The voice of a cello resonating in a deep cavern. I nod at him like I’ve been hypnotized or dazed by a stun gun or English is not my native language.
Finally I manage, “Thank you. For coming by, for everything.”
I didn’t know I could feel fourteen again.
Dr. Dumaine comes into the waiting room the next morning and sits down heavily, looks at my father and me somberly, runs a veined hand through thin gray hair. Weary, sad eyes. He puts his hands together as in prayer.
“Mr. Copeland, sir. Lyra. We might need to consider Louise’s living will.” He pauses, says each word slowly. “I’ll keep her on life support as long as the family wants. But she’s not going to get better. And I can’t be sure how much distress she’s in. She’s worn out, I think.”
My father shifts in his armchair, stares at the floor. Others in the waiting room grow silent.
Dr. Dumaine goes on, “Louise and I have had many long talks over the years, and she always told me she never wanted to be kept alive artificially. If the family wishes to exercise her living will, I can make her comfortable with drugs. The infection in her lungs will eventually take her or her heart will stop. You can decide whether to continue the feeding tube.”
It dawns on me what this means. “We cannot let her starve to death. She felt guilty about eating all her life—she is not going that way.”
Dr. Dumaine looks so sad that I want to tell him it’s all right, that he did his best for years. He holds out a form to my father. “If you want to remove the ventilator, you’ll need to sign this.”
My father looks off. “This should probably be my daughter’s decision.”
I whirl toward him. “You’re going to make me do this?”
“I won’t be around much longer myself.”
Dr. Dumaine waits, studies his hands.
Somehow I knew I’d end up on this cliff alone. Having to sign terrible papers to take care of someone runs in our family.
Finally I can help her.
After I sign, I walk into the hall. This was always meant to be my job.
We are no longer restricted to visiting hours. My mother has been moved out of ICU and into a private room. Twice she jerks to one side, and I find a nurse and check to make sure she’s getting the painkillers. The nurse tells me she’ll likely live for another forty-eight hours, perhaps I should get some rest. I sit and sing to her while my father goes to the cafeteria. He returns and settles into the armchair beside her bed—she’s breathing peacefully.
I’ve no idea why, but I have to go there before she dies.
I take the interstate into the city, exit erratically onto Elmwood Avenue and head down to Bull Street and drive onto the hospital grounds. I park in front of Babcock imprisoned behind its chain-link fence. No cops in evidence as I sit and stare. So much peeling paint on the portico columns bare concrete shows through. A graveyard of a building. I don’t want it renovated. Or demolished. I don’t want anyone thinking its history can be erased. With it gone, as integral to us as the Lincoln Street house, how would I explain my childhood?
Slipping beneath the chain across the portico staircase, I climb up to confront the plate-glass door. Inside lies a hallway with wooden benches, walls that pale green of all 1950s hospitals, papers scattered on the floor, dirt and debris, an odor of abandonment—sitting quietly on a wooden bench in that hallway, my mother is bent over crying, her hands shaking.
I stare through the locked glass door. Was she really there? Would I have had the strength to get through that year?
Inside the hallway an aged oak staircase leads upward; vandals have apparently torn out the carved balustrades, only four remain. The second floor landing is backed by a stained glass window, rainbow squares of light. I photograph the interior stairs and the crumbling portico. Descending to ground level, I pace alongside the north wing, staring at the row after row of barred windows. A window on the fourth floor haunts me—I have the uncanny feeling I’ve stood in this spot before, staring at that exact window. I take a picture of it. Gazing at the broken windows, the rusted iron bars, I wonder—what did he think when he looked through those bars? That he was in prison? That’s what I’d have felt. I have no idea what happened to him here, how bad it was. Was he mistreated, hit, ridiculed? What was the diagnosis? I’ll never know—the records are sealed for a hundred years.
