by Sara Dillon
Somewhere in Central Vermont, a song from Astral Weeks came on the radio.
Like a homing pigeon, I continued; Hyde Park, Morrisville, past the old road to the dump, past the field where Daddy and his cousin used to lie in the grass watching the train to Wolcott pass.
That summer had been the worst of all, the worst ever. When the Fourth of July came, I shuddered in fear; I would have to face them again. I would have to stand up and bring my mind into line with the cases, statutes, the meaning of a semicolon, be it implicit and or or, the grounds of decision, the questions as to whether a court had ever in the past deviated from, or hinted at, such a point, and I would have my usual reaction, I don’t know the hell, ask a lawyer. For several weeks, I worked at staying jovial, enjoying the summer mornings and the long summer evenings. Then August came like the Grim Reaper, and a grey cloud descended over my head. I couldn’t do it again. I couldn’t face it. I might never be the lovely girl on the station platform at Ochanomizu, but I couldn’t face this sort of August again.
I started my classes, I did. I don’t think I attended the welcome back lunch, though I’ve blocked it out and can’t be sure. Yes, I asked the students, Why waste time until Labor Day? No one laughed. The intense heat outside, the withering leaves; the air-conditioned interior, the bing of the elevator.
I either had to leave, or die. There was no way around it. I just couldn’t do it anymore.
Students wanting advice on what the next journal symposium topic would be left waiting. Professor Darcy will reschedule all appointments for a much, much later time.
I would have disappointed them in any case; I would have been off the beam, my mind on something else altogether. Professor Darcy, inimitable Consultant to the Government of Nowhere, on the topic of how to avoid the end of all things.
No one would miss me. If I had died, no doubt they would have stepped right over me. One of those e-mails would have made the circuit, with Professor Darcy in the heading.
And so, goodbye. Exactly like a homing pigeon, I flew north, not quite to Canada, but decidedly north.
——
Saint Theo’s; 2007
The memorial service was set for a Saturday afternoon of high summer; a classic summer day of hot wind and pale grass bent flat along the hillsides. It might have prefigured rain, or maybe not, the leaves were turned inside out, silver green, the cows lying in the cool spaces near water.
I left the kids with Emmet’s babysitter and promised to be back by late evening. I felt as if I had John Merrill in the front seat of the car with me; it was a once-off thing, he would never ride there again. But this one day, having left Emmet and Madina in Greensboro, I could have Merrill with me. Come along for a ride in my mother’s old Buick, I thought. It feels like the old days.
I walked across the campus at Saint Theo’s. It was ghostly; a deserted feeling, high summer. Little had changed in thirty years, only a new building here and there.
I went and sat on one of the benches that faced the chapel. I watched people arrive in ones and twos, small groups. All the women, like me, were wearing sleeveless black; items pulled from the back of the closet, awaiting a summer wedding, an evening one, put to different use today.
It was high summer, the real thing.
I thought I recognized people from Merrill’s family. I sat on the bench, early, alone, looking out at Saint Theo’s and feeling quite as if I’d never left. If someone had told me I was a senior doing my final papers, I would easily have believed it.
I sat there alone, in the warm wind. With a kind of terrible desire, I wanted Calvin Pini to appear, to park his car and saunter over to me, to say something cynical and sad. I wanted to see Calvin, to talk about Merrill with him.
In the chapel, familiar to me from years past, even from my brother Jack’s wedding a zillion years ago, I saw people enter in couples and small groups. It was the younger women who came in alone, with hair swept up and black mourning garb, sad and silent.
I saw professors I’d had in class more than thirty years previous, still energetic and completely recognizable; most did not in any case recognize me. I was tempted several times to lift my hand and wave my fingers to them, but did not. Instead, I sat rigid and grieving in the pew I had chosen, midway down the church.
From somewhere, appropriately in the heat and waves of quiet and swoon of midsummer came the sounds of the song Gracias a la vida.
I wondered if Merrill had chosen that himself for the occasion. I knew he would not mind me asking. He was not into reverence. It had the feel of too much resignation, though, and I wasn’t sure he would be that evenhanded about it all. Thanks for everything, it’s been great.
I so, so wanted Calvin Pini to arrive.
I kept seeing people I hadn’t seen in decades enter the chapel; the same, except for white hair. I imagined Calvin bursting out of the old dorm building, charging along, calling to Louis. There were dogs everywhere in those days. If I could catch up to Calvin, I might avoid every stupid thing I later did.
Merrill had wanted me to write to him; he had hunted around for my e-mail address; he had found it and written saying, I thought I would hear from you. He had asked. That and ten cents, as Una was fond of saying. But he had. And now there was no one to care about that, no one to tell.
I looked in the distance, to the visitor parking. Right up until the service began, I thought Calvin might arrive. Inside the chapel, I looked around for him, maybe smiling ironically in the corner, dressed casually but with a touch of summer charm. We would talk about Merrill.
I felt beautiful in my summer black sleeveless. I swayed between disbelief and disbelief. This was not good; this was final. He was lost to me. The part of my life that had begun with Merrill was over.
