for Suzanne
ON THE TWENTY-THIRD of June, a Thursday afternoon in 1988, I lay on my bed and looked out the sliding glass doors at blue sky and green poplars and I wanted to die. I wanted to see You and cry out to You: So You had three years of public life which probably weren’t so bad, were probably even good most of the time, and You suffered for three days, from Gethsemane to Calvary, but You never had children taken away from You. That is what I wanted to do when I died, but it is not why I wanted to die. I wanted to die because my little girls were in Montauk on Long Island, and had been there since Wednesday, and would be till Sunday; and I had last seen and held and heard them on Tuesday. Cadence is six, and Madeleine is seventeen months.
I wanted to die because it was summer again, and all summer and fall of 1987 I had dreaded the short light and long dark of winter, and now it was June: summer, my favorite season since boyhood, one of less clothes and more hours in the sun: on the beach and the fishing boats and at Fenway Park and on the roads I used to run then walk, after twenty-five years of running; and the five-mile conditioning walks were so much more pleasurable that I was glad I lost running because of sinus headaches in my forties. It was summer again and I wanted to die because last summer I was a shut-in, but with a wife and two daughters in the house, and last August I even wrote. Then with the fall came the end of the family, so of writing; and now the long winter is over and I am shut in still, and without my children in the house; and unable to write, as I have been nearly all the days since the thirteenth of November 1987 when, five days after the girls’ mother left me, she came with a court order and a kind young Haverhill police officer, and took Cadence and Madeleine away.
On Tuesday evening, the twenty-first of June in 1988, I ate pizza and Greek salad with my girls and Jack Herlihy, who lives with me, who moved into my basement in January of 1988 to help me pay the mortgage; to help me. But Wednesday and Thursday I could not eat, or hardly could, as though I were not the same man who had lived on Tuesday: in early afternoon, with my son Andre helping me, I had worked out with bench presses and chin-ups in the dining room, where Andre had carried the bench and bar and plates from the library. He rested the chinning bar on its holders on the sides of the kitchen doorway and stood behind me and helped me pull up from the wheelchair, then he pushed the chair ahead of me, and after sets of chin-ups I pulled the chair back under me with my right leg and my stump, and he held me as I lowered my body into it. This was after I had shadowboxed in my chair on the sundeck, singing with Louis Armstrong on cassette, singing for deep breathing with my stomach, and to bring joy to a sitting workout that took me most of the summer of 1987 to devise, with gratitude to my friend Jane Strüss, who taught me in voice lessons in the winter and spring of 1984 that I had spent my adult life breathing unnaturally. The shadowboxing while singing gives me the catharsis I once gained from the conditioning walks and, before those, the running that I started when I was nineteen, after celebrating or, more accurately, realizing that birthday while riding before dawn with a busload of officer candidates to the rifle range at Quantico, Virginia, during my first six weeks of Marine Corps Platoon Leaders’ Class, in August of 1955.
I came home from training to my sophomore year at McNeese State College in Lake Charles, Louisiana; and to better endure the second six weeks of Platoon Leaders’ Class in 1957, then active duty as an officer after college, I ran on the roads near my home for the next three years, a time in America when no one worked out, not even athletes in their off-seasons, and anyone seen running on a road had the look of either a fugitive or a man gone mad in the noonday sun. When I left the Marines in 1964 I kept running, because it — and sometimes it alone — cleared my brain and gave peace to my soul. I never exercised for longevity or to have an attractive body and, strangely, my body showed that: I always had a paunch I assumed was a beer gut until the early spring of 1987 when my right leg was still in a cast, as it was for nearly eight months, and I drank no beer, only a very occasional vodka martini my wife made me, and I could not eat more than twice a day, but with Andre’s help on the weight-lifting bench I started regaining the forty or so pounds I had lost in the hospital, and my stomach spread into its old mound and I told my physical therapist, Mary Winchell, that it never was a beer gut after all. Mary came to the house three times a week and endured with me the pain of nearly every session, and the other pain that was not of the body but the spirit: that deeper and more deleterious pain that rendered me on the twenty-second and twenty-third of June 1988 not the same man at all who, after my workout on the twenty-first of June, waited for Cadence and Madeleine to come to my house.
When they did, Jack was home doing his paperwork from the Phoenix Bookstore, and he hosed water into the plastic wading pool I had given Cadence for her sixth birthday on the eleventh of June. The pool is on the sundeck, which I can be on this summer because in March David Novak and a young man named Justin built ramps from the dining room to the sunken living room, and from the living room to the sundeck. I wanted to be with Cadence, so Jack placed the feet of the wooden chaise longue in the pool and I transferred from my chair to the chaise, then lowered myself into the cold water. I was wearing gym shorts, Cadence was in her bathing suit, and I had taken off Madeleine’s dress, and rubbed sun screen on her skin, and in diapers and sandals she walked smiling on the sundeck, her light brown and curly hair more blonde now in summer; but she did not want to be in the water. Sometimes she reached out for me to hold her, and I did, sitting in the pool, and I kept her feet above water till she was ready to leave again, and turned and strained in my arms, and said Eh, to show me she was. But she watched Cadence and me playing with a rubber Little Pony that floated, her long mane and tail trailing, and a rubber tiger that did not float, and Madeleine’s small inflatable caramel-colored bear Cadence had chosen for her at The Big Apple Circus we had gone to in Boston on the fourth of June, to begin celebrating Cadence’s birthday: Jack and Cadence and me in one car, and Madeleine with my grown daughter Suzanne and her friend Tom in another.
Cadence is tall and lithe, and has long red hair, and hazel eyes that show the lights of intelligence. Always she imagines the games we play. I was the Little Pony and she was the tiger; we talked for the animals, and they swam and dived to the bottom and walked on my right leg that was a coral reef, and had a picnic with iced tea on the plastic bank. There was no tea, no food. Once Madeleine’s bear was bad, coming over the water to kill and eat our pony and tiger, and they dispatched him by holding a rubber beach ball on the bottom of the pool and releasing it under the floating bear, driving him up and over the side, onto the sundeck. Lynda Novak, young friend and daughter of dear friends, was with us, watching Madeleine as Cadence and I sat in the water under a blue sky, in dry but very warm air, and the sun of late June was hot and high.
