Kinflicks (80 page)

‘That is
not
compassion, Mr. Solomon. You are not thinking of Mrs. Cabel's suffering. You are thinking of how to relieve your
own
suffering at having to listen to her. If you were truly compassionate, Mr. Solomon, you wouldn't exhibit such overweening impatience as Mrs. Cabel works out her role in the cosmic scheme.'

‘Cosmic scheme! You and your celestial vet dreams! There
is
no cosmic scheme, Sister! This life is it. Rendering this life as painless as possible is the only virtue man is capable of. Ven pointless misery can be averted, the ends justify the means. Step aside and let me by, Sister!' He snatched futilely at her beefy arms.

‘Such means as you are referring to, Mr. Solomon, can
never
be justified by any circumstances. You seem to regard man as master of his fate. But man is much more than just his intentional side. Your proposed system of ethics makes human rationality the basis of morality and puts man at the center of the universe, determining its purpose…'

‘Someone's
got to determine its purpose, Sister,' Mr. Solomon interrupted, ‘and your God is out to lunch. Your attitude, Sister, is the most profoundly
irreligious
one I've ever heard; you attribute everything to divine purpose and leave no scope for human responsibility. You are incapable of going beyond your sense of dependency on your God to become an active agent in the universe.'

‘In
fact,
Mr. Solomon, whether you know it or not, this universe is being administered quite handsomely without our assistance. So say those with eyes to see. You might do well to concentrate on developing such vision. Man's assignment is to live morally by discovering the meaning of the universe and conforming himself to it, rather than trying to fashion the universe to
his
purposes. You want complete control over life and death, Mr. Solomon, but you don't — and can't — have it…'

Ginny's head was spinning as she returned to her mother's room. Eddie had been right: People should be prohibited from ever beginning a sentence with ‘Man is…' And more important, hadn't Sister Theresa and Mr. Solomon done complete turnarounds in their stands on the advisability of snatching the tubes out of Mrs. Cabel? How had this changeover occurred? Ginny pondered their lines of reasoning. Mr. Solomon had switched from insisting that the prolongation of human life under any circumstances was the greatest good, to insisting that physical comfort and relief from pain was the greatest good. And Sister Theresa had switched from maintaining that God's plan included releasing Mrs. Caber's spirit from her body on the spot, to maintaining that God's plan included confining Mrs. Cabel's spirit to her body until He in His infinite wisdom felt she was ready to leave it. Intriguing. But what intrigued her most was their regarding themselves privy to knowledge of the highest good and of God's plan, respectively. How had they arrived at this enviable state of clarity and conviction?

Her mother was awake. Her unbandaged eye was staring out the window at a red squirrel in the elm tree. As they watched, the squirrel took a running jump and landed on the tip of a neighboring branch. The branch sagged under the squirrel's weight. Ginny and her mother smiled at each other, charmed by the squirrel's casual grace.

‘Mr. Solomon and Sister Theresa are at it again,' Ginny said.

‘Oh?'

‘Now
Mr. Solomon
wants to unplug Mrs. Cabel, and Sister Theresa won't let him. Each has a whole new set of equally convincing arguments.'

Her mother smiled faintly. ‘They're playing word games. It's a waste of time. You don't figure these things out by talking about them.'

‘I've noticed.' The confrontation had reminded Ginny of Wendy. Not surprisingly, since Wendy was now springing into her mind at the least excuse. As she drove down the road, each child she passed required a second look to be sure it wasn't Wendy. In a store, almost unconsciously, she would gather armloads of the foods Wendy favored; she would sit at the cabin absently munching animal crackers by the hour. The few times the phone had rung, she'd raced to it, certain that it was Ira and Wendy. She was obsessed and she knew it. And she couldn't stop herself.

Anyhow, Mr. Solomon's and Sister Theresa's debate had recalled Wendy's preverbal days. Ginny and Ira would sit talking to each other after dinner. Unable to stand being left out any longer, Wendy would interrupt, babbling incoherently at a furious rate, and gesturing with her hands for emphasis, and staring intently from her mother to her father, convinced that her sounds were as meaningful and as worthy of attention as those of her parents. And she was probably right.

