Father Bliss was tall and strong and it didn’t matter that he wasn’t very bright; in fact, it was almost better. He went straight to the bedroom window where Ida pointed, looked out, and said in a deep thrilling voice, “Begone.” He made the sign of the cross. The winter light gleamed on his thick silver hair. Then he turned to Ida, who was leaning forward on her pillows with her hands clasped. “Is that better?”
Ida laughed and nodded. The word “begone” made her shiver with pleasure. The horse and the two torturers had been gone since Christmas but there was no sense telling Father Bliss that; he’d leave too. He was a little like Kay in that regard: if you didn’t give him some small task to do to make him feel useful, he’d go home. And she didn’t want him to go yet. She gestured toward the empty wheelchair by the bed and shivered again as he crossed the room and sat down. He was the best-looking man she had ever seen in her life. He even smelled good: like Ivory soap and apples. “I feel safe when you’re here,” she said.
“You are always safe,” Father Bliss reminded her. “God is always with you.”
“It doesn’t feel like it,” Ida said, adding hastily, “Yet. Maybe it will when I get used to Him.” She reached for her cigarettes, lying within reach on the bedspread, hesitated, laid her hand flat. She hadn’t had a cigarette today. Hadn’t wanted one. All her vices were disappearing. She herself was disappearing. “Every day in every way,” she recited, trying to sound hopeful. “I do feel I’m getting closer to Him, though.”
“How can you get closer,” Father Bliss said, “to someone you are already part of?” He furrowed handsomely. “That’s like trying to be the nose on the outside of the face when you are already the air on the inside of the lungs. It’s not possible, is it?”
“No,” Ida said. “I guess not.” She kept her hand on the bedspread, hoping he would cover it with his own. He had done that once, during his first visit. She had told him the truth from the start—the only person she had ever told the truth to—and he knew her sins, not all the little ones, there were too many of those, but the big ones, the important ones, he knew those. He knew she had been a bad daughter, a bad wife, and a bad mother. What he didn’t know, what she hadn’t told him, was that she was afraid she had already become a bad Catholic.
“When I pray,” she said now, “I drift off.”
Father Bliss smiled, his grey eyes on the distance.
“I drift off,” Ida repeated, raising her voice.
“Ah.” He blinked. “And where do you go?”
“Nowhere. That’s so frightening. I feel suspended in nowhere. It’s better than before,” she added, “when I had the horse and the demons. Then I was in hell.”
“You don’t need to worry about hell,” Father Bliss said.
“No, I know, you told me, my soul will go to heaven, thanks to you and the beautiful, wonderful Holy Roman Catholic Church.” She plucked at the spread and glanced at him, hesitant. “That frankly is one of the reasons I decided to convert.”
“It doesn’t matter what your reasons are. God does not care what car you drive to His garage.”
“Yes, I know that in eternity I will be at peace and that’s a relief. But it’s now …” Ida continued. “Now that is so brutal.”
“ ‘Brutal’ is a hard word,” Father Bliss said.
“My life is hard.” Ida opened her mouth to say more but then closed it. How could she explain to him, to anyone, how isolated she felt. How alone. Even Francis didn’t know. Jim Deeds knew, but Jim Deeds was a doctor and didn’t care. Kay looked sometimes as if she knew, but Ida had seen that same look of sympathetic understanding cross Kay’s face when Nicky pinched his finger on the nutcracker or Stacy complained about a bad haircut. The sheer effort, will, and courage it took to lift a coffee cup, attend a conversation, or watch the evening news when all the time she felt on fire and in orbit, like a disintegrating meteorite, wanting to scream Help me help me help me when she knew that no one could. It didn’t matter. Other people’s pity was poison and always had been. I don’t need it, Ida thought. I never have and I never will. “I’ve had to fight for everything I’ve ever wanted,” she said.
“That’s all over now,” Father Bliss said. And without warning his hand, warm, strong, wonderfully human, covered hers. She almost shouted with pleasure. But nothing was simple. She had to risk what she had just been granted.
