White as Clouds

One night, James had a visitor, an extra, late one evening when he had already invited two friends from his writing classes to take turns reading manuscripts. They became minor, later that evening, but they were his focus now: a native Englishman named Davies who, months ago, had brought him an offering of Americanism: a cellophane-wrapped flat chocolate marshmallow non-confection called a “Moon Pie.” They had each tasted it with one bite each. The most horrible food ever made, they agreed.
A punishment, said James.
Surely the flower of all American manufacturing, said Davies.
Moon Pie Davies came with a newer friend, Santoro, on whom an English writing career would not be wasted: Santoro had first name “Paolo,” with its pow sound from comic books, and the almost-comical handsomeness of a young man who might race in the Palio. Professor Neville at the University made James aware of Santoro’s handsomeness –– her unashamed habit of watching Santoro in a bright, surprised way, as if he was a bright bird who had flown into her classroom through a window.
Santoro, also, once settled in any new room, had a habit of looking all around, his eyes going from one object to another. His first time here, this evening, Santoro was studying everything in James’ house, his expression admiring but mocking: But this is not your house. This is your old man’s house you’ve borrowed to impress us, you lucky one, in his eyes.
James had decided this month to be a writer. Difficult thing to announce, with as much likely success attenuated to it as an announcement that you are going to be the world’s best pole-vaulter.
I only formerly studied economics, he said. It will be writers and writing now.
Art, in my opinion, is king, said Santoro.
A king on the dole, said Moonpie Davies, laughing. Moonpie was becoming an economist; he lunched every college day in the small courtyard off the LSE. Slow food carts but many economists-in-training. Sometimes, even the instructors dropped by, always in too much hurry to stay –– or fearful of being accused of too much friendliness, pretending they had to go.
Davies and Santoro were both wearing thick student survival jumpers, which let them walk to classes in winter and home again without a coat. Santoro’s was spotless cream wool; Moon Pie Davies’, a sagging, ancient Shetland-pony gray one with holes near one elbow. The ragged one, somehow, was the more confident one.
James was wearing his crisp shirt, the one he wore days in a row until it asked to be laundered. The two guests sat on old fine chairs— they had to be fine, it was Bloomsbury; James’s father, Wolcott, had lived here thirty years before he died, collecting things Bloomsburians loved, things that looked almost borrowed from the blocks-away British Museum.
The two visitors, school friends, faced James, who was sitting on a low brown plain settee. James liked to imagine his also-dead mother had often sat there, impossibly American and young, with a young woman’s humble, flat-soled shoes. Anxiously she must have sat, waiting for a kind or practical word from a much older and much more financially steady Wolcott. Perhaps she’d been an acquisition. Like a chair, James thought, some visual thing, new, to look at.
Santoro and Moon Pie Davies and James –– all three could see by the door a sculpture on a polished stand. It was truly old, perhaps older than the old Russell Square row house’s bricks: a small bronze chariot, with no driver, and no horse.
What is this you have here, Santoro said to James. As Santoro walked around the sculpture, James knew neither could ever imagine how James first came to this house: at age twelve, by night dark taxi, sneaking away from his aunt, who was asleep in Hotel Piccadilly. How he’d stood cold with a day’s shock sweat on the single, solid front door’s brick step, afraid of the bright gold lights inside –– which were for adults and their parties, even after a funeral. The way he peeked in at the adults inside with their drinks in hand and their talking from behind filmy, dreamlike curtains, like a theatrical scrim. A twelve-year-old cannot fathom what adults talk about when they have drinks in hand; and worse, that had been, was, the night following his father’s funeral, the night following his American mother’s sudden death in taxicab –– on the way to his father’s funeral. She, thus, was a no-show for the funeral and this after-funeral; she was as dead as Wolcott. He himself, James, so hidden and feral a creature, so jagged a piece of evidence of a hoped-for relationship, which was a failure, he was not ever brought along, even to his own father’s funeral. On the step of this house, he had been like a bear looking into a house in the woods, for the first time.
But James had the halo of the orphan; he felt he deserved to be on the brick step to announce himself –– his existence –– somehow. Felt that he would at least be of interest. A carnival oddity. And he did not want to go back to America without her. His mother had chosen not to take him with her to the funeral; she had died alone in the cab. Here he was, now, leftover. England, he decided the night of his father’s funeral, the night he got in his own cab while his aunt slept, owed him something.
Santoro and Davies represented both his enemy and his predicament. James would always be an American in England –– an invader like Santoro, never fully accepted by the United Kingdom, even in this row house in Bloomsbury, furnished now only with things his father had acquired. Even though it was his father’s place, which had come to him by rule of British law. An insistent child’s inheritance, which he had claimed.
James had formed the opinion that to the English, a Spaniard, or an Italian, is a child — delightful. To the English, an American is also a child, but undelightful. Someone who angrily, foolishly departed for supposedly better things. In five years, or just two years, Santoro would likely return to the country he had come from. Where Englishmen would not ask him –– as they often still asked James –– to repeat much of what he knew he’d clearly spoken, to halt him, slow him down, by asking him, please, to say it again.
