by Paul Theroux
Sometimes she said, “I would trade everything I’ve written to have composed a ditty that people would go on humming,” and then stared and hummed a tune that strangely vibrated behind her face.
No one in her family had read a word she’d written. Reading was such a pleasant pastime that their refusal had to be deliberate, or hostile. They could so easily know me by reading me.
They don’t want to know me, she felt, and not reading her stories was their saying “See, we don’t care.” It wasn’t her son’s absence that pained her—it was his indifference. And what sharpened it was the attention of so many others, those strangers. She imagined herself an artist whose family refused to look at her paintings.
Returning home late one night, Kate stumbled on the front stairs and injured her lower back. “Trauma to your left kidney and some spinal bruising.” In the hospital she was reminded of Ivan Illych in the great story, how a fall had injured him, how he lay dying, the mention of his “floating kidney.”
Kate’s fall seemed like that, provoking a fatal illness; in her physical pain she felt immensely old and feeble. She lay in bed in her hospital room wondering whether her son and his family would walk through the door. How did they know she wasn’t dying?
On the second day—why the delay?—her son visited. “I just got the news” could not have been true. She stared, as you do at a lie. He held her hand and uttered the conventional formulas of concern. She wanted to tell him: I’ve written better commiserations than that.
“Not good,” she said, to test him when he asked how she felt.
The next day Brenda came. She took the bedside seat, stone-faced, empty-handed, as if commencing a deathwatch.
“I don’t know how much longer I have,” Kate said, “but I don’t want to die without saying this.”
She could hear Brenda’s breathing from the scrape of air in the hairs in her nostrils.
“I know you don’t like me much,” Kate said, without any bitterness, as though naming a color. “But I don’t know why. I just want to say that whatever the reason, if there was ever anything I said or did to hurt you,” and she paused, “I’m sorry.”
At first Brenda said nothing, and the only sound was the protest of the nose hairs. She swallowed a little, and the way she swallowed changed her expression and shaped her mouth to a rueful smile.
She faced Kate, unsmiling then. She had become a heavy plump-jowled woman.
“I accept your apology,” she said, barely opening her mouth, as if someone else inside her was speaking.
Kate Collier Delombre didn’t die. She lived for ten more years—ten years of solitude, not writing, looked after by Perta Mae, a respected figure in Peavy and elsewhere. Her fame grew and she won awards when she stopped writing, a paradox that amused her.
I met her in that period, and she told me how she had lost the affection of her son. Could it have been as simple as his adoption? Hated by her daughter-in-law, doubted by her granddaughter.
“My heartache.”
That was the lunch at Louleen’s when I urged her to fictionalize it, to ease her pain.
But she didn’t write it, she died of heartache, and I did not begin to write it myself until after I accepted Perta Mae’s invitation to visit the old house outside Peavy, set in the desolate fields her husband’s family had once farmed, the furrows grubbed and scabby in winter.
I took Perta Mae, who seemed much older, to Louleen’s, so as to be away from Kate’s aura in the house. But even so, her spirit lingered there in the diner. Why is it, on a return to such a homely place, you so often choose the same table? The familiar entrance, people looking up from their food, Perta Mae limping ahead of me.
Perta Mae ordered fried catfish and mentioned how Miss Kitty had liked it that way, with two sides, rice and gravy, coleslaw, and a biscuit, a sort of homage set out on a plastic tray.
“You were true to her,” I said. “The only one.”
“Had to be.”
“She was so grateful.”
“Never told her why.” Perta Mae worked her biscuit apart with her thumbs. “Old Mr. Jack and me was kinfolk.”
I thought, What? But I suppressed my shock. “Why didn’t you tell her?”
“Heh. Tell that woman anything and you see in her eye she fixin’ to make it a story.” She became serious and added, “Later on, I tell young Mr. Jack.”
“But he was adopted.”
“That’s why he need to know. For his wife sake too.” And she laughed and lifted half a buttered biscuit. “That’s why they gee and haw when they see me and Miss Kitty.”
