Tender Grace (5 page)

I won’t go home until it ceases to be a tomb.

I e-mailed the kids. I told them to tell the babies that the little boy on the trolley made me miss them. Molly says everyone hopes I’m home by September. I told her we’d see how it goes.

Before I left, I notified most of the people in my address book that I was going to be gone for a month or so. I didn’t say I was taking my laptop with me, though a few friends will probably assume it. Still, my in-box has been empty except for notes from the kids and one from Rita. Messages had diminished greatly in the last year anyway, because I so seldom looked at or answered my e-mail. Forwards had about come to a complete halt. That, I must say, was a relief. Mom doesn’t e-mail, because she doesn’t have or want a computer; she won’t even let me use the word
mouse
around her unless it’s the kind that leaves droppings. I called her before I left and gave her a version of my plans and said I’d call when I got home. She told me to have a good time on my “little adventure.” Molly said she’ll check on her and keep us posted on each other. The last I heard, Mom and her buddies were dreading leaving the beach house at the end of August.

I’ve watched a lot of television today too, but I haven’t come close yet to the ten-hour average of the last fifteen months. I made myself turn it off this afternoon and read something from John today. Why good, simple, enjoyable things have become so difficult, I do not know.

I could have guessed Tom would have highlighted John 3:16, but he also highlighted 3:17 and wrote “Yes!” in the margin: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

I know this is a salvation passage, the gospel encapsulated. So I hope God doesn’t mind that I applied it to my current emotional state. It occurred to me as I read these verses that God probably isn’t condemning me for how badly I’ve handled things. Satan is the accuser. God is in the saving business.

Did he put Tom’s Bible in front of me and insist I bring it along? Has he eased me into situations where I must engage life outside the walls of the home Tom and I built with such love?

I
have
noticed one thing: Since I left home I haven’t once awakened with the thought,
I don’t want to do this.
I may not be moving very fast or doing very much, but I’m doing more than watching ten hours of television a day. I’m a long way from holding a glass half full, or even half empty, but I think I’ve peeked into the cabinet where the glasses are kept.

In the spirit of that much enthusiasm, I’ve decided to take myself to the theater tonight to see
South Pacific.
That’s extreme—so extreme my heart races thinking about it.

six

August 18

Tom and I never got farther south in Texas than Dallas.

I decided to visit San Antonio because I’ve never seen the Alamo. I pulled up to the Hyatt (the zenith of my splurging) a little after six, surprised at how eager I was to see the old mission. Even though I surrendered my coonskin cap and overcame my Davy Crockett obsession by the fifth grade, the story of the patriots who gave their lives to fight against Santa Anna’s tyranny continues to fascinate me.

I admire their courage. I wish some of it would be lurking in the air, just waiting for me to absorb it.

When I think of San Antonio, I also think of the River Walk. Even Branson has a river walk now, but I heard of this one long before I heard of any others. I can see it from my eighth-floor window. I wish Tom could see it. We would have had fun exploring this place. I considered not coming to San Antonio. I have dreaded going where he hasn’t gone or seeing what he hasn’t seen.

But somehow here I am.

And I got a room, which, as it turns out, was a coup. There’s a canoe race tomorrow, and this place is bustling. The friendly bellman, who doesn’t look a day over twenty, told me all about it on the way up. He rattled off groups and organizations that would be racing, including the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. He said I could watch from my room if I wanted.

His friendliness demanded some comment. What to say?

“I’ll stand up here and root for the Girl Scouts.”

He congratulated me on getting this room at the last minute, a choice room at that. He apparently had been nearby when the assistant manager told me someone had just canceled. “Unfortunate for them,” I told the young man, “fortunate for me.”

I tried to make up for my lack of interesting banter with a good tip. He smiled, and I was glad I had at least attempted conversation.

I may indeed watch the race from my room tomorrow. I doubt I’ll venture into the bedlam. I did get out for a while this evening, though. Since it was still light after I settled in my room, I rushed over to the Alamo only to find it was already closed. I rattled the doors in my frustration. If I’d had a pole, I would have vaulted myself over the walls. Actually, they’re low enough that I might have been able to scamper over them—were I the scampering type. I was disappointed I couldn’t see inside tonight. The outside itself, however, was a sight to behold, once I got over the shock of the diminutive edifice sitting right in the middle of this city. I am a victim of cinema and history books filled with period pictures. I expected miles of dusty plains to surround it, not glass and concrete and a smattering of grass.

I walked back to the hotel, ordered room service, and e-mailed the kids that I had arrived safely at my next destination. I didn’t mention my run-in with the highway patrol, but I told them about wanting to pole-vault over the walls of the Alamo and about going to the theater in Dallas last night. I’m not sure they’ll know what to think about the latter.

Even I don’t know what to think. I have never gone to a play, or even a movie, by myself. Nor have I gone out at night by myself since Tom’s death. I can’t say I was all that eager to see
South Pacific,
but Carrie Underwood wasn’t in town. Besides, can the people who have flocked to it for over fifty years be that wrong? In my experience, even one song can save a musical, and I thought “Some Enchanted Evening” had the potential for making my effort worth it. “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,” memorable as that one line is, certainly wouldn’t have pried me from my hotel room.

I wore my sleeveless black dress with a V-neck in both the front and the back. Tom loved that dress. I bought it for his retirement reception. The diamond drop necklace he gave me in New York on our thirtieth anniversary looks especially beautiful with it. My hair, almost shoulder length now, is long enough to pull up in a loose updo, and I took extra care with my makeup, though as Tom often pointed out, I spend an awful lot of time on my eye makeup just to have my eyes hidden behind bangs.

