Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles

by Anne Tyler

  The old man next to him turned and stared. I moved on, but I couldn’t stop myself from nodding. And the name stuck in my mind.

  Now he visited every night I would allow it, presenting himself at the front doorway as if the house was another revival tent, carrying his hat by the brim. We sat on the green plush sofa in the parlor. Not once did he so much as hold my hand. He told me all about himself, in a deep voice reined in as if for church. He said he worked in a printer’s shop over in Murryville, forty miles away. He set type for circulars and stationery and wedding invitations. He was thirty-two. He lived in a rooming house. He knew, he said, the minute he saw me that I was the girl he’d been waiting for. I reminded him of an angel. He liked that cloudy white dress—why didn’t I wear it all the time?—and he liked my not using makeup and he hoped that I would never cut my hair. I listened almost in silence, not knowing how to answer. I liked him, too. It was plain he was a good man, though not well-educated or what you would call refined. And he had a strong, open face. But when he talked about angels I twisted my hands and looked in other directions. Couldn’t he just love Susanna Spright? Did I have to be wearing white cheesecloth?

  In September, he asked me to marry him. When I said yes, he kissed me as gently as moth wings, the first kiss he had ever given me. “I’ll try to live up to you, Susanna,” he said. “You won’t ever be sorry for this.”

  Once maybe my parents would have disapproved. You couldn’t say Ben was all that much of a catch. But I was twenty-eight years old by then, which must have worried them some, and I loved him. They said they were very happy for me, and they gave me a lovely white wedding with my two sisters for attendants.

  We moved to Murryville. Ben found us an apartment over a shoe-repair shop. For a while my days were nearly idle—nothing but three little rooms to clean, maybe a meeting or a coffee at our new church—but then people started coming to be healed again. Some made the trip from my home town; others, here in Murryville, heard on the grapevine and knocked at my door to ask, “Are you the Miss Susanna that lays on hands?” “I surely am,” I’d say. I felt different about all that now. Brisker, more sure of myself. I’d put” on weight and generally I wore a bibbed apron, which made me feel I was turning into my mother. I would stop stirring the soup to let my visitors in, show them to the sofa. “Have you seen a doctor over this? I always ask that first.” I would wipe my hands on my apron and then lay them on my patient, closing my eyes to pray. “It is the Lord’s hands that heal you,” I told them in my mother’s positive voice, and when I saw them out I was already planning what kind of chops to fry for Ben’s supper.

  We didn’t have any children. I couldn’t seem to get pregnant. “Do you think there’s something wrong?” I asked Ben, and finally I even went to see a doctor, but all he said was for me to be patient. “Have faith,” he told me, winking. (He knew who I was.) I left looking shame-faced and rumpled. Of course he had only been joking, but the fact was that I didn’t have faith. I resigned myself to childlessness, and I guess that Ben did, too. We started accepting the fact that this was the way our lives would be. We were content, more or less. Even if I did get a pang every time I saw some dark little baby’s head bobbing up front of me in church.

  My father died, and then my mother, and the pharmacy was sold to strangers. I was thirty-six years old. My hair turned gray and Ben’s was spiked with white above the ears. He didn’t think I was God’s angel anymore. Sometimes he teased me about my plumpness, and often when I came back from a healing he called me “Doc.” He liked after supper to pull me down into his lap, tugging me by the hands and saying, “Come on, Su, leave the dishes, come cure me of what ails me.” I would laugh, although I wasn’t sure I ought to.

  Once he came home with a backache. It was the first time I had ever seen him sick. When I touched him, I got a sense of tightness; maybe he had strained something. When I helped him to sit down he winced and groaned. “Never mind, I’ll have this fixed in no time,” I told him. I knelt by his chair and pressed between his shoulder blades, laying my head alongside his just for the comfort of it. I was nervous, though. I closed my eyes and prayed, breathing in time with Ben’s breathing, trying to remove my thoughts from his springy black curls brushing my temples. After a long while I drew away and asked, “Is it better?”

  “What, is that all there is?”

  “It depends on whether the pain is gone,” I told him.

  “Oh. I think it’s gone.”

  “Don’t you know for sure?”

