Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (16 page)

When they let me in to see her she was bluish-gray in the face and her eyes were not all-the-way closed, but they had rolled up, the slit that was open showed the whites. She always looked terrible with her teeth out, anyway, wouldn't let us see her. Cam teased her vanity. They were out now. So all the time, I thought, all the time even when she was young it was in her that she was going to look like this.

They didn't hold out hope. Haro came and took a
look at her and put his arm around my shoulders and said, “Val, you'll have to be prepared.” He meant well but I couldn't talk to him. It wasn't his mother and he couldn't remember anything. That wasn't his fault but I didn't want to talk to him, I didn't want to listen to him telling me I better be prepared. We went and ate something in the hospital cafeteria.

“You better phone Cam,” Haro said.

“Why?”

“He'll want to know.”

“Why do you think he'll want to know? He left her alone last night and he didn't know enough to get an ambulance when he came in and found her this morning.”

“Just the same. He has a right. Maybe you ought to tell him to get over here.”

“He is probably busy this moment preparing to give her a hippie funeral.”

But Haro persuaded me as he always can and I went and phoned. No answer. I felt better because I had phoned, and justified in what I had said because of Cam not being in. I went back and waited, by myself.

About seven o'clock that night Cam turned up. He was not alone. He had brought along a tribe of co-priests, I suppose they were, from that house. They all wore the same kind of outfit he did, the brown sacking nightgown and the chains and crosses and holy hardware, they all had long hair, they were all a good many years younger than Cam, except for one old man, really old, with a curly gray beard and bare feet—in March, bare feet—and no teeth. I swear this old man didn't have a clue what was going on. I think they picked him up down by the Salvation Army and put that outfit on him because they needed an old man for a kind of mascot, or extra holiness, or something.

Cam said, “This is my sister Valerie. This is Brother Michael. This is Brother John, this is Brother Louis.” Etc., etc.

“They haven't said anything to give me hope, Cam. She is dying.”

“We hope not,” said Cam with his secret smile. “We spent the day working for her.”

“Do you mean praying?” I said.

“Work is a better word to describe it than praying, if you don't understand what it is.”

Well of course, I never understand.

“Real praying is work, believe me,” says Cam and they all smile at me, his way. They can't keep still, like children who have to go to the bathroom they're weaving and jiggling and doing little steps.

“Now where's her room?” says Cam in a practical tone of voice.

I thought of Mother dying and through that slit between her lids—who knows, maybe she can see from time to time—seeing this crowd of dervishes celebrating around her bed. Mother who lost her religion when she was thirteen and went to the Unitarian Church and quit when they had the split about crossing God out of the hymns (she was for it), Mother having to spend her last conscious minutes wondering what had happened, if she was transported back in history to where loonies cavorted around in their crazy ceremonies, trying to sort her last reasonable thoughts out in the middle of their business.

Thank God the nurse said no. The intern was brought and he said no. Cam didn't insist, he smiled and nodded at them as if they were granting permission and then he brought the troupe back into the waiting room and there, right before my eyes, they started. They put the old man in the center, sitting down with his head bowed and his eyes shut—they had to tap him and remind him how to do that—and they squatted in a rough sort of circle round him, facing in and out, in and out, alternately. Then, eyes closed, they started swaying back and forth moaning some words very softly, only not the same words, it sounded as if each one of
them had got different words, and not in English of course but Swahili or Sanskrit or something. It got louder, gradually it got louder, a pounding singsong, and as it did they rose to their feet, all except the old man who stayed where he was and looked as if he might have gone to sleep, sitting, and they began a shuffling kind of dance where they stood, clapping, not very well in time. They did this for a long while, and the noise they were making, though it was not terribly loud, attracted the nurses from their station and nurses' aides and orderlies and a few people like me who were waiting, and nobody seemed to know what to do, because it was so unbelievable, so crazy in that ordinary little waiting room. Everybody just stared as if they were asleep and dreaming and expecting to wake up. Then a nurse came out of Intensive Care and said, “We can't have this disturbance. What do you think you're doing here?”

She took hold of one of the young ones and shook him by the shoulder, else she couldn't have got anybody to stop and pay attention.

“We're working to help a woman who's very sick,” he told her.

“I don't know what you call working, but you're not helping anybody. Now I'm asking you to clear out of here. Excuse me. I'm not asking. I'm telling.”

“You're very mistaken if you think the tones of our voices are hurting or disturbing any sick person. This whole ceremony is pitched at a level which will reach and comfort the unconscious mind and draw the demonic influences out of the body. It's a ceremony that goes back five thousand years.”

“Good Lord,” said the nurse, looking stupefied as well she might. “Who are these people?”

I had to go and enlighten her, telling her that it was my brother and what you might call his friends, and I was not in on their ceremony. I asked about Mother, was there any change.

“No change,” she said. “What do we have to do to get them out of here?”

“Turn the hose on them,” one of the orderlies said, and all this time, the dance, or ceremony, never stopped, and the one who had stopped and done the explaining went back to dancing too, and I said to the nurse, “I'll phone in to see how she is, I'm going home for a little while.” I walked out of the hospital and found to my surprise that it was dark. The whole day in there, dark to dark. In the parking lot I started to cry. Cam has turned this into a circus for his own benefit, I said to myself, and said it out loud when I got home.