“They’re wispy,” I’d say.

“They’re long,” he’d say, brushing them out of my eyes.

He wasn’t here to brush them aside tonight, so I fluffed my own bangs out of my eyes and walked to the elevator carrying my sequined black clutch purse and feeling a confidence I did not expect under such circumstances. No one was in the elevator except for a man about Tom’s age, dressed more elegantly than I. When I walked through the doors and gave him a fleeting look, he smiled, and I returned my standard smile for such encounters, quick and polite. When we stopped at the fifth floor, for what turned out to be an empty hallway, I realized he was staring at me.

Was my zipper undone?

I had no zipper.

Did I have lipstick on my teeth?

Who would know? My teeth hadn’t made an appearance since I got on the elevator.

What?

Perhaps he merely appreciated my posture. I’ve been popping calcium pills since my middle thirties, and my bones seem to be thriving.

Whatever the reason for the scrutiny, the minute we reached the first floor, I rushed out of the elevator and
click,
click, click
ed my way across the lobby in my black heels, through doors opened for me, and into a waiting cab, even though I had fully intended to get directions and drive.

I slid across the black leather seat and told the driver the name of the theater. I didn’t bother telling him I might be coming right back since I would be arriving without a ticket.

Tom always took care of that. But I remembered our going to a concert at the last minute one time and finding two wonderful seats still available, and I thought it could happen again, especially since I needed only one. And as it turned out, a perfect seat was available—row ten, right in the middle of the auditorium.

Tom and I have had our share of perfect seats at plays and concerts. And some that weren’t so perfect. We were behind a pole at a Josh Groban concert, and we were so far away from the stage at a Garth Brooks extravaganza we had to use binoculars. But we had box seats at
The Phantom of the
Opera
in Chicago and center orchestra seats when we saw Richard Harris in
Camelot.

Tom liked
Camelot,
but I loved it. Richard Harris’s performance thrilled me. They have stayed with me, his last three words after King Arthur’s kingdom was destroyed and the experiment of the Round Table had failed. A young boy found him in the rubble of the countryside and told the king that he wanted to be a knight of the Round Table. This moment was Arthur’s pinpoint of light in his darkest night. As I recall, he had the boy kneel so that he could knight him. Then he sent him away from the hostilities, shouting, “Run, boy, run!”

I feel some affinity with the boy’s desire for something worthwhile and Arthur’s hope for the return of a glorious day.

We had good seats when we saw Celine Dion too. I had wished we were in the privacy of our hotel room when she sang so passionately the song that we had replayed so many times we thought of it as “our song.”

“I’m your lady,” she sang, “and you are my man.”

I leaned my head against Tom’s shoulder as Celine sang about heading for something she didn’t understand, frightened but ready to learn “the power of love.”

That is most definitely how I felt when I met Tom Eaton the fall of my twenty-second year. He was the first man I had been willing to date in two years, and while I might have been afraid, he most certainly wasn’t.

I guess I’d have to say I enjoyed
South Pacific
even though I had no choice but to return to the hotel the way I had come.

I’ve had an irrational fear of cab drivers since the day in sixth grade when Mom’s car wouldn’t start and I had to take a taxi to my piano lesson one freezing afternoon in January. The driver who brought me to the theater, friendlier than an insurance salesman, made a dent in my residual hesitation. I knew the names of his three kids before we pulled up in front of the marquee and I had to fork over enough money for his older son’s braces.

The cab driver who took me back to the hotel, however, had nothing to say other than, “Where to?”

Thus, with the lights of Dallas as a backdrop, I became lost in thoughts of the musicals Tom and I had seen together, lost in the songs that had made them so memorable: “Sunrise, Sunset” from
Fiddler on the Roof,
“Climb Every Mountain” from
The Sound of Music,
“Memory” from
Cats,
“All I Ask of You” from
The Phantom of the Opera.
Such beautiful music we loved.

Then I thought of one of the songs from
Camelot,
one I doubt Tom would have remembered. It began to dominate my thoughts, to play in my mind as richly as if I sat before an orchestra accompanying Celine or one of the great Italian tenors. It played as I rode through the streets of Dallas, as I took the elevator to my room, and as I hung up my dress and took off my makeup. It was still playing when I mercifully fell asleep.

“No, no, not in springtime, summer, winter, or fall. No, never could I leave you, at all.”

August 19

This afternoon I braved the crowds and got my first look inside the Alamo. Despite the pathos the place evokes, I wanted to absorb it. I stood trying to imagine men and boys fighting to the death so that someday Texas would be victorious, and I tried to imagine women with their children, huddled in the corner of a room, fearing and dreading the cost of future freedom.

When I finished my self-guided tour, I walked over to get a pizza and sat at a booth, working hard to look like someone waiting for a carry-out order instead of someone sitting in a booth by herself. The difference, for a reason I can’t explain, matters. Clearly, any courage that may have been left in the Alamo didn’t come across the street with me.

Twenty minutes later I walked into the impressive lobby of the Hyatt and felt somewhat conspicuous, wearing crop jeans and a tank top and carrying a box containing a small pizza, thin-crust beef with extra cheese.

I am glad I saw the Alamo, but I am also glad to be back in my room.

It is remarkable that I left the room at all today. Besides watching television from my bed and the canoe races from my window this morning, I opened Tom’s Bible to John 4 and found notes tucked in the pages. When I unfolded them and saw Tom’s neat handwriting, a blend of printing and cursive, I drew in my breath.