In the Country of Last Things

  Dr. Woburn had been dead for just four months when I arrived at Woburn House. Victoria and the others were doing their best to carry on without him, but certain changes had been necessary—particularly with the medical aspect of things, since there was no one who could do the doctor’s work. Both Victoria and Mr. Frick were competent nurses, but that was a far cry from being able to diagnose ailments and prescribe treatments. I think that helps to explain why I received such special attention from them. Of all the injured people who had been brought in since the doctor’s death, I was the first one who had responded to their care, the first one who had shown any signs of recovery. In that sense, I served to justify their determination to keep Woburn House open. I was their success story, the shining example of what they were still able to accomplish, and for that reason they coddled me for as long as I seemed to demand it, indulged me in my black moods, gave me every benefit of the doubt.

  Mr. Frick believed that I had actually risen from the dead. He had worked as the doctor’s chauffeur for a long time (forty-one years, he told me), and he had seen more of life and death at close quarters than most people ever do. To hear him tell it, there had never been such a case as mine. “No sir, miss,” he would say. “You was already in the other world. I seed it with my own eyes. You was dead, and then you come back to life.” Mr. Frick had an odd, ungrammatical way of speaking, and he often made a hash of his ideas when trying to express them. I don’t think this had anything to do with the quality of his mind—it was simply that words gave him trouble. He had difficulty maneuvering them around his tongue, and he would sometimes stumble over them as though they were physical objects, literal stones cluttering his mouth. Because of this, he seemed especially sensitive to the internal properties of words themselves: their sounds as divorced from their meanings, their symmetries and contradictions. “Words be what tells me how to know,” he once explained to me. “That’s why I got to be such an old man. My name is Otto. It go back and forth the same. It don’t end nowhere but begin again. I get to live twice that way, twice as long as no one else. You too, miss. You be named the same as me. A-n-n-a. Back and forth the same, just like Otto myself. That’s why you got to be born again. It’s a blessing of luck, Miss Anna. You was dead, and I seed you get born again with my own eyes. It’s a great good blessing of luck.”

  There was a stolid grace to this old man, with his thin, spiny erectness and ivory-colored jowls. His loyalty to Dr. Woburn was unswerving, and even now he continued to maintain the car he had driven for him—an ancient, sixteen-cylinder Pierce Arrow with running boards and leather-upholstered seats. This black, fifty-year-old automobile had been the doctor’s only eccentricity, and every Tuesday night, no matter how much other work had to be done, Frick would go out to the garage behind the house and spend at least two hours polishing and cleaning it, putting it into the best possible shape for the Wednesday afternoon rounds. He had adapted the engine to run on methane gas, and this cleverness with his hands was surely the chief reason why Woburn House had not fallen apart. He had repaired plumbing, installed showers, dug a new well. These and sundry other improvements had kept the place functioning through the hardest of times. His grandson, Willie, worked as his assistant on all these projects, silently following him around from one job to another, a morose and stunted little figure in a green hooded sweatshirt. Frick’s plan was to teach the boy enough so that he could take over for him after he died, but Willie did not seem to be an especially fast learner. “Nothing to worry,” Frick said to me one day on this subject. “We break in Willie slow. There’s no rush about it no how. By the time I get ready to kick the bucket, the boy be growed into an old man, too.”

  It was Victoria who took the greatest interest in me, however. I have mentioned how important my recovery was to her, but I think there was more to it than that. She was hungry for someone to talk to, and as my strength gradually returned, she began coming upstairs to see me more often. Ever since her father’s death, she had been alone with Frick and Willie, running the shelter and attending to business, but there had been no one for her to share her thoughts with. Little by little, I seemed to become that person. It was not difficult for us to talk to each other, and as our friendship developed, I understood how much we had in common. It is true that I did not come from the same kind of wealth that Victoria did, but my childhood had been an easy one, filled with bourgeois splendors and advantages, and I had lived with a sense that all my desires were within the realm of possibility. I had gone to good schools and was capable of discussing books. I knew the difference between a Beaujolais and a Bordeaux, and I understood why Schubert was a greater musician than Schumann. Given the world that Victoria had been born into at Woburn House, I was probably closer to being a member of her own class than anyone she had met in years. I don’t meant to suggest that Victoria was a snob. Money itself did not interest her, and she had turned her back on the things it represented long ago. It’s just that we shared a certain language, and when she talked to me about her past, I understood her without having to ask for explanations.

