Sleepless Nights (14 page)

Queer, impudent decline, a
slight
, free, open on Sunday, galloping about the tall parlors on her long horse legs. Braying assurance of tone. She would say: What a pity, no more Socialist party. And: Henry Adams was the ugliest man I ever laid eyes on.

She had a curious wish to catch the learned in a byway of ignorance. Because she was a Boston spectacle, a number of gifted persons had come along during her lifetime—had come into the depressing parlors where she sat behind a tray of tarnished silver and offered English muffins which had been toasted in the morning and were as hard as cement. Sometime during the party, she would point to several old prints on the wall and announce with a sly grin:

I showed those little things to Panofsky once and he was stumped. Absolutely stumped. But, Professor, I said, they are simple
vues optiques
. That is all, ordinary
vues optiques
.

The old lady, lively as she was, had in a positive, outstanding way the deepest incuriosity. Biographies of maids, bodies of guests, were observed by her only by accident, the way things suddenly glare forth on a platter, quickly, in a blur. No doubt the incuriosity was the source of her attachment to anecdote, to the set piece of conversation with its tag line.

Yet, her last year of life was a marvel. In her eighty-seventh year she found an adorable friend. A chattering, high-spirited bird of a young man came into the gloom of the old house, which had not been painted for years. That is, he came as a visitor, a new friend, almost violently happy to be with her among the old portraits and valuables, the broken Chippendale, the dangerous, loosely caned chairs, the recent pie tins from frozen-food counters. He was what was then in antique circles called a “fairy”—and he flew in to her from the clutter of Somerville, the compost heap behind the Harvard Yard.

The young man adored the old lady and most gratifying of all was that he believed her to be a
character
; he saw her precisely as she herself did, without reservation. Yes, she was indeed an old Boston pedigreed specimen and this was astonishingly agreeable to both of them, this being her own image. He raced in and out of the house, not waiting for invitations; he ran up and kissed the muddled white head; he made the servant laugh with his Irish brogue imitations. He loved to look at her family photographs and when he saw her sitting on a rock near the ocean, wearing long black swimming drawers, he would say,
fantastic
. Or here she was more than half a century ago at a lawn party. You look fabulous, he cried out. The hat, the hat, marvelous!

It was genuine because he himself was a character also, a living, sturdy weed of gossip and laughter, of racing confessions about nights of fun and errors, of cooking recipes with unexpected olives, of fish sprinkled with chocolate.

She was nearing senility and he was a wound-up toy. They had a good time together and, in the end, inspired with honor and love, she left him a good deal of her money. She paid her bill.

Josette raced around Boston like a migrant bird. Sometimes Irish maids, fresh-faced even into old age from birth in a countryside somewhere, were taken aback by her industrial grayness, that discoloring gene of the mills and the shoe factory. Josette came by the day, one house on Monday and another on Wednesday; the Irish maids cooked cod cakes in the morning and soup and roasts at night and lived in small rooms hidden in great houses.

Grave disasters behind Josette’s swiftness. Beatings in childhood.

Once over a cup of coffee she told of having been raped by someone in the family and would not say who it was. It seemed to connect in my mind with the loss of her teeth, which, of course, came later. The cold of Canada, wet fur. No, it was not the most important thing in her life, she insisted—and long, long ago. But you remembered it? Remembered, well, that yes, she answered.

Josette’s mind was much occupied by a monstrous sister, still living in Lawrence. It was not affection so much as confusion of feeling that held her. And in a way she was thrilled by the power of her sister’s aberrations. We drove to Lawrence so that I might see for myself the outrageous, interesting invalidism in which the sister, coarse and homely as an old boot, lived, or reigned.

She was unparalleled indeed; one of those possessive, demanding persons who can demand and receive, can throttle and enclose others in a way undreamed of by the reasonable. The sister was transfixed by the spectacle of her incapacities, lifted up to peaks of feeling by every ache and pain, quick to throw the magic of her sufferings into the air like crooked smiles. Buried intelligence gave a dimension to her rigidity, brought to it the structure of an intense bookkeeping, without an error, directed upon herself.

