He rose and pulled on his pants, tiptoed past Rose Ella’s door, past the small room where these days Tom Hardin spent his nights (light still leaked from around his doorframe), out into the yard.
Against the turbulent sky the treetops were beginning to sway; the wind was picking up. The card players were stacking their decks and gathering their winnings. The party was over. Raphael crossed the yard to stand half-hidden by the sugar maple’s trunk, watching his nephews and their friends. He stood tongue-tied before the weight of history, a coward still before the speaking aloud of his fate.
Heart like a river, Catherine had said.
In San Francisco Raphael had heard the following, no doubt from one of his friends who was wearing crystals and attending self-healing seminars: that the Hopi believe that at death the breath from one’s last words rises to become the clouds, from which rain falls to nourish the corn that in turn nourishes the generations that follow; so that at meals one is eating the gifts of one’s ancestors, who have by their speaking made one’s own life possible. Raphael stood quietly, thinking of tonight’s meal, tonight’s clouds, of his unnamed ancestors whose small acts of generosity and courage had made possible the best parts of his life; thinking of Brother Samuel, and of Nick Handley, living in the Hardins’ midst, abiding their thoughtlessness and ignorance because they loved them so much. This they did for the Hardins, sorriest of lovers; and Raphael was humbled by the boundlessness of their love.
He stepped forward, dropped his jaw, spoke to his nephews words that breached a dam in his heart, to tap the lake stored there of bitterness and anger and love: all that death, his own death, his love for men, his love for them, his nephews, his love for himself and for his memory as it lived in these children, his children, his blood.
“I’m filled with anger and rage that no one will acknowledge that my friends are dying, and that they’re dying of AIDS.” The words spoke themselves—he had nothing to do with forming them; they came from some deep and necessary place where they had been waiting until the moment when he gave them permission to be heard. On them followed a silence as big as his life until now, but the words that demanded to be spoken had not yet finished themselves out, and he spoke again. “And I have the virus. I’ve had it for years.”
The silence that followed now was too large to comprehend or speak into. Raphael spread his hands but could not say more, his lips moved to form words that remained stuck in his throat.
Finally Michael spoke. “So at last somebody is letting us in on the big secret.”
In the conversation that followed, it was Michael who asked the difficult questions, who filled the awkward silences. With each of his nephew’s questions Raphael came to understand what for so long he had not allowed himself to see because he was afraid of the pain of seeing it: Michael’s own burden of pain, which the family had agreed to ignore because they found it too large and threatening to comprehend.
They talked into the night. Raphael told them what he knew, a reservoir of information gleaned by simple fact of living with and amid the illness. They told him what they had heard, a mixture of myth and rumor and lies. Little of this they believed—“scare tactics,” Michael said wiltingly. But what were they to believe? They plied Raphael with questions until his head thickened. In their questions, in their ignorance he understood how out of fear he had evaded his responsibility to them. He, after all, knew more than anyone here. Any number of times he might have chosen to speak; instead he had held his tongue and contributed another brick to the great wall of silence.
Tonight he released to the clouds the breath of his stories.
Much later, back in the holy bed. The measure of their curiosity had been exceeded only by the magnitude of their ignorance. Where had they gotten these notions? Raphael was exhausted, discouraged by the size of the battle, the shortness of time to fight.
“If AIDS is such a big deal,” Dwight Flaherty had said, “somebody would be telling us about it.”
“I’m telling you about it,” Raphael said.
“Well, yeah, but you’re gay.”
Raphael consoled himself: That, at least, was something—the ease with which, once given permission, they used words that for Rose Ella and for him had been forbidden. In the remembering and speaking aloud of words lay, not salvation—Rose Ella was right about that—but at least knowledge. And what was that? Some chance for life itself. Speaking to his nephews, he understood love’s most difficult and necessary of tasks—holding in the heart these contradictions: forgive, and remember; accept, and never shut up.
