Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
As if he’d wanted to come back inside. But the door was shut against him.
Now I am crying, now I am sobbing—“Reynard! Oh Reynard!”
This is a sick sobbing grief like the kind that overcame me in Ray’s hospital room, the day before Ray’s death. At a time when it had not seemed that Ray would die.
Another horror—Reynard is stiff, like a cat carved of wood. His teeth are bared, his eyes are half-shut, if there can be an expression on a cat’s face Reynard’s expression is one of extreme anguish, pain.
This was not a peaceful slumber-death. This was an anguished animal-death
,
suffered alone.
I am stunned by this death, my head reeling. I am so broken up, I think that I must be losing my sanity. Reynard was not a young cat! Reynard was an elderly cat! Yet, I can’t stop crying—not a normal sort of grief but ravaged, abandoned. Like a deranged child I am stroking Reynard’s coarse cold fur as if I could stroke life back inside him—I am stroking Reynard’s head, that feels bony, lumpy. The teeth bared in a snarling look—a fierce angry grin—disconcerting to see. . . .
This too is your fault. You left him outside
,
in the cold. He has frozen to death. He has died alone.
Carefully I wrap Reynard in one of our large bath towels—a thick green towel that, in the custom of our household, was Ray’s towel. With Cherie looking on warily, keeping her distance, I carry Reynard outside beyond the garden, and set him down amid tall grasses. Is this the proper thing to do? Is this a sensible thing to do? I am not feeling strong enough to dig a grave for Reynard, in this hard-packed soil. Somehow I slip and fall onto one knee and Reynard tumbles from my arms, stiff as if frozen.
I am aware of myself as if glimpsed at a distance, a woman who has become a cartoon-figure, as in a Charles Addams drawing, carrying a stiffened cartoon-cat.
Just as well
,
Ray isn’t here. Ray would be so sad.
It’s a taboo subject. How
the dead
are betrayed by the living.
We who are living—we who have survived—understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices
You will not forget me—will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.
Most days—most hours—the widow dwells in a netherworld of
not-here
and
not-there.
Most hours of the day the widow yearns for the unspeakable oblivion of sleep.
For the widow is a posthumous person passing among the living. When the widow smiles, when the widow laughs, you see the glisten in the widow’s eyes, utter madness, an actress desperate to play her role as others would wish her to play her role and only another widow, another woman who has recently lost her husband, can perceive the fraud.
One widow glancing quickly at another—
Is it like this for you? Are you dead
,
also?
. . . it took me a long time to get beyond being stunned by [my husband’s] death, which was in fact quite predictable. (I see now.)
Rereading my friend’s letter, I am struck by these words which I had not fully processed before.
The author of these words is in fact a very well known writer whose memoir of her husband’s death and her own survival a few years ago was a highly acclaimed best seller. Rereading her letter now, I wonder if it was the fact of being “stunned” that propelled my widow-friend into writing the memoir, that so combines the clinical and the poetic—if she had understood at the time of her husband’s death that his death was “in fact quite predictable” would she have written the memoir?
Could
she?
Now I am being made to think: is there a perspective from which the widow’s grief is sheer vanity; narcissism; the pretense that one’s loss is so special, so very special, that there has never been a loss quite like it?
Is there a perspective from which the widow’s grief is but a kind of pathological pastime, or hobby—a predilection of the kind diagnosed as OCD—“obsessive-compulsive disorder”—not unlike washing one’s hands for hours every day, or hoarding every sort of worthless junk; on hands and knees “waxing” hardwood floors with paper towels and furniture polish, or vacuuming late into the night rugs that are already spotless . . .
If only someone would publicly ridicule the widow
,
give the widow a good solid kick
,
slap the widow’s face or laugh in her face—the spell might be broken.
At 4
A.M.
such epiphanies rush at me like miniature comets. Such wisdom, that within a few hours will be lost in the groggy aftermath of insomnia and the low-grade nausea of the anti-depressant medication that never allows for full wakefulness as it never allows for full unconsciousness; never allows for any clarity of thought, and muddles even the most urgent of thoughts like radio static. This time, I have looked up my medication on the Internet and am not so surprised at what I find.
