My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  And then when he was not very old or even retired—she said—he

  had suffered some unusual kind of damage.

  “His wife is the one takes care of him usually. She takes care of him at home. She just put him in here on temporary care so she could get a break. Her sister wanted her to go to Florida. See, she ’s had a hard time, you wouldn’t ever have expected a man like him— They just went on a holiday somewhere and he got something, like some bug, that gave him a terrible high fever? And it put him in a coma and left him like he is now.”

  He asked her about these affections between residents. Did they ever go too far? He was able now to take a tone of indulgence that he hoped would save him from any lectures.

  “Depends what you mean,” she said. She kept writing in her record book while deciding how to answer him. When she finished what she was writing she looked up at him with a frank smile.

  “The trouble we have in here, it ’s funny, it ’s often with some of the ones that haven’t been friendly with each other at all. They maybe won’t even know each other, beyond knowing, like, is it a man or a woman? You’d think it ’d be the old guys trying to crawl in bed with the old women, but you know half the time it ’s the other way round.

  Old women going after the old men. Could be they’re not so wore out, I guess.”

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  Then she stopped smiling, as if she was afraid she had said too much, or spoken callously.

  “Don’t take me wrong,” she said. “I don’t mean Fiona. Fiona is a

  lady.”

  Well, what about Aubrey? Grant felt like saying. But he remembered that Aubrey was in a wheelchair.

  “She ’s a real lady,” Kristy said, in a tone so decisive and reassuring that Grant was not reassured. He had in his mind a picture of Fiona, in one of her long eyelet-trimmed blue-ribboned nightgowns, teasingly lifting the covers of an old man’s bed.

  “Well, I sometimes wonder—” he said.

  Kristy said sharply, “You wonder what?”

  “I wonder whether she isn’t putting on some kind of a charade.”

  “A what?” said Kristy.

  Most afternoons the pair could be found at the card table. Aubrey had large, thick-fingered hands. It was difficult for him to manage his cards. Fiona shuffled and dealt for him and sometimes moved quickly to straighten a card that seemed to be slipping from his grasp. Grant would watch from across the room her darting move and quick, laughing apology. He could see Aubrey’s husbandly frown as a wisp of her hair touched his cheek.

  Aubrey preferred to ignore her as long as she stayed close.

  But let her smile her greeting at Grant, let her push back her chair and get up to offer him tea—showing that she had accepted his right to be there and possibly felt a slight responsibility for him—and Aubrey’s face took on its look of sombre consternation. He would let the cards slide from his fingers and fall on the floor, to spoil the game.

  So that Fiona had to get busy and put things right.

  If they weren’t at the bridge table they might be walking along the halls, Aubrey hanging on to the railing with one hand and clutching Fiona’s arm or shoulder with the other. The nurses thought that it was a marvel, the way she had got him out of his wheelchair. Though for longer trips—to the conservatory at one end of the building or the television room at the other—the wheelchair was called for.

  The television seemed to be always turned to the sports channel and

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  Aubrey would watch any sport, but his favorite appeared to be golf.

  Grant didn’t mind watching that with them. He sat down a few chairs away. On the large screen a small group of spectators and commenta-tors followed the players around the peaceful green, and at appropriate moments broke into a formal sort of applause. But there was silence everywhere as the player made his swing and the ball took its lonely, appointed journey across the sky. Aubrey and Fiona and Grant and possibly others sat and held their breaths, and then Aubrey’s breath broke out first, expressing satisfaction or disappointment. Fiona’s chimed in on the same note a moment later.

  In the conservatory there was no such silence. The pair found

  themselves a seat among the most lush and thick and tropical-looking plants—a bower, if you like—which Grant had just enough self-control to keep from penetrating. Mixed in with the rustle of the leaves and the sound of splashing water was Fiona’s soft talk and her laughter.

  Then some sort of chortle. Which of them could it be?

  Perhaps neither—perhaps it came from one of the impudent flashy-

  looking birds who inhabited the corner cages.

  Aubrey could talk, though his voice probably didn’t sound the way it used to. He seemed to say something now—a couple of thick syllables.

  Take care. He’s here. My love.

  On the blue bottom of the fountain’s pool lay some wishing coins.

  Grant had never seen anybody actually throwing money in. He stared at these nickels and dimes and quarters, wondering if they had been glued to the tiles—another feature of the building’s encouraging decoration.

  Teenagers at the baseball game, sitting at the top of the bleachers out of the way of the boy’s friends. A couple of inches of bare wood between them, darkness falling, quick chill of the evening late in the summer.

  The skittering of their hands, the shift of haunches, eyes never lifted from the field. He ’ll take off his jacket, if he ’s wearing one, to lay it around her narrow shoulders. Underneath it he can pull her closer to him, press his spread fingers into her soft arm.

  Not like today when any kid would probably be into her pants on the first date.

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  Fiona’s skinny soft arm. Teenage lust astonishing her and flashing along all the nerves of her tender new body, as the night thickens beyond the lighted dust of the game.

