Broken Vessels (19 page)

She was only four. That summer of 1986 her mother and I believed Cadence would only have to be four and worry about a baby coming into her life, perhaps believing the baby would draw her parents' love away from her, or would simply be in the way. And her mother and I believed that, because I had a Guggenheim grant from June of 1986 to June of 1987, we would simply write and pay the bills and she would teach her fiction workshop at home on Wednesday nights and I would try to recover from burning out as a teacher, then becoming so tired visiting colleges for money from January till July of 1986 that I spent a night in intensive care at Montpelier, Vermont, on the fourth of July, with what the cardiologist thought was a heart attack but was exhaustion; and we would have a child.

Madeleine grew inside of my wife as she visited the hospital, then as she cared for me at home, changing bandages as they taught her in the hospital, emptying urinals, bringing food to the hospital bed in the library, and juice and water, and holding my leg when I transferred from bed to chair to couch and back again; Madeleine growing inside of her as she soothed the pain in my body and soul, as she put the bed pan under me then cleaned me and it, and she watched with me as the Red Sox beat the Angels in the playoffs and lost to the Mets in the World Series, sacrifice enough for her, to watch baseball till late at night, pregnant and caring for a four-year-old energetic girl and a crippled man. But she sacrificed more: for some time, I don't know how much time, maybe two weeks or three, because it remains suspended in memory as an ordeal that broke us, or broke part of us anyway and made laughter more difficult, I had diarrhea, but not like any I had ever had before. It not only flowed from me without warning, but it gave me no sign at all, so that I did not even know when it flowed, and did not know after it had, and for some reason we could not smell it either. So when a game ended she would stand over me on the couch and turn my body toward hers, and look, and always I was foul, so foul that it took thirty minutes to clean me and get me from the couch to the bed, after midnight then, the pregnant woman going tired and un-held to bed with Cadence, who would wake her in the morning.

Which would begin with cleaning me, and that remained such a part of each day and night that I remember little else, and have no memory of the Red Sox losing the seventh game I watched from the couch.
They saved your life and put you back together
, she said,
and they can't cure this
. Gene Harbilas, my doctor and friend here, cured it, and that time was over, and so was something else: a long time of grace given us in the hospital and at home, a time of love near death and with crippling, a time when my body could do little but lie still and receive, and when her every act was of the spirit, for every act was one of love, even the resting at night for the next long day of driving to and from the hospital to sit there; or, later, waking with me at home, to give me all the sustenance she could. In the fall, after the diarrhea, she was large with Madeleine, and exhaustion had its hold on her and would not let her go again, would not release her merely to gestate and give birth, and nurse and love her baby. The victim of injuries like mine is not always the apparent one. All that year I knew that she and Cadence were the true victims.

Cadence cried often. On a night in January, while Andre was staying with us for the month of Madeleine's birth, having come up from New York to take care of Cadence and mostly me (yes: the bed pan: my son) Cadence began loudly crying and screaming. She was in her bedroom. I was no longer in the hospital bed but our new one in the bedroom, and they brought her there: her eyes were open but she did not act as though she were awake. She was isolate, screaming with terror, and she could not see or hear us; or, if she could, whatever we did and said was not strong enough to break what held her. Andre called Massachusetts General Hospital and spoke to a pediatrician, a woman. He told her what Cadence was doing and she asked whether Cadence had been under any stress. He said her father was hit by a car in July and was in the hospital for two months and they cut off his leg, and her mother just had a baby and Cadence had chicken pox then so she couldn't visit her mother in the hospital, where she stayed for a week because she had a cesarean. The doctor gasped. Then she told Andre it was night terrors. I do not remember what she told us to do, because nothing we did soothed Cadence; she kept crying and screaming, and I lay helpless on my back, wanting to rise, and hold her in my arms, and walk with her, and I yelled at the ceiling, the night sky above it:
You come down from that cross and give this child some peace!
Then we played the cassette of
Porgy and Bess
by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald that she often went to sleep to, and she was quiet and she lay beside me and slept.