And then there was his father. On his way to bed Raphael had stopped before Tom Hardin’s door—his father’s light was still on. This is what all that death and dying had led him to, Raphael thought: the gradual burning away of the layers that he had constructed to protect himself from the great and terrible facts of the world. But how much more courage could he be expected to muster? Was there a limit to what love required? Raphael continued down the hall.
Lying in the holy bed, Raphael saw against the ceiling the splayed fingers of the clothes tree, thrown there by a distant flash of lightning. The whippoorwill stopped his calling. Raphael counted, one-and-two-and-three . . . at ten he gave up. Sometime later the thunder came, a distant grumbling.
In the stillness of the dark Raphael felt every farmer, every human being tied in any way to the land, every wild creature awake and lying in stillness hoping, afraid to move from fear that any movement would break the spell, would cause the rain to pass over to some other, more grateful place.
“I think of you sometimes, out in San Francisco,” Nick had said. Never before tonight had it occurred to Raphael that a life as humble and unexceptional as his own, as ordinary as Nick’s, as quiet as Brother Samuel’s might so deeply touch another’s life without that person’s knowing. It was the most forceful argument he knew for virtue: this symbiosis of interlocking lives, the ecology of love.
“You were in love,” Nick had said, and the longing in his voice spoke for itself. Raphael thought on Nick’s vision of who Raphael was and what he had done. What Nick held in his heart was a kind of love, Raphael knew this now.
In his twenties when his lover had called him these words—“kind,” “handsome,” “generous”—Raphael had dismissed him with a mocking, deprecating wave of his hand. “Oh, you’re just in love,” he’d said in his pretentious, macho, pseudo-worldwise way.
And now Nick was in love, in a way, and though Raphael told himself firmly and instantly there was no future in that—maybe there was some future in that. He owed it to Nick to call—he owed it to himself to call—he would call tomorrow, and ask Nick for what he’d have to call a date.
In Raphael’s mind they grew confused, the family and his lover and Nick and his nephews and the monks, so many of whom had passed through this bed on their way from one world to another. He saw them leaping, cowled and cinctured, over the old gatehouse (Pax Intrantibus), over the enclosure walls, up the crucifix-crowned hill, where with a last bound they sailed into the fleecy heavens: Brothers Anselm, Alfred, Asaph, Benedict, Chrysogonus, Chrysostom, Cyril and Darian, Paul, Polycarp, Raphael, his namesake . . . He lay watching the ceiling, waiting for the flash and rumble, waiting for rain.
Rose Ella lay awake, alone. Tom Hardin, who slept fitfully these days, had taken to spending his nights in one of the children’s empty bedrooms, so as not to disturb her with his tossing and turning. Rose Ella lay and stared at the sheet lightning flicker and dance across the ceiling.
Why me? Why us? People thought they were so smart these days, going to the moon and making all this money, but that’s what it came down to, that’s what it always came down to and always would come down to: questions with no answers.
Now she was alone; now she could cry, and she bit her lip to keep from crying. What had she done wrong? A big, country family, deep enough in the hills to avoid city influences but with enough flat land to live decent. “The family that prays together stays togeth
er,” the priest had said. Well, they’d prayed together, at first anyway, a rosary a night on their knees, then every other night, then every third night or once a week. Had they abandoned God? “More like the other way around,” she said this aloud, then muttered a quick Act of Contrition.
All those children in something like a decade, and that wasn’t counting the miscarriages. These no one remembered except her, who remembered them as clearly as if each of those babies had been born squalling and whole.
There’d been too many children, off in a million directions—cheerleading practice, football, homecoming parades, graduations, births, births, births, and always the cows to milk. Rose Ella had done her part, had stuck with the church. She had raised her kids to be good Catholics. Was it her fault they’d left the church? (At least Clark had escaped that fate.) What had she done wrong? That was no question worth lying awake over. If she was old enough to know anything she was old enough to know that, and still she’d spent a life hiding from questions that came upon her. Watching Tom Hardin’s balding, jaundiced scalp, his thick silver hair lost to chemotherapy; staying busy for a lifetime around Raphael because she was afraid of what he had to say, of letting herself know what she already knew.