Haro made me a drink.

“It'll probably get into the papers,” I said. “Cam's chance for fame.”

Haro phoned the hospital to see if there was any news and they said there wasn't. “Did they have—was there any difficulty with some young people in the waiting room this evening? Did they leave quietly?” Haro is ten years older than I am, a cautious man, too patient with everybody. I used to think he was sometimes giving Cam money I didn't know about.

“They left quietly,” he said. “Don't worry about the papers. Get some sleep.”

I didn't mean to but I fell asleep on the couch, after the drink and the long day. I woke up with the phone ringing and day lightening the room. I stumbled into the kitchen dragging the blanket Haro had put over me and saw by the clock on the wall it was a quarter to six. She's gone, I thought.

It was her own doctor.

He said he had encouraging news. He said she was much better this morning.

I dragged over a chair and collapsed in it, both arms and my head too down on the kitchen counter. I came back on the phone to hear him saying she was still in a critical
phase and the next forty-eight hours would tell the story, but without raising my hopes too high he wanted me to know she was responding to treatment. He said that this was especially surprising in view of the fact that she had been late getting to hospital and the things they did to her at first did not seem to have much effect, though of course the fact that she survived the first few hours at all was a good sign. Nobody had made much of this good sign to me yesterday, I thought.

I sat there for an hour at least after I had hung up the phone. I made a cup of instant coffee and my hands were shaking so I could hardly get the water into the cup, then couldn't get the cup to my mouth. I let it go cold. Haro came out in his pyjamas at last. He gave me one look and said, “Easy, Val. Has she gone?”

“She's some better. She's responding to treatment.”

“The look of you I thought the other.”

“I'm so amazed.”

“I wouldn't've given five cents for her chances yesterday noon.”

“I know. I can't believe it.”

“It's the tension,” Haro said. “I know. You build yourself up ready for something bad to happen and then when it doesn't, it's a queer feeling, you can't feel good right away, it's almost like a disappointment.”

Disappointment. That was the word that stayed with me. I was so glad, really, grateful, but underneath I was thinking, so Cam didn't kill her after all, with his carelessness and craziness and going out and neglecting her he didn't kill her, and I was, yes, I was, sorry in some part of me to find out that was true. And I knew Haro knew this but wouldn't speak of it to me, ever. That was the real shock to me, why I kept shaking. Not whether Mother lived or died. It was what was so plain about myself.

Mother got well, she pulled through beautifully. After she rallied she never sank back. She was in the hospital three weeks and then she came home, and rested another three
weeks, and after that went back to work, cutting down a bit and working ten to four instead of full days, what they call the housewives' shift. She told everybody about Cam and his friends coming to the hospital. She began to say things like, “Well, that boy of mine may not be much of a success at anything else but you have to admit he has a knack of saving lives.” Or, “Maybe Cam should go into the miracle business, he certainly pulled it off with me.” By this time Cam was saying, he is saying now, that he's not sure about that religion, he's getting tired of the other priests and all that not eating meat or root vegetables. It's a stage, he says now, he's glad he went through it, self-discovery. One day I went over there and found he was trying on an old suit and tie. He says he might take advantage of some of the adult education courses, he is thinking of becoming an accountant.

I was thinking myself about changing into a different sort of person from the one I am. I do think about that. I read a book called
The Art of Loving
. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same. What has Cam ever done that actually hurt me, anyway, as Haro once said. And how am I better than he is after the way I felt the night Mother lived instead of died? I made a promise to myself I would try. I went over there one day taking them a bakery cake—which Cam eats now as happily as anybody else—and I heard their voices out in the yard—now it's summer, they love to sit in the sun—Mother saying to some visitor, “Oh yes I was, I was all set to take off into the wild blue yonder, and Cam here, this
idiot
, came and danced outside my door with a bunch of his hippie friends—”

“My God, woman,” roared Cam, but you could tell he didn't care now, “members of an ancient holy discipline.”

I had a strange feeling, like I was walking on coals and trying a spell so I wouldn't get burnt.

Forgiveness in families is a mystery to me, how it comes or how it lasts.

Tell Me Yes or No
 

I persistently imagine you dead.

You told me that you loved me years ago. Years ago. And I said that I too, I was in love with you in those days. An exaggeration.

In those days I was a young girl, but didn't know it because times were different then. At the age when young girls nowadays are growing their hair to their waists, traveling through Afghanistan, moving—it seems to me—as smoothly as eels among their varied and innocent and transitory loves, I was sleepily rinsing diapers, clad in a red corduroy dressing gown, wet across the stomach; I was pushing a baby carriage or a stroller along the side of the road to the store (so habitually that without this prop my arms felt a disturbing lightness, my body weight had to be redistributed, tilted back), I was reading and falling asleep on the evening couch. We are pitied for this bygone drudgery, women of my age are, we pity ourselves, but to tell the truth it was not always bad, it was sometimes comfortable—the ritual labors, small rewards of coffee and cigarettes, the desperate, humorous, formalized exchanges with other women, the luxurious dreams of sleep.