Who are you? asked the Ancestress.
I am Clare, answered the cat.
Can you move the body you have entered, as I moved the keys on the piano?
Clare sent herself into every muscle and nerve. Cinnamon Monkeyshines stood up.
Not paralyzed, I see, observed the Ancestress.
The cat scampered across the room and exclaimed, It feels wonderful!
Time to go back, said the Ancestress.
I don’t want to go back, said the cat.
Go back out of kindness to your body, Clare. Such a faithful friend your body has been to you. Think how lonely it feels now. That’s a good girl.
When Clare glanced back at Cinnamon Monkeyshines, he blinked at her twice, jumped up to his spot on the sofa, and went on sleeping where he’d left off.
5
Everybody Should Learn to Swim
WHEN CLARE WOKE UP, her legs disappointed her. A hard frost still separated them from the rest of her body. Nothing had changed.
After breakfast a large nurse with a ruddy complexion and short blond hair strode briskly into the room, pushing an empty wheelchair.
“I’m Mrs. Thatcher. This morning you’re going to get some exercise, Clare.”
Mrs. Thatcher cranked the bed down, helped Clare into the new pink quilted bathrobe her mother had brought, and handed Clare a comb and a mirror.
“Don’t worry about the bruise on your forehead. In a week it’ll turn yellow instead of blue, and in two weeks you’ll hardly know it’s there.”
How could she not worry about the dark swelling just under her hairline? She ran her finger over it and tears sprang to her eyes. Her hair was too matted for the comb. But Mrs. Thatcher took a single lock and worked it between her fingers, and presently Clare was combing it, a few strands at a time.
“Let’s braid it, Clare. That way it won’t get snarled so fast.”
From her pocket she drew another comb and a pair of scissors and went to work on the snarls at the back. To Clare’s surprise, her touch was firm but gentle. Snip! sang the shears.
“Don’t cut it,” Clare pleaded.
“We don’t have to cut very much,” said Mrs. Thatcher. “Vaseline helps.” She was already braiding and banding the left side. But she did not hurry Clare, and she put the scissors back into her pocket and went on combing and chatting.
“Till you learn to use crutches, life is going to be more difficult than you’ve ever imagined. From now on, stairs are your enemy. Before you go anywhere, you’ll ask yourself, Are the doors wide enough? Is there a bathroom on the ground floor?”
Now she was braiding the right side, gathering the strands that Clare had combed.
“When I was seventeen, I got polio. I spent four years in a chair. When my mother took me shopping for clothes, nobody wanted to wait on us. Nobody would help me try anything on. The clerks would talk about me to my mother as if I were deaf and dumb. ‘Would she like this green dress? This yellow one?’ But I’ll tell you something. The day I took my first step was the happiest day of my life. My boyfriend stuck by me. I wanted to walk down the aisle without crutches or braces. And I did. There. Take a look at yourself.”
Clare peered anxiously into the mirror. A tight, greasy braid brushed each shoulder. Mrs. Thatcher lifted Clare into the chair and pushed a pair of bedroom slippers over her bare feet. Purple silk; her mother’s. At home Clare never wore slippers. Now she stared down at her feet, small, overdressed, cocked at an awkward angle on the foot rest of the wheelchair.
“Ready to meet the world,” said Mrs. Thatcher and wheeled her into the hall.
The world was filled with nurses, doctors, visitors, and orderlies pushing stretchers to operating rooms, to X-ray, to the emergency room. Carts stacked high with empty breakfast trays rattled down the hall. Clare recognized the rack of charts behind the nurse’s station, and here—wasn’t this the room in which she had watched one man live and another man die?
Her chair turned sharply, a door opened, and she was wheeled into a large room, empty save for two sets of parallel bars and a wheelchair. Another nurse was helping a boy of about seven to walk very slowly between the bars. He was dragging his legs in their heavy braces along the floor and hanging on hard.
“You’re doing so well!” exclaimed the nurse. “You’re doing so well.”
