Daughters of the Revolution (17 page)

“You should be feeling fairly relaxed, Mr. Byrd,” said a nurse he couldn’t see over his chest.

“Should I?”

“Oh yes. The pill will be taking effect any minute. Do you want to look at a magazine?”

“No!” he shouted back. “We’re fine as we are.”

The knife rose bloody in Dr. Wu’s hand. God bellowed—he roared. Who would have known the old man had so much feeling in him? He squeezed his eyes shut, but pain bled into him and he rose up—a monster, roused.

Mrs. Graves waited, stiff-lipped, impressed by his sounds, which traveled into the waiting room and made
Time
magazine tremble in her lap. Everyone pretended not to hear it. Mrs. Graves looked down at the article before her—about syndicate-made pop stars from Fabian to the Monkeys and the new hip-hop music by Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, which put back what rock took out—words—and changed how one thought of rebel music.

At the cashier’s, he collapsed on the linoleum and hit his head on the desk. While she wasn’t looking, someone put him into a wheelchair. Mrs. Graves pulled out wads of money—tens, twenties, change—and flung it all down on the counter. The charge was only five dollars; he was a veteran.

“He shouldn’t be disoriented like this,” a nurse said accusingly to Mrs. Graves. “I gave him a Seconal in his orange juice.”

“Do you need a taxi?” one of the attendants asked.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Mrs. Graves. “I have a car.

“We’ll get you home and you’ll feel better,” she told God.

“What do you know about it?” he cried out. The margins of his eyes were dull yellow, the blue pupils metallic and scattered.

An orderly wheeled him to the car and put him in. Mrs. Graves wrapped a seat belt around his tan raincoat. She turned the key in the ignition and nosed the car toward the edge of the parkway, a hideous snake of red lights. Cars veered sickeningly away, their horns unfurling like ribbons of sound.

“I hate this section,” Mrs. Graves remarked. “I take the back roads when I can.”

We are dead, God thought. He moaned with agony—and relief.

Somehow, she got them home alive. She bustled in the kitchen with cans of chowder and Indian pudding. God sat on a straight-backed chair, still in his raincoat.

“I’ve never heard anyone scream so loudly,” she told him cheerfully. “No one could read. I pretended to have nothing to do with you.”

God wheezed out a sound of anguish.

“I’ve never heard such carrying-on! The nurse gave you a pill.”

“She gave me nothing but orange juice.”

“The pill dissolves
in
the orange juice.”

“I was in no position to drink orange juice. I was lying down.”

Mrs. Graves softened, turned and put a hand on God’s arm. “You poor man,” she said. “It’s horrid to lose any part of yourself. I don’t care how old we are.”

The procedure cleared something that had blocked him. Overnight, groaning in his bed, God saw that the whole structure must be different; he and his kind must cut the cord. He had been a prisoner behind a wall, crouched in a tormenting position, nourishing the wall umbilically, as it were, with the
juice of his life. Or did he feed from the wall? The meaning of life had come to him passively. He had taken the motto of others directly to heart—The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living—had examined nothing on his own. Everything he thought he knew, the contents of his head, what he thought of as himself (as much “himself” as the friendly appendage so recently having gone under the knife) was like a turtle in its shell. He had never broken free, had never suffered the prick of an original thought. His head was a prison, his bones a cage. He let out a slow breath and exhaled words—small black typewritten lines that looked like ants, marching up and out of the depths of him, carrying
stuff
—the crumbs of other men. He breathed again and saw the tiny black specks organize themselves into recognizable letters—
are we not drawn onward we few drawn onward to new era
—before they broke up and faded out.

He’d been crouched behind his wall, holding it up so that others might slip their prayers between the stones. He’d been part of a great machine—first as a student, then as a teacher and then, finally and for a few generations, as the Head. How many boys had he produced to specifications he had lain awake in the night improving, refining? How many articles had he contributed to
The Independent School Journal
? “If a man wants to maintain that state of white heat necessary to transmit the essence of great works to his students, how he can maintain it on distant recollection, I do not know.” How sternly he had believed in himself! He had put that fire into every boy he could; he’d taught them that these poems, these rhythms, these meters, these themes, these characters were better than all the rest. How did he know? Who had told him? What if he’d been wrong?

He’d studied Greek as a boy because the democratic values of ancient Athens endured in Cape Wilde; so many boys were trained to endure them. Now the era of the old, narrow, ossified, privileged, entitled few—the men who had risen up, like himself, in the great liberal tradition—had ended. He was an
old man now and had nothing important left to lose. Without his foreskin, he felt exquisitely sensitive, receptive, even. Before she left him, his wife, Madeline, had lost a toe, poor girl. Then she died, he wouldn’t see her anymore. His own venerable flap was now nothing but a dry rose petal.

Toward morning, he dreamed of death. He found himself unprepared, having forgotten to bring a pair of socks from his top drawer, where his good nine-toed wife used to tuck them, rolled up into themselves. And so he had to stand barefoot in purgatory with other forgetful old men. What a disappointing end. He’d imagined light—if not a blaze of glory, a small persistent glow.

M
rs. Graves tended God with professional solicitude. She cooked light meals, digested the newspaper and regurgitated small nuggets for his benefit. She ran the laundry and the vacuum and took the recycling to the curb. Recycling! God had not heard of it, but his interest almost immediately gave way to a sense of mastery, and he took charge of separating the cans, bottles and paper goods. During this period, Mrs. Graves also put God’s obituary into her laptop. Now it would never have to be retyped. She showed him how she would send it to all the newspapers in advance; the date of his passing could be added later.

