Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (24 page)

Mother visits him by taxi once a week

for the last five years.

Marriage is for better or for worse, she says,

this is the worse.

So about an hour later we are in the taxi

shooting along empty country roads towards town.

The April light is clear as an alarm.

As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object

existing in space on its own shadow.

I wish I could carry this clarity with me

into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce.

I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy.

These are my two wishes.

It is hard to find the beginning of dementia.

I remember a night about ten years ago

when I was talking to him on the telephone.

It was a Sunday night in winter.

I heard his sentences filling up with fear.

He would start a sentence — about weather, lose his way, start another.

It made me furious to hear him floundering —

my tall proud father, former World War II navigator!

It made me merciless.

I stood on the edge of the conversation,

watching him thrash about for cues,

offering none,

and it came to me like a slow avalanche

that he had no idea who he was talking to.

Much colder today I guess….

his voice pressed into the silence and broke off,

snow falling on it.

There was a long pause while snow covered us both.

Well I won’t keep you,

he said with sudden desperate cheer as if sighting land.

I’ll say goodnight now,

I won’t run up your bill. Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Goodbye. Who are you?

I said into the dial tone.

At the hospital we pass down long pink halls

through a door with a big window

and a combination lock (5–25–3)

to the west wing, for chronic care patients.

Each wing has a name.

The chronic wing is Our Golden Mile

although mother prefers to call it The Last Lap.

Father sits strapped in a chair which is tied to the wall

in a room of other tied people tilting at various angles.

My father tilts least, I am proud of him.

Hi Dad how y’doing?

His face cracks open it could be a grin or rage

and looking past me he issues a stream of vehemence at the air.

My mother lays her hand on his.

Hello love, she says. He jerks his hand away. We sit.

Sunlight flocks through the room.

Mother begins to unpack from her handbag the things she has brought for him,

grapes, arrowroot biscuits, humbugs.

He is addressing strenuous remarks to someone in the air between us.

He uses a language known only to himself,

made of snarls and syllables and sudden wild appeals.

Once in a while some old formula floats up through the wash —

You don’t say! or Happy birthday to you! —

but no real sentence

for more than three years now.

I notice his front teeth are getting black.

I wonder how you clean the teeth of mad people.

He always took good care of his teeth. My mother looks up.

She and I often think two halves of one thought.

Do you remember that gold-plated toothpick

you sent him from Harrod’s the summer you were in London? she asks.

Yes I wonder what happened to it.

Must be in the bathroom somewhere.

She is giving him grapes one by one.

They keep rolling out of his huge stiff fingers.

He used to be a big man, over six feet tall and strong,

but since he came to hospital his body has shrunk to the merest bone house —

except the hands. The hands keep growing.

Each one now as big as a boot in Van Gogh,

they go lumbering after the grapes in his lap.

But now he turns to me with a rush of urgent syllables

that break off on a high note — he waits,

staring into my face. That quizzical look.

One eyebrow at an angle.

I have a photograph taped to my fridge at home.

It shows his World War II air crew posing in front of the plane.

Hands firmly behind backs, legs wide apart,

chins forward.

Dressed in the puffed flying suits

with a wide leather strap pulled tight through the crotch.

They squint into the brilliant winter sun of 1942.

It is dawn.

They are leaving Dover for France.

My father on the far left is the tallest airman,

with his collar up,

one eyebrow at an angle.

The shadowless light makes him look immortal,

for all the world like someone who will not weep again.

He is still staring into my face.

Flaps down! I cry.

His black grin flares once and goes out like a match.

Hot

Hot blue moonlight down the steep sky.

I wake too fast from a cellar of hanged puppies

with my eyes pouring into the dark.

Fumbling

and slowly

consciousness replaces the bars.

Dreamtails and angry liquids

swim back down to the middle of me.

It is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now.

This is not uncommon after loss of love —

blue and black and red blasting the crater open.

I am interested in anger.

I clamber along to find the source.

My dream was of an old woman lying awake in bed.

She controls the house by a system of light bulbs strung above her on wires.

Each wire has a little black switch.

One by one the switches refuse to turn the bulbs on.

She keeps switching and switching

in rising tides of very hot anger.

Then she creeps out of bed to peer through lattices

at the rooms of the rest of the house.

