Free Ghost Dance by Carole Maso Page B

were less grand or were harder to articulate. His voice transcended language, for even the French tourists who sat next to my mother and kept asking her beforehand about “les boutiques et les cafés Américains” fell silent when my brother began, caught in that voice. And to me, who knew him, and to others, who did not, it seemed that he alone might purify the air with his tone. There was such command there that we thought he single-mindedly might take the clouds and shake them free of their filth.
    We were so happy that day. It was one of the last times we would all be together. Dutifully we had dressed in white as we had been asked to “for the visual effect,” Fletcher said, “something the media might easily comprehend.”
    The visual effect was stunning. Father dragged the television from the closet so that we could watch the coverage of the event. We wanted to see what it looked like to the world. It was eerie to have a flash of Fletcher flickering blue from the TV set, if only for a second. And in the black and white dots of the newspaper I saw for the first time the strange resemblance between my brother and my mother. I was shocked that I had not seen this resemblance before. Maybe everyone doomed to newsprint, trapped on the page, in some silent way looks alike.
    “Look,” my mother said, pointing to the sky just before my brother reached the podium. “A dove—a beautiful white dove.” But when I followed her arm into the air I saw nothing, just the ominous gray clouds my brother was about to address, hanging like symbols in the sky.
    Had a common city pigeon turned into a dove before my mother’s eyes that day in the park as Fletcher got up and walked to the stage? Yes, I imagine it did. She had gasped with delight as she pointed up into the air, and it had reassured her in some way about the world. Watching her sitting there happy, content, I thought despite everything I would be privileged, I would count myself lucky to see what she saw, to be like her. I needed that dove, too, but when I looked up I saw only gray and no beautiful white bird intersecting it.
    Had I missed the dove my mother saw so clearly as Fletcher walked to the stage? Had it flown away in one instant as I turned my head to see it? Or had she at that moment invented that bird as her contribution to the day? Often, I knew, she altered or remade the world, revising it, making it a more habitable place, a more bearable one, or sometimes just more complete.
    “A dove,” she said again, this time softer. For an artist like my mother, there is no rest from perception. It does not stop when the body is raised from the typewriter, when the hands are folded safely in the lap, the canvas left to dry, the dance steps passed to the dancer, the whole rest placed on the final staff. It does not stop. There is no rest.
    She could not make it stop. “Look,” my mother had said, and she seemed exhausted as she spoke. This dove accounted for her fatigue, I thought. Her head seemed so heavy she could not hold it up and her shoulders quivered as they supported the weight. No hard laborer, no farmer, no fisherman looked as weary at the end of the day as she sometimes did. It frightened me: the idea of no rest ever. Must the sky always fill with lovely birds or blossoming trees? Even beauty becomes intolerable to the lidless eye—even pleasure. She had no rest in sleep, no break. Where we saw gray, she saw shapes. When we listened to people talk, we just listened, but she changed syntax or tone or the end of the story. Those of us who loved her would have traded volumes of her work for her serenity. I looked to her. But no, it was not true that I would have traded her work. I put my arm around her and looked to the stage.
    Would it all go on forever? I asked myself, and she seemed to look at me and nod. My mother accepted her life as children do, knowing no other one. She never complained. Don’t cry for me, she said with her eyes, filled with