I had planned to barbecue pork chops, four of them, center cut, marinating since morning in sauce in the refrigerator. When Cadence and I tired of the sun and the pool and the games in it, we went inside to watch a National Geographic documentary on sharks, a video, and while Lynda and Cadence started the movie, and Madeleine walked about, smiling and talking with her few words, and the echolalia she and usually Cadence and sometimes Lynda and I understood, I wheeled up the ramp to the dining room, and toward the kitchen, but did not get there for the chops, and the vegetables, frozen ones to give me more time with the girls. A bottle of basil had fallen from the work table my friend Bill Webb built against the rear wall of the dining room; he built it two days after Christmas because, two days before Christmas, he came to see me, and I was sitting in the dining room, in my wheelchair, and chopping turkey giblets on a small cutting board resting across my lap. You like to cook, he said, and you can’t do a Goddamn thing in that little kitchen of yours; you need a work bench. The basil was on the floor, in my path; I leaned down, picked it up, flipped it into my lap as I straightened, and its top came off and basil spread and piled on my leg and stump and lap and chair.
Nothing: only some spilled basil, but Cadence was calling: Daddy, come see the great white, and I was confronting not basil but the weekend of 17–19 June, one of my two June weekends with Cadence and Madeleine. So I replaced the top on the jar, and with a paper towel picked up the mounds of basil, and with a sponge wiped off the rest of it. Then on the phone (The phone is your legs, a friend said to me once) I ordered pizza and Greek salad to be delivered, and joined my girls and Lynda in the living room to watch sharks, and Valerie Taylor of Australia testing a steel mesh shark-proof suit by letting a shark bite her arm. The pizza and salad arrived when Jack had come home from the bookstore, and he and the girls and Lynda and I ate on the sundeck.
On Friday the seventeenth of June I had had Delmonico steaks, potatoes, and snap beans. Jack was picking up the girls on his way home from the store, at about six-thirty, so at five forty-five I started scrubbing potatoes in the kitchen sink, and snapping the ends off beans and washing them. I had just finished shadowboxing on the sundeck, and I believed I could have the potatoes boiling, the beans ready, and also shower and shave before six-thirty. Too often, perhaps most days and nights, my body is still on biped time, and I wheel and reach and turn the chair to the sink or stove and twist in the chair to reach and learn yet again what my friend David Mix said last January. David lost his left leg, below the knee, to a Bouncing Betty that did not bounce, and so probably saved his life, on the first of August in 1967, while doing his work one morning as a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam. His novel, Intricate Scars, which I read in manuscript, is the most tenderly merciful and brutal war novel I have ever read. Last winter he said to my son Andre: There comes a time in the life of an amputee when he realizes that everything takes three times as long.
He was precise. That Friday night I stopped working in the kitchen long enough to shower, sitting on the stool, using Cadence’s hand mirror to shave beneath and above my beard; I dried myself with a towel while sitting and lying on my bed, then wrapped my stump with two ace bandages, and pulled over it a tight stump sleeve to prevent edema. Twenty, maybe even thirty minutes, to shave and shower and shampoo and bandage and dress, yet we sat at the table for steak and boiled potatoes and snap beans and a salad of cucumbers and lettuce at nine-fifteen. And Jack was helping, from the time he got home till the meal was ready; but the kitchen is very small, and with the back of my wheelchair against the sink, I can reach the stove and nearly get food from the refrigerator to my right. I occupied all the cooking space; Jack could only set the table and be with the girls. Cadence was teaching Madeleine to seesaw in the hall, and often she called for me to come see Madeleine holding on and grinning and making sounds of delight, and I wheeled out of the kitchen and looked at the girls on the seesaw, then backed into the kitchen and time moved, as David Mix said, three times as fast as the action that once used a third of it.
Saturday’s dinner was easy: I simply had to heat the potatoes and beans left over from Friday, and finish frying the steaks we had partially fried then, before we realized we had more than we needed, and the only difficulty was wheeling back and forth from the dining room table to the kitchen, holding dishes and glasses and flatware in my lap, a few at a time, then squirming and stretching in my chair to rinse them in the sink behind me, and place them in the dishwasher between the sink and refrigerator behind me. After dinner Cadence went to a dance concert with Suzanne and Tom.
I bathed Madeleine in the sink. She was happy in the bubbles from dish soap, and I hugged and dried her with a towel, and powdered her body and put a diaper on her, then buckled my seat belt around her and took her down the ramp to the living room. The late June sun was setting in the northwest, beyond the wide and high glass at the front of the house. I put her on the couch and got on it beside her, and Jack sat in a rocking chair at its foot, and we watched Barfly on VCR while Madeleine sat on my chest, smiling at me, pulling my beard and lower lip, her brown eyes deep, as they have been since she was a baby, when she would stare at each person who entered the house, would appear to be thinking about that man, that woman, would seem to be looking into their souls. She is my sixth child, and I have never seen a baby look at people that way. She still does.
That night on the couch she sometimes lay on my chest, her fleshy little arms hugging my neck, her soft and sweet-smelling cheek against mine. I felt her heart beating, and felt from her chest the sounds she made at my face, a series of rising and falling oohs, in the rhythm of soothing: oohoohoohooh. … After sunset, in the cooling room beneath the fan, she puckered her lips and smacked them in a kiss, as Suzanne had taught her, then leaned toward my face, her eyes bright, and kissed me; over and over; then she turned and reached behind her toward Jack, pointing her right hand, with its shortened forefinger. The top knuckle was severed in the sprocket of an exercise bicycle when she was a year and twenty-one days old; she has a tiny stump that Cadence says she got so that when she is older she will understand my stump. I told her to go give Jack a kiss, and lifted her to her feet and held her arms as she stepped off my chest, onto the couch, and followed it back to the arm, where Jack’s arms and face waited for her: she puckered and smacked as she walked, then she kissed her godfather. During most of the movie, before she grew sleepy and I put her in the chair with me and buckled the seat belt around her and took her up the ramp and to the refrigerator for her bottle of orange juice, then to the crib and sang “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” while hers closed, she stayed on my chest, and I held her, drew from her little body and loving heart peace and hope, and gratitude for being spared death that night on the highway, or a brain so injured it could not know and love Madeleine Elise. I said: Madeleine, I love you; and she smiled and said: I luh you.