Some iron grilles are ornate, almost decorative. I feel like I see people behind the windows, people who’re tiny, so many faces, haunted faces, hands reaching through the iron bars, fingers poking through broken glass, wrists bleeding, so many lonely desperate people. I turn and run. When I come to a stop, I lean against a magnolia tree to breathe. Across from me a small dogwood tree has fallen across the fence, taking part of it down. Face it, look at it. Impulsively I scramble across the crushed wire, wondering if I’ll get caught and arrested for breaking into a nightmare. I head toward a side entrance, sidestepping fallen bricks, stopping to peer through a first-floor window. High ceilings, tongue-and-groove walls painted that same forlorn green, an archway whose entrance is covered by a wire screen door. Locked cage of wire, concrete steps leading upward, shuffling men in loose pajamas herded like animals up the stairs.
The building is shaped like a cross. I’ve read that all 1800s mental institutions were. I walk through the breezeway into an inner courtyard leading to an exercise field. A nearby door is open, scattered boxes and papers left behind on the floor, as though the building was vacated in a panic, people fleeing for their lives. All the walls are peeling paint, walls like seared flesh. Fallen shards of plaster and layers of white dust. A lone rusted gurney, beyond it a door leading to patient wards. The gurney seems like a stretcher, a man is thrashing about it on it, he’s crying not to be taken. My mother is crying even harder. I start toward the door leading to the wards. Filmy light makes a path inside but a voice stops me. “You don’t have to go this far.” I whirl around as pigeons flutter out of the eves. It sounded like my mother.
For once I listen to her and stride into the quadrangle, into the prison yard. All around me ghosts lean out of barred windows, faces in windows, that’s why they won’t renovate, too much misery in these brick walls.
My mother saw these faces, it’s Christmas—
I think I hear screaming and clap my hands over my ears and lean against a stone wall. Initials have been scratched into it at eye level: “A. Bender 1947,” “John Mulhand was here 1971,” the anonymous “Please tell my wife to come,” dates and names all down the plaster. How many other pleas have been painted over? I stare at a phrase off by itself, near the bottom. Tiny cramped handwriting. A little—is this my imagination—like my own?
I read out loud: “You don’t understand.”
Backing away, I scurry out to the fence and jump across the downed section. I want nothing more than to get away, yet I stop suddenly, turn back to look at the giant deteriorating structure. I re-cross the fence and gaze up at Babcock’s cupola. One cupola window, its frame peeling white paint, is half open—you think anyone got out? I remember the exhaustive photo album my mother once kept, dozens of family photos. The album simply stops in 1957. Not a single picture after that.
I pick up a brick and hurl it at a windowpane, listen to the glass shatter. I want that beautiful blue house on Lincoln Street. I don’t want other kids laughing at me, I want a father who cares. Make it not happen. I pick up another brick and aim for the arched window nearest me. Palladian windows date to sixteenth-century Italy, to Greek and Roman temple architecture, yet found their way to this distant time and place. Suddenly I can imagine how grateful Columbians fleeing the 1865 fire were for the walls and rooms behind those windows. Nothing is sadder, more desolate, than a lovely old building left to die. No matter what it was, the past matters. No one would have built such a hopeful structure, no artisan would have hand-carved the balustrades of a burnished oak s
taircase, in order to deliberately do harm. The impulse to help gone so wrong that no one will rescue the building, no one will forgive it, no one will acknowledge that it is not the story.
I drop the brick. Every story is larger than we think.
I drive back across town. Dark now. A night to make the “good death” many Native Americans pray for? There’s a full moon above me—creamy yellow, so low it seems I might touch it if I stood on tiptoe.
I go to my mother’s new room. My father is asleep in the armchair beside her bed. She breathes noisily, he’s snoring faintly. So here they are—I’ve lost the cynic in me as I think this—almost sixty years after a Christmas Eve wedding in a small white frame church in Brantley. He’s still beside her, she him. Maybe there’s something here that I simply don’t understand.
I notice Mother’s misshapen foot sticking out from beneath the blanket and cover it up.