She took a deep breath. “I never told you who those demons were. They were my daughter Kay and my husband Francis. And they were fornicating.”
She glanced up through her lashes.
Maybe Father Bliss didn’t know what the word “fornicating” meant. He was looking calmly at the far side of the bed where Francis’s pillow and ashtray and golf magazines lay. Ida turned her head and looked too. A hot flood of tears caught her by surprise, streamed down her face. She remembered how astonished Mimi Johns had been to learn that Francis still slept with her even after the amputations. But that was how Francis was, that’s how he showed things. He didn’t make love to her anymore, hadn’t since last summer, always had an excuse, an early meeting, a late appointment. But he never acted as if she repelled him. Never acted as if she were only half a woman now. And in the middle of the night when she reached for him he was there, slight, sour, snoring. “It wasn’t real, was it?” she asked.
“I don’t see how,” said Father Bliss.
“I’m a useless old cripple,” Ida blurted. “With a sick, filthy mind.”
“You are God’s child,” Father Bliss corrected her.
Ida softened and settled under the touch of his clean white hand. Then, eyes on her own reflection in the vanity mirror, her pale face distant as a friend left on shore, she let loose a last flash of anger and hurt. “Kay would never have the guts to do something like that anyway,” she said. “Kay’s afraid of her own shadow. And Francis. You know what he says about incest. ‘If she’s not good enough for her own family, who else would want her?’ That’s just a joke,” she added, catching Father Bliss’s mute, troubled stare. “That’s Francis’s sick sense of humor.” And despite herself, she laughed.
Her laugh was the first thing Kay heard when she came in the next week. She banged the front door behind her, propped her umbrella in the stand, and slipped out of her boots. Outside, the January rain fell fast and cold. “You sound happy,” she called. She padded toward the bedroom in her stocking feet with a dripping bouquet of garden narcissus held in front of her. She avoided her reflection in the mirrored hall. She knew what she looked like. Sweets, smokes, the daily hangover, a run of rained-out runs with Zabeth, insomnia, poverty, and Neal’s silent celibacy were doing her in. Plus she had not seen Charles Lichtman since the concert two months before. His bicycle was locked up; his house was deserted. Where had he gone? Was it her fault he’d left?
Greta met her at the doorway, a tense, tiny German woman with a stagy manner. She clapped her hands, said, “Oh how vunnerful,” and grabbed the bouquet. Kay, caught off guard, instinctively pulled back. Ida laughed from the bed again and Coco barked from her cage in the kitchen.
“Let Greta do what she wants,” Ida advised, stopping to cough. “You’ll just be sorry if you don’t.”
Ida was wearing a new nightgown today, yellow silk with roses and an edge of soft lace. Her hair had been washed and brushed into a light shiny cap. Kay found her eyes skipping over the heavy silver crucifix as automatically now as they skipped over the flat space under Ida’s blankets; she was stopped for a moment by the large white Bible open in Ida’s hands but was relieved to see that the remote control to the television set was being used as a bookmark.
“Now your dotter is here,” Greta said darkly, behind her, “we turn you.”
“Can’t we do it later?” Kay watched as Ida batted her eyelashes at Greta and in a baby voice added, “I haven’t even had lunch yet.”
“What can I do with her? She has the bedsores and needs to be turned. But! She is impossible.” Greta flung her hands out and pivoted toward Kay. “Today at least she wants lunch. I make her such a nice lunch too. Soup.”
“Not that sick soup,” Ida flirted.
“Nonono.” Greta wagged a finger. “This is good chicken soup. Just the way you like it. I use the bouillon, and then I add some carrot, some onion, some parsley …”
“No Cream of Wheat?”
“No, Ida. No Cream of Wheat. That is only for when I make you the sick soup and today is not a sick day. Your daughter is here. Your husband will be home soon. Father Bliss—oh! what a dreamboat—will be coming soon too. So today is a good day.” Greta rolled her eyes, clasped her hands, and backed out.
