Still Time

by Jean Hegland

  But he stays silent, still basking in Hamlet, the pity and the horror and the stunning beauty of that play. After a moment, the woman returns his hand and moves away.

  “Oh, hey—” she exclaims as she reaches the door, “I totally forgot! This’ll cheer you up.” Pausing in the threshold, she announces, “Your daughter called this morning.”

  John gives a little start. “My … ?” he echoes.

  “Daughter,” the woman fills in for him. “She wanted to know about visiting hours, and I told her there aren’t any—visitors are welcome anytime. That’ll be nice, won’t it?—something to look forward to—seeing your daughter.”

  She gives the door frame a pair of quick taps as if she were firming the soil over a seed, and then she’s gone, leaving John alone with a new set of words to rove his mind like changeable weather. your daughter fair daughter pensive daughter daughter and heir daughter of most rare note a whoobub against his daughter where hast thou stow’d my daughter?

  “I think we’ve found your daughter.” That’s what the taller of the constables announced when John opened the door of the hotel room to find Miranda slumped between them, pale and stricken but glowering even then.

  For a second his relief that she was alive trumped every other feeling. But after the constables left and he’d tried to get her to discuss where she’d gone and what she had done, she’d been much more stony than contrite, and even the next afternoon in the cab when he was returning her to Heathrow, she’d insisted there was nothing more to say. She’d apologized already, she claimed. She’d already said she’d never meant to be gone so long, had not wanted to make him worry or cause him any trouble. When he tried to help her see the inappropriateness of her actions and maybe even understand his side of the predicament and appreciate some of its awful consequences for him, she’d snarled and turned away.

  He hated having to send her home, back to her increasingly ineffectual mother and another summer of small-time loitering with her semi-delinquent friends. But even if she hadn’t chosen the night before his keynote speech to leave the hotel without asking, even if she hadn’t kept him awake all night and worried for hours the next day, her misbehavior was much too grievous to overlook. From what little she’d revealed about where she’d gone and what she’d done, she was lucky that getting lost was all that happened to her. As both he and Freya had tried to impress upon her, things could have been much worse.

  The three of them couldn’t possibly have traveled on to Spain together after that—not with Freya so furious, and Miranda so sullen and unforthcoming, not with half a week of the conference still to go, and John desperate to curtail the ruin as much as possible. He knew Miranda hadn’t had an easy time in the last few years, what with her mother getting more uncertain and her high school such a sham. But he also knew he wouldn’t be doing his duty as her father if he failed to hold her accountable for her actions. Especially after her Tijuana escapade earlier that year, she needed to understand there were lines she wasn’t allowed to cross. “Logical consequences” was what both Barb and Freya called it, and for once they were in agreement about the value of that approach.

  “John,” a voice trills from the hallway behind him. “It’s time for arts and crafts. You want to join us? We’re doing potato prints this morning.”

  But potatoes are an aphrodisiac, as every Elizabethan knows. And this morning John is not in the mood. “Pah,” he says, batting at the air behind him with an impatient arm.

  “You sure?” the voice wheedles. But he is too busy to trouble himself to answer. “Okay, then,” the wheedler teases when he makes no further reply. “No art for you today.”

  But art doesn’t mean potatoes. Art means knowledge or science or skill. Alchemy or entertainment. Magic. Trickery. Or transformation. Art can signify many things, but it is much too powerful for potatoes.

  If this be magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating. It’s Leontes who says that, John reflects, settling back into the lap of his chair with the satisfaction of a man who has just been served a plate of perfectly grilled steak. Leontes, the King of Sicilia, in the final scene of Shakespeare’s great romance The Winter’s Tale, as he and the daughter he has believed forever lost stand together before the marble sculpture of Hermione, Leontes’s long-dead wife and the mother Perdita has never known, marveling at the stone’s likeness to the woman she had been before Leontes destroyed everything.

