And Go Like This

by John Crowley

“We were so caught up with Shakespeare. Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Just like Delia Bacon.”

  “Oh Harriet. Come on.”

  “We got sick from Shakespeare,” Harriet says.

  “Harriet,” I say. “It wasn’t Shakespeare.”

  “Oh no?” she says, with vast conviction. “Oh no? Well.”

  I say no more. Her challenge, or joke, evanesces. She drinks, looking out at the evening. The flush on her cheeks actually brightens when she gets extravagant that way, like a Victorian heroine’s. Still, to this day.

  “You should write that story,” Harriet says. “In a book.”

  “What story?”

  “Delia Bacon. Killed by Shakespeare.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. A whole book?”

  “Well, aren’t you supposed to write books? Publish or perish?”

  “The only book I want to write,” I say, “is the history of the Free Spirits.”

  That draws her eyes to me again. “It’s a secret history,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “Isn’t it already written?”

  “Some. Not all.”

  “Maybe it is though. Maybe it’s all written down someplace. In code.”

  “Well. If Queen Elizabeth wrote the plays of Shakespeare, maybe it’s in there.”

  “Now she was a Free Spirit,” Harriet says. “Don’t you think?”

  “Yep. Whatever Delia thought.”

  “Secret marriages. Illegitimate children.”

  “‘And the imperial votaress passed on/In maiden meditation, fancy-free.’”

  She holds out a hand to me, and I get up to help her rise. In her tiny apartment behind the store, she can get around without her braces if she’s careful, moving like a gibbon from handhold to handhold to the big low bed. It’s where she socializes.

  “I’m listing,” she says, pausing in the door frame. “Two glasses of wine and I’m listing.”

  So I take her up, remarkably light, and lay her down on the bed.

  Harriet’s body isn’t like other bodies you’re likely to have encountered in this way. Her shoulders are broad and strong and flat, like anvils, and her upper arms look plump and soft till you take hold of them and find them to be iron. Harriet says her orthopedic surgeon could never figure out exactly how Harriet walks; she shouldn’t have the muscle strength to do it. However she does it, it’s given her washboard abs that any high-school boy would envy, and they look like a boy’s, finely cut and tender somehow in spite of being so hard. Her butt is a boy’s too: slight and soft and hollowed in the flanks. That’s where the nerve damage starts, and goes down her legs.

  It’s like making love to a marionette, I said to her once, lifting and propping apart her stick-thin legs, and she started laughing and had a hard time stopping and going on. But it had taken her a long time to uncover them when we were in bed, let them be part of our lovemaking.

  Two crips like us Harriet says sometimes, but that’s only a funny kind of politeness, to include me with her in a commonality, not to make me feel excluded.

  “So you’ve been thinking,” I say. It’s late in the night.

  “Yep.”

  “And?”

  “Let me pull this sheet up over me.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “Reach me the bottle, will you?” she says. Still a lot of Hoosier in her language. I struggle up to get the bottle and glasses, which leaves me outside the underside of the sheet with her, and posted on the bed’s edge.

  “So how come you asked me this, by the way?” she says. “Just so I know.”

  “Because I love you.”

  “You do?”

  “Harriet,” I say. “I love you. I’ve always loved you, even when I didn’t know it. I’ll love you till the day I die.” The wine is sweet and still cold. “That’s how come.”

  She drinks, and thinks; or maybe she already knows what she thinks, but not whether to say it.

  “So you’re not afraid?”

  “Of what?”

  “My history. I mean it’s not like I’ve been waiting for Mr. Right. There’s reasons I’m alone.”

  “I know.”

  “Not lonely. Alone.”

  “I know. I’m not afraid. Maybe I should be, but I’m not.”

  “Okay then.”

  She isn’t done. Far-off there’s a borborygmic rumble of thunder, the uneasy sky heaving.

  “So, have you heard about this new thing we get?” she says.

  “What thing we get?”

  “They’ve just started to discover it. A syndrome. Us old polios. My doctor told me about it last week.”

  “You were at the doctor?”

  “I started getting tired,” she says. “Or not tired, exactly. More like weaker. I wondered. And he told me. He’d just been reading about it himself. Post-polio syndrome.”

  “Explain,” I say. I say it double-calm. That’s a word Harriet invented for how actors say certain things in movies.

  She hands me her glass, so she can hike herself up with both hands. “It seems,” she says, like a joke’s opening, “it seems there’s this thing about the nerves you use. I mean everybody. The nerves that get used all the time to do things, in your hands and your arms and so on, they have like redundancies. Backups. As you live your life, the nerves wear out. Their coverings get worn away. Used up. So by late in life you’re using the backup ones.”

  “Ah.”

  “But in polio, the nerves get damaged. The ones you’d normally use, and even the backups in some places, so you’ve got nothing. And in the places where you’ve still got something, you’re using the backups, you’re using the surplus. Even if it’s nerves you think have always been fine: sometimes it’s really the backups you’re going on. So.”

  “So you wear them out sooner.”

  “It’s how you come back,” she says. “You somehow discover these backup nerves, and how to use them. Or you find other muscles, maybe without so much backup, because they’re like minor for most people, and you use them like nobody else. It’s how you get better. I got better. Even some of the iron-lung kids got way better. Now they’re old, and the surplus is gone. So we start to lose.”

