The Age of Miracles
The Age of Miracles
Ellen Gilchrist
Copyright © 1995 by Ellen Gilchrist
Originally published in print form 1995
All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from Don Congdon Associates; the agency can be reached at
[email protected]
The author is grateful for permission to include the following previously copyrighted material: “Begin the Beguine” by Cole Porter. Copyright © 1935 by Warner Bros., Inc. (renewed). All rights reserved. Made in the U.S.A. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications, Inc.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
.
Cover design by Barbara Aronica Buck
For Pierre
“It cannot be love, for at your age
the torment in the blood is quiet.
It waits upon the judgment.”
William Shakespeare
“I am torn in two, but I will conquer myself. I will take scissors and cut out the beggar. I will take a crowbar and pry out the broken pieces of God in me.”
Anne Sexton
Contents
Too Much Rain, or, The Assault of the Mold Spores
The Raintree Street Bar and Washerteria
The Age of Miracles
A Statue of Aphrodite
I
N NINETEEN EIGHTY-SIX I was going through a drought. I was living like a nun. I was so afraid of catching AIDS I wouldn't sleep with anyone, not even the good-looking baseball scout my brothers ran in one weekend to see if they couldn't get me “back into the swing of things.” My brothers love me. They couldn't stand to watch me sit out the game.
My name is Rhoda Manning, by the way. I write for magazines. I've lived in a lot of different places but mostly I live in the Ozark Mountains in a little town called Fayetteville. “I live in a small city, and I prefer to dwell there that it may not become smaller still.” Plutarch.
During nineteen eighty-six and nineteen eighty-seven, however, I lived in Jackson, Mississippi, in the bosom of my family. I had gotten bored with the Ozarks and I wanted to make my peace with my old man. “The finest man I've ever known,” as I wrote in the dedication to a book of poems. I don't think he ever read them. Or, if he did, he didn't read them very hard. He reads the
Kiplinger Newsletter
and
Newsweek
and
Time
and books he orders from the conservative wing of the Republican Party. He has large autographed photographs of Barbara and George Bush and Nancy and Ronald Reagan and flies an American flag in the front yard. You get the picture. Anyway, I admire him extravagantly and I was riding out the AIDS scare by being an old maid and eating dinner nearly every night with my parents.
Then this doctor in Atlanta fell in love with me and started writing me letters. He fell in love with a piece I did for
Southern Living
magazine. It was all about how we used to sit on porches at night and tell stories and the lights would go out when it stormed and we would light candles and coal-oil lamps until the power company could get the lines repaired. One of those cute, cuddly “those were the good old days” pieces that you mean while you are writing them. Later, you remember that you left out mosquitoes and flies and how worried we were that it wouldn't rain and make the cotton or that it would rain at cotton-picking time. The reason I leave that out is that I was a child at that time and thought the world was made of gold. It was made of gold and my daddy came home from the war unscathed and mostly we were able to pick the cotton and the black people on Hopedale Plantation were not miserable or unhappy and were treated with love and respect by my deeply religious family. I will never quit saying and writing that no matter how much people who were not there want to rewrite my personal history.
Anyway, this doctor was recently widowed. He was the head of obstetrics for Emory University Hospital and he fell in love with my article and the airbrushed photograph of myself I was putting into magazines at that time. I guess I was still having a hard time admitting I was pushing the envelope of the senior citizen category. Anyway, I kept putting this soft, romantic photograph into magazines and I still think it was that goddamn photograph that caused all the trouble and cost me all that money. I figured up the other day what my affair with the widowed physician cost me and it is upwards of ten thousand dollars. Do you know how many articles I have to write for magazines to make ten thousand dollars?
Back to the letters from the doctor. They were full of praise for my writing and “an intense desire to have you come and speak at our hospital enrichment program. We are very interested in keeping our staff in touch with the finer things in life and have a series of programs featuring writers and painters and musicians. We could pay you two thousand dollars and all your expenses and would take good care of you and see to it that we don't waste too much of your valuable time. Anytime in April or May would be fine with us. If you are at all interested in coming to light up our lives with a short reading or lecture please call collect or write to me at the above address. You could read the fine piece from
Southern Living
. And perhaps answer a few questions from the audience. Yours most sincerely, Carter Brevard, M.D.”
Can you imagine any fifty-year-old woman turning that down? I could read between the lines. I knew he was in love with me before I even got to the second paragraph. I've fallen in love with writers through their work. And here's the strangest thing. You don't care what they turn out to be. If you fall in love with the words on the page, you are hooked. They can be older than you thought they were, or messily dressed or live in a hovel. When their eyes meet yours all you hear is the siren song that lured you in.
Of course this doesn't work for romance or mystery writers or people whose main objective is to get on the
New York Times
bestseller lists. This only works for writers when they are singing the song the muse gives them. I don't sing it all the time, like my cousin Anna did, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I trust myself enough to “know the truth and to be able to tell the truth past all the things which pass for facts,” and when I do, people who read it fall in love. Re: Carter Brevard, M.D. Actually, if you subtract the two thousand dollars he paid me, I guess he only cost me eight thousand dollars. Which isn't all that much, considering the fact that I was living in an apartment and eating dinner with my parents every night. I guess I could afford eight thousand dollars to remember how nice it is to come. Have an orgasm, I suppose I should say, since this might make it into a magazine. But not
Southern Living
. They don't publish anything about what happens after people leave the porches and go to bed. It's a family magazine.