Davies, his past and present and future rich in steak and kidney pies and Paddington Station and Victoria Station and queues at The National Theater and likely a striving English wife in his future with cornsilk hair and a puff-pastry voice –– was who James wanted to be. But it was Santoro with whom he sympathized, understood; here in England, in Davies’ eyes, he and Santoro were not men but visiting boys. Who’d escaped somehow their aunts or Quixote’s or Romeo’s bad buddies or watchful widow Douglases.
I know what you’re about to ask, said James. Why is there no driver? No horse?
Oh, it’s obvious, to make you wonder that, said Moon Pie Davies. His attention turned suddenly to the front window and the brick porch beyond it. But hark. Someone’s here.
And perhaps pizza is not what he brings, said Santoro. Perhaps he comes to complete the circle, the sculpture. He is bronze. He is the chariot driver. He brings the horse also?
Did you invite someone else? said Davies. He’s tall. A bit old, really. I don’t recognize him.
James’s memories of his unmet father were stories –– like memories of a raft regularly falling apart in the ocean. Or a river. To James, Wolcott’s front step of brick had felt like being held at last above the water.
Old, James had kept hearing on the brick step of this house when he first stood on it the night of his father’s funeral: Old, old, old. Old step. Old house. Old life. Old life I wasn’t good enough for.
Are you going to answer it? said Davies.
They pulled back the sheer curtains, which, despite the lapses in housekeeping since James had come of age and let the last legally required housekeeper go, were still white as clouds –– frosty behind the horseless, riderless, bronze chariot, under one deep glass light shade hand-painted in its inside bell in a serious, dramatic floral pattern, something violet along long dull green twisting leaves which seemed endlessly joined to each other.
The bronze chariot! People always eventually asked: Where is the chariot driver? The horses? –– as if someone had sold parts of a once-nice set. Small sculpture left behind by Wolcott, something which, as an object feeling sound waves, has heard everything ever said in this room –– before Wolcott went underground in a box, dead. But Santoro and Davies knew nothing about his parentage –– the father who was like a memory of a wet raft badly put together and falling apart, the English father nothing but a foggy-white, curtained museum offering of a house — for the dense orphan.
And he knew nothing of their fathers. James tried avoiding learning too much about anyone else’s fathers; that felt like a failure of medicine.
As if conjured by moon pies and horseless riderless chariots and a pile of destroyed raft near  a waterfall –– and angry about it –– was a dark-skinned man on the brick step James had once stood on alone, age twelve. This was a man in his fifties, unbelievably tall and unhappy-looking.
But well-fed as a coddled child, James thought. Otherwise, how could he be –– so big? Holding something gold in the open palm of his hand, yellowishly, almost offensively gold, or an anxious yellow-bright imitation of gold. Cufflinks that looked as if Richie Rich of the comic books had lost them.
Who wore cufflinks? thought James. Who really would wear cufflinks? I would be the last.

James, even from inside the house, through the white, filmy curtains, had to look up to see the full frame of the tall man from India as you would look to the top of a Christmas tree. The Indian man, even half-seen, was obviously looking away, as if looking for something that had flown away down the street, or up into trees, in the place through which he had just walked.
Perhaps he was the bronze miniature chariot’s lost driver. An Indian taxi driver, who had driven his mother literally to her death, had been driving her to old Wolcott’s funeral when an aortic  aneurysm or rupture had toppled her like a flower being cut for a banquet bouquet. No one had ever tried much to find the driver; they seemed to prefer he was a mystery, prettier that way. But the hospital said it was an Indian man who had called the hospital, then had driven her himself there, refusing to wait for the offered ambulance which they had told the taxi company could come.
She can’t wait, they said he said, through the taxi service. So, she must have been alive, then. But by the time he had brought her to hospital, she was dead. He, the driver, had gone on.
She was gone, the nurses kept telling James, already gone when she arrived. She died in the taxi.
She died in a taxi. This sentence kept repeating itself in his head. A leaden joke. A taxi took you somewhere; it took his mother somewhere, and nowhere. Yes, surely, a joke.
James glanced at Davies and Santoro, sitting in the lit living room; they looked like puppets for a play, playing to a new audience.
It was the sun, wasn’t it, that the chariot pulled back and forth across the sky, James thought. The sun as bright and incorruptible as untarnishable gold. Gold drawn from the dark and the sun drawn from the dark ––
This must be the Indian taxi driver –– with what was missing from the square empty black velvet box which had been in his mother’s pocketbook –– the fat Wolcott klunk of gold. A guilt offering ten years later? But how had he found this house? James? How could he have gotten the gold from Wolcott, dead? A taxi driver? Who had taken on the burden of taking her, dying, to the hospital then quietly disappeared? Why here now? It could not be.
The aunt he was staying with at Hotel Piccadilly had thought that the taxi driver might have removed, taken, whatever was in the empty black velvet jeweler’s box. That was a polite way to say stolen. But they avoided the ugly inquiry they could have made; did they know whether anything had even been in that box? No. It seemed symbolic of the wedding ring never received.
That aunt had gone back to America. James sincerely disliked her. He stayed. It had all begun on the front brick step of this house. He had come to it like a raft.
