In the maddest grief there was not this kind of vitality. It was more akin to joy, dance, the sheer penetrating and hypnotic power of music.
And there he stood, looking lost, and suddenly looking at me as if he would ask something, and then looking away, his dark brows knitted.
"Tell me what you want," I said. "You said you wanted to drive me mad? Why? For what reason?"
"Well, you see," he said quickly in response, though his words were slow, "I'm at a loss." He spoke frankly with raised eyebrows and a cool poised manner. "I don't know myself what it is I want now! Driving you mad." He shrugged. "Now that I know what you are, or how strong you are, I don't know what words to put it in. There's perhaps something better here than merely driving you out of your mind, assuming of course that I could have done it, and I see you feel superior in this regard, having held so many deathbed hands and watched your lost young husband, Lev, dance on drugs with his friends while you merely sipped your wine, afraid to take the drugs, afraid of visions! Visions like me! You amaze me."
"Vision?" I whispered.
I wrapped my left hand around the bedpost. My body was shaking. My heart did pound. All these symptoms of fear reminded me that there was indeed something here to fear, but then again, what in God's name could be worse than so much that had happened? Fear the supernatural? Fear the flicker of candles and the smiles of saints? No, I think not.
Death is plenty to fear. Ghosts, what are ghosts?
"How did you cheat death?" I said.
"You flippant, cruel woman," he whispered. He spoke in a rush. "You look angelic. You, with your veil of dark hair, and your sweet face and huge eyes," he whispered. He was sincere. He was stung, and his head bent to the side. "I didn't cheat anything or anyone." He looked desperately to me. "You wanted me to come, you wanted--"
"You thought so? When you caught me thinking about the dead? Is that what you thought? And you came to what? Console? Deepen my pain? What happened?"
He shook his head, and took several steps backwards. He looked out the back window, and in so doing, let the light unveil the side of his face. He seemed tender.
He turned on me in an angry flash.
"So very pretty still," he said, "and at your age, and plump, even so. Your sisters hate you for your pretty face, you know it, don't you? Katrinka, the beautiful one with the shapely body and smart husband, and before him the string of lovers she cannot count. She thinks you have a prettiness that she can never earn or produce or paint or claim. And Faye, Faye loved you, yes, as Faye loved all, but Faye couldn't forgive you your prettiness either."
"What do you know of Faye?" I asked before I could stop myself. "Is my sister Faye still alive?" I tried to stop myself, but I couldn't. "Where is Faye! And how can you speak for Katrinka, what do you know about Katrinka or any of my family?"
"I speak what you know," he said. "I see the dark passages of your mind, I know the cellars where you yourself have not been. I see there in those shadows that your father loved you too much because you resembled your mother. Same brown hair, brown eyes. And that your sister Katrinka cheerfully bedded your young husband, Lev, one night."
"Stop this! What? Have you come here to be my personal Devil? Do I rate such a thing? I? And you tell me in the same breath that I'm not half so responsible as I seem to think for all those deaths. How are you going to drive me mad, I'd like to know? How? You're not sure of yourself at all. Look at you. You quake and you're the ghost. What were you when you were alive? A young man? Maybe even kind by nature, and now all twisted out of--"
"Stop," he pleaded. "Your point is clear."
"Which is what?"
"That you see me clearly, as I see you," he answered coldly. "That memory and fear aren't going to make you waver. I was so very wrong about you. You seemed a child, an eternal orphan, you seemed so ..."
"Say it. I seemed so weak?" I asked.
"You're bitter."
"Perhaps," I said. "It's not a word I favor. Why do you want me to feel either pain or fear? For what? Why! What did the dream mean? Where was that sea?"
His face was blank with shock. He raised his eyebrows, and then again tried to speak but changed his mind, or couldn't find the words for it.
"You could be beautiful," he said softly. "You almost were. Is that why you fed on trash and beer and let your God-given shape go to waste? You were thin when you were a child, thin like Katrinka and Faye, thin by nature. But you covered yourself with a concealing bulk, didn't you? To hide from whom? Your own husband, Lev, as you handed him over to younger and more beguiling women? You pushed him into bed with Katrinka."
