The Bradbury Report

by Steven Polansky

  I was with her in the hospital when she died. I sat by her bed, held her hand. I told her I loved her. I had lost a son I never got to see. There could be little doubt I would soon lose my wife. I was blasted, separated from myself, yanked out of my mind, unable to think or feel. Sara was not conscious of me, for which I am grateful. I don’t remember much about the time I spent with her in that hospital room. I don’t remember the moment she died. I don’t remember what the doctor said, or how he said it, or what I did after that. I ought to remember it all, but I have only one discrete memory from those cavernous hours.

  Her parents had flown in for the birth of our son. The baby was already dead by the time they arrived. They were in the waiting room. They were distraught. I was sorry they were there. Her father was loathsome. Her mother was inoffensive; she had done nothing to earn my enmity. For her sake, I tried to keep them informed. I came out at regular intervals to bring them word. There was never anything to say. Sara’s condition continued to worsen, and then she died. At some point, after six or seven hours of this deathwatch, I left the room with the vague intention of getting a candy bar and a drink from some vending machines I thought I’d seen on the way in. I didn’t know what I was doing, or where I was going. I wandered off. When I got back to the room, having to be led there by a hospital volunteer, having forgotten why I’d left, Sara’s father, the Reverend Bird, was standing over her. The room was dark; he had turned off the lights. He had some kind of prayer book in his hand, and he was reading from it aloud. I don’t know what he was intoning, though I’ve told myself, subsequently, he was performing the last rites. I knew that if she were awake, if she could hear him, see him standing there in the dark, Sara would be terrified. She would not want him there, doing that. I was furious. I told him to get out. He could see how angry I was and, wisely, did not resist.

  Five

  The heart is a vulgar thing. For all its symbolic currency—it is the only organ that so resonates (imagine a comparable poetic fuss made over the liver or lungs)—it is ignoble. A deep red mass of muscle tissue—quadripartite, not heart-shaped—with pipes and valves. On the streets of Calgary, my heart, already damaged, already rickety and winded, for the second time in a year threatened to shut down altogether. The cardiologist who saw me there, meaning, I think, to ease me of blame, said, “It may simply be your heart was programmed to last you until now, and not much longer.”

  I might have taken a new heart. It need not have come from my clone. Had I asked for one, it would have been taken from some superfluous clone. The heart perfectly homologous—the government has no cause to be sloppy; its supply of hearts is inexhaustible—but still a stranger, a disrupter of whatever sense of intimacy I might have had with my own body. (In the days before cloning, there was inculcated between donor and recipient—with the aim, largely, of promoting organ donation—the notion of solidarity. In the current mode of exchange, where the “donation” is in no respect volitional, no permission sought, among other things we have lost, we have lost that.)

  In what way, for whom, is my extended survival necessary? Or good? What is my presence here, that my absence would be significant? And these questions are beside the point. Even if my life were worth prolonging, I could not have taken a heart from my clone. Or from any other.

  I am writing this report. There may be value in that.

  In this one respect, at least, it seems I cling to life: I am aware of my heart, alert to it, as never before. I attend to its systoles and diastoles, its firings and misses, as if I were leaning in to catch the last whispers of someone I loved. I have earned the metaphor. This one, too: What would my life with Sara have been like, her life with me, if I had had a different heart?

  The texture of our brief life together—I mean the whole, not just the surface texture—was, until the very last, peaceful and easy. We were congenial. We did not fight, or rarely. There was never any anger sustained between us. We worked well and productively together. We kept a clean and orderly house, and took comfort in our thrift. We traveled when we could. We enjoyed each other’s company. I was faithful. By rule and nature, but also because I could not believe my luck. She was a fine and beautiful woman, and, to risk belaboring the point, I was, in all ways, ordinary and undistinguished. I believe she was faithful to me. (I mean in saying this to cast no doubt.) I know—I always knew—I was less than what she needed me to be. That as her husband, principally in the quality of my love, day by day I failed her. I believe she loved me, and that her capacity to give and receive love was far greater than my own. I see now I didn’t do enough to help her realize that capacity, come full into her endowment. To love me in the way I asked to be loved, in the way, perhaps, I permitted her to love me, she didn’t need to love enough, at a pitch sufficiently high or a level sufficiently deep, to love the way she could. The waste of it is what, after all the years, I can’t stop feeling. I taste it still on my tongue. It is what I see, too often, when I close my eyes. Our life together so short. My obtuseness. My reserve. Unforgivable.

