Without his noticing it, the fall had come and gone. How the year came crashing down again to winter! He had not fixed anything in the house, he had made no contact with former colleagues or friends, and he was not eating, but wasting away. It was as though he was rehearsing once more the slow attrition that he had watched in Margaret, following the steps of her emaciation to a quick end. But that was not way he saw it. The reason he could do none of the necessary things to take care of himself, on the few occasions when he thought of them, was that he was preoccupied elsewhere. Great gusts of emotion, of weeping but also of rage and strange exultation, and powerful images, full of color and detail, seemed to have taken hold of him.
Day after day, there was a regular progression of symptoms leading to an upspringing of visions and fantasy. He would increasingly find himself listless and tired, often after he had been up less than an hour. Whether he had been reading a book or doing some chore in the kitchen, he would become aware he was not thinking clearly—and the cause of this he saw as physical. An actual cloud, he felt, was stealing across his brain, evening mist across marshy ground. Banging himself on the side of his head with his open palm did not clear it. His listlessness seemed to push his hands and feet out to a great distance from his control. At this point he would become afraid that if he remained standing up, he might become dizzy and fall, and he would move slowly back to his bed and lie down. Sinking back into the bedclothes was at first a relief, and there was often a pleasant sense of rocking or swaying there, as though he had returned from a dinner with too much wine in him, or was lying in a hammock out of doors. Then the pictures would start up in his head, taking him over.
There were various strands of images supplied to him, mostly separate but occasionally running into each other. More than once a weird double feature played through his mind. The two parts were certainly different in tone, the first a somber art movie of Margaret, almost silent, filmed in a series of gloomy interiors. Heavy curtains around leaded windows and a pewter sky beyond. It was not their house, but it was Margaret all right. He had to peer to see her, to bring her near, but when he managed to focus, he saw her always distracted or agitated. He could hear his own voice talking to her, quite loudly, probably insisting too much, but she wasn’t paying attention anyway. Studying her expression closely, he saw flickers of distaste and irritation around her mouth. “I can tell you often did not like me,” he said. “Only towards the end,” she said finally and flatly, and looking away from him: “I didn’t like the way things were going.”
There were several things that troubled him about these sequences, one of which was that they left some hurt behind when he came to himself; another was his puzzlement about the mockery of his own inner mind, offering her back to him as unloving, unconnected, half-lit and inanimate, against all the patterns of his conscious memory and longings. He was not well equipped to pursue this line of thought, but the effect these pictures had was to screw him more tightly into his loneliness.
Then abruptly the pictures changed. With his feeble, wandering brain it was hard to keep track of time, but often they seemed to change in the same session, day or night. Wan scenes of recrimination would give way to war footage. This could not have been more different. The colors here were the bright orange, crimson, and black of exploding shells. Men in battle fatigues with small arms were running athletically and confidently among them, making their cut at the right point to avoid the next flash, like good broken-field runners. There was a tone of arrogance over the whole scene; some commander’s voice could be heard in the background making a radio report, clear above the static: “We’ve got the brains and the muscle, and we’re blowing them away.” MacIver had to admit he liked watching this scene; he did not know what cause the men were fighting for, but he liked the fact that they were invulnerable, disappearing at a steady clip into the middle distance. You could tell they would soon stifle the artillery fire bursting among them; they would cut it off at the source. MacIver had been in the navy himself: where did all these soldiers come from?
He would come to himself from these dreaming sequences, weaker still. And colder. Outside there was now a winter worth attending to. Large hanging icicles from the overflowing gutters above grew downward across the living room and bedroom windows, and glinted sharply in the afternoon light; but however brightly the sun blazed, day after day it had no warmth—as far as he could see, not one pendant drop of water ever formed, dangled, or fell from the icy points. When he looked past them into the glare of white on white, the trees seemed to have receded, grey striations whittled away by the snow plastered on their windward side; and the shadows they cast on the snowbanks as the sun fell were weaker too, no darker than a sickly blue.
The cold reached indoors with a vengeance. Among his many omissions was his failure to lay in firewood over the summer for the Vermont Castings stove, to supplement the pathetic furnace in the basement in just such a season as this. The house had been toasty warm the previous winter, when the stove had been kept at full blast trying to send its glow of comfort to Margaret’s shivering bones under the layers of blankets. The whole woodpile across the lawn had been consumed in this effort. Now his failure to replenish it loomed larger every day. He still had hot water for his shower, because that had an electric heater; but it was only a matter of time, he thought, before the ever-intrusive cold wrapped itself around some standing pipe and eventually burst it. Surprising it hadn’t happened before. He could drag his finger through the crusty ice on the inside of windowpanes in any room now. Lying in bed at night, often in his navy greatcoat, he could hear the old house groaning around him, shrinking in on itself under the onslaught. They were both just lying there waiting. Both of them old and cold. Margaret gone. Everything inside and everything outside frozen in its aches and pains to a tight immobility. One bold move and something would snap.
