“But Meester Ed, jew shood haf seeen theese women Clodeene. She come to tell us all abowed was wrong weeth jew.”
Lily looked at her sister, dumbfounded, unable to believe that the woman could talk to Pop like that to his face. She herself would no more have mentioned Pop’s illness in his presence than ask an amputee if he needed a hand. The man would have taken her apart, laughing all the way. Lily had been condemned to circumspection by her mother’s example, and could never understand how Rachel had escaped to become the Mrs. Simpson of family propriety.
Ordinarily, she would have kept her head down out of the crossfire. But tonight, she composed herself sufficiently to follow her sister’s lead. “We were asking it all sorts of questions, really.” Lily kept her voice as blasé as possible, given her adrenaline level.
“Theese woman say jew be seeing the ah-beese,” Rachel said, unrepentant. She traced out a wild pantomime of letters across the board with the plastic heart. “She toll us, from b’yon de grave, ‘ask jew jewselves.’”
Dad aped back, greatly amused. “She said that, did she? Now there is something worth looking into. Let’s give this another try, shall we? Mind if I sit in on a session?”
Lily certainly did mind. But Rule 0 was never scrap with the old guy unless you were ready to go all the way to the brink with him. She was not ready for brinksmanship tonight, so she cleared a little space for him at the magic message board.
“What’s the theory behind this piece of malignant machinery?”
Lily scowled, and linked the man’s fingers with hers. “There’s no theory behind it, Dad. Only ghosts. Just keep your fingers on the pointer as lightly as possible. And ask it what you want to know.”
Rachel began once again. “Hola, Claudia? Come in, Claudia. Claudia, this is Mission Control. Do you copy? Over.” Slowly, the board returned to life under new management.
N-N-N CLAUDIA NIX NOT
“You’re not Claudia?” Lily sounded disappointed. “Who are you then, Spirit. Where did Claudia go?”
MMQX YYT XKKX
The board failed to reach consensus under its six hands, partly because Rachel was laughing so hard. “Oh, I remember him. The little guy, from the Superman comic books. If he says his name backwards, he’s got to go back to the fifth dimension.” Pop remembered the same comics, the caped hero of the world’s crisis decade who everyone hoped might arrest the rapid deterioration of real events. Suddenly, the needle swung smoothly and quickly over the letters, spelling:
I LIKE YOU RACH
By the time the note came clear, Rachel was ready to fight. “All right. Which one of you did that?” Lily and Pop denied everything. “Well just cut it out, all right? This isn’t a game, you know.” She rabbit-punched them both for good measure.
Pop took his turn at framing a question. With great seriousness, he asked, “Spirit, is there a God, and can he show two forms of ID?” The pointer reeled, insulted.
ELO AB TWO AND MORE HORATIO
The answer delighted him. “Well-read creature we’re dealing with, here. Can you do the ‘hollow crown’ soliloquy from Richard II?” The letters began:
UNEASY LIES
then stopped as suddenly as they started. Pop grinned accusingly at both daughters. “We’ll give you partial credit for that one.”
Rachel said, “You think we’re pushing, don’t you? Huh? All right, then. We’ll see who’s controlling this thing. Board, what’s playing in Hobstown these days?”
NOW PLAYING IS NOW PLAYING
“Get to the point, will you?” Rachel shot a look at both the board and Pop.
COME TO TOWN AND SEE
Rachel slapped the Ouija. “Bratty kid. Okay, let’s ask this thing another way.” She shot a look at both blood relations, testing them. “Are we ready for tonight’s Big Question?”
Lily said, “Ready,” but did not sound it.
Pop said, without flinching, “Ready here, boss.”
Rachel paused, then backed down. “Go on, Lil. It’s all yours.”
Lily gave her sister a withering look. She took a breath and addressed the linked hands: “Spirit, can you give us some idea about what it is that Dad sees? What brings on the spells? And are the, you know, vomiting and fever and sores all part of the same thing?”
Rachel, her courage back, added, “What she means is, WHAT HELL WRONG OUR POP?”
