Telling Time

by Austin Wright

  In spite of all this I feel sorry for her. I asked about her brothers fighting, and she said, The family’s finished. Done. Nice while it lasted, a good growing-up environment, but now it’s over. She’s going to Seattle as soon as she’s free and live for the future not the past.

  As for you and Greta, my advice is forget it. Don’t tell Lucy Realm. Don’t ask Aunt Edna. Certainly not Father or Beatrice. Keep Grandmother in the dark. Don’t confide in Melanie because she’s distraught nor Henry because he’s depressed. In fact, I don’t think you should tell anybody because you must find it hard to keep explaining that she isn’t really your sister.

  WILLIAM KEY: What to tell Patricia

  I finally met your man. I see now why you kept him away, plain as the color of his face. I wonder which of a variety of possible fears it was that prevented you from telling me.

  You Westerlys are all the same. You take your inspiration from your father, though it’s a different inspiration in each case, and you go crazy because there’s always a catch. Like Philip, who thinks of Thomas as organization and control, except for those intimate papers full of groping youth. Or Henry whose father was a model for sweet feeling, crushed by the authoritarian order and control. And you my love the skeptical rebel a little short of courage for your beliefs.

  Well. I was on the upper front deck with Philip and I saw Angela and Tommy talking to a black man in the bow below. A big man with a back pack and a baseball cap. Then suddenly the three of them appeared beside me on the deck.

  This big man holding out his hand at me, thick-chested, tough with a beard and dark skin, his heavy pack and well-made jacket and baseball hat with NY on it.

  Saying, Mr. Key? I’m Pete Arena.

  So that’s who Pete Arena is. We talked like civilized modern man. He asked about my work and the ACLU.

  I’m deliberately, intensely, energetically refusing to resist your plans. Go your own way. I stay as calm as my heart permits and act as if I wanted it as much as you. I use my professional training to bear everything intelligently.

  I wasn’t prepared for the helplessness I felt when I saw your Pete Arena as a live person. How real and big as well as dark and how powerless I am to stick even a toe outside the liberated circle within which I live.

  PHILIP WESTERLY: To Ann

  Here’s the news. There was a fight between your boys, someone else can explain it to you. In town, Sam Truro broke out at last and got his family killed. Himself too. Henry thinks Father was going to offer himself as hostage to Truro when he had his stroke. Wow. Patty and William are splitting. I met her new boyfriend on the boat. He’s black. Why must I specify that? If I didn’t mention it, would you think I had failed to tell you something important?

  Father’s papers are innocuous. I left them intact, and Mother can decide where to bestow them. Coda to Wyoming. Penny Glade the kissing teacher showed up at the funeral. A little old lady in a wheelchair. I missed her, unfortunately. She talked to Melanie and William. Father postponed calling her until he was dead, just the way he postponed kissing her, only this time it was too late.

  Henry thinks Father was full of guilt but that’s because Henry is full of guilt. What am I full of?

  Raw material for a poem.

  About looking down before the boat sailed at the fence beside the cargo shed where she scanned the ship for a last glimpse. About how she took care of me under the blanket, her girl face when I cried what a terrible world, her soft woman voice lullabying me. Crying now on the receding dock, the crumpled ex-girl face folded into the crowd. The deep chord of the ship’s whistle blast, lullaby to the bereaved mother as dark opens between ship and dock, water rushing in.

  About going west into the sky cleaned by last night’s cold front. Brisk afternoon sea, the ship vibrating faintly, tightening breeze, North Point Light behind, the dunes and road where Truro died. The high bow with its flag staff and black wind vane blowing. Faint blue of line of mainland west.

  When they look, no one will know that it’s missing. Not knowing there’s a gap, no one will see a gap.

  Poem about what?

  He was the model of a good man. Proof the good man can exist through cynicism, nihilism, and irony. Despite Patty, Henry, William Key, and skeptics. To make sure of this, keep out what the world can’t understand. Drop it into the unrecorded past until it never happened, like everything else that never happened.