  “It seems to me like there’s still an echo of it. Know what I mean?” He wiggled his shoulders. “Or no, maybe not,” he said. “I might be wrong. Just then it seemed to be gone all the way. I don’t know.”

  “I see,” I said. Actually I had heard all that before, although I didn’t tell him so. True miracles didn’t happen every time—at least not so suddenly, not when I was working them. But I didn’t want to shake his faith, and so I just smiled and stroked his back again and the next morning he was fine.

  When I was thirty-seven years old I found out that I was pregnant. First I thought it was the change. I had given up all hope of having children. But when I went to the doctor he said no, it was a baby. It was due in March. You never saw anything like Ben’s face when I told him. He went around with his mouth all crooked from holding back the smiles; he announced it to everyone he knew or was even barely acquainted with. He didn’t want me to lift a finger. Each time I went to do some healing he would ask me, Was this necessary? Shouldn’t I save my strength? “If anything, this will make me stronger than before,” I told him. What I didn’t let on was that now I thought of my healing as a kind of payment—thanking God for letting this child come, praying it would turn out all right. I thought if I turned anyone away, maybe God would turn my baby away. I was so scared that maybe my good fortune wouldn’t hold out.

  The baby came a month early, but fine and healthy—a boy. We named him Benjamin Junior. He was his father’s from the beginning. He had Ben’s dark coloring and bright blue eyes, and as he grew older he liked to do all the boy-type things, hammering with his daddy or rolling a little yellow ball across the rug or making growl-y noises to go with the dime-store cars that Ben was always bringing him. Ben asked me once, did I think Benny would have the gift of healing, too? “Only God can say,” I told him, but underneath, I was hoping not. I wanted him just to be ordinary, to lead a happy, ordinary life. I can’t describe how it filled me with joy to see him out in the back lot with his friends, wearing tattered jeans and a little plaid flannel shirt exactly like theirs and bending his perfectly round, small face over a parade of plastic Indians. He smelled of rubber and grass and bubble gum, even five minutes after a bath. He liked to go to kiddie matinees with his daddy, wearing cowboy boots not six inches long. Standing at the kitchen window watching him leave, I always felt so happy I could sing: See how much he is like the others? See how he holds his head that cocky, perky way?

  When Benny was five, just starting kindergarten, I accepted the offer of a church to work out of. It was in the country a ways, a little one-room wooden church. On Tuesday mornings I drove to their prayer meetings in Ben’s old Hudson, and after the pastor had given his talk I would come to the front and whoever wanted could ask me for healing. At first it was mostly older people there. Well, naturally, considering the hour. But then others started coming, too. Sometimes every pew was filled. I stood at the front, holding out my hands. “I make no promises, but we can try. We can ask that God come down and pass through me to the root of your pain. Step forward, now.” I cupped the head of a kneeling woman and waited, with my eyes closed. Heat rose up in me and tingled through my hands. It seemed to me that the heat was joy; this church was so peaceful, this kneeling woman so full of faith, and I knew that when I left here I would walk out into a beautiful autumn day and go home and bake bread for my husband and my son.

  In the spring just after Benny turned six, he
was hit by a car. It happened on the way to school. When they called me, he had already been rushed to the emergency room by ambulance. Meanwhile, I had been making curtains, humming tunes from the radio. Wouldn’t you think I would have had some inkling?

  When I arrived at the hospital, out of breath, streaky-faced, in a faded house dress, Ben was already standing by Benny’s cot. All I saw was a small slope under the sheets. “Susanna! Thank God!” Ben said. “Lay your hands on him.” I moved forward, but there was a gauze cap on Benny’s head and I didn’t want to hurt him. I started to lay a hand on his chest but that was bandaged, too; he seemed to be mostly gauze. Only his face was untouched. There wasn’t a mark or a scratch anywhere on it. His long lashes curved over the curve of his cheeks and his breath came almost silently between his lips, which were slightly parted. Then in his ear I saw something dry and brown. I reached out just with my fingertips, which were shaky and cold, and touched his temples. It was there that my fingers were drawn—a bad sign. Meanwhile some doctor had come in and he was listing what was wrong, and what other things might turn out wrong later, but worse than what he said was the way Benny felt to my fingers. If any current passed from me, he didn’t accept it. I took my hands away. “Don’t stop!” Ben said. “Don’t stop!”

