by Sara Dillon
Why that summer in particular, I’m not sure. I didn’t complete a little collection of poems, didn’t finish a film script. I guessed that it had been fifteen years or so since Kido had written a song really worth listening to, but then he didn’t have to any more. He could repackage the old ones as Ansé’s Best, Ansé’s Silver Best, Only the Best, With Gratitude Best, Retrospectives Best, and so on, without any apparent sense of repetition.
As for love, I remembered the phrase, wherever it was originally from, that love is short and forgetting is so long.
As the time grew closer and I saw colleagues scurrying around the halls of the law school, I would pull the same old face, You know, trying to get something done. Get something done, a vile phrase, Oh, just trying to finish things up. I have a deadline. A deadline, I have a deadline. Meaning someone wants something from you; a point of pride.
Daddy had an old joke about the weather in Vermont, that it was just winter and the Fourth of July, but it fit with this other sense of the desperate shortness of the summer. Had I finished up the poems, even, I would probably have ended up publishing the collection myself, and selling about five copies. The rest would be piled up in a corner years later, and I would tell people, Oh it was a good experience. I don’t regret it. Piaf, c’est moi, Hymne a l’amour.
It was as if I had done all I could do, done it as many times as I had it in me to do. Enough with the teaching, the yammering, the explications. Enough with the WTO, the lunches where names of judges were dropped and where, you know, that self of mine went draining away.
Simply put, I would die if I tried to do it again. Something terrible would happen.
I hadn’t in fact been trying to finish something up that summer; rather, I was waiting for the announcement that someone had arrived to save me, to open the gates of the tower and let me go free. But as in other summers, such a person never appeared, and, more painfully, the scenario seemed far less plausible.
In Gramma’s world, summer was the time of dying; the scent of carnations at a Watertown funeral parlor in the evening, the whispered tones of a wake. Everyone except Daddy had died in summer, everyone she knew. I fought mightily against that notion, struggled to prove that summer was instead my magic time, my zone of perfection.
Gramma said some funny things that summer. One morning, the nurse’s aide in her assisted living had to wake her; she never overslept, but that morning she was hard to wake. Gramma opened her eyes and said to the aide, Yes, dear, I guess I was dead, but I didn’t know it.
That summer didn’t deliver for me, not a thing. Not a moment of the usual hope, not even the usual boom and bust of expectation and disappointment. The whole thing refused to get off the ground at all.
I couldn’t deliver the perfect essence of summer to Emmet and Madina either; just the usual visits to the pool, the week away, camps and air-conditioned restaurants. That August was my mortal enemy.
Funny how I still remembered Miles Bradford; how funny he was. His old words from that letter written at Alma’s, that it was Up up up or downhill all the way. I saw again what he meant.
The invitations to the law school’s Welcome Back Lunch came out. This was a bad sign. The net was closing around me. The grading committee would be meeting to decide whether to go for a mandatory curve; the Dean would be commenting on whether it was likely we would move up a fraction of a tier in the national rankings. But most of all, there were the law books to open again, like vials of poison I had kept under lock and key.
I was allergic to law offices and even the clothes worn by lawyers; the facial expressions, the gestures, the manner of closing a cell phone.
At her worst moments, Gramma had a way of looking around the room and saying, Won’t somebody help? Can’t somebody do something? I had heard this so many times, I usually responded by saying that no one could take away old age and that we would just have to soldier on as we were.
I did understand her, though; I did see what she meant.
I had my intro lectures done; the concepts, the promises of riches and rewards to come. I would not tell them that law was a trap, an absurdity, that most of it made no sense except from the point of view of preventing things from changing in a way that you would touch or taste. The pages upon pages of indigestible notions; fog across a lost world; the dark forest.
Summer as it had been once, me in my white dress, standing on the train platform at Ochanomizu in an unthinkably distant time; or in Ireland on a June night that refused to get dark.
Like Gramma, except that embarrassment kept me from asking, Can’t somebody do something? But you promised, you said, I thought, but, but.
And we started back teaching in August. August! The warmest, laziest, stickiest month, like the old age of summer, designed to force us to let go even our wish to hold onto summer. August. Into the classroom, out with the jurisprudence. Only people with no feelings could imagine, could devise, such a thing.
I had always anticipated ending up like Nina in The Seagull, but at least that would have been the right sort of failure. But that was merely a lament, gather ye rosebuds and all that, I wish I wish I wish in vain, et cetera. It was something much deeper, darker, a feeling unto death.
I would leave, or I would die, somehow death would come stalking me for bad faith.
In the Victorian novels, the ladies feared that at thirty the bloom was off the rose, but fifty, what was that all about. And forgetting is so long.
They assigned me a classroom that I didn’t like. That was always the case; I had to adjust.
There’s a feng shui problem here, I joked to the students. Not one of them smiled, let alone laughed.
I feel like I am talking to the air, I went on. Silence. Isn’t it great, being back in August? I mean, who needs summer? No one smiled or laughed or looked me in the eye. They wanted to see a smart businessman or gal, wellfitting suit, confident and predictable, indifferent to the season, fond of good restaurants, briefcase full of impeccable paper.
