The Saint Louisans (45 page)

And today was my day.

Morphine is the escape hatch from pain, the last call as my Titanic begins to sink. But there are no lifeboats in the endless, immaterial liquid.

I want you to have a face, you the cancer who destroys me. I want to say ‘This is stupid. You're winning, but you'll kill the body. It goes, and where are you then? You're a dead cancer. Is that reasonable? What kind of future is that?' I think of the old story. The scorpion and the frog who ferries the scorpion across the river and gets stung anyway. Because it's what a scorpion does. But you're not one for stories. You're not a scorpion. You're a bear, ready to take me over the mountain. Like the dance, and we're dancing together. Totentanz. Now it means something.

Thinking shifts to all tenses. Can't be helped. All the poetry, recollections, and brilliance are reduced to single lines, flashes of what was. Sara Teasdale: When life has had enough of me / These are the grasses that will blow / Above me like a living sea. I think that. Over and over. Planks to be hugged in the darkening waters. I'm like St. Louis, a city whose body fails, decays, its promise never fulfilled.

Memories are pictures in an immense, empty gallery. Canvasses drift and float. It's closing time. Pick one. One last moment.

I wait for my angel. Who will send me on? Not Saul. Nor those visitors I peer up at in the scuba world of morphine. Who will crouch like a jackal and lead me down the river? I think:
ned angli sed angeli
. Why?

I begin to see life outside me, outside the glass box I'm now shut up in. I'm Bessie in her shadow box, inside the TV, and all I see is mists, clouding, and hard glass against the light.

My body, our bodies, are everything, and mine is letting me down. I drown without suffocating. No more weight. Gravity. But angeli? It's a skeleton key, like the one to the room where the Seven Dwarfs locked me in that night, where they whispered what to do, how to get rid of me.

Not that memory. Pick a better one.

Your body shuts down organ by organ, your heart and brains the last ones to keep the light on. They're blips on the screen of your heartbeat, going to 2/4 time. You become a theory: time and mass are relative, and no mass leaves only time. You focus, but there's too much going on in each picture. All buzz and minuteness. You want an essence. One last, good memory. The funeral. Hello, Tom. A picnic. Delivering your first baby. Supernurse. No. Something better.

Light. Music. Midsummer.

The church is in the South side. Its lawn smells of a recent mowing, pinstripes of green line its body. The opulent odor of peonies drift in through open windows. An austere brick and stone church of Lutheran dignity, now almost devoid of parishioners, its pews fill with playgoers. Concertgoers.

“It's called ‘The Bladder-Stone Operation',” Pierce whispers as applause patters to the arriving musicians. “It's kind of weird. By Marais.”

I nod. “French. Baroque?”

“He was the guy in the movie. About the old man, Sainte Colombe, who had a viola da gamba with an extra string. That played like a human voice.”

I keep nodding, more polite than knowing. I raised Pierce on jazz. Coltrane. Miles. Bix. And he dotes on baroque. What's a mother to do? He smiles at my ignorance.

“The movie. At the Tivoli. With Gerard Depardieu.”

“Okay, gotcha.” Like most people, we recall movies, not books. We read images of light on walls and screens like Egyptians did their word language.

There is a harpsichordist. A viola da gamba player. A bass. The first two pluck and tune their instruments. Humidity is murder on early music. My head cranes about for Doc. He warned me he'd be late. Look around and what do you see? Crescent shaped pews that wrap around the stage, the sanctuary late Victorian, a series of arches. Vaults and gateways. Uncompleted circles. The stage is a semi circle. The musicians thrust out to the audience. The wood smells of varnish and dignity. You want to shake its hand.

Pierce continued. “In the movie, Sainte Columbe's wife died, but when he played the 'gamba in his hut, she came back to life.”

“'Gamba?”

He smiled. “I'm trying to sound like an early music groupie.”

“So this piece is about an operation?”

“Yes, Mom. An operation for gallstones. Doc'll like it. Marais was obsessed, because he had to play like Sainte Colombe.” Pierce shook his head at me.

“Doc,” I smiled. “You know, he claims the Beatles were inspired by South Africa.”

Pierce cocked an eyebrow. “That's from out of left field. How?”

The old song. ‘Marching to Pretoria'. You remember?”

Pierce sang very softly. “‘We are marching to Pretoria …' Sang that at camp.”

“And I sang it in high school. On the risers, spring concert. So, Doc says when the Beatles did
Magical Mystery Tour
, and the Walrus song … Well, Doc claims they lifted it from the opening from ‘Marching To Pretoria'.”

Pierce gave a cunning smile. “Okay. It's possible. I guess the song was sung in Liverpool.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Doc's really trying to show he's with it.”

Pierce was pleasantly doubtful. “The Beatles are kind of establishment.” He shrugged. “But did you know that in their song ‘I Am the Walrus'—”

I was quick. “The walrus is a death symbol? Among the Eskimos. Sort of helped to fuel the Paul McCartney is dead. Doc said in Capetown, he knew chaps who went starkers over it.”

“Interesting.” Pierce smiled. “You want me to help clue him in? On Heavy Metal?”

