Telling Time

by Austin Wright

  For Madeline and Elizabeth

  Contents

  Part One: Thursday

  Part Two: Friday

  Part Three: Saturday

  Part Four: Sunday

  Part Five: Monday

  Part Six: Tuesday

  Part Seven: Wednesday

  Part Eight: Thursday (2)

  Part Nine: Friday (2)

  Part Ten: Saturday (2)

  Part Eleven: September

  PART ONE

  THURSDAY

  LUCY WESTERLY: To George Westerly

  George? What is this thing, an answering machine? I hear your voice, don’t you hear me? Should I pretend you do? I can’t talk to someone who isn’t there.

  If I try, how much time do I have? You want me to think up a message before the machine cuts me off, a message? I have no message, what I have is news, George. It’s bad news, but you’ll cut me off before I can tell you.

  What good is an answering machine that doesn’t answer? It’s a wonderful invention, so modern and efficient, I’m proud of you, but I can’t speak to it. Call your brothers or sisters, they’ll tell you my news. Or me. You could call me. Yes, it’s so long since I’ve heard from you. I don’t even know where you are, except you have an answering machine, and that was your sweet deaf voice not answering.

  What do I say now? Stop? Roger? Over and out? Thank you and good night? Do you read me?

  RUPERT NEWTON: Item in the Island News

  A teller at the Island National Bank today took his own family hostage in his home, confined with a gun. Sam J. Truro, 28, well known to customers of the bank, where he has been employed for five years, retreated into his house at 25 Shoal Point Drive, and announced he was holding his wife, Georgette, 26, and children, Dinah, 7, and Roger, 5, prisoners. The nature of his demands was not known.

  Thomas Westerly, 72, of Peach Street, was shot when he tried to intervene. According to witnesses, Westerly approached the house calling upon Truro to give himself up. He was shot on the front walk after ignoring several warnings from Truro, who was standing in the upper window with a rifle. Westerly was taken to Island Center Hospital, where he was described last night as resting comfortably. The nature of his injury was not disclosed.

  Police have ringed the Truro house in a standoff. The siege began this morning when Truro called Edward Nelson, the Town Clerk, to state that he was holding his family hostage and would kill them if any attempt were made to rescue them. Asked if he intended to negotiate with Truro, Sheriff Jack Haines said, “We’re waiting for him to make demands. Then we’ll see.” He called it “a ticklish situation.”

  Westerly, the man who was wounded, is former President of River City University, Ohio, and a controversial figure in the academic world. He moved to this Island in 1988.

  Neighbors called Truro a quiet man, a loner, a good neighbor. His fellow employees at the bank said he was moody and variable. Several customers at the bank described him as helpful and friendly. Others did not remember him.

  ANN REALM: To George

  Mother asked me to find you since she can’t talk to your answering machine. I got your machine too but since you don’t return calls, here goes.

  She wants you to know Dad’s dying. He’s been dying for six months but this is different. Now it’s a stroke. He was in remission and seemed fine but he’s back in the hospital. How bad I don’t know, but when she asked the doctor if she should summon her children he said decide for yourselves. Everybody has visited him this last six months, Philip, Henry, Patty, everybody but you. I’ve been going every other weekend. Consider yourself informed.

  I’ll go back again tomorrow, one last quick visit. It has to be quick because Frank and I are moving to London next Tuesday. Career move for Frank, career move for me. You’d know this if you had talked to anyone these last months. Up we go in the world, write for details.

  Mother thinks you’re in the Canadian wilderness writing another of your so-called lovely nature articles, but I doubt it.

  PHILIP WESTERLY: To his wife Beatrice

  Left on the kitchen table, Ithaca.

  Going to the Island again, tomorrow before you get back. Dad’s had a stroke.

  I tried to call you at the Holiday Inn. Student party tonight. If Dad dies, you should come to the Island too. Hope you enjoyed your trip.

  I’ll give the kids to Mrs. Hook.

