Enduring (59 page)

Later Latha rides with Vernon and Liz and Jick to the waiting room of the I.C.U., which she has already thought means “I see you” or “Icy You” or Intermittent Cruel Utterances from the doctors, who come and go. George goes out to bring in breakfast for all. Vernon goes out to bring in dinner for all. Hank goes out to bring in supper for all, but afterwards he goes home, and others go home; everyone goes home and comes back, or goes home to stay. Latha does not leave. Jick does not leave. Latha learns that Diana, who has more wealth than Vernon, has instructed the hospital administrator to have the best possible specialists flown in at her expense. Latha learns the diagnosis: acute necrotic pancreatitis. Latha sits and waits. Some kindly doctor, taking her for the patient’s mother, explains the diagnosis to her and says there is little hope. George drives to the airport to fetch the big-city internists. Liz has fallen asleep with her head on Vernon’s shoulder. Latha tries to sleep, but cannot. A few of them, including Liz, are permitted to go into Clifford’s room to view him, as if viewing a corpse. He is still in a coma, and hooked up to many tubes and wires. Somebody, Latha can’t remember who, drives her home, where she tries to sleep but cannot, even with the help of one of Sharon’s pills. She takes a second one, and then a third.

When she wakes, Liz is holding her hand. It is dark out but Latha doesn’t know how long she has slept. Liz, out of the historian’s curiosity, has gone alone up to Clifford’s cavern, possibly searching for something suitable for him to be buried in. The grave has not been filled in. She has found Clifford’s notebooks, dozens of them, and has “borrowed” them to read, along with his copy of the Mark Raymond Harrington book,
The Ozark Bluff-Dwellers
, which has a chapter on their burial customs. She also has found hundreds of dollars in cash, which she has taken for safe-keeping. And she has found a will. It specifies that he be buried in the Bluff-Dweller fashion, in the floor of the cavern, with his atlatl and spears. He requests that those in attendance refrain from singing “Farther Along.” “Don’t you know it’s a joke? We won’t understand a damn thing farther along. But cheer up, my brothers and sisters, anyway.” He has listed his assets, a considerable amount of stocks and bonds in a safe deposit box at the Bank of the Ozarks in Jasper. His financial estate is to be divided into four equal parts as follows: one part to Latha, one part to Jick Chism, the third part to his former wife, and the fourth part to “The woman, whoever she is, who was going to save me from myself.” Liz asks Latha, “Do you think he might have meant
me
?” Probably, Latha says, but it may be too late. Liz drives her to the hospital in Harrison, where the doctors are still arguing and still shaking their heads. The halls seem to be filled with the elegiac sound of a French horn. Latha sits beside Clifford’s bed and holds his hand. Although he has not emerged from his coma, she begins to talk to him, quietly, telling him the rest of her story that had been interrupted: she tells him how she was rescued from possible death at the hands of the chauffeur/yardman at Lombardy Alley in Tennessee, how her rescuer accompanied her with his little girl on the return to Stay More, where the rescuer and his daughter lived until the girl was grown up and left home. A nurse comes and tells Latha that she doubts the patient can hear her, but Latha keeps on talking to him, telling him more of the story, almost in rehearsal for this story which she will tell to Sharon. She thinks that if she can make it interesting enough, Clifford will remember it when he comes out of his coma. “If you will live, if you will just get well and live,” she promises him, “I’ll tell you Dan’s whole story some day.” She is eager to tell him also the beautiful story of her third rescue, by the same man who performed the first one. She needs air, she can’t tolerate the air of hospitals, and she goes and sits on a bench outside on the lawn, joined by Clifford’s dog. When she hears the voice, she thinks for a moment he is a talking dog, not inconceivable, but dogs do not imitate French horns. She converses with the voice, wondering if she should be recommitted to the funny farm. But she does not remember talking to herself in the state hospital. She asks the voice to save her dying friend. She pleads, for a long time. Then she returns to Clifford’s room. The internists who had been arguing are now gone, perhaps back to their big city hospitals. The remaining one says to her, “I’m terribly sorry. There’s nothing we can do.” She walks to the bedside, where most of the wires and tubes and needles have been removed. She bends down and gives Clifford a long kiss, during which a French horn begins to play “Father Along.” On the last note, held longer than her kiss, Clifford opens his eyes.

