The Monk Upstairs

by Tim Farrington

  Those moments of rapturous union came and went, Mike had said, by God’s grace, and to the daily self they seemed in retrospect unreal, if recalled at all; but the arrows, by God’s grace, stayed. It was the arrows, he said, that pain in the heart, that wound to the daily self, that helped you remember what your soul had always known.

  Rebecca said now, thinking of those arrows, “It’s weird, but I really didn’t see this Phoebe stuff coming. Maybe I’m a Pollyanna after all, but once we had made it through the hospital time and gotten her home, I had pictured a sunset decade of mild decline, cooking soups and gardening together, doing watercolors by lakes with ducks, talking about profound things and debriefing her on that amazing life of hers. Watching Mary Martha grow up. And then she could die quietly in her bed, like a candle going out, with me holding her hand.”

  “It may happen yet,” Mike said.

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “Maybe I’m a bigger Pollyanna than you.” He hesitated, then conceded, “She does seem to believe herself that she’s on a faster track out.”

  “Do you think she’s…”

  Mike waited, then prompted gently, “Suicidal?”

  Rebecca began, quietly, to cry. The word struck her as obscene, in conjunction with her mother. But it was what she had been asking.

  Mike drew her closer. “I don’t think she is, in a strict sense,” he said, after a moment. “But I think she expected to die on that beach today.”

  They were silent for a time. The candle flickered in its cup at the touch of a draft, then settled again.

  “She said that she was waiting for your father,” Mike said.

  “Oh, God. Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “She really believes he’s alive? And coming for her?”

  “He has a boat,” Mike said.

  Rebecca’s heart ached. Her father’s boat had been one of the joys of her parents’ life, and of her own childhood; so many of her sweetest memories were of the family out on the water. If she were Phoebe, and losing it, she would want that boat to come for her too. And she realized that she could forgive Mike for egging her mother on, after all. She was just glad that Phoebe had someone she could talk to, on that cold beach, waiting for her dead husband to take her to heaven, or New Jersey.

  She said, “When I’m on my way out, will you come in a boat for me?”

  “Sure,” Mike said. “I may have to steal one, though.”

  They lay quietly together for a time, and then Rebecca said, “This is not the drama that I wanted for us, Mike. When we married. I thought maybe we’d have to have a bunch of theatrical fights about God, or the practicality of the New Testament in an Old Testament world, or something like that. Instead, we’re moving toward having to change my mother’s diapers.”

  “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” he said. “Love is still just love.”

  It was true enough, she thought, to go to sleep on. She eased back and leaned over to blow the candle out, then settled back into the warmth of his arms.

  “I love you,” she said. “I love you. I love you.”

  “I love love you you,” he said.

  It was a Mary Martha-ism, and a touch of their private silliness, a quiet way of saying that life went on and tomorrow was another day. Rebecca smiled into her husband’s chest, breathing in the comfort of him, and closed her eyes. The good-night, at this point in their marriage, was implied.

  Chapter Ten

  It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed;

  his compassions fail not.

  They are new every morning: great is Thy faithfulness.

  LAMENTATIONS 3:22–23

  As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O Lord.

  The man’s name was Tony, though no one had called him that for years. His street name had been Sly, and it had fit his manner. But his slyness had run its course now, his hustling had come to nothing, and he wanted, fiercely and abruptly, to be called by his given name. It was the first sign of understanding what was happening to him that Mike had seen in the two weeks he had known the man. The rest had been attitude, posture, and existential bluster.

  It was one of the hard ones. Tony’s lungs were almost gone, and what was left of them could not pump strongly enough to fight the fluid accumulating in them, to surface from the slow drowning that made every breath a gurgling struggle. But the physical agony was not the worst of it. He was in and out of consciousness, and when he was awake his terror was like an electric wire with its insulation shredded, a visceral current arcing across the space between the two men so that Mike felt every jolt and shock of it in his own nerves.

