Against the Ruins

by Linda Lightsey Rice

  “I’m not sure yet.” I stare blankly at the floral fiberglass drapes. “But I know we can find our way out of this.”

  “How do you think people at the seminary will look at me now? A man whose wife threw him in that hospital? Into that prison.”

  “Darling, you were sick. The doctor said that was the only thing that would help you.”

  “Do you think I got helped in that hellhole? Why didn’t you just send me back to the war? I guess I’m lucky you didn’t order a lobotomy.”

  William gets up and walks back over to the hearth. He stares at the photograph on the mantel—our engagement picture which I’d recently framed, the two of us on the steps of the Brantley house gazing happily at each other.

  I nod at the photo. “Remember that day, darling? Look how you’re smiling. It can be that way again. We need time to get our bearings. Remember our life in Summerville? All those Sunday afternoons at Hampton Park?”

  He turns and leans into my face. “You’ve ruined my life in the church. You’ve taken away my reason for living. How long did you think you could keep me in the dark?”

  I step back. He’s known all along.

  “I’m so sorry, William, I’m so sorry about what the seminary did. I had no idea that could happen. I’d do anything if I could change it. Maybe if you reapply—”

  “You’ve ruined our future!” he shouts. “Ruined our lives!” He leans farther toward me, spits out, “What kind of wife are you?”

  I open my mouth but no words come out. Tears run down my face.

  William orders me to stop crying. “You threw me into Hell,” he yells. “I can’t hold my head up with decent people anymore. You’ve ruined my good name. I ought to turn you out, divorce you.” He pauses, then says slowly, as though these words have been rehearsed for a long time—

  “As long as I live, I will never—ever—forgive you for committing me to the state hospital. Never, no matter how long we live.”

  I stumble to the armchair, bury my face in my hands, rock back and forth.

  William grabs the arms and shakes the chair as though he’ll never stop. I wait for him to hit me. He never has but when I look up I see the thought in his eyes. I offer my face to his fist. I don’t care if he scars me for life if only this can end.

  “You’re never going to use your precious dining-room table.” He leans down. “Did you hear me, Louise?”

  I mumble that I will give away the table, it doesn’t matter. “I’ll do anything to make it better for us.”

  “No, Louise. It’s not what you’ll do, it’s what you won’t be doing. You’re finished, just like you’ve finished me off.”

  He glares at me and then smiles, a smile so calculated and malicious—ah, but I’ve got you—that I shiver.

  “I will never forgive you. And you will never, ever, have another child.”

  Now.

  Now as you sit in a hospital watching me breathe in and out, rasping, struggling to stay in the world even as I go out of it, now it’s that long night again, when I stare into space—too devastated to speak—as William leaves the room and goes out to the garage to be sure the oil stove is there. I’m paralyzed, whimpering, a wounded animal denied the clean kill. It gets darker and darker and after a while William comes back in and takes a book and sits on the sofa, without speaking to me, and begins to read. As though nothing has happened, as though he’s not severed our future. You watch from the doorway, you’ve almost never seen my hands idle, no sewing, no papers to grade, and when you come into the living room I barely notice you. I guess you knew instinctively that something terrible had happened, but this terrible is different because it’s very quiet; maybe that was even more frightening. Your father asks me where did I get the television set and in a toneless whisper I say—“I thought you might like watching it sometime.” He says nothing and the silence goes on for an hour or so, how can the world be so noiseless, and after a while William gets up and goes out to look at the roof again. Finally I retreat to the kitchen to finish washing dishes but I do not sing over the suds. I don’t think I will ever sing again.

