Daughters of the Revolution (18 page)

“Where did you get this?” he asked her. She had invaded his head, his thoughts, his memories. Grateful, he wept.

“Oh, I’ve transcribed and assembled, but the story of the century—well, others have been there, too.” She patted him on the shoulder, softened. “Would you care for another glass of gin, Mr. Byrd?”

He paused, thinking. Mrs. Graves soldiered on, her still-nimble fingers quietly pushing down the keys, her face expressionless, professional and without judgment. A small fish
sandwich lay untouched in a tea saucer on the arm of her chair. His old friend, his old ally—what was she, really? He understood that life as he knew it would not be possible without the benevolent energy of women. Fried bacon, clean sheets, cream cheese and olive sandwiches, picnics, travel abroad, sock drawers, fresh, typed pages, Meals on Wheels. And yet her very diligence irritated him.

“You are still typing,” God remarked finally. “I’ve stopped speaking, but you are still typing.”

She turned her impenetrable brown eyes toward him. “I haven’t finished,” she said.

But then she never finished. She lost her way. The manuscript she’d prepared over the course of several months gradually lost coherence and strayed from the main themes:

When did she slip? She’d continued to drive, and to drop off Meals on Wheels to other elderly people. God did not detect the change until one afternoon (past time for the glass of gin she customarily offered) he went to the bonny nook and found her standing with her legs wide apart on the floor, urine streaming between them. “Oh, horrible! Horrible!” she said.

Her work habits had remained steady and she typed much of every day, but when God happened to look at a page she’d written, he saw that her transcriptions had become mechanical:

ajasjdkjlkjrjeurjkfksdkfnsijrkfksjhfskjhkjhjhak

Her lawyer sold her house and antiques, and then called in the junk dealer and an ambu-van from the long-term-care facility. Childless, her ex-husband long gone, Mrs. Graves had for years paid a premium on end-of-life insurance to assure she would never be a burden to anyone.

EV stands under the lavender wisteria, the hoary vine. She rings the bell and, to hell with it, opens the door. The rubber tree, oppessed these many years by the ceiling, has curled back upon itself, and died finally. The grandfather clock ticks once a second. EV stands in a silvery spray of dust motes and takes it all in. She sets her canvas duffel bag down by the door and moves toward the human sounds coming from the downstairs bedroom. She approaches the door and finds the enormous form of God, groaning and raving—apparently sleeping.

“You can’t go in there,” an old woman calls out. “Mr. Byrd is resting.”

“Mrs. Jones?” EV asks.

“Yes. I’m with Skilled Care.”

“I am EV Hellman.”

“Ah, you came,” says Mrs. Jones. She plucks at the ragged half of a sandwich she’s brought from the bedroom and takes a bite.

“Come with me to the kitchen, dearie. We’ll have a cup of tea. He wakes at four for his cocktail. You can see him then.”

The grandfather clock struck the hour—four. And there she stood, EV Hellman, in the doorway. She held in one hand a leather bag with metal handles. A bit of metal glinted in one nostril. He had not seen her for five years. She’d given reasons—San Francisco, New York. “Ahoy,” she said, as if she were a
passenger boarding a ship, avoiding, as she always had, the awkwardness of calling him by some name. She put down the bag and came forward. He felt the tension of a woman advancing even as he anticipated her embrace.

She helped him to his feet. God stood beside her, unsteady, taller than she was. EV had always seemed stunted by the cold. She claimed to have grown two inches when, at the age of eighteen, she moved away from Cape Wilde.

“You’ll have to buss me on the mouth,” God told her. “I feel nothing.”

“Moi,”
she said loudly, and kissed it.

His pants leg had ridden up beyond the band of one sock, revealing reptilian scales. He understood the commanding impression he made of age and wear, his venerable presence in the ancestral home. Sunlight hit the wide pine boards on the floor, which were beautifully worn down by years. The dirt between the boards had turned to a gleaming black wax, and the familiar furnishings remained where they had lived since before he was born: Aunt Olympia’s rubber tree pressing at the ceiling, his grandfather’s clock, the mahogany furnishings with their velvets and fleur-de-lis—all of it, he saw now, begrimed and shabby. “Mrs. Graves helped keep up appearances,” he said. “But now she’s gone.”

