“If she’s still moved by the music, she’s not dying.”
“Don’t get your hopes up, Greg. She’s not eating, she’s not speaking, she’s barely breathing,” Judy replied.
“She’s being difficult. You’ll see, she’ll be better tomorrow,” he said, clinging to the memory of a youthful mother.
But one early morning they called him from the hospital, and as dawn broke he was standing with his sister beside a bed containing the thistledown body of an ageless woman. His mother was nearly eighty, but she had bid farewell to life long before, abandoning herself to a benign madness that helped her circumvent the pain of existence without in any way affecting her good manners or delicate spirit. As she grew more infirm, Nora Reeves had regressed to another time and space, until even forgetfulness was forgotten. At the end, she thought she was a princess of the Urals, roaming the alabaster rooms of an enchanted palace and singing arias. For a long time she had recognized no one but Judy, who, incidentally, she confused with her own mother and spoke to in Russian. She returned to an imaginary youth where there were no obligations and no suffering, only the tranquil diversions of music and books. She read for the pleasure of reconfirming the infinite variation of twenty-six printed signs, but she could not remember the subject or form of what she read; she leafed through a classic novel or an instruction manual for electrical appliances with equal interest. Over the years she had shrunk to the size of a transparent doll, but with the miraculous cosmetics of her fantasy, or perhaps simply with the innocence of dying, she recovered the freshness lost in so many years of living and in death was just as Gregory remembered her looking when he was a boy, as she pointed out constellations in the night sky. Nothing, not weeks of fever and lost appetite, not the hair hacked off by her grandson’s scissors and never regrown, could destroy the illusion of beauty. Her soul departed with characteristic gentleness and shyness, as she was holding her daughter’s hand. She was buried without fuss or tears on a rainy day. Judy packed what little remained of her presence in a case: two worn dresses, a tin box holding the few documents that proved her passage through this world, two paintings by Charles Reeves, and her pearl necklace, yellowed with wear. Gregory took only a pair of photographs.
That night, after he bathed David and battled to get him to bed, Gregory fed the pets, threw the dirty clothes in the washing machine, picked up the scattered toys and tossed them into a closet, carried the garbage to the garage, cleaned the kitchen, reshelved the books his son had used to build a fort, and finally was alone in his bedroom with a briefcase stuffed with documents he must study for the next day. He put a Mahler symphony on the record player, poured himself a glass of white wine, and sat on the bed, the only piece of furniture in the room. It was already midnight, and he needed at least an hour or two to untangle the case at hand, but he could not summon the strength to begin. He gulped down the wine in two swallows, poured another, and then another, until he finished the bottle. He started the water for his bath, took off his clothes, and examined himself in the mirror: bull neck, broad shoulders, firm legs. Being so accustomed to having his body respond like a well-tuned engine, he could not imagine illness. The only times in his life he had been sick in bed were when he ruptured the veins in his leg and when he was hospitalized in Hawaii, but those episodes were nearly forgotten. He stubbornly ignored warning alarm bells: allergies, headaches, fatigue, and insomnia. He ran his hands through his hair and was saddened that not only was it turning white; it was falling out. He remembered King Benedict, who painted his skull with shoe black to disguise the baldness he found so disturbing; after all, he still thought of himself as a boy. Reeves observed his reflection, searching for traces of his mother, and saw them in his long fingers and narrow feet; everything else was the solid legacy of his father. Margaret took after her grandmother: the kitten face with high cheekbones, angelic eyes, gentle movements. What would become of her? The last time he had seen her, she was in jail. From the street to jail, from jail to the street, from one senseless act to another: that had been her life since she first ran away from home. She was still young, but she had traveled through all the circles of hell and had the terrifying look of a cobra poised to strike. He tried to imagine, against all evidence, that beneath the shell of her vices there were still traces of purity. If Nora Reeves had been transfigured in death, Margaret might be saved from depravity and by a miracle be reborn from her ashes. His mother had vegetated for several decades, untouched by the world’s travails, and, he was sure, would turn to mist inside her coffin, spared the working of diligent worms. His daughter might be saved in the same way; perhaps the long calvary that had led her so far down the road of degradation had not yet destroyed her essential beauty, and all that was needed was one of Olga’s prodigious purges and a good scrub with soap and brush and she would be clean, without stain—no needle marks, scratches, bruises, or sores, her skin newly luminous, her teeth gleaming, her hair shining, and her heart forever washed clean of sin.
