Arc of the Comet

by Greg Fields

  “You’re the only visitor I’ve had in months. Christmas, no, not even then.; don’t go. Or come back. Please tell me you’ll come back,” and her crackling, brittle voice faded into the conclusion that this human contact had been too brief, and would not come again. Finnegan sat in his car in the parking lot and bent his head to the steering wheel. His own tears answered those of the specter he had just left, for he knew that he could not return. This lovely lady, intelligent, warm, struggling to recapture a long dead vivacity, struggling to revert to a humanity she had long ago taken for granted, would most likely die in her hated, bitter loneliness, an orphan, homeless at her passing.

  Still, Finnegan knew that the institutionalized elderly presented only one aspect of the process of aging. To find another point of view, he dropped in on community centers and social clubs. There, too, he would start conversations with strangers, most of whom warmed to him at once. Conor listened far more than he spoke. He let his new acquaintances ramble on if they wanted, speaking about their families, where they lived, what they had done before they retired. He saw more pictures of grandchildren than he cared to remember. He inferred from his contact with these people that they greatly feared a world passing them by. They feared being considered dead before their time. They feared not being taken seriously, or, worse, being patronized. They did not care about national or international events nearly as much as they cared about companionship. Most of all, they feared exile to a place where they could be “cared for,” and in that care, smothered by neglect.

  Finnegan came to regard his work with these people as an expression of his own human symbiosis. We had drawn from them; now we need to give back. He constantly suggested new approaches to legislation addressing housing inequities, adjusting Medicare rates, providing transportation discounts, encouraging volunteer projects. Every call the office received from an elderly voice automatically found its way to Finnegan, who dove into the problems with a determined commitment not to fail them. If the voice needed help with government red tape, Finnegan would cut it for him; it if wanted information on a particular bill, Finnegan would discuss it at length; if it merely wanted to get something off its chest, Finnegan would listen sympathetically. He became passionately committed to this group, his group, his constituents, and wanted to serve them in their peculiar condition as best he could.

  As the summer wound to its close, then, Finnegan found himself inspired not only by the glamor of government work—the respect, the sensation of power—but also by the conviction that he could in fact serve the human condition. He could, indeed, do “some good.” It was what he had expected thirty months ago when he first considered government work. Now the realization of those old expectations was sweet and rich and clear.

  As Finnegan sat at his table, watching the traffic pass, watching the sun go low and sipping his scotch, he knew that his old plans would no longer work as he had constructed them. There would be no law school, at least, not at once. After he received his degree next June he would come back to Washington and pick up where he was leaving off. The senator had told him that the job would be there for him. There was no way he could turn it down. After seeing so completely how fulfilling, how purposeful, how gratifying this lifestyle could be, he would have been a fool to consider anything different.

  And what of Glynnis? She had been present through this wonderful and quick evolution. She had shared the best parts of this life. Conor did not know what Glynnis’s plans were, for this would be her final year of college, too. She didn’t know herself. But Conor presumed that they could work something out and that, if they did it right, they could be together. He knew that this glorious life would lose much of its allure if Glynnis were not part of it.

  Dinner came, and Finnegan started it with deliberate, measured motions. The scotch had slowed him down. At the same time he believed it sharpened his thoughts and quickened his perceptions. The street seemed clearer to him, the few pedestrians more animated.

  Again, Glynnis. There was not a day when he did not think of her, and once more a wonderment crept over him that such a remote series of accidents had brought them together. He could define in logical terms her attraction for him—her intelligence, her self-reliance, her deprecating wit, her quiet poise and grace, her rare physical beauty—but there was no romance in that. He could have described a house cat the same way.

