by BRIAN HALL
He wishes he could have prayed for his sister.
He remembers a discussion in the fifties among civil defense planners, about how to solve the problem of identifying dead schoolchildren after a nuclear attack. One suggestion was to tattoo serial numbers on them ahead of time, but that recalled the Holocaust, and anyway, no one would be able to read tattoos on charred skin. Another was to have mothers sew their names into school clothing. But the clothes would burn right off the bodies, everyone knew that. They eventually settled on metal tags that the kids would wear around their necks. Sure, some of them would turn white hot for a while, sizzle down through flesh, others would melt. But most would remain readable. They ran ads in magazines, picturing a boy holding his tag up to a soldier who might be his dad: “See? It’s just like yours.” All society an armed camp, like the Spartans.
There’s a dreadful law here.
He listens for a while longer to water falling on everything.
All his life, Charles Ives dreamed about composing what he conceived as his most important piece. He envisioned immense orchestras and choirs arrayed on mountaintops and in valleys, thundering out something magical and ineffable that would somehow capture, or maybe reawaken, the music of the world, the music of the spheres. He planned to call it The Universe Symphony. When he was old and suffering from dementia, and knew he would never write it, he said to his wife, “It’s all there—the mountains and the fields. If only I could have done it.”
It’s time to look away. For Ives’s sake, Vernon is weeping.
2006
He called it giving him the runaround. Meaning what you were saying had no merit as an argument, but was merely pointless obstinacy.
She said to him once, “You can argue better than I can.”
To which he replied, “No, I can think better than you can.”
He always won. And when you tried to walk away, because you knew that no matter what you said, he’d win, he would follow you from room to room. When you screamed at him, he’d look shocked and he would retreat, he would wait, he might even apologize for making you angry, then he’d assume a mild tone and start up again. He didn’t just want to win, he wanted you to acknowledge that he’d won. It wasn’t enough to surrender, you had to join his side. And if you said, “You’re right, you win,” he’d say, “You’re just saying that to shut me up,” and if you said, “You’re right again,” he accused you of being frivolous. It wasn’t enough to join his side, you had to do it sincerely. You had to really lose.
Susan couldn’t bear him. The moment she realized a conversation had turned into an argument, and therefore all paths through the maze led to his victory, she’d say, “Fuck you, Dad.” No matter how he responded, she would again say, “Fuck you, Dad.” It was kind of beautiful. It was like the soldier under torture who keeps repeating name, rank, and serial number. It made him so apoplectic, he was the one who finally had to give up.
Imogen wonders if she got married just so that she could have children.
She wonders if she got married because Mac got married.
She wonders if she got married because she was failing physics, and the only self-respecting way for an intelligent woman to drop out of school in 1951 was to get married.
She wonders if she got married because her mother didn’t want her to.
She wonders if she chose Vernon because she got to know him during the brief window when he felt unconfident, his fiancée having dumped him, and the only way she would ever have seen that Vernon again was if she had also dumped him.
The only thing she knows for sure: she’s glad she had children. Susan was so difficult, but Imogen loved her, and surely Susan knew that, and her death was the worst thing that could possibly have happened. Imogen would have traded her life for Susan’s in a moment. Whereas she’s not sure Vernon would have. And isn’t that the most damning thing you could say about a parent?
And look at all those years his mother was in the nursing home in North Carolina, when he hardly ever visited. “I would go down there if it meant anything to her,” he said. “But she doesn’t recognize me.”
Me, me, me. He was the most selfish man she’d ever met. His mother thought the sun shone out of his asshole. He thought he was smarter than everyone else, but he was stupid enough to think that she and Carlos were having an affair. (Me, me, me. Betraying me.) As though he hadn’t had plenty of evidence for many years that she didn’t like sex. (Me, me, me. Not attracted to me.)
She asked him that one time if he would take Susan to the beach so she could have a break, and he got so angry she was frightened. She knew never to ask again.
He never wanted to go anywhere. He clutched at his routines. And since his routines included her, he clutched at her. When Susan was getting her life back together and teaching in Madrid, Imogen wanted to visit her. Imogen had still never been abroad. She had taken up Spanish again, and all she wanted to do was go to Spain and spend time with her daughter and practice her Spanish. Vernon didn’t tell her she couldn’t go, he knew she would never put up with that, but he didn’t want to be alone, so he came along. And was miserable. He worried about the plane schedules, the tickets, the Spanish taxis, the tipping rules, the hotels. He got obsessed one night with the way the light switches were wired in a bungalow they’d rented on the south coast. There they were for two days on the beach with nothing to do but swim and read and eat out and be with Susan, but the double-switched hallway light didn’t operate in the expected way, or some such damn thing, if you think Imogen paid any fucking attention you’ve got another think coming, and he couldn’t let it go, he started searching for a screwdriver because he wanted to take off the faceplates and look at the wires, he wanted to call the property manager, he wanted Susan or Imogen to interpret for him, which they refused to do. “I don’t know the Spanish for fucking killjoy,” Imogen told him.
