Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories Page 12

  It was expected of me that I would behave strangely—in the tradition of Emily Dickinson, I was a half-crack’d Poetess. Already I’d fulfilled the expectations of the company, and was humbled by my own performance. (In my hair was a thread of cobweb—graciously Mrs. Caldwalder detached it for me, without a word.) Conversation turned to poetry as it often did in my presence, in such circumstances, with forced gusto, for Poetry is the secret vice of those who never read it but harbor faint nostalgic memories of having read it long ago, or having had it read to them as children.

  It was not surprising that a wealthy widow like Mrs. Caldwalder might endow a million dollars to a small college like Garrison, in the service of Poetry. Other arts might make their own halting ways, but Poetry must be given an enormous artificial boost.

  And so to entertain and to impress and because I so yearned for an interruption of our desultory dinner table conversation I recited, with something of an improvised Irish lilt, Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole”—shutting my eyes to remember the beautifully honed stanzas more clearly, and to suggest a suppression of tears.

  At the end of the evening, elderly Mrs. Caldwalder clasped my hand in both her hands, frail-boned as sparrows. Mrs. Caldwalder could not have been more than four feet eleven inches tall and wore bravely high-heeled shoes to bring up her height an inch at least. Tearfully she told me that that very poem of Yeats had been a poem her husband, deceased since 1981, had recited to her soon after they’d met in Lycoming, West Virginia, in 1946. We clasped hands for a brief tremulous moment.

  IT WAS AN ERA WHEN MOST NEWS CAME BY PHONE.

  Good news, bad news.

  News to make you fibrillate with joy, news to crush you to the floor where you quasi-wake minutes later dazed and deboned and your underwear wetted.

  By phone also meant land phone. Or, a more comforting term, home phone.

  Cell phone can be defined as a mode of instant (if not universally reliable) communication between unicellular life-forms. I was in fact in possession of a cell phone at this time, in an early year of the twenty-first century, for I liked to think of myself as drifting somewhat ahead of the curve, but it was my home phone I picked up to receive what I would later classify as the first, innocent-seeming installment of a series of very bad news.

  No. I am not that sick. You’re busy, you have your own life, your responsibilities. Don’t be ridiculous!

  He’d been bemused at the prospect of my coming to visit him when (he knew) I had responsibilities. But it was a phase of his life when bemusement shifted abruptly to irritation, anger, even fury—I said, don’t be ridiculous!

  Then again, more reasonably—There’s plenty of time. I’m fine—for now. “Stabilized.” You can’t interrupt your professional life—your obligations. You can’t let people down. A woman is no less responsible than a man.

  He’d paused, to let me absorb these words. He’d been the parent who had encouraged my determination to be a poet—at any rate, to live the precarious and uncharted life of a poet.

  When you’re through with the—what’s it—“residency”—drop by here. I’ll be here.

  He’d laughed, obscurely. His voice was just loud enough to be comforting.

  Several times I’d spoken with my brother, whose news was terse and guarded. Possibly he, too, had been having difficulty communicating with our father. He’d given me the hospice number to call but cautioned me not to upset our father by calling—at least, not frequently. “Hospice? But that means—” Weakly my voice trailed off.

  My brother was evasive and impatient. We had never been close—he was older than I was by seven crucial years, and had never taken me seriously; now that I had accumulated, by slow degrees, something like a reputation, he seemed resentful of me, and had made it clear that he’d never read more than a few poems of mine, and had found them incomprehensible.

  When I called my father he hadn’t wanted to discuss his illness—“That’s personal, honey.” He’d laughed irritably as if to acknowledge that, in this phase of his life, nothing could be personal again and he knew it. He seemed mildly insulted that I was concerned for his well-being, as if I were an intrusive stranger and not his only daughter. To my questions he answered with a vague sort of careless good humor like one swatting away flies.

  I could not speak with my mother—I’d never been able to speak with my mother about serious matters. She had reacted with childish terror at my father’s illness, withdrawing ever more deeply into her lifelong self-absorption in which all things related to her.

