Читать книгу Ironic Witness - Diane Glancy - Страница 8

Another letter from the afterlife, you might say. But this one starts before the afterlife and continues into it. I would implore you to make the effort. It’s for you, as much as for me—maybe more, for eventually, I am no longer in the place you call here.

At first, there was distancing of what I knew. There was Frank’s death. Daniel’s before that. The sound of the mower in our yard. The buzzing, always buzzing, at the window of my work shed. I think Daniel mowed because he needed the repetition—going back and forth over the same ground. Other times, a friend of Daniel’s mowed while Daniel stood in the drive and watched him as if part of his mind were caught there in the mowing.

Daniel was not our only child. We have two other children, Winifred and Warren. But Daniel was the focus, and all that followed him. I leaned on Frank, my husband, a retired minister and professor of biblical studies, as we traveled through the turmoil of the Daniel years.

—

Christianity. The sweet tangle of my life. I could shred it with my teeth. It was ever before me. As a young woman, I married a minister. Forty-two years later, what did I expect? Certainly not a son staked on drugs. Dead on arrival with an ear chewed by broken glass or an animal in the night, and an assurance from Frank, my husband, that Daniel was in heaven because he’d accepted Christ as a boy, though Christ was never a consideration to Daniel as far as I knew. Daniel seemed never to stop running from him. Or he acted like he wasn’t there at all. I expected Frank to say, “like his mother” in his despair, though he never did. Did Frank blame me and my indifference to what he preached? He never said so to my face, even when he went in by himself to identify Daniel’s gobbled body. It was a holy calling—a calling of the holy Christ to bear up as Frank did. It was as if Daniel, our son, had had enough and would spare himself and us further exasperation, and begging, and warning, and failure after failure, and use and reuse and reuse until we knew it would not change, not even by a blazing miracle of a high God, though I’m sure Frank held out hope to the end. Daniel wouldn’t have been in my heaven for all the grief he caused.

This is about the terror I faced. Evident in the weather—in attacks of other sorts, both from inside and out—in attacks of despair—in attacks of terrorists—in attacks of aging, which are terrorists in themselves.

I can look back at myself and say, “a gulf separates us.” Often I retreated into my work as if the upheaval could be terminated in the kiln, where I fired the clay as if it was the circumstances Daniel handed to us.

I was a maker of ziggurats. I shaped clay into the likenesses of ziggurats. I was a maker of their clay forms. The various gradations that climbed from them. I worked mainly with shape. There’s an edginess that comes when I’m working—a vision of sorts—a zigzag line or the jump of a lightning bolt, jagged as the jaws of life and as disconcerting as tearing a car open to extricate what is caught there.

I kept journals of my work on ziggurats in my work shed, which I titled, The Ziggurat Journals, or Ziggurats and Me, volumes 1 through 7. I was now in my eighth journal. All of them massive, sagging the shelves in my work shed where they sat. Sometimes I spent more time writing notes on the making of ziggurats than I did on the actual making of the ziggurats. The journals were about how I stepped into what I think now was hell—or the beginning of it.

From the start, Daniel showed up in my journals.

—

Journal entry, May 2: I hear Daniel on the stairs at night. I hear him in the yard. I think he’s talking to someone I can’t see.

“If you hadn’t named him Daniel—a man crazy with visions,” I said to Frank when we visited the cemetery with a bundle of wildflowers. Daniel, who died in a car accident at thirty-eight, zagged on drugs, as he had been for years.

“I saw a vision that made me afraid, and the thoughts on my bed and visions in my head troubled me,” Frank said. “From Dan 4:5, the twenty-seventh chapter of the Old Testament.”

I took Frank’s arm as we walked back to the car. My accusation wasn’t a reproach as much as a manner of conversation between us.

“Daniel in the Bible survived his visions, unlike our Daniel,” Frank said as we drove back to our place, and I returned to my work shed.

Journal entry, May 23: I write to you foreclawed in Christ our Lord.

