In the Country of Last Things (16 page)

Those were the facts I had to deal with during my first months at Woburn House. It was a dark period for me, darker than any period I have ever known. In the beginning, I stayed in the room upstairs. Three times a day someone would come to visit me—twice to deliver meals, once to empty the chamber pot. There was always a commotion of people down below (voices, shuffling feet, groans and laughter, howls, snoring at night), but I was too weak and depressed to bother getting out of bed. I moped and sulked, brooded under the blankets, wept without warning. Spring had come by then, and I spent most of my time looking at the clouds through the window, inspecting the molding that ran along the top of the walls, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. For the first ten or twelve days, I don’t think I even managed to go into the hallway outside the door.

Woburn House was a five-story mansion with over twenty rooms—set back from the street and surrounded by a small private park. It had been built by Dr. Woburn’s grandfather nearly a hundred years before and was considered to be one of the most elegant private residences in the city. When the period of troubles began, Dr. Woburn was among the
first to call attention to the growing numbers of homeless people. Because he was a respected doctor from an important family, his statements were given a good deal of publicity, and it soon became fashionable in wealthy circles to support his cause. There were fund-raising dinners, charity dances, and other society functions, and ultimately a number of buildings around the city were converted into shelters. Dr. Woburn gave up his private practice to administer these way houses, as they were called, and every morning he would go out in his chauffeur-driven car to visit them, talking to the people who lived there and giving whatever medical assistance he could. He became something of a legend in the city, known for his goodness and idealism, and whenever people talked about the barbarity of the times, his name was brought up to prove that noble actions were still possible. But that was long ago, before anyone believed that things could disintegrate to the extent they finally did. As conditions grew worse, the success of Dr. Woburn’s project was gradually undermined. The homeless population grew in vast, geometric surges, and the money to finance the shelters dwindled at an equal rate. Rich people absconded, stealing out of the country with their gold and diamonds, and those who remained could no longer afford to be generous. The doctor spent large sums of his own money on the shelters, but that did not prevent them from failing, and one by one they had to shut their doors. Another man might have given up, but he refused to let the matter end there. If he could not save thousands, he said, then perhaps he could save hundreds, and if he could not save hundreds, then perhaps he could save twenty or thirty. The numbers were no longer important. Too much had happened by then, and he knew that
any help he could offer would only be symbolic—a gesture against total ruin. That was six or seven years ago, and Dr Woburn was already well past sixty. With his daughter’s support, he decided to open up his house to strangers, converting the first two floors of the family mansion into a combination hospital and shelter. Beds were bought, kitchen supplies were bought, and little by little they worked their way through the remaining assets of the Woburn fortune to maintain the operation. When the cash was exhausted, they began selling off heirlooms and antiques, gradually emptying the upstairs rooms of their contents. With constant, back-breaking effort, they were able to house from eighteen to twenty-four people at any given time. Indigents were allowed to stay for ten days; the desperately ill could stay longer. Everyone was given a clean bed and two warm meals a day. Nothing was solved by this, of course, but at least people were given a respite from their troubles, a chance to gather strength before moving on. “We can’t do much,” the doctor would say. “But the little we can do we are doing.”

Dr. Woburn had been dead for just four months when I arrived at Woburn House. Victoria and the others were doing their best to carry on without him, but certain changes had been necessary—particularly with the medical aspect of things, since there was no one who could do the doctor’s work. Both Victoria and Mr. Frick were competent nurses, but that was a far cry from being able to diagnose ailments and prescribe treatments. I think that helps to explain why I received such special attention from them. Of all the injured people who had been brought in since the doctor’s death, I was the first one who had responded to their care, the first one who had shown any signs of recovery. In that
sense, I served to justify their determination to keep Woburn House open. I was their success story, the shining example of what they were still able to accomplish, and for that reason they coddled me for as long as I seemed to demand it, indulged me in my black moods, gave me every benefit of the doubt.

