“I’m already fattened up,” Messenger said.
“Maybe the Messengers would like to hear our news,” Sam said, suggested.
“They may hear our news when they have broken malted with us. They may hear our news when they have sipped from the glass touched by my pancreatically cancered lips.”
“Sure, Judith. Gimme,” Messenger said.
“Here,” she said.
He downed all the malted. “Gee, Judy,” he said, “there’s nothing left for you.”
“The news, of course, is that I’m dying. Well, that’s
my
news. People are so embarrassed by other people’s deaths that I’ve drawn up a sort of list—— ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Judith Glazer’s Death But Were Afraid to Ask.’
“First. The girls know. I told them as soon as I learned the results of the operation. Milly doesn’t accept it yet, I think. I mean she doesn’t believe it will happen. That’s unusual, because of the two she’s the more mature, though she’s younger than Mary. We told the two of them together. Mary’s the one who cried. Now she wets the bed and goes around stinking of urine. Well, I understand rage. It’s always been one of my subjects. But she’s twelve years old and almost six feet tall and she won’t change her underwear and goes about soiled and——”
“Look,” Messenger said.
“Oh, you’re just like Milly, aren’t you? Isn’t he just like Milly, Sam? He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t accept things.”
“I accept things.”
“No,” Judith Glazer said, “if you don’t want to know you can’t accept things. Oh. You’re embarrassed. For all your tough talk, you’re embarrassed, gun-shy. There’s hope for you. Shyness is a kind of love, too. Like chugalugging from the cancer cup.”
“Come on, Judith,” Messenger said, “cut it out.”
“Standing up to me is. It’s all right. If I bring you these messages from the deathbed it’s not because I want to rub your nose in things you aren’t up to, but because I love you, too, Cornell. I never loved Paula. Paula, I’m sorry but it’s true. Perhaps I will now, I can’t be sure. I shall certainly have to try. You, for your part, Paula, you shall have to try, too.”
“I’ll try,” Paula said.
“Do. Please do,” the woman said, and went on. “Have I told you about the girls? My medication’s wearing off, my pain confuses me. Where was I? Oh, yes, the girls.”
“If you’re tired, sweetheart,” Sam said.
“I have cancer, not fatigue. Try not, please, to be humiliated by me. You never were before. All those years I was crazy. Stand by me now. These are the facts, pet, this is the way I wet
my
bed. Humor your horrible wife.” She had been lying on the sofa. Now she sat up, her housecoat parted and her nightgown hiked. Messenger saw her bald, prepped groin and looked away. “I shall make a family man of him yet. I’ve barely more than five months, but we’re well begun. Oh, yes, we make furious love.”
“Sweetheart, I don’t think the Messengers…”
“Of course they are,” she said, “but even if they aren’t…As long as I have strength to speak and warn I shall use that strength to speak and warn. There’s grime in even the purest death, things the clearest-headed among us wouldn’t expect. Well, the children are an example, aren’t they? Oafish Mary and tender Milly. Their grandfather and uncle try to turn their heads, to bribe their attentions away from truth. The fact is they’re quite successful. They are. My girls will remember their mother’s passing as a shower of gold. Tennis and swimming and private lessons. Golf and horseback riding and dinners at the club——all lovely summer’s fine rare prizes. They’re going to the academy this year. Daddy’s paying their tuition. I don’t mind. It’s hard for kids. Milly doesn’t believe me and Mary pees her bed.
“But I haven’t told you yet how we do it. The stitches and pain and my cancer shining through my skin like sunlight. How does he get it up, do you think?”
Sam got it up and left the room. He went through the small dining room into the kitchen.
“Poor Sam,” his wife said. “I won’t talk behind his back, only out of his line of sight. He hears me now. You hear me now, don’t you, Sam? You’re listening to all this, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Sam said, his voice fainted by the intervening rooms.
She lowered her own voice. “How does he get a hard-on? He
wills
it. It’s his decision. Why, it’s no more trouble to him than acquiring a tan or arranging his hair. It’s biofeedback, Sammy’s sex. Decisive grooming, like the way his pants hold a crease or the fact that his hands don’t get dirty. And there’s no weight. Our skins barely touch. Platonic fucking. Orgasms like something shuttled back and forth in a game. Because he never comes until I do.” She was speaking normally again. “You don’t come till I do, do you, Sam?”
“I’m a gent,” Sam said in the kitchen. “I’m something in armor, something in tails.” He was crying.
