“SOME SAY THE WORLD will end in fire, some say in ice.” For us it was both.
Cremation is in. It shows ecological awareness. A sophisticated approach to the nature of flesh and spirit. All values Victor and I subscribe to, in the abstract. But when it came right down to it, we couldn’t.
“Oh God, no,” I said, I forget to whom. Maybe Victor’s sister Lily. Our living room was so crowded with sagging bodies, and all of them, even Nina, seemed to be wearing bleak and ugly clothes. From the kitchen there came a minor racket—Gabrielle being useful but dropping things in her confusion.
“Burn me! Let them burn me!” Victor roared. He charged through space waving his arms, jostling people, knocking down a lamp and one of his own paintings, a small still life with seashells. The men had to quiet him. Don gave him a pill. He put it in his mouth obediently, but then he pursed his lips and spit it halfway across the room. Finally I took him out to the park. I told him to run to the Soldiers and Sailors Monument and back a few times—I would wait on a bench. He ran like the wind. He is not particularly athletic—I hoped he wouldn’t have a heart attack.
When we returned the scene was unchanged. Nina was still sitting on the couch with her arm around Althea, stiff and chalk-faced, and Phil was huddled alone on the floor against the wall, crying sullenly, with horrid wet croupy noises. I went to sit alone in the kitchen for a few minutes. George arrived, for once not the customary portrait of savoirfaire: beard unkempt, fly half-open, eyes filmed with terror. He was carrying three bottles of seltzer, those beautiful blue bottles with the chrome squirt tops that he had described so many times, and as he put them in the refrigerator he glanced at me sheepishly. “They’re not for you. I know you don’t like it. I thought maybe you could use it for the others.”
“Mm-hm.” I nodded.
He pulled a chair opposite mine so we were knee to knee like children about to play pat-a-cake; he took my hands as though he were about to say something formally condoling. Then he dropped his head onto my knees and began to cry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should be taking care of you.”
“Well, you will, later.” I sat very still, stroking his head on my knees. “It’s all right. I’m sure you will.”
When he stopped we went inside where neighbors, mostly old people, a few young gay couples, walked in and out carrying casseroles, bags of fruit and cookies. Patricia and Sam, the very young pair across the hall, came in one at a time, the other staying home with the new infant—embarrassed to appear with the infant. The old people came over to Victor and me and in Middle European accents said things like, “What can I say to you?” Victor sprawled in a chair, still breathing heavily. And all the while I had the mysterious throbbing in my left ankle—I couldn’t remember from what.
It is not true, of course, that my children are dead. Other people’s children now and then die, and how sorry we feel, we may even shed a tear. Not mine and Victor’s. We are among the fortunate people and we have worked strenuously for our good fortune. We have known hardship and overcome it; have been poor, cold, sick, and frustrated. We have seen our parents sicken and die much too soon. Oh, we have not exhausted the possibilities by far, but have endured our fair share without complaint. Is this the reward? This is America, too, remember. Our grandparents ran from atrocities to these benevolent shores, and fulfilled their part of the bargain. For our sakes, they came, for our safety. (Were we insufficiently grateful? We were born here—it never occurred to us to be grateful.) No, no bus carrying our children home in the dark from a long-awaited school ski trip, in the early stages of a snowstorm, would dare skid off the road to careen into a clump of bushes and fall fifteen feet with a crash of thudding metal and cracking glass, outside a town called Pinecrest where a few years ago we attended an absurd wedding. Even if they died instantly. Even if their bodies were barely licked by the flames of the exploded engine. Even if “they were not the only ones,” as the curly-haired policeman told me, and oh yes, I remember, that’s how I hurt my ankle—I fell when he told me, onto Alan’s skateboard, which fled down the hall away from the news. Even if some of the others were burned past all recognition, with nothing left except maybe a heart like the heart that remained of the steadfast tin soldier, which I had to read to Vivian every night for a month when she was eight, a heart that outlasted flames. Of all the possibilities for their young lives, this one possibility is out of the question. What is unthinkable is untrue. Some philosopher offered that little conundrum and we puzzled in the dorm, uncomprehending. Now I comprehend. This is unthinkable and I will not think it. God moves in mysterious ways—we know he leans toward the theatrical. Remember what he pulled on Abraham? Well, he demands that we stage this melodrama and we obey. But before long a stranger in a dapper pin-striped suit will appear—the angel—and announce that it was only a test. Wake up your kids and take them home. Amen.
