“It's bound to be in her records.”
“We aren't supposed to call people. It's soliciting.”
“Write her a letter. Tell her we miss her.”
“I guess I could do that.”
“She could have broken her leg. Maybe she's on vacation.”
“That's probably it.” He put his hand on the rail of the stationary bike and bent his head to see how fast I was peddling. “That's good. You're going fast.”
“One of the old jocks told me the other day he saw a television program and some tacky television starlet said she had a twenty-one-inch waist from doing the Exercycle. I don't want a twenty-one-inch waist, I told him. You know what he said?”
“No. What?”
“He said, Of course you do. The gall of the man. He's the one that always wears the baseball cap. Who is he, anyway?”
“He's a football coach.”
“I knew it. They all look alike. Well, listen, are you going to write to her or not?”
“I might. Okay, I will.” He walked away and began going from machine to machine talking to the patrons. He was especially nice to anyone who was really old or just beginning. What a darling young man he is. And now Athena has disappeared. “Andy,” I said, when I was leaving. “You have the nicest manners of any young man I have met in years. I'd like to meet your mother. Tell her that the next time that you see her, will you please?”
“When I do.” He blushed and threw his arms back as he does when he pretends to be astounded that someone has stayed on the treadmill for twenty minutes, getting their pulse up to normal for the first time in twenty years. You see a lot of that at the Washington Regional Medical Center for Exercise. And don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking it.
On Wednesday afternoon the mystery was solved. I got to the Center about two o'clock and was just climbing on the Exercycle when Athena came in the door. Her hair was tied back with a ribbon and she had on black tights and a long white T-shirt that said
Venice, Arkansas
in black letters. On the back were the names of the registered voters of the town. There were forty-seven, including four men who were in the armed services.
“Where have you been?” I asked. “We've all been worried about you.”
She climbed on the Exercycle beside me. “I've been working nights, taking care of this nice old lady who's dying. She knows she's dying but she doesn't even care. She's had an exciting life. That's all she says to me, how exciting her life was and how she didn't miss anything. She's over a hundred and all her family and friends are dead so she doesn't care if she dies. She has this nice house on the mountain and she's in this room with paintings all around her.” She got down and adjusted the seat on the Exercycle, then climbed back on. “Anyway, she used to run around with painters and she ran the Spoletto Festival in Italy, you know, for music. She's so nice to me I'm ashamed to take the money, but she's loaded. Anyway, I'm staying there at nights only she made me take a night off. She said young people aren't supposed to spend spring nights by deathbeds. She's as clear as a bell. She's over a hundred years old. I feel honored to get to know her.” Athena turned up the heat on the Exercycle, bent over the bars. I speeded up beside her. “I'll tell you more about it later,” she said. “God, this feels so good. I've been missing this.”
“Your parents let you stay there at night?”
“I don't have any parents. I live with my cousin.”
“I'm sorry.”
“They died when I was four. I'm used to it. They were in a car wreck, coming home from a fair. It's okay.” She flashed that smile at me and hard as I tried, I couldn't register pathos or pity. A beautiful young couple late at night on one of our one-lane roads, from Tontitown to Springdale, say, a truck on a curve. It happens every Saturday night up here. It happens still.
“It's really okay,” she said. “I can barely remember them. It was my dad's fault. I guess they were having a good time.”
Andy emerged from the office and spotted her. His face lit up, and he hurried across the room and put his hand on a StairMaster to balance himself. “Where've you been?” he asked. “I was thinking of calling the cops.”
“I've been working overtime. Trying to save some money. I'm losing weight, but don't worry. I know it's just muscle turning to fat.” She was laughing. She always started laughing when Andy talked to her. Shimmer, shimmer, shimmer. Like water on a pond. Go on, Andy, I was thinking. Ask her out. Go on and do it.
“It looks good to me, but you're right. It's only temporary. Well, we're glad to have you back.”