  She had been married twice—once briefly, in a “brilliant society match,” as she sarcastically put it, and the next time to a man she referred to as Tommy, although I never learned his last name. He had apparently been a lawyer, and together they had had two children, a girl and a boy. When the Troubles began, he had been increasingly drawn into politics, working first as undersecretary for the Green Party (at one time, all political affiliations here were designated by colors), and then, when the Blue Party absorbed the membership of his organization in a strategic alliance, as urban coordinator for the western half of the city. At the time of the first Anti-Tollist uprisings eleven or twelve years ago, he was trapped in one of the riots along Nero Prospect and shot down by a policeman’s bullet. After Tommy’s death, her father urged her to leave the country with the children (who were just three and four at the time), but Victoria refused. Instead, she sent them along with Tommy’s parents to live in England. She did not want to be one of those people who had given up and run away, she said, but neither did she want to subject her children to the disasters that were bound to come. There are some decisions that no one should ever be forced to make, I believe, choices that simply put too great a burden on the mind. Whatever it is you finally do, you are going to regret it, and you will go on regretting it for as long as you live. The children went off to England, and for the next year or two Victoria managed to keep in touch with them by mail. Then the postal system began to break down. Communications became sporadic and unpredictable—a constant anguish of waiting, of messages thrown out blindly to sea—and at last they stopped altogether. That was eight years ago. Not one word had arrived since, and Victoria was long past hoping that she would ever hear from them again.

  I mention these things to show you the similarities between our experiences, the links that helped to form our friendship. The people she loved were gone from her life just as terribly as the people I loved were gone from mine. Our husbands and children, her father and my brother—all of them had vanished into death and uncertainty. When I was well enough to go, therefore (but where did I really have to go?), it seemed only natural that she should invite me to stay on at Woburn House to work as a member of the staff. It was not a solution I would have wished for myself, but under the circumstances I saw no other choice. The do-gooder philosophy of the place made me a bit uncomfortable—the idea of helping strangers, of sacrificing yourself to a cause. The principle was too abstract for me, too earnest, too altruistic. Sam’s book had been something for me to believe in, but Sam had been my darling, my life, and I wondered if I had it in me to devote myself to people I didn’t know. Victoria saw my reluctance, but she did not argue with me or try to change my mind. More than anything else, I think it was this restraint of hers that led me to accept. She did not make a big speech or try to convince me that I was about to save my soul. She simply said: “There’s a lot of work to be done here, Anna, more work than we c
an ever hope to do. I have no idea what will happen in your case, but broken hearts are sometimes mended by work.”

  The routine was endless and exhausting. This was not a cure so much as a distraction, but anything that dulled the ache was welcome to me. I wasn’t expecting miracles, after all. I had already used up my supply of those, and I knew that everything from now on would be aftermath—a dreadful, posthumous sort of life, a life that would go on happening to me, even though it was finished. The ache, then, did not disappear. But little by little I began to notice that I was crying less, that I did not necessarily drench the pillow before I fell asleep at night, and once I even discovered that I had managed to go three straight hours without thinking of Sam. These were small triumphs, I admit, but given what things were like for me then, I was in no position to scoff at them.

  There were six rooms downstairs with three or four beds in each. The second floor had two private rooms set aside for difficult cases, and it was in one of those that I had spent my first weeks at Woburn House. After I started working, I was given my own bedroom on the fourth floor. Victoria’s room was down the hall, and Frick and Willie lived in a large room directly above hers. The only other person on the staff lived downstairs, in a room just off the kitchen. That was Maggie Vine, a deaf-mute woman of no particular age who served as the cook and laundress. She was very short, with thick, stumpy thighs and a broad face crowned by a jungle of red hair. Other than the conversations she held in sign language with Victoria, she did not communicate with anyone. She went about her work in a kind of sullen trance, doggedly and efficiently completing every job that was assigned to her, working such long hours that I wondered if she ever slept. She rarely greeted me or acknowledged my presence, but every now and again, on those occasions when we happened to be alone together, she would tap me on the shoulder, break into an enormous smile, and then proceed to give an elaborate pantomime performance of an opera singer delivering an aria—complete with histrionic gestures and quivering throat. Then she would bow, graciously acknowledging the cheers from her imaginary audience, and abruptly return to work, without any pause or transition. It was perfectly mad. This must have happened six or seven times, but I could never tell if she was trying to amuse me or frighten me. In all the years she had been there, Victoria said, Maggie had never sung for anyone else.