He felt a little dizzy, and his vision was blurred. He climbed into the tub and sank into the comfort of the hot water, trying to clear his mind and relax limbs cramped with tension, but the day’s events rushed to the fore: the formalities at the hospital, the brief religious service, the lonely funeral in which the only touch of color flared from the huge arrangements of red carnations he had bought to silence his conscience for so many years of neglect. He remembered the rain, Judy’s obdurate and tearless silence, and his own discomfort, as if death were some kind of indiscretion, Nora Reeves’s one offense against the norms of courtesy and good manners. All through the drive to the cemetery he had kept thinking of the work piled up in the office, how he must settle King Benedict’s case or take it to trial, with the risk of losing everything; he had pursued every clue, however insignificant, like a bloodhound, but he had nothing concrete to cling to. He felt a special affection for this client; Benedict reminded him of a well-behaved boy in the anachronistic skin of a man over fifty, but he particularly admired Bel Benedict, a remarkable woman who deserved to be freed from the yoke of poverty. For her sake, he must anticipate the maneuvers of the other lawyers and beat them at their own game; the first lesson he had learned from the old man of the orchids was that it is not the person in the right who wins but the one who puts up the best fight. He hated himself for thinking of business before his mother’s corpse had grown cold. He remembered Nora Reeves in her last years, a woman reduced to the level of a helpless child, one more added to Judy’s tribe of eight, cared for with the same brusque and impatient solicitude. At least his sister had been there with his mother, while he kept finding excuses not to go near her, as his contribution paying the bills when necessary and making a brief visit a couple of times a year. He was heartsick that his mother had not recognized him, that her mind did not register the existence of a son named Gregory; he had felt he was being punished by his mother’s senility, as if her forgetfulness were but another way to erase him from her heart. He had always suspected she did not love him and that her attempt to rid herself of him by placing him in the orphanage and with the farmers was motivated by indifference, not poverty. The water was too hot; his skin was burning and his head was throbbing. Maybe another drink would not be a bad idea, and he stepped from the tub, wrapped a towel around his waist, and went to the kitchen to get a new bottle—on the way, turning off the heat because he was suffocating. He looked into David’s room and found him fast asleep in the opening to his Indian tepee. Gregory poured another glass of white wine and went back to his bedroom; the record had finished playing, and he could hear silence, a rare luxury since he’d lived with his son. His mother returned, a dogged memory; she was whispering to him, trying to tell him something, and he realized he did not know her, she was a stranger. He had adored her when he was young, but they had grown apart, and sometimes he thought he hated her, especially in those difficult years when she sat in her wicker chair, resigned to poverty and helplessness, while he scrounged a living in the streets
. He looked at the old photographs, yellowed scraps from another’s past that was, in a way, also his, and tried to fit together the puzzle of the gentle and obedient old woman. He could not visualize her as old but saw her as a young woman in her dress with the lace collar and her hair pulled back in a bun, standing on the outskirts of a dusty town, and he also saw himself, a thin child with precise features, blue eyes, and large mouth; behind him two men were grappling with a small black girl. He screamed, and the men laughed at him, but the girl freed herself from their terrible embrace and came to stand beside Nora Reeves, who handed her a pamphlet detailing The Infinite Plan. Then he saw his mother walking with long strides along a lonely road; she was leading, and he was trying to catch up, but the faster he ran, the wider the distance between them became, and the figure he was pursuing grew smaller and more indistinct against the horizon. The asphalt was soft and burning hot and stuck to his feet; he would never have the strength to overcome his fatigue, he could not go a step farther, he fell, he crawled, the heat was so stifling he couldn’t breathe. He felt an overwhelming compassion for that boy, for himself. Mother. . . . He called her first with his thoughts and then with a wrenching