by Molly Giles
Kay caught a glimpse of a silver whiskey flask in the folds of her coat and a handful of pearl-colored pills in her palm. “Yes,” Kay said. “You did.”
“Because I am so so sorry. For everything, darling. It’s just that I have cancer.”
“Mom …”
“You don’t have cancer so you don’t know how it feels. You can play another concert another place another day. You don’t need me to come coughing after you all your life. But I can’t. I don’t have a life. I have no legs, you know, Kay. And now I have cancer. What do you think about that? Do you think that’s fair? No. Don’t answer. I can tell what you’re thinking you little bitch don’t think I can’t and I don’t like it. You think I deserve this, don’t you. You think I’ve done this to myself.”
“I don’t think anything, Mom.”
“Now look what you’ve gone and done.” Francis’s words were jocular, but Kay knew the cold tone. He slipped into the car and fastened Ida’s seat belt over her mink lap robe. “Just when I’d gotten her calmed down too.” He gave Kay another of the stony looks that stopped her heart in mid-beat. As if she were an enemy. Kay stood back and watched as he started the car and drove away. As she turned back to the church she was startled to see she wasn’t alone. Glo was still there, watching too.
Ida bowed her head and pressed her hands together but she had scarcely begun the “Our Father” when here they came again, her husband, her daughter, naked as apes, sucking and pumping into each other as they tumbled down beside her. The bed rose and fell. It was intolerable. “I cannot stand this anymore,” she said. She struggled up to see Francis peering down at her. He looked frightened. He should be. “Darling,” she said, her throat thick. “There’s a piece of paper by the phone with a name on it. Call him for me, will you?”
“Father Bliss?” Francis said. “The Catholic priest?”
“Father Bliss,” Ida echoed. She could scarcely hear herself she felt so far away. “He’s going to save us.”
“Speak for yourself,” Francis said. But he dialed.
Eight
Father Bliss was tall and strong and it didn’t matter that he wasn’t very bright; in fact, it was almost better. He went straight to the bedroom window where Ida pointed, looked out, and said in a deep thrilling voice, “Begone.” He made the sign of the cross. The winter light gleamed on his thick silver hair. Then he turned to Ida, who was leaning forward on her pillows with her hands clasped. “Is that better?”
Ida laughed and nodded. The word “begone” made her shiver with pleasure. The horse and the two torturers had been gone since Christmas but there was no sense telling Father Bliss that; he’d leave too. He was a little like Kay in that regard: if you didn’t give him some small task to do to make him feel useful, he’d go home. And she didn’t want him to go yet. She gestured toward the empty wheelchair by the bed and shivered again as he crossed the room and sat down. He was the best-looking man she had ever seen in her life. He even smelled good: like Ivory soap and apples. “I feel safe when you’re here,” she said.
“You are always safe,” Father Bliss reminded her. “God is always with you.”
“It doesn’t feel like it,” Ida said, adding hastily, “Yet. Maybe it will when I get used to Him.” She reached for her cigarettes, lying within reach on the bedspread, hesitated, laid her hand flat. She hadn’t had a cigarette today. Hadn’t wanted one. All her vices were disappearing. She herself was disappearing. “Every day in every way,” she recited, trying to sound hopeful. “I do feel I’m getting closer to Him, though.”
“How can you get closer,” Father Bliss said, “to someone you are already part of?” He furrowed handsomely. “That’s like trying to be the nose on the outside of the face when you are already the air on the inside of the lungs. It’s not possible, is it?”
“No,” Ida said. “I guess not.” She kept her hand on the bedspread, hoping he would cover it with his own. He had done that once, during his first visit. She had told him the truth from the start—the only person she had ever told the truth to—and he knew her sins, not all the little ones, there were too many of those, but the big ones, the important ones, he knew those. He knew she had been a bad daughter, a bad wife, and a bad mother. What he didn’t know, what she hadn’t told him, was that she was afraid she had already become a bad Catholic.
“When I pray,” she said now, “I drift off.”
Father Bliss smiled, his grey eyes on the distance.
“I drift off,” Ida repeated, raising her voice.
“Ah.” He blinked. “And where do you go?”
