I thought that if my father
hadn’t died, he would have taught me all about insects, which was his specialty
at the university. He would also have taught me German and Greek and Latin,
which he knew, and perhaps I would be a Lutheran. My father had been a Lutheran
in Wisconsin, but they were out of style in New England, so he had become a
lapsed Lutheran and then, my mother said, a bitter atheist.
The graveyard disappointed me.
It lay at the outskirts of the town, on low ground, like a rubbish dump, and as
I walked up and down the gravel paths, I could smell the stagnant salt marshes
in the distance.
The old part of the graveyard
was all right, with its worn, flat stones and lichen-bitten monuments, but I
soon saw my father must be buried in the modern part with dates in the nineteen
forties.
The stones in the modern part
were crude and cheap, and here and there a grave was rimmed with marble, like
an oblong bathtub full of dirt, and rusty metal containers stuck up about where
the person’s navel would be, full of plastic flowers.
A fine drizzle started drifting
down from the gray sky, and I grew very depressed.
I couldn’t find my father
anywhere.
Low, shaggy clouds scudded over
that part of the horizon where the sea lay, behind the marshes and the beach
shanty settlements, and raindrops darkened the black mackintosh I had bought
that morning. A clammy dampness sank through to my skin.
I had asked the salesgirl, “Is
it water-repellent?”
And she had said, “No raincoat
is ever water
-repellent.
It’s showerproofed.”
And when I asked her what
showerproofed was, she told me I had better buy an umbrella.
But I hadn’t enough money for an
umbrella. What with bus fare in and out of Boston and peanuts and newspapers
and abnormal-psychology books and trips to my old home town by the sea, my New
York fund was almost exhausted.
I had decided that when there
was no more money in my bank account I would do it, and that morning I’d spent
the last of it on the black raincoat.
Then I saw my father’s
gravestone.
It was crowded right up by
another gravestone, head to head, the way people are crowded in a charity ward
when there isn’t enough space. The stone was of a mottled pink marble, like
canned salmon, and all there was on it was my father’s name and, under it, two
dates, separated by a little dash.
At the foot of the stone I
arranged the rainy armful of azaleas I had picked from a bush at the gateway of
the graveyard. Then my legs folded under me, and I sat down in the sopping
grass. I couldn’t understand why I was crying so hard.
Then I remembered that I had
never cried for my father’s death.
My mother hadn’t cried either.
She had just smiled and said what a merciful thing it was for him he had died,
because if he had lived he would have been crippled and an invalid for life,
and he couldn’t have stood that, he would rather have died than had that
happen.
I laid my face to the smooth
face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.
I
knew just how to go about it.
The minute the car tires
crunched off down the drive and the sound of the motor faded, I jumped out of
bed and hurried into my white blouse and green figured skirt and black
raincoat. The raincoat felt damp still, from the day before, but that would
soon cease to matter.
I went downstairs and picked up
a pale blue envelope from the dining room table and scrawled on the back, in
large, painstaking letters:
I am going for a long walk.
I propped the message where my
mother would see it the minute she came in.
Then I laughed.
I had forgotten the most
important thing.
I ran upstairs and dragged a
chair into my mother’s closet. Then I climbed up and reached for the small
green strongbox on the top shelf. I could have torn the metal cover off with my
bare hands, the lock was so feeble, but I wanted to do things in a calm,
orderly way.
I pulled out my mother’s upper
right-hand bureau drawer and slipped the blue jewelry box from its hiding place
under the scented Irish linen handkerchiefs. I unpinned the little key from the
dark velvet. Then I unlocked the strongbox and took out the bottle of new
pills. There were more than I had hoped.
There were at least fifty.
If I had waited until my mother
doled them out to me, night by night, it would have taken me fifty nights to
save up enough. And in fifty nights, college would have opened, and my brother
would have come back from Germany, and it would be too late.
I pinned the key back in the
jewelry box among the clutter of inexpensive chains and rings, put the jewelry
box back in the drawer under the handkerchiefs; returned the strongbox to the
closet shelf and set the chair on the rug in the exact spot I had dragged it
from.
Then I went downstairs and into
the kitchen. I turned on the tap and poured myself a tall glass of water. Then
I took the glass of water and the bottle of pills and went down into the
cellar.
