The Long Journey Home

by Margaret Robison

  V

  1947

  Dear God, don’t let my mother die, I prayed.

  The ambulance had sped past as I was walking home from town where, at age twelve, I’d taken my little brothers while Mother gave birth to my sister, Harriet, at home. I thought the ambulance turned into our drive, not into the road past Miss Sadie’s, where in fact it did turn.

  The baby, not my mother, I prayed over and over, my heart thumping frantically in my chest.

  Opening the front door that day, I’d opened the door to a world suddenly gone out of control and nightmarish. My sister’s shrill screaming filled the house.

  She’d been born blue, umbilical cord twisted like a noose around her neck. Old Dr. Rogers had stretched a piece of gauze over her mouth and blown his cigar-soured breath into her lungs, pronounced her healthy, and left the house. But the atmosphere in the room was charged with pain, and Mother was unreachable.

  After a while the nurse began to time my sister’s screams. She found that she stopped screaming for no more than two minutes in three hours. Then she screamed the whole night through. The nurse decided that she had pressure on her brain, which was true. My sister had cerebral palsy.

  Those first days and weeks after her birth have dissolved into a blur of confusion, pain, and despair. Mostly I remember my sister’s screams.

  Often I paced back and forth across the polished oak floor of my parents’ bedroom, holding her in my arms. I walked between the mirror and the closet door until she fell asleep. That she could relax enough in my arms to fall asleep gave me as much comfort as it gave her.

  Chapter Four

  I

  1948

  “IF THERE IS A WAY TO COMMUNICATE WITH YOU AFTER I’M DEAD, IF there is a way to cross over that threshold, I will come back to you,” Mrs. Clemons said to me.

  My mother was late in picking me up, and the cold winter light had drained from the room. A warm yellow glow from her chairside lamp illuminated Mrs. Clemons’s hands, long-fingered and arthritic, articulate and dramatic. She was as old as my grandmother. A silk scarf fell around her neck in elegant folds, concealing the goiter on her throat.

  “When I die, dear, lean close to my dead body,” she said, leaning toward me as she spoke. “Perhaps it will be easiest to speak with you just after I cross over.”

  I lowered my eyes for a few seconds, staring at her feet, side by side in their black satin slippers on a small needlepoint stool. Behind me on the mantelpiece and propped against a pair of cut-glass candlesticks stood announcements of her death, addressed in her own hand. The cards were bordered in black and said: “Dear Friend, Grace Clemons has passed away on this __ day of ____, 19__.” On the other end of the mantelpiece stood a snapshot of her mustached nephew from whom she awaited a visit year after year. On the wall beside me hung a picture of Death rowing a young woman across the River Styx. I say it was Death because I always thought of the somber figure standing at the stern of the boat as Death itself, though it was in fact Charon, the ferryman who rowed the dead across the River Styx into the underworld.

  “Cold lips and breast without breath,” Mrs. Clemons had recited earlier from Sir Edwin Arnold’s poem “She and He.” “Is there no voice, no language of death?” She’d recited the poem to me many times over the three years since I’d begun to visit her after I’d started taking painting lessons from Mrs. Forbes, who owned the house in which both women lived, and who lived below Mrs. Clemons.

  She recited the poem slowly and passionately. And, as always, when listening to her recite the poem, I saw in my imagination a vast room, high-ceilinged and windowless, and at its center, a beautiful young woman’s dead body lying on a slab of marble, long hair streaming down the sides of her pillow, strewn with blossoms, as was the hair of the young woman Death was rowing and rowing across the River Styx.

  Stillness. Gloom. Cold. These words from the poem filled my imagination, where the image grew so still that it became more like a tangible presence than the absence of sound or motion. That stillness had a weight to it, like the heavy cloak Death wore.

  During the three years that I’d taken my midafternoon break from my Saturday painting lessons and sometimes—as now—waited with her for my mother to come for me afterward, Mrs. Clemons often talked about her death. Sometimes she would announce: “I hear the bells tolling midnight in the distance and they are coming closer,” her deep voice anchoring the words in a place of sober acknowledgment and resignation. Sometimes she made reference to the funeral announcements. But until that winter evening she’d never talked about communicating with me after her death. She spoke carefully and thoughtfully. “If you aren’t with me when I die,” she said, “go to my grave. The soul has to have a place to come home to.”

