Winter Birds (33 page)

And see, he says now, moving to another room, here is your other daughter, Veronica, whose mind and body have been wasted from birth, who can do nothing for herself, who can speak no words whatsoever to those who brought her into the world. See her golden hair, her delicate fair skin. See her vacant eyes, her lolling tongue, her convulsions. Now you see her, now you don’t.

Two days ago, the day before Easter Sunday, Steve and Teri woke during the night to find Veronica in the grip of a seizure with no beginning and no end. She stopped breathing, and they rushed her to the hospital, where she began breathing again but only faintly and irregularly. A doctor told them that her heart was worn out. Over Resurrection Day Steve and Teri stood at her bedside hoping and praying—yes, Patrick and Rachel had convinced them by now of the efficacy of prayer—that she would stabilize and open her eyes, that a miracle would happen and they would be able to take her home again.

But from Rachel’s words on the telephone, it is clear to me that they will not bring her home again. And once more I am flooded with the wonder of a love that finds its joy in ceaseless giving with no earthly hope of receiving, that is overcome with grief when the hours of thankless toil, the daily reminders of empty dreams are suddenly over.

I retreat to my recliner and turn on the sound of the television. I do not want to hear Rachel, a mother bereft of her own children, reading from the Bible to another mother whose heart is broken. My own selfishness appalls me, for here is what fills my own heart. Not sympathy for Teri and Rachel, whose journeys through motherhood have been freighted with such sorrow, but sympathy for myself. Better a journey with a sad ending than no journey at all.

Yesterday, on Easter Sunday, Patrick and Rachel did not go to church. They left early in the morning to spend the day at the hospital with Steve and Teri. I believe they knew that Veronica wouldn’t come home. Rachel left bread on the kitchen counter and ham salad in the refrigerator for my lunch. They were gone until late afternoon. “Go lie down,” I heard Patrick say to Rachel when they returned. “I’ll get together something for us to eat.” He came to my door, asked if I had been okay, apologized for lunch. I said nothing, only nodded. There was nothing to say. Perhaps Patrick thought I was upset over lunch, for he apologized again, saying they hated to make me fend for myself and hoped it wouldn’t be necessary again.

It was too much trouble to speak of the insult I felt. Evidently Patrick thinks I do not understand that certain things, such as death and neighborly love, change the meaning of
necessary
. Making a ham salad sandwich for Veronica’s sake, and for Steve and Teri’s, was no hardship, but I did not bother to say this to Patrick.

After that I heard him in the kitchen clattering about for some time, and when he came back to my door, he had a request. “Aunt Sophie, I’m sorry to put you out again, but would you mind coming to the kitchen table to eat tonight? I’m not as good at this as Rachel, and it would help if I could serve it all at once.” It was the first time I could remember Patrick’s admitting inferiority in any area.

He had found a box of pizza mix in the cupboard, so this was our supper. A Chef Boyardee pepperoni pizza, baked on a rectangular cookie sheet instead of a round pizza pan. Rachel came to the table in her bathrobe. “I hope you like pizza, Aunt Sophie,” she said, something Patrick had not thought to ask, of course.

I nodded. The truth was I liked pizza very much. As a younger woman, I could eat a large one by myself, often did so. Patrick had made one for the three of us. The pizza was sitting in the pan in the center of the table, with three plates and forks arranged around it. Patrick had not thought to set out napkins. Or beverages.

He prayed a long, fervent prayer in which he begged for God’s “tender mercies to be poured out on our dear friends and their helpless little girl.” He also said this: “And if it be your will to take her up into your presence, to make her whole and well, to serve as one of your choicest angels for all eternity, may it please us to accept this as from your good and wise hand.” Evidently Patrick believes in a God who is pleased to create damaged goods only to perfect them later, after their pathetic days on earth are done. Such easy thinking conveniently settles the problem of deformed children. There’s nothing like a little trouble on earth to make the idea of eternal bliss more glorious.

