G. K. Wuori is the author of over fifty stories published throughout the world in the U.S., Japan, India, Germany, Spain, and Brazil. A Pushcart Prize winner, his work has appeared in such journals as The Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, The Taj Mahal Review, Barcelona Review and many others. His story collection, Nude In Tub was a New Voices Award Nominee by the Quality Paperback Book Club and and his novel, An American Outrage was Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year in fiction. He lives in Sycamore, Illinois and writes a monthly column called Cold Iron at www.gkwuori.com
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Beth told me that
on the day of her birth seventy people died of bubonic plague in Hawaii. She said her
mother never let her forget that, even though Beth was born in Maine and has never been to
Hawaii. Her birthday was April 30, 1900.
After the first foot of snow the plows stop trying. They
head back to the town barn where the drivers drink coffee and play cribbage, no need yet
to fret over the rascally fluff. Plow steel never loses. At two feet, however--this,
added to the six feet of salty, sandy crystal already on the ground--the drivers sense a
certain worry beginning, not in them because they have the boldness their equipment affords,
but in merchants staring out of shop windows, or teachers mulling a perilous trip home for
all the children. People in their homes, too, check the bread and spaghetti sauce in the
cupboards and pray (true prayers) that the television cable holds out. It nearly always does.
Snow is health in Quillifarkeag--Quilli, please--the first
stop of many watersheds in northern Maine, and the source of river frolic, hydroelectric power,
and crop strength farther south. It is, however, always scary.
Across the street the grey and white bungalow--white shutters,
a new chimney last summer--begins to fade into the snowy wall of trees behind it. The owners,
Alcide and Julia Thibodeau, write to us regularly from Florida where they tend hearts (their own)
wounded by long lives, Julia’s wounds deep enough for invasive therapy, a warm climate suggested.
Alcide’s ailments responded well to chemical intervention, but, then, they always had.
In their front window a Tiffany lamp they bought in Quebec
City stands as quiet, if expensive, sentinel.
“Would you keep your eyes on it, Beth?” Julia asked me.
“Alcide has it wired into the furnace. It will blink if there’s a furnace problem.”
Since six in the morning my mother and I have dutifully noted
the light blinking with heartbeat regularity. Beth, my mother (we have the same name), sat
in a chair by the front window as the silent drama unfolded. I noticed her blink each time
that light went on and each time it went off. Julia, however, had left no instructions for
such an event so by late afternoon I concluded I would no longer have to go over and water
their plants. Eventually, a furnace man got through, as did a plumber who shut off the water
and pumped out the basement. Apparently, others, with greater decision-making authority, had
also kept their eyes on the house.
Beth’s alertness pleased me, though I found that blinking
unnerving after awhile. I worried that she might irritate her eyes, quite fragile at her age.
Still, she took the measure of that minor event and I thought to myself, good girl.
Up until the turn of the century Beth’s age matched every year
of every decade and she took pride in that. Now, however, she felt unbalanced and said time
had played a trick on her.
“Is it possible,” she asked me a few years ago on the first
day of the new millennium, “that I’m now two-hundred years old?” Then she giggled and said,
“Or perhaps I’ve reverted to infancy and now have no age at all.”
“Time plays no tricks,” I told her. “Time is honest, the
most honest thing there is.”
“Shows what you know,” she said.
Beth took no medications, and her overall health never
failed to inspire grand smiles and respectful shakes of the head from her medical people.
Indeed, she’d lived through all of the useful medical fancies of the last century and buried
most of the doctors who’d ever attended her. She told me one time she thought of herself
as a skater at the end of winter.
“It’s a lumpy pond, Beth, rather corrugated and slightly
dangerous. Nonetheless, I find it all quite fun. The falls, yes, the falls are more frequent,
and there are very, very few handsome men to help you up again. Perhaps there never were,
but I cherish that little word--fun (how silly)--and try to redefine it each day.”
On September 6, 1900 a hurricane--they weren’t naming them
yet--slammed into the Texas coast and killed 8,000 people in and around Galveston. Such facts,
Beth said, came from her mother who announced them in tones of minor joy. Her mother did not,
Beth said, traffic in other’s misery. She only wanted Beth to see that life was a mortgage
always in arrears.
On one side of the Thibodeau’s lived another couple. We never
knew them. Mostly, we noticed them when the woman, tall, with very long and “done” and very
curly white hair, would push the man out to their car in his wheelchair. He would rise then,
and the two of them would wrestle him into the car. The woman had grandly shaped calves and
thighs, very strong, with the motions of her lifting precise and practiced. In a sense,
they had carried each other for a long time.
He usually wore a headband and jeans, often heavy boots; in
the summer, sandals. I never saw the woman in anything but a dress, short dresses,
| "You will understand, my daughter,” Beth’s mother
(my grandmother) told her, “that we are but lumps of sugar in a cup of tea--as sweet as need
be and always dissolving." |
long dresses, whippy and sere. She’d mow the lawn in a dress,
climb up to clean the gutters in a dress, and even had some old and raggedy ones she wore painting
the house the previous summer. I have seen much of her legs in pernickety winds and they are
good legs, long and well-turned, perhaps one of those sad complements to whatever put the spike
to her husband’s legs.
One time, in a friendlier season, I watched as the woman painted
a large birdcage, apparently wicker. Her husband lay on the grass not far from her, deviltry
clearly on his mind. That afternoon he wore a camouflage-print T-shirt and boxer shorts with
a bright red heart print.
