The Spectator Bird (22 page)

Ruth has had no luck finding anyone to substitute for Edith Patterson at the convalescent home. This morning at breakfast she braced
me.
How about coming down and talking to the old folks about contemporary writers? I would be surprised how much they read and how responsive they were.

I said what if I couldn't think of a contemporary writer I wanted to talk about.

“Oh, for heaven's sake, don't be that wayl There are dozens.”

I said name one.

She looked at me pretty stormily. It is her opinion that my distaste for many kinds of contemporary novelists, including the critic-intellectuals, the mythologizers, the fantasizers, the black humorists, the absurds, the grotesques, and the sexualizers, is as pigheaded as my prejudices against the young. She is of course right, I wouldn't argue with her. By definition a prejudice is a principle that its owner does not intend to examine. Which does not prove it is wrong. And what a comforting thing it is.

“How would I discuss the compulsory sex scenes with the old folks?” I said. “Do I start with the accepted major premise: if they aren't fucking it isn't fiction? (Unless, of course, they're sucking, then it's okay too.)”

“Do you have to be as repulsive as you say they are?”

“No. That's why I won't discuss their novels with your old folks.”

“They aren't all like that.”

I said name one.

“Well, if you won't talk about any American, talk about Césare.”

I said Césare was as bad as any of them. The only good thing about him was that he really
liked
women and
amore.
But the effect was about the same.

“Then tell them stories about him. He's a regular mine of stories. Tell them about his visit the other day, they'd love it. Make them laugh.”

I said what if I didn't consider Césare's visit a laughing matter.

She sat up in bed so abruptly that she slopped her coffee. “Oh, what's the
matter
with you? Can't you laugh at yourself any more? Laugh at me, then. Laugh at Minnie. Laugh at Césare. Don't just be a carping old man. It doesn't matter what you say to them, it's the interest you take in them that counts.”

I said what if I didn't take any interest in them. What if they scared the pants off me and gave me the glooms.

“Joe,” she said in despair, “it isn't
you.
You've always been such a joker. And you're not unsympathetic. I know you're not. You're a...
marshmallow
about other people's troubles!”

She sounded so distracted that I quit playing my little game, which when you think of it is a little cruel. Even if I don't want to talk to her shut-ins, I don't have to rub it in. So I fell back on the prepared position of a legitimate excuse. “An aching marshmallow,” I said. “If I go out in the wind the way my joints are now, you'll be taking care of me in bed.”

“Have you been taking your indocin?”

“Popping them like peanuts. And that's another thing, those pills eat away your stomach wall. Two more days and I'll be back to my adolescent ulcers.”

At that moment the “Today” show took a break to let a girl who “teaches college” tell about her headaches, and how she has found that there is something in Anacin, she doesn't know what it is, but it
works.
Ruth, who is dangerously susceptible to suggestion either overt or subliminal, said to me, “Maybe you ought to switch pain
pills if indocin
is so hard on you. Maybe Anacin
would
work. Or aspirin. Most people cure their arthritis with aspirin.”

“Mama,” I said, “you don't
cure
your arthritis with anything. You just chase it back from your borders, you set up a Roman wall to keep it off. That doesn't mean you've done it in. Off in the heather, back in the glens, it's sitting by a peat fire in its kilts, with its dirty knees showing and its teeth gleaming through its beard, telling itself that you mought of kilt it but you ain't whupped it. Then when your empire gets tired, and you have to pull back the legions to fight the Helvetians or somebody, here come the Picts and Scots sneaking down on your wall again with their black knives in their stocking legs. No switching around of the defenders is going to
cure
them. Did you ever hear of old Vortigern, who was a chief among the Romanized Britons? The legions kept the Picts and Scots off him for a good while, but they gave him plenty of bellyaches in the process. Then when the legions left, Vortigern called in Hengist and Horsa and a lot of Jutish raiders to take care of his problem. They were just as good at it as the legions, but they gave poor Vortigem even
bigger
bellyaches.”

She sat staring. “What on earth is all that? All I did was suggest that some other pill might kill the pain just as well, and be easier on you.”

“And all I did was demonstrate that one painkiller is as hard on you as another. Anything that's good for the joints is bad for the stomach. Ask Ben.”

“Oh, Ben! He's an enthusiast like you. Sometimes I wonder if his medicine isn't as much witchcraft as science.”

“But if he advertised on TV you'd believe him.”

Oh, right between wind and water. She stayed irritated through a rerun of the news and through an interview with a Watergate defendant who forgave his persecutors and had faith in the American system. Finally she said, “Well, I don't suppose you should go out, if you feel that bad. But I wish you wouldn't pretend you don't care about those poor old people. You do it just to aggravate me. What if you were in a home like that, wouldn't you want to have things to do and people to talk to and ideas to talk about?”

I said I didn't ever intend to get into a home like that.

“Yes?” she said. “How are you going to avoid it?” But the implications of what she had opened up made her close the lid again. Fretfully she said, “What am I going to do, Joe? I can't read to them the whole two hours. I haven't dared tell them Edith isn't coming, they look forward to her so much. She was so good! She'd play them Chopin and Mozart for a half hour, and then play requests, anything from ‘The Old Oaken Bucket' to
Hair
music. She'd even get them singing, they had a really good time.”

Over her coffee cup she brooded at me, and I saw an idea dawn. “Hey, you know, the Pattersons haven't gone yet, or they wouldn't be going to Ben's tomorrow. I wonder if I couldn't call her and see if just this once more...”

