Someone in this crowd is wearing our daughter’s heart. I imagined Douglas thinking those words. We were holding hands, wife and husband, here at this outdoor picnic arranged to honor donor and recipient families. Earlier, there had been a ballgame between the medical staff and the organ staff, with recipients part of each team to show that they were good as new. There’d been a fine Texas barbeque (the first we’d had in years), pork loin, chicken legs, lean beef, to show that recipients could eat with hearty appetites. Soon there would be awards, speeches, the lighting of the torch.
Our marriage was breaking to bits against the shoals of this group of coastal folks who meant nothing but kindness. How could a marriage be buffeted to bits as if against a coral reef even while we bent toward one another, clasping warm palms together (the heat also a stranger to us), weighted by the anchor of twenty-five years?
To say that there was a difference in our point of view was to say the obvious, to say nothing really. For me, it wasn’t a matter of the death of our daughter Bethany, or the decision to give some of what could be salvaged from what remained of her when she was gone. That I would deal with as I was able. It was Douglas’s joy, his hope, his belief that it was his daughter’s heart which was beating in someone’s chest. That she still was, that twenty-two-year-old girl, woman, our lovely strong-legged runner. Had it been someone else, someone not Douglas, the man I thought I knew through and through, skin to flesh to very bone, my Douglas, I could possibly have taken it as metaphor, as a way of seeing a baton being passed. The baton itself is not the runner, yet it is part of the race.
But Douglas had made his reputation writing about the “I,” the mind, about what made someone that someone. A biologist when we met, then neurobiologist, now generally called a brain scientist, he’d written books—Storing the Mind (an enlargement of his dissertation, Minding the Store), The Matter of Mind (his popular success), Mind Fields (the latest)—which had tried to add up all the short-cuts and long-cuts of the brain’s amazing circuitry to explain what scholars called consciousness and the rest of us called ourselves. And that Douglas, the agreed-upon scientist in our house with the piece of paper to prove it, my thoughtful, wise husband, walking about in his navy jacket, khaki trousers, tasselled loafers, that Douglas, who was tapping his chest with two fingers sending a signal: We gave a heart. Is it yours? That Douglas was a stranger.
I held on to him, in reflex, as if not to let him swim away into the clusters of nervous, near-delirious family units, those who had given and those who had taken away. Chests opened from throat to navel on both sides, body parts traded much the way children in their treehouse press cut wrists together, mingling blood, swearing lifetime connection.
Don’t find him or her, I begged in the silence of my own mind. Don’t. Fail to make contact. Let our recipient have decided to go away, to go fishing on Padre Island, to go see a film, now that she’s able to be up and about, so many movies missed, or to go bowling, now that he can lift his big black ball again.
It wasn’t even the grave-robbing aspect of it—these beaming people with parts harvested from previous owners, like cars with new valves or transmissions, accelerating around the course again, the whistle blown, the flag dropped, the race still on—that got to me. After all, in school at our respective Chicago universities we’d explored all aspects of the question: If every part of the bicycle is replaced, is it the same bicycle?
Rather, it was that Douglas, my Douglas, had become Dr. Frankenstein, condemning our daughter to roam the earth indefinitely, sewn up in someone else’s chest. It was the almost mystical atmosphere. The near-séance. We are in touch with your daughter, Professor Mayhall, she is sending you a message.…
I joined two of the doctors from the medical complex. One, Angleton, had done Bethany’s transplant; the other was a more famous, older man, straight-backed and slim. They were talking between themselves about the progress that had been made. How in the early days, most patients died. Talking about how the body never got used to foreign tissue, it only learned to tolerate it. Recalling for each other the story about the man who was on suppressants for nine years and, thinking he was just fine, went off them and died within the week. About the goat with the sheep’s heart who lived and had baby goats and grew old and, taken off the drugs, died in a matter of hours. “They never get used to it,” Angleton said, looking out at the happy parts carriers, medicated against rejection.
“That’s why we’re working on a pump,” he explained. “Inorganic material is tolerated.”
“It’s the way a closed safety pin,” I said, joining in, recalling a moment of panic when our son Bert was small, “can stay indefinitely in the body.”
Nodding, the older doctor added, “Or an artificial hip.”
I had been the one who’d initially given the go-ahead. We’d been called about the wreck, the unthinkable news, at eleven in the morning, Texas time. Some drunk driver had run a red light, hitting Bethany, who was headed for the brush country ranch over Thanksgiving break to see Daddy Mayhall’s widow. We’d got to the Houston hospital where they had her late that night, to be met with the question: Would we consider a gift of life?
Several gifts, actually, it turned out. The lungs were too crushed. But the heart appeared fine. The liver also. The kidneys. What about tissue? Corneas? Skin and bones? Burn patients needed skin. Crushed and tumored femurs needed replacing. The lame wanted to walk again. The blind to see. Nothing that was donated would interfere with an open-casket funeral, we were assured. Bones were replaced with prostheses as quickly as they were harvested; removing skin appeared as a mild sunburn. I had told them yes. Yes. What did it matter? Bethany was gone. I had made myself think of a stone for her, under that giant live oak where Daddy Mayhall’s stone was, at the ranch, with its baking summer, wide vistas, slow-feeding cattle.