So I gave Doctor Brevard a date in April and his secretary called and made travel plans and sent me a first-class airline ticket, which is an absurd waste of money between Jackson, Mississippi, and Atlanta, Georgia, and made me a reservation for a suite of rooms at a four-star hotel and in short behaved as though I were the queen of England coming to pay a visit to the provinces. It was “Doctor Brevard wants to be sure you're comfortable,” and “Doctor Brevard will meet your plane,” and “Oh, no, Doctor Brevard wouldn't hear of you taking a taxi.”
So now there are two people in love. Doctor Carter Brevard in love with an airbrushed photograph and a thousand-word essay on porches and yours truly in love with being treated like a queen.
My parents were very interested in this visit to Atlanta. “You ought to be thinking about getting married, Sister,” my father kept saying. “It would be more respectable.”
“It's against the law for me to get married,” I would answer, wondering how much money someone made for being the head of obstetrics for Emory University Hospital. “I have used up my allotment of marriages.”
February and March went by and unfortunately I had gained several pounds by the time April came. I trudged down to Maison Weiss and bought a sophisticated black three-piece evening suit to hide the pounds and an even more sophisticated beige Donna Karan to wear on the plane. I was traveling on Friday, April the sixth, leaving Jackson in the middle of the morning and scheduled to speak that night to the physicians of Emory University and their significant others. I was an envoy from the arts, come to pay my respects to applied science. I put on the beige outfit and high-heeled wedge shoes and got on the plane and read Denise Levertov as we sailed through the clouds. “The world is too much with us⦠Oh, taste and seeâ¦.”
He was waiting at the gate. A medium-sized white-haired man with nice eyes and a way about him of someone who never took an order and certainly almost never met planes. I could tell I was not exactly what he had ordered, but by the time we had collected my luggage and found a skycap and started to the car he was taking a second look. Letters can always win out over science. Letters can articulate itself, can charm, entice, beguile. Science is always having to apologize, is hidden in formulas, statistics, inexact results, closed systems. An obstetrician can hardly say, “I saw a lot of blood this morning. Pulled a screaming baby from its mother's stretched and tortured vagina and wondered once again if there isn't a better way.”
He tried. “I did three emergency C-sections in the middle of the night. I'm going crazy with this AIDS thing. I'm trying to protect an entire operating room and I'm not even allowed to test the patient. It's the charity cases that scare me. Fourteen-and fifteen-year-old drug addicts. My sons are doctors. I was covering for one of them last night. Sorry if I don't seem up to par.” He opened the door to a Lincoln town car and helped me in.
“I know what you mean,” I answered. “I haven't been laid in fourteen months I'm so afraid of this thing. My friends call from all over the United States to talk about it. We're all scared to death. I don't think there's anyone in the world I would trust enough to fuck.” Except maybe a physician, I was thinking. I don't suppose a doctor would lie to me. He got behind the wheel and started driving, looking straight ahead. “My wife died last year,” he said.
“That's too bad. What did she die of?”
He took a deep breath. He went down a ramp and out onto an expressway. “She died of lung cancer. You don't smoke, do you?”
“I haven't smoked since the day Alton Ochsner told my mother it caused cancer. She was visiting them one summer and came home and told us of his findings. I don't do things that are bad for me. I'm too self-protective. I'm the healthiest person my age I know and I'm going to stay that way. I can't stand to be sick. If I got cancer I'd shoot myself.” There, that should do it, five or six birds with one paragraph.
“I hope you enjoy the evening. It's at the University Club. The staff will be there and the resident physicians and their wives. They're all very eager to meet you.”
“I hope I won't disappoint them.”
“Oh, I don't see how that could happen.”
He delivered me to the hotel and three hours later picked me up. He was wearing a tuxedo and looked very handsome. I began to forget he was of medium height. In the last few years I have decided such concerns limit the field too much for the pushing the senior citizen category. After all, I don't want to breed with the man.
The dinner and reading went well but there were two incidents that in retrospect seem worth noting. Two things I did not give enough weight to when they occurred. There was a woman with him when he picked me up. A thin, quasi-mousy woman about my age who introduced herself as his interior decorator. “I'm doing his country house in English antiques,” she told me.
“I used to have a house full of antiques,” I answered. “Then one day I hired a van and sent them all back to my mother. I couldn't face another Jackson press or bearclaw chair leg. I like simple, contemporary things.”
“He likes antiques,” the woman said. “In furniture, that is.” She and Doctor Carter Brevard laughed and looked at each other with shy understanding and I felt left out. Later, in the ladies room at The University Club she made certain to tell me that they were not “lovers.” Did he tell her to tell me that, I wondered. Or did she think it up for herself.
Later, while we were drinking wine and eating dinner I was telling the people on my right about my father. “He's a heroic figure,” I was saying. “He has never told a lie. He's too stuck up to lie to anyone. And he's very funny. When he was about seventy-five he decided he was getting impotent. He told everyone about it. He told my brothers the minute that he noticed it. They said he came down to the office that morning shaking his head and laughing about it. âI can't do it anymore,' he told them. âImagine that.'”