“I’ll put down my bag and wash my face,” EV said. “Then I’ll mix us a drink, if you’re still allowed to have one.”

“I was cleared by Dr. Hauk—before he died—to have two. It’s the best hour of the day.”

“Put your bag upstairs,” he called after her, “in my room.”

“Why?” she asked, registering alarm.

“I sleep down here.”

“Oh, right,” she said.

“You’ll find clean sheets on the bed,” he called after her.

She turned around to look at him. “You made a bed?” she asked.

“Mrs. Graves put sheets on the bed before she … retired.”

He heard the girl upstairs in the bath, squeezing off the old tap with the pliers he kept on the sink. She descended almost immediately, disappeared into the kitchen and brought back two glasses on a tray. Holding a glass challenged God’s stamina, his fingers had so little feeling in them. She’d found the gin—under the kitchen sink with the cleaning-out equipment—and mixed martinis. She handed God one; ice rattled pleasantly. He leaned forward and touched her glass with his. “Your health,” he said.

“Cin-cin,”
she said. The first sip, promising. He put down his drink and laid his hands on his knees.

She went out again and brought back crackers and cheese on a plate that bore an etching of the Goode School chapel in red. “Don’t break that,” he warned her a bit sharply. (He’d promised himself he would not
shout
at her.) She moved a manila envelope from its place on the seat of the couch to the table in front of her and set down her drink. “Tell me about your health,” she said. He pointed an ear in her direction and made her say it again.

“Defanged!” he told her. “Castrated!”

They drank peacefully for a few minutes. “Remind me,” he said, “how you and I are connected.”

“You and my mother, Mei-Mei Hellman, and I—we lived here the year—the year the Goode School let in girls. Do you remember? I used to bring you the ice water from the urinal. I used to sleep in the bonny nook. My father was Heck Hellman. He was a student of yours at Goode.”

“Heck Hellman! Hum!” said God, and his eyes filled with tears. “And you were one of those Goode girls, were you?”

“No, my mother taught in the public schools. I went to Wilde High.”

“Very good.”

He’d gathered some books that dated from Olympia’s and even his grandfather’s time: Gisborne’s
An Enquiry into the
Duties of the Female Sex
, Darwin on female education, Whytt on nerves, Smith’s
Midwifery
, Hayes on coughs and colds, Niles on original sin, Terence’s
Comedies
, Lewis and Clark’s
Travels
, Hutchinson’s
History of Massachusetts
, Charles Knowlton’s
Fruits of Philosophy
from 1832—from which God had gleaned useful, gripping facts about the sexes. There was also his father’s copy of the King James Version, and Pringle’s
Observations on the Diseases of the Army
. He didn’t need them anymore.

“That’s kind of you,” she said doubtfully.

He was writing a book himself, he confided, his blue eyes narrowing.

“I’ve heard about that,” she said.

“It’s a history,” he told her, “of the ocean and the trees.”

He slept on the fusty bed downstairs and dreamed of illicit loves.
Dear Mrs. Rebozos, my sweet gynecomaniacal saint, let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment! My bride no longer finds me lovable—the rugged breath of age is upon me.…
And he pressed her gently up against the open window and the scent of Parker House rolls and his bay rum, using his experience and expertise (though both had been called into question) to introduce sensations into her rather brittle body. Even in the dream he had to overlook a coolness coming off the skin. Pressing into her was like pressing into a balloon—some fragile, almost infinitely flexible but still definite boundary. When he finished, a breeze came up through the window and sucked her away.