  But I did speak with one of the hospice nurses who assured me that yes, my father seemed to be “stabilized” for the time being—such remissions sometimes occurred even in hospice. She told me that my father was “one of our favorites” and that the hospice had a backyard barbecue and picnic area for families who came to visit patients.

  A backyard barbecue and picnic area! I had no idea what to say.

  The nurse asked me when I might come to visit my father and I told her two weeks. “That’s when Dad wants me.”

  There was a beat. The nurse seemed to be pondering a reply.

  “Well—yes. Two weeks is—good. But if you could come a little earlier, that might be—a better idea.”

  Two weeks, I told her. My father insisted.

  “You know how my father is by now—stubborn as hell.”

  It was a buoyant thing to say—stubborn as hell. You would not say stubborn as hell about a mortally ill man.

  The nurse, who sounded middle-aged and tired, not so upbeat as she’d seemed at the start of the conversation, said, “Yes, I know—a little—how your father is.”

  I waited for the nurse to say something more, but that was all she said.

  DURING MY TWO-WEEK RESIDENCY AT GARRISON COLLEGE, ROB Flint and I met a number of times in private, and in secret. These were not easily arranged meetings. For an academic administrator is a very busy man, with a schedule deftly constructed as a cat’s cradle; an administrator is likely to be closely watched by subordinates, most of whom are female. He is also likely to be observed by individuals eager to take up his time in the hope of influencing him on their behalf. Yet, Rob Flint took time to pick me up in his car, at the Bickerdyck Inn in which I was staying, in the late afternoon, when my responsibilities at the college were usually over for the day. (The Bickerdyck was an “historic” inn of faded luxury to which I’d insisted upon moving after two days in the antique-crowded Alumni House in which the college had installed me. It was explained to me that the Caldwalder Residency included room and board on campus, but not elsewhere, yet I insisted upon being moved to the hotel downtown, and I did not offer to pay for the hotel; I assumed that I would be billed, but I would not volunteer.) As Rob Flint drove us along the river and into the hilly countryside in his burgundy-colored Mercedes he talked to me in an impassioned voice—of himself, of course; Rob Flint had no other subject that so enthralled him—and I listened enthralled as well, or seemed to listen; thinking So this is where I am, now! And with this stranger.

  I thought If not here, where? A sensation of cold swept over me, at the prospect of being elsewhere.

  For where I should be, I’d been forbidden.

  From where I badly needed to be, my father had banished me.

  And so there was nowhere, except here. With this strangely elated, urgently eloquent stranger who dared to squeeze my hand as if we were already intimate—as if there wasn’t the slightest possibility that his masculine aggressiveness might be repulsed.

  “So happy that you’re here! Such serendity.”

  This word, Rob Flint mispronounced in a way that made me smile, with tenderness.

  There was no man in my life at this time—there had been no man in my life for some time. Enforced celibacy brings with it a kind of sardonic stoicism—as an individual with a limp might limp more emphatically, to forestall pity in observers.

  In Rob Flint’s lightest touch there was a sexual charge. In Rob Flint’s brooding
gaze, a predatory air.

  I’d wondered, at the formal dinner, if anyone else was aware of Rob Flint staring at me so openly, even as he led the conversation, lightly and entertainingly. In the back of the house, when he’d gripped my hand to help me rise from the fireplace, I’d felt the imprint of his strong fingers, and had tried not to wince; for Rob Flint was a man who could not help himself, shaking hands, gripping hands, inflicting a sort of innocent hurt upon others. I thought that only the object of the man’s sexual interest would be aware of it—for Rob Flint was discreet, by instinct. Yet the wife couldn’t escape feeling the diminution of such a husband’s desire, like a white-hot and blinding light suddenly switched off. I didn’t take pleasure in the humiliation of the wife, or anyway not much pleasure. I did think—She knows what he is, but in secret. She is too proud to acknowledge what she knows.

