Against the Ruins

by Linda Lightsey Rice

  “This is an unexpected pleasure, Mrs. Copeland. I was looking forward to meeting you at William’s second service.”

  Second service? When was the first? “Well, of course I’ll be there.”

  “I told him we need to schedule it soon. Even if he’s to pursue another option, he needs pulpit experience for graduation.”

  “Professor, I’m here because William has been taken ill. He may not be able to come back until next semester.”

  “Not a serious illness, I hope. We can give him an extension on papers and exams. We’ll need a letter from his doctor. What has him down?”

  I take a deep breath. If a letter is required, I have no choice. “He’s in the state hospital. He’s been working too hard. He just needs a rest.”

  Charles Estes regards me silently. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says finally. “We’ve been concerned about William for quite a while. Ever since he dropped out of his ethics class. I’m sure you know that when William led his first service it was—well, not very successful. We called him in for counseling.”

  I know nothing, apparently. “He’s a very private man.”

  “You don’t know what happened? Frankly, he botched his first service. Mumbled all through it, we couldn’t hear a word. I called him in and told him he needed a good strong voice to preach God’s word. I told him what I tell a lot of the men—preaching is salesmanship: you sell ’em something they don’t even know they want to buy.”

  Charles Estes looks pleased with himself. “Everyone understands that that’s just a little joke. But William had a conniption—said that wasn’t how he thought of Christian service. He lectured me about Jesus throwing the buyers and sellers out of the temple.”

  He rolls his eyes as though we’re sharing a private joke. “We finally recommended that he switch from the Master of Divinity program to the Master of Arts in Religion. He can teach theology. Or become a Christian education director. He can still be very active in a congregation, but he’d be relieved of the ministerial duties that might be difficult for him. The salary is a bit less of course, but we pointed out that he’s lucky to have a wife who works and can help him out.”

  William not become a minister? Be supported by his wife? He must have felt humiliated. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand this.”

  The professor pushes his fingertips together in front of his chest. “William does not—how shall I put this—well, he doesn’t have the necessary social skills. Social duties are an important part of a pastor’s job. Your husband is—well, a little too—unusual.”

  “He’s worked so hard to get here. He’s just been tired lately, worn down, when he gets some rest I’m sure he’ll—”

  “I’m sorry if this is upsetting, Mrs. Copeland. Perhaps we sensed whatever trouble has necessitated the state hospital. It’s odd how he talks about the Civil War as though it happened yesterday.”

  “He’s just in the hospital for a short time.” This can’t be happening. “He wants to be a minister so badly. It has to do with his wartime service—he’s a decorated veteran. I think he needs to—well, make up for what he had to do in the war.”

  The administrator’s phone rings; he tells me he has a meeting to attend and stands up. “Do give William our regards. When he’s up to it, perhaps his classmates can visit. The seminary maintains a certain ministry over there.”

  I shake his hand, ask, “When was William told he couldn’t be ordained?”

  “Very recently, actually. I believe it was last Friday.”

  Friday. The day the world blew up.

  On the way home, you ask me to sing a Christmas song. I say I can’t right now, that I’m not sure I know any songs anymore.

  I do, however, have an insistent racket in my head—

  If a man believed he’d sinned terribly,

  God said do not kill and he did,

  upon orders of his government wouldn’t change it

  and he needed to atone, needed to make—restitution.

  He’ll preach Thou Shalt Not Kill

  And then he’s told he can’t,

  What then?

  You’re looking out at Christmas decorations, humming “Rudolph.”

  “Stop singing, Lyra. This isn’t the time for Christmas songs.”

  Your severed voice hangs in the air as you regard me with a shocked look on your face. Your bright eyes grow dull, as though receding into their sockets. I feel like I’ve slapped you and narrowly miss hitting a curb. I slow down but can’t look at you.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. Come on, sing some more.”

  You gaze out the window and say you wish it would snow.

  Chapter Twelve

  Christmas was awful. How dare the world be joyous? Even before your father was committed, Rosa had hung strings of red lights (what else?) along her roofline and balcony and porch railings, plastic swizzle sticks hanging from them like icicles. Some evenings Uta stood outside and frowned at the scarlet spectacle—she said she’d given some thought to arson. As cooler air invaded, Rosa paraded around in a black coat with a fox-fur head. One Saturday before your father’s breakdown, we ran into her in Mrs. Flo’s store and she called, “Hey Louise. Hey Miss Lyrey, how are you, babe?” After you said you were pretty all right, Rosa added, “You come over sometime and I’ll show you my Christmas statues—got Santas and Marys to beat the band, I’ve been collecting ’em for years. It’s a wonderful time, Christmas.” She unhooked her fox’s mouth from its tail, wagged it at you and growled.

  In the days after William’s commitment, though, Rosa and Uta both brought us food or some toy for you or a piece of fabric that might make a nice dress for me. Uta urged me to come play the piano, but I always said no. She asked what I had planned for Christmas but I had no plans, I’d have to call my brothers and cancel soon. Uta said, well then, she’d be expecting the two of us for Christmas dinner and we’d be having Yorkshire pudding, which you were positive was custard. I told Uta I’d “have to see.” Truth was, I couldn’t even imagine Christmas.

