A Widow's Story (24 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
The hard part of travel is the return. Where formerly the return was the very best part of travel.
“Honey? Hello—”
In the hospital he’d said, in regard to one or another fussy procedure
They make too much of things
,
here
.
In fact, he’d been mistaken. In the end “they” had not made enough of things that had mattered crucially.
“Honey. Hello. . . .”
Silly forlorn voice. Even the cats aren’t deceived.
Walking through the rooms of the house and in each room there is a likeness of Ray—that is, of the watercolor portrait of Ray which an artist-friend painted after his death, as if it were the cover of the final issue of
Ontario Review.
The original, which is framed, is kept in the kitchen. Photocopies are placed elsewhere including on the door of Ray’s study and on my desk.
In this way, as I walk through the house, I am seeing Ray’s face as he would look, more or less, if he were alive this very day. To greet me, to cheer me up. To suggest to me
You are not going to be defeated by this. You can do it!
Aphorisms drift through my head. It’s like trying to stop a dripping faucet with a finger, to try to stop this drift.
For instance, this chilling aphorism of Nietzsche:
What someone
is
, begins to be revealed when his talent abates, when he stops showing what he can
do.
To this, the widow can add:
What I am
,
begins to be revealed now that I am alone. In such revelation is terror.
It was not that
,
of her own volition
,
of her own specific wish to do herself harm
,
nor even of her reasonable wish to annihilate the ceaseless cascade of broken and jeering language in her head
Your life is over, you are finished, you are dead and done for and you know it, hypocrite!
—that she began to calculate the ways she might die
;
rather
,
it was the wish itself—coolly conceived
,
pure and inviolable as a Chopin prelude of surpassing beauty
There is a way out, and the way out is death.
On a counter she laid out the pills accumulated over the years by both her husband and herself. These were painkillers prescribed for pains long since vanished and forgotten. These were painkillers of which but one or two had been taken from the container—obviously
,
pills too powerful to risk taking in ordinary life! There were sleeping pills
,
there were “muscle relaxants.” There were tranquilizers
,
sedatives. On the counter she spread them
,
carefully she counted them. Hypnotized by these pills
,
capsules. Hypnotized by what they contain. A sensation of such security
,
relief runs through her! Marcus Aurelius counsels
The power to take your own life is yours at all times. Never forget.
She never forgot.
I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, Eyes—
I wonder if it weighs like Mine—
Or has an Easier size.
Emily Dickinson, 561
.
Ringing phone at a distance as if through wads of cotton batting and later this morning an e-mail message—several e-mail messages—
CONGRATULATIONS
!—not one but two of my books of the past year have been nominated for National Book Critics Circle awards in two categories—fiction, nonfiction. The news leaves me just a little sadder than I’d been for thinking
But there is no one to share this with. There is no one
.
You would not realize, how painful “good” news can be. Who has known this?
“Bad” news—if I were diagnosed with cancer, for instance—would be a relief since Ray would be spared knowing of it. But “good” news that can’t be shared—this is painful.
In the bedclothes there is the elder tiger-cat Reynard still sleeping curled in cat-fashion with a single stubby paw over his tight-shut eyes. Almost you would think that Reynard isn’t breathing except if you look closely, you can see his sides move.
Reynard
named by me as a kitten for his beautiful bright tiger coat—that has faded and coarsened a bit, with time—as well as for
Raymond.
Recalling when Ray brought Reynard home, to surprise me. A very small abandoned kitten from a Pennington animal shelter.
How many years ago! I don’t want to calculate Reynard’s age.
Through the night Reynard slept beside me pressing warmly against my leg which was comforting though also constraining for I dared not move for fear of disturbing him, provoking him into jumping down from the bed and trotting away and so now carefully I make up the bed as always each morning I make up the bed—as if embarrassed of the nest, that must be, to a degree, dismantled—books, manuscripts, etc., removed to a nearby table.
Making up the bed also, quickly to forestall climbing back into the nest. Already I have forgotten why I’d been summoned to be
congratulated—
an ache in the region of the heart is all that remains—thinking of how my father assured me that there was no need for Ray and me to come visit him just yet—“You’re busy teaching, there’s no rush—you can come later—you can see me any time”—he’d convinced me—of course, I had hoped to be convinced—“I’ll be here.”
Except he wasn’t. I never saw him again.
