The Anna Papers

by Ellen Gilchrist

  A week later she found the first lump. She was walking across her bedroom wearing a slip. She was thinking about something that had crossed her mind in the shower, or in a dream, or in the middle of the night. She stopped and touched her breast with her hand and it was there. Very large, larger than she had dreamed such a thing might be. As large as a marble, as a golden taw. I knew this last night, she thought. I knew it yesterday. I have known it for a long time. Even I can’t ignore this goddamn lump.

  She walked across the dressing room and picked up her clothes from a wooden bench beneath a painting and put them on without looking in the mirror. Without glancing one time in the mirror she finished dressing and went downstairs and got in the car and drove to Brian’s office. A nurse took blood from her arm and she lay down on the table and Brian found three more. Two on one side and two on the other.

  “If it were cancer, how long would I have?”

  “Maybe forever. There are lots of things to do.”

  “Like be a cripple, an invalid, have my breasts cut off, have my hair fall out. Go to the hospital all the time, have people feel sorry for me.”

  “Anna.”

  “I won’t do it, Brian. I don’t have children. How soon can you know?”

  “We can do the biopsy in the morning.”

  “Not here. Not in this hospital. It will be all over town.”

  “Where else?”

  “I don’t know. Lexington maybe.”

  “You can go there if you like. Anna, this is crazy. I can keep it confidential.”

  “All right. What time tomorrow?”

  “Is eight all right with you?”

  “It’s fine. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell a soul.”

  Two days later he told her the results. It was very bad. It had to be stopped at once. It had to be stopped with all the ammunition he could muster. She agreed to let him treat her. Then she left by the side door and walked down the stone steps to the parking lot. The leaves on the oak trees were golden and orange and dark red. Like the heart of fire, she thought. Our brains are not programmed for infinity. Death and infinity. I am glad I have spent my life thinking of these things. It will come in handy now. Ought to come in handy. Don’t think, Anna. Just drive the car.

  Anna pulled a pair of beige slacks off a hanger and a soft white blouse and put them on and added a tweed jacket and ran a comb through her hair. Live the moment, she told herself. There is nothing to fear. Nothing in the world to fear. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. All I’m going to do is shut down a system.

  In the downstairs hall she added a yellow scarf to her outfit. An artist must remind the world of yellow, she was thinking. Remember that terrible writers’ conference on the West Coast and the poet who always wore a red scarf and took his children everywhere. There were wild flowers on the bluffs that summer, huge wild flowers as big as my hand. And all the women stayed inside and worried about getting published. I went to the poet’s dances and ate the wild berries we picked and walked at dawn and one morning I came upon four young people sleeping on the grass at the very edge of a precipice, asleep on thin, gray blankets, all wet with the dew. I have lived my life. I have not forgotten to be alive. I was glad to be here.

  She picked up her bag and the small suitcase containing the manuscript called Winter and turned off the lights and went down the stairs and out to the car and drove to the airport the long way across the lake, where once she had driven a motorboat fifty miles an hour from one end to the other from the simple joy of being alive. She looked out across the water, remembering the spray coming in around the windshield of the old Boston Whaler and how she had had the lake to herself that day, so early in the morning on a summer day and she was celebrating because she was going to marry a poet and get the hell out of North Carolina forever and ever, amen. A new world where she would be happy all the time. And I would have been, Anna thought. If he hadn’t died I would have been happy. Now I’ll see him I suppose. Wherever I’m going Frank will be there too. Don’t start that. Do it with courage. See Philip one last time, then do it. Let him be there when I call. He won’t know. If I get sick I can take the pills Brian gave me. He will touch my breasts. He will know. I can get around that. Somehow.

  Anna crossed the lake and turned off past the Little People’s Company, a kindergarten where one of her nieces was spending an IQ of 140 teaching three-year-olds to swing. Blaming herself for her mother’s weakness and her father’s winesoaked nights and mistresses.

