by Greg Fields
Then there is a void at the top, and we have become profoundly weak. We are misshapen. God help us, we are weak. We are weak, and we flounder about in a frantic, vain search for what has left us. It cannot be, it can never be, as it was. Father, wherever you are, come back to us in some way. Let us eradicate the mistakes we have made and let us make ourselves strong again, for we wallow now in our weakness.
What then, Mother? What if he dies? What is left of you? Of us?
Glynnis’s head began to ache; the train’s clanking rhythm did nothing to soothe it. She dozed off, but only for a few moments at a time, gravitating in that nebulous fantasy-waking world halfway between sleep and consciousness.
Once as she dozed, she shut her eyes but still managed to make out the scenery outside the train. They were in Rhode Island, or perhaps even near home in Massachusetts, and they were passing through some woods. The trees, many of them, seemed to have faces. Not distinctly defined at first, the faces were just suggestions of eyes, ears, noses, mouths and hair brought about by the sweep of trunk, line and branch. As she peered harder into the darkness, staring intently as the trees coursed by, the fuzzy outlines clarified. If she looked hard enough she could determine who they were, for it seemed now that they were all recognizable. And as they continued to resolve, there lining the tracks were the faces of nearly everyone she had ever known, all looking back at her as intently as she looked at them, each one firmly planted in the ground yet staying in front of her long enough to be counted before passing on. Everyone was in those woods—all her friends, some whom she hadn’t seen since childhood: Jordan Brophy and the rest of her professors; Lynda, a wispy branch falling across her sad visage; and then her family, starting with her cousins, aunts and uncles, then her brothers and sister. Finally her mother, but she did not sweep by with the rest. Her tree hovered slightly off the ground a few feet outside the train window. She stayed there, not moving, simply looking back at Glynnis who was now fighting a creeping horror. Her mother, watching her with a peculiar sorrow, was alone among the trees now faceless.
After a few seconds her mother, too, whisked out of view. No new faces appeared. They were just trees now, like any others, interchangeable and inanimate, purely incapable of judgment.
The train rocked onward and Glynnis continued to drift, peering bleary-eyed through the window hoping to see more trees, hoping, hoping, always hoping . . . Broken dolls, broken windows lined with steam from wintry days, and children’s stories . . . the Pied Piper tooting ’Follow me’, and then down a long, long, sandy slope to the seashore . . . he takes off his green tunic, throws his pipe aside and then, shirtless, runs down the sand, stumbling, not falling, awkward as a crab, and reaching the water dives headlong, arcing his back and shooting out his arms like tendrils to see what he could reach, and then the splash as his body breaks the water, and then . . . silence. As deadly and dank a silence as man can bear, the silence of loneliness in nature, just the sea, endless to the horizon, a rusty blue, inky, deep, no swimmer, no body, just the sea, and all that silence.
Glynnis woke with a start, jerking her head up from the window. She blinked her eyes rapidly and shook her wrists before leaning back against the seat to compose herself, to realize where she really was. She breathed deeply. The train, and Boston. Ah, yes. She turned back to the window and looked outward: only trees, and nothing else. Another hour and a half to go. She checked to make certain her bag was still in the rack above her. She reached up to lift it slightly, feeling its weight. The heft reassured her. Something heavy, something substantial. Glynnis sat back down and leaned her head back against the seat once more. She closed her eyes and slept, dreamlessly, the rest of the way to Boston.
Later that same night, after her mother’s welcoming hugs, after a cup of steamy coffee, after a conversation with her brothers and sister that was a bit too proper to be truly comfortable, after a phone call from her mother’s sister, matronly Aunt Rita, who always called to be certain that a wandering child had arrived safely, after a few stolen words with Martha, who excitedly showed her sister a picture of her new boyfriend and tried to summarize his matchless qualities in a few breathless minutes on the second-floor landing, after her mother’s ceaseless questions about her classes, her friends, her clothes, the city of Philadelphia and the joys of freedom in a faraway place, after this and so much else that wore her down and frayed her already weather-beaten edges, Glynnis went up to bed. Just as she had when she was still living at home, she would share a room with young Martha. When Glynnis moved away, her mother changed nothing.
