Please tell you what’s happening? Well, for one thing, at this exact instant, your grandson and his best friend the Forest
Ranger, working in their laboratory, have just discovered the cure for cancer.
“Really? But no, I mean, what’s happening to—”
For another thing, at this exact instant, the young moonshiner is chopping up his still with an axe.
“Wonderful! But what about—”
Eliza Cunningham at this exact instant has just discovered a passage in one of the Bluff-dweller’s notebooks which offers her a radical new insight about certain sufferings in her own life.
“But the Bluff-dweller himself?”
He is no longer the Bluff-dweller.
“Do you mean he’s dead?”
He no longer dwells in a bluff. He dwells in a hospital
bed.
“But he’s alive? And he’s going to live?”
No. He is the Dying Man.
You wept. I was sorry. But he was sinking deeper into the coma, his pulse rate dropped, the temperature dropped, the brain waves shortened, and the attendants summoned the specialists, who came to the I.C.U. and stood around shaking their heads. At length you asked, “And not even you, with your power, the power to hold my hand like this, can save him?”
I thought about that. I went away and spent years thinking about that. My French horn rusted. I didn’t practice enough. Some years I didn’t practice at all. I dwelt too much on my own problems. I suffered recurring bouts of hypomania and character disorders and probably neuroses too. I brooded upon the impossibility of ever doing anything more than hold your hand. I could never appear to you. Some years I could never even make you appear to me. I became distracted by other faces. At one point I almost considered pawning my French horn. Occasionally I would force myself to practice on it, but discovered it had rusted, and my lips were badly chapped. I grew tired of being a disembodied sound, a mere voice, and no longer a very melodious one at that. Lost in the woods, I chased after nymphs and dryads, and caught a few, but it wasn’t very good. I summoned the forest gods and cajoled them into listening to me while I played three separate versions of all of this on my rusted horn, and the forest gods shook their heads like the internists shaking their heads over the Dying Man. Somewhere in the woods, finally, I rediscovered Kind, whom (or rather which) I had forgotten. I remembered how your husband, who had spent so many years believing in ‘God,’ had at last, under the influence of your grandson, who had in turn been influenced by the Hermit, who had in turn been influenced by you, turned to Kind as a more acceptable substitute for ‘God,’ because Kind had long predated ‘God,’ and because ‘God’ had been invented as a kind of ‘front man’ for Kind, who was neither male nor female nor even ‘it,’ except insofar as ‘It’ is a very powerful little pronoun. I knew I could not pray to Kind because Kind, unlike ‘God,’ does not listen. I couldn’t ask Kind to save the Dying Man. But I could be Kind, just as we all of us are, or, damned, are not. Farther along, I became Kind, for a while, and I oiled my French horn and practiced on it until I was ready to come back to you. You were sitting as I had left you, on the bench of the lawn of that place in the night, with the Dying Man’s dog forlorn at your feet.
And I answered your question: Yes, I suppose I could save
him.
You were thrilled. “That would be so Kind of you.”
I laughed hollowly, and tried to make light of it. Well, you know, if he survives, my horn couldn’t very well play with his hair-comb-and-tissue. Nor even with the hammered dulcimer. I would drown out both of them. So I had better return to being lost.
“Hammered dulcimer?”
Yes, that’s Liz Cunningham, don’t you know. Not your ordinary mountain dulcimer, otherwise known as the Indian walking cane or Jacob’s coffin, with its three simple strings plucked by a turkey quill pick, or double-thumbed. No, the hammered dulcimer—in First’s time they called it “beaten” dulcimer but that was even worse—is a many-stringed instrument struck or beaten by a pair of wooden spoons or spoon-shaped beaters. In fact, Liz the First used to have one, which she played in private, or privately for The Governor. Liz the Second also has one. For both First and Second, the adjective is symbolic. Hammered. Beaten. But the sound is sweet. It’s almost like a soft harpsichord, but without the plunkety-plunk: the notes flow into one another without intervals. The sound is close to your harmonica. The hum of it will compliment the hum of the hair-comb-and-tissue. But my French horn would overwhelm all three of you.
“If you get lost again, I’ll miss you so.”
You’ll have the Dying Man to entertain you.
“You can’t call him the Dying Man if he doesn’t die.”
All of us, as somebody once said, are dying, from the cradle to the grave. So he shall remain the Dying Man.
“But I can’t talk to him the way I talk to you.”
You’ll learn how. You know, you really have been simply talking to yourself all along, and pretending it was me. When I’m not here, you’ll have to stop pretending and learn how to talk to the Dying Man and others.
“Yes,” you said. “Yes. Yes.”
Dawn was approaching. The sun was about to rise. I took both your hands and lifted you to your feet, saying, Come, my love. I led you back into the hospital, back into the I.C.U. Two of the internists, including the one who had wanted to administer curare, had already flown back to their big cities. The one remaining put a hand on your shoulder, and with a most sorrowful expression intoned, “I’m terribly sorry. There’s nothing we can do.”
