I used to hear quite a lot about Jocelyn Heathers in the early days of me and Sam. Patrick said that Sam was glad to put in an earnest day of hell raising, because at the end of it would be Jocelyn, who would either pout, freeze, or otherwise manifest her pained displeasure. It seemed to me that she had preyed on every one of Sam’s bad impulses. She took him by the scruff of his lovely neck and barbecued him. Everything I had constructed an intricate morality to avoid doing she did. He spent his time with her in a state of contrition, and Sam contrite was hateful. I didn’t care if he tooled off with his pals or gave himself a massive drunk when he passed the bar exam. I didn’t care because we were co-conspirators, and Sam checked in every several hours to assure me he was still alive. After one night of spectacular boozing in one of his scuzzy bars, he took a long shower and appeared with his hair slicked down, looking like a guilty choirboy. He presented me, slightly pigeon-toed and wearing an expression of doglike mournfulness, with a large bunch of anemones. Then he took me out to dinner and spent the first course staring at his plate.
“What’s wrong with you, Sam?”
“I’m sorry. I’m just really sorry.”
“What for?”
“For getting drunk.”
When he lifted his eyes from his congealing steak, I saw that he really was sorry, and I was about to say it didn’t matter, which was true. But he wanted to be sorry. He wanted me to be angry, and it would have been cruel of me to take the edge off his apology, so I accepted it, which seemed to cheer him.
Jocelyn hated that everything he did excluded her, even if they were together. She was frightened on the back of motorcycles. Her athleticism had to do with cheerful competition. Sam’s good times were not her idea of a good time and, for all that, she wasn’t a very gentle girl. She wanted Sam to haul off and slap her, and she perceived his recklessness as a form of brutality that she was all too eager to exploit, or else what was she doing with him? But I was a fan of recklessness. Gentle and contained Elizabeth liked the thrill of whipping down the River Road behind Sam. I liked driving too fast myself, and I loved a hairpin turn when I could find one. But, day to day, I just loved Sam. I loved him for himself, so how could I restrict what he held dear? His energy was a beautiful thing to me: it was bravery. Hadn’t I been brave? Hadn’t I chucked a tight, safe life with Eddie Liebereu? Didn’t I believe that safety lay on the side of those who made a pact with danger?
The little Marcus girl, Elizabeth Olive, nicknamed Olly, married the nice Bax boy and went to live in Cambridge with her husband, pursued her studies in music and composition, and continued her faithful practice of the piano. They unpacked the Spode, the silver, the sheets and towels. They unpacked their separate college possessions and hung their clothing side by side. The bride learned to fish, bought hiking boots, and listened to the Top Forty during the many drives she and her husband took. The groom learned to sit still for more than five minutes at a time, was introduced to the basics of cooking, and began to hum parts of the Mozart sonatas his wife played for him on the piano. The friends of the happy couple came trooping in and out and took the happy couple for granted. They were in great demand at parties since they could be counted on to dance. The groom’s brother came for dinner and watched over his sister-in-law as if she were a species of rare moth, and, all in all, they racked up quite a lot of photographs. Dark, skinny Olly smoking a cigarette on a boulder; Olly, Sam, and Patrick in front of an enormous Victorian mirror; Sam and Olly in bathing suits; Sam and Patrick carrying fishing rods and wearing straw hats; Olly surf-casting; Sam, Olly, Patrick, and Sara Lazary in tennis whites smiling like polite children; Sam by a window; Olly by a window; Olly and Sam as bride and groom; Henry Jacobs and Sam bending over a stack of papers. Olly asleep. Sam asleep. Sam throwing a stick to an unidentified dog at Little Crab. Olly with someone’s cat on her lap. The Marcuses. The Baxes. The in-laws together, linking arms. Sam with a wreath of flowers on his head, looking faunlike and devilish. Sam in a top hat. Sam walking down the beach alone. Sam and Patrick standing on the Sailfish Sam was killed in.
