In the Palomar Arms

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “He isn’t always articulate anymore,” the woman apologized, “but his mind is perfect. Ask him anything. Just give him a little time to answer.”

  “All right,” Daphne said, struggling to end this encounter, and helpless to offer comfort. She felt like throwing up by then, and wondered if she were being dealt some ironic justice for the lies about being sick that she had not yet told. “His supper is getting cold,” she said, giving the daughter a concrete shape for her flopping, formless guilt. “You’d better help him.” That did it, and Daphne was on her way.

  The Dream Lady said, “I’m at the foot of a long staircase that goes way, way up into the clouds. There’s music—harps and violins—and what’s-his-name, Russ Columbo, singing. My father is standing there in his uniform, looking down …”

  Daphne put the tray in front of her, and the Dream Lady said, “What’s this? Hamburgers? Who did they grind up this time?”

  The sisters in 225 had no visitors when Daphne got there, but there was evidence that some had come and gone: new kindergarten art, an enduring prickly cactus in a plastic pot. As always, Mrs. Feldman was happy to see Daphne, was generous with greetings and compliments. She asked a few questions about life outside—“just to keep up,” as she said. “What are a dozen eggs going for these days? How much do movie tickets cost?” Her sister was her usual confused and disappointed self. It struck Daphne that her delivery of supper must be the highlight of the old women’s day. But Mrs. Bernstein would always be restless with hungers she could no longer grasp or satisfy.

  In other rooms, lingering family members cut up the steamed meat, moved it around in the gravy, and fed the patients, and sometimes, almost absently, themselves. Many of the little packets of catsup, mayonnaise, and sugar, the cello-wrapped slices of white bread, and the envelopes of Sanka and Postum disappeared into purses and pockets. Residents without visitors were known to store these and other food items in night-table drawers against emergencies that never arose. After someone died, the cache was always discovered, rotting next to dentures, family snapshots, and ancient gas bills.

  Mrs. McBride went on as usual in 227—her death would have been bigger news at the elevators, and a major blow to the staff morale. In the kitchen, earlier, there had been comments about the oldest woman’s straight spine, her terrific stamina and healthy appetite. Her bowels were admired—“Every day! And firm, but not hard!”—and someone said that there would be live music at the birthday party. Feliciana did a rapid, stamping dance step, and selected the largest hamburger for McBride’s tray.

  She was sitting up in bed when Daphne got there, and she had a bedside visitor, a young, severe-looking nun. She must have been with one of the older, stricter orders, because her habit was long, black, and voluminous. Maybe she had taken a vow of silence; she didn’t even smile back at Daphne. Her hands gripped the crucifix at her waist as if she believed it might be snatched.

  The roommate’s daughter made up for the nun’s silence, addressing Daphne by name, chattering wildly to her stricken mother about the arrival of supper, and whether the bed should be raised and the bread buttered. The mother responded with a single, sustained sound that might have been a shriek of laughter or of pain, or the cry of a jungle bird in a Tarzan movie. It startled everyone, except perhaps the nun, who moved her fingers and lips to bless the food. Too late, Daphne thought as she left.

  Most of the visitors, she noticed, had cleared out. She went down the corridor and looked into the new man’s room. His daughter or son-in-law had helped him into the issued blue pajamas and green-striped seersucker robe. They fit the slump of his bones much better than the suit had. Its padded shoulders and correct tailoring were meant for the aggressive business of the world, and would never conform to this posture of utter surrender.

  Mr. Brady was asleep, snoring loudly, and Mr. Axel looked toward the doorway with expectation. Again, that odd smile.

  “Your children gone?” Daphne asked, and he nodded.

  His hands, especially the right one, pounded an involuntary tattoo on the wheelchair arms. “Like school,” he said. “First day.”

  “You mean harder on them?” Daphne asked, and he seemed pleased that she had understood him. She picked up his tray and saw that he had eaten very little. “I wish the food was better,” she said.

  “Late lunch.”

