ONCE UPON A TIME an editor, knowing my fascination with angels, invited me to write a story about one, and I thought, “Here’s an assignment after my own heart,” and I said yes. Then I panicked.
What did I know about angels?
The first angel I saw had a chipped nose. It was blond, male, and lived in a clock, which hung in the parlor of the apartment Mrs. Lear rented in my grandmother’s house in Owosso, Michigan. When the hour struck, two doors opened at the top, and a tiny platform revolved, bearing the archangel Michael from one door to the next. Such dignity, such beauty—he was a procession of one. Mrs. Lear’s husband had fought in the first world war and brought it from Germany, along with a Luger and some empty shells. A local jeweler who repaired it told him that it must have once held other figures, probably Adam and Eve being driven from the garden. Time had taken the archangel’s sword, the fugitives, and the tip of his holy nose. Nevertheless, when I knew the hour was preparing to strike, I would knock on Mrs. Lear’s door and ask to see the angel, moving from darkness into darkness. When the novelty wore off and I no longer asked, Mrs. Lear would knock on my grandmother’s apartment to announce the angel was marching and did I want to watch it?
An angel marching from darkness into darkness—such an event should not go unnoticed.
The second angel I saw was a picture from an old insurance calendar that my grandmother had saved long after the year was out. A young woman in a white nightgown is standing with arms outstretched over two children playing at the edge of a cliff. There is a large asterisk of apple butter on her wings, as if someone had hurled a full jar during an argument and the angel had taken a blow intended for someone else. The calendar hung in my grandfather’s treatment room, where patients with rheumatism and asthma came to avail themselves of the wonders of osteopathy. Only the angel and our family knew that the treatment room had once been a pantry and the waiting room doubled as the doctor’s bedroom; my grandfather unfolded the sofa at night to sleep and in the morning folded it up again before the office opened. Grandmother, who managed the renting of the other rooms, had her own quarters off the kitchen.
Though I have seen many pictures of angels since these two, they seem the real ones, the standard by which all others should be measured.
Two days after I’d agreed to write a book about angels, my sister Kirsten called from Ann Arbor with bad news.
“Mother fell and broke her hip,” she said, “so I grabbed the first plane out of Pittsburgh last night. The doctor said he wants to give her a new one.”
“A new hip? At eighty-seven?”
“He said it’s her only chance of walking. And it’s manmade, so it’s even better than her old one. It will last forever.”
“Is she conscious?”
“She’s right here. I’ll put her on the phone.”
I pressed my ear to the receiver and heard nothing.
“Mother? How are you feeling?”
She did not answer for a long time, and when she did, she sounded far off, as if she were speaking from a different room.
“Isn’t it the limit I should have to go through this?” she whispered.
A long silence, broken by Kirsten’s voice.
“I found Mother’s purse. It’s been missing for two months. And now we can’t find her teeth. They’ve simply vanished for good and all.”
“How long will she be in the hospital?”
“A week. They like to get you out early here. But we’ll need round-the-clock care when she moves home.”
“What about bringing her to Shady Park?” I asked. “Can they keep her?”
From the house she’d lived in for fifty years my mother moved to a single large room in Shady Park Manor, a convalescent home in Pittsburgh five blocks from my sister and her husband. She had a room of her own. Kirsten made sure of that. On its bare surfaces my sister put spindles of snapshots; on its white walls she hung the brass filigree frames that kept us all in line: me in my cap and gown standing beside Daddy in the cap and gown he only wore when pressed into marching at commencement; my sister in her wedding dress, rising from a swirl of lace; the grandchildren, who had long ago outgrown their school portraits; Mother’s diploma from Michigan, its blue and gold ribbon faded but intact. The bureau held her lavender underwear, her nylons, her purple shoes. The closet held all ten of her best purple dresses.
This was the room I saw when I arrived from New York. My classes at Vassar were finished; Kirsten and John would be gone for two weeks. The note in the kitchen laid out my duties.
“Please take in the mail, water the plants in the dining room, and feed the tortoise. He only eats scraped carrots. Scraper is on sink. Please take Mother’s dresses to the laundromat and wash them on DELICATE. They wash everything in hot water at the home.”
Every morning I walked the five blocks to Shady Park, past the Fourth Presbyterian Church and the synagogue, past the Greek restaurant, the Cafe del Sol, the Korean grocer who hangs strings of jade beads in the window among the melons. Past Eat’n Park, where families carry heaping plates from the salad bar and single men sit at the counter, drinking coffee and smoking. Past Jacov’s Vegetarian Deli and Tucker’s Secondhand Books.