When Daddy was satisfied that Mom would be well taken care of, in their assisted-care residence in Amherst, New York, he fell asleep, my brother Fred told me, and never woke up.
No one could wake him. Daddy was being treated for emphysema, prostate cancer, a heart condition but he hadn’t seemed close to death. Except—a powerful sleep overcame him, and he never woke.
So exhausted! For years he’d been concerned with my mother’s health, this had become an obsession with him. Daddy had burnt out, in living.
Now petting Reynard—rubbing his bone-hard head to evoke a low, near-inaudible purr, the barest hum of recognition—I am blinking back tears of grief for my father who died in May 2000.
In that last year of his life we’d spoken frequently on the phone. Since my father was hard of hearing, visiting him had its disadvantages—he would seem to hear, he would smile and nod and you couldn’t know if truly he heard what you were saying. But on the phone, Daddy could hear perfectly well. And so we spoke, as we’d never spoken in person.
Saying
I love you
was hard. I think perhaps I never did say
I love you
to my father. Only at the end of a conversation could I murmur something rushed and seemingly casual like
Love you
,
Daddy! Bye!
My father, my mother. My husband.
One by one disappearing.
Where?
The horror is: one of the books which has been nominated for the award is my
Journal
:
1973–1982.
Into which—I’ve just recently discovered—I can’t bring myself to look.
For if I do, each page, each paragraph is a mockery. Each entry—most of them breathless, rapidly typed and never revised—a testament of some younger, happier, oblivious time in my life—is a mockery to me in late winter/early spring 2008.
Worse yet are the photographs—the first is particularly heartrending, Ray and me in our little brick house on Riverside Drive East, Windsor, Ontario, seated on a sofa as I am laughingly posed pouring tea into Ray’s cup out of (as I recall) an empty teapot; as Ray, hair long, dark, with sideburns in the long-ago style of the era, looks on with an affectionate smile.
We thought we would live forever
,
then! We never gave a thought to—what awaits.
Or, if we did, it was cursory,
pro forma
—mortality, death, loss being “themes” in literary works of which we could speak knowledgeably.
Numerous photographs in the
Journal
were taken by Ray himself—the invisible man behind the camera. Joyce in a winter coat on the beach behind our Windsor house, on the Detroit River; Joyce in another winter coat, on a street in Mayfair, London, in 1972; Joyce with a very girlish-looking Margaret Drabble posing in front of Maggie’s house in Hampstead Heath, 1972.
Ray had seen the
Journal
of course—at least, portions of it, and all of the photos—but my parents had not. Their photographs, too, are heartrending to see.
Because of the nomination, I will be obliged to read from this
Journal
, and discuss it, with my lawyer/poet/friend Larry Joseph and John Freeman, the president of the National Book Circle, in a few weeks, in New York City. And because of the other nomination, I will be obliged to read from my novel
The Gravedigger’s Daughter
at one or another literary event.
How strange it is to the writer, whose life’s-blood would seem to have been drained, in order that works of prose be “animated”—given a semblance of life through printed language—when the writer is obliged to revisit the work, at a later time. Sometimes it’s a painful, powerful experience—opening a book, staring down at the lines of print and recalling—in the helpless, vertiginous way in which one recalls, or half-recalls, a lost dream—the emotional state of being you were in, at the time of the writing.
In my case—a “posthumous” case—the feeling is
But I was alive then! I remember that.
My friends are lifting their glasses to me. My friends are smiling happily at me. My friends are visibly happy for me. And I am grateful, or seeming-so; I am smiling, and lifting my glass—of sparkling water—shifting my face into a reasonable approximation of cheeriness, anticipation. So long have my friends pitied me, this opportunity to say
Congratulations!
instead of—for instance—
Condolences!
is not to be overlooked.
In this attractive Princeton restaurant my friends are not mocking me, I know. No one is mocking me. Only brash adolescents mock grief, laugh uproariously at death, are drawn to video games simulating violent death—presumably because they’ve had no experience of death, except as a game.
In this posthumous state my career—all that has to do with “Joyce Carol Oates”—has come to seem remote to me, faintly absurd, or sinister—like a black dirigible drifting across the treeline, some distance away.
John Updike once said that he’d created “Updike” out of the sticks and mud of his Pennsylvania boyhood—so too, I’d created “Joyce Carol Oates” out of the sticks, mud, fields and waterways of my upstate New York girlhood. Both of us—that is, our actual selves—John, Joyce—seem to have been amazed, over all, by the accomplishments of our namesakes. A shelf of books looks formidable when glimpsed all at once—as if the achievement were all at once, instead of wrought—laboriously, obsessively—through years of effort.
