by Nancy Thayer
One day Wilbur had closed his shop in the middle of the day and walked by himself down to a spot on the bank of the Blue River where he was pretty certain of being alone—it was not an especially pretty spot, a noisy highway ran just the other side of it, at the top of a steep bank, and no one fished there because at this point the river ran so shallow. Both sides of the river were overgrown with willows and ash trees and weeds and there was no sandy beach to sit on. Wilbur had just crouched down in the middle of some tall grass and stared at the water and, finally, assured of privacy, he had cried. He had cried and cursed God and man and life and death and wondered why he shouldn’t go ahead and take his own life and get it over with.
It was with perfect clarity that he suddenly heard Ricky’s voice: “Hey, Dad, look at the water skaters!”
Wilbur had looked automatically at the river, where a group of bugs were skimming busily on the surface, before he realized that he had just heard Ricky’s voice. He knew it was a trick of synapses, of longing and grief short-wiring his brain. Still, Ricky’s voice had been so vivid. And he hadn’t seen the water skaters before … He stopped crying, stopped thinking, and just stared at the flow of the river.
A few days later, in the shop, when he was loading up the cleaning and packets of freshly ironed shirts into the delivery truck, he heard Ricky’s voice again, saying, “Dad, you’d better get that left back tire checked. It’s low again.” It was the sort of thing Ricky might have said, because he was the son who hung around with Wilbur and helped him in the shop. Still, it was embarrassment more than disbelief that kept Wilbur from going home to his wife and children and telling them that he had heard Ricky say he should have a tire checked. If he was going to hallucinate about his dead son, surely it should be on a more spiritual level.
But he felt continually better after that, and slowly he began to believe that all that religious claptrap he had heard all his life might be true: that Ricky might be gone from this earth, but still somehow be very much real and present, and in a way, alive. He began to feel—whenever he heard a joke and thought: Ricky would have laughed at that—that perhaps Ricky was hearing it and was laughing. Wilbur began to enjoy a sense of companionship as he went through life. Perhaps he was crazy and that pretense was simply the only way he could bear to continue living. Or perhaps Ricky’s spirit really did accompany him, now and then.
As the years rolled by, Wilbur heard Ricky’s voice less and less until now it was a rare occurrence, but certainty of Ricky’s presence grew. Ricky had never been a child to hold grudges, and he didn’t seem to be a bitter presence even now. Wilbur had the feeling that Ricky didn’t mind being only an observer. Wilbur began to think that while life was of course usually preferable to death, the experience of daily life was just as fraught with unpleasantness, worries, fears, and griefs as it was with pleasures. Taken daily, life is harder than we like to think, and simply getting through a life requires any number of ameliorating illusions. Perhaps God had not been so unkind, after all, to take Ricky’s body from him after only seventeen years. Worse things might have happened to him—he might have grown up and lost a son of his own. At any rate, Wilbur now firmly believed that Ricky’s spirit still existed, and if he sorrowed over the vanishing of his son’s body and smile and clear blue eyes, he felt comforted by a sense of the sturdy eternity of the boy’s soul.
Wilbur found the teachings of the Church compatible with his life, or perhaps it was that he had shaped his understanding of the events of his life to be compatible with the teachings of Christianity. He believed in the definite individuality of souls. He saw Ricky’s soul as hearty and adolescent, forever cheerful. Norma’s soul was delicate, orderly, and elaborate, like a paper snowflake, much the same now that she was sixty-five as it had been when she was twenty. His own soul he thought of as a tough old piece of brown twine that had been put through so many convolutions by life that it now sat inside his chest all tangled in a clump of knots. Sometimes he could even feel it in there, sinewy and vigorous and triumphant in a sly way, now that it was obviously winning the game in the hare and tortoise race between body and soul. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, and no one knows why He does what He does, but Wilbur had always thought that if you had something, well then you stood the chance of losing it. That was just the way it was. He kept trying to be grateful for what he had, for what he had not lost.
Physically, it seemed he had less and less. Long ago he’d lost most of his hair and the skin of his arms and legs hung slack in places that had once been bulky with muscles and flesh. Now even most of his teeth had decayed and been replaced. He was getting hollowed out.
On the other hand, Norma seemed to be growing. Each year there was more of her. Ten years ago, on her fifty-fifth birthday, she had come into the dining room, where Wilbur and their three children awaited her with surprises: champagne, an elaborate layered birthday cake, and piles of presents, including beribboned boxes of fancy chocolates.
“Why, how nice this is of all of you!” Norma had cried, but Wilbur could tell that somehow something was wrong. Her face had taken on that tremulous look that betrayed some secret problem. The children all pretended not to notice—later Wilbur realized that they had thought Norma was upset about growing old—and they celebrated her birthday with almost violent enthusiasm. During the birthday feast, Norma’s spirits seemed to take a turn for the better and soon she was as jolly as the rest of her family, but that night when Wilbur was alone with her, he discovered her sitting on the edge of the bed in tears.
“My God, Norma, what’s wrong?” he asked, alarmed.
