“You tired of the salad?” She assumed some hidden motive.
Philly was winding down, having satisfied the initial craving that had prompted the lunch suggestion. “I guess so.”
“Well, let me catch up then and finish my wine.”
Philly backed off. “Sure, take your time. Who knows when Ma will go see her, anyway?”
Jesus, who had not mentioned anything about Philly’s ma in his warning, just looked at Philly with a pensive air and said no more, having delivered his message and leaving it to Philly to do his part.
Altogether, with Eileen finishing her meal, waiting for the check and then for the waitress to run his credit card, as well as the drive to the hospital, Philly knew they were much later than Jesus had wanted. He felt more nervous than guilty about that, but he did avoid eye contact with Jesus during the transition from lunch to hospital.
When they arrived outside Grandma’s room, Philly stopped at the sound of voices inside the half-closed door. He peaked around the door and saw two women in hospital scrubs working over Grandma’s bed. Philly had the presence of mind to understand what they were doing, with a mere glance, but he couldn’t tell how far along they were in the process.
He turned to Eileen. “I think they’re washing her up, and changing her sheets, and stuff,” he said. “Why don’t you go in and see when they’ll be done.”
Eileen nodded, sensing Philly’s growing tension, but assigning that to the discomfort of nearly walking in the room at an embarrassing moment. The wine she drank at lunch had dulled her perceptive capacity by a couple of notches.
Eileen slipped into the room, leaving the door at its half-way position. Philly heard her ask the nurse how much longer they would be, after introducing herself. Though he couldn’t hear the exact words, the tone of the response made it clear that he would have to wait in the hall for a while.
He turned to look at Jesus, who was watching a man in his seventies walking slowly past, with his wife on one arm and a mobile I.V. rolled along by his other hand. In these situations, Jesus seemed to Philly to look almost anxious, like a kid waiting to be offered something. Still confused about what Jesus was feeling, Philly offered nothing.
Finally, the nurse and a female orderly exited the room, pushing a cart packed with linens and supplies. When they had passed him, Philly headed boldly in. Aware of someone following him, he assumed it was Jesus, but a woman’s voice just behind him made Philly whip his head around to see who it was. Three young people followed him into the room, a young woman carrying flowers, a young man with a balloon and another young man carrying a woman’s overnight bag. Philly knew right away that they were there for Grandma’s roommate and his heart sank at the loss of the quiet time with Grandma that he and Eileen had planned.
Eileen sat on the other side of the bed, when Philly passed the roommate’s curtain. She held Grandma’s hand through the blanket, looking up at Philly only briefly. Jesus walked next to Philly, but seemed torn between the roommate and Grandma, as if he expected little would be required of him by Philly and Eileen, seeking better prospects elsewhere.
The family behind the golden curtain began to wind up their volume, even as Philly stood silently with his back to them. He wondered if he could ask them to keep it quiet, but then the absurdity of that request kept him silent, as he thought of the fact that Grandma was comatose. Eileen seemed less disturbed by the rising noise, locked in on Grandma, stunned by the tactile reality of her condition.
Jesus interrupted Philly’s silent daze. “Your mother and father are on their way up from the parking lot.”
Philly looked at him, trying to recalculate the timing of their visit, against the timing that Jesus had advocated at the restaurant. Uncertain of the exact numbers, nevertheless, he felt the oxygen-sucking impact of having ignored Jesus’s earlier warning. They had missed their target by as much as half an hour, the difference between being in the room before the change of linens, which they surely could have postponed, and getting wedged in now between three inconveniences. That Jesus wanted the chance to heal Grandma, still had not penetrated Philly’s newly-converted brain. Philly mourned only the loss of some quiet moments with her and Eileen.
Almost forgetting his grand secret, Philly stopped himself from warning Eileen of the approach of their parents, not ready yet to reveal his source for such intelligence. Instead, he leaned over Grandma and gave her a kiss on the forehead and rested one hand on her shoulder for a moment. He decided to risk talking to her in front of Eileen.
“Hi, Grandma,” he said. Eileen looked up at him, but seemed unperturbed by her brother’s speaking.
