Alcestis (24 page)

One of the girls had brought a tray of food when they came. It was almost all sweet things, dates and crumbled nuts and honey, dried figs like wrinkled little heads, flatbread wrapped around chunks of cheese. After the girls were gone I sat on the bed and stared at the food, my chin on my knees, wary, as if I expected a viper to uncoil from beneath a platter and strike me. I was so hungry that I felt malleable and shimmery like pounded gold. And it did not matter if I ate this fruit; Admetus would not appear to count the date pits, and I would be kept here whether I sickened myself or not. The cords of my fate had been cut.

I ate the bread and cheese and honey and left the fruit behind. Then I curled up to sleep again; I wanted to be deep in slumber when Admetus returned. And I was. But again the dreams came, and in them came Persephone. In the dreams she said,
I am yours, Alcestis, believe me
—but her face was blurred, as if I were seeing her through tears. The rest of the dream held a predictable misery: easy to guess how many times I reached for her, at what distance my arms seemed to dissolve into smoke.

I woke in the rosy dawn, crying. Admetus stirred a little but did not wake. I pressed my hands over my mouth and shook, my shoulders heaving, hot all over with the horror of missing her. Spring would come and she would be freed— but I would watch the trees green from this chamber, feel the warm breeze only in the hallways, the courtyard, the frame of the window. Every year I would watch, and I would know that she had come among us again, in the world above, come to live with her lonely mother. She would leave Hades behind, but she would not spend her springs and summers locked in my arms or lazing in my bed. The men would not allow it, not for two women watched as carefully as we would be. They would hold us to our promises, keep us in our marriages, the places we were given as girls and must sorrow in as women. And I would miss her in every fruit and every flower, every pain and every poison, every bit of rot.

I spent the beginning of my last day of silence watching my husband, who didn’t know how soon I would speak to him, who had only Heracles’ promise for comfort. He still lay asleep beside me; he smelled of smoke again, not of sunshine or laurel. I wondered what sacrifices he had been burning since I returned, to which god, to what purpose.

He blushed when he woke to find me looking at him. I saw the blood travel up from his chest. I lay beside him with my cold cheeks, my newly imperturbable body, and wished I could feel his excitement and anxiety. Wished I could think that the act of speaking to him would make new my story, reshape my world, change my return into a triumph and my heart into a clear and joyful thing.

“Good morning, Alcestis,” he said. His voice was wistful. Then he rolled away.

I let him go.

After he dressed and left me, a slave girl came to braid my hair. Her fingers trembled as she combed it out, and when I turned to look out the window, she cried out and dropped my wooden comb. It rattled on the floor, unbroken. I bent to retrieve it and offered it to the girl; she snatched it from my hand jerkily and ran out the door.

I reached up and felt the half-finished plaits around my head. The braids she’d completed seemed uncommonly tight. I had grown used to the sweep of my loose hair across my cheek, tangling in my eyelashes or brushing at the corner of my mouth. But I was a wife again and needed a wife’s containing braids. I finished the rest of the braids myself and submitted to be dressed when the Cretan women finally appeared. They stripped my pale shift over my head like removing a skin and wrapped me in bright, living fabric, yellow as a sun.

Then I sat down by the window and waited. Admetus insisted that I not walk on my wounded feet, but he would not let a male slave carry me, would not stay during the day to carry me himself. And yet he returned throughout the day—I’d hear a soft knock at the door and then the sound of his breath as he waited, fruitlessly, for me to call him in. With each visit the wait shortened, and when he knocked not long before sunset, he hardly waited at all.

He smiled at the sight of me in my simple robe. “Alcestis,” he said, on a breath of recognition. I lowered my eyes.

But he had grown bolder. He went to the jug and poured water and wine into the empty bowl beside it, carrying it over to set at my feet. He crouched before me, looked up into my face.

“The guests have left,” he said. “The courtyard must be cleared and the leavings burnt. The servants are all occupied, but I know how to change a wrapping.” He sounded cheerful, confident, but the edges of his smile looked fragile.

“May I?” he asked, reaching out, and I let him lift my foot.

My soles were healing well—indeed, almost too quickly, and the maids had whispered about it when they left my chamber. Admetus tended to my feet wordlessly, his hands gentle. His eyes were dark and lonely in a manner that made me think of Hades. I looked down at his bent head while he worked, at the pale skin usually hidden beneath his curls, now visible, vulnerable. I might have leaned down to kiss his hair—but I could not.

The cuts were still bright red, some of the skin puffy, but they were not much poisoned with dirt. My flesh would knit together, and in time only tiny white scars would remain, like the lines that had crossed my dead grandmother’s face. While Admetus worked, I sat on the windowsill and rubbed my fingers in the layer of ash. The servants had still not wiped it clean.

Admetus glanced up at me as he covered my feet with fresh bandages. He seemed nervous in the way Pelias had been nervous before Phylomache gave birth, as if he knew I might change, unexpectedly, and didn’t want to miss the moment. This was what awaited me: Admetus and his guilt, this new solicitousness, the blushes that traveled his skin. The children would come, and his concern for me would only grow, for I would then be a true Achaean woman, a producer of heirs. I’d spend long nights staring at the painted stars. It would be, in every outward sense, as if I had never chosen the underworld over the feasting table. I would grow old as Persephone had prophesied, delayed long in this world before I came to death at last.

