The Saffron Gate

by Holeman, Linda

  His breathing caught for a moment, and I squeezed his hand, looking at his face. A spasm passed over his features, but in the next instant both his face and his breathing settled, and I sat back again. My mouth was dry. I lifted the metal pitcher of water from the small table beside the bed, and saw my distorted reflection: my hair hanging around my face in long tangles, my eyes pulled to an odd shape in the metal, my thick eyebrows, the white bandage on my cheek, my lips parted as if in a question.

  I put the pitcher back on the table. ‘Dad,’ I said, quietly. ‘Dad. Please.’

  Please what? Wake up? Don’t die? Forgive me? I took his hand again, holding it against my unhurt cheek.

  ‘You should rest while he sleeps,’ a voice said, and, dully, I looked over my shoulder. It was a man, a doctor, I assumed, from the stethoscope around his neck. I put down my father’s hand and stood.

  ‘Can you tell me anything?’ I asked. ‘What … will he be all right?’

  The doctor looked at my father, then back at me. ‘There were many injuries. Internal.’ There was something vaguely familiar — perhaps the word was comforting — about the man’s voice. ‘And because of the age … it’s … Miss O’Shea, yes? You must prepare yourself.’

  I sat down. ‘Prepare myself?’

  ‘You would not wish to go home for a while? The man and woman who brought you and your father here — did you know them? Could you call them to take you home?’

  I shook my head once. I had only a vague recollection of a car stopping on the road, of a man lifting my father into the back seat, a woman pressing a handkerchief against my cheek, putting my coat around me. ‘I’ll stay with him.’

  The doctor was silent for a moment. ‘Has someone called your mother?’ he asked. ‘Or perhaps a brother, sister … You tell the nurse, and she will phone for you. You have family, someone—’

  ‘There’s only me,’ I interrupted, my voice hoarse. ‘Only me,’ I repeated.

  ‘The medication,’ he said then. ‘It has helped?’”

  I looked at my father. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Your face. It pains a great deal?’

  I reached up to touch the dressing as I had a few moments earlier. ‘No. I … I don’t remember …’

  ‘It’s the deep cut, Miss O’Shea. There were many small pieces of glass; I took them out and stitch it for you.’

  I suddenly heard his accent, and his slightly incorrect grammar, and understood what had created this familiarity; his English was similar to my mother’s. I had a recollection: the stinging smell of disinfectant, this man’s face close to mine, a tugging at my flesh which was cold, and unfeeling. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’

  Why was he talking about my insignificant injury? It was my father he should be attending to. ‘Can’t you do something? Is there some surgery you can perform, something … something to help him?’

  The doctor shook his head. His face reflected something — was it sorrow? ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and it was clear that he meant it. ‘Now it is only the time we wait.’ He glanced at a round watch he pulled from his waistcoat pocket. ‘I must go now, but I return in a few hours.’

  I nodded. His expression was, in spite of his professionalism, concerned. Perhaps even kind. And his voice … Again I thought of my mother, and felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life. I didn’t want this man to leave; at that moment even a stranger would have been a comfort.

  ‘Miss O’Shea. It is better for you that you sleep. It’s been many hours you sit like this. And the medication for the pain — for your face — it make you tired.’

  I thought of the doctor who had tended to me when I had polio, of the doctor who had come to see my mother in her last days. Those men were surely at the ends of their careers; they had appeared so old, so worn, as if they had had a lifetime of passing on sorrowful news. ‘It’s my fault,’ I said, not sure why I felt the need to confess to this doctor. His forehead was high and intelligent, his cheeks ruddy. He couldn’t have been a doctor too many years; he was surely only a little older than I. ‘He told me not to drive.’

  He didn’t reply, but kept looking at me, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, as if waiting for me to continue.

  Again I lifted my father’s hand, this time pressing it against my forehead.

  ‘I am Dr Duverger,’ the man said. ‘If you wish to speak to me about your father, or your face, you ask the nurse for me. Dr Duverger,’ he repeated, looking at me intently.