“Don’t be mean.” Ida settled back, serene, and soon Greta bustled in again with a bed tray set with a covered bowl, a plate of cold toast, and the narcissus, clipped to an even four inches and wedged into a baby-food jar. She put the tray over Ida’s blanket and set the jar down loudly by another enormous vase of black roses. Kay picked up the card. Glo Sinclair must be supporting the flower industry single-handedly.
“First your medicine,” Greta fussed, and Kay looked up to see Ida take the dime store demitasse Victor had given her for Mother’s Day when he was ten and sip something yellow. She dribbled, said “Damn,” handed the cup back to Greta, picked up her spoon, and bent over her soup.
“Don’t watch,” she said to Kay. “I slurp. Francis can’t bear it.”
“I’m not as delicate as Dad.” Kay remembered Francis imitating her and Victor when they were children, chewing with his mouth open, his eyes cold with contempt. Lucky Mom, she thought, she gets to see that side of him now. Idly she picked up the Bible and turned as she did with most books to the back. She stopped at a line from Revelation: “… and lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood …”
“It’s like a cartoon, isn’t it,” she mused. “Exactly the sort of thing I don’t let Nicky watch on Saturday mornings. Pow. Bang. Boom. Instant apocalypse.”
“What is apocalypse, Kay?”
Kay looked up. Ida waited, soup spoon in hand. Didn’t she know? Or was the yellowish medicine affecting her? Was the cancer jangling her brain again? Wasn’t she still in remission? She had made perfect sense—almost perfect sense—since Christmas. But if Greta called this a “good” day, there must be “bad” days, days Kay didn’t hear about. Sick days. “It means the end of the world, Mom.”
“Like that movie Francis rented last week. Apocalypse Now.”
“Dad rented that?” Kay dropped her eyes and read another line. “Scary stuff,” she decided, closing the book. She looked up, surprised to find Ida watching her.
“You’re so funny.”
“I am?”
“Yes. You’re jealous of Francis and Greta and Father Bliss and now you’re jealous of the Holy Bible.”
“I am not. What do you mean?”
“You’ve always had a green streak a mile wide.” Ida looked at her curiously. “You do know I love you, don’t you?”
“Sure. No. I don’t know. I’ve never known anyone loves me.”
“Nonsense.”
Kay shrugged, eyes down. “You didn’t like me when I was a baby.”
“You had colic. And you were awfully … I don’t know … clingy. But I like you now. Isn’t that enough? I especially like it that you have been coming up and seeing me as often as you have. It gives me enormous pleasure.”
That’s not the same as loving someone, Kay thought. But—“It’s my pleasure,” she said. It was. “Really.”
“And as for poor John …”
“Who?”
“Young Saint John who wrote Revelation. He just got too much sun. That’s what Father Bliss thinks. He was out there all alone on the rocks; there weren’t any trees or shade in Ephesus so he got overexposed and probably had a minor stroke. Everything’s changed now of course. The whole coastline’s gone. It’s not even an island anymore. Oh! Guess what! Alice died yesterday!”
Kay pulled herself back from Ephesus, wherever that was. Alice Bernard? Alice Bernard had come to the concert in November. She and Howard had tiptoed in late behind the Junior Bentleys, quaking with giggles; Alice had produced a thermos of hot spiced rum from the pocket of her fur coat during intermission. She hadn’t looked sick.
“Melanoma. Howard is quite upset. But he’ll be all right. He knows how to cook. And Alice used to go back East to visit her sisters every summer so he knows how to wake up alone. And he has friends. He meets with other men and they play drums. I guess you’d call them a … whatdoyoucallit …”
“Support group?”
“Yes. But Francis. I don’t think Francis has a support group.”
Kay shook her head. It was hard to imagine Francis in any group at all.
“I don’t know what will happen to Francis,” Ida said. “He doesn’t have anyone.”
“He has lots of people,” Kay said. “Lots of friends. Plus Victor, and”—less certain—“me.”
“He acts so independent but he’s going to fall apart. Oh look.” Ida touched her napkin to her face. “Am I sweating or what?”