Shady Park Manor stands over all, at the top of a steep hill. I hurry through the lobby, beautifully decorated in silver and blue wallpaper, up the stairs past the nurse’s station. When I arrive at my mother’s room she is sitting up in her chair, asleep, belted in, like a passenger in a plane about to land—but somewhere deep in the body of the plane, the fatigued metal has given way and sent this one woman, still strapped to her seat, hurtling through space.
Over my mother’s bed, someone has taped a list of instructions.
7:30: Get Mrs. W. up to eat breakfast. Be sure dentures are in with fast-teeth powder.
8:00–2:00: Keep Mrs. W. up once she is in chair. She will fight to go back to bed, but she needs to be kept active.
“Mom,” I say, “wake up!”
She opens her eyes.
“What is this place?”
“A condominium,” I lie. “Come on, Ma, let’s get the wheelchair and go for a spin around the block.”
“Why can’t I walk? What’s the matter with me?”
“You broke your hip.”
I unfold the wheelchair and lift her into it. She is staring at my feet.
“You need new shoes,” she says.
We both gaze down at my scuffed loafers. Miles of pavement have pared the heels away and loosened the stitching.
“Promise me you’ll buy a new pair. Take some money from my purse. Where is my purse?”
I hand it to her. She opens it and peers in and twitches up a five-dollar bill.
“Didn’t I have more money than this when I started?”
“Oh, Mother, you don’t need any money here.”
“Is this an old people’s home?”
“It’s a condominium, Ma.”
“It’s a home. I never thought my children would put me in a home.”
“Ma, you need twenty-four-hour care.”
“What did people do in the old days?”
What did they do? Dutiful daughters struggled with lifting, feeding, and changing their aged parents. I thought of my mother under the stress of caring for her own mother, who lived with us when I was growing up. Does my mother remember the night she got up to go to the bathroom and passed out from exhaustion? She landed against the radiator. Now, at the edge of her short sleeve I can see the long scar on my mother’s arm, deep as a knife wound, where the flesh burned slowly away as she lay, numb to the pain. These dutiful women—caregivers is the current term for them—did not go off to jobs in the morning. And they certainly were not writers.
We pass the nurse’s station and the board that lists the day’s activities. Talking Book Club, Pet Therapy, Monday Night Movie, Bingo, Current Events, Sensory Stimulation, this month’s birthdays. In the all-purpose room, the physical therapist is tossing a beach ball to a group of men and women in wheelchairs. None of them raise their arms. As I wheel Mother outside into the sunshine, she raises a pleading face to mine.
“Can’t you find a little corner in your house for me?”
In the evening, when I unlock the door of my sister’s house, the tortoise creeps out of his shell and crosses the kitchen floor to meet me. His ancient eyes blink when I scrape his carrots, letting the shavings pile up on the plate like golden pages. Outside in the shimmering heat, children play hide and seek and call to each other. The bedroom is suffocating. I carry my sheet and pillow downstairs and make a bed on the living room floor. I read another chapter in John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and underline a sentence that sounds like good advice, if only I knew how to follow it: “Fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader’s mind.” The last sound I hear before falling asleep is the tortoise taking his constitutional, the faint scraping of his claws along the floor.
Have I told you everything? No. I have not told you how every evening I sat down at my brother-in-law’s electric portable and worked on my story. A story about an angel.
The hardest part of writing a story or a novel is beginning it. A letter that arrived recently from a friend of mine whose first novel got rave reviews opens with these words: “So painful coming into possession of a new novel. There is a deep agenda, and I sometimes think I haven’t the faintest clue what it is. Still, every day, here I am, at my table, facing it and struggling with lethargy.” The material of a story offers itself to the writer like a house in which all the doors and windows are locked. Whose story is it? Whose voice does it belong to? The opening sentence is the key, the way into the house. It may let you in at the front door like a homeowner or at the window like a thief, but it lets you in.
For my angel story, I had no opening sentence. But I had a great many notes on angels, particularly those I deemed useful to writers. Uriel the angel of poetry and Raphael the angel of healing led the list. And how many angels there are, for every problem and purpose! There is an angel who presides over memory and an angel who presides over time, even an angel who presides over Monday. There is an angel for small birds and an angel for tame beasts, an angel for solitude and an angel for patience and an angel for hope. The angel who watches over footstools can offer you a pillar of light to support you, a gift that Hemingway and Virginia Woolf would have appreciated since both wrote standing up.
I also noted the angels who presided over conditions that writers pray to be spared. Barakiel is the angel of chance; Michael, the angel of chaos and insomnia; Harbonah, the angel of annihilation; and Abaddon, the angel of the abyss.
