Clio Rising

by Paula Martinac

  “Is she coming in today?” I asked, after I’d made the tour of the show and decided my favorites were Peg’s work and photos of dilapidated barns shot by another female artist.

  “Nah, she was in yesterday,” he said. “She’s home with her old lady.” My face must have registered confusion because he added, laughing, “Her girlfriend, man. You dig?”

  Walking out of the gallery, I marveled at how little I knew about my own hometown. Peg, a girl I’d sat behind in high school, was apparently living as a lesbian— with a girlfriend!— and making delicate, woman-centered art in the place I’d fancied such a backwater. What would have happened to me if I’d stayed?

  That question made me take a detour past Hallie and Tom’s bungalow. Their house was forsaken-looking, with no outdoor Christmas lights and no sign of movement inside. I wondered if they had gone to Tom’s parents in West Virginia for the holiday, or if they were just out for the day. But then I noticed a funny thing— a child’s tricycle in the side yard. With the motor idling, I puzzled over the trike, thinking it must be a neighbor’s, when a rap on my car window made me lurch forward and bash my chest against the steering wheel. It was a neighbor I recognized from all the times I’d been to visit Hallie, a guy who lived across the street with his wife and kids.

  “Livvie, right?” he asked through the rolled-down window. He was carrying a bag full of wrapped Christmas presents.

  “Hi, Mike,” I said, proud I’d unearthed his name.

  “You know they moved, right?”

  My mouth fell open. “No, I’ve been gone—”

  “Yeah, they sold the place in the fall, right after they split up. Tom said neither one of them could bear to stay.”

  “No, I guess not,” I muttered, my mind replaying the words “split up.”

  “Real shame,” Mike went on. “Nice couple.”

  “Do you know where they went?” I asked. “I mean where Hallie went? I knew her better than Tom . . . because of school. But I knew him too, of course.” My words were tripping all over themselves in my attempt to stay cool.

  “No idea. Tom got an apartment, I think over in West Asheville, but he didn’t say anything about her. Some bad stuff went down. Cheating type stuff. Her, not him.” Mike stamped his feet from the cold. “Gotta get inside now. Santa’s big night!” He extended his paunchy stomach and I worried he was about to deliver a “Ho, ho, ho!” But he spared me and simply said, “Merry Christmas!”

  Because I knew that Hallie and Tom wouldn’t be driving up at any minute and that Mike didn’t have contact with them, I took a few additional minutes to stare at the house. My thoughts traveled to the bedroom and the dive I’d taken out the window the last time Hallie and I were together. It was late afternoon and we’d fallen asleep, forgetting to set the alarm so I could leave well before Tom got home. Hallie practically pushed me out of bed when she heard Tom’s keys in the front door. Only half-dressed, I’d pitched myself out the window like a burglar, and crushed a hydrangea. I hunched out of sight, waiting to dash away until I heard Tom and Hallie screaming at each other. Hallie had driven me to her house, so I had to hitch a ride back to Weaverville.

  After a few days, I had called her from Cowboy Jack’s, begging her to see me, but she told me she couldn’t. “Not in that way. I’ll always have fond memories of you, Livvie, but I love Tom.”

  “You said you loved me!” I protested. “In your office that time, and then at the motel—”

  “Well, I did. At that moment. That’s something people say.”

  Her voice had dripped with annoyance, like I was a student protesting my grade, and that was what had made me fire back. “Well, here’s something else they say! I hate you! And I could fix you good, Hallie! What if I told Tom you’ve been sleeping with your student? What about that, Professor?”

  She had sighed, knowing as well as I that I’d never follow through on such a threat, that spilling our secret would hurt me as much as her. “Please, Livvie, don’t be like this. We had something special for a while, didn’t we? Let’s leave it at that.”

  As I drove from Hallie’s old house to Sue’s, the memory made my eyes fill. Luckily, my sister either didn’t notice I’d been crying or was so frazzled by the duties of being a parent on Christmas Eve that she ignored it.