Glynnis, pleading fatigue, preceded Martha to bed, although her sister came up shortly afterward. Glynnis anticipated that Martha would want to stay up with her and, in the old familiar habits of girlhood, turn out the light so that under the cover of a cloaking darkness they could trade secrets, gossip, dreams and tales. Glynnis had genuinely loved these late-night sessions. She usually looked forward to curling up in bed and talking well into the night until would both grow so tired that one or the other would drift off despite her mightiest struggle, sometimes in mid-sentence. Glynnis did wish to preserve this custom. But not tonight. She could conjure no warmth tonight, no willingness to open herself up to display her soft, moist, perennially jeopardized interior. She only felt weary, as if speech itself would drain the last of her sagging energies and her equally sagging spirit. When Martha came into the bedroom several minutes later, Glynnis feigned sleep.
Martha undressed in the dark and climbed into bed. “Glynnis,” she whispered, but her sister did not respond. “Glynnis, are you awake? Come on, you must be.” Glynnis kept her eyes closed and continued to breathe in a deep, somnolent rhythm. “Glynnis,” she whispered more loudly in one last effort. Her sister did not move. It became apparent that there would be no shared secrets tonight. “Oh, damn.” Martha threw herself back on her bed. “Well, good night anyway, you big jerk.” Within a few minutes Martha’s breathing, too, took on the measured resonance of sleep.
But Glynnis did not sleep. She could have if she had wanted, for she was quite tired, but really she had her entire vacation to sleep. Tonight a strangeness pierced her heart, a nuance of mood brought on by the peculiarities of time and distance. She wanted to feel it a bit longer. She wanted to know more what it was.
Sometimes a child who has cut her finger will remove the bandage to dig her fingernail into the tender flesh around the wound, then into the wound itself. She does so knowing full well that it will hurt, but she will still want to explore the sensation that pulses through her damaged finger, up her arm and into her brain. She wants to investigate the rift, the fire in her finger. She wants to see what it is.
Glynnis Mear lay in her bed, the covers to her shoulders, stared at the ceiling above her, and remembered how Christmas used to be.
There was, first of all, her father. He assumed a different air during the Christmas season. He shed the serious determination with which he customarily went about even the simplest task and became more spontaneous, more solicitous, more reactive. When Glynnis asked him once whether this was truly so and why it was, he answered that all year he fought with disease and death. During Christmas he would allow himself, force himself really, to deal with life. The holidays for him had to be different; he had to make them so, or else they were no good. He wanted to celebrate his own life, his own family and the goodness he perceived around him. Glynnis understood completely. While she loved and admired her father year-round, she absolutely adored him during Christmas.
The simplest acts of the season took on a significance that she now remembered fondly. She remembered her father bringing home the Christmas tree each year. He never permitted any of the family to accompany him. Always he sensed their excitement and wanted to build it to a peak by the time he made his appearance, pulling the tree behind him and littering needles everywhere on the way to the family room. And then the pent-up excitement would burst around him. The children would rush to help him with the tree, each stumbling ov
er the others and jockeying to get closest to the bounty. Once the tree was inside they would wrangle over where in the family room to place it. That decided, their mother would pull boxes of ornaments and tinsel out of the closet, place it all on the coffee table, then go into the kitchen to make hot chocolate and tea. The children would grab for their favorite ornaments and try to get the skinny hooks to wrap around the too-thick branches with their pointy needles. Their mother would join them again as their father finished wrapping the strings of lights around the tree. Always their father would insist that their mother put the angel on top, and so she would after setting her tray of mugs on the now-cleared coffee table. Glynnis knew that they must have had a Christmas tree before her brothers and sister were born, although she could not recall whether it ever meant anything then.