Sometimes, I read to Frank at the breakfast table before I went to my work shed. His eyes were not what they had been, and he read most of the day on his own, often with a magnifying glass. I started with the Bible that was not his favorite translation.

“‘You keep my eyelids from closing’ (Ps 77:4),” I read from the New Revised Standard Version.

Frank looked at his Bible. “‘You hold my eyes waking,’” Frank said. “That’s the King James Version, the one I prefer.”

“It means I can’t sleep because of your snoring, your voyages at night. The troubled waters of your sleep. You call out from your rowing. I can’t sleep, Frank. I think I’m moving to the other room.”

“Hopefully, Winnie or Warren won’t return.”

“It happens.”

“Yes, more all the time. But it doesn’t look like ours will be back soon,” Frank said. “They’d give us warning if they were coming.”

“They just have.”

“When?”

“I opened the e-mail before I fixed breakfast,” I said.

“For a visit or permanent?” he asked.

“A visit.”

“Short or long?”

“Winnie didn’t say,” I said.

“You didn’t ask?” he questioned.

“I haven’t answered her,” I said.

“Don’t make it seem like they aren’t welcome, or that we’re wondering how soon after their arrival they’ll leave,” he said. “What’s the purpose of their visit?”

“To see us. To make sure we’re all right. To see if we need to be put away. I’ll get Mrs. Woodruff to clean before they come.”

“You’re the only woman I know who calls her help by her formal name,” Frank said.

“I’ll have Edna Woodruff clean the house, so they know we’re still with it.”

“Don’t make them too comfortable.”

“Don’t drive them away too soon with your ranting,” I told him. “If they think you’re off, they might stay to corral you into some sort of reasonable presentation of yourself.”

“I won’t scare them.”

“I don’t know why it’s so hard for you to make yourself presentable,” I said.

“Because I’m looking at the lightings,” Frank continued, with his nose glued to his Bible. “‘His lightings lightened the world; the earth saw it and trembled’ (Ps 97:4, KJV).”

I looked at the Bible. “His lightnings, Frank. Not lightings.”

“I misread that for a purpose,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking of lights in the heavens. I was thinking of the lightings of the Word. I think God speaks with fire. There’s a physical light of sorts in the biblical language. I think I see it at night. I dream sometimes there’s a bright light blinding me. Each reading is a visit from God. In Scripture, there was light before there was the sun. There’s a mystery there.”

“Your children don’t like to hear your emanations,” I said. “I wouldn’t have them while they’re here. Our independence depends on their assurance that we’re still functioning. You can’t go on about his lightings lighting the world. You sound like you’ve not quite landed this morning.”

“No, I haven’t,” he agreed. “But it’s not from a voyage. It’s from somewhere in flight.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“You won’t be moving from the room until after the children leave?” he asked.

“No, maybe not then—if you’d stop your snoring.”

—

Once, I had asked Winnie and Warren how they had been affected by Daniel’s death. They were sorry, they said. They still grieved for him. As the oldest, Daniel had been the front-runner. They were closer in age, more friends with one another than Daniel. He had been absent for years. If he came to the house, he was distant, already disengaged from the family. Finally, his visits were dreaded. Winnie and Warren remembered him in his own world, even as a child.

—

“What does a passage mean in relationship to what came before and after it? What is riding on it?” Frank asked that evening. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to himself or me. Maybe Frank was addressing us both. “We’re not dealing with an ordinary house made of beams and timbers and walls and windows. What roof does righteousness have? What shingles cover justice?” He sat at the table, hardly tasting the dinner I had made—roast lamb with gravy he always liked. It had been work. Could there be a conversation? No, it was a one-way street, if there was a street there at all. Had he been working on the same passage all day? But hadn’t I been with the same ziggurat all day in my shed?

“What does that mean, ‘His lightings lighted the world’?” Frank continued. “The stars. The suns. The moons. The comets and meteors. The fire-tails of their frictions. How is it applicable to us here in our little lives? In our studies? At our tables and desks? In our work sheds? At our books? What hope is there that we could understand?”

