Tiffany had the back of her hand on her brow and appeared to be yet unmoved.
“And now I could never do that. When I think back, I think that was the saddest loss in my life.”
She had her hand over her eyes.
“What I always wondered,” I said, “is when you take the host outside, do you talk to it the way I talked to the statue?”
She still had her hand over her eyes. But her lips were stretched more tightly, and I could see just a little of her teeth. She was trying not to cry.
“John, Chapter 16,” she said.
“What?”
“That’s what I would recite. ‘Behold, the hour cometh…’”
“I don’t know it. Tell me the rest.”
She rolled on her side, facing the wall. “It doesn’t matter,” she said softly. “I don’t say it anymore, and I don’t take the host.”
Tiffany spent the month of September in a day treatment program. Tobey Johnson said she was on medication for depression. We went once for a Friday fish fry at a Perkins near her house. She was changed; the medication gave her a sleepy look in the corner of her eyes. She ate little and didn’t even use the catsup, which she used to adore. She said that the psychiatrist was hopeful that the depression was reactive, rather than chronic. She needed some time away, Tiffany said, and she would call when it felt okay.
Then in the middle of October, when Tiffany was already back in school, I came out to the reception room between clients and Kathy Dade looked up at me in an unusually expectant way. “Tiffany phoned,” she said. “Her mother died this morning.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, but I knew you had only one client left this afternoon, so I told her to just come over.” Kathy looked uncertain.
“That was absolutely right,” I said gratefully.
Waiting in my office for my next appointment, I found myself trying to recall the last scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It is pouring rain in New York City. In a cab, Audrey Hepburn is confronted by her lover for being a fraud. She opens the door to the cab, her cat runs out, she runs after her cat. Then I can only remember her crying, on a doorstep in the middle of the city, wearing a little sweater, the rain running down her face.
When I heard Kathy speaking to someone in the lobby, I wasn’t sure if it was my client or Tiffany who had arrived. But it was Mrs. Carrol, a woman my age who had been struggling with depression. She didn’t look good. Of all the maladies I treat, depression makes me the most weary. It is like trying to talk to someone underwater, knowing they can barely hear you.
“Sit down,” I announced too loudly. And I realized how truly agitated I was. Even Mrs. Carrol seemed a little stunned by my tone, and her face, which had been smooth and lifeless, took on a wary attention.
I went over in my mind the notes from her last session. “Continue with her introverted anger…” had been the plan for today. I would let her talk. Yet I found myself moving my chair into a position of confrontation. There was barely a distance between us. I knew that it was almost certain that Tiffany’s mother had killed herself, just as Mrs. Carrol’s mother had. Statistics were unrolling in my mind—an enormous number of children of suicides will eventually end their own lives. I heard the door to the outer office open. “If your life depended upon it, Mrs. Carrol, what if anything would you have faith in?” I had almost shouted this at her. Yet she kept her head lowered, and only the smallest furrow in her brow indicated that she had even heard me. “I mean, if you were to die because you didn’t believe in something, what would that thing be?” She was motionless for some time. It seemed I wasn’t using any kind of judgment in the tack I was taking. If she didn’t respond, I didn’t know how we could proceed. It occurred to me that if she didn’t respond I might just somehow pick her up over my head and shake her. She looked up slowly, not really seeing me, and then she began to cry.
“Outside my window,” she said softly, “in the morning, when I’m lying in bed, I can hear the traffic. It stops at the traffic light, I can hear the cars idling, and then when I hear them pulling ahead again, I know the light has changed.” She laughed, crying at the same time. “You must think I’m crazy.”
I shook my head no.
“I mean, it’s more than the light, it’s the sound. I mean, not the sound, but as if there’s something behind it all that keeps it going.”
“You need to believe that something won’t let it stop.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I do, too,” I said.
