She’s not dead, I scream at my father silently. She wanted this read after she’s gone. And if she can hear us, she knows we didn’t do as she asked.
The cousins stare at the paper in my hand. I know they’re shocked too.
Mother gasps. Machines whir. My father moves his hand closer.
I’m bent over her hand when I hear a muted, muffled voice: “I love you. I’ve always loved you.”
The voice isn’t mine. Not one of the cousins. A voice I’ve never heard say this. A hand that touches only a pillow.
I have always loved you.
Mother does not die. Classy of her not to reward a deathbed scene she’d have hated.
How awkward now—the loved ones hovering, waiting for the beloved to die, and she doesn’t cooperate? She breathes more easily, the machines are normal again. An ICU nurse comes in, says, “Y’all brought Mrs. Louise back. All that talk about Thanksgiving dinner—I’d stay around for that myself.”
My ears are ringing—I love you, I’ve always loved you—did he really say that? I don’t believe it.
The nurse adds softly, “Mrs. Louise isn’t ready yet. Y’all go back to the waiting room while I check her over. Come back in ten minutes.”
I walk to the waiting area, sit down, take out my mother’s typed letter.
Dear William,
You made a big point of telling me, more than once, that the dying shouldn’t make requests for their funeral because it wasn’t fair to the ones left behind. So if you don’t feel like doing the following, don’t trouble yourself. I’d like a closed casket and two hymns: “Faith of Our Fathers” and Leslye said she’d sing the solo “Come, Ye Disconsolate.” I’d like my mother’s prayer book buried with me. But if my funeral’s too much trouble for you, just forget it. I wouldn’t want to put you out.
I stare at the letter—dated four years ago, after Mother could no longer write by hand. He told her that even for her funeral she shouldn’t ask for what she wants? So she gets back at him, from death, with sarcastic martyrdom? This is how my family ends?
I tell the ICU desk to call me if there’s any change and go for a walk around the hospital grounds. It’s raining hard. After I’ve circled the grounds five times, I drive to my parents’ house. I don’t even dry off but go straight to my mother’s green hymnal on the piano. A book she sang from for forty years, her name in gold on the leather cover. I pick it up and fit my hand into the imprint left by hers, pebbled leather worn soft and smooth, caressed. The oil from her fingers seeps into mine—I can feel her holding on to this book. To her own voice.
As I thumb through the pages, looking for the second hymn she wants, a black and white photograph falls out, its rippled edges creased. My parents in 1940s clothes—their engagement photo maybe. They’re smiling like nothing exists except each other. Staring at the picture, I feel completely crazy. I put it down and find the hymn:
Come, you disconsolate, wher-e’er ye languish;
Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel;
Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish;
Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.
I curl up on the piano bench and beg whoever is out there to let my mother die.
Chapter Sixteen: Louise
Darling Lyra, you’re here early this morning. Oh how I will miss you—
I feel stronger today. My mind’s been stuck in 1957—so much of my life comes down to that year, but not all. Why, just a minute ago I dreamed about when my daddy and my uncle took us children down to Hilton Head. This was before there was anything there, the men were going hunting, though my father never shot anything, didn’t have the heart for it. We were staying with family friends, I was probably nine, and Daddy and Uncle Billy were out one night scouting for game, but they came back to get us and took us to the ocean to see a herd of wild deer, must have been twenty-five, in the water. The deer swam across the inlet and went up on Daufuskie Island and stayed a while, and got in the water again and swam out so far we couldn’t see them anymore. Daddy was smoking his pipe and kept saying, in a hushed voice, that he’d thought it was an old tale, the myth of the sea-deer. He whispered, “Louise honey, to see this means we’ve been chosen tonight.”
I never forgot those swimming deer. Wild creatures driven to bathe in moonlight simply for the beauty of it, their luminous gold-nugget eyes twin beacons through light and shadow and the sighing of inland rivers and pine forests. Eyes of the miraculous, of ancient faith. I wanted to have eyes like that. I’m swimming myself and I was never a good swimmer, but I seem better at it right now. Fortunately I’m not fat anymore, I did hate it when your father called me that. No one knows—save you—the terrible things he sometimes said to me; for decades, I haven’t known from day to day what strange or hurtful thing might happen. I know you think I should have stood up to him more. I’d like to think I just didn’t know how to stand up for myself. I felt so guilty that the state hospital ruined his career, our lives really. It was heartbreaking how no one would hire him afterward, him with an honors degree from the military academy. When he did get work, one job after another failed. But he kept going out to forage and I admired him for that. I’m sure he didn’t want to end up as a night security guard, a shell-shock victim ironically carrying a gun for years.
After William returned from the hospital people shunned us—people at the church, neighbors; a department store got wind of it and cancelled our credit card. And don’t think I don’t know what happened to you—children who wouldn’t play with you anymore, the Logan Girls Club all your friends were invited to join but you weren’t. What came after William’s breakdown was often worse than the breakdown itself. I so wanted another child, a large family—
Misfortune makes some of us punish ourselves, others punish someone else.
One year William was berating me—I forget for what but telling me, like I was a dimwitted child, that I didn’t understand anything—and I was about to say I’d had it, but somehow I couldn’t. I remembered how happy we were on our honeymoon. I remembered the shy way he held you when we came home from the hospital and how the Spanish moss draped across the crepe myrtle trees in Charleston when we went to Hampton Park to feed the swans. I remembered that he was sent a Dear John letter in the muddy trenches of war-torn Europe, remembered that he’d lost all his family when so young. I asked my sister-in-law why she put up with my brother’s drinking, and that sweet woman looked at me and said, “If I don’t take care of him, who will?”
I know that sounds ridiculously self-sacrificing to you, but I really believed in for better or worse. Even after William revealed his hideous revenge, I thought that to run away would be to think only of myself. I wanted you to have a whole family. So I made up my mind to stay and see what I could do to make things better, to play out the hand I’d been dealt. I was an optimist—things might change. Not much, as it turns out. But as Mr. Faulkner put it, we survived. Even after we left Lincoln Street—you were a handful in high school and your father tormented you—I was often depressed, though I’d never have called it that. I know I let you down sometimes. When Laidlaw closed because of white flight—I was principal then—and I was sent to teach in that massive, violent high school across town, I was miserable. An energy I’d always had went missing—
Sometimes it feels like I’m levitating—I can’t explain it—floating—but I want to say something else—
I could never admit the failure of our family life, couldn’t face that I hadn’t been able to give you a happy childhood. Maybe I was afraid you’d blame me. Do you? Eventually it was too late to change anything, too late—partially my own doing—to recoup what I’d most wanted. I settled for company, did without comfort. Now William has ended up taking care of me: caring for someone may not be love, but it is loyalty. Such things matter at the end of life, even if the inspiration is obligation. He kept watc
h over me after my surgeries and he’s checked my blood sugar every day and doled out my medicines, though he rarely lets me have the prescribed sleeping pills and painkillers, says I’ll “get hooked on them.” He brags that he hasn’t had a day to himself in four years, which is accurate I suppose but wouldn’t be if he hadn’t refused Medicare home nurses. He told neighbors I likely had infections that could be spread and they should stay away. Thankfully they paid no attention to him.
But he has been here every day. Because he has, I haven’t had to burden you with my old age, and I’m grateful for that. I haven’t had to go to a nursing home. I’ve gotten to stay in my favorite chair and look out the window at the camellias I planted so long ago. And once or twice—just for a moment—there’d be a glimmer of the past, as though William’s lack of warmth was a gray mist that sunlight suddenly broke through. Every autumn, even after I couldn’t walk well, he took me to the North Carolina mountains to buy the winesap apples I love. One day while we were sitting on a motel balcony, he said, “Time is slowing down, Louise. Sometimes I remember your singing, it was something.”
Shared history can be a powerful ligament. Like those twenty years I lunched every month with retired Laidlaw teachers. With them I was young and playful again. I’ve had wonderful times with friends. I’ve lost many of them in recent years, one year two died in the same month, but Clarice, who finally left Elmwood Park and moved to the suburbs, has been a godsend. For two decades we’ve talked on the phone at least once a day. Several times a day lately. In our seventies we went to every store opening in Columbia where something free was handed out. At one time I had a sizeable collection of neon Radio Shack Frisbees. Don’t tell me I don’t know a good thing when I see it.
If you don’t laugh now and again, you really will go crazy.
Clarice and I have kept ourselves going in our eighties by telling each other the same stories time and time again and never letting on we’ve heard them before. But when Clarice broke her hip and was rushed to intensive care, I was too feeble to visit her. Suddenly I could no longer talk to the friend who’d become the sister I’d always wanted. I could barely look at the telephone. As it did when you left home decades before, loneliness invaded every cell inside me. Six days later—maybe it was seven—I had this stroke that has stolen my eyes and my voice.
Everyone says the mind and the body are connected. I think it’s the body and the heart.
Lyra dear.
You’re whispering something—did I hear right—oh please let my hearing not go yet—did you say something about the farm?
Lights, sound, shifting shapes, and night and day. I scarcely know where I am and then I hear you. I hope I see my parents again—I wonder if my mother will still be thirty. What did you say about the farm? I never told you that your father deposited the farm proceeds into a bank account only he could use. My teaching pension paid our living expenses. He had extra cash, I didn’t. He also gave away a huge chunk of the farm proceeds out of paranoia. Wasted money. I didn’t mind living with old things; I do mind that he was far more generous to strangers than he was to us. I never forgave him for those ten acres he denied you. That’s been the story of our lives: your father has made countless decisions that affect you and me without ever considering how we feel. No matter who’s been hurt, he’s never apologized, never admitted to being wrong. I don’t know what’s wrong with him, I never have.
I should have said these things to you long ago. I did go to see the farm one last time—I guess it was several months after he sold it. I drove down while he was at work, passed the wooden shacks with vines growing out of their chimneys, turned onto the dirt road that cut through the piney woods, breathed in the cedars and pine sap, and found the old cemetery again, snug behind its wrought-iron gates. There was no sign of the new owner as I got out and walked through the grass. Oh how I longed for you, for the times you ran through that grass holding my hand.
Was that a nurse? I like that woman whose daughter I taught.
What was I saying—oh, my last day at the farm. For an hour that day I walked through the monochromatic stands of conifers, those unchanging green trees of sharp-pointed needles. At the house ruins I sat on the low brick wall, looked at the broken bricks, blackened beams, determined saplings struggling through the debris. I stared into the woods. This—family land—I’d wanted it to make up for the siblings that never came to make you less lonely, for what you had to endure. Is that too much to ask? But I was too tired to cry anymore, too defeated—how many times can one mourn the same loss? Then I found myself humming. I was surprised—by then I’d left the church choir and I rarely sang anymore, except when I visited Uta’s and Max’s graves. I was almost shocked—how lovely to hear my voice again, like finding an old friend in a strange city. I belted out the refrain—“I once was lost but now am found.” I sang and sang, I sang as I had at Uta’s funeral, I sang the old spirituals and the songs from my college days. Against the ruins of century-old destruction, I sang to feel the love I didn’t have. I sang to keep from losing my heart for good.
But you know what I just remembered? That last reunion in Brantley. Before it began, you and I went to my parents’ house—the new owners let us stop by for a visit and the wooden swing was still right there on the porch, the swing I’d swung my childhood away in, and we sat in it and I remembered the times I’d brought you there as a child. And I thought, I’ve done some good in my life—some good teaching. And look at this beautiful young woman beside me. Like a silly goose, I turned and whispered to the house—Look, Mother, look what we have made.
The reunion—you must remember it—was at my uncle’s farm in the country. I loved that rambling white farmhouse; my aunt who lived there married at sixteen and had ten children! Just imagine. I smiled all that day, spent that afternoon—your father never went to the reunions, of course—surrounded by my brothers and their families. Even now I can see myself standing beside the white board fence with my arms around the two gray-haired men who still called me “Sister.” That day we laughed and told old stories one more time. I got something you didn’t, Lyra—an easy childhood after my mother’s death, siblings and cousins to play with and to love, a father who never stopped holding my hand until the day he died. That reunion day I looked out across fields I’d roamed as a child, and I gathered in the tender moments of my life—the lovely bits and pieces—for safekeeping.
Loss is the inevitable coda of a long life. But at that reunion I felt our wonderful days at China Grove again as I watched the strong, graceful sunlight in the distant trees. Almost coral in color and moving in waves as all light does, I don’t have to tell a painter this, it spilled liquidly, like a wistful melody, across the tree limbs and pine-needled ground. I hope this doesn’t sound melodramatic, I’m not seeing any light of the Almighty in this hospital room. No celestial visions, not yet anyway. But out there that day a mysterious aura came forward and settled over us, light that was like time or history, for light exists and doesn’t, we can see it and see through it. That aura enfolded me until I couldn’t see anything else. Eventually I could see you again. Then I could see you staring into the light of old trees without me, but it wasn’t a lonely feeling at all.
I choose that day as my always.
Chapter Seventeen: Lyra
For several days after my mother almost dies, my father and I rarely leave the hospital. Often the ICU waiting room fills with my mother’s friends. One afternoon I can barely find a seat but when I do sit down, after embracing several older women I’ve not seen in many years, I find myself staring at the new man there. The son of the woman with the cane. Electric blue eyes that stare back at me intently. I try to remember if I’ve ever met him; I think not, he’s maybe ten years younger. Quite gorgeous too.
My mother’s friends ask about her condition, and I reply to polite inquiries about my life, listen to the women chat about their families or the hot weather. No one in
troduces me to Mr. Blue Eyes, but he and I continue our staring. He has the same shimmering eyes—iridescent, Monet-milky yet mysteriously translucent—found on Siberian huskies. Everything about him is put together well—his arms aren’t too short or too long for his just-right height (long legs encased in silk/linen trousers scream six feet), and his wavy dark hair is silver-flecked in all the right places. Broad shoulders in blue pinpoint.
So I’m fourteen again? Please tell me I’m not sweating.
I’ve not felt this magnetic charge toward anyone in a long time. Visceral, as though two comets are colliding. Maybe it’s true that loss can make one hysterical.
Finally I look down—the staring is conspicuous—and count the pulled threads in the carpet, mauve being the new dull, but I can feel this man—a few seats away but facing me—breathing. I mean it, breathing. He does that really well. My peripheral vision works overtime: elegant fingers, no wedding ring. I look back at him and feel a jolt, like I’ve upended a fifth of Wild Turkey.
Am I really hot and bothered about a complete stranger while my mother is dying? This is right up there with wearing an “I’m with Stupid” T-shirt to the opera.
His mother stands up, leaning on her cane. I go over to say good-bye. She takes my hand, says she’ll go in to see my mother briefly, and then they have to be off.
He puts a hand on my shoulder and smiles—even his teeth are in the right order. “I’m sorry your mother is so ill. Please let me know if we can do anything.”
Against the Ruins Page 23
