‘What lies, Mrs Tomolillo?’ I ask then, in a clear, loud voice, for Mrs Tomolillo is notably hard of hearing, although she refuses to learn to operate an aid. ‘I’m sure Doctor Chrisman …’
‘Lies, lies he’s written in that book. I am a good woman, my husband dead. You let me just get my hands on that man, I’ll teach him lies….’
I glance quickly out into the hall. Mrs Tomolillo is Hexing her strong fingers in an alarming fashion. A man on crutches, one pants leg empty and folded up in a neat tuck at the hip, is swinging along past the door. After him comes an aide from Amputee Clinic, lugging a pink, artificial leg and half an artificial torso. Mrs Tomolillo quiets at the sight of the little procession. Her hands fall to her sides, losing themselves in the folds of her voluminous black skirt.
‘I’ll tell Doctor Chrisman, Mrs Tomolillo. I’m sure there’s been some mistake, don’t you get upset.’ Behind my back, the window rattles in its frame as if some great draughty giant out there is trying to shoulder into the light. The rain is striking the pane now with the force of pistol cracks.
‘Lies …’ Mrs Tomolillo hisses, but more placidly rather like a kettle just coming off the boil. ‘You tell him.’
‘I’ll tell him. Oh, Mrs Tomolillo …’
‘Yes?’ She pauses in the doorway, black and portentous as one of the Fates, caught in a squall of her own making.
‘Where shall I tell Doctor Chrisman the record book came from?’
‘Down there in that room,’ she says simply. ‘That room where all the books are. I ask for it, they give it to me.’
‘I see.’ The number on Mrs Tomolillo’s record, printed in indelible ink, reads Nine-three-six-two-five. ‘I see, I see. Thank you, Mrs Tomolillo.’
The Clinics’ Building, big as it is, founded solid on concrete and built of brick and stone, seems shaken to its roots as Dotty and I cross through the first floor halls and down the passageway to the cafeteria in the main Hospital for a hot supper. We can hear the sirens, loud and faint, in and around the city—fire engines, ambulances, police wagons. The Emergency Ward parking lot is jammed with ambulances and private cars pouring in from the outlying towns—people with heart attacks, people with collapsed lungs, people with galloping hysteria. And to top it off, there is a power failure, so we have to feel our way along the walls in the semi-dark. Everywhere doctors and interns are snapping out orders, nurses gliding by white as ghosts in their uniforms, and stretchers with people bundled on them—groaning, or crying, or still—being rolled this way and that. In the middle of it all, a familiar shape darts past us and down a flight of unlit stone steps leading to the First and Second Basements.
‘Isn’t that him?’
‘Him who?’ Dotty wants to know. ‘I can’t see a thing in this pitch, I should get glasses.’
‘Billy. From the Record Room.’
‘They must be having him whip up records on the double for the Emergency cases,’ Dotty says. ‘They need all the extra hands they can get when things are thick as this.’
*
For some reason I can’t bring myself to tell Dotty about Mrs Tomolillo. ‘He’s not such a bad kid,’ I find myself saying, in spite of what I know about Mrs Tomolillo, and Emily Russo, and Ida Kline and the elephant woman.
‘Not bad,’ Dotty says, ironically. ‘If you happen to like vampires.’
Mary Ellen and Dotty are sitting crosslegged on one of the cots in the third floor annex, trying to play social solitaire by the light of a purse flashlight somebody has dug up, when Cora comes flying down the hall toward the row of us propped in the cots.
Dotty lays a red nine on a black ten. ‘You get hold of your mother? The roof still on at your place?’
In the pale, luminous circle cast by the flashlight, Cora’s eyes are wide, wet around the edges.
‘Say,’ Mary Ellen leans toward her, ‘you haven’t heard anything bad? You’re as white as a sheet, Cora.’
‘It’s hot … it’s not my mother,’ Cora brings out. ‘The lines are down, I couldn’t even get through. It’s that boy, that Billy …’
Everybody is very quiet all of a sudden.
‘He was running up and down these stairs,’ Cora says, her voice so teary you’d think she was talking about her kid brother or something ‘Up and down, up and down with these records, and no lights, and he’s in such a hurry he’s skipping two, three steps. And he fell. He fell a whole flight….’