“Eileen’s here to see you. She flew in from New York, just to see how you’re doing. We had a nice lunch and then came to see you,” he said, feeling lost about what sort of things he could say to her that would fit the gathering audience.
Eileen stepped in. “Hi, Grandma. This is Eileen. I almost forgot to talk to you, just sitting here holding your hand. I guess I was too stunned to say anything.”
Philly was glad he had dislodged Eileen from her silence, knowing the circumstances for talking to Grandma would deteriorate in just a moment.
Eileen continued. “I miss you, Grandma. It’s not nearly the same to come home without you here to talk to.” She hesitated. “I mean to have you awake and talking to me too.” She finished in a quavering voice.
His sense of loss during his grandma’s coma had lacked the scope necessary to included Eileen, because Philly had somehow missed the way in which Grandma served a similar role in his sister’s life. This moment of revelation, illuminated by Eileen’s intimate tone and affectionate words, expanded Philly’s appreciation of Grandma and of Eileen, as well. He had easily slotted Eileen into one of two places in his emotional universe, either in the space occupied by his ma, or the rebellious big sister space. In the first, Eileen nagged him about his life, in the second she yelled at her parents and gave them the finger before slamming the screen door behind her. Now, Philly opened room close to his heart for the sympathetic sister that he hoped she could be, and that she sometimes was, for him. Blinking at the flash of Eileen as a fellow lover and disciple of Grandma, Philly heard his own rigid packaging for his sister crackling under the strain of reality.
Even as Philly settled into the warmth of a new camaraderie with Eileen, listening to her continue to say the sort of things that he had said to Grandma, the door to the room opened and Philly heard a familiar voice.
“So this is where you kids ran away to,” said Ma. “I thought this might be where to find you,” she said, with more than a hint of accusation.
Philly turned toward that voice. Aware of Jesus making that same turn in perfect sync with him, he sighted his dad backing up his ma, as usual. Somehow, in that floating moment, Philly realized that Jesus heard his ma’s whining tone as clearly as he did. But Philly watched, as Jesus stepped through the current of her “Why is the world so cruel to me?” attitude, embracing her without hesitation.
As Jesus stood there, ready to wrap his arms around Ma, Philly caught a glance from the Savior’s eyes that said, “This is where you ought to be.”
Eileen stopped talking to Grandma and straightened up in her chair, like a woman caught in the throes of love-making, gathering her clothes and shame around her. Philly knew how this scene would play out, especially the way the atmosphere would change, the noxious fumes of his mother’s sorry soul filling the room and banishing the very memory of the sweet communion that had hung there a moment ago.
Again, in the look on Jesus’s face Philly found the courage to confront a monster. He turned squarely toward his ma and Jesus, nodding a greeting to his dad. Then he wrapped his arms around the aching bones of the woman that shoved him out into the world thirty-eight years before. In his awkward arms, his round belly pressing against her arms crossed over her chest, his ma burst into tears.
As many times as they had all heard her suffering protests, and sampled the aftertaste of
her bitter soul, no one in her family had ever seen her cry like this before, not even Philly’s dad, who certainly had archived many of her secrets inside his JC Penny façade. To Philly, the explanation was obvious. His arms, his hands filled in where Jesus stood, where Jesus wanted to connect with his ma. Of course, she would be moved.
Eileen and her dad, however, stared as if they had just watched Ma shove her hand into her own chest and produce a bloody, pulsing organ that must certainly be a living, human heart. At once, Eileen summed up a list of unanswered observations about Philly that had started during that phone call where he inexplicably stepped out of character and asked her about her job. What had happened to Philly? And what was he doing now to Ma?
These questions ran simultaneously in two opposite directions. Eileen sucked in the invigorating oxygen of a shocking hope that there might be some rest and satisfaction available for her mother’s hang-dog heart. At the same time, a screechy voice from just behind her left ear screamed, “What are you doing to my mother? What are you doing to my universe?” And the tornado of emotions created by the confluence of contradictory disorientations erupted in a noisy pipe leak of tears and sobs from Eileen, as well.