Meanwhile we do have to stage it. Victor, with all his taste for ritual, was in no mood for piety, nor was I. Our conventional parents wouldn’t care: three dead, one senile, and for the first time I was glad—they could miss this. And envious. We confessed to each other, though, that we wanted to hear something reverberant, something with pretensions to cosmic meaning, intoned over the bodies of our children. We wanted to hear a voice ordained for the purpose say in ripe, firm cadences, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. ... He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul ... I will fear no evil ... Well, of course fear no evil. What nonsense! What have they to fear now? Skidding buses? The dead can be fearless, and with good reason. Still, we wanted it.
“That would be good, if they said that.”
“Yes. Yes,” Victor answers. “That would be good.” This is hours later, two in the morning: we sit at the kitchen table drinking tepid water out of coffee mugs Gabrielle left out to drain. We can’t put anything else in our mouths. We told Althea and Phil they must try to sleep, and finally they went. But they never turned off their lights. In the dark hall, light slid from the cracks below their doors, and soon we heard Phil come out to knock on Althea’s door, and enter, and stay. I hope she let her younger brother curl up on her bed and held him in her arms while he cried. She always tells us she is a woman and we smile indulgently. I hope she is woman enough to do that. Victor, at the kitchen table, is still wearing his painting clothes—dabs of rich color on denim—but above the neck he is gray. His features look diminished and sunk in an expanse of skin with the sickly hue of dusty pewter. His hair, the sand color edging towards gray, is matted as though he has just risen from sleep. He looks defeated and homeless, a bum needing a shave. No beard any more—it was a passing thing. His voice is different, thick and hoarse, like an old man with phlegm. He wore it out shouting, the first twenty minutes. But when we find we are still so well suited, that we both harbor a desire so specific and so irrational, so futile—that is a slightly better moment. He closes his hand over mine on the kitchen table.
Don’t take on so, love. We’re only pretending. They’ll be back. That view—a thousand hours ago?—was not our last. Not possible. I cry only because I am supposed to, as the mother, and because even the pretense is enough to bring tears. Those bodies we saw and identified (three of us—Phil insisted on coming, there was no restraining him; Althea did as she was told, spared herself), those soft unmangled bodies (and who dared to touch my babies, take off their clothes, pull those coarse white sheets to their necks! They don’t even sleep that way! They like to sleep on their stomachs), bodies not too badly burned, only a little bit smudged (in a Heraclitan, generative fire, sowing a new world for fifty-seven parents), were not them at all. Pure artifice. Oh, they do these things so cleverly nowadays, but I was not fooled. Years of school mornings, all I had to do was stand over their still bodies and they woke. “If you just stare at a person who’s sleeping for long enough, they’ll wake up,” Vivie noticed.
We must go to bed now too. But as soon as we turn out the light I get waves of nausea and panic; the ceiling lowers, the walls approach, my throat closes, and so we lie for the few hours with a bedside light on. Eventually Victor falls asleep and I watch, as if by watching I might partake of his forgetfulness. His head is far back like someone proffering a throat to be slit. His mouth is open, the breath stale. The hairs on his chest are turning gray. His fine hands are dirty. His eyeballs are still, no dreams, and his brow is furrowed in pain; no, even asleep, he has not forgotten. Was it for this that he fell in love? My own body, which drew him and bore them, has been an instrument of ruin. I light a match and hold it close to my wrist, very close, just to know how it feels, but at the first real twinge of pain I shake it out. Coward. Children have known it. I wish this night would last forever. Bad as it is, it is better than what will come.
In the morning Nina calls—her tone soothing and low, perfect, only it does not soothe—to say she has spoken to a Reform rabbi who will conduct a brief and not very religious service including the Twenty-third Psalm. Nina has a wide acquaintance. How she persuaded him to alter the routine I will never find out. “Fine and dandy, just like sugar candy,” Nina’s parents made her say, with a curtsy, when grownups asked how she was. A woman who could survive that upbringing with her lifeblood still thickly warm can accomplish a great deal, even with a rabbi. Did she approach him in the harem outfits, the bangles? Surely not. Perish the thought. She approached him as a college professor and woman of impeccable and adaptable manners. She will take care of everything.