But among the angels, who can really tell which are for us and which against us? There is an angel who presides over hidden things. Forgotten names, lost notes, misplaced drafts—does he hide them or find them? There is an angel of odd events. Are they gifts or griefs, lucky accidents or lost opportunities?
Notice, I didn’t say I wrote my story. I said, worked on it. What did I really know about angels? How do we come to know things as a writer? I looked at my notes, but no story came. What was I looking for? I made tea. I thought of how other writers prepared to face the blank page. Balzac drank fifty cups of coffee a day, till it killed him; Disraeli put on evening clothes; George Cohan rented a Pullman car drawing room and traveled till he was done with the book or story. Emerson took walks. Colette’s husband locked her in her room, and Victor Hugo gave his clothes to his servant with instructions to return them when he was done.
After struggling with the story for three days, I understood the problem. This story had the shape of the one I’d just finished writing. What we’ve just written lays its shadow on the next work, and it can happen with any length, any genre. A friend who was working on her second novel told me, “It took me two years to break the spell of my first book when I started my second. I kept wanting to repeat what had worked so well. Combinations of characters, scenes.” Writing is like panning for gold. You put your pan down close to the mother lode and scoop up a handful of gravel. You know the grains of ore are sparkling in front of you, if only you could see them. Knowing this, even when you find nothing but broken stones, it’s hard to throw them away.
So I wrote a story about angels. I wrote badly. I was on the wrong track, but I didn’t have the courage to throw those pages away, for then I’d have nothing. Keats was right. All writing is a form of prayer. Was anybody out there listening?
Let me say right now that I don’t think anyone can command the angel to come, though I’ve known at least one person to try, a nun who told her first graders about the guardian angels they’d received at baptism and then said, “I want you all to move over and make room for your angel.” Twenty-five first graders shifted to the right and made room for the incorporeal and the invisible. That is perfect faith. The nephew who told me the story takes a more skeptical view of angels now.
None of this would be worth telling if I hadn’t promised my sister that I’d wash Mother’s clothes at the laundromat, and what shouldn’t happen did happen. I had a simple plan. I would sit with Mother till noon. While she ate her lunch in the dining room, I would carry the laundry basket over to the Wash Bored and read The Art of Fiction and work on my story while the clothes were spinning. And maybe I could take lunch down the street at Jacov’s Vegetarian Deli. It had been closed all week, but a sign promised it would be open on Monday.
I arrived at Shady Park around eleven and headed for Mother’s room. A thin, white-haired woman was walking toward me on crutches, leaning heavily on stout Miss Davidson, the physical therapist. Miss Davidson beckoned me over.
“I’ve been trying to get your mom to walk. She doesn’t try. She won’t even stand up for me. See if you can get her to make an effort.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
“Now Beulah here is doing fine,” said Miss Davidson.
The woman on crutches nodded.
“I walk every chance I get,” she said. “Miss Davidson says, ‘Well, how about heading back to your room now?’ and I say, ‘It hurts, but let’s go just once more, up and down the corridor.’ I can’t wait to go home.”
Miss Davidson frowned at me.
“Medicare won’t pay for your mother’s room if she’s not taking part in the physical therapy program.”
“Is she doing any activities?” I asked hopefully.
“She likes the crafts,” said Miss Davidson. “She made a purple flyswatter out of felt yesterday. And she had the kitten on her lap the whole day.”
“What kitten?” I asked.
“Pet therapy,” said Beulah. “Your mother wouldn’t let anyone else have it. Kept it on her lap the whole time.”
When I walked into her room, Mother was asleep in her chair.
“Ma,” I said, “I hear you had a kitten.”
She opened her eyes.
“What kitten?” she said.
“She forgot already,” said Beulah, leaning in the doorway. Mother turned to her.
“My husband taught for forty-seven years at the University of Michigan. We have a total of twenty-two degrees in our family, all from Michigan.”
“Isn’t that nice,” said Beulah. “Now me, I never went to college. My papa worked in the steel mill, and so did my husband till it shut down. I’m going downstairs in the wheelchair. They have Kool-Aid on the terrace.”
We heard her thumping back to her room. Mother gave me an odd look.
“Why are you carrying a box of soap?” she asked.
“I’m going to wash your clothes.”
And I heaved the laundry basket onto one hip. Lavender plastic; my sister had picked it especially for her.
“You’re a good girl,” she said and smiled. “Lord, I’m just an ordinary mother. How did I get two such wonderful daughters?”