  Though I didn’t see this at the start, she came to me sad and broken. Beyond what I could imagine, watching her with her father, I don’t know much about her childhood in Indianola. For good reason, she was not eager to talk about it. The truth is, I’m not sure I cared to know more than I did. She was the eldest of three children and the primary, I’d say obsessive, focus of her father’s attentions. She had a brother and a sister. Her father left the two of them all but exclusively to the care of their mother, who, in return for this sop, seemed willing to surrender all parental rights and influence with respect to Sara. When he knew she would be beautiful—I’ve seen the pictures: Sara en pointe in Sleeping Beauty; Sara with her violin; Sara sitting on her Connemara pony; Sara in her cotillion gown—her father, the Reverend Bird, a desperate Anglophile, had a vision for Sara. In imagining her become what he wanted her to become, in fashioning her for his own delight, I believe he conflated two types, neither of which he’d ever bumped up against in the flesh: the nineteenth-century squire’s daughter and the southern belle (the second, of which there was a surfeit at William and Mary when I was there, is, I’m guessing, just a poor copy of the first). He enrolled her at St. Agatha’s, a K-12 Episcopal school for girls. He insisted she take lessons on the piano and violin. He had her study dance with a teacher in Des Moines, and, by the time she was fourteen, Sara was lead dancer in that city’s youth ballet company. He bought her the pony, Finn (alas, even the pony gets an alias), which he boarded on a farm west of Indianola, and paid a matronly Devonshire woman, married to a fellow priest in the bishopric, to instruct her in equitation and dressage. He took an avid, unnatural interest in her clothes and hair and makeup and jewelry. It was he who decided her ears should be pierced. He insisted she get biweekly manicures. Even after we were married, he persisted in appraising her appearance, and continued to send her expensive jewelry and clothes, which, by then—this made me very glad—she would not wear.

  I met him for the first time at Easter, 2027. It had been only since late January that Sara had been living with me in my apartment above the Hmong gift shop in downtown Ames. She had not told her parents about our arrangement. She was expected home for the holiday. She asked me to drive her to Indianola and stay the weekend. She wanted her family to meet me. We would be married the following September, on the 12th, but, at that point, Easter, neither of us had yet mentioned the prospect of marriage, and I, at least, hadn’t given it a thought. I don’t know what she was thinking. She neglected to brief me about her father. I knew only that he was an Episcopal priest. If I expected anything—I don’t know that I bothered to form expectations—I expected to find the family not especially well off, living humbly and simply, in the proximity of the church, in a house provided for them by the parish. Sara never spoke about money and didn’t seem to have much of it.

  They were wealthy. Growing up in New Hampshire I knew no one so manifestly affluent. The house was in a new and demoralizingly sterile sub
demesne called Thrushcroft, and nowhere near the church. Palais Bird, as I liked to think of it. It was an architectural monstrosity. At base a sort of ersatz and hypertrophied English Tudor, with a roof meant to look, very broadly, like thatch, perversely combined with, among other anomalies, a quasi-Corinthian colonnade on either side of the front door, ultramodern casement windows in the façade, and a Victorian cupola center top. Inside, it was opulent—crystal chandeliers, marble floors, hand-knotted oriental rugs, gold-plated fixtures. In one of the formal reception rooms there was an ornate, working harpsichord—I heard Sara play it—from, I think, the sixteenth century. In another, even larger room, which opened out on a brick-and-stone terrace overlooking the formal garden at the back of the house—it was still too early in the Iowa spring for much of anything to be in bloom—was a Steinway grand her father made sure to mention had been played during an American tour by Rachmaninoff. Coming through the front door and standing face to face with a staircase that might have been lifted from a Venetian palazzo (I have not been to Venice, and know nothing, firsthand, about the palazzi there, or their staircases. I take it they are sweeping and grand.), I was be-dazzled. Sara’s mother was waiting for us in the entryway, which, I discovered, looking up into a glazed and gilded dome, was an atrium three stories high. Where did the money come from for this garish and profligate display? It as sure as hell did not come from the salary paid her father by the church. Though it made her family situation even more repugnant, I took great satisfaction in learning from Sara that her father contributed almost nothing to the pot. He absolved himself of any real financial responsibility on the grounds that he was a man of God, at the same time he spent wantonly the money that came, almost without limit, from his wife’s family, who had, for several generations, owned a shipping line back in Norway.