I was frantic to reach Bert, off diving in some underground cave in the spongy, porous, hollowed-out world of north Florida, to tell him about his sister.
But Douglas, head in hands, had cried out, “No, God, not her eyes, I refuse.” And so I’d told them: Organs but no tissue. And signed the lengthy, grisly forms.
Douglas, wandering the crowd, suddenly bounded forward, like a puppy sniffing a trail. Someone had beckoned to him, an elderly-looking black man dressed in a black suit, white shirt, a bright red tie with a red heart smack in the middle of it. A red hanky waving from the chest pocket. I didn’t follow but stood with the medical team, watching as my husband bent down—the man with the red handkerchief was small, frail—tears coursing down his face. My Douglas, weeping as he had not at news of the wreck.
I’d not expected the recipient to be a man, since we’d been told the donor’s heart had to be larger, that some function was lost in the transfer no matter how quickly they worked. But then Bethany, tall like her father, muscled, athletic, had weighed a dozen pounds more than the slight old man.
Reluctantly, I told the doctors I’d see them later, and crossed the grassy space in response to Douglas’s call. My hand in his, I stood at his side. “He’s just my age,” my husband said, entranced by the idea. “Can you believe that? We were born the same week, the same year.”
What did that have to do with anything? I wondered. That some boy born fifty years ago in a nearby Texas town had grown up to be kept alive by the offspring of some other boy born some two hundred miles away. What was the point? Was it the chanciness of it all? Or that the randomness didn’t seem so random if the men had birthdays a week apart?
I shut my eyes, with effort opened them. “Nan Mayhall,” I said, extending my hand. No need to hold myself back from this gentleman, whose attitude was certainly to be expected.
“The Reverend Calvin C. Clayton,” he responded, pumping my hand, his seeming not much more than loose bones in a sock.
Then there was a murmur through the crowd, signalling that it was the time of day to get settled, time for the ceremony, the highlight of the show. I tugged Douglas away. “Don’t,” I pleaded. “Don’t do this.”
“It’s a miracle,” he said, his face still damp. “Can’t you see?” His eyes filled again, and he wrapped his arms around me. “He said—” He broke down, got himself under control. “He said, ‘Tell me your girl didn’t take her own life.’ And I said, ‘No, no, she would never have done that. She loved life.’ And he told me, ‘Thank the Lord for that, I couldn’t have stood it.’ Can you imagine him worrying about a thing like that?”
“Douglas.” What could I say? He stood transfixed, his neck exposed. The life expectancy of the good preacher with the red heart-stitched necktie prolonged with his own blood.
The Reverend Clayton was speaking, “—certainly a miracle. She was, they told us right off, type O, which is the universal donor, and I was type AB, which is the universal recipient, so they didn’t have to bother with a lot of other matches. I can tell you we’d just about given up hoping. I was slipping right off the bedrock of this earth—”
Douglas leaned over to the man, now sitting upright on a nearby bench. “—for us, too, knowing that part of our Bethany still lives and breathes. You understand?” His voice shook.
I sat down by the man’s wife, who was stitching a pink rosebud on a piece of white linen on which there were two rosebuds already, the cloth held tightly in place by a double hoop. A womanly sort of occupation, which my mom would have given half of her life to see her only daughter perform. “Hello,” I offered, not sure what to say.
“My feet have given out,” she confided.
“My feet are okay.” I pointed to my black loafers, then to my black tapered pants and white shirt. “We’re still in winter in upstate New York. This was as summery as I could find for a Texas spring. We’ve been gone so long— It’s my talking that gave out.”
“My husband has been marking the days for this event.”
“Mine, too.” I studied the rounded face, the dark eyes looking through trim spectacles, and wondered how she felt about all of this, this woman, beyond being grateful that her man was around to mark off his calendar. Women were closer to the ground, as they said, closer to the matter of fact.
“You did a good thing,” the preacher’s wife allowed, tying a knot.
“She was already gone,” I said.
“I know, but everyone doesn’t see that.” She peered at her handiwork, getting hard to see in the dusk.
“Thank you.”
The staff people gave awards to the transplant teams and participating hospitals. They talked about the shared experience. The joy of hearing hope when there seemed to be no hope; the joy of giving the gift of that hope. The solace of knowing that someone was getting a second chance because of your generosity. They talked about courage: the courage to give and the courage to receive. To take heart from heartless happenstance.
A young man with sandy hair and a squeaky-clean white dress shirt and fresh-pressed jeans got up to speak. He was identified as the representative of the donor families. He started with an account of his wife, a Sierra Club hiker like himself, and the numerous climbs they’d taken together. Then, lowering his voice to a husky tremor, he talked about her cerebral hemorrhage, so young, only thirty-three, and how he’d given permission, knowing she would want this, for them to harvest whatever they could. Then he motioned to an older man in the audience, a balding and rather stocky man wearing a bright yellow bow tie. “This story isn’t just mine,” the young man said.
