The Ghost of Hannah Mendes (33 page)

She wanted her life back. She wanted to go home. And the more the doctors and technicians sat on her bedside and smiled encouragingly, explaining the Inquisitorial tortures they expected her to undergo bravely, the more she wanted to flee.

Why prolong it? Why not, as the good doctor from the talk shows with his little “how-to” best-seller on self-destruction suggested, simply lie back in a warm bath and let the darkness cover you? Why not “go gently into that good night”?

Life had been so lovely, so very pleasant and easy so much of the time, she thought. Why ruin it all with a sad and tortured ending? Pills, injections, bedpans, pain. Terrible pain. That was all she had to look forward to.

Janice was coming this morning. Again.

She was trying to be helpful, Catherine sighed, wondering how much of her empty chatter (the intricacies of wallpaper selection, the difficulties of finding a decent carpet installer…) she would have to endure before sending Janice away with the feeling that she’d done her duty by her difficult old mother.

Janice, of course, wanted her to endure the tortures.

They all did.

She lifted up her hand and touched her still thick hair. Bald and sick and unable to eat—one of the few pleasures age still allowed one—for weeks, they said. And if she was lucky, the enemy would be routed for a little while. But he would be back, storming the barbicans. This, too, was clear.

If they could only assure her she’d live forever. You’d go through just about anything for that, wouldn’t you? But a few extra weeks, a month or two. What was the point?

She’d known that her body was going to reach this state. But somehow, now that the moment had actually arrived, she felt cheated, angry, and a bit guilty—the irrational emotion of having done something wrong, of having erred, somehow. The wild goose chase to Europe had probably not helped her health. But she felt no regret. It had been so lovely to share those beautiful moments with the girls.

If only Suzanne hadn’t…

That child!

She’d always been her secret favorite. How could one help it? Beautiful, daring, bright. She was everything I always wanted to be, Catherine thought. And now she’s gone off with a man. And if that didn’t work out, she’d go find Renaldo.

Oh, G-d. Renaldo. What she had held most against him, she realized, was neither his age, nor his bohemian appearance, nor even his unresolved marital status. It was simply the sense of his otherness: He belonged to another people, another faith, with its own rituals, its own G-d. If Suzanne joined him, she would join that world. She, and all her descendants, would be lost to her own family, her own history.

Oh, she knew that people viewed mixed marriages easily these days. Each would keep their own religion. Mutual respect. And the children? Christmas trees and Hanukkah menorahs, Easter eggs and Passover seders, all mixed up together. As wholesome, some claimed, as scrambled eggs for breakfast.

How little people understood how life really worked! As if the soul were some iron-sided garbage can instead of a delicate living digestive system! As if you could throw into it whatever you pleased, making no distinctions, requiring no explanations! They wouldn’t expect their stomachs to survive a meal of Japanese, Hungarian, and French cuisine, and yet that was exactly what they expected from their souls.

You had to make a choice. Your lives were either a validation of your ancestors, or a rejection. “Or both,” she could hear Suzanne protest. Sometimes. But it wasn’t that easy. The modern idea that a consensus is always best didn’t always work. Sometimes you can’t compromise. You either use the past as a jumping-off point for the future, or you erase it and start from scratch. Worse, you erase it and start from someone else’s past, destroying all that had nourished those genes, those bones, and that flesh that had given you life.

That rejection, awful and absolute, was what Catherine feared most. The image of Suzanne holding a child in her arms to be baptized, instead of circumcised…

And Francesca? Dear, positive, responsible little Francesca, who never took chances? She’d probably look back on this trip to Europe as a strange interlude, nothing to do with her real life. And when she came back, she’d forget all about it the moment she got a new job and her own office on a double-digit floor in some glass tower. She’d attend some peroxided version of a Jewish service in some space-age excuse for a house of worship, going once or twice a year, the way she went to the dentist, and with the same amount of joy and meaning. She’d drag whatever offspring she had through the same experiences until their bodies grew too big to bully and their intelligence saw through the silliness to the frightening emptiness at its core.

