While I Was Gone (18 page)

His face seemed to tighten.

“Because if metaphor is one of the ways we have left to approach God, to begin to understand faith, memory itself is a living metaphor for the eternal life.” He paused, then slowly said, “Loss brings pain. Yes. But pain triggers memory. And memory is a kind of new birth, within each of us. And it is that new birth after long pain, that resurrection—in memory—that, to our surprise, perhaps, comforts us.

“It comforts us. And that comfort—and even joy—the comfort that rises within each of us by the grace of God, that comfort teaches us something, here on earth, about eternal life. It makes us all feel something we can believe in about its promise.” He waited a moment, looking out over the heads of his congregation, looking, I felt, into me, and then he bent his head and read, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, see the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God. They will be his people and God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more. Mourning and crying and pain will be no more. For the first things have passed away.”

He lifted his head.

“Remember it,” he said.

“In this world, God gives us pain. But He gives us memory, too, to change that pain to laughter, to joy. To bring the dead back into our lives. To comfort us.

To make us understand, by this living metaphor, His tender power.”

He rested his hands on the edge of the pulpit.

“To show us how, in that new world, God Himself will wipe away all tears.”

There was a long silence, and then he said, gently, “Happy Halloween.” He raised his hand.

“Happy All Saints’ Day.” And as he disappeared from my sight line, the organ pealed out the opening bars for the last hymn, and we all stood, and busied ourselves looking it up.

We sat for the benediction. I kept my head bowed as Daniel walked past me down the aisle, though I could have reached out and touched his robe, though I felt the air around me stir with his passage.

He stood in the narthe , out of the rain, to greet the parishioners.

I shuffled slowly up the aisle with the others, chatting politely when I needed to. Those in a hurry vanished out the side aisles, but most people seemed to want the company of these last minutes as a congregation.

The air cooled and dampened as I moved back. The church doors were open to the dark day, and the rain, which had picked up again, roared dully behind all the other noises. We all tightened our coats, buttoned them. There was the smell of wet on the earth, on the fallen leaves. It was wonderfully fresh after the closeness of the church.

As I drew nearer, Daniel’s face was in shadow, turned to greet the next churchgoer, and the next, the gray light falling from behind him.

He was shaking each hand, commenting, receiving comment. He held on to people, he touched their shoulders, he bent to hear the fragile elderly voice, the thin childish one.

In front of me was an old couple, and Daniel took his time with them, seeming not to be aware of me waiting behind them. Yet I felt the tension in his not looking, in his not acknowledging my presence.

The old man had much to say about the afterlife, perhaps triggered by the sermon but largely irrelevant to it. He was talking loudly now of his Sunday-school teacher.

“She always used to say”—and here he lifted his gnarled finger—” We shall gather by the river.”

” Dramatic pause, “Now, can you imagine how confusing that was to a small boy afraid of crocodiles?!” He laughed a loud, thoroughly practiced laugh, and Daniel laughed too.

I had been feeling an adolescent’s impatience, a tickling pleasurable irritation as I waited, so that when Daniel finally turned his pale eyes to me, I could have cried out. His hand was shockingly warm to my touch in the chill air. He pulled me to him quickly, kissed my cheek.

The cool smoothness of his face, the way he smelled, the sense of his taut body under the robe, made me breathless, and I couldn’t prevent a quick burst of giddy laughter. I stepped back. He still held my hand, and I felt myself flushing.

“Thank you for a wonderful sermon,” I said.

“You, above all others, are welcome.” His face was grave and smiling at once.

Then he turned away, as he needed to, and I moved on, out into the rain. But as I sprinted awkwardly down the street for the car, I felt such a wild reckless joy and excitement that I wanted to yell, to dance under the pelting rain.

“Daniel!” I wanted to shout. I wanted to tell the others running, too, scattering to their cars around the green.

“Daniel, my husband!”

C H A P’t E R a r AYHEW? I CALLED.

| V \ I wouldn’t have recognized the man who came around the corner from the waiting room, but as he moved toward me down the hallway, I adjusted my memory. Flesh had weighted the tall, big-boned frame. He’d gotten solid and wider, he’d become somehow prosperous-looking. His walk was a little shambling as he came toward me with the dog in his arms. Ah! He had a slight paunch, and he was completely gray. His hair was shorn tidily but still wavy. His face, too, had thickened, I saw as he drew near, smiling at me. A handsome, jowly, middleaged man.