And finally did. He had been making one more effort: to go out and glean something that would burn from around the exhausted woodpile or the edge of the woods. Slow and steady, no athletic moves. Except it was slow and jerky, at every step hating his own brittleness, his feeble shuffle-lurch, small, short mouse-breaths.
He had not got far, but he had got out the door. And then the frozen porch collapsed under him. He was pausing, planning the next step, and the porch, hitherto seemingly integral with the house, had skewed sideways and bowed; slightly wobbly undulations gave way slowly to a more systematic curve, a glazed path of least resistance, which he had slid down without injury. “Let the angels lead you down”—and indeed they had let him down lightly.
But quality will out. Sap and purposes run on, even after anyone has given up intending them. The old four-square porch had given up on its rotting steps, and designed itself instead this ramp—its simple railing for a moment damn near a balustrade. The odd steel pin must have stayed tensile, and permitted a twist instead of a shatter. The effect was not ungraceful, if the eye hadn’t been taught to expect something straight. The slow-motion image fixed itself in his mind, but there was commotion inside him. Shock and shame for the house giving way, and yes, for his own collapse. He lay on the new ramp counting his bones, and a sad resolution formed in his mind: I must retrench.
He clambered slowly back inside the house, and allowed himself to rest after the nasty shock of his fall. Head a little bowed, poor old man’s nape meekly exposed, hands limp in his lap, he sat and let the agitation ebb away. A small decent voice inside him whispered, You need help. But it was never as clear or insistent as the voice that kept saying, I must retrench. He still had room to retreat through, safe inside his house. It would be, he thought, a planned withdrawal as needed, to his last redoubt, his bed. They would have to come and get him.
Breathing a little more regularly now, and playing back in his mind the sudden slide, a piece of self-knowledge struck him: he had been trying to finish himself off. The porch had preempted it—cut him benignly short. But he could see how it had been meant to end. Not even wrapped aga
inst elements, wearing simply his old Marks & Spencer blue cardigan, he had shuffled out into the knife-edged cold, like Captain Oates leaving the tent. He must have understood that he could not crunch his way out and back; the snow had drifted and crusted with ice. He was barely strung together orthopedically, and it was nowadays even money whether he could putter safely across a level floor. Outside, one sudden lurch through the treacherous crust and he would have been down for good.
He could see the fall now. A little floundering but not for long. Everywhere he grasped for purchase crumbling away, pointless to struggle: the hurtful cold had already fastened on him, and was eating into him. The snow would compose itself again into a groove molded to the shape of his body. He could see himself lying there, one leg of his corduroys pulled up, showing the long johns, one arm stretched out ahead, the hand holding perhaps two or three pathetic twigs—the extent of his foraging. A small patch of pure ice around his mouth and nose, where feeble breathing had melted the snow briefly. In that cold, half an hour would have finished him, sculpting a frozen tableau for the local newspapers a few months ahead: HISTORIAN’S BODY FOUND BY SUMMER PEOPLE.
He pondered the picture for a while, and concluded that he did not like it. That was not the way he wanted to go. His mood was changing, the old adrenaline tank filling up again with bile and ebullience. He had been challenging himself where he was bound to lose. He should play it wily. Redefine the rules of the game so he was bound to win. Keep the mind engaged, and have fun doing it, not drifting and not hounding himself.
Some decisions started to shape themselves. Let me be to my sad self hereafter kind. He would set himself no more humiliating physical challenges, and he would no longer waste time trying to figure where he went wrong. (Where he went wrong at this point was in living on after Margaret died.) He should devise a plan, to harbor resources best for a kind of holding action. He should do things every day to keep himself alert and as happy as possible. If you are going to go under, it shouldn’t be from the weight of self-pity alone. He must make rules to hold himself together, like Descartes holing up by his winter stove to question the very foundation of things—exactly the kind of task he no longer needed to set himself! But let’s have rules, by all means.
Over the next two days, pottering around the house, he evolved his Rules for Winter Watch / Rules for the Inside Game: what they really were was a plan to take back his life, until he could give it away on an acceptable basis. Meanwhile, it would be healthy for him to tell himself what to do.
Keep personally clean.
Make bed every morning, and clean house twice a week.
Dress warmly, and light fire when necessary, burning least important things first.
Eat regularly.
Play music and read.
Television only in the evening, except for weekend and seasonal showdown sports.
Work every morning. Nap in afternoon if needed.
