Louis felt great admiration for him . . . and love?
Yes, his heart confirmed. And love.
*
When Ellie came down that night in her pajamas to be kissed, she asked Louis if Mrs. Crandall would go to heaven. She almost whispered the question to Louis, as if she understood it would be better if they were not overheard. Rachel was in the kitchen making a chicken pie, which she intended to take over to Jud the next day.
Across the street, all the lights were on in the Crandall house. Cars were parked in Jud's driveway and up and down the shoulder of the highway on that side for a hundred feet in either direction. The official viewing hours would be tomorrow, at the mortuary, but tonight people had come to comfort Jud as well as they could, and to help him remember, and to celebrate Norma's passing--what Jud had referred to once that afternoon as "the foregoing." Between that house and this, a frigid February wind blew. The road was patched with black ice. The coldest part of the Maine winter was now upon them.
"Well, I don't really know, honey," Louis said, taking Ellie on his lap. On the TV, a running gunfight was in progress. A man spun and dropped, unremarked upon by either of them. Louis was aware--uncomfortably so--that Ellie probably knew a hell of a lot more about Ronald McDonald and Spiderman and the Burger King than she did about Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul. She was the daughter of a woman who was a nonpracticing Jew and a man who was a lapsed Methodist, and he supposed her ideas about the whole spiritus mundi were of the vaguest sort--not myths, not dreams, but dreams of dreams. It's late for that, he thought randomly. She's only five, but it's late for that. Jesus, it gets late so fast.
But Ellie was looking at him, and he ought to say something.
"People believe all sorts of things about what happens to us when we die," he said. "Some people think we go to heaven or hell. Some people believe we're born again as little children--"
"Sure, carnation. Like what happened to Audrey Rose in that movie on TV."
"You never saw that!" Rachel, he thought, would have her own cerebral accident if she thought Ellie had seen Audrey Rose.
"Marie told me at school," Ellie said. Marie was Ellie's self-proclaimed best friend, a malnourished, dirty little girl who always looked as if she might be on the edge of impetigo, or ringworm, or perhaps even scurvy. Both Louis and Rachel encouraged the friendship as well as they could, but Rachel had once confessed to Louis that after Marie left, she always felt an urge to check Ellie's head for nits and headlice. Louis had laughed and nodded.
"Marie's mommy lets her watch all the shows." There was an implied criticism in this that Louis chose to ignore.
"Well, it's reincarnation, but I guess you've got the idea. The Catholics believe in heaven and hell, but they also believe there's a place called limbo and one called purgatory. And the Hindus and Buddhists believe in Nirvana--"
There was a shadow on the dining room wall. Rachel. Listening.
Louis went on more slowly.
"There are probably lots more too. But what it comes down to, Ellie, is this: no one knows. People say they know, but when they say that, what they mean is that they believe because of faith. Do you know what faith is?"
"Well . . ."
"Here we are, sitting in my chair," Louis said. "Do you think my chair will still be here tomorrow?"
"Yeah, sure."
"Then you have faith it will be here. As it so happens, I do, too. Faith is believing a thing will be, or is. Get it?"
"Yes," Ellie nodded positively.
"But we don't know it'll be here. After all, some crazed chair burglar might break in and take it, right?"
Ellie giggled. Louis smiled.
"We just have faith that won't happen. Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don't believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we know is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don't. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of. If we don't, it's just blotto. The end."
"Like going to sleep?"
He considered this and then said, "More like having ether, I think."
"Which do you have faith in, Daddy?"
The shadow on the wall moved and came to rest again.