  Dougherty had called Mike in the night before, just after midnight; Tony had been asking for him. It had been clear to all of them then that Tony was moving into his endgame. But sixteen hours later the man fought on. Every pant was its own painful adventure, a new labor sixteen times a minute. He would stop breathing sometimes now, for fifteen, twenty, thirty unnerving seconds, and Mike would be sure he was gone. But then with a shudder Tony’s chest would heave back into action, a violent, liquid gasp that seemed even more painful after the quiet of the pause, and he would resume the gurgling, metronomic panting.

  My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before Thee?

  The doctor had already been in and had just shaken his head quietly at Mike and slipped away. Tony had a clicker in his hand, a single button to activate the morphine pump, but he had refused to use it. Like embracing his given name, it was a belated, furious, and somewhat incomprehensible insistence: a couple clicks, they all knew, and he was gone. This fight could lead nowhere but defeat; the pain and terror gained him nothing but a few more minutes or hours of more terror and pain. But apparently Tony had decided that it was here that he would make his stand.

  The floor nurse, Anita, had made sure the IV morphine bag was hung and working at the start of her shift and had since avoided the room, as if Tony’s palpable agony were communicable. She was a good nurse too: Mike had seen her in action half a dozen times already, moving straight into the face of suffering, always doing what she could. But this was a bad one, there was nothing to do but ride it down, and Anita was keeping herself busy elsewhere with people she could still do something for.

  Mike himself had long since given up trying to find the meaning. Why he was here and what it meant, what Tony needed and what he or anyone could give this soul in the hour of need, what inscrutable Love asked of any of them here, it had all been used up long since. Mike wasn’t even sure Tony knew he was there anymore; the dying man had met his eyes only once in the last hour, pointing to his dry tongue, which Mike had wetted with a glycerin swab dipped in water, trying not to flinch from Tony’s breath, which smelled like wind from an opened grave.

  Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of Thy waterspouts; all Thy waves and billows have gone over me.

  Tony’s free left hand fluttered, some kind of request. Mike swabbed his tongue again, but that wasn’t it, and after a moment’s hesitation Mike did the only other thing he could see to do, which was take the man’s hand in his. It appeared that was what Tony had wanted; his grip tightened on Mike’s hand instantly, with surprising strength.

  They sat like that, with the shallow ragged panting keeping the only time. Tony’s eyes were closed now, as if breathing itself required all his concentration.

  And then, abruptly, his breathing stopped again, though his grip stayed steady. Mike sat still in the room’s sudden stillness and prayed silently, knowing it took him about fifteen seconds to say an internal Hail Mary. He was well into his third prayer when Tony’s body shuddered through its entire length and his claw grip on Mike’s hand clenched to the point of pain, and still no breath came, just his mouth gaping and groping as if for a word; and then his chest lifted as if a band had snapped and his breath came as a gasp, and he was panting again.

  Tony’s eyes opened an
d his gaze found Mike’s at once, in clear focus.

  “Surprised…” he said, between breaths.

  “Surprised?”

  “Every time…I in-hale.”

  “So am I, to tell you the truth,” Mike said.

  “The truth,” said Tony, who had spent so much of his life lying. He smiled. “I love…the truth.”

  His eyes closed again and he resumed his steady panting, somehow without urgency now; and ten minutes later, when the next apnea came, he was still smiling, and his hand in Mike’s turned gentle.

  Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.

  You never knew, Mike thought, saying his Hail Marys silently; and then, after the fifth one, aloud, turning the rosary beads in his own free hand. Even going in, you never knew. And he knew less with every death.

  Rebecca was astonished at how well she remembered her father’s boat, once she began painting it. She had begun with only the vaguest image, but she found that it didn’t matter so much what had stayed in her mind’s eye. As a girl, she had spent so many winter weekends in the boathouse with her father, scraping barnacles and repainting the hull, that her hands could still feel the shape of the bow, the dip to the shallow keel, the long slide along the graceful flanks to the stern. It had been years before she realized that the off-season maintenance work was supposed to be tedious. All she had known then was how wonderful it was to be with her father in the chilly boathouse, with a thermos of coffee for him and a thermos of hot chocolate for her. He would sing sailing songs in a funny accent; Rebecca could still recall most of the words to “Way-Hey and Up She Rises.” John Martin had actually had a hornpipe, and sometimes the two of them would dance absurd jigs on the cold concrete floor.

