by Kate Walbert
I take the stairs too quickly, flying around the corners as the students do at last bell, pushing the heavy metal bar on the fire door to charge out, forgetting, setting the alarm: the sound deafening. Your father sits behind the wheel in uniform, his hat shading his handsome face, and I take a fingerful of shaving cream and write a backward Yes across the windshield.
What next? How does the story go?
He steps out of the convertible and we embrace, though hurriedly. The alarm shrills as we round the drive and speed on. He turns to present to me the wildflower stuck in his jacket buttonhole: a violet I tuck behind my ear.
It is nearly five when we run up the steps of the Philadelphia courthouse, the last to be married—they no doubt forget to record it in their books—before they lock the heavy doors.
Then from here, what? What have I told you before? We are Lieutenant and Mrs. Rock; we travel so many places. Then, I can’t recall. An automobile? An airplane? The tipping of a kayak on a stormy sea?
He died young, I have said, leaving me no other choice but to lose you. This is the only truth of it: the rest is just another story.
6
It must have been close to the dinner hour at the Veteran’s Hospital. I could hear the clang of silverware, the rustle of table setting in the distance. Outside, the weather had cleared, and a trace of weak sunlight, the last of the sunset, slipped through the dusty windows. I must have stayed much longer than a half hour. I believe I dozed. When had I taken off my shoes? When had I found the stiff pillow? I felt dizzy, as if I had climbed too many stairs too quickly; I combed my hair with my fingers. The window was filthy, actually. I hadn’t noticed with the gray weather. Now the sky paled to a thin blue, pinkish clouds low over the Sound. A pink dawn, or was it dusk? It felt as if I had been sucked out of my own life into another, a dreamlife. I don’t dream often, but when I do my dreams feel this way: with scissored edges, as if the scene in which I stand has been cut from an illustration, or a puzzle, and that if I walk too far to the edge of it, if I turn a corner, I might tumble into nothing. I stood and approached the window, thinking of your father, wondering whether I should attempt to talk to him again that day, or to wait until the following week.
I found myself writing HELP on the glass.
The nurse surprised me.
“You’re awake,” she said.
I turned.
“You seemed so peaceful I didn’t have the heart.”
“Thank you. That was kind,” I said. I began to gather my purse, my cigarettes from the arm of the frayed sofa. “I’ve stayed too long. I’m sorry.” I searched for my cigarette lighter.
“Don’t apologize. We don’t get many visitors.”
I looked up at her. She wore a brown wool skirt and sweater with a nametag too far away to read; if she had been a blonde, she would have reminded me of Rita.
“I’ve lost my lighter,” I said.
She pulled one from her skirt pocket and clicked it open. “Here,” she said, approaching me. I saw her name was Julia.
“I didn’t mean,” I began, then thought better of it and reached for a cigarette.
“It gets lonely around here this time of night,” she said. “I’m glad for the company.”
I lit my cigarette, letting the smoke out slowly, trying not to cough. The truth is I had given up smoking several weeks earlier, but had found myself purchasing a package on my way to the hospital. The kind they wanted girls to smoke back then; I can’t remember the brand. I tapped the cigarette against an ashtray.
“You work nights?” I said, attempting friendliness.
“Nights, days. They blend together here. We lose track of time. Intentionally, that is. They’re stung by light so we keep it dark. Part of the therapy,” she said, lighting her own cigarette and exhaling. “But then, nights terrify them.”
“Oh.”
“So we don’t like to point out time at all.”
“I understand.”
“No,” she said, smiling. “You don’t.”
She looked toward the window and continued smoking. I followed her gaze; she must have seen the HELP, though she didn’t say a word.
“Who did you come for?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Which patient.”
Patient. It was the first time that anyone had referred to your father in this way and I understood, quite suddenly, that he was terribly ill.
“Henry,” I said. “Henry Rock.”
