“Louise,” George says.
“Louise,” says Mr. Mead.
“Well it’s so,” Louise says. “Isn’t it so, George? You’re saved. I mean all you got to do is pray. All you got to do is pray for us. Just open your mouth and let her rip. ‘Make things swell, Lord. Do all the other folks like you done me. Make things grand altogether.’ Ain’t that about the size of it, honey?”
“That’s about the size of it,” George says.
“I have another delivery,” Messenger says.
“Hey, don’t run off,” Louise tells him. “Stick around while my husband changes the world through prayer.”
Mr. Mead laughs. Then George and Louise do. Cornell Messenger also starts to laugh.
“What?” Mr. Mead asks. “What?”
“
I
hate to come into
this
neighborhood,” Cornell manages.
“Happy birthday, Dad,” his daughter says. “You thought we forgot, didn’t you? Oh,” she says, “I bet you forgot yourself. I’m ashamed of you, Dad. That means you forgot Mom’s, too, because hers was yesterday. Did you forget that, Dad?”
“I did,” Mr. Mead says.
“Is today your birthday?”
“She says so.”
“Of course it is,” Louise says. “I made pumpkin pecan pie. I’m going to fix you a piece too, Mister. I hope you don’t mind using a napkin on your lap instead of a plate.”
“I pray he don’t mind,” George says quietly.
“I forgot my own birthday,” Mr. Mead says approvingly. “I was a sailor twenty years and lived by landmark and azimuth and time. I was a sailor twenty years, five of them cook. I was already old but even down there in the galley I always knew where I was, could tell which farms we’d passed from one seating to the next.”
“Tell about the time the boat was stuck in the ice, Dad. When you and Mom and the rest of the crew had to walk across the river to the Arkansas side.”
“No, no,” Mr. Mead says. He wonders why he said that about being a sailor. He is too old to make overtures, too old to give assurances that he had once been young or known a world wider than the room in which he now lies. Evidently he has not always been so reticent, though he has no memory of decorating his life with anecdote. Perhaps she heard the story from her mother, though it’s possible she had it from him. People had their own frequencies, were constantly sending messages of self, flashing bulletins of being, calling stop press, overriding, jamming the weaker signals of others.
George wonders about the Meals-on-Wheels man. He knows of course, as Louise must, despite what she’s said to the old man, that he doesn’t work for the city. He doesn’t have the look of a civil servant. He would look out of place at the Hall, even paying a traffic fine or property taxes. He can’t imagine him buying license plates or going to the clinic for a vaccination. He suddenly realizes that he’s been denied access to an entire class of people. He has never been in their homes or done business with them. He watches Cornell pick at his pie as if it were somehow extraordinary, something ethnic.
“How about another slice?” George asks.
“Me? No thanks. It’s really quite good.”
“Sure. It’s from a recipe.”
“You remember, Dad. I got the recipe in trade school that time I thought I’d bake for the school lunch program. You thought it was delicious but told me all those ingredients would have tied up the galley.” She turns to Cornell. “There wouldn’t have been anywhere to store the pumpkins.”
She is embarrassed that a stranger brings her father’s lunch. It looks bad.
Messenger believes they don’t know anything about him.
Mr. Mead, the old farmer, the old sailor and river cook, the ancient, if Louise is right, birthday boy——Mr. Mead, on this ordinary afternoon in St. Louis, has a moment of special clarity, brighter and more exciting than the routine orientation and simple daily legibility of his life. His body, which these past——How many years had he been an old man?
“Is it really my birthday?”
“Of course, Dad.” The woman nods almost imperceptibly in Cornell’s direction.
“Is it?” he asks the man who has brought his lunch.
What’s going on? Cornell wonders. Are they having the old-timer on? Didn’t he just have bakery in his mouth? How old he must be. Cornell raises his fork toward Mr. Mead. “Happy birthday,” he says.
Louise is a little irritated with her father. They’ve never been separated—the trips on the river were business—but they were not really close. His fault. He was independent always. Even old he is independent. People in a family shouldn’t have to woo each other. She’s always sent him cards, brought gifts, kept track of his anniversaries and celebrations, kept score on his life. Now he asks a stranger if it’s really his birthday. She’s not sore because he doesn’t trust her—he’s old, it’s easy for a person her father’s age to become confused—but because
all
his confidence has not been blasted. Some remains. He appeals to strangers, outside authority.
