by Michael Nava
Elena had gone to call her partner, Joanne Stole, a painter who taught in the art department at the same school where Elena taught in the English department. I knew almost nothing about Joanne except that she seemed to disapprove of me.
When she returned to the room, I said, “How is Joanne?”
“She’s fine, Henry,” Elena said. “She sends her best wishes.” She picked up her book.
“I’m sorry I caused all this trouble for you.”
“You’re my brother.”
“Joanne’s your real family.”
She put the book down and studied me for a moment. “The first time the hospital phoned, they told me you were dead,” she said. “Two minutes later, they phoned again and explained they’d made a mistake, but the sadness I felt after that first call was indescribable.”
“It’s not like you to be sentimental.”
“I’m not sentimental,” she said. “But I trust my feelings. I felt that terrible grief because we have never resolved the things that have estranged us all these years.”
“What things?”
“To begin with, you could forgive me.”
“For what?”
“For not protecting you from Dad when we were children.”
“That wasn’t your job.”
“I know that now but at the time I thought it was, and so did you. You looked to me for protection.”
“I don’t remember anything like that.”
She reached into her purse and handed me an old snapshot. A little girl in pigtails happily held a laughing toddler in her lap. With astonishment, I recognized them as the children in my emergency-room hallucination. Elena and me. In the picture, her skinny arm encircled my waist possessively, as if to keep me from squirming away. I remembered how, in the hallucination, she had dragged me back from the light. The sensations came back with such clarity and force that it seemed like a real memory, not a dream.
“When you were first born, I wouldn’t let you out of my sight,” she said. “I cried when they made me go to school because I didn’t want to be separated from you, and Mom said you fussed until I came home. She called me your little mother.” She took the picture from me and studied it. “We may not consciously remember the first loves we form, but they stay inside of us. I have always loved you, Henry. You called for me when you thought you were dying. What was that except your way of remembering how much we loved each other? I couldn’t be there for you then. I can now, if you’ll let me.”
I replied with the sobs of a little boy and buried myself against her.
2.
DR. HAYWARD RETURNED to perch leprechaunlike at the edge of my bed, his feet not quite reaching the ground. After the standard Q-and-A about the state of my physical well-being, he cleared his throat sententiously and said, “You know, it’s not uncommon for survivors of heart attacks to have pretty wild emotional swings.”
I was too tired to be anything other than irritable. “Duh.”
Undaunted, he went on. “Your body failed you. In fact, you died for almost a minute. That’s one of the most traumatic experiences anyone can have. Your recovery may be slow and difficult and you’ll be having a lot of feelings. If you were already depressed before the heart attack—”
I had been slowly sliding beneath the blankets, struggling to stay awake. Now I sat up and demanded, “Who said I was depressed?”
He glanced at my sister, who had been quietly reading, or pretending to read, a biography of the poet Elizabeth Bishop. She lowered the book to reveal a guilty expression.
“I never told you I was depressed,” I said to her.
“The first night I was here, you talked about dying, Henry,” she said. “About wanting to die.”
“I had just had a heart attack, Elena. I felt like roadkill, plus I was pumped up with pharmaceuticals. I was out of my head.”
Her nostrils quivered, which I remembered from childhood was a sign of anger, but she restrained herself and replied mildly, “This wasn’t pain or the drugs. You mentioned Josh and other friends who had died from AIDS. You said, ‘Why not me, too.’ You said you had nothing left to do.”
“I don’t remember saying anything like that, and if I did, it was babble.”
Hayward, who had been watching our back-and-forth like a spectator at a tennis match, said, “I could prescribe Zoloft.”
“I’m not depressed by anything but this conversation,” I said. “And I won’t take happy pills.”
He eased himself off the bed. “Have you been up yet?”
I tugged at my IV line. “What do you think?”
“I think you should try walking down the hall.”
“I can’t even walk to the bathroom to take a leak.”
Hayward answered with a smile of great kindness. “I know it’s frightening to feel so weak, but that’s why you’ve got to get out of bed. Rejoin the land of the living. It’s that or the Zoloft. Your choice.”
After he left, Elena helped me out of bed and into my bathrobe and we went for a walk to the window at the end of the corridor, a distance of maybe fifty feet. After four days in bed, viewing the world vertically was shockingly disorienting. I tottered against my sister, pulling my IV behind me, taking tiny steps.
Elena said, “This reminds me of when you were first learning how to walk.”
“You can’t possibly remember that,” I huffed.
“I was five years old when you were born, Henry. I remember most of your childhood.”
Further conversation was impossible as I concentrated on reaching the smear of light at the end of the hall. I tried to keep my gaze straight ahead but sometimes my glance fell into one of the rooms, where figures lay huddled beneath thin hospital blankets as TVs flickered soundlessly overhead.
“We made it,” Elena said, a little breathless from shouldering my weight.
The window was double-paned to minimize the shriek of traffic from the street below, but I could still feel the heat of the sun when I pressed my hand against the glass.
“Why did you have to rat me out to the doc?” I asked my sister. “Now he thinks I’m mental.”
