Why don't I, my mother's daughter, have a soothing effect on my children? On Charles? If Mama were here, she'd uphold all of us here now, just as her will within the walls of a house kept those houses from collapsing down around us, it felt. It's inconceivable to me that I'm a mother. Even more inconceivable that one of my children could die.
Could he?
Here at the window in this empty-seeming house, on its sill a skin of dust. What are the reasons for- death, its cause? Can its course be altered? All those graceful clouds shaped like fish, like leaping deer and flying geese, get drawn down with the sun as if to slaughter. On the sill the skin of dust. Of my already dead son? My grandfather? My brother? Oh, Jerome, remember the relationship we had. Where are the bonds that bound us together, now that you're earth? Who in the face of death can hold himself tethered?
Do the dead forget we sometimes didn’t love them, as we forget? In our lives going on ahead at moving speed? The least death should bring is a mindless kind of limbo, as the Church calls it, where there'd be no consciousness of want or pain. On the window an array of my breath. I've hated enough to make a ghost of myself, but still hve and make steam; it's time I decided my disposition toward me and other lives and the ties that reach out and return and unite us, but how can I be who I am with my face gone and part of the winds again? Because I'm alive, I'm my life, I thought, and it was a lie.
Lord, where are the ends of this life of yours? My sight extends to the edge of Hawk's Nest and stops. What's on the other side, where I've never been, bear over the mountain again, either, sir? A perpetual field? A golden green tree? A fledgling weaned from flint, a feather of faith? My hate at all the lessons I haven't learned and the places I'll never see empties my heart. And what's it? A piece of my anatomy? Who gave names to pieces of me, as Mama gave to the unprotected frame around it all, the chrysalis of Alpha for eternity? Only Christ could fill me, a ciborium overbrimming with praise, at this late, long-awaited hour, and if I had Him, I'd give up my life and be this dust, I'd die for Charles, if it were in my power.
Beyond the bay window, the yard came into focus, growing dark, the wind risen now, the snow swirling higher into the air in streaking wings. There was a gray shape beyond the lilac stems. It moved toward her, growing larger and more dense at the edge of the window, and then she looked up, her eyes adjusted, and she was staring into a reflection of Martin's face.
"Alpha?" he said tentatively.
"It's time I made supper."
He watched her walk on rigid legs into the kitchen, and then stepped up to the window, which faced east, in the direction of McCallister, and was frosted at the level of his chest from her breath. He couldn't blame her for avoiding him. His thoughts were base and vile. He was horny. He'd never been this horny in his life. All through their marriage, he'd hardly looked at other women, not so much an indication of his moral character as a sign of his love; he was so immersed in her and making her happy he had no time to look. But lately, at school, he'd begun to notice the development of his female students, the delicacy of their hands and fingers, the shape and size of their breasts, the breadth of their hips, their bare legs, and the curve of their buttocks against their skirts, and once when he was at the blackboard, mechanically writing out an algebraic equation while most of his mind hovered over an image of Alpha, of her at home alone, nursing the boy, trying at the same time to care for the other children and keep up with her everyday chores, he found himself in the center of a dead silence, the entire class staring at him while he stared between the parted legs of Carol Hahn, a red-head whose skirt had slipped above her knees. Her face was crimson and shamed. He feigned illness (and after catching himself at that, he felt ill) and dismissed the class for the day.
The graver Charles's condition became, the more his own needs narrowed to sex, it seemed, as if there were a balance to be achieved in this disparity, and Alpha apparently sensed it; there were times when she looked like she wanted to talk, but the second he came close she'd turn and walk away, out of the room, as if in disgust He'd tried everything he could to keep his mind off those areas of her—novel-reading, prayer, meditation on the Blessed Virgin and the Trinity, cold showers, chopping wood, no pepper on his food—everything. Good Lord, he'd even started carrying a rosary to bed with him!