So there were no trips after that. Imogen had never gotten the opportunity to meet Hildegard in Germany. She had never gotten to see Norway. When her father had his retirement party in 1958, his colleagues at the Bureau of Public Roads gave him a new camera, which he took, along with her mother, on a two-month holiday in Europe. They saw the Eiffel Tower and the tulips in Holland. And guess what? They spent a month in Norway. Imogen sat on the living-room couch Vernon had made her buy and imagined her mother sailing the fjords.
She couldn’t divorce him, no matter how many times she threatened it. For one thing, he would fall apart. For another, marrying him had been her mistake to make, and she believed you lived with your mistakes.
But she’s so thankful she had children, and at least Vernon was a better father to Mark than he ever was to Susan. (Aren’t daughters your job? Could anyone believe he really said that? And he once called Susan a whore.) Mark has always been easy to love. From the time he was a baby, he was always happy. He would lie in her arms, sweetly smiling. When he was a toddler Imogen would ask him if he wanted juice or milk, and he would cheerfully say, “Either is fine!” Did he want to go to the park or the woods? “Either is fine!” Even in adolescence he never gave her a moment’s trouble. (Susan had five car accidents before she was twenty.) His teachers loved him. Imogen has never understood what happened with that woman. Mark would have made such a good husband. Imogen has never seen her granddaughter. The woman is obviously a monster. Good riddance to her and her spawn.
Would Susan have been less footloose if Vernon had bothered to connect with her more? Would she be alive today?
Imogen remembers when Mark was fourteen and there was a little girl three houses away who was always out alone in her backyard. Imogen knew the parents slightly. The girl had been a late pregnancy, a surprise. Her only brother was twenty years older. Her parents were busy. She would gaze through the backyard fence, gripping the chain links, watching other kids play if there were any out, or just looking at emptiness if not. “Why don’t you play with her?” Imogen said
to Mark.
He hesitated. She could tell he didn’t much want to. But his kindness kicked in and he said, “OK.” Several times a week that summer he’d climb over the fence and toss a ball back and forth with her, play hide and seek, and so on. He was so goodhearted, so conscientious. Years later, the girl came by the house selling cookies to raise money for a high school band trip. She played the flute. She was very shy, but seemed normal. Imogen was glad for her. “Do you remember my son?” she asked. The girl said she didn’t, but maybe she was too shy.
When Mark entered college, Imogen went back to school and got a degree in library science. If she had had everything to do all over again, she would have studied astronomy, she had such fond memories of those nights watching the sky in Park Forest. (Dear, silly Sarge, where are you now?) But Imogen was fifty, it was too late for that. She started by volunteering at Harvard’s medical library, then after she got her degree she worked in their interlibrary loan department for fifteen years. She loved it. A regular job! A paycheck. A pension. A commute. A parking permit. In a way, her work was similar to Skywatch, since it depended on orderliness and consistency. The library’s filing system was a stack of contradictory layers dating from different periods going back more than a hundred years, and her job was to navigate them quickly, find that one obscure requested item, sometimes misfiled, among the millions of items, send it on its way, record the transaction correctly. They told her she was the best employee they’d ever had, and she believed it, because she saw every day the sloppy work that had preceded her. She became a supervisor. She loved her bosses and her coworkers and her underlings. Maybe libraries attract collegial people. Or maybe it was because nearly all of them were female.
Of course there were frustrations. But if she ever complained about work, or said she was tired, Vernon would wonder aloud why she bothered, since they didn’t need the money. His cluelessness, as always, was stunning. No thought of the satisfaction she might get from doing a job well. No thought that perhaps the library and its patrons actually needed her, for fuck’s sake. No, anything she did was merely to satisfy a whim, and therefore if it wasn’t fun for her all the time, it wasn’t worth doing.
Then he got sick. By the time he retired, it was clear she had better retire as well.
Of course Imogen pitied him, or had compassion, or whatever. But her resentment toward him was his fault. He had always wanted to keep her at home, and as an invalid he got his wish in spades.
Parkinson’s is like a glacier. It nibbles away relentlessly over months and years. Vernon hung on for a decade after his retirement. The last five years were the most awful thing Imogen could have imagined. Each morning after her coffee and cigarette she would check to see if he was awake. He might have been lying in bed waiting for her, silent and motionless. He would apologize. She would remove the foam block from his left foot that kept his toes from pointing during the night and giving him a leg cramp. His toenails were thick and yellow, and she hated trimming them. They looked diseased. She would help him make the transition to his wheelchair, although she could only steady him, she wasn’t strong enough to hold him up. She would wheel him into the bathroom, help him remove the night’s diaper, help him shift to the toilet. Wipe him. Wheel him to the top of the stairs, help him transfer to the chair lift. Precede him down the stairs, help him into the downstairs wheelchair, wheel him into the kitchen, try to figure out what he wanted to eat. He was often too depressed to have an appetite. She would park him in the living room in front of the television and try to pretend he wasn’t there. A woman from social services came three times a week to engage him in conversation, as the doctor had recommended. He would say he didn’t need it, and that he didn’t like the woman, but occasionally he would liven up in her presence. Imogen should have sat with him more, but she couldn’t stand to. He would begin a sentence, stop. He would worry about things and want her to check on things and half the time she couldn’t even tell what he was talking about. When she lost her patience he would look at her apologetically with his ghostly gray eyes. Sometimes he would say, “I know I’m a burden.”