  PATRICIA KEY: Fax to Philip

  Please tell me what happened to Dad. Mother called when I was out and told William he had a stroke. When I came back Mrs. Grummond called on Mother’s behalf and told me someone shot him while he was taking a walk. A crazy man with a rifle out a window.

  So which is it? Dad’s in the hospital from a stroke or because he got shot? I presume he still has cancer either way. No answer from Mother when I called again. Can’t stand the mixup, so I’m faxing you. If you should happen to know.

  LUCY WESTERLY: What to tell her children

  This morning he was his usual self though uncomfortable, reading the paper, eating his cereal. At lunch quieter than usual, thinking about his writing, I supposed, which makes him uncommunicative. After lunch he went for his walk. I was out front with the watering can, and he went by without speaking. That’s unusual. He was like not knowing whether to go or trying to remember an errand. I watched him up the street in a shuffly way, making me think how old we’re getting, thinking it for both of us, not just him. But something wasn’t right.

  When the policeman came, I was still on my knees with the spade by the garden bed, looking at the garden earth. I saw the policeman’s feet first, then Thomas behind with a shabby lost look like a bum. Here you are, the policeman said. This where you live?

  The kind policeman, who said to me, Your husband, ma’am, he seems a little disoriented.

  Well, I never saw him look like that. His eyes empty like a bolt of grief. He bumped the door jamb going into the house, where I followed and found him on the bed. I thought I mustn’t let him go to sleep or he’ll die, so I talked to him, asking him, trying to make him speak while he stared at the ceiling with his mouth open. When I saw his eyes again I called 911.

  What else is there? They took him on a stretcher. Neighbors peeking out their windows to see what’s being shoveled into the ambulance from the Westerly house. I went with him. In the hospital room, he showed more life. No talk—he hasn’t spoken since it happened—but he knew where he was and knew me. He looked scared.

  I called Philip and Ann and tried to call George. I called Patty but got William. Mrs. Grummond called Henry for me and Patty again to make sure she got the message.

  PHILIP WESTERLY: Anticipating a memoir

  Entered on his computer in Ithaca, in a file c:personalmemblue.515, from which a paper copy will be made in a day or so.

  This episode began with the apologetic voice of my mother on the telephone. It was 7:30. I was alone in the house after a pizza and was in the bedroom taking off my clothes for a shower before the party. Her voice with soft anxiety: Philip? Thomas. Hospital. Stroke. I leap for the conclusion but she holds back having a narrative to tell. Her dramatizing impulse, negating the badness in the pleasure she gets from deferring the end. Telling the story in her good time while I sat on the bed with my pants off. Should I come, I said, ashamed not to know if this was a reasonable question.

  Then what to do with quick calculations about the pages of appointments with patients filling up tomorrow, Saturday, next week, the awkwardness of canceling or changing, the discomfort of a distinct guilt about something, the calculations which Myra would have to handle with a bunch of phone calls, not “the flu” this time nor yet a “death in the family,” but “a family emergency,” with Dr. Friedman standing by expecting the same for him sometime.

&nb
sp; Also had to decide between the morbidity of not going to the party and the callousness of going, unless the callousness could be called emotional strength, telling myself the young people would be disappointed. I went to the party then with doubled guilt doubly excused: without my wife because of her trip and without my father because the students would be disappointed. They drank wine out of transparent plastic cups, and the music played and they danced while I talked to a small group about glaucoma and cataracts and specializing in ophthalmology.

  If I put this in the speckled notebook instead of the blue I can be a little freer telling about listening to the loud music and watching a future psychiatrist named Linda Wesson dance, watching without Beatrice yet without realizing what I was watching because of the flight of my father through the music while this was happening, the voices, the wine, the small room full of people, and the darker room beyond where people danced in a purple light. The sudden pain of my father’s flight. Be more accurate. Six months ago it was sudden and this is the fruition. Yet six months ago it was not sudden either, my father at seventy-two having lived his biblical span, short though that may seem now after all the years when he seemed immortal in his good health and it looked as if what I had thought inevitable was in truth impossible, before the event put everything back in place and I could once again anticipate the great loss with everything unstringing and the world falling apart.

