The Crossings

by Deborah Larsen

  She had settled her thinking about prayer. It was a mystery. But she practiced some limping form of it. And as far as asking for things was concerned, the simple fact was that sometimes the answer was “no” or “not right now” or “not in this instance.” She had no idea how prayer worked. But the faith, the belief in a Presence that was both transcendent and immanent and beyond-all-concepts Personal, meant that there had to be a listener. That communication went on. That it would continue, gloriously, beyond death. Otherwise, faith would be in vain. In the end, though, it was mysterious.

  Once when she had told Ted something like this, he finished chewing his maraschino cherry and looked out at her over his manhattan. “Sounds like Cloud Cuckoo Land to me. Aristophanes.”

  Oh, she had to write him and tell him. She had joined The Cloud Society.

  “Well, I guess it all means that I am headed toward death,” she told her doctor. “That’s the way I think of it,” she said cheerfully. She had all the silent diseases—prediabetes, osteoporosis, hearing loss—that were for her part of the aging that led to death. Everyone dies of something.

  At her back these days she heard “time’s wingèd-chariot hurrying near.” Once the chariot reached her side and she climbed in, she knew in which direction the “horses’ heads” were set.

  Dr. Arvanitis raised her eyebrows. “You think about your approaching death.”

  “Well, yes. Is that strange?”

  “No. But do you spend a lot of time thinking about it, anticipating it?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “Well, what about hospice then?”

  “Hospice?”

  “Calling them in.” She sat back in her chair and lifted her chin. “You could call them in, order a hospital bed, and be prepared.”

  The doctor smiled. “You have to be a little careful around here,” she said. “Maybe especially careful if you live in or near age-restricted communities. The point being, to resist the idea that you are dying when lots of people around you are dying. Not to think you have to join them. Not to feel guilty that you are basically quite healthy and that they are dying. It’s not shameful to be healthier than many of them are. You can empathize with ill-health and frailty without taking it on, assuming it yourself. She paused and pressed her lips together in something that bordered on a smile. “For what all that’s worth.”

  Sophie sat still.

  Dr. Arvanitis sat forward. Then she said again, “You are actually in basically good health.” She leaned forward. “‘Therefore, choose life.’ Take measures. ‘Seize the day.’”

  Sophie began, then, practicing letting go of thinking about her death. Her idea had been to move. That was why she had come here.

  Her idea now was to keep ahead of the chariot (a metaphor she could not quite surrender) and have this adventure if she was going to have it. Go out and into this desert anticipating, like Pooh, some agave-flavored (in this case) honey.

  The doctor’s last words, her sayings were familiar. Later she found that the first was from Deuteronomy 30:19. The second was from Horace. Who was that doctor?

  The next time she was in Tucson, she stopped at a sandwich shop and thought about it. At a nearby table sat a grandmother and a mother and a daughter who looked to be about eleven. The daughter had “crackled” nail polish—silver over lime—on her toes. While her mother was up at the counter, she leaned over and said to her grandmother, “I think Mom keeps hurting Dad’s feelings. She treats him with—contempt. No one deserves that.”

  The grandmother said, “I’ve noticed that. But you better lower your voice.” They looked at each other.

  A young woman on the other side of Sophie was taking notes from a textbook. At an outdoor table, a young man talked on his cell phone and laughed. He listened. Then he threw his head back and laughed again. He stood up. His T-shirt said, “Wood at Work.” They all looked perfectly healthy and they were not talking about physical ailments.

  Sophie then decided that she would spend more time in Tucson. Hang around some younger persons. Perhaps spend less time in JJ Agave.

  Of course, the next day Sophie went to JJ Agave. She breathed in and out before she entered the store and headed straight for the produce department. The first person she saw was ancient. He was stooped—osteoporosis or scoliosis?—and had a basket over one bruised arm. Over the other arm was a cane. He was looking at peaches from under his broad-brimmed straw hat, staring at them as if he could not decide how they had come to be there in the first place.

  She hoped he hadn’t driven there. I need not to look at him. I need to stop thinking that he is what I will be, in fewer years than I want to imagine.

  Of course, she watched him. It was his manner that did it. He picked up a peach and held it a few inches from his nose. He turned it around. He put it back in the exact spot from which it had come and then he looked up and looked right into Sophie’s eyes.

  “A peach,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do I dare to eat a peach?” He grinned.

  Sophie did not know how to answer but he was already back, lost in the peaches as if she did not exist, as if he had not said a word to her. And the instant after she decided his question had been the purest of rhetorical questions, he said without looking up, “Of course I dare.”

