Angela had forgotten she was a grown-up young lady of ten, practically a teenager. She was sitting in my lap. Her skinny body was almost weightless, an inadequate buffer against Ruth’s onslaught. “You have two choices,” Ruth instructed. “Put your head in the sand or live with the questions.” “They’re not my questions,” I countered. “You’re missing an opportunity,” said Ruth. “Is that how Jane and Sally see it?” I asked. “I regret to say they lack my sense of adventure,” answered Ruth. “I came to offer my services to Henry. New blood for his team.”
Outsiders see our loved ones in terms that dismay us. According to Ruth, Henry was the leader of a team of researchers. He and his colleagues worked toward a clear-cut purpose. Their work was abstruse, serious, and respectable. I had acquired the habit of belittling his new interest. It was a safety valve for priestly frustrations. It was a fascinating indoor sport. Since it was too hot to go out and play, Henry had invented a game using mind, not muscles, in which he made up all the rules. He was playing this game with other housebound locals, whose jobs were too narrow for their spiritual ambitions. The game had an element of risk, which raised it above the level of armchair recreation. Up to now, only women had been at risk, and Henry was attracted to the role of knightly champion and rescuer. In recent years his career had afforded him no outlet for heroics, except on the occasion of the Baldwin baby’s baptism, when the hefty infant squirmed out of his godmother’s arms. Henry had caught him by his diaper as he was falling, head first, into the font.
Ordeals and tests of mettle were missing from Henry’s life. Where he saw an occasion for gallantry, he might be capable of miscalculating the dangers. It was possible to love someone and, at the same time, doubt his wisdom. The rift in our sexual connection had brought with it a degree of emotional detachment, bleak and unfamiliar. Could I trust Henry’s judgment in a crisis, the kind of confrontation he seemed bent on manufacturing? What good had he been that hateful night in Adele’s bedroom? Had he saved Adele from defilement? If the Thing had turned on me when it finished with her, he would have been torn between opposing interests, between an impulse to protect me and a desire to verify the spirit’s existence.
At least Ruth had no doubts about Henry’s leadership abilities. Like a lot of new volunteers to important causes—suicide prevention, population control, world hunger—she was eager to overcommit herself: sign up for extra shifts, offer her home for meetings, get involved in fund-raising. She expected to make a difference from the outset. Volunteers were sometimes plucked from the ranks and elected to the board of directors. Ruth announced they must go because Angela’s parents were due to fetch her, but she left a slew of messages for Henry. “Tell him he can use the library documents room for meetings; it’s tucked away on the second floor. Does he know I have considerable experience writing grant applications? He should delegate one of us to look into Dry Falls history—Indian massacres, underground rivers, Viking stones. That sort of thing. I’d be glad to do it. Lorraine’s talents might come in handy. Has Henry thought of letting her loose in Adele’s apartment?” “She’s been away,” I answered. “They have a shack on Cliff Island.” “So Lorraine’s not one of us,” said Ruth. “I didn’t think so.”
I lifted Angela off my lap and stood her on her feet. I took her hand and led her over to Ruth. I waved from the kitchen door as they boarded Ruth’s van. Ruth leaned out the window and delivered one last message: “Have Henry call me when he gets back. We should get to work as soon as possible.”
Chapter Twenty-three
After Ruth left, I carried our coffee cups to the sink, letting the water run long and wastefully, as if it could rinse away traces of her arrogance. I called Ruth a friend, but friendships in a village are less a matter of choice than of proximity. I shut my eyes to her irksome qualities because I had to live with her. Feuds and rifts, with the attendant side-taking, were unthinkable in a small community. They affected every connection, narrowing an already restricted acquaintanceship exponentially. I might resent her officious behavior, but I was required to hide my feelings. It was eleven o’clock in the morning and I was worn out, as much by the content of her visit as by her personality.
The kitchen was so hot I checked to see if I’d left the oven on. I moved from room to room downstairs, testing the temperature. Was the dining room cooler than the living room or only darker? We kept the wicker blinds drawn until sunset on the screened-in porch. They kept out the sun but they also cut off the air. In the front hall, a space wide enough to hold a slat-back settee, there was a cool (or less warm) spot in one corner, related to water pipes inside the wall. The settee was narrow and hard. Could I sleep on the floor with my body pressed against the cool spot?