A dim, undersea light filtered
through the slits of the cellar windows. Behind the oil burner, a dark gap
showed in the wall at about shoulder height and ran back under the breezeway,
out of sight. The breezeway had been added to the house after the cellar was
dug, and built out over this secret earth-bottomed crevice.
A few old, rotting fireplace
logs blocked the hole mouth. I shoved them back a bit. Then I set the glass of
water and the bottle of pills side by side on the flat surface of one of the
logs and started to heave myself up.
It took me a good while to heft
my body into the gap, but at last, after many tries, I managed it, and crouched
at the mouth of the darkness, like a troll.
The earth seemed friendly under
my bare feet, but cold. I wondered how long it had been since this particular
square of soil had seen the sun.
Then, one after the other, I
lugged the heavy, dust-covered logs across the hole mouth. The dark felt thick
as velvet. I reached for the glass and bottle, and carefully, on my knees, with
bent head, crawled to the farthest wall.
Cobwebs touched my face with the
softness of moths. Wrapping my black coat round me like my own sweet shadow, I
unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of
water, one by one by one.
At first nothing happened, but
as I approached the bottom of the bottle, red and blue lights began to flash
before my eyes. The bottle slid from my fingers and I lay down.
The silence drew off, baring the
pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of
vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.
It
was completely dark.
I felt the darkness, but nothing
else, and my head rose, feeling it, like the head of a worm. Someone was
moaning. Then a great, hard weight smashed against my cheek like a stone wall
and the moaning stopped.
The silence surged back, smoothing itself as black
water smooths to its old surface calm over a dropped stone.
A cool wind rushed by. I was
being transported at enormous speed down a tunnel into the earth. Then the wind
stopped. There was a rumbling, as of many voices, protesting and disagreeing in
the distance. Then the voices stopped.
A chisel cracked down on my eye,
and a slit of light opened, like a mouth or a wound, till the darkness clamped
shut on it again. I tried to roll away from the direction of the light, but
hands wrapped round my limbs like mummy hands, and I couldn’t move.
I began to think I must be in an
underground chamber, lit by blinding lights, and that the chamber was full of
people who for some reason were holding me down.
Then the chisel struck again,
and the light leapt into my head, and through the thick, warm, furry dark, a
voice cried.
“Mother!”
Air
breathed and played over my face.
I felt the shape of a room
around me, a big room with open windows. A pillow molded itself under my head,
and my body floated, without pressure, between thin sheets.
Then I felt warmth, like a hand
on my face. I must be lying in the sun. If I opened my eyes, I would see colors
and shapes bending in upon me like nurses.
I opened my eyes.
It
was completely dark.
Somebody was breathing beside
me.
“I can’t see,” I said.
A cheery voice spoke out of the
dark. “There are lots of blind people in the world. You’ll marry a nice blind
man someday.”
The
man with the chisel had come back.
“Why do you bother?” I said.
“It’s no use.”
“You mustn’t talk like that.”
His fingers probed at the great, aching boss over my left eye. Then he loosened
something, and a ragged gap of light appeared, like the hole in a wall. A man’s
head peered round the edge of it.
“Can you see me?”
“Yes.”
“Can you see anything else?”
Then I remembered. “I can’t see
anything.” The gap narrowed and went dark. “I’m blind.”
“Nonsense! Who told you that?”
“The nurse.”
The man snorted. He finished
taping the bandage back over my eye. “You are a very lucky girl. Your sight is
perfectly intact.”
“Somebody
to see you.”
The nurse beamed and disappeared.
My mother came smiling round the
foot of the bed. She was wearing a dress with purple cartwheels on it and she
looked awful.
A big tall boy followed her. At
first I couldn’t make out who it was, because my eye only opened a short way,
but then I saw it was my brother.
“They said you wanted to see
me.”
My mother perched on the edge of
the bed and laid a hand on my leg. She looked loving and reproachful, and I
wanted her to go away.
“I didn’t think I said
anything.”
“They said you called for me.”
She seemed ready to cry. Her face puckered up and quivered like a pale jelly.
“How are you?” my brother said.
I looked my mother in the eye.
“The same,” I said.
“You
have a visitor.”
“I don’t want a visitor.”
The nurse bustled out and whispered
to somebody in the hall. Then she came back. “He’d very much like to see you.”
I looked down at the yellow legs
sticking out of the unfamiliar white silk pajamas they had dressed me in. The
skin shook flabbily when I moved, as if there wasn’t a muscle in it, and it was
covered with a short, thick stubble of black hair.