Authors: Beth Gutcheon
“But don’t you see,” Carson had argued with Chandler in Curriculum Committee, “there are kids who will see a C in first grade and decide that they’re dumb, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If a late-bloomer (like Ashby McCann) has caught up by fourth grade, and he’s never had a C, you spare him a problem there’s simply no need for.”
Chandler thought this sounded tediously like Rue’s mewling about the decent survival of all. “So you want us to be surprised when they get to fourth grade and get grades for the first time? What if we find we’ve got a whole class of illiterates?”
“It hasn’t happened yet, has it?” she shot back.
When the matter came to discussion before the full Board, Chandler was stunned to find that a vote had been proposed and taken before he got into gear, and that Carson’s position had such a heavy majority that he had to abstain from the vote himself to keep from looking like a fool. He realized that somehow she had rigged this, on the phone, in the hot-lunch kitchen, in the parking lot, so that now there was a B Board and an A Board. Carson was running the A Board, and he was not on it.
It struck him, when he looked back on this year, that he had expected to feel a more complete sense of triumph.
D
ear Georgia, (Rue wrote)
It’s almost May, and you will never see another spring. You have been gone for two months, and I miss you every minute—I miss you in every cell. I have wanted to die very often in the last two months, but it hasn’t happened. I’m past the point in life when received wisdom can help me. My only help comes from ordinary souls around me, and they are learning it for themselves as they teach.
Darling child. My heart. I write this mostly at night, because those are the hardest hours. I write to comfort myself, because much as I want to believe otherwise, what I feel when I try to reach you is that you already know everything, and that you are beyond caring.
I’ve tried various things for the pain. Morphine is out. Scotch is out. Meditation and prayer are out, at the moment, because they require that you hold your mind still, and when I do that I miss you, and cry and cry. My current painkiller is to think. It’s like taking baby aspirin for a triple amputation, but you only have what you have. It’s a clock ticking in the rubble. Something still turns a gear, that turns a gear that turns a gear. I’m still part of the universe.
(And you are too, dear soul, but where? What part? All parts? I have to love it all to love you still? All right. More tears.) The Anasazi buried their dead in open air. (Buried, no, but what word?) As if the dead were not asleep, in need of quiet and dark, but more awake than they had ever been, in need of light and sky and wind all day and night.
I wish you had lived to see those canyons. Those ruins up in the walls, above the wolves and the flash floods, safe, but empty. I understood them at once. Everything changes because everything must.
Things get old, things die, things change, and old things give way to the new. But all change leaves pain and wreckage.
There I was, keeper of the flame. Thinking that something Saying Grace / 307
priceless is being lost and nothing of equal value put in its place, when people said Less when they meant Fewer, and Infer when they meant Imply, and Home when they mean House, the dumbing down of language, the subtleties lost. What has been gained when native English speakers say “I’m like…” for I said, I thought, I cried…? I thought I knew what was being lost. I thought I was right. I thought I could get others to see that it mattered. What a jerk.
Where are the brown-haired wavy-haired Anasazi? Did they melt into the Zuni and Acoma and Laguna cultures and become ancestors of the Hopi people, with their jet-black pin-straight hair? Or did they climb up into their rock caves and build the walls up around themselves and die of sadness?
The architecture and burial objects show that Anasazi people had no ruling class or person, no privileged group. All lived the same, all were buried the same. They must have found a way to conduct their communal lives so democratically that no hierarchy was needed. And they lived their lives so close together, so entirely in sight of others, that there would be no need for conscience. Every act would have a dozen witnesses. Every person shares a common tribal memory with all the others. Their religious life is inseparable from their daily life, so that every action is a moral one. Everything you do can be seen to affect the community, for good or ill. But now we live in a world where even people of good will cannot arrive at a common definition of kindness. Or of “home.”
They were basketmakers, the Anasazi. They could weave anything.
