Disturbances in the Field

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  He shook his head and guzzled expertly from the can. His Adam’s apple jiggled like a car riding over a bump. “I’m not hungry.”

  I eyed his crumpled, sour-smelling clothes. He must have slept in them. “Why don’t you go and … fix yourself up a bit. Take a shower. You’ll feel better.”

  “No I won’t.”

  “All right.” I sighed and started towards the bedroom with my book. An eerie part of my mind was clicking away in a vacuum: how unusually still it was; awfully late for Vivie and Alan to be sleeping; maybe go in and see if they were all right? The phone rang.

  A man identified himself as someone from the funeral place. “I’m extremely sorry to interrupt you at this difficult moment, Mrs. Rowe, but it has come to our attention that you are a well-known musician in our area, and we wondered whether you had any special preferences in regard to music. … During the service tomorrow?”

  I heard the words clearly—he enunciated with great clarity—but I couldn’t seem to grasp the meaning. “What?”

  “It has come to our attention …” He said it all again.

  “What?”

  “Mom!” Phil sprang up. Suddenly his eyes were dry, he didn’t stagger like a drunk—he leaped to my side like a grown man. “What is it? Who is it?”

  “It’s … Hold on,” I said into the phone. I was without words. It was like a dream where you forget your native language.

  Phil took the phone. “Hello … Yes … Yes, this is her son. … I see.” He waved me from the room and I went, as though he were the parent. “Let me think it over,” I heard him say, “and discuss it with my family, and I’ll get back to you soon.”

  This could only be a dream. That could not be Phil talking, who from the pits of adolescence found it too arduous to greet neighbors civilly but instead mumbled, not meeting their eyes. Who detested telephone formalities, who garbled messages, who wouldn’t even call to ask the time of a movie unless there was a recording.

  A little while later Althea knocked twice on our bedroom door and immediately entered. Victor, feeling sick, was stretched out on his stomach on our new king-sized bed (“I can ravish you at any angle,” he said last Wednesday with glee, after the delivery men left). I sat near him cross-legged, leafing through pages.

  “Mother, Nina is here again, with Gabrielle and Don. Aunt Lily and Uncle Lew are on their way up. Rosalie called and said she’s coming. What do you want me to do with all of them?”

  “Oh, give them lunch or something. See if there’s any food.”

  “Gabrielle brought a lot of food. She’s unpacking it.”

  “Good, they can eat that.”

  “I don’t see why so much eating is involved. Mother, are you actually reading?”

  “I’m looking for a poem.”

  Althea came closer. Unlike Phil, she smelled sweet and looked fresh. I had heard the shower early in the morning. She takes lengthy, epic showers. Victor and I have speculated on what she finds to do for so long under the spray: dance, act out fantasies, wash every square inch seven times in a circular motion while reciting a mantra? Her face was scrubbed shiny. She was wearing a navy corduroy jumper with a white blouse, and her blond hair, drawn back with a band, was still damp. So clean and so small, so staunch, she seemed younger than her years, a heroic child lacerated within but determined to behave well. A look Nina might have had as a child. I could hardly bear to see it. She would have been better off as Nina’s daughter, not have had to go through this. If I had known Nina was never to have children of her own maybe I could have given her one?—I had so many. Did I need that many? And what for? What am I thinking. There was not one I could have parted with. Like Lear’s entourage, reason not the need.

  “You look flushed, Mom. Are you sure you’re all right?” She put her cool palm on my forehead to test for fever, as if I were the child.

  I gave her a small smile of approval. Big girl. Just like Mommy. They never stop needing it. “I’m all right.”

  “But what do you want a poem for? For the funeral?”

  However capable and kind, she is relentless in her pursuit of lucidity, clinging to sequence and causality. Very like me, in so many ways. Not in appearance—she is fair and delicate like Evelyn. But inside. Our minds work alike. She speaks the things that I think; she is too hasty to speak, too crammed with ready opinion, but so was I at her age.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I don’t like when they read poems at funerals. It’s so affected. Like those people who write their own wedding ceremonies.”

  Yes, like Esther’s in Pinecrest, now a scorched field. Fire, Heraclitus said, lives in the death of earth, and Esther didn’t like that notion of one element’s flourishing by the other’s demise.

  “How would you know? How many funerals have you been to?”

  “A lot.” She listed them for me. They were a remarkable number for a girl just seventeen. Besides her grandmothers, there was the father of a close friend, a favorite English teacher, and a classmate who died of knife wounds from a mugging in the subway; the whole student body turned out. At the last three funerals poems were read, Althea said, and they made her uncomfortable, especially “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (the English teacher). She didn’t want to hear that again.

  “I wasn’t thinking of that one,” I said. “That’s for an older person.”

  Victor moaned loudly, coughed, and shifted around on the bed, clawing at the pillowcase. His complaint was vast, inclusive: not only the accident and the decimation of his family, but this conversation he was forced to endure.

  “Althea, before we decide anything we’ll talk to you about it, okay? Please go and take care of the people now. You’re very good at that. Be nice to Lily and Lew, no matter what they say. I’ll be out soon.”

  “Do you think she’s right?” I asked Victor when she left. “Victor, I know you’re not sleeping. Please.”

  He rolled over. On his face were lines I had never seen before, running from the corners of his eyes down the outer edges of his cheekbones, and from mouth to chin. A muscle low in his neck twitched with an irregular pulse—the skin puckered, relaxed, and puckered. His eyes were the color of slate, and his hands, sculpted by labor, lay across his stomach limp as empty gloves. “I don’t know. Maybe. She has good sense.”

  He went into the bathroom, leaving the door open, and vomited, while I sat staring at the poems by Ben Jonson. Not merely one but three on the subject. His First Daughter (infant mortality), his First Sonne (at seven), and a child actor (scarse thirteene). “Here lyes to each her parents ruth, MARY, the daughter of their youth.” Well, not exactly. I was thirty at the time of Alan, Victor nearly thirty-two, and Vivian was two years later. I heard Victor brushing his teeth. He came back greenish and unsteady on his feet, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

  “Do you feel any better now?”

  “I went to bed with this woman last week. Oh Lydia! It was not even the first time. It was the second. Lord! On a white shag rug.” He gagged, pressed his hand to his mouth and swallowed his gall. I didn’t speak for a long time, though he stood above me waiting for a reaction.

  “Uh … not now, Victor, all right? Don’t tell me that now. Don’t tell me at all. Forget it.”

  “That’s why.”

  Men like to overestimate their personal impact on the universe. In the book on my lap it said, “Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.”

  “That’s crazy. Be quiet,” I said.

  “It’s a punishment.”

  “Stop it! Don’t fall apart on me. Please.”

  “It just happened. I didn’t think … It didn’t mean—”

  “Will you shut up? Do you think the whole world revolves around where you put your prick? That that could cause anything!”

  Victor sat down with his face in his hands.

  “I don’t care anyway, I don’t care, I don’t care.” The words came out of me like a chant, over and ove
r; the sound was horrible and wouldn’t stop. He pinned me down on the bed and lay on top of me like a blanket, his hand over my mouth stopping the sound.

  It was too nice, that being covered and flattened by all his weight spread over me, and that warm palm on my lips. I didn’t want comfort or any soft feeling. I didn’t want any part of his superstition or repentance. The cause? I knew all about causes. I had not sat up nights memorizing Aristotle for nothing. Material cause, Victor: heavy snow, obscuring vision; slicked asphalt; a vehicle traveling at fifty miles an hour with a fallible driver. Formal cause, sweetheart: the laws of physics (the nature of the universe), decreeing that such a vehicle at such a speed, at such a bend in the road, in such weather, risks certain odds of going askew, wild but inescapable as the odds at a horse race. Efficient cause, baby: the tired driver lost consciousness for an instant, slipping into hypnagogic thought, or lost control, remembering a rankling injury done him by a loved one, or saw a light ahead and misjudged its position. Maybe even a deer in the glare of headlights, or an imagined deer. Final cause. Aha. The abstract purpose for which the event took place? That, my dear, I can’t … discern. To demonstrate something? What? And to us in particular? No. No Greek can make me believe this was some necessary alteration of the universe.

  “All right.” I nudged him off and got up. “Let’s go inside. They’ve come to see us. We have to.” I combed my hair.

  He got up and combed his hair too. So we had no poem at the funeral. We never got around to discussing it, never resolved the question of the good or bad taste of poetry read at funerals. (But “cover lightly, gentle earth”—how could anyone object to that?)

  The funeral escaped me anyway, or I escaped it. There was a tall broad man in a charcoal gray suit standing in the front corner of the chapel, near a door. Not the angel; an employee, I suppose, maybe the man who telephoned. In the upper left-hand pocket of his suit jacket was a triangle of white handkerchief in the style of former days, and this handkerchief tucked so neatly in its pocket drew me into a trance. Those innumerable pockets. So much to hold, to hide. No, not innumerable, for once, the night before we set out for the brown house, I enumerated, gazing at my father’s navy blue suit on its hanger while he stood in his underwear holding the tiny scissors he used to clip his mustache. Upper left hand, he told me: handkerchief, folded in triangle. Upper right hand: pens, sharpened pencils, cigars. Inner breast pockets, best of all because so hidden: business cards, letters, more pencils, gum. To have business cards! To be a grownup and possess so many worldly things! What a superb gesture of power, that reaching in like Napoleon and pulling something out, like a magician. And that strange little square pocket near the belt. Watch pocket, he said. Watch? Watch what? For a watch, silly Lydia, rumpling my hair. Rumpling my hair! God, how many ages ago! Never again to be a child. Always and always to be this grownup woman now, with this past, these worldly possessions. To have a man, with a suit full of pockets.

  The trance weakened for a moment; I heard a snatch about shepherds and pastures, rod and staff, all that bucolic rot. Better stick with suits. Something came creeping into my head and I pursued it like a bug. Yes. The spies in Alan’s spy-story-in-progress, which he used to read to me in segments while I cooked dinner. The spies wore three-piece suits. Chapter One mentioned the master spy unbuttoning his vest. Last week while I was listening to the latest episode and making chili, there was something important I meant to tell him, but by the time he finished, the chili was ready, everyone came in, and I forgot. The master spy and his Russian counterpart, both double agents and both in three-piece suits, were meeting in Central Park where, concealed by bushes, they wrote notes to each other lest the bushes were bugged. And to avoid leaving scraps of paper that might be found and pieced together, they wrote on a Magic Slate, which could be erased. What I meant to tell him was that a Magic Slate, too, could be stolen and interpreted by experts, since the magic pencil leaves impressions on the cardboard beneath. I hadn’t meant to spoil his idea; I was merely going to suggest that they destroy the Magic Slate after each meeting and buy a new one—the security would be well worth the expense. Suddenly I had the most urgent need to tell him this, and I glanced around in panic, searching in the crowd …

  There were hundreds of things left unsaid (and undone: those new sneakers he wanted so badly), but for some reason this about the MagicSlate was supreme, and the fact that his story would remain flawed, the spies would remain in grave danger and I would never see him again to tell him how to protect them, was absolutely, physically intolerable. I felt faint and lowered my head to my knees. Victor’s hand stroked my back.

  When I could sit up again the rabbi’s voice had stopped. I couldn’t see well—nothing was in focus—but things seemed about over. Some shuffling, a clicking noise, and—surprise: music. Music I had heard a thousand and one nights coming from his room. A song by John Lennon, the late: “Golden slumbers fill your eyes, Dreams await you when you rise, Sleep, little darling, don’t you cry, And I will sing a lullaby.” Paul McCartney’s voice is hoarse, cracked, and tragic, as if he is announcing, with an irony bitter as gall, Lennon’s imminent, premature death. The kids went to the memorial service in Central Park three months ago, all except Althea, who dislikes crowds and public demonstrations. They returned shaken and subdued, with banners: John Lennon Lives. Well, let it be. Let golden slumbers fill his eyes too. This is Phil’s doing. Where is he? Beside me, I forgot. I turn to him and pat his hand. “Good. You did good.” “Carry that weight,” all four of them sing. “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight a long time.” There is a long, intense, and complex drum riff. Then, after a few more clicks, comes Appalachian Spring. Oh, very different, exultant. The life force, la-di-dah. Not from the beginning, rather from the point where the melody of “Simple Gifts” enters. My son the taciturn adolescent turns out to be a genius impresario. He must even have marked the place on the record for them. He has behaved like a man, indeed is wearing a suit. I think maybe he has done a little too well, like God with the Egyptians. Dayenu, enough, because I am hearing her high, true voice in the shower: “When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend we will not be ashamed. To turn and to turn will be our delight, Till by turning, turning, we come round right.” All my arts of numbness have been to no avail. I try to turn to Phil, again to tell him, “Good,” but I cannot move my head. Dissolved. She was not to be thought of, Vivian, too hazardous. She is unthinkable but I am thinking her till she fills me, her body occupying mine, not like an embryo but arms inside my arms, legs in legs, heart inside my heart.

  Instead of taking the limousine home we ride in Don’s and Gabrielle’s Volkswagen bus. With them in the front seat is a stunned Cynthia, acne fading, body thinning—soon she will be a lithe but less subtle version of her mother. Well-bred Roger, away at Amherst, phoned us yesterday to speak his piece with a somber grace, and I bet with no prodding from his parents. Althea sits with Victor and me, and in the back, Phil with his old friend Henry, who sniffles for the whole trip, I don’t know whether from emotion or the icy weather. Henry also suffers from allergies but it is February, a chill parody of all our Sunday afternoon picnics, pleasure-bound via this old bus, six children boisterous in the back. Today no one is asking how much longer, no one even speaks. Today so many warm live bodies capsuled against the cold are no match for the Long Island fields so richly sown with corpses, richer now.

  George rode with Nina, so she would not be alone. She told me, later, that in the evening, after leaving us, they went to his apartment and made love, to feel better. She had not made love with him in so long, since Esther’s wedding, perhaps? She wasn’t quite sure. Oh no, there was that time after our Seder of last year. George had mellowed, she said. Well, naturally. I would have loved to hear exactly how, every blow-by-blow detail, but of course she didn’t go into all that. She did mention that afterwards he wept and said he had loved me best of all the women he had known, and should have married me when he had the chance; then this terr
ible tragedy would not have happened to me. He can be so obtuse. And tactless. It was not even true. He hadn’t loved me best and he hadn’t had the chance.

  Since Don’s muffler had broken on the way out, making that awful clanking noise, he couldn’t take the highways but drove through a succession of drowsy towns, past small half-timbered neo-Tudor houses with rooftops trimmed in snow and shrouded front lawns—the same snow that had coated the windshield of the chartered bus and slicked the macadam beneath its skidding tires. There had been a while, early in the morning, when the sky was flat, the color of dusty pewter, like Victor’s face, but soon the sun came out. And now the snow glistened innocently in the crisp Northeast winter light. Every line on the horizon was drawn with a knife edge. Not a soul was out in the pretty towns; maybe they were all in church: Sunday morning. In this stillness and beauty, this probably specious serenity, I spied out the window an incredible thing.

  Victor had his arm around me; on the other side he held Althea’s hand. All morning Victor had held me up, his hand on my shoulder or pressing at my waist, nudging his limping sleepwalker in the right direction. Always the touch of him, so I never felt alone. His shouting and moaning were over. Now it was he who took care. Chivalrous, to break the heart. He had turned on the water in the shower and handed me the soap. He zipped up my skirt as I stood before the mirror, arms hanging useless with amnesia; he knotted the woolen scarf around my neck. When he found me standing in front of the wide-open window gazing up at the sky, he gently drew me away and shut it. Maybe he thought I was going to jump. I had no thought of jumping; I was entranced by the flight pattern of a great flock of birds against the pewter sky, and thinking, Evelyn, Evelyn. No plane fast enough? Tomorrow, you wired. But I wanted you yesterday. Too vague, Evelyn, unattached, light, fey. Vivie was magic like you yet she would have made it on time. She had more guts. The birds kept circling, first in a shapeless mass, then they formed a dense triangle, then a slender V. They beat their wings hard in unison and abruptly coasted in unison, as if their patch of sky had uphills and downhills. I tried to count them as they circled: nineteen, seventeen, nineteen again, no, twenty—hopeless. I tried to see whether the same one was always the leader and another one always the last, but that was hopeless too; their swoops were quicker than my eye, and dizzying. I tracked one who kept falling out of formation and lagging behind, then made frantic efforts to catch up, a spastic agitation of the wings. Sometimes he succeeded, but more often he lagged so far that the circling group would catch up with him instead, and for a while he would travel in the front ranks, till some weakness or perversity made him slip back again, and again batten his wings desperately to rejoin. They circled the same patch of gray sky so many times—were they as hypnotized as I? Did they have the illusion of progress or was it their recreation, their rehearsal for migrating south? Strange that they hadn’t already gone. Victor drew me from the window and closed it. He told me to put on a little make-up, for my own sake—I would be glad of it, later on. He forgot nothing, even that my pride would survive my children, and perhaps my grief.