She thought of the lines from
Dr. Zhivago
that had stayed with her ever since she’d come across them years before: “Lara was not religious. She did not believe in ritual. But sometimes, to be able to bear life, she needed the accompaniment of an inner music. That music was G-d’s word of life, and it was to weep over it that she went to church.”

She was not afraid for Francesca the way she was for Suzanne. Something about Suzanne’s impulsive, searching nature would lead her to crave that inner music. If she did not find it in her own faith, she would find it in another’s.

Had she been asking the impossible? To transfer values that she herself had ignored or felt indifference toward? And maybe that’s not what we should want. After all, look at the kind of people who did move through the ages unchangingly, son following father, daughter following mother in an unwavering devotion to ritual: African tribesmen, aborigines. Or the Amish or the Hasidim, who were sunk in a time warp, down to their socks. Or the Moslem fanatics who mutilated their daughters so they would never know the joy of making love.

But the good things, the valuable things, it was so important that they get passed down somehow! Love of freedom, compassion for the poor, the transcendent joy of true prayer, the respect for a kernel of holiness in all human life and human creation. It was so important that those things didn’t get lost or disappear. Like beads strung on a necklace, it was all right for each generation to restring them, rearranging them into new patterns and adding a beautiful bead of their own design. And it didn’t even matter, perhaps, if the necklace looked completely different, as long as all the beads were there, and the string didn’t break, scattering them into the dust of time.

The important thing was that the necklace get handed down. And if your own children’s hands weren’t worthy or willing to accept it, then it had to be given to someone else’s children, who’d been raised with more wisdom, or perhaps simply more luck, than your own.

It made sense. And yet, a cold chill crept through her heart as she remembered the verse from the Scroll of Esther: “If you will be silent at this time, deliverance will come to your people from another place, and you and your father’s house shall perish.”

The tree, she thought with horror. The last two leaves falling to the ground and decaying into dust.

She turned over and faced the wall. It would be better not to live to see it.

“Mrs. da Costa?”

“Leave me alone!” she moaned, not looking up.

“Now, now. I’m just here to help.”

“You can help by showing yourself out and allowing me not to waste my precious breath!”

She felt a hand on her shoulder.

“What?” She sat up, enraged, shrugging it off.

It was a stranger dressed in that long-sleeved, mid-calf manner consistent with ultra-religious Muslim women, or Hasidic Jews. Her scalp was covered by a strange, old-fashioned snood that hid almost all her hair.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m a volunteer.”

“Well, thank you very much, but I don’t need anything, particularly not a do-gooder with a cheerful smile who invades private rooms and…”

The woman settled herself calmly in the armchair beside the bed.

Catherine stared, dumbstruck. “Do you want me to call the nurse and have you thrown out?!”

“I can only stay a little while. I can see that you’re feeling desolate, that you need to make a decision, perhaps the hardest and bravest one you’ve ever made.”

Catherine leaned back, sighing. If you wanted to get some rest, the last place a sick person needed to be was a hospital. “Why is your hair covered like that? You aren’t bald, are you? I mean, you’re not from some chemotherapy support group, are you?”

She shook her head. “I’m not from any support group.”

“Because, if you are, I want you to know that you’re wasting your time. There is no way I’m going to…”

“I’ve come to take you somewhere. I’ll be back in a minute.”

To Catherine’s astonishment, she returned with a wheelchair.

“And how, exactly, am I supposed to move with all these tubes and plastic containers trailing out of my arms?”

“Never mind. I know exactly what to do.” She grasped Catherine’s arm and helped her up, expertly arranging the bags on mobile poles beside the chair.

“You’re not a nurse, are you?”

“No, not a nurse. But my father was a doctor and I spent much time with people who were ill. My husband…” Her voice caught.

Catherine, who was glad to be getting out of the room no matter where she was being taken, looked up with sudden interest. “Are you a widow?”

She nodded. “All these long years. I was so young when I lost him.” Her voice cracked.

Catherine reached out and touched her with sudden, impulsive compassion. “Were there children?”

“Yes. A little girl. A precious, lovely child.”

“And you never remarried?”