‘Where is he?’ Dotty asks, slowly putting down her hand of cards. ‘Where is he now?’
‘Where is he?’ Cora’s voice rises an octave. ‘Where is he, he’s dead.’
It’s a funny thing. The minute those words are out of Cora’s mouth, everybody forgets how little Billy was, and how really ridiculous looking, with that stammer and that awful complexion. With all this worry about the hurricane, and nobody able to get through to their folks, memory throws a kind of halo around him. You’d think he’d laid down and died for the whole bunch of us sitting there on those cots.
‘He wouldn’t of died,’ Mary Ellen observes, ‘if he hadn’t been helping out other folks.’
‘Seeing how things are,’ Ida Kline puts in, ‘I’d like to take back what I said about him the other day, about him and that woman with the elephant sickness. He didn’t know what a bad stomach I’ve got or anything.’
Only Dotty is silent.
Mary Ellen turns out the flashlight then, and everybody takes off their dresses in the dark and lies down. Dotty climbs into the cot at the far end of the row, next to mine. All along the corridor you can hear the rain, quieted now, drumming steadily against the panes. After a while the sound of regular breathing is rising from most of the cots.
‘Dotty,’ I whisper. ‘Dotty, you awake?’
‘Sure,’ Dotty whispers back. ‘I’ve got asomnia like nobody’s business.’
‘So Dotty, what do you think?’
‘You want to know what I think?’ Dotty’s voice seems wafted to my ears from a small, invisible point in a great darkness. ‘I think that boy’s a lucky boy. For once in his life he’s got sense. For once in his life, I think that boy’s going to be a hero.’
And what with the newspaper stories, and the church ceremonies, and the Posthumous Gold Medal awarded by the Hospital Director to Billy’s parents after the storm is blown over, I have to give Dotty credit. She’s right. She’s absolutely right.
‘Context’
The issues of our time which preoccupy me at the moment are the incalculable genetic effects of fallout and a documentary article on the terrifying, mad, omnipotent marriage of big business and the military in America—‘Juggernaut, The Warfare State’, by Fred J. Cook in a recent Nation. Does this influence the kind of poetry I write? Yes, but in a sidelong fashion. I am not gifted with the tongue of Jeremiah, though I may be sleepless enough before my vision of the apocalypse. My poems do not turn out to be about Hiroshima, but about a child forming itself finger by finger in the dark. They are not about the terrors of mass extinction, but about the bleakness of the moon over a yew tree in a neighboring graveyard. Not about the testaments of tortured Algerians, but about the night thoughts of a tired surgeon.
In a sense, these poems are deflections. I do not think they are an escape. For me, the real issues of our time are the issues of every time—the hurt and wonder of loving; making in all its forms—children, loaves of bread, paintings, buildings; and the conservation of life of all people in all places, the jeopardizing of which no abstract doubletalk of ‘peace’ or ‘implacable foes’ can excuse.
I do not think a ‘headline poetry’ would interest more people any more profoundly than the headlines. And unless the up-to-the-minute poem grows out of something closer to the bone than a general, shifting philanthropy and is, indeed, that unicorn-thing—a real poem, it is in danger of being screwed up as rapidly as the news sheet itself.
The poets I delight in are possessed by their poems as by the rhythms of their own breathing. Their finest poems seem born all
-of-a-piece, not put together by hand; certain poems in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, for instance; Theodore Roethke’s greenhouse poems; some of Elizabeth Bishop and a very great deal of Stevie Smith (‘Art is wild as a cat and quite separate from civilization’).
Surely the great use of poetry is its pleasure—not its influence as religious or political propaganda. Certain poems and lines of poetry seem as solid and miraculous to me as church altars or the coronation of queens must seem to people who revere quite different images. I am not worried that poems reach relatively few people. As it is, they go suprisingly far—among strangers, around the world, even. Farther than the words of a classroom teacher or the prescriptions of a doctor; if they are very lucky, farther than a lifetime.