  He returned to the idyll island finally to escape sociology. Also anthropology, psychology, and politics. The old heritage-carrier who had done his work, to donate what he had and forget the rest.

  Make it that he wanted to be good whether he was or not, and persuaded at least one of his children to emulate. That’s the point if the poem can take it, not that he succeeded or failed, only that he thought it important to want to be. Make the poem connect this with the concrete moment on the forward deck under the pilot house where the poet lets the wind blow his face. Life in the contemporary world all around, a wife below, children of all ages exploring the decks, a man with him by the rail soon to be dropped and another, black, a stranger introduced by children, to take the first man’s place. In the poem only the son tries to remember how the father looked, the sound of his voice, the pitch of his vocabulary in the wind screech where the sky is now blazing over the continent, our mainland country and home, turning it into a band of black under fire.

  Use the gulls screaming on the wind to drown out distractions such as stolen papers in a briefcase. Let the wind confuse the sensations of his face in an imitation of blindness so that he need not name colors or specify tears but use only what the poem requires.

  Turn away from the wind to look past the davits and lifeboats at the receding island. It fades into omnivorous blue before sinking in the sea beneath the advancing night. Bury the mourning mother with the dead father in the descending blue of the devouring poem.

  Dedicate the poem to the slave-binding past and bring it finally to the hospital room where you lie in the tiled walls, the empty light, back raised, ribs heavy, mouth an expanding hole in the room sucking up the walls, sea and sky and everything until the whole day has passed through inside out, and the whole world has reversed direction on the way back to the big bang.

  There’s no poem though. Too much bias. The night kills the words and soon you will forget everything.

  LUCY WESTERLY: To Ann and George

  Don’t tell the others but you were our favorites, you two. Maybe the mails will find George. Enclosed are copies of Dr. Dawson’s and William’s funeral talks, which I won’t venture to judge.

  I sat through the ceremony like a substitute funeral, not the real one. This is not a criticism, I was moved and grateful, so I don’t know why it felt like a substitute. We had a last family dinner which I hope is not a last family dinner. Expect both Balsam and Edna to die soon, which is too bad though it does seem temporarily unfair that they’re living and Thomas not. Their going will rectify that but leave a colder world behind, so I mustn’t rush anything. I’ll probably live a long time. Then I’ll be like Edna.

  JEROME DAWSON: Funeral talk

  What is there to say about the Old Prof, as he was known in this town? Six years ago he came to the Island to retire with Lucy. They stayed in the Inn and called Foersly’s real estate and came to me. In my office Lucy admitted that Thomas was not a believer but they thought the minister could give them advice, telling me how he had retired at sixty-six and wanted this place which he loved from the summers of childhood. So we gathered to help, and Joe Foersly found a house and Janet Prism introduced her friends. Also the doctors and our hospital. Neighbors took them to the Library and the Historical Society and the Island Museum and my wife acquainted them with a carpenter, plumber, handyman. We took them into the community. And though I seldom saw him in church, I saw him often around the village with his white hair, and though I regret his not being religious, I know he was a good intelligent man.

  Others will speak of who he was, praise his n
ature, record his works. Let me address the grief you feel and the monumental question on all our minds as we participate in this rite.

  The monumental question is this: how can a body so full of life turn into that inert and decaying copy of a man we call a corpse? What has become of the spirit we knew, with the vitality to plant a portion of itself in each of our souls?

  I’m told that Thomas did not believe in the heavenly solace in which this community believes. This may grieve us. How can you endure the foreverness of his going if there is no return in the end?