“Nowhere. That’s so frightening. I feel suspended in nowhere. It’s better than before,” she added, “when I had the horse and the demons. Then I was in hell.”
“You don’t need to worry about hell,” Father Bliss said.
“No, I know, you told me, my soul will go to heaven, thanks to you and the beautiful, wonderful Holy Roman Catholic Church.” She plucked at the spread and glanced at him, hesitant. “That frankly is one of the reasons I decided to convert.”
“It doesn’t matter what your reasons are. God does not care what car you drive to His garage.”
“Yes, I know that in eternity I will be at peace and that’s a relief. But it’s now …” Ida continued. “Now that is so brutal.”
“ ‘Brutal’ is a hard word,” Father Bliss said.
“My life is hard.” Ida opened her mouth to say more but then closed it. How could she explain to him, to anyone, how isolated she felt. How alone. Even Francis didn’t know. Jim Deeds knew, but Jim Deeds was a doctor and didn’t care. Kay looked sometimes as if she knew, but Ida had seen that same look of sympathetic understanding cross Kay’s face when Nicky pinched his finger on the nutcracker or Stacy complained about a bad haircut. The sheer effort, will, and courage it took to lift a coffee cup, attend a conversation, or watch the evening news when all the time she felt on fire and in orbit, like a disintegrating meteorite, wanting to scream Help me help me help me when she knew that no one could. It didn’t matter. Other people’s pity was poison and always had been. I don’t need it, Ida thought. I never have and I never will. “I’ve had to fight for everything I’ve ever wanted,” she said.
“That’s all over now,” Father Bliss said. And without warning his hand, warm, strong, wonderfully human, covered hers. She almost shouted with pleasure. But nothing was simple. She had to risk what she had just been granted.
She took a deep breath. “I never told you who those demons were. They were my daughter Kay and my husband Francis. And they were fornicating.”
She glanced up through her lashes.
Maybe Father Bliss didn’t know what the word “fornicating” meant. He was looking calmly at the far side of the bed where Francis’s pillow and ashtray and golf magazines lay. Ida turned her head and looked too. A hot flood of tears caught her by surprise, streamed down her face. She remembered how astonished Mimi Johns had been to learn that Francis still slept with her even after the amputations. But that was how Francis was, that’s how he showed things. He didn’t make love to her anymore, hadn’t since last summer, always had an excuse, an early meeting, a late appointment. But he never acted as if she repelled him. Never acted as if she were only half a woman now. And in the middle of the night when she reached for him he was there, slight, sour, snoring. “It wasn’t real, was it?” she asked.
“I don’t see how,” said Father Bliss.
“I’m a useless old cripple,” Ida blurted. “With a sick, filthy mind.”
“You are God’s child,” Father Bliss corrected her.
Ida softened and settled under the touch of his clean white hand. Then, eyes on her own reflection in the vanity mirror, her pale face distant as a friend left on shore, she let loose a last flash of anger and hurt. “Kay would never have the guts to do something like that anyway,” she said. “Kay’s afraid of her own shadow. And Francis. You know what he says about incest. ‘If she’s not good enough for her own family, wh
o else would want her?’ That’s just a joke,” she added, catching Father Bliss’s mute, troubled stare. “That’s Francis’s sick sense of humor.” And despite herself, she laughed.
Her laugh was the first thing Kay heard when she came in the next week. She banged the front door behind her, propped her umbrella in the stand, and slipped out of her boots. Outside, the January rain fell fast and cold. “You sound happy,” she called. She padded toward the bedroom in her stocking feet with a dripping bouquet of garden narcissus held in front of her. She avoided her reflection in the mirrored hall. She knew what she looked like. Sweets, smokes, the daily hangover, a run of rained-out runs with Zabeth, insomnia, poverty, and Neal’s silent celibacy were doing her in. Plus she had not seen Charles Lichtman since the concert two months before. His bicycle was locked up; his house was deserted. Where had he gone? Was it her fault he’d left?
Greta met her at the doorway, a tense, tiny German woman with a stagy manner. She clapped her hands, said, “Oh how vunnerful,” and grabbed the bouquet. Kay, caught off guard, instinctively pulled back. Ida laughed from the bed again and Coco barked from her cage in the kitchen.