She looked back at me; she was stunningly pretty, and I remember how I felt dowdy in my new dress, my hair dyed the color I believed Rita might have suggested if she were still alive—a rich honey—my eyes rimmed with eyeliner in the style of the time. I had put on my shoes, again, and my newly swollen feet ached, my garter belt pinched my waist. Soon I would no longer be able to hide my condition, and my heart pounded to think of it, to think of what I would possibly do next.
“You must be Daphne,” she said. “He talks about you all the time.”
“Does he?”
“He’s one of my favorites, Henry. You get favorites here; that’s the trouble. You get favorites and it breaks your heart to see them leave and it breaks your heart to see them stay and so there’s nothing you can do. All day and all night you walk around with your heart breaking.”
“I’m sorry.”
She dropped her cigarette to the linoleum floor and stubbed it out with her heel. “Terrible habit,” she said.
She turned toward the door as if she had forgotten me; the sun had set and the room had gone fairly dark. I wondered if anyone ever bothered to switch on the lamps, or to play the phonograph in the corner, near a stack of what appeared to be old magazines. At some point there must have been great hopes for the Common Lounge, anticipation of game nights and the like, visitations.
“God bless you, Daphne,” Julia said; then left me behind.
• • •
I should have followed her; she most likely headed toward the main hall of the east wing, which I had passed through to find myself here. One could easily get lost. The hospital had originally been the summer mansion of a robber baron and it sprawled in several directions: its west wing completely boarded up, its widow’s walk rotted. On its terraced lawn, the stone walls sprouted moss and fern, wild cherry, the entire landscape fallen into disrepair; the VA, I imagine, barely able to heat the east wing, let alone maintain the grounds. A vast series of straggling box hedges, mazes of former topiaries, defined the once-formal gardens, where stone angels rose from the frozen lily ponds, their wings mottled as cold flesh. Leggy rose bushes overran a tennis court, its torn net sagging under the weight of a honey-suckle; a maple grown to my height sprouted near the half-court line.
On the days preceding my visit, when I had made the approach to the hospital yet could not muster the courage to walk in, I spent my time wandering here. If it weren’t too cold, I would settle on a moldy cement bench clearly intended for contemplation. I had brought The Gardens of Kyoto along, believing I might show the book to your father, show him Ryoan-ji, the garden with the fifteen rocks—the fifteenth unseen but there for balance—and tell him how Randall would say that on certain days the fifteenth rock was Jeannette, his mother, on other days it was someone else; how I would say mine was someone I had yet to meet, just a feeling of someone I would, eventually. Randall had understood, or pretended to: we were friends like that, I’d tell your father.
• • •
I did not follow Julia as she left the Common Lounge. I waited until I heard the fading click of her heels and then went in the opposite direction; unclear, suddenly, as to which way I had come in. Before long I got so balled up I couldn’t even get back to where I had been. I was lost in the west wing, barely able to see for the narrow hallway windows. Portraits lined the walls—the robber baron’s relatives, I presumed—man after man frowning out at me, each ivory painted face a composition of nose, eyes, and mouth, brushstrokes on a canvas within a heavy dark frame. I remembered what Sterling h
ad told me about Roosevelt, how he had died while sitting for his own portrait, the painter having only finished his face. Just a face, Sterling said, and all around it the blank page. Nothing more. Just a perfect face in the middle of nothing.
“What do you think that suggests?” Sterling had said. This as we sat in the backseat of the automobile the pilot drove toward the ferry landing. I wanted to answer, but I had no idea what I thought it suggested.
“I don’t know,” I said, waiting for Sterling to continue. But that was the end of it.
• • •
First I thought I heard a cough and then, strangely, singing.
