Were I a deep thinker, I would contemplate death from a philosophical perspective. Were I religious, I would have yet another vast cave to explore on the subject. But I am neither. I am a former teacher, a quarter Jewish and three-quarters Doubtful. Therefore, I sit in the rocking chair staring at the mortuary, often with my hand over my heart, feeling its quick shallow beats. I sit and wonder what it was like for all those people in their last breath, before they were brought through the back door covered by a sheet. This is the extent of my deep thinking. I try not to think of the moments after their last breath.
And did the proximity of Wagner’s Mortuary influence my choice to live with Patrick? For some people a nearby mortuary would be a discouraging factor. For others, an attraction of sorts, considering man’s inevitable end. For me—well, here I am. I knew the mortuary was across the street when I chose Patrick’s house.
I have heard the term prearrangement as it relates to funerals. I have heard it described as a way “to spare your loved ones additional grief when the time comes.” The word death is carefully avoided.
I knew a woman once, a colleague of my husband’s named Helga Sedgeworth, an imposing spinster who taught university courses in ancient and medieval literature. At a department dinner party one evening Helga told us that she had recently flown to New Brunswick, Canada, to the town of her birth, where she had gone to a funeral home to choose her own casket and headstone. She had filled out a form concerning her choices for the funeral service itself, had even selected flowers for the casket spray. She had gone to the adjoining graveyard to view the location of her plot.
She spoke solemnly to the ten of us around the dinner table. One of the men, a professor of modern fiction and poetry, tried to lighten the moment by asking if she had climbed inside the various caskets to test them for size and comfort, but she seemed not to hear him. For her headstone, she told us, she had chosen the inscription “Perhaps my love, my lord, inhabits there,” words she identified as those spoken by Psyche upon spying a distant temple on a mountaintop in her search for Cupid.
Helga had then written out a check for over eight thousand American dollars and left the funeral home. The same professor tried once more to make her smile. Had she gone dancing after that? he wanted to know. She turned to him and said, “No, I drove to a seafood restaurant and ate lobster.” Much later, during coffee, after we had drifted to other subjects, Helga filled a pause: “If one dies in the winter in Canada, the body is kept in storage until late spring when the ground has thawed.”
When my breathing comes faster, I force my eyes away from the funeral home. I look into the sky and try to think of rules that don’t bend. I try to remember things I might have once said in a classroom: “The past participle of lie is lain,” or “The pronoun must agree with its antecedent,” or “Avoid the sentence fragment.” I see these rules regularly broken in the things I read. I break some of them myself.
The page I seek out first in Patrick’s Time magazines is called Milestones. In sentence fragments, it records the deaths of noteworthy people. “DIED. FANNY BLANKERS-KOEN, 85, Dutch homemaker who won four gold medals in track and field at the 1948 Olympics, the most ever in one Olympics by a woman.” “DIED. UTA HAGEN, 84, revered stage actress and acting teacher best known for originating the role of Martha in Edward Albee’s 1962 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; in New York City.” Sometimes the cause of death is given: “of leukemia,” “of pancreatic cancer,” “a suicide by hanging,” “of a pulmonary illness.”
CEOs of companies, authors, actors, shipping magnates, gospel singers, museum curators—one by one they fall. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them.” Thus quotes the clown at the end of Twelfth Night. And then there are the masses, of whom I am one, who never taste greatness in any form, whose deaths go unrecorded in Time magazine.
Perhaps some would say that my wealth is a source of greatness, but I know what happens to money when one draws his last breath. It changes hands. Whatever man has done to get and keep it is, in the end, of no consequence. It is his no longer. Having lifted not a finger, fools may fall heir to a wise man’s fortune. Or wise men may fall heir to a fool’s fortune. Whatever the case, the “whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” The clown in Twelfth Night was no fool. He knew that nothing very much matters after all.
Chapter 3
To Dive Into the Fire, to Ride on the Curled Clouds
Since it catches most of its food on the wing, the barn swallow spends more time in the air than almost any other land bird, perhaps as much as ten hours a day. It has been estimated that a swallow may travel close to two million miles in its lifetime.
It is Thursday. Rachel is away but will soon return. She rarely leaves for more than an hour at a time. As I watch the funeral home, I see a moving van crawling down the street toward Patrick’s house. It stops in front of the lawyer’s office, then creeps forward to the next house, which has stood empty during the weeks I have lived here. On the side of the van I can make out the words CARRIED AWAY in large letters and beneath them the slightly smaller words MOVING AND STORAGE COMPANY.
The van slowly maneuvers its way backward into the driveway. A man climbs down from the driver’s side and a woman from the passenger’s. I watch the woman, who is dressed like a man, in work boots and overalls. She walks across the front yard with her head raised, as if studying the roofline, the gutters and eaves. Is this her job, I wonder—working for a moving company—or is she the new owner of this house? Perhaps the man is her husband and they are renting the van, which is full of their possessions. Perhaps the man is her husband, and together they own the moving company, including the van, which is full of other people’s possessions. Perhaps he is not her husband but merely a co-worker, and the van is empty. The possibilities and combinations are limitless. Perhaps he is a wizard, she is a sorceress, and the van is full of genies in lanterns. Perhaps, like most other things, it doesn’t matter.
