It Will Come to Me (32 page)

C
hildren screamed. Ruth found herself shoved and dragged in a sucking human tide as the crowd contracted and migrated toward the corner farthest from the broken window. When it had come to rest, Barbara Bachman broke the silence by calling out in her flat, carrying voice, “Is anyone hurt? Is anyone injured?” There was no reply except the weeping of children; Ruth recognized the deep, hiccuping sobs of real terror. “We have first-aid supplies over here. Please make your way toward the sandwich table if you feel you've been injured.”

It was too dark at first to tell if she had any takers, but now flashlights were being switched on and a cigarette lighter was being passed around to relight extinguished candles. Parents were able to assure themselves that their children had not been cut by flying glass. Ruth was able to make out the contours of the room and the shapes of the heads and shoulders of the people surrounding her. Was that Ben, just one body over to her right? Yes it
was. She reached around the intervening one, found his shoulder, squeezed it. He edged next to her.

A long suspended moment ensued. People stood quietly, still pressed against their neighbors, listening to the whistling, soughing wind that had invaded the room, smelling the misplaced smells of rain and overturned earth. The unseemly tree limb itself was visible a few yards away, lying on the glittering floor like the severed hand of a giant. Nobody was inclined to move; no one was prepared to believe that something worse might not happen at any moment. When Janice Trumpeter of the French Department spoke up to suggest that everyone take deep breaths to reduce the general stress level, only a few complied. When Ariel Bachman and her mother launched into the first verse of “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” they got only as far as “climbed up the water spout” before their quavering voices trailed off. Nobody, they seemed to realize, would want to hear the part about the rain coming down and washing the spider out.

Ruth found that her sense of interval had failed. She had no idea what time it was, or how long it had been since the power failed, or even how long it had been since she and Ben had arrived here at Horace Dees. But now something was happening: two candle holders were pushing their way toward the front. As they passed, Ruth recognized Ricia's curls and Charles's bulk. They were taking charge.

Charles and Ricia turned to face the crowd, Charles holding an open book in his hands. “I'd like to read aloud from
Beowulf
, beginning with the prologue.” The assembly murmured its assent. Charles cleared his throat. Ricia moved in closer, took Charles's candle in one hand and her own in the other and held them so that they shed light on the book. She looked, Ruth was thinking,
like a medieval page. For a moment, Charles closed his eyes and rocked back and forth on his heels, as though deliberately throwing himself into a trance. He began:

Charles's voice was a remarkable phenomenon in any circumstance, but in this breathing, flickering darkness it was exponentially more marvelous than in daylight. It was like the concentrated meat jelly in the grooves at the bottom of the roasting pan, or the mesmerizing burble of a distant Piper Cub on a summer afternoon. The voice commanded the crowd to obey the text's injunction: it listened, and people were called to themselves. The older ones were reminded of what they'd lost; the voice brought it back with a revivifying sadness. The younger ones were moved to imagine what was yet to come; the voice promised miracles, or disasters. Charles's voice made children see, against the screen of darkness, just what it was that the story was telling them:

The voice tamed and enchanted the crowd, made it an audience. Hardly realizing what they were doing, people sank to the
floor and sat transfixed, leaning into one another, their eyes wide and their lips parted. The power of the voice was such that most failed to notice that while Charles was reading the stanza that told of the sea burial of Beowulf's father—

—the headlights of a van had come bobbing up to one of the unbroken courtyard windows.

B
en saw the headlights, or rather felt them on the back of his head. He turned. The headlights were extinguished. Someone had arrived. Brigands? Dreddle? The missing graduate students? He got up quietly and wove his way through the seated listeners, still in thrall to Charles's voice. He could see that some complicated entity was moving slowly through the wind and rain outside, a human aggregation with several lowered heads. The double doors were pushed open and the company came trooping in. Reluctant to train his flashlight on their faces, he shone it on their advancing feet. They were a group of five, of indeterminate genders and radically varying sizes, wearing multiple layers of soaked clothing. Walking a few feet ahead of them was a sixth, a more tidily shaped person who seemed to be acting as their leader.

Now a murmur had gone up. Heads were turning. Charles's voice was faltering. He stopped. As the group approached, Ben
slowly backed away, using the flashlight beam to guide them around the fallen branch and the spray of broken glass that surrounded it. As they came into the ambit of the crowd's candlelight, he was able to identify the leader. It was Martinez. Standing directly behind him, the largest member of this troglodytic band, was Isaac, though he was not wearing his trademark wizard's hat. And could it be that he was taller? He seemed to have grown a full, face-obscuring beard.
Was
that Isaac? Ben lifted the flashlight. Isaac threw up an arm to shield his eyes. Ah, a mistake, already.

Ben held the flashlight under his own chin. “Professor Blau,” said Martinez, coming forward to shake Ben's hand, his teeth glimmering like a chain of moons. “Please don't be alarmed. Our little group has had nowhere to take shelter. We have driven here and there all evening, to no avail. The storm has grown stronger. We have a woman among us, a special circumstance. The campus security officer told us to come here. I would never have arranged it like this, but here, you see, is Isaac.”

Martinez stood aside. Ben moved into the semicircle formed by the group. He smelled their combined smell. Isaac declined to acknowledge him. “And here,” Martinez continued, “is Rosemary.” A tiny Asian woman wearing a large hooded Lola sweatshirt stepped forward. At first she struck him as elderly, but after a moment he saw that she was only prematurely wizened. Perhaps she was forty, or forty-five. Tucked into her elbow was a small wrapped bundle, shaped like a blintz.