  But I was suddenly so weary, so overcome, that I simply nodded, and turned back to my father.

  My father died just before sunrise, without regaining consciousness, without forgiving me. I was there, in the room with him, but at the moment of his death I was asleep.

  It was a nurse who came in and discovered he was no longer breathing. She roused me with a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss O’Shea,’ she said, when I stared at my father, and then at her. ‘There’s nothing more to be done.’

  I kept looking at her, as if she spoke a foreign language.

  ‘He’s gone, dear,’ she said, her hand still on my shoulder. ‘Come now. Come and we’ll get you a cup of tea.’

  I wasn’t able to understand how it could have happened this way. So quietly, and so unnoticed. Didn’t my father deserve more than this, from life, and from me?

  ‘Come now,’ she said again, and I rose and followed her, glancing back at my father’s body.

  I remember sitting in a small room with a cup of tea in my hands, and the young doctor — what had he said his name was? — speaking to me. But I couldn’t understand him. I walked from the room, but the doctor followed me, putting something — a small container — into my hand. Then he draped my coat over my shoulders. I smelted my father, the scent of his tobacco, and swayed for a moment. The doctor put his hand on my wrist to steady me.

  ‘You must put the ointment on your cheek,’ he said. ‘The ointment — there, in your hand. Put it on every day. And a clean bandage. Come to see me in one week. How will you go home?’ he asked, and I looked from his hand on my wrist to his face. ‘Who will take you to your home, Miss O’Shea?’ he said. ‘There is someone to take you, and to be with you now, so you are not alone?’

  I wasn’t thinking clearly. ‘Home? I … I don’t know. The car … my car … is it … where is it?’ I asked, as if he would know.

  ‘I don’t know about your automobile, but I think it is better if you do not drive. We will find someone … It’s very early … Where do you live, Miss O’Shea?’ he asked then.

  ‘Juniper Road,’ I said.

  ‘I will try to find someone to drive you,’ he said. ‘You may have to wait.’

  I stood there, trying to process his words. He was kind. ‘No,’ I said, my senses returning. ‘My neighbour, Mr Barlow. Mike Barlow. He’ll come and get me. He’ll take me home.’

  ‘He has a telephone?’

  I nodded. All I wanted to do was leave this place, with my father’s lifeless body. ‘Yes,’ I said. Suddenly I was very cold. Shivering. ‘But … I can’t remember the number. I can’t remember it,’ I said, putting my hand to my mouth. ‘I know it,’ I said, through my shaking fingers. ‘I know it, but I can’t …’

  The doctor nodded, moving his hand from my wrist to my shoulder. ‘It’s the shock, Miss O’Shea. Please. Sit here. Mike Barlow on Juniper? I will find this number,’ he said.

  I sat where he indicated, my teeth chattering, and watched his back as he left me, going to a nearby desk and speaking to a woman there. She looked at me, nodding, and then he looked back at me as well.

  ‘Put on your coat, Miss O’Shea,’ he said, his voice carrying across the small space. ‘Keep yourself warm.’

  SIX

  We drove through the thin early morning light. The sky had cleared and the rising sun shone tentatively, as if unsure of itself. Mr Barlow rolled down the window, and there was the sweet smell of the promise of spring. Suddenly my cheek th
robbed so terribly that I drew in my breath and closed my eyes.

  ‘You all right, Sidonie?’ Mr Barlow asked.

  I opened my eyes and looked at his stubbled face, suddenly remembering that when I was a child his gingery eyebrows had reminded me of caterpillars. They were threaded with white now, although still as thick and bristly. ‘You all right?’ he asked again, and I nodded, looking away from him to stare through the windshield.

  And then I saw it. The beautiful Silver Ghost, overturned. There was an overwhelming sense of sadness about it. It lay as though it were a great hulking white beast, beaten and defeated, in the muddy gravel. The sun caught its side mirror, reflecting so that I was momentarily blinded. I covered my eyes with my hands.

  ‘Your dad was a good man, Sidonie,’ Mr Barlow said.

  And I killed him. I killed him, I thought.

