The Age of Reason. Marian Birch

the woods, just above the trees, over the pond. Then, very gently, the air dropped her to the northeast of the barn into a small grassy hollow surrounded by blackberry briars. She descended as gently as if she had a parachute. This is just the way, she thought, that Uncle Teddy floated down into a field in France in the war the grown-ups always talk about.She landed softly on the long, wet grass. No one shot a machine gun at her the way they shot Uncle Teddy. She landed, rather softly, on her bottom. Seconds later, her bedroom window, unbroken, landed upright beside her. She thought, It will fall over, but despite a slight wobble, it remained standing. She scurried on hands and knees like a crab, under an enormous rootball from a fallen maple. Has the wind just knocked the tree over or has it always been here?She found that the ground under the maple’s twisted roots was soft and warm, a comfortable light-brown dirt that her father called “duff.” She noticed that she had lost her black velvet cape and her ivory wimple, as well as her shoes and socks and the red-and-brown plaid skirt Kitt had told her that morning not to wear. Kitt had said scathingly, “It swears with that shirt.” Edith now wore only her white Lollipop underpants and her pink knit T-shirt. Through the tangled roots and bittersweet vines above her head she could see that all sorts of things were still flying by overhead; a chair, a wheelbarrow, a bird’s nest, lots of branches, some quilts and laundry from the neighbors’ clotheslines were tumbling and flapping in the sulphurous sky. Is that a lady on a bicycle flying by? Or . . . ?The roar of the storm was so very loud that she could hear no other sounds, and yet somehow it was also distant and hollow. She crouched over her bent knees and put her hands behind her head the way Mrs. McKay had showed them to duck and cover for the grade school’s weekly air raid drills. Then she looked through her bent elbow across her little shelter hollow and saw her Teddy and her two best bears sitting in the soft duff, looking expectantly at her, as if they were still waiting for her to complete their baptism. Kitty, her Madame Alexander doll was there too, but upside down with her skirts over her head. When she’d gotten Kitty for Christmas, the doll had a tag that said she was meant to be Jo March from Little Women,but Edith had renamed her after her mother because of her brown hair. She didn’t see her blue leather missal anywhere. Was there an A-bomb?Edith looked at the skin on her leg to see if the plaid pattern from her skirt had been etched onto it by the blast. Arthur had been reading her a book called Hiroshimaat bedtime, about the A-bomb, and he’d read her one story about some Japanese ladies. When the bomb dropped on them, it burned the pattern of their kimonos into their skin. She knew there was another war now, in a place called Korea, that the grown-ups talked about a lot, and that they worried if there would be more A-bombs, but she’d also heard them talk about something they called the Dust Bowl. There was a lot of dust in her hollow, so she softly hummed a Woody Guthrie song that Arthur sang to her sometimes.

       I been doing some hard travelin’

       I thought you knowed

       I been doing some hard travelin’

       Way down the road

      Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the roaring of the storm fell silent and the air was perfectly still.

      ***

      Fifteen miles to the north, on the green wooded campus of Reese College, Mrs. Katerina P. M. Brynn sat in the tiny office she shared with Brian Cahill, who taught German. He wasn’t in today but she could still smell his revolting cigars. Kitt was not entitled to be called “Professor” because she was merely a lowly instructor. She was wishing, as she often did, that she weren’t so relentlessly irritable and critical of everything that everyone else said or did. Just a moment before, Beth Frost, the sweet, earnest departmental secretary, had come in and offered her a freshly baked loaf of her homemade bread. It smelled heavenly. Beth and her husband, Arnold, were followers of Scott and Helen Nearing, the pacifists and communists who lived on a farm in Vermont making maple syrup. Beth and Arnold did everything the difficult, time-consuming but natural way. They didn’t exploit anyone’s labor or extract any surplus value, so Arthur thought they were the salt of the earth. Beth and Arnold not only baked their own bread, they had probably milled the flour from their own wheat. Just like the Little Red Hen,Kitt thought, remembering the story she had read to Marcus last night. Kitt had reflexively hefted the heavy loaf that Beth offered her, tossed it back and forth between her hands. Acidly she’d commented, “Just the thing to fling at dangerous assailants!”

      Irony and sarcasm were lost on Beth, whose blue eyes had filled with tears. Always a little red-rimmed, her eyes had grown redder still, her cheeks flushed. Kitt noted unkindly that Beth didn’t blush attractively pink but blotchily red. Beth had tucked a wisp of the blond hair she wore in a modest bun behind her ear, then without another word had beaten a hasty retreat to her typewriter in the adjoining room, leaving Kitt holding the leaden loaf.

      Kitt rued that she was always saying unkind things like that, things that hurt people’s feelings for no particular reason. She’d done it all her life, or at least since she could remember, even (especially) to her own mother. She passionately believed in being kind to others and would have liked to be able to, but often she couldn’t. She didn’t seem to have the knack of it. If she saw a spray of lilacs through the window, she was more likely to remark on the streaks and smudges on the window glass than on the beauty of the flowers. That morning, she recalled, she had made a gratuitous comment about her little Edith’s last-day-of-school choice of outfit. It looked, she had told her daughter, like the get-up of a circus clown. The pink shirt, she’d added, “swore like a sailor” at the red-and-brown plaid skirt.

      To distract herself from the uncomfortable memory of Edith’s pleasant little face shutting down, Kitt concentrated on the headache she felt coming on. She pressed her thumbs and forefingers against her temples. It had been ten weeks since her last menstrual period and she hadn’t told Arthur yet that she was late. The truth is, I seriously wonder if this is Arthur’s baby anyway.Their sex life had been all but nil since Marcus was born almost three years ago. Something about diapers and bottles and lack of sleep had drained all the fun out of it for her, at least with Arthur. Arthur had never been the most skillful of her lovers, though she still enjoyed his vigor and his unbridled enthusiasm. Most likely this baby’s father was her brother-in-law Edwin, with whom she’d been sneaking clandestine trysts since the previous February. That first time it happened, on Edith’s birthday, they had both been quite drunk, though that didn’t explain why they’d kept at it since.

      Well, she thought, at least it’s the right gene pool. No one need ever know.Now she’d slept with all three of the handsome Brynn brothers—Dead Teddy, her husband Arthur, and Baby Edwin. Gladys would be appalled, she reflected. More accurately, my mother-in-law probably isappalled, since she’s a very keen observer. She probably won’t put this story into her Bradstreets of Whitby book, though. Edwin was much more imaginative as a lover than his brother, and anyway, the secrecy and the treachery made the sex terribly exciting.

      Kitt scrolled a clean sheet of onionskin paper into the typewriter and opened up the folder with the Akhmatova poems she’d been working on. Translation was so difficult to do well. So far the results of her efforts either sounded like her own not-so-good poetry that had little to do with the Russian original, or else they said, mechanically, in English, what Akhmatova said beautifully, without strain, in Russian. She didn’t know which was worse. As to the amazing little tricks of sound and meaning that studded the Russian poems like cloves in a ham, those were nearly impossible to make anything of in English. She shrugged and typed:

       There is in every mortal closeness

       A cut-off limit you cannot cross.

      The English sounded like a traffic manual. She tried again.

       There is a sacred boundary . . .

      No, sacred was wrong.

      The poems had been given to her by Earl Pipher, who worked at the United States mission to the UN. Earl (a man whom Kitt thought she would like to seduce) was the New York delegate of the executive committee of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Congress was a group of artists and thinkers who believed in democracy and freedom for artists to express themselves. That was what Earl said at any rate. Arthur thought the Congress was an anti-Communist front.