  Meanwhile, excuse this party in honor of Steve because the medical students wanted and Steve was counting on it. Otherwise it’s mope all evening thinking about time’s losses, though I suppose I could have written a poem if I could get the right slant. When I got home the fax machine had Patty with a crazy rumor. Not a stroke but a rifle shot. Which to believe? What a distraction. Hope it’s not the rifle shot, which would be an irrational intrusion on the natural development of events.

  Meet my patients in the morning, then fly to Boston in time to catch the late ferry. Myra’ll reschedule the week.

  ANN REALM: Diary

  Thursday, May 19, Boston. DAY. Pack, office, bank, box books. Dinner + FR, Flaming Stork.

  NEWS: TW stroke. Revisit? London Tues, vacate house, tix, big. LW sigh, bye bye, TW die. Ask FR. Bedside w/o talk? Dying, know? Know, care? Jam conversation w/Infinite?

  BUT: Momneed, daddeath, big. Thump heart. FR: OK, squeeze time, packself.

  SO: Fly Isl Fri. Ret Bost Tues, London per plan. Better-feel, less rue.

  PLUS: Rushwrite GW Mombehalf. GW 0 X mos, ans mach. Selfish pig.

  LUCY WESTERLY: To her dead mother

  It was good of me not to scold George on his new answering machine. Let’s hope he doesn’t come.

  I had the following thoughts when Thomas was lying on the bed looking dead.

  • Horror lest he needed CPR or emergency first aid which I don’t remember how to give or that he be already dead while I was figuring out what to do. It took me a while to think emergency loud enough to go to the phone and dial 9-1-1 with my heart jumping at what to tell the operator.

  • Regret for the Cruise, remembering my head full of whales and fjords, as I realized we would have been in Oslo today. Thank God for cancellation insurance.

  • Answer to the Question, Who Will Go First? Now I can think with a clear conscience how to get along after he’s gone. I used to wonder how much time I’d have for widowhood. It looks like I’ll have plenty now, more than I want.

  • Predictable Regret. I saw all forty-seven years in Thomas’s white head on the hospital pillow, with his open mouth and sleep rattling his throat. I saw him with the nurses’ eyes, how old he looked to them. Not to me. I thought we were still the Younger Generation. You’re the Middle Generation and Grandpa and Grandma are the Older one.

  • Widow. I try to adapt to the words that fit. The word girl is obsolete. Widows grieve. It’s part of the definition. Don’t tell anyone, but I seem to be more exhilarated than grieved. Changes excite me, history in the making. I wonder what unpredictable feelings are sneaking across the map, and the danger of being ambushed by a revolutionary crowd.

  • Worst Case. This would be if Thomas doesn’t die but drags on in ambiguous illness in a wheelchair needing to be diapered, crotchety, helpless, etcetera.

  • What to tell people. I teeter between recluse and gregarious. I want to chatter. On the other hand, I’m not ready. I need to prepare my speech. That’s why I’m writing you. It gives me practice, for my speech isn’t ready.

  PART TWO

  FRIDAY

  LUCY WESTERLY: Composed in bed

  Thanks for your message. I’ll describe it for you. Someone’s using a tractor this early. A shovel clinking near the garage. Foghorn—though the air seems clear. It must be fog in the harbor or out at sea. You hear it too unless your sealed windows keep it out. Overcast, rain coming. The curtains lift indicating an east breeze, and Freud sits in the window sniffing the sea and listening to birds. He hears robin, song sparrow, house sparrow. Seagulls beyond the houses like a field full of blades of grass. In the gaps a gasoline motor on a fishing boat, assuming it’s a fishing boat.

  I’m too excited, agitated. If you’re going to die now, there’s something I ought to tell you. I need to tell you because if you die, we’re going to be inundated, you and I. Already I feel the pressure on the dam. We’re going to be swept into the torrent of World Bereavement, and we’ll forget everything. I need to tell you like a tree to hang on to while the waters rush by. If I can remember what it was.

