Good and Dead

by Jane Langton

  He dreaded it. He had accepted the invitation more than a year ago, before Claire had become so ill. Now it was all he could do to frame an adequate speech. But when the day arrived, a rainy Saturday morning in June, he urged himself into his car and drove to Cambridge to do his duty.

  He knew why the organizers of the celebration had chosen him. Among his colleagues he had acquired a reputation as a sort of late-twentieth-century incarnation of Emersonian eloquence. He was famous in a small way as a transcendentalist of the same stripe. Driving down Oxford Street, looking for a parking space, Joe wondered how long he would be able to preserve the esteem his Pittsburgh preaching had won him. Now with each passing week in the Nashoba church, as Claire faltered closer and closer to a spaded trench in the lawn of the cemetery on Carlisle Street, his Sunday-morning sermons were more hesitant, more lame, more untruthful. Why, then, did the drowned visions beyond his windshield continue to press in on him, distracting his attention, forcing him to wonder at the rain falling in misty sheets and at the three-deckers and apartment buildings and science classrooms rising thickly on either side? He saw the classrooms crowded with students, and in the houses mothers spooning food into the open mouths of children, and men staring out the window at the rain. Out of sight to the south, beyond Memorial Hall and the Yard, lay the Charles River winding in a gray loop. He could almost smell the fresh muddy damp of the water-soaked shore. Even the vast bulk of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, that familiar place where he had spent so many hours cataloguing blowfish, attracted him with its monumental grip on the ground. Even the pattern of the chain-link fence around the parking lot at Andover Hall gave his vulnerable eyes no rest, even the raindrops beaded on the polished hoods of cars.

  To Joe’s surprise, he found an empty slot, and pulled in. Turning off his engine, he looked at his watch. He was more than an hour early. He didn’t want to walk into Divinity Hall too soon. What should he do now?

  The rain fell, too, on Joan Sawyer as she moved her husband into the County Hospital in Waltham. For Joan, the rain provided no visual stimulus. It merely added to the grimness of her errand.

  But the hospital was not as bad as she had feared. The staff members were tough and friendly, the head nurse massive and competent, armored like a knight in a stout foundation garment. Beneath her white uniform, her rigid bearing was obviously sustained by buckles, zippers, and grommets, a mighty girdle with a great fan of laces across the rear. Corseted thus, the Woman inspired confidence.

  Yet the place itself was more depressing than Juniper Terrace. The patients were an even sadder lot, and the ward, while clean and airy, was pockmarked and battered as though the blood of battle were hosed down every day.

  The head nurse introduced Joan and Howie to the other patients, Miss Stein, Mr. Canopus, Mrs. Beddoes, Mr. O’Doyle, Mr. Keizer. All of them were suffering from the same sort of affliction that had destroyed Howie. They stared languidly at Joan—all except Miss Stein, who kept her eyes shut. Joan shook hands with them, then cried out as something hit her painfully in the shoulder. “No, no, Mr. O’Doyle,” raged the head nurse, snatching up his ball. “What did I tell you? No, you can’t have it back, not today.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Joan, rubbing her shoulder. Then she said goodbye to Howie, afraid that he would cling to her and refuse to stay. But he hardly seemed to notice he was in a different place. Joan left him in the care of the head nurse and drove away, grateful that the transfer had been uneventful, wondering which was worse, her life before or after her husband’s mental disintegration.

  Before Howie’s stroke, Joan had lived in a condition of fierce hypocrisy, clothing her unhappiness in a perpetual pretense of contentment. It had been a ceaseless muscular effort of will, like lifting weights or balancing plates on sticks above her head. Her. decision to marry Howie had been a rational act, an attempt to improve her life, to exchange her dreary apartment in Somerville for Howie’s handsome house in the suburbs, and her dull job for perfect freedom. She would be alone all day, Joan had thought, she would take walks in the woods, she would make new friends and entertain.