You walked to the side of his aluminum-and-steel mechanized and gadgetry-encrusted bed and looked down at the Dying Man. They had even removed most of the tubes and wires and needles.
You permitted me to play all four stanzas of “Farther Along” on my French horn, and then you listened to a final rendition of the chorus.
Farther along we’ll know all about it,
Farther along we’ll understand why;
Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine,
We’ll understand it, all by and by.
The last note had a “bird’s eye” or fermata over it: an instruction from the composer to the musician to “hold this note as long as you need to or want to,” in this case: “HOLD FOREVER, please.”
The Dying Man opened his eyes.
Trio For Harmonica, Hair-Comb-and-Tissue, and Hammered Dulcimer
Do you have hope for the future?
Someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.
—David Ray, “Thanks, Robert Frost”
Chapter twenty-seven
Friday
Dear Linda,
A miracle occurred! He survived. He lives. I couldn’t help remembering, as I learned about it, of you and I last Christmastime listening to the University Chorus singing “The Messiah”: those majestic lines from First Corinthians: “Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the
trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall all be changed.” Can you hear me hammering it on my dulcimer?
Whether or not he is incorruptible remains to be seen, but he must be changed. The Woman was nearly in hysterics when I arrived at the hospital early this morning, driven there by her grandson’s foreman just moments before the news was announced. The Woman met me as I was entering the hospital, and from the look of her I knew at once that the Bluff-dweller had died. “Old Horn is gone!” she almost wailed. You mean he’s dead? I asked. “Not him,” she replied. “The Dying Man is alive, and he’s going to live. But Horn is dead.” This seemed incoherent, especially because she was referring to the Bluff-dweller as the Dying Man. Preserving identities like this is something of a nuisance, a contrivance, or at least a bore. But you, I think, understand. I remember how you laughed when you learned that I, of all people, would be the only one whose name could be revealed. I miss you. I wish you were here, etc., etc. How’s the garden coming? Etc. No, seriously, I do miss you, but I’ve been so caught up in events down here that I’ve scarcely been able to give you the thought you deserve and I wouldn’t even be writing this letter except that it’s nighttime now, and I’m alone at The House, because the Grandson is so excited over having discovered a cure for cancer that he and the Forest Ranger are staying up all night verifying their findings and he has probably forgotten that I exist. His foreman told me that when he took the news of the Dying Man’s “resurrection” to him, that he simply grunted and went back to his microscope and the Forest Ranger simply said “Great” and went back to his microscope. Their obsession with “knowing all about it, farther along,” is just too much. The Woman, after explaining to me who (or perhaps what) the French horn had been, told me that the French horn had wanted, at one time, to focus his music upon her Grandson and the Forest Ranger and their respective Mistresses, but that he had found their absorption with knowing all about it farther along too inhibiting and too limiting and almost the antithesis of what he was trying to achieve in the way of pastoral effects. You will agree that he didn’t quite achieve pastoral effects in his duet with the harmonica of the Woman, but I swear I could see some shepherds and shepherdesses lurking about somewhere in those woods and bosky fields. Well. How’s this getting to be for a long paragraph, O Mistress of the Long Paragraph? I really envy your fancy flourishing Victorian prose style; I feel such a terrible burden of responsibility to finish what the French horn could not, but as he said he would have drowned me out. I don’t play the dulcimer well, you know that, but I think I play it as well as First did. I’m sure I do, because so much of the time I truly believe that I am First. Of course I must be Second, but, as in that charming Bouguereau postcard you sent (an exact copy of which hangs in the Grandson’s double bubble house), if we are not One, we are at least Doubles, and the whole idea of all these doubles, duples, twins, mirrors, shadows and shades is reflection: both in the sense of images thrown back and the results of concentration of the mind. If I concentrate well enough, I am First. If you concentrate well enough, you could trade places with me, and I hope you often do. My only chance for handling the onus of completing what the French horn left incomplete rests with you, hence all of this is addressed to you.
During the days that the Dying Man was in the hospital, I must confess that I avoided going there as much as I could. I visited him only once while he was still in his coma, but you know of that, as you know of my trip to see his cavern. I think the avoidance was out of the same guilt that I felt when my grandfather died and then again when my father died. Both times, I was horrified by the thought of their ceasing to exist and also horrified at myself for so much wanting them to die. It was the same with the Dying Man: if he died, I would receive a fourth of his estate. Made me look terribly covetous and unfeeling, I know, but there it was, and at that point I had not read his notebooks and knew so little about him, other than that tip-of-the-iceberg that we got when he was playing his sorrows and sufferings on his hair-comb-and-tissue. I never could listen to that without, somehow, thinking of dandruff and shit. What a Kindawful thing for a dulcimer to say! But who was he to me, after all? He might have been just the right size for me, as if our bodies were almost made to fit each other’s, but there must be more to life than that. He’s sixteen years older than I, old enough to be my father if he’d married young. He was married, but divorced, and although his wife may seem to have been cold to him, it was probably his fault. He couldn’t relate to women. He couldn’t get outside the cave of himself. How ridiculous for the Woman to think that I could relate to him! How absurd! But I remember what you once told me that Hawthorne had said, “The fact is, in writing a romance, a man [or woman] is always—or always ought to be—careening on the utmost verge of precipitous absurdity and the skill lies in coming as close as possible without actually tumbling over.” And, dear Linda, you are expecting a romance, aren’t you? I dread tumbling over the precipice.