THERE IS MORE
All held their shared breath, but the board stopped. Finally Lily could stand it no longer. “Yes? Go on. More what?”
MORE TO ANY THAN ANY SUSPECTS
7
Ailene sat in her kitchen listening to the séance scratchings long after the mediums went to bed. She sat alone at the table that perpetually doubled for meals and cards. No one told her what messages had arrived from beyond the grave, and she didn’t inquire. Some things she saw no advantage in asking. Near the top of her rules of thumb was her deep belief that people made things more complex than they were. People meant, for Ailene, her children. Her husband.
She went to the sink and fetched a damp rag, then ran it over the spotless table. Back at the sink, she wrenched it out and spread it over the faucet. She drifted to the radio on top of the refrigerator and turned it on, aired it out, tuned to no station in particular. Calmed by the background sounds, she sat down.
She was not born suspecting complexity. But, then, she was not born married to Ed Hobson. She had attained simplicity over the years as a counterweight to the man, to keep their marriage near the American complexity median. When Ed turned the breakfast table on its ear with noxious, logical knots like the prisoner’s problem, it fell to her to insist that, with the right rules of thumb, the problem vanished. That was her expected line. That was her.
But the simpler a counter she grew to Ed, the more he disappeared in curlicues. No one would have given his breakfast-table bind another thought if they didn’t know the man like their own breathing. His mind was a maze, an overly ornate metaphor. Everyone knew at once that his latest thought game spoke for him. Him and them. Just the way he’d drawn it on the paper towel. It fell to Ailene to show the simplicity underpinning the riddle.
She suspected, alone in the kitchen, sitting in the dusk of the forty-watt range light, that the way out of the paper-towel prison, her way out, the way Ed could not find, was merely for each man to say to himself and no other, “I must choose not to compromise myself, as if no one else is implicated in the deal.” Forget the complex consequences; damn the other guy’s doublethinking. If Ailene had learned anything by living a life attending to the needs of others, it was that the two in the trap could only escape conviction through conviction. So simple: they had to do what they thought was right, no matter where it led.
There was a time, years back, when she troubled herself over those Teach Yourself the Great Thinkers series. But as far as she could make out, Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which she perpetually saw paraphrased in those books as “Each of us must act in the way that we expect everyone else to act,” sounded to her suspiciously like the Golden Rule, handed down to her as “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” The only difference was in the fancy packaging. You needed an advanced degree to appreciate the former, whereas everybody learned the latter in first-year Sunday School.
Because of this difference, the Golden Rule inspired Ailene while Kant’s dictum filled her with shame. Kant helped mirror her favorite regret: her never attending college. When Ed was not holding forth at dinner, she sometimes sneaked in the story of how, just four days before she graduated valedictorian of her high school, she was asked by the school guidance counselor, a not-so-closet alcoholic, what university she would attend the following fall. Explaining that she had no means to get through college, she was shocked to see the fellow pull from its shelf, far too late to be of any help, a massive tome that had not been touched in any semester in recent memory: a two-thousand-page index of grants, fellowships, scholarships, and awards.
That massive boo
k became her life’s icon. It stood for all blocked opportunities and missed chances, the “what ifs” of dashed hope, those matters of concealed occasion that were common knowledge to everyone else on this earth. Yet late at night, the same thick volume reversed its role and comforted her. Because the cash prizes of this life came bound and maintained in a handy reference work cross-indexed by place, amount, and designation, she slept well, knowing that even though she stopped short of where she might have gone, her children didn’t have to. Salvation was simple and indexed. Answers were alphabetical. All we had to do was look.
