by David Gates
The telephone bill is sixty-eight dollars!
I study it and study it. Most of the calls are to Wylie. One to Scottsdale, Arizona, which must be Alice’s sister Celia. Framingham (her friend June Latham), Taunton (her brother Herb), Taunton again. Oh, I suppose it’s correct. I’ve long given up trying to make sense of all those pages they send. I lay the thing down and look out the window.
“Wylie say?” I ask. It looks like such a long way down there to the mailbox. How had I managed it? The trees are dead motionless, even in their smallest branches, but beyond them, in the pure blue, a small cloud riddled with blue gaps is traveling steadily from left to right. Its shape slowly changes as it moves. On a high branch of our apple tree is perched a bird—a robin, if it pleases Alice to think so—that’s lifting its throat and opening its beak. Singing, apparently. A tiny speck drops straight, swift and silent from below its tail. This simple process is not an occasion for shame. At least among those of His creatures who are not accountable.
Alice hasn’t answered. I turn away from the window, and she’s holding the letter out to me with an expression I don’t know what to make of. Glad, but something else, too. It’s the expression I caught when she first watched me, cheered on by Mrs. Midgely, lurching up a flight of steps. I take the letter with my good hand. Like all Wylie’s letters, it’s written in blue felttip on lined notebook paper. Since they never taught penmanship at that school of hers—I came close to pulling her out of there because of it—her handwriting, part script, part print, still looks like that of a child. Though by no means as bad as mine looks now. As for her style, so-called, we also have progressive education to thank.
Dear Mom & Dad,
I thought I would tell you this in a letter instead of on the phone because I thought you might like having this letter to keep. Not to keep you in suspense anymore, you are going to be grandparents! I am having a baby sometime the beginning of December. We found out today and are so thrilled. I sort of wanted you to know right off by phone but thought this best. Please do phone though when you get this, but I decided you would like to have this to keep. Jeffrey sends his love.
Love you alot, Wylie
Well, my first reaction is, why all this folderol about sentimental keepsakes when the plain truth of it is, Wylie can no longer bear talking to me on the telephone. And of course such a piece of news might well have set me off, since I’m so—they have a wonderful expression for it—emotionally labile.
I tried to feel something more appropriate. I mean, good heavens, a grandchild.
“Oh, I’m so glad,” says Alice. “I thought she didn’t want children.”
“Trend the trend now the trend,” I say.
“The trend? I don’t like to think of Wylie as part of any trend.”
I wave my hand and say, “Shining individual,” meaning Fine, have it your way. Alice cocks her head: more gabble she won’t bother trying to decode. She looks at her wristwatch.
“Almost noon,” she says. “So it’s about nine o’clock.” She picks up the phone.
It’s so quiet in our house that I can hear the purr of the telephone ringing on the other end. Save this letter! Save it for when, for pity’s sake? Things like this make you realize that Wylie still thinks of us as we were when she was a child. I recall the time, a couple of years ago, when she was still living in New York, we came down to visit and she walked Alice’s legs off shopping. More to the point, look at her decision to move a continent away from us. The pace was slower out there, she said. The air was better. The air was better! I blame Jeffrey, in part. Of course this was before my shock; would she make the same choice today? I don’t know. I don’t suppose I want to know.
As Alice listens to the phone ring and ring, her smile becomes less and less a smile. Finally it’s not a smile at all. She lays the receiver back down. Here we are.
It’s a thing I try not to dwell on, but at times—talk to myself as I will, pray as I will for understanding—I can see no spiritual significance whatever in my ruin. And let’s for heaven’s sake not be mealy-mouthed about it: I am ruined, in this life. No appeal, no going back. Dragging a half-dead body from room to room, numb lips and steak-thick tongue refusing to move as I command. If I am of use at all anymore, it can only be as an example of patient endurance. Or, more likely, of the perils of cholesterol. Since I was neither a smoker nor (in recent years) a drinker, it keeps coming back to that, doesn’t it? Apparently I’ve thrown away my birthright—the everyday miracle of a functioning human body—for the sake of two eggs, every morning for forty years, over easy. For the sake of two strips of bacon, wet with fat, laid parallel beside the eggs, and the whole thing set before me like the four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. Initially out of love and ignorance, then later, as the magazine articles began to appear, out of love alone.
