The Light of Evening (29 page)

of simulating hospitality. His wife was in the country. I had heard him say so on the telephone, heard that she was in Lincolnshire, and thought, uselessly, of Lady Deadlock, dreading the footfalls on the ghost walk.

Yet despite the receiving rooms with view of garden outside, his patients were put to wait in a cupboard where you wouldn’t put a dog. A kitchen chair had been wedged in there, an abode so dark, so dismal that it could only help to further the heebiejeebies.

The day I brought my suicide dream he got quite conversant. The dream was thus. I had gone to Holland to avail myself of their suicide hospitality. It was a sort of garage, the light from the fluorescent tubes ghastly bright. We were told to sit for a given time. The waiting was perhaps to allow the sufferers to make peace with themselves or maybe write a last letter to kith and kin. Not once did we acknowledge one another. Then a few minutes prior to the appointed time there was a warning bell, like a bell at the interval in the theater, and we all stood up and formed an orderly line to go in and meet our end. At the very last minute I panicked. I realized that my children would see it as an everlasting betrayal and so I went to an attendant and asked to be excused, to be allowed to turn back, except that it was too late.

When I told him he mulled, looked at the notes he had already made on my condition, and came up with the crassest explanation imaginable. A few weeks previous I had wakened one morning to find that in my garden there were several pairs of men’s shoes thrown about
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some polished, some not, some without shoelaces, and all black. Moreover an apple that had been growing on a young apple tree was also missing. It had not fallen to the ground and there was no butt, no pips, just a tiny wound on the trunk where it had been snapped off. Naturally I was apprehensive, twenty or twenty-five pairs of shoes thrown into my garden and an apple mysteriously consumed. Some-

one had been in that garden while I slept. I was certain. He ignored that. According to him the dream mirrored my anxiety at coming to him, a new doctor, and that perhaps I had wanted to taste one of the apples in the bowl on his kitchen table. Pure balderdash. I was at my wits’ end trying to explain to him the most horrific part of the dream, the moment when I changed my mind but would not be allowed back. Herded into a cul-de-sac where a team of women stood, some holding white kidney-shaped enamel spittoons and others with cutthroat razors. I even tried to describe the scream, how endless it was, and in the aftermath, getting up, quaking, going down to boil milk, because there was something about boiled milk that seemed normal.

I only sat in that cramped cupboard for one more appointment and he was offended at my decision to quit.

A swish dining room, orange trees and lemon trees in big terracotta urns. A sepulchral maitre d’ who assigned me to an obscure table. As fate would have it a gentleman, also unaccompanied, was at a companion table, two solitaries, in the wide curve of the bay window.

Ere long, he began to send the Portia “fair speechless messages.” Then the maitre d’, to my surprise, came over and with a courtesy that had not hitherto been evident, asked, “Would madam wish for a glass of red wine?” Madam drank white wine. The gentleman bowed by way of consent. Rhone, Rhine, or Loire? Either. Something with a nose in it perhaps? Yes, something with a nose in it. A bottle arrived in a pewter ice bucket, beaded with dew, and he made much of offering me the cork to smell. A glass of red wine and a glass of white wine raised in mutual salutation.
Salute. Sante. Skol.
Cheers.
Slainte.
The west’s awake, the west’s asleep, and down the hatch.

Presently and with an alacrity, monsieur’s plate, cutlery, and glassware are plonked down at my table, he himself bowing obsequiously, charmed at the ease and glide of it all. He was a coffee

maestro, went into raptures about coffee beans, their nuttiness, their taste, their aroma, their aftertaste, their after-aromas, the different soils they throve in. He was from Turin. Was the Turin shroud, which was said to be placed over the face of the crucified Christ and bore his image, authentic or a hoax. Who knows, Bellissima! It was not a topic to his liking. The wines, coffees, and cuisines of the regions in which he traveled were his forte. Studied human nature and female beauty from the vantage of many a dining room.