“No, never. Come.”

“Wait, where are you taking me? Does my doctor know? Do you have permission?”

“I have permission from the highest authority. From the top one in charge,” she answered.

“The head of the hospital? Does he even know I’m here?” Catherine asked, startled, but strangely exhilarated at the roll of the wheels beneath her, the sudden movement out of the stale, unmoving air. She wondered if he was someone she’d been on a charity board with.

“And what about you?” the woman asked as she wheeled her down the corridor. “Do you have children?”

“One daughter and two granddaughters.”

“Do they visit you often?”

“Often enough. That is, my daughter does. My granddaughters are in Europe right now.”

“Really? Where?”

“One is traveling in Spain, and the other…I’m not sure.”

“Tell them not to miss Venice. Both of them. They mustn’t miss Venice. Will you remember?”

“It’s lovely in Venice.” Catherine nodded, remembering the soft lap of the water against the elegant prows of gondolas outside her hotel window. “Very romantic.”

“I never found it that way. But no matter, they should both go. Together.”

Catherine turned to look at her, startled.

They got into the elevator and rode up.

“Wait, why are we going up? Why are we getting out here?”

The woman didn’t answer, pushing the chair swiftly down the hall.

“Wait! I shouldn’t be here, it doesn’t make any sense. Stop!”

The wheelchair came to an abrupt halt.

Catherine leaned forward, trembling, her hands shaking as they touched the glass.

Babies. About twenty of them, their tiny faces perfect in repose or alive with need, fists flailing, mouths open with complaint. She looked at their exquisite, perfect skulls, the downy crown of black or blond begging to be caressed. Every single one, a new beginning, she thought, possessing a lifetime of still unspent minutes, hours, days, months.

She turned pale with rage. “WHY HAVE YOU BROUGHT ME HERE?!”

“Look,” the woman insisted calmly. “You aren’t really seeing anything. Your mind is elsewhere, wandering, dreaming. Look harder. The answer. It’s staring you in the face.”

“What answer?! GET ME OUT OF HERE, I TELL YOU, BEFORE I SCREAM…”

The woman sighed. “Shall I tell you, then?”

Catherine suddenly stopped struggling, her body freezing, motionless with tension. “Tell me what I’m supposed to see.”

“The future.”

No, Catherine thought. Not the future. The past.

Janice. There was a time when I needed nothing else but to feel her tender skin, to breathe her fragrance, to sink into the folds of fat on the back of her neck, her perfect, round shoulder.

She looked at the babies.

Had Janice been the extraordinarily beautiful infant she remembered? Or simply endowed with that miraculous loveliness possessed by every new creature freshly formed by the generous hand of the Creator? I cared so much…I wanted to give her so much….

My baby, she thought, trying not to weep.

And then, Janice herself giving birth, her body a woman’s, like my own. And I was so afraid for her. I didn’t want her to hurt. I tried to pray, but couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t find the words. Please, G-d, help her deliver this child, my grandchild, flesh of my flesh, my genes, alive and well. Let my daughter be all right. The quiet hospital corridors full of doctors’ tired footsteps. And then the news, breathtaking in its joyous revelation: a healthy birth. A girl. A granddaughter.

And she had thought then: A new life that will go on far into the future when I am dust. A part of me, taken into the future, further than even I could imagine. Vital, young, healthy in body, just as my own body is fading, wrinkling, breaking down.

Would you want to be young again, she asked herself? Go through all of that again?

She thought of her youth, those hot and fecund days filled with childbirth, swollen breasts, and a hungry infant that filled the world, reducing it to a small circle, almost intolerable in its intensity, and so rich with meaning nothing else ever came close.

Never. I couldn’t, wouldn’t want to.

I’m happy to be on the outside looking in, to watch the blossoming of those seeds I planted, the turning of the wheels I set in motion. Until the very last moment, she thought, with a clear sense of revelation, to see it all for as long as possible.

Babies again. Great-grandchildren. My flesh young again, beginning all over again. New hope. New chances. The formation of hands willing and eager to grasp the precious beads left behind. The future.