“He’s saying you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” Alice said to Dr. Ngo, translating for me. “He hates the breakfasts.”
“Ah,” said Dr. Ngo. “Two time a week it not hurt him, you understand?”
I understood. This meant: why not pop off a little sooner with a few familiar comforts, since pop off I must?
“I am of more value than my pleasures,” I said, or tried to say What drunken smear of vowels came out I’m unwilling to remember. What I meant was that I mattered and must persist.
“Say that again, dear?” Alice said.
I shook my head no and swatted the air with my good hand: Go away, go away. What I had wanted to say bordered on blasphemy. Had I forgotten that I was to have life everlasting?
But since my purchase on this life (though no one will say so) seems none too certain, it has been decided that we must lose no time in wishing Wylie joy in person. Decided, I need hardly add, by Alice and Wylie. These days I’m doing well to get a What do you think, dear? And since Wylie is not to travel—in fact, must spend much of her time lying down—we are to come to them. So it’s heigh-ho for Seattle. What do you think, dear?
What I think is, I’ll do as I’m bid. If I can be wheeled aboard an airplane, I can certainly sit for six hours. What else do I do? These terrorists hold no terrors for me, not because I’m armed in faith particularly—I wish I could say I was—but because no place seems safer than any other anymore. When we left Woburn there was a bad element moving in. In Florida you have your drug lords, and people shooting at you from the overpasses on I-295. Our problem up here is the roughnecks who ride the back roads in loud cars. They listen to the metal music.
Alice keeps asking, Aren’t you looking forward to seeing Wylie? Her aim is to keep me looking forward. What can I say but yes? Still, much as I love Wylie—and I do look forward—I must admit that she can be trying. She’s become one of those people who put bumper stickers on their automobiles—at one point, I recall, she had replaced VISUALIZE PEACE with TEACH PEACE, which seemed to me at least a small step away from delusion—and who believe we can communicate with the plants and the dolphins. I blame Bard College. And I imagine Jeffrey encourages it. I used to tell her, You’d best forget the dolphins and learn to talk to your Savior. These days I’ve come to accept that these things sink in if and when He wills them to. Now, some Christians—our minister up here is one—will tell you that the whole what they call New Age is of the devil. We’ll know someday: Every man’s work shall be made manifest. But we can be sure today that it’s a distraction and a time-waster, which is spiritual danger enough right there, it seems to me. The night cometh when no man can work. Wylie has told Alice that she’s already begun talking to the baby inside her. I hope it takes what it’s hearing with a good-sized grain of salt! I think Wylie imagines that this visit will have given her child at least this much acquaintance with its grandfather. Covering her bases, don’t you see.
I’m ashamed to say I think about it, too. As if I were clutching at a moving train, crying, At least remember me. (Keep me mindful that another home is prepared for me and that I shall have a new body, incorruptible.) I can remember my
own grandfather. Or at least I remember remembering him. He used to talk about the Civil War; he was twelve, I believe, when it ended. Now, his father had become an abolitionist—a Unitarian, he was—and when the news came that President Lincoln was dead, he had all the children dressed up in mourning. And my grandfather had a fistfight with a neighbor boy whose family hated the colored. The Coleys lived in Westerly in those days. And still lived there, in the old house, until my father died in ’41, and we still went to the Unitarian church. You know the saying, how the Unitarians believe in one God at most. Supposed to be a joke. But it chills me now to remember that beautiful white church house from which the Holy Spirit was so resoundingly absent. Back then, of course, I liked the hymn-singing, and that was that.
I thought of my grandfather’s story about President Lincoln the other night when we saw Aretha Franklin on the television, singing a song about the turnpike of love, I think it was, and lifting her fleshy arms above her head. A woman of her age and size ought not to be seen in a sleeveless dress. It seemed impossible that I could have lived so long as to have known someone who’d been alive when Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. I don’t know how we came to be watching such a thing; Alice and I used to enjoy Mahalia Jackson, but this one is too screechy. Sometimes we’ll be watching a program and then find ourselves watching the next program and the program after without meaning to. Up here we still get all three networks, naturally. And PBS, if you can put up with their political slant. But those people on the local news programs! So young and so coarse-looking. And so poorly spoken, as if they had all just come out of two-year colleges. That’s unchristian of me, I suppose. My own ruined speech is appropriate chastisement.
