The Truth About Death (30 page)

The resolution: Did you resolve the complication? What did you decide to do? If you didn’t resolve the complication, how did you handle your feelings? How did you change to deal with the new status quo? How did other people change?

No. We didn’t resolve the complication. What did we decide to do? Nothing. We just finished the bottle of wine that was on the table, and I gave them an edited version of my adventure, and we talked about the things we were going to do in September when Severino came to Carthage with the retooling crew. But to tell you the truth, I wasn’t interested.

Actually, we did do one thing. Before he left Severino got out a copy of
TuttoCittà
, which was in a drawer with the Florence phone book.
TuttoCittà
contains detailed maps of every part of the city, and it also has a map that shows all the bus routes. Severino opened it up on the desk and traced the route of the number twenty-three bus all the way from the
stop by the post office to the station, on out past the wholesale produce market into
zone industriali
, and then right off the edge of the map.

“You went out into the unknown,” Severino said, putting
TuttoCittà
back in the drawer. “Beyond the boundaries of the known world. And you made it back safe and sound.”

Concluding with a point: In your conclusion you should describe what you have learned and what your reader should have learned from your experience. Not the “moral” of the story, like the morals in Aesop’s fables, but something that brings closure, some insight or understanding that goes beyond the obvious.

I don’t know about closure or going beyond the obvious, and I’m not sure what I learned, but this is what happened. Severino never answered my letter, but he wrote to my aunt. He would not be coming with the Italian crew in September to install the new machinery and do the retooling. He was needed at the plant in Sesto Fiorentino. He asked my aunt to pass his greetings on to me.

My aunt showed me the letter. We were sitting on the large deck at the back of her second-story apartment downtown. It was August, and I was leaving for Ann Arbor at the end of the month. The deck was full of flowers—window boxes with trailing geraniums, large Italian pots with verbena and petunias; a tomato plant in one of the Italian pots was covered with yellow blossoms and tiny red grape tomatoes. We were drinking a glass of white wine, which I was not allowed to do at home, and I was glad, at that moment, that I’d held my tongue back at Hotel Mona Lisa, glad that I hadn’t
lashed out at my aunt. I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her how much I appreciated all the things she’d done for me over the years. I wanted to tell her what a good aunt she was.

It was six o’clock when I finished my glass of wine, which was warm by now. “I’ve got to go home,” I said.

“Thanks for coming,” she said.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” I said. “Maybe we could bike out to the forest preserve.”

“I’d like that,” she said.

And that’s how it ended.

We’d both gone off the map, and I wasn’t sure either one of us would ever make it all the way back.

THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHTS

Julian Dijksterhuis stood by a half-opened door in the vaulted corridor, his shoulder blades pressing against the clean white wall like the runners of a sled. He wasn’t in anyone’s way, but he didn’t belong there, and the nurses kept suggesting that he would be more comfortable in the waiting room, or sitting with his wife.

“Thanks,” he said, flicking ashes off a cigarette, exhaling smoke through his nostrils, “but I think I’ll wait here.”

His wife, Hannah, was talking rapidly in a low voice in the room behind him. The sudden death of their six-year-old daughter, Dinah, had toppled her over the edge of sanity, and Julian hadn’t been there to catch her. Perhaps he’d even given her a little push, though God knows he hadn’t meant to. But she wouldn’t stop talking.

Her chatter had filled their three-bedroom apartment on Chestnut Street, spilled out into the hallway, down the stairwells and elevator shafts. “Keep an eye on her,” old Dr. Janacek had said, who lived just below them on the thirty-second floor. And she hadn’t slept. If he’d get her to bed by midnight,
she’d be up again at twelve fifteen with a steaming cup of coffee, a cigarette smoking in the ashtray on the old rolltop desk in their bedroom, where she turned pages, made notes on index cards, and dozed a little from time to time.

Julian would pretend to sleep, until he couldn’t stand it any longer: “You’ve got to get some
sleep
. You’ve
got
to get some sleep.”

“I can’t sleep when you’re nagging at me all the time.”

“Lie down in bed, for Christ’s sake. And don’t drink so much coffee. How the hell could
any
one sleep after twenty cups of coffee?”

“I need it.”

“You need rest—can’t you see that?”