Philly, floundering internally, well out of his depth, turned slightly to look over his shoulder at Eileen, even as he maintained his ungainly hold on his tense, little mother. He struggled with a glandular guilt that he had violated something or someone, but managed still to remain latched to what Jesus seemed to think he should be doing just then. In a twist, his conviction that he had failed his family by not following Jesus’s instructions about when to get to the hospital, badgered him into this workman-like obedience to do something he didn’t comprehend.
When he turned back toward his mother, she loosed her defensive arms and wrapped them around her grownup son. Philly caught a glimpse of his dad’s face just then, or at least what ought to have been his dad’s face. As unfamiliar tears began to roll down his dry, old cheeks, his dad looked more like Grandma than Philly had ever noticed before.
Though Jesus showed no sign of moving from his grip on the throbbing artery of one emotional trauma victim in that hospital room, Philly tapped a part of his brain that felt he knew better how much his family could take and he loosened his grip. In doing so, he granted access to the sorry self-consciousness that subjugates honesty in most families. And Eileen, his ma and his dad all turned toward damage control, capturing tears and snot and apologizing for the uncharacteristic outburst.
No one in the room was sufficiently free from self-absorption to see it, but the coordinated retreat into defensive positions would have pricked the envy of a military tactician. Only after his ma began to fumble in her purse for tissues, the family behind the curtain began to speak up as if nothing had happened and his dad lifted his white hanky from his back pocket, did Philly regret releasing his mother early. He looked at Jesus standing there with no hands and wanted it all back. He tried several spastic moves to wrap his ma up in that healing embrace again, but she just batted his hands away and chattered at him like an angry squirrel.
Philly stood up straight and stared at Jesus, stunned by what he had just witnessed, both the power of obedience and the cost of hesitation. He looked at his ma, who was blowing her nose and turning fresh, white tissues into compact wads with nervous precision.
She spoke through her sniffling and throat clearing. “Must be my hormones, that doctor’s not giving me the right amount of estrogen, I just know it.”
Though the magic moment had disappeared, its retreat didn’t return them to the usual suspicions and accusations. Philly watched, as his dad ventured to put one big, gentle hand on his wife’s shoulder, as his sister looked back at Grandma with all of that love and affection that she had been pouring out before the interruption, and as his ma stopped muttering to herself and simply stood looking at Grandma. For one moment, it was not all about Ma’s own sense of multidimensional injustice.
Philly’s dad surprised them all by saying, “She was quite a dancer when she was young.” His voice gained strength as he assembled more than two or three words. “I bet you didn’t know that. Folks at her Pentecostal church aren’t as big on dancing these days as they used to be. And, I guess, the kind of dancing my ma used to do wasn’t the church kind of dancing, anyway,” he said.
As unfamiliar as the audible voice of God was to Philly’s family, so too was the sound of Dad reminiscing about his mother.
“I remember at my uncle George’s wedding, when I was just about nine or ten years old,” he said. “My dad was sitting with his father, and a couple of his uncles, and they were jawing and complaining about Eisenhower, or some such thing, and Ma went up to him and just took his hand as he sat there. And I guess it sort of caught him off guard, y’ know, like he hadn’t got his objections ready in time. And she gets him to stand up. I remember the way he looked, kinda stunned at first, and then all dreamy, like he was remembering something from years before. And I thought then that this was what it looked like when someone was in love and that my dad was remembering what it was like to be in love with my ma.”
They all stared at Philly’s dad as he spoke. “And I watched them twirl around the room, my dad looking at her like she was Cinderella, or something. And I remember how it made me feel to see them like that, in love, like in a movie.” He stopped there, took a couple of deep breaths and finished. “Yeah, she was quite a dancer in those days.”
Philly turned and looked at Jesus, whose expressive, emotionally articulate face showed clearly that he too remembered that day, and that dance, and what it looked like for those two people to recall being in love.