  It had been a mistake. Whenever she ventured into the wooded valley behind the house, it was only to discover that Howie’s name was emblazoned on every tree, stamped on every leaf. And the dinner parties dominated by Howie’s loud voice had been the keenest torture. A few weeks ago she had thought life would never ask more of her in the way of bitter courage than those cheerful goodbyes to clusters of pitying guests.

  But now her daily visits to Howie had become another kind of torment, sharpened by something new, her raging sense of. error. The reasoning part of her mind knew that Howie’s condition was purely a physical breakdown. The unreasoning parts of her body, her heart, lungs, and liver, told her that if she had truly loved him, he would not now be a puzzled beast locked in a bullpen. Joan was torn apart by the shattering disparity between her genuine concern for his welfare and her passionate desire that he should die.

  It was still raining. At the end of the hospital driveway she impulsively urged her car left instead of right. With the rain battering the windshield, she couldn’t face the thought of her dark apartment. She felt wretched and careless. Driving mindlessly along Trapelo Road, she beheld the shape of her own bitterness as if from some calm zenith. It was not some nameless woe, but a precise and particular despair. Knowing so clearly what was happening to her, she abhorred it. Her pity and scorn for Howie had flowed over into a contempt for everything else, that was the trouble. All the other men in the world had begun to seem pitiful, too, inadequate and fallible. She had cut herself off from human affection. The punishment for her failure to love Howie was the inability to love anyone or anything else. The world had become drab. The sky was no longer blue. The stars were merely flecks of chalk on a smeared blackboard.

  In Cambridge, Joan parked on Sacramento Street, then walked along Oxford to the Museum of Comparative Zoology to try the tonic effect on her condition of stuffed zoological specimens in glass cases. She hadn’t visited the museum since she had come with her father on Sunday afternoons long ago to see the hummingbirds and the whale bones and the bird that puffed out its throat like a red balloon. Would they still be there, twenty years later?

  Yes, yes, the bones were there. Joan grinned with pleasure at the whale still hanging gigantically from the ceiling, its vast baleen bristling like a comb. And the place still smelled of embalming fluid and mothballs and feathers and varnish and leather and the shells of giant Galapágos turtles collected a hundred years ago. The hummingbirds were there too, scores of them, poised with their long bills tipped up, their wings outstretched, gazing at Joan as if she were a colossal flower. They were dustier than she remembered. They had been in the case a long time. Joan could imagine the bright skins arriving in tiny parcels from Burma and Ceylon, from Brazil and Chile, from California and Oregon.

  Cheered by the hummingbirds, she stopped to admire the small hippo and the warthog, then made her way to the glass cases in which the great cats stalked, caught in mid-pace, their glass eyes staring. Someone else was looking at the lions. It was Joseph Bold.

  Joe glanced at her without making any sign of recognition, then began to speak as if he were continuing a monologue. “You see,” he said, gesturing at the lioness, “those claws are retractable, like a house cat’s. She can fold them down, then lift them up to claw at something whenever she feels like it.”

  “Yes,” said Joan, staring at the claws. “So she can.” “It’s what Darwin said,” Joe went on, waving a forlorn hand. “He said this terrible thing.”

  “He did?” said Joan.

  “He said …” Joe paused and turned to her as if to unburden himself of some ghastly secret. “He said that a devil’s chaplain could write a book about the horrible blundering cruelty of nature. That’s what he said.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Joan. “I guess I read that somewhere myself.”

  “Well, that’s it.” Joe turned and waved feebly at the
other glass cases. “It’s all like that.” Without saying goodbye, he walked away, his shoulders sagging, his hollow coat flapping. Then he looked back at her and released another appalling confidence. “You know what else he said whenever anybody asked him if he was the one who wrote the Origin of Species? He said it was like confessing to a murder.” With this hideous disclosure, Joe wandered away and disappeared in the direction of the gibbons and chimpanzees.

  Joan turned away too, and wandered in the other direction, looking for the bird that puffed out its chest like a balloon. She found it with the peacocks, the frigate bird. The taxidermist had stuffed its bare red breast with wads of padding. “Female frigate birds,” said the legend on the card, “are attracted to the male during the mating season by this extraordinary ability of the male to extend its breast.”