I’m the Meat, You’re the Knife
I WAS WALKING DOWN High Street to the funeral home when I spotted Ed Hankey coming toward me. He said, “Jay,” then, “Guess who’s sick?” then blinked and, “Murray Cutler.”
Sometimes bad news takes the form of a greeting. I hadn’t seen Hankey for more than twenty years, and felt this abrupt announcement was a tactic to overcome his awkwardness. Another reason I didn’t want to reply by saying that my father had just died, and that was why I was there. I wondered if he’d ask why I was in Medford Square after so long. Family tangles, bereavement, and failure send us home; seldom happiness. Perhaps he knew about my father’s death and was avoiding it by mentioning Murray Cutler. I was headed to Gaffey the mortician to meet my mother and sister, to choose a coffin and arrange the viewing.
When I asked how sick, Hankey said, “He’s at a hospice.” His lisp made the word juicier and more emphatic. He cocked his head to look straight into my face, clamping his mouth shut and widening his eyes, and this meant everything.
Instead of replying, I took a deep breath and nodded, reflecting on the news. Murray Cutler had been our high school English teacher. He was one of those people whose death, I knew, would be a problem for me unless I was somehow part of it. I was resigned to my father’s passing, though. We had no unfinished business, and he knew I loved him. What I dreaded were the futile formulas of consolation from people who didn’t know him. I felt fragile in my grief, hypersensitive to sound. Voices on the car radio grated on me, so did music, so did pity.
I said, “Maybe I’ll go see him.”
“Visit the sick, one of the Corporal Works of Mercy,” Hankey said, and he laughed. We’d been altar boys together, we’d been classmates, we’d sat side by side in English class, where Murray Cutler was a tease. “What can I do you for?” Or, showing me two copies of an exam, saying, “This is mine and that is urine.” “Copper Knickers,” he said, “he of the heliocentric theory.” He talked about the Huguenots simply so that he could call them the Huge Nuts. He had the tease’s gift for spotting a victim’s weakness.
All this time Hankey was talking about his wife and children, reminding me that he had married one of our classmates, how happy they were. Then: “I never really knew Cutler. He was a funny guy.”
“I know,” I said. I debated again whether to tell him my father had died. No, a death is not something you mention briefly in passing to someone you bump into, even an old friend. And it was better to keep these two dramas separate. Individually they were tragedies, lumped together they were merely news.
“Everyone said he was a wicked-big influence on you.”
“In what way?”
“As a story writer and all that.”
“Do you read my stuff?”
A look of suffering or at least sheepishness in his eyes, the visible evidence of a temptation to lie, like pressure on his head, and at last he said, “My wife’s the reader.”
When I snorted instead of replying, Hankey said, “Cutler taught us the word ‘procrustean.’ All these years, I’ve never used it.”
“And ‘transpicuous.’”
“Whatever that means. You probably used that somewhere, eh?”
“Not yet.”
He shrugged and said that the hospice was near the Winchester line, on South Border Road. “The Elms. Big old house. You can’t miss it.”
South Bord
er Road, of all places, in the wooded Fells, where I’d spent so much of my innocent youth, where I’d left my innocence behind.
“Jay, we were worried about you,” my mother said at Gaffey’s as I entered the waiting room. She sat compactly, hands clasped, my sister Rose next to her, both of them pale and stunned, as though waiting to see a doctor.
Rose said, “They’re getting the catalogue. For the caskets. It’s real stressful. I never thought—” But she didn’t finish the sentence.
In that awkward silence I said, “I just bumped into Ed Hankey.”
“Oh?” my mother said in a high and querying tone, her way of asking for details.
“He sent his regards. He asked how you were. He was sorry to hear about Dad.”
“Oh?” She wanted more.
Rose said, “I remember Eddie.”
I could not turn away from my mother’s imploring face. I said, “He claimed that when his father passed away his spirit still lingered. Eddie could feel it in the house, and sometimes it seemed to be inside him. Unconsciously Eddie became more like his father. Used the same expressions, began to be frugal, adopted some of his father’s attitudes. It made him feel better.”