  Chapter 21

  The next day, I rapped at Clio’s cabin door, but she didn’t answer. Where would she be on Christmas morning? My cheerful raps turned to urgent bangs as I called out her name. I moved to the window, but the shades were drawn, so I tried tapping on the glass. Still no response. A man in the neighboring cabin saw my distress and fetched Mr. Bell to unlock the door.

  “Doesn’t seem good,” Mr. Bell said as he fussed with a ring of keys before finding the correct one.

  Clio was sitting in the armchair, not moving. Her azure eyes registered terror.

  “Miss Hartt! It’s Miss Bliss. Can you hear me?” I crouched in front of her, searching for signs of recognition. When she opened her mouth to answer, she couldn’t form words.

  “Bet it’s a stroke.” The man from the next cabin over made the pronouncement from the doorway where he and a few other motel guests had gathered. “Happened just like that to my Pawpaw. Sat in his own piss for half a day.”

  “Be quiet, this isn’t like that,” I snapped. “Miss Hartt, we’re going to get you to a doctor. Do you understand?”

  She nodded. At least she could hear me, even if she couldn’t answer.

  “Call 9-1-1, would you?” I asked Mr. Bell. But he was elderly himself and navigated with a cane, so I jogged back to the main cabin.

  By the time the EMT van arrived, Clio was talking again. “This is too much fuss,” were her first words, but I reminded her that moments earlier she’d been unable to talk at all. One paramedic knelt beside her, examining her eyes and quizzing her on her name and mine, while the other brought in a gurney ready for her transport.

  “I am sorry to take you away from your families on Christmas Day,” Clio said with complete clarity, making me wonder if she really did need to go to the ER.

  I had called my parents, too, to tell them what happened and that it appeared I’d be spending Christmas in the ER. “But what about your supper?” Mama said with a tinge of annoyance in her voice, as if Clio’s episode was something I’d planned.

  “Save me a plate, would you?” I said, as upbeat as I could. “Make sure I get some of your amazing stuffing.”

  Her tone softened, and she told me to be careful on the roads.

  • • •

  The hospital had a bare-bones holiday staff, which meant Clio waited a couple of hours to see a doctor. She did get her own ER cubicle, though, and a cheerful nurse in an elf’s hat checked all her vital signs.

  “What is that?” Clio said, pointing an agitated finger at the nurse’s name tag.

  “Why, that’s my name, honey,” she said, shooting a glance at me. “Though folks just call me Lou.” The tag read “Louise German, R.N.” in white letters on a black background.

  I followed Lou back to her station and asked what she thought had happened— a stroke? We were supposed to travel the next day. Would that even be possible?

  “Let’s wait and see what the doctor says, hon.” She flashed a smile that seemed rehearsed.

  Back in the holding room, Clio remained shaken. “Do not let that woman near me!”

  “The nurse?” I glanced toward the nurses’ station; Lou seemed to be one of only two on duty. “I think that’ll be hard, Miss Hartt.”

  “There must be someone else.” Clio held my hand in an unyielding grip, like on the plane.

  “Well, we’ll see,” I said. The problem dissolved soon enough when the ER staff left us on our own with nothing to occupy our time, not even a TV. Christmas Muzak seeped through the PA system, and I soon found myself humming along to, “Frosty the Snowman.”

  After we’d been sitting for fifteen or twenty minutes, Clio announced, “You go to the hospital and they find so
mething horrible you didn’t know you had and then you die.”

  “Nah,” I said. “Hospitals fix you right up.”

  “Well, all I know is that’s how it happened for Flora.”

  I struggled to remember if I’d ever known what Flora had died of. Alcohol? Drugs? Gerri would have access to that fact.

  “May of 1958. By June she was dead.” Clio’s grip tightened. “She called me the day she went in. She was coughing up blood. They ran lots of tests. Doctor said her lungs were full of tumors. She died on her sixtieth birthday.”

  “Oh, Miss Hartt,” I said, squeezing her hand. “I am so sorry you went through that. And that Miss Haynes had to suffer.”

  Clio corrected me. “Flora didn’t suffer. She left on her own terms.”

  I wasn’t sure I took her meaning, but I hesitated to pry. Something else to ask Gerri about— the possibility that Flora had committed suicide.

