“Does that thing stay on all night?” she asked dubiously.
“It’s on a timer, set for an eighteen-hour day,” Mike said sheepishly, but with a trace of pride at his gadget. “There’s a photoelectric cell—it will click on on foggy days too.”
“You’re a maniac. You realize that, don’t you?”
He chuckled, conceding the point. Somewhere in the near distance a siren started up, and they listened in silence as it drew near, the urgency building to a wail, then passing on.
When the noise had faded, Rebecca said, “It was such a wild scene in the ambulance. The EMS guy was trying to get Phoebe to say, ‘The sky is blue in Cincinnati,’ to check her speech, I guess. And Mom was just trying to keep up the conversation as best she could; she thought he was making small talk. She said, ‘I’ve never been there, but I hear it’s beautiful.’”
Her voice caught slightly. Mike kissed her forehead. Her leg was thrown across his, a comfortable entwining, but she couldn’t relax yet. She could see her mother in the hospital bed when she closed her eyes; she could hear the hiss of the oxygen.
“She looked so frail,” she said. “Like the last leaf on a tree. Like a little puff of wind could come along and just send her spinning away.”
Mike was silent for a moment, weighing something out.
“What are you going to tell Mary Martha, if Phoebe dies?” he asked at last.
Rebecca stiffened, but his tone was true. It wasn’t a continuation of their earlier standoff; he really wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” she said.
He let it go at that. They lay quietly, his nose in her hair, her face against the warm solidity of his chest, and she began to cry. She cried for a long time, and it felt wonderful, to just be crying.
The light in the garden clicked off sometime after midnight, and not long after that she felt his breathing turn slow and steady. She must have slept herself, at some point, because the night passed. But she was awake when the pumpkins’ lamp clicked on again, as the darkness softened.
Chapter Eleven
Dear Brother James,
Thank you for your generous letter, and for your words of comfort for Rebecca’s mother. Her prognosis is still murky, but it appears that she will survive. We have been extraordinarily preoccupied, as I’m sure you can imagine—to have survived something like this is barely to have begun. But Phoebe’s spirit has always seemed indomitable to me.
I am sorry to hear of Abbot Hackley’s illness. It may surprise you to hear that I feel genuine fondness for the man. We fought on and off for the entire fourteen years he was my superior, and there were certainly stretches when my feelings toward him were less than charitable, but I never doubted the bedrock of his good intention.
There is real irony in the fact that he has, as you note, come to a greater appreciation for pure contemplation in recent months. He was always so oriented toward heroically active virtue. He and I went round and round about the true interpretation of Luke 10: Jesus arrives in “a certain village”—we know it to be Bethany—and Lazarus’s sister Martha receives him into her house. She hurries to show him every hospitality, while her sister Mary simply sits at Jesus’ feet and “hears his word.” At last Martha, “cumbered about much serving,” overworked and perhaps feeling unappreciated, comes to Jesus and says, “Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? Bid her therefore that she help me.” And Jesus replies—fondly, one imagines, even indulgently—“Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about many things: but one thing is necessary, and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”
For inward types like you and me, this story is the gospel text of choice, a manifesto for the relationship between the vita activa, the life of compassionate service, and the vita contemplativa, the life devoted to the contemplation of God. The obvious interpretation is the one Origen gave to it as early as the third century—that Jesus’ praise of Mary’s choice signifies the preeminence of contemplative love. But most interpreters have also given Martha her due and insisted that only in a balance of the two types is a genuine spiritual life achieved. Meister Eckhart goes so far as to insist that Martha is the spiritually mature sister, that Mary in fact needs to get up off her butt, and that Jesus’ words to Martha are not chiding at all but rather reassuring: that Mary too will eventually mature sufficiently to let go of the intoxication of his simple presence for the true spiritual work of an activity rooted in God’s love.