When she sees him again, with Liz, they have him sitting up in bed. They have reattached some of the tubes and wires but he is fully conscious, and Latha introduces him to Liz, at last. He can’t talk yet, so they have to ask him yes-or-no questions to which he can nod or shake his head. But he is clearly bent on recovery. And he is clearly enraptured with Liz. Latha is almost jealous of the fond looks he gives her. When the day ultimately comes that Clifford can be discharged from the hospital, Latha offers him th’other house of her dogtrot to stay in, and all the other Stay Morons also offer him places to stay so he doesn’t have to go back up the mountain to his cavern. Latha secretly hopes that Clifford will accept the offer from Liz, whose dwelling, after all, was once a hotel, with plenty of room. Clifford says that what he really wants to do is to return to his cavern, but he is in no condition for that, so he accepts Liz’s offer and moves into her house. She cooks for him. Latha comes every day to visit, and watches him grow better day by day. Clifford is concerned about the notebooks and the money he had left in the cavern, but Latha tells him that Liz took them for safekeeping. “I hope she hasn’t read the notebooks,” he says. If she has, Clifford can get even with her, in a way, by reading the first Eliza Cunningham’s diaries, which, Latha knows, were never meant to be read and are enormously private but which Latha and Liz have both read almost in their entirety, the eighty-nine volumes chronicling her life growing up in Little Rock, her meeting with Jacob Ingledew, and her becoming subsequently Sarah Ingledew’s social secretary and best friend as well as Jacob’s mistress, a triangle which continued for the rest of their lives.

Latha is allowed to witness, from a distance and from what both Clifford and Liz have told her, the budding romance between the two of them, which had been her original hope. She does not know how far it has progressed, but she knows they have become verbally very intimate, even to the concoction of certain theme phrases, “It doesn’t matter,” “It’s not important,” and “There must be more,” which crop up even in their conversation with Latha. Liz has taken such good care of Clifford (for which Latha thanks her as if Clifford were her son) that he is finally ready to leave the house and go for walks, holding Liz’s hand as they stroll down the creek and around the remains of the town. They are invited to supper with Day and Diana and Vernon, whose Jelena is still in California visiting her children. Liz later reports to Latha that they brought up the subject of restoring the town, and Diana generously offered to subsidize Clifford in the undertaking, if he would undertake it, but he was noncommittal. One offshoot of the evening was that Vernon was totally captivated by the idea that Liz might actually be Eliza Cunningham the First (as they began to refer to her). Since Day and Diana had long ago convinced themselves that Day was the reincarnation of Daniel Lyam Montross, it is easy for them to assume that if Eliza the Second is not the reincarnation of Eliza the First she is some kind of marvelous avatar of her. The problem is that First (as they call her,) had been madly in love with Jacob Ingledew, and therefore it is difficult for Second (as they kiddingly call her), not to fall in love with Vernon Ingledew. Latha tries to warn her that since the love story of Vernon and Jelena is the greatest in the history of Stay More (or at least a close second to the love story of Latha and Every), there is no hope of Liz being able to encroach upon it. This doesn’t stop Liz from accepting an invitation from Vernon to go swimming with him, up Banty Creek at the swimming hole known as Ole Bottomless. Is that why they don’t invite Clifford too? Or is he just not fully recovered from his illness? But apparently he is fully recovered enough to be hurt enough by jealousy to run away. He runs away. Latha gives her grandson a talking-to. She is the first to realize where Clifford has gone, and Jick is the first to confirm it. Clifford has resumed the life of a Bluff-Dweller in his cave on Ledbetter Mountain. Latha wants to know if Jick has resumed supplying him with spirits but Jick avows that he had destroyed his still when Clifford was hospitalized. So Latha can only imagine the problems that Clifford is having trying to sleep. His dog, at least, is probably happier to resume his old haunts.

Jelena returns from California, but without her children, who have elected to stay with their father. Unless Vernon himself tells her, Jelena does not find out about his dalliance with Second. She reclaims her place in his heart, and Vernon gives up his meetings with Second. The next time Vernon brings his grandmother a load of groceries, books and other supplies, Latha thanks him but gives him another talking-to. Doesn’t he want Clifford to restore Stay More? The best way to ensure that is to first restore his relationship with Second. Vernon protests that he doesn’t intend to have anything further to do with Second, and he wouldn’t have got himself “mixed up” with her in the first place if they had had the sense to wear bathing suits when they went swimming together.

