by David Lehman
And then, perhaps, he slept a bit
before the whole routine began once more
with the support hose, the hair spray, Miss Littlefield, the sex magazines,
the Grolier, the folding chair, the meeting, the calling card.
How crazy America was, he said, how he wanted to leave,
but he never left town, except jolting trips to the hospital
in an ambulance down all those brick roads.
V.
I lived in Cambridge two years.
After that, wherever I moved, we spoke, daily, over the phone, on landlines—
talking and listening, listening and talking, for fifteen years:
“You alright?” “Yes. You?”
In all that time, I saw him only once more, and by then he was nearly blind.
In all that time, we barely touched one another.
Why our relationship required its rood screen,
I could not fully explain to Sister Ann,
indeed, I can never seem to properly explain it to anyone.
But I have tried, and I will probably always keep trying.
But if I get nothing right,
I must try to get a nuance of our friendship
and his sponsorship right—
we were bound, bound by a vow, a vow of attention
(there are many causes for attention, among them redemption).
Our attention concerned the spirit,
although that sounds pious and we were not so pious,
we were more selfish, more human than pious.
What else can I say?
I needed a liberator
and liberators can come in some unexpected guises.
I may never wholly explain the two of us.
Perhaps the spirit defies the human mind,
even after all my time with Sister Ann.
Finally, from a hospital, came the report of Durell’s last day.
A charge nurse said: “I touched the gangrene leg, pink flesh was coming back.”
His compliments had increased the more his life failed.
In the final week, he quoted Cole Porter songs to me—
You’re a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet, you’re Mickey Mouse . . .
I did not repeat the rhymes to Sister Ann.
Who Durell was and why he did what he did and why he hid
what he hid I kept asking her.
Sister Ann quoted from Deuteronomy:
“I set before you life and death . . . choose life.”
Old pigeon flying back,
when I arrived at the hospital his body was gone.
The formalities were few,
for he had become a ward of the state.
The staff gave me a brown grocery bag of his things:
a roll of dimes, a pair of shoes, a belt buckle, an Einstein quote,
something about mediocre minds.
Afterwards, I went through Cambridge and found the meeting gone.
Night was coming.
Blindness worked on the people, shops, churches, streets.
No one knew me.
People said: “Where will we go?” and “What will we eat?”
I thought I recognized this or that face, but no, no, too much time had passed.
On Church Street, restaurants had replaced bookstores.
Windows on Mass Avenue shone with chandeliers.
Someone backed up photographing with a flash.
“Hold still,” they said, “hold still.”
A new set of homeless people pleaded,
coins rattled inside the used coffee cups they shook.
Everyone moved with packages, briefcases, textbooks, flash cards, cell phones, flowers.
The Charles advanced, determined as a hearse,
its dark waters gathering up every unattached thing.
An umber, granular dusk-light fell on the elms over Harvard Yard as they swayed dark and slow
like the chords in the waltz from Copland’s Rodeo.
There I stood, unsure of which way to go.
The light had more ghosts in it as it must have had that day in Emmaus.
VI.
Suddenly, Sister Ann announced our last meeting.
Down the linoleum hallway,
Sister Katherine and Sister Ruth moved and prayed.
Their numbers had dropped from seven to six,
and the nuns decided the Retreat House would close.
Soon, the chapel and offices would be leveled and replaced with condominiums.
In the halls, the swoosh-snap of duct tape yanked, pulled and cut,
straps tightened, vans bleating, and backing up into the back,
weather reports exchanged with the movers.
Sister Ann told me about herself that final time:
parents dead, alcoholic brother dead,
the brother embarrassed she had been a nun.
She opened her Bible on the shipping box between us,
leaned in, her hearing aids on, her silver crucifix knocking on her chest.
Above her head, a nail where the Emmaus scene had hung.
I asked: “What caused him to remain?”
Why did he want freedom for me?
Sister Ann spoke then of the Gospel of John
and the Samaritan woman at the well,
the one married nearly as many times as Elizabeth Taylor,
and how when Christ listened to her she became the first evangelist.
It was Christ’s longest conversation with anyone, Sister Ann said.
The Samaritan woman’s life changed because Christ listened to her.
John K., from the meetings, dead now too, once said:
“Oh, I knew Durell. He was odd. But we’re all odd you know.”
All I know now
is the more he loved me the more I loved the world.
VII.
I lost track of Sister Ann.
