This
goes back some. Nixon was still president but soon to
resign, and my world was going into the ground. Without
wanting to, dreading it, I picked up pen and paper, a stamp
already on the envelope.
My
letter, written on Tuesday, brought Carolyn’s father down
on Thursday—a great gray man with bloodless skin and
brilliant false teeth, a kind of shabby enigma in worn worsted
against whom I looked splendid in my buttoned-down shirt, dark
tie, and tweed jacket worn thin only at the elbows where he
couldn’t see. Stepping off the Greyhound, he said
nothing. Walking with me to the car, a tired blue Ford, he
said, “This yours or was it hers?”
“It
was ours,” I said and annoyed him by opening the passenger
door for him. He seated himself on stained upholstery,
waited while I made my way to the driver’s side, and then
tapped the dusty dashboard with crusted nails.
“It
wouldn’t bring in much cash money,” he said.
“I
don’t suppose.”
“How’s
the engine?”
“Shot.”
He
coughed into one hand, wiped it with the back of the other, and
stared at me at length. His eyes were blue peas hardly big
enough for his pupils, which resembled the kind of specks flies
leave behind. With remains of the cough still in his voice
and shredding his words, he said, “You and her had strange
ways, all that free-love stuff going around. Were you ever
properly married?”
“Would
you like to see the paper?” I had it in my
inside jacket pocket, knowing he’d ask. Because
Carolyn and I had had no children, he could never believe we were
legally married.
“Not
necessary now. I hope you know I had no insurance on her.”
“I
know,” I said with an urge to cry, not because of him or
Carolyn but because I was a poet and could no longer see rhyme or
reason for being one. I wished I were a plumber with a
toilet to tinker with, for there was purpose in that, with the
promise of money.
He
was staring so steadily that I felt certain he was about to say,
“You’re quite a weak young man.” But that
would have been intimate and from the start I knew he wanted no
intimacy. A man widowed and now childless, who lived by
himself without neighbors or telephone, without a dog or cat,
with only an old radio with a cracked shell, needed nothing.
Or maybe he needed that radio as much as I had once thought I
needed leisure and solitude. Maybe he needed that radio
like crazy!
“How’s
the burying bill going to be paid?” he said, opening his
suit jacket. A terrible musty odor flew out. I
smelled it, he smelled it, and immediately he closed his jacket.
“I’m
taking care of it,” I said. Suddenly it became
imperative that he think me responsible.
“You
got the cash money?”
“I’m
getting a loan.”
“Oh,
then you have a regular job now?”
“The
loan is from a friend,” I said sharply. There was
still some fight in me, and I was about to say more, but he
tapped the dashboard again.
“Take
me to her.”
Amidst
the odor of flowers we were shown into a small room with
olive-green walls where Carolyn lay, serenely rosy-cheeked.
There had been nothing whining or protesting about her death.
She had died without a sound, as if it were simply another
experience. I had awakened in the night and known that what
lay beside me was no longer a living being.
“Better
than her suffering,” a neighbor woman had said and I had
agreed. Her eyes as big as goldfish, the woman pulled in
her breath suppressing a dangerous desire to mother me . . . for
which I shall be eternally grateful.
Carolyn’s
father moved toward her like a man going to inspect merchandise.
“Yes,” he said, “it looks like her.”
His horny nails bit the box as he leaned over her. For a
second I thought he might kiss her, but he didn’t. He
put rough fingers to her red cheeks. “It’s not
her real color, is it?” he said, tipping his heavy head
toward me for a moment and then resuming his assessment.
His fingers slid to her mouth and brushed her lips. He had
always forbidden her to use lipstick.
I
was angry. I recalled his overbearing Puritanism which
would have turned Carolyn into a screaming idiot had she not been
ready to fling herself into the arms of the first man to happen
along. A slip of a girl, delicate and dainty with dark hair
and darker eyes, she had been a student at the state university
to which I journeyed with a lot of drunken others because of the
dance. I recalled her father’s terrifying silence
when she had married me, his refusal to have me in his home or
allow her in except as an invited guest who slept not in her old
room but in the spare one. Now he was her guest, invited
only because I had written. All the same, watching him paw
her face, I felt like an intruder on a private family scene in
which a silent and sadistic interrogation was taking place.
Alive, she’d have cringed. Dead, she lay blatantly
beaming with paint and rouge. I was on the verge of tearing
his hand away when he stopped.
“She’s
not wearing her watch,” he said, straightening.
I
was momentarily puzzled, for Carolyn had never worn a watch.
Then I recalled
an
obtuse white-gold piece with a forlorn face that Carolyn had kept
in a dresser drawer and had worn only during those rare visits to
her father.
“It
was her mother’s,” he said. “I’d
like it back if you have it.”
“Of
course.”
“I’ll
pay you for it.”
“Certainly
not.”
He
looked at her again, a final look, I could tell. “I
wonder what it’s like,” he said.
“Sir?”
Still
looking at her, he said “When there’s nothing left of
you but a stone with your name and dates dug in it that’s
rained and snowed on and Lord knows what else if there’re
dogs around.”