  Another day Uta came over brandishing a pair of scissors. She headed for the kitchen, took a dishtowel and wrapped it around her shoulders, and sat down.

  “I’m ready. Louise, I want you to cut off these foolish ringlets.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that? You need a beautician.”

  “I want you to cut my hair. This is special, letting go of this old fashion. One’s hair is magical—think about it, when you cut a lock from the dead it’ll last your lifetime, you can keep a live part of the person you love. How I wish I had a lock of Mackie’s hair. Now come on, let’s get to it.”

  “I don’t know how to cut hair.”

  “My dear, aren’t you doing a lot of things you don’t know how to do?” She looked at you, said why didn’t you go in the living room and color in the Christmas book she’d brought you. After you left, she asked, “How are you managing?”

  “I can’t talk about this, Mrs. Moazen. I’ll just break down.”

  She regarded me soberly—her black eyes bright. “So cut my hair, dear. I might have a ball to go to.”

  While I haltingly snipped here and there, she said, “You know that tour they give of the capitol building? I’m fond of our state seal—that part where the woman is walking over swords and daggers.” Uta got up to look in the mirror, turned back. “Let’s have a little more off.” She sat down again. “At the bottom it says Dum Spiro Spero.”

  “‘While I breathe, I hope.’ I took my honors class on the tour.”

  “Far superior to ‘May the Wind Be Always at Your Back,’” Uta said. “Seeing as how an Irish wind can blow you on your behind no matter where it’s coming from.”

  I laughed. It felt like many years since I had, and I wen
t on trimming the old woman’s wispy white hair, and you came in to watch the long strands fall onto the floor and asked Uta could you tie it up into balls and use it as snowballs on the Christmas tree we didn’t have yet, and Uta said that was an excellent idea, hair was magical all right, she’d known hers would come in handy some day, and I wondered if maybe that was inappropriate and Uta said it was her hair and she was making you a present of it. You began rolling her hair into snowballs, adding scotch tape to hold the hair in place, and the three of us found ourselves laughing, though I grew silent once and listened to the sounds of laughter, thought of the carousel that used to be where Uta’s house was—or so she claimed—how lovely laughing women and handsome men must have ridden on it, this would have been the same years that my mother was a young painter, and did my mother ever ride a carousel, if so maybe she’d have painted one, and then I remembered the painting that always puzzled me, the one canvas that was not dark and heavy—though the animal portraits weren’t either—but this seascape had incredible yellow light against a cliff over water, and suddenly I could see that yellow light, it hung in the air over you and Uta dum spiro spero-ing for all it was worth, and I reached over your head to put my hand into that light and for a fleeting moment the world was itself again.

  On the sixth day after William was admitted to the hospital, I was called in for a conference with the social worker and Dr. Dumaine.

  “I wanted to see you,” Alicia Ravenel said to me, “because the staff psychiatrist has recommended electric shock for William.”

  I slumped down in my chair.

  Dr. Dumaine asked how I was “holding up” and then said, “I saw William this morning. The thorazine calms him down but only with very large doses. Too much can cause involuntary muscle movements. Which can be permanent. We need to try something else.”

  My voice quavered. “But isn’t electric shock dangerous?”

  “It’s quite safe these days,” Dr. Dumaine said. “And often it does correct whatever’s awry. He’s to have unilateral shock—only on one side of the brain, that produces less memory loss. I wouldn’t advise this if I thought it would harm William.”

  Alicia Ravenel added, “He’ll be sedated. Right afterward he’ll be a little confused, a few patients cry, he’ll have a headache. He might have trouble sleeping.”

  “But what’s wrong with him?” I was nearly shrieking. I lowered my voice. “The day of the breakdown he got bad news about his career. Did that cause this? Was it the war?”

  “Either might be a factor,” Dr. Dumaine said. “For a lot of men, their youth, and the idealism that often protects the young, ended abruptly on the battlefields. Mental illness can lie dormant for years until something unleashes it, and wartime horrors could certainly do that. Some soldiers have more severe reactions to combat than others. Those men might have had severe reactions to other things that no one noticed. A mental problem might be made worse by war, or some other stressful experience, but might not be caused by it.”

  “I thought of something,” I said. “William won a medal at the Battle of the Bulge. That battle was in December. He’s never told me exactly what he did to win the medal.”

  Dr. Dumaine thought for a minute. “How long have you been married?”

  “Seven years. We got married while William was in college on the GI Bill.”

  “The euphoria of courtship might have kept William’s illness at bay—everyone’s at their best when falling in love. After that brutal war, when he saw so much death and destruction, he found a woman he loved and probably thought—things will be all right. But a marriage settles down and you have children and a bit of the luster wears off. That leaves you open to more influences. Wartime trauma sometimes has delayed reactions.”

  I hate that awful war, I thought. Wasn’t it enough that it killed two cousins and turned my oldest brother into an angry stranger too fond of the bottle? It killed William’s brother and a decade later it’s trying to kill him too? Haven’t we paid our fair share?

  “Does it ever end?” I asked. “Does what war does to people ever end?” What might we have been without it?

