Scissors, Paper, Rock

  But look at the photograph more carefully, and there are buckets—large buckets, two for each man, and the bearded father carries three and a sign: A SAD DAY FOR THIRSTY BOYS. Little Tice holds in one hand a string attached to the dog’s collar and in the other an already filled bottle. Why buckets? Why a sad day?

  Or the wedding photograph of Rose Ella’s parents. Rose Ella’s mother sits, her husband stands stiff as death for the camera’s slow exposure—my father’s subjects had to sit still; or maybe they were scared, or remembering the hard-won money they’d just placed in my father’s outstretched hand. Rose Ella’s parents are wearing the homeliest of homespun. Her father’s trousers reveal a long stretch of ankle; her mother’s dress, quilted from a patchwork of cast-off materials, is losing its hem.

  There is no lace, no watered silk, no obsidian buttons. As for the magnolia blossom at her ear—a tree in the background is bare as teeth; no magnolias will be blooming for months.

  At the bottom of the box: one photograph of my mother. She is in a small room built of unfinished lumber (a cottage? a shack?). Behind her chintz curtains billow from a half-open window filled with a light so blinding that it presents itself only as a white square—it’s broad daylight, but my mother is wearing a nightgown. She is huddled on a rough cot, rumpled bedclothes at her feet. Dark half-moons of sleeplessness under her eyes—I imagine her blushing (it was 1913) at the thought of this moment recorded for someone, anyone. She ducks her chin in modesty, but her eyes are bold with desire.

  On first encountering it, I set aside this last photograph. For some unmeasured time I lay on my side on the floor of my mother’s apartment, curled into a ball and searching for the strength to rise, in the face of this strongbox evidence of one person’s cruelty to another.

  How the course of a life is changed by each act, the reverberation of our smallest gesture into the lives of all those by whom we are surrounded: That photograph held the burden of my mother’s dreams, which she had so long concealed from me. Never having seen it, I would have stayed in Chicago; seeing it, I was drawn back to a place where I might live, if not amid blood relatives, at least among those connecting events that had made my mother who she was, and so had made me.

  I brought the two of us back to Strang Knob to be buried, one of us dead, the other alive. I told the town priest that my mother’s deceased husband—my father—was buried in Chicago, but that my mother had wanted to come back for a proper burial in her hometown, and I, the good daughter, was honoring her wishes. He balked for a bit—no doubt he had heard rumors—but it was a warm day in spring, the coffin carried its own implications, I bought the plot with cash. They dug the hole quickly enough.

  What was I to do with these pictures? They did not belong to me, I had no right to keep them, but to have handed them out on my arrival would have led to questions that for many years I was not prepared to answer, until what at first might have been explained as simple oversight (“Oh, by the way, when I moved from Chicago I came across these old photographs. Do you recognize them?”) took on the dimensions of a lie, which, like all lies, perpetrated itself into a life of its own.

  I exaggerate only a little when I write that the photographs in the box constitute, for some several hundred people under Strang Knob, the difference between the world that they have created and need to believe in—a world in which they can have faith—and the world as it is, or was. As for me, I have heard their stories so often repeated and embellished that they have taken on the authority of truth, until it is the photographs that I begin to doubt.

  This mystery deepens with time.

  It is possible, of course, that I have deceived myself. Perhaps, in fact, my mother met my father in Chicago, lived with him long enough to realize her mistake, then left him, taking the strongbox with her as sustenance for forty years of memories.

  But of all horrors the acknowledgment that we have deceived ourselves in love (whether of parents, or family, or friends, or partners) is the most painful, which we will go to ever-greater lengths to avoid; even so far as to spend half a lifetime under Strang Knob.

  Which is better, the world as it is or the world as we need and want it to be? How much reality can we accept and still keep going? I close and lock the strongbox lid.

  I had decided to leave the photographs to be found after my death—I liked the notion of this small cruelty visited on the people of Strang Knob: the camera’s inarguable comeuppance. Then Raphael Hardin returned to stay that winter and spring with his father.

  This was how it worked:

  Each morning he rose, a little later each day, but as early as his strength allowed. He made coffee for Tom Hardin, took it to his shop, sat with him in silence. Then he crossed the yard to my house to administer his IV treatment.

  I served him a cup of tea, or coffee, or a glass of water. Then he’d stand and roll his IV pole from the closet. On the first day I asked if I might help.

  —If I need help I’ll ask, he said brusquely. Then, a little more kindly, —The day I need help to do something as simple as this, that day will be some kind of watershed, some kind of frontier I’ll have passed and there’ll be no turning back. Besides.

  —Besides?

  —If you stuck yourself—there’s a risk. A small risk. But a risk.

  What could risk mean, at my age? How much I wanted someone for whom to take risks! But after that I was careful to keep an excuse at hand, some errand that took me to another room until I judged enough time had passed for Raphael to hook up his IV and get his medicine flowing.