I considered different jokes, references to just arriving back from Saint Tropez; knowing they wouldn’t laugh even then. It depended on how reckless I was feeling.
How was your summer, Catherine? The other law professors asked me. How are those kids doing?
They are well, nutty as they come, but fine overall, I would say. It was my way, our way of responding, that extra dimension of self-deprecation. I couldn’t help it, it was impossible for me to speak in any other way.
I don’t know how you do it, they would say. How on earth do you do it?
Well, I don’t, I would say, and they also failed to laugh. What did that mean? What wasn’t she doing?
I could imagine my colleagues saying, The students really value real world examples. Too bad she doesn’t seem to offer those the way Larry did. But can you imagine, really, me offering anyone examples of anything from the real world?
I dreamed of getting the children away from the city, to a place where a long rambling garden provided endless delights, nooks and crannies, sloping into old growth perennials and contented trees. Gramma’s brother had died in his thirties. He had contracted TB as a sailor and was put in a sanitorium with no view at all. She told me how he looked out the window and saw green hills and sheep. It’s so beautiful out there, can you see it? he had asked her. She had looked out and, of course, it was nothing much, just a car park and a busy road beyond. I can see it right out there, a lovely green hill.
It was a common trait of Catholics, the vision thing. To those other denominations, well, You take earth, then, and we’ll have heaven.
I may sound spoiled, but I wasn’t spoiled. I didn’t want much, didn’t even need much. Just please, I thought, do not make me do this again. No more. What’s the worst that can happen? You take earth, I’ll take heaven.
Greensboro; 2006
It had been harder than ever to leave the Tisdale house that last summer vacation. I felt like a refugee as I closed the screen door and walked across the lawn, my arms
full of plastic beach items, draped over with bags.
I wish it was our house, I said to Una.
Well, we never make anything happen, Una replied. She had shut down as we left the house. She was in revenge mode for the passivity and acceptance of Gramma and Daddy, their failure to struggle against fate.
We could, I said meekly.
It is what it is, she said, ending the conversation, angry in turn at me, Sven, Gramma, Daddy and various unnamed forces pulling us relentlessly in the unworldly direction.
On this trip, we had made our usual rounds; Stowe, Hyde Park with its cemetery full of Daddy’s old friends, Wolcott with its unchanged gaggle of riverside houses and churches.
Not another cemetery, Madina complained, throwing herself against the back of the car seat.
When we were little, we amused ourselves in the back seat, I said. Coloring books, looking out the window, playing games with the license plates.
Ahh, ahhh, Madina sighed. But it was perfectly true. Somehow or other, Una and I had sat for hours without a word of complaining, watching the little rivers that followed the roads in Vermont, waiting for the familiar sights.
On these holidays, Una railed against a bad weather forecast, throwing up her hands and looking around as if to say, Okay, who’s the culprit? It was some moral failing; had we just tried that bit harder, we would have earned better weather. Other people didn’t get crappy forecasts like this; just my luck, damn it all, rain for most of the week!
What was the word we had used in college, Calvin Pini and I: lastness, I think it was. That trip to Greensboro had the whiff of lastness.
Just when; 2007
I never liked those e-mails with someone’s name in the subject line. As with telegrams edged in black, you knew immediately that the news would not be good. When I saw the message that said simply “John Merrill” in the subject line, it was a stunning, terrible moment.
It had been forwarded to me from the English Department at Saint Theo’s and read:
We wanted you all to know that our friend John Merrill suffered a heart attack three days ago. As most of you know, he went in for a long-planned back surgery at the end of the academic year. The surgery went well; he was awake and talking to friends and family. Sadly, soon after, he had the heart attack. He has not regained consciousness. He is strong, and we are hopeful that he will pull through. His family has asked that he have no visitors at this time. Your prayers are most welcome. We will keep you posted.
I cried through dinner and cried myself to sleep. He hadn’t been conscious for days; there was no telling if he was still there or not.
I prayed that he would live, that I could go to Saint Theo’s and see him, to have him tell me again that I had the power of words, a power that had once wowed him and that guaranteed he would never forget me. You are not banished, Catherine, he had written, even in those dark seasons when the rain fell in Dublin day after day, even then.
Then just recently, he had wanted me to write to him. He had asked me to. He had told me about not writing any more, and said he didn’t want to be Robert Frost.
I began to phone people I’d known at Saint Theo’s. I kept asking what the doctors thought; never mind this talk about Merrill not being out of the woods yet. Suddenly practical, and God knows I had no belief in doctors, I wanted to know if he was coming out of the woods at all. I forwarded the message to Calvin marked Urgent. He wrote back, I’m sorry, how awful.
Calvin, I heard from someone up at Saint T’s that Merrill’s wife (remember the knitter?) left him some years ago. Even at his age, he married again. Did you know all this?
What I didn’t write to Calvin was God, if I had known, I could have thrown my hat in the ring. I could have done it, stranger things have happened. They told me that this second marriage had been good for him, kept him from being morose.
It would have been a bit weird, but I could have. We loved each other, after all, surely we did.