  We arrived late afternoon on Maundy Thursday. Sara’s mother met us wearing a black velvet dress with a single strand of pearls. Her hair was pulled back severely and tied off with a black velvet ribbon. She was small and plain. She was in her mid-fifties, but looked much older. The skin on her face and hands was dry and papery, her knuckles prominent, her fingernails, beneath the polish, ridged and bitten. Her hair, which had been blonde—Sara had a picture of her mother as a young girl in Bergen; she had been pretty—was now pure white. She was thin, even gaunt, and curved inward. She was skittish. She didn’t say much; after twenty-five years in America she was still not comfortable with the spoken language, especially not before strangers. When she saw Sara, she began to cry. After a suitable delay, Sara’s brother and sister drifted into the entryway. They were both still in high school and living at home. They were unambiguously glad to see Sara and, though not overtly impolite, paid me little attention. They were good-looking, relaxed, confident kids. They are both still alive and have, I believe, fared reasonably well. Except for the dutiful Christmas card from the brother’s wife, to which I don’t respond, I have had no contact with either of her siblings since Sara died. Sara’s brother is an electrical engineer. He lives in San Diego and has a daughter. Her sister is married, in Minneapolis, to a Somali with whom she’s had five children. Though we are not related by blood, these children are my nephews and nieces, whom I will never know. The last I heard, Sara’s sister had converted to Islam, which I was happy to hear, imagining her father’s reaction. Sara’s father and mother are long dead.

  What explains Sara? How could she have come—so fine and sensitive and graceful—from the commingling of two such parents, one of them positively malefic? So our genes are not our fate? Persuade my clone of that. I didn’t meet her father—the house was big enough that I didn’t run into him—until Saturday afternoon. The reason for his absence, given me by Sara’s mother—she was anxious to soften any possible offense I might take—having to do with the various offices and functions attendant on Holy Week that required his presence and ministration, seemed plausible enough. We’d been assigned separate bedrooms: Sara her old room on the second floor, and me one of the several guest rooms on the floor above. He had come to Sara’s room, in the evening, after I had gone to sleep, and again in the morning, before I’d emerged for breakfast.

  We all went to a Good Friday service at the church, where I saw Sara’s father for the first time, and heard him deliver to the assembled and somber few a brief meditation on the meaning of the Passion. I was predisposed to admire it, but I found his meditation platitudinous and bland—on the Passion!—found him affected and smug.

  After lunch on Saturday afternoon, Sara told me her father wanted to see me in the library. I would be in his house four days—he was there, too, off and on—and this was to be our only meeting. Sara led me—silently, guiltily, I thought, very much as if she were leading me to a special doom in which she was complicit—to a part of the house I’d not yet been in. It was, as they’d all been instructed to call it, their father’s wing, and contained, in addition to the library: his bedroom—her mother had her bedroom in another part of the house; his bathroom—he liked to take long baths and often did not complete his morning toilet until early afternoon; his sitting room, which I could see as I passed it, was spacious; and an indoor stationary lap pool, for his use only.