The sister sat in her wheelchair, the queenly owner of her arthritis—very much the way that stockings are advertised in
queen
sizes for those weighing from 270 to 350 pounds.

She sat, enormous and riveting, as she wheeled about the little apartment, the upstairs of one side of an old rotting clapboard two-family house. Doctors, years ago, had insisted she was not paralyzed. They screwed up their faces in annoyance at her perverse and determined defiance. No matter, she refused exercises for the joints, refused operations, refused to
try
, turning away every suggestion of amelioration as if threatened by a rival. She grew large and helpless, fat and weak, crippled and combative.

It was known that sometimes the sister howled all night in her pride in the pain of her affliction. The cries and complaints gained substance in the minuteness of descriptions, the persecutions deeply pondered.

Josette, by the time I met her, had already had both of her breasts hacked off by cancer, and other complications drifted about her in a whisper. She approached the mutilation from a distance, the place reserved for graying hair and wrinkles at the edge of the eyelids, something slow and common,
there
.

(Diseases. When I would fly home during the year, coming down at the Bluegrass airport, it seemed to me that sweet and cheerful greetings were always mixed with the warm handshake of diabetes, hernias, high blood pressure, cataracts, hysterectomies, prostate troubles.)

The sister circled about Josette’s lost breasts and her thinness and having taken them in still placed it all under a benevolent dispensation.

See Josette run about, she would say. For myself I am lucky to be able to crawl to the door and throw myself down the stairs when the time comes...

The halo of invalidism rose over her brow.

Ministering angels: she, quarrelsome, petty, deformed, and stubborn, had a few years back taken in a young man as a boarder. These things happen. People without the room to breathe in take in lodgers and ill-fed people put up signs advertising breakfast.

Soon the boarder was a companion, an accomplice caught up in her wild frozen life as intensely as herself. He came, fair-faced and inward, with the groceries after his day at the plant. He pushed the chair to the porch and usually got his huge charge into the car for a Sunday drive—in and out, carefully lifting and arranging, with a passionate, peculiar attentiveness, representing a defiant victory.

He talked and he listened. They shared suspicion of human intentions, and their eyes glittered over the down-casting news from the shop, the delinquency of neighbors, the bad character of the neglectful and ungrateful.

Throughout our visit, Josette smiled, sighed, and trembled as the victim wheeled to the cookie plate, approached the coffee on the stove, spun around in pursuit of spoon, sugar. Toward the end, Josette crumpled under the spell, grew grave and meek. Later she remarked that her sister was growing fatter and fatter and shriveling at the same time.

One night, a few months later, the sister fell into violent illness. The young man, fearing her demand not to be moved, feared death more. He called an ambulance amidst her groans and accusations, and the heavy, heavy figure was carried off to the hospital, to lie there in the waiting room among the injured and screaming who knew nothing of illness, who contemptibly let life and death near them with no sense at all of possibilities, lengthy martyrdoms.

Not a one of them, she whimpered, knew of years in wheelchairs, of the improvisations, accommodations and interior assets she had piled up.

The sister had many diseases at the end. She listened carefully, her eyes wide, to the listing of them all: diabetes, kidney disease, heart disease, and also arthritis.

She died. The young man closed the door on himself, scarcely going out except to the shop from which he returned with the groceries, now a bag of prepared foods. She was the only mother I ever had, he said. Josette came back from the Mass and the burial deeply ashamed, but not able to figure out the exact shape of any of it.

A brilliant night outside in New York City. It is Saturday and people with debts are going to restaurants, jumping in taxicabs, careening from West to East by way of the underpass through the Park. What difference does it make to be here alone? Even now, just after eight in the evening, the trucks are starting their delivery of the Sunday
Times
.