  On a bluff overlooking the river, Rob Flint parked the stately Mercedes. Out of the glove compartment he took a silver flask—(Could this really be happening? a scandalized voice wondered, close in my ear as a gnat)—and offered me a drink, a small sip—“Please, just a taste at least.”

  It had to be very good, very expensive Kentucky whiskey, I knew. Nothing but the best for Rob Flint who would not have wanted to drink alone.

  Rob Flint reiterated much of what he’d told me on our first evening, now adding details, and at length. He laughed at my “witty” commentary on the Mississippi River—how strange it seemed to a visitor that people actually lived on the banks of the Mississippi, lived close beside it, the great mythic river; over this river they drove routinely and with no particular attentiveness on bridges of no distinction; they spoke of the river as, merely, the river—as if unaware of its mythic status.

  “Nothing is ‘mythic,’ close up. Nothing is ‘mythic’ where you live.”

  Rob Flint spoke wistfully. On our return to town driving with his left hand, knuckles big-boned and covered in coppery hairs, while with his right hand, his stronger hand, he held my hand, and exerted a bruising pressure, unaware.

  To this remark, I made no reply. In Rob Flint’s company I was mostly silent, a vessel into which the man spoke as one might speak—freely, with no risk of being judged—when he was alone.

  “Though I’d guess that, if we could come back from the dead, to see where we’d lived—we would see that it had been ‘mythic’ then. Too late!”

  But Rob Flint laughed, to show that, for him, nothing would ever come too late.

  LATER, ROB FLINT said that he’d “loved” me—from the first moment he’d seen my photograph, on the dust jacket of one of my books. This had been nine or ten years ago, at least. And so when he’d learned that the Caldwalder residency was being discussed he’d suggested my name, and the committee had invited me—“Unanimously.”

  Rob Flint smiled, to suggest that unanimously might not have been the complete story. But it would do, for this was Rob Flint’s story.

  “Thank you! I’m very grateful.”

  Though rapidly my mind worked: the committee had not wanted me, but had deferred to the president’s suggestion. Very likely, the president had coerced the faculty members into inviting me as an exercise of presidential will.

  They would have preferred someone older, more distinguished. A male poet, burdened with the most prestigious awards, who’d have sneered at their invitation; or, if he’d accepted, would have fulfilled his obligations minimally, and gazed over the heads of the young poets he was obliged to teach.

  I was embarrassed, to be told this. But I was grateful for having been told in such a way that my embarrassment wouldn’t be noticed.

  “And I’m grateful, too, Violet. That we’ve met at last. That this—between us—has begun.”

  THE BICKERDYCK INN had once been an opulent place. Here I felt comfortably entombed.

  Carved mahogany paneling shone in the dim light and on the walls of the downstairs, public rooms were faded murals of heroic military scenes of the Civil War. There may have been scenes of slaughter involving horses—I did not allow myself to look too closely.

  There were three elaborately brass-grated elevators of which only one was operating but I seemed never to guess which elevator this might be.

  In my suite on the eleventh floor were faded velvet drapes on all the windows that, operated with a power switch, sprang to life and opened with startling vigor. Outside were sky, clouds, a gleaming river below and in the waning sun the river glowed red like something molten. Freighters made their way like great amphibians of a long-ago time.

  The windows were not very clean but they were floor-to-ceiling along an entire wall, plate-glass and impossible to open. I took a strange sort of solace in the fact that the cloud-formations above the river, like brain-masses of varying degrees of texture and color, beautifully eerie, hypnotic, were not part of the early-evening sky my father might be gazing at from a hospice window one thousand miles to the east.

  Several times, I placed a call to the hospice. Each time, I fumbled my message saying there was no urgent need to return my call.

