A Widow's Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “She escaped. Carol couldn’t.”

  It might have been when we were living in Princeton, that Carol died suddenly, in the hospital, or “home,” in which she lived in the Milwaukee area. Ray spoke on the phone with his brother and with his sister but did not go to the funeral, if there was a funeral; he did not wish to talk about his lost sister.

  I should say—lost is not Ray’s word. Lost is my word.

  When Ray died, in the confusion of those terrible hours—days—I could not seem to locate Mary’s address in Ray’s address book. I’d been instructed by an officer of the probate court that I must write to all close relatives of my deceased husband, to inform them of his death so that they might see his will, if they wished to see his will; if they had claims to make against the will, they would have to make these claims now. It was my responsibility to send a registered letter to Ray’s surviving sibling but I could not locate her address, and in desperation I looked through Ray’s papers, documents, desk drawers and filing cabinets; when a journalist called me from the New York Times, on some entirely different subject, I took the opportunity to enlist aid in searching for the elusive “Mary Samolis”—a resident of somewhere in Massachusetts, I thought—unless it was Connecticut. Eventually, from another source, I did locate the address and wrote to my sister-in-law, belatedly.

  How shocked she’d been, to learn that her younger brother Ray had died, and so suddenly! (Their younger brother Bob had died several years before.)

  Yet, the other day, in the courtyard, when I’d been looking through Ray’s much-thumbed address book, I discovered his sister’s name and address—it had been there all along.

  So often discovering things I hadn’t been able to find. Certain that I had looked, and looked, and looked—yet, somehow I’d overlooked what I was seeking.

  All this is new to me. This—dazedness.

  Beginning with the rude note under the windshield wiper of our car—LEARN TO PARK STUPPID BITCH. That was the first—the first indication that I am not thinking clearly, and I am not behaving—normally. The first indication from the world—the world that doesn’t give a damn about me, or Ray—that I have entered a new phase of my life from which there will be no return.

  Wet, wadded tissues. But these are my own, scattered on the carpet beside the bed.

  Chapter 77

  The Garden

  Surely Ray’s garden is a sinkhole. Surely it will be a terrible mistake for me to step inside.

  Yet I am unlatching the gate, I am stepping inside. A flood of such emotion comes over me, I think that I will faint. When we’d last been in this garden together, in the fall—how utterly different the garden had been, and our lives . . .

  There are the lightweight lawn chairs, we’d brought into the garden to sit in the sun and have lunch. Ray had been touched when I’d suggested this—the garden was always his place—he’d been happy when I came out to join him.

  And the cats, too—seeing that I was in the garden with Ray, and that we were talking together, Reynard and Cherie might enter the garden as if oblivious of each other.

  I want to think that Ray was very happy at these times. That he wasn’t thinking about the magazine, or the Press; he wasn’t thinking about financial matters, taxes or “maintaining” the house and property, a full-time occupation.

  If Ray’s spirit is anywhere—it’s in this garden.

  Painful to see how the garden has been ravaged by winter. Storm debris has fallen from nearby trees. I am trying to remember where Ray’s marigolds were, and his zinnias—everything is broken, their bright colors faded. Broken and rotted shells are all that remain of the pumpkins. Desiccated tomato vines on tilted poles, like frayed nerves. A snarl of last year’s cucumber vines entwined with the fence wire.

  Amid the ruin of the garden are some fresh green shoots that don’t appear to be weeds! These are what Ray called—(did he invent the term, himself?)—“volunteers.”

  Flowers that had reseeded themselves, and had survived the winter. Where everything else had died.

  I can’t identify these green shoots yet. In time, they will emerge as sweet william.

  Of course, morning glories return every year. Pale blue and white morning glories, I may have planted myself several years ago. For I was not always a stranger to the garden, I had loved Ray’s garden, too.

  This is the time of year when Ray would have the garden plowed. The hard-packed earth tilled in preparation for setting plants in. He would begin with lettuce, arugula, sweet basil. Would you like to come with me to Kale’s Ray would ask hopefully and in my study, at my desk I would murmur No thank you, I’m busy with—

  Now, too late. My insipid busy-ness has expanded, like a malevolent gas, to contain my entire life.