Abbot Hackley, obviously, was a Martha man, while I was just as clearly inclined toward Mary’s way. He wanted us teaching and preaching, serving and sweating, laboring in the vineyard, literally and figuratively; he had no patience for the consuming Quiet of the deeper reaches of prayer, and as that Quiet became prominent in my own prayer we were often at odds as to what my priorities should be. He was my abbot and my confessor, and I had taken a vow of obedience, but I fought hard for what I believed to be the deeper value—for “that good part,” the one thing necessary, the heedless repose in the loving consciousness of God. And it was easy for me to feel righteous in my obstinacy, for years on end, when the rewards of contemplation were vivid and all activity seemed like a kind of distraction. Ruusbroec castigates the “natural emptiness” of certain mystics of his time, their tendency to rest in a silence that is merely avoidance. But who is to say, at any given moment in a soul’s journey? By their fruits ye shall know them, as Father Hackley always insisted; but fruits ripen slowly, especially the fruits of silence. Push too hard along Martha’s busy path and you may wake one day to find that you don’t believe in anything anymore. Your own dry will has made every effort arbitrary. Abide too stubbornly in Mary’s quiet and you risk morbidity, mere inertness, a nothingness as arbitrary and willed as the nothingness of Martha’s driven and empty activity.
Obvious truths, perhaps. But it was not until I passed into the desert country of my own dark night, when the joy of contemplation withered into emptiness and dread, that the conflict reached its crisis for me. It was no longer a question of balancing Martha’s claims against Mary’s; the seed of love at the root of both the active and the contemplative life seemed to have died in me. I told Rebecca, when I first came here, that I had left the monastery because of my arguments with Abbot Hackley, but that wasn’t true. I left the monastery because those arguments had come to seem terrifyingly irrelevant. I was as incapable as ever of plunging into Hackley’s vigorous life of service, whistling as I worked, yet I could no longer feel that I sat smugly at Jesus’ feet, ensconced in the one thing necessary. I had simply lost my way.
These are the baffling ways of God. Abbot Hackley now is dying, and finding his joy in the prayer of quiet presence; I have no doubt that his meditations will be rich. And I have fallen in love with Martha and bent my will to serve with her at last. I hope the abbot finds a peaceful moment to smile at this; I hope the man can know the gratitude and love I feel now in my heart for him, the sweet fruit of all our battles. Will you let him know he is in my prayers?
Yours in Christ,
Mike
Friday passed uneventfully into Saturday at the hospital, and Rebecca settled in through the weekend. Phoebe was seldom awake for more than half an hour at a time, which was a sort of blessing because it was painful to be with her as she slowly discovered the things she couldn’t do. She had finally realized that she couldn’t move her right arm and leg. Rebecca would catch her looking at her limp right hand with a kind of wistful reproach, as if it were a favorite child who had let her down. Phoebe couldn’t find words for the simplest things, and tears would come to her eyes as her mind came upon another blank, another unnerving gap. There was a small clock on her bedside table, the time showing in red digits, and she couldn’t read the clock. She kept asking Rebecca what time it was, until Rebecca finally went out and bought a small old-fashioned clock with a big hand and a little hand. Phoebe looked at it, and tears came to her eyes again.
“Quarter
of three,” she said. But she still didn’t know what year it was.
Dr. Pierce was off for the weekend. His replacement was a neurologist named Al-Qabar, a brisk Iraqi with a rapid way of speaking that Rebecca found hard to keep up with after slowing down to Phoebe’s speed. Dr. Al-Qabar said that the first few days were often the worst, that some brain cells might be only temporarily damaged, not killed, and could resume functioning. Sometimes another region of the brain would take over the functions of the region damaged by the stroke. It was very hard to say.
“Ten percent have almost complete recovery,” he said. “Twenty-five percent survive with minor impairments, forty percent with moderate to severe impairments. Ten percent, unfortunately, require long-term care, in a nursing home.”
“She can’t read a digital clock,” Rebecca said.
“Fifteen percent die,” Al-Qabar said, finishing his thought. “Your mother has not died.”
