Saying Grace

by Beth Gutcheon

  “I know, but won’t it damage his kidneys? My husband’s a doctor,” shrilled Patty Bache. “Shouldn’t he take paragoric?”

  A brief pause before she erupted again.

  “There must be an antidote…what about milk? What about brain damage?” Finally she accepted that all she could do was give him liquids and let it pass through.

  “They said he’ll have a horrible headache.” The patient was sitting looking frightened on the bench before Emily’s desk. A half cup of rubbing alcohol. He did not feel good.

  When at last the office was quiet, Rue finished clearing her desk. Leaving, she was surprised to find Emily still in the outer office, though it was nearly five and the office closed at four-thirty.

  “What a day,” Rue said, stopping to say good night. “It must be the phase of the moon, or something. Where are your little ones?”

  “They both had play dates. I thought I’d just finish some letters I had to print.”

  “Did Mike tell you what Kim Fat Snyder told me?”

  Emily nodded.

  “Has Malone seen Lyndie, or talked to her? I worry about her.”

  “Malone does too. She’s tried to call her a couple of times, but Lyndie hasn’t called back.”

  “Maybe I’ll call the principal over at Midvale and see how she’s doing….” Rue was thinking aloud when the phone rang.

  Emily grabbed it. She listened.

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “Not at the moment,” and hung up. As she reached for her coffee mug, which she had forgotten was empty, it seemed to Rue her hand shook.

  “Em,” said Rue, “are you okay?”

  “Fine,” said Emily tightly. “It was just some salesman.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I mean, you seem…strained lately, at least to me. Is there anything wrong? That I can help you with?”

  Emily looked at her. Rue’s face was full of concern.

  “No,” said Emily finally. “I think you’re right, it’s just a star-crossed day.”

  “Thank god it’s over,” said Rue. “Good night.”

  But it was not over.

  The Coburn/Kleins were giving themselves a going-away party, and Rue and Henry were there. Bob had won a full-year sabbatical and a grant to write a paper on epidemiology. They were taking their hulking teenagers out of school and moving to Barcelona. Rachel would take an intensive course of Spanish. They would go to bullfights. They had been reading stacks of guidebooks, and they served Sol y Sombres at the cocktail hour.

  There were many toasts around the dinner table. The circle of friends that would be broken by the departure felt exhilarated and envious about this adventure. Halfway through the meal Rachel had to leave the table to get her calendar, as datebooks emerged from pockets and purses, and the friends got serious about when they would be over to visit.

  Henry looked at Rue. “Easter?” he asked.

  “I’m only off for a week. How about right after graduation?” She took out her book. “June fourteen. Leave June fifteen?”

  “Done.”

  “Now, you may be overlapping with my parents…hold on….” Rachel flipped to June. “Yes, they’ll be with us to the twentieth.”

  “The next week?”

  “Done,” said Rachel.

  “Great!” said Bob.

  “Bob, the only trouble I see with this plan is, when are you going to write your paper?” said Ted French.

  “I have that figured out. If the end of the year comes and I still haven’t done it, I’m going to write to King Juan Carlos and apply for the job of court jester. I will pledge to legally change my name to Flan De La Casa.”

  Everyone laughed.

  Henry reached for the sangría. “We’ve been thinking about running off to the Peace Corps,” he announced to the table.

  “Have you!” “How Great!” “Since when?” “When would you go?” “Where would you go?” The table responded with excitement.

  “I didn’t know you were thinking of that,” said Sylvia French to Rue.

  “I didn’t either,” Rue said, smiling.

  “I’d like to go to Africa or Thailand. Or to the Marshall Islands.”

  “How about the Virgin Islands? Or Fiji?”

  “No, I want to go someplace really horrible. Where we’ll have to eat poi, and the only books in English will be forty-year-old paperback Penguins. I was once stuck in a monsoon on the Costa Brava with nothing to read but the short stories of Bertrand Russell. I’ve never gotten over it.”

  “Are you going to teach? Or farm? Or what?”