  It was Mr Barlow who drove me back to the hospital three weeks later. He came to the door, turning his cap in his hands.

  ‘Nora says you got a phone call. You’re supposed to go back to the hospital. They say you missed your appointment.’

  ‘My appointment? For what?’ I asked, holding Cinnabar against my chest.

  Mr Barlow cleared his throat. ‘Most likely about your face, Sidonie,’ he said, touching his own cheek.

  Mr and Mrs Barlow had been good to me for the last few weeks. They had helped with the funeral arrangements and Mrs Barlow had brought me something to eat every day. Sometimes I ate it, sometimes I didn’t, and sometimes I didn’t remember if I’d eaten or not.

  Mr Barlow had taken me to the lawyer’s office in Albany, and sat with me while the lawyer explained that my father had left a simple will. He had managed to put away a small amount of money, left to me. I looked at Mr Barlow as we left. ‘Is it enough for the rent?’ I asked, not able, at that time, to understand what the sum meant.

  ‘Don’t worry about that, Sidonie,’ he said. ‘It will keep you for a little while. But …’ He stopped. ‘Don’t worry about paying any rent,’ he said, and I nodded. ‘You’ll have to open your own account, at the bank,’ he added, and again, I simply nodded. Nothing made sense, those first weeks.

  Occasionally I attempted to read, but couldn’t concentrate; I tried to paint, but the colours were flat, my brushstrokes lifeless. I would decide to make tea, put the kettle on to boil, and then forget about it until the piercing scream made me jump, and I realised I didn’t want tea after all. I would take up a pen to write down what I needed to buy when I next went to the grocery store, then stop, the pen halfway to the paper, forgetting what I had planned to write. I even wondered why Cinnabar followed me about the house for an hour one day, until I saw, with a guilty start, that her food and water dishes were empty.

  The house, without my father, was so still.

  When my mother died, I had mourned. The mourning was passive, and took the form of thinking of her, and weeping for her. When my mother died I still had my father. But with his absence I couldn’t mourn, couldn’t sit and weep. It was a different sensation; as opposed to mourning, I was grieving, and it was active. I had too much energy, but it was misplaced. I needed to keep moving, to find things to keep my hands busy.

  I missed our weekend searches for hood ornaments and radiator caps. I missed hearing his whistle as he shaved each morning. I missed ironing his shirts, and seeing the pleasure on his face when he slid his arms into the fresh-smelling and lightly starched sleeves.

  I went out to the shed and scrubbed the winter dust off the old Model T. I took all the hood ornaments and radiator caps from the pine cabinet and polished them oyer and over. I pulled my father’s cleaned, pressed shirts from his wardrobe and rewashed them. When they were dry, I unpinned them from the clothes line and ironed them, the iron thudding, the steam rising to dampen my face.

  But more than anything I missed talking to my father; he had been the object for my thoughts. So at any time during every day for those first weeks, that first month, I would spontaneously open my mouth to call out to him, something as insignificant as that I’d heard a mouse gnawing between the walls during the night. And then I’d remember he was gone, gone for ever, and we would never again share anything, as small as a mouse in the walls or as large as a crisis in the world.

  Still, through all of this I couldn’t cry. It was guilt. I couldn’t let myself forget what I had done to my father. If I cried, it would be for myself, to soothe and comfort myself. I did not think I deserved any comfort.

  I experienced a small epiphany one dark night, sitting on the front step and looking up at the constellations.

  Beyond the faint outlines of the bare treetops across the street the cloudless ribbon of night sky was familiar. Predictable. There was only a tiny sliver of moon, a scattering of stars. I found Orion and Cassiopeia, the North Star, Ursa Major. They were always there, old friends, when the night was clear. I had studied the constellations, learning their shape and design from the pages of books over that long-ago polio year of first hopefulness, then bitterness and resentment, and finally resignation. That year there was no view of the night sky from my bedroom window, and the stars were only paper constellations then.

  And now the thought came to me that I lived much of my life through the pages of books as well. That perhaps I, too, was only a paper figure. A cut-out, a silhouette. Flat.