He remembers now. Not because Harve’s father has wished him happy birthday. He
remembers.
He’s going to die. It isn’t a premonition. No Indian instinct commands him to cut himself from the herd. He is under no compulsion to be alone, to be anywhere but where he is. His knowledge of his death doesn’t even come from outside himself. And now he pinpoints the exciting clarity, the special orientation. It’s his body which has had the first inkling, his skin which cannot feel the bedclothes or register weight. His toenails which no longer slice back into his flesh, and his bones which no longer harbor pain, the gray blaze of years’ duration which has served as a sort of measuring device. (I am as tall as my pain.) His teeth which no longer have dimension, their honed edges and the bump of gums and the false-scale depth he has plumbed with his tongue. His stubble which he no longer feels when he draws his lower lip into his mouth. He is neutral as hair. And though residual movement remains—he can draw his lower lip into his mouth, he can open his eyes, shut them—and at least the minimal synapses which permit him his speech, he can no longer feel it resonate along its dental and aspirate contacts and stops, his voice as alien to him as if it came from a radio. (How can it even be heard?) His nervous system is shutting down, fleeing its old painful coordinates as if a warning had been given, like the blinking of lights, say, that signal people to leave a public building. He is dying.
And now he can’t speak either. Or close his eyes. And death has come to certain emotions. He means to be afraid, is certain he is afraid, yet
he feels
no fear, his mind and body not up to it, unable to accommodate it now that his resources are so depleted, as if on the occasion of final things, in emergency conditions, life entertained only that which was still essential to it, like a level-headed victim, like a clever refugee. Though he should be surprised, the nerves of astonishment have been cut.
Though he can no longer see or hear her—just now his ears have turned off—he knows that his daughter is beside him. Probably she is holding his hand. And he tries, helplessly, uselessly, to return the pressure. He could as easily fly. (Is he flying?) And now affection is deadened too,
all
the emotions tapped out as his skin. He knows what he
should
be feeling—and now italics leave him—as he had known seconds before that he should be afraid, that he wanted to be afraid, but it is all impossible. He may only—blinded, deafened, without italics—witness his death, less involved, finally, than the man, what’shisname, the lunch guy’s pal, who was going to have his wife committed if she didn’t cheer up. He’d be grateful if gratitude were any more available to him than fear or sight or the weight of his bedclothes.
Now he is almost used up. Denied physiology, he regards his Cheshire decline with what? With nothing. What should have been of interest, the most personal moment in his life, is now merely consciousness, knowledge, the mind’s disinterested attention. He is like someone neither participant nor fan who hears a ball score. Like a man in Nebraska told it’s raining in Paris. He watches death with his knowledge and no money riding on it.
He is alone in the map room, cannot perceive the quadrants of his being as his sectors succumb and are obliterated and do not, for all their pale, attenuate traces, seem even poignantly to flare in the face of their extinguishment. Typography and symbols fail him, all the niceties. He cannot read the signs and illuminations, the channel buoys, all the white lines in the road, all the lodestars and mileposts, vanes and windsocks and load-line marks that could show him boundaries or indicate how low he rides in the water. (And now even the circuits that make analogies have been discontinued.) He is almost history, narrative, gossip.
He knows he cannot see. Has he eyes? He knows he cannot hear. Has he ears? He knows he cannot feel. Has he flesh? Is his sphincter open? Has he still a body? Is it turned to bruise? Does it run with pus?
All that is left to him finally—and he could use his astonishment now if he were able—is what he will become when he no longer knows it. Nothing sacred is happening here, nothing very solemn, nothing important. There is almost certainly no God. He would tell George Mills not to bother about his salvation if he could, but it doesn’t make any difference that he can’t. What could he use now if it were still available to him? His amazement? No. His fear? Certainly not. His old capacity to care for them? Useless. Any of his feelings? No. Useless, useless.