  To Rue’s surprise, Henry said, “There’s an area in the Marshall Islands where whole families come down with a disease that looks like Alzheimer’s. When you open their brains, it looks like a meltdown in a power station. In certain parts of the brain, the wires are fused and rigid in a mass. Genetic disposition is in play, but it’s also environmental. Family members who move away from the area don’t get the disease in anything like the numbers of their relatives who stay behind.”

  “Wow,” said Rachel Klein.

  “I’ve read about that,” said Bob. “It’s something in the diet, isn’t it?”

  “They think so. There’s a foul starchy root they eat, especially in hard times, that seems implicated. I can’t remember what it is. I want to get there and see for myself before I fuse any more ganglia and forget that I wanted to go.”

  “Rue, what will you do?” asked Rachel.

  Taken off guard, she answered, “Commute.” The table roared.

  Driving home, they were quiet. Finally, Rue said, “Henry, are you serious?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how to make a decision like this without you.”

  A stunning thing to say, a stunning thing to hear. They reached home, and Henry turned off the engine. Neither moved.

  “Are you making it without me?”

  “I’m thinking about it without you.”

  More silence. They watched a doe, confused to find herself so deep in the suburbs, come to the sidewalk, stand poised with a fore-hoof curled up, a tentative pose, then dart across the street. She disappeared into underbrush, bounding toward Marvin Schenker’s garden.

  “I didn’t know you were so unhappy.”

  “I’m not unhappy. But I’d rather change my life at fifty than at sixty. I want to go while I’m young enough to take it, and while I still have something to offer.”

  She nodded in the dark. Clearly, they could stay up all night discussing the implications of this, or they could let it hang there between them. Rue thought that in many ways, it would probably come out the same. She also knew she had the Primary report cards to proof before bed.

  She opened her door, and he did the same. They left the car by the curb and walked inside.

  Rue went to the answering machine and played back the tape.

  “Anything?” Henry asked.

  “Three hang-ups.” She took off her coat and took it to the closet. Henry went to turn on the lights in the kitchen and then the living room.

  “Rue, look at this,” he said from the living room. She went in. On the stone hearth in front of the fireplace lay the captain’s clock, face-down, that had stood for sixteen years on the mantelpiece. Henry turned it over. The crystal was smashed and the hands were stopped at three minutes before nine. Rue stood over him, as they both stared.

  “Did we have an earthquake?” she asked.

  “I didn’t feel one. Is anything else out of place?” Nothing seemed to be. They stared, puzzled.

  “Well, that is truly weird,” said Rue.

  The phone rang and she went to answer it. Henry came into the kitchen to get a broom and dustpan to clean up the clock. She was standing in silence. Then she hung up.

  “The Breather?”

  She nodded. She sat down heavily at the table. The sequence, the hang-ups and the clock and the Breather, had upset her. Or the estrangement between her and Henry that upset her all the time these days, like a chronic low-grade f
ever.

  The phone rang again.

  “Let me,” said Henry, and he grabbed it. But it wasn’t the Breather; Rue could hear that a voice was speaking on the other end. Henry listened briefly.

  “Not at the moment,” he said. A question on the other end. “Please call tomorrow during business hours.” He hung up. Rue looked at him, questioning.

  “Why don’t I ever get the Breather? I want to tell him I’ll stuff the phone down his neck.”

  “Who did you get?”

  “Somebody wanting to sell bonds.”

  “It’s awfully late isn’t it?”

  “Ten of ten.”

  Rue thought that was awfully late. The salesmen usually called at dinnertime.

  “I’m surprised you told him he could call back.”

  Henry always said, Not interested, sorry, and hung up. She thought.

  “He won me over by not asking, ‘How are you this evening.’”

  He got himself a beer out of the refrigerator. He went to the closet for the broom and dustpan.

  “I’ll clean up the glass,” he said.

  “Thank you, honey.”