  She had her easel set up in the dining room, or her office, or whatever it really was these days. She hadn’t done any productive work for actual pay in weeks, so maybe it was just a studio now. Phoebe sat across from her in the big easy chair they had moved into the room, laboring in her slow and dreamy way over the eternal needlepoint, pausing over every stitch as if reenvisioning the entire pattern anew. Mary Martha was sprawled contentedly on the floor at Phoebe’s feet, working on a drawing of her own.

  It was a gorgeous scene, Rebecca thought, the three of them, like something out of Little Women or a domestic tableau by Vermeer, lit with a light like the gleam off pearls.

  “What is that you’re drawing, Mary Martha?” she asked.

  “I’m copying Gran-Gran’s needlepoint.”

  “Ah.” Rebecca could usually recognize her daughter’s subjects at once; Mary Martha was really quite good, and getting better all the time. For months now she’d been drawing unnervingly vivid pictures of the stations of the cross for her first communion class; their refrigerator, still in the living room, was covered with scene after scene of misery and holy gore. But this picture was just a bunch of dots and colored dashes; it looked like something by Klee, in a particularly austere mood. Rebecca hesitated, looking for something supportive to say but not sure exactly what. Maybe her daughter was going abstract on her. Or maybe she was just feeling goofy.

  Phoebe had craned her neck to peer at her granddaughter’s work too.

  “Perfect,” she said, and Mary Martha beamed and went back to work.

  Rebecca gave her mother a baffled glance, suspecting that Phoebe was cheating somehow. Or maybe it was just that after your brain had deteriorated a certain amount, everything looked perfect. Phoebe met her eyes with a smile that said she knew exactly what Rebecca was thinking, then held up her needlepoint to show Rebecca the back of it. It was the pattern of stitches on the underside that Mary Martha was drawing.

  Rebecca didn’t know whether to be more impressed with Mary Martha for doing that or with her mother for knowing it was happening. In any case, it was humbling. It made her wonder what else she was missing.

  The phone rang just then, and they all just looked at it. They’d gotten out of the habit of answering the phone recently, to a comical extent. It had started with Mike, who never touched a ringing telephone unless he was pretty sure someone was literally dying. Phoebe had made a point of answering phones for a while after her first stroke, more out of noblesse oblige than anything else, but she had eventually decided they weren’t worth the trouble. Mary Martha had stepped into the breach for a while and answered every call, but that had lost its novelty long since and now she tended to just go on with her business.

  Rebecca had always answered the phone slavishly, as a mother and a daughter and a wife and a woman trying to get a business off the ground. But she had no jobs in progress right now, and hadn’t for weeks, and so whenever she knew where Mary Martha, Mike, and Phoebe were, she too just let it ring.

  The phone rang again, and then the answering machine kicked in. It was Jeff Burgess, something about a job. Rebecca hesitated for a long moment, then picked up.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “You need a secretary, woman,” Jeff said. “You’re harder to get hold of lately than a greased pig.”

  “Well, you know how it is. One thing after another.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve got a couple more things for you, if you want ’em.”

  “Graphics jobs?”

  “Don’t sound so thrilled,” Jeff said dryly.

  “Sorry. Big or small?”

  “Medium.”

  Which meant enormous, of course. Rebecca looked at her mother and her daughter, both of them absorbed in their work. Mary Martha with her tongue out in concentration looked just like Rory, which was still touching somehow after all these years. Phoebe looked beautiful, serene, and oddly poised, like an autumn leaf leaking its last bit of color before it fell. It was exactly how Rebecca had pictured her life at its best, at various hopeful times; and, she knew, if her mother hadn’t been hell-bent on dying, it was probably something that would never have happened at all, something that would have been lost in the daily scramble of things you just did and did and did because they were so immediate and obvious and apparently pressing, until something finally happened to make you realize they hadn’t mattered at all and that you’d wasted all that precious time. Getting and spending: it was amazing, Rebecca thought, what it took to bring that heedless process to a halt. She could only be grateful, at this moment, that something had. They’d pay the mortgage somehow.