Once I paused the movie, and lifted her from me and got onto my chair and went past the television and down the short ramp to the sundeck, and I wheeled to the front railing to piss between its posts, out in the night air, under the stars. Madeleine followed me, with Jack behind her, saying: She’s coming after you, Brother. I turned to see her coming down the ramp, balancing well, then she glanced up and saw what I had not; and still descending, her face excited, she pointed the stump of her finger to the northwest and said: Moon.
I looked ahead of me and up at a new moon, then watched her coming to me, pointing, looking skyward, saying: Moon. Moon. Moon.
About the next day, Sunday the nineteenth, I remember very little, save that I was tired, as if the long preparing of the meal on Friday had taken from me some energy that I suspect was spiritual, and that I did not regain. Suzanne spent the afternoon with me and the girls. At five o’clock, in accordance with the court order, she took them to their mother’s.
Today, the sixth of July 1988, I read chapter nine of St. Luke. Since starting to write this, I have begun each day’s work by reading a chapter of the New Testament. Today I read: “If anyone wishes to come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” And: “took a little child and set him at his side, and said to them: ‘Whoever receives this little child for my sake, receives me’.”
In June of 1987 I graduated from physical therapy at home with Mary Winchell: she taught me to transfer from my wheel chair to the passenger seat of a car, meaning the Visiting Nurses Association and Blue Cross and Blue Shield would no longer pay her to come work with me. But it was time: for the physical therapy clinic at Hale Hospital in Haverhill; for Judith Tranberg, called Mrs. T by herself and almost everyone who knows her: a lady who worked at Walter Reed with amputees from the Korean War, a lady whose lined, brown, merry and profound face and hazel eyes and deep tobacco voice I loved at once. On the twenty-second of July I wheeled into her clinic and said to her: They’ve always told me my left leg is my best one, and she said: Why did they tell you your left leg is your best one? I said: I like you. I had my spirit till June, then the surgeon took off the cast and I saw my right leg and I started listening to my body. But now my spirit is back. Mrs. T said: I never listen to the body; only the spirit.
My right leg looked like one found on a battlefield, perhaps a day after its severance from the body it had grown with. Except it was not bloated. It was very thin and the flesh had red and yellow hues and the foot was often purple and nearly always the big toe was painful. I do not know why. On the end of my stump was what people thought then was a blister, though it was a stitch which would become infected and, a year later, require surgery, a debridement. So Mrs. T told me not to use the artificial leg. She started me on parallel bars with the atrophied right leg, whose knee probably bent thirty-two degrees, and was never supposed to bend over forty-five, because of the shattered femur and the scar tissue in my thigh muscles, and the hole under my knee where a bone is now grafted. The tibia was also shattered, and part of my calf muscle is grafted to the top of my shin. Because of muscle and nerve damage, my surgeon, Fulton Kornack, and Mary Winchell told me my leg would never hold my foot in a neutral position, and it still does not: without a brace, from the sole and heel up my calf, my foot droops, and curls. But Mary never gave up on the knee, nor has Mrs. T, nor have I, and it can now bend sixty-three degrees.
The best person for a crippled man to cry with is a good female physical therapist, and the best place to do that crying is in the area where she works. One morning in August of 1987, shuffling with my right leg and the walker, with Mrs. T in front of me and her kind younger assistants, Kathy and Betty, beside me, I began to cry. Moving across the long therapy room with beds, machines, parallel bars, and exercise bicycles, I said through my weeping: I’m not a man among men anymore and I’m not a man among women either. Kathy and Betty gently told me I was fine. Mrs. T said nothing, backing ahead of me, watching my leg, my face, my body. We kept working. I cried and talked all the way into the small room with two beds that are actually leather-cushioned tables with a sheet and pillow on each, and the women helped me onto my table, and Mrs. T went to the end of it, to my foot, and began working on my ankle and toes and calf with her gentle strong hands. Then she looked up at me. Her voice has much peace whose resonance is her own pain she has moved through and beyond. It’s in Jeremiah, she said. The potter is making a pot and it cracks. So he smashes it, and makes a new vessel. You can’t make a new vessel out of a broken one. It’s time to find the real you.
Her words and their images rose through my chest like a warm vapor, and in it was the man shattering clay, and me at Platoon Leaders’ Class at Quantico, a boy who had never made love, not when I turned nineteen there, not when I went back for the second six weeks just before becoming twenty-one; and memories of myself after my training at Quantico, those times in my life when I had instinctively moved toward action, to stop fights, to help the injured or stricken, and I saw myself on the highway that night, and I said: Yes. It makes sense. It started as a Marine, when I was eighteen; and it ended on a highway when I was almost fifty years old.
In the hospital one night when I was in very bad shape, I woke from a dream. In the dream I was in the hospital at Camp Pendleton, California, and I was waiting for Major Forrest Joe Hunt, one of the best commanding officers I ever served with, to come and tell me where I must go now, and what I must do. But when I woke I was still at Camp Pendleton and the twenty-nine years since I left there to go on sea duty did not exist at all and I was a lieutenant waiting for Major Hunt. I asked the nurse if we were at Camp Pendleton and it took her a long time to bring me back to where and who I was. Some time later my old friend, Mark Costello, phoned me at the hospital; Mark and I met on the rifle range in Officers’ Basic School at Quantico in 1958. I told him about the dream, and he said: Marine Corps training is why you were on the highway that night. I said I knew that, and he told me he had pulled a drowning man from the surf one summer at Mazatlan and that a Mexican man on the beach would not help him, would not go out in the water with him, and he said: Civilian training is more conservative. I had known that too, and had believed for a long time that we too easily accuse people of apathy or callousness when they do not help victims of assault or accidents or other disasters. I believe most people want to help, but are unable to because they have not been trained to act. Then, afterward, they think of what they could have done and they feel like physical or moral cowards or both. They should not. When I came home from the hospital a state trooper came to visit me; he told me that doctors, nurses, and paramedics were usually the only people who stopped at accidents. Sadly, he told me that people do stop when the state troopers are there; they want to look at the bodies. I am sure that the trooper’s long experience has shown him a terrible truth about our species; and I am also sure that the doctors and nurses and paramedics who stop are not the only compassionate people who see an accident, but the only trained ones. Don’t just stand there, Lieutenant they told us again and again at Officers’ Basic School; Do something, even if it’s wrong.