He wrote these down and read them over. They offered, he thought, a simple skeleton of the well-ordered life for a feeble old man. He found nothing to take exception to. But over the next two days, as he continued to wander still a little uncertainly through the house, he came to realize that some of the rules needed further clarification if he was to act on them. Rules Three, Four, and Seven in particular needed glossing, regulations for the application of the law. He took a fresh piece of paper, headed it Rules for Winter Watch: Reformed State, and added further subsets, under the headings Correct Order for Burning Household Objects, Calculations for Rationing Food Per Diem, and Appropriate Work for Winter Watch.
On Rule Three, he remembered a passage of Newman, doddered over to the shelf, found it in the book, and wrote it down: “Hear Newman on Saint John, ‘The ventures of faith’: ‘He had to bear a length of years in loneliness, exile, and weakness. He had to experience the dreariness of being solitary, when those whom he loved had been summoned away. He had to live in his own thoughts, without familiar friend. He was as a man moving his goods into a far country, who at intervals and by portions sends them before him, till his present abode is well nigh unfurnished.’ ” That’s the spirit, MacIver thought. Let it all go, one foot in the grave and one bag packed. We shall go to our end in the warm glow of the past, burning up the memories, all the clutter given back. What are the rules for dismantling / consuming the things of the past?
Retain the beautiful and useful.
Of wooden things, no articles of fine craftsmanship will be burnt. Consume journeyman chairs etc.
Margaret’s pictures to be kept. Otherwise, picture frames before pictures.
Books of rival scholars and other trash, before good books and my own.
MacIver was pleased with his subset of rules for burning. But on old Rule Four, he felt he needed more guidance; and he certainly needed improvement on his recent performance. The fact that he had not been eating regularly must account, at least in part, for his sharp decline over the last few months. Perhaps it also explained the images that assaulted him: had malnutrition made him visionary? He was inclined to think not. But the fact was he no longer knew what food he had left. Calculating back over the last hazy months, he thought it must have been a day or so after he saw the osprey, with his euphoria still in place, that he had made his last expedition for food. Ah, yes, he remembered, after Labor Day, when the shops and beaches had cleared, and the lines were short at the checkout counter. Why not, he had thought, pile a lot of stuff into the car, and save himself from doing it on some crowded holiday?
He had thrown himself into filling up two carts, muttering to himself as he trundled the aisles, the Flying Scotsman victualing his phantom ship. There was method in his madness. He laid his base with businesslike rods of pasta in their flat packets, good for storage, and hefty cans of Italian tomatoes pendant in their juice, depicted by some Florentine fresco painter on fine archaic labels; then bags of potatoes, yams, rice, flour. Sugar, butter, olive oil, tea and coffee, cans of soup, bacon. The freezer was working as far as he knew, so he laid in stores of frozen orange juice and vegetables. No scurvy on this ship, even if under Margaret’s sway all such things had to be fresh. She had once come upon him launching a slug of half-melted concentrate from the pulpy container of juice into a jug. Her horror had been quite unfeigned.
As the carts filled, his spirits rose, and with them his self-indulgence. The top layer of the second cart presented the further reaches of his taste: Tiptree’s Tawny Marmalade, two bottles of single malt whisky, six of Meursault, half a drum of Stilton, dark amber maple syrup, a jar of stem ginger, a small tin of foie gras. He might, he thought, dip into such things on rare banner days—after rounding the Horn, perhaps. The girl at the checkout counter was surprised at the quantity. “You’re certainly laying in supplies, Mr. MacIver: you expecting a flood or something?”
“That, and a long voyage to an unknown port,” he had said. She had yelled Bon voyage! to him as he had trundled the second loaded cart out to the car.
As he lifted the big grocery bags out of the back seat and lugged them into the house, his euphoria had left him abruptly. The house smelled lonely and unkept—what would he do with all this food? He would prepare it messily and munch at it alone. Into the emptiness loomed suddenly with intense longing a sensuous image of Margaret, in the endless halcyon days when they had first come to the Cape to play some thirty-five years before—Margaret gliding barefoot around the kitchen and cheerfully stashing food. How she had loved doing it! Cabinet doors flicked open and shut, each inviting a wonderfully particular set of foodstuffs, all destined in her mind for a series of dinner recipes planned for the days ahead. But this was no monthly or even weekly ritual. Daily the prospective delights had to be renewed and extended, the bags of plenty distributed into the little wooden cupboards. There were herbs and exotic vegetables and fruits out of season, there was rich foreign chocolate for bedtime. “This is like an ad for the happy singing peasants in Italy,” he remarked, leaning against the sink nursing his beer, and enjoy
ing the cheerful bustle without helping. “Ecco, monsignore,” she sang in her pretty light soprano, holding two Bosc pears up against her breasts and spinning, so that her flared skirt rose and showed her girlish legs and panties too. They ate like kings in those days.
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 2