Chapter Eight
Philly remembered that he and Brenda had planned a date for Saturday night, their first in over two years. He looked at Jesus, who sat now in his parents’ living room scratching their obese terrier behind the ears. Philly told himself that Brenda would be there for him in the future. Reviewing what he had seen and heard from Jesus, and what he had seen Jesus inspire in the people around him, he didn’t regret this time with his mystical visitor.
Eileen entered the living room from the kitchen. She looked at Blacky, the terrier, wondering why he sat so contently by himself. Usually the poorly-disciplined dog would be jumping on her, or begging someone for food. She didn’t give voice to her curiosity, however. Philly noted Eileen’s baffled look and suppressed a smile, still fascinated by the selective invisibility of his guest.
“Supper’s almost ready,” she said, plopping down on the other end of the couch and idly lifting a news magazine from the end table there.
“Great,” Philly said. He glanced at Jesus when Eileen opened the magazine.
Jesus said, “You might want to tell them all together after supper.”
Philly didn’t need to ask, “Tell them what?” He knew that Jesus was answering an earlier question which Philly had poked and flipped over more than a few times. Very briefly, he begrudged the loss of hidden jokes such as the dog’s unusual behavior, if he were to let his family in on it. But he tossed that aside as a distraction.
“Yeah, that could work,” Philly thought, staring at the grinning dog, instead of directly at Jesus.
Eileen interrupted his thoughts. “Did you ask that girl out, what was her name?”
“Brenda,” Philly said, resisting the annoyance that rose from Eileen forgetting.
“Yeah, sorry. Jet lag,” she said. “Well, did you ask her out?”
Philly nodded, assuming he would tell the truth, but careful about how much he carried into this hors devoirs conversation. “Yeah, I did. I figured out that she wasn’t still going out with the guy that she dumped me for.”
Eileen nodded, still looking at her magazine. “Did she seem open to the possibility?”
Philly bypassed his usual wriggling response to this sort of inquisition, preoccupied instead with measuring his revelations with careful precision. “Yeah, she seemed open to it, some time. Not just now, she said.”
“Did she say why?”
“Yeah, but you never know if someone is telling you everything,” Philly said, scrambling the truth and still keeping it together.
“You think she still likes that other guy?”
“No, not really. I didn’t get that impression,” Philly said.
“Maybe she just needs some time to recover.”
“That sounds about right,” Philly said, grateful for the fortune of accidental accuracy.
Dad stepped into the room and said, “Supper’s ready, kids.”
With that, Philly crossed the finish line in the grilling by Eileen, the winner’s tape trailing off his round, but hungry, torso. He had answered her, had not lied and had not told her the whole story. That, he assumed, would happen in due time.
They followed the salty odor of roast beef into the dining room, Blacky rising to accompany them only when Jesus did. Philly noted Jesus a step behind him and tried to nonchalantly pull a chair out for him, to avoid the distraction of Jesus standing up during the meal, or sitting behind him in one of the spare chairs his ma had tucked in the corner of the dining room. Having pulled a chair at the empty place next to his, he made a little noise to indicate he recognized his mindless error. Then he pulled out his own chair, which dragged on the dark gray carpet, as he surveyed the meal.
The roast beef, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole and Jell-O salad reincarnated a special dinner of his childhood. His ma set the gravy dish next to Philly’s plate and nodded when he seemed to have figured out where she expected him to sit.
Jesus thanked Philly for pulling him a chair, just the way a guest would thank his host under normal visibility conditions. This, however, surprised Philly for its odd normality and he said, “Umhm,” audibly in response to Jesus. No one asked why he said it, however, as his reflex reply mingled with the sounds of chairs sliding on carpet, forks ringing against plates and Dad clearing his throat.
Philly’s dad had always maintained a low, rumbling sort of base level of noise, via small inarticulate hums and gentle grunts, since he lost much of his hearing in an accident at the plant in Waukegan, where he worked twenty years ago. Philly thought of that stream of little self-sounds as a sort of audio test pattern that Dad maintained, to make sure that the tiny hearing aids in his ears were still working. His hearing loss had complicated Dad’s emotional exile, which predated the industrial explosion, but which blended into his physical disability afterward.
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