He inched along, moving yet motionless, while she concentrated,
a trait I have often seen in marriages. He’d moved to within inches of her bare feet, a dandelion,
fat and golden, in his hand. That snail’s pace, that dragging motion, irritated him, a certain
puffing of air and beseeching looks to the sky giving that away. Nevertheless, he knew he would
get to where he needed to be. Playfulness nearly always wins, and he began feathering her toes
with the dusty dandelion. She shifted a bit, joy beginning as an unthought wonder. She seemed
not to notice as her husband took one of her brushes--a child’s paintbrush--from the can by her
knee and slowly painted the bottom of her foot gold. She turned to him finally and laughed, her
own brush then--love’s fine marker--beginning to work on his nose, then his cheeks. I thought of
her as a volunteer from a homeless shelter painting clown faces on children at some festival
somewhere.
At the time, I envied their fun, though the incident also reminded
me of one of Beth’s husbands, her fourth. He was a clown (truly: his performing name, Tubbles).
“You will understand, my daughter,” Beth’s mother (my grandmother)
told her, “that we are but lumps of sugar in a cup of tea--as sweet as need be and always dissolving.”
On December 30, 1903, a fire in the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago killed five-hundred and eighty people.
Beth’s mother said, “Do you understand? Is there any force or shape to it at all yet?” Beth said
yes. She was three at the time.
Beth took on a century and she beat it. Hindsight suggests the
absence of any true contest (no one who knew her would ever bet against her), her struggles managed
like some captured enemy, her heartbreaks broken down into those worthy of tears and those which
would be gone by morning, any morning. But she beat it, that century, her name in a book of peers
who, had they known each other, would have wanted nothing to do with each other.
“I can no longer abide meeting new people,” she told me one time.
“They all just die on you.”
Beth’s only challenge after that lay in finding another foe, a
daunting task for someone who used to ask, as funny as Beth ever got, “If I live forever, do you
suppose there will be additional fees?”
More than one person would come up to me and bend low and speak
softly as though trying not to give away government secrets and say, “Whatever will your mother
do about death?”
An answer, sweetly cynical, always suggested itself, and just as
quickly disappeared.
In body Beth appeared large but wispy, momentarily frail.
“Your mind, though,” I asked her one time. “How does that feel?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“A good one. Sometimes you’re here. Sometimes you’re there.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then you’re less reliable than I.”
“At the age of only four I heard this one, though I can remember
it clearly. My mother said the tour boat, the General Slocum, had sunk in the East River in
New York. One-thousand and thirty were lost. Don’t forget it, my darling--June 15, 1904.”
We’d fenced our backyard with common sentinels: pine, lilac,
forsythia, and a stone wall high enough to hinder some vision, not all of it. In summer we
followed our Maine kin and tanned beneath a sun so mild, so fleeting we rarely burned. Beth
made the trip into the yard with no walker, only an old cane I whittled from a birch sapling
years before. The rounded grip, she said, felt like the service end of a randy dick.
“The service end?” I asked her the first time she said it.
“There is no end but the service end.”
“Shows where you haven’t been,” she said.
Spectacularly dirty, her comment, and typical of those later
years. Beth’s advancing of this point of opinion, this randy riposte, would have shocked her
friends from decades ago. Unseemly is how they would have put it, something terribly suspicious
about those who stood up and declaimed on the nature of things carnal, who challenged, above all,
the enigmas of desire (with politics never far behind--Beth never quite sure whether to twit by
saying she’d read all of Marx or that she slept naked). Still, raising questions always got you
into trouble and a good woman could never report to her husband that she’d pinched the public ire.
“God created the shadows,” Beth liked to say, “so we’d always
have a safe place to go.”
I bought Beth a new swimsuit every year for our tanning sessions,
a flowery print even in a plain season, and always a bikini. With the bikini, she said, she could
go from bathrobe to swimsuit with only a minimum of her remaining motions.
“Are you an accountant?” I joked with her. “How many of these
remaining motions do you have left?”
Beth ignored the question. Had she not, she would have sung
a few bars from her favourite anthem--that I was a “character” and mouthy, traits that made
one vulnerable to dismissal and scorn. “They don’t like it when a woman shows that spark,
honey,” she liked to say, usually at the end of some attempt to press me down like some old
flower in a book. My sin would lie in remaining pressed.
“How old are you now?”
“I’m six, momma,” Beth said.
“Then I shall have to send you to San Francisco where the
earthquakes will reach up with tarry fingers and snatch you right down into the bowels, the
very bowels of perdition just the way they did those thousand other people.”
“Am I so bad, momma?”
Beth always said she’d never known anyone as unafraid as
her mother.
On a truly sunny day we’d take our tops off and lean way
back in our webbed chairs, the process feeling both complete if a bit daring. A year ago,
Beth’s doctor, in one of his digital hunts for significant tissue, squawked out (he has a
smoker’s voice, a true comfort to some of his patients), “Jesus, Beth, you got a tan line!”
Beth, up on her elbows while lying on his table, looked
down on him and said, smiling, “But am I pretty, Desiderio?”
Desiderio charmed Beth and I think he would have married
her but for the age difference. Born in Mexico and raised in Chicago, he’d come to northern
Maine years ago because our remoteness enabled the forgiveness of some of his medical school
loans. Smiling, then taking a moment to cough some rearrangement of tobacco detritus in his
lungs, he said, “You make me research the condom ads every time you’re here, Beth.”
Beth loved those comments, although she told me one time
she’d really prefer it if he’d just come out and say she was a marvellous piece of ass.
Her mother withdrew her from school in March of 1908 after
hearing about the school fire in Ohio that killed a hundred and seventy-five children. “If
you want to go back to school, that’s fine,” her mother told her, “but I will not have it
on my conscience.”
A reporter came over several times one year and interviewed
Beth for a story set to run on Beth’s hundredth birthday. The story didn’t run, however.
In the summer of that year the reporter came by to update her story for Beth’s next birthday,
and when that didn’t run either I finally began to see what they were doing. As each year
passed, it became a better and better story, until I finally told the reporter I got it, I
saw their angle, that if Beth actually hit a hundred and five or a hundred and ten the
story would make the national wires, perhaps even the Today Show.