“No,” I said.

“What?”

“No, I wouldn't.”

“Why not?”

“Because they aren't going away. That was an excuse. Ben told me when he and Edith were over the other day. Tom isn't going to make it. The reason she isn't playing for your shut-ins is that she's staying home to help him die.”

I may have said it roughly, for I feel Tom Patterson's death sentence as something close and threatening. Not only does one watch—yet once more—the blotting out of a friend. One is reminded, without needing the reminder, that the line forms on the left. I jarred Ruth. If I am a marshmallow, she is a meringue. She has an affectionate and generous spirit, and she hurts for other people. Staring at me over the rim of her raised cup, she almost whispered, “Oh, why didn't you tell me! Why didn't she?”

“I didn't because Ben thought they want to keep it to themselves, and there wasn't a thing you could do. I suppose Edith didn't for the same reason.”

Taking away a big globed tear from the corner of each eye, she brooded about it. “Yes. If that's what they want, they're entitled to it. Oh damn, I was
afraid
that was the way it was. But I should think their friends might... Shouldn't we, maybe... ? But what's Ben's dinner? Is that a ... ?”

“Farewell? I don't think Tom's that close. He's got weeks, maybe a month or two. I suppose Ben's just making a gesture of solidarity. Business as usual. Help them act as if nothing is changed.”

“Ben's a nice fellow, he really is.”

“Yes.”

Her eyes came up, her questioning black eyebrows rose into her white bangs. “Is that why you've been so out of sorts ? Thinking about Tom and not thinking you should tell me?”

“I almost wish it was,” I said. “That would make me look good instead of just crabby. Maybe it was, some. But ever since Césare blew in on the big storm I've had sand in all my bearings. I don't suppose I was too thrilled to get a glimpse of us through Césare's eyes, either—off behind the garage in the long grass with four flat tires and half our parts gone. Also the mail we keep getting. One week Kenneth's institutionalized in Queens, as effectively dead as if they'd buried him. Next week Roy's dead in Savannah. Two days later we hear Dick's got Parkinson's disease in Princeton. Now Tom's moved into Death Row here. Even that ancient history we've been reading is a reminder of how old and helpless we're all getting. Doesn't it bother you to think of her buried down there in Bregninge, feeding her helpless harelip with a spoon? At our age, news is all bad. I don't
like
standing in line for the guillotine. I don't like being invited to my friends' executions.”

Well before I finished that harangue, I was aware that it was definitely too rough. Ruth thinks she wants all this communion, and talking things out, but you can't tell her what you really feel. That isn't what she wants. She wants to be reassured. So I got up, hobbling like an old grandpappy, with my hand on my lumbago, and limped toward the bathroom door.

“Look,” I said, pausing, “sometime I'll talk to your old folks, that's a promise. But not today. When I do, I'll come on like Rosie Bliven and help them down the golden steps, but today I've got to nurse my rheumatics so I'll be straightened out by tomorrow. I don't want a lecture from Ben on how the villagers of Vilcabamba, Ecuador, all live to be a hundred and thirty, and plow their fields with crooked sticks until they're ninety-eight. Also I don't want Tom Patterson feeling sorry for my lameness.”

“All right,” she said, appeased. “You'd better not even go down to your study. Take a Jacuzzi and wrap up warm and stay in bed all day.”

“Yes, Ma.”

She doesn't like that response, which smacks of irony and insubordination. Disgustedly she went into the other
bathroom.
Through the wall I heard her about her business, then the water running strongly in the tub. After five minutes she came in and said she had drawn me a hot tub and put the Jacuzzi in it. I caught myself in time, and didn't ask why she hadn't inquired whether I
wanted
a Jacuzzi. (My private opinion, diametrically opposed to hers, is that they do me no good.) She means well. Shut up, hold still, I want to take
care
of you.

I was still in the tub, working my stiff hands under the blast of the Jacuzzi's nozzle, when she poked in her head to tell me she was on her way. The sight of me in my bubble bath made her laugh. “You look like Nero, or Petronius, or somebody.”

“No slave girls.”

“Will you be all right? Can I do anything for you before I go?”

“You might hand me a razor blade out of the drawer there, so I can open my veins.”

“Oh, Joe, don't
jokel”

“One minute I'm not my old japery self, and the next I shouldn't joke.”

“Your sense of humor is perverted.” She looked at her watch. “Lord, I'll be late. You stay inside, now. I'll have to do some shopping afterwards, I won't be home till nearly one. Don't sit in the tub too long, twenty mintues is supposed to be enough.”

“Yes, Ma.”

She made a face and went. I sat on in my roaring mechanical massage parlor, a reluctant sybarite. It did actually feel good in the tub. The warmth was relaxing, the Jacuzzi drove and pummeled against whatever ailing part I exposed to it. The
bathroom
blind was up, and sunlight, broken by the wind-moved twigs of the plane tree outside, fluttered on the marble counter, and on the tub, and on me.

Plato's cave, with aqua-therapy. I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine the life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?

I got into a sort of awkward yoga position so that the jet could play on my swollen big toe joints, and sitting that way I held up my arm and felt the muscle. A stringy, old-man's arm, but reassuringly hard. I do more regular physical labor than I did when I was younger. Still, an old man's arm, bony at elbow and wrist, and at its end an old man's hand with enlarged knuckles and raised veins. The chest and belly rising out of the bubbles were an old man's torso, too—too white, too hairy, without resilience.