September Song (14 page)

He was always ready with a comforting pat on the back, and one day with one lower down, accompanied by a kiss on the lips. They were alone together in the church basement's Nearly New Shop at the time. On their way to the couch in the vestry they passed the pulpit. The stained-glass windows shed their soft glow upon the proceedings.

In his sermons over the next several Sundays Reverend Smith inveighed against sins of the flesh. In condemning them he made them sound irresistibly tempting. Tributes to her femme-fatality Julia understood them to be. She felt flattered that her charms had lured a man of the cloth to dare perdition. Through her church activities she had made friends with Mrs. Smith, and seated in the pew beside her, she enjoyed the added luxury of pity.

“Powerful medicine, padre!” said parishioners to Reverend Smith standing at the portal to bid them godspeed as they exited to go home to Sunday dinner and afterwards to ruminate upon forbidden pleasures of yore.

Last Words

D
EAR TOM
,

Many happy returns of the day. As the old song goes, “I gave you up. What more can I say?”

I read the announcement of your marriage in today's paper. It must have been a whirlwind romance. It is still less than a week since our divorce decree came through.

Your asking me for a divorce reminded me of your proposing to me. That time I gave you my answer at once, remember? So did I this time, though it was harder. But it was even harder on you, and my heart bled for you. The first time you had to convince me that you could support me, the second time that you could not, though neither time did I need much convincing. What worse blow to a man's pride than having to ask his wife for a divorce on the grounds that he could no longer support her but must ask her to declare herself a pauper and go on welfare? You need not have listed all the expenses I had incurred. The doctors' bills, the hospital stays, the costly medications. But it was such a painful step for you to propose that I understood your need to justify it. I regretted that I had not thought of it as a way out myself and spared you the humiliation of having to suggest it. It was not as though I never knew until then what a burden I had become.

You tried not to show it, of course, but I could see that my agreeing was a relief to you. It was to me too. I had done something helpful at last.

I once considered freeing you of me by doing what I am about to do now. I was prevented by the thought of how that would distress you, how you would blame yourself for it. I wish now that I had done it then. At least it would have been without this last taste of bitterness.

Goodbye,

Anne

An Eye for an Eye

James

I
LEAVE HOME FOR WORK
while the women are both still in bed. I leave early but by that time I will have done what many would consider half a day's work already. However little sleep I may have gotten I am up by five o'clock at the latest. I need no alarm clock. Not that I am eager to start the day but I am eager to end the night. Even on our better ones I am wakeful, expecting it to turn into another of the bad ones. On those nights I stay up throughout. I busy myself. While still in my pajamas I make my bed. When I have finished breakfast, bathed, shaved and dressed I empty the dishwasher, put the dishes back on the shelves. I sweep. I vacuum. I mop the kitchen floor. I water the houseplants. I do the laundry. The clothes are mostly mine, for the women, who never go out, live in their gowns and robes. I make a gallon thermos of coffee for them to find. It lasts them through the day. I set the breakfast table for them: cereal, cream, sugar, berries. I pack in paper bags two identical lunches: sandwiches, fruit, cookies. I might bake a cake. I take food from the freezer to thaw. I put together a casserole to be cooked for dinner. Once I could hardly make tea with a teabag but I have had to learn. I take out the garbage. I dust, wax, polish. Although nobody but me, except for the occasional repairman, has entered the place these six years, and although only I have eyes to see it, I keep it as tidy and gleaming as if company was expected any minute, God forbid!

Before leaving I walk the dog. There was a time when he would never let me come near him, me nor anybody else except his mistress. Would answer to nobody's call but hers. Bared his teeth if anybody, including me, her husband, approached her. He still does not like me, mutters and growls while I put on his harness, but the tables are turned and now he is dependent upon me. I never pet him but I am no longer afraid of him. Seeing us, a stranger would think it was a blind man being led by his seeing-eye dog. The truth is the other way round. I am the one guiding him. We walk to the end of the next block and back. That, twice a day—for I walk him again before bedtime—is as much as he is up to anymore.

