Goodbye,
Anne
An Eye for an Eye
James
I LEAVE HOME FOR WORK while the women are both still in bed. I leave early but by that time I will have done what many would consider half a day’s work already. However little sleep I may have gotten I am up by five o’clock at the latest. I need no alarm clock. Not that I am eager to start the day but I am eager to end the night. Even on our better ones I am wakeful, expecting it to turn into another of the bad ones. On those nights I stay up throughout. I busy myself. While still in my pajamas I make my bed. When I have finished breakfast, bathed, shaved and dressed I empty the dishwasher, put the dishes back on the shelves. I sweep. I vacuum. I mop the kitchen floor. I water the houseplants. I do the laundry. The clothes are mostly mine, for the women, who never go out, live in their gowns and robes. I make a gallon thermos of coffee for them to find. It lasts them through the day. I set the breakfast table for them: cereal, cream, sugar, berries. I pack in paper bags two identical lunches: sandwiches, fruit, cookies. I might bake a cake. I take food from the freezer to thaw. I put together a casserole to be cooked for dinner. Once I could hardly make tea with a teabag but I have had to learn. I take out the garbage. I dust, wax, polish. Although nobody but me, except for the occasional repairman, has entered the place these six years, and although only I have eyes to see it, I keep it as tidy and gleaming as if company was expected any minute, God forbid!
Before leaving I walk the dog. There was a time when he would never let me come near him, me nor anybody else except his mistress. Would answer to nobody’s call but hers. Bared his teeth if anybody, including me, her husband, approached her. He still does not like me, mutters and growls while I put on his harness, but the tables are turned and now he is dependent upon me. I never pet him but I am no longer afraid of him. Seeing us, a stranger would think it was a blind man being led by his seeing-eye dog. The truth is the other way round. I am the one guiding him. We walk to the end of the next block and back. That, twice a day—for I walk him again before bedtime—is as much as he is up to anymore.
I could afford to retire. If I go on working the reason is not that I enjoy it. I never have. I inherited the business. I have no son or son-in-law, nobody at all, to leave it to, but I could sell it, and for a good sum, for it is profitable. Not all the money in the world could buy me out. The office gets me away from the house for at least some hours of the day.
I keep a car but I use it only for shopping. I walk to work, my only outdoor exercise these days except for tending the grounds. Before, I used to play golf, but not since. I shot in the low eighties. I liked to tee off early in the morning while the dew was still on the ground. I played alone. With nobody to see me I was tempted sometimes to pick up the ball from a bad lie. I never did. Who would I have been fooling?
Our neighbors watch my passage down the street from behind their window curtains. People avoid me. Not because they know the truth about me but out of consideration, respect. To bid me good-day would be an impertinence. For the edification of all I hold my head high.
I know what they say about me because it is what I would say myself were I one of them.
“There goes poor Mr. Randolph. Poor soul! What a life! How he manages to carry on is a wonder. It was bad enough before, with just his wife, but after the accident to the other one—! He could afford to put them both in a home to be cared for, or hire a nurse, a housekeeper, but no, he takes it all upon himself. And the other woman is not even related to him.”
I take it all upon myself because I want nobody else in the house.
Many mornings on my way to work I make a stop at the post office or the branch library, sometimes both. I return the last book I borrowed and choose another, or rather, I never choose one, I just take the next one on the shelf. By mail, recorded books, a state service for the blind, go in and out of our house like the tides.
Once on my way downtown I pretended to be a Catholic. I had seen posted on the door of the church the hours of confession. I went toward the end of the time, hoping to be there alone after the other sinners had confessed and gone.
In the booth I whispered through the curtain, “Father, I have erred.” I said “erred.” I feared that I might not have used the right opening and have revealed that I was not a bona-fide member.
The voice asked me what my sin was, and, being unseen, I told. The priest must have heard a lot of stories not to be shocked at mine. So impersonal a tone came through to me that I wondered whether it might not be a recording. I had expected more individual treatment. He asked me if that was all I had to confess to. I felt like saying, “Isn’t that enough!”
The priest assigned me a penance to do and told me to go and sin no more. I did not want to sin anymore, but the feeling of absolution I had hoped for did not come. I felt I had damned myself still further by my faked act of faith.
Mine is monotonous work. It both demands and dulls the mind. Eight, often nine hours of quotations, buy and sell orders. I am the last to leave the office at the end of the day. I am sure my employees say of my working late not that I am money-hungry but rather, “If I had what he’s got to go home to I wouldn’t be in any hurry either.”
Irene
It happened during one of the periods—the last that was to be (though the cause of that was possibly as much psychological as physical)—when I was in partial remission, always a bad time for me, for it raised hopes soon to be dashed. But a drowning person clutches at a straw, and at the start of that day I was grateful to be able to see even a little for however short a while, the way a soul in hell might be grateful for a moment out of the flames and prays it will last but knows the torment will resume and will be all the more painful for the temporary relief. Knowing it would not last, I never told either of the others. Why spread your disappointments?
