Nearly every seat in the waiting room was occupied. “That’s what happens when you have an appointment at 1:45,” he said, pleased with his sense of authority. “Everyone’s late coming back from lunch.”
My brother was used to waiting rooms.
If I had told him that the day before I had met a woman who had given herself over to eleven hours of pure waiting for the sake of spiritual insight, he would have put it in the category where he put all my goofiness and that of my friends and acquaintances.
His definition of mortality would differ from the poet’s: mortality is what he knew better than anything else.
“The doctor’s a broad,” he told me. “These days it’s amazing how many doctors are broads.”
He was hoping to get the doctor to say everything was okay so he could dismiss the visiting nurse who came twice a day to administer antibiotics intravenously. In this we were at odds: our family always felt better about Raymond when he had a concrete physical ailment, because then he got the medical attention he needed, including the simple gestures of a kind touch and a listening ear. When he was mentally ill, he was often abandoned to his own terrifying lack of resources.
“Diabetes sure makes a lot of things into mountains,” he said.
“Even a stubbed toe,” I agreed.
We sat.
Moments went by laden with silence.
Raymond stirred.
He remembered that he had good news about his friend Joey, who had an under-the-table job directing traffic at the Brimfield Flea Market. Ten dollars an hour under the hot sun: it wasn’t what you’d call winning the lottery, but it beat sitting around, smoking, waiting for your toe to get normal. He had known Joey since they were teenagers. Joey had about six D.U.I.s.
“Thanks to those MADD people, you can’t drive even if you’ve only had one pop. Boy, are they out to get you.” Another favorite topic.
According to Raymond, Joey kept applying for a Cinderella license, which allows offenders to drive just to work and back, but the state wouldn’t let him have one. Sometimes Joey crashed at his place, which was fine. Joey traveled light. His prize possession was a snake flashlight, which his mother gave him one year for Christmas. “It helps you look around the corners of pipes and stuff. It’s good for fixing cars.” Joey didn’t try to grub food or anything. In fact, he had his own pretty big collection of canned goods. In exchange for the free use of Raymond’s sofa he didn’t mind cooking or doing the dishes. Sometimes Joey’s girlfriend dropped by, which usually meant there would be some good cooking.
A few seats down, a man was moaning. A little boy kept trying to get his attention: “Daddy, Daddy.”
“Puerto Rican,” said my brother, “by the looks of him.” The man had a metal protector, secured with white tape, covering his eye. Whenever the child squirmed out of his chair and starting crawling under it, the man would yell at him to get back in his seat or else he would kick his butt from here to you know where.
“Nothing wrong with Puerto Ricans,” Raymond said. “Once, when I was bumming around in Springfield, they kept giving me cigarettes without me even asking, just to be nice.” And of course he had been to Puerto Rico years and years ago, in another lifetime really. Selling encyclopedias. A nice place. Sunny. Good drinks. Pretty girls.
Outside it was ninety-five degrees. Everyone was wearing shorts and T-shirts and sandals. Everyone except my brother. He had on his uniform, the blue jeans and the polo shirt, winter and summer. Raymond’s most arresting feature was his hazel eyes, not just because they shifted color, but because they seemed to tunnel backward into a private dimension. People often assumed that Raymond was a Vietnam vet, and when they did, he just let them think it. It was at the Veterans’ Hospital in Leeds after all where he went to get his shots of Haldol from a nurse he liked named Karen.
“Mr. Melendez,” came the voice from the nurse’s station, bored and steady. “Please come to the front desk.”
Mr. Melendez made his way slowly forward, his arms feeling the air in front of him, like someone practicing to be blind, only in his case it might not have been just practice.
His little kid scooted after him.
“Sit down and wait for me,” he yelled. “Here, you can play with my keys while I talk to the doctor.”
“That’s pretty generous, you know,” said my brother. He said he would never let anyone play with his keys. He loved to feel their drag in his pocket and to hear their jangle. Keys were lucky. They meant you had a place to live, or a car, sometimes both.