“Let Greta do what she wants,” Ida advised, stopping to cough. “You’ll just be sorry if you don’t.”
Ida was wearing a new nightgown today, yellow silk with roses and an edge of soft lace. Her hair had been washed and brushed into a light shiny cap. Kay found her eyes skipping over the heavy silver crucifix as automatically now as they skipped over the flat space under Ida’s blankets; she was stopped for a moment by the large white Bible open in Ida’s hands but was relieved to see that the remote control to the television set was being used as a bookmark.
“Now your dotter is here,” Greta said darkly, behind her, “we turn you.”
“Can’t we do it later?” Kay watched as Ida batted her eyelashes at Greta and in a baby voice added, “I haven’t even had lunch yet.”
“What can I do with her? She has the bedsores and needs to be turned. But! She is impossible.” Greta flung her hands out and pivoted toward Kay. “Today at least she wants lunch. I make her such a nice lunch too. Soup.”
“Not that sick soup,” Ida flirted.
“Nonono.” Greta wagged a finger. “This is good chicken soup. Just the way you like it. I use the bouillon, and then I add some carrot, some onion, some parsley …”
“No Cream of Wheat?”
“No, Ida. No Cream of Wheat. That is only for when I make you the sick soup and today is not a sick day. Your daughter is here. Your husband will be home soon. Father Bliss—oh! what a dreamboat—will be coming soon too. So today is a good day.” Greta rolled her eyes, clasped her hands, and backed out.
“Wow,” Kay breathed.
“Don’t be mean.” Ida settled back, serene, and soon Greta bustled in again with a bed tray set with a covered bowl, a plate of cold toast, and the narcissus, clipped to an even four inches and wedged into a baby-food jar. She put the tray over Ida’s blanket and set the jar down loudly by another enormous vase of black roses. Kay picked up the card. Glo Sinclair must be supporting the flower industry single-handedly.
“First your medicine,” Greta fussed, and Kay looked up to see Ida take the dime store demitasse Victor had given her for Mother’s Day when he was ten and sip something yellow. She dribbled, said “Damn,” handed the cup back to Greta, picked up her spoon, and bent over her soup.
“Don’t watch,” she said to Kay. “I slurp. Francis can’t bear it.”
“I’m not as delicate as Dad.” Kay remembered Francis imitating her and Victor when they were children, chewing with his mouth open, his eyes cold with contempt. Lucky Mom, she thought, she gets to see that side of him now. Idly she picked up the Bible and turned as she did with most books to the back. She stopped at a line from Revelation: “… and lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood …”
“It’s like a cartoon, isn’t it,” she mused. “Exactly the sort of thing I don’t let Nicky watch on Saturday mornings. Pow. Bang. Boom. Instant apocalypse.”
“What is apocalypse, Kay?”
Kay looked up. Ida waited, soup spoon in hand. Didn’t she know? Or was the yellowish medicine affecting her? Was the cancer jangling her brain again? Wasn’t she still in remission? She had made perfect sense—almost perfect sense—since Christmas. But if Greta called this a “good” day, there must be “bad” days, days Kay didn’t hear about. Sick days. “It means the end of the world, Mom.”
“Like that movie Francis rented last week. Apocalypse Now.”
“Dad rented that?” Kay dropped her eyes and read another line. “Scary stuff,” she decided, closing the book. She looked up, surprised to find Ida watching her.
“You’re so funny.”
“I am?”
“Yes. You’re jealous of Francis and Greta and Father Bliss and now you’re jealous of the Holy Bible.”
“I am not. What do you mean?”
“You’ve always had a green streak a mile wide.” Ida looked at her curiously. “You do know I love you, don’t you?”
“Sure. No. I don’t know. I’ve never known anyone loves me.”
“Nonsense.”
Kay shrugged, eyes down. “You didn’t like me when I was a baby.”
“You had colic. And you were awfully … I don’t know … clingy. But I like you now. Isn’t that enough? I especially like it that you have been coming up and seeing me as often as you have. It gives me enormous pleasure.”