  He was waiting for me in the library. The room was a hexagon, which is an odd and disorienting shape for a room. Except for the door through which Sara and I entered, and the large sash window in one of the western walls—the drapes on this window were tied back, and the afternoon sun streamed through it—the rest of the wall space was taken, floor to ceiling, by bookshelves. These shelves were made from a kind of pickled pine. They were simple and elegant. Whatever the merits of the individual books it contained—for anything I knew, he’d bought them by the yard—the collection was extensive. I’d estimate there were two to three thousand volumes, maybe more than that, some of them leather-bound sets, almost all the rest clothbound. Here and there, space on the shelves was made for small, effeminate porcelain figurines—florid little shepherds and shepherdesses—and also for various diplomas and awards Sara’s father had earned, and photographs of him with assorted luminaries from the larger ecclesiastical world and the local political scene. The floor was made of wide unvarnished pine planks. Much of the floor was covered with an oriental rug, clearly old, its colors muted and quite beautiful. Near the center of the room, not quite facing the door, was a large, dark oak double desk with a deep-red leather inset top. One could sit on either side of the desk, or, as originally intended, share it. From the late Jacobean period (“Sheffield, circa 1625,” he said to me, when we were alone), the legs and edges of the desk, elaborately carved and detailed, looked almost medieval. The desk chair was straight- and high-backed, of the same dark oak. There was a green-glass reading lamp on the desk, an old-fashioned and ornamental inkstand, a framed photographic portrait of him standing behind his wife and children, and a silver tray with a crystal pitcher, several tumblers, and a silver bowl for ice. In one of the room’s six equal angles stood a large antique globe, in another a simple Shaker-style reader’s stand (when I was a young boy I drove with my parents into Maine, to Sabbathday Lake, to hear the very last of the vestigial Shakers sing their hymns) with, open upon it, an oversized and illuminated bible. Beside the window was a scuffed brown leather wing chair with matching footstool, and a tall brass standing lamp. It was the kind of room in which one might expect to encounter, if not Erasmus or Galileo or one of the lesser Medicis, at least a man with some education, a modicum of discernment, and unconstrained access to cash, who had an overweening interest in appearing connoisseurish (how to explain those figurines?), old-moneyed, and learned.

  Sara’s father, the Reverend Bird, stood beside the wing chair. He was holding a book, as if he’d been reading and had just risen to stretch his legs. His back was to the door, and he was looking out the window. For our benefit, I thought, he’d struck a prayerful, meditative pose. Though he could not have helped but hear us open the door, he did not turn towards us, until Sara said, “Daddy.” />
  Then in his mid-fifties, Sara’s father was handsome, tall and slim and graceful, his posture faultless, his complexion fair and smooth. His hair was silvery and fine. He seemed to me to be more conscientiously groomed than any man I’d ever seen. He was wearing a suit, dark gray with a pale chalk stripe, and a black clerical shirt with the priestly notch of white in the collar. His shoes had been brought, by someone, to a high black shine. I could see, when he turned to face us, that the book he was holding—he kept his place in it with his index finger, to suggest he intended, shortly, to continue reading it—was Pascal’s Pensées.

  “Darling,” he said to Sara. Without moving in our direction, he lifted his empty hand and held it out to her, his palm up, his fingers extended, a flourish, as if he were asking her to dance. Or, as I think of it now, as if they had already been dancing and were in the middle of some tricky break step that had taken them, briefly, apart. Sara went to him, took his hand, leaned in, raised up on her toes, and kissed him chastely on the cheek. Still holding his hand, she looked back at me—I had remained standing just inside the door—and said, sunnily, without guile, “Daddy, this is my friend. Ray Bradbury.”

  “Ray,” he said.

  “Mr. Bird,” I said. I intended no slight, though on the drive back, Sara told me he’d been displeased by the lack of form in my address, had taken it as a sign of disrespect. He expected me, she said, to call him “Reverend Bird.” When I knew what it was he wanted from me, the precise code of deference required, I could not, thereafter—not once in all the time I knew him, no matter that it might have made things easier for Sara—bring myself to do it. I am embarrassed now to confess I was, for seven years, to take heart in this paltry line of resistance. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said. Then: “This is a beautiful room. All these books. Amazing.” This was fawning of the worst sort, nearly pure obsequiousness.