In search of a better solution, I went back to the living room. There were two sofas, one at the far end near the dining room and one at right angles to the fireplace, both covered for the summer in well-worn linen that didn’t stick to the skin. I was wearing long shorts with the cuffs rolled up and a sleeveless blouse. The electric fan, a relic from the forties, was plugged in under the window to the right of the fireplace. By stretching its fraying cord full length, I could lie on the sofa and let it play directly on me.
I gathered up the sofa pillows and piled them on an armchair. I preferred to sleep with a pillow, but all of these were wool or velvet. I lay on my back, listening to the fan as it turned on its base. There was a rattle on its cycle and an irregular stutter, as if it were on the point of breaking down. I began to count the beats between rattles and stutters, wondering if the noise would keep me awake. The last thing I heard was a brand-new sound, a faint moan, no doubt the grating of metal on metal. I fell asleep trying to remember that the fan needed oiling.
When I slept in the daytime I went too far out, so far from my body that the way back was long and difficult. An astronaut is fastened by a lifeline to the mother ship. In day sleep I drifted unsecured, swimming home against outgoing tides, beaching up as exhausted as when I set off. As I came awake, I registered a series of small discomforts—the ache behind my eyes, the stiffness in my neck, the sweat pooling under my shoulder blades. My mouth was dry and I had trouble swallowing. I knew the penalties for napping. When I got up it would be hours before my head cleared. There was every temptation to prolong this state of limbo. I had nothing to do but put two more meals on the table.
The fan was rattling and whining, louder than before. I ought to unplug it. The cord was so old it could cause an electrical fire. I opened my eyes halfway, saw the crack on the ceiling and the overhead light fixture, an ugly brass ring set with flame-shaped bulbs, installed by our predecessors, the Furmans. We never got around to replacing it. I closed my eyes again. Wherever I looked I would see the house beckoning me, pointing out chores, unfinished projects, urgent repairs.
The muscles in my neck might relax if I shifted position. When I tried to turn over on my side, I couldn’t move my feet. I felt a sensation of weight, as if a good-sized dog, say a Labrador, had jumped up on that end of the sofa. My feet were asleep. My knees and thighs had no feeling. I would have to stay as I was until the numbness passed. I stretched my neck to release the cramp, with some success. I took a deep breath and prepared to drift away again. With any luck I could sleep through lunch duty. Henry could scavenge in the cupboards or have a sandwich at Ernie’s diner.
As I was casting off, letting the current take me, I thought I heard Henry coming in. How slowly he was walking, trying, rather clumsily, not to disturb me. He was putting his feet down flat, one in front of the other, like a driver arrested for drunkenness required by the arresting officer to walk a straight line. The footsteps advanced unsteadily. I had an image of his feet in shoes that were a size too large. I kept my eyes closed, practicing deceit. He was too considerate to wake me for no good reason. Perhaps he had invited someone to the house and needed the living room. Or he wanted to drive to the garage in two cars so he could leave his car overnight to be worked on.
Now the footsteps
were approaching from the direction of the open window near the fireplace. He had been in the room all along, before I woke up, so my subterfuge was futile. I opened my eyes and extended my arm for him to lift me up and help me walk off my numbness. I saw the window, and the curtains moving, stirred by the fan. I raised my head to scan the room. There was no sign of Henry. He had come and gone. I had incorporated his footsteps into a dream, unaware I was sleeping. Perhaps I was asleep even now, dreaming the room exactly as it was, dreaming my thoughts, my confusion and lethargy.
There was one way of determining whether I was awake. I pulled a hair from behind my ear and held it up to my eyes, a long yellow strand with a gobbet of scalp attached to it. People scratched a rash in their sleep, hard enough to draw blood, but no sleeping person inflicts and feels pain voluntarily. I rubbed tears from my eyes. The place behind my ear still smarted. The footsteps resumed. They were coming from the window again. What else could be making that sound, slap-slide, slap-slide? A loose slat in the venetian blinds? The pages of a magazine rustling in the artificial breeze?