After a year, more than a year, I return to you, Josette. In the meantime I have been to Honolulu and to Russia. A lifetime of worrying and reading may bring you at last to free trips you are not sure you wish to take. In the company of others not sure they should spare the time just now. You, so poor and hard pressed, would be interested to know that there are many cleaning women standing about in the halls of the hotels of Russia. Curious—they do not often enter the rooms. The remains of the first day’s sturgeon stayed all week on the plate, on the table next to the bed.

Josette had a love story, suitable to her old-fashioned struggle and to the steady, slow, determined pace of little expectation that must nevertheless be achieved. Michael was a small, insecure man, not very bright and always nervously working. The automobile shop filled him with anxiety and love, the anxiety of love perhaps. The men in the shop came into his conversation in whispers. Some of them he adored for their brightness, toughness, and worldliness; some with bad tempers, indolence, and carelessness haunted him. Ill-educated, with fear of displeasing, Michael was like a man of an earlier century, hierarchical, with himself at the bottom.

He dreamed of cars and finally one of his dreams came true when he bought a secondhand Buick. Its virtues, its mileage, its fine engine, its low price (close to stealing to get such a fine car for that, he said again and again): and himself at the wheel, ears tuned to every crunch and whine. He was happy, except for the horror of dents administered by others.

Sometimes on Sunday morning he would drive up the alley of Marlborough Street and gaze upon our own car. There he was in a brown hat, mediating. He caressed the car with a soft cloth, lifted the front and stared long at the inside. Inspection of battery, contemplation of tires.

Josette all day long dusted vases from France, swept over Oriental rugs, admired marble mantels and brought elaborate brass andirons to a high shine. She made up beds with antique spreads, looked into mirrors with eagles on them—and on the weekends and vacations she and Michael got into the Buick and drove off to trailer parks.

Many, many beautiful memories they had of the way the water and lights hooked up, the wandering people with their news of other parks, good sites and bad, the comradeship, the radio, the cans of beans for the miraculous little stove, the cans of beer from the perfect cooler.

Josette, in her passionate neatness, adored small places, metals that shone in blues and pinks and pale greens. She loved packaged mashed potatoes and frozen patties. And then there was always the car, the object for which they worked and saved. The trailer park, itself, was the hymn sung to the automobile, saying that a car was indeed their true home. The mobile home, the large box resting on its plot, asleep, dreaming of the road, dreaming of being pulled along forever, someplace beyond.

Michael, of course, was struck with a terrible illness that mangled his life. It is possible to say
of course
because there had never been any certain promises in his life and his lack of brightness of mind, along with his dutifulness, caused him to be fearful. He was one of those men who acted as if he expected to be shouted at and would not know how to reply.

A blood clot in his leg threatened his life and changed his life in a moment. He was never again well and yet he rose up out of bed, weak and crippled, thinking madly of the job, the job. He stumbled back to the car shop, desperately punishing himself, miserable and yet, blinking anxiously behind his yellowish spectacles, he would mumble about “return in six months” and never called the doctor to inquire about the appropriateness of symptoms during the interval.

He and so many deprived others I have known seemed afraid of bothering doctors, of acting out of turn, of complaining, and so they went on, the far-off appointment in their mind as if waiting for a reward or a lottery drawing.

At the shop, his face in a grimace that tried to be a grin of health, his condition worsened and he was forced to quit. For several weeks he was like a madman, and Josette was as gray as death, gray enough for her own and his.

Then a stroke of blessing, wonder. Michael got a job as janitor for a nice building in the Back Bay, working mostly for the accommodation of the basement apartment they were given.

He loved it and all of a sudden he was loved. Loved by the tenants, by the owners, for his neatness, his willingness, his devotion to the building itself. It filled his heart with passionate attachment, stepped in the sore place that had been left empty and aching by his departure from the car shop.

In the evenings, Michael painted all the basement walls. He set out scrubbed, beautiful garbage cans in rows. He stacked his tools and hoses, hung implements on nails, carried suitcases to lockers and would empty a whole bin in order to arrange stored things to size.