“Baby, don’t cry,” Judith said. “Hush, courtly lover.” And he hushed. “Bring me a pill, Sam.” They heard the faucet in the kitchen. Sam appeared with a pill and a glass of water. “See?” Judith said. “Thanks, darling.” She turned to the Messengers. “See? My last few months like a sort of pregnancy. See? Judith lying-in with doom and whim and old Sam hard by all hand and foot to fetch all the pickles of the grotesque, we never close.
“Sam, Sam, you Jew, you Jewish husband. Shall we tell them our news?”
“We’ve told them everything else.”
“No,” she said, “no we haven’t.” She turned to Paula. “Once, maybe two or three years ago, we gave a party. Cornell brought the ice, do you remember? Sam had called at the last minute to ask one of those gee-it-must-have-slipped-my-mind favors of his. Though we know better, don’t we, know that nothing ever
slips
Sam’s mind, that his mind goes around in galoshes and snow tires, radials, chains, and Cornell was high, stoned, and I’d been talking about TM, and your husband asked me to tell him my mantra. Do you remember that? Do you, Cornell?”
“I think so,” Messenger said. “Yes.”
“Yes,” Judith Glazer said. “And I wouldn’t tell you. Well I’ll tell you now. Lean toward me, I’ll whisper it.”
“I was kidding, Judith. I don’t have to know.”
“Suppose what I tell you were my last words? Not have to know what may be a poor dying woman’s dying wish?”
Messenger looked helplessly at his wife. She was already packed, checked out of the motel, all gone. He looked at Sam, similarly fled, browsing inside info on cordless telephones in
Consumer Reports.
Messenger got out of his chair and went toward the poor dying woman. He knelt at her side and she blew softly in his ear as if testing a microphone. Then she whispered four senseless syllables into it which he would never forget. He felt himself blush.
“An obscenity?” Paula suggested.
“My mantra,” Judith Glazer said. “There. I feel better. Only Cornell and my guru know. I can give it away because I don’t need it anymore. You, Sam. I just gave away my three-thousand-dollar mantra to Cornell.” She smiled and Cornell felt something like affection for the nutty lady. “I’m dying,” she said jovially, “and going to Heaven where I can look down on Sam. Only I may look down on Sam, you know. I earned the privilege by living with him, earned it at discount, the odor of his odd-lot, uncut, 35mm film on my breasts when he came to me from the darkroom where he cut and rolled it onto used cartridges, the cutting and winding done at midnight in closets so that we didn’t have the expense of even that single low-watt dim red bulb. I’m going to Heaven where I can look down on Sam, on his thick soft bundles of hair, Sam’s plateaus of head like actual geography, and let him know if he’s fucking up as dean. That’s
our
news. Sam’s to be appointed dean when Adrian steps down at the end of the semester.”
“Under the circumstances,” Paula said, “I’m not certain congratulations are entirely in order.”
“Oh yes,” Judith said, “of course they are. I’m going to Heaven and Sam’s going to the Administration Building.”
She seemed actually gay, her jaundice a kind of radiance. She
was
gay, even her crazy close-order drill less irritating than it could have been. There was a sort of warmth and comradeship in their edgy intimacy. There was a kind of truth in truth, Cornell thought. “How do you know you’re going to Heaven?” he asked.
“My rector thinks so, all the church ladies do. Besides,” she said, “the Bible tells me so.” She grinned. “Well,” she said, “if you can’t put your friends through it, what good are they anyway? I’ve put you people through it this afternoon. You’re good sports. Once in a while you weren’t even humoring me. You deserve a reward.”
“I couldn’t touch another malted,” Messenger said.
“No,” she said, “no more malteds. You know,” she said, “these are still the good times. No one’s ever paid this much attention to me. Not even when I was mad. But now, in the springtime of my death, when the pain is still manageable and discomfort’s only the mildest death duty, easily paid, easily confused with convalescence even; now, when my weight is down and I look as I used to as a girl, better really, for I was crazed then and had on me the stretch marks of my terror, now it’s all easy and there are hold buttons on my telephones and people bring us their covered chafing dishes and best recipes all made up and ready to go like take-out or room service and there’s nothing to do but visit with my girls when they come in all tan from the club, scrubbed as princesses, and I’ve time and inclination to answer all their questions, posing others that they dare not ask, stuffing them like French geese with hope and love, it’s not so bad.
“I’ve no recriminations, none at all.
“But dying’s like the marathon, I think. There’s no way to go the distance till you’ve gone it. And sooner or later you hit the wall and whimper if you cannot scream. I seem a saint and so far think I am one.