I called him back from despair with news. “You misread the words, Frank. It’s hard enough when you read biblical language correctly. How much harder when you don’t?”

But he considered it a divinely inspired mistake. A misreading of the highest order. He would spend the evening and the next several days seeking the meaning of that mistake. Where was it guiding him?

I looked at the photographs of our three children, Daniel, Winnie, and Warren, as I listened to Frank. They were on the wall behind him, with their wild Winscott hair and freckled noses.

“When you say ‘lightings,’ you make it sound like the heavens are wired with electricity and God just throws a switch and there is light.”

“I don’t want the children hearing our arguments over semantics,” Frank said.

“I don’t want them hearing us argue at all,” I insisted.

“If you want to argue, let’s make it something that counts.”

“Let’s argue over the pile of leaves you leave in the yard,” I told him. “Maybe Mrs. Woodruff’s husband or son would rake for us. Maybe I’ll get out there while she cleans the house. Maybe I’ll do your work for you. Let the children see that.”

“Eugena—” He used my full name. Not Gena or Jean. Not Euge, which reminds me of “huge,” which I am not. Or any of his other words for me. Leaving me to figure out exactly what he meant—leaving my name hanging in the air.

—

I was a maker of clay figures. I was caught up in the ziggurat—making likenesses of Dante’s nine rings of the Inferno. The tower of Babel also was a ziggurat, upright as the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, though the Guggenheim is inverted, its smaller rings growing larger as it climbs. Other ziggurats started larger and became smaller as they ascended. Dante’s Inferno began with the larger rings and became smaller as they descended. The tower of Babel and the Inferno would make a palindrome, if the ziggurats were language.

Most of my ziggurats did not even look like ziggurats. They were my interpretation. My indirect approach. What a ziggurat was at its essence. Its abstraction. Its meaning. There was something about the word I loved.

The brain is amazing. It is a ziggurat that cannot be penetrated. It can hide a city inside it. The coils of the brain are gray ropes of clay worked together, inextricable as a body wrapped around the broken pieces of a car. I was the shaper of those clay forms. The maker of larger rings growing smaller as they ascended—or descended to the pit of Dante’s Inferno, as if ropes let down to retrieve Daniel, a son who took our love for him and turned it into fury so malformed that no one guessed it could be love.

—

I was in my work shed behind the house working with another form when I heard the car.

It couldn’t be the children. They weren’t scheduled to arrive for several hours.

I returned to my clay, knowing Frank could answer the door. It was probably someone for him anyway.

At dawn, the side of a shed in the distance reflected the morning sun. Otherwise, during the day, I didn’t know the shed was there. It disappeared among the trees in the woods. By afternoon, in the other direction, the sun moved toward the west, shooting its light backwards across a field. It was then that I watched the rows of crops and pasturelands. Sometimes I marked my ziggurats with their rows. Usually, I worked until I could look at the trees in the yard and know they were tired after holding up their arms all day. Sometimes the different rungs of the circles of my ziggurats caught my attention as I passed there, maybe the way Dante stopped to take note of who was in the rings of his inferno and why.

I heard Frank call my name, irritated enough that I knew it had not been his first call. Our visitor was Edwin Harsler, an old friend of ours who had been recently widowed. He made a habit of driving around the country, stopping at houses where he knew people. Ours must have been the house of the day, but I was at work with my clay and didn’t want to leave. Frank called again.

I didn’t want to stop work. I felt inhospitable. When I passed through those moods, I felt a sourness I didn’t feel otherwise. Spaces appeared in the ziggurats I didn’t know were there.

I went to the house and found Edwin at the table with Frank. The coffee pot was empty. Frank could have made more coffee, but he used it as an excuse to call me.

“How are you, Edwin?”

“Fine,” he answered. “I was on my way to town when I passed.”

