by Mark Doty
“Arden?” they asked. And it seemed his name brought him back from wherever he’d been to the world of connection. He shook his head, as if clearing it, and looked at them uncertainly, and when they said it again he began to wag his tail and step toward them.
He wasn’t hurt; the vet’s poking and prodding later that day wouldn’t reveal a thing. He must have run in sheer terror, and hidden, not knowing where the familiar might be, not knowing how to return to his name.
The men stroked and talked to him until I got there. Wally said he couldn’t handle going, he was so afraid it would be another mistake, the wrong black dog, and he couldn’t bear it again. So I went alone, and when I stepped out of the car onto the sidewalk Arden came hurrying to me, and leaned all his weight against me, and buried his face in my coat.
Later, when both Wally and I were dealing perhaps most directly with the prospect of his dying (not the literal, actual illness, but the preparatory work, the—what to call it? consideration?—which went on about a year and a half ahead of his death) we both struggled in dreams to come to terms. And the dream that shook me most, night after night, centered on Arden. We were walking in a field, the three of us, near a highway, happy, at ease, and then Arden would catch a scent and bound ahead, wild with it, no calling him back, onto the road. He’d be hit, but in each dream there would be a variation—struck and killed, or run away, his situation unknown. I’d wake up in horror, afraid to sleep because I was afraid the dream would start again. I thought of lines from a poem of James Merrill’s:
the mere word “animal” a skin
through which its old sense glimmers, of the soul.
Always exploring ahead of us on our walks—the walks Wally couldn’t take anymore—Arden was our future’s dark vessel, the part of us that would scout ahead, sniffing out what’s to come. He was, in my dream, where we were about to be struck.
Refuge (3)
We bought the first house we saw.
Not, of course, without seeing many others between that first visit and signing the offer to purchase. We looked at condos—tempting, with their new appliances and slick surfaces, after our years of living in a Victorian undergoing uncompletable renovation, but soulless. And we looked at other houses, but nothing else drew us back for a second and third look.
I think it was on that third visit to the little Cape—a very old house whose character had been obscured by Sheetrock and awful paneling and shag carpets—that the realtor gave us a key and let us visit the empty house alone. (Joe the realtor’s dead now, like so many men who’ve figured in our story.) Upstairs, in a neglected bedroom which had escaped the remodeler’s touch, we were inspecting some moldings on the wall, a chair rail thick with layers of paint, when an odd detail caught Wally’s eye. We moved a bureau and there, half papered over but plainly visible, was a fireplace. Its opening was filled with plaster, but the surround, of old wide beaded boards in eighteenth-century style, was intact. It was then that we fell in love, and the making of home again began to be a project and refuge.
Looking at other early houses—in the distinctive Cape Cod style, a version of the rural English house which would be copied and modified, eventually, all over America—we could see clearly how this one ought to look. We talked to a town historian, searched the libraries for books, traced the deed as far as we could, and threw ourselves into making a plan for how we’d work with the house. The camp had sold, so we had just enough money to buy the new place and make the changes that seemed essential before we moved in; our rental cottage was leased till Memorial Day, so we had months to demolish and strip, to haul away debris and sand and paint. We could hire people to jack up sagging floors, repair the chimney, rebuild the rotting eaves and the crumbling sill in the corner of the kitchen. Like everyone who buys a two-hundred-year-old house, we’d read stories about new homeowners who discover a hidden mural, a beehive oven, or perfect wainscoting hidden behind an unpromising wall. Though we didn’t tell the realtor, even before the papers were signed we were sneaking around with crowbars and screwdrivers, poking through the plasterboard and peering under the rugs.
What we found was not, in fact, much. Some lucky Victorian fisherman must have come into enough money to modernize the house, and so the old mantels and paneled walls had gone, to the dump or for kindling. But underneath the carpets and a layer of linoleum and newspaper were wonderful wide-board pine floors, from which we carefully sanded gummy red and green paint made of whale oil, lead, and who knew what else. Under the vinyl paneling and the gypsum were the sturdy and simple bones of a beautiful house: hemlock beams in the low ceilings, intimate little rooms with walls of a soft plaster made of sand and horsehair and oyster shells.