The balding man was introduced as a recipient. He picked up the story. How he’d plumb run out of air, was gasping like a drowning man, and how this young man and his wife had stepped in and thrown him a lifeline.
The climber resumed the tale, “So the two of us hiked to the top of Mount Elbert, in the Rockies if you don’t know where that is, on her birthday, the way we’d planned to do it together, take our fiftieth hike, that’s the big one, on her birthday. And”—here he had to stop and clear his throat, swallow a few times—“I can’t tell you what it meant to me that Chuck here was willing to do that, you know, able to, what it meant to me that my wife’s lungs hiked to the top of Elbert with me.” He choked a minute, then added, “We crested the top together.”
The two men embraced, and then lit the torch and held it high.
Douglas sat rubbing his streaming eyes. The preacher wiped streaks from his cheeks, then slapped a hand on Douglas’s back. Douglas fumbled in both pockets, found his handkerchief. He turned and met my eyes, then turned away.
Grief cut a canyon there was no crossing.
Shortly after daylight, we headed west on I-10 toward the ranch, Douglas carefully sticking to the speed limit, both hands clenching the wheel as we passed the farm-to-market road where Bethany’s drunk driver had accelerated into oncoming traffic, while I concentrated on not spilling the too-hot cafe coffee on my legs. We did not even try to talk as the farmlands grew scrubby with cedar brakes.
I’d sat up late in my nightgown reading the packet of material about “gifts of life” while Douglas turned lobster red in the shower. I’d wished that our son Bert was there to talk to; the material was grim. In the way that fathers and sons divide up the territory, he was a physiologist, an underwater breathing expert, almost as if to say: You took the mind, Dad, I’ll take the body. Bert had lost friends, older men, experienced divers. Things happened to the oxygen mix or the rebreather equipment or they hit some hairpin twist in an underground cave. He could talk about bubbles and things going wrong and not confuse the accident with the buddy it happened to.
The donor, the guidelines explained, first had to be declared officially brain-dead. That was the term they’d given us for Bethany in November. But then we’d been spared the diagnostic details: was there doll’s eye movement, was there nystagmus when the ear was irrigated with cold water, was there a gag reflex following bronchial stimulation with a suction catheter? Such brutal procedures to inflict on a still-breathing body with a still-beating chest. You had to know the patient was gone. I stuffed the pamphlet into the trash. How could Douglas, who called himself a brain scientist, think of Bethany as still alive?
I’d wanted to watch the transplant, although, as the doctors had explained, no one could operate with kin as spectators. It was difficult to put into words, for those who didn’t understand on a gut level, that I needed to look at it from the other side, to separate out the process from the weight of my own grief. Loss, like pain, makes you self-absorbed. I wanted to see it standing in different shoes, and was aware at the time that somewhere in the hospital someone else (the nice Mrs. Reverend Clayton) sat also waiting, coffee growing cold, clock hands making their quartz clicks at slow speed.
“What transplant?” Bert had asked later when I’d told him. “Didn’t they take Sis’s liver, too,” he said, “and a kidney? Three transplants?” His point was well-taken, of course; his point of view true. At last evening’s event Douglas had not tapped his abdomen looking for a recipient, first his right side, then his left. We were invested in our hearts.
I’d mentioned my wish again to Angleton at the party and he had said, “Hmmmm”—not a bad response from a doctor. I hadn’t pressed. “Let me see,” he’d said.
“That boy last night—” Douglas broke the silence—“the one who climbed the mountain, seemed like a nice kid.”
Nice kid. A verdict any son would wait light-years to hear. “Yes.”
“Seemed all grown up, young as he was, not much older than Bert. I guess he had cause to be—” Douglas cleared his throat.
“The hiker lost his wife—” I bit my lip. It was very hard not to rise to Bert’s defense, knowing as I did that in his heart of hearts my husband wished that his son had been there at the barbeque and celebration, had lit a candle, had told a story, had been a part of the tearful scene.
The ranch spread south of the San Antonio highway, about an hour and a half outside Houston, and it was a relief at last to turn into Daddy Mayhall’s long drive, bump along the dry gravel, and pull up under the shade of a bent live oak. It felt strange not to be greeted by the sound of barking, but there were no longer dogs, cats, or even saddle horses now that Daddy’s Mayhall’s wife ran the place alone. She, Jesse, made a frequent complaining joke: If I was a man, folks would quit asking what I’m doing out here, on the south edge of nothing, me and the mesquite and the squatty palmettos and grasshopper frogs.
“You children look depleted,” she said now, a big woman, with a good person’s enveloping embrace. No longer red, her thick gray hair held high in a knot was laced with strands of faded rust, and she had a redhead’s skin. “You ready for breakfast?”
“We are,” I told her. “We waited to eat.”
