THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

 

 

              The bell came through the cold frozen cottage cheese air like down a long tunnel filled with foam and feathers. She wasn’t sure if she were dreaming it or if it was real, and as she opened her eyes, her mind was filled with shredded slices of images and sounds (a road somewhere -- Southern France? -- lined with tall, sentry-like trees, a woman on a bicycle, probably herself, a bicycle bell ringing) that had nothing to do with anyone ringing the doorbell downstairs.

              Her gigantic bed first was like an expanse of arctic snow, then covered with ermine, or wasn’t it white alpaca, and it was only after she’d latched the flexible wire-frames of her glasses onto her ears, that she slowly came into the Now, like pouring cold water slowly to the top of a cut crystal glass.

              She made her way slowly down the stairs to the front door, everything so white, like it was all a bleached world, or made out of sugar...salt...linen...

              She opened the door in total innocence, and a middle-aged blond woman in a mink coat was standing there flanked on both sides by little dark-haired girls with long curls and red coats and dresses, a tall man who looked like Millie’s favorite of all time, Jack Kennedy, standing behind her.

              “Well, we made it, Mom,” said the blonde, and Millie looked carefully at all four of them like she was looking at paramecium under a microscope, thinking ‘People really look funny, they really do look like monkeys, or, what’s their-names, tamarinds, especially someone like this blonde woman, the hair so moussed up and fakey, and all those layers of pancake makeup, and the violet lipstick, who was really there under all the theatrics?’

              She didn’t ask them in or go in herself, her face didn’t show any recognition, so the man that looked like Jack Kennedy kind of took over and bundled them all inside like he was a sheep dog and they were his sheep.

              Only Millie still stood there for a few long moments, looking down the driveway, out across the fields, into the woods, everything covered with snow, which was supposed to make her feel optimistic and up, she guessed, but which, in fact, made her think of morgues and formaldehyde, and her dead husband, Ben. They never should have let her into the cadaver preparation room to see him being drained of blood and pumped full of whatever they pumped him full of, being turned into a mummy. It was like a horror film, and for a moment she almost expected him to come walking up the driveway in the snow all bound in mummy wrappings.

              Hands around her, bringing her inside.

              “Any word from Arthur and Bea? I thought they might already be here...”

              For what?

              ‘Knowing’ the blonde was her daughter and the girls in red were her granddaughters, but not really ‘believing’ it for a moment.

              She couldn’t remember the blonde as a little girl, nursing her, a baby, or growing up. It was as if she’d always been the artificially bronzed woman all full of herself, ego like leaven, a woman like a big Viennese egg twist like you used to be able to buy in Boston when she was a kid.

              “Maybe you ought to call them,” said JFK to Pat, Patricia.

              “We can wait a while. Why don’t you go out into the car and get....”

              Sniffing, like she was missing something that wasn’t there, Millie’s mind filling with candles and shawls and they’d go to the Poor House and sing God Rest You Merry Gentlemen, Let Nothing You Dismay, For Chri-ist Our Sav-i-or is Born This Christmas Day. Only he wasn’t, had been dead for two thousand years, and what had he saved, that’s why she was out there in the middle of the Maine Barrens, because Ben had said ‘ENOUGH, Boston’s practically as bad as New York,” pictures of the Boston Commons passing through her head like a slide show, and the Saturday afternoons on Boylston, she couldn’t remember the names, where the French library was where they always gave concerts, her head full of fur coats and Schubert and Mauriac and Cambridge and the Harvard Yard.

              JFK and the girls starting to bring in all kinds of gigantic covered pans, and then Patricia and him in the kitchen, she could hear them like she had some kind of electronic focusing-in gadget plugged into her ears...

              TAKE CARE OF HERSELF -- CAN’T TAKE CARE OF HERSELF -- DOESN’T EAT RIGHT -- ALL ALONG -- EXTENDED CARE -- INSURANCE.

              Hated hypocrisy. Couldn’t they talk to her?

              She’d been through all that, the explosion of Krakatoa, destruction of Atlantis, Pompeii, Bern (whatever killed the dinosaurs after all?), everyone slowly leaving, they’d come summers and leave in the fall, farm and academic cycles, and there was always the horrible sadistic shortening of the days from mid-June on, so she had a real sense of the death of the year, crucified Jesus, the solstice god....

              Another car in the driveway.

              She wanted to go upstairs and listen to Rachmaninoff, maybe the last movement of the Second Symphony that went on and on, and she’d play it over and over again, in her room in a rocking chair, with an afghan on her knees, looking out at the landscape of frozen hell, like Scotland north of Aberdeen, she couldn’t think of a more god-forsaken place to be exiled to, thinking of Ben and all the courtship years in all the restaurants, and the shame of orgasm and passion and then going beyond shame to some sort of Debussy-pagan Afternoon of the Flesh, with real secretions, not just a veil left behind, and then children, the two linked together like horses and bridles, sex and children, and the apartment on Arlington and the thick carpets and gray velvet sofas in the living room that  you could sink into that for some reason reminded her of Napoleon’s Tomb/Les Invalides, Arthur and Bea coming in the front door, Arthur carrying a pan containing, of all things, a cellophane-wrapped baked GOOSE, as if he were too good any more for just plain turkey, and then she thought of Arthur and Patricia as toddlers, and then Patricia with a long teenage pony tail, her balletic look, before her thighs got all thick and matronly, and Arthur’s pimples and slide rules (when computers were as remote as albatrosses)....

              “Hi, Mom, how are you doing?”

              “Fine.”

              Arthur in tweeds like it was prison garb, Bea all snugly in white boots, quilted coat and a white wool cap that tied under her chin... kind of chunky, like a big white ham on legs. Two teenage boys all in white shirts and ties and tweed overcoats and suits, how much money did they think she had, was that how they greased the boards so that their future could be launched with a big, pretentious splash?!

              Gregory and Kevin...just as nerdy as their father.

              The tablecloth out on the table now. She didn’t want to have to do anything, it all took care of itself.

              First a moment of everyone crowding and circling around her (“You’re looking great, Mom, a little thin,” “I just got a new MacIntosh, Grandma...”). like carp in the pond in the Kew Gardens, rising to the surface and crowding a piece of bread to death, and then they discovered TV and went off to watch Headline News, which to Millie was less interesting than Pliny’s Punic Wars.

              The women and girls in the kitchen, the men and boys in front of the TV. It had begun to snow a little outside, they could be snowed in for days, who could tell, she never noticed the weather, liked to be surprised.

              Sidled over to the piano unnoticed and sat down.

              In perfect tune.

              Actually had taken a course, tuned it herself every couple of months.

              Her great  luxury -- a Steinway concert grand.

              Started to play, like opening up a giant children’s book, opening up the past, Paris, 1906-1908, Debussy had written it for his daughter, Chou-chou, who had tragically died before him.

              “Dr. Gradus Ad Parnassum.”

              It didn’t sound anything like a ‘satire’ on piano exercise writers like Czerny and Clementi. To her it was walking up Montparnasse in Paris, winter, summer, spring, fall, the essential Paris Conservatory cafe-life her, they didn’t have any idea who the old lady was at the keyboard, like there was an old, gray, weathered-clamshell in the mud her, and an inner her, all

glisteningly alive, like opalescent velvet.