James opened the black polished door. From your taxi? James said.
But it was as if he had asked the man if he was short, and the man was tall. A look of I-do-not-answer-questions-like-that was immediately showing on the man’s face, but also a look that said their dialogue was properly rolling, had begun.
I see your friends through your window. Standing up with alarm. The Indian man quickly, efficiently laughed. Who is this man, etcetera. Please tell them we will be done. Soon. Shut the door. I kept these to make sure I came back to you.
James believed him but was afraid. But he, above the single step, was a step above the taxi driver. Now his own house, by hook or by crook. What his mother had never been able to have, he had. His house. Once Wolcott’s, but Wolcott was dead.
James turned a bit and saw that, as the tall man had said, Moon Pie and Santoro were now turning toward them, listening, standing. He signaled to them to sit down again, move back. They did, slowly. James shut the door behind him. And he was now on the great and important step that had brought him into this house, years ago. But though he was on that powerful single step and should have been as tall or taller than this visitor, he was not. His visitor still loomed a full head above him.
This man was wearing blue jeans; his shirt had small red checks, red checks so small, houndstooth, one check biting into another, hazed brushed flannel, you could barely see each check. With rumply hair he had, and his great size, he looked as if he should have looked happy, standing on the step with the unexplained offering of gold. But he looked as if he had forced himself to do what he was doing.
Or it might be, thought James, that he always looked unhappy.
Did you forget to pay your fare, James? Moon Pie Davies had called before James had shut the door, implying that this was a man who watched turnstiles in the station, or drove a taxi, come now to track James down and make him pay.
If you need money –– I have it, Santoro had called out.
His friends were sitting, but out of the corner of his eye, James could see Santoro begin the pantomiming of the starting of a car, throwing his head back as James’ imaginary and unpaid taxi car vroomed off. They knew nothing of his mother or her death. Nor would they ever. They only knew they were students at the University of London and must be funny.
Taxi driver, bearing gold, the Indian man said. I was both driving it and its passenger for over a decade.
Can you repeat that? said James.
I am a good taxi driver. I own my taxi. You look like her much more than Wolcott, the man said. He coughed, continued. Before your friends joke again about fares –– again about a taxi –– consider that you stand in the doorway of the house that would be mine if you did not exist. I stand below.  
He was now a meter and half away from James, as if James was a contagion.
The man held out the cufflinks, heavy and useless as butter by itself, until James finally put forward his hand, and the man put them into James’ hand. They were small but heavy.
I was your mother’s driver, he said. And her lover. While I watched her bound up with your miserable father who did not ever give American her the due she deserved. Had I quietly disappeared, perhaps he would have married her. Which she needed. And you would have been born here. But when he died, she would have married me, and this would be my house through her, which you would only be sharing with me — that is my math, and here is the gold you are missing, which to me was symbolic of the nothing the old man deserved. Yet, do you know she actually intended to put the gold cufflinks into his coffin? To be buried with him? To be rid of his false promise? The engagement which never came to be? He gave her cufflinks. Why?
I do not still think he ever deserved to be buried with her carefully returned gift. I would have thrown them into a fire, but gold will not burn except at the very highest temperatures. Alchemy is pointless because of that. Or born from that. Perhaps you will fall in love someday, have a social occasion at which you wear the shirt meant for cufflinks. with this gold at the sides of your wrists, and they will catch everyone’s eyes, and you will be able to have in this country what I have never had. Adoration and belonging. And in case you wonder, I have two advanced mathematics degrees that are useless here, as they are from India, and I myself am useless, was useless, for anything;. But for your mother, I bring these to you. She was holding them in her hands. Now, again, I disappear. She was holding them. In her hands.
And then, he disappeared into the night, James’s visitor, someone who had adored his mother and used the word due about her as if she was a precious library book, owed to someone on time. James did not know the man’s name, but he knew what the man thought of him: that he was another Wolcott, a selfish usurper who was also using his mother for his own gain. This house, of course, the proof.
What, what, called Moonpie Davies and Santoro in their heavy winter jumpers, one brand new and one ragged, in the warm house when he came back in. How much.
You’re right, said James. It was about transit. Something left in lost and found.
Those transit people, Davies said. Intriguing. They really operate as if they’re a sovereign nation.
Why of course, said Santoro. They have their own coinage, their ranks and officers. What good luck he came by. Something valuable?
Oh, very, James said. My father’s cufflinks. They’re gold.
Your father will be happy, they said. They did not even know his father was dead. They assumed he was out with friends while his son borrowed his house to entertain more friends.
Friends, James thought, the bloodstream of life.
Pizza came soon, round as wheels or sundials, and they made sure to eat all of it, as Santoro said they must, for luck. They must not leave a single slice, Santoro said. And they did not.

ξ

Rebecca Pyle is the author of stories in Posit (forthcoming), Gargoyle Magazine (forthcoming), Map Literary, Stoneboat, Underwood Review, and Wisconsin Review. She's a poet and an artist, too, published in multiple other art/literary journals. Rebecca, named for the film and novel of the same name, lives in a gray brick house first occupied by a telegraph operator for The Salt Lake Tribune. See rebeccapyleartist.com.