When I leave the restaurant to return home, I must drive along Rosedale Road out into the country—always, this same route—reminding me so sharply of the days and nights of the hospital vigil—
Alive! Still alive!—
the voice on the other end of the phone had sounded so certain, so sincere—hopeful.
Letting people down. Letting friends/editors/agents down. I think that this is a proclivity of “JCO” from which I can’t altogether detach myself.
You will just be disappointed again. When my books fail to win. I am so sorry
,
there is nothing that I can do.
On February 28, John Updike wrote an eloquent and heartrending letter of condolence. I wish that I could quote it—John’s personal correspondence is no less beautifully written than his published work—but the provisions of his will forbid publication of his letters. In this brief typed letter John said that he and his wife, Martha, were both “shocked” to read of Ray’s death in the
New York Times
obituary. In his “mind’s eye,” John said, Ray was “still young and a fixture in the literary world.” So “calm, gentle, soft-spoken and sane”—Ray scarcely seemed like a “literary man” at all.
Reading this, despite tears, I had to laugh. For how like John Updike this was, a very funny remark embedded in a simple statement of condolence.
John concluded by saying that he and Martha would miss Ray’s “reassuring presence.” There was a little more, of course—but this is the essence of the letter.
(Over the years, since April 1977, John Updike and I exchanged perhaps hundreds of letters and cards—cards stamped with John’s address in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, were John’s signature mode of communication: he executed them with the flourish of a Renaissance sonneteer—which I’d once hoped to publish as a little book, after his death.)
This letter from John Updike, I’d read quickly when I first received it, then put away.
Along with so many other lovely letters and cards, some of which I could not bring myself to read fully, I put it away in my grass-green
Earthwise Reusable Bag
. And now tonight—late tonight—in fact it is past 2
A.M.
—in the interstices of a sudden frenzy of housekeeping—I am moved to reread it, and to think of the first time Ray and I visited John and his then-new wife Martha Bernhardt in Georgetown, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1976.
I remember the charming old house on the main road past which traffic streamed constantly, so that we could barely hear one another speak, at times. I remember how formidable Martha seemed to me, a strong-willed blond woman who’d brought three young sons into this new marriage/household—what a testimony to love!
I remember John saying that Harvard had had a destructive effect upon him—Harvard was “anti-matter”—and had made of his “hillbilly” self another personality, an “anti-self.” Bizarrely he’d said that he was “not famous”—but I was.
(By this time, John had had an enormous success with
Couples—
he’d become not only famous but infamous.)
Of course, John always spoke playfully, provisionally. In his lightness of tone he was the antithesis of dogmatic, argumentative, assertive; his natural demeanor was self-deprecatory. The most surprising thing he’d said to me was that James Joyce’s
Ulysses
seemed to him “ugly.”
Ulysses
!—that most beautiful, rhapsodic, phantasmagoric of novels from which Updike learned so much.
Some years later we visited John and Martha in their stately hilltop house in Beverly Farms, north of Boston: the quintessential upper-middle-class suburb, in which John took a homeowner’s pride. By this time the rural Pennsylvania hillbilly-self had long since been outgrown and cast aside like old clothes. The Updikes’ house was expensive, lavishly furnished, large—John took us on a little tour—we saw the warren of small rooms at the top of the house in which he worked: a desk and a typewriter for fiction, another desk and a typewriter for reviews, another space for manuscripts, galleys, books. Of all male American writers John Updike must be the most happily
domestic
, and
domesticated
: not for him the dubious pleasures of such masculine proclivities as hunting, fishing, hiking arduous trails; not for John, who adored and was adored by women, the ecstatic male-bonding of team sports, the army, war.
It has been years now since we’ve visited the Updikes. And now, Ray and I will never visit them again.
The smell of Drano makes my nostrils pinch—a pungent, powerful odor—more than fifteen minutes have passed since I’d poured Drano into each of three bathtub drains, now I must hurry to the bathrooms to turn on hot water, to “flush” the Drano down.
Not that the drains are blocked, yet. Not that any of this housekeeping needs to be done, just yet. Just now.