“I’m glad you stopped.” What was I saying? Was that me or Frank who spoke? It was me, I saw by Frank’s eyes. He was enjoying seeing me uncomfortable at the interruption. He liked the way I covered my feelings.

“My daughter’s coming for a visit. I wonder if you’d drop by.”

“Our children are coming also,” I said. “Why don’t you and Helen come by here and we’ll all have dinner and catch up?”

That must have been what he was looking for, because he seemed pleased.

“She’s bringing someone with her. A young man she’s been dating.”

“Is it serious?”

“I don’t know, but I suspect it is. She doesn’t usually bring anyone with her. Or if she does, it’s been girlfriends.”

“Winnie used to bring boys, but none of them ever seem to come back,” I said.

“You think it’s us?” Frank asked. “After they see the mess in my study and your clay infernos covering every open space in our house, they must find excuses to make an exit.”

“Yes, it’s harder to get married these days,” Edwin said. “The young are not so anxious. Or they take longer. To make sure, I suppose.”

“How are you doing, Edwin?” Frank asked. “There’re widows at every turn.”

I looked at Frank. When had he begun noticing widows? And what widows was he noticing?

He looked away.

“Yes, I’ve been invited to dinner several times. I’ve found a basket of biscuits on my doorstep. Saide doesn’t bark any more when the women leave a casserole on my porch or stop to slip an invitation in the mailbox.”

Was Frank wishing he could ride with Edwin past all the mailboxes, reviewing the names of widows of men who had passed on?

I returned to my work shed when Edwin left.

—

Our children: Winifred and Warren—the two who were left from the three.

Winnie came to me once saying she hated her name. Winnie Winscott. Why not Minnie Mascot?

I apologized for the cuteness. It seemed all right when she was small. But now?

“Well, call yourself by your full name—Winifred Winscott.”

“No.”

“Is it the alliteration?”

“Of course it is. Didn’t you know I would grow up to be an adult?”

“Yes, Winifred, I did. But when you were born, I had Frank’s parents standing over me and Grandma Winifred, of course, who wanted you named after her, just as she had been named after her grandmother.”

“But Winscott wasn’t her last name until she married. You should have refused.”

“Change your name,” I said.

“You should have insisted.”

“They were a formidable group,” I told her. “Blame your father. They were his relatives.”

“I didn’t know you were so spineless.”

“I have a spine. I didn’t mind the name. Winifred Eugena Winscott. Is it my name also to which you object?”

“No, it’s hidden between the two Ws,” she said. “I hardly know it’s there. You could have been more original.”

“Warren doesn’t complain about his name,” I reminded her.

“Because Warren Winscott isn’t as ruffled as Winnie Winscott.”

“I get your point. When you have a daughter, you can name her something removed from family ties. When you marry, you can take your husband’s name.”

“It would entice me to marry,” she said.

“I hope his name is Willets.”

—

There were times after Daniel died when I went through my blue mood. When I passed that place, which was most of the time, I felt things I didn’t feel otherwise. It was like that shed in the distance that only appeared when the morning sun passed over the hill.

One of the reasons I dreaded the children’s return was that they would leave again, taking Daniel with them also. Now I waited for another visit, suiting up to feel the loss of Daniel again. Why couldn’t I just appreciate the two children I had left?

The weather was often unpredictable, and we had waited in airports for hours for their arrival, sometimes making the long drive back home in rain or snow after canceled flights. Now Warren and Winnie rented a car. We began having our Christmas in July. The children would arrive with presents, unwrapped because of airline regulations.

I stayed in my work shed until I heard their car in the drive. I also stayed in the shed when they left.

—

I had been the mother of three children, still was. The death of a child didn’t remove him from being a child.

One morning, I woke with a dream that a bat had flown to the side of my head. I pulled it off and put it on the ground. I saw that it was wounded. In my dream, I actually saw the open, bleeding wounds that are drug addiction. The undercurrent of whispered names that unthreaded the structure of a family.