  It was Leontes who wrongly denounced Hermione as an adulteress, Leontes who ordered their newborn daughter Perdita abandoned as a bastard on the storm-chafed shores of fair Bohemia, Leontes who, in his misguided jealousy, tried to have his boyhood friend and Bohemia’s king poisoned as his wife’s seducer. Afterwards, it was Leontes’s demented rage that caused the deaths of both Hermione and their dear son.

  But during the sixteen years that have passed since then, Leontes has performed a saintlike sorrow, and in the previous scene, the audience has overheard how Perdita has been found, her royal birth revealed, her betrothal to Bohemia’s Prince Florizel blessed, the kingdoms of their fathers united in friendship once again.

  Now, precious winners all, they have assembled to view the statue of Hermione that the grave and good Paulina has kept hidden for so many years, and so excellent is the carver’s art, and so great is Leontes’s and Perdita’s yearning, that when Paulina draws the curtain, both father and daughter must be restrained from kissing the freshly painted stone. A moment later, as they, their court, and the audience all watch in a hush of wonder, Paulina conjures music and commands the statue wake. And like unto an old tale or perhaps even a miracle, the sculpture quickens, the stone begins to breathe, and a living Hermione descends from her pedestal to embrace her husband, bless their daughter, take up her life again. Bequeath to death your numbness Dear life redeems you be stone no more

  It’s been called the most moving moment in all of theater, the height of drama’s art and Shakespeare’s craft, the boldest and most beautiful scene he ever wrote. John has witnessed it many times onstage, has lived it many more times in the theater of his mind. He’s wept, watching, more than once. He’s even dared to call that scene sublime.

  He tells his students that Shakespeare wrought one last miracle when he wrote his final plays—The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and even Cymbeline and Pericles—those plays that Dowden dubbed romances for the way they begin with tempests, trials, and sundered families and end in scenes of recognition, with lives redeemed, worlds restored, and generations reunited.

  Some critics have complained that Shakespeare’s romances are too feeble or too fanciful to be taken seriously, that their gaudy plots, flimsy characters, and fabulous endings are evidence of an author grown careless, sentimental, or even senile. But John has long maintained that Shakespeare’s final plays are not failures but new directions. Beyond Hamlet’s silence and King Lear’s howl and Othello’s suffocating darkness, beyond the intellectual intricacies and sour humor of the problem plays, William Shakespeare found one last transcendent vision. Beginning awkwardly in Pericles and Cymbeline and concluding masterfully in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, he created yet another revolution, writing plays that celebrate the triumph of art and the gift of second chances.

  Outside, the flowers begin to wobble, testament to a passing breeze. Tulips and daffodils, their shapes as simple as Easter eggs and shooting stars, their colors crayon bright against the green bushes that line the wall.

  A child appears in John’s mind’s eye, a girl of seven or eight, sprawled on the floor of his office with a crayon in her hand. He keeps those crayons in his desk drawer for her visits, to occupy her while he works. “Draw me something,” he’ll suggest before turning his attention to whatever lecture or article or conference presentation he needs to finish next.

  “What should I draw?” she asks, crayons scattered on the floor around her like a broken rainbow.

  “Draw Romeo,” he answers absently, or, “How about Falstaff?” or, “Try Lady Macbeth.”

/>   “What’s a Falstaff?” or “Who’s she?” she queries once or twice, but when she sees he is already too engrossed to answer, she invents answers of her own, hunched over her sheets of onion skin typing paper, as intent on her project as John is on his.

  “Look,” she commands when she is finished, and John will interrupt his work to admire the image she offers to his view—perhaps a pig with a curled tail, a wizard in an indigo cape, or a woman in a long magenta gown, each drawing labeled with spelling as eccentric as an Elizabethan playwright’s: ROMeO. Fol staf. LaDie MekbeT.

  Gazing at the dancing flowers, John feels a little shiver of pleasure, another flush of pride, remembers studying those endearing drawings and imagining how far that child would go.

  But where? he asks the daffodils. Where did she go? It seems such a simple question. He can sense its answer shimmering just beyond his reach, and yet when he tries to grasp it, or to link those moments in his office with any part of now, his thoughts diffuse like smoke in wind, leaving only a faint bitterness behind, that awful nagging knowledge he’s had too often of late that his failure to keep track of some fact or other is adding to all the disasters that still await him.