The man comes to stand beside the woman and lays his hand on her shoulder. He is a big man, built like a football player. She moves closer to him in a way a co-worker wouldn’t. A minivan pulls up at the front curb, and a teenager gets out. She slides open the back door and lifts a small child out of a car seat. The man meets her and takes the child. He points to the house. Maybe he’s saying, “There it is, pumpkin. Our new home!” The teenager walks slowly toward the house, hands jammed in back pockets, head down. Maybe she’s not so excited about the new home.
Rachel’s car appears now, moving slowly past the mortuary, and I rise from the rocking chair, turn it around, and walk back through the dining room and kitchen, into my apartment. I close my door before I hear her key in the lock.
It occurs to me that I never see Patrick and Rachel touch, not even a hand on a shoulder. This means nothing, of course. There is no correlation between love and touching, at least the kind of touching done in front of others.
I sit down in my chair at the window by the bird feeder. I think about the woman across the street dressed as a man. I think of Rachel in her denim jeans and flannel shirts. Perhaps she and Patrick share shirts. Perhaps not. Perhaps his fit her a bit snugly. I turn to the Time magazine spread open on the table beside my chair. I think of all the women in the world who would never think of wearing men’s clothing.
“DIED. GEORGETTE KLINGER, 88,” I read. The woman pictured above the paragraph is dressed femininely, in something white, imprinted with a large flower across the bodice. A vase of roses stands on the table behind her. She wears a long strand of pearls around her neck and smiles openly toward the camera. She is described as a “fashionable skin-care pioneer of the 1940s,” a woman who experimented with “European facial techniques” and “inspired a revolution in cosmetic skin care.” I wonder if the mortician saw anything to distinguish her skin from that of all the other bodies he handled. I wonder what was hidden in the heart of this woman wearing white.
I think of how fragile a th
ing a heart is. Some hearts are broken early, some late, and some, I suppose, never at all. Considering the length of adulthood, my own heart was broken later than many. For this, perhaps, I should count myself fortunate, but I don’t. Fortunate has lost its purest meaning. It is a word often used to describe incomplete victories, bad circumstances that could have been worse.
Having survived childhood with a heart intact, a woman’s heart may be broken in so many ways. Men and children are common causes. The kinds of abuse a man may inflict are many, all of them involving a choice. Though a man may sometimes hurt a woman unwittingly, the pain is nevertheless a result of some choice made and carried out. He may not have meant to break her heart, but intention is irrelevant. Once a heart is broken, the words “I didn’t mean to” afford little relief.
A woman’s heart may also be broken by the absence of a man. I have known women, many of them buried now, whose lives were spent in quest of a man—spent in the sense of used up, depleted of emotional resources. Some of these women never found one man, yet some found too many, for “the absence of a man” does not mean the absence of a physical presence.
When speaking of children, however, absence is more literal. The physical presence of a child engages a woman’s whole mind and heart, defines not only the perimeter of her life but occupies the total square footage. A child, though imperfect in any number of ways, can light up a woman’s life. This I have observed. I have not experienced it firsthand. I speak now of a child of one’s own, not merely a child placed in one’s care for a time, for such children may delight a woman’s heart only temporarily. At some point she must always give them back to their mothers.
I recall a child in the first class of third graders I taught. I was twenty-one years old, and she was eight. I remember only her first name—Starr. Her eyes were like polished onyx, and she could run faster than all the boys in the class. Starr’s face is the picture I always carried with me of the daughter I might someday have. I carry it still, since I never had a daughter to take its place.
By simple arithmetic I know that Starr would be a woman of sixty-seven now. She might have arthritis, the beginnings of osteoporosis. Her black eyes could be clouded with glaucoma. In my picture, however, she remains a child.
It is after school, and Starr has just drawn a square on the chalkboard, very neatly, using a yardstick for the sides. I am at my desk only a few feet from her, correcting spelling papers. “Look, Miss Langham,” she says, and I do. I look at the square first and then at her face. “If I got in there,” she says, placing her finger in the center of the square, “and pushed hard against the sides—” she stops to lift her arms and flatten her hands as if trying to move a wall—“I could bend the square into a circle.”
I believe a child does this for a woman, changes the contours of her life, reshapes the square of each day into a circle, then expands it by another dimension into a sphere. The sphere is punctured when a woman loses a child. I think about Rachel and myself, inhabiting the same living space. We are a sad pair, a deflated balloon and a flat empty square.
I hear Rachel moving about in the kitchen on the other side of my door. I hear thumps, as if she is setting down heavy bags on the countertop. A bird alights at the feeder outside my window. I have seen his type before and have searched him out in my bird book, which identifies over thirty species of sparrows. This one, the chipping sparrow, has a chestnut crown and a white stripe above each eye. Described in my book as “pesky and tireless,” it is also called the hairbird because of its obsession with hair, which it supposedly favors for the lining of its nest, horsehair being its first choice but other donors also accepted—dogs, raccoons, deer, even humans.
