One Night Two Souls Went Walking

by Ellen Cooney

  Like souls have a door that can shut and might never be opened. Maybe, I felt, I should tell Plummy about the vase of the bug-eyed frog with the red bow tie, in the gift shop window beside the bootie, and see where things went. I didn’t know anyone else who would think it was an excellent thing to own. If he had it, I knew, he’d fill it with his crackers shaped like fish. Probably, they didn’t have Goldfish in Germany.

  Then I wished he had talked to me that day about why he loved the shirt.

  The quote could have been any Emily Dickinson line, because once when he was a sophomore in high school, he made a huge mistake, in an English class. They had an American poetry week, based on way-dead writers, as he’d put it, like the Nevermore Raven, and “Blessings on thee, little man/Barefoot boy with cheeks of tan,” and “Listen my children and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”

  He had tuned out but then along came this other thing.

  Which was part of curriculum and had to be presented. Which the teacher had stated, like an apology. It had seemed to Plummy that the teacher was not a fan of Emily Dickinson.

  All the teachers were Mr. or Mrs. or Miss, but not this one. Rick was his name and he was famous for being easy and jokey and cool. Plummy’s mistake was that, when Rick called on him, not that he’d put up his hand, he asked a wrong question. Rick must have noticed from his expression that he was having some thoughts, which did not ordinarily take place for Plummy in that class. He was ordered to tell everyone what he was thinking about whatever Emily Dickinson poems they were discussing, and he said, “How come you’re all making fun of this stuff like it’s weird and makes no sense?”

  Everyone thought he was playing the part of the high-IQ geek looking down his nose, faking an understanding, like his question was a lie and he only asked it to be a jerk. He wouldn’t tell me how Rick treated him for the rest of that term. Or how his classmates taunted him.

  He said it wasn’t that big of a deal and he got over it, and he only told me about it at all because he wanted me to know that he knew how to, like, read. Like he wasn’t one-dimensional or something.

  I had thought the shirt became lost in overseas mail. And I wondered, What look was on his face when he opened that package and saw what it was?

  Twenty-eight

  It was normal for my parents to be up and about early. I knew they’d had their bikes tuned and were itching to ride, now that the snow was gone. And if not a bike ride, golf. Their club was fully post-winter, and the chill in the new-spring air wouldn’t stop them; they had insulated jackets and foot warmers and good gloves.

  It wasn’t unusual, either, for them to get in touch with me as I was going off a shift. Drive home safely! Call us when you wake up! I knew that they imagined me falling asleep as soon as I landed on my bed. I had decided I would not take sleeping pills. Sometimes, it could be close to noon, or even one, before I finally settled down. It could take me that long to depressurize.

  I had just looked at my phone, which I had set on silent.

  The first text from them was a simple, “Call us before you leave work.”

  They were new at this, and didn’t quite trust it. The second text was, “Did you see the message we sent?”

  The third was, “Call! We have to talk to you!”

  The fourth was, “CALL IMMEDIATELY WE LEFT VOICE MAIL TOO IT IS NOT ABOUT ANYTHING THE MATTER WITH US YOU MUST DO SOMETHING SORRY WE KNOW YOU NEED TO GO TO BED BUT DO NOT LEAVE THE HOSPITAL WITHOUT CALLING WHICH YOU HAVE TO DO NOW IT IS VERY IMPORTANT & URGENT.”

  There were two voice mails, one father, one mother, saying pretty much the same thing.

  Yet I was not feeling I had to do as they asked. People in my family are always saying things are urgent when they are not. Once, my parents had me paged when I was on duty in the ER, and it had seemed a crisis was happening with them, much worse than what I was dealing with—and it turned out they wanted to tell me that so much time had gone by since the last time I was over for dinner, they had forgotten what I looked like and had to look at photos of me, and it’s not as if they were having memory issues. And I’d been over for dinner not even four days earlier.

  They were never to do that again.

