So why haven’t you heard of her?
It’s a good question, isn’t it.
With Pharos’ re-release of My Name is Rose and The Tattooed Heart, we can turn away from the glitz and gleam of the market, away from “women’s writing,” and look back at what a woman writing looked like on the page. In My Name Is Rose, by alternating between first person and third person, Theodora gives us an unhappily married woman who writes her second self alive through a passionate affair only available in the pages of her journal. A passionate affair with an underage boy. What emerges is the crisis between two women—the women we are from the inside-out and the women we are told to be by cultural scripts of “wife” and “mother.” Written in 1956.
Similarly, in The Tattooed Heart, a girl nearing adolescence spends a summer with her grandmother and discovers a younger boy in the wooded hills of the Long Island shore. The two revel in the younger boys childhood fantasies, almost as if it is possible to hover at the cusp of things, until the adult world around them shatters the possibility space of sexuality and creativity.
It’s as if all of her novels meant to explore the form and content of passion—what territories of the body, life and language are available?
As Joan Schenkar wrote in her wonderful essay “The Late, Great, Theodora Keogh” which appeared in The Paris Review Daily, “But if passion is Keogh’s real subject, it’s also the wrecking ball in her democracy of desire. In each of her books, passion equalizes class, age, race, and identity.”
Thrillingly, then, we get a chance to go back, down, under. Like Anais Nin. Like Virginia Woolf. Like Gertrude Stein. Like Marguerite Duras. Like Djuna Barnes. Other women writing who I keep digging up to reassure myself that we always knew exactly what we were, and are, doing.
Lidia Yuknavitch
THE TATTOOED HEART
to Hal Vursell
CHAPTER ONE
Twilight turned June’s reflection into a shadow. Slowly, as though by witchcraft, the mirror rendered back to her the hues of her flesh, the twin gleams of her eyes, the tawn of her hair, refused all but the nebulous outline of a young girl.
“Shall I turn on the light?” asked June aloud of the room.
But she was listless and did nothing, simply stood on there and felt the soft yet chilly night breeze contract her heart.
Half a year ago (how long it seemed!) June had been put to bed with one of those fevers that come from raw milk. She remembered herself quite well from those days: a thin, sinewy child, wild and rough as either of her two brothers. What had happened to that child? Where had she gone? Ah, she had vanished during those feverish nights and in those languid mornings she had disappeared, because the June who had risen lately could not have much to do with the June who had lain down. That homely drink of milk from which she had swallowed fever had contained, it seemed, another germ as well: the more ruthless one of adolescence. Yes, somewhere during the hazy aches of her illness, June’s childhood had gone forever. It was unfair. She had had no chance to say goodbye, no chance to make ready for the next guest.
June was displeased by the shape in the cupboard mirror. She saw herself as thickened, softened and spoiled, without purity of line. Her legs, because of a new fullness in her thighs, appeared shorter, her waist too small above her hips. Then, too, the dark, changing flowers of her bosom dismayed her and rubbed against her clothes. June was still weak from being in bed and was not allowed out or downstairs, so she was free to contemplate for hours these differences in her person.
As darkness settled, June could see the little dormer window in her room begin to glow, and innumerable insect sounds belonging to summer filled her head like a buzzing of her own ears. Then the lights were snapped on and a well-known voice said cheerfully:
“How can you stay like that in the dark?”
June turned to look at the stranger who was her mother. “When will I be able to go downstairs, Mother?” she asked.
June’s mother, or ‘young Mrs. Grey,’ as she was called, went over to the window and drew the blind. She was of the same colouring as her daughter: a dark blond with swarthy skin, but she had a thin, quick face and her figure was of the type known as smart. Before they had become strangers, June had really not known how her mother looked. Now she examined the woman furtively and closely, hoping that they were not alike.
“June,” said her mother, “you are getting well now and your strong constitution has helped, but you must go quietly and slowly. I came up to talk about summer plans. We have never really discussed them.”