“Good thing.” Jesse pulled Douglas to her, nearly his height. “Say, boy, where are your manners?”
He flushed a bit, then kissed her. “We’ve a lot to tell,” he said.
“Tell it then over hash browns and deer-meat sausage.”
While he complied, recounting the miracle of locating the recipient who had our girl’s heart, using all the words of the night before (organ recovery, living will), I sank gratefully back into the sprawling house which had that thick-walled feel of places built long before central heat and air-conditioning, even though the white plaster was no longer limed, the exposed beams no longer supporting structure, the old open fireplace and hearth once used to cook now only used to warm the rooms in winter when a sudden norther hit.
From that afternoon, twenty-six years ago, when Douglas first brought me here, I’d burrowed into his boyhood home like a hermit crab slipping into a moon shell or a whelk. Fastening my rasps with such a grip that only a lit fire could have dislodged me, claiming it an ideal fit in an instant.
Douglas and I had met over apple strudel at a student hangout on the North Shore of Chicago. Hearing the familiar Texas accent at the next table, I had waved, and he had picked up his dessert plate and joined me. How amazing a coincidence it had seemed; we’d rocked back in our chairs in delight, hooked a finger in the belt of our jeans. From the hill country? From the brush country? Studying at Northwestern? At Chicago? Graduate work in paleontology? In biology? What needles in a Midwest haystack. What destiny.
I’d been defensive from the start. His background assumed scholarship; mine assumed school. That was my joke, my way of saying that I’d started out a dollar short and miles behind. My way of kidding around about the feeling that he’d been competing in the Olympics while I’d been running three-legged sack races. Public school education, I’d said, dealt in facts (the Battle of Goliad), private school education in theory (the bias of the observer in history). In private school, I’d said, my collecting trilobites, the physical specimens, would have seemed mundane, a tally; I would have been urged to debate the theories about natural selection, using them as examples. And, conversely, I said, Douglas would have been considered a flake in public school, pursuing the idea of consciousness, how we know that we know we know; he would have been seen as trying to bullshit his way out of the biology final. Douglas went along with me. “I forget you went to public school,” he’d kid whenever I tried to make my point with concrete facts.
I hadn’t been what Daddy Mayhall wanted when I showed up that first time on Douglas’s arm. He’d wished his studious son to bring home some well-bred easterner whose (Boston or Westchester or Bucks County) folks owned a place on Nantucket. He was a mix of attitude, the old man—proud of the brains he’d raised, never failing to praise his boys, but feeling that their attributes were somehow something left over from a previous wife he’d never quite figured out, the mathematician who was in and out of his life like a parabola curve. He was conflicted about what he wanted for his boys, broad-shouldered Walter, built like his dad, and the younger boy, Douglas, who’d turned out downright handsome after having been a nerd as a kid. First off, he’d wanted them married well, to people of property, or at least of substance. If his sons wanted smart women, too, that was their privilege. Their right, you could say. Nothing wrong with that. Ranching women in Texas had always been smart as whips. They’d had to be—they usually ended up with the land, and with the money, too.
I’d come on like some foreman’s kid. A tomboy in an age when cute as a button was the order of the day. Later, the style would be called unisex, and Daddy Mayhall would hate it still. Most of my free hours before I’d escaped to Northwestern had been spent hauling myself up the road to Burnet, Llano, Cherokee, San Saba, Mason. Digging in the stratified outcroppings, finding fossils. Trying to get a glimpse of some other time and place as far from my own as possible. Eons were barely far enough away to be safe. Light-years would have been better, but all I knew to study was what my hands could uncover. My love was trilobites, those three-segmented ancient animals layered in the Cambrian who’d stayed on this planet longer than anything else we knew. I’d been impressed by their incredible foresight. Possessing compound eyes, each with hundreds of lenses that corrected for astigmatism and night sight, they were able to see in all directions, unequalled vision for which they had no use at all on the muddy bottom of prehistoric seas. Why had they been so far ahead of themselves? Why had I?
But Daddy Mayhall was one to make the best of a situation. He perceived I was going to stick by his boy; plus he soon saw that I loved the ranch and could listen to his accounts of it until the cows came home.
Douglas had got to the end of his story, about the balding man carrying the dead wife’s lungs up Mount Elbert, about the lighting of the torch. I helped myself to another of Jesse’s hot biscuits with honey. Grief made you ravenous. I had another deer-meat sausage.
Jesse refilled our cups. “You haven’t hardly touched your hash browns,” she said to her grown stepson, as if he was still in second grade. “Don’t you know I am the only person alive who makes them as good as you can get at a truck stop?”
Douglas took a taste of the soft potatoes, crusted with paprika, cayenne, and grease. “They serve what they call home fries in the East,” he said.
“I hear.”
“Fries no home ever saw.” He took a big bite while Jesse watched, but struggled to swallow it.
“That’s like homemade,” she chatted along. “That means they pour the mix in the sheet pan by hand. When you see that on the menu you know you can prepare yourself for a square: square biscuits, square muffins, square cake.”