Kay took the napkin and dabbed the perspiration gently off her mother’s cheek and hairline.
“He’s shy,” Ida continued. “Cut off. He doesn’t have the first idea about how to take care of himself. He’ll just hole up here with his crossword puzzles and never go out. If I just had six more months …”
“You do!” Kay began, trying to sound firm and hide her panic, but Ida silenced her with a sad, steady look.
“… six more months of halfway decent health, you know what I’d do? I’d put this house on the market, sell it, and make Francis buy one of those new condominiums by the golf course. He needs fresh air and exercise and upbeat jolly company. He needs a woman.”
“You’re a woman.”
“No, Kay. I mean a woman with two legs. Maybe his old girlfriend will hunt him down again. That little architectress from New York. She was very much in love with him, you know, but I don’t believe he’s given her two thoughts since he came back to us. He’s like that. Cold. Would you please rub my foot?”
“What architectress? You don’t have a foot.”
“Rub where it would be if I did.”
“Here?”
“Good. Thank you. Yes, you knew he left us to have an affair, didn’t you? You didn’t? Well it doesn’t matter. We got him back, you and I. And then Victor was born. The thing about love, Kay, you have to fight for it. You can’t just wait for it to come to you. You have to reach out and grab it and then you have to hold on to it. It’s a struggle, like everything else. You’ve had things easy. It’s all been handed to you on a silver platter. Now promise me one thing? Are you listening? Promise you won’t fuck your father?”
Kay started, dropping the invisible foot.
“Promise?” Ida repeated.
“Are you crazy?”
“I don’t know. Am I?”
“Yeah. Yes. I’d say you are. Sick …”
Ida chuckled.
“… and crazy.”
Ida pushed a package of Merits across the bed. “Don’t you want a cigarette, Kay?”
“Yes,” Kay said. “I do.” She lit one for herself and offered one to Ida, which Ida waved away. Kay’s hand trembled in time to the rain that ticked on the skylight like a loud clock. How far had the cancer gone? How much of Ida was it taking? She stubbed the cigarette out. “I’ve never even seen Dad naked,” she said at last.
“He’s modest,” Ida agreed.
“He wears shoes and socks to the beach.”
“Yes, his skin is white as a girl’s. Say, is there any stuff left in that cup?”
Kay picked up the demitasse and looked at the few yellow drops left on the bottom. “What kind of dope are you taking?”
“I don’t know. Francis gets it from somewhere. He wants to give me marijuana too. Can you see that? You think I’m bad now?”
“I don’t know … marijuana’s supposed to help with pain.”
“No, Kay. Nothing helps with pain. But you can’t tell Francis that. He’s always trying to find ways to make me feel better. Sometimes I’ll see him looking at me and his look is so sweet it makes me want to cry. I’ll pretend to read or be asleep because I know I don’t deserve a look like that. Old cripple. He’ll be better off when I’m gone.” Ida’s eyes circled the room, rested, at last, on the vanity mirror. “You all will. If I had any courage at all I’d …” She stopped talking and made a jerky slice at her stomach with the flat of her hand. “Like Duffy Sinclair. Did you know it’s okay to kill yourself now? Father Bliss says suicides can go to heaven and be buried in a churchyard like everyone else. And oh darling, I hate to ask you—but Francis has to go out of town Wednesday night, his investment club is meeting up north and he has to give a presentation and can’t get out of it. And Greta can’t stay over and I’ll need someone here. Can you baby-sit me?”
“All night?”
“Dear Kay.” Ida closed her eyes against the pillow. “Tell me, does Neal still take you to the symphony? When you first told us you were going to marry him, Francis said, ‘Well at least he takes her to the symphony.’ Greta,” she said, opening her eyes and smiling as Greta came in to clear the tray, “you cheated. You put egg in that soup.”
“I just put in a little egg, missus, mixed up with some flour. No Cream of Wheat. Just flour. That is how we do it in Germany.”
“It was delicious.” Ida closed her eyes again. “Now why don’t you turn me. I’ll try not to scream.”
“Why would you scream?” Kay asked.