  An orderly took Clio away for a brain scan, and brought her back after an hour. During that time, I rummaged through her purse for the scrap of paper with Ivy’s phone number on it and called to tell her what had happened. “Well, I just can’t come on Christmas Day!” the frantic Ivy kept repeating, even though I reassured her I had the situation in hand, and the call was just a courtesy.

  While my wait dragged on, I did something my mama would have smacked me for: I went on a full-blown hunt through Clio’s handbag, which I’d been left to guard. It was a weathered brown leather satchel with a hefty gold clasp, resembling an overnight case more than a purse.

  Making sure Lou the nurse was out of my line of vision, I snapped it open and checked all the pockets and folds for their secrets. The contents were mostly old-lady stuff: a lace-trimmed hankie; a comb with numerous teeth missing and strands of gray hair caught in it; a compact with a cracked cake of face powder and a black-spotted mirror; the worn leather change purse she always carried; an accordion-style credit card holder. Instead of plastic, though, it protected photographs— a tattered picture of her and Flora, young, on the cobblestone streets of what must have been Paris, and a blurry shot of Clio, Flora, and the bottom half of an unidentified woman at the foot of the Eiffel Tower; the woman’s torso had been sliced out of the frame. From the clear sleeves of the holder, I dislodged a yellowed newspaper clipping, so fragile-looking I feared it would disintegrate upon unfolding. I handled it as gingerly as I could, as it turned out to be Flora’s obituary.

  GUILFORD, Conn.— Flora Haynes, a playwright whose work won acclaim in the 1920s, died at home in Guilford, Conn., on June 5, her sixtieth birthday.

  The playwright, who lived in a carriage house on the grounds of the estate of Mrs. Louise Durand, also maintained an apartment on West 10th Street in Manhattan. She had been in failing health for several years, according to Mrs. Durand, a personal friend. The cause of death was cancer.

  Miss Haynes was born in Tarrytown, N.Y., in 1898, to Broderick and Leticia Haynes. Her father was a physician and prominent patron of the arts. In 1920, Miss Haynes studied at the Art Students League, and late that year married her life drawing instructor, George Littlejohn. The marriage was annulled the following year.

  Miss Haynes’s literary work includes three full-length plays, three one-acts, and a libretto. She first emerged in literary circles in 1920, when her play, To Call It Suicide, premiered to acclaim at the Provincetown Players. Critics marveled at the youth and sex of the author, who was just twenty-two. In addition to her credit as playwright, Miss Haynes played the minor role of Thelma.

  She told the New York Herald that she preferred acting to writing because it allowed her to “live the lives of other people, who are so much more interesting than I.” Over the next several years, she appeared in small parts in plays by Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Djuna Barnes. She also designed sets for the troupe.

  The Players produced her second play, Nothing Happened, in 1923, again to positive reviews. Shortly after the play closed, the Provincetown Players formally disbanded.

  Her connected one-act plays, grouped together under the title Portrait of a Madwoman, were produced by the Cherry Lane Theater in 1927 to mostly unfavorable reviews. The New York Times wrote, “Although her career started with enormous promise, Flora Haynes’s new work is as dense as mud. In its unrelentingly bleak portrayal of one woman’s life and descent into madness over three decades, it succeeds in being little more than a feminist screed.” In an interview after the trilogy’s opening, Miss Haynes derided critics as “sad little men who have never created anything.”

  The following year, Miss Haynes left for Paris, where for the next ten years she resided on the Left Bank, sharing an apartment with a fellow writer, Miss Clio Hartt, author of The Dismantled. Miss Haynes was a well-known member of the expatriate artists’ community on the Left Bank, taking part in several literary salons. Her plays were translated into French and performed by “Union des femmes,” a theater company she co-founded to produce plays by women.

  After returning to New York City in 1938, Miss Haynes attempted to interest producers in an absurdist play she wrote while living abroad. Based on an obscure incident in French history, the play was “too avant-garde, too ahead of its time,” Miss Hartt said, and it has never been produced. A libretto Miss Haynes wrote in 1940 was likewise never produced.

  In 1943, Miss Haynes won brief recognition for her work as a visual artist, when her original set designs for Provincetown Players were exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s Manhattan gallery. Of the exhibit, Mrs. Durand commented, “It showed the startling breadth of her genius. There was nothing Flora couldn’t do.”

