by Lore Segal
She glares. Why at me? I’m very sympathetic.
Behind them comes a skinny girl in a little white skirt. The gold braid on her peaked hat spells
The amputee
you see
has a chance
to dance
O.L.
Balanced on one leg, she twirls her crutch in the air, catches it, and stumps on. Behind her a pair of Mongoloids waltz around and around.
The twisted boy who follows wears a sweat shirt on which it says
The cripples
all
are having
a ball
O.L.
He ducks his head with a back-down-sideways motion, never quite in step, nor exactly alternating with the crossing of one foot over the other, in a syncopation that is out of time with any rhythm this world can make out, and marches, eyes fixed in terror, into the press of people coming toward him.
The geriatric case who brings up the rear turns her eager pinhead, like a bespectacled, super-intelligent chicken, this way and that. There’s something about the excellent cut of her sparse hair, a familiarity about the subtle browns of the dress …
She sees me and waves her sign on which is written
A poet who searched throughout Asia
For the word that she’d lost in aphasia
Found it here all the time,
Where it scans with her rhyme—
And her reason? To please and amaze ya.
O.L.
“It’s old Lucinella, isn’t it?” I ask her.
She nods. “Official CCRG poet.”
“What’s CCRG?”
“Cripples’ Conch-shell Raisin …” she says and shakes her head. Her arms make the charade player’s repeated urgent motion to draw my comprehension toward herself. “Conch-shell Raisin Group.”
“Cripples’ Consciousness Raising Group?” I suggest.
Right right right, she nods, her eyes happy with the triumph of communication.
“You probably should catch up with your friends,” I say, “but I’ve always wondered: does the malfunction of language tell you anything about the way it works?”
She nods eagerly, yes yes, holds up a forefinger for my attention, points to her head, and bends the forefinger to make a ring with the thumb.
“The head is round? Is a ring?’
No no no. Come on, come on, she motions with her arms.
“A circle? Zen!”
Come on, come on.
“Is okay? The head … the thinking is okay!”
Right right right. Attend: she points to her throat and repeats the sign of the ring.
“And speaking is okay.”
Right right. Attend: she moves her fore-and middle fingers with a scissor action across her face.
“But they don’t connect. What a brutal affliction for a poet!”
Brutal, right, right, she nods. “But so interstiting … interstriating … interspersing …” She shakes her head, laughs, and, urgently holding up one finger of her right hand, taps four left fingers on the wrist.
“One word. Four syllables,” I say. “First two syllables, ‘inter.’ Third syllable …”
Old Lucinella closes her eyes and puts her cheek on her horizontal palm.
“I’m afraid you may miss your friends,” I say worriedly.
Come on come on come on.
“Sleep? Rest! Interest! Interesting!”
Right right right right. “It is all so …” Old Lucinella stretches and turns her scaly, ancient neck like a turtle this way and that. She lifts her arms, points all around at the sky that has turned as black as black, at the Times building crawl, which says: … 11:55 … PROBABILITY OF SHOWER ACTIVITY … 11:56 … at the life-insurance eagle flapping neon red, Mickey Mouse, all the prettily lighted booths, and at the crowd, the inexplicable current of its movements: New York! Behind the owl spectacles on the great emaciated beak of her nose, old Lucinella’s eyes are suffused. “It’s so immensely, it’s all so intersticing …” She shakes her head.
“I really think maybe you’d better go.”
Right right. She waves to me and trots after the other cripples.
“Benjamin, for heaven’s sake! I haven’t seen you since the party at Maurie’s.”
“So, Lucinella,” Ben says, “this is the right party at last?”
“At last, Benjamin. This is the big blast!” I say. “And only one minute more till midnight.”
I see George and Mary in the crowd. I ask them, “How do you handle being frightened?”
George says, “By thinking of Last Things.” Mary says, “Making applesauce.” But it’s too late for that now. There goes the twelve o’clock siren, and I hear the screaming. At the edge of the crowd, people begin to run. I feel my flesh curdle—it must be from the radiation already released into the air, so now I don’t have to worry any longer what it is that’s going to happen. Now it has happened, I can breathe blissfully, and I raise my head and see Meyers. I ask him, “Why do I feel so euphoric?” Meyers says, “Euphoria is the flip side of disaster.” He’s looking up too. “It’s a direct hit,” he says.