“I can relate to that,” Rose said.
“The memory of his father made him stronger. Helped him with decisions.”
My mother was on the verge of tears, dabbing her eyes with a balled-up tissue.
“Eddie was a nice-looking guy,” Rose said.
“Your father was so kind. He had no business sense.” My mother was clutching her leather handbag. “Now you have to take his place. You’re in charge now.”
They stared at me, bereft. I sat closer to them and said, “Don’t tell anyone I told you, but Eddie had a couple of funny stories about online dating, things going wrong.”
A sad smile floated across Rose’s lips.
“One of the women posted a picture of her much prettier sister, wearing a tracksuit. ‘I like working out,’ she wrote under it. ‘Get physical.’ But when Eddie met her he didn’t recognize her—he said she weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. She ate a huge meal. He sat there dumbfounded.”
My mother said, “Oh?”
“Another one met him for drinks. He said she seemed nice, but a bit goofy. Anyway, they ordered some salads at the bar. Then a strange thing happened. This woman got a nosebleed, but didn’t seem to notice it. She says, ‘Anything wrong?’ ‘Yeah,’ Eddie says. ‘You’re bleeding into the caesar salad.’ So she gets up, and he figures she’s going to the ladies’ room. He never saw her again!”
“Something druggy about nosebleeds,” Rose said, smiling broadly as she hugged Mother.
“God forgive me,” Mother said, holding her rag of tissues to her mouth, laughing.
“Everything seems like a good idea on coke,” Rose said.
And then a solemn man in a dark suit appeared, and we were invited in to peruse the catalogue.
Driving along the road the next afternoon, I glanced to the right and moved through a map in my mind, from Bellevue Pond to Panther Cave to Wright’s Tower and the Sheepfold, until the shadow of Murray Cutler fell over the memory, and I realized that I was coming face to face with the man after all these years. I had no idea what I would say to him, but I needed to see him before he died.
At a bend on South Border Road, a large old house loomed from between tall trees, fieldstone and brick, with a pair of heavy-lidded dormers on the roof and bosomy bow windows on the front, set back from the road. The Elms: Hospice and Palliative Care appeared in green and gold on a swinging board at the opening of the circular driveway: a family mansion converted to a medical facility.
Inside, at the periphery of the lobby area, a white-haired woman in a blue sweater sat at a desk behind a glass partition and a slid-aside window opening onto a counter, like someone selling bus tickets. She stood and, plucking her glasses from where they had rested on her head and dropping them onto the bridge of her nose, leaned toward me. The odor of new paint and fresh flowers in the lobby and the way the woman greeted me made me think of their opposites, decay and deception and death, sinister and obvious distractions, especially the smile.
“Please sign in,” and she indicated the visitors’ book. I was reminded of the leather-bound visitors’ book we had chosen the day before at the funeral home.
I flipped pages, searching the column under Destination. Murray Cutler’s name did not appear on any of the pages I saw.
“Mr. Cutler’s not getting many visitors,” I said.
“Professor Cutler doesn’t have family,” the woman said. Professor! “He’ll be glad to see you. He’s in two-two-eight. Stairs on the left.”
His door was closed. I tried the knob, pushing it open slowly, then stepping into the inert body odor that hung in the small room like a sour baggy presence. Murray Cutler lay in a bed facing the window, an elderly woman beside him bent over a book, but turning her face to me, frowning, looking punished, when the door clicked shut.
“Sorry to interrupt.”
“You’re supposed to knock. I don’t appreciate it when people don’t knock.” She sighed and hoisted the book. “We’re reading this. I’m one of the volunteers.”
In this interval, Murray Cutler did not stir. His head remained canted to the side, his mouth open.
“I can take over from you.”
“He taught English at Medford High.” She glanced at him as though for approval. “Did he teach you?”
“Yes. He taught me how to tell stories.”
“He loves stories.”
“I have some for him.”
In a softer voice she said, “He’s got an awful lot of challenges.”
That was when he looked at me, not moving his head, but lifting his eyes, and remaining expressionless.