Mr. Frick believed that I had actually risen from the dead. He had worked as the doctor’s chauffeur for a long time (forty-one years, he told me), and he had seen more of life and death at close quarters than most people ever do. To hear him tell it, there had never been such a case as mine. “No sir, miss,” he would say. “You was already in the other world. I seed it with my own eyes. You was dead, and then you come back to life.” Mr. Frick had an odd, ungrammatical way of speaking, and he often made a hash of his ideas when trying to express them. I don’t think this had anything to do with the quality of his mind—it was simply that words gave him trouble. He had difficulty maneuvering them around his tongue, and he would sometimes stumble over them as though they were physical objects, literal stones cluttering his mouth. Because of this, he seemed especially sensitive to the internal properties of words themselves: their sounds as divorced from their meanings, their symmetries and contradictions. “Words be what tells me how to know,” he once explained to me. “That’s why I got to be such an old man. My name is Otto. It go back and forth the same. It don’t end nowhere but begin again. I get to live twice that way, twice as long as no one else. You too, miss. You be named the same as me. A-n-n-a. Back and forth the same, just like Otto myself. That’s why you got to be born again. It’s a blessing of luck, Miss Anna. You was dead,
and I seed you get born again with my own eyes. It’s a great good blessing of luck.”

There was a stolid grace to this old man, with his thin, spiny erectness and ivory-colored jowls. His loyalty to Dr. Woburn was unswerving, and even now he continued to maintain the car he had driven for him—an ancient, sixteen-cylinder Pierce Arrow with running boards and leather-upholstered seats. This black, fifty-year-old automobile had been the doctor’s only eccentricity, and every Tuesday night, no matter how much other work had to be done, Frick would go out to the garage behind the house and spend at least two hours polishing and cleaning it, putting it into the best possible shape for the Wednesday afternoon rounds. He had adapted the engine to run on methane gas, and this cleverness with his hands was surely the chief reason why Woburn House had not fallen apart. He had repaired plumbing, installed showers, dug a new well. These and sundry other improvements had kept the place functioning through the hardest of times. His grandson, Willie, worked as his assistant on all these projects, silently following him around from one job to another, a morose and stunted little figure in a green hooded sweatshirt. Frick’s plan was to teach the boy enough so that he could take over for him after he died, but Willie did not seem to be an especially fast learner. “Nothing to worry,” Frick said to me one day on this subject. “We break in Willie slow. There’s no rush about it no how. By the time I get ready to kick the bucket, the boy be growed into an old man, too.”

It was Victoria who took the greatest interest in me, however. I have mentioned how important my recovery was to her, but I think there was more to it than that. She was hungry for someone to talk to, and as my strength
gradually returned, she began coming upstairs to see me more often. Ever since her father’s death, she had been alone with Frick and Willie, running the shelter and attending to business, but there had been no one for her to share her thoughts with. Little by little, I seemed to become that person. It was not difficult for us to talk to each other, and as our friendship developed, I understood how much we had in common. It is true that I did not come from the same kind of wealth that Victoria did, but my childhood had been an easy one, filled with bourgeois splendors and advantages, and I had lived with a sense that all my desires were within the realm of possibility. I had gone to good schools and was capable of discussing books. I knew the difference between a Beaujolais and a Bordeaux, and I understood why Schubert was a greater musician than Schumann. Given the world that Victoria had been born into at Woburn House, I was probably closer to being a member of her own class than anyone she had met in years. I don’t meant to suggest that Victoria was a snob. Money itself did not interest her, and she had turned her back on the things it represented long ago. It’s just that we shared a certain language, and when she talked to me about her past, I understood her without having to ask for explanations.

