Daughters of the Revolution (19 page)

His life, a dream thin as paper, hinted obliquely at what he might have been. Like a page torn from a glue binding, God began to peel away from the world. He would go into the darkness alone—and circumcised! (Though for this journey, he would not need the foreskin, the prostate gland; he would not require that appendage he referred to euphemistically as “myself.”) His flesh was of no consequence; it would melt.

He’d made the original marks on 133 legal pads in what Mrs. Graves had criticized as a “gnomelike hand.” She interpreted and translated in those places where he had been too close. God hoped that his marks would become real to the writer who made
them march along the years, and to the printer who set and fixed them into permanence, and to the reader who read them. But he could not, himself, read the life in the work. At the bottom of the last page he wrote:

APPROVED—GB

He laid the red pencil and the silicone Vulcan in the drawer and made his way to the stairs.

He hit his head when he fell, said Dr. Wu. Part of him froze. He forgot how to eat and how to swallow.

Dr. Wu discussed the pros and cons of the feeding tube with EV and Mei-Mei Hellman, not because they had authority, but because they stood up in the waiting room when he entered. “Because we were like Everest,” Mei-Mei said; “because we were there.” Without the tube, God would die of pneumonia. With the tube, he could live until his heart failed.

EV and Mei-Mei agreed God wouldn’t want to live such a circumscribed life. With the tube, a nurse would pump liquids into God, but he would never eat or drink again—no salted nuts, no crackers and cheese, no evening martini. When EV brought the decision—no tube—to Dr. Wu, he said, “Have you asked Mr. Byrd what
he
thinks?”

She leaned over the hospital bed where God lay with his eyes closed and said, “The doctor wants to put a feeding tube in you. If you agree, you’ll never eat or drink again. But it will save your life for now. What do you say?”

God opened his eyes and wheezed. “I guess I’ll live.” Dr. Wu dropped the tube down, and sent him home with a nurse.

Delice Asgarali puts the kettle on for tea. “He’s near the end, poor man,” she says in her lilting island voice. “He tears at his bedclothes; he twitches in the night. He hasn’t lost his will, though, and that’s the great thing, EV.” She puts on a mitt, opens the oven door and pulls out a sheet of cookies. She scrapes the cookies off the pan with a spatula, lays them one by one on a blue-flowered plate and sets the plate on the table.

Ms. Asgarali chooses a cookie, bites, frowns, chews. “He thought he walked home last night, all the way from town. How could he have done that? All along the highway? It’s miles away! He asked for an egg, said he’d been walking all night. I said, ‘Where do you think you walked to, Mr. Byrd?’ And he said, ‘I walked home from town. What else could I do?’ And I said, ‘What were you doing in town, Mr. Byrd?’ and he said, ‘I had a rendezvous.’ I heard he hasn’t been himself since he was circumcised. It’s too much for a man this age. Any surgical procedure can be a shock, and this … well. The penis is so important to a man, don’t you think, even toward the end of life?”

He’d walked eight miles in the damp, and caught it—Death—probably from the shock of the explosion during the revolutionary protests in town. The episode rattled him, especially bones and teeth.

Women threatened even from this distance to drown him out. He waited; all he had to do was lie and wait. It would come to him. He fetched up an image to keep him company: a blue day, the wind crisp off Squantum. The tide approached, withdrew. He waited on the shore in a watery memory.

He’d asked that the helping women wear their names on their breasts. He had too much on his mind to remember their differences. He sat for a few minutes at his India-rubber desk,
or seemed to sit there, and sketched the shape he wanted for his gravestone in red pencil on the purchase order. (How wise he had been to buy early!) He wanted square corners. “No round,” he wrote beside the square.

He glanced at the electric clock on the desk: 11:33 p.m. The hairs rose on the back of his neck: The red second hand spun toward twelve, then suddenly stopped, though the little machine continued to buzz in a live way. The red hand of time—stopped. Moments passed and God waited for a minute, two minutes. He held the pencil in his dead-looking hand. Then the red hand began again, dropping gracefully down, a controlled and elegant swoop from twelve to six. God bore down again on his pencil and wrote in the instructions field, “Slate stone, if possible; it lasts.”