  I always thought I knew the shape of my life. Of course I thought I knew about life, thought I knew all I needed — or wanted — to know. And yet, like the opening left when a burning star falls from its perch, now an unexpected hole was left in what was once a solid curtain of understanding.

  What had I planned for myself once I was alone? Even though my father’s death had come too early, it was, after all, inevitable. What future had I seen for myself after he was gone and no longer needed me to care for him?

  Had I thought that my quiet, safe life was like a thread, running through me and attaching me to the earth? That I would continue on with my routines — caring for the house and garden and painting botanical images, reading on the dark winter nights when the nor’easters blew in, wandering through the countryside in the summer — as surely and predictably as the sun rose and set each day? That this thread would remain sturdy, and invincible?

  Now I knew the thread had been abruptly broken, and a huge, dark longing came over me. Sitting under the cold stars, I understood that it was death that made me recognise life, and the existence, or perhaps the non-existence, of my own being. I suddenly realised what my father had tried to tell me, years earlier, about going out into the world. I saw that my own life was so small — no, tiny; as minute as one of the billions of stars that created the hazy band of the Milky Way. Or perhaps it was presumptuous to even view my life as the most minuscule of stars; maybe it was more appropriate to think of it as one of the specks of dust that also littered that celestial sphere.

  I thought again of my father’s wishes for me, that I’d marry and have my own family.

  Although he had long ago given up on the notion of me having a job, he’d started a tiresome rant not too long after my mother had died, telling me that there was a connection between man and woman that couldn’t be duplicated in friendship or in familial ties. That only when that connection was broken by death did you understand its strength. ‘I want you to know it, Sidonie,’ he’d said, too many times for me to remember. And each time I felt a combination of anger and embarrassment; anger towards him for badgering me, and embarrassment within myself for not being able to tell him that he was blind to the fact that no man would ever want to marry me.

  As I sat on the steps, remembering his words, the lights in the Barlows’ house went out, and suddenly I remembered Mr Barlow saying not to worry about the rent as we left the lawyer’s office. I went inside and took the letter I’d brought home that day out of the drawer in the sideboard. I stared at the amount of the inheritance, understanding, only then, how small it was. I thought about what I paid for weekly groceries. The coal for the furnace ove
r the winter. My painting supplies. There was money for little else. And even with Mr and Mrs Barlow’s generosity of living in the house without paying rent, what would I do in a few years, when there was nothing left?

  And then I realised that although yes, my father had wanted me to find happiness, he’d also worried about what I would do when he was gone. How I would live. He had wanted to know I would be looked after, as it appeared I hadn’t done anything to learn to look after myself.

  A quiet panic filled me. I climbed into bed, still in my coat, cradling Cinnabar. But even when she grew restless and too hot under the coverlet, struggling to free herself, I clung to her as though she was a lifeline to shore, and I was adrift in a small boat.

  It was four days later that Mr Barlow came to the door to take me back to the hospital.

  He was still standing there, his cap in his hands. ‘Sidonie?’ he said, and I jumped, lost in thought.

  ‘Oh. Yes, sorry. When am I supposed to go to the hospital?’

  He shrugged. ‘Nora didn’t say. Just that you missed your appointment and you should go. I can take you today.’

  I set down Cinnabar — she was thirteen years old and heavy now — and pulled my coat from its hook behind the door. As we walked out into the spring sunshine, I put my hands in my pockets, and felt something in the left one. It was a small vial and a folded paper. I had worn my coat since the accident — to the funeral, to church, to the lawyer’s office, when I sat on the porch, and when I walked to the store — but hadn’t discovered these things before. Had I fingered them without even the curiosity to pull them out and look at them, or had I not put my hands into my pockets?

  The vial was the ointment the doctor had given me the day my father died, and the paper gave instructions to use it three times a day. It could be renewed if more was needed. There was also a date for me to return to see the doctor. It was for two weeks earlier. On the top of the paper was a small letterhead: Dr E. Duverger, MD.