He sat down in his easy chair, a red pencil and pad on the table beside him, and listened to the radio as the Red Sox lost again. His famous course, English 6, had named and attempted to digest the one hundred books God judged necessary. He
planned to include, in his personal monograph (that was the final achievement and legacy of every Head before him), a copy of his list. He tried to recall the spirit of the complaints that had come from the students and female faculty.
Why no women?
Emily Dickinson was there, if they looked closely; Jane Austen less so. Wharton labored in dubious territory (New York), covered with greater strangeness by Henry James, though James did not,
enfin
(as James himself might have said), make the cut. Willa Cather’s bohemian tales always charmed, but the Jewett girl covered territory he liked better. But if it came to that, he’d rather go back to Wharton’s eccentric
Ethan Frome
, which he found less fine than three poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson. The female faculty had dominated every conversation from the moment they arrived: The curriculum must be made “relevant” and “diverse.” What could be more elegant or diverse than Thackeray, or Shakespeare, or Conrad? His aunt Olympia, herself female, had taught him taste—
Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Treasure Island
, Hawthorne, Shakespeare and the rest of the great English poets. Blake and Milton—the divines.

The holes in his mouth itched. (After decades of drinking coffee, his wife had suddenly refused the stuff—said it made her breasts itch. He couldn’t stand that kind of talk.) His lost teeth lay in a silver candy dish. God shook them into his hand—his pearls. He sat in his chair with his teeth in his hands and watched flies buzz against the sealed windows. Why do anything now?

Because he was a tiger! (But he’d waited too long; they brought girls in.) He dropped the teeth back into the dish and took up his pencil and pad. He drew a column, Doric and stoic, and turned the capital into a man’s head. He drew hair—and set the hair on fire.

The hills beyond the Wetstones’ house were blue as city pigeons. What did he really want to say? The effects of his blood-pressure medicine, for example—a surging feeling. He
only wanted to leave some impression of himself upon the world, to show things as they were.

He watched the flies buzz and butt against the window and counted the bodies crawling upward on the glass. Five, six—they were drawn to the light. Today’s dying flies lay on their backs on the sill and rubbed their filament legs together. Yesterday’s flies lay dead and dry, each pair of legs crossed over a black triangular belly. A new generation marched over the preceding one. (Gazing through the glass, beyond that valley of death, God saw his white birch trees gouged with canker sores.)

What would his wife put on a bloody mouth wound? A picture of Madeline’s hands fluttered before his eyes, grains sifting down between her fingers: salt. He rose with trouble and poked around in the kitchen cabinets, whose blackened hinges wore the greasy deposits of years.

Salt. Would that be in a bottle? A jar? A dish with a spoon? Looking in the cabinet, he found garlic salt, celery salt. But he wanted a cardboard canister with a picture of a young girl on it. Here it was—salt. Salt rains; it pours.… He poured grains into his hand, clapped the hand to his mouth. Obliterating pain helped; it lifted the fog. Am I hardy and
hale
? he asked himself. The bone was strong, but the soft stuff that held the bones in place had worn down; the soft parts had worn away.

His teeth felt like chalk. He ground them down when he slept, as Dr. Dix had warned him not to. Dix had given God a rubber dam to bite, but he’d kept it in a drawer next to his bed the way a man might keep a pistol, imagining he wouldn’t have to use it.

Red pencil still sharp in his hand (his habitual weapon, his rapier!), God plodded up the stairs, his hand on the rail, and reached the bonny nook finally. He sat on the edge of the bed and rested. Mrs. Graves’s black binder sat on the blotter of the
lady’s tambour desk: his book. Groping in the bedside drawer, he found a floral bag of the kind his wife used to use for her specs. He opened the bag and let the object inside slip out.

He recognized the disembodied part immediately, assisted by fine print along the base.
The Vulcan. 100% nonporous silicone. Wash by hand using mild soap or in top rack of dishwasher
.

He turned the object around, observed its circumcised condition, its impressive size and substance, which combined the sensual texture and sheen of rubber with a sturdiness one associated with American-made products. A fetish, or a symbol of some kind—although what was a John Thomas, detached from a testicle, a symbol
of
? It was a deep, plummy red and had a slightly sticky texture that resisted pressure from his finger. He found its familiar oddness beautiful; the piece stirred him. (He wished he could tell Aunt Olympia.) He leaned back against the pillows on the bed, one cased and one bald, and rested. His chest heaved as if an ancient rock had been turned over and all the subterranean many-legged insects from the dark corners of his mind were scuttling for cover. But the rock turned; the lid lifted. God’s eyes overfilled with water and he wept. Tears rolled down his cheeks, down his neck. He’d never felt more human.