He ate heartily, jambon with artichoke, duck a l’orange, and then announced exuberantly his craving for zuppe Inglese. The waiter was uncomprehending, then scornful, holding up the carte where there was souffle, crepe au poivre, or tarte citron. No no. The coffee maestro must have his zuppe Inglese. A contretemps. “A little joke, monsieur, a traveler’s joke.”

Afterward a digestiva and a night stroll. A very select street, high shuttered windows, the shutters swinging open, the dwellers walking their small dogs, the last word in respectability. Back in the lobby a courteous goodnight as he betook himself to a bar in the cellar, no doubt to order a liqueur, having done the gallant with Bellissima.

The unfinished bottle of wine had been sent up to my bedroom. It lay there, wobbling in the ice bucket, and my sky-blue nightgown was draped decorously across the largest, fattest white bolster I have ever seen. There were two doors to the bedroom, an outer door padded with red leather and studded with red buttons, then a second door that led to the inner sanctum and guaranteed silence.

Tap-tap-tap.
There was even a little miniature knocker on the outer door. He had changed into a blazer, stood with a certain braggart air, his eyes keen but slightly contemptuous as though to say, “I always know when a woman wants to get laid.” Without any demur he leaned in and switched out the bedroom light, confining us to a dark and speechless confessional, the unfamil-

iar mouth, the unfamiliar cock, the unfamiliar cunt, the lunging thrusts, swift and loveless and sinuous, in which nothing was allowed in, not even you, Mother.

The woman doctor I consulted was less of a wall than the two ponderous gentlemen. Bertha was her name. Her eyes were soft and dark as sloes and the fact that she was Eastern held out even greater promise. I thought that she, or maybe another, could reach in and pull out all the tribulation and the mountainous bile. These thoughts often became fanciful and I pictured different methods, many surgical, then recalled my mother putting wire down the throttles of young chickens to cure them of their pip. She would cure me of my pip, I thought.

I would arrive early and walk up and down her wide, windswept street. I say windswept because there was always building work and hence rubbish and grit flying about, along with loose bolts from the scaffolding that were a hazard. They were white stucco houses, several stories high, with basements, one of which was her consulting room, number forty-eight.

I would keep my eyes on her door
—
it was a black door with a knocker that jammed
—
and wait for the patient preceding me to be helped out. She was a younger woman in a wheelchair and a chauffeur came to collect her just minutes before she was due out, then carry her up the steps. There was something so poignant about this young woman being carried up those steps, making sure always to smile, and then as he went back to get the wheelchair she looked out the car window, gazing and forlorn.

After me there was a man, tall, owl-like, with owlish eyes and metallic gray hair, shoulder-length, which I reckoned was a wig.

One day the Owl man was there ahead of me and, to my consternation, as soon as the chauffeur arrived and descended the rickety stairs, he followed and stationed himself in the doorway. He spoke to Bertha after the chauffeur and the young woman had gone and in those moments I became frantic at the prospect

of losing my precious appointment. She was nodding, listening, as he was obviously giving her a cock-and-bull story about having to catch a train or an airplane and she was falling for it. She saw me, saw my importuning, and presently he was coming back up the steps, muttering and with a galled expression.

Months later I did something extreme. I rang Bertha up one evening, invited her over, implying that it was important.

She came, muffled up. What a thrill it was, what a clandestine thrill it was to see her remove her garments and throw them off one by one, her scarf, her hat, her coat, and her black kid gloves with their zillions of little wrinkles. She crossed from the land of wide streets to the narrow street where I live, rows of Victorian cottages that adjoin or face each other but remain secretive, in one a window box with a few geraniums that survive the frosts, another with a dusty paisley curtain up against the window and wisteria on the double-fronted house, twice blooming, the trunk in winter pared back to the bone, bony and with a sallow thinness.

She was glowing. The fur collar around her throat brought to my mind a painting Rubens did of his second wife, who though clad in white ermine seemed stark naked. Bertha had taken trouble with her makeup, kohl under the eyes and the amethyst choker deepened the dark pools of her eyes.