Until the summer and fall of 1987 I still believed that Marine training taught us to control our natural instincts to survive. But then, writing a long letter to a friend, night after night, I began to see the truth: the Marine Corps develops our natural instincts to risk ourselves for those we truly love, usually our families, for whom many human beings would risk or knowingly sacrifice their lives, and indeed many have. In a world whose inhabitants from their very beginning turned away from rather than toward each other, chose self over agape, war was a certainty; and soldiers learned that they could not endure war unless they loved each other. So I now believe that, among a species which has evolved more selfishly than lovingly, thus making soldiers an essential body of a society, there is this paradox: in order to fight wars, the Marine Corps develops in a recruit at Boot Camp, an officer candidate at Quantico, the instinct to surrender oneself for another; expands that instinct beyond families or mates or other beloveds to include all Marines. It is a Marine Corps tradition not to leave dead Marines on the battlefield, and Marines have died trying to retrieve those dead. This means that after his training a young Marine has, without words, taken a vow to offer his life for another Marine. Which means, sadly, that the Marine Corps, in a way limited to military action, has in general instilled more love in its members than Christian churches have in theirs. The Marine Corps does this, as all good teachers do, by drawing from a person instincts that are already present, and developing them by giving each person the confidence to believe in those instincts, to follow where they lead. A Marine crawling under fire to reach a a wounded Marine is performing a sacrament, an action whose essence is love, and the giving and receiving of grace.
The night before the day I cried with Mrs. T for the first time (I would cry many times during physical therapy that fall and winter and spring of 1987 and 1988, and she teases me about it still, her eyes bright and her grin crinkling her face), my wife took me to a movie. She sat in an aisle seat and I sat in my wheelchair beside her, with my plastic urinal on the floor beneath my chair leg that held my right foot elevated for better circulation of blood. Two young couples in their late teens sat directly in front of us. One of the boys was talking before the movie, then when it began he was still talking and he did not stop; the other three were not silent either, but he was the leader, the loud one. In my biped days, I was the one who asked or told people to be quiet. But in my chair I felt helpless, and said nothing. There was no rational cause for feeling that way. When you ask or tell people to be quiet in movies, they do not come rushing out of their seats, swinging at you. But a wheelchair is a spiritually pervasive seat. My wife asked the boy to please stop talking. He turned to her, looking over his left shoulder, and patronizingly harassed her, though without profanity. I said, Cool it. He looked at me as though he had not seen me till then; and maybe, indeed, he had not. Then he turned to the screen, and for the rest of the movie he and his friends were quiet.
I was not. I made no sounds, but I felt them inside of me. As the movie was ending, I breathed deeply and slowly with adrenaline, and relaxed as much as I could the muscles I meant to use. I would simply look at his eyes as he left his seat and turned toward me to walk around my chair and up the aisle. If he insulted me I would pull him down to me and punch him. During the closing credits he and his date and the other couple stood and left their row of seats. I watched him; he did not turn his eyes to mine. He stepped into the aisle and turned to me but did not face me; he looked instead at the carpet as he walked past me, then was gone. The adrenaline, the edge, went out of me, and seven demons worse than the first came in: sorrow and shame.
So next day, weeping, lying on my back on the table while Mrs. T worked on my body, I told her the story and said: If you confront a man from a wheelchair you’re bullying him. Only a coward would hit a man in a chair.
That is part of what I told her; I told her, too, about making love: always on my back, unable to kneel, and if I lay on my stomach I could barely move my lower body and had to keep my upper body raised with a suspended pushup. I did not tell her the true sorrow of lovemaking but I am certain that she knew: it made me remember my legs as they once were, and to feel too deeply how crippled I had become.
You can’t make a new vessel out of a broken one. I can see her now as she said it, hear her voice, soft but impassioned with certainty, as her face and eyes were. It’s time to find the real you.
I was working on a novella in August, but then in September, a beautiful blue September with red and orange and yellow leaves, I could not work on it any longer, for I knew that soon my wife would leave. So did Cadence. We played now on my bed with two small bears, Papa Bear and Sister Bear. She brought them to the bed, and their house was my lap; Cadence had just started kindergarten, and Sister Bear went to school, at a spot across the bed, and came home, where she and Papa Bear cooked dinners. They fished from my right leg, the bank of a river, and walked in the forest of my green camouflage Marine poncho liner, and climbed the pillows and the headboard that were mountains. I knew the mother bear was alive, but I did not ask where she was, and Cadence never told me.
But what did she see, in her heart that had already borne so much? Her fourth birthday was on the eleventh of June 1986, then on the twenty-third of July the car hit me and I was in the hospital for nearly two months, her mother coming to see me from one in the afternoon till eight at night every day save one when I told her to stay home and rest, and Cadence was at play school and with a sitter or friends until her mother came home tired at nine o’clock or later at night.
Her mother had waked her around one-thirty in the morning of the twenty-third, to tell her Daddy had been in an accident and her brother Jeb, my younger grown son, was taking Mommy to the hospital and Jeb’s friend Nickie would spend the night with her, and she had cried with fear, or terror: that sudden and absolute change in a child’s life, this one coming at night too, the worst of times, its absence of light in the sky and on trees and earth and manmade objects rendering her a prisoner of only what she could see: the lighted bedroom, the faces of her mother and brother and the young woman, and so a prisoner of her imagination that showed her too much of danger and death and night. Her four years of life forced her physically to be passive, unable to phone the hospital or friends, unable even to conceive of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, of life and healing and peace. Over a year later, on a September afternoon in the sun, she told me of the first time her mother brought her to see me, in intensive care: The little room, she said, with all the machines. I kept that in mind, she said. You had that thing in your mouth and it was hard for me to kiss you. What was it for? I told her it was probably to let me breathe. Then she said: I thought you were dead till then. And I said that surely Mommy told her I was alive; she said: Yes. But I thought you were dead till I saw you.
