Kinsey and Me

by Sue Grafton

  “You know, I went up there one day when I got off work from Del, and Miss Mildred she didn’t like that much, I could tell, so I didn’t go unannounced since then. Your mother would never have done me that way.”

  “Well,” I say, “she was a good lady, I suppose.”

  “Yes, she was,” Jessie says firmly. “She was just a real sweet person. I remember on the day she died . . . well, not the day she passed away, but the day she took them pills. She come out the back way when I went home from work that day. Followed me out to the porch and gave me a potted chrysanthemum. She’d already said she meant me to have it whenever the blooms were gone so I could plant it in my backyard, but she give it to me then and I remember thinking, Now why would she do such a thing? But it wasn’t ’til later I knew. She hugged me real tight and waved good-bye and that was the last time I seen her alive.”

  death review

  I AM SITTING IN Dr. Sherwood’s office, typing on a Remington Twenty-Five electric machine, not even much amazed to find myself working again in a hospital atmosphere. Outside my office door, the patients walk up and down in their robes, reaching in occasionally to snitch a pastel mint from the blue glass bowl on my desk. Carts are rolled by with a rattle of breakfast trays and a bell pings relentlessly as the elevators go up and down. And the stretchers go by with their cargo wrapped in sheets and the nurses stroll past my door and the second hand on the big clock in the hall sweeps up and around as it nudges the minute hand. Across the hall, two attendants discuss a money-order chain letter presently making the rounds. For a twenty-dollar investment, the friend of one has made two hundred and forty dollars in four days.

  I came to Pacific Coast Medical Center last Wednesday as a Western Girl but I’ll be here a year or two. Somehow in a week of working, I’ve come to understand that this is true. And I don’t much mind. I’ve worked in a hospital once before and I’ve worked in a doctor’s office too. I know what it’s like to share an elevator ride with a man on a stretcher going up to surgery and I know what it’s like to see the same man come down and I know what it’s like to catch sight of four tumors in bottles down in Pathology, formaldehyde like a tide pool in which they’ve been caught unwittingly. I know what it’s like to hear Dr. Sherwood call down on the telephone and inquire if the doctor there has an interesting death to report for the monthly death review.

  I review death too, sitting out here at my desk; at least I review the death I’ve known intimately . . . which was hers, my mother’s, eleven years ago. The intern on the floor complained this morning that he’d been given a patient with cancer of the lungs, which he thought uninteresting. And for a moment I hoped to myself that I’d die of something smart. I don’t resent his obsession with obscure disease, his desire for peculiar contagions and growths of an unknown sort. I don’t even resent that death and the dying are commonplace to him. He’ll go down someday with the rest of us, dying of something dull, and he’ll pay just as much attention as we do. He’s just young right now and caught up in the point of view that medical death shouldn’t be a wasted event for a man with so much to learn.

  My mother died of an overdose of sleeping pills after extensive surgery so that the cause of death was probably listed as Despair. I would list it, I think, as Fortitude or Courage or Hope or one of the other rare virtues she suffered from. She was a burning woman in a burning world and she drank herself down to death and she smoked until her throat caught fire and they had to douse the flame and excise the scorched tissue. After the surgery, what could she do but finish the job she’d begun? They had saved her when she didn’t want to survive, rescued her life with their brand-new stainless steel tools when she was already done. After cancer, she did them one better with phenobarbital and from that, there was no salvation. They pumped medication into her arms and legs, filled her with blood and glucose and oxygen but she knew she had won and the silence of her death had a smug quality. And what was there left for me to say except “Good show.”

  So I’m back in a hospital job again, maybe looking for her in the files or looking for her on the carts rolling by or hoping for word of her in the medical journals on Dr. Sherwood’s desk. I’ve even thought of asking him to send for her medical records in New York as though in the cataloging of heart, lungs, and temperature, I might learn something new about who she was and how she’s related to me. Instead, I sit out here and type and smile at the patients in the hall and hope that some medical secretary years ago smiled at her and offered her a pastel mint for all her pain.

  a letter from my father

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE your twenty-ninth birthday, he writes you a letter, this father of yours, and in it, he tells you what he remembers of you.

  “In the course of thinking back over your twenty-nine years,” he says, “I called to mind many charming memories (and some distressing ones as well); and among the highest ranking of them all was when you were three, just before I went into military service. I sat on your bed and you knelt to say your prayers, and after praying for all the regular and proper people, and thanking God for all the regular and proper things . . . you concluded with ‘And God bless Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Easter Bunny’s Helper.’ I don’t know where the helper came from, and I didn’t want to laugh at your prayers, but I nearly exploded in an effort to contain my laughter until you were in bed, had got kissed good night, and I could get downstairs.

  “And in the same year, when the day came for me to put on my uniform and leave for Fort Knox, I didn’t see how I could possibly say good-bye without crying all over the place, so I had to think up something. You won’t remember, but what I suggested to you and Del was that instead of saying good-bye, I would come to attention, and so would you and Del—and then we would salute each other, as I had taught you to do. Del burst into tears and ran upstairs to her room, but you came to a very exaggerated state of attention, with your chest out and belly in, and chin very straight—and we saluted—and then I went out to the taxi, scarcely able to see what I was doing. I looked back and waved, and you waved too; and then I looked up at Del’s window, and she was standing there, with a handkerchief against her mouth, and she waved finally. A memory that is very sweet, and very upsetting and almost unbearable all at the same time.