  It will come to him again, he hastens to reassure himself. In an effort to prevent the panic that’s already starting to strangle him, he promises himself that that girl’s identity will resume its rightful place inside his mind as lost people and facts and places usually do, sometime when he is least expecting it—late at night, perhaps, or while he is driving down the freeway or in the shower, or even when he is trying to remember something else. He has known so many people in his life, has read so much and written so much, accomplished and experienced so much. It’s understandable if he can’t always remember every little thing.

  It doesn’t matter. That’s what people tell each other when they forget. When a student raises her hand in class only to have forgotten what she wanted to say by the time it’s her turn to talk, when a colleague stops John in the hall to tell him he read an article he thought John might be interested in though he can’t at that moment recall the author’s name, when Sally says there was something she wanted to ask him but now she can’t remember what, they laugh and shrug and reassure each other, “It doesn’t matter, it wasn’t really important—or if it was important, it will come back later.”

  It will come back later—John muses out the window—embodying the romantic view of time, the belief that the future will restore what’s lost, that nothing that truly matters is ever gone for good.

  “John,” a woman says, breezing in, “Are you ready to go—?”

  “Certainly,” he answers with alacrity, planting his palms on the arms of his chair and preparing to stand.

  “—to lunch?”

  “I’ve no need to eat,” he replies as he levers himself upright. “I’m ready to go right now.”

  “To lunch,” the woman agrees, reaching out a hand to steady him. She is a well-cushioned lass somewhere on the far side of thirty. Her top is decorated with images of frolicking kittens, and the tag on her chest reads MATTY.

  “Not lunch. I’ve been waiting all—” He breaks off, suddenly lost in a swirl of confusion in which the facts of his situation—how long he has been waiting, and for what or whom—spin past just out of reach. “A long time,” he adds more feebly.

  “I’m sorry about that,” the woman replies. “But hey—your wait’s over, ’cause now it’s time to eat.”

  “There’s been a mistake. I need to speak with … whomever is in charge. I don’t belong here. I understand it’s not your fault,” he offers generously. “But we need to resolve this before the situation grows worse.”

  “Okay,” she agrees. “How about you eat first, and then we’ll see?”

  “See what?” John shoots back. Pleased by his sudden acumen, he adds, “What will we see?”

  “First of all, we’ll see what’s on the menu. Whatever it is, it’s sure been smelling good.”

  This is chopp’d logic, John knows. He resents the evasion of it, the equivocation. But he suddenly feels too dizzy, too confused and ill at reckoning to challenge it. Instead he suffers the woman to lead him down a long bright hall to where a ragtag group of diners is converging by the French doors at the far end, some with walkers, some with canes, several riding in wheelchairs, some arriving like shy guests, some smiling vaguely like expectant hosts who’ve forgotten exactly whom they invited to dinner, others sour-faced or with faces absent of expression, all of them shuffling into a dining room where kitchen aides are filling water glasses and placing baskets of rolls around.

  His attendant shows John to a table set for four. “How’s this?” she asks, pulling out a chair, steadying him as he plops down. Two grandams already sit in the chairs on either side of him. The stout one waits placidly, hands folded in her lap, her head bobbing as if she were keeping time to a secret music. Opposite her, a bone-thin woman bends over to study the framed photograph in her lap.

  “That’s Esther,” John’s escort announces, gesturing toward the portly dowager, “and this is Betty,” she adds, reaching down to stroke the gaunt one’s arm. “Ladies, you don’t mind if John joins you two?”

  The skeletal woman does not respond, but the other interrupts her nodding to shake her head no, making a complicated motion with her head like a mobius strip. “Tea for two,” she sings, “and two for tea.” Raising her hand from her lap, she swings it like a conductor’s baton, keeping time to her shred of song.

  “John is new here,” Matty explains.

  “How do you do?” John says, urbane and wary.

  “How do I do what?” the quiet woman whispers, her head bent over her lap as if she were asking the photograph.