To make winter clothes, they first wove nets, three to four feet wide and sometimes 200 feet long, of hair and yucca fibers. And then a group, maybe the whole village, drove rabbits into the nets by the dozens. But instead of sewing rabbit skins together, they cut the skins into strips, and wrapped the strips around long flexible cores of plant stuff, so that each made a fat warm tube like rabbit-skin yarn, and those they wove into capes and robes. Everything woven, as if it was their metaphor for life.
They’re gone, of course. Extinct, or dragged into slavery by raiding Shoshone nomads, or taken in as refugees by other tribes who believed other things. Or had had better luck with the weather. Or sang to more powerful gods.
The Anasazi could sing. Navajo legend tells of a boy a thousand years ago, when the Navajo were still wanderers, who fol-308 / Beth Gutcheon
lowed his goats into Canyon de Chelly, and in the night, heard singing. He followed the singing deeper into the Canyon for four nights until at last he also saw firelight and shadows high up the wall, and he climbed up to the People. They took him into their kiva and taught him ceremonies, all secret, and gave him a name to take back to his clan, the first clan of the Navajo. Which proves that even though it was centuries before they returned to the canyon, the Navajo were always the spiritual heirs of the Anasazi, trying to find the way back.
I feel for the Navajo, trying to get the boy to lead them to the canyon, with him saying, “So I was like whoa, goats…” And then for centuries they wandered, keeping alive for each other the vision of the sacred place, where there was singing and firelight and everyone had the same gods and knew the same stories, and you knew without being told that this was home.
Did something fail because it ended? That is my question now.
I know God does not react well to being tested. But I need a sign.
R
ue was reading Blake when the phone rang. It rang so seldom in this apartment that it almost frightened her. She picked it up on the third ring. She had fantasies that when it rang, it would be Georgia.
“Hello?”
For a long moment, there was no reply. Just that live silence of someone on the other end, not speaking. Then Henry said, “Rue—it’s me.” She hadn’t heard his voice in three months.
This time the silence was on her end, for just a beat. “Hello,” she managed finally, and started to cry.
“I’m sorry to call so late,” said Henry.
“I’m up,” said Rue. That much was true. She sometimes felt she hadn’t slept in years.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“It depends on the time of day you ask me. Nights are hard. Hang on a second.” She put the phone down and went to the kitchen to take a drink of water and blow her nose. Then she came back.
“Where’s one-oh-nine Chatham Street?”
“It’s off Brattle. North of Radcliffe Yard.”
“You have an apartment?”
“A little dump, yes.”
There was a silence.
“Did Dad tell you where I was?” she asked.
“No, Mike and Bonnie did. I went home and there was some asshole living in our house.”
“Well, it is the school’s house.”
“Yes, I know.”
Another pause.
“So you didn’t know what happened?” Rue asked.
“No, no one knew how to reach me. I didn’t want anyone to. I 310 / Beth Gutcheon
didn’t want to wake up in the morning and wonder if…anyone had tried. If anyone would.”
“I understand that,” Rue said.
There was another silence.
“What are you doing?” Henry asked.
“You mean this minute? Or in life?”
“In life.”
“Moving slowly. I came here because I needed a library. I read a lot. I write a lot.”
“What are you writing?”
She paused. “It’s hard to describe.”
There was another pause.
“Rue—I’d like to see you.”
“Are you in Cambridge?”
“Boston.”
“Oh.”
“Could I come over?”
“It’s late. And it’s pouring.” She wasn’t sure she could handle this meeting with no preparation. After a while, she said, “All right.”
It took him about a half hour to find the address. The apartment was a typical Cambridge railroad flat, with tiny rooms in a row off a long corridor. There was a gas heater in the sitting room in front.
Rain rattled the bay windows. Beyond the sitting room was a tiny bedroom, a bathroom, a pint-sized dining room in which the last tenant had repaired his motorcycle, and a pullman kitchen.
“It’s bigger than the place we had in med school,” Henry said, after she had hung his dripping coat from the shower curtain rod over the bathtub. He was very suntanned, and thinner. He looked as if whoever had cut his hair last had had a learning experience.
“I know. I took the top floor because I get the most light, up here.
I’m getting used to the stairs.”
“How are the neighbors?”