The night he got home from taking Charles to the hospital, after he'd told Alpha what the doctor had said, and after they'd talked and tried to reassure one another, they got into bed and lay on opposite sides—"I don't really want to be touched now," she whispered—sleepless, tossing in anxiety under the covers, and then their legs touched, she turned, and he fell on her like an animal and couldn't use the whole of it it was so hard. Since then, it seemed to shame her to have him close. This morning before the children were up, when they were at the breakfast table, he was picking at a grapefruit, trying to decide whether to mention to her what had happened at the hospital the day before, when she said, "The crisis should come today, shouldn't it?"
"Or tomorrow, he said."
"He’ll call and let us know?"
"He’ll call Father."
"And well leave right away?"
"Of course, dear."
And with those words, he knew he could never tell her, no matter what. She was staring into her coffee cup, and it was as if he were seeing her anonymously, across from him in a train or a bus, and he realized again how divided her face was, and how that enhanced her beauty of delicate lines. Charles had her cheekbones, her nose, her lips, sharply outlined, the upper curved like a crossbow, the lower full and sensual— The throb of an erection tightened his pants, and in a moment of revelation—her eyes were cast down, showing violet lids—and her face pale—he saw her as the corpse of Charles.
"Alpha!" he cried. "You've got to eat!"
She got up and left the table.
Her grief was dynamic, even when expressed in anger, and she was always busy, angrily busy, working to ease her grief. His sat in him like a stone. He hated to speak, to eat, to perform the simplest task in her presence, because he knew his actions would expose his hidden feelings, as hers did, and reveal his guilt, lack of hope, horniness, and something worse he'd discovered in himself and was trying to cover up by carrying a rosary everywhere—his growing conviction that there was no God, beneficent or otherwise, by Lord—and because he knew it agonized her and made her even more angry, now that Charles was near death, to see unimpeded life in anybody else. Since he'd carried Charles into the hospital and left him there, he felt responsible for the way she was acting, and this, in the entrapping logic of emotions, made him feel responsible for the illness to begin with.
And what if Charles died?
He chewed on his upper lip, which was cracked from the heat of the house, and pushed his glasses up to grip the bridge of his nose; he hadn't known you couldn't enter a child's helplessness with all the skills of adulthood, and make him whole, but had to stand off with the knowledge adulthood brings, helpless, and watch the child suffer and hope that your hopes for him touched another source and returned to him as strength from the Lord. Or perhaps he wasn't a good parent. He thought he heard the baby crying. He Listened for her voice, for Alpha's footsteps going into her bedroom, but had imagined the sound. He massaged the bridge of his nose until the wailing waves were gone, and then let his glasses fall back in place.
Whenever anybody asked him who his favorite was among the children, he said, "Whichever one is sick or in trouble, that's my favorite; that's the one that needs me the most." But he was in such fear for Charles's life he could hardly bear to bring him to mind, much less lend him emotional support, and the minute he walked out of the hospital he couldn't even picture the boy's face. Sometimes he'd see for an instant, as if stopped in an eruptive exposure of lighted surprise, a vivid detail that made his breath catch; a nose with a plastic tube in one nostril, enlarged; a white profile with its eye rolled back in death (imbued with an imaginary smell of hospital alcohol and ether); a buttock honeycombed and
bleeding from needles; a broken bony forearm on the velvet of a coffin; an ivory head levitated against black. That was how he saw his son.
And once in a moment of extreme stress, when the tension threatened to deprive him of the power to reason, he found himself calculating how much more money they'd have if Charles died.
He looked at the white oval of his face on the window, looked into its eyes, beyond them to the outside, and felt a chill branch in patterns of lines over his back; loose snow was rising in columns and pillars that swayed and bent in every direction, collapsed, rose in another place, and went whirling toward the southwest out of sight, a blizzard warning. If one of those hits this window, he thought, Chuck will die, and then a tall enlivened sheet, taller than the electrical wires, with lacy streamers coiling along its outer edge, came speeding toward the house, and as soon as he readjusted his thought to. No, it means he won't! it swept past the lilacs and hit the window with such force the house rocked. He clung to the rosary in his pocket.
What was he doing?
He saw a sheet being pulled over a face, a mound of dirt on snow, a yellowish tonic, fear, an oval at the bottom of the grave, and heard voices, his and Charles's, laughing in a closed space. Yesterday Charles was more lucid, and talked about the other boys, the recent snow, the sled they got for Christmas, a long one that could hold three, about school and some of his friends, and then said in a quavery voice, "Dad, what do I have that's so bad?"