Reminded of lists and indexes, she stood and crossed to the pristine counter. She fiddled for a moment in the accumulation of depleted pens, calendar pages, and phantom match covers scrawled with forever unidentifiable phone numbers that nested between stove and refrigerator. She passed through the pile twice, forgetting what she was looking for. She came away with a pencil and tablet of gummed note paper. She sat back down and considered the blank page. No, she reaffirmed; four more years of higher education would only have confused her, obscured what she already knew, the only thing she needed to remember, whether she called it Kant or canticle: do what was best for the common good. She touched the pencil tip to the paper, freezing there for a full minute before sweeping:
1 doz eggs
Her script was perfect, an exact replica of those cursive loops from third-grade writing texts that most children never got closer to than rough approximation. As she wrote, she decided that the additional diploma, the superfluous degree, would have left her worse for the weathering. She had seen what upper-level sociology and psych courses had done to her husband. She had met, dated, and married an overgrown boy who returned to school after the service an idealist, seeking technical skills that would let him contribute to a better postwar world. He went into college an altruist but came out an educated man, his golden imperative hopelessly tarnished, complicated beyond recovery by that collegiate puzzle called the Tragedy of the Commons. As she had it paraphrased from Ed, the question ran: when the world grows too small to support everyone, who will let their livestock starve so that the others will have enough common grazing ground? Survival favors the self-interested. And so, educated, we all perish together, protecting our private claims.
Outwardly Ailene proclaimed her inadequacy, her lack of education. But inwardly she knew that four years of self-sacrifice and debt would only have taught her that Do Unto Others didn’t go nearly far enough toward prescribing who, exactly, could do how much of the grazing. Nor would additional letters after her name have led to a solution. Once started, the attempt to salvage simplicity would have led her, as it had Ed, into the province of the eternal postgraduate, or worse. So Ailene, shame notwithstanding, happily avoided throwing bad knowledge after good. Not quite happily, but steady of hand, she wrote:
1 gal milk
As an afterthought, an eye to family health, she soured her nose and added, in parentheses: skimmed. She had much too much native intelligence to live in naïve bliss. Since she could not have the degree without the attendant confusion, she asked only for a small, peopled garden in some tillable spot of the globe, governed by mutual respect and free from competing interests. She designed her household toward this end. On husband and children she bestowed unledgered, endless acts of affection—soaking undergarments in bleach, washing up after them, drawing up shopping lists, stocking the larder. All this she did without complaint, never doubting that her family would, in their own time and manner, repay her invested trust and return the favors when needed. Tonight they were needed.
She was those simple acts of trust. Things would be simple if only we let them. Back when she and Edward still socialized, she had enjoyed being the ingenue at gatherings of that small circle of high school teachers they had been so tight with once. The clique enjoyed having Ailene around: she made them feel sophisticated and subtle in comparison. She knew her part, and early on mastered the little-appreciated social art of saying only the extremely self-evident. While all the circle struggled to deliver clever or controversial points of view, she spoke so far beneath contradiction that others dropped in their tracks with stunned smiles. For that they loved her.
But her socializing days were history. She tried not to think of the night it had all started to unravel, and in rapid fire added to her growing list:
3 lb gr beef
head lettuce
brocc
oj
small sack potato
She broke off violently and exhaled. She tore off the note she’d been nursing and flipped it over. Listlessly she traced out three ovals, then wrote:
I should have started a diary thirty years ago, back in the fifties. Now I can’t even remember what happened when.
But she had no difficulty remembering what had happened the night Ed first collapsed in public. It was at a teachers’ Christmas party in the North Jersey high school district where Ed had taught history for the first seven years of his career. Ailene had never seen anything like it happen before to anyone, let alone the man she tailored her life around. He had not, back then, developed the practiced, insouciant air with which he managed later fits. He even went so far, in this first public crash, to point, scared witless, at whatever had ambushed his retinas. Obviously not the average passing-out, nor benign enough to ignore.
But that’s what she tried to do, at first. Ed crumpled onto a chaise lounge, streaming word-salad as if truly schizophrenic. He had been doing this tremendous baritone imitation of Sinatra, “A Sinner Kissed an Angel,” and all at once he was elsewhere. Somebody thought he’d hit his head on a nearby shelf, knocking himself down. Another bystander insisted he’d gone into the fit first and slammed his head only afterward.