“But do you honestly want Stay More rebuilt to look the way it did a hundred years ago?” he asks of his grandmother. “I can pay for it if that’s what you want, but you’d better give it some thought.” She gives it some thought. She is thinking about it on the morning she sets out to climb Ledbetter Mountain in search of Clifford. It is a tough hike, and she hasn’t gone halfway when she decides, wisely, that she’s just too old for that kind of activity. Turning around and heading back downhill, she thinks,
Stay More could be rebuilt, but I couldn’t
. And she decides any reconstruction of the town would be just that: a false copy, not a true restoration. So she marches straight to Second’s house and tells her this. And tells her that she isn’t First, she’s just a reconstruction of her. And asks her what she plans to do about Clifford. Second replies that she had just meant to make him jealous, not to drive him away, but that he appears to be sulking; if so, let him brood. “So he is out of reach for both of us,” Latha says. “He’s out of my reach because I can’t climb that mountain to his cave, and he’s out of your reach because he feels you betrayed him. You may as well go back to Missouri.” But Second does climb the mountain. She does not return, for several days, and when she does return she has Clifford with her, and his dog. They appear at Latha’s dogtrot and announce that they have decided to get married, but they will not live in either the cave or Second’s house (which had been First’s house). They have had a nonstop discussion, staying up all night some nights, and she has persuaded him that trying to live like a Bluff-Dweller is a hopeless reconstruction of the distant past, while he has persuaded her that any dream of restoring Stay More is a hopeless reconstruction of the recent past.

So what are they going to do? They have considered making some repairs, not reconstructions, on First’s house, but they would have to get Vernon to sell it to them. Vernon tells them that he can’t sell the house to them but they are free to live there as long as they like if they don’t mind the cockroaches. So they live there. Clifford says he is thinking of organizing his notebooks into a book that would be a commentary on the decline of contemporary American civilization. Second says she would like to organize First’s diaries into some sort of publishable memoir. So this work keeps them busy and happy for a good long while, despite the infestation of cockroaches. They interrupt their work to make occasional visits to Latha, to Day and Diana, and to Vernon and Jelena, and to invite all these to supper parties at the Jacob Ingledew mansion. Jelena never learns of Vernon’s infidelity, which isn’t that strictly speaking because they were never married. Nor do Clifford and Eliza marry, at least not at once, and maybe not ever. What they do, when their respective manuscripts are ready to be revised and prepared for publication, is take them to New York in search of publishers. It is the first visit of either of them to that metropolis, which is an unimaginably different world from Stay More, except that the cockroaches are just as bad, if not worse.

Latha receives letters from one or the other of them from time to time, which she answers as faithfully as she can.

Chapter forty-seven

W
hen Clifford and Eliza have vacated the Jacob Ingledew house, it further deteriorates, like all the abandoned buildings in Stay More, and several generations of cockroaches claim it as their world. Latha’s own house is free from cockroaches because of her cats, who don’t eat roaches but scare the living daylights out of them.