I didn't respond.
I felt an ever-increasing strength inside me. Even as I shuddered, I felt this strength, this grand excitement. It had been so long since any emotion such as this had visited me, and now I felt it, looking at him in his bewilderment.
"You are perhaps even a little beautiful," he whispered, smiling as if he meant quite deliberately to torment me. "But will you grow as large and shapeless as your sister Rosalind?"
"If you know Rosalind and can't see her beauty, you're not worth my time," I said. "And Faye walks in beauty that is beyond your comprehension."
He gasped. He sneered. He looked stubbornly at me.
"You can't recognize the power of one as pure as Faye in my memory. But she's there. As for Katrinka, I have sympathy. Faye was young enough to dance and dance, no matter how deep the dark. Katrinka knew things. Rosalind I love with all my heart. What of it?"
He looked at me as though seeking to read my deepest thoughts, and said nothing.
"Where does this lead?" I asked.
"Little girl at heart," he said. "And wicked and cruel as little girls can be. Only bitter now, and needing of me, and yet denying it. You drove your sister Faye away, you know."
"Stop it."
"You ... when you married Karl, you made her leave. It wasn't the painful pages in your Father's diaries that she read after his death. You brought a new lord into the house that you and she had shared--"
"Stop it."
"Why?"
"But what's all this to you, and why do we talk of it now? You're dripping from the rain. But you're not cold. You aren't warm either, are you? You look like a teenage rock tramp, the kind that follows famous bands around with a guitar in his hand, begging for quarters at the doorways of concert halls. Where did you get the music, the incredible, heartbreaking music--?"
He was furious.
"Spiteful tongue," he whispered. "I'm older than you can dream. I'm older in my pain than you. I'm finer. I learnt to play this instrument to perfection before I died. I learnt it and possessed a talent for it in my living body such as you never will even understand with all your recordings and your dreams and fantasies. You were asleep when your little daughter Lily died, you do remember that, don't you? In the hospital in Palo Alto, you actually went to sleep and--"
I put my hands up to my ears! The smell, the light, the entire hospital room of twenty years ago surrounded me. I said No!
"You revel in these accusations!" I said. My heart beat too hard, but my voice was under my command. "Why? What am I to you and you to me?"
"Ah, but I thought you did."
"What? Explain?"
"I thought you reveled in these accusations. I thought you so accused yourself, you so gloried in it, mixing it up with fear and cringing and chills and sloth--that you were never lonely, ever, but always holding hands with some dead loved one and singing your poems of contrition in your head, keeping them around, feeding their remembrance so as not to know the truth: the music you love, you'll never make. The feeling it wrings from your soul will never find fulfillment."
I couldn't answer.
He went on, emboldened.
"You so sated yourself on accusations, to use your own word, you so fed on guilt that I thought it would be nothing to drive you out of your mind, to make it so that you ..." He stopped. He did more than stop. He checked himself, and stiffened.
"I'm going now," he said. "But I'll come when I please, you can be sure of it."
"You have no right. Whoever sent you must take you back." I made the Sign of the Cross.
He smiled. "Did that little prayer do you any good? Do you remember the miserable California funeral Mass of your daughter, how stiff and out of place everything was--all those clever intellectual West Coast friends forced to attend something as patently stupid as a real funeral in a real church--do you remember? And the bored, toss-it-off priest who knew you never went to his church before she died. So now you make the Sign of the Cross. Why don't I play a hymn for you? The violin can play plainsong. It's not common, but I can find the Veni Creator in your mind and play it, and we can pray together."
"So it hasn't done you any good," I said, "praying to God." I tried to make my voice strong but soft, and to mean what I said: "Nobody sent you. You wander."
He was nonplussed.
"Get the hell out of here!"
"But you don't mean it," he said with a shrug, "and don't tell me your pulse isn't ticking like an overwound clock. You're in tireless ecstasy to have me! Karl, Lev--your Father. You've met a man in me such as you've never seen, and I'm not even a man."