“The way you were talking worried me. I know you don’t remember what you said, but—”
“I remember,” I said, resting my forehead against the window. The April wind rattled the palm trees that lined the boulevard. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I turned my face to Elena, resting my cheek on the glass. “If I explain, will you promise not to tell him?”
She struggled with that for a moment. “I promise, Henry”
“I didn’t feel depressed before the heart attack, not in the usual way people feel depressed. What I felt was—I don’t know. AIDS, Elena. How I can explain it to someone who hasn’t crossed off half the names in their address book as one friend after another died?”
“There are treatments now,” she said quietly. “Effective treatments.”
“I know and no one talks about AIDS anymore. For most people, it’s as if it never happened. But it did happen, it’s still happening. While it was going on for me, so many friends were dying before their time, I think I subconsciously assumed that I would also die before I got old.”
“You’re not HIV positive,” she said.
“So? For fifteen years, being gay has been like sitting in a trench on a battlefield, watching people get picked off right and left. Who got the virus and who didn’t, who died and who lived, all began to seem completely arbitrary, and as you staggered from hospital room to memorial service, it started to look like it would never end and there wouldn’t be anyone left.” I rolled my back against the window and stared down the hall of the hospital where I had sat the death watch for half a dozen friends. “And then one day I woke up and people I knew weren’t dying anymore and I was looking at the rest of my life, a life I had not expected to have. A life I was completely unprepared to have. Does any of this make sense?”
“When I left the convent, I think I felt something similar,” she said. �
�My experience as a religious wasn’t tragic, though. It didn’t leave me half-dead.”
“Yes, that’s how I felt. Half-dead. Readier to go the rest of the way than step back into the world.” I looked at her and smiled. “I didn’t try to commit suicide by inducing a heart attack. Honest. I wasn’t suicidal at all, but I was finding it hard to come up with reasons to be alive. I didn’t feel needed.”
“Your friends need you. So do your clients.”
“My friends love me, they don’t need me. As for my clients, well, lawyers are fungible. There is no one to whom I am irreplaceable. They’ve all died.”
“You don’t know that there won’t be others,” she said.
I looked away from the ghost-filled corridor to my sister’s kind, worn face and said, “I wish I could believe that.”
After two days of walking the hall, we graduated to the hospital’s small interior garden. I was liberated from my IV lines and rode down in the elevator in a wheelchair but discarded it once we got outside. Our course was a circular flagstone path that ringed a dozen rose bushes now in florid bloom, their scent mingling with banks of rosemary and lavender. But after only two laps, I began to tire and said, “Look, there’s a bench. Can we sit for a minute?”
The bench was of snowy marble carved with clawed lion’s feet. Embedded in the stone was a small brass plaque that read, IN MEMORIAM, CHRISTOPHER GRAYE, 1963-1992.”
“God,” I said. “I knew Chris Graye.”
“AIDS?”
I nodded and then didn’t want to talk about it anymore. For a moment we listened to the buzzing of bees and the distant thrum of traffic. I closed my eyes. The sun on my face and neck was like the warm breath of a lover. I was ruefully surprised that I could remember that sensation, given how long it had been since I had actually experienced it. Even before the heart attack, I concluded there was not much chance I would meet someone; and while my reflex was to regret it, when I actually thought it through, I felt relief. Love is very strenuous; only the young really enjoy it and I was not young. Now, my damaged heart seemed the perfect metaphor, and I was ready to let go of that part of life.
“This reminds me of the garden in the convent,” Elena said.
I waited for her to continue, because she rarely spoke of her years as a religious. Elena had been an honor student in high school, but because she was a girl, our father decreed it was unnecessary for her to attend college. One day, I came home from track practice and found three nuns in full habit sipping tea with my parents in the living room. They belonged to a teaching order called Sisters of the Holy Cross that was affiliated with a number of small Jesuit colleges. The sisters had come to ask my father’s permission for Elena to join their order. Though they were white women, they addressed him in fluent Spanish in firm, almost lecturing tones, while he sullenly shrugged and nodded. Elena knew that no one else could have persuaded our father to let her leave home and attend college except the representatives of a religion that, though he did not observe it, still exercised a primeval influence over the Mexican campesino who lived beneath his thin Americanized veneer.
Yet, she had once told me, after she joined the order she discovered a vocation, or at least enough of one for her to have spent six years as Sister Mary Joseph. The few times I had seen her during this period, she had radiated a calm, purposeful energy and seemed very happy. I assumed she would remain a nun for the rest of her life and was surprised to receive a brief letter from her announcing that she had left the order and could be reached through the English department at Berkeley, where she had been accepted to graduate school. I lost track of her altogether during most of the Berkeley years. Her remark a couple of days earlier about her disorientation at returning to the secular world came back to me now.
“What happened after you left the nuns?” I asked lazily.
“I went to Cal, you knew that.”
“All I know is that’s where you got your Ph.D. I don’t know anything about your life there. Isn’t that where you came out?”