  Wasted intelligence is nothing, Anna told herself as she passed her niece’s school. You should have been lucky enough to spend your days with children. Maybe Aleece will go back to school in a few years. I left the money for them, all those crazy nieces and nephews. Poor Helen, having to administer all that. Don’t think of Helen. Don’t think of Helen with the papers. My God. Still, it might get her through middle age. Who knows, she and Mike might like each other. Let go, Anna, leave the world. It’s okay. They won’t even miss you in a year or two. You have a day, two days, three days if he’ll go up there with you. This last little piece of time, like a ball of the densest material in the universe, like uranium, dense, thick and round. It will burst apart and sail out across the stars when you have used it up.

  She hurried into the airport and checked her bags and walked down a ramp to the plane and sat back and ordered a Bloody Mary.

  He said yes. He came and got her off the plane and drove her up the coast to Biddeford. He knew something was wrong, but he thought it was a man. He thought it was another man he was up against.

  Saturday morning was snow-covered and cold and clear. Philip stepped out onto the porch of the rented cottage and watched the wind bending the trees on the bluff across the way. The wind sailed up and down the screens on the windows. It howled across the water and tore past the neighboring hotel and disappeared over the hills in a sea of flattened grass.

  Philip’s hands were thrust deep into his pockets. He was wearing wool slacks and a blue sweater his wife had bought him in Scotland. He was thinking about Anna, the alarming pallor of her skin. It read like disease. It smelled like disease.

  “I love thee,” she said, coming to stand behind him in the doorframe. “Thee and thy cashmere sweaters. Come back here.” He turned and took her into his arms and began to waltz her back down the hall. He lifted her body from the floor as she hummed “The Blue Danube Waltz.” He waltzed her all the way down the hall and into the parlor with the fire and around the soft rugs and onto a sofa. She was worn on top of him like a badge when he stopped. “How do you remember all the notes?” he asked.

  “I’m a musician. You always forget that. You’ve never even heard me play.”

  “And I’ve never read the books.”

  “That’s a lie. You have read them all a dozen times. You read them before you met me.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Arthur told me so. We got drunk together the last time I was in New York and I got it out of him.”

  “He would never tell on me.”

  “I got it out of him in the bar of the Warwick Hotel on Sixth Avenue. Last August.”

  “Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you tell me you were there?”

  “I wasn’t there. I stopped off for one day to be on some television show and talk to Arthur and he came and got me and we got drunk in the Warwick Bar and he said, did I still see you, and I said no, and he said, well, he didn’t either, and then he said, well, that’s the price you pay for getting involved with a fan. Then I didn’t say anything, and he said you adored my books. Or your wife adored my books. Did you make that coffee or not?” She was lying across him with her legs spread out over his legs and her hands across his cheeks and a very long time seemed to go by while no one said anything. “This is the time of times,” she said finally. “This is an eternity if we let it be.” He moved her body until she was sitting across his lap.

  “No, it isn’t. It’s a long weekend in Maine in dangerous and dramatic w
eather. God, you have me talking like you do. Look at me, Anna. Look at me.” She looked at him. She raised her face to his, feeling the beginning of the pain in her arms and chest but only the beginning, nothing that would show.

  “I’m looking.”

  “You must marry me. Or, more correctly, I must marry you. We must be married. You were right about that. All these months that have gone on without you and every day I thought about you. No, wait, don’t turn away. I’ve already told her. I told her when I left yesterday. I told her that I loved you and was going to ask you to marry me. She took it pretty well. She took it okay.” Now it was his turn to look away. “She said she was relieved.”

  “No, no, no,” Anna said. She kissed him. Then kissed him again. “That’s a big fat lie you made up to get me to cook breakfast and it isn’t going to work. Make the coffee. Cook the eggs. Fuck me, my slave.”

  “Will you? Will you marry me?”

  “I might. And then I might not. Show me why I should want to.”