  I was ready to begin the slog of un-attaching myself from the medical center, then getting myself back to my apartment. It was, Oh, I’ll call them later. But then a memory rushed up to me from somewhere deep, as if I had actually summoned it.

  There’s a photograph.

  In the photo, I’m six, a first grader. The photo is in a frame, hanging on the wall of the house I grew up in, in the upstairs hallway, along with others of my sister and brothers at around the same age.

  The three of them are seen in action, outdoors: on child-size skis, kicking a soccer ball, riding a bike. The one of me has me inside, wearing shorts and a t -shirt, in the same hallway.

  I had not known it was being taken. It was a surprise when I saw it later, but I never wanted to get rid of it. I loved having it framed there, odd as it made me seem. In fact when I was home saying good-bye before leaving for seminary, I climbed the stairs to say bye to the photo too. I had spoken to the girl who was me.

  “I promise to be the sort of minister you would approve of,” I had told her. “I promise I will never do my work like I’m some kind of robot.”

  It was almost summer when the photo happened. There was an end-of-the-year school show with a theme of, “Let’s all think happy thoughts today and be happy.”

  Maybe it wasn’t exactly in those words, but that was the gist of it. Early on in the show, the first grade went onstage to lead an audience sing-along of “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands (Clap, Clap).”

  I was supposed to be in the back row, but things became chaotic when we were taking our places. Somehow I was pushed to the front—to the center, where I ended up standing several inches ahead of everyone else, so it appeared I was meant to have a solo, to perhaps be the star of the performance.

  I did not want that spot. That spot was all wrong. But when I tried to step back, I found that the front line was too packed with kids, shoulder to shoulder. Because something was happening we had not rehearsed, those kids all decided to just stick with the routine. No one was willing to make room for me, to let me slip to the rear where I belonged. I was trapped.

  I did not have worries about knowing the song. I’d known it for forever, and I had kept it to myself that I thought it was too immature for six-year-olds. I had felt it was a song for babies who don’t know how to walk yet.

  My problem was with the moves. In addition to the physical motions the song called for—clapping, stomping one’s feet, all of it—we were required to move our shoulders up and down, and bob our heads like saying yes, and lean a little bit forward then a little bit back, at a tilt, which our teacher called “choreography.” Everyone had to make these extra moves in exactly the right pattern, exactly the same way, at exactly the same moments.

  There was nothing I could do about the fact that I had come to decide at the age of six that this particular business of “choreography” was bad not only for me, but for all of my class.

  I knew what a robot was. Why were we forced to act like robots?

  What about the theme of the show? How could anyone be happy in a happy song when everyone was afraid of doing something wrong, all because of the extra moves? It wasn’t fun to have to perform those moves. No one smiled in the rehearsals. Everyone knew that if you didn’t keep track of when to do what, hard as you were trying to concentrate, the music would stop and everyone would look at you like you’d done something terrible, like peed in your pants.

  The song had a built-in choreography to begin with, I felt, with an excellent set of moves, as natural as anything. When you clapped and stomped and all the rest of it, your joy was coming from the inside out. But the teacher was new. She didn’t seem to notice she was banishing something natural and joyous. She never instructed us to make sure we kept our souls out o
f our performance, not in actual words. But we all got that message anyway.

  I had memorized all the extra moves pretty quickly. I just couldn’t make myself carry them out, which was why I’d been placed in the rear. The teacher had explained that the back row was for the kids who failed to meet the right standard.

  And there I stood, frozen, trapped, in a spotlight, if a spotlight had been shining. I looked out at the rows of chairs filled with parents, and of course, there were mine, way back in the back, because my father is so big and so broad, he had worried that people sitting behind them might complain about being blocked. It was the first time I was on a stage. I hadn’t told them what the song was, or what was required.

  At the piano, the teacher playing the song was starting it up, and I realized that if I didn’t take action to unfreeze myself and get out of there, I was going to die.

