The Bride of Catastrophe (22 page)

I shuddered, but it was only over the phone. He talked on more and more quietly until he'd talked himself to sleep like a child, and I hung up very gently, so as not to wake him.

*   *   *

HAD SWEETRIVER
been only a dream? My paper topics: “The Mythopoeic Substance of Shelley's
Ozymandias
”; “Despair in Beckett \\ Despair in Brecht”; “Is Borges Kidding?” All of them written out over page after page, while I lay sprawled across my bed, thoughts, dreams, and feelings looping together in lovely patterns, to absorb me while I waited for the day I'd be released from literature and set loose in the world of love. Now it seemed no more real than the “farm” I grew up on. And Philippa too was gone, receded back into the shadow world with the farm and the education. The thought that she missed me was as silly as my idea that I'd find a niche in investment banking. She was a college professor. I was a Dietary Aide III. There had never been anything of substance between us. I must be as crazy as my parents, to have thought such a thing.

I pushed my cart down through the maternity ward into oncology and started taking in the trays. The uniforms and hair nets marked us, so the doctors, nurses, even most of the patients, acted as if we were invisible, discussing their private sorrows in front of us under the assumption we couldn't speak English. A young woman, pale and fearful, bandaged around the chest and arm, reached her good hand out to smooth the hair of her little daughter, whose face was the image of hers, but radiant, excited. “My mom had an operation!” she said, proudly, and in her mother's tender smile I felt her premonition of death, of leaving her child alone. An old man's cawing scream came from the next room. Thoracic surgery; the ribs have to readjust … I stood at the gap where the curtain's metal track ended: Did he have someone to hold him? Because that's the central necessity, I was beginning to see. I was alone, a ghost who peered into these lives, seeing, seeing, though they never saw me.

Now, a woman with bandaged eyes, whose husband was reading aloud to her from the bedside chair. I cleared a vase of tulips from her table, listening:

“The word ‘presbytery' had chanced that year to drop into my sensitive ears and wrought havoc … I had absorbed the mysterious word with its harsh and spiky beginning and the brisk trot of its final syllables … ‘Presbytery!' I would shout it over the roof of the henhouse … the word rang out as a malediction: ‘Begone, you are all presbyteries!'”

He read in a fond, rueful voice, as if this was the story of his own youth, and I recognized the sentences as I might a lullaby my mother had once sung to me; my throat caught and tears sprang up, though I hardly knew why.

“Habla ingles?”
the man asked me, kindly. I had, I realized, been standing there with the tray in my two hands, gaping at him, for a very long time.

I nodded, setting the tray on the table. I'd forgotten it was possible to answer him in words. Colette, that's who had written those lines—
My Mother's House
—I'd read it because Philippa said I ought to.

“Where do you come from?” the man asked me, and I looked out the window, over the ruined block beneath the hospital, the boarded storefronts, and the sidewalk that glittered with broken glass, toward the west, the land I grew up on. I remembered now that in my dream of Ross, we hadn't been in the dormitory hall but walking down the narrow dirt road toward home.

“Connecticut. I grew up in Connecticut,” I said. It had been real once, it had, though now I saw it as if through the wrong end of a telescope, smaller and smaller, farther away.

“This
is
Connecticut,” the man said, very helpfully, in the high voice people use to soothe babies and pets. “Hartford is the capital of Connecticut.” He lifted the cup of ginger ale to his wife's mouth and forgot me, and I went down in the elevator back to the sub-basement, to the locker room where my face in the mirror looked so thick and plain and stupid with the hair drawn back in its net and the neat uniform collar, I understood why no one had wanted to look at me.

*   *   *

THE PHONE
was ringing when I walked in the door at home.
Suicide
, I thought, though whose would it be? Ma, having prayed all her married life for divorce, realized now that it only proved she'd been abandoned. And Pop, who'd never dared open his eyes to see us, had suddenly realized he'd missed his chance. Dolly had bargained away her mother, to stay with him until that moment, when the affection she knew must be in him would finally spill. There she was on the edge of the desert, roasting in the hallucinatory heat, shivering through the vast frigid nights …

“Hello?” I said, my voice trembling.