I wheeled her downstairs, and we sat on the terrace with Beulah till lunchtime. The only other patient was a thin, silent man in a wheelchair and a young woman who sat beside him asking,
“Grandpa, can you talk? Can you talk, Grandpa?”
“That’s Mr. Levine,” said Beulah. “He’s a hundred and two. The president sent him a telegram.” She leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “You ask him how old he is and he shouts, ‘A hundred and two.’ There’s not much else he knows. He has Alzheimer’s. And he still has a full head of hair.”
“What disease do I have?” asked Mother.
“You broke your hip,” I said.
“I’ve had lots of broken bones,” said Beulah. “Last year I broke my arm.”
Mother stared down at her own arm, the scarred one, as if it had just been brought for her approval.
“How old it looks,” she said softly.
The Laundry Bored was nearly empty. A woman was sitting under the lone hairdryer, reading a magazine from which the cover had been ripped away. I threw Mother’s clothes in the machine, dialed it to WARM, and poured in the soap. I put The Art of Fiction and my box of Tide in the laundry basket and strolled half a block to Jacov’s Vegetarian Deli.
The restaurant was tiny—no more than five tables. A sign on the wall read “Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ben Gurion Airport. Discover your Roots!” Only one other customer, an elderly man in a black suit, was waiting at the take-out counter for his order. The two cooks wore yarmulkes, yet how different the same garment looked on each of them. The older man was clean-shaven and middle-aged. When he chopped the onions, he seemed to be murdering them. He poured coffee as if it were poison, he shoved a plate of dumplings at the elderly man like a punishment. The younger cook had a thick blond beard and kindly blue eyes, and he loped from the stove to the icebox to the counter as if he had not a care in the world.
The menu over the counter listed vegetable soup and vegetarian pizza.
“I’ll have soup,” I said. “What kind of dumplings did you just give that man?”
“You won’t like them,” said the sour cook.
“I’ll have them anyway,” I said.
“Try one first,” said the young cook, “and if you like it, I’ll give you a plateful.”
He handed me a dumpling on a paper plate. It tasted like nothing I’d ever eaten before or would want to eat again. I ordered a plate of them, to spite the sour cook. The elderly gentleman took his paper plate, paused at a small rack on the wall from which he plucked a greasy page. Out of curiosity, I took one also and found it was a page from the Jewish prayer book, Hebrew on one side, English on the other. There was also a pamphlet, Thought for the Week, so I took that as well and read it as I munched my dumplings:
A Thought for the Week:
Love your fellow Jew as you love yourself.
Alas, I was not a Jew. They would feed me here but they would not love me. I read on:
Sidra Vayeishev. It is different at home (Part II). Last week we learned that our forefather Jacob did not feel “at home” in the world of material possessions. Knowing that he was only a temporary resident in this physical world he felt that his true “home” was in matters of the Neshama, in Torah and Mitzvos. The world with all its comforts, its palaces and mansions, is nothing more than a tent, erected during the journey of life to sleep over for a night, or rest for a day or two. And on a journey, after all, only the bare necessities of eating and sleeping are required; but when the journey is over and one comes home … well, at home it’s different.
When I’d finished the last greasy bite, I put the pamphlet and the prayer sheet in the rack and returned to the laundromat. The lights on the machine were off. The clothes were clean. So was the top of the machine.
The clothesbasket, along with The Art of Fiction and my manuscript, had vanished.
Though the day was hot, I felt as cold as if I wore the wind for a cloak. A terrible calm washed over me, leaving me lightheaded. Loss had numbed my capacity to rage.
Suddenly, among the Reader’s Digests on the folding table, I spied The Art of Fiction. I snatched it up. With shaking fingers I riffled through all the other magazines, shook them, and waited for my manuscript to come out of hiding, like a mischievous child.
Nothing. On this occasion the angel who presides over hidden things was not on my side.
What else was there to do but walk across the street and sit on the bench at the bus stop and consider my life? When the elderly gentleman from Jacov’s Deli sat next to me, I was scarcely aware of him till he began to edge closer.
“I notice the subject of your book,” he said. “It is a subject dear to my heart. Are you a writer?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Stories? You write stories?”
“Stories, a novel, poems,” I said.
“I too wrote stories once,” he said, “though I am not a writer now. I am a teacher. A teacher of American literature. But I have written stories.”
My heart sank. He saw in me a kindred soul. Soon he would press his manuscript upon me. Yet he had used the past tense; perhaps he wrote stories no more. Had his inspiration run dry? Had he lost his memory?
“What kind of stories do you write,” he asked, “if I may ask?”