The boy stopped. Sweat shone in large drops on his face.
“I want the chair now,” he begged.
Mrs. Thatcher and the other nurse exchanged nods.
“I’m going to buckle your legs into braces, Clare,” said Mrs. Thatcher. “They feel awful, but they’ll help you keep your balance. Your bars are just like his, only higher.”
In this room with a crippled child and two nurses, Clare feared for the first time that she might not get well. They were not healing her. They were teaching her to take her place in that invisible nation of the handicapped.
“Hold onto the bars. Use your arms for support,” said Mrs. Thatcher. “Don’t worry. I have a good grip on you.”
“I’m going to fall.”
“No you won’t. I’m right beside you. I’m holding you up. Move your legs from the hips.”
That she could move them at all gave Clare a small thrill. Two dead weights. She could not feel where she was setting them down.
“My legs are too heavy,” she exclaimed.
“Huh! You should’ve seen my first pair of braces,” said Mrs. Thatcher. “They had to be forged at a blacksmith’s and the straps had to be ordered from a saddlemaker. You couldn’t even buy braces in the town where I grew up. People with polio were supposed to be shut away where nobody had to see them. Thank God my parents had different ideas.”
By the time they returned to her room, Clare was glad to be lifted into the newly made bed.
“Somebody left you the Reader’s Digest,” observed Mrs. Thatcher.
Clare picked it up and found she was too tired to read it. She might have fallen asleep with the Reader’s Digest clasped to her chest if a young man in a white coat and white trousers had not walked into the room.
“I’m Doctor Henderson,” he said, extending his hand. Clare took it, and he pressed her fingers between his. “Did Mrs. Thatcher have you walking this morning?”
It annoyed Clare that he should ask her a question to which he almost certainly knew the answer. He glanced down at the papers on the clipboard he carried and hurried over the possibility of a reply.
“Your right leg is stronger than your left, but your left leg has more feeling in it. There’s no nerve damage, no muscle damage, no fever, and no infection. Something in here”—he tapped his head—“is telling your legs they can’t walk, and that’s what we’ve got to overcome.”
He gave her a broad smile.
“You won’t be going back to school. But there’s no need for you to shut yourself away from your friends. I had a patient who lost both arms and legs in an accident. Nicest guy in the world. Everybody loved him. He married the head nurse. Can you swim?”
“What?”
“Can you swim?”
Clare nodded her head, puzzled.
“Good. Swimming helps. There’s a good pool at the YMCA.”
Anger boiled up in her. She was a good swimmer, but how could she go to a public pool with her body like this?
In Paradise, the Lord of the Universe tosses a green ball which breaks into a red ball, which breaks into a gold ball, and Wanda Harkissian finds, in the lining of her winter coat, a silver coin with a skull on one side and a winged man on the other, strung on a thread of elastic.
“Ben,” she says at breakfast, “isn’t this the coin you lost years ago at the Y?”
She drops it into his open palm, and Ben sees himself on a hot day in July, eight years old, running along the edge of the pool. He always told people a bigger kid pushed him in at the deep end, because the truth sounded so goofy: he jumped in because he thought the water would hold him up. Water had always been friendly to him. Why shoul
d it do otherwise?
He sank swiftly into aquamarine, saw the ladder stretching still and blue, down, down under the water—how tall it stood! how far it reached!—resting its feet on the bottom like a great tree. Above him the white legs of swimmers churned the shining lid of the water into silver globes. He sank. He touched the floor of this vast, still room, felt the water push him almost to the surface; but he had fallen too far, and the shining lid was both near and far off, like land seen from the prow of a ship.
Then everything around him shattered, as the man who dived in to save Ben collided with him.
For weeks Ben would not go near the water at all. When he and Willie passed the Y, they crossed to the opposite side of the street.