In the early years here, before our children came, Jesse had kept goats, dogs, cats, horses, a flux of domestic animals that she talked to incessantly. The big redheaded woman carrying on a conversation with Pettigrew, the orange tom, or Hildegarde, the German shepherd, while trooping across the backyard past Daddy Mayhall’s current Lincoln Continental and his pickup trucks, to take the Appaloosas to pasture. (“Do you want to go or not, Hildy? You know you like nosing the ponies down to pasture, don’t you?”) It had made it possible for me, when I had babies, to talk up a storm to them, the same way Jesse had to her menagerie of animals.
I had to smile remembering the time, right after Douglas and I married, that I’d called her “Mother Mayhall,” thinking that proper. She’d thrown herself on the floor on her back with her two arms and her two legs stuck up in the air like a dead horse. “That slays me,” she said. “I’m flat on my back. Help me up, will you, come on, Nan, you put me down here. I didn’t change my name when you got married, you changed yours, am I correct? And one of these days that business will grind to a halt, too. Then tombstones won’t have to read: ELVIRA ARNOLD BLACKENSHIP TURNBALL WILLIAMS.” She’d hooted and lifted her hair straight up as if it was on fire. “I kid you not,” she’d declared. “The exact name of my grandmother’s grandmother.”
Now Jesse was retelling, settled back at the table, about the first time she met Douglas and his older brother. Her favorite, oldest tale.
“You remember hearing about this, Doug? I’d come to get to know you fellows, decide if I wanted to marry your daddy. We were still in the trial stage, you might say. I set right out and fixed you all hot chocolate with marshmallows and banana pancakes, a specialty of mine, as you’ll recall. Walter was just eight, you were barely seven.”
I liked hearing this story. It was the one Jesse always told, the way any family has its basic staples. How she was a young, spirited fiancée, coming out to the ranch house to spend the day with the kids who were about to become, by fiat, her stepsons. Her not having sense enough to be scared. And the first thing she sees is this eight-year-old boy, built stocky like his daddy, sitting at the kitchen table (the same one where we sat now) reading a book that looked to be a thousand pages long: H. G. Wells’s Outline of History. “Where’s your brother?” she asks, seeing one boy is missing, to which Walter replies, “He’s doing a study of self-recognition.” Oh, sure—here Jesse always rolled her eyes and tapped her head. At seven?
I remember thinking, when I first heard the story, that I’d have known Douglas was a younger brother without being told. Younger brothers had narrower shoulders; no need for them to bear the weight of the world. Big brothers had already done that.
Jesse went on, “I ask him, ‘Walter, can you read that?’ I can’t help myself, the words just come out. ‘I think so,’ he says, in that modest way smart kids have. And he does, to show me he is already into it: ‘—And first, before we begin the history of life, let us tell something of the stage onto which our drama is put—’ ”
Then she warmed to the part featuring Douglas, today’s audience. How he comes through the kitchen door, carrying a full-length mirror, the skinny, framed kind that you tack up on the inside of closet doors, taller than him by a foot, just a thin sheet of black-backed glass. And how she and the older boy watch as he props the mirror up against a chair and makes clicking noises out the back door until a fat tabby tom comes in, stretches, sniffs at the bowl of Friskies, and catches sight of himself.
“And then, Doug,” Jesse raised her voice and gestured to fill out her recital, “you move the mirror from side to side and that cat arches his back and shoots his tail in the air and hisses as big as you please. Then you move it again closer to him so he looks bigger and this time he reaches right around that frame, like he’s after some cat on the other side of the mirror. Finally, he gives up, swats it, and races off to the back of the house.
“Next you get this little tablet down from your school shelf and write it all up with a pencil. Then you announce, ‘I’m going to try a bird now.’ I could have dropped my teeth, I tell you. Here is this little kid in corrective shoes and big spectacles, hauling this flimsy mirror out the door as big as you please. Like it was crackers and cheese.
“Your brother, Walt, who took it upon himself to educate me, explains it. Doug’s interested, he says, in if we’re the only animal who recognizes itself. The books say so, but he’s got to find out for himself. He tried a cow, Dad let him go out to the pasture, but it didn’t even know it was seeing anything. That makes the cat smarter. ‘I bet pigs would know,’ he says. ‘Pigs are smarter than dogs or cats or horses.’ And I tell him, ‘I heard that, too.’ And I’m glad I know something, at least.
“ ‘Even a baby knows,’ Walt explains to me, like he is used to being the teacher. ‘You can sit a baby in front of a mirror and it laughs and says its name. So it isn’t something we learn when we get old enough to have ideas about self-reference, what I mean is,’ he tells me in this serious way, ‘it’s innate.’ And I say, ‘I bet you’re right.’ And I’m thinking, Here is H. G. Wells in the kitchen, and outside in the yard not a tire swing or even a sandpile but your basic summertime fun self-perception experiment by the bird feeder.”
