Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
This query has always been baffling to me! For I have no idea how I
am
, usually.
Far more logical to reply
How do I appear to you? That’s how I am.
For truly, my “self” is a swirl of atoms not unlike the more disintegrated paintings of J. M. W. Turner—almost, if you peer closely, you can see
something
amid the atoms, perhaps on the brink of coalescing into a
figure
—but maybe not.
Even when Ray was alive, and I was Ray Smith’s wife and not yet Ray Smith’s widow, I found it difficult to respond to this totally innocent, totally conventional social query.
“How am I? I’m fine! And how are you?”
From time to time, in a social situation, an individual will acknowledge that things aren’t so good, maybe he/she isn’t so fine, which will derail the conversation in a more personal, pointed direction. But this is rare, and must be handled with extreme delicacy. For it’s in violation of social decorum and people will be sympathetic initially—but finally, maybe not.
Now, when people see me, when they ask, often with tender solicitude,
How are you
,
Joyce?
—I assume that they mean
How are you managing
,
after Ray’s death?
Usually I tell them that I am doing very well. For I am, I think—doing very well.
Interminable days have passed, and interminable nights—and
I am still here.
This is amazing to me.
More and more it seems to me, I may have made a wrong decision at the time of Ray’s death. Picking up the phone, calling my friends—making of my plight their concern. Making them feel that they are responsible for me.
A nobler gesture would have been to erase myself. For there is something terribly wrong in remaining here—in our house, in our old life—talking and laughing with friends—when Ray is gone.
I feel that others might think this way about me, too. For there
is
something ignoble, selfish, in continuing to live as if nothing has been altered.
But I am not strong enough, I think.
And then—so I tell myself!—I had—I have—many responsibilities to which Ray would have entrusted me. And in the terms of Ray’s will, he has entrusted me.
Though Ray has left me, it is not so easy for me to leave
him.
“What do you want with me!”
The thing with the beady dead gem-like eyes—that thing, which now more clearly resembles an ugly lizard of some kind, or a Gila monster, than a sea creature—is ever more frequent now in the corner of my eye, alone here in the house.
Erase yourself—of course!
What a hypocrite you are
,
to pretend not to know this.
So, it’s good not to be alone! Except, when I am not-alone, I am in the company of other people, and aware of the fact that the one person I wish might be there is not there.
Thinking always of yourself. Only of yourself. Hypocrite!
This is true. I am obsessed with my “self” now—whatever it is, it seems to be about to break and be scattered by the wind, like milkweed pollen. Though the “self” has no core yet it is a nexus of random sounds, voices—some of them tender, and some of them jeering, accusatory—
Love to my honey and my kitties.
Hypocrite!
Really, I have no idea how I
am.
I have become a sort of wraith, or zombie—I know that I am
here
but have a very vague idea of what
here
is.
I have been observed laughing, with friends. My laughter is not forced but seems natural, spontaneous.
I have been observed staring into space, in the company of friends. Though I am aware of being observed—I try to shake myself, into wakefulness—sometimes it isn’t so easy, to haul myself back.
Talk at Princeton gatherings is of politics, mainly. America has become a rabidly politicized nation since the election of George W. Bush—since 9/11, ever more a virulently divided nation—it is quite natural that the personal life is submerged in the public life but how lonely, how empty, how spiritually depleted it seems, to one on the outside.
And so, often I leave for home early. Where Ray and I often stayed late—and were among the last to leave a party—I am now the first person to leave.
When I am departed, my friends talk about me, I suppose.
I hope that they are saying
Joyce is doing very well isn’t she!
I hope that they are saying
There’s no need to worry about Joyce.
I can’t bear it, if they are saying
How tired Joyce looks!
If they are saying
How thin Joyce looks!
Poor Joyce!
Often when I am driving our car, I begin to cry for no clear reason. Often it’s night, I am dreading my return to the (empty, deserted) house in which, on the dining room table, “sympathy baskets” and “floral displays” are still crammed together, and wilted petals are strewn underfoot like tiny bruised faces. Only a light or two will be burning—no longer is the house lit up as if for a festive occasion—the first instant, of unlocking the door—(unless it’s unlocked, I’d forgotten to lock it)—is the hardest, a horrible moment—then, if I can manage, I will slip into the bedroom without having to pass through most of the house—though I can’t avoid passing by Ray’s (darkened, deserted) study where, on his telephone, a red light will be blinking—new messages! Unanswered messages!—these responsibilities clawing at me, I am too exhausted to contemplate.
But in the car—there’s a kind of free-fall no-man’s-land inside a car—in which one is neither
here
nor
there
but
in transit.
If I am in tears while driving, by the time I reach my destination I am no longer crying—I am
fine.
A widow’s emotions—I think this must be generally true—resemble the “lake effect” of the Great Lakes. One moment, a clear sky and sunshine; minutes later, enormous dark thunderheads moving like battalions across the sky; soon after, a lightning storm, churning waves, danger . . . You learn that you can’t predict the weather from visible evidence. You learn to be cautious. The “lake effect” is ordinary time, speeded up.