"You're cocky, rude and filthy," I said. "And you are not a man. You are a ghost, and the ghost of someone young and morally uncouth and ugly!"
This hurt him. His face showed a cut much deeper than vanity.
"Yes," he said, struggling for self-possession, "and you love me, for the music, and in spite of it."
"That may be true," I said coldly, nodding. "But I also think very highly of myself. As you said, you miscalculated. I was a wife twice, a mother once, an orphan perhaps. But weak, no, and bitter? Never. I lack the sense that bitterness requires ..."
"Which is what?"
"One of entitlement, that things ought to have been better. It is life, that's all, and you feed on me because I'm alive. But I'm not so worm-eaten with guilt that you can come in here and push me out of my wits. No, not by any means. I don't think you fully understand guilt."
"No?" He was genuine.
"The raging terror," I said, "The 'mea culpa, mea culpa' is only the first stage. Then something harder comes, something that can live with mistakes and limitations. Regret's nothing, absolutely nothing ..."
Now I was the one who let the words trail off because my most recent memories came back to sadden me, of seeing my mother walk away on that last day, Oh, Mother, let me take you in my arms. The graveyard on the day of her burial. St. Joseph's Cemetery, all those small graves, graves of the poor Irish and the poor Germans, and the flowers heaped there, and I looked at the sky and thought it will never, never change; this agony will never go away; there will never be any light in this world again.
I shook it off. I looked up at him!
He was studying me, and he seemed himself almost in pain. It excited me.
I went back to the point, seeking deeply for it, pushing everything else aside but what I had to realize and convey.
"I think I understand this now," I said. A spectacular relief soothed me. A feeling of love. "And you don't, that's the pity. You don't."
I let my guard down utterly. I thought only of what I was trying to fathom here and not of pleasing or displeasing. I wanted only to be close to him in this. And this he would want to know; he might, he surely would understand, if only he would admit it.
"Please do illuminate me," he said mockingly.
A terrible pain swept over me; it was too vast and total to be piercing. It took hold of me. I looked up imploringly at him, and I parted my lips, about to speak, about to confide, about to try to discover out loud with him what it was, this pain, this sense of responsibility, this realization that one has indeed caused unnecessary pain and destruction in this world and one cannot undo it, no, it will never be undone, and these moments are forever lost, unrecorded, only remembered in ever more distorted and hurtful fashion, yet there is something so much finer, something so much more significant, something both overwhelming and intricate that we both knew, he and I--
He vanished.
He did most obviously and completely vanish, and he did it with a smile, leaving me with my outstretched emotions. He did it cunningly to let me stand alone with that moment of pain and worse, alone with the awful appalling need to share it!
I gave a moment to the shadows. The soft sway of the trees outside. The occasional rain.
He was gone.
"I know your game," I said softly. "I know it."
I went to the bed, reached under the pillow and picked up my Rosary. It was a crystal Rosary with a sterling silver cross. It was in the bed because Karl's mother had always slept in the bed when she came, and my beloved godmother, Aunt Bridget, always slept in it, after the marriage with Karl, when she came, or the Rosary was actually in the bed because it was mine and I had absently put it there. Mine. From First Communion.
I looked down at it. After my mother's death Rosalind and I had had a terrible quarrel.
It was over our Mother's Rosary, and we had literally torn apart the links and the fake pearls--it was a cheap thing but I had made it for Mother and I claimed it, I, the one who made it, and then after we tore it apart, when Rosalind came after me, I had slammed the door so hard against her face that her glasses had cut deep into her forehead. All that rage. Blood on the floor again.
Blood again, as if Mother had been living still, drunk, falling off the bed, striking her forehead as she had twice on the gas heater, bleeding, bleeding. Blood on the floor. Oh, Rosalind, my mourning, raging sister Rosalind! The broken Rosary on the floor.
I looked at this Rosary now. I did the childlike unquestioning thing that came to my mind. I kissed the crucifix, the tiny detailed body of the anguished Christ, and shoved the Rosary back under the pillow.