  “He needs an operation,” I said.

  “Yes, they said they will, they’re making ready. Don’t take your hands away!”

  I touched his temples again. I couldn’t feel anything but his little, flickering pulse.

  In the afternoon they operated, and then they wheeled him into a big room where other people lay groaning or talking in their sleep or just breathing unnaturally behind high white screens. I knew it was serious because otherwise they never would have put him in with grownups. Also nobody told us anything after the operation was over—how it had gone or what their hopes were now. Whoever the surgeon was, he didn’t stop to speak to us. “Susanna,” Ben said, “I’m begging you. Pray harder than you ever did before. If you try, you can. If only you don’t give up hope.” So I kept standing by Benny’s bed with my hands, like cold heavy stones, laid upon his temples. “Don’t fail me,” Ben said.

  “Ben, I’m trying,” I said.

  But at seven o’clock that evening, Benny died.

  My husband left me and went to some other town. He waited till after the funeral. While he was home he didn’t talk at all, just sat looking at his hands upon his knees, even when I cried and hung on to him for comfort. “Ben, you’re all I’ve got. We’re the only ones that can share this. Won’t you look at me? Are you holding it against me that I couldn’t help him?” All he did was untangle my arms and put me away, not in anger but absentmindedly, as if I didn’t count. Then after the funeral he left, taking only a suitcase and leaving me the car. I thought he was just staying away a few days. Maybe gone to that little cabin some of the men at our church used for hunting. I sat and waited, rocking in my rocking chair, drying up inside. He didn’t come back. His printing shop called. “Mrs. Meagan, we’re sorry as we can be for all your trouble. We know Ben will want to stay home with you awhile, but can you give us any idea when he might be coming in again?”

  “I don’t know. He isn’t here. He must have gone away altogether,” I said.

  I felt just too broken to bother covering anything up.

  Well, I would have stopped the healing right then if it weren’t for people begging me to come back. How can you say no to a mother standing there white and strained, with her baby suffering fever? “He’s been like this a week and a half, Mrs. Meagan. No doctor can tell me what it is. Tomorrow if he’s not better they’ll take him away from me and put him in the hospital. Won’t you lay your hands on him?”

  “My own little boy is dead,” I told her.

  “I know that, Mrs. Meagan. I was sorry to hear it.”

  “Then how come you still believe I can help?”

  “I expect the Lord just called for him, Mrs. Meagan. I know you couldn’t argue with God.”

  I went back to the little church, to the pews packed fuller than ever with sufferers waiting for my hands. It was like before. Sometimes I healed, sometimes I only lessened the pain, sometimes I did no good at all. Only now, I didn’t believe that the failures were meant to keep me humble. I thought they were battle losses. God and I were at war. I saw what He had done to the old people and the scared little children who knelt under my hand—deafness and blindness, fevers, burns, sores, growths, endless nausea, pains without known cause, lameness, stiffness, swellings, chills. God’s victims. I fought Him off. I tried to undo the damage He had done. Sometimes I won, sometimes He won. Sometimes it was a draw. Sometimes a child might pull away from me and look up, confused, “You’re pressing too hard.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” I always said.

  No point telling him it was God I meant to hurt.

  There was a woman just over the state line who healed by faith, too. I had heard of her. She was supposed to do a lot that I couldn’t—read minds, find lost objects, speak with the hereafter. To tell the truth I was always a little in awe of her. And now my pastor was asking, didn’t I want to go consult with this lady? People were getting worried, he said. I didn’t look well. I was thinner, or maybe just paler, or something was different. And you could almost say Hattie Doone was a sister, more or less. Would I take it into consideration?

  I don’t know why I said yes. Maybe the thought of her being a sister. Certainly I didn’t want to speak with the hereafter.

  I wrote ahead. She said that she would meet my train, she would put me up at her house for the night. A nice, round ladylike hand. She had heard my name many times, she said. My name? I felt so shy all of a sudden, I was sorry I had said I would go. But it was too late to write back, and surely if she were a mind reader she would see through any excuse I offered anyway.