Just as my having had no son—I’ve often thought this—may have been chastisement for my pride in family. (There’s only one family: the family of His saints.) Though perhaps it’s another, more malignant form of pride to believe myself singled out for chastisement. But for whatever reason, I am the last of the Coleys. There are other people named Coley, of course, but of our Coleys I am the last. We have become a branch of the family tree of people named Gundersen. Alice and I are often asked—or were, back when we socialized—if Wylie is a family name. I’d always say, Why, how’d you guess? to make light of the unusualness. The Wylies are my mother’s people. (Alice, of course, is a Stannard.) We knew the name might sound awkward with “Coley,” so we gave her the middle name Jane as a sort of buffer. When I was a boy, I knew a Mary Carey who called herself Mary Jane—she hadn’t been so christened—so we thought Wylie Jane Coley would sound all right. Naturally we couldn’t have foreseen that the other children would call her Wylie Coyote and tease her by yelling “Beep beep” and running away from her. (It had to do with some show on the television.) I’m afraid it didn’t mollify her when I told her that one of her Wylie forebears had been at the first Constitutional Convention! She called herself Jane from when she was eight or nine until she went away to college; then she apparently decided that “Wylie” would put her one up on the Wendys and Jennifers.
Though she hardly needed such help: even as a little girl she was always the prettiest in a group. Or so her father thought. She was almost plump in grade school. When I first went over to the Paquettes’—and if there’s a silver lining to this whole business, it’s that I’m always furnished with an excuse not to go over to the Paquettes’—I was reminded of her little belly by that wooden Buddha or whatever it is on top of their television set. (This in a supposedly Christian home! Of course, they’re Roman Catholics.) When she was about twelve, though, she began to starve herself and hasn’t stopped to this day. Now, I don’t mean that she was ever in danger of going the way of that other singer, Karen … I’ve lost the name. (Alice and I watched that poor soul on the television along toward the last, and we could both see she wasn’t well.) But even two summers ago, when Wylie came east, I noticed her ribs under her T-shirt when she bent to tie her shoes. (Carpenter, of course. You wouldn’t think a Christian could forget that.) Alice, in fact, is concerned about the baby on this account. Another reason for our trip, though naturally she’s not saying so to Wylie.
The story I always tell about Wylie—always told—is the time we went to Alice’s brother’s house down in Taunton for Christmas. Herb had married a Roman Catholic girl, and nothing would do but we had to go to their Christmas Eve mass. Well, when we got into the church, they had the biggest crucifix you ever saw hanging over the altar. The Christ wasn’t quite life-sized, but it must have been a good three or four feet long, with skin the color of a Band-Aid and a white-painted loincloth. The eyes wide open on it. Believe you me, Wylie’s eyes opened pretty wide, too: we, of course, had just the plain gold cross in our church. “Mommy?” she said, loud enough for everybody in the place to hear. “How come he’s got diapers on?” To this day, Wylie hates to have that one told on her, though it’s a perfectly harmless story.
These days I wear a diaper.
The story I never tell about Wylie is this. One afternoon I surprised her and the little neighbor girl behind the garage, both of them with their pants down. (This was at our house in Woburn.) I can still remember that little girl’s name, Myra Meyers. Speaking of names somebody ought to have thought twice about. I sent her about her business, then grabbed Wylie by the arm and marched her right inside and whaled the living daylights out of her. These days, of course, they say you’re not accountable: that you are what you are and not what you make up your mind to be. That it’s all genetic—drinkers, too, like myself, or the mail lady’s husband. That you’re helpless to change yourself and certainly can’t do anything for anybody else and never mind what God tells us in His word. Well, I believe I changed Wylie that day. Or at least helped her on toward the life she has now, with a husband (though not someone we might have chosen for her) and about to begin a family (however late). And away from—the old-fashioned word is abominations, but I’ll say abnormalities. (My own theory is, that’s what’s wrong with the mail lady, children or no children.) I don’t imagine Wylie realizes to this day—if she ever thinks of it—that each stroke burned with my love for her. But the day is coming when all that is hidden shall be revealed.