For most of his adult life--since college days, he supposed--he had believed that death was the end. He had been present at many deathbeds and had never felt a soul bullet past him on its way to . . . wherever; hadn't this very thought occurred to him upon the death of Victor Pascow? He had agreed with his Psychology I teacher that the life-after-death experiences reported in scholarly journals and then vulgarized in the popular press probably indicate a last-ditch mental stand against the onrush of death--the endlessly inventive human mind, staving off insanity to the very end by constructing a hallucination of immortality. He had likewise agreed with an acquaintance in the dorm who had said, during an all-night bull session during Louis's sophomore year at Chicago, that the Bible was suspiciously full of miracles which had ceased almost completely during the age of rationality ("totally ceased," he had said at first but had been forced backward at least one step by others who claimed with some authority that there were still plenty of weird things going on, little pockets of perplexity in a world that had become by and large a clean, well-lighted place--there was, for instance, the Shroud of Turin, which had survived every effort to debunk it). "So Christ brought Lazarus back from the dead," this acquaintance--who had gone on to become a highly thought-of o.b. man in Dearborn, Michigan--had said. "That's fine with me. If I have to swallow it, I will. I mean, I had to buy the concept that the fetus of one twin can sometimes swallow the fetus of the other in utero, like some kind of unborn cannibal, and then show up with teeth in his testes or in his lungs twenty or thirty years later to prove that he did it, and I suppose if I can buy that I can buy anything. But I wanna see the death certificate--you dig what I'm saying? I'm not questioning that he came out of the tomb. But I wanna see the original death certificate. I'm like Thomas saying he'd only believe Jesus had risen when he could look through the nail holes and stick his hands in the guy's side. As far as I'm concerned, he was the real physician of the bunch, not Luke."
No, he had never really believed in survival. At least, not until Church.
"I believe that we go on," he told his daughter slowly. "But as to what it's like, I have no opinion. It may be that it's different for different people. It may be that you get what you believed all your life. But I believe we go on, and I believe that Mrs. Crandall is probably someplace where she can be happy."
"You have faith in that," Ellie said. It was not a question. She sounded awed.
Louis smiled, a little pleased and a little embarrassed. "I suppose so. And I have faith that it's time for you to go to bed. Like ten minutes ago."
He kissed her twice, once on the lips and once on the nose.
"Do you think animals go on?"
"Yes," he said, without thinking, and for a moment he almost added, Especially cats. The words had actually trembled on his lips for a moment, and his skin felt gray and cold.
"Okay," she said and slid down. "Gotta go kiss Mommy."
"Right on."
He watched her go. At the dining room doorway, she turned back and said, "I was really silly about Church that day, wasn't I? Crying like that."
"No, hon," he said. "I don't think you were silly."
"If he died now, I could take it," she said and then seemed to consider the thought she had just spoken aloud, as if mildly startled. Then she said, as if agreeing with herself: "Sure I could." And went to find Rachel.
*
Later in bed, Rachel said, "I heard what you were talking about with her."
"And you don't approve?" Louis asked. He had decided that maybe it would be best to have this out, if that was what Rachel wanted.
"No," Rachel said, with a hesitance t
hat was not much like her. "No, Louis, it's not like that. I just get . . . scared. And you know me. When I get scared, I get defensive."
Louis could not remember ever hearing Rachel speak with such effort, and suddenly he felt more cautious than he had with Ellie earlier. He felt that he was in a mine field.
"Scared of what? Dying?"
"Not myself," she said. "I hardly even think of that . . . anymore. But when I was a kid, I thought of it a lot. Lost a lot of sleep. Dreamed of monsters coming to eat me up in my bed, and all of the monsters looked like my sister Zelda."
Yes, Louis thought, Here it is; at last, after all the time we've been married, here it is.
"You don't talk about her much," he said.
Rachel smiled and touched his face. "You're sweet, Louis. I never talk about her. I try never to think about her."
"I always assumed you had your reasons."
"I did. I do."
She paused, thinking.
"I know she died . . . spinal meningitis . . ."
"Spinal meningitis," she repeated. "There are no pictures of her in the house anymore."
"There's a picture of a young girl in your father's--"
"In his study. Yes, I forgot that one. And my mother carries one in her wallet still, I think. She was two years older than I was. She caught it . . . and she was in the back bedroom . . . she was in the back bedroom like a dirty secret. Louis, she was dying in there, my sister died in the back bedroom and that's what she was, a dirty secret--she was always a dirty secret!"
Rachel suddenly broke down completely, and in the loud, rising quality of her sobs, Louis sensed the onset of hysteria and became alarmed. He reached for her and caught a shoulder, which was pulled away from him as soon as he touched it. He could feel the whisper of her nightdress under his fingertips.
"Rachel--babe--don't--"
"Don't tell me don't," she said. "Don't stop me, Louis. I've only got the strength to tell this once, and then I don't want to ever talk about it again. I probably won't sleep tonight as it is."