Half the world that cared thought it a tragedy that the Bax boy had died so young. The other half thought it was a miracle he had lived to see thirty. Both halves checked in, by letter and by telephone, but mostly by letter. The postman was so overburdened that for two weeks he walked the two flights and delivered the mail by hand.
“I sure was sorry to hear the bad news, Mrs. Bax. You get to know the people on your route and I used to see that husband of yours going off on that motorcycle of his.” He handed me a bundle of letters. “I guess there’s nothing I can do, but I sure feel bad. I can see you got a lot of friends, so I’m glad to bring you all these letters.”
His name was Mr. Almonides, and I thanked him.
But the cards and letters, the bunches of flowers that appeared daily, filling vases, water glasses, and eventually milk bottles, the silence of the apartment, the rack of useless clothing in the closet—none of this informed me. It was too much at once. I wanted to pack up and leave, to go on to the next step, not to escape but because I knew I was going to pay heavily and I wanted to do it on my feet, in action. No week of breakdown, of intense weeping would have cleared my head. My mourning was going to be done over the long haul.
After I hit Patrick in the kitchen, we sat down and had a civilized breakfast in which neither of us had much interest. We went through two pots of coffee and read the papers. Patrick didn’t make any move to leave, and I didn’t want him to go. At midday, it began to rain heavily. By two o’clock we were jangly and over-coffeed.
“Let’s take a drive,” Patrick said, and we walked through the rain to his car. We drove into the country without saying a word, listening to the swish of the windshield wipers. Patrick turned off down a muddy lane and stopped the car. The rain brought down leaves, pasting them against the windows.
“In a few days, you’re going to be subject to a pow-wow,” Patrick said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that Leonard and Meridia will want to know what you want to do.”
“That sounds like they want to give me a hundred bucks and tell me to leave town,” I said.
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” said Patrick. “Your parents want to know too, and so do I.”
“How do you know I want to do anything?”
“Because you’ll want to do something.”
I said, “I could stay in Cambridge and study music.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Sam had a job offer in New York. We were thinking of leaving Cambridge anyway.”
“Do you want to live in New York?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m there,” said Patrick. “You have friends there.”
“I want everything to be normal,” I said.
“Well, it isn’t.”
“Would you like it if I came to New York?” I thought he would say it was up to me.
“Yes, I would,” he said. “It would probably be good for you to get out of here, but I asked more for my sake than for yours.”
When I asked what he meant, he started the car and began to drive home. Patrick, when silent, was shelled up like an oyster.
“It would be nice to have you around,” he said, and it was clearly all he had to say.
Part of Patrick was methodically businesslike, and part of me was practical. We dealt with Sam’s clothing a week later, and Leonard called to ask about what he called “the effects,” a word I found quaint, but which he used almost obsessively. The more he talked, the more I had the feeling that nothing of Sam’s was mine—it was only Sam’s and now that there was no more Sam it was rightfully the Baxes. After all, Leonard had always been Sam’s father, but I had only intruded into Sam’s life. Leonard didn’t mean to make me feel this, but I felt it. I told him that I didn’t know what to do with Sam’s things, that I did not consider them mine, that there were a few things I wanted and the rest, if they liked, was theirs.
“You are Sam’s widow,” said Leonard, who was a lawyer to his marrow. I said I would talk it over with Patrick.
Patrick was the only person I could bear to see, and he didn’t want any of Sam’s clothes—he was slightly taller and not so manically skinny—so we boxed and bundled them and gave them to the Salvation Army. Danny Sanderson asked for his leather jacket, and when I gave it to him, we both wept. Danny was Sam’s perfect friend: dumb and loyal, fall guy and straight man. He was as rough and risky as Sam, but if you saw them race off together, Sam on his Black Shadow and Danny on his sleek Ariel, you thought that one was sitting in the side car of the other. When his master died, poor Danny was struck deep in his unintelligent heart. He knew at least one thing about love and friendship, and he suffered.