  Then he clasped his hands in front of him. He seemed to be beseeching someone, but it was a dignified beseeching as if he was the celebrant in full vestments before an altar of peaches. Introibo ad altare Dei. The opening of the Mass of her youth.

  The server would respond: “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meum.” Or, now most of us could respond: “Ad Deum qui laetificat senectutem meum.”

  In a little while, he picked up another peach, which he inspected. No squeezing was involved. Lifting, holding, looking, putting down—that was his repertoire. She expected to hear the jingling of consecration bells any minute.

  Get the hell out of here. She made herself pick out a bunch of radishes.

  Part of her problem, she realized, was that she adored him. She admired many of the people she saw here: it took them ten minutes to get down one aisle. They were not all like Motorized Man, the guy with the hacking cough who bossed his wife around.

  These others, these with dignity, had their own actual ailments. Often, they could not reach an item on the shelf. Some had necks so stiff they had to turn the whole upper halves of their bodies to scan racks of soups. Not all of them, but some of them were emblems of patience, good-temper, and even good humor.

  And the point was they had gotten out of bed. They had dressed and eaten a little. They had put on Coral Sands lipstick. They had given up driving and were taking a community van to the grocery store. “No, don’t shop for me; I want to go myself.”

  They rather liked the idea of being out somewhere and dying, instead of dying in bed. Dying with their shoes on. Some of these people had learned the art of aging and had practically become poets.

  When Sophie had once been in the aisle that displayed candy, contemplating the relative percentages of the cacao in dark chocolate, a square or two of which she ate every day, a woman said to her, “You look like you could stand to eat some of that,” and then sailed right on down the aisle. She had somehow known that Sophie needed someone to speak to her.

  One of the things she had come to detest was jokes at the expense of the old. Flying around the internet, on greeting cards. Jokes about urine, jokes about the hopeless lack of erections. If men out on the golf course felt better about making such jokes about aging males, Sophie didn’t mind—men out on golf courses consoled themselves and each other in this way. But she loved the hard-earned dignity of some of the old and did not want it spoiled for a laugh.

  The only story she couldn’t help liking was the one about the ninety-five-year-old man who walked into a Green Valley restaurant and saw an attractive older woman
at the bar all by herself. She was drinking a martini. How refreshing. He judged her to be about eighty-five.

  He chose the bar stool next to hers and ordered a martini. When he glanced over at her, she was smiling at him.

  He couldn’t believe his good luck. He smiled back and said, “Do I come here often?”

  But the luck had been genuine. The woman thought so, too. She said to him, “You mean—?

  Down Bromley Kent

  18th

  My dear Lyell,

  Some year or so ago, you recommended me to read a paper by Wallace in the Annals, which had interested you & as I was writing to him, I knew this would please him much, so I told him. He has today sent me the enclosed & asked me to forward it to you. It seems to me well worth reading. Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd. be forestalled. You said this when I explained to you here very briefly my views of “Natural Selection” depending on the Struggle for existence. I never saw a more striking coincidence. if Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters.

  Please return me the M.S. which he does not say he wishes me to publish; but I shall of course at once write & offer to send to any Journal. So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed. Though my Book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated; as all the labour consists in the application of the theory. I hope you will approve of Wallace’s sketch, that I may tell him what you say.

  My dear Lyell | Yours most truly | C. Darwin 18

  —Letter, C. Darwin to C. Lyell. [June 1858]

  [Encloses MS by A.R. Wallace]

  Scooped

  On a June day in 1858, the postman came to Down, bringing a small packet. It came from Ternate, an island in the Dutch East Indies; the sender was Alfred Russel Wallace, a person whom Charles had encouraged.

  When Sophie read about Alfred Wallace, she was astonished. Not only was he a biologist, an anthropologist, a geographer; he was also a social activist who supported, for example, women’s suffrage. Apparently he believed that evolution might have a purpose and that human consciousness could not have arisen from purely material causes.

  She started to look up biographies of the man. Which one would be the best? She leaned forward, close to the computer and searched, searched. She was as fast and as intent as Lisbeth Salander.

  Then she stopped. She lifted her left hand and looked at it. She had picked up the fact that Wallace believed it was a crucial moment when primitive people stood up and walked; this freed their hands to do what their brains suggested to them. Or not. You could choose. Hands: a miracle.

  She needed, she decided, to talk more to her hands— the way Mark “The Bird” Fidrych talked to the ball when he was pitching for the Tigers. What years were those? She typed the Bird’s name into the search box.

  “Quit it,” she said to her hands. “We’re working with Charles right now; not The Bird, not Alfred Wallace. You can get to Alfred later. Stop searching for him.”