  When I saw her out of the train window, she was standing very straight beside a baggage cart, a tall narrow spinster of a lady with a brown bun, pursed lips, and a pinchy nose. I worried she would act old-maidish. But no, as I was coming down the train steps I saw her eyes, which were a warm brown and lit with changing lights. “Susanna Meagan,” she said, and she stepped forward and kissed my cheek. I wasn’t expecting that. Even the brief touch of her lips changed the way I felt about this visit.

  She lived alone in a turreted house very close to the tracks. She wasn’t married, she didn’t have any family. Her father had died just the past winter but he had been senile for years before that, she said, and the tending of him had been entirely up to her. She was perfectly cheerful when she told me all this. She didn’t act sorry for herself. And she didn’t hurry me into explaining why I had come, though my letter had said next to nothing and I know she must have wondered. She just let me get settled in my room—a cold, flowered octagon opening off the parlor—and change into a house dress, and then she brewed me some tea and set out Nabisco wafers on a blue willow plate in the kitchen. Then I said, “Miss Doone.”

  “Hattie,” she told me.

  “Hattie, then. And you call me Susanna. I guess you must be wondering why I wrote to you. Well, of course I’ve heard all about you. I know you get in touch with the afterlife. Only—please don’t be offended—I don’t much hold with afterlife. Oh, I believe in it, of course. But I wouldn’t like to think that Benny was up there waiting to get in touch with me. My boy that died. Because if he were, that would mean he was still a child in need of his mother, wouldn’t it? Still missing us and wondering why we’d sent him off all alone? I would hate to think that was true.”

  She didn’t answer. Just kept her eyes fixed squarely on mine. I don’t know what she thought of all I was saying.

  “No, why I came,” I told her, “is more for me, for my sake. I thought you would understand my problems. Miss Doone, Hattie, surely you agree this is the loneliest job in the world? Why, from the moment my gift was made known to me my life has nev
er been the same. People treated me differently. Even my parents, even my sisters. My family grew away from me, I see my sisters only once or twice a year though they live less than fifty miles from Murryville. At Benny’s funeral I wasn’t sure of the names of all my nephews and nieces. My neighbors are polite but not close to me, not friends. Once I touched the lady next door on the arm and she jumped as if I’d burned her, and then got red in the face. My patients, of course—they’re grateful to me but gratitude is not much to build on. Oh, why was I ever given this load to bear? What is it a punishment for? Here my only child is gone, and my husband who was such a loving man stopped loving me and left. All I have is gone. When I lay hands on now it’s bitter, it’s a bitter war, and what makes it worse is that even that way, cursing God and His mistakes, healing is still possible. It would be better if it weren’t. I would have more faith if I saw that my gift left when my faith left.”

  Hattie Doone rose up. I thought she might be going to slap me—what had I been saying? Still, I didn’t flinch. I would take whatever came. I sat perfectly straight, staring into my teacup. Then I felt her step around the table and bend to take me in her arms, laying her cheek against mine. She didn’t say anything. No words of Scripture, no prayers, no laying on of hands, just that long silent hug. I can still smell the homemade soap she used, and the wool of her stretched-out, wine-colored cardigan. I can still remember what I thought she was telling me: it was not God who made you a healer. It was your Aunt Eunice. It was her friend Mrs. Fortney and the man with the lump on his arm and all the others. While they performed their magic, you held tight to their hands. You witnessed their miracles and their semi-miracles and their utter failures. When they said you were responsible, you accepted the burden. What more can anyone do? Now rest awhile. Lean on me. Believe my half-truths, they are all we have.

  This spring I will be sixty years old. I look it. I am heavy and my veins are bad and it’s harder to get around. For this reason I don’t live over the shoe-repair shop any more but in a little squatty house beside the bus depot. I have a yellow-green canary and a tortoise-shell cat. The canary doesn’t have much to say but the cat is very good company. He follows me from room to room and he sleeps on my bed behind the crook of my knees. In his own way, I believe that he is fond of me.