Jesse looked fondly at her grown no-longer-bespectacled stepson. “I couldn’t believe you wise old kids, your heads as full of ideas as the Scarecrow’s was full of pins and needles. What had I got myself into?”
Douglas, who had heard this many times but always seemed to receive it as a blessing, said, “We were on our good behavior that day. We were showing off.”
“Then your brother Walter says to me, ‘I believe Mr. Wells is not thinking right. He says that the Chinese thought the world was flat and that the Greeks were the ones who figured out it was round. But you know he doesn’t mean that all the millions of Chinese got together by the Wall and voted it was flat. Or all the Greeks got together in the Forum. I think it was one person who had the idea, and everybody listened to him.’ And I could tell he meant to grow up and be that person.” Jesse gestured to the living room, where the remaining picture of Walter lived.
“Then you come back in, Doug, this cocky, four-eyed kid, and say, ‘I want to see what squirrels do,’ and you show me where to find a sack of mixed nuts up behind the cornmeal and chili powder. Hazelnuts, hickory, black walnuts, pecans. A feast, I remember thinking, to make any bug-eyed squirrel give herself a second glance.
“And I wonder, where do children like you two send off your scholarly papers? You two amiable brains with appendages? And for a few minutes, I tell you, Doug, I think of just slipping out the door, leaving your daddy a note that says, ‘Too late, honey, for me to make a dent.’ But then I decide maybe you fellows can use a little help—”
Douglas looked embarrassed. At his past self maybe, or at his voluble stepmother’s kindness. He nodded at her and I knew he was thinking that she’d told the story to take his mind off the previous evening. “I owe you one,” he said, making a shaky smile, and then pushed away his plate.
I could always picture the young Douglas when I heard that story. Behind the tall, fair, attractive man he was, that small boy in spectacles holding that wobbly mirror half again his height, setting out to discover what in the world could see itself. Concluding that we are alone in that ability. Douglas, grown, still holding that mirror up, hoping to glimpse someone besides himself looking back.
Jesse was the best thing that ever happened to him. And to Walter, his brother, too, I guess, although I never got to know him. I used to look at the picture of him in the living room, taken in his pilot’s uniform a couple of years before our wedding, standing in front of the wing of a bomber. His captain’s cap on straight, his face, bearing a family resemblance, solemn. I used to wonder if he’d thought about the outline of history when he’d flown his missions.
Walking from the ranch house, we held hands the way we always had, walking through the morning haze that the sun hadn’t baked off yet. The time of early morning when the cattle seemed beings from another planet, moving too slowly for ours, on another timetable, each bite chewed for as long as we take to eat a meal, each step taking the time it took us to cross a field. I’d often thought about that, about the fed cattle, as they called tomorrow’s steaks, or, once, from Daddy Mayhall’s point of view, tomorrow’s stake in a few more head of beef. That they were aliens, surely. That if we’d encountered anything like that alighting from a spaceship (taking an hour to get down the ramp), we’d have made much of it. The same was true, of course, the other way, concerning those beings like hummingbirds who moved hundreds of times faster than we did. Each species had its own fingerprint of time.
I’d found a children’s book for Bethany that I’d kept for Bert, since in that short time it had both gone out of print and out of the library. A little boy walks to school with a tortoise, an elephant, a horse, a dog, a butterfly. And by the end of his school day, it’s the end of the butterfly’s life. And by the end of his life, he’s now got a white beard to his waist, the tortoise is coming home from his first day of school. That was the title, First Day of School. With all the fuss about censoring books, no one apparently remarked when death became banned.
“Jesse still takes the cattle to market,” Douglas said. “She still studies the new breeds.”
“I guess on some level. Dad always said he wanted somebody with enough sense to run the place after he was gone, and that was one reason he picked her, somebody younger and who had taken care of herself. Still, I suppose I’m like the people she complains about, wondering what she does out here all by herself all the time. I admit it. And that I wouldn’t have wondered if he was here without a wife. I’d assume he needed running the place to keep his mind active. Not to get depressed—”
“Ranchers in Texas have always been mostly women.”
“I know.” Douglas tightened his grip on my hand. He was good about admitting what he saw as sexism. It didn’t exactly change his view, but saying those things out loud got him to thinking. And he was just as quick to call me on it, whenever he heard something like, ‘Men always …’
We got to the far fence and stood looking out at the vast grasslands that seemed to disappear in the mist, acres and acres, cattle dazed and grazing farther than the eye could see. Sleepwalking beasts, these creamy Charolais. Who would not have a clue a mirror was being held before their large oval eyes. Busy with bringing the cud up from their first stomach and chewing it at their leisure. Making that walk to school (the stockyards in their case) take a lifetime.
We stopped by the huge live oak at the back of the side pasture, a tree older than the ranch house, as old as the land, in a fertile field used now only in calving season. Three headstones stretched like a sleeper’s arm from one side of the massive trunk. Jesse had bought and tended all three markers: Daddy Mayhall’s, Walter’s, and now, new and with that glossy look of unweathered granite, Bethany’s. The old man’s age more than theirs combined.