  Meadowlake was short on mirrors, so he did not have to catch sight of himself stalking and prowling. But every once in a while it came to him how foolish and pathetic and perhaps unhinged he must look, trailing around after Fiona and Aubrey. And having no luck in confronting

  her, or him. Less and less sure of what right he had to be on the scene but unable to withdraw. Even at home, while he worked at his desk or cleaned up the house or shovelled snow when necessary, some ticking metronome in his mind was fixed on Meadowlake, on his next visit.

  Sometimes he seemed to himself like a mulish boy conducting a hopeless courtship, sometimes like one of those wretches who follow celebrated women through the streets, convinced that one day these women will turn around and recognize their love.

  He made a great effort, and cut his visits down to Wednesdays and Saturdays. Also he set himself to observing other things about the place, as if he was a sort of visitor at large, a person doing an inspection or a social study.

  Saturdays had a holiday bustle and tension. Families arrived in clusters. Mothers were usually in charge, they were like cheerful but insistent sheepdogs herding the men and children. Only the smallest children were without apprehension. They noticed right away the green and

  white squares on the hall floors and picked one color to walk on, the other to jump over. The bolder ones might try to hitch rides on the back of wheelchairs. Some persisted in these tricks in spite of scolding, and had to be removed to the car. And how happily, then, how readily, some older child or father volunteered to do the removing, and thus opt out of the visit.

  It was the women who kept the conversation afloat. Men seemed

  cowed by the situation, teenagers affronted. Those being visited rode in a wheelchair or stumped along with a cane, or walked stiffly, unaided, at the procession’s head, proud of the turnout but somewhat blank-eyed,

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  or desper
ately babbling, under the stress of it. And now surrounded by a variety of outsiders these insiders did not look like such regular people after all. Female chins might have had their bristles shaved to the roots and bad eyes might be hidden by patches or dark lenses, inappropriate utterances might be controlled by medication, but some glaze remained, a haunted rigidity—as if people were content to become memories of themselves, final photographs.

  Grant understood better now how Mr. Farquar must have felt. Peo-

  ple here—even the ones who did not participate in any activities but sat around watching the doors or looking out the windows—were living a busy life in their heads (not to mention the life of their bodies, the portentous shifts in their bowels, the stabs and twinges everywhere along the line), and that was a life that in most cases could not very well be described or alluded to in front of visitors. All they could do was wheel or somehow propel themselves about and hope to come up with something that could be displayed or talked about.

  There was the conservatory to be shown off, and the big television screen. Fathers thought that was really something. Mothers said the ferns were gorgeous. Soon everybody sat down around the little tables and ate ice cream—refused only by the teenagers, who were dying of disgust. Women wiped away the dribble from shivery old chins and men looked the other way.

  There must be some satisfaction in this ritual, and perhaps even the teenagers would be glad, one day, that they had come. Grant was no expert on families.

  No children or grandchildren appeared to visit Aubrey, and since

  they could not play cards—the tables being taken over for the ice cream parties—he and Fiona stayed clear of the Saturday parade. The conservatory was far too popular then for any of their intimate conversations.

  Those might be going on, of course, behind Fiona’s closed door.

  Grant could not manage to knock, though he stood there for some time staring at the Disney birds with an intense, a truly malignant dislike.

  Or they might be in Aubrey’s room. But he did not know where that was. The more he explored this place, the more corridors and seating

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  spaces and ramps he discovered, and in his wanderings he was still apt to get lost. He would take a certain picture or chair as a landmark, and the next week whatever he had chosen seemed to have been placed somewhere else. He didn’t like to mention this to Kristy, lest she think he was suffering some mental dislocations of his own. He supposed this constant change and rearranging might be for the sake of the residents—to make their daily exercise more interesting.

  He did not mention either that he sometimes saw a woman at a dis-

  tance that he thought was Fiona, but then thought it couldn’t be, because of the clothes the woman was wearing. When had Fiona ever gone in for bright flowered blouses and electric blue slacks? One Saturday he looked out a window and saw Fiona—it must be her—wheeling Aubrey

  along one of the paved paths now cleared of snow and ice, and she was wearing a silly woolly hat and a jacket with swirls of blue and purple, the sort of thing he had seen on local women at the supermarket.

  The fact must be that they didn’t bother to sort out the wardrobes of the women who were roughly the same size. And counted on the women not recognizing their own clothes anyway.

  They had cut her hair, too. They had cut away her angelic halo. On a Wednesday, when everything was more normal and card games were

  going on again, and the women in the Crafts Room were making silk flowers or costumed dolls without anybody hanging around to pester or admire them, and when Aubrey and Fiona were again in evidence so that it was possible for Grant to have one of his brief and friendly and maddening conversations with his wife, he said to her, “Why did they chop off your hair?”

  Fiona put her hands up to her head, to check.

  “Why—I never missed it,” she said.

  He thought he should find out what went on on the second floor, where they kept the people who, as Kristy said, had really lost it. Those who walked around down here holding conversations with themselves or

  throwing out odd questions at a passerby (“Did I leave my sweater in the church?”) had apparently lost only some of it.

  Not enough to qualify.

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  There were stairs, but the doors at the top were locked and only the staff had the keys. You could not get into the elevator unless somebody buzzed for it to open, from behind the desk.

