Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  “Can’t I just write a letter without doing that?”

  “The person you’re corresponding with needs to be able to write you back. Sooo … you need to come up with a name.”

  Viney refrains from reminding Addison that she already has one.

  “It can be really simple, like your first initial followed by your last name, or your name followed by a number: how many children you have, for example, or a significant year. It can relate to your profession or your interests. Or it can be whimsical. Completely made up.”

  In Viney’s experience, the people most likely to invent names for themselves are movie stars, strippers, and crooks.

  “But whatever you pick, it should be at least six characters long with no spaces. While you work on that, I’ll go help those folks at the counter. As soon as you’ve got something we’ll get you started, okay?”

  “Got it. Thank you.”

  Addison clomps away. It’s a good thing the library is carpeted. But then, maybe silence is no longer the commodity it once was.

  Pondering her assignment, she takes up a piece of scratch paper and a short, sharp pencil and prints her name across the top:

  ALVINA CLOSS

  Beneath this, she writes Acloss.

  She doesn’t like this, the way the word loss jumps out at her.

  Alvinac.

  A prescription drug for intestinal distress.

  Vineycloss. Vineloss.

  Maybe backward?

  Yenivssloc.

  Slavic—in a threatening, Iron Curtain, shoe-pounding Nikita Khrushchev kind of way.

  Acloss1929. Mother1948. Widow1962. Mistress76. Angelofdeath78.

  A name. She has to come up with a name. A new name. She really should be having more fun with this. After all, how often does this happen? How often does a seventy-five-year-old who’s lived in the same town her whole life and never been called by any name but the one she was baptized with get asked to invent an alias?

  Addison is back. “How you comin’ along?” she asks.

  “Maybe if you gave me an example. What name do you use?”

  “‘Sad bison at gee mail dot com.’ It’s an anagram of my first name and my middle and last initials. But it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Do you have any hobbies?”

  Viney considers. “I’m interested in nutrition. I do yoga.”

  “Fantastic! Just for now—what’s your first name?”

  “Alvina. I go by Viney.”

  “Perfect. Let’s try”—she types—“nutriyogavine.” She hits the Enter button as if she were cracking a bullwhip. “Congratulations! You’ve got an e-mail name.”

  “I could change it though, if I wanted to?”

  “Absolutely. Now we need the e-mail address of the person you’re writing to.”

  Viney pulls a notepad out of her purse, flips it open, and hands it over.

  Addison types brotherHenry@saintgwenfrewi.org. Now that Viney understands the range of decisions involved in choosing an e-mail identity, she’s grateful to Brother Henry for making such a traditional choice. She’d find it difficult writing a letter to a stranger with a name like Sad Bison.

  “Now,” Addison continues. “We’ll get the cursor moved down to where you need to start writing … Now you just start typing the way you would on a regular typewriter.” Addison’s fingers move with incredible speed. She demonstrates dragging, cutting, pasting, backspacing, highlighting, deleting. “Once you’re happy with everything,” Addison concludes, “you move the cursor here, click on the Send button, and that’s it.”

  “I see,” Viney says. “Wow.”

  “You’ll do great. I’ll be right over there if you have any questions.”

  Viney settles in. Well. Aside from all that naming business, this has been easy. Why has she been so intimidated about computers for so long? For some reason she thought you had to know all about the insides of the things before you could use one. But that’s silly. It’s just another appliance after all, another tool. She operates plenty of machines without knowing about their insides. Does she know how her car works? Her Juiceman? Her Electrolux? Hell, no.

  And she’s an excellent typist. Or used to be. It shouldn’t take too long to get her skills back. This will be a breeze.

  Dear Brother Henry

  She deliberates over the punctuation. Colon or comma? He’s a monk after all, and they’ve never met. She opts for the formal choice:

  :

  It’s a letter of introduction. An invitation. Being polite and straightforward is what’s called for. Viney typed lots of correspondence for Welly in her capacity as his medical secretary, so this should be simple.

