I dreamed that those long since dead
Came to my bedside at night and said
Too long have you tarried here…
The person
Has always been a prisoner
Ever since she slipped
From her warm and watery confines.
When after long years
The mind wanders free
The person inside
Will no longer be a prisoner.
No one can follow her
To her secret land.
Death takes her by the hand
She is free.
—MSC
I have lost so much weight that Aaron can lift me as if I were a child when he changes the sheets. Then he will deposit me with a tender kiss in the armchair by the bed. He used to think domestic details beneath him, but now he oversees the cleaning woman’s chores. He does light cooking and even leads me into the bathroom, which is scented with my fragrant pine soap.
In defiance of death, I wear my prettiest nightgowns and am meticulous in my grooming. A hairdresser comes weekly to wash my hair and manicure my nails. Although I never used to wear tinted polish, I now wear a silvery pink.
Aaron calls me brave. I think it’s rather that I should like to die with dignity.
“Don’t let them take me back to the hospital,” I plead with Frieda, who has been hired to nurse me. “Over my dead body,” she mutters.
“Aaron will want me to go back if it keeps me alive longer, but I don’t want to go,” I whisper.
Tests, tests, and more tests. Being sick is arduous and time-consuming. Aaron and I go by taxi for appointments with each specialist. They no longer make house calls as they used to when I was young.
It is time, murmur the presences.
One morning when I woke up, I sensed them all around me. Were these the spirits I used to read about in fairy tales? They were standing nebulous around my bed. It is time, they murmured. You have lingered too long.
Was this a dream or a shred remembered from a long-ago fairy tale?
“You are imperfectly incarnated,” Antonio once said. “As though part of you remained in the ether outside your body.”
Perhaps Rosa would understand. When Rosa talked of such things as reincarnation, it angered Aaron. “He’s a young soul,” Rosa once said. Although I always scoffed at Rosa’s beliefs in Eastern religions, secretly I wonder. At times I feel on the brink of understanding something beyond words, but then it fades.
Howard, Jesse, and Rosa, can you forgive my imperfections? I want to tell each of you things that I have never expressed, but I fear I will fail.
On what we both know is his farewell visit, Howard is quiet and gentle. I feel how true his affection is. He and his wife, Lydia, sit beside my bed during the long afternoon. I make a great effort and manage to go out with them for dinner at a local restaurant. In their company, I can relax at last.
Lydia comes from an upper class family. With her straight brown hair, freckles, and blue eyes. I imagine she would have fit well into any of the private schools I attended. They have two children. Their son, a stout boy of ten, is something of an academic genius. The daughter is thirteen. She’s full of rebellion, and they worry about her. They’re conscientious parents. Howard has stuck with his government job in Seattle all these years, although he finds it difficult, and at times doesn’t like it at all. Howard, perhaps you could have done more with your life if you’d had more confidence. If only I knew how, I would have given it.
We talk about books and theater. Underneath all this is a current of love and generous understanding. After they leave, I feel a certain sense of things resolved, although I’m weepy for days afterwards.
In contrast, when Jesse flies in from Los Angeles to make his farewell visit, he bristles with invisible porcupine needles of rage. But he is also breezy, gay in the Edwardian sense, and has a keen sense of humor. Howard and he are beginning to grow gray, and they both have put on weight. He seems to enjoy my discomfiture when he talks about the Jewish temple he’s joined. “Assimilation is like suicide,” he remarks.
“Why?” I ask, annoyed even now on my death bed.
He launches into a long explanation, during which I doze off and dream he’s a baby again, screaming, and I’m downstairs in the kitchen with my head in my hands.
At the end of his tirade Jesse pauses, leans over, and kisses me. “Thanks for giving me life, Mom,” he says, as if picking up my dream thoughts. “I’ve had a wonderful life.”
I shudder. A faint cry escapes me because his life has been shot through with suffering. He presses my hand. “It’s all right, Mom. I’m alive. You rest now. Goodbye,” he says as if I were not dying at all but going off to another country.