“He is deranged!” Ma cried, as if we were already in the midst of the conversation. “Pathetic, limp, fearful, and deranged!” Suddenly she was sobbing. “I don't know what I'm going to do,” she wept, at the thought of this pathetic, limp, fearful, and deranged person, and how he'd been torn from her arms.

“It's so sad, Ma, I know.”

“It's
not
sad,” she snapped, furious I hadn't read her mind. “It's revolting! He
owes me money!
How am I going to live?”

“What about the job?” I asked. “The teaching job.”

“Oh don't be absurd, Beatrice,” she said. “They don't want
me
.”

“Did you call up?”

“There's no point in calling up!” She was truly exasperated now by my ingenuous optimism. “It's all gossip and backbiting around here, God knows what people are saying about me, but you know Sarah Randolph has heard every word of it. They're small-minded, conventional people and no one wants to know my side. Oh, my
head
. Teddy, honey, get me a hot cloth, will you? As hot as you can make it, and wring it out tight.”

While the water ran in the background, I asked if she'd worked on her job letter.

“Yes,” she said, a good schoolgirl, and began to read it out:
“I started teaching when I realized my husband was incapable of holding a steady job, and I would have to fend for myself and my children alone. I'd been teaching at Wononscopomuc Public High School for three years and never had any problems until another teacher's jealous vendetta against me
—
”
She broke off for a minute, saying, “Thanks, honey, you're so good,” to Teddy. I'd brought the hot washcloth so often myself that I could feel her relax from miles away, and my own pulse slowed.

“You might want to take a—more positive—tack,” I said. I liked the sound of my voice, when I was giving her advice. It reassured me to hear it.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that they'll be looking to see what
you
can do for them. You want to show them what you have to offer, give some examples of what you've done already, stuff like that.”

“You mean they don't really care how hard it's been for me.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“No, of course,” she said with a bitter little laugh. “Of course.” Then, marveling at the workings of a world that wouldn't concern itself with the perils befalling the innocent ex-wives of the pathetic, limp, fearful, and deranged, nor rush in to ease the sufferings of wide-eyed, altruistic teachers at the hands of their cruel, jealous colleagues … “It's
not important
to them. You see, Beatrice, that's the kind of thing I'd never have realized if I didn't have you to point it out. Why should it be that way,
why?
Now that you say it, of course it makes perfect sense:
Why should the world care about me?”

The atmosphere of wonder was developing a charge and I sensed a thunderhead billowing, though her tone remained perfectly summer-afternoon, hazy and warm: “Beatrice, what would I do without you?” she asked. “I'd never have understood this on my own, but of course, it's childish of me to hope that anyone would recognize all I've suffered, would really care.”

“Well, maybe to hope that some unknown personnel officer—”

“No,
anyone!
” came the wounded cry. “Anyone at all!
Who is there
, for me,
except
unknown personnel officers. I'm alone, alone in the world!”

A silence fell as one side of me twisted the other's arm. “There's me, Ma, I understand, I do,” I managed to say, and truly. It was terrible, to have to blow every sorrow up until it loomed like a colossus, out of fear that no one would notice it otherwise. And then to quake in the cold dark of its shadow, defenseless against its enormity. She needed
me
, who, thank heaven, had been imbued in the womb with magical powers, to cast a spell on the monster, put it down.

“I—” I said, but nothing else would come. I could not spare enough of myself to repay her for so many tormented years. Hearing my hesitation, poison poured into her heart and she said coolly that she'd let me go, that obviously I (who
had
a good job, a good education, thanks to
her
) had more important things to do. How could I have become so stingy, unwilling to give what she needed, though it was only a few simple words?

“
Please
will you write the letter for me?” she asked.

“Of course, Ma, sure.”

“Isn't it amazing?” she said. “It seems only yesterday you were born, you were the cutest baby, and now you're all grown up,
you're
guiding
me
.”