  Now in May 2008 my choice is: to allow Ray’s garden to revert to weeds, or, what seems equally undesirable, for me to plant a garden in its place.

  When an avid gardener dies, his family must make this choice. You will see gardens that have been allowed to go wild, for no one is equal to the challenge of maintaining them.

  When we’d moved into this house the garden was uncultivated but surrounded by a ten-foot fence which Ray had reinforced. It wasn’t a very sturdy-appearing fence but it has kept deer out. I am thinking Really, I can’t do this. I can’t put in a garden. I don’t know how, and I am not strong enough. I have not enough time. This will be another posthumous mistake I will regret.

  Another alternative is to pay someone to put in a garden. But how sad this is. How desperate.

  Once, I’d teased Ray by bringing home a beautifully shaped squash, to insinuate in a muddle of squash vines at the rear of the garden. Some sort of ghastly zucchini-bore had devastated most of his squashes that had blossomed and began to form fruit then abruptly began to shrivel. And as a prank I’d insinuated a perfectly formed acorn squash.

  Look! Ray had said, bringing the acorn squash into the kitchen.

  I’d laughed—Ray saw my face, and knew—“That isn’t funny,” he’d said, frowning.

  Truly my husband had been hurt. But he’d managed to laugh, too.

  No more pranks! This is a bittersweet memory.

  I feel that really, I have no choice. I can’t let Ray’s garden go wild—the irony is too painful. And our friends will surely see.

  In fact, several friends have offered to come over with the intention of “helping you with Ray’s garden”—for always the garden will be Ray’s whether it is cultivated or not.

  So, here I am on my way to Kale’s. It’s a sudden—impetuous—decision, I hope I won’t regret. In Millersport, on our small fruit-orchard farm, I’d helped my mother with our vegetable garden and with a cornfield and a strawberry patch, as I’d helped feed the chickens and gather eggs and keep their terribly smelly coops reasonably clean, but I am not really a gardener, some crucial gene is lacking in me, like a gene for mathematics, or a beautiful soprano voice.

  At Kale’s I will ask for perennials, exclusively—where Ray planted only annuals. I will ask for perennials that are hardy as weeds, flowers that bloom for much of the summer—“Anything that requires a minimum of work and is guaranteed to survive.”

  In this way, unwittingly, and against the grain of her temperament, the widow has made a very good decision. The widow has made a brilliant decision. Instead of drifting about the house like a ghost in an ever-downward sinking the widow will take over her husband’s abandoned garden and she will plant her husband’s garden in a new way—hardy perennials and not perishable annuals, flowers and not vegetables, sinewy fast-growing Russian sage, swaths of black-eyed susans and Shasta daisies, hollyhocks, hostas, salvia, day lilies, peonies. Naively the widow had anticipated one or two visits to the garden center, in fact the widow will return to the garden center many times through the summer. Asked if she has an account with the garden center, giving her a 10 percent discount on her purchases, the widow says yes, her husband has an account—“Raymond Smith, 9 Honey Brook Drive.”


  Chapter 78

  The Pilgrimage

  Now I am beginning to realize—this memoir is a pilgrimage.

  All memoirs are journeys, investigations. Some memoirs are pilgrimages.

  You begin at X, and you will end at Z. You will end—in some way.

  At the outset, in the confused nightmare-days/nights following Ray’s death, the (familiar) terrain through which I moved had become terrifying—unfamiliar. The very house in which I lived, that was “our” house—this was terrifying because, though utterly familiar, it was—it still is, at times—“unfamiliar.”

  What had drained from it, like color bleached by the sun, was meaning.

  To be human is to live with meaning. To live without meaning is to live sub-humanly. Like one who has suffered damage to a part of the brain in which language, emotions, and memory reside.