She found that she was jittery after talking with Al-Qabar; the man affected her like strong coffee. Alone with her mother after a conversation with the doctor, Rebecca could not keep herself from finishing Phoebe’s sentences, from asking her leading questions, trying to coax her toward the privileged percentages of the less impaired. But any sign of haste or impatience just pained and exhausted Phoebe, who knew enough to know she was not performing well. She would grow increasingly distressed, striving to say something scintillating. Once she said, “The sky is blue in Cincinnati,” which she had apparently retained from the ambulance ride as a sentence of deep import. But usually she just floundered for a while and fell asleep, at which point Rebecca would flee to the elevator and smoke cigarette after cigarette on the sidewalk in front of the hospital, standing there with the people in their slippers and pajamas who had dragged their IV racks down from their rooms to cop a smoke.
Mike and Mary Martha had gone out to Phoebe’s house on Saturday to water her orchids, and they returned with two days’ mail. Leafing through the substantial stack at home that night, Rebecca felt a wave of despair, a sense of the full burden beginning to register. There were bills, bank statements, postcards from Europe, appeals from the many causes Phoebe supported, and an inscrutable but definitely threatening letter from the Marin County tax assessor that seemed to be part of an ongoing dispute.
Rebecca sorted the mail into two stacks, items that seemed to require immediate attention and items that could be deferred. It occurred to her that she could not ask Phoebe what to do about any of this stuff. She had already begun to worry about money, after missing so much work, and the thought of paying Phoebe’s bills until her mother could get her finances straightened out was overwhelming.
It was almost midnight. Mike was in the shower; he’d seemed as drained as she was. Mary Martha had been asleep long before she got home. Mike said that she’d been crying earlier, asking about Phoebe; she wanted to go see her grandmother. She had also wanted to go to the church again, he’d conceded unhappily, but he’d managed to distract her.
He’d managed to distract her from praying for her grandmother, Rebecca thought. That was great. Score one for my motherly guiding hand. Score one for shaping the souls of the next generation.
The kitchen’s shelves were full of unfamiliar products. Mary Martha had talked Mike into buying Count Chocula instead of Cheerios and an inferior orange juice substitute that was basically just colored sugar water. He’d bought brussels sprouts, which there was no way Mary Martha would ever eat, white bread instead of whole wheat, white rice instead of brown, and hamburger with all the fat. He’d bought milk, a quart instead of a gallon, with 4% fat instead of the 2% Rebecca always bought, which was really not that big a deal except that it was more clear evidence that everything was slipping out of control.
Mike had also bought something called Little Debbies, individually wrapped oatmeal cream pies with an obvious appeal to the six-year-old palate, and Rebecca ate four of these now, one after the other. She was trying to remember the last time she had eaten, and she could not. The lunch with Phoebe, sixty hours earlier, seemed like another lifetime.
Mike came into the kitchen as she was unwrapping the fifth oatmeal cream pie and adding the plastic wrapper to the little pile on the table. His eyebrows went up, but he could see she was in no mood for jokes, and instead he sat down across from her and took a Little Debbie of his own.
“I don’t know how long I can keep this up,” Rebecca told him.
“There’s milk to go with those,” he said.
On Sunday, Phoebe seemed much worse. She was worried about Goldwater and nuclear war. She was extremely agitated and even tried to get up at one point, though it was pitifully easy to keep her in the bed. She dictated shopping lists, the steak-and-potato shopping lists of Rebecca’s New Jersey childhood, heavy on the gin and menthol cigarettes. The rosebushes needed to be pruned, with an urgency equaled only by the need to get out the Democratic vote.
Dr. Al-Qabar seemed unreasonably cheerful about this sudden, basically incoherent flurry. He said that Phoebe was stabilizing nicely, that her energy level was up and her vital signs were strong. She was trying to put her world back together. He thought they could start her physical therapy soon.
That night Rebecca called Jeff Burgess from a hospital pay phone to tell him she wouldn’t be coming in to work the next day.