The others sent flowers to him, or books, the Woman took him a large and lovely bouquet of wildflowers, the moonshiner (whose little finger, by the way, was no longer black) presented him with a jug that contained unfermented grape juice—the hospital had to run a lab test on it before they would let him have it—and I took him, of all things, a roll of toilet paper and a fancy hair comb with 88 teeth—a full keyboard. I was dressed in one of First’s finest taffeta silk skirts with a flounced bottom, a lawn waist, and a straw braid dress hat stylishly trimmed with a plume effect. I wish you could have seen the look the nurses gave me. More, I wish you could have seen the look he gave me.
“How do you do? I am Eliza Cunningham,” I said to him, and presented him with the roll of tissue and the comb.
He smiled. We know that he is rarely capable of a smile, and in his condition it must have been difficult, but it was a genuine, spontaneous expression of pleasure.
He tried to speak, but couldn’t. I said, “You needn’t tell me your name, for I already know it.” He smiled again, and feebly gestured toward a chair beside his bed. I sat down, holding my reticule in my lap—do you know that word? oh, ridicule the reticule!—it’s a fancy netted lady’s purse. Then I said, “You mustn’t try to talk, so I shall simply ask you yes-or-no questions, to which you may nod or shake your head. First, are you feeling fine?” He shook his head. “Are you feeling absolutely wretched?” He shook his head. “Then are you feeling that you have been turned inside out, torn up, reassembled and might almost be whole?” Smiling, he nodded, twice. “Do you feel remorse for what you did to bring this upon yourself?” He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Do you want to live?” He nodded, then shook, then nodded again, and then sort of rotated his head in an ambiguous yes-no. “When you become well, do you intend to return to your cave?” He nodded. “And to your former way of life, and habits?” He nodded. “But the doctors say that you can never drink again. How do you plan to accommodate yourself to that edict? Oh, I’m sorry, that’s not a yes-or-no-question. Well, do you plan to exercise exceptional self-restraint?” He shook his head. “Do you plan to remove the temptation by not having any alcoholic beverages handy?” He shook his head. “Did you know that your young distiller destroyed his apparatus last night?” He grimaced painfully, and shook his head. “Could you not cultivate a taste for other beverages?” He shrugged and spread his hands, and gave his head a resigned nod. “Do you like tea?” He shook his head. “Am I annoying you with these questions?” He shook his head. “Does the fact that I am a woman make you uncomfortable?” He shook his head. “Would you at all care to become better acquainted with me, farther along?” He narrowed his eyes in that oft-mentioned stony squint, possibly because of the allusion of my dangling temporal qualifier. But then he nodded. “Would you permit yourself to reveal your most private sentiments to me?” He shook his head. “Why not? Because you think it would be an intrusion on my part?” He shook his head. “Because you feel that to do so would give us some sort of dependency upon one another, w
hich you would not wish?” He shook his head. “Because you feel that your inner being is your own personal property, not to be shared with anyone?” He shook his head. “Because you fear that if you were to do so, I might acquire a dislike for you?” He nodded, he nodded. “If I were to give you my solemn oath that nothing you could possibly say to me would in anywise offend me, nor change the coloration of my concern for you, nor diminish whatever affections I might develop for you, could you then unload upon me your most intimate feelings and thoughts?” He smiled and blew me a kiss. “Do you know who I am?” I asked. He blew me another kiss, then shook his head.
So I drew my chair closer to his bed and began telling him the story of First, who, if I not actually am, I can so convincingly pretend to be. I have wondered since if perhaps, having been in a coma, he was not entirely out of it, and fancied me some kind of entertaining hallucination. I was as entertaining as I could be, but I had told him only a fraction of First’s story when one of the nurses came and told me that I had visited long enough. I squeezed his hand in parting and said, “I trust we shall be having the honor and pleasure of further acquaintance.”
He spoke then, quietly but eagerly, “I sure hope so.” He held up the comb in his right hand and the roll of tissue in his left. “I’ll play these for you sometime.”
I was surprised to discover that the Woman, who I thought had gone, was standing just inside the door of the I.C.U. We went out together. “Did you catch any of that?” I asked. She nodded. “Did I say, or ask, anything wrong?”
“No, not at all,” she said. “I think you’re getting to him.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 38