But still I waited to speak until sunset. I didn’t want Admetus to think of Apollo, even indirectly, when I spoke. I wanted him to hear me. I wanted his attention, selfishly, as Persephone had wanted mine. I would never be able to act like this again—to act like a god or a child. This was my last day to try on either role, and I felt furious and almost relieved to have my freedom stripped from me like my pale, thin shift. Life was simpler than death; I would again know how to behave. There were, after all, some rules of Achaean life that I never could give up.

At sunset I put my hands on the sill and leaned out into the air. The window did not snap shut upon me. I watched the heavy way the sun slid below the mountains and thought of the skin stretching on my belly, the springlike promise of life. The horizon darkened.

Someone tapped at the door.

Admetus, startled, rose to collect our dinner from the slave girl and returned with a platter piled with bread and meat and red, polished apples balanced on the edge of the plate and looking as though they might tumble to the floor at any moment. I watched from the window, half hoping that the fruit would fall. I was afraid. I knew what to say, but I did not want to say it.

I waited for him to set down the platter. I could not look at him now; I cast down my eyes, thinking of the goddess’s lowered eyelids, thinking of the world hidden beneath the stone floor of our palace, beneath and beyond the earth. Then I asked him hoarsely the words scraping up my throat: “Have you learned to believe that I am Alcestis?”

I’d thought of speaking first to a slave or a maid or to the uncomprehending walls of our bedchamber. Had I not been kept penned in our chamber, I might have spoken to the dirt, hoping my words would travel through the soil to reach Persephone. But I knew I must speak to him before anyone else. I owed him this much, whatever he thought of me now, whatever he would think of me privately in quiet moments throughout the rest of his long life and mine.

I looked up. He was staring at me—at my mouth—as if he wanted to pry me open and seek out the source of that sound, my voice. He’d spent three days waiting for me to speak and he didn’t know what to think. There had been no living men to watch me in the underworld, to shame or honor me, and no one could tell him what had happened to me when I died, not even Heracles. He would have to accept what I said. He would have to take my word, as if I were a man, as if my word were worth taking.

“Alcestis,” he said slowly. And then: “Of course. Yes, of course I believe.”

[EPILOGUE]

THEY REMEMBERED HER name for centuries, and more than centuries. Poems and songs, plays and dreams of plays, translations. Yet whatever the structure of the verse or the pattern of the chorus, the story remained the same.

She was the wife of Admetus, who so loved him that she gave her life to save his.

She was returned to her husband silent, tainted, as Heracles said, by her time in the underworld. She did not speak for three days. And after that, what? There is no record but the stories of her heroic son, of her murderous half sisters, of her husband’s Olympian lover.

She bore two children, a boy and a girl, and lived to raise them; the boy grew to become a bold Achaean warrior, and then he grew old. When the war came, he led the Pheraeans and Iolcans into battle at Troy. He crouched in the dank con-fines of the horse his brother-in-law had built, his aching arms braced against the walls, listening to the Trojans sing praise to the gods for his army’s surrender. He thought of his own wife and his wife’s sister, both waiting husbandless at home, no doubt besieged by suitors—for they were daughters of a naiad, and quite beautiful—and reassured himself by thinking that Ipthime and Penelope had inherited their father’s stubbornness. He thought that his wife would sacrifice herself before allowing another man to take her husband’s place, and as he sweated in the hot wooden gullet of the horse, in the center of the Trojan city, he was proud.

About her daughter nothing is written. She is blank as a shade. One could assume that the goddess was correct about her, as she had been correct about the son—but then one must also assume that Alcestis died in bed, faint with age, and never saw the underworld again until she crossed it on Charon’s raft, clinging to the shade beside her, swaying slightly with each push of the old man’s pole in the swampy water.

Her half sisters, Phylomache’s children, earned a place in lyric through the spilling of blood. They grew up bitter and sharp. When Jason, rightful heir of the king whom Pelias had long ago deposed, returned to Iolcus and brought with him the golden fleece and his whispering Eastern wife, Medea, Phylomache’s girls needed little encouragement to turn their sharpness on their father. No man wants to remember being bested by his daughter, and so it was fortunate, perhaps, that Pelias did not have to suffer that injustice for long. They cut him up and boiled him in a bronze pot—the same pot the head maid had used to boil water for Hippothoe when she coughed and coughed in the night.

But even these are not Alcestis’ stories—they are stories that circle around her, draw some energy from her as the shades in the underworld did, reflect a little of her light. However incomplete the tales may be, they illuminate her, pick her out of history and set her in words, shining, as an example for womankind. Sometimes she seems so bright, so exemplary, so morally necessary, that words are not enough to describe her. Her image is carved into sarcophagi, rendered in oil on canvas. In one painting, Alcestis looks toward the sky—or toward the ceiling, perhaps, with its painted stars. Light pours down on her, cool as milk. Her hand splays on her breast. Her other hand, extended, fades into darkness as she reaches toward her stricken husband. She will never touch him. He is not looking at her, anyway; the god Hermes has bent to murmur in his ear. Others have crowded around, trying to touch her, to speak to her, to hold her in the mortal world—but still she looks up, away. She is waiting for death to come and claim her; she’s been waiting all her life.