by Paula Champa
That shining in his eyes reminded me of Emerson’s fervor in the Case Study House in Los Angeles, though it faded as he continued his tale:
“When the hospital visits started, I saw she was shrinking from our son. He would try to play with her, or sit with her, but she was like a stone wall. One day that winter, it was sunny and I persuaded her to come for a drive. I bundled Emerson up. We had not been out for more than twenty minutes when the Beacon started to vibrate. I guessed it was a wheel coming loose. But there was no way to explain—by then, the car was bucking violently. I was braking to pull off the road when the wheel flew off.
“I managed to bring the car to a stop. We were together there. Unharmed—I thought. But my wife was . . . well, something in her had loosened like the wheel. She wouldn’t respond. I sat with her by the side of the road, but it began to get cold as the sun dropped. I had to find the wheel and try to repair the damage. I was upset myself by then.
“As a patch to get us home, I borrowed a nut from each of the other wheels, and when I finished what I was doing, she was gone. I blew the horn and waited. Nothing. I started walking with Emerson. We covered a wider area of woods. A sickening feeling would not leave me. I would call her name and stop to listen, but it was empty.”
He collapsed into his chair. “I didn’t find her until it was nearly dark, by a stream that was partially frozen. She may have tried to cross it. I thought she was still catatonic.” As if it had just occurred to him, he added, “She was dead.”
Hélène tilted her head to the ceiling.
“I can’t describe how it was to carry her back to that car with my son. The woods, the darkness, it was like another place. To see her there on the seat . . . During the famine, she’d watched people eating leaves, eating soil. And there was my son, clinging to her, trying to lick the mud off her face. Afterward, I couldn’t bring myself to use the car. I left it outside, uncovered, let the snow and rain wash the mud off the seats. Emerson used to play around it—I don’t know what he remembered. One day I called McVane to get it out of here. Every time I saw it, it might as well have been her. But no one crashed. Not when I owned it, anyway. I asked McVane to separate the pieces so that it would only ever be ours, whole, as a family. No one else’s.”
“He never dreamed you were the one.”
“I was a young man,” he concluded with an apologetic nod. “It was a romantic response, I suppose, to a situation that, by then, had lost all romance entirely.”
He stood to scan the bookcases again, then turned back empty-handed.
“Like Eurydice, my wife died in a field. Except the snake that bit her was inside her. She was as full with her vast death as a fruit with its sweetness. I’m paraphrasing, but you understand, as Rilke describes Eurydice: She was completely content with her death.”
I shifted in my seat.
“She was fulfilled by it. My wife wasn’t afraid of what was beyond. After she was gone, looking back would have been the end of me. My son may have permitted himself to look back—that was his right. But I won’t be persuaded to do it.”
The way he described his struggle—wandering in the woods, carrying his wife—though he meant it literally, I recognized that he was grieving, perhaps only then, as he reluctantly admitted to us what he had endured. His droopiness, his difficulties . . . All my suspicions of his betrayal in befriending Miguel dissolved before the evidence of his pain. I wanted to offer him comfort, to hug him, but one look at him, turning away in his chair, told me it was out of the question.
“How I handled my life afterward . . . The thing about parents, as your friend Miguel can tell you, is that we don’t always manage things to our children’s benefit.”
“Miguel is not my friend,” I said. “I don’t even know much about him. Did you tell him you had a son?”
I could not control the slight accusatory tone in the question, though I was well aware that I had not told Miguel anything about Emerson either.
Webster seemed to be searching for words. “It wasn’t necessary.”
“I thought your connection to Miguel might be related to AG’s business. He denied it.”
“He told you the truth. The one who has business with Miguel is you.”
“What do you mean? I’m not interested in having anything to do with him.”
Distressed that he might know about what had happened in my hotel room in Monterey, I felt myself rising in my seat.
Hélène put her hand on my arm and addressed Webster. “Obviously, she is confused. Could you help us understand?”
“You’d have to speak to Miguel about that. It’s not my place to discuss it. What do you do, Beth?” he asked, now smiling kindly at me. “Do you have a job?”
I found myself mute with embarrassment.
“I do have . . . I am . . .” I reflexively reached for the scar on my calf. How could I explain that for the previous two years I had occupied myself largely by hitchhiking on his son’s life? Rather than elaborate on the nature of my employment, I asked, “How do you know Miguel?”
“There was a Beacon event at a zeppelin museum in Germany a couple of years ago.”
“You were there?”
“Yes. I am a former owner, as you now know.” He turned to Hélène and smiled. “And I understand you are too, in a sense?”
She returned his smile but said nothing, maybe because she was conscious, as I was, that the car he never wanted to see restored was parked just outside the shaded windows.
“I was introduced to Miguel that night,” said Webster, “like other potential investors. He told me he was on his way to Tianjin, where China’s battery manufacturing is based. We talked for some time. He kept in touch with me. I offered to advise him on something he’s been putting together with the Chinese, but he’s very sharp—he didn’t need that as much as someone to mentor him personally. He reminded me of myself.” He paused. “I lost my parents when I was very young, like him. His mind and talents are different from my son’s, but, without intending to, he’s helped me reclaim something of a parental role I have greatly missed. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”
“Of course,” said Hélène.