I touched my daughter’s stone, circled the tree, then wandered off a bit to see how far I could see in all directions. I didn’t know where Douglas’s mind was, what this was for him, this pilgrimage. I knew that only one grave contained a casket, Daddy’s; the others served only as memorials. Did that bother him?
I shaded my eyes to shut out the sight in the distance of my children, young, saddling up their horses, proud of being able to do so on their own, riding out for the afternoon, an empire of scrub-oak and cedar acres, and fences for the jumping. Bethany gripping tight with her jeaned knees, reins knotted and held in one hand; Bert hooking the stirrups with his boot heels, reins held separately, loose. Neither quite at home on animal-back. The girl preferring her feet on hard ground; the boy safer with water weighting him down.
“Bethany loved the ranch,” Douglas said.
It bothered me the way people freely attributed feelings and opinions to those who had died (“He would have wanted us to …” “She would never have wished …”). The real person became invention; the real scraps of truth became buried in revision. “She came here when she could,” I amended.
Close to the old ranch house, we stopped. Both of us, perhaps, thinking at once of the big oak bed with its massive carved Mexican headboard where we’d always slept on our visits. A real lovemaking bed from which you could see for miles out the recessed windows, but which felt very private, being at the far end of the spread-out, thick-walled house.
How quickly we used to have sex. Back when we were courting and Daddy Mayhall was feeling responsible for keeping intact and out of trouble this smart-aleck girl that his Dougie had brought home. There would be a sudden moment when the grown-ups had gone on ahead—to saddle up, or to pack a picnic in that year’s Lincoln, and we would race together to our back room, Douglas and I. “Do we have time?” I’d whisper. “Sure,” he’d say, reaching for me. “We got five minutes.” And we’d shout with laughter, rip off our clothes, fling them everywhere, diving for the bed like it was a big swimming pool. Both so ready it was pathetic. And in those school days, both of us came almost at the first touch, anticipation having done its heady work.
Later, married, we still rushed back to the room after our early walk, or after Jesse’s enormous breakfasts, to make love in the daylight, with the Mayhalls getting ready for the day, calling out to us.
As if remembering also, Douglas guided me along the wide outside stone walkway, getting to the familiar room without entering the main house. Once inside, in reflex, he threw the wood bolt on the door. After a minute, I pulled my red T-shirt over my head; I hadn’t put on a bra. Douglas, watching me, his face unreadable, began to unbutton his plaid shirt. I went to him then and, on tiptoe, kissed his eyes, then his throat, then, lowering myself, the flat hard bone in the center of his chest, a private place. On the bed, he pushed my legs up, my knees against my breasts, and kissed my stomach before he got me wet. He’d used to do that, long kisses on my stomach, an incredibly erotic thing that we’d let go, forgotten. He used to do that and whisper, “Baby, baby, baby,” not as endearment but as mantra. Wanting me to make a baby, another baby, lots of babies.
He’d get me aroused, and then he’d say it, “Baby, baby, baby,” and sometimes I’d laugh and it would seem foolish and funny. But, increasingly, it grew to bother me. “Douglas,” I told him, when we were not making love, “I don’t want to have any more children. We have two. I think that it is an indulgence, a narcissism, to keep reproducing yourself. You have a houseful and it’s for you; one or two always get the short end, feel neglected or cheated. Why do you press me to have more? Talk to me.”
And Douglas would answer, “There were only the two of us, and then, after Walter died, well, I could see that if there’d been five of us it wouldn’t have left such a gap. Or six. Or ten.” Then he’d laugh. “A dozen?” But he had not really been thinking it through. Jesse—with stretch marks and back pain and fatigue and frustration at providing a backup crowd, a second string to come in if anything happened to the first team? That was obscene.
This had been a frequent fight, until we’d hit forty, until the children were in junior high. Now Douglas, kissing my stomach, whispered the words again, “Baby, baby, baby,” and I wondered if he was back in the past or asking again. But I came and then he did and we stayed wrapped in each other’s arms and legs until Jesse called out to us.
“Where have you lovebirds got to?”
We were preparing to leave, hoping to scoot between the worst shifts in Houston traffic, to catch the connecting flight to Syracuse. But it was hard to think about getting back in the car.
The sun had turned the view out the window yellow, mesquite-filtered yellow, and I watched Jesse, sun on her freckled arms, pack us up a travel feast, ham sandwiches and chocolate cake. I wondered if she had ever thought about another man, seriously. I knew the good-natured woman would never burden Douglas with the concept that she’d recovered from his daddy, but it must get lonesome out here. On the other hand, it might be that Jesse liked running the show alone. Not an unattractive prospect.
I missed Daddy Mayhall, or rather missed those large, loud dinners we used to have in our Chicago days, what seemed the confusion of a table crowded with people, the effect due mostly to his booming presence. There was always real talk, work talk. Was Douglas going to take that teaching job in upstate New York? Could he move from there if he didn’t get tenure, or wanted a research institution later? What exactly was standout about this brain stuff he was cutting his rats up to study? What was his particular take on it? Who else was working on it? Real talk at least about Douglas’s work, if not about mine. But crumbs can seem a loaf, depending on where you come from. In those days, I was grateful enough just to eat at the table of scholarship.