We considered having a few poems read. I remembered one I had liked in school: Ben Jonson on the death of a small child. The required survey of English literature, first half—I sat next to Steffie Baum, bright-eyed and bathed in a sexual afterglow. And so later in the morning, Phil saw me climbing on a chair to reach the top bookshelf where I kept old college books.
“What are you doing up there?” he asked, but without any surprise. Nothing would surprise him for some time. He was sitting on the floor against the wall, drinking a can of Schlitz, exactly his pose of yesterday, as if there had been no intervening night. Except his crying was silent. Crying into his beer.
“I’m getting down a book.”
He took another swig. Since when does he drink beer? Should a boy of fifteen drink beer at all? Maybe he will develop a drinking problem. Teen-aged alcoholic: drowns his sorrows in beer first, then on to stronger stuff. Well at least he is not sneaky about it. At least he does it in his own home, in full view of his mother. Alan used to do a wicked imitation of a drunk flopping and flailing, not that he had ever seen one. He got it from movies and TV.
I climbed down with the book, careful not to rest any weight on the left ankle, and went over and knelt beside Phil. I smoothed his hair, wiped his cheeks with a crumpled tissue—liberties I would not usually take. “Let me make you something to eat. If you drink without eating you’ll get sick. How about a grilled cheese sandwich?”
He shook his head and guzzled expertly from the can. His Adam’s apple jiggled like a car riding over a bump. “I’m not hungry.”
I eyed his crumpled, sour-smelling clothes. He must have slept in them. “Why don’t you go and ... fix yourself up a bit. Take a shower. You’ll feel better.”
“No I won’t.”
“All right.” I sighed and started towards the bedroom with my book. An eerie part of my mind was clicking away in a vacuum: how unusually still it was; awfully late for Vivie and Alan to be sleeping; maybe go in and see if they were all right? The phone rang.
A man identified himself as someone from the funeral place. “I’m extremely sorry to interrupt you at this difficult moment, Mrs. Rowe, but it has come to our attention that you are a well-known musician in our area, and we wondered whether you had any special preferences in regard to music. ... During the service tomorrow?”
I heard the words clearly—he enunciated with great clarity—but I couldn’t seem to grasp the meaning. “What?”
“It has come to our attention ...” He said it all again.
“What?”
“Mom!” Phil sprang up. Suddenly his eyes were dry, he didn’t stagger like a drunk—he leaped to my side like a grown man. “What is it? Who is it?”
“It’s ... Hold on,” I said into the phone. I was without words. It was like a dream where you forget your native language.
Phil took the phone. “Hello ... Yes ... Yes, this is her son. ... I see.” He waved me from the room and I went, as though he were the parent. “Let me think it over,” I heard him say, “and discuss it with my family, and I’ll get back to you soon.”
This could only be a dream. That could not be Phil talking, who from the pits of adolescence found it too arduous to greet neighbors civilly but instead mumbled, not meeting their eyes. Who detested telephone formalities, who garbled messages, who wouldn’t even call to ask the time of a movie unless there was a recording.
A little while later Althea knocked twice on our bedroom door and immediately entered. Victor, feeling sick, was stretched out on his stomach on our new king-sized bed (“I can ravish you at any angle,” he said last Wednesday with glee, after the delivery men left). I sat near him cross-legged, leafing through pages.
“Mother, Nina is here again, with Gabrielle and Don. Aunt Lily and Uncle Lew are on their way up. Rosalie called and said she’s coming. What do you want me to do with all of them?”
“Oh, give them lunch or something. See if there’s any food.”
“Gabrielle brought a lot of food. She’s unpacking it.”
“Good, they can eat that.”
“I don’t see why so much eating is involved. Mother, are you actually reading?”
“I’m looking for a poem.”