"Was it that horrible?" he asked, knowing the answer already. It explained so much, and even things he had never connected before or only suspected vaguely suddenly came together in his mind. She had never attended a funeral with him, he realized--not even that of Al Locke, a fellow med student who had been killed when his motorcycle had collided with a city bus. Al had been a regular visitor at their apartment, and Rachel had always liked him. Yet she had not gone to his funeral.
She was sick that day, Louis remembered suddenly. Got the flu or something. Looked serious. But the next day she was okay again.
After the funeral she was all right again, he corrected himself. He remembered thinking even then that her sickness might just be psychosomatic.
"It was horrible, all right. Worse than you can ever imagine. Louis, we watched her degenerate day by day, and there was nothing anyone could do. She was in constant pain. Her body seemed to shrivel . . . pull in on itself . . . her shoulders hunched up and her face pulled down until it was like a mask. Her hands were like birds' feet. I had to feed her sometimes. I hated it, but I did it and never said boo about it. When the pain got bad enough, they started giving her drugs--mild ones at first and then ones that would have left her a junkie if she had lived. But of course everyone knew she wasn't going to live. I guess that's why she's such a . . . secret to all of us. Because we wanted her to die, Louis, we wished for her to die, and it wasn't just so she wouldn't feel any more pain, it was so we wouldn't feel any more pain, it was because she was starting to look like a monster, and she was starting to be a monster . . . oh Christ I know how awful that must sound . . ."
She put her face in her hands.
Louis touched her gently, "Rachel, it doesn't sound awful at all."
"It does!" she cried. "It does!"
"It just sounds true," he said. "Victims of long illnesses often become demanding, unpleasant monsters. The idea of the saint-like, long-suffering patient is a big romantic fiction. By the time the first set of sores crops up on a bed-bound patient's butt, he--or she--has started to snipe and cut and spread the misery. They can't help it, but that doesn't help the people in the situation."
She looked at him, amazed . . . almost hopeful. Then distrust stole back into her face. "You're making that up."
He smiled grimly. "Want me to show you the textbooks? How about the suicide statistics? Want to see those? In families where a terminal patient has been nursed at home, the suicide statistics spike right up into the stratosphere in the six months following the patient's death."
"Suicide!"
"They swallow pills, or sniff a pipe, or blow their brains out. Their hate . . . their weariness . . . their disgust . . . their sorrow . . ." He shrugged and brought his closed fists gently together. "The survivors start feeling as if they'd committed murder. So they step out."
A crazy, wounded kind of relief had crept into Rachel's puffy face. "She was demanding . . . hateful. Sometimes she'd piss in her bed deliberately. My mother would ask her if she wanted help getting to the bathroom . . . and later, when she couldn't get up anymore, if she wanted the bedpan . . . and Zelda would say no . . . and then she'd piss the bed so my mother or my mother and I would have to change the sheets . . . and she'd say it was an accident, but you could see the smile in her eyes, Louis. You could see it. The room always smelled of piss and her drugs . . . she had bottles of some dope that smelled like Smith Brothers' Wild Cherry cough drops and that smell was always there . . . some nights I wake up . . . even now I wake up and I think I can smell Wild Cherry cough drops . . . and I think . . . if I'm not really awake . . . I think 'Is Zelda dead yet? Is she?' . . . I think . . ."
Rachel caught her breath. Louis took her hand and she squeezed his fingers with savage, brilliant tightness.
"When we changed her you could see the way her back was twisting and knotting. Near the end, Louis, near the end it seemed like her . . . like her ass had somehow gotten all the way up to the middle of her back."
Now Rachel's eyes had taken on the glassy, horrified look of a child remembering a recurrent nightmare of terrible power.
"And sometimes she'd touch me with her . . . her hands . . . her birdy hands . . . and sometimes I'd almost scream and ask her not to, and once I spilled some of her soup on my arm when she touched my face and I burned myself and that time I did scream . . . and I cried and I could see the smile in her eyes then, too.
"Near the end the drugs stopped working. She was the one who would scream then, and none of us could remember the way she was before, not even my mother. She was just this foul, hateful, screaming thing in the back bedroom . . . our dirty secret."
Rachel swallowed. Her throat clicked.
"My parents were gone when she finally . . . when she . . . you know, when she . . ."
With terrible, wrenching effort, Rachel brought it out.