“Because it hurts, dum-dum. Why do you think? Look, Kay, I don’t want you in here. You’ll just get in the way. Why don’t you go play the piano.”
Dismissed, Kay left the bedroom. But I don’t want to play the piano, she thought. She saw the lunch Greta had set out for Francis on the dining room table—two tuna sandwiches in plastic wrap, a cup turned upside down in its saucer for coffee, a small bag of potato chips, and an orange, already peeled, drying crustily under the skylight. The afternoon paper was turned to the crossword puzzle and the gold pen lay beside it. It made an efficient and sterile composition, a picture of frugality and loneliness, and was surely more indicative of Francis’s daily life than any sexy lunch he might be having with Zabeth passing bags of pot back and forth under a tippy table at the Dark Moon Grill. Oh what had Ida meant when she’d said “Don’t fuck your father”? What an ugly thought. How hard it must be being Ida. How hard it was to be around her at all. Poor Dad. No wonder he had an affair. But so long ago! Before Victor was born? Before Ida tripped on the toys and took her first fall?
Maybe Dad will feel freer when she’s gone, Kay thought. Maybe he will be happier, more relaxed. Friendlier. He might come to dinner and take walks with us and go on picnics on Sundays. We might even travel, he and I, the two of us, alone. We might go to Ephesus. She saw herself on a cruise ship, standing at the rail in a windblown white dress, her arm in her father’s, both of them laughing … Such a good daughter, she heard other passengers saying. Such a comfort to him.
She shook her head and walked quickly to the piano. As she settled herself on the bench she heard a scuffling sound from the bedroom followed by a scream so uncontrolled that she trembled and hugged herself, one hand at her mouth. Brute, she thought of Greta, but she knew it wasn’t Greta, Greta was doing the best she could. It was Ida, Ida’s body, broken and still breaking, burnt with radiation, bursting with bedsores. She reached up and riffled through the sheets of music on top of the old piano. The scream rose again and her fingers tumbled onto the keys with a clamor.
She played for an hour, badly, passionately; she played all of Scott Joplin’s rags and Mozart Made Easy and the “Theme from Exodus”—anything to block out the terrible sounds of that woman who had been in pain, in the bedroom, for almost as long as she could remember.
· · ·
“When will you learn?” Neal asked. She had stopped by his shop on her way home from Ida’s and sat huddled in her raincoat in his back room, morosely trying to sip the herbal tea he had made for her on his hot plate. It was green and smelled like a mouse nest. “Your mother always gets to you,” Neal lectured. “It’s like every time you meet her is the first time you’ve met her.”
“That’s not so bad. What’s wrong with that? It sounds Zen. You don’t have any whiskey do you?” Kay asked.
Neal didn’t answer. His thick hair was ruffled and he had draped a crocheted shawl over his sloped shoulders. He looked like a grandmother. He had been bent over an envelope of papers when she first came in but had moved it aside; she got only a glimpse of a familiar name, Dominic Delgardo, stamped hugely on letterhead, before he shoved the papers into a drawer. “Who’s that who keeps writing you?” she had asked, expecting no answer and getting none. Neal’s secret life, one mystery after another. Still, the touch of his hand on her wrist was welcome, even though he had found and was rubbing a new bruise, and his eyes, as he regarded her, were quiet, ready to receive what she had to give. Which wasn’t much. The usual muddle. Neal, pressing down a final time on her bruise, rose and began to busy himself at the worktable. The rain continued. His favorite radio talk show droned on. What was the subject today? She tried to catch a word. “Potassium.” The subject today was “potassium.” If you ate a banana a day instead of an apple a day you would live longer. Well: good. Living longer was good. Wasn’t it?
“I saw Father Bliss today,” she said after a while. “He was driving up the hill as I was coming down. Big, tan, white-haired guy in a Cadillac. He looked confused, as if he couldn’t remember the address. Mom says he’s able to cast out demons.”
Neal looked up from the photograph he was matting. “Who’s Father Bliss, hon?”