“Listen, everyone. I make this pledge to you. There will be no trips to Mexico for Laetrile, and I’ll never call out for any other of those fast-food fixes of the hopeful doomed. Neither will I be wired to any of those medical busy-boxes to extend for one damned minute what only a fool would call my life. If Jesus wants me He can have me. To tell you the truth, He can probably use me.
“Now, Cornell, I want a favor.”
“Of course, Judith,” Messenger said, “if there’s anything I can do.”
“I want you to take over my Meals-on-Wheels route.”
B
ecause he knew Coule’s type. Recognized retrospectively the solid, bulldog centers of gravity of his kind, his big-bodied, full-bellied, hard-handed, heavy-hammed, iron-armed, thick-throated, barrel-chested lineman likenesses and congeners. Not overgrown, like giants, say, such men did not, or so it seemed to Mills, even
possess
glands, lacking not a pituitary so much as the space for one, mass not a function of secretions, of body-buried wells of the cellular juices splashed and splattered indiscriminately throughout the skeletal sluices of their frames, nothing endocrinic, hormonal, for there could have been no more room for these, or for organs either, than there was for glands, their insides pure prime meat, human steak all the way through, gristled perhaps and marbled possibly and certainly scaffolded with bone, but nothing liquid to account for size, and even their blood only for coloring, flesh tones, flush; their pee and excrement, too, merely variants of their blood’s limited palette, affected by the air perhaps, the light, like exposed film. So nothing leviathan in their genes—he’d seen their parents, their brothers and sisters like the law of averages—their physical displacement a kind of decision, the ukase of their boom town wills, their realtor reality. And many
were
realtors, or at least landlords. It would have been difficult not to be in the Florida of the thirties, even though this wasn’t Miami or even Tampa or Jacksonville, even though it wasn’t anywhere oceaned, beached, or even, particularly, mild.
It was Cassadaga, and except for the fact that George knew they had come south, that he and his mother and father had changed their lives and been translated to a state called Florida—he had no memory of how they’d gotten there, probably some of the way by bus, some by hitchhiking—where his father meant to pick oranges, become a migrant worker, it could have been not Milwaukee, since Milwaukee was a city of some size and Cassadaga was barely a town, but some residential neighborhood in Milwaukee. Stucco might never have been invented or Florida so new it had not yet become indigenous there, its properties undiscovered, it no more occurring to the other Easterners and Midwesterners to mix cement and sand and hydrated lime to make their homes than to build them out of thatch. So the houses were wooden as the trees, the ordinary oaks and elms and maples of any Iowa or Wisconsin yard or street. And perhaps that’s why he had no memory of how they’d gotten there (he’d seen no sea, no gulls or beach), because the landscape was the same he’d lived in all his nontropical, Tropic of Cancer life, along the bland, unrainy seasoned peel of earth with its gray and temperate gifts of the to-scale regular.
He did not even know where the oranges would be, could be. There were no groves near Cassadaga, nothing citrus in the odor of the wind. He’d seen more fruit in Milwaukee. And no palm trees except for the one by the bench in the town’s small square, its tall stem and leaves like an immense shredded umbrella.
“That’s a tree?” he’d asked.
“Hell,” his father said, “I don’t know if it’s even wood.”
He pointed to its sky-high shells, shaggy, brown as bowel, clustered as cannonball or the cabbages in produce bins. “Are the oranges inside those things?”
“If they are you don’t pick oranges, you climb them.”
Because this is where they’d been dropped, the young men who’d given them the ride—it was their journey he couldn’t recall, not their arrival—driving on toward Daytona Beach. “Looks nice and homey,” one of them said. “You should be able to get a room here. Tomorrow you can walk the few yards to where the groves begin.”
They had no luggage to speak of, only the single suitcase between them which contained not all their clothes but all the clothes which they still had, which they had not sold along with their furniture and dishes and odds and ends in order to get a nest egg together, a stake, to make the trip. Anyway, they had all the clothes which they believed they would need in the hot new climate to which they believed they had come——socks, the three changes of boys’ and men’s and women’s underwear, the two sets of overalls and denim workshirts, the two cotton dresses. They had not even brought handkerchiefs because they thought they had come to a place where no one caught cold. They had not brought anything dressy for Sundays. They were not religious and so wouldn’t need anything for church. For Sundays and holidays there were the three brand new bathing suits in the brand new valise. The only other things in the grip were a change of sheets and pillowslips and a large box of laundry powder. They were ready to make their new life, traveling light as any three people could who had excised not only fall and winter from their lives but the very idea of temperature.