About an hour after I’d checked in and left my overnight bag in my hotel room, my taxi pulled up in front of the house which, after years of moving around, my sister and her husband had settled into. A home-care person was there when I arrived and she made a pot of tea and served it to my sister, still well enough to walk around the house and chat for a while, to me and to a couple of other more distant family members, second cousins, who drank their tea quickly, and left. Alone, our chat consisted of a cursory inventory of her symptoms, a faintly horrified review of the last, worst one, which a new medication had at least temporarily taken care of, and a series of fraught silences, which began with sentences one or the other of us started but chose not to end, or couldn’t end, accompanied usually by gazes too profound to be called merely sad, into space, quickly broken by one or the other of us with a new, inconsequential comment in a carefully light tone. For instance, my sister said, “Auntie Daisy and Lily came a few days ago.”
“Oh,” I said. “I haven’t seen either of them in years. How is Lily?” Lily has suffered from severe depression since she was a teenager.
“Beth Billings was here too.” They had gone to high school together. “A day or two ago? I think, maybe…”
“Maybe?” I prompted, but my sister didn’t seem to hear me.
“Have you seen my box of tissue? Where is it?” The home-care person, who appeared to be busy in the kitchen and paying no attention to us, unobtrusively and silently picked the box off the sideboard and set it on my sister’s knees. Jaimie appeared not to notice. She didn’t touch the tissues.
“How long has Austen been back from the hospital?”
“Mmm,” she said. She turned her head toward the home-care lady who was back in the kitchen.
“A few days,” the woman called. “Five days.”
We talked about her hospitalization, and the ensuing release, about her and her husband’s various medical tests and procedures, and plans as to how to manage what would happen next. But this last was mostly about what would happen next to her husband, who was at this point bedridden, although not yet in the hospital or a hospice, but who could not get up even for the bathroom without a couple of people helping him.
I cannot say what I felt during all of this uneasy, non-communication. We had been taught by our mother to save our tears or any other strong emotion except laughter for when we were alone, that to ‘break down’ in public was shameful, so mostly none of us did. It was really very odd behavior, I see now, but it came out of, I think, that British stiff-upper-lip nonsense. Our father’s family, Latin all the way, held no such compunction; its members were, if anything, far too emotional for anybody’s good, or so our mother had taught us to think. I have personally discovered over the years, and especially since our mother has been long dead, that if you constantly stifle your feelings out of concern for what you have been taught is appropriate behavior, you soon can’t feel anything at all. Or at least, you have to dig very deep to figure out what your real feelings are, and that mostly this will not seem worth the trouble of doing.
Eventually, I could see that my sister was having difficulty sitting upright, or smiling naturally, and being engaged in our conversation. I understood that it was time to go, and I could only hope that I would be able to return to see her at least one more time before her illness reduced her to a shell who wouldn’t even know me when I visited. I remembered then that I had come to see her husband whose illness was far advanced on hers, a purpose that the moment I saw her in the flesh I had completely forgotten. Now I saw that this had always been a poorly considered undertaking, and thinking of what lay in the moments ahead, I was briefly afraid, and might have left without seeing him.
But she said then, “Don’t go without saying good-bye to Austen.” I nodded and smiled and the home-care worker and I helped her to her feet and walked her down the hall to the master bedroom where her husband was lying in the queen-sized bed under the stylishly-patterned duvet. My sister always did have wonderful taste, and the design and colour of the duvet fit perfectly into the décor of this handsome, if small, bedroom. My sister made her own way down the left side of the bed and perched on it, her legs curled under her, beside her husband who lay in shadow beside her. Behind us we could hear the home-care worker returning down the hall to the kitchen. I remained standing just inside the doorway while Jaimie settled herself, and until my eyes adjusted to the relative darkness at that end of the room so that I could make out Austen’s face. The duvet was pulled up under his chin and he didn’t move except to pull one hand slowly out from under the cover.
In a weak voice, he said, “I’m sorry I can’t get up to….” I think he meant to hug me, or shake my hand as a gentleman would. We were both deeply embarrassed – I believe that’s what it was – but, if so, it now seems a peculiar reaction on both our parts.
“Don’t even think of such a thing,” I said. “I don’t want to disturb you. I only came to say hello before I go.”
I could think of no way to say that I hoped he was doing all right, or that he wasn’t in pain, or was managing, or whatever. Perhaps how sorry I was that such a thing was happening, but I knew I could never say that, although I found at that moment that this was more true than anything I had ever said to anyone in my life, or failed to say, but had thought. I could not say a word more than that I had come to say “hi” before I left. But then I thought that this was one time when I needed to hug him, to kiss his cheek – no, that the situation required this.
In the gloom of that room, with my dying sister beside him, lounging tentatively against the pillows that she had pulled up to support her back, as if at any second she might have to leap up and do something or other, smiling nervously at me, and he – could he have been near tears? I couldn’t see well enough to tell – I was about to move down the side of the bed to his head so that I could try to hold him briefly and could kiss him, perhaps, I thought, on his forehead, when swiftly, the room filled up with love.
