A Certain Slant of Light (2 page)

  
A suitor bent upon one knee Death asked me for my hand

  
I could tell by the black stains on her fingertips that, most
likely, these were not the first lines she had ever written. I could
n't tell whether I had inspired her, but I prayed that I had. If I
could do some scrap of good, perhaps I would be granted entrance
into heaven. All I knew was that this saint was my salvation from
pain and that I would be hers until the day she died. And that's
what I called her, my Saint. She was as poised as a queen and as
kind as an angel.

  
I was confined to her world but was not her equal. I could fan
tasize that we were sisters or the best of friends, but I was still
only her visiting ghost. I was a prisoner on leave from the dun
geon—I knew nothing of my crime or the length of my sen
tence, but I knew I would do whatever I could to avoid being
tortured. Alone in the lilac air of her country garden, I glided
'round her while she wrote hundreds of poems, her hair and her
eyes slowly growing white.

  
One evening, when I had been moving with her along the
road to the woods and back, we stopped to observe a fly struggling
in a web while a spider waited on a leaf and watched. I could feel
my Saint devising a poem about the possibility of spider amnesty,
but what I didn't realize was that she had stopped watching them
and had marched home and was already dipping in ink before I
turned to find her gone.

  
At first I thought she must be just a few yards ahead, hidden
by the hedges at the curve of the road. I rushed toward our home, but it was too late. The old pain returned, first to my feet, like ice
slippers, then up my legs, slowing me to a crawl. I could still see
the road in front of me, but as I fell forward, I heard a splash and
cold rods shot up my arms and into my heart. I called to her until
my mouth was full of water. The evening had gone black as my
grave. I was back in the hell I'd known before I'd found her. I tried
to do what I had done the first time I'd heard her voice. I thrust
out my hands, feeling blindly for her skirts, but I felt only wet wooden boards. Clawing at them, I felt a corner and then a flat
shelf, then another shelf. I dug into the boards and pulled myself
up. When I reached out this time, I felt a shoe. The darkness
swam into warm light. I looked up to see my Saint standing on the
wooden steps of her pantry, a pen in one hand and a half-written
poem in the other. She gazed out at the dusk garden as if she'd
heard an intruder in her rose bushes. I was lying on her steps, one
hand gripping her shoe, thanking God for letting me come back to
her. After that I was ever so careful about staying close to my hosts.

  
On my Saint's final day, I hoped so passionately that she
would take me with her into heaven that I lay in bed beside her,
listening to her breathe. She had no nurse, no housekeeper. We
were completely alone. I didn't understand how much I would
miss her until she lay still as the earth under my head. My Saint.
My only voice on the air, singing or testing a metered line aloud.
My only companion on autumn walks. My page-turner by the
fireside. I prayed for God to let me go with her.

  
I couldn't recall my past sin, that deed I had done before my
death that had banished me from heaven, but I prayed now for
God to let me work off my debt beside my Saint.
Remember how
I had tried to comfort her when she was lonely,
I prayed,
and how I
inspired her when her pen began to scratch out line after line of
verse.

  
But God neither answered my prayer nor explained Himself. There was not even a moment when her green eyes turned to me
in recognition. My friend, my Saint, had simply gone. The famil
iar cold began to tug at my feet, blistering up my legs, twisting
ice into me. I was saved only by the insistent knocking at the door
below. I swam down the air, through the bedroom floor, the hall ceiling, the wooden door, and, desperate not to be thrown to the
darkness again, embraced the body that stood there. A young man who had been corresponding with her for a year, praising
her verse, had chosen that day to call on her for the first time. He
stood with a bouquet of violets in one hand, looking up at her
curtained windows with disappointment. I shut my eyes, pressed my face upon his hand, and prayed to God to let me have him.

  
Eventually my prayers were rattled by the sound of horses'
hooves. I found myself sitting in the safety of his carriage at my
new host's feet beside the violets he had discarded.

  
And so I was delivered again by a rescuer unaware. I called
him my Knight because he had come to my aid when I was in
distress. He was a writer, widowed and childless. He wrote stories
of knights and princesses, monsters and spells, tales he would
have told his dear ones at bedtime. His publishers would print
only his books on Scripture, not these enchanting stories. This made him angry and caused him to walk about stiffly, like one
who can never take off his armor. I tried to be his friend, and I
believe I softened his words more than once so that his books
would be accepted and keep his cupboards in bread.