That fireplace which had first won our affections turned out to contain a tiny, Victorian chimney with little round openings for stovepipes. Originally, the house would have had a massive brick spine of chimney at its center, opening onto several hearths, heating the whole building and anchoring it in Atlantic storms. But neighborhood tradition held that the house had been moved, brought here from Truro by being floated across the bay. I heard this from my neighbor, whose family had owned the little Greek Revival house across the street since it was built in 1825, so I took her word for it. The great chimney would have been demolished to allow the house to be moved; it probably simply crumbled, the soft oyster-shell mortar falling apart. Some of its bricks must have been reused, since there were odd curved bricks built into the chimney, blackened in all the wrong places.
Our Victorian chimney was so decrepit that we could simply pluck bricks out of it by hand, a situation which called for immediate attention; Bobby drove down to help for a weekend, and the three of us, starting up on the roof, in bright March sun, took the narrow stack of bricks down from its very tip through two floors, all the way down into the sandy dune on which the house rested, where pale beach grass had been sitting in just the same spot, untouched, how long? A hundred and fifty years?
We were finding new reserves of energy, intent as we were on the making of home, and pleased with this luxury, the opportunity to work on a house we didn’t have to live in yet. With the coming of spring, I turned to the new garden; here the old roses I’d wanted in Vermont but couldn’t grow because of the cold would thrive. The climate of our coastal zone is astonishingly kind to roses. We feel the Atlantic winds as brutally raw and damp, but the roses seem not only not to mind but to be entirely happy. I ordered lush climbers, to deck the clapboards (newly white, replacing a pale but undeniably hideous lavender) in heavily lidded pink blossoms.
And we built a fine picket fence, stopping to take walks together to study local styles of gates and posts, cutting every picket ourselves, adjusting and readjusting the angles to encompass the curve of the front garden in just the right way. There were plenty of things in the house that could have used our attention—the kitchen remained a funky zone of 1960s knotty pine, the bathroom a grim extravaganza of blue Formica—but there was something essential about getting that garden right, achieving the proper spirit for the entry to the house. And we did get it right; even that first summer the roses grew huge, twining around the windows with their black shutters, reaching for the roof with their fragrant pink clouds of petals, so that coming home always was coming home, an event and celebration.
With April and May also came the reopening of the town, and as the garden was a source of focus and pleasure for me, so work reappeared as a place for Wally to center his energies, a locus of activity and a source of new people and absorptions. He worked in a clothing store, selling at first, enjoying the opportunities to play and to flirt with the gay tourists who were shopping for new bathing suits, bright new clothes to wear on their holiday, and soon he was doing windows again as well. It made him happy, to go to work. Though I could tell it tired him more than it ever had, too, especially when things didn’t go well; he was ready only for the couch, at the end of a long day. But wasn’t it just ordinary fatigue?
That summer, 1991,
seems a chain of images, familiar and loved objects: our green and brown bicycles, old Raleighs for getting around town and on the seashore trails. My garden trowel and spade, stacks of paintbrushes for shop-window props, Wally’s handsome bow ties, the leather portfolio in which he’d carry sketches or lunch to work. His new black motorcycle jacket, stiff and fragrant. The mantel newly painted a licheny gray-green in a softly lustrous eggshell finish. Lovely rough antique hardware—hand-forged latches and bolts—and a clutch of raised panel doors bought from Ted, a salvage dealer just down the street. (Ted’s dead now, too.) A heavy glass vase full of pink and white cosmos, which bloomed and bloomed. A jar of paste wax, for the old oak dining table, so that when I laid out my mother’s blue and white china the reflections of the plates would gleam in the scarred, handsome wood.