  Then I sat and we talked about books, or the weather, or his job as a librarian, or my years as a teacher. For an hour and more he told stories of himself as a child, stories of the town that Rose Ella and Tom Hardin had created from their memories for his memory, stories of his life and his friends in San Francisco—all the stories of his life, with a needle in his arm and the slow drip of the IV.

  Then he’d glance at the IV bag.

  —Almost empty, he’d say, and I’d find an excuse to leave the room.

  Not long before he returned to San Francisco a day came when I asked some trivial question. Raphael did not respond. I gave him a sharp glance—there had been more of this recently, his passing in and out of attention.

  He glanced up at the IV bag. —Almost empty.

  But before I could rise to go he pulled on a fresh pair of latex gloves and slipped the needle from his arm. This he had never done before while I was present.

  —Do you suppose, he said, that if we made our dead welcome they would visit us more often? People in other places talk about their dead as if they are still alive. Is it possible that the dead visit them more freely and comfortably? I know a Oaxacan woman in San Francisco whose brother died of AIDS. She built an altar to him in a corner of her apartment—a recuerdo, she calls it, where she put all the artifacts from his life, everything from photographs to his favorite coffee cup to a half-empty bottle of tequila he was the last person to drink from. And his toothbrush. She lights a candle there every night, and once a week or so she sits down and talks to him, tells him about her life, even asks him questions. Superstition, or so I thought until all these people who made up my life died. Then I realized how my boundaries didn’t stop at my skin—how my life was a sum of the lives I have touched and who have touched me. Take away all my family, all my friends, all my loves and there’d not be much left. Is this superstition?

  —I don’t know. When I kneel to pray I think on my father.

  He inserted a first, then a second hypodermic into the catheter buried under his skin. It was the first time he had performed this intimate act, this sacrament in front of me.

  —I feel them with me even now, all of them. I wear their clothes—my closet is filled with clothes from six or seven men, all snappy dressers in very different ways, and when I put on a coat or a shirt that belonged to one of them I feel his body wrapped around mine. I hear them in my voice—I think and say things that I learned from them
without knowing I was learning. Or maybe they learned them from me, but I didn’t realize I said things that way until I heard them from some other person’s mouth. Where do they end? Where do I begin? We had this symbiotic life, this love, I don’t know another word for it. How can they be dead, when I feel them with me still?

  He was bundling together tubing and needles, for disposal in a hideously red plastic garbage bin. He spoke without meeting my eyes.

  —What is this life? he asked, and in his voice I heard only bewilderment. —You tell me. How is it possible to lose all and go on? Crucifixion—piece of cake, compared to what I’ve seen my friends endure. Jesus had the satisfaction of being a martyr, right in front of the masses. People compare all this dying with the Holocaust. That’s fatuous. It’s not like the Holocaust at all except in this one single way: You watch this happening to a world you thought you knew and you wonder: How can this be?

  —This is a great and terrible gift. The understanding that we understand nothing.

  —Great. Illness as blessing.

  —You have a better response?

  —For a long while I was enraged—in rage. Now I am trying to accept.

  —Why aren’t you saying this to Tom Hardin?

  —I wouldn’t do him the favor.

  —Which is why you’ve come across a continent to spend time with him.

  To this Raphael gave no answer.

  When he finished disposing of equipment I spoke a command—a teacher knows how to get what she wants.

  —Name them.

  —Name them?

  —Your friends. Tell me their names.

  Raphael swabbed his arm with orange disinfectant.

  —Well, there was Salvador, with the sleek black hair. Bill, who liked politics. Curt, who made movies. Robert, who showed them. James, with the leopard-skin tights and violet blouses. Greg, who wanted to write; Michael, who did. Arturo, who taught. Fred, who fought for human rights. Alain, who made pastries; Larry, who ate them, and who taught me how to love.

  He spread his hands. The IV pole fell clanking to the floor.

  —They were my family. Now who will remember me?

  I mirrored his gesture.

  —Who will remember me?

  We fall in love not with the real person but with an ideal of that person as we want them to be. If our love endures, with the passage of time it comes gradually to spring from our knowledge of the real person, the beloved as they are rather than as we would have them be. What is love but the intersection of memory and desire, past and future, the beloved we have known and the beloved in our hopes and expectations?

  But in love something miraculous happens. In loving someone we give them an ideal against which to measure themselves. Living in the presence of that ideal, the beloved strives to fulfill the lover’s expectations. In this way love makes of us the bravest and best persons that we are capable of being.

  A photographer may take a dozen or a hundred pictures of a human being and he’ll look ordinary as pancakes, and then she gets the right one, she and her subject and the light are all in the same place at the same time and there’s a kind of magic that transpires, the picture that floats up out of those chemicals is larger than any of the people who had a hand in it.

  That was the way it was between Tom Hardin and myself. I would see him a hundred times and he was ordinary as dirt, as plain as any man, and then he’d get his hands on a dog or pick up a block of wood and be transfigured. This is what I would call love, I don’t know what else to call what I saw in his hands, the way they brought out the best in an animal, or the grain and contour of that wood, and transformed it when everything was right into something larger than himself or the dog or the block of wood—something as large as life itself. Under his hands a hunting dog or a block of wood became its best self, the best thing it could possibly be. And if it was too bad he didn’t have that talent (the way only a few people do) with his wife or his children or with me, it’s better that he had it for animals, or wood, than not to have had it at all.

