Bereavements (5 page)

But about Angel . . .

Mrs. Evans wasn’t emotionally prepared, hadn’t sufficient courage to call the boy—the “child” she was sure had written the card. Not yet. But soon. If possible, tomorrow. Perhaps even tonight: after the false calm and mild eurphoria of the usual dose of chloral hydrate (Rose called it her “sleeping draught”) had begun the slow magic of its intoxication.

“Chemical therapy,” a close psychiatrist friend, a doctor, repeatedly called it; “the worst kind, really, removing at best, and only for hours at a time, a few nagging symptoms.”

The good sweet man had been angry, but he wrote her usual prescriptions, urging her again, so tirelessly, to work with him on the subliminal causes of her sleeplessness, as well as—more to the point—the excesses of her
neurotic
grief.

“Carma, Jamie is
dead!
Believe it, and have pity on yourself, There’s no need to suffer in the awful way you do.
Bury
him, in your heart and be done with it. Let him go! You can’t resurrect him!”

Her reply, underbreath had been
“Can’t
I?
Can’t
I?”—the teeth exposed and a sudden sick, fantastic look in her eyes. She was trembling when she added:
“I’ll
find a way.”

His hand pressed itself to the prickly coldness at the back of his head.

“Carma . . .!” But he stopped there, realizing, surely, that what she’d said had been figurative. She wasn’t
that
irrational—yet. It was his own foolishness.

The excesses of her neurotic grief!—an understatement if ever there was one. But what was one to do, or advise, a woman as strong-willed and other-worldly as Carma?—one as dangerously self-dramatized? As long as he’d known her—so many years now—and loved her in his way (hadn’t he once proposed!) she had made romantic literature, a kind of living poetry, of life. But now she was making something monstrous—far beyond tragedy and grief—out of death.

“I’ll
find a way!” What an extraordinary thing to say! Eerie. Sinister. He’d never seen this side of Carma, perhaps because it was new. It hadn’t been there to be seen before. Regardless, it confirmed his belief that
someone
must help her, and soon. If not he, alone, then perhaps one of his encounter groups?

Both ideas were ridiculous. She was hopelessly beyond any capacity for transference if that’s what Robert (V. Algood Jones) had in mind. Indeed, she was well beyond any psychiatric help at all, particularly with a man she had almost married. Perhaps they would have wed, if he hadn’t been embarrassingly “fourth” in line. (And how could she possibly add a Jones after a Smith?!) Besides, he in no way needed a wife. He was so existentially involved with all his patients, that he was drained, an empty vessel, at the end of each working day, having given all his energy and love away, seldom needing a woman at all, but simple, total rest to recharge all the mysterious batteries that kept his devotion and dedication in endless supply.

And a group? She imagined a stammered monologue into a circle of faces so strange they’d resemble a coven of witches stirring a brew. Brew it would be with questions to answer, intimate habits to expose, bizarre behavior to explain: confessing how theatrical she was by nature and inclination, how it helped immeasurably to dramatize her grief and her lack of sleep by prowling the streets of the Village at any small dark hour, her face so hidden she might have escaped from a harem, or, if she was on Long Island, by wandering through the misty grounds, writing spidery poems to her beloved on the steps of his tomb—one more fantastic example of her Jamie-madness!

Better the bitter chemical: the revolting red spoonful of syrup so thick with sugar that pink crystals had crusted over the mouth of the bottle, all of its sweetness insufficient to disguise its vile and evil taste.

The demi-tasse of silky black chocolate that came after it helped a bit, as did the routine of Rose’s amusing disapproval: the pout of that sweet Irish underlip, the puckered frown, the censorial shake of the pretty head. Goodness! If Mrs. Evans wanted the tiniest extra sip—just to be
sure
she’d sleep—she had virtually to wrestle the headstrong girl, unscrewing the bottle from an iron fist.

But about Angel . . .

She took his card for temporary safekeeping to the small safe behind the hinged painting Jamie had done of a few battered slum-shacks in St. Thomas, and placed it on top of the velvet box of the never-worn Harrington-Smith jewels, at least those she kept in Manhattan, and the day’s usual assortment of documents from her lawyers that required her signature, papers she often didn’t bother to read since most of them merely attested in boring detail to money she had lost, or, more likely, the ever-accumulating amount of her wealth.

Before she did this however, she examined for the first time the cancelled postmark on the card, going back to her desk to fetch a small magnifying glass.

The zip code was blurred but she could read it, and the postal map in the pages of the local phone book outlined the area in the city from which the card had been sent. 10023—the east side, between 117th Street and 129th.

Spanish Harlem.—A ghetto boy.

Dear Mother . . .

She felt a slight chill: one of hope and anxiety.

He’d be dark-skinned surely. Please let it be so!—the pale olive, brown gold of her son, or the dark ground nutmeg of Jamie’s father. Jamie’s father!—who had, so often, with glory, stood bowing to the strident shouts, the throat-torn cheers of the entire populace, it seemed, of old Madrid and who died, a stumbling alcoholic, drunk and disgraced, fatally gored, fearfully tossed, spilling coils of entrails onto the blood-wet sand of that dreary, disgusting ring in Tiajuana.

If Mrs. Evans had moments such as these, when she felt that nothing short of an identical twin, a doppelganger, Jamie ostensibly reborn, resurrected, could fill her longing, she hoped that “son” qua son, perhaps needn’t be a particular height, color, race, age at all, peculiarly, not even sex. Wouldn’t a loving and beloved “daughter,” if one could
fine
one, possibly, just possibly do? All of which, in part, accounted for the strange wording of her advertisement, so laconic it seemed a telegram, and perhaps in its urgency and desperation, was.

Truly,
Swingers All
had the right words if woefully the wrong means and method!—
“a good
time and
a lasting
relationship”—to keep her (but for what meaningful useful purpose, really?) from where she most often wanted and would eventually, inevitably be: “in the dust, in the cool tombs” beside the body of her boy.

He sends his love.

Many kisses . . .

Angel’s card had been first simply because it was
there,
instantly, before her eyes, impossible to ignore.

Perhaps that had been part of its sweet, or cunning, purpose. It was not a letter among others, to be shuffled through and opened third, or fourth, or last.
I’m
first. Or rather,
Im
first. Most probably,
Im firs’
—minus the apostrophe.

After Angel’s card, the cassette tape was irresistibly next, explored through the envelope with wondering fingers. She wasn’t to hear it—and then with mild chagrin and clear disappointment—until late afternoon of the following day after Dori had returned with the machine to play it, but its hard, flat, mysterious thickness piqued her curiosity.

As it slid with a plastic clatter onto the polished surface of her desk, she drew back in alarm. Surely the bewildering object had been designed and
timed in the next instant
to bring the room, the house, perhaps the entire city block, down in smoking ruins about her shattered head!

Her own stupidity exhausted her! A cassette cartridge, of course, plainly lettered
MEMOREX
60. And with her discovery, her hope, not her brain was shattered. She smiled, appreciating the intensity of the death-wish that had been so quick to make a bomb of a spool of black tape. Still . . . Today, even letters were suspect, with dogs trained to sniff out the faintest, subtlest whiff of death, blinded eyes, maimed fingers—though usually the intended victims were controversial figures, heads of state, or important persons of rabid political persuasions. Unhappily, she could think of no one at all, no one who wanted to blow her to pieces.

Only herself.

“Now / Hunted by thyself / Thine own prey . . . / Caught in thine own snares / Self-knower! / Self-hangman! . . .”

How lovely it would be to
have
a mortal enemy. That surely, as all things must, would imply the reality of its opposite: the power, the capacity to possess a
mortal
friend:
deadly, implacable.