Although I had not seen him since high school, I recognized him at once. Wasted, simplified, and revealed by illness, he was reduced to a skeletal caricature of himself, the way a sickness shows us who we really are by making us too weak to pretend. He’d always been thin, his close-fitting clothes made him a stick figure, but he was vain about his body. Teachers wore suits and ties then. His suits were well cut and stylish.
Exaggerated by his sickness, he was a skinnier version of a skinny man. His skin clung to his skull, a tissuey death’s head, a corpse’s face, yellowish, with dry split lips. When he drew a breath his eyes goggled from the effort. He looked weird and weightless on the bed, like a castaway adrift on a raft. His arms looked useless. Where there had been muscle, there was slackened sinew, less like flesh than old meat.
“I’ll leave him to you,” the woman said, rising from her chair and handing me the book.
Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls. I read the dark title aloud and made a face.
“Stories of survival and heroism,” she said, buttoning her coat. “We’ve just done Alexander Selkirk.”
“Robinson Crusoe and his man Freddy, the perfect partnership, he used to say.” I looked to Cutler for a reaction, but there was none.
“He’s had a stroke. Well, a series of small strokes. His speech is impaired but his hearing is perfect,” the woman said at the door. “His eyesight is challenged too, so please read to him—or tell him a story.”
When she stepped out and shut the door I put my face close to his.
“Remember me?”
He heard me. He seemed to strain, to focus his yellow eyes on me, his mouth gaping. His hands were folded on his chest, claw-like fingers, and a needle was inserted into the back of one hand, taped flat and attached to a clear plastic tube.
“I was your student. Jay Justus.”
In a measured set of whispered gasps that I had to translate, he said: “Had so many students.”
“You told me I was special.”
This took a moment to register, but when it did he seemed to smile, as though I’d teased him, and he opened his mouth wider, showing me what remained of his teeth, discolored stumps and raw gums. He was ill, but
I could see that there remained in his shrunken body a distinct intelligence that was like an intimation of heat. I was convinced of it when he became impatient, and that spark kept me resolute.
“Story,” he said, and, urgent, working his dry tongue, he looked reptilian, as corpses often do.
“You were always a reader. You used to loan me books.”
Impatience surfaced on his bony face again, twisting his features at me, his bulging yet unastonished eyes.
“You went to Mexico one summer. You told us all about it. How the Mexican children called you Papacito and followed you everywhere.”
He lifted his head as though to bat away my talk, and, slurring, he said, “Story.”
His saying the word gave me so much pleasure I hesitated until he repeated it two more times, chewing it in his insistence.
“This is a story about my friend in San Francisco,” I said, and Murray Cutler smiled and looked content. “He was lonely, he lived on his own, he worked in a cubicle, he found it very hard to meet people. One day there was an earthquake, which they get now and then in San Francisco. His office was evacuated. He ran into the street and found a doorway for protection. A young woman from his office dashed in and cowered next to him. Can you picture it, the doorway framing them? As the tremors continued he put his arm around her, not saying a word. She welcomed it—she was terrified by the earthquake, the screams of the people on the street. My friend began kissing her, and, in her fear, she accepted this. When the whole business was over she still clung to him, and instead of going back to work, he took her to his apartment and assaulted her.”
Murray Cutler seemed to listen with his open mouth, widening it as if to understand better. When I finished he grunted with dissatisfaction.
“More,” he said.
“Another man, another time, another story”—and Murray Cutler looked bewildered. “During a fire alarm at a hotel, a man in his pajamas and robe found himself standing next to a woman who was clearly very frightened. Firemen, hoses, sirens, men with axes, men in rubber boots. The woman recoiled from them. The man took the woman’s hand and drew her close, and he spoke to her in a reassuring way. She too was in a single room in the hotel. An hour of this, and then the all clear—a false alarm. But the elevators weren’t working. The man helped her find the stairs and led her to her room. ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ she said as she opened the door. He still held her free hand. He wouldn’t let go. He kicked her door open and said, ‘But I do.’”