“What would you like for dinner tonight?” I asked him. “We’ll stop and get something on the way home.”
A shrug. More silence. The radiation had eaten into his appetite. The doctor had told him to try to fill up on soups, applesauce, and milkshakes.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m indifferent.”
It was typical of him to suddenly marshal the precise word. He was often attuned and muffled at the same time.
“Mr. Blais.”
At first he appeared not to hear, then he looked up slowly.
Shuffling, he passed through the door being held open by a uniformed nurse and entered the antiseptic maze.
The doctor said his toe was better.
Later, in another office at the same hospital, his cancer doctor looked at Raymond’s throat with an instrument not unlike Joey’s snake flashlight and then scheduled a more elaborate “look-see” under anesthesia. “Awesome,” he said, rocking back on the heels of his comfortable shoes.
My brother had beaten the disease.
“Yeah, it’s good news,” said Raymond, with a shrug. He had begun a process of disconnection that we all tried not to notice. We teased him that he had nine lives.
If so, after the cancer, he was on his tenth.
His last months were perhaps the most peaceful he had ever known.
He was calm, even reasonable.
Not long before he died, he said, “Mother, do you notice anything about me?”
“Well, I notice a lot, Ray. Is there something in particular?”
“Have you noticed that I never swear anymore?”
It was true: it had dissipated, the verbal rage that used to cause him to strut around the house screaming slurs and other obscenities when he was a teenager, that prompted him to call the Department of Mental Health threatening lawsuits, or to harass a girl in a video store or a waitress at Friendly’s, to call 911 repeatedly to report out-of-control aircraft, or to call Sotheby’s to see if his alleged antiques were potential auction material. “Sir,” said the voice at the other end, dripping with reserve, “whatever it is that they are worth now, they will be worth even more in twenty years, so,” adding, totally icy now, “call back then.”
Raymond was subdued at the end, oriented to time and place. The calendar at his apartment above the motor shop was on the right month in the right year.
We fooled ourselves into believing that his days were no more numbered than anyone else’s.
He had made it through the fall, through Thanksgiving, and Christmas, supplying us with the usual lists, though this time, no longer able to wield a pen, he dictated them to our mother. The day before he died he called me at 7:45 in the morning and we discussed the mild weather for as long a time as it is possible to discuss mild weather. That afternoon, I spoke to my mother, who said she thought he was “failing, to use an old-fashioned word. I hope you’ll do something to lift his spirits.” His broken state made him less demanding, which made it easier to say no to his requests for company, and I was feeling the usual mantle of guilt after I hung up the phone with my mother. I made a promise to myself, which I can only hope I would have kept, to come up with some distraction: a trip to Nick’s Nest in Holyoke, a restaurant that serves franks and beans, popcorn, coffee, and milkshakes and nothing else, like an elderly relation with five basic stories to tell; or maybe to the Quabbin Reservoir, to stare at the water supply and try to see beneath its surface the outline of any of the fo
ur towns that were drowned to create it; or perhaps a visit to one of those maple sugar houses in the hills for a pancake breakfast. I would have held my breath against the odor of smoke and sweat embedded in his clothing and done my best to force conversation onto the long bolts of dead air that unfurled in his company.
The next day he headed to Mystic, after a doctor’s appointment.
Late that afternoon, my mother served him his favorite meal, steak and potatoes. She left briefly to return a book to the library, which was one block away. When she returned, he had already gone to bed so she didn’t get a chance to bid him a good night.
He died in his sleep in early March more or less of old age, two months shy of his fifty-fourth birthday. There was no sign of trauma, no postmortem evidence of fingers and toes curled up in agony, which the mortician told us is a sign of someone trying to fight off pain. As far as I know, the room went white and then it filled with angels.