That night, back at the rancher, wondering if my mother will live until morning, I dream what I dream so often—
I’m on a very windy street, seems like it’s in Elmwood Park, pieces of a child’s metal swing set are flying about and I have to duck to miss them. I’m going through a long dark tunnel, really a tube, and when I emerge I’m facing the house on Lincoln Street. It’s unnaturally tall, the roof disappears into the sky, and the house looks black, like it’s been burned. There’s the stone house next door, where the crazy lady told me that in her grandparents’ house in Ireland the hearth fire was never allowed to go out, if it did the soul of the house would die. I rush inside our house and cross to the living room, there’s the lumpy old sofa. I run to the fireplace, I don’t know why I’m running, but I grab onto the mantel and look below. Nothing in the grate but ashes. I drop onto the floor and stir them up, blow on them to try to provoke an ember. Nothing. I jump back up, frantic, and turn and race to the bedroom fireplace and the fire’s gone out in there too. I fall to my knees and reach in, nothing but cold ashes. I’m crying hysterically now. I run back to the living room. There’s a painting of a fire over the fireplace but still nothing in the grate. My parents have appeared, they’re sitting in separate chairs pulled up to the hearth, they’re not old or young, just silent, still, they look frozen like statues, and I run over to them but neither gives a flicker of recognition. I know they’re alive but they seem dead. I scream—Don’t you know who I am? Neither answers, neither looks at me. No one can see me, hear me. I run from bedroom to living room over and over to see if either fire can be revived—I have to figure this out—I have to get the fires going I have to have to I must—
A sharp light slashes on and Lincoln Street disappears. I rear up from the bed as though slapped. As in my childhood, my father has flipped on the overhead light, throwing blinding light into my face to wake me. I’m stunned, disoriented.
He tells me my mother is almost gone. I must come now if I want to see her a final time.
He drives crazily through the four a.m. streets, too fast, then too slow, crossing into the other lane twice, nearly running off the road. He tells me a nurse found my mother almost gone; he was in the chair beside her but had fallen asleep, he did everything humanly possible for her. The car lurches sideways.
When we arrive at the hospital, a nurse stands outside my mother’s door. She puts an arm around me as my father whips a small camera out of his pocket and barges into my mother’s room. Horrified, I see a flash through the cracked doorway.
He emerges and grabs me and whispers—“Don’t touch anything. All kinds of bacteria. If she goes, be sure and wash your hands afterward.”
I stumble into the room. I can hear him telling the nurse he’s been taking care of his wife for years, he hasn’t had a day to himself in—
Closing the door on his voice, I walk over and caress my mother’s still-thick hair. Her mouth is slightly agape, her breathing shallow, labored. I wish she seemed more peaceful. She’s leaving me with the truth: living is hard work.
I lean against her and whisper that I love her.
Chapter Eighteen: Louise
I’m in another room now—how fuzzy I feel—pain medicine? Hurts to breathe but it’s quiet, no bustling nurses every hour. No hissing machines. You’re crying, Lyra. Don’t. I’m relieved to be this near the end. I hope those who say we go home are right. I want to go home. I’m not sure home implies a place, maybe it’s a state of being, maybe you get to go back and live in the before, that’s what I hope for. What I remember most happily doesn’t exist anymore: skipping down the street in Brantley humming to myself, passing the open doors of neighbors who’re gathered around their radios or telling stories, laughing, the silly ordinary life, that’s what I long for. Maybe it’ll be 1939 again.
Did I ever tell you I named you for more than the musical instrument, that you’re a little-known constellation? I can’t recall if I told you or not. A small constellation that’s directly overhead during summer; some nights after you left home I used to stand out in the yard and look for it. Your main star—I think it’s called Vega, it’s among the brightest in the universe. I never realized until now that all your paintings are like stars—you’re drawing lines from star to star to form the constellation of your life. I hope and pray you find the pattern that gives you peace.