All of this chatter, such trivia, the talk before the concert. But it's so happy. All the anticipation. Pierce. Doc. A summer's evening. Two people I love.

Pierce looks over the program. “So, Mom?”

“Yes?”

“‘I Am the Walrus.' The chorus. What does Doc say
Goo-goo-ga-jube
means? What's the hidden symbolism of that?”

“He hasn't the slightest idea.” We laugh, a lighthearted, not-a-care-in-the-world laugh.

The instruments have been tuned. That beauty of silence, of anticipation before the music begins. Outside, the sun a dying gold. A robin chirps. I think of Pierce's ceaseless erudition. What woman is going to listen to this? He gets his pillow talk from
The New Yorker
. And Susan Sontag is taken.

The light is strange. The stained glass glows. All colors shine as the sun rallies before it sinks. Scenes of Jesus and the children, of John the Baptist, disciples, the woman of Samaria. The intensity of color astounds me. They've come to life. Why not? Osiris, the sun, died only to rise again in the East. Jesus really just an adaptation of Egyptian thought by world-weary Greeks who hung out with Jews. Fitting he should brighten and glow in stained glass serenity.

The music creeps and tingles. The bass doesn't sing, but narrates as the viola da gamba mutters and groans the operation: “The description of the surgeon's instruments.” Slow notes of trembling contemplation.

The glass bleeds into the music. Deep green. Royal blue water. Brilliant russet garments. Leaves almost wave. The maroon robe of Jesus has folds and shades with a depth so full you could smooth it down. Happy browns, as if the earth was chocolate, ready to be eaten. The glow is like the Vitrolite
at the King Tut play of so long ago … years? Ages, it seems. The scenes of Jesus aren't holy, but like a small town memory, Happy, but there's a kind of darkness around its edges. Like in the
Twilight Zone
episode ‘Willoughby'.

The instruments mutter. The bass gets dramatic. “Serious reflections.” We look at each other and grin.

“Clamping the arms and legs.” Quick tempo. Efficient, by-the-book nurses. “The incision is made.” The gamba wails.

Pierce bends to me. “Marais. He's doing Vincent Price.” Blood flows. Notes trickle. A long sigh of chords.
Ned angli
… Was it a Bishop? Speaking about angels? He smiles and whispers, eyes on the performance. “Don't worry, Mom. I'll get you through it.”

The sun glows in a final rally and the light fingers out. When Pierce's blonde hair glows like an aura from the stained glass, when for a moment he becomes one with the color, I remember.
Ned angli sed angeli.
It was what Doc explained to me last month in one of our outdoor conversations, when we had good food, wine, a bounteous sunset, and he got a twitch of the erudite. He told me it was what a bishop said of angles captured in battle, impressed with their fair complexion. Not angles, but angels.

Now you know. Pierce, you are the angel. You the one who will guide me through death. I've waited for you. There you are. Like through a microscope. I see your face. Through a key hole, door hole. You're small. I feel your hand. You speak, I see your lips move, but hear nothing. Your words are snowballs exploding as they hit a tree. How I watched you make snowballs and throw them when you were five and I wondered what the hell I'd do with my life; then I became a nurse.

“Here the clamps are removed.” Deep, slow tempo. The nurses are gentle.

“Here you are taken to bed.” Viola da gamba and harpsichord knit; kind hands moving the patient to bed. One-two … lift.

Your words form, but I hear nothing. I'm underwater, Pierce. I'm in the glass box. I think, I talk, but can't hear. The body is no longer mine. I'm being spiritually evicted.

“Recovery.” A merry gigue trills.

The deep strings make it a current, the bowels of the Mississippi gushing south, to the sea. The tinkling harpsichord the surface water, sparkling with diamonds of light when it joins the gulf. But now you don't need the last
movement. You need his hand holding yours. Looking up, you see his face now beginning to line with fatherhood. Lips still a dumb show, the eyes moist. There's Jama. Her eyes glow. She touches. Strokes. Together, my angels lead me, see me off at the gate, the dock, the levee.

I can only speak a few words, words that must be shoved out.
I … want … to … live.

Back at the concert comes a patter of applause. Pierce and I look up as Doc scoops in, sleeves rolled up.

“Hullo,” he nods.

“Did you hear it?”

“Yes. Stood in the back so as not to interrupt.”

“Well?”

Doc smiled at Pierce. Two violinists join the performers, as does a flautist. “No anesthetics. Marais caught that bit. Beautiful piece. Macabre and factual, hmm?”

I enjoy Doc's cologne, his open necked shirt. How Pierce will dine with us, then leave so we can enjoy a long, breathless night. “Did you notice the stained glass?”

Doc nodded.

I turned, but the sun had drowned in the West. Now the brilliant scenes were dark squares of brown I'd seen downtown, when Saul and I spoke. Brown squares dark as the river.

I am no longer flesh and bone. I am paper and ink, as if that's all I ever was.

When earth has had enough of me.

Good night, Sara, good night.

The pulse drops from burps on the screen to a single note. A current. Summer. Angel. Music. Float. Light. Space. Time.

Now and forever.