Grace Schulman

In Legends of the Jews, Lewis Ginzberg writes that an Egyptian princess hung a tapestry woven with diamonds and pearls above King Solomon’s bed. When the king wanted to rise, he thought he saw stars and, believing it was night, slept on. Scaling ladders with buckets of white enamel, I painted the stars and the moon on my windowpanes to hold back days and nights. I yanked the telephone and stopped the wooden clock. The weeks a lightning stroke, desire turned to love. With my blue diamond, I sliced minutes in half and made days vanish, fooling the hours. I became so skillful at firmaments that miracles occurred: a bearded comet moved across the room breeding no omens, tearing no major kingdoms into small provinces, but there it was, reminding us that rock may spin and flare, lifting the senses, burning into sight. You eased pale hands away; I saw your shoulders recede through doorways, watched your image fail with your famished smile. I left our room with dream-filled eyes, and standing in the sun, I gazed at bricks and glass and saw, suddenly, flashing in stony light, the stars and the moon.

Pardon us for uttering a handful of words in any language, so cut loose are we from homes, and from His name that is still nameless, blessed be He. We raised a prayer house— that is, we broke new wood for one, but some tough burned it, snarling: “Carve only stones for the dead.” Damp ground, no fire, no psalm we all remember. But tall ships anchor here, and at low tide, people with wheat-colored hair look out to sea, just as we’d searched for land. “Pray if you must,” my father said, “and when prayer fails, a story, if it is all you have, will do.” Months past, we left Recife’s forced-worship laws in the year of their Lord sixteen hundred and fifty-four, for our new world, old-country Amsterdam. Leagues seaward, Spanish pirates slaughtered our scant crew, and all that was left of us (friends wheezed their last while they ragged us on) rose up on deck and tossed our bags in the sea. We watched the wake turn silver: kiddish wine cups, hanging bowls, a candelabrum for the promised altar, carved pointers. Books’ pages curled and sank, prayer shawls ballooned and, soaking, spiraled downward. Just as we stared, again we heard swords clank— a French ship, the Ste. Catherine(her prow had shone gold on a gray horizon), came to our port side and rescued us. In that commotion on deck, we crouched below—not out of fear, I swear, but stunned by luminous words that echoed oddly—beautifully—like lightning flickering through palls of thickset clouds. A jaunty captain rasped to us in hiding: “Where are you bound?” “Amsterdam. Old country.” “Where?” “Amsterdam.” “Antilles?” “No, Amsterdam.” “Yes, yes. Nieuw Am sterdam. I’ll see you get there safely.” He meant well, bless him. Ste. Catherine sailed to land at its tip no larger than a meadow, fanned out at its sides: Manhattan Island. Our new master, Stuyvesant, lashed us with phrases,wheffs, guzzads, that stung but were not fathomed, mercifully, when we came on a Sabbath, more than twenty men, women, a baby born at sea. Still cursing, he let us land, and heard our praise, then disappeared among lank citizens with faded skin who stride to the bay and brood on water that we trust and dread, and listen to tales unstamped by laws and never sacred.

“Turn back!” was all she snapped out as she passed in a red dress that caught sunrays through mist. I saw her lurch upwind, kick off spiked heels, climb out to the edge of a knife-sharp rockpile, and, arms outstretched, lead the sea’s tympani, lure the din, guiding the steamy waves to shore.Will the Almighty answer me? she sang out to the ocean’s rising octaves, as blown palms pointed scarflike fronds to land. Earlier that Sunday, she had prayed to a black Christ in a church on the island, droned verses for a safe calm, and trekked homeward to board white louvered windows for the storm. She had refused the chapel’s sanctuary to ask the ocean why the wind ripped homes and would again. Her anger captured me, and stayed when I saw rain gleam on red ginger, drench trumpets islanders call yellow-bells, and soak ixora. Bonelike bits of shells and conchs lay on the beach as on an altar. Silent, I watched her. Under a blank sky, where waves broke over coral, in thick haze, pitched forward to hear the whirlwind’s reply, she shook a fist, then opened hands in praise.