cry, and the vague images grew clearer, the hazy lines became strong brush strokes, and Nora Reeves appeared before him, real and present, and held out her hands to him, smiling. He tried to stand and put his arms around her, as he had always longed to, but could not move and sat repeating, Mama, Mama, as the room filled with blazing light and other presences materialized in the room: Cyrus, Juan José Morales holding the hand of Thui Nguyen, the boy from Kansas who had died in his arms, accompanied by other pallid soldiers, Martínez, with no trace of his former insolence but still wearing his pachuco garb, and many more, silently filling the room. Gregory Reeves was bathed in Nora’s smile, the smile he so desperately needed as a boy and had vainly sought as a man. Time stood still, and he sat motionless in the tranquil silence, as one by one the long line of the dead disappeared. The last to go was his mother, who floated backward and faded into the wall, leaving him the certainty of an affection she had always felt but had been unable to express in life.
When he was again alone, something burst in his heart, a terrible pain deep in his chest, spreading into waves through the rest of his body, scalding, slicing, separating flesh from bone; he lost any ability to hold himself together; he was not himself but that unbearable suffering, that tortured jellyfish spreading across the room, seeping into every corner, one single open wound. He tried to get up from the bed but could not move his arms; he collapsed to his knees, unable to breathe, impaled on the lance thrust through his rib cage. For several minutes he lay panting on the floor, gasping for air, with a loud drumming in his temples. One lucid part of his brain registered what had happened and knew that he must get help or die on the spot, but he could not reach the telephone or cry out; he curled up like a fetus, trembling, trying to remember everything he knew about heart attacks. He wondered how long it would take to die, and for an instant was terrified by the idea but then imagined the peace of not existing, of not having to roll in the dust, battling shadows, of not dragging down a road behind that woman disappearing into the distance, and as he had in his youth when he hid with his dog in the foxes’ den, he yielded to the temptation to let go and die. Slowly, the pain passed through him, taking with it part of his incomparable fatigue. He had the impression that he had lived this moment before. He could breathe again and felt his chest to see if something was still beating inside—no, his heart had not burst. He broke into tears, weeping as he had not wept since the war, a visceral wail that came from the most remote past, perhaps before his birth, a spring fed by tears repressed in later years, a rushing torrent. He wept for neglect in his childhood, for battles and defeats he had vainly hoped to transform into victories, for unpaid debts and the betrayals of a lifetime, for the loss of his mother and his tardy recognition of her affection. He saw Margaret falling down a cliff and tried to hold her, but she slipped from his grasp. He murmured David’s name—David, so vulnerable, so hurt—asking himself why his children were singled out for the stigma of woe, why life was so difficult for them both, whether he had transmitted a curse in his genes, whether they were paying for his sins. He wept for the sum of his errors and for the perfect love he dreamed of but believed impossible to find, for his father, dead for so many centuries, and for his sister, Judy, trapped in her terrible memories, for Olga, fraudulently inventing the future with her marked cards, and for his clients, not the good-for-nothings and crooks, but the victims like King Benedict and his many unfortunate brethren, the blacks, Latins, and illegal immigrants, poor, deprived, and humble, who came to seek help in the Court of Miracles his office had become, and the tears still poured, now for memories of the war, his brothers in body bags, Juan José Morales, the twelve-year-old girl sold to soldiers, the hundred dead on the mountain. And when he realized that in fact he was crying for himself, he opened his eyes and at last faced the beast, looked at its face and thus learned that the animal always crouching behind him, that breath he had felt on the back of his neck his whole life, was the tenacious fear of being alone that had afflicted him since as a trembling boy he had hidden in the shed. Anguish wrapped him in its fatidic embrace, crept into his mouth, his ears, his eyes, his pores, filling his body as he lay murmuring, I want to live, I want to live. . . .