Jesse, there’s so much I want to say, but when I try to talk the words stick in my throat, and fatigue overcomes me. What I want to say is complicated. I love you, but mixed with the love is such a sticky, dark tangled skein. I think of a haunting melody you once played for me on your piano in that shabby Hollywood apartment where you now live.
Sometimes in the darkness of night, Aaron and I whisper confidences. But there is much he does not reveal. For many months now I suspect he has had a mistress.
Chagrin.
My lips tighten in bitterness.
Heinrich telephones, and attempts to cheer me up. We joke about our infirmities. “We linger, our glory is to blossom, and we go betrayed,” he says, quoting Rilke.
One afternoon Antonio calls. “I do not write to you, Eleanor, because I do not have the money even for the stamps. I sleep in the car a friend give to me.”
“Where did you get the money to phone?”
“Aha, Antonio has mysterious ways.”
When I tell him about my illness, he sounds anguished. His voice intensifies. “Eleanor, something in your life it is missing. You should have come away with me. Then you are not an invalid, and I am not sleeping in a Buick. You have too much life. Je t’aime.
“Isabel, she must inherit the Chilean piano my mother leave behind. You must call my brothers in Chile. My mother’s piano. I want Isabel to have it.”
“Who is that?” barks Aaron.
“Aaron, don’t interrupt.”
Aaron paces back and forth in the hallway. Afterwards he asks if it was Antonio who called. I say yes, it was.
“I forbid you to talk to him.”
“You can’t.”
“If you do, I’ll get a divorce!”
“Aaron, don’t be absurd.”
However, propped up as I am against the pillows, I am clearly aware of Aaron’s physical strength and my frailty. At that instant he would be capable of hurling me onto the floor and shattering my bones.
Antonio, I thought that incident long ago in Paris could be buried, but it has risen up to haunt us for the rest of our lives.
Six months to live, say the doctors. But I’ve lingered as if I were at a party and loathe to leave.
“My love, you can’t die,” Aaron whispers late at night, holding me close under the covers.
“You’ll survive quite well,” I say. There were strands of blonde hair on his tweed lapel this evening when he came back from his “meeting.”
“Give my clothes away,” I whisper. “I don’t want another woman wearing them.”
Aaron makes a terra cotta sculpture of me in bed. Am I really so thin? He sculpts me dancing in a happier time, sculpts me walking with my cane down a disembodied staircase, as if each of these effigies contained a miniature me.
“Eat,” he says.
I have lost so much weight that all my bones stick out. I am less than ninety pounds. Aaron lifts me in and out of the bathtub as if I were a child. He leads me to the toilet, holds my hand to steady me on the plastic seat.
Aaron is trying to hold me back, but it’s only a matter of time before they draw me into their light.
Much of the time I drift off into a half conscious state. Soon, murmur the presences. Perhaps after my death the knot between Rosa and me will dissolve. Hand in hand, she and I will float through another dimension. Rosa, I dream you’re here. But I cannot reach out for your hand and say “Stay!” I dream you fade into the mist and in your place a raven appears.
Aaron brings me a rose from a subway vendor. Gently he strokes my shoulders. I sniff the rose. It’s a beautiful shade of red and has a delicate fragrance.
The pain is so intense, it seems as if my former self has burned away. Certainly I don’t exist as I used to. Habits bind me together. I grow more particular about how a table is set, how my underwear is washed and ironed, how the magazines on the coffee table are arranged, as if rituals could bind together the billowing clouds, the dark whirling gusts inside me, as if patterns in the outer world could keep me from dying.
Patterns of time and space.
What is Aaron’s sculpting but a lifelong creation of patterns to keep death at bay? At times the futility of struggling against what must be shines clearly. Then it fades behind clouds, as do my thoughts, as do the words I wish I could speak.
The hall clock chimes. Cars sound on 84th Street even now at two in the morning. Aaron snores lightly. I lie awake, unquiet with memories. Physical pain spreads through me. Let it be. Soon it will end.