  Dear Brother Henry: My name is Alvina Closs and I am following up on an invitation made by my long-term friend employer partner common-law husband the man with whom I shared a bed for the past

  Dear Brother Henry: I recently came across your letters to my

  I am writing on behalf of

  I am writing to inquire if

  Are you still willing? I am asking you to please come

  It would mean so much to our town, to me and Hope and Welly

  It would mean so much to our children if

  Dear Brother Henry: You may know of me through your correspondence with Llewellyn Jones, the mayor of Emlyn Springs as I believe he mentioned me once or twice as his wife’s best friend and as his

  I have the sad task of informing you that your longtime correspondent and the mayor of Emlyn Springs, Dr. Llewellyn Jones

  Dear BH: I was snooping around the office of the dead mayor and by the way it might interest you to know that he was struck down by lightning on a golf course and perhaps you as a man of God would have a unique perspective on that I personally believe he was carrying out a sentence that he leveled against himself many years ago and you may also be intrigued as I am by the fact that he pretended for over twenty years to be a juice-drinking lacto-ovo-semi-vegetarian and was not as it turns out he kept a lot of secrets which shouldn’t surprise me at all since we’ve been keeping a very big secret around here for the past twenty-five years and I know you know what I’m talking about and

  Hello there! I’m Alvina Closs, Dr. Llewellyn Jones’s former nurse, longtime mistress, and one might add co-conspirator since we plotted a murder and got away with it

  Alvina removes her hands from the keyboard. With the help of her mouse she deletes everything she’s written. Then, inclining her body forward so that she can take advantage of the semiprivacy offered by the study carrel walls, she opens her mouth as wide as possible, sticks out her tongue, takes a large breath, and exhales forcefully, producing a kind of unvoiced roar.

  When she feels composed and focused enough, she begins again:

  Dear Brother Henry:

  My name is Alvina Closs. As a member of the Emlyn Springs community and a longtime close acquaintance of Mayor Dr. Llewellyn Jones, I have the sad task of informing you of the mayor’s sudden death in late August.

  I know that the two of you corresponded for many years on the subject of deepening the relationship between our Sister Cities. I am also aware that you and Dr. Jones discussed the possibility of establishing a second monastery in southeast Nebraska, not only in the interest of expanding the presence of the Benedictine Order here in the Midwest, but also with an eye toward enriching our community’s social, cultural, and economic life. Although Dr. Jones encountered some opposition in the past, our community is now eager to explore this possibility with renewed resolve. There could be no greater memorial to the mayor than to see his hopes for an invigorated Emlyn Springs come to pass through an alliance with the brothers of Gwynnedd Island.

  To that end, we would like to extend an invitation. You would of course be welcome to visit us at any time, and we are very much looking forward to showing off our little bit of Wales in Nebraska whenever your travels bring you to the States. However, we are especially hopeful that you will consider joining us next summer during our annual summer festival, Fancy E
gg Days. The festivities include a number of Welsh-inspired events which you and your fellow brethren might find especially enjoyable.

  I look forward to hearing from you.

  Sincerely yours,

  Alvina (Viney) Closs

  After doing a thorough proofread, Viney impulsively clicks on the Send button without consulting with Addison.

  This really is just too easy—writing a letter that doesn’t exist in any kind of physical form—and Viney fears the global effect of e-mail correspondence upon human morality. Who knew she’d have such an easy time of it, lying by omission to a Benedictine monk? If she’d written this letter the old-fashioned way and then had to stamp it, take it over to the post office, and hand it to the mailman, she never would have followed through. She would have been shamed by the physical evidence.

  The words Your email to brotherhenry@saintgwenfrewi.org has been sent appear on the computer screen. Not exactly reassured—and certainly not absolved—Viney nonetheless feels a sense of accomplishment.