At the top of the Times building boils a mass of blackish-brown bubbles that crowd each other out and shoot upwards with such a roaring that the little Puerto Rican boy with his shirt blasted off him, his arms hanging, his mouth as wide as it will open, seems to be crying on a silent screen. He rocks on the balls of his feet, wailing, wailing.
Where’s his mother? I look up to the second-floor window and see the wall crack, lean, and crumble toward me. The sky’s on fire.
“Now I understand!” I say to Betterwheatling, who’s appeared beside me. “Of course! The Rose, the Fire, the Bomb, and the Great Orgasm, they’re all one.”
Betterwheatling smiles and looks not through his glasses but down his nose at me, and he says, “You’re such a romantic.”
“A romantic! Me?” I cry. I’m upset.
Betterwheatling points his umbrella at the blackish-brown cloud as it is about to mushroom. It turns out to be the retractable kind, stops billowing, and reverses like a genie tricked back into its bottle. The young Puerto Rican father has come out of the street door in his BVD’s, tucks his little yelling, kicking boy under his arm, and carries him into the house.
I look to the edge of the crowd where the screaming people are still running. They are holding newspapers over their heads and duck squealing and laughing into the subway entrance to get out of the sudden rain. Betterwheatling has unfolded his umbrella over both of us, and I start being frightened again.
“Here you are!” William says. “Are you hungry? Let’s go get something at the Melting Pot Booth.”
“By the way,” I say, “William, do you think I’m a romantic? It isn’t even my idea. I mean, it’s all Dr. Treublau and T.S. Eliot. William, I almost forgot! Did you really get the Times Square Prize for the Best Younger Poet?’
“I did indeed,” William says. “Lucinella, do you think I am?”
“Absolutely!” I answer him. “Pass me a marinated mushroom, please.”
I scramble up his trouser leg into his jacket pocket and poke out my head. “I’ve just learned how to handle terror,” I say.
“How?” William asks.
“By remembering I have to die,” I say, and close the flap over my head.
XIII
“Lucinella dead? Impossible! There must be some mistake. I saw her in Times Square only yesterday and she was alive, I know, because I stood as close to her as I am to you now, and we were talking.”
“Well, she is dead; died in the early hours of the morning in William’s pocket through absolutely no fault of his. She climbed in herself. The funeral is at eleven.”
“Well, well. If the funeral is at eleven, then Lucinella must be dead.”
Please, William, put me in a plain pine box, not one of those polished jobs, and use the difference to buy yourself a comfortable chair to sit in or take a trip to Greece for me, William, it’s pleasure tha
t will keep you grieving, I’ll be so absent. Besides, I like plain pine, if it isn’t waxed or varnished, though I guess they’d better apply a coat of sealer. I like the idea of a final community with worms but not the practice. Or can I learn, like the Ancient Mariner, and bless maggots?
Keep the casket closed; no open casket, my nose is too long. And let there be Bach. They may mention god so long as it’s in Hebrew. See if you can stop the rabbi speaking English unless he is a poet, which isn’t probable.
Now that I’m wearing my plain pine, it does feel skimpy; one part of me always craved splendor.
It’s not a bad turnout. William, his chin pale and mottled, looks like a man after a heavy illness, and J. D. Winterneet’s eyes are red. Thank you, Winterneet, for minding. Now his whole face flushes with the effort to keep himself from smiling. It’s all right, Winterneet, don’t worry if my death excites you. Feel what you feel what you feel. I used to worry that I never wept appropriately at death but cried at anything by Bach; synagogues and churches indiscriminately made me swallow tears, I think, as if there’d been a promise broken. Maybe Bach is the promise kept?
The music stops and we are on our own again.
“Adonai nasan, Adoinai lakach. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” says the rabbi. “We are gathered together this morning to mourn the passing of Lucinella, poet, author, woman, a young woman much loved, to judge from the number of you gathered here today.”
(Strike the second “gathered.” Keep those Bible rhythms out of your modern prose and use your ear, Rabbi! If you say “this morning” you can’t say “to mourn.”)