He remembers—peculiarly, memory still flickers, and a certain ability, probably reflex, to muse, to consider; all this would be something to share if he could, to tell them that memory is the last thing left in the blood when you check out, that you die piecemeal, in sections, departments, and it’s memory goes down with the ship, though it might be different with different people; maybe it’s important sometimes, maybe it’s sacred once in a while, and God might come for some but not for others; Christ, he’s dying like someone stabbed in
opera,
stumbling around with a mouthful of arias (Jesus, is there hope? Where did the images and italics come from? He isn’t sure but certainly there is no hope.
He
does not hope.), and maybe that’s why death was so long-winded, why disease took as long as it did——to give the systems time to wind down, but that’d be different for different people too; maybe some went with a great flaming itch they couldn’t get to—his first large woman.
Well,
woman.
She was fourteen years old and weighed one hundred and seventy-four pounds. Lord, she was big. It wasn’t fat, circus lady fat, jinxed genes and a broken pituitary. What was merely chemical—he imagined cells in geometric replication, like a queer produce that laced some glandular broth—did not become human for him. It was never just weight which tickled his fancy, great boluses of flesh which draped their heavy arms and thighs like a sort of bunting. Great heavy asses so big their cracks seemed like surgical scars. Immense bolsters of breast that piled and rolled on their chests like tide. But some
idea
of heaviness, of mass and strength and density which sent out a kind of gravity.
It sure attracted
me,
he thinks, whose prick has just gone out, its nerve ends snuffed, doused as wick, and who recalls, with detachment, almost dead, too, not against his will but in dead will’s leaden absence, all sexual nostalgia gone, all bias——
that
stout girl. (Always one of the code words. Stately, plump, buxom, portly. Words whose meanings he knew but looked up in a dozen dictionaries just to see them written out.)
That
stout girl. Her strapping, robust, sturdy sisters. Their heavy haunches, their meaty hams. Their thick hair and big hands. Their full busts and statuesque figures.
Because maybe we really
are
clay. Something in flesh which takes an imprint and strikes us off like medals, human change.
“You can’t,” she said, and hoped he could, that someone could.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have to try.”
“Maybe in water.”
“Oh no. On land.” (And that moment has before him all his fantastic, dumb ideal. The woman who can’t be raised even in water, who drops on him like female anchor, sunk, unbuoyant treasure, against all the annulled, mediate influence of displacement, whelming him, his striving, kicking, bucking limbs. All I ever needed, he thinks, was to be drowned real good, and does not remember his actual wife who actually was.)
“You can try, but if I fall and hurt you it’s not my fault.”
She was not even teasing, he thinks now. Nor was I. I had such dialogues by heart. I put them through them like a cross-examiner with my ploys like so many idioms, leading them on, and my professed disbelief just one more idiom.
“No, that can’t be so. Your bathroom scale is off.”
“You think the doctor’s scale is off?”
“Oh, the
doctor’s
scale. You didn’t say it was the
doctor’s
scale.”
“Yeah, well it was.”
“Still, no scale’s
always
reliable. Unless you’re one of those people who looks lighter than she actually is. Let’s see,” he had said, “I know I can lift” and names a weight ten or fifteen pounds less than the one she has told him, fifteen or twenty more than he knows he can raise. “If I can’t pick you up, the scale’s probably right.” And he can’t, his knees already buckled in capitulate sexual deference to female mass, this body of body against whose volume he opposes his own, and not even
he
knows if he’s really trying, though he thinks he is, hopes he is, even as he fumbles, slips, goes down.
And if his tears had not already died he would be weeping now, and if his ability to sorrow were not gone he would be wretched.
And sees one last time their outsized dresses, their hundred relaxed postures——large women on benches, in bleachers, in stockinged feet along the slopes of shoe salesmen’s stools, sidesaddle on horses or climbing out of cars or down steep hills, sprawling in parks, on picnics, on beaches, floating in water or soaking in tubs, clumsy in changing rooms, bulging the sheets on examining tables, sitting on toilets or putting on shoes, reaching for dishes or passing the soup, turning in sleep, their nightgowns hiked up, or fetching a slipper from under a bed, stretching or bending or praying to God, sweating in summer and fanning themselves, looking behind them in mirrors for bruises, doing an exercise, letting out seams. In all disarray arrayed. Mead’s large ladies, Mead’s fat forms, his sprawled, spilled women tumbling his head like the points of a pinwheel.