*   *   *

I SAT
down and wrote: “I've found I have an easy rapport with disaffected students. I can help them see their natural talents and gain confidence. Many of these boys—students—need only kind guidance…”

Her true accomplishment was quite different: she had withdrawn, in fear, into a raindrop-sized world, but she'd managed to endow her raindrop with such complex drama that it became a virtual sea. We couldn't tear our eyes from it, we had to find out what was going to happen there next. I tried to think how to phrase this on a résumé, but there was the phone again.

“Beatrice?” It was Sylvie. “I've been trying to get you for an hour.”

“What is it? What's the matter?”

“It's … well,” she stumbled, and then in a gust of happy excitement: “It's nothing the matter, it's … I … guess what? I'm pregnant!”

“Oh my God, Sylvie,” I sat down hard on the kitchen chair. “Oh my God. What does Butch say?”

Her voice was soft, joyful. “He brought me flowers.”

“So you'll get married?” I said, thinking,
Ah, a suicide in the family tradition
.

“Oh, no,” she said sharply, “no, no. I'm never going to get all tangled up with someone else
that
way.”

“Having a baby with someone can be kind of an entanglement, Sylvie.”

“No, don't be silly,” she said. “If I'm not happy, if things go wrong with Butch and me, I'll just go … wherever.
We'll
just go, the baby and me.”

“Congratulations,” I managed.

“Thank you, Beachy,” she said, “thank you so much. I knew you'd be happy for me.”

“Now you eat right, okay?” I said, to my own surprise. I must have heard it on TV. “Pregnant mothers need lots of—milk, I think, and leafy green vegetables.”

She pulled on her cigarette and blew out a long, satisfied stream. “It sounds cozy, doesn't it?” she said. “Pregnant mothers?”

“Yes, honey, it does.”

*   *   *

“
DON'T FORGET,
Gemini, the tide turns when it is low as well as when it is high,” chirped
The Courant
astrology column, my best adviser, and the only part of the paper I could bring myself to read. I'd look away from the front page (
CITYFEST PLAZA WILL DISPLACE TWO HUNDRED FAMILIES; YOUTHS ROLL VAGRANT ONTO TRAIN TRACKS
, etc.). The classified was an endless list of the places I couldn't fit in.

The phone was ringing.

“I guess you've heard,” Pop said, when I answered. There was a long silence, which I couldn't guess how to break. Parents and children are not meant to live by conversation, I thought. You can't have a sensible dialogue with anyone while some little tune in your head goes: “Without his sperm, I wouldn't exist. If he'd swerved farther, I wouldn't exist. If he had his wish, I wouldn't exist. But he secretly adores me.” No, with a parent, you have to proceed by action: raising a timber frame or picking beans in adjacent rows.

“Heard?”

“I'm sorry,” he said, “I can't help it.” He was crying.

“I know,” I said gently. I
did
know—nobody felt worse about this all than me. We'd known the parental lives would come to pieces, but that Sylvie too should be stopped in her tracks here, before she was even grown! She was only sixteen, she didn't realize what she was doing. She wanted something soft and warm in her arms, wanted to breathe life into that beautiful dream of family. Sylvie had worked at that dream; she was the one smiling there with firm, adoring belief in her parents, the one who picked up all the wormy apples and put them through the press so we could say we'd made our own cider, the one who'd been absolutely faithful to every tenet of the dream.

Of course he was weeping, who wouldn't weep? If only he and my mother had had a grounding rather than a consuming kind of love, their children could have stood on that foundation to reach up toward their own dreams. Or, love aside … but we were not able to put love aside; it was our ideal, our prayer and our best excuse, because in love anything is fair. The words “I love you” brought expiation, they healed wounds without a scar. If my parents had only been
able,
if they could have gone simply about the business of their lives, working ahead through difficulty, accomplishing some things and not others—if they'd been more like Frank and Henny, then they might have divorced, gone mad, died, for that matter, and left Sylvie entirely on her own, but she'd have had an example to live by. She'd be at school now, studying biology—she'd wanted to be a midwife.