After the prayer Patrick said, “Uh-oh,” then snapped his fingers and went to the refrigerator. He brought back three cans of 7-Up and set one beside each plate. Then he snapped his fingers again and brought back napkins. These are the kinds of cartoon gestures one might expect to see from a man like Patrick: snapping his fingers, raising one finger and saying, “Ah-ha,” hitting his forehead with the heel of his hand. He would not approve of Samantha’s nose twitching. No doubt he would consider
Bewitched
a wicked program making light of sorcery, dabbling in the occult.

Meanwhile Rachel was cutting the pizza into squares. She served me first, then Patrick, then herself.

As we ate, Patrick told me that Veronica was “slipping away,” that the doctors were not expecting her to “come around this time.” They thought she had “gone” at one point while they were there, but then she shuddered and began breathing again, shallow ragged breaths. Mindy was there, too, he said, sitting in a chair by the bed, not saying a word, looking “like death warmed over.” It would not occur to Patrick that such an expression was tasteless.

“It was the strangest thing, though,” Patrick said. “Mindy reached over one time and started rubbing the back of Veronica’s hand, and—You saw it when it happened, didn’t you, Rachel?” Rachel nodded and Patrick continued. “And Veronica all of a sudden went stiff and held her breath like she was surprised—” Patrick paused to reenact these details—“and then she turned her hand
over
.” He stopped, took another big bite of pizza, and chewed for a while. “Maybe it was just a reflex or something,” he said, “but it looked for all the world like she wanted to hold Mindy’s hand. Didn’t it, Rachel?” Rachel nodded again.

“I never noticed before that she didn’t have a thumb on that one hand, did you?” Patrick added. He looked at Rachel, but she gave no response. Perhaps she was thinking, as I was, that a defect of that nature in a child like Veronica was hardly worthy of note.

We ate in silence for a while before Patrick resumed. “Anyway, Mindy put her palm against Veronica’s, and she sat there like that for the longest time. And then you know what she said?” It was a stupid question. Of course I didn’t know what she said. I was not there.

“She said, ‘I felt her
push
against my hand.’ She said it real soft, like she was talking to herself, but we all heard her. And Steve said she had probably just jerked a little, and then Mindy got mad and said she knew the difference between a push and a jerk and what she had felt was a push.”

I tried to see it from Mindy’s perspective. Watching your sister die, you might want to believe something impossible. And Steve’s perspective was just as easy to see. With his man’s mind, without stopping to think, Steve had merely stated the obvious. A child with such neurological impairment, a child who had never once shown receptivity to human touch or registered recognition of faces or voices, could not be expected to respond to her sister’s touch on her deathbed.

Did Veronica press Mindy’s hand or not? Who can tell? One believes what he wants to believe. There are mysteries past explaining.

But man seeks explanation. Ambiguity—this is what it is called in literature. An author leaves a matter open for multiple interpretations. It could be this, or it could be that. “Ambiguity of Purpose in
Measure for Measure
.” This was a paper of Eliot’s rejected for publication many times. It was a paper I typed many times, making minor alterations as instructed. But still it was rejected. It was the cause of many of his black moods. I found it among his things when I destroyed the contents of his desk. And though I burned the paper years ago, I remember well the sentence with which Eliot had ended it, a sentence he retained through each draft. Quoting from, and agreeing with, another Shakespearean scholar named G. B. Harrison, he concluded that
Measure for Measure
was “a flawed play, the soul of which became too great for its body.”

Rachel hangs up the telephone in the kitchen and appears at my doorway. “Aunt Sophie? That was Teri calling from the hospital.” She speaks loudly, over the closing music of
Bewitched
.

I open my eyes and look at her. Her hair appears not to have been combed this morning, the crest above her brow standing on end as if electrified. “Veronica has died,” I say.

Rachel bows her head and presses her hand against her mouth.

“Her soul became too great for her body,” I say. The words fall from my lips; I do not mean to be flippant. Rachel raises her eyes and looks at me briefly, then shifts her gaze to the window, her forehead wrinkled. I imagine her later tonight saying to Patrick, “Do you know what Aunt Sophie said when I told her? What do you suppose she meant by that? Or maybe I misunderstood her. The television was on loud.”