It was autumn before there’d be another moment of demarcation, another moment of descent. We hadn’t heard from Bobby for months, which was very much out of character. Usually he’d call once a week at least to chat, and come every month or so for a visit. But the last times Wally had called he’d seemed vague or unavailable, and said he had a cold he couldn’t shake. Then there wasn’t any answer at all.
In October, a mutual friend from Boston appeared at our door, and told us Bobby was in the hospital with pneumocystis, had been there for two or three weeks; Bobby’s “lover” hadn’t called us or anyone else, wanting to keep as much distance between the disease and himself as he could. We tried to reach Bobby in the hospital, but he’d checked out. No answer at home, so after a number of tries we called his parents, and there he was.
The lover had told him not to come back to the house they shared for eight years. I can’t, he said, take care of you. So Bobby packed a suitcase and went to his parents; he’d told them he had plain old pneumonia, but now he told his mother the truth. She got him to agree not to tell his father, and he’d stay there awhile, under these circumstances of deceit.
If this all seems a tangled skein of bad behavior, such circumstances weren’t exactly uncharacteristic of Bobby. Was the dishonesty he’d learned at home what he carried on through his own life? We’d known that he was HIV-positive, because of a previous bout with shingles, but there’d been no discussion of this, really, and no ongoing treatment or medical attention. He’d taken to going to Mass every day, we knew that.
And now he wanted to come for a visit, and it seemed plain that his family would very much like him to do so, too. His sister agreed to drive him halfway down to the Cape; we’d meet him at a rest stop on the highway.
I hardly recognized the man we picked up that afternoon. He’d lost twenty pounds, his hair had thinned, his face grown both craggier and less focused. He seemed confused, sitting in the passenger’s seat of his sister’s car, wearing a huge red parka to keep warm, a yellow flowered pillowcase on his lap containing his clothes. He’d brought a big brown plaid blanket, too; he was thinking mostly, it seemed, about staying warm.
The next morning, after I’d left very early for work, Wally and Bobby and Arden were walking on the shore of the bay, just half a block from the house, when Bobby suddenly said he felt strange and needed to sit down. Wally led him to an upturned dory and could tell by his eyes something was seriously wrong. He turned for help, and then looked back to see that Bobby had fallen to the ground, in a grand mal seizure, thrashing, his eyes rolling. Wally screamed for help, and indeed it was a very few minutes before the rescue squad was there.
By the time Wally reached me and I’d made it home, Bobby was in the hospital in Hyannis. It seemed impossible, in 1991, that the nurses were reluctant to enter his room; they put on their latex gloves outside the door. (Later, when Bobby began to have dementia, I took him back to the hospital for an MRI. Cold as he always was, he was wearing enough clothes for three men, and there wasn’t a body fluid in sight, but I watched the technicians arm themselves with latex charms. I don’t begrudge anyone their protection, but paranoia’s ugly, as is making your fear obvious.) Nobody in the hospital wanted to tell us anything. Perhaps because they didn’t know anything; two days later, the seizure was ascribed to “viral activity” and Bobby released.
To us. He had a prescription for something to prevent seizures. But no antivirals, no preventative medication for pneumonia. No doctor monitoring his case. No insurance. No income. No lover. No home—just his belongings, left in the house he had been booted out of, and a family that didn’t seem to know if they wanted him or not. His mother told him not to cry in the house, on her couch; she didn’t want those germs around.
Bobby had, of course, set up this situation, or at least played a role in its formation. He hadn’t made any plans for his medical needs; he’d stayed with an untrustworthy man, one he knew was untrustworthy. He hadn’t been truthful, or established a system of support. And we were assuming, in fact, that he was being truthful with us, that the lover didn’t want him, that his family couldn’t contend with the plain, spiraling fact of his illness.