In late spring of 1987 Cadence talked me into her room, in my wheelchair; I had not been able to do it till then, but she encouraged and directed me through the series of movements, forward and back and short turns, then I was there, beside her bed on the floor. After that I could go in and read to her. One night, still in the spring, I went into her room, where she sat on the bed. I looked at her face just below mine and said: “I want to tell you something. You're a very brave and strong girl. Not many four-year-olds have had the kind of year you've had. Some children have to be lied to sometimes, but Mommy and I never had to lie to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“We could always tell you the truth. We could tell you they were going to cut off my leg, and that the right one wouldn't be good, and you understood everything, and when you felt happy you were happy, and when you felt sad, you cried. You always let us know how you felt and what was wrong. You didn't see Mommy much for two months while I was in the hospital, and then she was gone for a week to have Madeleine and you only saw her for a couple of minutes at the hospital till the nurse saw your chicken pox and said you had to leave. Then Mommy came home with a baby sister. Most little girls don't go through all of that. All this year has been harder on you than on anybody else, and when you grow up, somebody will have to work awfully hard to make you unhappy, because you're going to be a brave, strong woman.”

Tears flowed down her cheeks, but she was quiet and her eyes were shining, and her face was like a woman's receiving love and praise.

Then in the summer and early fall of 1987, we did lie to her, but she knew the truth anyway, or the part of it that gave her pain and demanded, again, resilience; and she brought to my bed only the two bears, the father and the daughter; and her days must have drained her: she woke with the fear of kindergarten and the other fear and sorrow she must have escaped only in sleep and with new children and work at kindergarten, and with familiar friends at play school, in the same way adults are absorbed long enough by certain people and actions to gain respite from some deep fear or pain at the center of their lives. I could no longer work. When the house was empty I phoned Jack at the Phoenix Bookstore and asked for his prayers and counsel and comfort, and I went to physical therapy three times a week, going there and back in a wheelchair van, three hours each session with Mrs. T, and the physical work and pain gave me relief, and I prayed for patience and strength and love, and played with Cadence and Madeleine, and waited for the end.

The girls' mother left on the eighth of November, a Sunday night; and people who love us helped me care for my girls until after dark, around six o'clock, on Friday the thirteenth, when she came with the court order and the Haverhill police officer. That afternoon Cadence and I were lying on my bed. Beside her was her pincher, a strip of grey cloth from the apron of her first Raggedy Ann doll, before she was a year old. She goes to sleep with it held in her fist, her thumb in her mouth. When she is tired or sad she holds it and sucks her thumb, or simply holds it; and she holds it too when she rides in a car or watches cartoons. She held it that afternoon after my lawyer phoned; his name is Scotty, he is an old friend, and he was surprised and sad as he told me of my wife's lawyer calling from the courthouse, to say my wife was coming for my daughters. I wheeled from the kitchen phone, down the short hall to my bedroom where Cadence and I had been playing, where for nearly a year we had played with stuffed animals. I also played the giant who lay on his back, and had lost a leg, and his right one was in a cast. The giant has a deep voice, and he loves animals. Cadence is the red-haired giant, but we usually talk about her in the third person, the animals and I, for Cadence is the hearts and voices of animals with the giant; when Madeleine could sit up and be with me, she became the baby giant, cradled in my arm. Most days in the first year Cadence brought to the games an animal with a missing or wounded limb, an animal who needed healing and our love.

Next to the bed I braked the wheelchair and moved from it to my place beside Cadence. She was sitting. I sat close to her and put my left arm around her and told her that judges were people who made sure everyone was protected by the law, even little children, and Mommy had gone to see one because she believed it was better for Cadence and Madeleine not to be with me, and Mommy was coming now with a policeman, to take her and Madeleine. I told her Mommy was not doing anything wrong, she was doing what she felt was right, like a good Momma Bear. Cadence held her pincher and looked straight ahead and was quiet. Her body was taut.

“I don't want to go in the car with them.”

“Who's them, sweetie?”

“The judge and the police.”

“No, darling. The judge won't be in the car. Neither will the policeman. It'll just be Mommy.”