“Stead?” he answered mockingly as he entered the light falling into the hall from the exam room.

I laughed.

“Not now. Not ever, actually. As you may remember.”

We stood a moment looking at each other, I just in the room, he just outside it. Then he said, “Here’s Arthur. Let me”—and he moved past me to the examining table—“let me get him down.” And with a tenderness that seemed incongruous in such a large man, he lowered Arthur onto the table, settling him with a few caressing strokes.

Then he turned to me and extended his hand. His face was heavily lined, saw, lines of intelligence and worry. The flesh around his eyes was pouched and deeply crosshatched.

“This is”—he was gripping my hand now, moving it with both of his—“just such a surprise. And, of course, a pleasure.” He released me.

“Is it Dr. Becker now? I don’t know what to call you.” His eyes probed me, and I thought abruptly of the visual adjustments he was making too.

“Jo. Joey. Not Dr. Becker,” I said.

“Please.” His hands had been warm and dry.

“And certainly not Lish,” he said.

“No, but you knew that even way back then.”

“Yes, I vaguely remember some ceremonial unveiling of the true you. Though I must say I’ve thought of you as Licia all these years.” I noticed now that there was an ironic quality to the care, the precision, with which he spoke. Mocking. Or self-mocking.

I moved around to what I thought of as my side of the table. I felt I needed to speak, perhaps mostly to put myself at ease.

“I have to say, Eli, it was a real shock when your wife—when Jean—said your name and we figured out it must be you. But I’m delighted… I guess I’m delighted…” I smiled at him, and he smiled back, his eyes almost disappearing into the flesh around them.

“I was reeling for a few days, with all those difficult memories. But I guess I’ve found”—I shrugged—“well, I don’t know, a fondness in myself for those times.

What I’ve remembered mostly is how young and sweet we all were. So I’ve actually looked forward to this.”

“Sweet, eh?”

“Oh, yes!” I said.

“You don’t think so?”

He shook his head.

“In any case, I haven’t been sure what to feel.”

And then he smiled again, and I realized that his smile hadn’t changed.

There was still something surprising in the way it opened his serious face, something youthful in it. His eyes shifted down. He gestured at the scrubs I wore, at the white jacket.

“I must say it’s extraordinary to see you in the costume of science.”

“Oh, it’s not worth wearing real clothes at this job,” I said.

“I’m always startled that a few vets do.”

“Well, no, what I meant was—thinking of the past—one of the things I remember most clearly was that schism in the house. The group house. Don’t you? That anti science sentiment? The contempt in which everyone held my kind of work? At least I felt it was so.

And I even had it myself. I was embarrassed, more than a bit embarrassed, about my own work.”

“Were you? I guess I remember that a liele.” Of course I did. We had all thought of Eli as dull, as less remarkable than we were, because he dealt with facts. We, we glorious others, lived for art, literature, music, the imagination—what might be. He was stuck, poor Eli, with what was.

“I was ashamed, in fact.” He shook his head.

“Ah, the sixties. What a rowen decade.”

“Well, often this doesn’t feel much like science, actually. In fact, sometimes it seems like so much hocus-pocus. I mean, there are a few things we can cure, but a lot of it is still sort of primitive.” A thought occurred to me.

“I read something by Chekhov once, about what it felt like to be a doctor in the nineteenth century—how little one could actually do about so many things.” I lifted my hands.

“As with our friend here.”

“So I understand,” Eli said. He reached over and patted Arthur.

“Do you want to talk about the options?” I asked. The dog had been lying still on the table, seemingly relaxed, watching the discussion move from one of us to the other. Whenever Eli touched him, he lifted his muzzle and his watery gaze in trusting greeting. Oh, it’syou.

“Jean said there was a surgical possibility,” Eli said.

I shook my head.

“No,” I said.

“No, in fact, there really im’t here.

I probably mentioned it to her because sometimes with these back crises, if we get to them soon enough, there is a chance with surgery.