On one of her earlier visits, though, the reporter did ask
the expected question--why Beth had lived so long. To what did she attribute her longevity?
I knew the woman wanted Beth to say that she drank a quart of Wild Turkey each day or that
she ate nothing but buckwheat groats and carrots.
“Frequent urination,” though, was the unexpected answer.
“Yes?” the reporter asked.
“The lack of which eventually kills all cats.”
Beth had fun that afternoon, connecting smoothly, the tease
never far below the surface. She even got the reporter to paint her, Beth’s, toenails, and
then her own.
Eventually she asked, “So what do you think about this last
century?”
“The two sides have now been clearly drawn,” she said.
“Oh?”
“It took a long time.”
“I don’t...”
“Would you rather I talk about the wars?”
“Sure.”
“Maybe the inventions...?”
“If you...”
“Tampons and Super Glue.”
“Well...”
“Tupperware, Ortho-Novum, Napalm.”
“Lots of...”
“The airplane’s good. I used to fly all the time when I was a
professional.”
“Oh? What kind of work did you do?”
“Very, very, very good work, young lady.”
That point would remain unchallenged until the day Beth died.
“Did you know that just before my fourteenth birthday they
brought the Army out to Colorado because of a strike at one of Mr. Rockefeller’s units?
They set the tents of the strikers on fire and then shot those who tried to flee the tents.
Thirteen children died in those fires.” That story marked a certain point in Beth’s maturing,
since she reported it to her mother and not the other way around. Her mother couldn’t believe
she’d missed it.
“I have always distrusted the automobile,” she said to the reporter,
“because of an incident that happened in 1918. I’d just gotten my baccalaureate degree from Vassar,
having matriculated at the age of fifteen. Yes, I was precocious, although they didn’t pay all
that much attention to your age when you went to college back then.
| "I still think of owls as the dumbest of beasts.
Wisdom should do more than just sit and occasionally eat. For years and years I observed that
same sophia in the professors at Beth’s colleges: sly learning and tiny truths, arrogance, the
demon doldrums of the bitch savant. Smart women, I concluded early on, don’t get fat as they age.
They become masculine. The reverse held true in the male faculty. Alpha males become a
bit prissy." |
“Anyway, I was home and I heard a crash out on the road and I
ran out into the snow in my bare feet and wearing only a nightgown. Ice had coated the entirety
of the world the night before and all around me things were popping and cracking--all breakage
generally noisy--the world reducing itself to sticks and chunks.”
Beth stopped for a moment to let the reporter catch up with her
notes, then said to me, “I have forever remembered that night as unholy, Chops.”
‘Chops,’ I should mention, comes from my piano days, a mother’s
way of humanizing Chopin, whom I could never play, though I managed to tour and teach for a very
long time. A modern minstrel, I hauled my grants and my music from taverns to churches, from college
lounges to Grange halls, until I decided my audiences could no longer tolerate the flaws of the
live musician. Small boxes with batteries simply did it better and I grew tired of being an evening’s
novelty. People, I thought, could no longer connect with the truth in a living artist. Or maybe
they just got tired of rolling old pianos all over their little towns.
“He was the pastor of my church,” Beth continued, “and it disturbed
me greatly that the old creeds hadn’t made him immune to modern carnage. His wounds mimicked
the state of his automobile, numerous parts battered or hanging on by the thinnest of threads.
Flesh, of course, seems never as malleable as old metal, and I thought it grossly unfair that
such a man should have great chunks of it pulled raw from his person. Why or how he continued
to live I couldn’t guess, but I scooted half under the car and cradled such of him as I could
reach. I felt his warm blood seeping into my nightgown--‘the blood of Christ’ slipped into my
thoughts--and I kept the screaming infamy of it all from my mind by inserting the reverend and
myself into a series of sexual moments. Young girls, you know, can pull salvation from their
hormones as easily as they can pull it from some muscular wart of a hero. In the end, the man
died in my arms and I’ve often wondered how to go about recapturing that moment as a grown woman.”
“Beth?”
“Although we don’t want to forget about Cuba and the swarms of
mosquitoes so thick they occasionally carried live dogs out to sea. Quite honestly, I don’t
know why Cuba comes to mind. Perhaps I’m only looking for a place that’s as hot as Maine is cold.
Young girls do treasure their memories even though sometimes they’ll just put them anywhere.”
“Mother?”
“I do know that I have not lived since in any place that so
grudgingly permitted life to go on. When you think about it, though, place need not only mean
unwandering dirt. Time has its place, I think. We certainly park ourselves right on it as often
as we park ourselves in our houses. Do you suppose I’m finally answering that reporter’s question,
Chops? About the century? Has she gone yet?”
“Yes, mother.”
“Too bad. Even a quick reading of history reveals good centuries
and bad centuries. Each has enough slack, too, for the occasional atrocity or the most amazingly
beneficent decade. My personal tendency has me putting that one in a large cupboard somewhere.
Let the antique dealers find it at some much later date. Nevertheless, my own role had me in
leadership positions during a large part of it. Responsibility, you see. Perhaps I left too
many things undone.”
I didn’t believe that at all.
“Do you suppose you could get us a nice cup of coffee, Chops?”
“I have hesitated to tell this one to anyone,” Beth said,
“because it involves the most awful combination of horror and humour. You have to laugh or
people will doubt your humanity but, truly, on January 15, 1919 a fifty-foot tall tank of molasses
exploded in Boston flooding the north end in deadly goo. Can we ever say that death is truly sweet?
This could be it, as twenty-one souls found themselves battered and suffocated in that sticky
succulence.”