‘But what
do
you think about euthanasia?' Ginny asked. Perhaps her mother's detached intellectual observations on the topic would give Ginny insight into her mother's situation.

‘I
don't
think about it as a topic with a capital E — Euthanasia. I think everything depends on the circumstances in which it is embedded.'

‘And in Mrs. Cabel's circumstances?'

‘I think she should have expressed her wishes in writing a long time ago.'

‘But since she apparently didn't?'

Her mother shrugged. ‘It's not my concern.'

‘Mother, one time you asked me not to let you die a lingering death,' Ginny blurted out. ‘Do you want a gun or something?' There. For better or for worse, it was out in the open.

Her mother smiled again and for a long time said nothing.

Ginny blushed scarlet, as she had years ago when her mother had told her about menstruation. The two topics — death and sex — were surrounded with equivalent taboos, required equal delicacy. She'd probably blown it by being so blunt.

‘I remember saying that,' her mother finally replied. ‘That was when I was younger and infinitely more romantic about death. Thank you for asking. But no, I don't want a gun. I'm not in much pain, just enough to prod me into doing what I know I have to do — close out my accounts. I'm realizing that, like everything else, even death requires elaborate preparations.'

They sat in silence for several minutes, listening to the ticking of the steepled clock.

‘There
is
a point to suffering, you know,' her mother added offhandedly.

‘What
is
it?' Maybe there was actually a reason that her life to date had resembled the Stations of the Cross?

‘To make you glad to give up life, ready to embrace death.'

‘Oh,
neat!'

Ever since her mother's retina had ruptured, Ginny had been reading to her extensively from the last volume of the encyclopedia. This day she read the final entry, concluding her mother's nine-year project: ‘“Zwitterion (Dipolar Ion) — A molecule containing both acidic and basic groups may be expected to neutralize itself with the production of an internal salt or, as it is commonly called, a zwitterion.”'

Her mother nodded with satisfaction and lay silent with her eye closed. Then she asked Ginny to collect some papers from her desk at the house and to arrange for her lawyer to come.

For two days she busily consulted with her lawyer and sat up in bed writing on a pad propped against her knees. On the third day she handed Ginny a sheaf of papers. Ginny flipped through them — the format for her funeral, a list of pallbearers, the outfit she wanted to be buried in, her epitaph, a list of furniture to be kept in the family, various financial data. Distressed, Ginny stared at the neat lists.

Matter-of-factly, her mother said, ‘I've just sold the house and farm.'

Ginny looked at her with alarm.
‘Mother!'

‘Yes?'

‘But you can't just
sell our house.'

‘Why
can't I? It's mine, isn't it?'

‘But what if I wanted it?' Ginny wailed.

‘Ginny dear, the biggest favor I can do you is to sell that house. It's my parting gift to you. Every house should be sold before it's allowed to become a monument. The past, doted over, distorts the present,' she said firmly, with the conviction of personal experience.

Ginny stared at her, her eyes filling with tears. It was worse than being pushed out of the nest; the nest was being sold out from under her.

‘But I
would
like you to have my clock, to take with you wherever you decide to go.'

‘Thank you,' Ginny mumbled, unable to look at her.

‘“To you from failing hands we throw the torch,” — her mother quoted with a wry smile, as she picked up the clock and handed it to her.

It seemed to Ginny that she was like a runner in an endless relay race, being passed the baton. Just so, she would one day hand the family clock to Wendy. “Yes, but it's not enough,' Ginny muttered. What the hell difference did it make if life went on, if the Hull/Babcock/Bliss line flourished, when you yourself would most likely die a horrible death full of pain?

‘No, it's not enough.'

Ginny knew her mother had faith, whatever that meant. Not Sister Theresa's faith that Our Father Which Art in Heaven would answer to cries of ‘Daddy.' Nor Mr. Solomon's faith in an endless black void of rest and oblivion. Like the veins of coal through the mountains where she'd been born, her mother's faith laced her entire being. But faith in
what,
Ginny hadn't figured out, intended to find out very soon.