Althea came closer. Unlike Phil, she smelled sweet and looked fresh. I had heard the shower early in the morning. She takes lengthy, epic showers. Victor and I have speculated on what she finds to do for so long under the spray: dance, act out fantasies, wash every square inch seven times in a circular motion while reciting a mantra? Her face was scrubbed shiny. She was wearing a navy corduroy jumper with a white blouse, and her blond hair, drawn back with a band, was still damp. So clean and so small, so staunch, she seemed younger than her years, a heroic child lacerated within but determined to behave well. A look Nina might have had as a child. I could hardly bear to see it. She would have been better off as Nina’s daughter, not have had to go through this. If I had known Nina was never to have children of her own maybe I could have given her one?—I had so many. Did I need that many? And what for? What am I thinking. There was not one I could have parted with. Like Lear’s entourage, reason not the need.
“You look flushed, Mom. Are you sure you’re all right?” She put her cool palm on my forehead to test for fever, as if I were the child.
I gave her a small smile of approval. Big girl. Just like Mommy. They never stop needing it. “I’m all right.”
“But what do you want a poem for? For the funeral?”
However capable and kind, she is relentless in her pursuit of lucidity, clinging to sequence and causality. Very like me, in so many ways. Not in appearance—she is fair and delicate like Evelyn. But inside. Our minds work alike. She speaks the things that I think; she is too hasty to speak, too crammed with ready opinion, but so was I at her age.
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t like when they read poems at funerals. It’s so affected. Like those people who write their own wedding ceremonies.”
Yes, like Esther’s in Pinecrest, now a scorched field. Fire, Heraclitus said, lives in the death of earth, and Esther didn’t like that notion of one element’s flourishing by the other’s demise.
“How would you know? How many funerals have you been to?”
“A lot.” She listed them for me. They were a remarkable number for a girl just seventeen. Besides her grandmothers, there was the father of a close friend, a favorite English teacher, and a classmate who died of knife wounds from a mugging in the subway; the whole student body turned out. At the last three funerals poems were read, Althea said, and they made her uncomfortable, especially “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (the English teacher). She didn’t want to hear that again.
“I wasn’t thinking of that one,” I said. “That’s for an older person.”
Victor moaned loudly, coughed, and shifted around on the bed, clawing at the pillowcase. His complaint was vast, inclusive: not only the accident and the decimation of his family, but this conversation he was forced to endure.
“Althea, before we decide anything we’ll talk to you about it, okay? Please go and take care of the people now. You’re very good at that. Be nice to Lily and Lew, no matter what they say. I’ll be out soon.”
“Do you think she’s right?” I asked Victor when she left. “Victor, I know you’re not sleeping. Please.”
He rolled over. On his face were lines I had never seen before, running from the corners of his eyes down the outer edges of his cheekbones, and from mouth to chin. A muscle low in his neck twitched with an irregular pulse—the skin puckered, relaxed, and puckered. His eyes were the color of slate, and his hands, sculpted by labor, lay across his stomach limp as empty gloves. “I don’t know. Maybe. She has good sense.”
He went into the bathroom, leaving the door open, and vomited, while I sat staring at the poems by Ben Jonson. Not merely one but three on the subject. His First Daughter (infant mortality), his First Sonne (at seven), and a child actor (scarse thirteene). “Here lyes to each her parents ruth, MARY, the daughter of their youth.” Well, not exactly. I was thirty at the time of Alan, Victor nearly thirty-two, and Vivian was two years later. I heard Victor brushing his teeth. He came back greenish and unsteady on his feet, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
“Do you feel any better now?”
“I went to bed with this woman last week. Oh Lydia! It was not even the first time. It was the second. Lord! On a white shag rug.” He gagged, pressed his hand to his mouth and swallowed his gall. I didn’t speak for a long time, though he stood above me waiting for a reaction.
“Uh ... not now, Victor, all right? Don’t tell me that now. Don’t tell me at all. Forget it.”
“That’s why.”
Men like to overestimate their personal impact on the universe. In the book on my lap it said, “Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.”
“That’s crazy. Be quiet,” I said.
“It’s a punishment.”
“Stop it! Don’t fall apart on me. Please.”
“It just happened. I didn’t think ... It didn’t mean—”
“Will you shut up? Do you think the whole world revolves around where you put your prick? That that could cause anything!”
Victor sat down with his face in his hands.