  As for me—was it love for me? Was it the thing that transforms?

  One day Raphael said this during his IV treatment:

  —We’re among the last to remember.

  —What do you mean?

  —You’re among the oldest of your generation still alive. There are only a few left who remember the world as you came to it. That’s true for me among a certain group of friends—of eight or ten people I once did everything with, shared every memory, I’m one of two still alive.

  The sun, which when he first came to my house had slanted low through my windows, had climbed enough into spring that it shone full in our faces. I rose to pull the blinds, but Raphael continued talking as if I were still sitting across from him.

  —Can you imagine what it would be like to have a son die of this disease, of any disease, and no one to whom to speak your grief? Then you turn on the television and some nationally prominent figure is being treated with respect, or at least deference, while he talks about how your son, and by extension you, are somehow to blame.

  I sat then, and took his hand—the hand whose arm was hooked to its IV.

  —Does anyone in your family know?

  He told me of speaking to Rose Ella, and to his nephews, on the night of the last great Hardin family gathering.

  —Once I told my nephews, I figured everybody would find out sooner or later. You know how my family grapevine works. There are no secrets.

  —Except from Tom Hardin. Did Rose Ella tell Tom Hardin?

  —No. Mother would have taken her time—if she could bring herself to tell him at all—and she wasn’t given time. But it’s no secret from him, if he’d let himself open his eyes and see.

  —But he won’t open his eyes unless you open them for him. None of us wants to see the world as it really is unless we’re shocked into it. You can do that for him.

  Raphael’s lips tightened—I know that thin line; I have felt it on myself.

  —Let him ask first. I’m the one who’s sick. (He is too much like you to speak first, I recalled my words, spoken in the woodshop to Tom Hardin. Surely this would be the act of greatest courage—as much as or more than speaking before a crowd: sitting down and speaking something hard and true face-to-face with someone you love.)

  —You’re both sick.

  —He can come to me. He asks, I’ll tell him. All he has to do is ask.

  Remembering this person or that person, Tom Hardin or Raphael or me—this matters only in the short run, however it might be a good way to spend a rainy afternoon. It’s the accumulation of remembering that counts. The land remembers—the place remembers—people remember, if they give themselves the time and place. The tree remembers the forest that has come before. The earth remembers the people who have lived on it. People remember without knowing they are remembering. Have we left our place in history in better shape than when it was given to us? This is the big memory, the memory that matters, the sum of all our stories rendered into one big story, one big truth. What are we, finally, but accumulations of memory? The heart remembers, the body remembers what has been done to it, what has come out of all that’s gone before and what, with devotion and skill, may be given to those who follow. Memory is a gift. It does not belong to us; it’s not part of us. It’s ours to enjoy and replenish while we’re alive and to pass on, augmented, at our deaths.

  On his last visit, the day before he returned to San Francisco, Raphael finished his “drip,” as he called it, and packed away his medical paraphernalia in a large duffel bag.

  I poured us each a finger of whiskey. Raphael raised his glass in a toast.

  —To life. L’chaim, as the Jews say.

  I raised my glass and drank. Raphael drained his glass, then set it by his medical paraphernalia and asked this question, his father’s famous question that echoed in my memory.

  —How about going for a drive?

  I gave the answer which it was my place to give.

&
nbsp; —What do we have but time?

  We went outside to the car. Sitting at the steering wheel, I paused before turning the key.

  —Inside.

  —Ma’am?

  —There’s a small box next to my desk. An old-fashioned box—it has leather hinges and a big combination lock. Would you mind going in and getting it?

  I drove through the countryside to the Perlite Ford Bridge. A cold front had passed through the day before—high winds, tornado watches, spring. On this day the trees pierced an impossibly blue sky with livid shards of green. Raphael gestured at the sky.

  —In San Francisco there’s never this landlocked light. There when the weather blows through you get these brilliant days of marine light—all that light reflected from clouds and water and the pastel buildings and the sky is filled with light, but always it’s refracted light, with water in it or behind it. But here this dry light comes sweeping down from the north and brings a kind of polar clarity. It’s as if the cold air brings the arctic light along with it.

  In the distance the light—this polar light, as Raphael called it—greened the branches that lined the riverbank. Over moist, dark furrows barn swallows swooped and dipped, caught up in the exuberance of spring. The sky’s electric blue suffused every visible thing with its presence and color.

  We crested the backbone of a ridge and dropped into Perlite Hollow. Farms fanned out to either side, a patched quilt of plowed and fallow fields alternating with woodlands where brands of lavender redbud showed among the pale green limbs. On the north-facing slopes the trees were still gray and barren. Here and there in the fields long rectangles of white muslin billowed over fledgling tobacco shoots.