“Fine. The ones right below me are chamber musicians. I get to hear all their rehearsals through the floor.”
“Do you have any scotch?”
“No…I’m sorry.”
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He got up and went into the kitchen, and began opening cupboards. Rue followed him in. He found a bottle of vermouth.
“I’ll drink this.”
“I got that for cooking.”
“I know, I know you. It’s still potable. What’s
that?
” he asked, genuinely startled. Rue’s cat, Helen, a beautiful mahogany Burmese, had jumped almost silently onto the counter, where Henry was staring at it.
Rue picked the cat up and patted her, and then set her on the floor and told her to scoot.
Henry looked at Rue.
“You thought I wasn’t coming back,” he said softly.
Rue nodded. She handed Henry a glass and opened the little freezer to get out an ice tray.
When Henry had his drink and Rue had a mug of tea, they went to sit in the front room. The cat, knowing in the unerring way cats do that Henry was allergic to her, settled herself on his lap. He looked at it, slightly alarmed, and then stroked it and smiled. They sat in slightly uneasy silence.
“Remember when you still lived in the dorms, and we used to meet for breakfast beside the Charles?” Henry asked.
Rue smiled. “And you would read to me.” Rue remembered standing outside Elsie’s Lunch, holding their bicycles, while he bought them huge paper cups of coffee and crullers with icing, wrapped in waxed paper. Then they walked side by side to the river where they would picnic in the pearly light of the Cambridge morning. He liked to read to her from a book of Hindu folktales he had bought at an outdoor stall for a dime. Hindu folktales, or Damon Runyon. She would lie on the grass listening, and watching the clouds.
He nodded. “Has the town changed a lot?”
“Yes and no. I find that my emotions when we were young here were so intense that they come back, quite pure, day after day, when I walk down a certain street, or stand in front of a building in the Yard, or look at the sky over Mass. Ave. It’s good because the feelings are all charged with a sense of beginning.”
Henry nodded. They sat in silence for a time.
“Are you finding old friends here?” Henry asked.
312 / Beth Gutcheon
“A few. I haven’t felt fit for company much. I’m not ready to answer questions.”
Henry nodded. “I know,” he said. “I’ve spent the last three months with people who don’t speak English.”
“Good idea,” she said. She knew she should ask where he had been, and what he had been doing, but she wasn’t ready. She wasn’t ready to do much except look at him, and get used to his being here.
She’d forgotten how beautiful his speaking voice was.
After a while he said, “Mike told me what happened.”
“Good. Then I don’t have to.” He nodded. She wondered if he was thinking of apologizing for not being there. She hoped he wouldn’t. He didn’t. Instead he just looked at her, a long, steady thoughtful look. She felt he was different. As if he had lived so long without shaping reality through words that now he didn’t think of trying.
After a while, he asked, “Could I stay here tonight?”
“If we could just bundle,” said Rue.
“Of course,” said Henry.
In bed, in the dark, they heard a cellist below them start running scales.
Rue said, “I can’t seem to get used to this wet spring. It’s almost June, but I’m cold all the time.”
Henry, three-quarters asleep, wrapped himself around her. “I’ll keep you warm,” he said. “I’ll dream about fire.”
H
oly shit,” said Mike.
It was a Saturday morning in September, in San Francisco. He was reading the
Chronicle
.
“What?” said Bonnie, looking up from her book.
He looked down the hall to the bedroom Mary and Trinity shared.
The girls weren’t up yet.
Mike read, “Dateline Seven Springs, California. It’s a wire story.
Headline: ‘Wife of prominent lawyer arraigned for manslaughter.
Sondra Sale, thirty-seven, was arrested here today and arraigned on charges of second-degree manslaughter after ambulance attendants found her five-year-old son, Jonathan, dead in his bed. Police quote Mrs. Sale as saying, “He messed his bed again. I was just turning him over to spank him and something broke in his neck.” Mrs. Sale’s husband, Oliver, who is chief legal officer at Kip Graphics, a Seven Springs computer company, was out of town at the time of the incident. The couple’s older child, Linda, age eleven, has been placed in foster care.’”