I knew that although it did not emanate from me as I did not love him, it seemed to be coming through me; I was its conduit. Although I, too, was permeated with it, it was not that I suddenly, personally, now loved him. Also, astonishingly, I could actually see the love that had come and filled the room. The odd thing is that whenever I try to tell people this story – very seldom, I assure you – nobody ever asks me what love looked like. Ahhh. What to say. It was a dusky beige-pink; it had a very fine, soft, pebbly texture; it was very still, there was such beauty in that stillness; it gave the impression of perhaps – I’m being careful here – being maybe alive itself. But I might be adding that last because that is what people would say, of course. God in his goodness, and all that. That, instead, perhaps that exquisitely beautiful stillness, that very presence, was enough and the truest thing about it. Its thing-ness. An essence in itself.
My sister saw or felt it; she made a kind of inadvertent, gentle-sounding and surprised “ohh,” and her husband did something the same, “mmm” perhaps, close to a mild grunt, so he too felt or saw it, or both. Even in my awe and surprise or whatever it was I was feeling, I kept on moving down the side of the bed, and when I reached his head, bent to hold him and to kiss his forehead. As I was placing my hands gently on each shoulder, he said again, “I’m sorry I can’t get up,” again seeming to mean so as to respond courteously. In the midst of this, the love that was not exactly mine remained. But I held his shoulders briefly, lightly, and kissed his forehead as I had planned, murmured a few words that I can’t remember, including probably that I was flying back home the next morning. As I left the room, I think, the love had dissipated or had departed. It was all so much; I couldn’t – I can’t – remember details. I don’t think my sister left the bed. I believe I walked out alone. I must have come down the hall so silently that the home-care worker, still in the kitchen, didn’t hear me and didn’t say good-bye.
Indeed, although I did return several times in order to see my sister as her condition worsene
d, and although her husband lived weeks longer in a hospice, I never saw him again and, yet again, I did not know how to feel about this. It would be mawkish to say that thinking about it makes my chest ache, that it is as if there is a large burr or something in back of my forehead.
How could it be, I ask myself again and again, that I, who was not good at loving, who had had to teach myself to be decent, and who did not love that man, could have been a channel for some sort of disembodied or disconnected love to come and fill that room so full of the crushing, mindless cruelty that afflicts all human life and that could, for an instant at least, overcome the horror of the world? I am not sure if that is even true – overcoming the horror of the world. No, I cannot allow that thought; it is utterly sentimental.
I think my wonderment was that love had come alone, unasked for, unwilled, unexpected; the wonder was that it could exist in such a way, all by itself. But I’ve said that. The wonder is that the three of us saw it, felt it, and two of us then died, and only I am left who knows that such a thing can happen, and am trying, in these last few years, to alter my understanding to encompass it.
Grace’s Garden
Inspired by Alan Sillitoe’s, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”, 1959
As Grace advanced through the hallway’s gloom, she couldsee a man pressing his face against the lead-seamed stained-glass beside the front door. When he saw her, he dropped the hand he had been cupping beside his eye, and stepped back. Clearly, she thought, Steven had warned him she might not answer the door, although she was always at home. No use, she would have to let him in.
“Hi, Mrs. Mercer.” He offered a cautious smile. “I’m Everett Gower, pastor at the Plains of Hope Church.”
“I know who you are,” she told him briskly, although the croak in her voice made her sound a good deal more uncertain than she had intended. She stood back to let him pass into the hall, but, as he was half-way through, lost her grip on the heavy oak door so that it hit him on the shoulder and upper arm. “So sorry,” she said, although, of course, she wasn’t. She saw no reason to put up with his visit, except that here she was, putting up with it.
The kitchen, where she took him, had once been filled with sunlight when the children were little and Reuben was alive. Now the dying elms crowded out most of the light, and the tall stocks of pink or blue hollyhocks that used to nod and wink at her above the window sills – her father had planted them when she was a child – had, without good light, long ago died out. Puzzled, she noticed that his eyes had widened, turned in the direction of his gaze and saw that a burner on the gas stove was blazing away.
“I turned that on to make tea just as I heard your ring at the door,” she said, trying not to sound defensive. In fact, she had no memory of turning it on, but if she couldn’t explain that flame burning away without even a kettle on it, Steven would have the city on her in a minute and would force her into signing that damn power of attorney, and she would be finished. Hurriedly, which, she recognized, was actually glacially slowly, she pulled the kettle – thank god it was full, although who had filled it? and when? – over the flame. She now kept the few utensils and dishes – a plate, a bowl, two cups, a water glass – she used all the time on the counter within easy reach.
She carried the pair of saucerless cups to the table where Pastor What’s-His-Name was sitting with a hint of tension in his shoulders and a self-righteous smile on his mouth. His eyes were tiny, light blue, and hard, his pupils so contracted they had virtually disappeared. Where the hell had the teapot gone? But she gritted her teeth and took it from the pastor who had found it on the table behind the pile of books and greasy art magazines, carried it to the counter, dropped in a teabag and poured the not-yet-boiling water in. She could feel the assault of his grimace behind her. When she turned with the full pot, he leaped up, took it from her, and filled both teacups, not waiting for any semblance of steeping. Clearly, he was as eager as she was to get this – whatever it was – over with.