The Fifty-Ninth Bear
By the time they arrived, following the map of the Grand Loop in the brochure, a dense mist shrouded the rainbow pools; the parking lot and the boardwalks were empty. Except for the sun, already low above the violet hills, and the sun’s image, red as a dwarf tomato lodged in the one small space of water visible, there was nothing to see. Still, enacting as they were a ritual of penance and forgiveness, they crossed the bridge over the scalding river. On either side, ahead and behind, columns of steam mushroomed above the surface of the pools. Veil after veil of whiteness raveled across the boardwalk, erasing at random patches of the sky and the far hills. They moved slowly, enclosed by a medium at once intimate and insufferable, the sulphurous air warm and humid on their faces, on their hands and bare arms.
Norton dallied then, letting his wife drift on ahead. Her slender, vulnerable shape softened, wavered, as the mists thickened between them. She withdrew into a blizzard, into a fall of white water; she was nowhere. What hadn’t they seen? The children squatting at the rim of the paintpots, boiling their breakfast eggs in rusty strainers; copper pennies winking up from cornucopias of sapphire water; the thunderous gushers pluming, now here, now there, across a barren ochre-and-oyster-colored moonscape. She had insisted, not without her native delicacy, on the immense, mustard-yellow canyon where, halfway down to the river, hawks and the shadows of hawks looped and hung like black beads of fine wire. She had insisted on the Dragon’s Mouth, that hoarse, booming spate of mud-clogged water; and the Devil’s Cauldron. He had waited for her habitual squeamishness to turn her away from the black, porridgy mass that popped and seethed a few yards from under her nose, but she bent over the pit, devout as a priestess in the midst of those vile exhalations. And it was Norton, after all, bare-headed in the full noon sun, squinting against the salt-white glare and breathing in the fumes of rotten eggs, who defaulted, overcome by headache. He felt the ground frail as a bird’s skull under his feet, a mere shell of sanity and decorum between him and the dark entrails of the earth where the sluggish muds and scalding waters had their source.
To top it off, someone had stolen their desert water bag, simply pinched it from the front fender of the car while they were being elbowed along by the midday crowds on the boardwalk. Anybody might have done it: that man with a camera, that child, that Negress in the pink sprigged dress. Guilt diffused through the crowd like a drop of vermilion dye in a tumbler of clear water, staining them all. They were all thieves; their faces were blank, brutish or sly. Disgust curdled in Norton’s throat. Once in the car, he slumped down, closed his eyes, and let Sadie drive. A cooler air fanned his temples. His hands and feet seemed to be lifting, elongating, pale and puffed with a dreamy yeast. Like a vast, luminous starfish he drifted, awash with sleep, his consciousness fisted somewhere there, dark and secret as a nut.
‘Fifty-six,’ Sadie said.
Norton opened his eyes; they stung and watered as though someone had scoured them with sand while he drowsed. It was a fine bear, black-furred and compact, purposefully skirting the edge of the forest. To left and right, the tall, mottled boles of pines speared skyward, spreading out, far overhead, their dark thatch of needles. Although the sun stood high, only a few splinters of light pierced the cool, blue-black mass of the trees. The bear-counting started as a game on their first day in the park, and continued still, five days later, long after they stopped listing license plates from different states and noticing when the mileage showed four, or five, or six identical figures in a row. Perhaps it was the bet that kept it going.
Sadie bet ten dollars on seeing fifty-nine bears by the end of their stay. Norton had set his figure carelessly at seventy-one. In secret, he hoped Sadie would win. She took games seriously, like a child. Losing wounded her, she was so trusting; and above all, she trusted her luck. Fifty-nine was Sadie’s symbol of plenitude. For Sadie there were never ‘hundreds of mosquitoes’, or ‘millions’, or even ‘a great many’, but always fifty-nine. Fifty-nine bears, she predicted breezily, without a second thought. Now that they were so close to that total—having numbered grandfather bears, mother bears and cubs, honey-coloured bears and black bears, brown bears and cinnamon bears, bears up to their middles in trash cans, bears begging at the roadside, bears swimming the river, bears nosing around the tents and trailers at suppertime—they might well stick at fifty-nine bears. They were leaving the park the next day.
