Speaking with Strangers

by Mary Cantwell

  St. Vincent’s is a Catholic hospital, and someone had left a piece of a Palm Sunday palm draped over the crucifix on the wall of my room. Seeing it, I released myself . . . to God or fate, I guess. They are the only words I have to describe that letting go of my self. Snow White was with me and so was that crucifix and I didn’t need anything else, not even the priest who arrived a few minutes later. But I needed the nurse’s aide—plump and black and glossy as a plum in her pink uniform—who threw herself across me while a doctor did a spinal tap. Without her sweet, solid flesh to pin me into place, I might have moved, and the needle, of which I was afraid, might have wandered. “Thank you, God,” I breathed, thinking her an angel.

  As the days passed and I realized that I must be very sick, I called a friend and said she’d better tell B. Everything and everyone else fell away. Always a conscientious housewife, I finally had my house in order. The bills were paid, my will was made, and my children were strong and straight. As for the balding man, I knew that I would take on more reality dead than fleshed. He had buried a lot of women, or so he claimed, and he had loved them all, more in death than in life. I would become one of his gallery of dearly beloveds. Besides, I would not really die, because every day those two mock-ups of myself—Rose Red stiff-backed and determinedly tearless, Snow White anxious to get on with her constant circling of the Village and its lures but there nonetheless—were standing on either side of my bed, not me, but me, and living. At last I had a free pass to the Father, by whom I really meant Papa, and I was going with a collection of venial sins but no mortal ones. My duty was done, and the last thing I would see with earth’s eyes was my daughters, my descendants, growing like trees.

  Rocky Mountain fever, or a version thereof (no one was ever really sure), was diagnosed. I was dosed with Tetracycline, and my world expanded to include the morning papers being pulled past my room on a little red wagon and the old woman in the next bed who, half-dead from emphysema, hid cigarettes in her Kleenex box and crept from the room, when the nurses weren’t looking, to smoke on the fire escape. Our room was opposite the back door to the kitchen, and when at night I saw a few ambulatory patients lined up for leftovers, I told a nurse I was starving, and she sneaked me a slice of chocolate cake and, in lieu of a fork, a tongue depressor. A neighbor came over with my typewriter; a friend brought pounds of cherries into which my hand dipped with metronomic regularity.

  Still, I missed those days in which I had floated, only my nose poking from the water, and those nights of thermometer-interrupted sleep. I missed cotton blankets that absorbed sweat and rubber gloves filled with ice cubes and laid along my groin while nurses whispered. One seldom gets to die before the final death, to have the final view and live to look again, to see what is extraneous and what is not. In the end I saw my children, and nothing else. Now it is hard to remember that, just as now it is hard to reconstruct pain or love, time being a kind of universal solvent, but I want to remember. Because I read The Waste Land during my first year in college, it has sunk into my skeleton, and whenever I think of “these fragments I have shored against my rums,” I think of what to me will always be “my girls.”

  One of my girls, though, was leaving home again, not for the boarding school in the Berkshires this time but for a place on Eighth Street. From her former classmates, she had acquired the skills of a jailhouse lawyer and was now, she told me, a “self-emancipated minor.” It was on a late November afternoon she left, carrying shopping bags crammed with clothes and the dented pots and pans she’d saved from trashcans for a kitchen of her own. Now there would be no mother to say, “Where have you been?” and “Where are you going?” and no sister, busy with her homework, begging her to turn down Janis Joplin. Now there would be another school, this one, too, stocked with misfits but not, thank God, with juvenile delinquents, and other friends whom probably I would never see or, if I did, learn to like.

  The shopping bags were draped over her left arm. Tucked under her right was one of the Hallowe’en pumpkins I had carved for her and her sister. “You’re still a child,” I longed to say when I saw it. But she wouldn’t have believed me, nor paused for a second in her dogged walk toward an adulthood she construed as freedom from all adults.

  Whenever we parted the balding man would say, “Mah Mary, let me lay this on you. If we ever could marry, and I’m not sayin’ we ever could, would you marry me?” I always said yes. “I’d come to you in my shift,” I would say, in love with the sentence, which I had read in a book or heard in a movie, and safe in saying it because I knew I would never be put to the test.

  One morning, in bed with his arm around me, he said, “Oh, mah Mary, we’re never going to be able to get married.”

  “I know that, but we have to believe we can.”

  “Think you could manage in an academic community?”

  “Of course.”

  “Bet you’re a good hostess.”

  “Yup.”

  “Can you run an adding machine? Mah wife can. You ought to see her fingers fly. I’m practically a conglomerate, y’know.”

  “No,” I said, “but I can hire someone who can.”

  I was lying. I could run an adding machine. But there were limits beyond which I was not willing to take this conversation, and a possible career as an accountant was one of those limits.

  He could be as blunt as a hammer, and as destructive. “The only person I’d marry if I didn’t marry you would be some idealistic twenty-one-year-old I could train and teach and . . .” My eyes reddened, and the balding man added quickly, “Now, mah Mary, don’t get upset about a rival you haven’t even got.”