I could afford to retire. If I go on working the reason is not that I enjoy it. I never have. I inherited the business. I have no son or son-in-law, nobody at all, to leave it to, but I could sell it, and for a good sum, for it is profitable. Not all the money in the world could buy me out. The office gets me away from the house for at least some hours of the day.

I keep a car but I use it only for shopping. I walk to work, my only outdoor exercise these days except for tending the grounds. Before, I used to play golf, but not since. I shot in the low eighties. I liked to tee off early in the morning while the dew was still on the ground. I played alone. With nobody to see me I was tempted sometimes to pick up the ball from a bad lie. I never did. Who would I have been fooling?

Our neighbors watch my passage down the street from behind their window curtains. People avoid me. Not because they know the truth about me but out of consideration, respect. To bid me good-day would be an impertinence. For the edification of all I hold my head high.

I know what they say about me because it is what I would say myself were I one of them.

“There goes poor Mr. Randolph. Poor soul! What a life! How he manages to carry on is a wonder. It was bad enough before, with just his wife, but after the accident to the other one—! He could afford to put them both in a home to be cared for, or hire a nurse, a housekeeper, but no, he takes it all upon himself. And the other woman is not even related to him.”

I take it all upon myself because I want nobody else in the house.

Many mornings on my way to work I make a stop at the post office or the branch library, sometimes both. I return the last book I borrowed and choose another, or rather, I never choose one, I just take the next one on the shelf. By mail, recorded books, a state service for the blind, go in and out of our house like the tides.

Once on my way downtown I pretended to be a Catholic. I had seen posted on the door of the church the hours of confession. I went toward the end of the time, hoping to be there alone after the other sinners had confessed and gone.

In the booth I whispered through the curtain, “Father, I have erred.” I said “erred.” I feared that I might not have used the right opening and have revealed that I was not a bona-fide member.

The voice asked me what my sin was, and, being unseen, I told. The priest must have heard a lot of stories not to be shocked at mine. So impersonal a tone came through to me that I wondered whether it might not be a recording. I had expected more individual treatment. He asked me if that was all I had to confess to. I felt like saying, “Isn't that enough!”

The priest assigned me a penance to do and told me to go and sin no more. I did not want to sin anymore, but the feeling of absolution I had hoped for did not come. I felt I had damned myself still further by my faked act of faith.

Mine is monotonous work. It both demands and dulls the mind. Eight, often nine hours of quotations, buy and sell orders. I am the last to leave the office at the end of the day. I am sure my employees say of my working late not that I am money-hungry but rather, “If I had what he's got to go home to I wouldn't be in any hurry either.”

Irene

It happened during one of the periods—the last that was to be (though the cause of that was possibly as much psychological as physical)—when I was in partial remission, always a bad time for me, for it raised hopes soon to be dashed. But a drowning person clutches at a straw, and at the start of that day I was grateful to be able to see even a little for however short a while, the way a soul in hell might be grateful for a moment out of the flames and prays it will last but knows the torment will resume and will be all the more painful for the temporary relief. Knowing it would not last, I never told either of the others. Why spread your disappointments?

The first time I ran to my doctor breathless with my news. Ursula was not yet with me then but already I had to have Rex, my guide dog. My sight was failing like the shortening of the days at the onset of winter. Or to put it another way, it was as though I had been taken captive and forced into exile and watched the shores of my world recede as I sailed away into the foggy and featureless void. Now the ship had unexpectedly turned back and brought me again in sight of home. Dim, to be sure, but discernible.

“Doctor, Doctor!” I can hear myself gushing still, “I'm better! I'm better!! It's a miracle!”

It was no miracle. As gently as he could, the doctor told me that it was in the nature of my ailment that these “remissions” would occur from time to time for a while. But the condition would progress, irreversibly. The coming night could not be pushed back. These were the last glimmerings in the dusk.

Thus I learned from one great disappointment to be thankful for another. How in my condition could I have raised a child?