Everybody should learn to swim, his father told him, and he gave Ben the coin to wear on an elastic thread around his neck while he made his peace with the water. For a month Ben paddled at the shallow end while the young man who taught swimming led the other children out into deep water. One day Ben allowed himself to be led beyond his depth. He clung to the edge of the pool and kicked and he let go and swam across the pool, steadily and with great purpose, as if he were answering a summons from the other side.
Two days later Ben could neither find nor remember having lost the talisman he was sure had helped him.
Now, after so many years, the skull and winged man flashed in the morning light. Going into hiding had not tarnished them. Wanda said it wasn’t the coin but his own courage that had carried Ben across the pool. Ben guessed she was right; but couldn’t the coin still have a power of its own, the accumulated courage of the unknown soldier who lost it, and of his father who’d found it long ago, and of himself, who’d both found it and lost it, and found it again?
“I could send it to her with a note,” said Ben at breakfast. Willie stopped chewing his cornflakes. “Who?”
“Clare Bishop.”
“Who?”
“Clare Bishop. The girl I hit. She’s still in the hospital.”
“You called the hospital?”
Ben nodded. “They wouldn’t tell me how badly she was hurt.”
“Get yourself a good lawyer,” said Willie. “I’m not loaning you a cent.”
“I’ve got to talk to her.”
“You’re off your trolley.”
Wanda came into the kitchen, ready to leave for work—she always left a half hour before they did—and they both stood up to kiss her good-bye.
6
A Book of Gold
THE ATTIC DOOR STOOD open. Grandpa Ericson sat in the overstuffed chair, his hat in his hand, his coat thrown over his shoulders like a cape, singing,
“Thro’ many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have already come;
’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far—”
“Good-bye, Grandpa,” said Davy from the doorway.
Grandpa stopped singing.
“Davy, who sat under the terebinth tree?”
“The men of Shechem. And Abraham,” answered Davy.
“And why did they sit under the terebinth tree?”
“Because when the leaves rustled, they were whispering the secrets of the future.”
“Correct,” said Grandpa. “Take a penny from the jar. I’m leaving the penny jar in your care while I’m gone. Is your aunt from Grossey Pointe here?”
It amused him to speak of his own daughters as if they were other people’s relatives. And he had a way of saying “Grosse Pointe” that reminded Vicky she hadn’t always had it so good.
“You forgot to pack your books,” said Davy.
“They’ve got a public library in Grossey Pointe,” said Grandpa. “And before you know it I’ll be back. Let’s go downstairs.”
He took Davy’s hand and pulled himself up. They both sang the last verse.
“When we’ve been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun, We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise Than when we first begun.”
Halfway down the second flight of stairs, he asked, “Is your grandmother in the house?”
“No, Grandpa. You’re safe.”
Here’s where I saw Clare, thought Davy. And that other lady. In my dream.
At the dining room table, Helen and Vicky and Nell sat with the book of days open on the lace tablecloth before them, a leather-bound account book in which Vicky had recorded, for the last three years, Grandpa days and Grandma days. Grandpa’s were blue, Grandma’s bright red. They were worked like cross-stitch over the empty spaces under the names of Helen and Nell and Vicky. A simple pattern: when Helen and Nell had Grandma, Vicky had Grandpa. When Vicky had Grandma, Helen and Nell had Grandpa. Nobody needed credit for having Grandpa. He was no trouble to anyone.
Vicky kept strict account of their payments. Now she was showing Helen and Nell how many Grandma days they owed. One hundred and eighty days came to six months. No credit extended on account of illness.
“I don’t know how we’re going to manage when Clare comes home,” said Helen. “If only Grandma doesn’t try to run away.”
“Keep her busy,” said Vicky. “She loves to scour pots. She scoured a hole clean through my double boiler.”
The aroma of roast chicken appeared in their midst like an unannounced guest, and Vicky, remembering that she never stayed for dinner, rose and announced that she never stayed for dinner while Helen, remembering that it was good manners to offer people a drink at this hour, waved toward the sideboard and said, “Have some Harvey’s Bristol Cream.”