  I never thought of his wife as a rival. I never, away from him, fantasized a possible marriage. What he gave me, or, rather, what I took from him, was our shared passion for language, which may not seem like much compared to a marriage and children and the way B had looked at me on our wedding night. But it was all I wanted, especially since it came from someone whose work I loved. Had he been a lesser writer, he would have been a lesser lover. No, I am lying. He would not have been my lover at all. I could overlook a lot of imperfections, but not a rotten prose style.

  Sometimes I thanked Jesus for the balding man, believing that he represented absolution. If earning that absolution meant enduring indignities, it was the price I had to pay for having heaped indignities on B—for not having been a good wife—and on my children—for my failure to make a home in which their father could be happy. Waiting, frightened, in a hotel room for a house detective to burst through the door and haul me away for prostitution, knowing that every lie I told my daughters about where I’d spent the night meant a black mark on the white paper that was my immortal soul, knowing the mark was even blacker when, by my silence, I conspired in the balding man’s bigotry: these constituted my punishment.

  Once, we fought, and when I accused him of lying to me, he said, “Yes, I lied. But what has truth to do with me? I’m an artist. I make the truth,” and I, impatient with so artsy - fartsy a distinction, had gone home. As I walked in the door, the phone was ringing. It was he, and he was crying. “Mah Mary,” he said, “we mustn’t lose this.”

  I was crying, too. We’d come too close to severing the cord that connected us. Occasionally the cord had had to stretch five thousand miles or six months, but it never broke. I knew other men. One proposed and a second hinted, but I was already married, to him, and I would have been happy to stay married to him for the rest of my life. I suspect, too, he might have been happy to stay my make-believe husband for the rest of his. But reality got in the way.

  Early one autumn morning he phoned and said his wife was dying. Would I marry him? At first I was stunned. I had never wished her dead. I had never wished anyone dead except, when the night’s zero hour and mine coincided, myself. Then I remembered another morning, several years ago, when he, fond of drama and of playing wolf, had called to say that his wife was very possibly breathing her last. That time I had cried for hours, thinking myself—wi
th the guilt-ridden’s arrogant belief in her power—partly to blame. So this time, wary of his playacting and the pleasure he took in turning circumstance into crisis, I said something vague about how he should think only of her and not of any future we might have together, because I had always been with him and I always would be. That afternoon I told a friend he’d probably been on the phone all day proposing to everyone in his address book.

  In a week she was indeed dead. A week after the funeral he called me. Two days later he came to New York.

  A few nights before he arrived I was standing at the bedroom window looking out at the street, which was wet and empty. A woman appeared, walking toward the docks, drunk and waving an umbrella at nothing. There was a time when I would have felt sorry for her, poor soul with no roof over her head. This time I thought, “Maybe she likes it outside, and yelling.” Maybe I did, too.

  True, I had a roof over my head. I had raised it myself, and there is no pride like the pride that comes from being able to build a house for oneself. But for six years I had lived outside the world where the animals went into the ark two by two. It was a world I had lived in for a long time and since I was very young, and although I was ambivalent about moving back m, not marrying the balding man would have meant losing him. Or, to be more precise, losing the only strong connection I had ever made to any man besides my father and B.

  We were to meet at the delicatessen where we always had breakfast. He was late, so I stood outside in the morning cold, my eyes fixed on Sixth Avenue and the corner around which he would appear. A woman I worked with came by, walking her dog, and asked what on earth I was doing fifty blocks from home at nine in the morning.

  “I’m having breakfast with an old friend,” I told her. “If you see my secretary, tell her I’ll be in a little late.” I spoke calmly, but my body was urging her to walk on so that I could be alone when I saw him. The dog pulled on its leash, she waved a casual goodbye, and moved toward Fifth Avenue just as he rounded the corner of Sixth, wearing his big hat, his hands stuck in the pockets of his bulky sheepskin jacket. I ran to him, slid my arms inside the jacket and around his waist, and laid my head on his chest for a moment. We walked slowly, my right arm still around his waist, to the delicatessen.

  I carried my coffee to a table, and we sat facing each other.

  “Thank you for that lovely letter, mah Mary,” he said of my condolence note. “Of course I know you only wrote it because you want to marry me.”

  The floor opened and the walls slid away and I was dizzy. There was nothing to hold on to but that cup, so I wrapped both hands about it and stared. His eyes were those of a breeder at a horse auction.

  “Tell me about your daughter. I’ve got to know everything about her if you’re going to be mah wife.”

  I told him about Snow White, but not everything about Snow White. My child was entitled to her grief, her terror, and, above all, her privacy. “But she’s got a good pyschiatrist, whom she likes,” I finished, “and she’s coming out of it.”

  “Mah Mary,” he said, “there’s somethin’ awful wrong here. A child who hates her mother. And I just don’t think I can take on your financial responsibilities.”

  I was enraged. How dare he imply that I couldn’t provide for my daughter, or that her father, that “Jew,” would not?

  “If you don’t want to marry me, don’t,” I said. “But don’t you dare use my children as an excuse.”

  He asked a few more questions. He did everything but check my wind.