  Every resident, as we called them, had to agree to certain conditions before being allowed to stay at Woburn House. No fighting or stealing, for example, and a willingness to pitch in with the chores: making one’s bed, carrying one’s plate to the kitchen after meals, and so on. In exchange, the residents were given room and board, a new set of clothes, an opportunity to shower every day, and unlimited use of the facilities. These included the downstairs parlor—which featured a number of sofas and easy chairs, a well-stocked library, and games of various sorts (cards, bingo, backgammon)—as well as the yard behind the house, which was a particularly pleasant place to be when the weather was good. There was a croquet field out there in the far corner, a badminton net, and a large selection of lawn chairs. By any standard, Woburn House was a haven, an idyllic refuge from the misery and squalor around it. You would think that anyone given the chance to spend a few days in such a place would relish every moment of it, but that did not always seem to be true. Most were grateful, of course, most appreciated what was being done for them, but there were many others who had a difficult time of it. Disputes among residents were common, and it seemed that just about anything could set them off: the way someone ate his food or picked his nose, the opinion of this one as opposed to that one, the way someone coughed or snored while everyone else was trying to sleep—all the petty squabbles that occur when people are suddenly thrown together under one roof. There is nothing unusual about that, I suppose, but I always found it rather pathetic, a sad and ridiculous little farce that was played out again and again. Nearly all the residents of Woburn House had been living in the streets for a long time. Perhaps the contrast between that life and this life was too much of a shock for them. You grow accustomed to looking out for yourself, to thinking only of your own welfare, and then someone tells you that you have to cooperate with a bunch of strangers, the very class of people you have taught yourself to mistrust. Since you know that you will be back on the streets in just a few short days, is it really worth the trouble to dismantle your personality for that?

  Other residents seemed almost disappointed by what they found at Woburn House. These were the ones who had waited so long to be admitted that their expectations had been exaggerated beyond reason—turning Woburn House into an earthly paradise, the object of every possible longing they had ever felt. The idea of being allowed to live there had kept them going from one day to the next, but once they actually got in, they were bound to experience a letdown. They were not entering an enchanted realm, after all. Woburn House was a lovely place to be, but it was nevertheless in the real world, and what you found there was only more life—a better life, perhaps, but still no more than life as you had always known it. The remarkable thing was how quickly everyone adapted to the material comforts that were offered—the beds and showers, the good food and clean clothes, the chance to do nothing. After two or three days at Woburn House, men and women who had been eating out of garbage cans could sit down to a large spread at an attractively set table with all the aplomb and composure of fat, middle-class burghers. Perhaps that is not as strange as it seems. We all take things for granted, and when it comes to such basic things as food and shelter, things that are probably ours by natural right, then it doesn’t take long for us to think of them as an integral part of ourselves. It is only when we lose them that we ever notice the things we had. As soon as we get them back, we stop noticing them again. That was the problem with the people who felt let down by Woburn House. They had lived with deprivation for so long that they could think of nothing else, but once they got back the things they had lost, they were amazed to discover that no great change had taken place in them. The world was just as it had always been. Their bellies were full now, but nothing else had been altered in the least.

  We were always careful to warn people about the difficulties of the last day, but I don’t think our advice ever did anyone much good. You can’t prepare yourself for something like that, and there was no way for us to predict who would balk at the crucial moment and who would not. Some people were able to leave without trauma, but others could not bring themselves to face it. They suffered horribly at the thought of having to return to the streets—especially the kind ones, the gentle ones, the people who were most grateful for the help we had given them—and there were times when I seriously questioned whether any of it was worth it, whether it would not in fact have been better to do nothing than to hold out gifts to people and then snatch them out of their hands a moment later. There was a fundamental cruelty to the process, and more often than not I found it intolerable. To watch grown men and women suddenly fall to their knees and beg you for one more day. To witness the tears, the howls, the berserk supplications. Some feigned illnesses—falling into dead swoons, pretending to be paralyzed—and others went so far as to injure themselves on purpose: slashing their wrists, gouging their legs with scissors, amputating fingers and toes. Then, at the very limit, there were the suicides, at least three or four that I can remember. We were supposed to be helping people at Woburn House, but there were times when we actually destroyed them.

  The quandary is immense, however. The moment you accept the idea that there might be some good in a place like Woburn House, you sink into a swamp of contradictions. It is not enough simply to argue that residents should be allowed to stay longer—particularly if you mean to be fair. What about all the others who are standing outside, waiting for a chance to get in? For every person who occupied a bed in Woburn House, there were dozens more begging to be admitted. What is better—to help large numbers of people a little bit or small numbers of people a lot? I don’t really think there is an answer to this question. Dr
. Woburn had started the enterprise in a certain way, and Victoria was determined to stick with it to the end. That did not necessarily make it right. But it did not make it wrong either. The problem did not lie in the method so much as in the nature of the problem itself. There were too many people to be helped and not enough people to help them. The arithmetic was overpowering, inexorable in the havoc it produced. No matter how hard you worked, there was no chance you were not going to fail. That was the long and the short of it. Unless you were willing to accept the utter futility of the job, there was no point in going on with it.