  Soon we’re all three sitting in the living room once more. Neighbors’ voices lilt and fall on the street outside but our family has frozen into stone figures. You sit on the floor and watch TV, your father sits in the old rocker and stares at the paper and then at the TV, I sit on the sofa, untouched mending in my lap, and stare at the TV. The only sound in the room comes from I Love Lucy. Lucy is having a tough time getting something done, but she and her friend Ethel are laughing and dancing around their living room anyway. Every now and then I notice our reflections—the three of us—in the glaring television screen. Behind your father’s shape is the front window and after a while I can’t see the TV screen anymore, just that window and how we’re framed in relief on the panes.

  That night I sleep on the living-room sofa. After the lights go out, you creep past your sleeping father and tiptoe into the living room and find me there, covered by a thin blanket, my sobs muffled by a pillow. You walk over and put your hand on my shoulder. At first it comforts me and exhaustion pushes me into sleep. You scrunch up and lie down beside me. A few hours later, when I realize you’re there, I whisper, “Here, sweetheart, stretch out. Remember that your mother will always love you. Always and forever.”

  I walk outside in my nightgown, a new one I made for tonight, and sit on the front steps. The darkness is eerily still, not even an insect scrambling about. An oppressive, stifling Southern night, more summer than autumn. Summer that never ends, when life feels arrested, mummified. An hour later I rise and go back inside. I walk into the dining room and sit at the oak table. I don’t move until dawn. Sometime after the sun goes up, I go into the kitchen and come back with the butcher knife. In the early morning light I lean over and attack the dining-room table. I stab the beautiful oak, gouging it, scratching deep furrows into the finish. When I pull the knife out, I see several people across from me, three children—one is you, the others are boys, you have brothers like I did—and William is laughing and passing a turkey platter around and there’s someone else—a woman wearing an old-fashioned white dress like my great-aunts wore, and she’s putting a casserole dish on the table and she smiles at me in a special way—it’s my mother—and she leans down to kiss the top of your head—

  Then there’s nothing. They’re all gone.

  Night after night, confined to our silent house by shock and confusion, I slept on the living-room sofa. It was never mentioned, night after night after night as calendar pages flipped over and were thrown away, year after year after year. Sometimes your father and I sat staring into space at the kitchen table in silent bewilderment. No matter the year, though, no matter the march of time, our hands did not touch. After a while we barely knew why. No one spoke of the past. No one spoke of leaving. Each of us needed the other in order to sit this lifelong vigil over the death of our dreams.

  I will never forgive you.

  You will never have another child.

  Words that form the sentence of forever. From some words, some events, we don’t recover. The enemy camp is peopled with giants—an illness, a war, a hospital, a seminary, the meanness of a time and place.

  I always said that some things are there even when you can’t see them. And some things aren’t there even when it looks like they are. A family, a future. Love. Your father and I, entombed in our desolate vault, united by the defeat of the spirit, buried alive by inertia and fate, became our own elegy, static shadows flickering in a lighted window for half a century.

  There’s one other thing.

  A year after William returned, during a blackening depression, I asked for and got a hysterectomy I did not need. I couldn’t bear the weight of hope.

  Uta Moazen once said that every life is a vulnerable life, that even the act of breathing—elixir of oxygen taken i
n, noxious poison expelled—makes possible the day of reversal.

  Birth begins the end. A beautiful child in a shroud. Love invites us to the banquet of heartache.

  Every life is a brave life.

  Lyra's Epilogue

  2006

  Fall leaves skip across the Brantley graveyard, floating crimson and ocher and coral. This is a modest cemetery, its only stately monument a soaring eight-foot angel commemorating the life of a local suffragette. I like it that my mother’s family is buried in her shadow. Across from me honeysuckle vines encircle the wrought-iron fence and remind me of my childhood days here, when I idled down these steamy small-town streets, got a Coca-Cola at the gas station and stuffed salted peanuts through its narrow glass neck, went to the drugstore and the dress shop and said “Hey there” to people who always knew my name. My mother sent me here every summer; it was a gift, my annual respite from listening at the door of parental despair.