  “And here comes Robert,” Matty announces as if it’s welcome news. Turning to the hound-faced man who is easing himself down into the chair across from John, she asks, “How are you today, Robert?”

  “Okay, okay,” he replies mournfully. “Whatever you say, dear. Did you bring my shovel?”

  Elsewhere, other residents are settling in at other tables. Small arguments flare up about who will sit where, with whom. One man calls another man a bastard, says he’s been out to get him from the start. A woman sitting nearby chuckles merrily, announcing to the room at large, “I keep thinking there’s something I need to be doing wrong.”

  At a corner table a tiny crone in a white blouse and full dark skirt sits weeping. Occasionally she moans a few words in a language that John does not recognize—something Eastern European, perhaps—not Russian, but an even throatier cousin. But no one speaks to her, and soon her weeping becomes another background sound, like the clatter from the kitchen, like Frank Sinatra’s crooning about how fairy tales can come true that leaks from the speakers in the corner of the room.

  An aide moves among the tables with a bottle of hand sanitizer, squirting a dollop onto each diner’s palm. There is a little flurry of busyness while they rub the goo between their fingers. An antiseptic floral smell fills the room.

  “A termite walks into a bar,” the man across from John announces, “and asks, ‘Is the bar tender here?’” The man looks like an aged tortoise, his gaze fixed, his lashless lids hardly blinking. “An apple pie walks into a bar,” he continues in a solemn monotone, “and the bartender says, ‘Sorry, we don’t serve dessert.’”

  While his guests were finishing their dessert at his retirement dinner, John unwrapped the gifts they’d given him—a bobble-headed Shakespeare doll, a coffee mug emblazoned with curses from the plays, the framed cartoon an artistic graduate student had drawn of John genuflecting before the Roubiliac sculpture. Then he’d delivered quite a nice little speech, beginning by addressing his colleagues as we few, we happy few, we band of scholars, and going on to observe that although emeritus sounded like a disease, he hoped it wasn’t fatal because, unlike Prospero, he wasn’t nearly ready to drown his book.

  Sitting down, he’d been bathed in genuine applause—and even a few huz
zahs—and he’d gone home so warmed by his colleagues’ show of esteem that he found himself rethinking several long-standing feuds. But before he could dive into his work, he’d had to play general contractor for the home renovation they’d been planning ever since Sally moved in. Then his hip flared up again, and the doctors warned he shouldn’t wait any longer to have it replaced, and once he finally recovered from the operation and completed the rehab, he’d been retired for over two years, and it was time for their trip to Sicily.

  Sally wanted to meet Hyblean beekeepers and watch them work with their black Sicilian bees. She’d wanted to learn about beekeeping in mud hives and maybe help to harvest the honey that had been considered the world’s finest for at least three thousand years, the honey that Shakespeare celebrated in his plays.

  John hoped to develop his thinking about the evolution of drama by visiting the Greek theaters that dot Sicily’s coasts and attending some authentic Sicilian puppet shows. With Sally at his side, he’d looked forward to strolling the streets in Siracusa where Plato and Sappho and Aeschylus had visited, the streets where Archimedes had rushed wet and naked from his inspired bath. He’d wanted to breathe and taste and view that mythical land that, like Denmark, Verona, Venice, and Bohemia, William Shakespeare had dreamed but never seen, the island where Benedick and Beatrice sparred and loved, where Leontes raged, and where his saintly wife Hermione bequeathed to death her numbness and was stone no more.

  But instead of being stimulating, their trip seemed pointlessly complicated from the start. Even before they left home, planning and packing were more confusing than they had ever been before. He and Sally missed their connecting flight in Frankfurt for some frustrating reason John never entirely understood, and that first night, when they finally reached the hotel Sally had booked for them in Palermo, John opened his suitcase to find it contained only underwear and socks. He’d had to borrow Sally’s toothbrush, had had to find a business district the next morning and go shopping, joking with Sally until he nearly believed it himself that it had been his plan all along to buy a new wardrobe of Italian clothes.