  She meant to wait until Monday to do it. Until after he had left, but on Sunday morning he brought up the subject of her health and he wasn’t satisfied with her answers so she went on and did it Sunday morning instead. She left him at ten o’clock on Sunday morning saying she was going to drive to the store for marmalade.

  “Goodbye,” she said at the door. “Wait, come here, I want to tell you goodbye.” She put her arms around him and held him for a long time. They had made love not thirty minutes before, but now she held him and would not let go.

  “Why are you going out in this weather?”

  “Because I want some marmalade. You’re the one who says I’m thin. Well, I’ll fatten up.” She was saying this but it wasn’t what he was hearing and Anna never lied. “Goodbye,” she said again. “Goodbye.”

  “Anna.” She turned him loose, then walked away, then stopped and buttoned her jacket, then walked back into the foyer and hugged him again. Then she ran down the steps and got into the car and drove away. He would be playing this scene in his mind over and over for years, and then only occasionally, and then only when he heard the sea or saw one of her books somewhere or walked into a dark room or attended a funeral. After enough years it was only another memory.

  One last thing remained to be done. Anna stopped at an oyster bar that wasn’t open yet. An old man was sweeping the steps and he smiled at her out of old blue eyes and agreed to let her use the phone. Anna thanked him three times for letting her come in. Then she put a quarter in the pay phone and called Adam. He was asleep when the phone rang, in a room near the Vanderbilt campus. He was alone and asleep and the ringing of the phone was wrong and bad and he knew that across all those miles and answered it without the sleep showing in his voice.

  “Where are you, Anna? Where have you been?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s all right. Listen, Adam, I love you. I want you to know that. I love you and I care about you and I’m proud of you. What a fine man you are.”

  “What’s this about? Why haven’t you answered my letters? Anna, where are you?”

  “I’m in Maine. I called to say goodbye.” She paused, bit her lip. “Adam, I called to tell you goodbye.”

  “Why don’t you come to Nashville and live with me instead? I think you sound terrible. I haven’t liked anything since you went back to that goddamn Charlotte and I’ll tell you something else. I’m lonesome, Anna. I miss you.”

  “You need a girl your own age to have children with. Don’t think of me. Adam, listen to me.”

  “Dammit, where are you, Anna?” There was something in her voice, something terrible and compelling, and he listened.

  “I love you. I called to tell you goodbye. To thank you for the days and nights we had. Oh, this is terrible. I shouldn’t do this.”

  “If you won’t live with me, it is. Wait a minute. I want to get a cigarette.”

  “Adam.”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you. Take care of yourself.” She hung up. She was ashamed of herself for calling him. Shame will be a nice final emotion, she decided. That’s a good one. Remember when Francis told me that when we died the world would still owe us plenty so not to worry about any happiness we could steal. I remember that. And I knew it was true. It is true, goddammit.

  She thanked the old man again and walked out past the dirty bar stools and then through the dirty foyer and down the dirty wooden steps and the ocean lay before her, gray and stormy and real. Cold and real. It was possible to turn back but she didn’t want to. The alternative was a bed in a hospital and knives and terror. One big terror or a lot of little terrors. Death was going to win, either way. Poor Helen, Anna thought. She’ll never figure this one out. Time will heal the others, except for Adam. He may be stuck with me. I hope not. Oh, God, I hope he gets some joy. What a joyous light-hearted lover, with his tool belt and his grace. So graceful. I bet LeLe would like him. I should have left him LeLe’s address. Now, get in the car and go on. It’s getting late.

  It was getting late. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. By eleven thirty she was gone. She left the car beside the pier with the letters on the seat. By two o’clock the police had opened them and called Philip. Then they came to get him and took him to the pier. He waited until four to call Anna’s sister Helen. Then he had a drink with the police chaplain and called Anna’s editor. Then he called his wife.

  He threw the blue sweater away. He threw away everything he was wearing, piece by piece. Over a period of months he identified every article of clothing he had been wearing on that Sunday morning and he got rid of them. He punished them as if they were bad children or as if the germs of Anna’s madness could hide in clothes and germinate and grow.

