A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

by David Gates

  It’s as close to flying as we get in this world: breast-stroking through this uncanny element midway between earth and air, your legs extended behind you, your feet touching nothing. She swims out until she’s breathing hard, turns, treads water and looks back. The lights are on in the cottages, and here and there on the shore she can see tiny people clustering around the flames of outdoor grills. The stars are coming out, and the voices from far across the water are pinpricks in the silence. Her heart’s slowing again, she’s catching her breath. She treads water, floats awhile on her back, then treads water, then floats awhile. You could do this forever—or until you see the way that leads on from here, or until the dead speak to you at last.

  Alcorian A-1949

  The man who built this house—Royall Brown, 1750–1797—is buried in the graveyard up across the road, along with his wife, his son and his son’s wife and children. I’ve outlived him, at least in the sense that he was forty-seven and I’m now sixty-one. He built it in 1790, so I’ve occupied his house longer, too—unless you believe the lady we bought it from, who told Deborah she used to hear his ghost. Bring your drink out to the porch. You can see his headstone up there, the one with the top carved in the shape of wings.

  The year we moved here, Deborah did a rubbing and had it framed for my fortieth birthday, his epitaph in forward-slanting script: Dear Christian Friend, as here you stand / Thy Flesh is dust, thy Time is Sand. We were ironists but we weren’t—does that contextualize it for you? He the still-promising composer and sometime pianist who had studied with Morton Feldman; she the once-promising mezzo, pregnant with a last-chance child who was to be raised in clean air, among woods and white clapboard houses, where the wicked cease to trouble. Royall Brown’s epitaph sang to me, as words sometimes will even now, in a darksome, twisty melody, which I put through the grinder—inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion—and set for baritone and cello. You’ve heard that old Library of Congress recording of Golden P. Harris singing “I’ll Lead a Christian Life”? Well of course you haven’t, but that was the mood I wanted, though if you were to hear my piece—and there’s an if—it would just sound like good old dentist’s-chair serialism. Wasn’t I the shit back then? I must still have it on reel-to-reel somewhere, performed by colleagues at a faculty recital.

  Mrs. Gartner, who’d heard the ghost, lived on here after her husband died, despite macular degeneration and incipient dementia. When she finally fell and lay at the foot of the stairs for a day and a night, her granddaughter got her into Merrivale, the nursing home here in town—so her friends could still visit, in theory—and put the house on the market. But the lady signed the papers herself, God bless her, in the solarium, a lighted magnifying glass in her other hand, with the granddaughter standing beside her wheelchair. Then she clutched Deborah’s wrist and said, “You won’t forget me now?” Deborah and I took the girl to lunch afterward, though I shouldn’t say “girl”; she looked to be in her mid-twenties. She told us her grandparents had raised her—no explanation given—and that she’d lived in the house from when she was six until she went off to UNH. She had chopped-off black hair, black nail polish and black tights that showed white flesh through their ladders. Her name was Jessamyn. I’ll omit all that the male gaze registered, but isn’t it always a question of would you or wouldn’t you? Deborah (though she’d seen me looking and surely knew I would) told her to stop by anytime she came to see her grandmother. But we never heard from her.

  Deborah took to visiting Mrs. Gartner once a week. Mrs. Gartner would ask if hummingbirds still visited the feeders she’d put up—of course Deborah said they did—and if the swallows still made nests in the corner of the porch, which was true. She would bring roses from the garden (the old lady could smell them, at least) and stewed rhubarb from the plant in the side yard. Deborah got stories about the Gartners’ courtship—he used to bring her blueberries he’d picked, in a Maxwell House coffee can—but she could never find out how they had come to raise the granddaughter. “Children can be such a disappointment”: that was all the old lady would say. A few times, at her request, Deborah went over to sing, in what the nurses were instructed to call the living room, and she roped me in to accompany her, on an old Chickering upright. For conservatory types, we were convincing enough: I’d worked my way through Buffalo playing lounges, and Deborah could sing “My Old Flame” or “Someone to Watch Over Me” without sounding like a lieder-trilling twit. After Sophia was born, Deborah brought her along a couple of times, but Mrs. Gartner got “agitated,” as the nurses put it, when Deborah took the baby away, thinking it was her baby.