She babbled something, but she was crying so hard he couldn’t understand even a word. Finally he brought her a glass of water, and she drank it and calmed down a bit, and said, “My metabolism.”
“What?” Wilbur had asked.
“My metabolism.” Norma repeated. “Oh, Wilbur, the older I get, the harder it is to keep my weight down. You were all so sweet to think of me and surprise me with all those delicacies, but it will take me two weeks to undo the damage I did at the party today.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake, Norma,” Wilbur had said, “I always have thought you were silly to worry so much about your weight. You’re a pretty woman. You always have been and you always will be. Twenty pounds more or less isn’t going to make any difference at all.”
“Twenty pounds more will make me look fat!” Norma declared. “Why, if I gain even five pounds more, my cheeks will swell up and my eyelids will get puffy, and I’ll look like a pig!”
“You will?” Wilbur asked, and tactless in his amazement, he studied his wife’s face. Norma sat glaring back at him, daring him to see how she had gotten old, how five more pounds would destroy her looks. And Wilbur did see that his wife’s face had changed. She was very slim, so slim that her skin seemed stretched and taut over the bones of her face. He struggled for a moment to find the right words to say. He and Norma had lived together for so long and through so much that a necessary civility had developed in their intimacy, and this kind of vulnerability took on a crucial aspect. He wanted very much for his honesty to be kind.
“You’ve lost that sheen you had when you were young, when we were married,” he said. “That’s true. So have I. But you look—softer—now. I like softness. There’s something appealing about round, soft women. I don’t think anything could ever make me stop loving you, or thinking that you are the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“Oh, Wilbur,” Norma had said, and turned her face away. He put his arms around her, and drew her to him and kissed her hair. They made love, being very gentle with each other, without even drawing back the bedcovers, and when they were through and were lying together side by side, Norma had raised her head and studied Wilbur for a moment, then smiled.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll see.”
They saw. Norma relaxed her dietary standards and did gain weight; over the past ten years she had gained a good thirty pounds. Wilbur shriveled; Norma
burgeoned. At last it became a joke: “Well, Mr. Sprat, shall we have some chocolate cake for dessert?” Norma would ask. As her weight grew, so did, it seemed, her sense of humor and proportion. After all, they were both helpless as various parts of their bodies became puckered and wrinkled and sagged and speckled and bent. Still they loved each other, and the realization of that was a gift of such magnitude that they considered themselves lucky. Wilbur came to believe that the sparkle in the eyes of this woman he had loved for so many years was a far prettier thing than any younger woman’s more brazen blaze.
Now, looking down beside him, he could see Norma’s hands folded neatly in her lap. Her wedding rings had become entrenched in the chubby finger of her chubby hand, while his gold band was forever sliding off his skinny finger and falling into the meat section in the grocery store. Now his stomach rumbled loudly and a flame of indigestion licked up in his chest and he realized his mind had wandered from the sermon. He wanted to yawn. When he clamped his jaws together, his teeth clicked. It was a hard thing, growing old, although, as the comedians said, it was better than the alternative. If old age and death signaled the triumph of the spiritual over the physical, it would be so much more appropriate if the body could simply melt or evaporate or be peeled away like a husk exposing an ear of corn, in some pure, definite, cleansing act. Instead the body rotted and grew cantankerous and painful, and you were forced to spend time and precious thought on the sheer mechanics of physical existence: food, teeth, bowel movements, tumors, sleep. Also, it was frightening. You couldn’t help but take the deterioration of your body personally, even though it eventually happened to everyone.
Just as hard to bear, Wilbur thought, was the gradual and subtle deterioration of their social life. Wilbur liked people, and all of his life he had ranged up and down the scale of ages as freely as Flora Pritchard’s fingers moved up and down the organ keys. He had befriended, spent time with, served on committees with, gone to parties with, people of twenty and people of seventy and every age in between. But in the past few years, he found he had somehow gotten stuck up at the old-age end of the spectrum. He understood the militancy of old-age groups who demanded to be decently treated, like the real human beings they still were, but he didn’t think that younger people were actively prejudiced against older people. Younger people just did not stop to think—and who could blame them, they all had troubles of their own.
Wilbur had noticed his segregation first and most sharply when he had gone into the hospital two years ago for a bladder operation. It had been physically painful and emotionally terrifying. He did not like being helpless. He had spent much of his time in the hospital sick with fury at the betrayal of his body. He had lain in the hospital bed with his fist clenched and his jaws working, trying not to cry, trying not to bellow out his rage and fear. The three other men in the ward with him were even worse off; they were all in various stages of terminal diseases, and one of the older men just cried and whined and called out for people who never came. Wilbur had been miserable.
But when the nurses came into the room, squeaking on their rubber shoes, all officious and robust, how his spirits had lifted! He enjoyed watching their capable round arms. He just liked seeing the bulge and curve of breast and hip and stomach under the white cloth of their uniforms. He liked the enthusiasm of healthy bodies. One nurse in particular had been kind and pretty. She was a fifty-year-old woman named Peggy, and she had recently been divorced, and she liked to perch on the side of Wilbur’s bed and discuss her life. Three days after Wilbur had come to the hospital, she had come into his room and announced, “Well, what do you think of this!” She had gone out and had her gray hair dyed the most amazing color of red—a sort of pinkish red. She had found lipstick to match.