Gray dawn light seeps into the room. I open my eyes, shift in bed, and gaze out the window into the airshaft. The window across the way is dark. The walls of this room are a shadowy rose hue.
“Rosa’s flight gets in this afternoon,” says Frieda. “Let’s get you prettied up for your daughter. The hairdresser is on her way. Why, Eleanor, you’re crying.”
I cannot speak my true thoughts.
“Come now,” says the faithful Frieda. “Lean on me so we can get you to your bath.”
“Frieda, I can still bathe alone,” I say, furious at my ever-encroaching weakness.
Later that morning, Madame LaFont’s fingers knead my scalp. Tingles from the shampoo, and warm air from the drier. “Your hair is so soft and fine,” she says.
“Drink your high protein,” urges Frieda. She holds the glass with its pale pink liquid while I sip the sickly sweet stuff down my parched throat. I want to vomit it up. My stomach feels like a swollen net, and the mass stemming from my liver leaves barely any space for liquid in my throat. Making a great effort, I swallow.
Rosa leans down to kiss me. Her face has grown thinner. Her dark hair has been cut short and full. I think she said she tints it. She’s wearing black corduroy slacks and a white sweater. Her lips brush my cheek. She smoothes my hair, then backs away with a curious expression on her face.
At this instant I clearly realize that Aaron and I formed a pact against our first born. We allied against this intruder with her infant cries and constant need for attention. I liked to dress her in beautiful baby clothes, as if she were one of my old childhood dolls. Then she’d vomit all over the delicate material, and I’d be furious, which was certainly unfair. I was an isolated and ignorant mother.
There are also good memories, Mom.
I was four years old, recovering from whooping cough, and I hated to eat. To coax me, you put a morsel of hamburger and three green peas on a doll’s china plate and poured my milk from a miniature pitcher into a doll’s cup. “Chug-a-lug” you sang to the tune of a drinking song. “Chug-a-lug-a-lug.” Entranced, I swallowed.
You could weave into my consciousness as if you too were a child. “One little piggie went to market. Another little piggie went home,” you would sing, wriggling my toes as you dried them after a bath, while I sat on your lap, wrapped in a soft towel.
But at times you were granite, cold, unmoving, full of unshed tears.
“You sit on my lap, Mommie,” I would beg, trying to get some tenderness from you by giving it. You’d dismiss this as childish prattle.
I never knew how to please you. If I were “good” I felt a tinge of your contempt. If I were “bad” you’d get angry or nag.
I preferred your anger to your contempt.
If I did something you disapproved of, you might simply not respond. That coldness was your most powerful weapon.
“Hush. Your father’s coming. Don’t talk of death to Aaron. It upsets him too much.”
Why protect him? You’ve always shielded him so that he’s like a boy who never grew up. Antonio did grow up. He’s a man in a way that Aaron will never be. No matter that Dad heads the Sculptors’ Guild and that Antonio can’t even manage to hold down a job as a cook.
Often you and I pick up the phone at the same instant to dial each other, even with all our discords. Telepathy. The energy between us is sticky like glue. Boundaries fluctuate and dissolve.
Mother, your essence IS the Dream Mother. Beneath your icy surface lies such strong love. In your core, you merge with the Dream Mother. Because underneath your jealousy, your nagging and your coldness, your snobbishness, your concern with appearances, underneath runs a dark glowing current with such strong love that it bolsters me. Dark glowing waters of your love.
In my dreams Rosa exults as she dances over my ashes like an Indian dervish. “Die, Mother, so I can live,” she whispers, gloating, lips parted. But now as she looks at me, her dark eyes are filled with pain. “Oh, Mother, I love you. I don’t want you to die.”
Do I trust this Rosa apparition by my bed whom people call “real” or do I trust my dreams? Instinct tells me to trust the latter, although I would never confide this to a soul. Secretly I am as much a mystic as she.
Her eyes hood over.