She didn’t respond for such a long time that I thought she hadn’t heard me. I opened my eyes and found her staring into the middle distance, at a hummingbird zipping in and out of the roses in a blue-and-yellow blur.
“Elena? Are you all right?”
Slowly she turned her face to me and managed a pained smile. She said, “I always wondered how I would tell you about this. Or even if I would.”
“Tell me about what?”
“I had a child, Henry. A daughter. I gave her up for adoption the day she was born, almost thirty years ago now.”
A dry breeze rustled through the garden. I said, “What?”
“I started at Berkeley in nineteen-seventy. Do you remember what nineteen-seventy was like on college campuses?”
“I remember what it was like to be a junior at Stanford,” I said. “I had hair to my shoulders and the halls of my dorm smelled of patchouli oil and pot.”
“I was twenty-five. My hair was still growing out—we really did shave our heads in my order—and if you had asked me about pot, I would’ve thought you were talking about cookware. Needless to say, I knew almost nothing about sex. Mom had told me the bare minimum. The novice mother supplied some other clinical details but strictly in the interests of hygiene. We had taken a vow of celibacy, after all.”
“You had no feelings toward any of your sisters?”
“I had plenty of feelings toward them,” she said. “But I didn’t recognize them as being sexual. I really was very, very naive. When I walked around Berkeley, I felt like I was branded with a scarlet V.”
“I don’t understand.”
She shot me a look. “Virgin, Henry. All the other students seemed so sophisticated and experienced. I felt like a dress that had never been worn and I very much wanted to be worn. To be part of the excitement around me. To be young. I met a boy. A law student, actually. We went to a party and got drunk and I told him I was a virgin and he said he could take care of that.”
“Did he rape you?”
“God, no,” she said. “Though I can’t imagine it was much fun for him. I was very awkward the first few times.”
“The first few times?”
“I went out with Charlie for a couple of months.”
“Charlie?”
“Charlie Tejada,” she said. “He was the first Chicano I ever met. He couldn’t speak ten words of Spanish and his dad was an accountant in L.A., but he lectured me about la causa and told me that studying American literature was assimilationist.” Her tone was rueful but affectionate. “He dropped me for a girl from Chile whose father was in Allende’s cabinet. I was hurt and relieved. Grateful to him for teaching me about sex. He was kind and patient in bed. But not,” she added, “very careful. I knew about birth control pills but I didn’t start taking them until after we’d had sex several times. I remember complaining to one of my housemates that the pressure of studying was making me sick in the morning. She said, very casually, that I was probably pregnant. I went to the student health center. She was right.”
“What did you do?”
“Panicked. I was frightened and ashamed and I didn’t know who to turn to.”
“What about Charlie?”
She shook her head. “As inexperienced as I was, I still knew there was nothing to our affair. I mean, he wasn’t going to marry me and I wouldn’t have wanted that anyway.”
“Why not?”
“I had begun to think I might be lesbian.”
“Just like that, out of nowhere?”
“Those feelings I’d had for other women in the convent that I didn’t recognize as sexual? I did after I started sleeping with Charlie. Sex was the missing piece that finally made sense of things. Do you know what I mean?”
I had a flash of myself at nineteen in bed with the first boy I ever made love to, and how, when he kissed me, it eliminated any doubt in my mind about who I was or what I wanted. “I think so,” I said.
“I liked being with Charlie,
but something was missing. I was on the verge of admitting what it was when I discovered I was pregnant.”
“What did you do?”
“There was a professor in the department who was openly gay. I showed up at her office one day, told her I thought I was a lesbian, and begged her to help me deal with the pregnancy.”
“Did she?”
“She arranged an abortion,” Elena replied. “That was very brave of her, because abortion was still against the law and she could not only have lost her job but been prosecuted. I was grateful because my fall-back plan was to induce an abortion myself.”
“Oh, Elena.”
“That’s what women did in those days, Henry. Thank God for Nora.”
“The professor?”
She nodded. “The doctor’s office was on Grant Street in Chinatown above a restaurant. I remember sitting in the waiting room with Nora, trying not to be sick from the food smells coming up the vent from downstairs. To this day I don’t much care for Chinese food.”
“But you didn’t go through with it. Why?”
“The doctor scheduled the abortions late at night, after her regular hours. There was no one else in the waiting room except Nora and me. I went over to the window and looked outside at the neon signs and the people crowding the sidewalks and the shops, and slowly my own reflection emerged in the glass and I saw myself and realized I could not go through with an abortion.”
Her face had a vulnerability I had never seen before. I reached for her hand. “I wish you hadn’t had to go through that alone.”
“I wasn’t alone,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was alluding to her professor, but then I understood.
“You think God told you not to go through with the abortion? But you’re not antiabortion. Are you?”
“My God is not an unpleasant old man who lives in the sky and forces people to make desperate choices and then condemns them if they get it wrong. For me, God is the clear inner voice that guides us to the choices that are right for us, if we’re willing to listen. The choices are different for everyone. For some women, an abortion makes sense. I just wasn’t one of them.”