Anti-depressant medication is indicated for individuals suffering from obsessive thoughts
,
insomnia
,
depression
,
suicidal fantasies
;
yet
,
anti-depressant medication may sometimes exacerbate obsessive thoughts
,
insomnia
,
depression
,
suicidal fantasies.
Unmistakably
,
anti-depressant medication will cause urine retention
,
constipation
,
drowsiness
,
decrease in appetite and weight loss. In some
,
paresthesia
,
blurred vision
,
vivid nightmares
,
tremor
,
anxiety
,
palpitations of the heart
,
sweating
,
depersonalization.
Is this medication helping? Is it—making things worse?
I have no way of knowing. Since Ray’s death I have been transformed from a person who rarely thought about her “health” or “state of mind” to an ambulatory assemblage of symptoms like a skeleton rattling about in a loose gunny sack—some days, I can’t even imagine what
personalization
might once have been—I can’t remember having been a
person.
My Pennington doctor suggests that I begin to take 60 milligrams of Cymbalta a day, up from 30 milligrams. Since the lower dose “doesn’t seem to be helping.”
In the Pennington drugstore, like a manic character in a Dostoyevsky novel bent upon self-destruction, I swallow a 60 milligram Cymbalta tablet as soon as the pharmacist hands me the vial. Driving home, I imagine cotton batting clotting my brain, my arteries. It is true—my vision is blurred. And it is true, my heart often leaps and cringes in “palpitations”—but I am no longer obsessively thinking of Ray in the hospital bed, or Ray in the funeral home when I failed to see him one final time.
The medication is a scrim through which objects are viewed but so dimly
,
you have no clear idea what they are. You have no clear idea why they should mean anything to you
,
or to anyone.
Chapter 74
“Ashamed to Be ‘White’ ”
This was a long time ago, in Detroit, Michigan. In a residential neighborhood one block west of Woodward Avenue and one block south of Eight Mile Road where we’d bought a house—our first house!—on Woodstock Drive.
We’d moved north from Beaumont, Texas, as soon as the academic year 1961–1962 ended. In fact, we’d been so eager to leave that desolate East Texas landscape that Ray mailed in his final grades en route to Detroit where we had teaching jobs for the following year; we’d managed to pack everything we owned into the boot-shaped black Volkswagen that rattled at sixty miles an hour and had no heat except in gusts of hot air that entered from the motor.
In Detroit, we lived for a year in an apartment building on Manderson Road, near Palmer Park; then, we bought a four-bedroom, two-storey Colonial on Woodstock Drive in an area known as Green Acres. The price of our house in May 1963 was $17,900.
Ray’s yearly salary as an instructor at Wayne State University was $5,000. My yearly salary as an instructor at the University of Detroit was $4,900. The gentlemanly man who’d hired me—his name, renowned in the area at that time, was Clyde Craine—confided in me that he and the chairman at Wayne State had conferred, to make sure that Ray’s salary was just a little higher than mine.
On Woodstock Drive in the spring of 1963 our house shone with newness. White aluminum siding, orange-red brick, dark blue shutters—the house was ravishingly beautiful to us, we could not stare at it enough. Repeatedly we drove past our house before we moved in, admiring it, planning how we would furnish it. Of course, we didn’t own the house, technically speaking—the mortgage company owned it.
I remember being hurt and upset when, at the bank, my modest salary at the University of Detroit was discounted. Only Ray’s salary counted. I was a married woman, the bank officer told me, with an expression somewhere between disdain and pity. Likely I would quit work in another few years and have a baby.
“But we’re not planning to have a baby.”
“I’m sorry. That is our rule.”
Together, our two salaries were respectable. But only Ray’s salary would be computed for the thirty-year mortgage.
Thirty years! The expression on Ray’s face, as he signed these documents!
“This will take us to 1993. In theory.”
Quickly we discovered that Detroit was nearly as segregated racially as Beaumont had been. The area in which we lived was totally white. The Detroit
News
and
Free Press
were filled with reports of incidents one assumed to be “racial”—if you decoded them correctly. But the city would not explode in racial violence until July 1967.