I could see he was weary, but there was something else I had to ask him, on Emerson’s behalf.
“One more question before we go.”
He nodded.
“Where is she buried?”
“It’s not marked. Not noticeably, anyway.”
I had not scattered all the ashes. There was a small amount left in Emerson’s bottle of CD cleaning fluid, which had ended up on his bookcase when one of the healthcare workers had mistaken it for a med. I pulled the bottle from my handbag as I followed Webster and Hélène across the back lawn of his estate, relieved that Webster had not marched straight out the front door and into the Beacon. As we walked I noticed, dotted around the property, great pallets of building materials and what looked like solar panels waiting to be assembled.
Webster pointed beyond them to a field where some parcels had been dropped like bales of hay. “That’s hemp insulation,” he said.
“You’re remodeling?” I asked as we passed a parked bulldozer.
“The exterior, yes. And parts of the interior.”
“Are you tired of living in the Robie’s house?”
“Not completely,” he said with a frown. “But if my ancestors taught me anything with that pastiche of a house, it’s that if we’re going to be modern, we can’t live like people of the past.”
To my surprise, our small procession merged with the path I had taken two years earlier on my walk around the grounds. At the foot of a hillock, Webster stopped and pointed. “Short climb. You’ll see it when you get up there, where two stone walls come together. I wanted an inconspicuous type of shelter.”
He excused himself, pausing first to kiss Hélène’s hand. He made a comment I couldn’t quite hear about the car they had shared, and then he moved to shake my hand, glancing hesitantly at the bottle in it before turnin
g away with a somber wave instead. I watched his progress through the woods as he returned to the house. He never looked back.
The hill was the one I had climbed before, like an Indian burial mound. Despite its gentle slope, Hélène’s breathing was strained by the time we reached the top. Above us, sunlight shot through a canopy of leaves, forming a dome of blinding gold. From the moment the paths had merged, I knew what I would find before me, and now Webster had confirmed what it was. The cave had been sculpted stealthily, extending behind the pile of loose rocks. A roughly triangular opening marked the point where two aging stone walls had collapsed. I had seen the rubble, but not the opening. Webster may have put his family’s name all over public memorials, but this part of his grief was intensely private. Only a small metal plaque behind one of the walls, mounted inconspicuously on a flat stone, distinguished his wife’s final home from the den of a family of foxes. I dropped to my knees, attempting to convince myself of the Futurist’s argument that a tomb was no different from a museum or a library.
“Are you coming?”
Hélène’s flat nostrils flared. “I don’t think so.” She seated herself on a cushion of fallen leaves to wait.
The air at the entrance to the stone cave was cooler, more humid than the air outside. It smelled alive, paradoxically, but there was no movement as I reached my arm in and struck Hélène’s cigarette lighter. I saw nothing but the rough inner surface of the rocks, surprisingly clean—sections that must have been taken apart for the burial and then carefully rebuilt.
The cave was deep, but the entrance itself was not very high, requiring a belly crawl to pass through. I would have given anything so as not to put my body against the cold ground, but there was no other way in. I advanced like a snake, claws of moist dirt scraping over my stomach. When I was far enough in to clear the entrance, I flipped over and pushed my shirt tightly into my jeans.
The ground felt level under my legs, presumably where they had buried the coffin. I was lying on top of her. Emerson had said he would go to a cave when he died—the cave on the golden happy island—and I had convinced myself earlier in the day that the metallic tent at the garage had been his golden cave. He had slept inside it, across the Beacon’s seats, on the night he went missing, returning by some animal instinct to the place where he had last been together with his mother and father. In his own way, he’d reunited them as a family, along with the car body and the engine itself. The jubilant currents of those childhood rides must have coursed through his memories. They had never lost their power.
Outside, under the dome of yellow leaves, Hélène was singing to herself in French, high-pitched notes that sounded to my ears like a lullaby. I recalled the architect Schindler’s observation that caves were our first homes. Mothers are our first homes, I realized, my face wet with tears as I began to pat the last of Emerson’s ashes into the dirt. It was this modest tomb that I had found him weeping over in desolation all those years ago.
Eurydice was fulfilled by her death—wasn’t that what Webster said? She was satiated. Wrapped in her long burial clothes, she was already indifferent to the world of the living. She had moved beyond it, into death; she was content to stay. But the poet’s alteration of the accepted version of the story meant something more to me: It meant I had not been content to stay. As my father had been trying to tell me in his own way . . .