“Just leave me alone. I don’t see how in the hell
you
can sleep so soundly.”

“Lay off, will you?”

That’s the way it had been between them for the last three weeks, and now he was waiting for the doctor to bring the forms that he would have to fill out before she could be admitted, involuntarily, to one of the psychiatric wards.

“An acute psychotic break,” the doctor had said on the phone, and Julian wondered how he had missed it, hadn’t read, so to speak, the large block capitals on the wall:
ACUTE
PSYCHOTIC
BREAK
. But over the years he had not only become accustomed to her unorthodox ways. He even took a kind of pride in them, as the English pride themselves on tolerating mild eccentricities.
Has it ever occurred to you, Dijksterhuis, that your wife isn’t like other people?
Yes, it had occurred to him. Regularly, in fact. It occurred to him when he climbed into bed with her at night, and when he climbed back out again in the morning. She was terrific in the sack,
Aphrodite herself, fair ankled, soft armed, sweetly smiling, sweet smelling, quick glancing, laughter loving. Didn’t restrain herself there, or anywhere else, for that matter. That was the trouble. Lack of restraint—shapeless enthusiasms thrusting upward like the columns of books on the bedroom floor—pop psychology, holistic health, the Catholic Pentecostal movement, all interspersed with her classics: Teubners, Budés, red-and-green Loebs,
OCT
s. A temple under construction. Or perhaps in ruins.

Julian wrote out checks to Blackwell’s and Heffers and Kroch’s, and to the Cudahy Library at Loyola University, where she had matriculated in classics. Her fines were astronomical.

“Finish the degree, for Christ’s sake,” he advised her, “and why fart around with Plato and Augustine when you could be reading Homer or Ovid and Catullus?”

But she was a seeker; she sought to understand. “I want Truth, not Entertainment,” she said. “If I wanted Entertainment I’d lie in bed all day and fiddle with myself. That’s what you do with your detective stories.”

And she had a large heart. She brought home the lost souls who, drawn by invisible threads, sat next to her on the Howard Street L or the Michigan Avenue bus. Julian would feed them an omelet or a sandwich—and sometimes he gave them money—before sending them off into the night.

“Why do you pick up these creeps?”

“They’re human beings, Julie. They need help, just like you and me.”

She was specially fond of priests. Julian didn’t take much notice at first, not till the appearance of Father Axelrod, the Hyde Park opera buff, who wanted Julian to accompany him while he sang arias from Verdi and Paisiello. “This is a
magnificent piano,” he liked to say, seating himself at the old Blüthner grand (with its eighty-five keys) that had once belonged to Julian’s Aunt Hattie, “a splendid instrument.”

There was an Episcopalian too who couldn’t sing a note. Frog-toned Father Jack from St. Chrysostom’s on Dearborn. “Smilin’ Jack,” as Julian called him, was a disciple of Wilhelm Reich, and for a time Hannah embraced a number of bizarre Reichian doctrines. Julian didn’t have the patience to listen to her explanations—Christ as genital man, putting it to Mary Magdalene, and so on. She embraced Father Jack as well, in an orgone energy accumulator, a coffinlike contraption made of alternating layers of steel wool and rock or glass-wool encased in panels of Celotex soft board. The metal sides of the accumulator were designed to reflect and concentrate the orgone energy radiated by its occupant, causing it to repenetrate the body through the pores and through respiration.

“Cancer, head colds, psychoses—it cures everything,” Father Jack claimed, “maybe even death, eventually.”

Hannah got a big kick out of it.

“Why do you listen to this stuff?” Julian asked her. “Do you think I want to hear this crap? I ought to go to the bishop; I could have that frog-voiced shyster defrocked, that croaking bastard.”

But the bishop had already received complaints from other sources. Father Jack decamped to Toledo, Ohio; Hannah began taking instruction from a Jesuit, Father Frank Neumiller, whom she met in the library at Loyola.

“She’s absolutely safe with me,” the old priest told Julian. “You can put your mind at ease.”

The police had picked her up in Old Town and taken her to the Passavant Pavilion of Northwestern Memorial Hospital,
between Huron and Superior, half a mile south of the Dijksterhuis apartment. “They had to put her in restraints,” the doctor told him on the phone. “We can’t do a thing until you get down here.”

“In restraints?”