  Second letter.

  Mother, this excitement I feel, it doesn’t fit. I need advice. I need advice on what to do if this ends. If I’m obliged to stay on this island, and where I can go if I don’t.

  My God! All the people coming and the things I have to do. I should have been up. He must be dead by now. I shouldn’t have slept.

  ABEL JEFFCOAT: A speech

  Written Friday morning for possible use on a future occasion.

  A few words for my good friend Thomas Westerly, who passed or is passing or will shortly pass away. I last saw him at dinner last week wearing a jacket and tie, still pretending to be alive.

  I shouldn’t call him friend, since we have nothing in common. But I’m in a sentimental mood tonight. I met Tom three years ago, when I moved here. I bought my house, which you may have noticed, the big one near the harbor entrance which pays your taxes. Tom and his wife invited us to dinner. As much a newcomer and even more of an outsider than I, he thought he was upholding your famous Island hospitality, him with his gullible old heart. I know better. I asked him, Why did you retire to such a godforsaken place and he said, what the hell, it’s an island. He’d been looking forward to an island all his life and never thought how you people who live here might regard him.

  Him with his idealistic ideas, this ex-president of a university which you’d think was the top of his profession, pinnacle, acme, he was ashamed of his success. He told me so himself. What crap. You should know about life in the universities. It’s the only place in the world where the labor looks down on the management and if you go from labor to management they call you a sellout. Professors live the Life of the Mind and actually feel scorn for Deans and Presidents. That is, they pretend they do. My friend Thomas had it both ways. As President, he looked down on the scholars and scientists and teachers who never got to be President. As professor-at-heart, he looked down on his administrative colleagues, Deans, Provosts, other Presidents, and included himself for the finer scorn of it. However, if he hadn’t made it to president, he could not have afforded to live among us, you and me. It takes money to be rustic and romantic.

  Tom and I, we’re opposites. Diametrical. He’s all that liberal stuff you’d expect from one in his position. It’s built into the profession. Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton. ACLU. Have you read his speeches at River City University? Affirmative the action, dismantle the hegemony. Recycle the environment. Recycle integration. Iran the Contra. Hire women. Diversify the diversity. Recycle the canon. Ban the skinheads. Hire gays. Thank
your personal God he was President of a college and not these US and A. Recycle the faculty. Keep down the right wingers.

  You think I don’t mean it but I do, him and me, we come out of different worlds. He’s intelligentsia, I’m philistine, in spite of which you’ll find he’s all heart, the bleeding kind, whereas I’m all head, the hard kind. I’m business, corporate America, he’s academe. He’s geology, which means exhume the fossils. I’m bottom line, which means melt them down.

  One thing I’ll say for him. He wasn’t any good as President of River City University. Can’t say I blame him. A nonprofit institution is an absurdity to begin with, and university administration is a contradiction in terms, but if that’s where you put your bottom line you might as well save the top line for yourself. Don’t look him up in the history books. He did the best he could, and it’s not his fault. What am I saying? Of course it was his fault, but who cares when you’re seventy-plus years old and dying? At seventy it don’t matter if half your life was stupid. What matters is being seventy, and circumstances contingent upon that.

  The difference between him and me is that he was President but I was Board. If I’d been his Board, his job would be to come to me hat in hand, and mine would be to say No.

  You ask, How did you two get along? I’ll tell you. In retirement you don’t care. He didn’t mind that I’m a dirty capitalist. That I screw the poor and suppress the arts and exclude the blacks and vote Republican, and built myself a fortified house on an island miles out from a vengeful world. Now he’s retired, he don’t give a shit about principle. Never did, really. He thinks he’s a good man, has his heart set on it. We can indulge him in that.

  What we do, we don’t have to talk. We play chess. We’re matched. Chess is a quiet game, good for friends, especially friends who have nothing in common.

  God damn. How to end? I hope he don’t die, but I suppose he will. That’s a damn shame.

  ANN REALM: To her husband Frank