No matter how thoroughly anticipated death is, or even desired as the only way to alleviate suffering, there is still, when death occurs, a disconcerting sense of a wholesale shifting of the solar system. One time when my children were little and spent Saturday mornings watching cartoons, they saw one in which apparently a great big orb in the sky exploded. They came running into the kitchen.
“We need a new planet!” they shouted, jumping up and down.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because the old one is broken.”
Our mother dictated to us her usual elaborate obituary: “A visionary entrepreneur as well as a connoisseur of antiques and an expert on valley lore, he was active in the produce business …”
She spoke at length about his talent and his promise, his brilliance and his humor. She said that the obituary should point out that he had valor, and in case anyone was wondering, she was using the word with absolute precision. She had looked it up. Valor means more than ordinary courage; it means courage for the battle. Shunned at times, frightening at others, frightened himself more often than not, he fought bad odds day in, day out, yet he kept on keeping on. She said he had been a good boy, a loyal son, and when he was at Mount St. Charles he had sent the most thoughtful letters home. We took it all down, her magnificent tribute, but in the end all he got from the newspaper were a few lines, garbled at that.
A few days later, we emptied out our brother’s apartment. Raymond’s friend Joey had offered to take over the lease. We left him all the major furniture and the dishes.
“You don’t have to,” he said. “It all belonged to Ray. Everything except the food.” He promised to send my mother a picture he had taken of Raymond by his small artificial Christmas tree. If the picture was any good, Raymond had intended to reproduce it and to send it out (to whom, besides us, we had to wonder) the following year at the holidays.
There was no funeral, just a simple burial at St. Patrick’s Cemetery, on the ninth day of the third month, the month of precipitously sad parkas, of impulsive and ill-advised haircuts, the month when normal courtesies are suspended, the month of extremes. Lambs, lions, pussy willows, icicles, spring puddles, blizzards. The calendar should be rewritten, January, February, Bipolar, April, May.
The service would be private.
Dermot came in from Boston.
I suggested that perhaps donations could be made in Raymond’s memory to the Survival Center in Amherst or to the Honor Court in Northampton, both of which reach out to people of slender means, but our mother chose instead to suggest that remembrances be offered to the Dominican nuns at the Monastery of the Mother of God on Riverdale Road in Springfield, a cloistered order devoted to a regimen of constant prayer.
I would have allowed friends of the family to attend.
“No,” she said, adding the Gaelic, “Sinn Fein.”
I did not fight city hall.
“And,” she said, giving us her infamous glare, blue, icy, piercing, beyond language, “I shouldn’t have to say this, but I do. Don’t you girls dare wear slacks.”
The priest who would normally have presided was away on vacation: we were asked if we minded if a nun was sent in his stead.
Would we mind a nun?
Us?
Sister Edith arrived at the cemetery a few minutes before one o’clock on March 9, 1998. Like everyone else that winter, we blamed the bad weather on El Niño. With her white hair, spirited manner, and doughy, modestly suited body, Sister Edith was a familiar figure, interchangeable with the procession of elderly Irish ladies who have dotted the family landscape over the years. She possessed a master’s degree in pastoral counseling. Because she did such a remarkable job of remembering who was who, I decided she must have earned an “A” in the course called Keeping the Names of the Bereaved Straight.
At first, we stood huddled together.
She told us to spread out, to make a circle.
The day was raw, windy, bitter; it was raining ice. Our mother stood as tall as she could against the weather. Her posture put me in mind of the four times she was singled out and called to stand during her high school graduation ceremony. Her friend Kay Mannix had written on the Class Day program: “In your chain of memories consider me a link.”