I imagine this bird darting about, making diving raids to nip strands of hairs from the tails of grazing horses or lazy dogs. I imagine hatless men feeling a sudden pinch and reaching up to rub their heads. I watch now as the chipping sparrow pecks seeds out of the feeder, then flutters down to eat them off the ground. He hops about briefly, then is off, a streak of brown and gray disappearing into the treetops.
I think of a bird’s life, so much of it spent in the air, its nest only a place to lay and incubate its eggs, to house its fledglings until it can push them out. I think of the miles traveled by some birds in migration—a continual cycle of leaving their homes when the days grow cool, then returning in the warmth of spring.
I think of my husband. For thirteen years I marked the box for “married” when filling out forms. He sought me out, pursued me, won me, though with no appreciable resistance on my part. At forty-two I was not miserable with my unmarried state, for my sisters’ husbands had not impressed upon me that marriage was an altogether fulfilling way to live one’s life. Still, the prospect of marriage interested me.
I first found in Eliot a companion, an employer, and a teacher, and I was content with the arrangement. Later I found in him a husband, and I was more content—or I thought I was. Still later I discovered his fondness for flight, for the wide-open spaces of his imagination. I observed his sense of confinement in a nest, yet his habit of returning seasonally to the small comfortable pleasures of his domestic life.
When he was accessible, I was the one who flew. I fluttered about attending him. I ranged far and wide to bring home the things he requested. I plumped his pillows, brought his slippers, fetched his meals, typed his essays. I would have done anything he wanted. I came eagerly when he called. As in The Tempest, I was Ariel to his Prospero, ready “to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the curled clouds” for him.
I close my eyes and drift off into a confusion of squares and circles bumping against one another. I am in the air, and the shapes are soft and changeable as I fly through them. I have often flown in my dreams, an object of wonder to those on the ground. “Look, isn’t that Sophie up there? How does she do that?”
* * *
“Suppertime, Aunt Sophie!” I hear a knock at the door. Looking at the clock, I am surprised to see that almost two hours have passed. Rachel enters with a tray. She sets it on the small round table next to the sofa. She removes the items one by one, first the napkin, then the silverware, which she places one utensil at a time on top of the napkin. Then the glass of water, then a saucer on which sits a muffin, and finally the plate of food. From my seat by the window I see brown, orange, green. I can tell it is too much food on one plate, but I say nothing. Rachel rearranges the silverware, moving the knife and spoon to the right side, then looks at me as she turns to leave with the empty tray.
“It’ll taste better hot,” she says. She doesn’t raise her voice the way Patrick does when he talks to me. She seems to have realized already that the reports of my deafness have been greatly exaggerated.
She nods toward the table, as if to encourage me to leave my chair. Her eyes have the look of one who wants to say more but won’t. No doubt she is thinking of yesterday, when I sat across the room looking at my plate of supper until it got cold. It was not from obstinacy nor lack of hunger. I was merely contemplating the fact that so much of daily life was measured by food, that each day had now reduced itself to three meals delivered on a tray. When Rachel came back an hour later, I was nibbling at the edges of the spaghetti. She halted by the door, looking embarrassed. “Is it too spicy?” she asked, and I shook my head no.
After she leaves, I get up and walk to the table. It would be easier for Rachel simply to set the tray down and let me eat from it. It would take me back to my years of eating in the cafeterias of various elementary schools. The fact that she takes care to set the table and remove the dishes from the tray should make an old woman grateful. Perhaps it is calculated to do so. And perhaps at some level it does. Or perhaps an old woman could see it as another useless expenditure of effort.
On the plate are a mound of lima beans, another of carrots, and another of beef and gravy over yellow noodles. I feel no hunger, yet I sit down and pick up the fork. I think of robots programmed to perform manual tasks. I read once of a fact
ory with hundreds of the little metallic men moving about in perfect synchronization. Not one of them late for work. Not one complaining about the long hours, demanding higher wages, or calling in sick. No on-the-job chatting to undercut production. I fill my fork with beef and gravy and transfer it to my mouth. Down to the plate for more, up to my mouth. I imagine a factory in my stomach, hundreds of tiny robots wielding files, mashers, and power sprayers, pulverizing the food, pushing it along. This is a cartoon picture from a film I once showed a class of fourth graders: Your Digestive System.
The night I first ate meat loaf with Rachel and Patrick, when I came for my ten-day trial visit, Patrick said a blessing over the food. He placed his hands on the table, one on each side of his plate, and as he prayed, in his loud managerial voice, I studied his hands, which were not much larger than mine but surely stronger. His nails were bitten to the quick. We formed a V at the table, Patrick at the end, one hand extended toward Rachel and one toward me. I looked at Rachel’s face when Patrick pronounced the amen, but her eyes were on the bowl of buttered potatoes, which she picked up and passed to me with a face as placid as a nun’s.
I eat less than half of the beef and noodles Rachel has put on my plate tonight. I take a final bite of muffin, then a sip of water, and push the plate away. I know she will bring a dish of dessert with her when she returns. This is the routine. Whether she waits to prepare it after she has brought the tray or simply waits to deliver it, not trusting an old woman to eat her vegetables when dessert is at hand, I don’t know.
Winter Birds Page 3