"Pneumonia."
"What's that?"
"Oh, sort of like bronchitis, only deeper in the lungs. More fluid, I guess."
"How do you spell it?"
"P-n-e—"
"Not an N?"
"No, a P."
"Why a P?"
"It's Greek, I believe."
"Hard to learn?"
"P-n-e-u-m-o-n-i-a."
"Oh!" Charles said.
"Is it pretty?"
"Pretty pretty. Why the P?"
"I guess it's Greek, I said."
"It's Greek to me."
"Oh, you!"
"Greek, GREEK, greek, Greek," Charles was grunting and creaking, as though mesmerized by the word and acting out its meaning in the air.
"Where's the P?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Where did it go?"
"At the front of the word?"
"No, where did it go, Dad?"
"It went in hiding!"
"It did?"
"It went pee-moniaing!"
"Dad, stop!'
"Pneumoniaing?"
"I'll have to cough!"
"Does it hurt?"
"Whenever I breathe in or out or have to cough."
"Up pneumonia?"
"Or have to cough."
"Can you hang on?"
"Yes, I guess I will."
"Good boy!"
"Where's the P?" he asked again.
"The P in pneumonia or the P in hiding or the P in me?"
"The P in me!"
"That's the fluid.
"That's what I thought!"
"I'll cough for you. Blark! Hrgh! Krouf!"
"It keeps killing my breath."
"Hecka, hoofth!"
"My pee in me, too!"
They laughed and Martin bared his teeth and did a clutching grab at his belly with both hands and shook it up and down like a jiggly Santa Claus. Charles laughed harder and then started to cough and the cough wouldn't stop; it went on until he was choking and fighting for breath so badly Martin had to run for a nurse, and when the two hurried back into the room, Charles's face was blue and he was unconscious, having convulsions.
If Charles died, it would be his fault.
He heard pattery footsteps behind him—Alpha's when she was determined or in a fury—and turned; she stopped, her face tense and her eyes feverish-looking (was she also getting sick?) and empty of expression. "Father Schimmelpfennig is here," she said. "They say it's time."
*
When he thinks of his parents, which is seldom now, he thinks of them as the monarchs of a kingdom he once visited in a dream; his mother wears a full-length dress, flaming red (though when he sees her back from a distance it's a brown tweedlike coat), whose color increases the humming in his ears, and never shows more than her profile, like the queen on a playing card. His father has on a fur cap with fur earflaps turned up like half-moons, and carries a broom or a crozier in one hand. His bass voice has lost its usual timbre and sounds like (Charles observes this with interest but without puzzlement or surprise) the squeaking of a rubber mouse. What is it he's trying to say, Charles wonders, and sees himself older, with his father's face, at a table, extricating needles from his head of hair with pain. When his real father, looming moonlike over the bed, speaks to him from his real face, it's as difficult to understand; his ears seem sealed with cellophane that vibrates with every outside sound.
"Herzz verritzz swowoza bee."
"Brrrodja deezzz."
His own voice is a dampened hum at the center of his head, and his lips, split by fever, taste like coins turning green. His bones are ice and the ice is wrapped with layers of flesh that bum but have no effect. His brain is a fluid that exerts pressure at the base of his nose and occasionally leaks from it, or runs rawly down his throat, and puts pressure behind his eyes, which are dry as paper. The band of pain constricting his chest strangles the air he breathes, and the shallow breaths he takes beneath the pain are becoming more shallow and rapid each hour.
He has no center. When he opens an eye, he might be looking up from his stomach or out a knee. Sometimes he's the size of a thimble, and at other times so enormous, a toe of his could cover a city. One day his arms, which are either too heavy or too light, were gone from him for a while. Where? His illness is a sea and others are on land, unreachable. They materialize beside him at a great height and he stares up at them from beneath rocking water while their images sway with the movement of the water he sees them through (as their mouths move) and his body rocks beneath, as if bows saw on strings that flow through him from the firmament. The nurse arrives with a hypodermic the size of a pine tree, turns him on his stomach (wasn't he on it?), and as she drives it through his back the white-haired man across the hall screams again. Or was the hypodermic a spinal for him? Charles turns, or imagines he turns, and it's night once more.