  What did they do, after they lost it?

  “Some just sit,” said Kristy. “Some sit and cry. Some try to holler the house down. You don’t really want to know.”

  Sometimes they got it back.

  “You go in their rooms for a year and they don’t know you from

  Adam. Then one day, it ’s oh, hi, when are we going home. All of a sudden they’re absolutely back to normal again.”

  But not for long.

  “You think, wow, back to normal. And then they’re gone again.” She snapped her fingers. “Like so.”

  In the town where he used to work there was a bookstore that he and Fiona had visited once or twice a year. He went back there by himself.

  He didn’t feel like buying anything, but he had made a list and picked out a couple of the books on it, and then bought another book that he noticed by chance. It was about Iceland. A book of nineteenth-century watercolors made by a lady traveller to Iceland.

  Fiona had never learned her mother’s language and she had never

  shown much respect for the stories that it preserved—the stories that Grant had taught and written about, and still did write about, in his working life. She referred to their heroes as “old Njal” or “old Snorri.” But in the last few years she had developed an interest in the country itself and looked at travel guides. She read about William Morris’s trip, and Auden’s. She didn’t really plan to travel there. She said the weather was too dreadful. Also—she said—there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for—but never did get to see.

  When Grant first started teaching Anglo-Saxon and Nordic Literature he got the regular sort of students in his classes. But after a few years he noticed a change. Married women started going back to school. Not with the idea of qualifying for a better job or for any job but simply to give themselves something more interesting to think about than their usual

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  housework and hobbies. To enrich their lives. And perhaps it followed naturally that the men who taught them these things would become part of the enrichment, that these men would seem to these women more mysterious and desirable than the men they still cooked for and slept with.

  The studies chosen were usually Psychology or Cultural History or English Literature. Archaeology or Linguistics was picked sometimes but dropped when it turned out to be heavy going. Those who signed up for Grant ’s courses might have a Scandinavian background, like Fiona, or they might have learned something about Norse mythology from Wagner or historical novels. There were also a few who thought he was teaching a Celtic language and for whom everything Celtic had a mystic allure.

  He spoke to such aspirants fairly roughly from his side of the desk.

  “If you want to learn a pretty language, go and learn Spanish. Then you can use it if you go to Mexico.”

  Some took his warning and drifted away. Others seemed to be moved in a personal way by his demanding tone. They worked with a will and brought into his office, into his regulated, satisfactory life, the great surprising bloom of their mature female compliance, their tremulous hope of approval.

  He chose the woman named Jacqui Adams. She was the opposite of

  Fiona—short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive. A stranger to irony. The affair lasted for a year, until her husband was transferred. When they were saying good-bye, in her car,
she began to shake uncontrollably.

  It was as if she had hypothermia. She wrote to him a few times, but he found the tone of her letters overwrought and could not decide how to answer. He let the time for answering slip away while he became magically and unexpectedly involved with a girl who was young enough to be her daughter.

  For another and more dizzying development had taken place while

  he was busy with Jacqui. Young girls with long hair and sandalled feet were coming into his office and all but declaring themselves ready for sex. The cautious approaches, the tender intimations of feeling required with Jacqui were out the window. A whirlwind hit him, as it did many

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  others, wish becoming action in a way that made him wonder if there wasn’t something missed. But who had time for regrets? He heard of simultaneous liaisons, savage and risky encounters. Scandals burst wide open, with high and painful drama all round but a feeling that somehow it was better so. There were reprisals—there were firings. But those fired went off to teach at smaller, more tolerant colleges or Open Learning Centers, and many wives left behind got over the shock and took up the costumes, the sexual nonchalance of the girls who had tempted their men. Academic parties, which used to be so predictable, became a mine-field. An epidemic had broken out, it was spreading like the Spanish flu.

  Only this time people ran after contagion, and few between sixteen and sixty seemed willing to be left out.

  Fiona appeared to be quite willing, however. Her mother was dying, and her experience in the hospital led her from her routine work in the registrar’s office into her new job. Grant himself did not go over-board, at least in comparison with some people around him. He never let another woman get as close to him as Jacqui had been. What he felt was mainly a gigantic increase in well-being. A tendency to pudginess that he had had since he was twelve years old disappeared. He ran up steps two at a time. He appreciated as never before a pageant of torn clouds and winter sunset seen from his office window, the charm of antique lamps glowing between his neighbors’ living-room curtains, the cries of children in the park at dusk, unwilling to leave the hill where they’d been tobogganing. Come summer, he learned the names of flowers. In his classroom, after coaching by his nearly voiceless mother-in-law (her affliction was cancer of the throat), he risked reciting and then translat-ing the majestic and gory ode, the head-ransom, the Hofuolausn, composed to honor King Eric Blood-axe by the skald whom that king had condemned to death. (And who was then, by the same king—and by the power of poetry—set free.) All applauded—even the peaceniks in the class whom he ’d cheerfully taunted earlier, asking if they would like to wait in the hall. Driving home that day or maybe another he found an absurd and blasphemous quotation running around in his head.