  “What is this?” I asked. “A job interview?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “A job interview.”

  He walked me to the corner and I got in a cab. A glass bell had dropped, the bell that drops whenever air might crumble me, and I saw Fifth Avenue, and later my desk, my secretary, the magazine’s “staffers” walking past my door, from the inside looking out. I didn’t cry and I didn’t faint. I was as sealed in, and as dead, as the stuffed canary under its dome on the library mantel. That night I went with an old friend to a party for the balding man. Together we watched the performance: the smiles, the hugs, the swelling of the corpse. “Are you sure you want that, Mary?” my friend asked as he took me home. He didn’t say “him.” “Him” had disappeared.

  I had tried to keep my father from dying; I had tried to keep my husband from leaving; I was equally incapable of letting the balding man go. We had dinner the next evening. When he cried about his wife and about watering the plants himself, I cried, too, because I couldn’t bear the image of him with a little brass watering can in his hand.

  Sometimes, though, his martinis and the novelty of his new role dried his tears, and then he was as giddy as Pandora facing the box. “You wouldn’t believe the number of women willin’ to console the grievin’ widower. You know——?” (He named a well-known novelist, someone who, because I was still too naive to realize that a widower’s phone starts ringing about ten minutes after his wife’s interment, I thought beyond pursuing the bereaved.) “She called last week.”

  Then he spoke again of his wife, swinging as ever between love and anger, and I cried some more, for both of them. We soaked the restaurant’s pink napkins with our tears, and when my handkerchief, which we’d been sharing, was soggy, we blew our noses on them. I don’t know if anyone noticed us. My eyes were on him.

  We went to his room. We were calmer now, and we started talking about a “decent interval” and an Irish writer we knew. He asked if I would like to go to Ireland again “with your husband.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “We’ll go to the Dingle Peninsula. Have you ever been there? We’ll . . .”

  I was sitting in a club chair, my hands open on my lap, my stocking feet crossed on the bed, feeling the familiar ease fall over me. He brought out his guitar. “Let’s make up a blues,” he said.

  “She’s a New York woman,” he sang, “and she’s got big brown eyes. She’s a New York woman . . .”

  “And she’s tryin’ me on for size.”

  He laughed and hugged me. “Mah Mary. We are fated to be man and wife.”

  He wanted me to spend the night.

  “But I can’t. I would have called a sitter to come and stay overnight, but you said you were leaving terribly early in the morning, so I didn’t think . . .” I didn’t add that, with his wife a few weeks dead, I thought he’d want to give her her space in his bed just a little longer.

  “Your daughter is old enough to stay alone.”

  “No, she isn’t,” I said, thinking of New York and open windows and a figure sliding noiselessly under the sash. “She’d get scared.”

  “Mary, how can I marry a woman who can’t manage her time?”

  “That’s not fair. I manage my time very well. I . . . come on. You get into bed and I’ll read you to sleep.”

  He undressed and lay down, curled on his side. I pulled a sheet over him and sat in the crook of his body and read sections of one of his own books.

  “Young man who wrote that’s got a pretty big future,” he said.

  “He sure has,” I said.

  “Man who wrote that hasn’t done half of what he’s goin’ to do.”

  “I know. Remember that time at Lincoln Center when that boy waited in the dark to tell you how much he admired you, and I said, ‘Doesn’t that make up for everything?’ and you said ‘No.’”

  “I was lyin’, mah Mary. It makes up for a lot.”

  We were silent for a moment, and I pulled myself higher on the headboard.

  “Y’know. I was a good-lookin’ boy in my youth.”

  “I know that, too. I can still see him.”

  “I keep thinkin’, mah Mary”—and he rolled over on his back—“that if I get back into trainin’, I could be an Olympic runner even now.”

  “I’m sure you could.”

  I wasn’t humoring him. I had always believed he could do anything but love anyone very much.

  “Mah Mary, thank you. You can’t imagine what th
ese last six weeks have been like. You’ve restored me.”

  He was sleepy now, so I got up and turned off the light.

  “Mah Mary,” he said in the dark, “I want you to make me a statement. Do you love me?”

  “I love you very much.”

  “Would it hurt you a lot if we didn’t marry?”

  “Yes,” I said, “it would hurt me a lot.”

  Four weeks later he married a student. “She restored me,” he told the press.

  I was saving the morning paper to read with breakfast, so I didn’t know until someone called and read the little news item aloud. Speechless, I hung up the phone, left the kitchen, went into the bathroom, and turned on the shower. I was so cold my bones felt iced, so I stood for a long time in the stream of hot water, but they didn’t melt.

  I left the house and walked, I always try to walk off sadness, heading crosstown to a friend on Fifth Avenue. “Age,” she said, “his age.”

  Punctilious as ever, I walked to a Christopher Street hairdresser’s to keep my appointment. After my shampoo, while I was waiting for the haircut, I went to the pay phone on the wall and called the friend who had asked me if I was sure I wanted “that.”

  “Leo,” I said, starting to cry, “he blew it.”

  “You had too much baggage,” he said.