She and her husband, she and her daughters, she and her sons—of all of them this was true: They had been less than honest with each other because they had not wanted to speak of these matters, because none had wanted to hear what the others were unwilling to say. But wasn’t this true of everyone? What were words worth, when confronted with the mute intuition of things unseen: the infinitude of grief, the high pinnacles of joy, the profundity of love, the omnipotence of desire? How could grief, joy, love, or desire be spoken of, when they weren’t comprehended by words themselves? Words; as necessary and shapeless as water.
A summer afternoon. Rafe had talked about the hot light from the patio—that would make it the new house—sometime around 1960? Rafe would have been six or seven. And she had been so upset as to flat-out cry, right in the kitchen where one of the kids was sure to come upon her.
1960. She and Tom Hardin had been married seventeen, no, eighteen years. They hadn’t fought in a long while—not since around the time of Rafe’s birth. Now when things got tense Tom Hardin hid out in the woodshop. She had her sewing and cooking and cleaning, and one hour a week in the Sacred Heart Sodality when she napped while pretending to pray. When would she have had time to cry? Merciful memory: nothing.
Then something: One of the monks (Brother Edward? Asaph? Benedict? Romuald? he had long since flown north, back where he’d come from) had brought flowers. The monastery had a greenhouse in those days, where they’d grown flowers for the altar (none of that frivolousness now, under the new regime—the greenhouse had been dismantled years ago, the monks had brought her cuttings from the flowers they’d thrown away. These she’d rooted and planted and tended still.) This monk had brought succulents for Rose Ella’s cactus garden, and a single stalk of a cymbidium orchid from which there hung eight or ten blooms. In those delicate throaty blossoms she remembered Camp Junior, only son of a rich farming family who rode her around in his father’s car and took her to movies and, yes, bought her flowers. At the movies she’d realized how many of the stars were just country girls who had taken themselves to California with a little gumption and talent, and she had plenty of both. Oh, she had plans! The rich boyfriend (well, rich to her) took her out and they parked on the courthouse square and looked at maps. They would drive his new car (to be bought with the money he was sure to inherit) across Route 66 to Pasadena, to Hollywood, where he would go to law school (they must have law schools in California) and she would try her luck in the movies.
Then high school ended and Camp Junior went to the state university. She wrote him letters and waited, until the day when she met Tom Hardin on the courthouse square and she had waited long enough. Tom Hardin was flirtatious, he had no money at all but he had a truck; even if it was an old one it got them where they needed to go. By the time Camp Junior returned (in fact his father had died, in fact he had inherited the farm and a good deal more, in fact he was on his way to Vanderbilt Law), Rose Ella was married. She had her children and named them for movie stars and put all that foolishness behind her, until the day when that monk (Tobias? Brendan?) brought orchids and Rafe found her crying. Typical, she told herself sternly, that in a life with plenty of good reasons to cry Rafe should have come upon her crying over nothing.
California—the place where their children went. She imagined herself there now, standing at the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge—this was easy to do; on her only visit to San Francisco, Rafe had walked her halfway across, and she returned here often when she had trouble falling asleep. She felt the bridge tremble and sway beneath her feet—“It’s nothing but a plain old swinging bridge,” was what she’d said to Rafe on that first visit, “just like the bridge Tom Hardin built across the creek behind the old house, only bigger.” And Tom Hardin had the good sense to put a high chain-link fence on his bridge, she might have added, but this was California and there was between her and giddy air only a metal banister not much higher than her waist. To look over and look down was to be sucked in—you might fall off such a bridge just by looking down too long; she thought this then, standing next to Rafe, and now in her imagination she yields to temptation. She leans over and looks straight down, until the scalloping waves mesmerize her and she falls.