The rooms are silent and brilliantly lit

and full of huge furniture beneath which crouch

small creatures — not quite cats not quite rats

licking their narrow red jaws

under a load of time.

I want to be beautiful again, she whispers

but the great overlit rooms tick emptily

as a deserted oceanliner and now behind her in the dark

a rustling sound, comes —

My pajamas are soaked.

Anger travels through me, pushes aside everything else in my heart,

pouring up the vents.

Every night I wake to this anger,

the soaked bed,

the hot pain box slamming me each way I move.

I want justice. Slam.

I want an explanation. Slam.

I want to curse the false friend who said I love you forever. Slam.

I reach up and switch on the bedside lamp. Night springs

out the window and is gone over the moor.

I lie listening to the light vibrate in my ears

and thinking about curses.

Emily Brontë was good at cursing.

Falsity and bad love and the deadly pain of alteration are constant topics in her verse.

 

Well, thou hast paid me back my love!

But if there be a God above

Whose arm is strong, whose word is true,

This hell shall wring thy spirit too!

 

The curses are elaborate:

 

There go, Deceiver, go! My hand is streaming wet;

My heart’s blood flows to buy the blessing — To forget!

Oh could that lost heart give back, back again to thine,

One tenth part of the pain that clouds my dark decline!

 

But they do not bring her peace:

 

Vain words, vain frenzied thoughts! No ear can hear me call —

Lost in the vacant air my frantic curses fall….

Unconquered in my soul the Tyrant rules me still —

Life
bows to my control, but
Love
I cannot kill!

 

Her anger is a puzzle.

It raises many questions in me,

to see love treated with such cold and knowing contempt

by someone who rarely left home

“except to go to church or take a walk on the hills”

(Charlotte tells us) and who

had no more intercourse with Haworth folk

than “a nun has

of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates.”

How did Emily come to lose faith in humans?

She admired their dialects, studied their genealogies,

“but with them she rarely exchanged a word.”

Her introvert nature shrank from shaking hands with someone she met on

the moor.

What did Emily know of lover’s lies or cursive human faith?

Among her biographers

is one who conjectures she bore or aborted a child

during her six-month stay in Halifax,

but there is no evidence at all for such an event

and the more general consensus is that Emily did not touch a man in her

31 years.

Banal sexism aside,

I find myself tempted

to read
Wuthering Heights
as one thick stacked act of revenge

for all that life with held from Emily.

But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation.

As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women.

It is a chilly thought.

 

The heart is dead since infancy.

Unwept for let the body go.

 

Suddenly cold I reach down and pull the blanket back up to my chin.

The vocation of anger is not mine.

I know my source.

It is stunning, it is a moment like no other,

when one’s lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore.

I switch off the lamp and lie on my back,

thinking about Emily’s cold young soul.

Where does unbelief begin?

When I was young

there were degrees of certainty.

I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands.

Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands occasionally disappear —

From the next room I hear my mother shift and sigh and settle back down

under the doorsill of sleep.

Out the window the moon is just a cold bit of silver gristle low on fading

banks of sky.

 

Our guests are darkly lodged, I whispered, gazing through

The vault…

 

Thou

The question I am left with is the question of her loneliness.

And I prefer to put it off.

It is morning.

Astonished light is washing over the moor from north to east.

I am walking into the light.

One way to put off loneliness is to interpose God.

Emily had a relationship on this level with someone she calls Thou.

She describes Thou as awake like herself all night

and full of strange power.

Thou woos Emily with a voice that comes out of the night wind.

Thou and Emily influence one another in the darkness,

playing near and far at once.

She talks about a sweetness that “proved us one.”

I am uneasy with the compensatory model of female religious experience and yet,

there is no question,

it would be sweet to have a friend to tell things to at night,

without the terrible sex price to pay.

This is a childish idea, I know.

My education, I have to admit, has been gappy.

The basic rules of male-female relations

were imparted atmospherically in our family,

no direct speech allowed.

I remember one Sunday I was sitting in the backseat of the car.

Father in front.

We were waiting in the driveway for mother,

who came around the corner of the house

and got into the passenger side of the car

dressed in a yellow Chanel suit and black high heels.

Father glanced sideways at her.

Showing a good bit of leg today Mother, he said