On two separate occasions the people of Quilli elected me their
mayor. Beth and I, thus, could always discuss politics fairly freely. She always said she
voted for me even though I ran against a man. Beth believed strongly in having men on the
front lines of life’s deadlier games, even the small games in a town like Quilli. For a long
time I thought that view not only sexist but not at all characteristic of the Beth I thought
I knew. Finally, as we discussed a controversial liquor license requested for a stripper’s
bar one time she said, “Men like to destroy each other in petty wars just like this. That’s
why I found it difficult to vote for you, Chops. I can’t bear the waste of good women.”
She told me one night that she went to school with Margaret
Chase Smith, the former Senator. She lived in Skowhegan, but for as much as we talked about
her, admired her, we never tried a pilgrimage, not even in my mayoral guise of seeking political
advice. For as much as I played in Boston, Denver, Galveston, Pierre, and Chapel Hill, I never
played in Skowhegan. Very often, the people you live closest to are the last ones who want
to see (or hear) your talent.
“What brings her up?” I asked Beth.
“Her enemies thought her a bitch and then they sanctified
her--made her a saint. We like to punish women that way but it won’t happen to me. If you
outlive your enemies nothing matters anymore. If there’s anyone still healthy enough to hate
my guts, they’re not healthy enough to do anything about it. The future belongs to me. More
importantly, so does the past.”
More importantly, so does the past.
I teased her that night that we’d just had the last known
conversation about Margaret Chase Smith.
“Want to talk about Al Gore?” she said.
“Write this one down, Chops. Seventy-five communists met
in a railroad box car on a deserted siding near Bangor. Federal agents slipped into the scene,
though, slammed the doors shut, hitched the car to a locomotive, and hauled it away. They
coupled and uncoupled that car to a hundred different trains over the course of a year--the
year, as I recall, 1931.”
“I won’t write it down, mother.”
“Yes you will.”
Some people lose the world as they slip away. Beth, I knew,
was adding to it.
The reporter, as charmed as she could be by Beth’s rambling stories,
learned eventually that direct, even blunt, worked well, because Beth had always abhorred evasion.
She asked one time then, “What memory from your childhood really, really stands out?”
“Really, really?” Beth said.
“If you don’t mind,” the reporter said.
I think Beth expected at that moment a question on at least
one of her three college presidencies (Rockford, Beloit, Bates), or one of her four husbands,
because she took a breath and started to speak, then stopped with, “Oh ...”
“Beth still knows how to make butter,” I began, an utterly wrong
thing to say and I knew it. Regardless of whether or not we’ve had “help” over the years, the
standard soldiers of domestic life have always stood at strict attention--cooking, laundry,
cleaning, maintenance, but Beth will not grace those chores with the mantle of accomplishment.
One time she took a newly-adolescent me aside and said, “I will not praise you for cleaning your
room any more than I would praise you for wiping your butt.”
“Watching the whores burn,” Beth said to the reporter. “I take
it you meant it when you said you wanted a special memory, that you weren’t fishing for
cherished or lovely or beautiful.”
I don’t think the reporter, her mouth slightly open, knew
whether to nod or shake her head, but she knew she’d sprung the lock on something.
“Cooked,” Beth corrected, “not burned. You would have liked
them, Chops. They were revolutionaries.”
I had my doubts about reinvention, particularly since I had
no idea where I fit into a picture with either whores or revolutionaries. Discipline,
behavioural quirks, advocating the overthrow of anything not nailed down--as Beth’s daughter
I’d known, I’d been (so to speak), perfection. Even years later no one had ever threatened
to burn or blow up anything after one of my performances, although I had been known to put
a small gallery to sleep when I was mayor. That, however, involved simple civics.
Perhaps the harassment involved a sin I’d nearly forgotten,
a small one over a short time where I allowed every hair on my body to grow as long as it
wished. I thought the business experimental and not at all revolutionary. Beth mostly
thought I smelled. Revolutions, I think, tended toward an inclusive privacy in those
days.
Beth mentioned no year as she began the story for the reporter.
She simply placed herself like some elegant chess piece as if to say, I know. Shouldn’t you?
“Our sources, as one might say today, led us out to the cliffs
over the Pappa, a spot where the Indians at one time threw their dead down into the river.
An old Packard, appearing sprung up from the ground itself, lured us--privacy in its Detroit
format. Still and all, we found it a smashing place to meet and smoke and swear without
worrying over boys, teachers, or that gold standard of growing up: our reputations.
“Kissing, we saw that first of all, one of them leaning
against the car, the other leaning against her, predictable behaviour for whores we all
agreed, though I can’t recall how we came so quickly to that agreement. One of them, a
redhead with a reputation of useful intelligence, came from St. A de P, while the other,
a Mic Mac, lived variously on and off the reservation up in Quiktupac.
“I suppose we said things, nasty things. Same-sex relationships
back then didn’t come up as worthy of a great deal of conversation. Aberrance had a certain
cachet, largely devilish, and nearly everyone agreed on the necessity for a smooth and quick
pathway to hell.
“Anyway, we, us girls, did not cause the tragedy, since the
redhead and the Mic Mac had come prepared. Hearing us, they dismissed us and went on kissing
while we laughed and gagged and made noises appropriate to the thinking of a lynch mob. One of
us--I think it might have been me--picked up a rock and threw it and hit the redhead. I have
undergone a great deal of personal research on the throwing of that rock, but it remains a mystery.
Perhaps my immaturity demanded it, perhaps the peer pressure of our little crowd. Anyway, I don’t
believe in all these years I ever equalled that pinnacle of nastiness. At least I hope I
haven’t.”
The reporter scribbled rapidly in her notebook as she’d learned
to do on her earlier visits. Beth could be news; always, she was an event. Outside, on the
ledge that’s part of our front window, an owl watched us carefully, his head twisting slowly
on that universal neck joint they seem to have. I still think of owls as the dumbest of beasts.
Wisdom should do more than just sit and occasionally eat. For years and years I observed that
same sophia in the professors at Beth’s colleges: sly learning and tiny truths, arrogance, the
demon doldrums of the bitch savant. Smart women, I concluded early on, don’t get fat as they age.