  She drives home, barely able to keep her eyes open. Knowing that she’s done all she’s capable of today, she changes out of her clothes and into her bathrobe, draws the blinds and curtains, takes a couple of bites out of a stale powdered-sugar doughnut, and then lies down on the living room sofa and goes to sleep.

  Larken is making her way through the catacombs of Bryan/LGH Medical Center for her daily visit to the ICU.

  Her experience with the inner sanctums of intensive care units has been thankfully limited: other than those terrible visits to Bonnie back in 1978, before she regained consciousness, summons to hospitals have been more like social invitations. Larken has delivered balloons and Get Well cards to acquaintances recuperating from rhinoplasties, knee replacements, rotator cuff repairs. She’s visited Mia in the hospital twice; both occasions were celebratory, although one was slightly less so than the other. (Larken has always believed that Mia’s joy following Esmé’s birth was muted by the sedatives she was given during her complicated labor and emergency C-section. Two and a half years later, however, narcotic aftereffects notwithstanding, Mia was boundlessly jubilant following her tubal ligation, which went without a hitch.)

  Larken’s oldest memory related to hospitals arises from her early adolescence: it’s a distillation of countless hospital visits that occurred between 1973 and 1978.

  Most people experience the visual magic trick called “perspective” and the concept of “vanishing point” by staring down a railroad track. Larken and her brother and sister became familiar with this phenomenon by watching their mother and father walk down many very long hospital hallways, their figures growing alarmingly smaller with each step, until they disappeared behind heavy metal doors that clanged shut in a loud, emphatic way: the sound of a castle fortress being secured before battle, a maximum-security penitentiary at lockup. But who was being protected? Larken often wondered. Who was in prison? Her vanished parents, or she and her siblings?

  They waited with nothing to do. Larken pretended to read grown-up magazines—Life and Newsweek and Time. If there was a vending machine nearby, she bought candy bars and peanuts and cookies and pop for herself and her siblings. (As the oldest, Larken was entrusted with a small amount of money to spend as she saw fit while their parents were beyond the vanishing point; she eventually began using part of the money to buy cigarettes, swearing her siblings to secrecy.) If there were any National Geographic magazines around, Gaelan looked at those. Barring that, he played with a deck of cards that he always carried with him. He knew a million versions of solitaire; he also enjoyed the physics of shuffling and house-of-card construction. Sometimes they played gin rummy or war or spit. Bonnie could entertain herself for hours working on the “Hidden Pictures” pages of Highlights magazines. She never got tired of those.

  Whenever Larken suggested that they leave for a while, go to the cafeteria maybe, or walk around, just to stretch their legs, alleviate the boredom—because after all, Mom and Dad never said in so many words that they had to stay in the waiting room the whole time—she and Gaelan could never get Bonnie to go.

  What if they come back while we’re gone? she’d always ask. They’d be really scared if we weren’t here. You can go if you want to, but I’m staying.

  Their baby sister’s compassion and bravery moved them, shamed them, and so they stayed in the waiting room, waiting. Of the three of them, Bonnie was the one who never doubted that their parents would reappear, two tiny dots on the horizon, and make their way back to them.

  Larken is almost to Arthur’s room when someone calls out.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. Visiting hours are over.” Larken has been here every day since Arthur’s stroke but hasn’t encountered this person before. She backtracks to the nurse’s station.

  So many of these health care providers look sick themselves. This woman has pale skin glistening with excessive sweat or sebum or both, it’s hard to tell, and her blonde hair has been yanked back from her face and squeezed into a punishingly tight topknot. From buttocks to crown her shape is perfectly conical, giving the impression of whipped cream that’s been beaten vigorously until it forms stiff peaks. It can’t be easy being an ICU nurse. It can’t be easy being any kind of nurse. Larken can’t imagine how Viney did it for so long. Nurses are saints; that’s the only explanation. These people don’t just check vital signs and draw blood, they hold the line, guard the gate, admit only the worthy.

  “I’m here to see Arthur Collins,” Larken says. “I’m expected.”