  Instead he preferred to refer to snapshot images and the sentiments that came with them. He saw her in the Virginia hills with the scent of rain sneaking toward them. He saw her over dinner one night speaking of her family with a horrible tone of remorse. He remembered his first glimpse of her and how she stood out so remarkably at the art museum that morning last spring. He saw the affectionate, respectful smile in her eyes as he told her about his job, what he had done, whom he had met and how much it all meant to him. And he saw her beneath him or above him in their wide bed, naked and warm, the soft press of human flesh, and he noted the lost, faraway expression on her face as they made love, a rapture for them both, taking them back to some protected secret place long forgotten except by an aroused subconscious.

  There were, of course, countless images that Finnegan carried. Glynnis was to him a mosaic, intricately crafted, the compendium of all human emotion and promise. She intoxicated him, and by her love, confirmed his worth. She had become as necessary for Conor as hope itself.

  While Conor dwelt on both Glynnis and the meal before him, the couple who had also been on the outside patio paid their bill and left. Only a few people were on the street. This part of the city had relatively little social life to draw a night crowd. The restaurant stood near the end of the commercial section of the street, and the area in general was largely residential.

  At one point, toward the end of his meal something caught his eye. He looked up to see an old man, shoddy from head to toe, standing on the sidewalk just beyond the white railing. He wore a threadbare faded sport coat that was once a gray pattern. Beneath it he had only a polo shirt, dirty-white, a hole on the left side slightly above the heart. His pants no longer fit. They hung on him like dusty wrapping paper. On his feet he wore large hard brown shoes.

  The old man looked to be about sixty or so, maybe older. Maybe younger. He had not shaved for a while, and a grizzled, bristly gray-black growth spotted his cheeks and chin. His lips were thin, his cheeks hollow. He had shrunk within his clothes, wasting to a smaller and smaller form, and soon he would diminish altogether, disembodied for all time through sheer want.

  The old man was watching him eat. Finnegan could not tell how long he had been there. He had seemed to materialize in a blink, an emanation from the concrete under his feet. The specter’s eyes grabbed Finnegan’s, and held them. Finnegan at once harkened back to the tearful lady in the nursing home. It stunned him; a nervous jolt shot out of his chest and down his legs.

  Silent there on the sidewalk, the old man did not move. He simply stood and stared. Finnegan, totally disarmed, looked back. They stared at each other for no more than a handful of seconds, but for Finnegan all time had stopped.

  Hear now this, O foolish people and without understanding;

  Which have eyes and see not; which have ears and hear not.

  — Jeremiah, 5:21

  “You look at me, boy, as if I’m not like you.”

  Finnegan had no words to answer him. He continued to look hard at the old man. His eyes had been drawn to something immovable and timeless. The old man croaked his words in a crackly, tinny voice.

  “I said, you look at me as if I’m not like you. A hungry traveler, no more, no less. I’d ask you for some of that food if I thought you’d give it. But that don’t matter. To you or to me. I’ll eat all right, but I’ll eat a different food that suits me fine.”

  The phantom moved a few steps down the sidewalk. He continued to regard Finnegan, with whom he was almost now directly face to face.

  “You’re a good boy, probably, but that won’t do you no good. You got to be bad to keep
up. You got to be bad to keep from gettin’ hungry,” and he laughed. “Bad man to get good food. Don’t make no sense. But I know where I’m sleepin’ tonight, and the night after, and the night after that. I know where I’ll be ten years from now, boy. Do you? I know where I’ll be lyin’. Ain’t no trick to stayin’ alive, boy. Anybody can do that. The trick is knowin’ when you had enough.” He chuckled again and moved on a few more steps. No one else was around.

  “You ain’t no different, boy. A hungry traveler, just like me. Take a good look. Take a real good look. I’m your God damn daddy.”

  The old man turned fully away from Finnegan and headed down the street in a stumbling shuffle.

  Finnegan’s appetite died away. His legs and arms pulsed with the start the old man had given him. There had been no scent of alcohol on him, none of the dank, stale odor that permeated the street people. Where he had come from and where he would go were complete mysteries. The old man had been as out of place in the casual elegance of this section of the city as an Eskimo in the desert. Finnegan thought back to the early chapters of Moby Dick, Elijah collaring Ishmael and Queequeg. “Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship? Anything down there about your souls?”