They become masculine. The reverse held true in the male faculty. Alpha males become a bit prissy.
“The Indian girl helped the redhead--bleeding from her
forehead--into the car, and then she came back out of it with a gas can in her hand.
“You know, Chops, an ideology pervaded all of this, but I
don’t remember any of it. People back then didn’t have any more need to explain their desperation
than they did to explain their breathing. You came into this world with your hands out, and you
had very little control over what ended up in them. For a time, the Indian girl sang--something
keening, breathy, and beautiful in Mic Mac--as she emptied the gas can all over the car.
“Those of us watching tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t listen.
Someone said, ‘We’ve always loved you, Lorraine,’ yet stopping this ghastly event seemed about as
possible as putting glasses on a dog.
“Someone else said, ‘This is Quilli, you know,’ as though the name
of your town alone will keep you on the straight and narrow. Doesn’t work that way. Your hometown
will always let you kill yourself because they know, they understand.
“In the car, they kissed again--love gaining ground. We watched
care and we watched passion and we watched lust without having those words specifically
to hand, but ended up unnerved by what we saw anyway. All we knew about the ways of the world--a slim
content, Chops, hugely slim--had to do with a sort of geometric notion of propriety. Aristotelians
all, we reserved our highest condemnation for the unseemly, leaving us, thus, no match for a love
that didn’t care about the world, about an audience, and certainly cared nothing about public
opinion, a love doomed not so much romantically (as we understood it: hopeless conflict, shame,
and long caesuras of sighs that rose from your womb to your heart), as practically--blood, a
rusty car filled with animal droppings, the smell of gasoline. For a long time we watered
down a secular guilt with the rumour that they’d stolen money, but it turned out they’d only
walked off without paying for the can of gas--a novelty in Quilli at the time.”
Beth stopped then for twenty minutes. I thought her simply tired
until she looked over at me and said, “I have to go now.”
I have to go now.
That way of hers I didn’t find pathological. Intense, maybe
that--she searched for simple memories and found long hallways full of closets and secret rooms,
boxes and bundles and crates and shipping trunks all around. The packing crates sat full and tidy,
the work involved in getting into them profound: sparkling dinners; conversations running like the
Titanic on its outbound run; places we’d lived; honours placed on Beth’s shoulders like garlands on
the neck of a winning thoroughbred; citations from legislators and citations from towns so small they
had more than one name; losers, too, in plans gone foul, destinies distorted, the smutty slander that
is as queenly as any jewelled crown. Beth had friends, too, enough to fill a washtub with Christmas
cards every year, all of them (now) farewelled and never, ever seen again.
Beth occasionally pretended to a dose of dementia because we expect
so little else of the elderly. Consider, however:
“Mother--what’s my name?”
“You don’t know?”
“Do you?”
“I named you once. If you’ve lost it, find another.”
I’ll apologize if I should have explained earlier about being Beth,
the daughter Beth, sometimes Chops, but she named me Beth because during her first college presidency
and her first pregnancy she decided she deserved the compliment of repetition (cloning not a readily
available word at the time).
“If my mind ever goes,” she said to me, “I’ll tell you.”
Beth reminded me of some sort of travelling salesman of history, catching
me up short in the laundry room or when I might be unloading groceries from the car. Vulnerable, no
escape possible, I’d take a deep sigh and she’d say, “You’ll be pleased to know that during a faculty
meeting one morning-- the Depression not yet on the books--investments the topic with our coffers swollen
with funds, I interrupted things to discuss a dam that had burst in the Santa Clara Valley in California,
four-hundred and fifty people sliding wetly into their Maker’s arms.”
Predictably, Beth returned, looking slightly bemused as the reporter
crunched an ice cube from her glass of lemonade.
“One of them lit a match and for a moment the earth tasted green,
slightly electric. We screamed, all of us, then we stopped. Fire swept the outside of the car while
seeming to avoid the inside. That didn’t look very good, and I remember thinking how the amateurs
always get the revolutions underway and almost always botch them--the cost never less than ghastly.
“Fire heated them up without burning them. Great bubbles appeared on
their skin, burst, and appeared again. They kept trying to touch each other, to hold each other, but
pain got in the way, something not foreseen in their wretched plan. That seemed incredibly sad.
“Now it becomes quite awful, Chops.”
I said nothing, but it seemed to me we’d been into awful for quite some time.
“We had screamed in agony over this most dialectical, this most
sensual of passings, but then they didn’t die--not right away. None of us told anyone in Quilli about
the incident. How could we? To have participated in such an obscenity would have marked us worse than
giving up our virginity on the courthouse lawn. But we kept going back there, alone or with a friend,
each of us nourishing a fantasy-- myself in tortured slow demise--not realizing how much this cruel
scene stood before us as tutorial, not as novelty but as norm.”
“Normal, ma’am?” the reporter said. “What do you mean by normal?”
“Step outside of things, sweetie,” Beth said, “and you’ll find glory
at the end of a whip.”
* * *
“They did die, though?” I finally asked.
“It took them three days out there.”
“Oh, Lord,” the reporter said.
Beth looked at the owl then, and I wondered if the reporter had noticed
it and would put it in the story. Beth and I both knew, too, that the reporter would be researching the
whole incident. Confidently, then, Beth said, “So that’s what it’s all about.”
“Beth?” the reporter said.
“What?”
“Did anyone ever find them?”
“They’re still out there,” she said, “highly diminished.”
“In early October of 1928,” Beth began, “I wrote to my mother to tell
her about the hurricane that had ravaged Florida and killed two-thousand people. The letter came back
to me with a large Deceased scrawled across the front of it. I knew my mother’s handwriting, of
course, which gave me an inkling of how much parents resent it when their children bring them bad news.