The Greys had been preparing for a long trip which, in the case of June’s father, was a semi-business one. They believed in including their children on such excursions and were indeed very dependent on them for amusement and pleasure. June’s brothers were even now packing their bags. One could hear the sounds faintly through the thick old walls, a contrast to June’s own idleness and silence.
“You see, darling,” continued young Mrs. Grey, “you won’t really be your old self again until the fall. I know it seems sad that you should be here without us, but you must get in good shape for school. Besides, you’ll be such a pleasure to your grandmother.”
The summer stretched out in front of them both now, different for each, filled with mystery and hidden fate.
“What about my lessons?” asked June, who had missed the winter and spring term at school.
“Your father has found you a tutor—or rather your grandmother has. It appears she got a letter weeks ago asking her to find one for another child, and so had already made inquiries in the village. Really your grandmother is remarkable!” she finished in the cross tones which meant in fact: ‘She is secretive and sly.’
Young Mrs. Grey gave a bright smile and turned on her heel briskly as though glad everything were settled. She was about to leave the room when June asked:
“Mother, do you really think I will be my old self by winter?”
“Of course you will, darling. Why, you’ll be allowed downstairs in time to say goodbye to us.”
‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ thought June resentfully as her mother’s footsteps tapped sharply down the stairs, ‘and she knew perfectly well what I meant.’
It was true. June’s mother did know and she was glad to escape. She loved her children, but would she be able to love all of them, always? How oppressive the atmosphere had been in that darkened room! Something intensely sensitive, almost quivering, had emanated from the young girl’s being. Despite herself young Mrs. Grey felt a cold dislike and was unable to summon a grain of sympathy. She would be glad to leave for the summer; glad to leave June whom she had nursed so carefully for the last months, and glad as well to leave this gloomy house with its Victorian inconveniences. She could feel here an atavistic draught blowing through stairways and corridors. Alien blood called here from other lands, thick blood with which her own refused to mingle.
June’s mother was impatient. With her light step and quick, light, mobile thoughts, she longed for a country house of her own. She wanted chintz curtains, comfortable chairs and a fleecy bathroom. Yet so far they had come here every summer to live with an old woman on her hilltop where great, dripping trees darkened the windows.
Philip, nine years old, ran up to her as she reached the floor below. “Mother, I have no slacks and I need a real tie, don’t I, if we’re going anywhere?”
Philip had been a white blond, but each year his hair was growing darker just as his deliciously plump body was beginning to get thin. Now his whole face was twisted into an anxious, pleading expression. His mother smiled. She could see just the kind of tie he wanted: blue with a red stripe to turn him into a monkey.
“We’ll have to go shopping in the village tomorrow, won’t we?” she said in that complacent and motherly voice that is the balm of children. Silently she asked: ‘Will you get strange and different too? Will you be on my side?’
Philip’s blue eyes stared back at his mother as though to say: ‘Pierce me if you can. It’s still a secret.’ Then the little boy ran thumping off in his brown, schoolboy’s shoes.
And after all, reflected young Mrs. Grey, she felt no difference in Charles, and he was June’s elder by two years. Perhaps this house, this atmosphere, would only claim one of her brood, and leave the rest alone.
Below, from the ground floor, an uneven tapping told that old Mrs. Grey, called simply ‘Mrs. Grey,’ was moving from one room to another. After dusk set in, the old woman sometimes became restless. It was as though she were expecting a great company of guests and were seeing to it that the house was in readiness. Yet she turned on no lights and did not so much as raise her hand to straighten a curtain. Over her shoulders she wore a lilac shawl and her face shone like parchment. At Philip’s eager voice she turned her head upwards, but she did not smile for she disliked children as such, or rather, there were no children any more to whom she could give a place in her world.
‘How nice it will be when they go,’ she thought, ‘and when I am left alone in my house.’ Only June would remain, and June was no problem to her grandmother. She resumed her journey slowly, going out onto the wide veranda which overlooked both wood and water. Feeling the sweet night air she thought: ‘How it used to make me suffer!’ and she plumbed her breast for any sign of pain now. But there was none.
“Hello, Mother.” It was her son, her only remaining child, back from the city. He sat down on the railing. “Well, we’ll be off soon.”