With every one of his apologies, she could feel the millstone around her neck get heavier. She wanted to say to him, I don’t want your goddamn apologies, I want you to not need me. She was so furious at him, she was sometimes sick with rage, first for all those years of him being his fucking unchanging self, and then for changing, for coming down with this horrible disease. But of course she could never say this, no one would understand, everyone would rightly condemn her, she felt guilty even to be feeling it.
In other words, he had finally really won.
She told him never to try to get out of bed on his own, yet sometimes he did, and fell. He’d lost weight but he had a big frame, and when he fell the whole house shook. He lay there, eyes wide and puzzled, limbs floating up and down like a creature underwater. She couldn’t lift him, so she would call Jim and Alice next door, and if Jim was home he could lift Vernon on his own, otherwise, Imogen and Alice would struggle to do it together. Three times she had to call an ambulance just to get the EMTs in the house so they could lift him. Each time cost $300.
She hadn’t wanted to put him in a nursing home, but finally admitted to herself that it was too much. She found an open spot in a place five miles away. She felt terribly guilty. She visited him every day. His depression deepened. He sometimes seemed almost catatonic with grief. He asked her if she would bring in a gun so he could kill himself, and she was horrified. Where would she find a gun? How would that make her feel? What about the nursing staff? She asked him, “How can you be so selfish?”
After ten months he stopped eating and drinking and late last Friday night she called Mark and said, “They’re saying it could be any time.”
Mark caught a morning flight out of Ithaca, arrived at the house and went straight on to the nursing home. Imogen, exhausted, took a nap. Vernon died minutes later, in Mark’s presence. Hard to know what he was aware of by then, but maybe he had been waiting for his son.
Mark has been helping with the funeral arrangements, and it’s wonderful to have him here for a few days. Neither she nor he give a shit about caskets and all that crap, they made that clear to the smarmy funeral director. But even the bare-bones option included a viewing.
Mark asked, “Should we invite anyone?”
“He wasn’t in touch with anyone for years.”
Which was true. But more important, frankly, Imogen couldn’t bear the thought of someone trying to say a single solitary word of consolation or understanding to her. Nobody knew, and they could all go fuck themselves.
She and Mark declined putting a notice in the local newspaper. Vernon was a private person, and so are they. So it’s just the two of them in the viewing room at the funeral home. They sit in the middle of the front row of the folding chairs in the stark white space. An empty table and two easels are backed against the wall. Those would be for bouquets and wreaths.
Mark goes up and puts his hand on Vernon’s and stands there silently for a minute. Then Imogen goes up, since that’s what Mark did. But she has no sentimentality about the body. This isn’t Vernon. The brow and nose are large and sharp. You can see the skull under the skin. Imogen returns to her chair and says, “He really looks dead, doesn’t he?”
Mark says, “Since they didn’t embalm him, gravity has pooled all the fluids at the back of his head.”
“Well of course I know that.”
They sit silently for a minute, then leave. They will return in three days to pick up the ashes. On the drive home, Mark says, “Now you can do some of that traveling you’ve always wanted to do.”
The thought fills her with something like panic, which she buries under a derisory snort. “I have so much to take care of first,” she says. Logistics related to his death. Nursing home and funeral home bills. Notifying the pension people. Life insurance policies, veteran’s policies. God knows
what else. Vernon always took care of all that.
PART THREE
Friday, February 19, 2016
She stayed awake through last night and the following morning, then slept all afternoon between Billings and Missoula, when the bus was crowded. Woke up at 7:30 p.m. for the transfer. The bus leaving Missoula had fourteen passengers, of which six remained after the stop in Spokane at 1:30 a.m. (It’s “Spoke-ann.” Who knew?) Now it’s 3:00 a.m. and the other five are asleep, all quiet except for the hum of the tires and that vertical undulation like breathing that buses often do on highways, something modular in the construction of the roadbed. Her cone of light reminds her of her gooseneck lamp back home. She can almost believe the rest of the world doesn’t exist. So this is how to ride a long-distance bus—working the night shift. Maybe she could do it forever. In Seattle, buy a ticket for New York, repeat. Oscillate between the coasts like a cesium-133 atom in an atomic clock. From time dilation, she’d age slower than the rest of the population, gain maybe a millionth of a second over the course of her lifetime. Who needs love?
In Missoula she used the free Wi-Fi in the station to research tire hum. It turns out engineers use computers to randomize the size and placement of tread blocks on tires so that they (the tires, not the engineers) will generate, when rotating, a sound as close as possible to white noise. But as with light curves from stars, there will always exist a predominating frequency, however slight. It intrigues her that, of the six buses she’s been on since New York, the hum at highway cruising speed has always been somewhere between G and B-flat. As the tire model is probably standard throughout the Greyhound fleet, the differences in frequency could be the result of different amounts of wear on the treads, or different roadbeds, or different speeds at which the different drivers cruise. It’s true that the pitch drops when the bus slows.