  Whatever my eyes said must have been an adequate response for her. I had no words and she asked for none. I didn’t look from Mrs. Clemons’s gaze as we sat facing each other, the small room filled with the silence of a connection I’d never felt before. The fear that I’d experienced earlier at the idea of leaning close to her dead body was replaced by the feeling of wonder that I, a thirteen-year-old girl, mattered enough to her that she would try to communicate with me even after death. And I knew that she mattered enough to me for me to listen.

  The blast of a car horn rose from the street below.

  My mother had come for me. I hugged Mrs. Clemons goodbye. Then I rushed down the stairs and out the front door, her words playing themselves over in my mind—a place to come home to.

  II

  I no longer remember what threatened Mrs. Clemons’s health so much that she invited me to spend a night with her to keep her company. Her fear was so upsetting, yet no serious illness developed and I’m left with memories of a few details that anchor me in the turbulent waters of that weekend.

  Before then I’d barely noticed what she referred to as her guest room, nor had I ever known her to have an overnight guest. She’d shown me her entire apartment when I first began to visit her, but until that weekend, there’d been no reason to go anyplace except the room in which we visited, and the kitchen where we sometimes ate one of her special salads or a bowl of fruit. Now, carrying a small blue suitcase, I followed her past the kitchen, down the hall, and into the guest room that opened onto a balcony overlooking Merrie Gardens.

  It was furnished simply with a narrow bed covered by a white bedspread, a bedside table with a lamp, a bureau, and a straight chair. Mrs. Clemons had placed a white towel and washcloth on the foot of the bed. I remember quite well the thinness of the bath towel, the clean, pure smell of the soap in the bathroom, and how cold the enamel of the tub felt on my skin when, taking a bath later, I leaned my naked back against it. I also remember the pale pink blanket that lay folded at the foot of the bed. I unfolded it to cover the spread before climbing into bed and curling up between the sheets. I loved the feeling of the cool pillowcase against my face, but the room felt strange to me and not altogether comfortable, a foreign place inside the familiar space of Mrs. Clemons’s apartment.

  I had spent hours before that weekend listening to her talk about her life. Though she spoke of many hurtful experiences, they had happened to her so long ago that they had shaped themselves into stories, edges smoothed like pieces of broken glass tumbled by the sea. She had a storyteller’s gift, and the forms that she created for holding the stories of her life also enabled me to hold them. No matter how great the loss or deep the grief, her stories satisfied a need in me, and ignited my imagination more than they distressed me.

  But that weekend was different; her fear about her present health was so great that it seeped into every story she told, weighing it down with an unspoken anxiety that I felt so acutely that I, too, became heavyhearted and anxious.

  Mrs. Clemons was a Christian Scientist. I puzzled about the pairing of those two words. A scientist was someone, usually a man, who peered through a microscope at germs squiggling on a glass slide, or at bits of leaves, flowers, or animal tissue. I’d see
n photographs of some of these in National Geographic and sometimes in Life, and I saw that they were truly mysterious, so maybe there was some way to put the words Christian and scientist together. I knew Christianity was supposed to be about mystery, but judging from the words of the preacher in the Baptist church, I guessed it to be much more about moral rules and laws. Mystery had to do with the way light shone through the colors of the stained-glass Jesus, holding a shepherd’s staff in one hand and a little lamb in the other, or the way Maggie Roddenbery’s contralto voice filled the whole church when she sang.

  Healing from illness without a doctor or medicine from the drugstore seemed like a very large mystery. Though our preacher sometimes referred to Jesus causing the blind to see and the lame to walk, this information felt more like ancient history than present possibility. Of all the people I knew personally, only Mrs. Clemons talked in the present tense about healing through her religion.