  Miss Haynes was preceded in death by her parents. She is survived by her brother, Theodore Haynes, two nieces, and one nephew.

  The information in Flora’s obituary tantalized me. She’d been married, but only briefly. Clio was almost an afterthought in the article, “a fellow writer”— but then, that was how they appeared to the outside world. And there was the mention of Louise Durand— possibly the Louise so reviled by Clio. I reread the obituary a couple of times. But when I heard the squeaky wheels of Clio’s gurney rolling back into the ER, I quickly tucked the clipping into its sleeve and snapped her bag closed, ashamed for invading her privacy.

  Fatigue clouded Clio’s eyes. Concerned, I asked what they’d done to her, but she just waved me off with annoyance, as if I were to blame. She fell asleep for a while, and I read an old copy of People I’d found in the waiting area.

  After another hour or more, a middle-aged doctor whose face wore the burdens of his job arrived in her cubicle. Maybe a patient had died, or maybe he was simply bummed to draw the Christmas Day straw. He managed a faint smile and a “How are you doing today, young lady?” to Clio.

  “I am hardly a young lady,” Clio said.

  I stepped out of the cubicle so the doctor could examine her. The jovial Lou offered me a slice of gingerbread some grateful relative had just dropped off at the nurses’ station, which I accepted eagerly to quiet my grumbling stomach. The cake was drier than it looked and could have benefited from a glass of milk, but I ate it just the same.

  “You had a scare like this with your granny before?”

  “Oh, we aren’t related,” I said. “I kind of work for her.”

  “You mean like an attendant?”

  “More like a companion. She’s a writer.”

  “Really? She write anything I heard of?”

  “The Dismantled,” I replied, looking distractedly toward the drawn curtain of Clio’s cubicle.

  “The who?”

  I repeated the name, suspecting she wouldn’t recognize it, and she shook her head like it was the strangest title she’d ever heard.

  “It’s pretty famous,” I pointed out.

  “If you say so, hon.”

  My cake was long gone, the crumbs licked clean from my fingers, by the time the doctor emerged. He waved me to the cubicle.

  “She asked for you,” he said, making notes on a clipboard.

&nb
sp; “You tell her what you said to me,” Clio told him. “You have my permission. I don’t have any kin to speak of.”

  “The good news is that the scan showed there was no stroke,” he pronounced.

  “That’s great!”

  “Tell her the rest of it,” Clio instructed.

  “The results suggest to me that Miss Hartt had a transient ischemic attack.”

  “A transient . . . what?”

  “—ischemic attack. A ministroke. There’s no significant brain damage, as with a stroke, but the danger is that she could keep experiencing them. She may have even had a few already that we don’t know about, but she says she doesn’t remember any other time she couldn’t speak or felt numb.”

  “And if they keep happening?”

  “A succession can lead to an actual stroke, which is often incapacitating, or to a gradual loss of cognitive function. Losing vocabulary, repeating herself, not knowing how to tell time, neglecting medications or meals, eventually needing help with toileting and basic functions. But then, Miss Hartt is—” he glanced at her chart, “—almost eighty-eight, so she’s likely experiencing some of these symptoms anyway.”

  I thought of the little signs I’d noticed, like her forgetting if she’d fed the cat and leaving the stove burner on. Writing the same page over and over in slightly different ways. But then, she’d completed a story that was first rate, in my humble view, and she’d been working on something new just the day before. She might have years left with all her faculties.

  The doctor said she could travel as long as she wasn’t experiencing any symptoms, and that he would give her a prescription for a blood thinner to help keep blood flowing to her brain.

  “My blood is already too thin!” Clio complained, when I told her what the prescription was for. “I am cold all the time.”

  Clio put up a fuss, but there was no question in my mind of leaving her alone for the night, not after that scare. Short of my sleeping upright in a chair in her cabin, the only choice was to check her out of the Dry Ridge and go to my parents’. By the time we got there, my sisters and their families had left, Daddy was watching a rerun on TV, and my mother was washing a mess of dishes in the kitchen by herself.