  In the early days, weeks, months of her new, posthumous life the widow must live without meaning—as in an ontological black-comedy in which others seem to be reciting from prepared scripts, actors linked to one another by the circuitry of an elaborate if invisible plot, while she, the widow, the one who has suffered some irrevocable loss, like a limb, or an eye, or the capacity to reason, must stumble through scenes, missing the vital linkage, the significance: Why?

  Why?—the question asked only by the miserably unhappy, the marginal, disenfranchised, embittered, sickly, sorrowful, black-sludge-souled at the edges of the brightly lit social comedy.

  Why?—the question that, if you ask it, like turning a flashlight onto your own contorted face, reveals the asker as deficient, wounded.

  Why?—the question that has no answer.

  Why did you fall in love with the one with whom you fell in love?

  Why did you not fall in love with the many others with whom you did not fall in love?

  Why did he/she love you in return?—is it possible, he/she did not know you, as you know you?

  Why did he/she not know you?—is it possible, you hid your truest self from him/her? And why?

  And why do you imagine—for certainly, we always imagine this—that you know the one with whom you fell in love?

  This is the possibility of which the widow is frightened.

  This is the possibility of which the widow doesn’t want to think.

  To lose her husband is devastating enough—how painful then to realize that she might not have known him, in the deepest and most profound way.

  In Ray’s garden, such thoughts come to me. These are not thoughts that would come to me elsewhere, I think—only in Ray’s garden.

  For I’ve hired a man to come and till the soil, as Ray did each year at this time. I’ve begun hoeing, digging, raking—I am wearing Ray’s old garden gloves; I am using Ray’s garden implements, and I will use Ray’s garden hose if I can manage to affix it properly to the faucet outlet at the rear of the house.

  Ray would like it, I think—knowing that I am here. Ray would think I was so happy there! I wish that I could be with you now, there.

  In a corner of the garden is the bright-colored Victorian birdhouse on a pole, ravaged from winter and beginning to buckle. Ray would have forced the pole more securely into the ground but I don’t seem to be strong enough. I will lean the birdhouse against the fence and hope it will remain upright.

  In an untidy pile at the rear of the garden are sticks Ray used to support his tomato plants. The fence is covered with grapevines, morning glory vines, the desiccated remnants of last year’s cucumber vines. Broken tree limbs have fallen onto the roof of the garden shed on the other side of the fence and seem to have dented it. It is so strange to think that I am in Ray’s garden—and Ray is not here; as if someone were in my study, at my desk, going through my papers—but I am not there.

  Absence is terrible enough. Extinction, unthinkable.

  So I will choose to think Ray’s spirit is here.

  I will think If Ray’s spirit is somewhere, anywhere—it is here.

  At the garden center I’d bought a number of plants—too many, it seems. My head is beginning to hurt at the prospect of having to dig holes for all these plants, shake the plants out of their containers and place them in the soil, and lightly pack the soil about them. And water them. Ray would instruct Just do as many as you want to, today. The rest will save. Be sure to water them.

  It was an anxious moment, at Kale’s—when the cashier searched the computer for RAYMOND SMITH. For I feared he would say There’s no one here by that name. Sorry.

  Ray said: removing a plant from its pot, always cut the exposed roots with a hoe, mash the soil that has been impacted from the pot so that the roots can breathe. Somehow, though I would have said that I know virtually nothing about gardening, I remember this.

  Ray said: be sure to make the hole deep enough. But not too deep.

  Be sure to water the plant’s roots thoroughly. But don’t drown it.

  If a widow is honest about her feelings she will acknowledge that she has been afraid, since her husband’s death, of learning something about him—of having something thrust into her face, about him—of which she had no previous knowledge. The widow fears not having known her husband intimately—or, having known him intimately, not having known him in a more public sense, as others knew him.

  For intimacy can be blinding. The closer you are, the less you can see.

  For there is—in all of us, perhaps—in some of us, certainly—something unknowable, inaccessible. A stubborn intractable intransigent otherness.

  Why Ray would speak so reluctantly of his father, and then with a strange, hurt, bitter twist of his mouth—why Ray would turn from me, if I wished to come too close—this is a mystery, it arises from his otherness.