  Demented though she may have been, Mrs. Gartner had kept her mouth shut about Royall Brown until after we’d closed on the house. Deborah asked her how she’d known it was his ghost, and she said, “Why, who else would care?” Before Mr. Gartner’s heart attack, he’d been trying to talk her into moving to Florida.

  Deborah began hearing Royall Brown, too: a floor creaking somewhere as we lay in bed, a door slamming, a thump outside, the faintest ping from my piano down in the living room. Never anything that might not have been a gust of wind, or the house settling, or an apple falling from one of the old trees I never got around to pruning—we used to talk about buying a cider press—or a wasp lighting on a piano string. Or, in the fullness of time, Sophia sneaking out to buy drugs. Deborah once saw a patch of fog over his grave in the shape of a man, but it dissipated by the time I could get out to the porch. His presence, she told me, felt “disapproving.” I made my will a couple of months ago, and it specifies that my body be cremated, so I won’t be joining the cast of characters up across the road. Or my own mother and father, buried in the town in Massachusetts where I grew up, seventy miles from here as the spirit flies. And I doubt that my own spirit—if I have such a thing, if I am such a thing—will be mooning around the house, rattling windows and wringing its see-through hands over, say, having failed to love when it was still possible.

  Deborah had clearly worked up her farewell aria with some care: she would never have a career now, she told me, but at least she might have a life (this was a false ending), and (here comes the final cadence) she never wanted to see this place again. Come Judgment Day, they’ll confront me with a pie chart, showing just what percentage of me wanted this. So I’ve left the house to Sophia—who, when the time comes, might be more sentimental than she is now and unwilling to sell off her childhood home, from which she ran away for good at sixteen. She’s twenty-two, has apparently straightened herself out and lives with a boy in Berlin; if I’m accurately intuiting my own trajectory, she’ll inherit this place when she’s about thirty. By which time I will have done my important work—you understand that’s a joke, yes?—and the world (if I’m accurately intuiting its trajectory) will be shot to hell too, and she might be glad of a refuge—for however long such a refuge will last—twenty miles off the nearest interstate, where you can still sit and drink on the porch of a white clapboard house.

  I hadn’t seen Sophia for three years when she paid me a visit last month before flying to Germany, bringing the boyfriend as a buffer. Since my time, she’d had a piece of metal, like a tiny dumbbell, installed in her eyebrow, to show the world she’d been wounded. They sat together on the sofa and turned down my offer of a gin and tonic. “I’m trying to picture what your life is like now,” she said.

  “I can help you with that,” I said. “First you picture a hand coming out from under the piano lid.”

  “I guess you were always funny,” she said.

  “Until I wasn’t.”

  “I’ve let that go,” she said.

  The boyfriend had wandered over to the piano. He played a scale with his right hand—I watched the thumb spider up under the fingers—and then grabbed a two-handed diminished chord. The only kind of chord of which my piano is now capable, one might say, if one were still funny. “This is an amazing instrument,” he said.

  “Well then,” I said. “Oblige us.”

  “
I don’t really play.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Sophia said. “Eric’s band is going to Scandinavia next month.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Well, give my regards to Norway.”

  He went back and sat on the sofa. She got up and said, “We’re going out on the porch for a little, okay?”

  “I can go out,” he said.

  “No, you sit.”

  “If you change your mind,” I said, “the gin’s in the freezer.”

  I followed her out; she sat down in an Adirondack chair and tucked her feet under her. I lowered myself into the chair next to her, bracing on its arms like an old man. “Why are you being a prick to him?” she said.

  “I thought I was being self-ironic. I guess I’m not used to being around people anymore.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel sorry for you?” she said. “This was Mom’s idea, you know?”

  “I’m just glad you came. And I had wanted to meet your friend.”

  “Well, now you can check that off.”