Before we moved into our new house, before we even had a key to the house, we drove over in the evenings to work on the lawn—at this point, just hard-packed bare earth and weeds. We brought over bushels of topsoil, flats of ground cover, small trees. Earnestly we planted grass seed. The backyard was deep, bounded by an alley; beyond the alley was another row of smaller houses, and Eight Mile Road which was a major thoroughfare. One day when Ray was working in the backyard and I was raking in the front, a neighbor child approached me to ask—“Are you eighteen? My mother says you don’t look old enough to be married.”
I laughed at this. Not only was I over eighteen, I was twenty-four. My first book had been accepted for publication—though its publication had been postponed until fall 1963. I was an instructor at the Jesuit-run University of Detroit where, in the English department, there were but two women—an elderly nun with the impressive title Sister Bonaventure, and me; and my very nice, handsome husband Ray was an instructor at Wayne State—the area’s most prominent “institution of higher learning” with a mandate from the state of Michigan to bring education to culturally deprived—i.e., mostly black—students. With his Ph.D. from Wisconsin, Ray was considered a highly respectable academic, with the likelihood of promotion at Wayne, or elsewhere; with my master’s degree, and a gathering number of publications, I was what might be called “promising.” We were so young, happy and optimistic!—all the world lay before us.
Several months after we moved into the house on Woodstock Drive, neighbors began to complain to us—mostly to Ray, who worked outdoors in the back, laying bricks for a small improvised patio: there was a rumor that “Negroes” were moving in across the street. Residents on both sides of us spoke of the homeowner across the street who’d “betrayed” his neighbors—he’d listed his house with a real estate agent who sold to “Negroes” in an effort to “block-bust.”
In our naiveté Ray and I had had no idea of the racial melodrama smoldering in Green Acres, into which we’d moved with such anticipation. We knew little of the notorious history of racial violence in Detroit—a bloody riot on Belle Isle, a city parkland, in 1943, in which thirty-four people were killed, and many injured; the new threat of “block-busting” in white residential neighborhoods through the city—unscrupulous real estate agents arranging for black families to settle in houses in “white” neighborhoods, at low prices, talking anxious homeowners into selling their homes, and so inspiring panic—seemingly overnight, entire blocks of long-settled residential neighborhoods on the west side began to be festooned with F
OR
S
ALE
signs. Here was a demonic parody of racial integration that would eventually drive the city’s white-majority population into the suburbs—Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Southfield, Grosse Pointe and St. Claire Shores—and reduce entire neighborhoods to rows of abandoned houses and rubble-strewn vacant lots as in the aftermath of war—though no one could have predicted such a cataclysm, at the time.
In Green Acres in 1963, where the houses were generally newer, better kept and some distance from the inner city, there was no real panic—yet.
In Beaumont, the races had lived so far apart, there wasn’t—yet—any discernible tension. In Detroit, in an economy that was booming for some and stagnant for others, tension was evident. Though we never watched television—in fact, we didn’t own a set—we were aware of a kind of latent hysteria in the air, and often it was suggested to me—as a “white woman”—that I should be very careful walking alone in any semi-deserted place, or even in my parking lot at the edge of the University of Detroit campus.
Much was made in the local media of a lone woman—a “white woman”—whose car had broken down on the John Lodge Expressway, at night, and who had been harassed, chased, raped and beaten by marauding “black youths.”
It may have been at this time, or a year or two later, that much was made of the fact—if it was a fact—that there were more handguns in the Detroit area than there were residents and that, in law enforcement circles, Detroit, Michigan, was known as Murder City, USA.
In Green Acres, a F
OR
S
ALE
sign erected across the street in front of a two-storey brick house was knocked down, or removed; soon after, the F
OR
S
ALE
sign reappeared, and was knocked down, or removed. Each day we drove along Woodstock Drive we were made uneasily aware of the status of the F
OR
S
ALE
sign. “Who’s doing that?” one of us might ask, and the other would say, “Who do you think? Our neighbors.”
Behind the houses facing us on Woodstock Drive was a city cemetery.
It was believed by certain of our neighbors that “Negroes” are particularly frightened of living near a cemetery and so, stealthily one night, they’d gone to cut down vines and shrubs at the rear of the property that had hidden the cemetery from view. When Ray was told this by the man who lived next-door to us Ray failed to respond as the man might have anticipated and their exchange ended abruptly.