“Short stories,” I said.
“Forgive me,” he said. “It’s like asking the birds what kind of eggs they lay. Blue? Speckled? Large? Small?”
“Look,” I said, “I can’t really talk about my stories just now. Somebody just stole the only copy of the story I’ve been working on for weeks.”
“You are sure somebody stole it?” he asked, as if such things did not happen in this world.
“I left it in the laundromat while I was eating lunch. And when I came back—”
“Excuse me,” he interrupted, “but may I tell you a story? Long ago there lived in a north province in China a man good at interpreting events. This man had a son, and one day the son’s best mare ran away and was taken by the nomads across the border. The son was distraught, but his father said, ‘What makes you think this isn’t a blessing?’ Many months later, the horse returned, bringing with her a magnificent stallion. The son was delighted and mounted the horse, but had scarcely set out for a ride when he fell and broke his hip. Again he was distraught, and again his father said, ‘What makes you think this isn’t a blessing?’ Two years later the nomads invaded and every able-bodied man marched to battle. All were lost. Only the lame son and the elderly father survived. What is blessing and what is disaster?”
“Somebody stole my story. That’s a disaster,” I said.
Two young women joined us on the bench till one murmured to the other, “I can’t stand this heat. I’m going to the drugstore.”
“What you need in the drugstore?” said the other.
“Nothing. It’s air-conditioned,” said the first. “We can look at magazines.”
I was about to follow them when the elderly gentleman said,
“Steinbeck’s dog chewed the first half of the draft of Of Mice and Men. And Steinbeck forgave him, saying, ‘I’m not sure Toby didn’t know what he was doing when he ate that first draft. I have promoted Toby-dog to be lieutenant-colonel in charge of literature.’ You know, I used to write stories. And I almost wrote a novel. I had three hundred pages written in a big notebook. And then the war came. During the war I lost everything.”
“How terrible to lose a novel!” I cried. I meant to say, how terrible to lose everything.
He shook his head.
“Really, in my case, it was a blessing. I wanted to write a family history, a bildungsroman. Thomas Mann was my hero. I had notes, a family tree, plans, hundreds of plans. But in my heart of hearts I knew my novel sounded wooden. A wise man said, ‘A writer with a fixed idea is like a goose trying to hatch a stone.’ In 1940, I was sent to Ravensbrück. All my life my teachers told me not to daydream. Now it was my salvation. Can you outline a dream? Would it be worth dreaming if you could? In that terrible place I let my mind wander, and my characters came back to me, not as I saw them in my notes and plans but as they saw themselves, full of memories and longings. I understood their real story at last. I turned no one away. Does the sea refuse a single river? Have you heard of Van Der Post and his explorations of Africa?”
“No,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Never mind. He tells of the time he traveled to a village where a great hunter lived. When he arrived, he found the hunter sitting motionless. And the villagers said, ‘Don’t interrupt him. He is doing work of the utmost importance. He is making clouds.’”
“Did you finish your novel?” I asked. I have a weakness for happy endings.
“How could I finish it? We had no paper. No pens. But we had tongues. So I became a storyteller instead of a writer. I no longer thought of plots, only of voice. Of whose story I was telling. When I hear the voice, I know the story will find me. Storytellers do not lose their stories, except when they die. I like to start my stories in the old style, once upon a time. “Once upon a time” is a promise, a promise of a story, and I try to keep my promises. Of course, not everyone agrees with me about these methods. My son, for example. He’s a TV writer. Weekends, he wants to write the great American novel, but he doesn’t know how to get started. One day he calls me from New York, all excited. ‘I’ve just signed a contract to write the bible!’ Naturally I’m interested. He goes on to say that this bible is not from God, of course. This is the book TV scriptwriters use when they’re doing a new series of shows. It describes characters, it describes place, it describes adventures.
“‘And for what show are you writing a bible?’ I ask my son.
“‘It’s a mini-series,’ he says. ‘It’s called The Further Adventures of Alice in Wonderland.’
“‘How can that be?’ I say. ‘There is only one Lewis Carroll.’
“‘Yes, Papa, but there are five scriptwriters. They’ll make up the other adventures. But they can write only about what they know. I’m going to write them a detailed description of Wonderland and the characters.’ What do you think, fellow-scribbler? Is it a good idea, the further adventures of Alice in Wonderland?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What happened to your son?”
“My son read the Alice books carefully. He mapped the terrain, noted the architecture, the dangers, the geography, the birds and animals. He wrote out character studies of everyone mentioned in the books. And he got paid well. And suddenly a brilliant idea struck him. Why not write a bible for his great-unwritten American novel? How much easier it would be to start his novel if he had a detailed knowledge of his characters. Hadn’t his English teachers always said, ‘Write about what you know’?”