His father appears, his mother appears; they float and rock outside the bright, burning layers of fever that enwrap him like tinfoil, in a fragile, metallic grip, and a cold wet hand spans his forehead. Yes? Yes? They disappear into a brightness like the sun, and he sees a player piano, shining, crystalline, made of ice or glass. Jingle ping tink-tink. Jingle ping. There's a pain above his left eye like an embedded ax. His parents appear again and confront him with a phenomenon that makes no sense: there are, after all, other people in the world besides him, real people, and they're alive. They're his mother and father. Why are they so happy, then?
They smile and talk, showing their teeth, and now they're high above him, elongated, blurred and haloed in yellow, and smaller, as if seen through a tube. Their voices buzz and vibrate in his ears and then go away. A blue numeral two bends and unbends where they were. They appear again, smiling and talking, jingle ping. Yes? Yes? To reach their sanctuary, he has to lift himself upward, rising on an elevator of his will, and hold his body on the sea's surface with all his strength. He grips the bedclothes and turns his parched corneas on them. Only his father is there. It's as if Charles has entered a house in the night, one he's never seen before, has found his way to the living room and in a brilliance fed by outside whirs and hums has fulfilled fate's appointment (Dad! Dad!) with the right man. What's he doing here, he wonders, and feels his strength leave as he descends beneath the sea of sickness again, deeper than before. Dad! Dad! he tries to cry out in his real voice, and lifts himself once more, for the last time, it seems, and holds himself on the surface until his father says something that makes him laugh; the laughter turns to a cough that splits his chest
, breaks the ice of his bones, and drives splinters into his flesh until blackness comes. He'd rather be alone.
Above his left eye (the other stays closed), a bright disc, which might be a ceiling light, pulses and bums. It seems the last power he has to contend with. He pleads with it to move—it won't—or go out. Even when he closes his eye, it clings to his lid, expanding and contracting, changing colors, to a profile, a queen, a circle of icy piano keys. If he could deal with the light or the profile (now a numeral he's seen perform in this same way), he'd be at peace, because this isn't an ordinary day for him, he knows. He can feel a heaviness, like honey and salt water, rising in him, and though it hurts him to breathe it more than any other phase of his illness has hurt him, he breathes it deeply and evenly, trying to drown.
Then he’s chewing bubble gum. His jaws move from side to side in a soft, erotic, cowlike mastication. He's home again, in bed, asleep, yet not asleep; his eyelids are transparent gems. He sees there's nothing beyond the bedroom curtains, no yard or hedge or houses or countryside, only a shading of light blue, like sky, and as his jaws move he hears a sound between his ears like the shuddering roar of a waterfall heard from a distance, rising in volume each time his mouth opens wide. He chews the bedclothes. The curtains blow in and cover the bed. He chews them. The jaws move farther apart each time, the cascading roar increases, closer, while the jaws work at the curtains, becoming more rubbery and speeded up and voracious, chewing everything within reach—a dresser, a nightstand (which turn elastic like the bedclothes and curtains), a closet, a wall; and when the sunlight, blue in color, pours into the room, they begin chewing it
Then they move off and change, become otherworldly, impersonal, but still remain a part of him and continue to chew with ceaseless and increasing violence, rising as high as the house, slamming down hard, higher, hard, and then they turn, turn again as if seeking direction, turn and start toward him. He tries to get out of bed but the curtains cover his legs, and now are as heavy as sand on him. The jaws, flying apart in bits so wide they disappear awhile, reach the edge of the mattress and get a bite of it. Hot breath. He makes an effort to move, a final one, using the last of his remaining strength, the ration he's held in reserve, and breaks free into an icy brightness, borne on a current of chilling blue air, and sees a mirror image of his body, tiny as a doll, heading toward a black hole in the shining universe, a blue baby blue in the night as he spins out past constellations of echoing stars and comes back on a separate trajectory into his own silence again.
Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 21