At that moment his trance was shattered by a persistent ringing. It took an eternity to recognize the sound, to realize where he was and see himself on the floor, naked, wet with urine, vomit, and tears, drunk and terrified. The telephone was ringing like an urgent summons from another dimension, and finally he was able to drag himself to it and pick up the receiver.
“Greg? This is Tamar. You didn’t call me today . . . it’s Monday.”
“Come, Carmen, please come,” he stammered.
A half hour later Carmen was by his side, after breaking the speed limit from Berkeley. He opened the door to her, still in his towel, disoriented, and embraced her, trying to explain in a flood of words where it hurt: here, his chest, his head, his back, everywhere. Carmen draped a bathrobe around him, collected David, half asleep, got the two into her car, and raced to the nearest hospital, where within a few minutes Gregory Reeves was on a stretcher, connected to a monitor and an oxygen mask.
“Is my daddy going to die?” David asked.
“Yes, if you don’t go to sleep,” Carmen replied fiercely.
She sat in the waiting room beside the sleeping child until morning, when the cardiologist informed her that there was no danger; there was nothing wrong with Reeves’s heart: he had suffered an anxiety attack. The patient could be released, but he should see his doctor and undergo a series of tests, and, he said, he highly recommended consulting a psychiatrist, because this man was close to a breakdown. Once home, Carmen helped Gregory shower and get into bed, brewed coffee, dressed David, gave him breakfast, and took him to school. She called Tina Faibich to tell her that her boss was in no condition to work, returned to her friend, and sat beside him on the bed. Gregory was drained, and dazed with tranquilizers, but he could breathe without pain and was even slightly hungry.
“What happened?” Carmen wanted to know.
“My mother died.”
“But you didn’t tell me!”
“It happened very quickly, and I didn’t want to bother anyone; besides, there was nothing you could do.” And he began telling her everything that happened, without rhyme or reason, a river of unfinished sentences, memories, images, and terrors, a lifetime of hurdles and loneliness—all the time holding the hand of this woman who was more than his sister, who was his oldest and most lasting love, his friend, his comrade, a vital part of himself, so close and so different from him: dark-skinned, essential Carmen, brave, wise Carmen, with five hundred years of Indian and Spanish tradition in her blood and a solid Anglo-Saxon common sense that had helped her move through the world without stumbling.
“Do you remember when we were kids and I
ran in front of the train? That cured me of my obsession with death, and I went years and years without thinking of it, but now that same fixation has come back, and I’m afraid. I’m boxed in: I can never repay my loans, my daughter is a hopeless addict, and for the next fifteen years I’ll be battling with David. My life is a disaster. I’m a failure.”
“There are no such things as failure and success, Greg; those are gringo inventions. You just live, that’s all, the best you can, a little every day; it’s like a journey without a destination: it’s the getting there that counts. It’s time for you to slow down. What’s the rush? My grandmother always said, We don’t have to be slaves to the clock.”
“Your grandmother was balmy, Carmen.”
“Not always; sometimes she was the sanest person in the house.”
“I’m sunk, and all alone.”
“You have to hit bottom, then you’ll push off and rise to the surface again. Crises are good for us; they’re the only way we grow and change.”
“Just look at me—that’s who I am. I haven’t done anything right, beginning with my children. I’m like the Tower of Pisa, Carmen: my axis is off true, and that’s why everything comes out twisted.”
“Who told you life was easy? No one is free of pain and struggle. You’ll have to right your axis yourself, if that’s what it takes. Look at you, Greg: you’re a dishrag. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and put your shoulders back. You’ve been living on the run, but you can’t run forever; at some moment you have to stop and face yourself. However far you run, you’re always inside the same skin.”