“This is not about the dress code, is it?” Jeff asked uneasily.
“Jesus, Jeff. My mother can’t feed herself. She’s trying to shake off her IV lines to vote for Lyndon Johnson. She wants to buy martini fixings for my dead father.”
“I’m sorry,” Jeff said. “The company’s gone nuts lately. The techs and graphics artists are pulling some kind of sick-out to protest the dress code. And Moira’s all over me to get hair implants.”
“Hair implants?”
“She says I’m going bald.”
“Well, thinning out a little, maybe.”
“That’s what Charlotte used to say. She was always very gentle about it, even said that it was sort of cute. We would joke about aging gracefully together. But these younger women are so…intolerant.”
“About this life-and-death situation of mine, Jeff—”
“Of course, of course, take as much time as you need. It’s no big deal.” He hesitated. “How much time are we actually talking about here?”
“I don’t know. I’m barely keeping my head above water at the moment. I haven’t slept in three days, I’m spending all my time at the hospital or on the train.”
“I covered for you at the meeting on Friday, but they’re all over me for a finished product. And with this sick-out there’s no way I can slide your work over to somebody else—”
Rebecca groaned.
“I mean, I want to be as sensitive to your situation as I can, but—”
“God, I suppose I might be able to get in for a few hours…Wednesday, maybe?”
“Wednesday would be great.”
She thought of the first job she had done at Utopian Images, a series of posters for a little crew of hippies in Humboldt County who wanted to sell organic produce in inner cities. She could still remember the mangoes from those posters, the lush smear of watercolor orange and the wispy red. She’d put in a hundred hours on the project, and the hippies’ check had bounced. Jeff had laughed that day and given her the afternoon off; they’d gone out to the beach and drunk tequila shots, watching the sun go down. He’d written the whole thing off to karma then.
“We’ve become the people we never meant to be, Jeff,” she said.
He was silent for a long moment. In the background, she heard Moira’s voice, a little plaintive, “Jeffie, honey, come on back to bed.”
“Come in when you can, Rebecca,” Jeff said at last. “Seriously. Come in when you really feel that you can. I’ll get it covered somehow.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Jeff sighed.
“Plugs,” he said.
“What?”
“Plugs. That’s what these
hair implant thingies are called—plugs. Moira wants me to get a head full of plugs.” He sighed again. “Take care of your mother, Becca,” he said, and hung up.
Driving down Oak Street through the Panhandle on the way to the hospital on Monday morning, Rebecca’s car broke down. The transmission had been making ominous grinding noises for several weeks, so the breakdown didn’t come as a complete surprise, but the timing was maddening. Someone with a cell phone stopped to help, and she called AAA. The tow truck arrived forty-five minutes later and towed her to a garage in the Haight, where the mechanic seemed optimistic enough.
“We’ll just need a credit card imprint to get started,” he said.
She handed him her MasterCard, and he came back a moment later with an embarrassed look on his face.
“I’m afraid this card is maxed out, ma’am,” he said.
Rebecca began to cry. Of course it’s maxed out, she wanted to say. My mother is in the hospital, I’m my ex-husband’s bail bondsman, and my kid’s day-care provider charges extra after 5:00 P.M.
The mechanic wiped his hand off on his coveralls and patted her shoulder awkwardly.
“Why don’t I just get the car fixed, and we’ll figure you’re good for it one way or another,” he said, and he called her a cab.
Rebecca arrived at the hospital half an hour later to find that Phoebe had suffered “a setback,” as Dr. Pierce, back from a weekend skiing in artificial snow in the Sierra, put it delicately. Her mother was on a respirator, unconscious, her breathing labored and her brows knit as if in furious concentration. Pierce was as chary with details as ever, but she had apparently almost died overnight.
“Was it another stroke?” Rebecca asked him, in the hallway outside her mother’s room. Phoebe’s original hand-lettered sign had given way by now to a neatly printed one. It did not seem like progress.
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