A soul too great for her body. It is the kind of thing Patrick would latch on to, fitting it to his idea of a transfigured Veronica floating about heaven as one of God’s prize angels. I can imagine him volunteering to say a few words at the funeral, then standing, pausing dramatically, lifting a hand as if pronouncing a benediction, and saying solemnly, “We gather today, dear friends, to pay tribute to a precious child whose soul became too great for her body.”

“The funeral will be on Wednesday,” Rachel says, and then she turns and leaves, wiping her eyes with the loose end of her bathrobe belt. A few minutes later she comes to my door again, wearing her denim jeans and a T-shirt. “I’ll be back,” she says. “I’m going over to feed Stonewall and let him out for a little while.” She dabs at her nose with a tissue.

“Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?” These were words I heard Patrick read from the Bible last night. The pizza finished, Patrick dished up bowls of vanilla ice cream drizzled with chocolate syrup. When we were done, he said, “You know, it just doesn’t feel like Easter Sunday when you don’t go to church. Why don’t we read the resurrection story from the Bible?” I rose at once and walked out of the kitchen. I could have closed the door to my apartment, but I didn’t. I went to my recliner and sat down. It was growing dark outside by now, but I didn’t turn on a light.

Why did I leave my door open, knowing what was to come through it? And why did I sit in the dark? Why did I accept sound but refuse light? These, too, are ambiguities. Perhaps sound and light are symbols, perhaps not. But this I know. I heard Patrick read the Easter story from the book of John. As before, I could tell his reading was not for Rachel alone but for me, as well. I heard the story in the dark—that Jesus was buried in a borrowed tomb, that the disciples and Mary Magdalene were distressed to find the tomb empty, that Mary recognized the voice but not the face of Jesus in the garden, that she did not answer the questions he asked her, that when she knew he was Jesus she called him Master.

Patrick read until he came to these words: “‘But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.’” Then he stopped. Unlike Shakespeare in
Measure for Measure
, there is no ambiguity of purpose in John’s Gospel.

In
Measure for Measure
the duke disguises himself as a friar and visits Claudio in prison. Life, he says to the convicted man, is not a thing to be counted dearly. Let it go and you will spare yourself the disappointment of seeking things you cannot keep, of growing old yet finding no pleasure in the wealth you have accumulated. This thing called life, says the duke, is greatly overrated. Death—that is the better way, he says, for it is death “that makes these odds all even.”

And so I sit in my recliner in the middle of the day, a rich old woman, thinking about Veronica, a poor dead child. I close my eyes and try to imagine her small body fitted with the wings of an angel. I see her lift her arms and spread her hands to fly, hands that now have ten fingers instead of nine.

Chapter 26

The Web of Our Life Is of a Mingled Yarn

Much of the purple finch’s territory is shared by its cousin the Cassin’s finch. Because of their close resemblance, bird watchers often confuse the two. An experienced watcher, however, knows that the back of the male purple finch has a more reddish cast than that of the Cassin’s finch
.

For the first time since coming here to live five months ago, I have left Patrick’s house. If spring were to choose a single day to showcase her beauties, this might be the day. The sun is shining in a blue sky. The air is mild and fragrant. The occasion is no picnic, however, no shopping trip, no celebration dinner, but a funeral. Not the funeral of a family member or close friend but of someone with whom I never exchanged a word. No need to chronicle the standard formalities, the funereal trappings, the trite words spoken and sung, the tears shed, yet I will say that Patrick was indeed asked to take part.

“We want you to read some verses from the Bible,” Steve had said to him in the kitchen on Monday night. “You pick them. We don’t really have any suggestions. Just read something you think would be good.” Steve’s voice was weary.

And now I am present to hear what Patrick has chosen. It is from the book of Revelation. This is a book I have read from the red Bible I found on the bookshelf in my apartment. The first twenty chapters of Revelation are not happy ones, nor even comprehensible at times, with their visions of beasts, trumpets, scrolls, and fowls that swoop down to devour the flesh of men great and small.

But Patrick reads from the twenty-first chapter. I suppose these are verses often read at funerals, for they speak of old things passing away—things such as tears and sorrow and pain. And death, of course, although for now death has not passed away. It is all too real for those hearing the sound of Patrick’s voice.