Latha is never lonely, not just because of her cats and her dog (who has died and been replaced by a pup of shaggy coat whom she names after the friend and biographer of Socrates, Xenophon, or Fun, as she calls him) but also because of visits from Day and Diana and Vernon and Jelena, and primarily because of her correspondence, which consumes much of her time, not only to Clifford and Eliza, but also to each of her granddaughters, especially her favorite, Sharon, who is still working in that Chicago hospital from which she occasionally sneaks various medicines for Latha, who doesn’t need them, except for the occasional Dalmane. But Sharon loses her job. She is caught in bed with a patient, which is strictly forbidden. Latha has enjoyed Sharon’s accounts of the many men she has gone to bed with since escaping from Junior Stapleton; it would seem that she has jumped into bed with numerous medical students and doctors, but doing it with a patient is going too far. After she is fired, the patient, who is a young English professor at the University of Chicago named Lawrence Brace, spends months trying to find her, which in a place as big as Chicago is like hunting for a needle in a haystack, but aided by the Fate-Thing he finally chances upon her and persuades her to move in with him. It might have been happily-ever-after, but under the influence of Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, and other boozer-poets, Larry drinks too much. Sharon excuses his immoderate consumption on the grounds that some of the greatest modern poets had done likewise. But when he drinks too much, he does not listen very carefully to anything Sharon has to say, and in time she discovers that she is talking to herself. She cultivates the ability to have conversations, aloud, with herself. She becomes such a stimulating and witty self-conversationalist that Larry, sober enough on one occasion to eavesdrop, becomes jealous. He listens long enough, and carefully enough, to determine that she finds herself a more entertaining talker as well as listener than he, and he writes to her a long and sarcastic poem (this is in the days when he has not yet abandoned the creation of poetry for the criticism of it, and he has published a few poems himself) in which he so much as accuses her of being in love with herself. It is a difficult poem, and she is never certain she understands its allusions, but she gets its message. Writing him a short, angry note in response, she steals his car, intending to drive it home to Stay More. En route, the Fate-Thing arranges for the car, a decrepit Ford Fairlane, to break down in Eureka Springs, where a day later the Fate-Thing arranges a pile-up of two trucks, three cars and a passenger bus on a treacherous curve of scenic U.S. 62 to over-tax the employees of the Eureka Springs hospital, who give Sharon an immediate temporary job that becomes more permanent, at least until she finds herself once again unable to resist the invitations of male patients to climb into their beds. Once again she is caught and fired, but finds a job as the desk clerk at the famous Crescent Hotel, on a mountaintop in Eureka. The first chance she gets, she borrows someone’s car and drives out to Stay More, where Latha embraces her as if she has been lost forever and they are inseparable for two or three days. Together Sharon and her grandmother walk around what is left of the town, and Latha tells her the story of the Bluff-Dweller and the Second Eliza Cunningham. They visit the abandoned buildings, including Latha’s former house and store which Sharon wishes she could move into. Latha says she will be happy to deed it to her anytime she wants [you are so sweet, Gran]. Sharon is so much in love with Stay More that she wants to visit as often as she can if she can’t live here. To this end, she buys a used Chevrolet Camaro on a payment plan, which she names “Camilla” and talks to it almost as she talks to herself. On one of her visits, she takes her grandmother to meet a houseguest of Day and Diana’s, a striking European woman named Ekaterina, who has been working on a novel, and whom Sharon met in Eureka Springs when Dawny brought her there before taking her to Stay More. Latha is indignant, if not hurt, to learn that Dawny has been back to Stay More without stopping by to see her. She learns that Dawny was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh when he met Ekaterina and persuaded her to relocate to the Ozarks. Latha cannot remember the last time she heard from him, and she wonders if she might have said something in her last letter to him which estranged him. All that aside, she and the woman named Ekaterina are drawn to each other and spend many hours together at Latha’s, which Latha suggests could be called A Cat Arena. Ekaterina had been confined in a notorious Russian psychiatric institution known as Serbsky, so Latha and Ekaterina can spend many hours together telling each other about their experiences in the nuthouse. They each possess a stock of native ghost stories, and they have quite a time comparing the ghost tales of the Ozarks with those of Svanetia. When Ekaterina has finished writing her novel, and feels she has overstayed her welcome with Diana and Day, she moves to Eureka Springs and lives with Sharon. Latha misses her company. The cats seem to miss her company. Sharon asks her brother Vernon to see to it that Gran can have a telephone in her house, so Sharon can call her from Eureka. Sharon reports that Ekaterina has had her manuscript typed up by a woman who works at a local law office and who also read the novel and thinks it is terrific. Ekaterina has sent it off to an agent. Later Sharon explains on the phone to Latha just what an agent is, a “necessary evil,” and says the agent has turned down the manuscript without even reading it. Also, they have had a surprise visit from Sharon’s Chicago boyfriend, Larry Brace, and plan to bring him out to see Stay More. Soon the young man is presented to Latha, and Latha thinks he would make a better man for Sharon than Junior Stapleton or any of the guys she has mentioned in her letters. Latha is happy to see Ekaterina again, and after they’ve all stayed a few days, Latha gives them the full stay more behest, trying to get them to stay longer, but they have to get back to Eureka, and Larry has to go back to Chicago. Into the fall and through the winter, Sharon’s phone calls usually contain some mention of the progress of Ekaterina’s manuscript as it is turned down by one publisher or another. She finally finds a publisher but must wait a year for the book to appear in print. During that time, Sharon makes up her mind to return to Stay More for good.