I kept two sweaters, a rugby shirt, a braided belt, and a suede jacket Sam had gotten for his sixteenth birthday. I started packing up the rest on a Saturday, and packing up those clothes knocked me backwards. Patrick came over and sat himself in front of the television to watch a football game. He didn’t want to help: he wanted to be around, and I was profoundly grateful to him. I didn’t want help. I wanted his presence. There was only one way to face Sam’s mismatched socks, suits, shirts, handkerchiefs, and shorts, and that was to face them. There is a point at which true grief and sentimentality meet. I tried not to, but I wept all over his clothes.
It probably would have been a comfort if I had been able to convince myself and anyone in listening distance that Sam had abandoned me for death, that he had left me stranded in the springtime of our tender lives. There were times when it would have been easy to collapse on the shoulder of Danny Sanderson, or any of Sam’s goofy, stricken pals and mutter such heartfelt and sympathy-producing sugar roses. What grief teaches is that its most convenient and endurable form is pure greeting-card sentimentality. I didn’t want sympathy, or pats on the head, or the arms of comparative strangers encircling me in the face of an event so serious it did not need embellishment. As the days went by, I realized that grief is metabolic: it crawls through you like disease and takes your energy away. Then it gathers and hits like sudden migraine, like being hit by a car, like having a large, flat rock hurled at your chest.
It would have been easy to tote up my loss among all those shirts and socks. I could have done some mournful brooding over Sam’s tan suit—the last time he had worn it, and how we had gone out for dinner and a walk in Boston Common. I could have tried to remember what he said when he put on the green silk tie Meridia and Leonard brought him back from Paris, or the bright red-and-pink socks my parents found for him on a trip to Peru. But it seemed a pain so easily summoned that I didn’t trust it. There is a part of mourning that wants to be done unencumbered and in peace, that wants to be done in a spare white room, with nothing familiar around.
I found in his pockets the keys to his motorcycle, four dollars and sixty-five cents in loose change, a ticket stub to a Boston Celtics game, a cleaning bill, a postcard informing him that his lighter had been repaired. In the living room, Patrick had dozed off. It was halftime at the football game, and on the gray-and-white field a group of girls were tossing batons into the air while the crowd cheered. Patrick sat formally on the sofa, but his limbs were slightly askew, as if he had been thrown there like a rag doll. There was no expression on his face except the traces of exhaustion, and the sight of those inky lashes against his pallor made me feel a shot of tenderness, he looked so frail. He was wearing gray trousers and a white shirt with a frayed collar, and he looked uncomfortable. When he woke up, it was as if he had slid out of sleep.
“There are some things I think we should go over together,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Family things. Your grandfather’s watch chain, some cuff links, stuff like that.”
“I don’t want them,” said Patrick. “You keep them.”
“They don’t belong to me.”
“What you’ll find, Elizabeth, is that everything belongs to you.”
“It’s wrong for me to have them. They belong to your family.”
“Then give them to Leonard, for Chrissake.” He realized he had shouted, and apologized. “Look, my parents are a pair of sticks, but you have to remember that you were Sam’s family, too.”
Then he said, “Does Sam have any handkerchiefs? I seem to remember he had some fancy ones from England. I’ll take those.”
He went back to the football game and I went back to the closet. There was a small trunk of clothing Sam had gotten bored with, and three years before we had spent an afternoon trying to decide what should be thrown out. Sam didn’t like to throw anything away: that meant you had to make a decision about it. But since they were his clothes and something had to be done about them, he got quite into the spirit of the thing. If I found something that was worn, patched, and two sizes too small, something he hadn’t put on his back for seven years, his interest peaked immediately. He was filled with the notion of sentimental value, and he spent the afternoon saying, “No, keep it. We’ll put it in the trunk. I always liked that tee-shirt. I’ll get around to it. You never know when you’ll need an extra wind-breaker and if I take those loafers to the shoemaker, all they need are new heels and soles and some stitching and they’re perfectly reasonable. Besides, I wore those loafers to a dance once.”