It deflates, I think, the notion that in your children there is always hope, always rebirth and a sweeping
away of the crap--excuse me--left by earlier generations.”
One day Melanie, a ten-year old from down the street came by. We’ve
always found Melanie’s presence to be like a punishment for a small crime. She has crow-black hair
rarely tended (unrestricted development the principle guiding Melanie’s mother, not neglect; the child
never neglected), deep blue and slightly-skewed eyes, and a mouth that ran like an old Volkswagen.
That day, Melanie wore make-up, her lips a garish red and her eyes framed
in an awful blue eye shadow. Adulthood sat on Melanie at an angle, like a large cloche hat. Cookie crumbs
speckled the corners of her mouth and reminded me that cookies can attack at any age.
“I can’t stay long,” she said. Beth and I sat on our lounge chairs,
sunbathing, the sun bright and warming through a cool breeze.
“Oh ...”
“My mom’s making love. She said I should come over here and maybe I’ll
learn something from the ladies. Do you mind?”
Beth held her bikini top in her hand and Melanie, clearly curious, stared
at Beth’s breasts, imagining, I supposed, how that which had not yet emerged on her own body would look
in ninety or so years. Beth always said that even in her business suit days she made it a point to let
people know a woman lay within that sterile garb, that if persuasion resided within the intellect, no
greater power existed than a D-cup with a PhD.
Melanie took off her shirt and said, “My mother says I can start piano
lessons.”
Right away I thought that giving this child eighty-eight strings to
manage at once was either a brilliant idea or a prescription for disaster. Within the first five
minutes of her visit, Melanie had already sat on Beth’s chaise, my chair, the ground, and had just
boosted herself up onto our stone wall.
“She doesn’t want to buy a piano, though. She says they’re expensive.
Are they expensive?”
“Very,” I said.
“You have a piano, don’t you? My mother says she can hear someone
playing over here a lot in the summer. She doesn’t like music much.”
Standing next to Beth, then moving skittishly yet again, Melanie slowly
dropped her baggy shorts to the ground and stood there rolling her panties down to approximate the
shape of Beth’s bikini bottom.
“I do,” I said.
“You do what?”
“I have a piano.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Melanie tried to cross her legs at the ankles
the way Beth had her legs crossed, but she had a hard time doing it standing up. “My mother said
the last piano teacher died not long ago.”
Thus dismissed, I felt no urge to volunteer.
Beth, however, struggled with something, confusion the silent orator
in her eyes. The child’s nakedness did battle with the hot swamp (as Beth often said) of old times--the
shaky footholds and the memorial treats. Clearly I need some caution here to avoid some dark spectre of
paedophilia redux, since Beth only intended to reiterate her difficulties in finding babysitters for
meetings, conferences, and faculty gatherings, especially live-in sitters unafraid to change a diaper.
I teased her one time as to why she hadn’t channelled my precocity into the trick of changing my own diapers.
Taking me much too seriously she said, “I would have liked that.”
“Are you to be my lover?” Beth asked Melanie. Beth didn’t do humour
very well anymore. Subtleties, she said once, belong to the young. Old tapes of Bob Hope or Jackie Gleason
or Lucille Ball she still “got,” but she found all the connecting tethers, the cultural webbing of current
humorists “trying. I feel as though I’m about to be tested on contemporary mores.”
Anyway, the effect on Melanie of Beth’s comment looked fairly obvious:
adults are strange. Such conclusions provide a good rationale for growing up.
“Ma’am?”
I slipped my terry robe on and smiled at the child. The two of us,
conspiratorially met, constructed Beth--my past and Melanie’s future, the destination unknown. Waste
would arise, along with inspiration, critics, possibly failure. Perhaps Melanie would connect my mother
with royalty as a way of giving heft to her own ambitions: an unconditional view of one woman’s success.
I had my doubts about Melanie’s ambitions, however, with no disrespect toward her family intended. She
had a severely retarded twin who made goal-setting highly conditional.
Never in my life had I told my mother to shut up.
“I buried a husband at the end of World War I,” Beth said to Melanie,
“barely post-virginal and uncomprehending of widowhood. Then I buried another in World War II, and a
third in Korea. Not yet fifty though close to it, I began to sense a poor record developing. So, during
the Vietnam War, I married a janitor, a twenty-eight year old conscientious objector. That cost me a job
but I didn’t care. He had so little that he taught me once again to dream, to view myself as lovely and
breathtakingly fetching. Would you like some ice cream, Melanie?”
Melanie had goose bumps all over her, the sun lost to us behind the pines.
Beth looked over to me and said, “Are you sure we never visited Cuba?”
“Never,” I answered. Henry Kissinger had taken her to Qatar one time on a
fact-finding mission, educational diplomacy the objective. Beth’s book on international pedagogy had rested
briefly on the bestselling list, with “the Kiss,” as she called him, finding in her some sort of epistemological
ballast. Once again stymied by the need for my care during her trip, she consulted a former student and I
suddenly found myself placed in a nursing home for three weeks. Only ten at the time, though increasingly
sassy, I handled my stay quite well.
“They certainly fucked-up their island,” she said, not yet willing to release
Cuba. She placed her hand on Melanie’s rump, the gesture friendly, caressing, and not at all understood by
Melanie. Lessons, cautions, and warnings must have passed through the child’s mind, none of the school videos,
however, nor the slogans, the pamphlets, or the earnest talks by trained personnel containing advice about old
ladies who might touch.
“For forty years I smoked cigars,” Beth said, “a most generous shipping
executive, and a mostly average former student, seeing to a modest supply of Cuban and Honduran quality.
Anyway, the Kiss and I talked about Castro during our trip, and he decidedly had no love for the shaggy
General, though I thought him something of a dashing figure--Errol Flynn with just the gentlest touch of
a beer belly. Castro, of course. The Kiss simply looked overbanqueted.”