As God wrote, he slept, and as he slept he dreamed of a wall, a New England stone wall in which one hundred necessary books formed the stones. The wall had grown dangerously tall, the stones irregularly shaped, of different sizes, and so on, laid almost carelessly on top of one another without any mortar. Some had faces and names, but he could no longer read them. God crouched on one side of the wall, attached to it by a cord. The cord was structural, umbilical; his life fed the wall. He had seen one other wall like it, in photographs. People went there from around the world to touch the stones with their fingers, and leave their prayers in the chinks between the stones.

“Juice?” A regal, young, nut-colored nurse entered the room. A piece of torn masking tape on her bosom read
DELICEASGARALI
. Her face shone with estrogen. She flattened herself over God’s body and poured the fluid into him.

The cord of human knowledge! One end of the cord stopped—here.
DELICEASGARALI
said, “Mr. Byrd, it’s just your feeding tube. Does it feel like something sticking into you?” Yes, something was sticking into him—the cord of human knowledge that connected him to the stones.

Two undertakers in suits of midnight blue rolled God’s body onto a stretcher and bore it away under a black blanket. They stowed his shell in the back of a van and drove up the hill toward the full moon. God watched from somewhere beyond; he saw everything. His point of view lived on, why not? Life rolled on, continuous; Michelangelo died at the moment Shakespeare was born. Death granted infinite freedom. No longer attached by a mortal cord, he could not act upon the world. His point of view grew less fervent; he cared less, and then he did not care at all.

He did not ride with the women in the car to St. Vitus. The polished chrome hubcaps neatly covered the nuts of the tires and met the rims in the shape of a cross. God rode here—in the wheels. The revolutions of the radial rubber tires, faithful Goodyears, were turns of the earth around the sun. He stood at the center of the revolutions that pulled him toward his final destination. He saw, from inside his chrome cross, the familiar maple and birch trees, glimpses of ocean, the first vistas of granite and sea foam after the marshy wetlands to the south. He saw the whole road; it was a century long and led to the nave at St. Vitus, where he must leave behind those who remained and roll on alone. He’d been granted this privilege—and did not question it—of riding to his own funeral in the eye of the wheel outdoors, while all the women, whoever they were, sat contained in the car above him, insulated and protected and out of it.

T
he new Head, Dr. Ruth Brasile, ordered a hundred copies of Goddard Byrd’s book,
The Venerable Head: A Self-Portrait of Goddard Byrd
, printed in time for graduation. The cover featured a woodcut—God’s head—done by the New York artist Carole Faust, the first female admitted to Goode, who happened this year to be the graduation speaker.
The Venerable Head
, a handsome and distinguished product, turned out (at thirty-nine pages) more modest than the graduation program, a four-color job that contained advertising. The book had been a pet project of Mrs. Graves, God’s longtime secretary; she was the one who distilled the bright points of his experience from the murky constellation of a century, turned 133 yellow legal pads of observations and impressions, lists of “essential books” by men, letters, articles in the
Head’s Journal
, together with a rash of awkward arguments against coeducation that appeared in the
Globe
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mrs. Graves had turned it, turned him, into a coherent figure, or, as God would have said, “a figger.”

Dr. Brasile presented copies of the book to the board of trustees, to the faculty and to Carole, the featured speaker. Carole spoke about her experience as the first African-American female to attend the school. She spoke of struggle as the only form of knowledge, and praised God for his commitment to conditions that made struggle morally obligatory. She cited W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, none of whom she had read in
her time at Goode. The hardy assembly, over a hundred young men and women and their supporters, endured her brilliant talk through a sudden rainstorm that included apocalyptic thunder and even a few scratches of lightning across the leaden sky. The mortarboards began to take on water. Carole concluded:

Later, over coffee and cake in the castle, an old man wearing a plaid bow tie held forth to a knot of graduates, male and female, with an anecdote about the difficulties a new boy once had in God’s class. “He was a public school boy,” the man said, “but we all saw he had what it takes.”