“Why, Peggy, you look just like a long-stemmed red rose,” Wilbur had told her, and he had meant it. What an audacious and optimistic sight that head of red hair was, and from then on he had lain so that he could watch out the door to catch sight of Peggy as she flashed back and forth down the hall on her errands.
“A long-stemmed red rose!” Peggy had said, delighted with his compliment. “Just wait till I tell Joe! He’ll be so jealous!” Joe was her new boyfriend, as she called him, and whenever she could, Peggy slipped into Wilbur’s room to tell him about the latest development in their romance. Several of Wilbur’s friends and relatives had come during visiting hours to sit and chat with him, but Peggy was always the brightest spot in his day, perhaps because she was new to him and he could not imagine her life as he could the others. She made him aware of the vastness of the world again, and the thought of the thousands and thousands of people muddling along through the hot intricacies of their lives buoyed him up tremendously. Perhaps it was just sheer impertinence that kept people going on—well, it was a contagious attitude, and after each of Peggy’s visits, Wilbur found his spirit refreshed and eager, in spite of his body’s dawdling.
When he got home from the hospital, a brilliant thought occurred to him, and he wrote letters to the hospital staff and the local newspapers, suggesting that the geriatric ward be placed next to the ward for the newly born, with a one-way window put in between. That way no germs would pass from the old folks to the babies, and the nurses and newborns wouldn’t have to be depressed and frightened by the sight of all the old sick folks shuffling around. But the old folks would be able to sit or stand and gaze at all those bundles of brand-new life—it would do wonders for morale. Wilbur had been excited by this idea, and had offered to help raise money to rearrange the hospital in this way, but he had received only a polite, official letter from the hospital telling him that since the two areas were on different floors of the building, such a thing would be impossible.
After he came home from the hospital and found it necessary to rest so much, he began to feel like just another old bird perched out on the creaking and doomed limb of old age, peering shortsightedly as the energetic creatures in the real world scurried about their business. His children and grandchildren were thoughtful and dropped by often or sent chipper letters and humorous newspaper clippings. But Wilbur was more and more isolated. Now and then someone would drop by after work to talk, or would call him on the phone, and Norma told him each Sunday that Peter Taylor had reminded people to think of Wilbur in their prayers; after the service many people stopped her to ask her to give Wilbur their regards. So Wilbur knew that in many little ways the people of his town wished him well. That they did not show concern in an intense and desperate fashion reassured him. No one was worried, everyone thought he’d be around for years. But he realized how much he depended on parties, men’s clubs, church, and his daily walks to keep him feeling in the thick of life. He tried watching television or reading, but both bored him. He needed the actual spontaneous responsive flesh. He was fortunate; after a few months he was able to go out for his walks again, and to serve on club committees and attend parties. But he feared the time when that would be a world lost to him even more than he feared death.
Of all the people in the community, four people besides Norma had been and still were the sustaining force in his days. Two were men his own age, widowers who were experiencing the same bodily defeats he was. Wilbur got together with them once or twice a week to play pinochle or canasta and to laugh over sexy jokes, which made them all feel young again for a while. Peter Taylor was also reliable. He was an easy man to be with; he’d talk with Wilbur about this and that in a casual manner, and when he left, Wilbur would realize that Peter had somehow managed to give him something to think about, or some consoling thought. It was a real gift Peter Taylor had, to give comfort in such an offhand way that the recipient was never obliged to feel indebted. Even so, Peter Taylor was a minister, and Wilbur suspected his motives; maybe the reasons he came to call were all pro forma.
It was Ron Bennett who had surprised Wilbur the most with his genuine friendship and thoughtfulness. Wilbur had known Ron for a long time, ever since Ron came to Londonton as a young man with a new bride an
d started his own contracting business. Wilbur was a good twenty-five years older than Ron, and the year of Ron’s arrival, he had been president of the local Rotary Club. Ron had been as a younger man so earnest in his ambition that he verged on becoming pompous, but Wilbur had admired him because he was not afraid of hard work or new ideas. Wilbur had done a great many things to help Ron—throwing business his way, delicately apprising Ron of whom he could not afford to offend, giving him advice, and having him to dinner. It was as if Wilbur had metaphorically put his arm around Ron’s shoulder and drawn him into the fold of the community.
Now, twenty-five years later, Ron’s solicitude to Wilbur might have been motivated by nothing more than duty, a sort of psychological paying off of debts. Perhaps. But Wilbur did not think that was the case. In spite of the years that separated them—and the financial disparity, for Ron had gotten rich—Wilbur still counted Ron as one of his friends, and was certain that Ron returned the favor. Wilbur felt sure that Ron visited him out of friendship rather than simple consideration because of one clear fact: Ron still needed Wilbur.
Wilbur could not remember just when it was that Ron had begun to confide in him, so now it seemed that he always had. But there had been times in Ron’s life when he had been troubled, and he had turned to Wilbur for guidance, and a bond had been made between them.