I tried to move my legs, but my lower body was immobilized. I had the use of my arms. If I had to, I could push myself up to a sitting position, take hold of my legs, and lift them off the sofa. If my legs still refused to obey me, I could drop to the floor and drag myself from the room like a cripple who has fallen from her wheelchair. Across the living-room rug, using my elbows, over the sill and across the dining room into the kitchen. Along the hard surface of the linoleum to the screen door, down the wooden steps head first, overweighted by my senseless limbs, pitching sideways over the edge, landing flat on the ground, stunned and winded.
Why was I planning an escape when nothing was threatening me? The room was empty and silent, except for the fan. In my family Hannah was the sensitive one and I was the sturdy one. Everyone agreed I had no imagination. If I lacked the imagination to make up the footsteps, the sound of them must have been real, against the evidence of reason. From outside the window came a combination of sounds—a thwack followed by a swish, easy to identify. Our neighbor across the street was pruning trees, the lower branches of a stand of white pines along the roadside. Harold Schwartz was in his sixties, the veteran of one heart attack. He had hired someone else to do the pruning for him, some robust youngster, probably working shirtless. Whoever he was, he was earning his wages, already reaching for the higher branches, which toppled with a crash. In the motionless air the sounds re-echoed in the room with me, jiggling the Chinese dogs on the mantel and the fire tools in their iron stand. Were there two young titans working on Harold’s trees? One man alone could never chop so fast. At the rate they were going the stand of pines would be decimated. The noise was deafening, abusive. If they kept it up much longer, the neighbors would be up in arms. I had to call Harold and protest. They seemed to be starting on the tree trunks.
I willed my dead legs to move, but the weight on my lower body was moving upward, paralyzing my middle from my pelvis to my abdomen. I could lift my head with great effort. My arms were powerless. I had time to wonder why the workmen were using hand tools instead of power saws before the thudding of their axes and the booming of fallen branches resolved itself into a din that subsumed all loud ness: hurricane, cataract, dynamite, forest fire, bombing; avalanche, church bells, foghorns, sirens, war cries; a thousand steam engines roaring along parallel tracks. The universe was noise and I was an organ of hearing, a vibrating surface, a cymbal, a gong, a kettledrum. I was a marble chamber resounding with giant footsteps, massive feet shod in iron shoes. I was conscious of nothing but sound. Sound pressed on my eyelids, forcing them closed. Sound weighted my body, pushing me so deep into the cushions that I felt the springs. Sound was taking possession of me, prying me open, entering me through my clothing, filling the birth cavity. I was swollen with sound—vagina, womb, bowels, lungs, esophagus. The pressure from inside was equal to the force from above, as it happens in drowning. It seemed I must burst into pieces, like a bladder pumped too full of air, little scraps of me flying outwards in every direction, irretrievable, unmendable.
I heard Henry’s voice through the tumult, far away, nearly inaudible. “Move your hand,” it called. “Cora, move your hand!” He was asking the impossible. When Jesus bid him rise, did Lazarus spring to life instantly? I believe he lay there some time, resisting, thinking, “I can’t. He’s expecting too much of me.” As soon as I began to frame thoughts, Henry’s voice became louder. “Try to move your hand. You’ll be all right if you move your hand.” I directed my thoughts down my arm, to my wrist, to my palm, to my dangling fingers. I imagined them curling, flexing, making a fist. “Try harder, Cora. Just try to move one finger!” Why was he so impatient? I felt I had been trying for hours, for years, for a lifetime. “Move your finger. Just move one finger!”
I gave up. I surrendered to the weight above me. All at once it lifted, rolling back like low-lying mists in a scudding breeze. In that moment of relaxation I had managed to bend my thumb almost imperceptibly. I could open my eyes. The room was thick with a brownish vapor, dispersing silently. At first the absence of noise was overwhelming, as if all sound had been sucked out of the room, creating a vacuum.