“Poetry is a hard taskmaster,” the rabbi says.
(Much he knows. How many minutes is he supposed to go on talking?)
“It is the poet’s sacred task to keep his eye on his own heart and on the pulse of the nation, for it is he who, if I may be allowed to coin a phrase, must hold the mirror up to nature. But there comes to all of us the night when we must call it a day. The farmer hangs up his scythe, the scientist washes his test tube, the banker locks his vault, and Lucinella covers her typewriter for the last time, and God the Great Critic says, ‘Daughter, how have you used the talent I have given you?’ Lucinella answers him and says, ‘Success did not ruin me, neither did failure make me falter. The critic’s cruel pen did not turn me from my path nor did his praise unduly raise me up.’ And the Father says, ‘Well done, Daughter,’ stand and say after me, ‘Yisgadal veyiska-dash …’”
Bach is back. God, let me not be dead.
The last mourner has filed out. They switch off the phonograph, put me in the elevator, take me down and out the back door into the waiting hearse. (I always rather admired efficiency.) The driver hops in. We’re going east. There are a lot of nursing homes on Seventy-third Street. The wheelchairs are out this May morning. We turn north along the park and stop, I imagine, to let people pile into the limousines.
Betterwheatling, once, walking me around the lake at Yaddo, said my thoughts were natury. That’s funny, Betterwheatling, but look at those chartreuse leaves—buds of leaf! In one week the park will be thick and green. I remember reading about a letter left by a suicide who said in spring she longed to push the flowers back into the ground.
We’re moving. Seventy-seventh Street, where Maurie and Ulla live, right across from the museum. The names of the famous dead are engraved in Roman capitals around the façade: Pasteur, Pythagoras, Darwin, Einstein … lest we forget. Why do those animals in glass cases, stuffed by experts to look as if caught in mid-motion, look so dead?
That time in Nîmes, I remember, the bull galloped halfway round the arena with the banderilla sticking between its eyes; it slapped against the muzzle. The bull thrust its head forward, vomited blood, and the light went out in the open eyes, the black hide turned dusty, the forelegs buckled: it hung dead in the noon air.
Here’s where Lynn and Dick live. (They were there. She cried.) And those people whose name I never could remember—whose party William and I went to—where that man forgot his wife and had to go back upstairs …
Hundred-and-tenth. That burned-out body shop’s been here as long as I remember, next to the fly-bitten luncheonette called HARR’S PARADIE. I forget the name of the bridge we’re crossing. I always liked bridges.
Here the houses are more alien than Harlem. Who builds these neat homes on highways next to secondhand car lots with neon green and yellow pennants clapping in the wind? Motel Row. A Carvel’s. McDonald’s. Limbo. If I can find a single fine proportion or one graceful line, I shall be saved!
The cemetery wall goes on and goes on.
In Rome, I insisted on mistaking our direction, and Zeus and I walked all the way round the outside of Vatican City. For an hour and a half I kept thinking any moment we would come in sight of the right arm of St. Peter’s colonnade. There’s a cobbled path, a high, blank wall; on the right, nothing but weeds. At midday we met an angel, disguised as an ancient gardener, on his knees scraping the moss off cobble after cobble. He said it was his job to keep them tidy, but I believe it is to measure eternity on earth.
Inside the cemetery gates the driver gets a ticket with my number on it, and we move at a round pace between the graves, double back up the next row, down a third. “I had not thought death had undone so many.” (The last line is banal even though it’s in French, yet it’s true too. Your heart, sisters, will ache like mine to be dead.) Graves to the right, graves to the left of me. We’re massed on this hill. Imagine an army of us pitched against all of you …
They’ve stopped the first limousine around the bend. Reform funeral directors know that one can barely suffer the coffin at rest, much less when it is being moved, which suggests the motionless contents: me. It musn’t be seen like this, suspended on two poles over a hole in the ground. They hide me under two pieces of faded canvas.
The mourners are coming up the hill. The sky is a wild blue. Is that William crying?
“Say after me, ‘Sh’ma Yisroel …’ and throw on a handful of earth.”