That day I hired a private detective to follow me, and could not read his notes. In a tangled grove, I hid behind white pines, compressed my body, then watched him write, left-handed and myopic, under an Irish cap, when I asked for help from strangers who spoke Slavic languages. Wary, moving ahead, I found a depot, watched an immense train churn, haloed in steam, and boarded, second class. I had no ticket, and my expired passport represented a drooping head with unfamiliar eyes. Unshaken, rows behind, the stranger waited, wielding camera and pen. Across the border I disembarked, but knew he would capture me, with soundless footsteps, even on black gravel. I tried to recall my crime. I know I am guilty, but never why. Lawless, I have ignored those signs: WRONG WAY ; GO BACK and NO WAY OUT , circles that tell me YOU ARE HERE . I gather it is the whispers that explode, the looks that make dogs whimper. When I bow in prayer I think of love; I know I’ve killed my friends, pelting them with a touch—and yet I’ve heard they are alive. Besides, that’s not the real offense. I would cross any path, or trek through swamps to find my crime. But even he, that bald, insistent man who follows me, unsleeping, cannot tell me what I’ve done.

Squinting through eye-slits in our balaclavas, we lurch across Washington Square Park hunched against the wind, two hooded figures caught in the monochrome, carrying sacks of fruit, as we’ve done for years. The frosted, starch- stiff sycamores make a lean Christmas tree seem to bulk larger, tilted under the arch and still lit in three colors. Once in January, we found a feather here and stuffed the quill in twigs to recall that jay. The musical fountain is here, its water gone, a limestone circle now. Though rap succeeds the bluegrass strains we’ve played in it, new praise evokes old sounds. White branches mimic visions of past storms; some say they’ve heard ghosts moan above this ground, once a potter’s field. No two stones are the same, of course: the drums, the tawny pears we hold, are old masks for new things. Still, in a world where fretted houses with façades are leveled for condominiums, not much has altered here. At least it’s faithful to imagined views. And, after all, we know the sycamore will screen the sky in a receding wind. Now, trekking home through grit that’s mounting higher, faces upturned to test the whirling snow, in new masks, we whistle to make breath-clouds form and disappear, and form again, and O, my love, there’s sun in the crook of your arm.

“Is there no balm in Gilead?” So cries dour Jeremiah in granite tones. “There is a balm in Gilead,” replies a Negro spiritual. The baritone who chants it, leaning forward on the platform, looks up, not knowing his voice is a rainstorm that rinses air to reveal earth’s surprises. Today, the summer gone, four monarch butterflies, their breed’s survivors, sucked a flower’s last blooms, opened their wings, orange-and-black stained glass, and printed on the sky in zigzag lines, watch bright things rise: winter moons, the white undersides of a California condor, once thought doomed, now flapping wide like the first bird from ashes.

“The cure for loneliness is solitude.” —Marianne Moore Hopper never painted this, but here on a snaky path his vision lingers: three white tombs, robots with glassed-in faces and meters for eyes, grim mouths, flat noses, lean forward on a platform, like strangers with identical frowns scanning a blur, far off, that might be their train. Gas tanks broken for decades face Parson’s smithy, planked shut now. Both relics must stay. The pumps have roots in gas pools, and the smithy stores memories of hammers forging scythes to cut spartina grass for dry salt hay. The tanks have the remove of local clammers who sink buckets and stand, never in pairs, but one and one and one, blank-eyed, alone, more serene than lonely. Today a woman rakes in the shallows, then bends to receive last rays in shimmering water, her long shadow knifing the bay. She slides into her truck to watch the sky flame over sand flats, a hawk’s wind arabesque, an island risen, brown Atlantis, at low tide; she probes the shoreline and beyond grassy dunes for where the land might slope off into night. Hers is no common emptiness, but a vaster silence filled with terns’ cries, an abundant solitude. Nearby, the three dry gas pumps, worn survivors of clam-digging generations, are luminous, and have an exile’s grandeur that says: In perfect solitude, there’s fire. One day I approached the vessels and wanted to drive on, the road ablaze with dogwood in full bloom, but the contraptions outdazzled the road’s white, even outshone a bleached shirt flapping alone on a laundry line, arms pointed down. High noon. Three urns, ironic in their outcast dignity—as though, like some pine chests, they might be prized in disuse—cast rays, spun leaf—covered numbers, clanked, then wheezed and stopped again. Shadows cut the road before I drove off into the dark woods.