At the reception that followed, some of them looked at me as if I’d appeared out of a fog, a haze, a creature of the distant past they had assumed was far away, pursuing some obscure goal, and well outside the orbit of Saint Theo’s. Then on recognizing me at last, Catherine! Of course! I knew your father. What are you doing? Where are you now?
The artists and the English professors, still the same, genial, kind, warm in a way that most of the world has turned its back on. They looked puzzled to hear that I was teaching a course at Stannard State. Stannard; it must have sounded mundane and local to them, given the hype that had attended my time at Saint Theo’s.
Merrill’s brother looked eerily like him, a nearly identical face, though I overheard him sheepishly admitting that, unlike his brother, he was no poet. Seeing his brother made me crave Merrill, crave his return, and for a moment I wondered if there was some kind of magic that could resurrect him.
Calvin; 2007
I could have let it go, but I persisted anyway. I had always been persistent, stubborn. I wrote to tell him how I had expected him right up to the time I left, thought that against the odds he might appear.
I told him about who I’d seen, what they looked like now. About Merrill’s family and who had read at the service, the aging poets who had appeared and gone sadly down the aisle. There is no one who could understand how I feel about Merrill but you, I wrote to him. Whether this would be welcome news or not, I didn’t know.
When he replied, it was very short. I like the Mercedes Sosa version of Gracias a la vida. Do you know it? he wrote, and included a link to YouTube.
But this did not stop me. At this point, I wanted to know, was he on my side or not.
I wish you could have seen that bench outside the chapel before the memorial service. Besides you, there is no one else who could possibly understand about Merrill. I can’t help but ask you, do you care that he’s gone?
It was a dare of sorts, I guess. There he was in his bookshop, surrounded by antique editions of Treasure Island and Moby-Dick—he had always dreamed of a navy blue sea—and I persisted in asking him, raising the stakes as his silence persisted in turn. Do you care, Calvin Pini, do you wish to return, do you wish to remember?
Severa
l days passed. I wrote again, just one word.
Well?
When Calvin wrote back, it was brief and certainly to the point. He said:
I don’t live in the past like you.
And so that was that. I replied that I would not be writing to him again, not about the past, not about anything, and I didn’t. I could be as stubborn in leaving as in seeking out. I liked those dramatic scenes in novels and plays where one person tells another, From this time forward, I will treat you as if dead to me. I know no such person as you.
I don’t live in the past like you, wrote Calvin Pini to me. Well, fine, then. I would live there by myself.
Endings
Una didn’t exactly share my delight at the prospect of the Stannard teaching gig.
It could get a little weird, isolating. I don’t really like to think of you stuck there.
I generally protested, defending Stannard against charges of strangeness or being too out of the way.
Anyway, see how it goes. You don’t have to decide anything.
This was one of Una’s grand themes. Get all the facts, put off a final decision until later.
Keep your eyes open; there might be something better to apply for.
Una enforced this by falling silent for a few seconds whenever I mentioned Stannard. Then, as if to cut the discussion short, she would add something like, Well, whatever. See how it goes.
But I didn’t want to see how it went. That was the whole point. I didn’t want to wait and see and look around and pack my suitcase and wonder and hope. It was a simple bargain I was going for now, a fair exchange, one that in its own way felt like a great luxury. I could arrive home with the kids on a fall evening, and not fear anything, not agonize over anything.
Given what I had recently felt for Merrill, it was hard to be sure I had really given up; I was devious, I had my own silent agenda, but it was close.
Gramma had an early autumn birthday. I was trying to make her laugh and said, Well, not long before your birthday comes round again, Gramma. You’re heading for ninety five.
Don’t mention it to me! she said. How I wish God would give it to someone who would enjoy it!
As for Greensboro, I know there were other endings that would sound much better. For instance, one snowy afternoon, I would run into Miles Bradford in front of Willey’s, realizing in a coup de grâce that he had not died after all. I would be wearing a long blue coat with a faux fur collar, just as it had been then. We would pick up where we left off, driving about the Vermont roads just as we had so many years before. But of course, that did not happen.
Or as in an O. Henry story, a letter from Vincenzo the water engineer would be delivered, dated 1989. Since I moved so often, it had gone astray, but managed to reach me these many years later. Marry me, as you should and must, it would say, an awkward translation by the writer himself, Come and live with me forever at Lago di Como.
As for Kido, I was so annoyed at him that I refused to imagine an ending of this kind for him. In any case, it would have been too painful.
Emmet had already decided that he would grow up to be a rich man and live in a very big house. He liked limousines, the longer the better. We had a joke that Mommy would one of these days meet a Greek millionaire.
Lally like that, he said earnestly.
But what if he was strict, Emmet? I asked. He might not be all that nice.
What do then? Emmet asked, worrying as he always did, his eyes full of concern.
Then, Emmet, Mommy would say to that man, Leave your money and go.
Emmet found this tremendously funny; he laughed and laughed.
It was fitting that Merrill had warned me, warned the class really, but I remembered it as a personal caution: Beware of ending the story with lovers arm in arm, overlooking a big valley and saying, It’s all our’n.