  The smile was always there, Daphne decided, like a dolphin’s smile, and like a dolphin’s, it was beguiling but mirthless. She nodded toward Mr. Brady. “And the entertainment,” she added.

  “He didn’t … ask for me … either,” Mr. Axel said.

  She guessed that he would always be courteous and uncomplaining like this, would never offer his heart’s secrets to anyone. But those flailing hands gave him away, rapping out their protest on the arms of the wheelchair. Unjust! Unjust!

  “Well, good night,” Daphne said. “I hope you sleep well.” While she was stacking the last trays onto the meal cart, she thought that she might have said something better, more personal to him. It was his first night in this strange and final place, and “I hope you sleep well” was as meaningful as “Have a nice day.” Yet she wasn’t responsible, despite his daughter’s need to share the freight of sorrow and guilt. Daphne took the perfume dispenser from her pocket and sprayed a fine rain of fragrance she could walk through. She stopped at a hall window and looked out at the parking lot as the sun was starting to set. The last of the visitors were making their way to their cars. They all had separate and reasonable lives away from this place, and now they hurried off to resume them. A teenage boy went by, carrying one of those suitcase radios. The music was rebelliously loud and lusty, even through the sealed window. Car doors slammed, motors were gunned, and people vanished into the new evening. Then Daphne noticed a figure attached to a lamppost, wrapped around it like a cartoon drunk.

  It was Mr. Axel’s daughter, and she hung on to the lamppost as if it kept her from pitching over the edge of a cliff. Daphne watched as the woman’s husband emerged from the building and peeled her slowly away and into his arms.

  The next day, Daphne called her parents, and their voices were distant and dear. It was raining in Seattle, and although she spoke about the southern sunshine with automatic pride, at that moment she missed the rain. She also poignantly missed her mother and father, from whom she had once longed to escape because they had been so difficult to live with. They were not exactly perfect during the phone call. When she mentioned the possibility of coming home, they were instantly suspicious. Was she ill? In trouble? She assured them that she was fine, that she had a couple of sick days accumulated and just felt like seeing everybody. Didn’t they want to see her?

  Of course they wanted to see her. She knew the inquisition was only part of their old habit of preparing for the very worst, so that something less dreadful might be bravely borne. “What’s wrong?” they’d always demanded, and Daphne had learned to adjust her news or hide it when she believed it wouldn’t be welcome. For instance, she’d alluded to Kenny without ever mentioning that he was married. She can’t even remember the reasons she’d given them for her move to Ventura. They’d come to her easily enough at the time.

  On the long bus ride to the airport in Los Angeles, daylight fades and Daphne’s reflection is sharpened as the window becomes a dark mirror. She’s a pretty woman, even under her own critical examination. And she’s still young and relatively free. Her journey home has begun, and it’s as if she’s being drawn into a safety zone where no harm can possibly befall her; where temporarily, at least, she can take up the dependency of childhood.

  7

  SISTER MARIA GILBERT IS gone at last. Nora really still thinks of her as her sister Josie’s granddaughter, Maureen, that once scrawny, perverse, vain little girl who preened and tap-danced in front of every surface that would give back her own image. The last one in the world to ever go into a convent. Yet she did, at the unholy, or holy, age of sixteen. Nora kept waiting for her to break out of there, or be th
rown out, unruly, hungry for the world, and lacking a vocation. But instead she stayed, the most reverential of the flock.

  The whole family is loaded with nuns and priests, many of them the ones she’d traveled to help raise after Jack’s death. Hadn’t she had more influence on them than that? Sometimes Nora wonders if her own unborn children and grandchildren would have also chosen to be black and white and religious in such a heretic, technicolor universe. It’s something she’ll never know, and part of her is wickedly glad. Her relief is odd, because the absence of children had been so grievous long ago. She was “caught” often enough, as they put it in those days, a strange expression considering her willingness in bed, and her genuine longing for motherhood. But the pregnancies never held more than three or four months. The blood is bright in memory, a warm sticky dream on her nightgown and the sheets, a spilling dream from which she had to wake in horror and then wake Jack. The doctor told him that Nora had a “lazy womb,” whatever that was. “God’s will,” that old fart of a priest—what was his name?—always said. He wasn’t that old, she supposes, in his late sixties, maybe. But with an ancient’s authority, as if there could be no intermediaries between himself and God. Oh, what did he know! “It’s all right, love, it’s all right,” Jack would croon in his woeful voice, but of course it wasn’t all right.