That’s not the same as loving someone, Kay thought. But—“It’s my pleasure,” she said. It was. “Really.”
“And as for poor John …”
“Who?”
“Young Saint John who wrote Revelation. He just got too much sun. That’s what Father Bliss thinks. He was out there all alone on the rocks; there weren’t any trees or shade in Ephesus so he got overexposed and probably had a minor stroke. Everything’s changed now of course. The whole coastline’s gone. It’s not even an island anymore. Oh! Guess what! Alice died yesterday!”
Kay pulled herself back from Ephesus, wherever that was. Alice Bernard? Alice Bernard had come to the concert in November. She and Howard had tiptoed in late behind the Junior Bentleys, quaking with giggles; Alice had produced a thermos of hot spiced rum from the pocket of her fur coat during intermission. She hadn’t looked sick.
“Melanoma. Howard is quite upset. But he’ll be all right. He knows how to cook. And Alice used to go back East to visit her sisters every summer so he knows how to wake up alone. And he has friends. He meets with other men and they play drums. I guess you’d call them a … whatdoyoucallit …”
“Support group?”
“Yes. But Francis. I don’t think Francis has a support group.”
Kay shook her head. It was hard to imagine Francis in any group at all.
“I don’t know what will happen to Francis,” Ida said. “He doesn’t have anyone.”
“He has lots of people,” Kay said. “Lots of friends. Plus Victor, and”—less certain—“me.”
“He acts so independent but he’s going to fall apart. Oh look.” Ida touched her napkin to her face. “Am I sweating or what?”
Kay took the napkin and dabbed the perspiration gently off her mother’s cheek and hairline.
“He’s shy,” Ida continued. “Cut off. He doesn’t have the first idea about how to take care of himself. He’ll just hole up here with his crossword puzzles and never go out. If I just had six more months …”
“You do!” Kay began, trying to sound firm and hide her panic, but Ida silenced her with a sad, steady look.
“… six more months of halfway decent health, you know what I’d do? I’d put this house on the market, sell it, and make Francis buy one of those new condominiums by the golf course. He needs fresh air and exercise and upbeat jolly company. He needs a woman.”
“You’re a woman.”
“No, Kay. I mean a woman with two l
egs. Maybe his old girlfriend will hunt him down again. That little architectress from New York. She was very much in love with him, you know, but I don’t believe he’s given her two thoughts since he came back to us. He’s like that. Cold. Would you please rub my foot?”
“What architectress? You don’t have a foot.”
“Rub where it would be if I did.”
“Here?”
“Good. Thank you. Yes, you knew he left us to have an affair, didn’t you? You didn’t? Well it doesn’t matter. We got him back, you and I. And then Victor was born. The thing about love, Kay, you have to fight for it. You can’t just wait for it to come to you. You have to reach out and grab it and then you have to hold on to it. It’s a struggle, like everything else. You’ve had things easy. It’s all been handed to you on a silver platter. Now promise me one thing? Are you listening? Promise you won’t fuck your father?”
Kay started, dropping the invisible foot.
“Promise?” Ida repeated.
“Are you crazy?”
“I don’t know. Am I?”
“Yeah. Yes. I’d say you are. Sick …”
Ida chuckled.
“… and crazy.”
Ida pushed a package of Merits across the bed. “Don’t you want a cigarette, Kay?”
“Yes,” Kay said. “I do.” She lit one for herself and offered one to Ida, which Ida waved away. Kay’s hand trembled in time to the rain that ticked on the skylight like a loud clock. How far had the cancer gone? How much of Ida was it taking? She stubbed the cigarette out. “I’ve never even seen Dad naked,” she said at last.
“He’s modest,” Ida agreed.
“He wears shoes and socks to the beach.”
“Yes, his skin is white as a girl’s. Say, is there any stuff left in that cup?”
Kay picked up the demitasse and looked at the few yellow drops left on the bottom. “What kind of dope are you taking?”
“I don’t know. Francis gets it from somewhere. He wants to give me marijuana too. Can you see that? You think I’m bad now?”
“I don’t know … marijuana’s supposed to help with pain.”