My wardrobe was limited in a familiar way: dark cardigan, white shirt, black pants. My hair style hadn’t changed in several decades. Still eyeliner and a dash of lipstick every morning, not sure for whom. The same gestures, incredibly repetitious as I had always been, the same happiness on greeting the early morning, like I was getting it over on others that I was up and they were not.
Madina was moody in the morning. Emmet was crabby. I for my part was the same silently scheming, disciplined and undeviating self I had always been. Only now I didn’t have to make flow charts, nor sign in at law faculty meetings, nor account for what a particular Court of Appeals had held on any given topic. Caspian Lake changed color with each new morning. I had no wish to read new things, except in the rarest of cases. Mostly, I reread everything I had ever liked.
A big box of books I had in storage at Park Baun arrived, musty but forgiving, emerging like old pals.
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. . . .
There was something to it, this verbal thing, the thing about words, coming out of the tall grass near Park Baun and Turlough, the near mad thing with words, the fire leaping.
The turfcoloured water of the bath at Clongowes.
Turlough, just up the road from the dreary little slip of a town where Parnell had caught his last cold and then died from it. Stephen Dedalus feared the old fellows living in rural areas, red-rimmed watery eyes, standing at the half door. It wasn’t that kind I feared at all.
If Madina was born to ride a horse across the steppe, then I was born a fire leaper and as that would go to my grave. Funny to have chosen Japan, the utterly silent world. Funnier yet to imagine myself in law, stylized, frozen, not even as lively as science because it was simply made up, created to be rigid and threatening.
But now, I could read all the same books, with only a few spaces allotted for newly discovered European romantics, stumbled upon at the Stars and Moon Bookshop. I read Room With a View, and was convinced, once again, agreed by the end to love George Emerson, body and soul. I read Eva Trout and rented the strange musty house named Cathay, hard by the sea, told some fibs, hid my true self and surreptitiously sought out a few soulmates. It was all in a day’s work.
I hadn’t sold the house at Park Baun; there was the question of who would want it, but beyond that, still it was mine. I thought now and then of trying to sell it, but then did nothing. The cold stars would appear up above it, the house might feel aggrieved at being left behind after all the fuss. When I thought about it, I could feel the silence in which it waited; I could imagine the fox in his hole, emerging at nightfall to laugh softly in the neglected grass. And then there were the badgers that came out only at night and were never seen by people, not even in car headlights.
You are off-narrative today.
I thought of jokes like this, and there wasn’t a lot I could do with them. Ha ha, Madina would say, Funny not.
But I didn’t have to sit through meetings, listening as each participant lined up his best and most sonorous self promotion; letting fly anecdotes about when he was in-house counsel, or confidant to the AG, or finalist in an important dean’s search.
I didn’t have to convince a new roomful of students that I was big, tall, and important, despite indications to the contrary: my oft-washed jacket and odd mane of hair.
Emmet’s English had improved dramatically, no question. One night as he was drifting to sleep, he opened his eyes, their shallow lids invisible in the dark room.
Mommy ruled by fear?
Where had he heard this, I wondered, Star Wars? Princess Diaries? Madina’s influence was immense, but it didn’t sound like her style of thinking.
Am I ruled by fear, do you mean? Why do you ask? Lally is, at night, with bad dreams.
Was it Camus or one of those other existentialist guys so morbidly popular in the seventies, who invented a character who didn’t want to die, so made his life longer by waiting in cinema lines. When he got to the front of the line, he would return again to the end, just to make things
so tedious that time itself would last longer. I think I had managed something like that; if things went to plan, I wouldn’t have to regret or expect or dread the baton of one season being passed off to the next.
Good or evil angels,
I don’t know which,
hurled you into my soul
It was repetitious, my taste, the same old fragments of Alberti, but this time seen on the reverse journey.
At moments, it seemed that things might have gone any number of ways; but it was the fact that they didn’t that was compelling. They didn’t go that way; there were no genuine surprises, despite the fact that I was continually surprised at how things did not go according to my waking designs. Despite all the places, it came down to a pretty familiar map. In some mysterious way, I had made it come out just like this. A clumsy compromise, the bargain I kept thinking about as I took the Buick and drove away from Boston. But that’s not quite right, either. I could have been convinced along the way. I might have done otherwise.
I probably never fooled anyone, not for a moment. My manner was that of a school girl, a Catholic school girl in a hand-me-down blue uniform, blue belt twisted into a rope around my waist, in love with my Holy Name shoes; or in the alternative, like a peasant educated in secret under a hedge, books piled haphazardly next to the open fireplace. Aloneness was my eau de cologne, that inexplicable aloneness that should have entranced or repelled, but in the law school made them all simply write me off without mental comment.
I sent Una a YouTube link to that famous scene from the movie A Man and a Woman, the scene with the car at the seaside, Ba da da, na na na, na na na na na; the woman is on the beach with the kids and the race car driver sees them from afar; he flashes the lights, then gets in the car and drives towards them. He gets out and runs at full tilt; she runs towards him, the kids run towards him and they spin and spin with the grey expanse of sea and the overcast French sky behind them.
