by Ellen Cooney
I rose from my chair. I made way for the old man, as he was bound for the table.
“Let me pour you some water,” he told the librarian.
Small tremors were in his old hands as he reached for the pitcher, and the librarian was advising him, in murmurs, to be careful, he wouldn’t want to spill it.
You’d think that no one had ever before offered her a drink of water. I stayed long enough to watch him hold out the cup to her. He had only filled it about halfway.
Their fingers were brushing each other as I bade them a goodbye, and the librarian glanced at me and held up the hand attached to the drip, in a wave. In all the time I sat with her, I had never seen her raise that arm. All along, before, she had acted like it wasn’t really part of her, like it was some sort of dead weight, like something solid that used to be buoyant, but had recently sunk, like it was doomed.
Twenty-seven
It will happen that the painter of the mural in the new wing will not come back to finish the job. Someone in charge of such things will decide that the room of the cloud needed to become storage space. It seemed the new wing was like an addition to a house designed and built before anyone realized there weren’t any closets. The walls will be coated with primer, then painted gray.
It will be the same as if it never was.
As if I never stood staring into that room while my plate of food crash-landed and I did not clean up my own mess.
Once when I was still a baby chaplain, I was called to the bedside of a young man diagnosed with an illness that had not been discovered until it was too late. He came to the medical center for a procedure that might have extended the time he had left, but instead, things had grown much worse. When I entered his room, I was joining a vigil for his last hours.
He was a chef who had opened his own restaurant. Until his illness he had been free from medical problems. When I reached his side, he was drifting in and out of wakefulness, with moments of keen alertness.
Previously, in a consultation in the hall, one of the restaurant’s waiters told me the moments of alertness were terrible. It was hoped that a chaplain might be able to console him—in fact, when the chef was in college, he had taken many religion classes, and had considered becoming a minister himself. But that was before he started learning how to cook.
“He insists we keep his door open,” the waiter told me. “He keeps looking toward the doorway. But we don’t know why. Personally, I think something’s wrong in his soul.”
I hadn’t known of the restaurant, but I learned it was a popular bistro, in a neighborhood where the only other restaurants were chains: an Olive Garden, a Ruby Tuesday, a Red Lobster. I also learned that the chef had always been a private sort of person. No one knew about his illness until its signs were showing visibly. He was single, and too busy, he would say, for a relationship. Until he was sick he had spoken of marriage and children like a pot at the end of a rainbow that had not yet formed in the sky.
The chef was surrounded by members of his family and a few other employees. Each time he opened his eyes, he looked toward the doorway with a shiny, glittering hope—an expectation that excited him, then disappointed him, again and again.
It seemed obvious that he was waiting for someone to show up and say good-bye to him. Hanging over the room, combining with the hush and the heaviness, was the feel of someone missing. An old lover? A secret one?
It was impossible not to glance toward that doorway too. All eyes kept turning that way. The distress of his disappointment was awful to see. Had he wronged someone, and felt the need to ask for forgiveness? Had someone wronged him?
All along, the chef’s mother sat silently, her hands on him constantly. Her face was the face of someone who had decided to act as if wearing a mask—a mask of smooth, almost elegant composure. He was the baby of his family. Her favorite. Her ex-husband, the chef’s father, had remarried long before, but he was present in the group too, standing as a figure in a painting, a small one, in the background.
Perhaps his mother was thinking her own calmness would pass through her hands and enter him.
Do something. That was what everyone seemed to be telling me.
I took my place on the opposite side of his bed from his mother.
“Hello, I’m a chaplain here,” I said. “I wonder if I’m the sort of minister you’d have been, if you became one. After hearing about you, I think I might be.”
He heard me. He was able to speak. It was hard to decipher some of his words, but he was giving it everything he had.
He had no loose ends to tie up, no lover to have one last scene with, no grievance to settle. What he had was a belief. He believed his most regular customers had organized themselves to make a trip to his room all together, as if someone had put together a list of phone numbers, had taken charge of arranging things. Perhaps there were car pools. Perhaps there was a convoy.
He could not understand why the people who loved his food were taking so long to arrive. What he waited for was not the saying of good-byes. It was the pleasure he would feel when those people talked to him. They would describe their most memorable meals. They would tell him how much they would miss his cooking.
I could see that some of the vigil keepers packed into that room were wondering the same thing. How could a group visit be quickly arranged? Who could be called? Was there such a thing anywhere as a list of patrons?
“We love your food,” said a young woman, perhaps his sister, her voice trembling, so that the effect she hoped for was lost.
“I remember the first time I ever ate your chicken pot pie,” said another young woman, also seeming to be a sister. “It was the first time I ever liked carrots. And that crust. You did it awesomely.”
The chef did not seem to feel that compliments from anyone in the room counted.
I said, leaning in closely to him, “Your customers are on the way. There was a message. They want you to know they’re stuck in highway traffic. I’m sure you don’t want them to be upset they’re not here already. But they’re coming.”