It was the only alcoholic beverage she kept in the house. She’d called Vicky to ask what she should buy for her play-reading group, since you couldn’t expect all your guests to drink Sparkling Catawba grape juice.
Vicky eyed it suspiciously. “Is that the same bottle you bought three years ago?”
“For my club,” said Helen.
“Heavens, don’t open it just for me,” said Vicky.
And Nell called out from the hall, “Davy and Grandpa are here.”
Grandpa walked slowly down the front walk, Davy on one side, his cane on the other. Hal followed them with the suitcase.
“That sky means snow,” he said, but nobody was listening.
Vicky climbed into the driver’s seat of the Olds, and Helen and Nell and Hal and Davy lined up by the rear door, which hung open like a broken wing. Grandpa settled himself into the back seat, then leaned forward and inquired of Vicky, “Where is your mother?”
“Fred’s walking her around the block,” replied Vicky. “He should be bringing her back any minute now. We’ll drive around the corner and wait for him. I don’t want Grandma to see the car.”
A slamming of doors. The car hugged the curb and glided out of sight.
“Wave,” said Helen.
The little group at the curbside waved.
“They can’t see us anymore,” said Nell.
But Helen went on waving.
“When Hal and I said good-bye to the Crombergs in Berlin, they waved their handkerchiefs till our train was out of sight,” she said. “You never know when it will be the last time.”
“It’s a queer business,” said Hal, “when a wife can’t lay eyes on her husband without picking a quarrel.”
From the other end of the block, Fred approached with Grandma, wrapped in her sealskin coat, bulky with the sweaters she wore even in warm weather.
Davy thought: I don’t like Grandma but I like her braids. They make a little bridge across her head.
“No overcoat,” said Nell. “Fred has no overcoat.”
“Fred is the only man I know who puts on a three-piece suit to go outside and mail a letter,” said Helen.
“Stockbrokers always wear suits,” said Nell.
“He shaved his mustache,” observed Hal.
Nell shrugged.
“What else could he do? A client told him he looked like Hitler.”
Under the light banter, Grandma did not hear the good-byes, did not see Fred twinkle down the block to the getaway ca
r waiting around the corner.
He made it, thought Helen. They’re on the way home. Out of sight, out of mind.
Grandma looked east from where they’d come, west to where they’d gone.
“Where’s Peter? Where’s Peter?” she asked.
“Grandpa’s in Grosse Pointe with Vicky,” said Helen.
“Never here when he’s needed!” Grandma cried. “I got two men coming to fix the porch. He promised he’d fetch ladders.”
“Hal, take her suitcase to the guest room,” said Helen.
But Hal had already gone into the house, and Helen picked up the suitcase and carried it up herself.
The guest room on the second floor was as formal as the attic was cluttered. A peach satin bolster, bedspread, and ruffled duster. A double-globed milk-glass lamp that turned into flowered moons when Helen touched the switch. Silver mirrors on the dressing table; cut-glass perfume bottles. Nobody ever used the perfume, which had aged to the deep brown of old woodwork. On the wall over the bed hovered an angel that Clare had painted. Its body followed the contours of a large crack.
In front of the open suitcase, Grandma examined, arranged, and sorted, as if appraising goods at a rummage sale. The black suit was in good condition. The blue sweater was mended on both elbows. Two nightgowns like flannel tents were wrapped around a jar of Kaopectate (the wholesale size) and five rolls of toilet paper. She had once had an attack of diarrhea in church and ever afterward kept an emergency supply of toilet paper wadded in the top of her stocking, the way some women carry money. And the pink ribbed underpants and sleeveless undershirts—it was a joke among Helen and Vicky and Nell while they were growing up that all the women in their family together hadn’t enough to fill one bra.
“Let’s put your things away in the drawers, shall we?” said Helen.
But Grandma wanted nothing put away. She hung all her clothes on hooks at the back of the closet door. “I want everything out where I can see it,” she said.
Things Invisible to See Page 4