“Steven sent you.” Steven probably made a fair-sized donation to the church.
“He’s a good son; he’s concerned about you.” He glanced around the room and up at the cobwebs in the corners, where the dark-beamed ceiling met the crumbling once-white plaster walls, then over to the stove, and, without speaking, at the same moment as she realized that again she hadn’t turned off the burner, he jumped up, in two strides was at the stove, cut the flame and was back at the table again, fixing on her once more, comically, that hyper-intense pale blue gaze of his.
“What a bore you are,” she said, though pleasantly.
“He said you would be angry.”
“He wants my property; he wants me to sign a power of attorney. How Christian is that?” The pastor’s left cheek did a minute, quick dance; she could feel him wanting to draw back.
Good.
“He wants your well-being, as we all do,” he responded, his voice soft, leaning closer to her, “although he did say you would say that, even that you believe that.”
“Do you know what this place is worth? If not the house, at least this large lot in this truly refined and elegant area?” She could hear herself hissing. How she mourned the dead fruit trees in the small orchard at the back of the yard near where a fishpond had once been. Never mind. She didn’t believe herself that this was all that Steven wanted, but it seemed easier to defend herself with this claim. “I’m told a couple of million.” There, case closed. She managed to push her chair back an inch or two, enough that she could get herself to a standing position without falling or taking the hand he proffered.
“I don’t like you,” she told him. “I think it is diabolical of you to come here and try to coerce an old woman into doing something so profound, so inalterable that she does not want to do, purely for your own reasons.” Her word choice delighted her, as mostly she couldn’t think of words when she wanted them. She knew what they were but, slippery fish, they swam cunningly just beyond her grasp. “I will stay here; I will die here in my own house where I was…” she was about to say “born” but she hadn’t been born here. But then, who would remember that? It was nearly a hundred years ago and she could say anything she damn well pleased. “Born!” she said. “Where I gave birth to my three children,” also not true; “Where I was married,” sort of true, and only with her second husband, the reception had been in the back garden when it was splendid with flowers; “Where my mother died,” true; “and where I lived my whole life.” Except for her years in art school in the east of the country, and the few she spent in New York, and the five or so when she had lived in Europe with her first husband, Piers. And then there were those years after a heart attack felled her second husband, Reuben, her children’s father, when she had had to go out to schools across the country to teach and earn some money, her own practice as an artist not having made her a penny until lately – stuff she had done as a young woman mostly – when she no longer cared about money and didn’t need it anyway. Except to pay the taxes on this monstrous abode of hers. She must not ever forget to pay the taxes.
“I want you to leave now.” His expression didn’t change; he simply stood as if he had been planning to all along, for a brief second rested one hand lightly on her shoulder, walked out of the room, and down the hall. She struggled to her feet again and followed him, bumping against the wall – she had a tendency these days to wander a bit to the right. When it wasn’t to the left.
At the door, he said, “You phone me if you need anything. The church is here to help. And Steven and your daughters have your best interests at heart. They are not trying to steal from you or to mistreat you. They want you to be comfortable and safe in your last years.” She wanted to slam the door while he was still standing in it, but it was too heavy and while she was wrestling with it, he had stepped out onto the wide verandah, about to go, then quickly turned back again. “A power of attorney –” but she managed to get the door shut on the rest of his sentence, then pulled back the filthy – ev
en she recognized that the damn thing was filthy – sheer curtain that covered the narrow window beside the door with its bevelled and stained glass for which a collector had offered her a small fortune not so long ago, and watched Reverend Gower trot down the front steps, and then the straight-as-an-arrow path to the gate which he opened carefully, and shut with even more care, then went round his car, pausing at the driver’s door to look up to the front of her house where she stood gazing out at him, then got in and drove away.
She hoped he had seen the finger.
She went back to the kitchen, the single room in which she now lived, to the darkest corner closest to the sofa that was now her bed, where, on the counter in plain view, except for the shadows, she kept her scotch. Somewhere there should be a glass. She found it in the sink, rinsed it vaguely, and, not bothering to dry it, poured in a good dollop, and sat on her sofa with it.
The next thing she knew her middle daughter Karen was standing in the kitchen, staring straight at her with an expression of mild horror while a second woman, a stranger in professional dress (navy jacket, white blouse, tailored tan slacks) stood beside Karen, gazing around with undisguised interest at Grace’s arrangements.
“Who is she?” Grace demanded, although she knew perfectly well: social worker, probably the Mrs. Crowley on whom she had hung up at least three times and for whom she had twice refused to open the door. “Go away, both of you. Right now!” This tone had subdued her children, even as late as into their teens. When neither woman moved, she cast about for some other weapon in her sadly shrunken arsenal: don’t answer the door, don’t answer the phone, scream louder at people than they are screaming at you, cut them dead with your scintillating wit, recite your rights, then recite them again. She could see that she was moving toward the end of possibilities. She would not budge. She would not.
Season of Fury and Wonder Page 2