The Sunlight Dialogues (46 page)

Who listens to such stuff? I will not think. Won’t think …

Words.
Will not. Won’t.

Dear God prevent

(She stood in the darkness and smell of winter and burning leaves, her long blind hands clenching the splintering and yet soft wood of the railing, blind eyes looking down at the brown-green sluggish Tonawanda that she did not know then must be brown-green and sluggish as witches’ brew, for in her mind at least there was dignity yet, and romance and poetry and revenge: she would slip into the moonlit water as silently as a mossy stone and be carried away without grief or remorse and without even fear except for, of course, the first shock, like the shock of the ice-cold water around her body, biting at the white of her thighs and invading the funereal and elegant black dress, transforming cloth to the indifferent murderous lead that would drag her downward and soon, before she knew what was happening (she who had planned it) swallow her alive.
Not yet,
she thought. Her blind hands clung like roots to the damp-softened wood of the railing, and she thought, clinging,
Let me die.
Her life was, she thought, an indignity, and it made his life an indignity as well: and though she could not change it, neither by urgent smiling and cheerfulness nor by flight from him, because she knew he would pursue her, not from need or love or even duty but from his lack of any reasonable argument against it, she could end it: she could raise her fists to the sun and say:
It’s not good enough.
But not yet. Her life was a fall from light to darkness and a brainless hope for light that would never come, but she had at least this: she knew that her hope was brainless, she could refuse to be deluded, refuse to hope. That much at least. She was moved by the beauty of the idea of dying, the clear moonlight water closing above her, her pale corpse drifting through enchanted groves by the Tonawanda Creek to the Genesee River and in time the Atlantic, possibly, and behind her the healthy sorrow of release. (But the water was green, she was able to suspect, and she would be found, black, bloated, absurd, in the slime at the edge of some farmer’s pasture; and perhaps there was no moon that night after all.)
Not yet,
she thought, and waited a fraction of a second too long and discovered that the thing was impossible. And years afterward, sitting at the supper table, her husband reading aloud to her a piece from the paper about a girl who had thrown herself into the creek and been found two days later on the Cole farm, she would understand what dignity she had missed. But she had returned to the house, with her jaw set, and had found him asleep as if nothing had happened, and two or three days later she’d said with half-conscious malevolence that she would kill herself, she was a burden on him, and he had said “No! Please! Please!” She had felt like a whore, or like some medieval saint split down the middle between lust for evil and the longing for good. She wanted to sacrifice, be crucified for him, for in a part of her heart she was innocent and childlike and pure as beryl, but the other part of her laughed at that and said
Esther, you stick with me and we’ll make us a life.
Well, what could she do? She had given in.)

I did what I could, I was a better wife than some.
There were times when it seemed to her that they were happy, more happy than anyone she knew. She would sit in the truck at the Indian Reservation and smile fondly to herself while he talked his ridiculous pidgin English to some fat drunken Indian she could smell from fifteen feet away. “Buyum vanillum,” he would say—selling Watkins products then—and the Indian would say “What the hell is ‘vanillum’?”
But my dear good Clumly would not understand, for, whatever his other virtues, his greatest virtue was tenacity, especially when the idea he was clinging to was wrong.
But they liked him, understood him, by some clear and infallible instinct knew that he was not looking down or milking them of whatever he could get but merely bungling: “N’yas-kah-weh-noh-gah-gweh-goh,” he would say at the door, and they would answer in ancient Seneca and not laugh in his face, and when his truck mired up to the axles in some yard set deep in the woods they would take off their shirts and come grunt him and hoist him up to hard ground again, and they’d laugh and they’d slap each other’s shoulders and they would shake her hand and, if they were drunk, would kiss her. She was young, still able to charm without intention. Then old Mrs. Blue-eyes.

She was old, and her granddaughter was blonde, they said. We always went into her cabin when he sold to her, and that night the granddaughter was there. She was home from college. She moved as silently as any of them, but her smell was the smell of a white girl from the city. “I want you meet my granddaughter,” Mrs. Blue-eyes said, and the girl stood before me and I said, “Hello.” “Clara is her name,” Mrs. Blue-eyes said, and I said, “What a pretty name.” The old woman said, “Her eyes are blue, like all my children, so therefore she is white.” “Let me look at you,” I said, and she came a step closer. The instant my fingers touched her cheek I knew she was beautiful, and as I moved my fingertips over her forehead and down past her eyes and the wings of her nose to her mouth, I became afraid. “How do you like college?” I said. “I enjoy it very much,” she said. And I thought, Do you pity me? Do I disgust you? I had seen the line of her mouth, and though it was a gentle mouth there was pity in it, disgust. I said when we were driving home, “She’s a beautiful girl.” He said, “Oh, so-so.” It was the first time he’d lied to me, as far as I could tell.

Enough. That was not what she’d started out to say.

We were happy, much of the time, she’d meant to say.

Were we?

Well, we made do.
She was glad to say, he was always a man who loved work. Jobs that would have bored another man were exciting to him. Even the bakery truck. He would calculate ways of speeding up the loading, ways of rearranging the bakery goods he carried so that everything was conveniently in reach. He would think about it nights, and when he solved some trifling problem, he was radiant. She thanked God. How lucky I was, I thought, to have a husband like him. There were times when I felt less than human, and studying my face with my fingertips in the dark, I knew I was no longer pretty—if I had ever been pretty. Uglier than ever then, to speak plain. But it was not as great a disaster for me as for many women: my husband was not that kind. He loved his work, sat fascinated beside the radio listening to Drew Pearson or Lowell Thomas or Gabriel Heatter, or sat with some magazine, grunting with surprise or interest or irritation, and it seemed to me that he was better than other men, more mature, a rock.

She would hear them in the evening, she sitting on the back step in a holy spell of peace and silence, when he was working in the garden, and some neighbor was telling him some dirty story. His laughter was merely polite, a little embarrassed, annoyed. On Saturday nights their neighbors to the left would sit up drinking late, and when she and Fred were in bed half-asleep the neighbors would begin to shout, and they would call each other such names it made your heart race, and sometimes he would beat her. “Dear God,” Esther would cry in her heart, “I thank you! Watch over my precious, good husband who hasn’t the sense to watch over himself, and make him happy.” He seemed to be happy. He was so wise, so considerate of others, it used to make her cry.
“There’s a very good chance that if you have children,” the doctor said, “they’ll be afflicted.” Blind, he meant; half-blind at birth and, by twenty, blind as bats.
They had wanted children. It had seemed a kind of payment life owed for what they’d suffered. She was ashamed. Once again it was all her fault; her weakness—some ugly burnt-out thing in her blood—was once again an invisible wall raised more around his life than hers. He accepted it, with such terrible kindness that she was robbed of any right to anger—the rage that had been building in her all day, since the doctor had told her—anger that for sanity’s sake she had to vent on him because there was no one else, had no possible outlet—and so she raged at him, unthinkably cruel, stark mad, in fact.

Why do I do this? Over and over and over the same old ground. So much love, so much happiness.

(“But perhaps, in spite of all you say, he drove you to it,” Reverend Willby said. His voice seemed sly. Then is nothing good? Is nothing honest? “I don’t say that, my child, not at all. But isn’t it
interesting,
after all, that all his loyalty and patience and kindness should inspire in you no self-confidence! Think of the love of our Heavenly Father. As I said in my sermon, just the Sunday before last, what freedom, what confidence we feel when we know in our hearts that the Lord is our shepherd, He loves us and forgives us and cherishes us as we cherish our children! My child, my child, I
believe
you when you say that your husband is kind and patient and good, but I
cannot
believe you when you hint that he is beyond all the sticky unpleasantness of our common human nature. Surely we must not forget, dear lady, that there is
pleasure
in our self-sacrifice. Our kindness has been tainted with masochism since the world began, and it is not to our best interest to forget it. Think better of yourself, my dear Mrs. Clumly. No man was ever perfect but Jesus Christ. Do you think it doesn’t give you pleasure—if only a drop of pleasure—to tell me that you are unworthy of being alive? And, on the other hand, do you think I don’t find some touch of pleasure in suggesting that your husband is less than he seems—no better than yourself, in fact? Perhaps worse?” She had not believed him but she had felt better afterward, riding home in the taxi. Reverend Willby had no idea what human goodness was, and no more religion than a fly. She sat smiling to herself like a crafty witch, as though she had just avenged herself—though in fact she’d said nothing to the minister, of course: had nodded her thanks, as if thoughtfully, and had retired timidly, ashamed of herself for having turned to a man she had no reason to trust. And yet her anguish had been urgent, so terrible lately that she was afraid of the approach of September. She had been right to ask for help, merely wrong in imagining that anyone could give it. When the cab driver opened the door he reached in and caught her arm and threw her off balance a little, so that she bumped the door with the side of her head.
Let go!
she cried inside her mind,
get your hands off!
but she said nothing, paid him timidly and allowed him to lead her up on her porch, where she said, “Thank you, you’re very kind,” and gave him a quarter and hoped he would swallow it and choke. “No trouble, Ma’am,” the driver said.
You don’t know,
she said in her mind.
You’ll never dream!
Blindman’s tears seeped down her cheek, more horrible, she believed, than tears from the dead.)

I told him he smelled old, and it was true, but he should have defended himself.
She told him that when he made love to her the stink of his breath made her sick. She had told him that he was like an animal and that when friends came to the house she was ashamed of him. She told him he was stupid and that all their friends knew it. “They mention it to me,” she said, “they ask how I stand it.” “You’re angry and upset,” he said. “We mustn’t say harsh things and then tomorrow—” “I’ll say what I please,” she said. “For years I’ve said only what
you
please,” she said to him. “I’m sick of it. You stink. I don’t want to live with you. I just walk into a room where you’ve been sitting, filling the air with your stink … I don’t want to live at all!” Sobs. “Esther,” he said, “my poor, poor dear—” She locked the bedroom door that night and wouldn’t let him in, and he slept on the couch. But in the middle of the night she went down and asked him to come up where he belonged, but he was grieving and wouldn’t come—it had come to his poor slow wits, finally, that though all she had said she had said in rage, and the words had nothing to do with the rage, they were incidentally true. He had committed no crime, the crime was, as usual, life itself, the immemorial curse, and she had raged at him because life itself is impossible to seize in one’s two bare hands and choke. But though he was innocent, he smelled. That was true. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I love you, Freddy.” “Just go to bed,” he said. When she got up the next morning he had already fixed himself breakfast and washed the dishes and left the house, and she sat and wept. That time too she wanted to die, and she said to herself with conviction,
I am going to kill myself,
but she was afraid. She wanted to be even with him, balance the score once for all, but it was impossible, so impossible that she began to laugh as though her mind had slipped: “How can you balance the score with a policeman?—with the Law?” she said, and laughed and cried. It was he who had wanted children—both of them had, but he more than she—and because she could not give them to him she had turned on him in rage, and now to punish him for her rage she was thinking, like a maniac, of killing herself. It was life she wanted to settle with. She wanted to smash through this bungling idiotic darkness into peace, but the hope was pure madness. There is a moral to this: The operation inevitably fails.

Mother would sit by the window and her fingers would move slowly over her upper lip, where there was colorless hair like the peachfuzz on the cheek of a boy
(
I could not see it under her fingers but in the fingertips of my own hand I had the memory of it) and I would smell the burning leaves, but I could not see what it was she looked at—outside the window it was too bright, a wide whiteness like the heart of a fire with vague shapes being consumed in it like kings with melting crowns burning up on a pyre: I put my arm around her and said, “I love you, Mommy.” She said nothing. My father said, “She can’t hear you, Essie. Go and play.” When winter came she would be well again, but would watch me as though she were about to go away on a long long journey and never come back, or would come back only when I was grown and we had forgotten one another. It was I who went. The train wound up through the Catskill Mountains where the air smelled of oil and beyond the spackled train window the world swam with blue. I cried, and at night I was cold. There was no one with me on the train because my father couldn’t leave the milking and the wheat harvest, and my mother had to feed thrashers. I wanted to write to them and tell them I loved them and wanted to come home, but I had nothing to write with and no paper but the note my father had printed, bending down to it, squinting through the thick gray glasses that made his eyes seem larger than chickens’ eggs. I had a dream, I remember—a kind of waking dream—in which my mother seemed to speak to me very clearly, saying “Essie, can you make us some tea?” I started and looked all around me; the voice had been clear as could be; but there was only the half-empty car swaying on the mountains’ turns, and vague faces like objects in a fire, and rainbows at the edges of my glasses.
     
I did not like Batavia—the funny way the people talked, the bright red brick streets that a half-blind child could barely cross without falling, the stores where no one knew your name or, for that matter, cared, and in winter the snow drifts where sighted children squealed and played and blind children floundered and grimly pretended to laugh. And as for the Blind School itself, a horror! It was not their fault. The halls were long, and for what seemed a long time I could never remember where they went: the light that came in through the windows at the ends was gray, filtered through the shade of elms, and whatever direction you looked—north, south, east, west—the light was the same. I walked slowly, keeping to the wall, running my fingertips along the cool, smooth, painted cement, and the others ran past me, shouting (it seemed to me) angrily, and sometimes bumped me. I stood once by a door beneath a high wooden arch—I could just make it out in the dimness of the place—and I couldn’t remember where the door went. A boy came through it, holding his hands out toward me, a boy no older than myself, I think, and I watched as he came closer and closer, and I couldn’t speak. He bumped into me and jerked his head toward me, a face without eyes or nose or mouth, as far as I could see in that murderous light, and he held my arm tightly, as if to keep me from getting away, and with his free hand ran his fingers over my cheeks and eyes; then he released me as though I were a thing not alive, and he went around me, silent and indifferent, and felt his way on down the hall. Every night I prayed that my father would let me come home again, not because the people were unkind to me—it was not that—and the other children all prayed the same. I didn’t want to learn braille: my fingertips were stupid, every form felt exactly the same to me, and the very idea of reading a coarse page of scattered bumps seemed as hopeless as reading the stipple of a plaster wall. I did not believe I needed to learn. At home I sat in the front row of the one-room schoolhouse where I went, and if I concentrated I could see what the teacher printed on the blackboard. I had listened carefully, and at home, sitting with my mother at the diningroom table, I had worked carefully, painfully, with the books I brought home from school. I was getting better, I thought. But in the Blind School they put me in the next to the last row, and the room was dimmer than our schoolroom at home, and sometimes I could not see the teacher. I felt sick, as if I were sinking in quicksand or endlessly falling through empty space, and I said to the teacher one day, “I can see, Miss Ford. Please, please. I can see.” She took my hand—she was an old woman, kind—and bent her face to me, gentle. She had no eyes or nose or mouth. You can see what sort of dreams I have.