“My teachers said the same thing,” I laughed.
“They all say it,” said the elderly gentleman. “I even said it to my students. But I didn’t mean my students should write such a bible. If you take everyone’s advice, you’ll build a crazy house. My son wrote out descriptions of all his characters and their locale. Then he wrote the first two chapters and showed them to me. ‘Aaron,’ I said, ‘how can I tell you? This is from your head, not your heart. It’s predictable. No surprises. Even God is surprised by the actions of his creatures.’
“‘I’ve put a lot of time into this,’ he said.
“‘The nest is done, but the bird is dead,’ I told him. ‘You should take a lesson from your Lewis Carroll. He was a storyteller. I know for a fact that when he sent his Alice down the rabbit hole, he didn’t know what would happen next. That white rabbit was a gift from Providence. We should follow Providence, not force it.’ He’s intelligent, my Aaron, but he thinks too much. He needs intelligence to keep him from hindering himself so he is free to do amazing things. I tell him to watch Charlie Chaplin. You have seen his great film Modern Times?”
“A long time ago,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t quiz me on it.
“Maybe you remember, near the end, Charlie has to go on the stage and sing a song. And now he can’t remember the words. So Paulette Goddard writes the words on his cuff. He goes onstage, he tries to read them, he’s hopeless. Not a sound out of him. He’s paralyzed. And then Paulette Goddard calls out, ‘Never mind the words. Just sing.’”
“I think that kind of thing happens only when you tell stories,” I said, “not when you write them.”
“It can also happen when you write them,” he said. “You have two choices. You can arrange the material, with outlines. Or you can arrange yourself. I see you looking at the laundromat. You have business there?”
“I forgot to put my mom’s clothes in the dryer.”
“And you want to see if the thief returned your manuscript.” he added.
“Yes,” I agreed.
Suddenly I remembered my promise.
“Excuse me,” I said, rising. “Do you know a good shoe store?”
“From writing to shoes!” he said and laughed.
“I have to run. I promised my mother I’d buy some new shoes.”
“Are you in such a hurry?” he exclaimed. “Let me tell you about a man who set out to buy himself shoes. He measured his foot and put the measurements away. When he got to the market, he found he’d left the measurements at home. He chose a pair of shoes and hurried home for the measurements, but when he returned the market was closed. He never got the shoes, of course. And that night he dreamed his feet asked him, ‘Why didn’t you trust us? Why did you trust the measurements more than your own feet?’”
We stood up in unison.
“There’s a department store one street over,” he said. “But all shoe stores are good if you need shoes.”
I didn’t go shopping for shoes, and I didn’t find my manuscript. When I arrived at Shady Park, Mother was not in her room. She had been wheeled into the TV room. She was asleep, her head nearly on her chest; she had been left at a long empty table with her back to the TV. Probably she had told the attendant that she didn’t like television. The other chairs were all facing the set, as if their occupants were worshipping it.
I rushed in and turned her chair around.
“Wake up, Ma. We’re going back to your room.”
But Mr. Levine’s chair was stuck in the doorway, blocking it. He was making helpless swoops with his hands, trying to move the wheels.
“Let me help you,” I said, and pushed him through.
Instantly a ripple of movement started behind me, as if I had waked the very walls.
“Lady, can you help me?”
“Miss, can you get me out of here? Miss!”
Heads lifted, hands waved.
“Miss!”
I can’t help them all, I thought.
“Mother, do you want to look at the box of photographs with me?”
“I want to lie down,” she said.
What angel was present in the room with us on that evening? The angel of chance or the angel of memory? The angel of time or the angel of hidden things? After I’d put away her dresses, clean but crumpled from being carried in my arms, I sat on the edge of her bed and flipped through the box of snapshots. Tucked in among the pictures were Christmas cards. Mother never threw away a Christmas card that had a photograph on it. I held up a picture of an elderly couple standing in front of the Taj Mahal.
“Who in thunder are they?” exclaimed Mother.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Let me read you the writing on the back. ‘We visited fourteen countries and had a wonderful time. Love, Dorothy and Jack.’”
“Are both my parents dead?” asked Mother.
“Oh, Ma, you know they died a long time ago. If they were alive, they’d be a hundred and twenty.”
I pulled out another picture and held it up. It showed a middle-aged woman standing on what appeared to be a cistern and smiling. I turned the photograph over and read the scrawled inscription.