Whatever questions we had, we had a friend to take care of first. In a hurry, we converted our unfinished guest room—used as a storeroom then—into livable space. We covered the bare studs of the walls with fabric, stretching the warming and concealing yardage over them and attaching it with Wally’s staple gun. Window dressers are great for making almost anything look better. A futon and frame filled most of the room—which was fine, since Bobby slept most of the day.
And, we soon discovered, ate and complained for the rest. What illness seemed to bring out in him was the soul of one who’s felt deprived, who’s never really gotten his rightful share, and so must fuss and whine, blame and rail. Of course he felt awful, of course the world didn’t make much sense to him, and he must have felt that all he could control was what he ate—or didn’t. And yet such understanding has its limits. People can’t help it if they act more like themselves when they’re ill, for better or for worse—but those who take care of them can’t help how they feel, either.
With Bobby I experienced the most intense and peculiar combination of annoyance and pity. Food became the arena of combat. Since Wally was basically useless in the kitchen except for peeling and chopping and opening packages, it was Bobby and I head to head. He wanted mother food, comfort food, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, liver and onions, puddings and custards and vegetables boiled to bland innocuousness. My cooking tends toward salads and grilled chicken and crisp vegetables; I’ve never made gravy in my life. And I was also cooking for three, and teaching, and taking care of a man who’d just collapsed in my house; learning to cook like June Cleaver didn’t exactly seem an option. I did try to please, but the matter of oatmeal just about put me over the edge; Bobby wanted his prepared in a precisely undercooked fashion, with just the right proportions of milk and sugar. He’d remonstrate about my failures in a tone I wouldn’t accept from anybody. Though as soon as I’d feel myself flood with anger, I’d look at this ancient, withered forty-five-year-old man, his diminished body failing, and wonder how I could forget what I was dealing with. How could I set my temper aside?
Curiously, I was better at it than Wally was. I think because my friendship with Bobby didn’t go anywhere nearly as deep—was in fact, becoming attenuated, was more these days like a kind of discipline of compassion I was practicing. This was a fellow human being who needed help—not particularly a person I liked very much—and in some funny way that made it easier.
Not for Wally. One of the things I loved about him, after all, was that the boundaries between him and anyone or anything he loved weren’t very strong ones. Permeable, emotionally available, things entered right into him. I could see his patience wearing thin, his good humor taxed. He looked forward to going to work, and worried what he’d do when the store closed for the season. Upstairs, in bed, we’d talk as quietly as possible about how we’d get through this, about how we might handle the next day. That was one thing I always loved about us, one of any couple’s ordinary pleasures: intimate time, after no matter what, to talk
through anything and nothing, to find reassurance, sustenance, at least company in the face of whatever. What talk is better than talk in bed?
The annoyance we felt was replaced, all too soon, by something deeper—wonder and fear, because Bobby as we knew him began to disappear, his consciousness slipping to some different plane of perception. He’d say, when I brought him tea, “There’s something wrong with this quilt. These boxes won’t hold still.” Patterns seemed to trouble him, to move and shift, just in the morning at first, and then at any time he was resting. He’d call me into his room to tell me about it. At the breakfast table one morning he seemed agitated, close to desperate. “You guys have got to tell me something,” he said. “You’ve got to tell me the truth now, no matter what, I really need you to tell me.”
“Okay,” we both said, thinking he had something to ask us about his health, some fear, some question.
“The boxes,” he said, “do they ever hold still?”
How could we answer?
Wally couldn’t bear it, found it frightening and maddening, but I will admit there was something about his talk that fascinated me—an aesthetic interest, if you will, in perception and language, a professional interest. And cool and detached as it seems, as soon as I found that interest, I was suddenly able to care for Bobby with equanimity. Observing and thinking about how he saw the world gave me a way to be with him, and he must have sensed that he was welcome to talk about his new perceptions. He was, sometimes, heartbreaking. He’d sit on the couch and be unable to tell where his legs were, or how many of them he had. Once he looked at me quite directly and plaintively and said, “All I want is one head.” And he became weaker, more disoriented, and spent more of the day in his bed.