  “Then when I came back from military service, I remember the warm evenings, sitting on the front steps, when you and Del would beg me to tell a story. And in those evenings I made up Silly Mongoose, and the story about the little white dog and the blind horse that the French family had to leave behind when they fled in front of the German armies in 1940—and other rambling tales I can’t remember anymore. Sometimes I would start one without the foggiest notion of where it was going, or how it would end . . . and those seemed to be the ones you liked best. Both you and Del liked the sad stories best (but with a happy ending just in the nick of time) so I invented sad ones, and more of them. One time I got so engrossed in my own story that I was crying with you! Doesn’t seem possible but it’s true. I had to find a happy ending for that one and in a hurry. Then I blew my nose and felt better.

  “Another bittersweet memory is when they brought you down from the operating room after your tonsils were removed. You were groggy with sedation and kept urping up frightening amounts of blood and with your eyes still closed, the first thing you said was ‘I want my daddy.’ So I sat by your bed and you hung on to the index finger of my right hand forever, and I would not have moved away for any amount of money.”

  That letter is the story of your life, all the stuff of which you are made, so that reading it again, a year later, you are amazed to see how carefully your character has been described in the course of those paragraphs. Twenty-five years are missing in his recollection of you and in those twenty-five years you have lived out all the consequences of the first four or five. There was a time in your life when you didn’t believe in psychology, when you didn’t believe that intelligent, rational people were the product of anything more than their own intelligence and t
heir own rationality. Now you believe in everything; past, present, and future. You believe in memories. You believe in the suffering of truth and all that it requires. You believe that you are exactly the life-sized projection of that child sitting on the front steps of that house, listening to stories that were rescued, always, at the brink of truth.

  You do remember the day your father went away. You remember your own confusion about your sister’s sudden tears and her running to her room. That was not what your father had asked you to do. Your father had told you to salute and so you saluted proudly and you knew, even at the age of three, that you would do anything he asked, at whatever the cost.

  Now that you are nearly thirty, you are writing letters to him and what you say to him is this: we did, yes, fail in our lives, the four of us; you and Vanessa, Del and me. We died of all the unwept tears and all the things we never understood.

  You talk to him about your mother’s death, about her need to die, about the ways in which her death has set you free, and how her death has bound you, broken you, and mended you again. You tell him, as a mother would, that you have loved him, whatever his failings, that you forgive him, that you have failures, too, which require forgiveness of him. You tell him that you have loved your life, that you are at peace with the person you have become and that he may have that peace too in your behalf. “We none of us die of grief,” you say, “but only of not grieving quite enough.”

  And what you want for him is that he may weep too, for himself, for the ruin of all those years. You want to say to him, “Oh, my father, don’t you see that we are healed, all of us, by being exactly what we are, by loving, by remembering, by opening up the wounded places in our lives and letting go?”

  You want to tell him you treasure all the relics of the past. You know now that you are a living museum, full of rooms and crooked corridors that repeat themselves at every turn. And you want to tell him that by loving you, he can love himself too, that he can choose again rightly for every cloudy choice he’s made, that he can learn to have his life instead of giving it away.

  And you wonder if he’ll hear you, years and years away, across the wide far country of your life, across the sins and resurrections of your soul. You wonder if he’ll understand that, groggy in your life and full of pain, you call to him before you have even opened your eyes, that his presence there when you were four has reached across the world to you and touches you where you are now.

  For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit www.penguin.com/graftonchecklist

  acknowledgments

  Kinsey and Me (Bench Press, 1991), © 1991 Sue Grafton.

  The following stories from Kinsey and Me first appeared as noted:

  “Between the Sheets,” © 1986 The Hearst Corporation. First published in Redbook. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Long Gone,” © 1986 The Hearst Corporation. First published in Redbook as “She Didn’t Come Home.” Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Parker Shotgun,” © 1986 Sue Grafton. First published in Mean Streets, an anthology.

  “Non Sung Smoke,” © 1988 Sue Grafton. First published in An Eye for Justice, an anthology.

  “Falling off the Roof,” © 1989 Sue Grafton. First published in Sisters in Crime, an anthology.

  “A Poison That Leaves No Trace,” © 1990 Sue Grafton. First published in Sisters in Crime 2, an anthology.

  “Full Circle,” © 1991 Sue Grafton. First published in A Woman’s Eye, an anthology.

  “A Little Missionary Work,” © 1991 Sue Grafton. First published in Deadly Allies, an anthology.

  “Maple Hill,” © 1970 Sue Grafton. First published in California Review.

  The following story and essay were published as noted:

  “The Lying Game,” © 2003 Sue Grafton. First published in the Lands’ End Special 40th Anniversary Issue (Fall 2003).

  “An Eye for an I: Justice, Morality, the Nature of the Hard-boiled Private Investigator, and All That Existential Stuff,” © 1995 Sue Grafton. First published in The Crown Crime Companion.