Is that all? The mourners are turning to descend. Already men with shovels are piling on the dirt.
Hold it a moment! Wait! If you wait, I’ll tell you a story. I got the idea flying low over a mountain that looked like Gulliver face down, straining to rise although a million Lilliputian threads have him pegged to the ground. I imagined Lazarus tugged equally by Christ’s power to raise him and his yearning to stay under. I never wrote the story because I couldn’t figure where to go from there. Stop! Not yet! I’ll tell you another one. There’s a young man, in a subway accident. He’s not actually hurting—probably in shock. He’s watching the firemen put out the fires and coughs from the smoke. A policeman with a clipboard is taking down his name, address, place and date of birth, name of his father, his mother’s maiden name. The doctor arrives and gives him an injection. They bring blankets from somewhere. He’s pronounced dead and the subway resumes its journey. It stops at the regular Seventh Avenue IRT local stations, One-hundred-third, -tenth, One-hundred-sixteenth, and out into the sunlight at One hundred and twenty-fifth Street and back underground. The next stop begins to look unfamiliar, though he must have been here one time or another. It’s the turnstiles’ not being where he would expect them. At the next station the wastebaskets puzzle him, because they aren’t orange, and the tiles on the walls have a wrong, a foreign, look like the Métro, but now it’s the material that’s alien. And there are inexplicable free-standing objects … I never wrote this story either. I don’t write science fiction. How do you describe things whose raison d’être is that they are out of ken? Meanwhile, Jimmy travels on through the ur-particles of chaos—a sort of homogenized matter—out into Nothing, which cannot be written, which was the point of the story.
The thud of earth falling is duller now. More layers cover me. They say that ghosts come back from the grave to get retribution, or to make amends, but have you never left a lover and felt your bowels rip, and didn’t you go back just once more and j
ust once more? Let me haunt, if it’s only for a little while! I’ll get used to the separation bit by bit.
Ulla and Maurie drive William home.
The key in the lock echoes. “I’m sorry about all the clothes all over the floor,” says William. “Lucinella was going to find a chest of drawers …”
Ulla says she’ll make the coffee. “You sit, William.”
“I’m okay,” says William.
“I’ll get the door,” Maurie says.
It’s Winterneet. He takes William’s hand and says, “Just the other day, in Times Square, I was standing as close to her as I am to you now …”
Ulla says, “I’ll get the door.”
Betterwheatling and Cilena, and Meyers. Meyers says, “I’ve brought a goddamn apple pie.”
“I know,” Ulla says, “I keep making coffee. Let me go find a plate. Sit down, William.”
“I’m fine,” William says. “You’ll have to sit on the floor, I’m sorry. Lucinella was always going to get chairs but never found one that was elegant and honest, both.”
Maurie says, “William should go to Yaddo for a week or two. Shall I give them a call?”
William says thank you, but no, he’s got to clean up here.
The doorbell rings and George and Mary Friend arrive, and Pavlovenka, and Frank and Alice Friendling. Bert has come all the way in from New Jersey; Benjamin, Newman, they all come. Ulla brings them coffee. “Thank you,” they say. “No, no pie, thank you.” Nobody feels like eating. (Later they’ll get hungry.)
Meyers says he got it at the place down in the Village. Betterwheatling says he know a better place way over on First Avenue, he thinks it’s in the Fifties, where thy bake their own.
They’ve stopped talking about me.
William says, “Lucinella’s favorite food used to be bread and butter.” He gets up, walks out the door into the hall, gets on the elevator, and rides up and down, holding his finger on the CLOSE button. Then he goes back to his friends. They’re sitting quietly, talking.
Betterwheatling is saying he saw a woman climbing the subway stairs one step at a time. Her right shoe was unlaced and she had no sock on, so you could see the foot was covered with sores. Betterwheatling says he had some notion of giving her his sock or some other sock, which seemed implausible, so he decided it could not hurt as badly as it looked and ran past, up the stairs, and downstairs to the local platform, and took out his paperback. When he looked up, the woman was still putting her right foot one step up and bringing the left behind it. His train came. Before they closed the doors, Betterwheatling says, he looked up and saw the woman putting her right foot down the first step of the local stairs.