Above her eyes where there had once been eyebrows was just another crease of dotted skin. And not just that thick dark ridge had disappeared. What about time itself? On her face was an expression of pure bewilderment, as if she were trying to answer the question of where Time goes, as if she were flipping through some invisible filing system, observing how just a few minutes ago Christina and Maureen were fighting over each other’s Ginny dolls, and Michael wanted a BB gun for his birthday, and Jacqueline and Madeleine were helping to fold Raymond’s white shirts to put in that heavy black trunk for Camp Leo. And minutes before that, Raymond was an infant during the war and Lizzie was writing to her in Fort Pierce with instructions on how to knit him a sweater. Earlier still, some very sweet children in the sixth grade at the Valentine School were wishing her luck in her new life as a married woman. And then, she was back in college at Bridgewater, crafting perfectly scripted essays on Tolerance, playing the piano at the nearby prison while that gifted girl with the good voice belted out that entirely inappropriate song about looking down the long lonesome road, and then, even younger, she was back at the house on Belcher Street in Chicopee and was so glad her father had won the mayoral election because then she would get to play the harp at the inaugural ceremony, and then, burrowing further into the past, she was in the fourth grade, at her friend’s birthday party doing a silly dance she made up called “The Powder Puff,” hoping to get that quiet little boy who kept buying her trinkets to save his pennies and buy a scooter of his own someday, and then there she is, younger still, a toddler, caught in the shade of a linden tree, walking down the street, holding the hands of her parents, bathed in the smiles of neighbors, on the verge of pronouncing her first complete sentence. I like lilacs. Someone should scold Time for zooming forth to an unconvincing and altogether intolerable present. Time should take that drug that helps unruly children to settle down.
The ice had turned to rain, and it was coming down sideways.
Sister Edith led us in prayer. How it gets inside your bones, seeps into the sinews and the corpuscles, and hits a person up from time to time. The power derives from its repetitive quality, each prayer recalling every other time the prayer was offered, recalling the way, adorned in hats, we lifted our voices to recite the rote words on that succession of Easter Sundays, or in high school when the girls got to be the altar boys, to recite the sacred Latin words, “Domine non sum dignus,” or during those days in late summer, perfect days, cool and blue, with no sign of the devil anywhere when, much to the bafflement of anyone who wasn’t Catholic, on August 15 we celebrated the Feast of the Assumption, donning our madras shifts, streaming into church to honor the Virgin for having been the only human ever to be automatically assumed into the Beatific Kingdom, no questions asked.
The service for Raymond lasted no mor
e than ten minutes, concluding with a poem.
Michael stepped forward slightly.
Michael always amazes me. If my sisters and I had childhoods that sometimes operated on less than a quarter tank, his flirted with empty, operating on fumes. Yet he turned into a man of deep convictions with an assortment of passions. He likes cars, computers, RFK, John McCain, nonfiction, dogs, and influencing his niece and his nephews. He recently inspired one of them to start a debate team at his high school. He withholds judgment from just about everyone except petite actresses who say, “You like me. You people really, really like me” when they win an Oscar. He finds the rest of us excessively verbal. “Words, words, words,” he once said to me. “You people live in a bubble of words.”
Yet he turned out strong and tall and, the sisters’ greatest compliment, true blue.
He was the one who spoke for Raymond, to Raymond, at the final moment.
Without hesitation, in a solemn voice that did not falter, he read a poem called “Leaves” by Derek Mahon:
The Prisoners of infinite choice have built their house
in a field below the wood,
And are at peace.
It is autumn, and dead leaves on their way to the river
Scratch like birds at the windows or tick on the road.
Somewhere there is an afterlife of dead leaves.
A stadium filled with an infinite rustling and sighing.
Somewhere in the heaven of lost futures,
The lives we might have lived
Have found their own fulfillment.
We moved in clumps toward the cars that would take everyone back to my house for the reception I had assumed for years would be held there. Our mother was shivering. As we proceeded to leave, my brother’s friend, Joey, showed up, driven by his mother. The ritual had taken less time than we expected. Our mother paused in her leave-taking to greet them.
The news that evening was filled was the usual mix of folly and dread. The vice president was implicated in some kind of fund-raising hanky-panky. There were no new leads in the death of that little girl in Colorado. A disgruntled former employee killed four people at the headquarters for the state lottery in Connecticut.
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