When I think back about the first great intervention in my life (I count my shock as the second), I’m ashamed to remember how long I tried to hold out. I first sought the conventional remedy for a man of my background and education. One takes one’s child to see Fantasia, one dreams that night of the devil, one’s terror does not abate the next morning, nor the next, nor the next. After two weeks of this, one scurries to a psychiatrist. To whom one is induced to complain about one’s own childhood. One is talked around into trying to believe that one had such and such feelings about one’s father and mother: the so-called family romance. (Oh, yes, I know the jargon.) It is pointed out that the word abate is in itself a not insignificant choice. The terror still does not abate.
Then one has a quote unquote chance encounter with a friend who quote unquote just happens to be a Christian.
This was a fellow named John Milliken, whom I’d known when we were both graduate students at Stanford. He actually took his Ph.D.; I’d had to leave and go back to New England when my father died. The little money Alice made at the library was barely enough for the two of us, and now there was Mother to think of. Eventually I was lucky enough to catch on with what was then a scrappy new company (a shoestring operation in those days, right after the war), willing to hire a young chemist without an advanced degree. Well, Milliken, to make a long story short, ended up working for an outfit we did business with and living just over in Arlington. So he and I would get together two or three times over the course of a year. We might have seen more of each other, but I was a new father and he was a bachelor. And Alice never warmed up to him, before or after.
One Saturday night, probably a month into my troubles, he and I sat late in the bar of the old Parker House and I opened up to him. Alice by this time had taken the baby and gone to stay with Herb and Evelyn
in Taunton; we were not calling it a separation. Desperate as I was, I would hardly have told Milliken about it had I not been drinking. In fact, I was hoping he’d call it a night so I could slip over to Scollay Square, to a certain bar I had discovered and wanted to know more about. (The thought of which terrifies me to this day.) But Milliken kept sitting there, nursing his one Manhattan, nodding, putting in a word or two. More or less, I’m bound to say, in the manner of the doctor I’d been seeing. Though more kindly.
“Well, Lew,” he said, when I told him about my dream and the terror that wasn’t going away, “has it occurred to you to take this thing seriously?”
“What the Christ do you think I’m doing?” I said.
He shook his head. “Why don’t I swing by your house tomorrow morning. I’ve got the hangover cure to end all hangover cures. Are you all right to drive, by the way?”
I was not. The room, in fact, looked tilted and seemed to be going silent. I was not all right to live.
“I think you’d best let me drop you,” he said. “We can always pick up your car tomorrow. Unless you’re afraid to be by yourself tonight. In which case, I’ve a fold-out sofa you’re welcome to.”
Years later, when I read C. S. Lewis—so often a help to me, and I wish I had the strength of mind to read him now—I was struck by what he said about his conversion. I believe I still have it by heart. When we set out—he was riding to the zoo in London in the sidecar of somebody’s motorcycle—I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. That’s what it was like, riding to John Milliken’s house. True, he did begin to pray aloud as we were passing over the Longfellow Bridge, with its stone towers like a castle keep. But around me it was quiet, and the faraway tune his voice was making seemed to blend in with something else that was happening. Out Main Street we flew and onto Massachusetts Avenue, and the people on the sidewalks seemed to pass each other in comradely fashion, like the angels in Jacob’s dream—a thing I hadn’t thought about since I was a boy in Sunday school—moving up and down the ladder that reached from earth to heaven. They began to be surrounded by a pulsing radiance, and I thought I saw some of them passing right through others. It didn’t strike me as out of the ordinary. I looked over at John Milliken: his profile glowed along its edge from hairline to Adam’s apple; light frosted his eyebrows. His lips were moving. I looked at his hands, gripping the wheel, his bulging knuckles imperfectly mirroring the wheel’s knuckled underside, a patch of hair on the top of each finger. I closed my eyes, and sounds rushed back in: the rubbery, rapid-fire whapping of tire treads on pavement, John Milliken’s voice saying And in Jesus Christ’s name we something something something, a sweet-toned car horn off somewhere. When I opened my eyes again, there we were: just a couple of fellows in a car heading out Massachusetts Avenue.