Either Aaron or Frieda have been within earshot during her entire visit. Because of their presence, what I want to say to my daughter remains stuck in my throat. Tears fill my eyes. The unvoiced currents between Rosa and me are so strong.
“Don’t tire out your mother. She needs to rest after her meal,”
“Dad, I’m flying back to California in a little while.”
“I’m so glad you’ve visited.” My voice is barely audible.
Rosa takes my hand in her warm one and gently massages my palm. “I love you, Mother.”
Because I’m dying, I think. You love the fact that I’m dying. Soon I’ll be gone from your life, so you can afford to give me a little love.
I sit by my Mother’s side and I want to scream, bite her, hold her against my heart, talk to her. But that fat nurse with the stringy hair is here, and Dad is hovering over her, and she’s too weak. Dad stands in the doorway, waiting to usher me out. He emanates such anxiety. He looks older and more frail. It’s too late now. Too late. I hold her icy hand. Her face is bitter with suffering. She wears a silk bed jacket and, ill as she is, her hair is washed and brushed, adorned with a narrow blue ribbon. She’s neatly groomed, clean, elegant, a lady. There’s a certain nobility in that.
I feel awkward in this chair. My back hurts. I’ve mysteriously picked up Mother’s herniated disk condition, as if by accompanying her into realms of pain I could atone. But I’m learning how to heal myself with yoga and holistic methods. I’m determined not to become an invalid.
“Your mother must rest now,” says Dad.
He doesn’t want to leave the two of us alone.
“There are things I always wanted to say to you about sex and life,” Mother murmured last night. But Dad was in the room, just as he is now. She didn’t want to talk in front of him. Why didn’t I ask him to leave? Why did I go out to a bar instead and drink scotch?
“When do you leave for the airport?” asks Dad.
Anxiety is in his voice. He’s eager to see me off.
“Not for an hour,” I say.
Last night he confided, “Sometimes I’m walking down the street, and I feel fine in the cold air. Then I think about Eleanor dying, and I feel as if the sidewalk is on the edge of a cliff, and I’m going to fall off.”
He worships her as if she were a goddess. What will he do without her?
Rosa, the least word or phrase could set you off into a tailspin. I wanted you as a friend, wanted us to laugh together at things, wanted to go shopping linked arm and arm, wanted to be proud of you among my friends. Instead, I was ashamed by contrast when they talked about their daughters. You disparaged the gifts I gave you, the clothes I selected for you with much care. You would give them away.
“Anything from you is cursed,” you once said.
I want to tell you about Heinrich and Antonio. I want your forgiveness. I have always been afraid to tell you up until now. But Aaron is here listening.
Au fond, I am a simple woman beneath my complex veneer. I want to love and be loved.
“Mom, I have a job at the library. And I’m applying to teach night classes at Berkeley Adult.”
“That’s good, my dear.”
“My neighbor Molly has a friend who’s an agent. She’s taken my novel.”
“I’m very glad.”
Her hag face is ridden with lines. You’re getting old, too, my daughter. Mother, get out of my brain. Stop telling me to suffer.
I want to sell what I write.
Only others do, my dear.
Why did you give birth to me if only to torture me and sentence me to hard labor, failure, and humiliation?
The Mother inside my head bursts into sobs.
I put my arm around her.
I don’t know, she cries. I rescued you more than once.
She lies against the pillows. She’s so pale. Her lips are tight with pain.
Mother, tell me it’s all right to succeed, to get my writing out into the world, to be happy. Give me your blessing.
Mother, why did you sleep with Antonio?
You know very well why.
Mother, you don’t realize how much you hurt me. I could never please you. You wished I’d been your friend, but how could I trust you when I constantly feared you were trying to destroy me?
“When do you leave for the airport.”
“Not for an hour, Dad.”
The mixture of fear and anxiety in Dad’s voice is like a cloud of electric needles thrown out into the atmosphere. His emotions make it difficult for me to think. Why does he have to control everyone? Has he no generosity?
“One last sip of your protein drink,” urges Frieda.
“Your mother must rest.”