  I wonder if I’ve noticed any of this, in myself. I can’t tell. Maybe I’m more tired, have a harder time with the long walks across campus. Maybe.

  “You know what’s sad, though,” Harriet says. “It’s the ones who worked the hardest to come back, get function back, that are going to be losing it soonest. All those exercises, all that grit. The ones who weren’t going to be beat.”

  I put my hand on her leg. She puts her hand on mine.

  “So,” she says, double-calm. “Get it?”

  I get it. I do. It’s my answer: Harriet’s got a lot less function than I do, and if she knows she’s going to start to lose what she has, she can’t say yes to me: can’t, because it wouldn’t seem like a free choice, would seem to have a reason, an urgent reason; it would seem like a way to get the help she knows she’s going to need. Would seem, even if it isn’t. We’ll talk more, talk into the night, and I’ll say Don’t fall for that, Harriet, don’t fall for that no-pity stuff; I’ll say What about me, Harriet, what about the fact that I want to be with you no matter what, for better or for worse. But it won’t matter.

  “I think it’s rotten,” she says.

  She’s crying now. Only a little.

  “I don’t usually feel sorry for myself,” she says. “Wouldn’t you say that’s so? Have you seen me being sorry for myself much?”

  “Never,” I say. And it’s so.

  “I wish it would rain,” Harriet says.

  It does, toward midnight, wild nearly continuous lightning and hellacious thunder, almost Midwestern in its intensity, and Harriet clings to me whooping and laughing as though o
n a carnival ride; and when at last it’s gone, and quiet, and we’ve lain a long time listening to the gutters running softly, she sends me home.

  The next day she gets up early again, though not quite so early, to go out and make pictures. The day is terribly beautiful, sun-shot, raindrop-spattered, mist-hung. She loads her film holders, planning her moves from house to car with all the things needed, hoping she won’t miss the light, knowing she can’t hurry. Hurry is slow; hurry costs time. Festina lente.

  By midmorning she reaches the place she set out for, that she had imagined in advance. But a vast wind has come up, moving through the leaves of the huge trees, passing amid them, and then going around again. The trees are moving too much for Harriet’s slow exposures. She stands by her tall patient camera and watches. The wind stirring the heavy masses of new leaves lends the trees one by one a momentary animal life different from their usual vegetable one, a free will, or the illusion of one; and they seem to be glad of it, to delight in it even, raising and shaking their arms and shivering in glee.

  On her way back to town she cruises the tag sales. The families have just put out their stacks of mismatched dishes and white elephants and National Geographics, the pole lamps and tiered end-tables unaccustomed to the outdoor air and looking as though they feel uncomfortably conspicuous on the dewy grass. Harriet is an Early Bird and picks up a few “smalls” for the shop—a set of twelve silver “apostle” spoons and a nice set of wartime tumblers with decals on them of pinup girls in scanty uniforms. At one place she finds a game of Shakespeare, a board game which she has known existed and seen around but never played. The box is shut with a bit of masking tape, and is going for a quarter. Something touches her, and she puts her hand on it.

  “It’s all there,” the householder tells her. “Complete.”

  Harriet gives her a quarter.

  Back home again, she unloads her camera and brings in the shoulder bag she carries for purchases. The game of Shakespeare in its box. She thinks a while there, poised on her crutches like Chaplin on his stick. Then she goes to her closets—Harriet has no basement or attic, wouldn’t need or use them, but she has many closets—and after some searching she pulls out a small blue suitcase, one of a matched set that once included a round hatbox; there’s a poodle appliquéd on it. She humps the suitcase—it’s heavy—to the dining table, which she uses more for laying out and mounting pictures than for dining, and snaps open its clasps. Inside she has yearbooks and photographs and mimeographed programs from long-ago recitals, awards, blue ribbons. Scrapbooks too. She takes out a ragged manila envelope, addressed to her old house in Indiana, and from it the journals she kept and the letters she wrote home that summer, the program of Henry V, the 8x10 of Robin she took from the bulletin board in the theater.

  She has all that piled on her dining table, now in the summer of 1980. She adds the book I brought her, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. The game of Shakespeare too. She picks that up, hefting it in her hand—heavy, heavier than she expected, or is it some new weakness in that hand, which is not her good hand? Gripping tighter, she picks at the tape holding it shut, and maybe because she’s holding it too tight, she loses control of it and the box opens and spills its contents before she can recover. Among the contents are a dozen tiny busts of Shakespeare, the counters in the game, and they go bouncing over the table and onto the floor, rattling into corners and under things in that purposeful way that small dropped things have, as though trying to escape.

  Plastic Shakespeares red and white, black and brown. Two or three roll—Harriet catches them in the corner of her eye—under the tall armoire that holds more of her stuff. Now that’s a drag. Box still in hand, Harriet stares unmoving. She’ll have to get her braces off, lie full length on the floor, grope around in the narrow dark space under there maybe with a broom or some such implement, and knock them out from where they’re stuck. And she won’t be able to reach them, and she’ll have to get someone to shift the wardrobe and reach down the back to extricate them. Someone. Unless she chooses just to leave them there forever.