  “Since you’re here, I should probably show you a couple of things. This house is going to be yours someday, so—”

  “Oh,” she said. “Lucky me. What, are you making plans for an early exit?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Believe me, if I were in your shoes? I’m sure I’d feel the same way. I just want to do what little I can at this point.”

  “What am I supposed to say? ‘I’m sorry I was such a handful’? How about this? When I’m getting ready to check out, I’ll forgive you.”

  “I thought you said you’d let it go.”

  “So I guess I was lying,” she said. “I studied under the master, right?” She stood up. “We’re going.”

  “Could I just make one thing clear?” I said.

  She opened the door to the living room and looked back at me. “What?”

  What indeed?

  “No, nothing,” I said. “I’ll let you have the last word.”

  —

  By the time Mrs. Gartner died, Deborah had been living in Cambridge for a year. But she’d kept in touch with a couple who live on our road—my road—and who no longer keep in touch with me, you’ll be surprised to hear. She called me the night before the funeral to say she was renting a car and coming up. “I just wanted to forewarn you,” she said. “I promised her.”

  “Now you’ve shamed me into it,” I said.

  “That would be something to see,” she said. “Your shame.”

  “Oh, it’s on permanent display,” I said. “It’s become one of the local attractions.”

  “Good you still have your sense of humor,” she said. “It must be getting quite a workout these days.”

  You see? I always let them have the last word.

  It was the third week in August, still hot, though while driving to the church I noticed a red leaf on a maple tree. I took a seat in the back, next to Deborah—how could one not? She gave my hand a quick squeeze. Could it possibly be? Might I possibly want it? I spotted the granddaughter in the front row, sitting with a white-haired couple and an old lady with a walker. Jessamyn (I remembered the name) had to be forty now, though she still had that chopped-off hair, with a new tinge of maroon. I saw that her cheeks had gotten pudgy, suggesting she might be both appetitive and attainable—ah, this was just one of those reflexive thoughts that still intrude, as a corpse’s hair and fingernails are said to keep growing. I’d given up pursuing students, belatedly you’ll say, after a collegial talking-to from my department chairman, and—since I have no secrets from you—after taking a young woman to bed and being unable to follow through. Still, back in May, at the end-of-the-semester party, I drank too much—that is, I drank—and kissed one of my students good night, on the mouth, though I knew she’d been aiming for my cheek. The next day, to try to head off another complaint, I emailed her an apology for what I called “an excess of good cheer,” and she wrote back that she’d been “amused”: the midpoint, I took it, between “offended” and “saddened.”

  After the service, I walked out with Deborah and touched a hand to the back of her arm as we went down the steps. “There’s Marcia and Walter,” she said. This was the couple I was telling you about. “I should go say hello.”

  But Jessamyn was walking up to us, patting sweat from her forehead with a bandanna handkerchief that looked out of keeping with her black dress. “I don’t know if you remember me,” she said. I saw she wasn’t wearing a ring.

  “Of course,” Deborah said. “How are you holding up?”

  “Well,” she said, “it’s not like I wasn’t expecting it. Actually, I have a favor to ask? I wonder if I could come out this afternoon and see the house one more time.”

  “I’m probably not the one to ask anymore,” Deborah said.

  Jessamyn looked at her, then at me. “Oh. I guess I stepped in something.” I remembered her fetchingly harsh little voice.

  “That would be fine,” I said. “We were going to grab some lunch, but maybe three, three thirty?”

  “That works. I’ve still got all this to deal with.” She looked over her shoulder at the white-haired couple getting the walker lady into the front seat of a minivan. “Thanks.” I took care not to eye her as she walked away.

  Deborah said, “Aren’t we amicable.”

  “Would you like some lunch?” I said. “Let’s say hello to Walter and Marcia, and then we can go over to the Pine Grove.”

  “I think I’m just going to run along,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll have your hands full.” False ending. “Anyhow, I don’t want to weigh down your afternoon with any more nostalgia.”

