EVENTUALLY my thoughts brought me around to something I wanted to ask even though I wasn’t really sure I wanted an answer. I said, “Is Dr. Kepler out of the hospital yet?” Her house was on Fernwood, not far from here, but it had been at least two months now since I’d seen her.
“Yeah,” said Diana. “Mom said she’d probably be able to stay at home for a few weeks, but then she’ll have to come back to the hospital again.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. It’s not that I was necessarily that big a fan of old people other than Gram, it’s just that Dr. Kepler was a nice lady. Even now that she didn’t have hair anymore, I actually thought she was pretty in her own way, with her soft skin and dark eyes full of thoughts. She was so thin you could see her shoulder blades and the bones down her back, but I knew from listening to the talk on Wednesday nights when the book club met at Gram’s that she was still a fighter. And I found out scientific people can have pretty strict opinions about literature.
“We are Vladimir and Estragon!” she hollered in her sketchy voice one night. She’d made everybody read Waiting for Godot even though it was really a play instead of a book, because it was her turn to choose. When she said what she did, the other women kind of stiffened. They were mostly Baptists and Methodists, but she was a physicist, which meant that even though they liked her, none of them except Gram really understood her thinking. Diana and I were playing double solitaire at the kitchen table just through the archway from the front room, where we could hear everything. L.A. was at the pool practicing dives, so I felt like it was up to me to listen on her behalf too.
“Explain, Joan,” Gram said, setting her glasses on the lamp table, where they focused two little half-moons of concentrated light on the white cloth. She picked up her cup of tea and took a sip.
“Such folly!” Dr. Kepler said. “And such a fine metaphor for the entire human race—Vladimir and Estragon, waiting and talking, talking and waiting, endlessly deluding themselves and accomplishing nothing!”
“Well, I don’t see how that applies,” said Mrs. McReady.
“Dear, dear,” Mrs. Pynchon said from the green chair. She was always a step or two ahead of Mrs. McReady, and she did see how it applied.
“I smell a theological debate,” said Gram. “Why don’t I get us some cookies?”
Dr. Kepler thumped her doilied chair arm weakly with her little fist and said, “Only our deeds matter. Man must do!”
“. . . be-doo-be-doo,” sang Diana to herself as she turned over a card.
“Love matters,” said Mrs. Pynchon, setting her own cup aside. “Hope. Certainly faith.”
“Ah, yes, there is the magic word,” Dr. Kepler said. “Belief without evidence. With it we can justify anything.”
“How’d she ever get so smart?” Diana asked softly.
“Gram says they had different ideas about education in Europe.”
For me Dr. Kepler’s words carried a certain kind of excitement even when they sounded discouraging, but Diana saw it a different way. “That’s too scary,” she said. Not many things troubled her, but she had a certain concern for the fate of her soul. When Mrs. Pynchon said, “Nothing in this world means much to me if I can’t believe in something greater than myself,” Diana nodded without looking up.
Dr. Kepler said, “No one has brought us more unspeakable cruelty, more wars, more death, than the Prince of Peace and his peers with all their holy warriors. Perhaps we should look for greatness somewhere else.”
Diana shook her head unconsciously as she laid down the club five.
But now I was remembering when Dr. Kepler had come back from seeing her internist, the year after I came to live with Gram. Listening to her, Gram had said, “Oh, Joan, no!”
“Now, Miriam, the last thing I will have is you saying there is some higher meaning in this, that I am being called home to Jesus and we will understand it all in the sweet bye and bye, or any of that happy nonsense.”
“But Joan,” Gram had said, “is there no comfort for you?”
“My comfort shall be in seeing to the completeness of my life and trying to be worthy of my friends.”
Gram had hugged her and sniffled, and, watching from the hall, I’d felt a chill that seemed to go all the way down to the atoms in my bones.
Now I thought of Colossians, who had no problem believing in things greater than himself because, on account of being off-and-on insane, he seemed to hear from them on a regular basis. I was the one who had introduced him to Dr. Kepler, and they had hit it off in spite of the different things they thought were real. She hired him to do some yard work, but she seemed to enjoy his singing in the same amazed way that I did. She said that in Europe before the war he might have been a luminary of the continental operatic stage, which I took to mean he could have been a singing star. But she said he wouldn’t be the headliner very often because, always and everywhere, the best parts were written for the tenors.
“But what a splendid villain he might have made!” she said.
One day Dr. Kepler, in her straw sun hat and gardening gloves, was watching Colossians at work when L.A. and I arrived to deliver Dr. Kepler a loaf of dill bread Gram had baked for her. Colossians was planting bulbs in the front garden and I got interested in the process and left the bread presentation to L.A. Watching him on his knees in the soft, dark earth, smoothly turning aside a thick curl of the soil with his trowel, slipping a bulb from the sack beside him under it and moving on to plant the next bulb with no waste motion, his big hands barely seeming to move, I realized for the first time how much more there was to raising flowers than just throwing out a few seeds, how if you wanted to do it right it was a matter not only of understanding but of somehow joining with the soil and in a way befriending it.
“Perennials are so wonderfully appealing,” said Dr. Kepler. “Something that will come again each year, almost a way of going on oneself.”
“These amaryllis and hyacinth do you proud, missus. They faces be gloryin’ the Lord ever spring of the world.”
“Let them glorify your strong hand, Colossians—there is nothing in the sky I wish to exalt.”
“Why, land sakes, missus, you not believin’ on the good Lord?”
“I believe in what I know,” she said. “I know the damned gangsters burned up my mother and my father and my three sisters in big ovens, and I know the smoke went away into the sky. There must have been a great deal of it; maybe the good Lord saw it. Now I am only smoke that is waiting its turn to go up to the sky, and soon enough the gangsters will have their way with me too. Their bones, and the murderers who walk among us, can inherit the earth without any further protest from me.”
I doubted that Colossians knew much about the smoke or the ovens, but he took off his hat, wiped his head with his bandanna and smiled at us all with a drop of sweat hanging like a jewel from the end of his nose. “Well, that be all right, I reckon,” he said. “Expect He go on try to keep a good watch on us just the same.”
But it wasn’t the Lord I saw keeping watch at my bedside again that night. It was the girl who was death.
Doo-be-doo-be-doo, she sang softly from her cold blue mouth.