We ate and drank and lolled, sat on big cushions by the fire, she so plump and languorous and confiding, telling tales of a childhood in Alexandria, a rocking horse with jade stones for eyes, orchards of pomegranates that when ripe she and her sister would trample on, visiting uncles, all of whom had a thing for her and she knew even then just how much rein to give them, then the dancing in the evening in the drawing room, parents and children and guests and cousins, dancing to an orchestra that had been summoned from the city. The fact that I had not danced was of no consequence to her. She said I would find such a freedom in it and even, perhaps, such pleasure. There we were

dancing, my doctor Bertha and me. Her womanly arms soft but firm as junket, the musk smell of her perfume new, dancing as though in the fields of youth, the steps as wild and as fluid as she decreed them, in and out of the various downstairs rooms, rooms that had been crying out for a bit of life and thence into the garden, regardless of the season, where, in the aftermath of a shower of rain, the air was damp and refreshing.

Soon as she got her breath back she broached it, but very tentatively. I had said on the phone that her coming to see me was important. How could I tell her that it was, but now that it was not. How could I tell her that for the twenty-eight years since I first read it as a young wife, I had clung to the fable of the Steppenwolf, believing that his redemption would also become mine. I had thought and thought of Harry Haller as he chanced on the black sheen of wet asphalt in an unfamiliar quarter of the old town, chanced upon fallen lettering that when pieced together read “Magic Theater for Madmen Only.” Going inside he encountered Hermine, the mysterious hermaphrodite who taught him the tango and many of life’s sweet poisons. But sitting there with her, I knew that Harry Haller’s magic theater was not our magic theater, no more than Proust’s hawthorns in all their pink and tender effulgence could be our hawthorns, my mother’s and mine, our hawthorns and our selves belonging off there in that sacral and saturate place and just as dearly as I had longed for her to come, I now longed for her to be gone, so that I could allow in the wolf of loneliness, at last.

Human begetting raw raw raw. A scorching day, the smell of the elderflower sickly, sickening. I was inside of you. Being banished. Wave after wave of it, hour after hour. Your blood, your bloodshed, and my last stab at living. Between us, that blood feud, blood knot, blood memory. How can I know? I don’t know. I do know. It’s what we know before the words that is known. At the end of your tether, alone, alone as only the dying are. Except that

it did not turn out as you had planned. So little does. I picture you walking back, the heaving desolation, blood running down your thighs, down your legs, jellied blobs of it, and the drops here and there spangling the dry grass. Your Gethsemane.
Oh Father, oh Mother, forgive us, for we know not what we do.

PART VII

Dilly

dilly is sitting up, her bed made, partly dressed for a journey, her face pale and drawn, dark shadows under her eyes, and a hunted look.

All she needs is her coat, hat, and shoes to be brought from the cloakroom. It is only a matter of a day; she will have returned before nightfall. These are her words that she repeats again and again, fearing she will be thwarted. The young nurse puzzles, thinks it ought to be okayed with someone higher up, whereupon Dilly asks to see Sister Consolata, only to learn that Sister had to fill in on a two-day retreat for a nun that got mumps.

“I’m my own boss anyhow,” she says then quite commandingly and asks for her garments and the walking stick that Sister Consolata had put aside for her husband.

“Is it a funeral?” the little nurse asks kindly.

“Listen here … do you know anyone who could drive me?”

“I know one man … Bronco … he’ll get you there and back but he’s a terror on the road … umpteen crashes …”

“Like a good girl would you ring him for me … just do it on your own bat,” Dilly says, then foolishly and contrary to her resolution she tells how she is going home to see her solicitor, to change her will, because as things stand, it could only lead to trouble. She delves in her purse for the coins for the pay phone, the little nurse refusing them, saying she can use the office phone as there’s no one on duty yet.

“Are you sure you’re strong enough to go, missus?”

“It’s a flying visit.”

She drinks the tea without tasting it, eats the toast without tasting, without chewing, her mind like that hold-all in the pantry where things were flung, sharp knives, scissors, razorblades, implements.