Dissident Gardens Read Online Free PDF Page A

duckling or rabbit was associated, for Miriam, with her mother’s contempt for Catholic ritual: Easter eggs, bland milk-chocolate bunnies (“Too bad, but I’d never have German chocolate in the house,” Rose would say, in irony and sorrow, then following with her regular sighing incantation: “They made the very best of everything, of
everything
”), smears of ash, idiot Irish and Italian neighbors under the knuckle of idiot priests. So what was the anomalous Grey Goose, who wouldn’t be made a meal of, meant to signify?
He was nine months a-cooking, Lord, Lord, Lord / Then they put him on the table, Lord, Lord, Lord / And the knife couldn’t cut him, Lord, Lord, Lord / And the fork couldn’t stick him, Lord, Lord, Lord
. Where was Aesop when you needed him? Of all the songs on the album, this was the one Miriam studied, helplessly.
So they took him to the sawmill, Lord, Lord, Lord / Ho, it broke the saw’s tooth out, Lord, Lord, Lord
. At last, one day, Rose took mercy on her daughterand explained. The answer, when it came, wasn’t difficult, though Miriam, at eight, could never have guessed it.
    Now, tonight, nine years later, on the postage-stamp-size platform in a club so small any table was front and also rear, the grapevines of smoke clinging to the ceiling providing an illusion of distance in a room that cleared of bentwood chairs and voices and clamor and filth, and properly lit and fumigated, would have been revealed as no larger than the parlor where Miriam had memorized her mother’s albums, yet which somehow made room for not only a stage and a side bar featuring Italian coffee and red wine but also for a whole and intricate social world that Miriam was just learning to parse and manipulate—here, the tenor folksinger on the tiny platform crooned out Burl Ives’s version of the folk song, exactly. Note for note, vocal gesture for vocal gesture, syllable for syllable.
And the last time I seen him, Lord, Lord, Lord / He was flying over the ocean, Lord, Lord, Lord / With a long string of goslings, Lord, Lord, Lord
. Miriam guffawed seeing with what neat sleight of hand the blond raffish singer offered up a version cribbed from a children’s LP as if dredged out of some mossy Appalachian music-finding expedition, as if salvaged during some hobo’s stint working in a train yard, or begging at the kitchen door of the very farm that had raised the Grey Goose itself. Laughed at how smugly the rendition was gobbled up by those unqualified to know the difference—or those who’d endure fingernail splinters before confessing they were familiar with Ives’s version. The boy at her side turned, as he had each time that night she’d laughed for no evident cause, and said, “What?”
    “Nothing.” All this she couldn’t explain, not to him. (Years later it would be his name, among so many here, that she, famous rememberer, resolutely couldn’t dredge up.) Then Miriam laughed again and said, “Do you know what the Grey Goose represents?”
    “Eh?”
    “I’m asking what the Grey Goose represents. I just wondered if you knew.”
    The song now finished, she’d gained the attention of their whole table, and the table beside theirs as well. Chairs, long since reversed so chests married chairbacks, cigarette-knuckled hands flung carelessly forward for ballast, now squeaked. The margin between differenttables, between friends and strangers, those who’d arrived in one configuration and those who might later depart rearranged, in pairs or complicated threesomes or alone, had been lost a while ago.
    “Enlighten us, Mim,” said Porter, the clever one in horn-rims, the Columbia man. Eyeing her for several nights now but too genteel to pry her from the boy. He might think he had all the time in the world. She might agree.
    “Well, since you ask, the Grey Goose represents the irrevocable destiny of the working class.” Never had Miriam been so delighted to regurgitate a Roseism.
    Leaning in from the next