A
s Ruth approached, Martinez smiled brilliantly and threw his hands into the air, a frantically punctilious host. “Mrs.
Blau,” he called out. “Please remain for a moment just where you are. Right there, please. Come no farther. Professor Blau, take your place with Mrs. Blau. We will make the introduction.” As Ben joined her, Martinez removed the bundle from the small woman, placed it in Isaac's arms, propelled him gently forward to Ruth. The crowd had formed two blazing banks on either side.

Ruth found she didn't dare look into his eyes. Neither was she able to say anything except, softly, “Isaac.” Keeping his head lowered, Isaac extended the bundle to her. Ruth took it in both arms, and looking down, saw that it had a face. What she was holding was a baby, very small but not quite newborn, perhaps four or five weeks old, wrapped tightly and artfully on the diagonal, like a papoose. She swiveled to show the baby to Ben, and just as she did so it opened its eyes. It was a girl. The baby let out a cry, or perhaps a trill, an emphatic “L” followed by a succession of vowels—”laaaah.” A groan of adoration rose from the crowd, followed by scattered imitative coos. Ben took the baby, holding her awkwardly, just as he had held the newborn Isaac. This, Ruth understood, was Isaac's daughter. This was also, she couldn't help but infer, her grandchild, and Ben's.

“Drusilla,” said Isaac, in his deep, hollow voice.

“Drusilla,” said Ruth. (Drusilla?)

The baby's mother stepped forward and took her place next to Isaac. “Miss Rosemary Tran,” said Eusebio Martinez, “Professor Ben Blau. Mrs. Ruth Blau.”

This Rosemary was as much a street person as Isaac, Ruth could see—more so, perhaps, and a great deal older. But it was clear she had what Isaac lacked: manners. Presented to Ruth, she raised her eyes and smiled shyly, showing that she also lacked a number of teeth.

Ruth looked at Isaac. How tall he was, and how remote. The lattice of hair that overhung his eyes like a caul and the beard that had crept up his cheeks over the last two years obscured any expression. He might have been an apparition, were it not for his smell, which she'd been breathing through her mouth to avoid. But now she gave that up and took it—took him—into her nostrils. It was worse than she'd been able to imagine, but also quite tolerable, perhaps because in the context of this encounter it seemed more a confession than a challenge. What was the line from
Lean
“It smells of mortality.” That wasn't quite the case with Isaac. He was too young. Instead, she supposed, he smelled of humanity—of terror and need.

Were they a couple, Isaac and this Rosemary? Were they actually married, in some bummy way? Could it be that the imperative to mate for life had found an anchoring place in them, mad and dirty as they were?

Ruth looked down at the baby, who was yawning. Her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth opened wide enough to expose her cat-sized tongue and the delicately ridged vault of her palate.

T
he first to come out of the crowd was Barbara Bachman, Ariel in tow. “Look,” she whispered, approaching on tiptoe. “Look how tiny. See how the fingers curl? That's a reflex. She'll lose that as she develops.” The next was Fran Tevis, whose eyes seemed to be filled with real tears. She kissed Ruth on the cheek, struggled to speak, gave up, kissed Ruth again and moved on. Bruce Federman threw an arm around Ben's neck. “Life,” he breathed hoarsely. “Full of surprises, old man. Full of surprises.” Then came Rhoda, and Josh Margolis and his wife, and Beth
Mapes, and Daphne Porter and her husband, and, finally, Dolores. Ruth offered the baby to her for a moment. She took the bundle and turned it toward the light, dipping a little to examine the baby's face. “A beautiful child,” she pronounced.

Now Eusebio Martinez was laying hands on Ruth's shoulders, shuffling her a few feet to the right. “You also, Professor,” he said, escorting Ben across the floor so that he stood arm to arm with Ruth. He did the same to Isaac and to Rosemary, herding the family into a tight cluster. Meanwhile the crowd, understanding its part, began to shape itself into a long coiling line.

Outside, the wind continued to blow. Inside, the candlelit occasion had become a highly social and rather formal one, as decorous and rule-bound as a tribal feast or a shipboard reception. Ruth held the baby. Ben stood at her side. Eusebio Martinez hovered behind Isaac and Rosemary, whispering prompts. Unsummoned, Ricia and Charles moved in to flank the group on either side, holding their candles high. One by one, the members of the Lola Dees humanities community filed by, stopping to congratulate the family, to peer into the baby's face, to marvel.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
hanks, as always, to Julie Grau and Elyse Cheney, editor and agent extraordinaire. Thanks, more than ever, to my husband George Sher, who appreciated, criticized, and contributed to nearly every page of this novel, including the acknowledgments. He is a man obsessed with names, and out of his fertile and fevered imagination swarmed many of the names of characters, institutions, places, journals, and journal articles in the book. He came close to being a collaborator in this effort, and can thus lay claim to about thirty-seven percent of any credit or blame it accrues.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emily Fox Gordon is an award-winning essayist and the author of two memoirs,
Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy
and
Are You Happy? A Childhood Remembered.
Her work has appeared in
American Scholar, Time, Pushcart Prize Anthology XXIII and XXIX, Anchor Essay Annual
, the
New York Times Book Review, Boulevard
, and
Salmagundi.
She lives in Houston and teaches writing workshops at Rice University.