Indeed, my dear, there will be ample time to rest when I die.
“Dad, please let me talk to Mom alone.”
Aaron glares at Rosa, on fire with rage.
There is an enormous blockage in my throat. As in my dreams, as in my childhood, my muscles are paralyzed. They are all three looking at me, waiting for me. I am in a desert. I cannot move or speak.
Rosa strokes my face.
Gathering my strength as if I’m lifting an enormous weight, I say, “Aaron, do let us be alone for a while. Could you pick up some bath oil for me at the drugstore? Frieda can go home for the evening.”
He doesn’t move. Just stares at both of us.
“Dad please!”
“Frieda must stay,” he says.
“I’ll go into the living room,” volunteers Frieda. “I can do some mending.”
Furious, he leaves. I hear him carefully lock the dead bolt of the apartment door. Faint sounds come from the television in the living room, where I hope Frieda is resting her tired feet on a bolster.
Alone at last with Rosa I gaze off to avoid the intensity of her eyes.
“What did you want to tell me?” Her face is flushed. The room is overheated, as city apartments tend to be. Steam hisses from the radiator.
Rosa’s touch is warm as she strokes my fingers.
I’m so tired now I can barely keep my eyes open, although this is the chance we’ve been waiting for.
“I’m sorry about Antonio.”
Her throat tightens. She seems on the verge of tears, my daughter.
“What is love?” Rosa muses, much as she did long ago.
Then she adds after a moment, “Mom, I understand you better now that I’ve been raising Isabel. When I make terrible mistakes, I understand how you must have felt. I understand about needing something you didn’t get from anyone else.”
Stoic Isabel. Sweet Isabel. Sticks me subtly now with verbal needles, as Eleanor does. She learned from her Grandma. The point is finer and doesn’t go as deep, but the pattern was imprinted on the child at an impressionable age. Disparage Rosa. She’s a fool. Even though I adore my Mommy, Grandma thinks she’s a fool. And I love Grandma, too, even when I defend Mommy against her attacks. Grandma disparages her.
“No, Mommy is wonderful,” Isabel cries. But the child remembers, and the woman Isabel wounds me in the style she learned from her Grandma.
“He called me the other day. Aaron forbade me to speak to him ever again. He could be diabolic.”
Rosa stiffens. “Dad is the one who’s diabolic. More than Antonio. Only he hides it better.”
“Forgive me,” I murmur. “He cast a spell over me. You must forgive and forget, my dear.”
“That takes time.”
I see from her face that she only partly understands. Perhaps after I’m dead and years pass, she will understand more. Can one communicate from beyond the grave?
“Can you forgive me, too, Mother? I treated you so badly.”
“The fault was on both sides, my dear.”
We are both silent for a while.
“Life is so difficult now,” I murmur. “It used to be much simpler when men and women didn’t make love until they were married. Often men will not commit themselves. I fear for Isabel.”
“I’m sure she’ll be all right,” snaps Rosa. “I’ve raised her as a liberated person! To be assertive. She’s not ever going to be a victim!” Her eyes blaze with anger.
“I don’t know, my dear …” I wish I could quench my fears about Isabel’s future.
“We have only a little time left,” Rosa says, glancing at her watch. “Isabel will be fine,” she says, bristling.
Rosa, I want you to stay. Oh, I wish I hadn’t spoken about Isabel and my fear.
Rosa is too protective a mother even to listen to these thoughts. I want you so badly, Rosa, to be with me when I die. But I cannot say this. It echoes inside me. I fear you’re fleeing now because you can’t bear to be around me, and you’re upset with what I said about Isabel. If only I could swallow my words!
When you’re with me, you say you lose your identity. Can’t you sacrifice it for a little while?
If only you could cancel your plane, your life on the West Coast. If only we could work things out. I need to work things out with Jesse, too. Only with Howard do I feel at peace.
What if I were to insist on staying until she dies? But her voice sets all my nerves on edge. Although I know I’ll never see her again, I’m starting to feel crazy around her.