One of our animals we had played with since I came home from the hospital on the seventeenth of September 1986 is Oatmeal, a blond stuffed bear with pink ears and touches of pink on his cheeks and the top of his head and the back of his neck. On my birthday on the eleventh of August 1987, Cadence gave me shells and seaweed from the beach, and a prayer for a Japanese gingko tree she gave me with her mother, and Oatmeal. I am his voice; it is high. I am also the voice of his wife, Koala Bear; but after the marriage ended, Cadence stopped bringing Koala Bear to our games, save for one final night in December, while Madeleine was asleep and Cadence and I were playing in the dining room, and she said Oatmeal and Koala Bear were breaking up but maybe if Koala Bear had a baby they would love each other again; then she got a small bear from her room and put it with Koala Bear and Oatmeal and said they had a baby now and loved each other again. Then we watched Harry Dean Stanton as an angel in
One Magic Christmas
. After my birthday I kept Oatmeal on my bed; Cadence and I understand that he is a sign from her to me, when she is not here.

That afternoon she gazed in front of her; then quickly she moved: her face and upper body turned to me, her eyes darkly bright with grief and anger; and her arms and hands moved, one hand holding the pincher still, and she picked up Oatmeal and swung him backhanded into my lap. Then she turned away from me and was off the bed, circling its foot, and I watched the pallid right side of her face. When she turned at the bed's end and walked toward the hall, I saw her entire face, her right thumb in her mouth, the grey pincher hanging, moving with her strides; and in her eyes were tears. Her room is adjacent to mine, where I had slept with her mother, where I had watched all the seasons through the glass sliding door that faced northwest. Cadence walked past me, out my door, and into hers. She closed it.

My friend Joe Hurka and my oldest daughter Suzanne were in the house; Joe had been with us all week, driving back and forth, an hour and ten minutes each way, to his job in Peterborough, New Hampshire. I called to Cadence: “Sweetie? Do you want me in your room with you?”

I had never heard her voice from behind a door and a wall as well; always her door was open. Her voice was too old, too sorrowful for five; it was soft because she is a child, but its sound was that of a woman, suffering alone: “No.”

I moved onto the wheelchair and turned it toward the door, the hall, her room. I wheeled at an angle through her doorway: she lay above me in her bunk on the left side of the room. She was on her back and sucking her right thumb and holding the pincher in her fist; she looked straight above her, and if she saw anything palpable it was the ceiling. She was pale, and tears were in her right eye, but not on her cheek. I moved to the bunk and looked up at her.

The bunk was only a few months old and, before that, she had a low bed and when she lay on it at night and I sat above her in my chair, she could not see the pictures in the books I read aloud. So we lay on my bed to read. But from the bunk she could look down over my shoulder at the pictures. She climbed a slanted wooden ladder to get on it, and I had told Mrs. T I wanted to learn to climb that ladder.
Not yet, Mr. Andre
, she had said;
not yet
. In that moment in Cadence's room, looking at her face, I said in my heart:
Fuck this cripple shit
, and I pushed the two levers that brake the wheels, and with my left hand I reached up and held the wooden side of the bunk and with my right I pushed up from the arm of the chair. I had learned from Mrs. T not to think about a new movement, but simply to do it. I rose, my extended right arm taking my weight on the padded arm of the chair, and my left trying to straighten, to lift my body up and to pivot onto the mattress beside Cadence. I called Joe and he came quickly down the hall and, standing behind me, he held me under my arms and lifted, and I was on the bunk. Cadence was sitting now, and blood colored her face; her wet eyes shone, and she was grinning.

“
Da
ddy. You got
up
here.”

Joe left us, and I lay beside her, watching her face, listening to her voice raised by excitement, talking about me on the bunk. I said now we knew I could lie on the bunk at night and read to her. She crawled to the foot of the bed and faced me. Beyond her, two windows showed the grey sky in the southeast and the greyish white trunks of poplars without leaves. Cadence lowered her head and somersaulted, and her long bent legs arced above us, her feet struck the mattress, and her arms rose toward me, ahead of her face and chest. Her eyes were bright and dry, looking into mine, and she was laughing.