I hadn’t touched that trunk since. When I went through it, I found in the pocket of a torn work shirt a note I had written to him before we were married. It was dated, and it said:
S: I kissed your instep this morning but you only snorted. It is my sincere opinion that you are the cutest thing going. Have I told you lately that I love you?
Yours sincerely,
Elvis Presley
I took it out and put it with his papers.
4
Sam, his lawyer father’s lawyer son, had made a will. His father had a copy, and I found Sam’s copy underneath a stack of canceled checks and some old copies of Road and Track. I think he must have told me about it, but making a will for Sam was one of those romantic and secret gestures that has a legal channel in the adult world: he had both sides of the coin at once. He was doing the right thing and acknowledging his wild side at the same time. What a combination of the brave, heroic, protective, restless, and solid.
Two weeks after the funeral, Leonard called and asked me to have lunch with him. That meant serious business. Leonard was not the sort of father-in-law you popped in to have lunch with. You were summoned, casually. I had been to the Baxes’ every other day for the past two weeks, and I had spoken to Meridia every day. I talked to my parents every day too, who called from Connecticut. All in all, we tied up quite a lot of lines. There were always people at the Baxes’, sitting stiffly in their chairs: Henry Jacobs, the Baxes’ friends, tastefully garbed in navy blue and brown, and I felt like a guest too; I was kissed politely and had my hand shaken. I felt they were all angry at Sam for dying. He had created a scene, and I was his accomplice.
My telephone conversations with Meridia were gentle and soft. Neither of us knew whom to be more worried about. To say I was fine would have been a slap in her face. After all, it was her son I had lost. I wanted to mourn in a way that would have eased her but I couldn’t find it, so we stayed formal. Sometimes at night I had the urge to write her a long letter, a letter that would explain what I felt and how I felt it, but Meridia did not like excess. It was the excessive part of Sam that was the family’s trial, after all.
I would lie in bed and think about the conversation we might have if I sent such a letter, the sort of talk you have after you have fallen honestly into someone’s arms. She would open up her cut-off secret heart to me. She would say, “I can only love according to my own formula. I love my boys in the way a mother ought. That’s how I was brought up to behave. It’s the net around me.”
But Meridia said things like, “I think you ought to keep your calcium up. It’s a natural calm-down. If you’re feeling at all frantic, take milk.” The fa
ct is, I didn’t know what she felt about me. She dispensed with things in a way that would have admirably befitted the head nurse in a cardiology unit. She dealt with me and Sam in the same way she had gotten her boys off to camp, with all the name tags sewn in straight, with the proper number of socks and the required ratio of shorts to jeans. There was a washing machine in the basement of the Little Crab house, and when I thought about Meridia, I often pictured her standing in front of two large wicker baskets, sorting out the dark colors from the light, the light colors from the white. If she could find the proper slot for things, life made sense. If she couldn’t find a proper slot, she invented a new slot for those things that didn’t fit her sense of order. The hook on which she impaled Sam is that she never knew what she wanted from him. She smiled, but was never pleased. He knew he was pegged, and he kicked against it, but she pegged that too.
Sam’s enthusiasms were brief and quite intense. The rock climbing that had sliced his shoulder lasted passionately for six months and then it was the tennis season again. Tennis was a constant in his life, and swimming, but he didn’t think much about swimming. He had learned to swim before he walked. The only music he liked besides the Top Forty—and he said he liked the Top Forty because he liked to drive—was Cuban, and I never found out who had put him on to it or why he craved it so, but I if I came home and Sam was on the couch relaxing, it was with a bottle of beer and a Mongo Santamaria record. Then, in a bar, he heard Hank Williams for the first time, and within a week the collected works of Hank Williams were on the record player. This phase lasted just under a month, and then he went back to Mongo Santamaria.
Sam had the attention span of a fly. He didn’t land on anything long enough to savor it, but his intensity was enough. He passed. He passed for studious when he was only manic, he passed for athletic, he passed for normal, if it comes to that. The trouble with Sam and Patrick is that they suffered the emotional dislocation that is the result of too much attention and too little love.
Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object Page 3