Still Time

by Jean Hegland

  Back in his bedchamber, he wonders on. He knows he should have answers to all these wonders, dimly suspects that he has studied and argued and opined on Lear for years. And yet all the skill he has remembers none of what he’s read or what he’s said, and he knows enough by now to understand that even the truth will never make all things plain.

  “John,” a woman calls from the doorway of his cell, “They’re gonna have some music in the rec room before bedtime, Mrs. Wasson on the piano, for a little sing-along. You wanna come?”

  “I’m busy,” he snaps. “I’ve work to do. I’m running out of time.”

  “You sure? It would be good for you to socialize some more.”

  But he growls and waves the meddlesome wench away.

  “Okay, then,” she sighs as she moves on down the hall. “No singing for you.”

  He remembers singing.

  He remembers trying to transmute a handful of lines into a tune for the sake of the infant screaming in his arms, a creature so tormented with gas or colic or existential despair that her face looks bee-stung and her little body arches and stiffens as she cries.

  He has never sung for another person before. He knows he has a magnificent speaking voice. People tell him he reads beautifully. He can command the attention of a lecture hall full of freshmen with his voice alone. And yet his singing voice is surprisingly feeble. “Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,” he begins in a croak, borrowing the words from Shakespeare’s early romance Cymbeline.

  “Nor the furious winter’s rages.” Groping for notes he is not sure he can find, he tries to turn the dirge King Cymbeline’s rustic sons sing over the inert body of the youth they later discover to be their living sister into a lullaby:

  “Thou thy worldly task hast done,

  Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.”

  Because Shakespeare’s tune has not survived the centuries, John has had to cobble one of his own. He feels so uncertain at first—even at midnight, even in his own living room—it is as if he fears his brand-new daughter will interrupt her sobbing to criticize his song. But he is desperate for silence, desperate for sleep, desperate to make her crying quit, and so he persists, and slowly his voice grows more confident, slowly the melody becomes clearer as the hour wears on.

  “Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust,” he sings, taking pleasure in recalling that dandelions were called golden lads in Shakespeare’s time, that dandelions gone to seed were known as chimney sweepers, savoring those homey proofs that whatever Will Shakespeare became, in some part of his great heart he was always a country lad.

  “All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee and come to dust.” They are the words of a lament and not a lullaby, and John feels a nibble of guilt or even superstition to be singing them to one so newly come to this great stage of fools. But somehow it seems right, too, to be sharing with that screaming barne both the beauty and the tragedy of the world she’s been thrust into, as though he were warning her and promising her, even as he tries to shush her.

  And gradually, a different quality seems to enter her wailing. It is as if her attention were being divided, as if she were listening even as she cries. Slowly the space between her sobs grows longer until finally, with one last deep shuddering exhalation, her eyes sag shut, and she is asleep. Fear no more

  Pacing that tired square of floor, he’d been desperate to hush her, desperate to get her into her crib so that he can turn to his nightcap, his book and bed. But now, alongside his relief that she is finally sleeping, he wishes his success hadn’t made him obsolete. He is oddly reluctant to return to the rest of his life: a drink, a book, a sleep—and then what? Gazing into her soft face, he believes that all his sorrows—both past and yet to come—can never be as full as that moment’s joy.

  Sitting in his dimming cell, he wonders where she is now, that infant so fresh from her coming hither. As the watch on his wrist ticks away forever, he wishes she were with him still, wishes he could retrace one single strand of time from the mingled yarn that is his life back to that long-ago midnight, and so recover that blossom he’d once loved with the whole of his newborn heart.

  A woman enters. A dolorous moaning woman, who interrupts his reverie with such groans that she might be Ophelia when her wits have fled, or even Cassandra bewailing the disasters she alone can foresee, though when John turns to look at her, he finds no Trojan princess or young sweet maid, but a grandam, her gray hair bunned in some old-world way, who clutches a picture frame to her breast as if it were an icon or a prayer book.