“I know. The deal is to be healthy, right, not thin.” She giggled again. Gave him that Greco-Roman smile. Andy returned the smile. You could have tanned yourself in the radiance.
“Can I get you some water?” he asked.
“He's been worried sick about you,” I put in. “You should take him to a movie for all the pain you've caused him.”
“I will,” she said. “Have you seen
The Distinguished Gentleman
, with Eddie Murphy? It's at the Springdale dollar movie. You want to go?”
“When?”
“Tonight. I was going anyway. You want to go?”
“Sure. I get off at six. What time does it start?”
“Excuse me,” I said. “I have to change machines.” I got off the Exercycle and went across the room to the rowing machine. Where was Doctor Wheeler when I needed him? Wait till I told him this.
I never found out what happened at the movie. Because the world is full of surprises, pebbles thrown into the pond, concentric circles. It's not just the little surprises either, like my friend Brenda's cherry tree bearing fruit for the first time in years, not just every child that's born and so forth. Take the headline that greeted me the next morning on the front page of the
Northwest Arkansas Times
. LOCAL GIRL LEFT FORTUNE.
Mrs. Rosa Neely Parker, age 102, of Fayetteville and Key West, Florida, died last night of natural causes, leaving four million dollars in bonds and property to a young woman who nursed her in her last days. According to Bass Howard, attorney for the estate, the will is airtight. Miss Parker leaves no legal heirs other than the designee. The young woman, Miss Athena Magni, of Fayetteville, is currently employed by the Washington Regional Medical Center and lives with a relative, Mrs. Stella Magni, of 1819 Maple Street. She is a graduate of Fayetteville High School and the University of Arkansas School of Nursing. Miss Magni told this reporter she didn't want to talk about it. She said she had taken the night off at Miss Parker's request and blamed herself for not being there when Miss Parker died.
Internment will be at Kitchen's Funeral Home on Spring Street with burial Monday afternoon at the National Historic Cemetery on Spring Street. Miss Parker will be buried beside her maternal grandparents. This will be the first funeral at the historic cemetery in many years.
Mourners are requested to send donations to the music department of the university in lieu of flowers.
I called Doctor Wheeler. “What should we do?” I asked. “She lives with a cousin who works for Tyson's. She's not prepared for this.”
“Bass is a good man. A good lawyer. I'll call him.”
“Ask where she is. They won't answer the phone.”
“Maybe she's at the funeral parlor.”
“At eight-thirty in the morning?”
“Four million dollars. Rosa owned a de Kooning and an O'Keeffe. I saw them once.”
“You knew her?”
“When she first came home to live. At first she traveled quite a bit. Then she stayed alone. No one saw her. I haven't thought about her in years.”
“We should go see Andy. He's madly in love, completely smitten. They were going out last night.”
“Four million dollars. Even after taxes it will change her life.”
Miss Parker hadn't just left Athena money. She had called Paris and told them Athena was coming. She had called Italy and told them what to do. She had called the Emerald Travel Agency and gotten Annie Smithson to make reservations and arrange cars and hotel rooms. She had a young man waiting to meet the plane in Paris.
She had left Athena a letter with instructions of where to go and who would be waiting at each place and assurances of how safe she would be. She had left a package wrapped in shiny white paper with blue ribbon. It contained books to read on airplanes. “This is to ease my dying,” the letter said.
If I can think of you discovering the places I discovered when I was your age, then I am already in heaven. As for death, I do not fear it. I have been practicing sleeping for many years and have always considered it a blessing. When I was young I could not sleep more than five hours a night. Now I will get the rest I lost back then.
You have brightened up these last days. Live a long and happy life. Thank you for sharing a premonition of it with me. Yours in praise and wonder, Rosa Neely Parker.
That was all. We went to the funeral and Athena told us the plans. She kept her hand on Doctor Wheeler's arm, saying, “Well, no more bedpans or staying up all night eating junk food. They didn't bat an eye when I told them I was leaving. They can get plenty of people to work for what they were paying me.” She held up her head and I saw the thing that Rosa must have seen, the incipient thing. She would make it in the big world. She was already shedding her provincial manners. What had she dreamed all these years that made that possible? What movies had she seen? What books had she read?