But I’m afraid that by the time we knew something was seriously wrong with Arthur, the damage had been done.”

He nodded. She must have spoken of this, too, she must have blamed herself.

“I’m certain—and I rarely say this, but I am certain in this case-that there’d be no point.” I explained to Eli what I thought had happened to Arthur, what I thought the choices and options actually were.

We were standing on opposite sides of the examination table while I talked, with the dog between us. Eli’s questions to me were quick, probing, always apt. His face was mobile in its responsiveness to whatever I said—his forehead deeply corrugating in a frown, his lips tightening, his thick eyebrows moving up and down to register my points.

I thought abruptly of the careful mask that other Eli had worn, the cautious way he carried himself. This Eli was alive, and the energy in his face was testimony to that. Even the lines, evidence of a lived life.

He rested his hand on Arthur from time to time, as I did. Our hands touched once, and I moved mine away, quickly.

“So what you’re really recommending is euthanasia,” he said finally. He was leaning against the wall, his arms crossed. His face was grave.

I had sat down on my stool by now, to rest my hip. I shook my head.

“No. No, not at all.”

“Then why do I hear that?” he asked. It wasn’t a hostile question.

“Because I did say it’s incredibly time-consuming and overwhelming to most people. But I have clients who manage it. Two, to be exact.

Sometimes we have one of those dogs here for boarding—Sam, Sam the dachshund—and he’s a happy guy. But he drags his hindquarters around, and we have to express his bladder for him, just as you’ve been doing with Arthur. All that kind of thing. There’s a lot of cleanup, a lot of work.”

An image occurred to me.

“Maybe you’ve seen this photo, it’s kind of a famous photo, by Doisneau. It shows a dog in a cart on the street in Paris. They make carts for these dogs, the smaller ones,” I explained.

“You strap them in. Their hind legs. The picture is quite lovely, I think. Quite charming.” I had been delighted when I discovered it, leafing through a collection of Doisneau’s work in bookstore in Boston. Two women talk animatedly in a doorway, and the dog sits in profile on the sidewalk in front of them—sleek, alert, poised to go-with his hindquarters slung easily over his tiny cart, a cart whose pretty wheels seem a winsome and somehow logical extension of his body.

But Eli’s face had tightened in disgust.

“No, I haven’t seen it.”

I pointed at him, at his face.

“That, my friend,” I said, “is why you hear this as a recommendation for euthanasia. You don’t like any part of the idea.”

He stared a moment, considering it, his jaw working slightly.

“I’m afraid this is true,” he said at last.

“Well, it’s true for a lot of people. It’s how they feel about damaged animals. And it’s perfectly reasonable, it seems to me, when there’s so much work involved for the owner. And I think… I mean, from what I understand, it sounds as though you and your wife, you and Jean are pretty much at your limit with work and travel and the move.

And”-it occurred to me suddenly—“do you have kids too?”

“No.” Then he smiled.

“Just Arthur here. Do you?” he asked, after a second or two.

“I do. Three. But they’re all more or less grown and gone at this point. Three girls. Excuse me, women,” I said. Separately, they paraded through my mind. Hello. Hello. Hello.

“And you’re still married.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes,” he echoed. He shook his head.

“I would have bet money you were going to end up divorced.”

I had a moment of confusion, and then I realized he was talking of my past, of the marriage I was running from when he knew me.

“Oh! That marriage did end. Sorry!” I smiled.

“I always feel that one doesn’t even count.” I laughed quickly, a funny, false noise that vaguely embarrassed me.

“No, it was over right then, actually. All part of the counter life Or that dream we were all dreaming, or whatever it was.

But I’ve been married to Daniel, to the girls’ father, for twenty-five years or so now.”

“Ah!” he said. And then we both fell silent, looking at Arthur.

“It’s a very hard decision to make,” I said gently.

“The standard party line—I actually have a brochure I can give you—is to weigh certain factors against each other. But in the end, I think it probably rests more with what your feeling about animals is, whole versus not whole, and so forth. And how you see yourself, or humans generally, in relation to them. Big philosophical issues that translate into visceral, gut level responses.” His face had collapsed and become blank as he studied Arthur.