  I was not in a panic. I was calm. I saw that my parents were beginning to look like they suspected something was wrong.

  I don’t know how much of the song took place while I was rigid as steel, my arms at my sides, the air in my mouth feeling like it was maybe my last-ever breath, sucked in but never let out. I felt that my death on the stage wouldn’t hurt. It would only be a holding of breath, and then a next one would never arrive, as simply as anything there ever was.

  Probably, there were teachers doing their best to signal to me to perform. Probably, my own teacher was appalled, was trying to figure out what to do without screaming at me, as she was sometimes in our classroom a screamer, but not so loud it went anywhere for others to hear.

  Then I saw the hands of my mother and father in an act of spontaneous choreography. At first it looked like they were waving to me. They weren’t. They were summoning me. I could have been a player on a field, being called by coaches to the bench.

  I stepped forward to the edge of the stage, and jumped off. My great good luck was that I landed upright. I wasn’t even wobbling.

  The song, the routine, went on undisturbed. The singing and the music were at my back as I walked down the auditorium aisle. I was glad I wasn’t dead.

  But I was mad too. I had lost my chance to sing that song with the other back-row kids, even though it was so babyish. I had wanted to clap. I had wanted to stomp. I had wanted to make the natural moves and be happy and feel my soul, wide awake, zooming around inside me.

  The photo happened a little while after we all arrived home.

  My father snapped it, having rushed upstairs when they heard what I was up to. I have one foot slightly raised, in a pre-stomping. My arms are spread out wide, the better to clap the next clapping as loudly as possible. My head is tipped back a little, my mouth wide open, my hair wild with frizz. My eyes are closed, because I used to think that’s what you needed to do when you’re having a moment alone with your own soul.

  “Well, you’ll never have to worry about anyone turning you into a robot,” my mother said, when the photo was framed and hung. I had told them the whole story.

  “That was a great jump off the stage,” said my father. “That was an Olympic-level jump.”

  And so I called them, standing by a hallway window, looking out at the morning, watching day-shift people arriving.

  “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad,” I was saying. They still had a landline: a wall phone in the kitchen, portable extensions in three other rooms.

  And I was saying, “What do you need me to do?”

  Twenty-nine

  A professional golfer had entered hospice care at her vacation home, on the side of a lake I’d never heard of. The golfer was asking for a minister, when all her life she had sworn she had no interest in anything to do with church.

  The golfer didn’t say which type of minister she wanted. She only asked that it wouldn’t be someone who believed you should do to your soul what another pro golfer had suggested she do with her body.

  Her experience with that other golfer was the thing that made her famous, in a way her career and many tournament wins never did. In a contest to raise charity money, she had competed on a fairway, then a putting green, one on one, in front of television cameras and a large crowd of spectators, with an extremely good-looking man who was much younger than she was. A sports journalist who often mentioned Shakespeare characters in his columns started calling him the Romeo of the golf world, and it stuck.

  He was enormously popular. In the lead-up to the event, Romeo told reporters he welcomed the chance to show how gallant he was—that was the word he decided on. “I plan to be gallant,” he kept saying.

  There were interviews with him, although not with her, except for one or two in local papers, in which she was asked if she felt nervous, or if she felt she was staging an event for the sake of publicity for herself. Or if she intended to back out, having concluded she would only be embarrassed, and perhaps do damage to all women in all sports.

  Romeo stressed in his interviews that, in such a mismatch of strength and abilities, he intended to focus on his own swinging and hitting, as an exhibition of the beauty of golf. He wasn’t looking to lord it over someone he’d of course defeat—not that “defeat” was the right word, since it wouldn’t be much of a contest.

  When it was over, and his loss wasn’t close, he uttered his famous remark. He realized too late it was picked up on a live feed. He seemed to feel that he’d been unable to perform at his best for this reason: he had been bothered very much by the physical shape of the woman who had just shown the world that she could out-swing him, out-hit him.