She came to the hospital for short visits with her mother, then friends took her home; I talked to her on the phone from the hospital bed, and she was only with her mother in the morning and late at night. She did not mind that my leg would be cut off; he’ll be asleep and he won’t feel it, she told a friend who was with her for an afternoon in Boston while her mother sat with me. When Daddy comes home, she told her mother, I’m going to help him learn to walk. At the hospital her mother sat with me, and watched the clock with me, for the morphine that, twenty minutes after the injection, would ease the pain. Then I was home in a rented hospital bed in the library adjacent to our bedroom, and through its wide door I looked at the double bed, a mattress and boxsprings on the floor, where Cadence and her mother slept. In the mornings Cadence woke first and I woke to her voice and face, sitting up in the bed, on the side where I used to sleep, and looking out the glass door to the sundeck, looking out at the sky, the morning; and talking. That fall and winter she often talked about the baby growing in her mother’s body; and one night, when she and I were on the couch in the living room, she said: Once upon a time there was a father and mother and a little girl and then they had a baby and everything went crazy.
She was only four. That summer of 1986 her mother and I believed Cadence would only have to be four and worry about a baby coming into her life, perhaps believing the baby would draw her parents’ love away from her, or would simply be in the way. And her mother and I believed that, because I had a Guggenheim grant from June of 1986 to June of 1987, we would simply write and pay the bills and she would teach her fiction workshop at home on Wednesday nights and I would try to recover from burning out as a teacher, then becoming so tired visiting colleges for money from January till July of 1986 that I spent a night in intensive care at Montpelier, Vermont, on the fourth of July, with what the cardiologist thought was a heart attack but was exhaustion; and we would have a child.
Madeleine grew inside of my wife as she visited the hospital, then as she cared for me at home, changing bandages as they taught her in the hospital, emptying urinals, bringing food to the hospital bed in the library, and juice and water, and holding my leg when I transferred from bed to chair to couch and back again; Madeleine growing inside of her as she soothed the pain in my body and soul, as she put the bed pan under me then cleaned me and it, and she watched with me as the Red Sox beat the Angels in the playoffs and lost to the Mets in the World Series, sacrifice enough for her, to watch baseball till late at night, pregnant and caring for a four-year-old energetic girl and a crippled man. But she sacrificed more: for some time, I don’t know how much time, maybe two weeks or three, because it remains suspended in memory as an ordeal that broke us, or broke part of us anyway and made laughter more difficult, I had diarrhea, but not like any I had ever had before. It not only flowed from me without warning, but it gave me no sign at all, so that I did not even know when it flowed, and did not know after it had, and for some reason we could not smell it either. So when a game ended she would stand over me on the couch and turn my body toward hers, and look, and always I was foul, so foul that it took thirty minutes to clean me and get me from the couch to the bed, after midnight then, the pregnant woman going tired and un-held to bed with Cadence, who would wake her in the morning.
Which would begin with cleaning me, and that remained such a part of each day and night that I remember little else, and have no memory of the Red Sox losing the seventh game I watched from the couch. They saved your life and put you back together, she said, and they can’t cure this. Gene Harbilas, my doctor and friend here, cured it, and that time was over, and so was something else: a long time of grace given us in the hospital and at home, a time of love near death and with crippling, a time when my body could do little but lie still and receive, and when her every act was of the spirit, for every act was one of love, even the resting at night for the next long day of driving to and from the hospital to sit there; or, later, waking with me at home, to give me all the sustenance she could. In the fall, after the diarrhea, she was large with Madeleine, and exhaustion had its hold on her and would not let her go again, would not release her merely to gestate and give birth, and nurse and love her baby. The victim of injuries like mine is not always the apparent one. All that year I knew that she and Cadence were the true victims.
Cadence cried often. On a night in January, while Andre was staying with us for the month of Madeleine’s birth, having come up from New York to take care of Cadence and mostly me (yes: the bed pan: my son) Cadence began loudly crying and screaming. She was in her bedroom. I was no longer in the hospital bed but our new one in the bedroom, and they brought her there: her eyes were open but she did not act as though she were awake. She was isolate, screaming with terror, and she could not see or hear us; or, if she could, whatever we did and said was not strong enough to break what held her. Andre called Massachusetts General Hospital and spoke to a pediatrician, a woman. He told her what Cadence was doing and she asked whether Cadence had been under any stress. He said her father was hit by a car in July and was in the hospital for two months and they cut off his leg, and her mother just had a baby and Cadence had chicken pox then so she couldn’t visit her mother in the hospital, where she stayed for a week because she had a cesarean. The doctor gasped. Then she told Andre it was night terrors. I do not remember what she told us to do, because nothing we did soothed Cadence; she kept crying and screaming, and I lay helpless on my back, wanting to rise, and hold her in my arms, and walk with her, and I yelled at the ceiling, the night sky above it: You come down from that cross and give this child some peace! Then we played the cassette of Porgy and Bess by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald that she often went to sleep to, and she was quiet and she lay beside me and slept.
In late spring of 1987 Cadence talked me into her room, in my wheelchair; I had not been able to do it till then, but she encouraged and directed me through the series of movements, forward and back and short turns, then I was there, beside her bed on the floor. After that I could go in and read to her. One night, still in the spring, I went into her room, where she sat on the bed. I looked at her face just below mine and said: “I want to tell you something. You’re a very brave and strong girl. Not many four-year-olds have had the kind of year you’ve had. Some children have to be lied to sometimes, but Mommy and I never had to lie to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“We could always tell you the truth. We could tell you they were going to cut off my leg, and that the right one wouldn’t be good, and you understood everything, and when you felt happy you were happy, and when you felt sad, you cried. You always let us know how you felt and what was wrong. You didn’t see Mommy much for two months while I was in the hospital, and then she was gone for a week to have Madeleine and you only saw her for a couple of minutes at the hospital till the nurse saw your chicken pox and said you had to leave. Then Mommy came home with a baby sister. Most little girls don’t go through all of that. All this year has been harder on you than on anybody else, and when you grow up, somebody will have to work awfully hard to make you unhappy, because you’re going to be a brave, strong woman.”
Tears flowed down her cheeks, but she was quiet and her eyes were shining, and her face was like a woman’s receiving love and praise.