“A straitjacket.”

A clutch of horror at Julian’s chest.

She’d been talking gibberish on the phone when he woke up in the morning, speaking in tongues to Father Neumiller. He had gone into the bathroom and closed the door so he wouldn’t have to listen to her while he shaved.

“Take it easy,” he said later, lifting the filmy skirt of her silk breakfast dress and stroking her panties before he left for the Solomon Pharmacy to pick up a Sunday
Times
. “Calm down. Don’t get yourself all worked up. Try to get some rest. We’ve got to hold ourselves together.”

“ ‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,’ ” she said, “ ‘and His will is our peace.’ ”

E la sua voluntade è nostra pace
. She wanted it on Dinah’s tombstone, and after a prolonged argument, he had given in.

“It’s Italian,” he explained to Mr. Stoneking at the monument company, turning over samples of different colored marble.
RICHLY REWARDING
—a plaque on the Formica counter—
IS THE SPIRITUAL HARVEST OF A LIFE WELL LIVED. A MONUMENT SHOULD REVERENTLY AND BEAUTIFULLY EXPRESS THIS TRUTH.

“Don’t worry for a thing, Mister, I got two Eye-talians working for me in the shop right now. Master craftsmen. They’ll get it right if anybody can.”

“I want the accent right. Look—there’s one over the second
e
but not over the first.”

“I understand, Mister. That’s why we got these forms for
you to print on, just the way you want it. In this business it don’t pay to make mistakes.”

Hannah had been raised a Free Methodist; her father, the minister of a hyperactive congregation in St. Joe, Michigan, whipped her for square dancing with her classmates in the fifth grade. And she never quite got over it. Julian taught her to drink and smoke and swear, and he dressed her in European lingerie, which they ordered from special catalogs—a merry widow, silk stockings, lacy tap pants, and wispy bikinis in raspberry, blush, chocolate. Her brother, a motorcycle evangelist, wouldn’t set his righteous foot in the Dijksterhuis apartment. But in spite of everything she remained, in Father Neumiller’s words, a
deeply religious person
. “Her faith will sustain her,” the priest said to Julian, “but what about
you
?”

But her faith hadn’t sustained her, and now she was in trouble, and Julian was in trouble too. He didn’t want her committed, locked up in the loony bin like his Aunt Hattie. Twenty-five years in a nuthouse on the outskirts of Kalamazoo, eating like a horse. Hannah was a good eater too, but she stayed slim on plain lettuce and broiled calves’ liver that Julian bought for her at a Greek meat market on Jackson and Halsted. Twenty-five years in a nuthouse with no exercise, and she’d be as big as Aunt Hat, whose upper arms hung down over her elbows, and he’d be sixty. Too late. He had to do something now, tonight, had to explain Dinah’s death to her in a language she could understand. But how could he explain it to himself? He couldn’t do it in English. Greek or Latin either.

In the small waiting room at the end of the corridor he could see Father Neumiller trying to interest Sara, Dinah’s older sister, in a magazine. He was turning pages, pointing
with his square index finger. But Sara was boy-crazy, interested in one thing only. She spent her allowance on teen magazines and record albums that made Julian’s head reel. She chewed gum to mask the odor of tobacco and powdered the hickeys on her neck. Backseat work. The son of her ninth-grade science teacher. “A Boys Town dropout,” Julian said to Hannah.

He spoke to the boy’s father at a school open house. “Not to worry, Mr. Dijksterhuis. They’re a couple of good kids. It’s the chemistry of adolescence.”

But Julian worried. She had become silent and unresponsive when he read to her at night or tried to tell her a story. He was piqued. He fancied himself a regular Demodocus, a teller of tales, an old-style raconteur. “Once upon a time,” his stories began, “there were two little girls named Seremonda and Duva, who lived in a village halfway between the east and the west.” And what adventures they had, traveling south to the Mediterranean—Olympus, Ilium, Ithaka, Phaeacia, Uruk, Rome—and north to the halls of Hrothgar, to Heorot, to Camelot and Asgard. Thus did he keep his children from their play and his wife from her own quest for Truth, which she sought to exantlate from the deepest wells. But now there was only Sara, and Julian wished that
she
had died instead of Dinah. This thought was like a tumor pressing against the back of his brain, distorting his vision.