But I have become so—
sad.
I have become one of those blighted/wounded/limping/sinister malcontents in Elizabethan-Jacobean drama— an observer who glances about seeing, not happily smiling individuals, not friends whom I love but individuals destined for terrible, tragic ends—the women to lose their husbands, sooner than they would expect; the men to become ill, to age, to vanish within a few years. I feel a kind of sick terror for my friends, who have been so kind to me—what, one day, will happen to
them
?
Of all malcontents, Hamlet is the most eloquent.
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me the uses of this world! . . .
This is the very voice of paralysis, depression—yet it seems to me in my zombie-state an utterly astute reading of the human condition.
Still, one must not say so. One must
try.
Asked how she is it is a good idea for the widow to say, brightly, like everyone else, “How am I?—fine.”
Back home, I am likely to replay Ray’s final message—the one he’d made from his hospital bed just a few hours before he died.
Though sometimes, I call our home number from my cell phone, to hear Ray’s recorded voice that is so comforting, and which, when they call this number, our friends will hear for a very long time.
Neither Joyce nor I can come to the phone right now but if you leave a detailed message and your phone number . . . we will get back to you soon. Thank you for calling.
Chapter 31
“Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”
In Detroit, in the mid-1960s, when Ray taught English at Wayne State University, one of his courses was “Introduction to Literature” and among the poems he assigned his students was the elegy “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” by John Crowe Ransom.
This beautiful short poem, Ray read to me with such feeling, in his deep, subtly modulated voice, I am moved to tears recalling it. Reading the poem, which I haven’t looked at in years, I realize that I’ve memorized it, and I’ve memorized it in my husband’s voice.
There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall
,
It is no wonder that her brown study
Astonishes us all.
Was this Ray’s favorite poem? When I’d first met him in Madison, Wisconsin, Ray could recite a number of classic poems—sonnets by Shakespeare, John Donne, and Milton (“When I Consider How My Light Is Spent”); and he was much admiring of Whitman, Hopkins, Frost, and William Carlos Williams, as well as poetry by a number of our contemporaries whom he was to publish in
Ontario Review
—but no poem moved him as deeply as “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter.” It is his reading aloud of this poem that is imprinted in my memory—my handsome young husband, his voice quavering with emotion, in our house on Sherbourne Road in the small room at the front of the house, a kind of sunroom, where we sat most evenings to read or prepare our classes for the next day.
How I wish I could remember what Ray and I said to each other, on one of our ordinary evenings! In that little room, one of the few comfortable rooms in that not very comfortable house, where for so many nights after dinner we sat together on a dark blue sofa facing a window.
Outside, our lawn, a sidewalk, the street and a facing beige-brick house—this, too, is vividly imprinted in my memory, though I have not thought of it, still less seen it, in decades.
What could have so absorbed us, in those days? I know that we talked a good deal about our teaching, our classes and colleagues—Ray at Wayne State, me at the University of Detroit—but all this is vanished now. What was urgent, crucial in our lives, even upsetting—all is vanished. Virtually no friends remain from that time. We’d given parties in our large brick Colonial house—almost, I can see our living room with its oddly dark-blue walls, crowded with people—enlivened with laughter—but the faces are blurred, indistinct.
Some have died—my closest woman friend, prematurely. Others have moved away, altered their lives—our closest Jesuit friend, a colleague at the University of Detroit who’d been a prominent member of the English Department, now no longer a Jesuit, married and living in Texas . . .
Tom Porter has left the Church! My God.
Many evenings we’d spent in the company of our Detroit friends and colleagues and of all those evenings, scarcely a shred of memory remains. Of all the evenings Ray and I spent together, the meals we prepared together, the house we kept together, the shopping excursions we went on together—on Livernois Avenue, and at the Northland Shopping Center; the countless times we walked together in our residential neighborhood and in nearby Palmer Park, holding hands—I can remember so few.
This is terrifying to me—so much of our lives, lost.
Except, there is “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”—
There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study
Astonishes us all.
Her wars were bruited in our high window.
We looked among orchard trees and beyond
Where she took arms against her shadow,
Or harried unto the pond
The lazy geese, like a snow cloud
Dripping their snow on the green grass,
Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,
Who cried in goose, Alas,
For the tireless heart within the little
Lady with rod that made them rise
From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle
Goose-fashion under the skies!
But now go the bells, and we are ready,
In one house we are sternly stopped
To say we are vexed at her brown study,
Lying so primly propped.
Now John Crowe Ransom has been dropped from the American poetry canon. No one younger than sixty, probably, has even heard of this poem. Greatly admired in his time, and a figure of considerable influence, Ransom is a casualty of the academic-literary culture wars of the late twentieth century—a Caucasian male poet like Delmore Schwartz, Howard Nemerov, James Dickey, James Wright.
All of them, casualties of time.