  “Aroint thee, witch,” John snarls as is his wont whenever some wretch or knave invades his chamber. “Go shake your ears.” But she ignores him. Keening a lament in some language that is Greek to him, she lowers herself into the empty chair that sits beside his own.

  “Shog off,” he snaps, and, “Hag-seed, hence.” But when he darts his glare at her, he sees her wrinkled face is wet with tears, and it strikes him she may be lamenting for him, too, mourning his very griefs in her unknown human tongue.

  “Hush,” John whispers, borrowing the same soft sound that Gloucester uses to sooth the thunder-crazed King Lear. “Hush,” he says again, and “hush,” letting the little syllable balm his sorrows, too. Hush.

  Reaching across the gap between their chairs, he covers her hand with his, keeps vigil while she wauls, sits beside her as her faithful guardant as the day’s last light melts into night and the room fills up with living shadows and absent shades. Gradually, her weeping ceases. Slowly her prattle fades into a silence more tuneful than any song.

  Perhaps John dozes, his old hand blanketing hers, for he returns to himself to find himself alone. His book is gone, burned or drowned or wandered to some other where, but a framed photograph rests on the seat of the chair beside his own. When he lifts it up to look at it, he sees a child smiling through the smutched glass at him. In the dim light, her features are none too clear, but he tilts the frame until he can view her face in the wedge of light that spills in from the hall.

  The gap-toothed grin, the apprehensive eyes.

  Her name was Miranda.

  Miranda, with her love of stories and crayons, her understanding of endings. Miranda in the backseat of his car, begging him to member, claiming she did not like to get forgot. Miranda, his daughter, his sole and only child, the one for whom he’d once fashioned a lullaby from a dirge.

  Miranda, John marvels, gazing into her dear face. He’d given her that name himself. Barb had wanted Jennifer or Amy or Nicole, but he’d held out for what he loved.

  She’d had a gamin quality that he’d adored, when she was four and six and eight and even sixteen, a sly directness whose paradox enchanted him. When she was in grade school, he liked to pose her questions beyond her understanding—What is the cause of thunder? What is honor? Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts? and he enjoyed the odd oracular quirkiness of her replies: Birds’ wings flapping. A risky pickle. The only cause is be.

  He used to coach her in memorizing lines, too. They’d started with A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Lysander’s gloomy disquisition on the course of true love, Bottom’s revelation of his most rare dream, Puck’s agile epilogue. He’d encouraged her with Cracker Jack. Lord, what fools these mortals be! Wonder on till truth make all things plain A foolish heart, that I leave here behind I know a bank where the wild thyme blows If we shadows have offended

  She’d learned quickly, parroting the words she did not always understand, sometimes investing them with charming meanings of her own. Wild thyme, she’d claimed, was when it was okay to be loud and silly, and if, as her mother had recently explained, money did not grow on trees but came from banks instead, then it made sense for time to come from banks, too.

  Miranda. He has always loved that name, coined by Shakespeare for the magician Prospero’s daughter in the last full play he ever wrote. Miranda, from the Latin verb for wonder.

  Though for Shakespeare, a wonder can
be a calamity, a tragedy, or a disaster, too. What is it you would see? Horatio asks Prince Fortinbras in the final scene of Hamlet after the entire royal house of Denmark lies dead. If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search.

  And now John recalls a calamitous Miranda, not Prospero’s peerless daughter, but a girl more prone to disaster than to marvel. A strange changeling with purple hair and sullen shoulders, an angry wanton creature spitting curses at him. But despite all the ways she may have harmed him, despite the prickle of her demeanor and the folly of her garb, his old heart aches for her.

  “I did her wrong,” he says, looking past the smiling child to the scowling daughter beyond.

  A woman slips up next to him in the darkling room, a gentle slip of a woman, sweet faced, brown skinned, her eyes alive in her dusky face.

  “Mistah Wilson,” she says, her voice like a warm breeze or a rich spice. “It’s time for bed.”