“This is your old Aunt Velda standing by the well. Clark covered it over for me and put in running water, hot and cold. He also made the driveway you can see behind me, to the left.”
Mother’s face brightened.
“I remember that well,” she said. “There was a pump on Grandpa’s farm in Iowa. Oh, he had acres and acres of the best farmland in the county. And when the men were working in the fields, Grandma would fill a bucket of water from that pump. And she’d send me out with the bucket and dipper to give the men a drink. And it seemed like such a long walk coming and going, I was dying of thirst by the time I got back to the house. And Grandma wouldn’t let me pour myself a drink from the pump right off. No. She made me hold my wrists under the spout, and she’d pump and pump the water over them. To cool my blood, she said, so the cold drink wouldn’t give me a stomachache. Lord, how good that cold water felt. And how good it tasted.”
I’d never heard her tell this story. How many other stories lay hidden in her heart, waiting for a listener to wake them?
Suddenly I understood my real task. I would lay my angel story aside and forget about it for a while. Tomorrow I would bring a notebook and start writing down her memories. I would have to be patient. Memory has nothing to do with outlines and everything to do with accidents.
On my way home I stopped once more at the Wash Bored and couldn’t believe my eyes. There on top of the fateful washing machine stood the clothes basket. And safe in its plastic lavender embrace nestled my story.
I pulled it out and turned the pages, checking them for bruises. I counted the pages. I pulled up a chair and reread them. Was the angel of hope responsible for what happened next?
I threw the entire manuscript in the wastebasket. I would take Rilke’s advice: “If the angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced him, not by tears, but by your horrible resolve to be a beginner.”
Voices. Voices. That night, before I fell asleep, I heard the voices of my characters, though faintly, like a conversation accidentally picked up on a long-distance line. I did not let them know I was listening.
The next morning I set out for Shady Park Manor with a light heart and was pleasantly surprised to meet my storyteller coming out of the synagogue at the end of the block.
“You are going to visit your mother? May I walk with you as far as Jerry’s Good and Used?”
“What’s Jerry’s Good and Used?”
“Jerry has this and that of everything. His specialty is baseball cards. He calls last night and says, ‘I have a treasure. Something you want very much, a card of the great Japanese ballplayer, Sadaharu Oh.’ He asks me why I want a card of Sadaharu Oh. I tell him that I want a picture of the man who wrote in his autobiography not about winning but about waiting. Waiting, he says in that book, is the most active state of all. It is the beginning of all action. Did you find your manuscript?”
“I found it. And I threw it away. I’m starting over. This time I’ll wait for the story to find me. Like you said yesterday.”
I expected my new acquaintance to offer his congratulations, but he did not.
“The freedom of the dream doesn’t mean doing nothing. You still have to sit down every day and write. What if the angel came and you were out shopping for shoes? God helps the drowning sailor, but he must row. You have a long journey ahead of you. And it starts with one footstep.”
“It feels more like an ending than a beginning,” I said.
“Endings and beginnings—are they so far from each other? When I was in Ravensbrück, I was chosen to die. Only because someone among the killers recognized me was I saved. Now when I tell my stories, I remember that moment. It makes the telling more urgent. How is your mother?”
“Fine, I guess. Just very tired.”
“You know, when I was little, my mother would put me to sleep by describing rooms in all the houses she’d lived in. And so many things happened in those rooms. Now you can hardly find a house in which someone has died or been born. It all happens away from us, in big hospitals.”
“My mother told me a story yesterday,” I said. And I described to him my mother’s journey to the harvest fields with the bucket of water, and the journey back to the well, and the cold water on her wrists.
He was silent for so long that I felt I had said something foolish.
“The cold water—it’s such an unimportant detail,” I remarked.
“Unimportant?” he exclaimed. “That is why it’s worth remembering. When I was young I fell in love with a girl named Hilda, who happened to be a twin. I asked her to go out with me. She agreed to go, but only if I could tell her apart from her sister. I studied her face for several minutes. Then she ran and got her twin. Hilda had a blue vein on the bridge of her nose. Unimportant, a blue vein, but when I spied it, I knew I was saved.”
“I’ll save that detail about the cold water for my next story,” I assured him.
He wagged a finger at me.
“Don’t save it. Use it, use it now. You just threw out your life savings. This is no time for prudence.”
We passed Jerry’s Good and Used. My storyteller did not go in. Instead he kept pace with me, up the hill to Shady Park Manor.
“May I tell you a story as we take this little walk together? Long ago, when wizards still walked the length and breadth of the earth, there arrived in the world of the dead a great magician.