  Not madness, he decided finally. Mortality. It is mortality that maddens us. That goddamn child in Saint Vincent’s. His pain. Anna. Me. We have a right to anger. We have a right to thrash out against it and take it into our hands. She could have told me. I might have helped her. I might have done what? Being here, and then gone forever, and we are supposed to rationalize that, justify it, forgive, I wish I had been born in an older world and could blame it on the gods.

  II

  Elegy and Psalm

  15

  Niall and Daniel went with Helen to tell their parents. Daniel picked up Niall and they picked up Helen and she rode in the middle of the front seat of Daniel’s Jaguar and they all talked at once, then they were quiet. “I knew she was sick,” Daniel said. “She was acting so bad, being such a bitch to everyone. Something was wrong.”

  “She told you you were drinking because it was true. But she shouldn’t have done this like this. I will never forgive her.” This from Niall.

  “No,” Helen said. “She was sick with cancer. It’s okay. She had a right to her death.” Phelan will be here, she was thinking. He will come as soon as he hears.

  “Then she should have called them and told them she was going to, or written a note. God, I can’t believe it. If it gets on the news or something before we get there.”

  “We’re almost there. It’s only a block.” Daniel speeded up, passing the Hands’ next-door neighbor out for a walk with her Seeing-Eye dog, then almost knocking over the garbage cans as he turned the car into his parents’ long uphill driveway. They got out and walked into the house. Mrs. Hand was in the kitchen making a cake. She had on a yellow silk dress and beautiful little high-heeled shoes. She was so soft, so sweet, so gentle. She turned as they came in.

  “Anna is gone, Momma,” Helen said. She went to her mother and took her into her arms, encircled her mother with her arms. Daniel moved in, close, with Niall behind him. “Anna has been in an accident.”

  “Gone,” their mother said. “Gone. What do you mean, Helen?” She pulled out of Helen’s embrace, leaned into the kitchen counter to escape Helen’s arms. They were in a narrow part of the kitchen, the four of them crowded into a space between three doors. “Where has Anna gone?”

  “She was in an accident,” Niall s
aid. “We think she might be dead.”

  “She is dead,” Daniel said. “She is gone.”

  “How?” Mrs. Hand said. “How is that? What are you saying, Daniel? What do you mean, Helen?”

  “She was sick.” Helen looked at her brothers. They had always taken the blame for each other, all of them had always taken the blame for everything any of them did, as if any one of them could have done anything that happened and the villain of the moment was only the one who got there first to act it out. Helen felt guilty now, terrible and guilty, and Niall felt especially guilty because he had just been saying terrible things about Anna to his wife. Daniel took over. “She killed herself, Momma, because she had the worst kind of cancer you can get. She is gone.”

  “Not Anna,” Mrs. Hand said. “Anna wouldn’t do that. Anna wouldn’t deny God. How could she kill herself?”

  “She was sick, Momma,” Helen said. “Come on, let’s go lie down on your bed. We have to tell Daddy. Where is Daddy?”

  “Daddy’s here. He’s in the back. He might be reading. Not Anna, Helen. She just got home.” Then Mrs. Hand was in Daniel’s arms and he was leading her through the house to her bedroom and Niall followed them and reached out a hand and touched his mother’s back.

  They found their father in the bedroom reading a book and they sat around him on the bed and told him and his eyes sought out his wife’s and he put the book away and began to cry. At that his children began to cry also and the wake of Anna Elizabeth Hand, which would last six days and end in a silly pointless memorial service in a church she hadn’t entered for years, began.

  The first night lasted until dawn. Mr. Hand finished weeping and washed his face and hands and sat in a chair by the fireplace allowing people to embrace him. Mrs. Hand sat across from him on a sofa by the telephone, answering the phone and telling the story over and over again. People began to appear. Children and grandchildren, friends, men and women who had worked for Mr. Hand, people who had known Anna when she was a child. “I knew it all along,” her mother kept saying. “It was in her face.”