  I had heard of other people who mixed healing and religion, but they were people who went to tent revivals, where they talked in tongues, played drums, and danced and rolled in the aisles in what they called religious ecstasy. My mother, who looked with disdain at overt displays of emotion, told me of her friend who attended such a tent meeting with her crippled son. Her friend had told her how the people gathered around the boy moaning prayers while the shouting preacher laid his hand on the boy’s head, commanding the evil spirits to leave his frail body. Mother felt embarrassed for what she called her friend’s appalling lapse of judgment. I wanted to believe that it was possible for that boy to get up from his wheelchair and walk, but felt my desire meant that I, too, had poor taste and would risk my mother’s harsh judgment if I admitted my true feelings.

  The only other people I’d heard of who were involved with healing and religion were the Catholics who flooded to Lourdes with dreams of miracles rendered through the water from a special spring. Fascinated, I’d read that the young Bernadette Soubirous was directed to the spring by an apparition of the Virgin Mary. But the Virgin Mary had no place in the Baptist Church, and Catholics seemed like a different species altogether, as foreign as Yankees.

  Christian Science felt foreign, too, but it was a part of who Mrs. Clemons was, so I’d begun to learn bits and pieces about it. She never talked about a church but referred to the Christian Science Reading Room, a concept that seemed strange to me and not at all like going to church. She didn’t read The Atlanta Journal like my parents did but read The Christian Science Monitor, which she kept folded on the table beside her reading chair. Once, she told me, she tripped and broke her ankle when cutting through Paradise Park on her way home from the grocery store. Despite the urgings of friends, she said, she stood fast in her faith and refused to go to a doctor, waiting and watching as the broken bone knit itself together again.

  She’d been most adamant in her claims, which added to my anxiety that weekend; her fear about her present health felt to me like a crisis of faith. I say I felt rather than thought, because my perceptions were nothing I could articulate. But I felt the threat with a chilling surety. Her crisis precipitated a crisis in me. Her faith in Christian Science, strange as it was to me, was something I needed her to hold on to. I needed Mrs. Clemons to be unbroken and predictable in my world.

  The weekend itself, with all its blank spaces and its few clearly remembered details, was pivotal in the relationship between us. Young as I was, I was able to stand with her during the storm of her doubt. I felt I’d proven myself to her in some essential way. That she had asked me to be with her, difficult though it was, felt like a privilege.

  Fortunately, my stay was balanced by time spent with Mrs. Forbes. I had my usual painting lesson on Saturday afternoon, while Mrs. Clemons was at a special meeting of a group of Christian Scientists until early evening. After I’d painted for a long time, Mrs. Forbes suggested I stop and let her fix us an early supper. She led me into her kitchen on the other side of the house, took a large onion and a jar of mayonnaise out of the refrigerator, and set both on the enameled table at which I sat, watching. She peeled the onion, put it on the chopping board, and cut two enormously thick, sharply fragrant slices. She opened a loaf of bread and took out four pieces, which she put on two small plates. Then she spread mayonnaise on the bread, and onto one piece on each plate she placed an onion slice.

  I sat waiting for the other ingredients of the sandwich, but there were none. She plopped the remaining pieces of bread on their mates, poured two glasses of milk, and sat down. An onion sandwich. In our family, onions went with hamburgers. I’d never heard of a sandwich with nothing but onion on it. And this was nothing like the food Mrs. Clemons served. She made wonderful cakes and cookies. Sometimes she mixed exotic salads of grapes, walnuts, celery, lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers, covered with a creamy dressing totally unlike those my mother made.

  “This is one of my very favorite treats,” Mrs. Forbes said, taking a bite of her sandwich. I took a bite of mine and, to my surprise, liked it.

  When the painting lesson ended, Mrs. Forbes went into the foyer and pulled the string that dangled from a small bell at the head of the stairs. “Yoo-hoo!” she called, ringing the bell. “Yoo-hoo!” Mrs. Clemons came down then and played “To a Wild Rose” on the piano before we went upstairs for the night.