As she turned to leave, she set the clock back on the table, feeling that her mother should have it beside her now more than ever.

‘No,' her mother said. ‘Take it away please. And the pictures, too.'

That night Ginny phoned Jim at the last number he'd given their mother. A young man said, ‘Jim's, like, split.'

‘Where to?'

‘Don't know, man.'

‘It's important. His mother is very sick.'

The young man covered the phone and yelled something unintelligible. When he came back on, he said, ‘He's, like, backpacking in the High Sierras.'

Ginny called the Park Service, who felt it was unlikely that he could be located any time soon without more specific information.

Karl in Germany said he'd be home as soon as he could. Apparently the army, though dealing in mass death, reverenced individual death enough to grant leave at times like this.

The next day, as she entered her mother's room, Ginny noticed how bare it looked without the clock and pictures and encyclopedias. It could have been any room in the hospital. Except for some vases of flowers, Ginny had carted off all external traces of her mother's personality.

Her mother lay looking out at the squirrels. Ginny sat down. They didn't speak. Ginny couldn't think of anything to say. No more encyclopedias to read from. To turn on ‘Hidden Heartbeats' now seemed distinctly inappropriate. Ginny sat in silence, watching the squirrels. Her mother lay in silence, watching the squirrels. Ginny was longing for some sort of neat statement from her mother, like the closing passage of a novel, that would deftly sum up the meaning of life, that would grant Ginny the gumption to go on with it. A dissertation on “What I Believe and Why.' No such statement was forthcoming, and it was impossible to ask.

They floated suspended in silence for several days. Without the ticking of the clock to cue them in, time ceased to exist in its usual sense of being a relentless continuum leading from some past moment toward some future moment. Time now just existed as a whole, with Ginny and her mother encased snugly inside it, as though in a cocoon. Time lost its power to command. They took to judging segments of time by their quality, not by their duration. A nurse would arrive with an injection of an experimental drug. The pain of the injection and the pointlessness of further drugs made that particular bundle of time unpleasant, made the nurse's removal from the room pleasant. Flowers and a card from a friend would arrive. The scent would fill the room, for Ginny to sniff and report on; the colors would dazzle; a note on the card would touch them. That chunk of time would be of outstandingly high quality. Meals would arrive, bland and boring and repetitive, and those parcels of time were so mediocre as not to merit their awareness. They floated through time as though it were a sea of pudding filled with raisins they nibbled with delight, and pebbles they spat out with irritation.

Except for brief visits to the cabin to feed the young chimney swift and send it on its training flights and to check the mailbox for notes from Ira and Wendy that never arrived, Ginny was now spending most of her time in her mother's room. She slept in the spare bed. It wasn't that her mother needed her. Her mother appeared to need no one. They never spoke. An observer would have said her mother was severely depressed. But on the whole, Ginny thought that she probably wasn't. She was silent, unresponsive, it was true, but more because she seemed wrapped up in an interior dialogue that required all her concentration. This was why Ginny spent most of her time now at the hospital. She needed her mother, or rather needed to go through this vigil with her in hopes of being tossed some crumbs of the wisdom her mother was acquiring in her solitary confrontation with Death.

One morning Ginny woke up to find her mother already awake, sitting up watching the squirrels with her good eye. The one they had concluded was the father was sitting on a branch on his haunches munching seeds. A streak of early morning sunlight fell across his glistening red back. His fluffy tail twitched rhythmically as he stuffed seeds into his tiny mouth with his delicate paws. The elm tree swayed in a light breeze, and its leaves shimmied.

Ginny glanced at her mother. Tears were flowing down her cheek from her good eye. Ginny was bathed in pain. She clambered down and snatched up a Kleenex and careened to her mother's side and started blotting.

‘It's all right, Mother,' she blurted out, on the verge of tears herself.

Her mother closed her eye and shook her head slowly. Her mouth was contorted in pain. ‘No. No, it
isn't
all right at all.'