  In the meantime, Nora’s sisters and her brothers’ wives swelled and hatched with the senseless regularity of farm animals. Even two sets of fryer-sized twins survived in incubators, and grew up to be fat and fertile themselves. Her children and Jack’s would have been the best of the lot, she’d think during each bitter time of mourning. They’d been smart enough in their tiny gelatin souls to reject this life before the agony of consciousness, hadn’t they? A peg to hang on, it was then, because she coveted the downy, born, squirming infants whose godmother she often was. She loved the hot heaviness of their heads against her arm, and the miracle of outcry at the first drizzle of baptismal water.

  Maureen has left an old red Sunday missal for Nora’s comfort and redemption. It’s the kind they haven’t used in years, since Pope John the twenty-something started turning things around. Nora opens it and holds it close to her eyes, trying to focus in the opaque, textured light. The print is much too small, and she can’t make anything out. But she can guess what it says, the way she used to guess when she was a child and had not yet learned to read. It was a clever trick, encouraged by the grownups—three- or four-year-old Nora “reading” the headlines in The Herald. She’d held the paper close then, too, in imitation of adult concentration, and for the delicious, drugging odor of printer’s ink. “The sun … is … big!” she would announce, squinting at the black, mysterious symbols on the page. “Mama … is making … bread!” Everyone would laugh and love her for being so funny and bright, and she would laugh, too, because it was so easy to please. First lessons in seduction. The real readers in the family hunched over real words in schoolbooks, and scowled in her direction for being the beloved and ignorant baby.

  Now she can’t read anymore, but she is no longer ignorant, or beloved. The frontispiece of the missal is familiar, though, a miniature of that picture in her childhood dining room, of Christ’s Last Supper. There are the same figures, Jesus and His disciples, crowded around the table, ready to break unleavened bread, one of them to break trust, one of them to die. She’d loved that oak-framed picture when she was a small girl looking up at it from another crowded table, from the good smells of supper, one in an infinite number of suppers. And although her sisters and brothers quarreled, and jostled one another for elbow room and larger portions, just as the disciples did in the picture, there was never any question of serious betrayal among them, or of anything ever ending. The words under the illustration in the missal must say, Take and eat ye all of this; for this is my body. No juvenile trick now, but the recurring wonder of total recall.

  “Do you pray, Auntie Nora?” Maureen had asked a little while ago, and Nora had said yes, although it wasn’t true. She didn’t believe in anyone or anything to pray to, and without belief there was no burden of sin to her lie. Yet there was a moral question, wasn’t there? To tell this Bride of Christ that she still whispered gratitude for favors, and pleas for magic, when she didn’t, was immoral, if not sinful. Nora was too weary for any arguments about theology with such a strong-willed child. She knew what Sister Maria Gilbert would say about Nora’s immortal soul, about how it was dangling from the wall between this world and the next one, and how it would fall into a dark abyss without warning, and be lost, falling forever and ever. Like Jack’s mortal body.

  That girl could always argue in a stern, merciless way until she won. Once she’d argued for money and lipstick and freedom, and now for commitment to something she couldn’t prove, or even demonstrate. What, Nora thought for a fraction of an instant, if she were right?