The peace that descended over the room was like the sound of silence when you’ve been listening to a relentless, ear-hurting buzz of static. I bowed my head in the moments after his passing, and did not see his mother rising to come around to my side of the bed. She reached me so suddenly, so surprisingly, I had no chance to prepare myself for what was coming.
The mask was gone. The woman’s face was an etching of fury: a terrible look of the shock of a brand new grief, too big to be contained. It was the same as if the chaplain in the room was responsible for the breath of her son that was his last.
She towered over me. She spoke in a voice of icy coldness. She was a mother in the insanity of this moment, lashing out.
“Why did you lie to him? What kind of a minister are you? Why did you tell him a lie?”
She was raising her arm. I actually thought she might strike me. The waiter I had talked with in the hall implored me to leave, then whispered, “Thank you.”
Almost immediately, a nurse was summoning me elsewhere. I never saw anyone connected to the chef again. His restaurant, I soon heard, was shuttered and put up for sale.
And this was the story I planned to tell the librarian. I was so way beyond exhaustion, but I was cocky enough to expect the librarian to praise me for fixing the sickness of her soul. Just like that!
I pictured her face in the act of transforming from a sad and terrible tension to peace, like the face of the chef, because of a lie.
And maybe, if I really got into some energy for storytelling, as her breakfast would be coming and I might stick around, I’d tell her about what happened with a man who came to America to take a job in a company that went bankrupt and folded about an hour after he arrived, and he could find no other work except waitering in a Chinese restaurant. His English was limited. The company had promised him language lessons.
He had to earn the money to get back home. He and I were about the same age.
The first panel says, “I now return home. Bye to Lady Reverend Minister. Not to forget for all of life. Please to enjoy.”
On the second panel is the information that the restaurant, where the sender worked, would give me a free meal. When I cashed it in, they let me keep it. How that man knew the things I liked to order for takeout, I do not know. We hadn’t talked about food. I’d never been to the restaurant before.
“This a gift certificate paid for. Please to present at counter. 1 garlic eggplant. 1 fried bean curd, appetizer size. 1 appetizer vegetable dumplings. Little bit spicy only.”
The day he left the medical center, I went to his room and found him dressed and ready. Our heights were about the same. Silently, he placed a hand on each of my arms, a little above my elbows, cupping me. He had touched his forehead to mine. Not a word was spoken.
He was attacked late one night just before the restaurant closed. He was the only one in the dining room. A white man who seemed completely nonthreatening began to argue with him about his bill, accusing him of making an error in adding up the total.
The waiter’s eyes, this man said, were too slanted to see properly.
The waiter kept his composure when pointing out that the bill had been done by computer. The man became enraged for what he called “talking back to me.”
The man had a fold-up knife in his pocket. The stabbing was vicious, leaving multiple wounds. Although the waiter and other employees of the restaurant were able to give thorough descriptions of the assailant, he was never found. Later, the waiter kept telling himself how lucky he was that his attacker did not have a gun.
I sat with him for an hour or so every day for nearly two weeks. He had no medical insurance. His enormous expenses were taken care of through a fund set up by a Chinese American woman who ran a prosperous public relations firm in the same building. She had a table in the restaurant no one else was ever allowed to use.
Early on, in his delirium, the accountant-waiter took my shape in the chair, so shadowy to him, for his wife. I had seen a photo of her, slender and fit, her black hair straight and shiny: my female physical opposite.
The public relations woman didn’t come to visit him but she sent her employees, as did the restaurant, so there was often someone around to translate.
His wife hadn’t wanted him to try his luck in America, even though he’d been trapped in dull jobs and yearned for his dream of “America” to come true. She had been waiting for him to save enough money for her and their children to join him.
My boss, the Head, came up with the idea to consult a physician from Beijing we both knew, and with her help, I was able (barely) to manage the job of pretending I was sitting with my husband. We had learned from visiting employees that he liked poetry.
I had a couple of index cards on which the Mandarin words were in phonetic English. As advised by the physician, I did not attempt to put into my voice a false accent. The words would work on their own, I was told.
I don’t know what poetry the words came from. I was able to say from the shadows around me that inside himself he was as light and airy as a shiny white cloud.
Those three words had stayed with me in a way the others had not—there’d been phrases too about spring, a river, mist at the top of a mountain giving way to the sun.
Funny that I’d forgotten all about them, until this moment.
Shiny white cloud.
“Brains store up words for the time when you need the right ones and you think you don’t have any words! Brains are so awesome!”
“Oh, shut up, Plummy, because maybe it wasn’t my brain,” I was saying, like he was standing beside me.
“Souls are so awesome!” he replied, in just my imagination, once again, running away with me.
I was going to have to do something about him. But what? Text him not to text me anymore? Call him and say we had to let go of each other, a kind of death, like we were clinging to each other in our two different countries, on ex-lover life support?