Ailene stood in the center of the room, thinking it was all a joke. When there was no punchline, she tried the old trick of stating the self-evident for all she was worth: “My husband has fainted.” It didn’t work this time. For Eddie, although far from conscious, had not fainted. He was simply intent on that steady word stream, trying to attract the other partygoers toward something that seemed to lie not next to the divan, nor on the wall of the room, nor in the yard outside. The sight he tried to ward off lay far away.
Ailene insisted the fit was just too much booze on an empty stomach, but that wouldn’t wash either. His colleagues had long revered Ed Hobson as every schoolteacher’s drinking mentor. No matter how much he drank, he never got smashed beyond reciting Kipling’s “If,” teary-eyed, in booming bass, but unslurred. One woman in social studies said she’d seen this before. It was a stroke, and if they didn’t get an ambulance here within three minutes the man would end up mute or limping for the rest of his life, if he lived. But Eddie, reemerging on cue, refused to let anyone call an ambulance. The more his friends protested, the more violent he became.
From the vantage of her belated, one-page diary, Ailene saw that this refusal to treat the thing, Ed’s rejection of the socially prescribed treatment and not the illness itself, had lost them their visiting privileges, their niche among the others. She wrote:
First he got sick. Then he turned down the amenities. That’s when he got in trouble. That brought on the tribunal. That’s when we started to move.
During the remainder of the school year Ed’s fellow teachers showed what they thought of the incident: the man was mentally ill, and contagiously, judging by the sudden drop in invitations Eddie and Ailene received. At the end of the term, Eddie collected his fifth straight Outstanding Teacher Award, which he left on the assistant principal’s desk just prior to their leaving town on what, from then forward, he euphemistically called mutual consent.
Ailene replayed in her mind the family’s slow descent into gypsyhood. She found the sequence impossible to recover, mainly because her own relations with her husband had remained unchanged throughout. The only complaint she allowed herself—and only at her lowest moments, never outside the breakfast circle—was the cheerfully stoic, “After all, I’ve sig
ned the papers.” This meant she felt legally bound never to develop a muscle tick’s difference in her feelings toward Eddie from those she had had the day they drew up the marriage contract. Looking over the perfect script of her chronology, she found that keeping her part of the bargain had always come easier than the outside might have suspected. She felt a wave of shame at how she had blossomed on the compost of Eddie’s decline.
Her husband’s trail of crises brought out the best in her. She had learned, under fire, to issue the quick cover-up and invent the ingenious excuse. His suffering required her; she filled a need. Even his later illness, domestic and familiar, gave Ailene that whiff of forbidden tragedy, her one graspable proof that things did happen now and again in a daily canvas that otherwise insisted experience exists only far away—the Middle East, Asia, or Washington, D.C. His were the only headlines she believed. Newspapers announcing PRES BLOCKADES REDS OR SAIGON CHAOS AS EMBASSY TOPPLES had an unnatural urgency, as wholly implausible to her as JESSICA TELLS TED SHE HAS BEEN MARRIED BEFORE OR LIZ BEARS ALIEN’S BABY. Without Ed, she had no front page, no news: only warehouse clearance circulars and advice columns.
She understood, without benefit of college degree, that the price extracted for the model life, the one she was supposed to strive for, was anesthesia. Ordinary blessedness required that the occasional incident—burglary, car accident, or siren—never came closer than a block or two away. She felt how easily she might have become that dutiful mother who troops her kids in single file, stands them in front of the once-in-a-lifetime neighborhood blaze, and pretends to teach them, “See? This is what you get when you play with matches.” But her husband’s constant, low-grade emergency showed her how such women’s children always hear them lying. Kids know otherwise; the lesson of every other day is that matches cannot harm them, nor the one-in-a-million bolt from the blue. Blessed children already sense the steady, blank lay of the terrain. They mouth, “Sure Mom,” the Good Fairy, their faces baked in the neighbor’s blaze, all the while shaking their heads No Chance, as if death by fire were theater.
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