I was fiercely alert. I was like prepared for battle. It was like an early drunk in the first year, when the beer went divinely to my head and I ran down the street with arms outstretched, singing.
The pores of my skin tingled and the door opened with no effort whatsoever.
The finery of the alcove and the dining room looked brand new. Do things sparkle for those on the verge of battle?
Althea and Lacomb stood far across the length of the dining room, hovering in the pantry door, waiting on me. Althea looked plain afraid and Lacomb both cynical and curious as always.
"Like if you was to scream one time in there!" said Lacomb.
"I didn't need any help. But I knew you were here."
I glanced back at the wet stains on the bed, at the water on the floor. It wasn't enough to bother them with it, I thought.
"Maybe I'll walk in the rain," I said. "I haven't walked in the rain for years and years."
Lacomb came forward. "You talking about outside now tonight in this rain?"
"You don't have to come," I said. "Where's my raincoat? Althea, is it cold outside?"
I went off walking up St. Charles Avenue.
The rain was only light now and pretty to look at. I hadn't done this in years, walk my Avenue, just walk, as we had so often as children or teenagers, headed for the K&B drugstore to buy an ice cream cone. Just an excuse to walk past beautiful houses with cut-glass doors, to talk together as we walked.
I walked and walked, uptown, past houses I knew and weedy barren lots where great houses had once stood. This street, they ever tried to kill, either through progress or neglect, and how perilously poised it always seemed--between both--as though one more murder, one more gunshot, one more burning house would set its course without compromise.
Burning house. I shuddered. Burning house. When I'd been five a house had burned. It was an old Victorian, dark, rising like a nightmare on the corner of St. Charles and Philip, and I remember that I'd been carried in my Father's arms "to see the fire," and I had become hysterical looking at the flames. I saw above the crowds and the fire engines a flame so big that it seemed it could take the night.
I shook it off, that fear.
Vague memory of people bathing my head, trying to quiet me. Rosalind thought it a wonderfully exciting thing. I thought it a revelation of such magnitude that even to learn of mortality itself was no worse.
A pleasant sensation crept over me. That old horrific fear--this house will burn too--had gone with my young years, like many another such fear. Take the big lumbering black roaches that used to race across these sidewalks: I used to step back in terror. Now that fear too was almost gone, and so were they, in this age of plastic sacks and icebox-cold mansions.
It caught me suddenly what he had said--about my young husband, Lev, and even younger sister, Katrinka, that he, my husband whom I loved, and she, my sister whom I loved, had been in the same bed, but I'd always blamed myself for it. Hippie marijuana and cheap wine, too much sophisticated talk. My fault, my fault. I was a cowardly faithful wife, deeply in love. Katrinka was the daring one.
What had he said, my ghost? Mea culpa. Or had I said it?
Lev loved me. I loved him still. But then I had felt so ugly and inadequate, and she, Katrinka, was so fresh, and the times were rampant with Indian music and liberation.
Good God, was this creature real? This man I'd just spoken with, this violinist whom other people saw? He was nowhere around now.
Across the Avenue from me as I walked, the big hired car crept along, keeping pace, and I could see Lacomb muttering as he leant out the rear window to spit his cigarette smoke into the breeze.
I wondered what this new driver, Oscar, thought. I wondered if Lacomb would want to drive the car. Lacomb doesn't do what Lacomb doesn't like.
It made me laugh, the two of them, my guards, in the big crawling black Wolfstan car, but it also gave me license to walk as far as I wanted.
Nice to be rich, I thought with a smile. Karl, Karl.
I felt as if I were reaching for the only thing that could save me from falling, and then I stopped, "absenting myself from this dreary felicity a while" to think of Karl and only Karl, so lately shoved into a furnace.
"You know it's not at all definite that I will even become symptomatic." Karl's voice, so protecting. "When they notified me regarding the transfusion, well, that was already four years, and now another two--"
Oh, yes, and with my loving care you will live forever and ever! I'd write the music for it if I were Handel or Mozart or anyone who could write music ... or play.