  A wife must respect the otherness of her husband—she must accept it, she will never know him fully.

  Digging, hoeing, raking—protecting my hands from blisters by wearing Ray’s soiled gloves—I am thinking these thoughts. There is a deliberation in my thinking, I mean to think something through. When you are in the thrall of psychotropic medication always you are trying to think—trying to break through a scrim—like a bird desperate to break through a net. And so I am doing two things: I am working in Ray’s garden to save it from weeds, and to create a new garden, in Ray’s memory; and I am working with my hands, and with my back, and my legs—for working in the soil is working. And so, as I am working, I am thinking—but the kind of thinking I am doing isn’t anything like the kind of thinking I would do elsewhere, still less in bed, in the nest. This is a kind of thinking in tandem with working—some part or parts of my brain is roused, alive.

  What I am doing, I think, is—preparing myself for reading Black Mass.

  These weeks, months—I have been afraid to look at it. Ray’s novel manuscript, left uncompleted. Will I regret this? Would it be better for me to put the manuscript away, and never look at it again? Is there a story of Ray’s secret life that he’d have wanted to keep secret? And yet—if this were so, wouldn’t Ray have destroyed the manuscript long ago? Had he forgotten it? Outgrown it? Did he want me to see it—sometime? And is this the time? I am my husband’s executrix—I am the only one.

  Chapter 79

  “You Looked So Happy”

  In Windsor, Ontario, where we’d moved in the summer of 1968, and lived in a white brick house on Riverside Drive East on the Detroit River, looking across to Belle Isle. In Windsor where we both had teaching positions at the university and where each day, each afternoon, we walked together—along the crest of a long steep hill above the river, or along tree-lined residential streets in the Riverside district several miles from the university. Sometimes, we drove south along the Detroit River to Lake Erie and Point Pelee Park.

  (I am looking at photographs taken from our car, of autumn cornfields in the vicinity of Amherstburg. Brilliant blue sky, rows of broken cornstalks, how this so-ordinary sight tears at my heart . . . I am wondering Did I take these pictures? Was Ray driving? What were we talking about?

>   Did we have lunch somewhere along the lake? And what was awaiting us, back in our Windsor house? What were the preoccupations of our lives, at this time?)

  And there was a woman in Windsor of about my age, or just slightly younger—the wife of an English department colleague who’d been stricken with multiple sclerosis and who as he weakened, grew sicker and was finally forced to use a wheelchair, and was finally too ill to teach any longer, faded from our consciousness as from the memories of his students; and when this woman encountered me at university functions she would stare at me, so strangely—not obviously with hostility, though not in a friendly manner, either; and I felt uneasy, and tried to avoid her. And there came within a few years her husband’s death, at a quite young age—in his early thirties.

  And at the memorial service at the university there was the wife, the widow, surrounded by her friends, but staring at me, with a fierce little smile—saying to me that she’d seen Ray and me walking along the river the other day and we were holding hands—“You looked so happy.”

  It was an accusation, a reproach. That fierce hurt widow’s smile.

  I could not understand then. But I do now.

  Chapter 80

  Black Mass I

  On the desk in front of me is Ray’s unfinished novel-manuscript, in a soiled and tattered manila folder.

  Years ago, he’d given me some of this to read. Several chapters, of which I remember just a little. Later, when we were living in Windsor, Ray worked again on the manuscript, but didn’t show me what he’d written; like other subjects, the subject of Black Mass was not one that Ray cared to discuss with me.

  Once I’d overheard Ray say to a friend that being an editor was nothing like trying to be a writer—“No one ever killed himself over ‘editing.’ ”

  Most of Ray’s adult life is not represented here, in this tattered and much-annotated manuscript. Black Mass was written by a young man in his twenties whom I had not met—a highly intelligent, intellectual, yet insecure young man troubled by family issues, disturbed by religion—a “lapsed” Catholic who hadn’t yet become comfortable with his new freedom not to believe.