Then in the summer and early fall of 1987, we did lie to her, but she knew the truth anyway, or the part of it that gave her pain and demanded, again, resilience; and she brought to my bed only the two bears, the father and the daughter; and her days must have drained her: she woke with the fear of kindergarten and the other fear and sorrow she must have escaped only in sleep and with new children and work at kindergarten, and with familiar friends at play school, in the same way adults are absorbed long enough by certain people and actions to gain respite from some deep fear or pain at the center of their lives. I could no longer work. When the house was empty I phoned Jack at the Phoenix Bookstore and asked for his prayers and counsel and comfort, and I went to physical therapy three times a week, going there and back in a wheelchair van, three hours each session with Mrs. T, and the physical work and pain gave me relief, and I prayed for patience and strength and love, and played with Cadence and Madeleine, and waited for the end.
The girls’ mother left on the eighth of November, a Sunday night; and people who love us helped me care for my girls until after dark, around six o’clock, on Friday the thirteenth, when she came with the court order and the Haverhill police officer. That afternoon Cadence and I were lying on my bed. Beside her was her pincher, a strip of grey cloth from the apron of her first Raggedy Ann doll, before she was a year old. She goes to sleep with it held in her fist, her thumb in her mouth. When she is tired or sad she holds it and sucks her thumb, or simply holds it; and she holds it too when she rides in a car or watches cartoons. She held it that afternoon after my lawyer phoned; his name is Scotty, he is an old friend, and he was surprised and sad as he told me of my wife’s lawyer calling from the courthouse, to say my wife was coming for my daughters. I wheeled from the kitchen phone, down the short hall to my bedroom where Cadence and I had been playing, where for nearly a year we had played with stuffed animals. I also played the giant who lay on his back, and had lost a leg, and his right one was in a cast. The giant has a deep voice, and he loves animals. Cadence is the red-haired giant, but we usually talk about her in the third person, the animals and I, for Cadence is the hearts and voices of animals with the giant; when Madeleine could sit up and be with me, she became the baby giant, cradled in my arm. Most days in the first year Cadence brought to the games an animal with a missing or wounded limb, an animal who needed healing and our love.
Next to the bed I braked the wheelchair and moved from it to my place beside Cadence. She was sitting. I sat close to her and put my left arm around her and told her that judges were people who made sure everyone was protected by the law, even little children, and Mommy had gone to see one because she believed it was better for Cadence and Madeleine not to be with me, and Mommy was coming now with a policeman, to take her and Madeleine. I told her Mommy was not doing anything wrong, she was doing what she felt was right, like a good Momma Bear. Cadence held her pincher and looked straight ahead and was quiet. Her body was taut.
“I don’t want to go in the car with them.”
“Who’s them, sweetie?”
“The judge and the police.”
“No, darling. The judge won’t be in the car. Neither will the policeman. It’ll just be Mommy.”
One of our animals we had played with since I came home from the hospital on the seventeenth of September 1986 is Oatmeal, a blond stuffed bear with pink ears and touches of pink on his cheeks and the top of his head and the back of his neck. On my birthday on the eleventh of August 1987, Cadence gave me shells and seaweed from the beach, and a prayer for a Japanese gingko tree she gave me with her mother, and Oatmeal. I am his voice; it is high. I am also the voice of his wife, Koala Bear; but after the marriage ended, Cadence stopped bringing Koala Bear to our games, save for one final night in December, while Madeleine was asleep and Cadence and I were playing in the dining room, and she said Oatmeal and Koala Bear were breaking up but maybe if Koala Bear had a baby they would love each other again; then she got a small bear from her room and put it with Koala Bear and Oatmeal and said they had a baby now and loved each other again. Then we watched Harry Dean Stanton as an angel in One Magic Christmas. After my birthday I kept Oatmeal on my bed; Cadence and I understand that he is a sign from her to me, when she is not here.
That afternoon she gazed in front of her; then quickly she moved: her face and upper body turned to me, her eyes darkly bright with grief and anger; and her arms and hands moved, one hand holding the pincher still, and she picked up Oatmeal and swung him backhanded into my lap. Then she turned away from me and was off the bed, circling its foot, and I watched the pallid right side of her face. When she turned at the bed’s end and walked toward the hall, I saw her entire face, her right thumb in her mouth, the grey pincher hanging, moving with her strides; and in her eyes were tears. Her room is adjacent to mine, where I had slept with her mother, where I had watched all the seasons through the glass sliding door that faced northwest. Cadence walked past me, out my door, and into hers. She closed it.
My friend Joe Hurka and my oldest daughter Suzanne were in the house; Joe had been with us all week, driving back and forth, an hour and ten minutes each way, to his job in Peterborough, New Hampshire. I called to Cadence: “Sweetie? Do you want me in your room with you?”
I had never heard her voice from behind a door and a wall as well; always her door was open. Her voice was too old, too sorrowful for five; it was soft because she is a child, but its sound was that of a woman, suffering alone: “No.”
I moved onto the wheelchair and turned it toward the door, the hall, her room. I wheeled at an angle through her doorway: she lay above me in her bunk on the left side of the room. She was on her back and sucking her right thumb and holding the pincher in her fist; she looked straight above her, and if she saw anything palpable it was the ceiling. She was pale, and tears were in her right eye, but not on her cheek. I moved to the bunk and looked up at her.
The bunk was only a few months old and, before that, she had a low bed and when she lay on it at night and I sat above her in my chair, she could not see the pictures in the books I read aloud. So we lay on my bed to read. But from the bunk she could look down over my shoulder at the pictures. She climbed a slanted wooden ladder to get on it, and I had told Mrs. T I wanted to learn to climb that ladder. Not yet, Mr. Andre, she had said; not yet. In that moment in Cadence’s room, looking at her face, I said in my heart: Fuck this cripple shit, and I pushed the two levers that brake the wheels, and with my left hand I reached up and held the wooden side of the bunk and with my right I pushed up from the arm of the chair. I had learned from Mrs. T not to think about a new movement, but simply to do it. I rose, my extended right arm taking my weight on the padded arm of the chair, and my left trying to straighten, to lift my body up and to pivot onto the mattress beside Cadence. I called Joe and he came quickly down the hall and, standing behind me, he held me under my arms and lifted, and I was on the bunk. Cadence was sitting now, and blood colored her face; her wet eyes shone, and she was grinning.
“Daddy. You got up here.”
