Good and Dead

by Jane Langton

  Remembering his tragedy, his parishioners grew solemn. But Joe was bringing up the matter himself. Leaning over the reading desk, he spoke about his wife, explaining her latest surgery. “Claire will soon be well enough to have visitors. I know she’d love to become acquainted with the members of this church. But of course her strength mustn’t be overtaxed. Mary Kelly has kindly offered to organize the visiting. Just call Mary, and she’ll arrange it.” Joe stared at his notes, and looked up again. “Mrs. Hill? You have an announcement?”

  Rosemary Hill was a member of the parish committee on prison visiting. Standing up, Rosemary explained that a job and a temporary home were needed for a young inmate of the Concord Reformatory so that he could be discharged on early parole. She’ hoped someone in the congregation would provide either the job or the housing. Then Rosemary sat down, and the occupants of the pews around her sat silent, mulling it over, raising the question uneasily with themselves, trying to set it aside, not altogether succeeding. Ed Bell glanced at his wife and raised his eyebrows. Lorraine rolled-her eyes and made a face, meaning, we’ll talk about it later.

  It was time for the first hymn, and everyone stood up. After the hymn they remained standing to recite the Lord’s Prayer. For Ed Bell it was like talking to an old friend. “Our Father who an in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”

  “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done,” said Rosemary Hill, thinking timidly about her appointment with a specialist in Boston, two weeks away.”

  “… on earth, as it is in heaven,” said Betsy Bucky confidently, soaring upward, rollicking joyfully in the sky, while Carl stood silently beside her with sunken shoulders and gray face.

  “Give us this day our daily bread,” said Parker Upshaw, speaking loudly and clearly, providing leadership as always, thinking that his daily bread was something like two hundred dollars a day, not counting Libby’s income. He smiled to himself, imagining how some rich old geezer in Biblical times would stare at his daily bread, if the old geezer could see it stacked up in gold Roman coins.

  “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” muttered Jerry Gibby, adding a silent parenthesis: Oh, Jesus, Mother Mary, you hear that, God?

  “And lead us not into temptation,” whispered Arlene Pott, thinking of Wally and Josie Coil, angrily transferring her prayer to her husband.

  “… but deliver us from evil,” mumbled Joe Bold in anguish. Deliver my wife from her sickness. Spare her, O Lord.

  “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen,” murmured Joan Sawyer, for whom God was a once-powerful deity who had created the world and then turned his attention to other things.

  10

  Work, work, work has been my lot this day.

  James Lorin Chapin

  Private Journal, Lincoln, 1848

  These days Homer’s researches on the outward spread of the faith from Concord were taking him to the library of the town of Lincoln. Bundled up in a heavy sweater, Homer sat at a table in the marble chill of the vault in the basement, taking notes on the sermons of the Reverend William Lawrence. Lawrence’s eighteenth-century handwriting was spidery and faded, his sermons dry and doctrinal. Before long, the dust of the ages began piling up around Homer’s ankles, his knees, his waist, his throat. He was suffocating. Jumping to his feet, he put away the little volume of sermons, picked up his papers, and drove home for his midday meal.

  Pulling up beside the house on Fairhaven Bay, Homer ran up the porch steps eagerly, remembering the words of the funeral eulogy for Reverend Lawrence’s wife. “Hail, yokefellow!” he cried, throwing open the door. “O woman of stately mien and benign countenance, O wife of uncommon wisdom and prudence, what’s for lunch?”

  But Mary was on the phone, and Homer had to make his own sandwich. Slathering mayonnaise on bread, he listened resentfully while the women of the parish called, one after another, making appointments to see the minister’s stricken wife.

  Mary had become essential to Claire Bold. Claire had grasped at her old acquaintance, and she clung to Mary now as her only friend in a foreign land. Her desperate friendship was taking a lot of Mary’s time. Luckily it was Homer’s turn to teach the class on Civil War literary history at Memorial Hall in Cambridge. And now Mary was simply shelving her new study of the women of nineteenth-century Concord. All of them were dead and gone, after all, and here was a twentieth-century woman, alive and breathing (if only barely), who actually needed her. Every day Mary sat in Claire’s hospital room, correcting midterm papers or reading aloud, while Claire struggled to gain enough strength to go home. Every day another visitor dropped in promptly at three o’clock.

  Augusta Gill brought sprays of flowering cherry, Lorraine Bell long wands of peach blossom she had urged into bloom in jars of water. Imogene Gibby presented Claire with a pair of ruffled bedroom slippers, Barbara Fenster potted up a cutting from an enormous rubber plant that had come down in her family, Libby Upshaw gave Claire a thirty-dollar azalea, Betsy Bucky made her a bed jacket appliquéd with teddy bears, Rosemary Hill had forced a bowl of tulips on the cold steps under her bulkhead doors.

  In spite of all this attention from her husband’s parishioners, in spite of the care and concern of the nurses and doctors, Claire Bold made no progress toward getting well. There were tests and more tests. When a diseased bone was discovered in her shoulder, the surgeon called joe into his office and tried to speak plainly. “Perhaps it doesn’t make sense to put her through the ordeal another time.”

  But Joe refused to understand. “There’s no alternative,” he said desperately, flapping his hands. “Is there? Is there?”

  “Well, I guess not,” said the surgeon feebly.

  “He can’t let her go,” said Mary, telling Homer about it afterward. “That’s the trouble. It’s his way of holding fast.”

  The case of Howie Sawyer seemed equally hopeless. Howie was in no danger of dying, but there was no expectation of mental recovery. “He could live for another twenty or thirty years,” said the cardiologist; looking at Joan with pity, making no pretense that it was good news.

  The nursing home cost a hundred dollars a day. It was too expensive. Joan had learned to her dismay that in the last few months before his attack in church, Howie’s affairs had fallen into a disastrous state of confusion. He had ordered the same five thousand rolls of broadloom carpeting from a firm in Philadelphia nine separate times, apparently under the delusion that each time was the first. There were urgent phone calls from the proprietors of warehouses in Braintree, where the rolls were stacked in tens of thousands. Instead of a comfortable bank account, a portfolio of investments, and a prosperous business, Howie’s estate was a disheveled mass of unpaid bills.

  “I was wondering if I should say something to you,” his lawyer confessed to Joan. “But generally it isn’t good practice to talk to the wife behind the client’s back. I must say, however, I was increasingly dismayed.” The lawyer failed to ask Joan about her plans for dealing with her financial embarrassment. Sympathy was all very well, up to a point, but it was usually better not to get personally involved. Surely the woman had friends of her own.

  Joan had friends, indeed, but there was little they could do for her. She had taken care of herself before Howie came along; she would take care of herself now. Without a pang she put the house on the market, found an apartment in Watertown, and went back to her old job in the office of a lumberyard in Walt ham. She applied for Medicaid for Howie and visited him every day after work. She continued to come to church, driving over from Watertown, although she wished her fellow church members would not stop by to see Howie with the same dutifulness with which they called upon Claire Bold. Perhaps it would be. better for them not to behold the spectacle of a man who had so entirely lost himself.

  But on one Saturday morning Joan was glad to’ have the company of Mary Kelly at Juniper Terrace.

  “It looks like a nice place,” said Mary politely, inspecting the scalped yews beside the front steps.
Juniper Terrace had a sleazy pomposity, a kind of cut-rate majesty, with tall columns of white-painted aluminum and a doorway ornamented with a skimpy pediment and urn.

  “Well, it’s not a nice place,” said Joan.

  The front hall matched the exterior. There was an upward-swooping staircase and a chandelier on a chain. At a desk in the curve of the stairway sat the receptionist. She had an ageless face and a complicated arrangement of fawn-blond hair. Gracefully she rose and hurried toward them, her tall heels wobbling on the marble floor. “Oh, Mrs. Sawyer, I’d like to speak to you here in the foyer after your visit, if it be convenient.”

  “Well, all right,” said Joan, running ahead of Mary up the carpeted stairs.

  Together they walked through the TV room, where rows of elderly children drooped in their wheelchairs. “It’s just not a good place,” murmured Joan angrily, breaking into a run in the corridor on the other side.

  They were stopped by an obstruction in the shape of an old woman who was being wheeled out to her visiting relatives.

  “Doesn’t Mildred look a picture?” said the nurse, fluffing Mildred’s white hair, patting her. new housecoat.

  “Aunt Mildred?” said one of the relatives loudly. “I brought you a present. Shall I open it for you?”

  “Oh, Mildred,” said the nurse, “look at that, a new pair of slippers. What’s that, dear? Why, Mildred, what a naughty thing to say!”

  Mary had been in nursing homes before, but now she was distressed all over again. At the next open door she hesitated and looked in at the specter on the bed. The old woman’s face had fallen in. Her mouth was a hole. She was uttering hoarse cries. She stared at Mary and gestured with her hooked hand.

  Two nurses were chatting in the hall. “Oh, please,” said Mary, running up to them. They stopped talking and looked at her. “The woman in this room needs something, I think. She’s crying.”

  One of the nurses abruptly turned away and walked briskly in the other direction. The other smiled. “Who, Shirley? Don’t worry about Shirley. She’s fine, just fine. Shirley always cries.” Dodging around Mary, the nurse strode past the open door without looking in.

  Shirley always cries. Mary stood uncertainly. She wanted to do something for Shirley. But Joan was waiting for her at the door of Howie’s room. Mary gave up and hurried down the hall.

  She met Phil Shooky in the doorway. Phil had been visiting Howie. He was shaken. His feet were uncertain on the polished floor. “It’s so terrible to see him like this,” he said to Joan. “Just terrible.”

  “I know,” said Joan. “Thank you, Phil, for coming.”

  “Goodbye,” said Phil, looking vaguely around, starting in the direction of the sun porch at the end of the corridor.

  “Not that way, Philip,” said Mary, taking his arms lightly and turning him around.

  “Oh, I see,” said Phil. But a moment later he was back, wandering helplessly, and she had to set him on course again.

  They found Howie locked in a wheelchair. A tray was clamped across his lap. When he saw Joan, he began thumping with his big hands on the tray. She stroked his arm and held his hand, and soon he stopped thumping and quieted down. His attention drifted away. When Joan released his hand, he seemed not to notice. When she said goodbye, he was still gazing at the flowered wallpaper.

  Mary was as upset as Phil Shooky. Out in the corridor, walking down the hall again with Joan, she didn’t know what to say. There were no nurses in sight. There was no sound but the heartbroken cries of the woman whose name was Shirley. Don’t worry about Shirley. Shirley always cries. How many years had Shirley been crying?

  “Oh, Mrs. Sawyer!” The woman at the desk in the lofty front hall hurried to the foot of the stairs as they came down, then drew Joan aside and spoke to her in a whisper. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to move your husband to another facility.”

  “Move him?” Joan was astonished. “But why?”

  “I’m afraid you didn’t understand the terms upon which we accepted his application to reside here. We do not accept Medicaid patients at Juniper Terrace. This is a private facility. If he is to be paid for by Medicaid, you will have to find an alternate residence.”

  “Oh, no,” said Joan. “I thought—”

  Not a single fawn-blond hair stirred as the woman shook her head from side to side and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. Medicaid payments are not acceptable. You told us your husband was to be a private guest.”

  “Well, that’s what I thought at the time. But I can’t pay that much anymore. You see,” said Joan desperately, “I thought my situation was better than it is. I thought—”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Sawyer. So could you please be ready to move Mr. Sawyer out as soon as possible? We have another guest waiting for his room. Oh, and Mrs. Sawyer?” The woman glanced at a paper in her hand. “There will be an extra charge of two hundred and fifty dollars for a broken window.”

  Rosemary Hill arrived promptly, to the minute, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital for her appointment with the specialist. But he was distressed that she had waited so long before coming to see him. “You should have done something about it sooner. A lot sooner. You see what’s happened.” He showed her the X-rays and shook his head. “The thing’s out of control.”

  Timidly, Rosemary studied the white blobs on the dark negatives. “Yes,” she said, “I see. Well, I know I should have done something about it last fall, but the pain went away for a while. I thought it didn’t amount to anything. Listen”—she turned to the doctor swiftly and said what was on her mind—“when it gets bad, can I count on you to finish it quickly? You know, fix it so that I don’t have to wait long?”

  The doctor looked at her sorrowfully. “Look, Mrs. Hill, there are things we can do about the pain. You don’t have to worry about that. But you can’t ask anyone to do what you just said. I can’t do that. I’m really sorry.”

  Dr. Spinney said the same thing when Rosemary made a special appointment to see him, just to talk about the problem of making a graceful exit by her own will rather than an awkward one at the brutal hand of nature.

  “Rosemary, you don’t know what you’re asking. Listen, there was a case just last year in Tennessee. There was this doctor, a good man with a fine reputation. He obeyed the urgings of this old guy who was dying, and the pressure from his daughter and son-in-law. They all wanted the same thing. They were all pleading with the doctor to finish him off quickly. The old man didn’t want to die in the hospital, he said. He didn’t want to be a burden for another six months or a year. He didn’t want all that anguish and mental suffering, and all that expense. What was the point? So the doctor relented and eased him out of his life painlessly and quickly. But then the son-in-law, the bastard, realized he knew something about the doctor that could be held against him, and he sued him for malpractice, for first-degree murder. He won the case and. the physician lost his license and went to jail, and the insurance company paid seven million dollars to the daughter and son-in-law, and the cost of malpractice insurance doubled overnight in Tennessee. So I’m afraid the answer to your question”—Dr. Spinney took Rosemary’s hand and looked at her kindly—“is no.”

  “But look at Claire Bold,” said Rosemary, gazing at him intently. “How long must she go on suffering? She’s had three operations. I understand there’s to be another. Surely that’s a mistake. Anybody can see there’s no hope. And Howie Sawyer! He could live for years as a vegetable. Why doesn’t somebody help him out of his misery?”

  But Arthur Spinney was intractable.

  “Well, all right,” said Rosemary to herself, “I’ll think of something. I’ll take care of it myself. I’ll find a way. But first I’ll clean the attic. I can’t leave the attic for the kids to clear out. I’ll clean the attic and then I’ll do something.”

  Somehow, some way, she would take care of it.

  11

  Twos from the silver flood that VENUS rose.

  Reverend Charles Stearns, Lincoln

>   The Ladies’ Philosophy of Love, 1797

  Eleanor Bell lay in the tub. The water foamed around her in perfumed bubbles. Her breasts rose out of the bubbles, pale and freckled. They seemed miraculous to Eleanor, and important, terribly important, more important than anything else. And yet she couldn’t talk about them out loud. She couldn’t say proudly, “Look at me.” Her mother had stopped short one day and stared at her and said, “Eleanor, darling, good gracious, you’re developing a bust. We’ll have to go to Marshall’s and get you some brassières.”

  Climbing out of the tub, hot and pink, Eleanor put on an old shirt and a pair of ragged cutoff jeans torn to the hip socket. It was a nice day, but it was still only the middle of May. Eleanor shivered as she leaned against the sink and got to work on her face. She would have to change clothes again this afternoon for her job at the copy center, but this morning Bo Harris was coming over to start work on his car, and he was going to notice her this time. Just because he was a junior and she was a freshman, that didn’t mean he didn’t have eyes. Painstakingly Eleanor applied mascara to each separate fine hair of her lashes, then drew a line along her eyelid with a pointed brush. Consulting the latest issue of Seventeen for advice on the use of cover stick and cosmetic sponge, she dabbed at her nose and drew big dots under her eyes, then blended it all in, using outward strokes. Next she chose a blue eye shadow and highlighted it with silver. “Finally, for a perfect pout, add a touch of soft, nearly nude pink lip-gloss.”

  Eleanor occupied the bathroom for half an hour. When she came out at last, her mother was approaching with a pile of clean towels. Eleanor gave Lorraine Bell a brilliant anxious smile, then dodged into her own room and slammed the door.

  Lorraine stared at the shivering door, astonished. But she held her tongue, remembering her own youth and a certain kidney-shaped dressing table in New Jersey, its glass top covered with creams and elixirs, powder puffs and curling irons and eyelash curlers. Adolescence hit a girl like an avalanche, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. No, it wasn’t an avalanche; it was more like a cave, a labyrinth Eleanor would have to negotiate without a candle. It was a fraying rope across a bottomless abyss. Would she come out of it whole and unscathed? Lorraine and Ed Bell had watched and waited four times already, fearfully, while Eleanor’s older brothers and sisters had collapsed under the fall of rock, and descended into the cave, and teetered along the rope across the chasm. Every one of those four kids had come out all right. Surely, worried Lorraine, Eleanor would too?