This memoir, steeped in the grittiest of details as the bed linens of poor Emma Bovary were steeped in her physical agony, yet fails before the prospect of accurately suggesting how much, how very much, how unendingly much, there is for the widow to do following the death of her husband; so much to do, yet more to ponder, in various stages of anxiety, even when, as in this case, the deceased husband left behind financial records in very good shape, and a will.
A legally executed unambiguous will leaving everything to the surviving spouse!
Yet—still another document is required—“urgently”—and yet another “original” copy of the death certificate—this stiff-parchment document being the one that, to the widow, is most terrible to hold in the hand.
Advice to the widow:
MAKE DUPLICATE COPIES OF THE DEATH CERTIFICATE. MANY!
Another time now I am in Ray’s office looking through his files. Many of these are now in fact “my” files since I’ve rearranged the material and placed it in manila folders marked in large block letters to avoid confusion. (The widow is advised:
ALWAYS WRITE IN BLOCK LETTERS
in such circumstances. As the widow is advised
ALWAYS KEEP YOUR KEYS IN EXACTLY THE SAME PLACE.)
Belatedly, I have removed all the folders from the floor; it’s entirely out of character for poor Reynard to assuage his anxiety by climbing atop a table to urinate on these hateful documents—too much effort for an aging cat.
Until 4:10
A.M.
when exhaustion overcomes me I will search for whatever it is Matt has requested. Diligently I will search though I know—(I think I know)—that I have searched these files numerous times as I have searched Ray’s filing cabinets, and Ray’s study closet, not finding what I have been assured
has got to be there.
For Ray Smith left such careful records, it’s inconceivable that this document
is not in his office. Somewhere.
The last time I searched through Ray’s things, including desk drawers containing mostly office supplies like paperclips, pens, stamps, I’d discovered a valentine—
To My Beloved Wife
—which he hadn’t yet signed.
Such discoveries, that rend the heart.
Also, caches of old birthday cards, some of them hand-made, and meant to be comical, to Ray from me.
All these precious items I have put away, for safekeeping. With our cache of snapshots and photographs dating back to the fall of 1960 in Madison, Wisconsin.
Prominent on Ray’s desk is his calendar for 2008. How essential to all our lives, our calendars!
I am holding Ray’s calendar in my hand. I am staring at Ray’s calendar. This is not the first time that I have stared at Ray’s calendar in some bleak hour of the early morning, as if it were a riddle to be decoded. For all that the widow does, the widow has done previously. Quickly the widow has become a ghost haunting her own house.
How ironic it is, and terrible, Ray has X’d out every single day of January 2008; in February he’d X’d out February 1–10—the tenth, a Sunday, which would be the last day he would spend at home.
In his methodical way Ray kept a diary of sorts, in his calendar. Appointments, tasks to be done, magazines and press deadlines. Our social engagements entered, in abbreviations. If I try, I can recall what these engagements were—which dinner parties, evenings in restaurants, at McCarter Theater. New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day . . . February 14, Valentine’s Day, Ray had marked as for a party, here.
Now I am left with this pattern of X’s. If I examine Ray’s calendar for 2007, which is still in his desk, I will discover an entire year—365 days!—methodically X’d out.
By slow degrees our lives are a pattern of (ever increasing) X’s. With what misplaced satisfaction X’ing out a day, finishing with a week, a month, a year—with never the thought that the supply of days is after all finite, and you are using them up.
Congratulations!
I am thinking of, years ago, it might have been ten, or fifteen years ago, we were preparing for bed and the phone rang, past midnight this was, an alarming time for the phone to ring, immediately the thought came to me
Something has happened to Mommy
,
or Daddy—
the caller would have been my brother, in that case; but when I answered the phone, as Ray looked on, concerned, the caller identified herself as the book review editor at the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, calling to tell me—to “be the first to notify you”—that I was that year’s Nobel Prize winner in literature; it was not an altogether new phenomenon in our lives, that such rumors were passed on to me, or to Ray, always with an air of excitement; year after year, such vague wisps of rumor, presumably wafting about the heads of how many dozens, hundreds of possible candidates; tonight this information, or rather mis-information, came to me through a roaring of blood in my ears for I’d been dreading a call about my parents and now—instead—this dazzling if improbable news—to set my heart racing, and to stir my penchant for irony
Any nomination of any book of mine is simultaneously the announcement that the book has not won
—except in this case, as the journalist at the other end of the line emphatically assured me, this was no mere “nomination” that was the subject of her call but the news that Joyce Carol Oates had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. . . .