  Joan stared at the frigate bird, realizing to her astonishment that she had been snatched completely out of herself by her encounter with Joseph Bold. His drooping coat and melancholy face were working upon her in the same way that the breast of the male frigate bird compelled the attention of the female. They were like the glorious cantilevered tail feathers of the peacock, or the rosy bottom of the baboon. As a trick of wily Mother Nature, this particular arousal of her interest was destined for failure. It would not end in reproductive success. Her excitement was merely a part of an immense extravagance that tossed hundreds of seeds to the wind from a single milkweed pod, or deposited thousands of eggs in a mass of jelly from a single frog.

  Closing her eyes beside the frigate bird’s case, Joan dwelt on the glance of Joe’s hazel eye, his expression of pensive doubt, the cracked texture of his light voice, the swing of his loose coat. Then she descended the steps of the museum, feeling pleased with herself, as if she had taken a spoonful of medicine, a specific for her condition. For her outward life, the prescription was. meaningless and could work no cure. For her inner wretchedness, it was a wholesome tonic.

  She walked back to her car feeling better.

  14

  … the love of a wife (such as I have got) grows stronger and stronger every day, and cannot be bought for any money.

  James Lorin Chapin

  Private Journal, Lincoln, 1849

  “Look at it rain!” said Betsy Bucky to Carl. “Oh, Carl, you know what I’m going to do this afternoon? I’m going to start that bedspread. I’m not going to wait another minute.” Betsy hopped up from her chair, dragged it over to the refrigerator, climbed up on it, and reached for her pattern books, which were lying in a heap on top.

  Then she gave a little shriek. “Oh, Carl, I dropped it. I dropped the instructions behind the refrigerator. You’ve got to pull the fridge away from the wall. I can’t make my pretty new bedspread without the instructions.”

  Carl looked up from his lunch and stared at his wife in horror. “Listen, Betsy, I can’t move the refrigerator.”

  “Don’t be silly, honeybun.” Betsy hopped down from her chair and ran over to the stove. “Here, have another plate of spaghetti to build up your strength. Then you can do it. I just know you can.”

  Rosemary Hill had risen that rainy morning more tired than when she went to bed. After breakfast she had gone back upstairs to take a nap, but she still hadn’t been able to sleep. Now she sat in her bathrobe at the telephone table in her front hall, talking to Ed Bell, letting it all out in a flood.

  But Ed interrupted, obviously stricken. “Oh, Rosemary, I’m so sorry. Have you been to another doctor? Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Rosemary. “I’m sure. But that’s not the point. The point is—listen, Ed, dear.”

  And Ed listened while Rosemary went on and on, faltering, explaining. In the end, he said why didn’t they get together at his house and talk the whole thing over. And Rosemary said what about Thad Boland, he’d be interested, and so would George Tarkington, whose emphysema was so bad, and Rosemary had heard a rumor about Eloise Baxter.

  “Well, certainly,” said Ed. “Let’s all get together. What about three o’clock this afternoon at my house?”

  And then Ed hung up and set his mind to the new task. It looked very hard. Rosemary and Thad and George and Eloise would come into his living room at three o’clock, and they would all sit down and look at each other, and then somehow they would have to begin to talk. The moment would present itself, and he would have to face it. Ed had no fear that he would not be able to say something. The right words would float into his mouth, his tongue would shape them, his ears would hear them coming out of his lips. He had only to wait for them and expect them, and they would be there.

  By midafternoon the sky had cleared. On Lowell Road, Arlene Pott had spent the rainy morning fighting with her husband. Then she had tried to make up by preparing his favorite lunch of tacos and beans.

  “Wally?” said Arlene, knocking on the door of his den. “Lunch is ready.”

  “I’m not hungry,” growled Wally through the door. Arlene could tell by his voice he had been sleeping on the couch.

  She went back to the kitchen, slapped the tacos into the garbage disposal, crashed the dishes into the sink, and wept a little. Then as the sun came out, she collected herself and decided to spend the afternoon in her vegetable garden. Putting on her old slacks and galoshes and a pair of gloves, she went outdoors.

