Chapter 9.
"The Letter to Emily"
Chapter 9. The Run.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, it was morning yet the faint remnants of the dream were still fresh. It was the dream of flying and playing and friends and running and the Beatles. He was a boy and had been moving something across the lawn where his father’s business associates had been standing. He was aware of his boy’s status among men when they regarded him as an unwanted interruption.
In the dream, one said “Go back to work, Son.”
He rolled over, warm in the dim lit room with the first grey of dawn overhead and a single chirruping voice for time.
Today he would run again, would will that body up and away.
The more he thought of his home, his own home far away in Alabama, the more resolved he was to return. To live there, not here among the ancient memories of childhood and old wrestlers.
The car salesman, the janitor and the professor, he thought. Eddie had said something about like that describing them, once teammates on a championship team, each a weight class champion. Like a children’s rhyme. He would resist the circumstances that drove him from his own home, and he heard himself think.
For the last three years, he had carried that mortgage alone. A spectacular home he hadn’t lived in more than a few consecutive months now for five years. Ever since his bid for tenure was refused, it was as if their home, Brooke House, and the source of cash to hold it, were mutually repulsive.
Where he had awakened, was his mother’s place. She had won it in the divorce settlement years ago. Twenty. Not his. No longer. And it seemed each visit back to River Falls would only remind him of that girl and the waterfall, and when he returned without his wife and daughter, it was worse, the sense of being driven back without the full measure of successes he had nurtured over the years. This was all wrong, this wait on lawyers and vague answers.
Run.
In moments, he was treading down the hill in the early mists so common to that region of upstate New York. The run first thing, cleared his imagination of dreams.
* * *
The small white car swung round the circuit, carefully avoiding traffic coming up the hill from the Country Club. He mused while turning that such would be named a ‘circus’ in London, the traffic joined together in a ring encircling the monument.
Civil War?
No, revolution. The Revolution. Maybe even the French and Indian Wars. Most of the small villages in this part of New England and New York had, standing sole sentry atop a granite pedestal, the same sullen Yank, eyes mutely averted for the fallen.
The Volkswagen Super Beetle completed its turn and leapt up the hill, downshifting.
Moses Luddington.
Moses, he repeated to himself yet again. Then, Moses, as old as.
On the far left, the provincial hospital perched above Tigananock, presiding over births and deaths of the sleepy hamlet.
The fat droplets of rain spattered the windshield and he heard the repetitive mechanical grunts from the wiper motor. It had been years since his last visit.
She was there, still. The tiny wizened woman who made even the very old seem intact.
The nurse at the desk smiled approvingly when he asked for directions to Esther’s room. All around sat the unknowing, sitting together or apart, eyes vacant, years since vision and sense had departed them.
They all seemed shorter than his own stature, and he was aware of their smallness the same way a parent is conscious of scale on entering a child’s classroom.
The rain intensified as he stepped into the dark lit room, and one patient was dozing noiselessly, mouth agape, hair and face as white as the pillow, billowing out on both sides of her tiny face.
Esther sat across the room, staring into space behind her goggle-like lenses, hands quivering as if interrupted in midst of a task she had forgotten.
He glanced at the other, sleeping, sorry, for he could not whisper to his grandmother Esther and be heard by her, and it was rare he could make himself understood with one telling of it.
She seemed to finally acknowledge him as he sat there waiting, not to frighten or upset her with his arrival.
They talked the vague expressions of two not knowing whether the other understood, fumbling for some common ground. E. Glenn, her son, had warned she might not recognize him, but as the ancient lady pushed out her comments with great effort, there came a spark, an old recognition, magnified and refracted through her heavy lenses. Her feeble old hands he took in his own, held them within the compass of his own, warming them.
Yes.
He felt guilty for his billeting in her room at E. Glenn’s house on Factoryville Road, but they had been wrong. She did remember. She could not hear what she would not hear, the shouting dullness of people and family to make her senile.
He breathed into his cupped hands, held hers in one hand and reached around with the narrow span of her shoulders other to hug her.
The spark grew brighter.
“Do you remember, Gramma, when I was in school and you lived on Orville Street, and I would stop by your apartment on the way walking home, for tea?”