I wasn’t there, and so I didn’t hear. I have no idea what Ray actually said or what was said to Ray in return. But I know that the exchange was unpleasant, and that Ray was upset and disgusted by our neighbors’ behavior.
“It makes you ashamed to be ‘white.’ ”
Milwaukee, too, where Ray was born and had lived until he’d gone away to college, had its segregated white suburbs. But Milwaukee was never so racially fraught as Detroit and had comparable history of racial violence.
It was rare for Ray to speak of his home, or of his family. His father was a “devout” Roman Catholic who’d hoped that Ray might become a priest and had been disappointed when Ray had dropped out of a Jesuit seminary after graduating from the prestigious Jesuit-run Marquette High School in Milwaukee. His mother had been upset when Ray had ceased attending Sunday mass at the age of eighteen but, unlike his father, she had not tried to “reason” with him.
As a wife must respect her husband’s family even when—as it sometimes happens—her husband does not entirely respect them, or appears to be somewhat estranged from them, so I did not ever speak of Ray’s family in any way other than warmly and positively; if I asked Ray about his father, for instance, some stiffening in his expression, a palpable resistance in his manner, allowed me to know that I was intruding into my husband’s privacy, and had better retreat.
My sense was that Ray’s parents were politically conservative, like many Catholics; that, in the volatile matter of civil rights for Negroes, and in all matters involving radical or even reasonable social change in the United States in the early 1960s, they were adamant in opposition.
When you think of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” you might imagine the provocative singer addressing white Americans like Ray’s parents—
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
No words strike more horror in the hearts of parents—especially, in the hearts of conservative Catholic parents.
(And how Ray admired Bob Dylan in that early, thrilling and iconoclastic phase of Dylan’s career!)
Soon then it happened, in Green Acres, that the house across the street from ours was sold, and, yes—to a black family.
An altogether “respectable” black family, it seemed to us.
For we, too, were hyper-aware of our new neighbors. We, too, watched from the front windows of our house as movers carried furniture and packing boxes into the house across the street.
(For how could we not be
aware
, how could we not
look
? Though we had virtually no sense of anyone else living on Woodstock Drive and would probably not have recognized any of our neighbors out of context—yet we were distinctly aware of the new black family. Race makes of us hyper-vigilant in the most primitive and distressing of ways.)
Anxiously we waited for something to happen—some act of petty vandalism, or meanness. If the black family suffered any sort of harassment, we did not know about it, and would not have been informed, in any case. One day Ray said, “Let’s go over and say hello.”
And so we went across the street, rang the door, shook hands with our new neighbors and introduced ourselves: “Ray Smith”—“Joyce Smith.”
I don’t recall a word that was exchanged but assume that we “welcomed” the new family into the neighborhood—nor do I remember the black couple except that they were slightly older than they’d appeared at a distance, and that the man was a doctor who’d gone to medical school at Wayne State. I remember the man and his wife looking at us quizzically—smiling—though they didn’t invite us to step inside, and had not many questions to ask of us.
We never spoke to the black couple again, nor did they speak to us. Frequently we waved at one another in greeting, driving in our cars or working on our lawns. We smiled, we mimed cheery greetings— “Hello! How are you!” In such ways we might have imagined that we’d contributed to the amelioration of racism in Detroit.
Four years later the city would erupt in racial violence. After years of “police brutality against blacks” a raid by the Detroit police on the United Community League for Civil Action on Sunday, July 23, 1967, would ignite a social cataclysm of arson, looting, rioting and even sniping; both whites and blacks were involved in the rioting, but black fury was predominant, and much publicized; the violence would continue for several days, making of Murder City, USA, a national monument to racial/social American chaos:
Forty-four people would die, 5,000 were left homeless, 1,300 buildings would be destroyed, 2,700 businesses were looted, the smell of smoldering ruins would linger long in the very air, one might say permanently. On the first night of the rioting white homeowners like us would huddle in our houses with doors and windows locked, blinds drawn, listening to the terrifying sound of sirens, angry shouts and sporadic gunfire and waiting for martial law to be declared and the Michigan National Guard to occupy the city.
Ashamed to be “white”—but what alternative?