  Fortunately, Thomas was wrong. This is fact not fancy. I say it not in a spirit of argument but joyfully, for now that he has discovered the fact he is joyful too. Nor do I say it to condemn the genial skepticism which was the rule of his life. You will note that all my life I have marked and insisted upon the limits of skepticism, but I nevertheless do respect its uses. Skepticism was the natural habit of Thomas’s intellectual life. It’s an exploratory tool, helpful when you are trying to learn, if you don’t take it too seriously. It’s temporary, eventually you won’t need it. Thomas’s exploration is over now, the hunt is done, quest finished. He’s face to face with the ultimate and has discovered what we already knew. He has discovered God’s reason for death, which transforms all woe into joy. Do not grieve for Thomas, he lives in heaven. Since he thought he did not believe, I reckon he’s surprised to find himself there and maybe a little chagrined that the solution he so skeptically declined to accept was waiting for him so patiently.

  He’s there. We’ve had that assurance for two thousand years. Our souls do not die. The body cannot move without spirit, and the spirit being independent cannot be constrained by body. Proof is the Resurrection and with proof like that nothing more is needed. Take comfort, you will meet him again. He’s merely gone on a little ahead. Rejoice in his happiness now and yours in the time to come.

  I too look forward to meeting him in heaven. When that time comes I will congratulate him and tell him I spoke at his funeral and was glad to do so regardless of his beliefs. I’ll shake his hand and say, Thomas Westerly, you were a good man.

  WILLIAM KEY: Funeral talk

  I have one objection to what we just heard. The notion the soul is not confined by the body. Ask the lady in the wheelchair about that.

  When we visited in River City he used to take me to the faculty lunch. He liked to tease the chaplain, questions like what will our immortal souls do when the sun blows up and the earth is a cinder? Will we continue to dance around in the cold dead universe? What will be in our immortal souls? Will we retain our split personalities, our senility, and our chemical mood changes? There was a lot of talk in the faculty club and some of it was about things like that.

  Thomas at lunch. He talked about human skulls, which we all have. Like little fortresses, barriers of lead to keep the radiation in, or the turmoil of thought like boiling soup. What’s in your head, he says, you couldn’t tell me if you wanted to, but I’ll bet it’s full of wickedness along with the good. Flux and flow, Thomas says, which at any given moment you can never name because there are so many thoughts at the same time, right?

  So what you do, according to Thomas, you turn your thoughts into words, which is like picking up liquid with a leaking cup. Cupping a little of the liquid to turn into something solid. It’s not that hard, you may tell me, thinking how the words rush through your own garrulous lips, what could be easier than talk? But think how the words disappear when you speak, fast as they come, and all the residue of the unspoken too, besides which, who can remember anything anyone ever said? So you write or think your speech like writing, which makes you feel like one of these stencil boards, a piece of metal with holes for letters cut into it, the holes being your words. People know you by the words but never see the board. And you remain hidden in your skull, mysterious, immense, no shape or body, and what you say or write is not you but a replica of you.

  Think of that: the person you know through words is not the person but a replica. You live life creating replicas of yourself. What does it mean, friends? It means the replica is incomplete, like an image on a screen, but it draws attention from what isn’t visible, what you can’t show and can’t see except in reflection and oblique glances. No one knows you, least of all yourself.

  Which brings me to this. The secret of life, which in my view is secrecy itself. Our handicap and motivation, root of evil, root of joy. How did I come up with such a preposterous idea? It’s Thomas’s idea, the unavoidable result of the fact that we live like hermit crabs inside our skulls. We deal with secrecy all our lives: we pursue the secrets of others, we protect our own, keep some even from ourselves as we struggle to learn them, as Thomas would say by talking to ourselves or writing.

  The universe has its secrets too. We live like moles in the tunnels of ignorance, with language chipping like picks at the massive earth. The future, life emerging from darkness into light as time is unveiled, but even as it’s unveiled new darkness appears. The past, where what was known or partly known dissolves back into secrecy through the slippery hands of memory. Death. My colleague proposes that Thomas now dead knows all there is to know and is a little surprised by that knowledge. Try another view. Think with me about a place where there are no secrets and all there is to know is known. A consciousness transcending death. If there are no secrets you must dissolve the barrier skull which contains your consciousness. You must spill your eddying you-ness into the great all-ness. To partake of universal knowledge without secret you must be at one with no margin of ignorance, no process of learning or coming together. You must abandon your self, including your personal soul immortal or otherwise, to merge amalgamate into one.