I couldn’t read Tiffany when I was finally able to see her. Her school clothes were uncharacteristically traditional—a wool skirt, a blouse. My throat ached once I noticed she had stuck pennies in the slots of her loafers. She was holding a Styrofoam coffee cup that Kathy had given her, probably not knowing what else she could do. The coffee was to the brim and obviously cold, and she handed it to me when I came out as if she’d been holding it for me instead. I had an urge to tell her about the progress I had just made with Mrs. Carrol.
“Tiffany?” I said.
Her eyes went sideways in the direction of Kathy, letting me know she didn’t want to talk there. She uttered the beginning of something. I leaned closer. “I’m the designer,” she whispered.
She took me to Loring Park. It was still too early for the after-work crowds. But there were some regulars lounging on the grass or fishing in the lagoon. It was late afternoon, and in the October light the trees in the park glowed like lamps. Many of the orange and gold leaves had already accumulated along the sides of the path where we walked, and the sound of them under our feet became rhythmic.
“Tiffany, did she…?”
“No!” Before I could finish, she swung her fist to the side, connecting with my diaphragm. I had to stop to catch my breath, and I grabbed her arm in a gesture of defense.
Her voice was very tight, “Please, let me just do this.”
“Okay,” I said, “what do you want?”
I was still holding her arm, and she put her hand on my forearm. She looked at me, then lowered her eyes. “I want you to be her for a little while.”
“Okay,” I said softly, and relaxed under her hand.
We walked up the slope of a grassy hill. We were close to the center of the city, the freeway was a white roar, I could see the dome and other patches of the basilica through the trees. Children were running home from school over the lagoon bridge.
“Over here.” Tiffany took me under the yellow canopy of an enormous oak. “We used to have picnics here,” she said.
We walked up to the trunk. She leaned against it, touching it with her white hands, her fingers disappearing in the deep crevices of its bark. “There’s a spirit under this,” she said. And when I looked at her face, I felt, miraculously, that she was safe. “Lean against it,” she said. Once I had leaned my back to the tree, she seemed embarrassed and couldn’t look at me, but leaned her side against the trunk and went back to poking her fingers in the bark. “Close your eyes,” she said.
With my eyes closed, the air smelled stronger. “Autumn is the season that remembers,” a client once told me. It could have been any autumn I smelled now. I saw my first school shoes as I walked down a road in Wisconsin, and the yellow trees were bending over me, as if they did after all have spirits, knew me, and would continue to know me.
I felt Tiffany’s hand touch my ear. “Mother,” she said. I remembered I was to be her mother today. But I liked thinking of that road in Wisconsin, and now Tiffany was the girl, and I imagined I was her mother, and we were walking down the road together, both in our cloth coats.
“Can you hear me?” I heard someone ask. It seemed like the tree, but it was Tiffany, very close to my ear. ‘Behold, the hour cometh,’” she was reciting. “‘Yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered…’” I could see us walking down the road. “‘… Every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone,’ Mother,” she said. “‘These things I have spoken unto you that in me ye
might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good faith; I have overcome the world.’”
And we were walking down the road, and the trees were bending over us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank my editor, Jane von Mehren, for her careful, firm, and loving guidance. I especially thank my friends, Mark Cox, Mei Mei Evans, Ellen Lesser, Laura Cripps, and Janet Wigfield for helping me craft stories that at first were always awkward. And I thank my brothers and sisters. In addition, I am sincerely grateful to The Loft, the Pen American Center, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Robsons, and the Bush Foundation.
The Dzanc Books rEprint Series
The Dzanc Books rEprint Series is dedicated to publishing great works of contemporary literature that are deserving and clearly will benefit from having their work appear in electronic form. Our efforts include works that have recently gone out of print, books in print that have yet to be converted to e-form, as well as titles where the author holds the eBook rights and is looking for a publishing partner for the electronic version of their book.
For more information and the current list of available titles:
http://www.dzancbooks.org/reprint-catalog/
House of Heroes Page 26