  As a child, Maureen had had an answer for everything, too. All of the other girls wore lipstick; she needed money; why couldn’t they let her do what she wanted? She wanted and wanted. Her confounded parents worried, and prayed for guidance, while Nora secretly cheered the independent spirit that was so like her own, and wished it well. Then something happened—a weekend retreat Josie’s frantic daughter had shipped the girl off to, and a coming home to God and His reason. How sorry Nora had been when Maureen first came to tell her the great good news. It was right here, wasn’t it, or in a room just like this, where the girl sat in an aura of earnest happiness about giving up her ardent quest for boys, all her destructive appetites, the burden of that abundant auburn hair. She was already a smug little saint, and Nora pictured the shorn hair, wafting like feathers past those heaving shoulders and breasts to the floor, and said, “But, Reenie, are you sure?” How could she have doubted it? The child was in a passion of love, swooning for deprivation the way Nora had once swooned with lust.

  Nora had still been able to pray in her early teens. She was wild with sinful urges, and wanted to be repentant as long as it didn’t interfere with her pleasure. Forgive me, thank you, forgive me, oh, thank you, to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, to all the statues and icons that shimmered in yellow candlelight at St. Adianasius. Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. And then the melting kisses, the anticipation of more, of something else, of only God knew what. She’d have babies for the church, a thousand babies to make up for this recreant heat. Who else but God gave her that quivering breath, the madness that turned her body and brain to candle-wax?

  Nothing had prepared her for the wedding night, though, not the false piousness of prayer and promise, not the desperate rehearsal of clothed friction in the dark hallway of her house.

  In those days, no one told girls anything that was candid or useful about sex. If there were a way to deny its existence, most parents would have. But there was the biological evidence, those consequences of restless pollen and sperm, and the wide marriage beds creaking their message to sleepless children waiting for their own lives to begin.

  The cats mated, yowling, under the moon. That dumb hound, Dutch, mounted the boys’ legs for want of a bitch, and all of nature bloomed and prospered under the imperious rule of desire.

  So the news reached the children, even the girls who were only future victims of it, anyway, and they became excited by the equal horrors of wrong information and the truth. Nora had seen her brothers lined up for the toilet each morning, yawning, and scratching at those crooked little pencils in their underwear. Downtown, in an alley, there were crude wall drawings you were forbidden to look at, but which attracted more visitors than the art museum. One image stayed in Nora’s head, although she prayed resolutely for its exorcism. A plump red sausage emerging from a painted cloud of hair, and pointing upward to a scrawled message: Mr. Henderson’s Dick. Mr. Henderson was a lay teacher of manual training at St. Athanasius, and he was famous for banging boys’ heads together like blackboard erasers. The drawing was supposed to be his man’s thing, grossly exaggerated, of course, by creative license or
ineptitude. But Mr. Henderson’s first name was Elmo, after the patron saint of sailors, and intestinal disorders. Who in heaven’s name was Dick? And why would he want to be defamed by such association? There were so many puzzling things on this earth that one couldn’t speak about to anyone older and more informed. Nora and her friends decided that Dick was probably a boy whose head had been slammed by Mr. Henderson, and that the inscription was a strange kind of artistic signature.

  It rained on her wedding day, which was lucky, or unlucky, according to which superstitious neighbor you believed. Nora heard the violent downpour against the high rose windows, louder than Father’s voice joining her for eternity to Jack, far louder than their whispered vows, I will, I will.

  At the party in the church basement, she took small sips of wine but could not eat any of the splendid food her sisters and aunts had prepared. She stayed among the women and children, her last visit to their stronghold before going away. And for the first time she was truly shy, inhibited by the sudden strangeness of Jack among the other men, all of them flushed and tipsy on their side of the room.

  Later, she shivered under his silken length and prayed, a tardy zealot, for the door of her furnace to fly open and pull him inside like paper to be burned. He was too large, and she was barricaded by nature and by fear. No wonder the walleyed cat yowled like that in the yard. No wonder no one would ever speak directly of this. And Jack said, “Darlin’, please, my love, oh, easy, darlin’,” and bumped blindly against her hard, shuttered self. Mr. Henderson’s Dick, whoever he was, had been a genius of anatomy. Even the hair was true, a brisling forest to hide the enemy.