  “I’m sorry,” the nurse begins, “but …”

  “She’s family, Teresa.” Larken looks toward Arthur’s room and sees Eloise peering around the door frame. “Come on in, dear,” she says, gesturing Larken to approach and then drawing her into an embrace.

  Eloise exudes an aura that is warm but regal, removed. Even in close physical proximity, there’s a sense that her molecules abide by social laws rather than scientific ones and would never think of mingling.

  In Larken’s mind, Arthur and Eloise are reincarnates of some rare monarchial couple, inhabiting a time (and there was such a time, wasn’t there?) when figures of authority could be benevolent, magisterial, humble, circumspect, and wise; a time when world leaders did not appear in supermarket tabloids, wear tacky outfits, behave badly, speak idiotically, become spokespeople for Weight Watchers, mispronounce the word nuclear; when their imperfections made them so accessible, so commonplace. Larken prefers her heroes to be unassailable and shrouded in mystery. Eloise and Arthur stand alone in her imagination; their colors are so complex as to defy definition. To say that she loves them would be correct, but it’s a love that waves from a distance.

  “How is he today?” Larken asks.

  “He’s starting to demonstrate purposeful movement,” Eloise replies. “Last night, he even opened his eyes for a few moments.”

  “I’m so glad.” Larken moves toward the bed. “Hello, Arthur.”

  “He looks handsome, doesn’t he?” Eloise remarks. “His color is much better.”

  “Very good,” Larken concurs, although she is still struggling to define what he looks like, as if the right description would be a comfort somehow.

  When she teaches her unit on Southern Renaissance painting, she begins by eliciting descriptions from her students about the quality of the figures:

  How do they look?

  Totally flat.

  Why?

  There’s no light, no shadow.

  Tell me about the colors.

  They’re pale. They look bleached out.

  What do you imagine their skeletons to be like? Are their bones stout or thin, strong or brittle?

  They look like they could snap in two, like they’re made out of pretzels.

  What does that say about their weight?

  Like they don’t weigh anything.

  They look fake. They look prissy. They look like bad actors. They look like paper dolls.

  Once she’s managed in this way to ge
t her students beyond any entrenched attitudes they may have toward religion in general and Mother and Son in particular, she queries the significance of these portrayals:

  So, now that we’ve agreed that no one looks like this, what do you think the artist is trying to say about his view of Christ? What is he saying about the Virgin Mary? How do you think the artist wants you to feel about these characters? What does it mean that they are rendered in this very specific and nonrealistic way?

  How could Larken know that she’s been wrong all these years? She’d never lie to her students intentionally, she’d never disseminate information that she didn’t believe to be true.

  Arthur looks like Christ off the cross, but not Van der Weyden’s Christ. His torso, flattened against the bleached hospital bedding, is angled up slightly, and flat, as if he’s made of creased shirtbox cardboard. His long-fingered hands, palms up, look fleshless—they’re emaciated starfish on the bottom of a sunless sea. The tubes arising from his arm are like tendrils. Everything appears so thin and insubstantial. Larken can almost see his ribs; certainly she can imagine them—brittle as breadsticks—under the hospital gown that has been washed so frequently that whatever pattern was once there is a shadow of color, bleached beyond tone or variation. Arthur is one with the bleached cloth and the overlaundered bedding. He has been absorbed into the smells of alcohol and rubbery stale hospital food.

  The oxygen tube obscures his mouth; its curving length and centered position make him look like Fu Manchu in meditative repose. Or,

  … like Boris Karloff before the animating bolt of lightning. Or,

  … like Dashiell Hammett sleeping off last night’s binge. Or,

  “He’s just resting,” Eloise observes.

  It is surely meant as a reassurance, because he looks like nothing so much as Death.

  Larken and Eloise settle in and make small talk. Eloise is needle-pointing a Christmas stocking for her newest grandbaby. She looks toward Arthur occasionally, as if the three of them are having a normal conversation and Arthur has merely fallen silent. Any moment now he’ll have something to say.