“You forgot to mention your ex-wife, Madeline,” she remarked loudly after she read his draft. “I put her in.”

Mrs. Graves worked as efficiently as a machine. At times, she became almost too interested in her work, and impatient with his interference. She couldn’t help going under, submerging. She told his story the way a prophet speaks: by seeing. (His voice came to her through a sort of catheter tube to her brain.) As his secretary for twenty-five years, she felt she knew him better than anyone, certainly better than he knew himself. She had read the 133 legal pads that formed the foundational documents of his life story; indeed, he had forced the pages upon her with all the implications in that phrase of urgent physicality, until finally she’d said, “Enough already,” and climbed the stairs with his legal pads and her laptop, leaving him at the base station.

Like most literary characters, God wasn’t exactly the figure
he imagined. Mrs. Graves spent several hours a day—pacing, transcribing, composing—in a fever, really, of creation. She’d experienced nothing like it for years: that degree of engagement with another human being, that degree of control.

A scale, like the patterns on the skin of reptile, covered his head, his forearms and his shins. His handkerchiefs were rags with monograms so ancient, their hand-sewn letters had unraveled. Cataracts muddied his view. He hadn’t been the same since the circumcision; Mrs. Graves had said herself it was too late in life to make that kind of change. While she worked, he sat on the manila folder kept prophylactically under his usual seat on the couch to catch any residual drizzle. He still enjoyed music and rose every morning at five to play his piano in the basement. Occasionally, he fell—he confessed it—but so far had managed to pick himself up again. He often dozed or even slept in his chair, to avoid confrontations with the furniture. Sometimes she came or went and found him so far removed from consciousness, she thought he might be dead, but then she heard a low roar within, like a furnace firing.

Loss was one theme: the headship of the school, the battle over girls, memory, prostate, lung, teeth, foreskin. After Shanghai, he’d spent six months in a TB ward in a suburb near the capital. That was the year he wrote down his impressions and began the log of life he’d kept up ever since. In that lost year, he’d outlined his obsessions and made his original list of one hundred necessary books. To avoid obvious omissions, he’d polled the other men in the ward, but found their tastes ephemeral, populist. Madeline had written letters from home, which did not survive, but to which God faithfully had replied. (“I feel an unprecedented need to unfurl and expose and impress myself
on the page.”) He’d made a note, “Please save,” on every one, and Mad had saved them all.

Who could read it all? Who would protect those who’d be hurt by whatever he’d written? You couldn’t drop 133 legal pads into the recycling, another reason old men needed younger wives to outlive and clean up after them, dispose of their lives gradually. Who cleaned up after the women? Mrs. Graves, for one, had already cleaned up after herself.

He could die at home; she’d stay by his side. She knew how to keep him comfortable; give him a few hours a day to review the contents of his busy head, then knock him back again. She’d burn the papers in small batches in the evenings in the cozy fire-place upstairs.

Mrs. Graves sipped a glass of beer and read:

She sat in the bonny nook, reading God’s life, which took her more deeply into her own life, into moments of strong feeling.
This is why we read, she thought, to disappear—then disappeared. Sometimes God called out to Mrs. Graves and could not rouse her.

Other times, she’d lean over the banister and call down, “Would you care for another glass of gin, Mr. Byrd?”

He would. He allowed himself to fade back into the shadows that played at the back of his mind: the legions of boys, those doomed foot soldiers!—playing their hands of poker on the poke boat at Chongqing, the dead man floating on the yellow river. God woke feeling responsible, drooling silver trails of salt.

The publications office had asked Mrs. Graves to help put God’s notebooks into some order, preferably thirty-nine pages to be printed (the type transferred from a plate to a rubber blanket, then to vellum) in the same process the school had used for every biography of every head since the introduction of the offset printing press in 1903. They wanted it all in time for graduation, having waited patiently for over twenty-five years. It moved God deeply that Mrs. Graves, so late in life, would continue pro bono to do what she had always done for him.

Mrs. Graves worked tirelessly in the bonny nook, with its India-rubber desk, its view of the ocean and the trees, its shelves of books by men, its Colonial braided rug. In spite of lumbar complaints, a squeaking hip, the shocking sense that she might never again have sex with another person, well, Mrs. Graves had learned to love herself. She also took an almost sensual pleasure in the act of writing God, creating him.

God enjoyed the familiar sound of a woman banging at a keyboard, working on his behalf with unnatural diligence. It reminded him of marriage, the distaff side.

With Mrs. Graves to help with the typing and shaping, it was natural that the work would—at last—come to an end.
With every word she wrote, he died a little. He slept poorly, felt bored into by worms too small to see, pinpricks in his skin. Specks fell from his eyelashes and burrowed in his blanket.

He stared at the backs of his spotted hands as if they belonged to another man he wondered about. Those same hands shook as he read from a sheaf of papers she’d printed out for him.

He had lived, as the Chinese proverb has it, in interesting times. Born near the dawn of the century, he had come of age toward the end of the first war. In the second war, he’d helped to liberate Shanghai. (The dead man floated by on a drift of muddy water in his dreams.) Being among the dead had changed him, and made him more alive—a saved man. He survived the Great Depression, the crisis of modernism, civil rights, integration, McCarthy, the Bay of Pigs, the 1960s, black power, the sexual revolution, Vietnam and the Cold War! Yet still he felt connected to his boy’s spirit and body, his hand on the tiller of a daysailer off Penzance Point on a wet and breezy afternoon, alone with the bay swelling and yielding beneath him like some sea monster—or a woman.