She began to smile and it was uncertain, but the quavering head seemed to vacillate between a tremor and a nod. Her eyes were smiling, followed by the slightest amusement in the way her lips were pursed.
No, it was a smile.
He stifled back his tears and could not, for the life of him, know why this flood, just then, from his own eyes. Guilt at not coming sooner? The sadness of ancient times long gone? For the passing of age and his own youth or this vision of what his own future might hold? Anger at the indignity of imprisonment among the witless and vacant?
For waterfalls and the young woman in the prime of her pale, naked beauty, treading water?
He wondered if Susan would become Esther years hence when all the children, the poetry and the music had left her body, and what Esther might have written had she been able to capture this moment of her long life as she had in all the earlier moments of her days in the books of poetry she had published.
She looked up at him through the corner of her eye.
He continued with his memory of visiting her when he worked a construction crew summers between high school and college.
“…and you would serve me tea at your wonderful old walnut dining table with its Queen Anne chairs? Remember? I would come in sweat-stained and dirty working that construction crew on a building Glenn designed, heavy steel-toed boots on your carpet, and you would sit down before your silver tea service, daintily pour out our cups of tea, and we would tell all the old stories…”
“Yes,” she drawled slowly. “I believe I do…”
And it was that same accent, her soft, cultured Virginia tone that held within it the Old South, the soirees in Georgetown, the years of poetry that seemed to spring from who knows where within her ancient soul.
“…and you told me about the time you met Robert Frost…?”
He hugged her again, held her like a child for she was not much more than his nine-year old daughter, in heft.
“I like the one about Glenn,” he added. “The little boy left behind by brothers and sister, playing along, alone…”
“Yes, I liked that one, too.”
There was something else and she seemed to gather her strength to speak further.
“Was that from my book? Did I write another book?”
“Yes Gramma, you wrote another book…”
“Are you still in Germany?”
This shocked him.
It was suddenly the Esther he remembered talking, and he could hear the strength of her intelligence, warmed finally, stirred enough to speak again after all those years.
He had been back from Heidelberg two years and more.
“Yes, I’m back,” he replied speaking loudly without sounding harsh. “Heidelberg. The girls liked the wild swans on the Neckar River below the castle. We used to feed them summers when the girls came over, especially Lydia…”
His comments touched something in her and she took an odd stance with her head, seemed as if her shoulders drew back, her chest out proudly. He could not shake the image of a trumpeter holding up his piece, gathering all his breath for the call. A revival, summoning up palpable strength from who knows what wellspring…
…And the geese flying down, one after another, crying
Against the night. “Wild geese” you said from your sleep.
Wild geese- flying-.”…
As if another voice possessed her for a moment, for the words were clear and strong, the phrasing assertive. Evocative. He watched in amazement as she continued her recitation, seeming to rise out of her wizened self into something else, some other plane of existence, phrases rising to the occasion stayed with him as she caught him unprepared.
From memory.
When she had finished, she sank back into her chair, leaving him speechless. It was as if those lines were a permanent part of her soul, indelible no matter the number of passing years.
It frightened him just a bit, for the performance had something of the supernatural about it, something of the possessed, a part he recognized but did not comprehend. The strength of women: timeless.
They talked of children, and the new baby.
“What is the child’s name?” asked the centenarian.
“It is Emily, Gramma. Emily Rose.”
A smile came to her lips for the birth of another great-grandchild. Her children. Her grandchildren. Her great grandchildren. The widening arc of the generations, spreading out before and from her, and she seemed especially keen for news as the latest, furthest ripple moved outward toward the next century.
It did not surprise him, the knowingness of women, of women whom the years had spared. No: it amazed him. Esther was born in 1890, Emily in 1996. A century and six years between them. The years were less kindly to men, and the strength of the breed lay in its women.
Women like Gracey, his sister.
He wondered about this all the way back through the wet parking lot, skipping between puddles. Of all the things in life, he most hatred having his feet wet.
The engine turned over and caught instantly, a steady purr. He looked back though the downpour, wiping the inner windshield with a sleeve, and saw the grey building through the darkness.
A lighted window.
The Volkswagen bounced slowly through potholes, and steadily down the hill for the open road.
* * *