The last time we saw each other in a video call, it was, of all things, Valentine’s Day. I hadn’t known all the details about the budget ax, but I knew enough to feel a real sense of doom. I knew that when all the details came out, the changes would be swift, even immediate.
He had timed calling me at home to reach me before I left for my day shift. Somehow what started out sweetly and friend-like collapsed into a fight neither one of us won. He wanted me to say I was sorry for telling him so many times I’d one day be the minister at his wedding to someone his own age.
But the age thing wasn’t even the thing. Not as far as he was concerned!
What was the matter with me? What was the matter with my brain? How could I be so kind and thoughtful to patients, so just plain nice, then not even care what sort of effect I had on him, in terms of unbelievable things I said? Did I only care about, like, sick people?
Did I honestly think he would stand somewhere in a tux getting married, with me right in front of him, in vestments, because, not that he was marrying someone else, screw that, the wedding that never would happen would probably be in a church, probably in Germany, a place he planned to spend the rest of his life in, because I wasn’t asking him to please come back?
He was sick of Europe! He wouldn’t care if he never traveled anywhere again!
Did I think he’d return to his own country when I was in it, cold-shouldering him, still being a discriminator, just because, when he was a baby, I was double-digits in my age? Did I know what I also was? He would tell me! I was sexist. What if he was the woman and I was the guy? I should imagine that!
And he had realized he would have to wait out coming back to America until I died and he came for my funeral and everyone would wonder who he was. That is, if he even knew I was dead!
I had to stop him when he lapsed into German, in a sentence with “t -shirt.”
He backed up and tried again. Aha! He was thanking me. We were getting to the core of how emotional he was. He loved the shirt. He thought it was a great Valentine present, as if we sent each other Valentine gifts every year.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “I only told you once I’d marry you someday and I’m sorry. I promise not to ever say it again.”
“Officiate!” he shot back. “Not marry! Officiate at some no-way wedding of mine to somebody else.”
“Plummy, I have to go to work now.”
“How’s it going?”
“Not so good.”
“Want to talk about it? I’m starting to totally calm down.”
“I don’t! Bye!”
I didn’t tell Plummy I had mailed the t -shirt ages ago. For some reason it had only just reached him.
A lay chaplain who was also a poet, and no longer in our department, had brought it back from a conference, where some other chaplains were poets too. It was gray with white letters, all caps, and under the words, there was a drawing. Then under the drawing was a name, and it was Emily Dickinson, in letters in script.
THE SOULS SHOULD
ALWAYS STAND A
The drawing was of a jar.
The lay chaplain-poet had given it to me as a gift, as a consolation prize, or perhaps from feeling sorry for me. Although it fit me, I’d thought right away of Plummy, for a good reason. He’d put on weight since we were together—which means, he grew all the way up. I would have told him he was looking very attractive, if he hadn’t started his fight and called me sexist, never mind that I’m only considerate about patients, which hurt.
I was banned from conferences. I had attended one in the middle of America where I’d become distracted from the reason why I was there.
I’d felt that the conference was really about me looking at cornfields, in springtime, the stalks growing higher in front of my eyes, for miles and miles, endlessly, vanis
hing into the faraway horizon of a flat and beautiful sky.
I had wondered if it makes more sense to say there is infinity, as an actual thing, if you always see a lot of sky. I had thought of Plummy and his roots. I was emailing him descriptions of what I saw, and we were also in touch on our phones.
When I returned to work, I was in trouble. The gathering was prestigious; the Head had to plead with the medical center for the funds so I could go. But I had taken no notes. I could only report on the fields and the sky, and a paper that was presented about statistics, which said that many, many more Americans believe in forevers than Americans who do not.
Surveys had been taken. It really was impressive when the percentages came out, when the Yes people numbered the same as those new ears of corn, and the No people were sort of scant.
One of the respondents to the surveys had said, “Why would anyone not want to believe in their soul going to heaven, when you’ll never know you were wrong, being dead?”
I’ve thought often of those words, and of those in another comment too.
“I never used to believe in having an ‘afterlife’ until I got a cat and I realized you can’t say the word ‘tomorrow’ to an animal and expect them to know what you mean. Putting two and two together, I was less depressed about having a tomorrow after the end of my life on Earth, which has not been all that great.”
No one in my department cared that I said it was the best conference I went to, not even the Head, who usually stuck up for me.
And Plummy had not been impressed by how happy I was in my days in the middle of America, my soul ajar. How could I slack off at a conference? I stand around looking at cornfields, and all of a sudden it’s okay to slack off?
I would not, I was thinking, tell Plummy the story of the lawyer. I would not tell him about Eddie and me and being out in the air, and how it felt to hear the dog who was almost dying drumming music. Or about any of this strange, strange night.
Yes, I would.
All of it.
No, I wouldn’t.
None of it.
The soul should always stand ajar.