Joe left us, and I lay beside her, watching her face, listening to her voice raised by excitement, talking about me on the bunk. I said now we knew I could lie on the bunk at night and read to her. She crawled to the foot of the bed and faced me. Beyond her, two windows showed the grey sky in the southeast and the greyish white trunks of poplars without leaves. Cadence lowered her head and somersaulted, and her long bent legs arced above us, her feet struck the mattress, and her arms rose toward me, ahead of her face and chest. Her eyes were bright and dry, looking into mine, and she was laughing.
We were on the bunk for an hour or more. We did not talk about our sorrow, but Cadence’s face paled, while Suzanne and Joe waited with Madeleine in the dining room for the car to come. When it did, Suzanne called me, and Joe came and stood behind the wheelchair and held my upper body as I moved down from the bunk. In the dining room Madeleine was in her high chair; Suzanne was feeding her cottage cheese. I talked with the young police officer, then hugged and kissed Madeleine and Cadence goodbye.
In Salem District Court I got shared but not physical custody. The girls would be with me two weekends a month, Thursday afternoons and alternate Monday afternoons through dinner, half a week during the week-long vacations from school, and two weeks in summer. That’s a lot of time, people say. Until I tell them it is four nights a month with my two daughters, except for the two weeks in summer, and ask them if their own fathers spent only four nights a month with them when they were children (of course many say yes, or even less); or until I tell them that if I were making a living by traveling and earning a hundred thousand a year and spent only four nights a month with my family I would not be a good father. The family court system in Massachusetts appears to define a father as a sperm bank with a checkbook. But that is simply the way they make a father feel, and implicit in their dealings is an admonishment to the father to be grateful for any time at all with his children. The truth is that families are asunder, so the country is too, and no one knows what to do about this, or even why it is so. When the court receives one of these tragedies it naturally assigns the children to the mother’s house, and makes the father’s house a place for the children to visit. This is not fatherhood. My own view is that one house is not a home; our home has now become two houses.
On the tenth of January 1988, Madeleine was a year old. It was a Sunday, and one of my weekends with the girls, and we had balloons and a cake and small presents, and Cadence blew out the candle for her sister. During that time in winter I was still watching Cadence for signs of pain, as Suzanne and Andre and Jack were, and Marian and David Novak, and Joe Hurka and Tom. Madeleine was sometimes confused or frightened in her crib at night, but never for long. She is a happy little girl, and Cadence and Suzanne and Jack and I learned during the days of Christmas that “Silent Night” soothes her, and I sing it to her still, we all do, when she is troubled; and she stops crying. Usually she starts singing at holy night, all is calm, not with words but with the melody, and once this summer she sang the melody to Cadence when she was crying. We all knew that Madeleine, only ten months old when the family separated, was least touched, was the more fortunate of the children, if indeed anything about this can be fortunate for one of the children. So we watched Cadence, and let her be sad or angry, and talked with her; and we hugged and kissed Madeleine, and played with her, fed her, taught her words, and sang her to sleep.
The fifth of February was a Friday in 1988, and the first night of a weekend with the girls. Suzanne brought them into the house shortly after six o’clock in the evening; I was in the shower, sitting on the stool, and she brought them to the bathroom door to greet me. When I wheeled out of the bathroom into the dining room, a towel covering my lap, Cadence was in the living room, pedaling my exercise bicycle. A kind woman had given it to me when she saw me working on one at physical therapy, and learned from Mrs. T that I did not have the money to buy one. With my foot held by the pedal strap I could push the pedal down and pull it up, but my knee would not bend enough for me to push the wheel in a circle. In February I did not have the long ramp to the living room, against its rear wall, but a short steep one going straight down from the dining room, and I could not climb or descend it alone, because my chair would turn over. Madeleine was in the dining room, crawling, and Suzanne stood behind me, in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen, talking on the phone and looking at the girls. I was near the ramp, and Cadence was saying: Watch this, Daddy, and was standing on the right pedal with her right foot, stretching her left leg up behind her, holding with both hands the grip on the right end of the handlebar, and pushing the pedal around and around.
Then she was sitting on the seat and pedaling and Madeleine crawled down the ramp and toward her and the bicycle, and Cadence said: Madeleine, no, as Madeleine reached with her right hand to the chain guard at the wheel and her index finger went into a notch I had never seen, and a tooth of the sprocket cut her with a sound distinct among those of the moving chain and spinning wheel and Suzanne’s voice: a thunk, followed at once by the sound of Madeleine’s head striking the floor as she fell back from the pain, and screamed. She did not stop. Cadence’s face was pale and frightened and ashamed, and I said: She’ll be all right, darling. Is it her head or her finger? and Cadence said: It’s her finger and it’s bleeding, and Suzanne was there, bending for Madeleine, reaching for her, saying: It is her finger and it’s cut off. Three of my four daughters, and I see their faces now: the oldest bravely grieving, the youngest red with the screams that were as long as her breathing allowed, and above them the five-year-old, pale with the horror of the bleeding stump she saw and the belief that she alone was responsible.
Then Suzanne was rising with Madeleine in her arms and saying: I have to find the finger; they can sew it back on, and bringing Madeleine up the ramp to me. She was screaming and kicking and writhing and I held her and looked at her tiny index and middle fingers of her right hand: the top knuckle of her index finger was severed, and so was the inside tip of her middle finger, at an angle going up and across her fingernail. In months, that part of her middle finger would grow back. Suzanne told Cadence to stop the chain because Madeleine’s finger could be stuck in it, and she dialed 911, and the police officer told her to put the dismembered piece in ice. Cadence came up the ramp; I was frightened of bleeding and shock, and had only a towel, which does not stop bleeding. I said to Cadence: Go get me a bandana. She turned and sprinted down the hall toward my room, and I called after her: In the second drawer of my chest, and she ran back with a clean bandana she held out to me. Suzanne was searching the bicycle chain and the living room, and Cadence watched me wrap Madeleine’s fingers. I held her kicking legs up but she did not go into shock and she did not stop screaming, while Suzanne found the rest of her finger lying on the floor, and wrapped it in ice and put it in the refrigerator, and twice I told Cadence it was not her fault and she must never think it was.