She remembered, too, some nights when she was much younger. Bobby, Peter and Martha were just babies, or perhaps toddlers. Her father would take her onto his knee in the big leather chair near the fireplace in his den, that most mysterious of rooms. She felt the cold, smooth leather against her side. There he would read the Christmas books. She particularly liked Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” because it made her sense the cold and smell the wonderful, warm kitchen smells that the young boy savored so much.
She remembered going to Mass on Christmas Day, and the pungent odor of incense, the priest’s melodic incantations, the booming Christmas carols sung lustily by the people around her. She thought back to one Christmas where, during Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, she began to cry, right there at Mass. It all felt so powerful and so whole.
They would take drives then, at Christmas time, to see the lights. Their father would pile them into the car after their mother had bundled them up, then out into the Boston suburbs to look at the displays and the lights on the houses there. Then they would head back into the city itself. The old churches all had displays, and some of the tall buildings had special lights that formed giant red stars or white angels. Sometimes on the drive back the younger children would fall asleep, but when they got back home there would be hot chocolate to revive them, and fruitcake, and Christmas candy.
As the days of December wore on, presents would appear under the tree. Each new present would draw an immediate inspection to see, first, whom it was for, and, second, what it might be. Judgments were rendered by weight, shape and feel. Usually the children were totally wrong, but they relished the challenge.
Her mother, too, changed for the season. She became less harried, even though the holidays always brought much more for her to do. As if responding to her husband, she took on a more peaceful demeanor, calmer, more loving to him and to them all. She reveled in the season, and it showed in everything she did. Glynnis remembered her mother returning from shopping on cold December days wearing a knit scarf , her cheeks red as she entered the hallway. The crowds never bothered her, and she would come home smiling, going about the house humming to herself and keeping that incongruous smile on her happy face.
Sometimes during the season her mother would tuck Glynnis into her bed at night, then sit there talking with her for what seemed like hours. There they would share their deepest secrets, as Glynnis would later do with Martha. But this was her first time for any of that, and first times are indelible. Her mother listened to her then. No story was silly, no dream too wild. Sometimes, too, her mother would sing to her in her clear, vibrant soprano. Her mother had a lovely voice that she used too rarely. She would sing quietly to Glynnis at the edge of her daughter’s bed: Christmas carols, hymns, lullabies, popular songs, whatever came to her mind. She would never start to sing until after they had talked a while. Glynnis would listen to the crystalline voice, close her eyes and abandon herself to the most profound cognitions of warmth, of security, of love itself in the purest of forms, there smothering her into a holy bliss.
And then Christmas morning itself. Glynnis remembered waking early, always, and waiting to hear stirrings from the other bedroom. Sometimes her small brothers woke before she did and peeked into the girls’ room to see if they were awake yet. They would all mobilize there in the upstairs hallway, waiting for one another. Then, as quietly as they could, they would slip downstairs to lift and feel the mysterious packages once again. It was so hard to wait for their parents to rise, but they would not open their presents until all were together. Somehow it felt wrong, despite all the excitement and wonder, to want to open something without the entire family around. But such fragile convictions did not stop them from dividing up the presents and inspecting all sides of them. After a while their parents would hear them and come down.
Real joy would explode then, without fetters or restraint, the six of them in their bathrobes ripping through paper, holding up their newest treasures and the children squeaking with delight. In their excitement over the great packages the little ones never remembered to check the den where their stockings had been hung. Always their father had to remind them to take a look in the other room, take a look at the stockings, and they would jump up from where they sat to run into the den. There they would find the stockings jammed, with toy soldiers, or little dolls, or oranges, or candy, or books, or all these things. As they dumped out the contents of their stockings they would often get their gifts mixed, but it never mattered. Nothing mattered on these most magical of mornings.