“I don’t care anyway, I don’t care, I don’t care.” The words came out of me like a chant, over and over; the sound was horrible and wouldn’t stop. He pinned me down on the bed and lay on top of me like a blanket, his hand over my mouth stopping the sound.
It was too nice, that being covered and flattened by all his weight spread over me, and that warm palm on my lips. I didn’t want comfort or any soft feeling. I didn’t want any part of his superstition or repentance. The cause? I knew all about causes. I had not sat up nights memorizing Aristotle for nothing. Material cause, Victor: heavy snow, obscuring vision; slicked asphalt; a vehicle traveling at fifty miles an hour with a fallible driver. Formal cause, sweetheart: the laws of physics (the nature of the universe), decreeing that such a vehicle at such a speed, at such a bend in the road, in such weather, risks certain odds of going askew, wild but inescapable as the odds at a horse race. Efficient cause, baby: the tired driver lost consciousness for an instant, slipping into hypnagogic thought, or lost control, remembering a rankling injury done him by a loved one, or saw a light ahead and misjudged its position. Maybe even a deer in the glare of headlights, or an imagined deer. Final cause. Aha. The abstract purpose for which the event took place? That, my dear, I can’t ... discern. To demonstrate something? What? And to us in particular? No. No Greek can make me believe this was some necessary alteration of the universe.
“All right.” I nudged him off and got up. “Let’s go inside. They’ve come to see us. We have to.” I combed my hair.
He got up and combed his hair too. So we had no poem at the funeral. We never got around to discussing it, never resolved the question of the good or bad taste of poetry read at funerals. (But “cover lightly, gentle earth”—how could anyone object to that?)
The funeral escaped me anyway, or I escaped it. There was a tall broad man in a charcoal gray suit standing in the front corner of the chapel, near a door. Not the angel; an employee, I suppose, maybe the man who telephoned. In the upper left-hand pocket of his suit jacket was a triangle of white handkerchief in the style of former days, and this handkerchief tucked so neatly in its pocket drew me into a trance. Those innumerable pockets. So much to hold, to hide. No, not innumerable, for once, the night before we set out for the brown house, I enumerated, gazing at my father’s navy blue suit on its hanger while he stood in his underwear holding the tiny scissors he used to clip his mustache. Upper left hand, he told me: handkerchief, folded in triangle. Upper right hand: pens, sharpened pencils, cigars. Inner breast pockets, best of all because so hidden: business cards, letters, more pencils, gum. To have business cards! To be a grownup and possess so many worldly things! What a superb gesture of power, that reaching in like Napoleon and pulling something out, like a magician. And that strange little square pocket near the belt. Watch pocket, he said. Watch? Watch what? For a watch, silly Lydia, rumpling my hair. Rumpling my hair! God, how many ages ago! Never again to be a child. Always and always to be this grown-up woman now, with this past, these worldly possessions. To have a man, with a suit full of pockets.
The trance weakened for a moment; I heard a snatch about shepherds and pastures, rod and staff, all that bucolic rot. Better stick with suits. Something came creeping into my head and I pursued it like a bug. Yes. The spies in Alan’s spy-story-in-progress, which he used to read to me in segments while I cooked dinner. The spies wore three-piece suits. Chapter One mentioned the master spy unbuttoning his vest. Last week while I was listening to the latest episode and making chili, there was something important I meant to tell him, but by the time he finished, the chili was ready, everyone came in, and I forgot. The master spy and his Russian counterpart, both double agents and both in three-piece suits, were meeting in Central Park where, concealed by bushes, they wrote notes to each other lest the bushes were bugged. And to avoid leaving scraps of paper that might be found and pieced together, they wrote on a Magic Slate, which could be erased. What I meant to tell him was that a Magic Slate, too, could be stolen and interpreted by experts, since the magic pencil leaves impressions on the cardboard beneath. I hadn’t meant to spoil his idea; I was merely going to suggest that they destroy the Magic Slate after each meeting and buy a new one—the security would be well worth the expense. Suddenly I had the most urgent need to tell him this, and I glanced around in panic, searching in the crowd ...
There were hundreds of things left unsaid (and undone: those new sneakers he wanted so badly), but for some reason this about the MagicSlate was supreme, and the fact that his story would remain flawed, the spies would remain in grave danger and I would never see him again to tell him how to protect them, was absolutely, physically intolerable. I felt faint and lowered my head to my knees. Victor’s hand stroked my back.