She had been married twice—once briefly, in a “brilliant society match,” as she sarcastically put it, and the next time to a man she referred to as Tommy, although I never learned his last name. He had apparently been a lawyer, and together they had had two children, a girl and a boy. When the Troubles began, he had been increasingly drawn into politics, working first as undersecretary for the Green Party (at one time, all political affiliations here were designated
by colors), and then, when the Blue Party absorbed the membership of his organization in a strategic alliance, as urban coordinator for the western half of the city. At the time of the first Anti-Tollist uprisings eleven or twelve years ago, he was trapped in one of the riots along Nero Prospect and shot down by a policeman’s bullet. After Tommy’s death, her father urged her to leave the country with the children (who were just three and four at the time), but Victoria refused. Instead, she sent them along with Tommy’s parents to live in England. She did not want to be one of those people who had given up and run away, she said, but neither did she want to subject her children to the disasters that were bound to come. There are some decisions that no one should ever be forced to make, I believe, choices that simply put too great a burden on the mind. Whatever it is you finally do, you are going to regret it, and you will go on regretting it for as long as you live. The children went off to England, and for the next year or two Victoria managed to keep in touch with them by mail. Then the postal system began to break down. Communications became sporadic and unpredictable—a constant anguish of waiting, of messages thrown out blindly to sea—and at last they stopped altogether. That was eight years ago. Not one word had arrived since, and Victoria was long past hoping that she would ever hear from them again.

I mention these things to show you the similarities between our experiences, the links that helped to form our friendship. The people she loved were gone from her life just as terribly as the people I loved were gone from mine. Our husbands and children, her father and my brother—all of them had vanished into death and uncertainty. When I was well enough to go, therefore (but where did I really
have to go?), it seemed only natural that she should invite me to stay on at Woburn House to work as a member of the staff. It was not a solution I would have wished for myself, but under the circumstances I saw no other choice. The do-gooder philosophy of the place made me a bit uncomfortable—the idea of helping strangers, of sacrificing yourself to a cause. The principle was too abstract for me, too earnest, too altruistic. Sam’s book had been something for me to believe in, but Sam had been my darling, my life, and I wondered if I had it in me to devote myself to people I didn’t know. Victoria saw my reluctance, but she did not argue with me or try to change my mind. More than anything else, I think it was this restraint of hers that led me to accept. She did not make a big speech or try to convince me that I was about to save my soul. She simply said: “There’s a lot of work to be done here, Anna, more work than we can ever hope to do. I have no idea what will happen in your case, but broken hearts are sometimes mended by work.”

The routine was endless and exhausting. This was not a cure so much as a distraction, but anything that dulled the ache was welcome to me. I wasn’t expecting miracles, after all. I had already used up my supply of those, and I knew that everything from now on would be aftermath—a dreadful, posthumous sort of life, a life that would go on happening to me, even though it was finished. The ache, then, did not disappear. But little by little I began to notice that I was crying less, that I did not necessarily drench the pillow before I fell asleep at night, and once I even discovered that I had managed to go three straight hours without
thinking of Sam. These were small triumphs, I admit, but given what things were like for me then, I was in no position to scoff at them.

There were six rooms downstairs with three or four beds in each. The second floor had two private rooms set aside for difficult cases, and it was in one of those that I had spent my first weeks at Woburn House. After I started working, I was given my own bedroom on the fourth floor. Victoria’s room was down the hall, and Frick and Willie lived in a large room directly above hers. The only other person on the staff lived downstairs, in a room just off the kitchen. That was Maggie Vine, a deaf-mute woman of no particular age who served as the cook and laundress. She was very short, with thick, stumpy thighs and a broad face crowned by a jungle of red hair. Other than the conversations she held in sign language with Victoria, she did not communicate with anyone. She went about her work in a kind of sullen trance, doggedly and efficiently completing every job that was assigned to her, working such long hours that I wondered if she ever slept. She rarely greeted me or acknowledged my presence, but every now and again, on those occasions when we happened to be alone together, she would tap me on the shoulder, break into an enormous smile, and then proceed to give an elaborate pantomime performance of an opera singer delivering an aria—complete with histrionic gestures and quivering throat. Then she would bow, graciously acknowledging the cheers from her imaginary audience, and abruptly return to work, without any pause or transition. It was perfectly mad. This must have happened six or seven times, but I could never tell if she was trying to amuse me or frighten me. In all the years
she had been there, Victoria said, Maggie had never sung for anyone else.