I have often thought about her and all the time she spent with me.
I have wanted to tell her now for some time
that not long after the cloister closed, Durell’s sister located me,
leaving a message on my answering machine,
(it was still the time of answering machines),
inviting me to her winter house in Boynton Beach.
Durell’s sister gave me directions.
She was quite close to me, as it turned out.
She had some of Durell’s belongings that she wanted me to have.
“There isn’t much,” she said.
“But still, I think you should have what’s here.”
Durell spoke of his sister often,
but I did not know his family.
However, when we met, we recognized each other
as one sometimes recognizes what one has never seen before.
I said to her: “He knew me better than anyone.”
The sentence surprised us.
We sat by the pool in her gated country club.
The Florida evening was a watercolor in the making,
colors bleeding into striking mistakes.
After all the members withdrew,
she said, “There are many things you do not know about my brother.”
A worker folded terry cloth towels under a bamboo hut.
Her voice halted as voices halt
when words have been withheld.
“They called him names,” she said, “A nancy boy, a priss, a sissy, a fairy . . .”
The pool’s tempos ceased
until the silence about us was the silence in a palace.
Light disappeared everywhere.
The sun fell. She looked away,
said that he’d been to the army language school,
learned German and Russian, played the organ in his spare time,
mentioned he’d taken music with Copland at Harvard
(he had received a “gentleman’s ‘C’”—
the “C” stood for Copland she sa
id he always said—
which made us laugh and seemed to beckon him to us).
He had hoped for an army career, she went on,
and then she mumbled something about a little German town,
I think she said it was in Schleswig-Holstein, near Lübeck,
where he was stationed while borders were being redrawn,
the letters stopping, the army, the men, something, the drink . . .
and then her words fell and sank
into subtle variations of all that goes unsaid.
We heard the distant sound of a train on its track,
crossing the Florida map going brown then black.
He became difficult, isolated—
she spoke softly then like the penitent.
He was always asking for money.
As his requests persisted she began to screen her calls.
“It became easier to tell him I had not been home,” she said.
His behavior was affecting her marriage.
She chose never to introduce her children to Durell.
Perhaps he had a mental illness, perhaps he invented—
perhaps, perhaps, perhaps—
but no, she pressed on, perhaps it was his sexuality, he was too sensitive . . .
“People can be cruel,” she said.
She felt he had never adjusted to cruelty
as if cruelty was something that one needed to adjust to.
Later, he was picked up for charges of soliciting sex.
And the more she told me, the less I knew.
All about us, a stillness began to displace the light
and Durell was there, and no longer there, staining that stillness.
After an estrangement ends there comes a great stillness,
the greater the estrangement the greater the stillness.
Across the parking lot, a gate rattled.
I told her he often said his life had been a failure,
I tried to convince him otherwise, but he never believed me.
Half a century ago, she broke off contact.
Her protracted estrangement made her look ill.
“Please, please,” she said.
Her voice trailed off,
although what she was pleading for was not clear.
No, no, she did not want her grandchildren to know.
Subtle variations of Florida evening light withdrew with finality.
The pool brightened with moonlight, the color of snow.
The pool was still.
Darkness spilled everywhere.
There we were,
a man and a woman sitting in cushioned lounge chairs,
as if the world would always be an endless pair of separated things.
We did not touch each other.
We were still a long time.
from Poetry
PAISLEY REKDAL
Wax
Family portrait with French Revolution and cancer
Tussaud is said to have knelt herself at the cooling bath
to mold him: Marat, “just after he had been killed
by Charlotte Corday. He was still warm, and his bleeding body
and the cadaverous aspect of his features presented a picture
replete with horror.”
Now, the dripping head remains exactly
as it once looked, according to the placards, and to which
the famous painting can attest,
though what one says and what is history
are each rarely certain: here are only fragments
of what is left: the white sheet swaddling
the head, white body and bath, lank arm splayed
and the pallid face with its Egyptian cheekbones—
In the painting,
death comes in the form of a slight slit
delicately emblazoned on the right
pectoral: how tiny must have been that organ
for such a small wound to finish him. Not
like this wax man’s heart, which must be large,
dangerous, intractable, worse than yours as the knife’s great size
and placement indicate. Death
is not a small thing here. It takes work
to make it exact. It takes diligence.
Look, the doctors said,
as they took us in the room. The new cells with the old ones.
And they held the little chart up to the light.