  So how should we think of Thomas now he’s gone? Should we think him merged in the universal knowledge, melted in the transcendental stew? Or remember him as we knew him, who’ll never return to us except in our own circling thought? Take your pick. I believe Thomas would say that the Thomas we remember and miss is the replica. He would want us to remember the replica rather than the original. No one can know the whole Thomas, for he was infinite as the universe, whereas the replica was Thomas’s deliberate creation, manufactured with hardship and trial and not too bad a job in the end despite the inevitable flaws, patched spots, and loose connections.

  We’re here to filter the memory of the Thomas replica through the cacophony of his departure. It’s fragile, for the replica lives only in our minds. The job of creating the replica has passed from Thomas to us, distributed through all of us, a multiplicity of Thomas-replicas like an army of kites in the wind, your kite, my kite, frail and disintegrating, our kite versions of Thomas. Poor Thomas. They’re blowing away. Hang onto them while you can.

  LUCY WESTERLY: To Thomas or somebody

  I went back to the house. I parked in the garage and walked to the front, opened the door and went in. I saw the living room, our furniture, books, pictures, and through the doorway the dining room with the late afternoon sun. I heard the machine humming and identified it as the refrigerator. The afternoon paper was on the rug by your chair and I remembered William Key had sat there last. I took the ashtrays into the kitchen. There were glasses, cups and saucers, and Freud looked up at me by his dish. In the dining room I wondered when I would remove the extension leaves from the table. In the study, I wondered when I would pick up the files of your papers which the children last night had not put back. Your dictionary was open with the magnifying glass on the open page. I looked to see what words showed through the glass, but I knocked it: it jumped from diplex to diplopia to dinosaur. I felt a superstition against moving the glass or the dictionary.

  I switched on the radio without thinking and suddenly was hearing a familiar song in the old dead voice of Marlene Dietrich. It distracted me. It was a sad little song, though the words don’t sound sad, only rueful, dealing with a problem I’ll never have to face again:

  Falling in love again,

  What am I to do?

  That’
s all the words I remember. I listened and when the song was over I switched it off so as to hear it again in my head. I wondered why a song by Marlene Dietrich should haunt me now. I was never interested in Marlene Dietrich, who was my mother’s contemporary not mine. I couldn’t remember her movies and knew only a few of her songs. For years she was in the papers with pictures on the decks of ocean liners and getting off airplanes. She wore army uniforms and entertained the troops in World War Two. She was a friend of Ernest Hemingway, who praised her for exotic qualities and knowledge. With her arched eyebrows and long cigarette holder and deep bass voice full of irony, she stood for sophisticated celebrity in the outside world, the world of movies and magazines and America. She was a communicable symbol, which meant that everybody in my lifetime knew who she was, I could say her name and know the image in your mind. Through most of my life she was famous also for resisting age—famous legs still beautiful at fifty and sixty, her masklike face. Then suddenly she was too old and refused furiously thereafter to show her face. I saw her shortly before that, a farewell concert on television in which her face was veiled by a blurry lens, and she sang the song over and over like a theme, the one I had just heard:

  Falling in love again,

  What am I to do?

  The song seemed mysteriously and even unbearably sad. As I let it repeat, something happened to me. I thought, I am alone in the house. No one’s watching, no one can hear. Not even you, Thomas. There was some thought which I have forgotten and there was the melancholy music, and there was a distant scream like someone scalded or shocked. But the scream was not distant, it was close, it was in my ear, and after a moment I realized it had come out of me. Involuntary. I listened with amazement. It came up like a geyser. When I realized who was screaming I screamed louder. When I realized how still much louder was possible I pursued that loudness. I opened my throat, brought up the power of my lungs, stretched my back and howled and wailed and roared and sobbed. I was a hurricane.