  He pushed his plate away, grateful that he had finished most of his meal. When the server came he paid the check and walked down the street toward New Hampshire Avenue. Normally he would have taken a bus but the evening cool refreshed him. It was what he needed, and he wanted to walk.

  By the time he got to the circle, his reflective mood had returned to its original terms, the ones he had set for it as he had sipped his scotch. The old man had disappeared. Finnegan did not think further of him this evening, and, when he recalled the incident in the days ahead, he found he was able to dismiss him as a half-crazy, disoriented derelict, an isolated peculiar event in a summer heretofore remarkable in its harmony.

  ***

  The house stood dark and cool, silent except for the ticking of the great clock downstairs in the entryway. It could be heard even on the floor above, its softly thudding, regular tick muffled there in the darkness, the heartbeat first heard in the womb, before time itself.

  The lightest of breezes moved the tall trees outside just enough to create a rhythmic swishing that would have muted any night noise rising from the street—a neighbor walking his dog, a car passing, a party down the way. The unheated, unhurried winds of New England had snuffed out the day’s candle. The night came quickly, insulated and tranquilized, the security of the dormant years implicit in its whispers and its rhythms.

  Glynnis Mear stretched out in her bed in the cool New England darkness. She had come home for the first and only time this summer, here, at its end, when delay was no longer possible. In the next bed Martha rolled restlessly to her side. She was unused to having her sister with her, and so could not sleep.

  “Glynnis, are you awake?” she whispered.

  “Yes. I can’t sleep either.”

  “Talk to me, Glyn. Okay?”

  “If you want.”

  “I never see you anymore, Glynnis. I never get to talk to you.”

  “What do you want to talk about? Any deep, dark secrets you care to share with your older and much wiser sister?”

  “Remember how we used to talk ourselves to sleep? Every night. God, that was so great, to know you’d be here in the next bed. I always felt so safe when you were here.”

  “We get older, Martha. We grow up, and some of us have to go away.”

  “I know. I think I want to go, too. I want to go away to college, just like you did. I want to get out on my own. I can’t wait, sometimes.”

  “You won’t go away just like I did, Martha. You won’t be turning your back on anything. You’ll just be going, and that’s so much better. But what’s wrong? Why do you want to leave?”

  “Glynnis, there’s so much I haven’t seen. I know how trite that sounds, but it’s true. I’ve lived in Boston all my life, with the same people, the same friends, doing the same things. And then I see you go off on your own, for whatever reason. To this day, Glyn, I don’t know what it was you were running from even though you were running so hard. After Daddy died you got so distant. Don’t worry, you don’t have to explain anything. I know you love us and all that, and what you feel is your business. That’s not the point. It’s just that you seem to be doing so well and to be so happy now. I admire that so much, Glyn. I suppose I’ve never been more aware of the fact that you’re older than me until the last few months. You’ve grown up and you’ve grown away. You seem so assured now, so confident. I think that’s wonderful.

  “Remember when we were little kids,” she continued, “and you tried to teach me to swim in the ocean? We were up in Maine and I was scared to death. But you dove right through the surf and splashed around offshore, even as cold as it was there. You yelled back, ’If I can do this, so can you. We’re made of the same blood,’ then you slogged in and grabbed me by the arm. I can still remember how cold your hand was when you grabbed me. Then you pulled me into the waves, and I was kicking you and slapping you and crying. But it was all right, you know? It was cold, and the waves knocked me around, but it was all right. And after that I used to look forward to going back to the ocean, and I’d strut right up to the surf and march right into it like it was mine alone. I’ll never forget that, Glynnis. ’If I can do this, so can you. We’re made of the same blood.’

  “You’ve gained so much by what you did, Glyn. I can see it in every part of you. I’m envious, and I want to catch up.”