*
Hands snatching in the plaster, the eye
sockets, lip cleft: all Tussaud could take back to reconstruct
cire perdue’s inverse procedures: to coat the wax
on plaster instead, favor the viscous
over molten metals; Tussaud’s uncle, Curtius, taught her,
taking out the little calipers and stylus, looking
at the body and only seeing it, stopping thought
in order to make it spectacle. “Curtius
has models of kings, great writers, beautiful women,”
noted Mercier. “One sees the royal family
seated at his artificial banquet—The crier calls from the door:
Come in, gentlemen, come see the grand banquet; come in, c’est tout
comme à Versailles!”
Come and look. The king
is seated by the emperor. He is just your size
though his clothes are finer, and now you see the long face
is less attractive than imagined, the crab-like hand curls
over plated fork and knife: you are so close, you can walk beside him,
pointing out the little similarities, the curved
and moistened lip, mild smile, fat pads
of the cheeks: all of it so close it hurts the eyes to pinpoint
just where the light is coming from, to give it shape,
distance by giving it a perspective altogether
different from yourself. List all the family members
with a history of this condition. Today,
*
on the first floor of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum
you can find celebrities and sports stars, every politician of note
though you will not see these same figures five years in a row:
there is a death even for the deathless, objects
that depend on reputation to survive,
while the bodies in the chambered basement fever
in their blood-stained gowns. They can live forever
inside our terror, as in Florence, where once they sculpted
skeletoned ex-votos out of wax, oil-stained skins
appearing to stretch even as they stayed frozen, recalling Dante’s belief
that the medium’s malleability would retain whatever power
could be impressed upon it: a face, a ring, a life force.
It was a plague year. Churches
were filled with offerings: friezes of figures
writhing with disease, infants staked
in their parents’ grips. The wax gives each body
illness’ vivid texture, yellow skin, purple skin, skin that blackens
at the joints, all the colors corruption takes
as the bodies too collapse themselves to shelves
on shelves of flesh: the family become a single,
swarming mass of misery, as each ex-voto was itself
a prayer but altogether became a panic:
Take this shape, take this
body that is better than myself, that can be
burned down, melted, added to, can accrue
new filigree and detail: this one will survive
where the other won’t. Look: the wax
shares our secrets of birth and age, but unlike us keeps renewal
stored inside the cells.
The doctors
took out their pens. They wrote down all the family
members with this condition: grandmother, grandfather,
aunt, uncle, father, mother, who
&nb
sp; was it among us who hadn’t been touched? There
the ring of candles smoking gold beside the casket.
And so we looked and looked, the mother’s
father’s face frozen in repose—
You have to look, the doctors said. And turned
*
the human into map, drew bodies that could be
chart and information traced through centuries of experiment.
How many bodies to make the one body, endow the corpse
with attributes of life?
To keep it mute, intemporal—
And so the medieval
manuscript’s écorchés playing the lute, riding horses,
striding their bloodless legs into town. Here
one skeleton tilts a skull in his palm, his own bone face tilted toward us:
Genius lives on
while all else is material scrolled atop the vellum in its little,
withering snicker: it is all material here: all
answer and answer for the doctors,
and when the manuscript wasn’t enough they scraped
the hive’s glass scales with a knife.
They pounded and shaped, they took skulls
and poured on paraffin for skin
to give the blank bone personality again.
The wax could go where the mind was stuck.
It abandoned the map.
You’re
a visual person, the doctors said. Imagine this,
and pointed to a color, a stain, an opening.
I’d needed more and so they gave me more. They made
an anatomy of me.
*
In the museum, families want to take their pictures
with the murderers. They pace
the chamber’s cavern to stare into black pockets
of shock, cave after cave:
it was Tussaud who thought to bring in the death,
though hadn’t it always been here?
Here is the killer with his handsome face.
Here is Manson, Bundy, Hitler,
the Terror’s row of heads still spiked on stakes:
you can see into the cavern
of the jaw, and what is that feeling
its way out through the neckhole, these dead
of the dead, these never-dead,
where to look disperses what we think we see
the second it enters us?
The world is all brain, and does it matter that the thing before us
is a replication?
Even the wax only holds its breath—
And here is pancreas and breast, ovary, uterus, veins
that spangle fragmentary ropes, a negative
of this view outside my window where snow
on the hills creeps downward, turns fall trees in their fog beauty
necrotic, ghost.