In an instant Henry was in front of me, yanking me to my feet, which gave way under me. He caught me before I collapsed, hooked his arm under my shoulders and dragged me as far as the dining room. “You can walk, Cora. Use your feet. I won’t let you fall. Don’t quit on me!” He steered me around the room until I grabbed the back of a chair and shook him off. He was forcing my arms out of their sockets. When I proved I could walk on my own, he marched me into the kitchen. I wobbled toward a chair, but he stopped me. He made me walk back and forth, the length of the room, following behind me. When I began to complain, he took me in his arms like a dancing partner, leading me around the table in a lively two-step.
At last he let me sit down while he fixed a cup of instant coffee with hot tap water and ordered me to drink it with two spoonfuls of sugar. Was he treating me for shock or an overdose? I hated sugar in my coffee. I was tired to the bone, as if I had been doing physical work that was too hard for me. Under Henry’s eye I sipped the sweet coffee and conjured up images of horizontality. I thought of lying in a tub of scented water, of resting on a bank of pillows with another pillow under my knees, of swinging in the hammock on the porch, weightless and languid.
The coffee was acting like a sedative. My head fell forward, startling me awake. Henry grabbed my shoulders and pinned me against the chair-back. He jerked my chin up, squeezing my jaw so tightly my eyes watered. He was angry enough to hurt me. “You can’t go to sleep, Cora. I’ll keep you awake any way I can. You can sleep when this is over.”
PART IX
Christ When We Sit Down
Chapter Twenty-four
The next day the house was full of people making themselves at home. Henry had invited them and I was expected to feed them. There was a day shift and a night shift, composed of different personnel. Some of them took both shifts if they liked what was on the evening’s menu. We were having a marathon house party, three main meals, afternoon tea, drinks and sandwiches on a tray at ten p.m. Because of the heat they slept on top of the beds, not in them, dirtying only the pillowcases. I couldn’t ask them to be as sparing in their use of towels, but I did make a general announcement about emptying the ashtrays. I overheard Ruth objecting to the use of tobacco and alcohol—and Henry saying we had to cater to the volunteers if we didn’t want to lose them. They seemed happy enough to me, gabbing away on the screened-in porch, hanging around in the kitchen, dipping their spoons in my sauces and their fingers in my cookie batters.
I had no privacy. Someone was always on my heels, following me into the garden while I picked rosemary, the only herb to survive the drought; trailing me as far as the bathroom door. They hung around me but nobody helped out, except when Jane Shufelt was on duty—and she was no use. Oddly enough for a nurse, she thought running water over the dishes was the
same as washing them. I tried to close the door to the dining room when I was cleaning up, but someone always thwarted me, standing sentry in the doorway and chatting with the people at the table. Occasionally one of the women wandered in with a plate or a couple of glasses; otherwise I passed back and forth with a tray, clearing the dirty dishes—cook, scullery maid, and waitress.
After several days of three sit-down meals, I informed them that breakfast would be self-service and lunch would be soup and salad. I wrote little notes and posted them in major traffic areas: “Jiggle the handle after flushing”; “Silver knives DO NOT go in the dishwasher”; Please refill the ice trays.” Henry caught me tacking a notice on the pantry cabinets (“Please do not open new jars before checking the icebox”). “I’m sorry you feel so resentful,” he said. “They’re doing this for your sake.”
Apparently I was the “stolid, materialistic kind of person” who could tolerate negative atmospheres that drove more sensitive souls to madness. For this estimation of my character I was indebted to my closest friends and family, who were giving so generously of their time and energy in order to watch over me. As an object of concern and the subject of a psychical experiment, I was discussed quite openly, in my presence or within my earshot. I might even be consulted as to the accuracy of their opinions.
While I was serving breakfast the first morning, Walter said, “It’s important to keep her fed every two hours. The stomach should never be empty.” “She’s always been a good feeder,” said Emily. “Haven’t you, Cora?” “Just a piece of fruit or a cracker,” added Walter. “Who will volunteer to see she gets one?” “I’ll take care of it,” said Henry. “The bowels should be kept open,” said Walter, as I was heaping scrambled eggs on their plates. “If waste is allowed to accumulate in her system, it puts her at a psychic disadvantage.” “I’ve never known Cora to suffer from constipation,” said Emily. “I’ll keep you up to date,” I said. “Should I report to Emily?”
Incubus Page 26