Glynnis, lying in the darkness, looked back and remembered the deepest, most essential feelings of her childhood, all revolving around this special time, reflected in an amorphous blending of traditional images. Snowmen on the lawn, and snowball fights, and snow angels; the shopping plazas and department stores with everything looking so big; Christmas music; the special food, like roast duck and Christmas cookies and mincemeat pie. All that defined the innocent, excited wonder of childhood for Glynnis Mear was captured in this season. As she grew older she found herself marking her passage each Christmas, when the essence of life itself was made clear to her once again. She would reach back, and, as her father did, put aside all else to revel in the most basic of emotions, to strip away human complexities so that the purest of joys might come forward, to believe ultimately that she was part of something so great, so vast, so protective, that it would never, ever pass away.
In time she wearied of looking at the ceiling. Her thoughts, her memories bumped into each other as they skirted about her mind. They beat against her, as rain against a proverbial windowpane, and in so doing benumbed her. Sadness then, an old grief digging back into her. She had spent the night inspecting it from a distance, observing the images that, when juxtaposed with her present, defined as profound a pain as she could fathom. Her mind had worn too thin to fight it off, to keep the distance that kept her strong.
Glynnis Mear rolled over and pulled the covers tighter around her. She looked out her window at the shadowed forms of the backyard trees. There, in an icy December, for the first time in months, she began to weep.
***
The winter vacation rolled on soberly, removed from all past values and so forfeiting the expectation of joy. Glynnis Mear took little pleasure in the respite from an increasingly comforting routine of classes, study and embryonic friendships. In her estrangement she had consoled herself with the constructs of a new, entirely personal order. It was, for her, an assurance that she did indeed retain her own unique non-Mearsian identity. All that was suspended now. Through distance, she girded herself against the futilities of once again coming under the familial yoke. The calm, softly smiling, quietly energetic Glynnis Mear of her youth had gradually become listless, a scarecrow with all the straw shaken out.
She passed her days at home with scarcely a rustle. She slept late into the morning, for she did love to sleep and that was one pleasure usually denied her at school. After rising she would read through the afternoon, or go into downtown Boston with Martha, or alone, to shop, to walk around without aim, to look at the people in their wintertime guises. On occasion she got together with her closest friends, one at a time,
to brief each other on the past months. Even then she did not retain her excitement beyond the first few minutes of reunion. They were old faces, and too familiar, reflective of less complex days. Whatever she might do during the day, she made certain she was home for dinner. Glynnis saw no need to cause petty disturbances by skipping family amenities, and her mother was a very good cook.
After dinner she would watch television with her brothers and sister, or, more frequently, retire to the study, a room at the rear of the house where her father’s books were kept in wooden shelves, where also stood a history of family portraits on two desks at opposite corners, where sat two heavy leather chairs in which her father and mother might sit for hours, talking in retreat or merely feeling each other’s presence, where a classic bay window looked into the small patch of their back yard. Glynnis loved the study which, since her father’s death, had been largely ignored by the others. Here in the evenings she would read again, or sometimes just sit in one of the leather chairs and look out the bay window into the clammy white of a Boston Christmastime. She relished her solitude. Within two days of returning home she had timed her family’s routine so that she would emerge from the study only as her siblings were going to bed. Then she would spend ten or fifteen minutes with each of them, paying them singular visits like some vague avatar, assuring them and herself that all feeling had not been completely lost.
One evening in early January, after Christmas itself had faded and the New Year’s celebration, spent by Glynnis as any other night, had been quelled, Glynnis’s mother joined her in the study. Her mother’s entrance surprised her. Florence Mear, above everyone in the family, understood the sanctity of solitude and could be counted upon to honor it. As her mother entered, Glynnis was sitting in the chair nearer the bay window, reading Emily Brontë.
Her mother opened the door with a shy smile and walked to the other chair. She did not sit down immediately. Glynnis noticed that she was carrying a collection of Shakespeare.