What had I done wrong? Nothing. Nothing. It was Daniel’s fault. He was responsible for his own addiction. There were days when I was tired of children. After I fed them, after we played, after they napped, what was there still to do? Prepare dinner. By then they were restless and fighting. I bathed them, read to them, got them in bed. When I heard their feet on the stairs, I yelled at them to get back in bed. Sometimes I was in tears, as they were. If Frank was at a meeting, or visiting one of the members of the church, or traveling to a conference somewhere, the weight of the whole house was on my shoulders. I sat in the large, overstuffed chair in Frank’s study, too tired to do anything I wanted to do. Upstairs, Winnie and Warren eventually went to sleep, but Daniel must have sat in the darkness before an enormous emptiness that he later filled with drugs. Already, another day with the children was on its way, then another, and another. It was not my fault. I did what I could do. I did more than I could do. I was bored with the routine of housework, but I kept at it. Often, I only wanted my own work, which would have to wait for years and years, or at least until the children were in school, when I could have time in my work shed with my ziggurats, unless Frank insisted I take the women’s Bible study or some other function at the church as the minister’s wife.

—

Daniel never left, and therefore never returned for a visit as Winnie and Warren did. If Daniel returned, it was for an assault. Often, I thought I heard Daniel’s car pass in the night. Often, I thought he slept in his car at the end of the drive. Often, I dreaded him entering the house.

—

Edwin, his daughter, Helen, and her friend, Jake, came for dinner one evening as we had planned. Helen and Winnie had been friends, though Helen was a year older and in a different class in high school. We went to the same church, and they were in the youth group together. Warren was two years younger than Winnie. The children talked of their careers, the demands of city living, of the war, politics, the economy, and other turbulent events in the world. Edwin, Frank, and I listened, amused that we had taken a backseat. They were now the parents, and we were the children. Once in a while, they stopped to ask our opinion—just to be polite, to include others, as they had been taught. Or Frank would interrupt with some information they would consider irrelevant, just to irritate them—just to see how they could recover from his statement and continue their conversation. I glared at him once. Jake had lost his job and was looking again after a short period of dejection. Winnie was worried about her job. Helen and Jake seemed comfortable with their standing at work, “though no one really knows security anymore,” Winnie said. We lived in a tenuous world at best.

That was something Grandma Winifred could have said, though I didn’t tell Winnie.

The men began another conversation. Edwin was listening to Frank’s latest insight into translation. Jake was listening to Warren. Helen and Winnie were talking also, but listening at the same time to the boys and trying to pull them into their own conversation. I was listening to the children’s conversation and noticing a cycle, a circling up or down from a previous comment. They were making ziggurats, though they wouldn’t want that information either. When had I grown so limited in what I could say? But they were unaware of how often they circled up or down from the same place. Maybe they were aware of it also. Helen seemed to pull them away for a moment, but ultimately was unsuccessful. There was something in their pattern of speech that assured them of their place. Even Jake was aware that he was beginning a new beginning. Looking for another job that would take him in a new direction. He had to follow trends. He had to adjust. Be pliable. No, that wasn’t the word. Able to adapt. There, that was the word. His depression was on the mend. Dejection, he corrected Helen.

Helen was in retail at Millworth’s, a high-end department store. She invited Winnie to the city. She could stay in her apartment. They could see plays and visit museums. Winnie decided she would like that. Their acquaintance could be renewed. If old friendships could be revived. That would give Edwin more excuse to stop by when he was in the neighborhood, though we had no neighbors and lived on a road that only went farther into the country. He had to be on his way nowhere to drive by our house. Or taking a convoluted way to town by which he had to turn around or back up for some distance. He would bring news of the girls’ adventures in the city, though Winnie had a cell phone and we often talked.

“What about Helen Harsler?” I asked Winnie when they left. “Do you think she hates her name?”

“Was it an epidemic?”

“What?”

“Naming daughters with the letters that began their last names.”