The next day, and the next, the e-mails came at intervals, saying that Merrill was hanging on, but that there was no change in his condition.
I phoned the college and asked if there was a chance he would recover; whether of all the mid-western revelries and streams alive with fish and garden scenes, seasonal obsessions, anything remained. They were carrying out tests now, I was told.
I continued to wait. And as I feared, the news from the tests was not good. They let him go, and John Merrill was no more.
Everything I heard and saw made me cry, cry for John Merrill, Mr. Merrill, first and last to smile on my gifts, arbiter of words, wiser than anyone. Sometimes lush and generous with his own words, and sometimes terse, with only one or two to spare.
Calvin, I forward below info on memorial service. Will you come? More than anyone, I would like to see you. Please come. I so want to see you.
Mommy, just stop talking about that person if it makes you sad, Madina said. They were utterly fed up with my tears. She crossed her arms in a pout, Emmet standing loyally next to her. If I put on sad music, she snapped it off in a huff. Stop, Mommy, stop, we don’t like it, she said.
I really scrambled to recover myself, I tried. There was an unpleasant blankness about things. I was frightened. I had gone to John Merrill at the very beginning, before my later conceit and self-absorption, to verify the thing about the words.
I tap out sentences on my fingers, I had told him. He didn’t laugh, or even comment. He looked at me, and he sighed. This meant something to him; he knew. And it wasn’t even just that. It was much more than that.
The green gardens were blank, the vistas blank. There wasn’t much left, and absolutely nothing of that long standing.
I could have thrown my hat in the ring. I could have gone to see him now and again. I could have offered to be with him. It was a mad, zany thought, but at least it would have been fun.
I’m sorry, Una said when I told her. She remembered Merrill from years past. That’s really unfortunate.
But from Emmet and Madina, there was no mercy at all. No music for me, no time on the porch, no crying.
It wasn’t exactly grief; I had hardly seen him in recent years, after all. Rather, it was a sense of pointlessness, a coldness, that blank quality that undid even my memories. No one around me remembered what I remembered. It felt old, tired, a giving up beyond the giving up I thought I had already done.
You could go in the blink of an eye from charming, desirable, wonderful, to unknown, frumpy, anonymous. The point was who was watching, thinking, remembering the movie with you in it. Who was aware of you there in the world, your walking and moving and even your sleep. Who was curious about you, who wanted to sit and eat with you while the night sky settled in beyond your shoulder.
Beware, I thought, he warned you of bad endings. He warned mostly of happy ones; the clichés of togetherness, It’s all our’n, as he’d put it, while making us laugh in the writing seminar. There were the trite but unhappy endings as well, though not as easy to recognize or pillory.
Still, on waking in the morning, there was that knowledge of not being able to head out, find him if I needed to, elicit from him a sign of knowing, a sigh, a word.
Calvin didn’t answer my last message. Apart from him, there was no one to tell. Well, Una had some idea, but not as much as Calvin Pini did. He had been in the writing classes with me, back in the days when I was so important, was sought after and serenaded. For you, Calvin had written to me, who could raise small birds to a whisper.
But there was nothing much I wanted to say to Una. When she called, I just repeated, I’m really unhappy about Merrill, I can’t believe he’s gone.
She wasn’t terrible about it. She actually sympathized to some degree.
At the end of one telephone conversation, just as we were about to hang up, she told me, Gramma said a funny thing. I told her that it was really hard for you that Merrill had died. Oh, isn’t it time for her to get over that, Gramma said. He was a married man with a family, for God’s sake
. Why is she carrying on over a married man?
Greensboro; 2006
Like a homing pigeon that particular August, I was driving north. I left the law school, got the kids, packed as much as I could, and drove north. When we got to Vermont, at that place that always lived in my mind, the place where the river divided New Hampshire from Vermont, the place Daddy always told us to stop and listen, that it was Vermont, completely different, Madina asked me why we were going back up again. Did Una tell us to meet her there? I told her no, that I had decided we needed to go one more time, that I needed to see the fields as they were being made ready for the harvest.
Like a homing pigeon. I kept going north.
The fields had changed their look, from high summer to anticipating the fall. Madina kept asking, Are we really going back to Vermont, Mommy? Why? Did we forget something?
I liked that idea; it appealed to me. Yes, I forgot something and we are going back to get it. The locals in Greensboro, had they noticed or cared, would have said to themselves, Thought we just got rid of that crew—what are they doing back?
From Concord, New Hampshire on I knew every twist and turn in the road, into Vermont and the leisurely way the highways rose and fell, everyone speeding up to glide on the down slopes, saving on gas. These were Daddy’s roads; if he was wandering anywhere, it was on these near-empty Vermont highways.
We dere yet? Emmet kept asking, bored and restless after his initial surprise. He was probably wondering if this meant he could choose yet another prize at Willey’s or the Shaw’s General Store in Stowe.
As I drove, I was faintly aware that I would never have to think through all those legal puzzles again; shared competence, exclusive competence, preliminary references, interim relief. I would never have to, I would never be allowed. It was vaguely euphoric, as if emptying out the contents of a big suitcase as we traveled along, watching the clothes go flowing off into the fields out the back window.