I had longed for children with all my heart. In this big old house were rooms just waiting for them. We tried for them, my husband and I. We tried determinedly. We tried until the joy went out of the trying. As time passed, and with it, I feared, my desirability, I spent afternoons in beauty parlors, hairdressers' salons. From mail-order houses I bought undergarments that made me blush. But in my lust for motherhood I was shameless. Priestess of love, I made the boudoir my temple, the bed my altar. To make myself alluring I bought wigs, fishnet stockings, false eyelashes, Day-Glo lipstick. The savings account into which we deposited for the children's education was like a monthly offering to the god of fertility. I think my husband believed the fault was mine but all the same feared it might be his. I think that because it was, in reverse, my own feeling: guilt and blame, two sides of one coin—a loser whichever the toss. My fault or his, we lacked parenthood to draw us close, and there comes a time in married life, after the passions cool, when that is needed to sustain it.

I was lonely by myself in the house all day. I saw my husband off to work and wondered how to pass my time until his return. The place was so neat there was nothing for me to do. I longed for the dirt and disorder of a large family.

Neighborhood children still played in the street outside our house then. This graveyard silence had not yet settled around us. I told myself I loved their shouts and laughter, for I feared that envy would be held against me in my hopes for one of my own.

In the course of the afternoon I would, in imagination, experience all the joys—even the tribulations—of motherhood. I nursed, I rocked, I crooned, I sang lullabies. I taught them their first words, their first steps. I cried.

When I missed my first period I trembled with hope, shook with dread. Was I about to fulfill my womanhood, or to lose it? Fearing disillusionment, I put off seeing the doctor. I yearned for morning sickness, outlandish cravings. Childbirth held no fears for me. I panted for the pain.

The story is told that a woman was ordered by her emperor to kill her mother and bring him the heart. On her way with it to the palace the woman stumbled and fell. The heart spoke and said, “Oh! Did you hurt yourself, my darling?” I would have been that kind of mother.

It was my misfortune, or so I thought at the time, to reach the change of life early. With conception no longer a possibility, my ardor cooled. We were considering adoption when my sight began to fail. Now if I have anything to be thankful for it is that there are no children in this house of horrors.

Instead of a child, I got a guide dog.

I was not only dependent on Rex, I felt beholden to him. He had been bred and raised to devote himself entirely to one person, in his case me, like a mate whose marriage was contracted for at birth, pledged to forsake all others, to love, honor and obey.

He was my servant, not my pet. He never frolicked, never nuzzled me, never licked my hand. He was as sober as a bishop. He kept others from me, he kept himself to himself. He and I were linked only by his harness.

His intelligence made him all but human. At once he knew our house from all others as surely as did the postman. He knew the red and the green of traffic lights, he skirted us around puddles, whenever there were steps to climb he led me to the rail. To just one command other than mine would he respond: that of a policeman who stopped the cars for us and signaled him to cross the street.

He slept at the foot of my bed—if he ever slept. I verily believe he knew when my eyes closed and when they reopened. Unlike a hunting dog, whose working hours are part-time, Rex was on duty around the clock, like a doctor on call.

But Rex was my eyes outdoors. He could not help me at the kitchen range, with pouring out the right amount of hot water, nor read to me the labels on medicine bottles, and doing such things myself got harder by the day.

Enter Ursula.

We advertised for a lady's companion. It was a serious step, to take in a stranger to share your home, your life. The first applicants we interviewed were all older women, widows, their children grown and gone away. They depressed me with their solemnity toward my affliction. Ursula alone among them was young. James said something that made her laugh, and that in itself was enough to win her the job.

We had a housekeeper who came twice a week, but Ursula took it upon herself to do the shopping, the laundry, and in the evenings she and James together cooked and served the dinner. I told her that these tasks were not required of her. She was to be a companion, not a housemaid. But what was she to do with herself all day, sit with her hands in her lap looking at me? I think that having grown up in an orphanage she was happy to have a house to run, in being its mistress.