  Sweetly, she guides him out of his chair and into the bathroom, sweetly helps him to undo his buttons and find his way into a pair of pajamas, sweetly helps to ease him between the sheets. Moved by her slender fingers and the softness of her voice, John accepts her ministrations almost gratefully, suffers her to set him aright.

  “Good night,” she says, bestowing one last smile, and then moving to close the curtains.

  “Leave,” John cries, “the, channel. I mean”—he waves an impatient hand in front of his face as if he were batting a cloud of gnats—“the … arras.”

  “Arras?” Puzzled, the woman turns towards him. “Perhaps you mean de curtain?”

  “Curtain,” he nods, accepting the word from her and then claiming it as his own. “Curtain.”

  Reaching for the cord that hangs from the rod, the woman pulls, and the curtains part again, gathering in pleats at either side to expose the opaque black glass as if revealing a stage.

  “Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,” John mutters, staring beyond the dark window into a past where a host of ghostly memories is already being conjured, scents and tastes and glimpses that shift like wafting scarves.

  “‘Dat runaway’s eyes may wink, and Romeo leap to dese arms untalk’d of and unseen.’”

  The woman’s words tug him back from the brink of some distant moment. “I beg … your pardon?” he says, turning from the window to stare at her.

  “Dat is Mr. Shakespeare. We study his plays in school, in Trinidad. ‘Lovers can see to do dere amorous rites by dere own beauties, or—’”

  “‘—if love be blind, it best agrees with night,’” John finishes the line with her, their voices blending as easily as if they’d rehearsed the words together.

  “‘Come, civil night,’” he continues.

  “‘Thou sober-suited matron all in black,

  And learn me how to lose a winning match,

  Play’d for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.’”

  “So lovely,” the woman murmurs when he finishes reciting, and then she waits quietly, allowing the words to ripen further. A moment later she adds, “I do not recall wat comes next, but later Juliet says:

  “‘Give me my Romeo, and, wen I shall die,

  Take him and cut him out in little stars,

  And he will make de face of heaven so fine

  Dat all de world will be in love wit night.’

  “I always have loved dat especially,” she says, the love glowing on her face. “‘All de world will be in love wit night,’” she repeats, her voice pure, her diction, despite the music of her accent, precise, “‘and pay no worship to de garish sun.’”

  “‘When I shall die,’” John muses, “I.”

  “I must go now,” the woman says, laying a gentle hand on John’s skeletal shoulder. He feels her touch through the fabrics of his clothes, light as a golden leaf. “But I will see you again tomorrow. It is good to have a friend wit whom to recall Mr. Shakespeare.”

  Lying in his truckle bed, John watches as moonlight spills across the floor, so still, so calm, so silver, such a gift. When he lets his eyes sink shut at last, it seems the room is filled with spirits, as if everyone he ever lost is somehow with him still, so many gentle ghosts and tender phantoms—even Happy Dog, tangled in the covers somewhere.

  A faint light appears in the dark sky, a pale rainbow glow growing so gradually that at first John thinks it must simply be his fancy. But as he watches, the merest curve of white begins to edge above the wall. The moon, John thinks—or one of them—a fat, round moon, rising like a bulbous slow balloon.

  A moon like a blessing, he marvels as he watches, a cool forgiving moon, casting its soothing light on everything. gracious moon watery wandering pale-faced moon Its shine eases John’s eyes, turns the tide of his vexed mind. Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon!

  Still it continues its imperturbable ascent, gaining in girth as it emerges from behind the wall, drenching bushes, leaves, and grasses with its silvern glow. As John gazes, it reaches its widest diameter, and then it rises further, a portly, portentous moon, so near and large John thinks he’s ne’er seen the like, a benign giant of a moon, its serene and sorrowing face so close he might reach out and caress its shimmery coolth with his old dry palm. Moon, he thinks, his head ahum with sounds and sights and splintered facts, the same changeable orb the Elizabethans believed to be the boundary between the tainted earthly world and the perfect heavens above.