“‘Why have you come here?’ asked the Mistress of the Dead.
“The magician explained that when he was building his boat he found he could not finish it without four magic words, and that he had not been able to find them, however far he traveled.
“‘The Lord of the Dead will never teach you his spells,’ answered the Mistress of the Dead.
“But the magician could not give up the task of finishing his boat. He wandered here and there until one day he met a shepherd who told him to seek out the giant.
“‘In his vast mouth there are a hundred magic words. You will have to go down into his enormous belly, and there you will learn marvels. But it’s not easy to get there. You must go along a path leaping on the points of women’s needles, and over a cross-road paved with sharp swords, and down a third road made of the blades of heroes’ axes.’
“But the magician was determined to try it. He would do anything to find those four words and finish his boat. Four words! Marvelous words! Would you believe I once bought a photography book because of a single sentence? I was standing in Tucker’s—it’s a block down the street from us—and I opened up a book and read the epigraph on the first page. It was the beginning and the ending of Finnegan’s Wake.
A way a lone a last a loved
along the riverrun
past Eve and Adam’s
Right away I wanted to read Finnegan’s Wake. But Tucker’s didn’t have it. And the library was closed for a week. But how could I live without those words? So I bought the photography book. I bought it for those words.”
We arrived at Shady Park.
“It is good you are listening to your mother.”
“I’m going to write her memories down. I don’t want to forget them.”
“If you forget a few, don’t worry. What you need will come back to you. We don’t really understand something until we have forgotten it. Live in your roots, not in your branches.”
I took the elevator to the second floor. When I stepped out, a nurse hurried up to me.
“Your mother had a seizure last night. We phoned for the ambulance just an hour ago. Call Dr. Rubin right away—you can use the phone at the nurse’s station.”
The voice of medical authority at the other end of the phone named the problem: status epilepticus. Dr. Rubin explained he had given her Valium and phenobarbital.
“It took us over an hour to stop her seizures. Now she’s asleep.”
“Did she have a stroke?”
“This morning I thought yes. When I looked at the CAT scan, I thought no. Her brain is shrunken, and there’s an abnormal pattern of electric ions. It’s probably caused by the little strokes she’s had earlier.”
“I’ll be right over.”
I hung up, and the nurse touched my arm.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Let me call you a cab.”
I waited downstairs for the cab. The receptionist was changing the bulletin board, posting the new activities. Bingo, Sensory Stimulation, Current Events, Patio Outing.
A way a lone a last a loved along the riverrun.
Dr. Rubin and I are standing by my mother’s bed in the intensive care section. Mother is sleeping under the watchful gaze of the IV and the blood pressure basket hanging over her bed, its black tubes coiled into a nest. Over the basket a large plastic bottle bubbles and quakes. This is not the first time I have seen Mother in intensive care.
“When do you think she’ll wake up?” I ask.
The doctor shrugs.
“Who knows? It could be tomorrow. It could be in ten minutes. Or it could be never.”
I reach out and touch her hair, still soft and wavy, and the translucent skin on her temple: pale freckled silk. The doctor pulls away the plastic respirator that covers the center of her face with a clear green beak, and her sunken cheeks flutter in and out like the throat of a frightened bird. A tube snakes out of her nose, ready for her next feeding. Her mouth is a small black hole. The doctor leans close to her face, as if he might kiss her. Then he pries open her eyelids and looks deeply into her pupils and calls,
“Mrs. Williams! Mrs. Williams!”
Two green-gray coins stare back at him, as cold and indifferent as the eyes of a fish. I feel my knees growing weak, and I sit down fast on the edge of her bed.
“Can she hear us now?”
“Possibly. There’s no way of knowing for sure.”
When he leaves us alone together, I take her hand, frail as the claw of a wren. The IV has left a deep bruise on her arm. How old it looks, this arm, limp when I lift it, a mottled mineral brown across which white scars move like the shapes of ancient beasts.
I know I will never see her alive again. I do not know if she can hear. I put my mouth close to her ear and tell her I love her. I thank her for telling me about the cold water. I tell that I lost my story in Pittsburgh, a story about angels. I lost it at the laundromat, and I met a man who told me how to find it again. Maybe he wasn’t a man at all, maybe he was the story angel? He did not have wings, but who needs wings in Pittsburgh? Though my mouth is touching her ear, I feel my mother going farther and farther away. I want to talk to her till she is out of earshot. Though she is traveling with empty hands, I do not want my mother, who has given me so much, to leave with an empty heart. I give her an angel, a daughter, and herself. And I give her my promise to save them: once upon a time.