Away from the boardwalks, the spiels of rangers, the popular marvels, Norton revived a little. His headache, withdrawn to the far edge of awareness, circled and stalled there like a thwarted bird. As a boy, Norton had developed, quite by himself, a method of intense prayer—not to any image of God, but to what he liked to think of as the genius of a place, the fostering spirit of an ash grove, or a shore line. What he prayed for was, in one guise or another, a private miracle: he contrived to be favored, by the sight of a doe, say, or the find of a lump of water-polished quartz. Whether his will merely coincided with circumstance, or really did force tribute, he could not be sure. Either way, he had a certain power. Now, lulled by the putter of the car, and feigning sleep, Norton began to will toward him all the animals of the forest—the fog-colored, delicately striated antelope, the lumbering, tousled buffalo, the red foxes, the bears. In his mind’s eye he saw them pause, startled, as by some alien presence, in their deep thickets and noonday retreats. He saw them, one by one, turn and converge toward the center where he sat, fiercely, indefatigably willing the movement of each hoof and paw.
‘Elk!’ Sadie exclaimed, like a voice out of the depths of his head. The car swerved to a halt at the side of the road. Norton came to with a start. Other cars were pulling up beside them and behind them. Timorous as Sadie was, she had no fear of animals. She had a way with them. Norton had come upon her once, feeding a wild stag blueberries out of her hand, a stag whose hooves could, in one blow, have dashed her to the ground. The danger simply never occurred to her.
Now she hurried after the men in shirt sleeves, the women in cotton print dresses, the children of all ages, who were crowding to the verge of the road as to the scene of an astounding accident. The shoulder dropped steeply to a clearing in a thick growth of pines. Everybody carried a camera. Twirling dials, waving light meters, calling to relatives and friends above for fresh rolls of film, they plunged over the slope in a wave, slipping, lapsing, half-falling, in an avalanche of rust-colored pine needles and loose turf. Great-eyed, kingly under the burden of their spreading, dark-scalloped antlers, the elk knelt in the damp green bottom of the little valley. As the people came charging and crying toward them, they rose with a slow, sleepy amazement and moved off, unhurried and detached, into the pathless wood beyond the clearing. Norton stood on the top of the slope with a quiet, insular dignity. He ignored the people about him, disgruntled now, and barging about noisily in the underbrush. In his mind he was forming an apology to the elk. He had meant well.
‘I didn’t even have time for a shot,’ Sadie was saying at his elbow. ‘It was pitch-dark down there anyway, I guess.’ Her fingers closed on the bare flesh of his upper arm, soft-tipped as limpets. ‘Let’s go see that pool. The one that comes to a boil every fifteen minutes.’
‘You go,’ Norton said. ‘I have a headache, a touch o
f sunstroke, I think. I’ll sit and wait for you in the car.’
Sadie did not answer, but she ground the car into gear with an unmistakable wantonness, and Norton knew he had disappointed her.
A short while later, with a sense of approaching storm, Norton watched Sadie stalk away from the car in the peaked straw hat with the red ribbon bow under the chin, her underlip set, pink and glistening, in a grieved pout. Then she passed, with the line of other tourists, over the glaring white horizon.
Often, in daydreams, Norton saw himself in the role of a widower: a hollow-cheeked, Hamletesque figure in somber suits, given to standing, abstracted, ravaged by casual winds, on lonely promontories and at the rail of ships, Sadie’s slender, elegant white body embalmed, in a kind of bas relief, on the central tablet of his mind. It never occurred to Norton that his wife might outlive him. Her sensuousness, her simple pagan enthusiasms, her inability to argue in terms of anything but her immediate emotions—this was too flimsy, too gossamery a stuff to survive out from under the wings of his guardianship.
As he had guessed, Sadie’s jaunt on her own was anything but satisfactory. The pool boiled up, right enough, a perfectly lovely shade of blue, but a freakish shift in wind flung the hot steam in her face and nearly scalded her to death. And somebody, some boy or group of boys, had spoken to her on the boardwalk and spoiled the whole thing. A woman could never be alone in peace; a solitary woman was a walking invitation to all sorts of impudence.
All this, Norton knew, was a bid for his company. But since the incident of the water bag, a revulsion for the crowds of tourists had been simmering at the base of his skull. When he thought of going out into the mobs again, his fingers twitched. He saw himself, from a great distance, from Olympus, pushing a child into a steaming pool, punching a fat man in the belly. His headache stabbed back out of the blue like a vulture’s beak.