Was this a dream? They sounded like real voices: men’s voices in the rise and fall of a chorus. I walked faster, believing the voices came from behind an ordinary-looking door ahead of me, within a vestibule of sorts. As I approached, the sound of the chorus swelled to an amen. I turned the doorknob and pushed the door open, expecting to find a room packed with hundreds of soldiers in prayer—men leaning on crutches, leaning on canes; handsome, one-armed men, their uniform arms pinned to their elbows; bareheaded men and men wearing hats and men whose heads were wrapped in bandages; a chorus of men holding hymnals, swaying left, swaying right; men spitting and men with rotted teeth; men with their hands in their pockets, unshaven, slouched, and men missing eyes; men with bullet wounds and saber wounds; bumpy, knotted shrapneled flesh; scars that ran the length of their legs and roped their ankles; scars that crisscrossed their backs; mustached men; men with holes blown into their sides; men who dripped or burst or shat or slowly leaked; a room full of soldiers singing, amen.
But the room, of course, was empty.
• • •
It appeared to have once been a great ballroom, a chandelier of enormous size—like thousands of crystals sewn to a hoop skirt— hanging from a ceiling painted to resemble a bright blue sky where angels drifted on white clouds, their harps outlined in gold leaf. They eventually spilled into the corners, loafing and preening above the high arched windows. The windows, draped with silk curtains, looked out toward the Sound and it would have been a tremendous view if not for the dozens of chairs, their backs and seats cushioned in a dark, red velvet, circling the perimeter.
The room was a holy place, somehow; a place unaccustomed to visitors. An empty tomb. I wanted to cross it as quickly as possible, to get out. I could see now a door on the other side and in my rush to reach it I might very well not have noticed him. He stood with his back to me, stood at one of those deep windows as if he were still waiting, watching for my arrival. Perhaps I was late. The drive from Chester always so unpredictable. Rita wanting to stop to use the john; or Mother saying she had packed a picnic for Capetown, and couldn’t we take a quick detour?
We had promised to be here by noon and now it was nearly one and he had been waiting, hadn’t he? How much more time would we take?
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I wish I could tell you that he turned around, then; that he shrugged and said, “No matter.” But he did not. He simply faded away, blending too quickly into the silk of the drapes, the wavy, milky panes of glass, old as the warrior friezes that lined the walls— all those men I had envisioned, still whole and armored.
7
Tucked within one of the gardens of Kyoto is a shrine to unborn children, to lost children, to children too soon dead; a hidden altar, really, a stone on which women place azalea blossoms, or chrysanthemums; whole oranges, sprigs of cherry, offerings left in groups of seven, or five, or three: harmony, they believe, in odd numbers. The garden is in the northern end of Kyoto, within a heavily wooded area rarely visited by men; its temple, long ago carved from a stone hillside, is reached only by the ascension of a series of small, narrow steps worn into the hillside, according to legend, by the knees of worshipers. Above the temple, Mount Hiei can be seen; the perspective strange, the mountain appearing close enough to touch, its snow so fresh and white as to be mistaken for new snow, though the snow has been frozen there for centuries.
Women come to these woods: the ones who have lost their children, the ones who have never borne them, or borne them and given them away. They climb the steps on their knees, their kimonos hitched above their thighs, obis crooked. They keep their heads down as they climb, one knee up, and then the other, hobbling on bone. Around them azaleas burn against tall dark pines—the all of it a bowl of color: the women’s mourning kimonos sea green, or smoke gray, made from the silks dyed in the rivers that run in these same mountains, silks passed to them by their own mothers, grandmothers.
The women climb in springtime, mostly, though some will come in the winter when the dark pine boughs are weighted by fresh snow and the ground is hard frozen and dirtied by pine droppings. When they reach the temple they stand, though remain bowing. They know if they look up, toward Mount Hiei, they will be thought imperious, without shame. They are ashamed, of course; it is the reason they have come. There are so many things to ask forgiveness for; so many things. And so they bend low, whispering the names of the unnamed, of the never forgotten, lighting the half-burnt sticks of incense on the porcupined stone altar left by the ones who have come before. The candlewood smell, eucalyptus, seduces them and they straighten a bit, enough to see Mount Hiei, its onyx peaks white-capped, or, if in springtime, lit by mica and bright as rising crystal palace spires. Could they live there, then? Fly away if they wished? Sprout wings from their brittle shoulders? The incense burns to nubbins, flares, then dies. They descend as they came, their kimonos dragging.