  
I had another close call with hell while at the theater with my
Knight. He had gone with two friends to see a production of
Much Ado About Nothing.
As I stood in the box beside his chair, I
fell in love with the costumes and fun of the players. I was as
close to my Knight as two posts on the same fence, yet in the mo
ment when I made a wish, I broke a mysterious rule of haunting.
I watched the lovers in the pool of light below and wished one of
them were my host. A chill beat through my heart. I slid down
through the floor and half into my old grave before I could stop
myself. I gripped my Knight's hand and dangled there.

  
"I take it back," I prayed. "I want my Knight." I struggled
halfway in and out the window of hell for the rest of the act. An
icy pain pulled at me from below as if I were standing on the
floundering ship of my own floating coffin, the winter sea up to my hips.
"Please let me have him"
I begged. Finally, as the cur
tain fell, I was washed up onto the warm, dry carpet beside my
Knight's feet.

  
After that I was careful what I wished for.

  
At the end, as my Knight slipped away in a dim corner of a
hospital room, I found that again I was losing my only friend. I
prayed again to God to let me go with my host, but no answer
came. What saved me this time was quite a different voice from
those of my first hosts.

  
A playwright who had broken his arm was laughing with a
comrade in the next hospital room, repeating the adventure that
had caused his injury. I left my Knight's bedside, pulled out of the coldness that was already sucking at me, and tilted through
the adjoining wall, folding my arms around this silly youth. I
held him hard until I knew I was with him.

  
This lad, my Playwright, was nothing like my first two hosts.
He had parties in his rooms almost every night until dawn, slept
until noon, wrote in bed until four, dressed and went to the the
ater to work, then dined out and started the whole celebration
again. I don't think he was at all aware of me. He and his friends seemed to do little else than make light of their talents. His plays
made people laugh, but the only time I seemed to be influential
was on certain dark mornings when he would wake after only an
hour's sleep, frightened by a nightmare. I would sit at the foot of
his bed and recite poems written by my Saint until he fell back
into dreams. He drank too much, ate too little, and died too
young and quite suddenly at one of his own parties.

  
A sweet gentleman poet, who was a guest at the event, caught
my Playwright as he fell, like Horatio cupping Hamlet's head in
his large hand. I chose him instantly. My new host—I called him
my Poet—was more susceptible to my whisperings than the pre
vious one. When his mind would dry before a poem was com
plete, I would take great pleasure in speaking ideas into his
sleeping ear. Like Coleridge with his vision of paradise restored,
he would wake the next morning and turn my straw ideas into
golden lines. He fell in love unrequitedly with several other gen
tlemen, some inclined toward men and some not, but he never
found a mate. My Poet became a lecturer in his later years and
mentored a seventeen-year-old named Brown.

  
My Mr. Brown was a devoted student and wrote such passion
ate stories and listened so purely to all advice, I chose him in ad
vance. I could tell months beforehand that my host was going to
heaven without me. I cleaved to Mr. Brown when he came to say
goodbye to my Poet. Mr. E^rown was moving west to enter a uni
versity three thousand miles away. I chose him partly because he
loved literature so very much, but I also chose him because he
had a kind heart, an honest tongue, and a clear honor and yet seemed totally unaware of the fact that he was virtuous. This made him especially appealing. I had a half memory of being
fooled by a handsome smile, but Mr. Brown's face seemed a true mirror of his spirit. I felt even more attached to him than I had to the others. Perhaps that's why I called him by his name.

  
I had learned the rules of my survival well during those
decades—stay close to your host or risk returning to the dungeon, take what small pleasure you can from a vicarious exis
tence, and try to be helpful. And I do believe that I was helpful to
Mr. Brown when he was writing his novel.

  
From the time he was eighteen, he would spend at least an
hour a day working on his book. He kept it in a box that once held blank paper. He would sit in a park or at a table in the li
brary, composing one paragraph each day. He had more than two
hundred carefully handwritten pages but was still on chapter five.
I would sit beside him or pace around him, watching him think.
Each page was as precious as a poem. When doubts or thoughts of
mundane life stayed his hand, I would try grasping his pen to
urge him on, but my fingers would only pass through. I discov
ered that the best way I could help him become unstuck in his
writing was to place my finger on the last word he had written.
This always brought his pen back to paper and a smile back to his lips. It was a tale of brothers fighting for opposing kings in a medieval setting as rich and mysterious as Xanadu.