  The October sun is hearty at midday, but floating loose-cotton clouds provide now-and-again relief. I stare at my real grandmother’s grave; a low cement wall outlines the rectangular shape of her coffin. My grandfather’s grave, with the grandmother I knew beside him, lies a few feet away, my mother’s brothers and their wives nearby. Some cousins. A lot of military insignia carved into stone. One way or another, everyone’s come home. Mine is the arrested branch of this family tree, though; our line ends with the child who chose to have no child. My path, where I’ve placed my faith, has veered sharply from that of my mother.

  My mother was a child raptly peering into the sky for airplanes she couldn’t see; she had faith in the unseen. Bloodlines are borne of this. I was the child wandering through family ruins on the ground, where the losses were too vivid to ignore. Who knows where chance and choice intersect? I made sure I was inside those planes.

  The sun dazzles, leaves rustle in the trees. It’s a gorgeous day to be buried.

  Two years ago, when my mother’s heart stopped, my father and I were in the room, both asleep; it was the nurse Darlene who discovered she was gone and woke us. My mother probably liked that—no fuss, the messenger a kind woman she respected, who found the scissors for me to cut a lock of my mother’s hair. Two hundred people came to the funeral—Mr. Blue Eyes was a pallbearer, Johnny Truesdale brought his whole family. A formally robed choir, the hymns my mother wanted, a regal procession with the casket covered by an elegant white pall. The pall was laid across the burnished wood coffin by two women who’d known her for forty years; one folded the gold-embroidered cloth with tears streaming from her eyes.

  I placed my grandmother’s painting of a lone woman in a boat in moonlight on a vestibule table. Beside it sat the eight-by-ten engagement photograph of my parents. As people filed into the sanctuary, I studied the old picture. They’re sitting on the brick steps of the Brantley house: my father sports a head full of unruly blond curls, my mother wears a 1940s silk dress with a corsage on her shoulder, her shapely legs crossed, her hand on his thigh. Both smile seductively, gazing at each other raptly, intently.

  Once upon a time they really did love each other.

  Perhaps our lives are like impressionist paintings. Up close, when we’re young, it’s chaos—wavy lines, thickened textural masses, shadowy indiscernible forms. The picture only emerges as we stand back, as the gallop of years forces us to see again what we thought we knew. Not that all the questions ever get answered. But as I gaze at my parents in love, I wonder: If you start like that, in the innocence of that time and place, do you ever stop hoping love will return?

  I remember something Uta Moazen once said: A long life takes courage.

  Despite my protests that she should go to Brantley, my father insisted we bury my mother in Columbia, in the plot they purchased in their sixties. It was right next to woodlands so at least she’ll hear the birds sing, I told myself that day, and if the dead walk she’ll have a nice stroll under the pines. As earth was spilled across her coffin, my father leaned over to hide the single tear on his cheek. After the receiving line in the church, he and I walked back out to the gravesite. The funeral home had now lowered the casket and the family funeral spray, miniature red roses amid white baby’s breath, lay in state over my mother’s heart.

  As we stand there, I wish my father would tell me about their early days together, tell me how much he loved her. Please, just once say you love me too.

  “Daddy—”

  He looks at me. “You still doing that painting? You haven’t sold anything in years, have you? I didn’t think that would amount to much.”

  He walks away.

  I feel shot by a stun-gun. Did he really say what I heard? He did. I clamber after him to tell him to go to hell, but family friends waylay me to offer condolences. After they drive off, my father announces, “I won’t be buried in this cemetery myself. I have other plans.”

  A sparse wind blows through the trees, the pines creak, the hot sun blares down. I plan to bury him in a landfill.

  “You’re going to leave Mother alone? Wasn’t this cemetery your idea? For the two of you to be here together?”

  He looks at me with irritation. “I’m going to sell the house as soon as I can. The paintings are yours, of course. And your mother’s jewelry. I know you wanted that table my father made, some other furniture. A man from the church tells me they’ll bring a good price from an antique dealer. I could just sell them and send you the money.”