  “Maybe you’re just seeing illusions, Martha. Maybe you see what isn’t really there because you see me so seldom now.”

  “No, Glyn. You’re my sister. I know every inch of you. You want to know something? When you told me you were going off to school, I thought, ’She’ll never make it without someone to look after her. She’ll be back to stay inside a year.’ I just didn’t think you were tough enough, or that you could stand up for yourself. I thought people would walk all over you. Or through you. I didn’t think you’d know what to do or how to get along with the different types of people you were bound to meet. And I thought you’d miss us terribly since we were everything you’d ever known. You surprised me, though. The first time you came home you acted like a visitor, like you really felt you belonged somewhere else. It’s as if you grew up all at once, and that flustered, naïve girl who grew up ahead of me was gone. I saw it so clearly, Glyn, and I was so impressed by my new sister that I began to want some part of that for myself. And I do want it, more than ever. I’ve got to go away, Glynnis. I’ve got to see if I can do what you did.”

  “If I can do it, Martha, so can you. We’re made of the same blood.”

  Martha rolled to her back and laughed. “God, it feel so great to talk to you again. I miss you, Glynnis.”

  “I’m still your sister. You know where I am and how to get in touch. A phone call now and then might do us both some good.”

  “It’s not the same as lying here together, though. Besides, you’ve got someone else to bare your soul to. And you’ve told me nothing about him.”

  “He’s a friend, Martha.”

  “Don’t whitewash me, big sister. He’s more than a friend. I can tell by that stupid romantic twinkle in your eyes. Sometimes you act as if you’re not even on the same planet as the rest of us. You spend a lot of time with him, don’t you? And even now you’re thinking of him almost constantly. Now, come clean. What does he look like? Do you have a picture?”

  “I do, but you won’t see it. He’s tall, about six foot one. Strong build. He’s not thin but he’s not overweight. He has broad shoulders and a hard flat stomach. Brown hair long enough to touch the back of his collar. A cute little round nose, a strong chin, a full and fleshy face. He’s not gorgeous, Martha, but he’s far from unattractive. It’s his eyes that drew me first. Soft, large, deep, brown, dancing eyes. Oh, Martha, his eyes fix on you and ask you in, and how can I say no? I think he’s beautiful.”

&n
bsp; “Not handsome?”

  “No. Beautiful. Attractive with a hint of delicacy. I’m sure he bruises easily and it shows in his face. He opens himself so very quickly, and he expects you to like him. At least he’s hopeful you will. He’s hopeful for mankind itself, and that makes him delicate. I think we’re a species beyond hope.”

  “Conor’s his name, right?”

  “Conor Finnegan.”

  “Oh God, a pure Mick. Dad would be pleased.”

  “Conor and Daddy would have gotten along famously. Conor’s Irish to the core. I tease him about being a Romantic Irish poet, but Martha, if he had lived in the Middle Ages he’d have been a troubadour, roaming from town to town singing sad songs. He talks so sweetly, and sometimes he quotes me poetry.”

  “He’s in Washington working for a senator. That doesn’t sound too poetic, Glyn.”

  “That’s why I worry about him. He is Romantic. He loves humanity and he loves his God and he wants to be of service to both. He thinks he can do that—help the poor, feed the hungry, end wars. He can be so trusting at times. He’s bound to get hurt, and hurt badly. Someday he’ll have the realization that mankind can be brutal and selfish and ruthless and God knows what else. It’ll be beaten right into him. He’s still a little boy in some ways, Martha. An innocent, loving little boy.”

  “Glynnis, your little boy sounds marvelous.”

  “He’s from California, you know.”

  “You’re kidding? What’s he doing here? I just assumed he was from somewhere east.”

  “He came east to go to college. That’s the Romantic in him. A lust for different places. He’s said he wants to see humanity in as many forms as possible. He wants to set his own spirit independently so that he alone will be responsible for his success or failure. He’s explained that to me several times. I think he might actually believe it.”