8
After Rita’s death I wanted to get rid of things: The Gardensof Kyoto, Ruby’s letter from Paris, and anything else of significance. Betty and I had already packed what remained of Rita’s possessions in her attic room, carrying the boxes to the rain cellar, and I had gone from there to my own belongings, folding dresses that no longer fit, matchless socks, whatever I could find that was of no use into a crate, which I carted down to the rain cellar and set next to Rita’s. I cleaned with a frenzy just this short of grieving, ending with what remained of Randall’s package, which I now kept in the top drawer of my dresser among my underthings and the statement book for my bank account. I had already given up his diary, as I have told you, and other odds and ends would be lost along the way: his broken spectacles with the cracked left lens, the letter opener, the children’s primer, the spool of red thread.
No matter.
I took The Gardens of Kyoto downstairs and asked Mother for Ruby’s address. She did not say a word. She simply recited the address from her recipe box and I printed it on the brown paper shopping bag that wrapped the book. I then folded Ruby’s letter from Paris into a clean envelope, dust from the creased, brittle New York something cutout of the swells on the Mauretania on my fingers as I addressed it to Ruby in my steady, purposeful hand. Then I licked the stamp.
I should not have to tell you that I could not bring myself to mail the book. Halfway to the post office I tore the paper bag away, as if the illustrations might wilt without air. The letter I sent as intended, addressed to Ruby at the Gramercy Park Residence for Ladies. Had I not been so serious in my determination to send the letter on, I might have stopped and admired the look of that name on the white envelope: the elegance of the words “Residence” and “Ladies.” Old-fashioned words, I understand now, as antique as the brass griffin’s claw at the base of Randall’s stairway.
Mother had once told me of a visit she made there with her Aunt Maude, back, as Mother put it, when The Residence was still a grand place, a hotel for working women. Men came to call and were asked to sit in the parlor downstairs, their polished loafers firm on the oriental rugs that covered the oak floors; beaded sconces lit the walls. A grandfather clock chimed the hour that tea was served, when most of the girls would return from their jobs and prepare for their dates. The girls were buyers for department stores, Mother said, editors at publishing houses; occasionally, models or actresses, ballerinas. They treated one another as sisters would, borr
owing jackets to match particular skirts, suggesting drinks after difficult days. Even on gloomy evenings they walked the city, divine, they would say, in the fog. They spoke in the way of the popular radio stars and wore dressing gowns on Saturday mornings. They carried silver compacts in their pockets. Their dates took them to The Club Cha Cha and The Escuelita. All illegal, of course; these were the days of Prohibition, though it was like some great game everybody knew they could cheat.
Most of the girls eventually moved on. They married, following husbands to smaller towns. But a few, such as Ruby, stayed, their rooms preserved as they had always been, with a satin bedspread on a single bed and a desk at one angle in the corner where bills, neatly stacked, were paid on Sunday evenings.
• • •
I wonder at Ruby opening the envelope, finding her letter from Paris tucked within like a relic from her youth: the hand so assured.
Made a new friend on the crossing, she reads, who has introduced me to this wonderful little hotel in the Latin quarter.
And she is suddenly back to that hotel in Paris, to the yellow tiles in the bathroom, to the sound of the bathwater running as she lifts the book from her suitcase, turning to the inscription, expecting something, perhaps, less truthful: For Ruby and child, he has written. With affection.
She had been right to send it to Randall. It belonged to him as much as it belonged to her. Still, what an impulsive gesture—the book, the note—posted too rashly a few days before his thirteenth birthday. What had she said? You have reached the age of truth, she remembered. All a bit dramatic, but then, she is dramatic. And kind. And alone.
She looks out the window toward the pear trees in the park.
She had not heard a word from him, and now he is dead.
She turns back to the letter and fingers the embossed crest; smells the rainy streets and the sweet Belgian waffles wrapped in white paper sold from wheeled carts. What glory to walk the Seine, to see the world laid out along its banks like so many dishes at a banquet, everything entirely possible.