When I could sit up again the rabbi’s voice had stopped. I couldn’t see well—nothing was in focus—but things seemed about over. Some shuffling, a clicking noise, and—surprise: music. Music I had heard a thousand and one nights coming from his room. A song by John Lennon, the late: “Golden slumbers fill your eyes, Dreams await you when you rise, Sleep, little darling, don’t you cry, And I will sing a lullaby.” Paul McCartney’s voice is hoarse, cracked, and tragic, as if he is announcing, with an irony bitter as gall, Lennon’s imminent, premature death. The kids went to the memorial service in Central Park three months ago, all except Althea, who dislikes crowds and public demonstrations. They returned shaken and subdued, with banners: John Lennon Lives. Well, let it be. Let golden slumbers fill his eyes too. This is Phil’s doing. Where is he? Beside me, I forgot. I turn to him and pat his hand. “Good. You did good.” “Carry that weight,” all four of them sing. “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight a long time.” There is a long, intense, and complex drum riff. Then, after a few more clicks, comes Appalachian Spring. Oh, very different, exultant. The life force, la-di-dah. Not from the beginning, rather from the point where the melody of “Simple Gifts” enters. My son the taciturn adolescent turns out to be a genius impresario. He must even have marked the place on the record for them. He has behaved like a man, indeed is wearing a suit. I think maybe he has done a little too well, like God with the Egyptians. Dayenu, enough, because I am hearing her high, true voice in the shower: “When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend we will not be ashamed. To turn and to turn will be our delight, Till by turning, turning, we come round right.” All my arts of numbness have been to no avail. I try to turn to Phil, again to tell him, “Good,” but I cannot move my head. Dissolved. She was not to be thought of, Vivian, too hazardous. She is unthinkable but I am thinking her till she fills me, her body occupying mine, not like an embryo but arms inside my arms, legs in legs, heart inside my heart.
Instead of taking the limousine home we ride in Don’s and Gabrielle’s Volkswagen bus. With them in the front seat is a stunned Cynthia, acne fading, body thinning—soon she will be a lithe but less subtle version of her mother. Well-bred Roger, away at Amherst, phoned us yesterday to speak his piece with a somber grace, and I bet with no prodding from his parents. Althea sits with Victor and me, and in the back, Phil with his old friend Henry, who sniffles for the whole trip, I don’t know whether from emotion or the icy weather. Henry also suffers from allergies but it is February, a chill parody of all our Sunday afternoon picnics, pleasure-bound via this old bus, six children boisterous in the back. Today no one is asking how much longer, no one even speaks. Today so many warm live bodies capsuled against the cold are no match for the Long Island fields so richly sown with corpses, richer now.
George rode with Nina, so she would not be alone. She told me, later, that in the evening, after leaving us, they went to his apartment and made love, to feel better. She had not made love with him in so long, since Esther’s wedding, perhaps? She wasn’t quite sure. Oh no, there was that time after our Seder of last year. George had mellowed, she said. Well, naturally. I would have loved to hear exactly how, every blow-by-blow detail, but of course she didn’t go into all that. She did mention that afterwards he wept and said he had loved me best of all the women he had known, and should have married me when he had the chance; then this terrible tragedy would not have happened to me. He can be so obtuse. And tactless. It was not even true. He hadn’t loved me best and he hadn’t had the chance.
Since Don’s muffler had broken on the way out, making that awful clanking noise, he couldn’t take the highways but drove through a succession of drowsy towns, past small half-timbered neo-Tudor houses with rooftops trimmed in snow and shrouded front lawns—the same snow that had coated the windshield of the chartered bus and slicked the macadam beneath its skidding tires. There had been a while, early in the morning, when the sky was flat, the color of dusty pewter, like Victor’s face, but soon the sun came out. And now the snow glistened innocently in the crisp Northeast winter light. Every line on the horizon was drawn with a knife edge. Not a soul was out in the pretty towns; maybe they were all in church: Sunday morning. In this stillness and beauty, this probably specious serenity, I spied out the window an incredible thing.