  She said, “Thanks, Jeff, but I think I’m going to have to pass on these.”

  “What? You’ve got somebody else subbing you stuff? You’re really that overloaded?”

  “No, not really. I’m just in, uh, a lull, of sorts. A contemplative phase.”

  “Use it or lose it, Bec,” Jeff said, a bit severely.

  “Ain’t it the truth,” Rebecca said.

  She hung up the phone and got back to her painting. She was having a wonderful time with the blues. As a teenager, she had adored the work of Caspar David Friedrich, the sweeping romance of his sacred-feeling landscapes, and this felt a bit like that, the small boat dwarfed by an immensity of holy sea and sky.

  “Is that Grandpa driving the boat?” Mary Martha asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you going to put Gran-Gran on it too?”

  Rebecca hesitated, thinking, Honey, there is no way I’m letting your grandmother onto this boat. She glanced across at Phoebe and saw at once that her mother understood her perfectly. It was almost funny. Phoebe hardly ever talked anymore, and often when she did the sentences petered out for lack of the next word, or she simply didn’t make enough sense to keep a conversation going with anyone but Mike, who didn’t necessarily require sense, somehow. But as Phoebe had spoken less and less, Rebecca had come to realize how often the mother she missed so much was still there. She had been so wigged out by Phoebe’s dementia that she hadn’t been able to see past it. But a look like this was the best of their relationship, had always been the best: the shared understan
ding, the mutual acknowledgment of a tricky truth, and the dry humor. Her mother got her as few people did, as no one ever really had but Mike, and loved her anyway.

  Rebecca said, “Sometimes Grandpa went out by himself.”

  “Didn’t he get lonely?”

  Rebecca looked at her mother again, a frank appeal for help. And Phoebe said obligingly, in one of those bursts of sweet lucidity that made Rebecca suspect her mother might live for years still, like an increasingly feeble and enigmatic sphinx, “No, sweetie, your grandfather always felt like he was with God, on the boat.”

  The much-deferred dinner at the Schofields’ finally caught up with them that Friday night: it was Bonnie’s fortieth birthday, the big 4–0, and more or less unmissable. Rebecca began to have inklings of disaster when Bonnie called three times during the day with excited little details, confidings, and last-minute tasks and requests; she was so up for the event that it would have been nerve-racking even for a social optimist, which Rebecca was not. She tried to call Mike at work, to warn him that the thing was acquiring an outsized momentum, but his cell phone was turned off, which meant that whoever had been dying the night before was still dying. She felt incredibly petty, but she could not help but hope that whoever it was, God bless him and requiescat in pacem, he moved on to his eternal rest in time for Mike to get home and get a shower and some downtime before the party.

  When Mike did finally get home, just after six, he looked as exhausted as Rebecca had ever seen him, and her sense of impending calamity sharpened. He gave her a kiss, not a hello-honey-I’m-home peck but a conspicuously gentle, prolonged, and searching kiss, like a man coming home from time at sea. Rebecca didn’t have the heart to tell him before he got his land legs back that he had more work to do that evening, and in any case Mary Martha ran in just then as she always did when Mike got home and he immediately put on a good face for her. He lifted her up onto his lap, and the two of them bumped and nuzzled and talked about her day for about ten minutes with every appearance of sweet normality. If anything, Mike was exceptionally tender with her; but when Mary Martha went back up to her room, he grabbed a beer at once and, with a rueful tilt of his head inviting Rebecca to follow, went straight out to the back porch. Not good, she knew: he almost never smoked when Mary Martha was around and awake. She poured herself a glass of wine and went out after him.