And I must get back to my new job. To Isabel, who’s staying with a friend.
Poor woman. She loves me. She did the best she could.
Mom, I want our last moments together to be good. If I stay, I’m afraid I’ll crack and start screaming at you.
“Would you like a foot massage?”
“Yes,” I say. “That would be very nice, my dear.”
She has never done this before.
Rosa takes hold of one foot at a time underneath the blankets at the end of the bed, and she massages and kneads. I wonder where she learned this. I feel currents flowing from her blood through my body, soft as velvet. I sink and start to doze off.
The apartment door opens. I hear Aaron’s restless footsteps. He talks in a low tone to Frieda in the kitchen, then comes into the bedroom and addresses Rosa.
“Your taxi will be here soon. I’ll go down in the elevator with you.”
Rosa brushes against the silk of my bed jacket. The pain in my bowels flares. So much is still unresolved between us. “Mother, don’t cry.” Her lips brush my cheek. She clasps me in her arms. The tears in her eyes are like the first drops of the melting of a glacier.
I close my eyes because I can’t bear to watch her leave the room.
Was all this written in the stars before our births?
There is something I must understand before I die. I almost do, but it eludes me. It is almost within reach, like an orgasm almost grasped, but then the waves recede.
Will there be an end to this loneliness? Or will I merely lose consciousness? “To sleep, perchance to dream, ah there’s the rub.”
My presences murmur of light and of much more love than I have known on earth.
Antonio, will you join me one day?
Mother, Father, Frank, will I join you?
I am skating … gliding … flying with Antonio and Frank.
Perhaps all three of us will be reborn as brothers and sisters in a troupe of circus acrobats. Perhaps Rosa and I will be lovers or intimate friends.
Rosa, if only I could tell you my stories. Perhaps you could write them down. You are the worker. Can you sense them? Can I convey them somehow without words?
There’s so much I wanted to say. I want to tell you about my brothers, about my early life which was wonderful, rich, both sad and happy … so much I haven’t said, so much for which I lack the words, so many rich perceptions, thoughts, feelings. Now it’s too late. Rosa, perhaps you’ll write for me. You will write differently than me. You will not write my book. No one can. It’s too late now.
Childhood memories flood me. The smell of grass in summer. Jewelweed. Magic Japanese gardens which unfold from bits of paper in a glass bowl filled with water. Mountains in Switzerland. My first party dress of dark blue velvet edged with lace.
There is something I must complete. Many things like fine threads pulling at me before I die.
Memories of childhood. Yellow flowers. My brothers. The jewel weed.
There’s so much I want to say to you, Rosa.
I wish your life could have been easier. I wish I could have nurtured all my children more. I wish something in me had been completed through writing or love or perhaps communion with God. Our relationship was a constant thorn in my spirit. For many years I ignored your pain and mine, hardened myself against you.
I make a grocery list and a guest list for a party I fear I’m too weak to give.
Olives, cream cheese, black caviar, shad roe, Brennan’s water wafers, cocktail napkins, Cutty Sark, Amontillado, soda water, lemons, Brie, radishes, and Prosciutto … all foods I cannot swallow.
I’ll invite Heinrich if he’s well enough to come. Erica, too, of course. I want Melanie, the nice couple downstairs, and Margaret … a dozen others … If only I could think of their names. My pen wavers. This small effort has exhausted me.
Soon I will melt into my dreams.
“Sleep,” murmurs Frieda. “I gave you two Darvons. You go to sleep now.”
Frank, with his disarming grin. Mother in her dark dress with spangles. Father smiles and tips his hat to me from an ethereal Chevrolet convertible, bright yellow. Day by day they’re drawing me into the light. Very soon now I’ll join them.
“Play some Mozart chamber music,” I say to Aaron.
He turns on the stereo. The music, so beautiful, soothes me. Mozart understood about life and death. It’s all there in the clarity of the melody. Shaded lights give the rose colored walls and satin drapes a beautiful glow. Aaron puts his arms around me. His breath blows on my neck.