Melanie, feeling the confusing webbiness of all these grownup words,
struggled quietly under my mother’s assault, respect slowly withering beneath the holiness of autonomy.
I got up finally because Beth actually clutched the child’s buttock, her
fingers massaging, as I knew, a memory, holding the words in her hand. In my most imaginative days, I
couldn’t have explained to the child how her buttock had become a surrogate for a Cuban revolutionary.
Not at all a too-reverent prig myself, I laughed, barely noticeably, over the prospect of telling my
mother to get her hand off the fidelissimo’s ass.
Melanie reached down to pull her shorts up from where she’d dropped
them to imitate Beth’s bikini. With Beth’s hand on her buttock, however, she couldn’t pull them up.
“How many years in a decade, Mother?” Beth swung both arms over her
head, her ten fingers gradually relaxing into the politician’s ubiquitous V. Beth said one time she’d
taught that gesture to Richard Nixon and I had no reason to doubt it. It seemed only natural for me
to believe whatever Beth told me, especially since she had no contemporaries who might issue a pooh-pooh
or a “hot air, Beth. Always with the hot air!”
Melanie quickly put her shorts back on.
“My janitor,” Beth said, “had matriculated at a clown college. That’s
a description, by the way, not a derogation. A true clown with a bulbous plum for a nose, white face
and red lips, fresh grin for the humour. It was how he financed his beer and cigarettes and regular
fishing trips with the boys. He wouldn’t let me give it to him, the money. I would have. I’d never
had a husband with ‘boys’ to hang out with and I thought it all quite manly and tremendously sexual.”
Melanie looked toward the street, most likely, I thought, hoping to
hear a summons home. Children work so hard at finding entrances to everything that it takes them
awhile to learn the intricacies of a timely exit.
“Look,” Beth said, her forefinger pointing toward her head, “like
a hot-air balloon. This might be it, Chops.”
“Do you think so?”
“I just saw one of my husbands in a small child. That can’t be good.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know. That’s what worries me. Do you think I caused her
any distress?”
“She understands distress, mother,” I said. “Her family has many problems.”
Already I can imagine biographical master’s theses chewing on Beth’s
life. Eventually, those theses will merge into a doctoral tome (through research; I know the system),
then a published book. I see these words of mine right here as fit testimony, perhaps substantiation for
a crucial point developed over the third cup of coffee some morning. The children of accomplished people,
however, rarely distinguish themselves as good witnesses. Too much love, perhaps, or the biases of lived
truths that conflict with the public persona: mistresses and fancy boys; closets so deep the adored one
can’t remember if he’s now in it or out of it; grand depressions giving the lie to an optimistic saviour.
Often, too, when the world adopts its pestering mode, and the letters come in large bags and the phone
never stops ringing, the child finds herself fronted by handlers who buy ice cream and lead the way to
movies and zoos and parks and museums. I lived some of that, but not all of it.
In fact, when we moved to Quilli I came up with the idea that we
give the world a small gift in a Beth no longer quite able to read a book or peel an apple. A bicycle
accident at the age of ninety--we’ll say--has turned her hips to peanut butter (still a favourite food),
and she’s now concerned with things like bed sores and the rascally habits of her bowels and whether or
not she ought to quit smoking. I gave her scenarios; I gave her payback for the parts of her the world
had borrowed and never returned. I told her I resented those times when the White House called and I
had had to answer the phone, although I still managed to find myself hugely flattered the first time
the president’s appointments secretary called me Chops. That was after I’d told the secretary that,
when I was old enough to vote, I would vote straight Democrat, maybe Socialist, but before the one
time when the president himself spoke to me and my nerves dissolved so fast I farted. I don’t think
he heard that.
Anyway, consider all of this only an interim portrait. The last
days of anyone tend often toward either the clinically garish or the fatuously epigrammatic.
Mostly, I think we expect the richest wisdom to emerge from moments of (occasionally) catastrophic
debilitation. That, of course, right up to and including the day of her suicide, had never described
Beth.
“From an early age and onward I learned that not much good happens
in this world. My mother always said one avoids life’s eviscerating disappointments by expecting
either nothing at all or expecting only the worst. She thought that by filling me with disaster
I would find the other cheek not only easy to turn, but also hardened and barely able to feel the
next blow. Yet--what can you make of such a thing? Anything at all? Not hardly. Poke your nose
through the cloud at least occasionally and you will feel the warmth of the sun upon it. Yes,
you’ll also smell the smoke and the chemical farms and your neighbour’s dirty feet, perhaps even
someone burning or rotting away with an incurable ailment. So what? Just do it.”
I used those words as part of the eulogy at Beth’s last college
(in a very private service). I let memory merge with daring as I said what I could remember about
Beth’s last day. Prior to that we’d researched--good scholars both of us--the options and found
all the scholars quiet, certain books not yet written.
“The government has locked all the exit doors,” she said one time.
“That can’t be good.”
Beth had no named ailments, only a profound sense of completion,
of work done, of a life lived to all possible purposes.
“Thus,” she said, “I remain unqualified for the opiates a compassionate
practitioner might lay upon me, especially now that Desiderio is gone. Perhaps you could hire someone,
Chops. I’ve heard you can remove a wife for as little as a hundred dollars. Certainly, an empty old
bottle from the shelf of college management shouldn’t cost much more than that.”
“Too risky,” I said, aware of yet another dark tease. “There could
be pain, disfigurement.”
“I’m talking about professionals, my darling,” Beth said.
“They’re not always that professional, mother.”
“I cannot describe to you the emptiness residing within me, Chops,”
she said at one point. “I feel as though I’ve swallowed a thousand caesurae.”
Done, she repeated, completely done, but she couldn’t find an
illness, a condition, not even a slightly terrible pathology worthy of her. One night she asked
me to get a rope from the basement and we played with that for a long time--thirteen loops on a
hangman’s knot, she said.