  It was a fact that, at the time of the contest, the golfer did not have the usual body of an athlete. She was no longer young, and she was fleshy, especially around her middle, and she sweated heavily and acted proud of it; her caddy kept towels handy. Walking the greens, she often ran out of breath.

  Yet no one had ever gone public in making fun of her. Romeo tried to explain later that he’d been worried she might have a heart attack, or she might faint and collapse. But the truth was plain to see. He really didn’t like it that he was looking the whole time at a woman who did not look and act as he felt a woman should, and she was creaming him.

  “For God’s sake, you need to start wearing a girdle,” Romeo said to the golfer, even though he seemed too young to know what a girdle even was.

  In answer, the golfer looked at the putter she was holding, at the iron of it, and then she raised it, not angrily, not in a fit of temper, but quite serenely.

  It really did seem she was going to crash it against his head. It really seemed he understood he was now in mortal peril, and he was taking a moment to try deciding if he had time to flee her, or maybe raise his arms defensively. He looked very, very afraid, and also very surprised.

  When she lowered that weapon, and casually handed it to her caddy, and strolled away, she had made herself, as it was often said, immortal.

  And suddenly she was dying, and she was afraid.

  How could a minister be found who would not make her feel that someone was telling her to wear a girdle on her soul? The hospice organization running her care couldn’t promise to help. The request was too unusual. Her personal assistant, tapping frantically on her keyboard, found two nearby hospitals employing nondenominational chaplains. But they couldn’t be spared for a home visit, especially in such an out-of-the-way place.

  Calls were made to parishes that seemed to fit the golfer’s desire. Maybe the assistant didn’t do a good job describing the type of person being sought. Maybe everyone contacted just didn’t have the time to make the journey to her home.

  The only local people connected to the golfer were staffers of hers: a housekeeper, cleaning people, yard-work people. They had all been with her for all the years she owned that property; they knew her well. They were going about their work in the numbness of the dark, awful reality that had settled into the house. The golfer had been so strong, so alive, no one could come to terms with what was happening. Her illness had seemed like something to be swung at, as if the hit on the side of t
he head she had not delivered to Romeo was meant instead for the thing called Death, gathering itself all around her.

  Her staffers did not come up with suggestions. There were no neighbors to consult—the golfer’s home was in a maze of private roads. People who owned houses nearby tended only to come in the summer.

  She had not made friends in the area. She had not been in the habit of going out to many places.

  She wasn’t someone my parents knew personally. But for many years, before her illness made playing impossible, she had sometimes turned up at their club, as the only famous person who ever did. Although she kept to herself, and refused to pose for photos, and never attended anything she was invited to, everyone there was crazy about her. And she was generous with caddies, which counted for a lot.

  Her longtime business manager was staying at her home along with the people who were closest to her. He had arrived at the point when the golfer’s request turned into a demand, and the only thing she would speak of. Everyone in the house was talking about finding a random person willing to accept payment to impersonate a member of the clergy.

  That idea was appalling to the manager. He knew that, even under heavy medication, the golfer could not be fooled.

  In the night, probably around the time I was entering the mason’s room and being rejected, the golfer woke and claimed she felt better than she had felt in months—and she believed that she had summoned perhaps a last surge of energy inside herself, and she wanted a minister more than ever. She wanted to talk about her whole life, she explained, with someone who would come to her side just purely for the sake of her soul.

  At some point, her manager had the idea of getting in touch with someone high up in my parents’ club, and never mind it wasn’t even yet dawn.

  He had gone to the club with the golfer when he vacationed at the lake. After her illness fully took her over, and she withdrew from the outside world, he went there on his own. He didn’t play, but he always enjoyed a long lunch, followed by an afternoon in the bar, where a section was set aside for relaxing in comfortable armchairs. It seemed reasonable to him to hope that a member of the club would turn out to be a member of the clergy.