“Take our phone numbers and call us if you need us,” I said, and gave her a piece of paper Doctor Wheeler and I had prepared.
“Thanks,” she said, and stuck it in her purse.
Then she was gone. It's funny how at a place like the center one person going off can leave such a hole. A couple of chubby girls from the music department started coming in and we were all pulling for them as they tried to lose weight for their auditions in the fall. At least they knew about Italian opera and could discuss it with Doctor Wheeler.
The center started a program for nine-to twelve-year-olds and that was a diversion for a while, only most of the kids who came in were morbidly overweight and it was hard to stay interested in them.
It wasn't like having Athena come bounding in, light and youth coming into a place where most of the people were beginning to dim. Even the most brilliant ones like Doctor Wheeler were like flashlights on the last week of camp, like batteries getting damp and undependable. I did the best I could to cheer things up and started wearing bright shirts and even putting on makeup and lipstick before I went to exercise.
As for Andy, he dimmed too, but I thought it was a temporary thing. Soon he'll be starting to make plans for the Fit-for-Life run against Springdale and that should keep him busy. He's like a moon that's good at reflecting light. Sooner or later someone will be coming in that door to illuminate his face.
Joyce
I
N 1976 DOCTOR WHEELER TAUGHT JOYCE for the last time. He had sworn never to teach it again but the graduate students begged and pleaded and the dean cajoled and finally, one Sunday morning at breakfast at The Station, with the graduate students all around him and a piece of pumpkin pie topping off his scrambled eggs, he gave in and said yes.
“I will teach it,” he said. “If you will read it. I won't lecture if no one reads the books. My notes are not the works of James Joyce. Don't take it unless you're going to read the books.”
“We will,” they swore. “You can count on us.” And all around the long table of young writers and graduate students a great sigh of determination took place and moved from one to the other and rose like a cloud and joined the smoke from Doctor Wheeler's cigarette. Nothing is free. To be in the presense of so much brilliance was also to be in the presense of cigarette smoke. Doctor Wheeler chain-smoked. He smoked because he liked to smoke. He smoked until the very last minute of the clock that ticked away his life. After all, how much oxygen does a man with one leg need?
One of the students at the table was a woman named Rhoda Manning. She was a housewife from New Orleans who was trying to learn to write poetry. All morning every morning she sat at a Royal portable typewriter in a small apartment near the campus and tried to turn everything she saw or experienced into metaphor. She was forty years old and she considered this the time of her life. She had this one semester to be a student in a writing program, with other students all around her and people like Doctor Wheeler to adore. She knew about Joyce. She had tried to read Joyce. She had an old recording of Siobhan McKenna reading Joyce. Now she was going to study Joyce. She stood up. She raised her glass. “Champagne,” she said. “Let's order champagne. This demands a celebration. He's going to teach the Joyce seminar. We will read
Ulysses
.”
Also at the table was a tall unhappy man named Ketch McSweeney. He had been in Vietnam and had brought his wife and daughter to Fayetteville to learn how to write a book about the war. He couldn't stop thinking about the war. He couldn't stop dreaming about the war, so he thought he might as well make some money writing about the war. Not that he had much in the way of alternatives being offered to him at the moment. He was from Pennsylvania and had come to school to find a way to begin to make a stand. His wife had a job teaching second grade and his daughter was in a cheap Montessori school. He was making twelve thousand dollars a year being a graduate student in the writing program and teaching semiliterate freshmen to read and write the language that they spoke. He didn't mind. He was a good-looking man and the young girls all made eyes at him and he was sure that sooner or later he would make a killing of some kind in the writing business. Meanwhile, he was determined to make the best of it and have all the fun he could while he waited.
“I will teach it in the fall,” Doctor Wheeler said. “Sign up now because I'll limit the size of the class.”