  That night Mrs. Clemons and I sat together on the balcony that opened from the guest room and overlooked Merrie Gardens. The evening was cool, and we both wore sweaters. I felt emotionally drained and was grateful for the quiet that we shared. I’d never sat on that balcony before, and it felt strange, but the whole weekend had felt strange. Daylight was gone, and summer too, and frost had claimed the garden just days before. The yard looked colorless and drab in the dim light of early dusk. A few dry leaves were scattered on the lawn. From someplace in the pecan grove behind the barn, a mockingbird pierced the silence with its call. My heart ached at the sound, ached with its own need to somehow answer. Again the mockingbird called out, and its familiar notes evoked in me a longing deeper than anything I’d ever felt. It felt like homesickness, but for someplace I’d never known before.

  III

  Every summer Mother filled a basket with vegetables for me to take to Mrs. Clemons and Mrs. Forbes. She filled it with the bounty from her garden in the backyard or from the hampers of vegetables that my father brought home from his produce warehouse: radishes, peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, string beans, field peas, okra, carrots, cucumbers. She arranged them with the same care with which she arranged tiger lilies and aspidistra leaves in the brass bowl on the living room mantelpiece or camellias in the low, white bowl on the dining table. While housework defeated her at every turn, Mother was a devoted and creative gardener. More than at any other time, she appeared at peace with herself and the world when she was pulling weeds from a flower bed, planting seeds in the vegetable garden, or pruning the roses. Arranging the vegetables in the basket was one of Mother’s pleasures, and it never went unnoticed by either Mrs. Forbes or Mrs. Clemons.

  I loved carrying the basket from the car into the house, anticipating the pleased looks in both women’s eyes when they saw it. On those Saturdays when I brought the basket, Mrs. Forbes announced my arrival by ringing the bell and calling out “Yoo-hoo!” to Mrs. Clemons, who came down and stood with her, admiring the vegetables. This was such a Saturday, and the three of us stood in the foyer looking at Mother’s creation.

  “A feast for the eyes,” Mrs. Forbes announced, smiling.

  “Lovely,” Mrs. Clemons said. “Just lovely.” Then—being the cook for both of them—she took the basket from me, saying, “I’m baking a cake with chocolate sauce. It should be ready for your lesson break.” I watched her climb the stairs to disappear into the kitchen.

  Mrs. Forbes and I went into her workroom, where, for a long time, I worked on a watercolor I’d begun the week before. She sat in her reading chair near the daybed, telling me again about her dream of someday having a book of her own stories, poems, drawings, and watercol
ors. Then she recited from Emerson’s poem “The Rhodora” from memory, ending with “… beauty is its own excuse for Being.” Afterward she announced, as she usually did, that she intended to live to be a hundred years old before she left for her “scouting space” in the next world.

  I sat bent over the little desk, pulling my full paintbrush across the paper, the blue of a summer sky pooling along the horizon line in my watercolor. “And this is another poem I myself wrote,” she announced, smiling: “O Bumblebee Humble Bee / droning and buzzing,” she began, loving the sounds of the words as she said them, as they vibrated against her teeth and out through her lips. “Droning and buzzing so close to me,” she continued, not remembering that she’d said the poem to me more than once already. “I know you think you’re in Paradise / In the wisteria bloom on my porch.”

  I laid my paintbrush on the desk. Mrs. Forbes dragged a straight chair over beside me and sat down. We looked at my painting together. Against the blue background sat a dog, a white terrier with a black spot on its shoulder. A gray-and-yellow kitten looked up at its face. It was a sentimental picture copied from one of the prints that Mrs. Forbes had collected for her students to paint from. I thought I’d give it to Mother to hang over the chest of drawers in my parents’ bedroom where my sister, Harriet, slept. I thought it was something Mother would like, and it looked to me like something one might have for a baby.

  I rarely talked about Harriet to Mrs. Forbes or Mrs. Clemons. I didn’t talk to them about her screaming, or how often I paced the floor with her. I didn’t tell them how happy it made me when my pacing soothed the pain and I felt her relaxing into sleep, her small body limp against me, sweat-soaked and spent.