  “The table your father made with his own hands—don’t you want your child to have it?”

  “I need to get this done now. I’d appreciate it if you’d take down those photos your mother put on the den wall.”

  “Must you do this so soon? She just died.” My baby pictures, graduating from high school, leaving for Europe, getting married. Will he keep any at all? I’m sure not.

  When we reach his car, I say, “I want my grandfather’s desk. And those journals you offered me.”

  “You can have the journals, but I promised that desk to your mother’s cousin from Atlanta. She called yesterday, she said she’d always wanted that desk from Brantley.”

  I slam my hand against the car door. What is it with him and furniture?

  “Louise would want her cousin to get that desk,” he says. “I promised her the dining-room table too. Her feelings might be hurt if I don’t give it to her.”

  “And my feelings? Have you ever cared what I feel?”

  He stomps away, turns around. “I gave you and your mother a good life, you had food to eat and a roof over your head.”

  My blood pressure clears a mountain and I’m set to attack in full force—I’ve been oiling these weapons for years. “Do you have any idea what kind of father you’ve been?”

  “You’re mad with somebody else and taking it out on me. And I don’t appreciate it!”

  Suddenly it hits me: I need a new language. I need concepts that haven’t yet been invented to describe what’s been missing here. And even if I find words that differentiate love from obligation, he’s not going to get it. I start laughing—I’ve been doing what my mother always did, acting like if I just say the right thing he’ll snap out of it and take me out for an ice-cream cone.

  He looks like he doesn’t know what to do. Finally he says, “You’ve had that same laugh since you were a little girl—you laughed all the time at Christmas. You always did love Christmas.”

  I stare at him in surprise—he did notice something.

  He says he needs to get home, that he’s got twenty things to do. Long and lanky in his pinstriped suit, he slides into his 1992 Oldsmobile; still incensed about Pearl Harbor, he says he’ll die before driving a “foreign” car. He tells me my rental car is going to cost a fortune and probably isn’t safe.

  “In my next life I’m going to be a rich man,” he adds. “I’ll get a Cadillac and you can borrow it to move off
that Rocky Mountain you live on. Not enough air to breathe, you probably have TB. You could end up in an iron lung.”

  Even he’s smiling at this cheery pronouncement. He cranks up the Oldsmobile and waves at me hesitantly. I’m certain he wonders how he ended up with progeny; I’m certain that is the exact word he would use.

  As he drives off, I picture him in the rancher’s backyard watering my mother’s flowers, as I saw him do on a recent trip home. He’s standing in the twilight whistling to himself, the hose pressure so high it’s drowning the camellia bushes. I stand at a window watching, wondering what he feels, what he thinks about evening after evening as he attends living things. And maims them. Something about him catches in my throat—a loneliness. Only he’s not lonely, I am. He’s ironically protected by what he does not feel. He looks up toward the window where I stand but doesn’t see me. He whistles and waters on and I remain invisible.

  When I return to my mother’s grave the day after the funeral, I bring wind chimes and hang them in a nearby tree. I want her to have music. Staring at the inert ground, I also yell what I’ve never said—I didn’t deserve the guilt for your unhappiness, you should have stood up for me, for yourself, I needed—

  The melody played by the chimes stops my tirade; somewhere in the Low Country mingled body tissue still rests deep in Carolina soil. I will always miss you.

  The next day my father finds the wind chimes. He decides the wind might blow them free to damage nearby tombstones, so he secures them to the tree trunk with baling wire. He ties them so tightly they can’t make a sound.

  I go back and cut the wire.

  He comes back, rebales the chimes.

  I go and cut the wire again.

  After my parents’ house was sold, my father simply disappeared. He always wanted to travel so perhaps he’s out there wandering about. Before he went AWOL, he sent me the paintings and jewelry and the blackened silver coffeepot from China Grove. A few months later, care of an attorney, I also received a package and letter from him: