Things Invisible to See (9 page)

Was it very late? Had he fallen asleep? His legs felt stiff; one foot was asleep, and it prickled back to life as he tried to put his weight on it. He tipped his watch toward the doorway, and by the light from the corridor he saw the hands: midnight. The nurses had forgotten him and gone to roost. Everything around him had gone to its appointed place. He stood up and stretched, then bent down to look at Clare. He held his breath. He could go now. She would not miss him.

He leaned over and kissed her cheek.

“I
F YOU’D JUST LET
Mr. Knochen come to the house and give a demonstration,” pleaded Nell, spearing an artichoke out of the salad. “There must be some dead person you’d like to communicate with.”

“The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not traffic with magicians,’” said Helen. “Or ghosts or soothsayers or wizards.”

“Where does it say that?” demanded Nell.

“Give me the Bible and I’ll find it,” said Helen. “If Grandpa were here, he could find it right away. Who told you about this man?”

“Debbie Lieberman and Marie Clackett.”

“I saw some ghosts once,” said Davy and was glad that nobody heard him. The two women he’d seen on the landing by the photographs—were they ghosts? One of them had looked like Clare.

Grandma stopped humming. In her sealskin coat and black straw hat, she looked like a great shaggy beast.

“Hal,” said Grandma, and she reached over and patted his hand, “did anyone ever tell you that you have beautiful ears?”

Hal laughed, and Davy felt sure he was not laughing at Grandma.

“You did,” he chuckled. “You’re the only one.”

“I’ll be leaving right after lunch,” she said. “I’ll be taking the bus.”

“There are no buses running today,” said Helen. “It’s Thanksgiving.”

“And it’s raining,” added Nell. “You don’t want to go in the rain.”

“I never thought we’d get through the turkey without Clare to carve it,” said Helen. She stole a loving glance at Hal, who was chewing his soy cutlet and who could not have carved a turkey if his life depended on it.

“Where
is
Clare?” asked Grandma, surprised.

“Oh, Grandma,” groaned Nell. “She’s in the hospital. Remember?”

“Is she sick?” asked Grandma.

“Paralyzed,” said Hal.

“We told you,” said Davy.

Grandma squinted at Davy, not certain whether she knew him or not, and not wanting them to scold her if she asked his name. She decided that she did know him and that it would not be wise to ask.

“How old are you?” she inquired.

“You asked me that this morning,” said the boy.

“Hush,” said Nell. “It won’t hurt you to tell her again.”

“I’m five,” said Davy.

“Five,” Grandma exclaimed. “Already five?”

“Show Grandma the turkey you drew for Clare,” said Helen.

“It’s wrapped up,” said Davy.

“Clare painted this cup,” said Nell, changing the subject. “Isn’t it nice? Davy set the table, and he gave me this cup.”

She held it aloft. It was plain as an eggshell on the outside, but inside danced a riot of angels.

“We have an ancestor who was painter to the Kaiser,” said Grandma.

“You already said that,” said Davy. He did not believe in this ancestor, since nobody except Grandma knew anything about him.

“Hush,” said Nell. “You know she forgets.”

He hushed, but he could not understand why she forgot so often. Aunt Helen forgot things too, but differently. Sometimes she forgot where she put her watch or her ring. To keep from forgetting, she would say severely to her ring, “I am putting you on the sill,” or she would remind her watch she was putting it on the china cabinet, and sometimes she would explain to both the ring and the watch why she hated to wear anything that encumbered her hands when she washed the dishes and polished the silver.

“Do we have any coffee?” asked Nell. “I mean real coffee. Not the Battle Creek Sanitarium stuff.”

“Nobody drinks coffee but you,” said Helen. “I keep forgetting to buy it.”

“I thought there was one can left.”

“Can we get some more Ovaltine?” asked Davy.

“Someday,” said Nell. “Someday we’ll get another jar of Ovaltine.”

Ovaltine and Cream of Wheat. Once when he had to stay in bed with asthma, Aunt Helen gave him Ovaltine and Cream of Wheat, all he wanted, and Clare saved the silver seal with the raised letters
OVALTINE
inside the lid of the jar and sent away for an Orphan Annie cup. It had a red plastic top, so you could shake the Ovaltine and the milk together inside, and Orphan Annie on the front was holding another cup, just like this one, and on the front of that cup was a still smaller Orphan Annie holding yet another cup, though of course you couldn’t see it. He could only see the first two, but he knew they went on forever, each Orphan Annie holding the image of herself, tinier and tinier. Probably nobody could see the tiniest one, except God.

Those were good times. Clare brought the Sears catalogue and sat on the edge of his bed, and they would turn the pages of the toy section and say “Dibs on that train” or “Dibs on that sled,” and whoever said it first won. Having dibs on the sled was almost as good as having the real sled if you were sick and couldn’t use it. She brought
Better Homes & Gardens
and
Good Housekeeping
and
Parents’ Magazine,
and they looked for coupons that said no salesman would call, and Clare put his name on all of them. And after he was well the mailman brought him samples of Gerber’s cereal and a book on the wonders of the Frigidaire, showing in pictures how much better it was to keep food in an electric Frigidaire than wait for a man to bring the ice, and a Br’er Rabbit cookbook, which Clare said was like any other cookbook except that all the recipes called for molasses.

Nell opened the kitchen cupboard and gazed with a sinking heart at four cans of soy Protose and a box of Dr. Jackson’s Meal, which showed Dr. Jackson in white swimming trunks, looking fit and youthful. There was a big box of seaweed snacks. There was no coffee.

What difference did it make? You couldn’t really enjoy your coffee with Hal casting baleful glances at you every time you took a sip.

Suddenly, behind the Koepplinger’s Health Bread she spied a tea bag. Enough for one cup, maybe two. She put the water on to boil, and soon the teakettle was hissing and jiggling the way it always did since Helen pulled out the whistle. Nell’s spirits lifted.

The tea was strong and black. She drank it slowly and listened to the clatter of silverware in the next room.

There was a scraping of chairs, and Helen hurried into the kitchen. “Grandma’s headed for the front door,” she said. “Where’s that basket of clothes?”

“On the back porch. She won’t get out,” Nell assured her. “I locked the door.”

In the front hall they found Grandma shaking the doorknob.

“It’s been lovely,” she said, “but I have to leave. I got five men coming to work on the house.”

“Today is Thanksgiving,” said Nell. “Nobody works on Thanksgiving.”

“I have to go home
now
,” said Grandma darkly.

“Grandma, you promised you’d help me hang up the clothes,” said Helen. “I did a big wash this morning. We have to hang up the clothes.”

“In the rain?” asked Hal.

“Why not in the rain?” said Helen.

From the dining room they could keep an eye on her. The clean sheets fluttered over the spirea bushes that trailed their dead wands against the French doors. The clothesline was strung around the pole like a spider’s web, and when the sheets billowed out, it seemed to Helen that Grandma was rigging a peculiar ship.

“Look at the crows,” said Nell. “Three, four, five of them out in the pear tree.”

“Three for a wedding, four for a birth, five for your happiest day on earth,” said Helen.

Grandma turned the clothesline a little and started hanging up towels.

“She’s some help to you anyhow,” said Hal.

“Those are the same clothes she hung up this morning,” said Helen. “I keep the basket handy. Gives me fifteen minutes of peace.”

“She hangs ’em up and I take ’em down,” said Nell. “Has anyone seen my shoes?”

She always missed her shoes when it was time to clear the table and had to set off in search of them.

“Davy,” said Helen, “these are my best Dresden plates. Can you carry them very carefully to the kitchen? One at a time.”

Davy carried his own plate out first and set it on the sink while Helen collected the gravy boat and the platter bearing the ruins of the turkey. Before she reached the kitchen, Davy came running back.

“Aunt Helen, my mom drank up all the angels! Her cup is bald!”

And he waved the cup at her that Clare had painted. It was now totally blank. For a moment she felt as if Clare herself had been erased through that casual mistake. Then she could hear Clare telling her, Don’t worry, Mother. I can fix it. I’ll paint even better angels next time.

“Oh, Lord,” she said, “that was water paint and India ink. I never drink out of that cup. Will it hurt her, Hal?”

“Her hair will fall out and she will die of violent cramps,” said Hal. “And she won’t feel a thing. She’s strong as a horse.”

“Angels in the tummy,” sang Davy.

“Don’t tell her,” said Helen. “She’ll feel better if she doesn’t know.”

Helen washed the cup gently. She’d rather have lost the cup than the angels. Lost things, she felt certain, had a life of their own. They came back to their families like stray dogs. Maybe there really was an ancestor who’d painted the Kaiser’s portrait; maybe one of his paintings would find its way to America.

That’s where Clare’s talent comes from, she thought. From that ancestor. Not from Hal or me.

E
VERYTHING IN THE ROOM
was saying good-bye to her.

“Your last night here,” said the lamp.

“You won’t be seeing me again,” said the basin.

“Tomorrow you’ll sleep in your own bed,” said the pillow.

Ginny had spent half the afternoon helping her pack.

“That’s five nights running he’s come to see you. He’s madly in love with you, Clare.”

“He didn’t come on Thanksgiving,” said Clare. “The one day we have good food he doesn’t come.”

There had been cranberry jelly and dressing and two slices of white meat, and in the corner of her tray a paper turkey made by the Girl Scouts.

“You know he’s not coming for the food,” said Ginny. “Oh, God, I’m going to miss you, Clare. I never personally met anybody who made love for the first time in a hospital bed.”

Clare could see that Ginny wanted to hear all about it, but somehow the thing seemed too private to share. And where should she start? In bed? Or before, when she told him her dream about being locked in the high school gym, which was all decorated with crepe paper for the sock hop, and her friends were standing around in little groups, waiting for the band to start up, and Clare was there, too, as hale and free as anybody, and the band struck up “The White Cliffs of Dover,” and it was at that moment Clare felt herself starting to fade, to lose her substance till she was nothing but a big black-and-white snapshot, propped on a fold-out stand right in the middle of the dance floor—just like the big cardboard Santa Claus drinking Coca-Cola in the window of Clackett’s Fine Foods. The boy who looked as if he were going to ask her to dance lost interest and went off to find somebody more permanent. Her math teacher, one of the chaperones, picked Clare up and carried her down to the janitor’s office and left her there.

Without color, without dimension, without a body to call her own, she listened to the laughter and music overhead, the dance of life, from which she was excluded.

“I never noticed you in school,” Ben had said.

“I noticed you,” Clare had answered.

Though they were sisters by experience now, Clare could not tell Ginny. Not until Ginny told first. Ginny snapped Clare’s overnight case shut and pushed it into the closet and sat down on her bed.

“My first time was in a woods, with a guy I didn’t even like very much. I was a sophomore in high school and he was a freshman, but he looked older. I thought he was at least a junior when he called me up and asked me would I like to go for a walk. Some walk. It was a five-mile hike. We walked clean out of town. I remember the moon, huge and yellow. The harvest moon, he called it. We crossed one cow pasture and then another cow pasture, and he kept saying it was a shortcut home, and all of a sudden in the middle of nowhere he stops and turns to me and says, ‘You’re an older woman. You’ve had a lot of experience. Show me how to do it.’ That’s just how he put it to me. I was flabbergasted. I said he had me all wrong. I told him I was saving myself for marriage. He looked kind of hurt and mumbled something about no hard feelings and heading back into town.”

She paused, puzzled by what she had just said, as if the story were new to her.

“He said he knew a shortcut. We plunged into the darkest woods I have ever seen. I mean, I couldn’t see
anything.
Not even my own hands. Everything was just
gone.
And I was beginning to wonder if we were going in the right direction when suddenly we heard breathing.”

“I’d have died right there,” said Clare.

“
Heavy
breathing all around us, and stamping and running. My hand rammed into something huge and warm and furry, and I screamed and screamed—Lord, how I screamed! And Hubert said, ‘It’s cows. Stay where you are. It’s nothing but a herd of cows.’ So we stood quiet and they passed us. I never saw those cows. I just felt their big bodies brush up against mine, and I heard them stamping and snorting, and when the last cow was gone I was so glad that I flopped down on the ground and started to laugh. And Hubert flopped down on top of me and laughed, too. And I had no more sense of saving myself for marriage than those cows did. I was so glad not to be trampled to death, so glad to be alive.”

“That’s how I felt,” said Clare, “so glad to be alive.”

“You’re real lucky,” said Ginny. “If we get into the war, there won’t be any men left for us except the old and the married. Even if Ben is drafted, you’ll know you belong to somebody. You have somebody.”