I had so little memory of it, dipped as I was afterward in the waters of forgetfulness, the tips of my hands dragging through, erasing my fingerprints . . . I recalled the sight of the house numbers as I was brought out—clearly visible, black-on-white over our front door, nailed into place there long before by a father who’d wanted to be sure his family could be found quickly by an ambulance or a fire truck in the middle of the night. Dressed in the flannel pajamas I wore when they carried me into Webster Memorial, I was the last person to be contemplating mysticism in light of the evening’s events. There had been some trauma, a dislocation. I was home, and then I was swinging back and forth over a threshold, like an infant in a bouncy swing. I reached another home not long after, in the absolute sense.
I was safe there, as if playing in the neighbor’s yard just across the fence, and then someone was calling me back. I had almost stayed too long. I don’t know where I was—I don’t know how you could apply a where to it. What could have persuaded me to come back? I wondered if I would ever be able to answer, just as I wondered why Emerson had finally entrusted himself to me.
Alone in the cave, I called up for review the various afterlives in my archive, compiled over years of reading, until I recalled the concept of Ibbur—or impregnation—as named in the Kabbalah, in which the soul of the departed occupies another living person temporarily, in both body and spirit, often for the purpose of accomplishing a worthy task. This tradition collided abruptly in my mind with another that I had run across, in an account of some remote tribe—I could not remember where—whose people believe that when one of their own dies, the soul is too naïve at first to be given a new life, and so it must be chaperoned by the living until it is ready to choose a new one. It enters the body of a loved one then, and remains there for a time.
This is grief. A Westerner might call it possession, and fear it, for it implies the loss of self. But for the members of this tribe, to be possessed by the dead and carry the death to term is a badge of great honor, like a child growing inside, a womb carrying a fetus.
This was Emerson’s use for me. It was then that grief revealed its power: I’d been closer to him dead than I had been to anyone alive. I could continue to live through him; I had the plot I’d long desired—his. But it came with a price. I would never know what my own life could be. I was as hesitant about that as he had been of his own death.
He’d carried me as I’d carried him. Now his afterlife in me had reached its full term. Somewhere in the maternity ward of Webster Memorial, a new mother like Beckett was welcoming a being into the world. I had to do the opposite and let him go. It was the kind of pain Mr. Webster had known, a grief he still struggled with—what my mother had prayed I would never feel. Weightless in the cave, I felt the commotion in my belly, something trying to move through as I attempted to end my old, unended conversation with Emerson.
In the beginning, we were sailors . . .
Water was the road of our adventures for thousands of years, straight from the womb . . .
Did you prepare for your birth by feeling scared in the womb? Of course not. It would be absurd.
Death is no different.
Formless into form.
Form into formless.
Who can say you are not a being, even now?
Here, in my thoughts. In my heart . . .
When we were sailors, we believed the earth was flat. Then adventurers went off in their ships and gave their testament, piecing together another truth. They passed from this life still unsure themselves, but in time, beliefs changed.
You are not going to sail over the edge, Emerson. No, not in death either.
24
OUTSIDE THE BURRING PORT station, I sat in the car watching Hélène wipe a dusky constellation of bug matter off her glasses with the front of her T-shirt. She’d driven us there, and I intended to put her on a Metro-North train back to the city before attempting to drive myself down the road to my parents’ house.
“The train is coming now?” she asked, moving to climb out of the driver’s seat.
“No. Not for a few minutes yet.”
“Could we rest here?” she asked, falling back. “That was strenuous today.”
“Of course. You don’t have to wait on the platform.”
Without the camouflage of her glasses, the sadness in her eyes was plain to see. I tried to make conversation with her, but every subject I could think of shrank into a stream of mundane babble. I had not anticipated this moment, when I would have to take the car away from her again. There had been no way of knowing how it would be. It seemed she had not come to terms with some l
ingering grief.
I could believe now that reuniting the car and the engine had given Emerson a final peace. But he had known, by the end, that Hélène was just as possessed by its memory. Even if he did relish his victory, it seemed cruel that his last act had been to taunt her. Was that worth the effort of dragging himself all the way to her hotel?
The truth entered my mind then, wholly formed, as if my brain moved aside for another sensibility to make itself heard: Emerson had left the paintbrush in the Beacon on purpose.
He couldn’t write. What simpler, more portable symbol of Hélène could there be? The brush was as good as an arrow pointing to her, in case he failed to reach her hotel. He had even left it on the driver’s side. He had brought together the two things she needed to work: her missing tool and the inspiration she needed to use it.
“Hélène,” I began, grasping that Emerson had never intended the Beacon for me at all. “I don’t completely understand what this car means to you, but I think Emerson wanted you to have it.”
She turned to me with a look of uncertainty.
I pointed to the key hanging from the dashboard. “When he went to your hotel that morning, that was in his pocket.”
“It was?” She regarded me with tense, questioning eyes.
I remember.
“Oh!” she cried, reaching a hand tentatively toward the key.
“What did you say he told you that morning? ‘We have it.’”
“I thought he meant you and him.”
I shook my head. “He went there to give it to you.”
She reached for me across the seat, managing to grab the fingers of my left hand in an impassioned shake. “Are you certain? This must be very difficult for you, Beth.”
