence at fifteen tries to be brave, just the once. He takes instruction from Louise, and he is, at first, an excellent pupil. His sculptor’s hands have always learned to wing their way through solid substance, and at first, soft rabbit skin is much easier to carve than clay.

  But then he vomits into the bucket where the guts go, runs from the room, lays his hot face against the pillow and weeps. For himself? For the hare? Louise does not know. She knows she should go to him, but she is her father in so many ways and when she cannot fill a space with words, she will not fill it at all. She cannot help but scorn his softness.

  Louise is working on a blue finch when Clarence enters the room, hands gray as a corpse’s with packed-in clay. Are you having any luck? he asks politely. He knows she hates doing birds-in-flight. She can never get the feathers to lie as they should.

  Louise sighs and puts her brush down gently. Smoke, she says, and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. She packs them and peels open the top, slides one out and slips it between her lips in a graceful way Clarence always admires. He wonders, sometimes aloud and sometimes not, why his pretty, interesting sister has never married. She just smiles enigmatically in a way meant to discomfit him, meant to grab him by the apron strings and tie him tight to the fluttering strips of heart she still has left.

  Clarence, she asks, cigarette dangling, when is Tony coming next?

  Thursday, he says. He’s dropping off another dog for the Big Man.

  Louise laughs. Do we have to call him the Big Man, just because Tony does?

  I don’t know his real name, says Clarence. Don’t even know what he looks like. Big Man is fine with me. I met his wife, though. She came up with Tony last time. She’s a rhinestone. Must be half his age. He smiles, a soft, happy smile.

  Louise doesn’t like that smile.

  Their working theory is Russian mafia, but really they have no idea who the Big Man is. He found Louise, and he’s brought in a few hunting trophies and paid plenty for them. He also keeps dozens of whippets, and when they die he likes to immortalize them in his vast, unseen mansion.

  Be careful, says Louise, and blows smoke in Clarence’s face. She leans back and watches it swirl across the air between the two of them, catching and distorting his kind features like a fog. You be careful with the Big Man’s things.

  Louise’s father first taught her how to preserve and make dreams of the dead. But before she was allowed to touch an animal for reconstruction she was made to learn the basics: anatomy, sculpting, painting, tanning. She learned the long history of taxidermy, even took the train with her father to the Museum of Natural History in the city, so that he could show her the work of the best artists in the country.

  She studied Carl Akeley, William T. Hornaday, Walter Potter and Edward Hart, Roland Ward and the specimens he preserved for Audubon. She learned how to cast a form, how the life in eyes died so you had to make new ones from glass, how to glue on whiskers, and how to extract and reattach teeth. She even learned the best way to clean a skull, how to breed the kind of bacteria that would eat all the meat right off the bone. She paced the woods with her sketchbook, storing the kinetic movement of bodies in dead ink, in her living hands. She got used to the smell of blood, the smell of guts, the smell of the meat that had to die before the body could live again.

  Shouting outside. Honking. Tony the Tiger and his crew again. She throws a bed jacket
over her slip because she has suddenly remembered something: Clarence is sick today. She normally lets him deal with Tony but she will have to do it herself. Her mouth is a moue shape at the thought.

  Now she descends the stairs, bridelike in flimsy white, flashing bits of pale skin shot through with green rivers of blood. She fishes around in her jacket pocket to find the key to the carriage house, where the exhibit is crated up and waiting to go home.

  At the door, Tony looks her up and down and laughs. He always laughs at her. She doesn’t mind but she minds the gun in the car in Jackson’s lap and the way the driver stares like a goat in heat. That’s why she usually lets Clarence handle this part of the business. He is so tall and looks threatening, though of course really he’s as soft and malleable as clay.