  In the Tom Mix Museum

  1958, and we are going to the Museum of Tom Mix. It is in a place called Dewey. “Dewy” is what my father calls my sister. A dewy girl. She lowers her eyes to not see him looking at her. I have my guns on, I buckle them on every morning when I put on my jeans. They have ivory handles with rearing horses carved on them that look like Tony, Tom Mix’s horse. My father’s name is Tony too. There is a horse on the hood of the car, and my father said we follow the horse wherever it goes. I used to watch for the horse to turn right or left, to see if the car went that way, and every time it did. But I am older now and I get it. Tony was a trick pony. My mother says that my father is a one-trick pony. Tony can think and talk almost like a person (Tony the horse).

  The Museum of Tom Mix is Tom Mix, but Tom Mix is much larger than you would think, taller than the statue of Paul Bunyan in that other town. We go around to the back of his left boot, which has a heel as high as I am, with a door in it. We go in one by one. There is a stairway up to the top of Tom Mix, and it is dark at the top. Tony is there, halfway up; then above Tony is the other Tony, after Tony died, and above him another. Far, far up are Tom Mix’s narrowed eyes, letting in the light. We are standing together, I love them all, and we wait to see who will start to climb.

  And Go Like This

  There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world’s population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.

  —Buckminster Fuller

  Day and night the jetliners come in to Idlewild fully packed, and fly out again empty. Then the arrivals have to get into the city from the airports—special trains and busses have been laid on, of course, day and night crossing into the city limits and returning, empty bean cans whose beans have been poured out, but the waits are long. The army of organizers and dispatchers, who have been recruited from around the world for this job—selfless, patient as saints, minds like adding machines, yet still liable to fainting fits or outbursts of rage, God bless them, only human after all—meet and meet and sort and sort the incomers into neighborhoods, into streets in those neighborhoods, addresses, floors, rooms. They have huge atlases and records supplied by the city government, exploded plans of every building. They pencil each room and then mark it in red when fully occupied.

  Still there are far too many arriving to be funneled into town by that process, and thousands, maybe tens of thousands finally, set out walking from the airport. It’s easy enough to see which way to go. Especially people are walking who walk anyway in their home places, bare or sandaled feet on dusty roads, with children in colorful slings at their breasts or bundles on their heads—those are the pictures you see in the special editions of Life and Look, tall Watusis and small people from Indochina and Peru. Just walking, and the sunset towers they go toward. How beautiful they are, patient, unsmiling, in their native dress, the Family of Man.

  We have set out walking too, but from the west. We’ve calculated how long it will take from our home, and we’ve decided that it can’t take longer than the endless waits for trains and planes and buses, to say nothing of the trip by car. No matter how often we’ve all been warned not to do it, forbidden to do it (but who can turn them back once they’ve set out?), people have been piling into their station wagons and sedans, loading the trunk with coolers full of sandwiches and pop, a couple of extra jerry-cans of gas—about a dollar a gallon most places!—and setting out as though on some happy expedition to the National Parks. Now those millions are coming to a halt, from New Jersey north as far as Albany and south to Philadelphia, a solid mass of them, like the white particles of precipitate forming in the beaker in chemistry class, drifting downward to solidify. Then you have to get out and walk anyway, the sandwiches long gone and the trucks with food and water far between.

  No, we’ve left the Valian
t in the carport and we’re walking, just our knapsacks and identification, living off the land and the kindness of strangers.

  There was a story in my childhood, a paradox or a joke, which went like this: Suppose all the Chinamen have been ordered to commit suicide by jumping off a particular cliff into the sea. They are to line up single file and each take his or her turn, every man, woman, and child jumping off, one after the other. And the joke was that the line would never end. For the jumping-off of so many would take so long, even at ten minutes a person, that at the back of the line lives would have to be led by those waiting their turn, and children would be born, and more children, and children of those children even, so that the line would go on and people would keep jumping forever.

  This, no, this wouldn’t take forever. There was an end and a terminus and a conclusion, there was a finite number to accommodate in a finite space—that was the point—though of course there would be additions to the number of us along the way, that was understood and accounted for, the hospital spaces of the city have been specially set aside for mothers-to-be nearing term, and anyway how much additional space can a tiny newborn use up? In those hospitals too are the old and the sick and yes the dying, it’s appalling how many will die in this city in this time, the entire mortality of earth, a number not larger than in any comparable period of course, maybe less for that matter, because this city has some of the best medical care on earth and doctors and nurses from around the world have also been assigned to spaces in clinics, hospitals, asylums, overwhelmed as they might be looking over the sea of incapacity, as though every patient who ever suffered there has been resurrected and brought back, hollow-eyed, gasping, unable to ambulate.

  But they are there! That’s what we’re not to forget, they are all there with us, taking up their allotted spaces—or maybe a little more, because of having to lie down, but never mind, they’ll all be back home soon enough, they need to hang on just a little longer. And every one who passes away before the termination, the all-clear, whatever it’s to be called, will be replaced, very likely, by a newborn in the ward next door.