  Dr. Dumaine put a hand on my shoulder. I wanted to lean against him and cry my heart out. “There’s no way of knowing for certain what’s caused William’s breakdown,” he said gently. “And there’s no reason to think he won’t recover. But we need to stabilize him.”

  Because of the shock treatment, I couldn’t see William until Christmas Day. Until then, I distracted us by making fabric animal Christmas ornaments to give to neighbors and friends. As I sewed I reminisced about “the old Christmases” in Brantley, the twenty people around two tables. Giving only vague reasons, I had cancelled this year’s holiday reunion. As Christmas got closer, Lincoln Street looked as though it’d drifted Up North, what with everyone trying to make the subtropics look like fir trees and frozen ponds. Uta installed what she called “a solstice altar” on her porch, a pine tree sprayed with artificial snow, with various trinkets and photographs of Uta’s ancestors underneath, including a silver-framed portrait of a five-year-old girl. Mattie Sweete made cookies every day and set them on her steps for anyone who happened by. In Rosa’s front yard stood a six-foot Santa that a “client” who ran a garage had made by fusing melted tires into a figure and then painting it. The tread was still noticeable—Santa looked like he’d been run over. Eventually I got out our decorations and unwrapped the metal bells and tinkled one in your ear, reminded you that when you were a baby you’d lie under the tree and swat at the bells. You giggled—at the wise age of six—over the idea. How sweet that sound was, my child laughing. I took out the wooden crèche and set it up on the mahogany inlay table under the front window—I was proud of that table, I got it by saving Green Stamps for four years. But often I’d find myself in the bathroom crying. Later I’d reappear and say we should play a game, or maybe I’d read to you. I read you A Child’s Christmas in Wales, going to great lengths to explain where Wales was, and read “The Night Before Christmas” twice, rather desperately.

  Our Christmas had one saving grace, which wasn’t our Christmas morning in Uta’s stone house or her Yorkshire pudding, which you pointed out was definitely not custard. The saving grace started with Rosa, who had a Christmas Day drop-in. To your surprise, I—who never visited Rosa—marched you across the street. Rosa came to the door, music and laughter wafting behind her, a tall glass in her hand, and said, “Louise, I am so glad to see you. Merry Christmas. You and that gorgeous child come right in here.” I didn’t even flinch at Rosa’s tight red pants and low-cut white blouse—“I’m a red velvet cake,” she explained cheerily, herding us into her living room. From her record player issued Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas.” Maybe it was Elvis’ lonesome lament, maybe it was the bathtub-bourbon eggnog, maybe it was the mix of neighbors and “clients,” and definitely it was the absence of your father that made me put my coat on in fifteen minutes. As we were leaving, Rosa pulled me into her kitchen (painted purple) to ask me for a recipe; she shuffled around in an index box containing as many phone numbers as recipes.

  Abruptly she turned around. “You did the right thing. Nobody may say so, but you did. It ain’t easy being the one what’s gotta go it alone. Ain’t easy doing what everybody’s got a big fat opinion about, even when they don’t know the half of what’s up. I should know.”

  It took me a moment to respond. “Thank you, Rosa.”

  I collected you, and Rosa walked us to her front porch and for some reason came across the street with us. She—bright-eyed and coatless—said she’d love to come in—I hadn’t asked because I was tired and wanted to be alone. I heard a noise in the dining room and for a moment I thought William is home, but of course he wasn’t, William was locked up in the state mental hospital, that’s where William was. Rosa said she needed a glass of water and she and I walked into the dining room. There, to my surprise, stood Uta, and behin
d her—there was our dining-room table.

  “It came back,” you whispered.

  Uta smiled. “Merry Christmas, Louise. Faherty is no match for two women.”

  My hand flew to my mouth and I said, “Oh my, oh my,” and then burst into tears.

  Rosa marched over and ran her hand across the smooth oak surface. “It was right much fun to explain to sneaky Faherty about my friend the chief of po-lice, and my fellas were good sports to move it during the party.”

  I said over and over again that it was the nicest gift in the world, I’d missed the table so much and it was just the most wonderful thing, especially this Christmas, and soon I was going to fix a huge meal and they were all going to come to supper—

  When they left, while you played with your new toys—you loved the little desk that opened and had a drawer underneath for your colored pencils—I polished the table over and over and over again. I called you and grabbed you up and danced you around it. No matter what, there’s still this wonderful child and a beautiful table for the future.

  Later on Christmas Day, you and I visited your father. I packed a picnic basket for William—a roasted hen with stuffing, green beans cooked in bacon drippings, and a jar of tea. I was nervous and yelled at Fluffy, who got in the way as we were leaving the house. I kept saying things like “Won’t it be nice to see Daddy?” As we drove down Lincoln Street and the old houses flew by, I tried to calm down. We passed several children trying out shiny new bikes.

  At the hospital gatehouse, I told the scowling guard, clearly disgruntled to be working on Christmas Day, “We’re going to Babcock.” I gave him William’s name.

  He checked the book, nodded. “You know that little kid can’t go in, don’t you?”

  You glared at the man with the crew cut and called across me, “Hey mister, your head got run over by a lawnmower.”