I'll Take You There

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Hildie seized my hand; her fingers now were icy-cold, twined tightly through mine. Terrified by what rushed at us with dark beating wings but her terror had turned to bright, scattered energy. "Hurry hurry hurry hurry." As we stepped out onto the porch, Hildie made certain that I'd turned my head; she led me to the chair, forced me down and fairly pinioned my head in her arms. "Now, promise not to turn your head. Promise!" I murmured yes, I promised. "Good girl! Erich, your good girl is here, see her?" I swallowed hard and said, "Daddy? Good morning." The sickish odor of Death was stronger even in the fresh dry air of morning. My father's strangled Uhhhh-uh was "weaker than usual and wholly incomprehensible. Yet Hildie quickly translated, "Oh, he's happy to see you, dear. He thought you'd gone away." Shockingly, Hildie laughed. She stood behind me leaning against me, gripping both my shoulders with her strong talon fingers. "He has his insurance papers. His will. I wasn't ever welcome to see them. I'm not in the family, I guess!" Hildie was panting, laughing quietly. She whispered in my ear, "C'mon, talk. Why you're here, girl. Tell your daddy of—anything. And talk loud." So I began to speak. I spoke of how wonderful it had been, when my father telephoned home; when the phone rang after eleven o'clock, we'd know it would be him; it was like Christmas; it was so exciting; he was working in Alaska, and in Canada, and in the Pacific Northwest; I seemed to recall how my father had spoken to me at such times—"It was so special to hear from you, Daddy. You can't know." Hildie began to relax her grip as I spoke. I'd showered quickly and carelessly that morning in my motel room and my hair was still wet, sticking to my neck; I would discover afterward that I hadn't rinsed the shampoo fully out, and snarls of soap remained; nor had I taken time to dry myself adequately, my underwear clung damp and uncomfortable to my body; I too was panting, as if I'd been running in a desperate race to get here. My father responded only vaguely to what I was saying; yet I believed he was listening; I told him about Hendrick telephoning; me in Vermont; I told him of driving to Utah. "Me! Driving so far alone."

  Among my circle of friends and acquaintances I was known for my independence and what they called my not-thereness, meaning presumably my inaccessibility, yet to hear me speak to Daddy you would have thought I was eleven years old. I heard myself describe my car with the deprecatory affection with which people commonly speak of family curiosities, eccentricities. I heard myself say how I'd come to buy the car, with the advance from a publisher for my first book of stories; though I didn't say, for I didn't yet know that this would be so, that I would dedicate this book so precious to me to the loving memory of my parents Ida and Erich.

  It seemed to me a childish boast put to a dying man. My first car, my first book. But Hildie said quickly, like a woman plucking at hope, "Oh, a book? Like in a library? A real book not like"—possibly she meant to say paperback—"Mickey Spillane? Tell your father about your book, dear."

  "My—book? It's—" A long pause. Every pulse in my head was pounding. I didn't know if I felt shame, or merely embarrassment; or a confused pride; or if something of Hildie's hope had caught at me. "—stories. Set in Strykersville. I mean—not the actual place, Daddy, I call it by another name, but—" But what did I mean? My father continued to breathe hoarsely but he didn't attempt a reply; perhaps he was too exhausted; the effort of breathing was all his failing body could manage. I said, "Daddy, I wanted to make something beautiful," and now tears were stinging my eyes, for was this true? could it be true? what was beauty set beside the harsher requirements of truth? "I wanted to make something that would last a while, I hope s-someday you can see it, Daddy—I mean—" Oh, what did I mean? Saying such things to a dying man? I halfway thought Hildie would reach over and slap me. "My writing isn't my l-life exactly, Daddy, but I—I can't—I couldn't—live without it like—dreaming? Breathing?" My words rose into queries, like balloons.

  There I was sitting in my father's presence stammering words I could scarcely comprehend. I was sitting in a wicker chair with a sagging seat, my clothes damp and itchy; sitting straight as if someone were yanking at the hair at the top of my head; since the age of eighteen I'd become one whose posture is ramrod straight out of a terror of fatally slouching, slumping like a jellyfish, no spine at all; as, those terrible times, I'd glimpsed Vernor Matheius slumped at his desk, rubbing his eyes with hurtful thumbs inside the lenses of his smudged glasses; I was sitting straight and tall and staring beyond a tangle of vines and leaves like a curtain growing on Hildie's porch, staring in the direction of the railroad embankment thinking No train will rescue us today. Hildie had stopped translating my father's strangulated sounds even before he'd stopped making them; maybe she no longer understood what they meant, or dared pretend she understood; or maybe she'd become distraught. (Though Hildie had told me many times that no goddam doctors were going to be involved in my father's final hours, I seemed to know that Hildie had been on the phone that morning with a doctor's office, or with a medical clinic.) When I ran out of words, Hildie whispered, "Keep talking! You can't stop now." I thought I will tell Daddy I love him; I will tell Daddy that my writing is about love, because it's about truth. I was preparing to say these difficult words even as I had a premonition that I must not say Daddy I love you for at that instant my father would die.

  We were hearing—what?—a ringing telephone. A phone in the house. Hildie dug her nails into my shoulders and warned me not to turn my head while she was gone. "Remember! You promised.""