“Yet hanging, Chops,” she said, “I believe this--requires an executioner.”
“You’ve read this in a manual?” I said.
“I followed, I enforced, policies for many years,” she said. “It’s
a hard habit to break.”
“In this matter,” I answered, “you make your own rules.”
“Down which road lies loneliness,” Beth said.
Unexplained car crash takes the life of lone driver. I tape
this headline from our weekly paper on the refrigerator along with a note: Find someone to send
this to.
“Some years ago,” I began in my eulogy to my mother, “I published
a book of stories, very good ones, according to a respectable number of reviews, each one taking
as its theme some aspect of the musical life--my life. All of them, however, failed because
inspiration slapped away all my musicological poetry and dumped people down into my reveries--rather
rudely, I thought--people who never seemed to know where to go or how to get there, people loose,
people hurried and harried, usually frightened. Someone, however, always came along and rescued
them, showed them the way, talked quietly to them and showed them how to stifle the screams and
walk quietly into all the beginnings and all the endings that awaited them. No--Beth wouldn’t
leave me alone even when I wrote. She became all of the men in all of my stories and all of the
children, too. My women, however, often eluded me. They began as shapes, very large things that
tended to glow, very noisy things that often made me clap my hands over my ears though the sounds,
of course, thundered around deep inside. Always did I make them beautiful, and always did I put
them into terrible situations, inhuman situations, because I knew they would prevail over all the
indecencies, all the terrors we face each day, not the least of which are those that stare at us
in a mirror. Beth, I know, would have a slight tilt to her head over these words. She would
enjoy my praise--oh she knew she was so very, very good--yet warn me that even praise must find
its ending much as she found her own.
“It’s at the end of a road some miles from here, that daunting place
of cliffs and crevices where the Pappadapsikeag joins the Saint John, and where something of a beach
lies beneath one of the cliffs, a sand made of old bones ground out of distinguished lives. The place
juts out as a final flicker of Appalachian tongue, and the road will test even the most skilful driver:
rough, rutted, very curvy and there are drop-offs, chubby arms of pine waiting with deceptive treachery.
“At the end of that road the one car sits in all its corroded glory,
the old Packard, eighty years of rust a bare beginning in the world of deterioration. No doubt there
are people who’ve looked inside that car over the years. What they’ve seen I have no desire to know,
nor would I care about what truly happened to those two girls. Possibly, Beth needed something iconic,
something viciously dramatic from her young life to serve as groundwork for the drama she lived all
those years, doing all that work, nurturing those four hapless husbands and the one daughter she could
never release into the world. Possibly, she simply lied. Parents do lie to their children, all the
time, but I think the only thing Beth really wanted to say was that even the worst lies shape us.
They become like hammers and saws and levels and screwdrivers in that we can use them in an infinite
number of ways, or we can let them sit--never quite useless--only mute; thus, wasted.
Two girls died, crushed by public opinion. Beth embraced a kind
of quirkiness by saying Socrates flat-out blew it when he said the opinion of the many can make
you neither better nor worse. But those moments near the burning car had nothing to do with philosophy.
Beth summed it up by saying to me--everything having its practical spin--‘What could I call it other
than training, Chops? We girls would drive that century until its engine blew.’
“That’s an apt image, as you’ll see, and Beth took pride in it. She’d
often thought of her life as built of steel girders and concrete pourings, and she often referred to
her failures as mechanical breakdowns; thus, always repairable.
“Beth and I had no evening, no morning of crisp sunlight where we
enjoyed a long goodbye. As with any parent and child, the goodbye begins on the day of birth; hopefully,
as the days pass into years, as the words progress, the goodbye grows fat with richness and warmth. Or
maybe she simply felt comfortable having me--healthy, educated, experienced--in the wings: the reserve
Beth, the replacement. How do you say goodbye to yourself? I should mention, though, that Beth knew
all about our differences, that I was destined for no college presidencies, that the secretaries and
other groomsmen of top political people would have no reason to seek either my words or my comfort.
Quite honestly, the only ambition I’ve ever had in my life was to be Beth’s daughter, and I was
very good at that and she knew it.”
“At the northern edge of town we have a scattered outcropping of
trailers and the spartan housing of welfare mothers. I drove Beth out there and stopped the car
and helped her get behind the wheel. She felt good, she said, only a little stiff. It was a snowy
day, grey and mean-looking, the ice rocky and chunked up on the roads. We had heard a good ten to
twenty inches of snow forecast for the next day or two and we thought that served our--her--purposes
quite nicely. Beth’s driver’s license, by the way, was still valid.
“‘Go see Lorraine,’ I told her as I got out of the car. That car,
incidentally, an old Chevy, I’d bought a week earlier for a thousand dollars, a price, it occurred
to me, less than that of a coffin. I’d taken out no insurance on the car because that seemed both
a little silly and maybe a lot dishonest.
“‘Don’t concern yourself over what the welfare mothers might see,’
Beth said to me as I fastened my coat and put on my gloves. ‘It’s sad, but they don’t view themselves
as valid witnesses to anything.’
“Even as I speak right here I can see in my mind’s eye the distance
and the enveloping snow, great arms pulling Beth into some timeless bosom about the way a hawk might
pluck some bunny from a field. She puts the car in gear and begins to move toward the woods and the
rising hills, her progress steady, unswerving, her speed increasing. The old shocks and springs of
the car must be disintegrating as she flies around the curves and over the dips of that snaky road
that leads to the cliffs towering above the river. Inside, coming up through the rusty floor, I can
almost hear a fearsome roar as the car deflects ice chunks and the splatter of flying cinders, though
Beth might not have noticed it. Such a moment would have found her thoughtful, quite bemused, possibly
talking in a quiet monologue--something focused, precise: a professional woman, as she might have said,
with portfolio, credentials, and experience, off on another fact-finding mission.
* * *
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