  By 9:30 P.M. the downtown of the old riverfront city had darkened. Traffic had dwindled to isolated vehicles and there were few pedestrians. Except for the Bickerdyck Inn and several neon-lighted taverns on adjacent streets, the area was desolate. Within a quarter-mile of the dour granite county courthouse were blocks of once-stately granite office-buildings now FOR SALE OR LEASE. Many storefronts were empty. An Art Deco movie theater on Main Street had been converted to a discount furniture store and its exclamatory bargains posted on the marquee. How lonely, a dying city! Yet there was something thrilling about such emptiness, that spoke to the emptiness in my soul. I thought—If my father is dying, it is life itself that is the betrayal. I hate life! This was an exhilarating thought for it seemed to me an irrefutable truth and all truth makes us free—pushes us, however horribly, to Truth. From the windows of my suite in the historic inn I watched individual figures on the sidewalks eleven floors below, I observed vehicles slowing to red lights at deserted intersections. Though there was no other visible traffic, yet each vehicle remained at each red light until it turned green. One night, near midnight, I observed a gathering of men on the street outside one of the taverns and wondered what bond defined them—vehement male voices lifting faintly. I had the idea that the men were planning a desperate and irrevocable act but soon afterward they broke off their excited exchange, walked away and disappeared from one another and from me.

  If you are a fatalist, you understand that someone has to be observing these men at this time, and from this perch on the eleventh floor of the Bickerdyck Inn. It is futile to inquire Why?—Why me?

  One night at about 11:00 P.M., after Rob Flint had left me, I rinsed the hotel glasses in which we’d drunk whiskey—(which Rob Flint had brought to the room)—and washed my face that had become heated and blotched. I rinsed my mouth, that had acquired a sourish taste, and pressed a washcloth soaked in cold water against my slightly swollen lips. Too restless even to attempt sleep I descended in the slow-paced hotel elevator, crossed the deserted lobby where my heels rang against the marble floor, made my way along darkened and deserted Main Street in the direction of the river. There were few vehicles here, and no one visible on foot except me; in doorways, homeless men huddled, as if comatose, but would not glance up at me, or speak to me. The taverns were minimally lighted, like caves; from the street, you could scarcely tell if a tavern was open. And beyond the dim-lighted area was the great dark river.

  This has begun. This—between us . . . Rob Flint’s words replayed in my head, like a stuck record.

  Whether the words were ominous, or thrilling, I did not know.

  That morning as usual I’d risen early to walk along the river. At 10:00 A.M. I was to be driven to the college where for most of the day I would deftly impersonate the Caldwalder Poet-in-Residence. (One of the English faculty picked me up, not Rob Flint. Each morning there was a different individual in a different vehicle, and each seem
ed eager to speak with me.) Private time was precious to me and so quickly each morning I made my way along Main Street—to South Main Street—to the river’s abrupt edge—a desolate stretch of parkland adjacent to a railroad yard. And there, at the end of the railroad yard, was an asphalt road badly cracked, with a look of being superannuated, replaced by an elevated interstate highway on which traffic whirred and thrummed overhead; on this road, I began tentatively to run. The river-air was chilly as the sun rose by slow degrees in the eastern sky. I had no idea what the longitude was here, what the latitude was here, or why I was here. I smiled to think how the most elemental truths struck me as profound and unsettling—that, if one were alive, one must be somewhere and not rather nowhere.

  It did not seem possible to me that, one day soon, my father would be nowhere. That’s to say—I could search for my father everywhere, through all of the world, and yet I would not have been able to find him.

  For this dying, too, had begun. And once begun it would run its course.

  Yet, knowing this beforehand, I was powerless to see my father. I could not risk his wrath. I could not risk the loss of his love. I could not disobey my father, for I was not strong enough.

  And also, the most pitiless truth was, in my deepest self I did not want to see my father.

  I did not want to see the wounded, diminished, frightened man. I did not want to see his eyes, that would clutch at mine in denial of what was gathering in a corner of his room, what darkness and density of darkness. I did not want to be inveigled into a childlike pretense between us that my father was “all right”—his condition “stabilized.” I did not want to approach my dying father.