The first time I ran to my doctor breathless with my news. Ursula was not yet with me then but already I had to have Rex, my guide dog. My sight was failing like the shortening of the days at the onset of winter. Or to put it another way, it was as though I had been taken captive and forced into exile and watched the shores of my world recede as I sailed away into the foggy and featureless void. Now the ship had unexpectedly turned back and brought me again in sight of home. Dim, to be sure, but discernible.
“Doctor, Doctor!” I can hear myself gushing still, “I’m better! I’m better!! It’s a miracle!”
It was no miracle. As gently as he could, the doctor told me that it was in the nature of my ailment that these “remissions” would occur from time to time for a while. But the condition would progress, irreversibly. The coming night could not be pushed back. These were the last glimmerings in the dusk.
Thus I learned from one great disappointment to be thankful for another. How in my condition could I have raised a child?
I had longed for children with all my heart. In this big old house were rooms just waiting for them. We tried for them, my husband and I. We tried determinedly. We tried until the joy went out of the trying. As time passed, and with it, I feared, my desirability, I spent afternoons in beauty parlors, hairdressers’ salons. From mail-order houses I bought undergarments that made me blush. But in my lust for motherhood I was shameless. Priestess of love, I made the boudoir my temple, the bed my altar. To make myself alluring I bought wigs, fishnet stockings, false eyelashes, Day-Glo lipstick. The savings account into which we deposited for the children’s education was like a monthly offering to the god of fertility. I think my husband believed the fault was mine but all the same feared it might be his. I think that because it was, in reverse, my own feeling: guilt and blame, two sides of one coin—a loser whichever the toss. My fault or his, we lacked parenthood to draw us close, and there comes a time in married life, after the passions cool, when that is needed to sustain it.
I was lonely by myself in the house all day. I saw my husband off to work and wondered how to pass my time until his return. The place was so neat there was nothing
for me to do. I longed for the dirt and disorder of a large family.
Neighborhood children still played in the street outside our house then. This graveyard silence had not yet settled around us. I told myself I loved their shouts and laughter, for I feared that envy would be held against me in my hopes for one of my own.
In the course of the afternoon I would, in imagination, experience all the joys—even the tribulations—of motherhood. I nursed, I rocked, I crooned, I sang lullabies. I taught them their first words, their first steps. I cried.
When I missed my first period I trembled with hope, shook with dread. Was I about to fulfill my womanhood, or to lose it? Fearing disillusionment, I put off seeing the doctor. I yearned for morning sickness, outlandish cravings. Childbirth held no fears for me. I panted for the pain.
The story is told that a woman was ordered by her emperor to kill her mother and bring him the heart. On her way with it to the palace the woman stumbled and fell. The heart spoke and said, “Oh! Did you hurt yourself, my darling?” I would have been that kind of mother.
It was my misfortune, or so I thought at the time, to reach the change of life early. With conception no longer a possibility, my ardor cooled. We were considering adoption when my sight began to fail. Now if I have anything to be thankful for it is that there are no children in this house of horrors.
Instead of a child, I got a guide dog.
I was not only dependent on Rex, I felt beholden to him. He had been bred and raised to devote himself entirely to one person, in his case me, like a mate whose marriage was contracted for at birth, pledged to forsake all others, to love, honor and obey.
He was my servant, not my pet. He never frolicked, never nuzzled me, never licked my hand. He was as sober as a bishop. He kept others from me, he kept himself to himself. He and I were linked only by his harness.
His intelligence made him all but human. At once he knew our house from all others as surely as did the postman. He knew the red and the green of traffic lights, he skirted us around puddles, whenever there were steps to climb he led me to the rail. To just one command other than mine would he respond: that of a policeman who stopped the cars for us and signaled him to cross the street.
He slept at the foot of my bed—if he ever slept. I verily believe he knew when my eyes closed and when they reopened. Unlike a hunting dog, whose working hours are part-time, Rex was on duty around the clock, like a doctor on call.
But Rex was my eyes outdoors. He could not help me at the kitchen range, with pouring out the right amount of hot water, nor read to me the labels on medicine bottles, and doing such things myself got harder by the day.
Enter Ursula.
We advertised for a lady’s companion. It was a serious step, to take in a stranger to share your home, your life. The first applicants we interviewed were all older women, widows, their children grown and gone away. They depressed me with their solemnity toward my affliction. Ursula alone among them was young. James said something that made her laugh, and that in itself was enough to win her the job.
We had a housekeeper who came twice a week, but Ursula took it upon herself to do the shopping, the laundry, and in the evenings she and James together cooked and served the dinner. I told her that these tasks were not required of her. She was to be a companion, not a housemaid. But what was she to do with herself all day, sit with her hands in her lap looking at me? I think that having grown up in an orphanage she was happy to have a house to run, in being its mistress.
As for her attentions to me, I could scarcely stir but what she was at my side. Actually, by that time I had learned to feel my way anywhere in the house. I knew the number of paces from one point to another and just when and in which way to turn. I had in my mind a map of it all from which I could have given directions. But Ursula so enjoyed making herself useful, having someone to care for, being appreciated. This too I think came in part from having been an orphan, with no one to lavish care upon. She adopted me.