  He was in the living room with the broken clock in his hand when the phone rang again. He put the clock on the mantle. Rue had answered the phone; it had rung only once. He was sweeping shards of crystal from the hearth and the hardwood floor beyond, when he heard Rue scream.

  Georgia had died a few minutes before midnight. She had been hit from behind by a drunk driver, who had dragged the body almost a mile without knowing it. Jonah had gotten part of the license number.

  Jonah and Georgia were hitchhiking home from a gig in New Paltz, New York.

  “Why the hell were they wearing black?” Henry asked in anguish. (This was later.) “Why the hell were they hitchhiking?”

  He asked that over and over again, as if getting a simple answer to that one question would stop his pain.

  “Why the hell were they hitchhiking? If they were stranded, I would have sent them money….”

  It was hearing him say that that made Rue feel she would lose her mind from grief.

  All she had to do was call, and say Daddy, we don’t have any money, Daddy we can’t get home. And he would have sent them money. He would have. She knew it was true. All Georgia had to do was call. All she had to do was say Daddy. He would have told them to go to a motel. He would have wired them money. He would have gone to get her himself.

  All she had to do was call.

  Everything was over. Everything they had hoped for her, separately and together. Every joy she had felt, every smile, from the day they brought her home from the hospital, was for nothing. Every grade she had earned, every bite she had eaten, it was all a tease and a shame and a waste. She was gone. It was gone.

  They took it differently. Henry raged and drank and broke things. It was very bad that she had died estranged from him. Rue sat still and wept, with her arms hugged close to her body. The second day, when the kitchen table was covered with food that people had brought, and the people who came to distract and comfort them were eating it, Henry came downstairs and marched to Rue, as if there were no one else in the house, and said, “I want all her things out of here. Everything that was hers. Clothes. Books. Everything. Get it all out of here.” Then he took a bottle of scotch and went upstairs.

  Sylvia French and Emily brought boxes. They sat in Georgia’s room. For hours they worked emptying closets, folding clothes, packing them. Rue watched them. Sometimes she would see something that would make her cry out. A blue-jean jacket Georgia wore in fourth grade, with buttons pinned to it. Rue thought it was long gone. She held it in her lap and cried. After a while Sylvia took it from her and packed it. Then she’d stop them and reach out for something else. There was a shirt frayed at the collar that had been Henry’s. Georgia had worn it as a nightshirt. She held it for a while, then let them take it.

  Cleaning out the desk was much worse. Georgia’s handwriting. Georgia’s handwriting at fourteen, at twelve, at five. There were pictures made in kindergarten. There was a stash of notes passed from Georgia to Rochelle to Sasha when they were in eighth grade. What secrets were there, what jokes? What didn’t she know of her daughter’s secret life?

  What life? Who cared? What was the point of knowing your child’s secrets, except to advise, to protect? Rue sobbed till the muscles in her sides ached.

  When all the clothes and notebooks and papers and snapshots and cartoons and ribbons and pins were put away, Emily and Sylvia asked again.

  Get rid of them, Rue said. Burn them, send them to the dump, give them to Goodwill. All right, they said. And the boxes disappeared.

  And when a day later, she couldn’t stop crying, because she needed to hold her child and there was nothing of her left, they brought the boxes back.

  The police were sorry they hadn’t called earlier. Georgia’s wallet had been lost when she was dragged, and for an hour, Jonah couldn’t remember where they lived. Had she suffered? They didn’t know exactly what had killed her, or how fast. An autopsy would show. But had she suffered? Had she died in terror?

  Yes, the police guessed, since Henry insisted. They would surmise she had.

  No need for an autopsy. They certainly didn’t want to see her. Her ashes would be sent home, in a box marked Hum Rem, for human remains. The funeral home suggested Federal Express.

  Henry wanted the drunk driver. He wanted to bash the driver’s head against a pavement till it shattered like an egg, to scoop the brains out and grind his shoes in them. He wanted to crush the driver the way you kill the snail you find on the green leaf-blade of a daffodil. Crunch of shell, slime smear of body. The police hadn’t found him yet. They had a partial tag; they were trying.