  He’d made a study of the moon once, back in graduate school. He’d written a paper on the moon in one of Shakespeare’s plays, a comedy whose name tingles on John’s tongue’s tip like the taste of moonlight, although frown as he might, he cannot will that name into his mind.

  But he can recall those hours at his desk, his furious midnight typing, cups dregged with coffee, open books circled round him like magicians’ tomes, balled sheets of onion skin overflowing the wastebasket and littering the floor, the moon outside his window ignored as he balances the solitary joy of insight and discovery with the finicky work of fitting footnotes at the bottom of each page. How happy he’d been, conversing—or cavorting—with that luminous play. Had he ever truly known his own luck? he wonders now. Had he ever lived inside his life as fully as his life—and he—deserved?

  The moon perches atop the wall like Humpty Dumpty before his great fall while John strains to name that numinous play he’d once mined for the moon, the play of lunatics, lovers, poets, and fairies, as illuminated by moonshine as the night that blooms right now beyond his chamber window. Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung I do wander every where, Swifter than the moon’s sphere ill-met by moonlight, proud Titania Moonshine and Lion are left to bury the dead

  “‘Now the hungry lion roars,’” John chants in a rumbling whisper, “‘And the wolf behowls the moon.’” In his lonely throat, the words rouse a feeling sharp as a kind of thirst. When he continues, it’s as if another voice has suddenly joined his own, a child’s voice, piping across the years, adding its ghostly eager treble to his rumble. “‘Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud,

  “‘Puts the wretch that lies in woe

  In remembrance of a shroud.’”

  Now the moon floats free of the wall to hover in the darkness like a magician’s trick, and the play’s name pops into existence like a gold coin or a rabbit or an endless silk scarf—Dream, he thinks, gazing out the window in silvery contentment, A Midsummer Night’s

  dream

  When he finally manages to scale the ivied wall and heave himself over to land on the other side, he is scraped and aching in nearly a dozen places, his palms raw, his elbows stinging, his knees wet with blood or dew, his foolish mask askew. Panting, he lies on his belly in the damp grass. His heart pounds powerfully and his lungs feel huge, his body suddenly so alive that all his hurts are merest trifles, his torn clothes only another testament to the size of his life, the quality of his love.

  He tears off the mask, hurls it away into the darkness. Rolling over onto his back, he lets the cool air kiss his cheeks as he looks
up into the night where a moon hangs ripening. He sees the dark shape of the wall he has just scaled, sees the looming palazzo with its empty balcony, sees the trees that rise around him, their tops all tipped with silver, and above the trees, the blessed moon herself, while he lies in the damp rough grass, inhaling the scent of crushed weeds and jasmine and night-ripening fruit. All around him crickets sing, their song swelling and reeling, inhaling and exhaling like another kind of breathing, an endless, glorious spiraling of sound.

  Lying hidden in that forbidden orchard, he has never been so happy. Everything he’s ever known or done is merely a prelude to this moment, his whole life suddenly imbued with meaning simply because it has led him there, each stale day redeemed by his presence in this dangerous, life-engendering place. And come what sorrow can, he hardly cares, because in this moment he is entire. And alive.

  Suddenly, a door opens above him, releasing a stream of light into the night, and now a woman drifts out on that golden river to lean against the stone railing of the balcony. He sees her round, slim arms, sees the shine of her eyes, the sheen of her dark hair. When she speaks, he hears her ask the whole wide night what’s in a name

  ANOTHER DAY. OR PERHAPS the same one, in this welked and wayward time.

  Or maybe a day that he has lived before, and is now returning to once more, since time has of late developed the cunning trick of curving back on itself, curling under or doubling over so that he can reinhabit certain moments as if he had never left them, while the rest of his life remains as yet unclaimed.

  Or then again, perhaps this is the sum and total of his existence—this aching body slumped in this worn chair. Maybe this windowed gaol is all the world, and the scenes and images that drift through his mind are not memories gone ragged but only his imagination, roaming places and meeting people that have never been. Perhaps he has but slumbered here while these visions did appear. Or maybe he has already died, and this is the sleep that rounds his little life.