Back
in the car I drove rapidly around the fringe of the business
district and away from the foul exhaust of a city bus. The
clock on the bank building looked like the single median eye of a
Cyclops. We passed a solitary tree full of colorful
feathers. Autumn was upon us. With a slight heave,
Carolyn’s father shifted forward on the seat.
“Do
you have a plot for her?” he asked.
“I’ve
made arrangements.”
“There
was a place for her next to her mother. I buried a cousin
in it last year.”
“I
remember,” I said. “Carolyn was at the
graveside. I waited in the car.”
There
was silence as we coasted down a street lined with tenement
houses, three-deckers for the most part. He kept his eyes
on me as I tried to maneuver into a tight parking space.
Failing, I swung out and backed in, scraping the curb.
“I
never approved of you,” he said in a small burst.
“You and your crowd should’ve done your duty in
Vietnam instead of hiding behind your school books or sneaking
off to Canada. Now people like you are trying to drive a
good man out of office.” He drew a breath, a hard
one. “And I’ll say this to your face. A
man with no steady job who made his wife work while he wrote
verses is no man at all in my mind.”
“I
know your feelings, sir.”
“Did
she ever sell her blood for you?”
Bewildered, I
looked into his deadish face. I wondered if I’d ever
seen him smile and was sure I hadn’t. “What do
you mean?”
“To
one of those blood banks. I’ve heard how people do.”
“No,
she never did.”
“Why
didn’t she ever have any children?”
I
wasn’t sure how to answer him or even if I wanted to.
Finally I said, “We were careful.”
He
wrenched himself out of the car and stood on the cracked
sidewalk, waiting for me to lead the way. My tenement was
on the top floor, the climb a task for him, which he tried not to
show. He took a chair in my kitchen while I went into the
bedroom to hunt up the watch. Considering the messiness of
the place, he probably found it difficult to believe that Carolyn
had ever lived here. I was going to explain that the mess
was mine, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. I laid
the watch on the table, in front of him. Then I sat too.
“She
really live here?” he said.
I
nodded. At the same time I wondered what he was thinking
and imagined his thoughts all in small print. “Would
you like to see her things, in case there’s anything else
you want?”
“I
want nothing except this” He swept up the watch
and pocketed it without a glance.
I
wanted to show him the little epitaph I had written and fished it
from my pocket. It was nothing really; actually I thought
it unworthy and futile. What good are words when death
erases everything while denying what could’ve been.
“What’s
the matter?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“What
d’you have there?”
“Nothing.”
Behind my back I crumpled the slip of paper. I asked if he
would like to spend the night and wasn’t surprised when he
said he didn’t plan to attend tomorrow’s
funeral.
“What
will you do now?” he asked, lowering his chin as if tucking
in his breath. I wondered if his eyes—those tiny blue
chinks—were the only openings in his armor. Inadequate
peeks into the dark of his head.
“I’ll
keep on writing. There’s nothing else for me to do.”
Suddenly I had a memory of Carolyn occupying the chair her father
was in, both feet bare, one raised. She was painting little
piggies, working on the one that went to market. I could
see her so clearly. I could even smell the enamel.
“Those
verses?”
“Yes.”
“How
will you do it if there’s no one to work for you, put bread
on your table, a roof over your head?”
There
was no malice in his voice, only a flatness. “I’ll
manage,” I said.
“You
should’ve had a child,” he said. “What if
you never sell those verses? Who can you leave them to, so
you’ll know somebody will read them? Everybody should
have an heir.”
I
shrugged. I wished I could tell him that I had never given
it much thought, but he sat there so inscrutable, so airtight,
except for the chinks. His hands lay in his lap like big
mittens. Then I realized he was ill.
“Would
you like coffee?” I asked.
Glancing
at the wall clock, he said, “I have to catch my bus.
But I’ll use your toilet first.”
“Of
course.” I indicated the way, and he pulled himself
to his feet and moved awkwardly, as if his bones had lost much of
their character.
During
the ride back to the bus station we barely spoke. Either
there was nothing on his mind or too much. Once our eyes
met by chance, and it seemed I had caught him in an embarrassing
moment of pain. Passing that single tree again, I noticed
that the leaves on the bottom branches were fluffy yellow, like a
canary’s breast. Had I paper I’d have jotted
the impression down. The clock on the bank building gave
out the wrong time, as if cockeyed.
We
said goodbye in front of the nearly lifeless bus station.
The Greyhound was waiting but wouldn’t leave for
another twenty minutes. He shook his head when I offered to
wait with him. He seemed both anxious and reluctant to
part.
“Remember
her,” he said, “because I won’t.”
I
rocked a little on my heels. I was angry again, and he
could tell. He seemed glad. A cool breeze lifted his
hair, what there was of it. I tried hard, desperately hard,
to read some of his thoughts, a hopeless task. The print
was too tiny.
Back at the
tenement, instinctively and immediately, I went into the
bathroom. On top of the toilet tank, weighted down by a bottle of
Carolyn’s shampoo, was a wad of money, a small fortune I
could tell, with a stench of must and sickness about it.
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