I have to tell you what you deserve to know. The why. Even if you can’t hear me. I want to be like that old woman in To Kill A Mockingbird—Lord but I taught that book a thousand times—I can’t recall her name, the woman Jem read to who wanted to master her morphine addiction before she died. She defeated her enemy and went out as we come in, clean, uncompromised. Truthful, even if late.
DuBose. I think that was her name.
I want to be Mrs. DuBose.
We’re driving home from the state hospital under the canopy of colored maple and oak leaves on the day your father was released. You’re sitting on Uta’s stone fence, watching for us. When you spot the taxicab, you run into our house to get a drawing you’ve made of your daddy and reappear on the screen porch waving it.
William gets out of the car and stares at the house. I slip my arm through his and say, “Darling, it’s so wonderful to have you home.”
“The roof looks bad to me. Is it leaking?”
You run through the porch door, stop a few feet from us.
William is pacing back and forth alongside the house, looking at windows, walls. He finally notices you. “How are you, miss? You’re bigger.”
“Give your daddy a hug, sweetie,” I say. You crush yourself against William’s middle and show him the drawing; he mumbles something about it, I can’t make out what. Then he’s back to looking at the house.
Perhaps he’s embarrassed. It’s not like he’s coming home from a nice trip.
Inside, William surveys the rooms and furniture as though he barely remembers them. I follow him around, chatter about dinner. He stops at the living-room fireplace and I babble about how a real fire kept us warmer all winter, that a chimney sweep said the fireplace was safe. William gazes at me silently, and I add that the oil stove is in the garage. He looks over his bookcase in the hallway while I put supper on the table. The books from his seminary locker are in a closet. We’ll enjoy tonight and I’ll tell him tomorrow. Perhaps he can reapply.
“Lyra, William darling, come on, time to eat.”
William sits down at the oak table but takes no note of it. “I’ll not miss the hospital food, that’s for sure.”
I don’t think he remembers the table. Maybe he doesn’t remember much about his breakdown. That would be such a gift.
For the first time in almost a year, we sit together over a meal. I’ve lit candles, the glow settling softly over my new dress. A stranger peering in our window as that October evening slipped into darkness would have seen an attractive couple and their child, and a warm, lovely supper. William says the roast is good, but he doesn’t offer much to the q
uestions I ask: would he like to go to the farm tomorrow, does he have clothes that need to be washed, did I buy the right kind of tobacco? He nods absently and sometimes gazes at the window.
“Maybe we could go to the mountains next weekend,” I suggest. “Go to Maggie Valley and see the fall leaves. They must be beautiful by now.”
He says maybe so.
After supper William goes into our bedroom and begins unpacking. I flutter around helping and then wash the dishes. An hour later, after a bath, he steps into the kitchen.
“I’d like to speak to you for a moment, Louise.” He eyes you drawing at the kitchen table. “In private.”
I send you to straighten up your room, and William and I go into the living room. I sit in the green armchair. William paces back and forth across the thin carpet, stops once and stares at the logs I’ve stacked in the fireplace; his suit is gone, a clean white shirt and pressed khakis in its place. Twice he halts his pacing to stare at me as though waiting for me to say something. I feel confused. “What did you want to talk about?” I smile and add, “We’re overjoyed to have you home. Now we can start our lives again.”
William walks over and grips my chair arms so tightly his veins bulge out. “Do you have any idea what electric shock feels like? Do you?”
“William, I—” I stare at my hands in my lap. “No, of course I don’t.”
“It’s like your soul is being burned out of your body with a blowtorch.”
I feel hit by an electric charge too. Finally he’s angry.
He walks back across the room, stands by the hearth. “You have ruined my life.”
I rush over and put a hand on his arm, which he shakes off. “We can start over, William. In time everything will be all right again.”
His eyes—they’re the eyes of Dante’s dark wood. “And how will everything be all right? Tell me.” He goes and sits down on the sofa, his voice mocking. “Tell me, Louise. Tell me how everything is going to be all right.”
Against the Ruins Page 24