  —

  Sooner or later I’d been bound to get a DWI; I suppose I was lucky it happened while Deborah was still in the picture. After teaching a theory class one evening—this would have been February of last year—I went to a bar in the South End with my students, then headed up 93 listening to Hope in the Night, where gentle June Hunt gets callers to invite Jesus Christ into their hearts. Somehow I made it as far as Manchester before getting pulled over. For the rest of the term, Deborah drove me down to Concord once a week to catch the bus to Boston; only when they reinstated my license did she announce she was leaving. After she moved I had to unplug the phone at night, since the sainted Deborah—and I’m not saying she didn’t deserve Walter and Marcia’s sympathy—had developed a little problem herself. One night I forgot; I let the machine pick up and I heard her say, “You’re just up there waiting to die.” One of these days I need to set that shit, don’t you think? Just mezzo and snare drum—you hear the six-eight rhythm? “March from an Unwritten Opera” we could call it. Might end up becoming my little out-of-context keeper, my “Treulich gëfuhrt”—“Here Comes the Bride,” to you—or my Ride of the Valkyries. Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!

  For my community service, I chose to go over to Merrivale one afternoon a week and play for—I almost said pray for—the moribunds. Mrs. Gartner was now in her nineties, and she’d had a stroke on top of everything else, but the nurses thought she still responded to music, so they rolled her out, hands strapped to the arms of her wheelchair, like the statue of the Great Emancipator. The first afternoon, I tried them on the usual American songbook shit, but Deborah was in no mood to come in and sing with me, and who knows the words anymore to “Mountain Greenery” or “A Fine Romance”? Finally a lady in a flowered top and a white neck brace asked for “Sweet Caroline.” It’s one of those songs you’ve heard a million times, and I managed to get through it by ear. I didn’t know anything beyond “Where it began,” but the lady had the “Warm, touching warm” part, and a few of them came in on the dum dum dum: apparently this was a phenomenon at Fenway. So when I got home, I went online and ordered something called the Wedding and Love Fake Book—somebody else had a sense of humor, no?—with 450 songs: “My Cherie Amour,” “Baby I’m-a Want You,” “Danny’s Song” (that’s the one that goes “Even though we ain’t got money”), “Time in a Bottle.” And I paid the guy who tunes my p
iano to come from Hanover and try to get the one at Merrivale halfway playable. I’ve got my license back now, but I keep going there, partly to give my weeks more of a shape, partly to bring myself low. The nurses tell me I’m the favorite of all the people who come in, except for a woman who brings her Labrador retriever around.

  During the school year I still drive down to teach, though now I put up at a motel and go back the next day. Otherwise, I’m here. I get up, drink coffee and—in order to irritate myself, I suppose—put on New Hampshire Public Radio and listen to the Morning Diddle Diddle Dum. (Did all those Baroque composers have Asperger’s?) Then I go to the piano and work at working, until disgust tolls fancy’s knell. In the afternoon, the obligatory walk in the woods, or perhaps a trip to town for pie and coffee at the Pine Grove, where I’m known for my geniality. Every Tuesday I drive to Hanover to give a piano lesson to a no-hoper high-school boy, and on the way back I stop by the state liquor store in West Lebanon for a couple of handles of Tanqueray. After sunset, of course, I’m immobilized, as the undead are by day: this is when I drink, and the town cops know my car. Picture the door to the freezer inching open, the hand creeping in. So I sip the hours away, playing computer solitaire and listening to the radio. In the p.m., I switch to AM—my little way of bidding defiance to Time—crossing over into the wonder world of Jesus: Hope in the Night; Brother Stair, “The Last-Day Prophet” who sometimes bellows in the voice of God; and Open Forum with Harold Camping, who mikes his Bible so you can hear the pages turn, and who’s calculated the Rapture for May of next year, and the end of time for October 21. I’d find this fixation hard to explain if there were anyone to whom I had to explain it. You don’t suppose He’s calling me, or that I’m seeking Him? And of course I worry about my work. When you lose a game of solitaire, a box pops up: There are no more possible moves. What do you want to do now? It’s one of those ironies so obviously pointed at you that you can’t take it seriously. As I tell my students, if you’re not at a creative impasse, you’re not paying attention.