But she did not hear me. I imagine she heard very little but Madeleine’s screaming, and perhaps her own voice saying Madeleine, no, before either Suzanne or I could see what was about to happen, an instant before that sound of the sprocket tooth cutting through flesh and bone; and she probably saw, besides her sister’s screaming and tearful face and bandaged bleeding hand, and the blood on Madeleine’s clothes and on the towel and chair and me, her own images: her minutes of pleasure on the bicycle before Madeleine crawled down the ramp toward her and then once again, and so quickly again, her life became fear and pain and sorrow, already and again demanding of her resilience and resolve. When a police officer and two paramedics arrived, she said she wanted to go in the ambulance with Madeleine and Suzanne.
By then Tom and Jack were there, and I was drying and dressing. The police officer found the small piece of Madeleine’s middle finger in the chain and ran outside with it, and gave it to the paramedics before they drove to Lawrence General Hospital, because Hale Hospital has no trauma center. I asked Jack to phone David Novak, and by the time I dressed and gave the officer what he needed for his report, David was in the house. I phoned Andre at work and Jeb at home, then David and Tom and Jack and I drove in David’s Bronco to the hospital, twenty-five minutes away. I had put into my knapsack what I would need to spend the night in the hospital with Madeleine. Her mother was in Vermont, to ski. But in the car, talking to David, I knew that Cadence would need me more.
In the ambulance Madeleine stopped screaming, and began the sounds she made that winter when she was near sleep: ah ah ah ah… At the hospital she cried steadily, because of the pain, but now she was afraid too and that was in her voice, even more than pain. A nurse gave her to me and I held her cheek to mine and sang “Silent Night,” then Jeb was there. At Lawrence General they could not work on Madeleine’s finger; they phoned Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, then took her there. Suzanne rode with her, and Jeb and Tom followed. Suzanne dealt with the surgeons and, on the phone, reported to me; I talked to the girls’ mother in Vermont; and Suzanne and Jeb and Tom stayed at the hospital until the operation was over, and Madeleine was asleep in bed. The surgeon could not sew on the part of Madeleine’s finger, because of the angle of its amputation. Early next morning her mother drove to the hospital and brought her to my house; her hand was bandaged and she felt no pain; her mother had asked on the phone in Vermont if she could spend the weekend with Madeleine, and Cadence went with them for the afternoon, then in the evening her mother brought her back to me for the rest of the weekend.
When David and Jack and Cadence and I got home from Lawrence General, I put Cadence on my lap and wheeled to my bedroom and lifted her to my bed. She lay on her back and held her pincher and sucked her thumb. She watched me as I told her she had been very good when Madeleine was hurt, that she had not panicked; she asked me what that meant, and I told her, and said that some children and some grown-ups would not have been able to help Suzanne and me, and that would be very normal for a child, but I only had to tell her to get me a bandana and she had run down the hall to the drawer in my chest before I could even tell her which drawer to look in. She turned to me: “I heard you when I was running down the hall. You said the second drawer, but I already knew and I was running to it.”
I told her that was true courage, that to be brave you had to be afraid, and I was very proud of her, and of Suzanne, because we were all afraid and everyone controlled it and did what had to be done. She said: “You were afraid?”
“Yes. That’s why I was crying.”
She looked at the ceiling as I told her she must never blame herself for Madeleine’s finger, that no one had seen the notch in the chain guard, the bicycle had looked safe, and she had tried to stop Madeleine, had said Madeleine, no, and two grown-ups were right there watching and it happened too fast for anyone to stop it. She looked at me: “I started pedaling backwards when I saw her reaching for the wheel.”
Then she looked up again, and I said she had done all she could to keep Madeleine from getting hurt, and it was very important for her never to feel responsible, never to blame herself, because that could hurt her soul, and its growth; and if she ever felt that way she must tell me or Mommy or Suzanne or Andre or Jeb. Her thumb was in her mouth and her pincher lay across her fingers, so part of it was at her nose, giving her the scent she loves. Finally I said: “Is there anything you want to ask me?”
Still gazing straight up, she lowered her thumb and said: “I only have one question. Why does it always happen to me? First you got hurt. Now Madeleine is hurt. Maybe next Mommy will get hurt. Or I will.”
I closed my eyes and waited for images, for words, but no words rose from my heart; I saw only Cadence’s face for over a year and a half now, suffering and enduring and claiming and claiming cheer and joy and harmony with her body and spirit, and so with her life, a child’s life with so very few choices. I opened my eyes.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But you’re getting awfully good at it.”
It is what she would tell me now; or encourage me to do.
Today is the twenty-ninth of August 1988, and since the twenty-third of June, the second of two days when I wanted to die, I have not wanted my earthly life to end, have not wanted to confront You with anger and despair. I receive You in the Eucharist at daily Mass, and look at You on the cross, but mostly I watch the priest, and the old deacon, a widower, who brings me the Eucharist; and the people who walk past me to receive; and I know they have all endured their own agony, and prevailed in their own way, though not alone but drawing their hope and strength from those they love, those who love them; and from You, in the sometimes tactile, sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes seemingly lethal way that You give.
A week ago I read again The Old Man and the Sea, and learned from it that, above all, our bodies exist to perform the condition of our spirits: our choices, our desires, our loves. My physical mobility and my little girls have been taken from me; but I remain. So my crippling is a daily and living sculpture of certain truths: we receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses. No one can do this alone, for being absolutely alone finally means a life not only without people or God or both to love, but without love itself. In The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago is a widower and a man who prays; but the love that fills and sustains him is of life itself: living creatures, and the sky, and the sea. Without that love, he would be an old man alone in a boat.
One Sunday afternoon in July, Cadence asked Jack to bring up my reserve wheelchair from the basement, and she sat in it and wheeled about the house, and moved from it onto my bed then back to the chair, with her legs held straight, as I hold my right one when getting on and off the bed. She wheeled through the narrow bathroom door and got onto the toilet, her legs straight, her feet above the floor, and pushed her pants down; and when she pulled them up again she said it was hard to do, sitting down. She went down and up the ramp to the living room, and the one to the sundeck. Now I know what it’s like to be you, she said. When she was ready to watch a VCR cartoon, she got onto the living room couch as I do, then pushed her chair away to make room for mine, and I moved onto the couch and she sat on my stump and nestled against my chest; and Madeleine came, walking, her arms reaching for me, and I lifted her and sat her between my leg and stump, and with both arms I held my girls.
1988/1989