"When she died, my parents were gone. They were gone but I was with her. It was Passover season, and they went out for a while to see some friends. Just for a few minutes. I was reading a magazine in the kitchen. Well, I was looking at it, anyway. I was waiting for it to be time to give her some more medicine because she was screaming. She'd been screaming ever since my folks left, almost. I couldn't read with her screaming that way. And then . . . see, what happened was . . . well . . . Zelda stopped screaming. Louis, I was eight . . . bad dreams every night . . . I had started to think she hated me because my back was straight, because I didn't have the constant pain, because I could walk, because I was going to live . . . I started to imagine she wanted to kill me. Only, even now tonight, Louis, I don't really think it was all my imagination. I do think she hated me. I don't really think she would have killed me, but if she could have taken over my body some way . . . turned me out of it like in a fairy story . . . I think she would have done that. But when she stopped screaming, I went in to see if everything was all right . . . to see if she had fallen over on her side or slipped off her pillows. I got in
and I looked at her and I thought she must have swallowed her own tongue and she was choking to death. Louis"--Rachel's voice rose again, teary and frighteningly childish, as if she were regressing, reliving the experience-- "Louis, I didn't know what to do! I was eight!"
"No, of course you didn't," Louis said. He turned to her and hugged her, and Rachel gripped him with the panicky strength of a poor swimmer whose boat has suddenly overturned in the middle of a large lake. "Did someone actually give you a hard time about it, babe?"
"No," she said, "no one blamed me. But nobody could make it better either. No one could change it. No one could make it an unhappening, Louis. She hadn't swallowed her tongue. She started making a sound, a kind of, I don't know--gaaaaaa--like that--"
In her distressed, total recall of that day she did a more than creditable imitation of the way her sister Zelda must have sounded, and Louis's mind flashed to Victor Pascow. His grip on his wife tightened.
"--and there was spit, spit coming down her chin--"
"Rachel, that's enough," he said, not quite steadily. "I am aware of the symptoms."
"I'm explaining," she said stubbornly. "I'm explaining why I can't go to poor Norma's funeral, for one thing, and why we had that stupid fight that day--"
"Shh--that's forgotten."
"Not by me, it isn't," she said. "I remember it well, Louis. I remember it as well as I remember my sister Zelda choking to death in her bed on April 14, 1965."
For a long moment there was silence in the room.
"I turned her over on her belly and thumped her back," Rachel went on at last. "It's all I knew to do. Her feet were beating up and down . . . and her twisted legs . . . and I remember there was a sound like farting . . . I thought she was farting or I was, but it wasn't farts, it was the seams under both arms of my blouse ripping out when I turned her over. She started to . . . to convulse . . . and I saw that her face was turned sideways, turned into the pillows, and I thought, oh, she's choking, Zelda's choking, and they'll come home and say I murdered her by choking, they'll say you hated her, Rachel, and that was true, and they'll say you wanted her to be dead, and that was true too. Because Louis, see, the first thought that went through my mind when she started to go up and down in the bed like that, I remember it, my first thought was Oh good, finally, Zelda's choking and this is going to be over. So I turned her over again and her face had gone black, Louis, and her eyes were bulging and her neck was swelled up. Then she died. I backed across the room. I guess I wanted to back out the door, but I hit the wall and a picture fell down--it was a picture from one of the Oz books that Zelda liked before she got sick with the meningitis, when she was well, it was a picture of Oz the Great and Terrible, only Zelda always called him Oz the Gweat and Tewwible because she couldn't make that sound, and so she sounded like Elmer Fudd. My mother got that picture framed because . . . because Zelda liked it most of all . . . Oz the Gweat and Tewwible . . . and it fell down and hit the floor and the glass in the frame shattered and I started to scream because I knew she was dead and I thought . . . I guess I thought it was her ghost, coming back to get me, and I knew that her ghost would hate me like she did, but her ghost wouldn't be stuck in bed, so I screamed . . . I screamed and I ran out of he house screaming 'Zelda's dead! Zelda's dead! Zelda's dead!' And the neighbors . . . they came and they looked . . . they saw me running down the street with my blouse all ripped out under the arms . . . I was yelling 'Zelda's dead!' Louis, and I guess maybe they thought I was crying but I think . . . I think maybe I was laughing, Louis. I think maybe that's what I was doing."