I avoided people, not wanting my presence to dampen their spirits. Talk about my condition was carefully avoided, talk about anything else frivolous. My self-imposed isolation made me all the more grateful for Ursula’s company. For James too it was a relief to come home in the evening to someone besides just me, someone bright and busy, cheerful.
But the young woman had no life of her own and I feared she would get lonely, bored, depressed at being shut in with an invalid all the time. I still went out occasionally, but while I had my Rex, she insisted on accompanying me. I could not refuse her company without hurting her feelings but I feared that my being with her would turn off any young person who might want to strike up a conversation, make friends with her.
In the afternoon she read to me. Recorded books were available for the blind and the service was free and efficient and in the evenings I listened to them through my earphones, but I liked a living voice and Ursula enjoyed the books along with me and that added to my enjoyment. We paused and discussed what we had read. We laughed together and we cried together. Our sessions began and ended with her saying, “Synopsis,” and “To be continued.”
The reading over, she drew my bath, and after that I napped—or pretended to. I urged her to go out by herself, go downtown, go shopping, see a matinee. I would have no need of her. I told her that our home was her home and that she must feel free to invite her friends there. She never did. I supposed she wanted to spare them the sight of me and to spare me being seen and pitied. I said, “When your guests come you will want to be alone with them, of course. I will go to my room while you entertain downstairs.” Still she invited nobody. I supposed that she did not want them to see the confinement and narrowness of her life. At last I thought that as an orphan she had few friends or none. I felt that she was solitary by nature, or had been made so by her upbringing.
It was not, I am sure, to worm her way into my affections in order to secure a home for herself that she was so devoted to me. I was sure of that because she did not need to do so. She was soon made to feel like one of the family. It made the house more human to hear her hum and sing. She might be caged, but she was a canary.
After my nap she made me up. These attempts to maintain my “attractiveness” saddened me and I sometimes said, “Oh, what does it matter what I look like?” but she said, “Now, now. None of that. We must keep up our appearance.”
One afternoon as she was penciling my eyebrows I yielded to an urge that had become an obsession with me. I reached out and lightly touched her face. She flinched, I felt it, and, already embarrassed by my impulse, feeling that I had taken a liberty and forced upon her an unwanted intimacy, I drew back my hand as from a flame. But she had recoiled simply out of surprise, not revulsion, for she instantly corrected herself and, taking my hand in hers, placed it on her forehead. Several times I ran my fingertips over her features. I felt a smooth, ample brow, large round eyes, a full mouth, a well-formed chin and a firm jawline, a shapely neck, rich hair. The patience with which she submitted to my examination declared to me that she felt she had nothing to fear from it, nothing to hide.
When I let her go I said, “Now I will be able to picture you in my mind. I know you better than before.”
As the doctor had told me to expect, with the progress of my disease the remissions had grown fewer and further between and of shorter duration. Each might well be the last. So when I woke that Friday morning able for the first time in a long time to see a bit I did not cry and curse as I had done before. I determined to enjoy it for however long it lasted. Like a child at a fair, I would soak up sights. I would make for myself an album of images. They would be like souvenirs of a vacation. I would store them as on a roll of film, develop them later in the darkroom of my mind, linger lovingly over them forevermore.
For me the world that day was an art museum, rich in treasures. The house was a collection of dim-lit Dutch interiors. All out-of-doors was a gallery of Impressionist landscapes, the garden pond one of Monet’s water lilies. So fresh
was everything it was as though, seeing it for the last time, I was seeing it for the first time, and I was humbly thankful for my period of grace. All was out of focus, fuzzy, but perhaps the world was best seen when seen not too distinctly, in none too great detail. I let my faithful Rex feel no less necessary than ever, and with him at my side I spent much of that afternoon outdoors, going without my nap. Close my eyes for even a moment when I could see a last little something with them?
Flowers were in bloom. Roses! Snapdragons! Zinnias! Hollyhocks! I might have been Eve, before her expulsion from her garden, conferring their names upon them. Saying goodbye to them, I was preserving them, like pressing them in a book. For summer was on the wane and soon they would not be there for me not to see. They would fade and die as my sight would. But the bouquet my mind had gathered would remain as unchanged as a picture. And in the very impermanence of living things I now found a certain consolation, or if not consolation, some measure of acceptance of my lot.
That evening I sat alone in the living room, made up, combed and clothed by Ursula, waiting for James to come home. He was due any moment, and he was seldom late. His business was going well then and he was leaving the office at quitting time. I tried always to greet him cheerfully. I hated being the ball and chain I felt myself to be.
The sun was low, sending through the windows a horizontal beam like a trained searchlight. Too bright for even my poor partially restored vision. Like being dazzled by light on emerging from darkness.
James came in and thereupon Ursula entered the room.
For me to say that my eyes were opened then is no trite expression. Nor is it to say that I could not believe them.
She was naked.
Breathlessness alone kept me from gasping.
Like scissored cutouts silhouetted against the light the two embraced. Then she knelt, opened his trousers, reached inside, found what she was after, and—
September Song Page 11