Victor had his arm around me; on the other side he held Althea’s hand. All morning Victor had held me up, his hand on my shoulder or pressing at my waist, nudging his limping sleepwalker in the right direction. Always the touch of him, so I never felt alone. His shouting and moaning were over. Now it was he who took care. Chivalrous, to break the heart. He had turned on the water in the shower and handed me the soap. He zipped up my skirt as I stood before the mirror, arms hanging useless with amnesia; he knotted the woolen scarf around my neck. When he found me standing in front of the wide-open window gazing up at the sky, he gently drew me away and shut it. Maybe he thought I was going to jump. I had no thought of jumping; I was entranced by the flight pattern of a great flock of birds against the pewter sky, and thinking, Evelyn, Evelyn. No plane fast enough? Tomorrow, you wired. But I wanted you yesterday. Too vague, Evelyn, unattached, light, fey. Vivie was magic like you yet she would have made it on time. She had more guts. The birds kept circling, first in a shapeless mass, then they formed a dense triangle, then a slender V. They beat their wings hard in unison and abruptly coasted in unison, as if their patch of sky had uphills and downhills. I tried to count them as they circled: nineteen, seventeen, nineteen again, no, twenty—hopeless. I tried to see whether the same one was always the leader and another one always the last, but that was hopeless too; their swoops were quicker than my eye, and dizzying. I tracked one who kept falling out of formation and lagging behind, then made frantic efforts to catch up, a spastic agitation of the wings. Sometimes he succeeded, but more often he lagged so far that the circling group would catch up with him instead, and for a while he would travel in the front ranks, till some weakness or perversity made him slip back again, and again batten his wings desperately to rejoin. They circled the same patch of gray sky so many times—were they as hypnotized as I? Did they have the illusion of progress or was it their recreation, their rehearsal for migrating south? Strange that they hadn’t already gone. Victor drew me from the window and closed it. He told me to put on a little make-up, for my own sake—I would be glad of it, later on. He forgot nothing, even that my pride would survive my children, and perhaps my grief.
Assembled by Victor, and held by him, watching the towns pass by from the window of the Volkswagen, I see the thing. Incredible, yet I do see it.
Most of the pretty half-timbered houses trimmed in snow are fronted by broad lawns sloping down towards the road. At the edge of one snow lawn, near the sidewalk, is a clump of metal garbage cans; and lying in the snow, partly hidden by the cans, is a woman’s body in gentle repose, curved on one hip. Only the lower half is visible. She is wearing something pink and light, a nightgown or slip (a smok?) that ends halfway down her thighs. Her legs are slender, fair-skinned, and bent slightly at the knee. It might have been a painting by Victor: it had that reverence for detail, that cool accuracy and sinuosity of line. Odalisque. She does not move.
I swivel my head to keep her in view, but in a moment she is blocked by a stand of trees. Then gone. But not from the inner eye. A white woman half-draped in pink, embedded in snow. A woman who has stumbled and fallen while taking out the garbage and will instantly pick herself up? A discarded doll, a heap of garbage artfully arranged to resemble a female form? I don’t think so. A half-clothed woman, lying out in the cold. By choice? Or by design, accident, circumstance, necessity?
I may be dreaming. But there are the commonplace houses, the diurnal sun, the raw sounds of the broken muffler and Henry’s sniffling. There is Victor’s hand on my right arm, the heads of our friends in the front seat, Althea’s profile on my left, sharp as a cameo. The woman was as real as any of this.
After a while it occurs to me that we are fellow creatures also in the most ordinary sense. “Don, we have to turn back. I saw a body in the snow.”
Tactful disbelief. They think shock has brought delusion. But in the end they humor me. Don turns around and the morning rewinds on the spool of road. “Say when, Lydia.” I manage to locate the house, the lawn, and the garbage cans, but the body is gone. Their troubled concern is not for the woman but for me; to ease them I say very little, making sure to sound controlled and sane.
Once out of the town I whisper to Victor, “There was. I swear it.”
“I believe you,” he whispers back.
Where did she go and what will happen to her? During the long trip home a cold curiosity spins bizarre possibilities. They unwind to infinity like broad white ribbons, rippling strips of snow, snow ribbons wrapping up the world till the world is a covered ball, all done up in satin snow, sealed and ready to be given over. Surrendered.