  Immediately she felt better. She was pleased to see all the yellow flowers on her tomato plants. Her zucchinis were rioting all over the ground. Arlene tore out the old pea stalks and staked her beans. How amazing, she thought reverently, that all this lush greenery should have come from a few tiny seeds. She weeded everything, kneeling on the wet ground, getting her slacks dirty. Her garden was going to be a showplace. It was already a solid comfort, a solace for her bruised soul.

  The Kellys, too, had a vegetable garden, a ratty-looking plot rescued from the forest underbrush on Fairhaven Bay. When the rain stopped, Mary went out in her rubber boots, pushing through the drenched weeds to find the ingredients for a ratatouille, half a dozen baby zucchinis, some summer squash and green beans, an eggplant, a green pepper. The tomatoes were still a month away. She would have to buy some at Jerry’s supermarket.

  Mary had spent the morning with Claire Bold, and now Joe Bold was coming to supper. To be so much in company with the wife’s courage on the one hand and the husband’s anguish on the other was a peculiar kind of burden, a strange hiatus in the normal progress of Mary’s days. It was as though she had been shunted into a waiting room in some abandoned train station, an old railroad depot with a littered floor. There she sat with Claire in the half-light, waiting interminably for a train that never came, that would pull in at last to stop for Claire, then move away slowly, its iron wheels grating and screaming on the rusted track. She could wait forever, thought Mary, among the broken benches and empty gum machines and dirty windows, and pray that the train would never come.

  The meeting at Ed Bell’s house, the one inspired by Rosemary Hill’s urgent problem, began tentatively, in a mood of self-conscious embarrassment.

  “Well, here we are,” said George Tarkington, sitting back in his small chair, looking around at everybody, his hands on his knees. “Here we are.”

  “I just thought we should all get together,” said Rosemary. Reaching into her sewing bag, she jerked out a rag and began jabbing it with pins.

  Then Thad Boland started on a rambling story about his septic tank, a saga that had no point and no relation to anything they had come together to talk about. The rest of them listened patiently, as though they too were unable to confront the thing that sat invisibly among them in the center of the braided rug.

  When Thad’s story finally petered out, they all sat silently staring at the rug until Ed spoke up and took the creature by the throat.

  “Look,” he said, “we’re all going to die someday. Some of us just happen to know more or less when it’s going to happen. That’s bad in some ways, but maybe it’s good in others. It gives us control over circumstances. It means we can get r
eady for it. We can help each other through it. Perhaps we can even do more than that.”

  “More than that?” said Eloise Baxter, trembling.

  “More than that, right!” exclaimed Rosemary. Clashing her scissors in the air, she slashed at the rag in her hand. “If anybody thinks I’m going to die in the hospital with tubes going in and out of me, and losing control of my bladder, and going in and out of comas, they’ve got another think coming.” Fiercely she ripped her ragged piece of cloth down the middle.

  “Oh, I see,” said Eloise, putting pale fingers to her mouth.

  “Yes, yes,” said George. “I know what you mean. I worry about it all the time.”

  When all of them had had their say, Ed ended the meeting by reading the twenty-third Psalm. They all joined in, murmuring the well-known phrases about green pastures and still waters and the valley of the shadow of death, and the words penetrated very deep, and Eloise wept, and they all embraced and said goodbye and went home.

  As the meeting at Ed’s house broke up, the dinner guest at the Kellys’ house was just arriving. Joe Bold drove down Fairhaven Road, took a wrong turn, drove back, took another wrong turn, tried again, then arrived at last at the steep descent beside the river. Cautiously he inched his car down the slope and pulled up beside the house, then climbed out to say hello to Homer and Mary as they came running down their porch steps to greet him.

  He had arrived early, and therefore supper was early. And after supper there was still so much light that Homer said, “Look, let’s go to the hospital by the river.”

  Mary and Homer pulled the canoe down among the pickerel weed, and Homer climbed in. Then Mary hung on to one end while Joe got in awkwardly after putting one shiny shoe deep in the mud.