I’d joined the family looking like the kind of girl you saw in films of that era in jeans with a baseball cap turned backward, before that was the fad, a mop of curly, unruly hair sticking out, looking as if she hung out with her older brother and his chums waiting for a chance to play shortstop on their team. Small wonder Daddy never addressed me as a graduate student.
On the other hand, at my parents’ house, the outside world was a minimal construct. My mom, Mabel, kept brown ’n’ serve rolls in her flower-painted breadbox and Sara Lee cake in her aluminum cake tin. On the slightest pretext, she showed you how if you mixed a little Durkee’s with tartar sauce you got remoulade and if you mixed a little chopped sweet pickle and catsup with the Hellmann’s you got Thousand Island. Dip the tops of tear-apart rolls in melted margarine and they tasted homemade. You had to know the tricks, she said. In my view all her tricks took twice as long, were twice as difficult, and cost at least double just doing the thing from scratch. But scratch, she used to say, was for grannies, was from the old days.
My dad, Marnie Palmer—Round Rock’s favorite pharmacist—did pretty much the same at his job, mixing up ingredients from his shelves or, essentially, just transferring capsules and powders from the manufacturer’s to his containers. But, he said, it took a lot of reading to do it right, being as how it was his duty to warn his customers on the subject of side effects, about which they were totally unaware and about which the medical profession was indifferent, if not callous.
Alchemists, both of them, trying to spin gold into flax. To make a silk purse into a sow’s ear. Me.
“Listen, you two,” Jesse said, after she’d handed us bagged lunches to go, and got us settled with glasses of iced tea. “I thought, since now—” She set out a big manila envelope, settling it halfway between Douglas and me on the scarred wooden table. She was in cutoffs and tennis shoes and a big flopping shirt that must have been Daddy’s in her former life. She took a breath and started again. “I need to unload a bit of excess real estate on you, as long as you’re down in these parts and we don’t have to traffic in attorneys and language nobody can understand, or deal with fees nobody can pay.”
It took me a moment to understand what Jesse was offering us. The summer place on Sanibel Island, a wildlife haven on Florida’s west coast. It had been Daddy’s, theirs, when I married into the family. Had been a vacation place for all of us later, when the children were babies, then toddlers. Daddy had put up hammocks and set out binoculars and field guides. Jesse had done crab claws and boiled shrimp.
Douglas and I had never been there alone. It had no ghosts. The rooms held no scraps of fights or hurts or regrets or untranslated requests and refusals. It was a family place, but we’d been there only as part of Daddy Mayhall’s family.
Tears welled up in my eyes at the gesture. And at Jesse’s perception. She must have smelled trouble between Douglas and me the instant we’d pulled into her gravel drive at dawn. “Jess—” I said, at a loss.
“Hush. I want you to have it, you two. All I’ve done is rent it out since Daddy died. I’m deeding it right this Texas minute. Down the road, you might want to pass it on to that boy of yours, who might like a place to dry his bones when he comes up out of those caves of his. Meantime, it’s yours. I have got the tenants out, and have got you three sets of keys and a packet of maps which don’t make any sense until you’ve already got lost a couple of times, because the scale of miles is about one inch to one inch and that throws you off, when you’re used to Texas maps. But it’ll all come back to you; you’ve been there enough.” She tied her rust and gray hair off her neck with a red bandanna.
What a needed, timely gift. Douglas and I in our old Victorian home in the chill, hilly Alleghenies were crushing one another with silence. Here was an alternative—some breathing room. I looked at him, but he was bent over the papers, as if examining them.
“I think you’re crazy not to stay there half the year yourself,” I said. “You love Sanibel.”
“Crazy ever to go back,” Jesse said. “Wild mares couldn’t drag me. Florida? To do the arts with the beige-hairs and give myself skin cancer with the retirees? I’m too old to be with old folks. Anyway, they don’t have any decent animals down there. Mini-poos only. Hear me? It’s yours.”
“Oh, Jesse—” I said. “Thanks.”
Douglas turned over the deed, tossed the keys up, and caught them. His face sagged. “You take it,” he said to me, pushing the envelope and maps in my direction.
Daddy Mayhall’s widow, to indicate the matter was settled, picked up the San Antonio paper, grazing the headlines, exclaiming, “Would you take a look at this? A contractor is selling bulletproof shields for homes to cut down on drive-by shootings. What next?”
I remembered that she used to read the paper aloud to her dogs and cats, talk to them about the news of the day. “Look at this, Hildy, you are in mortal danger, here, girl.” And I wondered who she talked to now, now that tending the territory took all her attention. Maybe she asked the slow-moving, dreamy fed cattle from Planet Cow what she should do about her one remaining stepchild.