  When he read what was in the packet, Charles must have been devastated. Wallace had independently come up with the same theory about evolution. On this subject, Charles’s letter to his friend, Charles Lyell, is poignant.

  Charles Darwin had been scooped. But he had such integrity that he notified his mentor right away. And he said he would write Wallace and offer to send his manuscript “to any Journal.”

  On July 1, 1858, excerpts from both Darwin’s and Wallace’s writings were presented by Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker at the Linnean Society of London. Charles had done the honorable thing.

  The Origin of Species was published in London on November 24th, 1859.

  Sophie was thankful that Charles in the end could take comfort from the fact that his Book would “not be deteriorated.” All the “labour” that consisted “in the application of the theory” proved absolutely crucial and differentiated his work from that of Wallace.

  His book sold out. Editions, including foreign editions, followed. There was applause; of course there was outrage.

  A Miniature Manhattan

  She had taken to calling her New Yorker gathering a “miniature Manhattan.” The old Sophie who did not need anybody wanted to be with the somebodies in this group. Conversation was vigorous. Laughter ran free.

  Now she was becoming friendly with people from Massachusetts, Florida, Michigan, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, D.C., New York, California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The striking difference between some Manhattanites and most of these new acquaintances was that here they tended not to be wary, not to stand on ceremony.

  At the beginning, most of them made little or no mention about what they had “done” in their past lives. No veiled appeals to status. Nobody appeared to be in any big hurry; practically no one projected a sense of being frantic. It reminded her of—what? She pondered. Ah. Santos’s dinner parties.

  Only in time did Sophie came to know some of them and to know a little about their lives. A man who turned out to be a lawyer asked if he could report on the David Foster Wallace article; a mathematician raised her hand for “The Pop Life”; a writer spoke for “Letter from Reykjavík”; a painter wanted to talk about James Surowiecki’s latest one-pager.

  People liked to comment on the cover art, the cartoons; the ads—a monocle, anyone? A bow tie? A stay at Harvard in the McLean Pavilion, for psychiatric treatment? Does someone here need a blazer?

  Once Sophie made the mistake of saying that a person being profiled seemed so depressed that she just wanted to go to the East Coast, bundle him up and bring him out to the desert. From then on whenever an article was grim, downbeat, fashionably hopeless—and there were plenty of those—a man named Cedric would say, “Sophie should go get the mullah and bring him here to us; we will make him smile.” Or, “Sophie needs to go up and shepherd that poor contributing writer onto a plane. Fly her down to Tucson right away; then she can unbundle herself with all the rest of us.”

  Down Bromley Kent

  May 22

  My Dear Gray,

  . . . .

  With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. 19

  . . . .

  —Charles Darwin to Asa Gray 22 May [1860]

  A Dog on the Mind of Newton

  I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.” Sophie loved that. Charles was also the man who used to say, “It’s dogged as does it.”

  Despite almost constant ill health, he worked. He experimented, he observed; he wrote. His subjects included orchids, climbing plants, the descent of man, the expression of emotions, insectivorous plants, and worms.

  His work with Sundew plants was fascinating. How could you not love a man who took so much pleasure in experi
ment with the mysterious Sundew which trapped and fed on insects. By the time she finished reading about them, she imagined them dressed in black capes like Dracula. They should wear eyeliner—ash-colored. Someone should write Interview with a Sundew. Sundew plants should be sold for Halloween. They should be nurtured in haunted houses.

  While reading about the Sundews, she forgot to eat lunch. Or was it forgetting? Was it lack of appetite from thinking about her own and others’ Sundew propensities? Varieties of trapping and predation happened among humans as well.

  She thought of ordering a Sundew plant and placing it on her desk. Then she decided to act. She wanted to see for herself. She stopped thinking and ordered a Sundew plant.

  Charles did bewail the fact that at this point in life he didn’t care for poetry and found Shakespeare “so intolerably dull” that it “nauseated” him. “Pictures” no longer delighted him; music became a problem because it conjured up whatever he was working on and set him “thinking too energetically,” instead of giving him pleasure.

  Had part of his brain “atrophied?” Perhaps, from his mind having become “a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”

  But he was perplexed: history, travel, biographies, essays did still interest him. And so did the novel, though he did not like unhappy endings. “A novel,” he wrote, “according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.”

  How could Shakespeare possibly evoke nausea in such a learned man? But it was such an honest and intriguing remark that Sophie could not stop thinking about it. Maybe there wasn’t enough duration in a play so that you could come to “thoroughly love” someone in it.