At first she tumbles head over heels, but then she spreads her arms like the Olympic divers she’s seen on television, thrusting her ample breasts before her, pointing her toes to the retreating sky. A flock of mud swallows attacks her with sharp beaks and beating wings, but she falls through them and they bank and wheel back to their nests, built on the underpinnings of the bridge. She falls past screaming gulls, toward the billowing sails of the boats on the bay, past the crenellated turrets and gun emplacements and astonished tourists’ faces crowding the Civil War fort, into the sea, splashless as a pelican. The cold waters of the Golden Gate close over her; she runs her tongue over her lips and tastes salt.
The tide is withdrawing—she floats sideways, west toward the sun, toward the foreign places of her imagination, until pressure from the water above overcomes her buoyancy and she sinks. Rafe, who knows such things, has told her that the channel here is very deep—three hundred? four hundred feet? A shark swims by, the great white shark that breeds in the bay. It bares its teeth; she faces it down, smiling. She has not failed her scattered children, her dying husband, her youngest son.
Above the waves, the sun spreads itself across the Pacific. Tongues of livid scarlet yield to rose, then muted yellow, then the deepening violets of dusk. On the rocks of the Farallons, elephant seals slide into the water. Tens of thousands of birds—murres, puffins, petrels, cormorants—sink to darkness, finding nests and niches, tucking bills into their breasts, ruffling feathers about their young. Sinking below the waters Rose Ella remembers: Alfred, bringer of the orchids, and she sleeps.
Some Kind of Family
[1990]
Elizabeth is standing at a San Francisco dockside, clutching the jar of Raphael’s ashes she has carried from Kentucky. At her side Andrew cranes his neck to study a herd of sea lions sprawling on nearby boat slips, sunning in lazy contentment except for a few young males who butt heads and hump each other with half-hearted grunts of pleasure. Elizabeth watches what her lover watches, as the mourner’s question, old as grief, presents itself to her: Why should these animals have life, when her brother is dead? Weak-kneed, she sits on the closest bench, next to a group of tourists from Texas (you don’t know they’re from Texas, she admonishes herself as she sits) who are complaining loudly about how hard it is to find parking in San Francisco.
She is haunted now, as surely as any house, and memory is her ghost. As a child she’d been plugged into the continuity of things without even knowing it was there. Every other Saturday morning she’d tooled through the cemetery with a basket of flowers arran
ged by Rose Ella for distribution among the Hardin and Perlite family graves. Among her vast sea of relatives someone was always slipping over the horizon even as someone else was being born. And then of course there’d been her brother Clark, killed in Vietnam; after his death the graveyard visits became more frequent, the flower arrangements more elaborate, as if Rose Ella were using them to vent some passion for which she had no other outlet.
But then Elizabeth moved to California, time passed, not a single death in her life until Rose Ella died in an instant; one moment there, another gone. On an ordinary Los Angeles day (“Morning low clouds, followed by clearing inland . . .”) Elizabeth had picked up the portable telephone to hear through its crackle and static her oldest brother, Joe Ray, weeping that their mother was dead.
However many funerals she’d attended, before Rose Ella’s death Elizabeth had not given a thought to what now seemed so obvious: the unanswering deafness of this door, the finality of its closing. Then Rose Ella was gone, so quickly that Elizabeth was left with almost nothing to remember her by.
As she’d aged Rose Ella had shed the things she owned, giving away first her old treadle sewing machine, next her grandmother clock, next her hurricane lamps. These she gave to the married children, those with heirs. Elizabeth told herself she wasn’t hurt—how would she wrestle a two-hundred-pound sewing machine to California? Where would she fit it in her postage-stamp apartment? But she knew the answer to that question—had Rose Ella given her something, she would have figured out how to get it there and a place to put it.
Instead she was left with an old red coat with a real mink collar. A nice coat—a perfectly preserved period piece that would be the talk of any L.A. party, except that it never got cold enough in L.A. to wear a coat that heavy. Rose Ella herself had never worn it—not that Elizabeth remembered—but there it was in her mother’s closet, carefully wrapped in tissue paper and mothballs and labeled FOR BETTE C. In the heat of late summer Elizabeth wore it to Rose Ella’s funeral.
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