  Why had they been hitchhiking? Henry asked the police, during that first long night. The police didn’t know. The boy, Jonah, had $200 in cash in his pocket. They’d been paid for the gig. If they found Georgia’s wallet, they would send it. They’d send somebody out to look when it was light.

  How did they know what time it was when she was struck? They didn’t, exactly. The boy, Jonah, running after the car in the dark, screaming, had heard a church bell ring before he got to the body.

  Yes, she was dead at that time. Definitively.

  The boy wanted to know if he could keep Georgia’s guitar.

  Their priest, a small round-faced man named Tom Ware, came to bring them comfort and to plan the funeral. This was the last week in February. Rue and Henry thanked him for coming and gave him some sherry. He saw that they looked unearthly pale, as if neither had slept in weeks. He noticed too that they sat on opposite sides of the living room. That they addressed him, but not each other. That they avoided eye contact. Mourning sometimes had that effect. Of shutting people off from each other, each in his own private oubliette full of grief. It was one of its horrors.

  “The Twenty-third Psalm,” said Henry. “And ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past,’” and he bit his lip. In tears again. “Sufficient Is Thine Arm Alone, and Our Defense Is Sure,” they had sung side by side, he in his strong bass, Georgia with her shimmering, confident alto. Sufficient for what? Defense of whom?

  Tom brought out his prayer book. “You’ll be wanting the Funeral Rite? Or would you like to compose something? It may be that Georgia’s friends would like to help plan a remembrance.”

  “No funeral,” said Rue. “She said she wouldn’t want it.”

  Both men turned to look at her.

  “Don’t you remember?” She turned to Henry. “She said it over and over. She didn’t believe in organized religion.”

  “But she came to church with you,” said Father Tom.

  “That was because she loved us. And to sing. She was clear about this. We listened to her opinion. We understood it. We can’t just ignore her.”

  “But Rue,” said Tom Ware, looking uncomfortable in his collar. “Funerals are for the living. It will be a comfort to you, and to Henry….” Henry was staring at her.
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br />   “I know,” she said, starting to cry. “It would be a great comfort. But it wasn’t my life, and it isn’t my death, it’s hers. She didn’t want it. We can’t break faith with her just because she’s dead.”

  The minister looked at Henry. He was looking steadily at Rue, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  Finally he said to her, “She’s gone, Rue.”

  She looked back at him, or toward him. She looked as if she wasn’t seeing anything. Finally, she shrugged, and whispered, “A conscience is worth a thousand witnesses.”

  Sylvia French and Rachel Klein took turns answering the phone, since Rue couldn’t and Henry wouldn’t. Georgia’s friends, and Henry’s, and Rue’s, called incessantly to know when and where the service would be. Over and over, Sylvia or Rachel would explain.

  In twos and threes, Georgia’s classmates would arrive at the door, dressed as if for church or graduation. They had never paid a sympathy call before. They would be shown into the den where Henry and Rue sat, writing answers to stacks of notes and letters of condolence. Henry would stare at them, as if trying to forgive them for being alive. Sometimes they asked for information about the death; sometimes they said how sorry they were. Sometimes they said how much they would miss her and that they would never, ever forget her, which Henry and Rue knew was a lie.

  She’ll fade from your lives and you won’t even notice it, Rue thought. Whereas I pray for nothing except a moment when I forget her, and I don’t get one, not one moment of oblivion.

  “Did you hear about the clock?” Henry would suddenly ask, and the young people would shake their heads, no. Obsessively he would repeat this queer mystery, as if retelling it would reveal its meaning. The young people, who had come wanting to comfort, or be comforted, found that neither of these things could be done and found themselves trapped in a room where they understood how terrible that was.

  “Thank you for coming,” Rue would say, rising, to tell them that this was how they got out of it. They would leap to their feet and be gone. While they were there Rue felt she wanted only for them to go, and when they were gone, things seemed worse than before.