  I did not turn my head so much as a fraction of an inch after Hildie hurried to answer the phone; but I'd brought with me that morning, in a shirt pocket, the piece of mirror I'd found in the parking lot; covertly I slipped this out of the pocket and raised it slowly to eye level, in such a position that, even if my father were watching me closely, which I believed he was not, he wouldn't have been suspicious; as I continued to speak, hardly knowing what I said, and aware that my father wasn't listening any longer, I moved the mirror stealthily to the left and saw a sight that I couldn't at first interpret, my vision was blurred and blotched as if I were staring through water. A skeletal figure propped against a filthy pillow. A bald head that looked enlarged or in some way misshapen, and a ravaged face crosshatched with deep lines and veins; the skin was both ashen and reddened, as if it had been boiled; the gaping mouth disappeared into the upper jaw and the lower jaw was hardly more than a flap of lacerated toothless gum; there were welts or burns on the right side of the face and throat, and the throat looked as if it were melting into the shoulder. The eyes! I would not have recognized my father's face except for the eyes. They were deeply recessed and shadowed, with drooping lids; they were enormous staring sightless eyes; yet, as in a dream of horror, as I stared into the little mirror close beside my face, the eyes seemed to shift to mine; the face angrily creased, like a glove being crumpled in a hand; the skeletal body shuddered, and there came a groaning, near-inaudible Uhhhh-uhh of reproach.

  A terrible faintness rose in me. My eyes rolled in my head, the sliver of mirror fell from my fingers to the porch floor and shattered into pieces.

  9

  He didn't see! Couldn't have seen me.

  I am to blame. I am the cause of his dying.

  No: he couldn't have seen. Not those eyes.

  He saw, he'd never forgive.

  He saw nothing and there is nothing to forgive.

  He saw, and he'd forgive. A dying man forgives.

  Even in the confusion of my father's dying, on my hands and knees struggling not to faint I had cunning enough to sweep the mirror-slivers into my hand, and hide them in my shirt pocket.

  10

  After my father died I was sick for some time. But I recovered.

  Though Hildie Pomeroy would become my enemy, yet I exercised the first fully adult act of my adult life: arranging to ship my father's body home to Strykersville, to be buried in the Lutheran cemetery beside my mother.

  Poor Hildie: she'd planned for my father to be buried in Crescent; she was desperate for my father to be buried in Crescent; I understoo
d her wish to bring flowers to his grave for the remainder of her life; I understood her wish to powder her face dead-white and paint her lips a brooding maroon and wear frilly black clothes of mourning; I understood her wish to pass through her life in Crescent like a ghost, arousing respect, awe, sympathy, and even envy. That's Hildie Pomeroy whose lover died. Not a day passes she doesn't weep for him. I understood, but I couldn't acquiesce for my father had had contrary wishes.

  Hildie was livid with rage and cursed me for betraying her. She and my father had been planning to marry, before Erich got sick! Everybody in Crescent knew, and could testify! God damn, it was unfair.

  Hildie said bitterly, "You! Why'd I let you in my house! I knew I shouldn't call any of you! Should've told him nobody answered! You got no right to come into my Erich's life so late in his life. Erich loved me."

  Yet there was my father's painstakingly hand-printed will, dated just a few days before his death. If there is insurance money to cover such expenses I wish to be buried in the cemetary of the Luthren church at Strykesville NY & I ask my daugther to fulfill this. Insurance $ is hers. I do not wish to be a burden to survivers. My earthly possessions possesions I wish to divide between my daugther & my friend Hildegard Pomeroy with grattitude. There would be money remaining after burial expenses: my father had a life insurance policy for $7,000; though the last several premiums hadn't been paid, the insurance company agreed to pay out $5,800, which was more than enough.

  I was my father's beneficiary! The news was stunning to me.

  Yes, it was unfair. Hildie was right. I told her I didn't want what I didn't deserve. I told her that after the burial expenses, I'd make sure that Hildie received the rest of the money. Hildie wept and cursed. She didn't want my goddamned charity, she said. I protested it wasn't charity—"You brought him into your house, you took care of him until the end, you loved him. And he loved you." Hildie stared at me with wild glistening eyes. Since the morning of my father's death, she no longer painted her face; no longer applied mascara to her eyelashes; she'd become a swallow-skinned middle-aged woman with girlish features and a stunted yet perversely shapely female body, and that exotic black hair. What she said now so shocked me, I felt as if I'd been slapped: " 'Loved me'! Know what?—you're shitting me. Think I'm stupid?" I shook my head no, no, I didn't think she was stupid; of course she wasn't stupid; she was a kind, generous, noble person; a courageous person; a good person; I told her that my father had loved her very much, hadn't he named her in his will? Hildie snorted in derision, "Oh, sure! That. 'Earthly possessions' when all he had was junk. The money he leaves to you. Bullshit."

  Still, when I sent Hildie Pomeroy a check for $3,200 a few weeks later, Hildie cashed the check.

  I sold the Volkswagen for $285. I flew back east to Buffalo. It was my first plane flight, a thrilling experience; in a delirium of exhaustion, sorrow, relief; but the relief was predominant. My father's body was shipped air freight on a separate flight. The funeral at the Lutheran church was small, attended by fewer than thirty people; most of these were relatives and neighbors whom I hadn't seen since leaving Strykersville, and who seemed scarcely to recognize me. Ida's girl? That's her? Of my brothers, only Fritz took the time to come. For the joint grave I would replace my mother's marker with a small but, I thought, beautiful granite marker engraved with both my parents' names, birth-and death-dates. I would not be joining them in that rocky soil, but my family was now complete.

  If things work out between us, someday I'll take you there.