“Oh Neal.” She slid off the table, walked to the sink, and poured her tea down the drain. “What should I do?”
“About what?”
“Us. Them. Me.”
She came up behind him and put her arms around his waist. His body felt slight, bent, soft. She looked at the blown-up photograph he was matting. “What’s this?”
“West Valley in 1926. This is what the stables looked like then. Here’s where the shop is now. And the old theater. And Moriarty’s Emporium. And look at the railroad station. People came for miles to shop here. This place was a hub. And it could be again.”
Kay followed his finger across the brown and white paper, taking in the boxy wooden buildings, the wide main street, the woman with the parasol, the boy in knickers. That could have been her and Nicky years ago. “So,” she said, trying to understand. “You want to re-create the past?”
“I’d like to salvage some of the good things from it, yes.”
“Like us?” She met his blank look. “Remember when I used to come in here and meet you? You’d lock the front door, turn the CLOSED sign to the street, take the phone off the hook?”
“Lost a lot of business,” Neal conceded.
“You didn’t use to care about business.” Kay walked to a stack of prints and began leafing through them. The same old rock stars—Janis, Stevie, Grace—mixed in with the same old romantic stuff—Pre-Raphaelite nymphs with red hair and curled lips. Neal’s idealized women didn’t have much to do with the moody matron in a stained raincoat she had somehow turned into. She paused, eyes narrowed on a Chagall bride and bridegroom. She had just had an idea. “Want to go away? Take off for a few days? Nicky could spend the night at a friend’s house and you and I could drive up the coast, like we used to, just the two of us, have dinner at a little inn, spend the night.”
“I don’t know—conversation. Food. Romance.” She paused. “Sex.”
Neal shook his head. “I don’t think so … Now what are you suddenly so mad about? Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving you. I meant to do it last November after the concert. Why didn’t I? What happened? I can’t believe we ever got married and had a son.”
“Stop. You’re doing it, hon. You’re spiraling.”
“Don’t tell me what I’m doing. Look at what you’re doing. You’re the one who is making me spiral.”
“I can’t keep up with you,” Neal said. “You just asked if we could go away next weekend and I said I didn’t think so because I had too much work to do.”
“Is that what you said?”
“Yes.”
“Is that what you think happened?”
“Yes.”
“No. Neal. No. What happened is that I propositioned you and you rejected me. Like you always do. So what is the point of being married to someone who always rejects you? What am I doing being married to you at all?”
“If you’d calm down—”
“I can’t calm down. If I calmed down I’d be like you. I’d be dead. Oh, listen. There’s the doorbell. Can you believe it? You actually have a customer. Now maybe you will have too much to do.” She spun on her heel, slipped, caught herself, and strode shakily toward the front door. At the threshold of the workroom she stopped. “You don’t even take me to the symphony anymore.”
Neal lifted his palms. “What is that supposed to mean?”
She gulped back a surge of tears and gripped her shoulder bag to stop it from slamming against her hip as she hurried out. Even so she brushed against the man who had just come in. She tugged at the front door and his hand fell on hers.
“It’s a little stuck,” he said. She looked up. Chocolate-dropeyes. A gap between the two front teeth. Sunburn on the rosy cheeks. It must have been sunny in Mexico. Or Tahiti. Or wherever he’d been.
“That de Koonig book came in,” she said.
He lifted his eyebrows, said nothing.
“The one you ordered last summer.”
“Oh. De Kooning.”
“Is that how you pronounce it? Well. It’s on the Reserve Shelf. So whenever you want to come pick it up.”
“How about Thursday?”
“Thursday’s fine.”
“At four?”
“Four?”
“It’s a date.”
And she was out on the street in the rain again with tears in her eyes and a grin on her face and her mother’s scream in her ears and Neal’s puzzled face in her mind and the heat of Charles Lichtman’s brown hand on hers. It was no wonder, overloaded as she was, that she dropped her keys into a puddle by the side of the car and had to kneel in the street to retrieve them; the wonder was, as a truck driver shouted down, that she wasn’t run over and killed on the spot.